Strange Women, The (14 page)

"But no," Margaret argued. "If you and a husband have a row, or you see someone you like better, you have to go through the courts, and divide up the furniture, and provide for the kids, and argue with your in-laws, and maybe you think better of it. But if you and a—a—a lover have a fight, one of you packs up and walks out, and that's that." She swallowed. Nora knew that only in this oblique way could Margaret talk about what was hurting her; but she said:

"Mack used to say that even the stuffiest conventions made sense—even if intelligent people couldn't see why. A mathematical genius can solve problems in his head, but for most people it helps to memorize the multiplication table, and stick to it."

"Are you saying—there should be one set of rules for the intelligentsia and another set for ordinary people?"

"No, only—if you break the rules, you should know exactly what you're getting into. If you don't, you're safer sticking with the rules."

"But sometimes," Jill said, very low, "you get into a situation where there aren't any rules."

Margaret's eyes darkened. "Oh yes. There's always one.
Thou shalt not."
She stood up. "I've got to go really; if I don't work tomorrow I may not have a job."

"Want to sleep here? The couch is perfectly comfortable."

"Thanks. But no." Margaret collected her coat.

"Then let me drive you."

"Nora, I'm not going to swallow a handful of sleeping pills, or jump off the Hudson bridge!"

"I know, Marg. But you're acting awfully queer."

"I
am
awfully queer," Margaret said, "Aren't we all?"

Jill came up suddenly with her coat on. "I'll walk you home. Nora needs the car, anyhow, in case she gets a call." To Nora's surprise, Margaret went without protest, and Nora watched them go, frowning. What could she say without seeming to criticize? And who had given her the right to criticize? She lay awake for a long time, but when, at a quarter of three, she was summoned to the hospital where a cardiac patient was failing, Jill had not come home.

Now there was a definite date set to the end of the time of waiting. On May 15th—so Dr. Kuysman said—Kit Ellersen would be discharged from the hospital.

Nora arranged for a three months leave of absence, finding a young man recently finished with his resident year at St. Margaret's, to take over her practice. Now that there was a real shape to their future, Kit seemed sobered.

"I've got stagefright," he admitted. "Been tucked up so long, I'm not sure how I'll make out on my own. And something else we never discussed. I've got a partial-disability pension, but I let the business go when I went back in the hospital, and no telling how soon I'll be able to build it up again."

"Why worry about that now, Kit? Just—drift a while."

"Dammit, I've been drifting for three years," he exploded, then laughed. "Oh, well. We're lucky I wasn't an acrobat. I can always make out in an architect's office."

"Kit, we don't need to worry about money."

"I won't be pigheaded about that. Every wife works for her husband one way or another. But I can't sit around and let you support me indefinitely, Leonora," he added, his chin set in the stubborn line she knew.

"Problem for Jill now," said Nora, "finding a place to live."

"The sexy brunette? Maybe you'd better keep her around." Abruptly he said, "On second thought, I don't think I could manage a harem," and the quality of his glance altered; became so intimate that Nora could hardly face his eyes.

However, before Nora had a chance to bring it up, Jill told her that she was moving in with Margaret Sheppard.

"Marg can't afford that apartment on her salary alone. And now that Kit's coming home, it seemed the perfect solution."

"What about after the baby comes?" Jill had once mentioned some plan of Mack's to fly home for a week or two in August, and be with her when the baby was born. But she hadn't mentioned it lately and Nora hadn't asked.

"Marg said she wouldn't mind having a baby around. And Nor, I looked at apartments all week, and only found one I liked—and they wouldn't rent it to me when I told them about the baby."

Nora looked speculatively at Jill. She was well into the fifth month now; but she carried herself so well that a casual observer would not have noticed anything. She had not begun wearing maternity dresses, even; the crinoline-bouffant fashions this spring were concealing enough for street wear.

They were silent and a little constrained during these last few days, and Nora found herself remembering the weeks in Fairfax—when she had thought that their return to Albany would end the tension between them. It struck her, perhaps, that she was not being quite fair with Jill; but it no longer seemed important.

