A Thin Bright Line

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  “I embarrassed you.”

  “No. It wasn’t that. I’m pretty hard to embarrass. It’s just that . . . I felt responsible. For you. And also to the club. To Tiny and Ruby. I mean, look, I don’t know you. You come in the club like that, and if there’s trouble, well, I feel responsible. Because you were my fare.”

  Lucybelle laughed. “Me, trouble?” Then she remembered she’d asked the same question on Halloween night.

  Stella kicked out her legs, and then drew them back in, revealing an appealing uneasiness. “You never did tell me what you were doing alone on a street corner on Halloween.”

  “You must have thought I was a lunatic. Or think.”

  “I just thought—think—there’s a story.”

  “Not much of one. I went to a party with some friends from work. It was fun putting that costume together, but once I was there, at the party, I felt impatient with all the disguises. Of course it was stupid of me. I mean, it was Halloween. People were just having fun. But I thought, what am I doing at a party with a pirate and a clown? Besides, no one knew Djuna Barnes.”

  Stella nodded as she listened.

  “I like what you said about Halloween being the night when we can be ourselves. Maybe I just wanted to be myself.”

  “Yeah,” Stella said, taking off her sunglasses. “I’m not good at disguises.”

  “I can see that. But—” Lucybelle didn’t know if she was allowed a personal question. Stella cocked her head, bunched her mouth to the side. “What about when you were in the service? You must have had to—”

  Stella chuckled. “Nah. It was fine. I even showed up for my recruitment interview in my suit trousers and polished wingtips. My hair might have been a tad longer than it is now, and yeah, okay, I did style it a bit for that afternoon, gave it a faint whiff of girlishness. But look at me. A girl’s hairdo won’t take me far.

  “So my recruiter asks, ‘Have you ever had a crush on a girl?’ She practically winked at me. ‘What?!’ I said. ‘Heavens, no. My goodness gracious!’ Sitting there in my wingtips and trousers, two feet of air between my knees. She was white too, so you know, I threw in words they like, ‘gracious’ and such.” Stella paused, snagging on the word “they.” “Nah, it wasn’t a problem. They were dying for smart girls, people who could actually do stuff. I can fix anything.” She grinned and repeated, “Anything.”

  It was nearly noon by the time they got back to Lucybelle’s building on Michigan Avenue. Surely Stella had missed church. They stopped at the place Lucybelle had taken her fall.

  “How’s that hip of yours?”

  “Hurts like hell.”

  “Aspirin and ice.”

  “Thanks, doc. I have something for you. Wait here a moment?”

  “Sure. I’ll be in my car.”

  Lucybelle remembered how Rusty had locked herself in the moment she’d gotten out of the cab. Maybe Stella wouldn’t feel safe just standing around her neighborhood. “Do you want to come up?”

  She shook her head no.

  Lucybelle tried to hurry, but her bruised hip made walking difficult. As she returned to the street, Stella rolled down the driver’s window. Lucybelle ignored that and climbed in the front passenger seat. She handed Stella HOWL, as well as the copy of The Sea Around Us that she had bought in November. “Do you know Rachel Carson?”

  Stella shook her head. She flipped through the pages of the book, her mouth softly ajar, and then left it lying on the tops of her thighs. “Thank you. But you keep the Ginsberg.”

  “Thank you.”

  Stella nodded.

  “Also, I need to pay you for my ride on Halloween and the police bribe, and last night’s fare, as well.” By now it was pretty clear that Stella hadn’t come for the money, but it was also clear that Lucybelle wanted no festering misunderstandings, of any kind, between them.

  Stella chuffed. “I thought I told you that’s just part of doing business. Fifty bucks for the color of my skin and another fifty for being a dyke. It’s not so bad, really. I’m pretty lucky.”

  “Lucky?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “I really want to know.”

  “I got a little sweetheart deal on the side. I drive a guy around for free, whenever he needs me. He gives me some protection, not a lot, but some. He never asks for cash payments for the protection. He’s a gentleman. Just wants the free rides and a whole lotta discretion. He can count on me to get him anywhere and no one’s the wiser. For most of his business, he doesn’t want a Negro company carting him around, you see? But it’s a nice cover when he needs it. Works for both of us.”

