by Ann Bannon
"I know,” Cleve told her.
"You know?” Beth gasped. “What do you know?"
"That you've been seeing her,” he said, and he was not pleased. “Who do you think gets the brunt of her bad temper?"
"I thought I got all of it."
He shook his head. “You don't even get half."
After an embarrassed pause she said, “I'm sorry, Cleve.” She wondered how much of the truth he knew.
"So am I."
"She thinks she owns me. We've gotten pretty close. I can't disappear without giving her a message. Tell her I'm sorry, will you?"
"Okay.” He looked at her. “Is that all?"
And she knew from his voice, his face, that he was disappointed in her; perhaps his feelings were even stronger.
"Vega took it all wrong, Cleve. She took it too hard."
"She did that with Beverly, too. The girl P. K. Schaefer took away from her."
It took Beth a moment to place P.K.
"I don't want her to do anything awful, Cleve,” Beth said, pleading with him.
"Neither do I,” he said and gave her a twisted little smile.
"I guess I loused things up for you, didn't I? I never meant to. It just happened. It got away from me. Will you talk to her?"
"I'll try.” He was already bracing himself for another siege of fury and erratic temper and threats. When things like this happened to Vega he always had to nurse her through them. Her mother was too sick and Gramp was too frail and neither of them understood the problem. Mrs. Purvis, to judge from Cleve's description of her attitude, would have disowned her daughter at the very least had she known her true nature.
When Cleve made a move to get up she caught his hands, searching for the warmth, the desire to help her, that she so needed. But he was chilly, preoccupied with the problem she had thrust at him.
"Cleve, there's one more thing,” she said and he paused.
"Beth, I told you not to get mixed up with my sister, but you went ahead and did it. Now you're sorry but it's too late. Don't you think that's enough?"
She was surprised and shamed by it. But not silenced. “I must ask you—you're the only one. Write to me,” she implored. “Tell me about the kids-and Charlie. He won't write, I know that. Besides I don't want him to know my address, if I should leave my uncle's house. Oh, Cleve, please! You can't turn me down!"
He looked at her a second longer, at her pale tremulous mouth and shaking hand, and then he took the address from her. It was one of Uncle John's cards from her wallet. He folded it solemnly and put it into his pocket.
"Thank you, Cleve,” she said ardently. “You'll be my only link with them."
Cleve stood up. “I told Jean I had to go down to the corner drug store,” he said. “I've told her that so often she thinks it means the corner beer parlor. I'd better get home and give her a nice surprise. Nothing but coffee on my breath.” He Was making an effort, at least, to be kind, to take the awful heaviness out of the atmosphere. She knew he would do as he said for her, and she was moved and grateful.
He took her arm and led her to her car. At the door he told her, “If this is half as hard on Charlie as it is on you, he's going to crack up fast. You look like hell, Beth."
"I know,” she said. “I never did anything so awful—so hard—in my life. I feel like I'm going to die of it."
"Then you're a fool. Whatever your reasons were, they aren't worth it."
"That's what I have to find out,” she said.
"Sure you won't tell me?"
"Yes, Cleve.” She held out a hand to him and after a minute he grasped it and squeezed it. “I'm sorry,” he said. “For you both."
"Thank you. Goodbye, Cleve. And write to me."
He nodded and then he turned and walked away and she watched him for a second, thinking how much he looked like Vega and what a hell of a mess she had handed him. Subconsciously she realized that her train of thoughts was enough to shatter her mind, her emotions. The load was already too great. She had to turn to something else, she had to move and do things and act ordinary and sensible or she would fly to pieces.
The plane took off three minutes behind time. She felt the ground fall away beneath her and the wide steel wings rise, heard the captain's voice moments later and saw her seat neighbor light a cigarette—all with a feeling of eerie unreality reinforced by the small morning hour.
"We are circling over Catalina Island,” the pilot announced, “waiting for air traffic to clear over Los Angeles. In about five minutes we will be heading due east."
