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 bugeyes.” 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_ position. I wanted to ask him if he
understood _mine_.” There was hopeless bitterness in her voice.
“They never do,” Jack said quietly. “Still, that’s not the only high
school in the world. You could finish up somewhere else and go on to
pre-med, Beebo.”
“You didn’t,” she reminded him. “You got fed up and quit. But me—I’ve
been expelled. I’m not wanted anywhere.”
“Do you think a job as a truck driver is worth sacking a medical career
for?”
“What did you sack yours for?” He was making her defensive.
“My story’s all over,” he said. “But there’s still time for you. Beebo,
do you know what you’re trying to do? Get _even_ with the world. You’re
so mad at it, and everybody in it for the bum deal you got, you’re going
to deny it a good doctor some day.”
“I’d be a rotten doctor, Jack. I’d be scared. I’d be running and hiding
every day of my life.”
“Hell, plenty of doctors are gay. They manage.” He was surprised at the
importance it was assuming in his own mind. He really cared about it. It
depressed him to think of what she might be and what she was in a fair
way now of becoming. “You’re thinking that if people are going to reject
you, by God you’re going to reject them first. If they make it hard for
you to be a doctor, you’ll make damn sure they never _get_ that doctor.
You’ve been keeping score and now you’re avenging yourself on the world
because most of the people in it are straight. You keep it up and you’ll
turn into a joyless old dyke without a shred of love in her heart for
anyone.”
Beebo sat up and frowned at him, surprised but not riled. “Are you
telling me to go to hell because I—I think I’m gay?” she asked.
“I’m telling you to go to college,” he said seriously.
“Jack, you goofed your chance for an M.D. for reasons a lot flimsier
than mine. What are you trying to do? Push me into school so you can
make peace with your conscience? You’re the one who wants to give that
good doctor to humanity. If it can’t be yourself, better it should be
Beebo than nobody. And Jack Mann will have made a gift to his fellow
men. Jack, the Great Humanitarian. And you won’t even have to crack a
book.” She spoke wryly, but without rancor.
Jack was stunned into silence by her flash of insight.
“I hit it, didn’t I?” she said. “Jack, you don’t know what you’re asking
me to do: wear a skirt for the rest of my life. Forget about love till
my heart dries up. Go back and face the father I destroyed and the
brother who hates me ... well, I can’t. I’m no martyr. I’m not brave
enough to try to be a doctor now, just because you tried and failed. And
feel bad about it.”
He took her hands and rubbed them. “You hit it dead on, little pal, but
only part of it,” he said. “Sure, I’d like to see you with a medical
degree and know I’d had something to do with it. But forget me. Be
selfish about it. A degree would protect you, not expose you to more
trouble. Knowledge, success, the respect of other doctors—that would be
your defense against the world.”
“There’s no protection against myself. My feelings. I didn’t tell you
about the girls back home, Jack, walking down country lanes after school
with their arms around the boys, kissing and laughing. The girls I
couldn’t touch or talk to or even smile at. The girls I’d grown up with,
suddenly filling out their sweaters and their nylons, smooth and sweet
with scented hair and pink mouths. I didn’t tell you how I ached for
them.”
He got up and crossed the room, looking out his front windows. “I don’t
want you to end up an old bull dyke in faded denims, letting some blowsy
little fem take care of you,” he said acidly. “You’re not a bum.”
“I don’t want that, either. But Jack, I can’t spend the rest of my life
wondering!” She went to his side, speaking urgently, wanting him to root
for her, not against her. “They call this life gay,” she said softly,
following his gaze out the windows. “I need a little gaiety.”
“They call it gay out of a perverted sense of humor,” he said.
Across the street two young women were walking slowly in the mild
evening air, arms around each other’s waists. “There,” Beebo said,
nodding at them. “That’s what I want. I’ve wanted it ever since I knew
girls did such things.”
“You mean Mona?” he said.
Beebo shoved her hands into her pockets, self-conscious as always when
that name came up. “You have to start somewhere,” she said.
“You have quite a thing about her, don’t you?” he said.
Beebo’s cheeks flushed and she looked at the floor. “I never dared to
admit that I wanted a girl before, Jack. Maybe I picked the wrong time.
Or the wrong audience.”
“Pal, you just picked the wrong girl.”
“I don’t want you to pity me. That’s why I held out so long. I need you,
Jack. You’re the first friend—the first brother—I ever had.”
Jack was touched and embarrassed. “I feel no pity for you, Beebo,” he
said. “You don’t need pity. I feel friendship and ... anxiety. If you’ve
made up your mind to stay here, I’ll do anything to help you, teach you,
take you around. But, honey—not Mona. She doesn’t believe in anything
but kicks. She’ll charm the pants off you and then leave you standing
naked in front of your enemies.”
