The Harrad Experiment

by Robert H. Rimmer

  We had many Saturday-night parties with just-married friends and dating singles. Flirting with others in their twenties, aided and abetted by plenty of booze, was a way of life. The idea of playing strip poker was often bandied about, and not being adverse to seeing how women friends of Erma’s looked in their birthday suits, I devised a variation on blackjack, which made it possible to play for several hours with a slow and tantalizing divestment of clothing. You’ll find it described in Yale Marratt.

  Within the first year of marriage, although Erma and I were monogamous, I managed to hug half a dozen of her friends after they had shed their last stitch and didn’t know whether to run off or be embarrassed. But on December 7, 1941, our happy daydream began to end, like that of millions of other couples.

  A Rebel in World War II. By late 1942, although I had quit Relief Printing and taken a job at the Fore River Shipyard division of Bethlehem Steel, hoping to be deferred because I was working in an essential industry, it was obvious that my number was up. To my shock, I quickly discovered that the months I had spent at HBS learning how to direct the war from a cushy job in Washington weren’t about to be put to use.

  I told Erma I still thought I might wangle a commission in the Finance Department of the Army, but two weeks later I was drafted as a private. I ended up at Fort Devens, headed for the infartry with a lot of nice kids who had never met a college graduate, let alone someone with a master’s degree in business.

  During four long winter months at finance school at Fort Benjamin Harrison, near Indianapolis, the Army finally decided I might prove of some value in the Finance Department. I quickly discovered that no one gave a damn about my “superior” education; survival in the Army (with plenty of infantry training) depended on strictly obeying orders and ass-kissing officers and noncommissioned officers, especially master sergeants. Rebellion was heresy. Since I was never able to obey orders, I was unable to get a weekend pass to leave the base.

  When Erma, sure that I would be sent overseas, arrived in Indianapolis, I still couldn’t get leave until a friend, wiser than I in the ways of the Army, offered to write me a pass so that I could leave the base and spend the night with Erma.

  Finally I was shipped out of Fort Benjamin Harrison on a troop train destined for Shenango, Pa., a marshalling area for the European theater. At Shenango, when it looked as if I would soon be serving in bomb-blasted England and was prepared to bid a final, tearful good-bye to Erma, FH intervened. The change in my orders was the result of FH’s phone call to his longtime friend, Congress-man John McCormack. They laid the groundwork, and if I survived a finance school at Wake Forest University, I could apply to Officer Candidate School at Duke University. Three months later, I graduated from Wake Forest as a private first-class.

  At Duke arduous infantry training was combined with endless hours learning advanced army finance. It made my first two years at HBS look like a tea party. Erma didn’t come to Durham, N.C., until graduation day, which coincided with D-Day in Europe. During the entire four months at Duke, I was in continuous trouble, “gigged” for everything from insubordination to dust on coat hangers to inability to make up my bunk so the captain could bounce a quarter on it.

  Every month I appeared before the flunk-out board, composed of seven or more officers who hurled questions while I sat at rigid attention and tried to figure out how to answer them. What I was reading, and had read throughout my life, was a source of great interest to them, especially since I informed them that I’d not only read Karl Marx, the Daily Worker, and magazines like the New Republic, but I had also read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, as well as a current novel called Out of the Night, which was about a Communist spy. I told them that I thought “an officer and a gentleman” should know what both friends and enemies might be thinking. They weren’t amused. By a miracle, and possibly because there may have been a notation on my records about the family friend in Washington, I survived.

  When Erma arrived in Durham for graduation, we decided that the time had come to have a baby. Happily kissing condoms and diaphragm good-bye, we made up for lost time; she was soon pregnant. My first orders as a second lieutenant were to report back to Fort Benjamin Harrison, where I now had the opportunity to learn how real officers lived. Needless to say, in the Army, all men and women are not created equal. From Harrison, I was assigned to the Air Transport Command at Grenier Field in Manchester, N.H. While I was there, Erma had a miscarriage.

