by Ann Bannon
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “Could I have a little more of that stuff?” He handed the bottle down to her. “It’s not half as bad as it looks.”
“Did you have a job back home?” he asked.
“No. I—I just finished high school.”
“In the middle of May?” His brow puckered. “When I was in school they used to keep us there till June, at least.”
“Well, I—you see—it’s farm country,” she stammered. “They let kids out early for spring planting.”
“Jesus, honey, they gave that up in the last century.”
“Not the little towns,” she said, suddenly on guard.
Jack looked at his shoes, unwilling to distress her. “Your dad’s a farmer, then?” he said.
“No, a vet.” She was proud of it. “An animal doctor.”
“Oh. What was he planting in the middle of May—chickens?”
Beebo clamped her jaws together. He could see the muscles knot under her skin. “If they let the farmer’s kids out early, they have to let the vet’s kids out, too,” she said, trying to be calm. “Everyone at the same time.”
“Okay, don’t get mad,” he said and offered her a cigarette. She took it after a pause that verged on a sulk, but insisted on lighting it for herself. It evidently bothered her to let him perform the small masculine courtesies for her, as if they were an encroachment on her independence.
“So what did they teach you in high school? Typing? Shorthand?” Jack said. “What can you do?”
Beebo blew smoke through her nose and finally gave him a woeful smile. “I can castrate a hog,” she said. “I can deliver a calf. I can jump a horse and I can run like hell.” She made a small sardonic laugh deep in her throat. “God knows they need me in New York City.”
Jack patted her shoulder. “You’ll go straight to the top, honey,” he said. “But not here. Out west somewhere.”
“It has to be here, even if I have to dig ditches,” she said, and the wry amusement had left her. “I’m not going home.”
“Where’s home?”
“Wisconsin. A little farming town west of Milwaukee. Juniper Hill.”
“Lots of cheese, beer, and German burghers?” he said.
“Lots of mean-minded puritans,” she said bitterly. “Lots of hard hearts and empty heads. For me…lots of heartache and not much more.”
“Why?” he said gently.
She looked away, pouring some more schnapps for herself. Jack was glad she had a small glass.
“Why did you ditch Juniper Hill, Beebo?” he persisted.
“I—just got into some trouble and ran away. Old story.”
“And your parents disowned you?”
“No. I only have my father—my mother died years ago. My father wanted me to stay. But I’d had it.”
Jack saw her chin tremble and he got up and brought her a box of tissues. “Hell, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m too nosy. I thought it might help to talk it out a little.”
“It might,” she conceded, “but not now.” She sat rigidly, trying to check her emotion. Jack admired her dignity. After a moment she added, “My father—is a damn good man. He loves me and he tries to understand me. He’s the only one who does.”
“You mean the only one in Juniper Hill,” Jack said. “I’m doing my damnedest to understand you too, Beebo.”
She relented a little from her stiff reserve and said, “I don’t know why you should, but—thanks.”
“There must be other people in your life who tried to help, honey,” he said. “Friends, sisters, brothers—”
“One brother,” she said acidly. “Everything I ever did was inside-out, ass-backwards, and dead wrong as far as Jim was concerned. I humiliated him and he hated me for it. Oh, I was no dreamboat. I know that. I deserved a wallop now and then. But not when I was down.”
“That’s the way things go between brothers and sisters,” Jack said. “They’re supposed to fight.”
“You don’t understand the reason.”
“Explain it to me, then.” Jack saw the tremor in her hand when she ditched her cigarette. He let her finish another glassful of schnapps, hoping it might relax her. Then he said, “Tell me the real reason why you left Juniper Hill.”
She answered at last in a dull voice, as if it didn’t matter any more who knew the truth. “I was kicked out of school.”
Jack studied her, perplexed. He would have been gently amused if she hadn’t seemed so stricken by it all. “Well, honey, it only happens to the best and the worst,” he said. “The worst get canned for being too stupid and the best for being too smart. They damn near kicked me out once…. I was one of the best.” He grinned.
