Whisper Their Love

by Valerie Taylor

  Edith Bannister was standing in the middle of the study, tapping one foot like a woman who's tired of waiting. Her face was a mask Joyce had never seen before. Narrow vertical wrinkles between her eyes matched the thin pinched lines at the corners of her mouth. Her lipstick was blurred at the edges and a bit of hair hung down over her forehead. "Where were you last night?" she demanded.

  Joyce had to stop and think. Between last night and this morning there was a great gulf, a stretch of not-sleeping followed by restless, half-conscious sleep. Already the hours with John had the unchanging, fixed look of something that is over and past. She lifted her eyes carefully to Edith's face, and what she saw there warned her to be careful. "I went downtown with a boy I know, a town boy. We had hamburgers and coffee."

  Edith said nothing.

  "It was Dr. Prince's nephew," Joyce said nervously. "You know Dr. Prince, he gave the typhoid shots last fall." You're talking too much, she warned herself.

  "I know Dr. Prince, all right," Edith said. "I asked you where you were last night."

  "Did I forget to sign out? If I did, I'm sorry. You're always saying I should go out with boys because it keeps people from getting suspicious."

  "Oh, shut up!"

  Joyce had never heard Edith shout before. She stepped back. Edith leaned ahead, her neck stretched out—she had a skinny neck, Joyce thought—her lips fixed in a dreadful smile. "Do you want me to tell you where you were last night, you cheap little sneak? You were at the Sunset Motel with this doctor or whatever he's supposed to be, and you were there from around eight till almost one this morning. One of the board members saw you leaving and phoned me this morning." What in hell was he doing there? Joyce thought; as if I didn't know. "A blonde in a yellow coat, he said, and you've got the only yellow coat in school."

  Joyce put her hands behind her and watched Edith's face intently, afraid to look away.

  "Till one o'clock, my God, in a cheap motel, with a man, like a common whore. Oh no, you don't have to tell me what you were doing, I know what you were up to all right. It's been three weeks—" Her voice cracked. Joyce took another step back, measuring the distance to the door. The air was charged with danger.

  "No wonder you haven't wanted me lately! No wonder you looked down your snooty little nose at Anitra and her friends, after she welcomed you into her house! I saw you making fun and acting superior. You haven't got the guts for a real honest relationship." Her hand groped toward the desk. Joyce watched, fascinated. "No, oh, no, you have to go to bed with men. Any man that comes along, I suppose. You're no better than a common streetwalker."

  "That's a lie."

  Edith's smile broadened. Her teeth glittered. There was saliva on the edge of her lower lip; she wiped it off on her sleeve and that was the most shocking thing she could have done. "You'll catch a disease. You'll get in trouble and have to have an operation like your nymphomaniac friend. And then I'll laugh at you, do you hear me, I'll laugh at you."

  She's crazy, Joyce thought. The walls of the room seemed to shrink, penning her in. She reached behind her for the doorknob. The crystal ashtray whizzed past her head. She felt the air stir her hair, and then there was a crash and a thump as the ashtray hit the door and fell to the floor.

  A hot, reviving anger poured through her. She took two long steps and slapped Edith across the cheek.

  Edith burst into tears.

  "Oh God," Joyce said. She looked at this disheveled wreck of a woman standing with her hand to her red and smarting face, and there was neither fear nor love left in her, but only a deep strength. I hope to God nobody's out in the hall listening to this rumpus, she thought; they're sure hearing plenty if they are. The assurance that swelled her chest was like the feeling that had gripped her at Mary Jean's crisis. She could do anything she had to do. Somebody had to take hold and straighten things around. It was Aunt Gen's phrase. Her voice was like Aunt Gen's too, sure and quiet. "Oh, stop it. You're making a fool of yourself. It's none of your business where I go or what I do. You're not my mother."

  The words hung on the air of the room. It's true, she thought wonderingly. "I don't need a mother any more," she said. "I've grown up."

  Edith bent her head. "It's only that—I love you."

  "I guess maybe you do," Joyce admitted. "I thought I loved you too, but I didn't. I'm sorry. I never meant to lie to you, though."

