Used with precision, and a tongue in the corner of the mouth, the key worked in the secretary-desk drawer, and Ralph drew it open. In the foreground were three fresh packages of cigarettes. It occurred to him that, watching her pennies as she did, his mother kept count of this supply. This consideration, along with his distaste for smoking to begin with, discouraged him from the venture.
He must find another sneaky project with which to appease Hauser. Or simply conceal from Horse that he had been alone at suppertime. He had no keen natural taste for mischief. It had always seemed idiotic to him to go about on Ticktack Night, the eve of Halloween, throwing corn kernels against people’s windows and hiding their trash-can lids; then coarse and rude to appear the following night in costume and false face to collect free candy from those who had been harassed.
When he explained this to Hauser, Horse said: “Christ, Sandifer, you don’t know how to have fun.” Thereafter he confined his efforts to dissuading his friend, as they got older, from throwing rocks at windows and setting fire to garages, but not from giving parked cars four flat tires or strewing back steps with garbage. Horse had to be given some leeway in the venting of his strange rage against normal, decent people. Ralph saw it as his own task to keep this within the limits of sanity without showing himself up as coward, ass-kisser, pansy.
Along with the cigarettes the drawer held several of those big dull-red envelope file-folders fastened each with its own attached string. These had a deadly, legal look: no doubt they were stuffed with deeds and mortgages and tax bills signed and sealed and recorded in the county courthouse, a big solid block of dreariness, staffed by baldheaded men and dumpy women. Ralph had been there once, in the city, with his father years ago, stopping off en route to get a baseball glove at a discount from a guy who owed his dad a favor.
Ralph wondered whether prying into these documents would meet his obligation to Hauser. What people owed on their houses and how much tax they paid was confidential data. The trouble was this crap bored him so much that he could not consider its revelation a crime. However, the drawer had been locked, and he had opened it with an unofficial key. “I broke into the desk and went through my parents’ legal records,” he could say, and leave it at that. Hauser always soon interrupted anyway in his jealous urgency to go you one better: “My old man’s two hundred bucks in debt to some sheeny finance company. They got him by the nuts.”
If Ralph were going to say that though, he should actually do it, however quickly. He undid the string on one folder and looked within. He saw a leatherette volume inscribed in gold My Diary—1939 It was closed with a strap that terminated in a little brass lock.
Dropping it back inside the folder, he saw something else: a little blue bankbook. He claimed it and opened it to a page listing several deposits and interest payments, at the end of which appeared the sum of $752.87. The name at the top was Mary Joy, and the bank had a city address. He returned it to the big envelope and tied the strings.
He undid one more folder and found inside not a private diary as such but a regular book, a volume bound in purple cloth and entitled, in silver script, My Diary, 1936, by Mary Joy. This book he had never seen around the house. He did not as yet intrude within its covers. In the folder was also a sheaf of opened and smoothed letters, the parent envelopes secured above each by the giant-sized crisscross paperclip that held the lot.
The one on top, when the canceled envelope was bent away, was revealed to read:
DEAR MARY JOY:
Here’s your copy. We trust you are well under weigh on the volume for 1937. Some early reactions from our members have come in and are altogether positive. Your feminine approach—whether or not you are actually a woman—is unique among the editions we have printed thus far. We anticipate that it will create its own demand for subsequent volumes.
Indeed, so strongly do we feel this that we are in a position to offer you a fifty-dollar bonus for the next, as an incentive that might encourage you to complete it without delay. If you could complete the current volume by the end of August, we might then go to press and have it ready for distribution to the members as the Holiday selection.
Also, another note of interest. Responding to the requests of a number of members who own personal moving-picture projectors or belong to social groups which have one in common, we are considering the making of movies, probably, at least to begin with, of the one-reel length, say fifteen minutes each of screen time. Perhaps you could think of incidents from the Diaries which might come across with special effectiveness in such a form, and prepare a scenario or two on speculation. Naturally, these should be confined to scenes involving adults. We would not have the facilities to train animals, and such episodes as the seduction of the giant colored imbecile by the eight-year-old Mary Joy, though one of the high points of the ’36 Diary, would for obvious reasons not be practical. Thus far, by using only first-class mail and by proceeding with the caution of a private club whose members (including certain highly placed members of the legal profession) have a mutual interest in discretion, we have not run afoul of the law, and we wish to keep it that way.
We’ll pay twenty-five dollars each for the scenarios we accept.
Yours very truly,
THE SELECTION COMMITTEE
The respective names and addresses were of more interest to Ralph than the text, which was so cryptic in essentials. How his parents got hold of a letter sent to Mary Joy, P. O. Box 121, in the city, from Continental Products, P.O. Box 537, Maspeth, L.I., New York, was intriguing in the degree to which it defied explanation.
There were two more letters in the sheaf. The bottom one said:
We like the Diary for 1936 very much, and are happy to offer you $200 for the right to print it and distribute it in a limited private edition for the members of our club. Because of its nature, this type of book cannot be registered in the orthodox manner with the Copyright Office, and our printing of it does not constitute legal publication. But if you expect to have further lucrative association with us, you will regard our right as exclusive.
