Regiment of Women

by Thomas Berger

  He tore a strip from the hem of his dress and gagged her. She pretended her blue eyes were bullets, and executed him repeatedly.

  A weapon to use against the guards—that was what he needed. Else they would throw him down and emasculate him on the spot. There were two of them, one as large as he, and both carried truncheons. Besides, they were trained to violence. He was just a little secretary. Suddenly he had an instant of remorse. He examined Harriet to see whether she could breathe.

  Could he not surrender, with a plea of insanity?

  He loosened Harriet’s gag and narrowly evaded the set of white teeth she aimed at his hand.

  She could speak quite clearly now.

  She said: “I’m personally going to hack off your nuts.”

  He re-gagged her.

  “Listen, Harriet. I wish you would listen… Please listen: everything I told you was true. I’m not a militant revolutionary. I don’t belong to any underground. I just had a few beers and put on a sport jacket. That’s all, I swear. I don’t know why I threw you down just now. It was some kind of crazy impulse. I’m sick. I’ve been under the care of a psychotherapist for years. You can verify that. I’ll release you and take my punishment. I’m a very disturbed person. My doctor can tell you that. Look, if I untie you, won’t that prove I’m basically harmless? I don’t expect to get off scot-free, but maybe there’s a place for me in some state-run psychiatric facility—” He loosened the gag again.

  Harriet snarled: “I’m going to get me an axe, and I’m going—” He silenced her once more.

  Weapons. He pulled her box from under the cot and searched through it, finding, of all the arrogant things, a carton of Tampax.

  He grimaced at Harriet. “Why, you brazen bitch!” She did as much as could be done with a gagged mouth and venomous eyes.

  Ah, he found a comb. In the brief self-defense course given at school when his class reached puberty, the teacher had maintained that a mugger or rapist could be rendered ineffective by means of common objects found in any purse, properly manipulated. Comb as dagger, hair spray as poison gas, and so on.

  While he was deliberating, the cell door swung open, and the guards entered. In a trice their truncheons were to hand. The nearer guard was the one as large as he. Her porcine nostrils expanding in anticipated pleasure, she raised her club and waded in.

  Men have broad and large chests, and small narrow hips, and are more understanding than women, who have but small and narrow chests, and broad hips, to the end they should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children.

  MARTIN LUTHER, 1566

  5

  AFTER KNOCKING OUT both guards, Cornell stripped the uniform from the larger and got into it: tunic, trousers, and a cap into the crown of which he tucked his hair. A snug fit, particularly in the crotch, but possible. The shoes, however, were a problem. But he could not go down the corridor in his jail slippers. With much stamping and more pain, he finally encased his feet in the heavy brogans, which were stretched so extravagantly that nothing remained of the laces to tie. The excruciating pressure virtually petrified his feet—but the effect might prove useful to remind him to walk effeminately this time. Cornell was now potent, alert, and charged with an energy which enabled him quickly to see the underlying strengths in superficial weaknesses.

  Punching the first guard had been his second experience at deliberate violence. By the third occasion he was already an old hand. He grabbed the truncheon from the first woman as she fell and slammed it on the cap of the other. He had been assisted by their astonishment. Obviously they were stunned by his failure to fall whimpering at their approach. When he raised his fists, the beefy guard froze, her club in the air. He hit her right on the chin.

  He bound them with the extra belt and shoelaces. Big Bertha lay in her striped drawers and a none too clean T-shirt. Under the latter could be seen the wide canvas bandeau with which she compressed her fat breasts against the barrel chest.

  Cornell opened the door and peered cautiously into the corridor. It was empty. Hearing groans behind him, he went back and gagged both guards with their socks. He avoided looking at Harriet. When he returned to the door, the passage was still clear, and he stepped out and locked the cell behind him.

  He saw a series of iron doors. Harriet had also lied when she said they were alone in the block. There were five or six cells on either side of theirs, as well as a regular line of doors along the opposite wall.

  He had little hope of getting out alone. The answer was a mass escape, a riot. He began to open cells with the master keys he had taken from the guards.

