Whisper Their Love (7 page)

He wore a diplomat's hat, a small white flower in his buttonhole. He had brought identical corsages for them and she pinned on her own while he fastened Mimi's and then kissed Mimi. Whatever she said to him, she guessed it sounded all right.

Seeing him lighted a hard bright flame of anger in her, warming her so that she could leave the apartment with the two of them and walk up the steps of the big echoing courthouse and even smile when Irv introduced her to the young salesman who was his best man. She stood close to Mimi, angry, while the man behind the wicket window read the service, which sounded churchey, even in this building and with these people.

Forget it, he says. Like hell I'll forget it. Who does he think he is? She stood stiffly while the clerk mumbled words that should have been poetry. Mimi's hand shook when she signed the certificate. Joyce's didn't. She fixed her mind on the dusty spitty smell that was like the courthouse at Ferndell, and the one brown petal in her corsage of small pink roses and blue lacy stuff. Everything looked very clear and bright.

Things aren't so bad when you are actually living through them. It's looking ahead, dreading them. And then looking back, figuring out all the implications and possible outcomes. She was all right in the restaurant where they went for creamed chicken and salad in aspic; in fact, the food tasted good after no breakfast. Around three o'clock they wound up at the railroad station, the best man still tagging along, and she shook hands with everybody and kissed the air beside Mimi's cheek so as not to smear her make-up. Mimi cried a little and the two men bought her copies of
Life
and
Collier's
to read on the train. She guessed they looked like a nice family party.

It wasn't until the train pulled out of the station and was clear of the rows of tracks and the overhead red and green lights, back porches of tenement houses sliding past, that her busyness began to wear off like novocain from a sore tooth. Then the words began uncurling out of the air again.

I'm sorry, baby, but you asked for it.

You wanted it, didn't you?

Mimi's a smart kid. She knew what she was doing.

That meant she hadn't taken any precautions, hadn't used anything. Joyce's former vagueness about these matters had been cleared up by living with Mary Jean. Mary Jean was loaded with information, and she had equipment which, she said, you could get in any drugstore—it was better if you had it prescribed by a doctor, though. There were things you used to keep from getting in trouble when you were with a man.

But Mimi knew about such things. She'd slept with men, different men, all these years. Now how did I know that? Joyce puzzled. Nobody had ever said a word about it, and if Aunt Gen had any suspicions she wouldn't have mentioned them to anyone, not even Uncle Will. Aunt Gen thought even married sex was a little dirty.

She did that with him, so she'd get in trouble. So he'd have to marry her. Realization jumped at her. What had happened the night before was not only whispers in the air, it took on the solid form of catastrophic fact. Mimi is pregnant, she told herself.

And so am I.

Why not? I did it too, she reasoned. Weight of Irv's body against hers, pushing her back against scratchy cloth; excitement and hunger rising in her body like bubbles in a fountain. He didn't take any precautions; I would have known. She sat up straight, looking out of the window and seeing nothing.

Until now it had been a thing terrible in itself, but over and done with. I'll never see him again, she had told herself in the depot. Now she saw that it was not over at all, because she was in trouble. I'll faint and be sick in the mornings, she thought. Then what? What happens to girls when they have babies and aren't married? They go into some kind of a charitable institution, or die in childbirth like Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Her eyes filled with self-pitying tears. She held them wide open to keep them from running over.

Whatever happens, Mimi must not know.

Joyce rocked back and forth on the seat, her hands clenched, her eyes as bright and hard as glass marbles. I could kill myself, she thought. She suddenly felt intensely alive, her toes inside her pumps and her fingers against the clean seat cover full of awareness. She could cut her throat, but suppose the blood made her afraid and she changed her mind after it was too late? Or step in front of a car. Only she might be crippled for life, in horrible pain and without even the hope of death. She shivered, although the day was hot and the car stuffy. She could take a lot of sleeping pills and simply pass out. Never feel a thing.

But she didn't want to die. There simply wasn't any answer.

By the time they chugged to a stop at Henderson, she was incapable of thought. She was afraid to get up from her seat.

