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Subject: MJANE08.TXT m/F,teen 78K
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            ****  WARNING  ****  WARNING  **** WARNING  ****

 THIS DOCUMENT IS A SEXUALLY GRAPHIC STORY ABOUT AN INTENSE SEXUAL,
 EMOTIONAL AND INTELLECTUAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A TEENAGE GIRL AND
 A YOUNG BOY AND THE COURSE OF THEIR RELATIONSHIP OVER A PERIOD OF
 10 YEARS.  IT IS A DRAMATIZATION ABOUT REAL PEOPLE AND THEIR CON-
 FLICT WITH SOCIAL EXPECTATIONS.  IF THIS SUBJECTS OFFENDS YOU OR IF
 SEXUAL LANGUAGE UPSETS YOU, OR IF YOU DON'T WANT THIS MATERIAL SEEN
 BY UNDER-18 OR OTHERWISE UNQUALIFIED PERSONS, DELETE THIS DOCUMENT.

 THIS DOCUMENT IS COPYRIGHTED 1994, 1996 BY SJR.  SO--HEY, YOU CAN
 COPY IT BUT YOU CAN'T CHANGE IT OR SELL IT UNLESS I SAY SO.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

              THE ADVENTURES OF ME AND MARTHA JANE

                            by S.J.R.


                             PART 8A:


    The week preceding Martha Jane's last weekend of packing before she
left her charming apartment near Memphis State was a long, numbing one.
As far as I knew, it would be my last chance to spend time with her
before she moved to East Memphis under her new stepdad's watchful eye.
Although we spoke by telephone briefly during the week and set the
schedule for my Saturday visit, there was no mention of what might or
might not happen after that weekend.  I was too fearful of bringing it up.

    When Martha Jane arrived in her Chevy (which she still didn't like),
I felt distracted and dull.  My feeble attempts at appearing cheerful
fell flat.  When I couldn't think of anything to say I sat humming an
aimless tune and looking out the car window, pretending to be engrossed
in the passing scenery.

    At her apartment I dove into the work of packing, working so quickly
and efficiently that Martha Jane was left with little more than to stand
around and watch.  By three o'clock that afternoon I'd packed everything
and there was nothing else to do.

    "Well," she said, forcing a cheerful smile through the tension that
had been written on her face since we arrived.  She looked around at the
boxes stacked along one wall of the living room.  "That's that.  Good
work, cowboy, we finished two hours early."

    "Yep," I said, knowing that I sounded terse and sullen.  But I didn't
know what else to do.  I walked into the kitchen to wash my hands.

    "So what's next?" she called from the living room.

    I sighed.  "Can't play records or anything.  It's all packed."  I
stood in the kitchen doorway drying my hands with a paper towel.  "Hate
to see you give up this place."

    Martha Jane cleared her throat and said with an air of mystery,
"Well, there is one more thing.  I don't know what you'll think about
this...I mean, it's kinda...silly."

    I gave her a weak but indulgent smile.  "Try me."

    She blushed and hesitated before starting for the bedroom.  "Follow
me," she said.

    She led me into the bedroom and then into the rear bathroom.  Her
toiletries were still on the floor in two small shoulder bags.  She bent
over the tub and turned on the water.  "First, we need a warm tub..."
She adjusted the water flow and then turned to me with a naughty smile.
"Can you guess yet?"

    "Looks an awful lot like a bathtub filling up with water, lady."

    She winked and wagged a finger.  "Not...quite."  She reached into one
of the shoulder bags and pulled out a package of blue bubble bath powder
and held it up to me.

    "Remember this?"

    Blood rushed to my head, and to a couple of other places.  I smiled,
still a little unsure, and reached out for the package of bubble bath.

    She jumped back playfully.  "No, no, that's *my* part.  I get to
open the package.  Your part is to get nekkid first."

    I squinted.  "Is this supposed to remind me of what I think it's
supposed to remind me of?"

    She winked.  "Yes.  See, I told you it was silly."

    A sudden and chilling thought passed across my mind but, not wanting
to kill the mood for her, I kept the question to myself: did this ritual
mean that I was not going to see her again?

    I unbuttoned my shirt.  She came to me with a playful gleam in her
eyes and helped me undress, pausing now and then to touch my neck and
sides and to help me unzip my jeans.

    She turned to dump the powder into the water.  She watched the blue
bubbles expand and rise.  When she turned around again, I stood naked in
the middle of the room.  Seeing me, her eyes lit up and she walked over
to me.  Her face hovered near mine.  As she watched my eyes she trailed
her fingers down my tummy and onto the tip of my cock.

    "Remember this, too?" she whispered.

    "Hmmm.  Yes."

    "Feel good?"

    "Yes.  Like the first time."

    "Hmmm.  Nasty boy."  Her hand continued to graze my now twitching
penis.  "You have no idea how often I've remembered the first time we did
this."  She kissed me on one eye and then the other, and whispered near
my ear: "And since then, little Speedy has grown into a warm, lovable,
sensitive young man.  And a wonderful lover."

    I managed to keep myself from breaking into tears.  I resolved that
this moment, if it was to be our last intimacy, would be as she wanted
it.  But my unvoiced questions persisted, and so far my mind was still
uneasy on that score.

    I put a wet, open-lipped kiss on her neck and saw and felt goose-
bumps rise on her back and arms.  I said, "Hey.  The water's ready."

    "Oh, yeah," she said.  She saw that the tub was now half-filled with
blue bubbles.  "But we're both bigger now and we need a little more than
we used to.  You go in first."

    I pointed at myself as if to question "Me?", and she grinned and
nodded.  I settled into the tub, the bubbles engulfing me with an audible
hiss.

    She began to undress.  "Turn it off when the bubbles are high
enough."

    "How high?"

    "Nose high."

    "Okay."

    In a moment she was naked.  My cock lurched under the bubbles when I
saw her.  She was slim and firm; her legs seemed rather long for a woman
of her relatively petite stature, an illusion caused by her nineteen-inch
waist, the moderately lush flair of her hips and the firm roundness of
her tush.  Her breasts sloped smoothly and swiftly into rounded globes
with pointed, dark pink nipples.  Her mound was topped with a fine,
curly, almost transparent auburn fuzz that crowned her outthrust smooth-
lipped vulva and extended halfway down the length of her prominent slit,
which now was only slightly parted.  But it was all these bound by a
perfection of creamy flesh -- skin so tight and toned that it glistened
along her shoulders and hips and upper thighs -- that, and her long-
necked grace, gave her body an alluring mixture of woman and girl, harlot
and angel.

    She grinned as she approached the tub and stepped inside.  "You hard
under those bubbles?"

    I nodded.

    "Well," she said, settling into the nose-high foam and facing me,
"hold that thought j-u-u-st a little longer."  She grabbed the bar of
soap and lathered her hands and then reached under the bubbles to stroke
my cock with her slippery fingers.

    "Ah," I gasped.

    "Good?"

    "Mmm."

    "Don't cum, hon."

    "Aw, no fair."

    "Shh.  I'll just hold it," and she did.  "I have something to tell
you.  New house rules."

    "Phooey.  Rules."

    "You'll like this one."  She lowered her voice to a more serious
octave.  "From here on out, you're not Speedy anymore."

    "No?"

    "No.  You're Steven.  You don't look like a 'Speedy' anymore.  You
don't think like him and you don't fuck like him.  You don't have a
little boy's four-inch dick anymore.  You have a fine, perfectly shaped
cock with soft dark brown pubic hair in just the right amount and just
the right places.  And a warm heart, and a good mind, and very handsome
eyes.  You're Steven now.  Is it okay if I never call you Speedy again?"

    At the end of her little speech I was a blue-bubbled blob of silly
mush with a melting heart and a very hard cock.  If she asked me to shoot
the Pope and steal his name, I would have said yes. I reached for her,
and she moved closer to me and let my arms drape over her soft wet
shoulders before she said, "Wait, there's more."

    "Oh.  OK.  More."

    "From now on, I'm no longer Martha Jane.  I'm Martha.  I'm not a
teenage doll and not a kitten and not a Southern belle, and I'm twenty-
one years old.  Not long from now I'll be a professional and I'll dress
like a professional, not like a schoolgirl.  I want everyone to call me
Martha from now on.  I'll use that name on my resume's and checks and on
everything I sign.  And I'll insist on Martha from others.  But from you,
Steven--I don't want to demand, I want to ask... will you call me Martha
from now on?"

    Too choked up to speak, I nodded slowly and firmly, and then I pulled
her into a hug under the bubbles, and she hugged me back.  After a moment
in this humid, bubbly clinch she tapped me on the back with one finger.

