THE CHAPMAN REPORT
By Irving Wallace
Smashwords Edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
The Chapman Report Copyright 2011 Amy Wallace & David Wallechinsky
Cover Design by David Dodd
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TO MANY WOMEN
And
A FEW MEN
Every act of human coitus has something of the quality of a drama; it commences with some form of pursuit and may be climaxed by total intimacy, but often 'is not. By itself, sex cannot substitute for intimacy... .
-NELSON N. FOOTE Family Study Center University of Chicago
Author's Introduction
IT IS POSSIBLE that several of the many women with whom I have crossed paths in the years between puberty and the present will look into this book as they might into a mirror and, through some personal alchemy, see a reflection of themselves. To one and all, I assure them, I would have been totally incapable of capturing their beauty, habits, experiences, and elusive femininity on paper, even if I had wanted to do so. They possessed, all of them, too much complexity, as I possessed too little art, to serve as prototypes for the women in these pages.
The women in the morality play that follows are pure fiction—creatures of the author's imagination—and if any female reader finds here the remotest resemblance to herself, or to any other human being, living or dead, I must firmly state that the resemblance is one of incredible coincidence.
I must make the same disclaimer to male readers. If, somewhere in this happy land, there is a man who feels ill-used because he believes that he inhabits these pages, let him be relieved of the notion at once. Every man in this novel, from first page to last, is the result of make-believe.
Among readers of both sexes, there may be a temptation to ascribe to Dr. Chapman and other sexologists in this novel some of the characteristics and methods of real-life sex historians like Drs. Alfred C. Kinsey, G. V. Hamilton, Robert L. Dickinson, Lewis M. Terman, and others. Those who wish to play out the fantasy, and enjoy the fun of it, may do so, but at their own risk, not mine. For their speculations will have no basis in fact. Since 1915, when the pursuit of sexual behavior by scientific investigators first began, dozens of notable men and women have honorably served this occupation. I have never met, nor even seen, one of them. Nor have I met any of their associates.
I have undertaken to use, in a work of the imagination, an occupation that is a phenomenon of our time, a time in which I grew up, an age preoccupied with sex, with surveys, with confessions, with statistics. I have invented a group of sexologists and shown them at labor. If, by wildest chance, one of them resembles in some way someone who is alive, or was alive, I will be flattered at the accidental accuracy and perception of my pen, but surprised, too, since every character in this book is a product of my working daydreams.
I leave the patient reader with the sensible words of W. Somerset Maugham: "This practice of ascribing originals for the creatures of the novelist's fancy is a very mischievous one."
IRVING WALLACE
Los Angeles, California
1
ONCE A DAY, at exactly ten minutes to nine in the morning, a long, gray sight-seeing bus, streaked with dust, lumbered up Sunset Boulevard and entered that suburb of Los Angeles known as The Briars. The uniformed guide and driver of the bus adjusted the silver microphone before his lips and resumed his soporific drone: "Ladies and gentlemen, we are now passing through The Briars . . ."
No stir of excitement resulted among the passengers, already sated by the gaudy homes of motion-picture celebrities in Beverly Hills and Bel-Air, left behind twenty minutes before. The Briars, they heard, and sensed before they heard, held no more exotic wonders than the better sections of the towns they had briefly escaped in Pennsylvania, Kansas, Georgia, and Idaho. The Briars was, to sight, the model of perfect normalcy, and, therefore, nothing to write home about.
Many of the passengers used this interlude to change their positions, massage their necks, light cigarettes, or make are-mark to their neighbors as they waited for the transition to the more promising Pacific Ocean and its Malibu colony. But a few, mostly women with young faces and old hands, continued to gaze out their windows, admiring the relaxed, graceful, rural beauty of the suburb, wondering what the community was like and how it would be to become a member of its exclusive population.
Many buses like this one had passed daily through The Briars, during the several decades of its development. And always, to the transient beholder, the surface vision of placidity, retreat, and conventionality prevailed. And, indeed, the obvious buildings and guidebook statistics were comforting and familiar. For The Briars was to Los Angeles what Lake Forest is to Chicago and Scarsdale is to New York City.
Since it was a formal part of greater Los Angeles, without government autonomy of its own, the boundaries of The Briars had been fixed irregularly and erratically, long before, by a combination of local business boosters, realtors, and successive editors of throw-away weekly newspapers. Generally, it was regarded as a subdivision of eight square miles located on either side of curving Sunset Boulevard, between Westwood to the east and the Pacific Palisades to the West.
The subdivision restrictions were such that almost all lots were oversize, and the houses, most often one-story colonial or contemporary ranch modem, were spacious and set back sixty or more feet from the wide, paved streets. Almost every house was partially obscured, and so made more tantalizing by green mounds of landscaped earth or by a ring of eucalyptus trees, by hedges of hibiscus or a high stone wall.
A single major shopping area, advertised as The Village Green, much given to quaint shop structures (the shoemaker and barber labored under a modified Moulmein pagoda) and to exotic imported commodities and overpriced domestic products, gave sustenance to the area. Other indications of social conformity were the four elementary schools, the one junior high school, and the single senior high school. Almost defensively, the people of The Briars seemed to have built too many churches: two Catholic, one Latter-day Saints, one Methodist, one Christian Science, one Presbyterian, and one Jewish synagogue. At the fringes of The Village Green stood a branch of the main post office, a dimly lighted and under-stocked public library (the majority in The Briars bought their own books), an American Legion hall, an Optimist Club, a Junior Chamber of Commerce building, and the brick and stone, modernized Gothic edifice belonging to The Briars' Women's Association.
Except for several streets of new apartment buildings, much addicted to heavy brass outdoor fittings and occupied largely by white-collar workers who commuted to the city, the avenues of The Briars were populated by houses owned for the most part by their possessors, instead of the local drive-in bank. The owners of these houses earned from $20,000 to $100,000 a year. Few were advanced enough in years to be retired. The Briars was a community of the relatively young or middle-aged. Although its politics were actually liberal, its outward aspect was sufficiently staid and conservative to discourage invasion by persons employed in the entertainment industries. Members of the retrenching motion-picture business rarely got farther west than the opulence of Beverly Hills, and members of the expanding television business preferred the activity and excitement of more metropolitan areas.
