Strange Women, The (5 page)

"She knows what it means to
you?"

"That's it. And she's well, natural. Sex, sure." He looked away. "But the rest of the time it's like being with another man, or with you."

"And that's what you like?"

"Hell, yes. When I'm laying a girl, I'm laying her. But the rest of the time, I want somebody around who can treat me like a person—not a Romeo. Most women—well, between lays, they want you to act as if that was all you had on your mind—the next roll in the hay. Jill's not that way. I don't have to play up to her. I read some place— 'Love is to man a thing apart, to woman 'tis her whole existence'. A woman like
that
would bore hell out of me."

"Then you ought to be glad Jill's not in a hurry to tie you down, shouldn't you?"

"But that's just the point," Mack yelled, "I found the girl I want, and now I
want
her—to
keep!
I want her wrapped up in a package with my name on it! I want her in my bed and in my house, with my kids in her little belly! Get me?"

The maleness of that demand twisted inside Nora, like a fist in her vitals. She remembered Kit, gripping her angrily;

I'm not going to let you get away from me while I'm in the hospital! You're going to marry me now!

They had both risen; Mack was standing close to her. "Nora, after we leave Lima we may not even get mail regularly. Now look. I've never told Jill—she thinks there's only one kind of woman who would take money from a man. But I put my commission from the Sorbonne job—a couple of thousand—in the bank in Syracuse, in her name. If she needs it—or anything happens to me—" he fished in a pocket and laid a bankbook on the table. "And I'd want her to have my equity in the house, too. I think you could talk her into taking it. Just promise me, and I'll sleep easy."

Nora looked into his worried face, wondering how many tragedies would be averted if doctors and priests could tell what they knew. Mack and Jill were not patients, they were friends—family! But the habit of years was too much for her.

"I promise, Mack..."

"You're an angel!" He scooped her into a warm hug. "Why in hell did we ever lose touch, kid?"

For a moment, warmed and comforted beyond measure—how starved she had been for some affectionate touch—she lay against him, and he took her face in his big hands and kissed her. Then, to her horror and dismay, she felt an old, hated stirring. She pulled quickly free. "Take it easy, Mack," she said, and her voice shook.

"Oh, Christ!" Mack stepped back, with a troubled smile. "Are you still holding that against me? Look—Nor—it was buried, years and years ago. I swear. You're my sister, for God's sake. My
sister!
I was half asleep and half drunk and just a dumb kid—" his face looked as if he were going to cry.

Nora quickly mastered herself, with a false little laugh. "Sure, it's buried. I'm sorry, Mack, I'm a little raw-edged." She stood on tiptoe and quickly kissed his cheek. "Don't worry about Jill."

He still looked troubled. "Nor, I dumped my troubles on you, like always. But I've got a good big brotherly shoulder, you know. If you want to do some bawling on it."

"Thanks, But it was just a mood." How in hell, she wondered, can you tell Mack—or anybody—a thing like that?

* * *

The snow had stopped by the time she picked Jill up late the next day. Mack had left that morning.

Fairfax lay far to the north in New Hampshire, a little town buried in the mountains near the Canadian border. After some study of her road maps, Nora took the highway north from Albany, left it at Hoosick Falls and plunged into a succession of gradually worsening county roads.

All that afternoon they drove through Christmas-card New England scenery; in village after village the streets were strung with colored lights, and as the winter dusk closed down they began to glow, every house adorned with red and green and yellow colors. Jill began to hum, then to sing in a clear soprano:

"When Joseph was a-walking, He heard angels sing, This night shall be born Our heavenly King. He shall not be born In house nor in hall..."

"Don't stop," said Nora. "You have a pretty voice."

Jill hummed for a minute. "We sang that at the carol service in college. I've been thinking I might go back and work on a master's degree this winter."

Then it must be all right and she isn't pregnant.
But it was like a weight on her heart. "Cornell?"

"Loudon College in Albany. The Dean said I could earn my tuition by supervising freshman laboratory periods. But I'd hate living in a woman's dorm at my age."

Nora remembered she did not know. "How old are you?"

"Twenty-two."

And again on impulse, Nora made an offer which, if she had stopped to think, she might have foregone.

