Eleven Read online

  Without looking at it, she massaged the U-shaped scar on the back of her hand. Since she had got on the bus, her hands had never been still, the long backward-bending fingers clamping the soft palms symmetrically against the corners of her handbag, only to fly off to some other perch, as if she kept trying to pose them properly for a photograph. Her lizard pumps stood upright, side by side on the vibrating floor.

  Alistaire was the next rest-stop. She didn’t remember too much about the town except the name, or perhaps the town had changed a good deal in ten years, but the name was enough, and the fact she’d spent one of those happy, carefree nights in a tourist home with her family on one of their summer vacations. The sun was already down, so she decided to stay the night and get an early start tomorrow, as her father had used to say on their tours in the car. “Where you reckon we’ll sleep tonight, papa?” she or her sister Gladys would ask him from the back seat, where the khaki blankets and the picnic lunch and probably a watermelon would be tied up and stowed away in such apple-pie order it was a pleasure just to crawl in the little space beside her sister. Her father’d say, “Lord knows, sugar,” or maybe, “Guess we’ll make Aunt Doris’ by tonight, Gerrie. Remember your Aunt Doris?” which was almost as exciting as a new tourist home, because like as not, she’d have forgotten her aunt’s house since the year before. Wouldn’t she like to forget Clark’s house in a year’s time, too, but the memory didn’t work like that once you were grown, she knew. She remembered the Star Hotel only too well after fourteen months, every six-sided tile in the brown-and-white floor of the lobby that always smelled of disinfectant like a clinic; and the view from her room window of the lighted glass star that hung over the entrance.

  Not far from the bus stop, she found a house with a roomers sign on the front lawn, and though the woman seemed a little suspicious at first because she didn’t have a car and then because she didn’t have a man with her—but what could be suspicious about not having a man?—she was soon in a clean, very tastefully furnished front room all to herself. Geraldine bathed in the bathroom down the hall, lifting the washrag so the water ran caressingly down her arms and legs, thinking—“How long it’s been since you’ve been my very own!”

  She put on her nightgown and went right to bed, because she wanted to lie in the dark and think. No one would likely find Clark for three days, she thought. His cheeses were due at Etienne Station tomorrow, but they were used to his being a day late when he was on a bender. And since this was Thursday, the Trelawneys weren’t likely to stop by until Saturday when they went to town, if then.

  “I married you to help you, but the truth’s not in you. You are the first entirely evil human soul I ever saw and it’s my everlasting curse that I’m married to you!”

  She spread her legs restlessly under the sheet, and brought them together again like scissors. The crisp new sheet rattled about her with a sound like thunder. She pressed her fingertips harder into her thighs. Her mother in Montgomery would say, “Well, you did finally fill out, didn’t you, child?” Geraldine turned on her side and let a few tears roll out, over the bridge of her nose and into the pillowcase, because her mother had been dead almost a year now. The wind gave a sigh that blew the bottoms of the curtains out, held them reaching toward her for a moment, then twirled them like two capes. And she let a few more tears roll, thinking of her and Marianne’s apartment in Mobile and of how young and happy they’d been together when the fleet was first in. Oh, she’d tell them all about Mobile, too, if they wanted to ask her, she hadn’t a thing to be ashamed of. It was the country’s lawmakers themselves and the police who made money out of it who ought to be ashamed.

  She wouldn’t tell them about Doug, though, because it hadn’t been his fault. She’d say she came to the Star Hotel accidentally when she hadn’t any other place to stay, which was true. She could see herself telling it to some solemn judge with grey hair, asking him to judge for himself what on earth else she could have done—right up to the moment she lay here now in a strange tourist home—and she could hear him assuring her she couldn’t have done otherwise. She’d come to Mobile with her friend Marianne Hughes, from Montgomery, to take factory jobs after they’d finished high school, but they’d had to take jobs as waitresses until the factory jobs were open. She and Marianne had had a little apartment together, and she’d been able to send fifteen dollars a week home to her mother, and they hadn’t been there any time before the fleet came in. Not even the fleet, just a couple of cruisers and a destroyer stopping for repairs, but the city was suddenly full of sailors and officers, everything going full tilt day and night, and Marianne used to wake her up every morning at a quarter to six yelling, “Out of bed, honey child, the fleet’s in at Mobile!” which might sound silly now she was grown, but at eighteen and free as the wind, it had made her jump out of bed feeling like a million dollars, laughing and tingling with energy, no matter how tired she might be really.

