Whisper Their Love

by Valerie Taylor

  The stove here was gas, black and thick with spattered grease. There was a wood range alongside for winter use; a fire crackled in it, and red showed around the lids. A line over the stove held drying towels, some smeared and stained with food. A fat cockroach ran across the toe of Joyce's loafer and vanished in a shadowy corner.

  The stout motherly waitress was slumped down, stocking-footed, in a straight chair, drinking coffee. Bitsy reached for the enamel pot and tipped it carefully, pouring into a couple of thick white cups such as farm wives use for threshers. She handed one to Joyce. The waitress sat unmoving, cup in hand, until Bitsy smiled at her and sat down. Then her eyes met the girls' with liking and acceptance. "Nothing like hot coffee, a time like this."

  "Sure isn't."

  Joyce had drunk so much of the stuff in the last few days that it tasted like water, but at least the heat relaxed her throat. Maybe if I could get some sleep I'd be able to eat, she thought. She looked at Bitsy, sitting quietly erect. Bitsy wore a dark skirt and white blouse, as though bright colors would be an affront to a house of death. Her ponytail was slicked into a neat bun; her face looked sharp and sober, the freckles prominent. Joyce envied her. Bitsy would always know what she was doing, and would always do the right thing. If trouble came to her, it wouldn't be the outcome of her own foolishness.

  Bitsy intercepted her look. She set her cup down on the table, moving a sticky spoon, and took a piece of paper out of her blouse pocket. "What do you make of this?"

  The waitress drained her cup and left, tactfully.

  The paper was wrinkled with folding and unfolding. Mary Jean's big loopy handwriting, three or four words to a line. "Joyce. Maybe God will forgive me now. I know I've been bad but I can't take any more of this." Joyce's hand shook so that the sheet rattled. Bitsy's eyes were sharp on her face. The kitchen was warm and stuffy; for a moment she thought she was going to faint. She looked at the far wall, where a cobweb swayed slowly.

  "I have to know," Bitsy said. "It was under my pillow—thank the Lord I found it before anybody else did."

  There was no evading those gimlet eyes. Joyce looked at the floor. "She was in trouble," she said, low. "The time we went away. She had an operation—you know, operation."

  "I thought it was something like that," Bitsy said. She sighed. "That was good of you, to stick with her. It wouldn't have been so nice if anybody found out."

  Shame flooded Joyce. "I threw it up to her," she said. "I wouldn't even listen when she wanted to talk to me—the day she did it." It seemed long ago. "Maybe if I had, she wouldn't have."

  "It's too late now," Bitsy said sensibly. Oh, a sensible girl, the kind who gives you aspirin and hot tea for a broken heart. It now occurred to Joyce that maybe tea and aspirin would help, too. "Do you think—"

  "She was afraid of its happening again. That was what we fought about, partly."

  But was it, really? She shut her eyes, seeing how snarled and twisted the whole thing was, how the strands of her life and Mary Jean's were interwoven with half a dozen other lives. Nobody could ever unravel this tangle; nobody could say what was true or false, or who was to blame. She would never know.

  Bitsy's eyes were bright. "Whoever does the autopsy will know," she said. "That's the first thing they always think about when a single girl kills herself. It'll be on the record. Seems to me what we have to worry about is, will the doctor tell? Gossip, I mean."

  "No. Because he's the one—"

  "Ah," Bitsy said in disgust. "Her father's coming," she said, taking hold of the matter as Aunt Gen would have, by the practical end. "We'll simply have to work up a good story and stick to it, and hope Prince keeps his mouth shut. It was Prince?" Joyce nodded. "He's probably scared too."

  "Cancer. You can't pick up a magazine without reading some article about cancer," Joyce said hopefully. "It's supposed to make you go to the doctor and find out, but I think all it does is scare people."

  "Mind, you suspected all the time. Back me up on it, though, or so help me, I'll—" Their eyes met.

