by John O'Hara
Her great fear for days after that was that his grimy hands had given her a venereal disease. He never came back to the Mission, and she resigned the next week, but for weeks she was sure she had syphilis or something. The incident finally sent her, dying of mortification, to Doctor Malloy, to whom she told all. He very seriously examined her—he was not the family physician—and told her to come back the day after the next for the laboratory report; and then soberly informed her that she was free to marry and have babies, that there was nothing wrong with her. When she insisted on paying him he charged her fifteen dollars. This money he gave, without Caroline’s knowledge, to be sure, to the mother of the redhead, on the theory that the mother of such a child would appreciate anything in the way of a gift, without inquiring into the reason for the gift.
That was Caroline’s first completely unpleasant encounter with the male sex. She thought of it constantly in the days that followed. When she asked herself, “Why did he do it?” she always came to the same answer: that that was what you could expect of men, what she had been brought up to expect of men. She had had many men run over her with their hands, and there were some with whom she permitted it. She was still a virgin at that time, but until the child made his mysterious attack she thought she had sex pretty well under control. After the attack she reorganized, or entirely disorganized, her ideas about men and the whole of sex; and the one permanent effect of “that afternoon at the Mission,” as she referred to it in her frequent introspection, was that her ignorance of sex was pointed up. She knew herself for a completely inexperienced girl, and for the first time she began to remember the case histories in Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing and the lesser psychologists as more than merely pornography.
Up to that summer Caroline had been deeply in love twice in her life, although from the time she put her hair up she was always in love with someone. One of the men, the first, was a distant cousin of hers, Jerome Walker. He was an Englishman by birth and education, and he came to Gibbsville in 1918. He was about twenty-five and a captain in the British army. He was through, so far as the war was concerned; they were taking more and more bone out of his left leg, and putting in more and more silver. His presence in the United States, which he never before had visited, was to teach modern warfare to the draft army. Gibbsville girls threw themselves at him when he turned up at Caroline’s house on a month’s leave, and he was invited everywhere, a catch. He wore slacks, which were slightly unmilitary, and the stick he carried had a leather thong which he wrapped around his wrist. His tunic was beautifully tailored, and the little blue and white ribbon of the Military Cross, which no one identified, gave a nice little touch of color to his uniform. His lack of height fitted in with the fact that he was an invalid, a “casualty,” as most of the Gibbsville women—and men—called him. He took one careful look at Caroline and then and there decided for himself that this girl in the three-cornered hat and long gray spats and nicely cut suit was going to be something worth trying for. He was quite confident he could swing it in a month’s time.
He very nearly did. Caroline’s father was dead, and her mother was deaf, the kind of deaf person who, not wishing to yield to her deafness, refuses to learn to read lips or to wear earphones. In the Walker mansion on South Main Street were Caroline, her mother, the cook and the maid. And Jerry.
The first time he kissed her he all but gave up his ideas of having an affair with her. It was awfully far from the war, this warm room in Gibbsville in Pennsylvania in America, and there was nothing particularly warlike about “Oui, oui, Marie, will you do ziss for me?” which was going round and round on the phonograph. Caroline, except for her horrible accent, might have been an English girl, a sister of a friend, at home. But when she got up to change the needle and the record he reached out and took her hand and drew her to him, sat her on his right knee, and kissed her. She went to him without resistance but only the thought: “Well, we can kiss, can’t we?” But the kiss was not very successful, because they bumped noses in trying to get their heads at the right angles, and he let her go. She stopped the Victrola and came back and sat beside him. He took her hand and she looked at it and then looked up presently at him. They did not speak, and when she looked at him he was smiling very gently. A nervous smile came and went on her face and then she moved closer to him and really kissed him. But the moment of unscrupulousness had passed for him. She was all body and sensation and he had the terrible consciousness that while she felt this way, anything he chose to do to her, anything, would not be resisted.
This lasted a minute, two minutes, maybe five, before she squeezed back into herself and put her head on his shoulder. She was ashamed and grateful, because she never before had let herself go that way. “Let’s have a cigarette,” she said.
“Do you smoke?”
“I’m not allowed to, but I do. You hold it and I’ll take a puff.”
He got his silver case out of his trousers pocket and she smoked, not holding the cigarette very expertly, but taking appalling inhales. Cute was the word for her as she sat there, blowing smoke out of her mouth and nostrils, smoking the cigarette too fast. He took it from her to cool it off, and then they heard the quick catch of her mother’s car, a Baker electric, in the driveway on the way back to the stable. Caroline got up and put Poor Butterfly on the Vic. “That’s one of our old records,” she said, “but I like it because it’s so syncopated.” Anything that had the sound of the trap-drummer’s wood blocks in it was syncopated.
They often kissed after that; in the halls, the butler’s pantry, and in her Scripps-Booth roadster, which had a peculiar seating arrangement; the driver sat a foot or so forward of the other seat, which made kissing an awkward act.
