Ten North Frederick (15 page)

When they had finished she said: “Will you let me have one of those Fatimas?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Where do you live? Do you still live at the hotel?”

“Yes.”

“That's too bad,” she said. “Do you ever go away? Philly or New York City?”

“Only once since I came here.”

“I'd like to be in a real bed with you and we wouldn't have to be in such a hurry.”

“But you're all right, aren't you?”

“Sure. You could tell. You're a doctor.”

“Sometimes I'm not.”

“I'm glad of that. What if I get in the family way?”

“Well, let's hope you don't.”

“Let's hope I don't is right. Did you like me?”

“Yes.”

“Enough to have another date sometime?”

“Sure.”

“When?”

“Well—I don't exactly. You decide.”

“A week from tonight?”

“That's a Monday? Fine.”

“Will I come here with my sore finger, or what?”

“Get here a little later, after eight-thirty.”

“Any time you say. Listen, I don't want anybody seeing me any more than you do. I'm a respectable widow and business woman. I don't want any talk either.”

“That's good.”

“And you're younger than I am. I always used to think a woman that—well, I guess it doesn't make much difference, does it?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Give me another kiss and then I guess I'll get started on my way home.”

He kissed her briefly on the mouth.

“It makes you feel how much you've been missing over two years. It isn't that long for you, though.”

“No,” he said.

“Men are lucky,” she said. “If you have to go out on a call next Monday, will the Monday after be all right?”

“I'll be here.”

“For sure?”

“Well, unless there's some accident or something on that order.”

“I'm started wishing it was Monday already, and it's still this Monday. I wish I could go to the hotel with you.”

“Where do
you
live?”

“With my mother and father. They're both ready to go any minute. They have a trained nurse.”

For nearly a year Lottie and Ingram took care of their need of someone, with no one in Gibbsville the wiser. He was the first and for a long time the only man to come to her apartment, but she never had him present at the small parties she gave, poker parties with whiskey and beer. Love never happened to Lottie and Ingram and when he told her he was planning to marry a Lantenengo Street girl she was secretly relieved; his love-making had become routine, as had her own, and besides she was beginning to like to listen to Lloyd Williams, who was getting to be a frequent member of the poker sessions.

She was forty-one when she married Lloyd Williams, a man her own age, and it was a great surprise on their wedding night to discover how little Lloyd knew about making love. Indeed it was weeks before she finally and fully realized that with Lloyd she could never expect to have anything but the embellishments of love-making and never the ultimate love-making itself. She had known there were men like that, and she now had married one. For two years she submitted to his technique, which excited her but gave her no relief. “What's the matter with you?” he would say. “You like it, every woman does. Most women would rather.” He would become angry and frustrated by her own frustration. Time was getting short for her, she knew, and she thought of leaving him, of reopening her shop, but she would have no explanation to satisfy public or even private curiosity; he was not a drunkard, he did not beat her, he gave her a home, he was—publicly—a much better man than Jimmy Franklin had been. Then accidentally, during one of his angriest outbursts, she learned something about him that was something of a comfort without being satisfaction.

“Didn't you ever have real intercourse with a woman?”

“Sure I did,” he said.

“Those whores?”

“Yes, those whores.”

“Then what's the matter with me?”

“I don't know,” he said.

“I'm built the same way.”

“I never liked it with them.”

“What didn't you like?”

“The way I did it with them.”

“The regular way?”

“Yes, the regular way.”

“Then why did you do anything? Why did you do it at all?”

“I had to. A man has—desires. When I had mine I went to a whore. But it wasn't what I wanted to do. What I do with you was always what I wanted to do.”

“Why can't you do the same thing with me that you did with the whores? It's what I want.”

“I can't help it what you want. All I can do is what I do. Once a month I'd go to a whore and get satisfaction, quick. With you I don't want to have satisfaction, not the same kind. I want
you
to have satisfaction. Why don't you? You won't let yourself.”

“Didn't you do the same thing with the whores?”

“No, I tell you. I hated them. I respect you.”

