The Beebo Brinker Omnibus

by Ann Bannon

  “Hey, buddy,” Beebo said. “Maybe she’s mixed up but she’s still your mother. You know what we talked about that day when I was there? How much she loves you. She cried because you don’t believe her.”

  Toby pressed his lips together, unwilling to concede a single virtue to Venus. “My name isn’t Bogardus,” he said finally. “It’s Henderson.”

  “Your mother loves you, Toby Henderson.”

  “My father lives in Chicago. Were you ever there? He runs a dairy processing plant in Gary, Indiana. I’ve never met him and I never want to.”

  Beebo was shocked. After a moment she said, “Well, maybe you can’t love somebody you don’t know, even if he is your father. But aren’t you curious?”

  “Oh, he’s probably a dirty dog like the rest of us. At least if I never meet him, I can pretend he’s something better.”

  Beebo felt a stinging sympathy for him. “My father means a lot to me,” she said.

  “How come you don’t live with him, then? You said he lived in Wisconsin. Did you run away, Beebo? You’re awful young to be on your own here. How come?”

  He had scored a bull’s eye. She wondered how many years of lonely introspection it had cost Toby to become that perceptive; that quick to see the truth beneath the social tricks.

  “I had some tough problems, Toby,” she said. She was suddenly so grave that he retreated from the subject, afraid of hurting her. Beebo was thinking what it would do to him to know that she was a Lesbian; how desperately he would worry about her and his mother.

  “I’m not the dope Mom thinks I am,” he declared. “You can talk to me.”

  “No, you’re no dope, but I am, for running away. And I’ll tell you something, buddy. Fathers are something special. Even yours.”

  “Sure. He and Mom got together and manufactured me. Something special. A gorilla could have done the job better, Mom says. Or a test tube. Sometimes I think that’d be okay—a test tube. Then I’d never even have to know his name.”

  Beebo felt a little like crying. But it would ruin her prestige with him. She swallowed and said, “He must write to you. Send you birthday presents, and things.”

  “The only present he ever gave me was epilepsy,” Toby said in a flinty voice. “Mom says it came from his side of the family. So I haven’t much to thank him for. Do you know what that is—epilepsy?” He had said the word so many times there was no longer any drama in it for him.

  “Your mom told me,” Beebo said. “Does it…make things rough for you? Like at school, with the other kids?”

  “Not too bad,” he said. But she looked at his face and thought differently. It had made him shy and apologetic about himself, and, consequently, fiercely defensive. At any time, he might become a major source of inconvenience or even panic to his schoolmates, though the seizures hit him infrequently in their presence. Still, it was those times he remembered better than any others.

  “Leo is good about it,” Toby said. “He’s a pretty good guy. I’d rather have him around than Mrs. Sack, even.”

  “What’s Leo like?” Beebo said, suddenly afire to know.

  “He stands up to Mom, if that’s what you mean. She hates him, naturally, but she respects him. Leo gave her her name. He knew her before anybody else in Hollywood. He was her agent, and he got her started.”

  “What’s her real name?”

  “Jean Jacoby.”

  “That’s pretty…. Why won’t Leo divorce her?”

  “He really loves her, I guess. Boy, what a glutton for punishment,” Toby marveled.

  “If she hates him, why did she marry him?”

  “Oh, she talked herself into a crush on all her husbands,” Toby said, and Beebo wondered who had explained it all to him with such authority…. Leo? Mrs. Sack? “They were all rich and good looking and married to somebody else till she came along. I think it was sort of a challenge.”

  Beebo absorbed this in silence, disapproving and yet oddly amused. “What does Leo do?” She pictured him as a sort of legitimatized gigolo for his stunning wife.

  “He’s a director now. He directs all her films. That’s why people think she’s an actress. He can get a performance out of her nobody else can. She hates to admit it, but she loves her reviews. If they ever did get divorced, she’d have to let him keep on directing.” His words made Leo Bogardus seem like more of a man than Beebo would have liked. She lighted a cigarette.

