Stranger On Lesbos Page 2

  It seemed natural to have Bake suggest that they go out for a drink when the class hour was over. This was like high schoolgirls wandering off to the snack shop or soda fountain after hours. (But not skinny shabby little Frankie Kirby from the mines, ever.) They went to a little place just off campus, and Bake ordered Martinis.

  "But I don't drink."

  "You'll have to learn. You need to loosen up."

  The drink was cold and faintly bitter. It made Frances feel alert and relaxed at the same time. She listened while Bake talked about books, about Lawrence. "Read The Rainbow. It's not on Kemper's list, but it's one of the best." She mentioned an argument she had had with a man who had known Lawrence in New Mexico, a newspaperman whose syndicated column Frances read every week. "You meet all kinds of people on a job like mine. Some of the famous ones are slobs. But some are fascinating.”

  "It sounds wonderful."

  "It's all right."

  Four girls came in together and sat down at the next table. One gave Bake a curious look, raised a hand in greeting, then turned away. Bake's mouth hardened. "I've got to be going. Can I drop you somewhere?"

  "Oh no, the bus is handy."

  "Come on, I'll drive you home."

  She drove fast and well. Frances, who usually sat clutching the edge of the seat if Bill went over fifty, realized that they were well over the speed limit, but she felt no anxiety. They took the short drive in companionable silence. When they drew up in front of her house she found herself looking at it through Bake's eyes: a stodgy middle-class dwelling for dull people.

  "I hate this place," Frances said. "But what can you do with the housing shortage."

  "It doesn't matter. I'll see you Friday."

  Frances felt her face grow warm. "I'll buy you a drink then."

  "Good enough."

  Bake waved, turned the car around skillfully, and sped away, her left arm hanging negligently out of the open window. Frances stool watching until she turned the corner. Then she went inside, feeling more exhilarated than one drink could account for, and knelt down in front of the bookcase to look for The Rainbow.

  CHAPTER 3

  “I thought you weren't coming."

  "I had lunch with a client. God, I thought I'd never break away." Bake undid the top button of her jacket and puffed out a deep breath, indicating how she had hurried. "I wanted to see you even if I didn't make it to class. Did I miss anything?"

  "Snap quiz." Frances caught the waiter's eye. He gave her a token smile and came over. "You can easily make it up."

  "Sometimes I wonder if it's worth the trouble. I've been doing this for years and years, all to get two little letters after my name."

  "No classes Friday."

  "Of course not; Thanksgiving week end."

  "I'll miss seeing you."

  "I suppose you'll have a big family dinner, with turkey and so on?"

  "I'm afraid so." . Frances remembered, with a nostalgic pang, the first Thanksgiving after she and Bill were married. There wasn't any money for turkey; they were saving every nickel to pay for the baby. Bill came home from work with a sparrow feather, which he stuck solemnly on top of the meat loaf. She sighed.

  "What's the matter?"

  "Nothing really. I was just thinking how conventional people get as they grow older."

  "Age has nothing to do with it. Most people are born conventional."

  "I'll miss going to the University on Friday," Frances said. The waiter set their drinks down. She took hers absent-mindedly. "Bill will be out of town all day, and Bob's never home any more. If it isn't ham radio it's basketball."

  "It's going to be a good day to get out into the country, if the weather holds." Bake glanced out into the street, where a few late leaves rattled dryly along the sidewalk. The sky was blue, the sun bright. "Of course we could have a blizzard, but this is certainly unusual weather for November." She studied Frances above the rim of her glass. "Why don't we both take the day off and go for a drive? We could bring some sandwiches."

  Frances would have been willing to spend the day on a rock pile with a pickax if Bake had suggested it. Anything was better than wandering around an empty house, dusting furniture that was already clean and wondering what Bill was doing and when he would get home.

  "That sounds like fun."

  "Good. The woods out around Elgin ought to be gorgeous by now. I'll call you Thursday night and we can settle the details."