  Bitsy was little and wiry. She would have made a good pioneer, swinging an ax in forests infested with hostile Indians. Joyce followed her straight narrow back out of that slovenly kitchen, feeling a little better to know that Bitsy was helping carry this load.

  This try, she got a suitcase of clothes sorted and packed.

  Then she went over to the bursar's office to draw out the money so carelessly deposited, now precious because it would be the tool of her escape. The florid middle-aged woman looked at her suspiciously but asked no questions, and she offered no information. A new doubt assailed her: a woman controls her own money at eighteen, but can she leave school without permission from somebody? Worry about that later. Her account had grown to one hundred and thirty-two dollars. She felt safer when she had stuffed the bills into the zipper compartment of her Sunday purse. I'll think about plans after the funeral, she promised herself.

  In the dorm, everybody was cranky and short-tempered. Nobody had had enough sleep; there was an unsettled feeling in the air that kept the girls up late, playing cards, making coffee, eating, visiting back and forth from room to room. A few who had taken aspirin or phenobarbital to induce naps complained of feeling let down and heavy. Dinner was late, and the potatoes au gratin were scorched enough so that cheese sauce didn't help. Mrs. Abbott and Bitsy left for St. Louis, to meet the Reverend Mr. Kennedy's plane. Nobody had reminded the dining-room girl to change the tablecloths, and the untidiness added to the general feeling of disaster and disorder. Joyce left the table before dessert, without making any excuse, because she felt that she couldn't sit still another minute.

  * * *

  Mary Jean's father was a tall solid man with quirky eyebrows like hers and iron-gray hair that had probably been black, too. He wore a businessman's gray suit, but his rimless glasses and black oxfords were ministerial, and so was his handshake. Joyce saw him walking down the hall after dinner, with Mrs. Abbott on one side and Bitsy on the other, like a large and a small tug convoying a liner. His head was bent to Mrs. Abbott's unending talk, but his eyes were remote. Joyce guessed that Mrs. Abbott was telling him, like a stuck needle, what a wonderful girl Mary Jean had been, so pretty and talented. She hoped he wasn't listening. He looked like a man who had been talked at a lot in his time.

  Bitsy wasn't saying anything. She had one good walloping lie that would ease his mind if anything could, in so far as it gave Mary Jean a sound reason for doing what she did. Bitsy would bring out her story if the right time came, hoping that Dr. Prince was enough involved to cover himself and Mary Jean at the same time. Now she let Mrs. Abbott go on and on, wiping the tears away before they could roll down and spoil her make-up.

  Joyce thought that Mr. Kennedy looked like a good man and a strong one, regardless of what his religious beliefs might be. She hoped his faith would hold up under this. She didn't think he would sleep very well in the guest-room bed. He would get through the night hours somehow, remembering his wife's desertion and the short years of his daughter's life, and tomorrow he would take Mary Jean's body back to Charlotte on the train (more fitting, more dignified somehow than by plane) and start learning to live without her. He looked like a man who, having helped other people through their troubles, would bear his own sorrow well and not cry out against it or expect anyone to share it with him.

  She woke up thinking about him, at two in the morning. You can't ever really help anybody, she thought confusedly, turning on the reading lamp and reaching for the closest book. The printed words didn't make sense, and she couldn't ever remember afterwards what the story was about, but it helped to pass the time until the sky turned light.

  Chapter 24

  The next day was endless. Holly Robertson got hold of a fifth of rye and she and three of her best friends shut themselves into her room for a while and came out looking happier. Lunch was sandwiches and coffee; nobody was hungry. Several people found small errands to do and signed out for town, coming back more or less
reluctantly in time for the service scheduled at two. Joyce, sitting alone in the room where so much talk had echoed, counted her money one more time to make sure it was still there. She didn't know yet what she was going to do, except that she was leaving. Even if I have to run away in the middle of the night, she thought. I can't stand this place one more day.