May we also state that insofar as you have sent us the manuscript without solicitation on our part, that if you have another motive than you represent—that is, to be frank, extortion or blackmail, or if you are a law-enforcement officer—your procedure implicates you equally with us, if the former; and in the latter case constitutes entrapment.
The final, middle letter expressed satisfaction at Mary’s acceptance and noted the enclosure of a check for two hundred dollars.
Ralph next turned to the book itself. The title page said nothing about Continental Products, but announced, below author and title, “Privately printed for the exclusive use of the members of the Eros Literary Society. Not for public sale or distribution. Of an edition of 600 copies, this is Copy No.—,” no number being given.
Ralph’s habit when inspecting a book was after studying the frontispiece to open to the first page of the text and read one paragraph; then turn rapidly to somewhere around the middle and scan there; and finally to swoop to the last page and read the final sentence.
The opening of Mary Joy’s 1936 Diary was:
New Year’s Day, 8 A.M.—Lying here upon my pink satin sheets, my black-lace nightie drawn up above the twin swellings of my creamy-white breasts, tipped with erect rubicund nipples surrounded by large roseate aureolae, I greet the fresh new year with an exploratory finger in the deepest recess of the warm, moist grotto between my heaving ivory thighs, and think of another Jan. 1 on which, like the year, I was too a virgin….
Ralph wrinkled his forehead: something weird here. He was more perplexed than aroused however and therefore read no further in this passage, but split the book at the halfway point and read:
Again and again Wing Loo applied the vicious whip to my apple-round, pink bottom. The massive, opium-crazed Oriental, his naked, yellow, rotund belly slimy with sweat, his eyes narrowed to mere slits in his shaved head, was more stimulated than dissuaded by my anguished sc
reams. Gradually, cunningly, each blow of the steel-tipped lash fell closer to the vulnerable cleft between my nether cheeks, until at last the ultimate target was reached, the metal point stabbing profoundly within the tender linings of my rosy labia, raking them with fiery agony. The pain was insupportable. I swooned…then returned to consciousness with the realization that I was no longer being punished. Instead, a delicious warmth arose from my well of womanliness and began to suffuse throughout my limbs even unto the tips of my toenails, prickling like electric current to the very ends of my long golden tresses….
This passage was sufficiently bizarre to prompt Ralph to trace back to where it began, as an entry for July 4, 9 P.M.:
I awakened to the sound of exploding firecrackers this morning. To me this noise is inextricably intermingled with other explosive memories of the homeland of fireworks, China, where I spent so much of my girlhood as the only daughter of an American missionary….
Ralph wondered whether this, written so finely, could be called a genuine dirty book. He had never seen one before. Unlike the filthy cartoon eight-pagers, it was innocent of foul language. Perhaps that was why he was not aroused: that, along with the failure of Mary Joy thus far to get beyond stink-finger and ass-beating and get fucked—fucked by a man, that is, for now, having turned elsewhere, he saw that on September 27 she was being mounted by her pet St. Bernard.
Hauser claimed he jacked off a dog once, and also quoted a story of his brother Lester’s about a petty officer who, when stationed at San Diego, went on liberty across the border in Tijuana, Mexico, where he watched a Shetland pony jazz a greaser girl in a nightclub act. Both these tales had sounded like lies to Ralph, and now, all at once, he realized that Mary Joy was lying about everything. This book was fiction; which was to say, pure crap from beginning to end about nothing that had actually happened or that really mattered.
He dropped the Diary into the folder and fastened the strings. He had no interest in the contents of the other folders, which could be imagined. What they were doing in the same drawer as his mother’s cigarette supply was inexplicable. That he had never seen her write in a diary was as nothing when put alongside his conviction that she was sexless. It would also be typical of her to keep cigarettes in there for years without having the curiosity to examine the other burdens of the drawer.
She lived on a different layer of being from the rest of the race, now that he thought about it: quietly, serenely, above the battle as it were, which is why she was so suited to his father, who was always in the thick of it and seething behind his mask of apparent self-confidence. Ralph understood this consciously for the first time, although he had long instinctively felt the radiations when in his father’s presence, which always made him obscurely uneasy. It occurred to him now that his father was a nervous wreck, unable to remain at rest for three consecutive minutes, unable even to speak without frantic gestures of the chin and fingers soon followed by a kind of dancing escape. His fancy clothes were also a symptom of this condition, as were his abrupt phrasings and sometimes lately even his operation of an automobile.
“Mary Joy,” then, on the evidence of her texts, to characterize which there could be no other word, again, than “nervous”—being whipped by a Chinaman?—must be associated in one fashion or another with his father. That she might indeed be his father under a nom de plume was the most unlikely idea, despite the line in the letter that questioned her sex only to dismiss its importance.
He had never seen his father do anything with a pen except scrawl a hasty signature and then bite the cap, twiddle the shaft, and hurl the instrument away.
