Читать книгу Beebo Brinker - Ann Bannon - Страница 5

Jack Mann had seen enough in his life to swear off surprise forever. He had seen the ports of the Pacific from the deck of a Navy hospital ship during World War II. He had helped patch the endless cut and bloodied bodies, torn every which way, some irreparably. He had seen the sensuous Melanesian girls, the bronzed bare-chested surfers on Hawaiian beaches, the sly stinking misery of the caves of Iwo Jima.

A medical corpsman gets an eyeful—and a noseful—of human wretchedness during a war. When it was over, Jack left the service with a vow to lead a quiet uncomplicated life, and never to hurt anybody by so much as a pinprick. It shot the bottom out of his plans to enter medical school, but he let them go without undue regret. He’d be well along in his thirties by the time he finished, and it didn’t seem worth it any more.

So he completed the course he started before the war: engineering. And after he got his degree he took a job in the New York office of a big Chicago construction firm as head of drafting.

During those war years, when Jack was holding heaving sailors over the head and labeling countless blood samples, he had fallen in love. It was a lousy affair, unhappy and violent. But peculiarly good now and then. Good enough to sell him on Love for a long time.

He organized his life around it. He earned his money to pamper whatever passion came his way. That was the only real value his bank account held for him; that, and helping stray people out of trouble, the way others help stray cats.

But by the time Jack reached his thirties, there had been too many who took advantage of his generosity to swindle him; his confidence to cuckold him; his affection to torment him. He turned cynic. There was hope in him still, but he buttoned it down under his skepticism.

He wanted to stabilize his life, settle down with one person and live out a long rewarding love. But Jack Mann could only love other men: boys, to be exact. Volatile, charming, will-o-the-wisp boys, who looked him up Friday, loved him Saturday, and left him Sunday. They couldn’t even spell “stabilize.”

His emotional differentness had given Jack a good eye for people, a knack for sizing them up fast. He usually knew what to expect from a boy after talking to him twenty or thirty minutes, and he had learned not to give in to the type who brought certain suffering—the type who couldn’t spell.

But Jack had also learned that he couldn’t live his life only for love. The less romantic he got about it, the clearer his view of life became. It didn’t make him happy, this cynicism. But it protected him from too much hurt, and gave him a sort of sour wit and wisdom.

Jack Mann was thirty-three years old, short in height, tall in mentality. He was slight but tough: big-shouldered for his size and deep-chested. His far-sighted eyes watched the world through a pair of magnifying lenses, set in tortoise-shell frames.

They were seeing sharply these days, for Jack was between lovers: bored and restless, but also healthy, wealthy, and on the wagon. When the new love came along—and it would—he would stay up most nights, blow his bankroll, and hit the bottle. It was nuts, but it happened every time. It seemed to preserve his lost illusions for a while, till the new “love” vanished and joined the countless old ones in his memory.

Jack lived in Greenwich Village, near the bottom of Manhattan. It was filled with aspiring young artists. Filled, too, with ambitious businessmen with wives and families, who played hob with the local bohemia. A rash of raids was in progress on the homosexual bar hangouts at the moment, with cops rousting respectable beards-and-sandals off their favorite park benches; hustling old dykes, who were Village fixtures for eons, off the streets so they wouldn’t offend the deodorized young middle-class wives.

Jack was pondering the problem one May evening as he came up the subway steps at 14th Street. At six o’clock the air was still violet-light. It was a good time for ambling through the winding streets he had come to know so well.

He tacked neatly in and out through the spring mixture of tourists and natives: young girls with new jobs and timid eyes; older girls with no jobs and knowing eyes; quiet sensitive boys having intimate beers together in small boites. Shops, clubs, shoe-box theaters. It always delighted him to see them, people and buildings both, blooming with the weather.

Jack stopped to buy some knockwurst and sauerkraut in a German delicatessen, eating them at the counter with an ale.

When he left, feeling sage and prosperous, he saw a handsome girl passing the shop, carrying a wicker suitcase in one hand. Her strong face and bewildered eyes contradicted each other. Jack followed a few feet behind her, intrigued. He had done this many a time, sometimes meeting the appealing person behind the face, sometimes losing the face forever in the swirling crowds.

The girl he was tailing appeared to be in her late teens, big-tall, with dark curly hair and blue eyes: Irish coloring, but not an Irish face. She walked with long firm strides, yet clearly did not know where she was. In her pocket was a yellow Guide to Greenwich Village with creased pages. Twice she stopped to consult it, comparing what she read to the unfamiliar milieu surrounding her.

A sitting duck for fast operators, Jack thought. But something wary in the way she held herself and eyed the crowd told him she knew that much herself. She was trying to defend herself against them by suspecting every passerby of ulterior motives.

At the first street comer she nearly collided with a small crop-haired butch, who said, “Hi, friend,” to her. The big girl stared for a moment, surprised and uncertain, afraid to answer. She moved on, crossing the street and detouring widely around a Beat with a fierce beard who sat guarding his gouaches, watching her pass with a curious who-are-you? look.

Jack was amused at the girl’s odd air of authority, the set of her chin, the strong rhythm of her walking. And yet, despite her efforts to look self-assured, she was clearly no native New Yorker. Her face, when he glimpsed it, was a map of confusion.

Rather abruptly, as if suddenly tired, she stopped, and Jack waited discreetly behind her, leaning against a railing and lighting a cigarette, watching her with a casual air.

She searched with travel-grimy hands for a cigarette in her pocket, but found only tobacco crumbs. Wearily she let herself sag against a shop window, evidently convinced it was silly to keep marching in the same direction, just because she had started out in it. Better to rest, to think a minute. Her gaze fell on Jack, who was studying her with a little smile. She looked square at him, and then her eyes dropped. He sensed something of her reaction: he was a strange man; she was a girl, forlorn and alone in a city she didn’t know. And probably too damn poor to squander money on cigarettes.

Jack strolled over to her, pulling a pack from his pocket and extending it with one cigarette bounced forward for her to take. She looked up, startled. She was four inches taller than Jack. There was a small pause and then she shook her head and looked away, afraid of him.

“You’d take it if I were somebody’s grandmother,” he kidded her. “Don’t hold it against me that I’m a man.”

She gave him a tentative smile.

“Come on, take it,” he urged.

She accepted one cigarette, but still he held the pack toward her. “Take ’em all. I have plenty. You look like you could use these.”

She obviously wanted to, but she said shyly in a round low voice, “Thanks, but I can’t pay you.”

Jack chuckled. “You’re a nice girl from a nice family,” he said. “Know how I know? Oh, it’s not because you want to pay for the pack.” She looked at him with guarded interest. “It’s because you’re afraid of me. No, it’s true. That’s the mark of a nice girl, sad to say. Men scare her. I can hear your mother telling you, ‘Dear, never take presents from a strange man.’ Right?”

She smiled at him. “Close enough,” she said softly, and inhaled some smoke with a look of relief.

“Well, consider this a loan,” he said, gesturing toward the cigarettes, and then he tucked them in her pocket next to the Guide. She jumped at the touch of his hand. He felt it but did not say anything. “You’re pretty new, aren’t you?” he said.

“I’m pretty used, if you want to know,” she said ruefully.

Jack laughed. “How old? Seventeen?”

“Do I look that young?” she asked, dismayed. There was intelligence in her regular features, but a pleasant country innocence, too. And she was uncommonly handsome with her black wavy hair and restless blue eyes.

“Do you have a name?” he asked.

“Do you?” she countered, instantly defensive.

He held out his hand affably and said, “I’m Jack Mann. Does that make you feel any better?”

She took his hand, cautiously at first, then gave it a firm shake. “Should it?” she said.

“Only if you live down here,” he answered. “Everybody knows I’m harmless.”

She seemed reassured. “I’m going to live here. I’m looking for a place now.” She paused as if embarrassed. “I do have a name: Beebo Brinker.”

He blinked. “Beebo?” he said.

“It used to be Betty Jean. But I couldn’t say it right when I was little.”

They smoked a moment in silence and then Beebo said, “I guess I’d better get going. I have to spend the night somewhere.” And she turned a sudden pink, realizing the inference Jack might draw from her remark. “Everybody” might know Jack down here, but Beebo wasn’t everybody. For all she knew he was harmless as a shark. The mere fact that he had a name wasn’t all that reassuring.

“Looks to me like you need some food first,” he said lightly. “There’s always a sack somewhere.”

“I don’t have much money.”

“Better to spend it on food,” he said. “Anyway, what the hell, I’ll treat you. There’s some good Wiener schnitzel about a block back.” He tried to take her wicker case to carry it for her, but she pulled away, offended as if his offer were a comment on her ability to take care of herself.

Jack stopped and laughed a little. “Look, my little friend,” he said kindly. “When I first hit New York I was as pea-green as you are. Somebody did this for me and let me save my few bucks for a room and job hunting. This is my way of paying him back. Ten years from now, you’ll do the same thing for the next guy. Fair?”

It was hard for her to resist. She was almost shaky hungry; she was worn out; she was lost. And Jack looked as kind as he was. It was a part of his success in salvaging people: they liked his face. It was homely, but in the good-humored amiable way that made him seem like an old friend in a matter of minutes.

Finally Beebo smiled at him. “Fair,” she said. “But I’ll pay you back, Jack. I will.”

They walked back to the German delicatessen, Beebo with a firm grip on her suitcase.

She finished her meal in ten minutes. Jack ordered another for her, over her protests, kidding her about her appetite.

“Jesus,” he said. “When did you eat last?”

“Fort Worth.”

“Indiana?” Jack stared.

“Yes. I ate three sandwiches in the rest room, on the train. That was yesterday.” Beebo drained her milk glass and put it on the table. The pneumatic little blonde waitress brought the second plateful. Jack, watching Beebo, who was watching the waitress, saw her wide blue eyes glide up and down the plump pink-uniformed body with curious interest. Beebo pulled back, holding her breath as the waitress leaned over her to set a basket of bread on the table, and there was a look of fear on her face.

Jack thought to himself, she’s afraid of her. Afraid of that bouncy little bitch. Afraid of … women?

When she had finished eating, Beebo glanced up at him. For all her physical sturdiness and arresting face, she was not a forward or a confident girl.

“You eat like a farm hand,” he chuckled.

“I should. I was raised in farm country,” she said, looking away from him. Her shyness beguiled him. “Thank you for the food.”

“My pleasure.” He observed her through a scrim of cigarette smoke. “If I weren’t afraid of scaring hell out of you, I’d ask you over to my place for a drink,” he said. She blanched. “I mean, a drink of milk,” he said.

“I don’t drink,” she told him apologetically, as if teetotaling were something hick-town and unsophisticated.

“Not even milk?”

“Not with strange men.”

“Am I really that strange?” he grinned, laughing at her again.

“Am I really that funny?” she demanded.

