The Other Side of Midnight

‘Have you had dinner?’ Ron was asking.

‘Dinner?’ She stared up at him, trying to think. Should she have had dinner? If she said yes, then he could take her right to bed and she could get it over with. ‘No,’ she said quickly, ‘I haven’t.’ Now why did I say that? I’ve ruined everything. But Ron did not seem upset.

‘Good. Do you like Chinese food?’

‘It’s my favourite.’ She hated it, but the gods certainly weren’t going to count a little yellow lie on the biggest night of her life.

‘There’s a good Chinese joint over on Estes. Lum Fong’s. Do you know it?’

No, but she would never forget it as long as she lived.

What did you do the night you lost your cherry?

Oh, I went to Lum Fong’s first and had some Chinese food with Ron Peterson.

Was it good?

Sure. But you know Chinese food. An hour later, I was sexy again.

They had reached his car, a maroon Reo convertible. Ron held the door open for Catherine, and she sat in the seat where all the other girls she envied had once sat. Ron was charming, handsome, a top athlete. And a sex maniac. It would make a good title for a movie. The Sex Maniac and the Virgin. Maybe she should have held out for a nicer restaurant like Henrici’s in the Loop and then Ron would have thought, This is the kind of girl I want to take home to Mother.

‘A penny for your thoughts,’ he said.

Oh, great! All right, so he wasn’t the most brilliant conversationalist in the world. But that wasn’t why she was here, was it? She looked up at him sweetly. ‘I was just thinking about you.’ She snuggled against him.

He grinned. ‘You really had me fooled, Cathy.’

‘I did?’

‘I always thought you were pretty standoffish – I mean, not interested in men.’

The word you’re fumbling for is lesbian, Catherine thought, but aloud she said, ‘I just like to pick my time and place.’

‘I’m glad you picked me.’

‘So am I.’ And she was. She really was. She could be certain that Ron was a good lover. He had been factory-tested and approved by every horny coed within a radius of a hundred and fifty miles. It would have been humiliating to have had her first sexual experience with someone as ignorant as she was. With Ron she was getting a master. After tonight she would not be calling herself Saint Catherine any longer. Instead she would probably be known as ‘Catherine the Great.’ And this time she would know what the ‘Great’ stood for. She would be fantastic in bed. The trick was not to panic. All the wonderful things she had read about in the little green books she used to keep hidden from her mother and father were about to happen to her. Her body was going to be an organ filled with exquisite music. Oh, she knew it would hurt the first time; it always did. But she would not let Ron know. She would move her behind around a lot because men hated for a woman to just lie there, motionless. And when Ron penetrated her, she would bite her lip to conceal the pain and cover it up with a sexy cry.

‘What?’

She turned to Ron, appalled, and realized she had cried aloud. ‘I–I didn’t say anything.’

‘You gave a kind of funny cry.’

‘Did I?’ She forced a little laugh.

‘You’re a million miles away.’

She analysed the line and decided it was bad. She must be more like Jean-Anne. Catherine put her hand on his arm and moved closer. ‘I’m right here,’ she said.

She tried to make her voice throaty, like Jean Arthur in Calamity Jane.

Ron looked down at her, confused, but the only thing he could read in her face was an eager warmth.

Lum Fong’s was a dreary-looking, run-of-the-mill Chinese restaurant located under the Elevated. All through dinner they could hear the rumble of the trains as they ran overhead rattling the dishes. The restaurant looked like a thousand other anonymous Chinese restaurants all over America, but Catherine carefully absorbed the details of the booth they were seated in, committing to memory the cheap, spotted wallpaper, the chipped china teapot, the soy-sauce stains on the table.

A little Chinese waiter came up to the table and asked if they wanted a drink. Catherine had tasted whiskey a few times in her life and hated it, but this was New Year’s Eve, the Fourth of July, the End of her Maidenhood. It was fitting to celebrate.

‘I’ll have an old-fashioned with a cherry in it.’ Cherry! Oh, God! It was a dead giveaway.

‘Scotch and soda,’ Ron said.

The waiter bowed himself away from the table. Catherine wondered if it were true that Oriental women were built slantwise.

‘I don’t know why we never became friends before,’ Ron was saying. ‘Everyone says you’re the brightest girl in the whole goddamned university.’

‘You know how people exaggerate.’

‘And you’re damned pretty.’

