Thy Neighbor's Wife Read Free Page B

sink on which to lay down the magazine if he wished to use both hands. Also, and perhaps more important, if he was not careful the magazine might be stained by drops of water bouncing up from the sink, since he kept the faucet running to alert the family to his presence in the bathroom, and also because he occasionally needed additional water for lathering when the soap went dry on his fingers. While the water-stained photographs of nude women might not offend the aesthetics of most young men, this was not the case with Harold Rubin.
    And finally there was a practical consideration involved in his desire to protect his magazines from damage: Having read in newspapers this year about the more zealous antipornography drives around the nation, he could not be sure that he would always be able to buy new magazines featuring nudes, not even under the counter. Even Sunshine & Health , which had been in circulation for two decades and populated its pages with family pictures including grandparents and children, had been described as obscene this year at a California judiciary hearing. Art-camera magazines had also been cited as “smut” by some politicians and church groups, even though these publications had attempted to disassociate themselves from girlie magazines by including under each nude picture such instructive captions as Taken with 2¼ × 3¼ Crown Graphic fitted with 101 mm Ektar, f:11, at 1/100 sec . Harold had read that President Eisenhower’s Postmaster General, Arthur Summerfield, was intent on keeping sexual literature and magazines out of the mails, and a New York publisher, Samuel Roth, had just been sentenced to five years in prison and a fine of $5,000 for violating the federal mail statute. Roth had previously been convicted for disseminating copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover , and his first arrest, in 1928, came after the police had raided his publishing companyand seized the printing plates of Ulysses , which had been smuggled in from Paris.
    Harold had read that a Brigitte Bardot film had been interfered with in Los Angeles, and he could only assume that in a city like Chicago, a workingman’s town with a tough police force and considerable moral influence from the Catholic Church, sexual expression would be repressed even more, particularly during the administration of the new Irish-Catholic mayor, Richard J. Daley. Already Harold had noticed that the burlesque house on Wabash Avenue had been closed down, as had the one on State Street. If the trend continued, it might mean that his favorite newsstand on Cermak Road would be reduced to selling such magazines as Good Housekeeping and The Saturday Evening Post , a happenstance that he knew would provoke no protest from his parents.
     
    In all the years that he had lived at home he had never heard his parents express a sexual thought, had never seen either of them in the nude, had never heard their bed creaking at night with love sounds. He assumed that they still did make love, but he could not be certain. While he did not know how active his grandfather was in his sixties with his mistress, his grandmother had recently confided in a typically bitter moment that they had not made love since 1936. He had been an unskilled lover anyway, his grandmother had quickly added, and as Harold had pondered the statement he wondered for the first time if his grandmother had secret lovers. He seriously doubted it, never having observed men visiting her home, or her often leaving it; but he did recall discovering to his surprise a year ago in her library a romantic sex novel. It had been covered in brown paper, and on the copyright page was the name of a French publishing house and, under it, the date, 1909. While his grandmother had been taking a nap, Harold sat on the floor reading once, then twice, the 103-page novel, enthralled by the tale and amazed by the explicit language. The story described the unhappy sex livesof several young women in Europe and the East