Whisper Their Love Read online

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Oh God, you fool, I'm in trouble. That's a goofy thing to call it, isn't it? That's what the old ladies back home call it, and they're so right." Mary Jean shoved back the covers and sat up in bed, rocking. Most of the time she slept naked, but tonight she had gone to bed in a slip, as though to hide her betrayed and betraying body even from herself. "I'll have to get rid of it, or something, but oh God, I'm scared. People die from it sometimes."

  "Maybe there's something you can take," Joyce suggested. She sat down on her own bed. Beneath her real concern for Mary Jean's predicament was relief that she wasn't caught, that it was somebody else's trouble and not hers. It made her feel ashamed. "Ergot," she remembered. "There was a girl in high school and she always—"

  "That's an old wive's tale. You can't take anything. I mean, you can but it won't do any good. And it won't do any good to run up and down stairs, or get chilled, or sit in a tub of hot water." Mary Jean's voice wobbled. "It's an operation, and they don't give you any anesthetic for it. People get blood poison from it sometimes."

  Joyce shivered. She said, "Maybe you're just late. Lots of people are late sometimes. Maybe you've got a little cold or something."

  "Look, I'm the original clockwork kid." Mary Jean's face puckered. "I told him and told him. He wouldn't wait. I kept telling him, and he wouldn't listen to me."

  Men, Joyce thought with a cold anger rising in her. She felt a new affection for Mary Jean. She would have liked to pat her head or put an arm around her, but was afraid of being sentimental. She felt so alive and secure herself that she was ashamed. "Please don't make so much noise," she begged. "Somebody'll hear you."

  "This will kill my dad," Mary Jean sobbed. "He's a preacher, did I ever tell you that? Baptist preacher. Not like the ones in the movies; he's the kindest man that ever Jived. Only he always worried about me too, I guess." She was really bawling now. She fumbled for a tissue, didn't find one, and wiped her nose on the sheet. "All the damn housekeepers. All the goddam women all the time hollering about my mother. Ever since I was knee-high they've been waiting for me to get in trouble," she said bitterly. "My dad wants to think things like this only happen to girls from down by the railroad tracks," she said. "It'll kill him if he ever finds it out."

  "Well, my goodness, you don't have to let him find out anything about it."

  "You've got to help me. I'm afraid to stay by myself after—when it gets bad. People die sometimes."

  They looked at each other. "There must be plenty of doctors that do it," Joyce said. "It happens to a lot of people."

  "Sure it does. Only you never think you're going to be the one. You think about it sometimes when you're, you know, all excited—what will I do if I get caught? And you think, well, if anything happens I can have an operation. But you don't expect it to really happen." Mary Jean wiped her eyes, sniffling. "I'm sorry I'm so chicken."

  "Does Bill know?"

  "Sure. Oh, sure, I couldn't wait to tell him. I thought maybe he'd even marry me. I wouldn't mind being married."

  "And?"

  "He swore at me," Mary Jean said. "I think he can get me some money for the operation, though. His folks have plenty."

  "How much will it cost?"

  "I think it's around two or three hundred dollars. It's against the law, that's why they charge so much. If the doctor gets caught doing it they put him in jail. That's why the good ones won't."

  "There must be some good ones who need the money, though." Joyce hoped she sounded calm and reasonable. She didn't feel that way. "Look, tomorrow we'll go and look for a doctor. Don't they give you a rabbit test or something first?"

  "Not in this hick town we won't. They'd call the college first thing."

  "Okay, we'll go to St. Louis."

  "We can ask Abbott for permission to go shopping. She's going to be a problem," Mary Jean said, "she's such a snooper and she has a dirty mind."

  "You won't have to tell the doctor your right name."

  "You won't tell anybody, will you? I mean, not anybody at all."

  "Of course not. You'll be okay."

  Mary Jean shut her eyes and slid down against the pillow. "My head hurts. I wish I could go to sleep and never wake up."

