Victoria Balmoral: It is going to happen

She never quite remembered exactly when she first realized that it was going to happen: they were going to lose the house. Their home for nearly thirty years. Perhaps it had been when Cornelius, red-faced and sauced with cheap English ale, asked her what mortgage payment, haven't paid that since November. Perhaps it had been when she finally noticed the fourth unopened envelope, address to Mr. Cornelius Balmoral at 3601 Hamilton Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society, and opened it to assuage her worst fears. Perhaps it finally occurred to her when the bank posted its eviction notice on their front door and she knew they had 72 hours to vacate.

It hadn't been this way when Victoria Tasker, as she remembered the brown-haired, square-jawed girl with the saucer brown eyes, had agreed to marry Cornelius Tasker in West Carthage, New York. How proud her parents had been, marrying the grandson of the man who'd managed the queen's castle in Scotland! It seemed more like fate than irony that a young woman named Victoria would marry a man named Balmoral, and the Tasker descendants of England's loved queen, dead just two years at that point. Why, she and Cornelius would build a great house from the fortune they made running their general store in West Philadelphia! She'd entertain with majestic hospitality as if her house at the corner of 36th and Hamilton Streets were indeed the queen's castle! And she'd receive her two sons' new wives into the home and provide trusts and other bequests to their many children, her grandchildren.

But no, instead they would flee like nomads across the street to the dilapidated general store. She, Cornelius, and Norman -- the younger of their two boys, an architect who'd just lost his job in that lean year of 1932 -- would retreat to the upper floors of their store, the only possession they could still afford to keep. The three of them would live in three rooms -- a small living area, a bedroom for them, and a small room with no closet for Norman. Somehow, Victoria hoped, she'd find a way to entertain in this crowded space as if it were the queen's castle.