The two women were seated in the living room. Rodney had just walked in, clutching the paper bag with his loin cloth, moccasins and headband.
Shit, he thought. His mother is entertaining the famous Mrs Reilly. The lean, lustrous local celebrity.
Oh my god, he thought. The first time she had ever been in their house.
She was said to be a friend of eminent people including the outspoken Senator Joseph McCarthy, the famous Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and New York's Cardinal Spellman. She lived in that nineteenth century mansion, one of the state's well known historic homes, with its vast garden. "She is the chatelaine," Rodney's English teacher Ada Braithwaite had said. "The lady of the chateau."
Seated next to his mother she wore an elegant night-blue suit and a pearl necklace and looked out through black-rimmed cats eyes glasses. She was smoking a Chesterfield cigarette ("Always milder Better tasting Cooler smoking") holding aloft to one side the longest of cigarette holders. Her smoke flavoured the air, mixed with her suffocating, spicy perfume. Yes, this was the same Mrs Reilly who was convening these mothers' club meetings where discipline for boys was the one subject of conversation. Who was said to be an advocate of "old fashioned discipline" or "frontier discipline."
Whatever that meant she had been rumoured to have applied it to her sons, now grown up and fled Minnesota: one to serve in the army in Berlin, married shamefully to a German bargirl, the other to trade in Southern antiques in Savannah with a male friend.
This, too, was the same Mrs Reilly who, according to Stevie Lynton, was now delivered young male offenders by the local police, boys a bit older than Rodney and Stevie, who had to tend her garden naked- fellas who worked in gas stations and the Brewer dairy and the railyards, including Negro boys: force to work in her garden totally naked- naked and, Stevie avowed, very often stiff. Nude young men who his own mother, after those meetings in the Reilly mansion, had no doubt inspected with the other moms.
Hell! Think of it! His own Mom gawking at fellas not much older than her son, in their birthday suits and with hardons!
Including Negros, Stevie had said.
Hell!
In fact as recently as yesterday his mother had been late home because of a mothers' club meeting. She had come in wild-eyed, flushed, deep in thought. Now apparently still suffused with that experience she and her friend sat there, smoking, their coffee on the table. They looked stimulated, expectant. All this talk about punishing teenage males in a state of nudity appeared to excite ladies without husbands.
Now they were looking up at Rodney. They knew the boy had been off being measured and fitted. They had seen the drawings of the loin cloth. Gazing at the designs they had gossiped about how...how "tiny" and "flimsy" the things were, these Indian brave costumes. How revealing and, for the boys, humiliating.
They had chatted about this, the humiliation for 18 year old males. Fingering her pearls Mrs Reilly had opined, "My dear, how would they feel? That fragile flap...knowing we would see virtually everything?" And Rodney's Mom had replied, "It would be devastating for them...just devastating but..." And Mrs Reilly had finished her sentence, "But thrilling for us!" Then they had both collapsed in smokers' wheezy laughs.
They were very impatient to see a boy in one of the loin cloths. Revealed in one. Humiliated in one.
And in walks Rodney to stand blushing and shuffling, a paper bag with his costume.
"Of course, Mrs Reilly would like to see you in your costume, Rodney. Everyone's talking about Miss Cuff's production."
"Certainly all the females," offered Mrs Reilly.
Rodney froze.
After that fitting this afternoon he had walked through the streets of the town, trembling with shame. He had kept running through the details of the fitting at the home of Mrs Carruthers. Just him and Yuela, the Negro maid, in that fitting and sewing room.
She had kept him stark naked standing on the stool. After her slow, deliberate, sometimes clumsy work with the tape measure she had fitted on the loin cloth, with its tiny flaps front and back, fiddling and fussing at his belly and his bottom. Her fingers had drifted through his scrolled orange pubic bush. They had flickered at the cleft of his bottom. As she stretched the string waist band with one hand the pinky finger on the other had entered his belly button. He had felt her breath on his penis shaft and its fat glans. Her breath had stirred his pubic hair.
Then as she struggled with the assemblage her elbow had grazed one side of his dangling ball sack, moved off, and grazed it again.
Inevitably...
...as you would expect...
...Rodney's penis had swollen and stretched. Maybe it was the sensation of being tickled and breathed on but maybe, as well, the sight of her starched white apron. Ah, that apron and all the associations, the fervid fantasies. Either way after a few upward jerks he was soon sporting another stubborn, engorged, rock-hard 45 degree projection, blushing furiously as Yuela manoeuvred around it, arranging the loin cloth.
