DO EVIL IN RETURN
To Faith Baldwin
Do Evil in Return © 1950 The Margaret Millar Charitable Unitrust
This volume published in 2017 by Syndicate Books
www.syndicatebooks.com
Distributed by
Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Do Evil in Return eISBN: 978-1-68199-009-5
Cover and interior design by Jeff Wong
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
“Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.”
—W. H. Auden
1
The afternoon was still hot but the wind carried a threat of fog to come in the night. It slid in through the open window and with curious, insinuating fingers it pried into the corners of the reception room and lifted the skirt of Miss Schiller’s white uniform and explored the dark hair of the girl sitting by the door. The girl held a magazine on her lap but she wasn’t reading it; she was pleating the corners of the pages one by one.
“I don’t know if Dr. Keating will be able to see you,” Miss Schiller said. “It’s quite late.”
The girl coughed nervously. “I couldn’t get here sooner. I—couldn’t find the office.”
“Oh. You’re a stranger in town?”
“Yes.”
“Were you referred to Dr. Keating by anyone?”
“Referred?”
“Did anyone send you?”
“I—no. I found her name in the phone book.” The girl rose suddenly and the magazine and her cheap brown handbag fell on the floor. “I’ve got to see her. It’s terrible important.”
“If you’ll let me have your name and address, I’ll tell doctor you’re here.”
“Violet O’Gorman, 916 Olive Street.”
“Miss?”
“Mrs., Mrs. Violet O’Gorman.”
Miss Schiller gave her a sharp look before she turned and rustled starchily into Charlotte’s office.
Charlotte had already put on her street clothes but she was resigned to the idea of a change in plan. It had been years since she’d spent a day without one.
She was adjusting her hat in front of the wall mirror, a tall, slender woman just past thirty, with an air of calm efficiency.
“Now what?” she said, without turning.
“Someone just came in. She wasn’t referred, said she got your name from the phone book.”
“Oh.”
“She calls herself Mrs. O’Gorman.”
“If that’s what she calls herself that’s probably her name,” Charlotte said crisply. “And by the way, Miss Schiller, when you’re talking on the phone please say what is the name, not what was the name. It sounds as if you’re talking to a corpse.”
“I try to please.” Miss Schiller’s tone and her compressed lips implied that Dr. Keating was beyond pleasing anyway.
Charlotte took off her hat again and ran her hand expertly over her smooth brown hair. Miss Schiller frowned faintly in the direction of the hat. She disapproved of the way Dr. Keating dressed after office hours—in big picture hats and sheer dresses and high-heeled pumps. A patient meeting her on the street might easily lose confidence in her, thinking she was on her way to a bridge or cocktail party instead of to the hospital to make her rounds. Miss Schiller herself had never had any confidence to lose. She went to a chiropractor for her lumbago and bought Chinese herbs at a little store downtown to build up her hemoglobin.
“Show Mrs. O’Gorman in, will you?”
“Very well, doctor.”
Miss Schiller went out, holding her hand against the small of her back, an indication of performance of duty while in pain. Charlotte smiled. She knew about the chiropractor and the Chinese herbs, she knew practically all there was to know about Miss Schiller, and so she was tolerant. To know all is to forgive all, she’d quoted to Lewis once, and she believed it sincerely. Lewis had replied that she was a remarkable woman. She had agreed, without conceit. It was amazing in this day and age to be able to survive at all without nervous tensions or insomnia or any of the obscure psychosomatic symptoms that plagued half the people who came into her office.
Charlotte was both healthy and happy. She drove herself, but not to the point of exhaustion. She was competent at her work, which was general practice; she had a shrewd if not profound mind, and a nice sense of humor. Most of her male colleagues called her Charley and spoke of her behind her back in a friendly, rather sexless way. She wasn’t sexless, though. There was Lewis. And eventually—well, eventually something would have to be done about Lewis. They were passing irrevocably beyond the moonlight-and-roses phase. It was sun-and-dandelions now, stronger, earthier stuff. Lewis was becoming urgent, detachment difficult.
She made it a rule not to think about Lewis during office hours. She pushed him out of her mind and fixed all her attention on the girl Miss Schiller brought into the office. Miss Schiller had a firm grip on the girl’s arm like a prison matron escorting a possible runaway.
Her face was red and indignant. “Imagine. She wasn’t going to come in. Off she ran. Imagine, after all the trouble you’ve . . .”
“That will be all, thanks, Miss Schiller,” Charlotte said.
“I was so coming in,” the girl protested when the door had closed on Miss Schiller. “I only went out in the corridor to find a drink of water. I got this awful thirst.”
“Sit down, Mrs. O’Gorman.”
The girl sat down apprehensively on the edge of a chair. She was about twenty, dark-haired and quite plain except for the radiance of her eyes and the healthy flush in her cheeks. Though it was a humid day she wore a heavy tweed coat which she held tight over her stomach with both hands. Her forehead bore a long zigzagging scar. The scar had welted and Charlotte wondered if the girl had had any x-ray treatments to make it less noticeable.
