Chapter IV: Part 4

A handful of them wrote back to her and she established a correspondence with one or two that relieved her a little. She looked forward to their letters eagerly and poured out her desperate lonesomeness and bewilderment to them. After a few weeks they had all deserted her but one, who seemed really interested in her, named Nina Spicer.

Nina’s letters came in oversized envelopes with the name of her publisher in the corner, and Beth read each one avidly. She knew dimly that although Nina Spicer was gay there was very little else they had in common. That became clear from her letters. But Nina had become intrigued with her and Beth was grateful for the interest. It was a bridge into another world where she longed hopelessly to be, and it comforted her.

The thought began to grow in Beth that the only way out of her depression was to go back to Chicago and search for Laura. Charlie would refuse, of course, and he’d fight it all the way, but she had to get out, shed her present life, try to find herself in a new environment with new people.

Chicago ... it sounded beautiful, romantic as a foreign port to her, for the first time in her life. She had grown up there, she knew her way around. But it had never appeared as anything but huge and dirty and familiar, with sporadic excitements available.

Laura had grown up there, too. And suddenly Beth knew that she _had_ to get to Chicago. She would go if it meant a divorce; even if it meant giving up her children. No sacrifice seemed out of line to her. Uncle John would take her in. She could always feed him stories and hide the truth from him. The idea of actually seeing Laura again awakened a trembling hope in her that came very near, at her best moments, to being happiness.

She spent three days trying to figure out a good way to broach the subject. Nothing had changed between herself and Charlie. He spoke to her when necessary and he spent the nights on his side of the bed, never touching her except by accident. His silent suffering both touched and exasperated her, like Vega’s. Mostly it made her mad.

There was a secret woman in Beth, a woman capable of a wonderful and curious love for other women, and she wanted to dominate Beth. But, tragically for Charlie and her family, this tormented woman could not feel more for a man than a sort of friendly respect. If that was spurned she had nothing else to offer. And Charlie wanted passionate love and devotion, not a buddy who was more woman-oriented than he was.

It all came out in a single bright and anguished explosion. Beth had cast about for a way to explain herself to him; a hopeless job before it was begun, for she could not begin to understand herself. And when she saw the futility of it, she gave up and recklessly threw the whole range of her misery before him, like a picture on a screen.

She waited until the children were in bed and Charlie was watching the TV in the living room. She came in and sat down in a chair facing him. He was stretched out on the couch with his head on a hill of pillows, looking intently at the glowing screen in hopes of forgetting his problems for a little while.

“Charlie?” she said, and because she had not approached him for any reason for several weeks he turned his head and looked at her with surprise.

“What?” he said.

Beth swallowed once, to be sure her voice would come out clear and determined. “I’m going to go home. To Chicago.”

He stared at her briefly and then turned unseeing eyes back to the set. “I doubt it,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to leave Vega that long.”

“Vega can go to hell. She’s driving me crazy,” Beth confessed. He already believed the truth, although he had no proof of it. _So why in God’s name am I pretending?_ she thought defiantly. Suddenly it seemed easier and even cleaner to be frank.

“Don’t tell me the great romance is fading?” he said, still not looking at her.

She gazed at his face she had once so loved and she wished, for the sake of that decaying love, that he would be kind, that he would say things that would not make her hate him.

“The great romance never existed,” she said.

“If you’re trying to tell me it was all platonic, don’t bother,” he said.

“I’m trying to tell you I’m not in love with Vega Purvis,” she blurted. “I never was.”

“That’s funny!” said Charlie. “I got the other impression.”

“Well, I thought I was in love with her,” she said awkwardly, thinking, hoping the confession would unburden her at the same time that it destroyed Vega’s worst weapon against her. But suddenly the words were ugly and hard to shape and she wished she had simply told him she was going away and left it at that.

“I—I thought I loved her the night I took her the whiskey, at the Knickerbocker. And I discovered that I didn’t. That’s all.”

“After a little mutual exploration?” His voice was sarcastic. “Shall I send you a gold plaque in honor of your extra-marital affairs?”

She stood up and stamped her foot and started to speak, but he added quickly, “And don’t talk to me the way you talk to your children. I’ll take you up and beat the hell out of you, I swear I will. For their sakes.”

“Charlie, I’m going to Chicago!” she said flatly, finally.

“You’re not going to run out on this, Beth. You have a responsibility to me and the kids. Nobody held a gun to your head when we got married. Why, you weren’t even pregnant. You married me because you _wanted_ to marry me, and by God, you’re _still_ married to me. And you’re going to _stay_ married to me until you grow up and learn to face your responsibilities.”

“Charlie,” she said, suddenly earnest and almost scared, “I can’t _stand_ this any more.”

“Can’t stand what? No lovers? None of your lady friends suits you?”

For a second she thought she would explode with grief and fury, but she clamped her eyes shut and controlled herself. “I can’t stand living with a man,” she said, and suddenly the tears began to flow. She went on speaking, ignoring them. “It’s not your fault you’re a man—”

“_Thanks_,” he snarled.