  They separated, Bake to keep an appointment with a client, Frances to sit at the table a while longer, in a haze of well-being that came partly from gin and partly from being with Bake. A whole day together, away from other people and their demandsa day without assignments or obligations. It was more than she could accept. She was afraid to believe in it.

  She thought back over the scattered hours she and Bake had spent together in the last few weeks. Sitting side by side in the lecture room, their faces solemnly turned to the instructor, but aware of each other; facing each other across this little table three times a week, over the ritual after-class Martini; walking briskly down cracked and cluttered sidewalks among groups of playing Negro children. Brief as the encounters were, impersonal as their talks had been, they gave depth and color to the day. When Bake missed a class, as happened now and then, Frances felt flat and let down.

  Now, turning the empty glass in her fingers, she tried prudently to brace herself against disappointment. She'll change her mind, she thought. Or it will snow or something. Don't count on going.

  But she was smiling as she paid the cashier and went out into the crisp autumnal sunshine, warning herself: she won't call. Frances knew better.

  Bake called at eleven the next morning, just three hours after the Flanagans "dropped in for a minute" and while they were having one last drink, which was likely to stretch into three or four. Frances said, "Excuse me," and lifted the phone from its cradle, wishing desperately that she had succumbed to the telephone company's urging and had an extension installed in the kitchen. Betty Flanagan let her story trail off, listening. "Hello?"

  "This is Bake. Didn't get you out of bed or anything, did I?"

  "No. Just sitting here talking to some people."

  "Oh, then you're not free to talk."

  "No."

  "Look, suppose I pick you up around nine? I'll take care of the lunch. Wear something durable. We'll look for bittersweet." A burst of music drowned her out. Frances waited. Bake's voice returned, sounding far away and full of laughter. "I'm in Hal Butler's apartment with ten thousand crazy people, mostly looped. Look, baby, I'll see you in the morning. Right?"

  "Right." Frances hung up. "That was a girl in my class at the University," she said, coming back to sit beside Betty but looking at Bill. "I'm going for a drive in the country with some people I know, tomorrow."

  "Do you good," Jack Flanagan said generously. "Hey, Bill, anything left in that pitcher?"

  "Might be a small dividend."

  "How about you, Frances?"

  "Frances doesn't drink," Bill said. "She's a culture vultureShakespeare and the opera."

  "No vices," Betty Flanagan said. She crossed her knees so that her sheath skirt slipped a little higher. Bill poured another drink and leaned across the sofa to hand it to her, flicking a look down her scoop neckline.

  Jack Flanagan said, "Get with it, woman. Bill and I have to get up early and go to Milwaukee tomorrow."

  Betty winked at Frances. "We know what they're going to do in Milwaukee, don't we?"

  "It's a great town," Bill said. "All that beer, all those big busty blondes."

  "Maybe I'll go on your picnic, Fran. Any attractive men?"

  "Just girls. Anyway, there's no room."

  "Aah, nuts."

  Frances was silent. Why did I lie, she asked herself, honestly puzzled. I don't want Betty trailing along, of course. But there's no reason I can't go somewhere with just one girl. No reason at all to feel sowell, illicit. As if I had a secret date with a man.

  She saw the
Flanagans to the door, her silence unnoticed in the flurry of good nights, and came back shivering into the warm house.

  "Do you really have to go to Milwaukee tomorrow, Bill?"

  He looked surprised. "Sure, this is a big account. This guy buys all the toys for one of the biggest department stores in town. No telling what time we'll get back."

  She stood on tiptoe to put her arms around his neck. "Remember the first Thanksgiving we had together?"

  "I remember we were damn hard up."

  But not the laughter, or the way we fell into bed when the dishes were done, in the middle of the afternoon, because we couldn't wait. That was the first time I ever really She blinked.

  "Better hit the sack, honey," Bill said. "I'll be upstairs pretty soon."

  He honestly didn't remember.

