“To your health.”
Page smelled it doubtfully.
“Man, you don’t smell the stuff, you _drink_ it,” Jack said.
Page drank. “You know, sometimes I feel like I can tell you just about
anything,” he said. “Women don’t understand some things.”
“Well, let’s have it,” Jack said. “No, wait, let me guess. Sunny can’t
cook?”
“Oh, hell, she can cook anything.” Page made a sweeping gesture and
tumbled an ice tray to the floor.
“She squeezes the toothpaste from the top and you squeeze from the
bottom? That’s Laura’s specialty. Ought to be worth a trip to Reno.”
Page wrapped both hands around his glass. “Guess again, Counselor.”
“Well, there’s only one other problem we haven’t examined. You don’t get
along in bed?”
Page found himself laughing, knowing it was the liquor that tickled him,
and trying to stop. Jack slapped him on the back.
“Maybe you’d better tell me,” Jack said. “I’m not doing so well.”
“I only wish it were all as simple as sex,” Page sighed.
“Simple be damned. That’s an art.”
Page finished the drink and stared slowly up the wall behind Jack’s
head, unable to look squarely at him. He felt the words coming up in his
throat, and he had nothing left to fight them with. It was wrong, it was
grossly unfair to Sunny. And yet he felt safe with Jack, who had had an
earful of Page’s escapades over the years and never betrayed him.
Page was so bewildered that his thinking apparatus had ground to a halt.
The whiskey made it a cinch to surrender. He needed help and Jack was
there to give it.
“I don’t know how to say it,” he began. “It’s so ugly. So humiliating
and queer. It’s impossible, Jack, no kidding. But it really happened.”
Jack stared at this odd introduction. “The whole world’s a little queer,
Page,” he reassured him. But he was thinking, Jesus don’t tell me
Sunny’s gay. He knew Page wasn’t but he was never as sharp about the
girls.
“Help me,” Page said. “I’ve got to tell somebody.”
“Is it about Sunny?” Jack asked.
“About both of us. You see, we ... we’re....” Page looked at him very
hard and suddenly lost his nerve. “I’m adopted,” he told his shoes,
retreating.
“So?”
The liquor whirled in Page’s head and his heart ached and he knew, as
well as he knew his real name, that Sunny was thinking of him at that
moment.
“So Sunny is my sister.” He had to force the words out and his voice
boomed unnaturally from the effort.
Jack was stunned almost the way Page himself had been when he first
heard it. But before he could answer, offer his sympathy, Page bent his
head into his hands and sobbed, knocking over the whiskey glass at his
feet. A lone ice cube skidded out.
Jack left him alone for several minutes before he put a tentative hand
on his shoulder. “Your _sister_?” he echoed. “Are you sure?”
“You think I’m kidding? About a thing like this?” Page stood up like a
shot to dramatize his words, stood there wavering, trying to stabilize
himself.
“You, of all people,” Jack said, dazed.
“Why do you say it that way?” He flushed the truth out of Jack, who was
too shaken up for white lies.
“You hate everything like this, everything that isn’t normal and
ordinary,” Jack said. “This must have been unbearable. My God.”
Page was offended. “I don’t like abnormality, no,” he declared still
trying to balance himself.
“Sit down, boy, sit down,” Jack said, giving Page’s hand a tug and
toppling him back onto his packing box. “And I suppose you think this is
completely abnormal?”
“Well, what do _you_ think it is? Clean, wholesome fun?” Page demanded.
Jack got up and filled their glasses again. “I guess I just think it’s
an accident,” he said. “You can’t very well blame anybody for it.”
“That’s a matter of opinion,” Page answered. “Oh, don’t misunderstand
me, I know nobody planned to marry us off knowing we were brother and
sister. But it could have been avoided, if my real parents had kept me.
If the doctor had told Dad who I was. If my step-parents had kept it to
themselves when they found out.”
“That wouldn’t have been strictly moral, would it?”
“No. But at least I wouldn’t have had to—” Page stopped, ashamed, and
let Jack finish for him. “You wouldn’t have had to face it,” Jack said,
sitting down with their fresh drinks. “I guess there’s something in
that.”
“Remember when Sunny and I were going together in college? You used to
tell us we were like an old married couple. We even looked alike.” Page
laughed sadly.
“I remember. But I never thought....” Jack put his drink down between
his feet. “You know something, Page? I think you and Sunny could make a
go of it ... provided you keep quiet about it.”
“That wouldn’t be strictly moral, Jackson,” Page said, throwing Jack’s
words back at him.
“I’m not so sure this is any time to be moral,” Jack said, rolling some
whiskey thoughtfully around in his mouth.
