Stranger On Lesbos Page 4

  Ma had been pleased and excited. She sat up against the pillow, color coming to her face that had been pinched with pain since the last baby was born dead. "You go, Frankie. Don't let anything stand in your way. Not anything!"

  "Who'll take care of things here?"

  "Never mind. It's your chance."

  Remembering, she laughed harshly. "My father whipped me when I told him. He'd have killed me, I guess, if Ma hadn't threatened to call the sheriff. It's the only time I ever saw her stand up to him."

  Bake's mouth was soft. She laid a comforting hand on Frances' arm. "You've had a rough time."

  "It's all right."

  "How come you didn't finish college? Miss Whatsername run out of money, or something?"

  "My mother died. It took her a long time to die. Cancer."

  Put like this, it seemed incredible that any human being could agonize as she had done in those gray barren weeks after her mother's burial, crushed under the load of housework and despairing of ever getting free, cut off from the education that was her only way of escape, loaded with the knowledge that if she had stayed at home, her mother's suffering might have been lightened. Not endedno, it was too late for thatbut sometimes, as she mopped endless floors and wrung clothes out of the soapy water, it seemed to her that no sacrifice would have been too much if it could have spared her mother one hour of that eating, animal-like pain.

  "Then Ma's brother came to see us," she said slowly, "and took the kids home to his farm."

  She had been scrubbing the kitchen floor when Uncle Will Schroeder showed up at the back door and announced, as if it were an everyday thing to work miracles, that he was restoring her to life. Frankie had fainted against his chest, and come to with his firm callused hand on her wrist, his honest eyes fixed on her face.

  Her lips curved. "Then at college I met Bill. He was taking courses for extra credithe was a case worker for the State Welfare Board."

  "It sounds like a soap opera."

  "I don't suppose people would listen to soap operas if they weren't real, sort of. I mean, these things happen."

  "What I can't figure out," Bake said, "is how Bill ever talked you into marrying him. What happenedyou get pregnant or something?"

  Frances reddened. It was close enough to the truth; she needn't have worried, as it turned out, but she had worried for two solid weeks after that uncomfortable and embarrassing night in the local hotel, and Bill had gone on urging her, andShe sat upright. "Look, do we have to talk about me all the time?"

  "I'm interested," Bake said. "Aren't you glad I'm interested?"

  "Yes, of course. Only it's five o'clock, and I have to go home and cook dinner."

  "And there may be someone there to eat it, or again, there may not." Bake's face was blank; she kept her voice flat, without expression.

  Frances stood up. "I have to go, just the same."

  "Meet me for lunch tomorrow? Same place."

  "All right."

  She was surprised, whenever she thought about it, to realize how little time they actually spent together. Bake had a job. Frances had forgotten how time-consuming even a freelance job can be, compared with the flexible schedule of a housewife whose child is in school.

  Although Bake talked about her work slightingly, she took it seriously and devoted a great deal of time and effort to it. She was always going out at odd hourslate nights, Sunday morningto interview people. She spent hours at the library, tracking down data and checking obscure details. In her spare time she attended a handicraft class and two University courses. She also gave an evening every week to the children's wing of a big hospital, working with post-polio patients. Her hands were strong and sure, she was unsentimental and brisk, and Frances was surprised to find that she seemed rather ashamed of this service.

  "Always thought I'd like to be a physiotherapist," Bake said at lunch one day.

  "You make me feel so useless. I don't have enough to do."

  "I always thought these overworked housewives were kidding themselves," Bake said with a smile. She laid her purse and gloves on the table and leaned back, looking around the crowded dining room. "That's Robert Flynn, the public relations man for Midwestern Electric Manufacturing. The blonde with him is a secretary in a Loop law firm. I met her at a publishers' open house; one of her bosses had a book published a few years ago. He was interviewed on Book News and Views."

  "You know everybody, don't you?"

