Books: Nostalgia

BIG FAMILY — Bellamy Partridge —Whittlesey House ($2.75).

"If you're the man I think you are," said the agent who sold Bellamy Partridge's father a 16-room house, "you'll fill every room in that house inside of ten years." It took 13 years. Big Family, a sequel to Author Partridge's best-selling Country Lawyer, is a total recall of family jokes, family stories and the intramural mores of Father, Mother, Grandma and eight little Partridges from the time the youngest was born until the last has left the upstate New York nest. As bucolic Americana it is superb. As a picture of boys' life, it is what Booth Tarkington's Penrod is supposed to be and for many people isn't.

When Author Partridge was born, Father, an efficient man, put a sign on an open cigar box on his office desk: "It's a boy! Take one." Mother was also "an enthusiastic advocate" of big families. Author Partridge suspects that she had "some vague idea that by bringing children into the world she was helping to swell the armies of the Lord against the ... incursions of the Devil and the insidious infiltrations of Demon Rum." Author Partridge felt that older brothers were useful in a fight; younger ones made wonderful opportunities for teasing.

Younger brother Stan was Bellamy's chief target, especially after a little girl named Alice discovered that she was not an "own" child but an adopted orphan. :' 'Why, it might happen to anybody,' Stan said. 'How could a person tell?' It was at that moment when the idea came to me. . . . 'You couldn't tell,' I said, 'nobody could. . . . Stan, I hadn't intended to tell you this, but . . . you're not really my brother at all—you're an orphan.' "

His mother reassured weeping Stan. But Bellamy was not stumped: "They've made up their minds that you're never to know the truth." At last Mother forbade any reference to orphans. But when a visitor remarked that Stan did not look like his brothers, Bellamy said, "Now you know why." And when Stan discovered that his thumb was different from the other Partridge thumbs, Bellamy asked: "You're not surprised, are you?"

"Fight, Fight." In public the boys stood by each other. Bellamy's older brother, Herb, was a great scrapper. But whenever Herb was in a fight, it was understood that Bellamy would "hover near by waiting for the battle cry." If Herb needed reinforcements, he would shout: "Jump in, Bill!"

There was a much bigger, tougher boy named Joe. One day at cries of "Fight! Fight!" Bellamy came skating across the pond to find Herb on his back and Joe on top of him. "Herb had a tricky way of rolling an opponent who tried to pin him down; but Joe made no attempt to pin him—he simply began to hammer the living daylights out of him." Herb "must have been absorbing quite a drubbing for the moment he heard my voice he called . . . 'Jump in, Bill!' " But Joe had a long reach, held Bellamy off with one fist while he wore out Herb with the other.