The Masters Project Book 4: Hiram and Mildred

The Masters Project

Book Four (Hiram and Mildred)

by Robert Lubrican

zbookstore.com Edition

Copyright 2010 Robert Lubrican

Second edition 2026

License Notes

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Table of Contents

Foreword

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Afterword

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Foreword

This is the fourth in a series of narratives concerning a research project done by the author for his Master's Program. If you read the first three books, then you need read no further in this foreword. You already understand what's going on. Well, you can skip to the third paragraph of this foreword, anyway. That might help you be patient with what is a strange story.

If you haven't read the first three installments, then it would probably make a lot more sense to do that before you read this one. This narrative does stand alone, but at the same time it makes reference to things that happened in past interviews, not to mention the purpose of the project.

This family was wildly different from other families I interviewed too, so wildly different that it took a long time for anything to happen. For that reason, be forewarned that you'll learn a lot about the folks involved, before you get titillated. It's worth the wait, in my humble opinion, but I'm biased. You'll see why if you read the whole thing.

Bob

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Chapter One

Mildred and Hiram responded to my newspaper ad for the project. Instead of providing the preliminary kind of information I asked for, they simply wrote "We wish to participate in the marriage seminar." It was odd phrasing, but I'd met some odd people during the project.

I called to set up the initial appointment.

"Randall residence, this is Mrs. Randall speaking."

Now I don't normally put last names of the study participants in a narrative, but I needed to this time, simply because the way she answered the phone told me something about her. I have, of course, altered the name to preserve confidentiality.

I knew immediately that I was speaking with an old fashioned woman. These days, the average greeting one hears on the phone is "Hello?" A less frequent, but still normal greeting is simply "Yeah?" or "Yes?" Occasionally there will be a gruff voice asking "Whadda ya want?", but for most of us this simply signals a wrong number. But the old-time formal phone answering routine, where the name of the family is identified, and the person speaking identifies him or herself, is fairly rare, at least when a call is taken on a home phone.

Not that being old fashioned meant anything in particular to me concerning their participation in the study. Marriage is becoming old fashioned itself these days. I just assumed that an old fashioned girl would be married to an old fashioned guy, and that, being old fashioned, their marriage might be stronger than many others.

Never make assumptions. You never know how things will turn out.

I made the appointment and found out they had been married for twelve years. Other than that I was flying blind. Mrs. Randall wasn't the type to chat on the phone.

When I arrived at the house, I actually stopped and stared at it for a few minutes.

There was a picket fence. It was white. Inside of and along that fence were carefully tended flower gardens containing Geraniums, Iris, Pansies, and four or five other flowering plants I didn't know the names of. The grass looked like a putting green. There were bushes and fruit trees scattered about.

It was a traditional cape cod house, white, with dark blue shutters on each and every window. It had a wide, covered porch, with a porch swing on it. An elm in the front yard had a tire swing hanging from it. That swing looked wrong somehow, and I studied it. I finally realized that the grass under it was undamaged - no bare spot where little feet had torn and killed the grass as those feet skidded on it.

It looked like something out of a storybook, or a picture post card Norman Rockwell had created. That, in itself, might not have been so odd, but it was sandwiched between two cookie cutter houses in a fairly new subdivision of cookie cutter houses, none of which had fences, or even trees, for that matter. It had the appearance of a farm house that had been picked up by Dorothy's tornado in The Wizard of Oz, and plopped down on top of the wicked witch of the suburbs.

I went up to the porch. There was a welcome mat. There were also decorations beside the door, above the bell, made of wheat straws woven into beautiful geometric shapes. I rang the bell. A high pitched tinny bell, just like you'd find in an old farm house, rang until I removed my finger.

A woman way too young to be named Mildred came to the door. She had on an apron and was wiping her hands with a towel. Her hairdo looked like the house ... like in the pictures you see of women celebrating after VE day in the papers. She had on a dress that came to her shins, and sensible shoes.

