Pussycat pussycat

THE GIRL FROM PUSSYCAT

… AND THREE LITTLE KITTENS !

Penny Candie had problems.

Men seemed to start riots over her wherever she went, for one thing. But that she could take in her swingy stride -- it was part of the normal life of a healthy, sexy blonde.

Women were another matter, and one that really had her in a whirl. Penny was on the spot in choosing a temporary editor for Lovelights magazine. Sappho, Marie, or Annie? They were all dizzyingly attractive, and all dizzyingly oddball. And Penny was dizzy. ..

But that was only the beginning. Our accident-prone female bombshell was due for another hectic hayride through New York’s hippest and hottest spots — and a new series of whirling misadventures that would leave her even more wound up than before.

Here’s the whole story--told as only Ted (The Man from O.R.G.Y.) Mark can tell it!

From Berkeley to Boston, hip readers are asking...

WHO IS TED MARK?

He’s the man of mystery behind the Man from O.R.G.Y. and other improbable characters, the author of the decade’s most hilarious bestsellers, the creator of a

craze that’s sweeping the country!

Read his books...and you’ll ask, too!

PUSSYCAT, PUSSYCAT !

Ted Mark

1966

CHAPTER ONE

THE BOOBY-BOUNCING Season closes with Indian Summer. It’s then that the outdoor spectator sport enjoys one last spurt of eye-dancing activity. Indian Summer finds the young bucks turning out en masse to ogle the passing maids along lunchtime Fifth Avenue. Out for one last look before the figurative fig leaves begin to fall, they travel in pairs, using an elbow-to-rib signal like the sudden quiver of a bird-dog alerting the hunter. Like pointers in tandem, they stalk their prey and swap grunts as to the perfection of the pelt under scrutiny. Under their gaze, the young females of the white-collar tribe fall into one of three categories: over-bra’d, loose-bra’d, and bra-less.

Such classifications are a matter of expert judgment measuring the precise arc of horizontal jiggle, vertical joggle, angle of dangle, distortion of wool-wiggle where sweaters are worn, the effect of cleavage spacing on bosom bounce, and allowance for slipperiness of mammarian wriggle due to perspiration. Also, the experienced eye must evaluate breast-tip shadows and strap outlines, must distinguish between nature and its imitation by diabolically gifted brassiere designers, must differentiate -- and from obscured evidence-—-between bra-straps, slip-straps, and the white-on-tan flesh left over from a summer swimsuit. All in all, it’s no wonder that the Booby-Bouncing Season is prime time for development of the observational faculties of the male New Yorker.

This particular noontime, quite a few of the bodice-piercing eyes widened approvingly at the young blonde in the silk blouse standing at the bus stop in the Fifties. Some of the orbs popped with strain as her bosom rippled enticingly in the breeze from the passing traffic. Bra-less without at doubt, the experts decided, and tossed visions back behind their eyeballs, exaggerated imaginings of swelling fleshy melons on the point of bursting the deep V neckline which really did reveal the ) ( outline of the breasts.

Penny Candie ignored them. She was used to the stares her mammarian parentheses garnered in a culture conditioned by too-early weaning. Besides, her mind was on something else. She was concerned about the brown paper bag suspended from her scarlet-lacquered fingertips.

Her concern had started about an hour before when she had ransacked the mid-Manhattan offices of Pussycat Publications in a vain search for a bottle. A milk bottle, a jar, a cider jug, a paste pot, even a Coke bottle—although that might have presented certain problems—any of these would have better suited her purpose than the cardboard coffee container for which she’d finally had to settle. Alas, bottle-wise, the Pussycat cupboards had been as bare as a Schenley warehouse during Prohibition. So now, waiting for the bus, her anxiety centered upon the paper container in the brown bag she carried.

The container had sprung a leak. A dark stain widening over the bottom of the bag testified to that. Gingerly, Penny spread one palm underneath it, fearful that the container might fall through.

Penny’s predicament inspired one of her sidewalk admirers to action. Like a splitting amoeba, he separated his elbow from his companion’s rib cage and started for the distressed girl. “Watch me operate!” dribbled out of the corner of his mouth as he separated himself from his fellow girl-watcher and slithered across the pavement to Penny. “Excuse me, Miss, but your box is leaking,” he said when he reached her.

“It’s not a box,” Penny said hastily as several startled glances turned her way. “It’s a container. A coffee container.”

“That doesn’t look like coffee.”

Penny made a point of ignoring him.

“It doesn’t smell like coffee, either,” he sniffed.

Penny turned one haughty hip on him; the hip said it was really none of his business.

Not hip to the language of hips, the young man persisted. He prodded the soggy brown bag. “And it sure doesn’t feel like coffee.”

Penny restrained herself from asking him how coffee was supposed to feel and tapped her heel impatiently, wishing the bus would come so she could be rid of this pest.

“I’ll bet it’s not coffee at all" he deduced, summing up the evidence. “Nope! It’s not coffee! Is it?”

“No, it’s not.” Penny’s tone said her words were supposed to end the conversation.

“I knew it! What is it? Wait! Don’t tell me! I’ll bet I can guess.”

“Never in a million years,” Penny couldn’t help murmuring.

“Don’t be so sure. I only gamble on sure things. I’ll tell you what. I’ll make you a sporting proposition.”

“On Fifth Avenue? In broad daylight?” Penny’s innocent blue eyes grew big and round.

“That’s not what I mean. I say I can tell what’s leaking out of that bag in three guesses. And I’m willing to bet on it. If I’m right, you give me your phone number.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

“I’ll go away quietly and quit bothering you.”

“That’s the only thing you could have said that would make the whole thing worthwhile. Okay. It’s a bet.”

He reached out and prodded the soggy spot with his thumb. Then, when the thumb glistened with the wetness, he rubbed it against his forefinger as if testing the consistency. “Chicken soup!” he said positively.

“Wrong,” Penny told him.

He reached out again and scraped at the bottom of the bag with his fingertips. Then he held them under his nose and inhaled deeply, appraisingly. “Sauerkraut, or sauerkraut juice!” he announced firmly.

“Wrong again,” Penny purred.

Nettled, he held his open palm out under the bag for a moment. When a few drops of the liquid dribbling from the bag collected there, he carefully raised the hand to his mouth. He stuck his tongue out, tasted it, and then, with brow furrowed, he licked the palm clean. He puzzled over the flavor for a long moment, and when he spoke it was tentatively. “Something fishy,” he mused. “Yes, salt-water fishy. And clammy, too.” He snapped his fingers and took the plunge. “Clam juice, or some sort of clam dip!” he insisted triumphantly.

“Three strikes and you’re out,” Penny told him. “And here’s my bus. Ta-ta.” Her skirt hiked up as she mounted the bus-step. She paid her fare and took a window seat.

The window was open, and the pest’s face peered up at her. “What do you want now?” she asked, annoyed at his persistence. “I won the bet. Now shoo!”

“Yeag. Okay. Only one thing. Just to satisfy my curiosity. What is in the container?”

Penny leaned out of the bus window and placed her pout-shaped lips against his ear intimately to whisper the answer. “It’s a sample for a urine analysis,” she told him.

He jumped back and whirled around as if he’d been struck as the bus pulled away from the curb. Penny saw nothing of the quick sequence of events which followed. He cleared his throat frantically and spat blindly on the sidewalk. He was just starting to expectorate again when the cop grabbed him.

“You’re under arrest!” the officer roared.

“What?” The young man was taken so by surprise that he spat directly into the bluecoat’s eye.

“You’re under arrest!” The officer wiped his eye with a handkerchief and sniffed at it suspiciously. “A lightly brewed ale,” he judged.

“Wrong!” the young man told him.

“I’m the law. I’m never wrong. Don’t you know you can’t go around spitting on Fifth Avenue? Sixth, or Seventh, okay. Maybe even the skating rink in Rockefeller Plaza, or the fountain at Lincoln Center. But never on Fifth Avenue! One of them storekeepers sees you and the next thing you know the whole Fifth Avenue Merchants Association is screaming for a shake-up in the Police Department cause they ain’t getting adequate pertection. You done a real serious thing, Mac, and now you’re under arrest!”

“But, officer, I can explain!”

“Tell it to the judge.”

“He’d never believe it,” the young man said dejectedly.

“Excuse me.” A dapper little man stepped up and handed the young man a card. “I’m an attorney. Can I be of service?”

“Beat it, shyster. Go chase an ambulance!” the cop told him. He grasped the young man loosely by the arm and started to lead him away.

“Police brutality!” The little lawyer threw back his head and crowed like a rooster greeting an Arctic dawn after six months of night. “Police brutality!”

“Now, wait a minute,” the cop said, glancing uneasily at the faces of the crowd which had gathered. “I never laid a finger on him. I only used the minimum of necessary force to arrest him for committing a felony. And I got witnesses to prove it.”

“What witnesses?” The lawyer looked around slowly and pointedly.

The cop followed his gaze. The crowd had evaporated as completely and suddenly as trees in a defoliated forest. The cop spotted a gnarled old man dressed like a Bowery bum and crouching in the doorway of Cartier’s. The derelict, busy rummaging through a woman’s purse, hadn’t noticed the quick flight of humanity from the area.

“Him!” The cop pointed at the derelict dramatically. “He’s my witness. You saw this guy spit on the sidewalk, didn’t you, old man?”

“I didn’t see nuttin’. I don’t wanna get involved,” the tramp whined.

“You saw him,” the cop insisted. “I know you did ’cause I was just gonna grab you for snatchin’ that purse when this heinous crime was committed. Don’t try to deny it!”

“I didn’t see nuttin’! I don’t wanna get involved! An’ besides, I ain’t no stool-pigeon!”

“So you won’t talk, eh?” The cop was an inveterate watcher of old G-man movies on the Late Late Show. “Well, we got ways of making you talk!” Even without a monocle his face testified that he’d made the transference to the Gestapo character of the early war films.

“Maybe we can make a deal?” the aging purse-snatcher pleaded.

“You hear that? A deal!” the lawyer exploded. “An officer of the law swapping immunity for perjured testimony right before my very eyes! Why don’t you arrest him for stealing instead of harassing my client?”

“The Fifth Avenue Merchants’ Association is insured for theft,” the cop explained. “But they ain’t covered for spitting on the sidewalk!”

“Look,” the unfortunate young man said, “I can explain-—”

“Shut up!” the lawyer told “Nothing but name rank and serial number! Understand?”

“No,” the young man said bewilderedly.

“Hey, I saw that one,” the cop enthused. “Errol Flynn played this here RAF pilot what’s shot down and he’s got this little capsule of strychnine fillin’ a cavity in a tooth and when Eric Von-what’s-his-name wants to know where he took off from, he grits his teeth and then Flynn’s marching over this rainbow in his flight jacket while this here chorus of angels is singin’ the Marine Hymn. Yeah, real arty, too, the way he was transparent at the end with the British flag wavin’ through his behind.”

“’Scuse me, Captain, but what about me?” the purse-snatcher whined.

“Collaborationist!” the lawyer hissed. “You’ll get yours! Some day they’ll shave your head!”

The old purse-snatcher’s hand fluttered to his scalp. “There ain’t hardly no hair to shave,” he protested. “See: only a little piece.”

“A little peace!” A new voice, high and shrill, sounded out. “That’s all any of us want, brother!” A bearded youth in torn T-shirt and green jeans suddenly appeared on the scene. “A little peace.”

“That’s what got me into this mess,” the first young man muttered. “A little piece I never even got near.”

“Peace! The young men of America cry out for it!” The bearded youth unrolled a placard, fastened it to a pole, and then hefted it high in the air. FREE SPEECH FOR LENNY BRUCE! the sign read.

“I don’t get it.” The cop scratched his head, puzzled.

The bearded youth glanced up at the placard. “Oh, Hell!. Wrong sign!” He quickly turned it around. MOTHERS MARCH FOR PEACE! it proclaimed now.

A woman came rushing up pushing a baby carriage.

“I"m with you,” she said breathlessly. “I am with you! I am committed. And we’re all in this together.” She thrust the handle of the carriage into the hands of the old purse-snatcher. “We’ll march together until they ban the bomb,” she assured him. “And I’ll be shoulder to shoulder with you all the way. Only first, would you do me a favor and keep an eye on little Mervin while I just run into Saks for a minute? They’re having this sale on arch supports and my feet are killing me. I’ll be right back, and meanwhile the little darling will lend a touch of authenticity to the demonstration. Thanks so much!” And she was gone.

The baby wailed. The old derelict picked him up. Immediately, the baby wet the pavement.

“Look at that! Look at that!” the lawyer screamed. “You persecute my client for merely spitting on the sidewalk and then you stand idly by while a genuine desecration takes place. You call that justice?” he demanded of the cop.

“Please, counselor,” the cop said. “Can’t you see I got my hands full?”

This was certainly true. A young girl with lank, dank hair had fallen in beside the derelict wheeling the baby carriage, and as she followed the bearded youth she began strumming a guitar. Her clear, baritone voice rang through the air, sounding out the stirring words of a protest song, It was at this point that a Girl Scout troop across the street broke ranks to rush upon the scene. “It’s Joan Baez!” one little girl cried out, and the others took up the cry. “Joan Baez! It’s Joan Baez!” They fell into line with the protest march. “Hey, lady?” The nearest of them tugged at the shirt-tails of the female folk singer. “Are you really Joan Baez?”

“No, I’m not,” the singer replied between choruses. “But I certainly am glad to see you kids rebelling against regimentation and militancy.”

“You sure you ain’t Joan Baez?” the little Girl Scout said disappointedly.

“I’m sure.”

“Oh, well, would you like to buy a box of Girl Scout cookies?”

“I would not!”

“Oh. Hey, how about you, Mister?” the little Girl Scout tugged at the torn T-shirt of the bearded youth.

“Nah. They give me cavities. If you kids are gonna get hooked on gook like that, what good’s all this fluoridation?”

“I told you he was one of us! Come on, fellows.” A husky lad with a Prussian haircut led a group of tough-looking fellows wearing swastika armbands over to the line of march. “All together now,” he shouted. “Fluoridation must go!”

“Fluoridation must go!” they chorused.

“Ban the bomb!” the first group shouted.

“Be prepared!” The Girl Scouts paid their tribute to Margaret Sanger.

A new group appeared on the scene. LOYAL SUNS OF SICILY ROD & GUN CLUB, their first banner proclaimed. COSA NOSTRA CHAPTER was on the second banner. And on the third one, right behind it, their motto: The family that preys together stays together! Under the motto was the symbol of their organization, an American bald eagle, a Mama eagle, and two eggs in the process of cracking open.

Things were getting out of hand, and the cop decided to take action. He strode up to the bearded youth in the torn T-shirt and green jeans who had started the demonstration. “You’re under arrest,” he told him.

The bearded youth immediately went limp and fell to the sidewalk. “Passivity in the cause of peace is no crime,” he told the cop. “What’s the charge?”

“You’re a beatnik,” the cop answered.

“What’s that?”

“Damned if I know.” The cop scratched his head.

“Then what makes you think I’m one?”

“Well, first off, you got a beard.”

“So did Abraham Lincoln.”

“Second, your T-shirt’s torn.”

“That ain’t my fault. It’s cause my laundryman’s gettin’ back at us for keeping Red China out of the U.N.”

“And third, there’s them blue jeans you got on.”

“You must be color blind. They’re green jeans.”

“They are?” The policeman squinted. “They look blue to me.”

“The light’s bad here. Come on over to the window.” The bearded youth crawled over to the nearest storefront. “See? They’re really green. Sort of an aquamarine. Hell, man. I wouldn’t be caught dead in blue jeans. I don’t conform for nobody. These are green jeans. You dig? And that proves I’m not a beatnik!”

“How do you figure that?”

“All beatniks wear blue jeans, right?”

“I guess so,” the cop had to agree.

“So if these are green jeans, they prove I’m no beatnik. Dig?”

“Yeah, only--”

“Only what?”

“Only what about that dame with you, the one with the guitar and the seaweed hair and the Theda Bara gook all over her eyes. If she ain’t a beatnik, I never seen one.”

“Suppose she is. What’s that got to do with me?”

“Well, you’re marchin’ with her, ain’t you? If she’s a beatnik, that makes you one too.”

“Guilt by association!” The bearded youth dropped to the pavement again and kicked his heels. “McCarthyite! Storm trooper!”

“Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles.” The young Nazis picked up his accusation with a song.

“Arise, ye prisoners of starvation . . .” the folk singer sang back.

“America, the beautiful . . .” the Girl Scouts piped up.

“Hey,” shouted one of the Sons of Sicily, “don’t any ‘of you paisanos remember the words to Pistol Packin’ Mama?”

Before he could be answered, the mother emerged from Saks and began screaming hysterically. “My baby!” she yowled. “Someone’s kidnapped my baby! My Mervin’s been snatched! How can a mother march for peace without she’s got a baby to push around?”

It was all too much for the cop. Spying his original prisoner, the sacrilegious spitter, the sidewalk expectorator who had started it all, attempting to sneak away in the confusion, the bluecoat took refuge in his original charge. He dived for the young man and came up with him. “You’re under arrest!” he insisted firmly, reverting with a single-minded stick-to-it-iveness typical of New York’s Finest to the first cause and ignoring the subsequent chaos which had grown out of it.

“Wait!” The young man wriggled in his grasp. “Wait! I can explain! And there’s the witness to back up my explanation. Right there! Across the avenue.”

His finger pointed straight at Penny, who had just disembarked from a bus after delivering what was left of her specimen to the laboratory. She was on her way back to work at Pussycat Publications. Now she stood with her dimpled chin drooping in amazement at the spectacle on the street.

The cop allowed the young man to lead him over to her. “Miss, please,” the young man half-sobbed. “Tell him what happened. Tell him why I had to spit on the sidewalk.”

“What?” Penny backed away from him.

“Please.” The young man fell to his knees. “Please. If you’ve got an ounce of compassion in your breast --”

“Don’t you be talkin’ of such things to the lady now, you scamp.” Outraged, the cop’s brogue crept into a tone he identified with his mother who had hailed from County Cork. “Mind your manners now. Beggin’ your pardon, Miss-—-” He tipped his cap to Penny. “—I’m Patrolman Sean Fitzgerald, shield number 0945576587, and if you could throw some light on why this lad expectorated on the sidewalk, breaking ordinance number 306D, sub-section 29—”

“How should I know why he spit on the sidewalk?” Penny-interrupted. “I wasn’t even here. Why did you spit on the sidewalk, anyway?” she asked the young man. “That’s not a very nice thing to do.”

“Well, wouldn’t you? I mean, considering what you told me right after I tasted—”

“Oh!” Suddenly Penny understood. “Yes, I think I can explain why he did it.” She leaned very close to Patrolman Fitzgerald and whispered in his ear.

The officer’s face turned brick red. “Oh!” he said. “Well, I guess there was extenuatin’ circumstances. All right! See that you don’t do it again, laddie. You can go now.”

“I can?” The young man was dazed.

“Hurry up! Before I change my mind.”

But the young man stood rooted, too confused at his sudden freedom to move. Penny took pity on him. She took his hand in hers and led him across the street toward the building where Pussycat Publications had its offices. He followed her docilely, his palm sweating like that of a frightened child fearful of being separated from its mother. His face was a study in trauma.

Their direction paralleled that of the policeman crossing back to cope with the melee. But when he reached it, Patrolman Fitzgerald had a change of heart. He took one long look, decided nothing short of the riot squad could possibly straighten out the mess, and raised his voice in frustrated authority. “A pox on all your causes!” he howled, with a gesture that said he washed his hands of them.

Immediately, the bearded youth and the folk singer fell to the sidewalk. “We want a civilian review board!” they chanted. “Cops kill minority kids! We want a civilian review board!”

That was too much for Patrolman Fitzgerald. This was a direct attack on him and the hallowed institution he represented. One hand grabbed the girl’s shirt-tails, the other the youth’s T-shirt; and he began dragging them along the pavement. “You’re under arrest!” he raged.

