Chapter 2
Poverty! What terrible things it caused. Mildred had known it, had known a mother who faded into gray fatness as she continued struggling unsuccessfully to learn to speak "good English." She had seen her father beaten down by tough bosses and his own devil-may-care ways, changing from a charming, dark-haired, darkeyed, personable sort to one whose eyes were red and whose body was thin. Lines had formed around his jawline and there was liquor on his breath most of the time. He'd retreated into silence before the TV when he didn't have the change required to make it in the corner bar.
The mirror showed Mildred tiny, sprightly beauty. Her complexion had never been blotchy, was always smooth, and the big, innocent eyes of her she recognized as a usable asset from the age of around ten on. Her hair, long and dull and tangled, was the first thing she worked on ever since a teacher stayed in during recess to wash, comb and braid it for her. From then on, Mildred's hair always shone brightly and looked neat, even if she had to get to school an hour early and use the soap in the dispenser in the girl's room on those frequent occasions when none was to be found at home.
A strange insight let Mildred sense that the insecurity she felt was felt by many around her for various reasons. One boy had it because of pimples, a girl because of braces, another because of her skinniness.
Dumb animals instinctively learn to fend for themselves early in life. So do poor children. They learn rules of the game that older and wealthier ones don't even know exist. But the fight against personal poverty sharpens awareness. Mildred knew. She knew that the pimply boy was a poor student and that his father was a day laborer, that the girl with braces had a divorced mother who worked in the woolen mills, that the skinny girl's father was a shoe clerk and her mother was a salesgirl in a department store.
Then her attention became focused on Thelma. It happened one rainy morning when Mildred trudged to school, her feet sloshy and her thin coat protected by a sheet of plastic she had put around her inside out so that the marking on it "Imperial Cleaners" would be harder to read.
There had been a long, black car with much shiny trimming on the front. A small, neat man got out from under the wheel and opened an umbrella. Then he opened the back door and Thelma got out and walked under the umbrella, while the chauffeur walked in the rain to the school entrance.
She smiled sadly at the driver and thanked him. Then went into the school. Mildred saw that look of sadness, not with compassion-that was for the rich-but as an opportunity. As a matter-of-fact, that was the first time Mildred had realized how large Thelma was!
For a girl in her mid-teens to stand fully six feet tall before the boys in her class had attained their full growth was a burden, particularly if the girl was of largo proportions. Thelma had to weigh a hundred sixty five. Yet she was intelligent. She did well on her written tests but rarely volunteered a reply during oral discussions because a student was expected to stand while replying. Excitedly Mildred took inventory of everything else she knew about this girl, all because of that expression on her face.
No dates, ever.
On no school committees.
No close friends.
And her father owned a small furniture factory.
"I was watching you walk down the hall, so tall and proud in your bearing," Mildred had told Thelma, her eyes wide with her favorite look of innocence, "and I was thinking how much like a queen you looked."
The slight frown on Thelma's face had smoothed out.
"It must be wonderful to be tall, to know that years from now you'll still be beautiful the way tall women always are. Have you any idea how people my size look up to people like you-and not just physically?"
Thelma's voice was definitely friendly then and it was musical and rich. "I'm afraid I've been so involved with thinking of the disadvantages," she replied, "that I hadn't even suspected the advantages of being a big Amazon." There was a pause. "My name's Thelma Garrison and all I know about yours is that it's Mildred."
"Sweeny," Mildred replied, almost curtseying. "Mildred Sweeny. Shall we check each other's math papers before we turn them in?"
That had been a lucky break. Mildred's was perfect. She caught a small error in Thelma's. Thelma, an excellent student, looked at Mildred with new respect.
That afternoon it was still raining. Thelma's father's chauffeur drove Mildred home at Thelma's request, but Mildred insisted on getting off at the corner.
No sense in letting others know how deep was her poverty.
That was the year Mildred's Uncle Martin had come visiting, looked at his drunken brother, his fat, ignorant sister-in-law and his promising, alert niece. "Walk me to my bus," he told her, "and give me a hand with my stuff. You carry my brief case and garment bag and I'll handle the suitcase and club bag."
