Strange Women, The (17 page)

She pressed herself to him, not speaking. The thought of Jill was agony, and his hands aroused nothing in her; so that when his arms tightened, insistent, for the first time Nora pulled away.

"Kit, no—no, I can't—please—"

He was nice about it; but as she fell asleep Nora was torn by a dozen emotions, and they all felt exactly the same; sorrow, guilt, and above all, blurring them all, a tortured and passionate shame.

There had been no word from Mack; only Kit, Nora, Margaret, and Susan Bristol were present when, simply and without rites, Mary Bristol MacLellan was buried, never having lived.

Nora told herself, again and again,
she was not responsible.
Perhaps, except for the quarrel, she might have persuaded Jill to go to the hospital sooner. But Vic had foreseen this. It wasn't her fault.

Yet she suffered from the sight of Jill, white and shrunken as the front-page picture in the HARTFORD
TIMES
a year ago.

Four days after the funeral, her doorbell rang; Nora ran down to the vestibule, then stepped back in surprise; for Mack was standing there, with Jill.

He said, "I just got in this morning," and after a minute Nora managed to collect her thoughts. "Come in."

Kit rose and came, with his uneven walk, to meet them. "Hello there, Mack, it's been ages." They shook hands warmly.

Jill was wearing a dress Nora had never seen before, airy rose-colored folds enclosing a waist that seemed tinier than ever; gloves and pert hat and pointed shoes all the same fastidious white. Her close curls had grown to shoulder length. She might have been Pammy standing there, fresh and spoilt and pretty in one of her organdy party dresses.

Mack turned and swept Nora into a bearish hug. He seemed bigger and shaggier than ever in his light tropical-tan suit. "Why, Mack, you're black as an Indian!"

"I had the beard hacked off in Mexico city—afraid Jill wouldn't know me," he said, releasing her. Nora, self-conscious before the unlovely scowl on Kit's face, stepped back and led them to seats, her thoughts beginning to go round again on their turntable.

"From what you wired me, Kit, I expected to find Jill dying—God, I nearly went crazy—I had to hitch-hike down the coast to Lima, catching rides in the Mission car, a jeep—it took me five days. I'll tell you all about it some day. I caught a plane in Lima, but there was a storm over the Gulf and they set down in Panama for thirty hours—"

Nora flinched when she saw his eyes on Kit; even Nora, by now almost unaware of Kit's lameness, was newly conscious of it before Mack's bursting vitality. "How long can you stay, Mack?"

"Well, I told Harry that if there was anything seriously wrong with Jill, he could go to hell. Otherwise, I'm supposedly on leave to handle his chores in the States. Fly to the West coast and see our backers, arrange for storing and cataloguing the stuff that's coming in by sea, and he wants me to buy or charter a small plane for the mountain work. We're going to be there another three years—the place is a gold mine. Jill's going to love it."

"But," Jill said, "I'm not sure I
want
to camp out in the jungle for three years."

Mack laughed, not taking her seriously. He and Kit started talking about airplanes which might be suitable for the expedition, and Nora said, "I've got to go down to the office for a while. But don't go away."

Jill followed her into the bedroom.

"Can't I ride down with you?"

Nora hesitated. "All right. If you want to." She watched the girl sitting at her dressing-table, freshening her lipstick, her mouth like a fresh pink bud.

"Jill," she said at last, "I know you'll never forgive me—"

"Forgive you for what?" Jill put down her lipstick. "Don't worry. I'm not going to say anything to Kit. That's what you were really worrying about, isn't it?"

Nora heard herself make a horrible strangled sound. "Oh, God, Jill," she said, and dropped her face in her hands, leaning against the wall in blinded, tearing agony. "Oh, God." Dimly she heard Jill rise and come to her; then Jill's arms were pulling her round, holding her around the waist.

"Nora—look at me—please, please—"

Once Nora had bent to lift what she thought was a scrap of dust from the floor, and in her hand the faded ball had fluttered, beating convulsive wings against her startled palm, so she cried out in fright before she realized it was a living moth. Just so terrifying was the thing that leaped to life within her now. She lifted Jill's face and kissed her on the mouth. Jill clung to her, eyes closed; then swayed and lost her balance, and Nora caught her, alarmed.

"You aren't fit to be on your feet. Stay here."

