A Thin Bright Line

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  “Yes, ma’am. Where do you need to go?”

  “Into Chicago.” Why not? The holiday lights would be lovely. She could get a drink at the Drake Hotel. Her wool coat and the lush voice had warmed her, and she suddenly craved a cold martini.

  After a long pause, the woman said, “Into Chicago? But where are you?”

  How foolish of her. The transport company was already in Chicago. “I’m in Wilmette. 1215 Washington Avenue.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we’re not able to service Wilmette. Especially not on New Year’s Eve. Truth be told, we don’t have a driver available until well after two in the morning anyway.”

  “Oh. Well, thank you. Happy New Year.”

  “You too, baby,” said the woman in her cushiony voice. “Good night.”

  Lucybelle gently set the handset back in its cradle. She closed her eyes and tried to picture where a girl like Stella celebrated New Year’s Eve. She imagined Bader lifting a glass of whatever the Inuits drank. Phyllis and Fred were no doubt into their second or third bottle of champagne.

  Friday, February 1, 1957

  The Western Union delivery boy pushed past Lucybelle as she picked her way down the icy path along the side of her apartment building. The dirty slush from yesterday’s warming trend had frozen hard overnight, and she wondered how she’d make it to the train station without slipping and breaking her neck. She turned to see the delivery boy dive into her own entryway and take the steps two at a time.

  “Western Union!” he shouted, his voice echoing in the stairwell. She heard the heel of his hand pounding on wood, either her door or the Worthingtons’.

  She skated back to her stairwell. The boy flattened her against the railing as he flew down the stairs.

  “Who’s the telegram for?” she yelled at his retreating back.

  “Apartment 814,” he hollered over his shoulder and then cursed as he took a long slide on the ice, arms flailing.

  “That’s me!”

  She grabbed the telegram, climbed the stairs, and keyed open her apartment. The flimsy slip of paper depicted a long-legged stork flying across the top with a baby dangling from its beak. Pink ribbons and white baby shoes embellished the margins of the telegram. “Female Bledsoe born at 4 a.m. on February first. Name Lucy Jane contingent upon Aunt Lucy assuming burden of clothing, education, special gifts, and general obligations of sponsorship. Mother and daughter well. Love, John Bledsoe.”

  She would miss her train, but she was too stunned to move. A baby Lucy. She felt delighted, a rush of pleasure, as if the fresh start were her own. Then, just as quickly, she deflated. Her brother was joking, of course, when he wrote about assuming a burden of material support, but he wouldn’t be able to conceive of the hidden burdens, the subjective ones. Having a namesake felt like too big of a responsibility. This new Lucy would be looking to her for . . . something . . . someday.

  By lunchtime it was snowing hard, preventing the unfriendly trio from leaving the building. Lucybelle waited until they’d taken their seats in the lunchroom and gotten halfway through their sandwiches before pulling a chair up to their table.

  “My brother and his wife had a baby this morning,” she said. She wouldn’t mention it being named for her. Beverly would think she was bragging.

  “How nice!” Dorothy said with too much gusto, as if babies were something one must admire.

  “I’ve six nieces and nephews,” Beverly said dismissively.

  “Well, you win. I’ve only got four so far.” Lucybelle took a chance on teasing Beverly about her competitive tone.

  Ruthie laughed, but mirthlessly. Dorothy guffawed with genuine amusement.

  Lucybelle decided to go for broke. “I’m sorry to barge in on the three of you like this, but it’s hard getting to know people. I lived in New York for twelve years.”

  “Well, la-dee-da.” Beverly, of course.

  “Where in New York?” Dorothy asked.

  “The Village.”

  Ruthie giggled, the very mention of the bohemian neighborhood triggering her nerves.

  Lucybelle wanted so badly to just blurt what she knew, but instead she followed protocol by making an indirect reference. “I once got Djuna Barnes to speak to me.”

  All three women stared like prisoners at gunpoint. Perhaps she should have chosen a less provocative reference.

  “Never heard of her,” Beverly said.

