In the petition of Mrs. Barbara Bradshaw Kitteridge, widow, of Marlborough Plain, County of Berkshire, for the legal commitment of her daughter, Rosamund Anne Mary Kitteridge, aged fifteen years and seven months, to a private mental institution, the Court will hear evidence and take depositions in chambers. Although various criminal acts appear to have been committed by certain of the parties to be heard by the Court, Attorney for the Commonwealth has indicated that in deference to Miss Kitteridge's mental health, criminal charges will not be pressed against any of the parties to be heard. Mrs. Kitteridge has stated in writing that she does not intend to institute suit for civil damages in connection with any of the sexual acts committed upon the body of her daughter by any of the persons to be heard or by other persons as yet unknown to the Court. Therefore, the following immunities are granted: Trooper John F. X. Washalaskie, of the Stockbridge Barracks, is granted immunity from prosecution for forcible rape, carnal knowledge of a minor, performance of an unnatural act with a minor, forcing a minor to participate in an unnatural act, assault and battery, impairing the morals of a minor, and fornication.
By arrangement with 'authorities of the State of Connecticut, F. J. E. Woodbridge, Saul K. Moskowitz, Oliver Wendell Holmes Schapiro, and forty-nine John Does and Richard Roes, all of Emerson College, Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut, are granted immunity from prosecution for statutory rape, impairing the morals of a minor, commission of various unnatural acts with a minor, offering dangerous drugs to a minor, and fornication.
Willis W. Parsons of 1402 Park Avenue, New York City, is granted immunity from prosecution by the courts of the Commonwealth for statutory rape, and the commission of unnatural practises with a consenting minor. The New York Courts have granted Mr. Parsons immunity from prosecution for procuring a minor for prostitution, said minor being the aforementioned Rosamund Anne Mary Kitteridge of Marlborough Plain, County of Berkshire.
Mr. Paul Lucien Marc Duhamel, formerly French Master at Miss Potter's School, Lennox, is granted immunity from prosecution for statutory rape, impairing the morals of a minor, the commission of unnatural acts with a minor (anal copulation and fellatio), the offering of certain lewd, lascivious and obscene literature and photographs to a minor, said books in the French language, and failure to protect the morals and physical person of a minor legally under his care from bodily, mental and moral assault. Mr. Duhamel's statement has been taken down in the United States Embassy in Paris, France.
Miss Mary C. E. W. Alsop, of Lennox Meadow, County of Berkshire, is granted immunity from prosecution for the commission of carnal, lewd, and unnatural acts with a consenting minor, for unnatural copulation with a consenting minor of the same sex, and for the offering of certain lewd, lascivious, obscene and illegal objects to said minor, such objects having been illegally introduced into the United States from the French republic.
A diary, or "par book" said to have been kept by the aforementioned Rosamund Anne Mary Kitteridge, has been sequestered and sealed by the Court. The first leaf of this diary or par book contains the following notation: "A record of my copulations, anal, oral and vaginal, with description of positions assumed, size of penis or vagina of partner, number of orgasms of myself and partner or partners, unusual techniques encountered or interesting physical variations met, venereal diseases contracted and cured, bodily damage or wounds sustained before, during or after copulation, together with a record of my reading in the field, blue motion pictures seen, etc." This diary, the property of Rosamund Anne Mary Kitteridge, was removed from the owner's possession without her permission by detectives employed by the Petitioner in this Action, and seems to have been the source of the names and addresses of many of the witnesses to be heard by this Court. It is the opinion of the Court that the opening inscription reproduced above is in fact facetious. The Court regards this diary as legally tainted and will not accept it in evidence. The diary itself has been sequestered by the Court and ordered sealed by the bailiff.
A statement written in his own hand and signed on the day of his suicide by Mr. William Bradford Kitteridge of Marlborough Plain will, for the purposes of this hearing, be treated as a deathbed statement. The Court is satisfied that this document was indeed written by the aforementioned William Bradford Kitteridge of Marlborough Plain and is in his own hand.
The letter and accompanying documents offered by Miss Florentine Axley Gainsborough, of Miss Potter's School, Lennox, are to be treated as relevant discourse rather than evidence in the classic sense. The same is true of the sworn statement of Gunnery Sergeant Wesley Mygodney, U.S.M.C.
And of various notes written by Jean Mary Baxter of Philadelphia, Pa., Sylvia Feigenberger of New York City, Claudia Hope Beasley of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Mary Magdelen McGonigle of Chicago, Illinois, Gloria Sammis of Shaker Heights, Ohio, and Betsy-Jean Parkwell-Smith of The Grange, Upping Minor, Backsley Close, Hampshire, England.
The Court has received sealed reports from the following experts:
D. S. Cohen, Ph.D., M.D. Fellow, Amer. College of Obstetrics & Gynecology.
Vladimir Smith, M.D. Fellow, Amer. College of Urology.
Mandible Levin, M.D. Fellow, Amer. College of Psychology.
Ada Wisotski, R.N. of Miss Potter's School, Lennox.
The firm of Cuttshalk, Nevins, Nevins and Cutt-shalk, acting on behalf of Mrs. Oliver Bradshaw of New York City, acting in this matter as friends of the Court, have asked that the following depositions be taken into account:
Statement by Marcelline Durand Statement by Oscar Bengstrom Statement by Bridget McGann Statement by Mrs. Oliver T. Bradshaw
Cuttshalk, Nevins, Nevins and Cuttshalk have submitted verified copies of arrest records bearing on the matter. They have also asked that the Court hear testimony from Miss Sara Anne Lowther of Patchen's Corner, Iowa.
The Court will talk informally with Dr. Hastings von
Schmidt, Director of the Institute for Mental Hope, Grandview, New Hampshire, to which institution the petitioner in this action has asked that the aforementioned Rosamund Anne Mary Kitteridge be committed for an indefinite period of time or until such time that, in the judgment of competent physicians and of the Courts of this Commonwealth, she is no longer potentially dangerous to herself or to the citizens of the Commonwwealth.
Judgement is reserved until the depositions have been taken, the ancillary documents examined, the interviews accomplished, and until the body of relevant material has been studied by the Court and by such experts as the Court may appoint at its pleasure.
God Save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Rossiter T. Goodpasture (J) (S)
The Seal of the Commonwealth has been affixed to this document, 24 July, Ninenteen hundred and Sixty-Nine.
Done at Springfield.
Statement by Paul Lucien Marc Duhamel, formerly French master at Miss Potter's School in Lennox. The statement was taken down in the United States Embassy in Paris, in the presence of C. H. Glintenkamp, Vice Consul. M. Duhamel is thirty-one years old, married, and a citizen of France.
I am a Frenchman. Worse, I am a Paris intellectual and therefore mildly suspect in Provincial France, totally suspect in an Anglo-Saxon setting. The Anglo-Saxon mind immediately casts me as both Cartesian and confused, both Communist and Gaullist, both pederast and satyr. It is assumed that I entered the world already aware of the arts of love and that my nippled bottle contained not milk but red wine. In short, the French they are a funny race, they fight with their feet and so on. I am sure that M. the Vice-Consul understands.
I was aware of all of these things before I accepted an appointment to Miss Potter's School in Massachusetts and I was amused in advance. I was somewhat surprised and not absolutely pleased to discover that the headmistress was an Englishwoman who had lived in France for three years and concluded that we French are much like other men, except, perhaps, not quite as brave in war.
The school itself was a surprise. It is situated in the Berkshire Mountains, in what was once a great house. The young ladies are from the best American families, that is to say, the most prosperous families, and they are far less stupid than one had expected. I am told that there are other schools in which slow-witted children of the rich are prepared for life. At Miss Potter's I soon discovered that the young ladies were intelligent, industrious, and filled with both health and high purpose. I was amazed to find that many of them spoke French fluently if idiosyncratically, having traveled abroad in the company of their parents or of school mistresses hired as paid companions. My only experience in the teaching of Americans had been during the first year after I obtained my Agregarion. Attracted by the salary, I engaged myself to offer the rudiments of the language of Moliere to various groups of United States officers, mostly of substantial rank. I discovered that certain of these officers were not only innocent of the French language, but blissfully ignorant of the language of Shakespeare. It became necessary to instruct them in the rudiments of English grammar before passing to the French Simple Present.
But enough of the cross-cultural observations. I found Miss Potter's young ladies intelligent and agreeable and my wife and I were given a tight little stone house, with several chambers, a large salon, an astonishing kitchen, and a study in which I prepared for my classes and in which I offered in the Style of Oxford, advanced instruction to certain of the young ladies who revealed special aptitude in French. Mademoiselle Kitteridge was, of course, one of the young ladies who revealed special aptitude.
I must digress, with the Vice-Consul's permission, to clarify certain matters concerning my household. I married soon after I had finished my courses at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and I married in deference to the wishes and for the commercial convenience of my parents, who had selected for me a young woman who had certain social pretensions and a considerable amount of money. Her family, I might tell you, owns a substantial cheese packing enterprise in Normandy, her native province. My parents are in a kindred metier.
Unhappily, she is five years older than I, a nun manque, already somewhat dessicated, and she had been taught by her mother and by a series of maiden aunts that the connubial act is essentially unpleasant, that men, as a class, are brutal and thoughtless in such matters, and that though it is certainly the duty of a wife to submit to her husband, there is nothing in the Civil Marriage Service that commands her to enjoy this submission.
Marie-Clair, as my wife is called, is a prude, a shocking bore, a dry-skinned and dry-mouthed woman, dressed, even in the humid American summer, in a black suit sewn in Cherbourg. We now live apart by mutual agreement. Marie-Clair is of that species of female one sees in Bordeaux or Lille, counting her francs and centimes carefully, seeming as she does so almost to be offering an Act of Contrition to the small black leather purse in her hands, a purse fitted with a strong catch. She is also a Catholic, my excellent Marie-Clair, a daily communicant in France, wildly suspicious of the Irish priests to be encountered everywhere in America. Sometimes, during the two years that we were in Massachusetts, she went to confession twice, perhaps three times in a single day, being uncertain that the voice that came from behind the grill, over Irish-American tonsils, was in fact authorized to give absolution to a Frenchwoman and especially to a Normande.
Obviously, I became aware of the quality of my prize even before my marriage, although the true extent of her aridity was concealed from me, for Marie-Clair believed with passion that it was her holy duty to bloody the sheets of the marriage bed. Her favors had been withheld from the cheese-making Normans of her native town. That wedding night! I swear to you, M. the Vice-Consul, it was like something out of Balzac. Those dry shanks were offered to me lapped in a flannel nightgown of the sort one sees in a cartoon. When I attempted to remove it I was reprimanded and told to be more gentle. A bit of reconnaissance revealed that, under the cartoonist's flannel, those dehydrated loins were defended by drawers made of what seemed to be stainless steel, held at the waist and at each thigh by elastic of prodigious strength and powers of resistance.
I attempted to lower these pantaloons, made actually of extra-duty rubberized webbing of the kind used on military equipment. When my hand reached the elastic barrier at the waist a small fusillade of protest came from the unseen head attached to the body guarded by those iron underpants.
"I assure you, Marie-Clair, it is utterly impossible to consummate the marriage without removing these garments," I said.
"Very well," she responded. "If it is necessary, it must be done. I shall remove them myself."
And indeed she did. I cannot recall a more distressing adventure and I shall not spoil the Vice-Consul's lunch by describing it in detail. The point I wish to make, you will understand, is that the tone of my marriage was established in that rather stuffy bedroom, on the night of the Battle of the Iron Drawers. Things did not improve. If such a thing is possible, what set in was a deterioration. In point of fact, I applied for a post in America half in the hope that Marie-Clair would discover at the last moment that she was too ill to travel, being given to migraines. Malheureusement, it was not the case. She busied herself enthusiastically with preparations for the journey and when I reached Miss Potter's school in Massachusetts and the pleasant house set aside for the French master, Marie-Clair was at my side.
I seem to have portrayed Marie-Clair as a female without a positive attribute of any kind. This is a grave injustice, unfair and perhaps unkind. One or another of those maiden aunts had advised her that men are insatiable in their demand for women and that this distasteful lust is a simple fact of life perhaps ordained by the Almighty, and therefore to be humored, and further that the intelligent wife silently approved when her husband acquired a mistress and thus relieved her of a portion of the burden. To put it in another way, Marie-Clair acquired blinders and I enjoyed a certain amount of freedom.
Such was the situation that obtained during my first year at Miss Potter's School. It was a state of affairs useful to me, for I discovered that there existed on the staff a perfectly adorable young woman who had attended Radcliffe College, had passed a number of summers in France, and who now diverted herself by teaching history to Miss Potter's young ladies. I shall call her Sue. She is the kind of American female to whom the simple utterance of a French verb is a powerful aphrodisiac, and it became clear to me during my first month in America that an antidote to my chill marriage bed existed, one might say, under my nose.
That is not an inaccurate way to put it, for very soon Sue's delightful form was quite liberally under my nose. She made love as enthusiastically as she played field hockey with her girls, and she made love entirely in French. It was possible to arouse her, even after a good deal of lovemaking, simply by whispering fragments of La Fontaine into her ear, which ear was like a perfectly formed, excessively clean, not vitally interesting shell. She was, perhaps, more athletic than a French girl. Certainly she was more hygienic. Always, she smelled of soap of a very high quality. This disconcerted me for several weeks, for I enjoy the discreet hint of healthy perspiration. Eventually I became addicted to the odor, which derived from a soap prepared and sold by S. S. Pierce & Co of Boston, which is the home of Radcliffe College.
After a year at Miss Potter's School, Sue became bored with the teaching of history. She went to New York, where she worked for a glossy magazine of the type that is in imitation of Paris Vogue and soon she married a young man from the Law School of the Yale University. To judge from the photographs of this young man, as they appeared in the newspapers, he had from birth used the soap prepared by S. S. Pierce. I offered them my silent blessing and wondered what outlet I should discover for my bestial, masculine desires.
That was the second year Mademoiselle Kitteridge attended Miss Potter's School. I recall her with stunning clarity. She was young, very young, except for the eyes, which were as intelligent as the eyes of a French citizen, and the mouth, which betrayed a certain physical sophistication, or at any rate the promise of such sophistication.
In her second year, which was also mine, she was one of the three or four students offered what is called "Tutorial French." The headmistress sent for me, a few days after term began. She is an estimable woman, Miss Gainsborough, with not at all the kind of temperament you might expect from her appearance, which is that of the English lesbian of the inactive class.
"Rosamund reads French easily," the headmistress told me. "She is an exceptional student and she has passed several summers in France. I think she should be offered a course of reading in contemporary French literature. Sartre, I should think. Camus, by all means. Robbe-Grillet."
"Genet?" I said, intending to poke a little fun at my employer.
"If you think she should read Genet, by all means oblige her to read Genet," Miss Gainsborough said. "She is not a girl who will be damaged by ideas. What would be a disservice to her would be the absence of ideas."
I drew up a list of books to be read by Miss Rosamund Anne Mary Kitteridge of Stockbridge, Mass. I had her begin with Camus, because of the purity of his expression. At the first session in my study, I was astonished. She had read L'Etranger, La Peste, Le Myth de Sisiphe, and The Rebel, all in a week, and she discussed these books as efficiently as a student at the Ecole Normale in Paris. She is, of course, a genius. Not a French genius, but nevertheless, a genius. She is totally bilingual in French and English and I am certain that if it suited her disposition of the moment, she could quickly acquire a similar command of Spanish and Italian. I dislike to think of her uttering German, but I am forced to concede that she does indeed read that primitive language with ease.
French, quite naturally, is her favorite language and I found myself, after the first session, looking forward to my meetings with her in the way one looks forward to a weekly meeting with a young female colleague.
I should make it clear, by the way, that the headmistress assumed that the girls received under my temporary roof were chaperoned by Marie-Clair. and in the technical sense perhaps this was the case. Marie-Clair was always in the house-or almost always-but after dinner had been served she retired to her bedroom on the floor above my study, to knit or sew or read from the Douay Bible. Not once during the three years we were in Massachusetts did she enter my study after the noon hour. It was cleaned in the morning. The furniture and brass were polished, and that was that.
My special students were entertained in the afternoon or evening normally from seven until ten minutes before ten. At ten it is necessary for the 'girls to be safely in their rooms and ready for bed, house mothers or warders, being employed to see that each student was in fact exactly where she is supposed to be at that moment. Of course, after the lights are put out it is not impossible for the older girls to do a certain amount of maneuvering.
At any rate, on two afternoons of each week and on two evenings, I offered the Tutorial French to those considered worthy. It was a matter of chance that Rosamund Kitteridge was assigned to one of the evening sessions. Actually, because of her age-she was the youngest of all die students-I suggested that she be changed to an afternoon session, but the headmistress vetoed that. "She is to be treated exactly as are all of the other students," Miss Gainsborough said. "Except in intellectual matters, of course."
So Rosamund Kitteridge came to my house each Tuesday evening at a few minutes before seven. She was always prepared. She had always done the reading. She never failed to produce at least one original idea during each session. I often wished that instead of myself, Sartre had occupied that chair in New England. He would have learned a great many things that cannot be learned from Madame de Beauvoir.
At first Rosamund made no impression on me beyond the intellectual. The girls at Miss Potter's school wear uniforms during the school week, the principle behind this being to discourage competition in clothes. The uniform, in warmer weather, comprises a blue serge skirt, blue stockings that leave the knees bare, and a very clean white shirt. One comes to know things after a while, and I came to know that Miss Potter's girls are expected to wear, under the skirt of blue serge, tight-fitting but rather bulky drawers made of plain white cotton. Fancy underclothing is discouraged and each girl is expected to wear a garment that adequately defends her bodily apertures.
"It's not a matter of men," Miss Gainsborough explained to me. "Young girls of this age, living in close quarters, are easily aroused even one by the other. The solution of course is coeducation and perhaps communal living, but I'm afraid we're a long way from that."
"Communal living?" I asked perhaps rather doubtfully.
"Of course," Miss Gainsborough responded. "People should share their lives in a constructive way."
"But Madame, at what age should this begin?"
"It should begin at birth," the headmistress said. "But I shan't waste your time with my theories which are, no doubt, absolutely contrary to your own. If my girls learn a bit of French and a bit of history, if they get a smattering of mathematics, and of Science, I'm satisfied for the present. The exceptional girl should get more, of course."
"Miss Kitteridge, for example?" I said.
"Obviously," the headmistress said.
And so Rosamund Kitteridge came to my study in the evening, dressed in her blue skirt and virginal shirt, blue socks and square-toed oxfords. She is what we French call a pure blonde, une blonde claire. Her hair is rich and shot with gold and the eyes are of a Viking blue-clear and beautiful, alive with intelligence. The blue and white costume favored her, as it favors girls of a positive type-pure blondes or crisply dark brunettes. Her arms are thin and clean; the forearms then were just beginning to take on a truly feminine plumpness. Though she is not a tall girl, her legs for some reason give an impression of length and her calves and thighs are well-made. Altogether, she had, at that time, the physical appeal of a stripling taken from a Greek vase or pot, together with the quality of womanhood coming into bud, a quality that can be agonizingly arousing.
Her mouth is full and the lips, without rouge, are a rich, moist red.
The male teacher at Miss Potter's becomes accustomed to observing a flash of white under the serge skirt of a girl who changes position quickly and after a few weeks he is no longer troubled by the sight of these undergarments. The mini-skirt was in that year and the girls wore them on weekends, very daringly, but the school skirt remained at an inch or two above the knee, a kilt-like, neuter garment. The girls, of course, shorten their skirts by doubling them at the waist, and when a visitor or the headmistress enters a room where a class is in session, there is always a sudden flurry of movement as the young ladies adjust their hemlines to the official length.
I have said that one becomes accustomed to the rude flashing of white cotton drawers, a white cotton crotch becomes commonplace. One even gets used to the momentary flaunting of black lace panties, worn by some of the older girls determined to tempt the fates. Never, though, had a humble pedagogue been prepared for Rosamund.
On the fourth or fifth of her sessions with me-we were discussing Genet as I recall-she sat in a low-lying leather chair, opposite me in my study. It is a pleasant room, lined with books on three walls, furnished by the masculine or "club" style. There is a fireplace, fitted with brass tools, and the lamplight danced nicely from the polished brass, kept in order by Marie-Clair. There's an atmosphere of scholarly elegance, encouraging cerebration, dignity and academic calm.
I was warming up to the subject of Genet, discussing his use of thieves' argot in a poetic context. Rosamund had just made what I believe to be a sound and rather original point.
"What is significant about Genet, as I see it," she said, "is that he takes his homosexuality as a given, a donnee. He does not attempt to explain it or to apologize for it, or to cast blame on the world for it. When you read Genet you understand at once that you are in the presence of a fully persuaded cocksucker."
She used the English word; I supplied the French and she thanked me. Then, for whatever reason, my eyes dropped from her face and I found myself looking straight at the place where her thighs are joined. She wore nothing under the serge skirt, which had been hitched up by the low, deep chair, and from my position I enjoyed an undisturbed and well-lighted view of her pott and of the mild brown slit beneath it. The hair was strikingly blonde, like gold wire. I recall being somewhat surprised, then was reminded idiotically, of an off-color ditty:
Je ne suis pas curieux, Mais je voudrai bien savoir Si toutes les femmes blondes Ont les poilus noirs
The doggerel ran through my mind while my eyes remained fixed on the delicate object a few feet away from my nose. I assume that I had been speaking and that I broke off in mid-sentence, for Rosamund's eyes flickered and she seemed to offer a silent question. My mouth and throat went dry and my heart began to pound in a dangerous, exciting and familiar way. A wave of heat passed through my thighs and I felt myself growing large, inside my trousers. My hands trembled.
"What...? " she said. Then she realized that I was staring at her lap. She laughed gently and said, "Oh. Sorry."
"Please do not be sorry," I said. "The view is delightful. Charming."
Those blue eyes met mine; they were filled with candor. Certainly they were not the eyes of a child. Her lips parted, so that one got a flash of orderly,-well-kept teeth. Then her hands moved quickly to the hem of her blue serge skirt and in a moment the skirt was raised, so that her ripening thighs were exposed, her knees perhaps two feet apart, and a sharp red slit now showed between the brownish petals. She spread her legs quite wide and laughed pleasantly.
"Mademoiselle Kitteridge," I said. "Please. I am, after all, a schoolmaster."
She laughed and drew the skirt back over her thighs. "Certainly that does not mean that you have been emasculated," she said. She got up from the chair, swiftly as a young cat, kicked off her shoes, and crossed the room to a cabinet in which I kept a bottle of port. It is a wine I enjoy late at night, when I have been working. She opened the glass door and picked up the bottle, examining the label.
"May I have a little?" she asked. "I like the taste of port."
"I do not care to see the inside of an American jail," I said.
She laughed. "You won't see the inside of one of our jails because of me," she said. "I like you. I like you very much."
There was something in the timbre of her voice as she pronounced the words, "I like you very much" that touched my spine and sent a kind of shock through my system. I stood up and moved toward her across the excellent oriental rug with which the study had been provided. She turned to face me and her forearms, bare under rolled white sleeves, were extended in a gesture of absolute welcome. I simply moved into those arms and as my body touched hers, her head was tilted so that her mouth was beneath mine. We kissed. Her mouth was small and soft and warm. Her body, through the thin white shirt, was warm to the touch. My hand fell and my ringers grazed her buttocks. She trembled, then pulled away.
"Please," she said. "May I have the Port?"
"Of course," I said, sounding as if I had been strangled. I poured port for her and for me and we clinked glasses, then drank slowly. The sweet strong wine warmed my stomach. I searched her eyes. They were absolutely candid. Absolutely without fear.
She sipped her wine. When it was finished she took the empty glass from my hand and put both glasses on the tray. Then she moved toward me and her arms were around my neck, her mouth on mine, then in mine, and then our tongues were moving swiftly, her mouth and tongue hot and swift, tasting of the rich, fruity wine. Without command, my hand moved under her short skirt and my fingers found the warm, moist place between her legs. When I touched her, the air was expelled from her mouth quickly, making a hissing sound. Then her right hand, like a small white bird, was at my fly and her small fingers unbuttoned my trousers. The hand slipped into my trousers and found its way through the parting in my shorts, the warm fingers moving with superlative art, caressing me, so that I felt myself harden even more. My tongue was deep in her mouth and her left hand was soft against my cheek. For an instant I was afraid that I would come to the climax prematurely. You must remember, of course, that Marie-Clair offered nothing at all and that my young woman of Radcliffe College was no longer at the school. I was, to put it bluntly, very much hard up, as I believe the Americans put it. An interesting expression. Droll. Hard up. It was precise. An absolute description.
She freed her hand and went to the study door, turning the key in the lock. Then she unbuttoned her shirt, slowly, methodically. She took it off and her breasts were free, for she wore no brassiere. She looked enormously sexual, bare to the waist, dressed in that blue serge skirt, like part of the habit of one of those orders of nuns that has gone modern. I looked at her for many seconds, my eyes on the firm, rounding breasts with their taut, rose-colored nipples, uncompromisingly erect, perfect as a pair of French cherries. Then my eyes dropped to her waist and I was suddenly enormously conscious of the fact that the skin beneath that skirt was bare. She followed my eyes and after a moment her fingers moved to the zipper tab at the side of the skirt. The zipper made the sound of tearing and the skirt dropped to the Persian rug. She stepped out of it gracefully and offered herself, clad in those navy-blue stockings, folded below the knee.
It was not a woman's body. The hips and thighs were too slender for that, the hard-nippled breasts a bit too small. But it was not a child's body either, as the word child is generally apprehended. That boy-like figure was absolutely alive with sexuality. The little mound above her poil arched slightly and her fingers touched her breasts for an instant.
My hands moved toward my necktie.
"Please, I want to do it," she said.
She came silently across the patterned rug. When she was close to me I was sharply aware of her smell. She smelled of soap and of mild cologne and of sweet, graceful sweat. She removed my tie and my shirt, then unfastened my belt and peeled my trousers from my body. When I was nude she stood back to admire me. In Paris, young American girls sometimes tell me that I resemble Louis Jourdan-though I am much younger, of course. I think it is simply a matter of accent. However it was, Rosamund seemed satisfied with what she saw. Her body, warm as fire now, clung to mine for its entire length. Her pelvis arched upward, pressing my throbbing penis against my hip. Her mouth left mine and dropped to the nipples on my chest and her tongue sought for them amongst the crisp black hair. She was breathing rapidly now. Her fingers trembled delicately.
"Is this a new thing for you?" I asked. "I am not given to seducing the young except with ideas."
"You are new," she said. "You are new. You are unique." Her hand was on my penis and she guided it gently, arching her body so that she could take it as she stood. "I want your cock," she said softly. "Your French cock."
I went into her carefully, moving my hips with caution, but she offered a sudden, spasmodic movement and her feet left the rug. She clung to my shoulders with her hands. Her legs gripped my body, and her pelvis moved with a sure, strong thrust, so that she forced me into her, right to the hilt.
"Ah, god, it is marvelous," she said. "It is in me, that cock. That long French cock. In me. In me. In me. Move your cock in my body, your long hard French cock."
I lifted her in my arms and carried her to the leather-covered divan, lowering her gently, remaining inside her. Her legs seemed to spring apart when her behind was supported by the couch and I plunged into her, deeper, deeper. Her mouth was frenzied now, the warm swift tongue bathing my throat, my ears, my lips. I moved in her steadily, thrusting deep but using slow, steady strokes. I felt my loins begin to boil.
"I don't want to give you a baby," I whispered. "I don't want to give you a baby."
"It's all right," she whispered. "Don't stop. Keep it in me, that long cock, that long hard French cock."
And so I plowed away, aware of her tight, soft vagina, warm and moist and close around me, aware that this was a child beneath me, a child whose body I had entered, a child whose forming womb I explored, but delighted because of that and absolutely unaware of shame or fear or guilt. What I was doing seemed to me to be absolutely and inarguably right. I was giving pleasure to the body beneath me, to the body I had entered, and I was, I believe, more aware of my manhood than I had been at any moment in my life before that. She is a curious creature, Rosamund Kitteridge. An original. A force of nature, in one sense.
"Fuck me! Fuck me!" she cried, her small bare buttocks thrashing on the slick leather of the couch. "Fuck me! Ride me to death, to death, to death. Fuck me to death. Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me!"
I touched her cheek with my fingertips. She seized the hand and guided it. "Touch my ass-hole," she cried. "Finger my ass-hole! Touch it! Touch it! Touch it!" And her hand moved across my buttocks so that her small, strong finger was between them and then her finger was in me, in the hole in my behind. It was an experience. Unique. Gorgeous. Absolutely stunning. When it was over I rose slowly and took a fresh handkerchief from my pocket, cleaning her body. She trembled, all of her, for many seconds. Then she sat up, touched my cheek, kissed me, and said, "Thank you. Thank you very much."
In a moment of post-coital panic, I glanced at my watch. "My God, we haven't finished your lesson," I said.
She laughed, a low, gay laugh that warmed my heart. Already she was slipping into her simple costume. "I know my lines," she said. "You are teaching me French. Don't worry about it."
I got into my own clothing quickly. Then, puzzled, I said, "But aren't you afraid? Of becoming pregnant?"
"I take the pill," she said. "It works."
"But how...? "
"Do not concern yourself," she said firmly. "It is my affair. Simply be assured that I am competent."
She kissed me quickly on the cheek, caught up the green baize bag in which she carried her books and papers, and moved swiftly through the door. I glanced at my watch. It was thirteen minutes before ten. At ten minutes before the hour she would be in her tiny room, safe in that fortress of young virgins, her guarded uterus alive with my sperm, my good French sperm that would be soaked up by her young Anglo-Saxon body, secretly, in the dark, while she slept with scores of sleeping girls around her. Suddenly the incident struck me as a magnificent joke, an enormous blague, and I laughed out loud in my empty study, shocked by the sound of my own laughter and for a moment puzzled. I stood in the half-lighted study, my eyes on the shelf that held a uniform edition of the works of Balzac, wondering precisely what it was that seemed so strange. Then I realized that I had not laughed with such honesty since the day I had married Marie-Clair.
"Extraordinary," I said under my breath. "Extraordinary."
Then I laughed again, permitting the laughter to bounce back from the dead bindings that imprisoned Blazac. I was happy. It was extraordinary. I was in a country I do not understand and for which I have but limited affection, in a part of that country remote from everything European, and I was happy. I was happier by far than I had been in France for a long time, a very long time. I sat down on the couch that had supported our coupling and realized that I was delighted, not only because I had enjoyed making love, but because I had been in communication with a person, a free and vivid person.
"Look here, M. Duhamel," I said to myself in my schoolmaster's tone. "You are something of a monster, old chap. Here you have been violating children given into your care, yet you are pleased with yourself."
"One child," an inner voice observed.
"Agreed. One child. But as you well know, 'After the first death there is no other.' You should be swimming in guilt, dear man. Alive with shame. And you laugh. You simply laugh."
I made my way upstairs to my chamber and when I reached the head of the stairs I laughed again, a loud, clear, young laugh that rang out in the empty hall. From the depths of Marie-Clair's chamber came her voice: "Are you ill, Paul?"
"On the contrary, Madame, I am in rude health. I am in gorgeous health."
And I took myself to bed, going to sleep almost at once, stirring when the thin mountain dawn filtered through my window, instantly aware of the night before, so sharply aware of it that I almost felt that warm young body beside mine in the bed. I had not washed before going to bed, and the smell of her skin was on my own skin. It was delectable. I luxuriated in it. Then I laughed, a low-throated, almost secret laugh. I got out of bed with a bounce, shaved with enjoyment, dressed quickly, and hurried downstairs for my coffee.
That morning I lectured the senior girls, the seventeen and eighteen-year-olds, and the subject was St. Exupery. I inspected the twenty unblemished faces with interest, observed the white flash of a pair of drawers, commanded silence with a rap of the knuckles, and began to lecture.
To be perfectly honest, I have always considered St. Exupery a bit of a bore. His French is flawless and ingratiating, he is a hero, a gallant figure, but he is altogether too smug for a man like me, who feels at home in the less fragrant quarters of Paris. That morning, however, I warmed to the subject, and I made St. Exupery seem to be the perfect man, the perfect mind, the perfect soldier, the perfect lover. When I had finished the lecture the girls crowded around my desk.
"M. Duhamel, you were magnificent," a tall, somewhat angular creature said, her eyes attempting to touch me.
"Magnificent!" another said. "You make one feel so alive. So French!"
"Ah, bon. Bon," I said. "I am happy to have conveyed something of the spirit of a great Frenchman to you young ladies."
When the room was empty, I laughed again. "Not only is this good for my glands," I said. "It is supportive of the intellect. Astonishing! Absolutely astonishing."
And it was astonishing. Crudely, I am certain that the world would see me as a man who has seduced a child-surely a creature to be despised. But it was not quite that way. I was seduced as much as seducer. After that first night, we discussed the French language and its literature and we discussed the world of French ideas, but we did so in the act or in the attitudes of love. There is a great deal to be said for the technique. Certainly the Greeks employed the method in fifth-century Athens, and the fact that it was a boy's behind beneath those ancient and wise loins is a detail. The act of love is an art form, minor perhaps but authentic. Sometimes I think it is engaged with the logic from which all art derives. That would not be an unreasonable assumption.
Certainly Rosamund seemed to have grasped the interpretive logic of free copulation-freely received, freely given-that taunted but eluded such writers as Lawrence and Henry Miller and that, to Sartre's way of thinking, the thief and pederast Genet has seized and turned into a religious experience the magnitude of which makes Genet deserving of sainthood.
After that first night in my study, my life assumed a new pattern. Usually, Rosamund came to my house a few minutes early. If she had a question derived from her reading, she asked it and I tried to answer. Then the heavy oak door was locked and we stripped quickly, falling into each other's arms, absolutely drunk with sex. She is a tireless receptacle, eager, seeking, searching.
She adored to talk when I was inside her body and sometimes the things she said were startling and poetic. The sounds she made and the words she uttered were not those of the standard female.
"I fuck, therefore I am," she said one night, when I t was above her, piercing her body. "I am being fucked, therefore you are."
And her mouth would move to meet mine, then it would leave my mouth and drift across my body, her tongue working quickly, her lips just grazing the surface of my skin. There is a place, here in Paris, where one can possess a young girl, a girl of Rosamund's age and size. I sought the place out and paid over a large sum of money, but I was disappointed. The girl they gave me was thirteen, a shifty-eyed street child with a harsh, Montmartre accent. The orifices of her body were snug and tight as were Rosamund's, but there the resemblance ended. The child-whore was aroused for herself, she participated, but she did nothing to alter the flow of my blood. I came away the loser by several hundred francs, but I came away also a much wiser man.
The sense of excitement I felt with Rosamund had nothing to do with the fact that she is a child. After the initial shock had passed I no longer thought of her as a child. She did not respond to the youth cult that is abroad in America and even in France, where young women with babies continue to call themselves children.
"I detest the war," she said one night. "But flower children bore me. My flower is between my legs and it is not a passionless daisy. It is an orchid, perhaps. A steaming orchid, sometimes alive with the dark, musky perfume of the hothouse."
She caressed me, taking my body into her mouth, her lips warm on the skin that covered the rigid length. She took it all into her small hot mouth and she took the product, trembling as I poured the fruit of my body into her mouth, sucking it dry, sucking, sucking, until the hardness passed. Then she rested her cheek on my groin, her mouth and her nose in the moist tough V of dark hair, her breath warm, then cool on the skin.
She was faultless. It was as if she had been born knowing everything, understanding the physical facts of life and observing them flawlessly, but understanding too the ebb and flow of the spirit, the exercise of what might be called the etiquette of copulation. She was graceful. That is the word I want, I think. It is simple but it conveys, in this context, an enormous amount of meaning.
I refrained from asking questions about matters that did not concern me. I knew, of course, that she had completed some enormously bizarre experiences. Frankly, I was curious and for a time almost jealous, but I asked no questions, she volunteered no information. That is why, M. the Vice Consul, I can report only on my own interchanges with Rosamund. Her past, areas of her present during the time I knew her, her future-all those are very nearly blank to me.
I can, of course, tell you something about her mind, her intellectual attack, as it were. As you have gathered, she read with intensity and she retained. Ah, she retained! She was, I think, partly amused by the efforts of the French to reduce life to reasonable terms and by their unwillingness to part with the Cartesian clarities, yet she read our thinkers with close attention.
"I should like to be the landscape I contemplate," she said, the landscape at that moment being my study, furnished with my books, my certificates and my own nude person, at that instant beneath her own slim body, as she sat astride my pelvis, her small, strong hips grinding gently.
"What is it you really want?" I asked, touching her cheeks with the fingers of each hand.
"To taste in my mouth my own life," she said. "I want to make the world present to me."
"By fucking?" I asked.
"Fucking is affirmative if it does not deny life," she said. "In all its forms." And she used her hands to part her thighs a bit wider, forcing me higher into her body so that, with the very tip, I felt what seemed to be a small mouth, high in her body, eager for me, receiving me. My own hips moved against hers. Beneath her, I punched upward, grasping her buttocks with my hands, forcing her body closer to mine.
Her clear blue eyes began to burn and I could feel the heat of her body increase. Just above me were those rounding breasts, firm as young apples, the nipples like small, sweet nuts of fine brown color, mixed with pink. I took one into my mouth, then the other. Her hips and buttocks moved in a circle, grinding, grinding, while I surged upward.
"Ah, my God in heaven," she said. "You are in my flower, my orchid. Your man-flower is in me, high, high in me. I am fucking you, Paul Dou-dou. I am on you and you are in me and we are coming, coming, coming together. Ah, glorious! Glorious! The Paris gun is in me, the great and hard Gallic cock, rising in me, rising! Oh, screw me, screw me, screw me! I am impaled on the great Paris gun. You are burning in me. Burning. Flood me! Flood me! Flood me! Let me have it all, all, all. Flush yourself into me. Drain yourself. Pour the honey of your man-flower into my orchid, my hot orchid. Fuck me! Fuck me!"
Mostly, she spoke in French at moments like this one and the range of her vocabulary was startling. Her accent, as I may have observed, is flawless. She has a perfect ear. But it was not her accent that astonished me. It was her grasp of argot-thieves' talk, whores' talk, the words of the Metro, words heard only under the bridges of Paris.
What can I tell you, M. the Vice Consul? Rosamund Kitteridge is, I think, the healthiest person I have ever known. She has a famous mind, she does not tell lies, she harms no one ... least of all herself. During the year that I knew her-the school year only, you understand-she offered herself freely and with joy. She gave herself to me with all the profundity that can be read into that phrase. She gave me something priceless. She gave me my freedom, or as much of my freedom as I am-likely to have. I gave her less. Much less. It is a pity. I should like to have given her my life, or a larger part than I could give her, in that year and in that place.
It is droll, don't you think, that a professional intellectual from Paris should be obliged to search for his freedom in the forests of Massachusetts and that he should discover it in the body of a slim and gentle child with hair the color of fine gold and eyes as honest as the skies of the North?
Yes, it is droll. Tres drole.
Sworn statement of a witness granted immunity from prosecution on all charges that might ordinarily arise from his statement. Heard in the chambers of Judge Rossiter Goodpasture, in the City of Springfield. Witness identifies himself as Trooper John F. X. Wash' alaskie, Massachusetts State Police, Stockbridge Barracks. Trooper Washalaskie has been a member of the State Police of the Commonwealth for five years and four months, with time out for military service. He is 28 years old, single, and served as a rifleman with the-th Regiment, First Cavalry Division. He holds the Silver Star and the Bronze Star for gallantry in battle, and he has been awarded the State Police Medal for heroism in the line of duty. He has five departmental commendations. Having been sworn and instructed to testify in his own words and the words used by others as he remembers them, without regard for normal courtroom decorum, Trooper Washalaskie testified as follows. (This version edited from transcript.)
From a distance, I thought it was a boy, a runaway kid. There was something funny about the kid's walk but that wasn't what made me pull over. The bindle did that. I haven't seen a bindle in all my five years on the State Police. When a modern kid runs away he takes money, period. This must be a character, I thought. Along with the bindle went jeans and sneakers and a stable hand's denim jacket. I eased the cruiser onto the shoulder and struck my head out of the window. "Goin' far, fella?" I asked.
The kid's eyes didn't go with the bindle. They were blue, the bluest eyes I've ever seen, deep-set and with lashes that looked almost fake. The kid had a ripe full mouth and his face was cleaner than you mostly find on a kid you pick up on the highway.
"I don't know," the kid said, measuring my six feet four as if wondering whether I could be licked. "I lost my horse."
"Sure," I said, figuring to go along with the gag. "And his name's Tonto and you're the Lone Ranger. Hungry?"
"Thirsty," the kid said. "The horse is hungry."
"Well hop in. You can keep me company," I said, moving back behind the wheel. The kid piled into the right-hand seat, bringing the smell of what I took to be hair oil into the cruiser. I leaned over and smelled the hair, most of which was pretty well hidden under one of those Aussie-style hats, with a strap, the brim turned up on one side. "Well!" I said. "Stealing your mother's French perfume?"
"How much do you weigh?" the kid said in a small round voice. This with a long look at me, like an army doctor casing a prospect.
"Two-twenty even," I said. "All muscle, not fat."
"Bigger than my father," the kid said. "But not much."
I shrugged and pushed the car. A few minutes late,r I wheeled into the dusty lot in front of the V.F.W. We got out of the car and I followed the kid into the coolth of the Vet's, which smelled comfortably of stale beer, fly dirt, and air-conditioning. A rank of plump beige stools stands in front of the small bar.
"They look like a row of plastic asses," the kid said, taking possession of one. "I'll have a Coke."
I smacked the seat of the blue-jeans for the bad language, surprised because the backside felt like foam rubber. I should have tumbled to the scene right then, but I didn't.
"Draw me a beer, Tony," I said. Tony Saleppi, he's the permittee. "A Coke for my friend."
"I am not your friend," the kid said, wrapping small, plump hands around a Coke bottle.
The fingernails were cleaner than mine-too clean for a kid of twelve or thirteen, which is where I'd pegged this one. I hoped the kid wouldn't take up too much time. I had a date with a big L.P.N, at the State Hospital and her big Litvak behind had been on my mind all afternoon. I figured on a quickie when she came off duty, before I put the heap into the barn. I mean, that sounds a little rough, but you said to tell it like it is.
Anyway, I sipped on Tony's rancid beer and the kid sucked on the tall Coke, sizing me up piece by piece-legs, arms, hands, neck, then back to my waist, belt and pistol. For some reason, I felt funny. The uniform is tight and shows off your legs and thighs and lots of time the dames like it. But this kid, staring at me, made me a little uncomfortable. There was something in the eyes, as if the brain behind them was adding things up, trying to make a decision.
When the Coke was gone, the kid slipped from the stool and said, "I've got to piss. Where is it?"
"Inna da back," Tony said, motioning toward the shadows in the rear of the club house.
I frowned at myself in the fly-specked mirror, studied the small assortment of bottles, then exchanged glances with Douglas MacArthur, who loomed down from the wall behind the back bar. I picked up the kid's bindle. The knots gave me some trouble. They were neat and shrewdly tied, not the way a kid would do it at all. When I had the bindle open, all of a sudden I wished I hadn't. I'd expected to find a peanut butter sandwich and maybe some marbles and the hub cap off a Mercedes-Benz-the kind of stuff kids keep. What rested there on the bandanna was a can of hair spray, a package of condoms, some Tampax, a tube of K.Y. and four joints, rolled out of the very best Acapulco Gold. I saw plenty of grass in Vietnam and I know the good from the bad. That accounts for the kid's eyes, I thought. Probably smoked a joint out there on the highway and really thought there was a horse.
"Kid must hava da sist', " said Tony, rolling the Tampax.
"Sister my ass," I said, swiveling fast and heading for the John, the kid's bindle in my hand. When I got to the dark in the back of the club I couldn't decide whether to case the cubicle that said MEN or the one that said WOMEN. It was kind of dank back there and there was a smell of beer, mixed up with the smell of pee. I took the second floor, the one for dames. I was right.
There was the kid, stripped to the buff, quite a lot of corn-colored hair tickling a forming pair of breasts. Peeping through the hair were plump hard nipples the color of dead ripe cherries.
Nothing cherry about this kid though, I thought, glancing at the patch of pubic hair, thin and strong as brass wire, then at the full, red mouth, finally at those blue eyes, blazing now from the pot and from sex. The room was heavy with marijuana smoke, almost killing the reek of urine. She had nearly finished the joint in her hand and was milking the roach like an old pro, taking long, sexual drags, holding the smoke for the limit.
I am a cop and a good cop. Almost always, I go by the book. But any ideas I'd had about following standard runaway procedure melted in a fog of reefer smoke. That four-by-four John was as full of sex as a French circus in Saigon, and I'd had the Litvak's behind on my mind all day long, while I tooled the cruiser. I felt the hots start at my toes and rise straight up to my tongue, pausing just long enough on the way up to stab at my knotted balls, held close to my thigh by the tight-fitting breeches.
"I wondered when you'd have sense enough to come on back here," the kid said, moistening her lips with her tongue, flipping the roach into the can. "I hope you've got something worth waiting for. Big doesn't always mean good."
She threw the bolt on the toilet door, then hopped up onto the wall-hung basin, spreading her legs so the blonde hair parted. The basin was low and her crotch was at just the right height for a man of my size, making it good for a stand-up job. The kid's pussy winked at me through the thin brass hair. It looked small, too small, but I moved toward it anyway, my eyes on the moist scarlet slit between the peach-colored lobes and on the rose-brown path of crotch beneath the lobes, leading to the crack between her buttocks. The marijuana had worked fast, the way it does on the second joint. She was high as a kite and hot as a pistol.
"Come on, Fuzz," she said, her voice in her throat a little. "Come on."
She zipped the fly of my sky-blue breeches and managed my drawers like an expert, fishing out my penis and studying the honest Polish foreskin.
"A collector's item," she said, feeling it challenge her small hot palm, hunching her buttocks on the wash basin, then feeding me into her firm little body. The foreskin was peeled back and with the moist tip I could almost taste the fresh young pussy. It was almost like having the tip sucked by a mouth with small, firm lips, like the girls do it in Saigon, the way they've been taught by Frenchmen. I shucked down my breeches and drawers and played with her for a while, using my soft tip, teasing the little tulip at the mouth of her hole, my nose and lips close to her skin.
She smelled of new, mild sweat, of rut, and of some kind of very expensive French bath oil. There was a faint smell of horse too. In two years, maybe three, I remember thinking, she will be just another dame, with a figure held in by lastex and a made-up face ... another dame, off the pile. Right now she was eighty pounds of pure cunt flesh, the kind you can get in Vietnam, where they start young and firm and ripe. And clean. Man, they are clean in Saigon.
This body was like theirs, like the kid's bodies in Saigon. It was all cunt, pure cunt. There was nothing in her mind but my cock. She touched the part that was out of her with a light finger, then puckered herself around the tip. I almost couldn't hold it back and I trembled. The head was hot as a cinder but it was heat that didn't hurt. The temperature in the little John seemed to shoot up to a hundred but the smell of the two bodies blotted out the toilet smell. I tasted the sweat on her breasts with my tongue, then ran my tongue into her armpit, poking, poking with a wet, stiff tongue, the way you'd work on it down below, the way you'd work on a fresh, clean crotch on a fresh clean kid from Cholon.
The kid whimpered and rolled her buttocks. I had played with her a little too long. "Does the whole thing go in?" she asked. "Or just that little red part?"
Her heels dug into my behind and I rammed myself home in that tight little tube, enjoying the fit but thinking: Jesus! I must be hitting the back of her eyeballs.
I needn't have worried. Those heels pounded away on my behind and those cherry-bud nipples winked in and out of my mouth. Then the kid's mouth was on mine and I was guzzling that sharp little tongue, sucking it the way you'd suck on a piece of imported hard candy. My tough black crotch hair mixed with the light blonde snatch. On the downstrokes I hammered it home and you couldn't have fitted a postage stamp between the kid's body and mine. I was welding myself to her, using my rod as a welding torch. It was tighter and better and hotter than anything I'd had in Saigon. I moved a hand across her buttocks and touched her small hole with a finger. Her tube gave a little so that I pounded a little deeper, went into her a little higher.
