But Nora gently made an excuse, each time, and refused. The thought of sleeping with Pammy in that big bed was somehow too troubling to be considered. She knew perfectly well that girls did spend the night with each other without thinking twice; in her early teens she had been jealous of girls who could hug each other and kiss with spontaneous affection, but she had never been one of them. She had always been stand-offish, apart.
But of course the inevitable happened. They had been dressing after a swim, alone for once. Nora's jeans and Pammy's linen shorts were hanging from the same hook. Pammy turned, naked, gently bumping Nora's bare thigh. She stopped and stood very still, looking up at Nora with startled gray eyes.
Nora felt herself blushing. Her own flat boyish body seemed hardly to belong to the same sex as Pammy's; the curving hips, the small brown-tipped breasts, the hand-span waist. Nora was embarrassed at her nakedness, though she and Mack had often undressed for a casual swim, simply turning their backs on each other.
"You'd better get dressed, Pam."
"Oh, Nor, don't be prissy, we're both girls," Pammy said with a giggle. "You'd make a cute boy, though. Want to be my boy friend?"
"Pammy, don't—"
"Course, if you were a boy, I prob'ly wouldn't be standing here like this." Pammy was close to Nora, her damp tousled curls just touching Nora's bare shoulder. Suddenly Nora felt Pammy's arms pressing her close, Pammy's rounded breasts, rose-petal soft, brushing the spare slenderness of her own. Then Pammy swayed, crushing her body hard against Nora's.
"Kiss me, Nor," she begged in a whisper, "Please, please, kiss me—"
As if in a daze, Nora gathered Pammy up, lifting her from the floor. She was conscious of Pammy's silk skin touching her everywhere, as if her whole body were seared by it. Pammy's soft mouth, like a child's, stayed closed under her searching lips, but she wriggled her knee between Nora's thighs. They clung together for a long time, hungrily, dazed; then, signing, Nora felt the tense ache in her loins loosen and dissolve and she lowered Pammy gently to the floor. Pammy dropped her head to Nora's shoulder and held her, trembling.
Nora gave her a tender little spank. "Get dressed, you naughty girl," she whispered.
Dreamily they put on their clothes. Then Pammy pulled her back and stood on tiptoe, pressing her mouth to Nora's; Nora stood numb, shaking, her hands cupped around Pammy's breasts—so soft and warm through the thin blouse. Finally they pulled apart and Pammy, laughing nervously, fumbled in her beach bag for lipstick.
"Now you'll come and spend the night, won't you, Nor?" she teased. Nora couldn't remember what she answered; she only remembered the taste of Pammy's tangled hair under her lips. When they said goodbye Pammy had squeezed her hands and laughed. Her red mouth had never looked so merry.
She had never seen Pammy again. That night Nora's father had called her to the telephone. The voice of Pammy's father had been harsh and curt:
"Miss Caine, you are to have nothing further to do with my daughter Pamela."
Nora had literally stammered "Wha—what? Why?"
"Apparently you are not aware that there is a second entrance to the women's dressing quarters at the pool," he said coldly. "Pamela's mother was standing there this afternoon, and she saw what happened. Miss Caine, I do not interfere with Pamela's choice of friends, but—" and the voice had gone hard and vicious, "I do not allow my daughters to associate with lesbians." At that time Nora had not even known the word.
He had hung up on her stammered protest, and Nora sank down by the telephone in sudden, shocked comprehension.
She made no effort to justify herself. Pammy had first embraced her, true. But she was older than Pamela (she did not stop to consider that in worldly wisdom she was immeasurably the younger) and she should have prevented it from happening.
She went through the week in dazed and helpless pain, the world bleak and purposeless without Pammy's daily calls. Then autumn came, and she heard that the college of her first choice had accepted her; and when she came home next summer the Bristols had sold the big house and moved to another state, and she had never heard of any of them again—until Jill had walked into her consulting room an hour ago.
