A Stranger in the Mirror (2 page)

"It was at that moment," Dessard would tell the spellbound patrons at his bistro, "that I knew something terrible was about to happen."

BOOK ONE In 1919, Detroit, Michigan, was the single most successful industrial city in the world. World War I had ended, and Detroit had played a significant part in the Allies' victory, supplying them with tanks and trucks and aeroplanes. Now, with the threat of the Hun over, the automobile plants once again turned their energies to retooling for motorcars. Soon, four thousand automobiles a day were being manufactured, assembled and shipped. Skilled and unskilled labor came from all parts of the world to seek jobs in the automotive industry. Italians, Irish, Germans -- they came in a flood tide. Among the new arrivals wete Paul Templarhaus and his I- bride, Frieda. Paul had been a butcher's apprentice in Munich. With the dowry he received when he married Frieda, he emigrated to New York and opened a butcher shop, which quickly showed a deficit. He then moved to St. Louis, Boston and, finally, Detroit, failing spectacularly in each city. In an era when business was booming and an increasing affluence meant a growing demand for meat, Paul Templarhaus managed to lose money everywhere he opened a shop. He was a good butcher but a hopelessly incompetent businessman. In truth he was more interested in writing poetry than in making money. He would spend hours dreaming up rhymes and poetic images. He would set them down on paper and mail them off to newspapers and magazines, but they never bought any of his masterpieces. To Paul, money was unimportant. He extended credit to everyone, and the word quickly spread: if

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you had no money and wanted the finest of meats, go to Paul Templarhaus. Paul's wife, Frieda, was a plain-looking girl who had had no experience with men before Paul had come along and proposed to her--or, rather, as was proper--to her father. Frieda had pleaded with her father to accept Paul's suit, but the old man had needed no urging, for he had been desperately afraid he was going to be stuck with Frieda the rest of his life. He had even increased the dowry so that Frieda and her husband would be able to leave Germany and go to the New World. Frieda had fallen shyly in love with her husband at first sight. She had never seen a poet before. Paul was thin and intellectual-looking, with pale myopic eyes and receding hair, and it was months before Frieda could believe that this handsome young man truly belonged to her. She had no illusions about her own looks. Her figure was lumpy, the shape of an oversized, uncooked potato kugel. Her best feature was her vivid blue eyes, the color of gentians, but the rest af her face seemed to belong to other people. Her nose was her grandfather's, large and bulbous, her forehead was an uncle's, high and sloping, and her chin was her father's, square and grim. Somewhere inside Frieda was a beautiful young girl, trapped with a face and body that God had given her as some kind of cosmic joke. But people could see only the formidable exterior. Except for Paul. Her Paul. It was just as well that Frieda never knew that her attraction lay in her dowry, which Paul saw as an escape from the bloody sides Of beef and hog brains. Paul's dream had been to go into* business for himself and make enough money so that he could devote himself to his beloved poetry. Frieda and Paul went to an inn outside Salzburg for their honeymoon, a beautiful old castle on a lovely lake, surrounded by meadows and woods. Frieda had gone over the honeymoonnight scene a hundred times in her mind. Paul would lock the door and take her into his arms and murmur sweet endearments as he began to undress her. His lips would find hers and then slowly move down her naked body, the way they did it in all the little green books she had secretly read. His organ

18 would be hard and erect and proud, like a German banner, and Paul would carry her to the bed (perhaps it would be safer if he walked her to it) and tenderly lay her down. Mem Gott, Frieda, he would say. I love your body. You are not like those skinny little girls. You have the body of a woman. The actuality came as a shock. It was true that when they reached their room, Paul locked the door. After that, the reality was a stranger to the dream. As Frieda-watched, Paul quickly stripped off his shirt, revealing a high, thin, hairless chest. Then he pulled down his pants. Between his legs lay a limp, tiny penis, hidden by a foreskin. It did not resemble in any way the exciting pictures Frieda had seen. Paul stretched out on the bed, waiting for her, and Frieda realized that he expected her to undress herself. Slowly, she began to take off her clothes. Well, size is not everything, Frieda thought. Paul will be a wonderful lover. Moments later, the trembling bride joined her groom on the marital bed. While she was waiting for him to say something romantic, Paul rolled over on top of her, made a few thrusts inside her, and rolled off again. For the stunned bride, it was finished before it began. As for Paul, his few previous sexual experiences had been with the whores of Munich, and he was reaching for his wallet when he remembered that he no longer had to pay for it. From now on it was free. Long after Paul had fallen asleep, Frieda lay in bed, trying not to think about her disappointment. Sex is not every she told herself. My Paul will make a wonderful husband. As it turned out, she was wrong again.