"Oh, no, no—let me come with you," Jill begged, "I can't stand it—"

Mack and Kit were still talking about crosswinds and stall-out speed and hardly raised their eyes when the women left. Nora turned the car into the park.

"Nor, what is it, what have we done to each other?"

Nora swallowed. "I don't know. The way I feel now—" forcibly, she stopped herself. "Darling, Kit needs me, he trusts me, I—I'd feel better about deceiving him with a man, than this. And—and it wouldn't last. Try to remember, darling, these things don't last."

I hope to God they don't, at least...

"Darling, I've got to see Cranford. Wait for me, and we'll go somewhere for a drink, where we can talk."

"Where," asked Jill bitterly, "Flora's?"

She refused to come upstairs with Nora. Nora, discussing her business with young Cranford, mentioned that later in the year she might need a maternity leave, and the young doctor laughed:

"I ought to have expected that. After all, with your husband home all day, what else is there to do?"

Nora bent her head, angry at the realization that most doctors would not have talked this way to most women; angry, too, at herself for reacting. Six months ago she might have made such a remark herself.

Jarred by it, she decided on an irrevocable step.

"Look here, Andy; if you want this practice, I'll let you have it."

He blinked, his boyish face bewildered. "You can't be serious. It will be years before I'm in shape to take over this kind of a set-up."

"I'm not that old," she said dryly, "and if I didn't think you could handle it, I wouldn't offer." This would also deal with Kit's repressed, but perceptible, jealousy and resentment of Vic. He knew they had been lovers.

"I'll probably have a child to look after, and I'd rather not be tied until I'm sure where my husband wants to settle. Pay me what you can raise—I'll settle for the price of the office furniture if you can't do any better."

"You aren't giving up practice?"

Why,
she thought incredulously
, the kid doesn't approve of me; I'm not a woman, I'm just a doctor trying to get out of an obligation!

She said testily, "Certainly not, I just have to get permanently located. Do you want it, or not?"

"Oh, I do. Good Lord, a chance like this doesn't come along every day." He gulped. "I mean—it's awfully generous of you, doctor. I hate to take advantage—"

"Don't worry about that." She cut him short. "We can talk about the business end of it tomorrow. Don't worry, I won't change my mind."

As she left the office, she was thinking; now she had slammed down a barricade against the past. She would practice wherever Kit wanted to live.

Without asking, she drove Jill to a quiet restaurant where they could order drinks. She said finally, "Jill, there's something I must tell you. No, dear, let me finish this time. I think I'm going to have a baby."

Jill did some silent mental arithmetic. "It must have happened right away."

"I think so."
That first night.
"Kit's almost wild. It's the best thing that could have happened to him, I—thought I'd be deliriously happy, myself."

"And you're not?"

"Not especially. That ought to be obvious."

"Did you know—that day?"

"I'd just begun to suspect.
That
was what I was trying to tell you," Nora said, "that, and nothing else."

Jill picked up her drink and made a face. "I don't know why I let you order me a daiquiri. I despise them." She drank it anyhow.

"Nora, Mack thinks I'm going to Peru with him. Nor—do you know what was the worst of it, in the hospital, the thing I couldn't face? Knowing that I—I never wanted a baby at all. I'm—I'm not glad she's dead," she gulped, "I—they let me see her. She was like a little white baby-doll. Did you know they baptized her? They baptized her Mary. I'd have called her Pam if she'd lived. She had funny little ears—"

"Darling, don't—"

"The nurses and the nuns were so nice to me, and there I was knowing I'd never wanted her, and now I was free, I didn't have to marry Mack—" she wiped her dripping eyes with a paper napkin.

"I don't want to go with Mack. I—don't want any man."

Under the table Nora took Jill's hand; not bruisingly but very, very gently. "Sweet—listen. You can't possibly know now how you'll feel about Mack. Or men."

Jill wrenched the words out. "Since you—since you first—the whole idea of sleeping with a man makes me sick. Any man."

"Jill, you were pregnant; now that Mack's back—no, listen, dear, can't you take my word for something this once? My word as a doctor, even? Mack realized—if he doesn't, Vic will tell him, or I will—there can't possibly be any sexual relations now. Not for weeks."

"But—but I don't even want to
think
about it."

"Jill, give yourself time. It will be different, when you're well again, believe me."