  “Hey, can I have one too?” Toby said, with the light of friendly collusion in his eyes. “It’s okay, I’ve smoked before.”

  She handed him her pack. “I’m contributing to the delinquency of a minor, you know,” she grinned. “It’s your fault, buddy. You’d better kick the habit before they haul me in.”

  He did not inhale the smoke, but he was very pleased with himself, and with Beebo. He held the cigarette in a self-conscious imitation of a man’s gesture, taking a cautious mouthful occasionally and blowing it out with dreamy satisfaction.

  “Do you get along with Leo, Toby?” Beebo asked.

  “He’s been real decent to me. He does things with me, even when they’re things I don’t want to do. It’s nice of him…you know? And sometimes I end up liking the things I didn’t think I would. It’s funny…he tries to make them interesting. I guess you could say I like him.”

  Beebo grinned at him, impressed by his adolescent acuity; and aware, despite his wary phrasing, that Leo was quite an influence in his life. “You’re pretty grown up for your age, aren’t you?” she said seriously, and made him smile at the flattery.

  But his answer startled her. “I had to grow up,” he said, “with men climbing in and out of Mom’s bed while I played on the floor with my blocks.”

  “God! Was it that bad?” Beebo said.

  “They all thought I’d be the best adjusted kid for miles around,” he said with psychological detachment into a cloud of very grownup smoke. “I don’t know why all that stuff should embarrass me now that I’m nearly fifteen. I used to sit there and watch the whole show when I was little.” His face lengthened. “It never got to me then.”

  Beebo saw the resentment on his face flash and alternate with confusion, even love, for Venus. She wondered how much Venus was trying to show her love for him these days, and if it was making Toby all the more suspicious of her.

  “Toby,” Beebo said. “Do you know that Venus is kind of afraid of you?”

  He turned his face away.

  “She wants you to know she loves you, but she’s afraid you’ll think she’s kidding after all these years.”

  “She’s right.”

  “Maybe now that she’s trying to say it, you could listen,” Beebo suggested casually.

  Toby gave a deep sigh. “I guess that’s what she’s been doing all week,” he said. “She keeps saying she has something to say but she never says anything.” He returned Beebo’s gaze, his blue eyes, so like his mother’s, pained and puzzled. “I don’t care how she says it, if only she means it. I was lousy to her because whenever I try to tell her something, she’s lousy to me. I wanted to get back at her.”

  “You’ve only got one mother, Toby. You’ve got to make the best of her. I wouldn’t care so much what my mother was like, if I’d only known her. She died when I was young.”

  Toby pondered this a while, and then said, “If you ever run away again, I’ll go with you.” It was not an offer, it was a request—a plea.

  “You’re welcome aboard,” she smiled.

  Venus was waiting for them outside the elevator door in the service entrance, one early evening in the first week of September. Strangely, Beebo wasn’t surprised. It had been coming for weeks, and now she had to face it.

  Toby grimaced at his mother, and Beebo handed her the carton of home-cooked food. “Here’s your dinner,” she said. “Mrs. Pasquini appreciates all the orders.”

  “You might as well keep it, she never eats it,” Toby revealed. “She just orders it to keep you coming over.”

  “Sh!” Venus ex
claimed at him. She was wearing a bright-blue knit dress, into which her famous frame was smoothly slipped; a glowing target for the eyes.

  “Toby says you’re a good driver,” Venus said. “Now I suppose he’ll pester Leo to teach him when we get home.”

  “You know I can’t drive, Mom,” he said wearily. “They don’t give licenses to epileptics.”

  “Well, we’ll talk to the governor, darling,” she said.

  “Besides, what do you mean, ‘home’? California?” He looked at her suddenly, brightening. “I thought we were going to be here all winter.”

  Beebo felt almost dizzy at the thought of losing Venus before she had won her. It was too much to bear. Everything went wrong in bunches. “Home?” she repeated, frowning at Venus.

  “Well, you both look as if I had dropped a bomb,” Venus declared. “I just thought, with Toby’s friends in California, and all those miserable horses and sunshine and ocean…I guess I can put up with the smog.”

