Thy Neighbor's Wife (19 page)

The waiter arrived with the drinks, allowing Bullaro a few extra seconds in which to think before speaking. He certainly wanted to say nothing inappropriate now, but he had momentarily lost all sense of rationale. He had entered this restaurant expecting to be threatened or blackmailed by a vengeful husband; instead, he had been complimented by Williamson, and was being encouraged to continue sleeping with his wife. Under
these peculiar circumstances, Bullaro was not sure he wanted to; but he wanted even less to risk offending this unusual man who might, if affronted, resort to vindictiveness.

As the waiter left, Bullaro quickly decided that he had better go along with Williamson for the time being, avoid all arguments and debates, and perhaps flatter him if possible. Bullaro did feel an inward exhilaration because his job and marriage were apparently not in jeopardy, at least for the present; and wishing to celebrate his sense of relief, he held up his glass in a toast, thanked Williamson for his kind words, and expressed admiration for Williamson’s emancipated marriage.

“It’s really wonderful that you and Barbara have been able to reach the place where you are,” Bullaro began.

“Yes,” Williamson agreed, “but there are other places we’re now trying to reach.”

Bullaro nodded, acknowledging that he had already heard from Barbara about Williamson’s conviction that marriage should not encourage feelings of ownership, that couples ideally should be able to have sexual relations with other people without inspiring guilt or jealousy.

Williamson accepted Bullaro’s summary, but said it was more complicated and ambitious than that. There was a group of people, Williamson said, who met regularly at his home to discuss and explore ways of achieving greater fulfillment in marriage. The American marriage was in trouble, he said, the traditional roles of the sexes demanded redefinition, and the therapists and psychologists were too aloof professionally, and unprepared personally, to deal with the problem.

But Williamson’s group was making remarkable progress, he suggested, because the members were willing to use themselves “as instruments for change in others.” The group was largely composed of average middle-class people who held responsible jobs in the community, were integrated in the social system, but, being cognizant of certain limitations and flaws within their surroundings and themselves, they sought improvements. William
son mentioned that his group included a woman in whom Bullaro had already shown interest, Arlene Gough.

“Yes,” Bullaro said, surprised to hear that she was involved, “but it’s becoming too complicated and I’d like to cool it.”

“Well, then it will be cooled,” Williamson replied casually.

Bullaro was impressed by Williamson’s easy confidence, and he wondered if perhaps it had been Williamson who sent Arlene Gough to the insurance office that first day with Barbara. The whole arrangement seemed somewhat eerie, a sexual scheme of some sort that disturbed Bullaro; and yet, as Williamson continued during lunch to describe the interesting men and women who gathered at his home, where they sometimes conducted their meetings in the nude, Bullaro felt himself increasingly curious, lured against his will.

As the lunch ended, Williamson said that he hoped Bullaro would visit his home and meet his friends. Bullaro said that he would be happy to do so.

“Good,” Williamson said, “tomorrow night at eight o’clock.”

Bullaro, alarmed at how quickly things were moving, fearful as he saw himself being drawn closer to Williamson’s erotic world, concealed his uneasiness and said that he would be there.

W
ILLIAMSON’S
past began during the Depression in an Alabama swampland south of Mobile, an indolent nameless place of piney woods and cypress trees, of log cabins and clannish families, of birds and squirrels and rabbits that were stalked each morning for food by men who, like their prey, were guided by the primal demands of their nature.

The men killed with slingshots as well as rifles, and the women cooked on wood-burning iron stoves that provided the only heat within the cabins, which during winter were often rained upon by sleet and surrounded with ice. Summers in the backwoods were hot and humid, with so little breeze at times that the leaves did not rustle, the birds sat silently in the trees, and the only sound around the water was an occasional pop of a bubble on the stagnant surface made by an unseen creature nibbling below.

At night the woodlands crackled with crickets and locusts and crawled with snakes, but the two dozen people who occupied the six cabins that were clustered in the clearing—the family and kin of John Williamson—walked fearlessly through the familiar paths of this dubious paradise, preferring it to the subtler uncertainties
of outer civilization. Even if the men could have found full-time jobs in the farming region and mills beyond, they would have remained in the woods where they understood the sounds and echoes of isolation, and had learned to survive as hunters and fishermen and makers of moonshine, which they later sold to the bootleggers who serviced the hamlets and towns where liquor was outlawed.

The stills were sheltered in the swamps, and the boiling of the corn and sugar was done by one of Williamson’s uncles, while Williamson’s father, Claud, who had one arm, drove the whiskey to the bootleggers at night in an old car that was rusty and battered but mechanically perfect.

Claud Williamson was a wiry, dark-haired, ill-tempered man who during his youth had crushed his left arm against a moving freight train that he had been attempting to climb. Though he learned to compensate physically, the mental adjustment was more difficult, and long after the injury he imagined pain in the place where his left arm and fingers had been, and he sometimes dreamed that the missing limb was being consumed by insects invading the burial box, and he was also convinced that the arm had been buried in an awkwardly bent position and that this was contributing to his discomfort. Finally he dug up the box and saw that his preconceptions had been right; and after he had rearranged the arm in a straighter position and had sealed a slight opening in the wood against the infiltrating insects, he felt the lingering pain leave his body.

