Ungentlemanly Acts Read online

  Have you ever been called upon to examine lewd women, or those you had reason to believe were not virtuous, but who had never had children, and if so, have you or have you not found any differences in the genitals of such and those girls you had reason to believe to be entirely virtuous?

  If Dr. Taylor had insinuated that it was always possible to make this distinction and absolutely separate virtue from vice, Dr. Cupples predictably implied that it was rarely possible to do so.

  Paschal’s strategy in calling a number of other “medical experts” was undoubtedly based on his awareness that popular predisposition favored Dr. Taylor’s view: it would take a number of opposing doctors to counteract not only Taylor’s description of the (almost) black-and-white nature of virginity, but his repeated examinations of Lillie Orleman.

  The next defense witness was even more extreme than Dr. Cupples. Dr. Thomas R. Chew maintained that it was “the current opinion of the profession that the anatomical signs taken singly or collectively have no value in establishing virginity or the contrary.” This nihilism was too much for the judge advocate, who forced Chew’s admission that “repeated intercourse would make a change.”

  When Dr. John J. Gaenslen also affirmed that there were no anatomical signs of virginity, Clous was not prepared to let him get off as lightly as Cupples and Chew had. He asked Dr. Gaenslen to suppose that the vagina was “so tightly closed that it is difficult to insert a little finger to the first joint,” essentially what Dr. Taylor had said of his examination of Lillie. Unfazed, Gaenslen replied that this would determine “the question of penetration, not of chastity,” once again raising the unwelcome larger issue of a sexual intimacy that did not involve full intercourse. To further queries he declared that an “imperforate hymen bulging with menstrual fluid” would be positive evidence of lack of penetration and virginity. This was of little help to the prosecution since no one had suggested that Lillie’s menstrual discharge had been held back by her hymen.

  Clous might have wished that he had let well enough alone when Gaenslen went on to recall a case where the hymen of a married woman was so dense that penetration did not take place: “She had been copulating for six years through the urethra.”

  The court was still preoccupied with the question it had posed to Dr. Cupples, how to distinguish virtue from vice in the female genitalia. If, it pursued, the presence of a hymen was no evidence of chastity, nor its absence proof of illicit sexual activity, was it not, however, “extremely improbable that the hymen would remain unruptured after frequent intercourse with an ordinarily well developed male”? Gaenslen refused to satisfy the court, telling them that the hymen “frequently has to be incised before childbirth.” One may question the meaning of “frequent” in both examples as well as speculate on the dimensions of the “ordinarily well developed male” so casually referred to. No one had suggested an examination of Lieutenant Orleman to furnish any particulars about his sexual organs.

  Modern-day gynecology would support defense testimony that any one indication of virginity in a given individual could be misleading, but Dr. Taylor’s testimony about Lillie Orleman was extremely thorough. Nevertheless, it was governed by a presupposition that may well have undermined its accuracy. Lillie’s breasts, for example, were described as virginal because the nipples were both small and light in color, yet change in the nipples occurs, in the form of flaccidity and darker pigmentation, as the result of pregnancy rather than sexual experience. Women who have breast-fed infants exhibit these characteristics more markedly.

  Gynecology was still a new field of specialization in the 1870s, and young women were not likely to have a genital examination unless they had severe problems. In spite of his long professional experience, it may well have been that Dr. Taylor was primarily familiar with women who had had children rather than those who had had some sexual experience without pregnancy and childbirth.

