Whisper Their Love (15 page)

Groups of girls were in the before-meal huddle all over the downstairs hall and the lounge and the stairs. They chirped and chattered like birds, a pretty girlish sound if you weren't feeling sick. Mary Jean was nowhere in sight, but Edith Bannister detached herself from a waiting group and walked over to Joyce, a thing she very seldom did. "I've got to talk to you," she said in a low voice.

"It's lunch time."

"This won't wait."

Joyce followed her into the study, head down, like any girl about to be scolded by the teacher. Whatever it was, it wasn't going to be good. She stood and waited.

Edith shut the study door and turned the latch. She put a finger under Joyce's chin and lightly, delicately turned her face up. The two pairs of eyes met. Joyce began to tremble. This is it, she thought. This is where I spill the whole thing.

Sadness grew in her because she had gone through all that mess for no purpose, wasted so much danger and terror. She moved her shoulders a little, but the intent look in Edith's eyes held her.

"What's the matter between you and Mary Jean Kennedy?"

The question fell so far to the side of the real issue that Joyce's eyes widened in surprise. I don't really care any more, she told herself—and knew she was lying. She felt her way carefully. "She wants to be out all the time," she said. "Nights. She runs around all the time."

"That doesn't concern you. Unless you're jealous. Are you jealous? Are you starting to care for her?"

"Gosh, no."

Edith dropped her hand to Joyce's shoulder. "You must see that this puts me on a spot," she said reasonably. "As a dean, I'm supposed to keep an eye on my students. Their morals are my affair. Of course, as a reasonable adult I believe that the sex life of any person is his own affair." She smiled, ruefully. "If your little chum wants to howl on every back fence from here to St. Louis, it's nothing to me—as long as she's discreet about it. This is off the record, of course."

"Sure."

She stroked Joyce's shoulder, narrow rosy nails against the dark sweater. "If you get involved, then I
am
concerned. You know why."

"Please don't worry about it."

"When you went to Charlotte together, when her father was supposed to be sick." Edith hesitated. She's afraid to ask, Joyce thought, and pushed the thought out of her mind because she couldn't imagine Edith being afraid of anything. "Anyone else, in my place, would have called up her father or something. I didn't. I knew there was something, but I trusted you. Where did you really go?"

She doesn't know at all, Joyce realized, or she's playing dumb—but that's not likely. Even now she couldn't betray Mary Jean; it would have been the denial of her own qualms and protective efforts. There are a few things you can't do. "We went to Charlotte," she said stubbornly.

"You didn't go somewhere to be together?"

"No."

"Then you were with men. If you can call those pimple-faced boys of hers men."

Joyce jerked away. "Look, you've got it all wrong," she said angrily. It was the first time she had ever opposed Edith or denied her anything. She stopped, because what could she say without either telling the disastrous truth, or making up some long story nobody would believe anyway?

Edith's eyes widened. "It's all right. I trust you."

Joyce began talking rapidly to cover up her anxiety and to comfort Edith, because Edith looked on the verge of weeping and it was embarrassing to see anyone so self-possessed cry. "We had a fight because she kept coming in late and waking me up. She got mad and moved out. She's messy, too." It seemed like a good idea to pile up all the evidence she could against Mary Jean, to distract attention from her real crime. "She never picks anything up."

"You're not so tidy yourself," Edith said. Her lips were warm against Joyce's hair. The lunch buzzer sounded. "Oh, damn. Look, darling, I'll come up to you late tonight. Mary Jean's going in with Bitsy for a while; you know Bitsy's been alone since that girl from California flunked out." Her arms tightened. "Oh God, kiss me. Quick."

The kiss made up in intensity what it lacked in time. Joyce stood still for a moment, inside the door, before she felt her face compose itself. Thank God for smearproof lipstick, she thought; it would be too awful if anybody guessed. It was all she could do to keep from putting her hand to her mouth, or looking around to see if the others were watching her.

But I never cared. I honestly didn't, before. Then why now? She thought, laying her napkin across her knees, how awful it would be if anyone were to find out.