  "Well, people are just people anyplace you go. I sort of like this crazy mixed-up town, though."

  Frances shook her head. She felt that people who had their names in the paper were different, more important, more glamorous. Bake laughed. "You're as intelligent as any of them, more than most. I'll introduce you to some of the headliners if you want me to. You'll see."

  She wanted to reach across the table and touch the hand that held Bake's glass, make some small mute sign of love.

  As the weeks passed it seemed to her that the time she spent apart from Bake was time wasted, a dull passing of hours without meaning. She threw herself into housekeeping, hoping to find some degree of release in hard physical work, but the resulting backache reminded her too sharply of the hopeless days after her mother's death, and she gave it up.

  She went to the big public library at the corner of Michigan and Washington, and spent hours reading the books Bake talked about: the journals of Gide and Proust, Malraux, the poems of Baudelaire and Verlaine. Only the things that had some bearing on her relationship with Bake held any meaning. Only the hours that pointed to their next meeting had promise.

  It was best when they met at the apartment. Once she got up the steps and inside the building she could fall into Bake's welcoming arms and forget all the emptiness since their last time together. But she gathered up crumbs of companionship toothe minutes they spent walking together, the after-class drink that had become a ritual.

  If it meant as much to Bake, she never said so. Gradually, as though testing Frances' ability to enter into her life, she began to include Frances in her plans. She arranged for her to meet other friends, and told her small thingstrivial in themselves but important because they helped to fill in the years they had spent apartabout her own life. Gradually, Frances came to see that another world lay all around her, whose existence she had never even suspected.

  CHAPTER 7

  “Where do you think you're going?"

  Frances paused with her hand on the doorknob. "A girl I know is having a party. Any objections?"

  "You're certainly leading a social life these days," Bill said. He laid his morning paper, still folded, on the coffee table. His eyes rested on heraccusingly, or only questioningly? "How come?"

  She smoothed her hair back nervously. "After all, you're hardly ever home any more. You don't expect me to sit home alone evening after evening, do you?"

  "I go out on business. I'm beating my brains out to earn a living for you and Bob, and you damn well know it. There's nothing I'd like better than a chance to stay home with my family once in a while."

  "Is that why you play golf every Sunday?"

  He ignored that. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you were running around with some other guy."

  "Well, I'm not. I haven't got time to stand here and argue, either. I have a right to some friends of my own."

  "You might try being decent to my friends for a change. You were snooty to Jack Flanagan again last night."

  "I'm getting damn tired of having Jack Flanagan pinch me on the fanny every chance he gets," Frances said coldly. "I don't mind your eyes falling out of their sockets every time Betty leans over in those low-cut necklines of hers, but I don't care for that sort of thing myself." She pulled the front door open.

  "This isn't like you."

  "Maybe you don't know me very well. You're never home."

  She was rather proud of herself for keeping her voice so calm, considering the way her knees were shaking.

  There were six or seven people in Bake's small apartmen
t when she got there. The air was soft with smoke and loud with hi-fi blues. Frances made her way through the familiar rooms, trying not to feel that the guests were intruders, not to wish that they would all go home and leave her alone with Bake. She took off her coat and added it to the pile on the bed, reddened her lips and smoothed her hair, pleased that she looked pretty. In the mirror she saw Bake come into the bedroom, closing the door tightly behind her.

  "Hi," she said, raising a hand in greeting.

  "Hi," Bake said, sounding amused. "It's turning out to be quite a brawl. Are you staying afterward?"

  "I can't. Bill made a fuss about my coming at all." She capped her lipstick and dropped it in her purse. "It's the first time he's ever said anything."

  "You shouldn't have told him you were going out."

  "Oh hell, he's all settled down for a quiet evening at home. I don't know what got into him."

  "He doesn't suspect anything, does he?"

  "I don't think so. He accused me of being interested in another man," Frances said, giggling suddenly, "but I don't think he meant it. He was just peeved and wanted to hurt my feelings."

