Practically everyone in Cooper Station took sides in the question of Christopher Pappas and for those who seemed to be hugging the middle of the road there were plenty of people to help convert them to one opinion or the other. Of course there were a few who started out on one side of the fence and then by strength of persuasion or force of out-and-out threat were soon convinced of the folly of their thinking. One of these was David Strong, who taught music appreciation at the Cooper Station high school and in addition gave private piano lessons at his home. David held out against the pressure of Doris Delaney Palmer’s determination for almost a week and then he squeezed his temples in frustration and said,
“All right, Mrs. Palmer. All right. I’ll sign your petition.”
“Believe me, Mr. Strong,” said Doris Palmer with her small smile, “you’re doing the right thing. A man like you has stature in this community and I’m sure you’d never want it said that you approved of someone as undesirable as Christopher Pappas.”
David often thought later that he would perhaps have been stronger with Doris if she hadn’t put her extra pressure on him on a Friday. Fridays were always bad for David because on that day he gave five piano lessons in a row and when he was finished his nerves screamed and his head pounded with the sound of piano keys being manipulated by inexpert fingers.
Still and all, thought David, Friday or not, I shouldn’t have signed that petition. It’s not right. I’m not that good a teacher myself that I should sit in judgment of another.
The courses in music appreciation which David taught at the Cooper Station high school were electives and he knew very well what most of the students thought and said.
“Snap course,” they told each other. “An easy two credits.”
They soon learned differently, though, thought David in satisfaction.
His examinations in music appreciation were no snap.
Then they swore. “Jesus! I took the damned thing for an easy two credits and now I’m flunking that lousy course!”
Clods, thought David. Each and every one of them, clods. They were almost as bad as the nitwits who took piano lessons. Almost, but not quite. Nobody could possibly be as bad as the frizzy-haired girls who looked at him with moist eyes and said, “Oh, Mr. Strong. How long do you think it’ll be before I’ll be able to play something pretty like ‘The Maiden’s Prayer’ or ‘The Lost Chord’?” or the greasy-faced boys who had mothers who insisted that their darlings were loaded with talent and who said to David, “Look, Professor, I don’t like this any more than you do but it’s the only way I can get my allowance every week and you’re getting paid, so let’s get it over with.” No, thought David with a small shudder, nobody could be as bad as the ones who took piano lessons.
But perhaps it was because he wasn’t much of a teacher that he had so much trouble while Pappas, he had heard, was a very good teacher who not only loved his work but who could instill the desire to learn in young people.
I shouldn’t have signed that petition, thought David again. I’m nobody to hold a man’s mistakes against him. I’ve made too many myself.
Then he gave himself a severe mental shake. Stop it, he commanded himself. It’s Friday. No more piano lessons until Monday and tonight Mark is coming to visit. I’ve got to get busy and clean up this place. It looks like a sty. Damn it, right or wrong, I have to think of myself once in a while. Mrs. Palmer is a big influence in education here and if I hadn’t signed her petition she might hold up my contract for next year. It isn’t as if one name more or less were going to change things.
David began to move about, picking up things and straightening out what he called his studio.
But still, he thought, it wasn’t right.
David Strong lived in a house owned by a woman named Valerie Rutgers on the northeast edge of Cooper Station. He lived there because he had a passion for Victorian architecture and Mrs. Rutger’s house, which was painted dark red and trimmed with white gingerbread, was just about as Victorian as a house could be. It had a large, round room leading off the second floor and Val Rutgers called this room the tower while David, who rented it from her, called it the studio. Under the street-side windows in his room, David had a wide couch upholstered in dark-green raw silk and decorated with many small satin-covered pillows. He had a large refectory table in the center of the room on which he kept copies of music and theatre magazines and two small brass ashtrays, while the opposite side of the room was completely taken up with his Steinway concert grand piano, a gift from his father on the occasion of David’s graduation from the Cincinnati Conservatory. On the wall over the piano were two small water colors which had been done by a friend of David’s in Paris. The studio also held a glass-topped coffee table, three armchairs covered in chintz, a Capehart radio phonograph, a small, red leatherette bar with shelves of bottles behind it and a fireplace with two brass candlesticks on the mantle and a pen-and-ink sketch of David on the wall above.
“He’s got more junk in that room than a secondhand shop,” Val Rutgers often told her friends. “But I’ll say one thing for Mr. Strong. He keeps the place up good. Neat as a pin, he is.”
And sometimes David himself waved a deprecating hand around the studio and said, “We’re a little cluttered here, but cozy, and that’s what really counts.”
There were some people in Cooper Station who thought that David Strong was a little peculiar. After all, it wasn’t natural for a man to wear cologne or to polish his fingernails, even if he did use colorless polish, or to be so finicky about his food.
