It was deathly quiet in the cellar after Fleming and Darla were taken away for the second time. Tommy could hear his mother breathing in long, sighing breaths, and he thought he could hear the pounding of his own heart. But all else was quiet. He thought about what he had just been through – really, what his mother had been forced to endure.
Like most well-brought-up young men, he idolized his mother, and he found it impossible to believe that she had been involved in the fantastic circus he had just left upstairs. It just couldn't be! And now, Darla and their father were back up there, being forced into still more shameful acts. When would it end? Would they really be allowed to leave if the ransom were paid?
Then his mind shifted again, and he was trying to assess his feelings during the recent episode. I knew it was my mother there with me. And yet I enjoyed it! I really wanted to taste her body in my mouth – I loved the smell of her cunt, and the taste of her juice – the feel of her heat pouring out of her body at me. My God! What kind of madman am I, anyhow? I even loved it when I was fucking her! The feel of her juicy cunt wrapped around me was like nothing I've ever felt before. And what was that inside her that nibbled on me? My God! Is there something wrong with her, too? Could I really have seemed like a lover to her, or something?
He was working himself up to a nervous tension that he had never known before. The perspiration was gathered on his brow and upper lip. He hadn't realized it, but he was panting with the effort of thinking and searching in the recesses of his mind for some answers. In short, he was frightened with the immensity of what he knew had been a very terribly wrong thing. A thing in which he'd been forced to participate, but which he had actually enjoyed, once he'd started!
It was several minutes after his teeth started chattering with his nervousness, and with the cold of the dank cellar, which chilled him as his perspiration dried, that his mother spoke to him. "Tommy! What's the matter? Are you ill?"
He was silent, except for his gasping and chattering. Then he bubbled over. All of his fears and guilts and shame – all the things that were threatening his sanity – he poured out to her. After all, for the greater part of his young life he'd turned to her whenever he couldn't solve his own problems. He thought he'd outgrown his need of her as a confessor and comforter. But he could never have foreseen such events as this.
Ann heard him out. At times he was almost incoherent in his eagerness to get everything off his chest, hoping that complete confession would relieve him of his aching, bursting burden. But she understood him all too well everything he said. When he finally finished, running down like a record on a hand-wound phonograph that needed another cranking to get it up to normal speed, it was again silent in the old cellar. She thought a long time before she spoke. She had to be sure that she said the right thing. This could affect him for the rest of his life!
"Tommy, I may be able to answer you on everything, and I may not. I'll try to do my best. You know that I love you very much, and that I'll always love you. You know that, don't you?" She waited until he pulled himself together sufficiently to answer.
"Of course. I've never doubted that!" he replied.
"Just keep that in the back of your mind, then, no matter what else we discuss. Will you – can you do that?"
"Yes. And Mother…? No matter what else I said… I'll always love you just as I have since I could remember."
"I know, Tommy. I knew that the moment you turned to me to help you with all this that's bothering you so much." She almost choked up on her emotions, then got a grip on herself, and continued.
"Tommy, I'll have to talk to you awfully plain. I know that your father, thank God, has brought you up with all the basic sexual knowledge you need, but this mess we're in now is something no one could be expected to foresee."
"You've taken enough of the basic elements of human psychology to understand how closely we parallel the lower animals in certain of our normal functions. What always seems so hard to understand is that the entire package we call civilization – all the things we try to instill in ourselves, educate ourselves with, as it were really is only a very thin coating which we manage to keep pulled over the more basic, more deeply ingrained things inside us."
"Of course, everyone is an individual, because he has his own very special formula, which combines the things he has inherited, the things he has learned, and the environment in which he is brought up. There are other factors, too, but these affect us most."
"Now, you won't find two men much farther apart as individuals than your father and that Gerault." She used the Frenchman's name as if it were the filthiest thing she could utter.
"Chuck is a big, husky, he-man type, who pretends that he doesn't have a good education sometimes, especially when he's with those who really haven't. He talks as if he'd just as soon beat you as look at you, sometimes. But you know as well as I do – almost as well, anyhow – that he's really an old softy, and more gentleman than anything else."
"Gerault, on the other hand, pretends to be a gentleman, uses flowery speech to cover his crude thoughts and drives. He pretends to be so very refined in all other ways, yet you know – when he tells you he'll do something very horrible that he means it, for there seems to be nothing too foul or brutal for his mind to dream up or his conscience to object to."
"And yet, if those two were facing each other in anything like an equal battle, I'd bet on your father. Because underneath all of the veneer that we see his personality that we know, his many fine characteristics – lies that basic that we do not know. I think he might very well break the Frenchman in little pieces."
"Something like that can take place in any of us. No matter what we are like all the rest of our lives, underneath we are, after all, very basic creatures. Some of us have as many surprising differences in our basic nature as we do in the side of us which we show to the world everyday."
"Now, your father and I are both highly sexed individuals. And I'm afraid that both you and Darla have inherited more than your share of whatever genes may cause that trait. I can only say that I am not surprised you are so much like your father. And Darla is probably much more like me than I have wanted to believe."
"When we were forced into a situation such as this, Tommy, it was inevitable that we burst out of our civilized wrappers and exposed the depth of our sexualities. We were at those moments just two human individuals who were unfortunate enough to be placed in that very set of conditions."
"Sure, we could blame ourselves for breaking down, for giving in to our baser natures. But what would it buy us? It's happened. We couldn't undo it if we spent the rest of our lives and all of our family's resources. So, the only thing to do is to try to shove it into the back of our minds as far as it will go. If we find that we have trouble living with it, we'll just have to bring it out and discuss it again. But I hope we can think of it as a very unfortunate but irrevocable part of our lives that we need not think of, again."
"Before we do try to forget it, honey, it might be well to get the last bit of value out of it. Let me tell you that if you ever have one of those moments when you doubt yourself as a man, for any reason, you can remember that your mother gave you top honors."
"You're every bit the man your father is in all ways. You're thoughtful, gentle, and very exciting to a woman. The girl who gets you for keeps – and any others in the meantime will be very lucky. I'll always be proud that you're my son, Tommy."
She was silent, and the cellar was full of her presence as it had not been all the time she spoke. Tommy felt the magnetism of this wonderful woman who was his mother, and almost – not quite, but almost – he was glad that they had shared the rigors of this day. It was a lot of female, and a lot of heart that he had the good fortune to call mother. He wept quietly, unashamedly, for a while. Then he spoke his gratitude.
"You're great, Mother! I've known that for a long time, but after today, I'm afraid that you're some kind of impossible combination of saint and sweetheart that just might have spoiled me for all the other women in the world. I only hope that I'm lucky enough to get one just a little bit like you."
"Thank you, Tommy." She stopped for a moment, then thought of something else. "It's a hell of a way for it to happen, but I don't think we've ever been so close as right now. We've shared the very worst moments of our lives together, and yet found joy in them. Not many people can say that."