(1961) The Chapman Report (8 page)

Paul nodded, and dutifully jotted a sentence in the margin of his paper, even though twice before in the last month he had been requested to record the very same notation. Doing so, he wondered if Dr. Chapman was as tired as he, and Horace, and Cass. It was unlike him to be forgetful and repetitious. Perhaps the fourteen months of almost uninterrupted traveling, interviewing, recording, proofing, were taking their toll.

Dr. Chapman was reading silently ahead. “Interesting,” he mused, “how close these East St. Louis figures are to the national average.”

“I think it’s obvious women are the same everywhere,” said Cass.

Horace turned to Cass. “How do you account for those lopsided percentages in Connecticut and Pennsylvania?”

“It wasn’t a regional divergence,” said Cass. “Those women chased more because their husbands were commuting-and they had too much money and nothing else to do. It was social and economic.”

“All right, boys,” said Dr. Chapman quickly, “let’s not start analyzing-“

“I saw the advance sheet on The Briars,” continued Cass. “With that income level, I’ll lay two to one that we are approaching the land of the round heels.”

Horace held up his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, okay, Mother Shipton.”

“I don’t like that kind of talk,” Dr. Chapman said firmly” to Cass. “We’re scientists, not schoolboys.” Cass bit his lip and was silent.

Dr. Chapman regarded him quietly a moment, and then relented slightly. “We’re all overtired. I know that. Exhaustion creates impatience, and impatience makes objectivity go out the window. We’ve got to watch it. We’re not to permit ourselves snap judgments and unproved generalities. We’re in pursuit of facts-facts and nothing more-and I want you to remember that for the next two weeks.”

Paul wondered how Cass was taking this. He glanced at him. Cass’s mouth was curled in a set smile that wasn’t a smile. “Sorry, teacher,” he said at last.

Dr. Chapman snorted and returned to the digits before him. “Where were we?”

Paul hastily answered. “Question. Do you feel any sexual desire at the sight of the male genitalia? Answer. Et cetera, et cetera.” “Do our figures jibe on that one?” asked Dr. Chapman. “Perfect with me,” said Paul. He looked at the other two. Both Horace and Cass nodded.

“Let’s go on,” said Dr. Chapman. His stubby finger found his place on the page before him. He read aloud. “Question. Does observation of the unclothed male in that photograph of a nudist camp arouse you? Answer. Ten per cent are strongly aroused, twenty-seven per cent only somewhat, and sixty-three per cent not at all.” He lifted his head toward Paul. “Correct?” “Correct,” said Paul. Horace straightened, pulling his shoulders back to work loose

his stiff muscles. “You know,” he said to Dr. Chapman, “that category keeps giving me more trouble than any other one. So often the answers are not clear cut.”

“What do you mean?” asked Dr. Chapman.

“Well, I can give you a dozen illustrations. Do you want me to go into one?”

“If it’s pertinent,” said Dr. Chapman.

“When we were in Chicago last month, I asked one sample if the art photographs or paintings of nude males I showed her aroused her. Well, this woman-she must have been about thirty-five-she said that nude art never affected her one way or the other, except one statue in the Art Institute-an ancient nude Greek. Whenever she looked at it, she said, she had to go home and have her husband.”

“I should think that would indicate sufficient reaction to stimuli,” said Dr. Chapman. “How did you record the answer?”

“Well, I wanted to be certain that some personal association didn’t make this statue an exceptional thing. I kept cross-checking, as we went along, with other questions. At last, I found out that when she was-sixteen, I think-she used to keep a magazine cut-out in a drawer, under her clothes, some male Olympic swimmer in abbreviated trunks. Whenever she took it out and looked at it, she would follow with masturbation. But besides that. and the statue, no other photograph or art work ever aroused her. It makes it difficult to obtain a decisive-“

“I would have classified her in the ‘strongly aroused’ group.”

