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his parents' ages. 9
    Why such a fiction was necessary is unclear. Perhaps it was to protect Dr. Howard's ego, or Mrs. Howard's vanity, or both. Women in her time were usually married much earlier than was Hester Jane Ervin; those who were not were considered old maids. Hester Jane's mother herself was only seventeen—although sixteen would not have been uncommon—when she married her impetuous young husband, George Washington Ervin, who was only nineteen at the time. Mrs. Howard could well have recalled other women who were older than their husbands and who were ridiculed by local gossipers: "Robbing the cradle, she was!"
    Similarly, Isaac Howard, aware of the need for a doctor to fit the cultural pattern assigned to him, would have winced when it was said that his wife was almost old enough to be his mother. As scathing as common were the catty remarks: "Married to get a mother, he did!" Or, "Can't be much if all he could catch was an old maid!"
    Still, this concealment of their age difference was an overreaction, even by the standards of the Howards' day. The difference of only one year in their ages, while not so trivial as it would be now, still would not have borne the import that Hester Howard seemed to have attached to it by her "confession." This reaction, however, does give us an insight into the Howards' sensitivity to public opinion and into the small deceptions that they practiced to satisfy their need to be thought well of.
    It is important to note that this deception is but one of the many small fictions maintained by the family, which, taken together, gave young Robert a distorted view of reality. In this case it was a small distortion of little importance, easy to maintain because of Robert's isolation from the Missouri branch of the family; but the effect of such untruths, if they are accepted as fact, is the same as that of a delusion. Given Mrs. Howard's assumed birth date, the details of the family history did not add up. Robert's only choice was that of a person bound to a delusional system: he adjusted the facts to square with his belief that his mother was five years younger than her husband.
    Such accommodation to a delusional system is not of itself strange. All individuals, and by extension all families, have their systems of fictions and myths, which determine their view of the world. The child modifies these views as he gains a more accurate focus on reality, either through contact with other members of the family group or through experience with the world.
    Human development is a continuous process of organizing and reorganizing, by means of which the world and one's concept of the world come increasingly to match one another. Convergence of thought with reality may come about gradually as a process of growth and development, or suddenly when insights accrue so rapidly as to produce an unsettling conceptual chaos. A sense of chaos tantamount to world destruction often occurs when members of the family have been isolated and so deprived of the normalizing functions of social interaction.
    Isolation was an important part of Robert Howard's problem. Through an accident of geography, together with the isolation inherent in his exceptional intelligence and talent, the overprotection of his parents, and his subsequent withdrawal, Robert had few experiences with the real world. All of his responses were reasonable, logical, and often brilliantly conceived within his view of reality. It was his major premises, his underlying assumptions, that were faulty.
    Would it have made any difference in Robert Howard's ability to accept his mother's death, had he realized that she lacked but a few years of her allotted span of three score years and ten, rather than having been prematurely snatched away at the age of sixty? Would his sense of injustice and his subsequent anger have been less?
    According to Robert Howard, Colonel Ervin left Dallas when he became convinced by deaths in his family that he had brought