“Peculiar, hell!” said others, who were not so kind. “That guy’s a fairy if I ever saw one.”
“You’re crazy,” said David’s defenders. “He’s been living here in town since right after the war, and nobody ever heard of him doing anything out of the way.”
“I’ll vouch for that,” said someone else in mincing exaggeration. “Heaven only knows, I’ve given him every chance in the world and he never tried anything fresh with me.”
“Maybe you’re just not his type, sweetness.”
“Oh, stop that, you!”
“Well, I don’t care what none of you say. As long as he keeps his hands on the piano and off anyone in Cooper Station, I say he’s all right.”
“You’ll see!”
“And as far as that goes, it seems to me I heard a saying once. It takes one to know one.”
David, of course, knew that he was different from other people. His own mother had told him so many times, whenever anyone had laughed at him.
“Whenever people laugh at anyone, David,” Mrs. Strong had said, “it’s only to cover their own wicked envy of that person. Do not be disturbed, my dear. Just put your faith in God and everything will come your way.”
So David knew that the people who ridiculed him were just so many boors and he went right on being careful of what he wore, how he smelled and what he ate. As far as eating went, he had to watch his diet because he had a nervous stomach. Even the army doctors had admitted that when they classified him for limited service only during the war.
David enjoyed the years he spent stationed at an air force base in Brazil. As a second lieutenant in charge of a special service group, it was his job to plan entertainment for the troops and to stage productions for the officers’ club. It was warm in Brazil and David had developed a taste for South American music and had learned a smattering of Spanish and Portuguese. He also met people who understood him and he didn’t want to come back to the United States when he was demobilized. But he came back, and, as he often told himself, here he was stuck in Cooper Station, a town with a complete disinterest in culture, and his nervous stomach had turned into a vicious case of ulcers. He knew he had ulcers even though that damned Jess Cameron argued that he hadn’t.
“The x-rays show that you don’t have a sign of an ulcer,” Jess had told him. “But I warn you, if you keep on the way you’re going, you soon will have. Is there something bothering you, David? I mean, something other than this constant worry about your stomach?”
“Please, Jess,” David laughed and put up a protesting hand. “Don’t try your psychosomatic theories on me. If you don’t know what to do for me, just say so, and I’ll find someone who does know.”
His remark hadn’t fazed Jess Cameron in the least. The doctor continued his insistent prying until David lost his temper completely and stamped out of Jess’s office in an absolute rage. Jess didn’t understand him any more than did anyone else in Cooper Station.
But even in a community as drab and rustic as this one, David was sometimes lucky enough to run across someone who was different, someone who did understand him. Someone like Mark Griffin. Mark had known instinctively how to talk to a sensitive soul like David.
“It’s so peaceful here in your ivory tower, David,” Mark said. “When you play things like that fugue, Davy, all the tenseness in me just flies away.”
And David could talk to Mark. He could tell Mark anything and everything. Well, just about anything and everything. There were some things he would never tell anyone in spite of Jess Cameron and his nosiness.
“The smart thing to do, David,” Jess had said, “if something is bothering you, is to get it off your chest.”
“For heaven’s sake, Jess, don’t be so damned Freudian. The next thing I know, you’ll be asking me about my sex life!”
“What about your sex life, David?” Jess had looked sharply at him. “Is that what’s bothering you?”
“Well, really!”
“David, let me help you. I can’t do anything for you if you won’t let me.”
“The only things you can do for me, Jess, are to give me something for my stomach and then leave me to hell alone. I don’t need anyone to go about prying into my past to find out whether or not I had a wretched childhood and the effect this has had on me. When I feel the need, Jess, of a couch and a psychiatrist, I’ll go out and find one.”
And again David strode out of Jess’s office in anger. He had read a little psychology himself, he thought angrily, and he certainly didn’t need anyone like Jess Cameron to tell him that his childhood had been completely miserable. David just thanked God that he had been intelligent enough to rise above the influence of his parents. But sometimes, even now, his stomach knotted itself when he remembered how it had been.
David’s father, Alan Strong, was a black-haired, black-browed giant of a man who had made a fortune with his acres of virgin pine in the state of Maine. When he started he had dealt in lumber exclusively and had built a small paper plant as a side line, but as the years went by and lumbering in Maine became an industry of the past, the Strong Paper Products Company grew and spread. Alan Strong closed his sawmills and devoted himself to paper. He manufactured paper towels, cups, napkins, plates and other such small items and he grew enormously wealthy, but his greatest pride always remained the fact that he had started with nothing but a handsaw and the tall pine of Maine. He had always pushed the paper angle, though, and in the old days he used to go out to solicit orders himself and as he prospered he found himself going as far south as Boston to see prospective customers. That was how he met Julia Bancroft. He happened, one day, onto a small printing shop in Stuart Street and in the absence of the owner, Harold Bancroft, Alan spoke to Bancroft’s daughter, Julia. As he spoke he watched the color come and go in her pale cheeks and noticed the softness of her brown hair piled high on her head. He never saw the thinness of her lips nor the almost gaunt look of her cheekbones. He went back home but suddenly all the fun was gone from his life.