Nora felt now mild amusement and pity. She wondered, with retrospective tenderness, if Pammy had been punished. Poor little Pammy.
Nora supposed there was hardly a girl in the world—or boy either—who had not, either on impulse or in deliberate experimental mood, caressed another of his own sex. Such things happened to adolescents; they grew out of them. What had happened with Pammy had been as innocent, and as trivial, as the play of very tiny children. Nora had long ago dismissed any lingering guilt about it.
Or had she? Had the unconscious memory made her, by turns, too kind or too brusque with Jill? Jill, who now seemed so much like Pammy that it seemed incredible Nora had not recognized her at once.
Returning to the present, Nora frowned, pulling on her hooded coat and driving gloves, and went down the highway to her car. She'd already wasted too much time, and Kit was waiting.
CHAPTER 2
It began to snow late that night. Nora, driving back from a tense, unsatisfactory visit to Kit, welcomed the driving sleet; the icy roads, demanding every scrap of her attention, kept her mind off Kit's fierce, longing eyes. She could forget the way his hand had clung, furtively seeking out her breast, until, seeing a nurse's eyes on them, she had had to push his fingers gently aside.
All the next day the snow fell heavily; but toward evening the storm receded, allowing glimpses of a black, bruised-looking sky. At half-past five, Nora sat over a cold cup of coffee in the hotel dining room, impatiently checking her watch; evening office hours began at seven, and so far there was no sign of Mack.
She thought without pleasure of the cold empty farmhouse, and the strange patients; she thought with regret of her own comfortable Albany apartment and the good food and smooth beds of her housekeeper; and for the hundredth time she wished that Dr. Byrd, and his pneumonia, and his broken-down old farmhouse office, and his whole country practice, were all frying together on a choice grid in hell.
She was dreading the meeting with Mack. In a profession which is still not too easy for women, she had learned not to look back much. Youth is not an asset in a doctor; since her twentieth birthday Nora had hidden her youth behind a severe face and businesslike clothes, and now, reminded of the years since she had last seen Mack, she realized that the pretense was now a reality, a part of herself; she was really not young. Had she ever been?
She wondered what the mysterious "her" would be like. It was hard to imagine Mack accounting for his comings and goings to a woman!
The outside door swung open, with a blast of icy wind, and Nora, looking up for Mack, saw Jill Bristol.
She was looking back over her shoulder at a big shaggy-looking man in the doorway, stamping the snow off his feet. He shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog, and turned into the room; and Nora, with a curious feeling of shock and inevitability, recognized Mack.
She rose and came slowly toward them. Jill's eyes met Nora's; a look of panic came suddenly into them, but Mack had not seen.
"Nora! Good to see you," he exclaimed, and seized her hand in both of his. They were big hands, calloused with rough work, and his face, deeply bronzed, had the lines put there by wind and weather. He was four inches taller and forty pounds heavier, but the laughing brown eyes were the same.
"Did we keep you waiting? My car gave up two blocks down the street, and I had to arrange to have it towed." He was still holding her hand. Nora had forgotten that curious clumsy charm of his. She forgot how she had dreaded this meeting. If Jill hadn't been there she would have kissed him. He stooped and brushed her cheek with his lips, still cold with the snowy wind.
"You haven't changed much, Nor." Still holding her hand, he turned to Jill. "Honey, this is my stepsister, Nora Caine—Ellersen," he corrected himself.
"Caine," she smiled, re-correcting him, "at least professionally."
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nbsp; "And this is my fiancée, Jill Bristol."
"But you're Nora," Jill said slowly. "I know you, though you probably don't remember me. Didn't you pal around with my sister, Pam, one summer?" She laughed, that nervous little laugh. "I used to have an awful crush on you."
Mack led the way to the table, holding a chair for Jill, then for Nora. "But where is Kit—I imagine it's the same Kit Ellersen we knew in college, isn't it? There wouldn't be two?"
"No, it's the same one."
"Why didn't you tell me he couldn't make it tonight? We'd have fixed up a time when he could!"