    "Steven?"

    "Yes?"

    "You didn't call me Martha yet."

    "I will.  In a minute."

    "Call me Martha now.  I want to hear you say it."

    "Well...you have your new rules.  I have one, too."

    "What's that?"

    "I will call you by that name very soon, in just a little while, when
the time is exactly right."

    "When?"

    "You'll see.  Soon."

    We soaped and rubbed each other, adding some playful touches and
tickles.  She said it was the first time she'd had her nipples and cunt
soaped by another's hands.  Covered with bubbles, we climbed out of the
tub.  She stayed in the bathroom to powder and finish up, while I turned
off all the lights in the apartment so that a soft, late afternoon glow
filtered through the curtains.

    When she entered the bedroom I was sitting on the edge of the bed,
my legs under me.  She stood a few inches away, fluffing her hair with a
towel.

    She asked, "why are you sitting on the edge of the bed like that?"

    I said quietly, "C'mere.  Stand by the bed," and when she dropped the
towel and came to me I pulled her head close and whispered in her ear,
"Remember this?"

    "Remember what?"

    "The first time I saw you nekkid.  The first time you showed how to
get you wet."

    "Oh," she whispered.  "Oh.  Yes."  She backed away one step and
spread her feet so that her love-pod was more available.  I whispered,
"Let me fingerfuck you."  As her hands found and squeezed my cock and
balls, she opened her legs a little more.  Between her smoothly muscled
thighs was a small open alcove shaped and sized perfectly for the palm
of my hand.  I cupped her warm mound, which greeted me with a sliver of
slippery moisture along the middle of my palm.  She shifted her legs
again, allowing me a little more room to slide a tantalizing finger along
the slick edges of her firmly-rimmed slit.  Leaning into me and lifting a
nipple to my lips, she whispered, "Suck my tittie, hon."

    I kissed, licked, and then she sighed pleasurably as a nipple entered
my gently sucking mouth.  At my fingers, her slit swelled and opened.
Once more she made a fine adjustment with her feet, bending her knees a
little to lift her portal upward and toward me.

    She hissed, "Put it in me.  Slow.  Slow.  Ah."

    I whispered, "Squeeze my cock.  Just a little.  Give it a little tug."

    "Like that?...Mmm.  Yes.  Wet."

    Several years earlier when this scene was first enacted, I could hold
out for hours.  Now, I'd be lucky if I lasted half a minute -- and when
she spread precum over my shaft and circled her fingers around me, that
interval was seriously shortened.

    With my free hand I held both of hers motionless at my crotch.
"Wait," I whispered. "Not yet."

    "Not yet?"

    "Let me fuck you with my finger a minute."

    She grinned and smoothed a lock of hair from her forehead so she
could look down and watch my hand on her.  "Okay."

    For a few minutes that dripped with a seething eroticism I had not
seen in her for some time, I gently stroked and primed her clit, pausing
now and then to fingerfuck her slowly and deeply and properly, searching
her slithery inner walls until I found that rough spot just above the
curve lay that lay beyond her portal and which that made her moan and hug
my finger.  In a while her head drifted back and her eyes closed.  She
sighed to the ceiling, "Hon, that's so good."  I was so turgid  I felt
I'd need a firearm permit if I got any harder.  Soon she leaned against
me, murmuring, "My legs are getting weak, it's so good."

    I whispered, "Lie down."  She slid naked into the bed and lay with
her arms draped above her head and her thighs spread wide. She smiled
languidly.  She was wet and open enough to start fucking, and she
appeared to think that we were going to do just that.  Instead, I lay
between her legs and kissed her cunt and inner thighs.  Her head fell
back and she closed her eyes and whispered happily, "Yes."

    With one more preparatory smooch on the surface of her cunt, I
whispered, "Tell me when you're close."

    "Okay."

    "When you're very close."

    She crooked one knee and let her leg fall to one side.  I could
see her grinning toward the ceiling with her eyes closed as goosebumps
rose on her legs.  "Okay."

    I tongued her delicately.  When I found her clit she sighed, arching
ever so slightly.  Wetly I continued, sometimes full-mouthing her entire
mound and then sucking her clit between my tongue and inner lips the way
she liked.  Her arms reached behind her head and grasped the edge of the
headboard.  A few minutes later she tightened her grip, her knuckles whitening
with the effort, followed by tremors in the stretched tendons of her inner
thighs.  She was fully open to me then, her clit almost the size and
hardness of a thin thimble, her thighs drifting apart until her knees
were drawn up with her feet pulled together under my chest.  She began
whispering heatedly, "Suck it.  Right there, yes...Soft, hon. Suck...
Yes.  Mm, yes."  I felt the beginnings of the stiffening and trembling
that signaled the onset of her orgasm; I wondered if she'd remember to
tell me when she was near.  I did not want to remove my tongue to remind
her, for I knew she was getting dangerously close.  I trusted her to be
selfish, to cum whenever and however she pleased.  And just as it seemed
she might be ready to go over the edge, she lifted her head and looked
down at me, gasping, "I'm so close!"

   Immediately I rose, and the surprise on her face was matched only by
the pleased widening of her eyes as I entered her quickly, deeply and
smoothly, my eyes on hers.  She stared at me with wild-eyed, joyful lust
as I began fucking with the slow, steady rhythm I knew she preferred.
She slowly whispered, "Fuucck."  Then her writhing inner walls began to
pulse and contract, and she stiffened, and her eyes narrowed, and her
fingers dug into my arms, and she wept softly, "Hon I'm cummin'!", only
for her to find, just as her entire body went into its taut muscle-lock
of pleasure, that I had just jerked and squirted inside her, and her eyes
saw it happening for me and for her at the same time, and she saw and
heard me whisper to her, "Martha," and her eyes glazed wetly with
pleasure and she sank into the undertow of her long deep cum while I
squirted again in her tightening center.  I slowed and lengthened my
strokes to prolong the pleasure and to savor the full feel of her,
another hot and very hard spurt jetting out of me with a force that made
me moan, and I crooned to her between my own quickening gasps, "Cum,
Martha.  Cum."

   As my ejaculations ebbed, she came out of her climax and settled into
the bed with a childlike whimper of surrender and fatigue.  Her eyes
closed, and she pulled me against her and started breathing again.  I
kissed her ear and throat and hid my face in her neck while I made three
or four last, hungry probes into her, winding down.  Feeling her hand
push its way between our tummies, I rose slightly to allow her to wring
the last of me from my tubes, as she so much liked to do.  When she
finished I settled onto her, our joined lengths so hot and wet that it
felt like immersion in a bubble bath again.  We hugged, and breathed, and
rested.

    She purred, "Yes.  Oh, yes."




    We were dressed and it was dark outside.  I sat on the bed watch-
ing her brush her hair.  She looked at my reflection in the dressing
table mirror.

    "Are you staring at me?" she joked.

    "I'm asking you," I tempted.

    "Asking me what?"

    "Martha..."  I stopped.

    "Hmm, that sounded nice.  And you sure do know a perfect moment when
you see one."

    "Martha."

    "ye-e-e-s?"

    "Will we do this again?"

    Her brush slowed, and stopped, and a heavy darkness seemed to fall on
her.  After a moment she said, "Oh, Steven."

    "I was just asking."

    She sighed heavily and began brushing again.  "Yes.  We'll all be at
my mommy's wedding next week."

    Her answer and her dull manner told me the question had upset her, so
I dropped the subject.  I lay back into the pillow, resting.  With my
eyes closed, I heard her place the brush on her table, then heard the
rustle of her jeans as she walked across the room, then felt the bed
slant as she sat beside me and laid her head on my chest.

    "Steven, the answer to that question is that I want to.  But I don't
know when.  Or how"

    "You don't have to answer."

    She held her face over mine and removed the arm I'd draped over my
face.  Her eyes dug into mine.  "Steven, there's something I've wanted to
tell you for a very, very long time.  And I can't right now, not right
now.  But I will someday.  When the time is right."

    "Promise?"

    "Promise."

    "When?"

    "Oh, you devil..."  She put my arm back over my face and pouted.   "I
told you, I promise.  I keep promises."

    "Okay."

    "Don't say okay if you don't mean it."

    I smirked.  "Okay."

    She sat up on the bed and said, "But I will tell you part of it at
the wedding.  I just should need time to find the words.  Deal?"

    "Okay."

    "Really okay?"

    "Yes."

