The Beebo Brinker Omnibus

by Ann Bannon

  But he had not said, “Oh, come on, Beebo. You’re gay. Admit it. We both know it.” He had, however, come closer than she knew to saying it. And it was hard for Jack himself to realize that his hints and jokes were couched in a language still foreign to her in many ways. Often they went over her head or were taken at face value; saved and worried over, but never fathomed.

  So she found herself hung up on a dilemma: she was sure of his friendship as long as she was an observer of the gay scene, not a sister-in-the-bonds. But what would he say if she told him she had a desperate crush on Mona Petry with the long black hair? Or that she got dizzy with the joy of being in a crowd of gay girls; near enough to touch, to overhear, to look and look and look until they whirled through her dreams at night?

  Would he say, You can play with the matches but don’t get burned? Would he pity her? Turn on his wit? Would he—could he—take it with the easy calm he showed in other circumstances?

  She thought he could. She felt closer to him now that she had spent nearly two months under his roof. She knew his heart was big, and she had seen him in a Lesbian bar talking with his friends there. He was not being condescending. He valued them.

  Perhaps more than anything, she was persuaded by the need to talk it out; the need for help and comfort. And that was Jack’s forte.

  Beebo and Jack were watching a TV show one evening when he asked her, during the commercial, why she wasn’t going out that night. “Don’t tell me you gave up on Mona,” he teased.

  Instead of answering, she told him about the boy who was in love with her. “His name is Pat,” she said. “The bartender told me. He looks hungry, as if he needs to be cared for.” She laughed. “I was never much for maternal instincts—but he seems to bring them out.”

  “I’d like to meet him. He might bring mine out, too,” Jack said.

  “Why don’t you come with me Friday? He’s always at Julian’s.”

  Jack looked away. “I’ve been trying to give you a free rein,” he said. “You don’t want me along. I’ll find him myself.”

  “I do want you along,” she said. “I like your company.”

  “More than the girls’?” he grinned.

  She felt herself tense all over. There had been so many chances lately to talk to him, and she had run away from them all. Now, she felt a surge of defiance, a will to have it out. He had a right to know at least as much about her as she knew about herself. He had earned it through his generosity and affection.

  “I read a book once,” she said clumsily. “Under my covers at night—when I was fifteen. It was about two girls who loved each other. One of them committed suicide. It hit me so hard I wanted to die, too. That’s about as close as I’ve come to reality in my life, Jack. Until now.”

  He leaned over and switched off the television. The room was so quiet they could hear themselves breathing.

  “I was kicked out of school,” she went on hesitantly, “because I looked so much like a boy, they thought I must be acting like one. Chasing girls. Molesting them. Everything I ever did to a girl, or wanted to do or dreamed of doing, happened in my imagination. The trouble was, everybody else in Juniper Hill had an imagination, too. And they had me doing all these things for real.” She shut her eyes and tried to force her heart to slow down, just by thinking about it.

  “And you never did?” he said. “You never tried? There must have been girls, Beebo—”

  “There were, but all I had to do was talk to one and her name was mud. I wouldn’t do that to anybody I cared for.”

  Jack stared at her, wondering what geyser of emotion must be waiting to erupt from someone so intense, so yearning, and so rigidly denied all her life.

  “My father tried to teach me not to hate myself because I looked like hell in gingham frills,” she said. “But when you see people turn away and laugh behind their hands… It makes you wonder what you really are.” She looked at him anxiously, and then she said it. “I’ve never touched a girl I liked. Never made a pass or spoken a word of love to a single living girl. Does that make me normal, Jack?…And yet I know I could, and I think now I will, and God knows I want to desperately. Does that make me gay?” She spoke rapidly, stopping abruptly as if her voice had gone dead in her throat at the word “gay.”

  “Well, first,” he said kindly, “you’re Beebo Brinker, human being. If you are gay, that’s second. Some girls like you are gay, some aren’t. Your body is boyish, but there’s nothing wrong with it.” His voice was reassuring.