  Similarly, the “delicate tints” of the genitalia that he observed could have been due to the unpleasant nature of the occasion for his patient. What changes the appearance of the external female genitalia from pale to more vivid coloration is sexual arousal, a condition Lillie was unlikely to have experienced while submitting to such a gross violation of her person.26

  In his examination of the external genitals, Dr. Taylor described his difficulty in “introducing more than the end of his little finger.” Certainly that tightness could have been evidence in favor of virginity, but it might well have indicated Lillie’s extreme psychological discomfort with this attempted penetration or a calculated response on her part to produce the proper verdict. Or she may have had a very small opening. Examining a girl he was already convinced was a virgin, under the embarrassing circumstances of the trial, Dr. Taylor was unlikely to have forced this penetration further if Lillie had cried out in pain. Or simulated pain: the stakes were high for both the Orlemans. As Dr. Judith Herman was to write a century later,

  Within the medical profession, denial persists even in the presence of incontrovertible physical evidence, such as venereal disease in children. Rather than acknowledge the possibility of sexual abuse, physicians have been known to assert that children can contract venereal disease from clothing, towels, or toilet seats, an idea that transcends the limits of biological possibility.27

  In an essay on the “taboo” of virginity in certain tribal societies, Freud noted that “the high value which her suitor places on a woman’s virginity seems to us so firmly rooted, so much a matter of course, that we find ourselves almost at a loss if we have to give reasons for this opinion.” The reasons he found for the practice of assigning defloration to someone other than the husband in certain tribes, primarily a primitive fear of blood and of women, clearly struck Freud as inferior to the reasoning of his own culture on the subject. As he wrote, the requirement of virginity is “a logical continuation of the right to exclusive possession of a woman, which forms the essence of monogamy … Some such measure of sexual bondage is, indeed, indispensable to the maintenance of civilized marriage.”28

  Virginia Woolf found a similar rationale for virginity in St. Paul, that is,

  a very strong and natural desire that the woman’s mind and body shall be reserved for the use of one man and one only. Such a conception when supported by the Angels, nature, law, custom and the Church, and enforced by a sex with a strong personal interest to enforce it, and the economic means, was of undoubted power.29

  In Woolf, a sober assessment of the institutions arrayed on the side of this “sexual bondage” replaces Freud’s palpable satisfaction with these cultural arrangements.

  Sex outside marriage, whatever the degree of the woman’s culpability, was regarded as ruining her beyond redemption. In 1840, the thirty-three-year-old governor of South Carolina, James Henry Hammond, and his four teenage nieces, daughters of Wade Hampton, drifted into a reciprocal relationship of physical intimacy, which he recorded in his diary:

  All of them rushing on every occasion into my arms and covering me with kisses—lolling in my lap—pressing their bodies almost into mine, wreathing their limbs with mine, encountering warmly every part of my frame, and permitting my hands to stray unchecked over every part of theirs and to rest without the slightest shrinking from it, on the most secret and sacred regions.30

  In spite of “prescribed rigid standards of purity for ladies of their social position,” Hammond’s biographer conjectures that the girls were innocent because they had lacked close supervision after their mother’s death. Hammond clearly did know better, yet when the relationship was exposed, the culpable uncle rode out the storm of negative public opinion and was later elected to the United States Senate. His four nieces were unable to find husbands. A “state legislator remarked that ‘after all the fuss made no man who valued his standing could marry one of the Hampton girls.’”31 This was an instructive story for any young lady whose purity might be open to question.

  There were closer object lessons at hand in West Texas. As was clear fr
om recent history, the region was particularly notorious for Indian captivity, and most of the residents there were familiar with shocking stories of what captured white women could expect; some were probably acquainted with actual victims. They knew that the Comanches and Kiowa raped captive women, who were considered by white society to have suffered “a fate worse than death,” an experience that was so far beyond remedy that only a few years before the Geddes trial, General Philip Sheridan had refused to ransom a woman believed to be held by Indians on the grounds that after her presumed rape, there was nothing left worth reclaiming.32

  The nineteenth-century ideal of pure womanhood imposed a new burden on women:

  In the past, as long as she repented, the woman who once sinned—like a male transgressor—could be reintegrated into the community. Now, however, because woman allegedly occupied a higher moral plane than man, her fall was so great that it tainted her for life.33

  Whatever the reality of Lillie’s situation—and she need not have experienced actual or repeated penetration to have had a “criminal intimacy” with her father—Lillie could not claim the identity of a respectable middle-class woman if she was found to be other than virginal. But more than her personal fate was at stake. If she was judged to be impure, the trial would almost inevitably conclude with Geddes’s acquittal and her father’s condemnation. In turn, the entire Orleman family would suffer a peculiarly horrific form of disgrace entailing both social ostracism and the loss of occupation for their breadwinner.

