Neighbourly Love
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Cissy Fox strode aggressively along the sidewalk toward 
her front gate, swinging her handbag. She pretended not to 
notice her neighbour, Peggy Roth, who was weeding the 
flower beds, and kept her attention focused on the For Sale 
sign the realtor had erected on the front yard. 

The For Sale sign would never have been there were it not 
for Peggy Roth. If the neighbours had been more tolerable, 
she and her husband would never have contemplated 
moving at all. Leastwise, not so soon after having moved 
in. Cissy snatched some letters and a copy of the New York 
Times out of the mail box, slammed shut its lid, and 
continued her stride up the front walk. She concentrated 
her gaze on the newspaper photograph of President 
Truman shaking hands with one of Uncle Joe Stalin's 
comrades. She was glad that at least some things were still 
normal.

When Cissy and her husband, Ken, moved into the house 
not that many months ago, she was naturally nervous. It 
wasn't just the concern of what it would be like after those 
years of separation while her husband served his country in 
Europe and became one of the most handsomely decorated 
Negroes in the nation's armed forces. Cissy recognised that 
the causes of Liberty and Democracy came ahead of her 
desire for her husband to be by her side during those 
difficult months of pregnancy. A time that culminated in 
little Eleanor's birth (named after the wife of the president 
she and her husband so much admired). 

She knew that Negroes, even ones as well educated as Ken 
and Cissy, would not necessarily be welcomed in a white 
neighbourhood. But she and Ken had ideals, liberal ideals, 
fostered and encouraged by the example of the late 
president. When Ken got offered the appointment at the 
Hospital, he immediately accepted it. And this was despite 
it being a more junior role than would have been offered a 
white man with the same educational achievements and 
less well-decorated in defence of the flag.

"There's only one way that the white men in our great 
nation can come to accept the Negro, Cissy," he told her, 
"and that is for us coloured folk to show that we are just as 
able to succeed as they are."

So, on the day they moved in, it was with a certain amount 
of trepidation that Cissy and Ken first knocked on their 
neighbours' doors to introduce themselves. They were 
aware that their presence had been well noted from the 
stares they attracted as they stood by and supervised their 
possessions being heaved out of the delivery van. 

However, it was not Cissy's fears about racial prejudice 
that were ultimately to be their main vexation, although 
originally it was very much the greatest source of their 
anxiety.

In fact, it seemed that Peggy and Aaron Roth couldn't have 
been less prejudiced if they tried. Aaron shook Ken's hand 
so warmly, immediately broaching the subject that had 
remained unspoken but always present when they had 
introduced themselves to Herbert and Nelly Wood, their 
other neighbours. 

"Gee! It's great to have a Negro couple move next door. 
We're Jews, you know. And I can only give thanks that our 
parents emigrated from Europe when they did, otherwise, 
well, you read the news?"

"I visited one of the camps, myself," Ken remarked. "I saw 
the ovens and the corpses. We'd never believed it 
possible."

"Gee! I guess none of us did."

Cissy was delighted by their chat with Peggy and Aaron. 
She lingered for half an hour, drinking beer on their 
neighbours' porch while Ken told anecdotes about his 
service in Europe. Cissy never tired of his stories. How he 
captured those four German soldiers. How he prevented 
some American soldiers looting a German house. How the 
soldiers under his command had secured several key 
military targets, taking advantage of their skin colour for 
night-time reconnaissance. How he was treated like a freak 
in England, where people had never seen a black man 
before. And, of course, though this Ken didn't mention, of 
their belief that a black man's penis was larger than a white 
man's. Not something Cissy could ever vouch for, having 
never got to know a white man so intimately, but she was 
sure happy with all nine inches of what Ken had to offer.

But Cissy had to take care of little Eleanor, so she left Ken 
chatting with Aaron and Peggy. She was happy then, as she 
would not be now, for her husband to be out of her sight.

She could see that Peggy was, relatively speaking, quite a 
forward woman. But Cissy wasn't that sure of the ways of 
white folk, especially Jewish white folk, who she heard 
were especially liberal and open. Like Cissy, Peggy was a 
woman in her late twenties. Unlike Cissy, she wore her 
blouse cut just so low, her bosom pushed up just so high 
and her arms were bare from her shoulder to her bracelet-
adorned wrist. And the make-up! Was it necessary for a 
white woman to wear such thick layers? Her eyes were 
blue and startling. And the red of her lipstick made her lips 
seem as big as those of a Negro woman such as herself. 

