Candy

by Terry Southern

  “I’ll have you know that this is a hospital, and not a . . . house of ill-repute!” Dr. Dunlap proclaimed.

  “This is no place for a common young harlot to—”

  “Oh!” Candy whimpered, flinching at every word.

  “Another thing,” volunteered the younger nun, “how did her father get hurt? Who was it that struck him down . . . and why?”

  Mrs. Prippet nodded her head vigorously in agreement and said:

  “That’s right! We haven’t heard about that part yet.”

  “Probably did it herself,” the young husband muttered. “Or had her boyfriend do it,” added his wife, giving him a dark look.

  “I say that nobody in their right mind would come into their own father’s sickroom and—and,” said Dr. Dunlap, trying to develop his theory calmly and with scientific objectivity, but as he started to grope for words he lost control and was soon bellowing again: “TROLLOP! SLUT! FLOOSIE!”

  “Could you sit down, please?” the young nun said to the girl with the goiter. “She can’t see,” she explained, indicating the old nun who was straining forward in her chair and trying to look around the others, but who was evidently too weak to stand up.

  The plump girl did not sit down, but rather stepped to the side, considerately looking back to ascertain that she no longer obstructed the view.

  For Candy, overwhelmed with embarrassment, it happened with the economy and the faultless logic of a dream: the girl stepping aside and looking back . . . moving her slablike arm out of the way . . . and finally, the toothless old nun revealed, leaning forward with visible relish to drink in what she’d been missing. . . .

  “Good Grief!” Candy said aloud. “This is worse than a nightmare!” Then she fainted.

  7

  AS CANDY FELL, a dark-haired young man who had been standing in the doorway entered the room and hurried to her side. It was Dr. Krankeit, who, hearing the sound of raised and angry voices, had stepped out of his office and come to the waiting room to investigate.

  He had just time to understand that the girl, object and brunt of Dr. Dunlap’s awful accusations, was the daughter of the recently admitted Mr. Christian—one of his patients—and then Candy slumped to the floor. . . .

  In a moment he was on his knees next to her, taking her pulse and making sure that this collapse was not of a grave nature. Then, still kneeling, he raised his head and regarded Dr. Dunlap thoughtfully.

  Ordinarily, Krankeit had such consummate control of his feelings that he often appeared to his patients and colleagues as emotionless; but now there was an angry glint in his expressive brown eyes when he addressed the director:

  “Really, J. D., this is . . .” he paused, shaking his head incredulously as he sought to encompass the magnitude of it all, “. . . I mean were you trying to get this girl to faint? It’s—it’s simply astonishing!”

  Suddenly Mrs. Prippet hurried from her desk and knelt beside him. “Here, dear,” she said to Candy, whose eyes were fluttering open, “breathe in deeply—this will bring you round in a jiffy,” and she held a small bottle under Candy’s nose. Candy inhaled obediently several times before her eyes closed once more and her head slumped limply against Krankeit’s shoulder. He regarded her for a moment, then snatched the flask from Mrs. Prippet and whiffed the contents.

  “This isn’t smelling-salts, you imbecile,” he hissed, thrusting the bottle at her, “it’s ether!”

  Dr. Dunlap was quite silent now—as were all the others in the room—and visibly taken aback by what had occurred. It was not so much concern for Candy’s welfare that distressed him as it was his embarrassment before the onlookers—the incident had taken an unfortunate turn and was clearly showing an aptitude for becoming a small scandal. Worst of all, Krankeit had witnessed the thing, and might utilize it to undermine his (Dunlap’s) position at the hospital.

  “You’re quite right, Krankeit,” he muttered suddenly, “I completely lost my head and behaved like an idiot—here, give me a hand. Let’s get her into my office. She can lie on the couch till she comes around.”

  “No. Let’s take her to my office. There are some questions I’d like to ask her,” Krankeit said.

  “Questions?” Dr. Dunlap’s eyes widened and his jaw stiffened.

  “About her father,” explained Krankeit. “And I’d like to have her come with me when I examine him. That is,” he added sarcastically, “if she’s in any condition to do so.”