Nora said with a stiff little smile, "That would be difficult, I'm afraid. He's been in the Veteran's hospital for months, and he'll be there till next May."
"Good God!" Mack's grin vanished and he put his hand over Nora's. "What happened?"
She kept her voice flat and expressionless. "It was before I married him. He was in the reserves, and they sent him to Goodfellow Air Force Base, down Texas, as a flying instructor. Some fatheaded cadet who should have washed out of ground training managed to run a training plane into a bunch of telephone wires. They were both smashed up pretty badly."
Mack's hand tightened, painfully hard, on hers. "Me and my big mouth. So that was why you wouldn't break your date last night."
"That was why." Nora stared out the black window. Mack's sympathy made her feel—for the first time in years—like breaking down. Finally she looked up.
"They think, after a couple more operations, he'll have the full use of his legs again. But what about you, Mack? Still digging up buried cities and broken pottery in your spare time?"
"Full time now." Mack took Jill's slender, ringed fingers. "I got stuck behind a university desk for a few years, but I hated it. Then I was in Cambodia with a crew from the Sorbonne, and then—well, there's no time for a full-scale Odyssey, but next month I'm going to Peru with Harry Dunbardon. There's a city back in the Cordilleras—we flew over it a year ago and took aerial photos—"
"Dunbardon! But I saw that in the Geographic, Mack! Was that you?"
"Yours truly. It's back in the eastern range, what they call the Cordillera Oriente—but if I get started talking shop, I won't quit tonight. You know me."
"My letters used to come from the craziest places. Still as foot-loose as ever, then?"
"Well, not quite." He smiled at Jill, then looked at the window, dark with blowing snow. "I expect, before we order dinner, I'd better go and see what's doing on the car. I left it in the garage over there—I need a new one, but it hardly seems worth the trouble, when I'm taking off for Peru in three weeks!" He started to shove back his chair. "But you're not practicing here, are you, Nora?"
She shook her head. "I had an office in the Henderson building—maybe you saw it in the papers when it burned down? Everything gone, of course. I managed to lease office space, with a friend whose partner was retiring, but they couldn't get it fixed up within a month. Then I heard that old Byrd was laid up, and I offered to come out here until he was on his feet again. I've seen lights in the house, but it never occurred to me it was you!"
"And we could have gone right on missing each other," Mack said, "I've been driving to Syracuse two or three times a week—there are two big warehouses full of odds and ends that have to be crated and catalogued and shipped here, there and everywhere." He rose, pulling his coat around his shoulders. "Let me just go and see about the car. You order for me, Jill."
Jill watched him out of sight, then leaned across the table. "Nora, you didn't really recognize me yesterday, did you?"
"After you'd gone, I realized that you looked like Pammy. When are you and Mack going to be married?"
Jill said flatly and politely, "We haven't set a date," and the words were a courteous, but perfectly formed barrier against further questions.
Not so idyllic, then. But it doesn't seem like Mack. Is it his baby?
"Nora, you—you won't tell Mack I consulted you, will you?"
"Why—no, if you don't want me to," Nora said, mildly confused. "Didn't you ever hear of a professional confidence? I certainly wouldn't bring it up, unless you did."
Mack, snowflakes clinging to his thick eyebrows and beading his coat, came back and sat down. "The car's had it. Hope you've got your walking shoes on, Jill."
"I've got my car," Nora said, "I can run you both home before office hours. How far out do you live, Jill?"
Mack looked up sharply, but Jill met Nora's eyes, smiling.
"Well, as a matter of fact, I'm staying with Mack at your old place, and as far as people around here are concerned, I'm calling myself Mrs. MacLellan just now. It doesn't matter, but Mack's been in a stew because he introduced me as Jill Bristol."
Mack muttered, "Well, I wanted to ask Nora to our wedding, so how could I say—" he shrugged helplessly, but Jill reached across the table for his hand, and he smiled at her, his rugged face transformed with love. Nora felt a touch of cruel, sudden envy. She had been cheated of her honeymoon...