Immediately the dapper little lawyer came running up to them. “Does your organization have a legal defense fund?” he asked.

“Of course,” the bearded youth told him.

“Unhand my clients!” the lawyer demanded of the cop. “Police brutality!” he yelled.

“Police brutality!” the two prisoners chanted with him.

Penny and the dazed spitter stood off a little way watching the struggle arising from this latest development. The young man was coming back to his senses. Trembling, he removed his hand from Penny’s and began fumbling in his pocket. The first thing he came up with was a money clip containing two one-dollar bills, a social security card, a driver’s license and a draft card. He fumbled some more, and his hand emerged with what he’d been seeking—a pack of cigarettes. Once more he dipped into his pocket, and this time he came up with a pack of matches.

He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and put the pack back in his pocket. Absent-mindedly, he continued to hold the money clip in the same hand with the book of matches as he tore off a match and struck it. He should have closed the cover. He didn’t. The matchbook and the money clip flared into flames before he realized what was happening. He dropped it all to the ground and stamped on it to put out the fire. Too slowly. All that was left was ashes.

“Ohmigosh!” he exclaimed.

“What’s the matter?” Penny asked.

“I’ve burned my draft card.”

“What’s that?” The policeman’s head shot up. “Did you say you burned your draft card?”

“Draft-dodger! Commie coward!” The youth with the swastika armbands surged towards the young man and Penny. “It’s his kind that’s ruining America.”

“You sure he’s a Commie?” one of the brighter young rightists asked. “He don’t look nothin’ like Eisenhower.”

“Yeah, he’s a commie all right! Come on, let’s get the yellow-belly! Burning his draft card!”

“Wait a minute,” the young man protested. “I didn’t do it on purpose!”

“That’s right.” Penny backed him up. “It was an accident!”

“Accident, hell!” one of the Birchy bunch snarled. I remember this guy now. I tried to sell him a poppy on Veterans’ Day last year and he wouldn’t buy! He’s a Red, all right.”

The Sons of Sicily joined in. “Burning a guy’s one‘ thing,” their leader announced, “but burning a draft card’s something else again. That’s unpatriotic. Come on! Let’s get him!”

“Down with Communism!” The Girl Scouts came hurtling up. “The only ism we want in America is Americanism.”

“Aren’t you going to help us?” Penny demanded of the bluecoat indignantly.

“Not me! If this country isn’t good enough for you two, why don’t you go back where you came from? That’s what my sainted mother would say to the likes of you! A hundred percent American, she was.”

“Are you sure she wasn’t Irish?” Penny asked perceptively. ‘

“Sure and she was. A hundred percent Irish, too! But don’t you be talkin’ about her, you! Nothin’ but a draft dodger’s moll is what you are! Your filthy Commie mouth ain’t fit to pronounce her name.” Patrolman Fitzgerald spat his contempt at them and walked off, leaving them to the mercy of the advancing mob.

“What about you?” Penny asked the lawyer. “Won’t you defend us?”

“I wouldn’t touch the case with a ten-foot pole.”

“And you two?” Penny addressed herself to the bearded youth and the female folk singer. “This is really your cause. Won’t you help us?”

“We’re off the hook, sugar. You got our sympathies, but you know-—Look at it this way. Every cause has to have its martyrs. And better you than us, if you know what I mean. But we’ll see that you’re not forgotten. There’ll be leaflets and songs and even a rally so people will know how you gave your lives for the cause.”

“What cause?” the young man behind Penny howled. “It was an accident. I didn't mean to burn my draft card.”

“Honest, that’s the truth,” Penny added, joining hands with him as they backed away from the oncoming lynch mob.

It was too late. With a shriek of rage that seemed to come from one horrendous throat, the mob tore loose from its moorings and rushed the hapless pair. Penny and the young man bolted, the screaming mob right behind them, hands outstretched like tentacles, like the hundred claws of a centipede, a centipede lusting for blood, the young man’s blood, and Penny’s.

Dazedly, as she ran, knowing that the crowd was almost upon them, a stray thought flitted across Penny’s mind. She’d overstayed her lunch hour. She hadn’t even had lunch. It looked like she was going to die on an empty belly.

But not completely empty. That was really what lay behind the terrible predicament in which she now found herself. Yes, that, and that lousy, leaky, unhousebroken cardboard coffee container!

CHAPTER TWO

THE ENRAGED CROWD was almost on them when Penny remembered that they were in front of the entrance to the building in which Pussycat Publications had its offfices. Feeling the hot breath of their rage on her neck, she dived through the glass doors, dragging the unintentional draft-card burner along with her. The pair plunged toward a set of elevator doors which were just closing. They just made it, and the doors slammed shut before the leaders of the crowd could follow.

Penny led the way out of the elevator at the sixth floor. She darted for a doorway diagonally across the hall, still pulling the young man at her side. It wasn’t until the door closed behind them and Penny was leaning solidly against it that she dared to heave a sigh of relief. “We’d better stay in here a minute,” she told the young man, “just in case any of them followed us up.”

“Okay,” he agreed meekly.

“I don’t think they’d think to look for us here,” Penny added.

“What is this room?” The young man look around h1m' curiously. All he could see was the door Penny was leaning against, two parallel tiled walls, and a metal swinging door opposite her. They seemed to be in a sort of cubicle, and the entire floor area was only a few square feet.

Penny looked across and pushed the swinging door open a few feet. “It’s the ladies’ room,” she told him. “See for yourself.”

“Oh!” He peered interestedly. “Do you think I should be in here?” he asked doubtfully.

“Would you rather take your chances outside with that lynch mob?”

“No.”

“Then let’s stay put a while.”

They fell silent. The young man shifted from one foot to another awkwardly. He cleared his throat nervously. The second time he did it there was a question mark punctuating the sound.

“Yes?” Penny responded.

“I just wanted to thank you for helping me the way you have. And to apologize for getting you into this mess.”

“Well, you certainly should apologize. Not for what happened with the draft card. That was just an accident. It really wasn’t your fault. But you should apologize for being such a masher on the street before. If you hadn’t been so fresh, none of this would have happened.”

“I do apologize for that. Still, you sort of got even with me, didn’t you? I mean, was it really what you said in that container?”

“Yes, it was. And don’t start spitting again!” Penny added hastily.

“But why—?” he started to ask.

“That,” Penny told him frostily, “is none of your business.” She turned the doorknob slowly. “I’m going to go out and see if the coast is clear,” she said. “You wait here.”

“Wouldn’t it be better if I went?”

“No. I work here. My office is on this floor. I’m familiar with it. I’ll know where to hide if there’s any trouble. And I won’t have to explain to anybody what I’m doing here.”

“Okay. I’ll wait.” He leaned back against the tile wall as the door closed behind her.

The minutes dragged by. He wasn’t wearing a watch, so he couldn’t tell how many. Finally the doorknob turned again. Fortunately, he heard the voice before anybody entered: “. . . and so I told the doctor, ‘Look, you’d have a lump on your breast too if you was married to a guy that squeezes grapefruits for a living,’ and the doctor says . . .” The voice definitely wasn’t Penny’s. The young man dived through the swinging door and into one of the stalls before he could be seen. He bolted the door to the stall, and then, not knowing what else to do, he sat down. “Gee, Gertrude, after listening to you, I’m glad I’m not married,” a second female voice said as the two women entered the ladies’ room.

“Aw, come on now, Rosie. The way things are going with you and Mr. Antrobus down in Accounting, I’ll bet you got a rock on your knuckle before the year’s out.”

“Shh! You can never tell who might be listening.”

There was a silence as the two girls surveyed the closed stall and looked at each other with questioning eyes. Then Rosie’s eyes dropped lower, and she gasped.

“What is it?” Gertrude asked.

By way of answer, Rosie pointed to the space between the stall door and the floor. The young man’s shoes and trousered calves were clearly visible. Gertrude’s jaw dropped.

“That’s a man in there!” Rosie hissed.

“There can’t be.”

“I tell you there is.”

“Ooh! What’ll we do?”

“Nothing! I refuse to do absolutely anything while he’s here.” Rosie was adamant.

“Not even what we came in here to do?”

“Absolutely not!”

“But I have to!” Gertrude protested. “It can’t wait.”

“Oh, go ahead then. I’ll stand guard.”

“Thanks, Rosie. I’ll make it as fast as I can.” Gertie quickly seated herself in front of the vanity mirror and began wiping her face clean with cold cream. Then she patted the cold cream off with a Kleenex and applied her make-up. “Okay,” she said when she was finished. “Let’s go.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Rosie whispered. “Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe it isn’t a man. Maybe it’s really a girl in slacks.”

“Don’t be silly. Look at those shoes.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. Not the way styles are today. What with those high-heeled boots the girls are wearing and all.”

“Well, those are mighty hairy shins for a girl!”

Hastily, the young man tugged his pants cuffs down.

“I guess you’re right. We’d better report it to the supervisor,” Rosie said. “He might be some kind of sex maniac or something.”

“Do you really think so?” Gertrude mused. “Then maybe we’d better not report it to the supervisor. After all, what did she ever do for us!”

“You’re right. No man who was a sex maniac would be safe with her.”

The door closed behind them. The young man got to his feet, trembling in the aftermath. Just as he emerged from the stall, Penny entered the lavatory.

“The coast is clear,” she told him. “You can go now.”

“Good.” He started for the swinging door.

“Migosh! Don’t do that!” Penny pointed dramatically past him through the opened door of the stall he’d left.

“Do what?”

“That. Leave the seat up. Do you want to cause a scandal?” She strode past him and lowered the seat.

“A scandal?”

“Sure. That’s what happened at Girl’s High when I went there. The principal found a toilet seat up in the little girls’ room, and the next thing we knew the whole school was lining up for internal examinations.”

“Sorry.” He followed Penny out into the hallway.

She led him around a bend, down a long corridor, and through a door. “These are the back elevators here,” she told him. “You can go down that way and out through the alley to Madison.”

“Wait a minute,” he told her. “You can’t just leave me like this. I have to see you again.”

“Oh, you’re not going to start that again, are you?” Penny sighed. “Boy, you never give up, do you?”

“Wait! It’s not what you think.”

“The heck you say. Once a masher, always a masher.”

“No. Please. Listen to me. It’s not that I find you attractive, it’s—”

“And being insulting won’t get you anywhere either.”

“I’m not being insulting. I —”

“You are too! You as much as said I wasn’t attractive!”

“I didn’t mean it that way. I only meant I wasn’t trying to make another pass at you. I was just trying to say that I have to see you again because you’re the only one who can save me.”

“I already did that once today. And I can’t say it impressed me much as a career opportunity, either.”

“But you have to! They’ll send me to jail if you don’t,” he insisted.

“Who’ll send you to jail?”

“My draft board. I have to report there tomorrow, and when they find out I burned my draft card—”

“Oh! I see!”

“You’ve just got to come down there with me and back up my story of what really happened. Maybe then they’ll believe me. They’ve gotten very tough, you know. Just a hint of smoke where draft cards are concerned, and the next thing you know, you’re in Viet Nam.”

“Don’t you want to die for your country?” Penny asked loyally.

“Absolutely! Believe me, I’m absolutely dying to die for my country. My only regret is that I have but one li—”

“All right. Don’t overdo it,” Penny interrupted.

“Sorry. It’s just that I don’t want to go to jail as a draft dodger. That’s why you have to go down there with me.”

“Oh, all right.” Penny’s sympathies, always easily aroused, bubbled forth now. “I’ll go with you.”

“You will! Oh, gee, I’m so grateful. I don’t know how to thank you, Miss—?”

“The first time you opened your mouth to me, I should have known you’d manage to get my name somehow,” Penny observed with resignation. “It’s Miss Candie. Penny Candie.”

“Glad to know you, Penny. My—”

“Miss Candie to you.”

“Sorry. Miss Candie. My names Balzac. Balzac Hosenpfeffer. My mother was a literary snob. Balz to you.”

“I beg your pardon!”

“Balz. That’s what my friends call me.”

“Then I’ll call you Mr. Hosenpfeffer, she told him pointedly. “I’m not about to get on familiar terms with any Balz.”

“Ahh, come on. Be friendly. Say Balz.”

“No. And quit pushing, or I’m liable to change my mind about the draft board.”

Balz dropped the topic. He borrowed a pencil from Penny and scrawled the address of the draft board on a piece of paper for her. “Eight-thirty tomorrow,” he told her.

“Eight-thirty? That’s pretty darned early. How do I let myself in for these things?”

“It’s ’cause you’re all heart,” Balz told her. I knew it the minute I laid eyes on you.”

“Oh, sure! And I suppose the way you were staring at me was just cardiac research!”

“Heart and lungs,” Balz admitted blithely. “And your lungs would impress anybody interested in anatomy.”

“Your draft board better not turn out to have etchings on the wall,” Penny told him as she turned to leave. “I’ll see you there in the morning.”

“Good-bye for now,” Balzac Hosenpfeffer called after her.

“Good-bye.” Penny went through the door and back the way they’d come.

A few moments later she was seated behind her desk in her office at Pussycat Publications. The sign on the office door said: Lovelights, Editor. It didn’t say that Penny was the youngest romance-book editor in the magazine field, but she was. There were a few assistant and associate editors around her age, but at twenty-one she was something of a prodigy to have earned such a responsible position.

Now, having put Balzac Hosenpfeffer out of her mind, Penny was considering the responsibilities of that position. One in particular weighed heavily on her mind. She had to decide upon a temporary replacement for herself while she took a leave of absence due to circumstances she was convinced had passed beyond the point of her control.

Penny was sure that she was slightly pregnant! Slightly being about six weeks and two days. This was precisely the length of time which had elapsed since Penny had made the transformation from the most unwilling of virgins to the most unwed of possible mothers-to-be.

Participating actively in the transformation had been one Studs Levine, a young man who had cooked on all four burners until the marital intentions, which had helped propel his iron into the firebox had been doused by Penny’s taking them seriously. He hadn’t hung around long enough after that to be appraised of the signs of impending motherhood. Not that Penny had any valid reason to believe these might have made any difference to his disinclination to trot down the bridal path with her.

No, she couldn’t really put all the blame on Studs for her predicament. If he’d given her reason to think he wanted to wed her, she was honest enough with herself to admit that that hadn’t been the prime motivating factor behind her cooperating in her fall from purity. Her real reason, pure and simple, was a combination of her own dissatisfaction with her virginal state and the erotic fires which had long made her body burn with carnal desire.

Those fires had been hopefully fed with birth-control pills on a regular basis over a long period preceding Penny’s devirginization. But the pills had merely provided fuel for a fire no man reached the point of igniting. Thus the bitterest pill of all was the one Penny neglected to swallow during the day preceding the fateful night on which Studs’ unsheathed matchstick struck the longed-for spark. Now it seemed that that spark had caught all too well, and Penny was reacting to the consequences.

Aside from the practicalities involved, Penny’s reaction consisted of doing a complete about-face in her attitude towards sex. Where she had formerly made a strong effort to get herself seduced, now the idea of impending motherhood made her regard her body as a temple housing the mystery of life, a temple not to be defiled by further sex under any circumstances. Men—the very idea of maleness, which had once filled her mind with eagerly lewd imaginings—now seemed to her an ever-present threat against the new life budding in her womb. Their eyes devouring her body, the gazes which she had once answered with openly willing looks from her own blue eyes, now struck her as an unfeeling assault against the whole institution of motherhood.

Her experience with Balzac Hossenpfeffer epitomized her changed attitude. Once she would have met his overtures more than halfway. Now, although she hadn’t found him personally unattractive, his frank appraisal of her bosom had made her squirm as if he was poaching on the soon-to-be-lactating preserves of the unborn child She was determined to breast-feed. Thus any response she might have made to him was squelched by her awareness of the possibility of impending motherhood.

Although Penny was sure—a woman always knows, doesn’t she?— that possibility was by no means as yet a medical certainty. This fact was behind her trip to the laboratory today to deliver the urine specimen. The doctor there had explained to her how it worked.

“The first shpritz of the morning without you eat anything first-—this is it, yes?” he had started out.

“Yes,” Penny assured him, remembering the discomfort of controlling herself until she’d found that coffee container.

“Good. So, we make from this a solution, a cocktail for the little rabbit, a Bunny Fix the jokers in the lab call it, and this we inject into our long-eared friend. If you are with child, the wee-wee will make the bunny kick the bucket.”

“You mean it will kill him?” Penny asked.

“Exactly. Your tinkle will turn our live bunny bugger into a dead duck.”

“Suppose I’m not pregnant. Then what happens?”

“The rabbit takes the hypo swig in stride, and he gets a reprieve until the next batch of impregnated kidney rinse arrives.”

“It seems so cruel,” Penny sighed.

“It is that we all have to go sometime,” the doctor told her philosophically. “Although, to be honest with you, it isn’t the way I would like to go myself. Delicacy it lacks as a means to one’s end, yes?”

“Yes,” Penny agreed. “How long before you’ll know for sure?” she asked as an afterthought. ‘

“Twenty-four hours. But it could be sooner if, you are up-knocked and the bunny’s demise is rapid. If a ring you’ll give me around six, there may be news. Or maybe not. It all depends. Into the works I’ll put it right away. Just as soon as I transfer from this leaky coffee container into a test-tube.”

“Thanks,” Penny had told him. “And I’m sorry about the coffee container. I honestly tried to find something else, but I just couldn’t. Good-bye, and I’ll call later.” She had left then.

Now, she put all thoughts of the result of the rabbit test out of her mind and turned her attention to the problem of who she would put in charge of Lovelights if pregnancy forced her to take a leave of absence. The problem pressed heavily on her mind because of her conviction that the rabbit’s demise was inevitable and would only confirm that which her feminine intuition had already convinced her was true.

The solution to the problem boiled down to a choice between the three girls who assisted her in putting out Lovelights each month. On the basis of seniority, the logical choice was Sappho Kuntzentookis, the Greek girl who had been with Pussycat Publications even longer than Penny herself had—five years to be exact, or two years more than her shapely blonde boss. But Sappho presented a twofold problem which made Penny hesitate to transfer responsibility to her.

Sappho’s tenure was the first part of the problem. It had always caused friction between her and Penny. She had resented it when Penny had been promoted over her to a position she felt should rightfully have been hers. Sappho was ambitious. Very ambitious. And she was efficient, too. Penny had to face the possibility that she might do the job so well that the front office might not want to let Penny step back in as Sappho’s boss after the leave of absence.

The other part of the problem was the very reason that Penny had been promoted over Sappho in the first place. It was the fact that everyone in the office from the publisher to the mail boy knew that she was an uncontrollable nymphomaniac. Contrarily, this made Penny fear that Sappho might be erotically detoured from the job—as she had been from a few other tasks in the past-—and that the magazine might suffer as a consequence. The nightmare Penny envisioned was a picture of the magazine not being put to bed on schedule while Sappho put her latest conquest to bed instead.

The nightmare gained substance as Penny gazed through the glass partition of her office at Sappho seated at her desk. The tall Greek girl had arranged the display of her charms as artfully as the window of a chic French pastry shop. As she leaned back in her swivel chair, the frosting of long, lustrous, blue-black hair cascaded into tendrils encircling the maraschino tips of a yeast-cake bosom fully risen under the over-tight glace of the pink sweater she wore. She had contrived to rest her weight on one hip, and the other hip, plus half of the adjacent buttock, jutted roundly from her tiny waist, a baba rump that was both sweet and intoxicating. The high-heeled shoes tipping her long, slender legs tapped atop the desk itself, and the way her short skirt fell away from the legs presented an easy underview of silk-sugared tart-thighs, the raw dough of the flesh above, and a tantalizing taste of the custard eclair shimmering ever so faintly beneath a coating of bikini-panty. All in all, it was an attention-getting arrangement of goodies which was getting the attention it deserved from every male within eye-range.

