Chapter 9
Apprised of the facts upon his return, Teddy did three things: he ordered Kathi to her room, he fired Mrs. Ermold, and he took to his bed in utter despair. When hunger drove him out of bed three days later, he found that Kathi had left home.
Teddy went to his study and stared for a long time at the portrait of Julia over the fireplace. Making sure that the revolver he'd brought from his bedside table was loaded, he pressed the muzzle firmly into his ear and began to squeeze the trigger. The phone rang.
Teddy picked up the receiver and held it to his free ear. "Sculthorpe," he said listlessly.
"Mr. Sculthorpe," said an unknown woman's voice, "this is Wanda Fleurette, of the Center for Natural Meditation. I-"
"Fuck off!" bellowed Teddy, hurling the receiver back in place.
He regretted this as soon as he'd done it. He'd never deliberately hurt another person's feelings in his life. Now, somewhere in the happy outer world, a good woman who had donated her time to raise money for some worthwhile charity had probably been reduced to tears by his outburst: Teddy Sculthorpe's last words.
He put down the revolver and began chomping morosely on a ham sandwich he'd left unfinished. He tried to remember the name of the woman's organization so he could call back and apologize to her, but it eluded him. It must have been familiar to him, otherwise she wouldn't have known the unlisted number of his study phone. He hoped she would call back. If she did, he would pledge a million dollars, and he would write that check before ending his life.
He scowled, remembering that he never carried more than a few hundred dollars in his personal checking account. He would have to make special arrangements, involving meetings with brokers and accountants and tax lawyers, if he wanted to give someone a million dollars. It would take weeks, and all of those people would give him incontrovertible arguments against doing it. Life's complicated tangle was reaching out to clutch him even in his grave.
He absentmindedly picked up the revolver and stuck it in his ear. He was about to pull the trigger when the phone rang again, shocking him into a realization of what he was doing. He put the gun down and picked up the phone.
The same woman said: "Please don't hang up, Mr. Sculthorpe."
"I can't give you a million dollars, goddammit!" he said. "Why can't you leave me alone?"
"That's okay. A few hundred thousand will see me through the weekend," she said, and her irony brought Teddy back to himself.
"Oh. I'm sorry. I was thinking of something else. I'm sorry I hung up on you the way I did."
"I thought that being rich was never having to say you're sorry."
He refused to let his irritation show, but his voice was cold when he said: "My time is limited. Please tell me why you called."
"I wanted to assure you that your niece is all right. We thought you might be worried about her."
He was jolted into sudden guilt. He hadn't given a thought to Kathi. He had failed Julia's trust.
"Who's wet" he demanded with growing alarm, as visions of the Symbionese Liberation Army danced in his head. "Who are you anyway?"
"Wanda Fleurette, of the Center for Natural Meditation."
No matter how hard he thought, that meant nothing. "And where is my niece?"
"I'm at the Venezia Theater in Wesley Grove," she said. "I'll be glad to discuss your problems with you after my eight o'clock lecture, which I'll expect you to attend."
"Are you insane? I don't have any problems. I have nothing to discuss with you, and I don't want to hear your lousy lecture. What have you done with Kathi?"
"More to the point, Mr. Sculthorpe," she purred, "what would you like to do with Kathi?"
She waited, but he could think of no reply to this painfully embarrassing question, and she continued: "The problem we might discuss first is your frustrated desire to fuck your niece. We can solve that problem for you, in a way you wouldn't believe possible. All things are possible, Mr. Sculthorpe, once you surrender yourself utterly to my system of natural meditation. I hope to see you in the audience at eight."
It wasn't until Kathi sought Wanda's protection after running away from home that Wanda found out who her uncle was; and Wanda knew all about Teddy Sculthorpe. A few years before this, a woman named Felicia Sculthorpe had come backstage after one of her lectures. The lecture had concerned what Wanda called the sin of exclusiveness-preferring one person as a sex partner above all others. Felicia hadn't been able to resist telling her about her ex-husband, a man so hung up on his own sister that he couldn't even screw his wife without looking at pictures of the sister.