"Look, kid," Martin had said, "I'm not rich, but I have a little set aside. If I give you something, you must promise me you won't let your dad drink it up or your mother know about it. Get yourself some decent clothes and make up a believable lie about where you got them."
A cab came by an Martin loaded his bags in front. Then he picked up the girl and kissed her and pressed a green wad into her hand. It was five twenty-dollar bills!
She went through the routine of asking for a work permit and waiting two weeks before she spent any of the money. How carefully she shopped the basements of the stores, the Salvation Army and the Goodwill Industries, looking for exactly the right things to play her role. Then she brought home her first outfit, hiding the rest in her school locker.
Each evening, the strange couple, the big, wealthy girl and the little poor beauty, would work on their homework together and Mildred would always leave just before dinner time, despite the invitations of Thelma's parents.
Friends. Mildred knew her goal. She saw that Thelma was hunched over for a long time doing her homework and her strong, expert little hands began massaging the kinks out of Thelma's back just as she'd seen her mother do with her father when he had a bad night.
That first innocent kiss on the back of the neck before she left was accompanied with, 'Oh, please don't bother to get up, Thelma. It's late and I have to run."
But then the next Monday Thelma greeted Mildred with a bear hug and a kiss on the forehead And on Wednesday they sat holding hands while they recited memorized material from school together.
It was just two days later, during a discussion on sex, that Mildred learned that Thelma was absolutely, com pletely, utterly innocent. She had never even masturbated.
"I haven't the slightest idea what any part of it's like," Thelma put it, her big round eyes making it a true statement not to be questioned. "And I don't see how I'm ever going to learn."
"Let me teach you, darling," Mildred suggested. She had read up on the subject, had learned a little from heavy necking on dates when boys' fingers had found their way up under her skirt.
With an almost comic, clinical innocence, the big girl lay back on her bed. her skirt up, her legs apart, while Mildred bluffed the role of the skilled lesbian. She knew where she loved to caress herself and have boys touch her. She did that as best she could approximate it to Thelma. There was curiosity at first, then a sense of awakening and learning, and then it was a special sort of love between Thelma and Mildred, Mildred's calculated and pre-planned: Thelma's not quite as innocent as it seemed. "After all." she told herself, "I don't really have any alternatives. What boys have even asked me for dates?"
With the passage of just two years, Mildred had penetrated into the Garrison family to the point that she rarely saw her folks. Mr. Garrison gave her an after-school job as a file clerk and she had learned enough about the furniture business to make a fair interior decorator when she was just seventeen. Thelma, a year older, had become one of the firm's designers even wb" they were both in college on a scholarship fund Thelma s father had set up expressly to get this opportunity for Mildred.
Even when it came to finding a boy friend for Thelma, Mildred had discovered a way to be useful. Thelma had pointed out the man she wanted. It was a tall, blond young man, very quiet, his features too large and irregular to appeal to Mildred.
"Are you sure he's the one you want?" Mildred asked.
"He fits my idea of a husband perfectly," Thelma insisted. "He's taller than I am. I think he could carry his end of a conversation. He looks like a real man who could gratify a woman properly. And yet he's not the sort, I feel, who could walk all over me. I am a strong and competent human being, you know."
Mildred knew. And also she knew that the ties that were already in effect between her and Thelma would be even stronger if she somehow managed to get Eric for Thelma.
Her approach was, to say the least, unconventional.
He lunched in a restaurant near the furniture factory almost every day. He usually lunched alone with a sheaf of columnar pages before him, some firm's business records which Eric read as a musician does the score of a symphony.
Mildred prepared herself well for the occasion, even planting tacks at a logical height in the post outside the booths.
Then she saw him inside and proceeded to walk by. Hardly had she reached the side of his booth, with him paying far more attention to the figures before him than to that walking by, before Mildred deliberately snagged her skirt on the tack and ripped it.
"Oh, dear," she exclaimed and she plumped herself right into the booth with the man.
He looked up startled and then grinned. "Trouble?" he asked.
"My skirt," Mildred said. "I just tore it on that tack outside your booth. And I'm wearing sheer red panties!"