Alan Strong had been in the habit of going into town on Saturday nights with his men where he drank with the best of them and spent the hours after the saloons closed with one of the painted women who hung around the hotels during the logging season. It was his boast that he could make any whore alive yell “Uncle” before he was through with her and when this pleasure, too, lost its savor, Alan was surprised, worried and upset. The only time he seemed able to work up any enthusiasm about anything was just before he went to Boston on a selling trip. It took him three months to discover that what he wanted was a good woman to manage his house, bear his children and look after him. And then he began to court Julia Bancroft in earnest. He plied her with candy and flowers and loaned money to her father when the print shop seemed on the verge of bankruptcy. Gentleness settled in him for the first time when he noticed how tiny Julia’s waist was. There were times, of course, when he wanted to plunge his hands into the wavy, brown mass of Julia’s hair and kiss her until she became aware of the heat in him, but he controlled himself.
They were married in Boston and after a two-week trip to New York and Philadelphia, Alan brought his bride home to Berlinton. Within a month he realized that he had made the one big mistake of his life. At first, he had accepted Julia’s reluctance as natural for a virgin, but before the month was gone, he knew that he was married to a frigid stick of a woman who resented her marriage to an ignorant brute of a man who had dragged her from civilization to a wilderness of brawling men and loose women.
“If I had known then what I know now,” was Julia’s favorite prefacing remark.
“I thank God that my poor mother cannot see me now,” said Julia damply.
“Filthy drunkard!” shouted Julia.
“Beast!” cried Julia on many a Saturday night.
They had been married for three years when David was born. During Julia’s pregnancy she almost went out of her mind and drove Alan out of his, but when her time finally came, she kept him at her side during her entire labor. She clung to his hands with a fantastically strong grip and she screamed in terror when he tried to leave her. Alan saw his son born and he swore that he would never again be compelled to watch such a procedure. He never had sexual relations with Julia after that, and although she was thankful for this at first, there grew in her a terrible anger that she should be so ignored. She devoted the rest of her life to her son, David, and to the task of purging the father’s blood from the veins of the boy. Toward her husband she maintained a cold courtesy and she called him Mr. Strong to the end of her days.
David was a timid, pallid boy addicted to chest colds. He was too delicate to attend school regularly so his mother tutored him herself and though his early education consisted almost entirely of Bible study, the child did learn to read. Later, he hid in his room and read books of every description which he borrowed secretly from the public library.
Julia was an ardent member of a sect called Christian Adventists which, unlike the Seventh Day Adventists with which they were confused by the uninitiated, celebrated Sunday on Sunday, a fact which they pointed out with great care. Julia was forever exhorting her son to “Repent, David, repent,” and if, at times, the child wondered just what it was that he was to repent, his mother fixed him with such a stern and staring eye that myriad feelings of guilt churned in him until his mind fastened on some little act that he could be sorry for and then both mother and son were satisfied.
“Give your heart to Christ that you may be saved, David,” said Julia.
And regularly, twice a week, once at the Wednesday evening prayer meeting and again at the Sunday evening service, David was the first to kneel at the altar rail and give his heart away.
The Christian Adventists would have screamed in outrage had anyone mentioned Freud and his theory of the sublimation of the sex urge to them. Yet, they practiced a religion that was almost entirely composed of capitulation, submission and exaltation. In northern New England, the religious orgasms of these Christian Adventists outdid those of the uneducated Negroes from the swamps of Georgia so much more fiery were their sermons, their hymns, their rolling about on the floor.
By the time he was seven years old, David Strong understood that he must always be on guard against the evil within him and although his father was to blame for this misfortune, he must pray for his father also. Sometimes Alan Strong was so filled with rage at the sight of his velvet-clad son that he would go out and get very drunk and then come home to shout obscenities at his wife and taunt David with vile names. The boy cowered when his father called him “Sissy” and “Pantywaist” and after these times, David prayed harder than ever that his father might be saved.
When David was ten, his mother bought an upright piano and sent her son twice a week to a Miss Overstreet for lessons. In no time at all David could play hymns and when he was thirteen years old, he was made organist at the Christian Adventist Church. Tears would fill his eyes and his heart beat as if it would burst whenever he heard the congregation rise behind him to sing.
