To Sail Beyond The Sunset: The Life and Loves of Maureen Johnson

Chapter 7 - Ringing the Cash Register

From having read candid autobiographies written by liberated women in the twentieth century, especially those published after the second phase of the Final Wars, c. 195= et seq., I know that I am expected to tell in detail all aspects of my first pregnancy and of me birth of my first child - all about morning sickness and my cyclic moods and the tears and the loneliness... then the false labour, the unexpected breaking of the bag of waters, followed by eclampsia and emergency surgery and the secrets I spilled under anaesthesia.

I'm sorry but it wasn't that way at all. I've seen women with morning sickness and it's obviously horrible, but I never experienced it. My problem has always been to ‘stay on the curve', not gain more weight than my doctor thought was healthy for me. (There have been times when I would have killed for a chocolate éclair.)

With my first baby labour lasted forty minutes. If having babies in hospitals had been the expected thing in 1899, I would have had Nancy on the way to the hospital. As it was, Brian delivered Nancy, under my direction, and it was much harder on him than it was on me.

Dr Rumsey arrived and retied the cord and cut it, and told Brian he had done an excellent job (he had). Then Dr Rumsey took care of the delivery of the afterbirth, and Briney fainted, poor lamb. Women are more rugged than men; they have to be.

I've had longer labours than that one but never a terribly long one. I did not have an episiotomy with that first one (obviously!) and I did not need a repair afterwards. On later births I never allowed a knife to be used on me down there and so I have no soar tissue there, just undamaged muscle.

I'm a brood mare, built for it, wide in my thighs and with a birth canal made of living rubber elastic. Dr Rumsey told me that it was my attitude that made the difference but I know better; my ancestors gave me the genetic heritage that makes me a highly efficient female animal, for which I am grateful... as I have seen women who were not; they suffered terribly and some of them died. Yes, yes, ‘natural selection' and ‘survival of the fittest' and Darwin was right -stipulated. But it is no joke to attend the funeral of a dear friend, dead in her golden youth because her baby killed her. I was at such a funeral in the twenties and heard a sleek old priest talk about ‘God's will'. At the graveside I managed to back away from the coffin such that I got him proper in his instep with a sharp heel. When he yelped, I told him it was God's will.

Once I had a baby in the middle of a bridge game. Pat it was, Patrick Henry Smith, so that makes it 1932 and that makes it contract we were playing, not auction, and that all fits together, as Justin and Eleanor Weatheral taught us contract after 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 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 used some scandalous perfume Briney had given me for Christmas, got into a lime-green négligé Aunt Carole had given me as a wedding present, checked dinner and turned down the gas - I had it all planned - and was ready when Briney got home.

He let himself in; I was posed. He looked me up and down, and said, ‘Joe sent me. Is this the right address?'

‘Depends on what you are looking for, sport,' I answered in a deep sultry voice. ‘May I offer you the specialty of the house?' Then I broke my pose and dropped my act. ‘Briney! Dr Rumsey says that it is all right!'

‘You'll have to speak more plainly, little girl. What is all right?'

‘Anything is all right. I'm all back together again.' I suddenly dropped the négligé. ‘Come on, Briney! Let's ring the cash register!'

So we did, although it didn't work that time - I didn't catch again until early in 1901. But it was always delirious fun to try, and try we did, again and again. As Mammy Della once told me, ‘Lawsy a mercy, chile, jes hunnuds an' hunnuds a times ain't nuffin happen a tall.'

How did Mammy Della get in here? Brian found her, that's how, when I started being too big to do a washing easily. Our first house, a tiny one on 26^th Street, was only a short distance from darktown; Della lived within walking distance, and she would work all day for a dollar and car fare. That she didn't use the streetcar was irrelevant; that dime was part of the bargain. Della had been born a slave and could not read or write... but she was as fine a lady as I have ever known, with a heart full of love for all who would accept her love.

