Beggar of Love (6 page)

There wouldn’t be another train until Jarvy’s at seven. Jefferson pulled Angela up and they wandered toward the building, skirting it to avoid the main room and ticket windows, then strolling down a familiar set of stone steps. Jefferson tucked Angela’s arm under her own. She felt as wild and cool as James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause.

The platform was deserted, but passengers came and left at all hours, so the station was never locked. The bathrooms were downstairs, as well as wooden benches hidden from the street. The slightest echoing footfall on the wooden platform would break the sentry silence that filled the arches and high-ceilinged room of the empty station. They ducked into a short arched passageway that led to a locked wooden door. It was dark and out of the way.

Jefferson rested against the uneven stones, almost at the door, arms extended. Angela, eyes on Jefferson’s lips, moved to her so quickly she put her hands out as brakes. Jefferson’s lips touched hers again and again.

“Touch me, Jef. Touch me, touch me, touch me.”

“I love you, Ange. I love you,” she whispered.

“Jefferson, we have to find a way to be together. All night. All alone.” She already had Jefferson’s blouse out of her dungarees and was fingering her breasts through their bra. “If only you were going to college here. Why do they have to send you away?”

“Angie, Angie, come on, baby, it’s only Hunter in the city, a train ride away.” She wasn’t entirely sure how it had happened, but Hunter College, her family’s second choice, had accepted her, mediocre grades and all. It sounded better to her parents than a state school, and it did have a great reputation for physical-education training. She could do anything, according to her school aptitude tests, but she trusted her body most, so Hunter sounded great to her.

And then there were the bars. Eventually she could go to the gay bars. With or without Angela. She still loved Angela, but she was headed for a whole city of girls. They could be together again after college. Nothing could stop them then, could it? “You’ll transfer there on scholarship,” she said to comfort Angela.

“Sure, and I’ll be your first lady when you’re president of the United States.”

“Stranger things have happened,” Jefferson said, finally touching Angela’s breasts under her bra.

Angela was moving against her like she was desperate. She never got enough of Angela’s excitement and wanted to be closer. She reached under Angela’s skirt. As always the act excited her past reason. She stopped talking, one hand on a nipple, the other inside Angela’s panties. Angela had jumped when she pulled up the skirt. Jefferson laughed quietly, then let herself get swept away. Angela spread her legs as much as she could while standing. She pushed against the heel of Jefferson’s hand. There was no effort involved, such slight friction before Angela sighed into her shoulder to the familiar sound of Jefferson’s exhaled, “Ange.”

“I want to marry you,” Angela whispered, hand reaching for Jefferson’s zipper. “A big wedding with ‘The Wedding March’ and flowers and you kissing me in front of all of them.” Angela’s kiss was wet, full-lipped, lazy with satisfaction, and Jefferson’s fingers meandered on Angela’s wet parts. Angela stopped trying to get Jefferson’s zipper down and opened herself wider, knees bent. “I want to do this again and again on our honeymoon. Who needs to travel? All I want is a bed and a locked door.”

“Angie, Angie, we’ll have it all,” Jefferson promised, open-mouthed kisses muffling her words.

“What are you two doing?”

Jefferson’s heart felt like a massive bell struck by a clapper. She stepped minutely back from Angela so that the bottom of the hiked-up skirt would fall. Angela pulled her hands away from Jefferson. She felt cold as a glacier when she met Angela’s shocked, unblinking eyes.

The deep, accented voice seemed to boom from the alcove to the now-wide-open wooden door. The man was heavy enough to fill the doorway. He was almost bald, with gray tufts of hair everywhere: on his head, sprouting from his nose, ears, from the back of the hand that held a push broom. Angela tried to hide her face with her jacket. Jefferson stared him down. In a second the frozen feeling was gone. She straightened and summoned an angry defiance, born of defending her teammates, that now prepared her to kid and cajole their way out of this.

“No,” Angela whispered. “Don’t let him see your face.”