  "You—"

  "You want me to tell you where I was last night? I was out at the Sunset Motel with John Jones. I thought maybe if I acted like a normal decent person just once, if I went to bed with a man the way I'm supposed to, maybe I'd understand things better. It wasn't any good, though."

  "You did that!"

  "Yes. It wasn't any good. I couldn't do it." Joyce reached out and picked up the African figurine. Full sagging breasts, distended belly, full thighs. Woman, unthinking and fulfilled. She stroked it absently. "I'm one of those frigid females you read about. I haven't got it in me to love anyone."

  Edith lifted her head. Her shoulders straightened. "I could make trouble for you," she said. A thin smile touched her lips. "I can get you expelled. All I have to do is tell everybody what you are, what you've been. A pervert. They'd make it really bad for you." Her lips curled back so the teeth showed. The red patch on her cheek glowed dully. "There's nothing people enjoy more than hurting someone different. I could fix it up so you'd never get a job or an education, either."

  "I guess you could." The warmth still upheld her, and a mind not her own had taken over. She felt clearheaded; she felt fine. "Of course that works two ways. I can talk too. In court if it comes to that. I was eighteen when I came here," she pointed out, "a young girl from the country, and you taught me all those things. That would look fine in the papers, wouldn't it?"

  "Joy-"

  "Everybody knows about you. The girls." She didn't know where that piece of information came from, but she had no doubts about it. "There must have been others. I wouldn't make any charges, if I were you, or even start any gossip."

  Edith's knees caved in. She stumbled backward and landed on the desk chair, staring at Joyce with her mouth open.

  "Do anything you want to," Joyce said- "Tell anybody you please. It doesn't matter any more. I'm getting out of here."

  "Where?"

  She shrugged. A gesture borrowed from Mary Jean, who .used it to mean many things. "It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Can I go now?"

  "Joyce, for heaven's sake!"

  Joyce went out quietly, shutting the door without a sound. Her knees felt stiff. She realized that she was holding her breath, and exhaled deeply. She felt hollow, like someone who has borne up bravely under a long illness in the family and now, the funeral over, has to go back to an empty house.

  Hungry, too. She remembered not eating anything last night, and this morning she'd skipped breakfast. I'll go and wash up, she thought, then beat it downtown and have a sandwich and find out about train times. Maybe looking at schedules will give me an idea where to go. I'll get my money from the bursar's office. She hadn't known she had any plans, but there they were, all shaped and ready to be put into action. This is the time. Get a job in a store—no, an office. Find a room. Maybe if I can be alone for a while…

  One sure thing, she thought climbing the stairs, I can't go back to the farm. Can't face the folks till I get this worked out. Aunt Gen would never forgive me. Aunt Gen's face rose in her mind, the forehead knit in disapproval, the lips thin. No mercy there for anyone who transgressed her unchanging code of right and wrong. No, Joyce thought, I have to do this for myself. Nobody else can help me with it.

  The need for confession was urgent. Telephone John? No; he was probably hating me already. She felt, suddenly, a sharp realization of loss. There's nobody I can talk to any more. It was crazy, it didn't make sense, but already John had come to be that rare thing—a friend who could be counted on.

  Have to get the trunk out of storage; thank goodness I have enough clothes for a long time, she thought. She mount
ed the stairs, feeling at once competent and bereaved.

  The bathroom door was shut. Why, this time of day? She pushed it open and went in.

  A cold wind funnelled through the room. She stepped forward to shut the window, and stopped.

  The blood in the bottom of the bathtub was dark-red and sticky-looking, but what lay on the sides, splashed up in uneven scallops, was thinner and lighter. As if, finally, Mary Jean had bled herself dry—as if this was the last thin drainings of her life. The white of her bare arms was streaked with runnels of blood and there were flecks of it on her pink housecoat. Her fingers hung down, helpless. How could you push a blade through all the vein and gristle of a human wrist, and where had she found the old-fashioned straight razor that lay on the floor beside the tub?

  Soap and towel lay there too, stained. She had bathed, she had made herself clean for the final rite.