“And it’s not my fault I need a woman. You have to understand that, Charlie. I’m not doing this because I want to hurt you. I’m not gay because I enjoy it. I don’t even know if I’m gay at all. I wish to God, I wish with all my heart, that I could make a life with you and the children. I wish all I needed to be happy was what other woman need—a home and a man and children. I thought I _was_ like other women when we got married, or I never would have committed myself to a lifetime with you. I thought it was what I needed and wanted, or believe me I would have spared us both. I would have climbed aboard that train with Laura nine years ago. But I thought _she_ was different and _I_ was normal. And I was in love with you.”

He sighed deeply, covering his face for a moment with his hands.

“I remember Laura,” he said then, gazing into space. “I remember her so well, with that pale face, rather thin, and those big blue eyes. I remember how she adored you and how pathetic I thought she was. I remember how shocked I was when I found out that you had encouraged her. But I was always so sure, in spite of everything, that you were basically normal and that being married and having a couple of kids would straighten you out so easily. I was so sure of myself,” and she saw his self-doubt and confusion now and it touched her. “I thought because I was a man and because I loved you so terribly that we’d be able to work out anything together. I thought that living with me would give you a lifelong preference for my love. Real love, a man’s love. The kind of love that only a man can give a woman.”

“That’s not the only real love, Charlie,” she said, sinking to the chair again, and leaning toward him, tense with the need to make him understand a little, now, at long last. “I thought I’d get over it too when Laura went away, and I thought I had. It was years after we were married that I began to feel like this, and at first I didn’t even know what it was. It wasn’t till Vega that I even realized what was wrong with me. Charlie, maybe if I could just have a sort of _vacation_ from you.”

“Vacation? How can you take a vacation from a marriage? It’s a permanent condition,” he said, and she could tell from his voice that it didn’t make the first glimmer of sense to him.

“I know it isn’t sensible, and I’ve tried to fight it, but it overwhelms me,” she said. “I wonder, ‘What in hell am I married for anyway? My kids are miserable, I’m miserable, Charlie’s miserable.’ If I were doing any good with all this suffering it might be worth while. If it made Skipper and Polly happy, if it made _you_ happy, maybe it would be worth it all. But it doesn’t. We’re _all_ unhappy. Charlie ... please understand.”

“You can help yourself, Beth,” he said coldly.

“No, I can’t,” she said. “That’s the awful part of it. That’s what scares me so. I feel my irritation turning into hatred, almost. I want to get away so badly that I don’t think I can stand it sometimes.”

“Get away from what? Yourself? You have to take yourself with you wherever you go, you know.”

“No, I want to get closer to myself, I want to _know_ myself, Charlie. I don’t even know who I am. Or _what_ I am.”

“You’re _my wife_!” he said sharply, as if that were the argument to end them all, to end all of her doubts with one stroke.

“I’m myself!” she cried, rising to her feet again, her fists knotted at her sides. “And all I’m doing by staying here is creating agony for the four of us.”

“The five of us. You forget Vega. Apparently she’s not too happy with things, if you wish she were in hell.”

“Oh, Charlie, spare me! God!” she shouted. Her voice sounded nearly hysterical.

“Keep it down,” he said. “If you don’t wake the kids up you’ll scare the neighbors to death.”

For a long trembling moment she stood there, unable to speak through her sobs and unable to look at his tired and disappointed face. Finally she said, whispering, “I don’t know who I am, Charlie. Just saying I’m your wife doesn’t tell me any more than I’ve known for years, and that isn’t enough.”

“You’re either straight or you’re gay, Beth. Take your pick.” He couldn’t yield to her, he couldn’t be generous. He had been through too much and his restraint ran too high. He stood to lose a wife he loved, through that wife’s lack of self-understanding. He might see her transformed into a type of woman he neither understood nor liked, before his very eyes.

“It’s not that easy,” she said, appalled at his attitude. “You aren’t either black or white, you’re all shades of gray in between. It might be the kind of thing I could get over and learn to live with, and it might be the kind of thing that will change my whole life irrevocably.”

“What if you find out you’re nothing but a goddamn Lesbian?” he said in that rough voice that carried his grief so clearly, and he wounded her heart forever with his words.

Her patience snapped like a stick bent too far. Without a word—words had never seemed so inadequate, so meaningless, so useless between two people born to the same native tongue—she turned and went into the bedroom and emptied all of her dresser drawers on the bed. Charlie watched her while she marched in white-faced fury into the basement and hauled two big bags up the stairs.

She dragged them through the living room and he leaned forward to say softly, “You fool, Beth. You fool!”

But she couldn’t look at him. She thought she would either faint with her hatred or somehow kill him with the frenzy of it.

In the bedroom she stuffed things into the bags helter skelter. What didn’t fit didn’t go. The rest was left behind in a tangle.

Halfway through this frenetic task she went to the phone and called the Los Angeles International Airport. Charlie watched her, still on the couch, immobilized with disbelief. She made a reservation for that very morning at three o’clock.

And then she called her Uncle John and told him to pick her up at Chicago’s Midway Airport the next day. Her reservation on the plane was for one person only.

“Just you?” Charlie said softly, staring at her. “You mean you’d really leave me here with the kids? You mean you really don’t give a goddamn about your own children?”