  “Freedom!” he shouted in. “Let’s go!”

  He had opened four cells before he noticed, in dismay, that no one emerged. He plunged into the fifth, shouting exhortations.

  Two old men stood at attention.

  “Come on, fellows,” Cornell cried. “We’re busting out!” The prisoners maintained their military attitudes. Cornell seized the nearer and shook him.

  The old man spoke in a quavering voice.

  “Thirty-three oh-oh two seven.”

  His number! Cornell took precious time to react to that.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Thirteen years, ma’am.”

  Cornell seized him again. “I’m a man, man! We’re busting out!”

  The old fellow’s eyes rolled up into his forehead and he crumpled in a faint. Cornell let him fall and turned to the cellmate.

  “I knocked out the guards and took this uniform. I’m not a woman.”

  Like the other, this one gave his number. It was even lower. Cornell stared for an instant into his rheumy, fixed eyes, and dashed out and into the next cell.

  There, in a prison dress, stood Charlie Harrison.

  “Charlie!”

  Charlie gave his number.

  “It’s me, Georgie,” Cornell cried. “Come on!”

  Charlie stood rigid.

  “They tricked me, Charlie,” Cornell said. “I didn’t betray you knowingly.” He waved his hands in front of Charlie’s face. “Are you drugged?”

  At last Charlie spoke, opening his mouth like a dummy and hardly moving his lips.

  “Surrender, Georgie. They’ll get you.”

  “I don’t care,” Cornell shouted. “Anything’s better than this.”

  He seized Charlie’s wrist and tried to pull him out, but the stout man had a formidable inertia.

  “Charlie!”

  But he could not budge this coward, and time was short. He let Charlie go and raced into the corridor, expecting to be met by a squad of uniformed huskies. But the passage was still empty. He adjusted his tunic and made sure his hair was yet in the cap.

  Once more he called to his friend in vain, and then he followed the turn of the corridor. More cells. He would not waste any more effort. These men were mice.

  Another turn. Scarcely had he negotiated it when a cell opened and two guards emerged, pulling a limp, weeping prisoner by his hair.

  Cornell opted for boldness.

  “Need a hand?”

  It worked. The guards hardly glanced at him. They were too busy gloating over their miserable captive, a young man with long blond hair of which each had a fistful.

  “Get your own!” one of them said to Cornell. “This one’s ours.”

  “Mine!” said the other, and each tried to pull the victim in her own direction.

  Cornell marched on, trying to close his ears to the youth’s pathetic groans. He might have endangered his own getaway had he tried seriously to intercede. But it was more than that. The captive happened to be a large, robust young man. He was not resisting in the least as two women, of median size for their sex, dragged him along the concrete floor. Indeed, he was too heavy for their combined strengths. They could not have budged him had he not helped by paddling along, dachshund-fashion, on his four paws.

  Propelled by disgust, Cornell rounded another corner and found himself before a barred door, be
yond which was a kind of vestibule. A slovenly-looking guard, stogie in side of mouth, cap on back of head, sat behind a desk. Her feet were on the desktop, and she seemed either dozing or stupefied.

  His nerve diminished slightly. He tried quietly to open the door with his keys, but none would enter the lock. The guard’s head suddenly fell onto her chest. He leaned against the bars, observing her, and the door swung open. It had not even been latched.

  He paused at the desk and hefted his truncheon, then decided against busting another skull. Revenge was not his game. But how arrogant they were I The jail was hardly guarded.

  Across the vestibule was a door with a frosted-glass panel. He opened it and was outside the Men’s House of Detention, a fact he confirmed by reading the legend on the obverse of the glass. He was still underground, but free. He took the staircase and mounted to an upper lobby lined with what had apparently been shops in some former time but now were occupied by derelicts, gypsies, and the like. Rockefeller Center had an infamous reputation and was avoided by any boy in his right mind. Cornell had never been there before, and intended now to leave as fast as he could if not obstructed by the ruffians in residence.