What worried Penny was the knowledge that if one of these males dropped a hat, Sappho would be off to the stockroom for a quickie with never a thought for Lovelights. It wasn’t that she didn’t do her work conscientiously. She did. But sex always came first—and last and always as well—and that might prove horrendous if she carried the ultimate responsibility for putting the magazine out.

Penny shook her head and turned to gaze at the second girl she was considering as a temporary replacement for herself. Marie D’Ghastidi was her name. Although she was a few years older than Penny, there was a superficial resemblance between Marie and her boss.

Like Penny, she was a natural blonde of medium height with a good figure. But in Marie’s case the figure was apt to be underplayed in the tweed suits she was fond of wearing. Her golden hair was likely to be drawn back severely, and the rimless glasses she wore gave her pretty but thin-lipped face a pinched look. There was something almost asexual about Marie’s appearance, and most men responded to her negatively because she seemed to have created this air of asexuality on purpose.

This was related to the reason Penny hesitated to name Marie as her replacement. The reason itself harked back to the fact that Marie had once confided some details of her personal life to Penny. In confidence, she had told Penny that she was married. Despite the fact that this was a direct flouting of company policy, Penny had never betrayed the confidence. Still, the details of that marriage which Marie had related to her made Penny move cautiously in considering Marie as temporary editor of Lovelights.

“The man I married is a perverted sex maniac!” That’s what Marie had told Penny. But as she continued to explain her reasons for saying it, Penny began to doubt the judgment. What it boiled down to was that Marie’s husband wanted sex two or three times a week and Marie found even once a month repugnant. He wanted to experiment with certain mild innovations, and such things struck Marie as “depraved and filthy.” It was at this point that a question from Penny had pinpointed the marital problem as Marie’s, rather than her husband’s. “Of course not!” Marie had answered the question indignantly. “I thought only men—-” she sputtered. “What decent woman would-—-? I mean, I didn’t even know it was physically possible for a woman to have that sort of experience. I’m sure you must be wrong. After all, you’re just a girl and I’m a married woman, and I never felt anything like what you’re talking about!”

Penny hadn’t pressed the point. But she had remembered it. Thinking of it now, in the context of this day and age, she couldn’t help feeling that it would hinder Marie in putting out a magazine which dealt frankly with the love problems of young girls. On the other hand, Penny had to admit, there had never been any sign that Marie’s obvious frigidity interfered with her job on the magazine. So why assume it would if she took over the helm of editorship?

Reserving decision, Penny turned from Marie to consider the third and last of her assistants, a petite and bouncy red-headed girl around her own age. As Irish as corned beef and cabbage; Annie Fitz-Manley was Penny’s personal pet, although Penny tried not to let the preference show. On the business level, Annie was always bubbling over with enthusiasm and it was obvious that there was nothing put on about her enjoyment of her work. As far as Annie’s personal life was concerned, Penny was aware of no problems which might interfere with Annie’s business performance.

Yes, definitely, Annie was a strong contender. Appreciating this, Penny called on the office intercom and asked Annie to have dinner with her that evening. “I’ll probably have to be out most of the morning tomorrow,” she told the young Irish girl, remembering her date to go to the draft board with Balzac Hosenpfeiffer and seizing on it as an excuse to provide a sort of test run for Annie’s executive abilities. “And there are some things I’d like to go over with you so they won’t be held up until afternoon.”

Annie readily accepted the invitation, and Penny hung up. It was about four-thirty by then, and Penny devoted herself to manuscript reading until six o’clock. She just wanted to call the doctor before she and Annie left for dinner.

“Ahh, good news I have for you, Mrs. Candie,” the doctor greeted her.

“Miss Candie,” Penny corrected

“Miss Candie? I see. Well—” His tone changed. “Bad news I’m afraid we have, Miss Candie. The rabbit is dead.”

“Dead?” Penny absorbed the import of the loss. “You mean I’m definitely-—?”

“Pregnant. Yes. But despite your situation, Miss Candie, cause for rejoicing there is in the advent of a new life. Of the seed within you should sing songs of praise. Very important is the pre-natal attitude. So be glad, Miss Candie, of this life budding within you, no matter how illegitimate your child will be.”

“Oh, I am,” Penny told him. “Hallelujah!” she added as she hung up the phone. Halle—--cotton-pickin’—-lujah!

CHAPTER THREE

IT WAS still early when Penny and Annie finished dinner. By that time their discussiony of Lovelights had gone from specific problems to general aims. Annie suggested that they go up to her place where they might relax, have a glass of wine, and continue their talk. Still looking for clues as to how Annie might function if she took charge during her absence, Penny accepted the invitation.

Annie lived in the East Eighties, in a section of York-ville which was mainly Irish. Her apartment consisted of living room, bedroom, bathroom and kitchenette. It was simply furnished, sparsely utilitarian, rather than with any particular artistry. It confirmed Penny’s impression of Annie as a girl who might have a bubbly personality but was more serious-minded than flighty at heart.

Annie poured them each a glass of sherry, put a subdued Irish medley on the stereo, and settled down on the couch alongside Penny. The blonde girl sipped her wine and smiled at Annie. “So you live here all by yourself,” Penny observed idly.

“Yes. I like it better that way. I value my privacy.”

“So do I,” Penny agreed. “Room-mates have a way of interfering with a girl’s personal life. Particularly where men friends are concerned.”

“Well, that’s really no particular problem with me,” Annie sighed.

“No? That seems hard to believe. A girl as attractive as you, I’d think the men would be battering down your door.”

“Oh, I’ve had lots of opportunities, I guess. But I’m a one-man-girl. And did I ever pick the wrong man!” Annie confessed with a sigh.

“Don’t we all?” Penny thought of Studs Levine. “Want to tell me about it?” she added sympathetically.

“Oh, I don’t want to bore you.”

“I won’t be bored. But I don’t want to intrude on your private life, either. I just thought that talking about it might help.”

“Maybe it would,” Annie murmured with a speculative look at Penny. “It just might help. Well, it all began about a year ago. . . ”

It was Annie Fitz-Manley’s twentieth birthday, the night she first met Brian Henannigan. A tall, rangy lad he was, just off the boat from the Auld Sod, and with the bloom of County Killarney still fresh on his cheeks. A few years older than Annie, his curly golden hair crept down the nape of his neck like ripe wheat bursting over a field at harvest time. His eyes were a guileless blue, with a permanent twinkle and a long-lashed shyness in the presence of a colleen so pretty as Annie.

Brian was a cousin of the girl friend of Annie’s who had thrown the surprise party to celebrate Annie’s birthday. That’s how he came to be there. Throughout most of the evening he stayed back on the fringes of the party, seeming to enjoy the good time the others were having while shyly holding himself aloof from actually participating in it.

Perhaps it was this very shyness which attracted Annie to him. She had been watching Brian out of the corner of her eye for a long time before she finally approached him. A small girl, she had to toss her head back so the bright red curls glittered in the light from the chandelier when she spoke to the lanky lad. “You’re the only fellow here who hasn’t kissed me Happy Birthday tonight,” she told him, her cheeks flushed with good Irish whiskey, her green eyes flashing up at him impudently.

“Sure and I—-I didn’t feel right about it on such short acquaintanceship,” Brian stammered. “It was afraid I was that you might be thinkin’ me fresh.”

“Sure now, an’ I’d nivir be thinkin’ that.” Annie mimicked his brogue.

“Then ’twill be my pleasure.” He bent and kissed her very quickly on the lips.

“’Tis misled I’ve been about Killarney,” Annie protested, “if that’s the best you can be doin’ on me birthday.”

“Is it funnin’ me you are?”

“I guess I was. I’m sorry.” Annie dropped the bogus brogue. .“Still, that really was an awfully short peck. Don’t you like American girls?”

“ ’Tis just that I’m not used to their frankness. But I meant no insult.”

“Then prove it.”

“That I will.” Brian grasped her under both elbows, lifted her clear of the floor, and kissed her firmly.

It was a long kiss this time, and Annie was stirred by it. His lips were warm, and they moved sensually against hers. Before she knew she was going to do it, Annie found her tongue darting between them, and a thrill swept through her as he responded, a thrill that set her knees to shaking as he continued to hold her suspended in midair.

Finally, he set her down. “Well,” Annie gasped, holding onto him while she got her balance, “I’d say you’ve upheld Killarney’s reputation real well.”

“ ’Tis thankin’ you I am.” Brian actually blushed. “An’ many happy returns.”

“Thank you.” Annie continued to stand there for a moment, looking up at him. “Would you like to see me home?” she asked finally.

“Sure an’ ’twould be my pleasure.”

It was only a short walk, and when they got there Annie asked him in for a nightcap. He accepted, and soon they were seated side by side on the couch, sipping their drinks. After a moment, Annie leaned her head against his shoulder.

Brian took the hint and kissed her again. Annie clung to him, not wanting the kiss to end. Never before had Annie been stirred so strongly and so quickly by a man. Her whole body trembled in his embrace, and she knew without having to think about it that whatever he asked of her she would give freely and without a smidgeon of guilt.

But to her disappointment, he asked nothing—not even another kiss. Frustration turned Annie’s willingness into aggression. She leaned back across his lap, half facing him, the tip of one plump breast under the green silk party dress she was wearing pressed intimately against his hard-muscled stomach. She took his hand in hers and pressed the palm of it against the material covering her other breast. Automatically it closed over the straining mound, and Annie caught her breath sharply as the tip quivered and grew under his caress. Her hand tangled in the curls at the back of his neck, and she pulled his face down for another kiss. He bit her lip slightly toward the end of it, and Annie’s thighs clenched spasmodically, her knees doubling so that her skirt slid down her shapely legs to reveal the creamy-white hint of baby fat above her stocking- tops.

When the kiss was over, Annie kept her eyes closed while her fingers fumbled at the bodice of the dress. She opened the buttons and then arched one shoulder to free it of the bra-strap. One of her high young breasts sprang free of the bra-cup, its ruby-red tip straining toward the ceiling. Annie opened her eyes.

There was an odd expression, one almost of puzzlement, on Brian’s face as he gazed down upon the firm, bare flesh. Annie sat up then and pulled his face against the breast, her fingers digging into his neck as she felt his mouth gently take hold of the widened pink roseate. She guided one of his hands to her thighs then, catching it between them, clenching and relaxing the muscles there to urge it higher.

When it was where she wanted it, Annie moved off his lap. Still holding his hand prisoner, she began stroking his thighs with the long, red-coated nails of her fingers. Again, momentarily, she was disconcerted at the look on his face. She was even more disconcerted when she reached for the zipper of his pants and he firmly removed her hand.

Yet, obligingly, he continued to follow Annie’s lead where her own body was concerned. His mouth was wide over the naked breast and his tongue was hot and teasing as its tip strummed the nipple. The fingers of his hand were tangled in the material of her panties now, moving rhythmically against the soft, down-covered mound of flesh there. Shortly, Annie moaned and stood up. Quickly, but efficiently and neatly, she reached under the dress and pulled off the panties. Then she delicately lifted the hem of the dress in front and in back and tucked it into the belt around her waist. Her back was to Brian, but she heard him gasp at the sight of her rosy, round derriere.

The gasp encouraged her. She stretched out on the couch on her stomach, her cheek resting on one of his knees, and once again stroked his thigh. This time he made no move to stop her when she unzipped his pants. And the size of the inflamed Irish manhood which sprang free made Annie’s green eyes widen.

“Oh, Brian!” Her voice shook. “Take me, my darling. Take me now!” Seized by a spasm of desire, her body was grinding into the couch.

She started to turn over, but he stopped her. “Just be stayin’ the way you are, my girl,” he told her. He got up and knelt over her, his hands reaching from behind to push under her bra and squeeze the buttery softness of her swaying breasts as he gently tugged her into a crouching position.

Then, like the stab of a red-hot ingot of steel, Annie felt her flesh forced apart. “Wait!” she gasped. “That’s not the right place! You’re not—!”

But Brian didn’t heed her. His only response was to move one hand from her breast. It stilled Annie’s protests successfully. Caught up in the exquisite sensation, she all but forgot the pain of his misdirected thrusts. Her brain began to reel dizzily as the combination of his violent pounding and delicately thrilling caress set her to bouncing with building passion. Harder and harder . . . Faster and faster . . . Until finally the exquisite ecstasy reached its peak and Annie was shaken by one tremor after another until she felt Brian explode. He pulled her backward with the explosion, and she felt as if she must be torn in two. But then it was over, and he released her.

It took Annie a moment before she could catch her breath. When she had, she looked at him with a mixture of rapture and puzzlement. Finally she put the puzzlement into words. “Why did you do it that way?” she asked.

“An’ why not?” he countered. “Sure the back door’s good enough for me, an’ you’ll be wantin’ to reserve the front door for your husband. He’ll never be knowin’ I buzzed the button there, but sure an’ isn’t he the one should be breakin’ the door down altogether?”

“But how did you know?” Annie asked.

“Know what?”

“That I’m a virgin.” Under the circumstances, she couldn’t help blushing. “After all,” she added, “I was pretty brazen about wanting you to make love to me. How could you be so sure I hadn’t behaved that way with another man?”

“An’ had you, now?”

“No. You’re the first. I—I guess I just fell for you as fast and as hard as a girl can fall.”

“ ’Tis honored I am. An’ happy that with it all I’ll be leavin’ you every bit as pure as when I came here.”

“Will I see you again?” Annie asked quickly as she saw that he was re-arranging his clothes and getting ready to leave.

“That you will. I’ll be callin’ you.”

And Brian had called her about a week later. They began dating then, and they kept it up fairly regularly throughout the next year. But on all their dates, although there was much erotic play of one sort or another, Brian kept them clear of anything which might have destroyed her technical virginity.

“I’d not want to be responsible for ruinin’ a girl for marriage,” he’d tell her.

“Oooh,” Annie moaned on one of these occasions, “it’s buckos like you that give Irish chivalry a bad name!”

She couldn’t help feeling there was something peculiar about Brian’s sex pattern. But then there were a few other things about Brian that also seemed strange. Hung up on him as she was, Annie still had to admit that to herself.

For instance, there were those peculiar long absences of his whenever they went out anywhere. Whether it was to a movie, or a dance, or a night club, or just the neighborhood bar, Annie could be sure that at some time during the evening Brian would excuse himself to go to the men’s room and that he’d be gone for at least a half-hour, and sometimes for over an hour. After a while, she began to doubt that he really was going to the men’s room, so one night she followed him without his seeing her, just to make sure.

He went just where he said he was going, all right. And he stayed just as long as he’d stayed on previous occasions. Annie decided he must have some stomach condition that delicacy kept him from telling her about, and she stopped wondering about these absences.

Later, after she found out the truth about Brian, she understood what must really have been keeping him in the John so long all those times. The truth was something that knocked her over the night of Paddy Donegal’s wake. That was the night that Annie first saw Brian for what he really was. She kept loving him after that, but it was with the knowledge of just who and what it was that she loved. Yes, it was a real turning point in their relationship, and in Annie’s life itself, that night, that night the Irish gathered to pay their last respects to Paddy Donegal.

It. was a real old-fashioned Irish wake, with the whiskey flowing free and the women howling loud and the men feeling the joy of still being alive even if poor old Paddy was stretched out so fine, so splendid, so rosy-cheeked in his coffin. Everybody had liked Paddy, and many was the wake he himself had livened up with a sad song whiskeyed into a joyful jig. That’s the way he would have wanted it for himself, some tears, some laughs, lots of good Irish brew, the songs getting livelier ’til the feet got to tapping, and a grand old time had by all. That’s the way he would have wanted it, and that’s the way it was.

Annie and Bryan walked in around the middle of it. A hot July night it was, and the undertaker had taken the precaution of packing some ice around the bier. By the time they got there, the mourners were taking the ice from Paddy’s bier and putting it in their own beer. Nobody objected, the feeling being that Paddy would have understood and approved. Annie sipped at a glass of beer someone handed her while Brian took several fast gulps from the bottles of whiskey being passed around. After a while Annie went into the kitchen to pay her respects to the widow. When she came out, Brian was nowhere to be seen.

By that time all the mourners had moved out of the parlor where the casket had been placed and spread out over the dining room where the vittles were arranged and the living room where a fiddler had struck up a tune. Annie wandered through the throng, but she couldn’t find Brian anywhere. It got later and later, and still she couldn’t locate him.

It must have been close to three in the morning when she was attracted to a commotion in the doorway to the parlor where Paddy had been laid out. Drifting over there, Annie saw that the hubbub had stemmed from the fact that someone had noticed that the lid of the coffin had been closed. This was definitely counter to tradition, and now several of the men were staring at it, genuflecting, and discussing it among themselves. Inside the parlor, the overhead lights had been turned out, the only illumination now came from a candle at either end of the closed casket, and there was an eerie feeling about the shadowy scene. This, Annie realized, was why none of them were pressing closer to investigate the closing of the coffin.

Drink had revived old superstitions and made them timid. But Annie had downed only the one beer, and so she felt sober and clear-headed compared to the rest of them. Pooh-poohing to-herself at their superstitious rumblings, she entered the parlor.

Annie shouldn’t have been so daring. It resulted in the scare of a lifetime for her. She walked straight over to the table on which the coffin was resting, and when she reached it she loosed a scream of terror that sent the others scattering back from the parlor doorway. There, behind the coffin on the table, stretched out so close to it that Annie, didn’t see it until she was standing right over it, was the grinning corpse itself!

Annie froze, her scream still echoing in her ears. Then she regained control of her limbs and fled after the others. By then some of them had gotten back their own control and started back into the parlor to see what had made her scream. Annie again reversed herself and fell in behind them. She was right there a few moments later, with a clear view when they raised the lid on the oversized coffin so that the corpse might be returned to its proper resting place. She was right there to join in the outraged gasp as the eyes of them all fell on what was inside the coffin.

Brian Hennanigan was there. He wasn’t alone. There was another young man of around his age wedged into the velvet-lined casket with him. They were lying spoon-fashion, the trousers of both of them pushed down around their ankles. And they were too drunk to stop what they were doing—or, rather, what Brian was doing to the other lad—-even when the cold draft swept over them when the coffin lid was raised.

And that was how Annie Fitz-Manley found out what Brian really was. That was the moment when everything fell into place. That was the moment she would never be able to forget as long as she lived. . .

“But how awful for you!” Penny exclaimed when Annie finished her story.

“Yes, it was. But the worst thing was that even that couldn’t make me stop loving Brian. No matter what he did, what he was, I just couldn’t help myself. I went right on feeling the same way about him. And I still do.”

“Do you think he’ll ever change? Ever want you as a woman?” Penny asked.

“No. I don’t kid myself about that any more. He is what he is.” Annie sighed. Then, abruptly, her manner changed and she became more like her usual bubbly self again. “How’s that for a problem for Lovelights, hey?” she asked Penny. “What sort of advice does the editor have to cope with that particular problem? Dear ‘Young Girl Who’s Ape Qver Queer . . .’ Come on, what would you say after that, Penny?”

“I don’t know,” Penny admitted. “I’d have to think about it.”

“Well, you do that. You think about it while I go inside and get out of my girdle and into something more comfortable.” Annie vanished into the bedroom.

Penny did think about it, but she hadn’t come up with any solutions when Annie reappeared. She forgot about it momentarily as she took in the altered appearance of the young Irish girl.

Annie had brushed out her long red hair and tied it back with a simple green ribbon. She had changed into a black negligee. The negligee was shimmery and semi-transparent. Also, it was low cut on top and unbuttoned down the skirt so that the material parted. The result was that much of Annie’s petite and voluptuous body rippled in and out of view as she moved.

Penny had never before realized what a sexy little thing Annie really was. Now, the high thrust of the breasts with the scarlet nipples playing hide-and-seek with the black bodice, the ample hips thrusting out from the small waist, the firm, globular buttocks jiggling, the flushed pink of baby fat at the thighs — all the allure of the compact colleen struck Penny as though she were seeing Annie for the first time. And even as she was appreciating it, Penny was wondering to herself why Annie had gone to the trouble of arranging herself so seductively.

