That first reaction, however, was almost immediately lost in a
deeper sensation. Richard will swear today it was the same as if the
night with its light, its weaving voice in the pine trees, its
smells, and its seeming stillness was remonstrating with him and
saying: “I am only secret. Not threat. I don’t hurt. I reveal. Do
not repel me.”
He dropped the whistle from his mouth and sat down on the slope,
overwhelmed with one idea that kept drumming quietly at him in words
that sounded like his own: “I have yielded. I am going against my
training. But I want ... I have yielded . . . against my training .
. .” About this time he felt surrounded by shapes and presences
which had lain hidden or dormant up to this point. He was sure they
were there, although he could not see them. Fear was gone. Only
perplexity remained. The wind in the pines and the light on the
water were part and parcel of those presences.
But there was
something else he could not recognize, could only accept or struggle
to reject. Something spoke in the wind and shone in the light. All
together, these mysterious things wove a web around his perplexity,
washing it in a strange grace and, at the same time, softening some
part inside him, some part of him that was supposed to be hard and
insoluble, but that now was becoming soft, supple, diffuse, flowing
into some mystery. He remembers murmuring again and again: “I have
yielded ... I want to ... against my training . . .”
Then, even in the darkness, he began to notice details: the variant
colors of rocks around him, different kinds of ruffles on the water,
various shades to the trees, successive notes in the wind. And, in
flashes of memory, was back in the past: on the edge of the woods in
St. Joseph, listening to his sisters and his mother chatter and
talk, watching his father dancing with his mother at a family
celebration the previous winter, holding the hand of a high-school
girlfriend as they walked home from the cinema.
And, as that deep core of him melted, he heard his father’s voice in
a frequent phrase used to his sons, “Chin up, young man!” dying away
into repulsive jumble, “We men must be strong. Chin up chin up young
man chin man strong chin up man . . .”
He felt his body shudder as if shaking off scales or armor. It did
not go limp or cling to the ground. Rather, it was now a supple
continuation of ground, light, the voice of the wind, the silver of
the moon, the silence. His body seemed to hold the possibility of
all natural things at once. He knew it was incredible. There was one
last, clutching moment when something in him warned with a sharp
voice.
But, after an instant’s inner pause, he appeared to himself to let
go, willingly to accept, and to do so in almost poetic language: “I
don’t know you. I want what you are. I want to be in that mystery. I
don’t want a man’s hardness and strength. I want your wholeness.” He
actually spoke the words. They tumbled out half-whispered,
incredulous-for his brain kept telling him he was alone at night on
the mountainside. But something more powerful, not in his brain,
kept enticing him. He responded: “I want to be a woman . . . yes ...
man woman.” He did not know the sense of what he was saying, but he
kept saying it. And everything that night responded to him in
turn-infallibly, it seemed to him-and said: “You will be. You can
be. You will be. Secret. Strong. Mystery. Open. You will be. You can
be. Woman. Man. Soft. Hard. All. You will be. You can be.”
He lost track of time. He lit no fire. He did not budge from where
he sat. The moon
rose and set. The wind waxed and waned. There were occasional cries
from night
owls, and once or twice the scream of a bird surprised by some night
killer. Richard’s memory recorded all this indirectly. Filling those
hours was something else: the voice or the sensation of a voice
which soared and sank in a melody of notes.
Richard now underlines two things in his memory of that song. It had
no particular rhythm, no detectable beat. It seemed to be fully and
completely, but only, melody. More significantly, it told him
nothing new or shocking or awesomely strange-he seemed to himself to
have had all its notes already recorded in him; but now they were
evoked as echoes to the melody. And, as they resonated, they
delineated a quality or condition in which he always was but had
never realized, much less ever expressed it in his taste, walk,
glance, in the corners of his words where meaning’s shadow hid, or
even in his perception of the world around him.
But no longer now was knowledge a thrust outward to grasp an
objective, to obtain an exact pinpointing with the lens of
logic-“fixing the cross-hairs on it,” as his shooting-enthusiast
father used to put it. In that melodized condition, all objectives
were received within a delicate maze of sensibilities, emotions,
reactions, intuitions. And, over all, a sense of sacrament, of pact
with what made water and earth and air simultaneously strong and
tender, soft and unyielding, masculine and feminine. For this sense
of the possibilities of all natural things at once, in one
condition, was an inner persuasion now. And he felt a light-footed,
almost unstable touching on all things, with strength that was
gentle, with firmness but no pride, with definitive choice but no
violence.
On and on that melody went throughout the night, until at sunrise
his classmates and Captain Nicholas found him sitting on the slope,
fresh-faced, smiling, a little dreamy, but fully awake.
Only Captain Nicholas noticed the change in Richard: the peculiar
haze at the back of his eyes and the way he turned his head to greet
them as they approached him. After the first bantering, as they were
all clambering down the slope toward the camp for breakfast, the
captain drew abreast of Richard and said: “You okay, kid?” When
Richard turned his head to the ranger, the haze Captain Nicholas had
caught in his eyes before was gone, just as if Richard had pulled
veils down closing off his inner state. His answer was normal: “I
had a ball. Did I do okay?”
A week later the vacation was over. The entire party left the
mountains in the late afternoon, climbed down the slopes, and walked
to the forest ranger’s wayside post where they had left their
station wagon. After an hour’s ride, they arrived at the ranch
house, where Captain Nicholas’ wife and daughter, Moira, greeted
them. They were all tired; and after dinner all went to bed.
Richard, however, did not sleep very much. From the moment he met
Moira, he had a renewal of his recent experience on the
mountainside.
Fresh from that experience and still full of the pact he had made
with the air and the
water and the earth-the ecstasy of it all was quite vividly present
to him for weeks
after-Moira seemed to Richard to be a walking, breathing embodiment
of a secret
figure he carried in his memory. She seemed an answer to his prayer
uttered on the
mountainside, and the model he had felt promised him in the shadow
of that slope. He
saw the unconscious gravity of her head, the light strength of her
figure as the light
strength of that figure he had felt beside him on the mountainside
that memorable
night; the gentle swaying of her walk as an expression of its
freedom.
And all the
details of her appearance and person were a revelation of what he
desired to have
most: the husky tones of her voice together with the natural grace
of her hand
movements, the sense of privileged look her eyes carried, at least
for him, and the soft
bed of feeling that he knew cushioned her laughter and made it
utterly different from the loud laughter of his companions.