John Williamson’s mother, Constance, born in the Midwest, had settled in the Alabama woodlands with Claud almost as an act of rebellion against her own mother, whom she despised. Her mother was a buxom traveling show dancer from Chicago, a wandering libertine who left Constance’s father for a handsome gambler, and then, after that romance ended, had a series of affairs with other men while Constance, an only child, was usually left alone at night or was entrusted to casual acquaintances for sometimes weeks and months.

As a young girl, Constance grew up very lonely but adjustable,
independent-minded, and introspective, studious in the several schools she attended and an omnivorous reader. Unlike her flamboyant mother, who dressed with a flapper’s flair and sought constant attention from men, Constance cared little about how she looked in clothes or the impression she was creating. She was a plain, round-faced blonde with expressionless blue eyes who as a teenager, and throughout her life, was overweight.

After her mother had settled in Mobile with a new husband, a Nash automobile dealer, Constance, who was then fifteen, ran away from home. When her mother next located her, Constance was living with the group in the woods, was pregnant, and had married nineteen-year-old Claud Williamson. Resisting all attempts by her mother and stepfather to reclaim her, Constance remained with Williamson in the woodlands, where her daughter was born in 1924; and eight years later, after Constance had twice left the heavy-drinking Claud but each time returned, a son was born to them in 1932: This was John Williamson.

While the primitive living conditions with Claud rarely seemed idyllic, Constance nevertheless found comfort in the communal intimacy, a sense of family among rustic strangers. The vegetables that were grown, the game and fish that were caught, were exchanged within the group, and there was also a spirit of sharing in each other’s personal problems and difficult chores. The men helped one another in the building or enlarging of their homes and storage shacks, and the women served as midwives during the birth of children. Everyone’s children roamed freely in the outdoors, and when a child was injured or frightened he ran not necessarily to a parent but to the nearest adult.

When the children reached school age, they walked together each morning, sometimes without shoes, through a mile-long path to a dirt road where a bus stopped and took them an additional ten miles to a country schoolhouse. Later in the afternoon they returned to help the adults with the cleaning and preparing of food and the chopping of logs for firewood. During leisure
hours, in the privacy of trees and bushes, there was considerable sexual adventuring among teenagers, and, because of the insularity of their families, sexual contact between young boys and girls who were cousins was very common. John Williamson had intercourse for the first time at the age of twelve with a slightly older cousin, but the incest taboo was adhered to by all members of an immediate family.

Many people within the settlement were of French extraction and had been baptized Catholic, and on Sundays the faithful among them traveled to a small roadside church, attended also by Creoles, to hear Mass celebrated by an old Jesuit priest who had driven the twenty miles from Mobile. Constance Williamson, a Catholic convert, played the organ and sang, but no other member of her family was influenced by religion, and her sensuous daughter, Marion, a dark-eyed brunet with a voluptuous figure, was believed by the more righteous women to be under Satan’s sway, for there was no other explanation for Marion’s wild and rampant behavior.

Marion Williamson wore the tightest clothes she could find, and from the time she was fourteen there was not a man in the woods who did not lust for her body. Her awareness of this made her even more flirtatious, being endlessly pleased with the effect she could arouse in the opposite sex; but she sensed early in life that none of these men were worthy of her charms, nor could they provide her with what she really wanted—an escape from stagnation and the claustrophobic cabin of her surly father and her serene and vegetating mother.

She regarded her mother almost as a lost survivor of some secret tragedy, a wolf child in the wilderness, and Marion felt far less identity with her mother than she did with her maternal grandmother, that aging flapper who on rare occasions she was taken to visit in Mobile. Her grandmother was an attractive perfumed woman with dyed dark hair and large breasts pressing up against her well-made gowns, and she lived in a comfortably furnished home and owned a big car provided by the hefty German who was her second husband but would not be her last. She
drank martinis and chain smoked Chesterfields, had a sense of humor and exuded energy, and as Marion compared this worldly woman with her own pale and frumpy mother, she was seeing evolution in reverse, and there was no doubt in her youthful mind as to which woman had so far been the wiser.

Marion’s desire for escape was also prompted at this time by her awareness that the entire Mobile area was being invaded by thousands of free-spending pilots and naval men who were being mobilized for possible action in an upcoming war. It was 1940; the radio news spoke of Japanese and German aggressions, and each day the skies over the Mobile swamplands roared with military planes flown from the nearby Brookley Air Base or from the Pensicola Naval Training Station across the bay in Florida. The shipyards of Mobile were now busy with defense contracts, and soon there would be such a demand for workers that even the men in the woods would be recruited, and among those hired, despite his having one arm, was Marion’s father.

On weekends the sidewalks of bayside cities were crowded with airmen and sailors cruising for women, and one that they would soon see, looking older than her age, and smiling, was Marion Williamson, who had run away from home. Before her parents would again hear from her, she would marry a serviceman, becoming a bride at fifteen.