"Yes?" she asked, opening the inner door, but not the wooden screen door. I hadn't seen a screen door like that since I was a kid. It was the kind that had a long spring nailed to the jamb and to the edge of the door. When you opened the door the spring dragged across the edge of the door, making a repetitive twanging sound.

"I'm Bob," I said. I like to be informal.

"Oh yes," she said. She said it with all the enthusiasm of a person who's just been told that the kids who are going to leave a bag of burning dog shit on your porch are here. "Please come in."

She was polite, but there was no heart in it.

Hiram was sitting in an upholstered chair that had wings on the sides, as old fashioned as the house. The floors were some dark hardwood and gleamed. There were rugs scattered about, but no actual carpeting. Hiram was sitting, reading the paper, and I swear on my mother's grave, smoking a straight stemmed pipe. He had on slacks and a sport's jacket, over an open-necked button shirt. I looked around for the tie. It had to be here somewhere. I didn't see it, but I knew it was there. He also had a crew cut. I had a feeling I was looking at Dennis the Menace's father.

"Hiram, this is Mister Thompson. He's here for our appointment about the marriage seminar."

"Oh," said Hiram. He stood up, folded the paper and put it on his chair, and then stepped forward to offer me his right hand, while his left removed the pipe from his mouth. "How do you do?" His grip was neither firm nor limp.

"I do pretty well, Mister Randall," I said, as formally as I could. "How 'bout yourself?"

I don't do very well at being formal. Too many years in college, I suspect.

He took his hand back. "Shall we begin?"

No pussyfooting around with this bunch. That was for sure.

There were matching chairs, like the one Hiram had been sitting in. There was a table between them, with a lamp on it. The lamp was a huge old monstrosity, with a maroon shade, and from what I could see it would completely prevent anyone sitting in one chair from seeing the person in the other chair. I sat on a love seat. There was no couch. I looked around. Other than a coffee table, the rest was just bare wood floor - lots of it. The place looked more like an old time parlor than a living room. I suddenly realized that one of the things missing was a television. I looked around some more. Not only was there no TV, I didn't see a radio either. Maybe they had those in their bedroom. Sometimes people watched TV in bed.

I examined Mildred and Hiram. I had to admit they looked a lot alike. If you've ever seen that painting of the farmer, with the pitchfork, and his wife, they looked similar to that. They were both rail thin and had narrow pinched faces, but at the same time smooth, unlined skin on those faces. They both looked gray and insubstantial somehow, almost like they were only half in this world. The science fiction buff in me toyed for a few seconds with the hypothesis that they were actually aliens, posing as humans, using outdated information. It is hotly debated in the science fiction community that any aliens who visit earth will be fifty years out of date when they get here, because the light waves they can see will be so old. But they'll be traveling so fast that the last fifty years of light will just flash past them. So they'll think everything is like it was fifty years before they got here.

Mildred and Hiram and their house looked a little like that. They also looked way too young to have been married twelve years. I decided to find out about that right away.

I pulled out my pen and started asking questions.

"What are your ages?"

Hiram answered for them both. "I'm thirty and Mildred is twenty-eight.

That meant he'd married her when he was eighteen, and she was sixteen. Interesting, but not completely unusual. Maybe he'd gotten her pregnant and had to marry her.

"Any children?" I asked.

"No," said Mildred. It was delivered a little harshly, and it was impossible for me to tell if the idea of having children disgusted her, or if she was pissed off because they didn't have any. At any rate I knew they hadn't "had" to get married.

So far the ambiance in the room was pretty cool. They almost acted like they didn't want to do this.

"Are you sure you want to participate in this study?" I asked, giving them a graceful out if they wanted it.

"It's necessary," said Hiram.

Now that was an odd way to put it.

But I launched into the preliminary spiel about my hypothesis, and told them I'd be asking a lot of questions, some of them quite personal.

"Are you going to ask questions about ... sex?" asked Mildred. She sounded slightly ill at the thought.

"Well, sex is an integral and important part of a marriage." I said.