“You can’t be moral on a part-time basis. It’s a condition, like being
alive,” Page objected. “You have principles to live by. You can’t chuck
them overboard at the first crisis.”
“Some things are more important than principles, old buddy.”
“If you’re talking about love, you’re wrong. Love has to be moral too,
Jack.”
“Love has its own morality, doesn’t it?”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, it means you and Sunny have to work something out so you can go
on living together. Because you love each other too much to live apart.”
“That thing would eat us alive, Jack.”
“I doubt it.”
Jack’s calm, rational attitude angered Page. “You make it sound like a
little misunderstanding between friends,” he said. “Some trifle we can
just smooth over if we give it the old college try.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Jack said. “I guess I don’t shock so easily, Page.
I’m used to odd balls in my life.” It was as close as Jack had ever come
to revealing his homosexuality to Page.
He got up and went to the book-loaded cartons in the living room. Page
could hear him pottering around, skimming pages.
“I want to read you something,” Jack called. “Just remembered it. Ever
hear of Lord Byron?”
“Sure. English 231. The girls called him Gorgeous George.”
Jack found his book and blew dust off the top. He brought it back to the
kitchen and sat down by Page again. “Lord Byron was in love with a lady
named Augusta Leigh,” Jack said.
“So what?”
“So he wrote her a very beautiful poem.”
“Spare me the literature,” Page said.
“I’ll just read you a couple of lines. Listen.” He marked the words with
his finger and read: “‘For thee, my own sweet sister—’”
“_Whose_ sister?” Page flared.
“Byron’s. Augusta.”
“He was in love with his sister?”
“Didn’t they teach you anything in English 231, old buddy?”
“Well, I don’t want to hear about Byron’s troubles,” Page grumbled.
“He’s dead.”
Jack ignored him. “‘For thee, my own sweet sister,/ In thy heart/ I know
myself secure, as thou in mine;/ We were and are beings who never each
other can resign.’”
Page hiccoughed. “The poor broad was in love with him, too?”
“‘It is the same, together or apart,/ From life’s commencement to its
slow decline/ We are entwined—’”
“Jack, for God’s sake, this is very painful—”
“‘—Let death come slow or fast,/ The tie which bound the first endures
the last.’”
“Oh, Jesus! You mean they were stuck with each other?”
“Well, they weren’t married, but they always loved each other,” Jack
said, closing the book. “They settled for making love whenever they
could. And they had a daughter.”
“An idiot?”
“Now where in hell did you get that medieval idea?” Jack said.
“_Was_ she an idiot?”
“No, she was a normal girl. Why, Page? Is Sunny pregnant?”
Page nodded.
After a moment Jack said quietly, “I should think you’d have to stay
with her now.”
“Jack, if Laura were your honest-to-God sister, what would you do?”
“I don’t know,” Jack admitted. “But I wouldn’t let her go.”
“You’d keep her? As your wife?”
“Not as my cook and bottle washer, that’s for sure.”
“You’re as bad as Sunny,” Page complained. “You two would make a lovely
pair.”
“I’ve always thought so,” Jack said sardonically.
Page stood up again. “Knock it off,” he said, and took a swipe at Jack
that nearly staggered Page back to the floor. Jack lowered him onto his
packing box again and Page tried to control himself. “Forgive me, Jack,
I didn’t mean it,” he said, humiliated. “It’s the whiskey.”
“Forget it.”
“No, I want you to know,” Page protested with drunken urgency. “I’m sick
of myself. I can hardly bear to think of it. I know we were innocent
when we got married. But that only makes it seem worse. More sinister,
more tragic. We were so damn happy. And now—the contrast is torture. I
can’t have her back and just because I can’t, I want her so much I get
crazy with it. Did you ever want anybody that much?” He was clutching
Jack’s lapels, talking straight into his face.
“Yes, I did,” Jack said without flinching. But he didn’t describe the
kind of love that tore him up that way.
“No, you didn’t, you couldn’t have. Nobody ever did.”
“You mean,” Jack said, “nobody ever suffered as much as you did. Or as
long or as hard.”
But Page was too drunk and too desolate to hear the parody of self-pity
in Jack’s voice. “That’s it,” he said. “And to have to think of yourself
as—as good as queer, on top of everything else—”
“Oh, nuts,” Jack said. “No one knows about it but you and Sunny.”
“And the doc, and my step-parents. And now _you_,” Page said, suddenly
resenting Jack. “And for every one of us who knows, I get sick to my
stomach.”
“You mean if nobody knew you’d feel swell about it?”
“That’s not what I mean!”
