by Marjorie Lee
THE LION HOUSE
By
Marjorie Lee
The Lion House
By Marjorie Lee
First published in 1960.
ISBN: 978-1-936456-11-6
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
What is our innocence,
What is our guilt? All are
Naked, none is safe.
—Marianne Moore
DEDICATION
For Robert
INTRODUCTION
A new revolution was underway at the start of the 1940s in America—a paperback revolution that would change the way publishers would produce and distribute books and how people would purchase and read them.
In 1939 a new publishing company—Pocket Books—stormed onto the scene with the publication of its first paperbound book. These books were cheaply produced and sold in numbers never before seen, in large part due to a bold and innovative distribution model that soon after made Pocket Books available in drugstores, newsstands, bus and train stations, and cigar shops. The American public could not get enough of them, and before long the publishing industry began to take notice of Pocket Book’s astonishing success.
Traditional publishers, salivating at the opportunity to cash in on the phenomenal success of the new paperback revolution, soon launched their own paperback ventures. Pocket Books was joined by Avon in 1941, Popular Library in 1942, and Dell in 1943. The popular genres reflected the tastes of Americans during World War II—mysteries, thrillers, and “hardboiled detective” stories were all the rage.
World War II proved to be a boon to the emerging paperback industry. During the war, a landmark agreement was reached with the government in which paperbound books would be produced at a very low price for distribution to service men and women overseas. These books were often passed from one soldier or sailor to another, being read and re-read over and over again until they literally fell apart. Their stories of home helped ease the servicemen’s loneliness and homesickness, and they could be easily carried in uniform pockets and read anywhere—in fox holes, barracks, transport planes, etc. Of course, once the war was over millions of veterans returned home with an insatiable appetite for reading. They were hooked, and their passion for reading these books helped launch a period of unprecedented growth in the paperback industry.
In the early 1950s new subgenres emerged—science fiction, lesbian fiction, juvenile delinquent and “sleaze”, for instance—that would tantalize readers with gritty, realistic and lurid stories never seen before. Publishers had come to realize that sex sells. In a competitive frenzy for readers, they tossed away their staid and straightforward cover images for alluring covers that frequently featured a sexy woman in some form of undress, along with a suggestive tag line that promised stories of sex and violence within the covers. Before long, books with sensational covers had completely taken over the paperback racks and cash registers. To this day, the cover art of these vintage paperback books are just as sought after as the books themselves were sixty years ago.
With the birth of the lesbian-themed pulp novel, women who loved women would finally see themselves—their experiences and their lives—represented within the pages of a book. They finally had a literature they could call their own. Of course, that’s not what the publishers of the day intended—these books were written primarily for men… indeed shamelessly packaged and published to titillate the male reading public.
Many of the books were written by men using female pseudonyms and were illustrated by cover artists who never read the content between the covers. However, a good percentage (primarily titles from Fawcett’s Gold Medal Books imprint) were written by women, most of whom were lesbians themselves. For lesbians across the country, especially those living isolated lives in small towns, these books provided a sense of community they never knew existed… a connection to women who experienced the same longings, feelings and fears as they did—the powerful knowledge that they were not alone.
We are excited to make these wonderful paperback stories available in ebook format to new generations of readers. We present them in their original form with very little modification so as to preserve the tone and atmosphere of the time period. In fact, much of the language—the slang, the colloquialisms, the lingo, even the spellings of some words—appear as they were written fifty or sixty years ago. The stories themselves reflect the time period in which they were written, reflecting the censorship, sensibilities and biases of the 1950s and early 1960s. Still, these lesbian pulp novels are a treasure in our collective literary history and we hope you will enjoy this nostalgic journey back in time.
CHAPTER ONE
She was always talking about lions. She had a thing about lions. She used to dream about them; and she was the sort of girl who had to tell her dreams.
We'd be in that walnut den of hers in the house back home with the orange drapes and the little Rouault on the wall. She'd be lying on the studio couch, blue-jeaned knees pulled up and slightly spread; one arm across her stomach, the other hanging, cigarette in hand.
"It was coming towards me," she might say, half spoofing, half intense. "It was coming towards me: slowly, inevitably, with its shoulders glinting copper in the sunlight. It had eyes like amber hellholes, and its mouth was a death that smiled... Hey, what're Hons, Jo?"
"Carnivorous beasts; mammals; found in jungles."
"Oh, I don't mean like that. I mean what do they mean; like how do they stack up in the unconscious and why would you dream about them?"
"I don't dream about them; you do."
"I meant you in the impersonal: one. Why would one dream about them?"
"Search me."
And then suddenly she'd sit up. "Get me another drink, will you, Jo?"
So I'd get it for her and tell her to go on and say what happened next.
"Happened next?" she'd ask, playing the old trick of ditching a mood with me still in it "Asterisks, Jo, asterisks. We gotta use asterisks, sweetie, or we'll end up getting banned in Boston."
* * *
The first place I ever watched Frannie get banned in was the Wingo Day School. Of course that was a quiet, subtle kind of ban and I doubt that Frannie even took the trouble to notice it.
