Pin (3 page)

People called me “baby-faced.” My hair was such a light brown it could almost be called blonde, which I thought was a genetic mistake. But my father, or rather, Pin, explained it was by no means a “mistake.” “Your grandfather on your mother's side was very light haired and had the same kind of milky white skin with tiny freckles in his cheeks and along the sides of his nose. In fact you have your mother's nose and a somewhat soft, feminine mouth.”

“Feminine?” I didn't like the way he said that. I was broad shouldered and two inches taller than Ursula. When I was a teenager, I was accused of having a “Van Johnson look,” so I didn't really take to this “feminine mouth” thing. I suppose I got too defensive because I said, “Well, you know, you don't have much of a masculine face. Your nose is too straight and too pretty. Your ears are too perfect. And your penis is too small.” I thought that would hurt him.

“Penis size has nothing to do with sexual potency,” he said. Smugly, of course. I told Ursula what he said and she said size doesn't even have anything to do with sexual gratification. She said she told her girl friends that, but most of them refused to believe it.

The three of us lived here in my parents' old house about a quarter of a mile up Hassens Hill in Woodridge, New York. Woodridge is a small village in the Catskills, a little to the left of center of the heart of the Borscht Belt. I like to get anatomical when I describe where it's located. Everyone's always using that expression—“The heart of the Borscht Belt.” I suppose they mean center. I don't know where they get that idea from. It's certainly not true geographically.

I have lived here all my life and I had borscht only once. I wasn't crazy about it. Ursula likes it, but doesn't like what it does to her. She says it repeats; so she doesn't eat it. Pin says he could take it or leave it. My father felt the same way about it and my mother didn't like the way it could stain her tablecloths.

The house is a two-story building with an attached garage. The garage was added on years after the house was built. On the bottom level, once you come in, we have our rather large living room with an adjoining dining room. To the left of the dining room is the kitchen. On the right side of the kitchen is a door that leads out to the pantry and from there out to our backyard, a small clearing surrounded by a heavily wooded area with a pond behind it. Ursula and I have walked out to it many times. We have a bathroom downstairs, right off the living room. To the left of the living room is a small bedroom situated behind the garage. This is Pin's room.

Upstairs we have three bedrooms and a bathroom. Ursula's bedroom and my bedroom have an adjoining door. We left our parents' room just the way it was the day they died. We didn't give any of
their clothes away or upset any furniture arrangements. We don't go in there much, and the door is always closed. Our bedrooms have windows that open to the road outside. My room is toward the high side of the hill and Ursula's is toward the low side.

The house has faded white wood shingles with black aluminum shutters. We had the shutters put on recently. We haven't made many improvements on the house; neither of us really takes much interest in what it looks like. Ursula says as long as the heating works and the plumbing works, why worry about it? Pin rarely goes outside, so he couldn't care less about its appearance. People are always coming around or calling up to try to sell us some kind of home improvements. They all know we have money. My father was a very successful doctor here. Practically everyone went to him. His and my mother's funeral was a mob scene.

Once in a while I fooled around with my father's stethoscope and other paraphernalia. I'd take Pin's blood pressure and listen to his heartbeat and he'd do the same to me. When we were kids, Ursula and I always used to listen to each other's heartbeat. We still do sometimes, just for gags. The other night, I remember, we all had a little too much to drink and I took out the old stethoscope, putting it in my ears and walking around the place the way my father used to walk around. Then Ursula took off her blouse and called me over to listen to her heart. It was beating rapidly. I stuck the thing down into her bra and tickled the nipple on her breast. She laughed and screeched. Pin almost fell out of his seat in hysterics. Then she wanted Pin to listen to her
heartbeat. She nearly ripped the earlobes off me, pulling the damn thing away from me, and sauntered over to him. She shoved her breasts in his face and stuck the stethoscope into his ears. It kept falling out. Finally, she had to hold it to his head. He looked at me as if to say, “We've got to humor her when she gets like this.” I turned away.

After Ursula drank too much and got silly, she would always get maudlin and cry. I'd have to take her upstairs and help her get undressed and into bed. She would really get helplessly infantile at these times. I guess it all had to do with our losing our parents the way we did. At least, that's the way Pin explained it away. He was very learned and well read on the subject of psychology, and usually pedantic about his knowledge, I might add. I suppose he was right. Whatever the reason, Ursula needed the tenderness and affection. She wouldn't want to wear nightclothes. Naked, she slipped into the bed, sobbing softly and pressing my fingers against her lips. I would sit on the bed and stroke her hair. Sometimes she fell asleep quickly, and sometimes she talked. Usually her conversations centered around the Need and how she reacted to it. It was very intimate talk, but she had no one besides me to confide in.

