The Beebo Brinker Omnibus

by Ann Bannon

  “I—I thought I loved her the night I took her the whiskey, at the Knickerbocker. And I discovered that I didn’t. That’s all.”

  “After a little mutual exploration?” His voice was sarcastic. “Shall I send you a gold plaque in honor of your extramarital affairs?”

  She stood up and stamped her foot and started to speak, but he added quickly, “And don’t talk to me the way you talk to your children. I’ll take you up and beat the hell out of you, I swear I will. For their sakes.”

  “Charlie, I’m going to Chicago!” she said flatly, finally.

  “You’re not going to run out on this, Beth. You have a responsibility to me and the kids. Nobody held a gun to your head when we got married. Why, you weren’t even pregnant. You married me because you wanted to marry me, and by God, you’re still married to me. And you’re going to stay married to me until you grow up and learn to face your responsibilities.”

  “Charlie,” she said, suddenly earnest and almost scared, “I can’t stand this anymore.”

  “Can’t stand what? No lovers? None of your lady friends suits you?”

  For a second she thought she would explode with grief and fury, but she clamped her eyes shut and controlled herself. “I can’t stand living with a man,” she said, and suddenly the tears began to flow. She went on speaking, ignoring them. “It’s not your fault you’re a man—”

  “Thanks,” he snarled.

  “And it’s not my fault I need a woman. You have to understand that, Charlie. I’m not doing this because I want to hurt you. I’m not gay because I enjoy it. I don’t even know if I’m gay at all. I wish to God, I wish with all my heart, that I could make a life with you and the children. I wish all I needed to be happy was what other woman need—a home and a man and children. I thought I was like other women when we got married, or I never would have committed myself to a lifetime with you. I thought it was what I needed and wanted, or believe me I would have spared us both. I would have climbed aboard that train with Laura nine years ago. But I thought she was different and I was normal. And I was in love with you.”

  He sighed deeply, covering his face for a moment with his hands.

  “I remember Laura,” he said then, gazing into space. “I remember her so well, with that pale face, rather thin, and those big blue eyes. I remember how she adored you and how pathetic I thought she was. I remember how shocked I was when I found out that you had encouraged her. But I was always so sure, in spite of everything, that you were basically normal and that being married and having a couple of kids would straighten you out so easily. I was so sure of myself,” and she saw his self-doubt and confusion now and it touched her. “I thought because I was a man and because I loved you so terribly that we’d be able to work out anything together. I thought that living with me would give you a lifelong preference for my love. Real love, a man’s love. The kind of love that only a man can give a woman.”

  “That’s not the only real love, Charlie,” she said, sinking to the chair again, and leaning toward him, tense with the need to make him understand a little, now, at long last. “I thought I’d get over it too when Laura went away, and I thought I had. It was years after we were married that I began to feel like this, and at first I didn’t even know what it was. It wasn’t till Vega that I even realized what was wrong with me. Charlie, maybe if I could just have a sort of vacation from you.”

  “Vacation? How can you take a vacation from a marriage? It’s a permanent condition,” he said, and she could tell from his voice that it didn’t make the first glimmer of sense to him.

  “I know it isn’t sensible, and I’ve tried to fight it, but it overwhelms me,” she said. “I wonder, ‘what in hell am I married for anyway? My kids are miserable, I’m miserable, Charlie’s miserable.’ If I were doing any good with all this suffering it might be worth while. If it made Skipper and Polly happy, if it made you happy, maybe it would be worth it all. But it doesn’t. We’re all unhappy. Charlie…please understand.”

  “You can help yourself, Beth,” he said coldly.

  “No, I can’t,” she said. “That’s the awful part of it. That’s what scares me so. I feel my irritation turning into hatred, almost. I want to get away so badly that I don’t think I can stand it sometimes.”

  “Get away from what? Yourself? You have to take yourself with you wherever you go, you know.”

  “No, I want to get closer to myself, I want to know myself, Charlie. I don’t even know who I am. Or what I am.”

  “You’re my wife!” he said sharply, as if that were the argument to end them all, to end all of her doubts with one stroke.

  “I’m myself!” she cried, rising to her feet again, her fists knotted at her sides. “And all I’m doing by staying here is creating agony for the four of us.”

  “The five of us. You forget Vega. Apparently she’s not too happy with things, if you wish she were in hell.”

  “Oh, Charlie, spare me! God!” she shouted. Her voice sounded nearly hysterical.

