(Oh, I’d heard it. I have news for you, infant.)
(Yes, sir? I mean ‘Yes, Miss Smith,’ dearie. ‘Miss’ Smith—what a giggle I got when I first heard it. But it’s nice, since it means both of us. Say, Rosy is all right, isn’t he? Puts more into hand-kissing than some studs do into a romp on the pad.) (Sweetheart, you not only have a dirty mind—but it veers.) (How can I help having a dirty mind when it’s actually yours, Boss—I’m hip deep in the stuff.) (Shut up, Eunice; it’s my turn. The swing scene is nothing new. The Greeks had a word for it. So did the Romans. And so on through history. The orgy was relished in Victorian England. It was far from unknown in my youth in the heart of the Bible Belt, even though it was dangerous in those days. Eunice, as long as we are trying to get easy with each other, let me say this: Anything you’ve ever seen, or tried, or heard of, I did, or had done to me, before your grandmother was born—and if I liked it, I did it again and again and again. No matter how risky.)
The second voice was silent a moment. (Maybe we simply start younger today. Less risk and fewer rules.)
(Beg to doubt.)
(Oh, I’m sure we do. I told you how young I was when I got caught. Fifteen. And I started a year younger.)
(Eunice my love, the main difference between the young and the old, the cause of the so-called Generation Gap—a gap in understanding that has existed throughout all time—is that the young simply cannot believe that the old ever really were young…whereas to an old person his youth is something that happened just last week, and it annoys the hell out of him when someone in effect denies that this old duffer ever owned a youth.)
(Boss?) The thought was gentle and soft.
(Yes, dearest?)
(Boss, I always knew you were young underneath, behind all those horrid liver spots—knew it when I was alive, I mean…and wished dreadfully that you weren’t old and sick in your body. It hurt me so, to see you hurt. Sometimes I went home and cried. Especially when it made you cross and you would say something you didn’t mean and then be sorry. I wanted you to get well…and knew you couldn’t. I was one of the first to sign up—Joe and I both—as soon as word reached us through the Rare Blood Club. Couldn’t do it sooner or you might have found out—and forbidden me to.)
(Eunice, Eunice!)
(Don’t you believe me?)
(Yes, darling, yes…but you’re making us cry.)
(So blow your nose, Boss, and stop it. Because everything turned out all right. Look, you wanted to hear about my little bastard—will that take your mind off troubles we no longer have?)
(Uh…only if you want to, Eunice. My love. My only love.)
(I made it plain that I wanted to tell you, didn’t I? I’ll tell all—and that’ll take a long time!—if you want to hear. If you won’t be shocked. Say ‘Please,’ Boss—because the details of my sex life ought to help you in handling your own sex life. Our sex life, that is. Or did you mean that stuff you were shoveling at Dr. Garcia about not being ‘actively female’?)
(Uh… I don’t know, Eunice, I haven’t been a woman long enough to know what I want. Shucks, darling, instead of thinking like a girl I’m still ogling girls. That little redheaded nurse, for example.)
(So I noticed.)
(Was that sarcasm? Or jealousy?)
(What? I do not intend to be sarcastic, Boss dear; I don’t want us ever to be nasty with each other. And jealousy is just a word in the dictionary to me. I simply meant that, when Winnie was making up our face and you were sneaking a peek down the neck of her smock every time she leaned over, I was staring as hard as you were. No bra. Cute ones, aren’t they? Winnie is female and knows it. If you were male in your body as well as in your head, I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw a bed.)
(I thought you said you weren’t jealous?)
(I’m not. I merely meant that Winnie. would trip you and beat you to the floor. But I was not criticizing her. I’ve nothing against girls. A girl can be quite a blast.)
Johann was slow in answering. (Eunice, uh, were you implying that you have—used to have—relations with other, uh—)
(Oh, Boss, don’t be so early-twentieth-century; we’ve turned the corner on the twenty-first. Tell it bang. Do you mean ‘Am I a Lez?’ Homosexual?)
