Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

I was born just a couple of months before she died. My godmother and namesake, Elizabeth Jordan–a tiny woman, well-known in her long-ago day for her writing and editing, for her ostrich-plume hats and theatrical gestures. (Rumor claims she inspired the outspoken Henrietta Stackpole in Portrait of a Lady.)

By late 1946, when I was born, Aunt Jean (as our family mysteriously called her) had long outlived many, many admirers–for example Mark Twain (1835 -1910), Henry James (once rumored to be her fiancé(!)), and Frances Hodgson Burnet (1849-1924).
But when was Aunt Jean born? That was a family mystery, my mother told me, a deepest secret. My mother’s first clue to the mystery came when she brought her new baby, recently christened Elizabeth Jordan Devine, down from Massachusetts (where my father, post-World-War-II was finishing up at Harvard Law School) to New York City, where “the aunts” lived on Gramercy Park.
Aunt Jean was in bed, very sick, when we arrived–I was slid into the bed with her. She looked at me with great pleasure and whispered–though my mother heard–“Who would have imagined that this little baby is 83 years old?”
Even then, as so often before, my Aunt Jean was exaggerating. Because she herself was a mere 81 years old, having been born on May 19, 1865.