Bobby looked at the circle of women ... at the five pairs of eyes
staring at him. He noticed how quiet it was in the house, almost
as if he had gone deaf. Mavis shifted in her seat, and the rustle
of her skirts and creak of the chair came as a remarkably welcome sound.
There wasn't anything to do but sit in that empty chair, waiting for
him. Bobby didn't want to do that. But he knew he had
to. He owed that to them, at a minimum. And he knew he'd
tell the truth. He owed them that too.
Feeling tense, like when he knew he'd get a beating, he sat. No
one noticed the irony of the fact that he didn't speak until spoken to.
That ... conversation, to put it gently, would make a story all by
itself. There developed, during the hour that they bombarded him
with questions, the full range of emotions that women are capable
of. There was anger, and disappointment, and curiosity.
Remembered incidents were discussed, sometimes as if he weren't even
there any more. Donna's participation with Bobby at Prudence's
house came out in the process and, red faced, she defended her actions
by pointing out the actions of the rest.
The women wanted to be angry. In their minds they had the right
to be angry ... SHOULD be angry. And being duped was the least of
what Bobby had done to them. There were, in a sense, eleven
people in the room. Five of them were nestled deep inside five of
the others, floating, unconcerned, warm and safe. The women
carrying them, though, were not so serene, and they wanted to blame
their condition on Bobby.
But try as they could to be angry with him for his deception, all of
those women had loved him on some level, and been loved back, and his
answers about why he had done what he had done did nothing to suggest
that he had preyed upon them. They questioned him closely about
his life before Milleson House, and his experience with women before he
came there, half expecting that he was some Lothario who had taken
advantage of them. It became clear, however, as all their sexual
exploits were finally aired publicly, that the opposite was true.
They had exploited him. Not that he had cared. Quite
the opposite in fact, but it was clear that the only reason they were
all pregnant with his babies was because of THEIR emotional needs, and
his willingness to meet them.
Finally Mavis told him to go on to bed.
"Are you going to send me away?" he asked, standing. At this
point he expected that ... feared that ... but also felt like he
deserved it.
Mavis snorted. "You'll be seventeen in what, two months? I couldn't get the paperwork through in that time."
Her comment did not suggest that he was still welcome.
"I could just go on the road," he said. "If that would make things better."
"No!" said Sally firmly. "You'll not go off and leave us all here
alone." It wasn't clear exactly what she meant by that.
There was some muttering, but Bobby couldn't understand the words.
"Off to bed," ordered Mavis. "We have more talking to do."
Bobby went to bed, but he couldn't get to sleep right away, even though
he felt very lucky to still have a soft, warm place to sleep. He
could still hear the occasional muttering voices of the women down
below. More than once those voices rose to a scale where he could
hear a word or two clearly.
He stared at the ceiling in the dark, trying not to listen.
He had finally nodded off when the door to his room opened.
Someone came in. She smelled like Sally. There was
the rustle of clothing, and a naked body climbed into bed with
him. He was right. It was Sally.
He was, to put it mildly, astonished.
He was still wearing his night shirt, and her hand snaked down, and
under it, to slid up to his chest, passing by his flaccid penis.
She felt warm against him.
"You can't go off and leave me alone," she said to his cheek. "No
one has ever made me feel like you do." She snuggled more, and
her hand played with his skin. "I'd curl up and die if you left,"
she said.
"I don't want to leave," he said into her hair.
"It's still so strange to hear your voice," she said. "Will you make love to me?"
"Yes," he said.
She tugged and pulled at his shirt, getting it off of him, and melted
against him. Their lovemaking was slow and gentle, with her
starting on top and then pulling him over on top of her.
"We won't be able to do this much longer," she said from under him. "I'm going to get too big for you to be on top."
"I wish I could marry you," murmured Bobby. "Then we could do this forever."
Sally's hands, which had been on his chest, holding him up off of her
swelling belly clenched his skin, almost painfully as she froze and she
gasped.
"What's wrong?" he asked, glad that he could voice his question.
"You'd marry me?" she said in a tiny reedy voice.
"They'd never let me marry you," he sighed.
It was a frozen tableau in the dark as silence stretched. Her
fingers still gripped his skin painfully, but he didn't care.
"Why not Bobby?" she asked.
He thought about that. "I guess I just thought I'd always be an
orphan," he said. "I'm not used to thinking about making my own
decisions." Her knees came up and hugged his sides as her
pussy squeezed at his prick. "If I could ... would you marry me?"
he asked, his heart in his throat.
There was another agonizing moment of frozen silence and then he felt her body go limp as she drew in a lungful of air.
"YES!" she screamed. "OH YES BOBBY, YES!"
There was the thump of feet hitting the floor next door in Meg's room,
then the sound of the door opening, the hinges squeaking lightly.