“Best, worst, or—or different,” Beebo said. “I was different. I mean, I just didn’t fit in. I wasn’t like the rest. They didn’t want me around. I guess they felt threatened, as if I were a nudist or a vegetarian, or something. People don’t like you to be different. It scares them. They think maybe some of it will rub off on them, and they can’t imagine anything worse.”
“Than becoming a vegetarian?” he said and downed the rest of his beer to drown a chuckle. He set the glass on the floor by the leg of his chair. “Are you a vegetarian, Beebo?” She shook her head. “A nudist?”
“I’m just trying to make you understand,” she said, almost pleading, and there was a real beacon of fear shining through her troubled eyes.
Jack reached out his hand and held it toward her until she gave him one of hers. “Are you afraid to tell me, Beebo?” he said. “Are you ashamed of something? Something you did? Something you are?”
She reclaimed her hand and pulled a piece of tissue from her bag, trying to keep her back straight, her head high. But she folded suddenly around a sob, bending over to hold herself, comfort herself. Jack took her shoulders in his firm hands and said, “Whatever it is, you’ll lick it, honey. I’ll help you if you’ll let me. I’m an old hand at this sort of thing. I’ve been saving people from themselves for years. Sort of a sidewalk Dorothy Dix. I don’t know why, exactly. It just makes me feel good. I like to see somebody I like, learn to like himself. You’re a big, clean, healthy girl, Beebo. You’re handsome as hell. You’re bright and sensitive. I like you, and I’m pretty particular.”
She murmured inarticulately into her hands, trying to thank him, but he shushed her.
“Why don’t you like yourself?” he asked.
After a moment she stopped crying and wiped her face. She threw Jack a quick cautious look, wondering how much of her story she could risk with him. Perversely enough, his very kindness and patience scared her off. She was afraid that the truth would sicken him, alienate him from her. And at this forlorn low point in her life, she needed his friendship more than a bed or a cigarette or even food.
Jack caught something of the conflict going on within her. “Tell me what you can,” he said.
“My dad is a veterinarian,” she began in her low voice. “Everybody in Juniper Hill loved him. Till he started—drinking too much. But that wasn’t for a long time. In the beginning we were all very happy. Even after my mother died, we got along. My brother Jim and I were friends back in grade school.
“Dad taught us about animals. There wasn’t a job he couldn’t trust me with when it came to caring for a sick animal. And the past few years when he’s been—well, drunk so much of the time—I’ve done a lot of the surgery, too. I’m twice the vet my brother’ll ever be. Jim never did like it much. He went along because he was ashamed of his squeamishness. But whenever things got bloody or tough, he ducked out.
“But I got along fine with Dad. The one thing I always wanted was to live a good life for his sake. Be a credit to him. Be something wonderful. Be—a doctor. He was so proud of that. He understood, he helped me all he could.” She drained her glass again. “Some doctor I’ll be now,” she said. “A witch doctor, maybe.” She filled the glass and Jack said anxiously, “Whoa, easy there. You’re a milk drinker, remember?”
She ignored him. �
�At least I won’t be around to see Dad’s face when he realizes I’ll never make it to medical school,” Beebo said, the corners of her mouth turned down. “I hated to leave him, but I had to do it. It’s one thing to stick it out in a place where they don’t like you. It’s another to let yourself be destroyed.”
“So you think you’ve solved your problems by coming to the big city?” Jack asked her.
“Not all of them!” she retorted. “I’ll have to get work, I’ll have to find a place to live and all that. But I’ve solved the worst one, Jack.”
“Maybe you brought some of them with you,” he said. “You didn’t run as far away from Juniper Hill as you think. People are still people, no matter what the town. And Beebo is still Beebo. Do you think New Yorkers are wiser and better than the people in Juniper Hill, honey? Hell, no. They’re probably worse. The only difference is that here, you have a chance to be anonymous. Back home everybody knew who you were.”
