The Beebo Brinker Omnibus

by Ann Bannon

  He smoothed the hair off her forehead, admiring her features and her flawless skin without the least taint of physicality. He felt sorry for her, and scoffed at himself for wishing she were the boy she resembled at that moment. Then he lay down beside her and went to sleep.

  Beebo slept for fourteen hours. She wakened with a glaring square of sunshine astride her face. When she rolled over to escape it, she felt a new sensation: the beginning beat of the long rhythm of a hangover—her first.

  The thought of the peppermint schnapps nauseated her for a few moments. She looked around the room to forget it and clear her head, and found a note pinned to the pillow next to hers. It gave her a start to realize Jack had spent the night in bed with her. And then it made her laugh and the laugh sent aching echoes through her head.

  The note said, “I’m at work. Home around 5:30. Plenty of feed in refrig. You don’t want it but you NEED it. White pills in medicine chest for head. Take two and LIVE. You’re a devil in bed. Jack.”

  She smiled, and lifted herself with gingerly care from the bed. It was two-thirty in the afternoon.

  When Jack came home with a brown bag full of groceries, she was smoking quietly and reading the paper in his kitchen.

  “How are you?” he said, smiling.

  “Fine.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Well, I’m clean, and you can believe that. I took a bath.”

  “On you it looks good,” he said, putting food away.

  Beebo shook her head a little. “I was just thinking…you’re about the only friend I have, Jack. I’ve been kicking myself all day for not thanking you. I mean, you listened to me for hours. You’ve been damn nice about my problems.”

  “That’s my style,” he said, but he was flattered. “Besides, us frustrated doctors have to stick together. It’s nice to come home to a welcoming committee that thinks I’m the greatest guy in the world.”

  “You must have a lot of friends down here,” she said, curious about him. Beebo had done all the talking since they met. But who was Jack Mann, the guy who did all the listening? Just a good-hearted young man in a strange town who gave her a drink and a bed, and was about to give her some dinner.

  “Oh, plenty of friends,” he said, lighting the oven.

  “You made me feel safe and—and human last night, Jack. If that doesn’t sound too silly.”

  “Did you think you weren’t?” He put the ready-cooked food in the stove to warm.

  “I’m grateful. I wanted you to know.”

  “Marry me and prove it,” he said.

  She looked at him with her mouth open, astonished. “You’re kidding!” she said.

  “Nope. I always wanted a dozen kids.”

  Beebo began to laugh. “I’d make a lousy mother, I’m afraid,” she said.

  “You’d make a dandy mother, honey. Nice girls always like kids.”

  “Is that why you want to get married? Just to have kids?”

  “When I was in the Navy, I was always the sucker who put on the whiskers and passed out the popsicles on Christmas Day in the Islands. Hot? Mamma mia! I nearly passed out myself. Melted almost as fast as the goo I was giving away. But I loved those kids.”

  “Then why aren’t you married? Why don’t you have some kids of your own?” she prodded. It seemed peculiar to her that so affable a man, especially one who liked children, should be single.

  “Beebo, my ravishing love, why don’t you get married and have some kids?” he countered, disconcerting her.

  “A woman has to do the having,” she said. “All a man has to do is get her pregnant.”

  “All,” Jack repeated, rolling his eyes.

  “Besides, I don’t want to get married,” she added, her eyes veiled and troubled.

  “Hell, everybody gets married,” Jack said, watching her closely. Maybe she would open up a bit now and talk about what really mattered.

  “Everybody but you,” she said.

  He hunched his shoulders and grinned. “Touché,” he said. Then he opened the oven door to squint at the bubbling ravioli, and drew it out with a potholder, spooning it onto their plates.

  They sat down at the table and Jack told her, “This is the greatest Italian food you’ll ever eat. Pasquini on Thompson Street makes it up.” He glanced up and found Beebo studying him. “What’s the matter? Don’t like pasta?”

  “Jack, have you ever been in love?” she said.

  Jack smiled and swallowed a forkful of food before he answered. She was asking him, as circuitously as possible, to tell her about life. She didn’t want him to guess it, but that was what she wanted.