Wingo is a small progressive project in an area of New York's Westchester County called Wingowick Hills. It's one of those all-for-the-love-of-it schools with no financial endowment but that which can be scraped from the barrel-bottoms of parental devotion; and its co-operative, which means everybody has got to co-operate. On warm weekends fathers come out with their offspring to gravel a road or retile a bathroom; and in the summer when classes are over mothers beg, borrow, and steal for the advent of a bang-up bazaar.
It was in November of '54, I had heard, that Sylvia Morrison phoned Frannie at eleven-thirty in the morning, awakening her from a sound sleep. "We're starting real early this year," Sylvia said cheerily, "so we'll have just scads of things for the rummage sale, and the Foleys have offered to store it all in their garage till July! Will you give something? Kids' clothes, Marc's ties, chipped ceramics? Anything charming you're not using, just anything at all?"
"Sure, sure," yawned Frannie, "be delighted to. How about a hand-painted diaphragm…?"
Then there was the story the Headmaster's wife told. She was driving the bus that year because even though there was a transportation fee for each child it got used up for something else and there wasn't enough money in the till to hire a bona fide driver. Gertrude, her name was; and you know how there are doctors' doctors and writers' writers? Well, Gertrude was a friends' friend. She
was friendly to just about everybody, and she listened with the patience of a dictaphone. But, like a dictaphone, she had a way of playing it back. "I don't mind driving in the least," she told a group of lunching mothers one day, "but I must say I wasn't quite prepared for the additional job of putting on other people's children's snow-suits." When pressed for further details she reluctantly disclosed that the week before, after honking seven times to no avail, she had got out of the bus, entered the Browne house, and found Petey, Stu, and Blair eating a breakfast of cake and grapes... "After which," she went on with a benign smile, "it seemed to be up to me to get them dressed. Marc had left for work, and Frannie was just nowhere to be seen... Sleeping, I suppose," she added warmly. "Frannie's quite a sleeper, you know—in the daytime."
But the thing that really clinched the blackball for Frannie was her response to Wingo's grand prix of the editorship of its monthly bulletin: Wingo Lingo. Ruth Quinlan called her, virtually bursting with the news. "We had this meeting last night," she enthused, "and everybody voted for you! When you get right down to it, you're the only professional writer in the whole parent body, and if there's anyone who can give Lingo the spark it's been missing, it's you!"
At which point Frannie thanked her for the honor and, quite professionally, asked her to name the salary.
I guess I thought of Wingo because that's where I first met Frannie; or, more likely, because that's where Frannie first met my husband, Brad.
It was one of those parent-teacher parties at the beginning of the Fall semester: a dinner in the Threes room with everyone eating on tiny chairs, off tiny tables, and looking just about as comfortable as Gulliver in the Land of Lilliput.
I was new (Administrative—in charge of enrollment) so I didn't know her when she came in. In fact I might not have noticed her at all if it hadn't been for Brad.
"Who's that?" he asked; and that's when I glanced up and saw her. She had arrived late and alone and she was standing in the middle of the room with a plate of spaghetti in her hand, searching for a place to sit.
I had long become accustomed to Brad's addiction to the fair sex; in twenty-three years of wedded blasphemy I had learned the gentle art of sharing one's husband. Brad was, it just happened, a beautiful man—with a penchant for poetry which he recited in creamy tones, if inaccurately, to any female who would listen.
"I don't know her," I said, watching the girl in jeans who stood there, ill at ease, turning her short-cropped head from side to side, peering out through glasses in immense black frames.
"Shall we have her join us?"
"Sure," I said, thinking with an edge grown slightly blunt with wear: sweet, sweet man; gallant at once to swans and ugly ducklings; as free with the proffered hand to scullery maids as to queens... He got up from the table, unfolding his long lean legs for which there was no room, and walked slowly to her. "Hello," he said. "I'm Henry Bradford."
"Oh," I heard her say, smiling, but only briefly, before she turned away. "I'm Frannie Browne."
"Will you have dinner with us?"
She smiled again, but the smile was as short-lived as the first had been. It would be months before I learned that the fear in this girl lay, like a twin, beside the courage; the awkwardness beside the charm; and the hate beside the love.
"Thanks," she said. "It's awfully crowded, and Marc—"
Brad, in Brad's own way, put an arm around her shoulders and steered her to our table. "What about 'Marc'?" he asked as they sat down.
"Oh. Well, he's in town tonight—at a meeting." It seemed important to let us know that there was a Marc; that while Frannie Browne was on her own this evening there were legitimate reasons.
Brad introduced me as Elizabeth Johnston Bradford; and I felt an old tug of malaise: Elizabeth had always seemed to carry a ring of delicateness. For me, with a bosom surely responsible for the common phrase Pike's Peak or Bust—it was as suitable as a bib on a baby elephant. "Jo," I said. "From Johnston. I got it at college and I've had it ever since."