‘Thank you.’ She tried to make her voice sound like Katherine Hepburn in Alice Adams and looked meaningfully into his eyes. She was no longer Catherine Alexander. She was a sex machine. She was about to join Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Cleopatra. They were all going to be sisters under the foreskin.

The waiter brought the drink and she finished it in one quick nervous gulp. Ron watched her in surprise.

‘Easy,’ he warned. ‘That’s pretty potent stuff.’

‘I can handle it,’ Catherine assured him, confidently.

‘Another round,’ he told the waiter. Ron reached across the table and caressed her hand. ‘It’s funny. Everybody at school had you wrong.’

‘Wrong. No one at school’s had me.’

He stared at her. Careful, don’t be clever. Men preferred to bed girls who had excessively large mammary glands and gluteus maximus muscles and exceedingly small cerebrums.

‘I’ve had a – thing for you for a long time,’ she said, hurriedly.

‘You sure kept it a secret.’ Ron pulled out the note she had written and smoothed it out. ‘Try our Cashier,’ he read aloud, and laughed. ‘So far I like it better than the Banana Split.’ He ran his hands up and down Catherine’s arm and his touch sent tiny ripples down her spine, just like the books said it would. Perhaps after tonight she would write a manual on sex to instruct all the poor, dumb virgins who didn’t know what life was all about. After the second drink Catherine was beginning to feel sorry for them.

‘It’s a pity.’

‘What’s a pity?’

She had spoken aloud again. She decided to be bold. ‘I was feeling sorry for all the virgins in the world,’ she said.

Ron grinned at Catherine. ‘I’ll drink to that.’ He lifted his glass. She looked at him sitting across from her obviously enjoying her company. She had nothing to worry about. Everything was going beautifully. He asked if she would like another drink, but Catherine declined. She did not intend to be in an alcoholic stupor when she was deflowered. Deflowered? Did people still use words like deflowered? Anyway, she wanted to remember every moment, every sensation. Oh, my God! She wasn’t wearing anything! Would he? Surely a man as experienced as Ron Peterson would have something to put on, some protection so she wouldn’t get pregnant. What if he was expecting the same thing? What if he was thinking that a girl as experienced as Catherine Alexander would surely have some protection? Could she come right out and ask him? She decided that she would rather die first, right at the table. They could carry her body away and give her a ceremonial Chinese burial.

Ron ordered the dollar seventy-five six-course dinner, and Catherine pretended to eat it, but it might as well have been Chinese cardboard. She was beginning to get so tense she couldn’t taste anything. Her tongue was suddenly dry and the roof of her mouth felt strangely numb. What if she had just had a stroke? If she had sex right after a stroke, it would probably kill her. Perhaps she should warn Ron. It would hurt his reputation if they found a dead girl in his bed. Or maybe it would enhance it.

‘What’s the matter?’ Ron asked. ‘You look pale.’

‘I feel great,’ Catherine said, recklessly. ‘I’m just excited about being with you.’

Ron looked at her approvingly, his brown eyes taking in every detail of her face and moving down to her breasts and lingering there. ‘I feel the same way,’ he replied.

The waiter had taken the dishes away, and Ron had paid the cheque. He looked at her, but Catherine couldn’t move.

‘Do you want anything else?’ Ron asked.

Do I? Oh, yes! I want to be on a slow boat to China. I want to be in a cannibal’s kettle being boiled for dinner. I want my mother!

Ron was watching her, waiting, Catherine took a deep breath. ‘I–I can’t think of anything.’

‘Good.’ He drew the syllable out, long and lastingly so that it seemed to put a bed on the table between them. ‘Let’s go.’ He stood up and Catherine followed. The euphoric feeling from the drinks had completely vanished and her legs began to tremble.

They were outside in the warm night air when a sudden thought hit Catherine and filled her with relief. He’s not going to take me to bed tonight. Men never do that with a girl on the first date. He’s going to ask me out to dinner again and next time we’ll go to Henrici’s and we’ll get to know each other better. Really know each other. And we’ll probably fall in love – madly – and he’ll take me to meet his parents and then everything will be all right … and I won’t feel this stupid panic.

‘Do you have any preference in motels?’ Ron asked.

Catherine stared up at him, speechless. Gone were the dreams of a genteel musicale evening with his mother and father. The bastard was planning to take her to bed in a motel! Well, that was what she wanted, wasn’t it? Wasn’t that the reason she had written that insane note?

Ron’s hand was on Catherine’s shoulder now, sliding down her arm. She felt a warm sensation in her groin. She swallowed and said, ‘If you’ve seen one motel, you’ve seen them all.’