“He already did, Ange.” She knew seconds, perhaps thirty, had passed, but that they would only have the advantage for a few more.

“Run,” Jefferson whispered. “Keep your head down. I’ll meet you behind the band shell in the park.”

Angela only hesitated for the length of time it took Jefferson to speak. Then they were moving, Angela swift as the shadow of a bird as Jefferson was still pivoting to run—Angela was away—and the hairy arm, like a fat rolling pin, grabbed Angela’s arm. Jefferson stopped. Angela pulled away from the hand, twisted, ducked, slipped free, but the hand, the size of four of Jefferson’s, caught her skirt. She heard the rip, pushed him, heard the skirt rip more, should have pulled Angela, should have accused him of attacking them, but she still held a hope that no one would find out. He had Angela by the arm again.

“Is that the candy-store kid? What’s going on here, girlie?”

She thought of crazy explanations: we were rehearsing for a play; my friend is sick and I was helping her; wish I could stay and talk, but I have to catch a train. She couldn’t be flip with him clamped on Angela’s arm. She felt a new fire break out in her guts.

Angela cried, “Take your hand off me!”

“I don’t think so. Your father should hear about this.”

“Hey,” Jefferson cried, clawing to get his hands away from Angela, but she could not pry them loose.

“Let me go! He knows,” lied Angela.

“Knows his kid’s a dirty little queer?”

Angela pulled back her free arm and slapped him, openhanded.

The man shook her. “Damn slut.” He looked at Jefferson then. “I know who you are. I guess it wouldn’t do any good to let him know about the chip off his own block.”

The man watched her reaction. “Or didn’t you know? He’s not the only good family man in this town who finds the boys at the railroad station more interesting than his wife.”

What was he saying? She had a flash of a scene from the musical
Guys and Dolls
of the guys playing craps in an alleyway. She pictured Jarvy crouching against a wall, tipping back a bottle. Her straitlaced father? Did this have something to do with why Jarvy and Emmy drank more and more?

“And I don’t mean he’s out playing poker with them either. Like father, like daughter—or are you really a son? Maybe he does it to you too.”

Jefferson had been feeling helplessly small compared to the janitor’s bulk, but at that moment she understood what the man was saying and her whole world opened up in a way that was bewildering and painful and freeing all at once.

No! she thought. The monster cloud was coming, dropping over her like a hooded cape. She’d never be able to think her way out of this situation if she gave in to it. Her trusty body reacted on its own; she kicked his shin viciously. His grip loosened and they ran.

Normally it was exhilarating to run, but she was crying, embarrassed to be such a weakling. She should be the strong one, but how could she stand up to that man? He might as well be the supreme court, the state police, the weight of the whole disapproving world.

They reached the shelter of the band shell and hid behind the wooden enclosure to catch their breath.

“Why did he have to
know
us?”

“Jefferson,” Angela said with gentle sympathy. “Jefferson, who in Dutchess doesn’t know me?”

“And I guess my family may be a little bit infamous.”

“You mean what he said about your father?”

She nodded.

“Could the janitor be lying?’

She couldn’t look at Angela. “You know he wasn’t.”

“No, I don’t think he made that up.”

“I don’t know whether to be happy or upset.”

“It’s a shock, Jefferson. You need to get over the shock first.”

“Okay. But that’s beside the point. Do you think he’ll tell your father?” She wanted this ugliness over with so they could graduate and play all of their last summer before college.

“Not before I do.”

“Oh, God, Angie, he’ll hate me!”

“Face it, Jefferson. What else can we do? I want to go straight to Daddy, tell him like I’ve always wanted to. He says he wants me to be happy and married. He likes you. Why shouldn’t you be the one? We’ll get an apartment after we graduate, get jobs. You can go to school with me instead of going away.”

“Angie.” Her nose was stuffed, but she was no longer crying. “Are you nuts? Parents don’t say, ‘Sure, fine, my kid’s a queer, and that’s okey-dokey.’ They think we’re dirty.”