Nevertheless, despite her good Christian faith, Cissy was 
of the general opinion that white and black folks just didn't 
mix. That forwardness in her smile to Ken and the way she 
rested her hand on his arm just that little more lingeringly 
than Cissy ever would on a stranger, this was just the odd 
way white folks, particularly Jewish white folks, behaved. 
Perhaps the God of Moses and David was a more 
permissive God than the one she worshipped?

There was something strangely evasive about Ken when he 
finally arrived home, ever so slightly tipsy after having 
imbibed rather more than the half glass of beer that Cissy 
had permitted herself, His kiss on her cheek was somehow 
curt and perfunctory. And he buried himself in the 
newspaper crossword rather sooner than normal, with the 
radio broadcasting that bebop jazz that had been such a 
revelation to him when he returned to America. 

It was only later, when they lay in bed together, that Ken 
became more relaxed. Cissy was pleased that he was, if 
anything, rather more amorous than usual, although she 
hoped that the cries of their passionate lovemaking 
wouldn't awaken little Eleanor. Cissy stroked Ken's limp 
penis as it flopped between his thighs, admiring its 
distinctly darker hue.

"You seem troubled, love," Cissy remarked.

"It's nothing."

"Nothing? I can read you like a book. I can see it's not 
nothing. Is it the neighbours?"

Ken looked alarmed.

"Neighbours? What's this about the neighbours? Should I 
be troubled? What are you saying?"

"When we visited Mr and Mrs Wood, and Mrs Wood said 
'nigger'?"

Ken looked suddenly relieved.

"Oh that! You get used to being called a 'nigger' in the 
Army, dear. It's nothing. Nothing at all!" 

Cissy was right to be perturbed though. And it wasn't the 
Woods' unthinking prejudice as she discovered a short 
while later when she returned home unexpectedly. She had 
taken Eleanor to the nursery and found that she wasn't 
needed, after all, at the clinic where she worked most 
mornings. It was when she got home she discovered the 
real cause for Ken's strangeness that evening. And for his 
continued evasiveness the days following.

Perhaps Cissy should have been warned by the grunting, 
panting sound she heard when she pushed open the front 
door. She hadn't expected anyone to be home. Ken should 
be working at the Hospital, so perhaps there was something 
wrong with the plumbing. Or maybe it was the call of one 
of those strange birds that live further out West. What she 
didn't expect to see, when she pushed open the bedroom 
door, was her bed, or more exactly the bed she shared with 
her husband, occupied by not one, but two bodies, and that 
only one of those bodies was black.

"Kenneth Fox! What are you doing?" Cissy shouted, 
relieved that her anger gave her a voice that she would 
otherwise have lost in shame and disgust.

For there it was, as she adjusted her gaze to the unfamiliar 
sight, two people making love. In fact, and she hated the 
sound of the very word, let alone the actual sight of it, they 
were fucking. And one of those people, the one whose 
penis was thrusting in and out of the blatantly displayed 
vagina, was none other than her husband.

Ken turned round his head, startled and ashamed, but the 
white woman underneath, who Cissy could now determine 
was Peggy, gripped him tightly to her bosom, holding him 
so that he couldn't easily escape. 

"Gee! Hello, Cissy! We didn't expect to see you here!" she 
said, through short panting breaths, stubbornly gripping her 
legs around Ken's buttocks.

"I don't care what you expected. Get your hands off my 
husband!"

"Are you asking me to stop in the middle of a perfectly 
good fuck, Mrs Fox... Have you any idea how impertinent 
and rude that is? How would you like it if I were to come 
over while you were making love and forced you apart 
from your husband?"

"What? Sorry. What are you saying?" wondered a suddenly 
flustered Cissy.

Peggy gripped Ken to her breasts, Cissy's husband 
curiously uncertain as to what he should do, which 
bothered Cissy rather more than she imagined. In all the 
portrayals of this scene she'd ever imagined, or read about, 
or seen hinted in the movies, the discovered guilty parties 
separated instantly, guilty and ashamed, while the moral 
high ground was occupied by the wronged and affronted 
spouse.

"Your husband and I have just been making love. And very 
good at it, he is too! You are a very lucky woman, Mrs 
Fox. And now you come in, while we're in the middle of 
our lovemaking, and it seems that not only have you no 
intention of participating, which would be the polite way of 
extending your affection toward your husband in the thralls 
of his passion, but it seems you want us to stop."

"Well, of course! Ken is my husband. You can't do... you 
can't... what you're doing is..."

