The Harrad Experiment

by Robert H. Rimmer

  “Will you room with Harry again?”

  “No,” Beth said, fastening her bra. “He wouldn’t be happy with me.”

  “Would you room with me?”

  “No, because I’m only partially amoral. You said you love Sheila. Sheila would have to love me ...”

  “It’s too complicated,” I said ...

  “Too impractical, you mean,” she said and slapped me on the behind, “Come on, Stanley-the-Giant Killer ... get ready. A New Year is coming up!”

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF SHEILA GROVE

  December, January, February and March, the First Year

  Well, I did it! I made it possible for Stanley and Beth to be together. If you love a man, do you consciously test his love? Could I love Stanley so much that I wouldn’t be jealous of him if he went to bed with Beth? Could he love me and even consider such a thing? Could I love Stanley and permit myself to have intercourse with Harry? No! ... No! ... No! ... unless I loved Harry. Could I love both Stanley and Harry? According to the Tenhausens this is possible. But loving and having sex with two men ... that’s decidedly different. I couldn’t do it ... I don’t think. Anyway, that’s not really the point of my problem. It just comes down to this ... I do love Stanley. In a hundred ways we think and feel alike about so many things. Stanley is gentle, affectionate, and a wonderfully passionate lover. I would marry him. What is love? What is marriage? A person with whom to share your loneliness? Isn’t this what every human being must have ... someone who lets the little tiny thing that is really and truly “you” out of the shadowy hiding place in your brain, and accepts this strange “you” and loves whatever this something is that makes you what you are ... loves the mercurial “you” that maybe even sometimes you don’t understand yourself? And you love him in return in the same way, though there are no words for it and it “passes understanding.” Is that kind of love possible except between one man and one woman? And if you could love two men, wouldn’t something be subtracted out of each relationship?

  God, it’s confusing. Tonight, while I was eating at the most exclusive country club in Palm Beach, dressed in a three hundred dollar evening gown, trying to smile at Gregory Caldwell, and respond to him, Beejee Grove, my third mother, by adoption (insisting in a whiskey tenor that Gregory was a good catch and his family owned just piles of Humble Oil Stock), ... tonight, while I drank two martinis, four glasses of champagne, refused oysters and wasted a huge lobster ... the leftovers from all our meals would have fed a family of four (and who was really happy?) ... tonight, Stanley Kolasukas (whose family probably couldn’t even afford a Christmas turkey) and Beth Hillyer are somewhere between Boston, Massachusetts and Columbus, Ohio, in my car. I wonder what they ate for dinner. I wonder what they ... No, Damn it, Sheila, stop it ... stop it!

  Why did I come to Palm Beach, anyway? I had two choices. Mother’s house, with a Christmas tree and all the kids, and Sheila feeling like a maiden aunt while she helped her step-brothers and step-sisters play with their dolls and games. Or Daddy’s current winter-time house, where my newest mother, Beejee, is entertaining an endless procession of sleek friends; confiding in any male who cared to listen that sex with Daddy was hellza-poppin, and who said a man of fifty wasn’t any good? Where Sam Grove got the energy she would never know ... saying all this with a piercing look, hoping (I bet) that the listener might challenge her husband’s bed prowess. During the holidays I noticed several men who seemed eager to enter this kind of Olympics, and perhaps did. Beejee is a remarkably good-looking woman, and being only thirty-seven probably has a stamina for combat that would surprise Daddy, if he knew.

  “You know, Sheila,” Beejee told me, “your father is a very energetic man. Unfortunately, sex for him is only a necessary incident to sandwich in between other occupations. See what I mean.” She waved at Daddy, who was in the library making a long-distance phone call. “You know what he is doing? He is calling Iran. He wants to check the political situation and see whether the student uprising will spread to the Grove Oil properties. You know what he was doing twenty minutes ago? He was in bed with me. Ten minutes before that he was on the telephone to San Jose. Some fun!”

