Scruples

by Judith Krantz

  “To the Essex Motel, garden spot of the San Fernando Valley—and to Ellis Ikehorn, who would approve,” she toasted.

  “What!” he said, deeply shocked.

  “Hank, you don’t have to understand it, just believe me.” She moved closer to him, and with the same casual, yet precise, gesture she might have used to shake hands, she deliberately reached out and laid her elegant hand directly over the tight V of his jeans. Her fingers expertly searched out the outline of his penis.

  “Jesus!” In an electric reaction, he tried to sit up straight but only succeeded in spilling his drink.

  “I think you’d enjoy this more if you just sat still,” Billy murmured, as she unzipped his jeans. His cock was completely limp with shock, curled on a broad mat of blond hair. Billy took a long breath of delight. She loved it like this, all soft and small. This way she could get every bit of it into her mouth with ease and hold it there, not even tonguing it yet, just feeling it grow and grow in the wet warmth, experiencing her power without moving a muscle. Even the hair on those pouchy globes squeezed together between his legs was straw-colored. Gently she nuzzled them, inhaling deeply the secret smell. Until a woman has smelled a man precisely there, she thought, driftingly, she can’t know him. She heard the pilot moan protestingly above her questing head but paid no attention. He was recovering from his surprise, his cock beginning to twitch and grow. She cupped his balls with her free hand, her middle finger stealthily sliding and pressing upward along the taut skin of his scrotum. Now her lips and tongue were working together around the almost erect penis, which, though fairly short, was thick, as sturdily built as the rest of him. He lay back against the edge of the bed, abandoning himself entirely to the novelty of the passive role, feeling his cock jerking and leaping with a pulsating movement as more and more blood filled it. As he grew thick and then thicker still, she shifted her mouth slightly and and worked only on the swelling tip, treating it with a strong, unfaltering suction while the fingers of both her hands now slid up and down his wet, straining shaft. With a groan, unwilling to come too soon, he raised her dark head up from his lap and buried his face in her hair, kissing her beautiful neck, thinking that she was only a girl, only a girl. He lifted her onto the bed and flung his jeans to the carpet. Soon he had unbuttoned her blouse—her bare breasts were bigger than he had ever imagined them, the nipples dark and silky.

  “Can you imagine how wet I’ve been for the last hour?” she muttered against his mouth. “No, I don’t think you can—you’ll have to see for yourself—I’ll just have to show you.” Billy undid her skirt in one movement; under it she was naked. She sat up and pushed him down on the bed, holding his shoulders on the sheet with the heels of her hands. She threw one knee over him and moved higher, straddling him, so that her cunt was directly over his mouth. His tongue reached out to capture it, but she kept undulating back and forth above him so that he was only able to lap at her from second to second. Finally, maddened, unable to stand her teasing, he clutched her ass and pulled her down, firmly planting his mouth between the tumid, plump lips, sucking and licking and pulling and tugging blindly. She tensed, her back arched, arid with a muffled scream she came, almost immediately. His cock was so hard he was afraid he might spurt into the air. Frantically he took her by the waist, pulled her down on top of it and plunged up into her savagely while she still shuddered with her own spasms.

  The hours that followed never happened again, but Hank Sanders would have remembered them for the rest of his life even without the Georgian presentation box, once the property of the Duke of Wellington, which Billy gave him late that night as she said good-bye to him back at the mansion on the hill in Bel Air.

  As she walked up the wide staircase, the house seemed empty even though it was full of a dozen sleeping servants. Ellis was really and truly gone now, she thought, remembering the lusty man she had married twelve years before. When she had told Hank Sanders that Ellis would have approved of them that night, he hadn’t understood, but she had been speaking the truth. If it had been she who had died, an old woman, and Ellis who had survived, a young man, he would probably have fucked the first woman he could lay hands on, in private celebration of the past, a past in which they had loved each other so thoroughly. It might not be everybody’s idea of a sentimental way to salute a memory, but it suited both of them perfectly. His ashes clinging to the ripe grapes, the smell of cock in her hair, the welcome soreness she felt between her legs—Ellis would have not only approved, he would have applauded.