“You’re so damn mixed-up right now you don’t make sense,” Jack said,
speaking steadily with firm hands on Page’s shoulders that helped to
quiet him. “Am I right?”
“I guess.” Page said.
“Just because a man is different from the rest doesn’t make him
contemptible, Page,” Jack said.
“Just miserable.”
“Depends on how strong he is. How much of a man. These things happen to
people and they have to learn to live with them. The better they face
them, the stronger and finer they are in the end.”
“You mean, live with incest and be healthy,” Page said.
“I mean live with Sunny and be _happy_. And let the rest go to hell. You
don’t need to climb on a soapbox in Bughouse Square and explain that
your wife is also your sister. You don’t have to get yourself punished
in public to make your marriage permissible. You’ll only lose everything
that way,” Jack told him. “Some things have to be kept secret if you
want to make it in this world.”
“You’re telling me to do what Sunny wants me to do: keep it quiet and go
on as if it hadn’t happened.”
“Keep it quiet, yes, but for God’s sake, don’t go on as if it hadn’t
happened. Face it. Between yourselves. Adjust to it the best you can and
don’t let it defeat you.”
“Jack,” Page said uncertainly. “How can you respect me, knowing about
it?”
“Am I talking as if I didn’t?”
“No, but—”
“Page, listen. Learn something about charity. You respect me, don’t
you?”
“You know how much I think of you, Jack. I couldn’t sit here and tell
this to anyone else in the world.”
“Well, would it make a difference to you if Laura were my sister and we
were still married? Would you shove my teeth down my throat and turn me
over to the cops if you found out such a thing about me?”
“I can’t say I’d admire you for it,” Page said. “But I wouldn’t meddle,
if you wanted things that way. But hell, Jack, there’s nothing wrong
with you. You can’t possibly know how it feels—”
“I know exactly how it feels. What if I told you I’ve been as misfit and
miserable with my problems as you ever were with yours?”
“My God, Laura isn’t—” Page began.
But Jack stopped him with a wry smile. “No, she’s not my sister. It’s
me. I’m gay, Page.” He hadn’t planned to say it, but when it came out,
it came simply and generously. It was a brave risk to speak like that to
Page Pringle, who couldn’t watch a man do a hula in fun without
condemning him. It might cost Jack a valued friendship. But he was
hoping it would comfort Page instead; show him with a shock that you
could be different from the pack and survive. Better than that: live a
good life, love a good wife, and enjoy the respect you deserved.
“Gay?” Page repeated doubtfully. “You mean ... a homo?” The word tasted
even worse to him than ‘incest’. It smacked of pretty boys cruising the
streets in ridiculously tight pants.
Jack nodded, letting his hands fall away from Page’s shoulders. In
almost the same gesture Page released Jack with a shudder and they sat
looking at each other. Page was acutely embarrassed. Self-conscious and
clumsy and drunk, he fumbled for a way out. “Well, that must make things
dull for Laura,” he said, forgetting even that Jack and Laura had a
child. Jack didn’t smile.
After a few minutes of mortified silence Page stood up, steadying
himself with a hand on the kitchen counter. “I’d better go,” he said,
afraid to say more. The thing revolted him and yet he was ashamed to
feel that way. He wasn’t too drunk or too callous to realize what a
sacrifice Jack had made for him. And yet he felt remorse that Jack had
thought it necessary.
Jack rose and followed him, handing him his cigarettes and coat as he
reached the front door.
“I’m sorry you told me, Jack,” Page said quietly.
“I can see that.”
“Sort of ironical, isn’t it?” Page said, not sure if he were joking or
trying to hurt his friend.
“What’s ironical?”
“Your name. Mann.” Page began to laugh against his will.
“Laura doesn’t think so,” Jack answered. He had himself under tight
control. But he knew now he had forfeited Page’s friendship. Tired and
profoundly disappointed, he felt a sudden pity and scorn for Page; pity
and regret for himself.
“I should have known you couldn’t grow and learn a little,” he told
Page. “You can’t see any parallel between us. You can’t see how my
problem lets me understand yours. You only see that I’m queer—your word,
by the way. And suddenly I’m not like you any more and you want to wipe
me off like so much mud on your hands.
“Well, go on. I only wish to God Sunny had gotten the man she deserves
and not her chicken brother.”
Page paused in the doorway, insulted and shocked. “You hate me for
having the strength to leave her, to do what I know is right,” he said.
“You hate me because I’m a normal male. And if I weren’t so drunk—”
“Yeah, well, you _are_ that drunk, Brother Pringle. Go home and sober
up.”