But the marriage did not curb her restlessness, and within a few months, with the cooperation of the military, the relationship was dissolved. At the age of sixteen, however, she was married again, this time to a naval pilot who was ten years her senior. His name was John Wiley Brock, and he took her from Pensicola to Norfolk, where a son was born to them in February 1941.

When Brock was assigned to duty in Pearl Harbor, Marion and the baby moved in with Brock’s parents in Montgomery, but after the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, which Brock survived, Marion left with the child for California, explaining to her in-laws that she wanted to be closer to her husband while awaiting his return. But in California she met another man and began having an affair, placing her infant in a children’s
home; and soon her in-laws in Alabama received an angry message from Brock aboard the carrier
Enterprise
informing them of her behavior and asking that they fly to California to retrieve the little boy. This they did, bringing the child back to Montgomery and eventually becoming, despite Marion’s protests, her son’s legal guardians. Ensign Brock meanwhile rewrote his will and military insurance policy in an attempt to deprive his wife of certain claims as his beneficiary, and he also established a trust fund for his son, which was one of his final acts before Japanese antiaircraft fire hit his torpedo plane during the battle of Midway and sent him crashing to his death.

In 1943 Marion became the wife of a naval officer named Richard McElligott, an Annapolis graduate with whom she would have two sons and a daughter; but this relationship, too, did not diminish her drive for adventures with other men. In time she left the naval officer for a public relations man from Columbia Pictures with whom she had another son, only to leave this husband later for a Brazilian rancher.

During her endless odyssey out of the woods, like a beautiful vagrant bird in tireless flight, she settled briefly in dozens of cities in the United States, Europe, and South America, and held a variety of jobs—a tour guide in Rio de Janeiro, a barmaid in Taramolinas, an assistant buyer in the children’s department of Saks Fifth Avenue in New York, a cashier at a Hawaiian restaurant in Beverly Hills called the Luau; and periodically, and always unannounced, she returned to Alabama to see her parents and also her grandmother. Her last visit with her grandmother before the latter’s death was spent in a honky-tonk on the Alabama-Mississippi state line where the two women, together with Marion’s pot-smoking daughter, spent the evening dancing to jukebox music and playing the slot machines.

Of all the men who knew Marion, perhaps the one who most understood her nomadic nature, and emulated it, was her brother John, who was also obliged to her for providing him with his first
glimpse of the larger world beyond the trees. As a schoolboy he twice was invited to other sections of the country to stay with her and her third husband, the naval officer, Richard McElligott. On the first occasion, in 1943—when McElligott was assigned to a cruiser in Boston—the eleven-year-old Williamson lived in their apartment in Cambridge for six months and attended a Boston public school. In 1947, when Williamson was fifteen, he spent the summer with the McElligotts in Alhambra, California, near Los Angeles, where he met a group of teenaged drivers of modified racing cars and hot rods and helped them with the maintenance of their engines. Even at this age, John Williamson was a skilled mechanic.

In Alabama he had spent many hours after school working as a mechanic’s apprentice at a roadside garage not far from where his parents during the war had moved their house by rolling it on logs to a clearing beyond the woods. Williamson was a quiet tinkerer, a lean brooding boy with blond almost white hair and soiled fingers invariably fiddling with the parts of failing farm trucks, malfunctioning hunting rifles, broken record players. He had an instinctive sense of mechanical relationships, could feel his way through a repair. As a twelve-year-old he had built his own radio, using wire and discarded metal he had found in the woods, including a piece of copper he had stolen from one of the moonshine distilleries, resulting in a brutal beating from his father.

In the country high school he attended, he was an excellent student in science and mathematics and very poor in history. There were eighteen students in his class, but he was not particularly friendly with any of them. The presence of his irascible father inhibited him from ever inviting a classmate home after school, and he also preferred being alone much of the time so that he could read books, work on machinery, or communicate with the voices of distant strangers via his ham radio set.

While there were farm girls nearby that he occasionally slept with, and one who allowed him to photograph her in the nude, Williamson was never seriously involved, and his fantasies fo
cused mainly on his solitary escape from all that he had known in the rural South. After completing high school in 1949, his sister wrote that she had arranged for him an appointment to Annapolis; but the idea of rigid academic confinement was unappealing, and he enlisted instead in the Navy. After boot camp in San Diego, and training in electronics at naval schools in northern California, Williamson was sent thousands of miles further west to join American occupational forces on a series of small primitive islands in the South Pacific that would be his home for the better part of the next four years.

During this time he developed into one of the Navy’s most versatile electronics technicians, being adept in the maintenance and repair of all types of equipment from teletype machines to radar and sonar. Assigned first within the Marshall Islands to a bleak, almost treeless atoll called Kwajalein, on which a thousand sailors and airmen dwelled in a state of unflagging tedium, his status as a maintenance specialist soon allowed him to travel on naval patrol planes to several other islands on which he met not only a variety of military and civilian personnel, including women, but also the native inhabitants, which to him were far more interesting.