David practiced long hours on the upright piano in the Strong living room and when Alan, fed up with the eternal light, suggested a good, rollicking tune, David tried fixing him with the look that the Reverend Charles Parmenter sometimes turned on his congregation, a look full of pity for the sinner left unredeemed.
“And don’t look at me with those goddamned cow eyes!” yelled Alan.
If Julia were close by, David dared to remonstrate with his father.
“It is sinful to take the name of the Lord in vain, Father,” said David in a tone that matched his pitying look.
“Balls!” roared Alan and stamped out of the house.
Wherever Alan walked, his boots left little clods of mud on the immaculate floors and the sight of these, coupled with the sound of his father’s heavy tread, filled David with a little kind of shivery thrill that he could not have explained.
By the time David was fifteen years old, Julia had made up her mind that her son had received a divine call to the ministry. He had the thin physique and the noble brow for it and his voice would no doubt register in a lower key as he grew older. At seventeen David left Berlinton to enter the Christian Adventist College in Preston, Illinois where he would begin his theological studies and where the course of his life was set forever.
His trip to Preston, Illinois, was the first he had ever made without his mother, and he was lost and miserable. Julia had engaged a room for him in a house run by the president of the Ladies’ Circle of the Christian Adventist Church in Preston but even this woman, who was so like Julia in many ways, could not take Julia’s place. David had never made friends easily and after a few rebuffs, his fellow students left him strictly alone. He cried into his pillow at night and actually became ill with homesickness, but his mother had told him that no matter what, he must stick with his divine calling, so David never complained. He studied hard and went out seldom.
One of the few places that David did frequent, however, was a small restaurant at the edge of town. Coffee was forbidden by his religion on the grounds that it was poisonous and that it was a sin to poison the Temple of the Soul, but David indulged himself in this one defection and comforted himself with the fact that when he drank coffee he could study better and that if he studied better he could become a minister that much faster. The restaurant to which David went was called “Sal’s” and it was out of bounds for all Christian Adventist students. The administration at the college considered Sal’s a hotbed of vice, a place whose only customers were truck drivers who smoked, danced, swore and committed adultery every night of the week. David’s stomach had churned the first few times he had ventured to Sal’s, but after a few weeks his fear of discovery passed and he began to look forward to his trips across town.
Sal’s daughter, Millie, worked as a waitress in the restaurant, and when Millie had no customers to take care of, she often sat down in David’s booth to talk with him. She was a big girl, with long yellow hair and very white teeth. She wore skirts that hugged her buttocks and her breasts seemed to be forever struggling against whatever material restrained them.
David colored the truth a little whenever he talked to Millie. He made his divine call to the ministry sound rather like the vision of St. Paul and he was careful not to mention his mother to her. The fact that he was a divinely chosen minister of God enhanced David in Millie’s eyes. He was different and therefore interesting.
Millie was the sort of girl for whom “reader identification” had been invented. No matter which magazine story she read, nor what movie she saw, Millie immediately became the heroine of the piece. One day, when she had been forced to take refuge from the rain in Preston’s public library, Millie came across a book that someone had left lying on one of the tables. It was an anthology of short stories and the first story in the book was W. Somerset Maugham’s “Rain.”
Millie saw herself as a much more attractive version of Sadie Thompson than Maugham’s plump-legged heroine and she set out to inspire David to convert her to religion.
David, unfortunately, had never read “Rain.” Here he was, still in his freshman year at school, and already he had a potential convert.
He spent hours talking to Millie.
He pointed out to her the error of her ways with truck drivers and other unsavory characters. He shuddered when she related episodes from her life, most of them untrue, and he realized what a tremendous job it was going to be to save Millie. But even as she confessed her sins to him, her long hair falling on either side of her face, her breasts heaving with the passionate relief of telling all, David’s feelings of horror and pity were mixed with one other emotion. It gave him a wonderful feeling of power to watch this girl whom he considered beautiful prostrate herself before him. He felt a surging thrill whenever he watched the tears form at the corners of her eyes and his fingertips ached to place themselves on her bowed head.
“You must repent, Millie,” he said. “There is no sin so great that the Lord will not forgive you.”
Millie wept and David felt that the moment was at hand when Millie would throw herself on her knees and give her heart to Christ.
“I can’t talk any more in here, David,” Millie said.
And indeed she could not talk any more for she had run out of things to say. According to the story, David should have succumbed long ago to her charm.
The little punk, she thought, angry with disappointment. Who the hell does he think he is? He ain’t human. He’s dead.
“Come, then,” intoned David in what he hoped was a ministerial voice.