Ron looked at her strangely. But all he said was, ‘OK. Let’s go.’

They got into his car and started driving west. Catherine’s body had turned into a block of ice, but her mind was racing at a feverish pitch. The last time she had stayed in a motel was when she was eight and was driving across country with her mother and father. Now she was going to one to go to bed with a man who was a total stranger. What did she know about him anyway? Only that he was handsome, popular and knew an easy lay when he saw one.

Ron reached over and took her hand. ‘Your hands are cold,’ he said.

‘Cold hands, hot legs.’ Oh, Christ, she thought. There I go again. For some reason, the lyrics of ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life’ started to go through Catherine’s head. Well she was about to solve it. She was on her way to finding out what everything was all about. The books, the sexy advertisements, the thinly veiled love lyrics – ‘Rock Me in the Cradle of Love,’ ‘Do It Again,’ ‘Birds Do It.’ OK, she thought. Now Catherine is going to do it.

Ron turned south onto Clark Street.

Ahead on both sides of the street were huge blinking red eyes, neon signs that were alive in the night, screaming out their offers of cheap and temporary havens for impatient young lovers. ‘EASY REST MOTEL.’ ‘OVERNIGHT MOTEL,’ ‘COME INN,’ (Now that had to be Freudian!) ‘TRAVELLER’S REST.’ The paucity of imagination was staggering, but on the other hand the owners of these places were probably too busy bustling fornicating young couples in and out of bed to worry about being literary.

‘This is about the best of them,’ Ron said, pointing to a sign ahead.

‘PARADISE INN – VACANCY.’

It was a symbol. There was a vacancy in Paradise, and she, Catherine Alexander, was going to fill it.

Ron swung the car into the courtyard next to a small white-washed office with a sign that read: RING BELL AND ENTER. The courtyard consisted of about two dozen numbered wooden bungalows.

‘How does this look?’ Ron asked.

Like Dante’s Inferno. Like the Colosseum in Rome when the Christians were about to be thrown to the lions. Like the Temple of Delphi when a Vestal Virgin was about to get hers.

Catherine felt that excited feeling in her groin again. ‘Terrific,’ she said. ‘Just terrific.’

Ron smiled knowingly. ‘I’ll be right back.’ He put his hand on Catherine’s knee, sliding it up towards her thigh, gave her a quick, impersonal kiss and swung out of the car and went into the office. She sat there, looking after him, trying to make her mind blank.

She heard the wail of a siren in the distance. Oh, my God, she thought wildly, it’s a raid! They’re always raiding these places!

The door to the manager’s office opened and Ron came out. He was carrying a key and apparently was deaf to the siren which was coming closer and closer. He walked over to Catherine’s side of the car and opened the door.

‘All set,’ he said. The siren was a screaming banshee moving in on them. Could the police arrest them for merely being in the courtyard?

‘Come on,’ Ron said.

‘Don’t you hear that?’

‘Hear what?’

The siren passed them and went ululating down the street away from them, receding into the distance. Damn! ‘The birds,’ she said weakly.

There was a look of impatience on Ron’s face.

‘If there’s anything wrong – ’ he said.

‘No, no,’ Catherine cut in quickly. ‘I’m coming.’ She got out of the car and they moved towards one of the bungalows. ‘I hope you got my lucky number,’ she said brightly.

‘What did you say?’

Catherine looked up at him and suddenly realized no words had come out. Her mouth was completely dry. ‘Nothing,’ she croaked.

They reached the door and it said number thirteen. It was exactly what she deserved. It was a sign from heaven that she was going to get pregnant, that God was out to punish Saint Catherine.

Ron unlocked the door and held it open for her. He flicked on the light switch and Catherine stepped inside. She could not believe it. The room seemed to consist of one enormous bed. The only other furniture was an uncomfortable-looking easy chair in a corner, a small dressing table with a mirror over it, and next to the bed, a battered radio with a slot for feeding it quarters. No one would ever walk in here and mistake this room for anything but what it was: a place where a boy brought a girl to screw her. You couldn’t say, Well, here we are in the ski lodge, or the war games room, or the bridal suite at the Ambassador. No. What this was was a cheap love nest. Catherine turned to see what Ron was doing and he was throwing the bolt on the door. Good. If the Vice Squad wanted them, they’d have to break down the door first. She could see herself being carried out in the nude by two policemen while a photographer snapped her picture for the front page of the Chicago Daily News.