“Are you trying to say you disapprove of Mona, but not of the fact that
I’m—I _must_ be—gay?” she said.
“Why would I disapprove of that?” he said and then he laughed. “I swear
to God, Beebo, you can be thicker than bean soup. I’ve done everything
but sing it for you in C sharp.”
“I know you’ve tried to be tolerant and all, introducing me to your
friends. I thought it was because you suspected about me and you wanted
to be a good sport.”
“I’m trying to explain about _me_, not you,” he said, throwing out his
hands and still chuckling.
Beebo smiled back, mystified. “Let me in on the joke, will you?”
“The joke’s on me this time,” he said.
She studied him a moment, her smile yielding to perplexity. And then she
said, “Oh!” suddenly and lifted a hand to her face. She went back to the
sofa and sat down with her head in her hands.
“Well, you don’t need to feel badly about it, pal,” he said, joining
her. “I don’t. There are even days when I feel sorry for the straight
people.”
“Jesus, I should have seen it,” she murmured.
“No, you shouldn’t. I’m a genius at hiding it.”
“Jack, I’m sure a fool. I’ve been up to my eyes in my own troubles.”
He shook his head. “I couldn’t believe you wouldn’t figure it out. It’s
hard to realize the kind of life you’ve been leading up to now. How
little you’ve been allowed to see or understand.”
She looked up at him. “Thanks for being patient,” she said. “I mean it.
Jack, how long have you been gay? How did you find out about yourself?”
“I didn’t. I was told. In the Navy, by a hairy little gob who kept
climbing into my bunk at night and telling me fairy stories. When he got
a rise out of me, he made the diagnosis. I told him to go to hell, but
the next night, I was climbing into _his_ bunk.”
It made her smile. “Can you forgive me?” she said.
“Nothing to forgive. And I’ll let you back into my good graces on one
condition. Do you think your friend Pat will be in bloom tonight?”
“Probably,” she said, seeing him through her new understanding as
through a rainbow curtain. He was a new shape, a new color, a new man.
She was vastly relieved, and just a little awed. And ashamed of her
bean-soup intuition.
“Let’s go look at him,” Jack said.
* * * * *
The night was hot and damp, with a low black sky that had looked
menacing in the daylight, but was soft and close as dark came down,
floating over the neon merriment below.
Beebo was quiet as they walked, preoccupied with a new attitude toward
Jack and an almost unbearable sense of anticipation. Pat was usually at
Julian’s. When they arrived, the bar was crowded but there was standing
room at one end. They squeezed in and ordered drinks, and Beebo began to
pick out the faces that searched for her.
“Is he here?” Jack asked, glancing around.
She discovered him right away. “Over there in the blue shirt,” she said,
nodding.
“They all have blue shirts,” Jack said, squinting through the smoke.
“The blond one.”
There was a pause and Jack’s face puckered thoughtfully. “He looks
pretty young,” he said in a bemused voice.
“You mean, you like his face?” Beebo smiled at him.
“It’s a face,” he said noncommittally, and when she laughed he shrugged
and added, “Okay. A nice face. Beebo, I think you’re playing cupid.”
“I wouldn’t know how,” she said. “Besides, you told me you only fell in
love in the fall or the spring. This is midsummer.” But she wondered
suddenly what would happen if he broke his rule. It made her heart drop.
Jack’s apartment was small, with just one bed. Even if he didn’t ask her
to leave, how welcome would she be if he invited a third party to share
it with them? She’d have to bow out, out of simple consideration. But
where could she go? She had avoided making any friends, and the
Pasquinis with their five kids were out of the question. She would have
preferred a park bench anyway to a room with Pete Pasquini in it.
Beebo and Jack were both caught unaware by the sudden quiet
interruption. There he was, Beebo’s boy, standing behind and between
them. He had come over in the moment it took them to discuss him and now
they looked at him in surprise.
He paled a little and started to back away, but Jack put a hand on his
shoulder. “Don’t panic. We’re harmless when we’re drinking,” he said.
“What’s your name?”
“Pat Kynaston,” said the boy, staring into his beer. He supposed Beebo
had Jack with her this time to show him she was taken, and he was
crushed.
“Pat? That’s a girl’s name,” Beebo kidded.
Pat swallowed some beer and moved the sawdust under his shoes.
“Have a drink, honey,” Jack said, and Beebo felt a stir of strange
interest in the endearment. And yet Pat seemed more like a child than a
man, and it was easy to call him fond names. In spite of his light beard
he had a child’s face, full of a child’s hardy trust. He smiled at Jack,
reassured.
“He looks as green as you did last May,” Jack told Beebo. “How long have
you been here, Pat?”
