Virginia

The McElroys were swingers. They lived on Fifth Avenue in a big new duplex full of long white sofas and pop paintings, and they adored the Beatles, but they liked the Rolling Stones even better. They gave big parties that went on and on. Sometimes Andy Warhol and his friends came to the Mc-Elroys' parties, although the times they did not come were more numerous than the times they did. Mr. McElroy had made a bundle in Long Island real estate, and the society columnists knew him as one of the zingy new art collectors. Mrs. McElroy wore her skirts well above the knee and had her hair cut like a boy's on one side and like a girl's on the other. Nobody could believe she had an 18-year-old son by a previous marriage. She did, though.

Her son's name was Paul, and he was graduating from the Archer School in June. The McElroys drove up to see him graduate. They had their jazzy dark-green Jag sent around from the garage at 11 o'clock, and by a quarter to 12 they were winging. They took the Henry Hudson and the Saw Mill River and the Taconic State Parkways, and several state and local routes. During the trip they both wondered what it would be like having Paul around. For the last five years Paul had been spending vacations with his own father, a psychoanalyst up in Boston, but Paul's father had recently married a 22-year-old dental technician and now Paul was coming to live with the McElroys for a while. "The kid bugs me, to tell you the honest truth," Mrs. McElroy admitted. "He's so goddamn high-minded."

"Maybe he's changed," Mr. McElroy said. He had just learned that the Archer School was coeducational. "Anyway, it's only for the summer."

Mr. McElroy drove very fast and cornered skillfully, but they had not allowed enough time. When they arrived, the commencement exercises were nearly over. They missed seeing Paul receive the Good Citizen Award and the prize for The Boy Who Has Done Most for Archer, but they did see him get his diploma. He looked very tall and stern in his dark (continued on page 139) Virginiya (continued from page 103) suit. "Is that Paul?" Mrs. McElroy whispered.

"Sure," Mr. McElroy whispered back. Following the commencement exercises, refreshments were served in the garden of the headmaster's house. Mr. and Mrs. McElroy introduced themselves to the headmaster, Mr. Cudlipp, who complimented Mrs. McElroy for having a son whose outstanding moral qualities more than compensated for his C-plus average. "We expect great things of Paul," Mr. Cudlipp said. The McElroys thanked him and moved on. Mrs. McElroy accepted a glass of fruit punch from a small student but refused a cupcake. They could see Paul across the garden, chatting with his father and the technician. After a while Paul made his way over to their side, pulling behind him a big, moist girl in a white graduation gown.

"Glad you could make it," Paul said, using his free hand to grind one of Mr. McElroy's. "I want you to meet Virginia," he added. Virginia was an unusually big girl with skin blemishes and a tragic smile. Beads of perspiration glistened on her upper lip and in the deep trough of her bosom, and fat tears brimmed in her eyes. Another girl ran up and threw her arms around Virginia, causing them both to weep aloud. Paul drew the McElroys aside. "Look," he said, "I've invited Virginia to come and stay with us for a few days. She's got a big problem at home and, well, to be frank about it, she sort of needs me. You don't mind, I hope?"

"Why, no, not at all," Mrs. McElroy said. "Do you mind, Phil?"

"Fine with me," Mr. McElroy said. "Great," said Paul.

• • •

Andy Warhol and his friends did not come to the McElroys' party on the Sunday following Paul and Virginia's graduation. It was a swinging party all the same. By the time Paul and Virginia got back from seeing The Sound of Music, the Rolling Stones were going full blast on the record player and people were frugging all over the place. Paul and Virginia sat down at one end of a long sofa and discussed The Sound of Music. Mrs. McElroy tried once to get them to dance, but Paul said he thought that kind of dancing was infantile. Virginia giggled and caught Mrs. McElroy's eye. Mrs. McElroy decided she liked Virginia after all. Pretty soon Paul went to bed. Virginia stayed up until all hours and danced the jerk and the swim with a stamina that was quite surprising for someone her size. At about a quarter to one, Mrs. McElroy got the hiccups. She went to the kitchen for a glass of water and, hearing voices in the maid's room off the kitchen, peeked in and saw Mr. McElroy and Virginia sitting on the bed examining Mr. McElroy's left hand. "Virginia reads palms," Mr. McElroy explained when he heard his wife hiccuping behind him. "She says my life is going to undergo a change." Mrs. McElroy went back to the living room with the glass of water. As the party was breaking up, one of the guests discovered that she had lost her gold clip. The McElroys promised to look for it in the morning.

