The Melendy Family Series

The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright, 1941.

The four Melendy children live in a brownstone townhouse in New York City during the early 1940s. Their mother is dead, but they get along well with their father, and their housekeeper, Cuffy, is a motherly woman and helps look after the children. Each of the children has their own responsibilities in the house and distinctive talents and ambitions in life. Mona is the eldest at age 13, and she wants to be an actress. Rush, age 12, wants to be a mechanical engineer and a pianist. Miranda, who is 10 years old and usually goes by the nickname “Randy”, loves dancing and painting. Oliver, the youngest at 6 years old, wants to be a train engineer.

The children have a room at the top of the house which is a sort of playroom, although they call it the “office.” It has the children’s toys and books and plenty of things that they’ve gathered for their various hobbies, activities, and experiments. However, one rainy Saturday, the kids are bored. It isn’t that they don’t have anything to do. It’s more that the day is so wet and miserable that they have trouble getting interested in anything. While they debate different things they could do or wish they could do and complain about the weather and the size of their allowance, Randy comes up with an interesting idea.

Each of the four children has something that they wish they could do, but they’ve never been able to afford to do it because it costs more than the allowance they receive. Randy suggests that they form a kind of Saturday club. Every week, they will pool their allowances, and one of them will use the collected money to do something they’ve always wanted to do. To make it worth the investment from the others, they all have to agree that they won’t just blow the money on something they could do any time, like buy a bunch of candy. Each child’s special Saturday should be something really exciting and worthwhile. All of the kids are interested and have ideas about what they could do if they had a lump sum equal to four allowances and one free Saturday to do whatever they want by themselves.

When they explain the plan to their father and Cuffy, they agree that the children can do what they like with their allowance money, including taking turns pooling it and sharing it with each other. They also agree that the children can go off by themselves for their adventures as long as they agree to some basic safety rules. Over the next several Saturdays, the children take turns having their own special days with their pooled allowance money.

Randy is the first one to have her turn. As an art lover, she goes to an art gallery. To her surprise, Randy also sees an elderly woman she knows, Mrs. Oliphant, who is an old friend of the Melendy family. Mrs. Oliphant is a kind woman, but the Melendy children never thought of her as much fun. Randy loves the art and the ways the paintings make her feel, almost as though she could step into them and experience what the people in the paintings are experiencing. There is one particular picture that interests her, a picture of a girl who looks like she’s the same age as Randy is now. Randy finds herself wishing that she could meet the girl in the painting, like the girl might be someone she could have been friends with.

Then, Mrs. Oliphant approaches Randy and asks her about whether or not she likes the painting. Randy is surprised when Mrs. Oliphant tells her that it was painted 60 years ago and that she was the girl in the picture. Randy’s artistic afternoon takes an unexpected turn when Mrs. Oliphant invites Randy to have a snack with her, and she tells Randy about her youth in Paris, when she was a lonely only child being raised by a strict father, elderly aunts, and a governess. The artist who painted her was a friend of her father’s, who thought that she looked like a little princess. It was at the inspiration of the artist that young Mrs. Oliphant snuck out of her house to visit her first carnival when her overprotective family wouldn’t let her go, and she was kidnapped for ransom by a gypsy fortune teller. Fortunately, she was found again by the artist at another carnival where the fortune teller was performing. The artist persuaded her father to let him paint her after the rescue. Randy loves that exciting story and is surprised at how romantic and fascinating Mrs. Oliphant really is. Mrs. Oliphant invites her to visit her sometime and see some of the fascinating things that she’s collected over the years, and she buys a little box of petite fours (fancy little cakes that the children have never had before) for Randy to take home to her siblings.

When it’s Rush’s turn for a special Saturday, he decides that he wants to go see an opera because he loves music. He goes to see Wagner’s opera Siegfried (part of a series of operas based on the Nibelungenlied epic poem that helped inspire Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings), about a hero and a magic ring made by dwarves and a fearsome dragon. On the way home, Rush rescue’s a stray dog and brings him home. He tries to clean up the dog before showing him to his father and Cuffy, but the dog gets loose before he’s done washing him. Fortunately, the dog manages to charm the rest of the family, so the family gains a pet.

Mona’s turn is next. She really hates her long braids, so she decides to use her Saturday for her first trip to a beauty parlor and asks for a hair cut. She isn’t really sure that her father or Cuffy would approve of it, but nobody has told her not to (because she didn’t ask). At the beauty parlor, they ask her if she’s really sure that she wants a hair cut because her braids are almost down to her waist, but she insists. While she works on Mona’s hair, the stylist tells her a story about how she and her brother ran away to New York as children and how she got into the beauty business.

When she’s finished, Mona is impressed with how beautiful she looks, and she even lets the stylist paint her nails. However, the reception she gets at home is about as bad as Mona might have expected. Her father and Cuffy are pretty conservative on the subject of girls’ hair and makeup. They disapprove of her trying to be too grown up and not consulting them about her hair, and they want to get the nail polish off her fingers as soon as possible. Even her siblings think that she’s been too daring with her appearance.

