(1961) The Chapman Report (27 page)

His gaze continued down the page. Pre-adolescent heterosexual play. Routine. Premarital petting confined to kissing and brief breast contact. Usual. Petting always halted early. And finally, now, premarital intercourse-never. Dull. Dull as dishwater.

Cass knew that the rest was predictable. Nevertheless, the Great White Father and the STC machine must be served. He looked up at the cane folding screen, with little interest in Mrs. Mary Ewing McManus behind it, and resumed in the tired voice that she mistook for scientific objectivity. “Next, we have a series of questions on marital coitus-in short, the sex history of your marriage. What is the frequency of your love-making at the present time?”

“Well …”

“I know it varies. But can you strike an average per week or

month?”

“My husband and I make love on the average of three times a week,” said Mary clearly and proudly.

Cass detected the pride. Sardonically amused, he moved his pencil across the page. Children of this class, perhaps the young in general, were always proud of their frequency ratio, their vigor, their tireless acrobatics, as if they had discovered sex and planted a flag upon it and owned it exclusively. In twenty years, it would be once a week, if that, and she would wonder why her husband always had to work late nights, and she would take to heavier make-up and thinner dresses and a querulous note and wish that her husband’s new young business partner would be more attentive to her.

“Do you engage in petting before intercourse?” asked Cass.

“Oh, yes.”

“Can you describe what you do?”

“I … I don’t know-I mean, it’s hard to explain.”

Nevertheless, hesitantly, but with Cass’s encouragement, she described the preliminaries of love. Left breathless at the daring discussion of it, she was relieved that further necessity for exposition was done.

But no sooner had Mary relaxed than she was intimidated by a new series of queries on the act of marital love itself.

“I don’t know exactly,” she found herself saying. “A couple of times we timed it, just for fun.”

“Well, how long did it take?”

“Once, three or four minutes, and then five minutes-about five minutes-and, the other time, the last I looked, it was almost ten minutes, but then I forgot to look again-maybe it was eleven or twelve minutes.”

“Can you guess at an average?”

“Five minutes.”

Steadily, Cass translated to symbols the mingled shy and boastful details of young love.

Often, in his mind, he mocked the naivete of her worldliness, and several times he suffered the emotion of grudging envy.

“During the act of love, does it arouse you to watch your husband?” he asked.

“I don’t watch.”

“But when you do?”

“It makes me happy, yes.”

Automatically, Cass recorded the replies, glancing down the remainder of the page and estimating that it would be fifteen minutes more and that they would be done at three-forty-five. He wondered if he could hurry it. He had the pressure and throb over his right temple, the usual prelude to migraine, and he wanted to lie down for ten minutes before the next interview at four o’clock. Well, what was left? The series of questions on extramarital experiences. Then the short second category on psychological attitudes. And, finally, the third category on reactions to sex stimuli. He was tempted to omit most of what remained. He could accurately forecast her answers. Several times recently he had been so tempted. But again, as before, remembering Dr. Chapman’s persistent warnings that all standard questions be read fully, he repressed the notion. Instead, for variety, he decided to skip to the third category and return to the rest later.

He found the place on the page.

“Do you see the maroon box at your feet?”

“Yes.”

“Open it. Take out the first photograph on top. Study it for a moment.”

He heard her fumble with the lid, then remove the photograph. He heard her strained silence.

“What do you see? I want to be sure you have the right one.”

“It’s a … a picture of a classical statue-Greek, I suppose.”

“A nude adult male and rather handsome,” added Cass. “Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“The Hermes of Praxiteles. Now to the question. Does observation of the nude male in that photograph arouse you at all?” Inevitably, the statistical summary to date came to mind. “Four per cent are strongly aroused, eleven per cent only somewhat, and eighty-five per cent not at all.” Her answer would be no.

“No,” said Mary through the screen.

But Cass had already marked the answer before hearing it, and, stifling a yawn with the back of his hand, wishing he were free to take something for his head, he moved the pencil point down to the next question.