  A minister showed up from somewhere. She had never seen him before; he wasn't one of the oldish men who usually spoke at Sunday chapel, but young and hearty, with a booming bass voice and toothy smile. He shook hands with Mary Jean's father, who looked noncommittal, and mounted the platform with an air of being at home there. Joyce didn't like him much. It bothered her, because she had been brought up to have respect for all the appurtenances of religion.

  The heavy purple-velvet curtains were parted on the stage of the auditorium-chapel. Tomorrow night, Joyce thought, was the freshman play. She wondered if they would have it, and who would take back all the borrowed chairs and tables, the ostrich plumes and fans and furs. But it didn't matter. She wasn't going to be here. Already she felt separate from her surroundings, as if she had already gone and was looking back on her three months of college from a far place.

  There was a heavy silver-colored box on the platform, with pink and white carnations spraying out from a stiff silver bow on the lid. Mary Jean was in there. Joyce looked away. She sat up straight, trying not to listen to the organ playing "Rock of Ages." That song was tied up in her mind with too many funerals and revival meetings, it made her feel weepy, and she was in no state of mind to shed tears.

  A hat felt unfamiliar on her head. She looked down and saw that she'd put on her good gray suit, the one she had worn to Chicago. She didn't remember changing her clothes, but apparently she had, because she had on nylons, high heels, even gloves.

  The organist changed keys and went into "The Beautiful Garden of Prayer." That was better, that one was so sentimental you could feel scornful about it. There was a little scuffle in the back of the room. People half-turned to look, trying not to act curious but not wanting to miss anything either. Three young men sat down in the back row. The middle one was Bill. His face was white and there was a dab of "adhesive on his chin. He had been drinking. Somebody had got him into a dark-blue suit and a tie. He looked like an insurance salesman after a binge. His eyes were puffy from crying, or liquor, or both. He sat down carefully, looking straight ahead because his eyes wouldn't focus and he was probably sick at his stomach. Joyce wondered if he knew why Mary Jean had done it. She guessed he had a pretty good idea, anyway. Likely, scared as she was, she had gone to him and told him, maybe begged him to marry her this time. And if he knew, the sober, wary-looking boys flanking him knew too. It would be a miracle if the story didn't go farther. His friends sat looking at him, not at the casket or the Reverend Mr. Sampson.

  She looked at Mary Jean's father, sitting with his face composed and his hands folded, down in the front row. Let him get away from here without finding out, she prayed. It was a real prayer, the first she'd made in a long time, the first since she was a little kid down in the Primary Department, believing there was a God up in the sky who spent all his time listening to people and giving them what they asked for.

  The minister had never seen Mary Jean, but he talked about her just the same, saying the same things Abbott had been, saying for the last two days. They might have let Abbott give the sermon and saved him the trip, she thought. For one fleeting moment she had a picture of Mary Jean lying naked on the bed, chewing on an apple and reading French grammar. She'd get an awful wallop out of this, Joyce thought, she'd think it was funny as anything. She grinned.

  In the middle of the eulogy, Bill tried to say something. She knew it was Bill, because nobody else would have done it. She turned around a little but couldn't see him. The voice ended all at once, as if somebody had put a hand over his mouth and the thick, half-coherent words tapered off into sobs. Sitting there and crying, she thought, the big bum. But there was no life in it. There was no room for any feeling in her, she couldn't hate anybody or even remember how it felt to hate. She sat looking at the purple curtain with the tarnished silver "H" and wreath in the middle of it, seeing every little detail of the fabric and not thinking about anything else because there was nothing else that would bear thinking about right then.

