by Jim Thompson
“We-el, maybe. But not entirely. I mean, how am I going to know whether something interests me unless I’m informed on it?”
The man studied him intently; bobbed the bushy mass of his hair. “We,” he said firmly, “shall talk again.”
That was Mitch’s first meeting with Fritz Steinhopf, M.D., Ph.D. (psychiatry), F.R.A.S.; Heidelberg, the Sorbonne, University College. It was fairly typical of the psychiatrist’s introduction to other members of the hotel’s staff. Indiscriminately and without apologetic preliminary he had quizzed the resident manager, the haughty head-housekeeper—very much an executive in the hotel world—the superintendent of service, the head chef (another important executive), and various bellboys and clean-up men.
His attitude was one which, in ordinary cases, would have elicited the chilly suggestion that he would be “happier” at some other hotel. But Fritz Steinhopf was very far from being an ordinary case. In addition to his living quarters, he maintained an elaborate professional suite on the mezzanine floor. His patients were among the southwest’s most prominent and wealthy, including two of the hotel company’s major stockholders.
Mitch wondered why a man of Steinhopf’s importance didn’t concentrate on his practice, instead of prying into the affairs of people like himself. When the answer finally dawned on him, it did much in the shaping of his own character. One could not, he came to realize, approach every person and situation with a view to immediate gain. To be effective subjectively, a broad objectivity was necessary. Interest and curiosity were not traits to be turned off and on at will. Nothing was ever lost. Knowledge gained at one time could be used at another.
With much idle time on his hands, Mitch was more and more the target of the apparently non-sleeping Steinhopf’s insatiable curiosity. And the more that curiosity was exercised, the greater it became. The psychiatrist was completely uninhibited; he could not be brushed off. A little irritated with him one night, Mitch declared that he had to go to lunch. Steinhopf said that he would go also, and he trotted along at Mitch’s side to the all-night lunch room.
They ate together almost nightly after that, the psychiatrist stuffing himself with whatever was put in front of him, blandly asking the most intimate questions, occasionally making some comment which by turns enlightened, frightened, and infuriated Mitch.
“It is a substitute, this gambling,” he said. “A compensatory drive. You are haunted by your father’s impotence. He had no such compensating satisfaction. So you provide yourself with one.”
“Oh, come off it, Doc,” Mitch laughed. “If I was any better in bed, I’d need a harem.”
“So. Perhaps. But the fear is still present. A man confident of his prowess, that he is a man, is not dominated by his wife. As you are by yours, my dear Mitch.”
“It’s not like that at all! I try to be reasonable, of course. She brings most of the money into the family, and she should have something to say about how it’s run. But—”
“But she has always earned the major share of the income, has she not? There has been relatively no change. And money is obviously of no importance to her, something to be thrown away. How then does it justify her drive to make you less than a man?”
“Dammit, I told you it wasn’t like that! I’m in love with my wife. I want to do everything I can to please her and make her happy.”
“That is as it should be,” Steinhopf purred. “Assuming, of course, that she does everything she can to please you and make you happy.”
“But—!”
“I understand. Believe me I do,” the doctor said softly. “I am asking you to accept the unacceptable. You know your wife as no one else can know her. Between you there is something which is singularly your own, a history of troubles shared, of secret words and intimacies; the warm and delightful and always unique treasure which is peculiar to every marriage, no matter how bad that marriage may be. The husband is always the last to know, they say. Of course, he is. How else could it be, since he is closer to his wife than anyone else? But consider, Mitch. It is this very closeness which blinds him to the truth. It is almost impossible for him to be objective. A Negro patient once assured me with great bitterness that I did not know what it was like to be a Negro. I could only point out that he also didn’t know what it was like to be a white man.”
Mitch frowned. It seemed to him that the doctor had almost said something decidedly ugly.