“No.” He reached over the table top unexpectedly and pressed her hand. She tried to jerk it away but he held it tight, surprising her with his strength. “You’re a lovely girl,” he said. It wasn’t suggestive or even romantic. He didn’t mean it to be. “You’re a sweet young kid and you’re lost and tired and frightened. You need one thing right now, Beebo, and the rest will take care of itself.”

“What’s that?” She retrieved her hand and tucked it behind her.

“A friend.”

She gazed at him, sizing him up, and then began to move from the booth.

“I’m no wolf,” Jack said, sliding after her. “Can’t you tell? I just like to help lost girls. I collect them.” And when she turned back with a frown of disbelief, he shrugged. “Everybody’s got to have a hobby.”

He bought some Dutch beer and sausage, paid the cashier, and walked with Beebo out the front door. On the pavement she stopped, swinging her wicker case around in front of her like a piece of fragile armor. Jack saw the defensive glint in her eyes.

“Okay, little lost friend,” he said. “You’re under no obligation to me. If this bothers you, the hell with it. Find yourself a hotel room, a park bench. I don’t care. Well … I care, but I don’t want to scare you any more.”

Beebo hesitated a moment, then held out her hand and shook his. “Thanks anyway, Jack. I’ll find you some day and pay you back,” she said. She looked as much afraid to leave him as to stay with him.

“So long, Beebo,” he said, dropping her hand. She walked away from him backwards a few steps so she could keep an eye on him, turned around and then turned back.

Jack smiled at her. “I’m afraid I’m just about your safest bet,” he said kindly. “If you knew how safe, you’d come along without a qualm.”

And when he smiled she had to answer him. “All right,” she said, still clutching her wicker bag in both hands. “But just so you’ll know: my father taught me how to fight.”

“Beebo, my dear,” he said as they began to walk toward his apartment, “you could probably throw me twenty feet through the air if you had to, but you won’t have to. I have no designs on you. Honest to God. I don’t even have a bunch of etchings to show you in my pad. Nothing but good talk and cold beer. And a bed.”

Beebo stopped in her tracks.

“Well, the bed is good and cold too,” he said. “God, you’re a scary one.”

“Did you go home to bed with the first stranger you met in New York?” she demanded.

“Sure,” he said. “Doesn’t everybody?”

She laughed at last, a full country sound that must have carried across the hay fields, and followed him again. He walked, hands in pockets, letting her curb her long stride to keep from getting ahead of him. But when he tried to take her arm at a corner, she shied away, determined to rely only on herself.

Jack unlocked the door of his small apartment, holding it with his foot while Beebo went in. The corridor outside was littered with buckets, planks, and ladders. “They’re redecorating the hall,” he explained. “We like to put on a good front in this rattrap.”

He headed for the kitchen with the bag of sausage and the beer, set them on the counter, and sprang himself a can of cold brew. “What do you want, Beebo? One of these?” He lifted the can. When she hesitated, he said, “You don’t really want that milk, do you?”

“Have you got something—weak?”

“Well, I’ve got something colorful,” he said. “I don’t know how weak it is.” He went down on his haunches in front of a small liquor chest and foraged in it for a minute. “Somebody gave me this stuff for Christmas and I’ve been trying to give it away ever since. Here we are.”

He took out an ornate bottle, broke the seal and pulled the cork, and got down a liqueur glass. When he up-ended the bottle, a rich green liquid came out, moving at about the speed of cod-liver oil and looking like some dollar-an-ounce shampoo for Park Avenue lovelies. The pungent fumes of peppermint penetrated every crack in the wall.

“What is it?” Beebo said, intimidated by the looks of it.

“Peppermint schnapps,” Jack said. “God. It’s even worse than I thought. Want to chicken out?”

“I grew up in a town full of German farmers,” she said. “I should take to schnapps like a kid to candy.”

Jack handed over the glass. “Okay, it’s your stomach. Just don’t get tanked on the stuff.”

“I just want a taste. You make me feel babyish about the milk.”

He picked up his beer and the schnapps bottle, and she followed him into the living room. “You can drink all the milk you want, honey,” he said, settling into a leather arm chair, “before the sun goes over the yardarm. After that, we switch to spirits.”

He turned on a phonograph nearby and turned the sound low. Beebo sat down a few feet from him on the floor, pulling her skirt primly over her knees. She seemed awkward in it, like a girl reared in jeans or jodhpurs. Jack studied her while she took a sip of the schnapps, and returned her smile when she looked up at him. “Good,” she said. “Like the sundaes we used to get after the Saturday afternoon movie.”

She was a strangely winning girl. Despite her size, her pink cheeks and firm-muscled limbs, she seemed to need caring for. At one moment she seemed wise and sad beyond her years, like a girl who has been forced to grow up in a hothouse hurry. At the next, she was a picture of rural naïveté that moved Jack; made him like her and want to help her.

She wore a sporty jacket, the kind with a gold thread emblem on the breast pocket; a man’s white shirt, open at the throat, tie-less and gray with travel dust; a straight tan cotton skirt that hugged her small hips; white socks and tennis shoes. Her short hair had been combed without the manufactured curls and varnished waves that marked so many teenagers. It was neat, but the natural curl was slowly fighting free of the imposed order.

Her eyes were an off-blue, and that was where the sadness showed. They darted around the room, moving constantly, searching the shadows, trying to assure her, visually at least, that there was nothing to fear.

“What are you doing here in New York, Beebo?” Jack asked her.

She looked into her glass and emptied it before she answered him. “Looking for a job,” she said. “Me and everybody else, I guess.”

“What kind of job?”

“I don’t know,” she said softly. “Could I have a little more of that stuff?” He handed the bottle down to her. “It’s not half as bad as it looks.”

“Did you have a job back home?” he asked.

“No. I—I just finished high school.”

“In the middle of May?” His brow puckered. “When I was in school they used to keep us there till June, at least.”

“Well, I—you see—it’s farm country,” she stammered. “They let kids out early for spring planting.”

“Jesus, honey, they gave that up in the last century.”

“Not the little towns,” she said, suddenly on guard.

Jack looked at his shoes, unwilling to distress her. “Your dad’s a farmer, then?” he said.

“No, a vet.” She was proud of it. “An animal doctor.”

“Oh. What was he planting in the middle of May—chickens?”

Beebo clamped her jaws together. He could see the muscles knot under her skin. “If they let the farmer’s kids out early, they have to let the vet’s kids out, too,” she said, trying to be calm. “Everyone at the same time.”

“Okay, don’t get mad,” he said and offered her a cigarette. She took it after a pause that verged on a sulk, but insisted on lighting it for herself. It evidently bothered her to let him perform the small masculine courtesies for her, as if they were an encroachment on her independence.

“So what did they teach you in high school? Typing? Shorthand?” Jack said. “What can you do?”

Beebo blew smoke through her nose and finally gave him a woeful smile. “I can castrate a hog,” she said. “I can deliver a calf. I can jump a horse and I can run like hell.” She made a small sardonic laugh deep in her throat. “God knows they need me in New York City.”

Jack patted her shoulder. “You’ll go straight to the top, honey,” he said. “But not here. Out west somewhere.”

“It has to be here, even if I have to dig ditches,” she said, and the wry amusement had left her. “I’m not going home.”

“Where’s home?”

“Wisconsin. A little farming town west of Milwaukee. Juniper Hill.”

“Lots of cheese, beer, and German burghers?” he said.

“Lots of mean-minded puritans,” she said bitterly. “Lots of hard hearts and empty heads. For me … lots of heartache and not much more.”

“Why?” he said gently.

She looked away, pouring some more schnapps for herself. Jack was glad she had a small glass.

“Why did you ditch Juniper Hill, Beebo?” he persisted.

“I—just got into some trouble and ran away. Old story.”

“And your parents disowned you?”

“No. I only have my father—my mother died years ago. My father wanted me to stay. But I’d had it.”

Jack saw her chin tremble and he got up and brought her a box of tissues. “Hell, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m too nosy. I thought it might help to talk it out a little.”

“It might,” she conceded, “but not now.” She sat rigidly, trying to check her emotion. Jack admired her dignity. After a moment she added, “My father—is a damn good man. He loves me and he tries to understand me. He’s the only one who does.”

“You mean the only one in Juniper Hill,” Jack said. “I’m doing my damnedest to understand you too, Beebo.”

She relented a little from her stiff reserve and said, “I don’t know why you should, but—thanks.”

“There must be other people in your life who tried to help, honey,” he said. “Friends, sisters, brothers—”

“One brother,” she said acidly. “Everything I ever did was inside-out, ass-backwards, and dead wrong as far as Jim was concerned. I humiliated him and he hated me for it. Oh, I was no dreamboat. I know that. I deserved a wallop now and then. But not when I was down.”

“That’s the way things go between brothers and sisters,” Jack said. “They’re supposed to fight.”

“You don’t understand the reason.”

“Explain it to me, then.” Jack saw the tremor in her hand when she ditched her cigarette. He let her finish another glassful of schnapps, hoping it might relax her. Then he said, “Tell me the real reason why you left Juniper Hill.”

She answered at last in a dull voice, as if it didn’t matter any more who knew the truth. “I was kicked out of school.”

Jack studied her, perplexed. He would have been gently amused if she hadn’t seemed so stricken by it all. “Well, honey, it only happens to the best and the worst,” he said. “The worst get canned for being too stupid and the best for being too smart. They damn near kicked me out once.… I was one of the best.” He grinned.

“Best, worst, or—or different,” Beebo said. “I was different. I mean, I just didn’t fit in. I wasn’t like the rest. They didn’t want me around. I guess they felt threatened, as if I were a nudist or a vegetarian, or something. People don’t like you to be different. It scares them. They think maybe some of it will rub off on them, and they can’t imagine anything worse.”

“Than becoming a vegetarian?” he said and downed the rest of his beer to drown a chuckle. He set the glass on the floor by the leg of his chair. “Are you a vegetarian, Beebo?” She shook her head. “A nudist?”

“I’m just trying to make you understand,” she said, almost pleading, and there was a real beacon of fear shining through her troubled eyes.

Jack reached out his hand and held it toward her until she gave him one of hers. “Are you afraid to tell me, Beebo?” he said. “Are you ashamed of something? Something you did? Something you are?”

She reclaimed her hand and pulled a piece of tissue from her bag, trying to keep her back straight, her head high. But she folded suddenly around a sob, bending over to hold herself, comfort herself. Jack took her shoulders in his firm hands and said, “Whatever it is, you’ll lick it, honey. I’ll help you if you’ll let me. I’m an old hand at this sort of thing. I’ve been saving people from themselves for years. Sort of a sidewalk Dorothy Dix. I don’t know why, exactly. It just makes me feel good. I like to see somebody I like, learn to like himself. You’re a big, clean, healthy girl, Beebo. You’re handsome as hell. You’re bright and sensitive. I like you, and I’m pretty particular.”

She murmured inarticulately into her hands, trying to thank him, but he shushed her.

“Why don’t you like yourself?” he asked.

