THALIA SELZ
383
gripping his sides with her thighs, Hartford became so terrified
that his penis-in sheer panic-leaped again and again inside
her vagina. He screamed but whether in pleasure or revulsion he
couldn't have said then or later.
The following Sunday morning, his benefactress led him to
Saint Athanasios and enrolled him in a course of religious in–
struction. Hartford felt right at home, as though he were simply
starting up again where he had left off nine years earlier, for al–
most all the other pupils were children under ten:
Q.
What means the word, "Ca techism"?
A. It is a Greek word .
..
Of course! How comfortable. Hartford Anderson was christened
Athos Anderson seven weeks later, moved in the next day"with
his godmother, Nausicaa Paleologos, and for the rest of his life
considered himself, when he thought of it at all, as half-Greek.
Athos spoke modern Greek, both the high language and the low,
with such fluency and perfection of accent-tinged, however,
with the somewhat amusing (to other Greeks) peculiarities of
pronunciation found in Arcadia, whence Nausicaa had come–
that Greeks when they met him always thought he was a native
Greek and attributed his coloring to Arcadian birth-for there
are many blue-eyed blondes in the north central Peloponnesus–
and his American mannerisms to long years in the States.
Nausicaa never guessed his sexual preferences, for he was
fundamentally unaware of them himself and so did not struggle
to hide them and so did not lead either one of them to imagine
that he was actually more attracted to girls under nine years of
age than he was to the voluptuous widow who had all but mar–
ried him. She was a determined, affectionate woman who some–
times got as far as realizing that her young lover would rather be
somewhere else than in her bed; she suspected he preferred his
books to her and she was right. He preferred his books to any–
thing, including wet dreams about prenymphets, and when she
died suddenly, of a gall-bladder infection, when he was in his
twenty-seventh year, he was faintly relieved because his body had
begun to let him down occasionally at bedtime, he was tired of
going to church, and besides, he still had too many languages to
learn.
