Regiment of Women

by Thomas Berger

  “I don’t understand these things,” said Cornell. “I’m just an ordinary sort of boy, and I did a foolish thing, and I’m in terrible trouble.” He simpered at Stanley—then caught himself. For an instant he had reacted to Stanley as he would to an authoritative woman, turning on the helplessness, the appeal for sympathy. It occurred to him that he did this irrespective of sex: power was the determining factor.

  “Let me explain,” Stanley said. “Sometimes a woman in disguise, a provocateuse, a secret agent, will foment a meaningless little revolt, one that is easily crushed. The idea being—” The elevator arrived and opened, and they boarded it. Stanley pushed the SB button, and resumed: “A single match is lighted, and quickly blown out. This demonstrates that starting fires is useless.” He peered at Cornell. “You need an organization to touch off a holocaust.”

  Cornell was feeling the back of his hair: strange.

  He nodded at Stanley, though he was still in the dark about everything. However, it was good to have an ally at last.

  “You’re a lucky boy, Georgie. How you got all the way here from the jail without being picked up is amazing. Even in that uniform you’re not at all effeminate. Your movements, your gestures are outlandishly virile.” Suddenly he patted Cornell’s shoulder. “That’s no criticism. You’re a brave lad. We can use you.”

  We? But Cornell decided not to ask questions. Obviously Stanley was taking him someplace, and it had to be better than wherever he would have gone on his own.

  The cab reached the bottom of the shaft, the door slid back, and they stepped into the subbasement, all concrete and naked light bulbs, overhead pipes and ducts, some with valves so low that the men had to crouch. Stanley led the way to an iron door labeled in red: DANGER—HIGH TENSION—DO NOT TOUCH.

  Stanley pulled up his skirt. His stockings were rolled and gartered just above the knee, old-man style. From under the garter he took a key and unlocked the iron door. It was dark inside, but he found a flashlight somewhere and plunged ahead.

  “Wait for me!” cried Cornell, who did not want to be electrocuted. He could hear something humming ominously to his left.

  Stanley’s flashlight soon showed a large wooden crate against a wall of solid concrete. He handed the torch to Cornell and moved the crate out from the wall, revealing a jagged hole only large enough to admit a person who was doubled over. He bent and crawled through.

  When Cornell had joined him, Stanley reached back in and pulled the crate up snug. They were now in a high-ceilinged tunnel of some sort, and Cornell straightened his back. Ugh, he was stiff and getting no younger. Stanley certainly seemed to be in good shape for a man of his age—whatever that was.

  “Stanley,” Cornell said, “are you going to tell me where we’re going?”

  Stanley’s light played off the gray walls.

  “Why don’t you just wait and see for yourself?” he said.

  They went along the tunnel for some distance and made a turn which Cornell had expected because light came from beyond it. What he had not anticipated, however, was that two individuals were concealed behind the corner, and when he rounded it, they seized him.

  “Take him—or her—into the command car,” said Stanley.

  Cornell, being propelled by his captors, saw a series of metal cars upon a track. He thought he recognized it from photographs as an old subway train. The system had collapsed years earlier.

  He was taken along the platform to the last car on the right. The train could obviously travel nowhere: a pile of rubble rose halfway to the roof of the tube ahead.

  He was brought firmly through a wide middle door and into a place of parallel plastic-covered benches, before which, here and there, were little coffee tables that were being used as desks by—well, some of them were dressed as men and some as women.

  He really didn’t know the difference any more. Would he ever get back to normality, where a man was a man and a woman a woman? And what was Stanley—Stanley who now proceeded to take off his gray wig and then his bombazine dress, to roll down the female chino trousers that he wore underneath and tuck the tail of his T-shirt into the waistband. He had no discernible breasts. His hair was cut short and grew sparsely above his forehead. He seemed to be ten years younger.

  Cornell was still being held by both arms.

  He said: “Who are you, Stanley? And if you’re a woman, why don’t you just take me back to jail?”