He took her by the hand and led her out of the restaurant, but once they were outside it was Millie who took the initiative. She led him away from town and down a dirt road to the bank of a river. They found a place where the ground was flat and soft with pine needles and they sat down. Millie could hear the river flowing and she suddenly had a brilliant idea.
“I want you to baptize me, David,” she said.
“Oh, I couldn’t do that, Millie. I’ve no authority to baptize anyone.”
“Yes, you can. Anybody can baptize anybody. It says so right in that Bible you gave me.”
She was not sure that the book said anything of the kind, but perhaps David also was not sure.
“Please, David,” she said. “I’ll do anything you say. I’ll be good if you’ll do it, David. Truly I will.”
“But I can’t, Millie. Besides, it wouldn’t serve any purpose. You’d only have it to do over again when you join the church.”
“Please, David. I want so much to be good. Even if it doesn’t count this time, I’d feel as though I were at least on the right path.”
“All right,” said David at last.
He walked to the edge of the water and took off his shoes and socks and decided that if he rolled up the legs of his trousers he could still wade in deeply enough to immerse Millie.
“David!” called Millie. “David, it’s so dark. I can’t see you. Come back!”
When David returned to where he had left her, he saw that she was on the ground.
“Oh, God!” he cried suddenly frightened. “Millie, did you fall, Millie? Are you hurt?”
He knelt down on the ground next to her and in the next second she had swept both of her arms around his neck and was forcing his mouth down onto hers. At first, David was so dumbfounded that he could do nothing but remain as he was but when her lips opened and he felt her sharp teeth and probing tongue trying to force his mouth open, he tried desperately to break away from her. She was remarkably strong. Without moving her mouth she flung him onto his back and held him pinned to the ground while she pressed her naked body against him and then, to his horror, her powerful hands gripped his wrists and turned his hands palms upward so that they were filled with the soft, hot mass of her breasts. She writhed on him and little moans escaped the hot, wet mouth glued to his. David felt a terrible sickness rise in him. He had a sensation of drowning. He could not breathe and he struggled futilely with the panting creature who held him. He felt her clawing at his trousers and she squirmed as if she were trying to press him into the ground.
“Sonofabitch,” she said through her teeth when his belt buckle would not yield.
She had to use both hands and in that moment, David pushed for all he was worth and managed to roll her away from him. He staggered to his feet, gulping air in great, sobbing lungfuls, and then he hung on to a tree and threw up and threw up and threw up.
David developed a serious chest cold and ran a high fever for days. When his cold was better he had such violent stomach upsets that he could not attend classes and every day he put off going to the head of the school to hand in his resignation. He tried to forget his experience with Millie, but the harder he tried the sharper edged grew the images. Every time he looked down at his hands he felt the soft mushiness of her again, and his stomach tightened and quivered.
I shall have to leave here, thought David. I’ll go right now to tell the dean that I must leave.
He dreaded the ordeal, the questions that were sure to be asked, but he forced himself to get up and dress. He was halfway to the school when he met the local telegraph boy.
Julia was dying.
David ran back to his room and packed his belongings, then he raced for the Boston train.
“Mother,” he cried silently. “Wait until I get there. Don’t go. Don’t leave me. What shall I do if you go and leave me alone?”
But Julia was dead when David arrived in Berlinton.
“She had a stroke a week ago,” said Alan Strong. “The doctor said it wouldn’t do any good to send for you then. He thought she might get well, David, or at least live. He told me yesterday that if she had lived she would have been completely paralyzed.”
So, thought David, even as I lusted with whores and harlots my mother lay dying.
He could not excuse himself now on the grounds of innocence. The Lord knew well the secrets of his black heart even if David himself had tried to deny their existence. And He had struck him down with swift and just punishment for the wickedness of his soul.
“The Lord giveth,” said David, “and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
“Yeah,” said Alan Strong.
Alan made the arrangements and everyone in Berlinton said it was the biggest, most impressive funeral the town had ever seen and that even when the mayor had died last year, there weren’t half as many flowers for him.
Through the years Alan and David had arrived at a sort of truce whereby, though they still detested one another, they could, at least, speak civilly together.
“Well, David. How’s school?” asked Alan.
“I’m not going back,” replied David.
“Why the hell not?” demanded Alan. “I thought you were so all fired set on getting to be a preacher.”
“I’ve simply decided that I’m not fit for the ministry, Father.”
“Well, that’s fine,” said Alan, and for the first time in his life he clapped his son on the back. “Now you can come into the office with me. It’s a fitting thing that a man should have his son in business with him.”
David winced and shrank from his father’s touch; the Lord had not finished punishing him.
“What’s the matter?” asked Alan. “Don’t you want to come in with me?”
