Whisper Their Love (20 page)

She decided she never wanted to see him again. Now the first relief of telling was over, she was sorry. Talking about it hadn't settled one single thing. One thing though, he won't want to see me again either, after he's had time to think it over. That should have made her feel good, but it didn't.

Chapter 19

December was really winter. The radiators in the dorm, mostly used as shelves until now, clanked and rattled and from time to time gave off puffs of heat. Not at night, though. Whoever drew up the budget had made up for all those sterling salad forks by cutting down on the coal bills. A new kind of pajama became a fad on the second floor; one-piece, like a long red union suit with drop seat and bone buttons. Thin girls looked good in them; plump ones bulged. Fluffy types sent home for long frilly flannel nightgowns such as their grandmothers had worn and their mothers had made fun of. Joyce, diving into one of these at midnight, wondered if Mary Jean still slept in her skin.

Everyone was wearing winter clothes in spite of the advertised Southern climate. Holly Robertson became famous on campus as the girl who had not one handmade cashmere sweater, but two, at sixty dollars apiece. It even snowed one afternoon, a frail sugary wisp of white that lay in the cracks of the brick sidewalks for a couple of hours before it melted.

Rehearsals for the Freshman play started and she was asked to be prop girl, an exciting job that involved borrowing furniture and evening clothes from town people. She would have liked to be asked to play the lead—all her life she'd cherished a daydream of being tall, dark and a terrific actress rather like Cornell. Unluckily it made her throat muscles freeze solid even to stand up in front of an English class and deliver a five-minute oral on "My Summer Vacation." So she had to be satisfied with attending practice and scrutinizing the girl who played Lady Beckley-Robinson, and thinking how much better she could have done it if she'd only been able to act.

It was fun to go around borrowing lamps and tables, with the understanding that the college truck would pick them up later, and to sit around backstage drawing diagrams of what went where. She was very professional about labeling her little pictures UR and CL. Also, she wallowed in the smell of theatrical make-up, stale smoke and unswept dust that seems to haunt all places where plays are rehearsed.

School was home now. The cream-plaster walls and dark woodwork of her own room, like all the others and yet different because it was where she lived; the corridors echoing with voices, or still and hollow in the middle of the night; the classrooms, row upon row of one-arm chairs, with the teacher's desk on a little platform up front and the big Webster's on its lectern; the brick-framed windows looking out on a campus impressive with leaves and academic buildings. She was used to the dignified dining room and the smell of hot cocoa at seven-thirty on winter mornings.

She was beginning to like the liquid sound of Spanish words and sentences in her early section, and the awakening reality of the Art Appreciation course. She joined the class in folk dancing and found it fun. And now she began to notice girls she hadn't admired especially at first, serious ones like Bitsy and Kas and Margaret Sherwin who got A's and were on committees for different things. The original impression of glamour had worn off, and they seemed more like girls she'd known back in Community High.

There were days when she felt she could be perfectly happy in this place, like a round peg fitting into a round hole, if God or Freud or Darwin or whoever it was hadn't invented sex. If the human race could reproduce by splitting in two, like an amoeba, people wouldn't have to go through a lot of emotional dither. Mary Jean was always claiming that women's troubles were all on account of men, and she was willing to believe it—with variations of course. There were no men involved in what was bothering Joyce but she supposed even sexual abnormality might be an offshoot of the urge to reproduce.

Abnormality? Even Mary Jean, man-crazy, had thought she was Sappho for three weeks. She had looked up Sappho in the library and the stilted account she found there made sense to her, though it wouldn't have three months before. It did look more romantic after two or three thousand years, but she bet Sappho had had her problems too.

There was fussing and fretting going on in the back of her mind all the time now, even when she was wrapped up in the play or really interested in her lessons. It was like having a canker sore, it didn't hurt much unless you ate something salty, and yet you kept running your tongue around it all the time, conscious that it was there. She hadn't spent any time alone with Edith since the night of Anitra Schultz's party. Edith was plainly being patient and forbearing with her. The strategy was perfectly evident and she was afraid it might work, too. A glimpse of Edith across the dining room—the second six weeks were under way and the seating arrangements had all been shuffled—was enough to start confusion and uncertainty whirling in her mind. She didn't really know how she felt about going on, or breaking off, or anything.