"I suppose so." said Mildred.

I half expected these two to whip out pistols and take their own lives any second. I had never seen two people with less enthusiasm about ... anything! Well, that wasn’t true. There was enthusiasm about making their house look like something out of 1950's television, maybe Mister Wilson’s house. If they’d have had a kid I swear he would have been named Dennis. Not that he'd have acted like Dennis the Menace. Not with parents like these. With parents like these he'd probably torture cats in secret.

For lack of anything better to do I started asking questions.

"How did you two meet?"

Mildred laid her hands in her lap. "We were neighbors," she said.

She didn't say anything else. Now I was beginning to wonder if I wanted to take part in this or not.

"Could you provide me with a few more details?" I asked. My pen was poised over paper, but I wasn't too worried about running out of ink.

"My mother and father brought me here," she said, as if it were this very house. "They told me I would be marrying Hiram. One year later we were married."

I wondered if maybe Mildred worked for the CIA or something. She was about as tight lipped a woman as I'd ever met. I tried another question, just for fun.

"What was it that attracted you to Hiram?" I asked.

"Attracted?" she sounded surprised. "I told you. Our parents decided we would get married and so we did."

I started listening for music that I knew had to be playing softly in the background somewhere. It would be the theme to 'The Outer Limits'. Either that or 'The Twilight Zone'.

"You had an arranged marriage?" I asked, incredulous. It was 1995. It was the twentieth century. People didn't have arranged marriages in America any more.

"There's nothing wrong with arranged marriages," said Hiram, sounding superior. "It's a time-honored tradition in which the more mature judgment of adults establishes things, rather than leaving them to the whims of hormones."

They weren't in a marriage. They were in a ... "thing".

"Well, you two are a first for me, that's for sure," I said, trying to be affable. I didn't want to say what first came to mind, which would have been something along the lines of "You two are as crazy as a couple of loons."

At the same time, the psychologist in me was just about as fascinated as the sociologist in me. Everybody has heard of arranged marriages, but nobody I know of has actually gotten to study one. This might not fit into my master's thesis, but then again, who knew. I was suddenly much more interested. Now the trick was to get them to talk.

I turned on the bullshit.

"I have to say this is extraordinary luck for me," I smiled widely. "Traditional arranged marriages are quite rare these days, but I have always thought that they fell out of favor at precisely the wrong time in our history. The divorce rate is so high these days it's obvious that marriage is on the rocks - no pun intended." I smiled at my cute little joke. "I'm very pleased to be able to interview two people in a good arranged marriage."

Mildred looked at me sharply. Hiram moved around in his chair so much that I thought he might actually be alive.

Mildred's voice was frosty. "It is crude to make light of our situation," she said.

I wiped the smile off my face. "I'm sorry. Did I say something insensitive?"

"I don't see how you can hope to perform decent marital counseling when you mock the participants," she said stiffly.

"Marital counseling," I repeated.

"You are here to assist us in salvaging our marriage," said Mildred, the beginnings of worry in her voice. "Isn't this part of a marriage seminar?"

I really should have spent a little more on that newspaper ad.

It would have been easy to say there had been some misunderstanding and just get up and leave. But my professional curiosity was aroused, and I wanted to try to find out what made these two people tick ... assuming anything ticked inside their sedate bodies. I wanted to stay. To that end I tried a little more bullshit. This time I thought about it before I used it.

"My research is intended to help people create successful, long term marriages. It is not counseling in the classic sense. What I try to do is help people find the common bonds within a marriage, and strengthen them. If all works well, that does result in a happier and more fruitful bond."

It sounded pretty good to me, even though it was an awful stretch of the truth. Okay, it was outright lies. But it sounded good, and if that actually happened I'd be a pretty happy guy. I mean who would feel bad if they helped somebody have a better marriage?

Mildred relaxed a little, and the concern faded from her face.

"We've been having ... difficulties. I don't think we're ... happy."

"I never said I wasn't happy," said Hiram, fiddling with his pipe.

