Girls In 3-B, The (19 page)

But death is so permanent, she thought with a wry smile, forcing herself to move out of the doorway. A blast like ice water struck her in the face, so that her eyes shut and she staggered a little.
Oh God,
she thought,
if I ever get these clothes off and crawl into a nice warm bed I'll never ask for anything else.

The hospital was large and dingy-looking. She stopped in front of it, knowing she had to go in but unable for a moment to lift her feet. She pulled her coat collar straight, using the glass front door as a mirror, and took off her sodden gloves. The fake wedding ring she had bought at Woolworth's suddenly looked cheap and brassy. Alan would say it was a sop to bourgeois convention
--
well, Alan had run out on this problem, it was all hers.
It’s my baby,
she thought without humor, shoving the door open and stepping into the blessed, drug-smelling warmth of the foyer.

She had dressed herself carefully for the first time in weeks, partly for morale and partly because, when she got this life-or-death verdict from the lab, she was going to register at the State Employment Office. No matter what the rabbit said, she would have to find a job and work until she was fired. Any job. The papers said there were sixty thousand unemployed in Chicago, more being laid off every day
--
well, she would take anything she could get, even scrubbing floors. She twitched around the dress that was too loose, smoothed her wet hair, and hoped the shadows under her eyes made her look interesting rather than dissipated. A passing nurse looked at her curiously. She forced herself to cross the lobby, pass the receiving window and ring for the elevator.

The quiet whiteness of the lab was restful. She took her place on a bench beside an old man with crutches, and tried not to think about Alan.
The son of a bitch. All right, so an artist is above convention. What reason does he have to think he's an artist? What has he got to show for all these years of loafing? And why should an artist be different from anybody else?

She set her chin and tried to look as if she had a right to the services of a hospital and a technician.

A few minutes later she was smiling at the nurse who stood, card in hand, smiling back at her. "I guess there's no question, Mrs. Harvey. You're about as pregnant as a girl can get. Now if you want to sign up for our prenatal clinic
--
oh yes, and bring your husband in the next time you come. He'll love our expectant fathers' class."

"I'd love to." She twisted her ring, trying to look as if it had initials and a date inside. "I'll talk to him about it."

"You do that. The fee is five dollars. You can pay the office on the way out."

Handing over the five, receiving in its place a small crisp slip of paper, she reflected that one crime leads to another. If she hadn't been pregnant without the blessing of church or state she wouldn't have had to take six dollars from Pat's purse.
Or if Pat didn't leave things lying around,
she thought, trying to shift the blame. Seeing it on the drainboard, with Pat's week's pay stuck in so carelessly, had been such a perfect solution to her problem that she couldn't help taking the five and the change
--
for bus fare.
Maybe she won't miss it,
Annice thought.
Or maybe she'll think the janitor did it.

The employment office was crowded in spite of the cold and wet. Always people out of work, always people hoping for a better job, especially here in this neighborhood where dingy children played on the front steps of peeling apartment buildings and the neighborhood stores looked dusty and depressed. She scrutinized the waiting women, familiar types by this time. Fat middle-aged women who looked like scrubwomen and probably were. Yes, and they made more than office help
--
they had a union. Pretty colored girls in cheap smart clothes, their hair straightened, carrying themselves with the self-conscious independence of those whose mothers and fathers had been pushed off the sidewalks, whose grandparents had known the terror of lynching and the grind of economic slavery. Annice smiled. It made her feel good to hear their pretty soft voices and see them looking so spunky, even in the face of temporary layoffs and job discrimination.

