The Young Apollo and Other Stories by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online Page B

and me something not fit for young girls to hear. As in many Long Island estates, we had a night watchman who circled the house in the dark hours armed with a revolver. Ours was a dear old boy who couldn't have hurt a fly, whom Father, in his kindly way, had employed because he was on relief, saying that his mere presence might act as a scarecrow. But the poor old fellow had been arrested in the village on a morals charge, having approached a young man in a public washroom with an indecent suggestion. Father had appeared as a character witness for the unhappy defendant and persuaded the local magistrate to be as lenient as possible, but of course he had had to discharge him as a watchman.
    I can never forget how Mother raised her clasped hands in a gesture of fervent gratitude to a benignant deity and exclaimed, "To think all these years we've been at the mercy of an armed pervert!"
    Father simply chuckled at an emphasis so undue, but I was far from doing so.
    My patient believed now that he was doomed to live chastely. Though his sins were as scarlet, they would be as white as snow. If, returning to school, he sometimes succumbed to the temptation to masturbate at night, he would attempt to lessen the black feelings of guilt that he knew would assail him afterward by fantasizing that he was making love to a girl. At Yale, where he matriculated after graduating from St. Luke's, he allowed himself what he hoped was the harmless pleasure of reading the works of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, and John Addington Symonds and seeing his own repressed idealization of a certain kind of love condoned.
    In his summer vacations while he was an undergraduate, Marvin became interested in the daughter of Meadowview neighbors, a lively, good-tempered, dark-haired, wide-eyed girl called Barbara Shields. She loved fishing and hiking and riding to hounds with the local fox hunt; the latter sport was also a favorite of his. The other girls he had met at Long Island parties had by no means been indifferent to him. He was at least passably handsome, though shy with them; his manners were modest, at times even charming; his family, of course, was socially prominent. His mother indeed had found fit to warn him, although smilingly, to be careful about girls who might be "after his chips." But he didn't think Barbara was. She had none of the coyness, the affected shyness, the faintly feline glitter that he saw, or fancied he saw, in other girls of their opulent neighborhood. She was too much the outdoors sort for that, too much a good sport. He found himself at ease with her as he had never been with any member of her sex except for his sisters, who "didn't count." It only bothered him slightly when he heard from his sister Cynthia, the one closest to him, that people were beginning to speak of him and Barbara as a possible match.
    The reason that such talk didn't frighten him more was that Barbara didn't appear to expect him to play the game of sex, which all young men and women seemed expected to play, whether they wanted to or not. It was like football at St. Luke's, a rigid sports requirement until a student's last year, when he could elect, braving a slight sneering, the alternative of tennis or squash. But to Barbara being pals seemed quite enough. No matter how frequently they saw each other, there was no talk of a more intimate relationship. They shared hikes and rides and books and swapped anecdotes, sometimes hilarious, at the expense of each other's family. Marvin began to enjoy his new reputation of having a "steady" girlfriend, and Barbara was highly approved of by his mother. He even began to entertain warmer thoughts about her; at night in bed he would imagine what it might be like to hold her naked in his arms, causing him to have erections of which he no longer had to be ashamed.
    What happened next engendered a grave crisis in Marvin's life, and I turned on my recorder to catch his exact account of it.
It turned out, doctor, that