  Finally it was over. Her watch said twenty minutes from start to finish, but she knew better. She had been sitting there forever. Benediction, sonorous, with the hand upraised, but falling flat without a choir's amen as on Sunday mornings. Now people could get up and go out, not pushing or talking as they would have at a play or a commencement exercise, but quietly. Everybody knows how to behave at a funeral, how to put on humility and stand back and let others go first. Quite a few town people were there, relatives of local girls who had been students or storekeepers who made money from the place. In the corridor they stopped to exchange greetings, the women's voices regaining normal pitch while their husbands waited, looking less funereal and more normal. Their expressions said: pretty soon we can get home and take off our ties, have a drink, go back to the office for a couple hours and clear up those accounts, call up a girl or maybe get the wife into bed for a while. Somebody else was dead, but they were going to be alive for a while yet.

  The Reverend Mr. Sampson came out with Mary Jean's father and Bitsy beside him. She guessed Bitsy represented family, a sort of proxy for the aunts and cousins who would attend the interment in Charlotte. This is the time when you need your own folks, if you have any. Or maybe Bitsy was still on guard. Joyce didn't doubt that some of the girls guessed what the matter was, since living in a college dormitory is like living in a goldfish bowl, but they wouldn't talk. They probably all know about me, too. It didn't matter. But she felt chilly.

  Miss Ryan went by, flat feet slapping down hard, looking more masculine in a skirt and jacket than in her gym romper, with a hat on her bird's-nest hair. Scotty went by, raffish in a pretty good suit and a sunburst necktie. Genuine hand-painted glows in the dark. He looked at Joyce, lowering one eyelid a trifle. She looked the other way. I'll never have to see him again.

  There was only one person she wanted to see and he wasn't there. She felt clearheaded now, and she knew why she had looked at everyone so closely, coming in and going out of the auditorium. No man was there with high cheekbones and shrewd, kind eyes, eyes that knew everything before you could even make up your mind to tell him.

  Some day you'll need me. Some day you'll be ready to tell me.

  The telephones on this floor were all out in the hall on little tables, handy for teachers. It was impossible to get any privacy here. But in the basement there was a pay booth in a little glass cage, the one Edith Bannister had called from to pull her out of art class. She didn't know yet what she was going to say, what excuse she would make, but it wasn't important. She was already headed for the stairs.

  After counting that money a dozen times, waking in the night to feel the envelope in her purse and be sure it was still there because it was the key to her escape, she had left it lying on her bed along with—she remembered now—her tweed skirt and blue sweater. She thrust her hands into her pockets. A piece of Kleenex and a gum wrapper in the left one; in the right, down in the dusty-feeling seam, a dime. It was a sign. She clutched it in her palm and ran down the stairs, pushing the last of the mourners aside without apology or explanation.

  Edith Bannister walked past, erect and pale in a charcoal suit that was almost, but not quite, mourning. Their eyes met Edith looked away without a flicker of recognition. Holly Robertson was walking beside her, and though her voice was soft and her walk decorous, there was a glitter of interest in Holly's eyes and an alertness about her. I hope she knows what she's getting into, Joyce thought, pushing open the door of the telephone booth. In the moment between taking down the receiver and dropping in her dime, she felt a flicker of remote and impersonal pity.

  Chapter 25

  Joyce looked at him across the table. They we
re probably going through time and eternity sitting across tables from each other or side by side at drugstore counters. In a city of fifteen thousand, buildings thick all around them, there wasn't any other place where two people could find even halfway privacy.

  "I wish we had a place to go," she said.

  "We might try another motel." That wasn't as funny as it was supposed to be. She knew one thing now about this man who was still a stranger to her, but a stranger she couldn't feel complete without: he was funny when he was hurt or worried. Serious, everything was all right. The last motel had been disastrous in so many ways that she couldn't even find a token smile for him, but she looked at him with affection and an unexpected longing to comfort him. "Forget it," he said, "I'm sorry I said it. We'll have a house of our own some time. Lock the door and shut everybody else out."

  He had this crazy idea and she couldn't talk him out of it. Sure, she had to see him, but this was the last time. It had to be. She said, "Look, I'm frigid. I'm never going to live with anybody."