“Oh, since seven-thirty, I guess.”
“No, I mean in New York?” Jack grinned.
“Oh. January.” Pat’s eyes remained on Beebo while he answered Jack. But
when she returned the look, he glanced down to her belt. “I left school
then,” he said.
“Sounds like the story of my life,” said Beebo. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
Jack cleared his throat and Beebo’s mouth dropped open. “With that
face?” Jack protested. “You mean your _father_ is twenty-seven.”
Pat laughed a little and shook his head.
“Besides, what is a twenty-seven-year-old child doing in school? You
should be through.”
“I was working on a doctorate in entomology.”
“Bugs? You don’t look like a bug collector,” Jack said with a grimace,
and they laughed while the drinks came up. Jack pulled Pat between
himself and Beebo and teased him for a while, making him blush and
answer questions. But when it came out that Pat was working as a
garbage-collector for the New York City Department of Sanitation, Jack
stopped laughing.
“God! A frail kid like you? You shouldn’t do work like that,” he
declared.
“It was all I could get. Nobody wants an entomologist _manqué_,” Pat
said. “I guess that’s why I’m skinny. I look at those rotting scraps all
day and when I get home the stuff in my icebox looks just as bad.”
Jack tapped Beebo on the shoulder. “Do we have any of Marie’s chicken
tetrazini in the refrigerator?”
“Plenty.”
“Let’s go.” Jack threw a couple of bills on the counter and took Pat by
the elbow. Beebo took the other and they walked him out of Julian’s and
down the street.
* * * * *
Beebo had been elated to learn that Jack, too, was gay. But now she felt
the first twinge of misgiving. Jack was the older brother she never
really had; one she could learn from, look up to, even love. It was a
valuable feeling, new to her. For as fiercely as she resented Jim, she
had always harbored a secret regret that they could not have been
friends.
They walked toward Jack’s place with Pat clinging in bewildered pleasure
to Beebo, the object of what had seemed so long a futile attraction. But
Beebo was lost in herself, wondering if she could make it yet in the
city on her own. She was strong and handsome, and she walked, gestured,
even swore with a boyish gusto that made her seem more experienced than
she was. But she was still untutored in the ways of metropolitan gay
life and that fact undermined her self-confidence.
* * * * *
They put Pat, who was high enough to be sleepy, on Jack’s sofa and
looked at him. He dozed a little, his fair face averted, and the two
roommates were struck with the beauty of his features. Beebo was
unnerved to find herself suddenly wanting a girl with blast-furnace
intensity.
“I’ll heat the bird,” she offered to Jack, “if you’ll mind the patient.”
“You’re on,” he said.
But she was sorry to have to leave them alone together. Jack was
entirely too taken with the boy. Beebo moved pensively around the
kitchen, preparing the food with unaccustomed hands.
Jack brought Pat to the table when she called them. Pat looked so
slender and peaked that she felt a good doctor’s desire to stuff him
full of nourishment.
He leaned against the door frame, gazing at Beebo. “Who are you,
anyway?” he asked, drunk enough to be brave.
“Sit down, Hungry,” Beebo said, smiling at him.
Abashed, but unappeased, he obeyed.
“You know what’s wrong with you, Pat? Malnutrition,” she said. “If you
had any food under your belt, you wouldn’t give two bits for me.” He
turned a baffled face to her. “Why hell, the damn bugs eat better than
you do,” she told him. “They get all the garbage that ruins your
appetite.”
She tried to feed him but he turned away. “I can’t,” he said. The
excitement of coming home with this girl he had admired so fervently for
a couple of months was too much; that, and all the beer he had drunk ...
and a new gentle feeling stirring in him for Jack Mann.
“Sure you can,” Beebo said, and began to feed him as if he were a sick
lamb, while Jack cut the chicken bits for her. When Pat tried to protest
she popped a mess of spicy meat between his teeth and shushed him,
wishing all the while that she were ministering to a lovely girl instead
of a lost boy.
Beebo stole a look at Jack, afraid of what she might see. But he was
regarding Pat with compassion, the same he had shown to her when he
found her ... and just a trace of desire, tightly controlled. Jack had
kindly instincts. It was one of the things Beebo admired most in him. He
took care of people because it made him happy. No one was to blame if,
when the person was a beautiful young boy, it made him very happy
indeed.
Beebo got the chicken down Pat and made him drink his milk, which he did
out of pure infatuation for her. And then Jack filled the silence with
one word: “Bedtime.”
But Pat seemed to be in a sort of trance, brought on by fatigue,
fascination, and a full stomach. “Are you conscious?” Jack asked him
with a smile.
“I was just thinking,” Pat murmured, blinking at Beebo. “Maybe I’m
straight.”