  When Wilhelmina Hunnenwell Winthrop was born—in Boston, twenty-one years before she became Billy Ikehorn—people who cared about genealogy, and Boston is to family trees what Périgord is to truffle lovers and Monte Carlo is to yacht owners, considered her a very lucky little girl indeed. Her vast cousinage included the indispensable number of Lowells, Cabots, and Warrens, a good handful of Saltonstalls, Peabodys, and Forbeses, as well as a splash of imperial Adams blood mixed in every other generation or so. Her paternal line began with a Richard Warren, who was on the Mayflower in 1620—one could hardly hope for more than this—and on her mother’s side there was not only impeccable Boston blood but she could also trace her descent straight back to the patroons of the Hudson River Valley, as well as to some of the many Randolphs of Virginia.

  The fortunes of old Boston families, by and large, were founded on clipper ships, countinghouses, and the West India trade. These fortunes, conserved and husbanded by the prudent overseers of the clans, now form a network of interlocking trusts, which virtually insure that every proper Bostonian infant will never need to worry about money and, indeed, will grow up wondering why money problems loom so large in the concerns of most people. As long as the family trusts are quietly but mightily prospering and producing, many Bostonians are simply beyond money, just as a person in perfect health is beyond thinking about breathing in and breathing out. Fortunately, Old Boston has developed, in each generation, men with exceptional talents as money managers, men who watch over the investments of their relatives as brilliantly as they care for the investments of the large institutions they have under their charge. These men enable the rest of Boston to consider talk of money vulgar.

  However, even the very best of Boston families have branches that, as they may choose to put it, “do not enjoy the same means” as the rest of the family.

  Billy Ikehorn’s father, Josiah Prescott Winthrop, and her mother, Matilda Randolph Minot, were both the last of their respective subsidiary side branches of these great dynastic tribes. His family’s money had been all but wiped out in the financial disaster that befell Lee, Higginson & Co., the great brokerage firm, which lost twenty-five million dollars of its clients’ money when Ivar Kreuger, the “Match King,” went bankrupt and committed suicide. Matilda’s family hadn’t had money since the Civil War, although it was rich in history. Whatever was left of the ravished family trusts that Josiah brought to their marriage had been reduced to an income of little more than one thousand dollars a year. No fresh money had been introduced into either withering family in the past five generations. Again, not typical of the sensible Bostonian practice of restoring a faltering family fortune by marriage into a neighboring clan with nicely healthy trusts, the past generations of Winthrops had stubbornly married demure, sensitive daughters of educators and men of the cloth, both honorable Boston professions but not financially rewarding. The last decent sum of the family money was used to send Josiah Winthrop through Harvard Medical School.

  However, he was a dedicated student who had graduated high in his class and served with distinction as an intern and resident at the renowned Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. His specialty was gynecology and he could look forward to an excellent practice even if he only treated friends of his own female relations, who numbered in the hundreds.

  Late—much too late—in his last year of residency, Josiah Winthrop discovered that he wasn’t interested in private practice. He fell in love, passionately and permanently, with pure researc
h the minute he began to look into the new field of antibiotics. Going into research is the only way a doctor can positively insure himself against ever making a decent living. On the day on which he should have gone into practice for himself, Josiah Winthrop joined the staff of the private Rexford Institute as a junior research fellow at a salary of three thousand two hundred dollars a year. Even this small sum was about seven hundred dollars more than he would have made at a federally funded research establishment.

  Matilda, high-minded from the day she left the high chair, was too involved in the last months of her pregnancy to worry about the future. Together, she thought they could certainly manage on four thousand two hundred dollars a year and she had the greatest confidence in her Joe, tall, skinny, long-boned, his dark eyes filled with the quintessence of Yankee strength of mind. His single-mindedness and determination to follow his star struck her as the very model of a man destined for greatness. Matilda herself, a slender, dreamy, dark-haired beauty, seemed to have stepped from the pages of Hawthorne. There was little in her of the high-living Dutch and the hot-blooded Virginia gentry who decorated some of the branches of her family tree.