Beth looked out of the window and saw a wavy ribbon of orange lights—the shoreline of Catalina Island—and a cluster of white lights winking around the town of Avalon. She was on the side away from the mainland and couldn't see Los Angeles, but soon afterward the plane turned eastward and they headed inland again. She looked down, looking for landmarks in the night, and after a moment she recognized a few: the Colosseum, the brilliant green-white strips of the freeways, and then Pasadena with the winding pattern of Orange Grove Avenue discernible below. She followed it carefully with her eyes to where she supposed Sierra Bella began, and looked at the bouquet of lights there against the mountains, looked at it more with her heart than her eyes.
She closed her eyes then and for a short painful moment she could see the little town as it would look in tomorrow's daylight, bright with the colors of early summer, the lavender flowers of the jacaranda trees glowing over the streets, the pink and white oleander with its pointed leaves, the long palmy street up the mountainside to their small house, the sun frosting the purple mountains in the early morning, the sounds of her children tumbling out of bed and shouting for their breakfast, Charlie shaving and grumbling at the mirror.
Beth lighted a cigarette and said softly to herself, “Laura, I'm coming for you. Don't fail me. Be there, darling, or that's the end of me. I'll be destroyed, for I can never come back here."
Chapter Ten
UNCLE JOHN, GENIAL and bustling and worried, picked her up in Chicago. He had to be content with the briefest and barest explanation from her. She was utterly exhausted and all she wanted was to collapse and sleep. She even took sleeping pills when it developed that her bitter self-recriminations would give her no rest. And for two whole days she refused to leave her room.
"Ill just say. this,” she told Uncle John when he pressed her. “I've left Charlie. He has the children; they're all fine. Everything is my fault. It would kill me to have to talk about it now. I'll try to explain it later. I'm so tired and miserable I just want to be alone."
So they gave her their hospitality and let her have her way. Uncle John was anxious and he even thought of calling Charlie and demanding the facts. But his wife restrained him. “Let's at least hear her side of it first,” she said. “She did say it was her fault, after all."
Beth had no intention of explaining to them what couldn't be explained. She wrote to Charlie, just a note. She said she would be with Uncle John for a while and she'd let him know any new plans. Cleve wrote to her within a couple of days to say the kids were well but missed her badly, and Charlie had become very taciturn at the office. He had found a woman to care for the children during the day. Beth wondered impatiently what sort of woman she was—whether she was kindly and whether she liked children and whether she fixed them their favorite breakfasts, and what she looked like. There was no mention of Vega in Cleve's letter.
As soon as she had a little strength, a little sense, she determined to find Laura. The place to start was with Laura's father. Beth, didn't suppose that Laura was still living with him; they had never gotten along, and Laura, when she left Beth nine years ago, had been an entirely different girl from the one her father thought he had raised. She had found herself and had begun to live for the first time, and Beth guessed that her first move had been to leave her father. But Beth had to start somewhere, and so, when she had been in Chicago two days, she called Merrill Landon. It was mid-afternoon; it had taken her till then to
get up her courage. She wasn't sure whether she was more afraid of finding Laura or of not finding her. What would Laura think of Beth, now that her former lover was no longer a radiant college girl? Of course Laura would be older too, but she was still four years younger than Beth, and Beth had lived with a mountain of dissatisfaction and discontent that had left its mark on her pretty face.
Merrill Landon was not in. Beth had to call again at seven. She approached the phone in a nervous sweat, afraid that her voice would break or her throat go dry and betray her nerves to him. She had to be very casual.
This time she got him from his dinner.
Damn! she thought while the servant summoned him. He probably hates to be interrupted.
"Hello?” he said, and his voice was deep and rough. He spoke in the same tone he would have used to bark an order to a subordinate at the newspaper where he worked. Beth gasped a little before she could say, “Mr. Landon? My name is Beth Cullison. I—I mean Beth Ayers.” Her maiden name! God, she thought in dismay. But there was no time to scold herself.