  A single fly buzzed at the edge of the viscous red pool, lifting its jointed legs daintily out of the wet.

  Mary Jean's eyes were open, looking at her.

  Joyce screamed. She could hear herself screaming. The sound echoed inside her head and she knew she was making it, but she couldn't stop. She went on screaming until feet pounded on the stairs. Then Mrs. Abbott was in the door, a black whale with staring eyeballs, and Mrs. Abbott's rings were biting into her shoulders and the room was going around in slow sickening circles. Then nothing at all.

  Chapter 23

  Some things figure out the same, anywhere you go. Death is one. Everywhere on earth there are special taboos and rites associated with death, ceremonies to celebrate the good qualities of the departed or protect the living against evil spirits and unknown perils. Whether old hymns are sung or tribal dances performed, wreaths ordered from a florist or bowls of food set out on the burial mound, widows draped in black and given a handkerchief for their tears or bound hand and foot and burned on the funeral pyre, for a little while people set aside their own affairs and think with wonder of the life that has ended and the loss to those left behind.

  Even on battlefields, where man falls by his brother's hand, the chaplain says a prayer.

  So the folk rituals of Ferndell held, here on the campus, and classes were dismissed for three days. Two hundred girls were milling around, vaguely uneasy, with nothing to do. Not that there was any lack of activity. Two white-coated orderlies came and took Mary Jean away in a long wicker basket, steering it neatly around the bend in the stairs, and there were whispers and arguments. Autopsy. Yes, but what do they really do? The law, when somebody commits suicide. At the thought of Mary Jean's drained body subjected to knife and scalpel, Joyce's scalp prickled and she looked around wildly, feeling that the walls were closing in. As if Mary Jean could be hurt any more…

  The students, at a loose end, felt constrained to behave in a manner suitable to a house of mourning. Suddenly the campus became Mary Jean's home, everybody living on it a member of her family. Girls who felt like playing canasta or giving each other home permanents did so quietly, almost furtively, as if they owed it to their dead friend to be above such everyday pastimes. Meals were sketchy, and served with less ceremony than usual. That was partly because Mrs. Abbott, usually so quick to rebuke the heavyhanded and slow of foot, had delegated herself chief mourner and was going around sniffling into a wad of handkerchief. She talked about Mary Jean to girls who stood glassy-eyed and unanswering, wishing they were somewhere else. That beautiful talented young girl, Abbott kept insisting in a mournful voice that made Joyce want to push her face in, why would she do such a dreadful thing when she had everything in the world to live for?

  The police came with notebooks, and asked questions. Reporters, too, a young man from the local paper, and the fluttery old girl who did the Woman's Page, and a tired-looking man from St. Louis, from the Post-Dispatch. News photographers came and took pictures of buildings and teachers, but especially girls. Girls going to class with armfuls of books, and playing basketball in the gym, and toasting marshmallows in the lounge fireplace. They picked out the most photogenic students for this, and there was some feeling among those who weren't asked to pose.

  The story was printed the next day in papers Joyce had never even heard of, in Dallas and Birmingham and Raleigh, and there were five telegrams and a barrage of long-distance calls ordering people home at once. Nancy Freeman refused to go, and her father took time off from being a sugar tycoon and came after her in a blue Cadillac a block long.

  Plumbers came. They tramped upstairs with hammers and wrenches and took away the tub in which Mary Jean had bled to death. Even then, the girls at that end of the hall refused to use the room; they kept the door shut and sidled past. It created a rush-hour problem, everyone using the bathroom at the other end of the hall, but Lissa expressed the general feeling when she said, "You wouldn't get me to take a bath in there even if I stayed dirty the rest of my life."

  Miss Edith Bannister, that cool and competent woman, shut herself into her room for an afternoon and came out only a little paler than usual, with every hair in place and no trace of agitation. She refused to look at the body, but then, some people thought that showed her good sense. She called up the girl's father and they agreed that under the circumstances it would be best to hold the service at the school.

  "She's wonderful," Mrs. Abbott said fervently of Miss Bannister, and you had to admit that she was.