  “Mom, that’s great,” he said, surprise all over his face. “Are you doing a new picture?”

  “No, darling. I’m turning over a new leaf,” she said.

  They looked at each other and Beebo sensed an awkward rapport between them. After a decent pause she said, “Well—have a good trip, you two. I guess I won’t be seeing you again, Toby.”

  He turned to her in consternation, and Venus said, “Don’t be silly, darling. I have some lovely martinis all ready upstairs and a perfectly irresistible business proposition for you.”

  “Business?” Beebo said.

  Toby made a face. “Monkey business,” he said. “Can you walk on your hands, Beebo?”

  “Hush, darling,” Venus said, pulling them both into the elevator. “Not until she’s had her martini.”

  Toby had a distant look on his face on the way up. “I’ll have to write to everybody,” he said. “So they’ll know I’m coming.”

  Beebo let herself be led into the living room, full of sharp doubts that made her jumpy. Venus watched Toby go with a smile. “He’ll be busy for hours,” she told Beebo. “He rewrites all his letters two or three times. You’d think he was going to publish them someday.”

  Beebo sat down on a long white sofa and accepted a martini with an unsteady hand. The trembling had started already, and it seemed impossible to talk or act like a normal human being.

  But Venus, who was more of a sorceress than a goddess, talked softly to her for half an hour, letting the drinks and her own silvery charm relax her guest. Even then, Beebo looked so gloomy that Venus began to chuckle at her. She refilled their glasses and asked her, “Do you hate yourself for coming up tonight?”

  “Not as much as I hate you for asking me,” Beebo said.

  “Be fair now, darling,” Venus chided. “I’m not responsible for your weakness, am I?”

  “You know damn well you are,” Beebo said. And in the pause that followed she felt that if she didn’t escape now, she never would. “I’m sorry, it’s not your fault,” she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. “I guess you were born with—all that.” She couldn’t look at “all that” while she spoke of it.

  “No, I had to grow it, darling. Took me fifteen years, and it was a hell of a wait.”

  Beebo moved to the edge of the sofa when Venus joined her. “Were you a poor proud orphan till some movie scout discovered you?”

  “Oh, God no!” Venus laughed. “My family was solid apple pie. The trouble was, I was always so damn beautiful I never had a chance to be normal.” She spoke dispassionately, as if she were analyzing a friend. It wasn’t snobbish. “I was supposed to be fast and loose because I looked it. At first the attention spoiled me. I was cocky. A candy-box valentine brat with corkscrew curls—my mother’s pride and joy. Until I drove her frantic, and my friends out of my life. Nobody could stand me. Honestly. You laugh, but I cried when it happened. I couldn’t understand why I was alone all of a sudden.

  “I got shy and scared. Went my own way and told the world to go to hell. After a while, when my figure caught up with my face, I made some new friends: boys. It was so easy to give in. So hard to be anything but what people thought you were,” she said, and Beebo responded with a startled swell of sympathy. “Well, in a phrase, they made me what I am today: a conniving bitch.” Venus spoke defiantly…and regretfully.

  “I’m not proud of it, but I want to be truthful with you. You’re a sweetheart, Beebo. And very young, and maybe not too experienced. Tell me why you’ve made Toby come up alone with the food all these weeks. Did you think I’d throw spaghetti at you?”

  Beebo took a swallow of her drink. “I don’t want to crawl, Venus. I don’t want to be hurt,” she said harshly, defending herself with painful honesty in lieu of a worldly white lie.

  “Nobody does,” Venus said. “Were you expecting to be?”

  “Isn’t that what you want?” Beebo said, looking deep into her ice cubes. “To play games?”

  Venus touched a finger to Beebo’s cheek. “You’re not crawling,” she said. “You’re being difficult. That’s new for me.”

  “Is playing around with girls new for you, too?” Beebo asked, afraid to know the answer.

  “Depends on how you mean it,” Venus said. “You don’t trust me, do you?” She smiled.

  Beebo caught Venus’s hand as it caressed her cheek and kissed it warmly. And remembered with sudden sadness the way Paula had done that to her when they met. She put Venus’s hand down gingerly on the sofa.