  Joyce would have liked to sleep for a week, herself. "Don't worry," she said, "you'll get along all right" I hope to God I'm right, she thought

  Chapter 9

  “Maybe this time we'll hit the jackpot," Joyce said. There was no assurance in her voice, and her face was tired. She stood back and looked at the building. Grimy brick crisscrossed by a black webbing of fire escapes, its uncurtained windows lettered in black and gold: Painless Dentist, Furs Re-styled, Attorney at Law, The Clarion Press. "It doesn't look very sanitary," she said doubtfully.

  "You sure this is the right address?"

  "Says Fourteen Twenty-four." Joyce looked at the slip of paper she had carried all afternoon, rumpled now and smudgy from being clutched in a sweaty hand. "My feet hurt," she complained.

  "You ain't just beatin' your gums, grandma." Mary Jean eased one heel out of her black suede pump, and stood lopsided for temporary relief. A red blister showed through sheer nylon. "Next time I'll wear flats."

  "There better not be any next time."

  They stood eyeing each other. "We sure haven't made any headway so far. We might as well go in."

  "Do we have time before the train's due to leave?"

  "Unless he has a million other people waiting. We can't go back till we find somebody," Mary Jean said fretfully. "We can't ask for another Saturday leave without making Abbott suspicious."

  "This is a crazy way to look for a doctor. Like looking for a needle in a haystack."

  "Do you know any better way?"

  "We couldn't exactly call up the AMA and ask for the name and address of a good abortionist," Joyce admitted. They climbed the stairs quickly, both afraid of losing their nerve. Joyce's chest hurt, and she was having trouble breathing. Feels like somebody's sitting on my stomach, she thought crossly. Nerves, just plain old nerves. He can't do any worse than say no, the way the others did. Only if he looks at us like that fat one—

  Heck, he doesn't even know who we are. She held her purse more tightly. She and Mary Jean had removed every scrap of identification from their bags before they left school that morning, feeling, in spite of their anxiety, like characters in an Agatha Christie novel. Family snapshots, identification cards, the Social Security card she'd kept as a proud souvenir of the summer she detasseled corn. Mary Jean had even bought a wedding ring in Woolworth's and put it on. "So he'll tell me the' truth. If they think you're single they might not want to help you." This reasoning seemed a little lopsided but Joyce got it, finally: if you weren't married, people were likely to think it served you right. Maybe one doctor could do the diagnosis and another one the operation, she suggested. Mary Jean looked dubious.

  This waiting room wasn't as slick and clinical-looking as the others they had tried. It was as dingy as the outside of the building. The others had been brightly lighted, two by tubular fluorescent fixtures, the third by an abundance of little modern lamps. Two had amateur paintings on the walls—one was a seascape with sailboats, the other an abstract that reminded Joyce sickeningly of Mimi's apartment. "Do all doctors paint in their spare time?" she asked, and Mary Jean said lifelessly that she didn't think doctors ever had any spare time and probably the pictures were gifts from grateful patients.

  "Or maybe their wives do it, waiting up nights for them," Joyce suggested, but there was no answering smile.

  The patients in the other places had looked bright and prosperous too. Young mothers with healthy-looking little children, there for shots or a routine checkup. A couple of middle-aged men, and young wives in smocks. You couldn't imagine any of these folks ever being scared, or having anything to hide. Nor could you imagine any of the doctors, two of them youngish and partly bald, the third middle-aged and tonsured like a monk, doing anything illicit.
/>   That was the trouble, they were all too respectable. The first two young men had sized the situation up before Mary Jean could make any disastrous confessions and had said they didn't have time to take any new patients, they were awfully busy right now. The third said he was full just now, but why don't you come back this evening, Mrs. Uh, and bring your husband. He was nice about it, but firm. Still, it was his office nurse who had stopped them on the way out and given them this man's address.

  This room—well, you could imagine the people collected here being involved in almost any kind of furtive circumstances. Shot by gangsters, or infected with the kind of diseases they told you about in the back of those street-guide books. Or getting rid of babies.

