First Love
“Beebo,” Paula said, whispering so that Beebo had to bend her
head to hear her. “I’d like you to stay. Make yourself welcome.
Please.”
Beebo was afraid to believe her ears. It seemed incredible that
this exquisite stranger should reach out for her from the middle
of nowhere. “Paula,” she said, “I think we’re both just lonely. I
think it would be best if I go. You don’t want to wake up
tomorrow and hate yourself.” She was still hedging about the
ultimate test with a girl.
“I was lonely. I will be again if you go.”
“Maybe you’d be better off lonely than sorry.”
“Beebo, do I have to beg you?” Paula pleaded, her voice coming up
stronger with emotion.
Beebo reached for her in one instinctive motion. “No, Paula, you
don’t have to beg me to do anything. Just ask me.”
And Beebo Brinker, who had never done more than dream before,
slipped her arms around Paula and pulled her closer ... closer,
until their lips were touching....
Other Original Gold Medal Books by Ann Bannon:
ODD GIRL OUT
I AM A WOMAN
WOMEN IN THE SHADOWS
JOURNEY TO A WOMAN
THE MARRIAGE
The Gold Medal seal on this book means it is not a reprint. To
select an original book, look for the Gold Medal seal.
Beebo
Brinker
by Ann Bannon
An Original Gold Medal Novel
GOLD MEDAL BOOKS
Fawcett Publications, Inc., Greenwich, Connecticut
Member of American Book Publishers Council, Inc.
Copyright © 1962 Fawcett Publications, Inc. / First printing July
1962. / All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book or portions thereof. / All characters in this book are
fictional and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely
coincidental. / Printed in the United States of America.
Beebo
Brinker
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, shoebox 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 corner 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, tieless 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
teen-agers. 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 into 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 so
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 liqueur 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 goodhearted 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.