The answer wasn’t long in coming. But before it did, Annie perched on the couch beside Penny and picked up the conversation right where it had been left when she went in to change. “Well,” she asked Penny, “have you decided what I ought to do about Brian?”

“That depends,” Penny told her. “The best thing would be to forget him, of course, but I gather you’ve decided you’re in love with him and you can’t do that.”

“That’s right.”

“And you want to help him?”

“Yes. If I can.”

“Then you have to understand his problem. Male homosexuality is almost always due to psychological causes. To cope with it requires a Freudian orientation. You have to understand that to Brian you probably represent a mother figure. Since you’re female, he probably wouldn’t bother with you at all if that wasn’t true. But his mother was probably extremely authoritative, which could be why he is the way he is. This means that you should try to be the exact opposite. You should never be aggressive with him. You particularly shouldn’t be sexually aggressive.”

“We wouldn’t even have what little love life we have if I followed that advice,” Annie objected.

“Perhaps not. But it’s the only way I can see of coping with it. Have you been able to come up with anything better?”

“Why, yes, I have,” Annie said softly. “I have indeed.” Her arm circled Penny’s shoulder and stroked her cheek. “I think I’ve come up with something better.” She kissed Penny’s neck and began unbuttoning the blonde girl’s blouse.

“What are you doing?” Penny asked, taken by surprise. Annie ignored the question. “Yes, I’ve decided how to handle my problem,” she murmured. She fell to her knees and pushed Penny’s skirt up as high as it would go. Her red hair tumbled over the silken knees as she lowered her face.

“What the—-?” Penny was really alarmed now.

Just before she buried her lips, Annie crooned an explanation: “If you can’t join him,” she sighed, “lick ’em!”

CHAPTER FOUR

SHARP, laquered fingernails pulled the silken panties down Penny’s flushed thighs. Pursed lips found their mark so quickly that she couldn’t control the instantaneous reaction of her body. Her hips arched upward as a wave of exquisite sensation swept over her. Almost, she let herself be carried along by it.

Almost, but not quite. Even in the midst of the liquid feeling, the very proximity of the hungry mouth recalled to Penny her condition. Passion was flooded away by guilt. The thrill was dissipated by her conscience whispering dire warnings of the possible effects of pre-natal behavior of this kind.

Gently but firmly, Penny pushed Annie away. “No,” she told her. “Stop. I mean it. Stop.”

“What’s the matter?” Annie was hurt. “Don’t you like me?”

“I like you very much, but—”

“But?”

Penny didn’t reply.

“You think this is perverted or something? Is that it?”

“No. Really. It isn’t that. I’m not just being moralistic. There are personal reasons why—why I’d rather not.”

“I don’t believe you. What personal reasons?”

“I—I can’t tell you.”

“Then it is me!” Two large tears began to roll down Annie’s cheeks.

“No. Honestly. Please don’t cry. Believe me, there’s no reason to feel rejected.”

“Why not?” Annie was sobbing now. “I am rejected, aren’t I? First Brian, and now you. No matter which way I turn, I’m rejected.”

“Believe me, that’s not it.”

“No? Then you’re just being spiteful, is that it? Oh, I know your type! Always so Simon-pure!”

“Annie, please don’t be angry. Look—” Penny decided to take a chance. “I’ll explain if you’ll promise to respect my confidence. You have to swear that you’ll never tell a living soul what I’m going to tell you. At least not for the next few months.”

“All right.” Annie was curious. “You have my word. What is it?”

Penny took a deep breath. “I’m pregnant,” she told her.

“You’re kidding!”

“Yes. If you want to call it that.”

“You’re really pregnant?”

“Yes. I just found out for sure today. Anyway—I don’t know if you can understand this—but it’s sort of killed my desire for sex. Any kind of sex. Maybe it’s foolish, but I have this feeling that I should keep my body pure until after the baby’s born.”

“That’s sort of locking the barn after the horse is gone, isn’t it?” Annie observed. “I, mean, now you’re safe no matter what you do.”

“Perhaps. And the truth is I used to be terribly eager for any kind of sexual experience, and for one reason or another it always evaded me. And now that I’m reluctant, there seem to be more and more opportunities. Still, it’s the way I feel. I want to keep my body unsullied until after the baby is born.”

“Well, it’s your body. Still, I don’t see why you—”

Annie was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone from the bedroom. “Excuse me.” She went inside to answer it.

While Annie was gone, Penny rearranged her clothing. The redhead was gone a long time, and when she returned Penny saw that she had gotten dressed again, this time in a low-cut but simple black cocktail gown. Penny appreciated style, and now she admired Annie’s. The dress was in the latest Empire fashion, loose-fitting and short, billowing out from the half-moons of Annie’s bosom to just above her knees. She wore calf-high high-heeled boots, white and studded with rhinestones, and a long string of rhinestones around her neck which dipped provocatively into the cleft between her breasts. And she had brushed out her red hair so that it hung long and loose, forming a swirling mantle over the whiteness of her bare shoulders.

“That was Brian on the phone,” she told Penny. “He wants me to meet him. He’s with a friend at the Ginza.”

“The Ginza?”

“Yes. It’s a discotheque. Very chic. Very popular. Do you know it?”

“I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never been there,” Penny told her.

“Then why not come along? You’re invited. Honestly. I told Brian you were here, and he suggested that since he’s with a friend I bring you along and we make it a foursome.”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s getting late and—”

“Oh, come on. You’ll enjoy yourself. And if I know Brian’s friends, you’ll be as safe from temptation as if you were in a nunnery.”

“But I’m not dressed.”

“It’s not formal. You look fine. And besides, I’d consider it a favor. I always find it kind of awkward being alone with Brian and one of his boyfriends. Feeling about him the way I do, I mean.”

When Annie put it that way, Penny felt compelled to go along. Having encouraged her young assistant into revealing confidences, she now felt obliged to keep her company. Besides, she was curious to meet Brian after all Annie had told her about him.

The two girls took a cab to the Ginza on 58th Street off Madison Avenue. There was a line of people outside waiting to get in, but the two girls were able to bypass it since the men they were meeting were already holding down a table. From the outside it didn’t look like much, but once they were admitted, Penny found herself impressed by the place.

The Ginza combined many unusual elements, some in the latest fashion of what was “in”, others more traditional and designed for comfort. The decor was Chinese, as was the food. But it was served smorgasbord style, with long tables from which patrons might help themselves to the most succulent Oriental dishes at their convenience. The waitresses who brought drinks to the small tables arranged around the sides of the main room were also Oriental dishes — and spiced up with just enough dressing to cover the essentials.

This main room was reached by descending a long staircase just off the bar. The girls checked their coats at the cloakroom at the head of this staircase and went on down. The dance floor was jammed, but once they elbowed through it they found that the management had left ample space for each table so that an atmosphere of leisurely pleasure prevailed. Annie spotted the two men and led Penny to their table.

Halfway there Penny’s heart gave a jump and she stopped in her tracks. Annie had pointed out Brian, and now Penny recognized the man with him. It was Studs Levine .

Studs Levine! The father of Penny’s unborn child! The man responsible for her pregnancy! The last man in the world she wanted to see—now, particularly—or ever. Studs didn’t seem too happy to see Penny, either. A strong trace of embarrassment showed through his customary poise. It was a few moments before Penny realized that Studs was embarrassed about her seeing him with Brian. He guessed correctly that Annie must have told Penny about Brian’s homosexuality, and he figured Penny would find him guilty by association.

“So you two know each other, do you, now?” Bryan threw a massive masculine arm around Studs’ shoulders in a gesture just possessive enough to be a giveaway of the fact that he was jealous of Penny. “An’ doesn’t that make everything friendly an’ cozy?”

“I’d like to be friendly and cozy, too,” Annie said pointedly, looking at Brian with big cow eyes that were naked in their expression of adoration.

“Sure, me darlin’, an’ there’s enough friendliness an’ coziness for all,” he told her. His other hand squeezed her knee in a gesture of reassurance made ambivalent by the fact that his arm remained around Studs’ shoulders.

Outside of a helpless glance at Penny, Studs didn’t seem to mind. “Of course there is,” he agreed. “How have you been, Penny? Long time no see.”

“Long time no call,” Penny reminded him.

“Yeah, well, I’ve been meaning to, but I’ve been so damn busy. You know how it is.”

“No, I don’t. Tell me. How is it?”

“Tumultuous.” Studs sighed. “The world is too much with me.”

“Late and soon. But then sooner or later you’ll catch up with it, Studs. Or it’ll catch up with you. Then beware.”

“It almost has. And I’m bewaring like crazy.”

“You two lost me somewhere,” Annie interrupted. “Come on, Brian, dance with me while these two deep thinkers solve the problems of man’s alienation from man.”

“Not from man.” Penny couldn’t resist the dig, and she was rewarded when it brought a flush to Studs’s cheeks. “From woman,” she added.

“Come on, Brian. Before the show starts,” Annie insisted.

“Oh, all right now.” Brian followed Annie onto the dance floor, casting a reluctant backwards glance at Studs.

Penny and Studs sat silently, watching them dancing for a while. They were doing the frug to a fast beat, both moving uninhibitedly to the music, their bodies gyrating for all the world as if they were victims caught up in the mass hysteria of moving flesh. They merged with the shadows already merged in the wild cacophony of sound and movement. Then they were propelled into view again, Annie’s breasts bouncing so strenuously that they threatened to escape her low-cut bodice, Brian’s pelvis rotating as if in a frenzied parody of a burlesque grind. Both their mouths were moving now, the words lost in the din. Brian’s expression was petulant, Annie’s conciliatory. It looked to Penny as if he was angry about something and she was trying to calm him down with some sort of explanation.

“I think your boyfriend is angry that Annie brought me,” Penny told Studs cattily.

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“No? Well, you could have fooled me.” Curiosity made Penny drop the sarcasm for the moment. “But how come, Studs? I know you’ve got the morals of an alleycat, but I never would have-guessed you’d go for boys.”

“These are desperate times we live in.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning the draft. I’m due to be called up any day now, And I’m allergic to Vietnamese cooking.”

“But what’s that got to do with playing choir boys with Brian?”

“The draft board won’t take you if you’re homosexual. If you can convince them, I mean. I’m just laying a little groundwork so if they investigate they’ll find I’ve consorted with a known homosexual.”

“That’s pretty chicken!”

“Yeah. Maybe. But I’d rather switch than fight.”

“I didn’t know you were such a coward.”

“I’m really not, Penny. Oh, not that I’m so anxious to go and get splattered all over the Vietnam landscape. I’m not. Still, I’d go along with it if it wasn’t for my mother. I’m her only son, you know, and it would kill her if I got dragged off to war. It really would.”

“But there must be some other way.” Penny thought a moment, and some malice crept back into her tone as she resumed speaking. “Why not get married?” she needled him.

“Oh, I thought of that. I really did. But it’s no good. Johnson’s latest edict is to call up childless fathers between the ages of nineteen and twenty-six. That would mean me, even if I was married. And I’d never be able to produce a child in time to avoid the draft.”

“Still, the swish bit seems pretty drastic.”

“It is. But what can I do with my mother calling me up every day and singing the same old lullaby of how she didn’t raise her boy to be a soldier?”

At this point Brian and Annie returned to the table and Studs and Penny cut the conversation short. Brian seemed in a better mood now, somehow less threatened by Penny’s presence. He didn’t even seem to notice that she and Studs had moved their chairs closer together while they’d been talking.

Still, Brian was solicitous of Studs in a way that was vaguely lover-like. “Can you see all right, me bucko?” he asked. “The girlies are about to do their bit.”

“I’m fine,” Studs assured him.

“Be sure now. You don’t want to be missin’ your sister’s number.”

“Your sister?” Penny was surprised.

“Yeah. Lascivia. She works here.”

“But I thought she was—” Penny bit off the sentence. She had reason to remember that the one and only time she’d met Studs’ sister, Lascivia had been employed in an establishment that was shady to say the least. But she didn’t know if Studs knew, and so she dropped the topic. Her near faux pas was covered as the lights went up for the show. It was spotlighted on a sort of platform like a birdcage which hung suspended over the patrons in the main room. Three girls appeared here and went into a fast-paced routine of twist variations to the stereo beat bouncing around the room.

As wild as it was, the show had obviously been carefully staged. There was something for every taste, with about a dozen girls rotating so that there were always three gyrating in the birdcage, and so that the three were always a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. They were tall and slender, petite and voluptuous, curvy and lissome, long-legged and high-bottomed, hippy and hip. The one thing that they had in common was that they were all quite bosomy. Also they were all far above average in beauty.

The costumes they wore were designed to display their charms: low-cut leotards cut shockingly deep at the crotch with fringed bottoms that displayed more than concealed the writhing plumpness of some of the most delectable derrieres to be found in New York; skin-tight netting that enhanced every writhing movement of the large, fast-swinging bosoms; bright-colored and skimpy bikinis from which pulsating hips thrust out with tantalizing torridity; transparent and gauzy lingerie-like costumes which might have hidden nothing at all if it weren’t for the fact that the girls wearing them were moving so fast that their luscious bodies seemed a blur of sizzling motion—such was the fleshy appeal of the Ginza show. It was an exciting but tasteful treat for the eyes as they interpreted the frug, the watusi, the monkey, the Boston monkey and the swim for the appreciative audience.

“There’s my sister, Lascivia.” Studs pointed out a tall brunette in the center of the trio now performing.

Most of the men in the room were staring at her. She was worth staring at. With her back to the audience, her high, round, foam-rubber posterior evaded the fringe caressing it and assailed the senses of the audience like twin trip-hammers, each vibrating with a life of its own. Still bent over, she swung around and the tips of her large breasts grazed her knees. Then she slowly straightened up and—surely it must have been imagined—-a large red quivering nipple, shaped like a bullet, flashed into view, and then was lost in the bodice beneath the mounds of imposing flesh still jiggling to the now savage beat.

_A moment later the show ended and Lascivia went off with the other girls. “Will she join us for a drink?” Annie asked Studs, a glint in her eye.

“No. She’s not allowed. The management’s very strict about that. No mingling with the customers.”

“That’s a shame.” Annie sighed. “Hey, Penny, I have to rinse a kidney. Keep me company.”

“When you put it so delicately,” Penny said, “how can I refuse?” She got to her feet and followed Annie to the ladies’ room.

When they returned, Penny again detected a subtle change in the atmosphere. Mostly it was Studs’ attitude toward her which had changed. He was more attentive, seemingly more eager to restore some of that rapport they’d once had. But the more attention he paid to her, the more surly Brian became. This in turn bothered Annie, and before long the party was obviously fizzling out.

“It’s time for me to get home and to bed,” Penny said finally. “I have to be up very early tomorrow.”

“I’ll see you home,” Studs said quickly.

“What!” Brian exploded. “An’ what about me, laddie?”

“You can take Annie home,” Studs told him smoothly.

“It really isn’t necessary—” Penny started to protest.

“But I insist,” Studs insisted.

“Then it’s all settled.” Annie was quick to take advantage of the opportunity to have Brian all to herself. “Come along, darling.” She tugged at his sleeve.

Glowering, Brian allowed her to take his arm as they left the Ginza. Outside, Studs insisted that they take the first cab which came along. And then he and Penny were alone.

“My place is right near here,” he told her. “Why don’t we go up there for a nightcap before I take you home.”

“No thanks, Studs. I’m really awfully tired. And I do have to get up early tomorrow.”

“Please, Penny. There are some things I want to say to you.”

“So say them.”

“I can’t like this. Standing out on the street.”

“But why this urgency, Studs? Why now? After all this time?”

“I’ll explain why if you’ll come over to my place so we can talk.”

“Oh, all right.”

Studs’ place was a comfortable bachelor apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park. He mixed a couple of drinks, put some soft music on the stereo, turned the lights down low, and settled himself on the sofa beside Penny. It was just the sort of come-on she would have expected of Studs, and she resented it. She resented the implication that all he had to do was snap his fingers and she’d fall panting into bed with him. She particularly resented it because of the scene they’d had the time she’d done exactly that. That was the time that the subject of marriage had come up and Studs had given a good imitation of a man frantically searching for a fast train out of town.

This time Penny decided the shotgun was going to come first, before he wore down her resistance—which she had no intention of allowing him to do anyway. So, when he slid his aim smoothly around her and attempted to kiss her, Penny pushed him away sharply. “No, Studs!” she told him firmly. “I’m not going to get burned twice in the same place.”

“Ahh, come on, Penny. You can’t deny that there’s a damn strong attraction between us. So why fight it?”

“Lots of reasons. But the main one is that I can’t keep up with your changes of mood. I don’t hear from you for nearly two months and now you come on like we’re suddenly Tristan and Isolde.”

“Well, seeing you made me realize-—”

“No, Studs. It won’t wash. Seeing me didn’t make you realize anything. You weren’t exactly on fire for me during most of the time we were at the Ginza. Why the change?”

“I was too. I just don’t like to show my feelings in public,” Studs protested.

“Since when? Come on, Studs. You said you had something to say to me. So say it so I can get home and get some sleep.”

“All right.” Studs drew a deep breath. “Penny, will you marry me?”

“What? !”

“You heard me. I’m asking you to marry me.”

“Oh, I heard you all right. The question is: why? The last time the subject came up you shot out of my place like a man trying to beat out a spastic colon.”

“Because I love you!” This time Studs grabbed her firmly and managed to force a kiss.

“Well—” Penny said breathlessly, her resistance shaken. “Now just a minute!” She slid away from him. “Let me just think a minute.” She stared at him with mixed feelings. “You still haven’t answered me,” she said finally. “Why all of a sudden like this?”

“Because I realize that I love you, and I have to marry you.”

“You have to marry me,” Penny mused, thinking back. She remembered then that Studs’ attitude had changed from the time she and Annie returned from the ladies’ room. Something clicked, and Penny knew that while they were gone Brian must have told Studs something to make him change like this. But what? Then Penny remembered how Brian and Annie had looked while they were talking on the dance floor and how much less antagonistic Brian had been when they returned to the table. Now the pieces fell into place. Annie must have been reassuring Brian that he didn’t have to worry about competition from Penny over Studs because Penny was pregnant. Then, when they’d gone to the ladies’ room, Brian must have passed the information along to Studs, thinking it would discourage him from being interested in Penny.

Brian couldn’t have known that it would have just the opposite effect. And now Penny suddenly realized why it had had that effect, why Studs was so eager to marry her. It was the same reason he’d had for becoming involved with Brian. The draft! He knew Penny was pregnant and if he married her he would quickly become a father and that would keep him out of the army! Sure, that was it! But what Studs didn’t know, what he had no way of knowing because Penny had never told him or anybody else, was that he was the father of her unborn child!

That was Studs’s angle! Penny was sure of it! And her sureness made her decide to bring it out in the open. “Brian told you I’m pregnant, and that’s really why you want to marry me, isn’t it?” she said accusingly.

“No! It’s because I love you.”

“But Brian did tell you I’m pregnant, didn’t he?”

“Well —“

“Didn’t he?”

“Yes. But what’s so wrong with that? I just want to help you out of your predicament. Some people might even think I was being pretty noble.”

“Noble, my foot. You’re only doing it to stay out of the service! Admit it! Aren’t you?”

“Well, that’s part of it, Penny, but—”

“And you have the nerve to think that I—”

“You have it wrong. I also happen to be in love with you.”

“And all love’s fair in war! Is that it?”

“Love is love, and you talk too much.” Studs grabbed her and kissed her again.

“Now stop that,” Penny protested.

“No!” He repeated the kiss.

“It won’t do you a bit of good,” she said, her voice quavering in spite of herself.

“Uh-huh.” This time his hand squeezed her breast to punctuate the kiss.

“I’m not going to marry you.”

“Of course not.” The hand was inside her dress now, fumbling with the strap of her bra.

“Not under any circumstances.”

The breast was free now, and Studs pressed his lips to its rosy tip.

“And that’s final!”