  When their daughter was born they named her Wilhelmina, after a beloved aunt of Matilda’s, a middle-aged scholar who had never married. However, they both conceded that Wilhelmina was a burdensome name for a baby and they called their tiny daughter Honey, an acceptable diminutive of her formidable middle name, Hunnenwell.

  A year and a half after Honey was born, Matilda Winthrop was run over and killed as she crossed Commonwealth Avenue against the lights, in a fit of absent-mindedness resulting from a suspicion that she was pregnant again.

  For a short while, Josiah, stricken and disbelieving, hired a nurse for litle Honey, but he soon realized that he couldn’t afford such a luxury. The idea of remarriage was unthinkable, so he did the only possible thing left to do and resigned from his beloved Institute, where he had already achieved an enviable reputation. He took a despised but better paid job as a staff doctor, specializing in everything from measles to minor surgery, at a small and undermanned hospital in the undistinguished town of Framingham, about forty-five minutes’ drive from Boston. This job had several advantages. It enabled him to rent a small house on the outskirts of town, where he established Honey with Hannah, a good-hearted, simple woman who worked as both nursemaid and a cook-housekeeper; it was near a good public school system, and it left him enough free time to continue his researches in the small lab he constructed in the basement. Josiah Winthrop did not even consider going back to gynecology because he realized that he would never have time to himself in that branch of medicine.

  Honey was a dear child. Far too chubby, of course, and much too shy went the verdict of the countless aunts who drove out to Framingham with her cousins, unto the fourth degree, to visit the little girl or to fetch her and take her home with them for days at a time. But who could blame her for anything, that unfortunately motherless creature whose father—although one had to admit that he was a dedicated man—was almost always at the hospital or doing whatever he did in that basement. Honey had no one but Hannah to bring her up, after all. Hannah managed marvelously, but there were—well—limits—to her education. The aunts decided that next year, when she would be three, Honey really must start at Miss Martingale’s nursery school in Back Bay with Cousin Liza and Cousin Ames and Cousin Pierce, where she could get the right background for her future appreciation of music and art and become acquainted with the children who would form, in the natural course of events, her network of lifelong friends.

  “Out of the question” was her father’s answer. “Honey lives a good, healthy country life here and there are dozens of perfectly nice children around for her to play with. Hannah’s a good woman, decent and kind, and you aren’t going to persuade me that a three-year-old who gets plenty of fresh air and has normal intelligence needs to be ‘introduced’ to finger painting and, God save us all, organized block building. No, I simply won’t do it and that’s that.” None of the aunts could change his mind. He had always been the most stubborn of a stubborn family.

  And so Honey, at the age of three, began to become an outcast from the tribe. The visits from even the best meaning of the aunts slowed to a trickle, since their children were busy with nursery-school obligations on weekdays and they wanted to play with new friends on weekends. To say nothing of birthday parties! It was more sensible to wait until the holidays when dear Josiah could bring Honey to them for the day. It was a pity that he would never stay overnight, but he insisted on getting back to his work every evening.

  Honey didn’t really seem to miss the diminishing connection to her horde of stolid cousins and managerial aunts. She played quite contentedly with the children who lived in the modest houses on her street and attended a local kindergarten when the time came. Nor did she feel lonely with Hannah, who baked her cookies and pies and cakes every day. Josiah almost always came home to eat dinner with her before he disappeared downstairs to his work. This was the pattern of her life, and with nothing to compare it to, she accepted it.

