the girl from pussycat

PENNY. . . CANDIE?

Sure, it's an improbable name. But that’s only the first

of many improbable things about this pretty Penny.

As 21-year-old editor of Lovelights magazine, she

should know all about love. But she doesn’t-and that

gap in her knowledge is what sets off this rollicking

gambol that goes from one end of New York to the

other, picking up speed and laughs as it goes.

Loaded with slapstick misadventures and sharp satire,

this may well be Ted Mark's funniest book yet. Read

it and judge for yourself!

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!

THE GIRL FROM

PUSSYCAT

TED MARK

1965

CHAPTER ONE

“THE LIQUID sounds of lovemaking . . .”

Squish—squish?

No, that couldn’t be right. Penny Candie re-read the phrase. She put the manuscript aside. She closed her innocent blue eyes and strained her brain to imagine what “the liquid sounds of love-making” might sound like. Squish-squish was definitely out. So was slurp-slurp.

Drip-drip.

Absurd! '

Sizzle-drizzle?

Mmm . . .

Tickle-trickle?

Interesting.

Pitter-patter-putter?

Not very romantic.

Slap-lap-slap-lap?

A possibility.

Eel-squeal?

Yes! That was definitely it phonetically. But What did it mean? Penny didn’t know. But then what did “the liquid sounds of love-making” mean? Penny didn’t know that; either. She’d find out, though. She was determined to find out. And within the next twenty-four hours, too, or her name Wasn’t Penny Candie!

That really was her name. Penelope Candie. But the “Penelope” had been shortened to “Penny” for the past four years, ever since she had embarked on her career.

That was during her last year in high school, when she was seventeen. She had entered a movie fan magazine contest:

“ ............................................ ...... .. (name of favorite movie star) is my ideal because ……………………….”

In five hundred words or less, Penny had justified her choice of Elizabeth Taylor because of virtue expressed in the star’s ability to love. She cited Miss Taylor’s courage in standing up to poorhouse-bound producers, their wailing stockholders, and various wives who had obviously been stifling the talents of their Taylor-made spouses. She stressed Miss Taylor’s talents, waxing indignant at critics who judged them only with a tape measure while neglecting to appreciate the star’s ability to subdue her own sweet personality and portray an ambitious, amoral, husband-stealing Egyptian vamp — a role so obviously foreign to her own nature.

Penny was lucky. Her entry arrived at a time when Elizabeth Taylor’s “sweet” nature was being expressed in a million-dollar libel suit against a rival fan publication. Since lip-licking and oft exaggerated accounts of Liz’s loves had long been selling copies of all the fan mags, fear now ran rampant that she might start slapping subpoenas on all and sundry in the gossip game.

The stall of the magazine whose contest Penny had entered felt themselves particularly vulnerable. The publishers, whose whimsical name, Pussycat Publications, Inc., thinly masked a totally hard-headed and commercial attitude, knew they could never back up their story that the Marc that Cleo would wriggle her asp for when Dick petered out was Liberace. So they had seized upon Penny’s entry, proclaimed it the winner, and printed it in full as a means of assuaging any intentions Miss Taylor might have had to invoke the libel laws against them.

Penny’s price was the job of “Teenage Consultant” to the magazine. In each issue she dealt with a teenage problem submitted by a reader. To the gratification of the magazine’s editors, she performed her task very well and with a refreshing innocence of approach which met with the approval of the readers as well.

After high-school graduation, Penny was hired on a full-time basis. She was given a teenage column in a romance magazine to write in addition to the one she was doing for the movie fan book. The following year she was moved up to assistant editor of the romance book and given a raise. This enabled her to move from her parents’ home in Forest Hills to the independence of a one-room efliciency apartment on the East Side of Manhattan in the eighties.

The promotions kept coming over the next couple of years. The latest one raised her to the position of editor of the romance magazine. Lovelights was now her baby. But the first few weeks of editorship raised increasing self-doubts for Penny. Honesty and sincerity were the hallmarks of her character. She made herself face the fact squarely that there might be certain lacks in her ability to edit Lovelights. She expressed this feeling to her friend and mentor, Fanny Hill, editor of the teenager magazine.

“What lacks?” Fanny wanted to know.

“Experience mostly. Personal experience.” Penny hung her head. “I’ve never had a love affair,” she confessed. “How can I edit Lovelights in the dark?”

“You mean you’re a virgin?” Fanny Hill asked disbelievingly. .

“Yes.”

“How old are you?”

“I was just twenty-one.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Fanny thought about it a moment. “Still,” she concluded finally, “I don’t see why you feel that disqualifies you from Lovelights.”

"‘But how can I edit a magazine about love problems when I’ve never had any?”

“Simple. Do you know Frank Flabgut?”

“Slightly,” Penny replied. “What does he have to do with it?”

“Just this. Frank edits a muscle man’s magazine. Now just think of him a minute. The only exercise he gets is chasing his secretary around the water cooler. And he deliberately hired a secretary with a club foot. Just take a good look at him some time. Isometrically speaking, he’s a disaster area. Yet he edits a book for muscle addicts. And then there’s Arch Faggot.”

“I don’t know him.”

“He edits a cheesecake magazine. Yet he can’t even stand the sight of women. After a hard day’s work, he goes to the men’s room at Penn Station and stands around watching just to get over the ordeal of having to look at pictures of naked women all day. He does a good job, too, except maybe he tends to run too many derriere shots. Still, he’s fruity as a nutcake.”

“I think I see what you’re driving at,” Penny admitted.

“Sure you do. And it even applies to me. I edited a movie magazine for five years, and for five years I was unable to sit through a movie. Now I edit a teenage book — me, with my name, Fanny Hill, and all it signifies. Me, charting a life-course for young adolescents! What could be more ludicrous? So you see, just because you’re a virgin doesn’t mean you can’t deal with sex problems. It doesn’t mean you can’t edit a romance magazine.”

Penny had allowed herself to be persuaded. She stayed on the job at Pussycat. However, since her editorship involved the constant gleaming of such phrases as “the hquid sounds of love-making,” her sense of her own inadequacies did not diminish.

What did those “sounds” sound like? What did it feel like when one’s body “burned with passion”? Just what did it smell like when “the sweet aroma of animal desire dilated her nostrils”? Such were the questions posed daily by her editing of romance manuscripts.

Eyen more disturbing was the point these confession stories drove home that any girl worth her salt had surely been deflowered by the age of twenty-one. Penny’s petals were intact. But why?

There was no obvious answer. It seemed to be a matter of fate. Shuffle the deck thoroughly and one card still ends up in the same place. Set the rooster to servicing the hens and still one female fowl produces no egg. Prune a cherry tree and always one cherry will somehow remain unplucked.

That was Penny. An unturned queen; an unlaid egg; an unplucked cherry. Penny Candie—the great unplucked!

Some queens, of course, remain unmoved by choice. Some eggs, naturally, remain unlaid because of physical difficulty. Some cherries, obviously, remain unplucked because they simply aren’t appetizing. However, none of these applied to Penny.

She was not determined to remain a virgin queen. Her doctor periodically pronounced her ovarian yolks Grade A. And as to her being appetizing, her own eyes confirmed her yumminess regularly.

Stepping out of her shower and gazing at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door, Penny would blush prettily. The darling girl couldn’t help being reminded of the descriptions in the romance stories she edited daily. Yes, there was the “golden-haired innocence” and “blue-eyed naïvete” of the farm girl seduced in “SIN IN THE SILO”. And there were the “high cheekbones”, the “oval face” and the “kiss-pursed mouth” of the victim in “I WAS RAPED BY A TEENAGE GANG”. Yes, and the “satin-smooth shoulders,” the “uptilted, pear-shaped breasts” and the swaying, womanly hips of the heroine of “ADULTERY WAS MY FAVORITE INDOOR SPORT”. Her legs were “long and slender and lightly-muscled like a ballet dancer”, just like the limbs of Nina in “IF YOU WANT ME, ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS WHISTLE”. Her waist was “tiny”, her belly “smooth”, just the way Lauras’s were in “HOW MY BODY BETRAYED ME”. And inside she felt as warmly willing as the multiple-orgy queen of “NUBILE NYMPHO ON THE TOWN”.

Yet no man had come along to sully her virgin perfection. That this was at best a dreadful waste and possibly a great sin of omission was confirmed to Penny by her after-hours reading. As if by instinct, she had filled her lonely evenings with a literary selection beginning with Gone With The Wind and Forever Amber, proceeding through Peyton Place and The Carpetbaggers, and arriving inevitably at Lady Chatterly’s Lover, and the works of Henry Miller.

It was this last-mentioned that truly convinced Penny that she’d somehow been diverted from the mainstream of New York life. In his Tropic of Capricorn, Miller succinctly identified New York in highly specific language, as the land of sexual intercourse. The evidence he offered to justify the name was overwhelming. Yet here was Penny, twenty-one years old, and she still hadn’t gotten the lay of the land.

In vain the sweaters a size too small and stretched over the pointy-tipped bras. In vain the hip-wiggling walk and the up-from-under look meant to hint at boudoir cooperation. In vain the long conversations insisting on emancipated woman’s right to a single standard. For three years Penny had been gobbling birth-control pills religiously And the only thing they’d done for her was give her heartburn. It all seemed to prove that virtue, if anything, was its own punishment!

Now, laying aside the manuscript with its still puzzling reference to the liquidity of love, Penny renewed her determination that her unwanted chastity would be breeched that very night. For this was the evening of her first overnight date with a man. And the man was Studs Levine!

Studs Levine was the advertising representative of the publishing company for which Penny worked. He was a tall, muscular young man with shoulders too broad to be hidden by the Brooks Brothers suits he wore. His smile was a testimonial to fluoridated toothpaste and he was always masculinely deodorized. His personality was modeled on Rock Hudson in any movie prior to the scene in which Doris Day neutralizes it with matrimonial honey. This combination underlay the aptness of his nickname.

Studs’ success with women was phenomenal. It was also frequently calculated. Explaining it in terms of business to male cronies, Studs was fond of telling how he “plowed my way through half the pertinent receptionists and private secretaries in New York to land my accounts. As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he would add with a wink.

With women, of course, he was not quite so blunt. Rather, he was the soul of subtlety. Seduction was an art with him, and like any good artisan he prided himself on his individualistic technique.

Nor were all his conquests in the line of duty. To the beautiful and shapely and willing, Studs could be a true philanthropist. Charitably, he bestowed his seed ’twixt many a thigh incapable of furthering his career. Studs was never stingy. He would not withhold the elixir of his potency from the world of thirsting femininity.

Correctly, he gauged the extent of Penny’s parch. The panting Bartletts ’neath her sweater weren’t lost on him. The sweet flush of her yearning was a plea he couldn’t disregard. And so Studs had invited her for a weekend at his bungalow in Arverne.

Penny had immediately recognized the implications of the invitation. She knew Studs’ reputation and realized that seduction was his aim. But this knowledge only made her all the more eager to accept. Thus she found herself alone in the bungalow with him, alone with her eagerness to experience, alone with the man most likely to vanquish her despised virginity.

“You just relax and make yourself comfortable,”

Studs told her when he’s closed the door behind them. “I’m going to fix us a salad and some steaks for dinner.”

“I’m not hungry,” she said impatiently.

“Well then, I’ll mix us some martinis.”

“I don’t need liquor,” Penny told him forthrightly.

“Umm. Well, just let me put some records on the stereo.”

“I’d rather listen to the sound of the ocean lapping the shore.”

“Oh?” Studs was stymied. There were certain rituals to be gone through. This girl was disregarding them. She wasn’t playing the game. Preliminaries were important. You have to learn to crawl before you can walk, he thought to himself irrelevantly.

“Aren’t you going to defile me?” Penny asked when the silence lengthened uncomfortably.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Defile me. You know, like in Fanny Hill.”

“I never read it. Never got around to it, I guess. I keep pretty busy what with business and all,” he finished lamely.

“I hear you do,” she told him archly. “I’ve heard about how busy you keep. But when are you going to get busy with me? When are you going to slip it to me?”

“Slip what to you?”

“It. Like in the Tropics, you know.”

“I’ve never been in the tropics.”

“I mean the Miller books. Come on! You brought me here to screw me, didn’t you?”

“Good grief!” Studs drew back, appalled at her frankness. “You don’t waste much time on romance, do you?”

“Romance? Oh, you mean like in Lady Chatterly? Okay. Bring on the floral arrangements. I’m ready to be twined and vined.”

“Penny, what the hell are you talking about?

“Going to bed with you. Isn’t that why you brought me here?”

“Well, sure, but—”

“But what?”

“At four o’clock in the afternoon? Without a drink? Or dinner? Or anything?”

“Or anything?” Penny thought that over. “You mean like foreplay?” she said finally with the air of one who has just noticed an electric light bulb going on over her head.

“I’m not sure that I’d put it that way-”

“Oh, I know what you mean. And you’re right, of course. How thoughtless of me! All right, foreplay it is. Kiss the hollow of my neck.”

“Huh?”

“It’s an erogenous zone. Kiss it. Or breathe on it hotly, if you’d rather.”

“But I can’t just—”

“Maybe you’d rather stroke my breasts until the nipples stand out hard and erect against the thin silk of my blouse,” Penny suggested.

“I don’t think—”

“Or perhaps you might caress my legs above my stocking-tops until the flesh grows hot with desire and my thighs fall apart.”

“I think I’m going to fall apart,” Studs muttered.

“Beg pardon?”

“Let’s go for a swim,” Studs said desperately. “Maybe that way we can sort of ease into the – umm — foreplay.”

“You mean frolic in the water like playful, uninhibited animals? Will you kiss me underwater and push down my bikini so that my pear-shaped breasts bobble free?”

“I’m not a very good swimmer,” Studs confessed. “But if you promise to stay in shallow water, I’ll do my best.”

Penny went into the bedroom and changed into her bikini in a trice. Studs was waiting for her with his bathing trunks on, and he guided her out of the cottage, under the boardwalk and onto the beach. Here she broke loose and scampered into the surf. He followed more sedately. ’

It hadn’t been a very good beach day to begin with, and now the overcast sky of late afternoon had driven what sun-seekers had come out back to their pinochle games and mah-jong tiles. The dunes were deserted. They had the ocean virtually to themselves.

Penny dived into the first wave. Behind her, Studs edged into the water more gingerly. He went thigh-high and then stretched on the tips of his toes as the icy waves lapped intimately at his groin. Penny splashed him, and he gritted his teeth and plunged into the next breaker.

She swam out to the rope connecting the series of buoys and motioned for him to join her. He did, and then they were side by side, treading water and holding onto the rope with one hand. With her free hand, Penny leaned all her weight on Studs’ shoulder and pushed him beneath the surface. She sank down. with him, wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him.

It was a long kiss, and Studs came up sputtering and gasping for air.

“Why didn’t you open your mouth so your tongue could dart like a flame when I kissed you?” Penny demanded reproachfully.

“Because,” he explained, “I was afraid I’d drown if I did.”

“Oh.” Penny took his free hand and pressed it against the expanse of bare bosom overflowing the top of her bikini. “How my flesh tingles for you! How quickly you make me breathe. How yearningly hot my flesh is! Doesn’t it feel that way?”

“It feels like a cold, wet fish gasping out of the water,” Studs muttered, retrieving his hand.

“What?"

“Nothing.” He shivered. “Let’s go in before we turn blue,” he suggested.

“Oh, all right.” Penny was disappointed.

However, her hopes revived when they were once again alone together in the bungalow. “Let me dry you,” she suggested, looping a turkish towel over his shoulders and pressing her scantily clad body against his scantily clad body. Studs downed a hooker of whiskey, felt the warmth spread through his scantily clad body — which began pressing back against her scantily clad body — and decided to relax and enjoy it.

“Ohh, you smell so masculine—like the sea,” Penny sighed.

“Like the Fulton Fish Market, you mean,” Studs observed, sniffing at his armpits. “My deodorant must have let me down.” He went into the bathroom and returned spritzing himself with an atomizer.

“But I liked the way you smelled,” Penny protested. “Oh, well.” She shrugged and got back on her ovarian track. “Why don’t you dry me off now?” she asked coyly.

Studs took the towel and made a few passes at her back. Their scantily clad bodies went back into action. Soon Studs had forgotten his pique at her upsetting of his seduction formula and was reacting in keeping with his name.

Yes, he went along for the “L” of it. Lush breasts hot against his chest, longing sighs tickling his ear, lascivious thighs entwining with his, little whimpers, lustful groans —lovely, lovely, lovely was the love-hungry lass. Liberties he took with her, laving her lips with lecherous tongue, locking loins licentiously, lingering over large roseates still lavender from the cold sea. Lively he became, licking the long, semi-lactating nipples, fingers leching over her firm lower quarters, leaning his lump of lust into her liquefying lily-valley. Lastly, he lowered her to the chaise longue, his lust loosed and lenghty now, lightning rod lifted loftily, limbs taut with libilo, love-aimed at her now binkini-less body. Thus, lustily, lustfully, lovingy, lewdly, lifting and lowering, they sank into the depths of “L”.

But not quite.

Studs was a creature of sexual habit. Although Penny was juicily ready, rote called for Studs to bestow one final caress to insure maximum excitation. Thus he stroked the curl-covered hillock of Venus, played flip-flop with the burning, quivering, slippery sentinel at the arch-lipped gates of her womanhood, and finally dipped a pair of well-manicured fingers into the funnel of her pulsating honeypot.

One knuckle deep, and he stopped. He paused. He withdrew. “No!” he said.

“No?” Penny whimpered. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just can’t do it. I just can’t make love to you.” He rose and stood beside her, looking down, firm, proud, naked.

“But why not?” Penny asked. Why not? Her undulating hips echoed the question? Why not? Her outstretched, clutching hand repeated it in Braille. Why not? Her tight-clenched honeypot emitted a little suction sound of frustration.

“Because -” he explained, drawing himself up to his full height and speaking with a voice filled with dignity and a sense of honor befitting a man who has unexpectedly reached the point at which he will not compromise and found the strength to stick by his guns regardless of the strongest temptation, “—because you are a virgin!!!

CHAPTER TWO

THERE IT was! Out in the open. Penny felt as if he’d slapped her across the face. She blushed with the shame of having her secret so brutally revealed.

She was a virgin!

Unloved!

Unwanted!

Unplucked!

Her rosebuds were ungathered. No man, seemingly, was interested in helping her gather them. And now, just when she was so close — so close—another rejection!

Her hips stopped undulating. Her hand unclutched. Her honeypot gave one last sputter and grew cool. Tears welled up in her eyes as she looked at Studs.

There he stood, no longer full of “L”, no longer leonine, lusty and lustful. The proof was visible, the log a log no longer, hanging loosely, languidly, logy and lacklustre now, limp as licorice. And the sight of it filled Penny with the knowledge of another kind of “L”.

Penny managed finally to speak. “Everybody has to start some place,” she said in a small, woebegone voice.

“Not with me.” Studs was firm.

“But won’t anybody have patience with a beginner?” she whimpered.

“You don’t understand.”

“Yes I do. You don’t want me. I understand that.”

“That’s not it.” Studs knew that Penny was waiting for him to go on, but he just didn’t know how to begin. It was all so complicated and it had started such a long time ago. The summer he was thirteen; yes, a long time ago . . .

It was the summer of Studs Levine’s bar-mitzvah. It was the swellest summer of his life. The days were filled with the old gang. What a great bunch of guys! Red Lipschitz and Runt Ruditzky and Weary Blumenkrantz and all the rest of them. Sure, he’d had to give two hours a day to Rabbi O’Toole—who was real strict the way goys always are when they convert— but the rest of the day was all games with the swellest bunch of fellows in the East Bronx. They’d hitch rides on the trolley under the el on White Plains Road; or they’d go to the Paradise Theatre over on Fordham and the Concourse and sit in the first row of the balcony so when the faggot usher came up to shoosh them they could pull his pants off and throw them over the railing into the orchestra; or they’d snitch bagles from the kosher bakery on Allerton Avenue and sneak down the cellar of one of their apartment houses and make bets on who could string more bagles on his you-know-what (Studs set the record with five one day after seeing an unexpurgated version of the movie Ecstasy starring Miss Hedy Lamarr in the buff; even at that early age he showed promise); or they’d go to the poolroom and hustle some rich kid from the West Side; or maybe they’d just sit around gassing with the local pusher, making side bets on how many needle-marks there were on his arm.