  Venus let her sit and stew for a minute and then slipped across the cushion toward her. Their faces were very near and Venus put her rejected hand on Beebo’s leg. “I’m trying to give myself to you and you won’t have me,” she said. “Now who’s crawling?” She let her other hand, cool and questing, touch Beebo’s neck and slip over her shoulder, drawing fire with it.

  “You’re putting me on,” Beebo said, determinedly suspicious as only the young and uncertain can be. She took a deep breath. “But I don’t care,” she cried suddenly. “I don’t care. I’ll have you any way I can.” She put her head down and kissed Venus’s throat, putting her arms around her and grasping her firmly. Venus leaned against her, warm and willow-supple.

  “You want to know how it feels, don’t you?” Beebo said, trying to hurt her feelings, so sure Venus would hurt Beebo first if she could. “You want to know what it’s like for a girl to hold you instead of a man. Any time you get bored, let me know.” She bent to kiss her again but Venus stopped her. She was dismayed, and Beebo was ashamed to see it.

  “You really do hate me, don’t you?” Venus said.

  Beebo closed her eyes for a minute. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. She felt Venus moving in her arms. “I thought you were bored and frigid. Taking me like a prescription, or something. The way you talked—”

  “The way I talked about men, not women. Beebo, do you know something? I was scared to death you’d take one look at this face of mine, panic, and run out.” Her hands slid around Beebo’s back and into her short dark hair.

  Beebo’s face turned hot while those hands trailed softly through her hair and over her eyes. “You’re superb, Beebo,” Venus said. “I think I’m the one who’s afraid. I wouldn’t be if I knew you better. And myself.”

  “You know more than I know,” Beebo said. “Is this all a joke, Venus?”

  Venus hushed her by pulling her down and kissing her mouth, and her tenderness was no pleasantry. Beebo kissed back: Venus’s face, her ears, her pale throat, till Venus made her stop, shaking her curls to be let loose, and laughing.

  “Who the hell am I,” Beebo exclaimed, “that you should kiss me like this?”

  Venus caught her breath. “You talk to me as if I were a woman,” she said at last, gratefully. “Not a goddess, or a bitch. It hurts a little, but it feels good to hurt like that. Like when you’re awfully young and you have a beautiful dreamy pain to cry over.”

  Beebo rubbed her head back and forth in the cradle of Venus’s shoulder. “Did you c
ry over your dreams like other girls, Venus?”

  “I cried, but not like other girls. I never did anything like other girls. I never even looked like them.”

  “Would you rather be plain?” Beebo asked.

  Venus looked away and found the dignity to be honest. “No,” she said. “It’s a funny thing about women and me. Half the time I want to make them weep with despair over my beauty. And the other half I ache to be friends with them. Accepted. All the things I wasn’t when I was growing up. My whole world is men. They’re the only friends I have, and they aren’t really friends at all. Not with a woman like me. The women close to me are either fat and old, like Mrs. Sack, or homely and heartless, like Miss Pinch.”

  “The cook? Is that her name?” Beebo gave in to laughter that relieved her tenseness a little.

  “I know, it’s too good to be true,” Venus said. “Leo started calling her that, and it caught on. I fire her regularly but she comes back like a bad dream. She’s devoted to Leo.”

  Beebo put her head down so she could talk without exposing her emotions to Venus’s eyes. “Do you miss having a woman in your life?” she asked.

  “Yes. The right kind. Somebody cultured and intelligent and well-educated. Somebody to teach me things. I’m so damned stupid.”

  Beebo gave a short wry laugh. “Venus? I think there’s something you should know.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t finish high school.”

  Venus laughed, a charming sound, full of pleasure. “I thought you meant, did I want a secretary, or something,” she said.

  “I’ll bet you did.” Beebo sat up and lowered herself to the floor, where she leaned back on the sofa, locking her fingers around her knees. She felt Venus’s hand come down to play with her ear.

  “Did I say something wrong, darling?” Venus said.