Mercy (52 page)

“Thank you,” she said, “for allowing me to come.”

He turned around and saw her standing just inside the doorway to his office, unbuttoning her raincoat.

“That’s all right,” he said, and watched her slip off the raincoat and hang it on a brass hook on the wall behind the chaise. She was wearing a short-sleeved shirtwaist dress of blue rayon with tiny petallike designs in white. He approved of the single strand of tiny pearls that draped like beads of white liquid between the small protrusions of her clavicles.

“I want to talk,” she said unnecessarily. He nodded, and she walked to the chaise and slipped off her flats, swung her legs up onto the chaise, and leaned back, raising her hips slightly to straighten her skirt. Broussard imagined that this was the ideal woman for whom Freud had introduced the chaise longue. Mary had seemed to take to it from the beginning, though at first it hadn’t had any effect on her being cooperative. Nevertheless, she had never hesitated to lie down, to play the role of analysand in posture, if not in spirit.

Broussard settled himself in his armchair out of her sight and waited a moment for her breathing to become regular. He reached over where the switches to the recorders were installed under the lip of the desk and flipped one on. A small red light glowed from the shelves where the recorders sat in unobtrusive mahogany boxes resembling cigar humidors. He took a notepad off his desk and uncapped his fountain pen, turned to a clean sheet, and waited for Mary to introduce the topic she felt so urgently in need of discussing.

“It progressed oddly,” she said after a few minutes of silence. Obviously she was beginning
in medias res
, and Broussard cast his mind back to the subject of their last meeting on the previous Wednesday…the first time her father had fondled her sexually…in the swimming pool…his orgasmic hunching against her childish buttocks under the water.

“I was distant with him for a while after that,” she said. “I couldn’t help it. Even if he did act as if nothing had happened. I knew something had happened. But he was kind, genuinely kind to me, and I didn’t doubt in the least that he really loved me. Whatever had happened in the pool…well, that was maybe bad manners…or something. Or maybe it wasn’t even that.”

Mary’s hands rested at her sides on the blue rayon dress, with only her right hand visible to Broussard. He looked at it. She was a very beautiful woman. An image of Bernadine flashed in his mind, and he almost choked on a sob.

“The next time…we were watching television. I remember it clearly. Over the years all the…times run together, but this was the first time he went to my vagina…so I remember it. It was within a week or so of the pool incident. We were curled up on the sofa together, him and me. We were eating popcorn, and I had on my robe but I was in my panties, you know, ready for bed. The popcorn was salted and buttered; he’d go to a lot of trouble to get it just right. I was leaning next to him, and we were watching ‘G.E. Theater.’ It was a commercial break and a woman was standing next to a refrigerator which she was opening to show us. He had just eaten some buttered popcorn and his fingers were still slick because he hadn’t wiped them on a napkin yet, and he just reached down and slipped his fingers under the edge of my panties.”

Mary stopped, her narrow tapered fingers moving softly on the rayon as if she were mentally going through a piano exercise, only very subtly.

“I was petrified. And I remembered feeling a kind of humming spread all over me, and I felt instantly hot and then cold. I didn’t even take my eyes off the lady and the refrigerator, although I was wanting to in the worst way. I didn’t move. I was too young to have any pubic hair, so his buttery fingers just went round and round my vagina without any problem, and I remember thinking I might faint. He kept it up, getting more and more energetic, and I could feel his hips grinding again like in the pool. Finally he just made one quick dip into my vagina with his finger and lunged his hip against my side and kept it there. I didn’t know…all the signals. But it was over.”

Mary moved her tongue around in her mouth, trying to stir it to moisture. It didn’t seem to work, but she continued.

“After that he was still a minute. Then he pulled his hand out of my underwear and got up from the sofa and went into the bathroom. I didn’t take my eyes off the television. I didn’t stop eating popcorn. I was ignoring the whole thing as hard as I could. I thought if I stopped eating popcorn all these things would have to be confronted. After a while he came back and sat back down on the sofa, but I had moved over a little way. He didn’t try to get me to come back over to him, and we just went on watching television until the program was over and it was bedtime.”