  Lucybelle understood that “a guy” meant a mobster, but she didn’t see how it worked in Stella’s favor. “Seems like you had to fork over a lot of cash that night.”

  “Yeah, that kid cop who pulled me over is new on the force. These relationships take time, and I have to roll with the process. My guy’s already had a word with him, and okay, here’s the part I guess you should know: an envelope with all that bribe money arrived in the mail shortly after the incident. I got it all back.

  “You’re staring at me. I don’t do anything illegal, Arkansas. I just—”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Arkansas?”

  “Tiny called me that too. You’ve been making fun of me.”

  Stella looked at her hands, twisted her mouth to the side. “I’m sorry. I guess I have been a little.”

  “I’m just a joke among your friends.”

  “I don’t think you’ve reached that level of importance among my friends. We take jokes seriously.”

  “Who’s the woman with the sultry voice?”

  “You do ask a lot of questions.”

  “The one who sometimes answers your company telephone.”

  “That’s Wanda. My dispatcher. So you really did call?”

  Lucybelle wouldn’t be a fink by mentioning the woman’s rudeness on the telephone a few months ago. She just nodded, wishing she hadn’t used the word “sometimes,” which implied she’d called more than once.

  “I better go,” Stella said and put her hand on the keys dangling from the ignition.

  “Thank you for walking L’Forte with me.”

  “Thank you for the book. I’ll read it tonight.”

  “You will? Tonight?”

  “Sure. Why not?” Stella dropped her hand from the keys and smiled. “But you do still owe me.”

  Hadn’t she just told her, for the umpteenth time, to forget about the Halloween fare?

  “I put my telephone number inside the book I gave you.” She fanned the first pages of The Sea Around Us and then dug a pen out of the pouch on the inside of the car door.

  As Lucybelle wrote her telephone number on the title page, her hand shook as if she were signing a confession.

  “So that was kind of gutsy, you coming to Tiny and Ruby’s club last night.”

  “I’m sorry it was awkward for you.”

  “Nah. It wasn’t awkward.”

  “Now you’re lying. I can’t abide lies.”

  Just like that, an understanding sprung up between them. Stella’s cheeks and chin slackened, her mouth opened slightly and her hazel eyes caramelized. She nodded, looked away, and started the engine of the car. Lucybelle reached for the door handle just as Stella spoke again, “Okay then. Yeah, it was awkward.”

  “Thank you for that. You better get to church.”

  “I missed church.”

  Lucybelle laughed at the additional truth-telling, opened the door, and limped across the street in her purple homemade hat and plum overcoat, torn brown wool pants, and tie oxfords. She felt ridiculous, and yet, also, unaccountably, ridiculously beautiful.

  Monday, March 24, 1958

  The next book arrived that week. She knew right away, before opening the brown paper package tied up with twine, that it would be the successor to the one sent nearly a year ago. It was addressed in the same blocky lettering. The sender had all but cut and pa
sted letters from magazines, the writing so obviously someone’s attempt to disguise his own. Presumably that meant the sender thought she’d recognize his handwriting. She tore off the wrapping and found Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart.

  Lucybelle was floored. This literary missive was quite an improvement over Whisper Their Love. In fact, it was one of Lucybelle’s favorite novels. She loved that character’s buoyancy, resilience, luminosity. But of course that Lucy drowned. Still, as a twelve-year-old girl reading the novel for the first time, Lucybelle had thought the ending was pitch perfect. What other ending could be as true?

  The title read a little differently now in 1958 than it had read in 1935 when Cather published the novel. Lucybelle supposed that, given the book was delivered in the same furtive manner as Whisper Their Love, it also was intended as a threat.

  She flipped through the pages, looking for a note, but there wasn’t one, so she put the book under her desk and took it home that night. She reread it in one go, staying up way too late, and cried at the end when Lucy Gay-heart fell through the ice, got her skates tangled in the submerged branches, and slowly died. Not so buoyant, after all.