  She and Marianne would throw on their waitress uniforms and hurry down to the restaurant without even coffee, through the streets that would be even then full of sailors, some up early and some still out and maybe drunk, but by and large, she’d still say they were the finest, cleanest young men she’d ever met. There were always sailors in the restaurant for breakfast, and she and Marianne would tell them they were going to work in the marine supplies factory in five weeks, and the sailors would probably ask them for dates, and if they were especially nice looking, she and Marianne would accept.

  Then Marianne married a chief petty officer, and she’d had to give up the apartment. She’d known Douglas Ellison, a pharmacist’s mate from Connecticut, for about three weeks then, and they intended to marry, too, when they were absolutely sure they loved each other. She hadn’t yet found an apartment, so Doug had got her a room at the Star Hotel and paid a week’s rent for it. And he stayed with her a couple of nights—the first fellow she’d ever had anything to do with, despite what most girls in Mobile were doing, Marianne included. His ship had been leaving at the end of the week, but he was due back in a month, and then they were going to be married.

  That was also the month the job was to have been open at the factory, but wasn’t. And then—it never rains but it pours—she lost her job at the restaurant, because the girl who’d had it before came back, or so they said, from the marine supplies factory that was laying off instead of hiring. And suddenly there were so many people unemployed, one couldn’t even get a job washing dishes in exchange for three meals.

  She’d been ready to go back to Montgomery, when the Star Hotel told her they couldn’t get her trunk out of the basement for several more days, and upped the bill twice what it should have been so she wouldn’t be able to pay it, and when she threatened to call the police, told her if she did, they’d have her in jail. She’d gone out to tell the police anyway, and the doorman had stopped her. Didn’t she know the Star Hotel was a house, he said. Oh, she’d known a lot was going on at the Star Hotel, what else could you expect with the fleet in and right on the waterfront, but she hadn’t known it was a common brothel. And suddenly there were strangers standing all around her, pretending to take it for granted she was one of those women, too, laughing at her when she said Doug Ellison was her fiancé. They dared her to talk to a policeman, the police would have her in for ten years, they said, and she got terrified. Some of the other girls there said they’d been in the same boat, but didn’t mind now, because what work was there to be found outside anyway, and it was easier than a lot of work, whereupon she lost the bit of dinner she’d just eaten. She couldn’t eat and barely slept, and they started sending sailors into her room as if she’d have anything to do with them after Doug Ellison. But no letter ever came from Doug, she knew because Connie, one of the girls there, promised she would see she got it, if it came. They watched the girls’ mail, especially the outgoing, and she had to keep writing to her mother that she was still working at Carter’s Restaurant and very happy, hoping her mother would read between the lines, b
ut her mother’s cancer was getting worse then, and she never did. The sailors that came into the Star Hotel, even if they were fairly decent looking, made her sick that she’d ever felt gay hearing Marianne yell in the mornings, and sicker that she’d ever thought she’d tell her grandchildren of the most exciting period in her life, stories that began, “When the fleet was in at Mobile, I was just eighteen . . .”

  And if anyone chose to cast the first stone at her because she finally yielded, she would relate how they stopped putting enough food on her trays, and how all the girls, even Connie Stegman, advised her to co-operate and lay a little money by, because they didn’t give a snap for her life itself. But when they found she was hoarding her money, they came and found it and took it, for the truth was they didn’t trust their own doorman when it came to taking bribes. She threatened to kill herself, and she meant it, so they sent her to Chattanooga with two other girls in a car, to a hotel owned by a partner of the Star Hotel manager. If anybody didn’t believe her, let them go to Chattanooga and see the Blackstone Hotel standing there for themselves. Let them go inside and look around. She got so run down at the Blackstone, they sent her back to the Star Hotel. It worked this way: there was a whole syndicate all over the South, and wherever business was heavy, they shipped girls, or if they thought a girl was about to make a break, they shipped her where she didn’t know anyone.