She had less sympathy for the draggled-looking women from Arkansas and Kentucky and southern Missouri, their bad teeth and sallow skins testimony to too much fat pork and white-flour biscuits, their tired print dresses bungled together at home, their cheap run-down oxfords looking as if they would be more at home following a mule down a cotton row than on a city pavement. They came into the city by thousands with their slab-sided overalled men and snot-nosed kids, their rickety furniture piled high on trucks and old cut-down Chewies; they pushed into the garbage-smelling rat-ridden apartment houses of the South Side where their kinfolks already swarmed and went out to look for the jobs that weren't there. They would fall prey to the landlords and the installment salesmen, go hungry and try vainly to get on city's relief before they piled their stuff on the old truck and turned home again, beat. With them came pellagra, head lice, illiteracy, rickets. She was sorry for them, but she couldn't feel any kinship.

Then there were young girls from the South Side, seventeen, eighteen, hard-looking, with dime-store earrings and too much rouge, their pastel jackets sewn with sequins and rhinestones, their cheap pumps shabby in the sunshine. They would work for two or three years, marry neighborhood boys and have babies. Polish, Italian, Bohemian. A thin blonde girl smiled at her, and she smiled back. These kids had troubles. They had been born when their folks were on relief; they knew what it was to be hungry, to have holes in their welfare shoes. They lived in a world too big and too complicated for them. But most of them would pull through.

And so would she.

I'm no artist,
she thought,
whatever that cheap bum thinks he is. I'm like everybody else.
There was comfort in the admission. She marched up to the desk when her turn came, took card and pencil from a bored staff worker, and filled all the blanks in neatly.

"Don't call us, well call you."

"Okay." She stumbled over the patent-leather pumps of a tall girl in the front row of chairs. "I'm sorry."

"That's okay. I hope you find sompin'."

"I hope you do, too."

Her mind was working clearly now. The indecisions of the last few weeks were gone like a nightmare that dissipates at daybreak. This was real, this incredible thing was really happening to her, Annice Harvey. All right, she would live through it. She could work till she was at least five months along
--
longer, if she could convince her boss she was a widow
--
and then something would happen.

It's a big, rich country, richest country in the world. Nobody has to starve to death.

If this was a love story
, she thought, hovering in the warm doorway
, some nice fellow would come along and marry me and everything would come out all right in the last chapter. But that doesn't happen in real life.

Or does it?

Her mouth fell open. Actually. She stopped short, and an old woman who had been hobbling along behind her stopped, too, and gave her a sharp curious look before she hitched on past. Annice ignored her. Dime
--
she was sure she had a dime. Clutching it in nervous-sweaty hands, she riffled through the phone book, then shut herself into the pay booth at the entrance to the agency.

"Yes, I know he's in class. I know it. All I want to do is leave a message. Tell him Miss Harvey has to see him." She stopped, hearing her voice shrill with urgency, and swallowed. The small tinny voice at the other end said something she didn't understand. "Tell him I said it's urgent, of the greatest urgency. Tell him it's Annie."

She lifted her chin, going out into the snowy afternoon. Cold flakes drove down her neck, and her feet were cold. She ignored it.

He would be over tonight, curious, if nothing more. She would have to plan everything before she saw him, or she would never be able to go through with it. Honest or not, fair or not, this was a thing she had to do. She quickened her step, splashing through the puddles.

“Jackson, it's so good to see you."

"Good to see you too, Annie
--
Annice. I've been missing you."

She laid her hand on his arm. "Come on in, why don't you? I'm sorry Pat’s out right now, she'll be sorry she didn't see you." She reflected grimly that she had had a hell of a time getting Pat out of the apartment; she was all set, in duster and flats, for an evening of mulling over the travel folders that were her newest interest, and she was mad as a hornet because someone had lifted five dollars from her purse. She hadn't, apparently, missed the small change. Annice had covered up pretty well.

"Gee, I'm sorry, I forgot to put the latch on when I went out this morning. Do you suppose they took anything else?"

"The silverware isn't worth bothering about. Why do you suppose they took five and left the rest
?
"

"Maybe whoever did it thought you wouldn't notice. Anyhow, would you mind getting out and staying out for a while? I have a man coming up."

"Alan?"

"No, Alan and I are all washed up."

"Thank goodness. Is this anybody I know
?
"

"Jackson Carter. Remember old Jack
?
"

"Sure, he brought me home from a party once. I didn't know you'd been seeing him."