  “Nothing, except there’s a boy inside it,” she said. “And he has to live without all the masculine trimmings other boys take for granted. Jack, long before I knew anything about sex, I knew I wanted to be tall and strong and wear pants and ride horses and have a career…and never marry a man or learn to cook or raise babies. Never.”

  “That’s still no proof you’re gay,” he said, going slowly, letting her convince herself.

  “I’m not even built like a girl. Girls are knock-elbowed and big-hipped. They can’t throw or run or—look at my arm, Jack. I was the best pitcher on the team whenever they let me play.” She rolled her sleeve back and showed him a well-muscled arm, browned and veined and straight as a boy’s.

  “I see,” he murmured.

  “It was the parents who gave me the worst of it,” she said. “The kids weren’t too bad till I got to high school. But you know what happens then. You get hairy and you get pimples and you have to start using a deodorant.”

  Jack laughed silently behind his cigarette.

  “And the boys get big and hot and anxious, like a stallion servicing a mare.”

  Jack swallowed, feeling himself move. “And the girls?”

  “The girls,” she sighed, “get round and soft and snippy.”

  “And instead of round and soft, you got hot and anxious?”

  “All of a sudden, I was Poison Ivy Brinker,” she confirmed. “Nobody wanted whatever it was I had. My brother Jim said I wasn’t a boy and I wasn’t a girl, and I had damn well better be one or the other or he’d hound me out of school himself.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I tried to be like the rest. But not to please that horse’s ass.” Her farmer’s profanity tickled him. “I did it for Dad. He thought I was adjusting pretty well, and that was his consolation. I never told him how bad it was.”

  “So now you want to find Mona Petry,” Jack said, after a small pause, “and ask her if you’re gay.”

  “Not ask her. Just get to know her and see if it could happen. She makes me wonder so…. Jack, what makes a feminine girl like that gay? Why does she love other girls, when she’s just as womanly and perfumed as the girl who goes for men? I used to think that all homosexual girls were three-quarters boy.” She hung her head. “Like me, I guess. And that they were all doomed to love feminine girls who could never love them back. It seems like a miracle that a girl like Mona could love a—” she stopped, embarrassed.

  “Could love a girl like you,” he finished for her. “Take it on faith, honey. She doesn’t have to look like a Ram tackle to know that her happiness lies with other women. The girls you see around town aren’t all boyish, are they?”

  “They’re not all gay, either.”

  He ground out his cigarette. “Tell me why they ran you out of Juniper Hill. The whole story. Was it really just a nasty rumor about you and the Jones girl?”

  Beebo lay down, stretched out on the sofa, and answered without looking at him. “They’d been hoping for an excuse for years,” she said. “It was in April, last spring. I went to the livestock exhibition in Chicago with Dad and Jim. I was in the stalls with them most of the time, handling some of the steers from our county. Sweaty and gritty, and not thinking about much but the job. And then one night—I’ll never know why—I took it into my head to wear Jim’s good clothes.

  “I knew it was dangerous, but suddenly it was also irresistible. Maybe I just wanted to get away with it. Maybe it was the feel of a man’s clothes on my back
, or a simple case of jealousy. Anyway, I played sick at dinnertime, and stayed in the hotel till they left.

  “Jack, it was as though I had a fever. The minute I was alone I put Jim’s things on. I slung Dad’s German camera over my shoulder and took his Farm Journal press pass. On the way over, I stopped for a real man’s haircut. The barber never said a word. Just took my money and stared.

  “I looked older than Jim. I felt wonderful.” She stopped, her chin trembling. “A blonde usher showed me to the press section. She was small and pretty and she asked me if I was from the ‘working press.’ I said yes because it sounded important. She gave me a seat in the front row with a typewriter. It was screwed down to a stand. God, imagine!” She almost laughed.

  “I really blitzed them,” she said, remembering the good part with a throb of regret. “Everybody else was writing on their machines to beat hell, but I didn’t even put a piece of paper in mine. After a while I took out the camera and made some pictures. The girl came back and said I could work in the arena if I wanted to, and I did. It was hotter than Hades but I wouldn’t have taken that tweed jacket off for a fortune.