  QUARTERS

  In most frontier army posts, Officers’ Row consisted of a line of double-occupancy houses, except for the commanding officer’s.y In the quarters divided between Lieutenant Orleman and Captain Geddes, the lieutenant and his daughter occupied the left side of the structure and the captain the right. One room in back, attached to Geddes’s side, was claimed by Lieutenant Bigelow, who, as a second lieutenant, was lower in rank than the other occupants.z A great deal of investigation and trial testimony con-cerned the probability of Geddes’s having overheard from one of his rooms the incriminating speech of the Orlemans in their adjacent bedroom. As usual, prosecution and defense witnesses gave differing testimony.

  Second Lieutenant Edwin F. Glenn of the Twenty-fifth Infantry was asked if he had ever been able to overhear talking in Orleman’s quarters when he was in Geddes’s. He replied that he had, and added that even if windows and doors were closed, “conversation could probably be heard because of the canvas ceiling.” Frederick W. Ruoff, the forage master at Fort Stockton, went to Geddes’s quarters frequently at night. He indicated that he had heard noises from Orleman’s quarters: “It sounded as though it was a pot in the chamber, down on the floor and sounded as though it had been struck—as though it had struck the leg of a chair—it sounded that way—I could hear sounds as though persons were walking across the room—if I remember rightly I could hear voices as though persons were talking but I could not distinguish anything.” At that time, of course, Ruoff was not trying to hear the conversation in the Orlemans’ quarters. Ruoff had occupied the Orleman quarters in July and said he was able to hear voices from Geddes’s quarters there.

  On cross-examination Clous attempted to discredit the contention that voices could be heard from one set of quarters to the other by suggesting that the conversation Ruoff had heard had come through the open door. Ruoff replied, “I think if the door had been closed, I [would have] heard it plainer.”

  On reexamination Paschal asked Ruoff to explain this surprising statement. He told the court that after the Orleman-Geddes affair had become public at Fort Stockton, he had conducted an experiment to satisfy his curiosity: “I closed the door and windows one morning when the Sergeant of B Company brought his morning report. I cannot state exactly the exact words that I heard, but I could hear Lieutenant McMartin say, ‘What is this for Sergeant …’ something of that kind.”

  Post trader F. W. Young was called by the prosecution because he had lived in the Orleman quarters for five months. He denied the possibility of hearing anything: “There was a solid wall. I never heard anything, a person cannot—the only thing I ever heard was when Lieutenant Nordstrom was living there. He drove a nail in the wall.” Cross-examination established that Young had lived in the quarters in 1875 when the ceiling was different.34

  Orleman, recalled by the prosecution, testified that the floor covering in his bedroom consisted of a heavy layer of hay and a carpet stretched over it.

  Four of the seven original buildings on Officers’ Row at Fort Stockton remain standing today, but they have clearly been altered over time. Present-day examination cannot settle the question of how much sound might travel through the partition wall. In the one unit open to visitors—not the unit Orleman and Geddes lived in—the partition wall is two feet thick, but it is not adobe and appears to be hollow. With the door closed it is possible in one set of quarters to hear talking in the other.