"Sounds like a fascinating problem," he said. "Now I could get you a barrel and a needle and thread if you wished so you could go into the lounge and sew up the rip. Or I could get you less dramatic panties from the department store a few blocks away."
"You're teasing me," Mildred chided him, "and, really, I'm in a most embarrassing situation here. Could you smuggle me to my place where I could change?"
Gathering up his papers, Eric said, "why don't you lunch with me, while you're here, anyway? The crowd will be thinner later....That is, unless the bench is too cold for you."
Mildred managed a shy grin. "What can I say when you're logical?"
'By the time lunch was over, it was a joke between them and Eric had even charged Mildred those panties she was wearing as his taxi fare for taking her home to change. At meal's end, he wrapped his jacket around her and drove her to the little apartment she had all ready for this scene.
She showed him the torn skirt, the sheer red panties, offered him a drink, then another. She gave him the panties as a souvenir of this adventure. Then she called in and explained that she had had an accident and wouldn't be able to get back that afternoon.
Eric followed her cue and made a similar call.
The third drink and they were dancing to the music of Mildred's phonograph and soon Eric, his hands thrilling to the touch of her, his nostrils flaring from her perfume, his eyes dazzled by the sight of her, was unpantsed and in bed. He'd had a lot to drink. Mildred was exciting and knew how to gratify him.
It was three weeks later that Mildred arranged for the young interne whose home she had helped decorate and who found her charming to join her in her game. He called Eric at work and asked him to drop by his office that evening. Mildred had even arranged for the black lettering to be pasted in pressure-sensitive letters on the door to make it convincing, that he was a doctor.
"I can't say positively," the interne told Eric, "but should not be surprised if Mildred were pregnant. My first tests seem suspicious."
"Can we get this taken care of medically?" Eric asked. "She's so very young, you know."
"I know," the interne said drily. "If I were you, I'd either decide right now that I wanted to marry her or else get me another wife fast as protection." He studied Eric gravely. "And I'd go the latter route."
When Eric asked why, the young medico told him that there was alcoholism and insanity in Mildred's family and that chances were slim that any children she had would be normal."
"But I don't have any fiancee or anything," Eric said, his voice taking on a desperate tone.
The interne leaned forward and became a co-conspirator. "I haven't given Mildred the results of these findings yet," he confided. "She said something about having a wealthy friend, Thelma Garrison, she wanted me to meet. I'm engaged or I'd have taken her up on that. Thelma's a big girl, a really big one, but smart and unpregnant.
Eric received an invitation to dine at the Garrisons that week-end with Mildred there. Mildred had coached Thelma well. She played up her height with high heels and a dramatic pair of flaring black velvet hostess trousers and a wide-sleeved, deep-necked cream satin blouse that showed her magnificent breasts in a gleaming fabric nest. Make-up, long earrings, perfume were all part of Mildred's stage management.
She planned each subsequent date, where Eric was to take Thelma and what he was to do, what Thelma was to wear and what she was to say.
Everything to almost the point where she was the coxswain calling the stroke the first time they went to bed!
The picture in the paper, the wedding, the marriage, the sense of safety that Thelma presented to Eric and then, when he found that months went by without Mildred looking any bulkier, the sense of having been had. It was a marriage of inconvenience.
And in his relationship with Thelma it was a weakness that he showed alongside her strength, a sense of being taken by her at her will and pleasure. He was a thing she possessed as she possessed skill in designing furniture, in selecting flitches of veneer and sections for carving and solid planks for feature treatment, as she possessed physical strength superior to his and professional authority dwarfing his as bookkeeper with the title of controller for the furniture factory.
In bed, Thelma assumed the dominant role, mounting her husband whenever she chose, playing with his breasts to arouse him, forcing his head down between her legs, making him shave with a depilatory as a woman does rather than with a razor. It was soon apparent to Thelma that Eric hadn't married her entirely by choice. From that moment on, she dedicated herself to making his life miserable.
"I saw these nightshirts on sale," she told him one night, "and decided you should start wearing them instead of pajamas so that I could get at you more easily when I wanted you, dear." Thereupon she handed him a long-sleeved, high-necked black satin garment.