"You didn't have to," said Mildred. It was the most assertive thing I'd heard her say since I met them. Still, both comments had been made in that flat, listless voice that suggests that it's just words, and that they don't really amount to a hill of beans.

I wanted to stay, but I didn't think I could survive being in this atmosphere a lot longer if things didn't perk up a little. If they didn't blow their own brains out, I might be tempted to blow mine out.

"How long have you been having these difficulties," I asked.

Mildred looked straight at me. "Since we got married." She never even glanced at Hiram. "I don't think we got off on the right foot."

I sat there stunned. She'd stayed in a marriage for twelve years that she had hated since the very beginning? And now she wanted to do something about it?

"How often have you talked about it together?" I asked.

"We only decided recently that something must be wrong," said Hiram.

Well, it was pretty clear to me that something was wrong, and I'd only known them for half an hour.

"Look," I said, not nearly as patiently as I would have liked to, "Here's the deal. If you two want to make things better, you have to talk, and you have to talk about how you feel. To do that you have to unlock the emotion that's bottled up inside you. I'll be happy to help you if I can, but mostly what any marriage counselor does is help you help yourselves. If you're not willing to help yourselves ... to take some risks ... then we're really just wasting time."

Mildred was stiff again. "What do you want us to do?" she asked.

"Let me ask my questions. I want you to answer them to the best of your ability, and to answer them as completely as you can. That will get us started communicating, and then we can see where it goes from there."

"You said there would be questions about sex," said Mildred.

"Yes," I responded.

"I'm uncomfortable talking about sex," she said.

"That's one of those risks I was talking about," I came back. "Part of marriage is for the making of love ... the propagating of the species. That doesn't mean that couples who don't have children are failures. But part of being in love is having sex, and part of having sex should be being in love."

I finally got them to agree to answer the questions, but the first ones I asked weren't about their marriage. They were about their childhoods, and their parents, and how they were brought up. Those they had no problem with, and the answers made lights come on and sirens go off all over the place, at least in my mind.

It turned out that Hiram was raised in this house. It was a farm house back then, on the outskirts of a growing city. His parents and Mildred's parents were neighbors, each with their own farm. They were also part of a religious sect that was traditional, conservative, and which wasn't impressed with modern farm technology. What sect that was doesn't really matter. Religion is a very personal thing, and it's very difficult to apply religious tenets to broad groups of people. I know we try to do that, but it rarely works. Tradition, on the other hand, must be viewed with respect to how it affects broad groups of people, because broad groups of people bow to tradition in the same way. Religion is something you believe. Tradition is something you do.

And it was tradition that caused Hiram and Mildred to end up where they now were.

Their families grouped together, according to tradition, to work the land. At least the men did. Their parents were elderly, and lived a Spartan life, both due to tradition, and their refusal to boost yields by using modern technology. They were content to live off the bounty of the land, and then leave the farms to their issue. Back then you could actually do that.

They didn't stop with eschewing agricultural technology. They were intent in their resolve to forgo all manner of modern things that they didn't think were good for their families. Radio and television were at the top of the "we don't need" list. The odd newspaper showed up in the house, occasionally, but usually only the Sunday edition. The children were home schooled, and, for all intents and purposes, had no real interaction with the outside world. Progress was defined as getting the back forty plowed before the rain made it impossible. When your children came of marriageable age, you found them suitable mates with the same traditional values as your own. Since, in this case, the only suitable mate for Mildred was Hiram, that match was agreed upon by both sets of parents. It just made sense to them.

In short, while Mildred and Hiram grew up in the seventies and eighties, their life style and education was more in line with that of the turn of the century. When they got married, they moved in with Hiram's parents, per tradition. Mildred brought her clothes and her bed with her, and simply moved into Hiram's room with him.

I listened in wonder. I visualized their bedroom, with separate beds, just like Dick Van Dyke and his wife on TV. The more they talked, the more astonished I was.