Her husband was a roustabout with Ringling Brothers; I never laid eyes on him. She continued to come to see me - or to see Nancy, ‘her' baby - after I no longer needed help, sometimes bringing along her latest grandchild... then she would drop her grandchild in with Nancy and insist on doing my work. Sometimes I could nail her down with a cup of tea. Not often. Later she went back to work for me with Carol. Then with each baby, up to 1911; when ‘the Lord took her in His arms'. If there is a heaven, Della is there.

Can it be that Heaven is as real as Kansas City to those who believe in Heaven? This would fit, it seems to me, the World-as-Myth cosmology. I must ask Jubal about this, when I get out of this jail and back to Boondock.

In gourmet restaurants in Boondock ‘Potatoes a la Della' are highly esteemed, as are some others of her recipes. Della taught me a great deal. I don't think that I was able to teach her anything, as she was far more sophisticated and knowledgeable than I in the subjects we had in common.

These were my first five ‘cash register' babies:

Nancy Irene, 1 December 1899 or 5 January 1900

Carol (Santa Carolita, named for my Aunt Carole), 1 January 1902

Brian junior, 12 March 1905

George Edward, 14 February 1907

Marie Agnes, 5 April 1909

After Marie, I did not catch again until the spring of 1912. That one was my spoiled brat and favourite child, Woodrow Wilson... who was later my lover, Theodore Bronson... and much later, my husband, Lazarus Long. I don't know why I didn't catch sooner, but it was not from lack of trying; Briney and I tried to ring the cash register at every opportunity. We did not care whether it caught or not; we did it for fun... and if we missed, that simply postponed those several weeks when we would have to refrain before and after each birth. Oh, not refrain from everything; I became quite skilled with hands and mouth and so did Briney. But for solid day-in and day-out happy fun, we both preferred the old-fashioned sport, whether it was missionary style or eighteen other ways.

Perhaps I could account for all the times I failed to catch if I had a calendar of the Mauve Decade, with a record of my menstrual periods. The calendar would be no problem, but a record of my menses, while I did keep one at that time, is long gone and irretrievable - or nearly so; it would take a Time Corps operation to retrieve it. But here is my theory: Briney was often away on business; he was ‘ringing the cash register' his own way, as an analyst and planner for corporate mining ventures, one whose exceptional talents were increasingly in demand.

Neither of us had heard of the simple fourteen-day role for ovulation, or the thermometer check, much less the more subtle and more reliable techniques developed in the latter half of the twentieth century. Dr Rumsey was as good a family doctor as you could find at that time and he was not constrained by the taboos of the time - he had been sent to us by the Howard Foundation - but Dr Rumsey knew no more about this than we did.

If it were possible to prepare a calendar showing my menses 1900-1912, then mark on it by the fourteen-day role my probable dates of ovulation, then mark the dates that Briney was away from Kansas City, it is long odds that such a chart would show that those little wigglers never had a target to shoot at on those occasions that I failed to catch. This seems certain, as Briney was a prize stallion and I was Myrtle the Fertile Turtle.

But I am glad that I did not know the roles of ovulation at that time, because there is nothing that beats the tingling excitement of laying back, legs open and eyes closed and bare to the possibility of impregnation. And I know that this is not just one of Maureen's many eccentricities; I have checked this with endless other women: the knowledge that it can happen adds to the zest.

I am not running down contraception; it's the greatest boon to women in all history, as efficient contraception frees women from that automatic enslavement to men that has been the norm through all histories. But the ancient structure of our female nervous systems is not tuned to contraception; it is tuned to getting pregnant.

So it was grand for Maureen that, once I ceased being a bawdy school girl, I almost never needed to use contraception.

One balmy March day in 1912 Briney nailed me to the ground on a bank of the Blue River, almost exactly duplicating an earlier occasion, 4 March 1899, on a bank of the Marais des Cygnes. We both delighted in making love outdoors, especially with a spice of danger. On the occasion of that 1912 prank I was wearing opera-length silk hose and green round garters, and my husband photographed me so, standing, naked in the sunlight, facing the camera and smiling - and that picture played a major part in my life six years later, and seventy years later, and over two thousand years later.