Thy will be done, thought David, and aloud he said to his father, “Of course I do.”
During David’s six weeks with the Strong Paper Products Company, Alan discovered that his son had neither the brain for figures, the tongue for salesmanship nor the back for labor. He gazed in disgust at the tall, thin boy who had always had the look of a calf going to slaughter and his temper grew hot and exploded.
“Look here, you,” said Alan, “for years I’ve watched you sit on your ass and pick your nose while your old lady tit-fed you and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to have you underfoot any longer. Just what is it that would suit Your Royal Highness? Not the ministry again, I suppose, and you’d run my business into the ground in a year. Just what good are you? Just what in hell do you intend to do?”
David felt his stomach contract. He hated this man! Yet, there was always that odd sensation whenever he looked up at his giant of a father.
I know why he is a success, thought David. He has bullied and smashed his way through every obstacle. Nothing has been able to withstand him. Nor anyone. Not even my mother.
“I want to be a musician,” whispered David at last. “A pianist.”
“Jesus God!” roared his father.
David spent four years at the conservatory in Cincinnati. He met people whose ideas were incomprehensible to him and whose morals appalled him. But he had determined to try to learn from these people. He did not freeze now when a friendly overture was made but forced himself to respond. Now that the kingdom of heaven had been closed to him, he intended to become a citizen of the world. He sat in on bull sessions where his new friends conversed on every subject from communism to sex and, while he did not form a single idea of his own, he adopted those that appealed to him.
Roger Merritt, a second-year student who was also a pseudo-psychologist and had a fetish for four-letter words, set himself the task of “straightening out David, psychologically.”
“Listen, Dave,” said Roger. “These stomach upsets of yours are nothing more than a manifestation of sexual frustration. If you’d just go out and get yourself laid regularly you wouldn’t spend so much of your time puking.”
David had taken to smoking cigarettes which he inserted in a long, ebony holder. He had also cultivated the habit of looking at people through half-closed eyes since he was convinced that this gave him the aura of a thinker and of a man who considered every thought and attitude with great philosophical care.
“What would you say, Roger, if I were to tell you that I am a virgin?” asked David through a cloud of exhaled smoke.
“I’d say that you’re either a liar, a complete damned fool or a fairy. One of the three.”
“I am neither, Roger,” said David. “I simply regard sex as a mere nothing and I shall always remain celibate.”
“Horseshit,” said Roger bluntly.
During the years that David spent in Cincinnati, there were a few women who became intrigued by him. In spite of his adopted mannerisms, he had an innocent expression that was apt to bring out the most violent maternal emotions in some female personalities, and besides, David was good company. He could talk about styles of dress and shades of make-up and nail polish. Several girls at the conservatory claimed that they never bought a new dress until after David Strong had seen and approved it.
“But that neckline, darling,” David would say. “It’s just not you.”
Or,
“That color is magnificent, my sweet. It does something for your skin.”
Other women were piqued by what they termed David’s oddness. He recoiled from their touch and at the first suggestion of a tender glance, he ran like a jack rabbit.
“Maybe he really wants to be a monk instead of a pianist,” they told each other.
“Maybe he had an unfortunate love affair and it turned him against women for all time.”
“Maybe he’s queer.”
“No. If he were, we’d have heard it from some of the other boys.”
Near the end of his senior year, David wrote Arthur Aronson of New York who prepared pianists for concert work and was granted an appointment. The week after graduation, David left for New York.
David played Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue for Arthur Aronson and he was sure that he had never played more brilliantly. When he had finished he sat quietly, his hands folded in his lap, and waited.
Arthur Aronson was small, round-shouldered, shriveled, with hair the color of skimmed milk. He stood up and went to the one window in the room. For many minutes he stood and looked down at the traffic below him and then he turned slowly to face David.
“You are a fine technician, Mr. Strong,” he said. “But I should advise you to give up the idea of concert work. I do not believe that I can help you.”
David swallowed against the sudden nausea that his stomach flung up violently into his throat.
“What do you mean?” he demanded when he could speak. “I’ve spent years at the piano. Do you mean to imply that I’ve learned nothing in those years?”
“I said that you are a fine technician, Mr. Strong,” said the old man gently. “Never think of the years that you have put into your music as wasted. You are a very talented amateur. Being able to play will always be a source of pleasure to you. Perhaps you could teach.”
David’s voice went shrill. “Are these the verbal inanities that you are paid to utter?” he cried. “Is this what I came all the way to New York to hear? Tell me what you are thinking, sir! When I am ill, I go to a physician. When I want the answer to a question of fact, I go to a textbook. I came here for an opinion of my playing and you give me half-witted suggestions about teaching.”