“Is that what it is? Respect?”

“You'd never find me doing that to a whore. Never.”

“I don't understand it.”

“Can you understand this? You and the whores are the only women I ever knew. And what I always wanted to do I do with you.”

“That's almost as if you only knew two women in your whole life.”

“That's what it is. I only knew two women. The other woman was all the whores, and I hated them. And I don't hate you. I love you.”

“My God,” she said.

“Listen, I'm not half as queer as some people. You ought to hear some of the things in court.”

“I don't want to.”

“Well, then you'd know.”

“I don't want to know.”

“You ought to hear some of those things.”

“Why don't you change? Why should I be the one?”

“Listen, I'll give you some books to read. Havelock Ellis.”

“Aw, books. I never read a—”

“Not novels. Scientific.”

“Doctor books. I don't want doctor books. I know what I am: a woman. And you're supposed to be a man. Are you a fairy, too?”

“Like hell I am. I wouldn't be in love with you.”

“What kind of love do you call this?”

“It's a kind. There's all kinds.”

“Huh. Well, I'm going to sleep.”

“All right.”

“You were supposed to have—you were supposed to be Rudolph Valentino and Wallace Reid rolled into one.”

“If you knew more you'd understand better,” he said.

“I understand enough.”

“No. You don't.”

“There's one thing I understand and that's there's some things I don't care if I don't ever understand.”

So—he loved her; he used the word. What he meant by love was not what she had always meant by love, which was simple, irresistible, and satisfactory. At forty-three she was having to learn about a kind of love that was as distant as death without death's inevitability. Death was acceptable and postponable; this kind of love was not within her imaginable experience. And yet she was experiencing it. She made some compromises; her secret reading of Havelock Ellis was some help, and so was a furtive, embarrassed consultation with George Ingram, who was not a mental healer but who reassured her by telling her that she was not the only woman in the world, or in Gibbsville, who was experiencing dissatisfaction. What he told her was hardly more than what she would have discovered by listening to the court cases Lloyd had spoken of, but the difference was that coming from George it had greater value; George had been her lover; George was a medical man. The compromise she made was a difficult one and long in the making, but it was achieved. It was simple. She learned to be Lloyd's wife on his terms. And at precisely that moment she began to lose him. For a year they were happy. He had converted her, and she was a convert. Moreover their differentness gave her a hidden sense of superiority over other women. But he had won, and she was losing, and then there began to be nothing.

 • • • 

Ruth Jenkins had lived all her life in Gibbsville, never had been out of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania except for two one-day excursions to Atlantic City, but in twenty-six years she had never been inside the courthouse. Every day of her life, practically, she looked at the courthouse clock and that ended it. Like many residents of Gibbsville, her attitude was that the courthouse was county, not town, and a place that drew to Gibbsville a lot of ignorant miners in trouble and a lot of lawyers trying to get them out of it. Nothing could have persuaded her to set foot in the place, nothing but the kind of thing that did: the legacy from her aunt, the papers to be signed, and Mr. J. B. Chapin the lawyer to accompany her up the hill. The business in the office of Register of Wills was brief and she would have been home in another hour had it not been for her casual mention to Mr. Chapin that it was her first visit.

“Well,” said Mr. Chapin. “Wouldn't you like to see what makes the wheels go round? Court's in session. Let's have a look in Number
3
Courtroom. We might run across something interesting.” She was unequal to the problem of how to refuse the invitation. He led her to Number
3
, to a row of empty chairs inside the rail, and they sat down.

“This is assault and battery with intent to kill. The defendant is that Italian man with the mustache.”

“I see,” said Ruth Jenkins.

“The witness is being questioned by Mr. Williams, Lloyd Williams, from Collieryville. Assistant district attorney, and smart as a whip. Watch him tie that witness in knots.”

“I object, your Honor!”

“That's defense counsel. Mr. Troutman from Taqua,” said Joseph B. Chapin.

“And quite rightly,” said the judge.