He went away without telling her that he loved her, and without changing her status as woman or girl. He was dead of gangrene within six months of his visit to Gibbsville, and it was another two months before his family remembered to write to them. That had something to do with lessening Caroline’s grief: that he could have been lying dead in a grave while she went on thinking of him as the love of her life, while she was having a lovely time with the boys who were back from France and Pensacola and Boston Tech and the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. She was in demand, and she kissed a good many men with as much abandon as she had kissed Jerome Walker, except that now she knew how and when to stop. She was getting to be a prom trotter, too, as much as Bryn Mawr would permit, and having a perfectly wonderful time with the college boys. They were gay again now that the war was over and their universal embarrassment at not being in the fighting army was at an end, now that it was all right to be gay publicly. She was leaving for a week-end at Easton, where Ju English was in college, when her mother read the letter from England, which was mostly about how grateful the Cecil Walkers were for the hospitality their boy had received in Gibbsville, as they called it. There was one reference to Caroline. It was: “…and if you and your dear little girl should come to England, we shall…” Oh, well. But not oh, well. She knew, or hoped she knew, that the reason he did not tell his mother more about her was that he didn’t want his mother to think things. Still, on the ride to Easton she was depressed. When our minds run that way we date periods in our lives, and Caroline in later days and years fixed the train ride to Easton as the end of her girlhood. All her life, until she fell in love with Julian English, she was to feel that if things had been different, she would have married her cousin and lived in England, and she always thought very kindly of England. She did not, however, visit Jerome’s family when she went abroad in 1925. She was only going to be gone two months altogether, and by that time she was in love with a living man.
Joe Montgomery could be classified under many headings. Drunk. Snake. Rich boy. Well-dressed man. Debbies’ delight. Roué. Bond salesman. War veteran. Extra man. And so on. They all added up to the same thing. His chief claim to distinction was that he had known Scott Fitzgerald at Princeton, and that made him in Caroline’s eyes an ambassador from an interes
ting country, full of interesting people whom she wanted to meet and to see in action. She did not know, of course, that she was a member in good standing of the community which she thought Joe Montgomery represented, which Fitzgerald wrote about. She only knew that Gibbsville was her home town, but it or the people who lived in it certainly were not worth writing about.
Joe Montgomery’s home was in Reading, which is across two state lines from New York, but actually in the same radius as Hartford or New London—a fact which apparently is not known to any New Yorkers or to most Reading people, but was taken for granted by Joe Montgomery. His father was so rich that he had gone down in the Titanic, and it was told of Henry Montgomery, as it has been told of almost every other male on that vessel’s passenger list, that he had been (a) a hero, and (b) that the captain had had to shoot him dead to keep him out of the women’s and children’s lifeboats. Things in Joe’s background included vague recollections in Caroline’s mind of a Stutz Bearcat, a raccoon coat, Brooksy clothes, and some local reputation as a golfer. He knew a few people in Gibbsville, and he was a friend of Whitney Hofman’s, but he seldom came to Gibbsville.
He was hardly more than a name to Caroline in 1925, when she was thrown with him for a festive week in East Orange, just before her trip abroad. She was being a bridesmaid and he an usher at a wedding there, and she was elated when he said: “Lord, God, don’t introduce me to Caroline Walker. She and I are old pals. Or are we, Caroline?” He was about the best there was at the wedding, and she probably kissed him more frequently and more ardently than she did the other ushers. He must have thought so, because he stayed over in New York for her last week before sailing. The wedding fuss ended Sunday, the last day of May, and she was sailing on the Paris the next Saturday. He tried to monopolize her time, and all but did. He took her to see shows—“Lady Be Good,” with the Astaires and Walter Catlett, which she had seen in Philadelphia; “What Price Glory?”; “Rose Marie”; Richard Bennett and Pauline Lord in “They Knew What They Wanted”; the Garrick Gaieties. It was a stifling week, although only the first week of June. The whole country seemed to want to die, and, led by a former vice president who once made a remark about what this country needed, die many of them did. Joe kept saying “Jeezuzz,” unable to forget the heat, and after the first act of “What Price Glory?” he had no trouble persuading her to not go back. He had his car, a red Jordan roadster, in town, and he suggested driving out to Long Island, Westchester, anywhere. “I’ll swear for you and tell you some war stories,” he said. “And you’ll think you’re still at the play.”
He had enough sense or intuition not to try to talk much until they got out of the city. The heat was awful; it got up her nose, and everyone whose eyes met hers had a silly smile on his face that seemed to apologize for the weather. And she guessed she looked that way herself.
They finally came to a place on Long Island which Joe told her was called Jones’s Beach. “How are you fixed for underwear?” he said.
“Oh. So that’s it?”
“Yes, I guess it is. I won’t go in unless you do.”
Her heart was thumping and there was a shaking in her legs, but “All right,” she said. She never had seen a grown man with all his clothes off at one time, and when he walked away from his side of the car and stepped toward the water she was relieved to see that he was wearing shorts, part of his underwear. “You go on in,” she said. She wanted him to be in the water when she moved from the shelter of the car in her brassiere and step-ins. He got the idea and did not look until she was swimming a few yards away from him.
“What this is going to do to my hair,” she said.
