To Sail Beyond the Sunset

  As for Dr. Zeke the stupid geek, all he needed to do before he answered that door was to button his pants…which he had to do anyhow.

  We could have brazened it out. We could have looked them in the eye, refused to look guilty, invited them into our conference.

  But what he did was grab my arm, shove me into his coat closet, and turn the key on me.

  I stood in there, in the dark, for two solid hours that seemed like two years. I kept my sanity by thinking up painful ways to kill him. “Hoisting him by his own petard” was the simplest. Some of the others are too nasty to think about.

  Finally he unlocked that door, looked at me, and whispered hoarsely, “They’re gone now. Lets slip you out the back door.”

  I didn’t spit in his face. I said, “No, Doctor, we will now have our conference. Then you will escort me out the front door of the church, and you will stand there, chatting with me, until several people have seen us.”

  “No, no, Mrs. Smith! I think—”

  “You didn’t think. Doctor, the only alternative is for me to run screaming out of here shouting ‘Rape!’…and what a police matron will find inside me that you left there will prove rape to a jury.”

  When Brian got home, I told him about it. I had considered keeping it to myself. But we had reached a friendly agreement three years earlier concerning how and when we each could adulterate our marriage without offending or damaging the other. So I decided to make a clean breast of it and accept a spanking if he thought I rated it. I thought I did rate a spanking…and if it was a truly hard spanking, that would be an excuse to cry and that would probably wind up wonderfully.

  So I wasn’t too worried. But I did want to confess and be shrived.

  That friendly agreement for prudent adultery—We had resolved to operate together whenever possible, and always to help each other, cover up for each other, and help the other make the kill. The discussion had come about through Dr. Rumsey’s confirming that I was pregnant again (with Brian Junior) and I was feeling especially sentimental. That, plus an incitement: we had received a pianissimo “mixed doubles” invitation from a couple we liked.

  I started in by telling Briney solemnly that I intended to be utterly faithful to him. I had been faithful for four years and now that I knew that I could be, I would be, till death do us part.

  He had answered, “Look, Stupid, you’re sweet but not smart. You started in at fourteen—”

  “Almost fifteen!”

  “Short of fifteen. You told me that twelve other men and boys had sampled your sweetness—but you wanted to know if I thought that the candidates on your Howard list need be counted? Then you revised the tally, telling me that a couple of minor incidents had slipped your mind. You also told me that you had learned to enjoy it almost at once…but you wanted me to know that I was the best. Swivel Hips, do you really think that it changed you and your happy loving ways forever just because that bonehead preacher said some magic words over you? Truth will out, the leopard does not change his spots, and the day inevitably comes. When it does, I want you to enjoy it but to stay out of trouble…for your sake, for my sake, and especially for our children’s sake. But I do not expect you to be what society calls ‘faithful’ forever amen. I do expect you not to get pregnant, not to catch some filthy disease, not to cause a scandal, not to shame me or yourself, not to risk the welfare of our children. Mostly that means using common sense and always pulling down the shades.”

  I gulped. “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, my love, if it is true, as you assert, that Hal Andrews causes your gizzard to throb but that you are avoiding the temptation on my account, then be assured that your forbearance gains you no stars in your crown. We both know Hal; he’s a gentleman and he keeps his nails clean. He’s polite to his wife. If you don’t mean business, quit flirting with him. But if you do want him, go get him! Don’t mind me; I’ll be busy. Jane is as delectable a piece as I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve hankered to bisect her angle from the day we met them.”

  “Briney! Is that true? You never showed it. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “And give you a chance to go female and jealous and possessive? Sweetheart, I’ve had to wait until you admitted out loud, with no coaxing or coaching from me, that you were feeling a deep curiosity about another man…with a suggestion that perhaps I might feel the same way about his wife. It turns out that I do. So call Jane and accept their dinner invitation. We’ll see what develops.”

  “But what if it turns out that you like Jane more than you like me?”

  “Impossible. I love you, my lady.”