“Judge
Bramwell
,” said Joseph B. Chapin.

“Mr. Williams, shall we read back to you so that you'll know better next time?” said Judge Bramwell. “Twice in the past four minutes I've sustained Mr. Troutman's objection to that same line of questioning and now you persist in continuing it.”

“I apologize, your Honor,” said Williams. “I am only trying to show—”

“I think I know what you're trying to show, Mr. Williams. Right now the clock shows the hour to be past my lunch time and I think we'll all be the better for a recess. Let us adjourn until two o'clock.”

“All rise!” shouted a tipstaff.

They held their places during the confusion of adjournment. “I'm afraid this was a disappointment,” said Joseph B. Chapin. “But let's go over and say hello to Lloyd Williams.”

“All right,” said Ruth Jenkins.

“Lloyd! Lloyd!” Chapin called.

Williams turned and saw Chapin. “Hello, Joe,” he said, and it was another first-time for Ruth Jenkins; the first time she ever had heard anyone call Chapin, Joe.

“I would like you to meet Mrs. Jenkins. Ruth, this is Mr. Lloyd Williams, our eminent assistant district attorney.”

“How do you do, Mrs. Jenkins,” said Williams. They did not shake hands; his were occupied with papers and large heavy-paper envelopes. “You in the courtroom?”

“Just got here,” said Joe Chapin.

“Bramwell's been like that all morning,” said Williams, to Chapin, and addressed Ruth Jenkins: “Are you Mrs. Edwin Jenkins?”

“Yes, I am,” she said.

“I thought so,” said Williams. “Edwin has a very pretty wife.”

“Oh, now,” said Ruth Jenkins.

“He has indeed,” said Joe Chapin.

“Your client, Joe?”

“I have that honor,” said Joe Chapin.

“Well, you're in good hands, Mrs. Jenkins,” said Williams. “Unless you get in trouble with the law and I have to be on the other side. Then you'd see me ripping Joe to shreds.”

“Unless, of course, we were before Judge Bramwell,” said Joe Chapin.

“Oh, him. He should have retired ten years ago while he still had possession of all his faculties.”

“Uh—Lloyd doesn't—uh—”

“Oh, Mrs. Jenkins isn't going to report me, are you, Mrs. Jenkins?”

“What for?” said Ruth Jenkins.

“For saying what I think. That Judge Bramwell should have retired. That remark of his about knowing what I was trying to show. That kind of a remark might come in handy on appeal, in a different set of circumstances.”

“I thought of that,” said Joe Chapin.

“He knows I can't lose this case, so he's having some fun at my expense. Be glad your husband isn't a lawyer, Mrs. Jenkins.”

“You wouldn't be anything else,” said Joe Chapin.

“You're right, I wouldn't,” said Williams. “Would you care to see my office, Mrs. Jenkins? As a taxpayer, you might like to see how some of your money is spent.”

“I'm afraid we have to be running along,” said Joe Chapin.

“Whatever you say,” said Ruth.

“Come on, have a look,” said Williams. “Then I'll ride downtown with you, if that's all right.”

“Would you like to do that?” said Joe Chapin.

“All right,” said Ruth Jenkins.

“But I can't give you a ride downtown. You know that, Lloyd. I always walk.”

“Have you got a car, Mrs. Jenkins?” said Williams.

“Yes, I do,” said Ruth Jenkins.

“Then she can give me a ride, that is if she wants to.”

“It would be a pleasure,” said Ruth Jenkins.

It was so arranged. They had a look at Williams's office, which he shared with other members of the district attorney's staff and which reflected no personality; then they parted from Joe Chapin and got in her Ford two-door sedan. “I'm having a valve job done on my wagon,” he said. “Could I ask you to drive me out to Klein's Garage and see if it's ready?”

They drove to Klein's Garage; his car would not be ready until later in the afternoon. She heard him telling the mechanic that that was a hell of a note, and she heard the mechanic say that that was when they'd promised it. She wondered about that, but not disturbingly. When he returned to the car he said: “That's always the way.”