Strange Women, The (2 page)

So there's a
her
in the picture? No, she didn't want to be sprung unexpectedly on her brother's—her stepbrother's wife. "I'm sorry," she said firmly, "I have to drive to Albany this evening."

"Drive? On a night like this? You're out of your mind," he said. "Whatever your engagement is, you'd much better break it and have dinner with me."

She frowned at the old masterful tone.

"I couldn't possibly."

"It couldn't be that important, could it?"

"It certainly could, and it is." But then Mack's firm, positive voice got through the layers of resistance. He was the only person who had ever been able to change her mind, or make her do anything she didn't want to. She sighed, flunking of the snowy highways, ice and chains. Kit would understand.

But Mack was already saying, "Well, if you can't, you can't. I forgot you weren't a kid for me to boss around. Tomorrow, then? Five o'clock?"

They agreed on it, and Nora went back into the office. Jill Bristol, finished dressing, sat nervously pleating her skirt. With a rude shifting of mental gears, Nora managed to get back to what she had been saying.

"You can come in Friday for your test report."

Jill rose, picking up her gloves. "Dr. Caine—"

"Yes?"

"I—nothing. What do I owe you?"

"I'll make out a bill next time." Nora felt safe and barricaded again behind routine she could control. She opened the door for Jill, noting with relief that the waiting room was still empty; picked up the girl's coat and held it.

"No overshoes?" She asked. “I’ll have you as an influenza patient yet."

Jill only gave her a shy, guilty smile. “I’ll see you Friday."

Nora went back into her borrowed office, lighting the cigarette she permitted herself only when office hours were over. Suddenly, with the vivid visual memory of fatigue, she remembered Jill Bristol and recognized her.

It
had been
fifteen
years. And Jill had been just one
of
Pammy Bristol's little sisters.

That was the summer Mack had worked on a ranch in Oklahoma for college money. As if in the ripple of the faulty old pier-glass, Nora saw herself at seventeen, a leggy serious girl, shy and bookish. Pammy had been just fifteen. Nora couldn't even remember how they had met, or how their sudden friendship had flowered.

The Bristols had owned a huge old house at the edge of town, Pammy's father was a well-to-do Albany lawyer; her mother a leader in small-town church work and society. Nora's timid, reclusive father and stepmother had been quite outside their orbit; but Nora had often been invited to play tennis on their private courts—Pammy and her sisters in pretty tennis dresses that made Nora feel shabby and clumsy in her faded jeans. Every day after their game there was lemonade in the cool library, or upstairs in Pammy's chintz-flowered room.

Pammy was popular, spoilt, deliciously pretty, already rebelling against the girls' school she attended. Younger than Nora, she seemed already so much wiser in the ways of the world. Nora told herself Pammy was an empty-headed butterfly with nothing on her mind but dates; she would not confess to herself that she envied Pammy her boy friends, her poise, her popularity.

Her own goal chosen in childhood, Nora had gone after it so fiercely that there had been no time for fun, no time for boys—except Mack. And she shied away from the thought of Mack, and how they had lost each other.

It seemed that she and Pammy had talked all through the summer without stopping for breath; sprawled on Pammy's big bed, the sun making leaf-and-shade patterns on Pammy's upturned face. Tennis with Pammy, long bike rides on dusty white roads, swimming at the country club. It was tomboy Nora's first feminine friendship. It was also to be her last.

Not till the end of the summer did Nora grow troubled at her own pleasure in the younger girl's company. Pammy had taught her to dance, in the dark smooth-floored library; the lissome, boneless feel of Pammy's flexible waist between her hands was an almost painful delight.

Nora had little worldly wisdom, but she
did
have some vague idea that it was not quite right—the stirring she felt when she held Pammy, dancing… the ache of rage and fury when Pammy confided, giggling, how Jerry Marne had tried to touch her breasts.

Once, while they sprawled, chattering, on Pammy's bed, Pammy threw her arm over Nora and hugged her. Nora had pushed her away roughly. "Don't be silly," she said, but her arm was roughened with goose flesh.

Half a dozen times Pammy had begged Nora to come and spend the night. "We'd have such fun," she begged, "Mother lets me stay up 'most all night when I have company! Please, Nor!"

