The Tight White Collar (14 page)

David was a timid, pallid boy addicted to chest colds. He was too delicate to attend school regularly so his mother tutored him herself and though his early education consisted almost entirely of Bible study, the child did learn to read. Later, he hid in his room and read books of every description which he borrowed secretly from the public library.

Julia was an ardent member of a sect called Christian Adventists which, unlike the Seventh Day Adventists with which they were confused by the uninitiated, celebrated Sunday on Sunday, a fact which they pointed out with great care. Julia was forever exhorting her son to “Repent, David, repent,” and if, at times, the child wondered just what it was that he was to repent, his mother fixed him with such a stern and staring eye that myriad feelings of guilt churned in him until his mind fastened on some little act that he could be sorry for and then both mother and son were satisfied.

“Give your heart to Christ that you may be saved, David,” said Julia.

And regularly, twice a week, once at the Wednesday evening prayer meeting and again at the Sunday evening service, David was the first to kneel at the altar rail and give his heart away.

The Christian Adventists would have screamed in outrage had anyone mentioned Freud and his theory of the sublimation of the sex urge to them. Yet, they practiced a religion that was almost entirely composed of capitulation, submission and exaltation. In northern New England, the religious orgasms of these Christian Adventists outdid those of the uneducated Negroes from the swamps of Georgia so much more fiery were their sermons, their hymns, their rolling about on the floor.

By the time he was seven years old, David Strong understood that he must always be on guard against the evil within him and although his father was to blame for this misfortune, he must pray for his father also. Sometimes Alan Strong was so filled with rage at the sight of his velvet-clad son that he would go out and get very drunk and then come home to shout obscenities at his wife and taunt David with vile names. The boy cowered when his father called him “Sissy” and “Pantywaist” and after these times, David prayed harder than ever that his father might be saved.

When David was ten, his mother bought an upright piano and sent her son twice a week to a Miss Overstreet for lessons. In no time at all David could play hymns and when he was thirteen years old, he was made organist at the Christian Adventist Church. Tears would fill his eyes and his heart beat as if it would burst whenever he heard the congregation rise behind him to sing.

David practiced long hours on the upright piano in the Strong living room and when Alan, fed up with the eternal light, suggested a good, rollicking tune, David tried fixing him with the look that the Reverend Charles Parmenter sometimes turned on his congregation, a look full of pity for the sinner left unredeemed.

“And don't look at me with those goddamned cow eyes!” yelled Alan.

If Julia were close by, David dared to remonstrate with his father.

“It is sinful to take the name of the Lord in vain, Father,” said David in a tone that matched his pitying look.

“Balls!” roared Alan and stamped out of the house.

Wherever Alan walked, his boots left little clods of mud on the immaculate floors and the sight of these, coupled with the sound of his father's heavy tread, filled David with a little kind of shivery thrill that he could not have explained.

By the time David was fifteen years old, Julia had made up her mind that her son had received a divine call to the ministry. He had the thin physique and the noble brow for it and his voice would no doubt register in a lower key as he grew older. At seventeen David left Berlinton to enter the Christian Adventist College in Preston, Illinois where he would begin his theological studies and where the course of his life was set forever.

His trip to Preston, Illinois, was the first he had ever made without his mother, and he was lost and miserable. Julia had engaged a room for him in a house run by the president of the Ladies' Circle of the Christian Adventist Church in Preston but even this woman, who was so like Julia in many ways, could not take Julia's place. David had never made friends easily and after a few rebuffs, his fellow students left him strictly alone. He cried into his pillow at night and actually became ill with homesickness, but his mother had told him that no matter what, he must stick with his divine calling, so David never complained. He studied hard and went out seldom.

One of the few places that David did frequent, however, was a small restaurant at the edge of town. Coffee was forbidden by his religion on the grounds that it was poisonous and that it was a sin to poison the Temple of the Soul, but David indulged himself in this one defection and comforted himself with the fact that when he drank coffee he could study better and that if he studied better he could become a minister that much faster. The restaurant to which David went was called “Sal's” and it was out of bounds for all Christian Adventist students. The administration at the college considered Sal's a hotbed of vice, a place whose only customers were truck drivers who smoked, danced, swore and committed adultery every night of the week. David's stomach had churned the first few times he had ventured to Sal's, but after a few weeks his fear of discovery passed and he began to look forward to his trips across town.

Sal's daughter, Millie, worked as a waitress in the restaurant, and when Millie had no customers to take care of, she often sat down in David's booth to talk with him. She was a big girl, with long yellow hair and very white teeth. She wore skirts that hugged her buttocks and her breasts seemed to be forever struggling against whatever material restrained them.

David colored the truth a little whenever he talked to Millie. He made his divine call to the ministry sound rather like the vision of St. Paul and he was careful not to mention his mother to her. The fact that he was a divinely chosen minister of God enhanced David in Millie's eyes. He was different and therefore interesting.

Millie was the sort of girl for whom “reader identification” had been invented. No matter which magazine story she read, nor what movie she saw, Millie immediately became the heroine of the piece. One day, when she had been forced to take refuge from the rain in Preston's public library, Millie came across a book that someone had left lying on one of the tables. It was an anthology of short stories and the first story in the book was W. Somerset Maugham's “Rain.”

Millie saw herself as a much more attractive version of Sadie Thompson than Maugham's plump-legged heroine and she set out to inspire David to convert her to religion.

David, unfortunately, had never read “Rain.” Here he was, still in his freshman year at school, and already he had a potential convert.

He spent hours talking to Millie.

