by Sol Stein
Abigail, at eighteen, had learned some things from books and much more from experience. In fact, she’d actually run into one previous handwasher in Alabama. That one had killed small animals as a boy.
One day, as Abigail and Merle set out riding over his estate on two of the thoroughbred mares Merle was proud of, she shouted across the space between them, “You ever run down an animal on purpose?”
As he turned toward her, for a second his face seemed as if she’d shot him between the eyes.
“Never!” he shouted back.
“Don’t tell me you never even killed a cat?” she insisted, laughing.
“Abigail,” he said, reining in his horse so that she had to stop alongside him and measure the seriousness of his words, “I have never harmed any of God’s animals, so help me.”
“I believe you,” Abigail said, standing in her stirrups, thinking that if this twenty-nine-year-old millionaire was telling the truth, which was doubtful considering his reaction, what would account for his handwashing? She’d read in some women’s magazines that mothers should watch out for children with the too-much-handwashing habit. Had Merle been one of those fanatical masturbators? Or was he still?
Abigail smiled at him. “I believe you,” she repeated, and galloped off, Merle in happy pursuit, not a clue in his head that she was determined to discover all of his predilections in pursuit of her own clear goals.
The opportunity she sought presented itself when he invited her one Saturday evening to have dinner at his home instead of taking in a restaurant meal and a first-run movie downtown. The Spanish couple who kept house for him provided a candle-lit meal so rich in pepper and spices she felt the same almost painful excitement in her bladder that had been brought on once when a boy introduced her to Spanish fly. She’d washed it all down with more red wine than she’d ever had at a meal before, and Merle drank right along with her, though he’d had two bourbons before dinner and she none. As soon as the Spanish couple had cleared the dishes and retired to their own cottage on the grounds, Abigail and Merle were on the bear rug in front of the roaring fireplace, their arms around each other, alone in the vastness of the house.
The inevitable happened, of course. After the first ardent kisses, Abigail excused herself long enough to insert the diaphragm she had brought in her purse just in case. As it turned out, she hadn’t needed to, for what she discovered that evening was that Merle had special preferences. While the young men Abigail had known liked to be stroked gently as part of the preliminaries, Merle wanted to have her do that for the main course. That evening, Abigail also learned that if while she was handling his needs, she permitted him to look at her virtues the way most men looked at pictures in Danish magazines, his ardor would burst like it was the Fourth of July. He was ecstatic at her favorable reaction and, courteous man that he was, soon thereafter attended to Abigail’s needs with skilled and purposeful hands.
Over the next few weeks, Merle sought and obtained several opportunities to entertain Abigail at home, testing to see if she could be repulsed by the kind of things he liked best to do. Abigail used these opportunities to refine her knowledge of his wants, a few of which proved to be truly extraordinary.
For Merle had discovered, in his first decade after puberty, that some of the attractive young ladies he dated from good families were adamant not only about their virginity, but about what they referred to as heavy petting. How could he possibly go to the altar with one of them, only to have them view his special preferences with shock and possible disdain afterward? He found that one of the elegant prostitutes frequented by some of his friends accepted his needs as if he were ordering a meal in a restaurant with a menu that could suit any taste in Christendom. He didn’t mind the thought of paying for his indulgences, but he wouldn’t find a lifelong companion among professional purveyors. And so when he found Abigail responding to his needs with alacrity rather than disdain, he was so smitten by her sexual understanding, he declared himself in love.
Abigail wasn’t sure that was the case. To her it was like a man saying he was in love because he liked her cooking. She also didn’t know if she really wanted to settle down with a man who honored her with penetration only on special request and treated normal copulation as perfunctory.
In a month’s time Abigail had resolved her quandary. She had decided that after sampling just a few of the benefits of Merle’s fortunate economic state, if she were to marry a man less rich than Merle she’d never forgive herself. Access to luxury was to her a nonreversible addiction. And, after all, Merle did extend his courtesies to her bodily wants if she requested them. If their actual coupling was more rare than she would have preferred, she knew that if she ever felt the need urgently to be embraced with fervor in her fashion, her attractiveness insured supplements from others. Abigail therefore decided it was time to meet Merle’s family. She was sure they were fine people from the way Merle described them, but her folks back in Alabama would want some personal assurances from her that she wasn’t seriously contemplating a permanent relationship with just anybody who was rich. She needed details to fill them in.
And so arrangements were made for Abigail to meet Merle’s father, Sam Clifford, who turned out to be as different from his son as a man could be. His physical presence was astonishing. His experience of life filled his conversation with continuous interest. Though he was a quarter of a century older than his son, it didn’t take Abigail much time to decide that she’d prefer Sam Clifford to his son Merle, and not because he was richer than his son. She played at seducing him in a preliminary way; all she got for her pains was some wry amusement from the man, who finally decided that this young girl Merle was in love with needed some lecturing.