"I know exactly what I'm doing, Mrs Fox. And if you don't 
mind I would rather your husband and I continued our 
lovemaking as we were before you rudely interrupted us!"

Just for a moment, Cissy hesitated. Should she just say that 
it was all right, that they should continue as they were 
while she went downstairs to prepare a pot of tea... 

Of course not!

"Get off my husband now!" Cissy yelled, tugging Ken by 
his shoulders and pulling him apart, even while his penis 
was still inside Mrs Roth's vagina. It plopped out as Ken 
fell back and jumped onto his feet, looking much more like 
the guilty party that Cissy imagined a discovered man 
should.

"Oh! That's just fine, that is!" exclaimed Peggy, who knelt 
up on the sheets, naked and sweating, her hair shaken loose 
and an aggrieved expression on her face. "So, whatever 
your husband and I would like to do, whether we've already 
began or not, whether we are right in the middle of what 
we are doing, being passionate and everything, all that is 
irrelevant to you!"

"Well, yes it is, Mrs Roth!" Cissy replied. "And if you don't 
mind I would much prefer it if you left my house now. I 
don't want to see you near my husband ever again!"

"Well, Mrs Fox! I can see that I'm no longer welcome. 
Though it is obvious to me that had you not come home I 
could still be having a very pleasant time with your 
husband."

With that, Peggy gathered her clothes, put them on angrily, 
and strode out of the house. Cissy remained with her 
husband who now looked more frightened than he 
probably ever did in the war in Europe, even in that battle 
for which he was most highly commended.

It was not for several days, perhaps more than a week, until 
Cissy would again allow her husband to share the marital 
bed. And even then, she was reluctant to express anything 
to Ken that might suggest that she had pardoned him for 
his role in committing adultery, which a woman who loved 
him less and was altogether less forgiving would never 
have contemplated.

But was her forgiveness expressed too soon? Although 
Cissy no longer acknowledged her neighbour, she assumed 
this lapse of behaviour was just an aberration and she felt 
quite sorry for Mr Roth who appeared altogether oblivious 
to his wife's gross infidelity. 

And then one afternoon, after a tiring morning in the clinic, 
neatly folding her nurse's uniform ready to place on a 
hanger in the wardrobe, she heard the tinkle of the door-
bell. Cissy hurriedly slipped on a dress and shoes, and 
scampered down the stairs to the porch where she saw not 
only Aaron Roth, but also his wife, Peggy. What could this 
be about? Perhaps Mr Roth had discovered his wife's 
unfaithfulness and wished to discuss it further with the 
other wronged party.

"I hope you don't mind the two of us visiting, Mrs Fox," 
Aaron said, when Cissy had opened the door, anxious that 
her dress didn't look too much like it had been pulled on in 
a hurry. "But Peggy told me that you would probably not 
welcome her if she came by herself."

"After the way you spoke to me last time," Peggy said with 
a conciliatory smile, "and the way you've not said anything 
to me since, I thought it best I asked my husband to 
accompany me."

"I see," remarked Cissy, who hadn't forgiven Peggy one 
iota. Indeed, the enormity of the event had become even 
greater in her mind. How could the slut even dare to walk 
up the front walk? "I dare say you haven't forgotten the 
circumstances in which we last met."

"You must confess you were totally unreasonable," Peggy 
remarked.

As Cissy spluttered, unsure of how to respond to this fresh 
effrontery, Aaron put a calming hand on his wife's bare 
shoulder. "You must forgive my wife. Peggy's never really 
understood other folks' views on matters of neighbourly 
affection. We hope you can overcome your petulance and 
accept Peggy's difference of opinion. However, what we've 
come to do is return your husband's watch which he left 
behind when he last visited."

"Ken's watch?" wondered Cissy, taking into her hand the 
quite valuable pocket watch Aaron proffered her. This was 
the very one that was engraved with that declaration of 
love and fidelity that Ken had said on many occasions, 
through all the trials of war, was all between him and 
despair in the darkest early days of the Normandy landings. 
"How did he come to leave it with you? What was he doing 
that he could have lost it?"

Peggy smiled, with Aaron's affectionate arm around her 
waist. "Oh, you know, Cissy. The normal...."

"The what?" asked a suddenly irate Cissy.

"You know, what two people do together when they enjoy 
the pleasure of their mutual company," Peggy continued.

