Whisper Their Love

by Valerie Taylor

  Joyce stumbled up the stairs after her. Neither of them said a word. Edith Bannister shut the study door and turned the key. Sunshine streamed over the thinly painted bookcase, the neat desk. She took off Joyce's hat and laid it beside the African figurine, and put a hand on her shoulder. The touch brought release. Joyce burst into tears and then, her face swollen and pale from lack of sleep, into words.

  Chapter 6

  The radium-dial clock on the bedside stand said eleven-twenty. Joyce rolled over, feeling the muscles in her legs crack, and squinted at its face until the numbers came into focus. Eleven-twenty, and the sounds that drifted into Edith Bannister's apartment were those of the dorm settling down for the night. Where had the afternoon and evening gone?

  Footsteps tiptoed down the front stairs; that would be somebody sneaking out for a late date, leaving a roommate who would come down later to spring the Yale lock. Radio music trickled through a tissue-stuffed keyhole where some girl was getting at her books after loafing for two weeks, or hanging up nylons and slips illegally rinsed out in the bathroom. A drift of voices from the lounge suggested that the House Council, presided over by Bitsy, was still in session. Joyce lay listening, but not really caring.

  She tried to account for the hours that had passed since the train pulled in at Henderson that morning. Let's see, she figured, it got in at nine-something. That's fourteen hours. She remembered bawling like a baby—shame flickered through her at the memory of her collapse, and something like wonder at the memory of Edith Bannister's arms warm and comforting around her, the way a mother holds a crying child.

  Then I took that little white pill, she reminded herself, but it didn't work for ages and I was lying here looking at the sun on the door wishing I could go to sleep. She shook her aching head.

  The next thing was the afternoon light getting duller, the way it does around six, and Edith Bannister was standing beside the bed with some dishes on a tray. She didn't know whether she had eaten anything or not; she couldn't remember what was on the tray so perhaps she hadn't. She had no awareness of time's passing, either; it was like the time she was given ether when she had had her appendix out. I'm tired, she decided with some astonishment, really tired. She gave up thinking and lay unmoving for a while, looking vaguely at the dim square that was the curtained window.

  The late-night freight clanked across the corner of the campus and the pigeons perched on Colonel Henderson's statue complained softly. Light cut across the trees and reached into a clump of bushes where the redheaded freshman snuggled against her date, a boy from Ace Hardware. They hushed their whispering and stood rigid for a moment, until the train passed and the shadows were deep again. "Do that again," the boy said; "touch me like that again."

  The rhythmic clanking on the rails roused Joyce. This time her head felt clearer. She lay unmoving, aware of the sore places, and thought back over the day with more coherence than she had been capable of before. The ride from Chicago, gathering tension and terror with each mile that passed. The dizziness. The wonderful, heavenly relief of spilling everything, no matter if they threw her out in disgrace or told everybody. Afterwards the air around her felt light and clear, the way it feels after a summer thunderstorm.

  Later? Blurred by emotion and codeine, her memory refused to give up any definite picture of what had happened. I must have had a bath, she decided, because I can remember the warm water. Or was that some other time? No, because I was all sticky and sweaty from crying, and all. She sniffed cautiously, turning down the folded sheet. She smelled clean, and there was a nightgown of some thin crisp stuff, but she never wore anything but pajamas, so somebody must have helped her get to bed.

  Once when she was in third or fourth grade she had had measles. She remembered a lot of things quite clearly from those days in bed, isolated scenes that stood out with photographic sharpness: Aunt Gen's round face looking sober, and Aunt Gen's hands, with the nails unpolished and cut short and the skin a little rough from gardening and housework. But what she liked to remember, nights when she was falling asleep, was that Mimi had come and sat beside her bed. She still didn't know who had called Mimi, or why—maybe she was sicker than the grownups let on—but there was a magic moment when she stood in the doorway and everything in the world was absolutely all right.

  She felt that way now.

  For a little while she floated contentedly between sleeping and waking. Then the door opened—not the bedroom door but the one beyond that led into the corridor—and there were two sets of steps. The light tap-tap of high heels and the solid thud of a man's shoes planted firmly. Edith Bannister said something, but the words blurred and ran together. A deep voice answered. Joyce stiffened. Edith said, "That's silly, Roger. I always like to talk to you. It happens I'm tired tonight, though, so good night."

  "Sometimes I think you're frigid."

  "Think what you please. It would be a little spectacular, though, if somebody came in and found you here. Or don't you think so? After all, both of us are responsible for the manners and morals of all these innocent teen-agers."

  "Oh, hell."

  There was a small silence, about long enough for a ritual good-night kiss. Then the outside door closed. Joyce heard Edith moving around her study the way a woman does when she comes in at night, taking off her hat, lighting a cigarette, dropping her earrings on the desk.

  The bedroom door opened. A blade of light flashed in. "Hi. How do you feel?"

  "My head feels funny."

  "That's the codeine," Edith said. "Dr. Prince prescribed it for Sally when she broke her leg last spring—lucky I had some left." She crossed the floor, laid a cool hand on Joyce's forehead. "You better stay in bed tomorrow." She switched on the bedside lamp.

