Whisper Their Love (23 page)

Soap and towel lay there too, stained. She had bathed, she had made herself clean for the final rite.

A single fly buzzed at the edge of the viscous red pool, lifting its jointed legs daintily out of the wet.

Mary Jean's eyes were open, looking at her.

Joyce screamed. She could hear herself screaming. The sound echoed inside her head and she knew she was making it, but she couldn't stop. She went on screaming until feet pounded on the stairs. Then Mrs. Abbott was in the door, a black whale with staring eyeballs, and Mrs. Abbott's rings were biting into her shoulders and the room was going around in slow sickening circles. Then nothing at all.

Chapter 23

Some things figure out the same, anywhere you go. Death is one. Everywhere on earth there are special taboos and rites associated with death, ceremonies to celebrate the good qualities of the departed or protect the living against evil spirits and unknown perils. Whether old hymns are sung or tribal dances performed, wreaths ordered from a florist or bowls of food set out on the burial mound, widows draped in black and given a handkerchief for their tears or bound hand and foot and burned on the funeral pyre, for a little while people set aside their own affairs and think with wonder of the life that has ended and the loss to those left behind.

Even on battlefields, where man falls by his brother's hand, the chaplain says a prayer.

So the folk rituals of Ferndell held, here on the campus, and classes were dismissed for three days. Two hundred girls were milling around, vaguely uneasy, with nothing to do. Not that there was any lack of activity. Two white-coated orderlies came and took Mary Jean away in a long wicker basket, steering it neatly around the bend in the stairs, and there were whispers and arguments. Autopsy. Yes, but what do they really do? The law, when somebody commits suicide. At the thought of Mary Jean's drained body subjected to knife and scalpel, Joyce's scalp prickled and she looked around wildly, feeling that the walls were closing in. As if Mary Jean could be hurt any more…

The students, at a loose end, felt constrained to behave in a manner suitable to a house of mourning. Suddenly the campus became Mary Jean's home, everybody living on it a member of her family. Girls who felt like playing canasta or giving each other home permanents did so quietly, almost furtively, as if they owed it to their dead friend to be above such everyday pastimes. Meals were sketchy, and served with less ceremony than usual. That was partly because Mrs. Abbott, usually so quick to rebuke the heavyhanded and slow of foot, had delegated herself chief mourner and was going around sniffling into a wad of handkerchief. She talked about Mary Jean to girls who stood glassy-eyed and unanswering, wishing they were somewhere else. That beautiful talented young girl, Abbott kept insisting in a mournful voice that made Joyce want to push her face in, why would she do such a dreadful thing when she had everything in the world to live for?

The police came with notebooks, and asked questions. Reporters, too, a young man from the local paper, and the fluttery old girl who did the Woman's Page, and a tired-looking man from St. Louis, from the
Post-Dispatch.
News photographers came and took pictures of buildings and teachers, but especially girls. Girls going to class with armfuls of books, and playing basketball in the gym, and toasting marshmallows in the lounge fireplace. They picked out the most photogenic students for this, and there was some feeling among those who weren't asked to pose.

The story was printed the next day in papers Joyce had never even heard of, in Dallas and Birmingham and Raleigh, and there were five telegrams and a barrage of long-distance calls ordering people home at once. Nancy Freeman refused to go, and her father took time off from being a sugar tycoon and came after her in a blue Cadillac a block long.

Plumbers came. They tramped upstairs with hammers and wrenches and took away the tub in which Mary Jean had bled to death. Even then, the girls at that end of the hall refused to use the room; they kept the door shut and sidled past. It created a rush-hour problem, everyone using the bathroom at the other end of the hall, but Lissa expressed the general feeling when she said, "You wouldn't get me to take a bath in there even if I stayed dirty the rest of my life."

Miss Edith Bannister, that cool and competent woman, shut herself into her room for an afternoon and came out only a little paler than usual, with every hair in place and no trace of agitation. She refused to look at the body, but then, some people thought that showed her good sense. She called up the girl's father and they agreed that under the circumstances it would be best to hold the service at the school.

"She's wonderful," Mrs. Abbott said fervently of Miss Bannister, and you had to admit that she was.