Some of the other boys had noticed his fascinated look on the
evening of their arrival at the ranch, and he became the immediate
butt of their banter. “Richard wants to make her! Richard has the
hots! Richard wants to lay her!” He took it all in good part, even
when one of them seriously offered to “fix him up” with Moira.
Moira herself recalls being quite aware of the joke during that
evening. At first, she had the usual reactions, half-amused,
half-embarrassed. And she probably would never have been of any help
to Richard if she had not taken the initiative. It was in the
morning before their departure. Richard came down early to find
Moira preparing for breakfast.
From the beginning Moira quickly sensed that this was not just
another young man flirting with her. Nor did he act shyly. Beyond a
cheerful “Hi, good-mornin’,” he said little in the beginning, but
started automatically to help her in the breakfast preparations. But
she had a strange conviction that she and he had an unconscious
agreement or bond. The feeling was disturbing at first; then it
became a surprising pleasure.
As they worked she asked if he had any sisters.
“Three.” His expression was blank, neither pleasured nor disdainful.
They busied themselves setting the table. He glanced at her once or
twice. Then: “The trip was fantastic. Ever been out there?” She
shook her head, waiting for the usual litany of events, feats of
male endurance and strength. But Richard continued: “I found what I
want to be out there.”
She asked if he wanted to be a forest ranger. “No! No!” Richard
answered. He had found out, he explained, what sort of person he
wanted to be. He looked up at her, his eyes shining. Moira braced
herself for some protestation of eternal love and irresistible
attraction. But Richard, eyes still shining, said only: “On the
level, Moira, I want to be like you.”
Moira’s first impulse was to burst out laughing, make a wisecrack,
and carry on. But something stirred within her cautioning her. She
turned away quickly to the stove, disturbed, a little frightened. He
worked on, talking all the while.
He said he knew he sounded funny, but he meant what he was saying;
it was hard to explain, but he wanted to tell her. She tried to
interrupt, but his voice cut across hers hard, almost in reproach.
She looked around at him. His eyes were filled with tears. He still
had the shining look, but a strange expression of an apologetic
grimace touched his mouth fleetingly. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to shout.”
“You weren’t shouting. I just opened my big mouth.” She followed his
glance out the wide floor-to-ceiling windows of the kitchen. The
mountains covered with forests crouched out there, their distance
foreshortened in the morning haze; they looked as if the boy and
girl in the kitchen could touch them with outstretched hands.
“Whatever it was, Richard, it was very beautiful,” she said to break
the tension of the silence. “I hope you get what you want. It. must
be very beautiful.”
“You know, then. You know.” He was excited and boyish, still looking
out. “I will get it. For sure, now.”
Moira had no clear idea of what he was thinking. Since her early
teenage she had been
used to boys of various types for which she had her own names-the
“brawns (athletes,
outdoor types), the “softies” (nice but weak), the “teddy bears”
(effeminate), the
“profs” (studious, serious). They all talked about themselves and
nearly always in
terms of achievement in school, in business, in sport, or with other
girls. She was sure
now that Richard fitted into none of her categories. The caution
about him she had felt
earlier in the conversation had given away now to a sensation of
fragility in him matching her own. She felt that he knew-even if he
did not possess the instinct for-that detailed intimacy so
characteristically feminine and the real bond between all women as
compared to and distinct from men.
Richard talked on happily while they finished the breakfast
preparations. He spoke of feelings and tastes, of touching trees,
leaves, grass, flowers, of the smell in the air, of the wind, of the
silence, and of his desire to be as “inside” himself as she was and
as independent as his father was. It was a staccato speech,
punctuated with pauses, over forks and spoons and glasses, running
on pleasantly and softly. Just before the first pair of legs bounded
down the stairs, he paused; and she, looking him straight in the
eye, said: “Richard, shouldn’t you ask someone . . . ?”
“No one of them will understand. You know that,” he answered
immediately but not abruptly. “Don’t worry. I have plenty of advice.
From the right ones. When they’re finished, I’ll know how to feel
things, to be really boy and girl. All in one.”
Moira remembers protesting with all the earnestness she could
convey and trying to tell Richard that his “plan” sounded like the
hardest and maddest thing in the world.
“No!” Once again his tone had changed to a rough note. She caught a
glint at the back of his eyes which recalled her dim memory of an
Alsatian baring his teeth and growling at her long ago when she was
three. Now she was afraid. He told her abrasively: “Only a few can
get it.” He was smiling, but she did not like the smile. “That’s the
name of the game,” he remarked some moments later.
Moira thought that he was going to continue talking. But at that
moment the kitchen was invaded by seven other young men, loud,
laughing, joking, looking for breakfast, and loosening the spell of
a situation that had become uncomfortable and eerie for her. Moira
saw the veils closing over Richard’s eyes. He became once more the
easy, good-natured, smiling companion she had seen entering the
house the day before.
Back home in Detroit a few days later, and into the school year,
Richard continued to live in the memories of his vacation. Without
knowing it, he was probing deep into one of the most mysterious
elements of human personality: gender. In retrospect we can see how
the peculiarities of his personal makeup were responsible in some
degree for his later development. They do not, however, explain in
any way the onset of possession.
After one more year in high school, Richard went on to college.
During his first year there, both his older brothers got married.
His three sisters had already left home and were married. Although
he spent a lot of time comparing himself to them, Richard never
really knew them. He never engaged in any deep conversations with
his sisters, and he did not get any clear feeling for their points
of view where they differed from his.
He majored in mathematics, taking English literature and French as
extra credits. He corresponded regularly with Moira in Colorado, and
with time a deep friendship sprang up between them. Sometimes he
spent vacations with her and her family; sometimes Moira came to
Detroit and spent time with Richard’s family. Moira was studying
English literature and journalism at the University of Denver. She
intended to enter the field of publishing.
Toward the end of his second year, he had a conversation with his
father, who was
taken aback to find his son spouting what seemed to him to be very
advanced and
unorthodox ideas about sexuality. Richard had read all of D. H.
Lawrence, Virginia
Woolf’s Orlando, George Sand’s Indiana, and a host of other books
his father had
never I heard of. He could quote anthropologists and social
scientists in support of his views about matriarchy and woman’s
superior power and status.