Bobby's door opened again and Meg was standing there.
"Bobby?" she asked. "Sally? What's going on?"
Sally clutched Bobby to her.
"Bobby just asked me to marry him," she said in a completely normal voice. "And I said YES!" She yelled the last word.
"SSHHHHH" scolded Meg. Then "What?! Did you say MARRY you?"
"YES!" yelled Sally again, joyously.
Meg felt a rush of emotions run through her body. It seemed as if
the baby jumped in her womb, even though it was too early for that to
be happening. She felt jealousy, then joy, then worry, all in a
rush. She wanted to be elated for her friend, but she wasn't sure
she should be.
"Quiet down!" she scolded. "You're going to wake up everybody in the house!"
"I'll be good," said Sally in a quiet voice that sounded more like one
of her small female charges than an adult. Then she started
giggling, and then laughing until she covered her mouth with both hands.
Meg closed the door and stood, listening, not so much to Bobby and
Sally, but to see if any of the children had gotten up, or if Mavis had
heard Sally's shouts and was coming up to investigate. When
she heard nothing she shook her head. The bedsprings in Bobby's
room were making a racket now. As she went back to her room she
found her hands molded to the swell of her own belly, holding her baby
... Bobby's baby. She wished more than anything that Jimmy
was here, so he could make her bedsprings sing too.
In the morning Sally took the first opportunity to face Mavis and
announce that she couldn't make Bobby leave, because she was going to
marry him.
Mavis passed through the shock of the announcement almost instantly as
the sense of that hit her. Why hadn't she thought about
that? Oh, there had been that one time, when she and Meg had
talked of marriage, but that was in the abstract. Why
hadn't any of the women seriously thought about that? She thought
about herself, being wed to a seventeen year old, and wanted to
giggle. That wouldn't work. Not for her anyway.
But it was perfect for Sally. And Bobby WOULD get to stay.
No one could gainsay him if he were a married man, with a
job. She slumped as she realized that, of them all, she was
the only one likely to end up as an unwed mother. In her own self
pity she forgot about Donna.
Sally had watched Mavis' face closely as all that flitted through her
mind. She knew her employer well, and she saw that slump for what
it was.
"You can still see him," she said, clutching Mavis' sleeve. "I'll still share."
"You must be joking," said Mavis, shocked.
"Not at all," said Sally, as if it were the most normal thing in the
world to say in 1945. "If it weren't for you, Bobby would never
have come here. You let him stay. You and I both know
I'd have ended up as an old maid. Now I have a baby on the way,
and I'm going to have a husband, and my life is going to be full of
joy. All because of you. I couldn't do anything else but
share him with you."
"That's crazy," said Mavis. But at the same time her heart
leapt. When she was with Bobby in bed she was happier than at
almost any other time.
"And if you want to have more babies you can," said Sally. "I
know I'm going to. I'm going to have as many as I can!"
"Let's not get ahead of ourselves here," cautioned Mavis. "Bobby may have something to say about this."
"Bobby loves us all," said Sally firmly. "We talked last night,
in bed." She didn't blush at her admission, which she would have
before. Her self confidence was as high as it had ever been in
her life. "He's worried because he loves all of us, and he's
afraid we all hate him now."
Sally's eyes looked startled for an instant as she reflected on what she'd just said.
"Well, not me. He knows I love him. I made that clear." Now she did blush.
"I don't think any of us hate him," said Mavis. "We might be perturbed with him, but nobody hates him."
"Well, nobody told him that last night," said Sally. "We talked
for hours. He was still afraid you'd send him away. But you
can't. He's my fiancé now."
"I wasn't going to send him anywhere," snorted Mavis. "He's
almost a man. He's got a job, and he made a whole lot of babies
around here. He needs to be here. This is where he
belongs."
Then her eyes got round as the full impact of everything that had been
said hit her. He COULD stay ... WOULD stay ... and she'd STILL
get to be with him sometimes. She hugged Sally tightly.
"I'm so HAPPY for you," she said.
The mood in the house improved markedly that day. To those of us in
this modern day it seemes inconcievable that Sally would do what she
did, but remember that these women had been through years and years of
self denial, and sacrifice, and times so hard we have no concept of
what that was like. Sally went to each woman, explaining that,
while she was going to marry Bobby when he turned seventeen, on the 5th
of August, 1945, until then, and quite possibly after then, the women
would have access to Bobby if they so desired. She didn't exactly
encourage that. She simply stated it, and told the women that
Bobby loved them all. After lunch she went to see Rachel, who,
when she was finally able to unburden herself to somebody about whose
baby she was carrying, cried with relief. Sally hugged her,
suggesting that now they were sisters ... all of them.
