Chapter 8
The principal achievement in Teddy Sculthorpe's life had been his birth into a family that owned a newspaper, a radio station, a paper company, and several million dollars' worth of real estate. After his graduation from Harvard with a gentlemanly C average and his stint in the Army, where he served as a second lieutenant in a motor pool in Okinawa, he arranged to become Publisher of the Stateuride Press, the family's newspaper. It was a vaguely defined job with no particular duties that had been vacant since the death of his Uncle Dick a few years earlier from chronic gluttony.
Teddy installed himself in an office on the eighth floor of the newspaper's headquarters. Naturally reclusive-because he knew he could never say "no" to anybody-he made sure the office had a back stairway that enabled him to get in and out without being seen.
Employees were advised that they must not speak to Mr. Sculthorpe under any circumstances, and that they must pretend he wasn't really there if they happened to catch a rare glimpse of him. His secretary, whom he seldom spoke to, and Mickey Kinsella, the managing editor, were the only exceptions to this rule. Most of Teddy's contact with Kinsella was effected by memos. Teddy would spend three or four hours a day in his office, reading the successive editions of the paper as they came off the presses and thinking up memos to send Kinsella. These memos rarely had a thing to do with editorial policy. Typically, they would suggest that some piece of graffiti like "DEATH TO THE IDLE RICH" be removed from a washroom or that a panhandler in front of the building be moved on his way.
Kinsella never showed these memos to anyone else or revealed their contents, but whenever the managing editor felt like bullying someone, which was quite often, he would first make an elaborate show of thoughtfully studying one of the blue pieces of memo-paper that everybody knew issued from Teddy's isolated domain. Kinsella was liked and admired by the staff, who considered Teddy a maniacal tyrant.
Three or four times a year, Teddy would dabble in journalism by suggesting a possible story to Kinsella. The stories invariably involved some wealthy friend or neighbor or college chum of Teddy's whose daughter had recently made her school's honor roll or whose cat had just had kittens. These suggestions would become urgent assignments of the utmost priority as they filtered down to the lower echelons of the staff. Known as "Sculthorpe Specials," they would be thrust upon any luckless reporter who hadn't mastered the journalistic skill of looking busy while doing nothing. No matter how inane or dull the finished article proved to be, it would be splashed all over the front page with a spread of pictures. The appearance of these stories would reinforce Teddy's image of himself as a crusading newspaperman who would have been another William Randolph Hearst if his time hadn't been taken up by other interests.
His principal interest was collecting old cars and trying to make them run. These were not classic cars or antique cars, just old cars that could be bought for forty or fifty dollars apiece. He had been become interested in this hobby when he was twelve, and his interest had continued unabated for twenty-five years. As word of his hobby got around, more and more people would go to the Sculthorpe estate to buy spare parts or unload wrecks. Teddy didn't advertise what he was doing, nor did he even think of his hobby as a business, but he managed to convert his palatial estate into the largest automotive junkyard in the county.
His neighbors, mollified by publicity extravaganzas about their cute kittens or smart daughters, never complained. They would have viewed one junked car in the yard of a working class home as an intolerable eyesore or an environ mental threat, but they accepted Teddy's acres of mangled wrecks as a symptom of endearing eccentricity. On some dark mornings when the clock was empty and the bourbon bottle said three A.M., Teddy would suspect that without his inherited wealth, he would have been a marginally successful junk dealer or a second-rate auto mechanic.
After Kathi Palmer came to stay with him, Teddy had no time at all for the newspaper business. When his lawyers and accountants concocted a clever scheme for selling the paper to its principal competitor without violating the letter of the anti-trust laws, Teddy hardly noticed what he was signing; nor did he ever become aware that his stroke of the pen had rendered several hundred persons jobless. Had he been required to fire each of them in a face-to-face confrontation, he would have wound up giving them all raises.
Kathi disliked Teddy's reclusive habits, and she disliked even more his attempts to impose his life-style on her. She took to hanging around the garage, where most of the business negotiations connected with Teddy's hobby were carried on by the chauffeur-whose job title should really have been "junk dealer," since he never had time to drive anybody anywhere. He made a good living for himself by raking off most of the profits in the transactions. Teddy, whose financial expertise was on a par with his journalistic talents, never noticed.