When Mary McManus arrived at the parking lot, hardly aware of walking the block from the Association building, she found the new Nash Rambler that was her father’s anniversary gift and settled herself behind the wheel. She made no effort to turn the ignition key. She sat, holding the wheel with both hands, trying to sort out her emotions.

As in her attendance of Dr. Chapman’s lecture, which had disappointed, she had expected something practical and useful for herself from the interview, and now realized that again she was disappointed. The past hour and five minutes had been far different from what she had anticipated. Her two years of marriage to Norman, in every respect normal if one believed those marriage manuals, had convinced her that she was sexually sophisticated. But now she saw that her father had been right (as ever). The interview, with questions bold, intimidating, and generally startling, had been an unexpected ordeal.

Yet, reviewing it, she could not find a single inquiry that had been either improper or salacious. Nor had she been interrogated about a single matter that she had not, at some time, personally experienced or heard about or read about. Until this afternoon, the act of love had been the most natural thing on earth. But the persistent and detailed questions about every aspect of it-foreplay, position, those proddings about the climax-behavior she had never before dwelt upon-seemed to inflate the natural act beyond previous proportions.

Now, thinking it through, beyond the spinning bewilderment, she began to see that her sexual life with Norman-how much she adored him! how special he was!-was not merely one more gift of growing up, one more activity appended to the threesome that had so long been father, mother, daughter, the Ewing family. Rather, it was an act of serious importance that stood alone and concerned only the husband and wife, the McManus family. It seemed to be the one pleasure that was peculiarly her own, that could not be superimposed upon her previous existence. For the first time, she understood that the intimacy she shared and enjoyed with Norman, suddenly so complicated and unique, had no relationship to the old family or the old way but was part of a new family and a new way that cleaved her sharply from the recent past.

Until this moment, nothing else had been entirely her own. The steering wheel beneath her hands, the miniature sedan that coolly enclosed her, were cords binding her to the safe, dependent, ancient life, as did her features, her blood, her memories. When Norman had wanted to purchase the used Buick on payments, her father had ridiculed the idea and generously surprised them with the new Nash. Her father had given Norman a ready-made career, future unlimited, and saved him and both of them the inevitable struggle that would have resulted had Norman plunged headlong into that romantic partnership with Chris Shearer. And the whole mature concept of remaining unburdened by children, until they were older, saner, more secure, had been the fruits of her father’s wisdom. Yes, everything, it seemed, was tied to what she had been, was still part of, except the answers she had given to questions in that room of the Association building.

She reached for the dashboard and turned the key. The motor caught at once and hummed quietly. Even before the interview she had planned to visit her father afterward. She had felt guilty and unhappy in siding with Norman against him, in rebelling against his proved judgment by submitting to the interview. She had felt that the least she could do would be to heal the hurt. After the interview, she had told herself earlier, she would casually drop in on him at the plant, as she had so often before, and then father and daughter would chat of many things, in the old familiar way, not mentioning the interview but both tacitly understanding that she owed something to Norman’s authority although still (as evident) her father’s daughter.

But when she wheeled the small sedan out of the lot and drove down Romola Place to Sunset Boulevard, she knew that part of her plan, the most essential part, had been changed.

Inexplicably, her need was for Norman this moment, not for her father. She must find Norman, her poor darling, and go into his arms, and tell him how much she loved him.

She steered off the Sunset ramp onto the freeway, proceeding in the slow lane, behind trucks, until the freeway merged with Sepulveda. Riding south, past the International Airport, she presently made out the towering sign in the distance that read Ewing Manufacturing Company. After parking in the executive section, she hastened, in long strides, toward the imposing entrance and left behind the sticky outer air for the chilled interior of the plant’s main corridor.

She was hurrying up the corridor toward Norman’s office, in the wing behind her father’s suite, when she saw Miss Damerel emerge from the ladies’ room. Miss Damerel, whose hair was iron gray and severely shingled, whose suits were iron gray and sharply cut, was Harry Ewing’s private secretary and had been such for more than twenty years.