“I did not want to be cruel, Mr. Strong,” said Arthur Aronson, his voice more gentle than ever. “However, if you demand a cruel but honest answer I can give you one. There is something missing in your playing, Mr. Strong. A depth of feeling, of understanding, which should be there but which is lacking and which, furthermore, I do not believe you will ever be able to achieve. Fine playing is a combination of craftsmanship and an extension of the pianist’s personality. There is a lack in you, Mr. Strong, a shallowness that shows through your talent. I’m sorry, but I cannot help you.”
David felt so ill that when he stood up he had to cling to the edge of the piano.
“Thank you, Mr. Aronson,” he said quietly. “And please accept my apologies for my rudeness.”
“Think no more of that,” said the old man. “I’m used to the reactions of disappointment.”
David straightened his shoulders. “I’ll find it,” he said. “I’ll find this depth and understanding that you speak about and when I do, I’ll come back.”
“Please do, Mr. Strong,” Arthur Aronson said. “I should be delighted to listen to you at any time.”
“I’ll go to Paris,” said David. “I’ll go for a year and I’ll work very hard and then I’ll be back.”
“At any time, Mr. Strong,” said Arthur Aronson with a little bow.
As David was leaving the studio it came to him, with just a little jolt way at the back of his mind, that still the Lord had not done with punishing him.
David did go to Paris that year but when he got there he neglected his work, learned to drink and tried very hard to become a bohemian. He grew a beard and pretended to himself that he was an atheist. Then he met and became friendly with a young artist named Martin Mallory and they decided to share an apartment together.
David noticed Martin’s little idiosyncrasies almost at once. The way Martin’s hands caressed things, small pieces of pottery, soft materials. The way his eyes seemed to burn into David’s in a way that David found disconcerting but rather pleasant. Whenever David undressed in the room, he could feel Martin’s eyes on him, caressing, probing, and although this embarrassed David dreadfully at first he grew to love the sensation it gave him. He enjoyed, too, the way Martin made him lie down after hours at the piano and the way Martin rubbed his temples with strong, thin fingers. It excited him to know that he could make Martin miserable just by paying the most casual attention to other people and he loved the way Martin’s eyes flashed fire during their frequent quarrels. After an argument, Martin would sulk for hours, a black frown on his face, until David apologized. A simple apology was never enough for either of them. David had to plead and beg.
“Please, Martin. Please. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
Once, after they had both spent the evening drinking and David had deliberately ignored Martin for hours, Martin struck him. David fell to the floor, frightened at his own anticipation, and Martin whipped him with a leather belt. When it was over Martin stood over him and David, looking up, saw Martin’s brutally clenched fists and noticed the way Martin’s feet were planted squarely and firmly on the floor in an exact replica of the way David’s father used to stand.
“Get up,” said Martin and went to the door of the room and locked it. He stood with his back against the door and watched David get to his feet.
“Come here, David,” said Martin.
David came back to America just before the war broke out in Europe. He took a job with a small dance band and he never spoke of his year in Paris. He remembered his stay there with self-loathing and disgust and he could make himself physically ill just by thinking of the name Martin Mallory. He had terrible nightmares in which he heard Martin’s voice saying, “Come here, David,” over and over and he could feel his unwilling legs propelling toward the gigantic, dark-haired figure that stood waiting for him with outstretched arms. And he had even more terrible dreams in which his mother appeared to him and stood with her hands folded, gazing at him in horror.
Then he would cry out, “It’s not true, Mother. It’s not true. He made me do it. I didn’t want to. I hated him. He made me do it!”
But his mother continued to stand and stare at him, shaking her head, and when he tried to reach out to her she shrank back and faded away from him.
Then he had quiet, beautiful dreams in which he seemed to be lying on something warm and soft and he felt so at peace that he dreaded to wake. But when he did awake and remembered his dream, he turned cold and sick and hurried to the bathroom to vomit.
David never went back to play for Arthur Aronson, but when the war was over and he was home again, he decided to take the old man’s advice about teaching. There was an opening at the Cooper Station high school for a music appreciation teacher and Arthur Everett approved his application and passed it on to the Town Board of Guardians. A few weeks later, David moved into Val Rutger’s tower.
David had just finished his housework when there was a knock at the door of the studio.
“Mark!” said David. “Do come in. It’s so good to see you.”
“Hello, Davy.”
Mark Griffin was tall and slender. He had blond hair and rather slanted eyes and a very red, full-lipped mouth.
“I’ve had a devastating day, Davy,” said Mark who lived with his mother and never did anything more strenuous than bring up the old lady’s breakfast tray and give her an occasional back rub. “Do put on some Bach and pour me a drink.”
