A Stranger in the Mirror By Sidney Sheldon

One afternoon, when Toby was twelve years old, Mrs. Durkin, the neighborhood gossip, came to visit them. Mrs. Durkin was a bony-faced woman with black, darting eyes and a tongue that was never still. When she departed, Toby did an imitation of her that had his mother roaring with laughter. It seemed to Toby that it was the first time he had ever heard her laugh. From that moment on, Toby looked for ways to entertain her. He would do devastating imitations of customers who came into the butcher shop and of teachers and schoolmates, and his mother would go into gales of laughter.

Toby had finally discovered a way to win his mother’s approval.

He tried out for a school play, No Account David, and was given the lead. On the opening night, his mother sat in the front row and applauded her son’s success. It was at that moment that Frieda knew how God’s promise was going to come true.

It was the early 1930’s, the beginning of the Depression, and movie theaters all over the country were trying every conceivable stratagem to fill their empty seats. They gave away dishes and radios, and had keno nights and bingo nights, the hired organists to accompany the bouncing ball while the audience sang along.

And they held amateur contests. Frieda would carefully check the theatrical section of the newspaper to see where contests were taking place. Then she would take Toby there and sit in the audience while he did his imitations of Al Jolson and James Cagney and Eddie Cantor and yell out, “Mein Himmel! What a talented boy!” Toby nearly always won first prize.

He had grown taller, but he was still thin, an earnest child with guileless, bright blue eyes set in the face of a cherub. One looked at him and instantly thought: innocence. When people saw Toby they wanted to put their arms around him and hug him and protect him from Life. They loved him and on stage they applauded him. For the first time Toby understood what he was destined to be; he was going to be a star, for his mother first, and God second.

 

Toby’s libido began to stir when he was fifteen. He would masturbate in the bathroom, the one place he was assured of privacy, but that was not enough. He decided he needed a girl.

One evening, Clara Connors, the married sister of a classmate, drove Toby home from an errand he was doing for his mother. Clara was a pretty blonde with large breasts, and as Toby sat next to her, he began to get an erection. Nervously, he inched his hand across to her lap and began to fumble under her skirt, ready to withdraw instantly if she screamed. Clara was more amused than angry, but when Toby pulled out his penis and she saw the size of it, she invited him to her house the following afternoon and initiated Toby into the joys of sexual intercourse. It was a fantastic experience. Instead of a soapy hand, Toby had found a soft, warm receptacle that throbbed and grabbed at his penis. Clara’s moans and screams made him grow hard again and again, so that he had orgasm after orgasm without ever leaving the warm, wet nest. The size of his penis had always been a source of secret shame to Toby. Now it had suddenly become his glory. Clara could not keep this phenomenon to herself, and soon Toby found himself servicing half a dozen married women in the neighborhood.

During the next two years, Toby managed to deflower nearly half the girls in his class. Some of Toby’s classmates were football heroes, or better looking than he, or rich—but where they failed, Toby succeeded. He was the funniest, cutest thing the girls had ever seen, and it was impossible to say no to that innocent face and those wistful blue eyes.

In Toby’s senior year in high school, when he was eighteen, he was summoned to the principal’s office. In the room were Toby’s mother, grim-faced, a sobbing sixteen-year-old Catholic girl named Eileen Henegan and her father, a uniformed police sergeant. The moment Toby entered the room, he knew he was in deep trouble.