After a moment she stopped crying and wiped her face. She threw Jack a quick cautious look, wondering how much of her story she could risk with him. Perversely enough, his very kindness and patience scared her off. She was afraid that the truth would sicken him, alienate him from her. And at this forlorn low point in her life, she needed his friendship more than a bed or a cigarette or even food.

Jack caught something of the conflict going on within her. “Tell me what you can,” he said.

“My dad is a veterinarian,” she began in her low voice. “Everybody in Juniper Hill loved him. Till he started—drinking too much. But that wasn’t for a long time. In the beginning we were all very happy. Even after my mother died, we got along. My brother Jim and I were friends back in grade school.

“Dad taught us about animals. There wasn’t a job he couldn’t trust me with when it came to caring for a sick animal. And the past few years when he’s been—well, drunk so much of the time—I’ve done a lot of the surgery, too. I’m twice the vet my brother’ll ever be. Jim never did like it much. He went along because he was ashamed of his squeamishness. But whenever things got bloody or tough, he ducked out.

“But I got along fine with Dad. The one thing I always wanted was to live a good life for his sake. Be a credit to him. Be something wonderful. Be—a doctor. He was so proud of that. He understood, he helped me all he could.” She drained her glass again. “Some doctor I’ll be now,” she said. “A witch doctor, maybe.” She filled the glass and Jack said anxiously, “Whoa, easy there. You’re a milk drinker, remember?”

She ignored him. “At least I won’t be around to see Dad’s face when he realizes I’ll never make it to medical school,” Beebo said, the corners of her mouth turned down. “I hated to leave him, but I had to do it. It’s one thing to stick it out in a place where they don’t like you. It’s another to let yourself be destroyed.”

“So you think you’ve solved your problems by coming to the big city?” Jack asked her.

“Not all of them!” she retorted. “I’ll have to get work, I’ll have to find a place to live and all that. But I’ve solved the worst one, Jack.”

“Maybe you brought some of them with you,” he said. “You didn’t run as far away from Juniper Hill as you think. People are still people, no matter what the town. And Beebo is still Beebo. Do you think New Yorkers are wiser and better than the people in Juniper Hill, honey? Hell, no. They’re probably worse. The only difference is that here, you have a chance to be anonymous. Back home everybody knew who you were.”

Beebo threw him a sudden smile. “I don’t think there’s a single Jack Mann in all of Juniper Hill,” she said. “It was worth the trip to meet you.”

“Well, I’d like to think I’m that fascinating,” he said. “But you didn’t come to New York City to find Jack Mann, after all. You came to find Beebo Brinker. Yourself. Or are you one of those rare lucky ones who knows all there is to know about themselves by the time they’re seventeen?”

“Eighteen,” she corrected. “No, I’m not one of the lucky ones. Just one of the rare ones.” Inexplicably, it struck both of them funny and they laughed at each other. Beebo felt herself loose and pliable under the influence of the liqueur. It was exhilarating, a floating release that shrouded the pain and confusion of her flight from home and arrival in this cold new place. She was glad for Jack’s company, for his warmth and humor. “You must be good for me,” she told him. “Either you or the schnapps.”

“You’re going pretty heavy on that stuff, friend,” he warned her, nodding at the glass. “There’s more in it than peppermint, you know.”

“But it tastes so good going down,” she said, surprised to find herself still laughing.

“Well, it doesn’t taste so good when it comes back up.”

“I haven’t had that much,” she said and poured herself some more. Jack rolled his eyes to heaven and made her laugh again.

“You know I could take advantage of you in your condition,” he said, thinking it might sober her up a little. But his fundamental compassion and intelligence had put her at ease, led her to trust him. She was actually enjoying herself a little now, trying to forget whatever it was that drove her into this new life, and Jack hadn’t the heart to stir up her fears again. He wondered if she had left a scandal or a tragedy behind her in Juniper Hill.

“I was going to be a doctor once myself,” he said.

She looked at him with a sort of cockeyed interest. “What happened?”

“Would have taken too long. I wanted to get that degree and get out. And I wanted love. But you can’t make love to anybody after a long day over a hot cadaver. You’re too pooped and the sight of human flesh gives you goose pimples instead of pleasant shivers. Besides, I spent four years in the Navy in the Second World War, and I’d had it with blood and suffering.”

Beebo drank the schnapps in her glass. “That’s as good a reason as any for quitting, I guess,” she said.

“You could still finish up high school and go on to college,” he said, trying not to sound pushy.

“No. I’ve lost it, Jack. That ambition, that will to do well. I left it behind when I left my father. I just don’t give a double damn about medicine, for the first time in my life.”

“Because a bunch of small-minded provincials asked you to leave their little high school? You make it sound like you were just squirming to be asked.”

“You’re saying I didn’t have the guts to fight them,” she said, speaking without resentment. “It isn’t that, Jack. I did fight them, with all I’ve got. I’m tired of it, that’s all. You can’t fight everybody all the time and still have room in your life to study and think and learn.”

“Was it that bad, Beebo?”

“I was that bad—to the people in Juniper Hill.”

Jack shook his head in bewilderment and laughed a little. “You don’t happen to carry the bubonic plague, do you?” he said.

She knew how curious she had made him about herself, and she hadn’t the courage to expose the truth to him yet. So she merely said, “That’s over now. My life is going to be different.”

“Different, but not necessarily better,” he said. “I wish to hell you’d come clean with me, honey. I can’t help you this way. I don’t know what you’re running away from.”

“I’m not running away from, I’m running to,” she said. “To this city, this chance for a new start.”

“And a new Beebo?” he asked. “Do you think being in a new place will make you better and braver somehow?”

“I’m not chicken, Jack,” she said firmly. “I left for Dad’s sake as much as my own.”

“I didn’t say you were, honey,” he told her gently. “I don’t think a chicken would have come so far to face so much all alone. I think you’re a decent, intelligent girl. I think you’re a good-looking girl, too, just for the record. That much is plain as the schnapps on your face.”

Beebo frowned at him, self-conscious and surprised. “You’re the first man who ever called me ‘good-looking,’” she said. “No, the second. My father always thought …” Her voice went very soft. “You know, it kills me to go off and—and abandon him like this.” She got up from the floor and walked a little unsteadily to the front window.

“Why don’t you write to him?” Jack suggested. “If he was so good to you—if you were so close—he deserves to know where you are.”

“That was the whole point of leaving,” she said, shaking her head. “To keep it secret. To relieve him.”

“Of what?”

“Of myself. I was a burden to him. He did too much for me. He tried to be father and mother both. He indulged me when he should have been stern. He never could bear to punish me.”

She stood looking out his front window in silence, crying quietly. Her face was still, with the only movement the rhythmic swell and spill of tears from her eyes.

“My father,” she said, “is no angel. Much as I love him, I know that much.” Jack sensed a whole raft of sad secrets behind that brief phrase.

He stood up, crushed his cigarette, and looked at her for a moment. She stood with her legs apart and well-defined by her narrow cotton skirt. Her hair was tousled and damp with sweat, and there was a shine in her wet eyes reflected from the lamplight that intensified the blue. She had left her schnapps glass on the floor and her empty hands hung limp against her thighs. She lifted them now and then to brush away tears. Her head inclined slightly, like that of a youngster who has grown too tall too fast and doesn’t want to tower over her classmates.

Her face, sensitive and striped with tears, was in many ways the face of a boy. Her stance was boyish and her low voice too was like a boy’s, balanced on the brink of maturity. And there it would stay all her life, never to plumb the true depth of a man’s.

She became aware of Jack’s eyes on her and turned to pick up her glass, but bumped against a corner of a table and nearly fell. Jack reached her in two big steps and pulled her straight again while she put both hands to her temples. “I feel as if I’m dreaming,” she murmured. “Am I?” She looked quizzically at him.

“You’re not, but I am,” he said, taking her elbow and steering her toward the bedroom. “I’m a dream walking. I’m dreaming and you’re in my dream. When I wake up, you’ll cease to exist.”

“That would solve everything, wouldn’t it?” she said, leaning on him more than she realized. She tried to stop him in the center of the room to get her liqueur, but he kept pushing till she gave up.

“Come on, let Uncle Jack bed you down,” he said. He took one of her arms across his shoulder, the better to balance them both, pulled her into the bedroom, and unloaded her on his double bed. Beebo spread-eagled herself into all four corners with a sigh, and it wasn’t till Jack had all her clothes off but the underwear that she came to and tried to protest. Jack removed her socks with a yank.

“Why, you lousy man,” she said, staring at him. But when he smelled the socks, she laughed.

“God, what an exciting creature you are,” he grimaced, surveying her muscular angles with all the ardor of an old hen.

“So I’m not your type,” she said, getting to her feet. “I can still take off my own underwear.” She tried it, lost her balance, and sat down summarily on the bed.

Jack tossed her a nightshirt from his dresser. It was scarlet and orange cotton flannel. “I like flashy sleepers,” he explained.

She put it on while he washed in the bathroom. But when he returned he found her leaning on the dresser, dizzily close to losing the schnapps.

Jack guided her to the bathroom and got her to the washbowl before it came up.

“I had no idea there was so much in the bottle,” Jack said when she had gotten the last of it out. At last she straightened up to look in the mirror. “By God, Beebo, you were the same color as the schnapps for a minute there.”

He made her rinse her mouth and then dragged her back to bed, where he washed her unconscious face and hands. He sat and gazed at her before he turned out the light, speculating about her. Asleep, she looked younger, adolescent: still a child, with a child’s purity; soon an adult, with adult desires. Did she know already what those desires would be? And was that why she fled from Juniper Hill? The knowledge that her desires and her adult self would shock the town, shock her father, shock even herself?

Jack thought so. He thought she knew what it was that troubled her so deeply, even though she might not know the name for it. It wasn’t just being “different” that she hated. It was the kind of differentness. Jack wanted to comfort her, to explain that she wasn’t alone in the world, that other people were different in the same way she was. But he couldn’t speak of it to her until she admitted it first to him.

He smoothed the hair off her forehead, admiring her features and her flawless skin without the least taint of physicality. He felt sorry for her, and scoffed at himself for wishing she were the boy she resembled at that moment. Then he lay down beside her and went to sleep.

Beebo slept for fourteen hours. She wakened with a glaring square of sunshine astride her face. When she rolled over to escape it, she felt a new sensation: the beginning beat of the long rhythm of a hangover—her first.

The thought of the peppermint schnapps nauseated her for a few moments. She looked around the room to forget it and clear her head, and found a note pinned to the pillow next to hers. It gave her a start to realize Jack had spent the night in bed with her. And then it made her laugh and the laugh sent aching echoes through her head.

The note said, “I’m at work. Home around 5:30. Plenty of feed in refrig. You don’t want it but you NEED it. White pills in medicine chest for head. Take two and LIVE. You’re a devil in bed. Jack.”

She smiled, and lifted herself with gingerly care from the bed. It was two-thirty in the afternoon.

When Jack came home with a brown bag full of groceries, she was smoking quietly and reading the paper in his kitchen.

“How are you?” he said, smiling.

