A Thin Bright Line

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  If right then, Lucybelle could have said, I love you, Dorothy might have come around. Lucybelle did love her. Maybe could have even fallen in love with her. But it was too clear that the love would have to be proved, time and time and time again, and the shame overcome, also endlessly, and she didn’t have it in her to do that. She wanted Life itself, the sweetheart, the truth, and yes, the lust.

  “By the way,” Lucybelle said, opening her car door. “That wasn’t arson on Thursday. The workman who lights the fires under the kettles of tar accidentally started it. He’s given a full report. It was an accident. Once the propane tank went up, the fire was out of control.”

  “Maybe,” Dorothy said. “But maybe not. The way this town feels about us, who knows what happened.”

  “Everyone knows what happened. I just told you: the man who started the fire has given all the details. Why would you want it to be something sinister?”

  Dorothy raised her eyebrows as if there were dozens of unanswered questions.

  “If it was arson, they would have done a much better job of it. In the end, there wasn’t even that much damage.”

  Why were they arguing about fire? Lucybelle sighed and tried to think of something kind to say. Dorothy looked so defeated, so thickly sad, and she couldn’t join herself to that feeling, she just couldn’t. She got in her car and drove away. When she looked in the rearview mirror, she saw Dorothy standing in the street, unmoving, arms at her sides, her pale face watching Lucybelle leave.

  Wednesday, September 19, 1962

  For the past year, Lucybelle had been meeting Boris once a week for her Russian language lessons. He was a delightful and talkative fellow who much preferred practicing his own English to teaching Lucybelle Russian. But if she asked him questions about his home village in southeastern Russia, about his grandmother’s cooking and the characters with whom he grew up, he forgot himself and talked at length, in Russian, and that was how she learned. He became exasperated every time she interrupted him to ask what a word meant or how to pronounce another, but by supplementing their conversations with texts she found at the Dartmouth library, and studying on her own, she was doing well enough by now to read a bit of Turgenev. It was a revelation to experience an author in his native language, how drastically different it was to reading him in translation, and the experience made her hungry to read other Russian novelists in their own tongue. Though to a lesser extent than gossiping about his childhood, Boris also enjoyed reading out loud, and that was what they were doing, taking turns with Crime and Punishment, when Dorothy came into Lucybelle’s office without knocking.

  “Oh!” Dorothy feigned surprise. “I didn’t know you were in here. I was just going to drop something off.”

  “You’ve met Boris.” Technically, Lucybelle wasn’t supposed to talk about her Russian lessons, and so she hadn’t, but her teacher did come to the lab every Wednesday afternoon, so it wasn’t exactly a well-protected secret.

  “I have not.”

  “This is Dorothy, our librarian.”

  Dorothy nodded tersely while Boris gathered up his overcoat and briefcase and copy of Crime and Punishment, kissed Lucybelle on the cheek, said, “До свидания, моя любовь,” or “Good-bye, my love,” and made his exit. Dorothy shut the door behind him.

  “If I were a spy,” Lucybelle said, “I wouldn’t be meeting my contact in the lab.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “It’s the look on your face.” It didn’t matter what Lucybelle did these days—from lighting a cigarette to using a swear word—Dorothy managed to convey her disapproval. Lucybelle lit a cigarette now, inhaled deeply, and blew the smoke into the room.

  Dorothy said, “Sometimes I just don’t know what’s going on with you.”

  “Okay, I admit it, I’ve been sneaking off to Moscow regularly to reveal all. When I can’t make the flight, I talk to Boris.”

  “You think I’m stupid. You’ve always thought I was stupid. Now you just make fun of me to my face.”

  “I don’t think you’re stupid. That’s what angers me. You’re so not stupid.”

  A tremor jiggled across Dorothy’s face as she absorbed this backhanded compliment. Then, “So what are you doing with that man?”

  “Learning Russian. It’s part of my job. I need to read the Russian studies so we can know what they know.”

