they learned it and we were playing at their house. Eleanor and Justin were parents
of Jonathan Weatheral, husband of my first-born, so the Weatherals were a Howard
marriage themselves, but they were our friends long before we knew that about them.
We did not learn it until the spring Jonathan showed up on Nancy’s Howard Foundation
list of young male eligibles.
In this bridge game I was Justin’s parmer; Eleanor was Briney’s partner. Justin had
dealt; contract had been reached and we were about to play, when I said, `Put your
hands face down and put paperweights on them; I’m having a baby!’
`Forget the hand!’ said my husband.
`Of course,’ agreed my partner.
`Hell, no!’ I answered in my ladylike way, ‘I bid the bloody thing; I’m damn well
going to play it! Help me up from here!’
Two hours later we played the hand. Dr Rumsey, Jr., had come and gone; I was on
Eleanor’s bed with the table, legs collapsed and supported by pillows, across my
lap, and my new son was in my partner’s arms. El and Briney were on each side of me,
half seated on the bed. I had bid a small slam in spades, doubled and redoubled,
vulnerable.
I went down one trick.
Eleanor tilted her nose at me and pushed it up with the tip of her finger. ‘Smarty,
smarty, missed the party!’ Then she looked very startled. ‘Mo! Move over, dear! I’m
about to have mine!’
So Briney delivered two babies that night and Junior doc had to come back just as
soon as he reached home and grumbled at us that he did wish we would make up our
minds; he was going to charge us mileage and overtime. Then he kissed us and left –
by that time we had long known that the Rumseys were Howards, too, which made Junior
Doc a member of the family.
I called Ethel, told her we were staying overnight, and why. Is everything all
right, dear? Can you and Teddy manage? (Four younger ones at home. Five? No, four.)
‘Certainly, Mama. But is it a boy or a girl? And how about Aunt Eleanor?’
‘Both. I had a boy, Eleanor just had a girl. You youngsters can start working on
names… for mine, at least.’
But the best joke was another matter entirely, something we didn’t tell Junior Doc
or the children: Briney put that little girl into my sweetheart Eleanor, and her
husband Justin put Pat into me… all at a weekend in the Ozarks to celebrate
Eleanor’s fifty-fifth birthday. The birthday party got a bit relaxed and our
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husbands decided that, since all four of us were Howards, there was no sense in
bothering with these pesky rubber sheaths… when we could be ringing the cash
register.
(Cultural note: I mentioned that Eleanor got pregnant on her fifty-fifth birthday.
But the age of the mother on the birth certificate junior Doc filled was
forty-three, or close to that. And the age filed on mine was thirty-eight, not
fifty. In 1920 all of us had received a warning from the Howard Foundation trustees,
delivered by word of mouth, to trim years off our official ages at every
opportunity. Later that century we were encouraged and helped to acquire new
identities every thirty years or so. Eventually this became the full ‘Masquerade’
that saved the Howard Families during the Crazy Years and following. But I know of
the Masquerade only from the Archives, as I was taken out of that turmoil – thank
Heaven and Hilda! – in 1982.)
We rang the cash register five times, Brian and I, during the Mauve Decade – five
babies in ten years, 1900-1910 Gregorian. I was the first to call it ‘ringing the
cash register’ and my husband went along with my crass and vulgar jest. It was after
I had recovered from unloading my first one (our darling Nancy) and had been cleared
by Dr Rumsey to resume ‘family duties’ (so help me, that’s what they called it then)
if we so pleased.
I came home from that visit to Dr Rumsey, started dinner, then took another bath and