He pulled his face back. “Daughter, get out of here. And don’t come around me again half naked.”
“All naked, perhaps? Mon cher papa, je t’adore.”
“You shut t’ door…behind you.”
“Oh, Papa, don’t be mean to me. I need to be cuddled. I need to be hugged.”
“I know what you need but you are not going to get it from me. Now get out.”
“What if I won’t? I’m too big to spank.”
He sighed. “So you are. Daughter, you are an enticing and amoral bitch, we both know it, we have always known it. Since I can’t spank you, I must warn you. Get out this instant…or I will telephone your husband right now, tonight, and tell him that he must come home at once as I am unable to carry out my responsibilities to him and to his family. Understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now get out.”
“Yes, sir. May I make a short statement first?”
“Well—make it march.”
“I did not ask you to couple with me but if you had—if we had done so, it would have done no harm; I am pregnant.”
“Irrelevant.”
“Let me finish, please, sir. Ages ago, back when you were requiring me to work out my own personal commandments, you defined for me the parameters of prudent adultery. I have conformed meticulously to your definition, for it turned out that my husband’s values in this matter match yours exactly.”
“I am pleased to know that…but, possibly, not pleased that you told me. Did your husband specifically authorize you to tell me that?”
“Uh—No, sir. Not specifically.”
“Then you have told me a bedroom secret without the consent of the other person affected by the secret. Materially affected, as it is his reputation at risk as well as yours. Maureen, you have no right to place another person at risk without his knowledge and consent and you know it.”
I kept quiet a long, cold moment. “Yes. I was wrong. Goodnight, sir.”
“Goodnight, my darling daughter. I love you.”
When Brian returned, he told us that he would be going back to Plattsburg again in 1917—if we were not already at war by then. “They want some of us to get there early and turn instructor to help train the new ones with no military experience…and if I will, I go from second to first lieutenant in a hurry. No promise in writing. But that’s the policy. Beau-père, can you be here next year? Why don’t you just stay on? No point in your opening up your flat again, and I’ll bet that Mo’s cooking is better than the restaurant cooking at that Greek joint under your flat. Isn’t it? Careful how you answer.”
“It’s somewhat better.”
“‘Somewhat’! I’ll burn your toast!”
We had a small war on our southern border in 1916; “General” Pancho Villa raided across the border again and again, killing and burning. “Black Jack” Pershing, of Mindanao fame, who had been jumped by President Roosevelt from captain to brigadier general, was sent by President Wilson to find and seize Villa. Father had known Pershing when they both were captains in the fight against the Moros; Father thought well of him and was delighted with his meteoric rise (with more to come).
Father pacified a small war at home, for he did stay on with us, and took Woodrow largely out of my hands, with full authority to exercise on Woodrow the low, the middle, and the high justice without consulting either of Woodrow’s parents. Both Brian and I were relieved.
Father took a shine to my sixth child, and that left me free to hold Woodrow my favorite in my heart, with no need or temptation to let it show. (My children were all different, and I liked each one of them differently, just as with other people…but I did my utter best to treat them all with even justice, without any favoritism in act or manner. I tried. Truly I tried.)
At this great distance, more than a century, I think I at last know why my least likable son was my favorite:
Because he was most like my father, both in his good points and his bad. My father was by no means a saint…but he was “my kind of a scoundrel”…and my son Woodrow was almost his replica, sixty years younger, the same faults, the same virtues—and the two most stubborn males I have ever met.
Perhaps an unbiased judge might think that we three were “triplets”-aside from the unimportant fact that we were father, daughter, and daughter’s son…and that they each were as emphatically male as I am female (I am so totally every minute a set of female glands and organs, that I can cope with it only by carefully simulating the sort of “lady” approved by Mrs. Grundy and Queen Victoria).
But those two males were stubborn. Me? Me stubborn? How could you think such a thing?
Father clobbered Woodrow as necessary (frequently), took over his education as he had taken over mine, taught him to play chess at four, did not need to teach him to read—like Nancy, Woodrow taught himself. It left me free to rear my other, civilized, well-behaved children with no difficulty and with no need to raise my voice. (Woodrow could have pushed me into being the sort of screaming scold I despise.)
Father’s “adoption” of Woodrow left me more time with my lovely and loving and lovable husband. All too soon it was time for him to leave again for Plattsburg. Then I settled down for a truly dry spell. Nelson had been in town part of the time the year before. But now “Brian Smith Associates” had moved its physical location to Galena where Nelson was supervising a new mine that Brian had bought into, when his survey showed its worth but its developer needed more capital. Anita Boles had married and left us; our K.C. office was now just a post office box number, a telephone number transferred back to our house, and a little clerical work I could handle with ease, as my biggest boy, Brian Junior, now twelve, picked up the mail from the box on his bicycle each day on his way home from school.
So Nelson, my only utterly safe “relief husband,” was too far away…and my father, the puritanical shikepoke, was watching me closely…so Maureen resigned herself to four, five, possibly six months in a nunnery.
Father often spent a couple of hours in the evening at a pool hall he called his “chess club.” On a rainy night at the end of February he surprised me by bringing home with him a stranger.