  So, Beejee plays the field. And during the incessant round of parties and continual drinking, I began to wonder if any sane person would be really shocked by Harrad College. A good portion of the (adult?) world was obviously on a sexual merry-go-round, with everyone who was married trying to catch a new brass ring as it whirled by. But the laughter and high spirits seemed to have a hollow sound. It reminded me of Archibald MacLeish’s poem “Sonnet to the End of the World.” I learned it by heart at Brightwater.

  “Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot

  The armless ambidextrian was lighting

  A match between his great and second toe

  And Ralph, the lion, was engaged in biting

  The neck of Madame Sossman, while the drum

  Pointed; and Teeny was about to cough

  In, waltz-time, swinging Jocko by the thumb

  Quite unexpectedly the top blew off.

  And there, there overhead, there, there hung over

  Those thousands of white faces, those dazed faces

  There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover

  There with vast wings across the cancelled skies

  There in the sudden blackness, the black pall

  Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all!

  Oh damn, damn to hell with such morbid stuff. I know ... I really know the answer. It was all so clean and good ... those weeks in November with Stanley. For him, too, I’m sure. Can we recapture it? Can I recapture it ... or will I build a cross out of Beth and nail Stanley to it?

  The day after Christmas I couldn’t stand it any more. I begged off a very special party aboard the Caldwell’s fifty-foot Chris Craft. I was sure Greg would find me a “good miss,” anyway. I mooned around the swimming pool, thinking it would be fun to have it all to ourselves and swim naked in it with Stanley, and then make love lying on that rough Florida grass, and watch the stars and the black sky through the palm fronds. Finally I decided that wishing wasn’t going to make it so, and I went to bed in the big guest room that Beejee had given me for the holidays.

  To keep my mind off Stanley and Beth and sex and God knows what wormy thoughts were slightering through my brain, I turned on the late show on television. Propped up in bed I watched an old movie called Wings of the Eagle. Now this was a mistake! Here’s John Wayne, portraying a man who actually lived, Frank “Spig” some-thing-or-other, who was a naval hero. John is married to a very nice woman, played by Maureen O’Hara, and they have a baby boy. Are they happy? Well, John is. He spends his time crashing up airplanes (for fun), or establishing new flying records, or mostly brawling around with the “boys.” He hasn’t much time for Maureen or any sissy-like stuff that a man and woman might do together. Then their baby dies. Does John put his arm around Maureen and want to be close together in their tragedy? Hell, no! He sits in the living room; holds his head in his hands and smokes a pack of cigarettes. Big strong men don’t cry ... see? Anyway John doesn’t get drunk. He just tries to get cancer in one night. Next scene. Why worry? There’s more babies where that one came from. Here come John and Maureen, each pushing a baby carriage. Each with a daughter. Obviously a few years have snuck away. But John is still itchy ... not for Maureen. Hell, no ... for the Navy! He is now flying around the world and hasn’t been home for years. Maureen has to take her daughters to the neighborhood movie theater to see their Daddy in the newsreels. Mummy, is that man with the goggles really my Daddy? (No ... no ... that not my Daddy. My daddy not ugly so!) Then lo and behold! Daddy John comes home. The children don’t recognize him, but Mommy does! She’s sex-starved, I bet you. After years and years they finally go to bed in twin beds. Daddy John wakes up in the night (his first night home), Maureen is snoring in the other sack. Does he hear his darling children crying in the night? He does. Rushing out of the bedroom (the jerk has been away so long h
e’s forgotten he’s sleeping on the second floor), he tumbles down two flights of stairs and breaks his neck. Literally, no kidding!

  Does this make him a better man? Do Maureen and John come closer together? No, sir! John knows he’s been a bastard. So now he’ll be the big strong hero and not tie Maureen down to a poor crumb who has to stay on his stomach for ever and ever. How does he evacuate, I begin to wonder ... stretched out like that? This bothered me so much that I lost the thread of the plot for awhile. Anyway, Maureen loves John, broken neck or broken thing-a-ma-jig. But John is adamant. She must get out of his life! She should have skipped out singing! Not Maureen. She slinks bravely down the hospital corridor, struggling to contain her tears.