  She sat down on an old wicker couch covered in faded cretonne and picked up an old Saturday Evening Post from the pile on the table. Then she realized that she was still hanging on to her list, copied that morning from the Red Book in the depot phone booth. She folded it and slipped it into the pocket of her suit jacket, and looked at her watch. Forty minutes till train time, and we haven't bought a thing to take back. Even if Abbott doesn't get suspicious, Edith is going to ask questions. She shied away from that thought and looked at Mary Jean, who was sitting absolutely still on a straight chair with dusty rungs.

  The doctor came to the door. This one was an old man, not just on the other side of middle age, but really old, maybe seventy-five. He had no hair at all except a few oily wisps combed over the bare top of his head. He was thin, and dressed not in a professional white jacket but in old wash pants and a short-sleeved shirt with a bar of rust across one shoulder, as if it had been dried over a radiator. He walked slowly, stooping. He had a neck in folds like a turtle's and. his eyes were hooded like a turtle's too—or like a cobra's, she told herself in unreasoning terror. There was something really reptilian about him and also something dingy, not quite clear, like the room. He beckoned to one of the waiting women, and she got up heavily and followed him into the inner office.

  Mary Jean leaned over. Her cheeks were sallow. "Let's go, kid. I can't—"

  The others watched them leave, incurious, wrapped up in their own troubles. Their heels were loud on the wooden stairs. Out in the street, electric signs were coming on and after-work crowds thickening. Mary Jean puffed for breath, leaning against the outside wall of the building. "I'm sorry, Joyce. I simply couldn't stand it. He looked like, I don't know—"

  "An old snapping turtle. Or an alligator, or crocodile, whichever one it is eats people."

  "I can't ever remember either."

  They made the train by the skin of their teeth. The conductor had to wait while they dug up the return half of their tickets. It was a commuters' train, filling up quickly at this hour. Joyce was glad they didn't have to stand up, she didn't think she could have managed it. She looked at Mary Jean, sitting lax and still beside her. "Are you all right?"

  "Tired, is all. It's funny; I've been thinking, in the books they always get faint or something. I feel perfectly all right only I'm three weeks late, that's all."

  "Maybe they don't put that in the books because it isn't polite, or something."

  "Right this minute what bothers me is my feet are killing me."

  "We've wasted a whole day," Joyce said sadly. "I couldn't let that man do it. Do you reckon they're all like that?"

  "I wouldn't trust him to give a sick dog a dose of salts," Joyce said scornfully. It was Uncle Will's expression. "We'll have to think up a better way. We could ask around all day and not hit on the right person."

  "What we need is to ask somebody who's full of sin and wickedness," Mary Jean said in a frayed voice. She smiled to show she was joking, but it wasn't much of a smile. "We don't know the right kind of people. I know a lot of girls who've done their share of sleeping around and admit it. I even know a couple I think have had operations—but you can't ask."

  "They won't tell, you mean."

  "I can't wait much longer." The train jerked to a stop. Mary Jean grabbed the edge of the seat with both hands to steady herself. "The longer you wait the more dangerous it is. Besides, I'll go crazy if something doesn't happen pretty soon."

  "We're doing the best we can." That sounded sharp, and she didn't mean it to. I'm tired, Joyce excused herself. Tired and worried. It's no use to take it out on the poor kid, though, she has enough already. "We're going to be way late for dinner; you can go right to bed. Me too. I'm pooped."

  "Oh, you don't have to be literary tonight?"

  "That sounds like a dirty crack."

  "Sorry, I guess I'm kind of jumpy."

  "Sure."

  "I can't wait much longer," Mary Jean said again. "People can tell by the way your eyes look, or something. Besides, it's not safe after three months." She was close to hysteria; it showed in the way she clenched her hands and in the muscle that jerked beneath her ear. "We've got to do something right away."

  "Have you ever thought about going ahead and having it?"