  Joyce shut her eyes again. She felt completely safe and cared for. She could feel her mouth curve in a relaxed smile.

  "Look here, you're not still worrying, are you?"

  Something dark and ominous stirred in the back of her mind. She opened her eyes and looked, but the dean's face was impassive. Only something looked out of her eyes, gray-hazel, like Mimi's. Compassion, or concern, or even affection. Joyce opened her mouth, but no words came out. Edith Bannister leaned over her. "Listen to me. No one gets a baby from the first time. The chances are very small, anyway; starting a baby isn't so easy as all that."

  "Suppose it happened, though?"

  "If it happened," Edith Bannister said in a light, crisp voice, "we would arrange a little operation and in a few days you would be all right again. It's very simple. But it isn't going to happen, so you may as well stop worrying and get some sleep."

  She lay still and tried to believe this. Her mind had circled around the idea of pregnancy so long that she couldn't give it up now. Warm tears squeezed out from under her closed eyelids, making them sting. Edith said with quiet scorn, "Men. They never think about anything except themselves and their own needs. They're such fools. Forget it, Joyce. I tell you everything will be all right."

  "Oh God, I hope so."

  Edith turned back the top sheet, smoothing it. "You can stay all night if you want to," she said, "if you don't mind sharing the bed. I'm rather afraid to have you in your own room as long as you're in a confessing frame of mind, that sexy little slut you room with will have the whole story out of you and she'll spread it all over school in no time."

  Remembering some of the case histories she had had from Mary Jean, Joyce was afraid this might be so. She didn't want to move, anyway; it was quiet here, the air was lightly scented and it felt good to lie still. She followed with her eyes the movements of this slender, quiet woman. Miss Bannister took her dress off and put it on a padded hanger with a precision that was like Mimi's. She tied a thin flowered robe around herself and went into the bathroom, and there were the sounds of water running into a basin, towel whispering across skin, cabinet doors clicking. She came back no less tidy, only with her hair flowing loose instead of knotted. She was the first person Joyce had ever seen with really long hair;
some of the girls at school wore theirs loose on the shoulders, but the ends had been trimmed. It gave Miss Bannister an old-fashioned, feminine look.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed and took off her slippers, then snapped off the light and got under the covers. Joyce was acutely conscious of her body, not touching, but close enough for her to feel its warmth. She shut her eyes, feeling truly secure and cared-for at last.

  Edith Bannister stirred. "You'd better stay in bed tomorrow," she said calmly, "and it might be a good idea to sleep down here tomorrow night."

  That was all right, too. Joyce fell asleep, feeling completely happy.

  A confused and blurry day ensued, made up of alternate sleepings and wakings, and food on trays, but then she was too sleepy to eat. She went to sleep with bars of yellow sunshine lying across the floor, and woke to deepening shadows in the corners of the room. It was a sort of convalescence, she thought.

  Now it was night, and Edith Bannister's warmth and delicate fragrance, familiar since yesterday, was in the bed beside her. She must have slept after she became aware of that, because when she opened her eyes again there was a late-night feeling in the air. She lay still, not quite sure where she was or what had happened to her. A spot of warmth—someone had rolled over against her and a hand lay on her breast. She realized that it was Edith Bannister lying against her, and that Edith was awake. Joyce moved closer, impelled by a loneliness she couldn't define.

  Edith whispered, "Afraid?"

  "No."

  Joyce felt fingers stroking lightly, a warmth and comfort she had never dreamed of, and then a stirring, an awakening. All over her body sensations arose she had never known before. "Please," Edith Bannister said in a queer husky whisper. "Please."

  Joyce wasn't sure what was happening or going to happen. Whatever it was, she liked it. This had no relation to being with a man, the touch and smell of a man. She nestled closer, feeling the fingers unbutton her thin, borrowed cotton nightgown. Electric shocks now, wherever there was contact. She whispered, "Oh, yes."

  There was no fatigue or worry left. No yesterday or tomorrow and no world beyond these night-dark walls. Nothing but the stroking hand, and Edith's accelerated breathing at her ear, and the feeling that flooded through her.

  Chapter 7

  Mary Jean had a theory about love which she expounded practically every time the subject came up, over cokes at the Honey Bee and tonight in Holly Robertson's room. Love, she said, is rugged enough even when everything is in favor of it. Even when all four parents are for it, Mary Jean declared, romance is certainly hell on the nervous system.

  "When you have to sneak around and take it on the run," she said sadly, "you don't even have to diet to stay thin. Whether you do or don't," she added as a sop to convention.

  Holly Mae picked up the cup Mary Jean had put on the bed. "Going somewhere, dear?"

  "Late date." Mary Jean pulled on her tweed jacket, slanted a reminding look at Joyce: the door. Joyce blushed. Last time she had forgotten it and Mary Jean had had to come in through a basement window, which involved dropping several feet onto a sorting table in the laundry. "I'm going, too," she said vaguely, taking one more cooky from the carton and sinking back with her spine against the leg of the bed.

