Meet The Malones

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Lenora Mattingly Weber

1943, Thomas Y. Crowell Company

Mary Fred had just bought a horse. He was black and his name was Mr. Chips and Mary Fred was riding him home. The January wind had the moist breath of snow as it rippled the bridle reins, flapped the green scarf over Mary Fred's unruly dark hair, tugged at the end knotted under her tanned, squarish chin. She thought, "I've bought a horse." The thought could still startle her. For certainly she had not had the slightest intention of buying a horse with the money which had been sent her to buy a formal for the spring prom at school.

With this impulsive beginning we are introduced to 16-year-old Mary Fred Malone, the eldest daughter currently in residence at the ramshackle Malone house in Denver. Her widower father, Martie, is a columnist more involved in the war news than his family, leaving Mary Fred to organize the affairs of 15-year-old Johnny and 13-year-old Beany. When Martie trots off to cover the war news from Hawaii, Mary Fred decides to forgo the services of a housekeeper and split the salary between the siblings, who each have expenses: Mary Fred's upkeep of Mr. Chips, Johnny's new typewriter and Beany's remodeled bedroom. Things don't go smoothly, especially when their 19-year-old eldest sister, Elizabeth, returns home unexpectedly and sickly from a troubled pregnancy. But the two biggest cogs in the wheel of domestic harmony are Mary Fred's romance with high school hero Dike Williams (yes, I know) and the interfering kindness of their chic Philadelphia aunt.

A well-written, warm book which hits all the normal marks for books of this kind. A dead mother, a distracted father who has an intellectual yet underpaid job, a heroine who yearns to break free from drudgery but never will because she's so mentally enslaved, and a moral which rewards her slavish devotion to everyone but herself. All the males in her life spend their free time (which is plentiful, despite the fact they are forever held up as paragons of useful work) staring disapprovingly at anything she does which might be interpreted as, you know, selfish, and endlessly droning on about duty and how she'd be much happier supervising an impromptu Christmas play with pox-stricken 7-year-olds than skiing with a football hero.

I don't feel too bad for Mary Fred, though - she participates in other unsavory traditions of this breed of book. With the rest of her family, she casually scorns her neighbor, Mrs. Adams, who doesn't share the Malones's lively, warm, messy sense of what's important; Mary Fred loves to help Martie cater to a drunken old colleague, but she's indifferent and rude to the poor woman, who clearly hates living next door to a pack of obnoxious kids and their vicious dog.

It is a WWII book: Father said, looking around the table, "The fight's getting tougher. That means tougher on all of us." He wouldn't say more than that. But they knew he meant that they must give more of themselves, their work, their money. "Yes, we know," each one nodded soberly.

Yes, all right, it's war. And not just war, but THE war, the war against pure evil. But - I suspect that Martie Malone would have been like this anyway; he strikes me as a pain in the ass. He doesn't give up much. He clearly adores going off to Hawaii for work, he follows up this little lecture by lighting up his pipe, and he never seems to take a sabbatical from hectoring his womenfolk. Elizabeth, earlier, had dragged herself in off the prairie after giving birth in a shack, having been quelled by the menfolk into thinking:

"In times like these, we agreed, everyone has his own burden, and no one should add his. Don has his; Father has his; and this was mine."

I am agog to find out how this works out in divorce court; does he get custody of his war experiences while she retains full control of the children?