"You must be part horse," she said, kissing my face all over, the way a child kisses, then using a hot, stiff tongue on the corners of my mouth.
"Half horse," I said. "Half Polack."
I was hitting bottom now and my soft tip trembled, feeling its way through her red-hot body. At the base of my rod, where the hair blended, the tight mouth of her young hole clutched firmly at the hilt of my rod, threatening to hold it sometimes but always letting go.
She shimmied a little on the wash basin and I thought she was ready to blow her mind, but she shucked the rod out of her cunt and pushed me back. Then, her feet on the shithouse floor, she spun on her toes like a ballet dancer and braced herself firmly against the bowl, offering me a puckered hole that looked like a small, ripe peach.
"Use spit," she said. "Then get it into me. Pretend you are digging for gold with that big cop cock."
I thought of a Chinese kid in Cholon I had that way, and how she'd cried when I put it into her, and of the Chinese kid's mother, slapping the kid across the face for crying and saying, "You take G.I. cock. G.I. cock good." I looked at the small hole beneath me again.
"It will hurt," I said.
"I want it to hurt," she said. "I want to feel. Break me in two. Hit my tonsils if you can. Get it in me. In me. In me."
"You want I should use the K.Y.? " I asked.
"Spit on it," she said, her voice thin and tense.
"We'll use the grease if we have to. Grease kills it sometimes. I like to feel. To feel."
"It is your behind," I said. I dropped some saliva between her buttocks, then moved myself into her, feeling it slowly, a quarter of an inch at a time. The kid's hands remained on her behind, spreading the cheeks as wide as they would go.
"Shove it!" she pleaded, a kind of sob in her voice. "Break my ass in two. Break me in two. Make it bleed. Bleed. Bleed."
I shoved higher on the next stroke and as I moved up that tight passage I was as hot as that kid, hungry-hot, boiling, and I reamed her, shoving it hard, driving it. It was like fucking Marilyn Monroe in the nostril. The kid's rear end was snug but she took my seven inches and whimpered for more, grabbing the wash bowl with both hands and moving her buttocks like a pile driver. Those slim hips, in action, developed as much horsepower as a V.W. engine. The cheeks of her behind against my groin established a small sucking rhythm as the sweaty flesh met and parted, met and parted. Her body was burning now, covered with fine light sweat. Her breath made a kind of strangling sound. It was like nothing I had ever had before, in this country or in Vietnam, but the smell of that shithouse reminded me of the smell of Saigon-a mixture of the smells of sex, of urine and of rotting plaster.
"Finger-fuck my snatch, Fuzz," the kid said, catching one of my hands and guiding it around her hip to her moist, warm crotch. I worked a finger into her and she tightened up on the knuckle, then moved so the strokes came in time to a rhythm-long finger and long rod, long finger and long rod. I stabbed deep into her behind with my rod and came up hard with my finger. Nothing was loose. Back and front were as snug and firm as if this had been the first time she'd been plowed. I could feel my rod with my finger, pounding away, beating against the thin wall of flesh that separates the hole in front from the hole in back. I had lots of young stuff in Saigon. Eleven, twelve, that was nothing out there. If you had the price you could break one in. But I'd never felt in Saigon the way I felt in the sweaty, smelly women's John at the V.F.W.
"Ah, I wish there were two of you," she said. "I wish there were two cocks in me. But it's good. It's good. Give me another finger. Please. Another one-all the way in. Spear me with it. Ream me. Finger fuck, finger fuck, finger fuck."
I gave her another finger and her hole twitched like saying thanks. Under my chin the skin of her back was as soft as a new peach and hot as a hot tin roof. She moved against my rod and my finger, whimpering, then grunting a little as I plowed deep in her behind, hitting a high, tight place that seemed to close on the soft head. Her hand moved and then there were fingers light on my balls, feathery fingers, moving, moving. Her skin got hotter and she moved her behind a little faster now, that high, tight thing clutching at me on the upstrokes, like a little mouth high in her body.
"Break it!" she begged. "Break my ass, my ass, my ass. Break my ass in two. Break it with your cock."
I lifted her for a moment, holding her weight off the floor, lifting with my rod and pair of fingers deep in her front. I lowered her and when her feet were firm on the dirty floor I moved hard into her behind, driving my tool with all my weight, fighting for another half inch of depth, moving my fingers high too, feeling the mouth of that forming womb. I rode it hard with my big backside, driving like artillery, mashing her front and my fingers hard against the porcelain basin. She left my balls and with tough strong fingers stretched the cheeks of her behind again.
"Deeper," she said, begging, pleading. "Break my ass. Break it in two."
I gave her another quarter of an inch. My bollocks pounded against the lower crack of her behind. They were almost in her hole. In that tight place my rod seemed to get harder and longer than it had ever been before, the shaft fighting the walls of her ass-hole, fighting for space, more space.
"You are deep!" she said, her voice high and shrill with excitement. "I can feel it breaking. No one has ever been quite as deep before." She grunted, then growled like a small dog, hammering back with her behind, hungry, frantic for more. But there wasn't any more. The hairs of my crotch were in her ass. She had it all.
"Bite my shoulder," she said. "Bite it and make bleed."
I bit the soft flesh lightly, tasting the mild salt of her sweat. She wallowed back against the thrusting rod. The touch of my teeth made her wild. I raked her shoulder with my whiskers, making a bright red path on her skin. It hurt her just enough to get to the holes in her groin and behind and to make her want to be hurt more.
"Bite it," she said, her voice choking. "Really bite it. Make it bleed. Bleed. Bleed."
I bit hard and the tender skin broke under my front teeth. I tasted blood, mixed with the sweat, and I worked with my tongue, sucking her flesh, biting again. Then I grazed her neck and back, using the tip of my tongue like a feather. I used my free hand on her pelvis, forcing her back against my rod while she spread the cheeks wide again with her hands.
I could feel her coming before she knew it. That high thing around the tip of my rod closed and trembled and my fingers were sucked high into her cunt. She strangled again and fought for air, her body writhing. I could hear and feel her heart, pounding to the thrust of her behind. She shuddered, beginning to come, but her fingers were firm, keeping the cheeks of her behind apart. Her skin was hotter than a hot tin roof, hot as a red hot stove. I felt the rush of blood to her cunt and her ass-hole quivered the length of my rod. She moaned a little. It was a sound I'd never heard before, that moan. In one way it was the saddest sound I'd ever heard. In another way it was like a prayer of thanks, a happy prayer. Then she shook from head to toes, shuddering hard enough so that the wash bowl seemed to move.
"I am coming," she whimpered. "I am coming at both ends at once. I am even coming in my feet. Sink it! Sink it! Come with me. Come together. Come. Come. Come."
I plowed for a second, lifting her clear of the floor, speared on my rod and my fingers. Then I freed my fingers and smashed into her from behind, smashing her body under mine, hard against the hard porcelain bowl. I came for a long, long time and the hot, wet come poured into her, high, high in her ass-hole. She stopped shuddering, trembled for a moment, then went limp, whimpering. "Break it! Break my ass! Break it. Break it in two."
"It's broken, kid," I said. "It's broken good. I broke you in two, your ass in two. like you said, in two, in two, in two."
I remained inside her for at least a minute, steeping myself in her body, soaking in her behind. Then it slithered gently out of her hole. Bright new blood dribbled from her rectum, spattering on the rotting tile floor. She took a Tampax out of her bindle, stripped it quickly, and shoved it into her behind. As she did that she turned and I saw her front. Her pelvis was turning black and blue where it had been smashed against the porcelain bowl. Her body was covered with a high sheen of bright, sweet sweat. There was blood on her shoulder where I'd bitten her flesh. She was happy.
"You broke it," she said. "You really broke it. I could feel you, high up. I felt it when it broke. I could feel you come." She dropped to her knees on the floor of the John, sucking my rod, sucking it clean. Then she stood up and shook for a second.
"Thanks," she said. "Thanks, Fuzz."
I pulled up my skin-tight breeches and zipped my fly. She pulled her sneakers over bare feet, wiped off her mouth with a paper towel from the dispenser, then used it to swab her behind and her groin. She put on that Aussie hat so her hair was hidden, pulled on her jeans and shirt, and looked almost like a boy again.
"That man outside," she said. "Will it matter if he sees us?"
"Not to me," I said. "I am a certified war hero."
"Let's simply walk out then," she said, dropping the tough kid accent she had used in the cruiser and for a while in the toilet.
We passed through the dark little bar. There was a slab of sunlight at the far end. Tony, leaning on the wood with his forearms, looked up deadpan and said, "Ciaou, Polski. Ciaou."
"So long, Tony," I said, moving fast the length of the bar, guiding the kid with a hand on her elbow. We got into the cruiser and I started the motor.
"Where to?" I asked. "You want to go home?"
She nodded, then said, "There really was a horse. I'm glad he took off and left me."
"So am I," I said. "I'm glad but I'm scared."
She put a hand on my forearm. The touch was warm through the sleeve of the light cotton shirt. "Don't be afraid," she said. "There is nothing to be afraid of, believe me."
"I'll do my best," I said, pointing the car toward the highway.
"We go south, two miles," she said. "Then left for a mile and a half."
I nodded and said, "Check."
"Do something for me, will you please?" she said. "Hit the siren. When I hear a siren, close to, it's as if the sound went into my body, the way you went into it. Do you know what the sound of a siren is? It's one enormous orgasm, like the one we had back there in the toilet."
I hit the siren. I hit it again. "Yeah," I said. "I see what you mean."
I could feel it too, in my blood.
"Yeah," I'said. "It goes right to the old crotch."
When I said 'crotch' her body jerked. Her face went white for a second, then her hand came into my lap and she moved it slowly, rousing me just enough so that it was relaxing to drive, and the throb of the extra-duty engine was exciting and soothing at the same time. I kept one hand on the wheel and draped an arm around her shoulder, my hand cupping her right breast.
"What's your name?" I asked. The breast in my hand was the size of an apple, firm and warm to the tough even through the denim of the stable-boy's jacket.
"Rosamund Kitteridge," she said.
The sound of the name was like a knife between the ribs. Anyone who has worked in Berkshire County knows that name. I had a kind of sick sensation and I could feel the steel doors closing behind me. I played it cool, not moving my hand.
"How old are you?" I asked.
"Not quite fifteen," she said.
"Wow, man!" I said. "Do you like getting people put in jail?"
"There is no reason to be afraid," she said, her voice level and very calm. "I will say nothing. Absolutely nothing. If you keep quiet, I will keep quiet. As far as anyone is obliged to know, I was thrown by my horse, shaken up a little, and you picked me up on the highway."
Even without looking at her, I knew that she meant what she said. She is honest. She is absolutely honest, and you sense that, somehow, in her voice and her eyes and the set of her mouth. I don't feel too happy about being here now, here in the court, telling what happened, because in a way I promised I wouldn't.
Anyway, I believed her and I began to feel relieved. Her hand was still in my lap, the fingers moving slowly, very slowly.
"It's none of my business," I said, "but..."
"Of course it's your business," she said. "My uncle started me, a little over a year ago. He was hung like a bull. He used it the way a bull does. I was high on cheap schoolroom marijuana and he was drunk, but not too drunk to use himself like a bull. He was drunk enough to forget that I was tight and new though, and he went right into me, using all the power he had. I felt as if he had shoved a chain saw into me and I bled for a week. Then it healed up and I realized that I liked it and I wanted more."
"What did you do?" I asked.
"I waited for three days until he got drunk again, then I went into his room after everybody had gone to bed. He was using cocaine then. He shot me with some. That night the chain saw felt like a long, hard bullcock. It was glorious. It was simply glorious. A few nights later he opened my behind. I asked him to do it, I think. He used some grease but it hurt. It hurt a lot. But in the middle of it all a strange thing happened."
"What?"
"I realized that I enjoyed the pain. I felt alive, really alive, and it was the pain that made me sure that I was alive and that I was free, for I offered him my behind. I held it for him. It was a thing I did of my own free will, a declaration of my own freedom. Do you understand what I mean?"
She turned her head, so that I looked straight into those clear blue eyes. I wasn't quite sure what she meant, but I nodded and said, "I think so. It's that way in combat, sometimes. You take a chance, maybe even get hit, but there is something about it that makes you feel like a man!"
"Yes," she said. "Yes."
Her hand moved again in my lap. I was rising under her fingers and the inside of my thighs felt numb. My hand closed on that apple of a breast and she shifted her weight a little, moving her hips, hot again, the breath coming fast between her teeth. With her free hand she opened my fly and her head darted toward my lap. She kissed me with a hot mouth, then used her tongue. I pulled onto a dirt road, ran the car into a clearing, and cut the switch. Her mouth came up to mine, her tongue darting into my mouth, moving fast. She was hot again, burning. My groin was hot and I leaped in her hand. Then her head moved swiftly again and her lips were around me, delicate as a butterfly's wings, moving slowly. Then she took it all in her mouth, deep in her throat. Her free hand moved into my fly, a thin, hot finger seeking the cleft in my buttocks, moving slowly into the hole.
I have had it done in Saigon and I've had it done in France, where they say it was invented, but I have never had it done the way that Kitteridge kid did it, there in the squad car, out in the open. I forgot that I was a trooper, I forgot everything except the warmth of that mouth, and the shrewd way she used that finger. I slipped a hand into her jeans, feeling the hot bare skin beneath them, and explored her behind until I found the hole. Then my finger went into her roughly and she seemed to feel the pain with a spasm that made her lips work faster. My hips were moving fast now, in a rapid rhythm, the bones of my pelvis bruising her mouth. Her behind moved gently against my finger, the pain gone now that the finger was in her. I felt the Tampax, high inside, and the little string on the end of it. The hole puckered tightly around my finger and her hips began to move faster. My body felt numb and I shuddered, arching myself toward her mouth. Then I exploded and her mouth tightened on me, opposing the thrust in just the right way. I came for a long time and I felt her come. Her hips trembled, then shuddered, and she moved backwards against my finger.
She sucked me dry, then held it in her mouth until it went soft. After a while she sat up straight, her eyes bright and clear, an odd look of victory on her face. My finger slipped out of her and I drew my hand up slowly, over the soft skin of her behind.
"Thanks," I said. "Thanks."
She smiled and kissed my cheek in an odd way that told me, somehow, that it was over. All over. I zipped my breeches and she wiped her lips with a handkerchief. She looked really young then, and happy. Really happy. I started the car and backed out, then moved slowly along the dirt road, cutting back onto the highway.
"You want to go home?" I asked.
"Not really," she said. "But I'd better."
"Okay," I said, stepping on it, then touching the siren, just for a minute. "You want to make it with me again?" I asked, not looking at her, eyes on the yellow center line.
"I think better not," she said. "But I'm glad you picked me up. Really glad."
In ten minutes we rolled up the long driveway to the Kitteridge place, between a pair of granite pillars fitted with spiked iron gates. It is quite a house. There were stables off in the distance and expensive horses feeding on very expensive grass. The lawn in front of the house was like the greens on a golf course. Under the porte cochere was a woman in her thirties, with a lot of honey-blonde hair and a straight, slim figure. She wore breeches and well-cut boots and a very clean white shirt, open at the neck. Her eyes were blue, but a mean blue-the eyes of a woman who would shoot you without thinking about it twice, if shooting you was what she figured would work to her advantage.
"I was thrown, Mother," Rosamund said. "The trooper was kind enough to drive me home."
"I know," the blonde said. "The horse is here, in the barn." She walked around the cruiser to my side, taking a wallet from the back pocket of her breeches. "Thank you, officer," she said. "Please take this."
She offered me a crisp new twenty, clean and neat, rich people's money.
"I can't take that, ma'am," I said.
"Take it," Rosamund said. "You earned it."
I took the money and shoved it into my shirt pocket. "All in the day's work, ma'am," I said. "I'm glad to have been of service."
Rosamund's hand touched my thigh for an instant, then she was out of the car. "Goodbye," she said. "And thanks."
She has a way of saying a lot with just a word or two. As I sat there in the cruiser with the motor running, looking at her as she stood there under the porte cochere, and I knew that she meant goodbye, period. Not so long, or be seeing you, but goodbye. Period. I put the car into gear and rolled quietly down the driveway, cutting back out to the highway. It was late afternoon and there were long purple shadows on the mountains. It was cooler. I pushed the car, enjoying the feeling of power that flowed through the engine and reached my hands on the wheel.
I felt good. I was a trooper, a state trooper, and had just committed a number of crimes, but I felt good. I began to sing. For the first time since I got back from Vietnam I felt really good, as if I was all there, if you know what I mean.
I finished my patrol and checked into the barracks and went to bed. For a little while I just lay there in the dark, thinking of that hot little John in the Vets, and thinking of the taste of the kid's sweat, when I put my mouth on her breasts. Then I drifted off to sleep and I slept right straight through until the guy woke me for coffee.
That's about all there is to tell. I never saw the Kitteridge kid again. I never tried. I was surprised when the private detective came to see me and laid it all on the line and explained that I could get immunity. He put me in a box in a way. He didn't leave me much choice.
It's a funny thing though. I suppose the kid is abnormal and all that. I mean, doing it in a toilet that way, with a trooper she didn't even know. Maybe. A state cop meets a lot of people and there aren't many people I've met, here or in Vietnam, who made as much plain sense as that Kitteridge kid. She did what she did because she liked it. It was what she wanted to do on that day, at that time of that day, in that place. She told me she felt free. The funny thing is, I felt good afterwards, and for a long time. I still feel good in a way when I think about that day, in that little John, with the smell of the two bodies blotting out the smell of pee and of rot. I feel good. I feel alive.
I don't know who got hurt that afternoon. I know I didn't get hurt. I don't think the Kitteridge kid got hurt either, except for the pain she felt. And it was the pain that she wanted, the pain she asked for. I gave it to her. I gave her everything she asked for. I suppose I should feel sorry or ashamed or scared, but I don't. I hope nothing happens to the kid. I hope the deck isn't stacked against her, the way it seems to be stacked sometimes against people who don't have to try to be honest because they were just born honest, all the way through.
Letter from Miss Florentine Axley Gainsborough, Headmistress, Miss Potter's School, Lennox, to Hon. Rossiter A. Goodpasture.
Dear Judge Goodpasture:
I am rather at a loss when I attempt to respond to your letter, in which you suggest that Rosamund Kitteridge may be guilty of various anti-social acts, acts so serious that the Courts of this Commonwealth have actually taken under advisement a petition to incarcerate this child. In all of my many years as a schoolmistress, I have never heard of such an outrageous attempt to swindle an innocent and good child. Swindle is a harsh word no doubt, but it is the proper word and I do not use it lightly. I am morally certain that money rests at the root of this attempt to deprive Rosamund of her liberty and of the use of the fortune that properly belongs to her. The brutality with which sinister powers, including distinguished members of the Bar of this Commonwealth, have conspired against a defenseless girl makes the blood boil in my veins. The charges are contemptible and unEnglish and do not deserve refutation. Nevertheless, I shall attempt to set the record straight, as I see it from my vantage point as Headmistress of Miss Potter's School, here in Lennox.
Rosamund came to us two years ago, the youngest girl ever to be accepted by the School, and by far the most brilliant of any age. As I write I have on my desk, under my eyes, Rosamund's record here at the School and her scores on the various tests inflicted on the young in these days when the Universities control their destinies almost from birth.
When Rosamund entered Miss Potter's she had been placed in the ninety-ninth percentile by a reliable testing service in Hartford, in the neighboring state of Connecticut. Although a transcript of Rosamund's record filed with us by the Iroquois Mountain School suggested that she was indeed exceptionally gifted, I was hesitant to accept a percentile placement of this kind and asked that Rosamund be tested by a service of my own choice, in New York City. I have their report at hand as I write. They refused to place Rosamund in any percentile, saying simply that she was well above the genius level and that any attempt to categorize her intelligence or to predict her achievements would be meaningless, within the limits of the tests now generally accepted by psychologists and the teaching profession. Clearly then, Rosamund was an exceptionally gifted child when she came to us-the most gifted I have encountered during a long career as a school mistress both in this country and in the United Kingdom.
Her performance exceeded even that suggested by the tests. During her last year with us she was doing advanced mathematics (calculus and differential equations) under special tutelage. She had met the College Entrance Examination Board's four-year standard in German and in Spanish. In French she had achieved a perfect score on the Advanced Placement Test. She had started the study of Russian with a tutor and had done a good deal of Attic Greek on her own.
In the field of English and comparative literature her performance was equally startling. During her first year here she exhausted the offerings of our rather well-stocked library and my secretary had agreed to order such books as Rosamund wanted, on loan from the library at Yale University. Her reading was catholic, her tastes good. Her knowledge of English literature was at least equal to that of the normal student who graduates with honors in English from one of the better universities. You ask me to tell you whether or not she read erotica while she was a student here. I have no doubt that she read the standard classics in that field, but to suggest that she was drawn to dirt for dirt's sake is an impertinence, sir, if you will forgive me. The late Lord Mayor of New York, Mr. James Walker, once observed that he had never met a young woman who had been ruined by a book. To suggest that Rosamund's mind was poisoned by literature is absurd. She has a keen, critical, healthy approach to the whole world of English letters. She is at home with Wordsworth and with D.H. Lawrence, with Chaucer at his gamiest and with The Pilgrim's Progress.
But enough of that. While she was here at the School with us, Rosamund's academic achievement was formidable, but so was her social achievement. She came to us as the youngest girl in a school well known for its harsh class lines. One might have expected her to be withdrawn, or obnoxiously pushy, or perhaps lickspittle, currying favor from the older girls. She was none of these. From the day she passed through the gates of Miss Potter's to her last day with us, she was a joy and delight to all of us, girls, masters, mistresses alike. She was never reported for even the slightest lapse of decorum, to say nothing of being charged with any of the more serious offences, having to do with sex, alcohol, or, alas, drugs.
I had a special sense of commitment to. Rosamund. I still have that. I knew that one day she would be a very rich woman but I hoped that wealth would not prevent her from reaching her full development in the academic world and, as seemed to me probable, in the world of literature.
I find it utterly impossible to believe that a girl who lived for two years in a closely-knit community such as Miss Potter's school could have concealed "the dark side of her nature" which you suggest has come to the surface at various times since Rosamund approached puberty. I do not believe that I could have been fooled, even by a child as brilliant as Rosamund, for she was brilliant without being precocious. That means more, perhaps, to a schoolmistress than it does, to a judge, but it means a great deal, for it suggests the difference between the genuine object and the forgery.
No, I am obliged to believe that Rosamund Kitteridge is precisely what she seems to be-an extraordinarily gifted young woman, falsely accused by a mother unworthy of her own child, and falsely accused for the most base of all motives: gain. With all my heart, I wish that this child were the child of my own bosom, for had I the right I should fight for her freedom through every court in this Commonwealth and in this Republic.
If medical examination reveals, as you suggest, that Rosamund Kitteridge is not a virgin, then I am morally, spiritually, emotionally and practically certain that her present condition has its source in forcible assault on her body by an adult. This adult should be found and punished. Rosamund's mother-that wretched woman!-should be challenged to refute all that I tell you now. To incarcerate a human being of Rosamund's gifts would be a crime against humanity. No, worse. It would be a crime against the Creator himself.
I urge you to dismiss the petition brought to the court by Mrs. Kitteridge and to use the power and the resources of the courts and the Commonwealth in order to bring the guilty persons speedily to the bar of justice.
Sincerely yours, Florentine Axley Gainsborough, M.A. (Edin.)
Headmistress.
Post-Scriptum I enclose, for your information a letter written to me by my friend, Dr. Deborah Lansing Hawkins, of Radcliffe College. The document is self-explanatory. F.A.G.
Dear Flo:
At your request, we have seen Rosamund Kitteridge and made certain evaluations. You must understand that the project was undertaken only out of friendship for you and in the interests of the young lady. We cannot think of taking her until she has passed her sixteenth birthday. I am of two minds about the wisdom of this policy, but the rule is ironclad and I must defer to higher authority.
Rosamund was with us for four days and we were able to develop a rather informative academic profile, a somewhat less revelatory personality profile. As you suspected, she tests well in almost every discipline and, if she were to enter Radcliffe with the next class, my own recommendation would be that she be sent abroad for a year, preferably to France and Germany, and that when she returned to Cambridge she be placed with the then current junior class. There is no question in my mind that she could manage many senior seminars and a number of graduate courses, especially in the Department of Literature, but I think she would profit personally from the undergraduate experience, appropriately abbreviated, and from the administrative point of view it would be difficult to award the primary degree without a fairish amount of residence.
I quote from the reports submitted by the chairmen of the various departments in whose disciplines Rosamund was tested and evaluated.
ENGLISH
This young woman is abreast of the normal Radcliffe senior in the general field of English literature. She has broad familiarity with the entire range of English literature and she writes well. There is no substantial question but that she could write a distinguished senior paper and it is my personal opinion that she would take Honors in the subject with ease.
MATHEMATICS
Miss Kitteridge scored well in the qualifying test given to those who intend to major in mathematics. She is completely at home in the field through what would normally be encountered in the junior year. That is to say, she has a good working command of the differential and integral calculus and some acquaintanceship with differential equations. She performs all operations gracefully and we should expect her to do extremely well in advanced undergraduate mathematics and to hold her own on the graduate level.
FRENCH
Miss Kitteridge is very nearly bilingual in French and English. She reads with ease, speaks fluently, and composes French with close attention to the nuances of the language. She is familiar with the entire range of contemporary French literature and thought, and she has an adequate acquaintanceship with the French classics. Should she enter Radcliffe and elect to work in the field, we should recommend that she be directed to the appropriate graduate courses.
HISTORY
Miss Kitteridge seems to have read extensively in ancient, medieval and modern history. She has a keen understanding of the ancient world, most especially of fifth-century Athens. She has a nodding acquaintanceship with Chinese history and a sound grasp of the contemporary scene.
You may judge for yourself the importance of these departmental evaluations. In addition to the tests in specific fields, Miss Kitteridge sat for the aptitude test for graduate students, as given by the College Boards at Princeton. Her scores on these tests indicate that she could approach work on the graduate level with confidence.
I saw Miss Kitteridge on three occasions. I talked with her in my office, in a rather formal setting, I lunched with her in an undergraduate dining hall, and she joined me for dinner in my flat. I found her charming, attractive and intelligent, but I formed no clear idea of her emotional patterns. Dr. Bennaheim, one of our staff psychiatrists, drew a blank too. If troubles do smolder in the young woman's breast, she keeps the smell of smoke to herself. Ignorant of her chronological age, the average trained observer would conclude that she was an astonishingly normal and well-balanced human being, enormously gifted intellectually, but not compromised by that fact.
As I read back what I've written, it occurs to me that we have not been of much service to you. I wish that we could welcome the young woman here in Cambridge next autumn. Alas, that is impossible. When she passes her sixteenth birthday, we shall be happy to see her, should she be inclined to apply for admission to the College.
I do hope we meet in the Cotswolds during July. I look forward to it, as always.
Sincerely yours, Deborah Lansing Hawkins Assistant to the Dean
Statement by Sara Anne Lowther, made in the chambers of Judge Goodpasture. This witness was not summoned in these proceedings but has come forward as a friend of the Court. Miss Lowther is seventeen years of age, a student, and a resident of Patchen Plains, Iowa.
If you will look at me carefully, your honor, I think you will agree that a description of my physical person would be almost the same as a description of Rosamund Kitteridge. I am an inch taller, a few pounds heavier, somewhat older, but the points people notice are the same. My hair has less gold in it than Rosamund's, but it is long and blonde. My eyes are blue. My complexion is much like that of my friend.
Rosamund is my friend. I do not attempt to conceal the fact, and it is because I am her friend that I come to this court in order to establish the fact that whatever has been said here by the policeman, Washalaskie, is a lie if in any way it involves Rosamund Kitteridge. I was the person encountered by Trooper Washalaskie on that day and I doubt very much that he has been truthful about what occurred on that afternoon. I shall be explicit. I have been asked to reproduce from memory and as accurately as possible the words that were used as well as the events that transpired. I shall try.
First I must account for my presence on the highway on that afternoon. Actually, it was quite simple. My home is in Iowa, some distance from Miss Potter's School, where Rosamund and I are schoolmates. It is impossible for me to visit my home except at Christmas time and during the summer holiday. Rosamund and I were acquaintances the first year she was at Miss Potter's. During the second year, the year just past, we became friends. It was Rosamund's habit to ask me to pass the weekend at her home in the Berkshires at least once each month, sometimes twice. The house became a second home to me. Mrs. Bradshaw was seldom there but the servants were used to me and one of the guest bedrooms came to be known as my room.
On weekends we did as we pleased. I love to ride. So does Rosamund. Often we rode together, but if I felt the impulse to ride alone it was understood that I was to be given a horse, just as if I had been a member of the family. Except, of course, that there was no family. There was Rosamund. There was her mother. They lived in separate worlds. Rosamund's father is dead. I think Rosamund seldom saw relatives from either side of her family. In a very real sense she was mistress of the house. The house, of course, is hers, or it will be hers when she comes of age. Most of the Kitteridge fortune will be hers too, and that, I'm sure, is the reason for this legal charade concerning her competence.
To return to that afternoon.
It is an afternoon I recall with nearly stunning clarity, an afternoon I think it improbable that I shall ever forget. I should begin, I suppose, a little while after lunch, when I decided to ride Tiger, Rosamund's stallion. Rosamund, I recall, went to Pittsfield immediately after lunch.
We had chicken breasts for lunch. I remember that.
Young breasts, boned and pounded, then married to a slice of very thin French ham, cooked quickly, and served with a light sauce. Delicious.
After lunch I went to my room to rest and to read, but it was warm and I was restless and very much aware of the summer breeze that came through my window, billowing the net curtains, a light warm breeze, heavy with the smells of new hay and of clover and of the fresh new earth in the garden, just turned over. It was the kind of smell that makes you want to roll on the ground and embrace the earth, to take gobbets of earth in your hands and crumble them gently, permitting the yearning summer earth to run gracefully through your fingers. I heard a horse whinny, far off in the stables. The sound came clearly to me through the open window of my bedroom. I had slipped out of my dress and bra and I was stretched out on the wide bed, wearing nothing but thin silk panties, riding low on my hips and arching as they rounded my thighs, the kind of panties they make now to wear with very short miniskirts. The summer breeze caressed my body, bathing my thighs and my throat and my middle with the sweet, sad, compelling smell of young grass fresh from the knife, grass murdered early in life, to be saved and fed to the horses during the long winter, which seemed very far away from that warm July room, that bright, pretty bedroom, with high ceilings and many rugs and a large, brilliant Picasso painting over the modest, graceful mantel.
I could smell my body-a mixture of light sweat, soap from my morning shower, and very discreet toilet water, with which I'd swabbed my body that morning, after I'd dried myself with a big friction towel. The smell of my body, mixed with the smells of the summer day, made me feel intensely alive. I stretched, easing my panties, inspecting the place where the elastic had made a mark on my skin. Then the horse whinnied again, a high, demanding sound.
"That's Tiger," I said. "I'd like to ride him until he's too tired to whinny like that."
I got up, stretched again, put on my bra and slipped into soft faded jeans and a denim jacket of the kind stable-boys wear. I started to button the jacket, then took it off and unhooked my bra, dropping it onto the bed. I put the jacket back on, then punched my feet into old sneakers and laced them tightly. Then I got together a few things I wanted to take with me, and wrapped them in a bandana.
I prefer to ride in old jeans and thin silk panties because I like to feel the horse between my legs and to feel the saddle moving under me, close to my skin. There is nothing wrong about that. I feel as if the horse and I are one animal, and a long ride that way is relaxing. I would gallop the horse for a long time, feeling all that power through the thin jeans and the thin silk, and then I would take a long hot bath, and rub myself with bath oil from Jean Nate. I wore the shirt with nothing under it because I liked to open the top buttons and feel on my body the rush of warm wind made when the horse galloped. It was like taking a bath in sunlight, sunlight perfumed with the smells of grass and wild flowers and mildly with the smell of a well-groomed horse.
I trotted down the staircase, on the way to the stables, and met Mrs. Kitteridge in the great hall. We stood on the checkerboard floor, made of large squares of black and white marble.
"Are you off?" asked Rosamund's mother, looking deliriously cool in very proper lime-green shorts and halter.
"I'm going to ride Tiger," I said. "It's too great a day to stay in."
"That horse is dangerous," she said. "Why don't you take Gretchen?"
"Because I like a horse that fights back a little," I said. "I like a stallion."
She shook her head. "At least wear boots and breeches and proper underwear," she said. "You look like a stable-boy."
"That means I'll be safe from strange men," I said. "Who would molest a stable-boy?"
"Please yourself," she said, not happy with me. She detests Rosamund and dislikes her friends, with or without cause.
I raced through the door and ran to the stables. The groom on duty was a black boy named Anderson, a very black boy from Virginia. He straightened up and touched his cap.
"Saddle up Tiger," I said. "Fast as you can."
"You going to ride that horse, Miss Sara?"
"No, I'm just going to take him out for a long long walk," I said impatiently. "Saddle him up, will you? English saddle, the lightest you have."
I leaned against a whitewashed post, waiting in the hot sun, intensely aware of the horses in their box stalls, making low summer noises, stamping from time to time, snorting and pawing at the earth floor. Then Anderson led out Tiger, a big horse, even for a stallion, black with four white stockings, a handsome animal and willful. I swung into the saddle and started the horse with my rubber heels. He hesitated, then made for the open pasture behind the barn, and in a few minutes we were in wild free country, the cool blue ridge of the Berkshires a mile away to the East, sculptured, aristocratic hills, hills that are full of breeding.
I touched the horse and he responded, moving at a gallop across the meadow, heading for a fence that looked low enough for him to take with ease.
He took it but I didn't. He threw me very skillfully as he landed on the other side of the fence, glanced at me with firm contempt, then galloped off, away from me and away from the house. After a while I got to my feet, feeling my arms and my legs.
I wasn't hurt, just bruised a little and dizzy, but it was five miles to the house at least and too hot to walk. I crossed the field, stumbling over hummocks, and finally reached the state road. One thirty-eight, I think it was. I leaned against the guardrail, watching for cars. Then I found a straight stick on the ground and shoved it through the knot of my bandana bundle, slinging the stick over my shoulder.
A long black car approached, slowing down in response to my signal. When the car stopped I was scared. The man at the wheel was middle-aged, powerful, and he smelled of evil. So did his long, black, vulgar car. He leaned over and spoke through the window. "Hop in, cutie. Where you headed?"
I shook my head and backed away. He slithered out of his car quickly and moved toward me. "Come on, kid. You're hitch-hiking, I'm driving. Let me help you into the car."
His eyes dropped to the cleft in my shirt and I realized I'd forgotten to button it after Tiger threw me. A fat-fingered hand with rings moved swiftly into my shirt, clawing at my breast. "Little bitty titty," he said. "Hard little titty."
I used my stick as a weapon, jamming it into his fat belly. He gulped and backed away. "Why you dirty little bitch," he said. "Dirty little cock-teasing bitch." And he got quickly into his car and moved away, burning rubber so that it smelled. I fixed my breasts and buttoned my shirt, a little scared, but not much. Three or four cars passed but none of the drivers slowed for me. Then an XKE came barreling down the highway, moving at speed, a great car. It pulled up short, on a dime beside me. The driver was dark, about forty, wearing a sports jacket, ascot and cap. He took off his goggles and inspected me, starting at my sneakers and moving up slowly, pausing for a moment at the crotch of my jeans, then moving up to my eyes.
"How old are you, kid?" he asked, his voice tired and full of menace.
"Sixteen," I said, lying, because I really needed a ride.
"If you want to fuck, kid, hop in. If you don't, happy walking. No skin off my ass either way, but if you ride you pay the freight."
"I'll wait," I said.
You get used to words, Judge, and you get used to being pawed, the way the Cadillac man pawed my breast under my shirt. Words don't matter. Pawing doesn't really matter. I just stood there while the Jaguar purred like a very expensive cat. Then he hit the throttle and made it to sixty in a couple of seconds. The road seemed to be empty and I'd about decided to walk, when a State Police cruiser moved out from behind some trees a few hundred yards down the road. It came toward me, moving slowly, and the driver pulled off the road.
"Come on, kid, get in here," the trooper called. It was Trooper Washalaski, the one I identified. I thought he'd give me a ride all the way home. The troopers bring my father home when he's been drinking at the Golf Club, and I was sure to be safe with a policeman. He swung the off door open and I slid into the seat, impressed by the gadgetry on the dashboard.
"Can you take me home, officer?" I asked. "I really need a ride."
He looked at me craftily. "Maybe later," he said. "That depends. Right now I've got to take you to the barracks."
"Why?" I asked.
"Soliciting men on the highway," he said easily. "It's against the law, kid."
"You are crazy," I said. "I was trying to get a ride."
"Oh no, cutie. You were trying to give a ride. For a small fee."
He put the car in gear and we moved off, heading, I thought, toward Great Barrington. The barracks, I knew, were in Stockbridge. He turned off on a dirt road and headed into the back country, climbing easily. "I have to see a man first," he said. "Police business."
We passed through a desolate village, then we passed an abandoned saw mill, then some run-down farms, worked by swamp Yankees, old stock, gone to seed. It was country I didn't know, "Raggie Country" they called it, because poor families lived back there in sheds and rotting farmhouses. He swung sharp right, into a fine stand of white pine, and pulled up in front of a one-story frame building, with an American flag on a staff over the door. On the door was an emblem and the letters V.F.W.
"Come on, kid, let's go," he said, piling out of the car. "I'll buy you a Coke."
"I'm not thirsty," I said.
"Let's go," he said impatiently. "You're a State prisoner, kid. I can't let you out of my sight."
I moved ahead of him into the building. There was a square room with tables and chairs and a very small bar, a bar of the size people have in their houses, if they are the kind of people who have bars in houses. The smell was familiar. Then I realized that it smelled the way my father's room used to smell when he had been very, very drunk.
"Park your fanny, kid," the trooper said, lifting me to a stool at the bar. "You want a drink? A real drink?"
I shook my head.
"Okay, Coke," he said. Then he bellowed, "Tony! Service."
A runty, brown Italian with intensely white hair came through a door behind the bar. "Hello, Polski," he said, his accent heavy. "What you gonna have?"
"The usual," the trooper said. "A large Coke for my prisoner."
"She's a da priz?" Tony asked.
"You bet. Hard core prostie. Soliciting right out on the highway in broad daylight. I bet I get a commendation for bringing her in."
"You are crazy," I said. "I-"
He kicked my leg with his boot, hard. "Shut up," he said. "When you get busted, the cop does the talking. You keep quiet."
I drank the Coke very slowly and the fear receded a little, though my leg hurt where he'd kicked me. He fished into his pockets and took out a silver cigarette case. "You smoke, kid?" he asked.
"Sometimes," I said, deciding that the trooper was playing a joke, a kind of heavy-handed Polish joke, a kind of elaborate policeman's joke.
"Ever smoke grass?" he asked.
They were marijuana cigarettes, six of them, neatly arranged on the floor of his gold-lined silver case. They were hand-made, but carefully twisted. I had seen them at school and always wanted to try one but just never had the chance. Here's your chance, I thought. If you smoke it here you can't get kicked out of school, and you'll find out what it's all about.
"Go on, try it," the trooper said, putting a hand on my thigh lightly. "I'll show you how."
He lit the cigarette and got it drawing good, then handed it to me. "Draw in the smoke and hold it, kid. Deep in your lungs. Hold it while I count to twenty. You'll get used to it fast. Don't worry."
I smoked the thing the way he said, drawing the smoke deep into my lungs and holding it for a long time. He lit a cigarette for himself and smoked it easily, sipping on a double bourbon whiskey, taking his time about everything. There was an odd, almost European quality about that bar, in that light and with those people in it. Pale mountain sunlight filtered through a high window, playing on a cheap papier mache bust of John F. Kennedy, tinted bronze, and dancing off the surface of a plastic Virgin that stood with the bottles behind the bar. The short, brown Italian, like a gnome or a dwarf, stood with arms across his powerful chest, leaning against the back bar, watching, watching me, then watching the trooper.
The marijuana worked. I had an odd feeling of lightness and a splendid, conclusive indifference to time. The labels on the bottles became brighter, just the way people said all the colors would behave. The trooper beside me seemed enormous, in sky-blue breeches and polished boots, pistol slung from a leather belt that crossed the front of his laundered shirt. I read the labels on the bottles, slowly, with great care. Then I decided that I had to urinate.
"Is there a ladies' room?" I asked.
"Inna da back," the gnome said, moving his head.
"Little girl's room in the rear," the trooper said cheerfully. "Happy landings, kid. Don't fall in."
I moved into a dark place a long way back from the bar. In the gloom I made out a pair of doors. One said MEN, the other LADIES. I went into the ladies' room, a cubicle, possibly four by four, with a wash basin and an open toilet with a wooden seat that had been split. The air was heavy with the smell of urine. The mirror over the sink was beginning to glaze at the edges. Beside the mirror was a sign that advised me: EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS BEFORE LEAVING. I looked for a latch on the door, couldn't find it, and decided to take a chance. I lowered my jeans and squatted over the dirty toilet, the way you are told to do in France. There is a strong pull on the thigh muscles and it prods the bladder. That was when I truly noticed the effect of the marijuana. I urinated for a long long time, a strong, steady stream, and the hot urine coming out of my body felt pleasant and somehow important, in a way it had never felt before. When no more urine would come out of me I had a sharp awareness of loss, and remained in that odd position, astride the bowl but not on it, for a long time, hoping that I would have to urinate again. Then I flushed the urine away and went to the tiny, scabrous sink, using the degraded mirror.
My face and neck were filthy, smeared with mud from the fall I'd taken when Tiger threw me in the pasture. There was a rotting fragment of soap on the bowl and I thought I would scrub my face. I stripped off my shirt, wishing I'd worn a bra, and turned on the water. It ran rusty for a long time and made odd snorting noises. Then the door to the ladies' room opened and Trooper Washalaski entered, making a loud sound with his boots, easing the gun belt from his waist and shoulder, hanging the belt on a hook.
"Men's shitter is out of order, kid," he said. "Mind if I piss here?"
For some reason, the marijuana, perhaps, I wasn't shocked by the language he used, but through that euphoric fog I understood that I'd better get out of that room.
"I'll go," I said, reaching for my shirt.
"Stay right there, kid. Use the sink."
Then I heard the sound of his zipper as he opened his breeches. It was a sound like the sound of silk being torn and it frightened me. He opened the door for a moment, took a key from the outside, locked the door and put the key in his pocket. Then he reached into his trousers and took out his penis, making a little genuflection in order to ease it out of his drawers. It was large. It was very large. He turned full around and made me look.
"Collector's item," he said. "Uncut cock. Getting rare these days, kid."
He caught my hand and made me touch the skin at the end of his penis. When my fingers touched it, it began to get hard and he held my hand there until his penis was altogether long and hard, except for the red part at the end.
"Hard as a nightstick, huh, kid?" he said, his fingers grazing my breasts. "How'd you like to have that up you? Maybe just the red part, huh?"
"You pig!" I said. "You filthy pig!"
"Some kind of talk I don't like," he said. He grabbed me and we wrestled for a moment, but he was strong, too strong for me. He slapped me hard, then unzipped my jeans and pulled them off, over one foot first, then the other. I was wearing those thin silk panties and he grabbed the elastic top and ripped, tearing the panties from waist to crotch, then ripping them down my legs. I was naked except for my sneakers. He looked at me and whistled. "Jesus," he said. "You're built like a boy, almost, except for them cute little bubs." He caught one of my breasts in either hand and played with them. He hurt me. He put his hand on my vagina, hard so that it seemed to burn, and he made me hold his penis, using all of my hand. I was trembling, partly from fear and partly from the marijuana and mostly from the strangeness of being in that ladies' toilet, naked, with the penis of a policeman in my hand and strange promptings in my pelvis and my breasts. My mouth went dry and the adrenalin tasted like blood.
He dropped his breeches and his drawers and unbuttoned his shirt. I saw the powerful muscles on his chest and stomach and I saw his crotch, with his penis growing out of it, a man-flower, a long hard fungus, red at the tip. The hair on his body was black and tough. His penis was back in my hand again and it seemed to leap in my fingers.
"You been fucked before, kid," he said. "Don't let on you never had a cock up your hole."
"I am too young," I said. "And too small for you."
"Too young, my ass," he said. "In Vietnam my platoon gang-fucked a Chinese kid from Cholon. She was eleven, with a good tight hole and firm little tits like yours. Her hole was tight, that is, before we fucked her by the numbers. She fought and she screamed and she tried to fight back but by the time the third guy was in her hole she was crying and begging for more, jerking her ass and her hips like one of those mechanical monkies and yelling, 'Want G.I. cock. More G.I. cock.
More big G.I. cock.' There were a hundred and three men in our platoon and she took them all. And you say you're too young."
He slapped me on the buttocks, hard. Then he caught me under the armpits and lifted me off the floor, making me sit in the wash basin. The faucets dug into my buttocks and the porcelain sink was hard under my thighs. My vagina was at the edge of the basin, just over the edge, and he spread my legs a little. He was a tall man and his penis was level with my vagina. He moved toward me and I felt him open the mouth of my vagina wide. It was moist and he worked for a moment with his fingers. Then he put his penis into my body and thrust it into me with all of the force of his weight. The faucets bit into my buttocks and my head hit the wall behind me. He spread my vagina with his hands so that he could move higher.
"I'm fuckin' you, kid," he said. "I'm putting the old strap in your hole."
And he drove against me as if he wanted to kill me with his penis, thrusting hard into my body. It felt as though what he had put in me was a baseball bat covered with barbed wire. I felt the walls of my vagina break and I screamed.
"Nobody out there, kid," he said. "I told Tony to take off for an hour. We got the place all to ourselves."
He put his tongue into my mouth. It was big and salty and his mouth tasted of whiskey. He ran his tongue deep into my throat and I choked. Then he moved it back and forth, the way he was moving his penis, in time with his penis. Then he closed his mouth on one of my breasts and sucked so hard that he hurt the nipple, but the nipple rose under his tongue and stood up, straight and hard. All this time he was pumping away with his penis, in and out, and he rose on his toes in his trooper's boots to force himself higher into my body. I felt my flesh tear, high inside my body, and I began to cry.
"I am bleeding," I said. "You have made me bleed."
"Just like the Chink kid," he said. "A few minutes and you'll be yelling for more G.I. cock. I'm giving you a good fuck, kid. I'm giving you a good fuck. Say it. You say it."
When I didn't speak he slapped me hard. "Say it," he said. "Say: You're fucking me, cop. You're fucking me.
"You're fucking me, cop," I said. "You're fucking me."
"You don't need a horse, kid. You got me," he said. "I'm half horse and half Polack. But I'll bet you snuggle your cunt on the horn of that saddle when you ride, huh? You're a hot little bitch and I'm going to make you come."
I fought with him, then went limp, pretending to faint. When he drew back to thrust I twisted quickly, forcing his penis out of my body. He hit me in the face, hard, then spun me to the floor and whirled me around. He bent me and my breasts hit the sink, then he thrust a finger into my anus. He spat on his hand and forced the spit into my anus, rubbing with his finger. The pain in my breasts subsided. He worked with his finger.
"You don't want it up the cunt, you'll take it up the corn-hole," he said.
He rammed his penis into my rectum, causing a spasm of agony. I fought with him, but as I fought he rose higher and higher in my rectum. There was a lot of pain. I vomited into the sink, grabbing the sides of the sink for support.
"You have broken me," I screamed. "I am bleeding. You have broken me."
I fought with him, and he hit me again, then took the handcuffs out of his trousers, putting one wristlet around both my wrists, linking the other to the facuet. "Big enough to bleed you're big enough to butcher," he said. He shoved his finger into my vagina and thrust his penis high in my rectum. It hurt but not the way it had hurt when he first entered my rectum. A kind of lubricant seemed to seep out of his penis, easing the pain.