  The expression on Dorothy’s face intensified as her imagination kicked in. The faster Dorothy ran from herself, the larger her phantoms loomed. How she would love it if Lucybelle were a spy. For either side.

  “You said you were dropping something off,” Lucybelle said.

  “Yes. I thought these might interest you.” Dorothy placed some photographs on Lucybelle’s desk and then stepped back to watch her reaction.

  The photographic shades of dove- to steel-gray sent a current of fear zipping through Lucybelle, all the way down to her toes. The response was brief and crisp, but so distracting that once she recovered, even after she saw what the pictures were not, it took her a long time to see what they were.

  The photographs had been clipped from three different newspapers. Two showed members of an organization called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who last summer, in conjunction with the NAACP, had gone to a town called McComb, Mississippi, for a month-long voter registration drive. The third depicted James Meredith, the young Negro man who was attempting to enroll at Ole Miss. The photographs were all credited to Stella Robinson.

  Lucybelle went through the pictures again, looking at each one in careful detail, the faces beautiful in their resolve and pain. They were extraordinary pictures, each one a full story. And published. Stella had published her photographic journalism.

  “You’re smiling. I thought you’d be disturbed.”

  “I’m . . . I’m so happy for her.”

  “You must be kidding. I know you’re not that naïve. That girl is trouble.” Dorothy gestured at the clippings.

  “Trouble?”

  “I admire Martin Luther King. Pastor Lane says they’re on the right track. But that girl is just an opportunist.”

  “She’s put her life at risk to take these pictures. How exactly does that make her an opportunist?”

  “Using prejudice to get ahead in her so-called career.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m not against them. It’s just how they’re going about it that’s wrong. She’s capitalizing on that.”

  “Who’s ‘them’? Who’s ‘they’?”

  “The Negroes.”

  “How would you suggest ‘going about it’?”

  “Within the law.”

  “Taking pictures is well within the law. Anyway, James Meredith has the courts on his side. I’d call that within the law.”

  “They’re stirring up violence.”

  “The racists who oppose them are doing the violence.”

  “Pastor Lane says that patience would be a better course of action.”

  “Patience.” Lucybelle was surprised to hear herself nearly spit the word. “Where did you get these pictures, anyway?”

  “It’s part of my job,” she said, using the exact words Lucybelle had used for learning Russian. “I read all the papers so I can clip relevant stories. I ran across these. But I’m sorry I showed you. I thought it’d help. You know, with your feelings.”

  “My feelings?”

  “Getting over her.”

  “I haven’t seen Stella in four years.”

  Dorothy looked surprised, but then said, “And counting.”

  Lucybelle controlled her anger because what she really wanted was to be alone with the pictures. “Thank you for showing them to me. They do help me with my feelings. I’m so proud of her.”

  “Proud?” Dorothy looked truly baffled.

  “Why do you even care about my feelings for her? You have Mary.”

  “Mary? What in the world are you talking about?”

  “You know exactly what I
’m talking about.”

  A fresh smile played at the corners of Dorothy’s mouth, and Lucybelle realized she’d just given the impression that she was jealous.

  “Mary and I are just friends,” Dorothy said in a pious, maybe even triumphant, tone of voice. “I think you know that.”

  “What I know is that people lie all the time about relationships.”

  “How dare you.”

  “I’ve got work to do. If you don’t mind.”

  “How dare you suggest what you’ve just suggested.”

  Lucybelle shrugged, refusing to back down. She was so sick of the lies. Each one seemed to generate ten more. They rotted people from the inside out. She had no idea if Dorothy and Mary were having sex, but the look on Dorothy’s face the couple of times she’d talked about her new friend told her that they were, nonetheless, lovers.

  “In fact,” Dorothy said, squaring her shoulders, “Mary and I have a double date this weekend with a couple of fellows from church.”