  Bake lit a cigarette. She broke the match in two and flipped it at the corner wastebasket. "It's too bad you have to take him into consideration at alland Bob too. I haven't anything against Bob, I'm sure he's a nice kid, but no adolescent really needs a mother. You're just a handy source of food and spending money to him."

  Frances thought, I ought to resent that. I love Bob, he's my child, I'm sure he loves me too. Still, it's true that they start to make the real breakaway around this age.

  She said stiffly, "Let's forget it. Who's here?"

  "Theresa and Kitty, Kay and Jane, Patsy and Barbara." Bake paused to count. "I asked Lissa and Jo, but they've had a big fight and Jo moved out, bag and baggage. There's somebody else, of course. Lissa came alone. I'd just as soon she hadn't."

  "Why not?"

  "She likes you."

  "You don't need to lose any sleep over that."

  Frances was silent. The last time she had stayed after a party, it was to put a tangle-footed and incoherent Bake to bed. Bake caught her thought as she so often did.

  "I'm sorry about that, darling. I won't drink so much tonight."

  "What I hated about it," Frances said in a small hard voice, "was that Bill was awake when I got home. He wanted to make love to mefor a change."

  "My God, Frankie."

  "Well, what could I do? He's my husband."

  Bake snapped off the bedroom light. In the half-dark, she caught Frances' arm in her two hands and shook her. "Did you like it?"

  "I hated it."

  But that wasn't the whole truth, she thought as she made her way back to the living room and took the glass Pat handed her. There had been a fluttering of response, the more insistent because she had tried to deny it. Even though she tried to lie unmoving and unfeeling until it was over, thinking about something else, it was one of the few times when she had caught a glimmering of what the stories and poems were about. A dozen times, maybe, in sixteen years.

  Afterward, lying beside a Bill oddly spent and gentle, more like the young husband of their early days than she had seen him for a long time, she had to fight back a wave of tenderness that threatened to engulf her. She had been short-tempered with him ever since, in an effort to dispel that guilty tenderness, since it separated her somehow from Bake.

  It's all her fault, she thought. If I hadn't had to go home all keyed up and unsatisfied

  This party was going to be like a dozen others she had gone to. Lots of talk, some music, a great deal to drink. All of Bake's friends drank more than she was used tobut so did all of Bill's friends. Alcohol seemed to be the solvent in which all differences of personality, background, opinion were lost, so that people could endure being together. She walked through the living room, saying hello. She knew the girls now, all but onethe sulky brunette, not more than eighteen, sitting alone in front of the fireplace, who she supposed was Lissa. She shivered, feeling a real sympathy for the girl. God, suppose Bake ever left me, she thought.

  Her first impulse was to sit down beside Lissa and try to distract the child from her troubles, but Bake was watching her closely. She took her drink and went to sit with Kay and Pat, who were trading notes on their problems with the public school system.

  Being with these women always made Frances miserably conscious that she was a housewife, without status in the world of earners. Barbara and Theresa held office jobs in the Loop; they were two digits in the crowds of young women who took the subway to work every morning. Jane was with an ad agency and had to spend most of her salary on clothes and beauty parlors. Tonight, as a reaction from the chic imposed on her by her job, she wore pedal pushers and moccasins, but her long nails were enameled silver-pink and her hairdo was elaborate. Kitty looked exactly what she was, an unmarried librarian of thirty-five, shrewd, sensible and competent.

  Until a few months ago, Frances might have sat next to any of them at a drugstore lunch counter without suspecting that any part of their lives was not open to scrutiny. She had heard a great deal about the telltale marks of the lesbianmannish walk, severe dress, deep voice, short hair. All of these girls looked and acted exactly like any other youngish career women. Lately she had been looking curiously at other women on the street and in the classroom behind the counters of stores and at restaurant tables, wondering which of them belonged to this world within a world whose existence she had not even suspected till now. There was absolutely no way to tell.

