(I’m sorry, Boss.)
(Nothing to be sorry about now. But I was telling you something else—Eunice, when we’re up and around, remind me to dig into my jewelry case and show you my son’s ‘dog tag’—all that I have left of him.)
(If you want to. But isn’t that morbid, dear? Look forward, not back.)
(Depends on how you look back. I don’t grieve over him; I’m proud of him. He died honorably, fighting for his country. But that military dog tag shows his blood type. Type O.)
(Oh.)
(Yes, I said ‘O’. So my son was no more my physical descendant than were my daughters. Didn’t keep me from loving him.)
(Yes, but—you learned it from his identification tag? After he was dead?)
(Like hell l did. I knew it the day he was bom; I had suspected that he might not be mine from the time Agnes turned out to be pregnant—and I accepted it. Eunice, I wore horns with dignity and always kept suspicions to myself. Just as well—as all my wives contributed to my
cornute state. Horns? Branching antlers! The husband who expects. anything else is riding for a fall. But I never had illusions about it, so it never took me by surprise. No reason why it should, as I got the best parts of my own training from married women, starting clear back in my early teens. I think that happens in every generation. But horns make a man’s head ache only when he’s stupid enough to believe that his wife is different—when all the evidence he has accumulated should cause him to assume the exact opposite.)
(Boss, you think all women are like that?)
(Oh, no! In my youth I knew many married couples in which both bride and groom—to the best of my knowledge and belief—went to the altar virgin and stayed faithful a lifetime. There may be couples like that among you kids today.)
(Some, I think. But you couldn’t prove it by me.)
(Nor by me. Nor by all the kinseys who ever collected statistics. Eunice, sex is the one subject everybody lies about. But what I was saying is this: A man who takes his fun where he finds it, then marries and expects his wife to be different, is a fool. I wasn’t that sort of fool. Let me tell you about Agnes.)
(Agnes was an angel—with round heels. That’s obsolete slang which means what it sounds like. I don’t think Agnes ever hated anyone in her short life and she loved as easily as she breathed. She—Eunice, you said you had started young?)
(Fourteen, Boss. Precocious slut, huh?)
(Precocious possibly, a slut never. Nor was my angel Agnes ever a slut and she happily gave away her virginity—so she told me—at twelve. I—)
(‘Twelve!’)
(Surprised, dear? That Generation Gap again; your generation thinks it invented sex. Agnes was precocious; sixteen was fairly young in those days, from what a male could guess about it—not much!—and seventeen or eighteen was more common. I think. Actually encountering female virginity and, being certan of it—well, I’m no expert. But Agnes wasn’t hanging up a record even for those days; I recall a girl in my grammar school who was ‘putting out,’ as kids called it then, at eleven—and getting away with it cold, teacher’s pet and butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth and winning pins for Sunday School attendance.
(My darling Agnes was like that except that Agnes’s goodness wasn’t pretense; she was good all the way through. She simply didn’t see anything sinful about sex.)
(Boss, sex is not sinful.)
(Did I ever say it was? However, in those days I felt guilty about it, until Agnes cured me of such nonsense. She was sixteen and I was twenty and her father was a prof at the cow college I went to and I was invited to their house for dinner one Sunday night—and our first time happened on their living room sofa so fast it startled me, scared me some.)
(What frightened you, dear? Her parents?)
(Well, yes. Just upstairs and probably not asleep. Agnes being so young herself—age of consent was eighteen then and while I don’t recall ever letting it stop me, boys were jumpy about it. And that night I wasn’t prepared, not having expected it.)