  “Have a good time,” Lucybelle said and picked up her pencil. For nine months now, that drunken New Year’s Eve sex had sat between them like an undigested meal. Since then Dorothy had refused to talk with her about anything but the most superficial of topics, and only at work. It hurt. Losing a friend. But also seeing Dorothy lose herself. That night in Wesley’s study, Dorothy had allowed herself a bit of wild joy. A few hours later, she’d begun her campaign against that same joy.

  Dorothy still stood in front of Lucybelle’s desk, her lips pressed together, her arms folded tightly across her rounded figure, waiting for something that, even if it were offered, she wouldn’t accept.

  “Thanks for the pictures,” Lucybelle said. “They delight me.”

  Monday, October 29, 1962

  “Well, isn’t this the best international joke in a few decades!” Bader said banging the door to her office open.

  “Henri! When did you get in town?”

  “Here we’ve been spending millions of dollars to stop the Russians from invading via the Arctic, and like any rational people, they’re coming instead through the tropics. We should have been studying sand, not ice.”

  “Shut the door, if you’re going to talk like that.”

  He waved a hand over his head, dismissing the lab, the crisis in Cuba, maybe the entire United States government, and laughed. “They’ve essentially already fired me.”

  “Well, they haven’t fired me.” She got up and shut her office door. “How are you? It’s good to see you.”

  “Furthermore,” Bader continued, “we could have been drinking rum all this time, wrestling sharks, getting tans. All this polar business has been a big waste.”

  “What about your ice cores?”

  “Sure, yeah, from my point of view, thank god the government was so badly duped and blinded. So, okay, here’s the update.” He treated her to a long and detailed accounting of the most recent technology and attempts at fetching the ice cores and transporting them to New Hampshire, all of which she already knew since she’d edited every single report. She sat back and looked at her mentor, the man who’d hired her, the man who’d threatened her. She smiled thinking that all you had to do was add the prefix “tor” to the word “mentor” to get a pretty accurate picture of her crazy relationship with this tall, disheveled, handsome man sporting a black goatee.

  “But back to the Russians,” he said after he’d satisfied his obsessive need to talk about the ice cores. “Think about it. Seriously. If they can drink rum under a palm tree, wearing their swimming trunks, why would they come any further? Let them have Cuba, for god’s sake. The Ruskies and the Cubans, now there’s the strangest marriage I’ve ever seen. Kennedy is actually worried? Give me a break.”

  “How’s Adele?”

  “Fine. Good. And you? Staying out of trouble?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Good girl. Hauser tells me you’re already reading the Russian papers. I knew you were a quick study, but that’s kind of impressive.”

  “What else is there to do up here?”

  A scowl scrunched Bader’s brow. “You’re young. You should be having fun.”

  This man’s contradictions hardly even irked her anymore. Him telling her that she should be having fun, that was a good one. Anyway, she wasn’t young. Not anymore.

  He looked around at her walls, searching for a clock. “What time is it? I have a meeting with the lieutenant. Or is he a corporal? I don’t know the difference.”

  “You better get it right. They definitely know the difference. He’s a colonel.”

  Bader saluted and stomped out of her office.

  “Henri!” she called after him, and then went to the door to watch him stride down the hall away from her, the last of a species. Where else could you find that starch honesty and abiding passion?

  “Henri,” she said in a quieter voice. “Come back.”

  Friday, August 16, 1963

  The morning of her fortieth birthday, Lucybelle looked at herself in the mirror and didn’t like what she saw. Her blond hair had muddied over the years; she could hardly even call it blond anymore; and now there were threads of gray. She supposed crow’s feet on either side of her eyes were better than a frown line splitting her brow, but when did she start looking so tired? On some mornings, this one included, she looked as though she had two black eyes. Her nose looked swollen.

  Single, fluent in Russian, a completed draft of her novel, nothing more than a stack of paper under her bed, that was her life. She missed her father.

  She went to the west-facing window of her new studio apartment and shoved open the sash, startling a murder of crows perched in the giant oak tree. They cawed and flapped, taking flight into the early summer morning. It was her birthday. She’d try to make the most of it.