Broussard had been watching Mary’s face, the profile perdu of all his clients who reclined on the chaise, and when she paused he glanced at her hand again. She had gathered a fistful of her skirt, squeezing it, the hem on the side pulled up to her knee.

“I went to bed and lay awake waiting, but neither of them even came in to kiss me goodnight. I guess he was feeling ashamed. When I was sure they were both asleep, I got out of bed and went into my bathroom and washed between my legs, scrubbed with a washcloth and soap until it was raw, and then I dried and put perfume around there to get rid of the butter smell. Then I went back to bed and lay there a long time staring into the dark before I started crying and cried myself to sleep.”

Mary released her grip on her dress, and Broussard’s gaze went back to her profile. A single wet rivulet traced a slightly darker path down the side of her face and into the blond hairline at her temples. Broussard thought of the stories Bernadine had told him, all the different kinds of stories. She was the consummate raconteur, a Scheherazade who talked to forestall not her death, but her dissolution into the dark winds of insanity. That’s what all of them did, together all of them became a composite Scheherazade, talking, talking to save themselves. But he was no sultan, no executioner turned deliverer who, at the end of a thousand and one nights, could proclaim them liberators of their sex and set them free. And modern life allowed for no such romantic endings. Their lives were not redeemed by their cleverness or even by the compassion elicited by their despair.

“It was a month or two before he started coming to my bedroom,” she said, having once again wadded her skirt into another tight fist, advancing the hem of her dress still farther, above the knee, to the beginning muscles of her long, straight thigh. “At first he would come only deep in the night. I would be sleeping, and then I would feel him lifting the covers and his naked body sliding in beside me. He taught me how to masturbate him while he played with my vagina. He was very gentle with me. He didn’t hurt me. He would talk to me, tell me how much he loved me and how he believed I loved him too. This was the way we could show our love for each other, he said. He said that giving each other pleasure like this was a mutual sharing and sharing was what love was all about. Of course, he always assumed I was enjoying it; he never asked me if I was. And I was afraid to tell him otherwise. I don’t know why I was afraid. He never threatened me.

“His penis,” she said, pausing, preoccupied with the memory of that strange member, filtered through the mind of the child she had been. “I’d never felt anything quite like it, hadn’t even imagined anything like it. The stupid little shape of it. Sometimes he would come into my room before it was erect and want me to work it up. It was such a strange piece of anatomy, stuck on the front of him there, seeming not really to fit anywhere. I always thought it seemed so out of place, rather like an afterthought…just stuck on there. I mean, it seemed ill-planned, having a life of its own, changing shape the way it did. As a child, it struck me that way. So there was some curiosity. But mostly, I was just revolted by the whole thing, by the oily secretions and then the ejaculate itself, viscous and noisome.”

She stopped, her eyes having the unseeing glaze of a hypnotic stare that often accompanied a total immersion in recalling the past.

“I was a child.’”” She frowned in incredulity. “He had no right to acquaint me, however gently, with those sensations. I hadn’t the vaguest understanding of what he was going through, and I grew to hate the signs of it that I soon became familiar with. A child, only a child. I didn’t understand, but I came to a sad knowledge of the crude signals of his sexual anguish, the moanings and whimperings as I tugged on his penis. I was only a child, yes, but I had an innate understanding of what pathetic meant, and he became the embodiment of it. Whacking him off in those gray nights, I felt overwhelmed by the repulsion and sadness of it all.”

Mary stopped again. Broussard followed the path of her staring eyes, but they were going nowhere. He believed she was looking at the thick coverage of the treetops, the oaks and tallow trees and catalpas where the mist and light rain were sifting down from the lowering sky. What did she see there? Why did she stop? He waited. Her lips were parted slightly, the hint of a pucker at one corner visible to him at this angle. She was laboring to control her breathing, her gray-blue eyes enlarged slightly as if it were part of her effort to gain control of her breathing.

“I had already learned to remove myself from what was happening by thinking of something else,” she began again. “It was a childish effort, more like daydreaming. I thought of scenes of movies I’d seen.
The Sound of Music
. I was eleven when it came out. I saw it five times, and I retreated into the innocence of that movie many, many, many nights while I hammered away on him. Julie Andrews was all the sweetness that I imagined it possible for people to be. She was so good. And she was completely untainted by the sort of things that went on in my life.”

