(1961) The Chapman Report (58 page)

She thought, Old earth, I love you, love you.

When she returned to the bed, he was waiting. She went into his arms, joyful for their all-pervading intimacy.

She wanted to tell him about this, and against his chest she spoke, and he kissed her sweetly, and then he spoke. They talked bit by bit like this, softly, surely, occasionally, of what had been and what would be and what they were, and, after a while, they slept again… .

JUNE had given way to July, and summer to autumn, and with the coming of Christmas, the days in The Briars were short and the nights festive. Winter brought its intermittent rains and winds, and soon it was spring. Now the first yellow warbler came to The Briars, and then the busy finches and the needle-billed hummingbirds beating their wings over cups of gold on the vine, and the Monterey pines wore their green hoods more brightly and the magnolia trees opened their puffs of white, and the dusty gray sightseeing buses appeared in great number again, and in this new and burgeoning springtime, Kathleen Radford gave the bon voyage luncheon for Teresa Hamish. Dr. Jonas had the car pool this mild morning, and Kathleen

waited at home until he had picked Paul up for the short ride to the clinic before she changed into her best maternity dress. Later, at noon, in the auditorium of the Association, she personally greeted with a smile each of the arriving forty guests. Grace Waterton displayed a post card from Naomi Van Duesen in Michigan. Naomi was leaving the sanitarium soon, to move into the bungalow at Reardon that Horace had bought. Ursula Palmer excitedly announced the opening of her husband’s third branch firm, and proudly passed around a brochure that she had written. Mary McManus, seeming older than when she lived in The Briars, appeared with photographs of her infant son, and was grateful to one and all that they had not forgotten her, though she now had a house in the valley. Bertha Kalish had put on weight, and spoke of Sam Goldsmith’s children as if they were her own, and when someone asked when there would be a wedding, she blushed deeply.

Once assembled, the women, most of them anyway, began eagerly to discuss the recently published book, A Sex History of the American Married Female.

Dr. Chapman’s six-hundred-page report had been made public five weeks before, and within two weeks it had replaced James Scoville’s A Man Called Boy at the top of the nation’s nonfiction bestseller lists. On this spring day, coast to coast, Dr. Chapman’s volume led the nonfiction lists of the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, Time magazine, Publisher’s Weekly, and Retail Bookseller. In five weeks, it had sold 170,000 copies, and the bookshop in The Village Green had placed its third reorder. Dr. Chapman’s photograph was everywhere, and this morning a Broadway columnist had printed the rumor that Dr. Chapman was forsaking Reardon College for an academy of his own to be financed by the Zollman Foundation, and the Zollman board members had said that they had no comment but that an announcement relative to Dr. Chapman would be shortly forthcoming.

In the small group of women clustered about Teresa Harnish, all listened sympathetically to Ursula Palmer’s complaint about Dr. Chapman. Ursula had just finished reading Dr. Chapman’s book, and she was objecting now to the graph that reported specifically on twenty-seven high-income suburban communities, each listed by name, and The Briars among them.

“You’ll find it in the appendix,” Ursula was saying. “He states baldly that in communities like this, and he means ours, too, over twenty-nine per cent of the married women up to thirty-two years

old are having, or have had, extramarital relationships, and thirty-eight per cent-mind you, thirty-eight per cent-have committed infidelity by the age of forty-five. Now, what do you think of that?”

“I’ll tell you what I think,” said Teresa Harnish, “That dreadful book should be classified as fiction, not nonfiction, that’s what I think.”

And almost everyone in the group solemnly agreed.