(No, not at all! Well, perhaps I did mean that in a way. At least I wanted you to clear up what you meant. As it didn’t seem possible. You were married and—or was your marriage just a cover-up? I suppose—)
(Quit supposing, dear. Bang. I was not homosexual and neither is Joe. Joe is a tomcat always ready to yowl, and wonderful at it. Except when he’s painting; then he forgets everything else. But ‘homosexual’ isn’t a word that bothers anyone my age, either the word or the fact. And why not, with the Government practically subsidizing it with propaganda about too many babies that starts in kindergarten? If I had taken the Bilitis pledge, I would never have had that phony ‘rheumatic fever.’ But, while girls are cuddly and I’ve never had any inhibitions about them, I was—always—far too interested in boys to live on Gay Street. But which team are you on, Boss? One minute you’re telling me how you drool over Winnie, the next minute you seem upset that I drooled, too. So what are you going to do with us, dear? Left-handed? Right-handed? Both hands? Or no hands at all? I guess I could stand anything but the last. Do I have a vote?)
(Why, of course you do.)
(I wonder, Boss. You sputtered when I suggested that you could thank Doc Hedrick in bed…and sparked some more at the notion of going to bed with a girl. Sure you’re not planning on sewing it up?)
(Oh, Eunice, don’t talk silly! Beloved, happy as I am that we are together, that ‘Generation Gap’ is still there. My fault this time, as I have a lifelong habit of being careful in what I say to a woman, even one I am in bed with—)
(You’re certainly in bed with me!)
(I certainly am. And I’m finding it ever harder to be flatly truthful with you—‘tell it bang’ as you say—than it is to adjust to being female. But before Dr. Hedrick brought up the matter I saw the implications—and complications—and consequences—of being female…and young…and rich.)
(‘Rich.’ I hadn’t thought about that one.)
(Eunice beloved, we’re going to have to think about it. Of course we’re going to be ‘actively female’—)
(Hooray!)
(Quiet, dear. If we were poor, the simplest thing would be to ask your Joe to take us back. If he would have us. But we aren’t poor; we’re embarrassingly rich—and a fortune is harder to get rid of than it is to accumulate. Believe me. When I was about seventy-five, I tried to unload my wealth while I was still living so that it would not go to my granddaughters. But to give away money without wasting most of it in the process is as difficult as getting the genie back into the bottle. So I gave up and simply arranged my will to keep most of it out of the hands of my alleged descendants.)
(‘Alleged’?)
(Alleged. Eunice, my first wife was a sweet girl, much like yourself, I think. But the poor dear died in childbirth—bearing my one son, also dead for many years now. Agnes had made me promise to marry again and I did, almost at once. One daughter from that marriage and her mother divorced me before the child was a year old. I married a third time—again one daughter, again a divorce. I never knew my daughters well and outlived both of them and their mothers. But—Eunice, you’re a rare-blood yourself; do you know how blood types are inherited?)
(Not really.)
(Thought you might. Being mathematically inclined, the first time I laid eyes on an inheritance chart for blood types I understood it as well as I understand the multiplication tables. Having lost my first wife to childbirth, with both my second and third wives I made certain that donors were at hand before they went into delivery rooms. Second wife was type A, third was type B—years later I learned that both my putative daughters were type O.)
(I think I missed something, Boss.)
(Eunice, it is impossible for a type-AB father to sire type-O children. Now wait
—I did not hold it against my daughters; it was none of their doing. I would have loved Evelyn and Roberta—tried to, wanted to—but their mothers kept me away from them and turned them against me. Neither girl had any use for me…until it turned out that I was going to dispose of a lot of money someday—and then the switch from honest dislike to phony ‘affection’ was nauseating. I feel no obligation to my granddaughters since in fact they are not my granddaughters. Well? What do you think?)
(Uh—Boss, I don’t see any need to comment.)
(So? Who was it not five minutes ago was saying that we ought to be absolutely frank with each other?)
(Well… I don’t disagree with your conclusion, Boss, just with how you reached it. I don’t see that heredity should enter into it. Seems to me you are resenting something that happened a long time ago—and that’s not good. Not good for you, Boss.)
(Child, you don’t know what you’re talking about.)
(Maybe not.)