  Lucybelle showered and put on her new robin’s-egg-blue, sleeveless dress with the full skirt. The static electricity in the air made her hair even more frizzy than usual, but she didn’t bother with any pins. Let it fly, gray streaks and all. She also decided against lipstick. The morning was cool, but sunny and clear, and she’d go into the day as natural as the light.

  She felt much better by the time she got into her car. She did love her new place, one big room above a garage on a short dead-end street on the outskirts of the small town of Lebanon, New Hampshire. The houses on Placid Square Street all faced a round open field, where the handful of residents parked their cars. Not half a mile away, on the main highway, was Lander’s Restaurant, where the scientists met every Friday evening for drinks. She almost always joined them. The staff at the lab had grown so much since she’d started in 1956, and now with the new facility, the ranks had swelled even more. Social alliances had shifted as well. Lucybelle enjoyed the Hausers and the Woos, as well as her assistant, Doug, and his wife. If Beverly and Ruthie still hosted Friday night cocktails, she hadn’t been invited in a long while. But tonight they were getting together to celebrate Lucybelle’s fortieth. Even Dorothy had agreed to come, although Lucybelle may have sabotaged that fragile agreement.

  Yesterday at lunch she’d spotted Dorothy sitting with Beverly and Ruthie in the lab cafeteria, and so she’d joined them. As she set down her tray, she suggested that Dorothy bring Mary to the birthday party. Dorothy burst into tears and ran out of the cafeteria, leaving her uneaten lunch on the table.

  “That wasn’t necessary,” Ruthie said to Lucybelle. “Why do you goad her?”

  “I wasn’t goading her. I was trying to be cordial.”

  “You were not,” Beverly said but smiled.

  “Okay,” Lucybelle admitted. “Maybe not. I know she wouldn’t dream of bringing the Virgin Mary to one of our den of sin parties, but why the tears?”

  “I feel sorry for her,” Ruthie said.

  “Why?” Beverly used her best caustic tone, which Lucybelle had come to appreciate. She remembered how years ago Peter Hauser had told her that Beverly was “a real martinet.” Code, she now realized, for dyke.
r />   “We’re lucky,” Ruthie said. “She’s not.”

  “I don’t quite buy that,” Lucybelle said. “I’m single too, you know. I’ve not exactly had an exemplary history of romance, and yet I haven’t felt the need to denounce my lesbianism.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Beverly said.

  “I’m pleased she’s decided to join us for your birthday celebration,” Ruthie said. “Don’t say anything more to scare her off.”

  “Sorry.”

  Lucybelle did look forward to the evening, for old time’s sake, and she was glad that Dorothy was coming. She missed her sense of humor, her full-throated go at life, even if the go happened now to be at her church. Perhaps the outburst of tears was a good sign. Maybe her tolerance for disguise and fakery was crumbling.

  Dorothy showed up a full forty-five minutes late for the party. They’d already polished off a bottle of champagne and exchanged news about their families. They were just moving on to lab gossip.

  “I have exciting news!” Dorothy sang out the moment Ruthie opened the door. She was breathless and disheveled. She turned to Lucybelle and said, “Happy birthday. I don’t mean to trump your holiday.”

  “Please. Help me forget. What’s your good news?”

  “Mary is engaged to be married! We’re thrilled!”

  Lucybelle, Beverly, and Ruthie stood motionless, staring at this bit of theater, completely at a loss for how to respond.

  Dorothy began sobbing and dropped, right there in the doorway, to the floor and pounded the rug with her fists. “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” she wailed. It was not at all apparent to whom she was speaking. Herself ? Mary? The women in the room? At least this cleared up the mystery about yesterday’s cafeteria conniption. Ruthie helped her up and ushered her to the couch. Beverly shut and locked the door, then opened and poured more champagne, handing Dorothy a flute.

  “I know what you all think,” Dorothy said, sitting up straight, looking suddenly righteous, as if someone else, someone distasteful, had had the outburst.

  “It doesn’t matter what we think,” Ruthie said.