Page lunged at him but Jack ducked, grabbed Page, spun him out the door,
and let him blunder noisily into the wall across the corridor. Page
stood there dizzily, searching for his equilibrium like a man trying to
find his shadow; turning around and around with increasing frustration.
Jack shut the door and leaned against it, exhausted. He felt like
crying, the way he had when he was a kid and too small to defend
himself. He had learned a lot about fighting since then. But when
something like this happened, he felt vulnerable, as if he and not Page
had had the worst of it.
11
“Now you know why we haven’t seen each other since then,” Jack said
quietly to his guest, Mr. Winkler. Repeating the story had been almost
like reliving it; Jack felt tired and used. He poured himself another
drink. “It’s funny how you don’t suspect so much prejudice, so much
contempt, in somebody you know that well,” he said.
“Well, maybe his confusion was the Pringles’ fault,” Winkler suggested,
staring thoughtfully at the floor. He added diffidently, “Then again,
maybe there was some sense in his father’s ideas.”
“Sure there was. Quite a lot. Page wouldn’t have swallowed anything
vicious or stupid,” Jack said. “Do you know the Pringles, Mr. Winkler?”
He looked at his visitor curiously.
“Me? No, no,” Winkler said. “I suppose, being older, I can’t help
sympathizing with them a little.” He cleared his throat. “You lost track
of Page and Sunny after that?”
“No. Sunny began to write to Laura. She didn’t have anybody else. She
was madder than hell at Page when she found out he’d told me everything.
But she trusted us enough to get over it eventually.”
“I’m glad she did,” Winkler said. “I was afraid I’d miss part of the
story.”
* * * * *
On their own, Page and Sunny began to read books on incest. Page took
the ones on law and medicine; Sunny, all the history and mythology and
psychology she could find. They both dug out what they were looking for
and ignored the rest.
Page wanted to damn incest medically and legally. Sunny wanted to
whitewash and glamorize it. And the books, which reflected the world’s
confusion on the subject, gave them both ammunition.
What is incest? Why is it so wrong? Why are there strict laws against
it? _Because_, said Sunny’s books, _it’s so alluring. If the laws
weren’t strict, everybody and his brother—literally—would be taking it
up. The boy with his beloved mother, the girl with a father she
worships, the brother and sister sharing the same bed too long or
discovering each other erotically in some kind of emotional crisis._
There have to be laws against it, Sunny concluded, or we’d have an
epidemic.
She read about the ancient Ptolemies, fabled kings and successors of
Alexander the Great, who practiced incest for three hundred years and
produced a defiantly healthy line to the end.
She read about Cesare Borgia, who fell madly in love with his luscious
sister Lucrezia, and who arranged the plot by which her husband, the
Duke of Besaglia, was strangled.
She read of strange customs in the Melanesian Islands where sisters
turned away and covered their faces at the approach of their brothers,
so powerful was the forbidden attraction between them.
She read about the gold-encrusted Pharaohs, children of the Sun, who
married their sisters to preserve the purity of royal blood. And she saw
that after several thousand years of inbreeding they were still
producing tough healthy children. Even Cleopatra, the symbol of
seductive femininity, married her brother. And the poetry of love in
Egypt still uses the words ‘Brother’ and ‘Sister’ to mean ‘Lover’ and
‘Beloved.’
* * * * *
Sunny ignored the bloodshed and bitterness and rigid strictures against
incest that spotted these narratives. They were in the sections she
skipped: the austere laws of Leviticus in the Bible, the tales of crop
failure and calamity ascribed to incest in ancient Greece, the awful
tragedy of Oedipus.
The thing that confused her most was not in the books. It was a small,
almost artificially forced feeling, that she adored her husband even
more because he was her brother. Perhaps she had to feel that way or
lose her mind.
Sunny continued to see her doctor for regular check-ups. Finally,
burning with curiosity, she asked, “Doctor Settick, what happens if two
people, say two first cousins, get married and have children?”
He screwed his handsome young face into a laugh. “Whatever put that in
your head?” he asked. When he looked at her that way she wished she were
in the hands of an older, more businesslike doctor. But she liked
Settick. She laughed a lot in his office, and it was the only place
where she did.
She blushed at his question. “I read about it once,” she said. “When
you’re pregnant you read all sorts of goofy books. If a brother and
sister had a baby together would it—would it—”
“Would it what?”
“Would it be an idiot? A monster?”
“Not necessarily,” he said.
She tried to look casual, not relieved. “Oh,” she said, hoping he would
go on. He did, crossing his arms over his chest while she looked
demurely at the white sheet that covered her.