  "Very funny. I can see myself getting kicked out. It's only three and a half months till this semester's over. I can see Pop's face when I tell him. And the deacons'. He'd never get another church."

  "Well, girls do sometimes."

  "Yeah. Maybe I could get into some kind of a shelter for immoral girls, or whatever they call it." Mary Jean smiled thinly. "I think they teach you how to do housework. That's a bright future. Anyhow, I think it's a sin to bring a child into the world when you can't even take care of it or anything. An orphan in an orphan asylum, without anybody to even love it."

  "I wish you wouldn't talk as if it were a baby already. It's only a little clump of cells."

  Mary Jean swallowed. "That's what I keep telling myself. Let's not talk about it any more."

  "Okay. You brought it up, I didn't."

  They got off the train in Henderson. Same old depot, mellowed by twilight; same old troubles, Joyce thought drearily. Good Lord, were all women's troubles on account of men? They went into the waiting room, for no good reason except that both of them were reluctant to go back to school. Nobody was there except an old colored man who was pushing a cloud of dust ahead of a broom, looking as if his feet hurt. Well, Joyce thought, he's not the only one. At that moment she was not as worried about Mary Jean as she thought she should be, because what she wanted more than anything in the world was to take her shoes off and go to bed.

  "Let's go downtown and have a drink."

  "Okay, let's."

  They walked through the streets quickly, not stopping to look at any window displays—typical small-town, stodgy streets that got shabbier as they neared the college. It was silly, Joyce felt, to have such a high-class or anyway high-priced school on the edge of an area like this, but times changed and you couldn't always predict which neighborhoods were going downhill. They walked past the Honey Bee quickly, looking the other way in case some of the girls were inside, and stopped in front of The Bobcat's Den, its neon sign alight, a curvaceous nude with red flashing nipples. Mary Jean looked up at her. "Keep 'em covered, kid. You're likely to get in trouble that way."

  "In here?"

  "All right."

  It was dark inside and nearly empty; it smelled clean, but faintly sour. Colored bubbles of light chased each other around the rim of the giant juke box, which was mercifully silent, and the mirror behind the bar caught and reflected what light there was. Glasses and bottles arranged in artistic stacks and pyramids glittered in the dusk. The faces of the three men sitting perched at the bar were in shadow. "Martini," Mary Jean said. Joyce nodded. She had never been in a bar before—Aunt Gen, who still deplored the passing of Prohibition, called them saloons, and back in Ferndell no nice girl went into one. She looked around curiously, forgetting herself and her tired feet and her worries for a while.

  One of the men laid a bill on the bar and stood up to wait for his change. "Hi," he said, nodding to the girls. Mary Jean glanced up. "Hi, Scotty. Working or loafing?"

  "Some of both, I guess. What are you beau
tiful dolls doing out on the town, all dolled up like Mrs. Rockefeller's plush horse? The duchess know you're out?"

  "We're like you, we like a break in the monotony once in a while. How about another Martini, Joyce?"

  The drink still stung Joyce's throat. She was terribly thirsty; she would have liked another, but Scotty's eyes were fixed on her inquisitively. She shook her head. "No. You've had enough."

  "All right, meanie. If you're in a mood for work," Mary Jean said to Scotty, "why don't you take us back to the salt mine? We're too pooped to walk."

  "Take your time. I'll be ready when you are."

  Joyce fished the olive out of her glass and chewed it up, dipped a paper napkin into her water glass, and wiped her sticky fingers. She was hungry, too—they hadn't bothered about lunch. The drink and the short rest had perked Mary Jean up; she looked less pallid and she walked out to the taxi almost briskly. Scotty had vanished into the men's room, but they climbed into the back seat and sat there waiting.

  Scotty piled in and slammed the door shut. "You kids out lookin' for new hats?"

  "Looking for a doctor," Mary Jean said, sounding quite calm and even a little pleased with herself. Joyce thought: Oh dear, she never should have taken that drink.

  Scotty shifted gears. "Bellyache?"