The penis jutted forward, the miniscule flap drooped to one side. Yuela had smiled to herself as she completed her work, stood back to examine things and told him he would look wonderful on the stage. She had then announced she was going to invite Mrs Carruthers, the seamstress, to check on her work.
"Oh no, Miss, I wouldn't like that!"
The boy was gushing.
"Goodness, that lady's my boss! She always wants to see."
"But I...I..."
He looked downward on the view- the terrible view- of the stem and prow of his penis thrusting the flap aside and pointing straight out. Again, he thought how huge the glans was. Yes, mushroom-like as boys said when they saw him in the showers or at the pool.
"Please..."
He was begging now.
"Don't bring her in while I've got this..."
He was close to tears.
"...this..."
He was lost for words. How do you tell a Negro maid you don't want her to bring in her mistress, to look at his erection?
"...this problem."
And he looked down at it again as if to present the evidence.
She looked at it too. The ivory skin, the pink cap- so huge, as big as that on the dingus of the big Negro boys, the "bucks," she had grown up with and experimented with in Alabama. And that ball sack...God almighty, that was big and hung so darn low with those folds. Even that young man she had spent the afternoon with in the woods when she was 19- he a "a shoe polish black nigger-" did not have bull balls like those.
She seemed to be considering.
"It happened before...with all the fellas I bin fitting. She seen them too. When they was like that. Stiff and out front and all."
He withered. "And out front-" the term made him flip inside.
"Stiff and out front and all."
"And just like you those boys- sweet young men jus' like you- well, they don't like it neither. But she's my boss and she always wants to see the finished work."
Then she was gone but had carefully closed the door behind her.
Desperately the boy had tried to reposition the flap. For a second it would stay in place, lying on the sloping dorsal side of the stem like a little blanket but it immediately slipped off to the side each time. It was hopeless.
Within a minute Yuela had reappeared at the door. But...no Mrs Carruthers.
The maid had explained. What with all the fittings for the boys- day and night, all the young men from the school being fitted like Rodney- Mrs Carruthers had become more and more...
...how was the maid going to say this?
"Hot and bothered. Worked up. She very agitated. Gets excited."
Here Yuela had not been able to resist a lubricious grin.
"Her heart..."
Yuela gestured at her large breast.
"...beats like a drum. She's offta see that nice lady doctor, Doctor Speight. To fix her rhythms."
Rodney had thought of all the fellas from his year, mobilised for this silly musical, being forced to strip and stand on a stool and have this Yuela and Mrs Carruthers fiddling with their waists and those crazy flaps and girls appearing at the windows. He had thought of Kerry Fulbright, and Mark Campbell and Stevie Lynton in their birthday suits going through what he was suffering now. He was certain they, too, had suffered erections. He had thought of that expression, "suffering an erection" which Miss Newbold had used when talking about him to his mother outside the curtain of the fitting booth in Logan's. "Suffering." Like boys simply couldn't control their cocks.
The lewd thoughts had produced more jolts in his penis. It pointed right ahead, like artillery on a cruiser.
And to his disgrace- right there in front of this Negro maid- it yielded up a giant dollop of fluid, emerging from his meatus- that grinning slit- and bubbled there, like a glass decoration.
"A lot of veins!" Yuela had muttered, savouring the last moments with her captive. She had looked him right in the eye. And Yuela had then clearly noticed his offering of translucent fluid and audaciously, moving in what seemed like slow motion, raised her apron hem to scoop it off his meatus.
Taking a grip of his penis neck to help the accuracy of her near-medical gesture.
Oh hell! She was gripping it!
And she had beamed right back.
And he had frozen.
His walk home had been a sad experience. Everything about his privates- the big spongy head on his penis, the dangling balls with the extra droop on the left testicle, the red pubic bush was now out there, part of the knowledge of womenfolk in Brewer. Oh yes, you could bet on that.
And now in his own home he was facing two mature women, one his mother, talking as if they knew about the loin cloths the boys were being forced to wear- and what they failed to conceal. His stomach turned over at the thought. At the thought of a...female conspiracy...mothers fully involved...in which defenceless, powerless 18 year old sons are the victims.
