Spring Fire (15 page)

Mac's, Donaldson's, the Alley, French's, Miss Swanson's, all of them alive with hungry students swarming in and out the smell of hamburger predominant in each cafe, the sizzling crackle of French fries cooking in grease on hot open grills.

"Ham on rye."

"One over easy."

"Hey, Mary, catch the dog."

"Well, hell, you're almost an hour late!"

Leda stood finally on the curb in front of Miss Swanson's. She fumbled in her pocket for a nickel and ran into the drugstore on the corner. She made a mistake dialing the number, and she held the hook down until the dime came back and then tried again. When the voice answered, there was a long wait, the far-off sound of voices shouting down the halls, and then the answer quick and flip. "Robin's out to dinner. Call back later."

Her heart was pounding, and she could feel the perspiration soaking her body. If Mitch was eating with Robin, she might have it arranged already. Where was she eating? With the car, she could be anywhere, but it was unlike her to drive far at night. The clock read seven-thirty. In half an hour the chapter would meet and Mitch would go back to the house for her bags. Leda shivered in the night air and wished she had found Mitch before she had a chance to see Robin and carry her plan through. Now Leda would have to tell Marsha she was sick, that she had gone for medicine because she was sick and she could not attend the meeting. She would be in the room waiting for Mitch when she came.

A car swerved away from her as she stepped off the sidewalk into the street. The cab driver grunted, and skirted the curb narrowly as he drove fast.

"Hurry!" he said. "You girls always gotta be someplace fast. That's all I hear, 'Hurry, driver! Hurry, hurry."

* * *

"Marsha's in the Chapter Room," Kitten said. "Thought you were sick."

Leda said, "I am." She found the door to the room locked, and she knocked three times fast and once slow.

"Who goes?" She recognized Jane Bell's voice.

"Pledged in blood," Leda said. "Promised in the heart."

"Enter."

The bolt was slipped off and Jane Bell stepped back. She was wearing a silky white gown with a deep red scarf on her hair, drawing her hair back behind her ears. There was a sharp odor of burning incense in the dark room, lighted only by five single candles on a small table covered with the same silky white material. Marsha knelt at the table, arranging a red velvet-covered book with a black marker on the open page. When Leda walked in the room, panting, her face damp and hot, Jane stared at her.

"My gosh," she said, "you look feverish."

"That's what I came about. I can't attend the meeting tonight I feel lousy."

Marsha looked up from the book at Leda. There was an angelic look to her face by candlelight, a look that she was fully aware of, cultivated and practiced. When she conducted the weekly chapter meetings, this look lent an air of piety to the conduct of the service. With the members of the chapter standing in a solemn semicircle before her, she felt that there was something spiritual about her leadership, celestial and sacrosanct

"We're having a formal meeting tonight," she told Leda, as if to persuade her sickness to end.

"I see you are. I'm sorry. I just feel lousy."

"You look feverish," Jane Bell remarked again.

"I hope you feel better." Marsha smiled. "Did you know that Mrs. Gates, our Kansas City vice-counsel, gave us three new robes? Jane has one on."

Jane twirled and the robe floated on her gracefully. Inwardly Leda thought, Jesus! Oh, silly Jesus! but she pacified them by touching the material and exclaiming, then apologizing again. She backed out of the room just as the electric buzzer gave the signal for the members to line up in the hall and prepare to enter in single file.

The halls were still, the pledges confined to their rooms for study hour. Leda found the room dark. Mitch had not come yet. She struck a match and lit a cigarette, and in the blackness she went to the window and watched the street. Ten dragging minutes later the convertible pulled up in front of the house, and Mitch slammed the front door and hurried up the walk. Leda lay down on the bed, watching the cigarette smoke curl to the ceiling.

After the light went on in the room, Mitch felt a flood of surprise in her stomach as she saw Leda. She shut the door and set Robin's large empty suitcase on the floor. Leda sat up and looked at her.

"You're going to pack now?" she said.

"Yes. I thought you'd be in chapter meeting." She tried not to look at Leda, but she could feel the girl's eyes piercing her, stopping her attempts to avoid those eyes, and she went to the bureau and began removing socks and handkerchiefs and scarves.