His father consulted the rabbi of the local synagogue. And, during
the following Easter vacation, Richard and his father went to see
the rabbi. The rabbi found Richard quite sensible and his views
reasonable. He pointed out to Richard and his father that the
original Hebrew in the Bible does not say God created Eve, the first
woman, from a rib of Adam. The word used at this place in the Bible
means 1 “one of two matching panels.” He further pointed out that
this Bible | account is essentially androgynous. “So man and woman
are equal halves of the same entity,” concluded the rabbi, “but
woman is most like God because she has the womb of creation in her.”
It was all very confusing for Richard’s father. But Richard found in
it a fresh impetus 1 for his dreams of femaleness.
Toward the end of his last year in college, Richard spoke to his
father about a job in the insurance office. He had no particular
desire to specialize in any subject. Medicine and law did not
interest him. What Richard was really looking for was a situation in
which he could achieve his dream.
In early June 1961, at the age of twenty-one, Richard took up daily
work at his father’s insurance office. He proved a very willing
apprentice. He was conscientious, took instructions, worked long
hours, willingly gave up weekends to work on difficult claims, and
studied law at night. His father was very proud of his decision and
his performance. His mother loved having one son still at home.
In his free time Richard continued reading. He spent long hours
walking by himself. Since he was out of college and no longer forced
to take part in group activities, he began to elaborate his ideal.
He had one constantly recurring dream day and night. Once and for
all, he fancied, everybody knew he was woman and man all in one. It
was public knowledge, he dreamed, and accepted joyfully and
admiringly by everyone. He wore either male or female clothes,
according to the ebb and flow of his sexuality. His skin was either
smooth or hard, his voice metallic and masculine or husky and deep,
his hair long or short, his mind logical and rationalizing or
intuitive and feeling, his breasts round and full with marked
nipples or flat and formless, his genitals male or female. But he
was chiefly female and feminine-with a very marked peculiarity.
In his dream he had, as a man, attracted a beautiful woman who
possessed his own female face and body. She was he in female form.
When they made love together, he was not merely a male entering a
female. He was a female taking a male into her secret mystery. He
not only had the male sense of arrival and expansion. He had the
female sense of falling through the velvet veils of that mystery
where wreaths of creation and shaping forms of arcane worlds wove
around him with soft murmurs of love.
Sometimes in his dreams, all this took place at home in Detroit,
sometimes at the lakeside in the Colorado mountains, sometimes in
exotic lands. But most often the entire scene was played out in a
small house surrounded by trees and standing on the edge of water.
Wherever he traveled for the company, Richard began to keep his eyes
open: perhaps, he would find a house similar to the one in his
dreams.
His relationship with Moira now became something more than close
friendship.
Moira, in Richard’s eyes, was still the woman of his Colorado
experience and he felt
she could be part of his continuing dream of perfect man-woman love.
And Moira
was in love with Richard. It seemed perfect-on the outside.
Gradually it became a
mutual assumption that they were engaged and that they would
eventually get
married. In Moira’s mind this would take place when Richard got a
promotion in his company. In Richard’s mind it could only take place
when he found his dream house.
In mid-1963, Richard’s company sent him to Tanglewood in eastern
Illinois as a temporary substitute for a sick member of the local
office. In Tanglewood, Richard found several advantages. His new
boss liked him very much. It was a far cry from the urban ills of
midtown Detroit. His new post was in effect a promotion. The
Tanglewood office was just beginning to expand, and Richard could be
in on the ground floor of the company’s ambitious programs.
Chiefly, however, Richard found what he knew was the nearest
approach to the house of his dreams. It was called Lake House:
single-storied, standing on three acres of land, with sliding glass
panels in the back giving on to a large pond. The original owners,
back in the late nineteenth century, had covered the three acres
with trees, chestnut, sycamore, pine, elm, birch, oak. On his first
visit to inspect it, Richard heard the wind in the trees by the
water’s edge. He knew this was his house. And it was for lease.
By that autumn, he had moved into Lake House. With the
recommendation of his new boss, he obtained a permanent transfer to
Tanglewood. Then he wrote triumphantly to Moira asking her to marry
him. She answered immediately by telegram.
They were married in Tanglewood on June 21, 1964. They decided not
to go away for their honeymoon, but to spend it at home in Lake
House. By their own choice, also, they arrived there alone in the
evening of that day. All seemed perfect. The weather had a gentle
balm to it all day; the sun was warm, but a light wind sang in the
trees keeping everything cool and clean. “Our house is clean, not
pots-and-pans clean,” said Moira misquoting F. Scott Fitzgerald,
“but windswept clean!”
In all the years of their friendship and engagement, they had never
gone beyond a very occasional kiss of passion. Again, as with many
other aspects of their relationship, each had assumed that the other
wished it that way. Their first evening and night together as
married people was something Richard had lived again and again in
his dreams. It proved a total disaster, however, and not because
they both were virgins, but on account of Richard’s strange behavior
and Moira’s reactions.
They had taken hours in going to bed, strolling down by the water
and through the trees, chatting on the porch, and gazing quietly at
the night all around them.
Eventually they were side by side. Moira’s mind and body, by that
time, were totally attuned to Richard’s movements, the warmth of his
body, the smell of it, the urgency he felt. She glanced at his face,
her eyes full of invitation, Richard was lying on his back, his face
turned toward the open glass panels. He seemed to be listening to
the night sounds outside around the pond-the wind in the trees, the
ruffling of the water, the owls hooting.
Then he turned his head toward her: “Now, darling,” he said,
strangely quiet, “now Lake House is full of them. I am all of me
tonight.”
Moira did not understand. She didn’t care. He was already kissing
and caressing her, entering her. And, eyes closed, her hands all
over him, she started for the first time to feel the urging climb of
ecstasy in loving.
Then she heard his voice-this time with a note of stridency- saying:
“Open your eyes!
Look at me!”
The sight of his face froze every muscle in Moira’s body. It was
like a flat, featureless surface without a line. There was no
expression on it.
His mouth was closed. His eyes were open, but, unblinking and still,
they were mere sightless hollows glazed over with a dead patina.
“You’re not seeing me, Richard,” she said weakly.
But his body had become enormously heavy; she could breathe only
with difficulty.
She felt a sudden shooting contraction in her belly and groin. A
sweat of pain broke out all over her body like a thin film.
“Richard!” she tried to call out.
Richard was not with her. From the moment he turned back from the
window, he had seen no one but his female self. When he entered
Moira, a storm was on him over which he had no control. It was
carrying him, petrified by increasing longing and intensifying
loathing at one and the same time, at a speed which ruled out any
resistance on his part. Longing and loathing were becoming so
intertwined that the more repulsion he felt, the more readily he
gave in to longing. But this only brought on increased loathing, so
that longing and loathing became one. And both were coming from
inside himself. He was their source. The higher he went on that
first level of ecstasy, the lower he went on that second level of
disgust.
