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stimulation, Elias soon returned to his carousing ways. At least part of his problem was sexual frustration. Less than a year into the marriage, he discovered he was no longer able to raise Elsie's temperature, no matter what the time of year. Her Victorian disposition toward romance dictated that procreation was the only justification for engaging in the act of sex. Doing it for pleasure was unproductive, a sacrilegious waste of time, at least as far as she was concerned.
    Filled with many splendorous churches and lively music halls, Bristol provided ample opportunity for Elsie to worship God, at least as much as the numberless pubs and music halls accommodated her husband's more secular devotions. Indeed, Elias's relapse into roguishness found easy pickings in the traveling vaudeville companies that continually played the local theaters, where that sort of entertainment itself was seen by Elsie and the church folk as nothing more (or less) than the work of the devil himself.
    Victorian society believed that no crime went unpunished. If the authorities of the state did not arrest and prosecute those who broke the legal code, a higher authority surely would avenge those who broke the moral one. Such was the only explanation Elsie could fathom to explain the unexpected death of her firstborn, John William Elias Leach.
    She had given birth at home on February 9, 1899, and from the moment baby John took his first breath, Elsie devoted herself to his every need. She showered him with all the love and affection she withheld from her husband, who, she believed, had not remained true. He was surely the cause of God's retribution on their home when, in his eighth month of life, the child developed a cough, followed by violent convulsions and the onset of a fever that would not break. John died of tubercular meningitis on February 6, 1900, two days before his first birthday and one day before Elsie's twenty-third.
    She would not allow herself to cry at baby John's funeral. Throughout the solemn service she sat tearless, cloaked in black, and stared straight ahead into the private world of her overwhelming grief. God had indeed punishedElias for his sins and in so doing had brought His wrath down upon her as well, taking back the fruit of their corrupted marriage. After his burial, baby John's name was never spoken again by either Elsie or Elias.
    In the spring of 1903 Elsie became pregnant once more, a sign, she believed, of a merciful God. She had Elias redecorate the room that had been her firstborn's and add more insulation to the walls and ceiling to prevent any deathly drafts from blowing onto her new baby.
    Archibald Leach was born on January 18, 1904. Early on, to ensure his good health and moral righteousness, Elsie imposed her obsessive orderliness upon the lad, a prudent upbringing that would stay with him the rest of his days. “As a little boy,” he would remember nearly eighty years later, “I was fined for spilling things on the tablecloth. Thruppence a blib. But that wasn't so bad. I had a shilling a week for allowance, so I had four blibs—and we only put the tablecloth on the table on Sundays.”
    Elsie enjoyed keeping little Archie's hair long and curly and dressed him in frilly clothes that resembled nothing so much as a little girl's dresses. Much has been made elsewhere of this early treatment as the speculative root of Cary Grant's later bisexuality, and while it may indeed have been a factor, this was the common style of Victorian childrearing in pre-Freudian England. A toddler's sexuality was presumed to be nonexistent, and the so- called cross-dressing of boys was nothing more provocative than a mother's innocent “dolling up” of her baby, without regard to gender. Nevertheless links are links, and Freud did establish that sexual feelings are present in children, and that preadolescent emotional connections are often retained, in one form or another, for a lifetime. In his thirties Cary Grant and his