“Dirty? We’re not the dirty ones. Dirty is how that man looked at me. Dirty was what all those boys tried to do to me before I found you. I haven’t for a second felt dirty with you. Only delirious with love.”

They were hidden from the street on one side by the band shell, on the other by a clump of bushes. Jefferson wanted to hold her, but was scared to now. She felt like a broken little tree after a storm. Angela moved against her, but Jefferson stepped back.

“What are you so afraid of?”

She was still shaking and didn’t want Angela to know it. “They could throw you out.”

“I’m their daughter, they would never do that.”

“They’ll try to change you.” She cupped a hand around Angela’s breast.

Angela brushed her hand away as she said, “I can’t change. I’m yours. I want to spend my life with you!” Angela smiled into her eyes as if to will an infusion of courage into her.

Something in Jefferson shifted. She’d stopped shaking. It wasn’t exposure she feared, was it? She loved this girl, but, no, staying in Dutchess was all wrong. She would go away to school. This incident didn’t matter much at all as long as they kept it from getting out. Really, she’d known all along that the forever Angela talked about was a kid dream. There would be girls she’d like in college. She’d seen some playing field hockey.

She straightened and put her arms around Angela, then kissed her. She loved her, but good gravy, she was seventeen. “Do you want me with you when you tell him?”

Angela, such a small, sweet cuddly girl, laid her head on Jefferson’s shoulder. “No. Stay by the phone.”

“If my parents answer, don’t say anything to them, okay?”

“You’re not going to tell them?” Angela said, pulling back.

“Look, they aren’t very interested in me as it is. I don’t have as much faith that they’d go along with this as you do.”

“What do you have to lose?”

“You. Cripes, they might stop us from seeing each other.”

Angela looked at her. “You would let them stop you?”

“Like I’d have a choice?”

When Angela’s call came, Jefferson was watching
Gunsmoke
with her parents. Earlier, she had gone to the basketball game at the high school and continued a friendly argument about the restrictions of girls’ rules with the coach. She loved watching the game and was looking forward to playing in college, since she’d already made her name in field hockey. She’d completely forgotten that Angela was talking to her father tonight until the call came.

“Jefferson, help me,” Angela said on the phone. “He’s going to send me to my aunt’s in the city until you leave for school.”

Gunsmoke
was her favorite show. When she went back into the den to watch, she thought about Angela’s scheme to run away from home. Angry, of course she’d said no. She’d ride the train down to the city to see her every weekend this summer. Her parents wouldn’t think it was strange that Angela was spending the summer with an aunt or that Jefferson wanted to visit her best friend. But no, it turned out that Angela had decided she wasn’t going along with her father’s scheme and didn’t want to leave Dutchess and Jefferson. She begged Jefferson to get an apartment with her.

“No,” she’d said, with such firm fury, Angela cried more. Where was this anger coming from? She felt trapped. She needed a way out, but was Angela what she wanted to escape? Was getting stuck in Dutchess forever what she was angry about? She couldn’t think. “I’m going to live in the dorm at college and concentrate on school, not take any old job and some slummy apartment. That gets us nothing but poor and unhappy.”

She watched Marshal Dillon swagger through Dodge, hips heavy with six-shooters. She loved Angela, but she wasn’t giving up her entire future to be with her. The marshal ordered a bad guy out of town. Her decision was final. Damn it.

Margo Kurtz was not as striking to look at as Angela, but having spent her childhood in the cities of Europe, she had a worldly manner Jefferson had never before encountered. She also had an aura of glamour that came from teaching German at Hunter College and reading poetry at the Village coffeehouses.

“Rilke,” Margo exclaimed over coffee in the cafeteria. “There simply is no greater twentieth-century poet.” Margo read some lines about flowers and seasons and how “immemorial sap mounts in our arms when we love.” Jefferson wasn’t much on poetry, but this guy Rilke got it about making love.