"Well, which is it?” he boomed.
"Ayers. Mrs. Ayers,” she answered, trying to sound calm. She raced on, hoping to smooth over his first impression, “I'm an old college friend of Laura's. I'm visiting in Chicago and I thought it would be nice if we could get together."
Her voice went dry and she had to stop. There was an awkward pause. “A college friend?” he said, as if there were no such things.
"You are Laura's father, aren't you?” she asked timidly.
"Yea.” He waited so long to answer that it made her wonder. “What do you want with Laura, Mrs. Ayers?"
"I just wanted to talk to her. If she's there."
"I haven't seen Laura for the last eight years,” he said, and Beth's heart went cold. He added thoughtfully, “You said your name was Cullison. Were you one of Laura's roommates at the university?"
For some reason she was afraid to answer yes. Could it possibly be that Laura might have told him about the curious love that had sprung up between them? It was unlikely that he would remember her name unless it had special significance for him. What if he had forced the truth out of his daughter?
"Well?” he said, surprise and impatience in his voice at her delay. “Maybe you can't remember that far back:"
"Yes. Yes, I was her roommate. Excuse me, I—where is Laura now?"
"Mrs. Ayers, why don't you come over here tonight? I'd like to talk to you.” And when she hesitated again in a welter of uncertainty he said, “Are you far from here?"
"I have a car,” she said. ‘I'll come."
She took Aunt Elsa's Buick and drove out to the Landon house. It wasn't far; it was on one of the pretty shaded streets of Evanston. Merrill Landon lived there alone with his two servants. He had been there since he and Laura's mother first married and nothing could tempt him away.
There was nothing left of Laura's mother now but the memories. But they bound Landon to her and kept him in the home she had furnished, where he could still see traces of her taste, her touch. No other woman had ever replaced her for him. Except, in a strange and uncomprehended way, Laura. And because she couldn't be her mother, because she was only a sweet shadow, a photo transparency, he blamed her and was very hard with her.
When Laura had at last understood where she had unwittingly failed him, she left him. She was his daughter, not his wife; that was her crime. And because he couldn't have her he couldn't forgive her for living. She was a constant threat to his virtue, a painful reminder of his dead wife. The knowledge of his tormented desire gave her the courage to turn her back on him and run.
He had found her once, after that, almost by accident, and they had it out in words, the awful incredible words that had never been spoken between them before. The rupture had been complete after that. He admitted that he wanted her. He took her in his bearish arms and kissed her mouth brutally. And Laura, in her shock, told him what she was, a Lesbian. And who had done it to her; her own father. So they knew the very worst of each other, had known now for years, and had lost each other. But the knowledge, though it hurt, had washed away the bitterness.
Over the chasm of years and miles, Merrill Landon had come to love his daughter in a new way. He had never tried to pursue her, after that one shattering night in a New York hotel room when they had revealed themselves to each other, but he had spent the long years since then wondering about her, imagining how she might be living and with whom. His thoughts were mostly tender, sometimes resentful, always lonely. But he was proud and a little afraid of himself with her, and he would not seek her out again.
Beth rang his bell, ignorant of all that had passed between him and Laura in the years that preceded her visit. No servant opened to her, as she had expected, but Merrill Landon himself, as though he, too, was anxious for the meeting. She had never seen him before in her life but she knew him instantly. His flesh was Laura's and her whole body was suddenly covered with shiverings.
He was a huge man; not big like Charlie, not tall and long-muscled, but just big. Square-chested, slope-shouldered, powerfully built, with his dark hair and heavy beard. He stood high from the ground but you didn't realize it until you came close to him; the chunkiness of his construction gave him the look of a shorter man. In his heavy features she saw very little of Laura, who resembled most her mother. And yet there was something there, faint but visible, that kept the shivers coming in Beth.
