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Head of the family was Neil’s father, Dr. Kenneth M. Kingsblood, whom the community esteemed equally for his bridgework, for his Adult Bible Class at the Baptist Church, for his trap-shooting, and for the jig-saw puzzles which he cut out on a private lathe. He was a ginger-colored man, tall and thin and kindly and hesitating.

Neil’s mother, Faith, was small and slight and brown-haired, and she always seemed to be a little afraid of life, a little surprised that the four powerful children were really hers. Yet her dark eyes were as hot as those of her own mother, Julie Saxinar, that piquant and bawdy Frenchwoman, who lacked only a scarlet kerchief and a tambourine to become a gipsy. Faith’s eyes seemed to have a life of their own, while all the rest of her was gentle and entirely vague, and she never listened to anybody at all.

Next in the family were Brother Robert, the Vitavim Bread salesman, the joker and total-recaller, and his wife Alice and their three children, including Biddy’s pal, Ruby. But it must be understood that Alice was not merely the wife of Robert Kingsblood. She was nothing less than sister of Harold W. Whittick, the poetic bull-frog of advertising.

After them were Neil’s sister, Kitty Sayward, with her Charles. And youngest of Dr. Kenneth’s children was Joan, who was still living at home. Joan was ten years younger than Neil; reasonably pretty, reasonably intelligent, reasonably uninteresting. She thought that she wanted to go to Chicago and study dress-designing and she knew that she wanted to stay here and be married, preferably to her fiancé, an affable young man who was now a lieutenant in the Navy.

The tribe gathered, nine adults and six children—not to include Shirley and Prince—and though they talked about Russia and chemotherapy, they gave the feeling of the farmhouse-kitchen from which none of them was ancestrally far distant. The younger women all bustled about the stove and set the table (including the cut-glass dish of brandied peaches), while Neil elaborately served cocktails to the men, and Mother Faith was throned in the blue wing-chair by the fireplace, smiling and vague.

Dr. Kenneth took the head of the table of fifteen. (Under the linen table-cloths, there were concealed two cardtables, eking out the mahogany.) He looked down the two robust lines of people, loving them all, surprised at how beautiful and buoyant they were. He bowed his head, and in his thin kind voice he said grace:

“Dear Father in Heaven, through all these perilous days Thou hast preserved us, to celebrate again the birthday of Thy dear son. God keep us together all this wondrous coming year, and bless these, my children, bless them, oh, bless them!”

Neil remembered the hospital ward of a year ago. He looked past those beloved faces to the worn face of his father, and his breath caught sharply.

“Gee, two turkeys!” reverently whispered Robert’s Ruby.

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