All Richard could see was that beautiful face of his female self
flung back in an effort to match his passion. At the same time he
began to feel her hands on him as claws scraping his back and
buttocks, first lightly, then with increasing pressure and tearing
his skin. When she opened her eyes, their deep blue was swimming
with feeling. Then they narrowed and glinted with a beige glow that
reminded him of pigs’ eyes, but his fascination with all this only
swelled.
“You’re not seeing me, Richard!” he heard his female self saying.
“Look at me! Look at me!”
He groped with his body for her inner mystery, trying to explore
every curve and cranny of her vagina. And, as he did, he felt in
himself the rocking motion of something hard and angular. He heard
the voice: “Let me take you, secret and all, mystery and all,
Richard”-he could not know if it was his own voice or another’s-“I’m
your fucker . . . your fucker. Let me!” The voice died away again to
a heavy, labored breathing that rose and fell with increasing gusts.
It seemed to be acquiring a voiced character, a sound produced in a
spittle-filled throat, wheezing, grunting, blowing, inhaling.
Now his longing and loathing were reaching a climax. There was no
ejaculation. Rather he swelled and grew bigger and swelled with
desire until he felt his middle opening up; and, with a loathing
that held him hypnotized, he knew that an alien body was pouring
fluid through him, hot, sticky, scorching. Loving and disgust became
one. He started to thrash and flail.
By this time, Moira was screaming with fear as his terrible weight
pressed down on her. She began to choke on the scream. Suddenly, he
was off her. Her voice trailed away.
Richard was over by the far wall, a letter opener in his hand. He
was standing with his back to her, tearing and gouging at the wall
with wide sweeps of his hand, scraping paper and plaster on to the
floor, while he hammered the wall with a clenched fist. A muffled
groan rising and falling was all she heard from him.
His back, buttocks, and legs were a field of criss-crossing welts,
scrapes, and lesions oozing with little pinpoints of blood at
various places.
By now, Moira was afraid for her life. Without hesitation, she was
out of bed and running through the door. She grabbed her coat and
the car keys, flung the hall door open, and made for the car.
“Moira!” she heard him shout brokenly. “Come back! Moira, don’t go.
Help me! Come back!” But by then she was halfway down the drive. She
found her parents asleep in their hotel room. She never returned to
Lake House or to Richard. Two years later she obtained a divorce
from him.
Richard’s dream was shattered. But there was something else in its
place. He knew now that he had something new in him, something
alive, something alien to him, but now his familiar and cohabitant.
He spent the two weeks of what would have been his honeymoon inside
Lake House, rarely eating, refusing all callers, never answering the
telephone. Gradually he returned to normal life. He was back at work
in the office on the appointed day.
Outside office hours and activity, unless he was traveling, Richard
stayed at Lake House. He never received visitors. Even when his
family came to see him, they stayed in one of Tanglewood’s hotels.
Lake House was his refuge and his castle. On weekends he lay in bed
in the morning waiting for sunrise. Regularly, as the first streaks
of gray light appeared, the birds started to sing in the trees.
First one here and there, then another one or two, then two or three
together, until the house and garden were filled with the dawn
chorus of thrushes, finches, robins, wrens, starlings.
At night and at any time possible he listened to the wind singing in
the trees. It still brought tears to his eyes. And always he
strained to remember the voice behind the wind and to capture its
message and the identity of the messenger. His outlook was still
filled with the mystery and power of femaleness. And, he was sure,
the wind spoke of this and the birds sang of it.
Richard was now in the second stage of his development. His old idea
of an androgynous self had melted. On his trips for the company
business, he spent time regularly with prostitutes, and occasionally
had relations with female clients and office personnel. He repelled
any homosexual advances.
He admitted to himself after a while that in all these sexual
encounters it was not a genuinely male sexual desire that impelled
him. It was rather a jealous curiosity about the female and the
feminine. He was always watching on the sidelines. No woman ever
came back to him a second time. And more than one prostitute
remarked as she left him: “You’re freaky.”
He once invited a woman to Lake House because he wished to have
relations with her while listening to the wind. Everything went well
for a while, but something frightened her, and she fled from him as
precipitately as Moira had.
It was frustrating for him. He could only speculate about the female
ecstasy and experience. He noticed that some women, in having
intercourse, moaned in a dying fashion, turning their heads as if to
avoid blows or to catch a mouthful of air. And he wondered what sort
of lovely death that could be under the knife of female pleasure and
secret power, and what sort of enshrined mystery a woman possessed
that enabled her to live and die all over again the next time. For
that was how he thought of it.
But, in the meantime, his own identity-sexual and otherwise-
underwent an eclipse. For three years he never listened to or looked
at another human being. He merely heard and saw them. He lost,
therefore, any grasp on his own identity. He had no clear perception
of who he was, what he was about, where he was going, where he came
from. The pattern of his identity was in disarray: an essential
piece had been withdrawn invisibly but with shocking results. All
the earlier personal lines, geometrically clear and personally
pleasing, had melted into a criss-crossed haze. The fine tones and
delicate shades of taste and distaste, like and dislike, attraction
and repulsion lost stability and definition. All were now clouds and
swirls of the unknown and the unpredictable. The various gears of
his inner mechanism in mind, will, memory, brain, heart, gut
feelings were working at cross-purposes.
He stood helplessly hip deep in the running streams of impulses
where before a sharp instinct or a brilliant perception had teamed
with a never-failing voice in his heart.
The self he originally proposed to free and ennoble had become
indeterminate; it was
colored by any element injected into him. He was a cracked bell
jangling to the blow of any hammer. He was a bag of emptiness
blowing and puffing on insubstantial air. Living now in an inner
uncertainty of selfhood that nothing could dispel, he had become the
reality of his former nightmare: a nonperson for himself. What he
had cherished as a dream of happiness had become in reality an empty
void.
And this was not all. He found out on one particular occasion that
already within him there were impulses he could no longer govern,
and that these impulses seemed to arise from his original ambition
to enjoy both masculine and feminine qualities. On that occasion he
recognized the big change in himself. It was around the middle of
December 1968. He was on the road for his company. The weather was
very bad:
snow, sleet, strong winds, gale warnings. On his last evening in the
city he was visiting, he was walking home from a late meeting with a
client. It was around midnight. No one was out at that hour in such
wintry weather. Richard walked because the wind, his wind, was
blowing with a high-pitched sound-almost a warning, but still
enticing.