Local realtors estimated that there were 14,000 men, women, and children in The Briars. The pages of the slender yearly telephone directory gave the occupations of the home-owners: a clothing-store proprietor, a structural engineer, a psychiatrist, a building contractor, a research analyst, a writer, a dry cleaner, a motel owner, a university president, an advertising executive, an art dealer, a pet-shop proprietor, an attorney-at-law, an accountant, an architect, a banker, a dentist.
These were the men, and when they departed for their places of vocation, usually in the remote city, The Briars became a community of women.
From behind the windows of the daily sight-seeing bus, the passengers, predominantly female, stared with envy at those of their own sex whom they glimpsed in The Briars. There was always the slowly receding view of a blonde in Capri pants sliding into her low-slung Jaguar in a driveway, or an attractive dark-haired matron in an expensive orlon robe chatting with the head gardener from the front steps, or the well-formed wives in tight white shorts gracefully and expertly bounding about on a private tennis court, or the redhead, her hair caught in a silk scarf, behind the wheel of a Lincoln Continental, steering into a parking spot in front of the shopping arcade.
What the passengers in the sight-seeing bus did not see they invented and embellished in their own minds. They could imagine clearly how these women of The Briars lived. In the mornings, the female population of The Briars sent their young off in chartered buses to airy schools; dawdled over breakfast served by colored maids while they leafed through the latest Vogue or Harper's Bazaar; sunbathed in halters and shorts on contour lounges set on flagstoned patios; dressed leisurely in imported sweaters and skirts for luncheons with elegant friends on Wilshire Boulevard. And in the afternoons they browsed through magnificent, semi-exclusive dress shops, or relaxed in beauty salons, or attended tea or garden parties. And in the evenings, when they were not with husbands and friends in Palm Springs or Las Vegas or Sun Valley, they were in the city for an art movie, a play, a night club featuring the currently popular topical comedian. Sometimes they supervised an intimate dinner at home, or, in a silk shantung jump-suit, received guests (offering their warm cheeks to the men and cool handshakes to the wives) and drank immoderately, laughing at flirtatious sex jokes told against the dinning stereophonic phonograph. The morning following, while a maid sent the husband to work and the children to school, they indulged their hangovers with late sleep and awakened at last, vaguely regretting that they had not the time to read up for the approaching evening's class in art appreciation. This was, in the eyes and minds of those on the sight-seeing bus, how the women of The Briars spent their days, and, allowing for variations of individual tastes, this was actually how they did live.
But, of course, there was more behind the facade of scarves, harlequin sun glasses, loose-fitting sweaters and snug-fitting pants, more behind the foreign sports cars and leather car coats, more behind the clipped hedges and doctored elms and large, gracious houses. Because, for the outsiders who were not part of this envied life, it could not be imagined or understood that here, too, existence was often as difficult as it was easy and that for many of the 14,000 in The Briars this was the worst of times as well as the best of times.
The secret climate of The Briars, held as private as any Masonic rite, was, for most of its women, one of empty monotony, boredom, confusion. More often than not, the natives—as the parlor joke went—were restless. The malady was American and married female, but the women of The Briars chose to believe that it was exclusively their own. Yet they rarely gave voice to it, directly, openly, because they could not fully reconcile this continued unhappy unrest with material plenty.
When the women of The Briars had been single and aspiring, they had wanted only to be married and comfortable, to wear emotional security like a favorite garment and limitations on free choice like a veil, and to dwell in a sylvan paradise such as this. Now, at last, they were married (or had been) for two or five or fifteen years, and they were comfortable, and they were regulated, and they were safe in a community admired by all, and yet, somehow, it was not enough. Inarticulate for the most, they wanted more—but exactly what they wanted they could not explain, even to themselves.
And so they lost themselves in a bewildering maze of meaningless appointments, get-togethers, charities, activities, weekend flights; and to cease thinking of what was not there, they blurred their senses with vodka, sleeping pills, tranquilizing drugs, sexual experiments. And in this way, each dread morning was possible, and life went on unchanged, and seemed a vacuum, timeless except for the occasional awareness that a gray hair had dared to appear (obliterated quickly by a bleach), that the breasts sagged ever so slightly (supported hastily by the newest uplift brassiere), that the flesh on the hips was less elastic (pounded speedily firm by machine bands and Swedish hands), that the children were taller and taller (but now, at last, enemy Time triumphed, for there was no combating this fact that life was growing shorter and shorter) .
At five minutes after nine in the morning, the long, gray sightseeing bus, emerging from the most scenic thoroughfare in The Briars, regained its lane on Sunset Boulevard and started down the sloping highway toward destination beach.
Standing on the pocked, asphalt, circular driveway, before her broad, one-story Georgian house, Kathleen Ballard waved a last time to her four-year-old daughter, Deirdre, in the back seat of the station wagon, which was part of the daily car pool taking her to the progressive nursery school in Westwood.
After the station wagon had disappeared around the corner, Kathleen lingered a moment in the driveway. She studied the bed of yellow rose bushes nearby, particularly the row of blighted ones, reminding herself that she must consult Mr. Ito about some sort of spray treatment. She had first noticed the condition of the roses a few days before and had quickly forgotten them after they made her think of herself—how the outer bloom hid, from the casual onlooker, the deep inner sickness at the root, and nothing seemed amiss until you looked closely.
Lifting her gaze from the roses, staring across the expanse of green front lawn, through the thick foliage that protected her from all but herself, Kathleen could still see the last of the familiar gray sight-seeing bus as it moved slowly away and down the hill. She did not have her wrist watch—it was Albertine's day off, and she had slept poorly, and taken a pill at dawn, and then overslept, so that there had been barely enough time to slip into a brunch coat and dress Deirdre for school. But now she knew, by the bus, that it was after nine o'clock and that she must do what she had promised Grace Waterton the night before she would do.