The wedding caused a sensation in town. Many people had tried to
figure out how all those women at the Milleson House could turn up
pregnant, more or less within the same time frame. Many just
believed that the soldiers had caused it when they spread their wild
oats before being shipped out again. But when people found out
that one of the women was going to marry the orphan boy - the one who
couldn't talk, but then who experienced some kind of miraculous cure
and COULD talk - minds began looking at things another way.
Suspicion abounded, and that was probably one reason why Sally's
wedding was the best attended wedding in Hampstead history.
One of the most prominent attendees was Doctor Johansen, who gathered a
crowd as he expounded on what many people had been wondering
about. He described, in pompous tones, how many mute people were
that way because of things in their past, usually terrible things, but
that the ability to speak still resided in their brain.
Then, in extreme emotional situations, that ability could be broken
loose. He described how Bobby's love for the poor little girl
he'd saved must have broken his silence. He characterized Bobby as
"recovering" from his muteness, though not completely over it
yet. When Maud, the fat cook from the saloon argued that SHE had
heard him talk before, the doctor just smiled and reminded everyone
that THAT had been a horrific and emotional situation then too.
No one noticed the glint in the Doctor's eye or the hint of a smile on
his lips as he voiced his hypothesis. People's eyes began to
soften when they went Bobby's way as he stood ... silently,
interestingly enough, waiting for events to proceed.
The fact that Homer acted as Bobby's best man, wearing his badge and
pistol prominently, didn't hurt things either for that matter.
Still, it was a festive and rumor-filled assemblage, generating more
excitement than had been unleashed in the town in some years.
Sally herself, having few means, just got married in her best dress,
which had been altered to fit snugly over the evidence that Bobby was,
after all, simple minded, since otherwise he would not marry a pregnant
woman otherwise. At least that's what some thought.
Others assumed he was marrying the woman he'd knocked up, but then he'd
have to be simple minded to want such a plain woman too, wouldn't
he? Since all the other pregnant women from Milleson house were
not only present at the wedding, but were bridesmaids, and since they
displayed only love toward the bride, the rumors that Bobby had been
responsible for all of them were discounted. What woman, pregnant
with a man's baby, would stand idly by while he married some other
woman?
After a simple wedding, during which the whole congregation leaned
forward as one to hear Bobby say "I Do", the happy couple just walked
back to Milleson House, where they were going to keep living until
other accommodations could be found. It was five-fifteen in the
evening when things broke up.
The uproar in town would have gone on much longer than it did, but for
one thing. As Bobby and Sally left the wedding, to begin their
new life together, and bring new life into the world, thousands of
miles away, hundreds of thousands of people were dying in the same
amount of time that it took Bobby to utter the first two words most
people in town had ever heard him speak.
The American public didn't find out what happened at 5:15 PM, on the
5th of August, 1945, in a place a lot of people couldn't even pronounce
- Hiroshima, Japan - until sixteen hours later.
The news that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan swept all other
news, both national, regional and local, out of people's minds.
The descriptions released were horrible, unimaginable, and people
couldn't grasp the immensity of what had happened.
Three days later another bomb was dropped, and not quite a month later,
as leaves on trees in America began to emulate the populations of two
cities far away by dropping lifeless to the ground, Japan surrendered.
It was all over.
The boys were coming home.
And many more boys were coming home than had been thought would
be. Estimates of how many American soldiers would have to
die in the invasion of Japan varied, but all of them were in the
hundreds of
thousands. Now, instead of those hundreds of thousands of
American GIs dying, an equal number of Japanese people had died
instead.
Among the thousands who would live, and would be coming home, there
were three, named Wally, Ralph and Jimmy. So few, among so
many.
But they were very important to four women back in Nebraska.
As Bobby and Sally's wedding had taken place on a momentous day in
history, so it was decided that another momentous day would be used for
the weddings of Meg, Prudence and Rachel. All three
weddings would take place on the seventh of December.
Rachel was the only one who looked normal, as far as brides go.
Except for the two week old twins, one held by her and the other by her
groom as they said their nuptials.
It was a study in contrasts, as Meg looked like she might go into labor
during the wedding. Jimmy had to lean past her eight month
swollen belly to kiss her when it was time, and instead of hugging her
when he gave her that first kiss between husband and wife, his hands
rested softly on the thin fabric and skin that separated him from the
baby that wasn't his. As he stood, holding her hand,
when it was Prudence and Ralph's turn, he looked at the babies in
Rachel's and Wally's arms. If "his" baby looked anything like
that, he was going to be a proud father.