"I'm going to come a load of hot gism way up in your ass-hole, kid," he said. "You can feel it if you try. When I come my load, you come with me. You can come if you want to. Have you ever come with a cock in you before?"
I shook my head, but my hips moved against him without volition and his penis seemed to grow longer and larger. The pain was intense, mixed with a strange new feeling that seemed to be invading my body.
"No higher!" I cried. "No higher!"
He grunted, thrusting hard, and said, "A little higher. Okay, kid. I'll try to get it a little higher in your tight little ass."
He gave a great thrust with his fingers, so high that I felt the pain in my heart and I seemed to explode.
"That's it, kid. That's the big one," he said. "And you asked for it, don't forget. You asked for it."
He had shucked up his shirt and his breeches trailed so that his stripped body was hard against mine, hard as a hot, rough log. The tight, tough hair on his chest bit into the skin of my back.
"Say it," he demanded, punching my buttocks with his fist, the other hand high in my vagina. "Say it. Say: You're fuckin' me, cop. You're in my corn-hole."
He hit me again and I said it. "You're fucking me, cop. You're in my corn-hole."
I felt him ejaculate into my body. It was as if his blood poured into me. Then I had a feeling as if humming birds were in my stomach and I felt a long, throbbing electrical shock that forced my vagina to clutch at his fingers, forced my rectum to grasp at his penis. Then my body shuddered and for a second I fainted, clinging to the washbasin, held by the handcuffs.
I had had the same sensation on a horse, after a lot of rubbing, but weaker, much weaker, and just at the mouth of my vagina. I felt this all through my body. It seemed to radiate out from the center of pain high in my rectum, which seemed to blend now with the searing pain in my vagina, where his fingers were probing, probing deep.
"You're coming, kid," he said. "You're coming with me. Say it."
He punched me.
"Say it!"
"I'm coming," I whimpered. "I'm coming with you."
"Say: Fuck me, cop. Fuck me."
"Fuck me, cop," I said. "Fuck me."
He was like a bull inside me, still not finished, and he drove himself, his penis high and hard in my body. He smashed his weight against my buttocks, driving his penis. I could feel his breath on my neck, then at my ears, and I could smell the whiskey smell. He caught a strand of my hair in his teeth and pulled, then he bit my shoulder. All this time his penis continued to throb away in my rectum, and my body gathered itself to him, offered itself to him, and I felt another orgasm gathering at the end of his penis then radiating to my vagina. My orgasm. I knew what it was and I helped to build it.
His enormous body began to tremble, and the trembling of 220 pounds came to me through the end of his penis. "I'm coming, kid. Good hot come, way high in your ass-hole. High, high in your ass-hole. Come again. Come with me."
"I will come," I said, in a voice that seemed not to be my own. "I will come again."
His fingers worked in my vagina and the pain and the joy swept through me and I lost control of my body, responding to him, moving my buttocks against him, moving my pelvis against his fingers.
"Come, kid. Come," he said, punching my buttock with his fist.
I felt a great empty place in my body, then a series of small electric shocks, then a shuddering spasm of joy, a moment of ecstasy that frightened me, it was so strong.
"You're coming, kid," he said again, driving his pelvis with his buttocks. "You're coming again. You are hot, you red hot cunt. You are hot as a pistol and I'm putting my load right where I put the first one."
Then it was over. My rectum seemed to relax and his hand slipped out of my vagina. I hung there limp on the wash basin, then tried to move away, for the pain was coming back. "Let it soak, kid," he said. "Let it soak."
I felt his penis wilt in my rectum, wilt and die.
He unlocked the handcuffs and I rubbed my wrists, staggering when I tried to move. I was bleeding and the drops of blood were like scarlet rain on the dirty floor of the toilet. There was a Tampax machine on the wall. He fished some change out of his pocket, punched the machine, then punched it again.
"Bend over, kid," he said.
When I didn't move he bent me double and thrust a Tampax into my rectum, the other into my vagina.
"Get dressed," he said, turning to the toilet bowl, his penis in his hand, standing spread-eagled. He urinated for a long time, a strong thick stream like a horse. Then he turned and looked at his penis. It was smaller now and soft, insignificant almost. It was difficult to believe that it had torn my rectum and my vagina and made me bleed.
He pulled up his breeches. They were tight and light blue and the stripes on the sides had frayed. He zipped his pants, the sound for some reason frightening again, then strapped on his black leather pistol belt. The pistol smelled cleanly of oil. It was an almost healthy smell there in that fetid toilet.
"Get dressed," he said. "You want to go out of here bare-ass?"
Mechanically, I pulled on my jeans and denim shirt, then wiggled my feet into my sneakers. The violated underpants went on the floor. I turned to the corroded, fly-specked mirror. There was a scarlet mark on my face where he had hit me. My loins felt as if I had been invested with steel rods. My buttocks were sore to the touch.
"Come on, let's go," the trooper said. He caught my elbow roughly and pushed me through the door into the dank, dark spot at the rear of the barroom. The smell of beer was heavy and I gagged. Then I walked beside him, passing the deserted bar and the photograph of General MacArthur. Outside, the sun was still bright enough to assault my eyes, for they had become used to the sick yellow light of the toilet.
"Get in," the trooper said jerking his thumb at the cruiser.
I got in and he went around the car and slid easily into the driver's seat. He started the engine. It is a souped-up engine, powerful and throaty, and he seemed to enjoy both the sound and the fierce, controlled vibration that is felt in the car itself.
"Where do you live, kid?" he asked, lighting a cigarette by snapping a kitchen match to flame with one thumbnail.
"Patchen Plains, Iowa," I said, responding almost automatically.
"Kid, you are a winner," he said. "Nobody lives in Patchen Plains, Iowa."
"I do," I said. "It's near Des Moines."
"That's a little off my regular patrol," he said. "Where are you staying in Massachusetts?"
I told him. I think the name Kitteridge disturbed him for a moment but he recovered his cool.
"We're on the way," he said, and he wheeled out of the dusty lot, following a narrow, leafy back road for a mile or two until we hit the highway. He turned south, driving steadily. Then he touched a button and the siren wailed. I shuddered. He laughed and said, "I like the siren. You know what it sounds like, kid? It sounds like come. A great big come like the one we had in the shithouse. I can feel it, right here."
He caught my hand and pulled it to his lap, forcing my fingers between his thighs. I could feel him, through the light blue whipcord, hardening under my hand. It was a strange sensation. I wanted to open the car door and throw myself out of the cruiser to the pavement, but with another part of my being I was fascinated, physically held.
We drove for a few miles, my hand held there between his legs. Then he swung off the highway, following a dirt road that looked as if it hadn't been used for a long time. He swung into a clearing surrounded by good-sized, trees, stopped the car and switched off the engine. He released my hand and unzipped his breeches. His penis was fully erect. In daylight it looked menacing, enormous. I began to tremble. He put a hand on my shoulder.
"Don't be scared, kid," he said. "I'm not going to put junior into your behind again. I'm going to give you your supper. Nice hard supper."
He caught my hair at the back of my head and forced my face into his lap. I fought with him. He struck me with his fist. "Take it, you little bitch. Take it."
I fought against the hand that was holding my face in his lap. He hit me again. "Take it," he said. "Take it or I'll break your neck."
I did what he wanted me to do. When he began to ejaculate I tried to move my head but he held me there and the stuff poured into my mouth in spasms. He held me for a long time, then slowly relaxed the hand that held my head. I opened the door of the car and sank to my knees on the forest floor, vomiting for a long time. He laughed at me. I remember that clearing and being sick on the pine needles, retching, retching, and I remember that he laughed at me.
I got up, swaying, and started to move toward the road. He was out of the cruiser in a second and caught my arm. "Oh, no, kid," he said. "You go home in style. You ride." And he thrust me into the car.
He moved the car very skillfully over the narrow dirt road, then cut into the highway, heading toward the Kitteridge place, driving fast-seventy, eighty miles an hour. In a few minutes we rolled up the long driveway to the Kitteridge house. Mrs. Kitteridge was under the porte cochere. The trooper stopped the car at what I suppose he felt was a respectful distance. "You stay in the car, kid," he said. He got out and moved toward Mrs. Kitteridge, assuming a stiff-backed, military bearing. He touched his hat and they spoke for a moment. Then Mrs. Kitteridge went into the house. The trooper waited. She returned in a few moments and I saw her hand him a sum of money. He saluted again and came back to the car. When he was behind the wheel he turned to me, grinned, and said, "Okay, kid. Out."
I got out. He drove off at once, the heavy engine making a sound like that of a dangerous animal. Mrs. Kitteridge looked at me with a good deal of contempt in her eyes.
"Your morals are your own affair, Sara," she said. "Money is another matter. I was obliged to give that policeman one hundred dollars. I shall expect a check from your father as soon as it is convenient."
I opened my mouth to protest but she cut me off. "I don't want to hear any more about it. If you weren't actually soliciting you were certainly offering yourself to men on the public highway. It is disgusting."
She turned and walked away quickly. I stood under the porte cochere, stunned, sharply aware of the pain in my body. Then I went upstairs to my bedroom. I took a long soapy shower and put on a clean cotton dress. Then I sat at the escritoire and wrote to my father, explaining that it was necessary for him to send a check for one hundred dollars to Mrs. Barbara Kitteridge of
Stockbridge, Massachusetts. When I had finished the letter, addressed an envelope, folded, sealed and stamped the letter, I lay down on the pretty bed, carefully, not wanting to wrinkle my dress. I stared at a spot on the ceiling for a long time. I was sobbing inside but no tears came.
"I cannot be pregnant," I told myself, reviewing the biological facts. "I feel pain but the pain will pass. I doubt that I have been seriously contaminated or really injured. I should like to shoot that trooper but it is not practical. It is not practical to lodge a complaint against him. It would be his word against mine, for that ghastly Italian would say nothing. I must simply accept things as they are. It would be the troopers word against mine. A stalemate. Or what is called a Mexican standoff."
And that is the situation, your honor. It is a Mexican standoff. I have no witnesses. I can prove nothing. But only two human beings occupied that toilet on that afternoon. The trooper, Washalaskie, cannot prove that I lie. You cannot tell me that I lie, your honor. There were two in that choked and fetid closet. Two.
It is my opinion that Mrs. Kitteridge has paid the trooper to slander her daughter. I cannot prove that either. But I feel it in my heart.
I have nothing more to say. You must judge between us, between me and the trooper, Washalaskie. My own concerns are simple. They are first for Rosamund, second for the truth.
But the truth is your domain, Judge, or so we have been taught in the schools. You serve a blind mistress. It gives you a certain advantage, I should think. You can juggle the accounts without fear that your mistress will inspect your addition.
My father is a Federal judge. I love him dearly but I have always felt that his profession was a sinecure, since he had nothing to do but to sit in a raised chair, draped in his black robes, brooding over various unfortunates.
Now I pity my father as much as I love him. I would not be a judge. For my life, your honor, I would not be a judge.
Statement of F. J. E. Woodbridge, Jr., Emerson College, Chapel Street, New Haven, Conn., made in the Chambers of Judge Rossiter A. Goodpasture, Springfield. (Edited from transcript.)
It was one of those crazy things that happens and after it's happened it doesn't seem real and absolutely no one will believe you when you try to tell them exactly what did happen, the way it happened. They believe parts. For instance, Chink Moskowitz still believes that I knew Roz Kitteridge from some school dance or big weekend in Salisbury or Norfolk or somewhere and that I knew what she was like and that I conned her into coming up to the room, got her high on speed, and then organized the gang lay. I beg your pardon. I mean the multiple copulation that occurred in my rooms in Emerson College in November.
The fact is, it was absolutely an accident and in a way of speaking I had nothing to do with it. It was a long college weekend and lots of the guys had gone home or gone into New York. I was alone in my room. My roommate, Podunk Arnold, had gone home to New
Jersey. He has a kind of star, I think, that watches out for him. like, he has this pierced eardrum, not enough to bother him, but enough to keep him out of the army and out of Vietnam.
Anyway, I was all alone, drinking beer and trying to read Clarissa Harlowe. I had decided to read the whole thing that weekend, if it killed me. I haven't finished it yet, and that weekend was quite a while ago.
So there I was, reading and sipping beer and wondering whether or not Clarissa Harlowe would be easier to take if I smoked a joint, when the phone rang and I answered and it was this chick asking for someone named Monica McNeill. "Look," I said, "maybe next year there will be chicks in this college but as of now it's all male, period."
I started to hang up but she said, "What have I got on the phone? Yale College?"
"Part of it," I said.
"I have always wanted to meet Yale College," the chick said. "What are you doing, right this minute?"
"I am drinking some rather poor beer and reading Clarissa Harlowe. It's a book," I said. "By Richardson."
"Why are you reading Clarissa Harlowe?" she asked.
"Because, lover, I have to write a term paper on it and it's due soon and I just don't dig it."
She laughed, a low, mellow laugh. Not a kid's laugh at all.
"If you give me a beer and maybe some grass I'll write hie paper for you," she said. "I know Clarissa pretty well."
"Come on, friend, don't make fun of a drowning man," I said. "I really have got to write like three thousand words on Clarissa. Well, on Clarissa with some fleshing out on Richardson. So if you'll excuse me-"
"I never kid," the voice said, oddly serious. "If you want me to do your paper tell me your name and the number of your room and get me into the building. Do you have a typewriter there."
"Well, yeah, but-"
"But nothing. I'd much rather see you than Monica McNeill, even if the price is a term paper on Richardson. I'm serious. Dig?" '
"Suits," I said. And I gave her my name and told her how to get to the college from the New Haven RR station. Then I poured fresh beer, closed the book, fired up a joint, put my feet on the hassock and waited. She turned up in about thirty minutes. I was a little surprised. I'd had an idea it was a married woman, fairly young, maybe thirty or so. But Kitteridge didn't look like a fifteen-year-old that day. Not by a long shot. She had quite a lot of corn-colored hair, limp and straight in the modern style, as if it had been washed, then ironed. Her skirt was short but so are they all, and her legs were straight and bare and strong. Besides, by that time the beer and the grass had started to work. She was just a chick, a young chick, who said she knew something about Richardson. "Hi," I said. "You want a brew?"
She shook her head and that corn-colored hair swung loosely, like ropes of honey. "Uh-uh," she said. "But that smells like good grass. I'll have a joint."
I lit a joint, got it going good, and handed it to her. "Don't get too high before you write my paper," I said, not too serious because I didn't really expect her to write the paper.
"I can do it faster and better if I'm just a little high," she said. She was in Podunk's chair, one leg looped over the arm, both shafts free to the breeze. If you bent down just a little you could see the dark place at the top of her legs and see that she wasn't wearing any pants. Still, I don't remember having the hots just then. I was friendly. Friendly and a little curious.
She finished the joint, then sat up and said, "Where's the typewriter?"
I set it up for her.
"And where's Clarissa? I'll need it for the quotes."
I handed her the book; it weighed several pounds. She opened it, riffled through it, arranged it beside the typewriter, fed paper into the machine, and began to type fast, using all ten fingers. "The thing to remember about Clarissa Harlow is that she was a Junior League girl," she said, talking above the sound of her typing. "Do you know that there are girls in Evanston, Illinois, and in Shaker Heights, Cleveland, who are capable of trying to bury themselves from the world simply because they have been laid? Once? Believe me, it's true."
She talked as she typed. For some reason the words she used, ordinary words like shit and balls, had an odd effect on me. I began to feel my juices rise and my eyes were on the long shafts of her legs, braced efficiently against the leg supports of the typewriter table. It was just about then that I decided it would be nice to take her into the sack, but what I felt was kind of vague. Vague, but real.
She hammered out a dozen pages, shuffled them together, then read through them quickly, making the odd correction with a felt pen. When she was finished she handed them to me. While I read them, she wandered around, poking her nose into the sleeping cubicle, then into the little John. I heard her pee without closing the door and then I heard the John flush, loud. It got to me, just the sound of her making water. Then she came out of the John, her skirt hitched up a little, a drugstore bottle of speed in her hands. There were like fifty pills, dexidrene, and they belonged to Podunk.
"Wow, speed," she said, shucking four bright orange heart-shaped pills out of the bottle onto her palm, then popping them into her mouth. "I love speed."
"Take it easy," I said. "Speed kills."
"Everything kills," she said, flopping back into Po-dunk's chair, her skirt really high now so that I could see the hair between her legs and see the split in her groin when she shifted a little in the chair. It was brown at first, then red when she moved a little. It hit me like an electric shock and I sat up straight, putting the essay on Richardson aside. "Read it," she said.
I finished reading. It was a good paper. So good I wasn't sure Professor Ginsburg wouldn't spot the fact that it was beyond my talents. "Wow, man," I said. "Where did you learn to give out with stuff like this?"
"I read a lot," she said. "And I write pretty well. Put the paper away and forget it and give me another joint. I want to get high. I want to get good and high."
"Don't rush it," I said. "Are you used to this stuff?"
"Is a kitten used to milk?" she said. "Let's have a party. There must be a few people left in this tomb. Let's really turn on."
"We have the makings of a pretty good party right here," I said. "You and me and the grass."
"I like people," she said. "Lots of people. Lots of bodies."
I suppose that should have told me something but it didn't. "Okay," I said. "You want bodies, we'll get bodies." I rounded up Chink Moskowitz and about a dozen other guys. Everybody brought something. Except Chink. They brought grass and booze and beer. Lots of beer. And we woke up Turk Shapiro and made him play the guitar for us, and sing all the Joan Baez crap he knows, which is quite a lot, because he has a good memory for words and music.
The studies in Emerson are big, bigger than in any other college here and bigger than the rooms in Eliot, in Cambridge. In half an hour my stody was jammed with guys, all slugging down beer and smoking pot, while Turk gave out with his folk-rock, and Rosamund danced on top of my desk. She had swallowed another pair of pills and she was sky high on speed and a little bit flacked out on grass, so that when she danced she really made those guys blow their minds. She did a kind of Elks' Club smoker dance, except that it was burlesqued and she did a lot of bumps and grinds, making them seem even more obscene than they do in the original versions, where the dancer is usually a hustler hired by a bunch of fraternity brothers. At first she danced in that short skirt and shirt, just kicking off her shoes. Her toes were pink, I remember. Then she unbuttoned the shirt and peeled it off, tossing it into a corner. She was wearing a fishnet bra with holes cut into the cups so that the nipples stared out at you, brown and ripe, surrounded by bulging black spandex. She unhooked the bra and tossed it away and her breasts, released from confinement, were like firm calves' foot jelly, high and small but terribly real.
"Take it off! Take it all off!" Chink Moskowitz encouraged her, imitating that German girl who does the shaving cream commercial. Or is it a razor blade commercial? Anyway, there was Chink, his big nose under her miniskirt, chanting: "Take it off! Take it all off!" while the other guys watched and drank beer. Then the others picked up Chink's chant.
"Take it off! Take it all off!" they said. "Take it off! Take it all off!"
I think I knew at that moment just about what was going to happen, except for the details. They came as a real surprise. But I knew that Roz was going to take on a lot of the fellows and I didn't think it was going to be done against her will. Her eyes were really burning now, because she was freaked out on speed, and she reached down with her free hand to unhook her skirt at the waist, then unzip the placquet on the side. The skirt fell to the desk and she kicked it away. I knew she wore no pants so I wasn't surprised, but the other guys roared and began to applaud at the sight of her hair and her slot. She went on dancing in the nude, doing real bumps and grinds, whirling and spreading her buttocks with her hands, so that her rectum flashed brilliantly in the light.
It was my room and I had found her and by rights I should have been the first guy to have her but for some reason I hung back, not wanting to be first. She was watching me as she whirled on the 'desk, sticking out her tongue at me, making gestures with her hips and pelvis. I saw a French circus once, in the Place Pigalle, in Paris. It made me sick. Rosamund's dance didn't make me sick. It sounds odd, but her dance was intelligent as well as dirty. I was beginning to feel a great deal of sexual excitement, but I was a little scared too, and I had the feeling that I wanted to string things out, to make the whole experience last.
It was Turk Shapiro who made the first move, and that was odd because Turk always has trouble making it with girls. It isn't that he's queer or anything like that. He's just shy and he finds it hard to talk without his guitar.
This time he didn't have to do any talking. He vaulted up to the top of the desk, barefoot, wearing chinos and a tee shirt. Roz helped him out of the shirt, then worked the zipper of his khakis. We all applauded. Turk just stood there, his penis sticking out of him like a flagpole, looking like a scared kid at the zoo. She caught his arm and pulled him down and then they were both on the desk top. Her feet and legs shot into the air, the legs and thighs spread wide apart, facing all the guys, so that they could see the hole, blinking at them, bright red where the inside showed. Then Turk was on top of her and in her and her little heels were pounding on his buttocks.
He finished pretty fast and we all cheered and applauded.
"Come one, come all," Roz said. "Everybody comes."
Chink and another football jock manhandled Po-dunk's bed out of the cubicle into the study, and Chink picked Rosamund up and carried her to the bed. I forget who it was who served as number two, but after that it was a parade, one guy after another, and she didn't simply lay there like a whore, inert and just letting them do it to her. She moved like a small and very savage sexual animal, which, I suppose, is what she was that weekend at Yale College. After a dozen guys had plowed her she swallowed another dexidrene tablet and smoked a joint, smoking it like a pro.
"Take it easy," I said. "That's good speed. Take it easy."
"I am as high as the Vietcong flag at Berkeley, California," she said. "Besides, speed won't hurt you if you exercise and I'm getting plenty of exercise. Good exercise."
She finished the roach and Cowboy Walker got into the saddle. Cowboy is six four, rawhide thin, and he's from Texas. Where else? He had some idea that he could teach Rosamund a few tricks, but after he'd been in her for a few seconds she said, "Just move it in and out, cowboy. Save those shunts and double shunts for the sheep or for your cow pony."
It was getting pretty wild by then. Guys were drifting in and out and there were cats I didn't really know, people who lived in different entries and even a few from other colleges. The room was heavy with the smell of pot and Turk Shapiro was giving out with a lot of new Bob Dylan and somehow in that setting it seemed to me that my ever-loving classmate, Turk Shapiro, was the greatest folk-rock singer in the U.S. of A. For U.S. of A., read world. He sounded like a kind of super-Dylan and the songs floated out of his chest so naturally that you really believed he was making them up as he went along. It was a really groovy feeling, not what you'd expect an orgy or a gang fuck to be like at all. There didn't seem anything really wrong about it. No one was violent or mean or interested in hurting anyone else. Nobody fought over whose turn it was or tried to stay in the saddle after Roz was finished with them.
I remember one period when for a long time I just watched Rosamund's face, her eyes bright with speed and her mouth, a small mouth with round, full lips, lips and teeth slightly parted, so that from time to time her tongue moved in and out of her mouth in time with the rhythm of the guy who was moving inside her body. It was a hungry mouth, a mouth that seemed to yearn for nourishment, but there was nothing unhealthy or disgusting about it. In Europe and in the Caribbean I have seen prostitutes and their mouths suggest that their bodies are foul, ugly, evil-smelling. Rosamund's mouth was not like that. It was eager, yearning, the mouth of a child enchanted by an animal at the zoo, or a puppet show, or a sudden, dramatic flight of birds.
After a while she said, "I'm tired. That is, my legs are tired. But my cunt's not tired. Tie my legs to the bed posts, high so my hole is stretched."
"Take it easy," I said. "Take it easy. Rest for a while."
"Tie me!" she said, suddenly fierce, demanding, commanding. "Tie me up."
We used belts and stretched her legs so that the mouth of her vagina was open, wide open. Somebody had a camera with a flash, a Leica, and he kept snapping pictures of Roz while we were tying her up and after she was tied. She looked like a drawing in a history book of some kind of torture posture used by the Inquisition, as if she had been prepared for the inquisitive priest, who would insert red-hot objects into her body until she said what he wanted to hear or until she died of pain and shock. I recall my thoughts of that moment with extraordinary clarity and I remember thinking that the torturing priest was compensating for his celibacy in the most melodramatic fashion, turning himself into a textbook case for the post-Freudian writing shrinks.
Pretty soon she was anchored to the bed. The sight was sobering. Everyone shut up for a minute and we all just stared, a little frightened, I guess. Then Roz said, "I told you, my cunt's not tired. Fall in. By the numbers."
The guys piled on and she kept yelling for more. She was really freaked out. Her eyes were glassy. "College boy cocks," she cried. "I need a big black prize fighter."
"How about a football player?" someone asked.
She nodded vigorously, hanging there between the belts. "Next best thing," she said. "Bring him on."
In a few minutes one of the guys led Brandon Johnson into the room. We could hear Brandy arguing, all the way down the hall. "Man, I just haven't got the time for that kind of jazz." Then he came into the room and everyone stood still. He was the best football player to hit New Haven in a long time, very big, very strong and very black. He stood above Rosamund, looking down at her body, then at the arrangement with the belts. He put his hands on his hips and whistled. Roz reached out and caught the zipper of his fly. She pulled and her small white hand flashed into his trousers, like a fast, erratic bird. She had his penis in her hand and she gasped.
"It's big!" she said. "And it's black. So black!"
Brandy stepped back, closing his trousers. "Little Miss Anne wants a black rod, eh?" he said, looking at her with more hatred than I had ever seen on a man's face. "Well it won't be this black rod."
He spat into her face, deliberately, then spat at her vagina.
"Jesus, Brandy..." someone yelled.
"Shut up," he said. "Pigs. Honky pigs."
He walked quickly out of the room, brushing people aside as he moved to the door. Roz was sobbing a little. Someone got a towel from the John and sponged off the spit and she swallowed hard and stopped crying. Then someone was on her and in her and the parade had started again. I think it was at about this time that Turk Shapiro said into my ear, "You know some of this stuff is too good to lose. Why don't we set up your tape recorder?"
It sounded like a good idea at the time. I have a pretty good machine, from AR in Cambridge, and I hooked it up quickly and fed in a fresh tape. I know it was wrong and I know it was wrong to cut the record from that tape and sell the records all over the East Coast. I didn't really think things out. I simply knew that the scene was one that was somehow worth preserving, on film and on tape. So we kept the recorder going, all the rest of the time, and there must have been twenty guys who made photographs, and movies, some of them using flash bulbs, so that the smell and the smoke were in the air, mixing with the smell of pot and the smell of Roz and of all the guys.
About a dozen guys plowed her and the semen was running out of her vagina and dribbling onto the floor, making a pool beside the bed. "My front hole's full," she said. "Turn me over, fellows. On my belly."
We unstrapped her and turned her over. She ate more speed, then spread the cheeks of her behind so that her rectum showed red. "Come on, somebody, sink the strap," she said, almost impatiently. "This is round two. Bust it, whoever you are. Make it bleed."
"I'll strafe you," Chink Moskowitz volunteered. He is a football jock and weighs in at about two-thirty. He is hung like an elephant but it all went in. Her rectum seemed to glisten, as if it had been oiled or greased, and I realized that she must have prepared herself in the railroad station, before she came up to the room. Then I watched her face as he rammed it into her behind. Her tongue moved in and out of her mouth in time with the movements of Chink's body. She grunted a little, then whimpered with pleasure.
"That's more like a rod," she said. "Sink it, pal, sink it! I'm coming again. Come with me. Come in my ass. Come so high that I can taste it."
Chink plowed and made a noise like a hurt dog as he fed his penis into and out of her body. Afterward, he said, "There's a funny thing up there, like a little soft hand. It grabs you and holds you for a second."
Right then he just kept plowing and she moved her small round behind against him, fighting for more. "I can feel it!" she said. "I can taste it. Get the next guy into me quick, before your rod goes soft. I can come for hours this way. I am on a plateau. A high plateau, an hour of come, come, come."
I moved toward her and followed Chink. I had never used a girl's behind before and it was something new, and exciting. I trembled for a moment, then went into her. For some reason I began to cry but I didn't stop.
There were a dozen guys in the room, waiting. One of them put the palms of his hands on my buttocks and pushed. Then he thrust his forefinger up my rectum and that made me move quickly.
"I'm coming," I whispered into her ear. "I'm coming up your ass."
"Yes," she said. "You are coming up my ass."
And she slithered my penis out of her body and I rolled away.
"Keep it coming," she said, begging for it now like a hard addict begging for junk. "Keep it coming. Keep me on my high plateau. Don't let me fall. Please God, don't let me fall."
Her buttocks were turning black and blue and fresh blood bubbled from her rectum. "Get a hot towel," she said. "Swab me out. Too much come. I can't feel. Ah, God," she said. "My high. My plateau."
I wet a towel with tap water that was steaming hot and swabbed her down, running a twisted corner of towel into her vagina. I should feel sorry for her, I thought, but I didn't. She had taken on thirty-seven guys and she was black and blue and bleeding but her face was serene. It was like the face of an angel painted by El Greco.
"I'll suck a few while it dries," she said. "I like to suck but I can't suck as many as I can fuck. My jaw gets tired. I wish I could fuck with my eyes and my ears. I wish I could fuck with my belly button, my nostrils. What good is a hole that won't take a hard cock?"
She used her mouth for quite a while, then she said, "Tie me up again. Use the belts."
We tied her up as she'd been before. She swallowed more speed and smoked a joint, her third, hanging there in the straps. Then she asked for it again and the guys moved into her and out of her. The tape recorder was playing all this time, and when it ran out of tape I put on a fresh reel. The tapes tell you pretty much how she was at that time, after she went way out, high on speed and marijuana, and just plain high on sex, freaked out all the way.
I will play the record we made from the tapes and you can make up your own mind. We edited out a few parts, where her speech was blurred or she was just repeating herself, but the tapes are real. They are very real. They tell you a lot about Roz. I guess they tell you quite a lot about us too. Anyway, here they are.
"Pogue me! Pogue me! Invade my ass-hole. Stretch it and put your foot into my browneye. Put a fist up my cunt. Punch my womb with the fist of your cock. No! No! Drive that cock high and hard and straight into my ass-hole. Grab my tits and tear them off. Finger-fuck me while you bugger. Let me stretch my ass with my fingers so you can shove that cock higher. Cleave it! Break my ass-hole in two. Ah, there! It's tight and good, high up where it should be. Push up from the balls of your feet. Drive me through the floor with your cock. If I scrunch down limp I can feel it now, pounding away near my heart. My heart beats like a cunt in my chest. It's beating in time with your hard cock. I wish it had a spoke on the end, like one of those old
German helmets. Ah, it's tight at my rim! Tight as a calf s mouth on your wrist when the calf sucks for salt. Will a calf such a cock? Does a calf like hard cock?
"Pogue me! Pogue me! Split the cheeks of my behind the way you'd split an orange in half. Have you ever seen an oil well and the sharp bit that bites through rock? Use your tool on me like that. Ram it hard through the straight and narrow part. Make it bleed. Plow new ground. Make me come in blood. Pogue me! Pogue me! The French have a term for ordinary fucking. The little death, they call it. Make this the big death. Execute me with your cock. Shaft me! Shaft me!
"There is an arithmetic of sensation, an algebra of the cock and the clitoris. X joy plus Y pain equals Z ecstasy. The facts of life are very simple. They are birth, food, sleep, love and death. We begin with an experience we can't remember and end with an event we do not experience. Cute? It is plagiarism, pure and simple. And it is wrong. Fucking is real. Love is literature. And if Jesus is a trick on niggers then literature is a trick on us.
"Our Father, who art in mine ass-hole, hollowed out by thy name. You maketh me to lie down in green pastures under the prick of the prize bull. You maketh me to be bashed by the Bull of Bashan. My cunt runneth over. Thy rod and thy staff they rise in my holes, thy staff and thy rod in all my holes. This is the Maculate Conception. The little swimming fish of life will die in my shit, my inconceivable and maculate shit. And the little fish are superior fish, pumped from the pricks of the men of Yale. But they are swimming now in the sewer of my body, swimming toward what remains of the cutlet I chewed on at the luncheon table.
"Boola boo! That is a cock, that is a new one, a hard one, a long one, a leaper, a plunger, a long long sword that thrusts into me like a sword. Oh, good, good, good, good, good! You have started my juices again. You are lifting me with your long cock from a calm plateau on the edge of come, so that I may rise again and again to the sharp knife edge of explosion, then fall back for a long moment until the next rod or the next staff is in me, high in my hole. Who is fucking my ass now? The Son of Man? The Son of God?
"Pogue me! Pogue me! No grease. No spit. Just ram it home. Spear my ass-hole with your hard cock. Ram it into me, then rip the cheeks of my ass apart and it will go all the way in. Ah, God, that's right! I could feel that in my toes and in my tongue. Keep it coming. Move it! Move it! Pogue me! Pogue me! Fuck me! Fuck me! Finger-fuck my snatch. Tear my hips apart. Higher! Higher! Punch my ass and make it take more cock. More cock! Cock! Cock! Cock!
"Pogue me! Pogue me! Turn your cock into a poker, a red hot poker, and ram the hot up my browneye. Rape me in the ass! Smash my buttocks with your fists while your cock is in my ass. Make me feel as if I had an alligator up my ass, a hard, rough alligator, eating at the walls of my ass-hole. Ah, good, good, good, good, good! I can feel it high in my ass. I am girl-ass and boy-ass all in one. Put your balls close to my cunt. Poke one of them into my cunt. I will come three times on one ration of hard cock. I can feel your come like warm rain, high in my ass-hole. I suck it up into my body, that good warm come, a warm river of come in my corn-hole. Millions and millions of those tiny fish, swimming in my ass-hole, swimming upstream like salmon swimming to spawn. They will die as the salmon die. They will die in my ass-hole. My tight little ass-hole, it is the tomb of a million of the men of Yale, as yet unborn.
"I could die this way, with a big cock in me. I would die happy. Mea cunta, mea cunta, mea maxima cunta. Forgive me, Father, for I have fucked, which does offend Thee who hast no balls. Ave Maria, gisima plana. Benedicta tu, three four. Holy Mary, Mother of God, how many holes do you have in you? How many fuck-holes did the good Lord in his infinite mercy put into the flesh and body of the Holy Mary, Mother of God? I am holy as thou art holy. My cunt runneth over.
"Your penis, sir, is a great beast...."
Yes, sir. I will turn off the machine.
That's only one side but I think it gives you an idea of the way her mind wandered, after the first few hours. Of course, it was partly the speed. It was the speed that kept her going for thirty-seven hours. She came out of it pretty well, with some phenobarb and a long hot shower. Then I drove her to Massachusetts. It was funny. We sat in the car for a while, a little way from her house. I kissed her, just the way you'd kiss a girl after a dance or a party.
"Thanks," she said. "Goodbye."
"Solid," I said. "Really solid."
It was Turk's idea to cut the record. We played the tapes back, up in my room and Turk said, "I know a guy who makes blue movies and blue records and all that jazz. I'll bet we could get rid of a lot of platters, up in Cambridge and Hanover and at Ithaca. All over. It's a gas, you know. A real gas."
He was right. We sold fifteen thousand records, before the big money guys cut their own record, using ours with some hooked-up stuff. They forced us out of the market. I suppose it was the wrong thing to do but somehow at the time it didn't seem to be a thing that would do anybody any harm.
Not Roz, anyway. It didn't do her any harm. I know that.
Sworn statement of Miss Mary C. E. W. Alsop of Lennox Meadow, made in the chambers of Judge Rossiter A. Goodpasture. (This version edited from transcript.)
I am seventy-one years old and it is preposterous that I should sit here, facing a judge who belongs to my own generation, discussing the honest sexuality of a child like Rosamund Kitteridge. I suppose I could refuse, but that would be awkward. And it did occur to me briefly, while I was being driven here from Lennox, that a small measure of good sense may still exist in Massachusetts. My hope is weak, but it is real. I am very fond of Rosamund.
I knew her father of course, but I knew her grandfather better. There was a man whose heart was a lump of specie and whose mind was a kind of abacus. I always hated to touch that man, even when he and I were young and long before I turned my back on his sex in favor of my own. Oh don't fluster so! Everyone knows that I'm an old dike. A tough old dike, if you like. I am that, God rest my soul, but I am far from stupid. I have my marbles, all of them, and, as I told you, I am fond of Rosamund.
Her father was a handsome boy and he was for a time a handsome man, but he was weak. He could not find the strength to become a man like his father, and he lacked the courage to become a totally different kind of man. In that respect I have succeeded. People think of me as a lonely old woman, not quite respectable because of my past but to be tolerated because of my family and because I am mildly well off.
Let me tell you, sir, that I am not to be pitied. When I turned my back on Massachusetts in 1920 and established myself in Paris I was rid of that sense of obligation to the past which infects certain natives of this state like the virus of a disease. I tried men. Not Rosamund's grandfather, to be sure, but men who were like him in appearance and manner, and like him too in their estimates of women. There were, as I recall, eight young men from Harvard considered suitable by my family. I was exposed to them carefully at dances, house parties, boat races and football games. I was not bad looking and a respectable bourse came with the package. The young men were attentive.
I contrived a radical experiment, used in other climates perhaps, but not in Boston or in Massachusetts. I ticked them off, one by one, sleeping with them in obscure hotels scattered along the shore of Cape Ann, places with vast, wallpapered rooms, rusty plumbing, and enormous beds that sagged and offered creaking protest to the nitty-gritty of romance. There was always the smell of steamed clams and boiled lobster, and before the test of the creaking bed there was always the interminable shore dinner to be eaten.
It was a dreary exercise. Of the eight young men, only one revealed the inner fire that literature has encouraged ardent young girls to expect when first they are bedded by a man. Alas, the fiery one was sadistic, a blemish I apprehended on the first and only session. I felt rather smug when, a few years later, he was put away for a time, after having assaulted a young man with his fists.
I developed a low opinion of these Cantabridgean swains and it amused me to believe that their penises came to order in a blue and gold box from Brooks Brothers. "Please read directions carefully before trying to operate."
They were absurd, sterile in kind, lacking passion. At the end of the season I found myself pregnant, having achieved one orgasm in eight attempts-a frustrating experience, believe me, and one not-likely to encourage affection for the New England male. I took myself off to Paris, where I got rid of the child and discovered rather quickly that I preferred women to men. It was a conceit looked upon with generosity by the French of that day. I am told that the point of view has changed since the ascension of General de Gaulle.
It is not necessary for me to impose upon your time by recounting that part of my life that has attracted the attention of the press. I enjoyed Paris, I came to know everyone who was worth knowing, and I bought six hundred paintings, the best of which, I think, hang in my house in Lennox.
It was the paintings, of course, that led to my meeting with Rosamund. I was a member of the first class to be enrolled in Miss Potter's School. There really was a Miss Potter, and though it is simple to make sport of her, she was a competent schoolmistress. I must say that I prefer the present head, who is a woman of considerable depth, but old Pottie did her best.
I have never felt that it was sensible to offer loyalty or affection to institutions such as schools, colleges or governments, but I live in Lennox, I went to the school and I have some paintings worth looking at. The present headmistress, Miss Gainsborough, decided to lift the tabu against me, so that her girls could see my pictures. I'm rather glad she did. I've enjoyed having the young ladies in the house and many of them enjoyed the pictures.
Rosamund, of course, possessed them. She has a marvelous eye for painting and she often came back to look at one or another of the canvases in my collection. She would stand in front of the picture, absolutely still, scarcely breathing, and she seemed to absorb the painting into her body, into her blood. She looks at painting in the way an artist will look at his own work, astonished by what he sees, wondering, sometimes, how it came to be. She is never precious or pretentious or sententious about art. She sees exactly what is in front of her, an arrangement on a flat surface. I recall a statement of Renoir: "I paint like a child. When I want a thing to be red, I put on more red." He was simplifying, of course, but there is a measure of truth in what he said.
Rosamund looks at painting partly with the eyes of a child. She is capable of being astonished-again, and again, and again. This may sound simple to you, this matter of seeing exactly what is there, all of what is there, and nothing that is not there. Believe me, sir, it is not simple. It is a creative act. Rosamund is capable of assuming a nearly passive role when she approaches a painting and she places herself almost, but not quite, in the situation of the artist himself. When one does this and when he has the chance to commune, as it were, with an artist of distinction, he is himself changed-drawn out, if you will-or educated, though I dislike the word because it has been so much abused and because the institutions that serve it to the young are handmaidens of a dreary system, interested not in drawing out but in shutting up. Rosamund is the kind of human being who began to educate herself almost from birth, and her entire life will be a kind of education, a search.
She took to me almost at once, and after most of the girls had seen my pictures and carefully described them on ruled paper, bound in loose-leaf notebooks, she formed the habit of dropping in for an hour or two when she had the time to spare. She was always a breath of fresh air in the house and she always made me feel alive when she was in the room, or even when she was poking about in some corner of the house, looking, for example, at my small, formal French water colors by Diego Rivera. She has very fine eyes and a mobile, expressive mouth, intensely sexual but never gross. Her hair is always brushed to a gloss and has an undertone of red gold that gleams beautifully in the light. Her body, of course, is a child's body but she uses it with the authority of a young dancer, so that one is never aware of the gawky, half-finished effect that destroys the charm of most adolescent girls. She is, I suspect, a forming woman, rather than a girl. Very often she has a woman's sense of quiet command.
She is remarkably well-informed. I had a certain notoriety in my day, and while I lived in Paris the New York and Boston papers enjoyed printing bits of gossip about me, as they did about Gertrude Stein and Peggy Guggenheim and other women of independent means who preferred to live in Paris or Rome or Venice. In those days young men put me into their novels, never very accurately, to be sure, but with tags that made identification inevitable. Until the beginning of the Hitler war, I was never surprised to be recognized and quite used to being approached by strangers, asking all kinds of weird questions about Picasso and Braque and Gide and Cocteau and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and Henry Miller and Josephine Baker. I never minded. Actually, I was often flattered and delighted to be noticed.
All that went with the war, of course. People who were young in the forties and fifties and sixties know nothing about me, unless they have some special interest in the expatriate world or in the School of Paris. I am used to being ignored these days, as I was used to being recognized in other years. I find it comforting to be ignored and amusing to guard my own memories. I do not expect people to know me, except as an Alsop of Lennox, with an odd penchant for modern art.
And so I was surprised one day when Rosamund, warming her nose over a cup of my China tea, having taken a chair from which she had a view of my largest Matisse, looked at me candidly with those eyes, which are like fine blue stones, and said, "You knew Raymond Radiguet, Mrs. Alsop. How was he used by Coc-teau and the others?"
"How used?" I asked, faintly puzzled, meeting the child's intelligent eyes, then glancing at a spot on the teapot where the light bounced from the polished silver.
"Did they use his behind, his rectum?" she said calmly. "Or did they understand him with their mouths?"
I can't say that I was shocked, but I was astounded. That moment, while we sat in my pleasant sitting room, thin china cups balanced in our hands, surrounded by the blazing color of my pictures-an old woman with a scarred past, old fires long ago banked, and a young woman, for I call her that, whose blood and brain were throbbing with life-that moment was one in which we . shared what Joyce liked to call an epiphany. With an alarming rush of blood to the head and to the loins, realized that I did not face a child but a woman, a very young woman, but one who was my equal in many ways and was by no means innocent of sex or of the varieties of its forms. I have no reason to conceal things from you, so I tell you quite candidly that I was aroused in a way that I had not been aroused for more than thirty years. I wanted Rosamund. I wanted her in the most elementary sense of the word. I wanted her body-her young breasts, her mouth, her throat, the fresh, firm slit between her legs, the small, puckered fragrant rose that sheltered between her buttocks. I have said that the fires were banked. The term is accurate. As I sat there, the seductive perfume of China tea in my nostrils, my eyes on the child's throat, then on her blue serge thighs and the place where the serge sank into a small pocket between her thighs, I felt the fire rise in my blood, warming my own loins, filling the nipples of my breasts, causing my mouth to go dry for a moment. The hand that held the teacup shook and I spilled tea on the saucer.
"They browned him, of course, and he loved it," I said. "But they used him in other ways too. And of course he experimented with women, older women."
"Le Diable au Corps," she said, seeming almost to taste the words. "A hell of a fellow."
"He was a dangerous person," I said. "Brilliant. Flashingly brilliant, but dangerous. He enjoyed inflicting pain."
"I am sorry to hear that," Rosamund said. "It is a killing thing for an artist-to inflict pain."
We fell to speaking French for a time. Rosamund has fluent French, very nearly sans accent, and I have always treasured the language. She wanted to know a thousand things-detail, always.
"How large was Picasso's studio at the time he painted your Blue picture?"
"In what bedroom in the Colombe d'Or is the large Pascin of Julie?"
"Do you think that Matisse was a bourgeois at heart, or was it simply a pose?"
"Did you sleep with Gertrude Stein? Was it interesting? Was it good? Did she talk while she fucked?"
"Did you know Louise Bryant? Was she beautiful, even then?"
"Did you see Renoir in Cagnes?"
"Were you the model for the large Derain at the top of the stairs?"
"Was Hemingway an indifferent fuck?"
She seemed to dredge these questions up from a steaming reservoir of information about the Paris of the Twenties and Thirties. Obviously she had read the books-all the books-and she had constructed for herself a kind of scale model of the Paris of those days, with each cafe and boite on its proper carrefour, each artist exactly where he would have been found, each rich expatriate held in close focus. Her mind and her soul are absorptive; she steeps herself in a subject and its ambience, and she comes to possess it, so that sometimes, while we talked, I actually forgot that I was not conversing with a contemporary who had shared that Paris with me. Later on I came to know that she possessed all subjects in this fashion, utilizing a kind of total immersion, grasping a slice of history and holding it in her hands, as it were, discovering the art, the politics, the music, the literature, the catch-words and can't phrases, even the smells and the sounds and a sense of the air, blending them by means of some magic of the will, so that she seemed sometimes to stand in the rain in the Carrefour Montparnasse, those candid, splendid blue eyes absorbing the essence of the life around her, turning, perhaps, to the Closerie des Lilas, or passing to survey the Luxembourg.
She did not cease to astonish me. What happened, I suppose, was that I ceased to be unwilling to accept the power of her intelligence and of her spirit, so that what I felt was the kind of predictable astonishment that brings delight. I am certain that that is why I was not in the least troubled when she embraced me and kissed me on the mouth one afternoon, a few weeks after we had talked about Radiguet and I had experienced my epiphany. If I subject the events to cold logic, I can persuade myself that I behaved like a wicked and depraved old woman, but I am by no means prepared to concede that matters of this kind are properly submitted to logic, hot, cold or lukewarm. As I sit here in my chambers, beneath a portrait of Calvin Coolidge and another portrait of Charles Evans Hughes, beneath the flag of this troubled republic and the flag of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I have not the least awareness of shame. I feel that the passages between Rosamund and myself were filled with gain for each of us, each in her turn.
You are at liberty to make what you like of the adventure. I have said that my being here is in its way preposterous. I want very much to help Rosamund, and for a day or two after I read your letter I considered the possibility of lying to you, of concocting a story that would portray Rosamund as a mild, amiable, virginal child. This seemed not only dishonest, but foolish. Certainly, I reasoned, the Commonwealth must have a variety of so-called evidence. I can best serve my friend by telling the truth precisely as I remember it and in terms of feeling, so that hopefully you will understand that what passed between an old woman with a somewhat bizarre past and a young woman who burns with life was not a crime or an expression of depravity, but a thing that was-that is-positive, life-giving and life-sustaining, rather than destructive.
So I shall tell it warts and all, as nearly exactly as an old brain can make it. If I persuade you, I shall have done Rosamund a service. If I fail, I shall have done her an injury. It is a risk, but I take it. I have always taken risks. There is no other way to be free.
I remember the day quite clearly. It was a brilliant winter day, not long after the second term had started. Rosamund came to tea alone. Sometimes she came with another girl. Sometimes they came in threes. On that day she came alone. She was dressed in the school uniform-an affair of starched white broadcloth and pleated blue serge, the calves of the legs encased in ribbed blue socks, the knees bare. In warm weather the girls wear simply the shirt and skirt but in winter they add a tie and a blazer, so that they look like English girls rather than Americans. The costume rather becomes Rosamund, though I prefer to see her without the tie and without the blazer.