The way to his hotel led him past rows of detached houses. About
half a mile from the hotel, he heard a moaning sound from some
bushes and trees that stood in a deserted area between two houses.
He stopped and looked around. There was no one in sight. Most of the
nearby houses were dark, their owners probably asleep or absent.
Richard followed the direction of the moaning. Behind the bushes he
came across a spread-eagled form. It was a young black girl. She had
been raped and stabbed. She was practically naked; her clothes had
been torn off her. Between her legs and at her shoulder blood
stained the snow in small, dark patches.
Richard was fascinated. He watched her for a while. Then he lifted
his head and listened to the wind, feeling its fingers brushing and
striking his face. He crept forward, keeping his head down against
the wind, then stopped and watched her more closely. The girl was
still moaning; her head twitched now and then.
Richard remembers very little else. He recalls tearing off his own
clothes feverishly (he was afraid she might die before he finished
what he wished to do). He talks almost tearfully now of feeling an
irresistible desire to have relations with her then and there. He
recalls the wind whistling music in his ears and then, marvelously,
changing that music to words. He remembers catching the last glance
of the girl who stared at him for one instant before her eyes went
completely dead. He felt her body shudder.
Then apparently he stood up in a frenzy of triumph-he had achieved
the ultimate watch on woman, he felt. He was seized by a great
giddiness as the wind whipped around him. And now, for the first
time, he sensed clearly that all his thinking and willing and
feeling and imagining led like so many strings back to some central
point in him where they lay in the hand of another, who controlled
them and him. He felt the security of being controlled and the
promise of success: “You shall be as woman!”
Afterward, when he reflected coolly on the incident, he realized
that even in her death throes that woman had shown him the power of
the feminine; his sexual relations with her had been a revelation
for him. He knew that a decision had been made for him. He did not,
as yet, guess from where that decision had come. But he did know
what he had to do.
In the new year Richard went to New York. In previous years he had
read extensively
about transsexuals and the new transsexualizing operation. He now
put himself under
the care and supervision of a doctor who assured him that within 16
to 20 months, if
all went well with the tests and preparations, he could have the
operation, remove all
trace of his male inadequacy-this was how Richard looked at his
genitals-and acquire
the organs of a woman. In late 1970, after passing successfully
through the psychiatric
examinations, and the necessary changes in the chemistry of his body
having been produced by repeated treatments, Richard underwent
surgery and emerged successfully from his convalescence in a new
state of almost delirious happiness. He returned to Lake House. His
mother and father came to see him, as did his brothers and sisters.
They had become reconciled to his new status as well as its his
newly adopted name of Rita. His boss at the insurance office was
persuaded by his father that Richard could do the same work even
better than before. So two months later, Richard was back to a
normal life of daily work. As Rita.
The tempo of Richard/Rita’s inner existence now changed. He found
his outlook running in two main streams. One was the expected
femaleness resulting from the operation. He found greater delight in
little details-of cloth, of a story, of colors, of people’s voices,
in architecture. No longer did he look for large, sweeping lines in
the world around him, nor did he feel inclined to argue logically or
to engage in verbal polemics. He felt himself more vulnerable, more
susceptible to praise and flattery, on the watch for compliments
from men. He had a varied sexual life: he did not discriminate
between old and young, ugly and beautiful. It was enough for him
that he was desired and that they all found in him something that
mystified them while holding them.
The other stream in his outlook was pockmarked with some stinging
deficiencies that distressed him continually. When he had
intercourse, for instance, he felt a great deadness in himself:
there was no after-feeling of warmth and togetherness and
perpetuity. And often this lack was accompanied by an inner
bitterness that drove him into rages. It became an obsession with
him “to make love and feel life” in himself after he had done so,
and to hear his partner express himself in similar terms. But
nothing he did ever produced a ray of hope in this direction, until
he met Paul.
Paul, a Chicagoan, a former minister who had turned to banking and
brokerage and become a millionaire in the process, was a very
impressive character. Tall, good-looking, with salt-and-pepper hair,
suave, well dressed, educated, a very good conversationalist, Paul
had a brilliant smile. He and Richard/Rita liked each other from the
first moment they met at a cocktail party. Richard eventually told
Paul his life history. He was surprised by Paul’s matter-of-fact
reaction. What amazed Richard/Rita more than that was Paul’s
understanding of his difficulty in having intercourse and in its
aftermath.
“I think something can be done about all that, Rita,” he said. “But
you will have to consummate a carefully arranged marriage.”
“Marriage? But marriage is impossible-at least very difficult,”
answered Richard.
“Not the marriage I have in mind. You just need the right partner
under the right circumstances. You don’t realize it, but you have
been preparing for quite a while for this marriage. Leave it all to
me.”
Richard/Rita did not understand what Paul meant, until he
participated in the Black Mass on June 21, 1971.
The invitation he received from Paul was ostensibly for a midnight
party. It was a sultry night without a patch of wind. When
Richard/Rita arrived around 10:00 P.M., he was struck by the lavish
surroundings. The house, dating from the previous century, stood in
its own grounds. About 80 guests were drinking and eating a cold
buffet around an open-air pool illuminated by tall, thick candles.
Another 40 guests were dancing inside in the ballroom. The air was
full of chattering, laughter, music, and celebrations. Paul
immediately introduced Richard/Rita to a table at which two young
women and their escorts sat. Merriment pervaded the group. Everybody
was excited and happy.
From his position, Richard/Rita could see both ends of the pool. At
each end there was a long table covered with food, drinks, ice
buckets, and flowers. Behind each table, a long, wall-high,
embroidered red curtain hung from a pole. A butler in black evening
clothes stood motionless by each curtain.
Richard/Rita felt surprisingly at home. He joined in the laughter
and talk around the table, and cheered as some of the more mellowed
guests shoved each other fully clothed into the water.
At 12:45 P-M., Richard/Rita suddenly noticed a hush. Nobody was
speaking any longer. The stereo music had gone silent. Without his
realizing it, about three-quarters of the guests had departed. The
two couples who had been at his table had excused themselves shortly
before, saying that they wanted to dance.
The guests who remained had fallen silent. They stood in two groups
at either end of the pool, facing each other across the water. Then,
Richard/Rita noticed his tall host signaling to the two butlers.
