And so, one hot afternoon, his mother-to-be had gone to a drugstore for a sandwich and a milk shake. His father-to-be had gotten bored listening to a business conference between his father and a farm machinery manufacturer. When lunch hour came, the two older men had headed for a saloon. James, not wanting to start boozing so early, had gone into the drugstore. Here he was greeted by the pleasant odors of ice cream and vanilla extract and chocolate, the swishing of two big overhead fans, a view of the long marble counter, magazines on a rack, and three pretty girls sitting on wire chairs around a small marble-topped table. He eyed them, as would any man, young or old. He sat down and ordered a chocolate soda and a ham sandwich, then he decided he’d look the magazine rack over. He leafed through some magazines and a paperback fantasy about time travel. He didn’t care much about such romances. He’d tried H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard, and Frank Reade, Jr. but his hard Hoosier head rejected such implausibilities.
On the way back, just as he passed the table at which the three giggling girls sat, he had to leap to one side to avoid a glassful of Coke. One of the girls, waving her hand while telling a story, had knocked it off. If he hadn’t been so agile, his pants leg would have been soaked. As it was, his shoe was stained.
The girl apologized. James told her that there was nothing to be concerned about. He introduced himself and asked if he could sit with them. The girls were eager to talk to a good-looking young man from the faraway state of Indiana. One thing led to another. Before the girls had gone back to the nearby school, he had arranged a date with “Teddy” Griffiths. She was the quietest of the trio and not quite the best looking, but there was something about the slim girl with the Teutonic features, the Indian-straight, Indian-black hair, and large dark-brown eyes that attracted him.
Elective affinity, Peter Frigate called it, not above borrowing a phrase from Goethe.
Courting in those days was not as free and easy as in Peter’s day. James had to go to the Kaiser residence on Locust Street, a long trip by streetcar, and be introduced to her uncle and aunt. Then they sat on the front porch with the old folks, eating homemade ice cream and cookies. About eight o’clock, he and Teddy went for a walk around the block, talking of this and that. On returning, he thanked her relatives for their hospitality and said good-bye to Teddy without kissing her. But they corresponded, and, two months later, James made another trip, this time in one of his father’s cars. And this time they did a little spooning, mostly in the back row of the local movie house.
On his third trip, he married Teddy. They left immediately after the wedding to take the train to Terre Haute. James was fond of telling his eldest son that he should have named him Pullman. “You were conceived on a train, Pete, so I thought it would be nice if your name commemorated that event, but your mother wouldn’t have it.”
Peter didn’t know whether or not to believe his father. He was such a kidder. Besides, he couldn’t see his mother arguing with his father. James was a little man, but he was a bantam rooster who ruled the roost, a domestic Napoleon.
This was the concatenation of events that had slid Peter Jairus Frigate from potentiality into existence. If old William had not decided to take his son along to Kansas City, if James had not been more tempted by a soda than by beer, if the girl hadn’t happened to knock over the Coke, there would have been no Peter Jairus Frigate. At least, not the individual now bearing that name. And if his father had had a wet dream the night before or had used a contraceptive on the wedding night, he, Peter, would not have been born. Or if there had been no mating, if it had been put off for some reason, the egg would have drifted off and out and into a menstruation pad.
What was there about that one spermatozoan, one in 300,000,000, that had enabled it to beat all the others out in the race to the egg?
May the best wriggler win. And so it had been. But it had been close, too close for comfort when he thought about it.
And then there was the horde of his brothers and sisters in potentio, unhoarded. They had died, arriving too late or not at all. A waste of flesh and spirit. Had any of the sperm had the potentiality for his imagination and writing talent? Or were those in the egg? Or were they in the fusion of sperm and egg, a combination of genes only possible in that one sperm and that one egg? His three brothers had no creative and little passive imagination; his sister had a passive imagination, she liked fantasy and science fiction, but she had no inclination to write. What had made the difference?
