Authors: Lawrence Block
The conversation roamed from topic to topic but she was careful never to get talking about what was really on her mind. It had seemed so easy when she had thought of it—tell Joe she was pregnant and he would offer to marry her. It was as simple as that.
She didn’t love him. But he loved her and he would love her more if she met him halfway. He was the kind of guy who would marry her if she said the word, marry her just to keep her from having an illegitimate child.
That was the way he was.
And, she told herself, it wouldn’t be such a bad deal for him. She would love him if she lived with him and she would make him a good wife—faithful and considerate, interested in his work and happy to be with him.
It made sense on paper.
But, as she sat next to him on the bench, she realized that she couldn’t go through with it. Figuring out how logical it was didn’t help at all when the chips were down. How could she possibly ask Joe to marry her? How could she possibly dare to cheat him out of the chance of real love, for a wife who married him because she loved him and for no other reason?
And, as she thought about it, it occurred to her that Joe wasn’t the only one who would be cheated by that kind of marriage.
She would be cheated as well.
Oh, it would be convenient for the time being. But she would be stuck for life with a man she didn’t love, a man who was marrying her out of the goodness of his heart and not because the two of them would be right for each other. And she would spend the rest of her life wondering what might have happened if she had had the guts to work things out for herself instead of jumping at the easy answer.
She didn’t know what to do. But she did know what she couldn’t do. She couldn’t trap a guy like Joe, couldn’t stick him with a marriage that didn’t have a chance of working out properly. Joe was the kind of guy who could love somebody else’s child as his own, but this didn’t mean that he didn’t have the right to a better life than that.
No, Joe deserved better and so did she.
She didn’t tell him she was pregnant.
The conversation dragged on, finally dying by itself. Joe walked off in one direction and she walked off in another. The parting was more significant to her than just the end of a conversation. In a sense, Joe Gunsway was walking out of her life and she was walking out of his. There were only a few more days left in the period and they probably wouldn’t see much of each other with exams and all. Next year he would come back to Clifton and she would be somewhere else.
But it was better that way.
She went back to her room. Ruth was there studying and Linda had a strong impulse to tell her, to share the horrible secret with the girl who had become her best friend in the world. Four times she was on the verge of blurting out the news and each time she changed her mind.
She didn’t want to tell Ruth, she realized. She didn’t want anybody in the world to know, not now and not later. She didn’t want to have the baby, for that matter. She wanted to fall down a flight of stairs and have a happy little miscarriage. Or to go horseback riding and bounce the little bastard into the next county.
There had to be some way. She wasn’t cut out to be a mother. God, she wasn’t nineteen yet! What kind of a home could she give to a child?
But what could she do?
She sat down at her desk again. Studying had proven to be a better escape than sex or drinking—and, as it turned out, an infinitely safer one. Besides, pregnant or not pregnant, she was going to take that English exam tomorrow. She might as well try to pass it.
Once again studying proved to be a successful escape. She got lost in the book, lost in a world where Linda Shepard didn’t exist and where all the women in the book seemed to be bereft of ovaries for all the thinking they did about sex and for all the sexing they did. In this respect the book wasn’t true to life by contemporary standards, but at the moment Linda didn’t mind this in the least.
She studied from 7:30 to 10:15. By that time the print was doing a little dance on the page and she decided that she deserved a rest for a while. She closed the book and took a walk outside.
It was a warm, clear night. The stars were out and the moon was full enough so that she could see where she was going without any trouble.
She walked aimlessly at first but after the time spent studying her head was a good deal clearer and she didn’t feel as bad as she had felt earlier. Now she was able to concentrate on the problem at hand and to get some idea of the possible solutions she had.
She didn’t make much headway at first. Then she got an idea—there was one person in the world who could help her, one person in the world who would know exactly what to do.
One person.
THE PHONE RANG THREE TIMES before he answered it. Then she heard him lift it from the hook and say: “
Hello.
”
She took a deep breath.
“This is Linda,” she said. “Linda Shepard.”
He didn’t say anything and for a moment she was afraid he was going to hang up on her. She listened to the silence, her fingers trembling once again, her throat tight.
“I have to see you,” she said desperately.
“What for?”
“I don’t want to say over the phone.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “The line’s not tapped.”
“This one might be.”
He laughed at that. “C’mon over,” he said.
Then there was the sound as he replaced the receiver. She didn’t hang up right away, however. For a long moment she stood with the receiver next to her ear and listened to the silence, hardly able to believe what she had heard, hardly able to believe that Donald Gibbs had just gotten through telling her that it was all right for her to come over to his apartment. Then, hardly aware of what she was doing, she hung up the phone and drifted down the staircase and out the door.
He was waiting for her and the first thing she thought was that he looked the same as ever. His hair was still cropped close to his head and his beard was neat and well-trimmed. His eyes looked impossibly tired and there were deep lines in his forehead and around the corners of his mouth. She wondered how long it had been since he had had some sleep; the combination of the
Record
and final exams must have been keeping him awake constantly.
“Come on inside,” he said. He led the way and sat down on the edge of his bed; she took a seat in a chair across the room from him. He didn’t say anything and she didn’t know just where to begin.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Let’s have it.”
She still didn’t know what to say. Her nerves were on edge both from what she had to talk to him about and from the experience of seeing him again, of being with him at his apartment. She had passed him in halls during the past few months and had run into him in the cafeteria from time to time but they hadn’t spoken before, not since they broke up.
“You’re so tense you’re shaking,” he told her. “You better let me have it.”
Abruptly she said: “I’m going to have a baby.”
Nothing registered in his face. He didn’t seem particularly surprised or shocked or upset.
He said. “Whose?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long have you known?”
“I just found out today.”