That picture, I am told, changed the entire history of the human race in several time tines.

Maybe so, maybe not. I'm not fully sold on World-as-Myth even though I am a Time Corps field agent, even though the smartest people I know tell me it's the real McCoy. Father always required me to think for myself, and Mr Clemens urged me to, also. I was taught that the one Unforgivable Sin, the offence against one's own integrity, was to accept anything at all simply on authority.

Nancy has two birthdays: the day I bore her, which was registered with the Foundation, and the date we handed out to the world, the day that matched more properly the date of my marriage to Brian Smith. That was easy to do at the end of the-nineteenth century, as in Missouri vital statistics were just beginning to be taken. Most records were still of the family-Bible sort. The County Clerk of Jackson County recorded births and deaths and marriages if offered to him, but nothing happened if such milestones were not reported.

Nancy's birth was reported correctly to the Foundation, a report signed by me and Brian, and certified by Dr Rumsey. Then a month later Dr Rumsey filed a birth certificate with the county clerk, with the false date.

Easy to do - Nancy was born at home; all my babies were born at home until the middle thirties. So there were no hospital records to confuse the issue. On 8 January I wrote the happy news (false date) to several people in Thebes and sent an announcement to the Lyle County Leader.

Why such a silly hooraw to fuzz the date of birth of a baby? Because the customs of those times were cruel, cruel, harshly cruel. Mrs Grundy would have counted on her fingers and whispered that we had to get married to give our sinful bastard a name she shouldn't bear. Yes. It was all part of the nastiness of the grim age of Bowdler, Comstock, and Grundy, the vultures that corrupted what could have been a civilisation.

Near the end of that century single women openly gave birth to babies whose fathers might or might not be around. But this was not the behaviour of a truly free culture; it was the other swing of the pendulum and not easy for mother or child. The old rules were being broken but no workable new code had as yet evolved.

Our expedient kept everyone in Thebes County from knowing that sweet little Nancy was a ‘bastard'. Of course Mother knew the date was false... but Mother was not in Thebes; she was in St Louis with Grandpa and Grandma Pfeiffer. And Father had gone back into the Army.

I still don't know how to look at this. A girl should not pass judgement on her parents... and I shan't.

The Spanish-American War had brought me closer to Mother. Her worry and grief made me decide that she really did love Father; they just kept it private from the children.

Then, on the day of my wedding, while Mother was dressing me, she gave me that motherly advice that traditionally the brides mother gives the bride to ensure matrimonial tranquillity.

Can you guess what she told me? Better sit down to hear this.

She told me that I must be prepared to endure without resentment submission to my husband for ‘family duties'. It was the Lord's plan, explained in Genesis, and was the price that women must pay for the privilege of having children... and if I would just look at it that way, I could submit cheerfully. But I must realise also that men have needs different from ours; you must expect to meet his needs. Don't think of it as animal, or ugly - just remember your dear children.

I said, ‘Yes, Mother. I will remember.'

So what happened? Did Mother cut Father off? Whereupon he went back into the Army? Or did he tell her that he wanted to get out of that little town, so deep in the gumbo mud, and try a second career in the Army?

I don't know. I don't need to know; it's not my business. Father did go back into the Army, so quickly after my wedding that I feel sure he had it planned before then. His letters showed that he was in Tampa for a while, then Guantanamo in Cuba... then clear out in the Philippines, in Mindanao, where the Muslim Moms were killing more of our soldiers than the Spaniards had ever managed... and then he was in China.

After the Boxer Rebellion I thought my father was dead, for I did not hear for a long time. Then at last he was at the Presidio in San Francisco and his letter from there referred to other letters I had never received.

He left the Army in 1912. He was sixty that year - was he retired on age? I don't know. Father always told you what he wanted you to know; if you crowded him, he might treat you to some creative fiction... or he might tell you to go straight to hell.