“Fine.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Well, I’m clean, and you can believe that. I took a bath.”

“On you it looks good,” he said, putting food away.

Beebo shook her head a little. “I was just thinking … you’re about the only friend I have, Jack. I’ve been kicking myself all day for not thanking you. I mean, you listened to me for hours. You’ve been damn nice about my problems.”

“That’s my style,” he said, but he was flattered. “Besides, us frustrated doctors have to stick together. It’s nice to come home to a welcoming committee that thinks I’m the greatest guy in the world.”

“You must have a lot of friends down here,” she said, curious about him. Beebo had done all the talking since they met. But who was Jack Mann, the guy who did all the listening? Just a good-hearted young man in a strange town who gave her a drink and a bed, and was about to give her some dinner.

“Oh, plenty of friends,” he said, lighting the oven.

“You made me feel safe and—and human last night, Jack. If that doesn’t sound too silly.”

“Did you think you weren’t?” He put the ready-cooked food in the stove to warm.

“I’m grateful. I wanted you to know.”

“Marry me and prove it,” he said.

She looked at him with her mouth open, astonished. “You’re kidding!” she said.

“Nope. I always wanted a dozen kids.”

Beebo began to laugh. “I’d make a lousy mother, I’m afraid,” she said.

“You’d make a dandy mother, honey. Nice girls always like kids.”

“Is that why you want to get married? Just to have kids?”

“When I was in the Navy, I was always the sucker who put on the whiskers and passed out the popsicles on Christmas Day in the Islands. Hot? Mamma mia! I nearly passed out myself. Melted almost as fast as the goo I was giving away. But I loved those kids.”

“Then why aren’t you married? Why don’t you have some kids of your own?” she prodded. It seemed peculiar to her that so affable a man, especially one who liked children, should be single.

“Beebo, my ravishing love, why don’t you get married and have some kids?” he countered, disconcerting her.

“A woman has to do the having,” she said. “All a man has to do is get her pregnant.”

“All,” Jack repeated, rolling his eyes.

“Besides, I don’t want to get married,” she added, her eyes veiled and troubled.

“Hell, everybody gets married,” Jack said, watching her closely. Maybe she would open up a bit now and talk about what really mattered.

“Everybody but you,” she said.

He hunched his shoulders and grinned. “Touché,” he said. Then he opened the oven door to squint at the bubbling ravioli, and drew it out with a potholder, spooning it onto their plates.

They sat down at the table and Jack told her, “This is the greatest Italian food you’ll ever eat. Pasquini on Thompson Street makes it up.” He glanced up and found Beebo studying him. “What’s the matter? Don’t like pasta?”

“Jack, have you ever been in love?” she said.

Jack smiled and swallowed a forkful of food before he answered. She was asking him, as circuitously as possible, to tell her about life. She didn’t want him to guess it, but that was what she wanted.

“I fall in love twice a year,” he said. “Once in the fall and once in the spring. In the fall the kids come back to school, a few blocks from here. There are plenty of newcomers waiting to be loved the wrong way in September. They call me Wrong Way Mann.” He glanced up at her, but instead of taking the hint, she was puzzled by it.

“I didn’t know there was a wrong way,” she said earnestly.

“In love, as in everything else,” he said. “I just—well. Let’s say I have a talent for goofing things up.” He wondered if he ought to be frank with her about himself. It might relieve her, might make it possible for her to talk about herself then. But, looking at her face again, he decided against it. The whole subject scared her still. She wanted to learn and yet she feared that what she learned might be ugly, or more frightening than her ignorance.

He would have to go slowly with her, teach her gently what she was, and teach her not to hate the word for it: Lesbian. Such a soft word, mellifluous on the tongue; such a stab in the heart to someone very young, unsure, and afraid.

“And in the spring?” she was asking. “You fall in love then, too?”

“That’s just the weather, I guess. I fall in love with everybody in the spring. The butcher, the baker, the candlestickmaker.” He smiled at her face. She was amused and startled by the male catalog, and afraid to let her amusement show. Jack took her off the hook. “Good, hm?” He nodded at the food.

Beebo took a bite without answering. “What’s it like to live down here? I mean—” She cleared her throat. “In the Village?”

“Just one mad passionate fling after another,” he said. “Try the cheese.” He passed it to her.

“With the butcher and the baker?” she said humorously and made him laugh.

At last he said, “Well, honey, it’s like everyplace else. You eat three squares a day, you sleep eight hours a night, you work and earn money and obey the laws … well, most of the laws. The only difference between here and Juniper Hill is, we stay open all night.”

She laughed. And suddenly she said, “You know, this is good,” and began to eat with an appetite.

“So’s the salad.” He pushed the bowl toward her. “Now you tell me something, Little Girl Lost,” he said. “Were you ever in love?”

She looked down at her plate, uncomfortably self-conscious.

“Oh, come on,” he teased. “I’m not going to blackmail you.”

“Not real love,” she said. “Puppy love, I guess.”

“That kind can hurt as much as the other,” Jack said, and Beebo was grateful for his perception. “But it ought to be fun now and then, too.”

“Maybe it ought to be, but it never was,” she said. “I guess I’m like you, Jack. I goof everything up.”

He pointed his fork at her plate. “You’ve stopped eating again,” he said. “I want you to taste your future employer’s cooking.”

“My what?” she exclaimed.

“Pasquini needs a delivery boy. Can you drive?”

“I can drive, but can I be a boy?” she said with such a rueful face that he laughed aloud.

“You can wear slacks,” he said. “That’s the best I could do. The rest is up to you.”

His laughter embarrassed her, as if perhaps she had gone too far with her remark, and she said as seriously as possible, “I learned to drive on a truck with six forward gears.”

“This is a panel truck.”

“Duck soup. God, I hope he’ll take me, Jack. I have exactly ten bucks between me and the poorhouse. I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself.”

“Well, you haven’t got the job yet, honey. But I told Pasquini you had lots of experience and you’d do him the favor of dropping by in the morning.”

“Some favor!” she grinned. “Me, who couldn’t find Times Square if my life depended on it, making deliveries in this tangled-up part of town.”

“You’ll catch on.”

“What are the Pasquinis like?” she said.

“You’ll like Marie. She’s Pete’s wife. Does all the cooking. It’s her business, really. It was just a spaghetti joint when Pete’s dad ran it. After he died Pete took over and damn near went bankrupt. Then he married Marie. She cooks and keeps the books—like nobody can. She used to be a pretty girl, too, till she had too many kids and too much pizza.”

“What about Pete?”

“I don’t know what to tell you about that guy. I’ve known him slightly for the past ten years, but no one knows him very well. As far as Marie’s concerned, he’s her number one delivery boy. As a husband and a father, he’s her idea of a bust.”

“You mean he cheats?”

“He’s out every night of the week with weird girls on his arm. As if he were proud of it. He picks out the oddballs—you know, the ones who haven’t cut their hair since they were four years old, and wear dead-white make-up and cotton lisle stockings.”

“Lousy taste,” Beebo said, but when Jack smiled she looked away. She wasn’t going to give him the chance to ask what her own taste might be.

Jack paused, sensing her reticence, and then he went on, “Pete used to run a gang when he was in his teens. He was our local color.”

“You mean he’s a juvenile delinquent?” Beebo asked naively. “Are you sending me to work for a crook?”

“He’s an ex-j.d.,” Jack chuckled. “He went on to better things the day they broke his zip gun.”

“My God! Is he a criminal, Jack?”

“No, honey, don’t panic. He’s just a kook. He’s more of a loner now. It comes naturally to him to skulk around. But as far as I can tell, he only skulks after dark. And after Beat broads. He hasn’t been arrested since he was nineteen, and that’s been ten years.”

“He sounds like the ideal employer,” Beebo cracked.

“You could do worse; you with ten bucks in your pocket,” Jack reminded her. “Besides, he’s lived here all his life. He may be odd but you get used to him.”

“Just how ‘odd’ is he?”

“Honey, you’ve got to be a little odd down here, or you lose your membership card,” he said. “Besides, I’m not asking you to cut your veins and mingle blood with him. Just pass out the pizzas and take his money once a week.”

Beebo shook her head and laughed. “Well, if you say so,” she said. “I guess I’m safe as long as I don’t wear cotton lisle stockings.”

She got the job. Pete Pasquini had more deliveries than he could handle alone. Marie’s sauces, salads, preserves, and pastas were making a name and making a pile. The orders were going up so fast that it would take a second driver to deliver them all.

Beebo, dressed in a clean white shirt, sweater, and tan slacks, faced Pete at eight in the morning. She was somewhat intimidated by the looks of him and by Jack’s thumb sketch of the night before. He was a dour-faced young Italian-American with blue jowls and a down-turned mouth. If he ever smiled—Beebo doubted it—he would have been almost handsome, for his teeth were straight and white, and he had a peculiarly sensual mouth beneath his plum-dark eyes. He looked mean and sexy—a combination that instantly threw Beebo high on her guard.

“You’re Beebo?” he said, looking up at her with an order pad and pencil poised in his hands.

“Yes,” she said. “Jack Mann sent me. I—he—said you needed a driver.”

He smirked a little. Probably his smile for the day, she thought. “You’re as tall as I am,” he observed, as if pleased about it; pleased at least to make her self-conscious about it.

“Would you like to see me drive? I’m a good driver,” she said resentfully.

“How come you’re so tall, Beebo? Girls ain’t supposed to be so tall.” He put the paper and pencil down and turned to look her over, leaning jauntily on a linoleum-covered counter as he did so.

Beebo folded her arms over her chest in a gesture that told him to slow down, back off; a very unfeminine gesture that ordinarily offended a man’s ideals. “I can drive. You want a driver,” she said curtly. “Let’s talk business.” She had learned long ago to stand her ground when someone taunted her. Otherwise the taunting grew intolerable.

To her amazement, she made Pete Pasquini laugh. It was not a reassuring sound. “You’re a feisty one, ain’t you?” he grinned. “You—are—a—feisty—one.” He separated each word with slow relish, enjoying her discomfiture. For though she stood tall and bold in front of him, her hot face betrayed her embarrassment. She gave him a withering look and then turned and strode toward the door till she heard his voice behind her, accompanied by his footsteps.

“No offense, Beebo,” he said, “I’m gonna be your boss. I wanta be your friend, too. I don’t want people workin’ for me don’t like me. Shake hands?”

She turned around slowly, unconvinced. Maybe he really thought he was ingratiating himself with her. But she didn’t like his method much. It was the thought of her nearly empty wallet that finally prompted her to offer him her hand. He took it with a rather light loose grasp, surprising Beebo, who was used to the hearty grip of the farmers in her home county. But when he lifted her hand up and said, “Hey, that’s big, too!” she snatched it away as if he had burned her.

“Okay, okay, all you got to do is drive, you don’t have to shake hands with me all day,” he said, amused by her reaction. “I can see it ain’t your favorite game.”

