Chapter 1
EDWARD KILBY WAS CONVINCED THAT THE SUM of each man can be reduced to one basic need he has. The need varies greatly from person to person, but if one can penetrate the soul, there will be found a terrible urge that makes a man the kind of person he is. Like a desire to be rich. Or powerful. Or respected. Or even, in the millions of obscure people around the world, the need or urge or desire to be nonentities-to sit out an uncomplicated life, troubled with as few responsibilities and problems as possible.
His own basic drive, Kilby concluded, was hunger. It had started as a physical hunger when he was young, living in poverty. As he grew through adolescence and into adulthood, the drive was still hunger ... but a hunger for things.
He had often tried to shake off this obsession with gathering objects, because he saw how foolish it really was. He was a smart guy, Edward Kilby was, and he knew that in young adulthood, he had acquired much more than sufficiency, but even if by some terrible bad fortune he lost everything, he had the brains and the ambition to get it all back again. Yet the unreasonable feeling didn't leave him., even when he could tell himself quite logically that you could only eat one steak at a time, you could only take one woman to bed to play with at a time (usually!), you could only wear one suit, drive one car, and so on. Sure, it was nice to have variations in all these things, but he wished he could get over the horrible compulsion to grasp everything.
Kilby was the kind of person who went over and over his life with a mental fine-tooth comb, trying to see what made him tick. Like the reasons for his becoming a lawyer. Even those who knew him intimately assumed he took to law because it was a way for a climber to make it into the world of wealth and influence.
Yes, he liked the financial rewards. But that wasn't the reason. Money didn't guide him that way. It was principle. And those same intimate friends would have laughed their heads off if someone had suggested such a motivation. That was because no man ever gave off clearer indications that he was propelled by greed. Which was true enough when he was in his heyday as a specialist in divorce cases.
However, his first impulse toward the law was an idealistic one.
Edward Kilby had been born into a well-to-do family. His father was part owner of a factory situated in a small town. He was a big wheel in such a burg, and his family among the aristocracy.
But when Edward was still in grade school, his father lost it all. The boy didn't understand what happened, but over and over he heard whispered discussion that mentioned that whatever the disaster was-and whether it was caused by his father's incompetence or his partners' treachery-it was legal. Unfair but legal. That's the impression the youngster got.
This sort of searing experience as a youth-being reduced over night from prosperity to destitution might have made him bitter about the law which said the disaster was okay as far as it was concerned. Just the opposite. It puzzled young Edward and continued to do so. How could anything be legal and yet unjust? His eventual decision to study and practice law started right then. He, Edward Kilby, would see to it that law would mean fairness, justice, honor, and all that.
Considering the way he turned out, perhaps his close friends would have very good reasons indeed for laughing themselves sick about Edward Kilby's youthful idealism.
After his financial downfall, Eddie's father left the family and the town. At first, he wrote back letters indicating that when he got on his feet again, he'd send for the mother and their young son. However, the letters stopped, and they never knew what happened to him.
Eddie and his mother were forced to move In with the father's elderly uncle and his wife. They lived on the outskirts of a town that was even smaller than the one Eddie was used to. The old couple was not actively unkind, but it was a burden for them to take in two such helpless and unprofitable boarders. Eddie was still in grade school, and his mother was sickly. In fact, she wasn't long for this world when she moved into that big, drafty, ramshackle old house. A frail person, she had at one time been considered the belle of the town, but she'd faded under what she considered the persecutions of life: being poor, being deserted by her failure of a husband, and sent to live in these miserable surroundings.
She died when Eddie was eight years old. He was broken up about this at the time, but he sprang back with the resilience of youth. He had an inborn tendency toward being a loner, and all the circumstances of his existence firmed this tendency up in him.
His uncle's place was neither fish nor fowl-it was right on the outskirts of the town, yet not part of the community; it was also partly a farm, but his uncle was getting on in years, and didn't grow much. It had a barn, but only one cow. There were a few skinny chickens running around.
It was then that Edward faced hunger for the first time, and did so almost every day he was there. The elderly couple lived frugally, even miserly, and they weren't about to change their spending habits to accommodate an unwanted relative. Being old, they didn't eat much anyway, and they saw no reason why Eddie should have more: they didn't see him as a growing lad in need of nourishment, but just an unasked burden.