Cissy leaned back against the door jamb. There was Peggy, 
with her husband clearly totally unperturbed, his arm still 
around her waist and his grin if anything more affectionate 
and broad. This needed clarification. Surely, she had 
misheard things.

"Are you saying that in your home, you and my 
husband...?"

"Well, you did say that I should never enter your house 
again!"

"That's not the point!"

"Don't be angry, Mrs Fox," Aaron remarked kindly. "Peggy 
is very clean. She has regular check-ups and I can assure 
you that if there was the slightest risk of an infection..."

"Infection! My husband!"

Cissy felt a rumbling stir within her breast and thunder 
inside her.

"No one could ask for a better lover than your husband, 
Mrs Fox," said Peggy, as if the confession of intimate 
knowledge of this fact would somehow lessen the pain and 
anger that Cissy felt.

"Leave now! Just go away! Leave!" yelled Cissy, angrily 
slamming the door in front of her as she backed into her 
house.

And then she collapsed onto the floor, the door closed 
behind her, the view ahead of her being the hallway and the 
staircase leading to the bedroom, and burst into angry and 
loud sobs. Her chest heaved up and down with humiliation 
and disgust, while she clasped the pocket watch in her 
hands on her lap. Her eyes returned again and again to the 
words engraved there. It had been chosen with so much 
love in those days just before her hastily married husband 
climbed up that long narrow ramp onto the troop-carrier 
that she hoped, with so much fervour that it hurt, would not 
be victim to a torpedo from one of Hitler's U-boats. 

The happiness on Ken's face when he returned home, 
bearing a record by Dizzy Gillespie that he'd managed to 
buy at the drug store, was soon dispelled when Cissy 
confronted him with the news of her latest revelation of his 
deceit. 

Ken was once again a stranger to the connubial bed, his 
sleeping head once more pressed against the sofa arm. He 
was again denied any semblance of civilised conversation 
with the wife who presented him with the watch whose 
loss he'd assumed had taken place in the Hospital surgery.

It was then, of course, that Cissy first raised the subject of 
the two of them leaving their new home, simply to get 
away from the neighbours. This was not, as they once 
feared, as a consequence of the racial prejudice that they 
had experienced in so many small and slighting ways, but 
from a greater degree of affection between the races than 
the Lord Jesus had ever intended when he bade his children 
to love one another.

The issue of the sometimes bitter, and always protracted, 
arguments between husband and wife was not resolved. 
Despite her anger at the Roths, Cissy quite liked her new 
home and the amenities in this pleasant part of town. And 
Ken, himself, promised that all that which had happened 
between him and Peggy was over. He assured Cissy that he 
had been taken in, seduced, in fact, by the promise of easy 
love that the Roths offered. Their attitudes toward free love 
and extramarital sex were indeed very exciting and very 
tempting. Could Cissy blame him, a man who had seen so 
much horror in the battlefields of Europe and had seen the 
German women selling themselves so cheap?

"Do not pursue this discussion one word further!" Cissy 
warned her husband. "The war is over. Mr and Mrs Roth 
are perverts. What they do is their business. We are God-
fearing folk and we do not, repeat, do not behave that way 
ourselves!"

Were that always so true! The final straw, which led to the 
realtor being summoned, the sales board being erected and 
Ken being banished from the family home until the 
property was sold, occurred not long after. 

Naturally, Cissy no longer trusted her husband. Who 
would? Her husband, like all men, was a weak creature, 
easily misled by a Jewish temptress, like Peggy Roth. In 
her darker moments Cissy almost wished she had been 
turned into soap like the other unfortunates in the Polish 
concentration camps, the horror of which was still in the 
newspapers. 

It was a day when she knew that her husband believed for 
sure that she was working in the clinic, it being a Tuesday, 
one of the busier days. He should be at home, after a long 
shift in the Hospital, recovering after all those operations 
he'd performed, some of which on victims of war on whom 
only now was it necessary to perform the life-saving 
surgery. On this day, little Eleanor safely deposited in the 
nursery, Cissy made her way home, deliberately choosing 
to come in through the back yard gate. 

It was as she feared, after she pushed open the kitchen 
door, quietly and sneakily. Her husband was not in. He was 
not lying in bed, recovering from the lack of sleep, brought 
about by having to make do on the uncomfortable couch. 
He was not in the living room, playing those Charlie Parker 
or Louis Armstrong records on the new electric 
gramophone he'd bought with such pride. He was not in the 
kitchen, fixing himself a peanut butter sandwich.

So, if he wasn't home, where was he?

