by Warren Adler
Her mind spun with possibilities. For a long time, she eschewed the idea of creating a fictional account. No one questioned the accuracy of her companions’ stories. Perhaps they had taken a core of truth and embellished it with a bit of blarney to give it more heft, more interest. Wasn’t it the story itself that mattered? Did it really matter whether it was true or not? Just as long as it held the interest of the others in the group.
Susan ran through a number of possible scenarios in her mind, rejecting each one in turn. She needed a big idea, something that resonated, something that would earn her instant respect, something so original and compelling it would earn her permanent credibility and once and for all foreclose on her own feelings of inferiority. After weeks of fretting, a story began to emerge in her mind. She remembered her husband George’s tales emanating from the Kennedy White House where he had been enlisted as a “walker,” an escort and dancing partner for the single ladies invited to White House dinners. The stories were filled with rumors that implicated Kennedy in numerous extramarital affairs. In time, the stories became lore and passed into history, their truth validated in numerous memoirs. It was these stories that triggered her big idea.
She had always had difficulty with not being able to tell a lie with a straight face. Everyone knew, as her husband George had told her many times, that with Susan, “What you get is what you see.” He had actually made such a comment as the centerpiece of any compliment he would give her and often share with others. Integrity. Honesty. Fidelity. Once she had reveled in such praise. Not anymore. It did not have the same currency that it had when she was a protected species living on what seemed another planet.
It took her weeks to perfect the story she had concocted to tell her luncheon companions. She knew it required a sense of performance and the absolute appearance of truth. Then suddenly, her moment came.
“I had just graduated from Georgetown and was recruited for the typing pool at the Kennedy White House. It was a lot different in those days, before computers, before security paranoia, before political correctness. Things were informal, easygoing. Jack Kennedy would often nod and wink at us as he passed through the corridors. We knew there were two girls in the typing pool, dubbed Fiddle and Faddle, who were invited to go swimming with Kennedy when Jackie was on the road. Everyone, including the Secret Service, was in on the ploy. We all knew. And Fiddle and Faddle were quite proud of their activity although they did not speak about it, not to us at any rate. Heck, it was a feather in their cap.”
She noted that the women around the table seemed more alert and concentrated than usual. She was on stage and she loved it.
“Yes, one day I was recruited. Faddle was home with the flu and Fiddle asked if I wouldn’t mind. Mind? Would any of you mind? I did have some experience and knew my way around the maypole.” She thought she would choke on that remark, which she had thought up the night before. “Yes, I went. Jack, I mean the President, was there with one of his intimate buddies and we skinny dipped and played around, then later we dried off and Jack and I paired off and you know…” She paused. Too long.
“You’re leaving us hanging?” Pat cried.
“How come you never told me this?” Karen asked.
“I never told anybody.” She laughed, feeling suddenly powerful. “I saved it all for you guys.”
“So what happened?” Sara pressed.
“What happened? What do you think happened?”
“Oh my God. I’m going to pee in my pants,” Barbara squealed.
“All I’ll say is that it was rather quick.”
“I’ve heard that,” Joy said.
“Did it happen again?” Sara asked.
Susan nodded.
“How many times?” Barbara asked.
“Who counted?” Susan giggled.
“Come on, Susan. More details,” Joy said.
“Sometimes we did it in the Oval Office. In that little private room where he would take naps. Only sometimes he didn’t,” Susan said.
“Like Monica,” Pat said.
“No cigars,” Susan said, laughing.
“And the real thing,” Susan said.
“Did you…” Karen asked.
“Not in that time frame.”
“Did you feel anything?” Sara asked eagerly.
“Proud,” Susan winked.
“My God,” Pat said. “And you kept all this under your hat all this time?”
“Now that all the participants are gone…” Susan said.
“You’re not, Susie. You’re here to bear witness,” Barbara said.
“And I have,” Susan said.
She could sense that they wanted more, but she had the good sense to stop when she was ahead.
“That is an unbelievable story,” Sara said.
“Looking back,” Susan said, “I can hardly believe it myself.”
For the first time since she had joined the group, she felt fully accepted. After all, it was only a little white lie.
Remembrance Of Things Past
Of course it was her. He knew immediately. He had, by any measure, raped her sixty years ago.
They were sitting on the same bench in the little private park outside the apartment building on Sutton Place, where he lived, enjoying the view of the East River in the late afternoon of summer. He went there almost daily to smoke one of his prized Cuban cigars and read a chapter of one of the books he was rereading.
“You don’t mind?” he asked her.
He could have taken one of the empty benches, but this one had the best view of the river and, besides, it was part of his regular routine. For some reason, at his age routine was comforting and important.
“Not at all,” she replied, casting a sideward glance over her reading glasses. She was reading the business section of that day’s New York Times.