So when for breakfast Eddie got a small glob of sticky oatmeal, he dreamed of the days when he'd had orange juice, eggs and bacon. When dinner consisted of a thin sandwich of cold, greasy luncheon meat, he imagined dining on the steak he saw in a magazine advertisement.
If the living conditions of his uncle's home were a deep disappointment, the school was a real shock. One small, decrepit building contained the whole school system-kindergarten to senior high.
These pupils were a revelation to Eddie. He had gone to a grade school in a very small town, but the kids had mostly been nice ones. Oh, they might get bratty out on the playground, but they were shy and polite mostly, especially with adults.
Not these. Mostly children from farms, they were mouthy and crude. Only about one in every twenty-five had any ambition or hope of going on to high education, so scholastically their records were appalling. They didn't care what kind of grades they got, and even if they flunked a grade, it made no difference. A big, hulking fifteen-year-old might still be in the eight grade, but wouldn't care-another year and he could legally drop out.
They were a rowdy bunch outside. They knocked each other around and they fought on the slightest pretext.
Eddie's first day with them was typical. He had worn a nice cap he had retained from the good old days of his father's prosperity. On the playground behind the building after school was out for the day, one of the big boys grabbed the cap from Eddie's head and sailed it to another boy, and so it went, until one of them chanted in a sing-song voice, "Red schoolhouse, red schoolhouse, it's on fire." He tossed the cap on the ground, it being the red schoolhouse, and-Eddie couldn't believe his eyes-all the boys made a circle around his hat, opened their pants, and urinated on it. Right there, he thought to himself, where anybody passing by could see! But they just laughed, and they knocked him around when he started to bawl. He wanted revenge, but what could he do? He couldn't just go back into the school and tell the teacher what had happened. He trudged on home, tearful and angry.
Much later in his life, Eddie reflected on those schoolmates of his youth. They were really not much different from the kids in, say, a city slum area. Poverty had made them hard realists who lived in a basic, forthright manner. They weren't used to niceties and expected nothing from anyone. They got their kicks in the earthy ways that their existence prompted them to. Eddie could later reason that they could so nonchalantly expose themselves and piss on his cap because they were used to excrement as an everyday portion of life-not in the sanitary manner of a city bathroom, but as part of farm life which meant outhouses for human beings, and yards full of the droppings of chickens, cows, horses, geese, and so on.
It was much the same with sex. A child in a city slum accepted sex as a natural part of every day; nothing was hidden from him-he knew early how intercourse happened, had probably seen it happen, and experimented himself while still a sub-teener. On the farm, the kids may never have seen their folks doing it, but the entire life of the farm depended on it happening with the animals, from chickens to cattle.
At eight years of age, poor Eddie was way behind the other children in knowledge of the mechanics of sex. He'd never even seen a picture of a naked woman, much less the real thing. He had no sisters, so he didn't know how little girls were different from little boys. But his schoolmates quickly made up for this.
As a whole, the girl population of the school was far less forward and crude than that of the boys. But there were exceptions. If Eddie had been taken aback by seeing members of his own sex urinate in public, he was even more shocked by seeing some of the little girls, going to or from school, go off the paths and into the woods to relieve themselves.
A favorite trick of some of the more pushy boys was to go up close behind a girl on the path, or even, at times, in the school hallways, and shout, "Up, down, turn around," while he quickly upped her skirt, pulled down her panties, and tried to whirl her around. They'd get mad and some would kick at their tormentors and some would threaten to tell, but the boys usually picked on the less prissy ones, so they rarely got more than a sore shin out of the adventure.
And one day in the cloak-room, Eddie had seen the ultimate. While about a half-dozen boys watched, a little hussy about eight years old pulled her pants clear off, and leaned back against a broken desk that had been put there until it might be repaired. Then a farm boy took his prick out, and it was big and hard. And he put it into the girl's pussy.
