White Collar Girl

by Renée Rosen

  “Hey, Jordan, do you have time for a drink?”

  “Sure.” I set the wire report aside, switched off my desk lamp and placed the cover over my typewriter. “The others are over at Riccardo’s. Want to meet up with them?”

  M bit her lip and looked around the city room. “Would you mind if we went somewhere else? Just the two of us?”

  We ended up at Boul Mich and sat at a booth toward the back. We recognized a few people in there, including Mike Royko, who was at the far end of the bar. We kept our backs toward them and placed our orders, two Beefeaters up, dry with a twist.

  “So what’s going on?” I asked after our martinis arrived. “Is everything okay?”

  She shook her head and began chewing off her lipstick.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “I’m in trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  She lowered her eyes. “What kind do you think?” She rested her hand over her belly.

  “Oh. How?”

  “How do you think?”

  “No, I mean, I—I didn’t know you were seeing anyone. I know you go on dates all the time, but I didn’t know there was anyone you were, you know . . . serious with.”

  She laughed. “Then maybe you’re not as good of a reporter as you think you are.” She planted her elbows on the table and braced her head in her hands. “I always said it wouldn’t happen to me. And, well, here I am.” She gave off another sour laugh. “I’m so damn scared I can’t think straight.”

  “What about the father?”

  She shook her head.

  “Does he know? Maybe he could . . .”

  “He’s not an option. Believe me. I’m on my own on this one.” She closed her eyes, her band of false lashes creating a strange shadow on her face. “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Everything’s so out of order. I was supposed to meet the man of my dreams. Get married. Make a home for us. And then—then I’d have children.”

  “Have you thought about what you want to do?”

  “Pretty damn obvious, isn’t it? I’m not going to have a child on my own. I can’t do that. And I can’t disappear for six or seven months and have a baby and come back acting like nothing happened.” She leaned forward and grabbed my hand. “I need your help.”

  “Me? What can I do?”

  “Remember that piece you wanted to write about doctors who were performing abortions?”

  “Oh, God. M, no. I don’t know . . .”

  “Were any of them safe?”

  “They’re probably all in jail by now. Besides, are you sure that’s what you want to do?”

  “Please, spare me the lecture.” The martini was trembling in her hand. “I’ve tried everything else. I’ve punched myself. I drank half a bottle of gin in a scorching-hot tub.” She took another sip from her drink, her hand still shaking. “I even contemplated a coat hanger, but I lost my nerve.”

  “Oh, M.” I grew sick inside.

  “I know, but what choice do I have?”

  “How far along are you?”

  She shrugged. “About eight weeks.”

  “Have you been to a doctor?”

  “I don’t need to go to a doctor. I know I’m pregnant.” She cleared her throat and reached for my hand. “Will you help me? Please?”

  • • •

  “It’s not for me,” I said to Ahern the next day when I met him for lunch at Beefy 19, an out-of-the-way place that sold burgers and hot dogs for nineteen cents apiece. Beefy 19 was on Berwyn and Western and catered to motorcycle riders and hot-rodders, and neither one of us was likely to know anyone there.

  “It’s for a friend,” I said. “She doesn’t know where else to turn.”

  “And you figured I would?” Ahern closed his menu, stuffed it into the metal holder and signaled the waitress over.

  Originally I’d thought about asking Scott only because now that he was a defense attorney, he’d been rubbing elbows with the types of people who probably needed a doctor like that every now and again. But in the end I couldn’t bring him in on something so messy. Besides, Ahern and I were the keepers of each other’s secrets, and I figured this would be just one more to hold in our pockets.

  “Okay,” Ahern said after the waitress had disappeared with our orders, “there is one guy I know of.”

  “Do you have an address? A telephone number?”

  “He never gives that information out. I’ll have to take you and your friend.”

  So it was arranged.