She knows it will end when Kit comes home...

But when, that night, Jill came softly to her side, and held out her arms, Nora drew her down with an almost despairing sense of guilt and loss. Her hands, her mouth moved on Jill almost in desperation; Jill clung to her wildly, and even through the hunger of passion, Nora thought;
what am I doing, what have I done to her?
Jill, as simply and forthrightly as always, seemed to sense Nora's despair; and gave herself with fresh, spontaneous warmth, so freely that Nora's tension of guilt vanished in the delight of holding Jill, tender and pliant, in her arms, and the mutuality of the joy that swept them out of their single place in space and time. But long after Jill slept, Nora lay awake, the old doubt and despair creeping slowly back.

* * *

The first week in May, Nora came home one night to find Jill slumped face down on the divan. She had been crying; but when she heard Nora, she looked up, dry-eyed.

"Dean Bulwer called me in today. As a grad student, I was required to have a physical—"

Of
course.
Nora gathered up Jill's scattered armload of books. "She had your pregnancy report?"

Jill said with a dreary laugh, "I guess she'd expected me to wallow in hysterics. When I didn't, she said she could see she wasn't dealing with a schoolgirl in a mess. There is a regulation on the books, that students are supposed to get the Dean's permission to marry, but she hemmed and hawed and said after all in this day and age, and so forth. I guess she just wanted me to tell her I was married."

Nora said, gripped in the claws of an awful suspicion, "I hope to heaven you
did
tell her that!"

"I most certainly did not."

Oh Lord,
of
course not.
That would be too sensible.

"Would you
mind
telling me why not?"

"I don't mind lying to save you embarrassment, or my mother a shock. But if you think I'd lie to that old battle-axe—"

Of course not. Jill must always, always punish herself. "Dear God," said Nora, "so did she expel you, or just ask you to resign? You certainly didn't leave her much choice."

Jill pleated a fold in her skirt with nervous fingers. "Oh, she started in about how I had excellent references, but that Loudon expects their instructors to be morally above reproach, so forth and so on, that they had a responsibility toward—get this, Nora—toward their girlies!"

"Well, Jill—"

"Oh, I could tell her a few things about her girlies," Jill went on at white heat, "her nice girlies. The ones who carry a diaphragm around in their handbags. Or the other ones who've been taught that they have to save their cherry for a rich husband—"

"Jill, for heaven's sake! What did you expect? You didn't leave the poor woman a loophole, did you? I'm trying to imagine what would have happened to me if I'd started a baby in college—and everyone knew I was married! If one of the unmarried teachers had turned up pregnant, she'd probably have been tarred and feathered. I don't say I approve, but that's the way things are."

Jill bit her lip. "Oh, she didn't kick me out. She said there was no reason I shouldn't finish out the term, provided—this is how she put it—I was willing to be discreet. They'd just assume I'd been married all along."

"It seems she bent over backward to be lenient." As everyone did, Nora was thinking, with Jill. The providence that protects fools and children.

"I ought to know by now that hypocrisy pays off!"

"Oh, stop it! Why do you
insist
on punishing yourself?" And again she felt the premonitory dread. What other facts would Jill refuse to face?

"Jill, where are you going?"

The girl was ripping off her dress, flinging each piece into a corner. She pulled down one of the maternity smocks and hauled it over her head with twitching fingers. "There!" she said, choking,
"now
let those filthy-minded girls giggle about what I've been doing! Now nobody can say I'm trying to hide anything!"

Nora turned her back on Jill and went out. She had to. If she had not—even now she was not sure whether she had wanted to slap and shake some sense into the girl—or take her in her arms.

"Oh Kit, Kit," she whispered, falling on the divan still warm from Jill's body, "for God's sake come home before something terrible happens!"

Kit Ellersen roused up, not certain where he was. After the bareness and faraway noises of a hospital at night, these close walls, moon-striped with dark spaces and white, seemed alien. There was a subtle fragrance in the room, strange after months of disinfectant smells. Nora's perfume.

