Candy sat silently for a second, her eyes fixed on the telephone. She was waiting for it to ring again, and for that raucous, unladylike voice to complete its demolition of the lovely summer morning. As for the Miraculous Mandarin Suite, it had come to an end and the radio was now delivering an extremely nasal rendition of “The Wabash Cannonball.”
Candy bit her full lower lip in annoyance, and had just begun to pour herself a cup of espresso coffee when the bell rang again.
She placed the half-filled cup on the table with a little crash of exasperation and picked up the phone. There was no answer—and yet, the bell kept ringing. Then she realized that it was the front door; she had absurdly confused it with the phone.
Ordinarily she would have thought of such an error as no more than amusing; but not this morning. Coming after the stormy events of the past few days, this little stumble that her mind had made struck her as being significant—ominous as well. My nerves have had about as much as they can stand, she thought as she went to answer the door.
In the doorway stood a very thin old man dressed in a messenger boy’s uniform.
“Telegram for Miss Christian,” he said. He was blinking violently.
Candy noticed how slender and delicate his wrist was when she took the envelope. She looked at him again. He seemed to be on the verge of tears. “Is there anything wrong? I mean are you feeling ill, or—”
“Something in my eye,” he explained.
“Something in your eye! Well, for goodness sake don’t rub it like that!”
(He had taken out a handkerchief and was patting at his eye.)
Candy had to stoop down to look into his eye—he was quite short. As she did so her bathrobe opened considerably and, since this took place a few inches before his face, he found himself staring at her bare throat and splendid young breasts. . . .
“No, not that way,” she ordered, “look up!”
“Boy!” he muttered enthusiastically, squinting as best he could with his watery and twitching eye at Candy’s luscious chest.
Even if he had looked up it wouldn’t have been much good—he was standing in the doorway with the light behind him and it was impossible to see the speck in his eye. Impulsively, the young girl took him by the lapels of his jacket and drew him into the room where she turned him this way and that trying to get the proper light.
After a few minutes of this she ended up sitting on a sofa with the elderly messenger boy stretched out beside her and his head in her lap.
He had yielded limply when she had bent him down backward and now, as she leaned over him, her left breast became almost entirely disengaged from the bathrobe and loomed above his face. He snapped at it weakly, missing it by a few inches.
While Candy’s attention was wholly engaged in trying to remove the speck from his eye, the elderly messenger boy continued to regard her breast peevishly, and now and again lunged feebly, like a sick seal, at it. Finally, he paused, his mouth watering profusely as Candy stared at the red, winking eye. “I’ll have it out in a jiffy!” she announced cheerfully, then ordered: “Hold still!” And, as she twisted to and fro, the flimsily attached bathrobe really opened and both her pert, inquisitive young breasts appeared. “Don’t move!” she admonished. “I think I see it!”
The aged fellow held still as requested, but an instant later, when Candy leaned forward abruptly, bringing her fantastic breasts to within an inch of his face, he lost all semblance of control and dived desperately into the open bathrobe.
Candy was so taken aback that she sat stock-still at first, and for a few seconds the thin old man rooted and wallowed between her breasts, rubbing them with his nose and muttering wildly to himself.
“Now listen . . .” she said, suddenly realizing what was up. “What in the world are you doing!” and she pushed him firmly from her lap.
He fell immediately to the floor and lay there on his back with his frail limbs waving slowly like a beetle’s. Then he managed to stagger to his feet and shuffle to the open door. . . .
“Good-bye, darling,” he gulped, pausing there and blinking rapidly four or five times.
Candy waited till she was sure he was gone before she crossed the room and shut the door. “Well!” she said to herself. “I wonder what the messenger-service people would think if they knew that one of their messengers—” She stopped, noticing the telegram which she’d all but forgotten in the confusion. She stooped and got it from the floor, opened it and read:
EXPECTING YOU HOSPITAL 10:30 A.M.
DR. J. DUNLAP.
