When he was twelve, he had had many nightmares in which Mary Baker Eddy and John Calvin had fought for his soul.
It was no wonder, when he was fourteen, that he had decided to blazes with both faiths. With all faiths. Still, he had been the epitome of the prudish puritan. No foul words escaped his lips; he blushed if told a dirty joke. He couldn't stand the odors of beer or whiskey, and even if he'd liked them, he would have rejected them with scorn. And he' d have luxuriated in a feeling of moral superiority for doing so.
His early puberty was a torment. In the seventh grade he would be called on to stand up and recite, his face red, his penis thrusting against his fly, having risen at the trumpet call of his teacher's large breasts. Nobody seemed to notice, but he was sure every time he stood up that he would be disgraced. And when he accompanied his parents to a movie in which the heroine wore a low-cut dress or displayed a flash of garter, he put his hand on his pants to hide the swelling.
The flickering light from the screen would reveal his sin. His parents would know what his thoughts were, and they would be horrified. He'd be ashamed to look in their faces forever after.
Twice, his father talked to him about sex. Once, when he was twelve. Apparently, his mother had noticed some blood on his bath towel and spoken to his father, James Frigate, with a good deal of hemming and hawing and a twisted grin, had asked him if he was masturbating. Peter was both horrified and indignant. He had .denied it, though his father acted as if he really did not believe him.
Investigation revealed, however, that, when bathing, Peter had not been peeling back his foreskin to wash under it. He had not wanted to touch his penis. As a result, the smegma had built up under the skin. How this could cause a bleeding neither he nor his father knew. But he was advised to wash thoroughly every time he took a bath. Also, he was told that jacking-off rotted the brain, and he was given the example of the village idiot of North Terre Haute, a boy who publicly masturbated. With a grave face, his father told him that anybody who jerked off would become a drooling imbecile. Maybe his father believed that. So many of his generation did. Or maybe he'd just passed on that horrifying tale, purveyed for only God knew how many centuries or even millennia to scare his son.
Peter would find out that that was superstition, a reasoning from effect to cause, totally invalid. It was in a class with the belief that if you ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while you were sitting in the outhouse, the devil would get you.
Peter hadn't lied. He had not been indulging in the sin of Onan. Though why it was called Onanism he didn't know, since Onan hadn't masturbated. Onan had just used what Peter overheard his father refer to as the IC (Illinois Central) railroad technique. Pulling out in time.
Some of his junior high school acquaintances-the "racy" ones-bragged about beating their meat. One of these low-lifers, a wild kid named Vernon (died in a crash in 1942 while training to be an Air Force bombardier) had actually masturbated in the rear of a streetcar on the way home from a basketball game. Peter, watching, had been fascinated and sickened at the same time. The other kids had just giggled.
Once he and a friend, Bob Allwood, as puritanical as he, had been going home on a streetcar after a late movie. There was no one else aboard except the operator and a hard-looking peroxide blonde in the front seat. As the trolley came up toward the end of the line on Elizabeth Street, the operator had closed the curtain around himself and the blonde and turned the overhead light off. Bob and Pete, watching from the back of the car, saw the woman's legs disappear. It wasn't until a few minutes later that Peter understood what was happening. The woman had to be sitting on the ledge in front of him, or on the control post itself, facing the operator, while he screwed her. Peter didn't say a thing about it to Bob until after they'd gotten off the car. Bob had refused to believe it.
Peter was surprised at his own reaction. He'd been more amused than anything. Or perhaps envious was more appropriate. The "proper" reaction came later. That man and his doxy would go to hell for sure.
47
That was a long time ago. The time had come when Peter had laid a woman in front of the altar of an empty church, though he was drunk when he did it. This was in a Roman Catholic cathedral in Syracuse, and the woman had been Jewish. It had been her idea. She hated the religion because the tough Polish Catholic kids in the Boston high school she attended had roughed her up several times because she was a Jew. The idea of defiling the church had seemed like a good idea at the time, though next morning he sweated thinking of what would have happened if they'd been caught. But doing it in a Protestant church wouldn't have appealed to him so much. Protestant churches had always seemed barren places to him. God wouldn't be caught dead there, but He did like to hang around Catholic places of worship. Peter had always had a leaning toward Romanism and had twice been on the verge of converting. You could only blaspheme where God was.
Which was a curious attitude. If you didn't believe in God, why bother to blaspheme?
As if that wasn't bad enough, he and Sarah had entered a number of apartment houses on a street whose name he couldn't recall now. It had once been a very posh district where the rich had built huge, gingerbreaded, many-cupolaed houses. Then they'd moved out, and the houses had been made into apartments. Mostly affluent old people, widows and aged couples, lived there. The two of them had wandered through the halls of three buildings where all the doors were locked tight and not a sound except the muffled voice of TV sets was heard. They'd been on the third floor of the fourth building, and Sarah was down on her knees before him, when a door opened. An old woman stuck her head out into the hall, screamed, and slammed the door shut. Laughing, he and Sarah had fled out into the street and up to her apartment.
Later, Peter had sweated thinking about what would have happened if they'd been caught by the police. Jail, public disgrace, the loss of his job at General Electric, the shame felt by his children, the wrath of his wife. And what if the old woman had had a heart attack? He searched the obituary columns and was relieved to find that no one on that street had died that night. This in itself was a rarity, since Sarah said that she couldn't look out of the window from her apartment without seeing a funeral procession going down that street.
He also looked for a report of the incident in the papers. If the old lady had called the police, however, there was nothing in the papers about it.
A thirty-eight-year-old man shouldn't be doing stupid childish things like that, he had told himself. Especially if innocent people might be hurt. Never again. But as the years passed, he chuckled when he thought of it.
Though an atheist at fifteen, Frigate had never been able to rid himself of doubts. When he was nineteen, he had attended a revival meeting with Bob Allwood. Allwood had been raised in a devout fundamentalist family. He, too, had become an atheist, but this lasted one year. In that time, Bob's parents had died of cancer. The shock had set him thinking about immortality. Unable to endure the idea that his father and mother were dead forever, that he'd never see them again, he had begun visiting revival meetings. His conversion had taken place when he was eighteen.
Peter and Bob used to see much of each other, since they had been playmates in grade school and had gone to the same high school. They argued much about religion and the authenticity of the Bible. Finally, Peter agreed to go with Bob to a mass meeting at which the famous Reverend Robert Ransom was preaching.
Much to Peter's astonishment, he found himself deeply stirred, though he had come to ridicule. He was even more amazed when he found himself on his knees before the reverend, promising to accept Jesus Christ as his Lord.