Whisper Their Love Read online

  Mimi staggered a little, getting her long skirt out of the taxi. Irv steadied her. "Wake up, baby, we're home." He shook her gently, and she pulled herself together, reflex of many a groggy morning on the road, and marched up the walk with her head high. Joyce noticed sleepily that Irv unlocked the door, taking the key from an expensive-looking pigskin holder. It's none of my business, she told the accusing shade of Aunt Gen. He pays the rent. They're getting married tomorrow. I wonder if he'll stay all night? She felt a queer embarrassment, and a tingling excitement she had never known before.

  "I feel like hell," Mimi complained.

  "Take a phenobarb," Irv advised her. He followed her into the bathroom, leaving Joyce perched uncertainly on one of the small straight chairs. She could hear the murmur of voices, the running of water, the slamming of a cabinet door. After what seemed like an endless time Irv came back. "Poor kid, she feels terrible. She'll be okay in the morning, though." They looked at each other uncertainly.

  Joyce felt that she ought to say something, some kind of thanks for the evening. Mention the school fees, too. It's so good of you to spend all this money on me, I feel so grateful. The creaking of the bed in the next room distracted her from her dilemma. "Is she very sick?"

  Irv shrugged. He looked embarrassed. "Aw, you know how it is. Lots of women feel pretty punk the first few weeks." He waited for her to answer. She didn't know what to say. "Well, hell," he said defensively, "she did it on purpose. You don't put anything over on that baby; she's been around." He glanced at his watch. "I was pretty burned," he said. "Me, getting hooked by the oldest racket in the world! Then I got to thinking, hell, a man gets up in the forties he sort of wants to settle down. Have a home and some kids." He looked at Joyce, who remained silent and blank with astonishment. "I'm marrying her," he said, sounding a little angry. "Christ, not every guy would be that decent about it."

  Two tears trickled down Joyce's cheeks and fell. She felt, suddenly, tired and very sad. Irv patted her on the shoulder. "Don't feel like that, kid. I figured she told you. Happens all the time."

  Now that she had started crying, she couldn't stop. She sniffled. Irv put his arms around her. His chest was nice and solid under her cheek. "I feel so terrible," she sobbed.

  "That's excitement and sloe gin," Irv said. He sounded amused. "You'll feel all right in the morning."

  She didn't want to feel all right, she wanted to go on crying because life was so sad and Mimi was in trouble with this man and she'd never had a mother and now Mimi was going to have a baby who would get loved and looked after. She thought, All I ever had was Aunt Gen scolding about every little thing. It felt good to cry. She snuggled up to Irv. "I like you," she said.

  "You're a cute kid. Come on, give me a good-night kiss and then get to hell to bed. It's almost morning."

  She put her streaky face up. They stood like that for a moment, without moving. Her eyes widened. The fatigue in her bones began to melt. His eyes were fixed on her. Something besides pity and amusement shone in them. She stretched, lifting her bosom. His arms tightened around her suddenly, hard with muscle. "God, it's been weeks—"

  She lifted her mouth.

  This bore no relation to the good-night kisses of high school boys. She was aware of deep danger, but suddenly she didn't want to break away. She wanted—she didn't know. She felt a queer prickling excitement compounded of curiosity and unaccustomed alcohol, fatigue, and the look behind the kindness in his eyes. She pressed against him. Like a pin stuck to a magnet, her body urged itself against his.

  She felt alive and light. His arms tightened, and she took a deep breath. Her nipples rose and hardened, and there was a quivering tenderness down the insides of her legs. Sweat trickled down her back.

  He laid his hand against the bosom of her dress, and waited. There was hunger in his face and something like pity. She tore away the thin stuff, herself, and waited without moving while he undid the row of tiny hooks. In a dream, she saw that they had made little red marks on her flesh. He rubbed them away. His hands were brown and solid, with black hairs on the back. With her two hands she cupped her breasts, offering them to him like ripe fruit.

  This is crazy, she thought. But she didn't care, it was a thing she had to do. She couldn't have stopped if she had wanted to.

  Irv was pressing against her, his hands holding her down. "My shoes," she said. He bent and took the borrowed slippers off, setting them neatly side by side. She shut her eyes and waited, then opened them again to see him fumbling one-handedly with his clothes. Then he was on her, and she could hear his heart pounding fast and a little unevenly.

  The last thought she had, as his left hand slipped beneath her head and his right hand began caressing her, was how silly he looked half-dressed that way. I'd like to see him with everything off,, she thought. She lay shivering with excitement, while he shucked off what was left of Mary Jean's dress and turned back the crinoline.

  Chapter 5

  Sometimes words lie on the air of the room where they were spoken, and won't evaporate. They beat against the inner ear, pleading and accusing, shutting out all other sounds. You can go crazy, probably, if you listen to them long enough.

  It was like that with Joyce on the day of Mimi's marriage. Now and then she couldn't help looking nervously around to see if anybody else was hearing them, too. Nobody seemed to notice—nobody was even aware that anything was bothering her—and while that was a relief it was also a worry. Maybe I'm delirious or something, she thought, standing up beside Mimi while the City Clerk's assistant read the marriage ceremony.

  Over and over she heard Irv Kaufman's low voice, against the still air of late night. Traffic sounds coming up muted and diminished from the street Below. The bed in the next room, squeaking under Mimi's drugged turning. That Mimi was so close made it seem worse, made it more of a betrayal than if she had been out of the house. "I'm sorry, baby, but you asked for it." He really was sorry, it was in his regretful voice and his nice brown eyes. That's right, she thought wildly, I asked for it, but I didn't know what it was I wanted. Thought seemed to have no place in that surrender; thought had been suspended in favor of something older and more urgent.