  Upstairs, she undressed mechanically and put on her pajamas. Then, in a resurgence of hope, she stripped them off and stuffed them into the hamper. From a bottom drawer she took a sheer black nylon nightgown she had never worn, a present from Bill after a recent sales convention. (Guilty conscience? She pushed the thought out of her mind.) A dab of perfume on her arms and bosom and behind her knees, a quick brushing out of her hair, and she was ready. She lay tense, waiting.

  The clock struck one.

  From the foot of the stairs came the rustling of paper and the light scratch of a pen. She blinked furiously. He was down there mapping out his Milwaukee campaign, going over the plans he and Jack Flanagan had made this afternoon, while she lay here ready and waiting. She jumped out of bed.

  From the head of the stairs she could see him, surrounded by catalogues and price lists. "Bill, please come to bed."

  He looked up absently. "In a minute, hon. I'm busy."

  If I were like Betty Flanagan, she thought, I'd go out and get myself another man. As all wives do at times, she tried to imagine herself in a lover's embrace, but the picture refused to take form and she gave it up.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, waiting.

  Darling, she thoughtmentally addressing a younger and more responsive BillI don't want to get ahead in the world. Honestly I don't. I know you're doing all this for Bobby and me, but all we really need is to be the way we used to be. To share things, and go for walks together, and listen to records. To be together.

  The mature Bill, downstairs, rumpled a sheet of paper and threw it into the wastebasket. It landed with a soft plop.

  Men, Frances thought resentfully, pulling the pillow up around her ears to shut out the rustling of papers from downstairs. Never trust a man. They always let you down when you need them most.

  Like pain flowing back into an old scar, the memory of Freddie Fischer stirred in her. Freddie, the three-letter man and senior-class hero, the boy no girl ever said no to; Freddie, who sat in the back row of the senior English class not because he was shy, like her, but because he preferred not to catch the teacher's eye. Let other, less gifted men worry about Chaucer and the Lake Poets. He had glory and glamour, and he had women.

  He could have had her, any time. Homely little Frankie Kirby, with her stringy hair and faded cotton dressesand her straight A record. He had taken her home from school half a dozen times in his red convertible, letting her out at the corner so her father wouldn't know. Had kissed her casually, and let her write his term papers and book reports. Had invited her to the Homecoming Dance after his eligibility for the football team was finally secure, and had left her waiting half the night on the rickety front porch of her home, waiting for him to appear, corsage in hand. She still hoped that he had meant to go through with itthat it had been a fleeting generosity and not a crude joke.

  Because that night had cost her much. She had stolen the money for a formal, a permanent wave, high-heeled slippers and fancy earrings from her father's overall pocket while he slept, without a qualm except for the chance of his waking and catching her. Had been ready and eager to park with Freddie or go to a motel with him or, in short, do anything he wanted her to.

  Maybe, she had thoughtputting on the net dress with the sequined ruffles, teetering unsteadily on the tall heelsmaybe he'll even ask me to marry him. For it was 1941 and high school boys were marrying their classmates, marrying girls met in bars and dime stores, marrying anyone in their frenzy to experience love and leave children behind before they went off to be killed.

  She didn't know until the next day that he had patched up a fight with his real girl after the game, three hours before she changed into the net dress; that he was dancing with Patty Kelly, holding her tighter than the chaperones approved of and whispering into her ear, while she sat on the porch, until morning sun reddened the sky and she went inside and went to bed, but not to sleep. I'll never sleep again, she thought in her proud and hurt young ignorance. The sequins on her dress winked at her from the rough pine floor.

  Who cares how a miner's kid feels, a girl from Frisbie, that tangle of wooden cottages and slag heaps on the edge of town?

  The grown-up Frances turned restlessly between wrinkled sheets, dry-mouthed and tense, even now, under the memory of that rebuff.

  But Bill isn't like that. Bill's good and kind, and he loves me.

  Past tense. Used to be kind. Used to love me.

  (The small hotel room, small-town hotel at its worst, she knew now, had been blessed by his gentleness and patience. Even though he could not have known, that night of their hasty and ill-considered marriage, why she was afraid. She had started to tell him. "The night my mother died" and had faltered to a stop, with his eyes questioningly on her face.)