He came to Kansas City. Brian invited him to come live with us, but Father had already found himself a flat and settled into it before he let us know that he was in town, indeed before we knew that he had left the Army.

Five years later he did move in with us because we needed him.

In the 1900s Kansas City was an exciting place. Despite three months in Chicago ten years earlier I was not used to a big city. When I went there as a bride, Kansas City had one hundred and fifty thousand people in it. There were electric streetcars, almost as many automobiles as horse-drawn vehicles, trolley wires and telephone wires and power wires everywhere. All of the main streets were paved and more of the side streets were being paved each year; the park system was already famous worldwide and still not finished. The public library had (unbelievable!) nearly half a million volumes.

Kansas City's Convention Hall was so big that the Democratic party was scheduled to hold its 1900 presidential nominating convention in it - then it burned down overnight and its reconstruction was underway before the ashes were cold and the Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan in that hall just ninety days later.

Meanwhile the Republicans renominated President McKinley and, with him, Colonel Teddy Roosevelt, heroe of San Juan hill. I don't know for whom my husband voted... but it never seemed to displease him when someone would notice a resemblance between him and Teddy Roosevelt.

I think Briney would have told me, had I asked - but in 1900 politics was not a woman's business, and I was doing my utter best to simulate publicly the perfect modest housewife, interested only in kirk, kitchen, and kids as the Kaiser put it. (Kische, Küche, und Kinder.)

Then in September 1901, only six months into his second term, our President was murdered most vilely... and the dashing young war hero was precipitated into the highest Office.

There are time lines in which Mr McKinley was not assassinated and Col. Roosevelt was never president, and his distant cousin was not nominated in 1932, which utterly changes the patterns of wars, both in 1917 and 1941. Our Time Corps mathematicians deal with these matters, but the structural simulations are large even for the new computer complex combining Mycroft Holmes IV with Pallas Athene, and are quite beyond me. I'm a baby factory, a good cook, and I aim to be a panic in bed. It seems to me that the secret of happiness in life is to know what you are and then be content to be that, in style, head up and proud, and not yearn to be something else. Ambition can never change a sparrow into a hawk, or a wren into a bird of paradise. I'm a Jenny Wren; it suits me.

Pixel is a fine example of being what he is in style. His tail is always up and he is always sure of himself. Today he brought me still another mouse, so I praised him and petted him, and kept the mouse until he left, then flushed it away.

A midnight thought finally surfaced. These mice are the first proof anyone has had (I'm almost sure) that Pixel can take anything with him when he grasps a probability and walks through walls (if that describes what he does - well, at least it labels it).

What message can I send, and to whom, and how can I fasten it to him?

In shifting from school girl to housewife I had to add to Maureen's private decalogue. One was: thou shalt always live within thy household allowance. Another I formulated earlier: thou shalt not let thy children see thee cry - and when it became clear that Brian would have to be away frequently, I added him in. Never let him see me cry and be sure to offer him a smiling face when he returns... don't, Don't, DONT sour his return with fiddling details about how a pipe froze, or the grocer boy was rude, or see what that dadratted dog did to my pansy bed. Make him happy to come home, sorry to have to leave.

Do let children welcome him; don't let them smother him. He wants a mother for his children... but he wants a willing and available concubine, too. If you are not she, he will find one elsewhere.

Another commandment: promises must be kept - especially ones made to children. So think three times before making one. In case of tiniest doubt, don't promise.

Above all, don't save up punishments ‘until your father comes home'.

Many of these rules did not yet apply when I had only one baby and that one still in nappies. But I did think out most of my roles ahead of time and then wrote them down in my private journal. Father had warned me that I had no moral sense; therefore it would be necessary to anticipate decisions I would have to make. I could not depend on that little voice of conscience to guide me on an ad hoc basis; I did not have that little voice. Therefore I would have to reason things out instead, ahead of time, forming rules of conduct somewhat like the Ten Commandments, only more so, and without the glaring defects of an ancient tribal code intended only for barbaric herdsmen.