  Dr. Dunlap acquiesced. The sooner this whole affair could be transported behind a closed door the better. He took Candy under the arms and Krankeit took her legs and together they lifted her. At a frown from Dr. Krankeit, Dr. Dunlap shifted his grip—he had clasped his hands over Candy’s shapely breasts—and held her by the armpits, which was much more awkward. Then they carried her off.

  When they had laid her on the couch in Krankeit’s office, Dunlap straightened up and stood morosely silent, not sure what to do next.

  Arranging Candy’s skirt, which had climbed high on her thighs, Krankeit said: “Perhaps it would be wiser if Miss Christian didn’t see you first thing when she regains consciousness”—he paused, and suddenly his eyes flicked into Dr. Dunlap’s watery gaze—“she might blow her stack,” he said, and blew out a faint jet of well-inhaled cigarette smoke.

  Dr. Dunlap slumped as if he’d been dealt a stiff body punch.

  “Right,” he said nodding limply, “but . . . but, Krankeit . . . there’s something I’d like to ask . . . I mean about what happened here just now, I, eh . . . I trust you’re not . . . I mean I realize the thing must have looked shocking to you, but it’s a closed issue now and I hope—”

  “Don’t sob!” Krankeit snapped with contempt.

  “Don’t sob?” exclaimed the older man, his voice cracking, and, as if Krankeit’s admonition were a signal, he immediately began to sniff and wring his hands like a little girl. “It’s all very well for you to sit there and tell me this and tell me that and tell me to get out and tell me not to sob . . . You’re a young man, your career’s just beginning now and you haven’t got a care in the world. You’re not sixty-one years old. You haven’t been connected with this hospital for twenty-two years! You don’t have dismissal staring you in the face,” he blubbered, “and with just a few more months to go before retirement. . . .”

  Eyes bulging, and gasping for breath, he paused. Then, with a horrible contortion of his mouth which was meant to be a smile, he said: “You know, Krankeit, I’m not such a bad sort of guy—oh, I know we don’t always see eye to eye about everything—the latest techniques, the way the hospital should be run. I know you must think I’m conservative, not up-to-date; perhaps a—a—”

  “—a senile horse’s ass?” Dr. Krankeit suggested callously. Dr. Dunlap winced, and his pendulous lips quivered. It seemed for a moment as if he might lose his head completely and begin squealing like an insane ape, but suddenly he regained his composure, and when he spoke again he did so softly and not without dignity.

  “You may not believe this,” he said, “but I was very much like you are now—when I was a young man. Hotheaded . . . outspoken . . . I was pretty impatient with the older men too, and I didn’t give two hoots if they heard me saying so either. Just the way you are. I suppose that explains why—even though we’ve occasionally been at loggerheads since you’ve come here—I, er—er—well, that secretly, I liked you all the time. Sometimes, as a matter of fact, I almost feel as if I might be your Dad.” (Dr. Dunlap became a bit choked up again as he made this surprising revelation.) “Mrs. Dunlap and I don’t have any children,” he confessed, “but if we did have a son, I think I’d want him to be something like you. I don’t know why I should be telling you all this; especially after everything that’s been—” He stopped speaking brusquely and gaped at Candy.

  The precious girl lay on her back moaning faintly, like some sleeper beset by an ugly dream. In her new position, though she was still unconscious, she had drawn her legs up, and, once again, the pleated b
lack skirt had slipped up her legs, affording a breath-taking view of her marvelous bare limbs and the milk-white V the panties made, concealing her honeypot from the prying eyes of Dr. Dunlap—for that was exactly where his stare was focused.

  When Krankeit noticed this he leaned over and arranged the skirt properly. He moved expertly and with assurance, as if these exposed legs belonged to him.

  “Now, now,” he said, returning his attention to Dunlap, “try to be a good boy. As you say, you’ve got just a few more months to go before retirement.”

  Dunlap blanched at this latest thrust, and his lips fairly jangled with distress. He said nothing though, and, after a moment, there came into his eyes a saintly look of sadness.

  Something about this expression intrigued Krankeit very much. He recognized it, yet couldn’t think of what it reminded him.