That was all, but it scared and horrified and fascinated Eddie. When he had matured, the scene still puzzled him. The two little kids knew how intercourse happened, but they had no desire, and the boy couldn't climax. It was just a re-enactment of something they knew happened between adults-though in their babyish minds, they didn't actually know why.
Eddie had absolutely no idea of the significance of what he had witnessed. It was somehow dirty, but he didn't know why. He had no interest in doing that to a girl. However, he too had had erections at an early age, and that worried him. Oh, not the ones he had in the morning when he got up-that just meant that he had to go. But others came unexpectedly, and had nothing to do with girls. If he'd hear or read about somebody being tortured or murdered in a particularly brutal way, he'd become hard. He never understood why, and this sort of thing didn't occur any longer when he got into his adolescence.
But of course, by then, girls played a part in his life.
Hunger turned Eddie into a thief while he was still in grade school. Sometimes he would steal into a neighbor's garden patch after dark, and take some carrots or kohlrabi. And he'd swipe apples from an orchard. Everybody raided apple trees there, but only Eddie did it because he wanted to eat apples; for the others, it was just sport, foolish vandalism. Once in awhile, Eddie's lunch from home would be so skimpy-sometimes he had none at all-that he'd sneak into the cloak-room and take some food from somebody else's lunch box. He only got caught once, by a kid who socked him hard on the arm, but that was all. Nobody thought much about it if a sandwich was missing or a piece of cake; they'd make a noise, but no big fuss. Food to them was something you grew or processed at home, so it didn't matter. Much later in life, Eddie was to see much the same thing in factories or offices-if somebody took home some of the product, nobody thought too much of it, if the theft wasn't out of proportion. A secretary might take home paper, pencils, a stapler, scissors, stamps, and things like that ... and never considered it stealing. However, that same girl would not think of taking a dime out of petty cash and not returning it; that would be dishonest....
But if no one else thought of stealing an apple or cupcake as thievery, young Edward did. It bothered him. He never made a habit of it, and tried to resist the impulse as long as he could, until his stomach got the best of his mind and conscience. He was always to be like that-he might do something wrong and do it over and over again, but he never got really used to it. Trivial or big, it festered inside him.
One of the funniest things that even happened to him while he was in that small-town school came about because of food.
Eddie had survived the brutal conditions of life in his foster home and the school to become a good-looking-if thin-guy of thirteen. He stood out among the boys there, because of his looks and his withdrawn manner, which seemed the excess of courtesy compared to the coarse ways of the others.
One day, Eddie was invited by one of the girls to go on a picnic the following Saturday. He'd had minor dates with this girl and others, and it was unusual to have the female do the inviting. This one's name was Ruthie. Eddie had heard rumors about her ... like, she was a push-over. But he discounted a lot of what he'd heard. Lord knew, there were plenty of girls in school who did, but the boys tended to pin the label of Hot Pants on any girl who wasn't so nun-like that she'd be nicknamed The Iceberg.
But Ruthie fully deserved the heated reputation she enjoyed.
She and Eddie strolled off into the woods to a favorite glade known to the kids, sheltered on a hillside. She had scarcely sat down on the blanket he had spread, when she smiled up at him, and said, "Well, handsome, wouldn't you like some?"
He sure would! He dove right in. He tore away her....
... wrapping on the fried chicken! She was amazed when she saw what he was doing. Here she sat, her knees drawn up to reveal most of her legs, her Intimate parts heated and juiced up for action ... and he was panting to eat! Ruthie had a moment in which she was thoroughly mad, but then she burst out laughing. Eddie wondered at her amusement, but she wouldn't explain. She began eating fried chicken and deviled eggs with him, but with the voluptuousness of the eating scene in Tom Jones. And after he had fulfilled his most pressing physical need, she got him to fulfill hers.
Eddie was not a virgin at the time-he would have been almost a freak among the boys there if he had been. But his experiences hadbeenfew and hurried; he was far Ruthie's inferior in experience and as a sexual performer.
It seemed to Ruthie that she had always been aware of sexual attraction. Like that girl in the cloakroom that Eddie remembered, she had been penetrated while in grade school, and she had been properly had by an older boy when she was eleven-which was only two years previous.