Reluctantly, she started back into the front outer vestibule, moving between the graceful, fluted columns, past the tall potted cypresses, and entered the cavernous, empty, elegant house, resisting and resenting the hour that lay before her. Once in the kitchen, she turned off the stove, poured herself a steaming cup of coffee, and took it unsweetened to the white Formica dinette table. Setting the coffee down, she found a package of cigarettes in the cupboard above the telephone. With the cigarettes and manila folder Grace had left her in one hand, and the telephone in the other, she returned to the table.
After the first sip of warming coffee, she devoted herself briefly to the ritual of the morning's initial cigarette. Inhaling deeply, then exhaling, she felt momentarily soothed. Even her slender fingers, nicotine-stained where they held the cigarette, trembled less as she continued to smoke. After a while she crushed the half-burned cigarette in the porcelain ash tray bearing the faded legend "Imperial Hotel, Tokyo" that was still on the table where Boynton had always kept it to remind him of past glories. She wondered why she did not replace the ash tray with one that would irritate her less, but she knew that it was because she did not have the nerve.
The coffee was now merely warm, and she drank it down all at once. Thus fortified, she at last opened the manila folder. There were two sheets of paper inside the folder. On the first, neatly typewritten by Grace, were the names of a dozen members of The Women's Association and their telephone numbers. Scanning the names, Kathleen recognized everyone as a friend or acquaintance or neighbor. Despite this, she still postponed the assignment of telephoning each.
When Grace had dropped off the folder the evening before, Kathleen had immediately felt helpless before the older woman's charging and aggressive heartiness. Grace Waterton was in her late fifties. Her gray hair, set several times weekly by a male hairdresser, resembled a tin wig. She was tiny, churning, and verbose. After her children had married, she had gravitated for two years between a swami in Reseda and a psychiatrist in Beverly Hills and abandoned both for the presidency of The Women's Association, which had become her entire life. In some bank, somewhere, there was a vice-president named Mr. Grace Waterton.
Although Grace had finally intimidated Kathleen into accepting the folder, Kathleen had tried to object. She was exhausted, she pleaded, and busy. Besides, she had not seen any of the women for several months, not since the last Association meeting, and the telephone calls would necessarily be long and involved. "Nonsense," Grace had said in her strident, no-nonsense tone of voice. "This is business, and you treat it as such. Just tell each one you've got a dozen more calls to make. Besides, I think it's good for you. I don't like it, Kathleen, the way you've been holing yourself up like a hermit. It's not healthy. If you won't get out to see people, at least talk to them."
Kathleen had not wanted to tell Grace, or anyone, that it was not what had happened to Boynton that had made her a recluse—or possibly it was, but in a way and for reasons different than they realized. When she had been married, and he was home, as so often he was, she desired only to be out of the house, to be lost in the noisy chaos of companionship, though it was against all her natural instincts. But in the year and four months since she had been alone, escape was not necessary. She had reverted to, and luxuriated in, the lonely independence that she had known, and loved and hated, before marriage.
Suddenly, she had been aware that Grace was speaking again and that her visitor's voice had softened slightly. "Believe me, Kathleen, dear, we all know what an ordeal you've been through. But no one will help you if you don't help your-self. You're still young, beautiful, you've got a lovely daughter —a whole life ahead, and you've got to live it. If I thought you were really unwell, darling, I'd be the first to understand. Of course, I can get someone else to make the phone calls instead of you. But we need you. I mean, like it or not, you're still one of our most important and influential members. And you can see why I have to pick twenty of our most respected members to make these calls. I mean, it simply makes the calls carry more weight. Believe me, Kathleen, we need ,a full turnout, and everyone on our side—especially if the churches object to this meeting. I don't know if they will, but there's talk."
Until then, Kathleen had not, absorbed as she was in the effort to avoid an unpleasant task, fully comprehended, or even listened to, the real purpose of the meeting. When she inquired again, and Grace explained it to her briskly and proudly (yet not fully able to conceal her excitement at the daring and naughtiness of the whole affair), Kathleen had been even more disturbed. She was in no mood to join a company of women in listening to a man discuss the sexual habits of the American female, no matter how clinically. Worse—for then came the sudden realization of what the lecture would lead to —she was not prepared to disclose her private secrets to a band of strangers, to disrobe figuratively before a group of leering male voyeurs.
The whole thing was insane, ill-making, yet so great was Grace's enthusiasm—"it'll make our community famous; that's why Mr. Ackerman arranged it"—that Kathleen instinctively realized any objection would not be understood and would make her sexually suspect. So she had resisted no longer and had decided to bide her time.
Now, hastily lighting another cigarette, she was confronted with the damnable folder. She removed the list of names to examine the sheet of paper beneath it. This was a mimeographed publicity story—dated the following day "for immediate press release"—and it was signed by Grace Waterton. This release, Grace had explained, would give Kathleen all of the pertinent facts when she was telephoning to notify members of the special meeting two days hence. Dragging steadily at her cigarette, Kathleen read the press release.
"On Friday morning, May 22, at ten-thirty o'clock," the mimeographed story began, "Dr. George G. Chapman, world-renowned sex authority from Reardon College in Wisconsin and author of last year's best-selling A Sex Study of the American Bachelor, will address a full membership meeting of The Briars' Women's Association. For two weeks following the meeting, at which Dr. Chapman will discuss the purposes of his current study of the married female, Dr. Chapman and his team of assistants, Dr. Horace Van Duesen, Mr. Cass Miller, Mr. Paul Radford, all associated with Reardon College, will interview the members of the Women's Association who are, or have been, married.
"For fourteen months, the celebrated Dr. Chapman and his team have been traveling through the United States interviewing several thousand married women of widely varied educational backgrounds who represent every economic, religious, and age group. According to Dr. Chapman, the women of The Briars will be the last that he and his associates will interview before collating their findings and publishing them next year. `The purpose of this inquiry,' says Dr. Chapman, `is to bring into the open what has so long been hidden, the true pattern of the sexual life of American females, so that, through statistics, we may scientifically illuminate an area of human life long kept in darkness and ignorance. It is our hope that future generations of American women may profit by our findings.'