I shall describe the room for you. I think you have never been in my house. If I am mistaken, forgive me. The sitting room is on the large side, twenty-five by forty feet, with a lofty, plain plastered ceiling. The furniture is comfortable and close to the floor. There are a great many easy chairs and couches and many tables, each with an ashtray, for I smoke and expect that others will smoke. The rugs are Chinese, the furniture covered in a light-colored fabric with a modest floral design. The wooden furniture and the brasses are kept polished and on that day a hardwood fire burned comfortably within the east wall.
What gives the room its importance are the pictures, of course. There is my large Matisse, over the mantle, a very fine painting, related in period to the over-mantle done for Dr. Barnes, though my painting is clearly superior. Then, running clockwise around the room, are three Picassos of the white period, an astonishing Roualt, four small jewels by Juan Gris, a noble Pascin, a Derain, three Soutines, and a rather large, quite joyous Chagall.
The paintings are present in the room, and it is most important that this be understood. The paintings witness what goes on in the air space beneath them. They are an accusation, if you like, a prop for one's conscience and his mind. It is difficult to become slack-minded in the presence of those pictures, for they impose their own discipline upon their arbitrary ambience. Believe me, I am healthier and more intelligent because I have lived with those pictures, those and the others that hang throughout my house.'
It was in the large room that I received Rosamund on that winter's day, when the afternoon sky seemed aristocratic and distant, a streak of turquoise imposed upon the clear blue, near the mountain horizon. I wore a white cotton shirt and a Breton skirt that swept the floor, a skirt made of black wool, heavy with intricate embroidery done with silk and gold threads. I suppose that I am still a handsome woman, when I try, at least. I have all my teeth and all my hair and my skin is clear. Still, I am old. I am old.
Rosamund came swiftly into the room. She moves gracefully, with the ease and economy of a dancer. We embraced. We always did. But on this occasion we held the embrace for a number of seconds and I was aware of the warmth of her body, passing to mine through the thin layers of ironed cotton. Our breasts met and seemed to blend for a moment. My right hand was under her left forearm, the fingers seeming to touch the skin of her flesh just under her left breast. I felt her body, throbbing, pulsing with life. After perhaps a minute we moved apart and I rang for tea. It came almost at once and for some reason I said to the servant, "I shan't want you until supper time, Henriette. You may drive to the village if you like."
"Thank you, Madame," the maid said, fading easily out of the room.
I keep only one servant in the house. Others come into help with the cleaning and a man comes to do the gardens, but only Henriette lives in. As I poured the tea I heard the sound of her car starting, then flaring to life, then making a crunching sound as it moved away down the gravel drive. We were alone in that big house. The silence was heavy, almost a thing to be touched or tasted. The hall clock struck four and each stroke of the bell was like a stab in the heart. It is an enormously sad sound, you know-the tolling of a bell in a silent house.
Rosamund slipped out of her blazer and took off the striped uniform tie, freeing her throat. She sat back easily on the deep sofa, a long run of thigh exposed above her blue cotton calves. She shook out her glistening hair so that it made a magnificent fall on the left side of her face. Her hands moved efficiently as she took her cut and selected three small sandwiches. We did not speak. While she drank her tea she greeted and paid homage to the large Matisse, tracing the leaps of the dancing figures with her eyes. Then, finished with her tea, she said, "Do you mind very much if I smoke my own cigarette?"
She found a small silver case in the inside pocket of her blazer and from it she took a hand-rolled cigarette. She offered the case to me. "Mary?"
I shook my head. "No, my dear. I have not smoked hashish for many years. But I shall enjoy watching you."
She lit the cigarette carefully and smoked it slowly, holding the smoke in her lungs for a long time, releasing it gently, not expelling the smoke from her lungs, but allowing it to rise of its own accord. While she smoked I had the sense that she watched me, that she saw more than the normal eye could see. What she saw I suppose, was a young, reckless, sometimes impudent Mary Alsop, bright, brave and brittle in a way thought somehow to suit the times, a kind of Bostonian Lady Ashley, or perhaps a Nicole Diver, neither cruel nor schizophrenic. While Rosamund smoked I was aware that she had a strong sense of purpose, so strong that it seemed almost to radiate from her body, from her eyes and her mouth. I had sensed it at once when she entered the room. I sat and I waited, half-knowing what to expect, for I had dreamed of it, somewhat frightened, but aware of a powerful, surging current of desire that flowed through my body-not crude physical desire, though that was certainly there, but a profound desire to come alive, to feel, to experience freedom, if only for a few moments.
She finished the marijuana cigarette, then leaned back on the sofa, breathing slowly, her eyes on the plain plaster ceiling. Then she undid a button on her shirt, then another, and another, so that the collar fell away and her breasts were exposed, young and firm and the size, perhaps, of rather large apples, the nipples a pure pink-brown, firm, strong, seeming to tremble a little. Her hands moved across her body and she took her breasts, one in each hand, and caressed herself, her lips parted slightly her eyes still fixed on the ceiling. Her legs stirred and as she moved her white thighs flashed brightly in the firelight.
"Come to me, Mary," she said, her voice quite firm, quite low and thrilling. "Come to me."
At this point I suppose I might tell you that I was possessed by waves of guilt, that I accused myself, that I denounced the date of my birth and cursed the womb that had borne me. I did not. I got up rather easily, moved across the three yards of space between me and Rosamund, and sank to the couch beside her, covering her mouth with mine, exploring her mouth with my tongue. My hand moved naturally toward her naked breasts and I caressed first one, then the other.
"Let us go upstairs, child," I whispered.
Her lips were warm and moist at my car. "Of course, Mary," she said. "Of course."
My chamber is large and the walls are covered with a French paper, cabbage roses in great array-pure camp, I suppose, but delightful. There is a bank of windows that faces the mountains. There are some pleasant rugs, two elegant but uncompromisingly erotic Modigliani nudes, and a bed. A large bed from the South of France, made for love, though until that winter afternoon it had never been used for the act of love between man and woman, man and man, or woman and woman. Now it would support woman and child, almost, in a sense, mother and child.
Rosamund undressed quickly, slipping out of her shirt, dropping her skirt, then peeling off those monstrous socks, which left ridges in her pale skin. She stood naked before me, her slim, nearly boyish figure charming in the dying light, the pale hair of her poll catching the light, so that the fronds were shot with gold. Her lips were moist and slightly parted. She was enchanting. I took off my things and stood facing her, a few yards from her, my body free of encumbering garments. It did not matter that I was old and she was young. In that light, in that room, it did not matter at all. There was no such thing as age. There was only sex-pure sex-uncontaminated by guilt or fear of betrayal, healthy sex, life-giving, sex of the kind we are told was enjoyed by the Polynesians and others, before we inflicted upon them the benefits of Western European civilization.
Long experience of Western civilization and of Massachusetts persuades me that the eminent judge may find disgusting the very idea of a coupling between a woman of my age and a child like Rosamund.
Perhaps.
I am inclined to believe that no natural coupling of human beings is disgusting, unless one of the human beings is injured. I don't hope to persuade you but I insist upon making my position clear.
I have said that in that room, lighted by the dying winter sun and by the paintings on the walls, there was no such thing as age. There was only sex-pure sex. Rosamund moved toward me on the balls of her bare feet, her small firm breasts hardly reflecting the motion of her body. I was not conscious of the marks of age on my own body. I received her with my arms and our bodies touched, mouth upon mouth, breast upon breast, stomach against stomach, pelvis opposed to pelvis, thighs grazing warm thighs, one of her legs to the left of my calf, so that the calf muscles touched. It was like embracing an enormous phallus, a phallus the size of a human body. She was of the flesh fleshly, a delight, an angel in the flesh.
"Mon ange," I whispered, leaving her mouth for a moment. "My angel. My hot, my throbbing angel."
Her hips moved slowly, describing an easy circle, her pubis tight against mine, so that I felt the heat and the moisture below. The hairs of our bodies commingled. Her breasts rose against mine and I felt her nipples, like warm, firm nuts, pressing into the soft glands of my own breasts. We kissed again and she responded with hunger, her tongue stiff and spirited, moving quickly between my lips, exploring my mouth, deep in my mouth. She is a born lover. She was born, I think, knowing all, or almost all, there is to be known about what have been called the arts of love.
"I want to please you," she whispered. "What shall I do?"
"I want you, child," I said. "I want you with my mouth and with my soul."
I guided her to the large bed, maintaining the close embrace. A shaft of light made a bright patch on the bedspread, cold, clean, New England light, conferring a chill pure geometry on the objects it defined. Gently, I lowered her to the bed, so that her hips were in that patch of mountain sun. I parted her legs slowly, almost as if I performed a kind of religious rite. At the first clear view of her moist lobes, I gasped, half with delight, half with astonishment, as if somehow I was truly astonished to find that she had between her legs precisely what one expected to find.
I touched her with my fingers, gently at first, teasing her, rousing her, touching the lobes with the touch of a moth or perhaps a touch like the touch of the wing of a small, tropical bird. Her breath seemed to catch in her throat for an instant, then her breasts began to rise and fall in a rapid, steady rhythm. Her hips rose gently against my hand, her pelvis undulating slowly, making the pattern of a single wave, her lobes brushing my fingers as she described the wave with her body.
"I want to please you, Mary," she said, her voice husky and deep in her throat, but thrilling as always, vibrant and controlled. "I want to please you, to make you happy."
My largest finger moved slightly and I touched her clitoris, tumescent now, firm and erect as a strong young penis, but submissive, yearning, pleading, not arrogant or brutal as a penis can be, holding more promise than a penis, which after all is concerned only with itself and its explosion. Her clitoris was moist and hot and so were the lobes of her vagina, warm and pulsing under my fingers, moist with yearning, not for a penis this time, but for me, for my fingers, my mouth, my tongue.
Easily, I slipped to the floor, my knees on the prayer rug at the side of the bed. Bizarre thoughts sped through the mind. As I parted the child's thighs again, I asked myself: "Do I face Mecca? Am I addressing the Holy City?" Then my head came down swiftly, my mouth finding its way at once, my tongue perforating Rosamund's body, my old, strong tongue, stiff now as it had ever been, my moist, rigid tongue, a dike's cock, perforating the child's body, stabbing her with the blade of joy, running far into her body, alarmingly far, the tip of my tongue seeking I know not what, but seeking, seeking, seeking.
My hands moved and my left hand found its way to her pubis, massaging it gently while my tongue worked high in her body. My right hand sought her breasts and my fingers closed around one of them, firm and round and precise as an apple, but yielding under my fingers as could no apple on this earth, not even excepting the first apple consumed by man in the steamy beginnings. I touched the small, hard nipple. It seemed to leap under my fingers, and the breast rose toward my hand, opposing it gently, firmly, so that I began gently to knead the breast, grazing the nipple from time to time with the tip of my fingers, my mouth and my tongue alive on her cunt, in her cunt, kissing her cunt with the long kiss, the kiss that invades and beseeches the body, the kiss that awakens, awakens, awakens.
"Ah, God, Mary, it is magnificent," Rosamund said, her voice clear now and bright as a bell. "You are in my cunt, my cunt, my cunt. You are high in my cunt."
Her small hands, small as small birds, moved to my face, touching my cheeks, my ears, the sides of my lunging, moving chin, my skull, the nape of my neck, then my cheeks again-soft, warm, astonishing hands, seeking each susceptible patch of flesh, discovering it with Cartesian accuracy, feeding heat and life into my body.
Then she rose, spreading herself with her hands, so that the lobes were opened wide to my mouth and tongue. Her loins pounded against me now, alive with fire and tortured almost to the point of bursting, rising against my mouth, stabbing my lips and my tongue, rousing me, so that my own loins moved back and forth in the air, thrusting as I thrust with my tongue, my tongue that was piercing her body.
"You fuck me beautifully," she said, her voice rising in pitch again as her body truly caught fire. "You fuck me with a tongue that has known Paris, a tongue that has known the great past. Your Paris tongue. I embrace it. I strangle it with my cunt, my cunt that knows your tongue."
And her body seemed to express a spasm, then the walls of her passage closed on my tongue, holding it gently for an instant, then releasing it, so that it continued to glide in, to be held, then to be withdrawn with speed.
"Glorious! Glorious! Glorious!" she cried. "I am going to come. I am coming. I am coming in my cunt, high in my cunt. Now I am coming in my thighs, in my groin, in my breasts, in my throat, in my mouth, in my mind. I am coming, all of me. I am coming."
And her legs and feet rose high in the air, her strong young pelvis forcing the opening of her body hard against my mouth, into my mouth, the firm passage embracing my tongue, so that I felt the warmth in my own loins, rising, then throbbing, then rising again as wave after wave of pleasure rushed through my body, shock waves of ecstasy, warming me, urging me, clutching frantically at me. She gasped, the sound like a small explosion, and her body shuddered.
"Come," she begged. "Come with me! Come with me, Mary! Come!"
And then I shuddered, my knees drumming on the floor, drumming through the brilliantly colored rug, my bruised mouth clinging to her, my tongue rasping high in her, her hot hands circling my head to find my breasts, her legs lowering easily, so that her thighs embraced my head. It was astonishing ... a revelation. Together, we went limp and our bodies sagged. But my mouth, for a long time, remained on her body, glued to her body.
When she rose from the bed the room was dark. Her white shirt seemed to glow in the gloom. She picked it up and put it on, buttoning it quickly, then slipping into her skirt and socks. She went into the bathroom and I heard the taps run, first hot, then cold. The toilet flushed mournfully. I heard the mild clicking sound of a comb on the marble basin. Then Rosamund was back in the room, the light seeming to follow her as she came out of the bath. I saw her trim, nipped waist and her fine legs, in silhouette against the light. She moved toward me in swift, silent strides, caught my shoulders and guided me to my feet. We embraced and she kissed me on the mouth, then touched my tongue with hers.
"My tongue," she said. "My Paris tongue."
Then she was gone, leaving me naked and by myself, but not alone. Not really alone. Her young smell lingered in the room, on the bedspread, in the air, in my mouth, on my tongue. I stretched like a cat, then sat on the edge of the French bed, lighting a cheap French cigarette, enjoying the way it brought the smell of Paris into my room, pleased with the way it seemed to blend with the smell and the taste of the young girl who had inhaled and exhaled this air just a few momerits ago. The window was almost dark. There was the single, inevitable star, the cliche, offering a pinhead of chill light, a heatless, valueless diamond, far off in windy space. I sighed for joy. When I had finished the Gauloise I crushed out the butt and went to my bathroom, stepping into the shower at once, enjoying the spurting, tepid water, soaping myself for a long time with a soap that smelled of lemon, then teasing myself with the jet of water. At last I closed the taps and stepped out of the shower stall, onto a large, voluptuous rug. I rubbed down the skin of my body, taking pleasure in each stroke offered by the strong, coarse, expensive towel. "What are we having for dinner?" I asked myself, facing the mirror without flinching. "What am I having for dinner?"
There was a chicken stewed in red wine, served with a mound of Italian rice. A half bottle of Beaujolais had been decanted for me, or at least poured from the proprietor's bottle into a crystal decanter.
"Take the wine away, Henriette," I said. "Drink it yourself, if you like. Bring me a bottle of Chambertin. The good year."
"Madame?"
"A bottle of Chambertin," I said. "The good year. Bring me the bottle. I shall manage to pour it myself."
"As Madame has commanded," said Henriette, scurrying off to the kitchen. I heard the door to the cellar creak as it was opened and I listened to the clump-clomp of Henriette's honest, peasant's heels on the wooden stairway. I pictured her in the cellar, searching the ranks of dusty bottles, muttering fragments of Auvelfgnat wisdom and wondering why an old woman had decided to be extravagant-no, to be reckless-without the slightest warning.
Soon she was at my side, the bottle offered for my inspection. I read the label, calling up in my mind the Chateau de Chambertin; then, all in a rush, feeling the uncompromising, almost soulless warmth of the Cote d'Or, austere vineyards offering welcome to no one, gray, brooding timeless chateaus rising like sculpture above the vines, formed of a flinty and relentless stone, built not to outlive their makers, but to outlive the race of man itself.
I poured a bit of the wine and smelled it, thanked the girl, and poured more. I raised the glass, inhaling this time. The wine was faultless but almost brittle. In Beaune, I thought, they would give you this in a brandy balloon. I drank and then I sighed.
"Eventually, one cannot become French," I said, addressing the defenseless chicken on my plate.
Certainly I was not French, but I was happy and very much alive. I swallowed most of the coq au vin and finished the wine. I went to bed early, though I did not sleep. I lay in my bed, my body slightly turned so that I faced the window that addressed the mountains, and I enjoyed the play of starlight on my body. I thought of my youth and of Paris, of the long, gray tides of Paris, defeating time and man, perhaps even in the end defeating God himself. Then I began to cry softly. The tears were for myself and my past but they were happy tears, healthy tears. It was a long, bright night. I enjoyed it.
In honesty, I cannot say that I felt the slightest spasm of guilt on that night or any other. What had passed between myself and the child had served us both and harmed no one. I discovered no center of guilt, though my mind instructed me to seek it. I felt happy, I felt alive, and I had been invaded by what may be most comfortable described as a sense of purpose. I had in fact discovered a reason for carrying out the act of breathing. You are almost old enough, I think, to take my meaning.
After that first day, Rosamund came to my house as she had come before, sometimes with another girl, sometimes alone. When she came alone we went up to my brilliantly flowered bedroom and made love on my beautifully carved bed. Sometimes Rosamund smoked her hashish, more often she did not. We delighted one another. We talked about Paris and about books, about France and about art, and we made love, delicately sometimes, harshly sometimes, symbolically sometimes.
I found some old dildos I had bought years ago in Paris. I thought they would amuse Rosamund. They were in the style that might be called Dirty Gallic, a style that stems from the filthy pictures offered in side streets behind the Opera. One was enormous-perhaps seven inches long, and made of a semi-soft molded rubber. Possibly plastic is used today. A face with bulging eyes and a fine lascivious mouth had been painted on the tip of the object. It was droll. Ludicrous. Outrageous. Rosamund was delighted with it.
"We must try them," she said. "Do me. Do me with this one. Then I will do you."
I shook my head. "Are you certain?" I asked. "It is almost larger than life-size."
She laughed. "I have had a bigger thing than that in me. All the way in me," she said. "And it was attached to a state policeman who weighed two hundred and twenty pounds."
I felt an odd pang of something related to jealousy but I fought it back. "Very well," I said. "But I shall need something."
"I'll get it," she said. She ran to the bathroom and returned with a jar of vaseline, handing it to me.
I inspected the harness by means of which the object was to be attached firmly to the body, a clever arrangement of straps and sections of strong elastic. I strapped it to my pelvis. When it was firmly in place, Rosamund laughed brilliantly. "You must look," she said. "In the mirror. You must look."
I crossed the seductive, luminous rug to the full-length pier glass set into the wall. When my reflection came into view I stopped dead. Some kind of sound escaped from my throat-of surprise, delight, or shock, I'm not sure which. But as I stood there, contemplating the image of my nude body to which was attached the object from France, what struck me was not the quality of the grotesque but the fact that my body did not look old. My pelvis and stomach, actually, were partly supported by the arrangement of powerful elastic straps, but my breasts and my chin looked younger than they had when last I looked into a full length mirror, or indeed looked into any mirror at all except for the purely mechanical purpose of fixing my face. It was staggering. What I saw was a body that looked absolutely competent to give pleasure or to receive it. Yoga helps, I know that, but this was more than muscle tone. There was an elan, an esprit. In a minor way, I was in love and it had changed my body and put life into my skin.
Then I fixed my eyes on the reflection of my pelvis and I burst into laughter, echoing Rosamund. It was truly droll, that enormous, arrogant phallus with its predatory, lascivious eyes and small, red rubber tongue, jutting out of the mouth at the very tip of the object.
"It is a gas!" said Rosamund. "An absolute gas. I want it in me. In me. In me."
She came to me and we embraced before the enormous mirror. The objects slipped between her thighs, but outside of her body. Our mouths melted together and our breasts were close. Then we turned and for a long time we clung together, body to body, while we studied our reflection in the glass. Rosamund found my lips again and her tongue shot cleanly into my mouth, plunging between my lips, an action that contained its own form of demand. My hands moved around her body and my palms spread across her buttocks, fingers grazing the hot flesh, fingers grazing the declivity between her buttocks, moving, moving, touching her hips, her thighs, her pubis, the tiny opening between her buttocks.
Gracefully, hardly moving, she began to pilot us toward the bed. It was a kind of erotic dance, to a slow rhythm, formalized, heartbreakingly promising. When we reached the bed she kissed me again with her tongue, then kissed my breasts. Her hand moved swiftly under the French object, and the fingers sought the warming lobes of my vagina, touching them for just an instant, but making a statement for her and for me, proclaiming the fact that it was a woman who would mount her, a woman, with a body that matched her own. I cannot tell you why that touch of her fingertips, lasting perhaps a second, was profoundly important, but it is so.
Her hand left me and she sank to the bed, her buttocks on the edge of the mattress, legs parted wide, so that the scarlet slit between her thighs flared quickly, almost angrily. The lubricant was on the table, within reach of my hand. I used it on the object, then on her body. She was throbbing now and her skin was burning. I looked down, my eyes on the blunt, now powerful object, my eyes on the insolent red tongue that would lead it into her body.
"I want it!" she cried. "Give it to me, Mary. I want it! Impale me! Pierce me! Drive it long and deep and hard. I want it! In me. In me. In me."
Her voice rose in timbre and seemed to tremble as her body trembled. Her hips and pelvis arched toward me, the red slit opening wider, her breasts rising and falling in fast rhythm, the pink-brown nipples firm and searching. It is difficult to reconstruct with precision what I felt as I stood over her, between her legs, in the position of the rapist, the ravager. Certainly I felt a part of the power a man must feel when he has reduced a woman to his mercy, when he and he alone seems to govern her ability to breathe, the right of her heart to beat, the obligation of her blood to flow. He can spurn her and she will die a little. He can take her and she will gasp with pleasure, under him, subordinate, her servant, his body servant, invaded by him, perforated, smothered by the heat and the weight and the power of his body, finally accepting that of which his body rids itself.
Certainly, I do insist, I apprehended something of what he must feel. I stood without moving for a long moment, enjoying the sensation of absolute sexual power, aware that Rosamund whimpered, that she was pleading with me, begging me, imploring me.
"In me, in me, in me, in me, in me, in me," she said, almost strangling on the short words.
I smiled and my hands touched her firm breasts. Then my hips gathered power and I drove myself forward, pounding into her, driving with my hips. I could not feel through the object but I felt it all through her body, through the trembling that began when I drove the object home, high, high in her body, the small, tough rubber tongue lapping the mucilaginous walls, tickling, teasing, promising, as the object, blunt and large and uncompromising, punched its way into her body, then was withdrawn slowly, to be punched again, higher, each time higher, or so it seemed, for the child's body was frantic now, her buttocks seething and writhing beneath her, her pelvis rising, her pubis hard against mine, the long French phallus deep inside her.
"Invade, invade, invade, invade," she cried. "Oh, Mary, Mary, Mary ... fuck me! Fuck me with the French cock! Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me to death, to death, to death! Fuck me!"
And her torso rose so that she seemed to be supported in the air and her arms clung to me and her mouth covered mine, her tongue searching, searching. Then she fell back to the bed again, her eyes alive, her body covered with a delicate, delicious sweat, her pelvis shuddering as she rose against the phallus, her lips parted as if in anguish, her breasts arching, the nipples high.
"I am coming," she said. "I am coming. Can you come with me?"
"Yes," I answered firmly. "I can come with you. I am in you. In you. In you. I can come with you, with you, with you."
And I had a long, overpowering, curious orgasm that flooded my thighs and my pubis, then spread through my body. I cannot account for the fact that I felt that orgasm in the lifeless object strapped to my body, but it is true.
I felt the muscles of her loins contract. Her breath quickened. She fought for another fraction of the object. She moved almost savagely, like a young horse under the saddle for the first time, arching her back so that it was curved and tense as a longbow.
Then she was swept up into the current of my pleasure and her body quivered, her mouth expressing joy and anguish, pain and delight, her stone-blue eyes on the ceiling.
"Aiiiiiiiieeeeeeee!" she cried, the sound elemental as the sound of falling water. "A iiiiieeeeeeee!"
And then she was spent, truly spent. Her body went limp and she seemed to melt into the pretty counterpane, the hard French object still in her body. Her head turned to one side. She was breathing heavily and the light sweat was like gauze on her body, sweet-smelling and pure and lovely to the tongue, the sweat of a young girl in heat, the sweat of the Greeks, of Athens.
After a long time her head moved and her eyes found mine. They were filled with calm, content. "You have fucked me," she said. "You have fucked me."
"I have fucked you," I said.
"And you came? You came?"
"I came."
"I know. I know."
She wept softly, tears of joy, tears of life. Gently, I drew the French object out of her body. I drew back slowly, but the last two inches were expelled by some contraction of her muscles and there was a precise sucking sound, a sound that was a form of punctuation, almost grotesquely corporeal, like the sound of a belch or a fart. It astonished me. It was unfamiliar. Then, in a flash, I realized that it was indeed the vaguely improper sound of a stiff and fully aroused phallus, being withdrawn as if because of rude interruption. I moved an instant after the sound and glided softly to the bathroom, where I rid my body of the object, which now seemed ugly-a bad joke. I wanted to retain the masculine syndrome I had achieved while my body was poised above Rosamund's open thighs. I kept a part of it, physically, and I can call it up sometimes, when the light and the air and the temperature all are exactly right. It is extraordinary, the way we hoard sensation, as if the memory and the peripheral nervous system were musical instruments of a sort, capable of reproducing sensation in a formalized way, so that the reconstructed act and the sensation that belongs to it seem to observe certain of the primary laws of art. But I digress.
We did not use the dildos again, except as objects of amusement. I gave them to Rosamund at the end of term and it may be she has kept them as a kind of souvenir.
"This is the kind of cock you can really keep for a souvenir," she said, when I gave her the first one, the largest and longest and thickest, the one with the face and the impudent tongue, the one we had used. "Sometimes I've wished I could have kept it ... a live one, I mean, crowded with living blood."
I don't know how much of me she has kept. I have kept all of her. I treasure the memory of her mind and her body and the memory delights me. She brought me back to life, you know, as surely as a doctor who opens the breast of a dead man and massages his heart until it beats again, has brought that man back to life. And Rosamund restored my heartbeat without offering a knife to my body. I am an old woman and I have met not a soul who possessed the ability to give life in as full measure as that rare faculty is possessed by Rosamund.
I shall not see her again. I have given my house and my pictures to the school and God only knows what manner of gawky, flat-chested creatures will sleep, four to a room, in those pretty chambers above the stairs. It does not matter. I have the pictures in my heart, all of them. And I have Rosamund in my heart, for just as long as that unusually tough muscle will condescend to beat.
For a long time, I should think. I come from accursedly long-lived stock and I have never abused my body. I go to France in three day's time, the long way, to Cannes, passing the luckless Canary Islands, passing Gibraltar, passing those islands that belong to Spain and to Robert Graves and that I have always found self-conscious and dreary-Spain at its Hispanic worst, a culture of pretty manners and poor food, of bad skins and bad wine, when one has tired of sherry.
I shan't stay long in the South. When I have tasted the sun and the light of the past, inhaled the air still scented by the bones of the departed Romans, I shall go straight to Paris, where I shall find a flat, no matter what it costs, and I shall stay in Paris until I die, hopefully, in my sleep, after having enjoyed a modest but perfect meal and a splendid but well-bred wine. I have an idea that I shall die, not happy but content. I hope so.
There is nothing more I can tell you about myself or Rosamund Kitteridge. She is precisely what I called her once: an angel. An angel in the flesh. She is quite incapable of inflicting pain or of originating any kind of evil. She is alive, she is good, she is free. She should remain free.
Thank you for your patience with an old woman. I hope that I have added an ounce to the scales on the side that is in Rosamund's favor. I do.
I truly do.
Statement of Miss Elizabeth van Brandenberg of Chicago, Illinois, made in the chambers of Judge Rossiter A. Goodpasture. (Edited from transcript.)
I always liked Rosamund. I still do. It's funny. In a boarding school a year mostly makes a lot of difference, and if you're sixteen you look down on the new girls, who are mostly fourteen or fifteen. Roz was only thirteen when she came to Miss Potter's. I think that Miss Gainsborough said she was the youngest girl who ever came to the School since it was founded in 1910. You know that she is a genius? Roz, I mean. All the tests proved that. I heard from Mr. Walker, the English master, that after a certain point the tests just won't measure intelligence or genius or creativity or anything. Well, he told me that Roz had scored off the curve, as he called it, on most of her tests. She read a lot. You know that, I suppose? She could read books that lots of college students can't read and she could read books in French and in German.
Why am I talking about her now as if she was dead, I wonder? She isn't dead, I know that, but when a person goes away it's sort of final, like a boy going to Vietnam or something.
But anyway, I'll tell you about that weekend. Well, you know that I live in Chicago and don't have the chance to get home on weekends the way lots of the girls do, girls who live in Mass or Connecticut or even New York. It's really without it around school on a long hot weekend. You know Lennox. It's a pretty town but there's no action. No action at all. So when I got a chance, I took off. Roz liked me and that weekend-the twenty-ninth-she asked me to go home with her. You know her mother has a big place in Marlborough Plain, with stables and tennis courts and a full Olympic-size pool and a driving range and a putting green. It's a big place even for the Berkshires and there are some big places tucked away behind those high stone walls and those yew hedges. Roz didn't make a big thing of it. She just came into my pad-my room, that is, at school-and said, "Hya, Betts. Why don't you come home with me this weekend? Two kids from Choate are coming and it might be fun. We can play tennis, anyway, and maybe swim if we feel like it."
She was wearing a school top, navy blue, with a chopped off skirt and an embroidered school crest over the nipple of the left breast. I beg your pardon. I mean on the left side of the top. Anyway, it's the school crest and it says Per Ardua ad Astra under an open book that has some Hebrew letters on it. Roz liked her tops really short, so she hemmed them herself. She hasn't got what you'd call a voluptuous figure, on account of she's too straight and too thin, but a school top shows off her legs and they are long and graceful, and she moves quickly, so that her thighs flash, even in a navy leotard, but more when she wears stockings or goes bare-legged, wearing a mini and a top and not much else. Her hair is really that color, you know. She just washes it once a week with plain bathroom soap and it comes out warm gold and straight as a tall waterfall. People always looked at Roz and said, "She's going to have a groovy figure when she fills out." Then they would make sculpture motions at their breast and their ips. It's true too. She will have a really groovy shape when she grows in the right places. That's what my father used to say, when I was small. "When you grow in the right places." Anyhow, I remember the way she looked, standing in the door of my pad in Millbank Cottage, a light film of sweat on her forehead on account of she'd been running. She looked like one of those photographs you see in the catalogue of some camp or some school, a healthy kid, kind of honest looking, with simple hair and a simple figure that will be groovy when the kid grows in the right places.
"Solid," I said. "This place can be grim on Sunday."
"Never on Sunday," she said. "They send a car for me early Saturday. Bring your bathing suit and one dress-up dress. If you want to ride there's plenty of gear in the tack room."
She waved and darted off, light on her feet, the way Indians are supposed to be. I turned back to my book. It was something called The Catcher in the Rye, an old book by Salinger. We were reading it for Mr. Walker, in Class III English. I thought it was a drag, but Roz said it had a certain verbal merit. At least that's what I think she said.
On Saturday right after breakfast, we piled into the back of the big car that had been sent to pick up Roz. It was a Bentley, beautifully kept, and the real leather seats were like butter. The chauffeur drove in that kind of flawless way chauffeurs drive, making time but never never taking chances. There were fresh flowers in matching vases on either side of the passengers' space. Set into the back of the chauffeur's seat was a section of polished walnut with a spring door fitted so well you could hardly see the outline and you couldn't see the hinges. I touched the catch and the panel dropped.
There was a little bar behind that door, with a bottle of gin, a bottle of Scotch and a bottle of Canadian whiskey. Bottles and glasses were anchored to the panel with elastic webbing that etched the wood.
"Do you drink?" Roz asked.
"Sometimes," I said. "Not much."
"I hate it,' she said, giving the three words more weight than they really needed. "My father drank."
"Oh," I said. "Well, I just like wine, really. You know. Sherry, sometimes. Or some wine at dinner. White. I like white wine."
"Wine is another matter," she said, closing the panel. "All really civilized people drink wine."
She had a little tote bag, made of leather, with a draw-string top. She fumbled in it and found a package of cigarettes and a Zippo lighter. I took a cigarette and she lit it for me, then lit one for herself. The lighter made a big flame and a loud snap when she closed it. There was a crest on the metal face. I took it from her and examined it. The crest was something military. There was a number and the motto: Rock of the Marne.
"Funny lighter," I said. "Where did you get it?"
"From a soldier," she said. "He was a live solder then but I think he's a dead soldier now."
"How did you know him?" I asked.
"In the Biblical sense," she said quickly. Then she laughed, took the lighter back, and said, "I didn't know him at all, really. Not at all." She dropped the lighter into her tote bag, the way you'd drop a heavy stone into a well to see if there was any water at the bottom. She puffed very earnestly on her cigarette, inhaling deeply and holding the smoke in her lungs for a long time. "I hate liquor," she said. "But I like grass. Good grass, that is."
My scalp prickled a little, from fear, I suppose. "Have you smoked it much?" I asked.
"Enough to know that I like it," she said.
"I tried it once, in Chicago," I said. "And I had a few puffs at school in one of the girl's pads. I didn't feel much of anything."
"Maybe you don't know how to use it," Roz said. "I'll teach you, sometime. It's a gas to get high when you're with the right people. When you're turned on, everything else is turned on too."
At school we talk a lot about pot and acid, but there isn't very much pot in any of the cottages and I never heard of anyone who brought acid back to school. There was usually grass at school dances at Choate and Hotchkiss and Salisbury and sometimes I guess there was acid. There was always liquor. Once at a big Choate dance I kept track, just for fun. I danced with twenty-three boys and two masters. The masters were the only people whose breath didn't smell of liquor.
I glanced at Roz, who was stubbing out the cigarette in the recessed ashtray. Her face was intent on the stubbing out. She was that way-always concentrating on what she did, even a simple, mechanical thing, like putting out a cigarette. It was hard for me to see her in the marijuana scene. She looked too healthy and too innocent and too much as if she'd just had a cold shower and rubbed herself down with a big friction towel, the kind that comes from France.
"Who are the boys?" I asked. "The ones who are making the weekend. I know lots of boys at Choate."
She turned in the seat and looked at me candidly. "They aren't really from Choate, Betts," she said. "They're Yale boys. One's a junior, and the other one is a senior."
"Wow!" I said. "Will they bother with us? They'll think we're kids."
"They'll bother," she said. "But the idea is not to talk about Yale if my mother's around. She thinks they are first-form boys from Choate."
"I see," I said. "Solid. They are from Choate and I met them both when I was there at a dance last winter."
She nodded. The big car turned sharply and we followed a well-kept two-lane road for a couple of miles over rolling, horsey country, then passed through massive stone pillared gates, the name "Kitteridge" cut into the gray stone. It was a long, exciting driveway, rising toward the big house, which was approached through a double file of trees, what the French call an allee, I guess. It was all beautifully groomed, trees and grass and shrubbery manicured to the last leaf and the last blade of grass. My people have a nice place in Evanston, but it's nothing like the Kitteridge place. Oakridge, I think they call it.
Rosamund's mother met us on the big porch. She was younger than I'd expected and dressed in expensive riding clothes, breeches and boots and a short, stubby riding crop. Roz kissed her on the cheek and said, "This is Betsy von Brandenberg. She's here for the weekend."
Mrs Kitteridge looked at me with a pair of candid blue eyes. Then she frowned and said, "Are you Kurt von Brandenberg's daughter?"
"He's my uncle," I said. "My father is Friedrich von Brandenberg."
"Oh." She lost interest. Uncle Kurt was the older son and he got most of the money when Grandpa died in Berne. "Well, enjoy yourself. Rosamund will show you to your room and help you get settled."
They gave me a big flowered bedroom, overlooking a formal garden and the swimming pool. There was a lot of Eighteenth Century furniture-a poster bed, an ar-moire, a pair of exquisitely carved chests. I admired the things and Roz said, "Yes, it's all important, I suppose. I plan to give it to the Metropolitan in New York."
I looked at her sharply, puzzled.
"It's all my money," she said indifferently. "My father had everything put in trust. Mother gets an allowance, paid out of the income."
I decided not to get involved in Rosamund's pci on-al affairs. I said, "When can we swim? That sun felt good when we got out of the car."
"Right now," said Roz. "Go ahead and change. I'll pick you up when I'm ready."
She darted through the door, her legs flashing swiftly the way they do. I tossed my bag onto the bed and zipped it open, then dug out my suit. I stripped, enjoying the breeze on my skin, then slipped into my black silk bikini and halter. Roz tapped at the door just as I was zipping the bra. She came into the room, barefoot, wearing the smallest bikini I'd ever seen, just a pair of triangles, really, what the French call a slip, and it fitted so tightly that the shape of her sex was reproduced in very thin white silk. In one of those intuitive flashes you get sometimes, I knew, all of a sudden, looking at the crotch of that bikini, that Roz knew a lot of things and had done a lot of things that were offbeat for the brightest girl in Miss Potter's School. Her face was scrubbed and her long arms and legs were healthy looking and innocent, but there was a dangerous sense of sex about the way that silk bikini covered the place between her legs. She laughed and said, "Sexy, huh?" then took my hand, leading me down the big staircase.
There was a wide flag stoned terrace on all four sides of the pool and plenty of tables and chairs and umbrellas. We rubbed each other with suntan oil, then stretched out on a pair of inflated mattresses, closing our eyes to the sun. For along time we didn't move. Then Roz touched my hip. I opened my eyes.
"The boys who are coming," she said. "I told you, they're Yalies. They have been around a lot."
I nodded and said, "I guess so."
She sat up, supporting her body with one hand and arm. "Tell me, Betts, have you ever made out with a boy?"
I flushed a little, my eyes on the cleft in her bikini bottom. "You mean really?" I said. She nodded.
"Well, no. I'm what you might call liberal, I guess. I have my own system. I want to make it but I'm scared a little, you know. I am afraid it will hurt and I don't want to get pregnant."
"That's okay," she said. "Goose Finletter-he's yours-will try to con you but you just tell him to stop when you want him to stop."
Roz was seventeen months younger than I and I started to ask her if she had made it all the way. Then I saw something in her face I'd never seen before and I didn't have to ask the question. I knew. The idea excited me and I felt sharply inferior to Roz.
There was a sudden sound of masculine laughter and a moment later the boys came onto the terrace, wearing trunks and sandals. They were tall, blonde boys with slender hips and nice shoulders. Their hair was long but not too long. They looked like any two of a thousand boys I'd seen at various boarding schools all over southern New England.
"This is Betsy von Brandenberg," Roz said. "Goose Finletter. Carroll O'Conner."
We all shook hands, then Roz said, "Get us some Cokes, will you, Car? You know where it is."
Carroll moved around the pool to a small building and came out with four bottles of Coke, handing them around. The sun was really hot by then and the Coke tasted great. Then we swam for a while. The boys were really groovy swimmers. I asked if they were on the swimming team.
"Not good enough," said Goose. "We're oarsmen. Hundred and fifty pound oarsmen."
They had flat, hard stomachs and heavily muscled arms and it was funny, the way they looked alike. They didn't seem sexy at all, but sort of crisp and laundered. Actually, they looked exactly like the kind of boys I'd been meeting all my life, at dancing school in Chicago and at various proms, this last season, at Choate and Hotchkiss and Taft.
Rosamund stood up and said, "Mother's gone to New York for the evening. Do you want to have dinner here or drive to the Peppermill?"
"The Mill's a drag on a Saturday night," Carroll said. "Too many creeps from Lime Rock."
"We'll eat here," Roz said. "Let's change."
The main dining room had a table that extended to seat forty people. We had dinner in the breakfast room-thick steaks and baked potatoes and some kind of groovy dessert with ice cream and black cherries. After the maid had served coffee Roz got brandy for the boys. "You want some, Beits?" she asked.
I shook my head no, then said yes. Roz brought three snifters, strongly perfumed brandy sloshing around in the bottoms of the big balloon glasses. I drank mine slowly, liking the taste, and I felt the warmth of the brandy spread through my body, warming my middle and my thighs and my groin. It was a funny, sexy feeling and I think part of it was because of the way Roz had looked in her bikini and partly because of the things we'd talked about, there in the sun beside the pool. I'd experimented, the way most kids do, and I was curious, but I was scared too and I didn't plan to do anything real until after I got into Wellesley. I was scared, the way I said, but I didn't mind it when Goose moved his thigh close to mine and put an arm around me, grazing my breast with his finger.
Roz sat some distance away from Carroll, drinking coffee from a thin French cup, her eyes moving from one of us to the other. I felt self-conscious and moved away from Goose.
When we'd finished the brandy, Roz said, "Who wants to look at the horses? It's still light."
"Suits," said Goose.
"Okay by me," Carroll said.
We wandered down to the stables and a colored groom led out the horses, one by one, holding them by the halter. We sat in big canvas chairs, just watching the powerful animals, watching the long muscles in their legs. Then Roz said, "Okay, Anderson. You can go when you've put Tiger into his stall."
"Got some cleanin' to do, Miz Rosamund," the boy said.
"Do it tomorrow," Roz said. "Put that stallion away and go to bed."
"Yes, Miss," the boy said, leading the horse into the barn.
Rosamund stretched luxuriously, stretching, somehow, the way a cat stretches. She had changed to a scarlet mini-skirt and a simple white shirt. I'd put on a small green dress and my legs were bare except for a pair of panties the same color as the dress.
"Have you been around horses much, Betts?" Roz said.
I shook my head.
"Have you ever seen a real horse barn?"
"Only from the outside," I said.
"Come on," she said. "I'll give you the tour. The house may be a morgue but the stables are great, best in Berkshire County."
We passed through the barn, from one box stall to the next, looking at the big powerful horses. The barn was as clean as a Dutch kitchen but there was a powerful animal smell that got to you, an elemental smell of flesh and hair and urine. We came out of the bar into the tack room, which smelled of expensive leather, and the boys admired the various ribbons tacked to the walls, ticking off the really good ones. Then Roz said, "Let's climb up to the haymow. It's groovy. From the edge you can look down and see all the horses."
We climbed a spiral staircase made of steel. It was true, you could see the horses, in a kind of birds eye view. There was a strong smell of hay and straw, almost disarming, awfully innocent, and the late sun came into the loft through a rank of high windows, falling on the scattered hay and straw, making it show glints of gold. I knew why Roz had brought us here and I felt a small stab of fear. I started to say, "Gee, Roz, let's go down."
But I didn't, and at that moment Carroll moved toward Roz and they were kissing, red hot kisses, and he was running his hand over her body, his palm stopping on her buttocks, resting there for a moment.
"Let's sit down," Goose suggested, falling to the hay.
"Okay," I said. "For a while."
I sat beside him, fixing my dress so that it covered the vital territory just below my waist. He kissed me, not hard, but the way schoolboys kiss, and he took my hand. I leaned back on the hay, staring at the high ceiling, which had rough, heavy beams, held together with great spikes. The smell of hay was very strong. It was very warm in the haymow, a kind of warmth, with the hay smell and the faint animal smell of the horses, that was seductive.
Goose kissed me, using his tongue a little bit. He is a good looking boy and I liked him but I had my own rules. I'd told Roz that. He felt my breasts through my clothes, than put his hands between my legs. "No," I said. "Just one finger. A little way."
He wiggled a little and unzipped his trousers. He smelled of Lifebuoy soap, of some kind of lemon cologne, and of brandy. He smelled like a jock. An athlete. It was a safe, familiar smell. He took my hand and guided it to his crotch, easing it through his opened fly. I touched him, through his underwear, and he began to breathe heavily. He tried to force my fingers inside his drawers but I pulled away. Then he ran his hand along my thigh and put his finger into the opening of my vagina. He moved it and it felt good but I stopped him when his finger had gone into me about an inch. I could feel his thing, under his drawers, very hard. I felt the touch of his breath on my throat. I rolled my head and looked away.
Rosamund and Carroll were on the other side of the haymow. He had dropped his trousers and his drawers and she was on her knees, kissing his penis, kissing the head then running her tongue along the side of it. Then she was sucking it like a toffee. Then she stood up and slipped out of her skirt and shirt. She hadn't bothered to put on pants so she stood there naked, her small breasts hard. Carroll was kissing and sucking them now and his hand was working between her legs. I felt Goose's hand and his finger, but I held his hand back with mine. I couldn't pull my eyes away from Roz and Carroll.
"Look at them," Goose said. "Come on, Betts, suck mine. You can't get knocked up that way."
"No," I said.
He caught me by the shoulders and we fought a little. "Stop it!" I said. "I don't want you to do any more."
Goose let go and rolled away. "What a drag," he said. "I thought this was going to be a real weekend."
"You thought wrong," I said.
Roz turned away from Carroll for a moment. Her eyes were flashing and the nipples on her small breasts were hard and straight. "Come on over here, Goose," she said. "I can take you both. Betsy can watch us."
For a moment I didn't understand, but Goose stood up and dropped his pants and slipped out of his shirt and drawers. Then they were all three bare. The boys were hard and very large.
"Way down, Goose," Roz said. "Put your pants under your ass."
I felt the word as if it had been a switch across my cheek. I had known Roz for more than a year and I'd never heard her use words stronger than, say, hell or damn. I kept on watching, fascinated. Goose stretched out on the hay, the wad of his trousers under his buttocks. His penis was like a flagstaff, standing straight up from his body. Rosamund opened her bag and used a tube of something. Then she got on top of Goose, with her back to him, and slipped his penis into her rectum. I heard her grunt as he entered her. "Get it in solid," she said. "All the way."
She leaned back on Goose's body, spreading her legs so that her vagina parted. "Come on, lover, get it into me," she said. And Carroll went into her front. I heard him whimper a little, and I heard Roz grunt as her body was filled. Carroll seemed to make her wild. She moved her hips between the two boys and they were thrashing in and out of her.
"God," she said, "I love it, I love it, I love it."
And the three bodies moved together and I watched it, through the hot perfumed air of the barn.
I moved closer, frightened and fascinated, my tongue dry and my thighs burning, an ache in my breasts and groin. My lips were dry and I wet them. I looked down into Rosamund's face, beside the back of Carroll's head, free of the sexual sandwich they made. Her eyes were bright and her lips were moist. She reached up with a free hand, caught my skirt and pulled me down. Her quick, slim hand went between my legs and she ripped off my panties. Then her hand was working on my thighs, working in rhythm, in time with the boys, moving up to my vagina. She spread my legs and pulled me down.
"Put your cunt on my mouth," she said. "I can take you all. All three."
And she kissed my vagina. Not the way kids do at school, just on the outside and fast, but with her tongue, slicing her tongue between the walls of my vagina, sending it high into me, rolling her tongue inside my body, in my vagina and my rectum, pulling me down so that I was sitting on her face, one leg over Carroll's head. She reached up with both hands and held me down, her tongue piercing my vagina. I cried out with pleasure. Then she rubbed my breasts under my shirt, hard, so that the nipples rose.
Carroll groaned and said, "I can't hold out much longer, Roz."
"Me too," said Goose, his hard torso rising sharply now, lifting both Roz and Carroll from the floor as he moved upward in Roz's body. Rosamund freed her mouth for a moment.
"Come, Lizabet, come. Let's all come together."
Then her tongue was in me again, a warm, short, soft sword, stabbing into me. Her fingers were at my behind and a thin strong finger entered my rectum, and then it happened, so that I shuddered and felt faint and then seemed to explode, an explosion that started between my legs and rose through my stomach to my tongue. "It's lovely," I remember saying. "Don't stop, Roz. Please don't stop."
I went limp and fell away, gasping for air. I had had only part of the orgasm, but I didn't know that then. It was much more explosive than the mild feelings we girls gave to one another during pajama parties at school. It was real. I knew that. I felt that. It was important.
Then Rosamund's hands moved and she pulled Carroll close in to her body. I lay on the hay, watching her face, enchanted by her face. She arched her back and as she did Goose's hips rose under her body, pierching her.
