Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (18 page)

Naturally this line of thought—with the debonair Bitterbaron’s moral backing and solid, scientific reasoning—put Freddy into quite a state of delighted anticipation. Bentley was kind enough to make the arrangements for him (the amount of milk needed was the thing to make sure of), giving Freddy’s elegant apartment as the address to the wet nurse and making the first appointment for him.

The first appointment was for a Saturday afternoon—a matinee, so to speak. Freddy was extremely nervous and he spent the whole morning foolishly arranging and rearranging the flowers. (Yellow and pale-mauve Irises and bruise-purple Lady Slippers. For some reason the Lady Slippers always gave him a vague thrill. He called them “you smutty little darlings” and giggled at the ridiculousness of what he had said.)

When the doorbell rang, he was primping a little in the bedroom.

“Coming!” he sang.

He ran, flinging his elbows out a little, and he was panting when he opened the door. His face was a little red, but he had on his most charming smile, and he apologized profusely for not coming sooner. He offered to take the lady’s coat, very gallantly and affably, which she allowed him to do without any lack of aplomb, only saying:

“Yo name’s Mist’ Freddy Nipples?”

She was a big, genial woman with hands like first-baseman’s mitts and a bosom like the State Capitol.

Freddy glided under breasts, clutching her hat and coat, and hung them up, chattering to her.

She caught sight of him.

“Thas’ a funny name—”

“It’s K-nipples, not Nipples, dear. You can call me Freddy if you want, though.”

“All right, Mis’ Knipples—ah mean, Freddy,” she grinned.

“You all min’ paying me in advance, Mis’ Nipples—I mean, Freddy? I always ge’s paid first. I don’ want…”

“Oh sure, dear.”

“My name’s—”

“Yes, I know. Bee told me. Is that all right, Mary?”

He smiled and stuffed a bunch of bills into her hand and started off towards the kitchen with his hands tensed a little away from his sides as though he were dangling little weights on strings from the ends of his fingers.

“Yas, Mis’ Nipples! Yas, this is just fine!…I’m coming.”

She stuffed the money into her purse.

“My real name’s John, of course, but Mother and I both hated it. It’s so common—Mother passed on, poor dear. I was named after my Uncle Fred. He used to wet the bed.”

He giggled.

Mary looked around as she followed him across the large, airy living room.

“Sho mighty nice place, Freddy. Where’s the baby at?”

“What baby, dear?”

“De baby I gonna give ’is lunch to.”

“Oooo, darling, there’s no baaaby!” he howled. “That is, I’m the baby, darling.
I’m
the baby!”

Mary stood rooted to the floor.

“You de baby?”

“Didn’t Mr. Bentley tell you about it, darling?…It’s for
me,
” he wailed, delightedly.

“My milk’s fo’ you?”

“Well, you see, dear, Mr. Bentley’s a very,
very
famous man, and he says I need the kind of milk—that is—human milk. See, he’s a dietitian, dear. He knows all about it. It’s because of the butterfat, he says. I’m taking mushrooms too. All you have to do is put it into a bottle or something—you know—whatever it is you do…”

Freddy waved his hands and smiled charmingly.

“Put it in a bottle? Mis’ Nipples—Mis’ Nipples, I din’ come fo’ no—”

“Oh dear, Mary! How perfectly, excruciatingly exasperating! Now everything’s gone wrong. And Bee said—here—wait…”

He plunged his hands into his pockets and took out ten dollars and held them out to her.

“Here! Now, for heaven’s
sake,
don’t be a foolish old thing!”

He pressed the money into her hand. She now had about twenty dollars. It was sinking through her head that at twenty dollars a quart, roughly speaking…

“All right…all right, Mis’ Nipples. But I don’ put any milk in any li’l bottles—so, if
you
don’t mind, then
I
don’ min’. You jus’ gonna take it de way she comes, Misteh!”

“You mean—”

“Yas, Mis’ Nipples.”

She was grinning from ear to ear.

“You gonna be ma baby!”

She went off into roars of laughter, exploding and giggling and shaking all over uncontrollably, and Freddy joined her.

“Darling!” he screamed. “Wonderful!”

“Freddy!” she howled. “Mis’ Nipples…Oh, ma achin’ back!…”

And they both danced around the room, holding their hands to their mouths, rocking with laughter, and looking at each other, like a playful, pink mouse and a wild elephant.

Mary began unbuttoning her blouse, showing two enormous, velveteen dugs, lying on her stomach. With one great hand she reached out and grabbed Freddy by the arm and pulled him to her, sitting down on a chair and pulling him down on her lap at the same time. Before he even had time to protest (struggling would have been useless, and he knew that) she shoved his face into the right dug, forcing the stiff, leathery nipple into his open mouth. He tried to pull his head away for a bit, but she pushed it back, forcing his face into the warm, yielding flesh, and then he began to nurse, crossing his feet back and forth and closing his eyes. He had his left hand up on her shoulder, and with it he made a fist, holding the thumb inside. Every once in a while he opened it, and then he closed it again, sucking.

As I said, that’s the way it started, but that’s not the way it ended.

At the end of the nursing period, with milk drooling down his face, Freddy would sit for a while, while Mary rocked, grinning. They always had a little banter and made a joke of their relationship. She would call him “baby” and he would call her “Mother,” both chortling or howling with outright laughter. But when she left, he would go into his bedroom and fall onto the bed in a profound, dreamless sleep. She came by every day, and finally when she could no longer supply the growing demand, she brought along another wet nurse who took turns with her, and then Freddy had two mothers, and the wet nurses in good cheer shared the “baby,” drowning him in pap. He gained twenty-five pounds, learned to suck his thumb, wet his pants and do other things which the wet nurses thought terrifically funny, even helping him sometimes, howling with laughter. It was a gay and noisy threesome. They spoiled their baby and were spoiled in their turn. Freddy had never been quite so happy before.