  The following Saturday morning M and I waited outside her apartment on Lincoln Park West until Ahern pulled up in his Chevrolet. I introduced him only as Richard and explained that I’d met him while conducting research for the abortion piece I’d never gotten to write. M didn’t ask any questions. She didn’t say a word on the way there. She just smoked cigarettes, pushing the live butts through a crack in the window before lighting another one.

  While Ahern fiddled nonstop with the radio, I wondered how I’d gotten myself in the middle of all this. We drove on until finally, somewhere up on Irving Park, we came to an old limestone building with three small windows just above ground level. It looked like the sort of place where ominous things occurred. I held M’s hand as we went inside while Ahern waited for us out in the car.

  There was nothing medical about this facility. No canisters of cotton, no tongue depressors, no shiny silver trays of instruments. Instead we were in a little room with a couple of folding chairs and an opened box of wafers on a metal table. There was a dirty cat box resting in the corner. A door off to the side was cracked a hair. The doctor—if he even was a doctor—never gave us his name. He wore a white coat, but that wasn’t enough to convince me.

  “I’ll need the money up front,” he said.

  M pinched the clasp on her Kelly bag and handed him a hundred dollars. She’d told me she had to borrow the last twenty from a neighbor. She was tapped out. I had a mind to grab M and run back out to the car, but he had already opened the door and gestured for her to go inside and change into the gown on the table. He asked me to wait in the outer room, but before the door closed, I got a good look inside. No overhead light, no windows, just a table and a stool.

  I expected screams. I expected blood. I expected it to take longer than it did. But soon M was dressed again and joined me in the outer room. She seemed fine, almost a little too fine, and I had to wonder if she’d even gone through with it.

  “Are you okay?” I whispered as we were walking back to Ahern’s car.

  “Yeah. He said to expect a really bad period. Said probably sometime this afternoon, but that I’d be good as new by Monday.”

  So that was it? That was an abortion?

  We drove M home, but before Ahern dropped me off he said, “Could you use a drink? I know I could.”

  We went to a little place off the beaten path on Diversey Parkway called Mackerel’s. They had mounted fish on the walls and photographs of boats everywhere. Neither one of us had been there before, and it was unlikely that anyone we knew would have wandered in.

  Ahern twiddled the speared olive in his glass and thanked me for agreeing to the drink. “I wasn’t ready to go home yet. My wife, she . . . Well, we’ve been trying to start a family. I don’t think I could look her in the eye right now. You know, given what we did today. A woman who wants a baby more than anything in this world would never understand . . .” His eyes misted over, and he looked away, placing his thumb and index finger over his eyelids. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just that we’ve been trying for so long. I hope your friend doesn’t regret this for the rest of her life.”

  I was always surprised when Ahern gave me these occasional peeks at his vulnerable side. He really was a good guy. I reached across the table and squeezed his hand, which seemed to choke him up all the more.

  On our second drink he told me about his days in law school. “I was working three jobs and taking a full course load. All I wanted was to be a lawyer. I came from a fa
mily of steel workers. I saw what that kind of physical labor does to a man. My father was old before his time, arthritis in his back. His feet and hands were like sandpaper. . . . I knew I had to do better for myself. I was going to make my money with my head, not my hands.” He rattled the ice in his glass and grinned. “Didn’t mean to talk your ear off like that.” He shook his head and redirected the conversation. “So what about you? I never had the chance to ask what happened with the fiancé.”

  “How did you know?”

  “The ring. You don’t wear it anymore. So I figured . . .”

  “Oh”—I waved the matter aside—“it just wasn’t meant to be.”

  “Well, I’m sorry it didn’t work out for you.”

  “It’s okay.” I shrugged, avoiding his gaze by staring at a mackerel on the wall above his head. It was crazy how the sadness still sneaked up on me. Just when I thought I was completely over Jack, someone would say something, or a song would come on the radio, or I’d see something and my entire body would fill with pain. Suddenly I’d be longing and aching to be with him even though I knew it would never work.

  “You really don’t like talking about yourself, do you?” said Ahern.