With a solemn movement, they pulled aside the curtains.
When the curtains parted, Richard/Rita could see a low altar table
at either end of the pool. Above each altar there hung an ornament
in the shape of an inverted triangle. At its center there was an
inverted crucifix, the head of the crucified resting on the angle of
the apex of the triangle. From the interior of the house he now
heard the low peals of an organ. And someone was burning incense
there, so that the fumes drifted out lazily and lay across the air
like slowly twisting blue serpents. Then the guests started to
undress in an unconcerned fashion, each one dropping his or her
clothes where they stood.
As if on signal, both groups turned and started to come around the
sides of the pool toward Richard/Rita. He started to get up when
Paul’s hand fell on his shoulder gently but firmly: “Wait, Rita.”
The naked guests filed around him and stood stock-still. Nobody had
yet spoken a word. Then Paul took Richard/Rita’s arm so that he
stood up. Twenty pairs of arms stretched out from all sides; and
unhurriedly, calmly, they undressed Richard/Rita. His host, Paul,
was nowhere to be seen at that moment.
Then one guest, a young blond man in his late twenties,. came
forward. Around his neck he wore a narrow black stole. There was a
ruby ring on the index finger of his left hand.
“Rita,” he said evenly to Richard/Rita, “I am Father Samson, willing
minister of our Lord Satan. Come! Let us adore.”
His voice, the hands and fingers of the guests, the low organ music,
the sultry night, the light feeling in his body, the languid odor of
the incense, all this fell into a pattern of softness which
Richard/Rita felt all around him. He turned as gravely as the others
and walked in procession around the pool, past the tall
candlesticks, until they reached one of the altars.
Now he had no further difficulty in understanding what they required
of him. He waited passively and quietly.
They easily lifted Richard/Rita and placed him on his back flat on
the altar. Father Samson then appeared carrying a chalice. Someone
placed a small folded cloth on Richard/Rita’s pubic hair. Samson
stood the chalice on the cloth. Then Richard/Rita heard three voices
chanting the opening words of the old Latin Mass: “In nomine Patris
et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,” to which they added the extra name:
“et domini nostri Satanas.” Richard/Rita now understood. He felt a
strange exultation.
Father Samson had begun reading from a black-bound book held by
another naked
guest, a woman of about thirty-five. He gestured gravely as he
proceeded. The others
had grouped themselves around in two concentric circles: the inner
circle, all males,
had placed, each one, the left hand on some part of Richard/Rita’s
body. Those in the outer circle, all females, had placed their hands
on the hips of the males.
Just before the consecration, a woman pricked a vein in Richard/
Rita’s arm, letting some drops of his blood fall and mix with the
wine in the chalice. Once Father Samson had uttered the words of the
consecration (“This is my body . . .”), the guests paired off, lay
down on the floor, each man lying between the legs of a woman.
Father Samson parted Richard/Rita’s legs, mounted the altar, entered
Richard/Rita fully, took the chalice, sipped it, held it to Richard/
Rita’s lips so that he could sip it, and handed it to the nearest
pair. While this pair was sipping the chalice, Father Samson started
rhythmically to push and pull in Richard/Rita, saying as a refrain:
“Say-tan! . . . Say-tan! . . . Say-tan!,”lengthening the first
syllable as he drew partially out of Richard/Rita and hitting the
second syllable with hard emphasis as he drove into Richard/Rita. As
each pair handed on the chalice, they started to copulate following
the rhythm of Father Samson, until all-men, women, and Father
Samson-were chanting and copulating in unison. Richard/Rita was the
only silent one.
He lay, eyes closed, while Father Samson chanted on him. For the
first time Richard/Rita felt a strange tingling starting at his
buttocks, up through his spine, up the nape of his neck, around his
skull, down into his shoulderblades, past his middle and abdomen, in
around his vagina and down through his groin and calves, to the tips
of his toes. For all the world it felt as if an electrifying fluid
was being poured into him from Samson. Richard/Rita opened his eyes
to look at Samson, but the light was too dim, and the blue trails of
the incense were weaving through his vision.
Richard/Rita could hear heavy breathing, but he could see no face,
only the outline of a head. He murmured: “Father Samson . . . Lord
Satan . . . Father Samson . . . Lord”-but he was interrupted by a
harsh, grating sound of single words coming to him through the heavy
breathing.
“Girl-Fixer! . . . Girl-Fixer! . . . Girl-Fixer!”
Richard/ Rita no longer heard the chant of “Say-tan!” Now all seemed
to be joining in “Girl-Fixer! . . . Girl-Fixer! . . . Girl-Fixer!”
Father Samson’s index finger was now deep in Richard/Rita’s rectum,
massaging, scooping, probing, pulling, pushing. Richard/Rita felt
his own semen being loosened and flowing; and, inside him, he had a
sharp sensation of very hot, sticky oil squirting around the wall of
his vagina as he heaved and shook.
“Have me! Girl-Fixer! . . .
Father Satan . . . have me . . . smell me . . . fuck me . . .
through . . . through . . .” Richard/Rita’s voice rose steeply into
a loud scream. The organ notes thundered, filling the air. As each
pair of the guests reached orgasm, they screamed and groaned in a
jumble of half-words: “Sayt. . . fuck . . . take . . . Sayt. . .
have . . . smell. . . cunt. . . prick ...”
The scene subsided slowly. As the waves of pain, pleasure, and
exultation ebbed in Richard/Rita, he knew that he now had a
shadow-or, at least, that is how he described it. It was not glued
to his body, nor did it fall on the ground beside him wherever he
went. It was like a twin spirit or soul of his own soul or spirit.
And it possessed his own thoughts, memories, imaginations, desires,
words.
Richard/Rita again opened his eyes. Father Samson was gone. Paul,
his host, unsmiling, grave, helped him off the altar and motioned
him to stand, legs well apart. One by one each of the guests came
forward on their knees. Bending the head and pronouncing the long
word “Say-tan!,” they clamped their lips over his vagina and sucked.
Then they backed away out of the pool area.
When the last guest was gone, Paul handed Richard/Rita his clothes,
helped him to dress, led him around the house to the front, where a
limousine waited with its engine ticking. The chauffeur opened the
door for Richard/Rita. “You belong now, Rita. Serve him well” was
Paul’s parting phrase.
As he lay in bed later, Richard/Rita could sense his shadow near him
and with him.
