It was hard to tell whether our Lola Asun was prouder of Uncle B for being a surgeon at the Makati Medical Center, or for occupying a suite of apartments with Lily B and their six children in that great house. Lola Asun took special care with her toilette on the rare occasions that we went with her and Lolo Julian to visit Uncle B and Lily B in what she airily referred to as “the mansion where my eldest son the doctor lives.” Lola Asun had been orphaned while very young, and had stayed with a succession of better off relations in the fraught limbo of accommodation and petty humiliations that orphans and other poor relations must endure. Thus to see her eldest son ensconced in such grandeur was understandably gratifying.
Accordingly, the B Cousins were deemed ascendant over the rest of us.