But Nora gently made an excuse, each time, and refused. The thought of sleeping with Pammy in that big bed was somehow too troubling to be considered. She knew perfectly well that girls
did
spend the night with each other without thinking twice; in her early teens she had been jealous of girls who could hug each other and kiss with spontaneous affection, but she had never been one of them. She had always been stand-offish, apart.

But of course the inevitable happened. They had been dressing after a swim, alone for once. Nora's jeans and Pammy's linen shorts were hanging from the same hook. Pammy turned, naked, gently bumping Nora's bare thigh. She stopped and stood very still, looking up at Nora with startled gray eyes.

Nora felt herself blushing. Her own flat boyish body seemed hardly to belong to the same sex as Pammy's; the curving hips, the small brown-tipped breasts, the hand-span waist. Nora was embarrassed at her nakedness, though she and Mack had often undressed for a casual swim, simply turning their backs on each other.

"You'd better get dressed, Pam."

"Oh, Nor, don't be prissy, we're both girls," Pammy said with a giggle. "You'd make a cute boy, though. Want to be my boy friend?"

"Pammy, don't—"

"Course, if you were a boy, I prob'ly wouldn't be standing here like this." Pammy was close to Nora, her damp tousled curls just touching Nora's bare shoulder. Suddenly Nora felt Pammy's arms pressing her close, Pammy's rounded breasts, rose-petal soft, brushing the spare slenderness of her own. Then Pammy swayed, crushing her body hard against Nora's.

"Kiss me, Nor," she begged in a whisper, "Please, please, kiss me—"

As if in a daze, Nora gathered Pammy up, lifting her from the floor. She was conscious of Pammy's silk skin touching her everywhere, as if her whole body were seared by it. Pammy's soft mouth, like a child's, stayed closed under her searching lips, but she wriggled her knee between Nora's thighs. They clung together for a long time, hungrily, dazed; then, signing, Nora felt the tense ache in her loins loosen and dissolve and she lowered Pammy gently to the floor. Pammy dropped her head to Nora's shoulder and held her, trembling.

Nora gave her a tender little spank. "Get dressed, you naughty girl," she whispered.

Dreamily they put on their clothes. Then Pammy pulled her back and stood on tiptoe, pressing her mouth to Nora's; Nora stood numb, shaking, her hands cupped around Pammy's breasts—so soft and warm through the thin blouse. Finally they pulled apart and Pammy, laughing nervously, fumbled in her beach bag for lipstick.

"Now you'll come and spend the night, won't you, Nor?" she teased. Nora couldn't remember what she answered; she only remembered the taste of Pammy's tangled hair under her lips. When they said goodbye Pammy had squeezed her hands and laughed. Her red mouth had never looked so merry.

She had never seen Pammy again. That night Nora's father had called her to the telephone. The voice of Pammy's father had been harsh and curt:

"Miss Caine, you are to have nothing further to do with my daughter Pamela."

Nora had literally stammered "Wha—what? Why?"

"Apparently you are not aware that there is a second entrance to the women's dressing quarters at the pool," he said coldly. "Pamela's mother was standing there this afternoon, and she saw what happened. Miss Caine, I do not interfere with Pamela's choice of friends, but—" and the voice had gone hard and vicious, "I do not allow my daughters to associate with lesbians." At that time Nora had not even known the word.

He had hung up on her stammered protest, and Nora sank down by the telephone in sudden, shocked comprehension.

She made no effort to justify herself. Pammy had first embraced her, true. But she was older than Pamela (she did not stop to consider that in worldly wisdom she was immeasurably the younger) and she should have prevented it from happening.

She went through the week in dazed and helpless pain, the world bleak and purposeless without Pammy's daily calls. Then autumn came, and she heard that the college of her first choice had accepted her; and when she came home next summer the Bristols had sold the big house and moved to another state, and she had never heard of any of them again—until Jill had walked into her consulting room an hour ago.

Nora felt now mild amusement and pity. She wondered, with retrospective tenderness, if Pammy had been punished. Poor little Pammy.

Nora supposed there was hardly a girl in the world—or boy either—who had not, either on impulse or in deliberate experimental mood, caressed another of his own sex. Such things happened to adolescents; they grew out of them. What had happened with Pammy had been as innocent, and as trivial, as the play of very tiny children. Nora had long ago dismissed any lingering guilt about it.