He felt secure. When sleep came, it was dreamless and deep.
The aftermath was terrible. He now found that all his sexual
activity-whether in fantasy or in fact-had become of the same
texture as that repulsive level on which he had moved the night of
his wedding to Moira. And it reduced all pleasantness, pleasure,
beauty, joy, ecstasy, to sexual terms which today he characterizes
as “animality.” It made him feel and think and live like an animal
in heat, an animal which by a freak accident had been provided with
a self-conscious mind and memory, but which would shortly lose those
faculties and revert to being just animal.
Richard/Rita is the only ex-possessed person I have known who still
has a clear memory of what precise differences the culmination of
possession made to his inner self-mind, memory, will, emotions,
imagination.
The entry point of continued possession, its bastion, was his
imagination. In listening to him, one has to remember Richard’s
specific problem: gender and sexuality were one and the same for
him. Once possession was completed, it seemed to him that he had an
invisible but tangibly felt shadow, a twin of himself but yet
distinct from him, and that from that point onward self-control and
direction in him were exercised by that twin.
He points to the fluid or electrifying effect he received from
Father Samson at the Black Mass. For it now appeared to Richard/Rita
that in his conscious hours all his thoughts and willing and
remembering and sensations (and, therefore, all he said and did in
the view or hearing of others) came in a very different way. Now
continuously his imagination-rather than his memory or his senses or
his reasoning mind-received “imprints” or “messages”: images,
pictures, diagrams. There was also some other force or influence he
could not accurately name. But because it specifically, directly,
and exclusively concerned his sexuality, he calls it the S-factor.
Once his imagination received one of those “messages” or “imprints,”
then the whole internal mechanism of thinking, willing, remembering,
and feeling with his five senses came into play. The control thus
exercised on him was absolute. If he smelt an odor, if he desired
something, if he remembered anything, if he thought or reasoned, it
was all made possible by a prior “imprint.” And consequently any
words he spoke or actions he performed were made possible only by
that source.
The exercise of his sexuality-his desire and its consummation-was
under the strictest control. The desire came without warning: it did
not arise due to any exterior stimulus.
To cap it all, there were other moments: hours of high possession
when the control exercised over him acquired an intensity which
blotted all else out. In “normal” time of possession, he was still
self-aware, i.e., he saw and felt himself under the inescapable
influence of those “imprints,” but it was he himself who thought,
remembered, imagined, spoke, walked, acted. At the “high moments” of
possession, it seemed to him that he no longer did any of those
things. The very insides of his soul or spirit seemed to be drenched
in another’s being.
He himself felt reduced to a tiny pinpoint of identity, to be
imprisoned in the most solitary of solitudes, while every fiber and
sinew of his life was permeated with an alien tyranny, a brute
authority.
And, as he is able to relate it now, only in that microscopic
reduction of himself did
he spontaneously revolt. There he had no memory of the past-only a
memory that
there had been a memory. Nor had he any anticipation of the
future-only a
consciousness that anticipation was impossible. Neither praying nor
cursing, neither
praise nor blasphemy was possible there. It was an undivided and
infinitely sad
present, an awareness of oneself surrounded by utter blackness and
nothingness. The very self of Richard/Rita always refused (although
it could do nothing about expelling) that constant shadow.
Richard/Rita is emphatic on one point: the strict separation and
distinction between the detectable and measurable area of his
thoughts, emotions, memories, external actions, sensations, etc., on
the one hand; and, on the other, the self he never ceased to be. All
through his enigmatic experiences, that detectable and measurable
area varied and changed under the influx of differing intensities,
as masculine and feminine, male and female traits ebbed and flowed
in him. Psychologists would, justifiably in their terms, describe it
as rather extensive changes of personality. But the self-whether
reduced to the pinpoint of possessed slavery or free within the
general control of the central point in his imagination-that self
never ceased to be the same.
Asked about the suffering specific to possession, Richard/Rita says
that the genuine pain of possession does not come from any physical
distortion, deterioration, or ravages-these most of the time provide
the possessed with a savagely twisted pleasure and thrill. But it
lies instead in what he calls the “mirror of existence” of the
possessed.
The unpossessed, the normal person, is aware of the self he is only
when it is reflected in another person or in things other than
himself. And, without ever realizing it, when we perceive ourselves
reflected in someone else or in objects other than ourselves, we
instinctively compare that reflection of the self with an ideal
measure we have formed but which we usually leave unspoken, even
unthought. It is, however, ever present to us when we make
comparisons of ourselves. This is the third, the hidden third,
necessary for all comparison between two things. To be self-aware is
to be able to compare our selves with the reflection and with the
ideal measure.
The possessed has no such awareness. For in the state of possession,
the self-consciousness and self-awareness of the possessed becomes
absolute solitude. There is no hidden third, no ideal.
Metaphorically speaking, in possession a mirror is held up in which
the self of the possessed sees only itself in itself in itself in
itself and so on in an infinitely receding number of
self-containing, self-mirroring images, with no end in sight. And
this awareness is, by definition, complete and unending solitude.
For those near Richard/Rita-his office colleagues, his immediate
family, the few friends he had made in the immediate neighborhood of
Tanglewood, there was a marked change in him dating from June 1971
onward. Their memories of this change are unanimous and date from
about the time of the Black Mass-of which they knew nothing, of
course.
Richard/Rita now always wore male clothing; but ordinary people, who
did not know his story, could not make out exactly whether it was a
man or a woman they were meeting in Richard. Then there was the
smell, not unpleasant, just pervasive. It has been described by some
as “musky,” by others as “faded perfume” such as you get when you
open an old chest of drawers, by others still as “a clean animal
smell.” It pervaded Lake House, his room at the insurance offices,
his car, his clothes, even his handwritten letters. People always
found it distinctive; some found it repulsive. It varied in
strength.
Finally there were his peculiar fits. His normally deep-blue eyes
would take on a greenish hue. Some hidden glow or luminescence
emphasized the down of his face, neck, arms, hands, and legs, so
that he looked sort of furry; but when you looked closely, you saw
only skin. He spoke very little, mainly single words and at an
extremely slow pace, accompanied by a combination of chuckles,
grunts, snorts, twisting of his eyebrows, and mouth grimaces that
contorted his lips around his teeth.
Yet it was the indescribably roughened tone or timbre of his voice
that disturbed people the most during his fits.
At first sporadic through the summer of 1971, these fits increased
in frequency, so that by late October they were of daily occurrence.
