I spent most of my time working on it. At night, Pin, Ursula and I sat in the living room and I read them the day’s work. I have a high regard for Pin’s opinion of poetry, and Ursula does have a good deal of sensitivity for literature, probably because of her job in the library. Both of them always said I read well. I would get a fire going in the fireplace and we’d all sit around sipping coffee after dinner, and then I’d read what I had written. Ursula’s eyes always exploded whenever I hit something she thought was “marvelous.” She had that word, “marvelous.” Pin simply nodded silently at good things. It wasn’t a very emphatic nod, just a slight movement of his head. I always looked up quickly from the paper when I read a part I thought he’d appreciate, and sure enough, there would be that slight nod. I guess being so close to one another over the years had made us very sensitive to each other’s reactions. At times I felt we were almost a part of one another.
Ursula had a “wisp of a body.” At least that’s the way Mrs. Martin referred to it, but Mrs. Martin was so stout that anyone would have a “wisp of a body” standing next to her. She came once a week to clean the house. It took her a long time, almost all day, to do the place. For the most part, I would stay upstairs and Pin would stay in his room behind the garage. She never went into his room. He wouldn’t have tolerated any strangers coming into it. He was so emphatic on that point that I had to actually lock his room from the outside. She asked me about it only once. I told her in very strong, definite terms not to worry herself ever about that room. She shrugged and forgot about it. When she left, I opened his room and brought him out. I guess we really didn’t need Mrs. Martin to come in and clean. It was just something I felt my mother would have wanted us to do.
Anyhow, Mrs. Martin thought Ursula had a “wisp of a body.” That was because she was long legged and small waisted. She had thin arms and nearly no shoulders, but she was not small breasted. She was very deceptive that way. She insisted on giving that impression to people by wearing these awfully tight bras that squeezed her bosom against her.
“Your sister oughta eat something substantial,” Mrs. Martin told me once. “It ain’t healthy for someone to be so close to their own bones like that.”
I could understand why she felt that way. Ursula’s face was lean too. Her skin was wrapped tightly around the sharp chin bone. She had thin lips and her cheeks were as taut as the skin on a drum. The cheekbones protruded a little. The wideness of her forehead made her eyes appear small and deep, but when you stood next to her, you saw that they weren’t small eyes. Ursula thought she was ugly and she was always very critical of her appearance. I did a lot to build up her ego. Too much, if you ask me. However, if she asked me what Pin thought of her, I would say, “Ask him yourself. I don’t speak for Pin.”
People called me “baby-faced.” My hair was such a light brown it could almost be called blonde, which I thought was a genetic mistake. But my father, or rather, Pin, explained it was by no means a “mistake.” “Your grandfather on your mother’s side was very light haired and had the same kind of milky white skin with tiny freckles in his cheeks and along the sides of his nose. In fact you have your mother’s nose and a somewhat soft, feminine mouth.”
“Feminine?” I didn’t like the way he said that. I was broad shouldered and two inches taller than Ursula. When I was a teenager, I was accused of having a “Van Johnson look,” so I didn’t really take to this “feminine mouth” thing. I suppose I got too defensive because I said, “Well, you know, you don’t have much of a masculine face. Your nose is too straight and too pretty. Your ears are too perfect. And your penis is too small.” I thought that would hurt him.
“Penis size has nothing to do with sexual potency,” he said. Smugly, of course. I told Ursula what he said and she said size doesn’t even have anything to do with sexual gratification. She said she told her girl friends that, but most of them refused to believe it.
The three of us lived here in my parents’ old house about a quarter of a mile up Hassens Hill in Woodridge, New York. Woodridge is a small village in the Catskills, a little to the left of center of the heart of the Borscht Belt. I like to get anatomical when I describe where it’s located. Everyone’s always using that expression—“The heart of the Borscht Belt.” I suppose they mean center. I don’t know where they get that idea from. It’s certainly not true geographically.
I have lived here all my life and I had borscht only once. I wasn’t crazy about it. Ursula likes it, but doesn’t like what it does to her. She says it repeats; so she doesn’t eat it. Pin says he could take it or leave it. My father felt the same way about it and my mother didn’t like the way it could stain her tablecloths.
The house is a two-story building with an attached garage. The garage was added on years after the house was built. On the bottom level, once you come in, we have our rather large living room with an adjoining dining room. To the left of the dining room is the kitchen. On the right side of the kitchen is a door that leads out to the pantry and from there out to our backyard, a small clearing surrounded by a heavily wooded area with a pond behind it. Ursula and I have walked out to it many times. We have a bathroom downstairs, right off the living room. To the left of the living room is a small bedroom situated behind the garage. This is Pin’s room.
Upstairs we have three bedrooms and a bathroom. Ursula’s bedroom and my bedroom have an adjoining door. We left our parents’ room just the way it was the day they died. We didn’t give any of their clothes away or upset any furniture arrangements. We don’t go in there much, and the door is always closed. Our bedrooms have windows that open to the road outside. My room is toward the high side of the hill and Ursula’s is toward the low side.