  If she'd had a boy friend, she thought gloomily while Holly Mae refilled the percolator—if she hadn't made that Tony character so mad and "he'd asked for another date, she could have talked about him the way Mary Jean did about Bill and the girls would have kidded her, offered good advice and asked prying questions to find out how far it had gone.

  One disadvantage of this off-beat love, or whatever you wanted to call it—she guessed Mary Jean would have had a name for it but there were some things she couldn't tell even Mary Jean, not even in that hour after the lights were off, when confidences came naturally—one problem was that you had to keep it to yourself. You can admit being sexy or frustrated, but not abnormal. If love at its crazy best is a special kind of insanity that people hanker after instead of fleeing from it, at least being able to talk about it is a kind of therapy. She guessed that some of the girls got more real pleasure out of sharing their affairs than they did out of having them.

  When you're a girl of eighteen, and suddenly all that matters much is a woman almost twice your age, the need to keep it extra-secret makes everything that much worse. For a while Joyce went through her days blind and deaf to everything but Edith Bannister, pretending not to pay any special attention to her—keeping her face composed when they met at the table or in the hall. It would have been even more difficult if she hadn't been feeling vague and exalted at the same time, like a person walking around with about two degrees of fever.

  This love hasn't anything to do with movies and the sweet mush of popular songs, or even the poetry she used to copy at the library and carry around in the back of her chemistry book. Those were surface things. Two-dimensional, like pieces of paper.

  She slept heavily at night, waking full of a queer excitement and riot rested, rejecting sleep and needing more of it at the same time. She felt always a little hungry and thirsty. Yet it wasn't food she wanted. She ate what was set in front of her without paying any particular attention to it. She walked over to town with Mary Jean and Bonnie and Alberta, who had the same free periods she did, and in the slow interval between the last afternoon class and dinner they bought things to eat: Hershey bars and sacks of potato chips, sundaes with imitation whipped cream and maraschino cherries at the Bee. They were always stopping downtown for Cokes, though it cost a dime and tasted exactly like the six-cent coke in the vending machines on campus.-Once she picked an empty sack off the floor of the room and asked, "Who dropped this?" and Mary Jean said, "Goofus, you just ate the peanuts." She rolled up the bit of paper and threw it away, but she couldn't remember eating any peanuts.

  She must have taken showers and dressed, fixed her face, gone to class and recited when called on. She was always finding herself sitting in the library with a book open in front of her, and some of the print got through to whatever she did her thinking with in those days. But she was certainly not all there.

  Mostly, she waited. It was appalling how much time you could spend just sitting around and waiting, and the way most days ended in blankness. Edith went out a great deal, evenings. She sponsored school activities and belonged to social and study clubs in town. She dated, too. She went out with a lawyer who was supposed to be looking for a second wife, an eligible bachelor who was on the governing board of the college, a wistful little man who wore the only male beret—red—in Henderson and was supposed to be a painter.

  "How can you?" Joyce demanded. "How can you go out with men? Do you like to?"

  "I like an evening out now and then," Edith said reasonably. She sat on the edge of her bed, smoking. She smoked a great deal in her own rooms, never in public.

  "It doesn't seem honest."

  "We can't be honest," Edith said simply. She dropped her cigarette into an ashtray. She sat with her hands in her lap, palms up—a characteristic pose. "We have to be careful."

  Joyce touched her shoulder with the tip of an inquiring finger. The first tentative gesture towards what might be, this time, the time. "I don't care. I'd like to tell everybody."

  "I care," Edith said sharply. "I like my job, apart from having to earn a living. You don't know how they crucify people like us, tear us limb from limb and laugh when we suffer." Her normally cool voice was a little shrill; she shivered. "Everybody hates us."

  "There can't be so many—"

  Edith sighed. "You'd be surprised how many. All shapes . and sizes." She moved her hand from under Joyce's and took another cigarette from the silver case with the initial G engraved on it. "If any of these brats found out—my God, how they'd love it. Your roommate would have a fine time with it, the little nympho." Her eyes narrowed.

  Joyce had no answer for that, because it was true. Mary Jean knew more case histories than Kinsey. Accurate or not, she had a lively interest in
everyone's sex life, and she used words Joyce had never heard anyone else use, not even migrant hired men. But still she liked Mary Jean. Even if they couldn't swap clothes, they had fallen into a comfortable roommate-best-friend relationship. She stood between two loyalties, feeling clumsy and childish and frustrated, wanting to cry.

  Edith stood up, dropping her cigarette beside the other in the ashtray. She laid her cheek against Joyce's, their own special gesture of tenderness. "There isn't any future for us, Joy. You'll graduate, or maybe I'll get a better job. Or one of us will come to care for someone else."

  "I don't care about the future," Joyce said painfully. "I'm thinking about now."

  "A good idea," Edith said lightly. The wistful moment was gone. Her hand found Joyce's back and rubbed the tender spot between the shoulders. "I really place a great deal of confidence in you, darling."

  "Well, you can. I'd sooner die than hurt you." That was mushy, that was like a Grade B movie, and she felt her face redden. But the hand kept rubbing her back, gently, relaxingly, like someone stroking a sleepy cat. She buried her face on Edith's shoulder. "Really touch me."