  After months and months on his stomach (unable to evacuate, I guess, and hence pretty constipated) John, with the help of a Navy buddy who loves him, manages to wiggle his big toe, proving that whatever brain he had was finally equal to this effort, anyway. After this singular accomplishment, John becomes a famous writer (I was getting pretty sorry I had turned on the knob that started this whole mess). John makes a fortune writing stories, movies and plays about the wonderful boys in the Navy. Does he miss Maureen, who lives alone in another city? Misty eyed and slightly bald, he occasionally looks at photographs she has sent him of herself with her daughters. Time has passed—the kids are wearing baccalaureate hats. Finally, the guy who has taught him to wiggle his big toe convinces him that he might need a wife to take care of him in his old age.

  Unannounced, after what must be ten years or more, Big Daddy John calls on Maureen his hat in his hand, a bumbling, sheepish boy. He finally persuades her that “home is the sailor” or some such gush, and she figuring perhaps that since the old boy is on crutches, maybe he will stay put while she fetches his pipe and slippers. They turn on the radio. Wham! It’s December 7th, 1941 ... Pearl Harbor. Goodbye, Maureen ... my country needs me! Our hero hobbles to Washington, offers his services, invents an ingenious plan to beat the Japs, wangles his way onto an aircraft carrier, practically wins the Pacific War and then has a heart attack. Is he dead? Sweat through the deodorant and cigarette commercial. Nope ... Big John has three months, six months to live, who can tell? Get out your handkerchiefs, wipe your sniffly nose. Here comes John hobbling across the aircraft carrier while all the men stand at attention and the bugles play. With tears in his eyes, he salutes his “boys” and he is escalated off the carrier to a waiting destroyer ... homeward bound. While it isn’t shown in the picture, you know that Maureen will get the pleasure of burying him.

  By the time this movie was over I was really depressed. Was this supposed to be the story of a good man? Obviously. The big wonderful lovable brute could destroy the lives of his wife and daughters, but he was really and truly a man ... a hero, and isn’t love a secondary pursuit, after all?

  I sometimes wonder if the Tenhausens seriously believe what they are doing. Man, so amazingly ingenious at mastering his environment, creating such incredible things as automobiles, airplanes, television, computers, controlling life and even death; man dreaming of the stars and the universe, has so little interest or feeling or desire to really know and love another person. All you have to do is read the morning newspaper to know that it must be easier to invent a hydrogen bomb than to put your hand out to someone and say, “I understand... I sympathize ... I love you because I am you.”

  My life so far has been a tryst with loneliness, an overwhelming longing to find someone to run to, to hold myself against, to find someone in the world I could surrender to, to blend myself with; not essentially in a physical sense, but in a mutual involvement that was so strong that we would come to each other willingly as naked, defenseless human beings.

  Does man ever achieve this with man, or are we all so fearful with one another that even after years of living together most men and women are afraid to surrender to each other completely? I guess surrender of one’s self is against all concepts of the Western World which demand self-mastery; virility beyond any man or woman’s real capacity for virility. I would think people in love, in marriage, could do this with one another and yet for the most part I guess they can’t. We are all little, fearing souls ... afraid ... afraid of what? ... Of being scorned ... of being laughed at. This must be the reason that there are priests, psychiatrists, and social workers in the world. Someone a person can go to and attempt to be what he really is. But for me neither the priest nor psychiatrist nor social worker would be able to release the springs of my being. They would be unable to be involved with me, try as they might. Unless they, too, lived and responded to me in a defenseless way, I would know they were not really participating but inevitably would be judges. So most people never really have anywhere to turn.

  Today and yesterday, alone here at Harrad, I have been reading Toward a Psychology of Being. Maslow sums it up: “Expressing one’s nature ... refers to effortless spontaneity which permits the deepest, innermost nature to be seen in behavior. Since spontaneity is difficult, most people can be called ‘human impersonators,’ i.e., they are trying to be what they think is human, rather than just being what they are.”

  What I’m really trying to ask is why couldn’t I have really been Sheila New Year’s Eve? I arrived in at La Guardia Airport buoyant, happy. I was going to see Stanley again. I would be with all the kids at Harrad, and the uneasiness of my Palm Beach “vacation” would dissipate.