  “You did not,” Dorothy said, her eyes now gleaming with interest.

  “You don’t know who she is either,” Beverly said to Dorothy.

  “We spotted her at a big party, and my friends dared me to approach her. So I did, and to everyone’s amazement—since she has a reputation for being a complete recluse—she chatted with me for about ten minutes.”

  “And it was your charm that brought her out?”

  Lucybelle tossed down her sandwich. “Look, I—”

  “Beverly didn’t mean to be rude. It’s been a difficult time,” Dorothy said, her comment similar to the one she’d made at the beginning of December. “Beverly’s good friend—”

  Beverly emitted something like the letter “n” with a great deal of emphasis, as if saying the word “no” would be too revealing.

  “Oh, come on, Bev,” Dorothy said, but already Ruthie was packing up both her and Beverly’s lunch things.

  Dorothy stayed for about five minutes after the other two left, and they talked about a radio show Lucybelle had never heard, the weather, and some new books Dorothy had purchased for the library. Despite the boring topics, everything about the woman, including the silvery streaks in her otherwise light-brown hair, her large mouth with the wide gap between her two front teeth, and especially her prominent, globe-like dark-green eyes, seemed to announce a suppressed zeal. Lucybelle thought she could like Dorothy quite well, if that zeal were freed.

  Monday–Friday, April 22–26, 1957

  Bader returned in March, much to her relief, and he invited Lucybelle, along with all the scientists, out on his first Friday night back in town. They took the train into Chicago—Wilmette and Evanston were both dry cities—and spent the evening being entertained by Bader’s Greenland stories. The night he and some other scientists puked their brains out, thinking they’d eaten some bad food, only to eventually realize they’d developed carbon monoxide poisoning in their airtight ice cave. The twenty-foot-tall snowwoman they’d made one night, complete with breasts and vulva, and then lamented they’d made her standing rather than in repose where they might enjoy her offerings. The time Klaas, a Dutch scientist, came shouting into camp, after a trip to the loo, announcing that he’d seen airplanes on the horizon. “The Russians!” he’d screamed, really he had, Bader insisted, howling himself with laughter. Poor Klaas had hallucinated the invasion; the planes never arrived, nor did anyone else see them at all. That would be the Dutchman’s last chance at fieldwork.

  Lucybelle hadn’t laughed so hard in months. The next morning her stomach muscles actually hurt from the workout. Even better, her enjoyment of the stories brought her, finally, into the visible landscape of the scientists. Lights blinked on behind their eyes. They saw her: this woman who would laugh at bawdy jokes, who didn’t flinch at coarse language, and who, they slowly began to realize, made them look a lot better with her marks on their papers. She became bolder in drawing lines through entire paragraphs, circling others and sending them forward or backward in the text. Peter Hauser began sharing stories with her about his fieldwork, and Russell Woo told her about his parents, who were still in China. Friday night trips into Chicago for drinks with the scientists became the highlight of her week.

  On a Monday morning, late in April, upon her return from a trip to Portland where she met—and couldn’t help but delight in—her infant namesake, Lucybelle found a small brown paper package on her desk. She cut the twine and ripped away the wrapping. There was no letter, or even a note, just a paperback novel entitled Whisper Their Love, by Valerie Taylor. The cover depicted two women, one in pa
nts of course, with short hair, and the other sitting on the floor at her feet, wearing just a slip. You could just smell the cloud of cheap perfume. At the bottom of the book cover were the words, “Theirs was a kind of love they dared not show the world . . .”

  She could take a joke. Doing so these past weeks, time and again, had won her the scientists’ respect. And yet, she had to draw a line. Arkansas, her perfectionism, even her chain-smoking were all fair game, but this particular little bud of humor had to be nipped. Her best guess was Bader with his love of anything scurrilous. He undoubtedly found the pulp novel in some drugstore and thought it would be a jolly little joke.

  She wrote “Very funny” in large letters on a sheet of white paper and placed it squarely on his desk. An hour later he came into her office flapping the paper and asking, “What?”

