Fodderwing’s true name was Frederick; he was only later rebaptized, cruelly and in anger, by Jamie. He was the son of one of Peter Harding’s oldest friends, and he was to be here in New York City for two weeks only, visiting from someplace in Iowa (was there such a place as Pomeroy, Iowa?) and enjoying the Hardings’ hospitality, and the use of their guest room, and — as it later turned out — the ample use of their daughter’s until-then sacrosanct bosom. Fodderwing was Jamie’s identical age — twenty-four in that summer of 1950 — and he had been with the infantry in Europe and had suffered frostbite on all the toes of his left foot, which toes were later amputated at an Army field hospital, leaving him with a discernible limp that did much to encourage excessive sympathy for a young man who was exceedingly handsome anyway. Jamie distrusted him from the moment he took his hand and felt its warm, dry clasp, looked into those limpid brown eyes and glimpsed the soul of a seducer within, studied that almost feminine mouth with its pouting lower lip and Cupid’s bow upper, and thought at once of Janet’s former boyfriend who’d taught Connie to kiss.
As Foley limped his way to the bedroom down the hall, the one next door to Connie’s, the one that had been Janet’s when she’d been living here in New York before her marriage, Jamie felt a distinct tremor of foreboding. He and Connie had as yet exchanged no formal declarations of enduring love, but it was tacitly understood that they were “going steady” and that one day, perhaps after Connie’s graduation in June of 1953, by which time Jamie hoped to have established himself as a working photographer here in the Big Apple, one day they might consider getting engaged and then, maybe, sometime in the distant future, think about getting married. Or at least that was the way Connie seemed to consider their relationship. If Jamie had had his way, they’d have been married already. But she was, after all, only nineteen years old in that summer of 1950, and whereas she was a very good kisser, she seemed so terribly — young. Certainly too young to even consider marriage at this early stage of her womanhood. Marriage? She had just completed her freshman year, she would only be entering her sophomore year in the fall. Marriage? She was, for Christ’s sake, only nineteen years old!
Fodderwing Foley, the prick, thought it might be nice to seduce young Constance Tate Harding. Jamie could forgive him this; he had, after all, begun his relationship with Connie with the same rapierlike thought in mind, nor had its edge been dulled over the intervening nine months. What he could not forgive was the fact that the son of a bitch damn near succeeded! Whereas Jamie had been toying with Connie’s buttons like a safecracker all through the winter, spring and part of the summer, searching for the combination to the vault wherein the treasures lay; whereas Jamie had had his wrists caught and firmly held more times than a trapeze artist doing a double somersault without a net; whereas Jamie had pleaded and persuaded only to be scolded and excoriated; whereas Jamie had exhausted every male wile at his command in an attempt to weaken the resolve of Constance C. T. Hard-On Snow Queen Harding, that son-of-a-bitch son of her father’s best friend, that son-of-a-bitch guest in the third bedroom down the hall, the one next door to Connie’s, had to do nothing more than march in there one night while she was asleep and naked, and fondle her to his heart’s content, claiming the twin turrets of her femaleness as though they were cherished hills overlooking some disputed valley to be taken by an invading American army.
That he did not capture the tinier bastion below had been a miracle of self-restraint: Connie’s. In August — long after Fodderwing had once again departed for the more tranquil pastures of Pomeroy, Iowa, or Ohio, or wherever the hell he lived — she told Jamie all about that simmering steamy night in July, Freddie sneaking into her room and playing with her breasts all night long, kissing them and sucking them and stroking them and probing them and patting them, all of which had been excruciatingly nerve-racking for her, even though terribly exciting, the whole strenuous battle all night long, you know, to keep from doing what he really wanted her to do, and which of course she could not allow herself to do. (“I shouldn’t even be lying here on the couch with you,” Jamie thought as she told him her perfidious tale.)
He asked her, as well he might have, why she’d allowed Fodderwing into her bed to begin with. She explained that she hadn’t allowed him in, he’d simply come in, the same way Jamie had come into her hotel room that morning in New Haven when she’d accidentally left the door unlocked, and had found her naked in bed with just a blanket over her, which was the way she slept and which was the way Freddie had found her, too. When Jamie pointed out that in New Haven she hadn’t allowed him to climb between the sheets with her, had in fact raised a fuss that could have been heard in Paris, France, she explained that she hadn’t allowed Freddie to climb between the sheets, either, he had just done it, and she hadn’t been able to yell the way she had in New Haven because Mommy and Daddy were sleeping right next door, and this was Daddy’s best friend’s son, so what could she possibly do? It had all been just too impossible, and so she had suffered his advances and had got herself very, well, wet and, well, excited all night, but had nonetheless managed to save herself (except for her breasts) for whoever, you know, she might, you know, one day marry.
“So why the fuck are you telling this to me?” Jamie shouted in a rage. “What makes you think I want to know about your sordid little... your... your breast job with that... that toeless wonder... that that that Fodderwing—” and this was where Jamie baptized him after the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings character — “why tell me, go tell your Daddy whose best friend’s son that fucking cocksucker...”
“Jamie, I don’t like that kind of language,” Connie said. “I told you because if we ever do get married...”
“No!” he shouted. “No, we’re not going to get married, Connie! No, we are—”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said. “Of course we are.”
It was Jamie’s guess (and he was almost right) that his daughter, at seventeen, had never even been kissed, and he found the contradiction of her sophisticated demeanor and her true inexperience completely enchanting. He took her to see a sneak preview of a movie titled Last Summer that night, and was appalled by the behavior of the three teenage kids in it, all of them presumably Lissie’s age, but none of them even remotely like her. He did not once regret having missed the McGruder party, did not in fact even remember it until he was already in bed at eleven-thirty. From his motel room, he asked the information operator for the McGruder number in Rutledge, and then dialed it. Betty McGruder answered the phone on the fourth ring. There was the sound of music, laughter and voices behind her. He visualized her standing at the phone with one finger in her ear.