Daughters of Eve (7 page)

"If she ever does, it will be an eye-opener for her," Irene said quietly. "Men may feel a woman's place should be in the home, but when the middle-aged housewife gets forced out into the job market because of some emergency situation, the male employer isn't going to excuse her lack of experience. Discrimination is a reality. We have to face it, and we have to fight it."

"But, how?" Ruth asked worriedly. "I'm not a servant. I've got as much right to do things I want to do as Niles and Peter. I've tried to get that across to my folks, but they won't listen."

"What if you went on strike?" Paula asked her. "What if you just told them that you're not going to come home on Monday afternoons?"

"Dad would hit the roof. I'd be grounded."

"So what else is new?" Paula said. "It sounds as if you're pretty well grounded anyway."

"Would he hit you?" Jane Rheardon asked. It was the first time she had spoken since the meeting had begun, and her voice rang out thin and unnaturally shrill.

Ruth turned to her in surprise.

"No, of course not. Why do you ask that?"

"You said he'd be angry," Jane said defensively.

"Okay, he'll be angry. He gets angry about things lots of times, but that doesn't mean he goes totally bats. The worst he'll do is ground me, or maybe I'll have to miss dinner. I can pick up a hamburger at Foster's on my way home."

"You'd have to be prepared to stick by your ultimatum," Irene said. "If you back down, you'll have done more harm than good. Your parents have to be convinced that you mean what you say."

"I'll convince them." Ruth's face was pale and determined beneath its sprinkling of freckles. "I'm not going to be walked over any longer."

"Good stuff," Fran said. "Remember, you've got sisters behind you."

"Hear! Hear!" cried Bambi, her eyes sparkling, and suddenly the room was filled with applause.

They were so innocent, the lot of them, so totally naive! Irene's eyes moved in amazement from one young face to another. They might have sprung from the pen of Louisa May Alcott, products of an earlier era when men spoke and the women in their lives leaped to obey.

Perhaps it was as it should be that she had come here. These children needed her in a way the ones at Jefferson had not. Those had been city youngsters, tougher, more aggressive, able to recognize injustice and react to it. They had understood the situation immediately.

All she had had to do was to repeat the conversation.

"I didn't tell you I'd applied, because I wanted to surprise you," Bob had told her. Smiling. So pleased with himself. "I thought I'd wait and see how things turned out. You can't be mad, Renie. After all, it's for us."

"For us?" She had forced out the words.

"Well, sure. I love you, honey. I want to take care of you. How do you think I'd feel, getting married to a woman who earned more than I did?"

Even now, almost a full year later, she could not think back upon that scene without feeling sick with anger. Rage rose within her, and a sour taste flooded her mouth. "I love you, honey"—the meaningless words were tossed out so easily! And she had allowed herself to think he might be different!

He was exactly like the rest of them, shallow and arrogant, ready to crush her into nothing in the name of "love."

The newspapers had implied that it was she who had incited the riot. That was not true. She had only told her girls what had happened, and they had risen on their own. How proud she had been of them, all those fine young women, showing their love and loyalty in the only way possible!

Some of them had cried when she left

"We'll never forget you," they had told her.

Irene, herself, had been too furious to cry.

But, here, in Modesta, there was a chance for a new beginning. Here, she was truly needed....

"... will form bur circle," Fran was saying, "and all join hands."

Irene rose to her feet with the others. She felt Fran's strong, fine-boned hand close upon hers on one side and Laura's smooth, plump one on the other. The circle of vulnerable young faces swam before her eyes, blending one into another, to form a ring of light, and her heart lifted from its depression with a strange sense of pride.

These are my girls! These are my lovely children! No one must hurt them! No one must hold them down!

"Daughters of one mother—sisters to each other—"

The light, sweet voices rose all about her, and Irene joined them with her own.

CHAPTER 6

The third week of October the weather turned. It happened quickly; people who drifted off to sleep beneath cotton sheets got up in the night to hunt for blankets, and in the morning the air held a chill and the indescribable tang of autumn. All across Modesta, homeowners scrambled onto rooftops to disconnect air-conditioning units, and housewives sorted through summer clothing and packed it away in storage closets. Laura Snow's mother served hot cereal for breakfast ("With raisins, baby, to give you energy"), and Bambi Ellis reluctantly buttoned a sweater over her sleeveless T-shirt.

Fran Schneider brought her rat cages in from the garage and installed them in her room.

"Your mother's going to freak out," Paula Brummell said. Paula, who lived next door, was Fran's closest friend and had come over to help with the moving. Between them the two girls had managed to carry the four heavy cages in through the back door and up the stairs into Fran's small bedroom where they were now piled in layers, separated by plywood sheeting. Within their confines, the plump white rats scurried anxiously about, peering through the chicken-wire siding at their new surroundings with sharp, pink eyes.

"Probably," Fran agreed without concern. "She freaked out last winter. She refused to come in and clean my room for four whole months. She'd leave the bed linen in the hall outside the door and yell in to me to come get it and change my sheets."

"Won't she try to get you to move them out?" Paula asked.

"Sure, but after a while she'll give up. I can't move them out, and that's all there is to it. They'd die in the garage when the winter cold set in, and I might as well get them in here now so I won't risk losing them." Fran bent to look in at the rats on the lowest tier. "Are you fellas all right in there? I'm sorry we had to jolt you around so much."

"Ugh," Paula said. "I really don't see how you stand them. Doesn't it give you the creeps to sleep in the room with them?"

"Nope," Fran said. "I'm used to the guys. Besides, they're working for me. Every day they're putting me one step closer to that scholarship."

