from which she escaped only after a bloodletting bite into the wheezing fat man's thick-veined wrist. She had to spit out a hair. Next time she passed he whined he had only tried to be nice because she didn't have a father, and showed her silk stockings and pink underwear, but she said No, thank you, and didn't even stop.
Lucy didn't tell Mother, not wanting to scare her. After all, not only fat old Mr. Schmidt wanted to touch her. Men and boys always did. What's the matter with them? With boys like Frank it wasn't so bad to be kissed or hugged when they were nice and clean and smelled of soap. In a way it was like playing a game. But with Mr. Schmidt, and those men on street corners who rubbed up against you, it was different. Dirty old Mr. Schmidt. She crinkled her nose, the memory of his smell disgusted her.
But why did Mr. Schmidt and Frank and boys want to? She never wanted to touch boys—anybody. Look how excited they got. She must be missing something. She had stood before the mirror and looked at herself, touching the soft pink tips of her budding breasts. They felt soft, but that was all.
Sometimes she hugged herself to discover what Frank felt when he squeezed her so tight, held her hard, and breathed pantingly as if choking. His arm was round and firm but not nearly so hard as the trees in the park whose rough unyielding trunks stirred in her a sensation she could not define. A sensation of telegraphing an undecipherable message of electric warmth to the reaches of her body, even to the tips of her breasts which seemed then to swell.
A woman sitting on a bench had bared her full breast for her baby. Frank was more the clamoring baby than the—giving—tree. Her eyes had traveled down to the hillock with the small well whose source, she knew from her mother's blushing stammering explanation, was the channel of prenatal nourishment. When she was eight she had thought the navel opened and a baby popped out.
The purpose of what was lower down she had learned intuitively, an intuition guided by restless fumbling fingers of boys who seemed to go crazy.
She ran up another flight and down the hall to the door numbered 9.
On the inside of the door dresses hanging under a faded cretonne cover stirred as she turned the black china knob. From a flyspecked gilded spray of ancanthus leaves, in which little jets of gas once had lighted bawdy-house joys rehearsed in this room, now dangled a single feeble electric bulb.