It seemed peculiar enough to Beebo that they shake hands at all. They were not officially employer and employee yet, and even if they were, they were still man and girl. It made her feel creepy. She assumed that Pete had to get his wife’s approval before he could hire her. Marie was supposed to run the business.

“Well, come on, I’ll show you where things is,” Pete said.

“You mean it’s settled?” She hesitated. “I’m hired?”

“Why not?” He turned back to look at her.

“Well, I thought your wife? I mean—?” She stopped, not wishing to anger him. His face had turned very dark.

“My wife what?” he said. “You never mind my wife. If I say you’re hired, you’re hired. I don’t want no back talk about the wife. You dig?”

She nodded, startled by the force of his spite. She made a mental note not to press that sore spot again. He apparently needed and wanted the money Marie’s succulent concoctions brought in, but he hated surrendering control of the shop to her. Yet it was the price of their success. She knew what she was doing, in the kitchen and in the accounts, and he was afraid to interfere.

Beebo stood frowning at the sawdust floor.

“What’s the matter, kid? Something bugging you?” Pete asked.

She glanced up at him. It was strange that he should hire her on the spot without the slightest idea if she could drive worth a damn. “Do you want me to start deliveries this morning?” she said.

“I’ll take you around, show you the route,” he said. “First we got to make up the orders.”

He walked toward the back of the store with Beebo behind him. “Mr. Pasquini, there’s just one thing,” she said.

“It’s Pete. Yeah, what thing?” He handed her a large cardboard carton to pack a grocery order in.

“How much will it pay?” Beebo asked, standing there with the box, unwilling to start working till she knew what she was worth.

“Fifty a week to start,” he said, without looking up. He lifted some bottled olive oil down from a nearby shelf. “Things work out good, I’ll raise you. You want it, don’t you?” He looked at her then.

There was a barely noticeable pause before she answered, “I want it.” But she spoke with a sliver of misgiving stuck in the back of her mind.

Pete accompanied her on the delivery route that morning and again in the afternoon, watching her handle the truck, showing her where the customers lived. She had spent the night before with Jack studying a map of New York City and Greenwich Village, but what had seemed fairly logical on paper bogged down in colorful confusion when she took to the streets.

Pete swung an arm up on the seat behind her, his knees jutting toward her legs, and now and then when she missed a direction he would grab the wheel and start the turn for her. She disliked his closeness extremely, and throughout the day she was aware of his eyes on her face and body. It almost made her feel as if she had a figure, for the first time in her life, and the idea shocked her.

Beebo had broad shoulders and hardly a hint of a bosom. No man had ever looked at her appreciatively before, not even Jack Mann, who obviously liked her and enjoyed her company. She was not sure whether Pete admired her or was merely interested because she was so different from other girls.

He can’t possibly like me, she thought. Not the way men like women. The notion was so preposterous that it made her smile and reassured her. Till Pete noticed the smile and said, “What’s so funny, kid?” He looked too eager to know and she brushed it off. He let it go, but watched her more attentively, making her squirm a little.

It was a relief to climb down from the truck that afternoon—and a blow to feel the heavy clap of a masculine hand on her shoulder. “You did real good, Beebo,” Pete said, and the hand lay there until she spun away from him and walked inside to meet his wife.

Marie Pasquini was twenty-six, the overweight and overworked mother of five little Pasquinis. She did most of the cooking while Pete’s mother tended her kids, and the two women fell into several pan-rattling arguments per day. Beebo could hear the soprano squeals of young children upstairs in the apartment above the store, and a periodic disciplinary squawk from Grandma Pasquini.

Marie greeted Beebo with a big smile, revealing the shadow of the pretty face concealed beneath the fat.

“Your accent is French, isn’t it?” Beebo said.

“You got it,” Marie beamed. “Smart girl.” She moved about the kitchen while they got acquainted, eating, working, and talking incessantly. Pete slouched against the kitchen door chewing a wooden matchstick and watching Beebo.

Marie worked hard and she ate hard and she was going all to hips. But she was friendly and cheerful, and Beebo liked her.

“That’s a good boy, that Jack,” Marie said. “He comes in here two, three times a week, buys my food. Tells his friends, ‘Eat Pasquini’s stuff,’ and by God, they eat.”

“He gave me some last night,” Beebo said. “It’s good.”

“You bet.” Marie stirred her sauce and glanced at Beebo. “You live with him now?”

“Well—temporarily,” Beebo said, taken aback both by the question and by Pete’s silent laughter.

“About time he got a girl,” Marie said briskly. “Even one in pants.” And she glanced humorously at Beebo’s tan chinos.

Beebo colored up. “Well, it’s not quite like that,” she protested.

“Oh, don’t tell me,” Marie said, holding up two spattered hands. “A boy and a girl … well …!” and she gave a Gallic chuckle.

“What you want to do, embarrass the kid?” Pete demanded suddenly with mock anger. “She don’t sleep with no lousy fag.”

“Shut that big mouth, Pete,” Marie said sharply, without bothering to look at him. “She don’t want to hear dirty talk, neither.”

Beebo was burning to ask what a fag was, but she didn’t dare. She could hear in her imagination the cackling it would provoke from Pete.

Marie stirred in silence for a moment. “I never saw a boy put up with so much,” she said finally. “He got people in and out, in and out, every damn day, eating him out of house and home.” Beebo squirmed guiltily. “His only trouble, he got too big a heart. Don’t never take advantage of him like the others, Beebo.”

“What others?”

“You don’t know?” Marie looked at her, puzzled.

“Well, I’ve only known Jack a little while. I mean—”

“Oh.” Marie nodded sagely. “Well, he got too many fair-weather friends. Know they can have whatever he got they want. So they take. And he lets them. Can’t stand to see people go without. He’s a good boy. Too good.”

“He ain’t all that good, Marie,” Pete drawled, grinning at Beebo. “You just like him because he comes in here and gives you that swishy talk about what a good-looking dame you are. All that proves is, he got bad eyes. Now, Beebo here might have trouble with him, you never know. If I was her, I wouldn’t climb in his bed.”

“Pete, you got a mind even dirtier than your mouth,” Marie said. “Get out of my kitchen, I don’t want the food dirtied up too. Out, salaud!”

Beebo was amused by her accent, comically mismated with the ungrammatical English she had learned from Pete.

Marie threw a potlid at her husband. “See?” Pete shrugged at Beebo, catching the lid. “I try to say a few words and what do I get? Pots and pans. And she wonders why I go out at night.”

“Out!” Marie stamped her foot and he left them, disappearing bizarrely like a wraith into the gloom of the darkened store. After nearly a full minute had elapsed Beebo became aware with a silent start that the fingers of his left hand were curled around the door frame: five orphaned earthworms searching for the dirt.

Beebo stared at them with something very near loathing. She wondered if she was supposed to see them, and if he thought they would please her for some obscure reason. Or was he hiding, thinking the fingers out of sight? No, he knew damn well she could see them, and would. They were his gesture of invitation, unheard and unseen by his wife.

Beebo began to sweat with alarm and revulsion. She chatted determinedly with Marie for almost fifteen minutes before those five pale fingers retreated from their post. Maybe it was supposed to be a gag, Beebo told herself. She didn’t want to mention it to Marie. It would make her look a fool, perhaps even hysterical, if the whole thing was only a joke.

That’s what it is, Beebo told herself firmly. That’s what it has to be. She stood up and thanked Marie, accepting a bag of hot fresh-cooked chicken to take home for dinner, and walked through the front of the shop. She held herself together tightly, and if she had seen the least movement, heard the least whisper, she would have lashed out in abrupt terror. She had the uncanny feeling that Pete was somewhere waiting with those loathsome hands. But she couldn’t see him, she didn’t hear him, and she reached the door and the outside with a gasp of relief.

The relief was so deep that it turned into a laugh, soothing her and making her a little ashamed of herself. Away from Pete she could scold herself for her aversion to him. Maybe it wasn’t fair. He was just a guy, not a ghost, not a snake. He was spooky, but Marie seemed as healthy and normal as her good foods.

Beebo was disturbed by the strangeness of Pete’s manner, but she could never believe that any man would truly desire her, no matter how creepy he was. Not even a nut like Pete Pasquini. For his own reasons he was making a study of her, but beyond that he would never go. She began to feel safe and comfortable again as she rounded the corner to Jack’s street. She felt unassailable in the fortress of her flat-chested, muscular young body. It was not the stuff that male dreams are made of.

As Jack explained to her later, it was himself and others like him who had talked the Pasquinis’ shop into a financial success. Rather abruptly, Pete and Marie found themselves making money, and Pete, after an adolescence full of alley wars and hock-shop heists, found himself taking a belated interest in the dough: not the flour kind, the folding kind.

He had married Marie overseas when he was in the service and brought her back to his inheritance: the foundering grocery shop his father had left him. Undismayed, Marie set out to bear his kids and learn his mother’s recipes. By a combination of luck, sense, and skill, Marie pulled them out of the dumps.

It was still nominally Pete’s business, yet he did little more than run his wife’s errands and pocket all the money Marie would let him have. He always demanded more, but he respected her French thrift. The money she refused to give him went back into the business and made it possible for him to insist on more gradually as time went on.

This arrangement galled Pete, but he preferred it to poverty. Still, he had to get even with her. So he did it by openly sniffing up skirts around Greenwich Village. He would even flaunt a girl at Marie now and then and she, stung, would call him half a man, who played with other girls because he didn’t have what it took to keep one good woman satisfied. Or else she ignored him entirely, which enraged him.

It was not a quiet cozy family. Pete did not know or like his children very well. He got on famously with his mother, but his mother and his wife were lifelong enemies. Beebo began to learn about them as she worked near them in the shop.

Pete watched Beebo move around during the first week, making her feel clumsy as a young colt; getting in her way deliberately (she was sure) to make her dodge around him; turning up in out-of-the-way corners where she didn’t expect to see him. Her antipathy to him was lively, but fortunately she didn’t see much of him. Filling orders took less time than delivering them and she was out of the shop most of the day. In the truck she was disposed to be pleased with her job. She liked to drive. She liked to talk to people, and the customers were friendly. She even liked the chore of carrying the heavy cartons up and down all day. It pleased her to feel strong, equal to the task.

A week ago all her hopes had been crashing around her. She had retreated in disgrace from a cruel predicament. Then she found Jack Mann, a friend; a job; and some self-respect, one right after the other. She was grateful, full of the resilient optimism of youth.

Without any specific words on the subject, Beebo and Jack came to an understanding that she would live with him for a while, till she could afford a place for herself. “You’ll be better off with a roommate,” Jack advised her casually. “I’ll have to introduce you to some of my upper-class female friends.”

“Sure,” she grinned. “‘Pamela, this is my lower-class female friend, Beebo Brinker.’ And she’ll say, ‘Dahling, you’re absolutely crashing, but I can’t possibly share my apartment with those pants.’” She made Jack laugh at her. “Besides, Jackson,” Beebo added rather shyly, “I’ve already got a roommate. He only has one fault—he won’t let me pay my half of the rent.”