What was evident was that something had to happen. She felt that her relationship with Edith had to stop. It was with her when she, woke up at night and whenever she thought about home and Aunt Gen. But she couldn't come right out and tell Edith so; the thought filled her with terror.

I'd even be willing to die or get disabled, she thought dismally, if it would straighten this mess out. On the other hand, .when she thought about being completely alone in a loveless world it was like being dragged out from under a soft, warm wool blanket to stand naked in a biting wind.

She gathered from reading the novels of Colette that something like this always happened to love. The first excitement wore off and one partner became bored and, later, antagonistic while the other went through hells of anguish. Maybe it happens to everybody, she thought, married or single. She bet Aunt Gen and Uncle Will hadn't had an exciting moment together for twenty years; they stayed together from habit and morality. They think they're happy, and maybe they are. Maybe that's happiness, not caring any more.

She felt tired, and thought with sad pleasure that she might have TB, something that would mean being sent away and having a long recovery. The old daydream came back: Mimi sent for her and they were a family together. But there were Irv and the apartment, scene of her surrender, and the baby to change the picture now, and she couldn't even imagine its being anything like the old daydreams. Mimi was gone, as much as if she'd died. In her place was a pregnant woman who sent bi-weekly checks and had no part in her daughter's life.

There were moments when she was so desperate for rescue that she kept making up a story about Aunt Gen getting sick and Uncle Will urging her to come back to the farm. For several days the sight of Aunt Gen's neat schoolteachery handwriting on the envelope of her twice-a-week letters started a train of thought that comforted her.

What surprised her was that she was homesick for Aunt Gen as she never had been for Mimi. That was a child's dream, not meant to come true. This was a longing for real and solid things that had been a part of her life since she could remember. She wanted to see the farm. Most of all she wanted to see Aunt Gen, her honest, middle-aged face—she was about the only person Joyce knew who didn't use lipstick—the suggestion of a double chin offset by her erect-carriage, the smooth brown braids worn coronet style. Aunt Gen's homemade dresses hanging in a neat row in her closet, the polished low-heeled "comfort" shoes she wore, her bifocals, the lavendar cologne she saved for Sundays and special events, all added up to some lost innocence she would have given anything to regain.

There were things you couldn't talk to Aunt Gen about, things she would never forgive if she knew about them. Relations between men and women had to fall into a specified pat tern. Nice girls didn't let boys go too far with them, and even after marriage wives merely submitted to the gross natures of their husbands. When Joyce tried to imagine Aunt Gen in bed with Uncle Will, all she got was a picture of smooth braids on the pillow and a sheet drawn up under the sleeping face. You couldn't believe—

She remembered, suddenly, a Sunday afternoon when she was about thirteen and had been asked to go to the movies in Ferndell with a bunch of neighborhood kids. Aunt Gen had said no, in her crisp voice that left no room for argument. Sunday is the Lord's Day, she said; time enough for the movies on week nights, and anyway it's raining. Joyce had sulked a while, hanging around the kitchen. Then Uncle Will came in, bringing a whiff of cold fresh air, and she ran to put her arms around his neck-and tease him to let her go, since he was more apt than Aunt Gen to be easygoing about such things.

She was standing like that, pouting and pouring out her complaints in a high child's voice, snuggled up against Uncle Will's chore coat which smelled (but not unpleasantly) of grain and rain and animals, when Aunt Gen came into the kitchen. Her calm expression changed to what—disgust? Jealousy? Surely not jealousy. She said, "Joy, you're getting too big a girl to act so babyish. Get up to your room, now, and quit whining and carrying on."

That was all, and it was nothing more than a reprimand like a hundred others. But it gave Joyce a queer, self-conscious feeling. She had never sat on Uncle Will's lap again, or kissed him good night. No, you certainly couldn't tell Aunt Gen any of the crazy things that had happened in the past months.