“You said I couldn’t take them with me!” she cried. “I’d take them if you’d let me.”

“Never,” he said. “But I thought—God, Beth, I thought you’d try a little harder to get them than this. You’ve given up without a struggle.” He was truly shocked; it blasted all his favorite concepts of motherhood to see her behave this way.

“I’ve struggled with you until I haven’t any strength left,” she said hoarsely.

“You never loved them,” he said, hushed with shock and revelation. “You never loved them at all.”

“I haven’t a strong enough stomach to get down on my knees and beg for them,” she cried. “I’ve begged you long enough and hard enough for other things.”

“But they were _things_. These are _kids_. Your own kids!”

“I want them,” she cried, “but I want my freedom more. I only make them unhappy, I’m not a good mother.”

“Well, what sort of a _mother_ do you think I’ll make?” he shouted, and now it was Charlie whose voice was loud enough to wake the children.

She left him abruptly and finished her packing. In the children’s room she could hear stirrings and she prayed with the tears still soaking her cheeks that neither of them would wake up and break her heart or change her mind. She forced her suitcases shut with the strength of haste and fear, and half shoved, half carried them out to the car.

Charlie stood in the center of the living room and watched her with his mouth open. When she passed him he said, “Beth, this isn’t happening. It can’t be. I couldn’t have been that bad. I _couldn’t_ have been. Beth, please. Explain to me, tell me. I don’t understand.”

But she gave him a look of hopelessness, and once she snapped, “Is that all you can say? After nine years of marriage?”

_Is he just going to stand there and let me go?_ she wondered. A sort of panic rose in her at the thought that he might suddenly regain his senses and force her to stop. But he let her get as far as packing both bags into the back of the car and actually starting the motor before he yanked the door open and shoved her over so that he could sit in the driver’s seat.

“Beth,” he said, and his eyes were still big with the awfulness of what she was doing to him and their children. “You aren’t going anywhere.”

Suddenly he kissed her urgently, holding her arms with hands so strong and fierce that they bruised her flesh. She felt his teeth pressed into her tender mouth and something in the despair of it, the near-terror she sensed in him at the thought of losing her, brought an uprush of unwanted tenderness in her heart.

He tried to kiss her again, but Beth struggled wildly, trying to hurt him. And all the while he was wooing her with violence, almost the way he had when they first met, as if he knew now too that words were long since worthless between them.

At last Beth grasped one of her own shoes and pulled it off. Desperately she struck him with all her strength on the side of the head. The sharp heel cut his scalp and he gave a soft little cry of astonishment. He pulled away from her at last and they stared at each other, both of them shocked at themselves, at each other, at what was happening, both of them crying.

Finally, without a word, he got out of the car and slammed the door.

Beth dragged herself over to the driver’s seat and rolled down the window. “I’ll write,” she said, but their two white faces, still so near one another physically, were already separated by more than the miles Beth would fly across that night. He flinched at her promise, as if he knew that an envelope full of words would do no more good than those they had flung at each other in a huge effort to create understanding.

“Take good care of the kids,” she said and immediately she began to back out because she could hear one of them starting to cry.

He walked along beside the car, one hand on the window sill, as if that might keep her there longer. “What shall I tell them this time when they wake up and find you gone?” he asked.

“Tell them I’ve gone to hell,” she wept. “Tell them I’m a no-good and the only thing they can hope for is that life will be happier without me than with me. It will, too.”

She began to press the accelerator, gathering speed until he had to let go or run to keep up. He let go.

In the street she straightened the car around and gave one last trembling look to her house, her yard and garden, the lighted windows of the living room where the TV set played on to an audience of furniture. Skipper’s little voice wailed through the night for a glass of water and Charlie stood at the end of the drive, a silhouette with silver trim, watching her.

Beth drove away. _God, let me never feel sorrow like this again_, she prayed. _Let this be my punishment for what I’m doing. I can’t bear any more._

Chapter Nine

In Pasedena she stopped and called Cleve. It was past eleven o’clock and she hesitated, but she had to talk to somebody about Vega and had to make some arrangements about Charlie, and there plainly wasn’t anybody she could turn to but Cleve.

“I’m in a little all-night joint on Fair Oaks, at Colorado,” she said.

“God, Beth, you’re on Skid Row!”

“Sh! Don’t wake Jean up! Can you come down?”

“Sure, but you’d better find a cop to protect you till I get there.”

“It’s not a bar, it’s a coffee place,” she said. “Hurry, Cleve.” And the catch in her throat warned him to heed her words.

He got there in less than fifteen minutes. She was waiting out in front and when he arrived they went in and took a booth and had a cup of coffee in the dirty brilliance of the fluorescent light.

“Cleve, it’s not fair of me to dump my troubles in your lap,” she said, “but you’ve got to help me. You’re the only one who can.”

He was alarmed by the look of her. Her eyes were heavy and scared, red with weeping, and her hair hung about her pretty face in neglected confusion. She breathed fast, as though she had been running, and she stammered—something Beth, with all her poise, had never done.

