It was the living room of Mrs Reilly's house, high-ceilinged and richly decorated, a room all the ladies of Brewer longed to visit. The light poured in the tall bay windows, catching the swirl of the women's cigarette smoke. On the wall, in the shadows, one could just make out the oil painting of Venus hauling a nude Cupid over her knees- an 18 year old Cupid, nude and decidedly uncircumcised (and entirely hairless, as it happened); and nineteenth century paintings of nude males romping on beaches or sports fields with dressed females watching. She had bought them from a New York auction house: naked males, clothed females, this was the unifying motif. Chinoiserie vases displayed triumphs of the garden: white roses, hyacinths, Baker's fern.
Flowers, tended and picked by nude young men who worked off their minor police offences around her flower beds and shrubs. Naked...in their birthday suits...in her garden.
Mrs Reilly was seated with her guests. In one hand, a glass of J and B Blended Scotch Whiskey, only slightly diluted; in the other, a cigarette holder with a Camel yielding up a filagree of smoke to join the fug hanging in the room. All the ladies smoked, including Dr Speight who asserted that moderate smoking had health advantages especially in lowering blood pressure. Moreover, she believed, any detrimental effect of smoking could be more than rectified by menthol filter tips, like those in the brands Kool and Salems. Besides, she often argued, most of her doctor friends enjoyed tobacco; in Dr Kinsey's team, just about all of them; she loved and admired Dr Kinsey and the fearlessness of his trailblazing research, especially that on male sexual practices.
But this late afternoon they had been discussing something other than the debate about smoking or memories of Dr Kinsey.
"I think you are right," Mrs Reilly pronounced, after long consideration. "That is, about the shaving- the body hair. The boys' body hair."
Miss Cuff, the school drama teacher, was relieved at her friend's adjudication. She needed support for a proposition as daring as shaving off the body hair of...(gulp!) male students. The very thought made her shudder. With the daring, with the lubriciousness. And Mrs Reilly needed to approve. She had influence with the school board, Mayor Zeldin, Congressman Andresen and Police Chief Malone. She was a friend of Senator Hubert Humphrey's sister. That's why errant young men were delivered here, instructed to work naked in her sprawling garden.
"Good," said Miss Cuff. "Very good."
And with relief and anticipation drew deep on her own Camel, in its long holder, imagining the 18 year old males she had seen at rehearsals in their tiny loin cloths- mere flaps over their groins- flaps which showed off all their pubic hair- imagining them, free of that hair. Just like the Indians they were portraying. She was remembering what she had seen in a side-show tent nearly 20 years ago.
Dr Speight, school doctor and Kinsey sex researcher, nodded her approval and raised her glass to toast the decision. "The right decision. Shave them down there. Verisimilitude. You may get to take Cowgirls and Indian Braves to Broadway."
Mrs Carruthers who designed and sewed the boys' little costumes expressed her approval with a "Humph!" She had seen the problem close-up. Poked her nose into the pubic hair of these shamed, trembling boys. And now Miss Cuff had just persuaded them: off it must come. Maybe she and her Negro maid Yuela could have a role in the execution of the plan.
Right now Yuela was with her friends, Betty and Doris, Mrs Reilly's two Negro maids. The three of them were outside in the garden, looking at the nude white boys. Pointing and giggling while the fellas sweated and worked, stripped to the buff.
Miss Cuff thought it was time for her confession.
In the late 1930s when studying drama at Scripps College she and girlfriends had taken a holiday and driven through the Central Valley of California. They visited a carnival ("Carnivale" it was called on the big entrance sign) run by a charming dwarf everyone called Samson. He wore a shabby, well-worn three piece suit, with snap brim hat. He had kept this Carnivale together through the Depression and the disasters of the Dust Bowl, so that his band of "freaks" and performers stayed alive on baked beans, stew, spinach and mugs of coffee when whole communities had been wiped out, left starving. He befriended the college girls, clearly seemed taken by them and on some instinct steered them to an exhibit which featured Iroquois warriors from "The Wild West."
Two Indian braves appeared on the platform outside the tent. They wore deer skin trousers and their bare torsos glowed golden and athletic. They were "interesting" enough for Miss Cuff and her friends to pay a few dimes for admission. It was a quiet afternoon, the fair virtually deserted and the girls were the only visitors inside the darkened tent.