"Punch it!" she said. "Sink it deep. Ah! I can feel you both, coming way up high. Ah, God, it's good. I am coming at both ends. Fuck my ass. Fuck my cunt. I am coming at both ends. Why do I have only three holes? I would like a dozen cocks in my body, five cunts in five mouths. But I am coming off, high in my ass. I am coming off, high in my cunt. Rip me apart at both ends. Fuck me to death, to death. Oh, fuck me! Fuck me!"
Then it was over and they lay there for a while, bodies limp on the hay. I could smell the smells of their copulations and I shuddered, partly from fear, partly from desire. I wanted to learn, to know, to feel.
Rosamund rolled from between them and came toward me. I had forgotten that my shirt was open. She kissed my breasts and my mouth, then sucked the nipples of my breasts. She ran her hand between my legs, not putting her fingers into me, but rubbing hard and sucking the nipples, then running the other hand very lightly between my buttocks, her fingers light like the wings of a moth, touching the lobes of my rectum. And so she brought me, very slowly, to another climax. Just before it happened she caught my hand and forced it into her vagina, so that she came to a climax too, kissing my mouth hard, slipping her tongue between my lips, working it back and forth, as she had done down below.
"Goose isn't bad," she whispered. "You should have let him sink it all the way into you. like this." And her fingers moved into my vagina, reaching high, grasping, moving. "Like this," she said. And the fingers went back and forth, so that she gave me the second climax, very high in my body, the full orgasm. I had never experienced it before and it frightened me a little, but it excited and satisfied me too. While it was happening, the other hand worked on the zipper of my skirt and the buttons of my blouse, and when it was over I was naked like the others, and my clothes were in a little heap on the hay. I sunk down into the hay, struggling for breath, aware of a new and welcome looseness between my legs, caressing my thighs and the rise of my stomach, pleased with the thin film of sweat on my body. Goose dropped to the hay beside me and kissed my cheek, then my stomach. Then he put a hand on my stomach, lightly, not moving, and we all rested for a long time.
We all rested in the warm hay, feeling the scented heat on our bodies. Carroll started a marijuana cigarette, handed it to Roz, then lit another. Rosamund puffed, then passed the cigarette to me. I'd never taken more than a puff or two before but she showed me how to inhale and I finished the cigarette. I was high, really high. I felt light, as if I floated on hay, and the light of the dying sun at the high windows was mysterious and lovely. I stared at the high, rough rafters of the bar, lost now in the dying light. Goose's hand was light and gentle on my body, his fingers tracing the outline of my thighs and my breasts, touching the lobes of my ears. Then I said, hardly knowing where the words came from: "I want to be fucked. I want my cunt to be broken by a long hard cock. One of you come into me, for the love of God Almighty."
And I spread my legs and waited, my feet high in the air, the summer night warm as syrup on my warm, pulsating moist vagina, warm on my thighs and on my yearning buttocks, warm on my breasts.
Rosamund dug into her bag and found a condom. "Put this on, Goose. She doesn't take the pill."
He slipped the safe over his penis. I watched and it throbbed as he folded the thin rubber back to the tight healthy hairs of his crotch. He looked enormous and handsome and strong. His penis seemed longer and larger than it had felt in my hand. I felt my hips move and raised my legs higher in the air.
"I'll help," Rosamund said. She spread my vagina and encouraged it slowly, round and round with her fingers, then spread warm saliva on the lobes and worked it in with her fingers. I felt my skin catch fire and I began to whimper with pleasure.
"Work on her, Goose," said Roz. "Suck the nipples."
He fondled my breasts and sucked them, then kissed me on the mouth and used his tongue. Rosamund caressed my vagina, using the stuff from the tube: K.Y. "Now, Goose," she said. "Ease it into her an inch at a time. Don't hurt her. Break it gently. Gently Doucement! Doucemertt!"
Then Goose was on me and in me and he did it gently, the way she'd said. I felt it break and it hurt, but then he was high in my body and his hands were firm on my buttocks, lifting me toward his penis. Afterward, I suppose, I was frightened and perhaps ashamed, but at that moment it was glorious, with the breaking over and his man-flower high, high in my body. While he was in me I could see Roz, standing up, grasping a wooden piller with her hands while Carroll went into her body from the back, spreading her buttocks with his fingers, then thrusting in and out, hands locked on her pelvis. I could hear her pleading with him: "Another inch, Carroll, baby. Another inch and I will die happy. Pogue me! Pogue me!"
Then my hips began to move, naturally and in rhythm, and Goose's tongue was in my mouth, hard and brilliant and as full of lust as his penis, all thrusting hard, and I had a full, good orgasm.
I enjoyed it.
Whatever I felt later, it is a part of my life and I enjoyed it. I shall never forget it. Never.
We rested in the hay for a long time, then dressed by the light of a thin moon, which fell into the barn like mild rain. Roz found a flashlight and we walked back to the house, arm in arm, looking as innocent as any foursome of proper little girls and proper little boys. In the vast, silent kitchen we made sandwiches out of rich bread and thick slices of Virginia ham. The boys drank cold beer they found in the fridge, tall-necked bottles of Miller High Life. Roz and I drank milk. The mood of the evening had changed from the glorious, delirious sexual mood we all had felt in the warm hay, to the mood of a children's pillow fight, the two boys with their short blonde hair, crisp and proper as younger editions of Captain Robb in his Marine Corps suit.
When we finished the snack we all moved toward the stairs, without speaking. The boys found their way and Roz and I went down the long, heavily carpeted hall to our rooms. Outside my door, in the silent house, Roz kissed me on the cheek. "I like you, Betts," she said.
"I like you too," I said. And I kissed her cheek.
I slipped out of my things in the dark, used the John, then slipped between very smooth, very cool percale sheets. I lay back in the soft bed, staring at the patterns the moonlight made on the ceiling. I lay there for a long long time. An hour, perhaps. Two hours. Then my door opened slowly and Goose came into the room quickly, wearing a robe and pajamas and slippers. He came straight to my bed and kissed me.
"Hi, Betts," he said.
"Hi," I said.
And he slipped into the bed with me and we made love quietly and with great pleasure, like old friends, unembarrassed, aware of a force like the force of love, woven into the strands of a strong but gentle sex. I will marry Goose, I think. If he goes to Vietnam I will marry him before he goes. If he doesn't go into the army at all, I shall marry him later.
I think I will marry him. I love him. I think.
And so you see that I can't find harsh things to say about Rosamund, or that weekend at her house, or cruel things to say about the things that she did to me then, for I don't feel harshly toward her. She made me happy. She taught me a little about how to live. She is my friend and I love her.
I wish I could help her. I do. I do.
In the matter of Rosamund Anne Mary Kitteridge ... Statement by Willis W. Parsons, age 34, 1402 Park Avenue, New York City. Witness was advised of his immunity from prosecution, then sworn and asked to give his name, age, and occupation. Statement follows, edited from transcript.
Occupation? Well, Judge, that's a problem. It depends on the cat I'm talking to, and where I am doing the talking. Mostly, I like to think of myself as an agent. A talent agent. I like that because it's pretty close to describing what I do, right along, you know, like day after day after day. I find talent, I groom it, you might say, and then I see that this talent gets to the people who can use it and who can afford to pay for it. When I say pay, I mean top dollar. I don't deal with anything but the highest quality talent and when my talent begins to get ragged around the edges, out it goes. With a clientele like mine it just don't pay to deal in second-class merchandise. My girls are young, still young enough to get the hots and young enough not to be able to hide it when they are giving off the kind of steam my customers like. I have some important clients, especially advertising agencies, and I've had account executives tell me that with my girls their Johns are often fooled into thinking that the girl has gone with them for pure love. That's the way my kids are. Every trick is something new and it's for real. They haven't lived long enough to get tired of taking a man into themselves, the way the man that designed them had in mind when he made the first one, way back when.
Of course, Your Honor, I am a pimp. A panderer. A procurer. A whoremaster. You pick your own word. None of them bothers me. The trouble is that common pimps are one dime per dozen on the open market in New York. I am an uncommon pimp and I bring a lot more than a dime.
How much?
I don't mind telling you. I pay my income tax, your honor. I pay Uncle Sam, I pay the State of New York, I pay the City of New York. I keep books, one set of books, and I'm clean as a whistle. Now was it Eisenhower said he wanted his cats to be? Clean as a hound's tooth? That's right. Well, that's me, W. W. Parsons, pimp, clean as a hound's tooth. So I can tell you how much without worrying one bit about the old tax man.
In calendar 1968, my gross adjusted income was $853,475. And fourteen cents. Cool, eh, man? Well, I earn it, Judge. I earn it all. In my business you can't really write off failures. It's money down the drain. So I have to guess right. I have to pick them with a lot of care. A wrongo, a drunk let's say, or a flat-out junkie, can poison a good client so bad that you'll never hear from the guy again. I can't afford bad performance, bad behavior or bad manners. A girl on my circuit has got to look right, screw right and act right.
Of course this Kitteridge kid was a special. I knew she was just in the life for kicks and that when the kicks wore out she'd head back for the hills and the high livin'. She was a risk, let me tell you, but I thought it was a risk worth taking and I was right. Ordinarly, day to day, I don't touch stuff under eighteen, or if I do the kid has solid gold papers, bought from the right penman, proving that she was born at least eighteen years ago in Alabama or Louisiana or San Juan. Those kids, the ones that drift up here from tenant farms in the deep South or from the Island, they haven't got any people interested enough in them to report them missing after they take off. Lots of times the kid was pregnant when she took off and the guy that did it was her old man or her very best favorite uncle. Nobody wants to make waves. The papers are just as good as money.
The Kitteridge kid was different. Sure. I knew she was different the day I met her, at the race track just north of here, over the line in Vermont. I had driven up the night before in my Cadillac, pushing the bus myself because I wanted to be by myself, without a chauffeur or a bodyguard or any of the hangers-on that are drawn to money like flies to the honey pot. In my own way, on my own turf, I'm what you might call a celebrity. Just like the Hollywood chicks and cats, I like to be alone once in a while.
I dropped a few hundred dollars on some horses that the glue factory must have turned down and for some reason, losing made me feel good. I came out of the grandstand tearing up tickets, ambling across the parking lot in the late afternoon sun. It was cool and the air was clear, the way it is in Vermont, and the jagged outline of the mountains, way off in the distance, was blue at the edges. I figured on driving into Massachusetts and getting a room at the Berkshire Queen. It's one of those old wooden castles they called cottages, made over into an inn. The martinis are the best in the state, the food is good, the beds are clean and soft and it's quiet.
I moved toward my car, then stopped to light one of my Castro Specials-pure Havana, made by the people who made Uppman's-and while I was touching my gold lighter to the heater I saw that a honey-blonde chick was sitting in my car, next to the driver's seat. I was a little annoyed but I was curious too. I lit the cigar and walked slowly toward the car, getting a good look at the girl. She was very blonde, on the small side, and very, very young. Just how young, I didn't know then, but I knew she was young all right-too young to be on her own at the race track unless she was really an offbeat kid, making some scenes that should have been a long way from her home grounds. There are more little rich kids like that than you'd think and they come in all sizes and all four sexes.
"Hi," I said, leaning on the window of the car. "You like my wheels?"
She gave me that low, intelligent laugh, a laugh that is full of money, just like the man said. "I think it is a gas," she said. "An absolute gas."
It's the best Cadillac you can buy and I ordered a special paint job. Lavender, Benskin, that's my driver, has a lavender uniform that goes with the car. it makes quite an impression. I suppose that if you look at it one way, it's the most vulgar set of wheels in the whole of the U.S. of A. Anybody else but me owned it, it would be vulgar, sure enough. But I own it and that makes it the chariot of an eccentric. The difference is only partly money. To run a car that color you need money and plenty of what our Hebrew brothers call chutzpah. I got the money and I got that, and I guess the women think I've got style. Women who like a spade cat, that is, a good black spade cat.
"Are you just taking your ease?" I said. "Or were you fixing to go somewhere?"
"A man brought me up here from Massachusetts," she said. "And he ran out on me." She hesitated, then said, "For cause."
"So?" I said.
"So I need a ride for a few miles over the state line.
I guessed from your plates that you were moving south."
I have New York plates that read WWP-my initials. Maybe it's childish, but I get a charge out of those plates. Somebody asked me once, "Willis, what do they call those plates?" And I told him, "That stands for V.I.P., friend. Very Important Pimp."
To the blonde I said, "You don't seriously think I'm going to run you across a state line, do you?"
"I thought of that," she said. "You drive me to the border, then I'll walk across and pick you up on the other side."
"Kid, you are nuts," I said.
"Oh, no," she said, quiet seriously. "The other cats and chicks are nuts. I'm in right sharp focus."
I walked around the car, opened the door, got in and started the engine. "If I wind up in the Leavenworth jail I'll come back and haunt you, kid."
And I wheeled out of the parking lot, cut into Route Seven, and pointed the Cadillac's nose south. It is an easy car to drive and it's about everything I want in a car. Cats say to me, "Willis, you can afford it. How come you don't get a Rolls Royce or one of those Mercedes Benz?" And I tell 'em off. "Baby," I say, "Uncle Sam has been good to Willis. I'm patriotic. I'm not going to fool around with a mess of foreign wheels."
Anyway, I tooled along Route Seven, passing lots of cars, moving fast, the kid's eyes on the road, then on my hands, then on my face as I watched the road. She seemed impressed and when she spoke I thought she was going to admire my driving. But all she said was, "You are black. Jesus, you're black!"
"That's on account of my father and mother," I explained easily. "It's like, you know, heredity."
She laughed. This time there was plenty of money in the laugh but there was sex in it too. She touched my cheek with the tips of her fingers, then touched my right hand that was wrapped around the wheel. I'm used to chicks-all sizes, all shapes, all colors. Mostly they don't get to Willis unless Willis' wants to be reached. But this kid's fingers on my cheek made me twitch in the seat of the Caddie. I felt a sharp, pleasant, warning pain in the groin. I kept my eyes on the road and said, "What's with you, kid?"
"Nothing," she said. "Just exactly what you see, touch, hear and smell. And the taste of me harmonizes with the way I smell, feel, sound and look."
"How old are you, kid?" I asked.
"Old enough to find my way home from the race track," she said. "I walked out on the party, to tell you the truth. I was supposed to be staying up there in Vermont overnight. But I got bored."
"So now you're on your own, eh, kid?"
"I am always on my own," she said. And she moved closer to me, her slim body snug against mine, a thin strong hand on my thigh. I could feel the warmth of that hand through the cloth of my three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar suit. I kept one hand on the wheel and draped an arm around the chick's shoulders, my hand searching for her right breast. She was wearing a very expensive dashiki, the kind of thing you can pick up for ninety, a hundred dollars, in one of those African boutiques that have sprung up all over the city and the rich suburbs. It's cheap cotton trade cloth but the prints are vivid. I found the breast and my hand cupped it. I could feel the nipple through the cotton cloth. She was naked except for the dashiki and a fifty-dollar pair of sandals. And a pair of thin snug silk panties. I turned my head for just a moment and caught her smell. She smelled of skin, pure skin, very clean and very fresh.
"Are you going all the way to New York?" she asked.
"I had studied on getting a bed and a meal in Stark-field," I said. "Why? You going to New York? You said you were going to some town in Mass."
"I am," she said. "I'm going to Starkfield. With you."
I shook my head, eyes back on the road. "I don't know, baby. They are liberal at the Berkshire Queen, but there's a little matter of age and a little matter of color. I don't know."
"Yes you do," she said. "It will be almost dark when we hit Starkfield. Drive the car around the back and I'll go right upstairs. Then you register and we're in like burglars."
I touched the brake, slowing the car, and moved close to the right hand shoulder. Then I turned my head and looked the chick in the eye. Those damned eyes were as innocent as the eyes of a baby. I kissed her. It was not like kissing a kid. I could feel the charge, running into my tongue and spreading downward through my body.
"You sure you know what you're doing?" I said.
"I was born knowing what to do," she said. "Everybody is. Most cats unlearn it fast and that's why the world is not a very happy place. When people would rather fight than fuck then the Lord God Jehovah has sure copped out."
"You've got a point," I said. "A large point."
The sun slipped behind the New York mountains and the New England dusk came on fast. It was full dusk when we rolled into Starkfield and the town looked like a stage set-that long, long street with white houses on both sides, set well back, and the four lines of big elms outlining the sides of the street, a great big alley of trees, the inside rows touching at the tops.
The Berkshire Queen is just a little ways outside of town, on the south side, and the inn sits on a small knoll. I drove up the long driveway, made it to the back, and said, "I'll pick up the room key, kid. You go on upstairs like you said."
She was out of the car and into the house as gracefully as a cat burglar, and I walked through the inn to the desk. "Good evening," I said to the John on the desk. "Parsons. Willis Parsons."
He shuffled his cards and said, "Oh, yes. Mr. Parsons."
"Mrs. Parsons is with me," I said. "She came along at the last minute. I think we'll have drinks and dinner in the room. We're both a little tired."
"Splendid, Mr. Parsons. Splendid."
A few minutes later the chick and I were in one of those old-fashioned rooms with high ceilings and a fireplace. She used the John and left the door open just a crack, so that I heard her strong little stream and heard the swish of the paper as she wiped it. Then she flushed the John and the old plumbing made realistic, strangling noises. She came out of the bathroom, moving gracefully under that dashiki, her long thighs moving the cotton just enough so that the cleft between her legs was outlined and the mold of her breasts was firm, under the bright-colored print. If you like young stuff, she was made to order. I felt some action between my legs and my mouth went a little dry. Still, I said, "Look, you are a tasty bit of horse flesh and I like that, but I haven't had a meal since breakfast, except for a hot dog at the race track. I want a drink. Two drinks. And I want my dinner."
She laughed and said, "Relax, man. Relax. I'm hungry too."
I ordered, using the phone, and the food came up pretty fast-a pair of shell steaks, done just right, a big Idaho potato with half a stick of butter in the cross they had cut into the skin. There were two martinis on the tray and I offered one to the chick. She shook her head. "I don't like liquor," she said, blunt, as if she meant it. "I'll have a glass of wine. Wine doesn't count."
She sipped the wine while I drank the martini. Then we sat down, facing each other, the ail-American meal between us. Sometimes rich people have filthy manners.
Not this chick. She ate carefully, using her knife and fork like an expert, and she seemed to enjoy her food. We finished the meal and I wheeled the cart out into the hall, hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the knob, then closed the door and locked it. The chick had taken an easy chair, sitting with her legs over one arm, the dashiki shucked up high so that I could see her crotch and a long, glittering slab of thigh. She kicked off one sandal, then the other.
"What is with it?" I said, trying to figure out for myself just what was the catch, catch twenty-three.
"What has got to be with it?" she said. "I like you. I like to eat. I like to make love in bed. We had a good long talk and a good long dinner and pretty soon we're going to make love in bed for a good long time."
Well, Judge, you will just have to believe me when I tell you that I was shocked. Me, W. W. Parsons, the biggest and best pimp in N.Y.C. I was shocked and for a long time I just stood there in my three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar suit, my thirty-dollar shirt, my twelve-dollar tie and my ninety-dollar alligator shoes.
"Lots of time," the chick said. "Relax, man. Relax."
"Yeah," I said. "Relax. That what my mammy done tole me."
I took off my coat and she sprang up out of the chair, took it and arranged it neatly on a hanger. Then I peeled off my shirt and my shoes and socks. She put the things away, then plunked down into the easy chair again, long blonde shafts draped over the arm. In New York City there are maybe a hundred, two hundred people who would be scared out of ten years life, just being alone in a room with me. This kid never lost her cool. She was no more scared of me than she would live been scared of a horse or a big working dog. She just kept her eyes on me, trying to drink in the fact of my blackness, trying to turn the whole thing into an experience, a black experience.
That's what I liked about Rosamund Kitteridge. She was never scared. If I had told her to fuck a gorilla, she would have fucked a gorilla. She just didn't understand what it means to be afraid in those terms. And she had been born just like she said, knowing everything. And she had never forgotten any part of what she brought into the world with her.
After a long time she uncoiled her body and got up from the chair and crossed the room to me. She slid down naturally onto my lap and her head came up easily so that her mouth was close to mine. My head came down just a little and I kissed her so that our mouths seemed to melt, almost, and to blend, and her thin little tongue was in my mouth, my tough hard tongue in her mouth, and We stayed like that for quite a while, my hand running lightly over her body, grazing her hips and her breasts, just touching the place between her legs for an instant, then playing, my fingers playing, along the small of her back, under the dashiki.
She slipped gently to the floor and undid my trousers, drawing them over my legs easily, one leg at a time. I started to lower my drawers but she said, "No. Not yet. They are so white and you are so black. Leave them on for a little while."
"Have you ever been with a black man before, baby?" I asked.
"No," she said, and shook her head so that her taffy-colored hair swung like ropes of solid gold thread.
"What do you think it's going to be like?" I said.
"I know what it's going to be like," she said.
Then her swift little white hand was inside my silk shorts, playing like a bird for a minute or two, then grasping my rod with strong fingers, then drawing it skillfully out of my drawers. It stood up straight, black and hard. She gasped and let go for a second. I have been told by people in a good position to know that I have the best equipment in North America. In France they told me that I was the best hung man who ever hit town. Maybe. I don't know. It is big and it is thick and it gets as hard as a two-by-four. It is no toy for a child to play with and when I felt this chick's body I was just a little bit worried. She weighed, maybe, ninety-five pounds.
"I hope the road has been plowed," I said.
"All the roads have been plowed," she said. "Reamed out and reamed clean."
And her warm little mouth devoured my rod, my long stiff black rod. She sucked the head, then played with her tongue, then took the whole black length into her mouth and her throat. I stood up and she rose to her knees, her mouth still firm on my rod. I bent, caught the dashiki by the hem and began to raise it. She abandoned my rod and stood up while I pulled that African trade print over her head. Then she shook out her hair and moved toward me. Her breasts were small and firm as young ripe mangoes and the nipples were rosy-brown and hard. I picked her up, easily, and carried her to the big bed. I slipped her panties off.
"Just lay still for a minute," I said. "I want to look at you, good and hard, before I plant old Boscoe in you."
She stretched like a cat, then took a pose like a young nude in an oil painting. It was a slim body, almost a boy's body, except for the delicate rounds of her buttocks and the small plump breasts, rising from her bosom now, aching toward me ... those and the gentle rise of her pelvis and the small perfectly formed orchid down there between her slim legs.
"Man, you are something," I said. "You are candy to me. Sugar candy. I just must have done something right, maybe early this morning."
She kept her cool but I could see that her breasts were beginning to heave and her legs twitched once in a while, sharp, fast, horny twitches, as if you had touched the inside of her thighs with a thin, sharp, electrified wire.
"Man, it is big and black," she said. "Your rod. Your black rod. It should reach from here to here." And she touched her groin, then touched her throat. "All the way from here to here. That rod. That long black rod."
I am a pimp and I came up the hard way, running a string of three tan hookers, keeping them happy and busy. One of the tricks a pimp learns is how to make it last, how to give his chick a long, slow pimp roll, so that she really believes, all the time he is in her, that she is the only chick in the world for him, the only chick in the world.
"My rod!" the chick said. "My black rod. Oh! Oh! Oh! My long black rod."
I moved easily onto the bed and my black hand was between her legs and my black mouth was on her mouth and my tongue was deep in her small mouth, deep and moving, rolling around. She caught fire, real fire. Her skin was scalding to the touch and her eyes blazed in the sharp chemical yellow of the electric light. I ran one long finger deep up into her, fingering the walls of her body as I moved up slowly. It was tight, tight as a drum, but it was clear. The road had been plowed, just like she said.
"You want to take it now, kid?" I asked, my lips against her ear. "You want to take the black rod now?"
She moved under my hands and her legs rose in the air, small pink feet high in the air. Now I could see between her legs a thin red slash and the lobes of her thing were twitching, eager for it, hungry for it. I took my time and she was really breathing now, her small white hands like moths on the skin of my body, moving swiftly across my buttocks, along my thighs, then back to my buttocks and into the cleft between the buttocks, young, strong white fingers, playing on the surface of my black skin, playing like a delicate eager moth.
I moved my hand toward my mouth, intending to moisten her thing with saliva.
"No!" she cried. "No! I want to feel. I want to feel it all. Go into me the way it is. Hard! Hard!"
I raised my weight and slipped into the saddle. Those small hands, deft as a surgeon's, soft as a moth, guided my rod into her body, feeding the head into her body then releasing the rod and moving to her thighs, spreading her crotch open wider, a little wider.
"Now!" she said, her voice full of hunger and money. "Rip me apart with that black rod. Shaft me! Shaft me! Make me feel your rod behind my eyeballs. Move it into me fast. Higher! Higher!"
And her little heels rained blows on my buttocks and her arms rose so that her fingers touched the lobes of my ears. I moved forward, using all my weight, and I shoved the rod home as far as it would go. She gasped as it rose high in her body, then grunted, a good grunt of satisfaction, then whimpered softly when the rod was home, really high, high and strong and stiff in her body.
"It is the best!" she cried. "The best! The best! The best! The best!"
Then my mouth was over hers and her mouth was in mine and I moved it slowly but with lots of power, the long, slow, pimp's roll, holding back, holding back, bringing myself to the peak, then falling back, falling back.
"Ah, God!" she said. "It is glorious! Glorious! Fuck me! Fuck me with your black rod! Fuck me! Ah, God! I'm coming! I'm coming! I'm coming to your great black rod. I am melting in the heat of your rod, your black rod. I am coming! I am coming!"
Her small body shuddered and she fought with her hips for more, more.
"That's just one, man. Wait a while. I'm going to make you explode three, maybe four times. Just hold on, white chick, while I plow. Once is just to make sure it works. Twice is to see if you like it. The big numbers are three and four. Just hold on baby and move your behind and let daddy get on with his plowing."
"Make me blow my mind," she said, her small hips thrashing like a chicken after you cut off its head. "Make me blow my mind. Ream me! Ream me! Rod, rod, rod, rod."
"Easy does it, baby. Make it last," I said, coming out of her body with long slow strokes, smashing back into her with driving thrusts, so that her whole nervous system, centered there between her legs, was encouraged into a series of spasms-high, low, high, low, high, low. The blood seemed to leave her head and rush to her crotch. Her face was white as the white sheet and the little mound just above the cleft of her legs was red hot, steaming hot. She closed herself around my rod and it was like small soft fingers grasping at it, grasping, touching, but never stopping that good black rod as it moved in as fast as Muhammad Ali's right, and came out slowly, like a spoon out of thick molasses.
"Ah, God, God, God," she said, her voice close to the sound of strangling or perhaps to the sound of a drowned man makes just before he surrenders to the sea. "You are high, high, high! Fill me with your come. Is the come black? Is it black? Black? Black?"
And her heels drummed on my buttocks, her small, strong back arching, so that her pelvis smashed into my groin with some force. I covered one of her breasts with my mouth and touched the root of her behind with a finger. "Go ahead, white chick. Go ahead. I am blowing my wad into your little red cunt, baby. Come with me, baby. Come with daddy. Hold old Boscoe in there tight and come with Soul, sweetheart. Come with Soul."
She fell back, exhausted for the moment, and after a little I rolled away, slipped out of bed, and crossed the room for a cigarette. Certain things happen in a man's life. He eats a meal, and it's the point of reference for all meals. He sees a painting and he measures all paintings against it. He meets a man on the football field, outplays him or is smeared, but that man stays in his mind, so that he's all football players. Sometimes he takes a woman and that moment, when he gives her what comes out of his body, that moment is a referent, a star that stays there and against which he is going to measure brilliance for a long, long time.
It was like that with Rosamund and it had nothing to do with me being black or her being white. It was a original, the thing that happened, the kind of thing you're allowed to keep.
She knew it too. I lit my cigarette, inhaled deeply, then blew the smoke toward the high ceiling. Then I crossed the room in my bare feet, bent and kissed her breasts. "Thanks, baby," I said. "Thanks."
She nodded and said, "I know. I know."
She got up and slipped on my bathrobe, taking the big chair and lighting a cigarette. In that big shantung robe, and in that big chair, she looked all at once like a child and I laughed.
"You are just a kid," I said. "A schoolgirl."
"I know," she said. "Teach me. Teach me more."
I laughed, brooding a little. In this country, in those times, a black man who eats with a knife and fork, who can read and write and add and take away and who has a decently muscled body, that kind of black man is used to being taken as a sex toy by certain kinds of white women. I played football for a state university in the Middle West and I found out fast that it wasn't a matter of sleeping with a white girl. It was a matter of deciding which white girl it was going to be. There are too many candidates, good-looking sorority chicks who wanted you for their sexual scrap book, left-wing chicks who who wanted to feel that they'd reached out to their black brothers by having a black rod in them.
Rosamund wasn't like that. She wasn't like that at all.
I know quite a lot about women. Partly it's my business, and partly it's my hobby. I don't mean the obvious bull that's put out in psychology classes-like the idea that every chick wants to be seized, to be raped. I mean subtler things, like for instance that every chick has a little bit of man in her and that it adds something if you play on that, part of the time.
I know quite a lot about women and I know all the little tricks, the little tricks that somebody brings home from Tangier and peddles around Los Angeles, first with the movie creeps, then with lots of people.
"Teach me," Rosamund said. "Teach my cunt what your black rod knows."
So I did. We smoked that cigarette and another one and she drank a glass of wine while I sipped some brandy I'd brought with me in a silver flask. Then we sat for a while in the silent room, the beautiful, sleeping town all around us, the sense of a great clock ticking, way off in the distance, though there was no clock and no sound. There was the conviction that we were stealing time, using time that belonged to God, or maybe to the other guy.
I stood up and crossed the room naked, standing at the window, parting the filmy curtains, looking down into the long silent street, at the starlight glittering on the chrome and the paint of the parked cars. There was only a low light in the room and I could see out into the darkness.
"One advantage of being black," I said. "You can stand at the window naked and look at the street and folks won't see you from down below."
Her eyes were on my body. I read once about the way a Japanese painter will study whatever he's going to paint-a person, or a tree, or a cat-and he will burn it into his memory and then paint it, drawing from his mind. She looked at me in that way, burning the contours of my body into her mind, maybe into her soul.
I keep myself in good shape. I work out at the gym three times a week and I watch what I eat and what I drink. My belly is flat and hard as a washboard and my arms and legs are pretty well muscled. Looking in the mirror in the morning sometimes, I figure I look like the archetype of black athlete, the kind they put on the programs for the Olympic Games. Standing there at the window, I felt her eyes feed on the outline of my body and I didn't move. I made like a statue so that she could look. Then I said, "Black is beautiful, eh, baby?"
"You are beautiful," she said. "I wish that I could take all of you into my body, all of you. Every inch."
"I will teach you things," I said, my eyes on the empty, yearning street, in that beautiful, empty, yearning town, a Wasp museum, already dead, but beautiful in death, very beautiful and silent and proud in death. "I will teach you."
And I did. I had some Vicks salve in my suitcase and I put quite a lot of it on the end of my rod. I moved the ice bucket to the night table beside the bed, and then I sat on the edge of the bed, the small blonde chick cradled in my arms and my lap, my mouth blending with hers, tongues meeting, sliding, moving. I handled her sex in the way a safecracker handles soup, hardly touching the lobes, grazing the outside of it, touching the tips of her nipples with my tongue, teasing her, teasing, teasing, teasing, until she was panting and her skin was on fire, until she began to beg, like a prisoner begging for his life, begging, pleading, "Give me your rod. Oh, give! Give me your rod. Oh, give! In me. In me. In me. In me. Give me your rod."
I lifted her easily and arranged her so that her buttocks rested on the edge of the bed, never abandoning the place between her legs, my hand working, working. When her buttocks were on the bed her legs shot wide apart and her hole opened and she made small yearning sounds deep in her body. "Rod," she said. "Your rod. Give me your rod."
And I gave it to her, thrusting the whole length into her body with a single lunge, then working the head inside of her slowly, not pulling back until she felt the searing heat of the Vicks salve. When she felt it she went wild. "Oh, oh, oh, God!" she cried out. "You have started a fire in my hole. A burning fire in my hole. How glorious! Glorious! I want to burn with you. Burn, fire, burn," she said, moving under me like a contortionist, her rosebud lips dancing from one of my nipples to the other, her small hands thrust into my armpits, into the heat and the tough, dark hair.
I plowed and we both felt the whispering heat of the Vicks salve, high in her body.
"I am going to come," she said. "I am going to come to the heat of your rod. I am going to burn like a space thing moving too close to the sun."
"Let me know about it just before you come, baby," I said, keeping my cool, all pimp, in charge of things all the way, in control.
"Now, now!" she said, the gasp coming from deep in her chest. "Now. Now!"
And she drove with her buttocks, hard against me. I reached for the ice bucket and found a cube. Just as she began to shudder, I shoved the cube high into her rectum, thrusting hard with my finger, so that the inch-square cube of ice rose like a rocket in her ass-hole.
"Oh, God! God! God! God!" she panted. "I am coming with my soul. You are right. I am coming with my soul." And her rectum closed on the ice and on my finger and she exploded with a great shudder that shook the heavy old bed. A long, low whimper of agony and joy came from her lips. She clung to me, to the trunk of my body, shuddering as she reached the climax and rose to go beyond it. At last she was spent and she seemed to dissolve, just falling to the bed in a shapeless pool of blonde flesh, panting, heaving, her thighs and her pelvis twitching, like the after-death movements of a murdered frog. Then she was still and she seemed to sleep for twenty minutes, maybe thirty. I went back to my window with a cigarette, looking at the long, proud street and the high, proud white houses thinking, without much passion, that it was really a gas that if I offered twice the value of one of those houses I wouldn't get it.
I was lost in the shadows of the street and I didn't hear the chick get up from the bed and move toward me. Suddenly she was there, on her knees at my feet, kissing my feet and my legs and my thighs, kissing the hilt of my rod and the tough crotch hairs around it. She did all this in a ceremonial manner, as if it was part of a religious rite. The warm lips and tongue at my groin brought me back to life. I took her honey-blonde head in my hands and moved it closer to my groin, so that her small nose was in the cleft of my groin, her small hands moving on my buttocks.
"Let's take it nice and easy, baby," I said. "Nice and easy. Let's do it like we had a month. A year."
I carried her back to the bed. She was stretched out on the sheet like a statue, or maybe a patient waiting for the surgeon's knife. I had some nitroglycerine ampules and a needle in my suitcase and I took a long, sharp needle and one of the ampules. I sat on the bed beside her and touched her gently with the point of the needle, touching the inside of her thigh first, then moving up to touch her breasts, then back down to touch both cavities in her crotch. It is subtle. A Chinese thing. I has to be done by a man who knows how, a patient man.
I know how, and after about twenty minutes of work with the needle her hole was hungry. Her back arched and she was panting. "My front is tired," she said. "Use my behind. Put your rod into my behind."
"I'm too big for you there, baby," I said.
"No," she said. "My behind will take it."
"I'll ask it," I said. I spread the cheeks of her behind, parting the rim of her rectum. Then I used my tongue, gently at first, bathing the rim, darting the tip of my tongue in and out of her hole, using my tongue like a snake.
"I am rimming you, white chick," I said. "That is my tongue that is kissing your ass-hole."
She moved the hole against my tongue, thrusting back to meet my tongue, and she sobbed softly with pleasure. Then I stood up and fed my rod into that smaller, tighter hole. I knew that it hurt, but she didn't cry out. She gasped when it passed the sphincter, then grunted when it rose in her body, then whimpered with pain and pleasure as it moved back and forth in her behind. I carried it almost to the end, plowing carefully, feeding it to her. Then I dragged it out, rolled her over, and smashed it into her front hole, all in one motion really, moving easily into the larger hole, rising all the way in a stroke. I put a nitroglycerine ampule between my teeth, then took it out and said, "Look, baby, when I kiss you, get this in your teeth. When we come, we break it together."
We held the ampule in our teeth and I moved in her slowly, precisely, raising the stroke carefully the way a good coxswain raises the stroke of an eight-oared shell. I could feel her getting ready to come. I felt it in the end of my rod, a low, tender quivering, high in her body, like the throbbing of a bird's wing. I timed myself and we hit it together and our teeth bit into the ampule and the nitro opened our arteries and we came for a long, long time, rising high, high, high.
When she fell away I touched her mouth. "Soul, baby," I said. "Soul."
We went to sleep that way. Later on, maybe a couple of hours later, I woke up and straightened her out on the bed, then covered us both with a light blanket. We slept until it was full light and the sun and the sounds of the street were filtering through the high, opened window.
"You want breakfast, baby?" I said.
"Big breakfast," she said, her eyes flashing blue and bright as she tossed her hair. "Ham. Eggs. Fried potatoes. Lots of coffee. Lots of toast."
"Healthy, all-American girl." I said. "I'll phone for breakfast. When the kid knocks, you hit for the John. Night is one thing. Daytime is another."
"I don't want to give you a bad name here," she said. "I'll hide in the iohn."
It was a kind of English breakfast and it was good, served on a clean white cloth, with great big napkins, smelling fresh and rich to the touch. The coffee was strong and aromatic and there were lots of little curls of fresh native butter.
The chick scrubbed herself in the John, washed, combed out her taffy-colored hair, used my toothbrush, and put on her dashiki. She looked as if she'd just stepped out of her own innocent bedroom at home. The dashiki was fresh and unwrinkled. It was hard to believe that the things we had done in that room, through that night, were real. But they were real. I concentrated on the curve of her mouth and the small, swelling breasts under the dashiki, and I could bring them back into my mind.
"What do people call you?" she asked.
"Tiger," I said. "Easy Tiger. Football name."
"What do you do now?" she asked. "How do you buy things like that great big lavender car?"
"I am a pimp," I said, not hesitating for a moment. "A panderer. A whoremaster."
She looked at me levelly across the breakfast table. "Are you for real?" she asked.
"For real," I said. "And I am the best."
"If you do it, you are the best," she said. "Whatever it is, you would be the best." She poured herself more coffee, sipped it, then said, "I would like to try it."
"The turf?" I said. I shook my head. "You wouldn't like it."
"Just for a week," she said. "I have a week off from school at Easter time. I'd like to try it then."
I am a business man. This chick was a solid gold, yard-wide pre-debutante, young enough to be the grand-daughter of some of my big-pay clients, and she was a lady tiger in bed. For a seven-day stand, she was worth a fortune in money to me, even if I played it honest count and gave her every dime that she had coming to her.
"How come?" I said. "You need the bread?"
"No. I would like to know how it feels to be used. To be an object."
"Baby, baby, I was a business major in college," I said, "but I've read enough of those French cats to dig what you're getting at. It won't work."
"Please?" she said. "I don't want to imitate Genet. I just want to be a whore for a while. A little while."
I shrugged my shoulders. "When do you get off from school?" I asked.
She gave me the dates.
"You want to go on call?" I asked. "Or work in a house?"
"In a house," she said. "A whorehouse. A whorehouse." She repeated the word three or four times, rolling it around in her mouth as if she was trying to taste it.
"I could do it," I said. "I'd be lying if I said I can't do it. But I don't know."
She looked at me, her eyes as calm as a pair of cool blue stones. "Yes you do," she said. "We are alike, you and I. We might be brother and sister. We are alike."
"There's a little difference in skin color," I said. "A little difference."
"You know what I mean," she said, using the words like bullets. "You know exactly what I mean."
"Yeah," I said. "I guess I do."
And that's how she came to work in New York, Judge, for that week of her Easter holiday. I can't tell you much more, except that the folks at the house liked her and wished she would stay on. Oh, yeah. And I did write her a check for nine hundred dollars. That was honest count. She didn't want the money. She endorsed the check over to a fund for some spade cat who's in Havana, shacked up there as a fugitive from the State of Illinois.
I liked her. I like her now. She is probably more alive than any human being I have ever known. The spade cats talk a lot about soul. That little blonde chick was born knowing. She was born knowing what soul is. You lock her up in a madhouse and you'll be committing a crime, Judge. And it's the kind of a crime you can't work out in so and so many years for the State, or in the gas chamber or the electric chair. It's the kind of a crime that you never get rid of. You die with it and carry it with you, wherever it is that you go when you die.
You lock that little chick up with a lot of feebs and crazies and you'll be committing murder, Judge. Soul murder. The worst kind.
Document written by William Bradford Kitteridge, of Marlborough Plain, deceased by his own hand, August 23rd 196--. Handwriting experts of the Commonwealth and of the Federal Bureau of Investigation have examined these pages and made suitable overlay and comparison tests. The Court is satisfied that the document was in fact composed by the late William Bradford Kitteridge, of Marlborough Plain. (Unedited; reproduced from holograph text.)
As I write this, I am forty-one years, three months, and fourteen days old. I own this proud old house in which I was born and because of the diligence of my ancestors and the loyal stewardship of my bankers and lawyers, I possess a fortune of nearly four million dollars. I could, I suppose, go on living from day to day, arranging the pattern of my drinking so that for much of the time I remained on a plateau, seeking the services of prostitutes and others in a vain effort to sustain the illusion of manhood. There are men in my situation who arrange their lives on such a pattern. I do not envy them. I am not aware of the dark secrets that may be hidden in their minds and hearts. I am much aware of my own secrets, and they no longer permit me to live, even in the half-world of the alcoholic. I inhabit a prison, part of it constructed for me by my ancestors, part of it carefully built by myself. I am not free. I shall never be free.
I was sent from this house when I was twelve, to boarding school in the eastern part of the state. After six years there I went to Harvard, where my father and his father and his father had gone. I cannot recall an event of significance that happened while I was at boarding school. Certainly I did not discover alcohol at school. The hurried, sweaty experimentations with homosexuality are vague in my memory-as vague as the various things I must have studied in order to remain at school and to pass from there to Harvard.
It was at Harvard that I discovered both alcohol and sex, not as activities to be enjoyed from time to time but as controlling aspects of my life. The year was 1946 and Cambridge was overrun by the veterans of World War II, many of them married, some with children, giving Harvard an oddly domestic air, with dozens of cheap, war-quality prams and bright new war-quality babies crossing and crisscrossing the Yard. Married or single, the veterans were men, grown men. Those of us who had been too young for the war felt sexually inferior to them. They had made war, killed people and watched them die. As conquerors, they had taken women in far places. We entered Harvard at the usual age, but the veterans made us seem younger than normal even to ourselves.
And we kept to ourselves. Quickly, I found my place with a hard-drinking group of freshmen who had been to school at Groton or St. Marks or St. Pauls-mildly disappointed young men with plenty of money. We were called the Marquand Legacy. We were, I suppose, an anachronism, a hangover from the days before the war, before the character of Harvard was changed by the war veterans and the swiftly brilliant young Jews who now give both the College and the University its essential character.
I was always the heaviest drinker in the Marquand Legacy group. It is interesting, I suppose, for neither my father nor my grandfather was inclined toward liq-our. I took easily to the techniques of drinking. The first night I made myself really drunk I recall with clarity. At least, I recall with stunning clarity the morning after. I woke up aware of a fearsome hangover, aware of voices without meaning, mumbling in the air that surrounded my bed, my hands trembling, my mouth dry, my stomach heaving.
There was a bottle on my desk, about one-third full of Scotch whiskey. Without need for thought, I got out of bed, crossed the room, uncorked the bottle and drank. I shuddered, using the desk for support, then drank again and held it down. Soon I began to feel better. I suppose that somewhere I must have heard mention of the hair of the dog. I don't remember. I simply know that as if by instinct I understood that a drink, and another drink, would somehow make life physically bearable again.
In the realm of sex my instincts were similar. Most of the Marquand group used prostitutes from time to time-prostitutes of the first class-but their major efforts centered on taking to bed the various girls from good families who turned up in Cambridge for dances, football games, boat races and so on. I concentrated on prostitutes, favoring those who enjoyed odd practises or were willing to be highly experimental. I learned a great deal about the techniques of sexual intercourse and after the first few months I made no effort at all either to seduce or to satisfy the half-formed freshmen from Wellesley and Radcliffe and Mt. Holyoke. I fell into an arrangement, during my second year at Cambridge, with a spectacularly beautiful red-haired girl from New York. Her name was Josie Moran and she sometimes worked in the New York night clubs, but normally supported herself as a call girl. She was expensive, costing one hundred dollars for the night, and she was worth it. My maternal grandmother had left me a trust fund that offered an income of eight thousand dollars a year and my college fees were paid by my father's lawyers in State Street. I had no lack of money. In my junior year, I assumed the rent of Josie's flat in New York City, a gesture that gave me, if not exclusivity, a kind of droit de seigneur.
Toward the end of my third year at Cambridge, my father died. This must have been a shock to him, for he was not yet fifty and he came from a family line in which a life span of seventy years was regarded as low-normal. My mother had died some years earlier and, as the only child, I came into a substantial inheritance. I left college, intending to travel, but the war in Korea interrupted my plans. I enlisted, took a commission, and because of some obscure quirk in the military mind, was posted to Fort Riley, Kansas instead of being sent abroad to fight. This surprised and mildly annoyed me. Certainly it annoyed a number of officers who had served in World War II, been called up as reservists, and who were sent to the front to die. Fort Riley was dreary and the fact that an officer had money in his pocket did nothing to lighten the boredom. I entered a request for transfer, another, a third. They were lost in the great river systems of paper that is the army's circulatory system. When my tour of duty was finished I was released.
I took up my travels again, taking New York as a starting point and working my way around the world, through London, Paris, Rome, and on to the Middle East. From Istanbul, I backtracked to Tangier and in that city I discovered that sex can be given a variety of dimensions and that there exists an entire sub-world consecrated to supplying those who can pay with sexual excitement, variety, surprise-almost, the sense of astonishment. I also discovered that I was, through whatever odd crossing of the genes, a man of the South, of the Midi-a man of the Mediterranean. To a man born and reared in New England, this can be a disturbing discovery. He finds himself at war with himself, contemptuous of the tedious morality of his native state, shocked by the frankness of his animal reactions, aroused and nourished by the ancient sun that falls on Athens, and Cairo, and Marseilles, and Tangier. I find it simple to believe that the human race came into being near the Mediterranean. The sun itself is generative. So is the sea and the sun-bleached coast.
An Englishman in Cairo put me on to Tangier. We had met in a French Maison de tolerance and taken absinthe together before and after our venture to the upper floors of the house. The Englishman was in his forties and quite possibly is dead by now. He was called Squadron-Leader Ross and at some time during our brief but intensive acquaintanceship he showed me his decorations, and he talked, on one occasion only, of his experiences during the war, in which he had served as a fighter pilot with the R.A.F.
"Some things one doesn't like to remember, old boy," he said one evening, as we sat on the terrace of our hotel, sipping the tall green dangerous drinks. "I recall one day when we were doing a rhubarb over France and I got right down on the deck-really tree-top height, you know. Well, I was stooging along when all at once I saw, straight before me, a wedding party coming out of one of those dusty churches they have in French villages. There were the bride and groom and the priest and bags of people in attendance. I can't tell you why but I pressed the gun tit, old boy, and simply mowed down that entire party with my eight point three guns. I climbed, staggered a bit, then doubled back and flew over the dusty square. They were dead, most of them, on the ground in front of the church. I recall muttering as I moved away, 'Bloody Frenchies.
That'll teach you to play footsie with the Nazis.' And I made for home, feeling odd, but not in the least guilty. Still, I couldn't get the sight of the Frenchies out of my mind."
"What did you do?" I asked him.
"It's an odd thing," he said. "I had a few drinks in the mess, then looked up a cookhouse WAAF, a grubby little thing, with raw red knees. We rode our bikes a good way off from the base and found a quiet spot under the trees."