“If you’re in trouble—”

“It’s private trouble, Cleve. I’m leaving Charlie.”

His jaw went slack and he stared at her amazed while the waitress placed the coffee in front of them. After a moment he lighted them each a cigarette, passing hers to her, and then he said to the coffee cup, “I’m really sorry. God! I thought you two were sublimely happy.”

“Not everybody’s as happy as you and Jean!” Beth said, and there was more wistfulness than envy in her voice.

“Thank God for that,” he said wryly, but she was too wrapped up in her pain and perplexity to notice it. “Tell me about it?” he said.

“No,” she said, shaking her head and making a tremendous effort to control herself. “You wouldn’t understand any better than he did.”

“What about the kids?” His voice was cautious. He had been handling Vega’s flare-ups so long that frantic women were not new to him. He had some idea what to do.

“I—I left them. I’m no proper mother, Cleve. It was cowardly but I swear I think they’ll be happier.”

Like Charlie before him, Cleve was shocked. “But what in hell will Charlie _do_ with them?”

“I don’t know. I came to talk to you about Vega,” she said quickly. If he persisted in that obvious shock she would go to pieces. His sister’s name silenced him, threw him off the track.

“I went ahead and saw her, Cleve. I’ve been seeing quite a lot of her lately.” She didn’t know how to proceed. She couldn’t blurt out the truth to him, and yet she had to say something. In her frayed emotional state Vega was likely to do anything, even scream the facts to strangers, unless she could be reassured that Beth at least thought of her before she left.

“I know,” Cleve told her.

“You _know_?” Beth gasped. “_What_ do you know?”

“That you’ve been seeing her,” he said, and he was not pleased. “Who do you think gets the brunt of her bad temper?”

“I thought I got all of it.”

He shook his head. “You don’t even get half.”

After an embarrassed pause she said, “I’m sorry, Cleve.” She wondered how much of the truth he knew.

“So am I.”

“She thinks she owns me. We’ve gotten pretty close. I can’t disappear without giving her a message. Tell her I’m sorry, will you?”

“Okay.” He looked at her. “Is that all?”

And she knew from his voice, his face, that he was disappointed in her; perhaps his feelings were even stronger.

“Vega took it all wrong, Cleve. She took it too hard.”

“She did that with Beverly, too. The girl P.K. Schaefer took away from her.”

It took Beth a moment to place P.K.

“I don’t want her to do anything awful, Cleve,” Beth said, pleading with him.

“Neither do I,” he said and gave her a twisted little smile.

“I guess I loused things up for you, didn’t I? I never meant to. It just happened. It got away from me. Will you talk to her?”

“I’ll try.” He was already bracing himself for another siege of fury and erratic temper and threats. When things like this happened to Vega he always had to nurse her through them. Her mother was too sick and Gramp was too frail and neither of them understood the problem. Mrs. Purvis, to judge from Cleve’s description of her attitude, would have disowned her daughter at the very least had she known her true nature.

When Cleve made a move to get up she caught his hands, searching for the warmth, the desire to help her, that she so needed. But he was chilly, preoccupied with the problem she had thrust at him.

“Cleve, there’s one more thing,” she said and he paused.

“Beth, I told you not to get mixed up with my sister, but you went ahead and did it. Now you’re sorry but it’s too late. Don’t you think that’s enough?”

She was surprised and shamed by it. But not silenced. “I _must_ ask you—you’re the only one. Write to me,” she implored. “Tell me about the kids and Charlie. He won’t write, I know that. Besides I don’t want him to know my address, if I should leave my uncle’s house. Oh, Cleve, please! You _can’t_ turn me down!”

He looked at her a second longer, at her pale tremulous mouth and shaking hand, and then he took the address from her. It was one of Uncle John’s cards from her wallet. He folded it solemnly and put it into his pocket.

“Thank you, Cleve,” she said ardently. “You’ll be my only link with them.”

Cleve stood up. “I told Jean I had to go down to the corner drug store,” he said. “I’ve told her that so often she thinks it means the corner beer parlor. I’d better get home and give her a nice surprise. Nothing but coffee on my breath.” He was making an effort, at least, to be kind, to take the awful heaviness out of the atmosphere. She knew he would do as he said for her, and she was moved and grateful.

He took her arm and led her to her car. At the door he told her, “If this is half as hard on Charlie as it is on you, he’s going to crack up fast. You look like hell, Beth.”

“I know,” she said. “I never did anything so awful—so hard—in my life. I feel like I’m going to die of it.”

“Then you’re a fool. Whatever your reasons were, they aren’t worth it.”

“That’s what I have to find out,” she said.

“Sure you won’t tell me?”

“Yes, Cleve.” She held out a hand to him and after a minute he grasped it and squeezed it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “For you both.”

“Thank you. Goodbye, Cleve. And write to me.”

He nodded and then he turned and walked away and she watched him for a second, thinking how much he looked like Vega and what a hell of a mess she had handed him. Subconsciously she realized that her train of thoughts was enough to shatter her mind, her emotions. The load was already too great. She had to turn to something else, she had to move and do things and act ordinary and sensible or she would fly to pieces.