  “I mean what she’s sitting on. How she makes love.”

  “Possible, but unlikely. If I did, I would not stop loving you or lose interest in what you are sitting on; it’s special. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to try Jane; she smells good.” He licked his lips and grinned.

  He did and she did and we four did and they remained our loving friends for years although they moved to St. Joe two years later when he got a better offer from the school board there. That put them too far away for quiet family orgies, mostly.

  Over the course of time Brian and I worked out detailed rules about how to handle sex, all of them intended to avoid the hazards while leaving both of us free to “sin”—not carelessly but prudently, so that we could always look Mrs. Grundy in the eye and tell her to peddle her papers elsewhere.

  Brian made no concessions whatever to the prevalent belief that sex was in some way innately sinful. He was utterly contemptuous of popular opinion. “If a thousand men believe something and I believe otherwise, then it’s a thousand to one that they are wrong. Maureen, I support us by having contrary opinions.”

  When I told Briney about being locked in that closet, he sat up in bed. “That bastard! Mo’, I’m going to break both his arms.”

  “Then you had better break mine, too, as I went there intending to do it. I did it. The rest derived from that bald, inexcusable fact. I took a risk I should not have taken. My fault at least as much as his.”

  “Yes, yes, but that’s not the point. Sweetheart, I’m not faulting him for screwing you; any man not castrated will screw you if he has a clear chance at you. So your only protection is not to give him that chance if you don’t want him to take it. What I’m angry about is his shoving my poor baby into a closet, into the dark, locking her in, frightening her. I’ll kill him slowly. God damn him. I’ll nut him first. I’ll take his scalp. And cut off his ears.”

  “Briney—”

  “I’ll drive a stake—What, dear?”

  “I’ve been a bad girl, I know, but I got away with it cold. I didn’t get pregnant because I am pregnant. No disease…or I don’t think so. I’m almost certain nobody twigged, no scandal. I would like to watch you do all those things to him; I despise him. But, if you hurt him even a little bit, even punch his nose, it’s no longer a secret…and that could hurt our children. Couldn’t it?”

  Briney conceded the pragmatic necessity. I wanted us to leave that church. Briney agreed. “But not right away, love. I’ll be home for the next six weeks at least. We’ll go to church together—” We got there early and sat down front, facing the pulpit. Briney caught Dr. Zeke’s eye and held it, all through the sermon, Sunday after Sunday.

  Dr. Zeke had a nervous breakdown and had to take a leave of absence.

  Briney and I did not work out all our rules for sex and love and marriage too easily. We were trying to do two things at once: create a whole new system of just conduct in marriage—a code that any civilized society would have taught us as children—and create simultaneously an arbitrary and utterly pragmatic set of rules for public conduct to protect us from the Bible-Belt arbiters of morals and conduct. We were not missionaries trying to convert Mrs. Grundy to our way of thinking; we simply wanted to hold up a mask so that she would never suspect that we did not agree with her way of thinking. In a society in which it is a mortal offense to be different from your neighbors your only escape
is never to let them find out.

  Slowly over the years we learned that many Howard families had been forced to face up to the fact that the Howard Foundation program simply did not fit the midwestern Bible Belt…yet the majority of Howard candidates came from the middle west. Eventually these conflicts and contradictions resulted in most Howards either dropping out of organized religion, or paying it lip service as Brian and I did, until we left Kansas City in the late thirties and quit pretending.

  So far as I know, there are no organized religions in Boondock, or anywhere on Tellus Tertius. Question: Is this an inevitable evolutionary development as mankind approaches true civilization? Or is that wishful thinking?

  Or did I die in 1982? Boondock is so utterly unlike Kansas City that I have trouble believing that they are in the same universe. Now that I am locked up incommunicado in what appears to be a madhouse run by its inmates it is easy to believe that a traffic accident that hit an old, old woman in 1982 was fatal…and that these dreams of weirdly different worlds are merely delirium of dying. Am I heavily sedated and on IC life support in some Albuquerque hospital while they decide whether or not to pull the plug? Are they waiting to hear from Woodrow for authorization? As I recall, I listed him as “Next of Kin” in my wallet.

