Chapter 21
One Times Seven

Although the next Sunday began as another normal day, it would mark something of a landmark in Maria's time with the von Trapp children. After breakfast that morning, she expected them to all stand up and go upstairs for a meeting amongst themselves, all usual, but this time, to Maria's amazement, they invited her to join their meeting as well.

"We've been discussing some things that we feel need a neutral party's input," Friedrich explained to her, standing up very straight as he pushed his chair in, "if you would, Fraulein Maria."

"Why, yes, of course!" Maria exclaimed, so delighted with their invitation that she actually leapt right up out of her chair. She almost raced upstairs to the nursery, too, but she restrained herself and let the two littlest girls take her hands and lead her upstairs to the nursery with other children. But just before they went inside, Louisa turned to her sharply and put one hand on the doorframe, blocking her path.

"Of course, you have to wear something on your head during the meeting," she told Maria, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

"Yes, that's one of our rules," Kurt added brightly. "Don't you still have that hat you were wearing when you got here?"

Maria thought it a rather silly rule, but she just smiled. Of course she understood now that these children had a whole language of rules and nuances and subtle little signals that meant nothing to anyone else, but that meant the whole world to the seven of them. She knew that it was one of the ways they'd survived the lonely years since their mother died. And so she didn't argue, but only ran to her own room to fetch her hat.

When she returned to the nursery, she saw that sure enough, the children each wore something on their heads. Most of them had put on the straw hats that Maria had seen them wear before, during their outings in Salzburg, and Louisa had tied the playclothes kerchief that the girls shared over her hair. But Marta and Gretl were wearing, quite proudly, the oddest little caps; she supposed that one of the older children must have made them, for they were much too strange to be store-bought. They had feathers, strings, bits of cloth, and Maria-didn't-know-what-else glued on haphazardly.

As Friedrich had mentioned, the children wanted her input to settle a dispute between them, and the dispute, at least, had been exactly what Maria had expected. Another package had arrived from Uncle Max just yesterday, containing not seven but eight pieces of long, chewy saltwater taffy, accompanied by a short note: "I get a fiendish delight imagining all the fights between you lot over how to split the extra piece of taffy!"

And there had indeed had been some fine fights between the children over that. They had spent a large portion of yesterday afternoon debating it. Some wanted them all to draw straws for the extra piece, others wanted to cut it into seven exactly equal pieces, and others wanted to be generous and give it to Maria. The arguing hadn't stopped until Friedrich finally announced in a very short voice, "All right, we settle it at tomorrow's meeting!"

When Marta turned to Maria now and asked, "What do you think we should do with it, Maria?" she didn't want to take the expected route and vote for giving it to her.

She was silent for a moment, her chin in her hand, thinking the matter over carefully. Then she asked to see their uncle's note, and Liesl handed it to her. "I think you're the ones having a trick played on you now," Maria said, rereading it, "so why don't you turn the trick around and play it right back on your uncle?"

The children all looked around at each other and at her, curious. Louisa leaned forward in her chair, and Friedrich asked, "What do you mean, Fraulein Maria?"

"Well, your uncle is still planning to come back with your father when he returns from Vienna, isn't he?" Maria asked, and they nodded. "Well, how do you suppose he'd like it if when he came back, you still had this piece of taffy, and you gave it to him?"

They caught on to what she meant right away, their eyes bright. "Ooh, I see," Brigitta said. "We could act all nonchalant about it and everything, and say, 'Oh no, Uncle Max, we didn't fight about it at all.'"

"'Fighting over candy is really much too childish for us,' that's what we'll say," Liesl added, grinning.

"And we'll tell him that we didn't fight over it at all and saved it for him when he came," Kurt went on excitedly. "Ooh, I can just see the look on his face!"

The children were all pleased with this solution, and Louisa flipped open a notebook in which the children took turns writing notes on each of their weekly meeting. She asked the others as she wrote, "All right, now that that's settled, what else is there to discuss for this week?"

But it turned out that there wasn't much else to discuss today. Maria suspected that the children's meetings had been largely devoted to strategizing how to get rid of their governesses, and now that they had laid down their weapons against her, she'd noticed that they were shorter. She remembered the meeting that they'd held on her first Sunday here — the long, awkward surprise of time away from them in the suddenly too-quiet house. She was glad that there was nothing else to discuss, for that gave her time to ask some questions.

"Have these meetings always been on Sunday mornings?" she asked, and when Brigitta nodded, she added, "I see, and how long have you lot been holding them?"

"We started having them about... two years ago," Friedrich said slowly, remembering. "You see, our cook had been serving chocolate pudding for dessert after dinner every night.

"Every night," Louisa added.

"Well, I love chocolate pudding," Maria put in.

"So do we, but after a while, we'd all had enough of it," Brigitta went on. "So we asked Cook to start making other desserts — you know, different things — but still, every time she served dessert, it was always the same chocolate pudding."

"Night after night after night," Kurt complained, groaning.

Friedrich picked up the story again. "We couldn't get her to serve anything else for dessert," he said, "and then one day, finally, we figured out why."

"Why?" Maria asked, curious.

"Because," Liesl explained, with the air of letting Maria in on a great secret, "at the same time that I was asking Cook to make lemon schaum torte for dessert, Louisa was asking for black forest cake, and Friedrich was asking for almond streusel, and Brigitta was asking for applesauce cake, and Marta and Gretl wanted marzipan, and Kurt..." Liesl paused and smirked at her brother. "...well, Kurt wanted to Cook to make all of those things, plus a few more, and to skip dinner completely and just serve desserts instead."

Kurt glared at her and snipped, "Very funny."

"The point is," Liesl went on to Maria, "that our cook was hearing seven different voices. That was when we realized that if we wanted Cook, or Father, or anyone else, to really listen to us, then we couldn't all talk in seven different voices. We had to talk in one voice times seven to make them listen. And so the very next Sunday, we held our first meeting, and we all sat down and agreed on one dessert to ask Cook to serve after dinner."

"And really, not a lot's changed since then," Louisa continued. She was flipping pages around in the notebook on her lap, rereading notes that they'd taken on earlier meetings. "We made the rule that everyone had to wear something on their heads because that made it more official, and somebody took notes, and it's been that way ever since."

"That's what we call our meetings, too — One Times Seven," Brigitta added. "I mean, really, we just call them meetings most of the time, but their official name is One Times Seven."

Two years was a long time to children, and Maria felt sure that in all that time, the children had never once let anyone else in on their meetings until they'd invited her to join them today. As close as she'd grown to them, their meetings had been the one secret thing that they'd still kept to themselves. Would they even have let her in now, if not for their uncle sending an extra piece of candy that they couldn't agree on what to do with? Maria never thought that she would feel so grateful for a piece of candy, but when she said her prayers tonight, she decided that she was going to thank God for that extra bit of saltwater taffy.