* * * * *

The plane took off three minutes behind time. She felt the ground fall away beneath her and the wide steel wings rise, heard the captain’s voice moments later and saw her seat neighbor light a cigarette—all with a feeling of eerie unreality reinforced by the small morning hour.

“We are circling over Catalina Island,” the pilot announced, “waiting for air traffic to clear over Los Angeles. In about five minutes we will be heading due east.”

Beth looked out of the window and saw a wavy ribbon of orange lights—the shoreline of Catalina Island—and a cluster of white lights winking around the town of Avalon. She was on the side away from the mainland and couldn’t see Los Angeles, but soon afterward the plane turned eastward and they headed inland again. She looked down, looking for landmarks in the night, and after a moment she recognized a few: the Colosseum, the brilliant green-white strips of the freeways, and then Pasadena with the winding pattern of Orange Grove Avenue discernible below. She followed it carefully with her eyes to where she supposed Sierra Bella began, and looked at the bouquet of lights there against the mountains, looked at it more with her heart than her eyes.

She closed her eyes then and for a short painful moment she could see the little town as it would look in tomorrow’s daylight, bright with the colors of early summer, the lavender flowers of the jacaranda trees glowing over the streets, the pink and white oleander with its pointed leaves, the long palmy street up the mountainside to their small house, the sun frosting the purple mountains in the early morning, the sounds of her children tumbling out of bed and shouting for their breakfast, Charlie shaving and grumbling at the mirror.

Beth lighted a cigarette and said softly to herself, “Laura, I’m coming for you. Don’t fail me. Be there, darling, or that’s the end of me. I’ll be destroyed, for I can never come back here.”

Chapter Ten

Uncle John, genial and bustling and worried, picked her up in Chicago. He had to be content with the briefest and barest explanation from her. She was utterly exhausted and all she wanted was to collapse and sleep. She even took sleeping pills when it developed that her bitter self-recriminations would give her no rest. And for two whole days she refused to leave her room.

“I’ll just say this,” she told Uncle John when he pressed her. “I’ve left Charlie. He has the children; they’re all fine. Everything is my fault. It would kill me to have to talk about it now. I’ll try to explain it later. I’m so tired and miserable I just want to be alone.”

So they gave her their hospitality and let her have her way. Uncle John was anxious and he even thought of calling Charlie and demanding the facts. But his wife restrained him. “Let’s at least hear her side of it first,” she said. “She _did_ say it was her fault, after all.”

Beth had no intention of explaining to them what couldn’t be explained. She wrote to Charlie, just a note. She said she would be with Uncle John for a while and she’d let him know any new plans. Cleve wrote to her within a couple of days to say the kids were well but missed her badly, and Charlie had become very taciturn at the office. He had found a woman to care for the children during the day. Beth wondered impatiently what sort of woman she was—whether she was kindly and whether she liked children and whether she fixed them their favorite breakfasts, and what she looked like. There was no mention of Vega in Cleve’s letter.

As soon as she had a little strength, a little sense, she determined to find Laura. The place to start was with Laura’s father. Beth didn’t suppose that Laura was still living with him; they had never gotten along, and Laura, when she left Beth nine years ago, had been an entirely different girl from the one her father thought he had raised. She had found herself and had begun to live for the first time, and Beth guessed that her first move had been to leave her father.

But Beth had to start somewhere, and so, when she had been in Chicago two days, she called Merrill Landon. It was mid-afternoon; it had taken her till then to get up her courage. She wasn’t sure whether she was more afraid of finding Laura or of not finding her. What would Laura think of Beth, now that her former lover was no longer a radiant college girl? Of course Laura would be older too, but she was still four years younger than Beth, and Beth had lived with a mountain of dissatisfaction and discontent that had left its mark on her pretty face.

Merrill Landon was not in. Beth had to call again at seven. She approached the phone in a nervous sweat, afraid that her voice would break or her throat go dry and betray her nerves to him. She had to be very casual.

This time she got him from his dinner.

_Damn!_ she thought while the servant summoned him. _He probably hates to be interrupted._

“Hello?” he said, and his voice was deep and rough. He spoke in the same tone he would have used to bark an order to a subordinate at the newspaper where he worked. Beth gasped a little before she could say, “Mr. Landon? My name is Beth Cullison. I—I mean Beth _Ayers_.” Her maiden name! _God_, she thought in dismay. But there was no time to scold herself.

“Well, which is it?” he boomed.

“Ayers. Mrs. Ayers,” she answered, trying to sound calm. She raced on, hoping to smooth over his first impression, “I’m an old college friend of Laura’s. I’m visiting in Chicago and I thought it would be nice if we could get together.”

Her voice went dry and she had to stop. There was an awkward pause. “A college friend?” he said, as if there were no such things.

“You _are_ Laura’s father, aren’t you?” she asked timidly.

“Yes.” He waited so long to answer that it made her wonder. “What do you want with Laura, Mrs. Ayers?”

“I just wanted to talk to her. If she’s there.”

“I haven’t seen Laura for the last eight years,” he said, and Beth’s heart went cold. He added thoughtfully, “You said your name was Cullison. Were you one of Laura’s roommates at the university?”