Environment couldn’t explain it. The others had been exposed to the same influences as he. His father had purchased that library of little red pseudoleather-bound books, what in hell was its name? It was a very popular home library in his childhood. But they hadn’t been fascinated by the stories in them. They hadn’t fallen in love with Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler in A Scandal in Bohemia, or sympathized with the monster in Frankenstein, or battled before the walls of Troy with Achilles, or suffered with Odysseus in his wanderings, or descended the icy depths to seek out Grendel with Beowulf, or journeyed with the Time Traveller of Wells, or visited those wild weird stars of Olive Schneider, or escaped from the Mohegans with Natty Bumppo. Nor had they been interested in the other books his parents bought him, Pilgrim’s Progress, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island, The Arabian Nights, and Gulliver’s Travels. Nor had they prospected at the little library branch, where he first dug the gold of Frank Baum, Hans Andersen, Andrew Lang, Jack London, A. Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling, and H. Rider Haggard. And don’t forget the lesser, the silver, ore: Irving Crump, A.G. Henty, Roy Rockwood, Oliver Curwood, Jeffrey Farnol, Robert Service, Anthony Hope, and A. Hyatt Verrill. After all, in his personal pantheon, the Neanderthal, Og, and Rudolph Rassendyll ranked almost with Tarzan, John Carter of Barsoom, Dorothy Gale of Oz, Odysseus, Holmes and Challenger, Jim Hawkins, Ayesha, Allan Quatermain and Umslopogaas.
It tickled Peter at this moment to think that he was on the same boat with the man who had furnished the model for the fictional Umslopogaas. And he was also a deckhand for the man who had created Buck and White Fang, Wolf Larsen, the nameless subhuman narrator of Beyond Adam, and Smoke Bellew. It delighted him also that he talked daily with the great Tom Mix, unequaled in cinema flair and fantastic adventure except by Douglas Fairbanks, Senior. If only Fairbanks were aboard. But then it would also be delightful to have Doyle and Twain and Cervantes and Burton, especially Burton, aboard. And… The boat sure was getting crowded. Be satisfied. But then he never was.
What had he drifted off from? Oh, yes. Chance, another word for destiny.
He didn’t believe, as Mark Twain did, that all events, all characters, were rigidly predetermined. “From the time when the first atom of the great Laurentian sea bumped into the second atom, our fates were fixed.” Twain had said something like that, probably in his depressing What Is Man? That philosophy was an excuse for escaping guilt. Ducking responsibility.
Nor did he believe, as had Kurt Vonnegut, the late-twentieth-century avatar of Mark Twain, that we were governed entirely by the chemical makeup of our bodies. God wasn’t the Great Garage Mechanic in the Sky or the Divine Pill Pusher. If there was a God. Frigate didn’t know what God was and often doubted that He existed.
God might not exist, but free will did. True, it was a limited force, repressed or influenced by environmental conditioning, chemicals, brain injuries, neural diseases, lobotomy. But a human being was not just a protein robot. No robot could change its mind, decide on its own to reprogram itself, lift itself by its mental bootstraps.
Still, we were born with different genetic combinations, and these did determine to some extent our intellect, aptitudes, leanings, reactions, in short, our characters. Character determines destiny, according to the old Greek, Heraclitus. But a person could change his/her character. Somewhere in there was a force, an entity, that said, “I won’t do it!” Or—“Nobody’s going to stop me from doing it!” Or—“I’ve been a coward but this time I’m a raging lion!”
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Sometimes you needed an outside stimulus or stimulator, as had the Tin Woodsman and the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion. But the Wizard only gave them what they had had all the time. The brains of mixed sawdust, bran, pins and needles, the silk sawdust-stuffed heart, and the liquid from the square green bottle marked Courage were only antiplacebos.
By thought you could change your emotional attitudes. Frigate believed that, though his practice had never matched his theory.
He’d been reared in a Christian Scientist family. But when he was about eleven his parents had sent him to a Presbyterian church, since they were having a fit of religious apathy then. His mother cleaned up the kitchen and took care of the babies Sunday mornings while his father read The Chicago Tribune. Like it or not, he went off to Sunday School and then the sermon.
