“ It’s a good story,” the policeman said. “There’s one question that occurs to me, though, but you may not know the answer.”
“ Ask it.”
“ I was wondering,” the policeman said, “whether anybody ever gave that girl a paraffin test.”
The priest smiled.
On the eve of their wedding (the priest continued) Carolyn cooked an elaborate dinner. Afterward they sat with cups of strong coffee, and she said she had something to tell him, something she was afraid to tell him. “If you’re going to marry me,” she said, “you should know this.”
From the time she was eleven years old, she said, their father had taken to coming into her room while she was sleeping. He initiated a pattern of sexual abuse which progressed gradually from inappropriate touches and caresses while she slept, or feigned sleep, to acts which required her to be awake and an active participant. For the last three years of the man’s life, the repertoire included sexual intercourse, and the man did not use a condom. She lived in fear that he would make her pregnant, but he managed on each occasion to withdraw in time, depositing his sticky gift on her belly.
Toward the end, though, he seemed to be considering impregnating her, and more than once said he wondered what kind of a mommy she’d make.
She hated him, and wanted to kill him. She hated her mother as well. Early on she had told the woman that he was coming to her room, that he was touching her. The woman refused to take it in. He’s your father, she was told. He loves you. You’re imagining things.
And so, on that Saturday night, while her father sat in front of the television set in a drunken slack-jawed stupor, she got the handgun from the drawer where he kept it, thrust the barrel into his open mouth, and pulled the trigger. When her mother came in to see what had happened, she leveled the gun and shot the woman three times. Then she wiped her own fingerprints from the gun, placed it in her father’s dead hand, and curled his fingers around it.
Then she went off to meet her brother, and arrived just a few minutes late. And, having just committed a double murder, and sure she’d be found out and sent to prison, she blotted it all from her mind and gave herself over to a last night of joy and consummation with her beloved brother.
But of course she was never found out. The murder-suicide scene she’d staged was good enough to pass muster, and no one ever took a good hard look at her alibi. Her friend, Sandy, kept her secret; it wouldn’t do to let out that Carolyn had been out cavorting with a boyfriend, nor would Sandy’s parents be comfortable with the knowledge that their daughter had facilitated such deception. So why not keep that little secret? Carolyn surely had enough tragedy in her life, with her father having killed her mother and himself. She didn’t need to have her sex life exposed to public scrutiny.
Nor did Billy’s alibi get much attention. He crawled into his tent after taps and crawled out of it at reveille. Case closed.
And so, on the eve of his wedding, William Thompson learned for the first time that his father was not a murderer and that his sister was.
The following day they were married.
“And lived happily ever after,” said the doctor. “A curious business, incest. More common, it turns out, than we used to think. No end of fathers, it turns out, lurch into their daughters’ beds. And they’re not always hillbillies or immigrants or welfare cases, either. It happens, as they say, in the best of families. As for brothers and sisters, well, what’s that but a childhood game carried to its logical conclusion?”
“ Playing doctor,” the soldier said.
“ Quite so. It must happen often, and who’d ever report it? If the two are close in age, if there’s no force or intimidation involved, where’s the abuse? It may be forbidden, they may be transgressors, but what’s the harm?”
“ I wonder how often they actually marry,” the policeman said.
“ Not too often,” the doctor said. “I can’t imagine marrying my sister, but then I can’t imagine fucking her, either. Truth to tell, I can’t imagine anyone fucking her.”
“ If you had a better-looking sister…”
“ Then it might be a different story,” the doctor allowed. “Speaking of stories, that’s a good one, Priest. How did it turn out?”
“ I don’t know that it did,” the priest said. “Two years or so after our conversation, Carolyn gave birth to a daughter. I christened the child, and she certainly looked like her parents, for all that you can tell when they’re that small.”
“ So they rolled the dice,” the soldier said. “Although I suppose someone else might have been the father. Artificial insemination and all that.”
“ Or else they’d have been swimming in the shallow end of the gene pool,” said the doctor, “and that’s dangerous, but not always disastrous. On the one hand you’ve got the Jukes and the Kallikaks, those horrible examples they tell you about in high school biology class, and on the other hand you’ve got all the crowned heads of Europe.”
“ When we have more time,” the policeman said, “you can tell me which is worse. Any more to the story, Priest?”
The priest shook his head. “I was transferred shortly thereafter,” he said, “and lost track of them. I hope things turned out well for them. I liked them.”
“ And I like your story,” the policeman said. “Lust. I could tell a story about lust.”
The others sat back, waiting.
I’m not much of a storyteller (said the policeman) and I don’t know much about sin. Not that I’m free from it myself, but that I was not trained to think in those terms. My frame of reference is the law, the criminal code specifically. I can tell you whether or not an act is lawful, and, if it’s not, I can correctly label it a violation or a misdemeanor or a felony. And even then my classification will not apply universally, but only in the jurisdiction where I lived and worked.
Determining what is or is not a criminal act is difficult enough. Determining whether or not an act is sinful, well, I wouldn’t want to touch that with a stick.
Lust…
When I was still a young man, I was partnered with an older man named-well, let me choose a name for him, as the priest chose a name for his young couple. And I ought to be able to come up with something a little more distinctive and imaginative than William Thompson, don’t you think? Michael Walbeck, that’s what we’ll call my partner. Michael J. Walbeck, and the J stands for John. No, make it Jonathan. Michael Jonathan Walbeck, and everybody called him Mike, except for his mother, who still called him Mickey, and his wife, who called him Michael.
She was a beauty, his wife. Her hair was a heap of black curls that spilled down over her shoulders, and her face was heart-shaped, with dark almond-shaped eyes and a lush mouth. Walbeck was jealous of her. He’d call her eight or ten times a day, just to make sure he knew where she was. As far as I knew, Marie never gave him cause for jealousy, outside of always looking like she just hopped out of bed, and like she was ready at a moment’s notice to hop back in again. But he didn’t need cause. He was just a jealous man.
Meanwhile, he was running around on her. Here he was, talking about how he’d kill her if he ever caught her with another guy, and how he’d kill the guy, too, and at the same time he always had something going on the side, and sometimes more than one thing.
You’ve heard of guys who go through life following their own dick, and that was Walbeck. He said himself that he’d screw a snake if somebody would hold its head, and I’m not entirely certain he was exaggerating. He’d roust hookers and let them off in return for a quick blow job-it’s safe to say he wasn’t the first cop who thought of that one-but his real specialty was the wives and girlfriends of criminals.
That’s a little harder than getting a hooker to go down on you, but not by much. The first time I saw Mike in action, we had busted a guy who was cooking crank in his double-wide out on the edge of town. That’s methamphetamine, also known as speed, and it’s about as tricky to make as chili con carne. And cooking it’s a
