“I know it’s late,” she said, her voice soft and level, “but I was worried I’d miss you if I waited until morning. After the night you’ve had, I figured you’d head back to Royal Oak as soon as possible.” She fidgeted with her dress, brushing off lint that wasn’t there.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“The minute I got back in town, George told me you’d been asking about me and you’d gone to Croc’s searching for me. So I went looking for you. Billy must’ve followed me from Royal Oak and rounded up his sailor buddies to cause trouble. He was hoping to hurt me, not you. Henry told me what you went through. I’m so very sorry. Really. You were caught up in someone else’s ugly story. I beg your patience while I explain.”
“She needs you to understand,” George said, leaning forward, in an attitude of motherly protectiveness. “She can’t return to Jitters Gap. Ever.”
“I’m listening.”
Lily began. She explained how Billy Witherspoon had received a 4F from the Selective Service because of his diabetes and wasn’t called for the draft. He was lonely and idle, and his job at his father’s garage was boring him stiff. Lily was bored too, and as a result, easily flattered by his attempts to court her. If for no other reason than to fend off the gloom of Jitters Gap, she began seeing him. But when she attempted to pull away, he leeched onto her, resisting even a gentle parting of ways, and, in a gesture of desperation, he proposed to her. She rebuffed him immediately, sharply. He became furious and accused her of shaming him.
On the heels of Billy’s proposal, she received another proposal. Her aunt Kathy, who had lived in DC for years, invited her to come live with her in her boardinghouse and work for the government. Her father reluctantly granted her permission, and within a week, she was in DC; within a month, she found a job as a secretary at the Treasury Department. Billy continued to plague her with phone calls, letters, and even gifts.
“Occasionally, a letter would move me with its sincerity,” she said, “but I ignored the majority of them. I was changing, you see.”
“What she’s trying to say,” George broke in, “is she discovered she liked girls more than boys.”
Lily touched her gold earrings absentmindedly, as if she were afraid she might have lost one. I didn’t want to hear about her journey of self-discovery. I didn’t want her trying to draw sympathy out of me. I’d fled the underground world of Croc’s, and I didn’t want to look back.
“It was more than that,” Lily said. “But yes, I guess you’re right. For a few months, I was happy.”
Then Billy had appeared on her aunt’s doorstep, arms full of white roses and a box of Whitman’s, wearing his Sunday best. He fell to one knee and held out his grandma’s engagement ring and begged, “Lily, please marry me. I love you with all my heart. I’d do anything for you. I’ve left my home for you.”
She told him it was impossible. He became irate, cursed her, threw the roses and chocolate at her, and stormed off. Soon enough, though, he paid her another visit. And another. He continued to beg and plead with her, but he didn’t become violent again. With each of his attempts, she began to warm to him, wooed by the lowest form of flattery—desperation.
One January morning, he approached her when she was leaving for work. He was shaking from the cold, and his cheeks were flushed and raw. He walked with her to the streetcar stop.
“Lily,” he said. “I’ve run out of money. I can’t even afford a decent coat.” He was wearing a thin flannel jacket.
“Why don’t you get a job?”
“I didn’t think I’d be here this long.”
“I can’t help you.”
“I need a place to stay until I can find my footing. I was booted from my boardinghouse for not paying rent. I’ve been walking the streets all night.”
“You’ve taken this too far.”
But she was moved by his condition. Her aunt had just lost a boarder, so she persuaded her to let him stay with them for two weeks, or until he could secure a job. She made him promise there would be no more proposals.
After he had been with them for a week, Lily found him alone by the fire in the parlor one evening. Everyone else was out of the house. Billy’s head was in his hands, massaging his temples with his thumbs.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
But he didn’t respond.
“Billy, are you okay?”
He lifted his face from his palms, his cheeks moist with tears. “I really thought you would come to love me.”
She sighed and placed her hand on his shoulder.
He gently took it in his and said, “Can I have just one kiss, for good luck?”
There was a neediness, a sweetness about him that she found compelling. So she kissed him lightly, as if he were a little boy with a crush. He kissed her back, but his kiss wasn’t tender; no sign of the puppy-dog tears from moments earlier. He pressed his mouth and his body into hers and forced her onto a settee, pinning her arms against it.
In my room at the hotel, Lily faltered a little. This part of the story was hers and hers only, not for the sharing. She glanced at George, and her stoic, moon-pale face broke its countenance, and although she was determined not to cry, little tremors of pain ran from her forehead to her lips.
Why did she let such a man in her home? I thought. Why did she believe his histrionics, his saccharine charm?
Of course, at the time, I didn’t realize I was seeing myself in her, that I was questioning myself. My own foolish belief in a boy had nearly ended in similar brutality by the same man earlier that evening. I wasn’t thinking right. Lily wasn’t to blame and neither was I, but I was still so raw and angry that it was all jumbled in my mind.
“I’m sorry,” I said coolly.
“It wasn’t the only time,” George said.
Lily nodded. “The next night he forced his way into my bedroom and did it again. When it was over, I vowed if it happened another time, I was going to fight him.”
