Everything but the Squeal Read Online Free PDF Page A

sign of dinner. I was almost hungry enough to attack the carob cake.
    “But their families,” said Joyce, who supported, in addition to Bernie, a happily idle mother and father. “There have always been families. Where were their families?”
    “The family is largely a literary invention,” Miles said cheerfully. He was a bachelor. “In the tenth century, painters depicted the children who were lucky enough to live as little adults, and that's what they were. They died so often in infancy that the Koreans, for example, held a birthday party on the child's hundredth day to celebrate its having survived so long. The Chinese did it at the end of the first month.”
    “They still do,” I said. “I went to a one-month party with Eleanor a couple of weeks ago. There were lots of red eggs, sort of a Chinese Easter, except that the kids didn't have to die and get resurrected first.”
    “And where is Eleanor?” Miles asked. “I didn't want to intrude into what might be touchy territory.”
    “In China,” I said, wishing I hadn't brought her up.
    “Doing what? Seems rather a long way to go to escape your admittedly peculiar charm.”
    “Research on the extended family. Looking at ancestral shrines. She's going to write something,” I added, both to change the subject and to forestall the question I saw forming in Miles's mind.
    Joyce wasn't interested in China. She folded two hands defensively over her swelling stomach. “What do you mean, the family is a literary invention?” she demanded.
    Miles held up his empty glass, sighted through it, and poured some more red wine into it. He'd brought four bottles with him. “In medieval times, the family was purely and simply a unit of economic survival. The more kids, the more hands for harvest or for work, the greater the chance of passing along whatever miserable property the family might have managed to accumulate. Otherwise, when papa passed on, the neighbors would divide it, or the local lord— which is to say the closest armed thug—might simply annex it, just as he was likely to annex the prettiest daughter. Except that he'd keep the land, whereas he'd return the daughter after he'd had his way with her. ‘Had his way with her,’ ” he repeated, rolling the words and about twenty cc's of wine around in his mouth. “Such a delicious phrase.”
    Joyce was one of the few humans of either sex I'd met who could ruffle, and she ruffled now. “I guess it's delicious to some,” she said.
    “This is wonderful wine,” Miles said, congratulating himself. “Where were we?”
    “We were listening to you,” Joyce said a trifle ungraciously.
    Annie bustled in through the door, bowl in hand, looking domestic. “As the mother of two,” she said to Miles with a disarming smile, “I'd like to hear the rest even if it is a bunch of shit.”
    “You were more respectful in college,” Miles said.
    “I hadn't had kids then,” Annie said. “I thought the world was something real, and that people could explain it to you. I didn't know that it was something you invented as you went along.”
    “Anyway,” Joyce said, “what about mother love? You can't tell me that mothers haven't always loved their children. It's the central fact of the female principle.” Bernie put his hand possessively and approximately on her stomach, and she gave his wrist a pat. He lifted his glass to his mouth with his other hand. “I'm driving,” she said.
    “Of course they loved them,” Miles said soothingly. “They just couldn't get too attached to them. They were too likely to die.”
    “Mine,” Wyatt said, pulling the cork from a bottle of cognac, “are going to live forever. Sometimes I think Jessica already has.” Jessica, his daughter, was thirteen years old and too pretty for her own good. Her little brother, Luke, was nine.
    “Child mortality was fifty, sixty percent up through the seventeenth century,” Miles said. “Visit any old European graveyard and look at all the