3 is not a Crowd

WANDA: I would be in favor of bringing them up to screw each other. I am absolutely serious. What a sane clean healthy way to grow up! Every brother and sister want to do it. They may never realize it, but the desire is universal.

PETER: They want to screw their parents, too. Would you draw a line?

WANDA: No.

PETER: Neither would I.

GRACE: I think I would draw a line at that.

PETER: That’s your hang-up.

GRACE: I guess.

WANDA: I never wanted to screw him. Did you ever want to screw Mother?

PETER: It never occurred to me. Not until a quack shrink suggested it. My reaction, as I recall, was one of nausea. She was dead by then and I pictured myself in bed with her rotting corpse and I retched. I didn’t bother explaining the image to the quack and he was sure we were on the verge of an earthshaking breakthrough. Stupid son of a bitch!

WANDA: But if children were brought up that way—

PETER: I think they do that in some of those islands. The places Margaret Mead goes to.

WANDA: Would you want your children to screw Margaret Mead?

PETER: Only if they really loved her.

WANDA: And if she has any kids, I want them brought up Catholic.

PETER: You’re a perfect goose. You truly are.

JWW: Observations on ideal ways to raise children and the advisability of encouraging their early sexual experimentation were voiced frequently in the course of our several meetings. It may seem remarkable that persons so thoroughly opposed to the idea of having children had so much to say on the topic of raising them. I think this is less a contradiction than it seems. Both Peter and Wanda were very much aware that the subsequent emotional problems derived in large measure from the manner in which their sexual behavior was dealt with, and blame their parents for this. Furthermore, it would seem to me that by defending the position that brother-sister sexual relationships should be encouraged, they are defending their own early behavior and at once expunging any guilt they may feel for past acts and for their present situation as well.

Grace had relatively little to say on the subject of her childhood sexual experiences. She did mention that she was seduced at a very early age by a lover of her mother’s, who performed cunnilingus upon her on several occasions and induced her to masturbate him. She seems to have been five or six at the time, the relationship was undiscovered and was terminated after a very short period of time when the man abruptly disappeared. She reported no further sexual experience until initial coitus at age fifteen with a boy her own age.

This sort of childhood seduction at the hands of a male father figure is classic. It occurs with uncanny regularity in the case histories of prostitutes and female homosexuals. While it is generally acknowledged that the memory is occasionally false — that the seduction did not in fact occur — in the great majority of instances the act did seem to have taken place.

WANDA: We had been having sex for months before anyone found out. Then one afternoon one of the maids walked in on us. I had Peter’s pee-pee in my mouth at the time and was lying there with my eyes closed sucking him.

PETER: By this time we knew its right name. We didn’t still call it a pee-pee.

WANDA: And this woman walked in. Woman? She wasn’t much more than a girl herself. Maybe twenty years old, a little Irish thing fresh off the boat from County Something. She very nearly went into cardiac arrest. You can imagine the effect this had on her. In her eyes, fellatio was a mortal sin even if the two participants were husband and wife. For a girl to be sucking off her brother, that was the height of sin! Or the depth of sin, perhaps.

PETER: She beat the living shit out of us, Jack. No one ever hit us, neither our parents nor the help. It just didn’t happen. But she completely lost her cool and slapped us silly, and then she sat us down and told us at great length about Hell and how we were certain to go there. She said we would go there anyway because we were Protestants, but we would burn for eternity in the very inner circle of Hell for what we were doing, and we would have to stop immediately and never so much as touch each other again, or even touch ourselves, and if I ever touched my penis again it would shrivel up and drop off, and, oh, it just went on like this forever.

WANDA: I was terrified.

PETER: We were both terrified. I believe I was honestly less frightened of hellfire or even my cock dropping off than I was of this dried-up little bitch losing control completely and beating us to death. And we were also afraid she would tell our parents, of course.

WANDA: She couldn’t bring herself to do this, though. The words would have been too much for her to speak. Evidently she couldn’t even bear to think about it, because she left within the week, collected her wages and went away and never came back. For which I give thanks.

PETER: It might have been better if she told them.

WANDA: Are you mad?