“Oh, Lord. I suppose it had to come sooner or later,” he sighed resignedly, rolling over beside me and reaching for a cigarette. “You must won't let it lie, will you, Denise… this idea that I am having sex with your daughter? What a… a corrupt and evil mind you have. Usually, I am not even here in the afternoon. When I leave you at the Institute, I go on some business calls, check in with my confidential contact. Only once a week, do I ever come back here. And let's see… last Monday, I played tennis with Kathy at the town courts. Would you like to check with the groundskeeper there?”
“I want to know what your relation is with my daughter?” I screamed, getting a cigarette for myself and lighting it. “Have you ever screwed my daughter?”
“Denise,” he stated calmly, looking at me as if I were a child or a patient or something. “Every time Kathy gets in one of her little moods and squirms in my lap… who is it I come in here and have intercourse with? It's you, Denise, not her!”
“You… you admit it!” I jumped at him, wagging my finger like an old shrew. “You admit that she gets you aroused… sexed up, sitting in your lap and kissing you and going on with all that baby talk trash!”
“My dear, Denise, I admit it most readily,” Bob announced, gesturing with a wide swing of his arms. “Be logical. Kathy is a fully developed young woman in a physical sense. She is 17 years old. She measures 36-23-36 in all the right places. She is a sexually desirable human being! Any normal male would be excited if she was sitting in his lap in a pair of those nothing pajamas and wiggling her delightfully configurated buttocks around. For an adult male, this is a normal reaction.”
“And you allow it! You let her get you all excited and work yourselves up into a heat of lust!”
“Oh, Denise… Denise, you have a perverted mind,” he began to lecture me again. “It is a normal reaction for me to become aroused. But to Kathy, I am an authoritarian father image. To her, this is a thing of familial affection. Evidently, her own father lacks something. She finds it impossible to communicate with him and gain a proper rapport.”
“You… you'd love to screw her… wouldn't you? I asked him outright, trying to stare back at him with the same degree of searching that his eyes imparted to me. “You'd dearly love to have your hands all over those breasts… her naked body beneath you. Oh, Bob, how can you think I'm such a fool. You and your logic. You want her in bed, Bob. Admit it!”
“I admit it,” he said immediately, turning me over on my back again and entering me as he continued to talk. “She is a very desirable female and I would thoroughly enjoy breaking her in to the arts of sexual love. This is true, Denise. It is also true that I achieve erection while she moves about on my lap. I try to conceal my excitement from her and she probably doesn't even notice it. Yes, Denise, I would really enjoy sex with Kathy. But… I have enough good sense about me not to dwell on the idea and become morbid about it. The trouble with you is, that you must realize Kathy is not a little girl anymore in physical build…”
I felt so strange and dirty talking about Kathy in this way at the very moment Bob was making love to me. It seemed that when he spoke of her body or that she was sexually attractive, I could actually feel his penis get harder, his thrust more forceful. It was terribly upsetting, and I had a great deal of difficulty in coming.
THE following Monday, my car was in the shop, so I went downtown that morning to do some shopping on the bus, and told Bob and Kathy that I would go directly from there to the Institute. I had actually chosen that day to have the car worked on because there was no school at the Institute. It was closed for some carpentry work that had to be done on the stage. But Bob and Kathy were not aware of that.
At two o'clock, I got off the bus a block away from the house, walking down the alleyway and slipping in the back door. I heard nothing from the kitchen. The house seemed unusually quiet and still. The whole downstairs was vacant, no sign of anything, no sound.
And then I heard Kathy's voice!
“… crazy darling… oh, crazy darling…”
It came from her room, accompanied by the muffled and unintelligible words of a man. My first impulse was to dash right up to her bedroom and fling open the door! I wanted to claw at Bob with my bare hands, call him every kind of rotten and cheating liar I could think of!
But I paused. I grabbed hold of the banister by the stairway and squeezed it with all my might. I tried to think of what to do, what a rational person would do. Yes! They were in Kathy's bedroom! The spy-scopes Bob had put in three summers before were still in the hall closet! I would see for myself. I would see with my own eyes, and then all of Bob Morgan's powerful brainwashing would not convince me that it was only my imagination. I would see it for myself!
I gained amazing control and crept up the stairs stealthily in my stocking feet. I opened the closet door very slowly, anticipating the slightest squeek and stopping short, pushing up or pulling down to correct it. Parting the hanging clothes very quietly, I was soon up against the back wall of the closet, felling along in front of me for the spy-scopes.
I When I found the one to the right, I stopped dead in my movements. I realized that I was shaking all over. I had been so intent on what I was doing, that I had not listened to the words that were occasionally audible to me.
“… darling oh, crazy, darling,” Kathy was carrying on like before, “Do it more… that way… oh, crazy darling…”
The blood flushed through me like I had just yanked the handle of a toilet. And that was how filthy and dirty I felt too. Like a toilet. Bob was in bed making love to Kathy! I was trembling all over, filled with rage. Yet I still had to see it with my own eyes. I did not want to look. But I had to be one hundred percent sure!
I put both hands flat against the wall on either side of the spy-scope. I leaned forward and let my right eye come to rest against it. The vision was blurred, obscured, there was dirt and dust all over the lens. I pushed myself away and began to breathe, realizing that I had been holding my breath. With my finger, I brushed away the dirt from the lens, and I immediately pressed my eye to it again.
The view was crystal clear this time. Kathy was lying on the bed totally naked, her legs raised in the air and spread apart, her arms wrapped around him, her hips pumping away like mad in a frenzy of lovemaking. It was horrible! I could see his penis stroking as it entered and withdrew from my own daughter in a patterned rhythm and technique that I had taught him.
Ricky was making love to Kathy!
Was it a shock wave of relief I felt, or just a surprise, when I saw that it was Ricky who was making love to my daughter? I don't really know. The confusion and questions welled up in me and I couldn't think straight. Why Ricky? How did he ever get to know Kathy? Why hadn't she told me she knew him? Why? How? Why? How?
I threw reason and logic to the winds when I heard Kathy say, “Oh, Ricky! I'm coming… screw me harder!” I charged through the rack of clothes and out into the hall. When I found the door to Kathy's room locked, I began kicking, screaming and beating on it. I went delirious, hysterical. I was a virtual mad woman!
Within seconds, it seemed, Kathy opened the door and tried to come outside. I pushed her away and entered the room, going straight for the closet door and pulling it open. The sight of Ricky, cowering behind the rack of Kathy's dresses, so idiotically trying to cover his penis with his hands, sobered me more than anything else. For a second, I had the impulse to burst into crazed laughter at the spectacle he presented, but I reached in to grab him by the shoulder and drag him out. He flopped onto the bed when I let go, and quickly covered himself with a sheet.
Kathy had managed to get on a robe before she unlocked the door. There was something so bizarre about this, I thought. Ricky, the boy who I had taught to make love like a man, who I had been naked with in bed for hours at a time, covering himself up like some Victorian prude. But it was not a funny situation. Not when my daughter was involved.
“Denise… let me explain something about…” Ricky tried to speak up like a man.
“Mrs. Bryant!” I shouted him down, glaring at Kathy, who had maintained more composure than he and was standing by the foot of the bed. “What have… how did you meet my daughter?”
“Mrs. Bryant,” he addressed me most courteously, still scared out of his wits, “I… called you last month… about helping me… giving me some extra help in drama before school starts, Kathy… Kathy answered, and we just got to talking, and… well, she invited me over to see her…”
“How long has this been going on? I demanded, looking at Kathy.
“Mother, I am 17-year-old girl now,” she stated, walking up to me as if to challenge my maternal authority,