  Stanley ignored these questions and put one of his own to Cornell’s guards.

  “What do you think?”

  They both let Cornell go and stepped away from him and peered. Cornell returned the inspection. If they were women, they were outsized. One was a good six feet tall, husky, swarthy, and wearing a plaid Viyella shirt and flannel trousers. The other was even taller, but slender. He had dark-blond hair and wore the kind of sweatsuit that one of Cornell’s girl friends, an athletic type, had donned for workouts in the gym: for a while she had held the local Y record in pushups.

  Cornell thought of these persons as “he” for convenience’ sake; he didn’t know what they were.

  The swarthy one told Stanley: “There’s only one way to tell for sure.”

  Stanley said: “Strip, Georgie!”

  Blushing violently, Cornell began to carry out the order. Ironically enough, though he was wearing his second outfit of female clothes in three days, this was the first time he had ever taken off a pair of pants, having been undressed by the detectives after he was knocked out. He slipped out of the tunic now and stood there in the cheap prison brassiere and fiddled with the belt buckle, getting it open only to run into the tricky cross-hook-and-button arrangement of the waistband that had been much easier to put on than it was to unfasten.

  At last his trousers fell, and holding his breath, he hooked two thumbs into the elastic of his bloomers and swooped them down.

  “Congratulations,” said Stanley, putting out his hand. The other two wanted to shake, as well. There stood Cornell, bare from waist to mid-thigh, knock-kneed with shame, lower abdomen crawling.

  Stanley was smiling. “Pull ’em up,” he said. “You made it. You’re a man, all right. Welcome to the Movement.”

  Cornell was suddenly exasperated. Angrily he reclothed his lower body, making the zipper scream.

  All three of them still had their hands out when he was done. He fetched his tunic from the seat and got into it.

  Stanley said, in a placating tone: “We had to be sure, you see. Their agents are everywhere. This is the only incontrovertible proof.”

  The lean blond said: “Welcome, Brother!”

  “Put ’er there, Brother,” the swarthy man cried, and seized Cornell’s limp hand and pumped it.

  “Georgie’s a hero,” Stanley told them. “He just busted out of jail, alone and unassisted.”

  At this, the several other men seated behind the little desks rose and clustered around Cornell. He had forgotten about them.

  “Meet your Brothers,” Stanley said, and began a quick round of introductions that Cornell hardly heard. However, he had begun to be mollified.

  “Are you by any chance some kind of male-liberation group?” That had finally dawned on him. He was answered by genial faces and chuckling murmurs, backslaps. Someone produced a cigar, someone else a light, and Cornell found himself puffing.

  “Fellows,” Stanley said to the assemblage, “Georgie’s revolt was spontaneous, visceral and not intellectual, and triggered by the repression. It is another proof that their tyranny assists our cause. Any of you who still have lingering doubts, who think we should collaborate with the moderates in working for liberalization, should now know better. Georgie would not be among us were the clothing laws less severe. As you know, there are liberal elements within the Establishment who have tried to introduce laws permitting men to wear slacks, pants suits, and other female-type attire. Our policy is, and will continue to be as long as you wish me to be your Chairman, in adamant opposition to these measures.”

 
; Cornell blew out some acrid smoke. He would have liked to drop the ugly cigar down a toilet, but he felt obliged to be comradely.

  Stanley said: “The liberals are as much our enemies as the women, and even more sinister. At least you know where a woman stands. But a weak-kneed, flabby, whining reformer is the most disgusting organism on the face of the earth, a traitor to his own sex. I respect a policewoman, for example. She is ruthless, brutal, vicious, but she is after all honestly serving her cause, whereas the treacherous, prating little scum of a moderate turns my stomach.”

  Now he made his uplifted hand into a fist and shook it. “Georgie will now be wanted for iailbreak. The sentence for that is castration.”

  Women are not altogether in the wrong when they refuse the rules of life prescribed to the world, for men only have established them and without their consent.