He thereby subjected me to the greatest emotional shock of my life.
I found myself offering my hand and greeting a young man who matched in every way (even to his body odor, which I caught quite clearly—clean male, in fresh rut)—a man who was my father as my earliest memory recalled him.
While I smiled and made small talk, I said to myself, “Don’t faint. Maureen, you must not faint.”
For I had immediately gone into high readiness to receive a male. This male. This male who looked like my father, thirty years younger. I forced myself not to tremble, to keep my voice low, to treat him exactly like any other welcome guest brought to my house by husband or father or child.
Father introduced him as Mr. Theodore Bronson. I heard Father say that he had promised Mr. Bronson a cup of coffee, which gave me the respite I needed. I smiled and said, “Yes, indeed! For a cold and rainy night. Gentlemen, do be seated”—and I fled into the kitchen.
The time I spent in the kitchen, slicing pound cake, dishing up mints, setting out coffee service, cream and sugar, transferring coffee from the kitchen range coffeepot into a silver “company” serving pot—this busyness gave me time to pull myself together, not expose my own rut and (I hoped) cover some of my body odor simply by the odors of food and the fact that female clothing in those days was all-encompassing. I hoped that Father would not notice what I had been sure of, that Mr. Bronson felt the same about me.
I carried in the tray; Mr. Bronson jumped up and helped me with it. We had coffee and cake and small talk. I need not have worried about Father; he was busy with an idea of his own. He too had seen the family resemblance…and had formed a theory: Mr. Bronson was a by-blow of his brother Edward, killed in a train wreck not long after I was born. Father had us stand up, side by side, then look in the mirror over the mantelpiece together.
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Father trotted out this possible theory of Mr. Bronson’s “orphan” origin. It was many months before he admitted to me that he suspected that Mr. Bronson was not my cousin through my rakehell Uncle Edward, but my half brother through Father himself.
The talk that night let me, with all propriety and right under my father’s nose, tell Mr. Bronson that I looked forward to seeing him at church on Sunday and that my husband expected to be home for my birthday and we would expect him for dinner…since it was Mr. Bronson’s birthday, too!
He left soon after that. I bade Father goodnight and went up to my lonely room.
First I took a bath. I had bathed before supper but I needed another one—I reeked of rut. I masturbated in the tub and my breasts stopped hurting. I dried down and put on a nightgown and went to bed.
And got up and locked my bedroom door and took off my gown and got naked back into bed, and masturbated again, violently, thinking about Mr. Bronson, how he looked, the way he smelled, the timbre of his voice.
I did it again and again, until I could sleep.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
Hang the Kaiser!
I’m wondering whether Pixel will come back at all, so disastrous was his last visit.
I tried an experiment today. I called out, “Telephone!” just as I had heard Dr. Ridpath do. Sure enough, a hologram face appeared…of a police matron. “Why are you asking for a telephone?”
“Why not?”
“You don’t have telephone privileges.”
“Who says so? If that is true, shouldn’t someone have told me? Look, I’ll bet you fifty octets that you’re right and I’m wrong.”
“Huh? That’s what I said.”
“So prove it. I won’t pay until you prove it.”
She looked puzzled and blinked out. We shall see.
▣
Mr. Bronson was at church on Sunday. After the services, at the huddle at the front entrance where church members say nice things to the minister about his sermon (and Dr. Draper did preach a fine sermon if one simply suspended critical faculty and treated it as art)—at the door I spoke to him. “Good morning, Mr. Bronson.”
“Good morning, Mrs. Smith. Miss Nancy. Fine weather for March, is it not?”
I agreed that it was, and introduced him to the others of my tribe who were present, Carol, Brian Junior, and George. Marie, Woodrow, Richard, and Ethel were home with their grandfather—I do not think Father ever entered a church after he left Thebes other than to get some friend or relative married or buried. Marie and Woodrow had been at Sunday School but were, in my opinion, too young for church.
We chatted inanities for a few moments, then he bowed and turned away and so did I. Neither of us showed in any fashion that the meeting had any significance to either of us. His need for me burned with a fierce flame, as did mine for him and we both knew it and neither acknowledged it.
Day after day we conducted our love affair wordlessly, never touching, not even a lover’s glance, right under my father’s eyes. Father told me later that he had had his suspicions—“smelled a rat”—at one point, but that both Mr. Bronson and I had behaved with such propriety that Father had had no excuse to clamp down on us. “After all, my darling, I can’t condemn a man for wanting you as long as he behaves himself—we both know what you are—and I can’t scold you for being what you are—you can’t help it—as long as you behave like a lady. Truth is, I was proud of both of you, for behaving with such civilized restraint. It’s not easy, I know.”
Through playing chess with my father and, shortly, with Woodrow as well, Mr. Bronson managed to see me, en passant, almost every day. He volunteered as assistant scoutmaster for the troop at our church…then drove Brian Junior and George home after Scout meeting the next Friday night—which resulted in a date with Brian Junior for the following afternoon to teach him to drive. (Mr. Bronson owned a luxury model of Ford automobile, a landaulet, always shining and beautiful.)