"Mrs. Grace Waterton, president of The Briars' Women's Association, has already expressed her awareness of the honor in a telegram to Dr. Chapman and promised a one hundred percent turnout at his briefing lecture. Subjects will offer themselves for interview on a voluntary basis, but Mrs. Waterton predicts that after hearing Dr. Chapman, and learning that the actual personal interviews are even more anonymous than those in the past conducted by such pioneer investigators as Gilbert Hamilton, Alfred Kinsey, Ernest Burgess, Paul Wallin, few of the Association's 220 married members will refuse this opportunity to contribute to scientific advancement. The Association, which has its own club house and auditorium in The Briars, was established fifteen years ago and is dedicated to social and charitable works, as well as to beautifying the western area of greater Los Angeles."
Having finished reading the release, Kathleen continued to gaze at it with distaste. Irrationally offended by the words, she asked herself: What kind of Peeping Tom is this Dr. Chapman anyway?
She had heard of him, of course. Everyone had heard of him. The sensationalism of his last book (all the women she knew had read it avidly, though Kathleen had disdained even to borrow a copy), and the progress of his current study, so-called, had enlivened the pages of newspapers and periodicals for several years and had served to bring his portrait to the covers of at least a dozen magazines. One day, she supposed, Chapman would be a freak symbol of his decade and its obsessive concern with sex, just as Emile Cone was representative of a different curiosity in the nineteen-twenties.
But what, Kathleen wondered, would make a grown, educated man want to devote his life to prying into the secret sex histories of men, women, and children? The unceasing persiflage about "scientific advancement" could serve only to disguise beneath noble purpose an unhealthy and erotic mentality, or, as bad, a coarse commercial mind determined to capitalize on the forbidden. In fairness to Dr. Chapman, Kathleen remembered reading that he kept none of his considerable earnings for himself. Nevertheless, in this culture, a well-known name was equal to any annuity and might be cashed in at any time. Besides, he probably preferred notoriety to wealth.
Maybe she was being harsh with him, Kathleen reflected. Maybe the fault was her own, that she had become prim and old-fashioned, if one could really become old-fashioned at twenty-eight. Still, her conviction was unshakable: a woman's reproductive organs belonged to herself and to herself alone, and their use and activity should be known to none beyond herself, her mate, her physician.
Frowning at the necessity of having to promote something in which she did not believe, something so obviously unpalatable and indecent, Kathleen ground out her second cigarette. She brought the typed column of names and numbers back before her, lifted the receiver, and began to dial the numerals listed after Ursula Palmer's name.
Ursula Palmer was an aggressive clarifier, inquirer, pin-pointer. When she asked how-are-you, she meant to know, exactly, how-you-were from morning to night, and yesterday, too. No vague generalities, no misty expositions, ever satisfied her. In the world scrutinized by her luminous, large brown eyes, all had to be tangible, known, understood.
Now, one hand still resting on the space bar and keys of her typewriter and the other holding the receiver to her ear, she continued—as she had for the last several minutes—to plague Kathleen with concrete questions about Dr. Chapman's expedition into The Briars.
"Really, Ursula," Kathleen was saying with repressed exasperation, "I don't have the slightest idea why Dr. Chapman picked us for his last sampling. I only know what's on the publicity release in front of me."
"Well, then, read it to me," said Ursula. "I just want to get all the facts straight."
Ursula could hear the distant paper rustle in Kathleen's hand, and she listened, eyes closed to concentrate better, as her caller's husky voice read the words over the telephone. When Kathleen had finished, Ursula opened her eyes. "I suppose," she said into the telephone, "that covers it. Poor Dr. Chapman. He's going to be disappointed."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean what's he going to learn from this cold bunch of biddies that he doesn't already know? I can just see him asking Teresa Harnish her favorite position. Two to one she tells him it's being the wife of an art dealer."
"I don't think we're any different from women anywhere.”
“Maybe not," said Ursula doubtfully.
"Can I tell Grace you're coming to the meeting?”
“Of course. I wouldn't miss it for anything."
After she had hung up, Ursula Palmer regretted that she had irritated Kathleen, as she sensed that she had and always did. It was too bad, because she sincerely respected Kathleen and wanted her friendship. Of all the women whom she knew in The Briars, it was Kathleen alone, Ursula felt, who was her intellectual equal. Moreover, Kathleen possessed that indefinable air—that thing that made a woman a lady, a kind of well-bred repose known colloquially as class. To this, or part of this, was added the glamour of wealth. Everyone knew that Kathleen had inherited a small fortune from her father. She was independent. She did not have to work. Once, in one of her monthly features for Houseday, Ursula had written of the average well-off suburban wife and used the person of Kathleen as the model. She envied Kathleen her striking appearance: her shining black hair, bobbed short and smart; her provocative green eyes; the small tilted nose; the full crimson mouth—all this and the Modigliani neck set on a tall, boyish, graceful figure.
Swinging her swivel chair back to the typewriter, Ursula cast a sidelong glance at the wall mirror across her library and made a silent pledge to diet seriously again. Yet, studying herself in the glass, she knew that it was hopeless. She was not meant to look like Kathleen Ballard. She was big-boned, from cheeks and shoulders to hips, and she would always weigh one hundred and thirty-five pounds. Once a drunk at a party had told her that she resembled an overweight Charlotte Brontë. She was sure that this was because she parted her dark brown hair straight down the middle. Anyway, she liked the literary allusion. For a woman of forty-one—and a mother, she remembered (reminding herself to write Devin this weekend and wondering why she could never picture his father)—she was well preserved, and vain about her small hands and shapely calves. Besides, Harold liked her this way. And, besides, she was Sappho, not Helen of Troy, Sappho of the Muse, not of Lesbos, and what she had would last longer.