Felicia had been amused rather than convinced by Wanda's lecture, and she thought that Wanda might be amused by the anecdote. She saw no harm in telling it, since she withheld her name; but Wanda, always on the lookout for rich prospects, took the trouble of finding out who Felicia was. Felicia had mentioned the name of the obscene picture-book, Julia, and Wanda managed to obtain a copy. Felicia remained unconverted-she viewed Wanda's philosophy as "sophomoric drive!"-but Wanda filed the book and the information for possible future use.
Wanda didn't know that Teddy had screwed his sister, but it was obvious that he'd wanted to; and it was also obvious to her, from what Kathi told her of his strange behavior, that he wanted to screw his niece, too. If she could use Kathi as a wedge to convert Teddy, she might get all the money she needed to reestablish her Natural Meditation Center in style.
Wanda dug out her copy of Julia. The resemblance between mother and daughter was striking, and she wondered why she hadn't noticed it when she'd first met Kathi. The book was a photographic essay about a typical day in the life of "Julia S., a fashionable young American in Paris." Accompanying the explicit photos were captions that embodied an elephantine wit. "Julia always starts off the day with a hearty breakfast" was the caption on a photo that showed her kneeling in front of two men and trying to fit both their cocks in her mouth at the same time. "Julia accepts a delivery at the back door" showed her being buggered by a black man in a messenger's cap. "Julia plunges into a busy social whir!" depicted her accommodating no less than eight men at once, with her cunt, her mouth, her hands, her toes, and her armpits.
Wanda's first step was to take photographs recreating the tableaux depicted in the book, with Kathi taking the place of her mother. Eager to follow in her mother's footsteps, the darling girl gave it her all. Then Wanda dusted off her old lecture about exclusiveness and put in a few pointed references to Teddy's problems. She incorporated all of Frank's new ideas in a light-and slide-show specifically designed to send Teddy into a state of deep shock, where he might be manipulated more easily by her forceful personality.
Teddy, of course, could be manipulated by anybody under any circumstances, so it was an example of drastic overkill. When the show was over, he walked down the center aisle like a zombie. Waiting for him, after the rest of the audience had left, were Wanda and three of her most voluptuous Seekers.
Over Teddy's halfhearted protests, the four women proceeded to give him a round-robin blowjob. First one and then another of the voluptuous girls would take his prick into her mouth, licking and slurping and sucking with a dazzling display of the skills that Wanda had taught them.
Sometimes one girl would suck on the head of his cock while two others licked either side. The fourth girl would lick his balls while this was going on. It was more than enough to make Teddy forget all about his insuperable problems, all about the successive shocks that had burst on him that evening. He began to wonder if he really had succeeded in shooting himself that afternoon, and if he was now in heaven.
After a quick dip in the mouths of each of the four girls, Teddy turned to shove it again in Wanda's mouth. He couldn't bear to keep his prick out in the cold an instant longer than he had to. He was certain that this time Wanda was going to eat his come. His stiff meat was so inflamed by their lascivious teasing that he wasn't even sure he could keep himself from coming into the empty air.
He turned hastily and plunged it between the next pair of provocatively upraised lips, presumably Wanda's. He had slipped half the length of his prick inward before he realized that the girl he was fucking in the mouth wasn't Wanda at all. She wasn't blonde. She had dark reddish-brown hair, worn in brow-concealing bangs. Her eyes weren't green, they were smoky gray, with amber flecks in their depths. She wasn't in her mid-twenties, she was ... only ... about ... sixteen....
"Kathi!" It was a strangled scream, a sound torn not so much from his lungs as from the depths of his tormented soul.
"Mmmm," she murmured, rolling her eyes up to stare at him with gleeful malice as she sucked harder.
'You can't do this to me! Stop it-no! No! Get away from me, Julia, or I'll tell!" babbled Teddy.
He struggled, or so he believed. He told himself that he could do nothing to evade this incestuous union. The other girls surrounded him, holding him, pressing him in place with the warm vibrance of their naked flesh. He could summon up no energy to resist them. All of his energy had drained away into the rigid column of flesh thrust deep into his lovely niece's mouth. His prick was doing his thinking for him.
He hardly noticed Kathi's technique. He couldn't have said whether she was as skillful as Wanda or the other girls. Skill had nothing to do with it. This was by far the best, because it was Kathi who was doing it: Kathi, who had usurped Julia's place as the great love of his life, who was more desirable than Julia had ever been.
