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Why (as in yaverbaum)
“TWO Spades”—“THREE HEARTS”—“THREE SPADES!!”—etc. The contract, no matter where it would end up, would likely be “set” (fail), with the parent whose suit was not settled on (the now-voluble dummy) nevertheless taking a small amount of satisfaction from the defeat.
A similar pattern obtained with the use of affectionate names. My parents, who seemed to love and care (and, particularly in the case of my mother, worry) about each other and never engage in major fights, at least not in my presence, had the habit of calling each other “dear,” when they didn’t use “Arnold” (never “Arnie”) or “Just” (never “Justine”). As disagreements occurred, they would be doubly sure to maintain the use of “dear” in addressing each other, but they had refined the skill of conveying annoyance, disagreement, or self-satisfaction through the seemingly infinite number of intonations and volume changes that they could employ while hewing to that appellation.
My mother was the reader in the family. There was always a book or magazine to be read by her at the kitchen table between cooking, clean- ing, and talking on the telephone. The books were usually popular novels that were rented at the candy store for perhaps ten cents per day and, hence, had to be read quickly. A Stone for Danny Fisher, Lust for Life, The Agony and the Ecstasy, Marjorie Morningstar, Mila 18, or Peyton Place, for examples that I recall, would appear on a Monday or a Tuesday and then be gone by the weekend. Then she would be consuming Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, a monthly that, unfortunately, always enabled her to predict the outcome of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and other TV detective shows. She did not, nor did my father, read The New York Times. Rather, their taste ran to the New York Post, which at the time was a very liberal tabloid.
Not only was she the reader, she was the talker. There was no edito- rial function in evidence when she spoke, and everything that happened got a comment. I later referred to her as the “Howard Cosell of life.” Her reportage was not at all limited to what was going on around her or to the thoughts that would be triggered by the mere mention of a person, a place, a thing, a course of conduct, a political event, or a television
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