Good Grief, I’ll barely have time to dress, she thought and shuddered slightly—a chill feeling of foreboding had come over her as she read the message, and she couldn’t shake it off. . . .
By taking a taxi she managed to arrive at the Racine County Hospital at 10:30 on the dot. She hurried into the first door she saw, which didn’t happen to be the main entrance, and found herself standing in a gleaming long corridor flanked by spotless white doors. She started walking tentatively, looking for an office of some kind where she could state her business. Each door seemed very much like the next and she finally opened one at random, and went in, hoping to find a nurse or someone who would be able to tell her where to find Dr. Dunlap.
She saw at once that she was in one of the sickrooms. There was a disheveled bed, and squatting on the floor for some reason was the occupant.
It was a woman in her seventies with very long gray hair and wearing a white nightgown.
“Git out!” she said in a cranky voice.
“Oh!” Candy said. “Oh—I’m so sorry,” and she carefully shut the door.
After this she was more prudent, but when she came to a door with a bronze plaque on it on which was engraved OSPHRESIOLAGNIA, she paused. From inside she could hear the clicking of a typewriter. It stopped when she knocked and a deep masculine voice said: “Come in.”
Seated behind a desk was a dark good-looking young man. His deep brown eyes were the most sensitive and the most intelligent that Candy felt she had ever seen, and his nose was thin, with a fine aristocratic curve.
Her heart gave a little jump in that first instant of their meeting, and she even had time to think: Perhaps all the rest of my life I shall recall this moment—and then the silence was broken by his sonorous voice, as he cleared his throat and leaned forward slightly, placing his hands gracefully, almost protectingly, on the typewriter.
“Are you here for masturbation?” he inquired briskly.
“I beg your pardon?” said Candy. It was just possible, she thought, that she hadn’t heard right.
The young man held his fist up and agitated it meaningfully, yet with such a disinterested air that his gesture-ordinarily such a smutty one—seemed quite abstract and inoffensive. “You know—onanism—‘beating your meat,’” he explained.
“Oh no!” Candy declared, quite taken aback. “I’m not sure why I’m here . . . but it certainly couldn’t be for that!”
“You said ‘that’ in a peculiar sort of way—as if you thought there were something wrong with the subject,” observed the young man behind the desk, his eyes flashing belligerently.
“Well I—I said, er—I didn’t mean to make a value judgment,” she stammered, terribly flustered.
“I see,” he said coldly.
“But isn’t it unhealthy? I mean, masturbation is bad for the complexion, isn’t it?”
The young man stared at her with scientific detachment and said nothing.
What she had just uttered sounded idiotic to her and she tried frantically to think of some way to repair the damage, but nothing came to mind. She stood, blushing crimson for an unbearable few seconds, then, unable to stand the tension any longer, she wheeled and bolted—dashing out the door so precipitously that she collided with a nurse who was coming down the hall.
The nurse—a small stocky brunette—stepped back, clenched her fist and prepared to punch Candy in the jaw. (You had to be ready for trouble every moment in a hospital; an
d anyone who came flying violently out of that door could quite easily be psychotic.)
Candy excused herself as best she could and asked the nurse where the administration office was.
“Well, it’s not in there,” the nurse replied warily, indicating the room Candy had just rushed out of. (She still wasn’t sure she might not be dealing with some kind of raving, anal-erotic maniac.)
“Yes,” Candy said dryly, “I found that out. . . . But whose office is that? I mean there was a young man in there who . . .”
“Dr. Irving Krankeit,” the nurse cut in.
“Dr. Irving Krankeit,” Candy repeated musingly. “And he’s—?”
“He’s our staff psychiatrist.”
“Oh, I see! I was just wondering because some of the things he said were—Well, I understand of course, if he’s a psychiatrist . . .”
The nurse nodded sympathetically, then growing secretive, she suddenly grasped Candy’s elbow and drew her several paces down the hall. “Dr. Krankeit’s theories are unconventional,” she confided in a low voice. “Very unconventional.”
“Oh?”