“Too late to worry about it now,” he said. “You cold?”
“Not now,” she said.
“I should have built a fire. I didn’t think of it.”
“God, no! And have people see it and come running down? Gosh, I’m glad you didn’t.”
He came out first. “Better not stay in too long,” he said. “You can use my undershirt for a towel.” He went back to the car and started the motor and held his undershirt, which was damp from perspiration, near the engine. “Better come out now,” he said.
She came out, pulling her soaking step-ins about so as to get a maximum of modesty. Her brassiere was no good at all, and she was so angry at her swinging breasts that she wanted to cry; no matter how nice he was he couldn’t fail to notice her “chest.”
“Don’t be embarrassed,” he said. “I’ve seen a naked woman.”
“Oh—” she mumbled. “You haven’t seen me. Or hadn’t.”
“Please don’t. You’ll take the enjoyment out of the swim. Go on back and swim a little more and then come out without being self-conscious. Or anyhow, embarrassed. Go on.”
She did as he said and felt better. She felt fourteen years old. Less. She had not overcome her embarrassment, but she no longer was afraid. She dried herself with his warm undershirt. “I don’t know what I’m going to do about my hair.”
“Here.” He threw her a clean handkerchief. “That’ll help a little.” It didn’t.
He gave her the coat of his dinner suit and made her put it on over her evening dress, and they had cigarettes and were only vaguely aware of the discomfort. “I guess we could have saved all this trouble by going somewhere to a regular beach, or pool.”
“I’m glad now we didn’t,” she said.
“Are you? That’s what I wanted you to say.”
“Did you? I’m glad I said it then.”
He put his arm around her and tried to kiss her.
“No,” she said.
“All right,” he said.
“Don’t spoil it,” she added.
“It wouldn’t spoil it. Not now. At least I don’t think so. I waited till you were dressed.”
“Yes, and I’m glad you did. I like you for that, Joe. But even now. You know.”
“No, frankly. I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do. You—oh, hell.”
“Oh, you mean because I saw you without any clothes on.”
“Mm-hmm,” she said, although up to then she had been thinking that technically he had not seen her without any clothes on. Now she wished she had been completely nude. It was something you had to get over, and with Joe it had been a grand chance.
“All right,” he said, and took his arm away.
They talked about her trip abroad. It was her first. He said he wished he were going with her, or could go in time to take her around Paris and so on, but he couldn’t make it; he had to be a good boy at the National City, because it was time he was getting somewhere and making some money. A crooked lawyer and his mother’s stupidity had reduced his father’s estate. So he was working for the National City, with an office in Reading and a salary that just proved to him how worthless he was. She couldn’t muster much pity for him; she had seen the Montgomery home, Mrs. Montgomery’s Rolls.
“Well, this is all very nice,” she said, “but I think maybe we’d better start back to town. How far is it?”
“Oh, plenty of time. It isn’t far. I don’t really know how far it is exactly. Let’s not go back right away. You’re going away so soon, and for such a long time.”
“But I have so many things to do,” she said. “You’ve no idea.”
“Oh, yes, I have. Turkish towels, six. Heavy woolen underwear, six. Handkerchiefs, twelve. Two sweaters. The school will supply sheets and bed linen, but we recommend, and so on. All marked with indelible ink or Cash’s woven labels.”
“But I have. I have to—”
“Parents are specially urged to exercise restraint in providing boys with pocket money. A dollar and a half a week will be sufficient for most needs.”
“Oh, Joe.”
“The use of motorcycles is absolutely prohibited.”
“What about cigarettes?”
“Members of the Upper Middler and higher forms are permitted to use tobacco on written permission of one or both parents.”
&nbs
p; “I could tell you some you don’t know,” she said.
“Such as?”
“Oh—girls’ schools.”
“Oh, that’s easy. In cases where a girl is likely to be absent from class and other activities at frequent intervals during the school year, a letter from the family physician, addressed to the school nurse—”
“That’s enough,” she said. She was embarrassed and angry with herself. Here she was, talking about the most intimate part of a woman’s life, with a man whom she did—not—really—know. It was the second time tonight that she had done a “first” thing with him: he was the first to see her with nothing on (she had well-founded misgivings about the protection the step-ins had given her), and he was the first to talk to her about That. She hated all the euphemisms for it, and when she thought of it she thought of it in the Bryn Mawr term: “Off the sports list.”
His arm was around her again and his head was close to hers. He thought she was angry with him, and for the moment she did not care; but then she rested her face on his shoulder, and she put up her mouth for the kiss and then she let herself coast with him. He took down her dress and kissed her breasts and she patted and rubbed his head. She waited without tension for what he would do next. She thought she knew what that would be, and she did not prepare to fight against it. But she was wrong. He suddenly slipped her shoulder straps up her arms and back where they belonged. Her breath was coming as though she had stopped running a few minutes ago, slowly and deeply.
“You a virgin?” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Are you sure? Please tell me the truth.”
“Mm-hmm. I am.”
“Do you love me?” he said.
“Yes, I think I do, Joe.”
“How old are you?” he said.