They lingered at the table, Nora and Mack exchanging desultory reminiscences; Jill seemed content to listen, saying little. Nora finally had to break it up.
"I'm sorry, but I may have someone waiting for me. If I'm going to drop you off, we'd better get going."
They were crowded in the front seat of her car, and Nora felt Jill's closeness with a small, not unpleasant shock. She stopped at the old house which had once been her home, too, and watched them go up the drive together, Mack's hand protectively beneath Jill's elbow.
As they mounted the snow-laden steps, they turned and waved at her; then Mack drew Jill gently inside. Nora saw a light go on; she shivered, feeling cold and lonely, and shut out in the drifting snow.
After a minute she set her mouth firmly, reached in her pocket for a cigarette and started the car toward her evening's work, the strange rustling house and her cold, lonely bed.
CHAPTER 3
Nora eased her car toward the curb, and rolled down the window. "Jill?" she called, "are you going to Albany? Wouldn't you rather ride? The bus won't be along for twenty minutes yet."
Jill came around the car and got in, and Nora asked, "Where is Mack?"
"He had to go to Syracuse. He wouldn't take me because he's still not sure of the car."
A late thaw had melted most of the snow left by the blizzard; the road was clear of slush, and the sky had a damp, deceptive blueness. Jill sat very straight on her half of the seat, like a well-behaved little girl in mittens and boots. Nora said after a minute, "I'm going to stop off at the lab and pick up your test report. You must be anxious about it."
"Not particularly. The rabbit test is the one they call the Friedman test, isn't it? We used the old Ascheim-Zondek test, with mice, in Syracuse."
Nora raised her eyebrows, startled.
"You certainly are full of surprises," she said. "Where did you learn all that?"
"I majored in biology at Cornell. I worked for a while as a technician in a Syracuse hospital—that's where I met Mack."
"When is Mack leaving for Peru?"
"Next week. Wednesday or Thursday, depending on when he can get a flight."
No wonder she wanted to know right away...
"Are you planning on going with him, Jill?"
"Oh, no. I couldn't."
"Are you—do you mind my asking you? Are you going to stay on in Mayfield after he leaves? What are you going to do?"
"I don't know," said Jill wearily, and Nora, turning her head, saw that her eyes were closed. She had meant the question quite literally, what are you going to do, what are your plans, but the unconscious despair in Jill's voice stopped her cold. It had sounded so helpless, so indecisive, as if—the thought came unbidden—as if the girl had not contemplated any future at all; as if there was nothing she could do after Mack had gone.
Nora made her decision suddenly, as she always made important decisions. "You worked as a technician? Can you do routine blood tests, sedimentation rates, that sort of thing?"
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br /> "I did in Syracuse."
"Well, look here, then. Dr. Byrd will be back Monday. A classmate of mine wants a couple of weeks off at Christmas, and I'm still at large—my office isn't ready yet—so I'm going up there. My office girl doesn't want to leave town, so why don't you come along? You could make yourself useful, and I imagine we could keep each other company. Unless you're going home for Christmas."
"I haven't a home to go to," Jill said, and her face warned Nora not to ask questions.
"Well, then, we'll call it settled," Nora said, swinging the car into the lane of traffic over the Hudson bridge. Far below lay the drab winter harbor, ships lying frozen into the greenish ice, and Nora shivered.
"Where shall I let you out? I'm going all the way uptown."
"Anywhere. I'm just going to kill time—maybe go window shopping."
Nora, somehow reluctant to let her go, said "Nonsense. This is no weather to be killing time like that. If you really mean that, come along with me and meet my husband!"
After last time, she was thinking as she turned her car into the hospital parking lot, it's just as well if we aren't alone together...
Jill followed quietly as Nora asked at the lobby desk for a visitor's pass. But as they rode up in the elevator, she said in surprise, "They're awfully formal here, aren't they? If even an outside doctor has to have a pass—"
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