Annice said, praying for patience and the grace to tell a good long string of lies so they would sound like the truth, "More or less. I have a feeling maybe he's getting serious. Anyway, he's a lot nicer than I ever used to give him credit for. Give me a break
--
I'll do the same for you some time."

"Fat chance I'll ever need it."

"Why don't you start going out with some nice fellow
?
Like that cute Stan, or somebody
?
"

"Children bore me," Pat said loftily. But she got up, groaning, and put her office dress back on and went out, still complaining, to the movies. Annice wiped her sweaty palms on the sides of her skirt and took a deep relieved breath. Everything was going to be all right. It had to be.

So here was Jack, looking better than she remembered. Now that he was actually in the house she was light-headed with release from tension. She heard herself burbling. "You knew Barby moved out? Sure, a couple of weeks ago. She went in with some girl she knows at work. She's had a raise, too; they're letting her do some selling, like on Saturdays." She smiled up at him, a little frightened by his size and solidity and the direct gaze of his honest blue eyes. Think about the Salvation Army and the Florence Crittenton Homes, she admonished herself. Think about the hospital bills and the charity wards, and how they treat kids in orphanages. You can spend the rest of your fife making it up to him. He'll never know the difference.

She said, "I've missed you." That was a mistake; she'd said it already. The trouble was that she didn't know where to begin. She had it all planned
--
after a certain point. What held her back was not knowing how to reach that point. Her experience with Alan offered no clue, because he was always ready to jump into bed; and in his sex life, as in all of his dealings, he was dedicated to the principle that the straight line is the shortest distance to anywhere. She said breathlessly, "Sit down, I'll put on the coffee."

She felt easier with her hands occupied. Jack sat on the davenport, smoking thoughtfully, looking at her. When she came back to sit beside him he moved over, politely, to make room. She thought,
Oh, hell.
"Coffee won't take long, it's a good percolator. What's been happening to you?"

"Nothing much. I got two A's in my term exams."

"But that's wonderful."

"I've been planning to call you," Jack said gravely, dropping the term exams into the limbo of social topics. "I've been worried about you."

"How silly. I'm fine."

"You don't look fine. You've lost weight, and your eyes are different."

There was a small silence.

"I bumped into this fellow I used to be in class with, the other day," Jack said doggedly, "and he got off some cracks. I hit him. I guess I shouldn't have." His face got red. "He's some kind of a refugee, he looks hungry all the time and I guess maybe he is, but he made me mad. He used to live in the same building with that crumb, Alan." There was no way out of it; he looked around, but nobody appeared to help him out. "He said some pretty dirty things."

Jenni, God damn him.
Abstractedly, she saw that the percolator had stopped bubbling. She got up, filled two cups, added sugar and canned milk to Jack's, and sat down again
--
not on the davenport beside him, but in a stiff straight chair. She took a sip of coffee. "What he said was true," she said loudly. "I used to stay up there with Alan all the time."

"I don't believe it."

"You better. It's true." She was afraid to look at him. She stared into her cup. "I can't believe it myself, now
--
I keep wondering why I was such a sap. But it's true all right. I'm going to have a baby. That's why he went to Mexico."

"Why, the low son of a bitch."

"It was my fault. I knew he wouldn't marry me, he didn't believe in marriage. We used to fight about it all the time," Annice said with a faint smile. She set her cup down, rattling in the saucer, and stood up. "You know why I asked you to come over tonight
?
I was going to get you to marry me. I had it all planned out, I was going to get you to make love to me, and then later on I was going to tell you I was in trouble and ask you to marry me."

"And leave me with some other guy's baby," Jack said harshly. All the color drained out of his face. "You sneaking little bitch."

She trembled. "I guess I thought you wouldn't let me down, later. I was going to worry about that when I got to it."

He looked strangely at her. "What made you change your mind?"

"I don't know. Well, I didn't know how to get you started."