“When two people that closely related have children, however,” he said,
“the children are likely to have their parents’ strengths and weaknesses
magnified.”
“How does it work?”
“Well, if you have bad eyes and your husband, who is also your
brother”—he smiled interestedly at her—“also has bad eyes, your child is
going to have a terrible pair of eyes. On the other hand, if you both
have good vision, he’ll probably see like a hawk.”
“That sounds normal.”
“Almost. Incest just seems to exaggerate the parents’ characteristics in
the children.”
“If you were both healthy, then, your children would be, too?”
“Very likely.” There was a small line of intrigue between his eyes. “Why
all the questions?”
“Oh, my husband was telling me about a family he knew where the parents
were first cousins. And their kids were crippled and bald.”
“You tell him it was probably some other complication than
consanguinity,” said Settick. “That might have intensified the trouble,
but it probably didn’t cause it unless there had been a lot of close
inter-marriage over several generations. Why hell,” he said, “my own
brother fell madly in love with our first cousin once.”
“He did?”
“Sure. Fortunately he was only thirteen at the time. He got over it.
Still, it wouldn’t have been such a catastrophe if he hadn’t. From the
standpoint of having kids, anyway. But he got smart and put off
marriage. Didn’t get hooked till he was thirty-two.”
“That’s kind of old,” Sunny said.
“Couldn’t be helped. The damn fool went through medical school. And
dragged me after him. Takes quite a while, you know, particularly if you
specialize.”
Sunny chuckled with him. He had reassured her and she went home from the
examination feeling better.
* * * * *
But Sunny had not reassured her doctor. Richie Settick had a couple of
favorite patients, and one of them was Sunny Pringle. It was not the
incest talk that bothered him. He dismissed that as vagrant curiosity
inspired by her reading. His patients came up with all manner of
moon-shot questions. He had learned to answer with a straight face, even
when they brought him their horoscopes and ordered their babies
delivered on a propitious day.
What troubled him about Sunny was that she was actually losing weight.
Although the foetus continued to grow and Sunny didn’t complain, she was
obviously worried and unhappy. And she was getting visibly thin.
“At the rate you’re going,” he informed her the next time she came, “you
won’t need to bother with maternity clothes till the last week.”
“Oh, I’ll wear them anyway. Makes me feel motherly,” she said. “Besides,
I’ll look like I’ve swallowed a watermelon the next time you see me.”
But she didn’t. When she came back her face and limbs were thinner
still, her waist still small.
“You look too sexy to be as far along as you are,” he told her
critically. “In five months of pregnancy you’ve lost two pounds. What
are you trying to do, disappear?”
“Will it hurt the baby?” she asked anxiously. “I can’t work up an
appetite.”
“Nuts,” he clucked at her. “I don’t see how you could be getting the
minimum healthy diet. And I don’t mean just vitamin pills.”
“Dr. Settick,” she said seriously, “if anything happens to this baby,
I’d want to die. But when I force myself to eat I upchuck.”
“What’s all this dying talk?” he broke in. “That’s no way to carry on,
Sunny. Nothing’s going to happen to the baby. That’s number one. But if
anything did, there’s nothing in God’s world to prevent you from having
a whole passel of kids if you want them.”
“Yes there is,” she said quietly. The last few empty months in the
apartment had made her desperate to talk to somebody, the way Page had
been desperate when he confessed to Jack Mann. She didn’t want to open
her soul to Dr. Settick. But he stood there waiting for some
explanation; compassionate and friendly and with the sort of frank,
good-featured face Sunny fell for. So she said in an unsure voice, “My
husband doesn’t want any more children.”
“Can’t stand them, hm?”
“No.” She looked away, already sorry she had spoken. But the doctor came
over to her and touched her gently. “Any time you want more you just
come and see me,” he said. The words were insolent but Settick wasn’t.
His tone was quite respectful. “You can always tell him it was an
accident,” he added.
Sunny didn’t know whether to laugh or lose her temper. She turned
scarlet and couldn’t look at him. “I love him,” she said.
“He’s making you unhappy, isn’t he?” Dr. Settick stood where he was,
taken with the daffodil lights in her hair, the trembling of her
finely-sculptured mouth.
“It’s something neither of us can help,” Sunny said, squirming with the
intimacy of the situation.
“I’ll tell you something,” Settick offered. “The beautiful Mrs. Pringle
is hurting her baby’s health by hurting her own. And if Mr. Pringle is
to blame, I’ll talk to him myself. I’d rather flatten him out on the
floor, but I’ll _talk_ to him, I promise.”
“There’s nothing you can say that would help,” she said. “He won’t
come.”