For some reason she was afraid to answer yes. Could it possibly be that Laura might have told him about the curious love that had sprung up between them? It was unlikely that he would remember her name unless it had special significance for him. What if he had forced the truth out of his daughter?

“Well?” he said, surprise and impatience in his voice at her delay. “Maybe you can’t remember that far back.”

“Yes. Yes, I was her roommate. Excuse me, I—where is Laura now?”

“Mrs. Ayers, why don’t you come over here tonight? I’d like to talk to you.” And when she hesitated again in a welter of uncertainty he said, “Are you far from here?”

“I have a car,” she said. “I’ll come.”

* * * * *

She took Aunt Elsa’s Buick and drove out to the Landon house. It wasn’t far; it was on one of the pretty shaded streets of Evanston. Merrill Landon lived there alone with his two servants. He had been there since he and Laura’s mother first married and nothing could tempt him away.

There was nothing left of Laura’s mother now but memories. But they bound Landon to her and kept him in the home she had furnished, where he could still see traces of her taste, her touch. No other woman had ever replaced her for him. Except, in a strange and uncomprehended way, Laura. And because she couldn’t _be_ her mother, because she was only a sweet shadow, a photo transparency, he blamed her and was very hard with her.

When Laura had at last understood where she had unwittingly failed him, she left him. She was his daughter, not his wife; that was her crime. And because he couldn’t have her he couldn’t forgive her for living. She was a constant threat to his virtue, a painful reminder of his dead wife. The knowledge of his tormented desire gave her the courage to turn her back on him and run.

He had found her once, after that, almost by accident, and they had it out in words, the awful incredible words that had never been spoken between them before. The rupture had been complete after that. He admitted that he wanted her. He took her in his bearish arms and kissed her mouth brutally. And Laura, in her shock, told him what she was, a Lesbian. And who had done it to her; her own father. So they knew the very worst of each other, had known now for years, and had lost each other. But the knowledge, though it hurt, had washed away the bitterness.

Over the chasm of years and miles, Merrill Landon had come to love his daughter in a new way. He had never tried to pursue her, after that one shattering night in a New York hotel room when they had revealed themselves to each other, but he had spent the long years since then wondering about her, imagining how she might be living and with whom. His thoughts were mostly tender, sometimes resentful, always lonely. But he was proud and a little afraid of himself with her, and he would not seek her out again.

Beth rang his bell, ignorant of all that had passed between him and Laura in the years that preceded her visit. No servant opened to her, as she had expected, but Merrill Landon himself, as though he, too, was anxious for the meeting. She had never seen him before in her life but she knew him instantly. His flesh was Laura’s and her whole body was suddenly covered with shiverings.

He was a huge man; not big like Charlie, not tall and long-muscled, but just big. Square-chested, slope-shouldered, powerfully built, with his dark hair and heavy beard. He stood high from the ground but you didn’t realize it until you came close to him; the chunkiness of his construction gave him the look of a shorter man. In his heavy features she saw very little of Laura, who resembled most her mother. And yet there was something there, faint but visible, that kept the shivers coming in Beth.

He sized her up like a seasoned journalist. “Come in, Mrs. Ayers,” he said, and showed her into a comfortable den stacked high with books and papers. It was apparently his study, the work room where he wrote his daily editorials, read his books, did his dreaming, perhaps. Beth sat in a large ox-blood leather chair. She was afraid to lean back in it for fear of getting lost, of making herself look small and shy to this man she wanted so much to impress with her social ease. It would have helped immeasurably if she could have guessed by looking at him how much he knew of her love for Laura.

Landon mixed her a drink. “What are you doing in Chicago, Beth?” he asked with his back to her, and the sound of her proper name startled her.

_Now he thinks he’s got me_, she thought. _I’m here in his house and he thinks he’s going to find out about Laura and me once and for all. I’m not even Mrs. Ayers any more, I’m just Beth. Just a school girl._

She told him she was visiting her uncle, she was living in California, she had two children. That was all. His questions were brief, as though she were a socialite he had to interview for the next day’s paper, and she tailored her answers the same way. But Beth wanted to ask her own questions. She was the one who urgently needed to know, who had left her home and kids and husband and come all this way to find this man’s daughter—and perhaps, at the same time, herself. She gazed around the room, taking in the working disorder, the handsome, slightly worn furniture. Laura knew all this, Beth thought; it was as familiar to her as her own room, and the thought made Beth ache for her.

She interrupted Landon to ask him, “Where is she, Mr. Landon? Maybe there’s still time for me to see her tonight.” He smiled at her over-bright eyes and somehow she expected his answer.

“I doubt it. She’s not living in Chicago any more.”

_Of course not. Goddamn! That would have been too easy. I should have known._ “Where is she?” she demanded, and again he smiled at the pink flush in her cheeks, the line between her eyes.

“I’d like to know myself,” he said. He was almost teasing her.

“You must have some idea,” she cried, desperately afraid that Laura would slip out of her fingers before she ever touched her again. If she had been more observant she would have seen the understanding that began to show in his smile. He was needling her for a purpose.