He chewed on his pipe, then frowned. "It was an odd thing. That girl-Dapline Buttershed, I recall her name-was to be had by any pilot, just for the asking. The odd thing was that I didn't ask. I forced her, even though there was no need. I tore off her passion killers-those awful drawers, dyed khaki, that they issued to WAAFS-and I went into her straightaway, without so much as a kiss. She fought with me and tried to run, and whimpered small cockney protests. That was what I wanted. I held her down and I forced her, using her her dry, as it were. I finished, then kept her there until I was ready to have her again. When I was, I turned her over and used the servants' entrance. She shrieked and then cried out, 'Sir, Flight Lieutenant Ross, sir, you are causing me pain.' 'Yes,' I said. T know.' And I simply reamed that poor creature, enjoying the fact that I was causing her pain. When I was finished I let her go and she got to her feet unsteadily, pulling on those awful knee-length drawers and saying, 'Cor, sir, you are a one.' 'I'm sorry I hurt you.' I said. 'It's not the 'urt, so much, sir. You outraged my sensibilities of what's proper, sir. I shan't go with you agyne, sir.' 'Very well, Buttershed. Here's a quid for your trouble.' And I gave her the money. She took it, said thanks, and mounted her bike, speeding off into the dusk."
I had been listening to him, utterly fascinated, and when he finished I realized that I had ejaculated in my trousers. The combination of sex and cruelty fascinated me, even at second-hand. I pretended indifference and said, "Well, the war, I suppose..."
"Ah yes, the war," he said. "Jolly good times we had." He looked at me shrewdly. "Kitteridge, you would have enjoyed the war. Pity you missed it. You're the kind of chap who enjoys the unusual and you've got the brass to pay for it. Actually, you should go to Tangier."
"Why Tangier?" I asked.
"Buy anything in Tangier, if you've got the price. Anything. Fella you want is Achmed Sebastian. Half-Spanish, half-Arab, and all pimp. But he is the best pimp on the Med. Find him at the Cafe El Salvador." He finished his drink, stood up and said, "Well, I'm off in the morning. Good hunting, old chap. Take my advice and try Tangier. Chap like you shouldn't miss it."
I took his advice and for three months I explored the delights of Tangier. One night I remember clearly. I smoked hashish, very discreetly, under Achmed's direction, and then I was serviced by three girls, ranging in age from nine to eleven, little Arab toys they were, beautifully bathed and perfumed, wearing tiny beaded skirts, their forming breasts bare. They were virgins, all of them, but they had been taught to bear pain cheerfully and told what to expect and how to perform. The two youngest had almost no pubic hair and it was odd to break them, using some kind of perfumed grease, hearing their small cries of pain, then marveling at the way in which they used their small hips against me, acting out the parts for which they'd been so carefully prepared. Each of them dutifully revealed the fact that I had drawn blood, using a clean linen square.
I was nearly exhausted after the third child, but I was determined to have intercourse with at least one of them to discover whether or not the performance would vary, whether, in fact, I had really changed them, beyond the fact of the broken hymen. I chose the eldest of the girls, a pretty little thing of eleven. She caressed me gently while I rested, touching my penis with her tongue, her tiny hand cupped to hold my testicles. After a little I was aroused and arranged the child on the edge of the bed, her legs parted in the air, mounting her with care, using what arts I possessed, eager to see whether or not I could bring her to a climax. I did. At the moment I ejaculated into her tiny body her hands gripped my shoulders and her hips pumped as if she'd gone mad. She began to whimper, then, to pray, then to laugh in pure joy, her small legs embracing my buttocks. I was supremely victorious, delighted with myself.
A few nights later, Achmed took me to the most exclusive peg house in Tangier. There were half a dozen boys, most of them about eleven, I guessed, perfumed and powdered, each of them seated on a thick, rather heavily greased peg, so that the sphincter was stretched enough to permit entry without inconvenience. I had been doubtful about the boys but Achmed said, "Until you have tried the crisp, tight hole of a boy you have tried nothing, effendi. It is paradise to the loins."
He was right. I selected a good-looking fresh-faced lad who guided me up a circular stair to a room hung with rich silk drapery, the floor covered with overlapping Oriental rugs of extraordinary depth and color. The air was heavy with an erotic perfume. The boy undressed me carefully, hanging my things with the expertise of a valet. When I was nude he began to stimulate my penis, touching it with his small soft fingers, kissing the extremity with his lips, which had been lightly made up. When he judged that I was ready he turned, doubled himself over the low, divan, and spread his buttocks skillfully with his hands offering his rectum to me as if he were serving as a willing sacrifice at some odd religious rite.
I hesitated, suddenly struck by a sense of guilt and a flashing, unpleasant awareness of my ancestors. It was a turning point in my life, that night in Tangier when I stood naked and aroused in that oriental room, the boy's rectum twitching a little as if to entice me, my mind suddenly beclouded by an unwanted sense of my identity as a man of New England, with the responsibilities of New England. It may well be that had I turned away, thanked the boy politely, made my way downstairs and from there to my hotel, then booked air passage to New York the next morning it may well be that had I turned away I would not sit here tonight, with a fountain pen in my hand, a loaded pistol on my desk to give emphasis and force to the words I write.
I did not turn away. I moved forward and plunged into the boy's body, surprised by the fact that I entered him easily, causing only a grunt to escape from his lips, a grunt that may have been prompted by pain or pleasure, it was difficult to tell. That he got pleasure later on was clear, however. He closed around me, using his oiled sphincter, and moved his body, offering tiny, babbling sounds in Arabic, unmistakable sounds of joy, rising in pitch as my thrusts rose in intensity, and finally, at the moment of my ejaculation, becoming a full-throated cry of joy, clear and high and exciting in that room where the sounds were muffled by dozens of yards of heavy silk and many square feet of oriental rug. He beat on the low couch with his fists and said, over and over again, "Ah, effendi! Good effendi! Good!"
Later, in the car I'd hired, I asked Achmed, "What becomes of those peg house boys when they are too old for that way of life?"
Achmed was a tall man, with the face of a depraved Spanish aristocrat. He wore a fez and an excellent Italian suit. I studied his face in the street light as he considered my question.
"Who knows, Senor Kitteridge?" he said slowly. "I had my start in life in the very house you have just visited. In Tangier, anything can happen. Anything."
I enjoyed Tangier and I stayed on longer than do most Americans or Englishmen, unless they plan to stay for good. I was tempted to do that, and if I could isolate the monitor in my mind or my soul or my psyche that intervened, perhaps I should not be sitting here now, able to see the Berkshire hills when I raise my eyes from the page, with a glass of raw spirit at my right hand, a loaded revolver beside the glass, seeming almost to tick away time like a clock.
I cannot isolate the monitor or even assign to it a definite tone of voice or precision of manner. Nevertheless, it was there, attemting to guard my body from the sun of the Mediterranean.
One morning at about eleven, I sat on the terrace of a cafe, a Pernod on the table beside me. Near the glass was a package of American cigarettes-Chesterfields. The sun was high and hot and the edges of the buildings were sharp and true against a chalk-blue sky. I tasted my drink and was mildly disturbed when the licorice taste seemed to hang on my tongue, unpleasant and somehow evil. The crowd that passed in two directions was the same crowd I had seen for months, but on that morning the people, Frenchmen and Spaniards, Arabs, red-faced English, seemed alien-not to be trusted, not to be embraced, certainly not to be joined. There was a high, sing-song Arabic cry. I felt it in my viscera. It was a warning sound. A small French whore sauntered in the shade, her cheap Paris handbag swinging in pleasant rhythm with her stride. She caught my eye and smiled. I looked away. I tasted the cloying drink again and permitted my eyes to fall out of focus. The faces blurred. I saw the outline of the hills I now see when I turn my head-the Berkshires. I was stabbed by guilt-not because I had broken various tabus during my wanderings, but because I was wasting time, time that, in the proper order of things, belonged to New England.
What I felt was not homesickness. I felt more at home in the sun than ever I felt in Berkshire County. The thing that gnawed at me was what must be felt by a soldier who deserts his unit in wartime. The natural order of things compels his presence in the ranks. It has nothing to do with affection, or a yearning for place. It is an expression of the sense of duty, reduced to an abstraction. The man of the Mediterranean is wiser. He feels obligation to his wife, to his children, to his lemon trees or his olive trees. These are concrete, a woman who can be embraced, a child who will laugh, a tree that gives its ancient fruit in return for care.
On that terrace in Tangier I was suddenly struck by the suggestion that a New Englander belonged in New England, and that it was inappropriate for him to remain in the sun, idle, sipping a heavily perfumed drink. There was a shifting of the emotional gears, and without need to frame the words, I spoke aloud to the sun-drenched air: "I must get home. They will expect me at home."
There was no one to expect me. My lawyers, who had been my father's lawyers, did not question my absence. The small staff at this house in Marlborough Plain were certainly indifferent to my comings and goings. Nevertheless, I felt that I was expected to open this house, to see it put into order, and to live in it for the better part of the years of my life. It was a genuine, an immaculate act of cowardice, a failure of will and of nerve. I could have cabled the lawyers and instructed them to sell this house. I might have bought for myself a house on the Mediterranean. If I liked, I need never have set foot in New England again.
I did not do that. I was outnumbered by the array of my ancestors, dead and rotting in their Yankee graves, but atrociously strong in their numbers. I had not been aware until that moment that I was controlled by a sense of sin, the origin of which was and is unclear in my mind. The feeling was powerful and somehow Hebraic, though it had nothing whatever to do with religion.
I was frankly shocked, and for a long time I sat on the cafe terrace, sipping Pernod, trying to comprehend the nature of the force that seemed to stab at my heart. At last I abandoned thought, paid for my drinks, and walked slowly toward my hotel, where I booked air passage to New York, a city I have always detested.
It was winter, a poor season in which to open a house in the Berkshires, so I took a furnished flat on Sutton Place and began to accept invitations of every variety. It was at a large and expensive charity ball that I met my wife, Rosamund's mother. Barbara Bradshaw, as she was then, was nineteen and had recently graduated from the Chapin School. She was a student at Barnard College, attendance at which permitted her to be in New York for dances and parties. It had occurred to me, at some time after my return from Europe, that it was preposterous to think of living in this house as a bachelor. If a man is to live in a house like this, he needs a wife, and for a wife he wants a woman who has been given some instruction in the management of a large house.
Barbara was perfectly trained. Her people owned a town house in the East Eighties and a large house, used in summer, on the south shore of Long Island. She was and is an extremely handsome female, a straw blonde with fine clear skin and what I took to be candid blue eyes. She danced gracefully, was quick-minded without being rude, and she knew many of the families who were to be her neighbors here in the Berkshires.
I took her to dinner, to the theater, to most of the more sedate night clubs. She listened attentively, said the appropriate thing at the appropriate moment, and caused a minor stir when she entered a restaurant, because of the purity of her coloring.
In late April of that year, she went to bed with me in my flat on Sutton Place. I should have taken warning from the experience. It was rather like going to bed with a tennis champion from Australia. Barbara had a simplistic attitude toward the entire performance, which she seemed to regard as hygienic.
"Aren't you afraid I'll give you a baby?" I asked, when we were both undressed and she had turned back the sheets.
She shook her head. "I've known for weeks that this was going to happen," she said. "I have a diaphragm. I thought Doctor Willcox would be shocked but he wasn't."
She was a virgin with a clean-lined, long-limbed, bathing-suit model's figure. She was also the first girl of my own social class I had taken to bed since leaving Harvard. I should have been eager, excited, inspired by the idea of conquest, even, perhaps, madly in love. I was frankly bored and I performed indifferently. I discovered that I could only perform at all by calling into my mind an image of the rectum of the boy in Tangier. I closed my eyes as I deflowered the young woman who was to become my wife and I saw, burning in the darkness behind my eyelids, that small, tight Arabian rectum, stretched on a perfumed peg in preparation for my delight. With that vision before my eyes, I moved my body with considerable force, invading the person of my future wife with something that must have passed for excitement, for she cried out in what seemed to be genuine pain, then wept quietly as I pierced her partially severed hymen and brought myself to a climax.
A few seconds before I was ready to ejaculate, she called out clearly, uttering a name. "Oh, Clement!" cried. "Clem, darling. Darling."
like a small bird, a flash of curiosity flashed through my mind as I went on with my chore. I shook it off. You are a man of the world, I said to myself. If, at a moment like this, she thinks of a childhood sweetheart, what difference can it make?
A great deal, as I was to discover. At that moment, I was simply aware of the fact that my promised bride was sexless as a bar of Ivory Soap. I recall with precision my flight of ideas as I swung my body out of hers, dropped to the floor, fetched her a towel, then found my cigarettes and lighter. This is, no doubt, the sexual posture of respectable girls from well-placed families, I thought, snapping my lighter, touching the flame to a cigarette, passing it to Barbara, then lighting another for myself.
I knew better than that, of course. I simply had no interest in whether or not my wife took pleasure from the sexual act. I did not want a woman to sleep with; I wanted a woman to manage my house, bear my children, appear with me in public from time to time, and, with any luck, thus put to rest the bony and accusitive Yankee finger that had reached out to touch me, across the seas and the oceans. I felt that there was a ghost to be satisfied, here in the Berkshires, and that I would not rest comfortably until I had paid my respects to these stones and these acres.
It is difficult to be honest when one speaks of the past. We attempt to rig the dice. However, I am almost certain that I was aware, that winter and spring in New York, that for whatever reason I was condemned to inhabit two worlds and to be truly at home in neither of them. In my lifetime I have not gone in very much for self-analysis. When I have been curious I have sought answers in experience rather than thought. During those months before my marriage I simply fell into a pattern that had been arranged for me, or for someone much like me. And so I married Barbara Bradshaw, with the approval of her father and her mother and her younger brother, who was at that time a midshipman at the Naval Academy, a tall, powerfully built, rather sullen boy, with little to say. Barbara seldom mentioned him, but she was fond of him and kept his photograph on her dressing table, a thing she has always done, using the same silver frame, changing the photograph from time to time, so that at this moment, in her room in this house, there is a photograph in color, revealing Major Bradshaw in his blue uniform, his breast heavy with the medal ribbons soldiers and marines seem to acquire in large quantities these days as souvenirs of our various wars.
We were married in June at St. James' Church and the reception was held in a drafty room at the Colony Club. We went abroad at once, to all the proper places, a month in London, a month in Paris, a month in Rome. In each of these cities people called, people exactly like the people who had jammed the church and jammed that room in the Colony Club, sipping champagne and praising the hors d'oeuvres. People who had known my father pumped my hand and told me how pleased they were that I had decided to settle down and to live properly in Berkshire County. People who had known my mother embraced me and said in stage whispers, "She is lovely, dear boy. If only your dear mother could see her. She would rest in peace, knowing that you've found a most suitable wife."
Indeed she was suitable. She suited me-the kind of man I had been born and partially trained to be-a proper citizen of Massachusetts, a country gentleman, if you like, or the closest thing we have in this republic to what the English call country gentry.
The difficulty was that I didn't care for myself at all. I went to my father's tailor in Dover Street and ordered scores of suits, expensive and dark, suits of the kind he had worn when he was in Boston or London or Paris or Rome. And I ordered riding clothes and some excellent boots and even some polo mallets, and had them shipped to Berkshire County. I hated the clothes. What I wanted were a pair of sailor's canvas pants from the Mediterranean, and a pair of rope-soled shoes and a striped jersey-chemise de matelot-and absolutely nothing else. In London, I yearned for the Mediterranean. In Paris I longed for the South of France. In Rome, I hungered for the sun of the Midi, for the taste of cheap, astringent wine and the taste of wrinkled black olives, a taste as old as the taste of cold water. In the depths of my being I felt that I was a man of the sun, a man of the Midi, and I yearned for the South and for the smells and sounds and the warmth of the South. I had been seduced by the oldest mistress in the world-the Mediterranean-and I longed for a life that would follow the sun.
In the very strictest sense of the world, I am what is called a WASP. I am white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, and I was brought up to believe that this estate is the most desirable of all of those known to man. Unhappily, a part of me clung to the hard Wasp core at my center. I simply did not have the spiritual resources to dismiss my wife with a generous allowance and to find my own way around and around the Med, seeking that priapic sun.
I began to seek out whores in Paris, and in Paris, I began to drink in a serious, alcoholic way. By the time we were ready to return to the United States, Barbara had accepted the fact that on certain nights I would disappear and that on certain other nights I would drink myself into insensibility. Perhaps she thought that I would change when we came home here to the Berkshires. I don't know. She was a stranger to me then. She is a stranger to me now.
We did return and we came to live here in this old house, which my grandfather built and my father enlarged, and to which I have added nothing but a wing on the stables. Ah yes. And a pool. A swimming pool. That was Barbara's idea. She designed it and superintended the digging, the paving and the plantings at the poolside terrace. Beyond the stables and the pool I have added nothing to what was passed on to me in trust. I have not been a good steward and my fortune remains intact only because my father retained excellent managers.
My marriage was a blank from the beginning. It was a blank even before it began, and I found that I could sustain a reasonable approximation of normal relations with my wife only by calling up the memory of that rouged rectum in Tangier or of the face or the brown nipples of some costly young whore I had taken in Paris or Rome, in Nice or in Cannes. For a long time I thought that my wife was simply disinterested in the sexual act. Some years passed before she began to seek outlets of her own discovery, and by that time I no longer concerned myself with her affairs.
In the meantime, however, Rosamund was born.
Barbara detested the child even before it was born, and for many days in the hospital she refused to see it or touch it. I thought it was part of the post-natal melancholia one reads about in books. So did the obstetrician. "It will pass," he said. "Do not concern yourself."
It did not pass. From the first, Rosamund was fed and cared for by a series of nurses-competent, rough-handed Scottish women who wore old-fashioned uniforms and breathed efficiency. They would stay for a year or eighteen months, then move on, to be replaced by another from an agency in New York City.
I formed the habit of looking into the nursery at least once each day. The room had been my nursery, and the idea that the walls now sheltered my child was attractive in a mild way. I found the child charming and thought it monstrous that Barbara rejected her. Once I suggested that she consult a psychiatrist.
"It's not natural," I said. "The child should give you pleasure."
She is well cared for by McBain," Barbara said harshly. "Do not concern yourself about the state of my mental health. In any case, you see things thiough the bottom of a bottle. Why not heal yourself?"
She was right; I did not speak to her about Rosamund again.
My mother-in-law, Mrs. Oliver Bradshaw, came sometimes to see the baby and I overheard Barbara quarreling with her mother on a number of occasions. Mrs. Bradshaw was not pleased, that much was clear, but she did not see fit to take me into her confidence, so I have no way of knowing what she felt about her daughter's behavior as a mother.
I was delighted to have a girl, though all of those people who had known my father and my mother commiserated with me and suggested that I'd have better luck next time.
There was no next time, for the simple reason that my wife and I ceased to cohabit and my wife was far too intelligent to conceive with any of the various partners who passed in and out of her life later on, when she must be supposed to have discovered a kind of passion that persuaded her to couple with a series of beflanneled clubmen from Harvard and Yale, bachelors, mostly, and not long out of college, young men enjoying a few years of liberty before being married to a girl much like my wife in appearance, accent and manner.
Do not suppose that I bear ill will toward my wife for having slept with various men or for having done so under my roof. It was at my suggestion that she did so. Rosamund was, I think, seven, and I had been abroad for a month, in the south of France. I still went abroad in those days. I reached the house after having passed a few days in Boston and I was drunk in a kind of non-combative way, soaked in alcohol, so that while my senses were blurred I was able to function. I went straight to the den-my private territory-and ordered a bottle of whiskey. A few minutes after the servant brought the whiskey, my wife appeared at the doorway.
"Must you drink the moment you reach the house?" she asked, her voice cool, bitterly courteous.
I looked at her for a long time. She wore breeches and boots and a very clean white shirt, open at the throat. Her waist was slim, her breasts rose pleasantly. She aroused me no more than would a bale of hay.
"Indeed I must," I responded, in the tone of tolerant arrogance often assumed by drinks. "Why don't you go and busy yourself with fornication or other appropriate domestic pursuits."
She turned white for a moment, then reddened and her strong, square hands became fists. Her eyes were like a pair of laser beams. Her body trembled. "Don't be vulgar," she said.
"I'm not being in the least vulgar," I said. "I seem not to attract you as a partner. Perhaps you should explore until you find a well-hung gentleman who strikes your imagine. When you find him, let me know. I will buy him for you."
"I may do exactly as you suggest," she said, suddenly in full control of herself.
"Bonne chance," I said. "Good hunting."
She went off to busy herself with the household or perhaps to ride. I opened the whiskey. As I drank, I brooded about my wife, trying to imagine her in the act of sex with various candidates-men of my own acquaintance. I could not produce a convincing picture. The idea of Barbara regarding the act of copulation as anything other than a somewhat badly arranged function involving masculine evacuation was simply funny. I thought of the stock juvenile character, in white flannels, carrying a racket, popping into the country sitting room with his: "Anyone for tennis?" That would be the kind of chap Barbara would understand, a white-flanneled oaf, with an undersized penis in his hand, calling: "Anyone for fucking?"
This picture seemed enormously funny to me and for a long time I laughed over my whiskey. I went to sleep in my clothes on the long leather couch in the study and when I woke up at about eleven I rang for a maid and asked for some ham and eggs and a pot of strong coffee. When I finished the food I climbed upstairs and went to sleep in my own bed, still amused at the idea of Barbara and her lover in tennis flannels.
Indeed, however, she took my advice. In those days I tried to ride every day, having a vague idea that exercise was a way of earning the moral right to drink. About a week later, when I came up to the house from the stables, I heard some well-bred laughter from the swimming-pool terrace. Curious, I walked around the house, wearing breeches and boots and a polo shirt, carrying my riding crop. There were Barbara, in a bikini-they came in that year, I think-and a squash-playing type with short blonde hair, every inch the Harvard clubman, well built, not showing any fat at all, clad in sabots and a pair of white trunks that fit him tightly and showed the lump of his sex in a rather padded, antiseptic way. Barbara was enormously courteous, enormously proper. Both of them stopped laughing and came toward me, the gentleman offering a square wet hand.
"This is my husband, Bill Kitteridge," said Barbara. "This is Marcus Hallowell."
"I'm happy to meet you, Mr. Kitteridge," Hallowell said. "I believe that my father knew yours."
"Indeed yes," I said. "And your grandfather knew my grandfather and if we had the time and the patience and the inclination we should undoubtedly discover that we know each other in the family way for the last three hundred years. You are welcome here, sir. Enjoy your swim."
I went on upstairs to change. After I had showered and rubbed down I went to the window of my bedroom. From the south window I had an excellent view of the pool and the pool terrace. Barbara and Hallowell were sunning themselves, stretched out close together, bodies touching. He lit a cigarette and put it into her mouth, then lit one for himself. She turned her head and they kissed-nothing vulgar, nothing a real voyeur would have cared a damn about, but still a kiss that meant more than common kisses between friends. I was suddenly taken by an enormous desire to see Barbara in bed with a man-this one or another, it didn't matter. Plans formed in my mind as I watched them from my window. Then I saw Hallowell's hand move discreetly toward Barbara's body, grazing the side of one of her breasts, then touching the bare midriff for an instant. Then they really kissed, quickly, but with a genuine exchange of such sparks as they possessed. Their bodies moved together, her pelvis tight against him, her breasts flat against his chest, skin touching at thighs and midriff.
"Ah, well," I said to myself, turning away from the window. "Who would have thought she'd have taken me up so quickly?"
At dinner I made polite conversation, and deliberately I drank too much. When Hallowell and I had brandy together I pretended to be pretty well under the weather. When we rejoined Barbara I staggered a bit, and my speech was blurred. After half an hour I excused myself.
"Had too much sun and a bit too much to drink, I'm afraid," I said. "I'm rather tiddly."
I went upstairs to my room, slipping out of my dinner clothes and into a dark turtleneck sweater and a pair of dark trousers. The principal bedrooms in this house have balconies, and from the balcony of the guest bedroom, beside my wife's chamber, you can get an excellent view of her bed. Her room and the guest room are at the other end of the house from mine. I smoked a cigarette, had a drink, and made up a schoolboy's dummy in my bed, using some clothing and a pillow. Then I went down the hall to the guest bedroom, entered quietly, and took up my post on the balcony.
I waited for an hour, then another. For a moment it occurred to me that Barbara might have taken the fellow into the library or the study. But that wasn't like Barbara. The library and study were my domain. She would use her bedroom, her own turf, as it were. That would be the way her sense of honor would operate.
I heard them coming down the hall. The door opened and I saw Barbara's face, intense and eager but essentially athletic. "He is dead to the world, dear boy," she said. "He will sleep like a log until morning."
She turned to Hallowell and they kissed. His hands explored her body, a big square hand resting on her buttock, then moving deliberately to her breast, covering it, squeezing it a little. She reached around and unzipped herself and her evening dress fell to the rug. She stood in bra and panties, showing a great deal of suntanned flesh. He fondled her again through her underwear, then she began to undress him, rather tenderly, I thought, managing his dress tie with care and getting him out of his shirt and trousers. He stood there in his shorts and undershirt, socks and shoes. "I knew he'd wear garters," I said to myself, suppressing a giggle. "Garters! I'm sure he has military brushes with a little crimson shield that says Veritas."
She got him out of his underwear and he kicked off his shoes with his heels. If the Kinsey Report has established the mean dimensions of the American middle class penis, then I am morally certain that they are the dimensions exactly describing Hallowell's equipment. He was decently erect and I had the impression that he was holding his stomach in just a bit. I was used to seeing my own equipment, which is long and thick and somewhat menacing, I've been told. By comparison, Hallowell's penis seemed inconsequential.
But not to Barbara. She touched it, after a moment of fear, then gasped with delight. Hallowell, masterful Harvard man, moved close to her and they embraced, kissing one another with some heat, while Hallowell's hand ran up and down her back, caressing the smooth round of her buttocks.
"Put a finger into her behind, you bloody fool," I muttered, out there in the darkness. "Make her go down on that excuse for a prick."
I wanted to see her used, I suppose, and it may be that I wanted to see her hurt in the act of sex, as Ross had hurt his little cookhouse WAAF. She was not used and she was not hurt. She was in control all the way. It was her performance. She kissed Hallowell's chest, avoiding the nipples, then kissed his shoulder, then regarded him, bright-eyed, as she might have regarded a partner on the ski slope. She led him to the bed by the hand, hoisted herself unobtrusively onto the mattress and parted her legs, knees up, following every rule in the book. Her legs looked tanned and hygienic.
He mounted her, taking his weight on his elbows, and they seemed to have some difficulty in establishing penetration. Then I gathered that he was in her because she cried out "Ow!" and he said, "I am sorry, my dear. Very sorry." Then his unsullied Boston behind began to move in what seemed to me a desultory rhythm. Beneath him, she very nearly was inert, moving her feet from time to time. He finished the performance in what seemed to me a very short time and I heard him say, in a kind of stage whisper: "Oh, delightful. Perfectly delightful!"
"Thank you, Marcus," she responded politely, as if he had just offered her canapes from a silver tray.
After a bit he got up from the bed and went into her bathroom to wash. I heard the taps run, then he flushed the John. It was one of those specially ordered affairs with a low, full-throated, well-mannered flush. Barbara had ordered it from New York to replace one that was like all the others in the house. He came through the door of the bathroom, hair combed neatly, holding a towel so that it covered his groin, an enormous, obtrusively clean towel, cool green in color to match the tiles in that bathroom. Barbara remained on the bed, drawing the night blanket up so that it covered her legs and her hips. Her breasts were exposed, neat, reliable breasts, in absolute repose and absolutely identical in size. The blunt nipples were lifted a bit, for her hands were clasped behind her head, and her eyes seemed fixed on a bit of ornamental plaster work on the ceiling.
Hallowell dressed quickly, and he dressed completely, even tying his dress tie. He crossed the room silently and bent to kiss Barbara's forehead. "Thank you, darling," he said.
"Thank you, Marcus," she said, more solemnly this time.
"Good night," he said, inspecting the hallway through a slightly opened door, then disappearing. Barbara rolled to her side, smoked a pensive cigarette, then went to the bathroom. Again I heard the taps run and this time the sound of sloshing as she washed away the moist debris, then swabbed herself with a clean dry towel. When she came back into the room she wore a full-length nightgown of sheer white silk with a demure arrangement of ribbons and lace at the throat.
That was all there was to it. I wanted to laugh long and loud, out there on the balcony, the cool night air on my cheek, the smell of freshly barbered grass and of trees in my throat. I waited until she was safely in bed and the light was out, then left my vantage point and passed through the darkened guest room, into the silent corridor, and back to my room, where I had a drink, destroyed the dummy I had left in my bed, and rang for Genevieve, the second maid, who had been my companion-for want of a better word-these last four months.
She was a potent, tough-hipped girl of twenty from a village in the Alpes Maritimes, with a handsome fall of very black, strong hair, full lips, and flashing, intelligent black eyes. She entered my room without knocking, bearing a silver salver that held a bottle of the best Bordeaux, a wine glass and some bland French biscuits. The wine was for herself; I kept in my room a bottle of Marc de Burgogne, a water-clear brandy with an abusive, enormously sexual bouquet and a raw potency that tore at the throat and sometimes brought sharp tears to the eyes. A Paris whore taught me to enjoy it. It was what I preferred to drink when I took a French woman into my bed.
Genevieve nodded courteously, put her tray on a small table, turned and said, "M'sieu?"
I nodded. She poured the wine for herself, sipped it, then took a dry biscuit, soaked it in wine, and nibbled on it gracefully. Her crisp white apron was belted tightly at the waist over a black uniform and the costume displayed her figure to advantage. I sat on the edge of my bed, undressing while she drank the wine, enjoying the sight of her small strong fingers handling the bottle with precision, enjoying the short line of her back, running quickly to the white-pinched waist and the frankly animal rounds of her buttocks and heavily muscled thighs, attached to sturdy legs and feet. For some reason her service-weight black stockings were more erotic than the most expensive sheer nylons. There was a blunt, honest quality about them, almost like the quality of simple, cheap underpants, covering a generous crotch and a Rubenesque behind. One looks at such underwear, on a French peasant's body, and knows from across the room that it will smell of strong soap, mildly of urine, and frankly of natural rut.
When she had consumed half of the bottle, Genevieve undressed with mathematical precision, first dismantling the absurd white bow that secured her apron, folding the apron carefully, then slipping out of her uniform, shaking out the cheap black silk, folding it as if it were an heirloom, pausing a moment then, for she knew that I liked to admire her hips and her groin in those knit cotton drawers, then getting out of her brassiere and her stockings, leaving her drawers until last. Each item was folded with care and arranged neatly on a chair. She stood in the light of a shaded lamp, her sturdy body intensely real and well-muscled under her skin, which ranged in color from a rosy brown to dark brown at her crotch and armpits, with shafts of a color that was almost red where the lamplight struck her skin full on. The marks of her drawers and of her heavy bra were branded into the skin, a deep ridge where the drawers had been held closely by elastic at the waist and at mid-thigh, smaller ridges running up and down between these marks, the impression of the coarse-knit pants themselves.
"Je m'excuse, Monsieur," she said, offering a small nude courtesy, then moving silently into my bathroom. The taps ran and I smiled. I knew that she was washing herself for me, a thing she had done without fail, from the first night she remained in my room. She came out of the bathroom quickly, a small, courteous smile brightening her lips, which were like red-brown fruit.
"M'sieu?"
I crossed the room to her, naked now, my penis moving before me as I walked, a long, hard rod of flesh. Ominous, I had been told. Dangerous, I had been told. Her eyes were on it. "Formidable!" she said in a kind of harsh whisper. "Formidable!" She always used the same word and she never failed to use it.
When I reached her I stood for a moment, my hard sex poking her in the stomach at about where her navel scarred that smooth, rosy arena of flesh. Then I caught her in my arms and carried her to the bed, arranging her at right angles to the mattress, parting her thighs so that her legs and feet were high up in the air, her strong, plump cunt addressing me directly, the lobes spread just a trifle, the crisp, dark Gallic hair still moist from her ablutions, the slit of her cunt rather long and straight.
I dropped to my knees on the bedside rug and my face plunged into the hair and flesh that smelled of soap, my tongue invading her crotch with the authority of a hard cock, my lips working on the lobes of her cunt, my tongue moving swiftly in and out. She moved her hips and murmured what sounded like a small French prayer, her small strong hands in my hair, then at my ears, where the fingers worked. I sought her breasts with both hands, searching deep with my tongue. She caught fire slowly, then burned with a steady, dependable flame, those strong hips moving in response to my tongue.
"Formidable!" she gasped. "Formidable!"
Slowly, I withdrew my tongue, got to my feet, and for a moment looked at my sex. It was pulsating gently, throbbing, and it was hard, very hard. Conscious of being mildly theatrical, I thrust it into her suddenly, catching her off guard, ramming it high into her slot, which was lubricated with the juices of my tongue and my mouth.
She grunted in mild pain and surprise and her hips wrenched quickly in spasm. "M'sieu!" she said, the word rising from deep in her body. "C'est epatant ce soir. Epatant."
She was an artist, a minor artist. I played upon her body as you'd play on a musical instrument, plunging, reaming, bruising her pelvis, then teasing her, holding back, holding back, giving her agony and pleasure in a proportion she understood and that filled her hot compact body with absolute, uncomplicated joy. To go into her body, I often thought, into that peasant body which was as complex and as simple as a superb French cheese, to do that must be to feel what Adam felt when he invaded Eve. The smell of her flesh was essentially primal. Her body was frankly an animal's body. I paid her a thousand dollars a month, but when she plunged her tongue into my mouth and treasured my sex high in her hole, she did it and she did it well, not because I paid her money to be transmitted to France but because it was what she had been born to do, because that was what her body had learned under the high and noble sun of the inland sea that had nurtured the
Greeks and the Romans, the sun of the South, enriched by lust as honest as the chalk-blue sky or the modest hills under their coverlet of olive trees, ancient and classic and gray-green, trees that have become the servants of man but never acknowledging man as their master.
During the months that I had Genevieve, I could bring the Mediterranean into my bedroom in New England simply by pressing an electric bell and waiting for perhaps ten minutes. She remained in the house for almost a year, performing her household duties faithfully and with skill. She departed when she had remitted enough money to France to buy a tiny inn with a bar, snuggling in the small Alps, a place favored by well-to-do farmers on hunting sallies, short strong men with tanned skins and powerful legs, a vagrant collection of pointers and setters at their heels. Always, around the fire at night, there were the hunters and the hunting dogs, and there was always a fire after dark, for the mountain chill comes down with force. From the highest room in the auberge one can see the lights of Cannes, she promised. And the rich, painted toes of Cannes are lapped by the ancient sea, reaching for many miles to the African coast and beyond.
She gave proper notice to Madame and a little sadly reported this fact to me. "When you come again to France, Monsieur," she said, "You must stay at my inn in the Alpes Maritimes. The wine of the country is small but good and so is the rabbit stew and the saddle of venison one gets sometimes from a hunter proud of his skill and good fortune."
"I would like to live and die in your inn and the hills," I said, absurdly serious for a moment.
She looked at me blankly, suddenly intensely grave, then said, "That should not be a difficult matter for a man like Monsieur to arrange."
Early the next morning she left my house. I watched from my window while they loaded her comically
French trunk into the station wagon. Solemnly and on both cheeks she kissed the cook, the two maids and the gardener who had come to see her off. Then she got into the station wagon, unconsciously and for the last time offering me a view of her short, plump, powerful legs. How many times have I been between them? I wondered, watching the wagon wheel out of the driveway. Three hundred? Three hundred and fifty? It didn't matter. Now she was gone and I knew that I would never see the auberge in the hills and never taste the local wine or the savory stew made of rabbit. I turned away from the window, aware of a sharp sense of loss. It persisted throughout the day.
A tall Swede followed Genevieve, with straight legs, long as ski poles, and a blonde poil that matched the shock of corn-colored hair that she washed obsessively and that smelled of some medicinal shampoo she used in the belief that it would protect her Nordic scalp from the germs of North America. She was a tireless sexual athlete with a broad, innocent looking mouth, with which she would perform any service that can be performed with the mouth and tongue. Her light skin tanned beautifully, and in summer she stretched on my bed in the nude, the pattern of her bikini harshly white against her golden skin, almost cruelly sexual, as if she had been in some way branded. It was difficult at first to make her understand that her services to me were not covered by her wages, but in the end she took the money.
There were others-a doltish farm girl from Nova Scotia, a junior from Ohio State, working as a maid for the summer, the inevitable nymphomaniac Pole, a shrewd, mercenary French woman from Bordeaux with a tight, dry vagina, an Arab girl from Lebanon, educated in a Catholic lycee in Beirut, an Irish stable boy who offered his virgin rectum at a price, a Liverpool slummy named O'Grady who seldom bathed but instead rubbed her body with cheap cologne. There were others, most of them forgotten.
I found that it suited me to remain in New England, where I had a certain status and where danger was controlled. I ceased to travel, even to Boston or New York. I rode when I could manage to sit the horse and I employed a masseur who came in each day and restored my sluggish circulation.
My wife continued to take lovers and I continued to observe them in action, hoping, I suppose, that one of them, chosen by mistake, would beat her with his fists or take her in sodomy or, perhaps, fall in love with her and take her away from this part of the world, to New York or Philadelphia or Cleveland, Ohio.
None of these things happened.
Rosamund, that summer, was fourteen and a half and passing most of the long holiday at home, having objected to going away to the camp in France I had chosen for her.
Rosamund was a puzzling creature to me, almost from the first, but especially after she began to read. That was the year she was four. She taught herself, I believe, though she may have simply memorized the stories read to her by the leathery Englishwoman who had her in charge, then obliged the printed text to match the words arranged in her mind. I don't know. I do know that by the time she was seven and eight she was reading at random from the library shelves, reading at an astonishing rate of speed, devouring three or four modern novels in a day Recently I read a newspaper advertisement for a course in speed reading invented, I believe, by the late President Kennedy. Rosamund read in exactly the way the advertisement promises anyone will read, if only he takes the Kennedy course.
I tested her once when she was eleven. She sat on a red leather chair in the library, reading the novels and stories of D. H. Lawrence, which were ranged on the shelves in a neat row. Her eyes moved quickly down the center of each page, her small fingers ready to turn, and she. bestowed no more than a few seconds on each page of type. Her face was intent and her eyes, which are an absolutely pure Baltic blue, seemed to burn through the book itself. She wore a crisp blue dress, tight at the waist, and her slim legs were doubled under her body. From a short distance she was the picture of the amiable child, reading, one might have guessed, A Child's Garden of Verses or perhaps Alice in Wonderland. When you were close enough to see her face you felt the intensity of her concentration, or seemed to feel it, as you seem to feel electrical power emanating from a great fenced dynamo.
I watched her for several minutes, then said, "You can't really be reading that book."
She finished the page, turned, then looked up. "Oh yes. I am reading it, Daddy," she said.
I touched her cheek. "You can't be," I said. "Give me the book."
She handed me Sons and Lovers, opened to the place where she'd broken off. I read back for three pages, then asked, "What does it say on these pages? The last three?"
She stared at a spot on the wall and the words fell to place in her mind. Then, while I followed the text, she gave back the words of Lawrence, almost as Lawrence had written them. I shook my head and returned the book. "How do you do that?" I asked.
"I don't know," she said. "It's simply the way I read."
I went to the stables where my horse was waiting, mounted and trotted off in the sun. The child troubled me. We Kitteridges have always been a normal family as far as intelligence is concerned. During the three hundred odd years that the line has flourished on this continent, I think there has never before been either a genius or a dolt. The intelligence is as standard as the. architecture of the face. Yet I could not persuade myself that Rosamund's extraordinary mind came from her mother's family. It was a strange thing, I supposed, a trick of the genes or perhaps a trick of the gods.
That evening, on the telephone, I called the headmistress of Miss Trotter's School in Lennox, where my mother had been a student. The voice was English and brisk and informed with orderly intelligence. The owner of the voice recognized my name at once.
"I shall be glad to see the child, Mr. Kitteridge," she said. "Perhaps I can make a suggestion. I simply can't admit her before she is fourteen."
"Fourteen?" I said. "But at my school...."
"This is Miss Trotter's, sir, not your school," the voice said, putting me in my place. "But I shall be happy to talk with your daughter if it's convenient to bring her to Lennox."
A few days later, Rosamund and I drove to Lennox in an open car. The countryside was lovely and it occurred to me that I had always enjoyed driving but seldom did it nowadays. Rosamund sat beside me, watching my hands on the wheel and the shift lever, then studying the tachometer on the dashboard. At Lennox we wheeled into a generously proportioned driveway, leading upward between ordered rows of large maples. The school had once been the house of a celebrated woman, a painter, and stone cottages had been built near it. These were the girls' living quarters, I knew. I had visited here with my mother, years ago.
The headmistress was waiting for us in a handsomely furnished, comfortable study, furnished with leather chairs and many books and large portraits of British royalty. The woman behind the desk had the head and eyes of a highly intelligent bird. She offered me a touch-skinned hand, shaking mine as a man shakes hands.
"I am Miss Gainsborough," she said. "And this is Rosamund?"
"I am Rosamund Kitteridge," the child said.
"Indeed. Would you like to talk with me for a few moments, child?" the schoolmistress asked.
"I will talk or listen, as you prefer," Rosamund said.
Miss Gainsborough nodded then glanced at me. "If you will be kind enough to leave us, sir," she said. "I would like to see the child alone."
I walked through the deserted grounds, empty of girls now, in high summer, quite beautiful but faintly sad. I found a stone bench, pleasantly situated so that the sitter had a view of the Berkshire Hills, rising to the north toward Williamstown. I waited for perhaps two hours, smoking a number of cigarettes, holding the butts in my hand, because it seemed somehow inappropriate to toss them into the shrubbery. Then Miss Gainsborough came down the walk, Rosamund beside her.
"If it's at all possible I should like to see Rosamund, let us say once each month," the headmistress said. "I find that we have tastes in common in the field of English literature."
"Of course," I said. "If you send me a bill I will see that it's paid."
"There will be no bill," Miss Gainsborough said. "I make no charge for my conversation."
And so began Rosamund's auxiliary education. It was taken for granted that she would go to Miss Trotter's School when she was thirteen, Miss Gainsborough having agreed to shade the entering age by one year. I was satisfied with myself, feeling that I'd behaved as a responsible parent, faced with an unusual situation. I had sought the advice of an expert, obtained it, and the result had been useful. Rosamund's mother agreed without argument that the child should go to Miss Trotter's and I busied myself with my own affairs, satisfied that my daughter was in good hands.
Then, the summer Rosamund was fourteen, after a year at school, my wife took as her lover her first cousin, Danton McLane of Philadelphia. McLane came to
B the house that summer to pass a month in the Berkshires and with him was my wife's brother, Major Clement Bradshaw, home on rest leave from Vietnam. Bradshaw was a big man who had played football at the Naval Academy. He reached the house wearing summer uniform, crisp, starched khaki with black buttons and a variety of medal ribbons. We seldom met, for his service obligations kept him out of the country during much of the time, but we had disliked one another at once and time had done nothing to modify the dislike. He regarded me as a blurry sot; I thought of him as a swaggering oaf, enjoying his trade, which was now concerned with the extermination of large numbers of small-boned people in wide straw hats.
And now, he had five weeks' medical leave and planned to pass four of those weeks in the Berkshires at my expense. I was not very much disturbed by the idea of having him here. I proposed to ignore him, as I ignored my wife and ignored the sequence of proper gentlemen who passed through her bedroom, scarcely ruffling the well-pressed sheets.
Rosamund found him fascinating, mostly, I think, because he had served abroad in a number of improbable places and because she was at first astonished, then baffled, then amused by the fact that a grown man who was an officer of the United States Marine Corps had the intellectual equipment of a second-class golf professional and the social attitudes of a chauffeur. The Vietnam war was younger then and she asked him hundreds of questions about the country and the people.
I don't want to give the impression that Rosamund attached herself to her uncle. She did not. Mostly, she passed her days as usual, riding for an hour or perhaps two, enjoying a short, brisk swim, then reading in her room or in the library. But she saw him at dinner on week nights and sometimes lounged at the poolside with him during a long hot afternoon. I saw them once beside the pool, Rosamund in a tight, black, midriff suit, her young-breasts just beginning to fill the small cups of the brassiere, the major in skin-tight trunks of yellow and gold, with the anchor, world and eagle device of the Marine Corps embroidered on one side. The trunks revealed his private parts, not as ajock-held lump, but in clear outline, his penis and testicles bulging through the silk-like gold fabric, the penis large even at rest, as large, perhaps, as my own.
I recall observing them rather closely, aware of my daughter's budding figure and of Bradshaw's muscular chest and shoulders, and the blunt tracery of his crotch, but I cannot recall even the slightest whisper of danger, there in the hot sun, in the brilliant New England afternoon. I saw Rosamund's short finger trace the outline of the anchor, world and eagle on her uncle's thigh, then touch his right shoulder, where the same device had been tattooed. She asked a question and I heard him laugh softly, then rumple her taffy-colored hair. She was on her feet in a moment, straight almost as a boy in her close-fitting suit, just a hint of cleavage at her bosom, where the spandex material lifted her breasts, giving them more definition than I'd noticed before. Idly, I wondered whether the bra under the swim suit was padded. Then I turned away and went upstairs to my room, to shower, submit to the ministrations of my Danish masseur, then pass a comfortable hour with a book and a long, rather weak highball.
There were guests and we dressed for dinner. My wife wore a rather severe black sheath. Rosamund was in white, with a bit of gold at her throat. I realized, looking at her under the lights of the high, crystal chandelier, that she was indeed wearing a padded bra, but I assumed that this was the habit of the young and gave it no particular thought.
For some reason, instead of dinner clothes, Bradshaw wore uniform-a white monkey jacket with miniature medals on the left breast and badges that I took to be solid gold. It is an effective, almost a theatrical uniform, and Bradshaw carried it with style. His tremor had almost entirely disappeared and he seemed to be drinking modestly, restricting himself to a few glasses of wine and a single brandy after the meal. Certainly, he was not drunk when I took leave of him in the study at about nine. He was talking about Vietnam and he seemed at ease.
Oddly, in view of what happened, I stepped out of doors for a moment and briefly thought of an hour's ride in the cool of the night-a thing I liked to do sometimes, especially when the moon was clear and full. I decided against it and went upstairs to my room, where I rang for Inga (the Swedish maid) and sodomized with her briefly. She had ample but hard buttocks and a rather tight rear orifice, which could only be entered if you used a quantity of KY or some other effective lubricating agent. I always thought it strange that she enjoyed buggery, for I realized, entering her, that I always caused pain, but she delighted in turning her back for me and when I had punched myself into her she pumped with a rare, healthy vigor, grunting and muttering fragments of Swedish wisdom, masturbating herself with long clean fingers when she sensed that I was approaching the climax.
"Why do you like it, Inga?" I asked.
"Is sanitary," she said, swabbing her behind with a hand towel. "Comes out everything when I go to the toilet."
That night I finished with her quickly and washed myself, putting on a pair of black silk pajamas and settling down with a drink and my book, intending to read myself to sleep. I read until about midnight, pacing my drinks nicely, so that I was pleasantly mulled. I don't know what prompted me to go down the corridor. Perhaps I wondered whether Barbara was safely in bed with her cousin. I'm not sure. For whatever reason, I left my room and as I passed Bradshaw's door I heard low voices, a male voice that I took to be his and a female voice that was strange to me.
There was an empty room beside the one that had been given to Bradshaw and I passed through it quickly and got out onto the balcony, then moved a bit so that I had a clear view of Bradshaw's room. There was a small light burning in the corner and on his nightstand I saw a syringe of the kind medical men use. It struck me suddenly that he was a morphine addict, and though I was mildly surprised, I was not shocked or in any way outraged. I saw the girl in the shadows, on the bed beside him. He was nude and his shoulders looked formidable. Then he moved a bit and tossed back the sheet and I saw his penis, in full erection, a good seven inches, I guessed, heavy and blunt at the tip.
The girl's voice was low and husky. "How did you do it to that girl in Vietnam?" she asked. "How did you go into her?"
Bradshaw laughed and his hand moved in the half-light, touching the girl's breasts. "Up the old dirt road, kid. The corn-hole," he said.
"Give it to me that way," she pleaded. "Do it in my back, the way you did to that girl in Vietnam. What is it called? That's it. Bugger me. Teach me to do it that way."
"It will hurt," he said, his voice blurred, his hands moving on her body, moving down from her breasts. "It hurt that girl."