Other Editions

Other Books

Beany Malone

Leave It To Beany

Beany And the Beckoning Road

Beany Has A Secret Life

Make A Wish For Me

Happy Birthday, Dear Beany

The More The Merrier

A Bright Star Falls

Welcome, Stranger

Pick A New Dream

Tarry Awhile

Come Back, Wherever You Are

Something Borrowed, Something Blue

Don't Call Me Katie Rose

The Winds Of March

A New And Different Summer

Beany Malone (1948)

Beany Malone

Lenora Mattingly Weber

1948, Thomas Y. Crowell Company

The Second World War is finally over, but the Malone family is still struggling. Eldest daughter Elizabeth is awaiting the return of soldier husband Don while raising their now 3-year-old son. Their father, Martie Malone, is still recovering from the near-fatal bout of pneumonia which he survived only because Mary Fred missed a year of high school to nurse him. Johnny is racing time with old newspaperman Emerson Worth write a history of Denver. And 16-year-old Catherine Cecilia or Beany is hopelessly in love with Norbett Rhodes, a moody senior who has a history of hopeless adoration for Mary Fred.

This is Beany's story. Martie goes off to recuperate further, leaving the entire clan in her hands, a less-than-responsible but typical thing for Denver's most self-righteous crusading columnist to do. Before he goes, though, he triumphantly carries out a campaign against Norbett's guardian, the city's safety manager, for not enforcing traffic laws. By the time he's done, Norbett has sworn vengeance against the entire family, a vividly unpleasant problem for lovestruck Beany - and possibly for the complicated Norbett, whose guardians are not the warmest or most loving of people.

Beany: "You wouldn't feel right if you didn't have an excuse for hating the Malones."

Norbett: "I'd hate you whether I had an excuse or not, Beany. Because you're everything that I'm not. You like people - and everyone likes you. You're like that breakfast food on the radio - you're strengthened from the inside."

She, meanwhile, has come under the influence of a new friend's mother. Faye Maffley looks and acts more like her daughter's sister than her mother, and says that she's stayed so young and happy by not getting involved in unpleasantness. Beany, constantly harassed by unpleasantness like an old drunk reporter bunking on the sofa or the pain of losing foster kids back to their real parents, decides that from now on the Malones will look out for themselves first and not stick their necks out for others.

And she'd see that the other Malones didn't lay themselves open to disappointment and hurt.

This is, of course, not possible. Beany learns how impossible - and undesirable - it would be to change this aspect of her family, and gets her guy.

About the Author

1895-1971

The Beany Malone books

Meet The Malones

Beany Malone

Leave It To Beany

Beany and the Beckoning Road

Beany Has a Secret Life

Make a Wish for Me

Happy Birthday, Dear Beany

The More the Merrier

A Bright Star Falls

Welcome Stranger

Pick a New Dream

Tarry Awhile

Something Borrowed, Something Blue

Come Back, Wherever You Are

The Belford books

Don't Call Me Katie Rose
The Winds of March
A New and Different Summer
I Met a Boy I Used to Know
Angel in Heavy Shoes
How Long Is Always
Hello My Love, Goodbye
Sometimes a Stranger

Stand Alone books

My True Love Waits

Happy Landing

Sing For Your Supper

Nonie: An Autobiography

Wind On The Prairie

The Gypsy Bridle

Podgy And Sally: Co-eds

A Wish In The Dark

Mr. Gold And Her Neighborhood House

Rocking Chair Ranch

Riding High
My True Love Waits
For Goodness Sake! - cookbook
Beany Malone Cookbook - cookbook

Links

New editions available through Image Cascade

A New And Different Summer (1966)

Lenora Mattingly Weber, il. Jo Polseno (jacket)
1966, Thomas Y. Crowell Company

She got up and glanced in the McHarg's refrigerator. Beautiful! Butter in neat cubes, bacon in flat packages, clean white eggs in their own niches. Neat stacks of brown'n serve rolls and coffee cakes ready for the oven. That's the way the Belford refrigerator was going to look, once Mother took flight to Ireland and Katie Rose was at the helm.