But none of my roles were really difficult and I had a wonderfully good time!

I never tried to find out how much Briney was paid whenever I had a baby; I did not want to know. It was more fun to believe that it was a million dollars each time, paid in red gold ingots the colour of my hair, each golden ingot too heavy for one man to lift. A king's favourite, lavished with jewels, is proud of her ‘fallen' state; it is the poor drab on the street, renting her body for pennies, who is ashamed of her trade. She is a failure and she knows it. In my daydream I was a king's mistress, not a sad-faced mattress-back.

But the Foundation must have paid fairly well. Attend me - Our first house in Kansas City was close to minimum for respectable middle class. It was near the coloured district; in 1899 this made it a cheap neighbourhood even though it was segregated for whites. Besides it was on an east-west street and faced north, two more points against it. It was on a high terrace with a long flight of steps to climb. It was a one-storey frame house, built in 1880 with its plumbing added as an afterthought - the bath opened directly off the kitchen. It had no dining-room, no hallway, just one bedroom. It had no proper basement, just a dirty-floor cellar for the furnace and coal bin. It had no attic, just a low, unfinished space.

But houses for rent that we could afford were scarce; Briney had been lucky to find it. I had thought for a while that I was going to have my first baby in a boarding-house.

Briney took me to see it before he closed the deal, a courtesy I appreciated as married women could not sign contracts in those days; he did not have to consult me. ‘Think you could live here?'

Could I! Running water, a flush toilet, a bathtub, a gas range, gas lamp fixtures, a furnace -‘Briney, it's lovely! But can we afford it?'

‘That's my problem, Mrs S., not yours. The rent will be paid. In fact you will pay it for me, as my agent, the first of every month. Our landlord, a gentleman named Ebeneezer Scrooge - ‘

"Ebeneezer Scrooge" indeed!'

‘I think that was the name. But there was a streetcar going by; I may have misunderstood. Mr Scrooge will collect in person, the first of every month, except Sundays, in which case he will collect on the Saturday preceding, not the Monday following; he was firm about that. And he wants cash; no cheques. He was firm about that, too. Real cash, silver cartwheels, not banknotes.'

Despite the house's many shortcomings its rent was high. I gasped when Briney told me: twelve dollars a month. ‘Oh, Briney!'

‘Get your feathers down, freckled one. We're going to be in it just one year. If you think you can stand it that long, you won't have to deal with dear Mr Scrooge - his name is O'Hennessy - as I can tie it down for twelve months with a discount of four points. Does that mean anything to you?'

I thought about it. ‘Mortgage money is six per cent today... so three points represents the average cost of hiring, the money, since you are paying in advance and they don't own the money until they have earned it, month by month. One point must be because Mr O'Hennessy Scrooge won't have to make twelve trips here to collect his rent. So that comes to one hundred and thirty-eight dollars and twenty four cents.'

‘Flame Top, you continue to amaze me.'

‘But they really ought to give you another point, for administrative overhead.'

‘How is that?'

‘For the bookkeeping they don't have to do because you are paying it all in a lump. That brings it down to one hundred thirty-six eighty. Offer him one hundred and thirty five, Briney. Then settle for one thirty-six.'

My husband looked at me in astonishment. ‘To think I married you for your cooking. Look, I'll stay Nome and have the baby; you go do my job. Mo, where did you learn that?'

‘Tbebes High School. Well, sort of. I worked a while on Father's accounts, then I found a textbook at home that my brother Edward had used, Commercial Arithmetic and Introduction to Bookeeping. We had our school books in common; there were shelves of them in the back hallway. So I didn't take the course but I read the book. But is silly to talk about me doing your job; I don't know beans about mining. Besides I don't want that long streetcar ride down to the west bottoms.'

‘I'm not sure I can have a baby, either.'

I'll do that, sir; I'm looking forward to it. But I would like to ride downtown with you each morning as far as McGee Street.'

‘You are more than welcome, Madam. But why MeGee Street?'