  Seeing some burly, dreadful creatures just ahead, he instinctively tightened his behind and moved to bring his purse up under his arm—and felt the truncheon instead. He had nothing to fear. He was in uniform and armed. Nor, when he drew closer to the malignant-looking bums, did he see the usual hostility on the features of these degraded women. Indeed, they touched index fingers to their caps and shuffled aside.

  He passed through the front of the building, a great jagged hole where the main doors had originally swung, and around a mound of trash made by the bums’ litter and the rubble that had fallen from the upper stories into the avenue. More derelicts thronged the street. Cornell marched through them with impunity. He was enjoying this, and steered for one group simply to see them scatter obsequiously.

  Had he really overwhelmed Harriet and knocked out two guards? There was no precedent for that sort of thing in his history. And here he was again in women’s clothing. Fate had begun to impose upon him an inexorable effeminacy. With this thought he turned west on a crosstown street and suddenly lost his nerve. Of course he must turn himself in. He had no place to go. The apartment would be staked out, and his money was in the purse that had been taken from him in jail. His feet now hurt abominably in the heavy, binding shoes, and his constricted crotch had begun to ache.

  In pain and terror he continued to propel himself along, oblivious to his direction. Other people, respectable types, were also abroad now. The brown-mustard sky told him it was morning. He had no gas mask, and would die of asphyxiation—no sooner had he formulated this solution than he saw no one was wearing a mask.

  His next observation was that he stood on the corner of Broadway and 50th Street, very near the building in which he worked. It was the morning rush hour. He leaned against a lamppost and took the breath he had been suppressing. He should probably just go on into Huff House, report to the janitor’s closet, and claim his mop. He might have time to tidy up the men’s room before the police arrived. Surely that would make a good impression. Perhaps his assaults on Harriet and the guards could be interpreted as resulting from a temporary nervous seizure: he had that long history of psychotherapy. Certainly he would not expect to get off scot-free, but—

  But, but, but! He took his fingernails from his mouth and saw that he had drawn blood. He saw too that he still wore the nail polish he had applied before going to Charlie’s. A uniformed guard from the Men’s House of Detention with tangerine nails! His panic now became particular. He was seized by the desperate conviction that the means to safety resided in a bottle of oily polish remover. He kept such among his emergency cosmetic supply in the bottom right drawer of his desk at Huff House. There was a drugstore just across the street from his lamppost, but dressed as he was he could hardly make the needful purchase.

  The usual queue had formed at the desk of the security officer in the lobby. A wall clock gave the time as 8:39. Work began at ten for publishing people, but some of the other tenants in the huge structure, insurance companies, mutual funds, and the like, opened their offices at eight-thirty or nine. The officer was examining I.D. cards. Cornell automatically joined the line and sought to fetch up his purse. Again he found the dangling truncheon, and again it was a source of strength. He stepped imperiously from the end of the queue and strode past the desk, saluting the uniformed woman with an insouciant wave of the club.

  He left the elevator at the eighteenth floor and entered the offices of Huff House. They were empty of people, silent, strange. He went to his cubicle and found the polish remover and cotton balls. Seeing the neighboring desk, he thought of poor Charlie. When he had finished cleaning his nails, he raised both hands together, palms outward, and inspected the job. His hands were not his most attractive feature, the fingers shorter, thicker than he would have liked. In compensation he grew his nails rather long and trimmed them to pointed arcs.

  He set his jaw now, took up a pair of clippers, and cut the nails straight across at the margin of the quick. Going from strength to strength, he found a pair of shears on Charlie’s desk and proceeded to cut off his hair just above the ears, guided only by touch and peripheral vision. Until the rough cut was finished he lacked the nerve to lift the mirror of his spare compact. Around he went, blindly, across the nape, the thick auburn strands falling softly to the floor.

  He put the shears down and plucked off the hairs that clung to the adhesive serge of the uniform. At last he studied himself in the tiny mirror, recoiling at first, then with comb and brush and more scissorswork making the best of the crude job. But he could not of course see the back of his head.