He sized her up like a seasoned journalist. “Come in, Mrs. Ayers,” he said, and showed her into a comfortable den stacked high with books and papers. It was apparently his study, the work room where he wrote his daily editorials, read his books, did his dreaming, perhaps. Beth sat in a large ox-blood leather chair. She was afraid to lean back in it for fear of getting lost, of making herself look small and shy to this man she wanted so much to impress with her social ease. It would have helped immeasurably if she could have guessed by looking at him how much he knew of her love for Laura. Landon mixed her a drink. “What are you doing in Chicago, Beth?” he asked with his back to her, and the sound of her proper name startled her.
Now he thinks he's got me, she thought. I'm here in his house and he thinks he's going to find out about Laura and me once and for all. I'm not even Mrs. Ayers any more, I'm just Beth. Just a school girl.
She told him she was visiting her uncle, she was living in California, she had two children. That was all. His questions were brief, as though she were a socialite he had to interview for the next day's paper, and she tailored her answers the same way. But Beth wanted to ask her own questions. She was the one who urgently needed to know, who had left her home and kids and husband and come all this way to find this man's daughter—and perhaps, at the same time, herself. She gazed around the room, taking in the working disorder, the handsome, slightly worn furniture. Laura knew all this, Beth thought; it was as familiar to her as her own room, and the thought made Beth ache for her.
She interrupted Landon to ask him, “Where is she, Mr. Landon? Maybe there's still time for me to see her tonight.” He smiled at her over-bright eyes and somehow she expected his answer.
"I doubt it. She's not living in Chicago any more."
Of course not. Goddamn! That would have been too easy. I should have known. “Where is she?” she demanded, and again he smiled at the pink flush in her cheeks, the line between her eyes.
"I'd like to know myself,” he said. He was almost teasing her.
"You must have some idea,” she cried, desperately afraid that Laura would slip out of her fingers before she ever touched her again. If she had been more observant she would have seen the understanding that began to show in his smile. He was needling her for a purpose.
"I do have some idea,” he said calmly, sitting down behind his desk. “I'll gladly share it with you. If you'll do something for me, Beth."
"If I can."
"You can.” She watched him while he listened to his memories. He could hear Laura's voice in his inner ear crying,
“And that's not all! Remember Beth Cullison? Remember my roommate at school? Her too, Father! She was the first! I loved her! Do you understand what I'm telling you?” That voice, sharp with the saved-up sorrows and frustrations of a young lifetime, crying at him through tears and fury of what she had become, what her true nature was! And he had understood her, at last. His perverted love for her had twisted her whole personality. He had controlled his terrible desire for years, but it had cost Laura a normal childhood.
"When you find Laura,” he said, “I want you to tell me where she is. That's all. Will you do that?"
Beth stared at him. “When I find her?” she said. “Where do I have to go?"
"Tell me her address, that's all,” he bargained. And she knew then that he could see plainly how badly she wanted Laura. She struggled to keep her face smooth, her passion under wraps. “Yes,” she said. It was a whole confession of love, that word. It said, Yes, I'll find her, I'll go to the ends of the earth, I'll do any favor for you if you'll tell me where to start, where to look.
He smiled. He had her. “She's in New York,” he said. Beth's mouth fell open. “New York!” She was dismayed. She had only been there once, when she was a little girl of ten. She didn't know the city at all. And the size of it! “But, good God, Mr. Landon, there are millions of people in New York!” she exclaimed.
'There's only one Laura. She's been there a while, she knows people."
"What people?” Her discouragement showed now, too. She couldn't have hidden it from her extraordinary host.
"If I were you I'd start in the Village,” he said. “She lived down there a while."
"I don't know the Village,” she protested. “I don't know New York at all. I can't fly to New York just to scare up an old roommate of mine.” It was supposed to throw him off the track, demonstrate her normalcy. But Merrill Landon was too far ahead of her. He knew too much that she didn't know. He saw the strength and determination in her chin, the trembling of her sensual mouth, and he smiled once again.