The Tight White Collar Page 8

  “My God!” he whispered when it was over. “My God!”

  “And I’ve never been to Princeton,” said Doris. “I learned everything I know from books.”

  “There aren’t any books that teach you things like that,” said George, still unable to control his breathing.

  “Oh, yes there are.”

  “Where?”

  “You’ll tell if I let you know.”

  “No, I won’t, Doris. Honestly, I won’t.”

  “There are books like that right here in this room.”

  “You’re crazy,” said George. “If you think my mother would allow books like that in this house you’re stark, staring crazy.”

  “All right,” said Doris. “Don’t believe me then,” and she went on dusting.

  “Just show me,” demanded George.

  “No, I won’t. You think I’m crazy and you don’t believe a word I say so I’m not going to show you anything. Besides, you’ll tell.”

  “Doris, I swear I won’t tell, and I don’t think you’re crazy and I do believe you. I swear it.”

  She looked at him for a long time then went to the humidor that sat on a corner of Mr. Justine’s desk. She rummaged through it for a moment and finally brought out a small gold key. Then she went to the locked bookcase directly behind the desk and unlocked the doors.

  “There,” she said.

  “I knew you were crazy,” George said in disgust. “Those are my father’s books on economics and law and things like that. After all, he is a stockbroker and that’s his library of business books.”

  Doris smiled. “Take a look at one.”

  It took George Justine only a few minutes to realize that his father, Theo, was the owner of one of the most extensive pornographic libraries in existence. His face grew whiter and whiter as he picked up one book after another and his hands trembled violently.

  “Have you looked at all of these?” he asked at last.

  “I’ve read every single one of them,” said Doris.

  “My God!” said George weakly. “Does my father know?”

  “Don’t be such a fool. Of course he doesn’t know.”

  “How did you find out about the key?”

  Doris smiled. “I know a lot of things about this family,” she said. “Little things that none of you would want outsiders to know. I wasn’t really worried when you caught me in Patricia’s dress, you know. If you’d said you were going to tell and had gone to your mother, I don’t think she would have fired me.”

  “What kind of things?” demanded George.

  “Oh, you’d be surprised,” said Doris.

  “Tell me at once.”

  “Oh, things like your sister Pamela lets that friend of yours Edward Duckworth open the front of her dress when the two of them are supposed to be out looking at the garden.”

  “I don’t believe you!” cried George.

  “Well, don’t then. But it’s true just the same. Ask her if you don’t believe me. Ask him.”

  “You know very well that I’d never insult either of them with such a question,” said George.

  “Don’t then.”

  “You’re nothing but a disgusting little sneak,” said George. “I don’t know how I could ever have thought that you were sweet and pretty.”

  “I am sweet and pretty,” said Doris. “It’s just that I’m alone in the world and I have to look after myself.”

  George did not even glance at her as he stamped out of the room and Doris smiled and hummed as she picked up her duster and finished her work.

  For the most part, Doris had judged George Justine correctly. He could not keep away from the locked bookcase in his father’s library and now he took to coming home from Princeton almost every weekend.

  “He’s a fine boy,” said Mrs. Justine. “He loves his home and his family. Why, just look. Other boys his age have nothing on their minds but carousing about every weekend and George comes home to his family.”

  But when the Justines went out on Saturday evenings, they could never get George to accompany them. He always pleaded a heavy study schedule or a headache and as soon as the family was out the front door he made his way to the library. Doris smiled and waited and as the weeks passed, a terrible anger grew in her. For if George Justine could not keep away from his father’s books, he could and did keep away from Doris.

  She smiled at him and posed in front of him and as often as possible she managed to be in the same room with him, but George never smiled back and all he ever said to her was either “Good morning, Doris” or “Good night, Doris.”

  You bastard, she thought viciously. You blue-nosed bastard. Just you wait.