Now that it was too late, she also wished she could talk to Mary Jean. Mary Jean might know how to bring this sort of affair to an end. In the first days of her enchantment, Joyce hadn't understood that this thing had happened to other people. Of course there had to be some; Edith's story of her tragic first love showed that, but she thought of them as rare and exceptional. As far as she could tell, nobody she knew was like that. She couldn't have opened her mouth to talk to anybody about it, least of all a girl like Mary Jean, who was sophisticated and could design her own clothes and had had an abortion.

She knew now that it happened to a great many people. The men-women and women-men at Anitra Schultz's party had opened her eyes, and the habitués of Club Marie were only shabbier, dingier examples of the same thing. There were bars and clubs and magazines that catered to these people and enabled them to find each other. Famous scientists had written books about them. It was true there weren't any of these books in the college library—but the college library didn't even have a copy of Kinsey.

So perhaps Mary Jean could have given her some good advice. The trouble was that she couldn't ask. The quarrel between them had simmered down to a kind of politeness. They spoke now when they met in the hall. You couldn't avoid anyone on a campus as small and chummy as this one, and in any case Joyce had never learned to stay angry. But the old closeness was destroyed, and couldn't be built up again.

Even if she could think of a good excuse to get Mary Jean off by herself for a few minutes, it wasn't a subject you could jump into. It needed the darkness and leisure of late night, after other things were talked out. But Mary Jean was rooming with Bitsy now, and their light was out by eleven.

If only something would
happen.

All her days were up and down. When she was memorizing lists of conjugations, or sticking gummed labels with the owner's name and address under borrowed armchairs, or losing herself in Degas and his tulle-skirted girls, she felt at home and easy in her mind. When she passed Edith in the hall, or counted the days since they had been in each other's arms, she wanted to lie down and die.

Chapter 20

“So I went over to his house and told him I was sorry," John said. He smeared mustard on his hamburger, put the thick slice of onion back in place, and closed the bun. Then he laid the whole thing back on his plate and sat looking at it, shaking his head. "Hardest damn thing I ever did in my whole life. He was nice about it, though.”

"Well—"

"He's a good guy, you know that? I don't think I ever appreciated him before. I didn't change my mind about what he does," John interrupted himself to say; "I still think it's a stinking thing to do. But other ways. He didn't defend himself."

"What could he say?"

"Well, there are arguments. He's sorry for the girls, he could say. If he didn't do it some quack would and they'd be worse off. I read it in some magazine; one pregnancy out of every six in this country ends in abortion." He scowled. "That's what they figure; of course you can't get accurate statistics on it."

Joyce shivered. It was cold in the diner; the manager-cook had gone to the bank to deposit his Saturday take, leaving John in charge. No other customers had come in and John had opened the door to clear out the smoke from the grill. "I haven't really thought it through. I'm figuring it for myself right now," John went on. He stirred his coffee and put in more sugar. "What I mean, basically he's a decent guy. Not the hero I used to think. Maybe there aren't any heroes."

"Yes," Joyce said. She was thinking about Mimi and Edith, and in her thoughts they were somehow the same person, and she felt a new compassion for them.

"You have to grow up some time and learn to make allowances for people." Introspection didn't have any effect on John's appetite. He bit a half-moon out of his sandwich and sat chewing, frowning with thought. "If he didn't do it, they'd go someplace else. Someone who wouldn't boil the instruments. Your girl friend was all right, wasn't she?"

"She was fine. He did take a chance coming out to see her, too."

John shook his head. "It's not so simple."

Chill touched her heart. She reached a hand to him, then pulled it back. "You wouldn't do it, though. Would you?"

"No. But I'm glad I made it up with the old man, though."

She got up and filled his cup from the glass pot. It was as though, having made up his mind to tell her, he wanted to get it over with. I know how he feels, she thought with a sudden flash of insight. I felt the same way with him. She flashed him a startled look. He caught her thought. "Good at spilling to each other, aren't we? Maybe it saves a couple other fellows from being bored with us."