(No ‘maybes’ about it. A baby is a baby. Babies are to love and take care of and that’s what this whole bloody mess is about, else none of it makes sense. Eunice, I told you that my first wife was something like you. Agnes was my Annabel Lee and we loved with a love that was more than a love and I had her for only a year—then she died giving me my son. Then I loved him just as much. When he was killed something died inside me…and I made a foolish fourth marriage hoping to bring it alive again by having another son. But I was lucky that time—no children and it merely cost me a chunk of money to get shut of it.)
(I’m sorry, Boss.)
(Nothing to be sorry about now. But I was telling you something else—Eunice, when we’re up and around, remind me to dig into my jewelry case and show you my son’s ‘dog tag’—all that I have left of him.)
(If you want to. But isn’t that morbid, dear? Look forward, not back.)
(Depends on how you look back. I don’t grieve over him; I’m proud of him. He died honorably, fighting for his country. But that military dog tag shows his blood type. Type O.)
(Oh.)
(Yes, I said ‘O’. So my son was no more my physical descendant than were my daughters. Didn’t keep me from loving him.)
(Yes, but—you learned it from his identification tag? After he was dead?)
(Like hell I did. I knew it the day he was born; I had suspected that he might not be mine from the time Agnes turned out to be pregnant—and I accepted it. Eunice, I wore horns with dignity and always kept suspicions to myself. Just as well—as all my wives contributed to my cornute state. Horns? Branching antlers! The husband who expects anything else is riding for a fall. But I never had illusions about it, so it never took me by surprise. No reason why it should, as I got the best parts of my own training from married women, starting clear back in my early teens. I think that happens in every generation. But horns make a man’s head ache only when he’s stupid enough to believe that his wife is different—when all the evidence he has accumulated should cause him to assume the exact opposite.)
(Boss, you think all women are like that?)
(Oh, no! In my youth I knew many married couples in which both bride and groom—to the best of my knowledge and belief—went to the altar virgin and stayed faithful a lifetime. There may be couples like that among you kids today.)
(Some, I think. But you couldn’t prove it by me.)
(Nor by me. Nor by all the kinseys who ever collected statistics. Eunice, sex is the one subject everybody lies about. But what I was saying is this: A man who takes his fun where he finds it, then marries and expects his wife to be different, is a fool. I wasn’t that sort of fool. Let me tell you about Agnes.
(Agnes was an angel—with round heels. That’s obsolete slang which means what it sounds like. I don’t think Agnes ever hated anyone in her short life and she loved as easily as she breathed. She—Eunice, you said you had started young?)
(Fourteen, Boss. Precocious slut, huh?)
(Precocious possibly, a slut never. Nor was my angel Agnes ever a slut and she happily gave away her virginity—so she told me—at twelve. I—)
(‘Twelve!’)
(Surprised, dear? That Generation Gap again; your generation thinks it invented sex. Agnes was precocious; sixteen was fairly young in those days, from what a male could guess about it—not much!—and seventeen or eighteen was more common. I think. Actually encountering female virginity and being certain of it—well, I’m no expert. But Agnes wasn’t hanging up a record even for those days; I recall a girl in my grammar school who was ‘putting out,’ as kids called it then, at eleven—and getting away with it cold, teacher’s pet and butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth and winning pins for Sunday School attendance.
(My darling Agnes was like that except that Agnes’s goodness wasn’t pretense; she was good all the way through. She simply didn’t see anything sinful about sex.)
(Boss, sex is not sinful.)
(Did I ever say it was? However, in those days I felt guilty about it, until Agnes cured me of such nonsense. She was sixteen and I was twenty and her father was a prof at the cow college I went to and I was invited to their house for dinner one Sunday night—and our first time happened on their living room sofa so fast it startled me, scared me some.)
(What frightened you, dear? Her parents?)
(Well, yes. Just upstairs and probably not asleep. Agnes being so young herself—age of consent was eighteen then and while I don’t recall ever letting it stop me, boys were jumpy about it. And that night I wasn’t prepared, not having expected it.)
(Prepared how, Boss?)