  Wayne Allston came, as the only resident trustee. He wore the uneasy look of a hearty man thrown into sudden contact with death. He had taken a couple of drinks before he left the office, and now he found himself needing another. Nothing you could do for the girl, poor kid, and Ede seemed to have everything under control. He found her sitting at her desk staring at the blank plastered wall, doing nothing. He cleared his throat. "This is an awful thing. Anything I can do, you just let me know and I'll see to it."

  She didn't answer for a moment. She looked at him absently, as if she had met him somewhere but couldn't quite remember him. "Thank you. That's good of you."

  "Well, I thought flowers. It's tough on you. Nobody could blame you for anything, though."

  She was silent.

  Dr. Prince stood washing his hands over and over, although the wet slipperiness of the skin and his awareness of time's passing told him they were clean. Crazy damn kid. Hysterical type, going off half-cocked before she could be sure. He frowned, remembering that the beautiful mutilated body had been under his hands before, and wishing he didn't have to remember. She had behaved well that time, ready to explode with pain and nervous tension, but standing it better than most. A pretty kid, the sort any boy would fall for.

  No question about why she did it. Five to six weeks, he guessed, far enough along for easy diagnosis. She hadn't wasted any time getting in trouble again. The question was, why? He remembered the faces of other girls sharp with repulsion, voices shrill in protest. Not me, doctor, I'll never look at another man. Sometimes, God and their perplexed young husbands knew, they kept on feeling that way after you'd expect time to work its healing miracle.

  This one had been looking for trouble. Some kind of a mental twist, he guessed. He stepped on the hot-air dryer, glad he was a man. Women have it tough. A hell of a business to be mixed up in. Yeah, but if you don't do it, someone else will, and there are the payments on the house.

  For one crazy moment he wondered if there was some way to falsify the records, and knew there wasn't. Hide anything, fake anything around a hospital? Somebody always knew.

  Joyce moved through the buzzing and the silences in a kind of stupor. I wish I could cry, she thought, watching Lissa and Holly wipe their eyes and blow their swollen noses. It must be a relief. Her mouth tasted tinny and her throat ached, her stomach pinched with hunger, but the smell of food made her sick, and when she tried to swallow her chest hurt. She sat in her room with the door shut, wondering what they were doing at the hospital. In her mind autopsy was confused with dissection; she had a blurry image of medical students under a glaring light
, which dissolved into a picture of the undertaking parlors downtown. Embalming. Or sometimes they cremated you instead; that didn't seem, so bad, clean and final. Holly said they took all the blood out when a person was going to be buried, and put some chemical in. But Mary Jean didn't have any blood left.

  She remembered that slender lovely body drawn up in the convulsions of cramps, and later, sprawled out in a doped sleep. Quarrel or no quarrel—oh, God, how silly that seemed now—she had taken care of Mary Jean intimately. The thought of any further indignity to her was unbearable.

  She thought, I won't look at her when they bring her back. I can't.

  Ought to be packing. She was jumpy with impatience to be gone from this place, could hardly wait for the funeral to be over so she could leave, yet the thought of actually making plans paralyzed her. She went to the closet and stood looking at the double row of dresses and blouses.

  Bitsy came in without knocking. "I have to see you alone," she said imperatively. "Come on down to the kitchen and have some coffee."

  "I don't think we're supposed to go there."

  "Rules are made to be broken," Bitsy said primly. "Sometimes it's necessary to use your head."

  The kitchen was at the back of the basement, reached by a narrow cement-paved corridor that gave on dark mysterious storerooms, fruit cellars and coal bins. Joyce had never been there before, and in spite of fatigue and grief she was curious. Visitors were never shown through this part of the building, which was run by the servants under Mrs. Abbott's direction, and Mrs. Abbott was ladylike enough to ignore what she couldn't change. As a result, there was no regard for glamour here and not too much attempt at sanitation, either. The Home Ec classes had a lab kitchen and dining room in the Administration Building, and Joyce had assumed that the food she ate came from some place as white-enamelled, as glittering with stainless steel. Now she realized that the substructure of her meals was shabby to the point of slovenliness.