The most sensible explanation was that Mary was an actual woman, perhaps using a pen name because of the nature of her expression; though perhaps, being a mad exhibitionist, not. And in either case she was a customer of his father’s or even a friend, or both, quite a good friend to put this nutty garbage into his keeping. With that thought he remembered a phrase about “extortion or blackmail,” as used by the Selection Committee, and next the reference to a “law-enforcement officer.”
These would certainly be real worries if you ran a dirty-book club. With the choice of blackmailer, who in the movies always lost, and FBI man, who always prevailed, one would not hesitate in the labeling of one’s own dad.
That his father was indeed an undercover G-man, collecting evidence against a smut ring, would go far to explain his nervousness, as well as his frequent absences from home at mealtimes. In picture shows the Feds were depicted as cool and collected, but then neither did anyone ever seem to sustain real hurt in movie fistfights, whereas, in the real ones you occasionally saw on the street outside the Star Bar & Grill, when the rare punch connected with a face it caused damage which was still visible a week later.
Ralph and Hauser had seen a medium-sized guy named Dutch Ballbacher close the eye and break the nose of Turk Tucker, a much larger man, in that spot only last July. He might have killed him had not the cop come along and pulled him off.
“That Ballbacher is a mental case,” said Horse. “He goes out of his head if somebody looks at him crosseyed. Lester went to school with him. One time he was walking across a railroad trestle when the train came along, and he had to jump down on the rocks in the gulley and he broke his skull and they put a steel plate in it. It don’t pay to fuck with that monkey.”
Nevertheless, a week later, Ralph zoomed around the post-office corner on his bike and ran right into Dutch Ballbacher, who had just stepped off the curb. It was like hitting a wall of masonry. With lightning reflexes, Dutch caught both bike and Ralph, who said his prayers. However, what Ballbacher said, while gently bringing his assailant into balance, was “Gee, I’m sorry, sport. You hurt?” Upon being reassured, he slapped Ralph’s rump and continued across the street. Thereafter when they ran across each other, Ballbacher remembered and would say: “Hi, sport,” and Ralph would answer proudly: “Hi, Dutch,” impressing Hauser if he were along.
Ralph now shut the drawer and picked the lock in reverse, throwing into place the little vertical bar. In search of further evidence of his father’s connection with the FBI, he went to his parents’ bedroom, flipped back the chenille spread, felt beneath the pillow, and found the object he had seen his naked dad put there when they were preparing to go to the laying-out of Leo’s mother.
Of course it was a pistol.
He replaced it and smoothed the bed. The only trouble with the discoveries he had made was that they could not be revealed to Horse Hauser. The great thing though was that at long last he was fascinated by his father. Ralph had never had much interest in used cars.
At this point the telephone rang. He crossed the hall, went through the kitchen, and lifted the instrument from the little stand in the corner of the dining room.
“Hi, Ralph. It’s Margie.” Her voice was huskier on the wire than in the open air. “I was just calling to see if you were still mad at me.”
“Mad?” In his distraction he had no clue to her concern. “No, I’m not mad.”
“Well, I’m going to apologize anyway.”
“For what?”
“I shouldn’t have criticized you, at least not when you were doing me a favor.”
“Oh, well, forget it,” Ralph said generously, remembering at last. “It was an awfully hot day and I had to wear that suit.”
“You sure looked real nice in it, though…. I took a chance on finding you home. Is that party over already?”
“There wasn’t any party.” He was reminded, however, of the box of candy; he might well eat it before he could get it to Laverne.
Her voice was gleeful. “Oh, really? What are you wearing now?”
He had to look down at himself. “Wash pants and a sport shirt, I guess.” He really had nothing to say, so he asked: “What are you?”
This provoked a giggle. “Oh, I can’t tell you.”
What a bore she was. “All right,” he said, “don’t.”
She breathed audibly for a while. Then: ?
??I mean, because it’s not much…. It’s awful hot here and nobody else is home.”
“Uh-huh.”
She raised her tone in mock indignation. “Well, I’m not in the nude! I’ve got on, uh, you know—underwear.” Her voice cracked slightly on the last word.
At hearing “nude,” Ralph’s pecker went instantly rigid; at “underwear,” it began to throb violently. He could get an erection by looking up “vagina” in the unabridged dictionary.
Margie said in the boldest voice yet: “I guess I shocked you. But it’s almost as much as you would wear at the swimming pool.”
Ralph had to get back his self-esteem. “That’s the point I was trying to make this afternoon about words like ‘pregnant.’ They just describe things that exist. Take ‘underwear.’ If you called it a ‘bathing suit,’ you could get away with it.”
Margie giggled again. “I couldn’t get away with this, unless I was a boy.”
The blood in Ralph’s member now surged so brutally that he felt as though he might be toppled from the stool. He assumed a counterfeit indignation of his own. “You mean you don’t have on—” He absolutely did not have the nerve to say “brassiere” to a girl; anyway, he knew from feeling her bosom that she did not wear one when going about in the outside world.
He tried again: “You don’t have an undershirt on?”
“Never in summertime.”
Suddenly her brazenness annoyed him. “What about in winter?” he cried.
“Say,” said she, “aren’t you getting pretty fresh?”