  MICHEL EYQUEM DE MONTAIGNE, 1588

  6

  FRANKIE, the big swarthy man, showed Cornell to his quarters, the last car at the other end of the train from the command post In between were other cars containing typewriters, mimeograph machines, a tailoring shop, and a kitchen-mess hall facility. They threaded their way through all of this and the men in attendance.

  Cornell was still stunned and said little. Frankie introduced him to the others as a “revolutionary hero” and recounted his exploits in jail. He was the recipient of numberless handshakes, backslaps, and even little fake punches in the area of the belt buckle: effeminate expressions, it would seem, especially when offered by male militants; but there was so much he did not understand.

  Triple-decker bunks filled the dormitory car, with stall showers and toilets at either end. Between the tiers of bunks were gas-pipe-racks for clothing and wooden footlockers.

  “You have quite a choice,” said Frankie. “Most of our people have cover roles out in the world, some as men and some as simulated women. They might occasionally spend a night here, but they have apartments or rooms on the outside.”

  Cornell chose a top bunk somewhere near the middle of the car. It made no difference to him. Frankie showed him the clothes rack and an empty footlocker.

  “All I have is this uniform,” said Cornell.

  “We’ll go to the tailor shop and have Murray fit you up,” Frankie said.

  “Just a little sweater and skirt would do. And a pair of low-heeled sandals. My feet feel like they’ve been amputated.”

  Frankie laughed. “It’ll take a while to get used to,” he said. “But unless your job requires you to go out as a man, you wear what you have always known as women’s clothing, down here.” He laughed again at Cornell’s frown. “There’s an awful lot to learn, and you’ve been with us only an hour. Believe me, we’ve most of us gone through it in our own day, and we’re sympathetic. You have to begin all over again with the development of your personality. It’s like being reborn. Your head will spin at times. What is important is that your heart is in the right place. You’ve proved that. It took quite a man to do what you did.”

  Funny. If Cornell had had to explain what motivated him to attack Harriet, which started all of this, he woud have said: his outrage at being deceived. He was, or had been, a trusting sort of boy. He had grown less naive in the past forty-eight hours; therefore he would not disabuse Frankie. Instead, he looked modest, lifted both wrists and let them fall, and asked Frankie about himself.

  “How did you come to join the Movement?”

  Frankie twitched his big, crooked nose.

  “I almost beat a girl to death,” he said. “She made advances to me. I went a little crazy, I guess, but I didn’t know what to do. I panicked. I was an innocent kid then. They didn’t get me. I hid out, living like a rat, stealing food at night, creeping through these tunnels by day—which is how I found this place, and the Movement.”

  “When was that?” Frankie was obviously older than Cornell.

  “Eight years ago,” said Frankie. “I haven’t been out of here since. I’m still wanted, and I could hardly use a disguise. I don’t look much like a woman, even in women’s clothes. Oh, I guess I could get Jerry—he’s our plastic surgeon—to give me a new face and I could get new I.D. papers, and go up as another man, but I kind of like it here, among the Brothers, where I never have to even see a rotten woman. If I went up now, I’d probably kill the first one I came across.”

  Frankie was a fanatic. Cornell wondered whether they were all like that. Despite what he told Dr. Prine in his hysteria, he himself had never hated women, and he did not intend to do so now. He did not even hate Harriet. In fact, he had a strangely tender feeling towards her. Why not? They had grappled, and he had won.

  Frankie stood erect and inflated his big chest.

  Suddenly he said, with piety: “Of course, brutality is not the answer to brutality. We must never become what they are.”

  “A picture of you appeared on TV last night,” Stanley told Cornell next morning.

  In the interim Cornell had been provided with a complete female outfit: chino slacks, knitted shirt in navy blue, and fawn-colored desert boots. Beneath this he wore broadcloth shorts, a T-shirt, and the prison bra. A little tailor shop, administered by a little man named Murray, occupied an end of one of the subway cars. Up in the normal world Murray was an alteration seam-ster at Bergdorf Goodman.