And so Billy came again a week later. He shoved the door open, popping the eye-hook out of the wall. Lily, not asleep yet, snatched a pencil from her bedside table. She had been writing in her journal before bed and had several freshly sharpened pencils. He must not have seen her move in the dark room, because as he approached her, his guard was down. When he leaned across her, pressing his knee into her side, she sat up and jammed the pencil into his arm. He screamed and toppled over. He kicked frantically at the darkness around him, managing to overturn the bedside table and scatter its contents across the floor in a bright clatter of glass and metal. Then, recovering a little, he backed himself into a corner, breathing in great gasps, steadied himself against her dresser, and lunged for the door.
When Kathy and several other boarders appeared in the doorway, Lily still had her back to the wall, pencils held out in front of her like soldiers in a phalanx. She told them she had attacked Billy, because she thought he was a burglar, and at first they believed her. However, after getting patched up, Billy came back, and Kathy, having put two and two together, told him to get out and forbade him to return. She was holding her late husband’s rifle on him at the time, the safety switched off. He left, taking a job as a deckhand on a cargo ship, and for a long time, Lily didn’t hear from him.
“That’s when I enter the picture,” George said. “Lily was pushing paper over at the Treasury Department, and Vivian, a friend of mine who worked with her, invited her to drinks at Croc’s. I think Viv was trying to make a move on her, but Lily—being the innocent little lamb she is—didn’t know she was crossing into uncharted territory. When I first saw her, I knew she was something special. That face of hers, wouldn’t you agree, is as smooth and dreamy as a silent movie star’s, and that hillbilly accent—pure charm. She didn’t condescend to me, either. I’m sorry, Bunny, but most white girls are that way. They can’t imagine a negro woman who is as sophisticated as they are.”
“I thought you were beautiful,” Lily said.
“You handled all the
shit that came your way with great poise. If you ask me, honey, that’s the definition of sophistication.”
“I was smitten, that’s all.”
“Being a concierge is just my day job, Bunny. My passion is the blues. Lena Horne, with that magnificent voice of hers, is my idol. I invited Lily to hear me sing at Club Caverns one night.”
“And she sang ‘Stormy Weather.’ It was so beautiful and sad. I fell for her then and there—but we’re getting off track.”
George leaned toward Lily and covered Lily’s hands with her wide palm. The gesture made me queasy. Hours before, Billy had called me a “goddamn dyke,” and his voice still hung in my ears like stale air. Billy’s violence, his ugliness, had been terrifying, but even more terrifying was, as I sat there, I could identify with his sentiment. I wanted Lily and George to tell their story and leave. I never wanted to see them again.
“It was only a week later I met Jay at Croc’s,” Lily continued. “I overheard him talking to a soldier about Royal Oak, and I butted in and told him I came from the same area. We compared notes on our childhoods, and we both decided the mountains were stifling, especially being, well … who we are. He told me I looked like a friend of his. I wonder if he meant you? You’re much prettier than I am—and a brunette. It really seemed to intrigue him, though. For a moment, I thought he might be flirting with me, but of course, he wasn’t there for the girls. Anyway, the three of us really hit it off, and we became good friends.”
But Billy haunted her from hundreds of miles out to sea. She hadn’t been feeling well for a while, and one day in late March, after a lengthy bout in the bathroom, George looked at her and said: “You’re pregnant, honey.”
The news was crushing. She was four weeks along and was completely at a loss. After much discussion, she decided she needed to be with her father. He could provide financial security. She phoned him and told him she wanted to come home. She told George she didn’t know if she would return to DC.
Frank Vellum had been lonely in Lily’s absence and had started seeing Bernice Hersh, but Bernice was needy, hotheaded, and brash, not qualities Frank particularly admired, so their affair had been waning. Frank was pleased to have his daughter home. He doted on her and bought her dresses and even a strand of pearls at Brickles.
Eventually, Lily told him about her condition. His face flushed with shock and confusion, and then softened with the gloom of disappointment. In a terrible silence, he drove her to the doctor. After the family physician confirmed it, her father said, “Whose baby is it?” She begged him not to make her tell, but he insisted. So she told him.
“Jesus Christ, Lily,” he said. “You left town because of him!”
“He followed me.”
“And your aunt let this happen?”
“It wasn’t her fault. I was the one who asked her if he could stay with us. He was starving. I never thought … I thought he understood. Please don’t tell Kathy. I’m so sorry.”
“I’ll give you that—you are sorry. You desert me and then you come crawling back when you’ve gone and gotten yourself pregnant. I would take a layer of skin off your backside if you were younger. I don’t know what the hell to do with you now.”
Lily fell quiet for a moment, her hand still in George’s. Her eyes were full and tense, tears nearly at the cusp, but she seemed determined to control herself.
“I couldn’t bring myself to tell Daddy how it really happened,” she said, and smiled vaguely. “I know that seems odd, but I just couldn’t say it. The words were like jelly in my mouth. I was afraid if I told him, he wouldn’t believe me. That would’ve been so much worse. So he locked me in the house and refused to let me go out. He didn’t want anyone to know I was pregnant. He wanted me to have the baby and give it up. I caved in. I was at his mercy. Then George’s letter arrived. Daddy was screening my correspondence, but I got lucky, and he wasn’t home when the mail arrived one day.