  About four-thirty, I walked into the Harrad Suite. A bunch of the kids were sitting in the living room. Bottles were stacked on the coffee tables. Although everyone was drinking, they were talking in whispers and their eyes were bright with excitement. They hushed my noisy greeting. Jack Dawes, followed by Peter Longini, Roger Wilnor, and Harry Schacht emerged from one of the other rooms. I thought Harry had a strange, flushed expression on his face. Jack Dawes broke the embarrassed silence.

  “Sheila,” he whispered, “I hope you are in a good mood and still have a sense of humor.” I took off my coat and looked at him, puzzled, “What the heck is going on ... it looks like a meeting of the Communist International.”

  “Beth and Stanley are in one of the bedrooms ... sound asleep. We’ve rigged up a surprise for them.” Peter chuckled.

  “It’s awful,” Dorothy Stapleton said, but she obviously didn’t think so. “We all got here an hour ago, and Jack discovered them. They haven’t even heard us. Jack and the boys filled a ‘safe’ with water and hung it over their heads. It’s hanging there like a huge bloop ready to burst any minute. It must have a gallon of water in it.”

  “You mean they slept through all of this,” I asked, feeling as if the pit of my stomach had sunk through the floor to the lobby.

  I followed them through the connecting suite and into the bedroom. It is a wonder that I didn’t burst into tears. Beth was sleeping with her arm across Stanley’s chest. Stanley looked as peacefully happy as a male angel.

  I didn’t have time to even gasp in disgust (was it disgust? or hate? or more a feeling of terrible submission before the lash of a whip?), because the safe collapsed, and deluged the sleeping cherubs. Jack yanked the blanket off the bed, and Stanley and Beth, naked and dripping wet, awoke from their sweet dreams to a world of yelling and screaming maniacs.

  I ran out of the room, followed by Harry Schacht, and finally the rest of the kinds. Was that a mistake? Maybe. Harry and I could have stayed in the bedroom with Beth and Stanley. For the rest, it was none of their business. Maybe somehow I could have spoken the rush of emotions I really felt. Stanley, I love you, I’m not really shocked. Only a little frightened to know that I have shared you ... that maybe while you were making love with Beth you were laughing at me.

  Later, back in the living room, with Harry silently drinking and Beth much too convivial with the rest of the Harrad kids, Stanley said to me: “I’m sorry if I hurt you, She.”

  “Why don’t you just sock me in the jaw?” I asked sarcastically. “You might just as well finish the job.”

  Stanley looked at
me sadly. “Loving isn’t a game of subtraction. I love you no less.”

  “It isn’t a game of multiplication, either. Let’s not talk about it.”

  And we didn’t ... nor could I, no matter how much I wanted to, talk with Stanley the rest of the evening. Like Faust I let my soul go to the Devil (not for knowledge) but for pride. All I really had to do was try to talk with Stanley ... or listen. I could tell by the expression on his face that if we were alone for a minute he would have kissed me or touched my hand and maybe somehow have made me believe that what had physically taken place between him and Beth did not automatically undermine the joy we had and still might have with each other. Although I dimly perceived that in some utopian world it might be possible for several men and women to interweave their lives so their sexual acts with several mates not only did not diminish them individually, or for each other, but actually might become a corner-stone on which an even greater arch of love and life might be erected, it was only a dim perception. So I grabbed Mephistopheles’ tail and plunged into New Year’s Eve. Or was it really a Walpurgis Night that began with a condom swaying from the œiling over two lovers and ended on Hartz Mountain with Sheila nearly raped by horrible demons?

  The second meeting with the Witches began when Valerie Latrobe, instead of letting the whole episode sink into oblivion, insisted (in the true Harrad tradition) on cleansing the wound in public.

  Harry Schacht tried to shut her up, but her persistent probing and laughing re-hash of what had happened in the bedroom finally commanded the attention of the entire group.

  “I really don’t see why you are so darned shocked, Harry,” she said imperturbably. “So ... if Stanley and Beth slept together? Isn’t that what you expected would happen at Harrad?”