  “I’m better at asking the questions than answering them.”

  “You really are tough, aren’t you?”

  I had just taken a pull from my drink and ended up half laughing, half choking. “Hardly,” I said, catching a trickle of gin running down my chin. “I only look tough.”

  “I’m serious. Aren’t you ever off your guard?”

  “Apparently, according to my ex-fiancé, I’m a bit cold. But really, it’s not that. I just don’t like to burden people with my problems.”

  “But you’re not burdening them if someone asks.” He cocked his head to the side and smiled. “So is that what happened with the two of you? He wanted you to burden him?”

  “Oh, please. No, what he wanted”—I paused, a finger raised to accent my forthcoming correction—“what he needed was a nice Irish-Catholic girl.”

  “And what are you?”

  “I might have an Irish name, but that’s where it ends. I’m not Catholic. I’m not anything.”

  “So it was religion that got in the way?”

  “Sure, we can blame it on religion. It’s easy to say that mixed marriages have disaster written all over them. But really, our problems ran a lot deeper than that.” I raised my glass and realized that not only had I already finished my drink but that I’d been babbling. “Oh, God, don’t listen to me. I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  Ahern didn’t say anything, but he seemed wholly invested in my every word. Maybe it was that, or maybe it was that second martini, but for whatever reason, I kept talking.

  “Jack couldn’t handle me being a journalist. But he knew I was serious about my career when he met me. My God, I come from a family of journalists. Did you know that? Did I ever tell you that my father was a newspaperman and war correspondent? My grandfather was a newspaperman, too. And so was my brother. He was a reporter. He worked at the Sun-Times. . . .” I was drunk and no longer in command of my words, and I realized that I was making Ahern uncomfortable.

  He shifted in his chair and fidgeted with his cuff before he gestured to the bartender for the check. He turned back to me, consulting his wristwatch. “It’s getting late. I hate to do this, but I have to get going.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m afraid I was rambling.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Ahern gestured again for the bartender. “Check.”

  Suddenly I was very drunk and it seemed like neither one of us could get out of there fast enough.

  • • •

  Later that night, after I sobered up, I telephoned M to see how she was doing.

  “It’s like he said. Just a really bad period.”

  She sounded tired. I asked if she needed anything, and she assured me she was fine. And she did sound all right, but as the evening wore on, a nagging feeling crept up on me and I couldn’t shake it. Finally, I broke down and telephoned her again. This time there was no answer. Maybe she stepped out to get a bite to eat, or she was sleeping? When there was still no answer half an hour later, the nagging feeling grew more persistent. Two more hours passed without an answer from her, and I grabbed my handbag, flagged down a taxi and went over to her apartment.

  I rang the doorbell and knocked until I heard footsteps padding across the floor inside. She cracked the door, and even through that sliver I could see how pale she was. As soon as she let me inside, I gasped. Even before she opened her mouth, I knew she was in trouble. She was standing in a pink negligee soaked from the waist down in blood, and there was a crimson trail leading from her bedroom to the front door.

  “Help me,” she said, her voice weak and strained. “Something’s wrong. I think I’m dying.”

  I hoisted her in my arms as best I could and got her back into bed, her blood-soaked hands faintly clutching to me. I called a doctor I knew who wouldn’t have performed the abortion, but he wouldn’t have reported it to the authorities. M was feverish, so I fed her aspirin and placed a cool washcloth on her forehead. It seemed to take forever for the doctor to arrive. While we waited for him, M slept and I cleaned up the trail of blood on the floor with a pile of rags and a bucket I found beneath her kitchen sink. The water turned scarlet after just a few wipes.

  When the doctor showed up, I waited outside her bedroom door, pacing. Fifteen minutes later he came into the hallway, looking at me with such grave disappointment.

  “Who did this to her?”

  “I don’t know.” It was the truth. I didn’t know the guy’s name. Hell, I didn’t even know who the father was. “Is she going to be okay?”