Leda let her click the suitcase open, and watched her while she placed the things inside it. She could feel the sharp edges of the letter against her chest there near her bra where she had put it before dinner. With her left hand she reached down and fished the letter out and stuck it under her pillow.

"I decided," Leda said finally, "that the least I could do was to say good-by to you."

Mitch felt choked up and agonized with desire. She scooped out an armful of slips and panties and pajamas and thrust them in there with the other clothes. Her lips formed the word "Thanks," and she meant to say it, but there was no sound. On the floor of the closet there were fluffy swirls of dust near her tennis shoes, and she brushed them away with her hand. She tossed the shoes onto the bed, and took the chair from the desk over to the closet to reach the boxes at the top.

Leda said, "Want any help?"

"No. Thanks, though. I can do it myself."

"You've got an idea," Leda said, "that you can do everything yourself. I don't know where you got that idea."

"Sometimes it's up to yourself," Mitch said.

"You've got a lot of ideas, I bet. I bet you've got thousands of good ideas."

The box slipped from Mitch's hand and fell to the floor, spilling out two round hats, one black, one brown, both alike
—round and plain.

"Someday you'll find out that most of the ideas don't work. None of them work."

Mitch looked up at Leda. "What are you trying to say?" she asked. "What are you trying to tell me? You never say anything right out. You always talk around and make it hard."

"I'm trying to say, don't go. Going isn't the answer."

The tears came in her eyes, and Mitch looked away at the shoe bag on the closet floor. She thought of Robin, her friend, of the swimming team, of other years and anything to keep them from being the same, but this made it worse and the sob started low in her throat. Then Leda bent and caught her shoulder and held her, kneeling on the rug, listening to the stifled crying.

"Mitch," she said, "don't go. Don't leave me, please."

"But you know what I am. I told you what I am in the letter."

"I don't care. Mitch, I don't care."

"I can't stay with you. I won't feel right I
—"

Leda put her hand on the girl's face and felt the tears. She turned her face and put her lips on the salty moistness. "Come on over to the bed," she said. "Get up, Mitch, and come on over to the bed."

Mitch lay down with her face buried in the pillow, and Leda sat on the edge, her hands stroking Mitch's hair.

"Can you hear me, Mitch? Listen, it doesn't help to run away. You don't think it helps, do you? It doesn't help."

"No," Mitch sobbed. "I can't stay here. I can't bear to see you every day and know what I'm doing to you."

"What are you doing to me? What in hell are
you
doing to
me?"

"I'm a Lesbian," Mitch answered. "That's how I feel about you, too. I'm not like you
—with Jake and everything."

"Oh, God, Mitch! All right, listen. I love you, you crazy kid. I don't have to label my love, do I? Do I have to say that it's Lesbian love? O.K., then that's what it is. It's Lesbian love, pure and simple. Ye gods, I've known about myself for years. I didn't run away. I didn't walk out and run away. You gave me plenty of reason to. You were the first one to come along and blow up my little plan for hiding the way I am. You think
you're
doing something to me! Oh, Mitch! If anyone's doing it, I'm doing it I'm doing it because I love you."

Mitch brought her head up from the pillow and turned over on her side. "But you said it" she said "You said you couldn't love a Lesbian. You said
—"

"I said so damn much, didn't I? You've got to understand, Mitch. I don't like what I am. If Jan ever knew, I'd take a razor and slash my wrists. I couldn't live with people knowing, and pointing and saying 'queer' at me. No one knows but you, and I guess I never would have told you if you hadn't started to leave. Do you think it's easy to admit it? It was different when I could say it wasn't this way, that I was bisexual and all that rot. Bisexual
—that's sort of like succotash, isn't it? Only this succotash hasn't got any corn in it. It's straight beans!"

"What about Jake?" Mitch blew her nose and sat up. "What about all the time you spend with Jake?"

"Maybe I'm trying to prove something to myself. Part of me is trying to say that I'm not what I am. That's the part of me that everyone knows
—the alluring Leda, the queen, Jan's daughter, an apple never falls far from the tree. Out with Jake every damn day to keep myself away from what I really am. Want to know what sex with him is like? It's like dry bread, that's what it's like. Like dry bread!"