‘Kansas City Business College. I want to spend the next few months, before I get too big, learning to use a typewriter and to take Pitman shorthand. Then, if you ever become ill, dearest man, I could work in an office and support us... and if you ever go into business for yourself, I could do your office work. That would save you hiring a girl and maybe get us past that tight spot the books say every new business has.'

Briney said slowly, It was your cooking and one other talent; I remember clearly. Who would have guessed it?'

‘Do you mean I may?'

‘Better figure up what it will cost in tuition and carfare and lunch money -‘

‘I'll pack lunches for both of us.'

‘Tomorrow, Mo. Or the next day. Let's settle this house.'

We took the house, although that skinflint held out for one hundred and thirty-eight dollars. We stayed in it two years and another girl baby, Carol, then moved around the comer on to Mersington and into a slightly larger house (same landlord), where I had my first boy, Brian junior, in 1905... and learned what had become of the Howard bonuses.

It was the spring of 1906, a Sunday in May. We often took a streetcar ride on Sundays, to the far end of some line we had never explored before - our two little girls in their Sunday best and Briney and me taking turns holding junior. But this time he had arranged to leave our three with the lady next door, Mrs 0hlschlager, a dear friend who was correcting and extending my German.

We walked up to 27^th Street and caught the streetcar heading west; Briney asked for transfers as usual, as on Sundays we might change anywhere, wind up anywhere. This day we rode only ten blocks when Briney pushed the button. ‘It's a lovely day; let's walk the boulevard a while.'

‘Suits.'

Brian handed me down; we crossed to the south side, headed south on the west side of Benton Boulevard. ‘Sweetheart, would you like to live in this neighbourhood?'

‘I would like it very much and I'm sure we will, in twenty years or so. ‘It's lovely.' It truly was - every house on a double lot, each house ten or twelve rooms at least, each with its carriage drive and carriage house (barn, to us country jakes). Flower beds, stained-glass fanlights over the doors, all the houses new or perfectly kept up - from the styles I guessed 1900; I seemed to recall building going on here the year we came to KC.

‘Twenty years in a pig's eye, my love; don't be a pessimist. Let's pick out ore and buy it. How about that ore with the Saxon parked at the kerb?'

‘Must I take the Saxon, too? I don't like that door that opens to the rear; a child could fall out. I prefer that phaeton with the matched blacks.'

‘We're not buying horses, just houses.'

‘But, Brian, we can't buy a house on Sunday; the contract would not be legal.'

‘We can, my way. We can shake hands on it; then sign papers on Monday.'

‘Very well, sir.' Briney loved games. Whatever they were, I went along with them. He was a happy man and he made me happy (in or out of bed).

At the end of the block we crossed over to the east side and continued south. In front of the third house from the corner he stopped us. ‘Mo, I like the looks of this ore. It feels like a happy house. Does it to you?'

It looked much like the houses around it, big and comfortable and handsome - and expensive. Not as inviting as the others, as it seemed to be unoccupied - no porch furniture, blinds drawn. But I agreed with my husband whenever possible... and it was no fault of the house that it was unoccupied. If it was.

Tm sure it could be a happy house with the right people in it'

‘Us, for instance?'

‘Us, for instance,' I agreed.

Brian started up the walk toward the house. ‘I don't think there is anyone at home. Let's see if they left a door unlocked. Or a window.'

‘Brian!'

‘Peace, woman.'

Willy-nilly, I followed him up the walkway, with a feeling that Mrs Grundy was staring at me from behind curtains all up and down the block (and learned later that she was).

Brian tried the door. ‘Locked. Well, let's fix that' He reached into his pocket, took out a key, unlocked the door, held it open for me.

Breathless and frightened, I went in, then was slightly relieved when bare floors and echoes showed that it was empty. ‘Brian, what is this? Don't tease me, please.'

Tm not teasing, Mo. If this house pleases you... it's my long delayed wedding present from the groom to the bride. If it does not please you, I'll sell it'

I broke ore of my roles; I let him see me cry.