She resumed banging away at the typewriter. She had another hour before she would have to leave for the airport to meet Bertram Foster and his wife, Alma. Although, in many ways, Foster was not her ideal of a publisher—his coarseness and vulgarity often made one wince, and his interests in the more commercial aspects of Houseday rather than the literary were sometimes disappointing—still he had been astute enough to select Ursula from among his many free-lance contributors and to promote her to Western editor of the widely circulated family magazine.
Presently, having completed her précis, Ursula drew it from the typewriter and began to proof it. The précis was cleverly conceived, designed to cater to Foster's financial prejudices and to improve Ursula's own job. It covered her office's activities the first half of the year. It emphasized small economies and big accomplishments. It suggested wider authority and coverage for her department, at little extra cost, and in a way that might be enticing to potential advertisers.
"Dearest?" It was Harold's voice.
Ursula looked up as Harold Palmer came tentatively into the den carrying a breakfast tray covered with eggs, toast, coffee. "You'd better have something, or you'll get a headache."
She watched absently as Harold set her dishes on the desk before her and then poured his own coffee. Although he had prepared breakfast almost every morning of their married life, and persisted in the custom even after they had employed a live-in maid, each time he made it appear as if he were going to do it this once as a favor. He was a tall, hesitant, inarticulate man, gray-faced and concave, and two years her junior. He had the appearance of, and in fact was, an accountant.
He settled in the leather chair across from her. "Hadn't you better be getting dressed?" he inquired, nodding at her quilted long robe as he stirred his coffee.
"I've got my face on, and I'm dressed underneath. I just have to slip into a skirt."
"How long are they going to be here?"
"Two weeks, I think. They're going on to Honolulu."
"Now that's the way to live." He drank his coffee. "Maybe if I land Berrey today, we'll be going to Hawaii ourselves next year."
Ursula's mind had been elsewhere. "Who's Berret?" she asked dutifully.
"Berrey," Harold repeated with shy understanding. "He owns the Berrey Cut-Rate Drugstores. There are ten in the area. It could do a good deal for me. I met him a couple times, when I was with the old firm."
The old firm, Ursula remembered, was Keller Company in Beverly Hills, a large beehive of underpaid accountants that Harold had been with since his graduation from the university. In an uncharacteristic burst of independence, he had left them three months before to open his own office. He had taken two small clients with him—but, Ursula observed wryly, it was she who was now paying the bills.
"Well, good luck," Ursula said.
"I'll need it," Harold conceded worriedly. "I'm meeting him downtown at five. I may be a little late for dinner."
"Harold, please. You know we're taking the Fosters to Panero's. You've got to be on time."
"Oh, I will be. But Mr. Berrey is an important man—I can't cut him short. It means a lot."
"Foster means more. You be here."
Harold did not contest this. He rose, slowly gathered the cups and saucers, piled them on the tray, and started out, as Ursula returned to her proofing. At the door he hesitated.
"Ursula."
"Yes?" She crossed out the word detrimental on the page before her and wrote harmful above it.
"I wish you could come down to the office. It still doesn't have a stick of my own furniture. I've just been waiting for you."
"I will, soon as I can," she said impatiently. Then, looking at him with a smile, speaking in a more gentle tone, she added, "You know how busy I've been. But I'll make it."
"I thought maybe Friday—"
"Friday I'm giving that enormous luncheon for the Fosters —all the publicity people, and actors ..." Suddenly she clapped her head. "My God, I promised Kathleen Ballard I'd go to hear Dr. Chapman Friday morning. How can I?"
"Dr. Chapman? The sex expert?"
"Yes—he's lecturing at the Association. I'll tell you all about it later. I've got to think."
Harold nodded and departed for the kitchen, where the colored maid, Hally, was defrosting the refrigerator. Ursula sat back in the swivel chair and shut her eyes. Dr. Chapman would have been a lark, but now he was a nuisance. She was a working wife, and she had no time to spare for this sex gibberish. She would simply call Kathleen or Grace and plead a previous business engagement. After all, Foster came first.
Still, she was not satisfied. She rose, found cigarette and silver holder, joined them, and thoughtfully lighted up. She realized that she had looked forward to Dr. Chapman more than she had first imagined. Crossing the room, she halted before the wall of books, located A Sex Study of the American Bachelor, and pulled the heavy volume from the shelf. Slowly, she leafed through it, pausing here and there to absorb a graph of statistics or a long paragraph. Just as when she had read it the first time, she was fascinated—not by any relationship the numerals might have to her, but by the bedroom doors they opened into other lives.
Even as she returned the book to the shelf, the title of the article was projected before her mind's eye. It would read: "'The Day Dr. Chapman Interviewed Me,' by a Suburban Housewife." Ursula herself, of course, would be the suburban housewife. It was perfect for Houseday. She would handle it lightly, humorously, teasingly, and yet with just enough provocative questions and answers to make it highly quotable. And better still, the interview with Dr. Chapman or one of-his team would make a perfect conversation piece for the Fosters, reinforcing his image of her as competent and witty and yet The Eternal Feminine.
Turning it over in her head, relishing it, she could visualize Bertram Foster's happy leer as she fleshed out each detail in innumerable anecdotes of the private adventure. There was no doubt in her mind now. She must attend Dr. Chapman's lecture and then volunteer for an early interview. Once Foster knew what she was sacrificing for him and the magazine, he would permit her to make a late appearance at his luncheon. She could picture her entrance—the center of all eyes, for all would know what had delayed her—and then see herself masterfully regaling employer and celebrated guests with the inside Sex Story. She was positive Foster would be more admiring than ever. It could lead to anything. Even to New York.
The bus horn honked twice, loudly, beyond the window over the kitchen sink. And then, because engine trouble had detained the bus earlier, the horn honked twice again.
"Can you hold on just a minute, Kathleen?" Sarah Goldsmith said into the telephone. "It's the school bus." Capping her hand over the mouthpiece, she called to Jerome, her nine-year-old, who was finishing his cereal, and Deborah, her six-year-old, who was munching a cookie, "Hurry up now, it's the bus, it's late enough. And don't forget your lunch boxes."