“I like to pay bills,” Jack said. “Gives me a sense of power.”

“Marie says you’ve got too big a heart,” Beebo told him. “And she’s right.”

“Marie’s a good girl,” he said. “How are you getting along with Peter the Wolf?”

“Fine, as long as he’s out of my sight.”

Jack grinned. “You can handle him, honey. Just keep a can of corn beef in your pocket. If he tries to lift your wallet, clobber him.”

“It’s not my wallet I’m worried about,” she said. “There’s nothing in it, anyway. It’s just that he’s always under my feet when he should be on the other side of the store.”

“I suspect it’s for Marie’s benefit,” Jack said. “Every female who comes into the store gets the once-over from Pete—provided Marie is looking. And most of the time, she is. She likes to keep score, I guess.”

“There was a girl today,” Beebo said. “She came in the shop about noon, when Marie was fixing lunch. I waited on her.” Her face became intent as she summoned the girl’s image in her mind’s eye.

“What about her?” Jack said curiously.

But Beebo, coming to herself at the sound of his voice, said, “Oh, nothing. But she was more Pete’s type … any man’s type.”

“What was she like?”

“She had long black hair,” Beebo said, as if it were very special. “People don’t let their hair grow like that any more. It was lovely. She let it hang free down her back. And her face …” She was gone again, seeing it in her imagination.

“She must have been a looker,” Jack said, frustrated by the reticence between himself and Beebo. He knew what hundreds of questions she needed to ask, what a wealth of help she would be wanting soon. But she didn’t dare start asking and because she didn’t, Jack dared not force the answers on her yet.

“She was absolutely gorgeous,” Beebo said with a certain wonderment and innocence that touched him. “I never saw such a girl in my life before.” There was a small silence. Beebo’s words hung in the air like a neon sign and reduced her abruptly to confusion. To cover up, she said, “She wasn’t a very nice girl, though. Not by your standards.”

“My standards?”

“She’s not afraid of boys,” Beebo grinned. “At least, she wasn’t afraid of Pete. But I think they knew each other from somewhere. He called her … Mona.” She spoke the name self-consciously. “It sounds old-fashioned, doesn’t it?”

“I wonder if it’s Mona Petry,” Jack said. “She has black hair, but I didn’t think it was that long. Still, I haven’t seen her for a while.”

“Who’s Mona Petry?” Beebo asked, her eyes intent on Jack.

“Old flame of Pete’s,” Jack said. “She used to come into the store a lot three or four years ago. She and Pete got quite a charge out of putting poor Marie on. Mona isn’t the charitable type. She likes to land a man who belongs to some other woman—more to spite the other woman than because she wants the man. As soon as she won Pete, she dumped him like a sack of meal. For some reason, Pete never fought back. Makes me think she really meant something to him. God knows, none of the other broads do.”

“Is she one of those man-hungry girls that can’t get enough?” Beebo said. “I forget what they’re called, but there’s a name for it.”

“The name is nymphomaniac,” Jack said. “But Mona doesn’t love men. She just plays around with them. They’re good ego builders.” He lighted a cigarette, seeing, without seeming to, the concentration on Beebo’s face. The question was there on her tongue, in her mind, but she couldn’t get it out. If Mona doesn’t love men, she was thinking … then who?

“There’s another word for Mona,” Jack said. Beebo tensed up. “Bitch.” He threw her a grin and made her laugh with nervous relief. “Actually, Mona loves girls,” Jack went on, speaking in a smooth casual flow, a conversational tone that bespoke no shock, no disapproval, nothing but ordinary interest. He deliberately looked at the front page of the evening paper as he spoke.

Beebo answered huskily, “What do you mean? What girls?”

“Lesbians,” he said. “Want to freshen this up for me, pal?” He handed her his highball glass. She took it with astonishment still plain on her face. When she returned from the kitchen with the new drink, she asked him, “Aren’t they sort of—immoral? I heard the word once before. I thought you weren’t supposed to say it.”

At that, Jack looked up. “Lesbian? You mean you thought it was a dirty word?” he exclaimed, and laughed in spite of himself. Beebo was momentarily offended until he cleared his throat and said, “Forgive me, honey, but that’s the bloodiest nonsense I’ve heard in a long time. Whoever in the hell told you it was dirty?”

“Doesn’t it mean loose women?” Beebo asked.

He shook his head. “It means gay women,” he said. “It means homosexual women. It means women, Beebo, who love other women. The way heterosexual women love men.”

His words put a focus on Beebo’s fascination. She stared at him from the sofa with her lips parted and her eyes fixed steadily on his. “You said Mona was a bitch,” she said finally, softly. “And then you said she was a Lesbian. Doesn’t that make her cheap? Q.E.D.?”

“Some of the staunchest Puritan ladies I know are double-dyed bitches,” Jack said briskly. “And just because Mona is a bad apple doesn’t mean all the gay girls in the world are full of worms. Mona would be bitchy anyway, gay or straight.”

“What’s ‘straight’?”

“Heterosexual,” Jack said.

“Where did you learn all those words?” Beebo said, bewildered.

“I’m a native. I speak the lingo,” he said, but instead of catching his implication, she thought he meant only that he had lived in Greenwich Village so long he had picked it up, like everyone else.

“Does it ever happen that a nice girl is a Lesbian?” she asked him shyly.

“All the time,” he said, opening up the paper and gazing through the ball scores.

“Did you ever meet any?”

“I’ve met most of them,” he chuckled. “They’re just as friendly and pleasant as other girls. Why not?”

“But can’t you tell by looking at them that they’re—” She rubbed a hand over her mouth as if to warn herself not to speak the word, and then said it anyway: “—Lesbian?”

“You mean, do they all wear army boots and Levis?” Jack said with a smile. “Does Mona Petry look like a buck private?”

Beebo shook her head. “That’s why it’s so hard to believe she’s what you say she is.”

“Gay? Why hell, she’s slept with more girls than she has men. And let me tell you, that’s damn near enough girls to elect a lady president.”

Beebo laughed with him, and yet she felt a strange obsession with the whole idea. She half resented Jack’s merriment on the subject, although she was relieved that he displayed no contempt for Lesbians as a group. Only for Mona Petry. She was surprised to find herself wanting to defend Mona, whom she knew so little. And yet she trusted Jack’s judgment. Still, what a pity to think a girl that pretty was that hard.

Jack sipped his drink and picked up his cigarette, still with his eyes on the paper. “There are some nice little gay bars around the neighborhood,” he said. “We’ll have to take some of them in. Maybe this weekend, hm?” He didn’t look at her. His cigarette waggled between his lips as he talked.

“Is it all right to go there?” Beebo asked. “Don’t the police make raids on those places?”

“Now and then!” he conceded. “Of course, if you’d rather not …”

“Oh, I’d like to go,” she said, so quickly that he smiled into the newsprint. “But aren’t they just for men—the gay bars?”

“Men, girls, and everything in between,” he assured her.

“Do you ever go there, Jack?”

Again he was tempted to be honest with her, and still again he restrained himself. “I go when the mood is on me,” he said. Beebo became silent at once, as if she suspected she was trying to learn too much too fast. But she spent the remaining weekdays waiting impatiently for a tour of the bars with Jack.

Jack took her to three or four of his favorite places, and to one strictly Lesbian bar where they admitted only the faces they recognized, through a window in the door. Beebo followed him around quietly, watching, listening, almost breathing in the atmosphere. She said little, and most of what she did say was interrogatory.

Jack answered her calmly while he sipped one beer after another. He would order one for her and let her work at it, but he usually ended up finishing it himself. In every bar he was kept busy greeting people, trading jokes, laughing. Beebo trailed along in his wake, smiling and shaking hands with the strangers who were Jack’s friends, and promptly forgetting their names.

But not their faces. Toward the end of the evening she began to feel that she had seen more faces in one night than she had seen in a lifetime in Juniper Hill. And these faces seemed different to her: rare and beautiful, sharers of a special knowledge. They had bright eyes and young smiles, no matter how old they were.

“They make a big thing of keeping young down here,” Jack told her. “The men are worse than the girls. Nobody loves an old queen.”

It was almost one in the morning when they left the last co-ed bar and Jack asked if she was game for one more. “This one is just for Lesbians,” he said.

She nodded, and a few minutes later they were being admitted to a basement bar saturated with pink light, paneled with mirrors, and filled with girls. More girls, more sizes, types, and ages, than Beebo had ever seen collected together in one place. The place was called the Colophon and it was decorated with the emblems of various famous publishing houses.

Jack fought his way through the crush at the bar, absorbing a lot of pointed merriment directed at his masculinity.

“Sour grapes,” he cried good-naturedly and inspired a chorus of laughter and catcalls. Beebo, pushing in behind him, became aware suddenly that she was the object of mass curiosity. She could look over the heads of most of the girls and her height made her visible from all directions.

Abashed, she closed in on Jack, who was hollering an order to the bartender. “Maybe we ought to go. I—I mean—” She didn’t know how to explain herself to him. He was looking at her with a startled frown. “They don’t seem to like having a man in here,” she said lamely.

Jack began to laugh. “You want me to go, honey? Okay. Just give me two bits to see a movie.”

She gasped. “That’s not what I meant!” she objected. “I don’t want to be in here alone!”

“Why not?” He reached between two girls at the bar to grab his beer. “You’ll make out. I might cramp your style.”

“Jack, damn it, if you go, I go.”

“Okay, pal, I won’t ditch you,” he said, glimpsing her anxious face. “Relax. We’ll have one more and then cut out.”

She had had quite a bit of beer already, even with Jack finishing them for her. But she couldn’t stand there with all those eyes on her and do nothing. Better to drink a beer than gape back at the gapers. She poured some into her glass and drank it. And then drained the glass and poured some more.

Jack took her elbow. “I see some friends over there,” he said, guiding her toward a table near the back. There were introductions all around, but to Beebo, things seemed different. The other bars had been all male or mixed. In this one, Jack Mann and the two bartenders, and a small scattering of “Johns,” were the only men in a big room solidly packed with women. It excited Beebo intensely—all that femininity. She was silent, studying the girls at the table while Jack talked with them. When she shook hands with them, a new feeling gripped her. For the first time in her life she was proud of her size, proud of her strength, even proud of her oddly boyish face. She could see interest, even admiration on the faces of many of the girls. She was not used to that kind of reaction in people, and it exhilarated her. But she didn’t talk much, only answering direct questions when she had to; smiling at them when they smiled at her; looking away in confusion when one or another tried to stare her down.

They had been there half an hour when somebody came over from another table and asked her to dance. Beebo turned around, her stomach in a knot. “Are they dancing?” she asked.

“Sure,” said the girl. “By the jukebox.”

Beebo had heard music without looking to see where it came from. She got up from the table and went to the back room, realizing as she stood up how much beer she had drunk. At the back of the crowd surrounding the dance floor, there was room to stand and watch.

