Beebo Brinker Chronicles 4 - Journey To A Woman (12 page)

Halfway through this frenetic task she went to the phone and called the Los Angeles International Airport. Charlie watched her, still on the couch, immobilized with disbelief. She made a reservation for that very morning at three o'clock.

And then she called her Uncle John and told him to pick her up at Chicago's Midway Airport the next day. Her reservation on the plane was for one person only.

"Just you?” Charlie said softly, staring at her. “You mean you'd really leave me here with the kids? You mean you really don't give a goddamn about your own children?"

"You said I couldn't take them with me!” she cried. “I'd take them if you'd let me."

"Never,” he said. “But I thought—God, Beth, I thought you'd try a little harder to get them than this. You've given up without a struggle.” He was truly shocked; it blasted all his favorite concepts of motherhood to see her behave this way.

"I've struggled with you until I haven't any strength left,” she said hoarsely.

"You never loved them,” he said, hushed with shock and revelation. “You never loved them at all."

"I haven't a strong enough stomach to get down on my knees and beg for them,” she cried. “I've begged you long enough and hard enough for other things."

"But they were things. These are kids. Your own kids!"

"I want them,” she cried, “but I want my freedom more. I only make them unhappy, I'm not a good mother."

"Well, what sort of a mother do you think I'll make?” he shouted, and now it was Charlie whose voice was loud enough to wake the children.

She left him abruptly and finished her packing. In the children's room she could heard stirrings and she prayed with the tears still soaking her cheeks that neither of them would wake up and break her heart or change her mind. She forced her suitcases shut with the strength of haste and fear, and half shoved, half carried them out to the car.

Charlie stood in the center of the living room and watched her with his mouth open. When she passed him he said, “Beth, this isn't happening. It can't be. I couldn't have been that bad. I couldn't have been. Beth, please. Explain to me, tell me. I don't understand."

But she gave him a look of hopelessness, and once she snapped, “Is that all you can say? After nine years of marriage?"

Is he just going to stand there and let me go? she wondered. A sort of panic rose in her at the thought that he might suddenly regain his senses and force her to stop. But he let her get as far as packing both bags into the back of the car and actually starting the motor before he yanked the door open and shoved her over so that he could sit in the driver's seat.

"Beth,” he said, and his eyes were still big with the awful-ness of what she was doing to him and their children. “You aren't going anywhere."

Suddenly he kissed her urgently, holding her arms with hands so strong and fierce that they bruised her flesh. She felt his teeth pressed into her tender mouth and something in the despair of it, the near-terror she sensed in him at the thought of losing her, brought an uprush of unwanted tenderness in her heart.

He tried to kiss her again, but Beth struggled wildly, trying to hurt him. And all the while he was wooing her with violence, almost the way he had when they first met, as if he knew now too that words were long since worthless between them.

At last Beth grasped one of her own shoes and pulled it off. Desperately she struck him with all her strength on the side of the head. The sharp heel cut his scalp and he gave a soft little cry of astonishment. He pulled away from her at last and they stared at each other, both of them shocked at themselves, at each other, at what was happening, both of them crying.

Finally, without a word, he got out of the car and slammed the door.

Beth dragged herself over to the driver's seat and rolled down the window. “I'll write,” she said, but their two white faces, still so near one another physically, were already separated by more than the miles Beth would fly across that night. He flinched at her promise, as if he knew that an envelope full of words would do no. more good than those they had flung at each other in a huge effort to create understanding.

"Take good care of the kids,” she said and immediately she began to back out because she could hear one of them starting to cry.

He walked along beside the car, one hand on the window sill, as if that might keep her there longer. “What shall I tell them this time when they wake up and find you gone?” he asked.

"Tell them I've gone to hell,” she wept. “Tell them I'm a no-good and the only thing they can hope for is that life will be happier without me than with me. It will, too.'*

She began to press the accelerator, gathering speed until he had to let go or run to keep up. He let go.

In the street she straightened the car around and gave one last trembling look to her house, her yard and garden, the lighted windows of the living room where the TV set played on to an audience of furniture. Skipper's little voice wailed through the night for a glass of water and Charlie stood at the end of the drive, a silhouette with silver trim, watching her.