Leda got up from the bed and reached for her cigarettes on the desk. She felt relieved, cleansed, as though her mind had been emptied and she was free. She walked over to the suitcase on Mitch's bed and picked up the clothing, taking it in her arms to the drawer. "You want this all put back, don't you?" she said to Mitch. "You won't leave me?"

"No," Mitch said. "I'm going. Robin arranged everything, and
—oh, Leda!" They stood in the center of the room holding one another, their lips fastened hard, their arms strong around each other. Leda's hand reached for the buttons on Mitch's blouse.

"Just stand still," she said. "Just let me take everything off and look at you. I want to look at you."

The skirt fell to the floor, and the blouse. Mitch stepped out of her shoes and stood before Leda.

"I want to love you," Leda said.

Her hands stroked Mitch's body gently. She leaned over to kiss her lips and her forehead and the closed eyelids. She said her name and held her, feeling the fast beat in her pulse and knowing that she had almost lost her.

The blood beat furiously in Mitch's throat and she could feel a mounting strength in her legs and arms. With the arrogance of a master, Mitch's nails dug into Leda's flesh as she began to pull the sweater and the thin blouse from her shoulders.

Leda's gasp was one of pleasure and desire and it moved Mitch to more violence, pinning Leda's wrists behind her back and jerking at her skirt.

Neither of them heard the door open.

They turned in time to see Kitten and Casey framed in the doorway, eyes big, mouths dropped, and they fell apart from one another when the door was slammed, and the sound of the intruders' feet running down the hall was as loud and fast as the beating of their hearts in that room.

It was a long time before they talked. Mitch lay dumb with horror, never forgetting the look on their faces as they had found her that way with Leda, unclothed and wild like a fierce animal. Sitting with her head hung, her hands pressing at her eyes, Leda was the first one to speak after the minutes passed as they would in a slow nightmare when nothing is real.

She stood up and picked the blouse off the floor. "Look," she said. "I'll go and talk to Marsha, That's where they ran to. I'll go and straighten it out."

"How?"

Leda reached in the closet for a fresh blouse, and straightened her skirt so that the zipper was pulled and on the side. She ran a comb through her long hair, and her hands were trembling.

"I'll explain it somehow. Marsha's gullible, and I'll explain it I have to go now, or they'll have a chance to talk and spread the story. I've got to stop them before they tell anybody else."

Mitch said, "I'll go too, Leda, I'll go too. What'll we say?"

"No!" Leda put her hands over her face and shook her head. "I'm sorry I yelled. We've got to handle this just right. You stay here. It's better for me to go alone."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. Look, get into bed. I'll turn the light out and you stay here. If anyone else comes in here, pretend you're asleep."

She waited while Mitch pulled her pajamas from the suitcase on her bed and threw the suitcase down on the floor, before she stepped into the pants and the coat. After she got in bed, Leda snapped the light out and went back by her own bed before she opened the door to go.

"Don't worry," she said. "Don't worry at all. And stay here!"

In her hand, as she walked toward Marsha's suite, Leda clutched Mitch's letter, wrinkled and folded on the long sheet of notebook paper. Her eyes were set and determined and there was a tight line about her lips.

Under the heavy violet and black quilted robe, Mother Nesselbush wore a voluminous peach-colored flannel nightgown. Her hair was rolled on large black pins so that it pulled at her scalp and gave her round face a bizarre expression like that of a mild Jersey cow. Her skin shone with night cream, and until everything began, it was with conscious effort that she stifled the great yawns that exposed her pressing lethargy, as well as her gold-studded molars.

Everything began when Marsha shut the door to Nessy's suite and pressed the lock down to secure it. Besides those two, Casey, Kitten Clark, Jane Bell, and Leda shared the secrecy of the meeting that was about to commence. Marsha stood while the others sat in various positions around the small anteroom.

"I don't need to tell you that this gathering is an extreme emergency. We must all pledge never to reveal what we hear. Our whole reputation as a national sorority is at stake, to say nothing of the reputation of Tri Epsilon on the Cranston campus. I've asked Jane to come because she's a member of the Grand Council. Fortunately, our other two members were on the scene when this thing happened. And Leda will explain her part in it. Nessy, we've inconvenienced you tremendously, but this is too terribly serious."