  “I fall in love twice a year,” he said. “Once in the fall and once in the spring. In the fall the kids come back to school, a few blocks from here. There are plenty of newcomers waiting to be loved the wrong way in September. They call me Wrong Way Mann.” He glanced up at her, but instead of taking the hint, she was puzzled by it.

  “I didn’t know there was a wrong way,” she said earnestly.

  “In love, as in everything else,” he said. “I just—well. Let’s say I have a talent for goofing things up.” He wondered if he ought to be frank with her about himself. It might relieve her, might make it possible for her to talk about herself then. But, looking at her face again, he decided against it. The whole subject scared her still. She wanted to learn and yet she feared that what she learned might be ugly, or more frightening than her ignorance.

  He would have to go slowly with her, teach her gently what she was, and teach her not to hate the word for it: Lesbian. Such a soft word, mellifluous on the tongue; such a stab in the heart to someone very young, unsure, and afraid.

  “And in the spring?” she was asking. “You fall in love then, too?”

  “That’s just the weather, I guess. I fall in love with everybody in the spring. The butcher, the baker, the candlestickmaker.” He smiled at her face. She was amused and startled by the male catalog, and afraid to let her amusement show. Jack took her off the hook. “Good, hm?” He nodded at the food.

  Beebo took a bite without answering. “What’s it like to live down here? I mean—” She cleared her throat. “In the Village?”

  “Just one mad passionate fling after another,” he said. “Try the cheese.” He passed it to her.

  “With the butcher and the baker?” she said humorously and made him laugh.

  At last he said, “Well, honey, it’s like everyplace else. You eat three squares a day, you sleep eight hours a night, you work and earn money and obey the laws…well, most of the laws. The only difference between here and Juniper Hill is, we stay open all night.”

  She laughed. And suddenly she said, “You know, this is good,” and began to eat with an appetite.

  “So’s the salad.” He pushed the bowl toward her. “Now you tell me something, Little Girl Lost,” he said. “Were you ever in love?”

  She looked down at her plate, uncomfortably self-conscious.

  “Oh, come on,” he teased. “I’m not going to blackmail you.”

  “Not real love,” she said. “Puppy love, I guess.”

  “That kind can hurt as much as the other,” Jack said, and Beebo was grateful for his perception. “But it ought to be fun now and then, too.”

  “Maybe it ought to be, but it never was,” she said. “I guess I’m like you, Jack. I goof everything up.”

  He pointed his fork at her plate. “You’ve stopped eating again,” he said. “I want you to taste your future employer’s cooking.”

  “My what?” she exclaimed.

  “Pasquini needs a delivery boy. Can you drive?”

  “I can drive, but can I be a boy?” she said with such a rueful face that he laughed aloud.

  “You can wear slacks,” he said. “That’s the best I could do. The rest is up to you.”

  His laughter embarrassed her, as if perhaps she had gone too far with her remark, and she said as seriously as possible, “I learned to drive on a truck with six forwa
rd gears.”

  “This is a panel truck.”

  “Duck soup. God, I hope he’ll take me, Jack. I have exactly ten bucks between me and the poorhouse. I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself.”

  “Well, you haven’t got the job yet, honey. But I told Pasquini you had lots of experience and you’d do him the favor of dropping by in the morning.”

  “Some favor!” she grinned. “Me, who couldn’t find Times Square if my life depended on it, making deliveries in this tangled-up part of town.”

  “You’ll catch on.”

  “What are the Pasquinis like?” she said.

  “You’ll like Marie. She’s Pete’s wife. Does all the cooking. It’s her business, really. It was just a spaghetti joint when Pete’s dad ran it. After he died Pete took over and damn near went bankrupt. Then he married Marie. She cooks and keeps the books—like nobody can. She used to be a pretty girl, too, till she had too many kids and too much pizza.”

  “What about Pete?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you about that guy. I’ve known him slightly for the past ten years, but no one knows him very well. As far as Marie’s concerned, he’s her number one delivery boy. As a husband and a father, he’s her idea of a bust.”