The next morning, Mrs. McElroy and the cleaning woman looked under all the sofas and turned up all the cushions. They found $1.65 in change, a Zippo lighter, two highball glasses, a key, a lady's handkerchief, a ballpoint pen, nine shrimp and a nail file, but no gold clip. Later in the day, though, when Mrs. McElroy happened to pass through Virginia's room, she glanced into the partially open top drawer of the dresser and saw a gold clip sitting on a pile of extra-large bras. Right next to it was the sapphire pin that Mrs. McElroy had bought at Tiffany's in February, as her anniversary present from Mr. McElroy. She mentioned this to her husband when he came home from the office that evening. "Are you sure?" he asked.

"Of course I'm sure. I checked, and mine's gone."

"Good Lord," Mr. McElroy said.

When Paul and Virginia came back from visiting the United Nations, the McElroys waited until Virginia had gone to her room and then spoke to Paul about it. "I'm afraid that is one of her symptoms," Paul said gravely. "All the kids at school were just great about it, but the trouble is, her mother gets so terrifically upset, and that makes it about a hundred percent worse."

"What a shame," Mrs. McElroy said. "Well, but at least now we know where the things are, so perhaps you'd better suggest that she give them back."

"God, don't you people understand anything?" Paul said sternly. "That would be about the worst thing to do."

"Paul, pet, I'm very sorry, but--"

"Look, just leave it to me, can't you?" Paul said. "Virginia and I are working on the whole problem."

Mr. and Mrs. McElroy agreed to leave it to Paul. He did seem to know a lot about Virginia's problem, and anyway, they had tickets to hear The Supremes that evening at Carnegie Hall. Two days passed. Paul said he was making good progress with Virginia's problem, but the gold clip and the sapphire pin remained in Virginia's top dresser drawer. They were joined on the third day by Mrs. McElroy's diamond wrist watch. This was too much for Mrs. McElroy. She made Mr. McElroy have a talk with Virginia in her room that evening, before Paul returned from leading a boy-scout hike. Virginia screamed. When Mrs. McElroy looked in to see what was wrong, she saw Virginia standing on the bed without a stitch of clothes on, screaming her head off. Mr. McElroy was very pale. Luckily, Paul came home just then. "Now you've done it," Paul said. He sent Mr. and Mrs. McElroy out of Virginia's room, but Virginia kept on screaming. After a while Paul opened the door and called for Mrs. McElroy. "We've got to feed her," he shouted over the screams. "Something sweet--a dessert or something. It's the only way." Mrs. McElroy nodded and went to the kitchen. She found half a chocolate-cream pie and a quart of coffee ice cream in the icebox. When she returned with these, Paul took them from her and closed the door. Gradually Virginia's screams died down, and by two A.M. the apartment was quiet.

Things were unsettled after that. Paul said the incident had undone all his work on Virginia's problem and that he would have to fall back temporarily on oral gratification. Virginia stayed in her room and ate quantities of sweet desserts. Whenever she saw Mr. McElroy, she started to scream. Mrs. McElroy ordered a big supply of frozen pastries and cream pies and ice cream, to keep on hand in the freezer, but Virginia got up in the middle of the night and finished them all off, not even bothering to thaw the pastries; so from then on, Mrs. McElroy had to get in a fresh supply every day. As long as Virginia had something sweet in her mouth, she did not scream at Mr. McElroy and she did not steal things. Mr. McElroy was all for sending Virginia home to Cincinnati, but Paul explained that this was out of the question. Virginia kept insisting that Mr. McElroy had tried to rape her, Paul said, and there was no telling what would happen if she left the apartment in this state of mind. The McElroys' friends all thought it was a very kicky scene. Some of them started bringing expensive desserts and pastries for Virginia when they came to parties at the McElroys' apartment, and this cheered Virginia up no end. Virginia could hardly wait to see what the guests were going to bring her next. Paul said they were undoing all his work. He was very depressed because his applications to Harvard, Columbia and Dartmouth had all been turned down, and he did not want to go to Tufts.

In July Mr. and Mrs. McElroy moved out to Southampton for the summer, and Paul went to the Moral Re-Armament congress on Mackinac Island, Michigan. Virginia stayed in the apartment. Mrs. McElroy had tried very hard to persuade her to go home. She had even tried to telephone Virginia's mother in Cincinnati, but Virginia's mother, a prominent divorcee, was attending a birth-control conference in Chandigarh, and the answering service did not know when she would be back. Anyway, Virginia still maintained that Mr. McElroy had tried to rape her and, as Paul pointed out, this rather complicated matters.

Virginia ate steadily all summer. When the McElroys returned to the city after Labor Day, she weighed close to 300 pounds and could barely get out of bed. Mrs. McElroy said, "Really, Virginia, this has got to stop." Virginia gave a particularly piercing scream. Mr. McElroy ran down to the pastry shop and brought back a dozen mocha eclairs. It seemed to be the only way.