Sam Goldsmith, his mouth filed with a hot cake, dropped the business section of the morning paper and held out his arms as first Deborah kissed him and then Jerome. "Now remember what I told you when you get out there at recess," he said to Jerome. "Hold the bat away from you and high—like Musial—and then cut down into the ball. You'll see."
Jerome nodded. "I'll remember, Pop."
Both children grabbed their lunch boxes, pecked hasty kisses at Sarah's face, and headed for the front door, Jerome bounding, Deborah scrambling, until they were gone, the door slamming loudly behind them. Sarah stood on tiptoe, craning her neck to see through the high window. She watched Jerome and Deborah race across the paved parking area before the car port and climb into the bus. When it began to grind away, she lowered herself and took her hand from the mouthpiece.
"I'm sorry, Kathleen. It's like this every morning."
"Oh, I know."
"Now, about that lecture—you say everyone's going to be there?"
"That's what Grace says."
"Well, all right. I don't want to be the one who's different. I suppose it is important."
"For 'scientific advancement,' to quote Dr. Chapman." Kathleen paused a moment. "Of course, it's all voluntary, Sarah. After you've heard him, you either pledge to be interviewed or you decline."
"I'll do what the majority does," said Sarah. "I read his last book. I think it's a good cause. It's just that—well, I suppose it's sort of embarrassing. Is it really anonymous?"
"That's what the press release says."
"What I mean is—I once read an article about all those surveys in a digest magazine—about their history, the way they keep their material secret—but I remember even Kinsey used to sit across from you and ask questions right to your face. And there was another one before Kinsey—I don't re-member his name."
Kathleen consulted the paper before her. "Could it have been Hamilton?"
"That sounds familiar. Something like that. He used to give typed questions on cards. But you still had to answer them to his face. That would make me terribly uncomfortable."
"Yes," Kathleen agreed, almost automatically. But though she sympathized with Sarah's viewpoint, she knew that she must not accept it. "Still, I understand Dr. Chapman doesn't do it exactly that way. I don't recall what I heard about his method, except it's the most anonymous of all—you realty come off the assembly line hermetically sealed, like a Vestal Virgin. I wish I could tell you exactly how, Sarah. But Grace says he's going to explain all that in the lecture."
"All right. I'll be there."
After Sarah had settled the receiver in the cradle, she glanced at Sam. She wondered if he had listened to the conversation. He was still buried deeply in the latest stock averages and apparently oblivious to all. Watching him in silence, as she did so often lately, with her right hand characteristically over her heart (where lived that secret thing), she wondered if he ever saw her any more as he had seen her when they first met. She thought he might be agreeably surprised if he looked closely.
Sarah Goldsmith wore her dark hair pulled sleekly back in a bun, and though her heavy, black-rimmed spectacles gave her a rather severe aspect, her face, with the unplucked eyebrows and broad nose, was remarkably Latin and soft in early mornings, when she had not yet put her glasses on. She was thirty-five, and her deep breasts and full hips were still firm and young. She was rather proud that, unlike Sam, she had never let herself go. Even after twelve years of marriage and two children, her weight had not varied by more than five pounds.
Now, with a sigh, she moved to the table, poured a cup of tea, and sat across from her husband. She gazed past his newspaper, at his arm and the portion of his thick-jowled face visible, with detached pity. Although only four years older than she, he had become, at least in her eyes, an overweight clod. She had long forgotten her need for the safety of his solidity in their early years, and her approval of his dogged fight for their security. She remembered only that, after twelve years, he had evolved into a dull, insensitive, inanimate, sedentary fixture, an object with little interest in the world around him, its high excitements and marvelous refinements, beyond an obsessive concern for his men's clothing store, his children, his back-yard garden, and his wing chair set before the television set. Love he performed dutifully, breathing hard, once a week, on Sunday night, and never satisfying her. This she might have endured, Sarah thought, had there been some romantic air about it, or some fun at least. But it had been added to the monotonous necessities of eating, sleeping, and chores to be done. Oh, he was a good person, of course, and kind, there was no doubt about that. But he was good and kind in that special flabby, sentimental, Jewish way, too quick to apologize or cry or be grateful. In a world alive, he was a sort of death.
She had once read Madame Bovary, and she had committed to memory several lines: "Her innermost heart was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned a despairing gaze over the solitude of her life, seeking some white sail in the far mists of the horizon... But nothing happened to her; God had willed it so. The future was a dark corridor, with its door at the end shut fast." And afterward she always thought that she knew Emma Bovary better than she knew any woman friend in The Briars.
"Nine-thirty already!" she heard Sam exclaim. He was on his feet, pushing up the knot of his tie. "If I get there late like this every morning, they'll rob me blind." He started into the living room: "The minute the help sees you are lax, they take advantage. I see it all the time." He reappeared with his flannel coat. "But who can leave when it's so comfortable at home? I like to be with my wife and children. I like my home." He stood over Sarah, tugging on his coat. "Is that a crime?"
"It's very good," said Sarah*.
"Or maybe it's just that I'm getting old."
"Why do you always make yourself older than you are?" said Sarah, more sharply than she had intended.
"It bothers you? All right, I'm sweet sixteen again." He bent, and her face, eyes closed, was waiting. She felt his chapped lips on her own. "Well, I'll see you at six," he said, straightening.
"Fine."
"Tonight's what? A-ha, the fat comedian at seven. Maybe we should eat in the living room so we can watch.”
“All right."
He went to the door. "You got anything special today?”
“Shopping, Jerry's dental appointment after school—a million things."
"Be good."
She sat very still, listening to his leather heels on the cement, to the creaking of the car door opening. After a moment, the sedan coughed, started, and she heard it back out the driveway and then drive off.
Quickly, she finished her tea, removed her apron, and went into the master bedroom. She stood before the Empire dresser, intent on the mirror. Her hair was fine, the checked shirt-maker becoming. Unclasping her straw handbag, she pulled out lipstick and compact. Carefully, she touched up her cheeks and then painted on her lips in subdued carmine. Again, she surveyed herself in the mirror, then turned and moved to the telephone on the stand between the twin beds.