"How do you know what it will be like for me?"

Nora drove her nails into her own palm. "Listen, Jill. Even if we're both unhappy—" but that had slipped out against her will, and she bit it off.

"Nora, are you unhappy too?"

"How can I possibly be happy about it? Do you think I like hurting you? But if we try to drag this out, we'll keep hurting each other, and Kit, and Mack—even if you hate me for it, I have to say—"

"I couldn't hate you, Nor. You know I—"

"No." Nora cut her off before she could say it. "Jill, Jill, if you're smart, the minute you leave—you'll marry Mack. Tonight. Fly down to Peru with him. Have another baby the minute they'll let you. Oh, darling, be smart—" she reached for Jill's hand again, then suddenly pulled it away and closed her eyes.

"No," she said, "No, I'm not hysterical. But—I'm begging you. Go marry Mack. Forget you ever knew me.

For God's sake," she almost shouted, though the cry tight in her tight throat, could not be heard two feet away and Jill had to bend forward to hear her, "for God's sake get out while you can!"

Gray lines of rain were streaming down the windows. Kit laid aside his magazine as someone knocked at the door.

"I wonder if that's Jill? We haven't seen her for couple of weeks, have we?"

Nora rose and went toward the door. She had see Jill only once since Mack left for the coast—Vic Demorino had advised Jill against making the trip—and that troublingly. Answering an emergency call deep in the slum quarter, late one night, she had waited almost an hour for an ambulance to take her patient to a hospital; afterward, finding herself within a block of Flora's, she had gone for a drink.

She had sat alone at a corner table, slowly unwinding from the long tension; then, looking up across intervening tables, she saw Jill, with Margaret Sheppard. They were close together, their backs turned to Nora—neither of them had seen her.

A woman in a T-shirt and jeans came toward Nor asking gravely, "Lonesome, kid?" She was slightly drunk. Nora said a quiet "No, thanks," rose and went out. But the sight haunted her.

She had accused Ramona of warping Margaret's natural bent—when Margaret was alone and disillusioned by bad marriage. Had she done the same to Jill?

She told herself angrily; Margaret liked the place, Jill might have come at Margaret's request, to ward off unattached girls. Or because they wanted a drink. She didn't have to jump to conclusions! But she knew—none better—that loneliness drove people to doing strange things. She herself had slammed the door against Jill, refusing even to discuss it. How could she blame Jill?

It was not Jill, however, at the apartment door, but Mack. His hair was wet and curling; he had on white canvas trousers and a faded but immaculate blue chambray shirt.

"Hi, Mack," said Kit with lazy good nature, "When did you get in from the coast? Get us some beer, Nora."

Nora turned; then hesitated, rebellious against Kit's easy assumption of command.

I shouldn't feel this way, Kit's got the right to order me—to ask me for something.
But before Mack— "Suppose you ask first if he wants it? Mack doesn't like beer." She brought beer for Kit and Scotch on ice for Mack, and opened a bottle of ginger ale for herself; but her triumph was as flat in her mouth as the taste of the soft drink, as Mack took a chair beside Kit.

"Hear you're moving?"

Kit nodded. "We decided to settle in the country—build up a business outside the rat race. Build split-levels instead of skyscrapers. Nora, did the mailman come?"

"I saw him downstairs in the hall."

"My license photostat ought to have come. Run down and see if it's there, will you?"

Mack rose to his feet, saying "Let me go," but Nora was already on the stairs. There were two envelopes addressed to Kit, and one for her, on the letterhead of Pearson Associates.
Hardly worth while opening that.
She tore it idly across, and stood, stunned:

Type; FRIEDMAN

Specimen subject; Ellersen, Mrs. Leonora

Results; negative for pregnancy.

It tore, and she realized that her steady hands were shaking. She had been so sure... she had told Kit. He had been so proud—now she would have to destroy that joy and pride. The old guilt tore at her:

If you don't mind risking your chance of ever carrying a healthy child to full term...

Nonsense, she thought angrily, I simply wasn't pregnant at all, it's right there in the
report
—but the pain did not go away.
I've failed Kit.
She buried her face in her hands, unwilling to go back and face him with it. At last she put it dress pocket and went back upstairs. Kit stretched out his hands for the envelopes, but did not interrupt himself;