  After two years at a local kindergarten Honey entered the Ralph Waldo Emerson Elementary School in Framingham. There, from the early days of first grade, she became very gradually aware that she was somehow different from her schoolmates. They all had mothers and brothers and sisters instead of just Hannah, who was not a relative, and a father whom she saw only during a hasty dinner. They had a kind of daily family life, made of jokes, and fights and the intertwining of emotions, which fascinated and puzzled her. On the other hand, they did not have cousins who lived on enormous estates in Wellesley or Chestnut Hill or in glorious town houses in Louisburg Square or in Bulfinch mansions on Mt. Vernon Street. They did not have aunts who belonged to the Sewing Circles and went to Mrs. Welch’s Waltz Evenings—even if now they rarely came to Framingham. Nor did her schoolmates have uncles who had all gone to Harvard, who all either played squash or sailed large boats, who belonged to the Somerset Club or the Union Club, the Myopia Hunt and the Athenaeum. They were not taken by one aunt or another to the Boston Symphony on occasional Friday afternoons.

  Honey fell into the habit of boasting about her relatives and cousins and their houses in order to make her lack of a mother and siblings and an ordinary homelife seem unimportant. Gradually her classmates stopped liking Honey, but this didn’t affect her boasting because she never understood precisely what it was that they resented. Soon they stopped playing with her after school or inviting her to their houses or including her in their parties. She began to compare them more and more unfavorably with her Brahmin cousins. Although her cousins didn’t seem to particularly dislike her, neither did they like her. Slowly, inevitably, helplessly, and without understanding why, she became a very lonely child. Hannah baked more and more, but even apple pie with vanilla ice cream was little help.

  There was no one to talk to about it. Honey never considered telling her father how she felt. They didn’t talk about feelings; they never had and they never would. She knew, without knowing that she knew, that he would disapprove if he found out that she was unhappy. Her father often told her that she was a “good” child, too heavy of course, but she’d soon grow out of it. A good child cannot, dare not, allow it to be known that she is not liked or approved of outside of the home circle. Not being popular, to a child, seems to be a final judgment that has been made against her for reasons she does not understand but everyone else does. A child accepts this severely damaging judgment and is ashamed for herself. The humiliation of unpopularity is so great that it must be hidden from anyone who still loves that child and approves of her. That love is too precious to risk with the truth.

  When the time came that the aunts insisted that Honey be sent to dancing school, even stubborn Josiah Winthrop had to agree. He was too much of a bred-in-the-bone Bostonian not to accept unquestioningly the sacred ritual of Mr. Lancing de Phister’s Dancing Class. Naturally, without need of explanation, it was simply par
t of Honey’s heritage, just as was her future membership in the Colonial Dames. Without even thinking it over, he knew that if Matilda had lived, she would have been one of that elect band of well-groomed mothers who escorted their small daughters to the ballroom of the Vincent Club every other Saturday afternoon from October until late May.

  Children started at Mr. de Phister’s when they were a minimum of nine years old, not a day before. From the ages of nine till eleven they were considered beginners; from twelve to fourteen they were intermediates; and when the students of fifteen to seventeen had mostly gone off to boarding school, the classes were held on holiday evenings and became, in effect, predebutante dances.

  Much later in her life Honey was to discover that almost every woman who had ever been to dancing school had retained horrified memories of gloves lost at the last minute, of petticoats that fell down in the middle of a waltz, and of sweaty boys who stepped on their toes on purpose. But she was secretly convinced that they enjoyed trotting out these nostalgic minor traumas as evidence that they had come from the kind of families who sent their children to dancing school. She never told anyone about Mr. de Phister’s. The lessons she learned there had little to do with dancing.

  Instead of an appropriate nine, she had been almost ten years old that first year of classes because of her inconvenient November birthday. A ten-year-old who stood five feet six inches tall and weighed one hundred and forty-five pounds. A ten-year-old in a dress bought in the teen department of the Wellesley branch of Filene’s because nothing in the children’s department fit her. A terrible dress, that Hannah had helped her pick out, a genuinely hideous bright blue taffeta dress.

  Various aunts kissed her as she came into the lobby of the Vincent Club, an embarrassed Hannah at her side, and then gave each other appalled glances. “Blast that thickheaded Joe anyway,” one muttered to another with fury, quite forgetting to wave good-bye to her own dainty daughter, neatly turned out in a dusty-rose velvet with an Irish lace collar. Honey’s scattered cousins gave her small waves of greeting as she shyly sidled into the crowded room.