  Great Scott! he thought suddenly. It was true! Dunlap actually was behaving as if he were his father! There was no mistaking it—that look of patient suffering—he had seen it before on the face of his own father. And now thinking about his father (who had disappeared when Krankeit was still a boy) he felt a jab of remorse.

  “Do you think it’s nice,” Dunlap sniffled, “to have your every action pounced on by somebody and wrenched asunder?”

  Krankeit crushed his cigarette out in an ashtray and said:

  “It’s not you, it’s the damned shell you’re imprisoned in that I’m trying to jack off—er, I mean wrench off.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Dunlap asked in a hurt tone.

  “Just this: you’ve an ocean of drowned impulses to jack off! All your life something’s been preventing you—first your mother, then you yourself. You come from the last ‘primitive’ generation before Freud discovered copulation; you have a veneer of high moral virtue, but deep down you’re a veritable sewer of bestiality and lust!”

  This analysis of his character seemed to please Dr. Dunlap more than anything else, and he perked up a bit. Krankeit was, at least, taking a serious interest in him as a personality, which was a clear improvement over his former, uniformly vitriolic attitude.

  “I’m taking advantage of the fact that you symbolically adopted me as your son a little while ago, to speak frankly—in ‘family intimacy’—to you about this thing,” Krankeit said.

  At the words “adopted me as your son,” and again, at the words “family intimacy,” Dunlap’s eyes welled with happiness, and his spine began to straighten in sturdy little jerks—Exactly like an erection! thought Krankeit, taking a step forward, his hands cupped and raised as a ready catalyst for the process, before he checked himself.

  “You know, my boy,” said Dunlap, “there’s a great deal of good sense in what you’ve said about me. I have been holding myself in all my life. As you say, I was brought up to look on sex as an evil and forbidden subject, and I suppose that’s why I’ve always been fascinated by its symbols—the body of this young woman, for instance. But how about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Well, how do you feel when you look at her—you who are from a younger generation, and who have made a deliberate effort to rid yourself of old-fashioned notions?”

  Krankeit looked at Candy blankly.

  “She’d look like Marilyn Monroe in that calendar picture,” Dr. Dunlap pointed out, “if she didn’t have any clothes on.”

  “If you’d read my book, you’d understand how I feel about these things,” Krankeit said. “In the fifth chapter of Masturbation Now! I state expressly that heterosexual lovemaking is the root of all neuroses, a shabby illusion which misleads the ego, that we must endeavor to keep it in its true place—as an aid, and adjunct to masturbation, which is the only sex-mode that permits complete fulfillment and mental health.”

  Dr. Dunlap listened with utmost seriousness. “It certainly was a courageous book,” he said, looking at Krankeit with paternal admiration. “In it you defy all the conventional sex mores.”

  Krankeit smiled complacently and said: “Of course, for someone like you, who hasn’t got any sex-orientation, heterosexuality is the logical starting place—it’s certainly better than nothing. Theoretically, there’s nothing wrong at all with that impulse you have to look at this girl’s body—it’s even a very good thing that you’ve finally gotten up nerve to do it.”

  Nervily, Dunlap turned and looked at Candy as she lay stretched out on her side on the couch. Just then she sighed, and rolled on her back as before. Her sweet knees lifted and her skirt slid back so that the white frilled V of her panties showed again. The righteousness quickly drained from Dunlap’s eyes and was replaced by a hard, corrupted glint.

  “Of course,” Krankeit went on, “for myself, I’ve never had much time for those things—too busy with my work.”

  Dunlap said nothing. He was keeping his eyes trained on the scalloped V, beneath which pulsed Candy’s precious little lamb-pit.

  “Yes, first there was med school, and then my research and writing . . . I’ve had little time for anything else . . . no romance, no family life . . . I’ve missed that though—the family life.”

  “Is that so?” said Dunlap, who had been paying no attention whatever and hadn’t the least idea what had just been said.

  “Yes, it is. When you spoke about feeling like my Dad a little while ago, I couldn’t help being a bit touched. You see—I never knew my own father.” A slight huskiness came into Krankeit’s voice as he said this.

  Dunlap said nothing. He was stooping over slightly in Candy’s direction and staring at her intently.