“Abigail,” he said to her in private, “you are a good-looking filly. You’re smart as hell for an eighteen-year-old, and you’ve got the figure of a racehorse. But you don’t have much experience with people who are as smart as you are. I wouldn’t give you a tumble, if that’s what you’re inviting, even if you were the Queen of Sheba because Merle brought you under this roof as a prospective bride and I have the obligations of a host, which are stronger than the obligations of a father. Besides, it would please me if Merle ended up with a wife as interesting as you because if he married a bore I’d never look forward to family visits.”
Abigail was chastened, but not enough. If her curiosity about how the old stallion behaved in bed wouldn’t be assuaged just yet (never count out the future, she would tell herself, the future is full of pleasant surprises), at least she could find out how he got so damn rich. She was sure that getting rich was a broth of secret formulas that the rich shared with each other in order to keep the doors closed to outsiders, but one could always take advantage of having a body like a racehorse to at least try. Trying with Merle wouldn’t do much good since he was born rich and might not know.
When she asked Sam the question, he first went through the ritual of lighting his pipe, tamping the smoldering tobacco down, then puffing till he got the right draw and saw that his audience was in a suitable state of suspense. Then he said, “Abigail, child, I made my money in oil by means it would no way enlighten you to know because you couldn’t use that information to your advantage. I made it before there were income taxes, so I kept what I made and made it grow. When the loonies in Washington put taxes in, I had to be in two businesses at the same time—oil and avoiding taxes. Oil is oil. But avoiding taxes is a sport, and I relish not only the game but getting back at all those people lazy enough to want to work for the government.”
Abigail knew he hadn’t given any secrets away and it just increased her admiration for him. She thanked him with a hug that brought her racehorse form in close contact with his body from about where his string tie was in a bow to just above his knees.
“Hey there,” he exclaimed. “If Merle sees, he’ll be jealous.”
The truth was that Sam felt just the least prickle in his loins from the moment of contact, and he decided to hold
the lady’s attention by satisfying her curiosity a bit more and giving himself a chance to think a few harmless lewd thoughts while gazing keenly at her.
“I will tell you something about the oil business that might be useful to you, child, ’cause it speaks to the fundamentals of business life. There’s more money to be made in having the oil than in doing anything with it. Now, we know oil is in the ground under someone’s feet, but the only time it does an outsider any good is when the fellow whose feet it’s under doesn’t know it. Lesson one. Lesson two is to find out what that fellow is and make a friend of him. Tell him he may think he’s standing on a piece of fertile farmland, which is true, but that someone with geological know-how like yourself might be able to find a crop underground on little patches of his land that won’t disturb his farming the rest of it. You tell him you’ll spend the money to find out if you’re right and if you’re wrong, you’ll take the loss of it, and if you’re right you’ll share with him, and if he’s a fellow like most he’ll say yes, what’s he got to lose? Lesson three is that a fellow like that has got one piece of land, but your geological know-how can be applied to the land of two fellows or three fellows or ten fellows, and if you’re sharing with all of them, you’re collecting on ten shares while each of them is collecting only from one. I see you smiling, so I guess you get the point.”
Actually Abigail was smiling because she was thinking of Sam stark naked in the shower, and wondered if he exuded as much authority under a spray of water as he did standing there in his string tie looking like he owned half the world.
“Lesson four,” Sam said, “is when you’ve got something to sell. In my case it was oil. You got to find at least two customers. That’s called creating competition. And then you don’t go calling on them like you was a peddler or something. You see to it that they find out what you’ve got from some third party. That’s called public relations. It makes them come to you. Lesson five is that when they come to you, no matter what they offer, you say no. Then you wait for the other fellow, the competition, to come to you, and you tell him about that crazy fellow you just saw who offered you X. X is just plain silly. So the new fellow offers you Y, which is more than X. So you thank him for his offer and say you got to think it over. What you do is go back to the first fellow and say guess what, I got offered Y for my oil, and he’s bound to say he’ll offer you Y plus something since he was first and he’d like to make the deal. Lesson six is to know when it’s time to stop. Make your deal. Then the next time you’ve got something to sell, you go to the other fellow and say listen here, I owe you something because you didn’t get the deal the last time. You make me an offer and no matter what anyone else offers me, I’ll come back to you so you can make the last offer and get the oil at whatever the market really is. You get the point, child?”
Abigail rewarded him for his lesson with a further hug, and told Sam enough was enough about business, she wanted to get acquainted with Merle’s family background, could Sam tell her how he came to marry Lucinda. She knew that the best way to get a fellow thinking about you is to ask him about his wife.
“You’re not going to like this story,” he told her.
“Tell it anyway,” Abigail coaxed.
“Well now,” Sam said, “when I was a young buck of nineteen, I was beginning to do real well in the oil business, and other young fellows kind of clustered around, friends, cronies, hoping some of it would rub off on them. I ended up hiring most of them sooner or later because what rubbed off was that I had the gift of talking to people. Well, in a year or two I had me the feeling that all my friends were marrying the same girl, by which I mean each one of them zeroed in on a girl who didn’t fool around with other fellows, a girl who looked pretty, talked pretty, knew how to keep a house and act respectable in public. Sometimes it was hard to tell their girls apart. When I met Lucinda, I told her I didn’t care if she could cook or keep house because I was going to hire help to do all that. Mind, she did know those things, but I wanted my emphasis to be elsewhere. I told Lucinda that I would never buy a car without driving it around the block. She got my meaning real quick, and so we spent some private time together, and I’ll tell you something. Merle’s mother was a mighty skilled woman. She could make love like a professional, and my belief was—this is lesson number seven—that if you’re going to spend the rest of your life owning one car, you better make sure it’s good at doing what it’s supposed to do.”