The Need was one thing my father discussed with us. He had very liberal ideas about sex and he was always very factual and clinical about it. There wasn't a question he wouldn't answer if we had the nerve to ask it, and he loved to make fun of the words and expressions some parents thought up to avoid telling it like it is. One day he sat Ursula and me down in the living room and went through the
whole sexual process. I was two years older than she, of course, but, remarkably, our bodies were coming into maturity at the same time. He used the word “remarkable.” He explained sex to us in terms of a biological need. He said that just as people get thirsty for water, they get thirsty for sex. For a long time the sex thirst is very great, and then it gets less and less intense. It's better to know all about it, he said, so you can go about satisfying the Need without hurting yourselves. Ursula sort of got the idea that getting pregnant was hurting herself. Of course, my father tried to correct that misconception later by explaining that pregnancy wasn't physically damaging. He never bothered with the moral or social aspects. In a rare criticism of my father, Pin said he should have bothered.

I'll never forget how my father pronounced the word, “vagina.” He said, “vorgina,” and looked very intense when he said it. Although his description of an orgasm was very scientific, there was still something mysterious and erotic about it. I'm sure he left us with an impression opposite to his intent. Although we didn't come right out and tell it to each other, we were both dying to experiment with our bodies. I like to think that was normal.

Very soon afterward, Ursula found a book in my father's library that went into it all in very great detail. It was an old book, however, and many of the concepts and theories are outdated today. The thesis of one of the sections was that masturbation is very bad for you. It described all sorts of possible horrible effects, including a drying up of the sexual organs. I think the initial reading and studying of that book definitely had a bad lifelong effect on us. We often
experienced guilt feelings along with any sexual acts. I wanted to discuss the things we read with my father, but it was always very difficult, if not impossible, for either Ursula or me to initiate an intimate conversation with him. He would talk when approached, but he was so aloof and objective that it left us with a cold feeling. Mother would write that off by saying, “It's just the doctor's way.”

For the most part, Ursula had the Need more than I did, and that's leaving out the times she went into Pin's room to satisfy the Need with him. At first she wouldn't admit to it, but I knew that was why she went in.

“Your father should have read more Freud,” Pin told me. “Then maybe he wouldn't have been so matter of fact about sex. He didn't have the proper respect for sex.” I nodded because I had just finished reading some Freud myself.

“I know. There was nothing romantic about my father.”

“I don't mean the romantic end of it. I mean the psychological end of it,” he said in a very pedantic tone of voice. When Pin was serious, he would tolerate no frivolity.

“I suppose you're right,” I said. I was always supposing Pin was right.

As time went by, I noted that it took more and more to satisfy Ursula's Need. There were times when I was tempted to say something about it to my father, but I just couldn't get myself to betray Ursula that way. I knew she would interpret it as a betrayal. We had so many secrets from our parents. For me to go and discuss her sex life with my father, I would have had to breach an unwritten agreement between us. I worried about her, though. I saw the way she
looked at boys in school and I knew how they thought of her.

Once I found our telephone number on the wall in the boys' room. There was a little note under it that said, “If you want an easy screw, Ursula will do.” It enraged me and I tried to scrub it off. Finally I had to literally chip the wall away. I brought it to her attention early one evening, but she didn't seem to realize the full import of what was happening.

“Why do you think the boys picked your name out to write on the wall?”

“I don't know. What's the difference? What harm does it do?”

“What harm does it do? WHAT HARM DOES IT DO?” I was beside myself. I felt my face flush. “Jesus, how can you be so damn indifferent!”

I turned and looked at her. She sat there looking down at her hands in her lap. Then, when she realized I wasn't talking, she looked up and smiled stupidly at me.

“Do you want every creep in the school calling you for a date?”

“Oh, nobody will call.”

“What makes you so sure, Ursula?” She looked down. “What makes you so sure?”

“I'm sure,” she said and she left. I was so mad all I could do was lie down on my bed and stare at the wall. Later she came in and sat next to me. She touched my shoulder, but I didn't turn toward her.

“I guess I can't hide my feelings,” she said. “I guess boys see it on my face.”

“Well, you better do something about it,” I said, “or you'll be unhappy.”

“You'll still love me, won't you, Leon? Won't you?”

“I don't know,” I said. She was silent for a while. Then I felt her hand on my cheek. I turned and looked up at her. She smiled and, of course, I couldn't stay angry at her much longer. “At least make an effort, will you, Ursula?”

“I'll try,” she said. “I'll really try.”

AS
LONG AS
I
CAN REMEMBER,
P
IN HAS ALWAYS BEEN
with us. He was in my father's office before I was born. As far as I know, my father's voice would come out of himself and out of Pin. People at dinners or at parties would try to get my father to do voice throwing, but he wouldn't. He wouldn't do it anywhere but in the office. When Ursula and I were very small children, we would sit on the floor in the office and listen as my father and Pin carried on conversations about different patients, reviewing diagnosis, treatment and prognosis. Occasionally my father would say something like, “Oh, you don't concur,” and then he'd do some more research and discuss the research. Right from the beginning, I had the sense that whenever he was trying to convince
Pin of something, he was really trying to convince himself.

As a child I remember staring at Pin's face while my father and he talked. Pin was absolutely inscrutable, except for the smallest gleam in his eyes. Of course, Pin was naked in the office. Being it was a doctor's office, that was all right. When he came to our house later on, we dressed him in my father's clothes. They were practically the same size. But naked, he was certainly fascinating to look at.