It was shortly after the honeymoon that Frieda began to see Paul in a more realistic light. Frieda had been reared in the German tradition of a Hausfrau, and so she obeyed her husband without question, but she was far from stupid. Paul had no interest in life except his poems, and Frieda began to realize that they were very bad. She could not help but observe that Paul left a great deal to be desired in almost every area she could think of. Where Paul was indecisive, Frieda was firm, where Paul was stupid about business, Frieda was

19 clever. In the beginning, she had sat by, silently suffering, while the head of the family threw away her handsome dowry by his softhearted idiocies. By the time they moved to Detroit, Frieda could stand it no longer. She marched into her husband's butcher shop one day and took over the cash register. The first thing she did was to put up a sign: No credit. Her husband was appalled, but that was only the beginning. Frieda raised the prices of meat and began advertising, showering the neighbourhood with pamphlets, and the business expanded overnight. From that moment on, it was Frieda who made all the important decisions, and Paul who followed them. Frieda's disappointment had turned her into a tyrant. She found that she had a talent for running things and people, and she was inflexible. It was Frieda who decided how their money was to be invested, where they would live, where they would vacation, and when it was time to have a baby. She announced her decision to Paul one evening and put him to work on the project until the poor man almost suffered a nervous breakdown. He was afraid too much sex would undermine his health, but Frieda was a woman of great determination. "Put it in me," she would command. "How can I?" Paul protested. "It is not interested." Frieda would take his shriveled little penis and pull back the foreskin, and when nothing happened, she would take it in her mouth -- "Mein Gott, Frieda! What are you doingy -- until it got hard in spite of him, and she would insert it between her legs until Paul's sperm was inside her. Three months after they began, Frieda told her husband that he could take a rest. She was pregnant. Paul wanted a girl and Frieda wanted a boy, so it was no surprise to any of their friends that the baby was a boy. The baby, at Frieda's insistence, was delivered at home by a midwife. Everything went smoothly up to and throughout the actual delivery. It was then that those who were gathered around the bed got a shock. The newborn infant was normal in every way, except for its penis. The baby's orgjan was enormous, dangling like a swollen, outsized appendage between the baby's innocent thighs.

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His father's not built like that, Frieda thought with fierce pride.

She named him Tobias, after an alderman who lived in their precinct. Paul told Frieda that he would take over the training of the boy. After all, it was the father's place to bring up his son. Frieda listened and smiled, and seldom let Paul go near the child. It was Frieda who brought the boy up. She ruled him with a Teutonic fist, and she did not bother with the velvet glove. At five, Toby was a thin, spindly-legged child, with a wistful face and the bright, gentian-blue eyes of his mother. Toby adored his mother and hungered for her approval. He wanted her to pick him up and hold him on her big, soft lap so that he could press his head deep into her bosom. But Frieda had no time for such things. She was busy making a living for her family. She loved little Toby, and she was determined that he would not grow up to be a weakling like his father. Frieda demanded perfection in everything Toby did. When he began school, she would supervise his homework, and if he was puzzled by some assignment, his mother would admonish him, "Come on, boy -- roll up your sleeves!" And she would stand over him until he had solved the problem. The sterner Frieda was with Toby, the more he loved her. He trembled at the thought of displeasing her. Her punishment was swift and her praise was slow, but she felt that it was for Toby's own good. From the first moment her son had been placed in her arms, Frieda had known that one day he was going to become a famous and important man. She did not know how or when, but she knew it would happen. It was as though God had whispered it into her ear. Before her son was even old enough to understand what she was saying, Frieda would tell him of his greatness to come, and she never stopped telling him. And so, young Toby grew up knowing that he was going to be famous, but having no idea how or why. He only knew that his mother was never wrong.

Some of Toby's happiest moments occurred when he sat in the enormous kitchen doing his homework while his mother

21 stood at the large old-fashioned stove and cooked. She would make heavenly smelling, thick black bean soup with whole frankfurters floating in it, and platters of succulent bratwurst, and potato pancakes with fluffy edges of brown lace. Or she would stand at the large chopping block in the middle of the kitchen, kneading dough with her thick, strong hands, then sprinkling a light snowflake of flour over it, magically transforming the dough into a mouth-watering Pflaumenkuchen or Apfelkuchen. Toby would go to her and throw his arms around her large body, his face reaching only up to her waist. The exciting female smell of her would become a part of all the exciting kitchen smells, and an unbidden sexuality would stir within him. At those moments Toby would gladly have died for her. For the rest of his life, the smell of fresh apples cooking in butter brought back an instant, vivid image of his mother.