The following Saturday he took my five older children on a picnic; they were as charmed by him as I was. Carol confided to me afterward: “Mama, if I ever get married, Mr. Bronson is just the sort of man I want to marry.”
I did not tell her that I felt the same way.
The Saturday after that one Mr. Bronson took Woodrow downtown to a Hippodrome Theater matinee to see the magician Thurston the Great. (I would have been delighted to be invited along; stage magic fascinates me. But I didn’t dare even hint with Father watching me.) When Mr. Bronson returned the child asleep in his arms, I was able to invite him inside as Father was with me, lending his sanction to the meeting. Never once during that strange romance did Mr. Bronson enter our house without Father being there and then publicly present.
Once when Mr. Bronson fetched Brian Junior back from a driving lesson, I invited him in for tea. He inquired about Father. Learning that Father was not home, Mr. Bronson discovered that he was already late for an appointment. Men are more timid than women…at least in my experience.
Brian arrived home on Sunday the first of April, and on the same day Father left on a short visit to St. Louis—to see my mother I assume, but Father never discussed his reasons. I could have wished that Father had stayed home, so that Brian and I could have taken a little journey to nowhere, while Father guarded the teepee and Nancy did the cooking.
But I said nothing about this to anyone, as the children were as anxious to see their father and visit with him as I was to get him alone and take him to bed. Besides—Well, we no longer had an automobile. Before leaving for Plattsburg this time Brian had sold “El Reo Grande.”
“Mo’,” he had said, “last year, leaving in April, it made sense to drive to Plattsburg; I got lots of use out of the Reo there. But only a fool would attempt to drive from Kansas City to upstate New York in February. Last year in April J had to be pulled out of the mud three times; had it been February I simply would not have made it.
“Besides,” Briney had added, with his best Teddy Roosevelt grin, “I’m going to buy us a ten-passenger car. Or eleven. Shall we try for eleven?”
We tried for eleven but failed to ring the cash register that time. Briney went off to Plattsburg by train, with a promise to me that when he got back, he intended to buy the biggest passenger car available—a seven-passenger, if that was the biggest—and what did I think of a closed car this time? A Lexington seven-passenger sedan, for example? Or a Marmon? Or a Pierce-Arrow? Think about it, dear one.
I gave it little thought as I knew that, when the time came, Brian would make his own decision. But I was glad to know that we were going to have a bigger motor car. A five-passenger car is a bit cramped for a family of ten. (Or eleven when I managed to catch.)
So when Brian got home on April first, 1917, we stayed home and did our lovemaking in bed. After all, it isn’t necessary to do it in the grass.
That night, when we were tired but not ready to go to sleep, I asked, “When must you return to Plattsburg, my love?”
He was so long in answering I added, “Was that an improper question, Brian? It has been so long since ’98 that I am unused to the notion of questions that may not be asked.”
“My dearest, you may ask any question. Some I may not be able to answer because the answer is restricted but far more likely I won’t be able to answer because a first lieutenant isn’t told very much. But this one I can answer. I don’t think I’ll be going back to Plattsburg. I’m sufficiently sure of it that I didn’t leave anything there, not even a toothbrush.”
I waited.
“Don’t you want to know why?”
“My husband, you will tell me if it suits you. Or when you can.”
“Maureen, you’re too damned agreeable. Don’t you ever have any female-type nosiness?”
(Of course I have, dear man—but I get more out of you if I am not nosy!) “I would like to know.”
“Well—I don’t know what the papers here have been saying but the so-called ‘Zimmerman telegram’ is authentic.
There is not a chance that we can stay out of the war more than another month. The question is: Do we send more troops to the Mexican border? Or do we send troops to Europe? Or both? Do we wait for Mexico to attack us, or do we go ahead and declare war on Mexico? Or do we declare war first on the kaiser? If we do, do we dare turn our backs on Mexico?”
“Is it really that bad?”
“A lot depends on President Carranza. Yes, it’s that bad; I already have my mobilization assignment. All it takes is a telegram and I’m on active duty and on my way to my point of mobilization…and it’s not Plattsburg.” He reached out and caressed me. “Now forget war and think about me, Mrs. MacGillicuddy.”
“Yes, Clarence.”
Two choruses of “Old Riley’s Daughter” later Brian said, “Mrs. Mac, that was acceptable. I think you’ve been practicing.”
I shook my head. “Nary a bit, my love; Father has watched me unceasingly—he thinks I’m an immoral woman who sleeps with other men.”
“What a canard! You never let them sleep. Never. I’ll tell him.”
“Don’t bother; Father made up his mind about me before you and I ever met. How are the Plattsburg pussies? Tasty? Affectionate?”
“Hepzibah, I hate to admit this but—Well, the fact is… I didn’t get any. Not any.”
“Why, Clarence!”
“Honey girl, they worked my tail off. Field instruction and drills and lectures in the daytime, six days a week—and surprise drills on Sundays. More lectures in the evenings and always more book work than we could possibly handle. Stagger to bed around midnight, reveille at six. Feel my ribs; I’m skinny. Hey! That’s not a rib!”
“So it isn’t; it’s not a bone of any sort. Hubert, I’m going to keep you in bed until we get you fatted up and stronger; your story has touched my heart.”