Stiffly, Kit sat up, making out the dark line of Nora's body in the other bed. The luminous clock marked eleven. He grinned crookedly; three years ago that would have seemed a lot too early for bed. He had been asleep since three that afternoon.

Hell of a trick! Lie down for half an hour and fall asleep like a sick pup. Rough on the poor girl. She just let him sleep, too, bless her.

He stretched out again, with a restless shove at his pillow.
Hell, she might as well sleep!

It had been bad enough when they only saw each other in the antiseptic atmosphere of the ward. Living together would make it worse.

He'd never forget—it had kept cropping up in his worst hospital nightmares, and he'd had some dillies...

It had been a quiet wedding; half a dozen of Nora's hospital friends. They had decided to stay in Nora's apartment until he could design, and begin building, their own home. You couldn't have paid him to live in one of those mass-produced crackerboxes in the suburbs.

It had started so well, in a surge of confidence and joy. He had learned to maneuver so easily on his crutches that he was not even aware of them; only a small sting of consciousness touched him now and then. Nora was lovely in blue; too austere, but he already knew about the responsive, giving passion behind that mask.

When they went into the bedroom he had the old exhilaration of climbing into a jet—the perfect shapes and functional beauty, the breathless muted surge of almost tonic fear covered by a calm layer of confidence. He recognized the sensation, and welcomed it. He had thought it gone forever—after the accident, when he knew he'd never fly again—that particular excitement born of anticipation, excitement, eagerness and joy.

Nora had unpinned but not unbraided her bright plaits; they lay thick and soft on her bare shoulders. Tall as she was, she felt small in his arms. He took his time, kissing and caressing her, revelling in the softness of her body, the delicacy of her breasts. She had remarkably small breasts for a woman so tall; they seemed somehow more sensually perfect than the ample curves of a Hollywood sexpot. He was content to go easy, feeling her waken and respond to his hands. They had waited for each other, knowing it would be good, not wanting to blunt the edge of discovery and passion that they both knew would explode when they gave it leave; savoring its slow unfolding.

It boiled up in Kit like a searing hurricane; an ache of heat in his loins, an impatient hunger and need. He seized her roughly, his hands guiding her; violently, forgetting all caution, he rolled on top of her.

A burning bite of agony lanced from his bad leg up through his body, stabbed into his heart, and in a flame like the explosion that had crippled him, he fainted.

He came to himself with the hurting sting of ammonia in his nostrils; Nora, a robe drawn tight around her nakedness, was bending over him. She hushed him, made him lie quiet and sip brandy, when he tried to speak. Afterward, when she asked questions, he had yelled at her; sick with humiliation. "Quit it! I'm not your patient!"

She had crumpled, her hands over her face. Kit thought she was crying; he did not know yet that Nora could not cry. It was agony as she forced the words out. "I was frightened for you—I thought I'd—I couldn't stand it..." and he had broken into his lashing self-accusations by taking her in his arms, trying helplessly to comfort her shaking anguish. Quiet, with the passivity of her fright, she lay against him; and hours later Kit said into the darkness, "All right, Leonora. It's not fair to you. You were right all along." The next day he had made arrangements to go back to the hospital, telling her only after it was done:

"I won't have people saying you've tied yourself down to a—a damn cripple!" A year—five years—it was little enough, to make himself worthy of her.

A quiet rapport had grown between them in that week; love growing constantly, passion with the lid on. Twice—Kit with humiliating caution, Nora anxious and fearful—they had managed to make love. It hadn't been good. It hadn't been what they wanted. But it had been better than nothing. A token; a down payment against the good times they knew would come.

And that first horror had tormented Kit in his worst hospital nightmares. He'd be double damned if he'd let anything like
that
happen again. He wasn't going to start anything he couldn't finish.

And Nora had changed, this winter; the woman to whom he returned was hardly the one he had married. Kit wasn't conceited enough to think she'd bloom like that, just waiting around for him! Kit had fought a bitter battle, that endless spring, facing the possibility that Nora had a lover. Well, he whispered to the barred moonlight, why not?