"You can stay with me until Kit gets out of the hospital. We seem to get along."

Jill smiled. "I'd like that," she said shyly.

The snow was beginning to flurry across the road again; Nora, pulling off to consult the map, found that Fairfax still lay across forty miles of bad, hilly roads. "What possessed Reynolds to live up here, I'll never know," she grumbled. "Shall we stop for the night somewhere? They may not get a snowplow into the hills before tomorrow."

"They probably won't, if I know Vermont."

"Then keep an eye out for a place to stay."

The next tourist court was only a row of shabby cabins under a dull orange sign. "It doesn't look like much," Nora hesitated.

"I'm game for anything but bedbugs," Jill giggled, as Nora guided the car under the wooden arch. She went in to sign for them both; an old man in a peajacket glanced at the signature and produced a key. "Doctor, hey? Cabin four."

They had stopped for supper two towns ago; and Nora, who had been up at five that morning, was already yawning. The room was warm, with a gas fire, and Nora stood over it gratefully, holding out her hands to the warmth, before she took in the rest of the room; the plain maple furniture made comfortable with cushions and chintz, the wide chenille-covered double bed.
Oh-oh,
she thought. She had expected twin beds, but had forgotten to specify, forgetting that she was with a comparative stranger. Jill had pulled off her boots and was rubbing her toes, and Nora thought irritably;
they probably thought we were mother and daughter! She looks about fifteen! .

Jill was deep in her suitcase. "You can have the bathroom first. Age before beauty," she said flippantly.

Long habit, and the need for haste in emergencies, had made Nora an efficiency expert; when she came out of the shower, in pajamas and robe, Jill jerked around, startled, her slip half over her head. She snatched her nightgown and pulled it down.

“All yours." Nora started to take the pins from her braids. "Did you think I was a prowler?"

"You're very quick—"

"You learn that when you're on call twenty-four hours a day. In my intern year I could shower, dress and do my hair in six minutes and nineteen seconds. We women had the edge on the men because we didn't have to shave."

In the mirror she saw Jill wriggling out of her panties in the shelter of her nightgown. The gown was so thin she might as well have had nothing on. Nora, unravelling the last few inches of her plait, remembered Pammy's mother, Jill's mother. Doubtless she had taught her daughters that a nice young lady always undressed beneath her nightgown. Nora wondered what Mack thought about it.

She brushed her hair slowly, luxuriating in the rare prospect of a night of unbroken sleep—no telephone, no hospital within reach—and before she finished she saw Jill behind her, watching her in the mirror. She smiled, her face half hidden in the weight of rippling hair that flowed down to her waist, the color of a new penny.

"It's beautiful," Jill said, "but I'd never have the patience to fuss with it. Isn't it hard to wash?"

"Not as hard as you'd think. Now where in the deuce did I put my warm slippers? Confound it, I'll bet they're in the big suitcase in the car."

"Didn't you put them in your briefcase, that day in your apartment?"

"Why, so I did. Now if I can find the briefcase—"

"Here it is." Jill handed it to her, glancing at the stamped monogram. "Whose initials?"

"L. C. R. Mine. Leonora Caine Rannock. My first husband gave it to me."

"I didn't know you'd been married before."

"It was years ago. I was just a kid—nineteen." It had been a long time since Nora had let herself think about that hasty, disastrous and long dissolved marriage with Les Rannock.

"It was the usual kid thing," she said at last, taking out her slipper; but instead of putting it on she sat turning it inside-out and right-side-to, again and again. "We were crazy to sleep together, and being very young and very moral, we called it love and talked our families into letting us get married first. It was marvelous for about a year—as long as we could make up all our quarrels in bed. When that started to wear off, we realized we'd sold ourselves a deal. Les wanted a housewife and kids. I wanted medical school. If we'd had children, I would have stuck it out, like everyone else. But we—didn't." With a little gesture of finality she slid the slipper on her foot.

"Speaking of initials. I noticed your luggage is marked GCB. Is Jill short for Gillian?"

"It isn't a G, it's a C. Jill's just a nickname—my sister Jacqueline and I were always Jack and Jill. I was named for Daddy, Cassandra Carroll; you see, he was Alexander Carroll, and Cassandra and Alexander are the same name—"

She stopped and gasped, her pixie face suddenly bone-white. Nora started to speak, and stopped. All Jill's reticence, the curious shadow of tragedy Mack had sensed, became clear. Jill stood frozen, her hands out as if to ward off a blow.