“I just got an awful thirst. I guess I drink about two gallons of water every day.”
“That’s good for you,” Charlotte said, “in your condition.”
The girl let out a little cry. “Oh God. Oh God, does it show? Does it show?”
“I’m sorry I startled you. I thought naturally . . .”
“How could it show already?”
“It doesn’t.”
“It must! You said—you said . . .” She covered her face with her hands. Tears spilled out between her fingers and dripped off her wrists.
She wore a wedding ring. But then, they all did. They bought them at the dime store. Charlotte thought that for some that must be the worst period of all—even worse than labor—when they went to the dime store to buy their rings. There probably wasn’t one of them who hadn’t dreamed of being a June bride. Charlotte felt depressed.
She said finally, “Where is your home, Mrs. O’Gorman?”
“In Oregon. Ashley, Oregon.”
“Are you married?”
“Yes. Yes. Only I left him. He isn’t the one, he isn’t the—the father.”
“What do you want me to do, Mrs. O’Gorman? . . . What’s your first name?”
“Violet.”
“Who sent you here, Violet?”
“No one.” The girl widened her eyes in a show of innocence. Charlotte wasn’t fooled. She thought, I hope the word isn’t around that I perform illegal operations.
“No one sent me,” Violet repeated. “Like I told the nurse outside I saw your name in the phone book and I came to you because
you was a woman, because I thought you’d understand how it is being in the family way with no husband.”
“You don’t want your baby, is that it?”
“How can I want it?” Violet asked simply.
“You’re young and healthy. If you go ahead and have the child you’ll be able to hold your job until the last few days . . . ”
“I don’t have a job.”
“Well, perhaps the man involved will contribute to your support. If you can prove that it’s his child, he’ll have to.”
“I can prove it, all right. I wasn’t living with Eddie. He said I was making him nervous so I went to stay with my sister for awhile. That’s how he knew the baby wasn’t his.” She touched the scar on her forehead with the tip of one finger. “He hit me with a lamp. I stood it for two months after that and then I left him. He said such terrible things to me. I didn’t mean to be bad.”
The girl started to cry again. Charlotte looked at her, crisp and businesslike. (“Does nothing move you, Charley?” Lewis had asked her last week before he left. “In my profession I can’t afford to be moved,” she had told him. “I would be weeping all the time and quite useless, don’t you see?” He didn’t see. In spite of his sophistication he judged the weight of an emotion by the amount of tears or laughter it displaced.)
She said, “I gather that the man involved doesn’t want to marry you.”
“He couldn’t anyway.” She fumbled in her coat pocket for a piece of Kleenex. She found one, sodden with previous tears and stained with lipstick. “He’s married already.”
“Did you know that when you . . . ?”
“Yes. He told me. But I didn’t care then. He was so different from anyone I ever met.”
“Older than you?”
“I guess, about forty.”
“Had you known him long?”
Violet uttered a sound that was almost like a laugh. “I never saw him before in my life.”
“Yet you . . . ?”
“Yes. Yes. I—oh, you wouldn’t understand.”
“I’ll try,” Charlotte said gravely.
“Well, he came in the bar where Eddie works—Eddie’s my husband. He began talking about the big redwood trees, how it was such a crime to cut them down. He said some of them were four or five thousand years old and two hundred and fifty feet high, and how they were almost human. I don’t remember his exact words but he talked like—like poetry.”
Charlotte watched her in silent pity.
“Well, Eddie said that was a lot of baloney about the trees, and when I started to talk he told me to shut up and go back to my sisters. I was scared not to. Eddie is—is tough.”
“Tough?”
“He used to be a pro fighter until his appendix burst. I didn’t want no trouble, so I left.”
“But not to your sister’s.”
She shook her head. “I went out and waited beside his car. It was the only car there with a California license. I—I really only wanted to apologize to him for Eddie’s bad manners. We talked for a while and then he said he had to go back to his motel because he was leaving in the early morning, going home.”
“That is, coming here, to Salinda?”
“Yes. I was awful disappointed. I mean, didn’t you never go to a big city like Portland and maybe catch someone’s eye when you were walking along the street—and you knew right away that you had something in common, a lot in common? I felt like that about him. . . . I guess you never been to Ashley.”
“No.” She had never heard of it.
“It’s a little town where people never stay. They go through it, heading east or north or south. No one stays.” She raised her head and said passionately, “I hate it. I hate Eddie, too.”
And out of the hatred, Charlotte thought, had come Violet’s union with the man who talked like poetry. To her he was probably a symbol of all the romantic and exciting people who passed through the town, heading east or north or south, but never stayed.
“I don’t know how it happened after that. I don’t know. I—oh doctor, please. You’ve got to help me.”
“I’m sorry I can’t, not in the way you mean.”