"But this is a woman's nightgown!" Eric protested.
Thelma pretended to examine it again and said, "So it is, Apparently the salesgirl mare a mistake, Well, I want you to wear it all the same, dear. They're not exchangeable. And I bought several."
Then she made him put it on and teased him through it so that he had an instant erection.
"Apparently; you like women's things, dear," she said. And then she sprayed him with her perfume and put a matching satin nightcap on his head.
That was the start. Soon she was requiring him to wear women's panties instead of men's shorts. She chose them for their tactual satisfaction, squishy-feeling pink or tearose rayon bloomers; gleaming black nylon long-legged panties, bargains after the mini skirts came out; pretty, flagrantly feminine things in the most fem inine of colors. Eric protested. Thelma punished him whenever he resisted any of her demands by putting him into what she termed "a new type of cage."
These were incredibly ingenious and always they caused him to be in a position where his head was buried under Thelma's skirts, his tongue in her chalice, unable to withdraw his head, compelled to gratify her without any reciprocal gratification as his most severe punishment.
What were these devices? There was a double-skirted dress, through the space between them in which Eric as compelled to go, his head at an opening exactly positioned. Now wide ribbons passed from where they were stitched securely inside the underskirt and passing through to the outside where they could be tied in big, beautiful bows. Thus Eric's shoulders and arms were tied in place; his head was in a fixed position; he could only lap at his wife's crotch, kneeling in subjection before her, his body trapped between layers of gleaming, heavy silk.
There was a dog collar riveted to the inside of a short leather skirt so that when it was padlocked around his neck and the skirt was chained around Thelma's waist, Eric could only submit once again to his ordeal of gratifying her but not himself.
There was a huge pair of red faille bloomers with a window in the front through which Eric's head went and then a ribbon was drawn around the window, pulling the fabric around his neck securely.
She had special panty hose made so that they fitted both her legs and body and his head. Handcuffs, chains, leather double-cuffs, and many other unusual implements held his hands useless. One of Thelma's favorites was to sew his hands between two thicknsess of heavy silk and then shape the material around Eric's body so that his hands were securely attached to his own crotch, or his breasts or rump, but his mouth was hers to command.
A dozen ingenious devices were Thelma's and, owning the furniture factory as, to all intents and purposes she did, she had no difficulty crafting for her use on Eric, stock? and pillories. Or, a favorite of hers, a big, padded board through holes in which were locked Eric's head and wrists. Thelma frequently made him kneel before her in this while she put her legs over the pillows and threw her full silken skirt over his head.
Mildred was soon made a party to these activities and Thelma took pleasure in parading the latest degradation she had conceived for Eric before her friend. They made him wear skirts whenever he was in the privacy of their home and called him Erika.
Was it any wonder, when Mildred first conceived the idea of mate-swapping years later, that she frequently chose Eric as her toy; she understood his weaknesses and training so thoroughly.
Charlie was different. He was a big man; not tall, but big. He was considerably cider than Thelma and Mildred, by some twelve years. But there was about him an aura of authority, of decisiveness, of strength that they just couldn't link to an older, plumpish man whose hair was a bit thin on top.
He had come walking into the little studio Mildred shared with two other interior decorators, an older, brilliant faggot and a hat-wearing, positive, arty woman. "I need an office done professionally to impress my clients," his large bass voice boomed.
His statement was made and left lying there, flat, almost as though he'd just spat on the floor.
"You're an attorney, then?" the faggot suggested.
"An architect," the arty woman proclaimed.
"Okay, buddy," Mildred said, talking out of the corner of her mouth, "what's your racket and how much you fixing to spend?"
"I pick you," Charlie said, his fat, strong finger touching her on the tip of her pert little nose. "I'm a liquor wholesaler and I dabble a little in prime meats for restaurants, the high-class, syndicate-controlled ones. I need a place that's a good front for whatever else I want to go into. You know, walnut paneling-and don't mean paper made to look like wood. Dark, rich, copper, brass and pewter, leather and wood and fine books and a good liquor set-up and maybe something green growing."