Ron moved up to Catherine and put his arms around her. ‘Are you nervous?’ he asked.

She looked up at him and forced a laugh that would have made Margaret Sullavan proud. ‘Nervous? Ron, don’t be silly.’

He was still studying her, unsure. ‘You’ve done this before, haven’t you, Cathy?’

‘I don’t keep a scorecard.’

‘I’ve had a strange feeling about you all evening.’

Here it comes. He was going to throw her out on her virgin ass and tell her to get lost in a cold shower. Well, she wasn’t going to let that happen. Not tonight. ‘What kind of feeling?’

‘I don’t know.’ Ron’s voice was perplexed. ‘One minute you’re kind of sexy and, you know, with it, and the next minute your mind is way off somewhere and you’re as frigid as ice. It’s like you’re two people. Which one is the real Catherine Alexander?’

Frigid as ice, she automatically said to herself. Aloud she said, ‘I’ll show you.’ She put her arms around him and kissed him on the lips and she could smell egg foo young.

He kissed her harder and pulled her close to him. He ran his hands over her breasts, caressing them, pushing his tongue into her mouth. Catherine felt a hot moisture deep down inside her and she could feel her pants dampen. Here I go, she thought. It’s really going to happen! It’s really going to happen! She clung to him harder, filled with a growing, almost unbearable excitement.

‘Let’s get undressed,’ Ron said hoarsely. He stepped back from her and started to take off his jacket.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Let me.’ There was a new confidence in her voice. If this was the night of nights, she was going to do it right. She was going to remember everything she had ever read or heard. Ron wasn’t going back to school to snicker to the girls about how he had made love to a dumb little virgin. Catherine might not have Jean-Anne’s bust measurement, but she had a brain ten times as useful, and she was going to put it to work to make Ron so happy in bed he wouldn’t be able to stand it. She took off his jacket and laid it on the bed, then reached for his tie.

‘Hold it,’ Ron said. ‘I want to see you undress.’

Catherine stared at him, swallowed, slowly reached for her zipper and got out of her dress. She was standing in her bra, slip, pants, shoes and stockings.

‘Go on.’

She hesitated a moment, then reached down and stepped out of her slip. Lions, 2 – Christians, 0, she thought.

‘Hey, great! Keep going.’

Catherine slowly sat down on the bed and carefully removed her shoes and stockings, trying to make it look as sexy as she could. Suddenly she felt Ron behind her, undoing her bra. She let it fall to the bed. He lifted Catherine to her feet and started sliding her pants down. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, wishing that she were in another place with another man, a human being who loved her, whom she loved, who would father splendid children to bear his name, who would fight for her and kill for her and for whom she would be an adoring helpmate. A whore in his bed, a great cook in his kitchen, a charming hostess in his living room … a man who would kill a son of a bitch like Ron Peterson for daring to bring her to this tacky, degrading room. Her pants fell to the floor. Catherine opened her eyes.

Ron was staring at her, his face filled with admiration. ‘My God, Cathy, you’re beautiful,’ he said. ‘You’re really beautiful.’ He bent down and kissed her breast. She caught a glimpse in the dressing-table mirror. It looked like a French farce, sordid and dirty. Everything inside her except the hot pain in her groin told her that this was dreary and ugly and wrong, but there was no way to stop it now. Ron was whipping off his tie and unbuttoning his shirt, his face flushed. He undid his belt and stripped down to his shorts, then sat down on the bed and started to take off his shoes and socks. ‘I mean it, Catherine,’ he said, his voice tight with emotion. ‘You’re the most beautiful goddamn thing I’ve ever laid eyes on.’

His words only increased Catherine’s panic. Ron stood up, a broad, anticipatory grin on his face, and let his shorts drop to the floor. His male organ was standing out stiffly, like an enormous, inflated salami with hair around it. It was the largest, most incredible thing Catherine had ever seen in her life.

‘How do you like that?’ he said, looking down at it proudly.

Without thinking, Catherine said, ‘Sliced on rye. Hold the mustard and lettuce.’

And she stood there, watching it go down.

In Catherine’s sophomore year there was a change in the atmosphere of the campus.

For the first time there was a growing concern about what was happening in Europe and an increasing feeling that America was going to get involved. Hitler’s dream of the thousand-year rule of the Third Reich was on its way to becoming a reality. The Nazis had occupied Denmark and invaded Norway.