  His blank expression made her doubt his guilt, and so she quickly tried to formulate another reason for having left the oversized note. Thankfully he had the attention span of a gnat. He wadded the paper and tossed it into her wastebasket and then asked her when she’d be done with the Camp Century site plans.

  That night she decided that the best course of action would be to pretend the book had never arrived on her desk, to just play dumb. What choice did she have? Wave the book around in the lab and cry out, Ha ha ha! along with the boys? Hand out scientific tracts about homosexuality so they would better understand? Maybe Kinsey’s female study? Nope. The best course of action was to swallow the tacky little book whole, to pretend the incident had never happened.

  Still, all that week she watched the scientists for signs of guilt. They were none of them good actors. She’d see it. Instead, all she noticed was their increased kindness and respect for her work, at long last.

  Late on Friday night, after getting home from drinks in Chicago with the guys, she read the book in one go. Then she tossed the paperback across the room, startling L’Forte. The book angered her: the wretched level of dependency the female lovers had upon one another, their shame, and the corrective ending; how this kind of trash served to define her to the rest of society. She needed to know who sent it to her. Phyllis would never have bought, or even touched, one of these books. Nor would Harry, unless, somehow, it was a follow-up to his statement that she needed to “play.” But no, Harry saw the world through Freudian eyes and probably had never read a book by a woman in his life. If he’d determined to help her, he would have sent something about penis envy. She called him anyway.

  “It’s one in the morning, Lucy.”

  “Someone sent me a paperback book. One of those drugstore ones about girls.”

  “Well, that’s nice.” She heard Wesley muttering in the background.

  “No, it’s not nice. It’s horrid. The writing alone—”

  “Don’t be self-hating, honey. Look, it’s too late to talk now.”

  She wasn’t self-hating. People who sent lurid lesbian tales anonymously through the mail were self-hating. “I need to know who sent this to me.”

  Harry yawned. “Clare?”

  Why hadn’t she thought of that? She was probably also guilty of telling Phyllis her whereabouts.

  “She talks about you sometimes. I figured you were in touch.”

  “Do you have her telephone number?”

  “Well, yes, I do, somewhere. But it’s past one in the morning and I—”

  “Please just get it for me, and then you can go back to sleep.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” she heard Wesley groan.

  Harry clunked down the telephone. The bedsprings creaked as he got up, and she wondered why a man who made a good income as the self-proclaimed “shrink of inverts” didn’t buy a better mattress. A minute later, he read the information to her from his address book. Lucybelle thanked him and hung up.

  “Why did you send me that book?” she said when Clare answered the telephone.

  “Who is this?” Clare asked eagerly. Unlike Harry, she was pleased, curious, about someone calling her in the middle of the night.

  “And to my place of work. You well know that could get me fired. You also told Phyllis where I am. I need you to leave me alone.” With a girl like her, only absolute candor would work.

  “Oh! It’s Lucy!” Still pleased. “Is it a secret?”

  “Is what a secret?”

  “Your place of work.”

  “No. But Clare, anyone with a modicum of discretion would know to not hand out that information to someone’s ex.”

  “You should know I have no discretion, not a modicum or any other kind.”

  True, she should know that. Yet she’d allowed herself that interlude in the entryway; she’d told Clare where she was moving, even where she would be working. It could be argued that she deserved Whisper Their Love.

  “However,” Clare continued. “I haven’t sent you any books. I haven’t even written you a letter.” There was a pause followed by an intake of breath. “But truth be told, I’ve thought about you. A lot.”

  “You didn’t send me the . . . the book . . . by Valerie Taylor?”

  “That new one? Whisper Their Love? The ending really ticked me off, although I guess you could argue that running off with a man is better than suicide or insanity, which is usually what they do to us in books.” Clare paused, as if she expected Lucybelle to have a conversation about the book, as if they were sitting in a bar with drinks. “Yes, I told Phyllis where you’d gone. Like I said, I didn’t know it was a secret, and if it was, you shouldn’t have told me. But no, I didn’t send you a book.”