Yeah, those were the days. Studs got a lump in his throat just thinking about them. And the nights? Well, that was also the summer that Studs discovered sex. It came about oddly.

“So a few weeks from now you’ll be a man,” Papa Levine observed one night, “so when you grow up, what kind man you going to be?”

“I dunno?” said Studs, a product of his crummy, cruddy, underprivileged environment.

“Maybe a cutter like me?” Papa Levine said hopefully.

“Nah.”

“It’s an honest living, you shouldn’t knock it. But be what you want. Only one word of advice, learn to do something with your hands.”

That very night Studs felt a sudden tumescence in his you-know-what. Experimenting with his hands, he discovered how to relieve it. The sensation was so pleasant that he relieved it five times that very first night. By morning he had learned to do something with his hands. But was his father pleased? He certainly should have been, for it was very rare for Studs to act on his advice so quickly and diligently. Alas, Papa Levine was not pleased. He caught Studs at it in the bathroom one night and rewarded him with a mighty clop on the head and a few words of parental sex instruction.

“Don’t play with your schmuck, schmuck. Meshuginah in the kopf it’ll make you!”

After that Studs was more careful. He wasn’t afraid that beating his meat would drive him nuts. But he was sure that many more clops on the kopf from his old man would. Papa Levine was not one of your over-permissive parents, and he packed a wicked right.

So Studs was very careful. With no lock on the bathroom door, he had to be. What he did was to pretend to take a shower and pull it off behind the closed shower curtains and under cover of the running water. Soon he was taking three and four showers a night and Mama Levine was bragging about him to the neighborhood yentas: “Clean? That boy’s so clean, you wouldn’t believe it!” The other women on the block, who either had locks on their bathroom doors, or perhaps only sons come late to puberty, were indeed envious. However, with him occupying the bathroom so much, there were certain grumblings within the Levine family.

The main kvetch was Lascivia Levine, Studs’ sister, three years older than he. “Mama, make him get out,” she wailed night after night, “I have to do my hair.”

Instead of making such a tsimmes, you should be proud to have such a clean brother.”

“Proud, shmoud! What does he do in there so long?”

“What should he do? He scrubs. Soap and water. Better you should try some instead of that gook you shmear all aver your face. It might maybe get rid of the blackheads. ’

“Never mind my blackheads. Just make him get out. I’m all ready for bed and I have to set my hair.”

“You want him out, so you get him out. Such a hygienic boy, I wouldn’t bother.”

Fuming, Lascivia strode to the door and called to her brother. No answer. She called again, louder. Only the sound of running water. She screamed his name with all her might.

“Sharrup!” came Papa Levine’s voice from the bedroom, “You want they should hear you on Pelham Parkway.

Gritting her teeth, Lascivia went through the bathroom door. She was greeted by the sight of the closed shower curtains. She spoke her brother’s name again. Still no answer. Angry beyond the proscribed modesty of Jewish law which says that no good hamishe girl, single or, married, should look on the private parts of a Jewish man or boy, regardless of the relationship (even applying to husbands and wives), Lascivia threw back the shower curtains to confront her brother.

“You can’t keep hogging the bath—” she began. She stopped as she saw what he was doing.

It was more the sudden cold draft than his sister’s voice that made Studs reluctantly open his eyes. He blinked and looked again. Immediately, Lascivia became inextricably mixed up in the fantasy he’d been having. His hand kept moving as he stared at her with his jaw hanging loose with a new awareness.

His sister was as sexy as a shiksa whore! Why had he never noticed it before? Standing there, with her cheeks blushing and the sharp red tips of her little breasts swelling visibly under her transparent nightgown, she was more exciting by proximity than the celluloid Hedy Lamarr had ever been. Studs allowed his gaze to drop further down. The thick, curly black triangle of her girlhood was thrusting out against the nightie.

Their hands reached out at the same moment. Lascivia’s replaced Studs’ on his erect you-know,-what. His pulled up her nightie. Then his finger tangled in the sporran. Soon it was glistening with lotions of love.

After a while, Studs stepped from the tub and he and his sister sank silently to the bathmat. It was here that Papa Levine, his eyes half-closed with sleep, his reason for getting up dangling out of his pajama fly, almost tripped over them. He stood speechless, but his suddenly rigid rod gave him away before he could give vent to his anger. Lascivia noticed it with interest.

To both children’s surprise, Papa Levine didn’t explode. Perhaps it was his awareness of his own lack of control which made him take a tack that was strangely mild for him. “Go to bed, Lascivia,” he said. “In the morning Mama will talk to you. And you and I,” he told his son, “are gonna have a bissel chat right now."

Studs steeled himself for the knock on the noggin after his sister had gone. But it didn’t come. Instead, Papa Levine put his arm around his son’s shoulder in a way he never had before. “So it looks like you really are a mensch,” he began, “even before the bar-mitzvah.”

“I guess so, Pa.”

“Then it’s time, Mr. Mensch, that I told you about women. Some things you should know. First of all, you don’t just stick it wherever’s handy, you know. Not in your sister, not in Mama. They got a name for that -—insist, I think it is. So you keep hands off the family, I make myself clear?”

“Sure, Pa.” Then, as an afterthought: “What about cousins?”

“No cousins. Absolutely.”

“Okay,’ Pa.” Studs was disappointed. His second cousin Gertie was a real piece and he’d only recently started considering her as the one who might cooperate with him in following Weary Blumenkrantz’s advice to “break you cherry.”

“No cousins,” Papa Levine repeated, “even if they’re willing. Now listen, son, man to man, just like Judge Hardy in the movies, you know, I’m gonna give you very important advice. So clean out your ears.”

“I’m listening, Pa.”

“Good. Now, there are two kinds women in the world. There’s the kind who do and the kind who don’t. There’s the good girls and the bad girls. And your sister, incidentally,” Papa Levine said firmly and in contradiction of all the evidence, “is the kind who don’t. She’s a good girl. A good Jewish girl, you understand?”

“I understand, Pa.”

“Hokay. Now, a nice Jewish girl, even if she ain’t your sister, it’s hands off. You got that? What you do with the other kind, that’s your business. But the nice ones you leave alone.”

“Okay, Pa. Only—”

“No ‘Only’ !”

“But?”

“And no buts!”

“I just wanted to ask you—”

“So ask me. How else are you going to learn? Ask already.”

“Well, Pa, how do you tell the difference?”

“Such a question! How do you think? A girl does, she’s a tramp. That’s all!”

“Yeah, but how do you know before?”

“How should you know before?” Papa Levine shrugged. “An X-ray machine, you’re not. Just remember if she’s a good girl, don’t do it. Even if she’s willing, don’t do it.”

“But I don’t understand how you can tell.”

*“If she’s Jewish,” Papa Levine shouted, losing patience, “she’s a good girl!”

“And if she’s not Jewish?”

“A goyishe maiden? A son of mine should even think of filthying himself with a goy! Is this how I brought you up?”

“I’m sorry, Pa. Don’t get so excited.”

“I’m not excited!” Papa Levine’s voice rattled the pasadiche wine glasses in the kitchen cabinet. He brought it under control. “Just remember, no kitchy-koo with nice girls, Jewish or”—he heaved a great sigh of tolerance—“gentile. Virgins you leave strictly alone! And stay away from tramps, too, you bum. One thing we don’t need in this house is a case of clap, everybody should be afraid to sit on the toilet.”

“Okay, Pa.” Studs’ brain was whirling. He just wanted to get to bed and see if he could figure out the tangle of taboos for himself and still come up with something left over for his post-puberty days.

“I’m glad we had this talk.” Papa Levine was mollified by his son’s conciliatory tone. “Man to man,” he winked rapport, “I used to be a young buck myself. It’s not so long I can’t remember, you know. Hot-in-the pants, a young fella’s got to do something about it. I know. Only what you’re doing and who with and who not with. We understand each other, hey, son?”

“Sure, Pa.”

“So good night then. And”-—he winked at Studs — “don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“What wouldn’t you do Pa?”

“Not much, boy, not much!” He chuckled. “Believe me, it gives you a lot of leeway.” He puffed out his chest. “I’m not as old as maybe you think I am. Good night.”

“Good night, Pa.”

Studs heard his father go into his bedroom. A moment later he heard a loud belch.

“What’s the matter, Sam?” Mama Levine asked sleepily.

“Nothing. Kids. Aggravation. A little heartburn, maybe.”

“What's the matter with our kids?”

“I’ll tell you in the morning.”

“You should stop picking on the boy, Sam. You should be proud. The cleanest boy in the neighborhood, and he’s your son.”

By way of answer, Papa Levine belched again, a little louder this time.

“You got heartburn, Sam?”

“I said I did.”

“So from what? From my cooking you don’t get heartburn. It’s that garbage you eat downtown. It’s bad?”

“It’s heartburn. How else should a man know he’s Jewish?”

“I’ll fix you a little chicken soup to take it away.”

Studs heard his mother puttering around the kitchen. Then it was quiet. He lay awake for a long time, sorting out what his father had told him. Finally, he fell asleep…

A long time ago! And yet now, sitting across from Penny in the lengthening silence of her disappointment and despair, he could remember it like it was yesterday. And it was that night that his father had given him the one code he’d never broken. It was a point of honor with Studs that he never bedded down a good girl, that he refused to be a de-virginizer, that he kept the faith of his father. Maybe he’d broken the other articles of that faith, but on this point Studs had stood fast, and he was proud of himself.

And never prouder than this day. For the truth was that up until now the point had never been put to the test. Jewess and shiksa alike, Studs had up until now encountered only one of the two kinds of girls his father had categorized. He’d met only the bad girls. Indeed, he’d become convinced that the other kind were some sort of old Jewish myth his father had dreamed up. But now, here was Penny to prove to him that there really were virgins in the world. It was like discovering that there really was a Jewish Santa Claus. And she had helped him prove to himself that when it really counted, he had the kind of willpower Papa Levine would have been proud of him for displaying. He looked at her and filled up with emotional gratitude and warmth.

She looked back at him with eyes red from crying. “Why is my life so filled with heartache,” she muttered more to herself than to Studs.

“Would you like a little chicken soup? It helps.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Chicken soup. You said you had heartburn. It really does help it.”

“Heartache, not heartburn.”

“Oh. Well, maybe the chicken soup would help, anyway.” Studs thought nostalgically of his mother.

“No, thanks.”

They fell silent again. And suddenly Studs had a vision, a great vision, a revelation. It was as if his dead father’s voice was whispering in his ears. There was the echo of kaddish in the air, and the faint scent of Friday night candles. Yet it was so much more powerful than that that Studs looked around automatically for the other nine men of the minyan to confirm the shadowy face of his father before him, to give the pious nod to the words, somber and hollow from the grave.

“A virgin; a good girl; that’s the kind of girl you marry, my son!”

And Studs found himself on his knees before Penny, tears of love welling up in his eyes, the exaltation of religious inspiration making his voice tremble. “Penny, oh, Penny, will you marry me?”

“What? What did you say?” She stared at him as if he’d gone mad.

“I said will you marry me? I love you. I want to marry you.”

“You’ve flipped!”

“Only for you, my darling. Will you? Say you will!”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

Studs became aware that his knees ached from kneeling. He looked around the room. No vision. He cocked his ears coldly, but he couldn’t hear his father’s voice. What the hell was he doing, anyway? Slowly, he got to his feet. “Why not?” he asked Penny automatically, although he no longer really cared. “Why won’t you marry me?”

“For one thing, because we couldn’t make it before.”

“That’s no reason.”

“I think it’s a very good reason. But I’ve got better ones. Would you like to hear them?”

“Sure,” Studs said woodenly, beginning to be relieved at her attitude and increasingly more amazed at himself for having raised the question of marriage.

“All right. Because I don’t want to throw my life away by becoming some man’s marital slave. That’s one thing I’m sure about!”

“Marital slave? What the hell are you talking about? I asked you to be my wife, not pull an oar in my galley.”

“Oh, I know what happens to women once they get married. That’s the end. A girl might just as well drop dead and bury herself right then and there!”

“And just how do you know what happens to a girl when she gets married?” Studs asked.

“Well - From reading, for one thing.”

“Reading? Reading what?”

“Betty Friedan, for one thing.”

“Never heard of her. Who is she?”

“Only the author of The Feminine Mystique, probably the most important book for women written in this century. It’s every woman’s Emancipation Proclamation, but I Wouldn’t expect you to know about that.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve run across a feminist or two in my travels.”

“Run over them, more likely. That’s what men like you try to do to women. Well, you’re not going to do it to me! I plan to live my life right out of Sex and the Single Girl. Marriage indeed! I want to live—live! live! live!—not get married. No woman worth her salt would marry a man!”

“So who would she marry, then?”

“Very funny. But you know what I mean. Any woman worthy of the name values her independence.”

“You know, I’m beginning to resent this,” Studs said. “After all, my mother was a married woman.”

“Are you sure?” Penny asked sweetly.

“All right! Just cut that out! My mother was a damn good wife and mother, and what’s more she was very happy to be just that!”

“She was brainwashed, that’s all.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just like Betty Friedan says, women are hampered from the start because from the first they’re taught to accept their role in life. Psychologically, biologically and sociologically, our society puts them down from the day they’re born and does its utmost to hold them down.”

“You’ll have to elaborate on that.”

“All right. First, psychologically,”—Penny ticked off the points on her fingers-—“women are told that every single one of them suffers from penis envy. No exceptions. And who originated this new theory to convince them to stay in their place? Sigmund Freud—a man, naturally. Second, biologically, scientists, male of course, keep piling up evidence to prove that we’re the weaker sex. Man is physically stronger—not necessarily true, incidentally, since little girls are never given the opportunities to develop their muscles the way growing boys are -- and therefore he is entitled to dominate woman. Third, sociologically, the woman is relegated to the home. That’s her place. She’s fit only for the company of squawling brats and babies in manure-spread diapers. Any attempt to avoid this prison, or to break loose from it, results in the serious questioning of her femininity. Why does she want to compete with a man? Has she latent Lesbian tendencies? Doesn’t she realize that working women deprive some man of a job? And what’s more —"

“Wait!” Studs held up his hands. There was an icy glint in his eye and his voice was carefully under control. “I’ve heard it all before. And from dames even more belligerent about their deprived status than you. Oh, some of it’s true enough. But only from the most selfish viewpoint.”

“Selfish! Selfish! . . .” Penny sputtered.

“Yes, selfish. Not one of you dames ever tried applying the same ridiculous yardstick to men. If you did, you might think twice about all this whining.”

“We’re not whining! We’re just starting to demand our rights!”

“What about the man’s rights? What about his deprived status? What about the masculine mystique?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“No? Then I’ll tell you. Just sit and listen for a minute. You might learn something.”

“I doubt it,” Penny said haughtily.

“We’ll sec. All right. I.et’s start at the beginning. Let's consider the arbitrary masculine role thrust upon a man by society."

"There is no such thing.”

“Isn’t there? Just listen." Studs rook a deep breath. “A man takes the woman out, right? He picks her up and takes her home. He foots the bill. He brings her flowers, or candy. He has to ask her for a date—which puts him in the position of a beggar, and Milady in the position of bestowing upon him an act of charity. Just once I’d like some dame to take me home after a night on the town and try to edge her way into my apartment!”

“A fat lot of good it would do her if she did,” Penny interrupted pointedly.

Studs ignored her and continued. “And then take all these masculine activities that women are always complaining they’re barred from. Well, what about all the feminine activities that are off-limits to us men? I might like to go to a baby shower, or a sorority initiation. I might like to join the League of Women Voters. I might like to satisfy my curiosity about the Ladies’ Room at the Radio City Music Hall!”

“It’s quite a sight,” Penny admitted.

“I’ll bet. Anyway, you mentioned penis envy before. But what about bosom envy? Do you know that the most traumatic experience in an adolescent boy’s life is when he glances down at himself for the first time and realizes there’s something missing? Do you know what it feels like to be told you’ll never wear a brassiere?

“Psychology!” Studs warmed to his subject. “From the first men are barred from the woman’s world. They’re conditioned to accept the fact that no matter how they work toward it, they’ll never be chosen as ‘Playgirl of the Month’. No man’s picture will ever appear as the centerspread in Playboy. No man dares style his hair in a bouffant. Nobody whistles when a man adjusts his garters.”

“I didn’t know men still wore garters.”

“Sometimes they do.” Studs waved the question aside. “And biology! Oh, there’s a female-favoring field if there ever was one. Women are the weaker sex, they tell us, and we’re supposed to care for them. Weaker sex! Did you ever try to unscrew a bottletop screwed on by a woman?”

“I’m well aware of your screwing problems,” Penny told him.

Studs refused to be sidetracked into an exchange of sarcasms. “Weaker sex!” he repeated scathingly. “Every actuarial table ever figured tells us that women live longer than men and are generally healthier.

“And, oh, yes, sociology. Well, let’s just look at the sociological restrictions on man. He’s a victim of anatomical determinism. Right from birth, he’s sexually segregated. He can never be the mother when he plays house with his little friends. Later, society tells him he can’t join the Girl Scouts-—no matter how much more congenial he may find them than the Boy Scouts. When he grows up, an occupation which embraces one half of the country’s population is barred to him.”

“What’s that?” Penny asked.

Studs noticed that she asked it through clenched teeth. Obviously, his diatribe was making her pretty angry. But he was past caring. He was filled with the justness of his argument. “Housewife,” he explained. “And that’s not the half of it. Society dooms man to be always a taxpayer and never an exemption. His work may be a bore, but if he complains, the female-oriented sociologists tell him that this is his role in life and he must learn to accept it. Then one day he drops dead of a heart attack. But his wife lives on another twenty years, spending his insurance money and complaining to the end about how she never fulfilled her potential.”

“And she probably never has,” Penny insisted hotly.“

“Her potential? That’s a laugh! What about his potential? What about all the booties he never knitted? What about all the hen parties he never went to? What about all the babies he never had?”

“Are you kidding?” Penny was filled with scathing anger at the heresies to which she’d been listening. “No, you’re just naturally fat," she answered her own question sarcastically. “Of all the utter hogwash I’ve ever —"

“Hogwash! Hogwash!" Studs was shouting, the righteous light of the fanatic in his eye now. “Let me tell you something, you-you woman, you! Our day is coming! Man is waking up! We’re going to demand our rights! Equality of the sexes, nothing less! Sociology be damned! Psychology be damned! Biology be damned!”

“That last one figures,” Penny shouted back, her anger turning to rage at the threats he seemed to be hammering home at her.

“The hell with it! The hell with you!” Studs raised his fist and shook it to deliver the last of his oration to an invisible audience composed of the men of the world. “Arise ye prisoners of womanization! Arise ye wretched of this woman’s world! Arise and claim your rightful place in the delivery rooms and maternity wards of the earth!”

With this last speech, Penny had pulled on her bikini. Now she confronted him, livid and trembling. “Just you try to claim that place!” She spat the words at him. “Just try! The only way you get there is in some woman’s belly! But not this woman. I’ll bear no man-children. And certainly not for the likes of you!” She paused and shot her last arrow bull’s-eye to the groin. “If you ask me, your whole theory is homosexual!” she told him. And she wheeled on her heel and marched out the front door of the bungalow, slamming it behind her. There was the echo of Phil Spittalny’s all-girl orchestra playing the Marsielles in her wake.

However, once outside, Penny’s rousing exit speech was dimmed by the realization of the predicament she was in. Her overnight bag and her clothes were still inside. So was her pocketbook and the little purse containing her mad money. What on earth was she going to do, dressed in a bikini and without a red cent?

No matter! She squared her shoulders resolutely and looked toward the setting sun of dusk over the ocean. If necessary, she would sleep on the public beach. She would never go back into that cottage, never give Studs the pleasure of pointing out just how feminine it was of her to have stormed out without clothes, or money. Never!