“George wrote such a lovely note. The last line said, ‘Remember I love you, and remember who you are.’ Her words cut through the fog I was in. You see, I hadn’t asked for the baby. I had done everything I could to prevent it. It was me against the baby, each in a corner, and I was going to fight it out. I wrote a letter to George and a letter to Jay, begging them to help me.”
“That’s the letter I have,” I said. “The letter to Jay.”
“As soon as I received her letter,” George said, “I started hunting for a doctor to do the procedure. I know several girls who have had it done.”
George frowned at me. The disapproval was apparently evident on my face. I wasn’t raised in a particularly religious household, but abortion, not unlike homosexuality, seemed to deserve my scorn. Like many other people, I simply took my cues from my community.
George said, “I was against it, on principle, but I wanted Lily’s suffering to stop. In her letter to me, she told me she couldn’t love her baby knowing it had Billy’s blood running through its veins. I understood. I found an MD who did the procedures underground. It was going to cost a small fortune, but if it brought her back to me, then I was willing to give up my savings.”
“Jay had left DC by that time,” Lily said. “He didn’t get my letter immediately. In fact, George contacted him first. They decided they needed a more secretive way of communicating with me, so Jay became the messenger. He would drive over to Jitters Gap, sneak up to my window late at night, and rap on the glass to get my attention. On his first visit, Daddy almost caught him. I didn’t know he was coming, you see. He saw Jay running away, and I told him it was Billy. He believed me.”
“Jay had been to your house many times before he took us,” I said. “He lied about that too.”
“That’s strange. I don’t understand why he would take you there.”
I did, but I didn’t offer an explanation.
“During his visits, we planned my escape. Inspired by my lie to my father about Billy’s appearance at my window, we decided to stage an abduction, hoping Daddy would go looking for Billy, who was still out to sea. On Friday the thirteenth of July—I remember being nervous we had picked that date—Jay forced open my window to make the abduction believable. I spent the night at his house, and the next day, we drove to DC in his grandmother’s car.”
“I saw the article and your photograph in the paper,” I said. “I thought it was odd Jay said he’d planned to meet you to take your photo for a modeling application four days after you’d disappeared. He slipped up on that one.”
“A modeling application?”
“You never rendezvoused with Jay to have your photo taken?”
“No. I wonder why he’d tell you that.”
“You never met on a train either, did you?”
“I took the train, but never with Jay. Come to think of it, he did shoot photos of Viv, when she thought she might try out modeling, if I’m remembering right. Nothing came of it, though.”
For a moment, I stared at her, taking in her nervous eyes, the pale pink of her blush. “He needed to find a way to connect himself to you without giving away how well he knew you. It was to make them believable.”
“I don’t follow you—”
“The photos. He wanted us to believe they were what he said they were.”
“I’m so sorry. I’m confused.”
“Just finish your story,” I said sharply.
A little flustered, Lily continued: “When I arrived in DC, I stayed here at the Howard. George rented me an inexpensive room. I was too afraid and ashamed to contact Kathy. George took good care of me, and we talked about what we might do together. We fantasized about traveling abroad, visiting exotic locations, inventing new names and identities for ourselves. My anger gradually subsided, and the bitterness eased. I’m not sure what it was. Maybe it was George’s kindness, or maybe it was being away from Daddy. Either way, I began to believe I could keep the baby. I told myself the baby was part Billy, but she was also part me, and that counted for something—for a lot. When the day of t
he appointment came, I didn’t go. George was surprised by my decision.”
“Yes, I was,” George added. “I was pleased too.”
“We decided then and there we would raise the child on our own, even if we had to live on the fringe. A black woman and a white woman together—who’s going to want to have anything to do with us?”
A pang of resentfulness shot through me, but I tried not to show the displeasure on my face. I still wanted to know everything they knew about Jay, so I steadied myself and listened patiently.
“Unknown to us,” George said softly, “Billy had returned to DC and heard about Lily’s disappearance. He wasn’t happy to discover he was the prime suspect. He decided the best way to clear his name was to find Lily and bring her back, so he started asking around. He went to the Treasury Department and bullied Viv, who knew nothing about Lily’s disappearance, but stupidly, she mentioned my name. Then a few weeks ago, he showed up in the lobby of the Howard spitting fire.
“I was on duty then. When he asked me where Lily was, I played dumb, but he wasn’t having any of it. He said, ‘Tell me where she is, or I’ll beat you to a pulp.’ He meant it too. I told him to hold on a second while I got the manager, and I slipped into the back office, sliding the bolt behind me. He hopped the desk and came after me and began pounding on the door, calling me all sorts of things. Nigger this, nigger that. Sticks and stones, I always say. He quieted down, and I came out after a few minutes. He was gone.”
She paused. “I should’ve been smarter,” she said. “I should’ve thought …”
“It’s okay,” Lily insisted.
“Billy saw the hotel register on the front desk. That’s what made him stop huffin’ and puffin’. He found Lily’s name and the room number beside it. It was stupid of me to leave it out in the open. Plain stupid.”
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