When the third nurse was brought in, Freddy was suckling most of the time, and he always had drinks set up so that his mothers could get high, and the party often grew frolicsome. But they always treated him like a child, and he steadily slipped deeper and deeper into childhood, sometimes being unable to speak for long periods of time during the day, only laughing and playing with himself.

He never left his apartment anymore, spending most of his time in bed or on the laps of his mothers.

Freddy might have rocked gently forever on the Mare Lactosa, gulping and drowning and blubbering deep in tumescent warmth, flowing backwards protoplasmically into the vaginal darkness of memory (or out of it, who knows), if the whole thing hadn’t gone too far. But the mothers were jealous, and there were times when they tried to snatch him away from each other, the liquor firing their natural possessiveness.

“Give him…to me! It’s my turn!”

“No—”

“Give—him—I—say—give…”

“No, no! Stop that now, I say! Cut it out! I got him!—”

“Oh, no you—haven’t—”

“Ugh—”

“Mary, Mary! Help me. Hey!”

And so they tugged at him and pulled him and tore at his pudgy, sweet body, hugging him and clutching him to their enormous, velvet dugs, stuffing his pale, panting face between them into the terrae incognitae of progressive suffocation. The harder he gasped for air, fighting their great strength with his puny one, the harder they clutched him and hugged him into the cruel, nostril-clogging meat of the Mammary Glands. It was as though by pulling him hard enough, he might be pulled right inside and the warm doors of protectiveness closed after him forevermore.

And so it was that one day, after such a steaming, grappling tempest of desire, he went suddenly limp in the arms of Mary, who held him, tiny like the Christ of Michelangelo’s
Pietà
in her lap, and the three weeping mothers saw their child was still. And although they all tried blowing breath back into his little lungs, tearing him again to be the one to bring him back to life, hugging him and clutching him and sobbing and bending over him, it was no use whatever. His lungs were full of milk. It ran miraculously out of his mouth, out of his ears, out of his eyes. His very blood was no longer red but white. And when the mothers saw this, when they saw that their baby was dead, they held him for a while, looking at each other in amazement. And then they dropped him, and he sprawled like a broken doll on the great big bed in the bedroom, still drooling a little out of his mouth.

Brooks Baekeland

The origin of the burlesque “Milk” was not as esoteric or as interesting as some people wish. When I was at Avon Old Farms School in Connecticut, we had one perfectly harmless, effeminate boy—I mean laughably so. I think it was some fifteen years after that, in 1953, that I saw “Freddy” again. It was at tea at our East Seventy-first Street neighbors Sarah and Tom Kelly’s. “Freddy” was balding and was trying to stimulate hair growth with iodine, and he was dressed, and behaved, just as I described in “Milk.” Furthermore, he was with Gayelord Hauser—“Bitterbaron Bentley” in my story—and one of Sarah’s Chihuahuas did vomit yogurt in his lap. And there was a diet. I merely invented the mother’s milk part for symbolism, and then I was carried away by the spirit of the thing. And by “Freddy,” who wrote it himself, so to speak—wrote it just as it appeared. The piece just typed itself immediately we got back from Tom and Sarah’s, and then it went the rounds.

Not so funny is the dramatic foreboding, for when it was written Tony was six or seven years old and showed no signs whatever of becoming homosexual. The theory of the destruction of homosexuals—some homosexuals—by an excess of possessive “motherhood,” here symbolized by milk, had later in Tony’s own life its horrid, and perverse, materialization.

Notes from a Psychiatric Consultation on Antony Baekeland, New York, March 12, 1971

Marjorie Fraser Snow

Barbara was a very conscientious mother as I remember. I had no children myself at that point. We used to wheel Tony over to Central Park in one of those stroller-type things—once, he got out and started walking along the edge of the sidewalk and I said, “Barbara that’s awful dirty there for him, we’d better get him back into the little stroller,” and she said, “If you keep him isolated from all kinds of dirt, he’ll never build up antibodies to prevent any disease that may come along.” Of course in those days that was rather an unusual way of looking at it—today I think it’s accepted. So she understood and knew exactly how to raise him, I felt.

Patricia Neal

The whole atmosphere of Broadmoor reminded me of a play I was in—
The Children’s Hour.
I don’t know why that just shot into my head but it did. Maybe because there’s a school in the play. James Reeve, who painted my portrait, said, “Why don’t you come along with me to visit a friend?” He told me that the boy had murdered his mother—I didn’t get their name. It seemed really horrendous, but he wanted me to come see him. And I wanted to—I’m loving. So I went and we had tea with him and he was very glad to see us and very polite and well-mannered. He knew I was an actor. James had told him he was bringing me to see him. We sat in a big room with a lot of other people. And he was charming. We made jokes. There was a lot of laughing. Anyway, on the way home I realized who he was. It suddenly dawned on me—Baekeland! Because his aunt is a great friend of mine. I said to James in the car, “I’m sure he’s the one!” and when I got home I called Elizabeth Baekeland and I said, “Elizabeth, you’ll never guess who I just saw! I just saw Tony.” And she said, “You didn’t! You didn’t! You didn’t!” It was like she got frightened.

James Reeve

Elizabeth Baekeland lived in London and never once went to see Tony in Broadmoor, which was disgraceful. And one in the eye to her when Pat Neal rang up, you know, saying she’d just come from seeing him in Broadmoor. I mean, that must have set her back on her haunches! I asked Pat to come because I knew it would give Tony great pleasure, it would sort of bolster him up in the eyes of the others—it’s frightfully important when you’re in that sort of place to seem to have interesting friends.

Letter from Antony Baekeland to Miwa Svinka-Zielinski, Undated