She lifted the receiver, hastily dialed, then waited. There were three rings, and his voice was on.
"Hello?"
"It's Sarah. I'll be right over."
She hung up, breathlessly went around the bed and into the bathroom. Pulling open the drawer beside the washbasin, she reached deep inside for the zippered blue kit. Emerging and going back to the dresser, her hand fondled the kit, feeling the rim of the large diaphragm and the small tube of vaginal jelly. She dropped the kit into her straw handbag, snatched a pink cashmere sweater from the drawer, and hastened through the house to the carport.
Mary Ewing McManus—she had been married less than two years, and she knew that it pleased her father that she retained the Ewing whenever she signed her name—sat on the rumpled bed, long, thin legs crossed beneath her blue silk nightgown.
"I think it's just the most, Kathleen," she said into the telephone. Twenty-two and uncomplicated, and in love with her husband, Mary could still be exuberant before ten in the morning. "You write a big exclamation mark after my name. I wouldn't miss it for anything in the world."
"Fine, Mary. I wish everyone were so agreeable."
Mary was surprised. "Who wouldn't want to hear Dr. Chapman? I mean, there's always something to learn." Mary Ewing had come to Norman McManus, in marriage, a healthy, cheerful, virginal young girl. Although raised with intelligence and affection, she had been, in ways, sheltered, and everything that followed her wedding night seemed new to her. She was as curious about the pathways of sex, about exploring its mysteries and learning its techniques, as she was about attempting new cooking recipes and learning to sew. One night, in the first year, after reading a chapter of a new marriage manual, she and Norman had spent the entire night, with mad hilarity and then silent excitement, testing their various erogenous zones.
"Dr Chapman isn't exactly going to be teaching anything," Kathleen was saying. "It's really a serious study he's making."
"Oh, I know," Mary said in her important, adult voice. "It's like being part of history, in a way—as if Sigmund Freud were coming to The Briars to talk about psychiatry or Karl Marx to discuss communism. It's something to tell your children."
"Well," said Kathleen uncertainly, "I guess it is, in a way.”
“How's Deirdre?"
"Fine, thanks."
"She's so pretty. I'm glad you called me. See you at the lecture."
Hanging up, Mary placed the telephone on the bed stand. She felt thrilled about the invitation, like looking forward to Sunday, and she was suddenly eager to share the news with Norman. She cocked her head, listening, but heard the beat of the shower muffled in the bathroom behind her. When he was out of the shower, she would tell him.
She uncrossed her legs and fell back on the pillow, feeling alive in every limb and happy that the day was young and the night still ahead. The sounds of the shower persisted, and she thought of Norman beneath the cold spray. She could visualize him as she saw him when they often showered together. His funny scrub haircut, and the piercing dark eyes set in the square, handsome face, and his hairy chest and flat belly, and long, muscular legs. It was still a miracle to her that he had sought her out at that sorority party, three years before, and looked at none of the more attractive girls that night or any night since.
Mary Ewing McManus had no illusion about her own beauty. Even though her tangled, boyish brown hair made her resemble Wendy in Peter Pan—or so Norman had remarked several times, with admiration—and even though she was a vivacious extrovert, unfamiliar with a single dark mood, she did not delude herself about her physical appearance. She was a tall, bony, athletic, long-striding girl. Her brown eyes were set too close together. Her nose, while straight, was excessively evident (in finishing school she had pinned a romantic drawing of Cleopatra over her bed when she had learned of Pascal's remark that, had Cleopatra's nose "been shorter, the whole aspect of the world would have been altered"). Her mouth was small, though her lips were full and her white teeth regular. She was flat-chested—no foam padding would hide this—and flat-bottomed. And yet, she did not feel unlovely. She had grown up the center of the household and the vast family beyond, always admired and clucked over. Her natural high spirits had made prettier girls seem pallid, and she had never lacked a boy friend. And when she had wanted a husband, Norman had appeared and supplanted childhood affection with mature love.
From the moment of their meeting, Norman had become the center of her universe. Harry Ewing had objected at first, in his soft-spoken, decent way, protesting her youth and Norman's poverty (he had just been admitted to the California bar). Because she adored her father, she had listened attentively, but immediately set out to win him over. Since Harry Ewing could refuse his daughter nothing, he agreed to let her have her husband, knowing she would have him anyway. The only condition Harry set—and to this Mary and Norman quickly and gratefully acceded—was that the newlyweds move into the vacant upstairs suite of the Spanish stucco house and live under the Ewing roof until they could one day get on their feet and have their own home. Then, anxious to get his daughter's marriage on a secure financial footing, Harry Ewing went further. Just when Norman had applied to several large legal firms for jobs, and when he was seriously considering going into a partnership with his old classmate, Chris Shearer, in a poorer section of downtown Los Angeles, Harry Ewing made his son-in-law a generous offer. Harry manufactured prefabricated building parts, and his legal department had four attorneys. One was leaving, and Harry tendered the position to Norman, with a starting salary of $150 a week.
Mary was overwhelmed by her father's generosity, but Norman was less so. Somehow, he felt that he was giving up part of his independence for a dowry. Moreover, the prospect of becoming a real struggling trial attorney with Chris, in a district that needed help, seemed more challenging. But, after a brief day or two of vacillation and uncertainty, he was at last convinced that Harry's opening was one that a hundred young barristers would covet (which, indeed, they would), that his concept of attorney-at-law among depressed peoples was romantic and impractical, and that, after all, Mary deserved the best. Carried away by his wife's enthusiasm, Norman joined her father's staff.
In the year and a half since, sensing her husband's restlessness at being a desk and contract lawyer, Mary had tried to alleviate his boredom. Secretly, she had spoken to her father, imploring him to give Norman some of the courtroom work. Her father had promised that he would do so at the first opportunity. That had been several months ago. Nothing had happened since.