Cissy knew, of course. 

Her anger exceeded the limits of her politeness and the 
constraints of neighbourly propriety. She strode over the 
low picket fence that divided the Roths' lawn from their 
own, and headed not to the front door, where she might be 
confronted only by excuses, but to the kitchen door, which 
like her own, was open to the back yard. She eased the 
door open, needing only to be concerned about whether it 
should need oiling, rather than whether it should be locked. 

She stood in the Roths' kitchen, her heart thumping in 
excited anger, as she breathed in deep in an attempt to calm 
herself.

She knew what needed to be done. She could quite 
distinctly hear the sounds of lovemaking from where she 
was. And although she'd only ever once before heard the 
sound of a mature couple fucking (and such despicable 
behaviour didn't deserve a more polite term), so often had 
she rehearsed that first discovery in her memory that there 
was no mistaking it now for something else.

She made her way stealthily up the carpeted staircase, each 
tread taking her closer to the grunts and cries and gasps 
that indicated that sexual intercourse was proceeding in the 
upstairs bedroom. 

She placed her hand on the handle to the bedroom door. 

She hesitated whether she should lower it and enter the 
room. After all, it was possible that it was just Peggy with 
her husband, Aaron. However much she despised the two 
of them for their bestial behaviour and their lack of respect 
for Christian values, it would be a humiliation too far for 
her to discover not her husband in embarrassing 
circumstances, but instead Peggy and Aaron Roth 
indulging in what was wholly permissible after they had 
exchanged their marriage vows.

When she heard an unfamiliar male grunt, that had that 
slightly nasal sound she associated with Aaron and his 
Brooklyn Jewish accent, Cissy was on the verge of 
retreating. And then she heard the grunts of a man's voice, 
which even though it wasn't in the usual close proximity 
that Cissy normally heard, was undeniably that of her 
husband.

Cissy pushed open the door, her entry speech prepared and 
ready to fire.

"And so this is the faithfulness you promised me so many 
times?" Cissy began, her voice at first high and assertive, 
and then fading to nothing as the true horror of what she 
was witnessing became clear.

Yes. There was Peggy. And yes, there was Ken, as Cissy 
had guessed, his penis deep inside her. But not inside her 
vagina, but within the other hole, the orifice designed not 
to receive but only to give, and only what had previously 
been eaten. 

And also, which shocked her even more, beneath Peggy's 
outstretched arms, and the crouched body that was being 
buggered so vigorously by Ken, was the form of Aaron, 
hairy chest and equally erect penis, deep inside Peggy's 
vagina. 

And as if the three of them were not enough, there was a 
girl, perhaps only a teenager, whose mouth was on Ken's 
mouth and whose hands were stroking Peggy's nipples with 
a lasciviousness that no woman should feel for another 
woman.

Although outnumbered, Cissy pushed apart the fucking 
couples, enduring the indignation from Aaron, Peggy and, 
most of all, this other girl, who was more concerned that 
she be paid for the services she provided. She pushed her 
husband as hastily as she could out of the bedroom, 
allowing him only the time to grab his clothes, which she 
only let him put on again once they were well clear.

"Have you no idea how very rude you are, Mrs Fox!" 
Peggy shouted down the staircase at the retreating couple. 
"How would you like to have a cock pulled out your ass 
like that?"

"I expected to be paid for a double fuck and a double fuck 
is what I'll be paid for, whether I get it or not!" shouted the 
girl, standing naked at the top of the stairs, except for a 
white bra that covered her small breasts.

"Mrs Fox! Could you not at least wait until we had 
finished?" pleaded Mr Roth, whose arm was around this 
strange girl, and which intimacy went wholly unremarked 
by his wife.

And so that was that! Cissy couldn't trust her husband to be 
within sight of the Roths. From now on, his every 
movement was suspect and Cissy ensured that there was a 
telephone in the doctor's surgery where he now slept on a 
camp bed purchased precisely for that purpose. And Cissy 
made sure that she telephoned her husband as often as she 
could to check that he hadn't yet again chosen to run back 
into the arms of that slutty Peggy Roth.

And as Cissy eased close the front door behind her, she 
sighed as she surveyed the house that once she'd loved so 
much but now hated so deeply. 

And then the telephone rang.

Cissy jumped up. It was what she lived for now. It was 
either her husband, once again meekly and sorrowfully 
attempting to make good a hurt that only the patience of 
the Lord could make better. Or, and this she hoped for 
more, a realtor with the promise of a showing.