Beebo threw him a sudden smile. “I don’t think there’s a single Jack Mann in all of Juniper Hill,” she said. “It was worth the trip to meet you.”
“Well, I’d like to think I’m that fascinating,” he said. “But you didn’t come to New York City to find Jack Mann, after all. You came to find Beebo Brinker. Yourself. Or are you one of those rare lucky ones who knows all there is to know about themselves by the time they’re seventeen?”
“Eighteen,” she corrected. “No, I’m not one of the lucky ones. Just one of the rare ones.” Inexplicably, it struck both of them funny and they laughed at each other. Beebo felt herself loose and pliable under the influence of the liqueur. It was exhilarating, a floating release that shrouded the pain and confusion of her flight from home and arrival in this cold new place. She was glad for Jack’s company, for his warmth and humor. “You must be good for me,” she told him. “Either you or the schnapps.”
“You’re going pretty heavy on that stuff, friend,” he warned her, nodding at the glass. “There’s more in it than peppermint, you know.”
“But it tastes so good going down,” she said, surprised to find herself still laughing.
“Well, it doesn’t taste so good when it comes back up.”
“I haven’t had that much,” she said and poured herself some more. Jack rolled his eyes to heaven and made her laugh again.
“You know I could take advantage of you in your condition,” he said, thinking it might sober her up a little. But his fundamental compassion and intelligence had put her at ease, led her to trust him. She was actually enjoying herself a little now, trying to forget whatever it was that drove her into this new life, and Jack hadn’t the heart to stir up her fears again. He wondered if she had left a scandal or a tragedy behind her in Juniper Hill.
“I was going to be a doctor once myself,” he said.
She looked at him with a sort of cockeyed interest. “What happened?”
“Would have taken too long. I wanted to get that degree and get out. And I wanted love. But you can’t make love to anybody after a long day over a hot cadaver. You’re too pooped and the sight of human flesh gives you goose pimples instead of pleasant shivers. Besides, I spent four years in the Navy in the Second World War, and I’d had it with blood and suffering.”
Beebo drank the schnapps in her glass. “That’s as good a reason as any for quitting, I guess,” she said.
“You could still finish up high school and go on to college,” he said, trying not to sound pushy.
“No. I’ve lost it, Jack. That ambition, that will to do well. I left it behind when I left my father. I just don’t give a double damn about medicine, for the first time in my life.”
“Because a bunch of small-minded provincials asked you to leave their little high school? You make it sound like you were just squirming to be asked.”
“You’re saying I didn’t have the guts to fight them,” she said, speaking without resentment. “It isn’t that, Jack. I did fight them, with all I’ve got. I’m tired of it, that’s all. You can’t fight everybody all the time and still have room in your life to study and think and learn.”
“Was it that bad, Beebo?”
“I was that bad—to the people in Juniper Hill.”
Jack shook his head in bewilderment and laughed a little. “You don’t happen to carry the bubonic plague, do you?” he said.
She knew how curious she had made him about herself, and she hadn’t the courage to expose the truth to him yet. So she merely said, “That’s over now. My life is going to be different.”
“Different, but not necessarily better,” he said. “I wish to hell you’d come clean with me, honey. I can’t help you this way. I don’t know what you’re running away from.”
“I’m not running away from, I’m running to,” she said. “To this city, this chance for a new start.”
“And a new Beebo?” he asked. “Do you think being in a new place will make you better and braver somehow?”
“I’m not chicken, Jack,” she said firmly. “I left for Dad’s sake as much as my own.”
“I didn’t say you were, honey,” he told her gently. “I don’t think a chicken would have come so far to face so much all alone. I think you’re a decent, intelligent girl. I think you’re a good-looking girl, too, just for the record. That much is plain as the schnapps on your face.”
Beebo frowned at him, self-conscious and surprised. “You’re the first man who ever called me ‘good-looking,’” she said. “No, the second. My father always thought…” Her voice went very soft. “You know, it kills me to go off and—and abandon him like this.” She got up from the floor and walked a little unsteadily to the front window.
