(1961) The Chapman Report Read Online Free PDF

on.
    “Hello?”
    “It’s Sarah. I’ll be right over.”
    She hung up, breathlessly went around the bed and into the bathroom. Pulling open the drawer beside the washbasin, she reached deep inside for the zippered blue kit. Emerging and going back to the dresser, her hand fondled the kit, feeling the rim of the large diaphragm and the small tube of vaginal jelly. She dropped the kit into her straw handbag, snatched a pink cashmere sweater from the drawer, and hastened through the house to the car port.
    Mary Ewing McManus-she had been married less than two years, and she knew that it pleased her father that she retained the Ewing whenever she signed her name-sat on the rumpled bed, long, thin legs crossed beneath her blue silk nightgown.
    “I think it’s just the most, Kathleen,” she said into the telephone. Twenty-two and uncomplicated, and in love with her husband, Mary could still be exuberant before ten in the morning. “You write a big exclamation mark after my name. I wouldn’t miss it for anything in the world.”
    “Fine, Mary. I wish everyone were so agreeable.” Mary was surprised. “Who wouldn’t want to hear Dr. Chapman? I mean, there’s always something to learn.” Mary Ewing had come to Norman McManus, in marriage, a healthy, cheerful, virginal young girl. Although raised with intelligence and affection, she had been, in ways, sheltered, and everything that followed her wedding night seemed new to her. She was as curious about the pathways of sex, about exploring its mysteries and learning its techniques, as she was about attempting new cooking recipes and learning to sew. One night, in the first year, after reading a chapter of a new marriage manual, she and Norman had spent the entire night, with mad hilarity and then silent excitement, testing their various erogenous zones.
    “Dr. Chapman isn’t exactly going to be teaching anything,” Kathleen was saying. “It’s really a serious study he’s making.”
    “Oh, I know,” Mary said in her important, adult voice. “It’s like being part of history, in a way-as if Sigmund Freud were coming to The Briars to talk about psychiatry or Karl Marx to discuss communism. It’s something to tell your children.”
    “Well,” said Kathleen uncertainly, “I guess it is, in a way.”
    “How’s Deirdre?”
    “Fine, thanks.”
    “She’s so pretty. I’m glad you called me. See you at the lecture.”
    Hanging up, Mary placed the telephone on the bedstead. She felt thrilled about the invitation, like looking forward to Sunday, and she was suddenly eager to share the news with Norman. She cocked her head, listening, but heard the beat of the shower muffled in the bathroom behind her. When he was out of the bower, she would tell him.
    She uncrossed her legs and fell back on the pillow, feeling alive in every limb and happy that the day was young and the night still ahead. The sounds of the shower persisted, and she thought of Norman beneath the cold spray. She could visualize him as she saw him when they often showered together. His funny scrub haircut, and the piercing dark eyes set in the square, handsome face, and his hairy chest and flat belly, and long, muscular legs. It was still a miracle to her that he had sought her out at that sorority party, three years before, and looked at none of the more attractive girls that night or any night since.
    Mary Ewing McManus had no illusion about her own beauty. Even though her tangled, boyish brown hair made her resemble Wendy in Peter Pan-ox so Norman had remarked several times, with admiration-and even though she was a vivacious extrovert, unfamiliar with a single dark mood, she did not delude herself about her physical appearance. She was a tall, bony, athletic, long-striding girl. Her brown eyes were set too close together. Her nose, while straight, was excessively evident (in finishing school she had pinned a romantic drawing of Cleopatra over her bed when she had learned of Pascal’s remark that,