I wish she'd let me alone for a while, she thought suddenly. I wish I could go back and start over, I don't know if I'd do it all over again or not.

She thought about it, chewing and swallowing, but it wasn't a yes-and-no matter and she couldn't make up her mind. She gave it up.

Chapter 15

Joyce made a point of staying away from the room all afternoon. She was dreading the prospect of another fight with Mary Jean, and also she was pretty sure there would be something popping if they bumped into each other now, tired and hurt as they both were.

But there was more than that. She had this silly feeling her home was being broken up, the only home she had. It didn't make sense, but there it was.

The stay in Stella Chivari's shack had been a turning point in her feeling about the school. She didn't know why it should work that way, but there it was. After all her feeling of remoteness and unreality, when she got back the place had enfolded her with a dear familiarity. She hadn't known it was possible to put down roots so quickly in a place where she hadn't felt quite at ease. Now she was almost afraid to find everything different. It was like the breakup of a family. Not because she was so crazy about Mary Jean, she reasoned, but because things were changed. She told herself that it would be heavenly to have things neat and quiet, not to have anybody sneaking in at two, three o'clock in the morning; she told herself Mary Jean ought to be ashamed of herself. But all the time she had the sick let-down feeling that follows a family quarrel.

So she stayed downstairs after classes, and when dinner had dragged to its routine tapioca-custard close she wandered around for a while, picking up copies of fashion magazines off the window seats at the end of the hall, glancing at the preposterous exaggerated styles without interest and laying them down again. A couple of young men wandered in and sat down on the window seat, obviously waiting for their dates, and their appraising looks made her uneasy. She knew that her sweater and skirt were all right, and she had gone to have her hair done a few days before, but she felt as if her clothes were all twisted and lopsided and she needed a bath. She looked into the lounge, but some kind of a committee meeting was going on in there, so she started out again. Just then a small red-haired freshman whizzed around the corner and yelled, "Hey, Cameron, you got company. Front door."

She hadn't expected ever to see John again. She hadn't expected anybody, but him least of all. He stood at the head of the stairs, looking even more like a faun—she wasn't sure what a faun was but she knew that was what he looked like—in pressed slacks and a loud sport shirt. His hair was even redder than she remembered it. "Hi," he said grinning. "Look, I have to talk to you."

"I'm busy."

"You don't understand, I
have
to talk to you. Where would you like to go?"

"I don't care where
you
go," she said patiently. "
I
have studying to do." She waited.

He laid one hand on the newel post. "You're the most unreasonable person I ever knew," he said in exasperation. "Look, I told you this was important. Don't you think I know what's important and what isn't? Don't you have any sense at all?"

She looked at him. He wasn't kidding. He was pale, and his freckles stood out. She disliked him intensely. Still, there was that empty hollow room waiting upstairs. Mary Jean would be running around with armfuls of stuff, Bitsy helping her, most likely, looking moral and righteous. She cleared her throat. "All right. Not very long though." They stepped outdoors.

It was dark under the trees. Even now, with most of the leaves fallen, their interlacing branches made a shade. "I thought maybe we could walk out in the country a ways, or are you like all these people—lost the use of your legs?"

"I don't care."

They walked side by side, not touching or speaking. The blocks past the campus were built up in small houses and here and there an old farmhouse cut up into apartments, the garage fixed up from a shed or barn. The voices of children playing out in the chilly dusk mingled with the evening television programs. Out here the street lights were only at the intersections, and the middle of each block held a deep well of shadow. "Street's kind of rough," the boy apologized.

"That's all right."

He looked straight ahead, his profile sober. "Look," he said, "you were right.”

"Right?"

"What you said about my uncle. I asked him." In the dim light she saw his mouth tighten. The muscle in his cheek twitched. It hadn't been an easy asking. "He tried to weasel out of it, but it didn't do any good. I guess everybody knows—I wouldn't be surprised if Aunt Peg knows even."

"I shouldn't have said it."

"No, that's okay. It was true. Look," John said, "all my life I've wanted to be a doctor, see? I guess all kids have a favorite aunt or uncle when they're little, somebody who seems like some kind of a hero to them. Specially if they don't have folks of their own, like me." He looked at her, and she nodded.