  Suddenly, I received orders to go to Florida; from there, I was to proceed to Karachi, India. I looked at a map of the world in shock, noting that India was halfway around the world. I was assigned to the China/ Burma/ India theater, where the British, backed by the Americans, were determined to fight the Japanese all the way across the Chinese mainland if necessary. Everyone in the CBI theater was sure it would take at least another ten years to win the war this way. “The Golden Gate by ’58” seemed an appropriate slogan.

  Three weeks later Erma, pregnant once again, kissed me goodbye as I boarded a train for Miami. I’ll never forget the sight of her standing on the deserted track, sobbing as the train pulled out. In my pocket were a dozen pictures I had taken of her naked and three months pregnant. Would we ever see each other again? Both of us doubted it. The United States was not only bogged down in Europe, but we were trying to defeat the Japanese island by island across the Pacific. It seemed in 1944 that World War II would never end.

  Two weeks later, with stops in Algiers, Cairo, and Abadan, Iran, I was in Karachi, headed for Calcutta and ultimately an air force base in Shamshenagra, located in the upper Assam Valley, an area now called Bangladesh. India was a unique learning experience. I soon discovered that the Indians were great readers. In the major cities there were hundreds of bookstores, and there were all kinds of translations into Hindustani and other languages.

  I became interested in Indian yoga and tantra—the wine, woman, and song approach to nirvana for those who did not want to pursue the ascetic yoga disciplines. I soon had a fully illustrated copy of the Kama Sutra, which in the 1940s and 1950s, along with James Joyce, Henry Miller, and D. H. Lawrence, would have put an American bookseller in jail if he dared to offer such a picturesque view of human sexuality.

  Tantric sex offered the potential of extended sexual intercourse without ejaculation to achieve a blending of the yang and the yin as a path to nirvana. I also learned about tantric rituals in which sexual merger with a loved one wasn’t necessarily monogamous. Joy in sex, tantric style, is discussed in the middle section of Yale Marratt, and it’s one of the goals of a Harrad style of education I wrote about many years later. Subconsciously, although I didn’t realize it until later, my Galatea and tantric sexual-merger daydreams were two sides of the same coin.

  In August 1945, after receiving a telegram that my son Robert, Jr., was born on July 3, I was running a finance office in China, on a base with 3,000 men and an equal number of Chinese laborers. A few weeks later, the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and suddenly it seemed that I might get home after all.

  Then I was called back to Calcutta and given what presumably was a choice assignment but which entailed endless flying to strange destinations. When the Japanese surrendered, the U.S. Army quickly moved into occupied countries. More than a month had gone by since most American soldiers had been paid. My first flight was to Rangoon and then to Saigon and Singapore. In the latter, the Army had taken over the Raffles Hotel, where officers were living in high style.

  Finally I received orders to return on a troopship with several thousand enlisted men and several hundred officers, whose cabins, twenty or so with triple-decker bunks, were topside. The only way to survive the three-week ocean crossing was to stay awake all night, try to sleep during the day, and thus avoid the snoring of your companions. Three weeks later, after steaming around India to Singapore and across the Pacific to Tacoma, Wash., I was on a four-day, cross-country train ride. Like a Jules Verne character, I could say that I had been aro
und the world, but it took more than eighty days!

  Blessed Civilian Life. On February 1, I stepped off the train in Boston, more than a little surprised to see Erma, FH, Blanche, and a contingent of Blanche’s friends. It was Blanche’s birthday, and I was her present. Since it was early Saturday evening when I arrived, she thought we should all go to a cocktail lounge and celebrate.

  Hugging me after a year, Erma whispered, “What the hell could I do? They’re your parents.” I could see my son Bobby, who was now eight months old, and be with her later.

  Erma had another surprise, which FH confirmed. He had bought us a house, putting $1,500 down on a six-room English bungalow and leaving only a $5,500 mortgage. I could pay him back in the coming years. The house was on a third of an acre, but only one house away from Blanche and FH’s home. The trap was set and I fell into it—happily at first, I must admit.