At the outset of her sexual career, Ruthie had done it because the boys wanted it-some expected it even if they so much as put out a little cash for a movie-even a soda.
Gradually it was she who expected it. She became sort of a female Don Juan. She wanted to have had all the men in the world at least once. She was trophy hunting.
Along with this vast experience came a real lust for sexual gratification, developed slowly from the time she was eleven. Now that she was thirteen, it wasn't enough that she could brag that she had seduced another boy-she also wanted the wonderful waves of pleasure than emanated from her lower parts, if her partner performed correctly.
But Eddie was a youngster without much practice in the erotic arts. He couldn't help himself-he had hardly touched her hot slickness than he felt the dizzying surge' of his climax.
That was all right with him; it meant little more to him than the load of good food he had just put in his stomach-maybe less.
Eddie had rolled over on his back, exhausted, content and lazy. Ruthie pulled herself atop him. Down below, he was limp, but she worked at him, with her words as well as her body. "Darling Eddie," she called him, and "Honey". As she slowly moved her hungry crotch over his, she also kissed him, teasingly darting her tongue through his lips. Her hands went through his hair, or moved down on his shoulders, as she murmured appreciatively of his strength ... though he knew, in truth, his physique was nothing to brag about.
But the whole process worked on him until he was Inflamed with eagerness to have her again. Through her movements, his cock thrust up in her again, but this time he was not so amateurish as to have no control. Still on his back, he moved his hands under her blouse to get at the young, hard, eager buds of her breasts. His tongue explored her mouth.
In this position, he could not get the full, satisfying thrust of his shaft into her, so he grabbed her round, naked buttocks, one in each hand, and heaved her over on her back. Now firmly in the driver's seat, he could do with her as he wanted. He had the highly gratifying masculine satisfaction of not only giving himself such great pleasure, but bringing her to completion also. She moaned in joy as he pushed into her; her red circle of heat moved hungrily against him as he withdrew a bit to let her shove up at him.
They came together. He saw showers of white-hot light in the darkness of his consciousness as he came and came and came. Ruthie cried out at the fiery relief she was feeling, and bit her lower lip so that there was blood on her teeth afterward.
For all the ecstasy that Eddie found in sex, he Was not playing the field at school. If he felt that he really needed bodily relief, he'd date some girl like Ruthie, who knew her way around and was had by all. Eddie feared being trapped by some nice girl who could be talked into sex, but who might not know enough to prevent becoming pregnant, or who might expect him to marry her anyway, just because they had done it together. As he got into senior high, he saw this increasingly often. Girls of about sixteen got pregnant and had to marry the unlucky guy. The guy didn't always think he was unlucky, of course, because he thought he was in love, and may have been, by his lights. Other couples went steady and expected to get married right after they graduated and the boy went to work on his father's farm.
Not for Eddie was the future that this portended.
As far back as he could remember about that town, he had determined never to be a permanent part of it. He knew he could never exist a lifetime in that place. He would go crazy, he'd die.
In his secret heart, Eddie Kilby felt he was far above these people and his surroundings. He came from better stock than they did; he would rise in the world to heights they couldn't glimpse, much less understand. He was like those children who get the illusion that they are not the real issue of the people who pass as their parents; someone better sired them, they are sure. They are lost princes, hidden dauphins.
So he didn't want to be hooked into any kind of alliance with any female in that place. He would get away ... he would enter the much better world that must exist somewhere outside this rural area.
It was probably at this time that, entirely unconsciously, entirely unknown to the surface of his mind, that he became interested in divorce. It was only later, after he'd become a lawyer, that he almost accidentally entered that field, but the groundwork had been laid, if ever so flimisily, by his dealings with a fellow classmate in high school.
Her name was Phyllis Deering. She was the sixteen-year-old daughter of a woman who clerked in one of the few stores in town. Mrs. Deering was divorced, and at that time, years back, and in that small, narrow-minded place, divorce was almost unheard of, and those involved-especially the women-were considered very tarnished characters.
Eddie could never have said exactly-why he liked to go out with Phyllis. It wasn't fun as with some other dates. She wasn't good-looking. In fact, she was rather drab and withdrawn.