  "Frankie, wake up. This is the third time I've spoken to you."

  Frances blinked. "I'm sorry I was just thinking what a good-looking crowd this is."

  "Conventional looking, you mean." Jane smoothed down her pedal pushers, a gesture she had acquired from wearing sheath dresses. "What did you expect, a lot of butches?"

  "Well"

  "There are some, you know. You'll see, if we go pub-crawling after a while."

  Bake asked, "Who's going pub-crawling?"

  "All of us, after you kick us out."

  "After the booze is gone you mean," Pat suggested.

  "I’ll go too," Bake said, "if it will get you out of here any sooner."

  Frances laughed. But there was a restless feeling in the room tonight that neither music nor liquor could dispel. She wanted to be alone with Bake, not only for the excitement and fulfillment of love but to talk. I'm not a party girl, she admitted, recognizing the onset of the boredom that always overcame her when Bill persuaded her to go to a dance or a bridge party. She looked around, but Bake was being a hostess, urging drinks and sandwiches on people.

  "I'll go too," she said, taking a third Martini.

  It became evident after a while that the idea was growing. Maybe it was the tang of spring in the air, rising above the exhaust fumes and the varied smells of city life. Maybe it was the unrest fostered by the swollen eyes and drawn face of Lissa, who sat drinking steadily and silently. At last Kay said, "Well are we going slumming or are we not?" and there was a gradual gathering up of handbags and jackets. Bake snapped off the lights and replenished her supply of cigarettes and kitchen matches. "Going along, Frankie? You don't need your coat, you can pick it up later."

  Lissa said in a low voice, going downstairs beside her, "I met you somewhere, didn't I?”

  Pat said, "She's Bake's girl.”

  "Oh."

  "Come on, Frankie, ride with us."

  She looked around for Bake, who was backing out her own car. "Okay. Where are we going?"

  "Wherever Bake wants to go, I guess. It's her party. Besides, she knows all the places."

  Lissa asked, "Have you been with Bake very long?”

  "About five months."

  "I was with Jo a year and a half."

  Jane said, "For God's sake, baby, stop thinking about Jo. She'll come back."

  "No she won't. She's got somebody else."

  "Look, kid, we've all been through it. You'll feel bette
r pretty soon."

  "I want to die," Lissa said. Her pretty childish face puckered into a new burst of crying.

  Jane gave Frances a look that said plainly, never mind, there's nothing to do for the poor kid. They were silent. Frances thought, will Bake and I separate some day, too? Is it impossible to stay together and go on loving?

  She asked timidly, "How long have you been with Kay?"

  "Fourteen months. Let's seeit'll be fifteen months next Wednesday." She turned the heavy silver ring she wore on her engagement finger. "We gave each other these on our first anniversary."

  "And before that?"

  "I don't know about Kay. She came from out on the Coast somewhere. But of course you know I used to" She stopped suddenly, looking sharply at Frances.

  "What?"

  "Nothing."

  Frances was silent. It was the first time she had thought about the future, and the picture was disquieting.

  Karla's, where they rejoined the people from the other car, was a basement place on the near North Side, flanked by apartment buildings and lighted by a dim red neon sign. Frances had gone with Bake to three or four similar places, just outside the business district, but she still felt that there was something a little sinister about them.

  She followed Jane down a flight of steps, paid her admission dollar, and helped group chairs around a too-small table so the nine of them could sit together. An awkward number. Here, as in the heterosexual world, where she lived with Bill, the animals came in two by two. She touched Bake's shoulder lightly as they took their places.

  Bake ordered drinks all around. She had already had too much, Frances thought; her walk and speech were all right, but she had the shrewd narrow-eyed look with which she barricaded herself when she was beginning to feel her liquor.

  Frances said, low, "Don't take any more."

  "Why not, for Christ's sake?"

  "You've had enough."