The house has faded white wood shingles with black aluminum shutters. We had the shutters put on recently. We haven’t made many improvements on the house; neither of us really takes much interest in what it looks like. Ursula says as long as the heating works and the plumbing works, why worry about it? Pin rarely goes outside, so he couldn’t care less about its appearance. People are always coming around or calling up to try to sell us some kind of home improvements. They all know we have money. My father was a very successful doctor here. Practically everyone went to him. His and my mother’s funeral was a mob scene.
Once in a while I fooled around with my father’s stethoscope and other paraphernalia. I’d take Pin’s blood pressure and listen to his heartbeat and he’d do the same to me. When we were kids, Ursula and I always used to listen to each other’s heartbeat. We still do sometimes, just for gags. The other night, I remember, we all had a little too much to drink and I took out the old stethoscope, putting it in my ears and walking around the place the way my father used to walk around. Then Ursula took off her blouse and called me over to listen to her heart. It was beating rapidly. I stuck the thing down into her bra and tickled the nipple on her breast. She laughed and screeched. Pin almost fell out of his seat in hysterics. Then she wanted Pin to listen to her heartbeat. She nearly ripped the earlobes off me, pulling the damn thing away from me, and sauntered over to him. She shoved her breasts in his face and stuck the stethoscope into his ears. It kept falling out. Finally, she had to hold it to his head. He looked at me as if to say, “We’ve got to humor her when she gets like this.” I turned away.
After Ursula drank too much and got silly, she would always get maudlin and cry. I’d have to take her upstairs and help her get undressed and into bed. She would really get helplessly infantile at these times. I guess it all had to do with our losing our parents the way we did. At least, that’s the way Pin explained it away. He was very learned and well read on the subject of psychology, and usually pedantic about his knowledge, I might add. I suppose he was right. Whatever the reason, Ursula needed the tenderness and affection. She wouldn’t want to wear nightclothes. Naked, she slipped into the bed, sobbing softly and pressing my fingers against her lips. I would sit on the bed and stroke her hair. Sometimes she fell asleep quickly, and sometimes she
talked. Usually her conversations centered around the Need and how she reacted to it. It was very intimate talk, but she had no one besides me to confide in.
The Need was one thing my father discussed with us. He had very liberal ideas about sex and he was always very factual and clinical about it. There wasn’t a question he wouldn’t answer if we had the nerve to ask it, and he loved to make fun of the words and expressions some parents thought up to avoid telling it like it is. One day he sat Ursula and me down in the living room and went through the whole sexual process. I was two years older than she, of course, but, remarkably, our bodies were coming into maturity at the same time. He used the word “remarkable.” He explained sex to us in terms of a biological need. He said that just as people get thirsty for water, they get thirsty for sex. For a long time the sex thirst is very great, and then it gets less and less intense. It’s better to know all about it, he said, so you can go about satisfying the Need without hurting yourselves. Ursula sort of got the idea that getting pregnant was hurting herself. Of course, my father tried to correct that misconception later by explaining that pregnancy wasn’t physically damaging. He never bothered with the moral or social aspects. In a rare criticism of my father, Pin said he should have bothered.
I’ll never forget how my father pronounced the word, “vagina.” He said, “vorgina,” and looked very intense when he said it. Although his description of an orgasm was very scientific, there was still something mysterious and erotic about it. I’m sure he left us with an impression opposite to his intent. Although we didn’t come right out and tell it to each other, we were both dying to experiment with our bodies. I like to think that was normal.
Very soon afterward, Ursula found a book in my father’s library that went into it all in very great detail. It was an old book, however, and many of the concepts and theories are outdated today. The thesis of one of the sections was that masturbation is very bad for you. It described all sorts of possible horrible effects, including a drying up of the sexual organs. I think the initial reading and studying of that book definitely had a bad lifelong effect on us. We often experienced guilt feelings along with any sexual acts. I wanted to discuss the things we read with my father, but it was always very difficult, if not impossible, for either Ursula or me to initiate an intimate conversation with him. He would talk when approached, but he was so aloof and objective that it left us with a cold feeling. Mother would write that off by saying, “It’s just the doctor’s way.”
For the most part, Ursula had the Need more than I did, and that’s leaving out the times she went into Pin’s room to satisfy the Need with him. At first she wouldn’t admit to it, but I knew that was why she went in.
“Your father should have read more Freud,” Pin told me. “Then maybe he wouldn’t have been so matter of fact about sex. He didn’t have the proper respect for sex.” I nodded because I had just finished reading some Freud myself.
“I know. There was nothing romantic about my father.”
“I don’t mean the romantic end of it. I mean the psychological end of it,” he said in a very pedantic tone of voice. When Pin was serious, he would tolerate no frivolity.
“I suppose you’re right,” I said. I was always supposing Pin was right.
As time went by, I noted that it took more and more to satisfy Ursula’s Need. There were times when I was tempted to say something about it to my father, but I just couldn’t get myself to betray Ursula that way. I knew she would interpret it as a betrayal. We had so many secrets from our parents. For me to go and discuss her sex life with my father, I would have had to breach an unwritten agreement between us. I worried about her, though. I saw the way she looked at boys in school and I knew how they thought of her.