  “You mean he cheats?”

  “He’s out every night of the week with weird girls on his arm. As if he were proud of it. He picks out the oddballs—you know, the ones who haven’t cut their hair since they were four years old, and wear dead-white make-up and cotton lisle stockings.”

  “Lousy taste,” Beebo said, but when Jack smiled she looked away. She wasn’t going to give him the chance to ask what her own taste might be.

  Jack paused, sensing her reticence, and then he went on, “Pete used to run a gang when he was in his teens. He was our local color.”

  “You mean he’s a juvenile delinquent?” Beebo asked naively. “Are you sending me to work for a crook?”

  “He’s an ex-j…d.,” Jack chuckled. “He went on to better things the day they broke his zip gun.”

  “My God! Is he a criminal, Jack?”

  “No, honey, don’t panic. He’s just a kook. He’s more of a loner now. It comes naturally to him to skulk around. But as far as I can tell, he only skulks after dark. And after Beat broads. He hasn’t been arrested since he was nineteen, and that’s been ten years.”

  “He sounds like the ideal employer,” Beebo cracked.

  “You could do worse; you with ten bucks in your pocket,” Jack reminded her. “Besides, he’s lived here all his life. He may be odd but you get used to him.”

  “Just how ‘odd’ is he?”

  “Honey, you’ve got to be a little odd down here, or you lose your membership card,” he said. “Besides, I’m not asking you to cut your veins and mingle blood with him. Just pass out the pizzas and take his money once a week.”

  Beebo shook her head and laughed. “Well, if you say so,” she said. “I guess I’m safe as long as I don’t wear cotton lisle stockings.”

  She got the job. Pete Pasquini had more deliveries than he could handle alone. Marie’s sauces, salads, preserves, and pastas were making a name and making a pile. The orders were going up so fast that it would take a second driver to deliver them all.

  Beebo, dressed in a clean white shirt, sweater, and tan slacks, faced Pete at eight in the morning. She was somewhat intimidated by the looks of him and by Jack’s thumb sketch of the night before. He was a dour-faced young Italian-American with blue jowls and a down-turned mouth. If he ever smiled—Beebo doubted it—he would have been almost handsome, for his teeth were straight and white, and he had a peculiarly sensual mouth beneath his plum-dark eyes. He looked mean and sexy—a combination that instantly threw Beebo high on her guard.

  “You’re Beebo?” he said, looking up at her with an order pad and pencil poised in his hands.

  “Yes,” she said. “Jack Mann sent me. I—he—said you needed a driver.”

  He smirked a little. Probably his smile for the day, she thought. “You’re as tall as I am,” he observed, as if pleased about it; pleased at least to make her self-conscious about it.

  “Would you like to see me drive? I’m a good driver,” she said resentfully.

  “How come you’re so tall, Beebo? Girls ain’t supposed to be so tall.” He put the paper and pencil down and turned to look her over, leaning jauntily on a linoleum-covered counter as he did so.

  Beebo folded her arms over her chest in a gesture that told him to slow down, back off; a very unfeminine gesture that ordinarily offended a man’s ideals. “I can drive. You want a driver,” she said curtly. “Let’s talk business.” She had learned long ago to stand her ground when someone taunted her. Otherwise the taunting grew intolerable.

  To her amazement, she made Pete Pasquini laugh. It was not a reassuring sound. “You’re a feisty one, ain’t you?” he grinned. “You—are—a—feisty—one.” He separated each word with slow relish, enjoying her discomfiture. For though she stood tall and bold in front of him, her hot face betrayed her embarrassment. She gave him a withering look and then turned and strode toward the door till she heard his voice behind her, accompanied by his footsteps.

  “No offense, Beebo,” he said, “I’m gonna be your boss. I wanta be your friend, too. I don’t want people workin’ for me don’t like me. Shake hands?”