There was then a peculiar fear-causing element in any conversation
with Richard/Rita-and his job was 80 percent of a talking nature.
When anyone spoke to him, their words seemed to fall into a deep,
deep hole and to be lost.
They felt he hadn’t heard or that, if he
had, there was no communication between them. Then, as they were
giving up or trying again by repeating what they had said, he spoke
either in single words or in a series of disconnected words. They
made sense and, most of the time, gave an answer. But they seemed to
come from far in the distance, from the bottomless depth of that
hole into which their words had fallen. Impersonal, uncommunicative
of any personality, unwarm, at that stage Richard/Rita reminded some
people of the humanly unresponsive effect a tape recording gave
them.
People quickly learned that his responses and conversation always
made sense. Indeed, they were highly intelligent and relevant. His
business judgment was better than ever before. But always the
freakish atmosphere communicated by the tone of his voice disturbed
them. This, together with an almost overnight suspicion in his
colleagues that “wherever Richard/Rita is, there is always trouble,”
finally brought his dismissal from work and caused him to lose his
friends one by one.
The “trouble” was eerie. At first, it affected mainly his life at
the insurance office. But gradually it affected anyone who contacted
him even fleetingly-the delivery boys from the grocer, druggist, and
dry cleaners, his cleaning woman, the laundry woman, his gardener.
Once it got to a policeman who gave him a traffic ticket. And
eventually it affected each member of his family who visited him.
The “trouble” was strictly reminiscent of what happened at the Tower
of Babel in the Bible story. Men and women who had known each other
for years and had worked together intimately for substantial periods
of time suddenly started to misunderstand each other and to wrangle
and quarrel. To some onlookers of such “trouble,” it seemed as if
what one person said was heard backwards by another person, i.e.,
with exactly the contrary meaning that the speaker intended.
The
“trouble” affected only those talking and dealing with each other.
But once any onlooker got between the disputants-entered their
“atmosphere,” so to speak-he or she was also affected by the
“trouble”; and there was an additional source of babel and confusion
and wrangling.
Incidents of this kind took place always and only where Richard/
Rita was present physically. He seemed to be highly amused at the
whole thing, but he himself never got caught by the “trouble.”
The “trouble” also affected those writing or typing in his presence:
they wrote or typed the opposite of what they meant, or it turned
out to be complete nonsense. And all incidents of the “trouble”
cumulatively pointed too strongly in Richard/Rita’s direction to be
explained in complete disconnection from him.
When there was no fit of any kind and no “trouble,” Richard/Rita’s
accustomed sweetness of character and affability came to the fore.
The change at those moments was almost shocking.
It was some time before Richard/Rita realized why he had lost
friends, why he found people turning away from him, and why he
became unpopular in his office.
In the last days of October he was fired. His brother, Bert, came in
to see him. Then
Bert went and talked with his immediate boss. From what Bert learned
from him and
from others in Tanglewood, joined to his own impressions, he
concluded that his
brother needed psychiatric care. But Richard/Rita’s behavior then
became a hide-and-go-seek game. Whenever he visited the psychiatrist, he was
absolutely normal; and the psychiatrist could find nothing wrong or
sick about him, no matter what diagnostic means he used. Indeed, the
psychiatrist concluded that Richard/Rita’s dismissal from the office
was based on the boss’s repulsion of Richard/Rita as a transsexual;
and he advised Richard/Rita to sue for damages and reinstatement in
his job.
But matters took another turn when Bert and Jasper came and stayed
with him for a long weekend. Richard/Rita had several fits.
And the “trouble” was again very evident. Now, in his calm moments,
Richard/Rita talked to them frankly and pathetically. He had begun
to know in a dim and fragmentary way something of the drastic
changes in him.
His brothers stayed on at his house, determined to get to the bottom
of it all. Richard willingly underwent a complete physical checkup.
The results were negative. Further psychiatric examinations were
equally fruitless.
Bert and Jasper together with Richard/Rita decided to ask the local
Lutheran pastor for some advice. He diagnosed Richard/Rita as a soul
who had neglected God and prayer. When the pastor’s counseling was
of no avail, they called on the local rabbi. This man, a very
saintly person, consented to read some prayers in Richard/Rita’s
presence. He also read some texts of the Talmud and explained them
to the three brothers.
The following days, there was no change in Richard/Rita’s general
condition. They then decided to call on the local Roman Catholic
pastor. The three of them walked over to see Father Byrnes, who
already knew Richard/Rita by name and sight. He listened to them,
but threw cold water on any expectations of concrete help. It wasn’t
because they were non-Catholics, he explained apologetically, and he
sounded sincere to them. But he didn’t know what to do. Sure, he
would include Richard/Rita in his prayers. But, they shouldn’t
forget, so had the others. And what good had all that done? It
didn’t seem enough, Father Byrnes concluded. Bert took Father Byrnes
aside and pleaded with him: his brother was ill in some peculiar
way. Doctors and psychiatrists had given up on him. Didn’t Father
Byrnes know some Catholic priest who might help?
“Call me tomorrow, after midday,” Father Byrnes answered. He had
just remembered Father Gerald and his great common sense.
The morning of the exorcism Richard/Rita rose early, bathed, washed
his hair, carefully sprayed himself with deodorant, and applied his
favorite perfume to neck, breasts, wrists, and behind his ears. He
put on a pair of dark blue slacks, a red turtleneck sweater, and
loose sandals. His long black hair was brushed and combed in a
simple manner. He wore no makeup or jewelry. When he was dressed, he
went out and fed the ducks in the pond, walked around for a while,
then returned in time to greet Gerald’s assistants at the door.
Partly because his two brothers were assistants, it was almost like
a group of intimate friends gathering for a reunion or for the
celebration of a very private event. Richard/Rita collaborated
laughingly and pleasantly, making coffee, arranging the room for the
rite of Exorcism, and in general was very apologetic and apparently
appreciative of the “inconvenience being given,” as he said
repeatedly. For the exorcism, Richard/Rita’s bedroom had been chosen
by Gerald after some discussion, and mainly because it seemed to be
the place Richard/Rita wanted most to avoid.
When all was ready, Richard/Rita sat down with the assistants and
waited, sometimes chatting, sometimes praying with them, until
Gerald’s car was heard in the driveway. Bert went out, reported to
Gerald, then came back and told Richard/Rita to sit or lie down on
the couch. But Richard/Rita insisted on waiting for Gerald.
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