"Do it!" she said hoarsely. "Do it. Go into my ass-hole. My ass-hole."
I think I knew at the moment that the girl was Rosamund, but I could not move. I remained on the balcony, frozen, my eyes on the two bodies, moving now in the long shadows cast by the lamp across the room, so that the effect was that of watching bodies in silhouette, or through a sheet with a light behind it, in the way children make imitation movies. She turned her back for him, bracing herself on the edge of the bed, jackknifed, and he crossed quickly to his bathroom, his penis moving in front of his body, a threatening black shadow. He was back in an instant, holding what I later discovered was a jar of hair pomade. He anointed himself, then used it between the cheeks of her behind, rubbing artfully until her buttocks began to move under his fingers, gently at first, undulating, then rearing fiercely as she became aroused, her small pelvis describing circles under his hand, her buttocks and her rectum rising toward him, thrusting toward him temptingly at first, then almost with anger.
"Ah yes," her voice came, a low, thrilling voice now. "I understand. I understand. It is strange to me and new. New. It is like being born. Put your finger into me a little ... a little ... a little. More. More. A little more."
Bradshaw's hand moved into her, moving hard now, his long hard finger plunging in her rectum, encouraging her loins, so that she reared like a young bucking horse, riding that stiff, hard finger upon which she had been impaled, whimpering with surprise and delight, crying out as the finger moved: "Oh, it is delightful. Delightful! Move it into me faster. Harder. Higher, higher, higher. Search me with your finger. Poke it higher, higher, higher!"
She was frantic now and her buttocks lashed back savagely against his hand. His head moved and he was kissing her buttocks, then the other hand moved around her body and he touched her young crotch. That made her wild and she cried out: "Now! Please, now. Bugger me now! Use your cock, your cock, your cock. Bugger me! Bugger me! Bugger me! Now! Now!"
There was a sudden rush of suction as his finger was withdrawn from her rectum. Then his buttocks rose over her in the air and he guided himself with his hand.
"Spread your behind with your hands, Roz," he said, whispering hoarsely. "Spread them so I can get at your hole."
Her hands flashed like white birds and the fingers clutched savagely at her buttocks. His body lunged forward and I heard the sound that was made as he entered her in one powerful thrust, reaming her, punching himself high into her body. He made a sound like that of an excited horse and pumped energetically, talking to her and to himself. "I'm poguing you, baby. I'm poguing you. I'm in your behind, baby. In your ass."
"Aiiiiieeee!" she cried, a long high note with pain in it-pain and surprise. "Ah, God, it's like a knife. Butcher me! Higher! Higher!" And then she cried: " Aiiiiiieeee!" again as his buttocks rose and he pounded into her body, on his toes now, driving himself all the way, with all his weight, clawing at her breasts and her crotch, riding her, pounding her hips into the mattress, panting now and grunting savagely as he wedged himself higher and higher into her rectum, fighting for it now, grasping her pelvis in both hands, forcing her body back against his own, driving with a strong, fast rhythm, making her grunt and whinny with pain, then yell with delight: "Aiiiueeeee!"
"I'm coming, baby. I'm coming," he said. "Feed it back to me. I'm coming."
"I know," she gasped. "I know. I am feeling it all. I am drunk with the pain of it in me and the shock of it high in my ass. It is like something out of Lawrence. like being fucked in the hedgerow, in the mud and the warm sweet rain. Plug me! Plug me! Let me feel it all. It all. It all. It all." And she shuddered so that the bed make an odd tinkling noise and she uttered that sound again: "Aiiiiiieeeee! Aiiiiieeeee! It is now. Now. Now. Now."
At that instant I realized that I had reached erection and that I was pumping myself with my hand, while the other hand clawed at my own behind through the heavy silk of my pajamas. I ejaculated copiously into the warm summer night at the instant they reached the climax, there on the bed in the darkened room. I was part of it all. I sprayed myself on the terrace floor, then stood in the night, trembling, feeling as if I had been struck with a heavy object, struck on the head and on the neck, at the base of the brain. I was stunned and I was sick. I turned to the rail and vomited. Then I turned back to see Bradshaw coming out of her, his huge, brown behind moving toward me as he backed away. Then I saw her, jackknifed on the bed, her buttocks still stretched by her hands, a bubble of bright blood rising from her rectum. "Ah, God," she muttered into the mattress. "To be buggered. Buggered. I have been buggered."
My mind cleared and in place of the fog there was bright rage. In a corner of the room was Bradshaw's golf bag and my eyes were on the driver, the heaviest club. I moved into the room swiftly, giving him no time for thought, and the driver was in my hand. I used it as if I were playing golf and swung quickly, striking his head near his left ear, then striking again, higher this time, so that the blood showed on his scalp. He tried to turn, stumbled, fell to his knees and raised his face, the eyes flooded with fear, his mouth working spasmodically.
"Chung hoy!" he said. "Chung hoy!"
I hit him again with the club, this time on the ridge of his cheekbone, and he sank to the floor, his body twitching.
"Chung hoy!" he said, his body twitching. "Chung hoy. Chung hoy."
Then he stopped moving.
There was the odor of raw feces, mixed with the smell of pomade and with the musky fragrance of adolescent rut, of mild, sweet underarm sweat, and through it all the thematic odor of a young girl's mildly perfumed soap and shampoo. The marks of his hands could be seen on her pelvis, where he had clawed at her body. They will be black and blue, I remember thinking. She covered herself with a pillow, looking like a very young child, embracing a stuffed toy. I looked at her arm. There was a puncture in the skin. I looked from her arm to the syringe, then back at her arm, then at the man on the floor.
"Why did you do it?" I asked. "Why?"
"He said it was harmless," she told me, her forehead creased. "He said it was a thing from the Orient, harmless and wonderful."
I inspected his arm, observing a series of punctures. Then, without volition, I looked at his penis, limp now, moist and soiled, glistening with the pomade he had used, the jar of which I now saw on the edge of his dresser, the lid still off, the perfumed grease showing the marks of his large fingers.
"You had better get dressed," I said. "Where are your things?"
She crossed the room to the closet, legs flashing. Her evening dress was on a hanger.
"Are you all right?" I asked. "Did he hurt you?"
"I am all right," she said. "I am all right."
Her eyes were on my pajama trousers, on a spot just beneath the closure. The sticky moistness showed. In that instant I realized that she understood that I had been on the balcony for a long time. I knew that she knew, yet I had no sense that she judged me. And I did not judge her. "Will you need a doctor?" I asked.
"Perhaps," she said. "I don't know."
"Did he ... I mean to say did he use the other...? "
"Yes," she nodded solemnly. "Yes, he did, Father."
I shook my head, feeling as if I'd been stabbed in the heart, given a mortal wound which for some reason I was unable to feel, to the imperatives of which my body did not in the least respond. I looked at the figure on the floor, absolutely still now, almost at peace on the light-colored rug. "He is hurt," I said. "He is badly hurt."
"He is dead, Father," she said. "The second blow killed him."
I knelt beside the body of my brother-in-law, touched his forehead. "My God, you are right," I said. "What shall I do?"
Rosamund was dressed by now. She went into the bathroom, ran water for a moment, and busied herself at the sink. When she came back into the room she was composed, her hair in place, her bruised mouth bathed with cold water.
"You must not feel that you have done wrong, Father," she said, moving toward me, kissing me on the cheek, then holding me for a moment, so that I felt the length of her body against my own. Her body was still warm, the blood of her passion still racing, so that her breasts felt hard against my chest. It was a strange, heady sensation. She kissed me again, then stepped away. "He was a man who earned his living by killing people," she said. "It is not strange that he should be killed."
"What am I to do?" I asked. "I can't tell the police that I found you here with him."
She shook her head. "Let us dress him in breeches and boots," she said. "Then we can call for three horses. We can manage it together and no one will see. We can ride far out into the country and throw him into a gully near a bad jump. Then we can turn the horse loose. When they question us we shall say that he was drunk and perhaps drugged and that he left us, galloping off."
We did exactly that. I often rode at night and the boy brought the horses around without question. The most difficult part was not carrying him down to the side doorway but getting him into his English boots. We finally managed it though, and rode off into the high moonlight, his body draped over the horse, swinging gently as the animal moved. About four miles from the house, in a thirty-foot gulley, we dumped the body. The horse whinnied and seemed disinclined to leave us.
"Do you have a cigarette, Father?" Rosamund asked.
I nodded, then lit one and handed it to her, lighting a second for myself. She puffed for a moment, then trotted up to the rider-less horse. She held the cigarette against his flank until the horse reared. Then she struck him smartly with her riding crop and the animal bolted. We rode slowly back to the house. By the time we reached the stables, streaks of dawn were beginning to show in the night sky. About a hundred yards from the stables, Rosamund whipped up her horse and trotted smartly to the door, dismounting gracefully. I climbed down from my animal, heavy-legged and exhausted. Arm in arm we crossed the stable yard and climbed the slight rise to the house.
"You must not feel guilty, Father," Rosamund said. "He expected to die. I know that."
"I simply cannot feel sorry that he is dead," I said.
"Of course not," she said. "But you must not think of it again."
We had stopped for a moment, there in the morning, Rosamund in jeans and jodhpurs and a blue denim shirt she liked for riding, I in breeches and English boots. She looked very much the child at that moment, rather beautiful, I thought, and innocent.
"I am hungry," she said. "I am famished. Let's have breakfast now, Father. Please. I am ravenous."
"Why not?" I said. "Let's go 'round to the kitchen."
They gave us ham and eggs and lots of toast and an enormous pot of strong black coffee and we had our breakfast on the east terrace, watching the Berkshire dawn come up. The sun rose high and bright and the day was warm and clear, the air itself stunningly clear, so that the hills in the distance seemed pasted to the sky. Rosamund talked very gracefully about the mountains and about the horses we had ridden.
"I wonder..." I began.
She shook her head, buttering toast. "I don't think we should ever talk about it again," she said. "I am sorry that you have been troubled, but it is in the past. It should never be mentioned again."
I said nothing more. At about noon the State Police arrived and Rosamund and I answered their questions, giving the very simple responses that Rosamund had planned. A sergeant asked the questions and a young trooper took notes. They were very much on their good behavior and exceedingly polite. Almost apologetically, the sergeant asked if he could see the room Bradshaw had used. He was upstairs for perhaps an hour. When he came back into the library, he carried a sheaf of bound notes.
"Did Major Bradshaw ever give the impression that he intended to take his own life, sir?" he asked.
I shook my head. "To my knowledge, never," I said. "Why do you ask?"
The sergeant handed me the document. It was the bound transcript of a general court martial, held in the city of Danang. The accused was Major Clement Bradshaw, U.S.M.C., and the specification to the charge was forcible rape, the victim being one Dao Thi Mai, aged twelve years, killed during enemy action five days after the alleged sexual assault on her person.
I glanced through the neatly typed pages, a small Greek tragedy, reduced to questions and answers and dispassionate naval terminology. There were a number of Vietnamese witnesses, three of them girls of about the age of Dao Thi Mai. One an old man, one the girl's father, one a Marine who, at the time of the trial, was himself awaiting court martial for defection in the presence of the enemy, the charges having been preferred by Major Bradshaw, his commanding officer.
The verdict was not guilty; the accused was restored to duty.
The typed pages swam before my eyes. I saw Rosamund, doubled on the bed, Bradshaw's loins driving hard against her groin. I heard her cry "Aiiiiiieeeee!" and I smelled that mixture of raw feces, pomade, and mild, sweet adolescent sweat, that I had smelled when I stood over Bradshaw's body, the golf club in my hand.
"I understand your question," I said. "Will it be necessary to release this document to the press?"
"That will be up to the coroner, sir," the sergeant said. "I shouldn't think so."
It was not necessary to release the transcript of the trial to the United States press. The coroner's verdict was routine. Bradshaw had died as the result of an unfortunate accident in the field. He was buried in a family plot on Long Island and there was a firing squad of blue-clad Marines. The court martial transcript was returned to me and I burned it in the fireplace in my study, two days after the funeral.
I felt oddly innocent of murder. I felt, in fact, detached from the episode as far as Bradshaw was concerned. So little touched was I that I was aware of a sense of relief that he was out of the house.
When the police had gone Rosamund went to her room and I went to my study, where I mixed a drink. I sat in a deep chair, the glass in my hand, waiting for Barbara. In about ten minutes she came, knocking twice on the door, then walking into the room.
"You have killed my brother," she said.
"I was his executioner," I said. "You sentenced him to death when you brought him here."
"He was my brother."
"You knew that he would attack Rosamund," I said. "That court martial transcript was no surprise to you."
She laughed. "Attack!" she said contemptuously. "That child was like a mongrel bitch in heat."
"But you knew," I said. "You knew what he was like."
"Yes," she said, her lip trembling. "I knew."
"Why do you hate the child?"
"She is wanton. She is a little whore at heart."
"You are jealous," I said, amazed at the simplicity of the explanation, but absolutely certain of it.
She slapped me hard on the cheek. "Don't say that!" she said. "Don't ever say that again."
I got to my feet and took a step toward her, so that I saw her face and her eyes quite clearly. "You are a monster, Barbara," I said. "A vicious and jealous monster."
"I have things to do," she said.
And she walked out of the room, leaving me with my glass and my bottle. I heard her call a servant from the head of the stairs.
"I am going abroad," she said. "Please pack my things. I shall travel by air."
"Yes, mom."
I consulted the glass in my hand, swalldwed some whiskey, then laughed. "I think I have seen the last of you, my dear," I said softly, speaking to my friend, the bottle. "I can't say that I am sorry."
She did not wait until her brother's body was out of the house, but departed that evening for Paris. Rosamund and I made the journey to Arlington, to see Bradshaw safely in the ground. His mother-Barbara's mother-was calm through the short service and icy calm at the grave site when the rifles coughed and they handed her the flag. We stood together beside the raw grave, the woman with the flag in her hands, held as one holds a handbag.
"If there is any way in which I can be of service to you, William, please do not hesitate to ask."
I thanked her. She kissed Rosamund on the cheek, then held her for a moment. Then she embraced her, almost hungrily. "Take good care of her, William," she said. "She is my only grandchild." .
She moved away from the grave, her step light, her pace steady, the awkward lump of bunting underneath her arm.
"Do you want to see the city?" I asked, turning to Rosamund.
"That would be nice," she said.
We drove about for two hours, passing the marble temples of state, then left the city, driving north, fast, heading for the Berkshires and home.
The day after Bradshaw was buried I entertained my Swede. It was no good. We tried a variety of positions and she used her mouth until her jaws were exhausted, but she could not arouse me. She came three days later and I did perform, but I was aware of the loss of power in the same way one is aware of failing electrical current, when the lights fade, then surge a little, then fade again. I injected myself with testosterone and it helped, but the climax was almost without feeling, a dull, numbed emission of fluid.
A week after Bradshaw's funeral I took Rosamund to see Dr. Frankz von Klemperer, who had been at Harvard with me and who now was a specialist in the medical affairs that concern women. I told Franz that Rosamund had been assaulted in the stables by a drunken Irish groom.
"Of course I thrashed the fellow within an inch of his life," I explained. "But I don't want the child involved with the police or the courts."
Franz nodded. "I think you are right. How long ago, did you say?"
"A week," I said.
"I will examine her now. It will be necessary to see her again in two weeks' time."
"Why?" I asked.
"If she has conceived, I shall be obliged to do a curettage," he said.
"Is that serious?" I did not like the sound of the word but I trusted Franz.
"Everything is serious," he said, a friendly hand on my tweed shoulder. "A cut finger is serious. But I am supposed to be rather good at my trade. I don't think you need worry."
Two weeks later, in Boston, Rosamund's womb was scraped with a long, thin blade. She was white-faced when she came down from the operating room, but she smiled and touched my hand. "Don't worry, Father," she said. "I'm all right. I am perfectly all right."
She has always been able to bear pain; when she was small, she seldom cried. Von Klemperer remarked upon it. "She is an extraordinary child, Kitteridge," he said. "She is a genius, but I presume that you're aware of that."
I nodded.
"She was as calm as a surgical resident up there, and she asked the same questions. She wanted to see the instruments and asked if the thing could be managed without the use of anesthetic. When I asked her why, she simply said "I prefer to be aware of things that are done to me.' An extraordinary child. An extraordinary person."
Her management of pain, I supposed, had enabled her to go through the experience with Bradshaw without anything that suggested trauma. "There is minor scarring in her rectum," Franz had informed me. "The walls were torn a bit, but there's nothing to give us concern. Her vagina is undamaged."
We drove back to the Berkshires in my Jaguar with the top down, the sun warm on our bodies. Rosamund wore a lightweight cotton dress and I could see the outline of the surgical padding between her legs, as if she wore some kind of male athletic support. "Does it hurt?" I asked.
She shook her head. "Just when I make water," she said.
We were on mountain roads now, the Knox Trail, and I moved the car into a curve. Rosamund's body was pressed against mine and I felt the warmth of her flesh through my clothing. When I corrected and the car was moving on a straightaway, her body remained in the position it had assumed in the curve, her hip and thigh tight against mine, her left breast soft against my shoulder. My hands tightened on the walnut wheel and my mouth went dry. For a moment my vision was affected and I blinked my eyes clear. The heat of her body entered mine. I felt a tragic, hopeless sensation in my groin, pain like the pain of a ruptured heart, and the blood rushed to my crotch, so that, under my lightweight trousers, I felt myself stiffen and rise and I knew that the outline must be brutally clear to Rosamund, whose cheek was close to mine now, and whose thighs seemed to melt and blend with mine. She kissed me on the cheek, an arm circling my neck, the small, warm hand on my other cheek, fingers touching my jawbone. The smell of adolescent sexuality rose from the skin of her cheek and from her clean, parted lips.
"I love you, Father," she said, kissing me again, then touching my thigh. "I love you."
"I know," I said. "I know."
I braked the car and pulled to the side of the road, pretending that I wanted a cigarette. She moved so that I could search my pockets, find my cigarettes and lighter, then start the car again, and for the rest of the journey her body did not touch mine again.
That night, aware of physical discomfort, I sent for Inga. She undressed deliberately but swiftly, her long body pure gold except for the patches of white at her hips and breasts. I had taken four ounces of vodka and injected myself with testosterone, and I hardened at once at the sight of her body, my eyes fixed on her blonde poil, then on her scrubbed slit as she parted her legs for me, taking the position I preferred, with her buttocks on the edge of the bed. I plunged into her at once, driving myself all the way into her body, making her wince, then grunt as the dry walls of her slot received me. I closed my eyes, moving within her, and a field of violet, streaked with electric yellow, replaced my field of vision. Then my mind seemed to abdicate to the subconscious and pictures in montage swam into that violet field-Rosamund at the poolside, tracing the Marine Corps insignia on Bradshaw's trunks; Rosamund on tip-toe, the cleavage at her breasts innocent, yet filled with promise; Rosamund on the bed with Bradshaw, while the shadow pictures played; Rosamund jackknifed for him, her small hands spreading her buttocks; Rosamund's body under him as he plowed, plowed, plowed; Rosamund's cry of astonishment of pain, of delight; Rosamund's small white hips, flashing under Bradshaw's body.
I rose in my Swede, thrusting with almost monotonous rhythm, approaching the climax, then bursting, as if my man-flower had exploded inside her like a star shell, my own throat uttering Rosamund's cry of shock and of joy: "Aiiiiiiiieeeee! Aiiiiiiiieeeee!"
When Inga was gone, I went into my bathroom and turned on the high-intensity light, fitted to a round magnifying mirror. I examined my face with great care, looking for any sign of change. I turned the mirror on its swiveled mount and arched myself, inspecting the center of my body, again looking for a sign of change. There was nothing. I poured myself a drink, consumed it slowly, poured another and put it on my night table, then got into bed with my book, reading myself to sleep.
A week later I drove Rosamund to Miss Trotter's School in Lennox. A group of new girls had clustered outside Miss Gainsborough's office; the upper classes were not due to arrive for a week. I looked at Rosamund's classmates with some interest. They were a year or two years older than she, but she seemed to blend easily with the group. I did not linger, but kissed the child goodbye, climbed into my car, and drove home, faster than I usually drive on Route Seven, hitting eighty-five and ninety on the straightaway, enjoying the speed and the sharp, acid sense of danger.
I called for my Swede again that night; it was hopeless. Aware of an odd sense of obligation, I used my mouth to bring her to the climax she must have expected and treasured in her mind from the moment she answered my bell, deep in the house, in the servants' hall. It is not really my metier, but I have a certain skill. She was enchanted, babbling in simplistic Swedish periods: "J a, Ja! Tacka sa mycket. Tack, Tack, tack."
I finished her and raised my mouth for a moment. "Ver sa god," I said. Then I buried my face in her poil, the crisp, blonde hair moist but intensely clean, the fish-pale skin beneath it filmed with light, odorless sweat. My mouth and nose were in the hair, my eyes, half-opened, observed the rhythm of her breathing, transmitted to her stomach, which rose and fell rapidly at first, then slowed gently until her breathing matched my own. I rose from the rug on which I had been kneeling, kissed the down on her belly, then touched her cheek with my fingertips.
Ten weeks passed before Rosamund had a free weekend. I did not drive to Lennox to fetch her. She came home in a closed car, driven by Hawkins, who normally drove for Barbara and for guests. She looked astonishingly well, her cheeks flushed, her splendid blue eyes glittering like jewels, her shoulders a little straighter, her carriage suggesting a sharpening of the posture. I met her at the driveway, kissed her cheek, and said, "I will see you at dinner, Rosamund darling. You'll want a bath and a rest."
"I want neither," she said, embracing me. "I feel as strong as a young horse."
"Even so," I said. "Take a good long shower. You'll feel better."
She trotted off, going upstairs quickly. I wandered back to the library and poured myself another drink. I was on a rather level alcoholic plateau, as I had been since the night Bradshaw died. I drank enough to avoid direct confrontation with the part of myself that I feared, but not enough to make ordinary living a series of monstrous chores.
Rosamund and I were alone at dinner. Her mother had driven to New York on Thursday and indicated that she planned to return on Saturday-tomorrow. Rosamund sat in her mother's place, facing me down the rather long table. It seemed strange to look up from my plate and to see her there. She does not really resemble her mother, yet there is enough similarity in color and head shape to make her outline, in that chair, confusing.
I had brandy in the study and she joined me. I lit a cigar, a good one, and she drank in the smoke. "Do you mind very much if I have a cigarette, Father?" she asked.
"If you like," I said.
She took a cigarette from the silver box on the study table, flicked a silver lighter into flame, then inhaled deeply, blowing the smoke toward the ceiling in a neat, controlled cloud. "Ah, delicious!" she said, falling into a heavy leather chair.
"Would you like a little brandy and water?" I asked, taking the French view of things.
She wrinkled her nose and shook her head. "No," she said. "I don't like the taste of it."
"The taste of brandy?"
"Of alcohol," she said.
I turned my attention to my cigar, puffed carefully for a few seconds, then said, "Because of me?"
She pondered for a moment, her fine eyes deadly earnest. "I don't know," she said. "Perhaps."
Because of the way I live now, on native grounds, as it were, guarded almost against myself, I am not very often sharply ashamed of my drinking, though my Protestant conscience protests against it and my second self, that unborn man of the South in my soul, holds the abuse of alcohol to be an abomination. At that moment, in the study, Rosamund's words troubled me and the integral part of my being seemed to sink, to leave my body, and I was aware of desperate shame and of an overwhelming sense of loss, the loss of myself to myself, the deepest betrayal of my nature. I felt the blood rise to my cheeks and I finished my brandy quickly, pouring more at once.
"You are wise," I said. "When I started to drink years ago I thought I had acquired a servant. like many a better man, I discovered that I took not a servant but a master."
Quickly, she came across the room, feet silent on the heavy rug, to kiss my cheek, then my hand. "But I didn't mean..." she said.
"Of course not," I said. I caught her hand and kissed it. "Of course you didn't."
She went back to her chair, suddenly quiet, intent on the tip of her cigarette. I looked at her carefully, over the rim of my brandy glass. Her end-of-summer skin was tawny, her carefully tended hair like rubbed gold, her eyes, in meditation, a deeper blue, her long, fine legs, covered for only a few inches below the V of her body, were without stockings and flawless. They talk about the bad seed, I thought. Am I bad? Is my seed bad? Have I done this child a disservice by inaugurating the events that led to her birth?
I thrust the thoughts from my mind, poured more brandy, and took a cigarette, for my neglected cigar had gone out. At times I operate with a shrewd clarity that suggests the Cartesian. Her mind and her body are sound, I thought. Her soul is her own affair. That and her history-the long lifeline, the ancestry, formed in squares, somehow to be answered and made to be quiet. That is a private thing, I thought. A matter of single combat.
I swallowed more brandy and permitted the alcohol to inform my system with confidence. She has not been led by the nose, I told myself. She has not been made to feel that what is enjoyable is bad, simply because it is enjoyable. The first headmaster of my school, before the school was ready to greet its first class, journeyed to Britain and offered his prayers for the future at Eton College, as though Eton had been a church. He observed that the Etonians lived in cubicles rather than rooms, so we had cubicles in New England. He noted too that the dormitories lacked basins with taps and that the Etonions performed their ablutions in God-fearing discomfort, using tin wash basins and cold water. We in Massachusetts had chipped tin basins and the water was cold. Later, when it was suggested that the lack of plumbing at Eton had to do with the stone construction of the buildings and with money, rather than having been adopted as a negative instrument of moral power, the headmaster simply refused to entertain the thought. For all I know the boys use tin basins and cold water to this day.
It is a terrible thing to be persuaded early in life that pleasure is by its nature evil and that pain, or at least discomfort, is good for the soul and the spirit. The Society of Jesus used to say, more or less, that if they could have a child for the first eight years of life they would have no fear for his future, or at least for the future of his soul. The seed of fear, by age eight, has been firmly planted and has taken root. The Jesuits might have learned a great deal from New England.
It is an inward-turning thing. The famous smut-hunter, Anthony Comstock, was an inveterate mastur-bator and the journal he kept as a soldier is studded with such things as: "Again when I went to my tent tonight, I sinned against Our Lord." Whether he masturbated while he read the thousands of dirty books he had a mind to suppress, I do not know. Certainly a dirty book persuaded him to masturbate and he had no doubt, no doubt at all, that masturbation was morally wrong.
At my father's dinner table, Anthony Comstock might well have been treated with respect. When I went through my father's papers, with a view to disposing of most of them, I found wads of bank drafts payable to the Watch and Ward Society, and during the years that I knew my father I do not think that even once I heard him use a word he would not have used at the dinner table and in the presence of ladies.
A portrait of my father hangs in the study, a sombre painting in low key, the figure exactly life size. It was behind Rosamund's chair and above her head. I looked up at the face that was much like my own face and met the contemptuous blue eyes squarely, staring down the painted face. In the buttonhole of his lapel was the rosette of the Society of the Cincinnati. The suit was dark and the bit of puckered ribbon leaped forward like a flashing jewel on black velvet. The same rosette is in a small leather box in my bedroom, along with my cufflinks, studs and tie pins. I have never worn it. Perhaps that means that I have progressed, moving at the speed of a glacier, perhaps, but nonetheless moving.
My eyes dropped from the eyes of my father and met the eyes of my only child. She has an oddly gallant face, invested with the suggestion of bravery. When our eyes came into focus, each with each, she smiled at me. My lips were faintly numb with brandy.
"Do you like the school?" I asked.
"Very much," she said. "What was my grandmother like? There's a picture of her at Trotter's, in the library."
"She was long-suffering," I said. "Virtuous, intelligent, diligent and joyless. She despised me, I'm afraid."
"Why?"
"She despised my frivolity. The fact that I enjoyed my food in an un-English way. The fact that I insisted on having a jacket from Saks Fifth Avenue instead of Brooks Brothers. The fact that I danced with the wrong girls and refused to dance with the right ones, in spite of the fact that I had been taught to know the difference. Mostly, I think she despised the fact that I did not embrace my obligations."
Rosamund shook her head. "Yes, there are girls like that at school," she said. "Some of them are real. Mostly, I think they are fakes."
I nodded.
"Mother is a fake, isn't she?" Rosamund asked.
"Your mother is from New York," I said. "It is not quite the same thing. But your instinct is right. She feels that she is a foreigner here."
"Is that why she hates me?"
That was the first time Rosamund had been explicit about her mother. By instinct, I gathered my forces to dissemble, then relaxed and simply said, "Perhaps. Mostly, I think she feels that you stem from me more than from her. She feels that I have neglected her. She is right, though not in the terms she understands. She feels that the bridge of blood is strong between you and me. She has persuaded herself that she is excluded."
Rosamund said nothing. I looked at her, making a small appraisement. It is true, I thought. Rosamund and I have always been in communication, even though there has not been a great deal of conversation, and though we have not been much together. What was important was the fact that we could begin to discuss any subject-a horse, the war, the weather, a book-and discover the accurate wave length at once, without need for a period of psychic warm-up or the verbal fencing most people find essential. It had been that way that night in Bradshaw's room. We had turned at once to the problem at hand and we spoke, each of us, in the absolute knowledge that our words would be understood-as words and as symbols for action and reaction.
I stood up, shrugging my coat into position on my shoulders. "I am going to walk through the garden," I said. "Would you like to join me?"
She shook her head. "I'm going to read for a bit, then sleep," she said. "I want to ride tomorrow."
She got up from her chair easily, bent to kiss me on the cheek, and was gone. I finished my brandy, then wandered through the house to a side door, stepping out into the fresh, clear evening. A flint stone path leads from that door to the principal gardens and I followed it, walking slowly, eyes fixed on the small fine stones at my feet.
The gardens that sustain the environment of this house are important enough to be included on annual viewings for charity, and occasionally a gentleman gardener or his lady will write to ask if the roses can be seen. They are impressive-many low-lying bushes, then a long post and rail fence of weathered oak to which the vines have been espaliered, so that each rose-laden vine stands to attention like a soldier in a crimson tunic. The overall effect is rather sobering. One is aware of the imposition of the directing intelligence, and to many people, to me, for instance, the roses seem to have been brought under a kind of harsh discipline, of the kind to be associated with armies or prisons or boys' schools. Still, there is no denying the beauty, and when the roses are in full bloom the scent has enormous authority when you move close to the flowers.
The roses were in bloom on that night and I squatted on my haunches beside the rank of espaliered bushes, inhaling the fragrance as one inhales the fragrance of a woman. I have never thought of the rose, or of flower scents in general, as bearing very much erotic power. Other smells encourage my glands-the smell of a hotel carpet, of wet bathing clothes, of a woman's clean hair close to the nostrils, of a cheap Gauloise cigarette, of retzina or raki or any of the turpentined wines. The smell of fresh straw arouses me, but not the smell of flowers.
That night the roses seemed staggeringly voluptuous in color and texture and scent. I reached out to touch one, half expecting the petals to wither. The bloom felt warm to my fingers, warm as flesh. I reached for another and a briar pierced my skin between thumb and forefinger. A drop of blood, bright red, rose on my skin, then another. I touched the puncture with my tongue and the taste of the blood was like the taste of semen, warm from the body. I stood erect, then shuddered. Fresh blood replaced the drops I had swallowed. I sucked them away and passed quickly before the wall of roses, moving into an area of intelligently planned perennial beds. The air was like warm, clear wine, palpable as water on the skin, or so it seemed, for it was one of those evenings when one is sharply aware that he moves through the substance of air, and not through imbecilic space.
I passed an hour in the gardens, then walked slowly back to the house. The house seemed empty, though five servants were in their quarters, far off from the principal rooms, and upstairs in her pretty chamber Rosamund was asleep or reading, or simply bathing in the scented air that passed through her opened windows. I walked over heavy carpets, moving from one room to another, searching out the portraits of my ancestors, though I began the search without pattern or awareness that I was doing more than wandering idly through the house.
There are twenty portraits in all, though the only important canvas, as a picture, is the full-length Sargent portrait of my grandfather, Henry Scituate Kitteridge, who made most of the money that was passed on to my father and then to me. I inspected the long head, the rather full mouth, the sharply accented blue eyes, the chin corrupted by power, and I decided that he looked as I look when I am hung over and exhausted. Quite possibly he pursued money with more energy than I have pursued sensation, but I suspect that for him the silent copulations of gold, the noiseless ecstasies of treasury notes reproducing themselves in airless vaults, as if a slender cord of love existed in the darkness where money is stored-I suspect that the perverse way in which money begets its kind was for him the source of true sensation.
I turned away and looked at the others, aware of neither shame nor hate. They were all men who had done the things that had been expected of them, sustained the blood line and gone to their graves each lapped in the knowledge that he had played his part with competence.
But not distinction. Never distinction. Distinction, in fact, was vulgar. To seek it meant to seek attention. To seek attention was wrong, as I had been advised by my father many times when I was a child.
I walked from room to room in this way, the floors creaking slightly under my weight, then mounted the staircase slowly, moving toward my room without thought. I stood at the opened window while I took off my clothes, encouraging the light breeze to caress my chest and my shoulders, my legs, the air like a weightless liquid, enchantingly soft on my inner thighs, almost like the fingers of a woman, tracing the outlines of my body with the tips of her fingers, just grazing the skin, moving moth-like over my thighs and my still-sleeping groin, warming the skin. I turned so that my back addressed the window, made a jackknife of my body, and spread my buttocks with my hands, so that the scented, liquid air washed gently over my rectum and the inner cheeks of my buttocks, causing the glands to stir almost imperceptibly. I became erect and stood up, touching myself with the tips of my fingers. I made a small animal sound, a sound of pain, or so it seemed to me as I heard it.
After a moment I put on a pair of scarlet shantung pajamas and the robe that went with them. I was physically aroused but deliberate, very calm, moving slowly from my bathroom to my wardrobe to my liquor cabinet, where I poured for myself a glass of Strega, walking back to the window to drink it. There was a pale, heatless moon and many stars, and the light that spilled through the window looked wet on the rug. I sipped my drink, the thick sweet spirit clinging to my lips and my tongue. I finished the glass and had another. Then I went into my bathroom and switched on the light.
I do not use hair pomade, but there was a jar of vaseline on one of the shelves of my medicine cabinet. I dropped it into the pocket of my robe. It made the pocket sag, as if I carried a gun under the light, nubby silk. I use a simple French cologne and I uncorked the bottle, shaking the spirit onto my palm, then dabbing my face and my neck. I unbuttoned my robe and dabbed my chest with the scent, then opened the closure of my pajamas and patted myself with it. I corked the bottle, aware of my face in the shaving mirror. The face was serene, the eyes clear, the mouth firm and unflinching. Without thought I raised my hand to my reflection and offered myself a soft salute. Then I switched off the light and went out of the room with firm steps, moving down the hall to Rosamund's bedroom.
The door was ajar and her night light was burning, making a wedge of melon-colored light on the hall carpet. I tapped gently then walked into the room. She was in bed with her book and she looked up, startled for a moment, then said, "Oh, Father. It's you."
"Yes," I said. "It's me."
She put her book aside and sat up straight in the bed. She wore summer sleeping clothes, made of pale blue lawn. There was a loose top of the kind that is called a shortie, and I knew that below the waist were short, very full bloomers-the costume a kind of designer's spoof. I crossed the room and sat on the edge of her bed. She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek, then put her hands on the sides of my face and kissed me on the mouth, gracefully, but not altogether innocently. Then she dropped her hands and smiled.
"You have come for me, haven't you, Father?" she said. "You want me."
A wave of heat swept through my body and the blood pounded in my head. In my groin was a pain, sharp as the pain one would expect to be made by a knife or perhaps by an old fashioned ice pick. The muscles of my body trembled and there was the taste of blood in my mouth.
"I want what he had," I said, my voice strangling. "I want what you gave him."
"I understand," she said, meeting my eyes without fear or protest.
I moved toward her, my body hard, and then my arms were around her and my tongue was in her mouth. She shuddered, her small hard breasts astonishing against my chest. I touched her waist with my hand, then moved down so that my fingers found the elastic that held her bloomers at the top. My hand was beneath the filmy cloth and moved rudely toward the V of her body. My finger sought the upper opening, found it, and quivered for a moment at the lobes, then moved upward with power. Her mouth left mine and she gasped, "Ah, God! God!" She kissed me again with her tongue, than pulled back from me, so that her body ejected my finger, though my hand remained inside her clothing. Her eyes were grave. She looked at me. "You may have me that way if you must," she said. "I will understand. But it is not wise. It is not wise."
"Why would it be wrong?" I said.
"That is a word I use very cautiously, Father," she said. "I did not say it would be wrong. I said it would be unwise. It would not matter so much to me, but I think you would find that you could not live with it. You are not free, Father. You are not free. You feel their eyes on you ... all of those pale blue eyes, watching you, watching your hands and your mouth and your manhood ... the commentary of three hundred years. You are not free, Father. You belong to those eyes, the eyes of the past. If you take me as he did those eyes will kill you. They will cause your heart to wither in your chest."
I got up from the bed, suddenly drained, my crotch a moist, soft mass, a pulpy growth between my thighs. "Of course," I said. "I am sorry."
"You should not be sorry," she said. "I want you. I desperately want to feel you in my body, in the mouth of my body. If you were free I would take you into the depths of my belly and I would cry for joy. But you are not free. You are my love, Father. I love you. Only you. And I know you. I have known you for all the days of my life. You believe in sin. You are not free. It is a pity for you, but in losing the battle you have set me free."
"You are free?" I asked.
"I am free. I do not believe in sin. I believe in life. To me phenomenology is as simple as rain. To feel is to live. To live is to respond to sensation." She smiled at me and reached forward to touch my hand. "I know," she said. "I sound like a book. But I really do not confuse books with life. My ideas are as simple as rain, I say. The logic of my life began when I was ten and one half years old and I rode the stallion, Persian, bareback on a hot summer day. I rode him far out across the fields, my knees high, my thighs blending with the flesh of the horse. When I was far away from the house I swung out of the saddle and slipped out of my jeans and my light silk pants. Then I touched him, the stallion, running my fingers gently over his body, so that he whinnied and shuddered a little. Then I moved beneath him and touched the wonder of his loins with my lips. Then I remounted and rode him at a flat gallop, taking the jumps that I could find, permitting the warmth of that powerful body to enter my own body through the hole that is between my legs and through the hole that is between my buttocks. I felt alive. I enjoyed the pain. I was part of the horse. It was Biblical. It was glorious."
She touched my hand again, then touched my cheek.
"And when I trotted into the stable yard, wearing my pants and jeans again, I was freei I understood that to be alive was to be a horse, a plant, a man, a woman. To be a receptacle for sensation, the guardian of sensation."
She fell back to her pillow and clasped her hands on her middle. Her hair was a tangled pool of gold. Her lips were moist and glistened in the yellow light of her reading lamp. Her young breasts rose under their thin covering. She was alive. I was dead, or so large a part of me was dead that it hardly seemed appropriate to keep the residue alive.
"You are alive," I said. "Really alive."
"Yes," she said, and she nodded. "I am alive. If you want me in that way I will not refuse you. You must understand that."
"No," I said. "It is gone. It is all gone."
I kissed her cheek and left the room quickly. In my own bedroom I examined myself under a bright light. I was limp as a dead worm. And I understood, with a thump in my chest like the thump of a strong electrical shock, that that part of my life had ended. I closed my pajama trousers and went to my liquor cabinet, seeking the bottle of clear raw spirit, the Marc de Burgogne. I sat in a chair near my windows with the bottle and a glass and I drank methodically until morning. I fell asleep in the chair and did not wake up until I heard, through the side window, the crunching of gravel as a car mounted the driveway. It was my wife, back from New York. I did not want to see her.
I shaved, bathed and dressed, all with deliberate care, then went down the back staircase, walking to the garage. I got into my Jaguar and started the engine, shook my head to clear it, then moved out of the garage and down the driveway, pointing the nose of the car toward Boston.
I drove carefully but at speed and rolled into Boston a few hours later, going directly to a garage, where I left the car, then to the Harvard Club, where I booked a room. My head was clear by this time and I was in firm control of myself when I called my lawyer from the room in the club.
"Jerome? Kitteridge here, Bill Kitteridge. I want to change my will. At once. No, a codicil won't do. As far as is legally possible, I want to leave everything to Rosamund."
He lunched with me at the club. I told him again what I wanted done. He responded shrewdly, using terms such as "dower rights" and so on, until I became impatient.
"Jerome, for the love of heaven, what I want to do is as simple as rain. You see that it's done in such a way that the courts won't interfere. I want to give Rosamund power with which to defend herself from her mother. From anyone."
"My dear fellow, of course," he said.
"And Jerome..."
"Yes?"
"I shall be sending you a sealed document. I want it kept in the safe. It is to be opened only if it is in Rosamund's interest, do you understand?"
He made some notes in a small book bound in soft red leather, then addressed himself to the fish on his plate. "It will be placed in the safe," he assured he. "And I shall leave the proper instructions, also sealed, attached to the wrappings of the document."
"Good man," I said. "I don't suppose you'd care to join me in the bar?"
He flashed a grin, glanced at his watch and said, "Afraid not, old Bill. Must keep ahead of the New York lawyers, you know."
I signed the check and went into the bar, taking a small table and ordering whiskey and soda. There were perhaps thirty faces in that room and for several moments I sat in my imitation captain's chair, not moving, simply permitting the faces to invade my field of vision. I had a persistent, compelling conviction that the faces were all alike, as alike as the heads of rabbits slung in a rank from steel hooks in a French butcher shop. The skin color was uniform-a deep red. The eyes seemed the same.
For a few moments it was distressing. Then my retinas seemed to surrender and I made out differences between the faces and the suits and neckties beneath them. My ears cleared, as they do when you descend in an aircraft. Voices penetrated my consciousness.
"The best Number Four who ever rowed for Harvard...."
"I would cut their hair and burn their clothes, then make sure they took a long hot shower. Then I'd talk about taking them back . ... "
"I bought it at twelve and forgot about it...."
"I'm down from three packs a day to two and a half...."
I had the sense that I was a captive audience of one, strapped to this fake antique chair, obliged to listen to meaningless phrases recorded on tape, then broadcast over a faulty public address system. A man thirty feet away caught my eye and waved. I waved back, got out of the chair, and moved rapidly toward the front door. I had planned to pass the night in Boston but suddenly I was afraid of the city. I hailed a cab, rode to the garage, and recovered my car from a lean, athletic Negro, who took my tip with disinterest and without thanks.
I drove out of Boston, aware of various new highways with overpasses, underpasses and cloverleaves, then pointed the car toward the Berkshires, at the other end of the state. When I was well out of the city I bought a bottle of vodka, and found a motel that looked clean and was secluded. I passed the night and the next morning in a large room with pale green walls and a bed with a mattress that shimmied for ten minutes when you fed a quarter into a slot. It was late afternoon when I reached the house, and Rosamund had gone back to school.
I had a light meal in my room, then sat down at my desk to write the pages that precede this one. After an hour of writing, I unlocked a cabinet and selected a pistol. It was one of three that had belonged to my father, and it had recently been cleaned and oiled. I loaded it carefully, handling each shell as if it had a special meaning, then placed the weapon at my desk, near the hand with which I write. I had hoped that the loaded pistol and the knowledge that it would be used would impose a theme and some direction on the pages I planned to write.
I'm afraid the pistol has failed in its literary duty, though it will not fail to perform its primary function. I have written some of the things that seemed to me important as my hand moved across the paper these last five days. I want these things on record, though I am not absolutely certain why I feel that what I have written should be preserved.
I am not free.
Rosamund was right when she told me that. I live partly in the prison of the past, so that I am soaked with guilt, even though analysis tells me that I have not done great harm in the world. I am soggy with guilt because I have indulged myself, because I have demanded a second dessert, and another, and another. Literary men, most of them born in other places, have called Boston the Athens of America. It is not that, but it may be the Sparta of America, a place where arid duty is enjoyed for its own sake.
I did not enjoy duty or the idea of duty, but I failed to make good my escape. I am no Gauguin, no Rimbaud, no man to escape at all. All of my ventures-with sex, with alcohol, with fast cars, with murder-all were detours, various ways of playing truant from myself. I failed to escape because I never honestly tried to saw through the bars.
But Rosamund is another matter. She has escaped. She escaped, I think, the day she rode the stallion, the V of her body spread wide by the hot, powerful body of the horse, her bodily openings bluntly parted, seared by the crisp, sharp hairs of the horse. To touch the stallion with her fingers, to move under his body and kiss his dangerous parts with her mouth-that was a ceremonial act, a puberty rite of her own devising, inspired by awareness of her hot young body, awareness of the shaft of sensation that pierced her groin and carried life up into her belly and into her soul.
She is free. She is free in a way that Lawrence was never free, free in the way the condemned are free. She has embraced life, and the most positive form of life is a hard cock, a driving cock, a tough, brave man-flower.
I have no fears for Rosamund.
I have none for myself.
I shall wait until the documents from Boston reach me, then I shall sign them, have then witnessed in Stockbridge, and mail them back to Boston, together with these pages, done up in a sealed packet.
When both documents are in my lawyer's safe in State Street, I shall return to this room, drink a bottle of Marc de Burgogne, then use the pistol, which is cleaned, loaded and ready for me.
Communication from Mandible Levin, M.D. Dr. Levin is a member of the American College of Psychiatry, of the Psychoanalytic Institute of the United States, and is Professor of Psychiatry at the College of Physicians & Surgeons, Columbia University.
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
I have seen Miss Rosamund Kitteridge on six occasions in my office in New York City. These visits were arranged by the law firm of Cuttshalk, Nevins, Nevins, and Cuttshalk, acting on behalf of Mrs. Oliver T. Bradshaw, maternal grandmother of Rosamund Kitteridge. The sessions were diagnostic rather than therapeutic in character, and each session had a time frame of one hundred and fifty minutes, or three times the normal therapeutic session. Miss Kitteridge was wholly cooperative and at no time attempted to resist the course of the diagnostic inquiry.
After a review of the material provided by my sessions with Miss Kitteridge, together with careful study of the analysis of a Rorschach test carried out by
Helena Finterkind, Ph.D., of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, I have concluded that there are no grounds for suggesting that Miss Kitteridge is suffering from psychosis of any kind. She betrays no serious neurotic pattern, despite her undeniably bizarre behavior pattern. She is, in my judgment, in remarkable close touch with reality. Her goals are realistic and well-defined. She plans to study law and to involve herself, as a lawyer, with a number of social causes that have attracted her interest during the last few years. In view of her unusually high capacity as a student, and her financial independence, this goal seems to be clearly within the realm of the possible.
During her sessions with me, Miss Kitteridge was entirely frank in discussion of her sexual activities, which seem to be at the root of the parental concern for her safety, well-being, and social potential. She has had a variety of sexual contacts, sometimes with strangers, and she has engaged freely in oral and anal as well as vaginal copulation. The range of her sexual activity might best be described as adventurous, and there is certainly no doubt that she has had many more sexual contacts, involving many more partners, than might be considered average in her own peer group in the United States.
She has had sexual activity with multiple partners on three occasions, once in the stables on her family's place in the Berkshires, once in a student's room at Yale, and once in an open field on a farm near Pitts-field, Mass. The last-noted episode involved five United States servicemen recently returned from Vietnam, and the offering was made by Miss Kitteridge, who reports that two of the young soldiers, in her judgment, had not before experienced heterosexual relations involving actual intercourse.
In Western society there can be no question that the seeking out of multiple copulation is taken as evidence of disqualifying neurosis or even of psychosis. In other societies, of course, this is not the case, and I am by no means persuaded that the several adventures undertaken by Miss Kitteridge necessarily suggest the presence of mental illness of any description. She feels that each of the adventures was undertaken out of curiosity, with the exception of the episode involving the young soldiers. That, she maintains rather persuasively, was an act of kindness on her part. She has, at the present time, little interest in sexual activity involving several partners, though she does not rule out the possibility of such an episode in future.
In most cases, sexual excess, and what is called promiscuity, have been taken as the ultimate expression of revolt against the various social units-family, school, the military, the state, business and industry. There seems little evidence to refute the statement made by Miss Kitteridge that she regards sexual activity as the primary means of discovery of her own body, which she regards as central to her personality. Quite convincingly she argues that sexual activity is affirmative rather than negative, that it is a positive expression of the absolute fact of life, more dramatic in content than the taking of food or the evacuation of bodily wastes, or than strenuous exercises such as riding, but essentially linked to these activities as expressions of the life force.