  But summer arrived and George prepared to go north to Bar Harbor with his mother and sisters and Doris was still as virginal and untouched as the day she got off the boat. It was the only time her shrewdness had failed her and it was the last time in her life that she ever misjudged a man. Never again did she allow herself to become overconfident or make the mistake of overplaying her hand.

  “You’ll spend the summer here,” Mrs. Justine told Doris. “You and cook and one of the other girls. And you must all take very good care of Mr. Justine. He gets very upset at times when the family is away and I want all of you to make things as pleasant as possible for him.”

  Doris had counted heavily on the summer at the shore and she almost wept with frustration. On the morning that the family left, George Justine stopped her in the hall of the second floor.

  “My father knows,” he said.

  “Knows what?” demanded Doris.

  “You know what,” whispered George angrily. “He saw one of those books in my room.”

  “You’re a fool, George Justine,” said Doris.

  “He knows that you know, too.”

  “I knew you’d tell.”

  “I wasn’t going to take all the blame by myself,” said George. “He asked me how I’d found out and I told him.”

  “Isn’t that nice,” said Doris sarcastically. “What is he going to do? Throw me out?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t want to do anything until Mother and the girls had left.”

  “You bastard,” whispered Doris viciously.

  George stood up straight. “You brought it all on yourself,” he said sanctimoniously. Then he turned and went downstairs to join his mother and sisters.

  Days passed and Doris waited nervously for the axe to fall, but Mr. Justine neither said nor did a thing. Toward the middle of July she began to breathe more easily and think that perhaps Mr. Justine had chosen to ignore the whole episode. But one hot night she was in her third-floor room, dressed in a thin wrapper and brushing her hair, when there was a knock at her door. She opened it quietly and Theo Justine stepped into her room.

  “Keep still,” he ordered. “If you make a sound, I’ll have you thrown out into the streets bag and baggage.”

  “What is it?” whispered Doris.

  Theo Justine leaned back against her closed door and his eyes grew heavy as he looked at her.

  “Take off your clothes,” he said.

  Doris stepped away from him, more in surprise than in fear.

  “But sir,” she protested, playing for time to think. “I’m just a young girl. A good girl. I’ve never been with a man before. Please, sir. Don’t make me. What would Mrs. Justine say?”

  “Shut up,” said Theo Justine. “I’m not going to hurt you and Mrs. Justine is in Bar Harbor. Do as I say. Quickly.”

  As Doris began to slip the wrapper off her shoulders she heard him turn the key in the lock, but he never moved away from the door. He stood and leaned against it, his arms straight down, his hands flat against the panels, and only the sound of his quickened breath betrayed the fact that he was in the room at all. Doris stood nude before him and as his eyes travel
ed over her, she watched him.

  The old bastard, she thought in sudden exultation. All he wants is a free look. Well, it’s not going to be as free as he thinks it is.

  “Turn around,” said Theo Justine and Doris turned slowly, letting him admire her and the sound of his breathing filled the whole room.

  “Lie down on the bed,” he said and Doris lay down and put her arms over her head. She made her body curve, so that one hip was thrust up higher than the other and when she looked at Theo, he had moved his hands from the door panels and was holding his groin. Doris sighed deeply and moved a little on the bed and with one gigantic breath that was almost a sob, Theo Justine reached his climax and it was over. He turned and left her room as quietly as he had come.

  During the weeks that followed, Theo Justine came to Doris’s room more and more often and as time passed she grew more and more bold with him. She still followed his panting orders, but more slowly now. Sometimes she walked to within six inches of him and cupped her breasts with her hands and rubbed her nipples with her thumbs until they stood out hard and pink and all the time she watched Theo’s face. When she lay down on the bed now, she spread her legs a little and she said, “Come over here, Mr. Justine. You can’t see everything from way over there.” Sometimes she traced the outline of her dark triangle with her fingertips and said, “Aren’t you tired of just looking, Mr. Justine? Wouldn’t you like it all?”

  “Adultery is a sin,” rasped Theo Justine. “I’ve never been with any woman other than my wife since we married.”