He could stand only a few seconds of Kathi's swirling, sucking mouth-love. He writhed erratically as his cock began to pump its load into her mouth. He would have fallen to the floor if the other girls hadn't supported him. The sinuous muscles of Kathi's throat writhed under her ivory skin as she swallowed and sucked for more and swallowed again.
Thus came about the conversion of Teddy Sculthorpe, and for a while it seemed that Wanda had landed with her ass in butter. A Foundation for Natural Meditation was established, with Wanda Fleurette as the chairman of its board of directors, and Teddy signed over his estate and his money to it.
He was given the title of President, a post of responsibility similar to the one he'd held as Publisher of the Statewide Press. He installed himself in a small suite of rooms, convenient to a back staircase, on the top floor of his former home. A secretary was given strict orders to discourage those he didn't wish to see, a category of persons including nearly everyone except Wanda and Kathi.
The junkyard was closed down. Wanda insisted that the wrecks be towed away, with the exception of a dozen choice relics that she permitted him to maintain behind the garage. Her followers needed the space to frolic in, she said, nor did she want their uninhibited activities observed by customers of the junk business. Teddy didn't object very strenuously. He was willing to admit that his hobby had grown beyond manageable bounds, and he was glad to see what he thought was the last of the hoodlums who had frequented the junkyard. In this he was disappointed, however. Bob Peterson and some of the other habitues declared themselves converts to Wanda's philosophy and continued to hang around.
Wanda began to branch out. She established another commune at the Sculthorpe summer home on the shores of Horseneck Lake in Cattaquitpiss County, Maine. She wrote a book called Fucking Is Fun! illustrated profusely with scenes of life at the Center, and began selling it by mail. Wanda Fleurette Coloring Books, designed to give children an early grounding in her philosophy and a thorough knowledge of the possibilities of the human body, were another hot item.
Teddy's relatives had always thought he was the kind of Sculthorpe who would finally get religion, but they were scandalized by the faith he'd chosen to embrace. He was worse even than his sister, who'd never made a public spectacle of her promiscuity. They were ignorant of the book in which she'd appeared.
They bided their time, gathered evidence, and sprang, attempting to have Teddy declared mentally incompetent. Even while the board of directors was organizing itself to meet this threat, Bob Peterson revealed himself as an undercover detective for the state police and announced that everyone was under arrest.
Federal officials got in on the fun, too, charging Wanda with innumerable violations of the Mann Act and various postal regulations. All this publicity did no good for Teddy's civil case. Against the Freudians and Jungians that his family arrayed against him, he was able to produce only a couple of Reichian psychiatrists, whose sanity was itself suspect, in his own behalf. He was packed off to a bin and his money reverted to his relatives.
Although she hadn't been a party to the suit, one of the relatives to share in the dismemberment of Teddy's funds was Julia Palmer. She, in fact, got most of Teddy's assets. She had been out of touch with all these events, absorbed in her business: she ran a brothel called The American Way on the Street of the Monkeys in Macao. She didn't need to do that for money, of course; it was a hobby with her, like Teddy's junkyard.
Julia returned to find out what was going on, and she discovered a soul sister in Wanda Fleurette. Julia needed no conversion. She had been actively practicing Wanda's philosophy all her life, but it was a revelation to her to hear all of her basic beliefs put so clearly into words. She was grateful to Wanda, too, for having given her child such an invaluable education and instilling in her such a healthy outlook on life.
Kathi, meanwhile, had been declared an incorrigible child and sentenced to an indeterminate term at a girls' reform school. Julia was able to get her released in her custody: not only because Julia was able to produce the most eulogistic character references for herself that money could buy, but because the correctional authorities were only too glad to get rid of Kathi. They considered her a bad influence on the other inmates.
Backed by Julia's millions, Wanda could have dragged her cases through the courts for twenty years. But she was anxious to get the ordeal over with and be free once again to preach her philosophy, perhaps in some new and less legally vulnerable form. The lawyers that Julia hired were able to get the state charges, which were the more serious ones, dismissed-mainly because the state, having dealt with Kathi, wasn't terribly eager to get Wanda into its women's prison. Wanda had to serve two years in a relatively comfortable federal prison, where she drew up the plans for the F-meter and plotted her next incarnation: as a marriage counselor.
Her philosophy, of course, was dead set against marriage. She planned to break up as many of them as she could.