    She removed my arm, kissed my forehead, replaced my arm, and rose to
get ready to drive me home.  I watched as she moved about the place doing
her Martha chores and touching her Martha things.  I could tell she was
hiding some distress from me.  I sorely regretted having allowed myself
to blurt out my question about us.  I resolved I'd never again mention
it, would never again bring that shadow into her face.  Never again.



    Her mother's wedding was a festive, crowded, expensive affair, as
ornate as Mr. Buchanan's could afford.  I attended the ceremony, watching
from a front pew in the cathedral while Martha, as a member of the bridal
party, stood stiff and uneasy in a pale blue, formal gown.  After the
ceremony she came to me during the drawn-out handshake ritual on the
front steps of the church and confided, "How wasteful and barbaric."  She
sighed impatiently.  "Hundreds of people, tens of thousands of dollars,
all these clothes, all this display -- just so a man and woman can sleep
together."

    The huge crowd gathered that evening at the formal dinner and recep-
tion at Colonial Country Club.  Mr. Buchanan, finally married, showed off
his bride and his two stepdaughters.  "The three prettiest gals in the
whole city of Memphis," he boasted during one of many pre-dinner toasts.
During the evening Martha seated me beside her at a long table apart from
the one where her sister and mom and stepdad were gathered.  I waltzed
with her once, both of us blushing as I attempted valiantly to subdue an
insistent erection under my rented tuxedo.  Time and again as we attempt-
ed to chat at our table, we were interrupted by one request after another
for Martha's hand on the dance floor. Finally, as the evening's end drew
near, she and I moved outside for a quiet stroll among the cherry trees
and pines in the gardens behind the reception hall.  A faint breeze
filtered through the cherry blossoms.

    I stood near her as she leaned on the low bough of a cherry tree.  I
said little, distracted by the fear that as long as she was living in Mr.
Buchanan's house we would not be free to see each other intimately.

    "Something's on your mind, isn't it?" she asked, her eyes searching
mine.  Her voice -- needy, cajoling, seductive -- floated through the
sweet spring air and washed over and into me.  Her beauty and the perfume
from the cherry blossoms and the moonlight worked on me relentlessly.
She said, "It's so hard for me to tell you what I wanted to say last
week, if you hide from me.  It makes me feel I'm here all alone, hon."

    Falteringly, my own effort at concealment almost choking off my
voice, I told her that what I was feeling at that very moment, in that
place, would sound strange.  "Even a little weird," I said.

    "Tell me.  Let me decide if it's weird or not."

    After beating around the bush for a while, I haltingly confessed that
I wish she'd been my mother.  Or my sister.  But I guessed I'd have to
settle for her being "my friend."

    Hearing this, her eyes softened and she, too, blushed profusely.
"How strange, Steven," she mused.  "How so, so strange."

    Girlishly, diffidently, almost guiltily, she confessed to me:  "Hon,
I'm shocked to admit this to you, much less to myself.  But I wanted to
tell you the same thing.  I wish you'd been mine, too.  My brother.  Or
even...my son.  Isn't that an outrageous, wicked thing to say?  Would we
have slept together?  I don't know.  But if I ever had a son, I would
want him to be like you."

    Deathly afraid of revealing more, I fell silent.  Deep inside me, my
emotions swelled and wanted to shout themselves to the world.  I was
partially soothed by the sound, somewhere beyond us, of the dinner crowd
singing in chorus.  Muffled by distance, the sound of their voices sing-
ing a plaintive waltz drifted through the trees.

    The distant voices sang:

                    Last Saturday night I got married.
                    Me and my wife settled down...

    "It's the last dance," she said.  "The bride's choice.  My mother
chose that song.  It's her favorite.  Such a sad song.  But so pretty."

    I turned to her, to nod in recognition of the bittersweet lyric.  At
that moment our eyes met.  She smiled sweetly, her eyes looking deeply
into mine, poignant and yearning.  I asked myself: yearning for what? Had
I seen, somewhere within the warm affection in those soft, hazel eyes, an
even more meaningful message?  Deep inside the glistening pools of the
clear whites of her eyes lay something more, something tense, enigmatic,
hypnotic.

                    Irene goodnight, Irene goodnight.
                    Goodnight, Irene,
                    Goodnight, Irene,
                    I'll see you in my dreams.

    "Hon," she whispered reluctantly, "I have to go.  The dance is over
and they'll be looking for me."

    Quickly she kissed me on the cheek and hugged me, and then left for
the reception hall.  I stood paralyzed, watching her disappear among the
cherry blossoms.  Slowly I strolled to the building, not caring whether
my parents spotted me or not.  Oblivious to the milling crowd that gath-
ered their belongings and prepared to leave, I crossed the vast hall and
strolled into the parking lot, hoping for a sight of her as she passed
by in the car with her family.  Perhaps I'd catch her before she left; so
much was left unsaid.  Perhaps I'd get up the nerve to say it.

    But the moment had fled, and Martha was nowhere to be seen.



                             PART  8B:


    In early June of that year she graduated with honors and a Bachelor's
degree in special education.  The ceremony was held on a Sunday after-
noon.  I was staying at my godparent's restaurant in downtown Memphis at
the time and was able to get a ride to Memphis State with Aunt Frances,
who grumbled about having to make a special trip all the way out there.

    When we arrived on the main boulevard that bounded the campus, Aunt
Frances frowned in bewilderment.  "Where are all the people who go to
school here?"

    Looking around, I saw students swarming all around us.  I answered,
"This whole crowd is students, Aunt Frances."

    "This is what they wear to school?  They don't have to wear uniforms
on Sunday?"

    "Aunt Frances, you don't wear uniforms in college."

    "The nuns let them go to class with no uniforms?"

    "Nuns don't teach the classes out here, Aunt Frances."

    "Oh," she said, her eyes widening even more in shock and confusion.
"Which one of these buildings do the nuns live in?"

    "There aren't any nuns, Aunt Frances.  No Nuns!"

    "Look at the way these boys come to school.  Hmp.  No ties, no nice
shoes.  Look, that one boy over there, he's the only one with a tie!"

    For over forty years she had driven down the same streets to work and
Mass and home again, oblivious to growth and changes in other parts of
the city; nor could she imagine an educational institution other than the
Catholic elementary girls' school she had last attended in 1918.  When
she dropped me off near the administration building I explained to her
how to get back to Central Avenue a few blocks away, a street she knew
only because Immaculate Conception Cathedral was located on it, even
though this was the first time she had been on that street's ten-mile
eastward extension that had been built in the 1940's.  I gave up trying
to explain college to her.

    Later, seated in the balcony of the auditorium, I spotted Martha in
the procession of students in cap and gown, as well as her mother and
Evelyn and another female relative who sat in the audience.  I hadn't
seen Martha in several weeks; she looked pleased, if not visibly ex-
hausted after the crunch of her final exams.  When she walked to the
podium to accept a special certificate of honor, I wondered how soon she
would leave Memphis State, or if she would leave the city altogether.  At
the end of the ceremony I found her in the audience and traded niceties
with her relatives.  She offered to give me a ride back to my Aunt Fran-
ces' place downtown, which I gladly accepted -- although, as she drove me
in her Chevy, I found I was holding back so much of what I really wanted
to say that I said little.  Whether or not she noticed this, I didn't
know.  She seemed limp, glad that it was finally over.  So far, she'd
heard nothing from her applications for graduate aid.

    Arriving at the restaurant on Calhoun Street, she smiled tiredly and
thanked me for showing up at her graduation.  I tried to be as cheerful
as I could.  As I got out of the car she said, "Wait a minute!  Don't
you dare leave me without a hug!"

    She got out of the car and met me on the driver's side, where she
threw her arms around me and gave me a close, long, moaning hug.

    "We'll get together soon," she said.  "At last, I'll have some free
time."

    From the street we saw my relatives inside the restaurant -- Aunt
Frances and Mama Rose and a couple of visiting aunts.  They waved at us
through the restaurant's front window.  We waved too, and as Martha got
back into her car she blew me a kiss and a sympathetic smile:  "Don't let
'em drive you crazy, hon!"  Then she drove away, leaving me feeling
rather lonely but knowing that she was leaving temporarily, and that she
was headed for a well-deserved rest.

    A few weeks later I was again spending Saturday afternoon at the
Tremont Cafe.  I was completely unprepared for her excited phone call.

    "I don't believe it!" she squealed excitedly over the line.  "Steven,
I don't believe it!  It came in the mail, just this afternoon!  Columbia!
Columbia University in New York!  I don't believe it!  New York City!"