  Doris smiled and moved her body on the bed.

  “But you’d like to be with me, wouldn’t you?”

  “I can’t,” whispered Theo. “I can’t.”

  Doris laughed out loud and turned over onto her stomach, then she began to contract and relax the muscles in her buttocks until they quivered and she listened to Theo’s harsh whisper.

  “Turn over, Doris. Please turn over. Please, Doris.”

  She made him beg and plead, often until tears streamed down his cheeks.

  “What’ll you give me if I do?”

  “Anything. Anything you want. Just please turn over, Doris.”

  “A hundred dollars if I show you something special?”

  “Yes. Yes. Anything you want.”

  Theo stood at the foot of her bed and Doris turned over slowly, very slowly. She drew up her knees and watched him and his eyes never moved from her body. Suddenly, she let her knees separate.

  “Do you like this, Mr. Justine?” she asked softly.

  Theo did not answer her. With a great cry he fell on her and struggled and fought his way into her and Doris tasted blood where she had bitten through the shoulder of his dressing gown. When it was over, it was Theo who wept. Doris held his head cradled against her breasts and listened to him sob and even with the throb of pain that burned between her legs, she smiled up at the ceiling.

  The next morning there was an envelope with a hundred-dollar bill in it that had been slipped under her door sometime during the night and as August came to a humid end there was a neat stack of bills under the stockings in Doris’s dresser drawer. Theo came to her almost every night now, and every time he swore to her that it would be the last but Doris had learned well from his supply of hidden books. She made love to him with a perfection that was in itself almost a perversion and Theo could not keep away from her.

  By the time September came and the family returned, there was a new quality to Doris’s smile. It was self-confidence and power and it even showed in the way she stood and walked.

  “I must say,” said Mrs. Justine crossly, “that a summer in the city didn’t hurt you a bit, Doris. You’re blooming like a rose.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” said Doris demurely.

  “Theo my dear,” said Mrs. Justine. “You look exhausted. I know I should have insisted that you leave business to join us at the shore. Just look at you.”

  Doris filled Theo’s coffee cup and smiled when she saw the way his hand shook.

  One evening, toward the end of October, Theo Justine was alone in his library. Mrs. Justine had gone to a concert with the girls and George had not come home for the weekend. Doris waited until the rest of the household were in bed, then she went downstairs. She faced Theo across his desk and she did not mince words.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  Theo put his head in his hands. “I knew it was going to happen,” he said.

  “Well, it’s too late to feel sad now,” said Doris briskly. “What are we going to do?”

  He raised his face. “We?” he asked stupidly.

  “Who do you think?” demanded Doris. “Surely you don’t expect me to cope with this thing alone?”

  “I can’t do anything,” protested Theo. “I have my family to think of.”

  “I’m not asking you to leave your silly family,” said Doris. “I’m just telling you that I have to be looked after and that someone is going to have to support the baby.”

  Theo might have been a fool in many ways but he was also a businessman. He knew when a deal was in the offing.

  “How much?” he asked at last.

  “Fifty thousand dollars,” said Doris bluntly.

  “You’re crazy,” he said.

  “No, I’m not. But you very possibly may be if I decide to open my mouth.”

  “No one would ever believe you,” said Theo.

  “Maybe not everyone,” said Doris. “But enough people would to make things ugly for you. Your wife, for instance. And your children. And I might even decide to get a lawyer or go to the newspapers.”

  “Who’d believe a little Irish housemaid?”

  “We can try to find out if you’d like.”

  Theo Justine sighed. “I’ll have it by the end of the week,” he said. “And as soon as I hand it over to you, I want you out of my house.”

  “That’s what you say now,” said Doris with a sly little smile. “But there’ll be nights when you’ll be sorry I’m not here.”

  “Get out of here,” said Theo.