  Are “Lazarus Long” and “Boondock” a senile fantasy?

  Must ask Pixel next time he visits me. His English is scarce but I’ve no one else to ask.

  One fine thing we did even before we got our new house furnished: We got the rest of our books out of storage. In the crackerbox we had been living in we had had room for only a couple of dozen volumes, and that precious few only by storing them on the top shelf in the kitchen, a spot I could reach only by standing on a stool—something I did not risk when I was big with child. Once I waited three days for Brian to come home from Galena, intending to ask him to reach down for me my Golden Treasury—I could see it; couldn’t reach it—then, when he did get home, I forgot it.

  I had two boxes of books in storage, Brian had more than that…and I had “inherited” case after case of my father’s books. He had written to me when he went back into the Army to tell me that he had had them packed and shipped to Kansas City Storage and Warehousing—receipts enclosed. His bank was instructed to keep the storage paid up…but if I wanted to give them a home, that would please him. Perhaps someday he might ask for some of them back, but in the meantime treat them as my own. “Books are meant to be read and loved, not stored.”

  So we got our printed friends out of bondage and into the light and air—although we had no bookcases as yet. Briney got boards and bricks and set up temporary shelves…and I learned what my husband liked better than sex.

  Books.

  Almost any books but what hooked him that weekend were Professor Huxley’s essays…which I hardly noticed because I had my hands on Father’s Mark Twain collection, Mr. Clemens’s books, for the first time since May 1898—everything of his up to that date, mostly first editions and four of them signed by Mr. Clemens and by “Mark Twain”—signed on that great night in January 1898 when I fought to stay awake in order not to miss any of Mr. Clemens’s words.

  For perhaps two hours Brian and I took turns touching the other one’s elbow and saying, “Listen to this!”—then reading aloud. It turned out that Brian had never read “The £1,000,000 Bank-Note” or “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut.” I was astonished. “Dear, I love you—but why did they let you graduate?”

  “I don’t know. The War, probably.”

  “Well, I’ll just have to tutor you. We’ll start with the Connecticut Yankee.”

  “I’ve read it. What’s that fat one?”

  “That’s not Mark Twain; that’s one of Father’s medical books.” I handed it to him, returned to The Prince and the Pauper.

  A couple of moments later I looked up when Briney said, “Hey, this plate is not correct.”

  I answered, “Yes, I know. As I know what plate you are looking at. Father says that any layman who gets his hands on that book invariably looks at that plate first. Shall I take off my drawers so that you can check it?”

  “Quit trying to divert me, wench; I have an excellent memory.” He thumbed on through. “Fascinating. One could study these plates for hours.”

  “I know. I have.”

  “Amazing how much machinery can be packed into one set of skin.” He went on thumbing through, then got hooked by a work on obstetrics, shuddered at parts of that one (Brian was a good jackleg midwife, but he didn’t like blood), put it aside and picked up another one. “Whee!”

  “What is it this time, dear? Oh. ‘What Every Young Girl Should Know.’” (He had picked up the Forberg etchings, Figuris Veneris. I was startled, too, the first time I opened it.)

  “That’s not its name. Here’s the title page: Figures of Venus.”

  “Joke, dear. Father’s joke. He had me study it as a sex instruction manual, then we discussed each picture and he answered any questions I asked. Lots of questions, that is. He said that Mr. Forberg’s pictures were anatomically correct…which is more than we can say about that censored plate you complained about. Father said that these pictures should be used in school, because they were far superior to the behind-the-barn cartoons or photographs that were the only thing most young people get to look at—until they were confronted by the real thing and were frightened and sometimes hurt.” I sighed. “Father says that this so-called civilization is sick throughout but nowhere more so than about sex, every aspect of sex.”