  Lucybelle almost believed her. Clare was nothing if not vigorously candid.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucybelle said. “I shouldn’t have involved you in my life the way I did my last night in New York.”

  “‘Involved you in my life,’” Clare quoted. “Wow. Nice way to put it.”

  Lucybelle lit a cigarette, deeply regretting this phone call. “It’s late.”

  “But you called me, didn’t you? You’re still ‘involving me in your life.’”

  “I thought you’d sent something that was an endangerment to me.”

  “I’m an endangerment to you. Whether I sent you anything or not. Just my status in the world, my commitment to being true to myself. That threatens everything, doesn’t it?”

  The anger building in Clare’s voice was the last thing she needed. But she understood it. Clare was right and deserved a better apology. Lucybelle knew exactly why she’d kissed her that night. Clare was a marvel of genuineness. Lucybelle didn’t want to be Beverly wadding up her sandwich paper, or Ruthie laughing hysterically, or Phyllis marrying a poofter, as if that somehow protected her. Clare’s lack of fear was an aphrodisiac.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucybelle said again.

  “They’re having a baby, you know.”

  She didn’t know.

  “Everyone’s been laughing about it. No one thought they’d ever, you know, carry through with the actual marriage act.” Clare’s laughter was like a bell, and it lightened something in Lucybelle’s chest, despite the news.

  Clare sighed and said, “I’d never do anything to hurt you.”

  “I know.” She refrained from apologizing yet again.

  “You’re a sweet woman. Don’t let ’em eat you alive, you hear?”

  “No. I won’t,” Lucybelle said, chagrined that it came out in a whisper.

  “If you ever make it back to New York, look me up, will you?”

  “Good night. Thanks for talking.”

  “You’re lonely,” she said. “I hear it in your voice.”

  Lucybelle hung up. What else could she do? Clare would never say good-bye.

  Monday, April 29, 1957

  By the end of the weekend, she’d decided on a course of action. Beverly and Ruthie’s hostility angered her, and the anger emboldened her. Something had to be done if she was to have any peace at work. Even if they weren’t the culprits, there was a good chance they’d know who was. She had to take the offensive, rip the Ban
d-Aid off the wound and give it some air.

  Lucybelle waited until midmorning when everyone would be immersed in their work. Beverly and Ruthie were alone in the foyer, the first pursing her lips at an order form, a sharpened pencil in her firm grip, and the latter typing with wicked speed, her fingers as nimble as a concert pianist. Lucybelle stood watching for a moment, listening to the sharp tat of each key striking the paper, impressing its neat ink letter. She almost hated to disturb them; a symbiosis of purpose seemed to hold the two women together— and everything else at bay.

  Lucybelle dropped Whisper Their Love, face up, on Beverly’s desk, and then stepped back to monitor the reaction.

  Beverly stared, reddened, and then pushed back her office chair as if the book were a tarantula. “Where’d you get that trash?”

  “I’m asking you. It came to me in the mail.”

  “Get it away from me.”

  “Look. I know about you. I read your file.”

  “You what?” The words were a soft hush of fire.

  Ruthie wheezed.

  Beverly looked at Ruthie, and then back at Lucybelle. Her expression was unreadable, but it wasn’t quite hatred and it wasn’t quite fear. It was like resolve hardened to amber. Beverly picked up the book. She tore off the cover and title page. She shredded these into bits of paper, and then she set to work on the rest of the pages.

  Ruthie’s wheezing intensified.

  “Is she okay?” Lucybelle asked.

  “No, she isn’t,” Beverly said as she proceeded with her destruction of the paperback.

  Ruthie was seriously having trouble breathing, and Lucybelle went quickly to her side. She put a hand on her shoulder. “Can I help?”

  The secretary was bent in two, coughing great desperate gasps, but she found enough energy to shrug away Lucybelle’s hand.

  Beverly scooped all the bits of paper into her wastepaper basket and tossed in a lit match. As flames leapt up the metal sides of the can, she snatched their coats off the coat rack and ushered Ruthie, who was fighting for breath, out the door.