  She turned around slowly, unconvinced. Maybe he really thought he was ingratiating himself with her. But she didn’t like his method much. It was the thought of her nearly empty wallet that finally prompted her to offer him her hand. He took it with a rather light loose grasp, surprising Beebo, who was used to the hearty grip of the farmers in her home county. But when he lifted her hand up and said, “Hey, that’s big, too!” she snatched it away as if he had burned her.

  “Okay, okay, all you got to do is drive, you don’t have to shake hands with me all day,” he said, amused by her reaction. “I can see it ain’t your favorite game.”

  It seemed peculiar enough to Beebo that they shake hands at all. They were not officially employer and employee yet, and even if they were, they were still man and girl. It made her feel creepy. She assumed that Pete had to get his wife’s approval before he could hire her. Marie was supposed to run the business.

  “Well, come on, I’ll show you where things is,” Pete said.

  “You mean it’s settled?” She hesitated. “I’m hired?”

  “Why not?” He turned back to look at her.

  “Well, I thought your wife? I mean—?” She stopped, not wishing to anger him. His face had turned very dark.

  “My wife what?” he said. “You never mind my wife. If I say you’re hired, you’re hired. I don’t want no back talk about the wife. You dig?”

  She nodded, startled by the force of his spite. She made a mental note not to press that sore spot again. He apparently needed and wanted the money Marie’s succulent concoctions brought in, but he hated surrendering control of the shop to her. Yet it was the price of their success. She knew what she was doing, in the kitchen and in the accounts, and he was afraid to interfere.

  Beebo stood frowning at the sawdust floor.

  “What’s the matter, kid? Something bugging you?” Pete asked.

  She glanced up at him. It was strange that he should hire her on the spot without the slightest idea if she could drive worth a damn. “Do you want me to start deliveries this morning?” she said.

  “I’ll take you around, show you the route,” he said. “First we got to make up the orders.”

  He walked toward the back of the store with Beebo behind him. “Mr. Pasquini, there’s just one thing,” she said.

  “It’s Pete. Yeah, what thing?” He handed her a large cardboard carton to pack a grocery order in.

  “How much will it pay?” Beebo asked, standing there with the box, unwilling to start working till she knew what she was worth.

  “Fifty a week to start,” he said, without looking up. He lifted some bottled olive oil down
from a nearby shelf. “Things work out good, I’ll raise you. You want it, don’t you?” He looked at her then.

  There was a barely noticeable pause before she answered, “I want it.” But she spoke with a sliver of misgiving stuck in the back of her mind.

  Pete accompanied her on the delivery route that morning and again in the afternoon, watching her handle the truck, showing her where the customers lived. She had spent the night before with Jack studying a map of New York City and Greenwich Village, but what had seemed fairly logical on paper bogged down in colorful confusion when she took to the streets.

  Pete swung an arm up on the seat behind her, his knees jutting toward her legs, and now and then when she missed a direction he would grab the wheel and start the turn for her. She disliked his closeness extremely, and throughout the day she was aware of his eyes on her face and body. It almost made her feel as if she had a figure, for the first time in her life, and the idea shocked her.

  Beebo had broad shoulders and hardly a hint of a bosom. No man had ever looked at her appreciatively before, not even Jack Mann, who obviously liked her and enjoyed her company. She was not sure whether Pete admired her or was merely interested because she was so different from other girls.

  He can’t possibly like me, she thought. Not the way men like women. The notion was so preposterous that it made her smile and reassured her. Till Pete noticed the smile and said, “What’s so funny, kid?” He looked too eager to know and she brushed it off. He let it go, but watched her more attentively, making her squirm a little.

  It was a relief to climb down from the truck that afternoon—and a blow to feel the heavy clap of a masculine hand on her shoulder. “You did real good, Beebo,” Pete said, and the hand lay there until she spun away from him and walked inside to meet his wife.

  Marie Pasquini was twenty-six, the overweight and overworked mother of five little Pasquinis. She did most of the cooking while Pete’s mother tended her kids, and the two women fell into several pan-rattling arguments per day. Beebo could hear the soprano squeals of young children upstairs in the apartment above the store, and a periodic disciplinary squawk from Grandma Pasquini.