Wayne Allston came, as the only resident trustee. He wore the uneasy look of a hearty man thrown into sudden contact with death. He had taken a couple of drinks before he left the office, and now he found himself needing another. Nothing you could do for the girl, poor kid, and Ede seemed to have everything under control. He found her sitting at her desk staring at the blank plastered wall, doing nothing. He cleared his throat. "This is an awful thing. Anything I can do, you just let me know and I'll see to it."

She didn't answer for a moment. She looked at him absently, as if she had met him somewhere but couldn't quite remember him. "Thank you. That's good of you."

"Well, I thought flowers. It's tough on you. Nobody could blame you for anything, though."

She was silent.

Dr. Prince stood washing his hands over and over, although the wet slipperiness of the skin and his awareness of time's passing told him they were clean. Crazy damn kid. Hysterical type, going off half-cocked before she could be sure. He frowned, remembering that the beautiful mutilated body had been under his hands before, and wishing he didn't have to remember. She had behaved well that time, ready to explode with pain and nervous tension, but standing it better than most. A pretty kid, the sort any boy would fall for.

No question about why she did it. Five to six weeks, he guessed, far enough along for easy diagnosis. She hadn't wasted any time getting in trouble again. The question was, why? He remembered the faces of other girls sharp with repulsion, voices shrill in protest. Not me, doctor, I'll never look at another man. Sometimes, God and their perplexed young husbands knew, they kept on feeling that way after you'd expect time to work its healing miracle.

This one had been looking for trouble. Some kind of a mental twist, he guessed. He stepped on the hot-air dryer, glad he was a man. Women have it tough. A hell of a business to be mixed up in. Yeah, but if you don't do it, someone else will, and there are the payments on the house.

For one crazy moment he wondered if there was some way to falsify the records, and knew there wasn't. Hide anything, fake anything around a hospital? Somebody always knew.

Joyce moved through the buzzing and the silences in a kind of stupor. I wish I could cry, she thought, watching Lissa and Holly wipe their eyes and blow their swollen noses. It must be a relief. Her mouth tasted tinny and her throat ached, her stomach pinched with hunger, but the smell of food made her sick, and when she tried to swallow her chest hurt. She sat in her room with the door shut, wondering what they were doing at the hospital. In her mind autopsy was confused with dissection; she had a blurry image of medical students under a glaring light, which dissolved into a picture of the undertaking parlors downtown. Embalming. Or sometimes they cremated you instead; that didn't seem, so bad, clean and final. Holly said they took all the blood out when a person was going to be buried, and put some chemical in. But Mary Jean didn't have any blood left.

She remembered that slender lovely body drawn up in the convulsions of cramps, and later, sprawled out in a doped sleep. Quarrel or no quarrel—oh, God, how silly that seemed now—she had taken care of Mary Jean intimately. The thought of any further indignity to her was unbearable.

She thought, I won't look at her when they bring her back. I can't.

Ought to be packing. She was jumpy with impatience to be gone from this place, could hardly wait for the funeral to be over so she could leave, yet the thought of actually making plans paralyzed her. She went to the closet and stood looking at the double row of dresses and blouses.

Bitsy came in without knocking. "I have to see you alone," she said imperatively. "Come on down to the kitchen and have some coffee."

"I don't think we're supposed to go there."

"Rules are made to be broken," Bitsy said primly. "Sometimes it's necessary to use your head."

The kitchen was at the back of the basement, reached by a narrow cement-paved corridor that gave on dark mysterious storerooms, fruit cellars and coal bins. Joyce had never been there before, and in spite of fatigue and grief she was curious. Visitors were never shown through this part of the building, which was run by the servants under Mrs. Abbott's direction, and Mrs. Abbott was ladylike enough to ignore what she couldn't change. As a result, there was no regard for glamour here and not too much attempt at sanitation, either. The Home Ec classes had a lab kitchen and dining room in the Administration Building, and Joyce had assumed that the food she ate came from some place as white-enamelled, as glittering with stainless steel. Now she realized that the substructure of her meals was shabby to the point of slovenliness.

The stove here was gas, black and thick with spattered grease. There was a wood range alongside for winter use; a fire crackled in it, and red showed around the lids. A line over the stove held drying towels, some smeared and stained with food. A fat cockroach ran across the toe of Joyce's loafer and vanished in a shadowy corner.