  After an enormous breakfast of flapjacks, fried ham and eggs, which Cornell (who until his lunchtime tuna-on-whole-wheat never took much into his stomach but instant coffee) could barely nibble at, Frankie had conducted him to what seemed to be the command car, because Stanley was there. It was otherwise empty.

  Stanley wore his janitor’s dress, wig, and glasses.

  He said: “Actually there were two pictures. One was described as the portrait from your high-school yearbook. You had bobbed hair. The other was a snapshot taken at a beach, more recent than the first, but the face wasn’t very clear. You were wearing a white bikini.”

  Cornell hadn’t slept too well, though the bunk in the dormitory car was more comfortable than the prison cot He kept awakening and trying to remember where he was.

  He said: “I never have been photogenic”

  Stanley nodded briskly. “What matters to us is that there are very few people who would recognize you on the basis of these shots, if that’s all the police have. And it must be, because they have certainly ransacked your apartment by now. What about your friends, lovers, co-workers? Could they provide more recent pictures?”

  Cornell smoothed his upper lip with the lower. He missed the taste of lipstick.

  “I have this funny way: I look different on every snapshot.”

  Stanley suddenly stared at Cornell’s breasts and put out a hard finger.

  “Those may have to go.”

  Cornell’s smile was ill.

  “We have our own plastic surgeon,” Stanley said. “He’s self-trained but quite good. His cover role is as nurse at Beth Israel Hospital. He has assisted at a number of operations and kept his eyes open. He has stolen, one by one, a full set of surgical instruments. Get those tits off and maybe a little work on the nose, and you’ll pass anywhere. That should be our first concern—protecting you against discovery. The Movement takes care of its own. Then we shall ask you for something in return.”

  Cornell frowned. “The facial change I can understand. But the breasts? Why must they go?” Not only had the silicone injections cost him a pretty penny; the operation had been much more painful than promised; surely taking them off would be even less pleasant. “After all, most men have breasts of some kind.”

  “Now, that’s an interesting statement,” said Stanley. “In reality it is women who would grow them naturally if they did not bind their chests at puberty. When women produced young, the mammary glands were functional, secreting milk. Is it not degrading, now that tits are useless, that we are the sex who wears them?”

  At this moment several other men filed into the car and chose seats on the parallel benches. They were all attired in normal male clothin
g, i.e., dresses or skirts, no doubt because they would shortly be en route to their respective employments in the normal world. It must have been about seven A.M. Cornell had been awakened by Frankie at six and directed to a little stall shower without a door—also without a showerhead! Frankie had dashed a bucketful of icy water on him. They had no running water supply down there. The toilet was chemical. Ugh. Afterwards, that ghastly breakfast.

  “Come along,” said Stanley, taking Cornell’s arm and leading him up the aisle to the head of the car. “This is our Council.” To the men he said: “This is Georgie.” He gave a brief account of Cornell’s jailbreak.

  Frankie had left the car, and Cornell had never seen any of the other men before. They were all obviously older than he and none of them was especially attractive. One wore nurse’s whites; another, a waiter’s peach-colored, matching dress and cap from one of those chain restaurants, Child’s or Schrafft’s. The rest were probably typists and receptionists, switchboard boys.

  “Brothers,” said Stanley, “Georgie’s example is instructive in several areas. First, he was by no means a conscious rebel. He was rather a typical male conformist, a serf, a lackey, mindlessly accepting the status quo.

  “He even had breast injections.” Stanley turned to Cornell. “I’m not trying to embarrass you, Georgie. The Movement has no time for personalities. We here are your Brothers, not individuals. That is our strength. We are one, not many. The self has but one function with us: self-criticism. No Brother ever criticizes, disciplines, or punishes another. One does these things for himself, in the presence of his Brothers. There is no hierarchy of power here. Don’t misunderstand my position, for example. I am an equal among equals. I am addressing the Council because I have something to say. If they disagree, they will let me know in no uncertain terms.”