He pushed her back on the couch now, easing her skirt up over her trembling thighs.

“I absolutely will not marry you under any circumstances!”

Studs pulled down her panties, and Penny’s whole body tingled as his fingers dipped into the dew aroused by her passion. Penny’s confused mind managed to remind her that she’d decided not to have sex until after the baby was born. She remembered that she wanted to keep her body pure and unsullied while it was the harbinger of this precious new life. But her resolve was rationalized away with the realization that Studs was after all the father of her unborn child. It had been he who had planted the seed within her. So who had more right than he to make love to her? Certainly there was nothing immoral about that. And besides, it felt so damn good!

“Oh, Studs,” she moaned, giving herself up completely to sensation, shelving all the really valid reasons why she shouldn’t give in to him again.

“Come on in the bedroom,” he panted. “It’s more comfortable in there.”

As if hypnotized, Penny let him lead her to the bed. She writhed impatiently as he finished stripping off her clothes and then took off his own. Then he stretched out beside her and took her in his arms.

Penny’s body arched as she felt the heat of him pressed against her. Breasts rising and falling rapidly, her hands clenched on his back and her nails dug into his flesh. “Now! Hurry!” she moaned. And then Studs was over her, poised on his elbows, about to plunge the iron into the center of the fire consuming her body. But —

“Hoo-hoo!”

The sound came from the other room. Studs froze. Penny’s blue eyes opened wide with the realization that the train had been derailed before chugging into the tunnel of love.

“Hoo-hoo? Irving, you’re home?”

“Who is it?” Penny asked.

“Shh!” Studs hissed. “It’s my mother.”

“Your mother? At this time of night? What does she want?”

“I don’t know. Be quiet, will you? She’ll hear you.”

“So what?”

“So what? She’s a Jewish mother, that’s what.”

“Now you’re being chauvinistic.”

“Look, I haven’t got time to argue. She’ll be in here any minute. You’ve got to hide.”

“Oh, all right,” Penny agreed.

“Well, don’t just lie there. Go ahead, then! What are you waiting for?”

“I’m waiting for you to get off me so I can get up!”

“Oh! Sorry!” Studs eased over so that Penny could free herself.

“Where shall I hide?” she asked.

“Hoo-hoo ?”

“In the bathroom. Quick! She’s coming in here!”

Penny ran into the bathroom as Studs quickly threw her clothing under the bed. She closed the door behind her and leaned against it, listening.

“Hoo-H— Oh, here you are, Irving. What are you doing here?”

“I’m trapping elephants. What else would I be doing in my own bed in my own bedroom at three o’clock in the morning?”

“You got heart burn?”

“No. Why?”

“Whenever you’re irritable, since you’re a little boy, it’s from the heartburn. So if you haven’t got heartburn, why should you be so irritable?”

“I’m not irritable!” Studs snapped.

“No? So then you could be a little glad to see me. I’m your mother, the only mother you got. Remember?”

“I remember.”

“You do? Then it must be that the Telephone Company isn’t working any more. More than a week now you haven’t called me. Or is it that maybe you broke your finger and you can’t dial?”

“My finger’s fine. I’ve been busy, Ma. I meant to call you, honest.”

“Meaning and doing is two different things. I could be lying there dead with my heart, all alone in my apartment, and you’d never know it. All right, so I gotta face the fact. You don’t care. But even if you don’t care, I’m a mother. I can’t help caring. Why doesn’t he call? I ask myself. Because he don’t care? Maybe. But maybe not. Maybe something terrible happened to him. Maybe he’s lying there all alone in his apartment, dead, and nobody knows. So I’m a mother. The least I could do is come down and bury my only son when he needs me.”

“Ma, I’m not dead. You could have waited until morning. You didn’t have to come down here in the middle of the night.”

“So when should I come? When are you home? All day and all night you’re running around killing yourself, doing God knows what with God knows who. I figure this is the only time I’m gonna catch you in, so I get up in the middle of the night and well I’m not, you know, and younger I’m not getting either—but I make the trip and I consider myself lucky you’re even here, and what kind of reception do I get? You’re glad to see me? Like the rabbi was glad to see the cossacks back in Pinsk-—-that’s how you’re glad!”

“Mama! Please don’t start crying now.”

“I should cry? For what? For a son who don’t know I’m alive? I wouldn’t shed a tear for you!” She began sobbing loudly.

“Please, Mama!”

“So all right. I’ll stop. But not for you. For me. My heart can’t take it. And I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction of dropping dead here in this den where God knows what goes on, this place you took because Pelharn Parkway and your mother ain’t good enough for you any more. No, here I wouldn’t have a heart attack and drop dead if it kills me! So I’ll stop crying.”

“Good, Mama. There. That’s better.”

“So I’ll wash away the tears I shed for such a thankless son. That’s your bathroom in there?”

“Yes, but—”

“But what? Now your own mother isn’t good enough to use your bathroom?”

“No. Of course not. Only—”

“Then I’ll be right back.”

As the door to the bathroom opened Penny darted quickly into the stall shower and closed the frosted glass door behind her. There was the sound of water running in the sink. It stopped after a moment.

“Irving, where do you keep your towels?”

“On top of the hamper there, Ma.”

“Sloppy and all crumpled up like this you keep towels? That’s no way. Irving, you need somebody to look after you. Maybe you should get married.”

“Believe it or not, I’ve been thinking along those lines, Ma.”

“Oh? You got a girl in mind?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s a nice girl? A Jewish girl? A clean girl?”

“She’s so clean,” Studs answered, “that you can’t get her out of the shower.”

Penny had to throw her hand up to her mouth quickly to suppress a giggle at Studs’ remark. The gesture proved unfortunate. Her elbow tripped the hot water faucet and a stream of scalding water descended on her naked body. With a loud scream, she shot out of the shower stall and straight into Mrs. Levine’s mammoth bosom.

Mrs. Levine took one horrified look and did what any good Jewish mother would do under the circumstances. She fainted!

CHAPTER FIVE

“MA!” Studs shot into the bathroom. “What did you do to my mother?” he asked Penny accusingly.

“What did I do to your mother? You mean what did I do to myself! I’m scalded! Just look at my skin! I’ll never order live lobster again!”

“Mama!” Studs ignored Penny’s complaints. “She’s unconscious. What is it, Mama? Speak to me?”

“My heart!” Mrs. Levine moaned.

“It’s her heart!” Studs looked panic-stricken.

“My ass!” Penny said.

“How can you talk like that?” Studs was indignant.

“Just look at it.” Penny peered over her shoulder into the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. “It’s going to be all blistered. I won’t be able to sit down.”

“Gee, it does look bad at that,” Studs sympathized. “Here, let me put some ointment on it for you.”

“I’m lying here dying with my heart and he’s playing with fannies,” Mrs. Levine moaned. “What mother deserves such a son?”

“Mama, how do you feel?” Studs turned away from Penny.

“So how should I feel? A naked Jezebel jumps out and attacks me from my son’s shower, I should feel good? I’m unconscious with my heart—and my gall bladder too, don’t forget—and my only son is too busy making like a Donald Juan to notice, I should give testimonials to my health? I’m lying here on the cold tiles—when was the last time you had this bathroom washed; it’s a disgrace— every breath could be my last, and he wants to know how do I feel? How do I feel? Hitler should feel like I feel. You should call a rabbi before it’s too late, that’s how I feel.”

“Does she really want you to call a rabbi?” Penny asked, becoming more concerned for Mrs. Levine.

“Miss, on top of everything else, you shouldn’t be meshuginah!” Mrs. Levine answered before Studs could. “You think I want a rabbi should see my son’s disgrace? You should call a rabbi so he could see how Sadie Levine’s son keeps naked women in his bathroom? But why should we stop there? Why not ask the whole Hadassah up? Then everybody should know how a son can shame his mother.”

“Come inside, Mama, and lie down on the bed. You’ll be more comfortable.” Studs pulled her to her feet.

“Your bed I wouldn’t lie on. What goes on there, such a place I wouldn’t pick to die.”

“All right. All right.” Studs led her into the living room and settled her on the sofa. “Put something on,” he hissed to Penny over his shoulder.

Unable to find her clothes, Penny threw on a bathrobe of Studs’ and went into the living room. “Are you feeling better now, Mrs. Levine?” she asked.

“Bitter I’m feeling, not better. But whatever you are, at least you thought to ask. My son, he wouldn’t think to ask his mother is she feeling better.”

“Are you feeling better, Mama?” Studs asked.

“Don’t ask!”

“Can I get you anything?” Studs wanted to know.

“Like what, for instance? A new heart you can’t give me. And the old one you already did enough to.” Mrs. Levine stared at Penny shrewdly. “So for this you left your mother’s house,” she said to Studs finally.

“You don’t understand, Mama. This is the girl I’m going to marry.”

“You have to marry her?” Mrs. Levine’s eyebrows shot up. “I’m not surprised.”

“I don’t have to, Mama. I want to.”

“Now, Irving, let’s don’t be hasty. Whatever I said, I didn’t mean it. I don’t want to push you into getting married. And this isn’t the girl for you!”

“What makes you so sure?” Penny asked indignantly.

“Just from looking I could tell.”

“What’s wrong with the way I look?”

“Who could tell, with no clothes on?”

“I think she looks fine,” Studs interjected.

“Fine? For what, fine? Blonde hair and a shiksa nose and big memories and legs like a Rockette she’s got. But is this what you want in a wife, Irving? Remember, beauty is only skin deep.”

“That’s deep enough for me,” Studs murmured, remembering.

“But the important things, Irving? You got to live with a wife day-to-day. Not just at night. She knows how to fix chicken soup the way you like it?”

“Nobody can make chicken soup the way I like it except you, Mama.”

“She could sew buttons on your shirts? With a figure like that? I don’t believe it!”

“Now wait a minute, Mama,” Studs said soothingly. “Let’s be calm and reasonable. You don’t want me to go in the army, do you? Well, if Penny and I get married, I can stay out.”

“I knew it!” Penny exploded.

“So if getting married will keep you out of the draft, that still doesn’t mean you should pick a girl who runs around men’s bathrooms in her bare skin to marry. There are lots of nice Jewish girls around. Mrs. Cohen’s daughter Marilyn, for instance.”

“Marilyn Cohen? With her acne? Her face looks like something a moon rocket would photograph!”

“So she’s no Jake Mansfield. She’s a nice girl anyway. And she’s very good to her mother.”

“Then let her mother keep her.”

“So all right, you don’t like Marilyn Cohen. How about Sarah Ginsberg? She’s also eligible.”

“Eligible for what? Fat lady at the circus, maybe?”

“So she’s a little zaftig. That’s a crime? She’s a healthy girl, she likes to eat.”

“I’d sooner marry a St. Bernard. It’d be cheaper to feed, too.”

“So all right. Forget Sarah Ginsberg. How about Ethel Schwartz, maybe? What’s wrong with her?”

“Rheumatism. Hemorrhoids. Kidney stones. Outside of that, nothing. And I might even marry her if I wasn’t afraid the AMA might declare her a disaster area. Think of the exercise I’d get just pushing her wheelchair around.”

“All right. If not Ethel, then how about——”

“Forget it, Mama. I’ve found the girl I want to marry and she’s right here. We’re getting married and that’s that.”

“That’s what you think!” Penny said through clenched teeth.

“But why does it have to be this girl?” Mrs. Levine whined.

“Because I’m pregnant, that’s why!” Penny blurted out angrily. “And if he marries me he’ll be a father and that’s the only thing that will keep him out of the draft!”

“This is true?” Mrs. Levine asked Studs.

“Yes, Mama.” He hung his head.

“And you’re the father?”

Studs could only shrug.

“And he’s the father?” Mrs. Levine turned to Penny.

“That’s for him to say!”

“The truth is, I don’t know,” Studs admitted. “I suppose I could be.”

“And this will really keep you out of the army?” Mrs. Levine’s mind was making a rapid adjustment.

“Yeah.”

“And he could be the father?” She turned to Penny again.

Penny was too angry to give her any more satisfaction than a noncommittal shrug. “He could be,” she said tonelessly.

“A girl who isn’t even sure, a girl like this you’re going to marry?” Mrs. Levine demanded of Studs.

“Yes.”

“A girl who’s pregnant you’re going to marry?”

“Yeah.”

“All right.” Mrs. Levine sighed. “It will keep you out of the army, so I’ll forget all the reasons you shouldn’t get married. I’ll make the arrangements for the temple and—”

“What temple?” Penny asked.

“To get married in. Where else but in a temple should a nice Jewish girl—”

“But I’m not Jewish,” Penny interrupted.

“You’re not Jewish?”

“No.”

“She’s not Jewish?” Mrs. Levine turned to Studs.

“No, Ma.”

“She’s not Jewish! Oy, vey!”

“Now, Ma—”

“She’s pregnant, she’s not sure by who, that’s not bad enough. But she’s not Jewish? My heart!”

“Now take it easy, Ma.”

“You run around with girls and maybe make them pregnant and they’re not even Jewish, I should take it easy? A minyan I should call to mourn for my son!”

“Now, Ma —”

“All right. You’re right. It will keep you out of the draft, and a mother’s first concern is her son should stay alive. So she’s not Jewish, I’ll learn to live with it. For my son I’ll do these things. And more. A wedding I’ll give him. And after the wedding you can move right into my apartment. My bedroom you can have, the one Papa and I shared before he died. He’ll turn over in his grave, but for my son I’ll do it. Yes, my bed you can have.”

“But Mama, where will you sleep?” Studs wanted to know.

“Sleep? Don’t worry about it. I won’t be sleeping. Right after the wedding with this pregnant goy for a daughter-in-law, I’m dropping dead! That I’ll promise you!”

“Now, Mama—”

“I’m sorry. So pretend I didn’t say it. You’ll see for yourself anyway how quick I’ll drop. Now, about the wedding. You got a large family?” she asked Penny.

“Very large,” Penny said spitefully. “And very close.”

“So it’ll be only the immediate family. No children. No cousins. No friends. Just your Mama and Papa from your side. And just the people who are really close from Irving’s side.”

“Like who ?” Penny asked.

“Well, we have to ask his Uncle Meyer.”

“Who’s he?” Studs asked.

“Who’s he? A man is married for twenty years to your father’s only sister, and you ask who’s he! You don’t remember he sent you the sailor suit when you were five years old?”

“Oh, yeah. I thought he was dead. Or out in California or something.”

“Alaska. That’s where he is. But believe me he wouldn’t miss the chance to fly in for the wedding. And then there’s Aunt Sophie, of course.”

“Do we have to ask her, Ma? You know how she is!”

“It’s gas. She can’t help it. So we’ll put her in the back, nobody should notice. But Tante Sophie is a must. I couldn’t face myself if I didn’t ask her. Oh, and Mrs. Shapiro, of course.”

“Why her?”

“You can even ask? Every week for seventeen years I play mah-jongg with her, you think I can leave her out of my only son’s wedding? And then there’s Mrs. Jacobsen and Mrs. Kaufman, too. You don’t know them, but they’re part of the mah-jongg group. I couldn’t show my face if I left them out.”

“Isn’t this going to be rather expensive?” Penny asked.

“So maybe it is. But why should you worry? Your father will pay for it gladly.”

“My father?” Penny’s voice shot up.

“Who else? The bride’s father always pays for the wedding. Irving will supply the schnapps. But there’s no drinkers in my family, so that shouldn’t cost much.”

“What makes you think my father—” Penny started to ask.

“He’ll be happy to! Believe me! He’ll consider himself lucky to unload his pregnant daughter.”

“That did it!” Penny shouted. “I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last mother’s son on earth!” she told Studs. “Now, if you’ll tell me where you hid my clothes, I’ll get dressed and get out of here!”

“They’re under the bed, Penny. But—-” The door slammed behind Penny before Studs could finish the sentence.

When she reappeared a few moments later she was completely dressed. “Goodbye, Studs—-” she started to say.

“Already you’re leaving?” Mrs. Levine protested. “We haven’t even finished with the guest list.”

“You finish it,” Penny told her sweetly. “Anyone you ask is fine with me because I won’t be there.”

“Penny, can’t we talk this over?” Studs pleaded.

“You talk it over with your mother. I’m just not in the mood to get married in the near future.”

“The mood maybe, no,” Mrs. Levine said pointedly. “But in your condition, moods you can’t afford.”

“That’s my problem and I’ll solve it,” Penny told her. “So long, Studs. Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes.” She opened the door to leave.

As she closed it behind her, Mrs. Levine’s last motherly wail echoed behind her: “I didn’t raise my boy he should be a soldier!”

Penny walked over to the Lexington Avenue subway and waited on the subterranean platform for an uptown local. Ostrich-like, she dismissed Studs and the subject of marriage from her mind. Instead, she concentrated on the more immediate problem of who should temporarily take her place as editor of Lovelights.

Her evening with Annie Fitz-Manley and the things she’d learned had to be weighed carefully. It wasn’t that Annie must automatically be counted out because of her Lesbian leanings. She was still in the running, but Penny did have to take those leanings into account. They had to be balanced against the possible shortcomings of Marie D’Chastidi and Sappho Kuntzentookis, the other two contenders for the job.

But Penny was tired. She couldn’t make her mind concentrate on the problem. It kept skidding off, and she found herself staring blankly up and down the subway platform. Looking at the yawning tunnel made her dizzy after a while, and she turned away from it. Her eyes focussed on the back wall of the platform. She found herself reading the graffiti scrawled there.

They fell into many different categories. Political mementoes, for instance; an old campaign poster carrying a picture of Barry Goldwater underneath which someone had written, “I’d rather be right than be President.”

And epitaphs; a crudely drawn gravestone on which was lettered: “Born a virgin. Died a virgin. Laid in the grave!”

Also sexual comments for the living: “Of all my relations, I like sex the best!”

There were advertising comments, one right in keeping with the generally held huckster conviction that a picture is worth a thousand words. Under the caption “I got my job through the New York Times,” someone had pasted an old newspaper photograph of Polly Adler.

Yes, and there were even historical footnotes on the derivation of widely-spread idiosyncratic word-forms like the over-blatantly capitalized phrase “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” printed beneath the smiling face of a policeman on a P.A.L. poster.

Other grafiiti capitalized more outrageously on the posters of the lawful advertisers. An ad for Berlitz, for example, bore this postscript: “Young, swinging couple interested in photography and French would like to meet twosome in 20s with similar interests. Advanced French techniques. Cunning linguists.” A phone number was scrawled underneath the invitation.

The particular handwriting on the wall which attracted Penny’s attention was marked as a dialogue by two alternating styles of handwriting. It began philanthropically:

“Hey, fella, suffering from Lackanookie? Call Lulu— KR-3-5642. She’s the greatest. Say Herb said to call.”

The initial response was cautious. “Dear Herb: Is Lulu a pro? If so, not interested. If not, maybe. Please let me know. Don.”

“Hey, Don. She’s no pro. Just ready, willing and able-bodied. Give her a blast and let me know how you make out.”

“Called Lulu. She wanted to know how I got her number. Told her Herb gave it to me. Said she never heard of you. What should I do now?”

“Man, Don, you must really be from Squaresville. Says she never heard of me, hey? Don’t let that throw you. I done her dirty, I guess, and now the poor chick just wants to make like I never was. She’s still on the rebound, so why not catch her on the fly? Go on, Don, give her another buzz.”

“Called Lulu again and made a date to take her to the movies. Will keep you posted, Don.”

“The movies? There ain’t no beds in the movies, jerk!”

“Herb-—I take it slow and easy. And don’t call me jerk!”

“Okay. So how was the picture?”

“Not bad. It was an old Errol Flynn revival. He’s a privateer captured by the Spanish and when they torture him to find out where the English fleet is, Flynn impales himself on a barbecue skewer and dies a hero. At the fadeout he’s standing at the helm of his ship while it’s skimming over the bounding main. He’s transparent and there’s this skull-and-crossbones waving from the skewer while this eighty-piece symphony orchestra plays The White Cliffs of Dover. I was very stirred by it and so was Lulu.”