She shook her head. “One time in high school I had a kind of nervous breakdown, I guess. Back then, though, the teachers in the public school systems weren’t trained to recognize the symptoms of what I was going through. But there was one teacher…she knew. She tried to get me to go to a state Public Welfare office. I wasn’t alone, she said. There were other girls…going through this. I could talk to them, get counseling. I could share this with other girls, hear their stories. Jesus.

“Well, for me, it wasn’t that way.” Mary’s voice was taking on a hard edge. “I didn’t find it any kind of relief at all to know that there were other kids like me. I didn’t find this enormous sense of comfort in knowing that there were other kids as abused and sick as me. I wouldn’t have been comforted in the least to learn that my best friend was going through the same thing I was going through and would have understood my confusion and repulsion and desperate desire to be loved differently than I was being loved. I didn’t want any part of that kind of ‘comfort.’ I wanted to think about beautiful Swiss highland meadows and the clear, smiling face of Julie Andrews singing ‘Edelweiss’ under blue skies with white clouds as clean and soft as dreams. She knew nothing of what my life was like, and that was what I wanted. I was looking for escape, not for a sisterhood of molested, lonely little girls who could tell me they understood what it was like to tug away on their fathers’ penises at night while they desperately turned their minds to something else—anything else.”

As if another thought had swept past and drawn her thoughts after it, she stopped, her lips slightly parted as she momentarily followed some other strain of music, attended to some other story. Then she proceeded.

“We progressed to fellatio. I didn’t know…what it inevitably would lead to. I just thought if I went along with whatever he wanted, then at some point he would be satisfied and leave me alone. Children don’t know anything about the nature of a sexual drive, certainly not one like his. I couldn’t have known…I just couldn’t have…have…ha…haa…”

To Broussard’s surprise Mary began stuttering and then suddenly stopped altogether. She whimpered. That was the best word for it, but it was an eerie mewl and reminded him of the
cri du chat
. Rather, it had sexual overtones and was accompanied by Mary’s anxiously kneading her upper thigh with her fist in which she still clutched the hem of her dress, which now had worked itself inappropriately high. This continued for some minutes until she once again gained a degree of control. Then she continued.

“And then that was not enough, either, and after a while he was penetrating me. He painstakingly worked up to it over a long period of time. As I think back, he was really quite clever about it. His preoccupation with his own body was enormous, and he wanted me to find it as fascinating as he did. At the time, of course, I didn’t realize it, but looking back it’s clear that he was almost preadolescent in his fascination with his own penis. It was pitiful. But at the time…he was my father, and that fact alone had more influence over my mind than anything else. If he said so…you know, then even if it made me sick, I went on with it. But I cried a lot. God, how I cried.

“The daydreaming…it just wasn’t enough anymore. Not after the intercourse began. At first I was dumbfounded…all over again.” She paused.

“You wouldn’t think that, would you? I mean, a child who has been performing fellatio with her father…you wouldn’t think she would be ‘surprised’ by sexual intercourse. But I was. I just didn’t know that this…these acts were leading anywhere. I mean the stuff before intercourse…He puts his penis on your stomach and has you tug away on it and then it squirts all over you, hot and gagging you. Incredible. And then he experiments and puts it all over you, different places. And soon he wants it in your mouth. You think, Okay, this is it, it’s what he was wanting all along. This is as bad as it’s going to get. You can’t believe it. It’s the most outrageous thing you can imagine. The outer limit…But no, there’s more. Now he wants it in there, where you go to the bathroom. It staggers you to think of it. It can’t be. It’s too big. He forces it, and you just think, Oh, God, and you cut yourself loose from your body. Let him do it, whatever the hell it is he wants to do if he will just go ahead and get it over with.

“And then later, when it’s all over and time has passed and you know he’s going to be coming into your room again, the fears start coming at you. How many more places can he think to put it? How many more things can he dream up for you to do to it? You never stop fearing it will somehow get even worse than it is; he will think of something even more grotesque. A child…you know…a child has no idea of the progression of events in this…the enormity of what he is doing simply grows and grows…and the fear and humiliation…and the awful, awful sadness.”