  Geraldine sat up at the knock on the door.

  “Got everything you need?” called the frail, high voice of the landlady.

  “Yes—” She swallowed air, and her heart beat wildly. “Thank you.”

  “There’s ice water in the pitcher on the dresser. Hope you weren’t asleep, didn’t see no light.”

  “No, I wasn’t asleep,” said Geraldine, beginning to smile.

  “Awful early,” said the woman pleasantly, sounding as if she were turning away.

  “Yes, it is.” Geraldine wished she could think of something nicer to say. “Good night,” she called, and lay down on her back, still smiling.

  And then Clark. She’d tell them about those first four visits of Clark’s to the Star Hotel and every word he said, and just let them judge for themselves. She could still see him exactly as he looked when he stepped into her room for the first time, a really impressive man with his straight back and heavy black brows and moustache. He’d had on his square-toed boots with his trouser cuffs tucked into them and his long, nearly black jacket, and she’d thought right away he looked like some kind of a statesman or maybe an actor around the time of the Civil War. He was still and formal and hardly said a word or even looked at her until just as he went out the door, and she remembered that look like no other, because it had scared her. If she had only obeyed her instinct then! He had turned with his hand on the knob of the open door and looked back at her over his shoulder, as if he might have forgotten something or as if he wanted to remember her because he hated her. She hadn’t liked him at all, and when he came in a few days later, she’d been about to tell him to leave, when he just sat down and lighted a cigar and started talking. He wanted to know all about her, how old she was and how she happened to be there, and though his brown eyes were really quite kind, almost fatherly if it wasn’t sacrilegious to say such a thing, she’d resented his idle curiosity and not answered much.

  Then the third time, he had brought her candy, and the fourth time flowers, presenting them with a bow, and the fourth time she’d told him the whole story and cried on his shoulder when he sat down beside her, because she’d never told anyone, not even Connie Stegman, that much. “What would you say if I asked you to be my wife?” he’d asked right out of the blue. “You think it over till I come back. I’ll be back in a week.” She hadn’t believed him, but naturally she’d thought about it, about the farm he’d described in the flat country north of New Orleans, and the fancy cheeses he made for a living and the duck-callers he made out of wood and shipped to hunters everywhere—little wooden boxes with a cover that scraped and made a sound like a duck, he’d brought her one to show her—and she’d thought what a special kind of farmer he was, not just a dirt farmer but an educated gentleman. And the girls at the hotel told her how lucky she was, for Clark Reeder was a fine man even if he was over forty and a little old-fashioned, and Margaret the hotel director had told her how many girls had found themselves good husbands that way and how often the husbands came back and said what fine wives the girls made. So she’d thought about being mistress of a farmhouse that she would make neat as a pin and stock with good things to eat, but mainly of course she’d thought of being free and the next time he’d come, she’d said yes. And like a bird out of a cage, she’d almost died of happiness at first, not even wanting the honeymoon Clark had suggested, just wanting to get settled at home. She’d cooked and sewed and scrubbed every inch of the place and been delighted to do it. But why even tell them all that if they couldn’t imagine it? Or how good it felt just to be treated like a human being again, the way Clark had said, “Herbert,” speaking to Mr. Trelawney, “I’d like you to meet my wife,” presenting her on his hand as if she were a queen.

  She was pumping water by the back steps and the pump was acting queer, making a boom-crash-boom whenever the water gushed out, spilling all over the bucket but not filling it, and even Red Dog was up looking at it. Then she opened her eyes and discovered the sound came from out the window—a military band! Either a parade or a circus, she thought, jumping out of bed as gaily as when Marianne used to awaken her. The music was coming from a park a couple of blocks down the street where she saw a lot of colored lights like a celebration. She whirled around and pulled her nightgown over her head.

  Clark!