    I don't remember the rest of the telephone call.  She had been award-
ed a scholarship and a graduate teaching assistantship at Columbia.  She
had not expected it, and I even recalled her saying when she mailed her
application months earlier that she doubted anything would come of it.

    It was another week before she picked me up at the Tremont to spend
Sunday afternoon with her.  She drove into the county and into Shelby
State Park, where we parked her Chevrolet in the tourist's lot and went
for a stroll deep into the woods of the park.  I was familiar with the
area through my brief tour with the Boy Scouts at St. Michael's School.
We were both rather subdued, but glad to see each other.  For some time I
did not ask the big question, but I finally summoned up the nerve to do
so as we rested on the grass atop a heavily forested hill and snacked on
some cold fried chicken I had brought along from the Tremont.

    "So when will you be leaving for New York?"

    She smiled at me warmly, touching my cheek and then squeezing my
arm.  "I don't really know, Steven, but it will have to be soon.  Very
soon.  You have no idea, the confrontations I had with Mr. Buchanan.  It
happened just yesterday, when I told him I was going to leave home to
take the assistantship.  It was almost a shouting match.  He got down to
saying: how *could* you move to New York when you have a home right here
in Memphis and an obligation to marry and keep the family going?"

    I turned away, toward the distant valley.  I had no idea she would
meet with such resistance from her stepdad.  It made the distance from my
own family seem secondary, at least for the time being.

    She went on.  "He's dead set against my leaving.  Especially to big,
bad New York.  You know how people are in Memphis, they think Memphis is
the whole world, the only possible choice.  Why would anyone dare run off
to another city, when everything one could ever need is right here in
good ol' Memphis?"

    "But you can't give it up.  It's what you worked for.  You earned it.
You broke your back for it."

    "He treated me as if I were some kind of ungrateful beauty queen.  I
even offered to give back the Chevrolet.  I never wanted it that much in
the first place -- I always knew that damn car would be symbolic of
trouble sooner or later."

    "So, will you give it back?"

    "He won't let me.  Can you believe it?  He wants me to keep it.  He
thinks he can buy me with it.  He thinks that car would be as important
to me as it is to him."  She lowered her face and set her jaw firmly.
"But it won't work.  I found a friend who can sell it for whatever cash
we can get.  And I'll need it in a place like New York.  I haven't saved
a dime and Mr. Buchanan certainly isn't going to help me out.  Mother
offered to wheedle something out of him, but I won't let her.  I know it
sounds crazy, but I still want to do this on my own."

    She stopped and looked at me.  Her hazel eyes were sisterly and
knowing.  "You don't want me to go, do you?"

    "I never said that."

    "Steven, I know you never said it, but..."  She looked down and
fingered a fallen leaf.  "It's just as sudden for me as it must be for
you."  She looked up at me.  "It's not forever."

    "Not forever?"

    "Only for a Master's.  Only two years.  I'll be teaching and working,
so there won't be any crash course this time.  It'll take me the full two
years to get through it.  So...it really won't be that long.  Besides --
you'll find a girlfriend, you know.  You'll forget all about me."

    I gave a low, wry laugh.  "Right."

    "You will, Steven.  You're becoming a very accomplished young man.
You'll be in high school then, your social life will have changed.  And
you'll be older and taller.  You'll be different.  So very different by
then."

    "And you'll find somebody, too," I said, avoiding her gaze.

    She sighed and shook her head and looked out over the bucolic scene
before us.  "I don't know, hon.  I don't think so.  I'm not planning on
it.  All I'm planning on is all the hard work I'll have ahead of me.
Graduate school at a first-rate place like Columbia is no pushover.  It's
no picnic at all, from what I hear."

    She looked back at me, apparently to check my reaction to her words.
I shrugged and laughed it off.  I played with a long blade of grass that
I pulled from the ground.

    "So," she insisted, "how do you really feel, Steven?"

    "It's yours," I answered stoically.  "You worked for it.  You should
have it."

    She searched my eyes and then smiled wanly, looking away. "All right,
if that's really what you wanted to say.  You're unnecessarily brave
about this."

    "How?" I asked.

    "Oh, I don't know.  I expected something else from you.  Maybe some-
thing poetic.  Or even angry.  But you don't reveal much about yourself
the way you used to.  Do you really feel so noble and sure of yourself
..or are you just accepting it for my benefit?"

    I considered my answer quickly, but carefully.  I wondered if she
could tell that my reply didn't exactly match my feelings.  I lied: "I am
this noble.  I am this sure of myself."  Then I partly told the truth:
"And I am doing it for your benefit."

    She smiled.  Broadly.  Lovingly.  She put her hand on my arm and
squeezed.

    "Thank you, Steven.  Thank you for that."

    As we left the park and headed back to the city and the Tremont Cafe,
I felt her and everything about her slipping away.  My anxiety welled so
violently, and I concealed it with such difficulty, that my chest and
head felt physically crushed.  I gazed blindly out the open window on my
side of the car, afraid that if I exposed my face to her she would know
everything I felt and thought.  The world that passed my view at fifty
miles per hour on the highway seemed to be little more than a rush of
strange, alien objects that threatened to swallow me up and smother me at
any moment.  I was torn between needing her and letting her go to claim
what was rightfully hers.  And I was afraid that any open expression of
my fear and helplessness would be an affront to her, would reveal that I
really and truly was only thirteen years old and that I would not know
what to do without her.

    She didn't say much.  She drove with her eyes leveled straight ahead
on the highway.  I wanted desperately to hold her.  Then it hit me that
not only was Martha on her way out of my life, but all of the places
where we could have been alone and unseen had already vanished.  The
Lauderdale Courts was gone, her apartment was gone.  I knew of no place
where we could be together.  I harried myself with worry over what she
would think if I asked her if we could go somewhere and be together
again.  Would she feel that I were attempting to hold her back?  In the
past, we had not always had sex when we met; in the past I felt assured
that it would happen again, later, when the opportunity arose.  Now,
suddenly, I realized that "later" was not going to happen.

    I shuffled in my seat, folding my arms tightly before me in an effort
to appear only mildly affected -- which, of course, I soon realized only
revealed the storm inside me.  It was a strange effect, to be able to
stand so far away from myself and observe with embarrassment how I moved
and spoke and appeared.  It was something that happened to me more often
and was becoming a modus operandi that left me feeling extremely uncom-
fortable about myself.

    Eventually I asked with great effort, "Will I be able to see you
again...before you leave?"

    To my surprise, she smiled wickedly.  "You mean...you wanna try to
get together somewhere?"

    "Yeah."

    She smirked.  "I was wondering how long I'd have to wait for you to
ask first.  Well...I'll see if I can arrange something."



    A few days later she called and told me that she would be leaving in
two weeks.  She would leave by train and move to New York.  She had a
college girlfriend who lived there and who would help her get settled.
Going by airplane would be faster but much more expensive; the cheaper
train fare and the cash from the sale of her Chevy would have to suffice
until money from her award at Columbia materialized in the fall.

    She relayed all this information as though it were secondary -- or
perhaps too unpleasant to contemplate at the moment.  Quickly she changed
the subject and told me that all her college friends had left Memphis for
the summer, so she knew of no one's apartment where we could hide out for
a day.  And it wouldn't be possible for us to spend an entire night to-
gether: neither of us could think of a good excuse for my being out all
night that would be acceptable to my parents or hers.  So she would rent
a room in a new Holiday Inn motel in southeast Memphis on Airways
Boulevard in a part of town our acquaintances never frequented, and where
not even her car in a motel parking lot would be recognized.

    She picked me up on a Saturday afternoon at the Tremont Cafe.  I
didn't tell my parents about it; my isolation from them had intensified
to the point where a few mumbled words at the breakfast table during the
week were all that transpired between us.  But I did tell my Aunt Frances
and Mama Rose and the others at the restaurant that Martha and I were
going on a picnic in Riverside Park and then to the movies, and that we
wouldn't return until later that evening.

    I slipped into her car and we both smiled and waved at onlookers in
the restaurant's front window, then pulled away and headed for Airways
Boulevard.  For a few blocks I didn't speak.

    "What's wrong?" she asked.  "You're so quiet."  She winked.  "Afraid
we'll get caught?"

    "Oh, nothing," I murmured dully.  For the first time in my relation-
ship with her, I actually felt we were being deceptive and sneaky.  In
the past, our getting together had somehow seemed like a naturally occur-
ring event, like occasional rain or a change of season.

    I told her, "More and more, I'm leading a secret life that no one
knows anything about."