An important factor in framing my judgment in the case of Miss Kitteridge has been the fact that she seems to have controlled the sexual patterns of her life as efficiently as she has controlled other areas of activity, such as the academic, the social, the economic, the civic. Despite a very large number of sexual contacts she has not conceived and has not contracted a venereal disease.
A rather interesting socio-psychological point was developed in the course of my interviews with Miss Kitteridge. When one compares the socio-sexual patterns of the so-called "normal" member of Miss Kitteridge's peer group, as developed in various studies, he discovers that Miss Kitteridge has actually devoted about one half the "normal" amount of time to sex-play and sexual activity. Her homosexual contacts have been minimal and were not traumatic, which is not the case with a very large number of her peers, a fact which has been confirmed by many therapists and which is suggested by contemporary literature.
Many of Miss Kitteridge's judgments, incidentally, seemed to have taken the form of their expression from literature, but the judgments themselves are firmly based in physical experience, subjected to intensive reflection. This young woman possesses superior intellectual equipment and in many cases seems to have anticipated classical literary judgments.
Reference to the reports of physical examination of Miss Kitteridge by members of the medical staff of the College of Physicians and Surgeons persuades me that she has suffered no physical damage of any kind and that her sexual organs and endocrine functions are in every respect normal.
In my judgment, Rosamund Kitteridge is an exceptionally healthy young woman in both the physical and the psychological areas. My recommendation is that she be permitted to shape her life and to fashion her experience in response to her own needs, judgments and intuitions. She has virtually unlimited potential.
Statement of Dr. Dobell Burns. Dr. Burns is a Fellow of the American Psychoanalytical Society and is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons.
I have seen Miss Rosamund Kitteridge in my office in New York City on three occasions and I have examined the reports offered to me by Dr. Mandible Levin. Also, I have conferred with Dr. Levin on two occasions. I am in substantial agreement with Dr. Levin's findings, although I do not agree that Miss Kitteridge might not derive benefit from psychotherapy, conducted, most certainly, on an out-patient basis.
The family patterns are blurred and clarification would certainly be helpful. Miss Kitteridge seems to bear no resentment against her mother, for example, despite her mother's apparent hostility. She feels that her mother is a victim, while she is not. She holds her father, a suicide, in great affection and seems to bear no malice whatever against an uncle who most probably deflowered her by force. Such generosity is highly abnormal, and if Miss Kitteridge's emotions are not directed into the appropriate channels she faces the possibility of serious psychological embarrassment in future, especially when she undertakes the normal obligations of marriage and motherhood.
Substantially, this young woman has been abandoned by her father and betrayed by her mother, and these facts should be brought into significant focus. My recommendation would be that Miss Kitteridge undertake a course of psychotherapeutic sessions, three times weekly, perhaps, and for at least one year.
In my judgment, hospitalization or sequestration of any kind is contra-indicted in the case of Miss Kitteridge. Hospitalization involving confinement would be a potentially dangerous course of action and might well do permanent damage to the young woman.
Letter from Dr. D. S. Cohen, Professor of Gynecology and Obstetrics at the College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Gynecological examination of Miss Rosamund Kitteridge reveals no abnormality of the reproductive organs. Vagina, uterus, and womb are normal and in normal position. There is slight scarring of the rectum, but no more than might have been caused by a bone, pin, or other object swallowed and excreted with the feces. Clitoral development is normal and clitoris is of normal size. Breasts and nipples are of normal development.
Miss Kitteridge first menstruated at age eleven years and eight months, which is early but well within normal limits. She denies venereal diseases and pregnancies, and there is nothing to suggest that she has concealed or obscured the facts.
Laboratory tests included serology, urinalysis, and various vaginal and uteral smears. These tests revealed no abnormalities.
The young woman is in vigorous health and there is no indication that she has suffered from abuse, neglect, or assault.
Very truly yours, D. S. Cohen, Ph.D., M.D.
Statement of Vladimir Smith, M.D., D.Sc, Professor of Urology, College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Examination and the reports of laboratory tests suggest no abnormality in the genito-urinary organs of Miss Rosamund Anne Mary Kitteridge. Miss Kitteridge denies abnormal bleeding or other menstrual irregularity. There has been no damage to the vaginal walls.
V. Smith, M.D., D.Sc.
Letter from Ada Wizotski, R.N., of Miss Potter's School, Lennox.
To Whom It May Concern:
Infirmary records reveal that Rosamund Kitteridge was ill on two occasions during her two years at the school. On one occasion she was admitted to the Infirmary, suffering from influenza. Last year she was treated for severe sunburn. During her residence at the School her general health has been excellent.
Ada Wizotski, R.N.
Statement by Hastings von Schmidt, Ph.D., Director of the Institute for Mental Hope, Grandview, N.H.
I simply cannot understand why you will not permit me to refer to the diary. It certainly reveals the child as an altogether immoral and godless individual, who is in dire need of expert care in an institution like my own. I have read the diary at the request of Mrs. Kitteridge and I have no hesitation in stating flatly that Miss Rosamund Kitteridge is a threat to herself and to society. Her mind is polluted and must be cleansed before she can hope to return to normal life.
As a patient at the Institute, she will be well-treated, but separated from society and restrained sufficiently to prevent her from wreaking harm upon her person or that of her fellow patients. A stay of several years seems to be indicated by the evidence at hand. She will be permitted to read wholesome books and an effort will be made to encourage sublimation of her destructive drives, which have been expressed through promiscuity, abnormality, and immoral activity.
Our chaplain at the Institute, Dr. Harwood P. Pettycutter, is a gifted man who has a kindly but firm approach to our patients. Most of our people, under Dr. Pettycutter's urging, begin to attend church services shortly after they arrive at the Institute and most of them come to worship regularly.
At the Institute, the approach is positive and our chief text-second only to the Bible, of course-is The Power of Positive Thinking by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. Dr. Peale has visited the Institute on many occasions, and has praised our work highly both in print and from the pulpit.
Yes, it is true that Dr. Peale has a financial interest in the Institute, but this interest in no way influences his judgments concerning the institution or its staff.
No sir, I do not have last year's financial statement with me at this time, but I shall be happy to make this available to the Court, after I have conferred with my attorney. You must be assured, however, that profit plays an altogether secondary role as far as I am concerned. I am motivated by the desire to provide treatment for the mentally disturbed patient in a Christian atmosphere. I hand you this folder, in which you will find a list of distinguished men and women who have praised the work of the Institute. No, Mr. Lyndon Johnson was not a patient at the Institute, but we had the high privilege of restoring to health a very dear " friend and companion of that great son of the State of Texas.
No, sir, I regret to say that I have not had the opportunity to interview Miss Rosamund Kitteridge. However, I have had a number of meetings with her mother and I have carefully studied the diary in question....
Yes, sir, I understand. I will not refer to the diary again, though I am at a loss to understand the Court's point of view in this matter.
My degree, sir, is not in psychology but in applied religion-a more demanding course of study and one that includes thorough grounding in the work of Christian psychiatrists as well the theories put forth by the godless Vienna School.
I can assure you that Mrs. Kitteridge selected the Institute as the proper place for her daughter only after an exhaustive survey of the various establishments open to a child as troubled as Miss Rosamund Kitteridge.
Yes, sir. We have agreed on a fee on nine hundred dollars per week. This arrangement, of course, is subject to the approval of the lawyers who supervise the trust fund established to Miss Kitteridge by her late father, poor man.
Your Honor is absolutely welcome to visit the Institute and to see for himself the comfortable quarters provided for our patients, the lounge, the game room, the studio, the occupational therapy wing, the dining hall, from which one gets a view of Mt. Washington. Indeed, sir, it is sometimes difficult to persuade our patients to leave the Institute, after they have been restored to health. They come to think of the Institute as home, and when they do depart, it is as if a family member departed.
Statement of Gunnery-Sergeant Wesley Mygodney, U.S.M.C., taken down in the presence of Commander Joseph C. R. Weber, U.S.N., of the Judge of Advocate's Department, United States Navy, at Mare Island, California.
Major Bradshaw was a good officer. He used to ride my tail a lot, especially when we was in I Corps, making a lot of patrols, but he didn't get nothing serious on me until that time we got hit by VC, north of Danang. He had the idea he could expect more from a regular Marine. I was on point and there were two good guys on my right and my left, guys I knew a long time. All of a sudden, Charlie opens up and I see my buddy get hit. That was Beeson, the one on the right. Then Kir-stein got it, right in the face, I got hit in the shoulder and I started to pull out, but the Major was right behind me.
"Move it, Mygodney," he says. "Move your ass. Return their fire and use your grenades."
"I can't Major. I'm hit," I said. And I showed him the place on my shoulder where I got clipped. "I'm bleeding, sir. I'm bleeding bad."
"You're not hurt bad enough to fall out," he says, bringing his piece up level with my gut. "You're supposed to be a Marine. Move it!"
I threw my rifle on the ground and said, "Okay, Major, I just as soon get shot by you as by them."
For a minute I thought he was going to shoot me right on the spot. Then he said, "Move back, Mygodney. I'll see you get a court for this."
I crawled back, mostly on my belly, and found a corpsman and got my shoulder fixed. Then I had some chow. I figured the Major would forget all about it, on account of people say funny things when it gets hot like that, and on account of I was a regular and a Sergeant.
But he didn't forget. When the patrol came in he put me under arrest. We didn't have a brig up there in the line, so he locked me up in a hut near the perimeter.
"You'll go out on the first chopper tomorrow. Under guard," he said.
I couldn't sleep. My shoulder hurt and I was still scared. I just walked up and down in the hut, wondering what they would do to me, wondering if the Major could make it stick. Then I sat down on the floor of the hut and I guess I dozed off. I woke up all of a sudden and I heard voices near the hut. I got up and went to the window. There was a full moon, or near full, and I could see the hut next to mine as if the sun was out. I saw the Major, staggering a little, a bottle of whiskey in one hand. With his other hand he held this Dao Thi Mai, the one that got zapped a few days later. She was a good looking kid, about eleven, I guess, or maybe twelve, with high, pointed breasts and long legs got a Vietnamese. Most of the grunts gave her stuff they'd bought from the PX-lipsticks and stuff like that. Everybody talked about getting into her breeches, but it was only talk, the way guys talk in a forward area. You'd hear them a lot when she walked by, her round little behind going boomp, boomp, and her breasts loose, with the nipples showing, one, two, one, two, through her thin black pajamas.
She was a teaser, all right, like the Major called her, and I don't think it took the Marine Corps to teach her that. But she was just a kid and most of our guys wouldn't have touched her, except to sneak a feel of her breasts or behind. But this night the Major was good and drunk and his eyes looked wild, as if he'd really gone Asiatic. He was stripped down to fatigue pants and pistol belt, and he drank from the bottle in the moonlight while he rasseled with the kid.
"Come on, you little gook bitch, turn it up for me, you hear?" he said, his voice kind of thick, but real positive, like he meant to have her one way of the other.
She babbled away in Vietnamese, trying to back away from him. He put the bottle on the ground and ripped her pajama top with his hand, tearing it down the front with one pull. Then his hand was at her waist and he tore her pants so that they fell off. She was naked, except for what was left of her pajama top, and the moonlight danced on her hard little nipples and on her round little belly. For a gook kid, she wasn't bad, but she was kind of scrawny, the way they are. I figured she weighed maybe eighty pounds. The Major tops two hundred.
"Come on, bitch," he said, his hand at her crotch. The moonlight was on it. She had a little hair. Not much. "Open up for the U.S. Marines."
He forced her legs apart with his hand, lifting her clear of the ground, shoving his fingers into her so that she screamed, then began to cry. He held her in his arms the way you'd hold a baby, except that his right hand was between her legs and you could see his arm moving in the moonlight. His head moved down and he kissed her on the mouth. He turned a little and I could see him working on her breasts with his mouth, a whole breast in his mouth. I don't know what I felt right then. Excited, I guess. I had had an eye on her, like most everybody else.
He moved her to the ground and parted her legs, then his hand flashed white again and he opened his pants. I saw him move on top of her and I heard her cry when he punched himself into her. I tried to see but I couldn't. He just moved in and out, steadily, pounding her behind in the dirt, grunting a little and breathing hard. Then I heard him make a noise as if he was strangling. After a little he stopped moving but he stayed on top of her. I couldn't move away from the window. I know I should have yelled or something, but I couldn't. I just stayed there, watching.
For a long time he just stayed there on top of her, his face in the moonlight kind of calm. Then he moved again and I could see his private parts and see that he had an erection. The gook kid began to whimper and he slapped her across the face with the back of his hand.
"Shut up," he said. "Shut up and turn over."
He rolled her over, handling her like you'd handle a sack of wheat, and I saw him wet his hand with his mouth, then put the hand on her backside. He did it again, then got on top of her and I saw him force himself into her behind. He went really ape then and as he moved inside her he beat her with his fists, beating the cheeks of her behind and her shoulders, using his fists, then his open hand, then clawing away at her breasts and at the front part of her crotch.
"Gook cunt," he said. "Good tight gook cunt. Good tight gook hole."
She was crying now, but quietly so you could hardly hear her. He really used his fists on her and I could hear the sound as his fists hit her flesh-ca-chunk! ca-chunk! For some reason I said to myself: "Why is the crazy bastard hitting her? What does he get out of beating her up?"
I still don't know but he sure did give her a going over all the time he was using her behind. She just whimpered, then cried a little. Then I heard a little noise and in the dark I saw an old Vietnamese man in pajamas. It was Dao Thi Mai's grandfather. Everybody knew him. He picked up a stick and made for the Major. The Major had just finished with Dao Thi Mai and he was getting to his feet when the old man hit him. The Major hit the old man with the back of his hand and sent him sprawling. Then his hand moved toward his forty-five.
"Get this little cock-teaser out of here," he said. And he kicked the kid in the stomach. "Get her out of her, I tell you. I'm sick of looking at you Goddamned gooks. All V.C. anyway. All of them."
The old man picked up the kid and carried her off into the dark. The Major stood there in a cleared space, the heavy pistol in his hand. Then he said, "Oh, shit! Shit, shit, shit, shit shit, and double shit!"
He stood there for a while like that, holding his pistol. Then he put it away and buttoned up his fatigue pants and walked back to the officers' area, his head down.
I knew he was cracking up, worse than I had cracked up that morning. At least I was wounded. I had a bullet in my shoulder. He had just fallen apart. I could see that. Too many patrols, too much heat, too many dead Marines, too many gooks. Mostly, I guess, too many gooks.
To tell you the truth, I don't really have anything against the Major. He was a good Marine. But so am I. I am a career Marine, the same as him. He should have given me a break in the morning, after I got shot. If he had let me fall out after I got shot I would have been at the aid station, five hundred meters south, and I never would have seen him do what he did to Dao Thi Mai.
But I did see it, and all I can do to protect myself is to tell it the way it happened. I've seen lots of guys force girls, way out in the boondocks, .and I've seen plenty of line-ups, where a dozen guys will use the girl, sometimes for dough, sometimes not. Mostly they were a little older though. The girls I mean. And lots of times nobody had to force anybody to do anything. Some of the young stuff has been in the hamlets for a couple or three years, with no men around except old men, like Dao Thi Mai's grandfather, old wrinkly guys, so wrinkled it's hard to tell them from the women. You take a young gook dame with red hot pants and believe me, they get the hots, and she'll shack up with a Gyrene or with Charlie or even with a Doggie, if that's all there is around. What she wants is something good and hard inside her and she ain't particular about the color of the guy that owns it or particular about which side he's on. And she don't care if she gets knocked up higher than a kite. , It's only natural. It's what you got to expect. And there's plenty of good ripe stuff to be had, if you ever got time to knock it off. That's the big problem. Up in the line, if you got time you're dug in behind a parapet, living in a ditch, scared of the incoming. If you're moving, on patrol or on a big sweep, you don't have time to sneak a feel, let alone get your end wet.
Of course the VC know this. They carry their dames along with them and they don't have the same problems. They shoot over leaflets sometimes. like there'll be a picture of a good-looking blonde chick with a black guy in her breeches, hard at it, and there will be a big smile on the dame's face and a big grin on the black guy's puss, and there's like a caption that says: "Who's fucking your wife tonight, Marine?" or "Who's in your girl friend's pants, G.I.? "
Stuff like that. And once in a while they shoot over some really hot stuff-stories and pictures and stuff like that, like the kind of crap you can buy in N.Y.C. on Times Square. When you are Stateside, stuff like that just makes you laugh, but out here, when you've been in the line for a while, you look at the stuff for a long time and you try to laugh, but it just ain't funny. It ain't funny at all. It gets to you and makes you feel uncomfortable for a long time, and you find yourself eyeing the gook dames in a new way and sniffing around for something-a stand-up job, done fast, or even a quick hand job behind a hut during a twenty-minute break. Of course some guys will fool around with another Marine and I guess they can't help themselves. I never had much use for that kind of stuff.
There is something about war, combat, I mean, that makes you think of women a lot, and when you do think of women you don't just find yourself humming some kind of June-moon horse-shit. You find yourself with your eyes on the moist crotch of a good-looking gook dame, and what you think is: I'd like to shove this in you, sister, right here on the roadside, or right here on a rice clump, with the stinky water all around.
I grew up on a small farm in central New York State,-a poor farm with like ten cows and some chickens and a few sheep. When I was twelve, thirteen, just beginning to grow up, I remember feeling that way in the summertime when the sun was hot, really hot, right through your jeans, so that all kinds of ideas ran through your mind, especially in the barnyard, where you could smell the animals and the hay and straw. Sometimes on a hot day I'd see one of my sisters crossing the yard, nothing on but a faded cotton dress washed so thin you could see through it when the sun was behind her, and I'd get a look at the hair between her legs and I'd think; Jesus, Olga, I'd like to fuck you. Or, Christ, Katerina, I'd like to ram this into you. Or, Holy Moses, Annitchka, I'd like to feel your twat with this.
Mostly, my old man would catch me watching my sisters or the hired girl and he'd belt me across the face with the back of his hand, so that he knocked me down in the dust, and he'd kick me in the behind, hard, then say, "Stop looking dirty at your sisters, pig. Go into the barn and get to work."
I'd pick myself up out of the dirt and chicken shit and hustle off to the barn, my rump hurting quite a lot where he'd planted his big G.I. shoe. I'd climb up into the haymow and flog my mutton. Then I'd feel better and go back to work, building up a real good sweat, laughing to myself at the old man and his kicking me and all. Plenty of times I seen him look one of my sisters over, just the way I did, only more so.
I never bothered with any of my sisters, but I could give you the names of lots of guys that did get into their sister's pants. That doesn't mean I didn't get into the hired girl's belly though. Not the same hired girl, but a young kid just out from Poland, when I was like seventeen. We used to sneak up to the hay loft at night a lot, the last summer I was home.
It was on account of her that I joined the Marine Corps and left home. I knocked her up and she was going to tell my old man. I took off at four o'clock one morning and high-tailed it for Albany. A few days later I was in Parris Island.
The reason I mention some personal details about myself and the female sex is so you won't think I'm some kind of a Christer and that maybe I figure the Major was one hundred per cent wrong. That's not the way I feel. I never kicked a dame out of my bed and I went after a lot of snatch in a rough and ready way, out there in I Corps, in Vietnam, and in Korea, and in Japan. Not so much at home, on account of I am an American and I figure American girls are different. But overseas it's anything goes, like they say, the gyrene is out here saving these people's country for them, so why shouldn't a dame open up for a grunt who has been in the line?
I'm no Christer and I don't hold anything like that against Major Bradshaw. I take my nooky where I can find it and I do all right. Still, I never forced an elevenyear-old kid like that and used her backside and beat her up bad, like the Major did to Dao Thi Mai. He really hurt her bad and I bet she was glad when she got zapped a few days later.
There's some kind of a limit, like. I can't say exactly what it is on account of the conditions vary. It's just something you know by instinct, the way you know when you're moving into Charlie's territory, before he fires a shot. You have to like feel it if you don't want to go Asiatic. That's what happened to Major Bradwhaw, I guess. He just kind of forgot how to live, on account he had been in the line too long.
I know he tried to get me court martialed and I suppose I ought to feel something about him, but I don't. He was a good Marine for a long time and I'm sorry that he fell off a horse and got killed. I never heard of a Marine officer riding a horse anyway. Maybe they did in the old days, before World War II. But not now. To tell you the truth, it's years since I actually seen a horse. Out here the gooks use water buffaloes and we use half-tracks and tractors. But a horse? No. Wherever he was going that day, the Major should have gone by car, or maybe walked.
It's a funny thing. After the Major was found not guilty, down in Danang, I was standing in the corridor outside the big room where the court met-a full court, with lots of brass. I was wearing clean cottons, with my medal ribbons, like you're supposed to. When the Major came out of the courtroom I popped to an saluted. He returned the salute and stopped, looking at me for a long time. Then he put a hand on my shoulder.
"I will order all charges against you dropped, Mygodney," he said. "I couldn't do it before the court-martial findings. It would have looked bad. But I'll do it now."
I braced, old-style Marine, and said, "Thank you, sir. The Major is generous."
He slapped my shoulder with his hand, then tucked his swagger stick under his left arm. He was a good looking officer. He always was.
"You're a good Marine, Mygodney," he said. "That's about all that matters any more."
"Yes, sir," I said. And he moved away, shoulders straight, that little stick held close to his body.
"A good Marine," he said. "That's about all that matters any more."
He may have been right, I guess.
I think he was right.
State and documents submitted by Albert Pavluchik, Agency of Boston, Mass., retained by the attorneys record of the late William Kitteridge: Saltonstall, Cabot, Lowell and Lodge, of Boston.
On the 23rd of August, 1968, I was assigned to investigate certain events in the life of Major Clement Bradshaw, United States Marine Corps. Major Bradshaw was already deceased, so it was not feasible to obtain information from him by means of a statement or as the result of surveillance. The following persons were interviewed:
Marcelline Durand, maid in the Bradshaw household. Oscar Bengstrom, butler employed in the Bradshaw household. Bridget McGann, second cook employed in the Bradshaw household. Mrs. Oliver T. Bradshaw, mother of Major Bradshaw and of Mrs. William Kitteridge of Marlborough Plain, Mass.
Photostatic copies of two arrest records are appended.
Statement of Marcelline Durand follows:
I am French and I do not like to judge the behavior of persons in a country other than France. Still, it was a bad thing that went on between Miss Bradshaw and her brother and perhaps it is best that the world discovers the facts.
The facts are very simple. Miss Bradshaw was attracted to her brother in the wrong way, and attempted on various occasions to persuade him to share her bed. I cannot say when she conceived this passion, but she was very much possessed by it at the time I joined the household. She was then, I think, seventeen. Her brother was a year younger. He is dead and one does not wish to speak ill of the dead. Even so, certain things must be said.
Many times, too many to repeat, I heard or saw improper things pass between brother and sister. A maid is a part of the family, you understand and yet she is not altogether a part of the family. In some ways she is like a dog or a cat. She moves through the household without attracting much notice, simply a creature carrying a tray or a pile of fresh towels. Sometimes it is difficult not to come into the possession of information one might be better off without.
I recall a number of occasions in the household, at the swimming pool and elsewhere, but one incident stands out clearly in my mind. It was on Long Island. The Major, I think, was eighteen. He was already in the Academie Marine at Maryland. Of this I am certain because he wore uniform. His sister was then nineteen.
I had just finished doing the master bedroom and I went from there into the Major's room, going first to his bath to put it in order. I had hardly started when I heard the Major come into the room. I was about to excuse myself and to explain that I would return later, when I heard her voice.
"You are cruel. You are sadistic. You are a monster!" she said.
"You are the monster, Sis," he said.
"You know you want me," she said. "Look at me. Look me in the eyes and tell me that you don't want me."
I could see them in the mirror over the wash basin. They were in bathing costume. She wore a bikini, bright yellow. He wore shorts, navy blue. They were very nearly naked, and in a moment she was naked. She stood before him for a moment, then moved close to him. Their bodies touched. I could hear his breathing.
"Don't, Babs," he said. "It's not fair."
"Take me," she said, seizing his hand and guiding it to the place where her legs joined. "Feel me. Feel me there."
They kissed then, a very long kiss, and when their lips came apart he made a strange sound, like the sound of a wounded animal. "You are driving me around the bend," he said. "For God's sake, Babs..."
"To hell with God," she said. "I want you. I want no one else."
"It's not healthy," he said.
"Wanting is not healthy," she said. Her hands were at his waist, then at the place between his legs, and in a moment she had unfastened his trunks. They fell to the floor and he was exhibited. He was in the state of erection and I recall that he was very large, larger than normal. When she saw him she gasped.
"Please," she said, close to him again. "Please. I am pure. I have never been touched."
She slipped to the floor, on her knees, and her mouth covered his erect parts. He drew in his breath, hard, and his hands moved to her head. She was at him for some time, her mouth covering him, her head moving, her hands stroking his buttocks.
"Jesus," he said. "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! I am blowing my mind. You little bitch, I am blowing my mind."
As he reached the climax, his face was like the face of a madman or an epileptic. His eyes were wild and he handled his sister's head roughly. When it was over for him, he stood above her for a moment, then slapped her hard across the face, first one side, then the other.
"Thank you," she said. "Thank you. Thank you."
"Get out of here," he said, his voice hoarse. "Get out."
I watched her put on the bikini, then I slipped through the second door of the bathroom, leading directly into the hall. I moved swiftly away and had turned the corner before I heard the sound of the bedroom door being opened, then closed.
I could tell you a great deal more, but it would simply be a matter of piling one incident upon the other. It was an unhealthy matter and it is my opinion that it affected the major's mind. In one sense I embrace the belief that the major's sister was responsible for his death. He was a skilled horseman, even when drunk, and I am not fully persuaded that his death was a simple accident. She is a bad one, Mrs. Kitteridge, quite capable of murder.
Statement of Oscar Bengstrom:
In Sweden we have a more advanced attitude in matters between men and women. It is like any other function of the body, for sure, and to use the body in that way is hygienic. Repression is not good for the health of man or of woman.
Here is different. Even engaged persons do not share the bed, except in secret. That is unhealthy, I think. In this country, sex is not arranged in a manner that is constructive, so what happens is that all kinds of bad things go on in the mind.
That is what happened between Major Bradshaw and his sister in my opinion. I was many years with the family and I watched them grow up, Miss Bradshaw and her brother. Especially in the summer you could not avoid discovering what went on, if you were a servant in the house.
It started good and early, I can tell you that. The Major was about thirteen, I think, when I saw them first. It was not a matter of spying. They were in a little summer house, a few hundred yards from the main house and they had come from the beach. It was impossible not to see and hear.
"Let me see it, Clem," she said, and she touched him. "I'll let you see mine. You can touch mine. Have you ever touched a girl there? Touch mine. Put your hand inside my suit. Here, I'll help. There. Higher, a little higher. Move your hand. That's right. Move it slowly. Slowly. Do you feel my hand? You are getting hard. Hard. Will you put it in me? No? Why? That's what it's for, you know, to put in girls. It's really hard now. And it's hot. Don't take your hand away. Move it. Put a finger inside me. Here, I'll show you. Put your finger in me, into the crack. Ahh! Good! Good! You are hard, you are hard. I am going to make it happen to you. Has it ever happened? In bed? No? I will make it happen. With my fingers. But it should be inside, inside, inside me."
I heard him make a funny noise and then he whinnied like a horse.
"That is it," she said. "You are wet. Do you feel it? Feel it? Feel it? Move your hand in me. Move it. Don't stop. Oh! Bastard! Bastard! Bastard! Why did you stop?"
He bounced down the steps of the summer house quickly, running away from her, scared of her. I remember thinking: Poor lad. He needs a woman of thirty.
He ran that day, but he couldn't really keep away from her. After that it happened a lot. Many times she begged him to deflower her but he wouldn't do it. She cursed him sometimes and he hit her, not the way you would a sister, but hard, using his fists on her breasts or her buttocks or her stomach. Once I watched them on the beach when they thought the beach was deserted. It was nearly dusk. The sea was the color of lead. Her hand was moving inside his trunks and after a while I saw him writhe, like a young horse in trouble. Then he beat her with his fists, punching her in the stomach and on the breasts until she fell to the sand. He kicked her in the groin while she was groggy or unconscious, then carried her to the edge of the sea, his feet deep in the wet sand. For a moment I thought he was going to drown her but he simply dipped her body into the surf and held her in the water for a moment, then did it again and again until she was conscious. Then he lowered her to the wet sand, above the surf. Her arms were around him and they embraced. Then they kissed and I saw his hand go inside her bathing costume. I moved away.
That kind of thing happened for a long time, for many years, on Long Island in the summertime and in New York City when the summer was gone. I know it continued until Major Bradshaw was a midshipman at Annapolis, for I saw them once on the beach, she in a light summer dress, he in an officer's white uniform. They made love under their clothes, with their hands. Never, I think, did they engage in mature activities, though I simply guess. It is my opinion, that is all.
Statement of Mrs. Bridget McGann, widow, aged fifty, sometimes second cook in the Bradshaw household:
It's not a thing I like to be talking about. A dirty business and that's for sure and a thing I wouldn't believe at all if I hadn't seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. I grew up in a back alley in Belfast and I never heard of such things. I was shocked and you can believe it.
What I remember best was one summer down on the Island. The Major, I'd say, was eighteen. His sister a wee bit older. I always liked the Major, I might say. I had no use for the girl. Not ever.
Anyway, there was a little cabin, or shanty, you might say, in the piney woods quite a way from the house. The windows had been boarded up but there were furnishings inside-a bed and a couple of chairs and a moldy old straw rug. There was a toilet that didn't work, for the water had been cut off. Still, it was a snug little place in the summertime and we servants used it when we had reason to want to be away from the house and our rooms below stairs.
I was a bit younger then and I used to walk out with a lad named Monahan, second chauffeur for the Dick-steins-Jewish people they were, in Easthampton, mind you, not Westhampton, where the Bradshaws lived. Still, they paid the lad well and they treated him well and nothing black like what went on in the Bradshaw family ever happened at the Dicksteins. Or so young Monahan told me, and he was never a lad to lie about serious matters, you see.
Anyway, that day I met Dennis-that was Monahan's first name-a little way from the Bradshaw house. I had a bottle of Dublin whiskey, left over from a big house party and doing no one a bit of good, since none of the Bradshaws drank Irish whiskey. It was a whiskey that Dennis fancied and we thought to drink it in the old shanty, out of sight as you might say.
We dawdled a bit on the path, engaging in a bit of harmless horseplay and sampling what came in the bottle. When we came within sight of the shanty, I put my fingers to my lips, meaning for Dennis to keep quiet. I can't tell you why I did that. Something went through my mind, like. Anyway, we walked up to the cabin, real quiet, and looked in through the one window that wasn't altogether boarded up. It was a pretty sight we saw, I can tell you that.
There was young Mr. Bradshaw, naked as the day he was born, stretched out on the old bed Dennis and I had planned to use. There was a young girl in the room, a little blonde thing Mr. Bradshaw had asked to the beach for the weekend. And Mr. Bradshaw's sister was there. The young lady who was a guest was wearing her slip and not much else. Miss Barbara was dressed in breeches and boots and she had a riding crop in her hand. She was doing the talking.
"You slut!" she said. "You dirty little whore. How dare you come down here and seduce my brother? My own brother!"
And with that she let fly with the crop, using it like a club, beating the young woman on the face and about the breasts and shoulders, all the while employing language that made the air blue even outside the shant where Dennis and I stood.
She drew blood on the young woman's cheek and after a little the girl fell to the floor. Mr. Bradshaw got up then and grabbed his sister's arms. He held her while the young lady put on her clothes. Then he said, "You'd better go back to the house, Midge. I'll stay here with her."
And the young woman made for the door of the shanty, doubling quickly around to the path, not seeing Dennis and me. Mr. Bradshaw let go of his sister. He shook his head and then he laughed. "You are the end, pal," he said. "You are absolutely the end."
His sister moved toward him, unbuttoning her shirt, then opening the zipper on her breeches. I thought he would smash her face for her but he didn't. She moved right into his arms and I saw his hand go into her breeches, moving inside her pants, and him as naked as the day he was born.
Dennis Monahan took that moment to put his filthy hands inside my dress. I almost hit him with the whiskey bottle.
"Mind your manners," I said in a whisper. "Let's leave the shanty to the Sassenach."
We left the window then and wandered deeper into the piney woods. We found a place under the trees where there was a blanket of pine needles on the ground and we stretched out in the warm, enjoying the good Dublin whiskey.
I will never forget the way she looked, Mrs. Bradshaw's sister. I have seen women jealous and I've seen women in an honest rage, but never have I seen murder in a woman's eyes more clearly than I saw it in Miss Bradshaw's eyes on that summer afternoon. And that's the God's truth.
Statement of Mrs. Oliver T. Bradshaw of New York City:
Yes, the relationship between my son and my daughter was unhealthy. I dislike speaking against my daughter, but she is a destructive creature. She had destroyed her brother, almost certainly. She destroyed her husband, who was not a bad sort of man, though certainly a problem when he had been drinking, and that was a great deal of the time. If she is not controlled, she will destroy her child, and while I don't think that Rosamund holds me in great affection, she is my flesh and blood and I will not see her destroyed.
One reads about troublesome genes, about something called the bad seed. I cannot say. My own family, the Van der Waters, has had its share of drunkards, wenchers, spendthrifts and thieves, mostly unpunished. My great aunt, Miss Catherine van der Water, was most certainly a sexual invert, but she took herself off to London, where she was unknown in society, and did little to tarnish the family name. Actually, when I was a young woman, people thought of Aunt Catherine as an eccentric and felt that she added a bit of spice to a family that has always been unimportantly well-off and indifferently distinguished.
Be that as it may. My own family line is as free of the truly destructive as most and the Bradshaws are unused to scandal of any kind. My late husband, I am entirely persuaded, never told an important lie, never put his hands on a dollar except by legal means, never committed an important or significant act of adultery, served ably in two wars, and expired peacefully in his own house, in the presence of his pastor, his wife and his servants.
But not in the presence of his children. By that time they had gone their ways, Clement into the Marine Crops, Barbara off to the Berkshires, with her proper Bostonian. I did not inform them that their father was dying. At that moment, a serious moment to me at least, I did not want to see them together or to be in the same room with them.
How did it happen? I suppose that's the question that you'd like me to answer.
I can't answer sensibly except to say that it did happen. They were a year apart, my son and my daughter. They grew up together, close together. When they were nine and ten and eleven everyone thought it cute that they were so close, so alike. I thought it was cute. I thought it was charming.
The passages between them had been going on for some time before I guessed what was the actual state of affairs and challenged them with it, each in his turn.
"Mother, you exaggerate!" Barbara said. "We were playing. Just playing."
"It's nothing, Mother," my son insisted. "You're making a lot out of nothing."
But it went on. I could feel it in the house, especially in the house in Westhampton, during the hot, moist summers by the sea. The atmosphere was that of a diseased Greek tragedy. It was sick. Unhealthy. I felt it. It was at about that time that I saw O'Neill's play about his own family, and there was something about the Tyrone house in Connecticut that reminded me of my own.
Yet what could I do? I refused physically to spy on my children. It seemed undignified. I knew that my daughter made abnormal demands on her brother. I could feel it. Yet how does one make such an accusation? The line between affection and abnormality is slight, after all. It was impossible to banish my daughter, equally impossible to banish my son. I decided to wait. I thought that when my son finished his studies at the Naval Academy and took his commission that he would be off the scene, far away. Surely Barbara will want to marry, I reasoned. If I attempt to denounce them now they will simply turn against me.
So I did nothing.
To my sorrow.
When my son was in his last year at Annapolis he was arrested for molesting a child of twelve, the daughter of simple working people who were unable to cope with what had happened. The arrest was made near Baltimore and my husband brought such influence as he could muster to bear. It was an expensive matter I believe, with money paid to the child's parents and perhaps to the police. My husband disliked talking about it and I believe that the shock he felt when the whole thing was repeated hastened his death.
It happened again in another city, after my son had taken his commission in the Marine Corps. It was more serious, for I believe that he actually violated the second child. When we were called in the night, I said to my husband, "He should be in a hospital, in one of those places where they have staff accustomed to dealing with such matters. The Hartford Retreat. I recall that name."
My husband was dressing. He stopped, hands on his shirt buttons, and stared off into a dark corner of the room. Then he shook his head. "No," he said. "I can't do that to him. Perhaps if he's sent out of the country, for duty abroad, the thing will disappear. But I can't be responsible for ruining his career."
"He will ruin himself," I protested. "Do you know why he does these things? Do you?"
"I am not a fool," my husband said. "These things happen. They can be cured in life, not in prison. Not even in a very expensive and privileged prison."
And he went off in the night, or rather in the early morning, to board a plane and to busy himself with the police and the child's parents. It is astonishing, what can be done simply by writing checks in large denominations. My husband paid the parents one hundred thousand dollars and guaranteed the child's medical expenses. I do not know how much he paid the police and the police magistrate, but the charges were dropped and my son was sent abroad, first to Guam, then later on to Vietnam.
He did extraordinarily well in the war. He had not been in Vietnam for six months when he was awarded the Navy Cross. I have the medal here, with the citation and with the other medals. He was promoted to Captain, then to Major in the field. When we were informed of the award of the Navy Cross, I recall thinking: What a pity he was not born a generation earlier, so that he could have flourished as a soldier in a proper war, instead of this confusing activity far away, at the bottom of the world. I recall the excitement attached to men who fought the Germans or the Japanese. People wanted to touch them, to touch the cheek of a young soldier, to kiss his cheek or shake his hand, to wine him and dine him, to help him understand that he was a hero.
One was ashamed that his son had distinguished himself in this war, which seems without rhyme or reason. My son's Navy Cross was a thing we did not mention. It is a pity, I think. Had he served in a respectable war, the experience might have saved him.
I do not know what happened in Vietnam, but I know that my son returned from combat under a kind of cloud. He was here for a few days but it was difficult to find the words that were wanted. Then, the third morning he was home, he said, "I'm going to Massachusetts, mother, to Barbara's place. I need the country. I want to swim and ride and soak up some honest sun."
"Do you think it is wise?" I asked.
"Don't be absurd, Mother," he said.
He was a grown man, a Major in the Marine Corps, and I could hardly forbid him to see his sister, but I was not at all happy about his going to the Berkshires. For several years I had heard unpleasant gossip concerning my daughter. It is not especially to my credit that I believed this gossip, but believe it I did, and I had not seen my daughter for more than a short weekend at a time for many years. I was uncomfortable at the thought of my son in that household, and my concern centered on Rosamund. My fear was vague and without direction, but it clung to me like a soggy cloud. I could not shake it off.
I am ashamed to admit that when the telegram came, informing me that my son was dead, I felt relief-again vague, shapeless, but very real. It was not until weeks after he had been installed in the ground and saluted by the rifles of his Marines that I began to brood over the manner in which he met his death. When I began to turn it over in my mind, it made no sense.
My son was an expert horseman. He had ridden since the age of five, in Central Park during the fall and winter and on Long Island during the summer months. In another era he would almost certainly have been a cavalry officer. He loved the saddle and he sat a horse as well as any man I have ever known, and I rode for years with the Hunt. My eye is good for both rider and mount.
It seemed wildly improbable that he would have been thrown by a saddle horse in the Berkshires, even in fairly rough country. It seemed impossible to believe that if thrown he would have been killed, except in the most freakish kind of accident. I did not believe it. For a time I considered seeking legal help in having my son's body exhumed. I abandoned the idea when it became clear that it could not be done without encouraging a storm of publicity of the rankest kind.
Not much later, my son in law, William Kitteridge, shot himself to death in his home in Massachusetts. A pattern of evil began to form in my mind, but it was like the pattern made by seaweed under water-changing, blurred, contradictory. I wanted to challenge my daughter but I could not find the courage.
That, I am obliged to believe, has been my problem for many years. I was taught never to make a fuss. If I cut my finger, I did not cry. If I bruised my heel, I was silent. If thrown from a horse, I waved aside offers of help or medical assistance. Always I have been reluctant to make a scene, yet if one does not make scenes the play simply cannot progress toward its resolution.
For a long time, of course, I simply had not the will to accept the truth. The things that were happening in my household seemed out of context. They were the kind of things that happened to one of those maggot-ridden, Faulknerian families, depraved and incestuous entanglements played out in an ancient swamp, the steaming air heavy with a sickening perfume of Negroes and diseased flowers, of clotted water and smoldering, rotting bodies. These things simply did not happen to people who lived on Park Avenue during the winters, on the South Shore during the long, bleached summer.
But of course they happen-in life and in the crystalline pages of Mrs. Fitzgerald, verbally an enormous distance from the tangled swamp of Faulkner's pages, alive when he intends it to be so, because a flower as bright as a flag burns clearly above the miasma. They happen. Of course they happen.
I have no real choice in the matter, you see. To protect my grandchild I must murder her mother, not in the flesh but in the heart. I have instructed my lawyers to begin the proceedings that will remove Rosamund from the presence of her mother.
Why do I see myself as fit, when my own handiwork is stunningly bad? Because I have learned something in the process of seeing my family destroyed. I am not a brilliant or a clever woman, but I am honest and I am no longer without courage. I intend to protect Rosamund from her mother, no matter what the cost in pride or what distress to the memory of my only son. I understand the disease and I can deal with it. My daughter cannot do this. She is wracked by diseases of the soul and the spirit. She is hopelessly ill, irreversibly ill-a terminal case.
Rosamund is young. She must live. She must be free to live. She must be free.
In the matter of Rosamund Anne Mary Kitteridge of Marlborough Plain, the Court has heard various witnesses, examined a number of relevant documents, and given close attention to the opinions of medical specialists, educators, and others.
Trooper John F. X. Washalaskie and Miss Sara Anne Lowther have testified to the same sequence of events and there is substantial difference between the Washalaskie account of the episode and that offered by Miss Lowther. The Court does not impugn the testimony of either Trooper Washalaskie or Miss Lowther, and is inclined to agree with Miss Lowther's description of the situation as a "Mexican stand-off."
There seems to be no reason to question the sworn statements of other witnesses heard in the course of this inquiry. The Court is inclined to regard the statements of Duhamel, Woodbridge, Alsop and Parsons as accurate within the normal bounds of memory. The same is true of the depositions offered by Mr. Pavluchik. The document written just before his death by Mr. William Kitteridge is, for the purposes of this hearing, given the weight accorded to a death bed statement.
The Court has considered the record carefully and attempted to put the various statements into useful perspective. On two occasions the Court has interviewed Miss Rosamund Anne Mary Kitteridge. These interviews were conducted in chambers but Miss Kitteridge was not regarded as a witness and the interviews were not taken down and are not in any sense a part of the record in this case.
The Court is aware that action involving custody and guardianship of Rosamund Anne Mary Kitteridge has been taken in another of the Courts of the Commonwealth. Testimony offered in this case may well parallel testimony offered in support of the second action, but this Court has given no weight to the second action in its decision here.
Careful review of the evidence persuades the Court that Miss Kitteridge has most certainly committed various offences actionable under the laws of the Commonwealth. Were action to be taken against Miss Kitteridge as a juvenile delinquent, it would be difficult to put aside the evidence heard by this Court. This Court has disregarded the possibly criminal character of various acts in which Miss Kitteridge has been a partner and has regarded as relevant only such data as bear on her mental competence.
Many of the practises in which Miss Kitteridge has indulged are considered unnatural, lewd, depraved and sinful by many segments of the population of the Commonwealth. Promiscuity alone is often taken as an outward sign of mental illness. Yet various psycho-sociological studies suggest that supposedly "unnatural" practises are the regular indulgence of a large segment of the population, especially among members of the affluent and welleducated phalanxes of our society. Very large numbers of distinguished men and a smaller number of distinguished women have been sexually promiscuous at various periods, and it is doubtful that promiscuity alone indicates a disqualifying psychological illness.
In arriving at a judgment in this matter, the Court has followed a simple rule of thumb-with due respect for the opinions of qualified medical experts-seeking to answer, in each case, two questions. First, did Miss Kitteridge harm, physically, socially, economically, morally or psychologically, her partner or partners in any of the episodes described in testimony or in documents submitted to the Court? Second, was harm in any of these categories inflicted upon Miss Kitteridge during the course of any of the episodes described in testimony or in documents submitted to the Court? In attempting to answer the second question, in each case, the Court has considered any harm to herself done by Miss Kitteridge.
In spite of the shocking and sometimes brutally frank revelations disclosed in testimony, it is difficult, on sober reflection, to support the idea that Miss Kitteridge has in any way damaged the witnesses in this case or others involved in the various episodes described to the Court. The witness Duhamel seems to flourish in France. The witness Woodbridge has been granted admission to the Harvard Law School. The witness Parsons continues his activities in an area beyond the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth. The witness Alsop was inspired to give shape to the closing years of her life. The witness von Brandenburg has recently married. The witness Lowther, according to her own testimony, indeed suffered grievous mental and bodily harm at the hands of Trooper Washalaskie. However, if one accepts the testimony of Miss Lowther, Miss Kitteridge is in no way involved. Immunity granted Trooper Washalaskie in connection with this case obviously offers him no protection vis-a-vis Miss Lowther.
The Court finds inescapable the conclusion that Miss Kitteridge has not knowingly harmed any of those with whom she has had the sexual contacts mentioned in the testimony under review. Three competent psychiatrists and a specialist in gynecology, retained by counsel for Mrs. Oliver Bradshaw, have concluded that Miss Kitteridge has in no way injured herself.
We are left, therefore, with the statement of Hastings von Schmidt, Ph.D., of the Institute for Mental Hope, Grandview, New Hampshire. The Court has given close attention to Dr. Schmidt's testimony, but the Court has also taken into consideration evidence submitted by the detective Pavluchik, through attorneys for Mrs. Oliver Bradshaw, which evidence suggests that payment of fifteen thousand dollars was made to Dr. Schmidt by the plaintiff in this action, Mrs. Barbara Kitteridge of Marlborough Plain. The detective Pavluchik has also submitted a deposition indicating that the Elijah T. Goddard Bible University, from which institution Dr. Schmidt received the Ph.D., was on five occasions cited as sub-standard by the United States Veterans' Administration and that the institution was finally deprived of Veterans' Administration approval, a few weeks after which decision it closed its doors.
Nevertheless, the Court has given careful consideration to Dr. Schmidt's statement. The Court, however, has been somewhat compromised by the fact that Dr. Schmidt has not seen Miss Kitteridge and that his judgments are based on various interviews with the plaintiff, Mrs. Barbara Kitteridge, and on his personal inspection of a private diary said to have been kept by Miss Kitteridge, which diary has been sequestered and sealed by the Court. In these circumstances, Dr. Schmidt's testimony seems to be outweighed by the opinions of other specialists in the field of mental health.
The Court has twice interviewed Miss Kitteridge in chambers, on the first occasion for two hours, on the second for three and one-half hours. Though these interviews are not a part of the record, the Court is inclined to regard them as relevant.
In the opinion of the Court, Miss Rosamund Anne Mary Kitteridge is a superior young woman both physically and mentally. Though she is not a professing Christian, Miss Kitteridge regards herself as a moral person and she is persuaded that her existential morality, or, as she prefers to call it, her "Ethics of Ambiguity" is usefully summarized in the words of the Golden Rule. The Court finds it difficult to reject her statement.
The Court has also been influenced by the fact that Miss Kitteridge has been accepted as a second-year student at one of the so-called Seven Sisters, a prestigious institution, famous throughout the Commonwealth and the Republic for its high standards, intellectual excellence, and its industrious students.
While the Court intends in no way to suggest that it places the seal of judicial approval on Miss Kitteridge's past conduct, as such, the Court feels that the plaintiff in this action, Mrs. Barbara Kitteridge, has failed to establish the fact that her daughter, Miss Rosamund Anne Mary Kitteridge, is incompetent. Motion for committal is therefore denied.