And so, as the sun sank slowly in the west, this brave young girl, this latter-day Joan of Arc, this feminist fighter of the good fight, held her head high and prepared to battle a hostile world with nothing save the bikini on her rump!

CHAPTER THREE

ARVERNE. THE RIVIERA of the Rockaways. The Cote D’Azur of the Grand Concourse jet set. The kosher cooking Cannes of the Brooklyn vacationer. Arverne. Paradise perfumed by knishes frying in deep fat.

Walking the streets in the deepening dusk, Penny’s nostrils quivered at the odor. She was hungry. But she was broke. Chin up, rump still held high, she dismissed the longing for food from her mind. She was determined to be brave, yet —

Yet she was alone in a strange land; alone without money, without clothes, without friends. And the realization of her predicament sank in and sapped her courage. What was she going to do? What could she do?

She did what any red-blooded American feminist does when confronted by a knotty problem. She sat down and wept. She wailed, she cried, she tore her hair. Ah, me, what could she do? Poor woebegone figure huddled on a bus-stop bench and crying her pretty blue eyes out!

The car was traveling fast, but it braked sharply, swerved expertly and pulled up short alongside the bench. The woman at the wheel looked out at the pathetic Penny. “Trouble, honey?” she asked in a deep, husky voice. “Anything I can do?”

“No,” Penny started to answer, still sniffling. “I don’t think there’s any—” Then she thought better of it. She was in no position to turn down any help that was offered. “Could you lend me fifteen cents for the subway? No, wait, I mean thirty cents. I forgot it’s a double fare. If you could just do that, give me your name and address, I swear to you that I’ll mail the money back to you tonight, just as soon as I get home.”

The woman smiled at Penny’s fervent insistence on honesty. “I guess I can take a chance on thirty cents,” she said. “But you really don’t have to worry about sending it back. I can afford it. Here.” She fished out some coins and held out her hand to Penny. “Just take it.”

“No.” Penny resolutely put her hands behind her back. “I won’t take it unless you give me your name and address so I can send it back to you.”

“And me without my lamp.” The woman laughed. Penny looked at her, not comprehending.

“I mean like Diogenes, you know,” the woman explained. “Looking for an honest man. I wasn’t even looking, and it seems I’ve found one.”

“I’m not a man,” Penny said more vehemently than she’d meant to, still feeling her resentment at the argument with Studs.

“I noticed that first thing,” the woman cooed. “If you’d been a man, I wouldn’t have stopped,” she added in a tone of voice which seemed a little odd to Penny. She seemed to be saying something else. But her tone was quite normal when she continued. “All right, then, so you’re an honest woman. My address is 482 West 95th Street, Manhattan. And the name is Well.”

“Would you write it down, please?” Penny said, accepting the coins. “And thank you, Miss Wells.”

“Well. Not Wells. No ‘s’. Just Well.” She fished in her handbag for a pencil.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Miss Well,” Penny said. “My name is Penny Candie,” she added.

“Hi, Penny. You don’t mind if I call you Penny, do you? Last names are so formal.”

“I don’t mind.” Penny paused. “But I don’t know your first name,” she pointed out. ‘

“It’s Wellesley. But nobody ever calls me that. It sounds so institutional-like being called Radcliff, or Vassar, you know? They call me Well.”

“Well?”

“Well.”

“Well, well, well,” Penny mused.

“No. Just Well Well. No middle name. Oh, I really have one, but I never use it. Just the initial sometimes.”

“What’s the initial?” Penny asked.

“W.”

“But it doesn’t stand for Well, right?”

“Right. It stands for Willa.”

“Wellesley Willa Well.” Penny spoke the name aloud.

“Just forget the Willa, will you? I told you I never use it.”

“I’m sorry. Just Well W. Well?”

“Just Well Well.”

“Well well.”

“Well to you. I told you, I don’t like formality,” Well said intimately.

“Well. All right, Well. And thank you very much for the loan.”

“You’re quite welcome. But what are you going to do now?”

“Take the subway home.”

“In that outfit?” Well Well stared at the expanse of Penny pulchritude overflowing the tiny bikini. “You Won’t get very far.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Well Well began narcissistically, “if you don’t get raped on the subway, you’re sure to get picked up by the transit police for indecent exposure.”

“Oh, dear, I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Look, just where do you live?”

“Manhattan.”

“So do I. And that’s where I’m going. Why don’t you just get in and I’ll give you a lift back to town?”

“Oh, thank you,” Penny said gratefully. She carefully handed the thirty cents back to Well Well and got into the front seat of the little sports convertible beside her.

“My pleasure.” Well Well shifted gears and her hand fell quite naturally on Penny’s naked thing and remained there. Penny thought nothing of it. The car was so small that there really didn’t seem any other logical place for Well Well to park her hand. And besides, they were both girls, weren’t they? It wasn’t as if Well Well was a strange man. She was a strange woman, that was all. “Anyway, I’m glad of the company,” Well added. “All day today I’ve felt this welling up of loneliness.” She chuckled. “A Welling Well, that’s me today.”

“If it was me it would be a wailing Well,” Penny sighed.

“Oh, aren’t you adorable!” Well pinched her thigh lightly and the flesh flushed. “Right now,” she said meaningfully, “I’m a wishing Well.”

It went over Penny’s head. What an odd woman! She thought. But nice. Still, her hair, her clothes, her manner were very strange. That too-short bob combed straight back without a part-—it was like something out of the flapper era. And that unstylish tweed suit she was wearing—too hot for summer—and with a jacket that seemed designed to make her small chest look even flatter than it was. No make-up, either, and the hair a dull, dandruffy brown, as if she’d never even heard of shampoo. And the clipped, English way she had of speaking— like a speech teacher in one of those exclusive finishing schools for young ladies.

“What sort of work do you do?” Penny asked to make conversation.

“I’m a speech teacher in one of those exclusive finishing schools for young ladies,” Well told her.

“Oh! Are you British?”

“Yes, I am. Why? Does it show? It shouldn’t. I’ve been over here for quite a while now.”

“I like the way it sounds.”

“You do? Well, aren’t you nice?” She spoke so warmly that Penny blushed at the compliment. Well noticed and laughed delightedly. “What a pretty Penny you are,” she said, enjoying it when Penny blushed the more. “Tell me, why were you crying back there?”

“Because I had no money and no clothes.”

“How did you get into such a predicament? Wait! Don’t tell me! It was a man, wasn’t it? All men are beasts! Filthy beasts! Flaunting their male superiority!”

“You can say that again!” Penny agreed bitterly.

“Flaunting their male superiority!” Well repeated agreeably. “Tell me, dear, did he try to take advantage of you? Is that what happened?”

“Well, not exactly,” Penny hedged.

“Oh, I like the way you say my name.”

“What?”

“Well.”

“Well What?”

“Well. My name.” Well explained. “I like the way you say it.”

“Oh.” Penny was still confused.

“Never mind. Skip it. And you don’t have to tell me what happened, either. You’re really much more alluring as a mystery girl, anyway.”

“Gee, there’s nothing mysterious about me,” Penny said.

“Really? Then tell me all about yourself. Where do you come from? What do you do for a living? Who are you?”

So Penny talked about herself and her background and her job, and before she knew it, she had talked her way through the Queens Midtown Tunnel and they were in Manhattan. “Where would you like to be dropped?” Well asked, politely interrupting Penny’s chatter.

“My place, I guess. Eighty-third Street between York and First Avenues.” Penny sighed. “Oh, how I dread going home.”

“Ahh, I see a glimmering of light. You have to face your husband, and you won’t be able to explain how you lost your clothes. You poor little thing! First taken advantage of by one man, and now facing a beating by another. All men really are beasts!”

“No. I’m not married,” Penny told her. “It’s not that. It’s my landlady I don’t want to face.”

“Your landlady?”

“Yes. She’s a snoopy enough old gossip as it is. But when she gets a look at me coming home like this, she’ll really have something to tell the neighbors.”

“Can’t you just sneak in?”

“No. I don’t have my key. It’s in my pocketbook back at—where I was. I’ll have to ring her bell and get her to let me in.”

“Oh. But what a shame. How embarrassing. Look here, wait a minute now —“

Well took a deep puff as if for inspiration from the foot-long cigarette holder clenched between her teeth. “l’ve got an idea. Why don’t you come with me to my place? I can loan you some clothes and then you can go home.”

“But wouldn’t that be embarrassing for you? I mean, suppose somebody saw me with you dressed like this?”

“Nobody has to see us. I can pull the car right into the basement garage and we can go up in the service elevator to my apartment. What do you say?”

“What can I say but thank you. Thank you so much,” Penny said emotionally. “I don’t know when I’ve met anybody so kind.”

“Nonsense. It’s just that we girls have to stick together, that’s all. No pun intended,” she added under her breath. “It’s my pleasure to be able to enjoy more of your company, my dear.” She stroked Penny’s thigh reassuringly, edging crotchwise with cagy, trembling fingers.

Twenty minutes later they were cozily ensconced in Well Well’s digs. “You can have your pick of the wardrobe in just a moment, “ Well said hospitably. “But first, would you like a drink?” '

“I could certainly use one,” Penny said gratefully.

Well opened a fifth of gin and poured the contents into a large pitcher. She passed the vermouth bottle over it for tradition’s sake and put in some ice. Then she stirred gently, poured out two water glasses full and dropped an olive in each. “Here we are.” She handed one of the glasses to Penny.

Penny took a deep sip. “Wow!” she said when she was able to speak. “You sure mix a wicked drink.”

“I’m a wicked girl.” Well giggled coyly. She raised her glass. “Down the hatch,” she said, and drained the contents.

“Bottoms up!” Penny followed her example.

“Let’s hope so,” Well murmured to herself, eyeing Pemiy hungrily. “Let us hope so.”

“What?” Penny was feeling a little dizzy from downing the mammoth drink on an empty stomach. But she felt good, too, as the warmth of the liquor spread out from her precious little hollow tum-tum and made her tingle.

“Nothing.” Well took her glass and refilled it. “Drink up,” she told Penny.

“All right,” Penny replied obediently, raising the glass to her lips again. “I’ll drink up before the well runs dry.” She choked on her drink. “Sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I wasn’t referring to you. I was—” She waved her hand helplessly and swallowed some more martini. “You know,” she said vaguely.

“Yes, I know.” Well soothed her. “And you don’t have to worry about this Well running dry, my little kitten. This Well is self-lubricating. As a matter of fact, at the moment,” she added, allowing her shrewd little eyes to run over the lush contours of Penny’s bikini-clad body, “this Well is a veritable greasepit!”

“Huh?” Penny felt as if her head was really spinning now. She set her glass down on the table and stared at it blankly.

“Never mind, my sweet. Tell me, do you like to dance?”

“Oh, yes. I just love to go dancing.”

“Well, then, why don’t we dance here?” Well put a record on the hi-fi and soon the room was filled with the low, sensual sounds of a slow tango. “Let’s dance,” she told Penny.

Penny looked around her vaguely. “With whom?” she said. “There are no men here.”

“We don’t need men. Not for dancing. Not for anything. Come on. I’ll lead.” She held out her arms to Penny.

“All right.” Penny got up and walked toward her.

“Just a minute.” Well took off her tweed jacket. There was a stiff white shirt under it. Under the white shirt, it looked as if she wasn’t wearing anything, if Penny was any judge. The faintest outlines of small, long breasts, very lowslung, were visible, and that was all.

A moment later, as they started dancing, Penny’s judgment was confirmed. Held close in Well’s arms, she could tell for sure that the older girl wasn’t wearing any bra. Still, Penny felt very warm and secure and cared for in Well’s embrace.

“I feel very warm and secure and cared for,” she managed to articulate her thoughts to Well.

“You mean in my embrace?” Well murmured.

“Yes. I feel like a child. Like you were my mother looking after me in my time of .need.”

“That’s the old Oedi-pull,” Well observed. “But beware of it, my child. In the end, Oedipus rooks. Let us hope ours will be a more satisfy-—umm—worthwhile relationship.” She fell silent a moment. Then—“You certainly are a good dancer, Penny,” she said. “I’m really enjoying this.”

“So am I. You’re being so nice to me. You’re really swell, Well.”

“It’s my pleasure.”

“Gee, this music is so slow and dreamy, isn’t it? You hardly have to move to it at all.”

“You just sort of stand there and just sort of do it,” Well said, grinding her pelvis even harder against the bottom of Penny’s bikini.

They danced silently for a while. Well closed her eyes and reveled in the feeling of Penny’s liquor-warmed, young, vibrant body pressed to hers. Penny snuggled close, feeling increasingly more secure, but quite dizzy from the liquor now and concentrating on following Well’s lead without losing her balance. Well had maneuvered one of her hands against Penny’s breast and she was squeezing it rhythmically in time to the music. A thrill went through her belly as she felt the nipple grow hot and hard under her grasp.

“You must be getting tired,” Penny said after a while.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you’re breathing so hard.”

“Oh, you are precious!” Well stopped dancing and impulsivelly put her arms around Penny’s shoulders and gave her a long, deep, soul-searching kiss.

“Why did you do that?” Penny asked when it was over, her blue eyes wide with wonder, her voice the voice of puzzled innocence. Also, she was a little breathless now herself.

“Why not? We’re friends, aren’t we? Didn’t you like it?”

“Yes, I did. Only—”

“Only what? There’s no harm in two girls kissing, is there? You see women doing it all the time, right out on the street.”

“Oh, sure, that’s all right. But the way you—”

“Well, then —?” Well interrupted her. She shut off Penny’s protests with another long, lingering kiss. “Let’s sit down on the couch,” she suggested after it was over. “It’s more comfortable there.”

Swaying a little and feeling decidedly tiddly, Penny gratefully leaned back on the sofa. Well sat down beside her, very close, and put her arm around the sweet young virgin’s shoulders. She pulled Penny’s head against her breast and stroked her smooth, alabaster brow. “My poor baby, you’re tired, aren’t you?” she crooned.

“Oh, yes. That feels so good.” Penny stretched out so that her head was in Well’s lap. “Don’t stop.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t.” Well massaged Penny’s shoulders and then her hands drifted farther downward to cup the delicious pear-shaped breasts.

“What are you doing?” Penny asked woozily.

“I’m just giving you a massage, baby. It will take all that nasty old tension out of your precious little body. Now you just relax and leave everything to Well.” She reached under Penny’s back and untied her bikini halter.

“Why did you do that?” Penny asked dreamily.

“The better to see you with, my child.”

“What?” Penny opened her eyes. The words had a familiar ring. There was something vaguely ominous about them.

“Hush, now. It was cutting into your lovely white ivory skin. How can I help you relax if you’re all tied up by tight clothes? There now. That’s it. Just close your eyes.” Well nimb removed the bottom of Penny’s bikini.

“Should I be lying here naked like this?” Penny asked with sweet, dimpled innocence.

“And why not? We’re both girls, aren’t we? No nasty man is going to lay eyes on you here. You can be sure of that!” Well’s hands hovered over Penny’s breasts with the fingers crooked like hooks, and then descended in unison to grapple the twin red crests. Soon they were even redder, and quivering with a life and length of their own in the night air. Unable to contain herself, Well swooped down vampirelike on the virginal young body and caught one of the delicious breast-tips between her tongue-laved lips.

“What are you doing now?” Penny wanted to know.

“Just kissing you.” Well had to spit it out quickly to talk, but she immediately recaptured the perfect tip of the perfect pink roseate set in the perfect center of the perfect round breast.

“Oh. But why there?” Penny wanted to know.

“My, will you listen to the child! So full of questions! What difference does it make whether I kiss you here or on the lips?”

“It makes a difference,” Penny said, blushing even in her drunkenness to realize she was panting.

“Will you please just relax? If you must have an explanation, I’m kissing you here to stimulate the circulation. One can only be relaxed when the blood flows freely.”

“It makes me tingle.”

“It’s supposed to. That’s what happens when the blood flows freely.” Well switched breasts and suckled contentedly at the other one for a while. Then she lowered her lips, running them over the soft curve of the belly, nipping at the navel, combing the feather-light blonde curls over the plump mound, and finally tongue-dipping to taste the sweetness of the forbidden fountain itself. After a few moments she raised her head to relieve her jaw muscles, which were beginning to feel the strain of her activity. “There now, doesn’t that stimulate your circulation?” she asked Penny. “Isn’t your blood flowing freely now?”

“Well, something’s flowing, but I don’t really think it’s my blood.”

“Don’t worry about that. All the juices of the body have to flow if you’re going to relax.”

“I don’t really feel very relaxed. But don’t stop. After all, I was pretty tense to start with. Just be careful though, will you? You have a sharp tongue. And” — Penny blushed prettily—“I’m still a virgin.”

“I’ll be careful,” Well promised. She returned to her ministrations, parting the red, red nether-lips and capturing the rigid, wriggly little sentinel at the gates of Penny’s femininity between gentle teeth. She punished him until he puffed out his chest even more, until, it seemed as if he must break through the very skin, the so tender skin, which was his uniform.

Penny squirmed now. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut. Her brain roared with a combination of martinis and passion. Her hips arched, her thighs quivered, and she came down hard with both hands on the back of Well’s neck. She lost all consciousness of anything except the hungry mouth at her equally hungry funnel of womanhood. And then she was a geyser composed of mighty spurts of ecstasy, a string of firecrackers—no, dynamite—exploding in rapid succession with each blast mightier than the last, her body an erupting volcano shaken by a series of searing, molten quakes. It was Nirvana! It was Paradise! It was Heaven!

And then, suddenly, it was—as Papa Levine might have put it—a drek-sack full of tsouris.

“Well!” The voice came from the just-opened door to the apartment. It was more than shocked; it was damned mad.

Well’s head shot up fast, snagging a tendril of hair in her teeth on the way.

“Ouch!” Penny was rudely tumbled from the peak of her volcano. “Be careful, will you?”

But Well wasn’t paying any attention to her. She was staring with chagrin at the figure of the woman in the doorway.

“Well, Well, what have you got to say for yourself? How do you explain this? What’s the matter, has the pussy still got your tongue? Are you ill? You don’t look well, Well. Come on now, aren’t you going to say anything?”

“What—What —” Well gurgled. “What are you doing here? You weren’t supposed to be back before tomorrow night. I didn’t expect you until then.”

“Obviously!” The woman bit the word off and spat it at Well. She slammed the door behind her and marched into the room. She stood over the two of them on the couch with her hands on her hips and fire in her eyes. “If you had expected me,” she told Well, “you wouldn’t be shacking up with this little slut here. The minute I turn my back, you—”

“Just a minute,” Penny interrupted indignantly. “What right have you got to call me names?”

“Every right, you little bitch! Whose apartment do you think you’re in? Whose sofa do you think you’re having your cutey-cute little orgasms on? Who do you think pays the rent around here? Well? On her piddling salary from the debutante factory she works at? Not on your life! I pay the bills. And I pay them because she’s my woman. So what right have you got—”

“Wait.” Penny held up her hand firmly. “You’re under a misconception. I know it must have looked peculiar, but all that was happening was Well here was giving me a massage so I could relax.”

“A mouth massage? Are you kidding?”

“No,” Penny insisted. “That’s what it was. You see, I was feeling very tense and—”

“Is she for real?” The woman looked at Well and jerked her thumb toward Penny.

“You see, I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately-—” Penny tried to go on, but her voice was quavery with liquor and sex.

“Where the hell did you ever find her? She doesn’t even look like a dyke!”

“I’m not Jewish myself,” Penny said haughtily, “but I really do have strong objections to insulting people on the basis of their race or religion. I don’t think a person should stand idly by when that happens. One must raise one’s voice,” she shouted, “and speak out for tolerance for people of all faiths.”

“Oh my god! You really picked a Lulu this time, Well. you’d better watch yourself. One of these days you’re going to be arrested for molesting squares.”

“Oh, why don’t you leave her alone,” Well said. “She’s just a sweet young kid!”