“Yeah. I always admired Flynn. His private life more than his flicks. So just how stirred was Lulu?”

“Stirred. She let me hold her hand all through the picture.”

“Why, Don, you Casanova, you! What a gay dog you are! Held Lulu’s hand, hey? Just what kind of a Boy Scout are you?”

“Eagle Scout. With thirteen merit badges. Why do you ask?”

“Read page 354 of the Boy Scout Handbook on Conservation, and shame on you, Don. A grown man like you! Aren’t you? If you are, you’ve got to take yourself in hand! Strike that! I mean you’ve got to be a little more aggressive with Lulu!”

“Dear Herb: Thanks for the advice. I took Lulu out for dinner the other night and she let me kiss her good night. Then she said I reminded her of a pet rabbit she once had. It sounded nice, but I’m not too sure what she meant. What do you think?”

“If I said what I think, they’d send out a crew to scrub down this wall! Look, Bugs Bunny, you don’t need all this build-up with Lulu. She’s a real roundheels. Push a little.”

“Dear Herb: I pushed. She slapped my face.”

“Slapped you? I can’t believe it. Why?”

“She was standing at the top of the stairs when I pushed. Boy, was she ever mad! But I sent her some flowers and now we’ve made it up. She asked me over for dinner tomorrow night. Is Lulu a good cook?”

“Is Lulu a good what?”

“A good cook?”

“Oh! Please print more distinctly and try to round off your O’s, Don. That was very misleading. I wouldn’t know if Lulu’s a good cook. We never took time out to eat. And brother, are you ever getting sidetracked!”

“Dear Herb: Sorry for long lag in answering, but I’ve been getting over a severe attack of ptomaine poisoning. Convalescence gave me a chance to think, and now I’m determined to make out with Lulu. Am seeing her Saturday night and will keep you posted.”

“That’s more like it. Can’t wait to hear details.”

“Herb: Again sorry for time-lapse. Have been recovering from third-degree burns. Got them while trying to make out with Lulu in front seat of my sports car. She accidentally pulled out cigarette lighter from dashboard and dropped it down back of my shirt. By then though, it didn’t matter. Believe me, there’s just no way to make love in an MG!”

“Don: Why didn’t you get out of the MG?”

“Great idea. Don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself. You’re really got a head on your shoulders, Herb. And I’m sure not blaming you for what happened with Lulu; After all, how could you have known that little glade we picked to make love would turn out to be a skunk’s lair? Anyway, Lulu was a real good sport about it. And she says she’d love to see me again—just as soon as I’m all aired out.”

“Gosh, old stinker, sure was sorry to hear about your latest flub. Next thing you’ll be telling me is you tried to make love to Lulu in a haystack.”

“Dear Herb: That haystack was a lousy idea! I know you mean well, but this is the wrong time of year. It’s the season when they pitch the hay. And the guy pitching the hay while we were pitching woo didn’t see us until it was too late. I caught the pitchfork right in my bare bodkin. Eight stitches! Not that they’d bother me so much if only Lulu would stop laughing!”

“Don: Maybe I remember wrong, but doesn’t Lulu have a nice big bed all her own?”

“Yes.”

"Well —"

“Well?”

“Well, hasn’t it occurred to you that might be a good place to make love to her?”

“Gee, Herb, thanks! Will do!”

“Well?”

“Have done!”

“And? And? And? !”

“Lulu is everything you said she was. I start itching all over again just thinking how great it was. Can’t wait to see her again!”

“Well, Don? Was it as good the second time?”

“Even better! And I’m itching more than ever.”

“So scratch, Don! Scratch!”

“I’m scratching! I’m scratching! But it doesn’t seem to do any good. I just keep itching more and more!”

“Whoa, boy! Don’t go overboard! Don’t overdo!”

“Dear Herb: Your warning came too late. I’ve just come from the doctor’s. It could have been worse, I suppose. He says sulfa drugs should clear the rash up in about six weeks. No more Lulu for me!”

“Sorry, Don. That’s the way the nookie bumbles! Don’t be too sure you’re through with Lulu, though.”

“Herb: Wow! Were you ever right. I’m sure not through with Lulu. Or, rather, she’s not through with me. Seems while she was giving me a dose, I was giving her something, too. Herb, old pal, could you maybe give me the name of a discreet doctor who’ll get the bun out of the oven before it’s too late?”

“Dear Don: Tell Lulu to use the same doc I took her to the last time.”

“Herb: That was no piker you sent her to! Six hundred bucks! Wow! But I had no choice. The only thing is I wouldn’t put it past Lulu to pocket the six hundred and use a darning needle. What do you think?”

“I think you’re absolutely right, Don. I’ll lay odds Lulu was never even ready to puff at all. No bun, no darning needle, no regrets. She and I are off to Bermuda on your six C’s. Thanks a lot, Don. It’s been nice knowing you. Maybe this’ll teach you not to start up with subway pen-pals. So long, sucker! And the same from Lulu!”

The graffiti correspondence broke off there. Penny finished reading it as the subway train pulled into the station. Sighing to herself over the perfidy of human nature, she boarded it and took a seat.

A moment later there was a switchblade knife at her throat!

CHAPTER SIX

“NEW YORK is a Summer Festival!”

That’s what it said on the poster across the aisle from Penny. But her bulging eyes made no sense of it. Her mind was still trying to grasp the fact of the blade at her throat.

Now her eyes bounced around the car like loose pinballs suffering from an overdose of hashish. They caromed from one to another of the sparse scattering of people in the early morning subway car. None of them were as yet aware of Penny’s predicament. Finally her gaze came to rest on the face hovering over the twitching knife.

It was a black face with mushy features. The lips were over-full, the lower one dangling like a piece of brown-smeared blubber. The eyes were crazed, dark, and with very little white around the fringes of their hate-filled pupils. The cheeks were fat and merged with loose jowls. The skin was very shiny, as if coated with sweaty shoe polish. The hand holding the knife also had this shiny, brown, bead-covered look about it.

Penny reached for the hand. Not to struggle. She was too terrified for that. It was an automatic gesture to relieve the pressure of the knife-point at her jugular.

“Don’t y’all try nothing’ now!” He spoke as Penny’s fingertips grazed the back of his hand. His voice was a nasal syrup made in Mississippi.

Hastily, Penny removed her hand. She looked at the brown stains on her fingertips where she had touched him. Her eyebrows shot up questioningly.

“Bet y’all di’nt thank it rubs off, hey? Well, it sho ’nuf do.”

“W-what do you want?” Penny found her voice. “Here. T-take my pocketbook.” She tried to hand it to him. “There’s not m-much in it, but you’re welcome to it.”

“Ah don’ want youah lousy money, white gal!”

“W-what do you want?”

“Mebbe same thang’s you’all want, sugah. Mebbe.”

“What do you m-mean?”

“Come off it, white gal! You a N’Yawker, ain’t y’all? Lib’ral an’ all like that. Sho ’nuf now you ain’t got no objections to a little cozy integration. Now have you?”

“B-but I don’t understand,” Penny said, looking once again at the brown stains on her fingertips. “Why are you bothering me? You’re not really a colored man. You’ve just got some kind of dye or something smeared all over you.”

“Hush up! Y’all hush now, heah!” The knife nicked Penny’s flesh. He looked around nervously, as if afraid someone might have overheard what Penny had said. Indeed, he seemed more concerned about that than about the much more likely possibility that someone might see him threatening her with the knife.

“But what do y-you want?” Penny asked fearfully. “What are you going to do to me?”

“Ah’m a-gonna love you up, sugah. Tha’s what. So’s ewabody can see. Then ah’s gonna cut you all up, niggah-style. Ewabody gonna see that, too. Then they all gonna know what a black man do when you let him neah a white woman. Even a Yankee white woman!”

“But you’re not a black man!”

“Shet up! An’ stay shet! You knows that, but the rest o’ them don’t. They gonna think a nigger done it. Jes’ one more animal run loose in N’Yawk to show how y’all keep youah crime rate up ’cause you Yankees don’t know how to control youah nigras. Then maybe y’all gonna think twice’ fore you send them beatniks down home to stir up trouble. Ah’m gonna show how that can work two ways, you heah? When ah gits through with you, them what sees is a gonna think twice ’bout how they oughta keep outa the South an’ get onna ball with they own niggahs up Nawth. Y’all see now?”

“I see.” Penny stared into the berserk face and finally she found the energy to scream. “Help!” she yelled. “Help! Rape! Help! Murder! Help!”

“What’s the trouble, Miss?” A man in the uniform of a transit system employee stopped a few feet from Penny, eyed the knife at her throat, and kept a cautious distance.

“This man wants to rape me! He’s threatening to kill me!”

“Y’all keep back!” The knife shot up to point at the transit worker, then returned to prick Penny.

“Won’t you help me?” Penny begged.

“I’d like to, Miss, but I can’t.”

“Why not? Are you afraid?”

“Yeah. But it ain’t that. I just can’t be a scab, that’s all.”

“A scab? What’s that got to do with it?” Penny asked, distraught.

“Well, it’s like this,” the transit worker explained. “The TWU’s goin’ into negotiations with the T.A. any day now and Mike Quill’s called for a slowdown so’s he’ll be in a stronger bargaining position. If we’re ever gonna get a four-day week—”

“The hell with a four-day week!” Penny exploded. “I need help! Can’t you see that?”

“Sure I can see. And it’s part of my job to help you. That’s the whole point. If it wasn’t, I’d help you in a minute. But it is, and that means if I help you, I’ll be scabbin’. Sorry, lady, but I just ain’t gonna be no scab.”

He tipped his hat and continued slowly up the aisle until he reached the next car. The door closed behind him, and he was gone.

“Okay, sugah. I done wasted enough time with you-all.”

Penny’s assailant grabbed a handful of the silk blouse she was wearing and ripped it down the middle. One of her naked breasts sprang into sight and he closed a hand over it, smearing it with brown dye.

From across the aisle a little old lady peered nearsightedly at the couple. “It must be a mirage,” she told herself as she saw the man embrace the girl. Then, squinting myopically, she made the natural—if incorrect-—racial distinction and tsk’d disapprovingly. “These mixed mirages never work out,” she muttered.

The man’s bulk blocked the knife from the old lady’s vision. Penny peered over his shoulder helplessly. “Don’t you see what he’s doing to me!” she wailed.

“I certainly do!” the little old lady replied. “And it’s disgraceful! I don’t know what gets into you young people nowadays. Right out in public where everybody can see. It’s shameful, that’s what it is! And I’m not going to sit here and watch this kind of brazen behavior one more minute!” And with that she got to her feet and flounced indignantly out of the car.

The man was sprawled across Penny now. The knife was pressed against her naked breast. His free hand was under her skirt, between her thighs, brutally trying to push them apart. Frantically, she tossed her head around, seeking help.

There was a man seated on the same side of the subway car a few seats down from Penny. His nose was buried in a newspaper. A hearing-aid cord dangled from one of his ears. Struggling, Penny managed to call to him. “He’s tearing off my clothes!” she screamed.

“Orioles?” The man looked up pleasantly. “They lost eight-five.”

“Stop this killer!” she screamed.

“Rockefeller? Says here he signed the sales-tax bill.”

“He’s a sex fiend!”

“Nope. Nothing here about Abe Beame.”

“Can’t you see he’s mad?”

“Yeah, it was sad. But you never know how an election will go. I’ll bet Lindsay was even more surprised than he was.”

“Are you blind!”

“No, I don’t mind. Go right ahead. I like to see youngsters enjoy themselves.”

“I’m being murdered right here in the subway!”

“Terrible. Terrible. You’re right. I’m afraid to ride the train myself. And people don’t care. You could get killed right in front of their eyes and they wouldn’t even notice. That’s the way it is, I guess. Nobody wants to get involved. Believe me, young lady, you’re fortunate to have your young man with you to protect you.” He buried his nose in the paper again.

Her assailant had pried Penny’s legs apart now and was fumbling with the zipper on his pants. “Please,” she begged. “I’m a pregnant woman! Please don’t!”

“Pregnant, hey? Tha’s awful! Jes’ ain’t no limit to the apostrophes us cullid is capable of. You shoulda thunk on that afore you passed that there Civil Rights bill.”

“Help!” Penny screamed, attracting the attention of two teenage boys strolling up the aisle.

The boys paused at Penny’s scream, and one of them removed the transistor radio from his ear. They both wore black leather jackets and sideburns. They had both been moving up the aisle like cats on the prowl.

“Hey, this car’s no good,” one of them said. “Somebody beat us to it.”

“Yeah,” the other replied. “And an amateur at that. Look at him. Man, he’s nowhere with technique.”

“Ahh, come on. Don’t be like that. You gotta have patience with beginners. You wasn’t born with a switchblade in your hand.”

“Still, some guys got it, and some guys ain’t. Looka how he’s holdin’ that knife. He’s gonna turn himself into a soprano, he ain’t careful.”

“Yeah. Hey, Mac,” the youth called in a kindly tone. “That ain’t the way. Don’t wrap yer fist around it. Ya gotta hold it lightly, with the fingertips.”

“Y’all mind your business!” the man atop Penny snarled.

“How d’ya like that. Try an’ give a fella advice an’ he gets nasty. I tell you, the class of people calls themselves muggers these days.”

“Yeah. Amateurs is ruinin’ the business. Come on. Let him botch it. The hell with him!”

“Ya right. The hell with him!”

The pair continued up the aisle and into the next car. Penny’s assailant was poised to complete the rape now, but just as he lunged the subway lurched and he lost his perch. As he scrambled to regain it, the train ground to a halt at a station platform. Penny called to a burly-looking man who had just risen from his seat. “Help me! I’m being assaulted.”

“Sorry, lady. I’m getting off here.” He really did look sorry as he stepped through the just opening doors.

Another man, younger, but equally burly, stepped around him and entered the car. He carried a book under his arm. Karate Made Easy was the title on the cover.

“Help!” Penny’s scream was hoarse by now.

“Trouble, lady?”

“Yes. I’m being mugged!”

“Mugged? Well, we’ll just see about that. Just a minute, now!” He opened the book and began thumbing through it quickly.

“Hurry!” Penny wailed as the weight of her assailant fell on her again.

“I’m coming. Don’t you worry. I’ll be right there.”

“Please hurry.”

“Yeah. Sure. Ah, here we are. Mugging. Umm . . . Chop from the wrist in the number two position . . . If the enemy is armed, then—Is he armed?” he asked Penny.

“He has a knife.”

“A knife . . . Ah, here we are. Feint with a forearm slice and counter with opposing elbow to disarm knife-wielding opponent. Bring knee up at same time as chopping with elbow from number five position . . . Number five position? . . . Now let me see . . . Ah, I’ve got it! All right, you! Unhand that woman!” He struck the classic pose of the karate fighter.

“Look heah naow. You-all jes butt out!” the mugger told him.

“Butt out? Never! I’ve been studying karate for two years, just waiting for a chance to use it. I’ve got my black belt,” he announced proudly. “Now, unhand that woman.”

“You jes’ stay ’way from the black belt, we wouldn’t be havin’ this heah trouble now. Heah me? Yankee, go home!”

“Stand up and fight!”

“Sho nuf? All right. You askin’ foah it!” The subway mugger got to his feet, the knife clutched in his right fist.

The karate expert stole a quick glance at the book, shrugged off the fact that his opponent wasn’t wielding the knife in the proscribed manner, quickly put the book back in his jacket pocket, and once again froze in the recommended position. The attacker approached slowly, arms held out at his side. Suddenly he lunged, and at the same moment he tossed the knife from his right hand to his left. The knife moved like greased lightning toward the belly of Penny’s would-be rescuer.

Only the fact that he got his feet twisted trying to reverse from a right to a left-hand defense saved him. He tripped and fell backward, away from the knife. Without even consulting the book, he launched a beautifully styled karate kick from his prone position—and then emitted a yelp of pain as he barked his shin on the pole running up the center of the subway car. The attacker managed to control his laughter and lunged downward for the kill.

He had hesitated an instant too long. Before he could complete the stabbing motion, a heavily weighted woman’s handbag crashed down over his head, sending him spinning. It descended again, full-swing, and the mugger dropped to the floor like a stone. He was out cold.

Penny brushed the tears from her eyes and looked up at the face of the girl who had saved her. She found herself looking into the deep black eyes of none other than Sappho Kuntzentookis, the Greek girl who was her assistant at Pussycat Publications. “Penny, are you all right?” Sappho asked.

“Yes. N-now I am. Thanks to you. How will I ever thank you?”

“Don’t worry about that now. You look all shook up. Come on. Let’s get off here and grab a cab. You don’t live too far from here, do you? No. I thought not. Come on, we’ll get you home and into a nice dry martini.”

Still shaking, Penny followed Sappho off the train. There was a cab outside the subway exit and it wasn’t long before Penny was leading the way into her apartment. “You go change,” Sappho told her. “Meanwhile I’ll mix us a couple of drinks.

When Penny returned, she drained off half her martini at a gulp and felt the tension ease out of her tired, bruised body. “What were you doing on the subway all alone at this hour of the morning?” she asked Sappho.

“I might ask you the same question.”

“Sorry. I really didn’t mean to pry.”

“No offense taken. If you really want to know, I was coming from an oddball orgy,” Sappho told her.

“An oddball orgy?”

“Yes.”

“How does that differ from a plain old garden-variety orgy?”

“In more ways than you’d ever imagine.” Sappho smiled reminiscently.

“Tell me about it.” Penny couldn’t help being curious.

“Wow! That’s a tall order. I’m not sure I know where to begin.”

“Well, where was it held?” Penny prompted her.

“In Brooklyn. The Bay Ridge section.”

“In Brooklyn? That seems an odd place for an orgy.”

“Well, I told you, it was an oddball orgy. This place where it was held, it’s one of these old mansions. Looks kind of run-down from the outside. But once you get past the front door, it out-Waldorfs the Waldorf—and with almost as many rooms.”

“Whose house is it?” Penny asked.

“I won’t tell you that. You’d recognize the name, and that wouldn’t be cricket. He’s the kind of guy who hobnobs with presidents and prime ministers. But he’s got his tastes-—-bizarre by most standards, I suppose — and he likes his fun, which is why he keeps the house in Brooklyn.”

“Is he married?”

“Oh, sure. His wife was there tonight.”

“She was?” Penny was shocked.

“Yep. She’s a real swinger. Everybody there was—in one way or another. And lots of them were married couples.”

“What did they do?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you,” Sappho pointed out. “But you keep interrupting with so many questions that I can’t get down to the meat of it.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll keep quiet. Go ahead.”

“Okay. Well, first of all, everybody there has some particular bit that he or she is hung up on. Whatever it is, the host does his best to provide whatever’s necessary so everybody can get satisfaction. In a way, I suppose that’s his hang-up—or what’s at the bottom of his hang-up, anyway. You see, he gets his kicks running around with a Polaroid camera and snapping shots of what everybody else is doing.”

“What are they doing?”

“That depends. For instance, one small bunch of them tonight were shoe-sniffers.”

“Shoe-sniffers?” Penny was uncomprehending.

“Yep. They get themselves all worked up sniffing each other’s shoes. The men sniff the women’s shoes; the women sniff the men’s shoes. It’s not as uncommon a fetish as you might think.”

“I don’t understand what they get out of it,” Penny remarked.

“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.”

“Have you tried it?”

“Well, no. But the truth is I gag over changing my stockings. One of the fellows there tonight, one of the shoe-sniffers, was trying to convince me that I’m too inhibited. Could be he’s right.”

“It still seems just too far out to me.”

“You have to look at it from their point of view,” Sappho told her. “They have a whole sort of mystique about it. For example, the older and more worn the shoes the sniffer sniffs, the more status he has in the group. That’s the whole thing, really. The shoes are like a sort of sexual status symbol.”

“How about slippers and socks, things like that? Do they sniff them, too?”