  He walked to the men’s room and pushed open the swinging door—He must remember that sort of thing! He spun and, crossing the corridor, plunged into the women’s lavatory. The second thing he saw in the glass over the washbowls was that one of the toilet stalls was closed. He made a faucet gush to match the roar of his blood, then shut it off as impulsively.

  Whoever sat in there produced an almost palpable silence. His eyes cornered on the mirror, Cornell began to steal towards the door. He had only a few more paces to go when the stall opened slowly and a wretched figure emerged. Cornell was at once amazed and relieved to recognize old Stanley, the janitor whom he had been assigned to replace. From Stanley’s stooped shoulders hung a shapeless dress of bombazine, with collar and cuffs of a white which age had yellowed. His ankles were thick in cotton stockings, and his shoes were run over.

  Stanley shook his gray-bunned head and spoke in a miserable whine.

  “I know I done wrong, ma’am. But I didn’t use the commode. I was just sitting on the closed top. I finished cleaning up, see, and was taking a rest. I’m retiring after today. I put in many years of faithful service, ma’am. It seems hard I would get a bad report on my last day.”

  Cornell had never known Stanley well, and besides the old man was notoriously nearsighted. He might just get away unrecognized. Once again boldness seemed the answer. He returned to the glass and combed his hair as a woman would, with brisk strokes across his temples. He said nothing. The onus was on Stanley. But then he saw, as he had not earlier when preoccupied with his hair, that overnight he had acquired the usual growth of whiskers. He had walked for blocks while wearing a woman’s uniform and a man’s shadow of beard. Many females of course wore false beards and mustaches, but a stubble was unmistakably male. He gasped, and Stanley came up behind him.

  Cornell covered his chin with one hand and gestured for Stanley’s benefit with the other.

  “I’ll overlook it this time,” he sternly told the old man.

  Stanley’s voice had changed. “You’re not exactly a policewoman, are you? You’re some sort of watchman or guard.” His tone altered further. “You’re not exactly a woman, are you?” He put an astonishingly forceful hand on Cornell’s shoulder and turned him. “In fact,
” he said, “you’re Georgie Cornell.”

  Without deliberation Cornell threw a punch at him, missed, and was felled by a combination karate blow made by Stanley—or so he assumed: Stanley struck him so quickly and so deftly that he could not see precisely how it was done. He was sitting on the tile floor, looking up at the old man, who was certainly not as old as one had thought and perhaps not even a man.

  “Oh, no!” Cornell wailed. “Not you, too.”

  Stanley put out a hand and raised him.

  “Are you a woman?”

  Stanley’s smile was grim.

  “Certainly not.”

  “Who are you, Stanley?”

  “I was going to ask you the same question,” Stanley said.

  “Are you going to turn me in?” Cornell was wondering whether he might get in a sneak punch, anyway, thereby gaining a moment in which to dash for the door.

  “Well, I might,” said Stanley, his formerly rheumy eyes now quite keen behind the glasses.

  Actually, the blow Cornell had tried to strike had been a sneak punch and got him nowhere. He decided against further violence.

  “They’ll castrate me, Stanley,” he said. “Don’t be a traitor to your own sex.”

  Now Stanley barked a laugh. He clapped Cornell on the arm.

  “Come on, boy,” he said, leading the way to the door. He snorted. “Who would have thought it? Georgie Cornell! The most obsequious, submissive little boy in the office. You’ve got a better act than me.” He frowned. “Or you had, anyway. Fill me in on this uniform. Is this an independent adventure? Why didn’t you contact the Organization?”

  This was all Greek to Cornell. He related his series of catastrophes as they walked along the corridor that led to the mail room. Stanley seemed to have a particular destination.

  When he had finished his story, they were standing before a freight elevator. Stanley pushed its button, and it began to hum.

  Stanley said: “The lesson is obvious, isn’t it? A man cannot get anywhere on his own. These individual rebellions are doomed to failure from the beginning. They are mere sentimental exercises, perhaps ultimately even masochistic. Sometimes they are actually rigged by the Female Establishment.”