To Sail Beyond the Sunset (25 page)

But now it was “
Deutschland Über Alles
” and everybody knew that the Jews owned France and ran everything there, and if those American passengers had minded their own business and stayed home where they belonged, out of the war zone, they wouldn’t have been on the
Lusitania
—after all, the emperor had warned them. It was their own fault.

My brother Edward in Chicago reported much the same sentiment there. He did not sound pro-German himself, but he did express a fervent hope that we would stay out of a war that wasn’t any of our business.

This was not what I heard at home. When President Wilson made his famous (infamous?) speech about the sinking of the
Lusitania
, the “too proud to fight” speech, Father came over to see Brian and sat there, smoldering like a volcano, until all the children were in bed or elsewhere out of earshot. Then he used language that I pretended not to hear. He applied it mainly to the cowardly tactics of the Huns but he saved a plentiful portion for that “pusillanimous Presbyterian parson” in the White House. “‘Too proud to fight’! What sort of talk is that? It requires pride in order to fight. A coward slinks away with his tail between his legs. Brian, we need Teddy Roosevelt back in there!”

My husband agreed.

In the spring of 1916 my husband went to Plattsburg, New York, where the previous summer General Leonard Wood had instituted a citizens training camp for officer candidates—Brian had been disappointed not to be able to attend it in 1915, and planned ahead not to miss it in 1916. Ethel was born while Brian was away, through some careful planning of my own. When he returned at the end of August, I had the property back in shape and ready to welcome him, i.b.a.w.m.l.o. so that he could w.m.t.b.w.—and “Mrs. Gillyhooley” did her best to be worth more than five dollars.

I suspect that I was, as my biological pressure was far up past the danger line.

It was the longest dry spell of my married life, in part because I was thoroughly chaperoned at home. At Brian’s request Father lived with us while Brian was away. No harem guard ever took his duties more seriously than Father did. Brian had often “chaperoned” me as a shut-eye sentry, protecting me from the neighbors, not from my own libidinous nature.

Father included protecting me from himself. Yes, I tested the water. I had known way back when I was still
virgo intacta
how thoroughly incestuous were my feelings toward my father. Furthermore I was certain that he was just as moved by me.

So about ten days after Brian drove away. when my animal nature was crawling up on me, I arranged it so that I missed saying goodnight to Father, then came into his room right after he had gone to bed, dressed in a low-cut nightgown and a not too opaque peignoir—freshly bathed and smelling good (“April Showers,” a euphemism)—and said that I had come in to say goodnight, which he echoed. So I leaned over to kiss him, exposing my breasts and producing a wave of that sinful scent.

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.

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.

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.”