  “Keep it down,” he said. “If you don’t wake the kids up you’ll scare the neighbors to death.”

  For a long trembling moment she stood there, unable to speak through her sobs and unable to look at his tired and disappointed face. Finally she said, whispering, “I don’t know who I am, Charlie. Just saying I’m your wife doesn’t tell me any more than I’ve known for years, and that isn’t enough.”

  “You’re either straight or you’re gay, Beth. Take your pick.” He couldn’t yield to her, he couldn’t be generous. He had been through too much and his restraint ran too high. He stood to lose a wife he loved, through that wife’s lack of self-understanding. He might see her transformed into a type of woman he neither understood nor liked, before his very eyes.

  “It’s not that easy,” she said, appalled at his attitude. “You aren’t either black or white, you’re all shades of gray in between. It might be the kind of thing I could get over and learn to live with, and it might be the kind of thing that will change my whole life irrevocably.”

  “What if you find out you’re nothing but a goddamn Lesbian?” he said in that rough voice that carried his grief so clearly, and he wounded her heart forever with his words.

  Her patience snapped like a stick bent too far. Without a word—words had never seemed so inadequate, so meaningless, so useless between two people born to the same native tongue—she turned and went into the bedroom and emptied all of her dresser drawers on the bed. Charlie watched her while she marched in white-faced fury into the basement and hauled two big bags up the stairs.

  She dragged them through the living room and he leaned forward to say softly, “You fool, Beth. You fool!”

  But she couldn’t look at him. She thought she would either faint with her hatred or somehow kill him with the frenzy of it.

  In the bedroom she stuffed things into the bags helter skelter. What didn’t fit didn’t go. The rest was left behind in a tangle.

  Halfway through this frenetic task she went to the phone and called the Los Angeles International Airport. Charlie watched her, still on the couch, immobilized with disbelief. She made a reservation for that very morning at three o’clock.

  And then she called her Uncle John and told him to pick her up at Chicago’s Midway Airport the next day. Her reservation on the plane was for one person only.

  “Just you?” Charlie said softly, staring at her. “You mean you’d really leave me here with the kids? You mean you really don’t give a goddamn about your own children?”

  “You said I couldn’t take them with me!” she cried. “I’d take them if you’d let me.”

  “Never,” he said. “But I thought—God, Beth, I though you’d try a little harder to get them than this. You’ve given up without a struggle.” He was truly shocked; it blasted all his favorite concepts of motherhood to see her behave this way.

  “I’ve struggled with you until I haven’t any strength left,” she said hoarsely.

  “You never loved the
m,” he said, hushed with shock and revelation. “You never loved them at all.”

  “I haven’t a strong enough stomach to get down on my knees and beg for them,” she cried. “I’ve begged you long enough and hard enough for other things.”

  “But they were things. These are kids. Your own kids!”

  “I want them,” she cried, “but I want my freedom more. I only make them unhappy, I’m not a good mother.”

  “Well, what sort of a mother do you think I’ll make?” he shouted, and now it was Charlie whose voice was loud enough to wake the children.

  She left him abruptly and finished her packing. In the children’s room she could hear stirrings and she prayed with the tears still soaking her cheeks that neither of them would wake up and break her heart or change her mind. She forced her suitcases shut with the strength of haste and fear, and half shoved, half carried them out to the car.

  Charlie stood in the center of the living room and watched her with his mouth open. When she passed him he said, “Beth, this isn’t happening. It can’t be. I couldn’t have been that bad. I couldn’t have been. Beth, please. Explain to me, tell me. I don’t understand.”

  But she gave him a look of hopelessness, and once she snapped, “Is that all you can say? After nine years of marriage?”

  Is he just going to stand there and let me go? she wondered. A sort of panic rose in her at the thought that he might suddenly regain his senses and force her to stop. But he let her get as far as packing both bags into the back of the car and actually starting the motor before he yanked the door open and shoved her over so that he could sit in the driver’s seat.

  “Beth,” he said, and his eyes were still big with the awfulness of what she was doing to him and their children. “You aren’t going anywhere.”

  Suddenly he kissed her urgently, holding her arms with hands so strong and fierce that they bruised her flesh. She felt his teeth pressed into her tender mouth and something in the despair of it, the near-terror she sensed in him at the thought of losing her, brought an uprush of unwanted tenderness in her heart.