One afternoon, when Toby was twelve years old, Mrs. Durkin, the neighbourhood gossip, came to visit them. Mr. Durkin was a bony-faced woman with black, darting eyes and a tongue that was never still. When she departed, Toby did an imitation of her that had his mother roaring with laughter. It seemed to Toby that it was the first time he had ever heard her laugh. From that moment on, Toby looked for ways to entertain her. He would do devastating imitations of customers who came into the butcher shop and of teachers and schoolmates, and his mother would go into gales of laughter. Toby had finally discovered a way to win his mother's approval. He tried out for a school play. No Account David, and was given the lead. On opening night, his mother sat in the front row and applauded her son's success. It was at that moment that Frieda knew how God's promise was going to come true. It was the early 1930s, the beginning of the Depression, and movie theaters all over the country were trying every conceivable stratagem to ml their empty seats. They gave away dishes and radios, and had keno nights and bingo nights, and

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hired organists to accompany the boundng ball while the audience sang along. And they held amateur contests. Frieda would carefully check the theatrical section of the newspaper to see where contests were taking place. Then she would take Toby there and sit in the audience while he did his imitations of Al Jolson and James Cagney and Eddie Cantor and yell out, "Mein Himmel! What a talented boy!" Toby nearly always won first prize. He had grown taller, but he was still thin, an earnest child with guileless, bright blue eyes set in the face of a cherub. One looked at him and instantly thought: innocence. When people saw Toby they wanted to put their arms around him and hug him and protect him from Life. They loved him and on stage they applauded him. For the first time Toby understood what he was destined to be; he was going to be a tar, for his mother first, and God second.

Toby's libido began to stir when he was fifteen. He would masturbate in the bathroom, the one place he was assured of privacy, but that was not enough. He decided he needed a girl. One evening, Clara Connors, the married sister of a classmate, drove Toby home from an errand he was doing for his mother. Clara was a pretty blonde with large breasts, and as Toby sat next to her, he began to get an erection. Nervously, he inched his hand across to her lap and began to fumble under her skirt, ready to withdraw instantly if she screamed. Clara was more amused than angry, but when Toby pulled out his penis and she saw the size of it, she invited him to her house the following afternoon and initiated Toby into the joys of sexual intercourse. It was a fantastic experience. Instead of a soapy hand, Toby had found a soft, warm receptacle that throbbed and grabbed at his penis. Clara's moans and screams made him grow hard again and again, so that he had orgasm after orgasm without ever leaving the warm, wet nest. The size of his penis had always been a-source of secret shame to Toby. Now it had suddenly become his glory. Clara could not keep this phenomenon to herself, and soon Toby found himself servicing half a dozen married women in the neighborhood.

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During the next two years, Toby managed to deflower nearly half the girls in his class. Some of Toby's classmates were football heroes, or better looking than he, or rich -- but where they failed, Toby succeeded. He was the funniest, cutest thing the girls had ever seen, and it was impossible to say no to that innocent face and those wistful blue eyes. In Toby's senior year in high school, when he was eighteen, he was summoned to the principal's office. In the room were Toby's mother, grim-faced, a sobbing sixteen-yearold Catholic girl named Eileen Henegan and her father, a uniformed police sergeant. The moment Toby entered the room, he knew he was in deep trouble. "I'll come right to the point, Toby," the principal said. "Eileen is pregnant. She says you're the father of her child. Have you had a physical relationship with her?" Toby's mouth suddenly went dry. All he could think of was how much Eileen had enjoyed it, how she had moaned and begged for more. And now this. "Answer him, you little son of a bitch!" Eileen's father bellowed. "Did you touch my daughter?" Toby sneaked a look at his mother. That she was here to witness his shame upset him more than anything else. He had let her down, disgraced her. She would be repelled by his behavior. Toby resolved that if he ever got out of this, if God would only help him this once and perform some kind of miracle, he would never touch another girl as long as he lived. He would go straight to a doctor and have himself castrated, so that he would never even think about sex again, and... "Toby..." His mother was speaking, her voice stem and cold. "Did you go to bed with this girl?" Toby swallowed, took a deep breath and mumbled, "Yes, Mother." "Then you will marry her." There was finality in her tone. She looked at the sobbing, puffy-eyed girl. "Is that what you want?" "Y-yes," Eileen cried. "I love Toby." She turned to Toby. "They made me tell. I didn't want to give them your name." Her father, the police sergeant, announced to the room at