But he could talk to her-maybe that was it. Really talk. No matter what he had to say, no matter how flippant or how deadly serious, she'd listen, and she seemed to comprehend his mood, really see into him and understand.
That's mostly what they did on their dates ... which weren't, much like dates as other teenagers knew them. Eddie got no allowance from his great-uncle, and he had few opportunities in that community to earn anything. A couple of boys had paper routes, but any delivery-boy positions were handled by sons in the families of the owners of the stores. In the summer, Eddie could sometimes get some seasonal jobs on the farms, but there wasn't much call for outside help, and Eddie wasn't the best hired hand anyway, due to his inexperience and-even more-his rather weak physical condition.
So when he took a girl out, it was a big evening if they got to the movies. He didn't have a car, so they walked wherever they were going.
The first night he invited her to just take a stroll out in the country, she hesitated. But he used persuasive words and finally, with downcast eyes and biting her lip, she went with him.
Later, he found out why she had held back. Being a homely girl, she had learned that the reason boys invited her out was to lay her-it was as simple as that. They expected it as a favor for asking her out.
But Eddie didn't try to force himself on her. And she didn't misinterpret this either; that is, she didn't think he was not making love to her because he found her too distasteful. No, he appeared to her to be a perfect young gentleman with whom she could communicate. She could unburden herself of many things she wanted to talk out, but about which she could speak to no one else in school; they would have been unsympathetic or would have blabbed about it to others afterward.
In many ways, Eddie and Phyllis had encountered much the same nastinesses of life. Phyllis's life started relatively comfortably, as Eddie's had. Then there had been the divorce.
"Why?" Eddie asked."
Phyllis shrugged at the question. She had for years tried to figure out the reasons, from the few hints she got from her mother and acquaintances, and from what she pieced together for herself. Finally she replied, "I don't know for sure. Mother would never give me a straight story-you know, unemotional. I only get her side, and she says things like 'he drank a lot' and 'he chased women'. He wanted to be free to whoop it up, she tells me."
"What do you think?" Eddie persisted.
"I think...." The girl stopped, embarrassed. She turned her face away. Eddie was sure that if it hadn't been dark there on the edge of the woods where they'd sat to talk, he would have seen that she was blushing.
He was soothing and confidential. "You can tell me what you think, Phyl."
She took in a big gulp of air and determined to do just that with her new friend-say what she thought. "Well, I gather that he left my mother because he was dissatisfied-you know."
"No," he said simply.
"Well, in bed," the girl finished quickly. She paused for some time, then continued: "I think that's why she's like she is today, why she acts as she does."
"What does she do?" Eddie asked.
"Don't you really know?"
"No, I don't."
Phyllis sighed. "I thought everybody in town knew about my mother. She ... she sleeps with a lot of men."
Eddie was puzzled. "I don't understand. I mean, what did the divorce have to do with that?"
"I think she's trying to prove ... you know, that she can make a man happy in bed. She's proving it over and over," the girl ended bitterly. "That's what divorce does to you, I guess."
"What?" Eddie queried, feeling foolish because this girl seemed to know so much more of the world than he did.
"Well, it tears at you inside-makes you feel inadequate. And then there's the financial matter."
"How's that?"
"The court ordered my father to pay support, but he skipped the state and we don't get a cent. My mother-she accepts things from the men ... like a prostitute!" The girl was on the verge of tears. Eddie didn't know what to do or say, so he sat there, miserable. Finally she went on: "I don't mean she does it for money, but she takes things from them, as if they were sweethearts. None of them is interested in her-you know-romantically. They-they just want one thing from her. And why not? She's no beauty. She's worked and worried too much. And even if they were interested in her, who'd want to have a divorced woman and a sixteen-year-old foster-daughter in one fell swoop? So she takes little token gifts-stockings, a compact, boxes of candy. It isn't much payment, but every little bit counts." The bitterness broke into her tone violently again. "Maybe that's how I'll end up."
"No, no." Eddie tried to say something comforting.
"Why not? The town can't afford a full-time house of ill-repute. Maybe part-timers like Mother are an economic necessity."
She was crying now, and he put his arm around her, and said meaningless little things like "There, there," and "Everything will be all right."