  “To get back to what I was saying,” continued Krankeit, “you’re terribly jammed up. This mechanism you’ve contrived to keep your sexual lust a secret from the world, and from you yourself, is causing you more trouble than you realize. That’s why I decided it was all right for you to look at Miss Christian’s legs—it’s exactly what you need.”

  “Exactly what I need,” echoed Dr. Dunlap like a zombie, and moved a few inches closer to the luscious form on the couch with his fingertips twitching spasmodically.

  “It’s a thousand times better for you to satisfy that sort of desire, than to fight it down and have it haunt your Unconscious for years to come,” said Krankeit persuasively.

  “Dunlap . . . I say, DUNLAP!!”

  Dr. Dunlap had quickly stepped to Candy and he was wrestling off her panties in a veritable frenzy. “I thought you said it was ‘exactly what I needed,’” he mumbled, confounded now.

  “Ah yes, but only up to the point where it doesn’t interfere with some other party. That’s an important distinction.”

  Dr. Dunlap finished pulling Candy’s panties over her shoes and flung them over his shoulder, where they settled like a silken butterfly on Krankeit’s typewriter. Candy was now delightfully nude from the waist down and lying on her back. Unhesitatingly, the hospital director put his hands on her legs and drew them apart . . .

  “DUNLAP!!”

  Dr. Dunlap hastily placed his hand on the pulsing jelly-box he’d exposed, with the air of a little boy caught doing wrong, and wishing to hide the evidence. “All right,” he said peevishly, after a moment during which Krankeit merely glared at him, “I’ll put them back on.”

  By “them,” he obviously meant Candy’s panties, yet he made no step to retrieve them. He stood, his knees slightly bent, forthrightly facing Krankeit; and his hand resting politely on Candy’s golden V.

  Krankeit’s expressive brown eyes flashed impatiently. “Well, what are you waiting for?” he said.

  “All right, all right,” exclaimed Dunlap, “how many times do you want me to say it?”

  Dr. Dunlap behaved as if there were nothing in the situation of an emergency nature—certainly nothing for Krankeit to lose his head over and raise his voice. . . . “DUNLAP!!!”

  (Krankeit had just noticed that Dr. Dunlap appeared to have only four fingers on the hand in question—that his little finger had treacherously sneaked into the orifice.)

  “Look here, Krank
eit, there’s no need to shout,” Dr. Dunlap said, “we’re not in the ghetto you know.”

  Dr. Krankeit pretended to ignore this racial allusion, but when he next spoke the volume of his voice had lessened considerably and was rife with Princetonian modulations. Nevertheless it was very firm.

  “If you don’t take your finger out of Miss Christian this very instant, and replace her undergarment, I shall report what you’re doing in detail to the board of trustees.”

  This turned the trick; Dunlap let go and went to retrieve the precious little garment, wagging his hand incredulously the while to an imaginary—and sympathetic—onlooker in the corner. “Krankeit, the great rebel, the man who had the guts to jack off in the face of a Supreme Court decision, is shocked,” he said. He slipped the panties over Candy’s shoes and pulled them up into place. This was a bit complicated—he wasn’t in the habit of putting underwear on young girls—and, of course, his hand got caught inside and remained there.

  “Good Lord!” said Krankeit, exasperated. “If you’re going to poke your finger into that girl every three minutes you could at least put a p.c. on.” (p.c. standing for pinky cheater, was hospital slang for the rubber fingers gynecologists wear during digital examinations.)

  Dunlap fumbled ineptly for a little while before finally freeing his trapped hand.

  “After all,” he said, looking abused, “I was only following your advice—trying not to suppress something and have it haunt my Unconscious.”

  “It gets a little more complicated when you begin to involve another party. I didn’t say that you could just walk up to a strange woman in the street and interfere with her genitals, you know.”

  “But that’s just it!” Dunlap exclaimed. “This one is unconscious; she doesn’t know what’s happening . . . and, since it does me such a lot of good and doesn’t affect her in the slightest, why shouldn’t—”

  “Just what do you want to do?” Krankeit asked, narrowing his eyes.