  “I guess I took pictures for almost three hours…just wandered around, kidding the girls on horseback and keeping clear of the Wisconsin people.” She hesitated and Jack said, “What happened then?”

  “I got sick,” she whispered. “My stomach. I thought it was bad food. Or that damn heat. Awful stomach cramps. In half an hour I was so miserable I could hardly stand up and I was scared to death I might faint. If I’d had any sense I’d have gone back to my seat and rested. But not Beebo. I didn’t want to waste my moment of glory. It would go away—it had to.

  “Well, I was right about one thing—I fainted, right there in the arena. The next I knew, I was strangling on smelling salts and trying to sit up on a cot in the Red Cross station. The doctor asked how I felt and I said it was indigestion. He wanted to have a look.

  “I was terrified. I tried to laugh it off. I said I was tired, I said it was the heat, I said it was something I ate. But that bastard had to look. He thought it might be appendicitis. There was nothing I could do but cover my face and curse, and cry,” she said harshly. Jack handed her a newly lighted cigarette, and she took it, still talking.

  “The doctor saw the tears, and that was the tip-off. He opened my shirt so fast the buttons flew. And when he saw my chest, he opened the pants without a word. Just big bug-eyes.” She gave Jack a look of sad disgust. “I had the curse,” she muttered. “First time.”

  After a moment she went on, “I never meant to hurt anybody or cause a scene. But I hurt my father too much. He suffered over it. I had to wait till my hair grew out before I could go back to school, but I could have saved myself the bother. They let me know as soon as I got back I wasn’t wanted. Before Chicago, they thought I was just a queer kid. But afterwards, I was really queer. There’s a big difference.”

  Jack listened, bound to her by the story with an empathy born of his own emotional aberration.

  “The principal of the high school said he hoped he could count on me to understand his position. His position. I wanted to ask him if he understood mine.” There was hopeless bitterness in her voice.

  “They never do,” Jack said quietly. “Still, that’s not the only high school in the world. You could finish up somewhere else and go on to pre-med, Beebo.”

  “You didn’t,” she reminded him. “You got fed up and quit. But me—I’ve been expelled. I’m not wanted anywhere.”

  “Do you think a job as a truck driver is worth sacking a medical career for?”

  “What did you sack yours for?” He was making her defensive.

  “My story’s all over,” he said. “But there’s still time for you. Beebo, do you know what you’re trying to do? Get even with the world. You’re so mad at it and everybody in it for the bum deal you got, you’re going to deny it a good doctor some day.”

  “I’d be a rotten doctor, Jack. I’d be scared. I’d be running and hiding every day of my life.”

  “Hell, plenty of doctors are gay. They manage.” He was surprised at the importance it was assuming in his own mind. He really cared about it. It depressed him to think of what she might be and what she was in a fair way now of becoming. “You’re thinking that if people are going to reject you, by God you’re going to reject them first. If they make it hard for you to be a doctor, you’ll make damn sure they never get that doctor. You’ve been keeping score and now you’re avenging yourself on the world because most of the people in it are straight. You keep it up and you’ll turn into a joyless old dyke without a shred of love in her heart for anyone.”

  Beebo sat up and frowned at him, surprised but not riled. “Are you telling me to go to hell because I—I think I’m gay?” she asked.

  “I’m telling you to go to college,” he said seriously.

  “Jack, you goofed your chance for an M.D. for reasons a lot flimsier than mine. What are you trying to do? Push me into school so you can make peace with your conscience? You’re the one who wants to give that good doctor to humanity. If it can’t be yourself, better it should be Beebo than nobody. And Jack Mann will have made a gift to his fellow men. Jack, the Great Humanitarian. And you won’t even have to crack a book.” She spoke wryly, but without rancor.

  Jack was stunned into silence by her flash of insight.

  “I hit it, didn’t I?” she said. “Jack, you don’t know what you’re asking me to do: wear a skirt for the rest of my life. Forget about love till my heart dries up. Go back and face the father I destroyed and the brother who hates me…well, I can’t. I’m no martyr. I’m not brave enough to try to be a doctor now, just because you tried and failed. And feel bad about it.”