  Obviously, as soon as I was discharged from the Army, I was expected to go to work at Relief Printing Corporation, which had survived the war with no bigger problem than how to find employees to produce the business-card orders that had continued unabated. Even today, the Japanese and the Americans have one thing in common; without business cards, their economies might grind to a halt.

  Since I had a wife and a child to support and was no longer angry at FH for interfering in my previous love life, it seemed convenient to live near my parents on my new salary of $75 a week.

  But I did have an old problem. Neither in the business world nor in my social life was I meeting anyone who was as fascinated with music, the arts, and literature as I was. Nor, spending my days as a salesman, was it easy to make contacts with anyone with equivalent interests. As a result, during the next ten years, I became like someone with a split personality—a kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, who no longer bothered to play the Pygmalion game with Erma. She was proving to be a fun companion and wife in many other ways. As “Dr. Jekyll,” I was a sober citizen and a hard-driving business-man, who soon proved that I could sell major accounts.

  As a benign “Mr. Hyde,” I was an enigma to my family and friends. As an antidote to the business world, I was reading novels and collecting anything that had been written about human sexuality, as well as more abstruse books in the areas of psychology, religion, and economics. I was omnivorously searching for answers to questions about life and death that I couldn’t even formulate. I was also buying and listening to a wealth of music that was suddenly available on LP records, discovering chamber music, ballet, concertos, and symphonies, along with the world of art.

  With business friends or people that Erma met through her women’s clubs, I rarely revealed my true inclinations. With a few drinks of bourbon, I was one of the boys. But I told Erma that we were like two people on different trolley cars going in different directions but waving at each other as we passed. Still, in many areas, we were well mated. Erma soon proved her talents in our thirty-year-old bungalow, personally painting, wallpapering, laying cement walks, and expanding the house, as well as cooking gourmet dinners and taking care of Bobby. We had many goals in common, but little intellectual companionship.

  In the late spring of 1946, a few months after I was discharged from the army, a friend whom I had known at Harvard came to Boston and phoned to see if I’d survived the war. In May, he and his wife Elizabeth came to see us, with their kids.

  Libby, a brown-eyed brunette with almond-shaped eyes, coolly sexy, thought nothing of sitting on a sofa with her arms around her knees, well aware that she wore no panties and her nether parts were beckoning. She was a sharp contrast to Erma. Before she settled down with Bill, she had known quite a few boys and men intimately.

  Arriving in our suburb, Libby couldn’t believe her eyes. Here was a house filled with more books than some college professors owned, plus hundreds of records. Her husband read a bit and listened to some classical music but was an entirely different cup of tea from Bob Rimmer. I was charmed. Erma wasn’t, but she liked Bill. During the weekend, I discovered that not only was Libby an omnivorous reader but she also wrote poetry, which her friends and family thought was great. Libby told me later that she loved Willy, as she called Bill’s father, more than her husband, who was now a rising executive at a department store in Manhattan. During the weekend, I managed to take Libby alone on a fast auto tour of our area. We soon stopped for a torrential embrace, during which she told me that her marriage was falling apart and she was already having an affair.

  The weekend ended with a few more discreet hugs from Libby and an invitation from Bill to spend a weekend near West Haven, Conn. Within a few hours after Erma and I arrived, we were all drinking gin, and Libby whispered that she really had to talk to me alone. How we were going to escape our spouses in such confined quarters was a mystery to me, but by nine o’clock, Bill and Erma had drunk so much that all they wanted to do was go to bed. Libby’s hope that they might end up in bed together never materialized, but she and I went for a walk along the river. We were soon feverishly undressing each other. Despite the discomfort of bugs and sand, we nervously made love on a lonely inlet.

  During the next two years, 1947 and 1948, I arranged sales trips to New York City about every six weeks, and Libby and I met. Did we feel guilty? A little, perhaps. We always ended shopping for presents to take home to our kids. I loved Libby, but I loved Erma too and never considered divorce. I kept wondering if we could ever match up Bill and Erma, who had a lot in common, but it never happened.