    "Steven," she said seriously, watching the road as she made the wide
turn into busy Airways Boulevard, "I've been doing that with my folks for
a very long time."  She sighed heavily as she pressed the accelerator and
merged with traffic on the road that widened into the highway to Birming-
ham.  "I haven't had time to worry if it was the right thing to do, or
not.  But if I were to stay sane...it was necessary.  It's not me, and
it's not you.  It's the world."

    Soon the homes and businesses along the busy highway thinned out.  We
passed the airport area and then the wide expanse of land occupied by the
outdoor drive-in theater district.  Beyond that point, I was in a totally
unfamiliar part of town.  When we pulled into the parking lot of the huge
Holiday Inn, I felt lost and shaky.  She and I had always been alone in
familiar, secluded, cozy places; the building I saw in front of me was
impersonal, massive, and coldly public in the hard midday June sun.

    She pulled into a parking space in the lot behind the building, shut
down the engine and turned to me.  She laughed.  "You look scared to
death."

    "I'm not," I lied.

    "Is this place okay?  I realize it's not like home--"

    "Yes," I said, opening my door and moving out bravely.  "Let's go."

    Our room on the second floor was neat and spacious.  It smelled of
cleaning fluid.  It was so meticulously color-coordinated in dark browns
and burnt orange that it seemed almost monochrome.  Martha closed and
double-locked the door behind us and motioned toward the wide bed.  "Have
a seat," she said.  "Try it out."  As I sat on the firm bed she yanked on
the cord of the halfway-open drapes and pulled them shut, closing us off
in a square white-walled room that was now dimly lit only by remnants of
sunlight seeping around the edges of the floor-length drapes.

    I had a paper bag of snacks and Cokes on my lap.  I reached over to
the nearby chair and placed the bag there while Martha removed the small
overnight bag from around her shoulder and placed it on the desk near the
wall.  Sitting next to me on the bed, she caught her breath and pushed a
few stray locks of hair from her face.

    "Well," she breathed.  "It's a little antiseptic."

    "I could get used to it."

    She shivered and rubbed her bare arm.  "Let's turn down that air
conditioner before we both become frozen peas in here."

    I got up and then knelt at the air conditioner, found the controls in
the dim light and turned the temperature and the fan halfway down.
Standing, I turned to see her sitting on the bed and looking about the
place warily.  Her discomfort appeared to be similar to mine.  As I
watched her she looked in my direction, caught me eyeing her, and smiled
apologetically.

    I smiled back.  "Anyway...it's quiet.  Just feels a little strange."

    "A little sleazy?" she asked jokingly.  "What do you say we take a
shower and rinse off all this summer sweat?  It was so muggy in that car,
I'm all clammy."

    In the big reverberant bathroom we ran steaming water in the shower
and got undressed, eyeing each other with a growing sense of intimacy and
anticipation.  The discomforts of the place and the room were soon dis-
placed by our grinning and tittering and our bumping against each other
under the water.  We unwrapped the little bar of hotel soap and swathed
each other provocatively, Martha closing her eyes and moaning as I
caressed her hardening nipples with my sudsy fingertips.

    She toweled off quickly, and while I dried myself she went into the
main room.  When I shut the light and left the bathroom I saw that she
had lit a cigarette and was sitting on the bed against the headboard, her
knees drawn up to her chest and her arms around her slender, shiny
shins.  Naked, she seemed daintily trim and diminutive, her firm breasts
jiggling as I got into the bed.  She exhaled a thin stream of gray smoke
and gave me a sly smile.  I smiled back.  Before me, between her thighs
and half-hidden behind her calves, was the smoothly domed swell of her
furrowed conch, sparsely fuzzed with tiny auburn cilia, the rims of her
narrow slit just beginning to glisten with her dew.  Its primal, she-
animal character presented itself in impudent contrast to the statuesque
elegance of the rest of her.




                              PART 8C:



    She indulged in her cigarette, her voice throaty, secretive, con-
spiratorial.

    "This is beginning to feel very naughty," she said.

    "All those people driving by," I said, joining in her mood, "not
knowing we're nekkid."

    "Yeah," she breathed, pleased.  She took another puff. "After today,
you'll have to go to confession."

    "I don't go to confession.  I just pretend I do."

    "Don't you feel strange about that?"

    "A little.  But it's what I have to do."

    "It's a sin," she said, testing me.

    "Only for everyone else."

    "This...is a sin," she announced, a little amused.  She reached over
to the ashtray and slowly, carefully, mashed the cigarette several times
against the glass until it was completely extinguished.  "It's the major,
most unacceptable, most outrageous...most delicious sin."

    "Can I have one of those?" I asked mischievously.

    "One of what?" she asked, settling against the headboard.

    "One of those," I said, motioning my head at the ash tray.

    "Don't you dare.  It's an awful habit.  One of my few vices.  I'm not
lazy, I'm not narrow-minded, I'm not hateful.  I don't rob anyone, I
don't kill anyone, I don't hate anyone.  I'm not a racist, not a bigot.
But I do smoke.  And I'm a hypocrite.  And deep inside, I'm ruthless."

    I asked, surprised, thinking she was joking,  "You are?"

    "Yes. I am.   I have such a sweet, innocent, kitten-like look.  Mr.
Buchanan thinks that Evelyn and I are both virgins.  Saints.  But Evelyn
fucks.  And I fuck."  She looked at me, expressionless, studying me.

    I gave an embarrassed laugh.  "That's not so sinful."

    "Oh, it is.  It's a sin because I like it so much.  You can't like
something that much without it being a sin.  It's so difficult to let
someone else know how much I like it.  It's so good with you, but even
with you sometimes...I get a little scared of myself, it's so good and
so...unexpected.  Sometimes, hon, it's so much of a strain on me.
Really.  It's not always so easy to let you know that about me.  I am a
terrible sinner when I'm nekkid with you."

    "Really?  After all we've done?"

    "Yes."  She suddenly and playfully hid her eyes with one hand.  "Oh,
I can't believe this.  Why am I so embarrassed?  It's like telling you
about my period.  It's so silly."

    I paused.  "Is that the secret that you wanted to tell me about?
That you think this is a sin?"

    "No, hon, no.  My big secret is something else, and I can't tell you
that now."  She uncovered her eyes and with a coy smile she leaned her
head on her knees, smiling at me indulgently.  "But I will tell you one
day, don't worry."

    "Okay," I said, disappointed.

    "Do you think this is a sin?"

    "Yes.  Sort of."

    "Sort of?"

    "Well...only because everyone else says it is."

    "Yes...I know what you mean."

    She dropped into deep thought for a moment.  She rubbed her leg and
then her voice shrank into that of a hesitant little girl.

    "Hon...do you like sinning with me?"

    "Yes.  That makes me as big a sinner as you are."

    "Then there's no hope for us," she said, grinning slyly and lowering
her legs, stretching out and lying naked and open.  "Sin with me," she
crooned.  "Lick me."

    As I moved over her and bent to kiss her firm inner thighs she looked
down.  Fastidiously, she brushed her pubic curls aside and gently parted
her cuntlips for me.  "Lick me, hon."

    Gradually she became almost uncontrollably licentious, whispering and
rasping lewdly and with an abandon I hadn't seen since our nights in the
Lauderdale Courts.  I have no idea what incited this effusion of raw
lust; I could only guess that, like me, she was grasping at something
that would soon end.  She seemed to have somehow reached back to her six-
teenth or seventeenth years, when it was all new and unimpaired by change
or necessity.  I realized that I was not the only one in that room who
felt afraid and threatened.

   As I mouthed her cunt she moved my body around so that my knees
straddled her head and my cock fit easily into her mouth.  She sucked me
slowly and lecherously, her hips jerking now and then when I sucked her
clit.  Soon I rose and stretched over her, entered deeply, and fucked in
long deep strokes.  Her head raised and resting against the headboard,
she grinned and watched me fuck her.  Soon she stiffened and climaxed,
wrenching her head back and to one side.  She finished with a lurch of
her hips, gasping and sighing, "Fuck...oh, fuck."  Raising her knees, she
reached between us to touch my shaft and feel the spurts hurtling into
her.  She watched with salacious glee while I finished cumming.

   We napped, waking in mid-afternoon.  Whispering sultrily she leaned
over me and quickly jerked me off, entreating me as I came, "C'mon, hon.
C'mon.  Ah.  Those hot little squirts.  Yes."   We rested again and then
drove to the Howard Johnson's down the street and ate like cave people,
giggling and spilling things.  Martha would grin and say something stupid
like "Pass me the salt, hon -- " and then lean close to me over the table
and whisper laughingly, "-- and squirt on my tits!"  We squealed and
sniggered and I would reply with something like "Cum on my ear," which
threw her into a squirming fit.  She said, "Mr. Buchanan would have a
stroke.  Haha, Evelyn would have a stroke.  The walls of the First
Baptist Church of Memphis would come tumblin' down, and the doors of the
temple would be rent asunder."