  “Your father is dead right, I think. But, Maureen, do I understand that Dr. Johnson gave this to you as an instruction manual? My revered father-in-law endorsed everything in these pictures? Everything?”

  “Oh, heavens, no. Just most of them. But in general Father says that anything two—or more—people want to do is all right as long as it does no physical harm. He felt that the words ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’ were ridiculous when applied to sexual relations. Right and wrong were the correct words, used exactly as they would be used in any other human relation.”

  “Mon beau-père a raison. And my wife is a smart cookie, too.”

  “I had tutoring by a wise man all my life, until he turned me over to you. At least I think my father is wise. Here, let me sit beside you and I’ll point out what he approved of, what he didn’t.”

  I moved across beside him; he put his arm around me and I held the book on his lap. “The title page—Note the date, 1824. But the pictures are mostly classic Greece and Rome, except one in Egypt. Father said that, despite that date less than a hundred years back, these pictures match murals in whorehouses in Pompeii…except that these are artistically much superior to the Pompeii paintings.”

  “Dr. Johnson has been to Pompeii?”

  “No. Well, I don’t think he has. With Father it is sometimes hard to be sure. He did tell me that he had seen photographs of Pompeii murals in Chicago. At Northwestern or in some museum.”

  “But how did he get these pictures? I hate to tell you, my sweet innocent, but I’m certain that these pictures would get us a long rest at federal expense…under the Comstock Act. If we were caught with them.”

  “‘If we were caught.’ ‘Caught’ is the important word. Father urged me to know the Law as thoroughly as possible…so as not to get caught when I broke one. Father never felt that any law applied to him…other than in that sense.”

  “I think it is clear that your father is a subversive character, a bad influence, a wicked old man…and I admire him without limit and hope to grow up like him.”

  “I love him all to pieces, mon homme. He could have had my maidenhead just by lifting his eyebrow. He wouldn’t take it.”

  “I know that, beloved. I’ve known it since I first met you.”

  “Yes, I’m a woman scorned…and someday he’ll pay. But I want to take his advice about the Law. Briney, do you suppose I could attend classes at the Kansas City School of Law…if I could squeeze the tuiti
on out of my household allowance?”

  “Perhaps. But you won’t have to squeeze it out of your housekeeping money; any schooling you want we now can afford. But never mind such trivial matters; we’re talking about sex. S-E-X, the stuff that makes the world go around. Next picture, please.”

  “Yes, sir. Missionary style. Approved even by priests. The next picture is almost as widely accepted, although perhaps Mrs. Grundy never gets on top. This next one is certainly not used by Mrs. Grundy although by everybody else—says Father. But he noted that a gentleman, in coupling with a lady from behind and standing up, will reach under and find her button, so that she is insured a good time, too. Now the next—Oh! Briney, someday, when we can afford it, I want a bed just the right height so that you can put me on it in that position, on my back, legs up—just the right height so that you can stand up and enter me without crouching. I like that position, so do you—but the last time we used it, you got cramps in your legs and were trembling toward the last, you got so tired. Darling, I want you to enjoy it as much as I do. Loads, that is.”

  “Lady, you’re a gentleman.”

  “Why, thank you, sir! If that is not a jest.”

  “No jest. Most ladies are not gentlemen; they will pull stunts that would get a man ten days in the stocks…and walk on, with their noses in the air. But not my Mo’. With you, fair is fair and you don’t expect to get by on your sex.”

  “Ah, but I do. By ‘ringing the cash register.’”

  “Don’t confuse me with logic. You treat everyone decently, that’s all, even your poor old husband. Yes, I’ll build you that bed. Not only the right height but one guaranteed not to squeak. I’ll get busy on the design. Mmm, Mo’, how would you like a really big bed? Say one that would hold you and me and Hal and Jane—or playmates of your choice—all at once.”

  “Goodness, what a thought! I hear that Annie Chambers has a bed like that.”

  “But I’ll design a better one. Mo’, where did you hear of K.C.’s top Madam?”