  The story struck Lucybelle as even more poignant than it had when she read it as a girl. This was a love story about a young woman for herself. Lucy Gayheart wanted so much more than a simple marriage and safety. But her lively presence in the world couldn’t be accommodated. Her vision for life, a primary partnership between herself and music, just wasn’t possible. Lucybelle was glad, as she had been the first time she read the story, that she drowned rather than succumbed. Dramatic maybe, but true. At least it was true.

  Tuesday, April 15, 1958

  A full month after their Sunday morning walk, Stella called and asked her out to lunch for the following day. Lucybelle suggested the soda fountain at Lyman’s drugstore on the corner of Fourth and Linden in Wilmette.

  In the morning she washed her hair and tried to comb it into submission. The air here was either too dry or too wet; she never could do anything reasonable with her blond curls. She might as well have been feral, fresh from the woodlands, the way it swept off her head in random swirls. Clothes presented another problem. It was a beautiful day, cool but clear, and so she thought she might even be able to wear her summer dress, the polka dot one, with a sweater. But the sight of herself in all those dots made her feel like she was at the circus, and so she stripped off the dress and left it wadded on her bed. The tweed skirt and white blouse made her look like a librarian, especially with her thick glasses, and so she settled on a lavender short-sleeved blouse, a dark blue straight skirt, her black heels because they were all she had other than the tie oxfords or Keds, and the cream cardigan her mother had knit. The lavender was pretty, anyway.

  It was plain stupid how nervous she felt all morning. It had taken Stella a month to ask her out, if this was even a date, so her heightened anticipation was unwarranted, at least unmatched. Still, she had no appetite, couldn’t imagine choking down a hamburger in Stella’s presence. Maybe she’d just have a soda, but that would reveal her nervousness.

  Stella stood in front of Lyman’s drugstore, her taxicab parked at the curb. She smiled at Lucybelle coming down the sidewalk, which made Lucybelle’s knees give a little, and she swerved. She looked drunk at noon.

  “How about hot dogs for lunch?” Stella asked.

  “Sure. They have tunafish, hamburgers, whatever you want.”

  “I was thinking of Comiskey Park. It’s opening day. The White Sox are playing the Detroit Tigers.”

  “I love baseball. But I only have an hour for lunch.”

  “The game starts at two thirty. Maybe you could get a stomachache.”

  “I love baseball,” she said again, unable to cap the wellspring of pleasure.

  “Let’s go then.” Stella stepped to her gleaming cab and opened the front passenger door.

  “I should tell them I’m not coming back this afternoon.”

  “I’ll swing you by.”

  “It’s just a few blocks away. 1217 Washington Avenue.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Stella said, pretending to be just her driver.

  Lucybelle ran up the stairs to the SIPRE office. Beverly and Ruthie were already at lunch. She checked the lunchroom, but they weren’t there. She even looked in the library, just in case Dorothy hadn’t yet left. Somehow telling someone in person felt more honorable than leaving a note, but she had no choice, so she wrote, “I won’t be coming back after lunch today” on a piece of paper and left it on Beverly’s desk. It was quite possible that friendship would trump office management, and Beverly wouldn’t even mention her absence to Bader. It was even more likely that he wouldn’t notice.

  As she got back into the taxicab, Stella reached into the backseat and fetched a folder, which she laid in Lucybelle’s lap. Inside she found two large photographs of L’Forte. In the first, he was running full speed, all four paws off the ground, his ears flying, toward an also airborne stick. The picture captured his joy. In the second, he stood on a rock by the shore of the lake, stick in his mouth, long nose tilted toward the sky, the most regally proud dachshund ever.

  “L’Forte ‘Christopher Columbus’ Bledsoe,” Stella said.

  “Perfect. They are hilariously, endearingly perfect portraits of the little beast. You captured his spirit exactly.”