The nurse grew even more conspiring. Her voice threatening to descend to a whisper, she said: “Yes, he believes that the way to clear up our mental problems, and to settle all the troubles in the world is to get everyone to—” She broke off, regarding the young girl uncertainly.
“Yes?” said Candy, eager to learn.
“. . . to—well, you’ve heard the title of his book, haven’t you?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t,” said Candy.
“It’s called . . . Masturbation Now!” the nurse said, forming each syllable slowly with her lips and making almost no sound. Then she sucked in her cheeks appraisingly.
“That certainly is an unconventional idea,” Candy admitted.
“He claims that normal sex relations,” the nurse went on, “cause all these mental disorders so many people have, and he says that his way would stop War!”
Candy thought of Dr. Krankeit’s earnest young face, the evident sincerity of his dark beseeching eyes. . . . Surely he was honest! . . . and dedicated too, and—and sweet and kind. . . . “Well,” she said philosophically, “maybe the world needs some shocking new notion like that to make men stop fighting with each other.”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” the squat little nurse said shrugging, and with that she turned on her heel and started to walk away. “‘Reception’ is down that way,” she called back, “turn right at the end of the corridor,” and she pointed to the way from which she herself had come.
Candy followed these instructions and soon found herself in a waiting room for visitors and “out-patients.”
The several people sitting about all put down their magazines and ceased their whispered conversations to stare at the newcomer; and Candy, feeling quite self-conscious, went straight to the reception desk and presented to the woman there the telegram she’d received. The receptionist was a small, birdlike woman whose name, according to a sign on the desk, was Mrs. Prippet.
“Have a seat,” she said, having scarcely glanced at the telegram and regarding Candy fixedly as if there were something extremely curious about the lovely young girl standing before her.
Candy hesitated. “This came this morning,” she said, indicating the telegram. She paused, and Mrs. Prippet and the people seated about looked at her expectantly. “I wonder if you could tell me . . .” her voice trailed off uncertainly—everyone in the room was listening with great interest and she was especially intimidated by the receptionist, Mrs. Prippet, who was looking at her with a pained expression as if Candy were speaking some sort of grotesquely broken English.
“You are Candy Christian?”
“Why yes, I—”
“Then please sit down,” Mrs. Prippet said icily. “Dr. Dunlap will see you as soon as he’s free.”
Candy turned only to face a barrage of silent eyes.
Not until she had found a seat did they leave off and, with a rustle of pages and dry whispers, go back to their previous occupations. And now that she was safely ensconced, Candy, in turn, began to look at them, stealing furtive glimpses and turning quickly away whenever another pair of exploring eyes clashed with her own. . . .
Sitting opposite was a fat girl about her own age, and her throat was horribly distended with goiter. Candy looked at it for five seconds in fascination before realizing that she was “staring.” She turned then, angry with herself. For heaven’s sake, she thought, a thing like that is merely an accidental glandular condition; it has nothing whatsoever to do with what the girl’s really like. She might be someone with a great awareness of Beauty . . . a sculptress perhaps, or a magnificent contralto . . . well no, not a contralto . . .
She continued taking inventory. There were two nuns; one old, one young, but both pale and wearing eyeglasses with silver rims. From time to time the younger one hissed something to her companion who would give no sign of having heard anything. Near them a young couple, the woman pregnant, whispered together. And finally, a man wearing Bermuda shorts and a sport jacket whose face she couldn’t see since he was holding a copy of National Geographic in front of it. Candy’s gaze lingered on the man’s knees and calves, which were a bit plump she thought, and then she realized with a start that he was looking at her—peeping, that is, through the fingers that held the magazine, and, presumably, watching her reaction to his plump knees. . . .
She looked hastily away and her eyes were drawn to the goiter again; but this time its owner caught her in the act, and stared fiercely back at her. Candy didn’t know which way to turn and was considering just shutting her eyes when a man with snow-white hair and a goatee strode into the waiting room.
There was a distinct elegance about this man, Candy thought, something chivalric—a natural grace in the way his body bent from the waist almost as if he were bowing.