“Sometimes. But it’s frowned upon. It’s sort of considered being a fringe-sniffer. Slippers are looked down on the way people who appreciate a good wine look down on a beer drinker. The bouquet is all wrong. And with socks the bouquet is considered vulgar. It’s like the difference between cheap perfume and Chanel Number Five. A sock-sniffer would go to a two-dollar whore. The bonafide shoe sniffer is the kind of discriminating fellow who might have an affair with a high-class courtesan, a lady of culture and taste. Still, the principle is the same. Both types get their sexual arousal out of the aroma of feet.”

“What do they do besides sit around sniffing each other’s shoes?” Penny wanted to know.

“That depends. Tonight there was a sort of ritual they followed. Everybody wore their oldest shoes. All the women’s shoes were thrown in one pile, all the men’s shoes in a separate pile. Then the men rummaged around in the women’s pile, and vice-versa, until everybody had come up with a pair of shoes that appealed to them. Then they made love.”

“To each other?”

“Of course not. That came later. First they made love to the shoes.”

“Just how does one go about making love to a shoe?” Penny wondered.

“That depends on the shoe,” Sappho told her. “And also on whether the one making love is a man or a woman. A man may make love to an open-toe shoe rather easily. But the man who is a connoisseur seeks a greater challenge. He may test his ingenuity and technique with a high-heeled boot or the angle of a French heel. That’s another reason he looks down on the sock-sniffer. After all, making love to a sock! It might as well be a handkerchief or something. No better than a frustrated adolescent.”

“What about the women?” Penny asked.

“That depends on how advanced they are. There was one real cute little beginner there tonight who grabbed a pair of those real pointy Spanish dancing shoes so the tip wouldn’t put too much of a strain on her. But was she ever disappointed later when she found herself paired off with the faggot they belonged to. Most of the women try to outdo each other to show they’re really with it. They go for wing-tips with lots of scrollwork.”

“What’s the scrollwork got to do with it?”

“Simple. A man’s shoe with lots of scrollwork is known as a podiatric French tickler among shoe fetishists. Other girls go for those clodhoppers with the real thick soles; sort of like they’re proving they can take on a real man. One or two masochists were quick to grab athletic shoes with spikes. One girl was real funny. She grabbed a moccasin because she said it was so limp and soft that it wouldn’t make her feel she was being unfaithful to her husband. The laugh was on her later, when it turned out to be her husband’s moccasin.”

“What did they do after they finished making love to the shoes?”

“Well, by that time everybody was all heated up from watching everybody else. So they paired off with the shoes and began necking and petting, all the time sniffing the shoes together. Pretty soon they were having sex, half of them holding the shoes in their teeth so they could smell them while they were at it.”

“I never heard of anything like that in my life,” Penny admitted. “I suppose there’s some sound psychological explanation for all of it?”

“Psychology, hell!” Sappho said, remembering. “Take me. I suppose it really began for me when I was about sixteen years old. I was taking a bath. And when I climbed out of the bathtub, I slipped and accidentally impaled myself on one of those stand-up drainpipes. From there on, it’s quite a story. . . .”

CHAPTER SEVEN

SAPPHO KUNTZENTOOKIS was a virgin before the accident. Technically speaking, she was no longer a virgin after it. But there was far more than a technical aspect to what transpired that evening.

Sappho was alone in the house when the incident occurred. At first the visible proof of what had happened made her panic. Her panic grew when she realized she was so firmly impaled that she couldn’t pull loose no matter how she strained the muscles of her legs and haunches. But it soon gave way to another sensation as her body reacted to the way in which she was squirming.

Slowly, her up-and-down movements in trying to free herself took on a decided rhythm. At first she was unaware of this rhythm, but after awhile she became so caught up in it that her downward motions became more violently insistent than her efforts to free herself. Spasms of ecstasy shook her body as it embraced the drainpipe again and again. Soon the demands of these tremors had nothing at all to do with pulling free, but only provided fulfillment after fulfillment for a desire growing insatiable.

This was the situation when Papa Kuntzentookis came home and discovered his daughter’s predicament. Under the impression that she had gotten into it deliberately, the first thing he did was slap her soundly across both cheeks.

“It was an accident,” Sappho wailed. “I was only taking a bath! That’s all!”

“Child of disgrace! This you expect me to believe? No! This I do not swallow! Saturday nights are for taking baths! Sunday night this is! How do you explain that, shameless hussy?” Hands under her armpits, he was heaving mightily now in an effort to free her.

“I was feeling grubby, that’s all. I was all alone in the house, and so I thought I would bathe. Is that so terrible?”

“Yes. What you do would be bad enough on Saturday night. A sin to bring shame on your father’s house! It would be unforgivable even on Saturday night. But on a Sunday? Never! Never on Sunday! Do you hear, you sinful child? Never on Sunday!”

“Oh, Papa, I’m sorry!” Sappho wailed.

“Sorry? What good is sorry? And I don’t believe you! You’re not sorry! If you were, the least you could do is stop when I talk to you!”

“I can’t, Papa— The music— I just have to move when I hear that music!”

“This I can understand. It is good Greek music from a good Greek radio station. No one with Greek blood in their veins can be still when hearing such music.”

“Papa! Please stop clapping your hands and help me!”

“It is the wild sound to stir the lusts of the gods!”

“Papa! This is no time for dancing. Please stop!”

“Music like this! Some good Greek wine! A healthy Greek woman! What more could a man ask?”

“Papa. Be careful! Don’t leap so high! You’ll crack your head on the ceiling!”

“Aaiiyyee-ee-ee! Smell the ripe olives on the trees! Leap for the highest branches! Embrace the hot sun goddess of the isles of Greece! Aaiiyyee-ee-ee! . . . Oomph!”

“Papa? Papa, speak to me! Oh, Papa! Now what will I do?”

Sappho did the only thing she could do under the circumstances. She resumed writhing in time to the music, forgot all about her unconscious father stretched out on the tiles of the bathroom floor, and gave herself up to the delightful new feelings she had discovered. Some hours later her father regained consciousness and succeeded in prying her loose. But by that time, the traumatic experience had firmly entrenched itself in Sappho’s subconscious.

A psychological reaction mechanism had been formed, and from that time on Sappho was helpless in its grip. She began to bathe every day, sometimes twice and three times a day. She was obsessed by her love for the drainpipe. Sometimes she would simply stand in the bathroom and devour it with her eyes, brimming over with adoration. She washed and polished the fixture constantly until it sparkled. She bought a ribbon for it, decided that was too effeminate, and substituted a necktie. She spent hours in the bathroom, caressing the drainpipe, crooning wordless songs of love to it, kissing and embracing it.

Papa Kuntzentookis objected. Not just on moral grounds, but also because it interfered with his regularity. It got to the point where whenever he felt the need to go to the bathroom, Sappho was already locked in there. He started imposing on the neighbors, and soon they too began objecting to this obsession which resulted in his ringing their doorbells at all hours with a Greek newspaper under his arm, a smelly pipe smouldering between his jaws, and his shamefaced need written clearly on his face. But no matter how much he beat Sappho, he still couldn’t keep her out of the john. Drastic measures were called for, and finally Papa Kuntzentookis took them.

He made arrangements to move. Informed of this, Sappho broke down at the prospect of being torn from her love-object. She wept. She screamed. She frothed at the mouth. She tore her garments. All to no avail. Papa Kuntzentookis was firm. They were moving to new quarters on the first of the month, and that was that!

Moving day brought an unexpected catastrophe which affected the entire city. While Papa Kuntzentookis was busy with the movers, Sappho locked herself in the bathroom with the family tool-box. By the time they had managed to break down the bathroom door, Sappho had already worked the drainpipe loose of its moorings.

The real trouble arose because those moorings were of a delicately balanced complexity which would have given a master plumber screaming nightmares. In some way, they tied in with the other fixtures in the bathroom, which in turn were intimately connected to all the plumbing fixtures in the house, which likewise affected all the plumbing on the block—and for blocks around. It was like the pulling of the bottom matchstick from a precariously balanced matchstick castle; things began to happen.

The first sign was when the Kuntzentookis toilet erupted into a geyser. While Papa was attempting to cap this geyser, the bathroom sink had an attack of hiccups and began regurgitating scalding water. Papa leaped to the faucet and it came off in his hand. Immediately a torrent of cold water splashed into the bathtub. But Sappho’s fiddling had incapacitated the drain and now the tub quickly filled and began to overflow. A moment later there was a pounding protest from the ceiling of the apartment below.

Papa ran into the kitchen and attacked the main valve controlling the flow of all the water in the apartment with a wrench. He must have turned it the wrong way, for immediately little miniature geysers of water began spurting upwards from all four burners of the gas stove. Papa tried to disconnect the stove, but it was too late. The oven was already gushing with ice-cold water.

Three floors below a tenant turned on her kitchen sink faucet and set herself on fire with the flames which belched forth. Next door, another tenant who had been defrosting her refrigerator was overcome by gas fumes—- lightly scented with the aroma of a fine old Greek cheese -—when she opened the door to remove the ice trays. In the apartment above, a gentleman just about to perch on the toilet emitted a scream of anguish as a baby alligator propelled upwards by the churning water nipped his naked nether cheeks.

The alligator was not alone. Many lizards, snakes, crocodiles and other alligators, once souvenirs of visits to Florida, had outgrown their pet status and been flushed down various toilets. Such wildlife flourishes in the sewers of New York. Now, caught in the snowballing effects of Sappho’s attempt to play plumber, these creatures stampeded for the surface of New York.

First to appreciate their menace were the Con Ed workers who arrived to repair the power lines which had been shorted out by the backing up of the churning waters. They fled screaming from the sewers, screaming, “Dig we must, but this ain’t just!”

When the ’phone lines were affected, the New York Telephone workers formed ranks and attacked the animals with live wires. They succeeded in electrocuting many of them, but in the end the animals captured the high-power lines and reversed the attack. The telephone repairmen also fled, screaming like children for their supervisors.

But it was no use. By this time the automated ’phone system had been thrown completely out of whack. Computerized dialing became a nightmare. It was truly Black Friday for phone company executives. Quite a few of them threw themselves out of windows. And the major computer in the New York area deliberately shorted out its circuits and immolated itself.

One of the groups which managed to keep its head in the emergency was the Explorers’ Club. Rising creakily from their armchairs, these mighty white hunters armed themselves and organized a safari. Borrowing elephants from the Central Park Zoo and guides from the Indian Embassy, they raided several bars for gin and a Schweppes warehouse for tonic, and valiantly set out on their underground expedition.

They were never heard from again. It was some months before their bodies were found and their fate determined. It seems that another group from the Safari Association had recruited guides from the Pakistan Embassy and also descended into the sewers. When the two groups met, the white hunters were caught in a crossfire between the Indian guides and the Pakistani guides and completely wiped out. Those who survived the battle fell easy prey to the monsters swarming underground.

In the end, it took the 101st Airborne Division and a special contingent of Navy frogmen to restore order to New York. It was weeks before the various floods were brought under control, the several raging fires extinguished, the pockets of gas cleared away, the animals subdued. The plumbers raised their rates, of course, and there was talk of socialized plumbing on the floor of the Senate. The AMA joined forces with the plumbers to exert pressure to defeat the bill, and the effort was successful. It was successful despite the fact that a certain left-wing student group staged a bathe-in at the White House.

(Indeed, there were those who felt that the bathe-in did more to harm the cause of socialized plumbing than to help it. When the President went on TV with a special broadcast to the nation and complained that his unshaven appearance was a direct result of the bathe-in, feelings ran so high that there was a general disavowal of the bathtub-sitters. The opposition party criticized the Administration for not taking stronger measures—holding them under the water for five minutes or more was one recommendation. But the President, a humanist with an image to protect, turned thumbs down on immersion and simply had the water shut off. Finally the bathe-in demonstrators dried themselves off and emerged. Immediately they were brought up on charges of stealing the White House towels. When they were convicted, the A.C.L.U. stepped into the case and appealed. When the Supreme Court reversed the conviction, the John Birch Society demanded that Justice Warren be impeached. When he wasn’t, they went on a bathing strike by way of protest. Months went by, and still they refused to bathe. But it fizzled out when the general public proved so apathetic as to be incapable of distinguishing the difference between the unwashed Birchers and the brain-washed ones.)

By the time New York—and the nation—had returned to normal, Sappho and Papa Kuntzentookis were installed in their new apartment. But the forced separation from the object of her love only made Sappho’s heart ache the more. She wept constantly. She refused to eat. She went into a state of acute and deep melancholia. And nothing Papa Kuntzentookis did seemed able to relieve her despair.

Finally one night she ran away. Papa Kuntzentookis didn’t even know the girl was gone until the police called him. Sappho had been apprehended breaking into the apartment in which they had once lived. She had climbed up the fire escape and then, head-first, through the bathroom window. She had plunged straight into the bathtub, which was filled, half with water, and half with the bulk of the man who now occupied the apartment. The man had been startled, to say the least. But he had managed to subdue Sappho and hold her until the police arrived.

“Where is it?” she kept screaming while they waited for the police. “What have you done with it?”

Finally her captor realized that she was referring to the drainpipe which had once stood beside the bathtub. He explained to her that it had been removed, and that the entire plumbing system had been revamped and was concealed inside the wall now. When he showed her the little switch under the faucet which controlled the drain now, she burst into tears.

She was inconsolable. And she remained inconsolable. It was as if Sappho was grieving for a dead lover.

She refused to go near the bathroom of their new apartment. The very sight of its drainpipe-less glitter was enough to put her into a suicidal depression. Papa Kuntzentookis had to buy her a chamber-pot. And it was only with difficulty that he was able to persuade her to bathe in the kitchen sink once a month. Where would it all end? he would moan to himself.

It ended as such adolescent crushes usually end. Slowly, Sappho emerged from her depression under her own steam. She was young and resilient, and her body was too hungry for love to go on mourning a lost love forever. But the ending was also a beginning, the beginning of something which presented new problems.

In her seeking, Sappho was still subconsciously attracted to objects which reminded her of her first love. The first time Papa Kuntzentookis was made aware of this was when he was summoned to school to confer with Sappho’s teacher. The teacher was a forthright lady, and she didn’t beat around the bush.

“Sappho won’t stay in her seat, and that disrupts the class,” she told Papa Kuntzentookis.

“This I don’t understand. For why does she leave her seat.”

“To go to the back of the room where the steampipe is.”

“So maybe she’s cold, poor child. For what I pay in taxes, they should heat these schoolrooms better!”

“If you ask me, it’s not that she’s cold. It’s that she’s too hot!” the teacher told him frankly.

“What are you saying?”

“She seems to have some sort of bizarre affection for that steampipe. She kisses it, and hugs it, and wraps her legs around it. If it wasn’t so ridiculous, I’d think there was something sexual about it.”

“Aha!” The light of understanding broke over Papa Kuntzentookis’ face. “I see now!”

“You do? Well I wish you’d explain it. It’s Greek to rne.”

“Hey, lady, you watch that! I don’t care if you are a teacher! Nobody don’t make cracks about the Greeks to me.”

“I’m sorry. I meant no ethnic insult.”

“Anti-Greek-ite!” Papa Kuntzentookis muttered. “What are you? Some kind of Turk or something?”

“Please, Mr. Kuntzentookis. I didn’t mean to offend you. I just want you to control your daughter’s behavior.”

“You control your steampipe! I’ll control my daughter!” Papa Kuntzentookis turned on his heel huffily and walked out.

But his subsequent talk with Sappho bore no fruits at all. She was in the grip of an obsession that was beyond her control. And this obsession led to one incident after another.

There was the time that Sappho leaped up on the counter of a soda fountain and attempted to impale herself upon a shiny metal seltzer spiggot. There was the time when she was driving along the highway with Papa Kuntzentookis and she leaped from the car to wrest a jack from a motorist attempting to change a tire and began making violent love to it even as the car came crashing down on the rim of the wheel. There was the time she broke into the showroom of an outlet for plumbing supplies and staged a one-girl orgy. And there was the time she climbed the girders of a budding building project, grabbed the riveting machine from a startled construction worker, and went so wild with passion that she almost toppled thirty floors to her death. Only his cutting the wire which fed the riveting machine its power saved Sappho.

Finally, Papa Kuntzentookis, at his wits’ end, sought help. He arranged for Sappho to be seen by a psychiatric social worker. Aside from her obsession, Sappho was an obedient girl, and she readily agreed to keep her first appointment with the social worker.

To her surprise, he was quite a young man. She didn’t know it, of course, but this was actually his first case. Naturally, he was very anxious to make good with it. And Sappho’s dark beauty only added to his fervor.

He asked her to describe her problem herself, and she did. When she was finished, his fingers drummed the table while he gathered his thoughts before speaking. “You are very fortunate that I was assigned to your case,” he told her finally.

“Why do you say that?” Sappho asked.

“Because I am the most empathetic therapist you could possibly have found.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Before depth analysis resolved my problem, I suffered from a sexual aberration quite similar to yours. Therefore I can identify with your problem quite easily. And that is very important if I am going to help you.”

“What do you mean?” Sappho asked. “What was your problem?”

“I—-” the young therapist paused dramatically— “was an incubator baby!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said I was an incubator baby.”

“Oh?” Sappho stared at him uncomprehendingly.

“You don’t understand, do you?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Then I shall explain. We form our conceptions of what is sexually attractive quite early in life. To most infants this means a parent fixation. The boy baby is attracted to his mother, the girl baby to her father. And those concepts are lasting. That’s why psychology concentrates on the Oedipal feelings in patients. That’s why we make jokes about men marrying their mothers. But, since I was an incubator baby, there were certain early and lasting complications in my own sexual concepts. Do you see?”

“No,” Sappho admitted. “But go on. Maybe it will get clearer.”

“Right. Now, at the crucial stage of an infant’s life, when a mother’s warm and loving arms are needed, what was my only emotional contact with? An incubator, that’s what! Still, I shouldn’t be bitter. It really was quite an incubator,” he reminisced. “The most modern of its kind at that time. A miracle machine it was. Yes, a miracle of glass and metal, moving parts that whirred musically, flashing lights that imprinted themselves upon my budding vision like the most beautiful of rainbows, rubberized cogs that caressed me when I bumped against them-—such was the mother I knew and loved; such was the mother I grew up to search for as a mate. Is it any wonder that in my post-puberty years I was such a crazy mixed-up kid?”

“I suppose not. What did you do?”

“What could I do? I was in the grip of an obsession I didn’t begin to understand. All I was capable of doing was reacting to it. And my reactions were uncontrollable.”

“Just how did you react?” Sappho’s curiosity was aroused.

“Erotically, of course. Very erotically. Passing a juke box for instance—a juke box with its flashing, multi-colored lights and moving, metallic parts—I would become filled with overpowering desire. Ah, how well I remember the one in the malt shop I used to frequent as an adolescent. I was so in love with it that I couldn’t eat or sleep for thinking about it. First loves can be very traumatic, you know. It’s all very well to sneer at schoolboy crushes, but I tell you that what I felt for that juke box was as strong an emotion as any grown man is capable of feeling.”

“What did you do about it?” Sappho wanted to know.

“What could I do? Like all frustrated lovers from time immemorial, I brooded and pined. My reason told me that my love was beyond my grasp, but my emotions knew nothing of reason. I lost weight, became haggard, and then one day I faced the ultimate in desolation. The juke box had been removed from the malt shop. The owner had been unable to stand any more the crowds of kids it attracted. I tried desperately to find out where it had been taken, but I failed.”

“How devastating!” Sappho sympathized.

“Yes. It was. I tried to console myself with a pinball machine, but it just wasn’t the same. Oh, there was an attraction of course. But it was strictly physical. No matter how the lights flashed and the little metal balls bounced off the rubber bumpers, there was never any real emotional contact. Still, it was better than nothing.”

“What happened then?” Sappho wanted to know.