During the course of the meal Brad, more than I, was able to break through and draw her out: she had come to New York almost eleven years ago for a job on the editorial staff of a national magazine. Where from? Chicago. It was a marvelous city; but No: she didn't miss it. Or rather, she did; but (laughing) her mother lived there and nine hundred miles were essential for Survival.
"Survival from what?" Brad wanted to know.
"From her," she answered. "You see, she's—well, she's the kind of woman who can walk in after not seeing me for six months and tell me before she even says hello that the front door knob needs polishing... I wouldn't mind so much," she went on, "but the thing is I always get the feeling that it isn't really the door knob but that the door knob is me—you know what I mean? Actually her big pitch is that I don't Live Right. You know: Wild, Disorganized. She used to keep telling me if I didn't settle down and get Systematized I'd be dead before I was thirty."
Brad shuddered.
"Oh, don't worry," she assured him. "I was thirty in June and nothing happened so I guess she was wrong. But the night before my birthday I didn't go to bed at all."
"Scared?"
"Well, that; and besides, I figured I might just as well be awake when it hit me so I could see what it felt like."
That would be interesting, Brad agreed; to die on your feet; for the experience, one might say.
Well, it was true, she argued. After all, if you didn't experience things what would you have to write about?
Then she was a writer? Yes. Along with responsibilities to a husband and three children she was a free-lance writer. And Yes: she had been published: short stories in the slicks, a number in the qualities, and a raft of verse. Marc? Marc was a lawyer. The firm name was quite familiar—one of the top ones in town: Bendheim, Blatz, and Mendes-Cohen. (Browne? I wondered, hating myself for it, what Browne had been before the Change.)
How had they met, Brad asked.
"I had this apartment in the Village," she said, "and they were having this cocktail party next door. I'd been working on some assignment and I was wearing a shirt and an old pair of slacks that were worn out clear through; and when this boy came over and asked me to go to the party I just went—I mean right that minute; and I got all engrossed in a conversation with somebody, and I guess you know what happened: I forgot to keep my legs crossed. So that's when Marc began to notice me, and four weeks later we got married. About a year after, when I asked him what it was that could possibly have been so attractive about me at that party, he said, Well, I'll tell you: it was simply a matter of not having been able to resist the view.'"
"And how did your mother feel about that?" I asked, when we had stopped laughing.
"You mean the marriage? Oh, she just got a friend of hers in New York to check on his professional position and his family background and his standing as a member of the Mill Pond Country Club and when she found out he was terribly top-drawer she decided he was a lovely boy who should have his head examined and gave it two years—which was awfully ungenerous of her: hers lasted eight."
"Proving," Brad said, "that, once more, she was wrong."
"Yes," Frannie agreed. "But that's only because Marc is a saint. I mean how would you like to come home and get nine pages for dinner?"
"Does he mind?" I asked.
Oh, not horribly, she supposed; at least not nearly as much as some men might. One day perhaps, though God only knew which day, she would make it all up to him by banging out a crazy little novel.
"Why wait?" Brad wanted to know.
"It hasn't happened yet."
"What hasn't happened yet?"
"It.”' she answered thoughtfully. "The crazy little Plot..."
After dinner we separated and I lost track of her. I didn't think of her again till it was time to go and I couldn't find Brad. I tried the school kitchen. Brad was big on Kitchen Romance: there was always the excuse of having gone to help so-and-so with the ice cubes. But there was no one there. It was only af
ter I'd swallowed a pride that was quite used to being swallowed and asked for clues to his whereabouts that I lifted the shade in the Sixes room, looked out into the moonspattered parking lot, and saw him standing at the window of Frannie's convertible.
"... and we'll call you," he was saying. "Spend an evening—the four of us."
"Fine. You'll love Marc."
"You sure?"
"Positive. Everybody loves Marc."
"Do you?"
She thought for a minute; not for the answer but because, perhaps, the answer was too big to give. "A lot," she said finally.
"Then I," sighed Brad, "shall find him unendurable."
I lowered the shade. It was an old routine; a broken record; the first chapter of the inevitable soap opera I'd lived through, over and over and over, for twenty-three years.
Enter, Frannie Browne, I thought, as I walked across the dark room to the door.
CHAPTER TWO
It was about two weeks before I saw Frannie again. She came over to Wingo one afternoon to pick up Petey for a dentist appointment. I was out of my office getting a breath of air.
"Hi!" I called to her across the playground. She turned and ambled towards me. She was still in blue-jeans, and a clean white boy's shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her shorn hair, sun-bleached in a streaky variance from brown to blonde, was wet at the ends from a recent shower. On her feet she wore a pair of ancient moccasins, one split from the sole so that her toes came through. Standing beside her (though I was barely taller) I felt like an absolute mountain both size and age-wise. "How've you been?" I asked.
"Just fine." In the daylight her eyes behind the black-rimmed goggles were green.
"Nice party here the other night," I offered.
"Hate crowds. Agoraphobia. Know of any cut-rate couches?"
"You? You strike me as the sort of girl who gets along all right. Why dabble in the Unknown?"