All it had taken was one glance at her in profile. Adrienne Frank. He was dead certain. She would be his age, or close to it, by one or two years, part of their old crowd at Rockaway Beach where their parents went summers. He could remember the beach party, the blankets circling the bonfire, the smell of potatoes, spuds they called them, still baking under the fire, the glowing ashes, the tang of ocean salt and the sound of the waves slapping against the beach, the vast canopy of stars twinkling in the cloudless sky.
His memory was specific to that event, although their crowd often frequently built bonfires during those summers. Beach bonfires, burning old crates, were part of the ritual of their crowd, perhaps twenty of them, teenage boys and girls, who necked and petted as body contact was called in those days. During the afternoons, they stretched across a spot along the beach at 63rd Street, heads on stomachs and thighs, like some erector set built of teenage flesh.
He had little doubt it was her. He could see the old outlines of youth hidden behind the wrinkles and the loose flesh around the mouth and neck. She had been a brunette. Now she was blonde, but that could not hide her identity from him. There was the same nose, which seemed slightly elongated, the chin with the vague cleft. He remembered a dimple.
“Actually, I don’t mind the smell of cigars. Reminds me of my father.”
She had turned to him full face, offering a smile, and, sure enough the dimple creased. He even remembered her father, a kind of roly-poly balding fellow who always winked at him when he saw him on the porch of that big converted Victorian-type house in which their parents rented rooms in those days to get away from the blazing non-air-conditioned sweltering New York summers.
Memory had become his proudest possession, both long and short term. Those of his friends who were his age now, late seventies, would often claim lost memory, especially short term. Senior moment, they called it.
With some pride he would often cite what to him was a phenomenon, the memory of his days in his baby carriage. He was dead certain that he could recall the smell, a powd
ery scent of his toddler’s clothes, the leathery smell of the carriage and the straps that held him secure, even the movement of the wheels as his mother pushed it from behind. And the feel of his baby clothes, soft and wooly.
He could remember the exact layout of his parents’ apartment on Eastern Parkway, and could walk it through his mind as if it were yesterday. They hadn’t lived there long since it had been a step up at the time, but the depression had been cruel and by the time he was three they had moved back to his grandparents’ house.
Perhaps it was his accountant’s training, since he could add numbers in his head and could remember old telephone numbers and addresses despite moving frequently in those days. Retired now, living alone in the apartment he had shared with Betty, who had died four years ago, he followed the routine of a relaxed widower who had come to terms with his new singleness. He wondered if that, too, had to be with memory, since he could relive his entire life, almost. At least seventy-five years of it. Maybe, he wondered laughingly, the attraction to the East River had something to do with sloshing around in his mother’s womb.
“Are you visiting?” he asked politely, not having seen her in the little park before.
“Not officially,” she said. It was uncanny, he thought. Even the voice seemed the same. “I’ve moved in with my sister-in-law. Birds of a feather. We’re both widows. Call us roommates.” She laughed, the same laugh then put out her hand. He took it, even the touch of her flesh had a familiar feel to it.
“I’m Adrienne Bartow.”
“Oh yes. Sybil Bartow.”
“Her husband, my brother, was on the board.”
“Yes, that one. Poor fellow.”
“He had a good life.”
She looked at him, smiling but without curiosity. There was not the slightest sign of recognition. In the process of nodding, his gaze swept her figure, greatly expanded from what he remembered. For a brief moment, he held back offering his name, but then, he decided, to test the waters, tamping down trepidation.
“I’m Herbert Bass,” he said.
He watched her face for even the slightest flicker of curiosity. None was visible.
“Nice meeting you,” she said, looking out across the river, his name quite obviously barely a blip on her memory, then her interest turned elsewhere. “Great view.” Had he expected recognition? The thing he had noticed with older people, they had varying degrees of long-term memory.
Then he recalled that most kids of that era were prone to nicknames. He was Beebee, which came from Bertie, which was his parents’ name for him. Bertie Bass. She was Addy, short for Adrienne. He could reel off many of the nicknames of their crowd. Immie and Fritz and Smitty and Hesh, Solly and Moe. Harry for Harriet. Cholly for Charlene. And on and on.
They came together summers only, dispersing when it was over. They lived in different places in the city. In those days neighborhoods had preset boundaries, mostly connected to school districts under the city public school plan. High school expanded the territory. Addy lived in the Bronx and went to Evander Childs. Beebee lived in Brooklyn and went to Erasmus. Summers they all lived in Rockaway, one block from the gorgeous white beaches and the ocean, another bounded territory.
They were part of the crowd that congregated just off the boardwalk on Beach 64th Street. Each crowd was self-contained. They came together by some mysterious process. Crowds never crossed boundaries. They were planted on a specific spot on the beach. At night they gathered at a specific spot on the boardwalk and moved together like a dog pack.