  Several details in the court-martial testimony on this matter raise questions that were not pursued in the trial. The mysterious difference between the thickness of the partition wall in the quarterly building reports and in the diagram created by Bigelow for the trial—one foot versus two feet—requires that one measurement be grossly inaccurate. The quarterly building reports were presumably disinterested documents; on the other hand, they may have been done in the perfunctory manner of routine reports. An error in the original set could easily have been perpetuated down through the years since no one would think to remeasure the post’s buildings every quarter. It seems like a strange mistake, nonetheless. For one thing, a foot would be a more customary width for an internal wall of an officer’s quarters; for another, a mistake of a foot would be a significant error.

  As for Lieutenant Bigelow’s diagrams, he was a fervent partisan of the Orlemans, but he was also a punctilious and principled man, unlikely to cook the measurements, especially when he would have to attest to their accuracy under oath. On May 13, he wrote in his diary that he had been summoned to San Antonio as a witness in the trial. He had been instructed “to verify the drawings and surveys that are to be used as evidence … I infer from the telegram that I shall have to certify under oath to the accuracy of the documentary evidence; I must therefore make all the measurements myself.” On May 17, however, Clous sent another telegram to the commanding officer of Fort Stockton:

  Drawing Geddes Orleman quarters received but found defective. Let Lieut Bigelow thoroughly post himself on matter contained in my letter: height of partition walls, whether going up to roof or not; character of material of which built—height of ceiling and of what material made, paths, if any, inside of enclosure to be delinated [sic], the nature of ground and character of obstructions if any between Lieut Bigelow’s quarters and the kitchens and outhouses in same inclosure to be thoroughly examined and described. All these are matters of the utmost importance, and Lieut Bigelow should be well posted.35

  It would be useful to know in what way the original diagrams were “defective.” Most likely, given the second telegram’s list of particulars, they were simply not as comprehensive as Clous wanted. Bigelow never did testify about his carefully detailed diagrams, but they were introduced into evidence, and the defense did not challenge the width of the partition wall. It did object to the labelling of the rooms, stating that Geddes’s sitting room and bedroom were reversed. Given that Bigelow lived in the same house, this, too, is an odd mistake.

  Ruoff’s personal experiment—which in a modern court would have been ordered—seems the closest we can come to an objective assessment. He was able to make out some words, just as Geddes testified to doing. We can assume that Geddes was actively eavesdropping because he confessed to having already had suspicions about the Orlemans. He may have become curious when he began to hear noises and snatches of conversation, especially when he heard his own name mentioned. The buildings on frontier army posts were notorious for poor construction, and the likelihood of noise travelling from one half of the house t
o the other would be increased by the canvas ceiling. Moreover, the cushioning underfoot in the Orlemans’ bedroom would have done little to absorb voices.

  LITERATURE AND ITS DISCONTENTS

  Lieutenant Orleman testified that Geddes had given his daughter a “scandalous novel” entitled Infelice, which he—Orleman—had thrown into the fire after finding his daughter crying over it. Witnesses friendly to Geddes countered that he had a perfectly respectable library although each defined respectability in terms of somewhat different genres of literature. Two of Geddes’s friends invoked the safe rubric of “standard works,” but for Joseph Friedlander, respectability was most demonstrated by poetry, while for First Lieutenant Henry Landon, the preferred genres were history and biography. Friedlander said that he had “examined” Geddes’s library and that it contained “standard works, English and Scottish poems—and most all the poets’ works.” When asked if there were any sensational works, he replied that he had never seen any.

  Landon, a friend of Geddes stationed at Fort Davis, told the court that Geddes’s library consisted of “biographies, histories and standard works.” He, too, denied finding any highly sensational novels in the collection.

  Another officer of the Twenty-fifth Infantry stationed at Fort Davis, First Lieutenant Walter Scott, said that Lieutenant Reade of Fort Davis had borrowed the novel Infelice from Geddes and Scott had returned it to Geddes on a trip to Fort Stockton. In speaking of the book with Lillie Orleman, Scott had praised it, and Lillie had expressed a desire to read it. He arranged for its loan to her. Scott further remarked that he did not think Infelice was “sensationalistic or improper for a young lady to read.”