“For a long time I drifted from one pinball machine to another, feeling nothing, for all the world like a bee flitting from flower to flower. Oh, I had my kicks all right, but there was never any real emotional satisfaction. And it made me feel cheap, settling for what I could get that way. It made me feel like the kind of fellow who’s driven to two-dollar whores.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Sappho said.

“Yes. I thought you would. That’s why I’m telling you all this. It’s important that you realize that I have gotten over it. And that you can cure your obsession as well.”

“But how? How can I stop wanting my drainpipe? How did you get over your incubator-juke box-pinball machine fixation?”

“Simple. I was made to recognize the fact that it was basically a sublimation. I didn’t really want that juke box, you see. Nor those pinball machines, either. Truly, I didn’t even want the incubator back. It had never really been anything more than a substitute.”

“A substitute for what?”

“At first for Mother, of course. But later, the substitution was for the more natural object of affection. I was substituting these machines for girls. As soon as I was made to realize this, as soon as I experienced the fullness of sex with a real girl, I was cured.”

“And do you think that would cure me?” Sappho asked ingenuously.

“Absolutely. Only with a man, of course. Once you experience sex with a man, your fixation for plumbing fixtures and things which resemble them will be cured.”

“But I wouldn’t even know how to start with a man.”

“That’s what I’m here for. To show you.” He walked around the desk, took Sappho by the shoulders, and kissed her. “There. Do you see? You’re starting to learn already.”

“Yes.” Sappho was breathless. “I do see what you mean. Kiss me again.”

He kissed her again and began fumbling with the buttons of her blouse.

“What happens now?” Sappho asked naively.

“Now we really make those colored lights spin, baby!”

“Colored lights? But I thought you were cured!”

“I am. But there’s always a little residue of neurosis. I always see colored lights. Wait. Maybe you’ll see them, too.”

“No,” Sappho said a long time later. “I didn’t see any colored lights. It was nice, though. I think the cure is beginning to take effect.”

“No colored lights, eh? What did you see?”

“Spinning drainpipes.”

“Ummm! Well, we’ll just have to keep up the treatments until that’s resolved.”

From that day on, Sappho visited the therapist for “treatment” twice a week. She kept up the visits for six months. By then, her obsession with plumbing fixtures was completely gone. Still, she had to overcome the therapist’s objections before he’d let her leave treatment. Finally she did, and she was glad; she was getting awfully damned tired of ‘him and his colored lights!

“. . . And so that’s how I became a nymphomaniac,” Sappho told Penny now as the two girls sat in Penny’s apartment.

“But I don’t understand,” Penny protested. “I thought he cured you.”

“He did. He cured me of drainpipes. He convinced me that men were better.”

“But isn’t it just as sick if you’re so uncontrollable with men that you have to have one after another make love to you. “

“Maybe it is,” Sappho granted. Maybe it is. But believe me, honey, they sure beat drampipes!”

CHAPTER EIGHT

THERE WERE glints of daylight slivering the sky by the time Sappho finished speaking. Noticing them, she decided to leave and try to catch a few hours sleep before going to work. Penny, however, had given up on the idea of sleep. In less than an hour she would have to dress and leave to meet Balzac Hosenpfeffer at the draft board.

Besides, Penny’s mind was churning. Sappho’s frank admissions of nymphomania, in no way softened by what she had told Penny about her background, still left Penny undecided as to the Greek girl’s ability to fill in as editor of Lovelights when Penny took her leave of absence. Weighing Sappho’s roundheel tendencies against Annie Fitz-Manley’s budding homosexuality, Penny simply couldn’t make up her mind as to which might be the lesser drawback in doing the job. Oh well, she sighed to herself, there was still Marie D’Chastidi to be considered. Perhaps a talk with her might prove her to be the one least unfit for the job.

On this thought, without meaning to, Penny did drift off to sleep. It was only a cat-nap, but the morning sun woke her with a start, and she realized that she would have to hurry if she was going to meet Balzac on time. She ran a comb through her short blonde hair, decided not to bother with make-up, threw on a sweater and a pair of slacks, and dashed out of the house.

Twenty minutes later her cab was pulling up in front of the draft board. Balzac Hosenpfeffer was waiting. With him was his companion of the day before, the fellow girl-watcher with whom he’d been promenading along Fifth Avenue. “Hi, Penny,” Balzac greeted her, and then turned triumphantly to the lad beside him. “See! I told you she’d show. Come on now! Pay up!”

“I sure have to hand it to you, Balz.” He passed Balzac a five-dollar bill. “I wish you’d tell me what your technique is.”

“Some other time.” Balzac took Penny by the arm and led her up the steps of the building housing the draft board. “I’ll see you around.” He waved good-bye to his friend.

“You don’t miss a trick, do you?” Penny observed.

“Well, now I can take you out to lunch.”

“Sorry. I’ve got other plans. Let’s just get this over with.”

“Okay. Wait here a minute.” He left Penny sitting on a bench in the waiting room while he went over to talk to the receptionist. He returned after a moment. “We’re in luck,” he told her. “The draft board is meeting and they’ve agreed to see us right away.”

The intercom buzzed. The receptionist listened a few seconds and then looked up at Balzac and Penny. “You can go in now,” she told them.

Balzac led Penny into a large room. Six men were seated behind a long table. One of them gestured for Balzac and Penny to take chairs on the opposite side of the table. Balzac held out a chair for Penny and then sat down himself.

The man who had gestured, evidently the chairman of the group, was the first to speak. “Suppose you tell us why you asked for this meeting, Mr. Hosenpfeffer. You haven’t been called up yet. There’s no question of requesting a deferment at this point.”

“Oh, no, sir!” Balzac was extremely deferential. “I don’t want a deferment. I’ll be proud to serve my country -—if my number comes up, that is. Of course, I’m engaged in essential industry, so it isn’t likely that —”

“What sort of essential industry, Mr. Hosenpfeffer?” one of the members of the draft board wanted to know.

“My firm manufactures American flags.”

“Oh! I see!” The draft board member was visibly impressed.

The member sitting beside him was a little more curious, however. “And what is your specific job, Mr. Hosenpfeffer?” he wanted to know.

“I’m a Star Counter.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I count the stars on the flags. Each flag is checked individually before it’s sent out. You see, there was a slip-up a few years back when Alaska and Hawaii came into the Union. A whole shipment of flags went out with only forty-nine stars on them. At first we suspected Commie subversion. But when we investigated, we found it was only a seamstress who counted the states wrong. Seems she kept leaving out Montana. Just couldn’t remember Montana.”

“Was there a security check on this seamstress?” the chairman of the draft board asked.

“Oh, yes. She was clean as a whistle, was old Mrs. Ross. Why, Betsy never even signed a petition for a second front back in the forties.”

“Her name was Betsy Ross?”

“Yes. Quite a coincidence, isn’t it? The Flag Sewers’ Guild is one of those mother-daughter unions, you know. The Ross ladies have been at it for generations.”

“Very interesting,” another member of the board piped up. “And just how long have you been employed in this vital industry, Mr. Hosenpfeffer?”

“Six years now. Before I was promoted to Star Counter, I was a Stripe Checker.”

“A Stripe Checker? What are the duties of a Stripe Checker?” The chairman was curious.

“To make sure that the red and the white stripes come out right, sir,” Balzac explained. “Many people don’t realize it, but this is very important if the American flag is to maintain its authenticity. The top and bottom stripes must always be red, and in between there must always be alternating white and red stripes. There are thirteen stripes in all, six white, seven red.”

“Do you mean that there is more red than white?” the chairman demanded.

“Yes, sir. There’s one more red stripe. It’s traditional.”

“I don’t care if it is!” The chairman was indignant. “I’m going to write my congressman about that! If you ask me, somewhere along the line there’s been some sort of infiltration! Someone sneaked an extra red in!”

“Oh, no, sir.” Balzac objected respectfully. “You see, originally, there were thirteen colonies, and that’s why there are thirteen stripes.”

“Are you insinuating that more than half of the original thirteen colonies were Red-dominated?” the Chairman asked, his voice quivering.

“Never, sir. Not at all! Of course not! I’d never-—”

“Then why are there seven red stripes and only six white stripes? I’ll tell you how! Because somehow those sneaky Commie bastards managed to sneak in an extra stripe! That’s how! And I intend to see that a full-scale investigation is held!”

“You’re aboslutely right, sir,” Balzac agreed hastily. “And you can depend on me to testify if I’m needed.”

“Good. That’s a good sign of your loyalty. I’ll remember that. Now, suppose we get down to what brings you here, Mr. Hosenpfeifer.” The chairman glanced briefly around. “I’m sure my fellow board members are wondering just what your problem is.”

“Yes, sir. Well, it’s not easy for me to say. It’s kind of embarrassing.”

“You may speak freely, Mr. Hosenpfeffer. Confidences told to your draft board are sacrosanct. Just look upon us as you would your family doctor.”

“I could never tell my family doctor what I’m about to tell you.” Balzac hung his head. '

“Why not?”

“He voted for Goldwater. He froths at the mouth if fluoridation is so much as mentioned. If he knew what I’ve done, he’d probably lead the mob to lynch me.”

“Come, come, my boy. It can’t be as terrible as all that.” A look of kindness and understanding spread over the face of the chairman of the draft board. “Surely you can tell us.”

“I want to, but I just can’t.” Balzac was close to tears.

“Young lady.” The chairman turned to Penny. “Perhaps you can shed some light on what is troubling this lad.”

“Yes, I can,” Penny replied. “He’s burnt his draft card.”

A shocked silence fell over the room. Six pairs of eyes filled with loathing were turned on Balzac Hosenpfeffer. Six mouths were stopped up with contemptuous rage. Six chests heaved with the effort of control in the face of blatant desecration.

Finally the chairman found his voice. “And you a Star Counter!” It was all he could bring himself to say.

“But it was an accident,” Balzac burst out frantically.

“A likely story.” The chairman shook his head sadly.

With the precision of a Rockette chorus line, the other five heads wagged along with his.

“Wait!” Penny said. “It really was an accident. That’s why I’m here. To vouch for the fact that he didn’t mean to do it. You see, it all started when I was waiting for the bus to take me to the lab, and—”

“Lab?” The chairman’s head shot up. “What lab? A government lab? What were you bringing there? More important, what were you getting? Just what sort of courier are you? The truth now! Who paid you to do this? How did you get security clearance?”

“I don’t have security clearance.” Penny tried desperately to explain. “But—”

“You don’t have security clearance? Then just how did you gain access to a government laboratory? Gentlemen,” the chairman turned to his fellow board members, “I think perhaps that this is a case for the FBI. Draft-card burning. Infiltrating classified premises. Top secret, no doubt. There’s definitely more here than meets the eye.”

There were murmurs of strong agreement from the other members of the board.

“Wait!” Penny tried again. “You don’t understand. It wasn’t a government laboratory.”

“How do we know that?” the chairman demanded frostily. “We have only your word for it.”

“I can prove it.” Penny dug frantically into her pocket-book. “Here. Here’s the receipt from the lab. This should prove it has nothing to do with the government.”

“Watch out, George! It could be a forgery!” one of the draft-board members cautioned the chairman as he accepted the slip of paper from Penny.

“Don’t worry. It will be checked out thoroughly,” the chairman assured him grimly. “Go on with your story, young lady,” he told Penny.

“Yes. Well, I was standing and waiting for the bus with this brown paper bag in my hand—-”

“What was in the bag?”

Blushingly, Penny told them.

“I see. Continue.” The chairman’s tone was still very suspicious.

“Well, this young man wanted to know what was in the bag, and—”

“I should think so!” one of the members interrupted. “You never can tell what people are carrying around these days. Why, it could have been a bomb. For all anybody knew, you might have been planning to blow up a Fifth Avenue bus!”

“Why should I want to blow up a bus?” Penny was bewildered.

“How do I know? Why should anybody want to blow up a passenger plane? I don’t know. But it’s being done all the time.”

“They do that for the insurance,” Penny pointed out.

“And don’t you carry insurance?”

“Of course. But-—”

“Then there you are. I rest my case.”

“And you may have an important point there,” the chairman told him. “We’ll certainly keep it in mind. But for now, I fear we digress. Let’s hear the young lady out, regardless of our personal feeling about this loathsome situation, shall we?”

“All right.” Penny picked up the thread of her story. “Anyway, the bag was leaking, and Mr. Hosenpfeffer called my attention to it. Actually, I suppose he was flirting with me.”

“Well, that’s none of our business,” the chairman pointed out.

“Certainly not. Certainly not.” The board chimed agreement.

“Yes,” Penny went on stubbornly. “Anyway, he began trying to guess what it was that was leaking from the bag, and he guessed wrong, and then the bus carne along, and just before it pulled out, I told him what it was, and the last I saw of him he was spitting.”

“Spitting! Spitting where?” the chairman demanded.

“On the sidewalk,” Penny told him.

“On the sidewalk!”

“On Fifth Avenue!”

“Disgraceful !”

“Contemptible !”

“A desecration!”

“Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” The chairman rapped for order. “I’m as shocked and repelled by this revelation as any of you. But let’s maintain some decorum. Now, young man!” He turned to Balzac with a look of loathing. “Is it true that you expectorated on a Fifth Avenue sidewalk?”

“Yes sir,” Balzac admitted. “But I can explain -”

“Does the Fifth Avenue Merchants’ Association know about this?” one of the draft-board members exploded. “If they do, they will surely prosecute. And if they prosecute, the results are liable to reflect adversely on this body. Do you realize that?”

“I do,” the chairman said soothingly. “But there are obviously many more ramifications to this case than we expected. Let us simply resolve to do our duty and face whatever consequences may result. Now, young man, just why did you feel it necessary to besmirch the sidewalk of Fifth Avenue with your saliva?”

“It was uncontrollable,” Balzac tried to explain. “I had tasted the contents of the bag, and when she told me what it was, I simply reacted as anyone might have. I spat. And that’s when this cop grabbed me.”

“Good for him!”

“New York’s Finest!”

“Glad to see they’re on the job!”

“Gentlemen!” Once again the chairman rapped for order. I appreciate your sentiments. But if we don’t let the young man tell his story without further interruption, we’ll be here all week. Go on now, Mr. Hosenpfeffer.”

“Well, it all gets kind of confused after that. There was this lawyer, and these demonstrators, and counter-demonstrators, and some woman who lost her kid, and the Girl Scouts, and—”

“The Girl Scouts! An admirable organization. I just love their cookies. You didn’t happen to buy any, did you?” one of the board members asked Balzac.

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“Why not?” he demanded. “Don’t you like Girl Scout cookies?”

“I love them, sir. I just love them. But there was so much confusion—”

“Sounds damned suspicious to me,” the draft-board member grumbled. “Denying little girls their birthright. Refusing to buy their cookies. A lousy couple of bucks . . .”

It s a very worthy cause, sir,” Balzac was quick to say. “It’s just that there were so many worthy causes there all at the same time, and I was trying to explain to this policeman, and—”

“How is it that the policeman didn’t arrest you?” the chairman asked.

“I’m coming to that, sir. He was going to when Miss Candie here returned and explained to him just why it was that I spat on the sidewalk. That’s when he let me go. But I was still so shook up that I had to have a cigarette. And that’s when I burned my draft card.”

“Then you admit it!” The chairman pounced. “You admit that you burned your draft card!”

“Yes. But it was an accident. You see, the pack of matches flared up in my hand, and—”

“What kind of matches?” another member of the board asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I asked you what kind of matches. I mean, you’ll admit that it’s pretty unusual for matches to just flare up. What I’m getting at is just what kind of incendiary matches were these? How did they come into your possession? What was their point of origin? How did they get into the country in the first place?”

“I don’t see what-—-” Balzac started to say.

“Oh, you don’t, don’t you? Well, young man, you may not realize it, but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. If this draft-card burning really wasn’t deliberate on your part, then there’s always the chance of planned sabotage. How do we know that there aren’t more of these incendiary matches being sneaked into the unsuspecting hands of other draft-card holders? How do we know it isn’t all part of a carefully worked out conspiracy designed to undermine this nation’s conscription program? How do we know it doesn’t go further than that? How do we know these matches aren’t being foisted off on those holding security clearances, or White House passes, or—I shudder to think of it—Diners’ Club cards!”

“Gee, I never thought of that,” Balzac admitted. “I guess I’m pretty naive, all right. I thought it was just a simple accident. It never occurred to me that it might be part of an international plot.”

“Now, just a minute,” the chairman interrupted. “We’re by no means sure of that as yet. Your innocence has yet to be established. So far all we have is your unsubstantiated story that this matchbook flared up and burned up your draft card. All this talk of deliberate sabotage might just be a red herring you’re using to throw us off the track. The point is, can you prove you didn’t do it on purpose?”

“Miss Candie here saw it happen. She’ll bear me out.”

“Well, young lady?” The chairman turned to Penny.

“That’s true,” she said. “The matchbook flared up, and the next thing I knew his draft card was destroyed.”

“How do we know you’re not in cahoots with him?” a board member asked.

“And even if you’re not,” another wanted to know, “how can you be so sure of what was in his mind at the time of the draft-card burning? Maybe the matchbook flaring up was just a big act to pull the wool over your eyes.”

“Yes,” said a third. “Also, it’s even possible that the young man did it deliberately without even being aware that he was doing it deliberately.”

“You lost me going around that last curve, Al,” the chairman protested.

“It’s psychology, George,” Al explained. “Suppose this young man had a subconscious desire to burn up his draft card, and without his conscious mind being aware of it this prompted him to set fire to the book of matches in such a way that it couldn’t help setting fire to the draft card. Wouldn’t that make him just as guilty?”

“Subconscious? Is that like subversive?” a fourth member interjected.

The chairman ignored the question. “You’re right,” he agreed with Al. “He’d be just as guilty. Even more so. Nothing’s worse than a subconscious coward. Nothing’s more of a threat to the security of the nation than a man who’s a traitor and doesn’t even know he’s a traitor.”

“I’m not a traitor!” Balzac wailed. “It was just an accident!”

“It really was,” Penny echoed. “Just an accident!”

“Perhaps,” the chairman said judiciously. “Perhaps it was. I’m not prepared to say until myself and my colleagues have given the matter full deliberation. If you have nothing further to say in defense of this heinous crime, then I would ask you to wait in the anteroom so that we can get down to these deliberations.”

Balzac led Penny from the room. They collapsed together, side by side on a bench in the antechamber. “What do you think they’ll do to me?” Balzac asked after a moment, nibbling on his cuticles.

“I don’t know,” Penny admitted. “And frankly I’m feeling sorrier and sorrier that I got mixed up in this whole mess.”

“What do you mean? I’m innocent. You know that. You had to help me prove that. It was your duty as a citizen.”

“Maybe. But maybe I’m not so sure you’re innocent any more. Maybe that man in there was right and you just made it look like an accident so you could suck me into being your witness. How do I know? I don’t know anything about you. I never met you before yesterday. Maybe you’re a Communist sympathizer for all I know.”

“Now you’re turning on me, too!” Balzac protested. “It was an accident! You know that! You saw it! It was an accident!”

“I suppose so,” Penny sighed. “I don’t know. I’m so confused. I’m so tired and confused.” She got to her feet. “I’m going to find the ladies’ room and throw some cold water on my face and freshen up,” she told Balzac. She left him and crossed over to the receptionist to ask directions to the ladies’ room.

“Through that door, down the hallway, turn left at the end, first door to your right, second door to your left after the ‘Fire Exit’ sign.”

Penny started out following the directions, but somewhere along the line she got mixed up. She came through a door and found herself on the end of a long line of young men in civilian clothes. She started to back out when a familiar voice sounded out from a few feet in front of her.

“Penny! hey, Penny, what are you doing here?” It was Studs Levine.

Penny walked over to him and fell in alongside him. Just as she started to speak, a uniformed MP gently swatted the bottom of her tailored slacks with his billy. “Stay in line, fella,” he advised. “You’ll have plenty of time to talk to your buddy later.”

Penny shrugged it off and turned to Studs. “What are you doing here?” she threw the question right back at him.