They laughed at him, till he got indignant and tried to explain that
even Beebo’s marginal femininity didn’t discourage him.
“You need some sleep, buddy,” Jack told him, and took him off to the
sofa. “And no damn trash cans for you in the morning.”
“What if I lose my job?” Pat said.
“That would be the best thing that could happen to you.”
“I’ll starve,” Pat whispered.
“Not while I’m around,” Jack said. Pat smiled at him sleepily, and then
shut his eyes and turned on his side.
* * * * *
Beebo climbed into Jack’s bed feeling like an impostor. But she was
embarrassed to make an issue of it; more than that, afraid. If she
offered to take the sofa herself, Jack might grab the chance to have Pat
beside him all night.
Beebo felt no physical attraction to Pat; only sympathetic interest. But
his puppy love had scorched her a little; just enough to keep her moving
and twisting on the warm sheets for an hour, obsessed with the growing
need for a girl. A girl to curl in her lap and kiss her and talk away
her fears.
Pat’s loneliness shocked her. She saw herself mirrored in his
predicament. Who was more alone than a lost and defenseless soul, hungry
for something it couldn’t find? Couldn’t even define? It was enough to
warp the heart, deform the soul.
It was enough to get her out of bed at midnight that night, make her
dress in silence and leave the apartment, undetected by Jack or Pat.
* * * * *
She was almost as surprised to find herself on the street as Jack would
have been to see her there. And yet the cool night air washed gratefully
over her face and cleared her thoughts. She wandered aimlessly a while,
as if trying to ignore the one place she wanted to visit: the Colophon.
But her feet took her there anyway, and she found herself ringing the
bell. The owner opened the peek-through in the door and nodded to her.
She felt a momentary country-girl shame at being recognized in such a
place. But she was glad enough to gain entrance. The glow inside was the
color of fluorescent Merthiolate. It seemed almost antiseptic to Beebo,
who had painted the undersides of countless cows and sows with
disinfectants the same shade prior to a delivery.
She took a seat at the bar. “Scotch and water,” she said.
While the barman got it, she gazed idly into the mirror behind him,
picking out the interesting girls surrounding her. She felt
uncomfortable here in the pants she usually wore to work; in her hair
that had just been cut and was too short again.
_Do they think I’m funny?_ she wondered. _Or—exciting?_ She drank in
silence, and ordered another, thinking that the solitude and uncertainty
she felt now were worse than those she felt with Jack. For a minute,
almost anything seemed better than having to leave Jack, with only fifty
bucks a week to spend, no friends, and no place to live.
The bartender brought her another drink while she searched for the last
cigarette in her pack. It was empty. The girl sitting next to her
immediately offered her one, but Beebo declined. It was partly her
shyness, partly the knowledge that it was better to be hard-to-get in
the Colophon.
“Do you have cigarettes?” she asked the bartender.
“Machine by the wall,” he said.
She got up and sauntered over, ignoring the outrage on the face of the
girl at the bar. The machine swallowed her coins and spit out a pack of
filter-tips. Beebo noticed the jukebox, looked at her change, and fed it
a quarter, good for three dances. She liked to watch the girls move
around the floor together, now that the initial revolt had worn off.
But when she regained her seat, she found most of the patrons paying
attention to her, not the tunes. She looked back at them, surprised and
wary. The cigarettes in her hand were an excuse to look away for a
minute and she did, lighting one while the general conversation died
away like a weak breeze. She lowered her match slowly and glanced up
again, her skin prickling. What in hell were they trying to do? Scare
her out? Show her they didn’t like her? Had she been too aloof with
them, too remote and hard to know?
She had started the music, and it was an invitation to dance. They were
waiting for her to show them. It wasn’t hostility she saw on their faces
so much as, “Show us, if you’re so damn big and smart. We’ve been
waiting for a chance to trap you. This is it.”
She had to do something to humanize herself. There was an air of
self-confidence and sensual promise about Beebo that she couldn’t help.
And when she felt neither confident nor sensual, she looked all the more
as if she did: tall and strong and coolly sure of herself. She had
turned the drawback of being young and ignorant into a deliberate
defense.
It didn’t matter to the sophisticated girls judging her now that she was
a country girl fresh from the hayfields of Wisconsin, or that she had
never made love to a woman before in her life. They didn’t know that and
wouldn’t have believed it anyway.
Beebo recognized quickly that she had to start acting the way she
looked. She had established a mood of expectation about herself, and now
it was time to come across. The music played on. It was Beebo’s turn.
The match she held was burning near her finger, and because she had to
do something about _it_ and all the eyes on her, she turned to the girl
beside her and held out the match.
“Blow,” she said simply, and the girl, with a smile, blew.