Kathi had started hanging around the garage merely for the sake of seeing people, any people. Teddy and the chauffeur got into the habit of sending her on errands around the yard for tools and auto parts. It wasn't long before she developed a good working knowledge of which tool did what and which part went where. By the time she was sixteen, she was demonstrating a real mechanical talent. Teddy was pleased with this, not only because it gave them a shared interest, but because she was demonstrating no talent at all in any of the formal subjects she studied with Mr. Owen. She could tear down the rocker arm assembly on a 1957 Chevy and put it back together blindfolded, but long division baffled her.
Along about this time, however, Teddy began to wonder if he hadn't welcomed a Trojan horse into his junkyard by encouraging her interest. Among the regular visitors to the junkyard were a motley crew of youthful drag-racers, motorcycle gangsters and car-strippers to whom a girl who was not only breathtakingly beautiful but who also knew the difference between a carburetor and camshaft was irresistible. Any one of those louts would have been overjoyed to seize the opportunity of showing Kathi what a wiener looked like, but fortunately Kathi's fear of men was greater than her curiosity about them; Uncle Teddy was still the only man she really felt at ease with. The rougher element was also discouraged from hanging around by Mr. Owen, whose interest in them equalled theirs in Kathi.
Nevertheless, Teddy was in a constant state of apprehension that one of these hippies, as he called them, would quite literally sweep his niece off her feet. She was already accepting pillion motorcycle rides from a particularly wretched specimen named Bob Peterson, whose front teeth were all missing as the result of a collision with a beer-mug.
Therefore he was far less reluctant to consent than he might otherwise have been when Kathi asked him if she could take a beach club membership in the nearby seashore resort of Wesley Grove. He had resigned himself, however reluctantly, to the sad fact that he could never be her lover; he knew, although he would rather not have known it, that he couldn't keep her forever cloistered from contact with the opposite sex; and he reasoned that she would meet a far better class of young men at the beach club than she would at the junkyard. The idea of someone like Bob Peterson getting anywhere near water was unthinkable.
Teddy did draw the line firmly, however, in absolutely forbidding her to wear the miniscule bikini she'd bought. But she wore it anyway.
The attention that Kathi got at the junkyard in her greasy denims was nothing compared to the sensation she caused at the beach in her bikini. After her first few visits to the club, the manager made a special rule for her: she had to spread her beach-blanket out behind the lifeguard stand, because her presence between the stand and the water proved to be too overwhelming a distraction for the guards.
She might have learned something about sex if she'd made friends with some girls her age, but the girls detested her on sight. She was able to keep her numerous male admirers at arm's length with the excuse that her uncle didn't allow her to have dates yet. But contact with young men who weren't as intimidating as the latter-day Huns and Ostrogoths who hung around the junkyard was beginning to erode her fear of them, and it wouldn't have been long before she would have challenged Uncle Teddy's dating rule.
She would have-if her life hadn't taken a drastically different direction at this point. One day while strolling along the boardwalk, her eye was caught by a sign outside the Venezia Theater. It was a crumbling old Moorish palace of stucco, a movie house that hadn't shown any movies in years. Sometimes in the summer it was rented by evangelists, and Kathi thought that the poster was an advertisement for some such preacher.
The poster bore a picture of a woman who could only be described as stunning. She had long golden hair, and her lips were parted and her green eyes half closed in an expression that might have denoted religious ecstasy-some kind of ecstasy, anyway. The biggest print on the sign said: THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION-Kathi had heard about that, in a vague sort of way-and the caption under the woman's picture said: "Wanda Fleurette, a student of Wilhelm Reich." Further down, it said: "Let Dr. Fleurette show you how to liberate your repressed sexual impulses!" That sounded interesting. She had a lot of im pulses she didn't understand, and for all she knew they might be sexual. They were certainly repressed, except when she was rubbing her slit. In even smaller print, so small that she had to bend close to read it, were the words: "Free yourself by fucking!"
Bingo! It was a long time since she'd heard Edith Snedeker's explanation of what "fuck" meant, and she'd gradually come to the conclusion that Edith had been all wrong. She knew that the word "fuck" was in some strange way indelicate, but she believed it was a synonym for "defective"-as in, "fucking ignition,"
"fucking Fords," or, in the case of her mother's boyfriends, "fucking bastards." This was the first time since that afternoon with Edith when she'd heard the word definitely linked to sex.
She entered the theater, just in time to catch Wanda's matinee lecture. Kathi didn't know much about preachers, never having seen the inside of a church, but she still believed that was what Wanda was, even when she was talking about "fucking" and "screwing" and slinging words around like "cunt" and "prick," whatever they meant. She certainly wasn't using them to mean "woman" and "undesirable person" respectively, which is what they meant when Bob Peterson used them.
