The Gibbsville Mission was an old, three-story brick house in the very dingiest part of Gibbsville, and was supported by Lantenengo Street contributions. Babies were brought there to be cared for through the day by girls like Caroline, and a professional nurse. Then in the afternoon, after the parochial and public schools closed for the day, the children up to twelve came to play and be read to until six o’clock, when they were sent home, their supper appetites spoiled by a pint of milk.
One afternoon in the spring of 1926 Caroline had said good-bye to the children and had gone around, tried doors, getting ready to close the Mission for the day. She was putting on her hat, standing in front of the mirror in the office, when she heard a footstep. Before she could see who it was—she saw it was a child—two arms went around her legs and two hands slid up under her skirt, and a red little head was burrowing into her stomach. She slapped down at him and tried to push him away, and finally succeeded, but he had touched her where he wanted to with his vile little fingers, and she went insane and struck him many times, knocking him to the floor and kicking him until he crawled and ran away, out of the office, crying.
Her great fear for days after that was that his grimy hands had given her a venereal disease. He never came back to the Mission, and she resigned the next week, but for weeks she was sure she had syphilis or something. The incident finally sent her, dying of mortification, to Doctor Malloy, to whom she told all. He very seriously examined her—he was not the family physician—and told her to come back the day after the next for the laboratory report; and then soberly informed her that she was free to marry and have babies, that there was nothing wrong with her. When she insisted on paying him he charged her fifteen dollars. This money he gave, without Caroline’s knowledge, to be sure, to the mother of the redhead, on the theory that the mother of such a child would appreciate anything in the way of a gift, without inquiring into the reason for the gift.
That was Caroline’s first completely unpleasant encounter with the male sex. She thought of it constantly in the days that followed. When she asked herself, “Why did he do it?” she always came to the same answer: that that was what you could expect of men, what she had been brought up to expect of men. She had had many men run over her with their hands, and there were some with whom she permitted it. She was still a virgin at that time, but until the child made his mysterious attack she thought she had sex pretty well under control. After the attack she reorganized, or entirely disorganized, her ideas about men and the whole of sex; and the one permanent effect of “that afternoon at the Mission,” as she referred to it in her frequent introspection, was that her ignorance of sex was pointed up. She knew herself for a completely inexperienced girl, and for the first time she began to remember the case histories in Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing and the lesser psychologists as more than merely pornography.
Up to that summer Caroline had been deeply in love twice in her life, although from the time she put her hair up she was always in love with someone. One of the men, the first, was a distant cousin of hers, Jerome Walker. He was an Englishman by birth and education, and he came to Gibbsville in 1918. He was about twenty-five and a captain in the British army. He was through, so far as the war was concerned; they were taking more and more bone out of his left leg, and putting in more and more silver. His presence in the United States, which he never before had visited, was to teach modern warfare to the draft army. Gibbsville girls threw themselves at him when he turned up at Caroline’s house on a month’s leave, and he was invited everywhere, a catch. He wore slacks, which were slightly unmilitary, and the stick he carried had a leather thong which he wrapped around his wrist. His tunic was beautifully tailored, and the little blue and white ribbon of the Military Cross, which no one identified, gave a nice little touch of color to his uniform. His lack of height fitted in with the fact that he was an invalid, a “casualty,” as most of the Gibbsville women—and men—called him. He took one careful look at Caroline and then and there decided for himself that this girl in the three-cornered hat and long gray spats and nicely cut suit was going to be something worth trying for. He was quite confident he could swing it in a month’s time.
He very nearly did. Caroline’s father was dead, and her mother was deaf, the kind of deaf person who, not wishing to yield to her deafness, refuses to learn to read lips or to wear earphones. In the Walker mansion on South Main Street were Caroline, her mother, the cook and the maid. And Jerry.
The first time he kissed her he all but gave up his ideas of having an affair with her. It was awfully far from the war, this warm room in Gibbsville in Pennsylvania in America, and there was nothing particularly warlike about “Oui, oui, Marie, will you do ziss for me?” which was going round and round on the phonograph. Caroline, except for her horrible accent, might have been an English girl, a sister of a friend, at home. But when she got up to change the needle and the record he reached out and took her hand and drew her to him, sat her on his right knee, and kissed her. She went to him without resistance but only the thought: “Well, we can kiss, can’t we?” But the kiss was not very successful, because they bumped noses in trying to get their heads at the right angles, and he let her go. She stopped the Victrola and came back and sat beside him. He took her hand and she looked at it and then looked up presently at him. They did not speak, and when she looked at him he was smiling very gently. A nervous smile came and went on her face and then she moved closer to him and really kissed him. But the moment of unscrupulousness had passed for him. She was all body and sensation and he had the terrible consciousness that while she felt this way, anything he chose to do to her, anything, would not be resisted.
This lasted a minute, two minutes, maybe five, before she squeezed back into herself and put her head on his shoulder. She was ashamed and grateful, because she never before had let herself go that way. “Let’s have a cigarette,” she said.
“Do you smoke?”
“I’m not allowed to, but I do. You hold it and I’ll take a puff.”
He got his silver case out of his trousers pocket and she smoked, not holding the cigarette very expertly, but taking appalling inhales. Cute was the word for her as she sat there, blowing smoke out of her mouth and nostrils, smoking the cigarette too fast. He took it from her to cool it off, and then they heard the quick catch of her mother’s car, a Baker electric, in the driveway on the way back to the stable. Caroline got up and put Poor Butterfly on the Vic. “That’s one of our old records,” she said, “but I like it because it’s so syncopated.” Anything that had the sound of the trap-drummer’s wood blocks in it was syncopated.
They often kissed after that; in the halls, the butler’s pantry, and in her Scripps-Booth roadster, which had a peculiar seating arrangement; the driver sat a foot or so forward of the other seat, which made kissing an awkward act.
He went away without telling her that he loved her, and without changing her status as woman or girl. He was dead of gangrene within six months of his visit to Gibbsville, and it was another two months before his family remembered to write to them. That had something to do with lessening Caroline’s grief: that he could have been lying dead in a grave while she went on thinking of him as the love of her life, while she was having a lovely time with the boys who were back from France and Pensacola and Boston Tech and the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. She was in demand, and she kissed a good many men with as much abandon as she had kissed Jerome Walker, except that now she knew how and when to stop. She was getting to be a prom trotter, too, as much as Bryn Mawr would permit, and having a perfectly wonderful time with the college boys. They were gay again now that the war was over and their universal embarrassment at not being in the fighting army was at an end, now that it was all right to be gay publicly. She was leaving for a week-end at Easton, where Ju English was in college, when her mother read the letter from England, which was mostly about how grateful the Cecil Walkers were for the hospitality their boy had received in Gibbsville, as they called it. There was one reference to Caroline. It was: “…and if you and your dear little girl should come to England, we shall…” Oh, well. But not oh, well. She knew, or hoped she knew, that the reason he did not tell his mother more about her was that he didn’t want his mother to think things. Still, on the ride to Easton she was depressed. When our minds run that way we date periods in our lives, and Caroline in later days and years fixed the train ride to Easton as the end of her girlhood. All her life, until she fell in love with Julian English, she was to feel that if things had been different, she would have married her cousin and lived in England, and she always thought very kindly of England. She did not, however, visit Jerome’s family when she went abroad in 1925. She was only going to be gone two months altogether, and by that time she was in love with a living man.