"So you know. I'm Cassandra Bristol, and my father was Alex Bristol. Now you know."

Nora had never guessed that the Alexander Bristol of the Hartford narcotics scandal, the suicide, the murder indictment, was Pamela's stern father. The tabloid pictures of Cassandra Bristol, white and shrunken, her arm protectingly over her face, had looked like no one on earth—certainly not Pammy's little sister.

Alex Bristol had been uncovered, after months of detective work, as head of the best organized narcotics ring east of Chicago. The papers had painted him a sinister Fagin, using his beautiful daughters to deliver innocent looking packages—of heroin. When apprehended, he had shot himself; the girl had been held on suspicion of murder, but the formal verdict had been suicide. No evidence had been found to shake her protestations of innocence, or to implicate her in the drug trade.

"I saw the papers. I didn't know it was you."

Jill sat down, not deliberately but as if her knees would no longer hold her up. "Mack doesn't know. He was in Peru—"

Nora laid her hands on the girl's bare shoulders. "Don't, dear. Don't. I'd never believe anything bad of you! The courts found you innocent, and that's enough for me."

"It wasn't enough for my family." Jill squeezed her eyes tight shut, a child's pathetic grimace. "They thought Daddy shot himself to keep from having to testify against me—my own mother—oh, none of this will mean anything unless you know how I felt about my father—"

"Jill, you don't have to tell me anything."

"I was always Daddy's pet. Mother—well, Pammy was so pretty and popular, and Jackie so clever, and Susan—and well, I was the clumsy one in the middle. Mother kept hunting up nice boys for me, but they were just people to dance with, until after I met Jeff. Jeff Stearns—the detective. I know now he—he just got acquainted with us because he was working on the case, but I—I thought it was me he liked. I thought he was in love with me. I didn't have any idea he was a—a policeman. Daddy never liked him, and Mother said he wasn't quite our sort—"

Nora smiled grimly, remembering Mrs. Bristol's harsh judgments.

"But I said he was the only man I knew who cared for anything except tennis and cocktail parties, and I liked him—" Jill twisted her hands together and whispered harshly, "and if I hadn't, Daddy might be alive now."

"And still making addicts. Child, do you know anything at all about heroin?"

Jill said thickly, "That's the awful thing. If I'd been the one to find it out, I might even have gone to the police myself. Drugs—"

She began to shiver, and the words rushed from her uncontrollably, as if she could no longer hold them back.

"Jeff came to pick me up for a swimming party, and I had an errand for Daddy. There was an old man to whom Daddy sent a bottle of brandy every few weeks. At least, that's what I thought. But Jeff went with me, and when I handed it over he—he grabbed it and broke it, and there was some white powder. I thought Daddy had been playing a joke on the old guy. I said right away quick—
Talcum powder,
and I—I laughed, and Jeff—oh, it was awful, he—he said
I'm sorry, Cassandra,
and then he said
I
have a warrant for your arrest on charges of dealing unlawfully in narcotic drugs…
"

She began to sob, tears streaming down her face. " I didn't know—Daddy had been arrested when I left the house. The next day they let us out on bond, and—Daddy took me home and said I mustn't talk about it. He gave me a sleeping pill—oh, I'd cried and cried until my eyes were swollen shut, but I still believed it was some horrible mistake.

"Daddy kissed me and went downstairs and I heard the shot and ran down in my nightie and I—I found him. He was sitting in his old leather chair and there was blood all over his face and I guess I must have gone crazy because I grabbed the gun and I thought I'd shoot myself too and get it all over with, only it was empty and Mama came and took it away from me. She thought I'd shot him, only there were powder burns on his own hands—" her voice strangled and she collapsed on the bed, huddled over in misery. Nora sat beside her and took her hands.

"You poor kid! And you never told Mack?"

"I—was afraid—"

"Jill, it wouldn't matter to him; believe me. Any more than it does to me."

Jill sat up. "It's nice of you to say that," she said dully, "but you don't have to. I'll go away."