“I do have some idea,” he said calmly, sitting down behind his desk. “I’ll gladly share it with you. If you’ll do something for me, Beth.”

“If I can.”

“You can.” She watched him while he listened to his memories. He could hear Laura’s voice in his inner ear crying, “And that’s not all! Remember Beth Cullison? Remember my roommate at school? Her too, Father! She was the first! I loved her! Do you understand what I’m telling you?” That voice, sharp with the saved-up sorrows and frustrations of a young lifetime, crying at him through tears and fury of what she had become, what her true nature was! And he had understood her, at last. His perverted love for her had twisted her whole personality. He had controlled his terrible desire for years, but it had cost Laura a normal childhood.

“When you find Laura,” he said, “I want you to tell me where she is. That’s all. Will you do that?”

Beth stared at him. “When I find her?” she said. “Where do I have to go?”

“Tell me her address, that’s all,” he bargained.

And she knew then that he could see plainly how badly she wanted Laura. She struggled to keep her face smooth, her passion under wraps. “Yes,” she said. It was a whole confession of love, that word. It said, _Yes, I’ll find her, I’ll go to the ends of the earth, I’ll do any favor for you if you’ll tell me where to start, where to look._

He smiled. He had her. “She’s in New York,” he said.

Beth’s mouth fell open. “New _York_!” She was dismayed. She had only been there once, when she was a little girl of ten. She didn’t know the city at all. And the size of it! “But, good God, Mr. Landon, there are millions of people in New York!” she exclaimed.

“There’s only one Laura. She’s been there a while, she knows people.”

“What people?” Her discouragement showed now, too. She couldn’t have hidden it from her extraordinary host.

“If I were you I’d start in the Village,” he said. “She lived down there a while.”

“I don’t know the Village,” she protested. “I don’t know New York at all. I can’t fly to New York just to scare up an old roommate of mine.” It was supposed to throw him off the track, demonstrate her normalcy. But Merrill Landon was too far ahead of her. He knew too much that she didn’t know. He saw the strength and determination in her chin, the trembling of her sensual mouth, and he smiled once again.

“You can’t, but you will,” he said. “Isn’t that why you’re here?” There was an embarrassed silence. She didn’t know how to answer without exposing herself to him. “Beth,” he said, and the gruff voice softened slightly, “I know you were in love with my daughter.”

She gasped, and as he went on she gulped the rest of her drink.

“She told me so. You have a right to know that I know. She—well, she had to tell me; she didn’t do it to hurt you. I’ve kept it to myself. I knew you from the pictures she used to have of you.” She began to cry, and into the sniffly silence he added, “I love her too. Only I can’t go find her now. Someone else will have to do that for me.”

When they were able to look at each other again he said, “Did you come all the way from California to find her?”

She was undone. She had no secrets. He was too much for her, with his bright eyes that penetrated hers and saw so much and suspected so much more. “Yes,” she confessed. “I had to get away from my husband. I was nearly cracking up. I just wanted to see Laura again. Everything was so wonderful then, so awful now. I thought it might help. I thought maybe that was what was wrong with me.”

He lighted a cigarette for her and one for himself. “Laura doesn’t want to see me again,” he said. “With you it may be different. If you follow her to New York, Beth, you’ll find her, somehow. I want you to tell me about her and where she’s living. I won’t give you cause to regret it. I’ve messed up her life enough as it is. Just tell me when you find her.”

“All right.” She seemed to have no will now. Only a need for Laura, a need for her love so great that it would propel her onward until she found her. “Mr. Landon,” she said, looking at him with all her subterfuges stripped from her. “Why are you kind to me? Why don’t you despise me for what I did to your daughter?”

“For what _you_ did to her?” He gave a scornful little laugh that turned against himself. “If I were guiltless myself I could despise anyone I pleased. I could blame anyone I pleased. But I’m not guiltless.” His words made her feel braver. “If it hadn’t been you it would have been somebody else, Beth. You know that, of course. Laura is a Lesbian. Sooner or later she would have understood that, whether with your help or without it.”

It was logical, it was sensible. But it had never struck Beth quite that way and it hurt. She stood up with a little gasp and walked away from him. “No,” she blurted. “It was special, it was—almost sacred.”

“To you perhaps.”

“To both of us. She couldn’t have done it with anyone else.” She spoke positively because she was suddenly so unsure.

“I didn’t mean to shock you,” he said. “I thought you would have realized long ago that somebody had to be first with her and it just happened to be you. It was no divine choice, just blind accident.”

Beth lighted a cigarette with trembling hands. “I guess it’s because I’ve never known any other woman the way I knew Laura,” she said, talking fast to keep the tears back. “I guess it’s because there never was anybody else I wanted like that.”

“And you just took it for granted that Laura never wanted anybody else, either? You’re fooling yourself, my dear. That’s her nature. That’s her life. For you, with a husband and a family, life has been very different. Now, when you want her again, you’re resentful to find that Laura’s life has gone on without you. That she’s found other women, a whole new mode of living, other interests that you don’t share.”

It knocked her ego into a corner. “Oh, you spiteful bastard!” she cried in pure self-defense. And then clapped her hands over her mouth, sinking to a small straight-backed chair and weeping angry startled tears that nevertheless broke the tension and relieved her.