Mildred's single attempt to get information from her mother about what she was supposed to do on her wedding night was met with: "We don't talk about those things. You'll know what to do."

In fact, she didn't know what to do ... and neither did Hiram. They fumbled through destroying Mildred's hymen, based on what they had seen farm animals do, but that was about it.

Taking their cues from their parents, Mildred submitted sexually to her husband on a traditional schedule. On the first night of the full moon, their wedding night, they fulfilled their 'marital duty'. The next time they coupled was on the first night of the new moon after the next full moon, and then the full moon after the next new moon and on like that. In other words they had sex every forty-two days or so. Unless she had "the curse", as Mildred called it, in which case they simply skipped that turn.

[Author's note: I thought this was exceedingly odd when I first heard it, but didn't ask any questions. Once they started talking I didn't want to give them any excuse to stop. I later researched this 'schedule by the moon' thing, and found that, in an obscure sect during the middle ages, that schedule was believed to bring children at a manageable rate. Modern science would suggest that, since a woman's 28 day fertility cycle mimics the cycle of the moon, exposing a woman's womb to sperm every 42 days would only threaten pregnancy approximately five times per year. They would get to 'enjoy' lovemaking a whopping nine times per year, but only five of them would be during a relatively fertile period.]

Five years after they were married, both sets of their parents died when a grain bin they were cleaning out collapsed. There was a shared wall with another grain bin next door, and their parents were suffocated by grain that buried them. The farms were suddenly property of Hiram and Mildred.

Neither was prepared to work the farms, and couldn't have managed, even had they tried. Not only that, the only adult role models they had were now gone, and they had to make up their own rules along the way from that point on. With almost no outside influence from the media, this tiny anachronistic microcosm, in the middle of the most advanced country in the world, puttered on.

Advanced society caught up with them as the city expanded and, fortunately for them, their land was now valued so highly that, once everything but the house was sold, they were financially set for life.

All that meant was that they didn't have to find jobs, and had no real reason to go out and mix with the rest of society. Other than infrequent trips to the grocery store, for Mildred, and the hardware store, for Hiram, they pretty much sat at home and made it look beautiful.

But they weren't happy. In fact, one could argue that they didn't know how to be happy. In fact ... one could even argue that they didn't know the meaning of happiness.

That brought us to the present.

Except they left out one teeny little thing. That thing came through the door about the same time as Hiram was explaining how they were financially independent.

That thing was a woman.

She opened the door quietly, and walked in as though she was trying not to wake anybody up. I saw a resemblance between her and Mildred immediately. She had the same drawn look, with the flesh on her face seeming strained and thin somehow. She had the same hairdo as Mildred. She wore a dress that could have been the one made right after Mildred's was made.

"Oh!" she squeaked as she saw us sitting in the living room.

"Gertrude!" said Mildred sternly. "Where have you been? You know we don't approve of you going off alone."

"I'm sorry," said the woman meekly. "I went for a walk."

I looked at my watch. I had been there three hours. Whoever this Gertrude person was, she took long walks.

"We'll discuss this later," said Mildred firmly. "Right now we're having a private conversation with mister ... with this man. Go to your room please."

I didn't know if she'd forgotten my last name, or simply didn't want the other woman to know it.

Gertrude ducked her head and trudged up the stairs to the upper floor. I heard boards creak as she turned and went to my right.

"Gertrude is my younger sister," said Mildred. "She lives with us."

I was shocked. At no time during the whole story of their history, had any sister been mentioned. True, the term "children" had been used several times, but no names other than Mildred's and Hiram's had been spoken.

Gertrude, as it turned out, had no one to marry. What that meant was that the parents who had arranged Mildred and Hiram's marriage, hadn't been able to identify an acceptable mate for Gertrude before their untimely demise. So Hiram and Mildred, being the matriarch and patriarch of the family now, took it upon themselves to ... take care of her.

There were three victims in this sad little anachronistic microcosm.