    We returned to the room.  Dusk found us sinning and lusting like
animals, me licking her slowly, her spread thighs taut and trembling as I
made her cum, and then we fucked and I made her cum again, then again.
Each orgasm for her was deeper, harder, more paralyzing than the one
before.  Each time she would clench my shoulders and with her lips near
my ear she would moan, "Again.  Again, Steven.  Fuck."  Until finally her
fourth cum was a long pleasure-drenched struggle, and when it finally
arrived I felt my own orgasm creep slowly from my strained back and then
into the tip of my cock, on whose length her clinging cunt fed greedily
and invoked yet another hot jet from my balls.  I yelled and then
groaned, straining on outstretched arms and quaking knees, as I watched
her long body writhe in ecstatic lust with our last prolonged, exhaust-
ing, excruciating release.

    For almost an hour afterward, we held each other silently.  I lay on
her for a while, then rolled over and lay with her head on my shoulder.
Soon we changed positions again, me lying on her breast before we curled
up spoon-style.  At one point she sat up, leaned back against her pillow,
and lit a cigarette.  I watched her inhale and then slowly exhale.

    After a moment she whispered, "Steven."

    I looked at her and waited.

    She paused and took another puff.  She shook her head no, once.  She
whispered, "Nothing."

    Finally, it was time to dress and leave.

    She drove me back to my Mama Rose's house.  We arrived at eleven, an
hour after the Tremont had closed.

    "You be good to your Mama Rose," Martha told me from her car window.
"she's so sweet."

    "I'll come to Union Station next Saturday and see you off."

    "You don't have to," she said quietly.  "You sure?"

    "I'll be there," I said, winking -- not knowing if I were really up to
it, but letting her think I believed I was.

    She winked back.  Unsmiling, she stepped on the gas.  She and the car
raced down the street and grew smaller.  I stood on the curb and watched,
wondering what the hell I was going to do.




    Of all the weeks Martha and I had spent apart, that week of waiting
for her departure was the longest that I remember.  The only memory I
have of that week was of standing in our front yard one sultry afternoon
with the cloying humidity hanging in the air as I stared into the vast
suburban sameness around me.  As in an underexposed, bleached-out still
photograph, nothing seemed distinct.  Nothing moved.  But I felt the
earth move; and I felt time move, slowly and relentlessly.

    During breakfast on Friday morning my mother told me, "This coming
weekend will be the last week for you to have nothing to do while
school's out.  Your daddy wants you to work at the grocery during the
week, starting Monday."

    "You have to learn the value of a dollar," my stepdad grunted as he
came to the table for his coffee.  He took a quick sip and then bent over
to tie his shoes.  "Learn about runnin' a business," he went on. "Sackin'
groceries.  Trim the produce.  Then we'll get you on the big bikes with
the delivery crew, and you can make some money.  Ten cents for every
order you deliver in the Lauderdale Courts.  The work ain't that hard,
but it'll help put some muscle on you, get you out in the sunshine and
the open air."

    I mentioned that a new play was going to start soon at St. Michael's
and that I had been assigned a role.  I would have to leave the store by
five to get a bus in time for rehearsals.

    Unfazed, he continued.  "That school dramatics crap will just have to
wait.  The store stays open 'til seven during the week and 'til nine on
Saturday.  So your games at school can wait until September."

    "...Yessir."

    "You just tell them at school that you're sorry, but your time
belongs to the Liberty Cash Grocery Number 23 until school starts again."

    "Yessir."

    "That dramatics shit is a lot of foolin' around anyway."

    "Yessir."

    "The money you earn will be yours.  I'll keep it in a checkin'
account for you, at Union Planters, just like a regular checkin' account.
I'll keep tabs on it.  You can spend it, but get somethin' you need and
can use at school.  Don't spend it on crap."

    "Yessir."

    The conversation ended.  It was perhaps one of the longest exchanges
I'd had with my parents in several months.  For the rest of the day I
moped in my room.  Near dusk I drove my squeaky kid-sized bicycle to
Gaisman Park.  The bike was an undersized blue machine that Aunt Frances
had given me for Christmas when I was nine years old.  The thought that
I'd be able to earn my own money for a sparkling new bike was a comfort,
at least.  At thirteen, going on fourteen, I needed more mobility; for
the time being I was limited to city buses and my own two feet.  The idea
of buying a full-sized bike gave me something to look forward to.  And,
hopefully, a few months of hard work at the supermarket in my old neigh-
borhood would get me back into the heart of the city and give me some-
thing to think about other than Martha's absence.

    By sunset I returned home and told Mom I didn't want dinner.  I
boarded a bus and made the long trip into old Memphis and the home of my
Mama Rose and Daddy Joe Ricci, my deceased father's parents.  Usually I
alternated my weekends between them or Aunt Francis and Uncle Johnny.

    Being with my grandparents was more subdued and folksy than weekends
spent with my disoriented Aunt Frances and my tired and ailing but affec-
tionate Uncle Johnny.  The Ricci's lived in a newer home, a tidy 1920's
brick duplex occupied on one side by my grandparents and on the other by
their daughter, my Aunt Baby Sister, so called to distinguish her from
several other Aunt Catherines in the clan.  The Ricci's kept a living ar-
rangement that even in my youth I considered unusual.  My Uncle Johnny
and Aunt Frances, with all the extra space they had in their big old
Victorian home, slept together in the same room and the same bed; but
Daddy Joe and Mama Rose, in their smaller duplex, kept separate rooms.
Mama Rose's room was in the middle of the long hallway that led through
their side of the duplex.  Behind her room was the bedroom that once
belonged to my Uncle Frank and my father.  Frank was never around, having
used his GI bill to get through Vanderbilt University in Nashville, after
which he landed a job with a local bank and found an apartment elsewhere
in Memphis with his recent bride, my glamorous and vivacious Aunt Leigh.
Behind Frank's room, at the far end of the hall, was the small add-on
that was Daddy Joe's solitary room.

   Gentle, submissive and soft-spoken, Mama Rose would greet me from the
front door of their corner house when I got off the bus across the
street.  Watching the street carefully in both directions, she would wear
a frown of concern until I safely crossed the six lanes of busy Peabody
Street, and then she would smile her warm motherly smile as I strode up
the front steps and onto their little brick-walled, plant-lined front
porch.  Like her older sisters, My Aunt Frances and my sister's godmother
Aunt Mary, Mama Rose had a squeaky voice: but hers was a small, serene
one that matched her manner and her diminutive size.  Like my deceased
father, she had black hair; but her caring, madonna-like eyes were a
bright blue that could be seen across a room.  There was a quiet joy in
her whenever she greeted me and led me into the kitchen for a bowl of
cereal or some milk and cookies.  When I entreated her to not go through
trouble on my behalf, she would insist on waiting upon me, circling about
the kitchen with her weak little walk and her bad back, looking far older
than her fifty-odd years as if some great weight had attached itself to
her petite frame at some point in the past.  Always, there was a sweet
remark about how I looked just like my daddy, Steven Senior.  Always.
And always she would at some point confuse me with her son Frank, whom I
also resembled.  And almost always she would at some point call me Steven
instead of her favorite nickname Butch (and where she came up with Butch,
I'll never know.  She was the only person who called me by that name
instead of by Speedy).  And always, at some point, she would call me
Frank, then give a shy little laugh and apologize, saying, "Oh, I mean
Butch.  I'm so sorry, sweetheart.  Did you hear me say Frank?  Wasn't
that silly?"

    After I snacked I would ask about Daddy Joe, and a shadow would fall
over her face--a quick and barely visible flash of something sad and
lonely in her--and she would recover and say, "Oh, he's back there in his
'man's room', where he always is.  You go see him, and then we have to
get to sleep and go to the Tremont in the morning.  Go on, go see him.
You know he loves you, Butch.  He always wants to see you.  You go on
and I'll clean up in here."

    At the end of the long unlit hallway, Daddy Joe was in his room.  He
was a short, kindly but fidgety man who spoke and moved suddenly, jerkily
and unpredictably.  I had a strange liking for him; not the same warm and
comfy affection I had for the saintly Mama Rose--but an affection mixed
with a wariness of his nervous style and his occasionally bitter cynicism
that seemed to underlay his reactions to everything and everyone around
him.