Now, turning on her pillows to look at the electric clock, Mary saw that it was twenty to ten. Her father would be down to breakfast already, and he would be done by ten. He would expect Norman to be ready, since they drove to the plant together every morning in Harry's Cadillac. She had decided she had better remind Norman of the time, when suddenly the shower stopped.
Quickly, Mary sat up, slid off the bed, and padded barefoot to the bathroom door.
She pressed her head to the door. "Norm?"
"Yes?"
"It's twenty to ten."
"Okay."
She remembered Kathleen's call. "Guess who called.”
“What?"
"I said guess who called." She raised her voice slightly. "Kathleen Ballard just telephoned. Dr. Chapman's coming here to interview us."
"I can't hear you. Come on in. The, door's open."
She turned the glass knob and went inside. The narrow bathroom was warm, and steam clung to the walls and mirror. Norman was in the center of the room, beside the bathtub, standing flat-footed on a large orange mat. His arms were lifted and his muscular back to her as he wiped face and hair with a towel. He was naked, patches of wet still on his back.
Staring at him as she shut the door softly behind her, she felt again the aching pleasure in her loins that she had known the night before. He had possessed her then, and it had been excruciating and marvelous. Now, suddenly, she heard her heart.
She tried to keep her voice casual. "I was just saying, Norm ..."
He turned, smiling at her, and her eyes touched his lean body possessively and proudly. "Hi, darling," he said. "I thought you were going to sleep."
"Someone called," she said breathlessly. "Dr. Chapman's coming to lecture at the Women's Association Friday.”
“Chapman?"
"You know, the Chapman report on sex. He's going to interview us."
"Good for you. Don't keep any secrets." He handed her the towel. "Give me a hand with my back."
He turned away as she took the towel. "Should I tell him you're the best lover in the world?"
"It won't hurt to let it get around."
She touched the curve of his spine with the towel. "You are, you know," she said.
"Now, how would you know?" he asked teasingly as he turned again to face her. "Or is that what you tell all your men?"
She stood very still, the towel poised ridiculously between them. "I love you, Norm," she said.
His smile was gone. He reached out and drew her to him. The towel fluttered to the tile as she clutched his bare back, her eyes tightly closed. "I want you, honey," he whispered against her hair.
"Yes," she whispered, then remembered, and tried to pull away. "No, Norm, it's late—Dad's downstairs—"
"To hell with Dad," he said, kissing her neck.
"Don't say that," she said almost inaudibly, before all speech was lost, and she could say no more. Slowly, she sank to the orange mat beside Norman; then, cradled in his arm, lowered herself to her back, hardly aware of the cool contact of tile on her shoulder blades and legs. Eyes shut, she felt the sure fingers at her gown, and the desired and beloved presence all-encompassing, and in a moment she gave herself completely to sensation, unable any longer to remember that her father was downstairs, waiting.
Once, during a supper party at Ursula and Harold Palmer's, a dozen guests played the word-association game. When Ursula, who was reeling off the list of words to a male guest, came to antiseptic, the guest automatically replied, "Teresa Harnish." This created great hilarity and extensive parlor analysis, with no serious conclusion reached beyond general agreement as to the aptness of the association. Later, the incident was repeated to Teresa, who had not been at the party, and the moment that she could she looked up the word in her dictionary. When she learned that it meant "opposing sepsis, putrefaction, or decay," she was pleased, and made no further effort at comprehending the true meaning as it might be related to her.
Now, leaning against the shelves of her study that contained not books but exquisite representations of pre-Columbian statuary mounted on small marble bases, she listened to Kathleen reading her the details of Dr. Chapman's impending arrival. At the age of thirty-six, Teresa Harnish was the perfect picture of poise and grace. Nothing harsh or real—sweat, for instance, or dirt or germs—had ever blemished her fair complexion, or so it seemed. Each blond, wavy hair was in place. The oval face, wide eyes, patrician nose, thin lips painted full, had the perpetual look of a startled chrysanthemum. Her height and figure were medium in every respect, and her raw-silk blouse, with dipping neckline, gray Bermuda shorts, and thong sandals were unwrinkled and unscuffed. Her appearance and manner gave her an air of remote and sophisticated intellectuality, which she enjoyed and fostered. Her breadth of reading knowledge was considerable, but her depth of under-standing and originality of thought did not go beneath her flawless skin. She enjoyed conversation that alluded to the classical and was barely comprehensible, and she preferred her sexual activity neat and straight. If she emerged from either experience without being jostled or confused, she was satisfied. She thought Lord Byron vulgar, Gauguin disgusting, Stendhal ridiculous, and Rembrandt grubby. She rather fancied Henry James, and Thomas Gainsborough, and admired Louise de la ValHere and (somewhat guiltily) the poor Lady Blessington. She found it one of the burdens that marriage imposed to conform to her husband's respect for such weightless abstract painters as Duchamp, Gris, and Kandinsky.
"Yes, Kathleen, I think it's perfectly clear," she said into the telephone at last, in an accent long cultivated that would have troubled a philologist (who might have located it as somewhere between Boston's Beacon Hill and London's West End). "Geoffrey and I think Dr. Chapman is a marvel, a monument to enlightenment."
Geoffrey Harnish, bent over the huge, ornately carved Medici writing table nearby, absorbed in copying several oddments from Giorgio Vasari's DeIle Vite de' pih eccelenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori (the later Italian edition published in Florence in 1878) for a Pasadena customer interested in Renaissance illuminated manuscripts, glanced up sharply at the mention of Dr. Chapman's name. Teresa cocked her head coyly, bestowing upon him a secret smile, and he lifted his bushy eyebrows with agreeable surprise. Dr. Chapman had superseded Vasari, and Geoffrey Harnish settled his small, compact frame back in the fragile chair to listen. He smoothed the side of his thinning sandy hair, stroked his magnificently shaggy, incongruous Grenadier Guard mustache, and vaguely wondered if Dr. Chapman might be induced to pen the foreword to his art catalogue advertising the forthcoming exhibit of abstract art, many of the canvases concerned with conjugality, by Boris Introsky.