"Hell," Mildred told him, "you're a better decorator than any of us. You're more sensitive than you admit, too, Charlie Greco. So let's start out with me mainly a wholesale connection for you and see what I can shake you down for."
They left. "Well," the faggot said, "I'm certainly happy that ruffian didn't choose me. That's the sort of client I could live a long, happy lifetime without."
"He looks like a better stud than that to me," the arty lady said. "Wonder what he'd be like in bed."
"Migawd," the faggot exclaimed, "do you like your men butch too?"
Mildred finished the office and got a bonus of a thousand dollars. That night she asked Thelma's father about Mr. Charles Greco.
"Greco?" Mr. Garrison said, rolling the name about on his tongue like a drop of wine. "Interesting fellow. Graduated from two universities and taught in one of the colleges. Humanities, I believe. Then he heard of some student being rejected because of his father's criminal record. The boy's grandfather had been a bootlegger and his father was doing something in international monetary exchanges.
"Charlie Greco insisted that the gangster was a finer man for admitting who and what he was than was the Dean of Admissions and the president of the school for their visiting the sins of the father on the son. Greco even went to work and got a conviction set aside for the student's father.
"He went into pinballs and slot machines next, the numbers racket, liquor, muscling meats into the syndicate-controlled restaurants. Somehow neither cops nor competitors dared touch him. Once two men came to take him for a ride or maybe just a discussion with one of the bosses of the rackets. Both simply disappeared.
"When Charlie Greco changed; he changed completely!"
"I want to marry him," Mildred said. "Is he married?"
"He was once, many years ago when he was still on the faculty. But his wife drowned the summer before he changed so completely."
That was when Mildred set her trap.
"Charlie Greco?" the veteran member of the university faculty scowled at the name, then brightened. "Oh yes, the egghead who turned into a beetle-brow. I recall him. Lovely person until he decided to become a caricature of a toughie. Married a beautiful student we both had. I recall her; always wearing a bright silk scarf around her head or her neck. She must have had a hundred ways of wearing those big, heavy, bright silk scarves."
"Greco? Did you say Charlie Greco?" the old wholesale meat market operator was looking at her coldly. "An astute man. Hard. I did business with him. That's all I choose to tell you."
"Can't you tell me anything about him and women?" Mildred pressed. "I find him extremely attractive and would like to know what it is that excites him."
"He had a pretty wife. Used a special perfume that I don't mind admitting got through to me even at my age. I got some for my wife, but it wasn't the same effect. 'Seduction and Enslavement' was its name."
She had systematically gathered a dossier on his weaknesses, interests, favorite topics, foods, drinks, other apetites. In sex, it soon became evident, he liked variety but his women had to have certain common demominators.
"Okay" Mildred Sweeny said to herself, "if that's the way the game is played, I'll play it that way to win."
Charlie Greco received a letter in the mail, a passionate, sensual letter filled with invitation and promise and scented with Seduction and Enslavement.
Charlie Greco received a phone call, a sensuous, thrillingly vibrant voice, promising him pleasures beyond his wildest dreams.
Charlie Greco received a photograph of Mildred wearing a gorgeous silk scarf knotted on one shoulder, a short skirt, high-heeled shoes, the package scented with Seduction and Enslavement, and an inscription: "Passionately yours, Mildred."
Charlie Greco called Mildred for a date.
She saw that he was driving without his seat belt fastened. She snuggled over to him, and fastened his seat belt around the two of them. Her perfume, the proximity of her silken allure, the knowing way her hands explored him all had him panting and wanting in minutes.
They were driving along the water's edge, the moon rippling over its surface. She was sitting on his lap. She threw her scarf around his neck as well as her own, their mouths locking in a hot kiss, tongues entwining, hands exploring.
Now his was under her skirt and hers was inside his fly and he was hungering and ready for her.
"Marry me," Mildred commanded.
"I'd be cheating on you in two months," Charlie Greco said.
"Good enough. I'll help you. Now marry me."
"Wife, you just made yourself a deal."
Then she slid over on her back, pulling him over her with the scarf they had around their necks. And immediately Charlie knew that he had no occasion to regret that decision.