“I was going to be a doctor once myself,” he said.
She looked at him with a sort of cockeyed interest. “What happened?”
“Would have taken too long. I wanted to get that degree and get out. And I wanted love. But you can’t make love to anybody after a long day over a hot cadaver. You’re too pooped and the sight of human flesh gives you goose pimples instead of pleasant shivers. Besides, I spent four years in the Navy in the Second World War, and I’d had it with blood and suffering.”
Beebo drank the schnapps in her glass. “That’s as good a reason as any for quitting, I guess,” she said.
“You could still finish up high school and go on to college,” he said, trying not to sound pushy.
“No. I’ve lost it, Jack. That ambition, that will to do well. I left it behind when I left my father. I just don’t give a double damn about medicine, for the first time in my life.”
“Because a bunch of small-minded provincials asked you to leave their little high school? You make it sound like you were just squirming to be asked.”
“You’re saying I didn’t have the guts to fight them,” she said, speaking without resentment. “It isn’t that, Jack. I did fight them, with all I’ve got. I’m tired of it, that’s all. You can’t fight everybody all the time and still have room in your life to study and think and learn.”
“Was it that bad, Beebo?”
“I was that bad—to the people in Juniper Hill.”
Jack shook his head in bewilderment and laughed a little. “You don’t happen to carry the bubonic plague, do you?” he said.
She knew how curious she had made him about herself, and she hadn’t the courage to expose the truth to him yet. So she merely said, “That’s over now. My life is going to be different.”
“Different, but not necessarily better,” he said. “I wish to hell you’d come clean with me, honey. I can’t help you this way. I don’t know what you’re running away from.”
“I’m not running away from, I’m running to,” she said. “To this city, this chance for a new start.”
“And a new Beebo?” he asked. “Do you think being in a new place will make you better and braver somehow?”
“I’m not chicken, Jack,” she said firmly. “I left for Dad’s sake as much as my own.”
“I didn’t say you were, honey,” he told her gently. “I don’t think a chicken would have come so far to face so much all alone. I think you’re a decent, intelligent girl. I think you’re a good-looking girl, too, just for the record. That much is plain as the schnapps on your face.”
Beebo frowned at him, self-conscious and surprised. “You’re the first man who ever called me ‘good-looking,’” she said. “No, the second. My father always thought …” Her voice went very soft. “You know, it kills me to go off and—and abandon him like this.” She got up from the floor and walked a little unsteadily to the front window.
“Why don’t you write to him?” Jack suggested. “If he was so good to you—if you were so close—he deserves to know where you are.”
“That was the whole point of leaving,” she said, shaking her head. “To keep it secret. To relieve him.”
“Of what?”
“Of myself. I was a burden to him. He did too much for me. He tried to be father and mother both. He indulged me when he should have been stern. He never could bear to punish me.”
She stood looking out his front window in silence, crying quietly. Her face was still, with the only movement the rhythmic swell and spill of tears from her eyes.
“My father,” she said, “is no angel. Much as I love him, I know that much.” Jack sensed a whole raft of sad secrets behind that brief phrase.
He stood up, crushed his cigarette, and looked at her for a moment. She stood with her legs apart and well-defined by her narrow cotton skirt. Her hair was tousled and damp with sweat, and there was a shine in her wet eyes reflected from the lamplight that intensified the blue. She had left her schnapps glass on the floor and her empty hands hung limp against her thighs. She lifted them now and then to brush away tears. Her head inclined slightly, like that of a youngster who has grown too tall too fast and doesn’t want to tower over her classmates.
Her face, sensitive and striped with tears, was in many ways the face of a boy. Her stance was boyish and her low voice too was like a boy’s, balanced on the brink of maturity. And there it would stay all her life, never to plumb the true depth of a man’s.
She became aware of Jack’s eyes on her and turned to pick up her glass, but bumped against a corner of a table and nearly fell. Jack reached her in two big steps and pulled her straight again while she put both hands to her temples. “I feel as if I’m dreaming,” she murmured. “Am I?” She looked quizzically at him.
“You’re not, but I am,” he said, taking her elbow and steering her toward the bedroom. “I’m a dream walking. I’m dreaming and you’re in my dream. When I wake up, you’ll cease to exist.”
“That would solve everything, wouldn’t it?” she said, leaning on him more than she realized. She tried to stop him in the center of the room to get her liqueur, but he kept pushing till she gave up.
“Come on, let Uncle Jack bed you down,” he said. He took one of her arms across his shoulder, the better to balance them both, pulled her into the bedroom, and unloaded her on his double bed. Beebo spread-eagled herself into all four corners with a sigh, and it wasn’t till Jack had all her clothes off but the underwear that she came to and tried to protest. Jack removed her socks with a yank.
“Why, you lousy man,” she said, staring at him. But when he smelled the socks, she laughed.
“God, what an exciting creature you are,” he grimaced, surveying her muscular angles with all the ardor of an old hen.
“So I’m not your type,” she said, getting to her feet. “I can still take off my own underwear.” She tried it, lost her balance, and sat down summarily on the bed.
Jack tossed her a nightshirt from his dresser. It was scarlet and orange cotton flannel. “I like flashy sleepers,” he explained.
She put it on while he washed in the bathroom. But when he returned he found her leaning on the dresser, dizzily close to losing the schnapps.
Jack guided her to the bathroom and got her to the washbowl before it came up.
“I had no idea there was so much in the bottle,” Jack said when she had gotten the last of it out. At last she straightened up to look in the mirror. “By God, Beebo, you were the same color as the schnapps for a minute there.”
He made her rinse her mouth and then dragged her back to bed, where he washed her unconscious face and hands. He sat and gazed at her before he turned out the light, speculating about her. Asleep, she looked younger, adolescent: still a child, with a child’s purity; soon an adult, with adult desires. Did she know already what those desires would be? And was that why she fled from Juniper Hill? The knowledge that her desires and her adult self would shock the town, shock her father, shock even herself?
Jack thought so. He thought she knew what it was that troubled her so deeply, even though she might not know the name for it. It wasn’t just being “different” that she hated. It was the kind