"You're really counting on winning it, aren't you?" Paula regarded her friend with respect "You're not worried about the competition?"

"There isn't any on the local level," Fran said matter-of-factly. "I've checked it out. It's me against Gordon Pellet, and he didn't even decide to enter until last week. What can he throw together before December? It'll be stiffer at state level, but I feel pretty confident about that too. What I've got is something really special."

"What is it?" Paula asked. "You've been working with those things for over a year now, but you've never explained to me exactly what you're doing."

"I haven't wanted to talk about it," Fran said. "The whole thing is so far out, I knew if I told people they'd think I was crazy. I wanted to test it first and see if I could back up my theory with statistics. It's wild—I mean, really wild."

"What is it?"

"You promise you won't tell? Especially not Mr. Carncross. I want to spring it on him right before the competition. This will knock him dead."

"I promise," Paula said. "I give my word as a Daughter of Eve."

"Okay." Fran gestured toward the top cage. "Do you see those?" She drew a deep breath. "They're alcoholics."

"They're what?" Paula asked blankly.

"You heard me right. The rats are alcoholics. They're genetic alcoholics. Their parents were alkies, and their grandparents and their great-grandparents. These poor slobs stay drunk all the time. See how sluggish they are?"

"You mean you feed them alcohol?" Paula asked skeptically.

"They feed themselves alcohol. The desire is bred into them. See those bottles?" Fran pointed at a row of four glass bottles, hung upside down across the far end of the cage. "See that fella going over to drink? He'll choose the one at the far end. There—see? I told you. They all choose that one. I have to refill it a couple of times a day. Know what's in it?"

"It's not water?"

"It's half water, half vodka. The bottle next to it is twenty-five percent vodka. They'll go to that one if the end one is empty. The third bottle contains ten percent vodka, and the fourth is pure water. If there's anything in the other bottles, they won't touch the water. What they have there is a self-service bar, and they operate it themselves."

"What about the ones in this cage?" Paula asked, indicating the one on the second tier. "They seem livelier. Are they alcoholics too?"

"Watch and see," Fran said. The two girls sat silent a moment, intent upon the performance of the animals. Then Fran asked, "Well?"

"They're drinking from the water bottle. That is, unless you've changed the order."

"No, that's straight water, all right. This is my control group. They can't stand alcohol. I think they'd die of thirst before they'd take a swig of half-and-half. What I'm proving, Paula"—Fran's eyes were shining with excitement—"is that the tendency toward alcoholism is genetically inherited."

"You mean somebody with an alcoholic father or mother has a better chance of being alcoholic himself than the average person?" Paula frowned, trying to understand. "I thought that had already been proven. Didn't Mr. Carncross say something about it in class?"

"Yes," Fran said, "but he made a very definite distinction between heredity and environment. He said that children growing up in a family where heavy drinking is common are more likely to drink as adults than kids who grow up in a family of nondrinkers. His idea, though, is that it's for psychological reasons. The kids get used to seeing liquor around the house and seeing people drink it when they're having a good time. It's an accepted part of their lives. But if a child of alcoholic parents is separated from them at birth and is adopted into a nondrinking family, Mr. Carncross thinks he'd have no more tendency toward alcoholism than anybody else.

"That's what I'm challenging. My theory is that the compulsive desire for alcohol is not psychological but physical. It's in the genes. You can pass it down from generation to generation, like curly hair or brown eyes. That's what I'm proving with my experiment."

"But, how—" Paula began.

"I ran through a lot of rats the month I started," Fran told her. "I had them in a cage with my bottles, and almost all of them drank the water, but there were a couple who liked the water with the ten percent vodka. I put those in a separate cage and bred them, and out of a couple of litters there were a few who liked the ten percent stuff and a couple who went for the twenty-five percent. I got rid of the water drinkers, and bred the heavier drinkers to each other. I kept doing that until—behold—my alcoholic generation!"

"That's incredible," Paula said.

"You're darned right it's incredible!" Fran gestured toward the second cage. "Those are the descendants of the nondrinkers. I've kept records on all of them. And those two sectioned cages are for breeding. I'm so excited about it, Paula—the way it's all working out—it's revolutionary! It'll set those science writers on their ears!"

"How do you suppose Mr. Carncross will take it?" Paula asked. "Won't he be sort of set back to have you go out and prove the stuff he's been telling us in class is wrong?"

"Oh, I don't think so," Fran said. "He's a pretty cool guy. Besides, that's what the field of science is all about—breaking through old beliefs and proving new things. That's why it's so challenging and why it means so much to me to win that scholarship."

"You'll win it," Paula said with certainty. "How could you miss!"

"I've got to admit, I feel like that myself. And you can see why I can't risk the health of these guys by keeping them out in a cold garage?"

"Of course!"

"Though with the amount of booze this one batch gulps down, they probably wouldn't feel the cold." Fran burst into laughter, and Paula laughed with her, caught up by the contagious merriment

Fran's eyes, behind the thick lenses of her glasses, were sparkling, and her narrow face was aglow with accomplishment. Looking at her across the stack of cages, Paula thought with surprise, Why, she's almost pretty!

It was the first time, during all the years of their friendship, that this thought had occurred to her.

"Hey, Bam-Bam, it's nice you could make it," Peter Grange said sarcastically. "I've been sitting here waiting for you for a good twenty minutes. You're lucky I didn't pick up somebody else and take off on you."

"Don't call me 'Bam-Bam.' It sounds like something out of a kids' cartoon show." Bambi Ellis dumped her armload of schoolbooks in through the car's open window to free her hands so she could turn the handle of the door. "I told you I had to talk to Miss Stark awhile. You didn't have to wait if you didn't want to."