  Stella pulled away from the curb, pleased by Lucybelle’s delight in the photographs. Maybe it was the pictures of L’Forte, the example of his abandon, but Lucybelle’s nervousness fell away. She couldn’t stop talking as they drove south to the ballpark. She told Stella about leaving the note on the office manager’s desk, and then described Beverly and Ruthie, making Stella laugh and herself feel guilty for making fun of the couple. She also told Stella about receiving Lucy Gayheart in the mail three weeks ago.

  “Strange. You have no idea who sent it?”

  “There’s this girl in New York.” Lucybelle paused, trying to decide how to describe her relationship to Clare. “She collects everything that’s ever printed about gay girls. She carries this big maroon velvet satchel around, like a walking queer library.” Lucybelle had never before used that word out loud. Some “on” button seemed to have gotten pushed and un-edited words flew from her mouth. “But I don’t really think it’s her. I mean, she’s genuine to a fault. There’s nothing furtive about her.”

  “That’s funny,” Stella said. “So you and this girl were an item?”

  “No.” At least she could keep that little incident bottled up.

  “So if not her, then who?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s the second one. Almost a year ago someone sent me a book called—”

  “Called?”

  “I hate the title. It’s like a crooked finger luring readers to view the freaks. Whisper Their Love.”

  Stella shouted her laugh and suddenly it wasn’t at all freakish, just funny.

  “Whisper their love,” Stella stage-whispered.

  “Have you read it?”

  “Nah. Someone sent that to you anonymously as well?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess you have an admirer.”

  “An admirer? I think of the books more as threats.”

  “Who’d want to threaten you?” Stella’s glance lingered. It was such a simple question, but the “you” in Stella’s mouth swelled with complexity. You who’s sitting next to me in my cab in your lavender blouse and unruly hair and thick, cat-eye glasses, talking too openly. You, being so fully, so quickly, you.

  “I met the author,” Lucybelle said. “Valerie Taylor. She was at the Halloween party. I think she’s a smart woman. But I don’t want . . . I don’t know . . . to be that kind of writer.”

  “You’re a writer?”

  “I want to write a novel.” Words spilling out.

  “Why not a writer like Valerie Taylor?”

  “The book is pretty trashy.”

  “So you want to write about genteel people?”

  �
��No.” She wanted to talk with Stella about Willa Cather and Carson McCullers. She wanted to write luminous stories about real people. No code, no disguises.

  “So what was wrong with Whisper Their Love?”

  “I suppose Taylor had to marry the girl off to a boy in the end. But . . . I don’t know. Does that have to be the end?”

  “Did she at least have girls in the interim?” Stella grinned, making those dimples.

  Lucybelle laughed. “Yes, she did.”

  “Hot diggity. I’d like to read those parts.”

  Lucybelle wanted to tell Stella more about the end, how maybe Taylor intended to leave a door open for the protagonist, a secret door visible only to her lesbian readers. But they’d reached the parking lot for Comiskey Park, where Stella saluted the attendant as if she knew him, and steered her Acme Transport cab to a parking spot.

  “You two together?” the ticket taker asked, scraping his eyes across both women.

  “Yes, sir,” Stella answered and kept walking.

  “Why did you answer him?” Lucybelle asked when they were a few paces away. “He doesn’t have a right to ask us questions. Why did you call him sir?”

  “Because we are together.” She took Lucybelle’s elbow and guided her to their seats. “I’ll be right back. What would you like for lunch?”

  “A hot dog, lots of mustard, and a Coke. And a bag of peanuts, please.”

  Stella stood looking at Lucybelle. “I like you,” she said before turning to go fetch lunch.

  Lucybelle glanced around at their neighbors on the bleachers. Likely most of them thought Stella was a man. Fine. Their color difference might be challenge enough for public consumption. She felt another surge of pleasure. She did love a baseball game: hot dogs and spring weather, a crowd cheering a team, the crack of a well-hit ball, the clouds of dust as players slid onto bases, losing herself in a story that mattered not at all. She wanted the White Sox to win. Of course she did. But who really cared?

  Apparently Stella did. “We gotta win this one,” she said emphatically as she handed the box of food to Lucybelle and got situated on the bleacher next to her. “First game sets the tone. This year we’re gonna blow through the Yankees.”