“I’ll ’sweet young kid’ her. If she isn’t out of here in two minutes flat, I’ll scratch out every eye in her head. Don’t forget, this is my apartment!”

“Well!“ Penny exclaimed, not speaking to Well Well, but rather of her feelings. “I certainly know when I’m not wanted.” Hands shaking, she started to pull on her bikini.

“I’m really ashamed of you,” Well told the woman. How can you call yourself a butch and behave like this? She asks for shelter, and you give her a stone.” Well’s voice became impassioned. “Pitilessly naked in the world, and you cast her out. Shame! For shame, I say! Give her also the right to her existence!”

“Never mind, Well.” Penny was at the door now. “I’m leaving. I just want you to know that I appreciate your kindness and I’m very sorry if I caused you any trouble. I’m sorry it had to end this way.” She lifted her chin proudly and left with dignity, closing the door softly behind her.

But out in the hall, her chin sagged neckward again. She was still in a terrible predicament. How could she ever get all the way from Riverside Drive to her apartment on the East Side without any clothes or money? She should really have asked Well for something to wear. But how could she, with that vulgar harridan screaming like a banshee about how she owned everything in the apartment? No, she’d just have to try to make it home as best she could. Tired from sex now, and still a little drunk, Penny pressed the button for the service elevator.

She got off in the basement and went out as she’d come in, through the garage. It was dark now, and the street looked fairly deserted. That was good. Penny slipped out of the garage and started up the block, keeping to the shadows provided by the sides of the building and avoiding the pools of light cast by the street- lamps.

She made it to West End Avenue without incident. Nor did she have any trouble getting from there to Broadway. Here, the brightly lit intersection presented a problem, but Penny simply lurked in the shadows, waiting for the light, and then darted across the street as fast she could run. She vanished into the side-street murk of the block leading to Amsterdam Avenue. That block presented no difficulties, but the next one, running from Amsterdam to Columbus, found Penny’s flight turning into a nightmare.

The nightmare started when the Puerto Rican girl sprang up in front of Penny like some terrible vision of vengeance. She appeared so suddenly that Penny almost tripped over her. Her face was spread in a threatening, gold-toothed leer. Her hands were on her plump hips, her feet spaced well apart like a boxer getting set to deliver a knockout blow. One hand flashed from her hip to appear, palm upheld, in front of the large breasts bobbling loose from the extremely low-cut blouse she was wearing. The hand stopped Penny in her tracks.

“Hey, keed, why you think you do here? This, she’s mi calle. No chicks hustle here but Maria. You savvy?”

“No, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Penny was frightened, but she found the courage to try to step around the girl and continue up the block.

But the girl moved quickly to block her path. “Hablas Espanol?” she asked Penny.

“Un poco. A year in high school —” Penny started to explain.

She was too late. The girl unleashed a fiery tirade of rapid Spanish that was incomprehensible to the bewildered Penny. It was accompanied by threatening gestures and flashing eyes and frequently punctuated by such words as “puta” and “perra.” Finally, the girl scream-chattered to a climax, ran her finger pointedly over her throat and fell silent.

“I’m afraid you’re going a little too fast for me,” Penny admitted. “Maybe we’d better stick to English.”

“Hokey-doke. I tell her in Engleesh. You wanna hustle, you go over to Broadway, or maybe better the casa up the block. Here, she’s my territory. I pay the protection. Nobody gonna play me for no bobo. What you take her for? You think Maria’s got no amigos? She got plenty. They look out for her. You dress up like a beach puta an’ you in business. That what her think? Even you on the hook legit, I no stand for you ’round here dress like that. She’s unfair competition, that’s what she is. You no gonna get away with it. Now you just take her ass outa here in wan beeg hurry, or I gonna chop it off.”

“Now see here!” Penny had had just about all the pushing around she was ready to take for one night. First Studs, then Well’s friend, and now this girl. She just didn’t want to be pushed around any more, and that was all there was to it!

But that wasn’t all there was to it. And Penny quickly decided she was quite ready to be pushed around again when the girl, reacting to her hostile tone, reached quickly between her legs and came up with a pushbutton knife. The blade flashed open and glittered in the darkness. The girl moved towards Penny with the panther-stride of a practiced street-fighter. “You gonna vamoose, now? Or I gonna slice her boobs off?” she asked softly.

Horror-stuck, Penny backed away.

“Vaya! Faster!” The girl lunged towards her suddenly.

Penny turned and bolted.

The girl was hot on her heels. “This, he’s Maria’s territory. You remember that, or I gonna tear out your ovario.” she shouted, chasing Penny down the block toward Central Park. “Yankee, go home!” she screamed as Penny plunged into the bushes and kept running.

Finally, Penny was sure the girl was no longer chasing her. She stopped and leaned against a tree to get her breath. That’s when the true terror of her predicament struck her.

She was lost! She’d been so anxious to get away from the girl that she hadn’t noticed which way she’d come, or which way she was going. She was lost in the night-time jungle which was New York’s Central Park.

In the distance she could hear the sound of music coming from the concert on the mall. But she couldn’t tell from which direction it was coming. Music to be mugged by!

The sweet young thing, half-naked and frightened as a rabbit, trembled against the tree and couldn’t help thinking of all the horrors which the night-time park might have in store for her. She’d entered the park a virgin and alive. Would she leave it the same way?

CHAPTER FOUR

A PENNY FOR your thoughts. A scent of summer violence heavy in the jungle air of New York’s Central Park. A lost Penny, one of many, too insignificant for an affluent society to trouble itself about. Surrounded by danger in the night, could this Penny be saved?

It was up to her. She had to shake off her fear and take some action. She couldn’t just crouch there in the dark and cry with terror because she was lost. Even if it was a headsy-tailsy decision, she had to strike out in one direction or another in search of civilization.

She heard a wild animal growl nearby and it filled her with panic. With an effort, she overcame it and turned it to her advantage. The sound must mean that she was near the zoo. She was sure she must be west of it. So all she had to do was establish from which direction the sound was coming and strike out toward it. If she did that and followed a straight path, then sooner or later she should emerge on the east side of the park.

Resolutely, Penny pinpointed the growl and started out toward it. Trembling still, she pushed through the foliage, seeking a trail. Then, after a few moments, she heard the growl again, louder now, and seemingly very close!

Common sense told her that it must be from an animal in the zoo and that the beast must be safely caged. But common sense was no match for her fear, and so Penny froze in her tracks. Again the growl came; it seemed still closer. And then there was the terrifying sound of a rustle in the underbrush quite close to Penny.

She shrank back in the shadows, and as she did so her eyes focused on a puzzling detail spotlighted by the moon’s rays. There, under a nearby tree, was a pile of clothing. Penny angled her head forward for a closer look. She saw that it was the uniform and cap of a zookeeper strewn carelessly about under a large tree. Another rustle in the underbrush, getting closer now, and Penny was struck with a thought that was pure horror.

Suppose one of the animals had escaped! A lion, or a tiger! Suppose it had devoured the zookeeper, leaving nothing but his inedible clothing behind! The sounds of another movement, terrifyingly close now, sent Penny scurrying up a tree. All she could think of was that if some ravening beast was at large, the only safety might lie in climbing high enough so that he couldn’t reach her.

She got as far up into the tree as she could and crawled out on a none-too-sturdy limb. Now there was the loud noise of something crashing through the underbrush on the edge of the clearing in which stood the tree she had climbed. Penny held her breath and watched as the foliage parted to reveal —

A woman, running and stark naked. Something was chasing her. Penny held her breath, expecting to see some primitive beast come crashing through the bushes in the naked woman’s wake and pounce on her and tear her to shreds. Something did hurtle from the clearing’s edge and pounce on her. But it wasn’t an escaped beast. It was a man, as naked as she, and as he tackled her and brought her to the ground, the woman laughed gaily. So overwhelmed with relief that she felt dazed, Penny watched them.

The zookeeper—and such he must be, Penny decided, for surely the clothes under the tree were his—tussled playfully with the lady. She squealed with delight as he pinched her and caressed her and rolled her around on the grass. Fleeting embraces and then she would squirm loose and back off and he would pursue her and she would let him catch her and then they’d start all over again. Finally, they rested, nestling together in a patch of clover and stroking each other’s loins fondly.

“Ahh, Constance,” he said, “thee art indeed a bonnie lass. ’Twas the very first day I set eyes on thee I dinna hesitate to tell meself, Thoreau, yon is the very lass for thee.”

“Ohh, I’ll never forget that first day. You were so brave. Remember?”

“Aye.”

“I’d pushed my husband’s wheelchair too close to the polar bear pit and forgot to put on the brake. And when it rolled in, you just dived in among those beasts to rescue him. You were magnificent! The sight of you coming out of that bear pit with him in your arms, naked to the waist, with bear droppings dripping from your muscular, pale white torso, smelling so earthy and all. Magnificent! I almost swooned!”

“Aye. Thy cheeks so flushed and red and thy long, woman’s breasts all a-pant wi’ excitement. I canna forget.”

“But there’s something you don’t know about that day, my darling.”

“Wha’?”

“I really didn’t forget the brake on the wheelchair. I wanted him to die.”

“Aye, lassie. ’Tis no a surprise to me. I guessed it.”

“Ohh, Thoreau, you don’t know what it’s like! Living with a half-man. Having to cater to all his needs. Having to listen to all his interminable complaints about his gout! Oh, I know it must be painful. But I just can’t feel sorry for him in his torment any more. All I can feel is that he really would be better off dead. All I know is that I want to stay here with you in the park and never go back to that penthouse again.”

“Aye. Bu’ you must return. ’Tis the way of the world. ’Tis the fault o’the ugly, industrial society we poor mortals ha’ inflicted ’pon us-selves. Ha’ ye looked at it?” He warmed to his subject. “The poison o’ the smog they breathe in the ugly, sprawling city yonder? The tall, ugly cliffs they live in? Central Park West and Fifth Avenue — the signs o’ man’s inhumanity to man, an’ ’tis yet luxury they be callin’ it! Machines! ’Tis everythin’ they have perverted, the bloody, bloodless monsters! Machines! They suckle us from womb to tomb! Machines! How they rob man o’ his very manhood!”

“All but you, Thoreau. They haven’t robbed you!”

“Machines! Do you know the day they installed flush ‘toilets in the park I wa’ truly so disgusted I ’most packed oop an’ hied back to Wales! Believe me, Constance, ha’ it not been for thee, lass, I would ha’ gone. Truly, I would!”

“Hush, my darling. We’ve our own world here in the park. Here I can forget about my husband’s gout. Here you can forget about the evil machines. After all, my darling, there’s still one thing machines can’t do. Birds do it. Bees do it. We do it. But—”

“One day we’ll live to see machines do it!” he interrupted bitterly. “Mark my words well, Connie. It’s a-comin’. The diabolical things will na’ rest ’til they’ve made more o’ their own kind an’ ta’en o’er God’s good green earth from man.”

“Hush. Don’t think about it. Here, in each other’s arms, let us think only of love.”

“Love’s a hard thing, Constance.”

“Aye, tha’ it is,” she mimicked him, squeezing him intimately and confirming his observation.

“Shall I take thee now?” he asked shyly.

“Yes, my darling.”

“Like the beasts in the field?”

“Oh, yes, darling!”

“Like the vegetables in the garden?”

“Yes! Now!” she panted.

“Aye, thee art ’deed a hot-blooded lassie. But it do no’ be good to hurry things, Constance. Thou hast thy rump all a-quiver for it, bu’ I will no be rushed. Thy loins are hungry, an’ shall be fed in good time, but first, Constance, let Nature garb thee.”

“Do we have to take time out for that again?” she asked plaintively.

“’Tis the only thing, really, wha’ seperates us from the machines, Constance. Surely thee would no deny me that.”

“Very well,” she sighed. “Let’s get on with it.”

“Aye, lass.” He pulled up a handful of turf and began go arrange it artistically on her palpitating and naked body.

“Be careful!” she exclaimed, jerking away suddenly. “There’s been a dog by here! ”

“Agghh!” he grunted his disgust, selecting a large turd from the handful of mud ‘and flinging it into the darkness. “An’ they call themselves civilized! Sullying God’s good earth wi’ their damned poodles’ puddles an’ suchlike. Why do they no’ teach their pets to let go o’er their own foul cement tombs?”

“Hush, darling. Forget it.” She pulled some leaves from a bush, arranged them into a garland and twined them around his manhood to pacify him.

“Damn ye, Constance, will ye no remember to be careful o’ the thorns? Or are ye like all the others? Is it that ye wish to unman me, ye bloody bitch?”

“No! No! It was an accident, that’s all. I’m sorry.”

“Well, all ri’ then, but take more care, will ye?” Mollified, he entwined a garland of his own making about her low-slung woman’s breasts. “Aye, lass, I’ll clothe ye for love ri’ enough.” He placed his hands on her milk-white thighs, gently forcing them apart, and inserted a twig of pussy-willow. “Turn ye o’er now,” he instructed. When she obeyed, he began stripping a nearby patch of vegetation and arranging the small leaves to cover her bare derriere. “You can turn back now,” he said after a while.

Constance followed his instructions and sat up. She took some part of the left-over leafs, fashioned a sheath for his manhood and clothed the now-quivering, frighteningly large instrument of his sex in it. “Will you take me now?” she whispered.

“Aye! Thee be ready for the lovin’, an’ so be I!” He swooped down on her then, shy no longer, eager to have it done.

And Constance was as eager as he. She felt him to her very bowels and all but fainted at the exquisite thrill which swept over her as he moved. They moved together now, locked together as Nature meant them to be, pushing, pulling, panting, palpitating, pressing on towards passion’s heights. They’d almost reached them when Thoreau suddenly stopped.

“What’s the matter, darling?” Constance asked.

“Do ye no feel somethin’ qui’ strange?”

“Like what, my darling?”

“A terrible itchin’, it be. Down here, where the man be lodged.”

“No, not there.” Constance suddenly became aware that she did feel an itching, though. Not where he’d indicated, but rather on her hindquarters. It was suddenly agonizingly fierce. She reached for the sheath she’d placed around his manhood, pulled off one of the leaves still clinging there, held it up to the moonlight and examined it. “Darling,” she said, squirming free of the leaves twined ’round her bottom, “this is poison ivy!”

“Damn!” He pulled the vegetation from his body and flung it savagely from him. “Why do they no’ defoliate this bloody park?”

“Well, I asked you to come up to my place so we could do it in bed like normal people, but you’re so hipped on nature and all—- Ahh, well, it’s done. The question is, what do we do about it now?”

“When thee itches, thee scratches,” Thoreau philosophized. He resumed making love to her.

Constance forgot her discomfort in his fierce embrace. Soon their bodies were once again straining toward the peak of mutual ecstasy.

But they never reached it. It was at that moment that Penny, cramped from her perch on the tree-limb, tried to change position. The branch gave way under her and she hurtled toward the ground. The darling girl must surely have been badly hurt had not she been so fortunate as to have Thoreau and Constance break her fall.

“WOW! Do that again!” Such was Constance’s first reaction before her mind was able to take in what had happened.

“OOF!” Having caught Penny’s full weight, his response was more natural. The wind went out of his body and it was a moment before he could speak. But when he did, it was with a vast explosion of the accumulated rage of one who feels that finally society has gone too far in its madness, or one who feels—-unconcerned with rationality-—that imposing on one’s sex is the final indignity, and the one which no man should willingly suffer. He got slowly to his feet, red with this rage, and started for Penny the way a berserk animal closes in on its prey.

The darling girl knew madness when she saw it. She recognized vengeance when it stalked her. She realized that her fall had been the last straw to him and that the accumulation of his anger and frustration was about to be unleashed against her. It would be no use trying to reason with him. The only thing to do was run. She ran.

It wasn’t until she was sure that he had stopped pursuing her that Penny stopped running. She was more lost than ever now. She had no idea where she was. Then she once again heard the roar of an animal, placed the direction from which it was coming, and struck out for what she presumed to be the Central Park zoo.

As she drew nearer, the sounds the animal was making grew more and more terrifying. Now stop being silly, Penny told herself. It’s just an animal in a zoo. You’ve seen them lots of times before. It’s silly to think it might just he running around loose!

It was good, common-sense thinking. There was only one thing wrong with it, rational as it was. Penny found out what it was when she emerged from the trees into another clearing.

There, in the middle of the clearing, was a large, ferocious-appearing tigress! And it wasn’t in a cage!

From the mall, in the distance, floated the sounds of the band playing something by Ravel.

Penny stood stock still. She was afraid to move. She was afraid to scream. The animal hadn’t seen her—yet. All Penny could think was that the slightest motion on her part might attract its attention and then she’d be a goner. So she just stared, horror-struck, as the beast bayed at the moon.

Suddenly a man appeared from the other side of the clearing, as if in response to the noises the creature was making. He was wearing a uniform, the same sort of uniform Penny had seen lying under the tree before. He must be another zoo-keeper.

“Did you call, cherie?” he sang out jollily as the beast bounded over to meet him. He had a pronounced French accent. “Are you growing lonely for Pierre?”

The tigress licked his hand, then nuzzled its nose between his legs.

“Ahh, my passion-flower. Do not be impatient. I am here now. Pierre, who loves you, my savage beauty, he is here. Cry for me no longer. I am here.” He sat down and took the beast’s head in his lap.

The tigress whimpered and looked up at him with soulful eyes.

“Ahh, how naughty of you to doubt me. Did you think I would not come? I was detained by my wife. Merde! What a bitch that one ees. But then so are all women, eh, cherie? But I don’t need her. I don’t need them, any of them. I have you, no? My little cub zat I have nurture to your full flower. Oui, my own savage passion flower. How lucky I am. Lucky Pierre! Yours ees ze only true love. You could rip me in two if you wanted to, but no, you won’t. You love me. Ahh, cherie, and I love you, too.”

The tigress purred and licked its lips at him. He bent and kissed her.

“Yes, I love you. See what I have brought you. For your sweet tooth, my own.” He held up a bakery box and the tigress sniffed at it. “Oui, zat ees right, my own. Chocolate mousse. Your favorite.” He unwrapped it and set it out on the grass.

The tigress began lapping it up. When she’d finished about half of it, she looked up at Pierre and purred again. Then she rolled over on her back with her hind legs wide apart. Inadvertently, the lightly waving tail caught up what was left of the mousse.

“Ho-ho!” Pierre chuckled. “Like zat, eh? Passion in the dessert! Oh, but how brazen we are tonight. How female! How anxious. Very well, for I am as anxious as you.” He dropped his pants and sprawled over the tigress. “Come now, and show me how well I taught you, cherie,” he panted.

They embraced. The tigress’ hind paws came together over his haunches. Then, suddenly, the beast shifted position.

“What ees eet?” There was annoyance in Pierre’s voice.

The tigress placed a paw against his chest and turned him over on his back—gently, but firmly. Then, bracing her front paws on his belly, her muzzle dropped toward his manhood.

“But no!” Pierre exclaimed. “I’ve told you before cherie, zat I do not like zat. What ees the matter weeth you? Eet ees perverted! Eet ees dirty. Now you stop zat, cherie. I nevair taught you to be a degenerate. Stop it, I say.”

Angry now, he slapped the beast hard on its questing snout. The tigress emitted a savage little yelp. When Pierre slapped her again, the yelp turned into a snarl. This is no love-tap, the snarl seemed to say. Her jaws shot downward and closed and Pierre’s sudden scream testified that he wasn’t lucky any more.

Penny’s scream echoed Pierre’s. She bolted the scene. “Help!” she screamed as she ran. “Help! Before it’s too late! Help! Help! Help!”

She was so panic-striken in her flight that she tripped right over the odd little man before she even saw him. “Oh, thank goodness,” she said as they got to their feet together. “You have to help me. There’s a tigress back there and she’s eating a man!”

“Oh, you mean Pierre and his cherie?” the little man said. “Don’t be alarmed, young lady. I know Pierre protests, but he really likes it. Don’t let him fool you. And even if he didn’t, it takes two for sex and she’s entitled to her little preferences.”

“But you don’t understand! She’s eating him!”