The girl let out a cry of despair. “I thought—I thought being you was a woman like me—being you . . .”
“I’m sorry,” Charlotte said again.
“What can I do? What can I do with this—this thing growing inside of me, growing and growing, and me with no money and no job and no husband. Oh God, I wish I was dead!” She struck her thighs with both fists. “I’ll kill myself!”
“You can’t, Violet. Stop now and be sensible.”
Miss Schiller appeared. She’d been listening at the door. She liked excitement, and violence was always cropping up in her dreams.
“Did you need me, doctor?”
“Why, no,” Charlotte said coolly. “As a matter of fact you may go home. I’ll lock up.”
“Well, I thought . . .”
“Good night, Miss Schiller.”
The door banged shut again.
Violet’s face was blotched with white. “She must of heard me. She’ll go around telling everyone.”
“She has no one to tell, only her cat.”
“C—cat?”
“She has a big tomcat; the two of them gossip together for hours. . . . Are you feeling better now, Violet?”
“Why should I? Nothing’s been changed.”
Charlotte felt a little foolish. Ordinary tact seemed silly in the face of such simple and direct reactions as Violet’s: How can I want this child? Why should I feel better when nothing is changed?
“Such operations are illegal,” Charlotte said bluntly, “unless they’re necessary. That is, medically necessary, in the case of a mother’s life being at stake.”
“My life is at stake.”
“You only think that now. Later on, when you adjust to the . . .”
“Please,” Violet said. “Please. Give me some medicine.”
“I can’t. Even if I could it wouldn’t work. Your pregnancy is too advanced. How far along are you?”
“Four months.”
Charlotte thought of the child secure inside Violet’s reluctant body, impervious to the violence of her fists and the animosity of her mind. It would be recognizably human by this time, the arms and legs well formed, the cervical flexure gone, the head nearly straight, the nose and lips and cheeks already distinct. Four months—how could the girl be sure?
“I’m sure,” Violet said. “It only happened once.” She raised her head and looked at Charlotte, half-hostile, half-anxious. “I guess you don’t believe that no more than Eddie did.”
“I believe it.”
“Just once, it happened. Just for a minute, and now look at me. It ain’t fair. I don’t deserve it.”
“I know . . . I know . . . This Eddie you mentioned, your husband . . . Perhaps your best bet, for the time being anyway, would be to go back to him if he’ll take you.”
“Oh, he’d take me, all right. He likes to have me around, somebody to cook for him and to bully. Oh, what’s the use sitting here talking? You won’t help me.”
“I can’t.”
“You can, but you won’t, because you’re afraid. Well, I’m afraid, too, worse than you.” Violet’s eyes were bleak. The crying had washed away their softness; they glared like marbles. “Doctor—you don’t know anybody else who’d . . . ”
“I’m sorry, I don’t,” Charlotte said honestly. There were rumors, of course, about old Dr. Chisholm, but then there were about many doctors, off and on, herself included. Most of the rumors originated with disgruntled patients or chronic cranks.
Violet was watching her, sadly, bitterly. “I guess you’ve never been desperate like I am.”
Charlotte was patient. “Now Violet, let’s not make this a contest be
tween you and me, who’s more afraid or who’s more desperate. This is a practical problem. We can’t solve it with emotions. Tell me, have you any place to stay?”
“My step-uncle keeps a boarding house downtown. He’s letting me stay in the back room upstairs until—until things are settled.”
“What things?”
“He thinks I should get money from this man—the father.”
“Have you tried?”
“Yes. But he wasn’t home. He was out of town.”
“Is he coming back?”
“Yes, tonight, they told me.”
“He doesn’t know that you’re pregnant?”
“No.”
“Do you think that he’ll admit that the child is his?”
“He’s gotta. It is. My uncle says I can go to court and make him pay a lot of money. I can ruin him forever, my uncle says.”
“I wouldn’t think of revenge, Violet—only of doing the right thing for yourself and your child.”
There was a long silence before Violet spoke again. “I don’t want to ruin him. I got no hard feelings being it was as much my fault as his. I don’t even want money. I only want to be the way I was before—without anything growing inside of me. I’ll put up with Eddie, with anything, just so’s I could be the way I was before.”
“I’m sorry,” Charlotte said. “I wish I could help you.”
The phone rang in the reception room and Charlotte went out to answer it. It was Lewis. She told him, rather brusquely, that she was glad he was back and that he was to call her later at home.
When she returned to her own office Violet was gone. She had slipped out the rear door, and the only evidence that she’d been there at all was the wad of sodden Kleenex left on the chair and the history sheet on Charlotte’s desk. The sheet was blank except for the name and address at the top, written in Miss Schiller’s librarian’s backhand: Mrs. Violet O’Gorman, 916 Olive Street.
She picked up the history sheet and stood holding it in her hands for more than a minute. Then she crumpled it into a ball and hurled it quite viciously at the wastebasket.
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