The music was rhythmic and popular. The floor was jammed with a mass of couples … a mass of girls, dancing, arms locked around each other, bodies pressed close and warm. Their cheeks were touching. Quick light kisses were exchanged. And they were all girls, every one of them: young and lovely and infatuated with each other. They touched one another with gentle caresses, they kissed, they smiled and laughed and whispered while they turned and moved together.

There was no shame, no shock, no self-consciousness about it at all. They were enjoying themselves. They were having fun in the most natural way imaginable. They were all in love, or so it seemed. They were—what did Jack call it?—gay.

Beebo watched them for less than a minute, all told; but a minute that was transfixed like a living picture in her mind for the rest of her life. She was startled by it, afraid of it. And yet so passionately moved that she caught her breath and held it till her heart began to pound in protest. Her fists closed hard with the nails biting into her palms and she was obsessed momentarily by the desire to grab the girl nearest her and kiss her.

At that point she murmured, “Oh, God!” and turned to flee. She felt the way she had in childhood dreams when she was being chased by some vague terrible menace, and she had to move slowly and tortuously, with great effort, as through a wall of water, while the monster gained on her from behind.

She caught Jack’s shoulders in her big hands and squeezed them hard. “Let’s go, let’s go,” she said urgently.

He looked at her as if she had lost her senses. “I just ordered another round,” he said.

“Jack, please!” She pulled him to his feet.

“Jesus, can’t you wait a little while, honey?” he said, and triggered an outburst of merriment at the table. But she meant it, and he was not too high to see her panic. He picked his jacket off the back of his chair, apologizing to his friends. “When she wants it, she wants it now,” he grinned, shrugging.

“Who are you kidding?” they laughed.

Beebo was already pushing her way to the exit and Jack had a battle to catch her. He found her waiting for him outside by the door.

“Hey,” he said, and put a friendly hand on her shoulder as they started to walk toward his apartment. “What happened?”

“I don’t want to go back there, Jack,” she blurted.

“What’s the matter with it? Too much fun?”

“It was awful,” she said, not even knowing why she said it.

“You liked the other places.”

She wouldn’t answer, only striding along so fast in her haste to leave the Colophon behind that Jack had to run to keep up.

“Was it the dancing?” he said.

She whirled to answer him, her face flushed with emotion. “I suppose you’ve seen it so many times you think nothing of it,” she cried. “Well, it’s—it’s wrong!”

“Who the hell do you think you are to call it wrong?” Jack demanded. “Those are damn nice girls. If they want to dance with each other, let them dance. You don’t have to watch.”

Beebo listened, her anger fading, to be replaced by a fearful desire.

“Did it make you feel … that way, Beebo?” he said gently.

“It made me feel …” She turned away, unable to face him. “Funny inside. As if it was wrong. Or too right. I don’t know.”

“It’s not wrong, pal,” he said, speaking to her back. “You’ve been brought up to think so. Most of us have. But who are they hurting? Nobody. They’re just making each other happy. And you want their heads to roll because it makes you feel funny.”

She covered her face with her hands and rubbed her eyes roughly. Through her fingers she said, “I don’t want to hurt them. I just don’t want to stand there and watch them.”

“Well, why didn’t you dance?” he said. “Hell, I don’t like being a wallflower, either.”

“Jack, I can’t dance like that,” she said in a hushed voice.

“Why can’t you?” She refused to answer, so he answered for her. “You can. You just won’t. But you know something, my little friend? One of these days, you will.”

“You’re no prophet, Jack. Don’t predict my future.” She started walking again.

He followed her, throwing up his hands. “Okay, okay. It shook you. But not because it was vulgar and indecent. Because it was beautiful and exciting. Besides, you envied those kids on the dance floor. Didn’t you?”

Her confession never came. They walked in silence the rest of the way to Jack’s apartment. He closed and locked the front door and turned on the living room light, tossing his jacket into a chair.

“Beebo,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “You’ve been living with me almost a month now—”

“If you want me to move, I’ll move.” She was surly and defensive.

“I want you to stay. When you move, it’ll be because you want to,” he said. “Besides, that’s not what I want to talk about. In the past month, you have never once told me the most important thing about yourself, Beebo.”

She felt a flash of fear, piercing as sudden light in darkness. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

Jack gave her the freshly lighted cigarette and she hid gratefully behind a smoke screen. “You know,” he said. “But I’m not going to insist on it. I think you want to talk to me, but you’re afraid. I’m trying every way I know to show you that it won’t offend me, Beebo. You think about that. You think about the people who are my friends—people I enjoy and respect—and then you ask yourself what you have to fear.”

There was a long pause. At last she said, “It isn’t that easy, Jack. I should know what I am. But I don’t know myself at all. Especially here in this new place. Back in Juniper Hill, I could only see what other people saw, and I was afraid and ashamed. But here, I look all different. I even feel different.” She looked at her hands. “Don’t push me, Jackson.” And she rushed past him suddenly, to cry in the privacy of the bathroom; to wonder why the girls she had seen that night had moved her so dramatically.

She did not fall asleep until very late. And when she did, she dreamed of sweet, supple, smiling-faced girls, dancing sensuously in each other’s arms; glancing at her with wide curious eyes; beckoning to her. She saw herself glide slowly, almost reluctantly, over the floor with a girl whose long black hair hung halfway down her back; a girl with an old-fashioned name: Mona. Beebo touched the hair, the long dipping curve of the back till her hands rested on Mona’s hips.

The next thing she knew, Jack was shaking her awake. “Wake up! Jesus!” he said, grinning at her in the early light. “You’re beating hell out of the mattress.”

Her eyes flew wide open and she stared at him, stuttering.

“Funny thing about dreams,” he said softly. “They let you be yourself in the dark. When you can be yourself in the morning, too, you’ll be cured.”

“Cured of what?” she said in a disgruntled whisper.

Jack chuckled. “Dreams,” he said. “You won’t need ‘em.”

Beebo was relieved when he went back to sleep. There was no escaping now what she was. The dancing lovers in the Colophon had impressed it indelibly on her. And yet Jack wanted her to confirm it in so many words, and the idea terrified her. It would be like accepting a label for the rest of her life—a label she didn’t even understand yet.

And there was no one to tell her that the time would come when the label wouldn’t frighten her; when she would be happy simply to be what she was.

They went a while longer without discussing it. Jack was on the verge of confronting Beebo a dozen times with his own homosexuality. But she would catch the look in his eye and warn him with tacit signs to keep still. He began to wonder if she understood about him at all. He had tried to make it obvious the night they went barhopping. He wanted to say to her, “Okay, I’m gay. But that doesn’t make me less human, less moral, less normal than other men. You’ve got the same bug, Beebo; only with you, it’s girls. Look at me: I’m proof you can live with it. You don’t need to hate yourself or the people you’re attracted to.”

But if she saw it she kept it to herself. She’s too wrapped up in discovering herself to discover me too, he thought. He tried to kid her. “You think it’s all right for the other girls but not for Beebo,” he said, but she wouldn’t give him a smile. He felt stumped in front of her stubborn silence; aching to help her, afraid of scaring her into an emotional crack-up.

She was very tense. And then one evening, about a week after her night out with Jack, over dinner she said, “Mona was in the shop again. I talked to her.”

Jack looked up in surprise. “What about?”

“I asked if she was Mona Petry. She is.” She seemed afraid to elaborate.

“Is that all?” he smiled.

“You were right about her—she’s gay.” She looked up to catch the smile.

“Did she say so?” he asked.

“No, Pete said so after she left. He said he used to date her but he dropped her when he found out.”

“Well, he’s got it backwards, but never mind. The point is, Mona’s a slippery little bitch. She’s good to look at but she isn’t any fun. She’s out to screw the whole damn world. If I were you—”

“Jackson, I don’t give a damn what you think of Mona Petry,” Beebo said.

“Then why bring her up?”

She colored, and put down a few more bites of the dinner they were eating. Finally, slowly, with her face still pink, she said, “Do you think it would be all right if I went out tonight? I mean—alone?”

“If you eat all your spinach.”

“I am asking you,” she said hotly, “because I value your judgment. Not because I’m an addlepated child.”

“All right,” he said, smiling into his napkin. “Where do you want to go?”

She looked at her plate. “The Colophon,” she said, making him strain to hear it.

“Why? Want to drop a bomb on the dance floor?”

She sighed. “Pete says Mona hangs out there.”

“In that case, I don’t think it’s safe,” he said flatly. “But it should be educational.”

She said, “Jack, I’m scared. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared of anything in my life.”

“It’s no disgrace to be scared, Beebo. Only to act like it.”

“I feel as if that damn silly bar—the people in it—are a sort of challenge,” she said, fumbling to express it justly. “As if I have to go back or I’ll never know …” She shook her head with a self-conscious smile. “That’s a hell of a place to go looking for yourself.”

“Hell of a place to go looking for Mona,” he said. “I don’t know though, pal. It has to come sooner or later. It’s time you learned a thing or two. You’re naïve, but you’re no fool. Go on—but go slow.”

Mona was not at the Colophon that night, or for many nights afterward. In a way, Beebo was relieved. She wanted to meet her, but she wanted time to meet other people too, to see other places, and cruise around the Village without any pressure on her to prove things to herself. Or to a worldly girl like Mona Petry. Beebo was still a stranger in a strange town, unsure, and grateful for a chance to learn unobserved.

She would sit and gaze for hours at the girls in the bars or passing in the streets. She wanted to talk to them, see what they were like. She was often drawn to one enough to daydream about her, but she never mentioned it to Jack. Still, she was eagerly curious about the Lesbian mores and social codes. The gay girls seemed so smooth and easy with each other, talking about shared experiences in a special slang, like members of an exclusive sorority.

Beebo, watching them as the days and weeks passed, became slowly aware how much she envied them. She wanted to join the in-group. And she would watch them longingly and wonder if their talk was ever about her. It was.

A few of Jack’s friends, who had met her in his company, would come up and talk with her, and knowing for certain that they were Lesbians gave Beebo a vibrant pleasure, whether or not the girls themselves were exciting. Looking at one she would think, She knows how it feels to want what I want. I could make her happy. I know it. Even the word “Lesbian,” which had offended her before, began to sound wonderful in her ears.

She shocked herself with such candid thoughts, but that was only at first. Little by little, it began to seem beautiful to her that two women could come together with passion and intelligence and make a life with and for each other; make a marriage. She dreamed of lovely, sophisticated women at her feet, aware even as she dreamed that she hadn’t yet the savoir faire to win such a woman. But she was afire with ambition to acquire it.

She would walk into a bar, order a beer, and sit alone and silent through an evening. In her solitude, she seemed mysterious to the laughing chattering people around her. They began to point her out when she came in.

At first, ignorance and inexperience kept Beebo aloof. But she quickly understood that her refusal to be sociable made her the target of a lot of smiling speculation. When she got over being afraid of the situation, it amused her. The fact that she attracted girls, even ones she knew she would never pursue, was almost supernaturally strange and exciting to her. She submitted to their teasing questions with an enigmatic smile until she realized that one or two had worked themselves up to infatuation pitch over her.