  He’d still be lying on the back porch with the rag on his moustache, if the breeze hadn’t blown it off. She shimmied into her girdle. Well, so be it. Some actions were a necessity, like killing animals for food, or sawing through the bars of a prison to get free. And Clark’s house had been a prison as bad as the Star Hotel, except he never touched her, saying she was too dirty for him. Clark set himself up as her savior while telling her all the time she tortured him. Did it make any sense to torture her and torture himself, too? She made the two red arcs on her upper lip that Clark said made her look like a harlot but were simply better for her kind of mouth, and combed what was left of the curls into a loose short bob. She snatched up her handbag and went out into the hall, but on second thought came back and left her money, except for one dollar, in the pocket of her coat in the closet.

  From the sidewalk she could see a striped tent top and something like a ferris wheel lighted up and spinning, and could hear a man yelling over a loud-speaker, and between the boom-crash-booms that were louder than anything, the band played a song she was pleased she could recognize as “The Stars and Stripes For Ever.” She looked down and concentrated on getting across the dark road in her wobbly high heels. Her heart was going like sixty and she really must stop and get her breath before she went one step farther. And it was only a church benefit at that, she saw by the streamer over the entrance. FIRST METHODIST ANNUAL WELFARE NIGHT.

  “Admission only twenty-five cents!” roared the voice on one note. “And dig down in your pocket for a second quarter if you’re really thinking of entering the Kingdom of Heaven!”

  Geraldine pushed her money through the high window. “I’ll pay my two quarters.”

  “One?” a voice roared.

  “One.”

  The music stopped as soon as she went in, and there wasn’t any band, she saw, it was all from the merry-go-round that had a drum and cymbal machine in the center that kept going. A final boom-crash shimmered into silence, and Geraldine stood staring at the still bounding horses on the platform that made a hollow sound like roller skates on a wooden rink and for some reason excited her terribly. The roof of the merry-go-round was like a king’s crown with gilt scallops hanging around the edge, each set with a blue or red light like a jewel. Suddenly something made her gasp, something blurred her vision wi
th tears: she had been on this very spot before, been on this merry-go-round as a child, the time she’d passed through this town with her family. They might have stopped at the same tourist home for that matter. There was the Ferris wheel way back under the trees and the parking lot with the kerb around it where her father’s big car had stood, and the separate booth that sold pink cotton candy, and the big ice-cream parlor with an open porch all around it like a summerhouse—all just as it had been one night so long ago she didn’t really remember. And laughing at herself, she hurried to buy her merry-go-round ticket.

  The glare of white lights made her feel positively naked as she stepped onto the platform, but there were so many other grown-up people getting on—maybe some like her, coming back after many years—she forgot her self-consciousness and weaved right through the maze of nickel-plated poles to the pink horse she wanted. The boom-crash-boom started with a terrible din right in her ears, then music so loud she couldn’t recognize it and had to laugh, and the pink horse rose slowly up and down. She felt herself sink again, and closed her eyes, letting it catch her up in swifter and swifter rhythm, pulling her outward so she had to hold on with both hands. She felt so happy, she could have cried. What was it, she wondered, with the music pounding in your ears and your two hands holding the pole and the small rise, small fall, so wonderful beyond all . . . Her throat closed, and she opened her eyes, seeing a blur of black trees and sliding dots of lights and a few figures standing at the edge of darkness smiling up. Where were her parents? She wanted to wave to them. Then her shoulders crumpled as if she had been struck and the tears fairly leapt from her eyes, because she knew it was only to be a child, with her parents waving and shouting to her to hold on, only to be astride the horse in a short dress and to be put to bed in less than an hour and to be too small to reach the bottom of the bed with her toes, and to get up tomorrow to ride in the back of the car, asking, “Where you reckon we’ll sleep tonight, papa?” that was so wonderful, and it was all, all gone now forever. She felt her face twist with a tragedy too profound for tears, and deliberately she looked away from the people standing watching to the merry-go-round’s center where the scenic pictures showed “A Swiss Chalet,” “Pike’s Peak,” “Venice,” thinking quickly how she would tell them, if they asked her anything, how Clark had accused her of ever more disgusting practices, the worst he could think of, and how he brought men into the house on pretexts, just so he could accuse her of something later.