Abigail said, “I wish I had known you then.”
“Well,” Sam said, figuring he’d best skip that thought, “we got hitched in time to have a few months between then and when she delivered the first colt. That wasn’t Merle, it was Lucy. God damn it, I wanted a son to help me in the oil business, and sure enough, just as the 1918 war was drawing to a close, Lucinda give me a present named Merle. I spoiled him silly I did, bought him clothes he was much too small to wear, I got him a pony long before he could get on its back and ride. I’ll tell you something.”
Abigail had a feeling that Sam was about to tell her something she shouldn’t know, so she said, “Why don’t we go inside now and we can talk some more later?”
“No,” Sam said, in a voice that brooked no opposition. “If you and Merle are going to come together, I want you to hear this. He was a small child. That was a minus point in Texas and in my life. And he always had a tendency to fat. I thought it was baby fat, but it stuck with him, that shape. I urged him to get more involved in sports. I bought him barbells, the works, and he tried all right, but Merle’s real interest was in exercising his head. That kid had a real curiosity. He used to take clocks apart and put them together again so they worked. He read books like there was no tomorrow. Mind you, he was no goody-good. I caught him dissecting the family cat out of curiosity, and when I made to whup him, he said he was interested in biology. Lucinda thought he was a pervert for killing the cat. She never understood that boy. Lucinda’s never been much in the brain department, and she didn’t understand that people with as much curiosity as that boy had always get into some trouble now and again.”
Abigail was ecstatic. Merle, the handwasher, was a cat-cutter as well as a masturbator! She swelled with the power this knowledge gave her, and Abigail never looked so beautiful as when she felt powerful.
And so Abigail and Merle were married in Dallas at a ceremony attended by four hundred people. Within weeks of their honeymoon, Abigail observed that Merle’s needs for sexual recreation tapered off to once a week and then once in two weeks. She twitted him about it only once; his face red with anger, he said sex was all right in its place, but it interfered with the supply of energy he wanted to devote to his genetic studies. It was thus inevitable that Abigail would arrange her life so that she might take her pleasure from time to time with, at first, older men who entered into their business life.
Merle was not a typically jealous man, he was so preoccupied with other things, but Abigail, being prudent as well as wise, had a private meeting with a lawyer who was second only to Percy Foreman in the area and who advised her that in the event Merle Clifford ever asked for a divorce, this lawyer could make it cost him something like seven million dollars. Rage at someone’s infidelity, he counseled Abigail, is one thing, seven million dollars is quite another, and a man like Merle would never knowingly choose rage. However, the lawyer was wise in the ways of the world and cautioned her to keep her adventures private, which she did with one exception. And when Merle raised his suspicions with her, she managed to deny that anything had happened and at the same time allude to the seven-million-dollar advice she had received and from whom. Merle never raised the subject again.
Merle’s preoccupation, other than the oil business, derived from his feeling that he was a mixture of his father’s superior and his mother’s inferior genes, and the one thing he blamed his father for was the use of his mother to reproduce him. He thought that a fundamental, irreversible mistake that would handicap him for the rest of his life unless he learned to use every oun
ce of brains that he had. Merle continued in his father’s oil business, but his off-duty hours were devoted to cramming his head full of all the learning he didn’t get at Harvard Business School. His intellectual pursuits included hobnobbing with some of the more sensible faculty at the university, who were always glad to get a splendid free meal at the Cliffords’, and one or two found a way to thank their hostess privately in a way that pleased them both. Merle Clifford ventured to New York, where he occasionally attended a salon conducted by a French lady that was frequented by conservative intellectuals and by more than one senator. He took Abigail with him on these excursions because her mind was good, she kept up with him as best she could, and wasn’t an embarrassment in that kind of company the way so many Texas wives were.
Merle’s special interest in genetics also took him to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to attend conferences, where he was always welcome as a donor and eventually as a participant. His only problem with his eastern ventures was that he suspected that a good many of the people he met in Cambridge and New York were Jews, and that bothered him somewhat more each year.
Merle was torn between his sometime need for intellectual companionship and his horror at how many faculty members and graduate students in genetics had Jewish names. Worse still, he wondered how many of the others with ordinary-sounding names might be concealed Jews. Over the years he developed a series of discreet questions that enabled him, in the guise of a discussion of genetics, to probe the true ancestry of one suspect or another.
He settled on the fact that New York was a dangerous trap, but in his travels over the next two decades, he came to the conclusion that San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Baltimore were rife with scholars and wits of Semitic origin. The statistics about Jewish Nobel prizewinners was appalling! Couldn’t something be done about these people?