  He paid her in cash and Doris left the Justine house in the middle of the night. From the moment she left, she covered her tracks well. She opened an account in an obscure bank, keeping just enough money with her to see her through the months to come and she left New York for Philadelphia. She found a small apartment and took very good care of herself during her pregnancy, not for the sake of the child soon to be born, but for her own. She posed as a widow and oddly enough people in Philadelphia believed her just as had the people at the bank in New York. The baby, a boy, was born in the spring and Doris began to make plans at once. When her son was six weeks old, she left Philadelphia and returned to New York. She rented a cheap room and withdrew her money from the bank and she waited for a dark rainy night. It came at the end of the second week in June and Doris dressed her son in clothing she had bought in a cheap, crowded store. She wrapped him in a blanket and carried him through the rain to a Catholic church three blocks from her rooming house and when she got there she fed him and waited until he was asleep. Then she got up quietly and left him lying in the corner of a dark pew. Within an hour she was on a train bound for Boston, her few belongings packed in one suitcase that was lined with over forty-eight thousand dollars in cash. By the time the train arrived in Boston, Doris had washed all remembrance of New York, the Justines and her son from her mind. None of that had ever happened. She was twenty-one years old and her life was just beginning.

  Doris Delaney never got through the locked door of Boston society, but with her looks, her smart address and her new wardrobe, she managed to attach herself to the fringe that dwelt right outside. She met Adam Palmer, at a charity ball at the Copley and made up her mind to marry him.

  Adam Palmer was a good businessman but he was notoriously lacking in the ways of the world. Doris posed now as an or
phan who, although fixed well enough financially, was totally alone in the world. Adam was first sympathetic, then very sorry for her and at last, in love with her. Within three months of the charity ball at the Copley, he asked Doris to marry him.

  “I know I’m much older,” he said apologetically, “but I’ll try to make you happy.”

  “Oh, Adam, my dear,” said Doris gratefully.

  “You’ll like Cooper Station,” Adam told her. “It’s a nice town, a pretty town.”

  Doris had counted on remaining in Boston and was startled at this announcement.

  “But, Adam, what about your business?”

  “Oh, it practically runs itself now,” he said comfortably. “I come down on the train and spend a day or two here every week, but the rest of the time I go up home and putter around. There’s breathing room in Cooper Station which is more than I can say for this place.”

  Doris shrugged mentally. Perhaps it was better this way, after all. Adam would never be upper crust in Boston and maybe it was better to be a big fish in a little pond like Cooper Station than to be no fish at all.

  “Oh, Adam,” she said softly. “You’ve made me so happy.”

  “I love you, Doris,” he said. “You’ll never be sorry.”

  They were married in Boston and went to Niagara Falls for the wedding trip and Adam Palmer treated his wife as if she were made of fragile china that might shatter under his clumsy touch. Doris did nothing to offend his strict New England sensibilities. She wore a nightgown that covered her from head to foot and she shivered as if in fear when Adam tried to touch her.

  “Oh, Adam, Adam,” she cried. “I’m so frightened!”

  “I love you, dear,” he repeated over and over. “I’d never harm you.”

  At last she let him force his knee between her thighs and then she tightened herself against his onslaught. When at last he penetrated her, she gave such a cry of agony that Adam Palmer never doubted for a moment that he had deflowered a virgin.

  Doris Delaney Palmer did well in Cooper Station. She joined the Congregational Church and became attached to various clubs and committees. Within five years the town elected her to serve as a Guardian and the mantle of respectability that Doris wore perpetually fitted her as if she had been born with it in place. Within ten years, there were many people who never stopped to remember that Doris had been born elsewhere, so completely did she suit Cooper Station. The only person who ever wondered about Doris was Dr. Gordon Cameron. She had come to him because she suffered from acutely painful menstrual cramps and in the course of his examination, the doctor had seen the episiotomy scar that gave her secret away. But he kept silent. Afterwards, as he filled out a card, he asked casually, “Have you ever been pregnant, Mrs. Palmer?”