When Cuffy sees how upset Mona is about their criticism and disapproval, she comforts her, and she admits that the hair cut is actually practical because it will be easier to wash and brush shorter hair than long hair. Mona’s father admits that he might also get used to the hairstyle and come to like it. He further admits that it can be hard for parents sometimes, when they see signs that their children are growing up. Randy also says that Mona really does look like a movie star.

The children continue taking turns with their special Saturdays. Oliver, being only 6 years old, can’t go out into the city alone, like the others can, so the others spend their Saturdays at home with him whenever it’s his turn. Then, on one of Oliver’s Saturdays, he disappears. Sneaking out of the house by himself, he takes the money that he’s saved and asks a policeman the way to the circus, which is at Madison Square Garden.

While his siblings panic when they realize that Oliver is missing, Oliver has a great time at the circus, watching all the animals perform and buying cotton candy and other treats. However, when it’s time to leave, Oliver gets lost on his way home, and he starts feeling sick from everything he’s eaten. He gets a ride home from a friendly policeman on a horse, and looking back on it, Oliver decides that was the best part of his day. He decides that maybe, instead of being a train engineer, he’ll become a policeman on a horse when he grows up.

After Oliver’s circus adventure, the siblings decide that they want to do a shared adventure, so they go on a picnic. Their new dog, Isaac, later saves them from a disaster caused by a careless mistake that could have killed them all at home. The children’s father decides on some home repairs, and the children realize that they won’t be able to go away for their usual summer trip and that they’ll have to economize on their Saturday adventures. Fortunately, Mrs. Oliphant has an idea for a summer adventure for the family. She owns a lighthouse, and she invites the Melendy family for a summer visit!

This is the first book in The Melendy Family series. The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive, as part of a collection.

My Reaction

I like this series because it’s set contemporary to the time when it was written, in the early 1940s. This first book sets the time period with a comment about a mark on the floor left by one of the children trying out roller skates on Christmas 1939 and one of the children commenting that a stain on the wall looks a lot like Hitler because it looks like a man’s face with a mustache. (One of the other children comments that he’s going to turn the stain into a bearded man, like George Bernard Shaw, because he doesn’t want to see Hitler.) Toward the end of the book, the children talk about the war a little with Cuffy. The war has definitely been going on because they mention bombs and blackouts in London, and Randy asks Cuffy what it was like when the world was peaceful. Cuffy says that it seemed lovely, at least on the surface, but the peace didn’t last. There was another bad war before this one, and a peaceful time in between the two wars when people could travel freely. When Mona was a baby, their parents took a trip through Europe, and Cuffy was there to look after Mona. Because the children live in New York, they never see the war directly, but they’re aware that it’s happening, and they have feelings about it.

Apart from the historical war references, this book is just generally fun to read. It’s fun to see what each of the children does when they have a little money and the freedom to go where they want and do what they want in the city. The kids have minimal adult supervision on their adventures, and it’s the sort of thing that kids today might dream about doing. In general, kids love stories about other kids with the freedom to do what they want to do, although because this family likes the arts and culture, many of their chosen activities, like going to an art gallery or an opera, are things that many other children might not think to do. I was thinking that, probably, one adventure that many kids in my area could do or might do unsupervised might be to get their hair cut and/or nails done in some fancy way, like Mona did.

I was a little surprised that the father of the family reacted as strongly as he did to Mona having shorter hair because shorter hair for women and girls had become more acceptable by the 1940s. I think that regarding short hair as scandalous was more common when the style was new in the late 1910s and the 1920s (see the story Bernice Bobs Her Hair by F. Scott Fitzgerald from 1920). On the other hand, the real issue here seems to be that the father and Cuffy think that Mona is trying to act too old for her age (which is a way of saying too attractive or too sexy for a girl who is still too young to date). The father somewhat admits that it can be a shock to a parent to see how much his daughter is growing up. In that case, it’s not so much about short hair in general but now grown-up and attractive Mona looks in a more adult hairstyle.

Something else I’ve noticed about books in this series is that they frequently contain mini-stories told by other characters to the Melendy children. In this book, we get the story told by the hairdresser about how she and her brother ran away to the city when they were young and the story of Mrs. Oliphant’s adventures when she was kidnapped by a gypsy as a child. Children kidnapped by gypsies is a theme in vintage children’s books, although this is considered a stereotypical depiction in the 21st century. The stereotype of the child-stealing gypsy was probably based in prejudice, the use of community outsiders as scapegoats, and erroneous conclusions drawn from observing family members who do not physically resemble each other. (For example, I remember being told as a child that two blue-eyed parents would not produce a brown-eyed child because blues eyes are a recessive gene, yet it actually does happen, although it’s relatively rare. It’s just that human genetics are complex and produce more variations or throw-backs to earlier generations than some people might expect.) The main character in another book by a different author, The Girl in the Window, challenges the prejudices of adults in her community when they start to blame the disappearance of a local girl on a gypsy.