16-year-old Katie Rose Belford is secretly thrilled when her mother is called away to tend an ailing relative in Ireland for the summer. Finally, a chance to run the chaotic Belford household in her own way. Katie, sick to death of contributions from their rural family and slightly off produce from a friendly grocer, has her eye set on the gracious middle-class lifestyle of her favorite babysitting client, Mrs. McHarg. And who can blame her? The Belfords are respectable people but with lots of kids, second-hand food, slapdash housekeeping, etc., they veer too close to an appearance of disreputable for Katie Rose's comfort. She knows that to some people, her family could look like the slatternly Flood family, whose calculatingly crass daughter Rita is in her grade at school.

"I don't dodge Rita because of her messy folks or that messy house or the way she dresses - or even because her brothers are always in and out of the Regorm School. I feel sorry for her - "
"You can feel sorry for someone without liking them," Jeanie had said in understanding. "She's the kind that if you gave her an inch, she'd take three miles."

This old-fashioned practicality has a dark side - as when Katie's adopted pal Jeanie worries that she might not come from 'good stock' - but on the whole, it's refreshing to see poor people portrayed as something more complex than a simple morality task for a family which is poor but stable (Mr. Rose is a journalist, not a criminal, etc.)

Katie learns inexorable lessons during the course of the summer, mostly having to do with the costs of feeding a large and voracious family while coping with a handsome college student/boarder whose cluelessness verges on autism most of the time (he obsessively harasses her about the costs of her project, despite the obvious attempts she's making to seduce him) But most of her financial problems arise not from her attempts to feed the hogs at her trough with food other than potatoes, but in impulse decorative purchases. If there had been a Mikasa nearby, the poor girl would have been sunk on the first day, she shows so little resistance to placemats and glassware.

Vastly out-dated, with Katie's old-fashioned take on the disadvantaged asshole, the admittedly creepy view of 'good stock' from the adopted friend, the family's obsession with tomboy Jill's refusal to wear a dress, and college boy Perry's obnoxiousness. But the best anachronism is Katie's agony over the horrible old-fashioned food - the 'thick Irish bread', 'rich Jersey cream' and thick slabs of farm-fresh bacon and ham - all ingredients modern cooks salivate over while glaring at the plastic-wrapped mass-produced articles that Katie Rose swoons over. Whatever you have, you want the opposite. I spent some envy time as a child wishing we had central air and a finished basement while my friends were wishing they lived in a rickety old house filled with neat old stuff.

This is part of Weber's very extensive series of books about the Malones and Belfords, all set in Denver. Beany Malone, now a grownup with a baby, makes a brief appearance. The first in this series was published in 1963; the last was published in 1972. They necessarily reflect the enormous social change. As I mentioned above, in this 1966 novel Katie and her friend Jeanie hold a common-sense attitude toward their low-class neighbors the Floods. By the 1968 sequel Angel In Heavy Shoes, Katie's little sister Stacy has been pulled into helping Rita Flood and her brother, reflecting the new, more sympathetic view of poor white trash. And by 1971's Hello My Love, Goodbye, Stacy experiences a rape attempt.

About the Author
1895-1971

The Beany Malone books
Meet The Malones
Beany Malone
Leave It To Beany
Beany and the Beckoning Road
Beany Has a Secret Life
Make a Wish for Me
Happy Birthday, Dear Beany
The More the Merrier
A Bright Star Falls
Welcome Stranger
Pick a New Dream
Tarry Awhile
Something Borrowed, Something Blue
Come Back, Wherever You Are

The Belford books
Don't Call Me Katie Rose
The Winds of March
A New and Different Summer
I Met a Boy I Used to Know
Angel in Heavy Shoes
How Long Is Always
Hello My Love, Goodbye
Sometimes a Stranger

Other
My True Love Waits
Happy Landing
Sing For Your Supper
Nonie: An Autobiography
Wind On The Prairie
The Gypsy Bridle
Podgy And Sally: Co-eds
A Wish In The Dark
Mr. Gold And Her Neighborhood House
Rocking Chair Ranch
Riding High
My True Love Waits
For Goodness Sake! - cookbook
Beany Malone Cookbook - cookbook


New editionsAvailable through Image Cascade