Over the past six months the talk on campuses across the country had shifted from sex and clothes and proms to the ROTC and the draught and lend-lease. More and more college boys were appearing in army and navy uniforms.

One day Susie Roberts, a classmate from Senn, stopped Catherine in the corridor. ‘I want to say good-bye, Cathy. I’m leaving.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘The Klondike.’

‘The Klondike?’

‘Washington, D.C. All the girls are striking gold there. They say for every girl there are at least a hundred men. I like those odds.’ She looked at Catherine. ‘What do you want to stick around this place for? School’s a drag. There’s a whole big world waiting out there.’

‘I can’t leave just now,’ Catherine said. She was not sure why: She had no real ties in Chicago. She corresponded regularly with her father in Omaha and talked to him on the telephone once or twice a month and each time he sounded as though he were in prison.

Catherine was on her own now. The more she thought about Washington, the more exciting it seemed. That evening she phoned her father and told him she wanted to quit school and go to work in Washington. He asked her if she would like to come to Omaha, but Catherine could sense the reluctance in his voice. He did not want her to be trapped, as he had been.

The next morning Catherine went to the dean of women and informed her she was quitting school. Catherine sent a telegram to Susie Roberts and the next day she was on a train to Washington, D.C.

Chapter Four

NoelleParis: 1940

On Saturday, June 14, 1940, the German Fifth Army marched into a stunned Paris. The Maginot Line had turned out to be the biggest fiasco in the history of warfare and France lay defenceless before one of the most powerful military machines the world had ever known.

The day had begun with a strange grey pall that lay over the city, a terrifying cloud of unknown origin. For the last forty-eight hours sounds of intermittent gunfire had broken the unnatural, frightened silence of Paris. The roar of the cannons was outside the city, but the echoes reverberated into the heart of Paris. There had been a flood of rumours carried like a tidal wave over the radio, in newspapers and by word of mouth. The Boche were invading the French coast … London had been destroyed … Hitler had reached an accord with the British government … The Germans were going to wipe out Paris with a deadly new bomb. At first each rumour had been taken as gospel, creating its own panic, but constant crises finally exert a soporific affect, as though the mind and body, unable to absorb any further terror, retreat into a protective shell of apathy. Now the rumour mills had ground to a complete halt, newspaper presses had stopped printing and radio stations had stopped broadcasting. Human instinct had taken over from the machines, and the Parisians sensed that this was a day of decision. The grey cloud was an omen.

And then the German locusts began to swarm in.

Suddenly Paris was a city filled with foreign uniforms and alien people, speaking a strange, guttural tongue, speeding down the wide, tree-lined avenues in large Mercedes limousines flying Nazi flags or pushing their way along the sidewalks that now belonged to them. They were truly the über Mensch, and it was their destiny to conquer and rule the world.

Within two weeks an amazing transformation had taken place. Signs in German appeared everywhere. Statues of French heroes had been knocked down and the swastika flew from all state buildings. German efforts to eradicate everything Gallic reached ridiculous proportions. The markings on hot and cold water taps were changed from chaud and froid to heiss and kalt. The place de Broglie in Strasbourg became Adolf Hitler Platz. Statues of Lafayette, Ney and Kleber were dynamited by squadrons of Nazis. Inscriptions on the monuments for the dead were replaced by ‘GEFALLEN FUR DEUTSCHLAND.’

The German occupation troops were enjoying themselves. While French food was too rich and covered with too many sauces, it was still a pleasant change from war rations. The soldiers neither knew nor cared that Paris was the city of Baudelaire, Dumas and Molière. To them Paris was a garish, eager, overpainted whore with her skirts pulled up over her hips and they raped her, each in his own way. The Storm-troopers forced young French girls to go to bed with them, sometimes at the point of a bayonet, while their leaders like Goering and Himmler raped the Louvre and the rich private estates they greedily confiscated from the newly created enemies of the Reich.

If French corruption and opportunism rose to the surface in the time of France’s crisis, so did the heroism. One of the underground’s secret weapons was the Pompiers, the fire department, which in France is under the jurisdiction of the army. The Germans had confiscated dozens of buildings for the use of the army, the Gestapo and various ministries, and the location of these buildings was of course no secret. At an underground resistance headquarters in St Remy resistance leaders pored over large maps detailing the location of each building. Experts were then assigned their targets, and the following day a speeding car or an innocent-looking bicyclist would pass by one of the buildings and fling a homemade bomb through the window. Up to that point the damage was slight. The ingenuity of the plan lay in what followed next.