While at times the author tried to restrict his attentions to a single woman—beginning with his first wife, for example, when he was twenty-six—his efforts were invariably subverted by the sight of someone new. His wife was wealthier than he was, and as he grew to become financially dependent on her she became increasingly critical of him—“She checked my smile, sneered at my past, moaned over my future . . . was loathsome to me in bed. Long I strove to do my duty, and be faithful, yet to such a pitch did my disgust at length go, that laying by her side, I had wet dreams nightly, sooner than relieve myself in her.”
Five years after her death, when he was probably in his early forties, his memoir suggests that he had taken another wife and aspired to remain faithful to her. “For fifteen months, I have been contented with one woman. I love her devotedly. I would die to make her happy. . . . I have fucked at home with fury and repetition, so that no sperm should be left to rise my prick to stiffness when away from home; fucked indeed till advised by my doctor that it was as bad for her as for me.” But later, with resignation, he concluded, “All is useless. The desire for change seems invincible. . . . It is constantly on me, depresses me, and I must yield.”
Although his marital relationships did not produce offspring, Professor Marcus came to believe, after reading the eleven-volume memoir, that the author “impregnated women of various kinds—servants, respectable women with whom he had affairs, courtesans whom he briefly kept. A few of these had children, the largest number procured abortion, which seems to have been fairly easy to arrange in the England of the time (he does not report on this in detail).”
Marcus also cited quotes from the author of My Secret Life that I thought applicable to my current subject of interest, Gerald Foos.
“Why,” asked the author, “is it abominable for anyone to look at a man and woman fucking when every man, woman, and child would do so if they had the opportunity? Is copulation an improper thing to do; if not, why is it disgraceful to look at its being done?”
Since I was about to have dinner with Gerald Foos, I decided to mention Professor Marcus’s book and obtain a copy for him if he had not read it. I thought it would be interesting to get Foos’s twentieth-century reaction to a book that featured a nineteenth-century voyeur. I also hoped that Gerald Foos’s manuscript, when and if I obtained permission to use it, would serve as a kind of sequel to My Secret Life.
THREE
AT THE Black Angus restaurant, after ordering a margarita and a sirloin, Foos promised that he would mail me a photocopy of his manuscript, although emphasizing I must be patient. For reasons of privacy, he alone would have to photocopy its hundreds of pages outside his motel, perhaps in the public library; and, since he might face limitations in time and privacy wherever he went, he preferred doing the job in small sections, each section numbering no more than fifteen or twenty pages.
“I’ll try to mail you the first section in a week,” he said, “but it may take six months or more before you get the entire manuscript. And again, I trust you’ll keep all of this strictly private. There are hundreds of secret stories in these pages, and each lists the names and addresses of the guests, lifted from the registration forms. Donna and I got to know some of these guests personally, those who stayed with us for days at a time, and did lots of communicating with us around the front office. And sometimes we got to hear what was said about us—them talking in their bedrooms, and us listening in the attic. It wasn’t all flattering.”
I asked Gerald Foos if he ever felt guilty about spying on his guests. While he admitted to constant fear of being found out, he was unwilling to concede that his activities in his motel’s attic brought harm to anyone. First of all, he pointed out, he was indulging his curiosity within the boundaries of his own property, and since his guests were unaware of his voyeurism, they were not affected by it. “Visit any of those old colonial mansions and you’ll probably find listening places and observing holes. This is an old business, people watching, but there’s no invasion of privacy if no one complains.” Repeating what he had told me earlier: “I’ve observed hundreds of guests since owning the Manor House, and none of them knew it.”