  In the meantime, Erma was pregnant with our second child, Stephen King, who was born May 18, 1948. Long before I wrote Yale Marratt, it occurred to me that the solution to my dual life was not to create a Galatea but simply to enjoy two very different women.

  Libby and I mailed books we were reading back and forth to each other. She wrote me five- to ten-page letters mailed to my office. I had never been privileged to enter any person’s mind so completely. Libby was like a dammed-up river, bursting through the dikes of an unhappy marriage. She flooded me with a million words, seeking answers for herself and for me. At one point, I had four file drawers jampacked with every letter she wrote me, and I often thought if they were ever published, they would be among the most intimate revelations ever put down on paper by a woman, for Libby was a colorful writer.

  Then, the bubble burst. Carelessly (or on purpose), Libby left a long letter she had been writing to me on her desk, and Bill read it. Within a week, a certified letter arrived at home. Erma opened the letter from Bill’s lawyers. “Cease and desist seeing Elizabeth Jones,” they wrote, or be sued for alienation of affection.

  I thought it was silly, but, needless to say, Erma was hysterical. Did I want a divorce? No. I loved her and Steve and Bobby. I didn’t believe in divorce. We might not be riding on the same trolley, but we had a lot of good things going for us. I simply needed a female friend in addition to a wife. I was intellectually lonesome.

  Surprisingly, after a rocky month or two, Erma stopped asking for details of my extramarital love life. Six months later, I discovered why Erma had suddenly become so complacent. She had told David, the doctor she took Bobby and Steve to with various childhood ailments, about me. David had even been in our house and seen my large collection of books and told her, “My wife, Nancy, would go crazy if she saw these. She’d never leave. She reads all the time.”

  But poor Nancy, who read so much, was a recluse. In her childhood, she had had a severe attack of rheumatic fever, which damaged her heart. Although she had survived and even given birth to two very much wanted children, on her heart specialist’s orders, she spent much of her time resting in bed and wondering if the next time she was out of breath, or her heart started fibrillating uncontrollably, it would be the last time. She was thirty-nine.

  David and Nancy. With David, Nancy was a loving but limited sex partner. David couldn’t understand how I could neglect such a pretty, healthy, and competent woman as Erma, but he told her she should accept male reality. Man had invented monogamy, not for himself bu
t to keep women under control. If men, married or not, ever lost interest in the joy of loving and being loved by a woman, the world would come to an end. Erma was dubious, but ready to let him prove it.

  Now, without me or Nancy being aware of it, Erma and David became lovers. It wasn’t easy for a wandering husband and my wife, with four kids between them, to find a place to be alone. Erma didn’t know Nancy, but she assured David that Bob would enjoy a woman with whom he could share all of his “damn books.” The die was cast.

  David convinced Nancy, who rarely went to social events, that she should attend a local hospital ball and he’d introduce her to a man who had enough books to keep her reading for two lifetimes.

  Nancy was very pretty. Nearsighted with big, luminous brown eyes that you could drown in, she sighed when I asked her to dance, “I really shouldn’t. My heart isn’t very good.” I told her that I wasn’t a great dancer. “My heart is pounding too,” I laughed. “We don’t have to move fast. We could dance on a dime and just hug each other.” And we did, most of the evening, to the exclusion of everyone else—including David and Erma.

  Although we realized later that our spouses had been making love for several years, Nancy was under no pressure from me to have sex together. She knew about Libby, and much later, I told her the finale.

  Arriving at the front door of the Relief building one morning at eight o’clock, I was shocked to see a woman smiling at me a few yards from the entrance. It was Libby. She had left Bill and her children, but not wholly because of me. “You knew our marriage was on the rocks from the beginning,” she sighed. I reminded her, as I had many times before, that I didn’t think divorce was the answer. I had known Bill at HBS for two years and I really liked him. I was sure that he loved Libby, but she shook her head.