“There’s no need to be graphic, Miss. I understand perfectly. All I’m trying to do is point out to you that your very fear is a moralistic value judgment. Now, it may not be to your taste, may disgust you even, but you have no right to dictate to others what their sex lives should be. To each his own, young lady. Live and let live.”

“I’m not talking about sex!” Penny was beside herself. “I’m not talking about perversion!”

“No? How charming! How enlightened! You find nothing odd about a man and a tigress making love? May I congratulate you on your broad-mindedness? It isn’t often today that-”

“Please!” Penny was in tears. “You don’t understand! The tigress has gone mad! She’s tearing his flesh from his body!”

“A lover’s spat.” The man shrugged. “What a shame. They seemed such a happy couple!”

“She’s killing him, I tell you! Do something!”

“You mean she’s really attacked him?”

“Yes! She’s killing him!”

“Killing him?”

“Yes! Do something!”

“But what should I do?” the man asked logically.

“I don’t know. Something.”

“I think,” the little man said, “that I’d prefer not to get involved. That tigress can get nasty when she loses her temper.”

“But you can’t just leave them there! She’ll devour him!”

“If you’re so concerned, why didn’t you do something? Why did you run away?”

“I was afraid,” Penny admitted. -

“Exactly. So am I.” The little man’s tone of voice said that there was nothing else to be said on the subject.

“Oh! But I have to get help!” Penny started to run off in the direction she’d been going.

“They won’t help you,” the little man said.

“Who?”

“Them.” He pointed vaguely. “Wait, I’ll show you.” He lifted the binoculars hanging from the strap over his shoulder, held them to his eyes, and focused for a moment. “Here, see for yourself.” He held them in position and motioned to Penny to come and look.

She squinted through the eyepieces. They were aimed at the shore of the Central Park lake. She looked again, unbelievingly, and gasped. There were ten or twelve young men, mother naked, cavorting on the grassy slopes beside the lake. Some of them were stooped over; the others were vaulting over the stooped figures and then stooping in turn.

“Who are they?” Penny asked.

“Didn’t you ever wonder where those pretty chorus boys from the Broadway musicals go after showtime?”

“Yes.”

“Well, now you know.”

“But what are they doing?” Penny Wanted to know.

“Playing leapfrog.”

“Playing leapfrog?”

“Sure. Listen.”

Penny strained her ears and managed to hear the voices raised in song wafting through the air from the lake. Soon she could distinguish the words:

“They were only playing leapfrog.

“They were only playing leapfrog.

“They were only playing leapfrog.

“When one sweet sister jumped right over another sweet sister’s back!

“They were only playing leapfrog . . .”

“Well, I’ll be!” Idly, Penny moved the glasses to scan the landscape.

“Ouch!” the man said as the strap tightened around his neck. “What are you trying to do? Garrote me?”

“Sorry.” Penny eased up on the tension of the cord “What’s that over there?” she said suddenly, pointing off to the distance on their right.

“That? Oh, that’s the Museum of Natural History.”

“I think it’s being robbed,” Penny said excitedly. “Look! There are men on the roof!”

The little man took back his fieldglasses and looked where she’s indicated. “So there are,” he agreed. “But I don’t think they’re burglarizing the place. After all, who’d be foolish enough to try to rob a museum?”

“Well, if they’re not burglarizing it, What are they doing?”

The little man thought about it a moment. “Making a movie,” he decided finally. “That’s it. They’re making one of those silly movies. I don’t know why they can’t make movies that are true to life, instead of nonsense like that.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Penny agreed. “Say,” she said, her thoughts taking a sudden turn, “maybe it’s none of my business, but what are you doing here in the park at this time of night, anyway?”

“I’m a birdie-watcher.”

“A bird-watcher?”

“No. A birdie-watcher. You know what a birdie is, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t,” Penny said, honestly bewildered.

“Well, aren’t you the unsophisticated one,” the little man giggled. “A birdie’s what those boys down there have, and you haven’t.”

“You mean—?” Penny blushed.

“Exactly.”

“And you come here at night to watch them?”

“Oh, dear me no! They’re such tame game. I couldn’t be bothered. I come to see the hood-peckers.”

“The what?”

“The hood-peckers. They’re my real hobby. Of course, anybody can see them on the street all covered up by those tight-fitting pants. But then all you see is the swollen outline pulsing for freedom. It’s really a crime to cage them like that, isn’t it? Still, I must admit that that’s how I originally got interested in them. But how many people get the opportunity to see them flying free in their natural habitat? Not many, I’ll wager. Yes, I’ll bet I’m one of the few who watch them when they’re wild and uninhibited in their own environment.”

“I’m afraid I don’t—” Penny began.

“I’ll show you.” He scanned the edge of the park with his glasses. “There! There’s a flock of them.” He held the binoculars up to Penny’s eyes.

She looked through them and saw a bunch of young hoods crouching behind the bushes at the edge of the park. All wore the same sort of crotch-strangling pants and black leather jackets. In their hands they carried an assortment of billyclubs, switchblade knives and tire-chains. They seemed to be waiting for something.

“What are they up to?” Penny asked.

“Let’s get up closer to them and you’ll see.”

“But won’t they see us?”

“Not if we’re careful. I do it all the time. It’s the only way to really see the hood-peckers and categorize them. Come on, I’ll show you how.”

Penny followed the little man, and soon they were behind a clump of bushes on a little hill overlooking the teenage gang. She watched as they sized up the occasional passersby strolling along the sidewalk just outside the park. A middleaged woman, fat and housewifely, came up parallel to where they were hiding. They stalked her for a moment, and then they pounced.

With practiced teamwork, one boy closed his hand over her mouth to cut off her screams while two of the others lifted her bodily and pulled her into the bushes. It all happened so fast that from the outside of the park it must have looked as if the woman had vanished by magic. Penny watched, appalled, as they spreadeagled the woman on the grass and efficiently stripped off her clothes.

“Scream, and we’ll kill you,” one boy hissed, holding a knife to the woman’s throat.

The hand was removed from her mouth. “What are you going to do to me?” It was half a whimper, half a whisper.

“Whaddaya think? This is a gang-shag, lady; An’ you’re it.” He unbuckled his tight pants and dropped them to his ankles. His rape-eager manhood twanged towards the sky.

“There! See!” The little man nudged Penny excitedly. “There’s a fine example of the hood-pecker! A truly exciting specimen! And larger than most!”

The young hood fell atop the fat lady and ravished her quickly. As soon as he was finished, another boy replaced him. Then another. And another. “Your turn now, Tony,” the last boy said.

“Nahh! I don’ wanna.”

“Why not?”

“She’s too old and fat!”

“Yeah, but she’s all we got.”

“I don’t care,” Tony said. “I ain’t gonna.”

“Now just a minute, young man!” The defiled victim sat bolt upright and wagged her finger angrily in Tony’s face. “You have to! After all, a gang-bang is a gang-bang!”

“Well, of all the shameless—” Penny exclaimed. Her voice was louder than she’d intended it to be.

“What was that?” One of the hoods sprang up and peered into the darkness.

“Over there!” A second one pointed. “They’ve been watching us.”

“Why, the dirty—! Let’s get them!” The gang was on its feet now, making for Penny and the birdie-watcher.

“Oh, dear!” The little man wrung his hands.

“What’ll we do?” Penny said, frightened.

“Run!” the little man said. “Run as fast as you can!”

He suited his action to the advice and disappeared into the darkness.

Penny followed. She ran. Once again she was running as hard as she was able. But it wasn’t fast enough to keep up with the little birdie-watcher. Soon he was lost to her in the darkness. And behind her she could hear the gang crashing through the underbrush, mouthing vile curses, and getting closer and closer.

They were right behind Penny when she ran, by chance, through a tangle of bushes and emerged on one of the park’s crosstown transverses. Their footsteps on her very heels, she kept running—but now she had a goal. Halfway through the transverse, she could see the stone-block walls and little green light of a fortress-like police station. Penny ran up to the stout oaken door and pounded on it.

“Help!” she screamed. “Help!” She was hysterical and the words came pouring out. “Help! There’s a gang after me! Help! There’s tigress eating a man! Help! There’s a man with poison ivy chasing me too! Help! They’re naked and jumping all over each other. Help! They’re robbing the museum! Help! They’re going to rape me! Help! Like they raped that poor little woman! Help! They’re going to kill me”

Behind the stout wooden door of the police station, the rookie cop looked up at the wizened old desk sergeant who was playing solitaire. “Do you hear something?” the rookie asked.

“No, laddie, that I don’t.”

“It sounds like a woman screaming.”

“ ’Tis surely a possibility, but I can’t say as I hear it.” The desk sergeant studied the cards.

“Do you think I should go and investigate?’

“That I don’t!” the desk sergeant said positively. “I’m older an’ wiser than you are, laddie. Even if it were a woman screamin’, wouldn’t it be foolish now to laive this nice warm place an’ go out into the cold?”

“It’s not cold. It’s summer,” the rookie pointed out.

“I know. I were spaikin’ metaphysically. What I mean is, it be dangerous out yonder. A man could get killed in the park after dark. Why go lookin’ for trouble? Just be doin’ your duty an’ ticketin’ the cars an’ breakin’ up the ball games an’ you’ll get ahead on the job, laddie. Don’t be lookin’ for trouble.”

“I suppose you’re right.” The rookie peered over the desk sergeant’s shoulder. “The red jack goes on the black queen,” he pointed out.

Outside, Penny had stopped screaming. She had her back to the wall now and watched from fear-struck eyes as the gang closed in on her. There was a certain ballet-like grace in their movements as they approached. And there was murder in their cruel faces, murder for the frightened, precious girl.

On the mall, the band was playing something by Leonard Bernstein . . .

CHAPTER FIVE

“SOME PIECE!”

“What a pair of boobies!”

“Come on! Let’s get her! What are we waiting for?”

“Please!” Penny begged. “Please! Don’t rape me. I’m a virgin!”

“She’s a virgin!” The pack of young hoodlums laughed. “Catch her!” They crowded the street to close in on her.

Fate intervened. A large truck barreled down the transverse and they scattered to avoid being hit by it. The driver, experienced in the ways of park hi-jackers, sped up when his lights caught them. As the truck swept past, Penny darted from the wall to the gutter, grabbed hold of the truck’s tailgate, and pulled herself up.

The boys gave chase, yelling threats and curses, but the truck was going too fast for them to catch it. Luck was with Penny. The truck caught the green light at the park exit and the one at Madison Avenue after it. By then she was completely out of the gang’s clutches

She dropped off the truck at York Avenue. She was right near her house. She scampered through the shadows until, at last, she was home.

That is, Penny was at the house in which she lived. But she wasn’t inside it. Her keys were in her handbag back at Studs’ bungalow in Arverne. She entered the vestibule and pushed the buzzer beside her landlady’s nameplate. There was no answering buzz. She pushed it again. Still no answer. Again. Only silence.

The landlady wasn’t home! A fine kettle of tuna! What was she going to do now? Penny thought about it. While she was thinking, a young couple came up the stoop behind her and entered the vestibule. They rang one of the apartment buzzers and stared at Penny curiously while they waited for an answer.

“Some doorman!” the man whispered, eyeing Penny’s bikini-sculpted curves.

“Don’t be silly. This place doesn’t rate a doorman,” the girl replied. “We must be on Candid Camera. It’s one of those tricks they pull to see how we’ll react.” She fluffed up her hair and a self-conscious smile that was all but ghastly appeared on her face.

“So where's Allen Funt?” he asked.

“Probably waiting for us inside, behind the staircase, or something. And the microphone’s probably hidden behind those buzzers there.” She turned the smile on Penny. “I’ll bet the camera’s right behind her,” she whispered.

The buzzer rang and the couple backed through the doorway to the inner hall, smiling and preening as they went. When they finally turned around, Penny moved just fast enough to get her foot in the door before it closed. She waited until they’d gone up the stairs and were out of sight, and then she quickly scampered through the door and up the stairs herself.

She went up two flights, and then she was standing outside her apartment door and wondering what she was going to do next. The door was locked and she didn’t have so much as a hairpin with which to try to open it. What could she do? Where could she go? To whom could she turn?

It was then that Penny thought of Scarlett Amber. She was the only neighbor with whom Penny had slightly more than a nodding acquaintance. Her apartment was around on the other side of the building U on the same floor as Penny’s. Now the poor, darling, circumstantially victimized girl decided she had no choice but to go to Scarlett Amber for help.

She started down the hallway, but she hadn’t gone far before she heard voices coming up the stairwell in front of her. She recognized the voices as belonging to her next door neighbors, the Comstocks. If there was one couple she didn’t want to meet in her present half-dressed condition, it was them. Mr. Comstock was a censor by profession. (No relation to the Anthony Comstock, but his bearing of the same name had influenced Mr. Comstock in his choice of profession.) And Mrs. Comstock, nee Carrie Nation Hays, was president of the local chapter of SINA, an organization dedicated to keeping dogs, cats and other animals from indecent public exposure by clothing them so that their private parts might be adequately covered. Yes, these were not the people for Penny to encounter in her present state.

She glanced about frenziedly, spotted an alcove in which to hide, and crouched down in the shadows it provided with her back to the hallway. In this position, without having planned it, Penny found her chin resting on a windowsill. The window was open and she found herself staring straight into the windows of Scarlett Amber’s apartment, which were also wide open against the summer heat. She had a clear view of both the bedroom and living room, with the wall in between. It was like looking at one of those cutaway stage sets of a Broadway play.

In the bedroom, an infant lay on the big double bed with pillows propped around it to keep it from falling off. The crib beside the bed was empty. In the living room, Penny could see Scarlett Amber dressed in a sexy negligee and her husband, Rhett, wearing only pajama pants.

Rhett was stretched out on the sofa. Scarlett was directly above him with a long, sharp instrument of some sort in her hand. Even from this distance Penny could see that its tip was red-hot.

“No!” he was shouting, his voice filled with fear. “I can’t stand pain! Now get away from me, you perverted—”

“It has to be done,” Scarlett Amber insisted, her green eyes glowing. “That boil on your neck has to be lanced before it spreads. Or is it a plague on your body you’d rather have?” Her voice had just the trace of a York-ville-Irish lilt.

“No!” He placed both his hands over the back of his neck and braced his feet on the couch to push backwards and away from her.

“If I don’t lance it now, you’ll have it forever, Amber,” she told him, pronouncing his last name with a sneer of contempt.

“No!” he shouted again. And this time his arm shot out and he knocked the probe from her hand so violently that it went flying out the open window.

“Now see what you’ve gone and done!” Her eyes shot fire; her bosom heaved proudly. “Well, all right. It’s done with you now, I am!” She wheeled around and marched through the bedroom door, slamming it behind her.

Rhett followed, his muscular torso bulging, as light on his feet as an Indian. He tried the doorknob. It was locked. “Scarlett,” he demanded, “open this door!”

“It’s alone you’ll sleep this night and all that follow,” she answered. She was lying on the bed now, one knee raised so that the negligee fell away to reveal a shapely thigh, her breasts still heaving, her eyes still bright.

“Scarlett! Open this door! I’m your husband! Madame, I’ll not let you keep me from your bedroom. I’ll not let you deny me a husband’s rights, Madame! If you don’t open this door this instant, I’ll kick it down!” he huffed and he puffed, a little out of breath from emotional exertion and frustrated lust.

“Kick and be damned!”

“Very well!” Rhett stood back and delivered a mighty kick to the locked bedroom door. “OWEE!” He fell to the floor, cluthcing his foot like a wounded bird between his two hands. “OH! OH! OH!”

“What’s the matter?” Scarlett called.

“I think I’ve broken my toe,” he sobbed.

She opened the door and came out to him. “Oh, dear, she wrung her hands. “What are we going to do now?”

“You’d best get me to a hospital,” he groaned.

“But what will I do about the baby? Where will I leave her?”

It was at this point that Penny left the alcove. She had been going to ask Scarlett to help her, but now the sweet-natured girl had forgotten all about that and was hurrying to help Scarlett in her time of need. Thus, eager with altruism, she knocked loudly on the door to Scarlett’s apartment.

Scarlett opened it immediately. Before she could say anything, Penny was blurting out her offer of help. But how did you know—?” Scarlett began. “And what are you doing dressed like -?”

“There’s no time for questions,” Rhett insisted, writhing on the floor. “This toe hurts something fierce. Leave her with the baby and get me to a doctor!”

“But what will I do about Humphrey?” Scarlett wailed. His boat got in tonight and he’s due here any time now.”

“Who’s Humphrey?” Penny asked.

He’s my brother. He just came over from the auld sod. He’s never been in this country before. I don’t know what to do about him. Whatever will he think if his own sister isn’t here to greet him?”

“I’ll explain everything to him,” Penny said soothingly. “And I’ll look after the baby, too. You just go on along. ’

“Oh, I don’t know! Rhett, do you think it will be all right?”

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” Rhett groaned.

“You’re right. I’m not going to worry about it now,” Scarlett agreed. “I’ll think of it all tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is another day.” She helped her husband to his feet and supported him as he hobbled out the door.

“Shall I put the baby in the crib?” Penny called out after her.

“No. She’ll wake up and start crying if you try to move her. Just leave Bonnie where she is on the bed and she’ll be all right.”

And then they were gone. Penny was alone, except for the sleeping baby. It was at this moment, alone and safe at last, that the events of the evening caught up with the darling girl. It was now that she became aware of nerves stretched to the breaking point, of a head pounding with the effects of all the excitement, of a lush young body aquiver with all that had occurred. She went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet to look for something to calm her nerves.

She found a bottle with a label that said it contained tranquilizers. Just as she reached for it, her foot skidded on the bathmat on which she was standing and she glanced down in regaining her balance. Her hand continued to grope, however, and her fingers closed over an identical bottle right next to the one she’d been seeking. This ones’ label identified the contents as laxatives!

Unaware of her error, Penny dumped two of the capsules into the palm of her hand, replaced the bottle, poured a glass of water, and washed them down. Then she returned to the bedroom. She browsed through Scarlet Amber’s bureau drawers in search of pajamas or a nightie.

She settled on a frilly baby doll set. She stripped off her bikini and donned the baby dolls. She started for the bed, and then stopped to consider the infant sleeping in the middle of it.

If she tried to squeeze in beside the baby, she’d undoubtedly awaken it. But she was so tired! Then her eye lit on the empty crib beside the bed. Well, why not?

Penny turned off the light and climbed into the crib. Very sleepy, she curled up like a foetus. One arm crooked around a Teddy Bear which had been left in the crib. Her thumb went into her mouth, and soon the innocent young virgin was fast asleep, a childish smile dimpling her doll-like face.

Thus she slept, deeply, unseeing, unhearing, innocently uncaring. Thus she slept, her delicate, shell-like ears deaf to the footsteps entering the apartment, entering the bedroom. Thus she slept, her eyes closed to the eyes staring at her curled up in the crib, closed to the man’s tongue licking his lips as he stared. Thus Penny slept on, her breathing even, a counterpoint to the increasing harshness of the breathing of the man who was watching her.

It was only as the man moved over to the infant on the bed that Penny awoke. Some maternal instinct snatched her from sleep in response to the possibility of a threat to the baby. “Who are you? What do you want?” She shot bolt upright in the crib.

“Sure, an’ I’m Humphrey Humphrey,” the man replied calmly. “ ’Tis brother I am to the woman what lives here. An’ who might you be?” His brogue, together with the shock of red hair sticking up from his head, said he was as Irish as Paddy’s cow.

“Oh.” Penny relaxed. “I’m a friend of Scarlett’s.”

“An’ what might you be doin’ in the crib like that?”

“I’m tired and I didn’t want to disturb the baby, so—”

“I see. An’ where might me sister be?”

Penny explained that there had been an accident without going into the details of it. “So I’m watching the baby until Scarlett gets back from the hospital,” she finished.

“Ahh yes, the baby.” He leaned over the bed and studied the infant. “Well-named she is. Bonnie. So they called her, and so she is.” He crooked a finger and tickled the infant. .

“Careful, you’ll wake her.”