There followed a period of elation when she walked into Julian’s or the Cellar and saw the eyes she knew had waited all night to look into hers turn and flash in her direction. She always passed them by and went to a seat at the bar. But each time she came closer to stopping and answering a smile or asking someone to join her in a beer. And still, she couldn’t find Mona.

The only wrong note in the tune was a boy, slight and fine-featured, who watched her and seemed to have persuaded himself that he loved her. He fell for her with an awkward crush that embarrassed them both. Often, at the end of an evening when he was pretty high, he would approach her and timidly offer to buy her a drink.

Beebo kept turning him down, kindly but firmly. He always flinched when she said no, and she pitied him. He had a gentle appealing face, fair in the way of extreme youth. She guessed he must be a couple of years younger than she, and wondered how he could buy drinks in a bar.

“I’m sorry, I’m just leaving,” she would tell him.

And he would watch her go, wistfully. He looked tired and malnourished, and she wondered once if it would offend him to be offered a free sandwich. She never quite got up the nerve to find out.

At home, Jack did not press her. But her silence regarding her activities at night worried him and put a strain between them. She knew that Jack was waiting for her to talk about it, and she wanted to be honest with him more than ever. He had been patient, humorously tolerant with her. And she knew that he was a man of the world. He had made it clear that he enjoyed the friendship of many delightful gay women, that he approved of them, and that he thought she might enjoy their company.

But he had not said, “Oh, come on, Beebo. You’re gay. Admit it. We both know it.” He had, however, come closer than she knew to saying it. And it was hard for Jack himself to realize that his hints and jokes were couched in a language still foreign to her in many ways. Often they went over her head or were taken at face value; saved and worried over, but never fathomed.

So she found herself hung up on a dilemma: she was sure of his friendship as long as she was an observer of the gay scene, not a sister-in-the-bonds. But what would he say if she told him she had a desperate crush on Mona Petry with the long black hair? Or that she got dizzy with the joy of being in a crowd of gay girls; near enough to touch, to overhear, to look and look and look until they whirled through her dreams at night?

Would he say, You can play with the matches but don’t get burned? Would he pity her? Turn on his wit? Would he—could he—take it with the easy calm he showed in other circumstances?

She thought he could. She felt closer to him now that she had spent nearly two months under his roof. She knew his heart was big, and she had seen him in a Lesbian bar talking with his friends there. He was not being condescending. He valued them.

Perhaps more than anything, she was persuaded by the need to talk it out; the need for help and comfort. And that was Jack’s forte.

Beebo and Jack were watching a TV show one evening when he asked her, during the commercial, why she wasn’t going out that night. “Don’t tell me you gave up on Mona,” he teased.

Instead of answering, she told him about the boy who was in love with her. “His name is Pat,” she said. “The bartender told me. He looks hungry, as if he needs to be cared for.” She laughed. “I was never much for maternal instincts—but he seems to bring them out.”

“I’d like to meet him. He might bring mine out, too,” Jack said.

“Why don’t you come with me Friday? He’s always at Julian’s.”

Jack looked away. “I’ve been trying to give you a free rein,” he said. “You don’t want me along. I’ll find him myself.”

“I do want you along,” she said. “I like your company.”

“More than the girls’?” he grinned.

She felt herself tense all over. There had been so many chances lately to talk to him, and she had run away from them all. Now, she felt a surge of defiance, a will to have it out. He had a right to know at least as much about her as she knew about herself. He had earned it through his generosity and affection.

“I read a book once,” she said clumsily. “Under my covers at night—when I was fifteen. It was about two girls who loved each other. One of them committed suicide. It hit me so hard I wanted to die, too. That’s about as close as I’ve come to reality in my life, Jack. Until now.”

He leaned over and switched off the television. The room was so quiet they could hear themselves breathing.

“I was kicked out of school,” she went on hesitantly, “because I looked so much like a boy, they thought I must be acting like one. Chasing girls. Molesting them. Everything I ever did to a girl, or wanted to do or dreamed of doing, happened in my imagination. The trouble was, everybody else in Juniper Hill had an imagination, too. And they had me doing all these things for real.” She shut her eyes and tried to force her heart to slow down, just by thinking about it.

“And you never did?” he said. “You never tried? There must have been girls, Beebo—”

“There were, but all I had to do was talk to one and her name was mud. I wouldn’t do that to anybody I cared for.”

Jack stared at her, wondering what geyser of emotion must be waiting to erupt from someone so intense, so yearning, and so rigidly denied all her life.

“My father tried to teach me not to hate myself because I looked like hell in gingham frills,” she said. “But when you see people turn away and laugh behind their hands … It makes you wonder what you really are.” She looked at him anxiously, and then she said it. “I’ve never touched a girl I liked. Never made a pass or spoken a word of love to a single living girl. Does that make me normal, Jack? … And yet I know I could, and I think now I will, and God knows I want to desperately. Does that make me gay?” She spoke rapidly, stopping abruptly as if her voice had gone dead in her throat at the word “gay.”

“Well, first,” he said kindly, “you’re Beebo Brinker, human being. If you are gay, that’s second. Some girls like you are gay, some aren’t. Your body is boyish, but there’s nothing wrong with it.” His voice was reassuring.

“Nothing, except there’s a boy inside it,” she said. “And he has to live without all the masculine trimmings other boys take for granted. Jack, long before I knew anything about sex, I knew I wanted to be tall and strong and wear pants and ride horses and have a career … and never marry a man or learn to cook or raise babies. Never.”

“That’s still no proof you’re gay,” he said, going slowly, letting her convince herself.

“I’m not even built like a girl. Girls are knock-elbowed and big-hipped. They can’t throw or run or—look at my arm, Jack. I was the best pitcher on the team whenever they let me play.” She rolled her sleeve back and showed him a well-muscled arm, browned and veined and straight as a boy’s.

“I see,” he murmured.

“It was the parents who gave me the worst of it,” she said. “The kids weren’t too bad till I got to high school. But you know what happens then. You get hairy and you get pimples and you have to start using a deodorant.”

Jack laughed silently behind his cigarette.

“And the boys get big and hot and anxious, like a stallion servicing a mare.”

Jack swallowed, feeling himself move. “And the girls?”

“The girls,” she sighed, “get round and soft and snippy.”

“And instead of round and soft, you got hot and anxious?”

“All of a sudden, I was Poison Ivy Brinker,” she confirmed. “Nobody wanted whatever it was I had. My brother Jim said I wasn’t a boy and I wasn’t a girl, and I had damn well better be one or the other or he’d hound me out of school himself.”

“What did you do?”

“I tried to be like the rest. But not to please that horse’s ass.” Her farmer’s profanity tickled him. “I did it for Dad. He thought I was adjusting pretty well, and that was his consolation. I never told him how bad it was.”

“So now you want to find Mona Petry,” Jack said, after a small pause, “and ask her if you’re gay.”

“Not ask her. Just get to know her and see if it could happen. She makes me wonder so.… Jack, what makes a feminine girl like that gay? Why does she love other girls, when she’s just as womanly and perfumed as the girl who goes for men? I used to think that all homosexual girls were three-quarters boy.” She hung her head. “Like me, I guess. And that they were all doomed to love feminine girls who could never love them back. It seems like a miracle that a girl like Mona could love a—” she stopped, embarrassed.

“Could love a girl like you,” he finished for her. “Take it on faith, honey. She doesn’t have to look like a Ram tackle to know that her happiness lies with other women. The girls you see around town aren’t all boyish, are they?”

“They’re not all gay, either.”

He ground out his cigarette. “Tell me why they ran you out of Juniper Hill. The whole story. Was it really just a nasty rumor about you and the Jones girl?”

Beebo lay down, stretched out on the sofa, and answered without looking at him. “They’d been hoping for an excuse for years,” she said. “It was in April, last spring. I went to the livestock exhibition in Chicago with Dad and Jim. I was in the stalls with them most of the time, handling some of the steers from our county. Sweaty and gritty, and not thinking about much but the job. And then one night—I’ll never know why—I took it into my head to wear Jim’s good clothes.

“I knew it was dangerous, but suddenly it was also irresistible. Maybe I just wanted to get away with it. Maybe it was the feel of a man’s clothes on my back, or a simple case of jealousy. Anyway, I played sick at dinnertime, and stayed in the hotel till they left.

“Jack, it was as though I had a fever. The minute I was alone I put Jim’s things on. I slung Dad’s German camera over my shoulder and took his Farm Journal press pass. On the way over, I stopped for a real man’s haircut. The barber never said a word. Just took my money and stared.

“I looked older than Jim. I felt wonderful.” She stopped, her chin trembling. “A blonde usher showed me to the press section. She was small and pretty and she asked me if I was from the ‘working press.’ I said yes because it sounded important. She gave me a seat in the front row with a typewriter. It was screwed down to a stand. God, imagine!” She almost laughed.

“I really blitzed them,” she said, remembering the good part with a throb of regret. “Everybody else was writing on their machines to beat hell, but I didn’t even put a piece of paper in mine. After a while I took out the camera and made some pictures. The girl came back and said I could work in the arena if I wanted to, and I did. It was hotter than Hades but I wouldn’t have taken that tweed jacket off for a fortune.

“I guess I took pictures for almost three hours … just wandered around, kidding the girls on horseback and keeping clear of the Wisconsin people.” She hesitated and Jack said, “What happened then?”

“I got sick,” she whispered. “My stomach. I thought it was bad food. Or that damn heat. Awful stomach cramps. In half an hour I was so miserable I could hardly stand up and I was scared to death I might faint. If I’d had any sense I’d have gone back to my seat and rested. But not Beebo. I didn’t want to waste my moment of glory. It would go away—it had to.

“Well, I was right about one thing—I fainted, right there in the arena. The next I knew, I was strangling on smelling salts and trying to sit up on a cot in the Red Cross station. The doctor asked how I felt and I said it was indigestion. He wanted to have a look.

“I was terrified. I tried to laugh it off. I said I was tired, I said it was the heat, I said it was something I ate. But that bastard had to look. He thought it might be appendicitis. There was nothing I could do but cover my face and curse, and cry,” she said harshly. Jack handed her a newly lighted cigarette, and she took it, still talking.

“The doctor saw the tears, and that was the tip-off. He opened my shirt so fast the buttons flew. And when he saw my chest, he opened the pants without a word. Just big bug-eyes.” She gave Jack a look of sad disgust. “I had the curse,” she muttered. “First time.”

After a moment she went on, “I never meant to hurt anybody or cause a scene. But I hurt my father too much. He suffered over it. I had to wait till my hair grew out before I could go back to school, but I could have saved myself the bother. They let me know as soon as I got back I wasn’t wanted. Before Chicago, they thought I was just a queer kid. But afterwards, I was really queer. There’s a big difference.”

Jack listened, bound to her by the story with an empathy born of his own emotional aberration.

“The principal of the high school said he hoped he could count on me to understand his position. His