“When’s the happy day?”
“I’m about two months gone. Maybe a little more.”
He nodded. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit one for himself, offering the pack to her more or less as an afterthought. She took one and lit it herself, dragging deeply on it.
“What do you want from me?”
“I don’t know.”
He stared at her thoughtfully. “You must want something,” he said. “We haven’t spoken to each other in months. What is it that you want?”
In a small voice she said: “Help.”
She couldn’t look at him now. She turned away and looked at the wall instead, then puffed nervously on the cigarette. She tried to blow smoke rings but the smoke refused to form circles and trailed to the ceiling in shapeless wisps.
“Linda—”
She turned to him.
“Do you want to find a guy and get him to marry you?”
She shook her head.
“Sure?”
“I don’t want to marry anybody.”
“Then what
do
you want?”
Help
, she started to say again. Instead she said nothing and started to turn away from him once more. Maybe it was a mistake coming to see him, maybe he couldn’t help her at all. She didn’t know what to do or what to say.
“I’d heard you reformed,” he said lightly. “I heard you stopped trying to set local bedroom records.”
She nodded dully.
“How come?”
She shrugged.
“Are you coming back here next year?”
She shook her head.
“Why not?”
“They threw me out.”
“Grades?”
“Partly.”
“What else?”
She tried to smile but it didn’t work. “Local bedroom records,” she said.
“Oh.”
“I’m going to pass my courses,” she offered. “I’ve been studying day and night and I’m going to pass everything. I told the dean that but he said it didn’t matter.”
“Dean Maples?”
She nodded.
“He’s a son of a bitch.”
She nodded again, thinking that she ought to say something but not having anything to say.
“What are you going to do next year?”
“I don’t know.”
“Going home to Cleveland?”
“No.”
“Transferring somewhere else?”
“I’d like to,” she said. “If there was some place where they would take me. I don’t think there is.”
“If you pass your courses—”
“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “That’s secondary. First I’d have to find a college that admits unwed mothers, and that knocks out a lot of them.”
“Oh.”
She put her cigarette out in an ashtray. She didn’t stub it out viciously but ground it out gently, methodically. She wasn’t as nervous as she had been now; somehow talking to him was very relaxing. Just the fact that someone else knew was a help, and Don wasn’t scolding her or condemning her or berating her for her condition. He was listening to her, questioning her and, indirectly, helping her.
She felt a little better already.
“Linda—”
She looked up.
“Are you positive that—”
She told him about the test and the examination.
“Who knows that you’re pregnant?”
“The doctor,” she said. “But he doesn’t even know who I am and he wouldn’t care if he did.”
“Nobody else?”
“You—that’s all.”
He closed his eyes for a minute or two, thinking. Then he opened them and stared fixedly at her for several seconds.
“Linda,” he said levelly, “you are not going to have that baby.”
He stood up, walked to the telephone and sat down in a chair next to it. He put the receiver to his ear and dialed the operator.
“New York,” he said.
When the New York operator was on the line he said: “Person-to-person to Mr. William Norment, ORegon 4-0527.”
He waited while the call was placed.
“Bill?” he said after a moment. “This is Don Gibbs … okay, thanks. Look, Bill—I don’t want to talk much. I want to ask you for a name and number.”
Silence.
“The name is that of one of your benefactors,” he said. “As I understand it, he’s a fairly big operator.”
He smiled then and began writing something on a pad next to the phone. “Swell,” he said when he had finished. “Give my love to everybody, fellow.”
He hung up the phone.
“You’re not going to have that baby,” he told Linda. “Bill’s an old buddy of mine. When a girl he knew got into some difficulty due to the spontaneous failure of a piece of rubber goods, Bill had to do something about it. Rather, he had to find somebody who would do something about it. I just got the name and number of the somebody.”
She didn’t understand.
“This guy,” he said, indicating the name on the pad, “is possibly the only really reliable rabbit-snatcher in the western world. Outside of Sweden, that is. In Sweden this sort of thing is all open and aboveboard, but here in this middle-age country of ours—”
“Rabbit-snatcher?”
“One of the more picturesque American colloquialisms,” he explained. “It means abortionist.”
“Abortionist?”
“Linda,” he said, “you’re going to have an abortion.”
She looked blank.
“You’re not going to have that baby, and next to a kick in the stomach the most logical way not to have a baby is to have an abortion. Isn’t that what you wanted when you came here?”
She thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I didn’t think of it that way. Somehow an abortion never even occurred to me. I just thought you’d be able to do something to help me.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Don, isn’t it dangerous?”
He shook his head.
“You hear lots of stories—”
“Sure,” he said. “You can go to one of these old women who cut you open with a filthy butcher knife. But this guy is reliable.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. He’s a human contradiction in terms—a dedicated abortionist. He does the job because he believes certain people have a right not to have babies and certain babies are better off unborn. Take a case like yours—what chance would a kid have with nineteen-year-old unmarried mother? He’s got two strikes against him the minute he’s born, not to mention the way it ruins your life.”
She nodded, agreeing with him.
“This guy’s a regular doctor,” he went on. “A Pittsburgh surgeon with a large legitimate practice. Abortions are a sideline and he does them for very little money right in his own operating room. He doesn’t try to make a profit on it—he’s not that kind of guy. I don’t think he even makes expenses on the abortion part of his business.”
“But isn’t it illegal?”
“Of course.”
“Then—”
“Hell, he doesn’t advertise. If the cops know about him they also have the good sense to leave him alone. And the medical association takes care of its own—they’re not going to give him a hard time. It’s not as if he was taking risks. If a patient’s healthy and in the early months of pregnancy an abortion’s less risky than an appendectomy—a good deal less risky.”