  Mixed with remembered shame, now, was the growing, insistent pressure of desire, a dim feeling of need at first, sharpening to a definite, insistent urge. She sat up in bed, hating herself for needing him, hating him for humiliating her this way.

  "Bill," she called.

  "What's the matter?" His voice was loud and cheerfula salesman's voice, she thought. She said hesitantly, "I can't sleep."

  "Take a phenobarb. Some in the medicine chest."

  Her eyes widened. She sat irresolute, waiting. Bill's chair scraped across the floor. "Don't wait up for me. I'll be a little while."

  "Oh, to hell with it," Frances said aloud. She pulled the covers up under her chin and lay silent for a long time, staring at nothing.

  CHAPTER 4

  Bake turned the handle that opened the car door. "You look a little shadowy. Company stay late?"

  "Late enough. They were just some people Bill knows." Frances took a deep breath, feeling better. "One of the salesmen and his wife."

  "What's your son doing?"

  "Spending the day with a friend."

  Bake stripped off her leather-palmed gloves and wadded them down behind the seat. "Damn it, I like to get my hands into things." She gave Frances a look at once sharp and concerned. "Relax, baby. We're going to get out of traffic and get a little fresh air."

  The highway was a long white ribbon unrolling before them, with a few cars scuttling like insects. "Not much traffic," Bake said. She lit a cigarette. "Sunday will be terrible, but everybody's hung over today."

  They rode as they always did, without talking.

  They cut over to Aurora, slowing for all the soft little suburban towns where commuters were digesting their Thanksgiving dinners, and took the river road north. The Fox River, studded with little green islands, wound alongside the highway, sometimes only a few feet from the pavement, sometimes lost from sight for a mile or two behind hills and trees. The water was bright blue, sequinned with sunshine. Here and there a group of three or four Negroes in bright holiday clothes were fishing, heedless of passing cars and the cold wind. North Aurora, Batavia, Geneva, Saint Charlesclean tree-shaded towns with identical business districts, brick schools, white frame houses.

  A few miles south of Elgin, Bake turned off the highway. They picked their way over a gravel road edged with drying brown weeds. Crows flew up, shrieking, at the car's approach. A woman hanging clothes on a backyard line looked after them cur
iously. Bake took the car to the end of the road, which dwindled out in a clump of trees. Beyond a sagging barbed wire fence was a thick stand of shagbark hickories, reaching as far as Frances could see in three directions. She turned an inquiring look upon Bake.

  "It's like this for miles, all along the riverbank. Virgin timber, the way it was when the Indians lived here."

  "It's quiet, isn't it?"

  They were still. Far away a dog barked. Single leaves fell slowly, turning in the breeze. "Hungry?" Bake asked.

  "Not so very."

  "I've got sandwiches and a thermos of coffee and some Scotch. Hal gave me the Scotchit ought to be good." She stretched luxuriously. "God, this is beautiful. I thought we might cook dinner at my place, if you want to. If we feel like going back and cooking, we will. If we don't, we can eat along the way. There's no hurry."

  "I'd like to see your apartment."

  "No hurry," Bake said again. "Let's see what it's like in the wilderness."

  Frances climbed through the barbed wire fence, wishing she had worn slacks. Bake stood beside her, neatly trousered and sweatered, the wind ruffling her short dark hair. They looked at each other. Then a red squirrel ran up a tree, jabbering and scolding, and Bake laughed.

  "Come on. I bet there's bittersweet in some of these old fence corners, and you hardly ever find it growing wild any more."

  The brown leaves crackled under their shoes.

  It was almost evening when they climbed through the fence again, holding the rusted strands apart for each other. Frances was tired, but exhilarated. She laid her armful of scarlet sumac, bittersweet and late maple leaves on the back seat while Bake turned the hickory nuts out of her jacket pockets. They sat down in the car, side by side, breathless and smiling. Frances was conscious for the first time that her shoes were wet and muddy, her hands stained with hickory hulls and barbed wire rust. She laughed.