He pointed out to her the error of her ways with truck drivers and other unsavory characters. He shuddered when she related episodes from her life, most of them untrue, and he realized what a tremendous job it was going to be to save Millie. But even as she confessed her sins to him, her long hair falling on either side of her face, her breasts heaving with the passionate relief of telling all, David's feelings of horror and pity were mixed with one other emotion. It gave him a wonderful feeling of power to watch this girl whom he considered beautiful prostrate herself before him. He felt a surging thrill whenever he watched the tears form at the corners of her eyes and his fingertips ached to place themselves on her bowed head.

“You must repent, Millie,” he said. “There is no sin so great that the Lord will not forgive you.”

Millie wept and David felt that the moment was at hand when Millie would throw herself on her knees and give her heart to Christ.

“I can't talk any more in here, David,” Millie said.

And indeed she could not talk any more for she had run out of things to say. According to the story, David should have succumbed long ago to her charm.

The little punk, she thought, angry with disappointment. Who the hell does he think he is? He ain't human. He's dead.

“Come, then,” intoned David in what he hoped was a ministerial voice.

He took her by the hand and led her out of the restaurant, but once they were outside it was Millie who took the initiative. She led him away from town and down a dirt road to the bank of a river. They found a place where the ground was flat and soft with pine needles and they sat down. Millie could hear the river flowing and she suddenly had a brilliant idea.

“I want you to baptize me, David,” she said.

“Oh, I couldn't do that, Millie. I've no authority to baptize anyone.”

“Yes, you can. Anybody can baptize anybody. It says so right in that Bible you gave me.”

She was not sure that the book said anything of the kind, but perhaps David also was not sure.

“Please, David,” she said. “I'll do anything you say. I'll be good if you'll do it, David. Truly I will.”

“But I can't, Millie. Besides, it wouldn't serve any purpose. You'd only have it to do over again when you join the church.”

“Please, David. I want so much to be good. Even if it doesn't count this time, I'd feel as though I were at least on the right path.”

“All right,” said David at last.

He walked to the edge of the water and took off his shoes and socks and decided that if he rolled up the legs of his trousers he could still wade in deeply enough to immerse Millie.

“David!” called Millie. “David, it's so dark. I can't see you. Come back!”

When David returned to where he had left her, he saw that she was on the ground.

“Oh, God!” he cried suddenly frightened. “Millie, did you fall, Millie? Are you hurt?”

He knelt down on the ground next to her and in the next second she had swept both of her arms around his neck and was forcing his mouth down onto hers. At first, David was so dumbfounded that he could do nothing but remain as he was but when her lips opened and he felt her sharp teeth and probing tongue trying to force his mouth open, he tried desperately to break away from her. She was remarkably strong. Without moving her mouth she flung him onto his back and held him pinned to the ground while she pressed her naked body against him and then, to his horror, her powerful hands gripped his wrists and turned his hands palms upward so that they were filled with the soft, hot mass of her breasts. She writhed on him and little moans escaped the hot, wet mouth glued to his. David felt a terrible sickness rise in him. He had a sensation of drowning. He could not breathe and he struggled futilely with the panting creature who held him. He felt her clawing at his trousers and she squirmed as if she were trying to press him into the ground.

“Sonofabitch,” she said through her teeth when his belt buckle would not yield.

She had to use both hands and in that moment, David pushed for all he was worth and managed to roll her away from him. He staggered to his feet, gulping air in great, sobbing lungfuls, and then he hung on to a tree and threw up and threw up and threw up.

David developed a serious chest cold and ran a high fever for days. When his cold was better he had such violent stomach upsets that he could not attend classes and every day he put off going to the head of the school to hand in his resignation. He tried to forget his experience with Millie, but the harder he tried the sharper edged grew the images. Every time he looked down at his hands he felt the soft mushiness of her again, and his stomach tightened and quivered.

I shall have to leave here, thought David. I'll go right now to tell the dean that I must leave.

He dreaded the ordeal,
the questions that were sure to be asked
, but he forced himself to get up and dress. He was halfway to the school when he met the local telegraph boy.

Julia was dying.

David ran back to his room and packed his belongings, then he raced for the Boston train.

“Mother,” he cried silently. “Wait until I get there. Don't go. Don't leave me. What shall I do if you go and leave me alone?”

But Julia was dead when David arrived in Berlinton.

“She had a stroke a week ago,” said Alan Strong. “The doctor said it wouldn't do any good to send for you then. He thought she might get well, David, or at least live. He told me yesterday that if she had lived she would have been completely paralyzed.”

So, thought David, even as I lusted with whores and harlots my mother lay dying.

He could not excuse himself now on the grounds of innocence. The Lord knew well the secrets of his black heart even if David himself had tried to deny their existence. And He had struck him down with swift and just punishment for the wickedness of his soul.

“The Lord giveth,” said David, “and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

“Yeah,” said Alan Strong.

Alan made the arrangements and everyone in Berlinton said it was the biggest, most impressive funeral the town had ever seen and that even when the mayor had died last year, there weren't half as many flowers for him.

Through the years Alan and David had arrived at a sort of truce whereby, though they still detested one another, they could, at least, speak civilly together.

“Well, David. How's school?” asked Alan.

“I'm not going back,” replied David.

“Why the hell not?” demanded Alan. “I thought you were so all fired set on getting to be a preacher.”

“I've simply decided that I'm not fit for the ministry, Father.”

“Well, that's fine,” said Alan, and for the first time in his life he clapped his son on the back. “Now you can come into the office with me. It's a fitting thing that a man should have his son in business with him.”

David winced and shrank from his father's touch; the Lord had not finished punishing him.

“What's the matter?” asked Alan. “Don't you want to come in with me?”

Thy will be done, thought David, and aloud he said to his father, “Of course I do.”