Prudence, at seven months, wasn't far behind Meg, though she wasn't as
extravagantly pregnant. Some people though Meg was going to have
twins too. Prudence looked radiant, though, as many pregnant
women do. Part of that radiance was the result of a clear
conscience. Prudence's conscience had bothered her so
much, and Ralph's attitude toward her was so loving when he got "home",
that in a huddle with Meg and Rachel, she told them she was going to
confess to him whose baby she was carrying. She couldn't lie to
him any longer. When Meg admitted that she had already told Jimmy, and
that he loved her anyway, it was decided that all would come clean to
the men. At that time, the men had only been back home a
week. A dinner engagement was set up at Milleson House and,
before dinner, Rachel took Wally into Mavis' room, while Prudence took
Ralph into Meg's room.
The rest waited in the dining room anxiously. Jimmy, who
who had been through so much with his two friends, was let in on what
was happening.
"And you let them go in a bedroom alone?" he asked, scratching his head. "I thought we wuz here for dinner."
"Ma'am, I lived with those men the last few months, and all they could
talk about was those women. I don't think there's any
arguing going on in there at all. But that's the first time
either of them has been alone with their woman. I don't
s'pect there's any talking going on in those rooms at all!"
In fact, when, almost forty-five minutes later the two couples came
back into the dining room, their clothes were rumpled and there were
big smiles on the faces of both men. The women just blushed, and
announced that the weddings would proceed as planned.
As if a triple wedding with all the women either pregnant or recently
delivered wasn't enough to cause a sensation in town, the attendance of
Mavis and Donna, now both five months pregnant would have caused a
riot, except for the fact that there were almost fifty other women in
town who were with child. Everybody knew a pregnant woman,
many of whom were planning hurried weddings, and it was difficult to
chastise one woman and not another.
Prudence's divorce was adjudged final in October, and the landlord let
her stay. After the wedding Ralph moved in, but they didn't stay
long. It was too small, and Ralph wanted to be closer to the
farm. Wally and Rachel were already living there, of course, and
with the twins and Rachel's stated goal to raise at least six children,
it was clear that the house would be full of their own
family. So two houses were built side by side, with a
common wall, in a style that was catching on around the country, called
a duplex house. Ralph and Prudence lived in one, while
Jimmy and Meg moved into the other. They all thought that having
three bedrooms in a house was extravagant, but they'd be glad for all
that room in a short two or three years. Prudence, Meg and Rachel
entered into a friendly competition that the men didn't know about, to
see who could get pregnant first after all Bobby's children were born.
Sally and Bobby stayed at Milleson House. After the war, the
desire to adopt children gained in popularity, and the Government, in
its infinite wisdom, decided that small orphanages like Milleson House
were not efficient enough. Financial support was
withdrawn. By the time the letter was received notifying
Mavis that the last government payment to her would be made in three
months, and suggesting that she complete all remaining transfer orders,
most of the children had already been adopted. Only June Bug, who
could not speak and Patrick, who had one ankle that made the foot
attached to it go slightly pigeon-toed, were left.
One night, as decisions were being made by Mavis in the next room about
what she would do with her house now, Bobby was reading to June Bug and
Patrick. When he got to the end of the story, and said the
magical words "and they all lived happily ever after", June Bug looked
up at Bobby's face and said the first words anyone had ever heard cross
her lips.
"Will you be my daddy?"
Sally and Bobby adopted both children, adding to their growing
family. Together with Mavis, they had two babies, and now two
older children. Both Mavis and Sally were already pregnant again.
Bobby, now working full time for the cabinet maker, ordered a house to
be built that would hold three more children than they already
had. Sally thought she might be satisfied with six, but wasn't
promising Bobby anything.
One other thing needs mentioning as this tale winds to a close.
One of the things associated with weddings is wedding gifts. In
those hard times, when people did without so that their sons and
husbands would have what was needed to end the bloodshed, wedding gifts
were fairly mundane things. You might get some towels. If
you were lucky, and people worked together, maybe there would be a set
of dishes. Many gifts were hand-me-downs, from relatives.
An heirloom clock, or the family silver might be transferred to those
who were going to carry on the family line.
In Hampstead Nebraska, sitting prominently where each of six women can
see them, are six exquisite wood carvings, gifts at their weddings,
from the orphan boy they took in and learned to love. They are
small things, when compared to the other gift he gave each of those
women, but you may rest assured that, if the house in which any of
those women live ever catches fire, after grabbing the children she
bore, each of those women will snatch up that carving and rescue it too.
A new sign sits out in front of Milleson House. Donna and
Mavis run it now, and Sally is the cook until the new house being built
for her and her husband is ready to move into. There's really no
need of any other help. And the new tenants feel
right at home with those two women ... women who fully understand the
situation those tenants are in.
The townspeople still chuckle about what Mavis decided to do. The
town now accepted all the children running around, who looked amazingly
alike whenever they got in a group. But they had not forgotten
all those pregnancies in that house. That was why they
laughed at what Milleson House had become.