I knew that what this couple needed was an ... extreme makeover. Having enough money to live on without going out of the house would make a lot of people happy. In their case, the proceeds from the sale of the farms had gone to a money manager they never met, but who did a pretty good job. They could easily live off of the dividends paid to their account, and the principle wouldn't suffer. But then most people would spend money like that on, well, stuff. Mildred and Gertrude went food shopping, and to the fabric store, but that was about all. They sewed all their own clothing, and Hiram's too. That was, after all, what they'd been taught to do. Hiram, never having built up much self confidence, and not having any farming to do, just re-read old copies of Reader's Digest, Life and National Geographic magazines that had piled up over the years in a closet. Which parent had been so extreme as to obtain those was unknown. And they kept the house up, along with a huge garden out back. Early to bed and early to rise, they just existed for most of a decade. They weren't so much living their lives, as existing on autopilot.

And having sex every forty-two days, of course. At least Mildred and Hiram were. Gertrude, obvioulsy, was not.

What fun.

How anybody could survive a marriage like that for twelve years was worth its own research project. But the fact was that, despite their hermit-like lifestyle, and the traditions that had kept them from improving their lives, they were both intelligent enough to eventually figure out that they weren't happy, and had made the first step toward trying to work on that. They had joined a 'marriage seminar'. That in itself was a momentous move for these two.

Where to start? I had no idea. I knew they needed to have some fun, but I didn't have the faintest clue as to what might be fun for either of them.

After "What do you like to do together?" fell flat on its face, and "What do you think is his sexiest feature?" got a horrified grimace from Mildred, I forged off into areas that had nothing to do with marriage.

"What's the last movie you saw together?" I asked.

"We don't go to movies," said Hiram.

"Okay, what television programs do you like?"

"We don't own a television."

"When's the last time you ate out? What restaurant is your favorite?" I asked, reaching for straws.

"Mildred prepares all our meals," said Hiram. "Gertrude helps, but she has strange ideas."

[Author’s note: I wouldn't find out until later, but in the last few years, being bored out of her mind, Gertrude often 'escaped' from the house by going for a walk. On one of them somebody must have thought she was homeless or something, because they gave her money. She used it at a McDonalds, because it smelled so wonderful. She wasn't stupid either, and knew that if she asked for money, her sister would want to know exactly what it was going to be spent on, so she just hung around, learning how to panhandle without saying a word to anybody. She almost always spent what she got on food, and that's when she brought her "strange ideas" back to the kitchen. She also tried to sew dresses that were more like the ones she saw on those exciting looking women at the mall. It was after that that it became a rule that she not go out of the house unescorted.]

I had to think about this for a while. To give myself time to do that, and to prepare them for changing things, I gave them a little speech.

"Okay, here's what I think. I think you two have tried your best to live by traditions and roles that your parents taught you and which, if you were still operating a farm, might have served you better. But the fact is that you are not living the same kind of life as your parents did, and that means that trying to live that way has become stressful. A marriage is intended to be based on love, and you two have never had the opportunity to learn how to love each other. To start on that path, the first thing to do is learn to like each other ... to enjoy doing things together ... to share the same passions. Normally you would do that while you dated. You didn't get that chance. So, now that you're married, I think the thing that will produce the best results is to expand your horizons a little, and find some ways to have fun and learn things together that will bring some passion into your marriage. We can also explore some recreational ideas ... things to do just for fun ... that you can share. Having fun and passion in a marriage makes it a lot easier to get through the rough spots that all marriages have."

They sat there, staring at me. I had the feeling I had used words that weren't in their vocabulary. Words like 'love', 'like each other' and 'passion'.

I made another appointment to meet with them, and told them I'd bring along some experiments that they might find useful.

"How much do we owe you?" asked Hiram, getting out a check book.

Now I had an ethical dilemma. I wasn't charging anything to do these interviews. But they thought this was 'therapy', and people charged for those kinds of services. By the same token, what I was thinking of doing was was going to cost some money, and I didn't have a lot of that. So, I am ashamed to say, I quoted them an hourly fee, and then said the fee could be re-negotiated in the future, should they feel inclined to do that. I left with a check in my pocket. The last thing I said to them was that, since Gertrude lived with them, and was part of their lives, perhaps she could be included in the experiments.