“Why don’t you write to him?” Jack suggested. “If he was so good to you—if you were so close—he deserves to know where you are.”
“That was the whole point of leaving,” she said, shaking her head. “To keep it secret. To relieve him.”
“Of what?”
“Of myself. I was a burden to him. He did too much for me. He tried to be father and mother both. He indulged me when he should have been stern. He never could bear to punish me.”
She stood looking out his front window in silence, crying quietly. Her face was still, with the only movement the rhythmic swell and spill of tears from her eyes.
“My father,” she said, “is no angel. Much as I love him, I know that much.” Jack sensed a whole raft of sad secrets behind that brief phrase.
He stood up, crushed his cigarette, and looked at her for a moment. She stood with her legs apart and well-defined by her narrow cotton skirt. Her hair was tousled and damp with sweat, and there was a shine in her wet eyes reflected from the lamplight that intensified the blue. She had left her schnapps glass on the floor and her empty hands hung limp against her thighs. She lifted them now and then to brush away tears. Her head inclined slightly, like that of a youngster who has grown too tall too fast and doesn’t want to tower over her classmates.
Her face, sensitive and striped with tears, was in many ways the face of a boy. Her stance was boyish and her low voice too was like a boy’s, balanced on the brink of maturity. And there it would stay all her life, never to plumb the true depth of a man’s.
She became aware of Jack’s eyes on her and turned to pick up her glass, but bumped against a corner of a table and nearly fell. Jack reached her in two big steps and pulled her straight again while she put both hands to her temples. “I feel as if I’m dreaming,” she murmured. “Am I?” She looked quizzically at him.
“You’re not, but I am,” he said, taking her elbow and steering her toward the bedroom. “I’m a dream walking. I’m dreaming and you’re in my dream. When I wake up, you’ll cease to exist.”
“That would solve everything, wouldn’t it?” she said, leaning on him more than she realized. She tried to stop him in the center of the room to get her liqueur, but he kept pushing till she gave up.
“Come on, let Uncle Jack bed you down,” he said. He took one of her arms across
his shoulder, the better to balance them both, pulled her into the bedroom, and unloaded her on his double bed. Beebo spread-eagled herself into all four corners with a sigh, and it wasn’t till Jack had all her clothes off but the underwear that she came to and tried to protest. Jack removed her socks with a yank.
“Why, you lousy man,” she said, staring at him. But when he smelled the socks, she laughed.
“God, what an exciting creature you are,” he grimaced, surveying her muscular angles with all the ardor of an old hen.
“So I’m not your type,” she said, getting to her feet. “I can still take off my own underwear.” She tried it, lost her balance, and sat down summarily on the bed.
Jack tossed her a nightshirt from his dresser. It was scarlet and orange cotton flannel. “I like flashy sleepers,” he explained.
She put it on while he washed in the bathroom. But when he returned he found her leaning on the dresser, dizzily close to losing the schnapps.
Jack guided her to the bathroom and got her to the washbowl before it came up.
“I had no idea there was so much in the bottle,” Jack said when she had gotten the last of it out. At last she straightened up to look in the mirror. “By God, Beebo, you were the same color as the schnapps for a minute there.”
He made her rinse her mouth and then dragged her back to bed, where he washed her unconscious face and hands. He sat and gazed at her before he turned out the light, speculating about her. Asleep, she looked younger, adolescent: still a child, with a child’s purity; soon an adult, with adult desires. Did she know already what those desires would be? And was that why she fled from Juniper Hill? The knowledge that her desires and her adult self would shock the town, shock her father, shock even herself?
Jack thought so. He thought she knew what it was that troubled her so deeply, even though she might not know the name for it. It wasn’t just being “different” that she hated. It was the kind of differentness. Jack wanted to comfort her, to explain that she wasn’t alone in the world, that other people were different in the same way she was. But he couldn’t speak of it to her until she admitted it first to him.