(1961) The Chapman Report Read Free

recognized everyone as a friend or acquaintance or neighbor. Despite this, she still postponed the assignment of telephoning each.
    When Grace had dropped off the folder the evening before, Kathleen had immediately felt helpless before the older woman’s charging and aggressive heartiness. Grace Waterton was in her late fifties. Her gray hair, set several times weekly by a male hairdresser, resembled a tin wig. She was tiny, churning, and verbose. After her children had married, she had gravitated for two years between a swami in Reseda and a psychiatrist in Beverly Hills, and abandoned both for the presidency of The Women’s Association, which had become her entire life. In some bank, somewhere, there was a vice-president named Mr. Grace Waterton.
    Although Grace had finally intimidated Kathleen into accepting the folder, Kathleen had tried to object. She was exhausted, she pleaded, and busy. Besides, she had not seen any of the women for several months, not since the last Association meeting, and the telephone calls would necessarily be long and involved. “Nonsense,” Grace had said in her strident, no-nonsense tone of voice. “This is business, and you treat it as such. Just tell each one you’ve got a dozen more calls to make. Besides, I think it’s good for you. I don’t
    like it, Kathleen, the way you’ve been holing yourself up like a hermit. It’s not healthy. If you won’t get out to see people, at least talk to them.”
    Kathleen had not wanted to tell Grace, or anyone, that it was not what had happened to Boynton that had made her a recluse -or possibly it was, but in a way and for reasons different than they realized. When she had been married, and he was home, as so often he was, she desired only to be out of the house, to be lost in the noisy chaos of companionship, though it was against all her natural instincts. But in the year and four months since she had been alone, escape was not necessary. She had reverted to, and luxuriated in, the lonely independence that she had known, and loved and hated, before marriage.
    Suddenly, she had been aware that Grace was speaking again and that her visitor’s voice had softened slightly. “Believe me, Kathleen, dear, we all know what an ordeal you’ve been through. But no one will help you if you don’t help yourself. You’re still young, beautiful, you’ve got a lovely daughter-a whole life ahead, and you’ve got to live it. If I thought you were really unwell, darling, I’d be the first to understand. Of course, I can get someone else to make the phone calls instead of you. But we need you. I mean, like it or not, you’re still one of our most important and influential members. And you can see why I have to pick twenty of our most respected members to make these calls. I mean, it simply makes the alls carry more weight. Believe me, Kathleen, we need a full turn-oat, and everyone on our side-especially if the churches object to this meeting. I don’t know if they will, but there’s talk.”
    Until then, Kathleen had not, absorbed as she was in the effort to avoid an unpleasant task, fully comprehended, or even listened to, the real purpose of the meeting. When she inquired again, and Grace explained it to her briskly and proudly (yet not fully able to conceal her excitement at the daring and naughtiness of the whole affair), Kathleen had been even more disturbed. She was in no mood to join a company of women in listening to a man discuss the sexual habits of the American female, no matter how clinically. Worse-for then came the sudden realization of what the lecture would lead to-she was not prepared to disclose her private secrets to a band of strangers, to disrobe figuratively before a group of leering male voyeurs.
    The whole thing was insane, ill-making, yet so great was Grace’s enthusiasm-“it’ll make our community famous; that’s why Mr.
    Ackerman arranged it”-that Kathleen instinctively realized any objection would not be understood