Strange Women, The (10 page)

There was a short, stricken silence. Jill lay so still Nora could hardly hear her breathing. Nora said, "And speaking of social and moral taboo, pet, one of us had better go and finish the night in that other bed. Or at least muss it up a little."

Jill put up her face to be kissed. "Nora. Are you—
ashamed
of this? Listen, this was my fault, don't think I don't realize—"

"I wasn't blaming—"

"If you're ashamed, or anything, I'll never forgive myself. I thought we both wanted it."

"I did," Nora said very quietly. "Surely you could tell." The clock ticked in the silence and a little ruffle of wind flung a branch against the window. "Jill, may I ask you—a terribly personal question?"

"Ask me anything you want to."

But with this license Nora could not frame her question. She had been thinking of Pammy; but at last she asked "Were you and Mack—physically compatible?"

"If you mean did I enjoy going to bed with him, the answer is yes, doctor. At least after the first couple of times." Jill sat up abruptly, pulling the fallen robe around her bare shoulders.

"Where are you going?"

"Back to my own bed" she snapped haughtily, "can't forget all the social and moral taboos, can we?"

Ill at ease, Nora switched on the light. Tears were raining down Jill's cheeks, and the thin arms were shaking as she fumbled with the buttons.

Nora went after Jill, picked her up like a child and carried her back to bed. She climbed in beside her and took the girl in her arms, kissing the wet eyes and the little feathers of hair at the temples.

The only thing that mattered in the world was to banish the shadows from those wet gray eyes.

Nora sat in her office, thinking vaguely about the patient she had just seen, then discarding the thought, deliberately, until the next day.

She had a curiously compartmented mind. A doctor cannot afford to be preoccupied with personal problems; and only by this rigid division of her life had she managed to keep the disaster of her first marriage, and now the tension of her second, from affecting her work.

She had managed likewise to keep her feelings for Jill in an air-tight, light-proof portion of her mind. But in these transitory moments, crossing the bridge that separated doctor from woman, she found herself surveying both with sharp perspective.

She had dismissed Pammy as childish nonsense. She had expected to dismiss this business with Jill as loneliness and sexual starvation. She had expected to say to herself;
well, now you know.
Most women were curious about lesbian practices, and, whether they would admit it or not, wanted to experiment. Jill had taken her off guard, at a low point of physical need.

She knew the clinical phrases. Frustration. Substitute satisfaction. Mutual masturbation. The sort of thing that flares up on board ship or in girls' schools. A
faute de mieux.

But she found she could not dismiss it so easily. Next morning, looking into Jill's flushed face, she had smiled and kissed her reassuringly; and that night when Jill held out her arms, she had gone to them as if compelled.

Wearily, Nora laid her face on the desk, almost grateful for the consultation that had held her here—away from Kit—this afternoon.

Ramona came to the office door, and Nora looked up at her with newly perceptive eyes. "Are we through?"

"Just about—no, someone's on the stairs."

Nora went to the hall door and looked out, then smiled-it was Jill, her small white cap jaunty on her curls.

"Am I butting in, Nora?"

"No, I'm through for the day." There was a smudge on Jill's bright face and her curls were badly in need of a comb, and Nora felt an unruly lift in her voice as she said, "Let's hurry up and get out of here before somebody comes along. Ramona, can we give you a lift home? We might be able to catch Margaret at the library—I've been wanting Jill to meet her." She added, to Jill, "It's time you met a few of my friends."

As they pulled up before the library, they saw a tall, slender girl coming down the steps. "Success. We did catch her," said Nora.

The girl saw them, waved, and came hurrying toward the car. She was tall, with a wide and flexible mouth and pale-green eyes behind thick glasses. Light hair, carelessly brushed, swung loose around her coat collar, and her hands, large and heavy-knuckled, had the librarian's occupational grime embedded in the knuckles; yet the effect was not shabbiness but careless grace. She got in beside Ramona.

"This is Jill," Nora said, "she's living with me now. Jill, Margaret Sheppard."

"It's nice to know you." Margaret's voice was huskily sweet. She leaned forward as Nora started the car; "Jill— have you any name besides Jill?"