The school station wagon was waiting. Mimi must have phoned or something. Her first impulse was to go back inside the depot and hide. Then she saw who was at the wheel, calm hands folded on smooth lap. At the sight of Edith Bannister her knees crumpled. She had to lean against the wall of the station for a moment, careless of dust and crumbling paint. When her legs stopped wobbling she walked quickly to the car and got in, dragging her suitcase after her.

By the time you are thirty-six, if you have any sense at all and a reasonable experience of people, you know trouble when you see it. If you've been a dean of women for ten years you learn to sort out the different kinds before a sick, or crying, or sullen girl can get her mouth open. By the time she turned the ignition key, Edith Bannister knew that Joyce wasn't hung over or carsick, or coming down with anything. Traumatic experience, she thought in the jargon of Teachers' College. She drove quickly to the campus.

Joyce stumbled up the stairs after her. Neither of them said a word. Edith Bannister shut the study door and turned the key. Sunshine streamed over the thinly painted bookcase, the neat desk. She took off Joyce's hat and laid it beside the African figurine, and put a hand on her shoulder. The touch brought release. Joyce burst into tears and then, her face swollen and pale from lack of sleep, into words.

Chapter 6

The radium-dial clock on the bedside stand said eleven-twenty. Joyce rolled over, feeling the muscles in her legs crack, and squinted at its face until the numbers came into focus. Eleven-twenty, and the sounds that drifted into Edith Bannister's apartment were those of the dorm settling down for the night. Where had the afternoon and evening gone?

Footsteps tiptoed down the front stairs; that would be somebody sneaking out for a late date, leaving a roommate who would come down later to spring the Yale lock. Radio music trickled through a tissue-stuffed keyhole where some girl was getting at her books after loafing for two weeks, or hanging up nylons and slips illegally rinsed out in the bathroom. A drift of voices from the lounge suggested that the House Council, presided over by Bitsy, was still in session. Joyce lay listening, but not really caring.

She tried to account for the hours that had passed since the train pulled in at Henderson that morning. Let's see, she figured, it got in at nine-something. That's fourteen hours. She remembered bawling like a baby—shame flickered through her at the memory of her collapse, and something like wonder at the memory of Edith Bannister's arms warm and comforting around her, the way a mother holds a crying child.

Then I took that little white pill, she reminded herself, but it didn't work for ages and I was lying here looking at the sun on the door wishing I could go to sleep. She shook her aching head.

The next thing was the afternoon light getting duller, the way it does around six, and Edith Bannister was standing beside the bed with some dishes on a tray. She didn't know whether she had eaten anything or not; she couldn't remember what was on the tray so perhaps she hadn't. She had no awareness of time's passing, either; it was like the time she was given ether when she had had her appendix out. I'm tired, she decided with some astonishment, really tired. She gave up thinking and lay unmoving for a while, looking vaguely at the dim square that was the curtained window.

The late-night freight clanked across the corner of the campus and the pigeons perched on Colonel Henderson's statue complained softly. Light cut across the trees and reached into a clump of bushes where the redheaded freshman snuggled against her date, a boy from Ace Hardware. They hushed their whispering and stood rigid for a moment, until the train passed and the shadows were deep again. "Do that again," the boy said; "touch me like that again."

The rhythmic clanking on the rails roused Joyce. This time her head felt clearer. She lay unmoving, aware of the sore places, and thought back over the day with more coherence than she had been capable of before. The ride from Chicago, gathering tension and terror with each mile that passed. The dizziness. The wonderful, heavenly relief of spilling everything, no matter if they threw her out in disgrace or told everybody. Afterwards the air around her felt light and clear, the way it feels after a summer thunderstorm.

Later? Blurred by emotion and codeine, her memory refused to give up any definite picture of what had happened. I must have had a bath, she decided, because I can remember the warm water. Or was that some other time? No, because I was all sticky and sweaty from crying, and all. She sniffed cautiously, turning down the folded sheet. She smelled clean, and there was a nightgown of some thin crisp stuff, but she never wore anything but pajamas, so somebody must have helped her get to bed.