Steinhopf smoothly continued. “Aside from your intensely subjective viewpoint, there is the matter of your childhood; the marriage of your parents. You grew up in circumstances which were anything but normal, so your present home life does not seem as shocking as it essentially is. Nor is your wife too blatant a contrast with your mother. Your mother seems to have been lacking in most of the instincts normal to a mother, while simultaneously possessing an over-supply of certain other womanly instincts. So Teddy, by comparison—”
Mitch got up and stomped out of the place. The doctor caught up with him, trotted along at his side. They would talk again, he said imperturbably. They would talk again, many times, for there was much indeed to be discussed.
At the moment, Mitch had other ideas on the subject. He’d just about had it with Steinhopf. But they did talk again, many times and at length, and at Mitch’s own wish. Because he was getting very worried about Teddy himself.
He still loved her, or believed that he did, but their relationship was becoming increasingly unsatisfactory. The more he saw of her the more dismayed he became.
And he was seeing a great deal of her. Literally, constantly. She took him to bed the minute he came home. The normally delightful demands she made upon him had, through excess, become a source of despair and disgust. She couldn’t carry on a conversation—not a real honest-to-Hannah conversation. Why hadn’t he noticed that before? What he had taken for wit was really the product of ignorance (she didn’t realize she was being funny) and the parroted statements of others.
Actually, she was almost completely humorless. Joking with her, laughing in her presence, could induce her to insane fury.
He’d better not laugh at her! Very bad things happened to daddies who laughed at their mamas.
She paid no attention to little Sam, and she was angrily jealous when he did. She wanted one thing of Mitch—over and over and over. And when he could not deliver it, she was peevish, pouting…yet with a kind of smugness, an air of self-satisfaction.
So Mitch’s talks with Dr. Steinhopf resumed. In detail, he poured out the story of himself and Teddy from the very beginning.
“I guess I was supposed to be another guy,” he explained, with attempted humor. “Someone she was engaged to before I came along. I remember she was crying in her sleep the night we were married, mumbling about getting a letter from the general and everyone telling her this other fellow was dead.”
Steinhopf said that he doubted very much that there had been any other fellow, in the context of Mitch’s meaning, or any general. The other fellow was a sexual fantasy. The general represented authority trying to destroy the fantasy.
“You mean,” Mitch frowned, “she’s insane?”
“My dear Mitch, please do not use that word in my presence! Let us say she is not normal—in the accepted sense of that misused term.”
“The poor kid,” Mitch said bewilderedly. “I just can’t understand it.…”
Steinhopf shrugged. “She is a classic case, I would say, of a not uncommon disorder among American women. You could find less exaggerated and complex examples all around you. Where are its roots? In a dominant mother, of course, and a defeated but beloved father. Mingle with these the factor of penis-envy—a younger neighbor’s boy, perhaps, and the childhood pastime of playing house. Add in large sums of money—the nominal proof, sad to say, of superiority—and the urges normal to woman. This, broadly speaking, would give you your Teddy…I believe. To be conclusive or helpful, I would have to see her over an extended period of time, an obvious impossibility.”
“Well,�
�� Mitch hesitated. “If it was just a matter of money…”
“Always,” the psychiatrist said gravely, “a fee of some kind is necessary. What is given for nothing, I find, is usually valued at that. But it would be no problem, I assure you. Five dollars, say, for what I would ordinarily charge a hundred. The problem is that your wife would not see me. She would become very angry at the suggestion that there was a problem. Or do you say otherwise?” Steinhopf waited a moment, then continued. “Sexual degeneracy is a way of life with her. The right way. She has no desire to change it. The tendency”—another delicate pause—“has always been to expand it.”
Mitch felt himself reddening, as the doctor’s words slowly sank in on him. Steinhopf spread his hands apologetically.
“Is not the evidence all around you, Mitch? A woman of patently limited mentality, who allegedly earns an extravagant salary? The peculiar working conditions? The voracious demands upon you? The constant—”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Mitch said coldly. “Thank you, very much.”