"She's just a girl!" said a mildly outraged twenty-eight year old woman about her twenty-six year old maiden sister.

"We won't do anything too radical," I promised. "We're just going to explore some recreational ideas. And don't go to any effort in the kitchen, please. I'll bring the food."

What I did was pack my TV and VCR into my car, stopped to buy a couple of DVDs, and then stopped at Pizza Hut on my way to our second appointment. Since they were paying, I shot the works, getting three different kinds of pizza and two movies. Choosing the movies was the hardest part. I instinctively knew that anything with sex or violence or bad language in it wouldn't fly. That left children's movies. There's not much romance in children's movies, and some of them were even too goofy for this pair.

Walt Disney saved the day. Armed with 'Snow White' and 'The Absent Minded Professor', I sallied forth to rock Hiram and Mildred's world.

And it did too. They were like little kids. They had never had pizza - didn't even know what it was at first. But the explosion of taste and spices was like some magic thing that just blew them away. Other than salt and pepper, Mildred didn't cook with any spices. They ate until they were stuffed.

I ran Snow White first, explaining that it was a classic story for all ages. Initially only Gertrude reacted, and she reacted instinctively to the old hag.

"Don't take it!" she squealed, when the hag offered Snow White the big juicy red apple.

Mildred only hushed her. She was leaning forward in her chair, tense, and she never took her eyes off the screen.

It was a resounding success.

"Are all movies like this?" asked Mildred, her mouth relaxed, even if it wasn't smiling yet.

"Not at all. They're all quite different. Some you'd like, and others you probably wouldn't want to see.

I turned to Hiram. "So, what did you think of Snow White?" I asked.

"What do you mean?" he asked back.

"Did you think she was beautiful?"

He looked at me with an arched eyebrow. "She's just a drawing, not a real woman," he said.

I left it at that.

"I wish somebody would come along and kiss me like that," sighed Gertrude.

"Gertie!" scolded her sister.

"Well why not?" whined the young woman. "Hiram kisses you like that doesn't he?"

"Of course not!" said Mildred, fanning her face for some reasons.

"I see people kissing all the time," said Gertie. "It looks like they're having fun."

Before they could get into an argument about whether or not Gertie had any business being where she could see those hedonists flaunting their immoral behavior, I told them to get ready for a different kind of movie. I explained that it was a fantasy comedy, just in case. For all I knew they would have thought it was a scientific documentary.

The story of Flubber was an even bigger hit, I think primarily because it had real people in it. Hiram could connect with Fred MacMurray because Fred was so reserved and removed from the goings on around him. Gertie was smitten by the High Schoolers, with their "fancy dresses" and smiles and all the insane fun they were having. And Mildred identified with the Betsy Carlisle character because she got to choose which man to marry. There was actually laughter from all three of them during the movie, which I didn't watch because I was so busy watching these people experience something new and exciting and different.

Thus began my seduction of the Randall family. I didn't intend to seduce them into anything other than joining the twenty-first century and putting a little joy in their lives. But what they embraced in the end was much ... much more.

Chapter Two

I went back every week for two months. I helped Hiram buy a television and VCR, but we didn't hook it up to an antenna. I didn't want routine television fare shocking them. Then, on a night when I didn't have any other interviews, I'd take a couple of movies over and the four of us would watch them.

I chose carefully.

There was Gone With the Wind, to introduce them to dramatic acting, with a little G rated sex thrown in, and even some bad words. I fed them some old John Wayne movies to acclimate them to violence that was at least rational in terms of why it was done. I got a DVD of old "I Love Lucy" episodes from a friend, to introduce them to innuendo and interplay between a husband and wife. And I got movies that had kissing in them - the old fashioned kind where there was a grip and a kiss, but no obvious tongue involved.