Once when she was in third or fourth grade she had had measles. She remembered a lot of things quite clearly from those days in bed, isolated scenes that stood out with photographic sharpness: Aunt Gen's round face looking sober, and Aunt Gen's hands, with the nails unpolished and cut short and the skin a little rough from gardening and housework. But what she liked to remember, nights when she was falling asleep, was that Mimi had come and sat beside her bed. She still didn't know who had called Mimi, or why—maybe she was sicker than the grownups let on—but there was a magic moment when she stood in the doorway and everything in the world was absolutely all right.

She felt that way now.

For a little while she floated contentedly between sleeping and waking. Then the door opened—not the bedroom door but the one beyond that led into the corridor—and there were two sets of steps. The light tap-tap of high heels and the solid thud of a man's shoes planted firmly. Edith Bannister said something, but the words blurred and ran together. A deep voice answered. Joyce stiffened. Edith said, "That's silly, Roger. I always like to talk to you. It happens I'm tired tonight, though, so good night."

"Sometimes I think you're frigid."

"Think what you please. It would be a little spectacular, though, if somebody came in and found you here. Or don't you think so? After all, both of us are responsible for the manners and morals of all these innocent teen-agers."

"Oh, hell."

There was a small silence, about long enough for a ritual good-night kiss. Then the outside door closed. Joyce heard Edith moving around her study the way a woman does when she comes in at night, taking off her hat, lighting a cigarette, dropping her earrings on the desk.

The bedroom door opened. A blade of light flashed in. "Hi. How do you feel?"

"My head feels funny."

"That's the codeine," Edith said. "Dr. Prince prescribed it for Sally when she broke her leg last spring—lucky I had some left." She crossed the floor, laid a cool hand on Joyce's forehead. "You better stay in bed tomorrow." She switched on the bedside lamp.

Joyce shut her eyes again. She felt completely safe and cared for. She could feel her mouth curve in a relaxed smile.

"Look here, you're not still worrying, are you?"

Something dark and ominous stirred in the back of her mind. She opened her eyes and looked, but the dean's face was impassive. Only something looked out of her eyes, gray-hazel, like Mimi's. Compassion, or concern, or even affection. Joyce opened her mouth, but no words came out. Edith Bannister leaned over her. "Listen to me. No one gets a baby from the first time. The chances are very small, anyway; starting a baby isn't so easy as all that."

"Suppose it happened, though?"

"If it happened," Edith Bannister said in a light, crisp voice, "we would arrange a little operation and in a few days you would be all right again. It's very simple. But it isn't going to happen, so you may as well stop worrying and get some sleep."

She lay still and tried to believe this. Her mind had circled around the idea of pregnancy so long that she couldn't give it up now. Warm tears squeezed out from under her closed eyelids, making them sting. Edith said with quiet scorn, "Men. They never think about anything except themselves and their own needs. They're such fools. Forget it, Joyce. I tell you everything will be all right."

"Oh God, I hope so."

Edith turned back the top sheet, smoothing it. "You can stay all night if you want to," she said, "if you don't mind sharing the bed. I'm rather afraid to have you in your own room as long as you're in a confessing frame of mind, that sexy little slut you room with will have the whole story out of you and she'll spread it all over school in no time."

Remembering some of the case histories she had had from Mary Jean, Joyce was afraid this might be so. She didn't want to move, anyway; it was quiet here, the air was lightly scented and it felt good to lie still. She followed with her eyes the movements of this slender, quiet woman. Miss Bannister took her dress off and put it on a padded hanger with a precision that was like Mimi's. She tied a thin flowered robe around herself and went into the bathroom, and there were the sounds of water running into a basin, towel whispering across skin, cabinet doors clicking. She came back no less tidy, only with her hair flowing loose instead of knotted. She was the first person Joyce had ever seen with really long hair; some of the girls at school wore theirs loose on the shoulders, but the ends had been trimmed. It gave Miss Bannister an old-fashioned, feminine look.