“Please, Mitch. For your own sake…”
Mitch turned his back on him. He kept it turned.
But he could not forget what the doctor had said. He could not allay the suspicions which, as Steinhopf had guessed, were already in his mind. He was very wrong to have them, he knew. It was hateful and ungrateful to think such terrible things about the mother of his son. Finally, he persuaded himself that he owed it to Teddy to find out the truth.
Mitch took his days off from work in the ordinary way, during the week in which they occurred. Teddy allowed hers to accumulate, taking them during the five days of the month which menstruation made difficult for her. Thus, he had the opportunity to follow her, and since she was not looking to be followed it was shamefully easy.
He knew the place she went to, not from personal experience but from informed hearsay. Still, however, he would not believe what was obviously a fact. There had to be some innocent explanation. Teddy would have gone there on some entirely honest errand, and she would not go back again.
He waited outside; waited for hours. She did not come out. So he followed her again the next night—still stubbornly resisting the truth—and that time he went in.
It was a well-run place. A partitioned tunnel extended a few feet inside the door, and an ape-like figure, with a sawed-off ball bat under his arm, stood at its end.
“No booze, no rough stuff,” he recited, giving Mitch a quick frisk. “Okay, you’re welcome.”
He stood aside to let Mitch enter. In the hallway, seated at a desk which guarded without blocking the stairs to the second floor—for this was a well-run place, you know—was a polite, pudgy little man in a neat serge suit.
“No booze, no rough stuff,” he smiled. “What can I do for you, sir?”
Mitch told him. The man hesitated. “I think you must mean Neddy, don’t you, sir? Yes, I’m sure you must. Oh, no, please!” He gestured distastefully as Mitch reached for his wallet. “The gratuity must be left with the young lady.”
Mitch sat down in a row of chairs with three other clients. They kept looking at one another and looking away again. As they were permitted to ascend the stairs, other men were coming through the entrance tunnel, each greeted with a frisk and a singsonged, “No booze, no rough stuff…”
At last the man at the desk smiled and nodded at Mitch. Mitch started up the stairs, and the man said that Neddy could be found at the first door on his right.
“A preferred room, sir. And a very special young lady.”
“Thank you,” Mitch mumbled.
He was getting the Class-A treatment, he guessed. He was a more likely-looking customer than they usually got, and they wanted him back.
At the head of the stairs, he paused and drew a long shuddery breath. Then, he opened the muslin-covered screen door on his right and went in.
He was hardly breathing; unable to breathe. Nervously, he caught the door, letting it close without a sound. He dragged his eyes to the bed, made himself look and almost shouted with relief.
The girl was lying on her stomach, head pillowed on her arms. In the subdued light, her naked body was a shadow carved of ivory. A beautiful but vaguely limned shadow. It was only a little more clear to him than her face.
But he could see her hair, hair that by no stretch of the imagination could be Teddy’s. A long page-boy bob trailing to her shoulders—and black! Coal black.
Fine beads of sweat broke out on Mitch’s forehead. He was relieved, oh, God, was he relieved, but what the hell did he do now?
Obviously, he couldn’t do what a patron was expected to do. But what was the alternative? What would this girl think or do, and what about that guy downstairs with the baseball bat?
He didn’t know what would be an acceptable course of conduct. Almost as far back as he could remember, he had been hearing about places like this in the frankest detail. But he had never been in one. He didn’t know what a customer who wasn’t a customer was supposed to do.
Looking for a way out, some clue to getting off the hook, he let his eyes rove the room.
On the mirrorless dresser stood a white crockery water pitcher and a washbowl of the same color and material. Conveniently nearby was a small cardboard box of purplish disinfectant; the so-called snakebite remedy, soluble crystals of potassium permanganate. The washbowl was tinged with traces of purple. There were also smudges of purple on the towels which half-filled the basket at the side of the dresser.