  He tried to kiss her again, but Beth struggled wildly, trying to hurt him. And all the while he was wooing her with violence, almost the way he had when they first met, as if he knew now too that words were long since worthless between them.

  At last Beth grasped one of her own shoes and pulled it off. Desperately she struck him with all her strength on the side of the head. The sharp heel cut his scalp and he gave a soft little cry of astonishment. He pulled away from her at last and they stared at each other, both of them shocked at themselves, at each other, at what was happening, both of them crying.

  Finally, without a word, he got out of the car and slammed the door.

  Beth dragged herself over to the driver’s seat and rolled down the window. “I’ll write,” she said, but their two white faces, still so near one another physically, were already separated by more than the miles Beth would fly across that night. He flinched at her promise, as if he knew that an envelope full of words would do no more good than those they had flung at each other in a huge effort to create understanding.

  “Take good care of the kids,” she said and immediately she began to back out because she could hear one of them starting to cry.

  He walked along beside the car, one hand on the window sill as if that might keep her there longer. “What shall I tell them this time when they wake up and find you gone?” he asked.

  “Tell them I’ve gone to hell,” she wept. “Tell them I’m a no-good and the only thing they can hope for is that life will be happier without me than with me. It will, too.”

  She began to press the accelerator, gathering speed until he had to let go or run to keep up. He let go.

  In the street she straightened the car around and gave one last trembling look to her house, her yard and garden, the lighted windows of the living room where the TV set played on to an audience of furniture. Skipper’s little voice wailed through the night for a glass of water and Charlie stood at the end of the drive, a silhouette with silver trim, watching her.

  Beth drove away. God, let me never feel sorrow like this again, she prayed. Let this be my punishment for what I’m doing. I can’t bear any more.

  Chapter Nine

  IN PASADENA SHE STOPPED AND CALLED CLEVE. IT WAS PAST eleven o’clock and she hesitated, but she had to talk to somebody about Vega and had to make some arrangements about Charlie, and there plainly wasn’t anybody she could turn to but Cleve.

  “I’m in a little all-night joint on Fair Oaks, at Colorado,” she said.

  “God, Beth, you’re on Skid Row!”

  “Sh! Don’t wake Jean up! Can you come down?”

  “Sure, but you’d better find a cop to protect you till I get there.”

  “It’s not a bar, it’s a coffee place,” she said. “Hurry, Cleve.” And the catch in her throat warned him to heed her words.

  He got there in less than fifteen minutes. She was waiting out in front and when he arrived they went in and took a booth and had a cup of coffee in the dirty brilliance of the fluorescent light.

  “Cleve, it’s not fair of me to dump my troubles in your lap,” she said, “but you’ve got to help me. You’re the only one who can.”

  He was alarmed by the look of her. Her eyes were heavy and scared, red with weeping, and her hair hung about her pretty face in neglected confusion. She breathed fast, as though she had been running, and she stammered—something Beth, with all her poise, had never done.

  “If you’re in trouble—”

  “It’s private trouble, Cleve. I’m leaving Charlie.”

  His jaw went slack and he stared at her amazed while the waitress placed the coffee in front of them. After a moment he lighted them each a cigarette, passing hers to her, and then he said to the coffee cup, “I’m really sorry. God! I thought you two were sublimely happy.”

  “Not everybody’s as happy as you and Jean!” Beth said, and there was more wistfulness than envy in her voice.

  “Thank God for that,” he said wryly, but she was too wrapped up in her pain and perplexity to notice it. “Tell me about it?” he said.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head and making a tremendous effort to control herself. “You wouldn’t understand any better than he did.”

  “What about the kids?” His voice was cautious. He had been handling Vega’s flare-ups so long that frantic women were not new to him. He had some idea what to do.

  “I—I left them. I’m no proper mother, Cleve. It was cowardly but I swear I think they’ll be happier.”

  Like Charlie before him, Cleve was shocked. “But what in hell will Charlie do with them?”

  “I don’t know. I came to talk to you about Vega,” she said quickly. If he persisted in that obvious shock she would go to pieces. His sister’s name silenced him, threw him off the track.

  “I went ahead and saw her, Cleve. I’ve been seeing quite a lot of her lately.” She didn’t know how to proceed. She couldn’t blurt out the truth to him, and yet she had to say something. In her frayed emotional state Vega was likely to do anything, even scream the facts to strangers, unless she could be reassured that Beth at least thought of her before she left.

  “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.