    As usual, he sat in the small, chilly room with the windows wide
open, he in his worn, heavy brown leather chair with his short legs
propped on a matching footstool.  He held a pipe in one hand, a National
Geographic magazine and a newspaper in his lap.  Around him were his
man's trophies that graced the walls of his man's room: an oversized 1948
calendar with color photos of legendary racehorses like Citation and Sea
Biscuit; a yellowed, framed, original copy of the announcement of the
Wall Street crash in the New York Herald; over three decades' worth of
the National Geographic; old copies of the Wall Street Journal; an
ancient telegraph set from the Frisco Railroad, where he worked for many
years as a youth; a battered dumbbell with two heavy, rusting weights; a
photograph of Charles Atlas tugging a subway car in the 1930's; and
portraits of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt.

    He would greet me with a big grin and a coarse but chummy "Aaaaa!", a
kind of gruffly playful reproach accompanied by a firm ruffling of my
hair and a pinch on my ear.  Then a quick hug, his red cheeks always
scratchy and tickly against mine.  And then questions: how was I?  Would
I grow any taller?  What was I doing in school?  And always, regardless
of my answers, a waggish "Aaaaa!" as he unexpectedly rose from his chair
and ruffled my hair again.  I never quite knew when he was going to jump
up and pull that frolic on me.  Our conversations were more like an
effort on my part to find out who he really was, while he remained
roguishly elusive.

    I mentioned that I had received a birthday card from my Uncle Frank
and he asked, "Yeah?  You ever see your Uncle Frank?".  I answered no,
and he dismissed it with a wave of his hand and a gruff, "Ha!  Your Uncle
Frank.  To hell with him, Speedy-boy.  Right?  Never comes to see *ME*!
Huh, SPeedy-boy?  Sonofabitch."  As usual, he immediately changed the
subject and asked about my Mom.  I said my mother and daddy were doing
well, and he muttered, "Your 'daddy'.  Hmp.  Your daddy's dead," a
frequent remark to which I never had a reply, and he would growl "Aaaa!"
and ruffle my hair again and then confound me by cheerfully asking if
Mama Rose had fed me well when I came in.  "Your Mama Rose is sweet on
you, Speedy-boy.  You're her boy, you know that?  She's sweet, your Mama
Rose."

    This meandering and inconclusive conversation seldom varied.  Neither
did it last very long, as Daddy Joe would want to spend some time going
over the stock quotations in the newspaper.  He would preface this by
again mentioning his plans for the day when he hoped to retire from the
liquor business, cash in his stocks and move to Hot Springs, Arkansas,
where he would play the horses all day and "live like a white man."

    He sent me back into the caring hands and motherly smiles of Mama
Rose, who laid out my pajamas and turned back the bedspread in Uncle
Frank's room, and tucked me in with a peck on the cheek and a little
sing-song about, "Oh, I love my little Butch, just like your daddy
Steven."  And after the lights went out I would be in that room alone
with my father's ghost and the relics of my mysterious, long-absent Uncle
Frank.  I often wondered, if either of them had been around, how I would
talk to them and what they would advise me about my situation.  How would
they, grown and apparently sane men, handle it?  Why were they always
gone?  What were they really like?  Was I like them?  Would I be able to
tell them about Martha?

    Certainly, despite their affection, neither Mama Rose nor Daddy Joe
nor anyone else could be someone I trusted with the story of me and
Martha Jane, whom I now called Martha but whom I still pictured as the
original Martha Jane, and who would be leaving the next day.




                              PART 8D:



    Perhaps, when I awoke groggily at my Mama Rose's house that Saturday
morning, July 2, 1955, I had been dreaming of my father while asleep in
that room.  I had little else to hold before me as a model of what I
might do and how I might behave when I went to Union Station later that
day to say goodbye to Martha.  I wondered how Steven Senior might handle
it: he was a hero, a winner of the Air Medal, two Purple Hearts and the
Silver Star.  He had faced the terror of war with the Nazis twenty-two
times.  He had readily attempted to hold together a B-17 landing gear
with little more than his bare hands.  If he could do that, then as his
son I could certainly hold my own at Union Station.

    I rode to the Tremont Cafe with Mama Rose and ate a big breakfast
there.  I left just before eleven o'clock and walked two blocks to Union
Station.  It was a gaudy Romanesque building of massive proportions, a
relic of the Gilded Age, with a vast main lobby graced with chandeliers
clustered, gigantic warm-white globes.  The atmosphere was so much
quieter than I would have thought;  I expected a noisily milling crowd
and a rush of people in all directions.  Instead, all was quiet and
sedate, with few people waiting on the long rows of curved mahogany
benches.

    Martha sat in a pleated black skirt and white blouse near the
newsstand in the center of the lobby.  She was reading a magazine.  At
the sound of my footsteps she looked up and smiled, put her magazine
aside, and rose to meet me halfway.  She gave me a long warm hug.

    She whispered a happy "Hi, hon."  And I almost cried.  But I showed
little of it.  Heros didn't cry.  The sons of Silver Star winners didn't
cry.  In the movies, neither William Holden nor Bogart did that sort of
thing.

    Evelyn was there, and another girlfriend whom I didn't know but whom
they introduced as Tasha.  So I was unable to say much of what I wanted
to say--and at any rate, I doubt I would have said anything anyway.

    Martha told me she had sold her car.  When she told Mr. Buchanan
about it before leaving, he had been bitter and unrelenting.  There had
been some angry shouting.  He would support her in Memphis, but not in
New York.  New York was golgatha, sin city, filled with queers and
commies and perverts.  If she wanted to teach, she could teach just as
well in Memphis and then find herself a husband and raise a good
Christian family.  Everybody in New York was a drug addict, the mafia
owned everything, and anyone who wasn't a mobster was a Puerto Rican, a
wetback or a Jew.  Even staid Evelyn, who now sat waiting unhappily with
Martha and her friend in the station, thought her stepdad's ravings were
little more than strident hysteria, and certainly she thought New York
could not be nearly so awful.

    My concern for my own problems vanished when I noticed that Martha
herself, keeping up a good front of cheer and optimism about claiming her
future, sat holding my hand hidden from the others in the folds of her
pleated skirt.  She held on tightly, almost frantically.  Again and again
she gave my hand a tight squeeze, and now and then she would rub her
thumb nervously and firmly across my knuckles.  At first I thought she
was doing it for my comfort; after a while I could sense the tension
throughout her body.  But others were present, and there was little I
dared to say, even in a whisper, lest they notice.

    At one point Evelyn mentioned that the announcement for the train's
departure would be heard soon, and she and their friend jaunted off to
the ladies' room.  I sat with Martha and looked around at the vast
railroad station that I knew so well and where I had spent so many
weekends roaming and playing.  Those weekends were followed by a trip
back home to the Lauderdale Courts, where Martha lived next door.

    "Steven, I'm scared," I heard her say beside me.

    I turned to find her looking down at my hand, which she grasped and
rubbed nervously.  "I'm really scared.  I didn't think I would be this
scared.  I can't have my father here -- He's long gone.  It's been so
long since he died.  I know Mr. Buchanan was spouting nonsense and
superstition.  I mever thought he'd explode that way.  I sometimes think
I understand why he dislikes what I'm doing...but I had no idea he would
hate me so much.  It scares me, somehow.  I can't even let Evelyn see,
she's so strong and so successful and she fits in so well.  But even
Evelyn had to lie to him about coming here with me.  He thinks she's at
her office.  It scares me.  I don't know why."

    I whispered, levelheaded and all grown up.  "I'm not scared."

    She looked up at me with thankful, loving eyes.

    I said, "I'm proud of you.  You earned this.  You deserve it.  And
after you leave here today, you'll be in a place where you can be your-
self.  Mr. Buchanan won't be around to make you feel like a criminal for
being yourself."

    Her eyes shuttled quickly to one side and she whispered, "Evelyn and
Tasha are coming back."  She gave my arm an extra squeeze and, looking
down, she sent me a secret smile.  "Thank you, hon."

    Within five minutes the cathedral-like walls rang out with the echoes
of the departure announcement.  Groaning and sighing, Martha and Evelyn
and Tasha grabbed the baggage and we all walked to the departure gate at
one end of the lobby.  Before us the trains waited noisily, hissing and
steaming and whistling.  It was near the end of the era of the long pas-
senger railroads, and the line of Pullmans was not as long as I remem-
bered from a few years earlier.  But the black porters were still there,
smiling and polite and spry, asking "Can I see your tickets, please
ma'am?  Here ya go, Miss, the porter'll take those bags for you, ma'am.
George, these are for car 4111."  It was still the age of tipping caps
and friendly smiles.