"Me either," she said.

"Well, that's the way it was," he said. "It hasn't got anything to do with being a doctor, though. Not any more. Even if he is a fake, I'd rather be a really good doctor than have a million dollars."

Shame washed over her.

He went on doggedly talking, as if he'd been planning this out sentence by sentence and didn't mean to skip any of it, as if he didn't dare stop until he got it all said. "When I was in Korea I was jealous of the medics the whole time. Everybody else was tearing guys apart, and here they were patching 'em up. There're only two kinds of people," he said as gravely as if nobody before him had ever had the same idea. "A good doctor, a good
person
even, ought to help life along, not destroy it. That's why I can't forgive my uncle."

"I don't see anything so terrible about it," Joyce said stubbornly. "A lot of people do it."

"A lot of people steal."

"I suppose you think people ought to go around having babies all over the place."

"That's a damn silly quibble. There're ways to keep it from happening." She had no answer for this, because she'd thought it, herself, a hundred times during those first nights of panic. Said it, too. All this mess and suffering because somebody was too lazy to stop at a drugstore. She scowled at him. "I don't think so much of these girls who're always jumping into bed with somebody," he said. "They get sort of messy and sloppy."

"I suppose you think there's something the matter with sex."

"I guess it's here to stay," John said, “right along with baldness and the common cold. It's a question of emotional maturity, that's all."

They were on the edge of real country now, the last block of little window-lighted houses behind them. Tall weeds grew along the edges of the highway, dry and rattling in the cold wind. A single late cricket chirped. It was an unbearably lonely sound.

"I'm going to be a doctor," John said again. "I've read a lot about this stuff, see? Besides, anybody ought to know—it's crazy that what you don't know won't hurt you. Just the opposite." He was better-looking when he smiled; sadness didn't go well with his face. Still, she had a feeling that he'd often been unhappy. "Here's a nice soft culvert we can sit on," he said amiably, "and I'll brief you on what every young girl should know."

"You're crazy."

But she sat down on the culvert, which was cold. Her calves ached as they hadn't since her Girl Scout days.

Little kids, John said, folding his hands around his knees, got curious about their own bodies as soon as they had sense enough to know anything at all. They had a hell of a fine time experimenting around, until some dumb grownup got them full of batty ideas about this is wrong and that's wrong. Matter of manners, not morals, really, but try and get parents to see it. Then, the way the psycho men had it figured out, they grew into a parent-fixation stage where little boys were in love with their mothers and hated their fathers, and vice versa. Freud started that idea, he said, and bright people now weren't shocked by it any more. "Of course, you realize this is just the synopsis."

Joyce reflected that she wouldn't know. Still, there had been a time when she tagged Uncle Will all over the place, and looked to him for babying when Aunt Gen scolded her. Well, but then Aunt Gen—Oh, no. No, not a mother's place. Or had Aunt Gen really been her mother, for all she'd been born out of Mimi's body?

Around junior high, John went on, ignoring her abstraction, kids got into a sort of homo stage. Girls fell in love with their women teachers mostly, and fellows went around together and maybe did a little experimenting. Perfectly normal, even if the newspapers did make a scandal out of it every once in a while. "Most kids grow out of it. Thing about all these middle-aged queers you see around, they never grew up past the age of fourteen. The gifted ones develop lopsided, smart as hell about painting or music or something, but they're like dumb kids in other ways." He pulled a stem of seeded grass, wiped the dust off absent-mindedly on his pantleg and starting chewing it. "Course, there are a lot of things to keep people from growing up. You can't really blame 'em." He spat green juice.

Don't be touchy, Joyce admonished herself. This kid doesn't even know you. He doesn't mean anything in your life. He couldn't possibly know. She turned her face away from him, but his voice pierced through her thoughts. "Then they get all wound up in the opposite sex, and then they grow up—if they're lucky—and learn to put the whole thing in its right perspective." He got up and stretched. "Now you know all the facts of life," he said, looking embarrassed at having talked so much.