Paul came home for two days in September. Instead of going to college, he had decided to join the Peace Corps. He was being sent to a training camp in Arizona, after which he hoped to go to an extreme hardship post on the upper Amazon. On his last night home, Mrs. McElroy put it to him straight. "God-damnit," she said, "you brought her here, now it's up to you to get her the hell out."

"It might just possibly surprise you to know," Paul said, "that there are more important things in the world for me to do than attend to your personal problems."

"My personal problems! Listen, you high-minded fink--"

"This sort of discussion is futile," Paul said. "No wonder the world's in a mess. Why don't you people grow up?" Paul went upstairs to his room. The McElroys went out to a Beatles movie, which they enjoyed even more than the last time.

In time, Mr. and Mrs. McElroy grew accustomed to having Virginia around. Before each party they propped her up on one of the long white sofas in the living room, where she could receive the sugared offerings of the guests and watch the dancing, in which she was by now too immense to take part. She looked nice on the sofa, in one of the long, tent-like muslin garments that she had taken to wearing, putting down desserts and smiling her tragic smile. Andy Warhol made a movie of Virginia sitting on the sofa eating a lemon-chiffon pie--he used the same close-up shot repeated over and over for three and a half hours. People also discovered Virginia's clairvoyance. In addition to her being able to read palms, she could sense emanations from people. Just by sensing the emanations, Virginia could tell someone what he would be doing several hours later and, sure enough, when the time came around, he would find himself doing it. Once she told Dr. Strauss-Huppe, who lived downstairs in the same building and came to all the McElroy parties, that he was going to bed with Mrs. McElroy. Mr. McElroy had a lot to drink that night and he never did find out whether Virginia's prediction came true, but he was bothered all the same.

Soon Virginia began to receive visitors even when the McElroys were not having a party. The number of her visitors grew larger and larger. They came at all hours of the day or night and they always brought something delicious for Virginia to eat. Virginia enjoyed her new life. She seldom screamed anymore, and when she did, it was usually just in fun. But Virginia's new life was putting more and more of a strain on Mr. and Mrs. McElroy, who had to take care of Virginia and get her in and out of bed and dressed and undressed, and so forth, because they could no longer keep any servants in the house, not even a cleaning woman. Mr. and Mrs. McElroy found that they were spending all their time taking care of Virginia. Some mornings Mr. McElroy could not even get to his office. They hardly ever went out to a Beatles movie, or to other people's parties, or used their jazzy dark-green Jag, or even listened to the Rolling Stones on the radio--Virginia had decided the Rolling Stones were a drag. One night, after they had put Virginia to bed, Mr. and Mrs. McElroy sat up for a long while talking. "We can't go on like this," Mrs. McElroy said. They decided to run away that very night. Each of them packed a suitcase, and very quietly they tiptoed to the front door and rang for the elevator. Just as they were getting into the elevator with their suitcases, Virginia started to scream. Luckily, the elevator was self-service. Mr. McElroy pushed the door-close button and they went down, with Virginia's screams getting fainter and fainter in their ears.

The doorman flagged a taxi for them on Fifth Avenue and they told the driver to take them to the airport. On the way out, they discussed where they would go. Mr. McElroy wanted to go to Miami, but Mrs. McElroy had her heart set on Nassau. They decided to go to Miami first and then to Nassau. As luck would have it, there was a midnight flight to Miami. Mr. McElroy bought the tickets, and they were just going down the ramp to the plane when the police moved in. "Mr. Philip McElroy?" the lieutenant asked. Mr. McElroy nodded. "I'm afraid you're needed at home. It's your daughter."

"She's not my--Oh, God," said Mr. McElroy. He considered making a break for it, but decided it was no use.

They went back to town in the squad car. "Somebody in that kinda condition," the lieutenant said reproachfully, "you just can't go off and leave 'em. It's lucky that doctor got hold of us." The policemen came up in the elevator with them. Dr. Strauss-Huppe from down-stairs was waiting in the apartment. He said he had given Virginia a sedative and an eclair and that she was sleeping quietly, and it did not take the McElroys more than a moment to realize that she was sleeping quietly in their own bedroom. The McElroys thanked the policemen and Dr. Strauss-Huppe and saw them to the door.

Mrs. McElroy needed something to calm her nerves. She felt sure Dr. Strauss-Huppe would have something and, to save him another trip upstairs in the middle of the night, she decided to run downstairs to his apartment. As Mr. McElroy stood in the hall wondering what to do with himself, he heard a noise in his former bedroom. It was his former bed groaning as Virginia turned over in it. Mr. McElroy tiptoed to the bedroom door and peeped inside.

"Tomorrow," Virginia called out drowsily, "you're going to hear some real screaming."