  "Lord, I've been so hard up it isn't even funny. Mimi hasn't been in the mood for quite a while, poor kid." Tucking in his shirttail, zipping up his trousers, straightening his tie, absent-mindedly but with precision. "I'm going to marry her," he said. "I'm not going to weasel out on it.” He patted Joyce's shoulder as she sat hunched over on the davenport, holding the torn billow of net around her. "Try and forget it, will you, kid?"

  Nothing that he said made sense. After an endless time he went away and she locked the apartment door. Then she went back to the davenport and sat there for a while, trying to figure it out in her own mind. All she knew was she felt sick, and all her muscles ached. Later, turning from side to side on the scratchy upholstery—she was too tired to open it out or spread the clean sheets—and rolling over on her back again, trying to find a comfortable position and not make any noise, she was conscious only that her bones hurt. If I could only get some sleep, she thought.

  It wasn't until morning that things began to come unscrambled. When Mimi came out of the bathroom, sallow-faced and shaking, and she went in to sit soaking in scented steamy water, the meaning of Irv's words got through to her. Sharp pity knifed through her and she forgot her fatigue and morning-after dizziness. Poor Mimi, she did this, got herself into trouble so he would have to marry her. Uncle Will's worst, seldom-uttered curse flew into her mind and she told herself grimly, By Jesus H. Carrie Ann Christ, he'd better marry her. I'll kill him if he doesn't. If he had opened the apartment door at that moment she would have fallen upon him tooth and fist. The moment of pure compassion passed, and she was back in a hurricane of remembered words again.

  There was one other thing, for what comfort it might be worth. Partly, it made up for all the hateful rest. She remembered it in the course of brushing her teeth, and her anger softened. While she ha
d been standing at the door, wishing to God he would go home so she could cry, he said softly, "I'm sorry, kid. It was the first time for you, wasn't it? I'm sorry as all hell. I made up my mind a long time ago I'd never start a girl." So it was true, they could tell if you'd done it before or not. Or had she done something that gave it away, moaned or moved when the quick brief pain came?

  Still, he was sorry. He said so, and she believed him. It didn't make sense, but she felt a little better because of it.

  The mushy books never said anything about the way it made you feel, the first time. There was a lot of stuff about the wedding night—they took for granted you were getting married, you wouldn't be having anything to do with it otherwise—about undressing and whether to turn the light off or not, and a lot about mutual consideration and getting adjusted to each other, all in such polite language that if you didn't already know what it was about, you'd never guess. She had always wondered who read that stuff, and now she wondered whether they were surprised when they found out what it was really like.

  They didn't mention the dull knife stabbing where you were tender, how sore and achey you were the next day, pains across your lower back and down the insides of your legs. Of course, lying awake on a folded-up davenport isn't exactly restful either, she admitted. Maybe it was different in a double bed, in the arms of someone you loved. They never mentioned the way your eyes ached, and how sick you felt when you saw the little purple bruises on your thighs.

  Maybe Aunt Gen was right. Right to turn her face away when the neighbor women started any discussion of mating or birth, and change the subject at the first pause. Right to shut the east windows when a wind from the barnyard brought in the lowing of a cow in heat. Right to drop her household magazine in the woodbox when it carried a story about a bad girl. Joyce looked out of the train window, but she could see Aunt Gen's round face set in forbidding lines, hear the little edge to her voice when she greeted a young neighbor whose first child had been born too soon. That edge was there when she spoke to Mimi, on Mimi's visits to the farm; Joyce wasn't sure when she had grown into an understanding of it, had first known what it was that lay between the sisters after so many years. It made her feel both resentful and ashamed, when Mimi came into the kitchen and her older sister turned from the stove to look her over—her curled hair, reddened lips, high heels.

  Now she thought she knew what Aunt Gen had known all along, the dirtiness and meanness of men and women and what lay between them. She shivered.

  She tried to keep in mind that this was Mimi's wedding day. Keep it light, make a real production of it, make Mimi as happy as a bride in her situation can be, because she must have had some worried moments herself.

  A crazy mixed-up day. Dragging herself out of bed at seven, after five hours of no sleep. Locking herself in the bathroom and scrubbing as if hot water and French soap could wash away the touch of a man's hot hands, the pressure of a man's body. Refusing breakfast because of so much food last night, then feeling remote and hollow with only coffee inside. Getting dressed for the wedding, which Aunt Gen would have said was no wedding at all. Mimi had brought the matter up, while they were breakfasting on black coffee; maybe Aunt Gen's rock-bound ideas of right and wrong had been chewing at her.

  After all, she'd been brought up by Aunt Gen, with fifteen years between them and Gen taking the place of a mother the best she could. She said she guessed it would be legal, all right, according to the laws of Cook County and the State of Illinois. "Irv hasn't been inside of a synagogue since he made barmitz-vah and I'm not anything, so I guess we won't have any fights over religion, anyhow. Neither of us has any." Joyce had smiled back, stirring the coffee around and around in her cup and trying not to listen to the voices.

  She dreaded seeing him. The thought of seeing him made her feel a little faint, unable to breathe. All the time she was putting on the gray suit and borrowed pink blouse and her good hat—too loose now, because of the feather cut—her hands were shaking. Then the buzzer sounded and he was there, still bright-eyed and alert. It didn't tire a man out, then, the way some of the girls said it did.

  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.