Beth drove away. God, let me never feel sorrow like this again, she prayed. Let this be my punishment for what I'm doing. I can't bear any more.

IN PASADENA SHE stopped and called Cleve. It was past eleven o'clock and she hesitated, but she had to talk to somebody about Vega and had to make some arrangements about Charlie, and there plainly wasn't anybody she could turn to but Cleve.

"I'm in a little all-night joint on Fair Oaks, at Colorado,” she said.

"God, Beth, you're on skid row!"

"Sh! Don't wake Jean up! Can you come down?"

"Sure, but you'd better find a cop to protect you till I get there."

"It's not a bar, it's a coffee place,” she said. “Hurry, Cleve.” And the catch in her throat warned him to heed her words.

He got there in less than fifteen minutes. She was waiting out in front and when he arrived they went in and took a booth and had a cup of coffee in the dirty brilliance of the fluorescent light.

"Cleve, it's not fair of me to dump my troubles in your lap,” she said, “but you've got to help me. You're the only one who can."

He was alarmed by the look of her. Her eyes were heavy and scared, red with weeping, and her hair hung about her pretty face in neglected confusion. She breathed fast, as though she had been running, and she stammered—something Beth, with all her poise, had never done.

"If you're in trouble—"

"It's private trouble, Cleve. I'm leaving Charlie."

His jaw went slack and he stared at her amazed while the waitress placed the coffee in front of them. After a moment he lighted them each a cigarette, passing hers to her, and then he said to the coffee cup, “I'm really sorry. God! I thought you two were sublimely happy."

"Not everybody's as happy as you and Jean!” Beth said, and there was more wistfulness than envy in her voice.

"Thank God for that,” he said wryly, but she was too wrapped up in her pain and perplexity to notice it ‘Tell me about it?” he said.

"No,” she said, shaking her head and making a tremendous effort to control herself. “You wouldn't understand any better than he did."

"What about the kids?” His voice was cautious. He had been handling Vega's flare-ups so long that frantic women were not new to him. He had some idea what to do.

"I—I left them. I'm no proper mother, Cleve. It was cowardly but I swear I think they'll be happier."

Like Charlie before him, Cleve was shocked. “But what in hell will Charlie do with them?"

"I don't know. I came to talk to you about Vega,” she said quickly. If he persisted in that obvious shock she would go to pieces. His sister's name silenced him, threw him off the track.

"I went ahead and saw her, Cleve. I've been seeing quite a lot of her lately.” She didn't know how to proceed. She couldn't blurt out the truth to him, and yet she had to say something. In her frayed emotional state Vega was likely to do anything, even scream the facts to strangers, unless she could be reassured that Beth at least thought of her before she left.

"I know,” Cleve told her.

"You know?” Beth gasped. “What do you know?"

"That you've been seeing her,” he said, and he was not pleased. “Who do you think gets the brunt of her bad temper?"

"I thought I got all of it."

He shook his head. “You don't even get half."

After an embarrassed pause she said, “I'm sorry, Cleve.” She wondered how much of the truth he knew.

"So am I."

"She thinks she owns me. We've gotten pretty close. I can't disappear without giving her a message. Tell her I'm sorry, will you?"

"Okay.” He looked at her. “Is that all?"

And she knew from his voice, his face, that he was disappointed in her; perhaps his feelings were even stronger.

"Vega took it all wrong, Cleve. She took it too hard."

"She did that with Beverly, too. The girl P. K. Schaefer took away from her."

It took Beth a moment to place P.K.

"I don't want her to do anything awful, Cleve,” Beth said, pleading with him.

"Neither do I,” he said and gave her a twisted little smile.

"I guess I loused things up for you, didn't I? I never meant to. It just happened. It got away from me. Will you talk to her?"

"I'll try.” He was already bracing himself for another siege of fury and erratic temper and threats. When things like this happened to Vega he always had to nurse her through them. Her mother was too sick and Gramp was too frail and neither of them understood the problem. Mrs. Purvis, to judge from Cleve's description of her attitude, would have disowned her daughter at the very least had she known her true nature.