  “She’s lost a lot of blood. She’ll recover, but if you’d waited any longer, she could have died. You girls, you.” He shook his head and handed me a prescription. “Get this filled. Make sure she takes it. All of it.”

  I stayed with M that night, preparing cold compresses for her forehead and forcing tea and dry toast on her. It was the first time I’d ever seen her without makeup, without the false lashes, the penciled-in beauty mark, the painted-up lips. It was surprising just how truly beautiful she was as herself.

  She moved in and out of sleep during the night while I kept watch from a chair parked in the corner of her room. There was a stack of movie magazines on the floor next to me. I leafed through issues of Photoplay and Movie Life. I was reading about Ava Gardner when M began muttering. More cool compresses, more medicine and she fell back asleep.

  I got up to stretch my legs and wandered out to the living room. M’s place was nearly twice the size of mine. I couldn’t imagine how she afforded it and I knew now that her father really had died, so he wasn’t the one paying for it. I wondered if it belonged to the baby’s father.

  Big as it was, the place was a mess. There were more movie magazines strewn across the couch and floor, dirty glasses and coffee cups on the tables, lampshades hanging cockeyed. I straightened up the stack of magazines and set them on a bookshelf next to the fireplace. I couldn’t help but notice that most of the titles she had were romance novels. One book, A Certain Smile by Françoise Sagan, was resting on her coffee table. As I picked it up a bookmark—or what I thought was a bookmark—fell to the floor, facedown. When I reached for it and turned it over, I was speechless.

  I was holding a strip of photographs, the kind taken in a photo booth. What I found shocking was that the people in the photographs were M and Mr. Ellsworth. Together. Smiling. Cuddling. Kissing. I studied the shots one by one. There was no mistaking what I was seeing and yet I was confused. Mr. Ellsworth was married and M seemed to always be dating other men. She had a string of them, a dinner or two with this one or that and then she’d be on to the next.

  I looked again at the photo strip. M was seated on his lap, an arm thrown over his shoulder, her face nuzzled into his collarbone, then his neck and finally it was her mouth on his. A new picture of my o
wn was forming inside my head. I thought back to Christmas Eve and the shocked look on Mr. Ellsworth’s face when he saw M all dressed up, and how he’d questioned me about her plans later that night. This was not just some fleeting affair. I realized Mr. Ellsworth must have been the father. He was the one paying for this apartment.

  I studied the first shot. I’d never seen Mr. Ellsworth smile before. I’d never even seen his teeth, always hidden by his beard. For an older man, he was handsome. So where was he now? She needed him. He should have been there with her now, not me.

  I heard M stirring in the bedroom and went to her. I didn’t say anything about Mr. Ellsworth. She had enough on her mind as it was.

  But the next day, when I went into the city room, her secret was eating me up inside. As the day wore on I became aware of Mr. Ellsworth passing by M’s desk, looking for her, for signs of her: a cigarette burning in the ashtray, a steaming cup of coffee, a sweater tossed over the chair—anything. Surely he knew why she wasn’t at work.

  It took all my will not to scream at him to get himself over to her apartment. I knew I couldn’t say a word. He was still my managing editor and this was none of my business, despite M having dragged me into the middle of it.

  I went back to my typing, unable to look at Mr. Ellsworth.

  Chapter 26

  • • •

  I knew it would happen sooner or later. After all, there were only so many bars the newspaper gang went to and I’d already run into Jack at most of them. Short, friendly encounters, quickly forgotten after the next drink.

  But there was that one night in October when I glanced across the hazy, smoke-filled room at Andy’s on Hubbard Street and saw Jack Casey with another girl. A beautiful girl with long dark hair that reached her rear end. I sobered up. It was like someone had just thrown ice on my heart.

  I had to turn my back to them, but M was with me, reporting the details.

  “They’re laughing about something,” M said. “Sitting pretty close together. But they’re not holding hands or anything. . . . And don’t worry, she may have that hair, but you’re much prettier than she is. . . .”