“Why, Mary,” Miss Damerel called out, “it’s so nice you could drop by. Your father will be pleased to see you.”

For a split second, Mary’s step faltered, the stimulus of an elder’s voice imposing upon her Pavlov’s conditioned reflex, and then, with an effort of will greater than she realized that she possessed, she nodded and blindly hurried on. She knew that Miss Damerel was watching her, surprised and disapproving. She also knew that Miss Damerel would tell her father. But today Mary McManus did not care. She did not care at all.

At night, Villa Neapolis was illuminated by rows of blue and yellow lights shining from the roofs of the terraces on two levels, and by four hooded white floodlights projected from steel poles at the corners of the swimming pool. Seen at a distance, because the motel was on a hill against an arch of blue-black sky, the dots of colored light appeared to be a galaxy of artificial stars in a man-made firmament. But up near, from the vantage point of the pool, the effect was quite different. It was like setting up housekeeping under a mammoth Christmas tree, Paul Radford decided, as he came out of the shadowed dining room into the blaze of rainbow colors.

He had been preceded into the patio by Benita Selby, who had changed for dinner and was wearing a lilac Orion sweater, new, over a sleeveless pale blue dress, old, and he was followed by Dr. Chapman, lighting his cigar, and Horace and Cass.

By mutual agreement, they had dined late, meeting at eight-thirty and eating at two tables joined together and lighted by four candles. The first day of interviewing had been, as it usually was in every new community, completely enervating, and this, combined with a constant sensibility of Dr. Chapman’s dictum that the day’s interviews not be gossiped about in his presence, reduced sociability to sporadic small talk and prolonged gaps of silence.

Once they were in the patio again, Cass wondered aloud if the two rented automobiles were spoken for. Benita said that she had to catch up on her journal and then write a letter. This same letter she wrote five nights a week to her invalid mother in Beloit, Wisconsin. Horace thought that he might want one of the cars. There was a movie in Westwood that he wished to see. Dr. Chapman told Cass that he could have the other car, since he and Paul were going to finish some work.

After Horace and Cass had gone off to the garages, and Benita had returned to her room, Dr. Chapman led Paul to a pair of wicker chairs near the hibiscus bushes at the far end of the pool. The patio was relatively quiet now, except for the two couples playing a vocal game of gin rummy behind the diving board. But now they were far enough away so that the card players’ groans and hilarity were indistinct.

Dr. Chapman loosened his leather belt, rolling his. cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other, and Paul filled his briar pipe and lighted it.

“Well, I’ve been waiting to hear about you and Victor Jonas,” said Dr. Chapman. “All I got from you this morning was that there wasn’t much hope.” He searched Paul’s face. “Does that mean some hope or no hope?”

“No hope,” said Paul flatly and unmistakably.

Dr. Chapman grunted. “I see,” he said. He stared down at the flagstone, thinking. At last, he said, “Tell me what happened.”

Paul told him the events of the previous evening concisely and bluntly. He described Dr. Jonas, his wife, his sons, his house. He repeated parts of the early conversation in the rear bungalow, the parts where Dr. Jonas had deduced that Paul had been sent to do Dr. Chapman’s “dirty work,” and where Paul had defended Dr. Chapman’s honesty, omitting only Dr. Jonas’ remark that he was glad Paul had come alone. Then Paul related how he had been taken fully off guard by Dr. Jonas’ knowledge of the work in progress.

Dr. Chapman’s head lifted up and his eyes narrowed. “How can he know what we’re doing?”

“That’s exactly what I asked him. He said you were filing carbons of your female findings with the Zollman Foundation-“

Paul halted, and waited for an explanation. Dr. Chapman met his gaze frankly. “Yes, that’s true. They’re meeting before our report will be ready, and I decided it would be in our favor to keep them up to scratch.”

“But the work’s not ready-it’s raw.”

“They’re not children. There are scientists in the Foundation. They know how to read and project unfinished data. I’m sure it’ll serve us.”

“Then it’s serving Jonas, too. The minority group at Zollman who hired him-they sent him photostats-“