“Don’t be silly, Stewart. He was just rubbing my back.”
“I saw him kiss you there, Molly. That isn’t right for a boy to do to his mother.”
“Oh. Stewart, you’re being just plain ridiculous. He’s just a boy. He didn’t mean anything sexy by it. After all, I’m his mother. He was just showing that he loves me.”
“Maybe. But you know what you were doing. I saw you squirming around—just like when we’re going at it.”
“I couldn’t help it, honey.” Dave’s mother laughed lightly. “I was thinking of you, wishing you’d hurry up and get home so we could—you know.”
“That the truth?” A hungry look had come over Stewart Evers’ face. “Davey, you get to bed now where you belong,” he’d said, running his eyes over Molly’s body. But there had still been anger in his tone. Anger, and something else the boy couldn’t understand. Jealousy, perhaps, or maybe the hint of a threat.
Dave had done as his father said, gone to his bed, which wasn’t really a bed at all, but only the Castro in the living room of their three-room apartment in the East Bronx. Perhaps, when they’d originally rented the apartment, before Dave was born, it had really been out of necessity. It had been the tag-end of the Depression then, and Dave’s father, earning peanuts and glad to get it, hadn’t been able to afford more rooms.
But things had gotten better during the years Dave was growing up, and there had been no reason for not inking a larger apartment where Dave might have had a room of his own. Certainly now, twenty-five years after Stewart Evers had signed the first lease on the apartment, there was no reason why they couldn’t afford it. Rabbits! Bitterly Dave reflected that the reason they remained in these cramped quarters was the same now as it had been then. For some perverse reason, his parents liked involving him in their sex life, and the lack of space provided them with an excuse to keep from facing this fact. Yes, they enjoyed it—just as much now as they had that long-ago night when his father had caught him giving his mother a massage.
They’d left the door open on purpose that night, too, Dave was sure. They’d left the lights on also, giving him a clear view of their activities from the Castro. And so he’d watched them, as he would watch them many times in the nights to come.
His father hadn’t even bothered to undress. Breathing heavily as he gazed at his wife with the nightgown up around her neck, he’d merely taken off his jacket, unzipped his pants and pushed his underwear aside to free his manhood for action. The shock of seeing it, so big, so hard-looking, so seemingly dangerous like some giant weapon which might tear his mother asunder, made Dave even more afraid than he’d been before when his father had bellowed at him.
Without reasoning it, he became sure that now his father was going to punish his mother brutally for what she and Dave had been doing. As his father sprawled on top of her, Dave became positive that this was what was happening. And as that giant weapon tore at her body, seeming to split it in two, Dave was possessed by the idea that he must go to her rescue, that he must run in there and pull the heaving man-beast off her before he destroyed the mother Dave loved.
But he hadn’t the courage. He didn’t dare move from the Castro. He just lay there and watched, overcome with his own guilt and fear. He just lay there and watched and cursed himself for a yellow coward.
There was more. At the end his mother had squealed with delight. And she had covered Dave’s father with kisses. And her voice had carried to the boy cowering on the couch.
“Uh, Stewart, the way you make me feel! Oh, you are my man! And you’re all man, Stewart. All man!”
“Beats playing with the boy, hey?” Dave’s father had chuckled.
“He’ll be lucky if he’s ever half the man his father is.”
“Even if he is, he’ll never get himself a woman like his Daddy’s got.”
Dave had pulled the pillow over his head and ground it into his ears so he wouldn’t be able to hear any more. Now his fear, his guilt, his hatred at himself for his cowardice, were all merging into another, overpowering emotion. Dave was consumed with jealousy of his father, and that jealousy was to harden into a steely hatred.
Yet this hatred, as he grew older, would never be as great as the hatred he would develop towards his mother. It was she who would reject him time after time during his adolescence. Yes, she would reject him, with anger at times, poking fun at his display of affection at other times. And, always, she would make it clear that she preferred his father. That which she denied Dave, she not only gave willingly to his father; she spent night after night arousing him to accept the gift ---and all the time the two of them knowing that Dave could see and hear everything.
Dave remembered many such nights, but the one which stood out occurred when he was thirteen. He’d been going to sleep on the Castro as usual. His parents had been undressing with the door open and the lights on—as usual.
Molly, his mother, had stood directly in front of the door, facing the side-wall mirror. She’d already, taken off her dress, her shoes, stockings, garter-belt, panties and bra. Now she wore only a halfslip and was fiddling with the earrings at her ear-lobes. She dropped one of them, and the half-slip, which was very short, rode up over her buttocks as she bent over to pick it up.
At that moment, Dave’s father, completely nude, came up behind her. He leaned over her and his hands closed over her bare breasts, squeezing them. Dave’s mother wretched her arms out and grasped the edge of the bureau for support. She widened her stance deliberately and pushed backward against her husband. And then they locked together, writhing with the blind lust of animals.
Dave couldn’t tear his eyes away from them. His father loomed like some giant prehistoric monster over his mother. Yet the expression on her face and the eager wrigglings of her body told Dave of the ecstasy she was feeling at his assault.
Ashamed as he was, Dave’s body was seized with the thrill of what he saw. Gazing almost directly into his mother’s passion-blinded eyes, his hand groped under his pajama pants and encircled the throbbing response his parents had aroused. Not just his fist but his whole body moved then, rising and falling with the staccato thrusts of his mother and father against each other. And when his father gave that final lunge and his mother half-screamed with her own release, Dave’s last surging spasm was a party to their fulfillment. It was during the following moments, as his brain cleared, that Dave really began to hate his mother for arousing him in his solitude while granting to another man the ecstasy she would always deny him. His hatred of her may not have been logical, but it was strong enough to warp his sex outlook right through the beginnings of his adult life.
Now, twenty-four years old, still a virgin and despising himself because of it, Dave was filled with rage towards both his parents as he watched them make ready ready for bed. They were in their forties now, but time hadn’t diminished their uninhibited ardor. They still played like rabbits almost nightly, and they still seemed to take some sort of perverse pleasure in flaunting their sex-play before their grown son.
Dave watched his father sit down alongside his mother on the edge of the bed and fondle her breasts. He heard her giggle and saw her lean over and blow suggestively in his father’s ear. Disgusting! he thought. Gray-haired and going to pot, but acting like a couple of high school kids with hot pants! It reminded Dave of his own high-school days, of the first time he’d almost gotten rid of his virginity when he was sixteen.
It had been on a dark night, no stars shining, no moonlight, along a deserted stretch of beach in the early autumn. The girl’s same had been Rhoda something, a pudgy kid with large breasts, only a year or so younger than himself. But she’d been much longer on experience. The word around school was that she’d been putting out since she was twelve. And the way she acted, it was obvious she had more idea of how to go about things than Dave did.