So, he had gotten two contrary religious educations.
One believed in free will, in evil and matter as illusion, in Spirit as the only reality.
The other believed in predestination. God picked out a few here and there for salvation and let the others go to hell. No rhyme or reason to this. You couldn’t do a thing to change that. Once the divine choice had been made, it was done. You could live purely, agonizedly praying and hoping all your life. But when the end of life on Earth came, you went to your appointed place. The sheep, those whom God for some unexplainable reason had marked with His grace, went up to sit on His right side. The goats, rejected for the same mysterious reasons, slid down the prearranged chute into the fire, sinner and saint alike.
When he was twelve, he had had many nightmares in which Mary Baker Eddy and John Calvin had fought for his soul.
It was no wonder, when he was fourteen, that he had decided to blazes with both faiths. With all faiths. Still, he had been the epitome of the prudish puritan. No foul words escaped his lips; he blushed if told a dirty joke. He couldn’t stand the odors of beer or whiskey, and even if he’d liked them, he would have rejected them with scorn. And he’d have luxuriated in a feeling of moral superiority for doing so.
His early puberty was a torment. In the seventh grade he would be called on to stand up and recite, his face red, his penis thrusting against his fly, having risen at the trumpet call of his teacher’s large breasts. Nobody seemed to notice, but he was sure every time he stood up that he would be disgraced. And when he accompanied his parents to a movie in which the heroine wore a low-cut dress or displayed a flash of garter, he put his hand on his pants to hide the swelling.
The flickering light from the screen would reveal his sin. His parents would know what his thoughts were, and they would be horrified. He’d be ashamed to look in their faces forever after.
Twice his father talked to him about sex. Once, when he was twelve. Apparently, his mother had noticed some blood on his bath towel and spoken to his father, James Frigate, who, with a good deal of hemming and hawing and a twisted grin, had asked him if he was masturbating. Peter was both horrified and indignant. He had denied it, though his father acted as if he really did not believe him.
Investigation revealed, however, that, when bathing, Peter had not been peeling back his foreskin to wash under it. He had not wanted to touch his penis. As a result, the smegma had built up under the skin. How this could cause a bleeding neither he nor his father knew. But he was advised to wash thoroughly every time he took a bath. Also, he was told that jacking off rotted the brain, and he was given the example of the village idiot of North Terre Haute, a boy who publicly masturbated. With a grave face, his father told him that anybody who jerked off would become a drooling imbecile. Maybe his father believed that. So many of his generation did. Or maybe he’d just passed on that horrifying tale, purveyed for only God knew how many centuries or even millennia to scare his son.
Peter would find out that that was superstition, a reasoning from effect to cause, totally invalid. It was in a class with the belief that if you ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while you were sitting in the outhouse, the devil would get you.
Peter hadn’t lied. He had not been indulging in the sin of Onan. Though why it was called Onanism he didn’t know, since Onan hadn’t masturbated. Onan had just used what Peter overheard his father refer to as the IC (Illinois Central) railroad technique. Pulling out in time.
Some of his junior high school acquaintances—the “racy” ones—bragged about beating their meat. One of these low-lifers, a wild kid named Vernon (died in a crash in 1942 while training to be an Air Force bombardier) had actually masturbated in the rear of a streetcar on the way home from a basketball game. Peter, watching, had been fascinated and sickened at the same time. The other kids had just giggled.
Once he and a friend, Bob Allwood, as puritanical as he, had been going home on a streetcar after a late movie. There was no one else aboard except the operator and a hard-looking peroxide blonde in the front seat. As the trolley came up toward the end of the line on Elizabeth Street, the operator had closed the curtain around himself and the blonde and turned the overhead light off. Bob and Pete, watching from the back of the car, saw the woman’s legs disappear. It wasn’t until a few minutes later that Peter understood what was happening. The woman had to be sitting on the ledge in front of him, or on the control post itself, facing the operator, while he screwed her. Peter didn’t say a thing about it to Bob until after they’d gotten off the car. Bob had refused to believe it.