  He took her hands and rubbed them. “You hit it dead on, little pal, but only part of it,” he said. “Sure, I’d like to see you with a medical degree and know I’d had something to do with it. But forget me. Be selfish about it. A degree would protect you, not expose you to more trouble. Knowledge, success, the respect of other doctors—that would be your defense against the world.”

  “There’s no protection against myself. My feelings. I didn’t tell you about the girls back home, Jack, walking down country lanes after school with their arms around the boys, kissing and laughing. The girls I couldn’t touch or talk to or even smile at. The girls I’d grown up with, suddenly filling out their sweaters and their nylons, smooth and sweet with scented hair and pink mouths. I didn’t tell you how I ached for them.”

  He got up and crossed the room, looking out his front windows. “I don’t want you to end up an old bull dyke in faded denims, letting some blowsy little fem take care of you,” he said acidly. “You’re not a bum.”

  “I don’t want that, either. But Jack, I can’t spend the rest of my life wondering!” She went to his side, speaking urgently, wanting him to root for her, not against her. “They call this life gay,” she said softly, following his gaze out the windows. “I need a little gaiety.”

  “They call it gay out of a perverted sense of humor,” he said.

  Across the street two young women were walking slowly in the mild evening air, arms around each other’s waists. “There,” Beebo said, nodding at them. “That’s what I want. I’ve wanted it ever since I knew girls did such things.”

  “You mean Mona?” he said.

  Beebo shoved her hands into her pockets, self-conscious as always when that name came up. “You have to start somewhere,” she said.

  “You have quite a thing about her, don’t you?” he said.

  Beebo’s cheeks flushed and she looked at the floor. “I never dared to admit that I wanted a girl before, Jack. Maybe I picked the wrong time. Or the wrong audience.”

  “Pal, you just picked the wrong girl.”

  “I don’t want you to pity me. That’s why I held out so long. I need you, Jack. You’re the first friend—the first brother—I ever had.”

  Jack was touched and embarrassed. “I feel no pity for
you, Beebo,” he said. “You don’t need pity. I feel friendship and…anxiety. If you’ve made up your mind to stay here, I’ll do anything to help you, teach you, take you around. But, honey—not Mona. She doesn’t believe in anything but kicks. She’ll charm the pants off you and then leave you standing naked in front of your enemies.”

  “Are you trying to say you disapprove of Mona, but not of the fact that I’m—I must be—gay?” she said.

  “Why would I disapprove of that?” he said and then he laughed. “I swear to God, Beebo, you can be thicker than bean soup. I’ve done everything but sing it for you in C sharp.”

  “I know you’ve tried to be tolerant and all, introducing me to your friends. I thought it was because you suspected about me and you wanted to be a good sport.”

  “I’m trying to explain about me, not you,” he said, throwing out his hands and still chuckling.

  Beebo smiled back, mystified. “Let me in on the joke, will you?”

  “The joke’s on me this time,” he said.

  She studied him a moment, her smile yielding to perplexity. And then she said, “Oh!” suddenly and lifted a hand to her face. She went back to the sofa and sat down with her head in her hands.

  “Well, you don’t need to feel badly about it, pal,” he said, joining her. “I don’t. There are even days when I feel sorry for the straight people.”

  “Jesus, I should have seen it,” she murmured.

  “No, you shouldn’t. I’m a genius at hiding it.”

  “Jack, I’m sure a fool. I’ve been up to my eyes in my own troubles.”

  He shook his head. “I couldn’t believe you wouldn’t figure it out. It’s hard to realize the kind of life you’ve been leading up to now. How little you’ve been allowed to see or understand.”

  She looked up at him. “Thanks for being patient,” she said. “I mean it. Jack, how long have you been gay? How did you find out about yourself?”

  “I didn’t. I was told. In the Navy, by a hairy little gob who kept climbing into my bunk at night and telling me fairy stories. When he got a rise out of me, he made the diagnosis. I told him to go to hell, but the next night, I was climbing into his bunk.”