Once I found our telephone number on the wall in the boys’ room. There was a little note under it that said, “If you want an easy screw, Ursula will do.” It enraged me and I tried to scrub it off. Finally I had to literally chip the wall away. I brought it to her attention early one evening, but she didn’t seem to realize the full import of what was happening.
“Why do you think the boys picked your name out to write on the wall?”
“I don’t know. What’s the difference? What harm does it do?”
“What harm does it do? WHAT HARM DOES IT DO?” I was beside myself. I felt my face flush. “Jesus, how can you be so damn indifferent!”
I turned and looked at her. She sat there looking down at her hands in her lap. Then, when she realized I wasn’t talking, she looked up and smiled stupidly at me.
“Do you want every creep in the school calling you for a date?”
“Oh, nobody will call.”
“What makes you so sure, Ursula?” She looked down. “What makes you so sure?”
“I’m sure,” she said and she left. I was so mad all I could do was lie down on my bed and stare at the wall. Later she came in and sat next to me. She touched my shoulder, but I didn’t turn toward her.
“I guess I can’t hide my feelings,” she said. “I guess boys see it on my face.”
“Well, you better do something about it,” I said, “or you’ll be unhappy.”
“You’ll still love me, won’t you, Leon? Won’t you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. She was silent for a while. Then I felt her hand on my cheek. I turned and looked up at her. She smiled and, of course, I couldn’t stay angry at her much longer. “At least make an effort, will you, Ursula?”
“I’ll try,” she said. “I’ll really try.”
Chapter 2
AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER, PIN HAS ALWAYS BEEN with us. He was in my father’s office before I was born. As far as I know, my father’s voice would come out of himself and out of Pin. People at dinners or at parties would try to get my father to do voice throwing, but he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t do it anywhere but in the office. When Ursula and I were very small children, we would sit on the floor in the office and listen as my father and Pin carried on conversations about different patients, reviewing diagnosis, treatment and prognosis. Occasionally my father would say something like, “Oh, you don’t concur,” and then he’d do some more research and discuss the research. Right from the beginning, I had the sense that whenever he was trying to convince Pin of something, he was really trying to convince himself.
As a child I remember staring at Pin’s face while my father and he talked. Pin was absolutely inscrutable, except for the smallest gleam in his eyes. Of course, Pin was naked in the office. Being it was a doctor’s office, that was all right. When he came to our house later on, we dressed him in my father’s clothes. They were practically the same size. But naked, he was certainly fascinating to look at.
His transparent body was soft as skin. All of the internal organs were different colors to correspond with a chart my father had on the wall beside Pin. Each organ was described in terms of its function. The printed matter was done in the same color as the organ. Every one of Pin’s joints was movable. Even his diaphragm was movable.
My father used Pin not only when he explained parts of the body to children, but also when he explained ailments to adults. I never saw anyone come away without being fascinated by Pin. Why, the fingers of his hands were as long and as powerful looking as my father’s.
Anyway, it was interesting to listen in when my father had these discussions with Pin. Pin was always careful about contradicting him. His tone of voice was always polite. In those days there wasn’t the slightest trace of temper in his tone. He never raised his voice.
Occasionally, my father would stop in the middle of a discussion and stare at him. I’d wait with my little hands folded neatly in my lap, my breathing subdued, and look from him to Pin and back to him again. Pin never changed expression. The more I think about it, I don’t see how my father could have realized Pin was disagreeing. That’s why I say my father was really out to convince himself. If he had doubts, he would assume Pin had them.
My father wouldn’t talk to Pin much when adults were
being treated, but he often did when he treated children. He’d look over at Pin propped up in the corner and he’d say, “Guess what we have here?” Pin would reply, “What?” The child’s eyes would grow big, but my father wouldn’t crack a smile. He was always serious, even when he talked to Pin in front of children. “We have a bad throat infection,” he’d answer, or he’d say, “Another stomach flu. It’s a regular epidemic.”
One time when I was waiting for my father in the lobby, I had to go to the bathroom bad. He let me through the examination room just before a senior high-school girl, Maralyn Meyers, came in. I was in the bathroom so long, I guess my father forgot I was there. When I was finished, I opened the door slowly and looked out before walking back through the office. Maralyn Meyers was naked from the waist down and she was up on the examination table, her feet stuck in what I later found out were called stirrups. My father was giving her an internal examination, but I thought he was helping her because she had gotten the Need. Pin was sitting in his corner, just behind my father. He didn’t say a word. He just sat gazing straight ahead. When he spotted me, a faint smile formed on his face and I was afraid he was going to laugh at me, so I closed the bathroom door and waited. When I opened it again, Maralyn was gone and my father was outside talking to Miss Sansodome, his secretary. I came out and walked over to the desk. I looked down and read the things my father had written about Maralyn Meyers. I read them quickly, as much of it as I could make out.
“The doctor forgot about me in there, I guess,” I said to Pin.
“He’s got a lot on his mind, Leon. You did the right thing waiting in the bathroom. It might have been embarrassing for Maralyn Meyers.”
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