Or had she?
Had the unconscious memory made her, by turns, too kind or too brusque with Jill? Jill, who now seemed so much like Pammy that it seemed incredible Nora had not recognized her at once.

Returning to the present, Nora frowned, pulling on her hooded coat and driving gloves, and went down the highway to her car. She'd already wasted too much time, and Kit was waiting.

It began to snow late that night. Nora, driving back from a tense, unsatisfactory visit to Kit, welcomed the driving sleet; the icy roads, demanding every scrap of her attention, kept her mind off Kit's fierce, longing eyes. She could forget the way his hand had clung, furtively seeking out her breast, until, seeing a nurse's eyes on them, she had had to push his fingers gently aside.

All the next day the snow fell heavily; but toward evening the storm receded, allowing glimpses of a black, bruised-looking sky. At half-past five, Nora sat over a cold cup of coffee in the hotel dining room, impatiently checking her watch; evening office hours began at seven, and so far there was no sign of Mack.

She thought without pleasure of the cold empty farmhouse, and the strange patients; she thought with regret of her own comfortable Albany apartment and the good food and smooth beds of her housekeeper; and for the hundredth time she wished that Dr. Byrd, and his pneumonia, and his broken-down old farm-house office, and his whole country practice, were all frying together on a choice grid in hell.

She was dreading the meeting with Mack. In a profession which is still not too easy for women, she had learned not to look back much. Youth is not an asset in a doctor; since her twentieth birthday Nora had hidden her youth behind a severe face and businesslike clothes, and now, reminded of the years since she had last seen Mack, she realized that the pretense was now a reality, a part of herself; she was really not young. Had she ever been?

She wondered what the mysterious "her" would be like. It was hard to imagine Mack accounting for his comings and goings to a woman!

The outside door swung open, with a blast of icy wind, and Nora, looking up for Mack, saw Jill Bristol.

She was looking back over her shoulder at a big shaggy-looking man in the doorway, stamping the snow off his feet. He shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog, and turned into the room; and Nora, with a curious feeling of shock and inevitability, recognized Mack.

She rose and came slowly toward them. Jill's eyes met Nora's; a look of panic came suddenly into them, but Mack had not seen.

"Nora! Good to see you," he exclaimed, and seized her hand in both of his. They were big hands, calloused with rough work, and his face, deeply bronzed, had the lines put there by wind and weather. He was four inches taller and forty pounds heavier, but the laughing brown eyes were the same.

"Did we keep you waiting? My car gave up two blocks down the street, and I had to arrange to have it towed." He was still holding her hand. Nora had forgotten that curious clumsy charm of his. She forgot how she had dreaded this meeting. If Jill hadn't been there she would have kissed him. He stooped and brushed her cheek with his lips, still cold with the snowy wind.

"You haven't changed much, Nor." Still holding her hand, he turned to Jill. "Honey, this is my stepsister, Nora Caine—Ellersen," he corrected himself.

"Caine," she smiled, re-correcting him, "at least professionally."

"And this is my fiancée, Jill Bristol."

"But you're
Nora,"
Jill said slowly. "I know you, though you probably don't remember me. Didn't you pal around with my sister, Pam, one summer?" She laughed, that nervous little laugh. "I used to have an awful crush on you."

Mack led the way to the table, holding a chair for Jill, then for Nora. "But where is Kit—I imagine it's the same Kit Ellersen we knew in college, isn't it? There wouldn't be two?"

"No, it's the same one."

"Why didn't you tell me he couldn't make it tonight? We'd have fixed up a time when he could!"

Nora said with a stiff little smile, "That would be difficult, I'm afraid. He's been in the Veteran's hospital for months, and he'll be there till next May."

"Good God!" Mack's grin vanished and he put his hand over Nora's. "What happened?"

She kept her voice flat and expressionless. "It was before I married him. He was in the reserves, and they sent him to Goodfellow Air Force Base, down Texas, as a flying instructor. Some fatheaded cadet who should have washed out of ground training managed to run a training plane into a bunch of telephone wires. They were both smashed up pretty badly."

Mack's hand tightened, painfully hard, on hers. "Me and my big mouth. So that was why you wouldn't break your date last night."