“Sure an’ she’s awake already. Smilin’ for her Uncle Humphrey, too. Ahh, what a darlin’ little nymphet she is."

“Nymphet? Isn’t she a little young—”

“Ohh, but ’tis her youth I’m admirin’. So innocent an’ so sexy at one an’ same time. Stirs a man’s blood, it does. Kitchy-kitchy-koo!” Humphrey Humphrey poked a finger inside the baby’s diaper and Bonnie gurgled delightedly.

“I don’t think you should—”

“Nonsense! She loves it! ” Humphrey moved his fingers knowingly. “Look at the smile on her. You little temptress you! Bouncy-bouncy, that’s the way! Oh, so sexy!”

“Now just a minute!” Penny started to remonstrate further, but she was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. She went into the living room to answer 1t.

It was Scarlett. “I’m going to have to spend the night here,” she told Penny. “Rhett insists.”

“Why does he insist?”

“Oh, I know it sounds silly, but he’s afraid of a switch because of what happened when the baby was born.”

“What do you mean? What happened when the baby was born?”

“Oh, you know, all those stories about how babies get switched in the hospital.”

“You mean your baby was switched with another one?”

“Oh, no. Rhett doesn’t think the babies were switched. He just insists they switched wives on him.”

“Well, did they?”

“I’m not sure,” Scarlett admitted. “That twilight sleep is pretty potent. I just don’t remember.”

“I see,” said Penny, not really seeing at all.

“Anyway, the thing is that Rhett’s afraid if I’m not at his bedside, they might switch husbands on me. So I have to stay. By the way,” she added, “did my brother get there?”

“Yes. He’s here. As a matter of fact, Scarlett, he’s the reason I wish you’d come home.”

“Why? What’s happening? ”

“Well, I don’t know how to tell you. But he’s — he’s playing with the baby.”

“Well, what’s wrong with that? He’s her uncle. Why shouldn’t he play with her?”

“I mean he’s playing with her. He’s playing with her — with her you-know-what.”

“She hasn’t got a you-know-what,” Scarlett pointed out.

“Umm.” Momentarily Penny was hung up on the euphemism. “Well, he’s playing with her wherever you-know-what would be if she had a you-know-what,” she explained confusedly.

“Don’t let that worry you,” Scarlett said cheerfully. “All infants are masturbatory anyway. Erotic play is good_ for them. Keeps them from developing neurotic repressions.”

“But,” Penny whispered, “he keeps calling her his little nymphet.”

“Humphrey always was a bit—odd. But don’t let it worry you. He’s harmless. I’ve got to go now, honey. I’ll see you in the morning.” Scarlett hung up.

Penny returned to the bedroom. Humphrey Humphrey was supporting the baby on his outstretched palm now and bouncing it up and down violently. There was a faraway look in his eyes. “Ahh, me little darlin’,” he crooned, “me lovely nymph, me own Lolita.”

“He name is Bonnie,” Penny pointed out.

“I know. I know. But ’tis an old love she reminds me of for sure.” He inserted his hand inside the diaper once again. “Ouch!” He withdrew it hastily. There was and open safety pin sticking out of the knuckles. “So ’tis scratchin’ me ye are, me passionate plaything,” he said, extracting the pin and sucking at the blood.

“You’d better put her down and let me put something on that for you,” Penny suggested.

“Oh, all right,” he agreed reluctantly.

When Penny had doctored the scratch with a little iodine, she guided him into the living room. She sank down on the couch, determined to keep Humphrey Humphrey away from the baby. “Sit down.” She patted the cushions beside her invitingly. “And tell me all about Ireland.”

“Ahh, ’tis the Emerald Isle.” He sank down beside her. “ ’Tis a little bit o’ heaven fell from out the sky one day.” There was a faraway look of longing and nostalgia in his eyes. “ ’Tis the land me mother came from.”

“Why did you leave there?”

“ ’Tis a rainy, cold and barren land. Never nothin’ to ait but potatoes. A poorly land indaid is Mother Erin. An’ anyhow, I had to laive. The bloody English was after me for fair. ’Tis lucky I am to be alive to tell it.” He crossed himself.

“Were you mixed up in the rebellion? I thought that was all over.”

“ ’Twill never be over!‘ Never!” he shouted, the fire of a furious patriotism in his eyes. “Never so long as one heathen Protestant Englishman stands on fair Erin’s soil. We’ll fight to the death, we will! We’ll drive them out, every last one! Down with the British! Down with partition! Up the Irish!”

“Up the Irish!” Penny echoed, herself carried away by his ardor. “Up the Irish!”

“Damn to all Orangemen! Down with the traitors! Up the Irish!”

“Up the Irish!” Penny looked at him breathlessly. What a man! Yes, what a man he was with his muscles bulging and his red hair flaming in the lamplight and his eyes shooting fire. She forgot completely about the incident in the bedroom now. She forgot that she had only lured Humphrey Humphrey out here to keep him from taking advantage of the infant. She forgot the infant altogether. All she knew was that she was here, alone, with this man, and that his vibrant zeal was making her respond to him as a woman responds to a man. The darling girl’s heart beat quickly -- pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat—and her body tingled with the warmth filling it. “Up the Irish!” she said again, and her lips were very close to his. “Up the Irish!” and she closed her eyes.

Humphrey Humphrey kissed her. “Well now,” he said as her soft, warm lips parted to his questing tongue. “Well now!” and he kissed her again.

Under the thin gauze of Scarlett’s baby dolls, Penny felt her pear-shaped breasts swell with passion. Humphrey stroked one of them and the precious little tip grew precious big. It stood out red and stiff and trembling with a little drop of passionate moisture. He bent his head to kiss the darling darling’s darling love-bud. Penny gasped and her hips began to writhe as she felt the chapped manliness of his lips at her breast.

“Oh, yes,” she moaned. “Let it be like this. Let it happen now. At last. I’ve waited so long. And now, at long last, here is a man from over the sea, an Irish man, strong and brave, to, make of me a woman!”

Humphrey Humphrey’s hands dropped to the skimpy little elastic of the skimpy little baby doll pantalets. He slid them down over the smooth round belly and stroked the light blonde curls demurely hiding the womanhood beneath it. “Ahh, the lovely damp,” he sighed. “How warm and sweet it is to come home to the lovely damp.”

Penny raised up on her plump little haunches so that he might remove the skimpy little baby doll pantalets. When they were dangling from one ankle, the darling young virgin arched her thighs and squirmed urgently until his hand was where she wanted it.

Her precious little ruby grew larger and rubier as he played flip-flop with it. Slippery it was, but Humphrey Humphrey managed to re-clutch it each time it escaped. And yet it grew more slippery as her now frothing honeypot bubbled with still more love-nectar lubricant.

“Oh, yes,” Penny moaned. “Now, darling! Now, my Irish darling! Give it to me now!”

“Now?” Humphrey Humphrey queried eagerly.

“Now! Now! Now!”

“Crouch over then, me darlin’. Crouch like the good Irish beasts in the good Irish fields of the good Irish countryside.” He put his hands on her plump, trembling hips and guided her body until it was positioned the way he wanted it.

But the position put too much of a strain on the baby dolls and Penny felt them rip as she crouched. She paid no mind to the damage as his hand caressed her pulsating honeypot. The touch made Penny feel the urgency of her desire right down to her very bowels. As a matter of fact, that was exactly where she felt the sensation most acutely. It was the sudden shift of position that made her so aware of it, no doubt. Anyway, that was what she told herself at first.

But as she maintained the position, Penny began to realize that it wasn’t passion that she was feeling in that area. Indeed, the poor, innocent girl had no way of knowing it, but the laxative she had mistakenly taken was beginning to act quite strongly. “Just a minute,” she said. “Before we—- That is, I think first I’d like to go to—“

“Ireland waits for no woman!” Humphrey Humphrey exclaimed. “The time is now!”

“But no! You don’t understand! I have to—!”

Humphrey Humphrey wasn’t listening. He couldn’t listen. His ears were pounding with his own desire. “Up the Irish!” he shouted, thrusting for the target of her womanhood.

But he missed his goal. Suddenly Penny wasn’t there. She was diving for the bathroom door.

And Humphrey? He was sprawled on the floor watching the figure in the torn baby dolls disappear into the bathroom. And the echo of his voice must have seemed a hollow mockery indeed in his ears.

“Up the Irish! ”

CHAPTER SIX

POOR PENNY was mortified. She locked herself in the bathroom and sobbed and sobbed. She dashed cold water on her face and sobbed some more. She removed the tattered baby dolls, and -- not knowing what else to do with them—put them in the clothes hamper. Then she sobbed still more, determined never to face Huinphrey again, trapped in the bathroom, incapable of planning her exit, too overcome with mortification to do anything but sit on the edge of the toilet lid and let the tears flow.

She might have stayed there sobbing indefinitely if she hadn’t heard the muted sound of voices from the other room. She strained her ears and made out Sacrlett’s syrupy tones. By opening the door a crack, Penny was able to distinguish the words Scarlett and Humphrey were speaking.

“. . . and the doctor said the sedative he gave Rhett would knock him out and keep him out until morning,” Scarlett was saying. “He told me I might as well go home, that there wasn’t a chance Rhett would wake up and panic because I wasn’t there. So here I am.”

“Sure, an’ it’s wonderful happy I am to see you, Sis.”

“And I you, Humphrey me darlin’.”

Peeping through the crack in the barely opened bathroom door, Penny could see that they had their backs to her. Taking a deep, quivery breath for courage, she tiptoed out of the bathroom and silently made her way behind them to the front door of the apartment without being seen. On the wall to the right of this was a clothes closet used for hanging outer garments. Penny quietly opened the door to this closet and took down a mink jacket that was hanging there. It was Scarlett’s one luxury, squeezed out of Rhett after five years of marital nagging. Penny donned the mink to cover her nudity. It reached to a point just barely below the juncture of her legs. Then she opened the front door and, with her hand still on the knob, called to Scarlett.

“I have to be going right away now. Can I borrow this? Just for tonight.”

“Why, Penny, where—-?” Scarlett wheeled around in a complete circle and then half around again until her eyes focused on Penny. “I was wondering where you were. But what on earth--? Where are you going? Why —?”

“I have to go. Right now.” Penny looked straight down at her bright red toenails, carefully avoiding Humphrey’s gaze, which was also leveled at her now. “Can I borrow the jacket?”

“Of course. But what do you want with a fur coat in the middle of summer? And you’re barefoot, too. Let me get you a pair of shoes.”

“Never mind.” Penny grabbed a pair of riding boots that were on the floor of the closet. “I’ll just take these if you don’t mind. They’ll do fine. I’ll return everything tomorrow.” And she was out the door, unable to stand Humphrey’s stare one moment more.

In the hallway she paused to pull on the riding boots. There was a riding-crop sticking out of one of them, and she looped it carelessly over one wrist so that it wouldn’t get lost. Then she made her way down the stairs to the landlady’s door again. As she’d expected, her ring wasn’t answered; the landlady still hadn’t returned home; Penny still had no way of getting into her own apartment.

She leaned against the wall in the hallway and tried to consider her predicament calmly. It was then that she remembered Fanny Hill, her friend and co-worker at Pussycat Publications. Fanny lived over on Madison Avenue, just a few blocks downtown from the block on which Penny lived. Certainly Fanny would be glad to put her up for the night. With the mink coat covering her nudity, Penny decided she would have no trouble walking over to Fanny’s place.

So she struck out down the crosstown block, heading for Madison Avenue. She walked briskly and without incident until she reached the corner of Park Avenue. Here the light was against her, and she paused at the curb. When it changed, she started across the street.

A little more than halfway across, Penny never even saw the lavish Rolls Royce limousine as it careened around the corner. Still blinded by her tears of mortification over what had happened with Humphrey, she stepped into the path of the Rolls. The car swerved to avoid her, but didn’t quite succeed. It sideswiped the mink-topped figure and the pavement came up and cracked Penny on the head. Everything went black for the unfortunate girl.

When she regained consciousness, Penny was quite disoriented. Her surroundings were completely unfamiliar to her. And she didn’t know any of the people clustered around her. She blinked and her eyes roved over the room, seeking some clue to where she might be.

The room was large and luxurious, albeit somewhat spartan in its furnishings. The armchairs were carved out of marble and there were no cushions on them. The couch on which Penny found herself was fashioned of jade. It also had no padding, although a pillow had been placed under her head. The scatter rugs strewn over the expanse of floor were animal hides with claws and fangs protruding from them perilously. There was the complete skeleton of a small dinosaur in one corner of the room. On one wall a collection of Neanderthal arrowheads and clubs had been arranged. On another wall, hewn of rough granite blocks, there were primitive caveman carvings and drawings, The makings for a fire were arranged in a crude fireplace.

Yet other facets of the room seemed to contradict this primitive scheme. The lighting was ultra-modern, indirect and fluorescent. An extra-large color TV screen took up half of one wall. Maps of the world showing concentrations of natural resources hung framed on the other walls. A ticker-tape machine like the ones in the stock market stood in the corner opposite the dinosaur. A telephone switchboard was partially visible behind a sabre-toothed tiger-skin drapery. And the room was comfortably air-conditioned.

“She’s coming to.” The voice was authoritative, and the group around Penny parted to allow a tall man to stand before her. He had a craggy, Gary Cooper-ish face and the leather skin of an outdoorsman. His eyes were steel blue, his hair gray-blond. And he was wearing pioneer-style buckskins. Penny missed the Davy Crockett cap she was sure he must wear when he went outside.

“Where am I?” she asked weakly. “Who are you?”

“You are in my headquarters. And I am John Fuller Gall.”

“Who is John Gall?” Penny said confusedly. Her words had a familiar ring in her ears. Somehow she had the feeling she’s heard that question raised before—and perhaps more than once; perhaps many times.

“I am the head of GRABB,” John Fuller Gall explained.

“What is GRABB?”

“An organization dedicated to the salvation of the individual,” john Fuller Gall told her, the light of the zealot shining suddenly and brightly from his eyes. “An organization dedicated to the high moral principle of each man taking what he can get and fighting to hold onto it. An organization dedicated to the survival of the fittest and the extinction of the fit-less. An organization which lives by its slogan.”

“What is your slogan?” Penny was beginning to feel stronger, and with her regained strength came curiosity.

“ ‘I’m all right, Jack; screw you all! ”’ The others present chanted the words along with John Fuller Gall. They subsided as he continued to speak. “GRABB believes that individual enterprise should be rewarded. That the laissez faire of Jesse James should be returned to the American business community. That the competitive instincts exemplified by Aaron Burr should once again be encouraged. That, like Benedict Arnold, a man is justified in doing anything if it lands him on the winning side: the side of profit, that is. And GRABB believes in fighting for its ideals with all the weapons at its command. The tools of our struggle are the dumdum bullet, the karate chop, the crotch-kick, the poison gas pellet and germs in the water system.”

“But that would poison the drinking water, wouldn’t it?” Penny protested.

“The Reds have already done that. They’ve fluoridated the water. Do you realize that every time you take a drink your vital life juices are being poisoned, weakened, sapped?”

“No, I never realized that,” Penny admitted.

“But, young lady, we are not merely an activist organization. No, indeed. We have our ideals, too. In our own way, we are quite devout. Each of us, in his own way, reveres the omnipotent power of the Almighty Dollar.”

“Amen!” chorused the others. “The Almighty Dollar watches over us. Amen!”

“But what does GRABB stand for?” Penny wanted to know.

“Tell her, fellow individualists.”

“Go Right And Beat Betterment,” the individualists chanted.

“That’s all very well,” Penny said, “but why did you bring me here?”

“It was a necessary compromise. According to our beliefs, we should have left you lying in the gutter. You were the weak and the Rolls Royce was the strong. Survival of the fittest. You see? Helping you was an act of philanthropy, and that is quite contrary to GRABB’s aims.”

“Then why did you help me?

“Necessity. We couldn’t be sure that the exercise of our superior strength went unnoticed. If our license number had been taken down by some meddler, it would have proved embarrassing. The idiots probably would have called it hit-and-run. The nature of GRABB is such that we can’t afford publicity. We don’t want attention. We prefer to go about the business of attaining our ends unnoticed.”

“It sounds like the John Birch Society,” Penny observed.

“Those leftists!” John Fuller Gall sneered contemptuously. ‘

“I thought they were right-wing,” Penny said. “Like Barry Goldwater.”

“Barry Goldwater! Ha! He’s a Communist dupe. Just like J. Edgar Hoover.”

“You don’t seriously mean that the FBI is a tool of the Reds?”

“Don’t I? Young lady, consider two statistics. Take the admitted membership of the Communist Party in the United States today. Then take the number of FBI agents Hoover says have infiltrated Commie cells. Do you know what you’ll find when you put those two figures together?”

“No, I don’t,” Penny admitted.

“You’ll find that one out of every four Commies in the United States today is a member of the FBI, that’s what! One out of four! Just you stop and consider what that tells you about J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI. Think about it!”

“I will,” Penny promised. “But not right now. Right now, I think I’d better be going.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” John Fuller Gall told her firmly.

“You mean I’m a prisoner?” Penny’s eyes opened very wide.

“Let us say, rather, that you are my guest. Although,” Gall added, musing to himself, “the whole concept of hospitality is anathema to GRABB. But never mind. You are our guest. You see, our work depends on maintaining secrecy. You are the first person who is not a member of our inner circle to gain admittance to this headquarters. We can’t possibly let you go until we are sure of your allegiance. However, I suggest that you resign yourself to the circumstances. To steal a leaf from the Existentialists, What is is. Why rail against it? Rather relax and allow me to introduce my disciples. Ladies first.” He motioned to the only other female present. “Our chief spokelady.” He put his arm around her fondly. “This is Little Elfin’ Aynie.”

“Women are vessels to be filled at man’s whim,” Little Efiin’ Aynie said. “If you agree, I’m pleased to meet you. What did you say your name was, anyway?”

“Penny Candie,” Penny told her. “I’m glad to know you too. That’s an awfully pretty dress you have on.”

“I know. I’ve been wearing it for twenty seven years. I don’t believe in an ostentatious wardrobe. Every so often I dye it, though.”

“And this is my faithful servant, Pungent,” Gall continued. “He’s a Sikh eunuch.”

“Why wouldn’t he be?” Penny observed to herself. “How do you do?” she added to the giant brown-skinned man with the mammoth bare chest, the silk pantaloons and the white turban.

“I don’t,” he said taciturnly.

“And here,” Gall went on, “is Daddy Whorebucks, a true entrepreneur of the old school. He’s a multi-millionaire already, but still quite active in business.”

“Hello.” Penny greeted Daddy Whorebucks.

“A little skinny for my taste,” Daddy Whorebucks observed, sizing Penny up. “But that’s the fashion today. I know a Frisco brothel that might be interested in her.”

“Later, Daddy Whorebucks,” John Fuller Gall told him. “Man cannot live by broads alone.”

“The hell he can’t,” Daddy Whorebucks muttered.

“John, you’re forgetting to introduce Randy,” Little Effn’ Aynie interjected. She tweaked the ears of the large, slavering, furry, four-footed beast rubbing up against her.

“Oh, what kind of doggie is that?” Penny asked.

“He’s not a dog, he’s a wolf,” Little Effn’ Aynie explained, restraining Randy, who was snarling his resentment at the insult. “A genuine wolf.”

“I’ve met his type,” Penny answered, girl-to-girl. “But only the two-legged variety.” Then, in keeping with the chummy rapport she was establishing, she asked, “Why do they call you ‘Little Effn’ Aynie’ ? ”

“Because I’m petite and I used to work for Daddy Whorebucks over there,” Aynie explained.

“Turned many a good trick, she did,” Daddy Whorebucks sighed nostalgically.

“Why did you quit?” Penny asked.

“We of GRABB don’t believe in prostituting our services,” Aynie explained. “It was all right until I began enjoying my work. That was dishonest, you see, because I was also getting paid for it. I was being overpaid for what I was selling.”