Wanda's thesis for the day was abstract love, which seemed an appropriate subject for a preacher, except that she was against it, which struck Kathi as rather unexpected. To have a love for mankind, or for any subdivision of it, was either meaningless or downright harmful. One should love people only in their specific individuality, and love had meaning only when it led to fucking. This jarred Kathi: the only person she really loved was Uncle Teddy.
Abstract love, said Wanda, the passionate urge to help people by making the world a better place to live in, was the force that had motivated Adolf Hitler; it was the cause of all inquisitions, pogroms, purges, and wars. The only way to serve humanity, Wanda said, was to fuck another human; the only way to help a disadvantaged minority was to take one of its members to bed.
Kathi caught Wanda in a transitional period, before Wanda had adopted Frank Weston's ideas for revitalizing her style with aggressive showmanship. But even then she was gifted with the rare quality of stage presence or charisma. She was the sort of person who could make a crowded room seem empty by leaving it. She commanded attention; people wanted to believe her. She could have sold cigarettes in a cancer ward. Her audience was sparse. A few of its members walked out, some of them pausing to hurl denunciations at the lecturer-"You'll burn in hell, you honey-tongued whore!" or "Go back to Russia, where you belong!" or "Wash your mouth out with soap!" To which Wanda would sweetly reply, "If someone hates you, you should make love to them." But those who stayed were hypnotized by her beauty and her personality; and none was more thoroughly hypnotized than Kathi.
Wanda's response to her hecklers reinforced Kathi's belief that she was at a religious revival. Mr. Owen, an ardent Episcopalian, had introduced her to the New Testament, and she knew that Christ had said you should love your enemies. She found it an extremely puzzling book, though. When he wasn't talking about loving enemies and turning the other cheek, he was flogging moneychangers, zapping fig trees, suggesting that millstones be put around sinners' necks and urging his disciples to buy swords. Wanda was equally puzzling, so she probably belonged somewhere in the same bag.
At this time, Frank Weston's principal duty was interviewing potential converts. After each lecture, two or three people would always drift up to the stage to ask questions about natural meditation, as Wanda then called her philosophy. They would be urged to contribute to the cause. The larger contributors would be invited to visit the Natural Meditation Center, Wanda's commune, as soon as she found a suitable place to reestablish it; the commune had recently been dismantled by the vice squad in another state. Young and attractive Seekers who had no money were eligible for scholarships that enabled them to visit the Center for nothing. Frank didn't publicize these scholarships, knowing that Wanda's detractors would twist the facts and make them look like bait for a white-slavery operation.
Most of the female Seekers, unfortunately, weren't scholarship material. A statistical profile of the typical female convert would have shown her to be a thirty-five-year-old housewife who had married at eighteen and given birth to a child within the first year of marriage. Her husband, a blue-collar worker, earned between ten and fifteen thousand a year and fucked her infrequently. She was looking for something more out of life, but she didn't know what it was; she only knew that her husband didn't know what it was, either, nor could it be found in church or on television or in her astrology magazines.
But today he was confronted by a girl of sixteen who looked like a younger and even prettier edition of Gina Lollabrigida.
"I have a question," she said. "I hope you won't think it's silly."
"I'm sure I won't. What is it?"
"What's a cock?"
After a long, incredulous pause, Frank said: "Come backstage, and I'll show you," and he did.
Kathi became Wanda's most enthusiastic convert. She not only found out what a wiener looked like that afternoon, she also found out what it felt like and tasted like. She was thrilled, she was dazzled, she was transfigured. She found out what a cunt was, and what that tasted like, too, because Wanda didn't believe in letting mere accidents of gentler get in the way of lovemaking. She could hardly wait to get home and tell Uncle Teddy all about it-an ambition which she blurted out, and which Wanda was able to dissuade her from doing. But she had certainly found a remedy for all the itchings and squirmings and burnings and yearnings that had been tormenting her for so long. It was infinitely better than lying around and rubbing her own slit.
While Teddy was out of town the next day, hot on the scent of a 1954 Studebaker, Kathi brought one of the lifeguards home from the beach club. They were lying in an exhausted pile of flesh on the living-room floor, murmuring sexy noises to each other, when Mrs. Ermold, the elderly housekeeper, walked through the front door and screamed with horror.