Peter was surprised at his own reaction. He’d been more amused than anything. Or perhaps envious was more appropriate. The “proper” reaction came later. That man and his doxy would go to hell for sure.
That was a long time ago. The time had come when Peter had laid a woman in front of the altar of an empty church, though he was drunk when he did it. This was in a Roman Catholic cathedral in Syracuse, and the woman had been Jewish. It had been her idea. She hated the religion because the tough Polish Catholic kids in the Boston high school she attended had roughed her up several times because she was a Jew. The idea of defiling the church had seemed like a good idea at the time, though next morning he sweated thinking of what would have happened if they’d been caught. But doing it in a Protestant church wouldn’t have appealed to him so much. Protestant churches had always seemed barren places to him. God wouldn’t be caught dead there, but He did like to hang around Catholic places of worship. Peter had always had a leaning toward Romanism and had twice been on the verge of converting. You could only blaspheme where God was.
Which was a curious attitude. If you didn’t believe in God, why bother to blaspheme?
As if that wasn’t bad enough, he and Sarah had entered a number of apartment houses on a street whose name he couldn’t recall now. It had once been a very posh district where the rich had built huge, gingerbreaded, many-cupolaed houses. Then they’d moved out, and the houses had been made into apartments. Mostly affluent old people, widows and aged couples, lived there. The two of them had wandered through the halls of three buildings where all the doors were locked tight and not a sound except the muffled voice of TV sets was heard. They’d been on the third floor of the fourth building, and Sarah was down on her knees before him, when a door opened. An old woman stuck her head out into the hall, screamed, and slammed the door shut. Laughing, he and Sarah had fled out into the street and up to her apartment.
Later, Peter had sweated thinking about what would have happened if they’d been caught by the police. Jail, public disgrace, the loss of his job at General Electric, the shame felt by his children, the wrath of his wife. And what if the old woman had had a heart attack? He searched the obituary columns and was relieved to find that no one on that street had died that night. This in itself was a rarity, since Sarah said that she couldn’t look out of the window from her apartment without seeing a funeral procession going down that street.
He also looked for a report of the incident in the papers. If the old lady had called the police, however, there was nothing in the papers about it.
A thirty-eight-year-old man shouldn’t be doi
ng stupid childish things like that, he had told himself. Especially if innocent people might be hurt. Never again. But as the years passed, he chuckled when he thought of it.
Though an atheist at fifteen, Frigate had never been able to rid himself of doubts. When he was nineteen, he had attended a revival meeting with Bob Allwood. Allwood had been raised in a devout fundamentalist family. He, too, had become an atheist, but this lasted one year. In that time, Bob’s parents had died of cancer. The shock had set him thinking about immortality. Unable to endure the idea that his father and mother were dead forever, that he’d never see them again, he had begun visiting revival meetings. His conversion had taken place when he was eighteen.
Peter and Bob used to see much of each other, since they had been playmates in grade school and had gone to the same high school. They argued much about religion and the authenticity of the Bible. Finally, Peter agreed to go with Bob to a mass meeting at which the famous Reverend Robert Ransom was preaching.
Much to Peter’s astonishment, he found himself deeply stirred, though he had come to ridicule. He was even more amazed when he found himself on his knees before the reverend, promising to accept Jesus Christ as his Lord.
That promise was broken within a month. Peter just could not hold fast to his convictions. In Allwood’s parlance, he had “backslid,” “fallen from grace.”
Peter told Bob that his early religious conditioning and the passionate exhortations of the converts had been responsible for putting him in a fine frenzy of faith.
Allwood continued to argue with him, to “wrestle with his soul.” Peter remained adamant.
Peter approached the age of sixty. His schoolmates and friends were dying off; he himself was not in good health. Death was no longer a long way off. When he was young, he had thought much about the billions who had preceded him, been born, suffered, laughed, loved, wept, and died. And he thought of the billions who would come after him, who would be hurt, be hated, be loved, and be gone. At the end of Earth, all, caveman and astronaut, would be dust and less than dust.