“I always thought so,” Gall remembered. “But please, Miss Candie, allow me to present the last of my disciples. This is Dr. Werner Braunshnout.” He indicated a slender little man with a Charlie Chaplin moustache and his hair falling in his eyes.

“How do you do, Dr. Braunshnout,” Penny said politely.

“Heil Hitler!” Dr. Braunshnout clicked his heels and raised his arm stiffly.

“Werner . . . ” There was a note of chastisement in Gall’s voice.

“Ach! I’m sorry, mein Fuhr— Ach! Again I apologize. Habits are so difficult to break. One cannot escape one’s own magnificent Kultur.”

“Are you German?” Penny asked naively. “Ja! Aber nicbt Nazi! Nicht Nazi! I didn’t know what was going on. I just did like I was told, like all gut citizens of the Fatherland. Ich -”

“That’s enough, Werner.” Gall’s voice was sharp. “The war has been over for twenty years.”

“Ja! So sorry. Aber the war against degenerate socialism must go on, mein Fuhr— I mean, Herr Ubermeister Gall.”

“There you are right, Werner. We must indeed exterminate this plague of creeping socialists infesting the world. And this time we must not fail. There must be no repetition of that last fiasco with the bazooka. This time that abominable UN building must be destroyed.”

“Still, we were fortunate,” Little Effn’ Aynie interjected. “We were lucky to be able to pass the buck to two Cubans. But you’re right. It was a fiasco. We never should have tried it. It stood to reason that any attack launched from such an unlikely place as Astoria, Long Island, would have to fail.”

“Perhaps. But every movement has its own Bay of Pigs,” Daddy Whorebucks pointed out. “Just think how differently history might have turned out if it wasn’t for that Washington tailor.”

“What Washington tailor?” Penny asked curiously.

“The one that found the note in the Secretary of State’s pocket and removed it. Surely you’ve heard of the incident.”

“No, I haven’t,” Penny owned.

“It read, ’Don’t forget to tell President about Bay of Pigs’,” Daddy Whorebucks explained. “But the tailor threw it away and the Secretary of State did forget. A pity.”

“Don’t be naive. It was all part of a plot,” Little Efin’ Aynie told him. “Our agents found out later that that tailor was a homosexual who slept with a high official in the State Department. And do you know what they slept on?”

“No. What?”

“A Castro convertible!”

“It figures,” Daddy Whorebucks sighed. “The State Department is riddled with Communists today-—and of course they’re all homosexuals.”

“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it, dumkopf,” Dr. Braunshnout advised.

“Enough, Werner!” John Fuller Gall commanded. “Enough, all. We have serious business to discuss. We must finalize our plans for the destruction of the UN building.”

“Why do you want to destroy the UN building?” Penny asked timidly.

“I am an architect,” Gall said loftily, as if that statement explained everything.

“I don’t understand.”

“A functional architect.” His tone implied that she was an idiot.

“So?”

“I have it on reliable authority,” Gall condescended, “that in the basement of the UN building, subversively and deliberately hidden from view, there is”—he took a deep, outraged breath—”a gargoyle! Now do you understand? Those collectivist perverts have ruined the entire functionalism of the building by placing a gargoyle in the basement. Not only that, but there are reliable rumors of plans to erect a cupola on the First Avenue side of the building. And it is a fact that the urinals in the men’s room are” — Gall shuddered—“round! Bowl-shaped! This is a besmirchment of the entire decor of the building. They should be triangular, or course! Triangular! Triangular! Triangular!”

“Don’t get so excited, john,” Little Effn’ Aynie soothed him. “Drink some carrot juice to calm your nerves. Then let’s get on with our plans to dynamite this abomination.”

“All right.” Gall downed the carrot juice and composed himself. “I’ll hear your report on the storm troops now, Dr. Braunshnout.”

“Jawohl!” Dr. Braunshnout heel-clicked to attention.

“In Yorkville, our men are ready, aber ein problem there is .”

“What is this problem?”

“There is only one tailor in the neighborhood, and the sleeves of our troops’ black shirts need sewing.”

“His reason for refusing?”

“He is Jewish.”

“Can’t you persuade him?”

“Nein. I tried.”

“How did you try?” Gall wanted to know.

“ ‘You have relatives in Chermany? ’ I asked him. But he said ’nein’. I don’t know what the world is coming to. In der guten alten days all the Juden had relatives in Chermany. What happened to them all?”

“You’re asking me?” Gall said with pointed sarcasm.

“Nicht Nazi! Nicht Nazi!” Dr. Braunshnout defended himself excitedly. “Ich had nothing to do with it. Ich never even knew it vas happening.”

“Achtung!” Gall roared. “Get hold of yourself, man! We’ll have no more of your hysterics. Now tell me, was that all that happened with the tailor?”

“Except that he threatened if I did not leave his shop he would report me to the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai Brith at their next mah-jong party.”

“And so you left,” Gall said. “Well, you had to, I suppose. Still, Werner, I do wish you wouldn’t bother me with these petty details. Get some of the barmaids in the rathskellers to sew on the swastikas. You should have thought of that yourself.“ Why do I have to think of everything? Is there anything else new in Yorkville?”

“Nein - Oh, vait. There is another report going around that Hitler lives. According to the Police Gazette, he vas seen at the dock on Vest Forty-second Street boarding a tramp steamer bound for Argentina.”

“But I thought that according to the last issue of the Police Gazette he was in the Himalayas organizing the Abominable Snowmen into Nazi shock troops.”

“He gets around,” Dr. Braunshnout shrugged. “Funny, though, how he alvays has a Police Gazette reporter with him. Do you suppose Goebels could have arranged it? For propaganda purposes, I mean?”

“What difference?” Gall shrugged. “Like all great leaders, like myself, he was surrounded by idiots. I am weary of you now. Of all of you. Leave me. I wish to be alone with our guest.”

They obeyed, filing out of the room. When he was alone with Penny, Gall turned to her with a gleam in his eyes. “I have plans of domination for you, my dear,” he said mysteriously. “Sexual domination. But wait. You shall see. First I must relax. I must relax all my muscles.” He knelt down on all fours in the center of the room. “Bring that over here,” he said to Penny, indicating a large globe of the world standing opposite her.

She hefted the globe and found it quite heavy. The effort of bringing it over to him left her panting.

“Now, put it on my back, between my shoulders,” Gall instructed.

Penny did as she was told.

Gall raised his hands so that his weight was on his feet and his arms were dangling in front of him. The globe rested between his shoulders as he performed a series of exercises in this position. He was quite adept and managed to keep the globe in balance despite his movements.

“That’s very good,” Penny remarked.

“It’s symbolic,” Gall told her. “Notice how I carry the weight of the World on my solders whilst I obtain the gratification of physical exercise.”

“It’s remarkable. Doesn’t the weight bother you?”

“Not at all,” Gall shrugged. He shouldn’t have shrugged. The globe tumbled from his shoulders and smashed into several fragments on the hard rock floor. “Damn! I lose more damn worlds that way!” Gall told Penny ruefully. “Well, no matter. Now it is time for me to indoctrinate you, anyway.” He approached her ominously.

“What are you going to do to me?” The frightened young girl shrank away from him. ,

“I am a man and you are a woman. I am going to take you. By force! It’s the only way. It’s the way I take all my women. It’s part of the philosophy of GRABB. The most delightful part.”

“You mean you’re going to rape me?” Penny sounded relieved.

“Brutally!” Gall assured her. “Savagely, as a man should take a weak Woman.”

“Oh, goody!” Penny squealed, allowing Scarlett’s mink to part so that her quivering ivory breasts with their quivering bright red tips were quiveringly revealed.

“You mean you don’t mind?” Gall paused.

“Oh, no!”

“You want to be raped?”

“Oh, yes. But please, won’t you hurry it up?”

“Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” Gall’s face was dark as a thundercloud. “You actually want me to rape you? That’s what you’re saying. Damn! Then I can’t do it, of course.”

“But why not?”

“I never have sex with a woman who’s willing. It would go against everything GRABB stands for.”

“But please! I’m begging you. I want sex so bad it hurts.”

“Well, that’s something,” Gall sighed. “If not having sex with you makes you feel pain, then my course is clear. I must dominate you with non-sex. Do you really feel pain?”

“It’s subsiding.” Penny pouted.

“That’s too bad. But, wait! I have an idea.” He strode over to Penny and slipped the riding crop from her wrist.

Penny, who had forgotten it was even there, watched him curiously. “Now what?” she asked.

“Stand up,” he said. “Ah,” he looked at the riding boots she had on, “that is good. Better if they had high heels, but no matter. Take off your coat.”

Penny obeyed quickly. “Have you changed your mind?” she asked hopefully.

“Not at all. I am going to whip you, that is all.”

“Oh, no!” Penny pulled her coat back on and backed away from him.

“But why not? After that, I might even rape you. If only it didn’t give you too much pleasure. You see, pleasure has to be paid for with pain. That’s a platform in GRABB’s constitution. If you want to join us, you must realize that everything in life has its price and the price must be met.”

“Then I don’t want to join you,” Penny said firmly.

“Nonsense. You don’t know what you’re missing. Here, let me show you.” Gall stripped off his buckskin shirt, handed her the riding crop and knelt in front of her. “You whip me. Go ahead.”

“I don’t want to.”

“If you don’t, I shall call Pungent and have him whip you. Go on, now.”

Reluctantly, Penny raised the riding crop and brought it down on Gall’s bare shoulders.

“Harder!” he ordered.

Penny struck him harder.

“Again!”

She hit him again. And again. Harder each time. Soon she found herself caught up in what she was doing. She broke the skin on Gall’s back, and the stripe of blood incensed her so that she beat him even more energetically. She stood over him like an Amazon, the mink jacket flying out behind her, a statuesque nude figure in boots, breasts straining with her exertions, nostrils aquiver, hips and belly undulating with a strange, sadistic, sensual pleasure at the punishment she was inflicting on the man before her.

Gall lowered his buckskin pants and indicated that he wanted Penny to whip him on his bared buttocks. She complied, and the sight of his aroused manhood when she attacked this portion of his anatomy in turn aroused Penny to even greater heights of sadism. She slid quickly around in front of him and before he could protect himself, she had delivered a series of blows on this most vulnerable member.

“OWEE!” Gall screamed. He sprang to his feet and wrenched the rising crop from her hands. He tore the mink jacket from her body and tried to strike her. But Penny was too agile for him. She got the couch between them and kept it between them as they circled.

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to be beaten.”

“All right.” Gall paused. “Then we’ll do it the hard way. Pungent!” he called. “Pungent, get the whip and come in here!”

The giant Sikh came through the door. In the crook of one arm nestled a wicked-looking cat-o’-nine-tails, its lash curled and waiting.

“Grab her,” Gall ordered.

Caught between the two-of them now, Penny was captured with ease.

“I’ll hold her,” Gall told Pungent. “You give her thirty lashes.”

Penny felt herself grasped firmly and bent over the back of the couch. Pungent moved around behind her and raised the whip. A second later the lash whistled through the air sliced into the plump roundness of one of Penny’s plumply round buttocks.

Penny screamed aloud. It was like the slash of a red-hot razor. “No! Please!” she begged.

To no avail. The whip came down again and a rivulet of blood spread over the creamy white surface of the trembling, creamy white orbs.

The pain made Penny scream again. It hurt something fierce. And yet the darling girl couldn’t help feeling the sexual excitement of it too. Thus was she trapped between the agony of the whip and her own uncontrollable lust.

Pain. Terror. Lust. What else had Fate in store for Penny?

CHAPTER SEVEN

IT was just after the moment that Penny admitted to herself that sexual masochism has its points that the door to the room was flung violently open. Dr. Werner Braunshnout stood there with a rare, hand-carved British Mauser held firmly in his hand. But it was a much transformed Dr. Braunshnout. The little Charlie Chaplin moustache was gone. His bangs were combed back into a sleek pompadour. He stood erect and tall and the single-breasted midnight-blue cashmere suit he was wearing was a testimonial to the excellent tailoring in which he indulged himself. He was the very picture of self-assured suavity.

“Unhand that gal, Gall,” he drawled in cultured, upper-class Welsh tones. “And you drop the whip while there’s still time to spare the ribs, Pungent,” he instructed.

“What’s the meaning of this, Braunshnout?” Gall demanded.

“Not Braunshnout. Jock Bind. That’s me. Secret Agent .069 of Her Imperial Majesty’s Secret Service. Jock Bind. .069. Assigned to crush the organization known as GRABB and bring in the nefarious john Fuller Gall alive or dead.”

“Traitor!” Gall screamed.

“Drop that rod, Jock.” It Was Little Effn’ Aynie, She had come up silently behind Jock Bind and held a gun trained on a point dead center between his well-tailored shoulder blades.

“This is my rod, and this is my gun,” Jock Bind said, indicating the difference. “This is for shooting and this is for fun.” He was playing-—for time.

The maneuver paid off.

“Ditch da gat, Aynie. I gotcha covered.” The voice came from behind Little Effn’ Aynie. When she didn’t comply quickly enough, the speaker moved quickly up behind her and hit her in the kidneys with his own As she slid to the floor in agony, he snatched a quick kiss from her pain-twisted lips.

“Daddy Whorebucks! What are you doing?” Gall demanded.

“Not Daddy Whorebucks!” He pulled at his scalp, and it was revealed that the bald pate was really a rubberized wig. Two more pieces of rubber were whisked away and eyebrows appeared. He sucked in his Whorebucks belly and was transformed into a hard, tough, young private eye. “Spike Stapler,” he explained. “Fifty-dollar-a-day gumshoe. Plus expenses, natch. I been ‘on your tail a long time, Gall. I woulda nailed ya, too, if pretty boy over there hadn’t decided to play Sir Lancelot wit’ da chick an’ spilled da beans before I really got da goods onya.”

“I’m licensed to spill!” Jock Bind protested.

“Ahh, shut ya trap. Ya went an’ spoilt everything witcha stupid grandstand play.”

“You are an interfering boob,” Jock Bind told him frostily. “I had everything well in hand before you interfered.”

“On’y one thing you had in hand I could see,” Spike Stapler jeered. “I hadn’t come along, this broad woulda plugged you.” He gave Aynie a gratuitous kick in the ribs.

“This business is over your head, Stapler.” Jock Bind was confidently supercilious. “Your Neanderthal mentality may not grasp this, but they were whipping this lady. Perhaps an American goon like you might stand idly by and let that happen. But in Britain, we have certain scruples about letting a lady be subjected to such treatment.” He lit an imported cigarette, drew on it lightly, with the air of a connoisseur, and expelled the smoke through his aristocratic nostrils.

“Nuts! Da jane prob’ly enjoyed it. Admit it, sister. All dames like to be roughed up, don’t dey?”

“Of course not!” Penny blushed at the lie. Secretly, she was a little regretful that Jock Bind had brought matters to a halt when they were just beginning.

“You just don’t know the difference between a lady and a dame,” Jock Bind told Stapler. “I think now you’d best leave matters in my hands. Just leave. It’s probably time for you to have your dinner, anyway. What do you eat? Raw meat, I suppose. Why don’t you hop over to the zoo? You should be just in time for a midnight snack. It should be feeding time there now. Go on. Go snatch a bite -- or vice versa.”

“Vulgar boy,” Stapler said. “Be careful, or I’ll slap yer hand. Now let’s just cut da comedy. Let’s get this straight. It’s my caper. An’ I’m bringin’ Gall in.”

“Not likely!” Jock Bind was intrepid.

“Dat’s da way it’s gonna be!” Spike Stapler stood fast.

They faced each other now, each training his gun on the other.

“While you decide, does anybody mind if I put my coat back on?” Penny shivered in her delicious nudity.

“I mind,” Stapler said, licking his lips and staring at her ripe young breasts avidly.

“For once I agree with you,” Jock Bind said, nibbling his upper-class lower lip suavely and gazing with polite interest upon the goosepimply orbs.

“Too bad about both of you.” Penny donned the coat.

At Spike Stapler’s feet, Little Effn’ Aynie groaned and tried to sit up. “Get back dere!” He reached down and smacked her casually with the flat of his hand. As her head rolled back he gave her a quick, passionate kiss. “Too bad ya gotta fry, sweetie,” he remarked. “You an’ me coulda made beautiful music together.”

“Wait,” Aynie moaned. “You don’t understand. I’m not what you think I am. Listen to me. Please.” She clutched at Spike Stapler’s legs pleadingly. Fr a moment it looked as if he would boot her away, but when she clutched a little higher, he restrained his violent impulses.

“Dat’s nice, baby. Don’t stop,” he told her.

Aynie took a good, firm grip. “Now you listen!” she commanded.

“Ouch! Just like a dame to pull a trick like dat. An’ just like me ta fall for it. Dat’s da story of my life. All right, just ease up a little an’ I’ll listen.”

“First of all,” Aynie began, “I’m not really Little Effn’ Aynie at all. I’m not even a member of GRABB.”

“You sure act like one,” Spike groaned. “Wouldja ease up on ida left one just a little. It’s killin’ me.”

“All right. My real name,” she continued, “is Dominique Fantail, and I"m a reporter for the Architectural Herald. I only infiltrated Gall’s organization because we’re planning an expose on him.”

“I am surrounded by traitors,” Gall groaned.

“And I demand the right to interview him first,” Dominique Fantail added.

“He’s my prisoner,” Jock Bind reminded her. “He and Pungent both.”

“You’re forgettin’ I got a gat on ya, Bind,” Spike Stapler objected. “There two bozos is my prisoners.”

“And you’re forgetting something, too.” Dominique Fantail squeezed just a little bit harder to remind him. “They may be your prisoners,” she said sweetly, “but at the moment you’re my prisoner.”

“I’m nobody’s prisoner,” Pungent said in the high soprano voice which was one of the hallmarks of his eunuch personality. And before anybody could stop him, the cat-o’-nine-tails lashed out with deadly accuracy across the room, flicked the light switch, and plunged the room into darkness.

Involuntary reflex to the darkness made Dominique Fantail, formerly Little Effn’ Aynie, clench her hands. Spike Staples, the bogus Daddy Whorebucks, screamed and involuntarily squeezed the trigger of the gun in his hand. The gun went off and Jock Bind, Secret Agent .069, who had impersonated Dr. Werner Braunshnout, reacted by instinctively firing back.

The result was chaos. The darkness was filled with flying bullets, flying fists, flying whiplashes. In the confusion, Penny felt herself lifted from her feet by a super-strong arm and whisked from the room. Outside the door, the wolf, Randy, was guarding the exit.

“Arf!” he said, springing to his feet and snarling. “Arf.”

Gloryosky, Randy, Penny couldn’t help thinking despite the frightening situation, despite the undignified way in which she was dangling from her captor’s arm like a sack of potatoes, Gloryosky, Randy, what kind of way is that for a wolf to speak? Arf. Arf. It’s bad enough for a dog!

Her captor set Penny on her feet and pushed her behind him while he coped with the wolf. This was done quite simply. He simply brought his fist down hard on top of Randy’s head and the beast let out a yip and toppled over on his back. Then the man turned back to Penny and at last she saw his face.

“Pungent!” the darling girl exclaimed. “It’s you.”

“Wrong,” the eunuch told her. “I’m not really Pungent at all. Except insofar as my deodorant has let me down, that is. Like the others, I too infiltrated GRABB or my own purposes. My real name is Xavier X—or, XX, as I’m known among my followers in Harlem. Perhaps you have heard of me?”

Yes, I have." Penny looked at him with a mixture of fear and awe. I’ve read about you in the papers. You’re the chief of the Harlem Mau Mau. You advocate cannibahsm as a weapon to be used by Negroes against the white power structure.”

“That is correct.”

“And you’ve written a book, haven’t you?”

“I have. A cookbook. It contains some truly rare recipes. Saute of Southern fried segregationist. Alabama Sheriff au gratin. Roast of Mississippi klansman. Pan-broiled politician a la Wallace. Filet of Florida motel owner. White trash hash. That’s especially good when it’s warmed over a burning cross.”

Penny’s mind was spinning. If Punjab was really XX, a spy who had infiltrated GRABB, if all the others were also impersonators, that still left one question unanswered: Who, in reality, was John Fuller Gall? The question nagged at her mind: Who is John Gall? Who is John Gall?