Nora said quickly, not giving Jill the chance, "She's Mrs. Roger MacLellan, my—stepbrother's wife. Mack's in Peru now with an archaeological expedition." She brought the car to a stop before an enormous frowsy house which had once been a mansion. Now it bore the painted sign LENOX APARTMENTS.

Ramona got out and stood on the sidewalk. "Blossom and Melinda have had their kittens, Nora," she said. In the office it was always, correctly, Dr. Caine. "Won't you come up and have a peek?"

Nora looked questioningly at Jill.

“Love to."

The apartment was up two flights of stairs that smelled of floor-sweep and, faintly, of mice; but the rooms were freshly painted and tastefully furnished. On the sofa a package of laundry was spilling blouses and pressed white uniforms from torn brown paper. Margaret frowned and began to gather it up.

Ramona opened a door leading to a glassed-in porch, empty except for a narrow single bed covered with a faded blanket. Two cats were curled on the blanket; Ramona bent over them scooping up a kitten in each hand. The cats purred, but did not protest. Ramona turned, dangling the kittens between loosely competent fingers. She was rather like a kitten herself with her triangular face and furry eyebrows.

"We'll make money on this batch. They have perfect points. But then, we've never had one left on our hands."

Margaret, hunched over to look into a mirror too low for her, was running a comb through her untidy hair. "No—only in our clean laundry and all over the beds," she said dryly, pointing with her comb at the burst package.

"May I hold one?" Jill asked. Ramona put a kitten into her outstretched palm and Jill snuggled the fragile, fluff-coated bones against her sweater. Margaret took Nora's hat and gloves. "Let me put these up. Nothing's really safe with the cats around."

Ramona was fiddling with a record player. Dance music, smooth and bright, filled the room.

"Jill, do you like Dave Brubeck?"

"Who's he?" Jill asked blankly, and Ramona stared.

"You don't like music?" She held up the record envelope.

"Not jazz, especially."

Ramona sniffed, a very tiny sniff. "Then you and Marg ought to get along. She is strictly square and longhair. She even likes opera!"

"If you're going to fight that one out again," Nora said, putting down an empty record sleeve, "let me pick out a neutral corner."

Jill said shyly, "With a name like Barbieri, I'd think you'd be a real opera fan."

"Well, I'm not," replied Ramona shortly.

Margaret said with a crooked smile "Careful, Jill, you've hit her sorest spot. She's afraid someone will call it low taste. She won't admit she knows Toscanini from Rocky Marciano. Come and see
my
records."

Jill was already kneeling beside Margaret before the record cabinet, "Oh, I see you have the new TURANDOT. Is it better than the old Cetra set?"

Ramona laughed and made an 'I give up' gesture at Nora. "Well, Marg is in her element. You come along and see my kittens."

The porch was empty except for the cats' boxes and sandboxes; two half-grown kittens scuffling softly over a length of ribbon, the two queens suckling their litters. Nora looked down at the tangled, tumbling balls of fur, listening with half an ear as Ramona analyzed their perfection of points and eye color. She was not an animal lover, nor—usually—sentimental about baby creatures. But the curious, aloof maternity of the queens, the blind helplessness of the kittens, struck some new, deep-down emotion she could not reach.

Jill and Margaret came out after a while. While Jill crooned over the kittens, Nora asked, "How is Skippy, Marg?"

"I saw him at Christmas. He seems healthy and happy." Margaret looked out the window. "It's going to drag on for years. A child custody suit is like a perpetual motion machine. Once you get it started, you can't shut it off again."

Jill asked, "Which cat is the mother of which kittens?" and Ramona laughed.

"I wouldn't know. Cats do the nuttiest things. These two wouldn't even eat from the same dish, but a few weeks before the kittens came, they began snuggling up to each other, and—this is the craziest thing ever—when Blossom started to deliver, Melinda—the one with the dark patches, there—crawled in with her and did likewise, just to keep her company. I lifted her into her own box a dozen times, but she had her mind made up. I had to go to work, and Marg never notices, so when I came home, here they were, five kittens between them, licking them all indiscriminately. And they've made a regular community project of bringing up the babies."

"Communists," Nora said. "Collective nurseries."

"Early Christians," said Margaret.

"Lesbians," said Jill.

Ramona straightened, with a curious sharp look at Jill. Then she laughed. "Exactly; crazy, mixed-up kittens." But there was a silence around the laughter.