The stout motherly waitress was slumped down, stocking-footed, in a straight chair, drinking coffee. Bitsy reached for the enamel pot and tipped it carefully, pouring into a couple of thick white cups such as farm wives use for threshers. She handed one to Joyce. The waitress sat unmoving, cup in hand, until Bitsy smiled at her and sat down. Then her eyes met the girls' with liking and acceptance. "Nothing like hot coffee, a time like this."

"Sure isn't."

Joyce had drunk so much of the stuff in the last few days that it tasted like water, but at least the heat relaxed her throat. Maybe if I could get some sleep I'd be able to eat, she thought. She looked at Bitsy, sitting quietly erect. Bitsy wore a dark skirt and white blouse, as though bright colors would be an affront to a house of death. Her ponytail was slicked into a neat bun; her face looked sharp and sober, the freckles prominent. Joyce envied her. Bitsy would always know what she was doing, and would always do the right thing. If trouble came to her, it wouldn't be the outcome of her own foolishness.

Bitsy intercepted her look. She set her cup down on the table, moving a sticky spoon, and took a piece of paper out of her blouse pocket. "What do you make of this?"

The waitress drained her cup and left, tactfully.

The paper was wrinkled with folding and unfolding. Mary Jean's big loopy handwriting, three or four words to a line. "Joyce. Maybe God will forgive me now. I know I've been bad but I can't take any more of this." Joyce's hand shook so that the sheet rattled. Bitsy's eyes were sharp on her face. The kitchen was warm and stuffy; for a moment she thought she was going to faint. She looked at the far wall, where a cobweb swayed slowly.

"I have to know," Bitsy said. "It was under my pillow—thank the Lord I found it before anybody else did."

There was no evading those gimlet eyes. Joyce looked at the floor. "She was in trouble," she said, low. "The time we went away. She had an operation—you know, operation."

"I thought it was something like that," Bitsy said. She sighed. "That was good of you, to stick with her. It wouldn't have been so nice if anybody found out."

Shame flooded Joyce. "I threw it up to her," she said. "I wouldn't even listen when she wanted to talk to me—the day she did it." It seemed long ago. "Maybe if I had, she wouldn't have."

"It's too late now," Bitsy said sensibly. Oh, a sensible girl, the kind who gives you aspirin and hot tea for a broken heart. It now occurred to Joyce that maybe tea and aspirin would help, too. "Do you think—"

"She was afraid of its happening again. That was what we fought about, partly."

But was it, really? She shut her eyes, seeing how snarled and twisted the whole thing was, how the strands of her life and Mary Jean's were interwoven with half a dozen other lives. Nobody could ever unravel this tangle; nobody could say what was true or false, or who was to blame. She would never know.

Bitsy's eyes were bright. "Whoever does the autopsy will know," she said. "That's the first thing they always think about when a single girl kills herself. It'll be on the record. Seems to me what we have to worry about is, will the doctor tell? Gossip, I mean."

"No. Because he's the one—"

"Ah," Bitsy said in disgust. "Her father's coming," she said, taking hold of the matter as Aunt Gen would have, by the practical end. "We'll simply have to work up a good story and stick to it, and hope Prince keeps his mouth shut. It was Prince?" Joyce nodded. "He's probably scared too."

"Cancer. You can't pick up a magazine without reading some article about cancer," Joyce said hopefully. "It's supposed to make you go to the doctor and find out, but
I
think all it does is scare people."

"Mind, you suspected all the time. Back me up on it, though, or so help me, I'll—" Their eyes met.

Bitsy was little and wiry. She would have made a good pioneer, swinging an ax in forests infested with hostile Indians. Joyce followed her straight narrow back out of that slovenly kitchen, feeling a little better to know that Bitsy was helping carry this load.

This try, she got a suitcase of clothes sorted and packed.

Then she went over to the bursar's office to draw out the money so carelessly deposited, now precious because it would be the tool of her escape. The florid middle-aged woman looked at her suspiciously but asked no questions, and she offered no information. A new doubt assailed her: a woman controls her own money at eighteen, but can she leave school without permission from somebody? Worry about that later. Her account had grown to one hundred and thirty-two dollars. She felt safer when she had stuffed the bills into the zipper compartment of her Sunday purse. I'll think about plans after the funeral, she promised herself.