It was one question to which Penny was never to have an answer. Nobody could answer it. Even Little Effin’ Aynie, now revealed as architectural reporter Dominique Fantail, would flounder in the quicksand of her own confusion in attempting to identify Gall. Who is John Gall? Aynie’s answer would make Gall a what, rather than a who, thereby removing him from the human race and relieving the human race of any need to consider him at all.

Now, however, Penny had already ceased to consider the question. She had her own predicament to ponder. Not quite sure what that predicament was, she timidly put the question to XX. “What are you going to do with me?” the deliciously frightened girl asked.

“You shall find out soon enough. For now we must get out of the enemy’s territory.” XX picked Penny up and carried her to the elevator. A few moments later they emerged from a basement entrance onto a side street just a few doors from Park Avenue. Still keeping a firm grasp on Penny’s arm, XX forced her into a parked car. He started the vehicle and piloted it uptown, toward Harlem.

“Do you really mean all those terrible things you say about what Negroes will do to white people if they take over?” Penny asked after they’d been driving in silence for a while.

“I do.”

“But why do you hate us so? Surely you realize there are well-meaning white people who want to help your race.”

“They’re the worst kind. I hate them most of all for what they did to me.”

“What they did to you?”

“Yes. You think my voice is high because I’m plugging for a job in a church choir?”

“Oh! You mean your-—your—” Penny was at a loss for words.

“My missing parts. That’s right, lady. That’s what happens when a black man gets mixed up with well-meaning whites. They call it penal reform.”

“But how did it happen?”

“It's a long story. But if you really want to know, I’ll tell you. It all started when I was a kid, with a white lady social worker in Harlem.”

“Oh, those people are so dedicated,” Penny enthused. “So well-meaning.”

“Sure. They took up the white man’s burden right where Kipling left it lying. Anyway, I was around thirteen or fourteen when this white lady social worker took me in hand. Almost right away, she had a profound effect on my life.”

“How do you mean?” Penny wanted to know. .

“She made me see the light. Before she came along, I was crazy about fried chicken. Ate it whenever I got the chance. Watermelon, too. But she made me see how I was conforming to a stereotype, and so I cut those particular calories out of my diet. I did a pretty fair rumba, but she made me see my natural rhythm for what it really was: ammunition for pigeonholing bigots. She taught me to miss the beat and be purposely clumsy. Yes, she was something. I’ll never forget the day I told her I hoped to grow up and be rich so that some day I might own a Cadillac. She practically had apoplexy on the spot. Only one thing got her social-working dander up worse than that: the time I told her I liked listening to Amos and Andy on the radio. Believe you me, she made me see that Hattie McDaniel, Bojangles, Rochester, Stepin Fechit¹ , all that gang, were nothing but traitors to the race.”

“Still, I can sort of see her point,” Penny said hesitantly.

“Oh, sure. But the trouble was she was taking the few enjoyments I’d had right out of my life. That was all right, though, because she was also teaching me to be good and surly. You see, I’d been brought up to be polite to people. But she made me see that being polite to white people was just being an Uncle Tom. Yessir, she made me see the light. The times I rode home with my feet aching because I wouldn’t take any of the empty seats at the back of the bus!”

“She was just trying to give you a sense of racial pride.”

“No kidding? Well now, aren’t you real perceptive? But you’re right. That’s what she was trying to do. And she set about it with a vengeance. She lugged all kinds of books on the ethnic background of the Negro up to my home. History, primitive art, music, culture, tradition—she fed it all to me until it was coming out of my ears.”

“You don’t sound very grateful,” Penny objected.

“Maybe that’s because I know now that she had an ulterior motive. One so ulterior that she probably wasn’t even aware of it herself. You see, she’d get all fluttery and excited about the wonderful contributions of the Negro to the world. I do believe, looking back on it, that she was the first black supremacist I ever met. But she got carried away with her own admiration.”

“What happened?”

“Well, all the time she was convincing me of Negro superiority, you see, she was convincing herself. Now you have to picture this white lady social worker. She was one of these frustrated thirtyish types. Rimless eye-glasses, fervently bony, face like a horse, and given to pimply blushes and hot flushes. Well, she got one of those hot flushes with me one night. Came on strong. Seems one stereotype she’d never gotten rid of was the concept of the Negro being a superior stud. That night she was out to put it to the test.”

“How awful! What did you do?”

“I wanted to oblige her, but she was just plain too unappealing to me. Unfortunately, this must have come across. She got real desperate then. Told me if I didn’t make love to her she was going to scream rape and have me locked up. I tried, but it was still no good. Then she left in a huff.”

“Did she do what she threatened to do?”

“No. I think she realized that even an ofay cop wouldn’t believe any man—even a black man-—would try to rape her.” '

“What did you do?”

“I took all the books she’d left on the ethnic background of the Negro and lined them up and urinated on them. Then I threw them in the garbage. That was the end of the white social worker and me. But it was only the beginning of what I was to suffer at the hands of well-meaning white liberals.”

“Tell me about it.” Penny was genuinely interested.

“I met a rich white lady who was just getting in on the fad for tolerance. I was a godsend to her. See, she was short one cocktail-party Negro.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, you see, with tolerance the ‘in’ thing with the upper classes, it became necessary for every hostess to have at least one Negro present when she threw a party. But my benefactress was more ambitious than that. She always had to have two Negroes—two Negroes of roughly the same height and build.”

“Why?”

“She had an eighteen-foot couch, a custom built job, in her living room. It was done in pure white velvet. She’d sit a Negro at each end of the couch like a pair of bookends. We supplied just the right finishing touch for the color scheme.”

“But that’s not integration!” Penny said indignantly.

“Maybe not. It was good interior decoration, though.”

“Couldn’t you move off the couch, change your seat or something?”

“Sure. I did that one night.”

“What happened?”

“She never asked me back again. Kind of a shame. She had great hors d’oeuvres. Crackers spread with cream cheese and a black olive in the dead center of each one.”

“She wasn’t a genuine liberal!” Penny said with a touch of self-righteousness.

“That she wasn’t. I met up with a genuine white liberal later though. He was kneeling on the steps of a church and singing ‘We Shall Overcome’.”

“Was it a sit-in? A pray-in, I mean?”

“No. It was a Harlem church. He was just tying his shoelace. Everybody else was singing, so he was singing too. Still, don’t get the wrong idea. He was real gung-ho for integration. I tripped over him; that’s how we met. And not long after that, he had me just as dedicated to the cause as he was. The only thing is, he was white and I was black.”

“But you were fighting for the same thing,” Penny reminded XX.

“Maybe. But when it came right down to it, I was the one who had to do the integrating. For instance, we began on schools. You see, he’d discovered an absolutely segregated high school right here in New York.”

“How appalling! What did you do?”

“We set about integrating it, of course. And we succeeded. That’s where I came in. We’d decided on deliberate speed, you see, and I was elected to be the token integrationist. I was the first Negro to attend that all-white school.”

“How did they react to your presence?”

“It’s hard to say. You see, they didn’t speak any English. Only Yiddish. As it happened, this school was a Hassidic Yeshiva. So, once we’d made our point, I didn’t hang around. And by that time my avid white liberal friend had other plans for me, anyway.”

“What sort of plans?”

“Housing. He’d decided that housing was the answer to all the Negro’s problems. What we’d do was, every Sunday we’d get into his car and go to where some new development was going up on Long Island, or in Westchester-you know, the $35,000-per-unit kind of development-—and look over the model houses. We’d talk real loud about how we were going to plant a watermelon patch here and put the barbecue pit there and things like that. Boy, we sure scared the hell out of some real estate agents. But after a while it began to pall and my white friend decided that the real answer was employment.”

“That’s certainly one of the big problems to be solved,” Penny granted.

“Uh-huh. Only I think my integrationist pal got off on the wrong foot. He got all fired up over the wrong field of endeavor, you might say.”

“I don’t see how he could,” Penny objected. “Every field is important. They all have to be integrated.”

“Well then, at least he started off with the wrong complaint. It was against CBS, and it’s hard to buck those big outfits. You see, there was this Negro fellow in the movement with us who applied for a job there as a television announcer and got turned down cold.”

“Disgraceful! You should have protested. You should have picketed. You should have boycotted. You should have staged a sit-in!”

“We did. We did all those things. But it didn’t help. They still wouldn’t budge an inch. They just wouldn’t hire this fellow.”

“You should have brought it to the F. E. P. C.”

“We did. And it looked like we might win, too, until the applicant for this announcing job got on the stand.”

“Why? What happened then?” Penny asked.

“Not much. They heard his story. They heard him out. But then they decided against him.”

“But why?”

“Just one reason. The same reason we shouldn’t have made a federal case out of it in the first place. He was asking for a job as an announcer, and he stuttered something fierce.”

“Oh! What a shame! But I hope you realized that one setback like that didn’t negate the need to end discrimination in employment.”

“Oh, absolutely. My white friend was more resolute than ever. And the next time around I was elected to be his test Negro. He aimed big, this boy. With him behind me, I took on one of the largest ad agencies on Madison Avenue. It was his idea they were discriminating in the choice of the models they were hiring. So he picked one specific account to tackle them on and demanded that they hire me to replace the white model being used.”

“Was sort of an account was it?”

“Suntan lotion. It was one of these before-and-after ads. It showed a picture of a real pale-faced white man with a caption under it reading: ’Why look like this?’ Next to it was a white man with a real good tan and the caption read: ‘When you can look like this!’ It was my integrationist friend’s idea that I should substitute for the man in the second picture. He argued that I had a far superior tan to the fellow in the ad and that therefore I was obviously more qualified for the job, and if I wasn’t given it, it was obviously due to pure discrimination.”

“Did you get the job?”

“No. The company claimed that no matter how much white people might want a tan, they didn’t really want to look Negro like me. The court upheld them. But that didn’t daunt my friend. He took out after something really big then. He got on the tail of the U. S. Government’s astronaut program. He said they were discriminating because there were no Negro astronauts. He insisted they make me an astronaut.”

“How wonderful. You must have been thrilled at the idea,” Penny enthused.

“Thrilled hell! I was so scared I damn near turned white! I get airsick riding an elevator! Still, I let myself be convinced it was for the good of my people. I went for it hook, line and sinker. I even came up with a slogan for the campaign.”

“What was it?”

“ ‘A coon to the moon by June’,” XX told her.

“Even coming from a Negro I don’t think that kind of language is in good taste,” Penny said indignantly. “You shouldn’t make jokes like that! Think what it would mean to your people if a Negro astronaut did go into space.”

“You mean if the jig was up? All right! All right! Don’t get excited! I’ll withdraw that remark. Anyway, fortunately for me, this project was just as much of a flop as all the other ideas my integration-minded friend got so hopped up about. When it came to the physical, they turned me down because I had flat feet—probably from all the picketing I’d been doing. By then I was pretty fed up with my white friend’s projects and I gave him the brush-off. But as far as white people generally were concerned, it was just the beginning for me. You see, it was around that time that I started hanging around the Left Bank.”

“The Left Bank? You mean you went abroad? To Paris? You mean the left bank of the Seine?”

“Nope. The left bank of the Harlem River’s what I mean. Where all the existentialists hang out, you know? Ever since Norman Mailer wrote that piece on The White Negro, hipsters-black and white together —have been congregating there to compare their orgasms. I got involved with one gang that was trying to take out a patent on a machine that would measure orgasms. The machine was made out of old switchblade knives and obsolete zip-guns. Then one night, at the Crillon-—that’s a local motel—-I met Lady Pratt Gashley and because of her my whole life was changed.”

“You fell in love,” Penny guessed romantically.

“We did. She was an English girl in her early thirties, a noblewoman who had forsaken her title to serve as a nurse in the war against discrimination. I met her when I was wounded in a battle on the Italian front. You may recall the battle. It was known as the Battle of Pizzeria. It was triggered when a Negro opened a pizza parlor in the section of East Harlem that borders on the Italian section. The Italians blockaded 116th Street and refused to let the Heinz trucks delivering tomato sauce through the blockade. The supporters of the Negro pizza-maker retaliated by sitting in at an Italian restaurant and draping their ravioli in black. Violence broke out when the Italians attempted to lynch one of the Negro demonstrators by stringing him up from a lamppost by a long strand of spaghetti. In the thick of the ensuing fray, I was wounded by a flamethrower spraying hot minestrone. When I came to, I found myself in an ambulance looking up into the beautiful hazel eyes of this white nurse. And that’s how I met Lady Pratt Gashley.

“ ‘Don’t try to move, Jake,’ she said, smiling down at me.

“ ‘My name’s not Jake,’ I told her.

“‘You’re Jake with me,’ she answered. ‘I don’t care what color you are. All you chaps are Jake with me.’ ”

“She sounds like a real democrat,” Penny interrupted. “Despite her aristocratic background.”

“That’s what I thought.” XX resumed his tale. “Certainly, she wasn’t a snob. But she did have other faults. And perhaps that’s why our love was doomed from the first. You see, she was a nymphomaniac, and I was a eunuch-to-be.”

“But you weren’t a eunuch then. Your love could have been beautiful. What happened?”

“I was a victim of the war against intolerance. As Brett told me after it happened, I gave more than my life. That was true. I gave up the power to love. Can any man live without the power to love? It was rotten. I kept a stiff upper lip, but it was such a rotten way to be wounded!”

“Tell me how it happened.” Penny’s voice was trembly with sympathy.

“Lady Pratt Gashley went that white lady social worker one step better, that’s how. She was sold on the ethnic of the Negro and all that jazz. What happened was that we made love. It was grand. For me and for her. Grand. Lying in bed, drinking Spanish wine sweet and warm from the winebags, spurting it into our mouths, occasionally varying it with calvados, listening to her talk about all the chaps she’d been to bed with before me—-yes, it was good. The sex was good. But Lady Pratt had one misgiving.”

“What was that?”

“The size of my sex. ‘It is too large,’ she would say. ‘It is so large that it gives credence to the canard about the Negro male having abnormally large organs. Something must be done about it. Surely a chap with your awareness doesn’t want to conform to a concept formulated by the enemies of tolerance.’ At first I tried to ignore her arguments. ‘Obscenity thee!” I would say. ‘Obscenity thy mother and thy father, too. My rod and my staff are thine, but by being thy rod and thy staff, do not think you may alter them.’ But she kept at me.”

“I don’t understand. What did she want?”

“She wanted me to have myself circumcised.”

“Well, they do say it’s healthier,” Penny pointed out.

“Ha! That’s a laugh. That’s what she said. And also that it was more sanitary and that it was really an economic deprivation not to be circumcised. ‘Up thy obscenity,’ I would reply. ‘Thou art carrying on like the daughter of an unwed pig. Thou art talking like a mother-obscenitying illegitimate child.’ But in the end she prevailed. She was acting out of love, you see. And I could not hold out against her love for I could not help returning it. So finally I agreed that the circumcision should take place.”

“It’s a simple operation,” Penny observed.

“Too simple. Lady Pratt took me to a doctor friend of hers. He gave me a spinal, a local anesthetic. Lady Pratt, since she was a nurse, assisted. I was quite conscious, and we chatted throughout the operation.”

“What did you talk about?”

“The civil rights movement. Perhaps that’s why it happened. Perhaps if we had talked about something else, I would not today be half a man. ‘The movement must develop more Negro leader chaps,’ Lady Pratt said. ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘We need more professionals. More architects and statesmen and lawyers and doctors.’ At this point Lady Pratt’s doctor friend looked up from the scalpel he was sterilizing. ‘More doctors?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I replied as he grasped my member and poised to deliver the stroke of circumcision. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we must force them to raise the medical school quotas for Negroes. Surely a dedicated white integrationist like you must see that,’ I told him. ‘You’ve fought for housing, fair employment, integrated schools, voting rights, so surely you must see the need for raising the quotas for Negroes in medical schools. Don’t you?’ He brought the scalpel down with one clean stroke. ‘No,’ he replied ‘I’m afraid I don’t. Oops! I’m afraid my hand must have slipped.’ He apologized profusely, but it was no use. That one stroke had made me a bona fide castrato.”

“Well, I can certainly understand why you’re bitter against white people,” Penny said. “But what about Lady Pratt? What happened to her? Didn’t she stick by you in your hour of need?”

“No. It was too much for her. The last thing she said to me was, ‘Oh, Jake, we could have had such a damned good time together. I’m so sorry, old chap.’ And then she left for Pamplona. The last I heard she was badly gored by a toreador during a sex orgy.”

“Don’t be despondent,” Penny tried to console him. “After all, the sun also rises.”

“Maybe it does, but I don’t. What’s left just dangles. As Lady Pratt might have said, ‘It’s a bloody shameful place to be wounded.’ Anyway, all that’s behind me now. When she left, I washed my hands of all those helpful white liberals. I joined the black supremacists. I became XX and I’m proud to be XX.” He braked the car to a halt. “We’re here,” he told Penny, indicating the rundown brownstone house on the rundown street in rundown Harlem. “Get out.”

Penny did as she was told. XX led her up the steps and into the vestibule of the house. A Chinese maid greeted them. “Madame X will be with you in a minute,” she told XX.

“How come the maid’s Chinese?” Penny asked before she stopped to think.

“We couldn’t have a Negro maid, could we? That kind of type-casting is for Hollywood.”

“I see. And who is Madame X?”

“She runs this place. She used to be known as Mama Macri. But when she joined our movement, she discarded her slave name and took the title of Madame X.”

“Oh. What sort of place is this?” Penny wanted to know. “And why have you brought me here?”

“It’s a brothel,” XX explained. “And you have been brought here to work. It is the only occupation suitable to an inferior white woman. How do you feel about that?”

“ ’Tis a pity I’m a whore,” Penny sighed fatalistically. But at heart she knew that there were aspects of her predicament which really appealed to her. At last, she told herself, she would experience the sexual relationship. After all, if she couldn’t manage to have her virginity violated in a whorehouse, then there was certainly something wrong with this sexiest of all possible girls in this sexiest of all possible worlds!

CHAPTER EIGHT

PENNY WAS a prisoner in the bordello, and yet in the sense that her own eagerness for experience coupled with her curiosity made her a willing accomplice to her fate, she was not a prisoner. She was in the clutches of a black white slave ring, but if those clutches turned out to be the embraces of love at last, Penny had no desire to escape them. To some girls it might have seemed a fate worse than death, but to Penny it seemed that she had finally received her passport into Henry Miller’s promised land.

Madame X arrived to take her in hand, and XX departed, never to be met by Penny again. The Madame, a horny-looking Aunt Jemima type—or, to put it less chauvinistically, an ebony Molly Goldberg sans accent —escorted Penny into the main lounge to “meet the girls”.

So Penny said hello to Phyllis Up and Fay Down and Ophelia Tietz and Mimi Mee and Berta Control and Ida Lovett and Joy Gurley (Whose last name had once been “Brown,” but who had changed it for fear of giving ethnic offense) and Uta Rust and Lascivia Levine (alas!) and Zas Zas Vavoom and all the rest. After which Madame X escorted Penny to her room and introduced her to her roommate. “Penny, this is Puppy,” she told the darling girl.

“But he’s a he!” Penny protested. “How come I room with a man? Why can’t I room with one of the other girls?»

“Watch who you callin’ a man!” the nubile Nubian lad called “Puppy” told her. “Ah’m top cat ’round heah.”

“Yes. Puppy’s just one of the girls.” Madame X smoothed things over. “And one of the most popular ones in our little establishment. Actually, you should be honored to have a roommate who’s in such demand.”

“Yeah, white gal. I’se the queen heah.”

“I’m sorry,” Penny apologized. “I didn’t realize you were a— That is, I didn’t know —” She floundered in her attempts to put it diplomatically.

“As a three-dollah bill,” Puppy chortled. “An nevah ’thout mah fairy wand.” He dangled a limp wrist and laughed. “But don’ fret, sugah. Ain’t no hard feelin’s. Ah’m gonna wise you up on the scoah ’round head.”