Merrill Landon laughed softly and she was unnerved to hear Laura’s inflection in the sound. “You have a little spirit, after all,” he said. “Good. You’re mad because I’m right. Isn’t that so? Of course.”

And of course he was right, to her chagrin.

“I didn’t even think about her after I’d been married,” Beth said brokenly. It was the first time in all these weary months of wondering and experimenting with the wrong person, of deceiving Charlie and perhaps her own self, that she let go and spoke of it. And it felt good. Landon understood her language. That alone made it possible to speak.

“I was dissatisfied,” she explained to him. “Oh, hell, I was just plain sick to death of the whole mess. The little things with a husband aggravated me even more than the big things. And the kids nearly did me in. When it got so I couldn’t stand to have Charlie touch me, I knew we’d had it. _He_ didn’t, though. He still thinks I’m going through a phase.

“I guess when _I_ changed so much it seemed to me Charlie should change, too. But that was unreasonable of me. Here I am, a completely different Beth, and he’s just the same old Charlie.”

“You fell in love with him that way,” Landon reminded her.

“In love and out,” she said.

“When did it occur to you that Laura might cure your ills?” He handed her a fresh drink and she took a swallow before she answered him.

“I began to dream about her,” she said. “Just a little at first, but then all the time. I met another woman and I tried to find with her what I had known once with Laura, but it didn’t work. Made me think that no other woman would be right for me.” She glanced at him shyly, suddenly recalling that he ought to be shocked and disapproving, wondering where she found the guts to confess as she did. The whiskey? The house, Laura’s house? The man, Laura’s father? She saw no shock in his face, only interest and a certain remote sympathy, and it gave her a new respect for him.

“The other woman didn’t love you?” he asked.

“Yes, she did,” Beth said. He saw her chin quiver and knew she was understating things for him.

“When you find Laura, do you think she’ll be just the way she was when you knew her in college?” he asked.

“No. That’d be pretty naïve of me,” Beth said.

“And yet that’s what you’re looking for in her. You don’t know her the way she is now. You’re setting out to find your old college roommate. Laura may disappoint you like this other woman did. Just by being different from your memories of her. Then where will you turn, Beth?”

It was a dismal thing to face. She had resolutely ignored the possibility until now.

“You’d better make plans,” Landon continued. “A thing like that could crack you up if you’re not prepared for it. It’s been a while, Beth, quite a while. Nine years?”

She nodded. “She hasn’t forgotten me, has she? Could that be?”

“She hadn’t when I saw her. She remembers a college girl with no real experience of life, the way you do. She remembers an ingenuous romance. She remembers that you jilted her for a boy you knew, and probably married the boy. End of story. You’ll have to take it from there yourself when you find her.”

“_If_ I find her,” she said and emptied her glass again.

“You will, if you still want to as much as you did when you came in here tonight.”

She put the glass down. “I do,” she whispered.

He smiled. “You may get to New York and find her right there in the phone book. Who knows?”

Beth gave a wry little laugh. “Sure,” she said. “I was thinking, on the plane, ‘What if I get to Chicago and there she is, at home with her father.’ It would have been too easy, though. But I _did_ think she’d be living in the city, at least. Now ... New York. God. When I get to New York they’ll tell me she’s living in Paris. And if I ever make it to Paris, damned if she isn’t already on her way to Hong Kong.”

“She’s not much of a vagabond,” Landon reassured her. “She’d have stayed here in Chicago if I’d made it tolerable for her. This was her home. She liked it here.... Have you any money?” he asked abruptly, looking directly at her.

“A little,” she said with some pride.

“A little doesn’t last long in New York.”

“I have about three thousand in my bank account.”

“Well, depending on how you live and whether you work or not, that might see you through a half year.”

“I don’t gamble,” she snapped. “I don’t eat at the Stork Club. And I don’t throw the stuff away.”

He laughed. “Okay, my dear. Go to New York with your three thousand dollars and live on it for the rest of your life if you can. I wish you only luck—the best kind. I was just thinking, if you should need a loan....” And seeing her face storm up he added, “I’m not laughing at you, Beth. I think you’re a better girl—a braver girl—than I did at first. Maybe I hoped you’d be a disappointment. You see, I haven’t liked you very well, over the years, since Laura told me she loved you. Simple jealousy. I haven’t liked any of the others she told me about either. But I suppose it’s only fair. I had her all to myself for eighteen years and only made her miserable.” He turned away as he spoke. “When at last I had to share her, it was with her own sex. I was shocked when she told me, but after a while I found I preferred it to sharing her with men.”

There was an awkward silence. Beth stared in surprise at his broad back in its brown tweed lounging jacket, feeling that his admission bound her to him, as hers bound him to her. They had a little something on each other now. They owed each other some small allegiance.

“I’ll send you her address, if I find her,” Beth said.

“Thank you. And your own. I don’t think I’d better write Laura. I’ll have to depend on you for news. Do you mind?”

Beth began to laugh and made him turn around to stare in his turn. “Is that funny?” he asked.