(Contraception. I had a year to go to get my degree, and no money and no job lined up, and having to get married wasn’t something I relished.)
(But contraception is a girl’s responsibility, Boss. That’s why I felt so silly when I got caught. I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking a boy to marry me on that account—even if I had been certain which boy. Once I knew I was caught I gritted my teeth and told my parents and took my scolding—Daddy was going to have to pay my fine; I was not yet licensed. Grim—but no talk of getting married. I wasn’t asked who did it and never volunteered an opinion.)
(Didn’t you have an opinion, Eunice?)
(Well…just an opinion. Let me tell it bang. Our basketball team and us three girl cheerleaders were all in the same hotel, with the coach and the girls’ phys-ed teacher riding herd on us. Only they didn’t; they went out on the town. So we gathered to celebrate in the suite the boys were in. Somebody had lettuce. Marijuana. I took two puffs and didn’t like it—and went back to gin and ginger ale which tasted better and was almost as new to me. Didn’t have any intention of swinging; it wasn’t the smart scene at our school and I had a steady I was faithful to—well, usually—who wasn’t on the trip. But when the head cheerleader took her clothes off—well, there it was. So I counted days in my mind and decided I was safe by two days and peeled down, last of the three to do so. Nobody made me do it, Boss, no slightest flavor of rape. So how could I blame the boys?
(Only it turned out I didn’t have two days leeway and by the middle of January I was fairly certain. Then I was certain. Then my parents were certain—and I was sent south to stay with an aunt while I recovered from rheumatic fever I never had. And recovered two hundred sixty-nine days after that championship game, barely in time to enter school in the fall. And graduated with my class.)
(But your baby, Eunice? Boy? Girl? How old now? Twelve? And where is the child?)
(Boss, I don’t know. I signed an adoption waiver so that Daddy would get his money back if somebody with a baby license came along. Boss, is that fair? Five thousand dollars was a lot of money to my father—yet anyone on Welfare gets off free, or can even demand a free abortion. I can’t see it.)
(You changed the subject, dear. Your baby?)
(Oh. They told me it was born dead. But I hear they usually say that if a girl signs the papers and somebody is waiting for it.)
(We can find out. If your baby didn’t live, then the f
ine was never levied. Didn’t your father tell you?)
(I never asked. It was a touchy subject, Boss. It was ‘rheumatic fever,’ never an unlicensed baby. Just as well, I guess, as when I turned eighteen, I was licensed for three with no questions raised.)
(Eunice, no matter what cover-up was used, if your baby is living, we can find it!)
The second voice did not answer. Johann persisted. (Well, Eunice?)
(Boss…it’s better to let the dead past bury its dead.)
(You don’t want children, Eunice?)
(That wasn’t what I said. You said it didn’t matter that your son wasn’t really yours. I think you were right. But doesn’t it cut both ways? If there is a child somewhere, almost thirteen now—we’re strangers. I’m not the mother who loved it and brought it up; I’m nobody. Really nobody—you forget that I was killed.)
(Eunice! Oh, darling!)
(You see? If we found that boy, or girl, we couldn’t admit that I’m still alive—alive again, I mean—inside your head. That’s the thing we don’t dare admit…or back they come with those horrid straps and we’ll never be free.) She sighed. (But I wish I could have had your baby. You were telling me about Agnes, dearest. Tell me more. Am I really somewhat like her?)
(Very much like her, Eunice. Oh, I don’t mean she looked like you. But if I believed in reincarnation—I don’t—I would be tempted to think that you were Agnes, come back to me.)
(Maybe I am. Why don’t you believe in it, Boss?)
(Uh…do you?)
(No. I mean I didn’t believe in it, even though most of our friends did. I couldn’t see any reason to believe either way, so I kept my mouth shut. But, Boss, it gives one a different viewpoint to have been killed…and then turn out not to stay dead. Dearest Boss—you think I’m a figment of your imagination, don’t you?)
Johann did not answer. The voice went on: (Don’t be afraid to admit it, Boss; you won’t offend me. I know I’m me. I don’t need proof. But you do. You need to know. Admit it, darling. Be open with me.)