Nora picked up a kitten, then put it gently down, and dug in her pocket for a cigarette. "Marg, Ramona, are you doing anything tonight? Jill hasn't been out since we came to Albany. We could go for a drink. I thought—" she crushed out the cigarette, though she had taken only two puffs, "we might take her to Flora's."

Margaret said sharply, "You're not serious."

"I am. I haven't been there for months."

"Why not?" Ramona's dark eyes twinkled. "Don't be a wet blanket, Marg."

Margaret frowned a little at Jill, but finally said, "All right. Why not? You can pick us up at seven."

* * *

Inside their own apartment, Jill turned on Nora angrily. "What possessed you to introduce me as Mrs. MacLellan?"

Nora stared. "What else? In a few weeks you will be very obviously pregnant. I thought it would save embarrassment."

"I'm embarrassed enough, right now! I gave in my name to Dr. Demorino as Mrs. Bristol—to Ramona!"

"I never thought of that," said Nora, startled and angry. What a stupid thing to do! All of a piece, of course, with Jill's self-punishing actions. "I thought you'd feel awkward."

"You sound like my mother," Jill said, cheeks flaming, "Regard for appearances! Lie, cheat, steal, as long as the neighbors don't know!"

"Nonsense." Nora went through into the kitchen. "We'd better get supper, and I've got to check with the answering service. Jill, you're not on the witness stand. For that matter, at common law, Mack's baby has a right to his name—legitimate or not—and you have a right to call yourself his wife."

"Who's talking about
rights?
That's just the sort of thing I won't do. I haven't any
claim
on Mack—"

Nora turned away impatiently. "Oh, you're hopeless. All right, you can tell Marg what a liar I am, and set the record straight by confessing all your sins. Why not wear a big scarlet letter while you're at it? Will you set the table please, or do you want to eat out of the sink?"

Jill did not move. She said thinly, "Nora, are you ashamed to introduce me to your friends because I'm going to have a baby and—and not married?"

"For God's sake,
stop
it," said Nora. Then it dawned on her; Jill had meant it. She was actually fighting back tears. Nora came swiftly and put her hands on the shaking shoulders. "My dear, don't you know me better than that?" But through her dismay, exasperation surged up, so that she felt conflicting impulses—to hug Jill and to shake sense into her.

"But, dear, you're too sensitive. If we want to live in this world, we do have to accept a certain amount of—"

"Hypocrisy."

"Exactly." Nora let her arm drop and began dishing up the chops. "There are more polite words. Look, let's turn it around. After my divorce I lived alone ten years. The world subscribes to the notion that, being legally unmarried, I have no physical, psychological, emotional or spiritual need for sex. If I want to keep on practicing medicine, I have to subscribe too—or make people think I do. Rightly or wrongly, our society is dedicated to the proposition that I couldn't possibly be a tramp and a good competent doctor at the same time. The way it works out is that anyone who wants to leave the paths of so-called virtue shows a little—not hypocrisy—a little decent discretion."

"Decent! I don't think it's indecent for a woman to have lovers, if she wants to. But sneaking around to do it—that's dirty!"

"Well, you're outvoted," said Nora wearily, unfolding her napkin. "Be honest and a martyr, or be a mild hypocrite and do as you damn please. It's your life."

I'm angry,
she thought,
because Jill's more honest than I am...
There was something else she had to say, and she didn't know where to start. "More tea? Jill, by the way—no more cracks about lesbians in front of Marg."

Suddenly she realized; Jill might interpret this like her lie about Jill's marriage; a hint that she was ashamed of the true state of affairs. "But you couldn't know—Marg left her husband and baby to live with Ramona."

"Husband? I thought real lesbians never married."

"Whatever you mean by a real lesbian," Nora said dryly— "Since I've said so much—Frank Sheppard is a heel. He never did a decent thing in his life. When Skip was a month old, Marg packed up and walked out. For a while, she lived here with me."

Nora thought of the weeks when Margaret and Skippy had lived here; the force of her own self-deception now became clear to her. She had thought she was simply doing a down-and-out girl a favor.

"I mean; she kept house for me, before she got the library job. Later she moved in with Ramona." She had watched them with detachment which now seemed wholly false, hiding from herself.