It was, of course, a lost world, long gone, although it lived vividly in his persistently accurate memory. He considered such recall a gift. He felt enormously lucky to be able to relive his life to its nether reaches and revisit places and moments in his long history like an endlessly spinning movie reel. Grandparents, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, schoolmates, girlfriends, boyfriends, business acquaintances, places where he had lived or visited came alive again under every fresh spell of memory, recalled by sheer willpower. It gave him the insight to tell himself the truth.
He opened his book and pretended to be reading, but he was really going over that moment with Addy. The book was the third volume of Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Times Past,” which seemed oddly appropriate. He spent most of his time these days reading classics of literature and it was ironic that of all things he was reading Proust, the translation’s title based upon the Shakespeare quotation, also remembered. “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, we summon up remembrances of times past.” Sitting next to Addy Frank, the irony sent chills throughout his body.
They had been as the expression went, “going steady,” meaning that they had staked out a definite pairing, since the crowd settled into couples during the first weeks of the summer. It was more than puppy love, since by then the hormones were charging and the first clumsy sexual couplings were taking place.
The sexual rituals of those days were a far cry from today’s anything goes activity. Fear of pregnancy, instilled by worried mothers of that era, was the dominating inhibition of the girls. The boys were perpetually horny, grappling with their masturbatory fantasies and frequent self-induced emissions.
Everyone knew the boundaries, although some were more adventuresome than others. He smiled at the language one used to describe their sexual exploits. Getting bare tit was a big step in climbing the ladder of sexual prowess and stinky pinky was almost like winning the sweepstakes. A hand job was nirvana and actually getting laid was an achievement that went beyond the pale of accomplishment. As for a blowjob, that was something so unattainable that it was barely mentioned in the mix of conquests.
Most of this hot sex was achieved under the blankets lying around the beach bonfire.
“You won’t respect me,” was the girl’s perpetual plaint as the boys grappled with the forbidding elastic underwear of the day and the tricky catches that fastened brassieres.
He and Addy were mad for each other that summer. He hung around her like a moth around a flame and the flame seemed to give off a lot more heat than light. They could not keep their hands off each other. They graduated from bare tit to stinky pinky and a hand job in what was a short period of time.
They swore undying love to each other. He could think of nothing else that summer. Being with Addy was like breathing. He needed the oxygen of her presence. He wrote her passionate love letters, which she returned in kind. She had given him a lock of her hair, which he carried around in his wallet, along with the just-in-case condom which left its impression on the surface of his leather wallet and which he never used.
Not a day passed when they were not together during that summer. Others, too, among their crowd had also coupled in that manner. Necking and petting was a daily ritual, more intense at night, especially under the blankets around the bonfire on the beach.
That night, after the fire had died down and they had eaten their semi-burnt spuds and roasted marshmallows, they retired, along with the others, under their individual blankets and began the nightly coupling ritual. She wore loose cotton shorts over her panties and once under the blankets, her brassiere came off and he kissed her nipples and kneaded her breasts while she stroked his erection over his pants.
The details of the memory did not surprise him, although until that moment in the park, he had not thought about it for the nearly six full decades since its passing. Emboldened by his and her passion, he opened his pants and exposed the flesh of his penis to her ministrations. What he did then was to slip it between her legs where it rubbed against her clitoris through the loose bottom of her shorts.
“Please, no,” she whispered, her breath coming in short gasps. In those days, he was never certain whether or not she had an orgasm, probably thinking that once he had come that was the end of the sexual experience, something that had to be re-taught as he grew older and more experienced with the other gender.
/> “Let me, sweetheart. I love you.”
“No, you mustn’t.”
“Don’t you love me?”
“With all my heart and soul.”
“Then let me,” he pleaded. “Just a little bit. Not all the way.”
“No, it’s wrong.”
“Please darling, prove your love. Just for a second, just a little bit. I promise I won’t do it all the way.”
Her breath was coming in short gasps. She tried to push him away, but he was adamant, getting his erected penis to the entrance of her vagina through her loose shorts. He had pulled her panties aside and was positioning his body so that he could provide enough purchase to get his penis through the tight opening.
“No. No. Please, Beebee, please.”
It was a heavy whisper, half drowned out by the sound of waves slapping against the beach. She was pushing him away, trying to close her legs, but he had her bested. He was stronger than her and was pushing his body with all his might, getting his penis through the opening of her vagina in one giant thrust. She gasped, but did not cry out and he pulled himself out of her after a spine-shuddering orgasm. Clearly, in retrospect, by any present definition, it was forced rape. He felt a sudden thrill of shame, but it quickly passed.
“See, I kept my promise,” he said when he had calmed.
“I’m wet,” she whispered.
He kept her in a tight loving embrace.
“I love you,” he said. “And you proved to me how much you love me.”
They continued to lie together for some time. The fire slowly dwindled and they got up, folded the blankets and started homeward, hands around each other’s waists. In the streetlight she looked down at her crotch and she could see the blood and the greasy stain of his semen.
“Oh my God. Oh my God,” she cried. “What have you done?”