The cool canvas interior was welcome after the dusty heat. A few flies buzzed. The dirge-like organ sounded outside, grinding out its sad repertoire of carnival tunes. Samson cleared his throat and puffed a cheroot.
The girls waited.
Miss Cuff gazed off into the distance and shared her recollection.
"Four Indians entered. We guessed they were 19 or 20. They were strikingly well-proportioned and handsome with long black hair falling to their shoulders but shy, as native people often are, and couldn't look us in the eyes. The trousers the two had worn earlier had been replaced with loin cloths. All us girls were thrilled by the unexpected male nudity, the grace of these young men. Their sculpted shoulders...the corded muscles in their forearms...their big brown nipples, like medallions on their chests. The flaps of their loin cloths were long, and they wore them front and back- nothing like what we have designed here in Brewer..."
And she smiled at Mrs Carruthers who, in turn, toasted her with her whiskey.
"...but it did leave their thighs exposed on the sides. Muscled like colt's, and as they strolled back and forwards behind the rope we caught glimpses of their long, straddling legs and, as their flaps moved, other body parts as well. Just hints. We were frisky young things and each of us was giggling as the boys executed a half-hearted war dance and their long flaps swung some more and it was clear that they wore nothing underneath...no jockstraps, for example."
There were smiles. Jockstraps! What a hoot that had been!
"I felt bold enough to tell their leader that we girls were used to seeing men swim naked at college (I didn't tell him we had removed loose bricks in the wall between our change room and the pool!) and I suggested they might dance without the encumbrance of loin cloths. They looked surprised and embarrassed until little Samson suggested we offer a tip of a dollar and said, "Whaddabout it, Injuns, these young ladies wanna see yas without ya flaps. What say we earn a bitta cash here?" Anyway, he was clearly the boss. Within seconds they were easing down their loin cloths and standing nude, hands by their sides. A bit bashful. And after we got used to their natural beauty- goodness, we were swooning!- what we noticed was they had no body hair! Their copper-toned groins were entirely smooth! It made...everything stand out. The anatomical detail..."
Miss Cuff said she had a friend who taught in the Anthropology Department of Berkley, one of the top five schools in the country. His name was Kermit Schmidlap, now an esteemed professor. He told her that adult Iroquois in their natural state were near hairless. But they carefully scraped off what fluffs appeared on their groins or under their arms, using a turtle shell.
Kermit was an old "sissy" and seemed to have researched the subject with a suspicious interest, living on a reservation and taking a lively interest in the warriors, following them on their hunts, swimming with them in mountain lakes and at night sharing a blanket around a fire. "Certainly, my dear, their scrotums feature not a single hair, entirely glabrous. Tonsured testicles! Renders them unbelievably sensitive!"
Mr Carruthers slapped her knees. "Tonsured testicles!"
"Which we must replicate!" said Mrs Reilly. "With our dear boys. Shave off their fluff, their wiry fur. Scrotums as smooth as eggs! We must be true to life, Indian life."
"They'll hate it, of course. The loss of manhood," said Miss Cuff.
"All the more reason," said Mrs Reilly, grinning like a crocodile.
Which left the question: how and where would it be done, the shaving of the 18 year olds?
Dr Speight had an idea. "Mobilise the girls! I expect to recruit many for careers in medicine. That young Milly Slink for example- she talks about becoming an army or navy nurse. Very taken with the idea of helping to examine recruits- military medicals are very thorough. She's drooling at the thought, quite literally."
Mrs Reilly endorsed the notion of involving the girls.
"Pick, say, Rodney or Mark or that sweet Johnny Marcello. Have the girls practice on him and we can supervise. Trimming with sewing scissors, working up a lather, whisking the curls off with a razor. Then very, very carefully closing in and shaving off every last hair. The scrotums would be challenging..."
"Oh, but with practice. Remember, 'tonsured testicles' on young Indians."
"Start tomorrow then. You have that examination room at the school."
"Start tomorrow."
"But right now, let's see how the young men are going in the garden."
"Yes, of course, but first, finish the story about the naked braves. In the side-show tent, all those years ago..."
"Yes...did they sport...you know...'tonsured testicles?'"
Three women leant forward, indecently curious, to hear Miss Cuff talk about what happened at the fairground back in the 1930s.