In addition to a chair, and of course the bed, there was one other item of furniture. A large white chamber-pot. It was about half full like the towel basket—what could be more logical?—and its yellowish contents were also veined with the purple of potassium permanganate.
A well-run place. A house with a social conscience.
Mitch’s lips quirked in a nervous smile. The smile began to spread. Then, the girl turned over on the bed. She sat up and stared at him.
She was a very wholesome-looking girl, with a sprinkling of freckles across her nose. The change in her appearance wrought by the black page-boy wig was incredible.
Mitch gulped. His emotions locked on the delicate gear between comedy and tragedy, the hideous and the hilarious. Then, there was a kind of inward back-thrust, the “kick” of a mechanism that had built up more compression than it was meant to handle. And he began to laugh.
He laughed as though his life depended upon laughing well, as, in a sense, it did. He was still laughing, laughing and weeping, when Teddy got up and slugged him with the pisspot.
10
The major was waiting, studying Mitch with a mixture of malice and—and what? Envy? Hunger? Mitch’s mind raced, trying to probe the other man’s soul and brain. Meanwhile, the major felt forced to speak.
“A very fine young man, Samuel. I am truly sorry that he will not be able to continue here.”
“Why won’t he?” Mitch said.
“Oh, now really, Mr. Corley. This is a very select school, as you know. To have a student whose mother is a, uh—uh—well, you must see that it’s impossible.”
“Why? The semester will be ended in less than three months. Just why can’t he remain here for that length of time?”
The major’s mouth worked wordlessly, a man trying to explain the axiomatic. At last, with a helpless gesture, he placed the matter in purely practical terms. Yet his visitor remained unimpressed.
“But no one knows you received this, Major. That’s right, isn’t it? If the question should ever arise—and it won’t—there’s no way to prove that you received it.”
“But—but I know, Mr. Corley. I, uh, know and my duty is painfully clear.”
Mitch said that he didn’t see it that way at all, and he was sure that the major wouldn’t if he thought things through. The major’s first duty was toward his students. And how could duty be interpreted as the punishment of a student for the wrong-doing of a parent?
“You’re a man of the world, Major; I can see that. I’ll bet yo
u’ve had a fling or two yourself, haven’t you?” Mitch smiled engagingly. “A man right in his prime as you are can still enjoy a juicy taste of life. He knows what life’s about. There are certain rules to observe, of course, but he certainly isn’t going to embarrass someone like myself, another man of the world, because of a youthful mistake.”
The major coughed. His swollen flesh shifted inside the tan uniform, straightening and readjusting its mass, trying to remold itself into some semblance of the trim figure that sat across the desk.
“As you say, Mr. Corley—huh-huh. These things do happen to the very best of us fellers. Oh, yes, huh-huh. There was a girl in the Philippines—” He broke off in sudden alarm. “Now, Mr. Corley! I really can’t see—”
“No one knows about this,” Mitch said steadily. “No one but you and I. There’s not a reason in the world why anyone else has to know it.”
“But—but what are you suggesting?”
“I can’t enter Sam in another school at this late date. If he’s forced to leave here, he’ll lose an entire semester’s work. Now, I was reading an article the other day on the cash value of an education to a boy. I don’t remember what the overall figure was, but I think that if you broke it down a semester would be worth about…two thousand dollars?”
The major stared at him dazedly. He looked down at the hand that was being held out to him, heard Mitch murmur that he’d have to be running along. The major shook the hand and withdrew his own palm. Felt the flat-folded crispness that was like no other feeling.
It was done, then, so easily and smoothly; a gracious thing that could only be undone ungraciously. He wobbled upright on his wretched legs, hardly at all discomfited, the benefactor rather than the benefacted, seeking the words appropriate to one man of the world when addressing another.
“We must get together again, Mr. Corley. Two fellers like us, heh? And, uh, let me repeat that we are most happy to number Samuel among our students. We shall, uh, hope that he shall be back with us again next year.”