“Yes, I did. But it’s often difficult-“

“Naturally,” said Dr. Chapman. “We’re dealing as much with grays as blacks and whites. Human emotions don’t seem to measure out mathematically’-but they can, with experience and intelligence applied by the interviewer.” He tugged at his right ear lobe thoughtfully. “We’re not infallible. The critic and layman want us to be, but we’re not. Some error has to creep in as long as women will distort because of defensive exaggeration, involuntary emotional blocks, or prudish deceit. However, Horace, I believe our system of repeated double-check questions, especially the psychological ones-those, as well as consideration of the subject’s entire attitude and response, are safeguards enough. In grave doubt, you still have recourse to the Double Poll. After all, in the Double Poll, we have the benefit of the forty years Dr. Julian Gleed devoted to analyzing married couples separately and setting up for us a statistical basis for discrepancy or percentage of probable error. His papers are a gold mine. Too often, we neglect them. Anyway, by now, Horace, I’m sure you know when an interview is utterly hopeless and must be discarded.”

“Certainly,” said Horace quickly.

“Then, that’s enough. Occasional indecision about recording a reply will not affect the whole.”

Paul observed that whenever any one of them questioned the method, as they had more frequently done in recent months than earlier, Dr. Chapman would make his reassuring little speech. Curiously, it was always effective. There was about Dr. Chapman an air, a quality, a Messianic authority that made what they were doing seem right and important. Paul supposed that Mohammed must have projected this in defending the Koran, and Joseph Smith in presenting the Book of Mormon. For all their trials and problems, Paul knew that his own faith in their mission, in Dr. Chapman’s method, stood unshaken. He knew that Horace felt that way, too; Cass, alone, was possibly the only potential apostate. Possibly. One could never be sure of the true feelings that pulsated in Cass’s complex nervous system.

Dr. Chapman had resumed the proofing. Paul focused his attention on the paper in his hand. Dr. Chapman’s head was low over the manuscript as he droned the questions, answers, percentages. Does observation of those three still photographs of romantic scenes from recent movies and legitimate plays excite you or fire your imagination? Yes, strongly, six per cent. Only somewhat, twenty-four per cent. Not at all, seventy per cent. Does examination of the male physical-culture magazine you have just been leafing through make you wish your husband was another type of man? Yes, definitely, fifteen per cent. In some ways, thirty-two per cent. Not at all, fifty-three per cent. For those of you who replied that you wished your husband was in some ways a different type, please define in what ways you would like him different? Taller, more athletic, forty-seven per cent. More intelligent and understanding, twenty-four per cent. Gentler, fifteen per cent. More authoritative or masculine, thirteen per cent. Does the sex scene you have just read from the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence, the scene among “the dense fir-trees,” erotically stimulate you in any way? Yes, strongly, thirty per cent. Only somewhat, twenty-one per cent. Not at all, forty-nine per cent.

Although his hand continued to move his pencil down the page,

Paul’s mind was inattentive, and it wandered. He stared at the top of Dr. Chapman’s head. Casually he wondered, as he had numerous times before, about Dr. Chapman’s personal sex life. Usually, he tried not to wonder. It was an act of lese-majeste. The-Queen-has-no-legs, he told himself, was the only proper note. But the nagging curiosity persisted. Paul knew, of course, that somewhere among the thousands of discarded questionnaires in the rented storage safes of the Father Marquette National Bank in the town of Reardon, there was one that revealed Dr. Chapman’s sex history. Who had questioned Dr. Chapman? Who, indeed. Who created God? Who analyzed Freud? In the beginning, there was the creator. God created God; Freud analyzed Freud; and Dr. Chapman had questioned himself.

The project had its testament and books of revelation, and even its Genesis. By now, Paul could recite it by heart. Six years ago, six years and two months to be exact, Dr. George G. Chapman had been a fifty-one-year-old professor of Primate Biology at Reardon College in southern Wisconsin. Except for a paper on the mating habits of the lemur and the marmoset, he was a scholastic nonentity. His income was a comfortable $11,440 a year. He roomed, off campus, with a younger sister who was in awe of him, with her husband, who engaged him in chess when not wearied by dentistry and golf, and with three young nephews, who regarded him as joint father.

