One evening in March, Mrs. Brunson suddenly cried out during the salad course. We all—all but Betty—knew that her labor had begun several weeks before it should have. In their prudish way, her parents had planned to spare Betty any demonstrations like this and had hoped to have her installed in New York with a distant relative. In the tumult of getting Mrs. Brunson off to the hospital, the child was all but ignored, her father only casting instructions over his shoulder to Maudie to stay all night in the house and to me to keep Betty company as long as I could. Yet even in his agitation, he recollected her innocence and shouted loudly from the vestibule that he would telephone from Boston as soon as they had selected a baby. She was perplexed by the abrupt departure and a little annoyed since her mind had been made up to receive the baby after her trip to New York, but far from suspecting that she had been misled, she thought her mother had been informed (presumably by telepathy) that a particularly choice specimen was available and that if she wanted it she must make haste to be the first bidder. This delicacy was hard to understand, for in every other way the Brunsons were extremely common or, as they put it, “broad-minded.” I, whose rearing had been far from gentle, had been told that it was unseemly to discuss any adventure remotely connected with the bathroom at the table, but any of the Brunsons might say, without a hint of embarrassment (although, because they always laughed, it was clear that they were somewhat self-conscious), “There isn’t any more toilet paper.”

Maudie, Betty, and I put up a card table in the parlor and Maudie taught us how to play five-draw, deuces wild. In the midst of the game, she brought us some hot chocolate and said, “Well, boys, let’s lay off for five-ten minutes.” Betty’s mind had not been on the game and she was glad for the recess.

“Maudie,” she said, “do you think Mummy is terribly beautiful?”

“Shucks. Of course she is. You know that and you’re just fishing.”

“I want to be just like her when I grow up.”

“Don’t you worry,” said Maudie with a wry smile and a wink to me, “you will be. You’re the spittin’ image of her now.”

“I love her dresses!” cried her daughter in a rhapsody.

Mrs. Brunson dressed flamboyantly, even when she was pregnant, wearing, in the evening, flowered chiffon dresses that trailed the floor behind and barely covered her knees in front and black satin afternoon dresses touched up with rhinestone gimcracks. She always wore high heels. From her rather large, powdered ears depended tarnished bangles. Her blond hair, lighter than Betty’s, dipped and rose in hard permanent waves that framed a puffy face with orange lips and an orange circle on either cheekbone, eyebrows like peaked black thread and a beak of a pink nose.