When Cleve made a move to get up she caught his hands, searching for the warmth, the desire to help her, that she so needed. But he was chilly, preoccupied with the problem she had thrust at him.

"Cleve, there's one more thing,” she said and he paused.

"Beth, I told you not to get mixed up with my sister, but you went ahead and did it. Now you're sorry but it's too late. Don't you think that's enough?"

She was surprised and shamed by it. But not silenced. “I must ask you—you're the only one. Write to me,” she implored. “Tell me about the kids-and Charlie. He won't write, I know that. Besides I don't want him to know my address, if I should leave my uncle's house. Oh, Cleve, please! You can't turn me down!"

He looked at her a second longer, at her pale tremulous mouth and shaking hand, and then he took the address from her. It was one of Uncle John's cards from her wallet. He folded it solemnly and put it into his pocket.

"Thank you, Cleve,” she said ardently. “You'll be my only link with them."

Cleve stood up. “I told Jean I had to go down to the corner drug store,” he said. “I've told her that so often she thinks it means the corner beer parlor. I'd better get home and give her a nice surprise. Nothing but coffee on my breath.” He Was making an effort, at least, to be kind, to take the awful heaviness out of the atmosphere. She knew he would do as he said for her, and she was moved and grateful.

He took her arm and led her to her car. At the door he told her, “If this is half as hard on Charlie as it is on you, he's going to crack up fast. You look like hell, Beth."

"I know,” she said. “I never did anything so awful—so hard—in my life. I feel like I'm going to die of it."

"Then you're a fool. Whatever your reasons were, they aren't worth it."

"That's what I have to find out,” she said.

"Sure you won't tell me?"

"Yes, Cleve.” She held out a hand to him and after a minute he grasped it and squeezed it. “I'm sorry,” he said. “For you both."

"Thank you. Goodbye, Cleve. And write to me."

He nodded and then he turned and walked away and she watched him for a second, thinking how much he looked like Vega and what a hell of a mess she had handed him. Subconsciously she realized that her train of thoughts was enough to shatter her mind, her emotions. The load was already too great. She had to turn to something else, she had to move and do things and act ordinary and sensible or she would fly to pieces.

The plane took off three minutes behind time. She felt the ground fall away beneath her and the wide steel wings rise, heard the captain's voice moments later and saw her seat neighbor light a cigarette—all with a feeling of eerie unreality reinforced by the small morning hour.

"We are circling over Catalina Island,” the pilot announced, “waiting for air traffic to clear over Los Angeles. In about five minutes we will be heading due east."

Beth looked out of the window and saw a wavy ribbon of orange lights—the shoreline of Catalina Island—and a cluster of white lights winking around the town of Avalon. She was on the side away from the mainland and couldn't see Los Angeles, but soon afterward the plane turned eastward and they headed inland again. She looked down, looking for landmarks in the night, and after a moment she recognized a few: the Colosseum, the brilliant green-white strips of the freeways, and then Pasadena with the winding pattern of Orange Grove Avenue discernible below. She followed it carefully with her eyes to where she supposed Sierra Bella began, and looked at the bouquet of lights there against the mountains, looked at it more with her heart than her eyes.

She closed her eyes then and for a short painful moment she could see the little town as it would look in tomorrow's daylight, bright with the colors of early summer, the lavender flowers of the jacaranda trees glowing over the streets, the pink and white oleander with its pointed leaves, the long palmy street up the mountainside to their small house, the sun frosting the purple mountains in the early morning, the sounds of her children tumbling out of bed and shouting for their breakfast, Charlie shaving and grumbling at the mirror.

Beth lighted a cigarette and said softly to herself, “Laura, I'm coming for you. Don't fail me. Be there, darling, or that's the end of me. I'll be destroyed, for I can never come back here."

UNCLE JOHN, GENIAL and bustling and worried, picked her up in Chicago. He had to be content with the briefest and barest explanation from her. She was utterly exhausted and all she wanted was to collapse and sleep. She even took sleeping pills when it developed that her bitter self-recriminations would give her no rest. And for two whole days she refused to leave her room.