Once, in dim memory, there had been a Mrs. Chapman. George G. Chapman had been a senior at Northwestern University when he had met her at a fraternity dance and married her. She had been the well-educated daughter of a prosperous publisher of technical books in Chicago. After the wedding, the couple had spent their brief honeymoon in Key West and Havana. (The only photograph that Paul had ever seen of her, the one reproduced so often in magazines, had been taken in Havana. The enlarged snapshot was encased behind glass in a brown leather frame on Dr. Chapman’s office desk. It revealed a tall girl in a shapeless, knee-‘length dress of the period. Her broad brow, high-boned cheeks, thin nose, and wide mouth gave the impression of one good-natured and amused. The camera had caught her squinting into the lens, because the hot and glaring Cuban sun was in her face. Across her long legs, in a faded spidery scrawl, she had written: “To the brains in the family. Love, Lucy.” The glass covering the picture, the last time Paul had seen it, was dusty.)

After four years of marriage-Dr. Chapman had obtained his first teaching assignment in Oregon, and then moved to North Carolina at higher salary-his wife had incredibly suffered a paralytic stroke. She lay in a semi-coma for six weeks, and then, one cool spring dawn, she died. Less than a year later, when Reardon College had offered him the chair of Primate Biology, Dr. Chapman moved back to the lovely Wisconsin lake country, scene of his childhood and school years. Several years after, through the bait of financial assistance, he induced his new brother-in-law to establish a dental practice in the town of Reardon, a mile from the school, and then he helped his brother-in-law and sister buy a house which lie made his home.

Until his nephews came, Dr. Chapman was lost to the world of books and considered somewhat antisocial and dull by faculty wives. There was a brief flurry of interest in him after his paper on the lemur and the marmoset, but when he remained vague and lumpy at parties, this interest subsided. But soon his growing nephews, whom he looked upon as his own children, gave him a link to reality and the community of the living. More frequently, he began to speak up on the trials of fatherhood and schooling, and became conversant with Dr. Spock, and even made gentle little jokes about finding future brides for the boys among the daughters of the faculty families. Gradually, a few families accepted him into their circle of friends and found him comfortable and undemanding. Finally, there occurred the event-often likened by the press to the day Franklin flew the kite and Newton saw the apple fall-when Dr. Chapman was catapulted from faculty old shoe to national celebrity with the status of foremost politician, baseball player, matinee idol, racketeer. And it was the eldest of his nephews, Jonathan, who was the catalytic agent in Dr. Chapman’s transformation.

Jonathan was in his thirteenth year, and about to enter high school, when one afternoon he overheard several men-about-the-neighborhood (he was barely their junior) discuss the act of love and procreation in a language that baffled him. He had heard similar talk before, but, being an unaggressive and childish child, he had ignored it. His interests were sports and hobby cards. But now, suddenly having discovered that the presence of the opposite sex was equally as pleasurable as soft ball, he was curious for a clearer understanding of the strange chemistry between male and female that seemed to evoke expressions of excitement among his contemporaries. Rarely shy with his mother, Jonathan came out with it and asked her to enlighten him. She sent him to his father. His father, busy trying to diagnose the best approach to an impacted wisdom tooth, and feeling that an authority on the biology of primates might manage the crucial explanation better, sent him to Dr. Chapman.

Not one to equivocate-for he looked upon sexual intercourse . as a phenomenon no more remarkable than any other motor activity-Dr. Chapman promptly undertook to explain the act of copulation in dry scientific terms. Fifteen minutes later, when he was done, Jonathan knew considerably more about monkeys and apes, but over human love there still remained the veil. He stammered his confusion to his uncle. Surprised, Dr. Chapman stared at his nephew, and, at last, he saw him as a boy. To Dr. Chapman’s credit, he sensed at once that he was incapable of communicating on this subject more simply. He realized that this was a matter that might best be handled by men who worked with words. Dr. Chapman advised Jonathan (dryly, it is to be hoped) to practice abstinence for a few days, to check his curiosity, and to withhold further inquiry, while an effort was made to locate several good books on the subject.

Impatiently, Jonathan waited. Impatiently, Dr. Chapman searched. Lucid books giving exposition on sexual union were few and far between. There were several how-to-do books, but they were dated and poorly done. There were academic studies and surveys, such as those by Davis, Hamilton, Dickinson, and Kinsey, but they were either limited, special,* and incomprehensible to the younger layman, unless popularly interpreted, or so broad and general in coverage as to be useless for any specific use. There were literary novels, but they were romantic, ill-informed, and too often erotic. And nowhere was there a single popular volume, designed for ordinary adolescents, that contained sound and thorough research into the actual sex life of under-aged human beings rather than mere speculation.