    We walked together to the start of the waiting platform, where the sun
blazed down on us in the open air.  Beyond that point, only ticketed
passengers could venture down the platform walkway.

    "'Bye, sister," Evelyn whispered tearfully as she gave Martha a
close and affectionate hug.

    Then her girlfriend took her hand and looked in her eyes and tried
bravely to smile, saying "Martha...", only to break up angrily and sob,
"I'm gonna miss the hell outta you!"  They clutched each other and Martha
whispered something in Tasha's ear I couldn't hear above the hissing
steam of the waiting trains.  In response, Tasha nodded and stepped back.

    Then Martha came over to me with a courageous smile and reached out
for me to come to her for a hug.  I went to her and she grabbed me like a
big watermelon and almost lifted me off my feet.  I felt certain there
was no danger at all that Martha would cry, but I still wondered if I
could hold myself together so well.  I was barely taller than she; her
lips, as usual when we embraced, were just below my ear.

    She laughed and whispered, "I won't cry if you won't."

    "I won't," I said.

    And then, her face on my shoulder, she started crying.  Almost in
terror, I wondered if the others noticed.  They had, but not in the
manner I feared; Evelyn gave a sad little smile and said something to the
other girl and pointed to me, as if explaining about me and Martha.
Reading her lips, I saw Evelyn mouth the words "grew up together", and
the other girl nodded as if she understood.  That, at least, is how their
conversation appeared to me.

    But my concern was about Martha's crying.  With a deep breath and a
sudden straightening, she stepped back and wiped one eye hastily with a
bare hand.  "Damn, I didn't think I would do this."

    I gave her a kiss on the cheek, and a gentle smile that said it was
okay.

    "You behave, cowboy.  And write to me."  She kissed my cheek quickly
and turned away.  Unstopping, undaunted, she smiled and waved to the
others and made her way down the length of the train.  Two or three times
she turned as she walked, one time shouting to us, "You people write to
me, or I'll come back!"

    The other girl shouted back, "Watch out for those New York taxi
drivers!"

    For a brief time I watched as she grew smaller on the path down the
line of Pullmans.  I did not want to see the rest of it.  She was walking
ahead strongly now, far past the point where any of us could be heard
over the steam and the commotion of the boarding platform, so she no
longer turned to yell at us.  The others stood waiting, and as I turned
to leave I caught their glances and motioned a polite goodbye.  I felt I
had to go elsewhere; I was exhausted from holding back all expression
of my feelings.

    I walked into the cool shade under the giant awning that covered the
departure area, and into the quiet station.  The noise of the trains
retreated behind me, leaving me feeling less haunted by the sounds of
their leaving and taking Martha away.  I retreated to the area around the
newsstand, stood alone and shoved my hands into the pockets of the dressy
slacks I wore for the occasion.  A deep breath.  Another, deeper breath.
I loitered, pretending to gaze at the magazines while I pulled myself
together enough to pass through the station and appear perfectly normal
in front of the bystanders who entered and left through the main arches.
I was not really aware of anything around me.  My mind went completely
blank.  I didn't know where I was going or what I would do.  My urge was
to hop on the train, ticket or no ticket, baggage or no baggage.  I could
not believe I was thinking such impossible thoughts.

    Abruptly I felt I'd had my fill of this scene.  I turned and, in one
long series of movements during which I consciously fought to keep moving
ahead rather turning and running for the departing train, I kept going
until I was out of the station and onto the sidewalk.  I made my way
quickly back to the Tremont Cafe.  I have no idea what kinds of sounds
the train made as it left Memphis, no idea how it looked or whether
Martha might be gazing out the window and back at Union Station, or what
she might look like riding in the Pullman on her way out of town.

    I entered the front door of the Tremont Cafe, now crowded at the
height of the lunch hour with crusty old railroad men and a bunch of my
aunts and grandfolks and the two middle-aged waitresses who worked there.
Bill Hailey and the Comets were drumming out "Rock Around the Clock" on
the light-swirling Wurlitzer.  It was a record that had been on the juke
box so long it had taken on a cloudy, garbled, hissy sound.

    Without a word I stepped behind the lunch counter, grabbed a dish,
and filled it with several round scoops of Forest Hill vanilla ice cream.
Though there were no tears, I knew I was crying: I had a thick salty
taste in my throat.  Shuffling past the help and the dishes, I made my
way through the rear kitchen where my ancient great-grandmother, Mama
Nifa, smiled her toothless smile and happily stirred a huge caldron of
steaming beef stew.  I smiled and nodded to everyone who smiled and
nodded at me, and found a seat in the fairly quiet and unpopulated rear
lunch room.  I sat wordlessly and poked at the ice cream, which was
soothing and cool, although in my numbed state I couldn't taste it.

    Wanda, a wiry little redheaded waitress who always talked out of the
side of her thin mouth, came into the room on a break with a glass of
iced tea and asked me, "Hi, sport, you gonna type the menus for us again
today?"

    Mustering my most casual smile, I answered, "Sure."

    "Here," she said, grabbing a seat at the table in front of me and
pulling several handwritten pages out of her apron pocket.  "Here's the
dishes and the prices, so you can type this up for us.  I'd rather you
did it anyway, I can't spell worth a damn and you do such a nice job on
the typewriter."  She spread the pages on the table before us.  She lit a
cigarette and sipped her iced tea.

    I looked at her.  She was in her late thirties and I knew she was
divorced.  She was thin, long-necked, rather attractive despite her long
and slightly crooked nose.  I had always felt there was something seduct-
ive about what I could see of her small tits and slender arms.  High-
waisted and leggy, she was always friendly and unceremonious with me from
the first time I saw her.  Now I sat directly across from another woman
whom I knew to be sexually attractive to me in a kinky way that partook
of something of the forbidden manner in which Martha had been sexually
attractive.  But Martha was gone.  Those two facts -- Wanda's physical
presence and loose manner, and Martha's complete absence -- gave me a new
and undefinably odd feeling.  It suddenly occurred to me that for the
first time since I became a sexual person, there was no way for me to
express my sexuality.  I found it strangely disorienting.

    Wanda puffed on her cigarette.  "What's up, sport?  You don't look so
happy."

    Brazenly I said, without a blink:  "I just lost my girlfriend."

    "What the hell," she said, with a disdainful smirk and a wave of her
hand.  "So get another one."

    "I don't know any other ones."

    "So what?  You're young.  Not like me!  My last one wore me out!
Made me old before my time."  She stretched in a tired yawn, a motion
that shoved her tiny nipples against her thin apron, and it occurred to
me that she didn't appear to be wearing a bra under her uniform.

    "Anyway, I gotta get back to work.  Give the menus to the boss-lady,
you know, your Aunt Frances, when you finish.  And thanks, honey--my
English ain't nearly good enough for that kind of work.  I envy you,
bein' smart enough at your age to do that kinda stuff."

    She turned and sauntered off, with horny little thirteen-year-old me
following her slim hips and long legs all the way out of the room.

    I retrieved the heavy Smith Corona typewriter out of the broom closet
and loaded it with paper and carbons for the day's food listing, of which
I would type several carbon copies that would be slipped inside the
plastic covers of the restaurant menus.  As I worked I wondered what it
might be like to fuck Wanda.  But, then, Wanda wasn't what I wanted.  I
knew I was merely lonely and that what I really missed was knowing that
sooner or later Martha would be around, moaning and talking and fucking.
Of course, that wouldn't happen.  With a new and sudden pain in my balls
and in my gut, it began to hit me -- suddenly and with the force of the
wind from an atomic blast -- that my needs had nowhere to go.

    Restless and growing anxious and angry, I threw myself into typing
the menus.  The restaurant had no duplicating machine; I had to type the
menus manually, one original and five carbons at a time.  Aunt Frances
would give me five bucks for the job.  Not much, but five bucks was five
bucks, in addition to a couple of bucks for a weekly allowance that she
would slip to me, and another two or three bills from Mama Rose or Daddy
Joe as the balance of my allowance.

    My brain started adding this up.   That was about nine to eleven
bucks a week.  If I continued to lie about my age at the movies and kept
getting in on the child's ticket price, and if I kept my spending down to
a reasonable level at school during the week, I could save perhaps
twenty-five or thirty bucks a month.  Maybe more.  And I would be deliv-
ering at my step-dad's grocery, which would amount to more money every
week.

    As I typed, I wondered:

    How long would it take to save up enough money to get to New York?



                           Continued...


-- 
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