Suddenly he straightened bolt upright and stared at her, at Candy! Then he bent down quickly again, whispered something. . . . Mrs. Prippet was eying her too now and was nodding “yes” with her head. . . .
“Miss Christian,” she called.
Candy sprang up and came to the desk. Once again all eyes focused on her, and a warm blush welled up, darkening her pretty face. It was like being the point of interest in a stadium, she thought, as she gracefully took her position before the man with the snowy hair.
Mrs. Prippet cleared her throat, and said, in a whisper everyone in the room could hear, “Dr. Dunlap would like to ask you a few questions, Miss Christian,” and then added ominously, “Dr. Dunlap is the Director of our hospital.”
Candy expected that the courtly gentleman would invite her to his office at this point, but such an idea didn’t seem to occur to him. He was staring at her in an extraordinarily blunt fashion.
“Yes,” he said in a rasping whisper, spacing each word slowly and distinctly, “I most certainly would like to ask Miss Christian ‘a few questions!’”
Needless to say, his vehemence discomforted Candy still further.
There followed a pause now, during which the distinguished-looking doctor glared sternly at Candy as if to see whether she dared say anything. The suspense increased by the second; everyone in the waiting room leaned forward, hardly breathing, and shamelessly attentive. . . .
This would have been a good moment for Candy herself to suggest that they retire to Dr. Dunlap’s private office, but she discovered she was incapable of speaking. Helplessly she glanced about at the audience with their bulging eyes, then, mutely entreating, she turned again to the director. . . .
Either Dr. Dunlap didn’t understand this plea, or else he simply didn’t care. He held his hands clasped behind his back and stood with his feet spaced well apart, and now, just before he addressed her, he rose up and down on his toes several times in a terrifying imitation of Charles Laughton in Mutiny on the Bounty.
“Miss Christian,” he snarled in an ear-splitting whisper, “your father was admitted to this ho
spital two nights ago with an extremely grave head injury, suffering from shock, loss of blood, and possible concussion. . . . He had been dealt a violent blow to the frontal lobe of his brain—a blow, which, if by some miracle does not prove fatal, will nevertheless probably leave him mentally impaired for the rest of his life!” Dr. Dunlap paused, carefully breathed three times, rising up and down on his toes as he did, then went on even more slowly and pompously than before. “Last night, Miss Christian, at a time when your father was hovering so closely to death that the slightest disturbance might have sealed his fate, one of our nurses, hearing a noise, entered the room and found you . . . stark naked, writhing, wallowing and—and—and—COPULATING ON THE FLOOR OF THAT SICKROOM!”
A gasp of triumph—almost of relief—burst from the crowd at this revelation. The girl with the goiter slapped herself on the thigh as if she had somehow guessed what was coming all along.
Dr. Dunlap had actually shouted the last few words of his terrible accusation and now stood with his jowls trembling from the intensity of his emotions.
Mrs. Prippet, the receptionist, smiled proudly, and as for poor Candy, her knees suddenly sagged and she felt as though she were going to swoon.
“No,” she moaned. “No . . . no . . .”
“What!” the director demanded indignantly. “I say that you were seen, you and some man, having wanton intercourse on the floor under your father’s bed! Seen—do you hear me? Seen going at it like a pair of HOT WART HOGS!!!” (He had begun to shout again, carried away like a holy-roller preacher.) “HORSING ON THE FLOOR! HUMPING UNDER THE BED! GROUSING IN THE GOODIE!”
“No, no,” Candy sobbed, “oh please . . . please, please. PLEASE! You don’t understand . . .”
“DON’T UNDERSTAND?” roared the director.
“Don’t understand?” echoed the girl with the goiter, who had suddenly gotten to her feet in the excitement.
“No!” Candy cried. “You don’t! . . . It isn’t what you think!”
“Why the nerve of her!” the pregnant woman exclaimed.
“She could have killed her own father—doing a thing like that right there under his nose,” interjected the man in the Bermuda shorts.
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