David’s tenderness was almost tangible. “Of course, Mark,” he said. “Now tell me. What in the world has happened to exhaust you this way?”
Mark began a recitation of his day from the moment of his arising to the last harried movement that had brought him to David’s door.
“Well,” said David. “I had my usual ghastly Friday, but made even ghastlier today by a little set-to with Doris Palmer. She wanted me to sign that damned petition for a referendum to reverse the Guardians’ appointment of Christopher Pappas.”
“And did you?”
“Of course. Believe me, after the day I put in I’d have done anything to keep that old harridan off my neck.”
“Mother signed it, too,” said Mark. “Of course, nobody asked me. Nobody ever does, but I’d have signed in a flash.”
“You would?”
“Of course. Isn’t this town full enough of wretched people without adding more? Good grief, the Pappases are the worst type of peasants and of course you’ve heard about her?”
“No, I haven’t,” said David. “I’ve never even met her.”
“Well I must say you’re not missing much. She’s just become Anthony Cooper’s mistress, that’s all.”
“Not really?”
“It’s all over town.”
“Well,” said David with a sigh, “that certainly makes me feel better. Here I was, thinking that Doris Palmer was being dreadfully unfair and all the time she had good and sufficient reason for not wanting those people here.”
“Exactly,” said Mark.
They began to talk of other things and the Bach played softly in the background. They drank whiskey and soda and the room was very peaceful and softly lit.
“Did it ever occur to you, Davy, that we have something in common with many of the great of the world, you and I?” asked Mark.
“I don’t quite follow you,” said David. “What do you mean?”
Mark put his glass down on the coffee table and went to sit next to David on the couch.
“Why should we be ashamed and frustrate ourselves just because the world of so-called normal people is not ready to accept us?” asked Mark.
David sat very still. “I’m afraid that I don’t understand you at all,” he said.
Mark moved closer to David and put a gentle hand on his thigh.
“Poor Davy,” he said. “Did you think that I wouldn’t find you here in Cooper Station? Our kind always find one another. That’s what I meant by our having so much in common with the world’s great, Davy. We, too, should be proud of our love and be able to forget the bigoted world outside, even as Wilde and Gide and the countless other great ones.”
David jumped to his feet, sweeping Mark’s hand away as he did so.
“You filthy pig!” he cried. “You’ve taken advantage of my hospitality and my friendship with nothing in the back of your mind but your own perverted, rotten desires. Let me tell you, I’m not like Wilde or Gide or you or anyone else like you. Now get out of here. Get out of my studio!”
David shook with rage and insult and he took Mark’s jacket and flung it at him.
“Get out!” he shouted.
Mark was calm and white faced. “David,” he said, “why fight it? It’s all right. I understand. I understand everything. You needn’t keep up a front with me. Believe me, Davy, I can sympathize with the bad times you’ve had and I can understand the squelching of your desires and the frustration that follows. I went through the same ordeal myself before I developed enough honesty to admit what the matter was with me.”
“You queer!” David screamed and tears began to pour down his face. “You fairy! You perverted sonofabitch! Get out of here and leave me alone!”
Mark’s face had a carved look as he stood and looked at David.
“You calling me names, David?” he asked at last. “You calling me those horrible names? Who are you trying to fool, David? You’re a homosexual and everyone in town knows it. Even the peasants who don’t know the proper word for you realize that you’re different. Even Jess Cameron trying to get you to admit it to yourself in the mistaken hope that he could help you. I realized that Jess knew as soon as you began telling me that he wouldn’t treat your silly, nonexistent ulcers.”
“Shut up!” cried David. “Shut up and get out!”
“You should hear the way people talk about you, David,” Mark went on in his cool, relentless voice. “Did you know that every parent with a son who studies with you tells him to be careful, to run right home and tell if you ever try to put a hand on one boy? Did you know that, David? And did you know that Nathaniel Cooper and Jim Sheppard know all about you and that the only reason your contract is ever renewed at all is that Doris Palmer is on your side? No wonder you signed her silly petition.”
“If you don’t get out, I’ll throw you out,” said David quietly.
“Oh, I’ll go, David,” said Mark and picked up his jacket. “But when you finally wake up and realize what you are, don’t you dare come crawling back to me, begging me to take you. I’ll spit in your face.”
David stood for a long time in the center of his studio after Mark had gone, then he went to the piano and began to play softly.
He’s mad, of course, thought David. Absolutely stark, raving mad. I’m not like that. I’ve never been like that. How could anyone possibly think such an evil thing of me?
But every note he struck echoed the same sound. Martin Mallory, said the music. Martin Mallory. Martin Mallory.
David’s hands came down on the keys with a discordant crash.