by Ann Bannon
At the station break, the secretary put his head in and said, “Beebo? Telegram for you.” He handed her the yellow envelope.
Beebo felt the bottom of her stomach sink southward. She was sure it couldn’t be good news. Not when she had left so much angry confusion behind in New York.
The wire was from Jack: “Get home, pal. N.Y. safer than L.A. Couple of people want your scalp. Jack.”
What does he want me to do, go back and give it to them? she wondered, taking her worry out on Jack.
“Was it bad news?” Toby said, looking at her face. Beebo pursed her lips and nodded.
“A friend in New York. He says my enemies want me dead.”
Toby paled, started to ask about it, and suddenly turned back to the TV screen as if afraid to know the truth.
When the show was over, Toby and Beebo went for a walk on the lawn, meandering side by side and speaking little. Beebo was full of the shadow-image of Venus on the screen; glittering, gorgeous, inaccessible. Finally Toby stopped in a garden path, standing stiff-legged and staring back at the lighted windows of the empty living room. “Beebo,” he said. “You’re not going to leave, are you?” It was not just Beebo he feared to lose. It was his mother as well.
Beebo’s hands curled into fists. “I don’t know,” she said, so softly it was hard to hear her. She knew she was going to have to, that she was way beyond herself here. And yet not even the discouragements of boredom, shame, and abstinence had completely crushed her. She kept thinking of how it might have been.
“I feel so bad about it all,” Toby said. “They have no right to say those things about you. It makes me sick. Stay with us, Beebo. Leo will take care of you.”
His faith in Leo moved her. She wished she could risk the truth with him, without destroying him. She wished he could know somehow what she was, and that the knowledge would not make him loathe her.
Beebo stood beside him, silent in the night, letting him rant against the cruel accusations in the papers with youthful outrage, protesting his trust and affection, and she felt a terrible sob coming up in her throat.
Leo had forbidden her to tell him she was his mother’s lover. But it was the meanest sort of cowardice to let him stand there and thank her, and beg her to stay on, when all the while she was betraying his gratitude.
“Nobody in this world ever did so much for Mom and me,” he was saying. “Honest, Beebo. If you go now, it would ruin everything. I don’t see—”
“Toby, stop it! Please! Oh, God,” Beebo cried. The sob broke and her voice went hoarse. “Stop it, stop it, stop it!” She covered her face with her hands for a few agonized moments. Toby stared at her as if she had taken leave of her senses, very much distressed at her sudden explosion. He tried clumsily to calm her.
“Did I say something wrong?” he asked apologetically.
“It’s no use, Toby,” Beebo cried, so brokenhearted that he was stunned. “I have to go.”
“Go where?”
“New York.”
“You said there were people back there who want to hurt you,” he objected, turning white again. “Beebo, if that’s true, you can’t go. I won’t let you.”
“Anything would be better than here,” she said, looking at him in torment. “They’ll flay me alive out here—if not tomorrow, then the next day. Oh, Toby, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” The sobs silenced her for a minute. “Please believe me. I wouldn’t do this to you for the world, only—”
Toby turned and walked away.
She pursued him, calling anxiously, “Toby! Toby, wait!” She caught up as he was letting himself down gingerly on a stone bench, moving for all the world like an old man with bursitis. Beebo joined him, reaching out to touch him, then pulling back when he turned away.
“I don’t understand,” she heard him murmur. “I told you—Leo—don’t you believe me? He can help—if it were true, but it’s not—”
He frightened her. The words were so breathless and disjointed, the voice so small and hurt. He was rocking back and forth, as if shaken with sobs, but there was not the slightest sound audible now from his throat. “Toby? Are you all right?” Beebo said.
He moved around, again with that strange parody of crippled age, and seemed about to answer her, when all of a sudden he startled her by springing straight into the air with a weird howl. In the elapsed time of less than a second, Beebo realized he hadn’t sprung at all; he had been thrown upright by the abruptly powerful tensing of his entire muscular system. He was having an epileptic seizure.
And before she could move to help, he had fallen forward, rigid as a cigar store Indian. He struck his head on a decorative rock across the path when he hit the ground. Beebo cried out, horrified, and then dashed to his side, lifting him carefully off the gravel and onto the soft grass.
Her years of experienced with sick animals and illness steadied her a little. She knew he mustn’t swallow his tongue but it was too late to put anything between his teeth. His jaws were locked shut. She rolled him gently on his side, thinking that he could breathe better and would be less likely to choke on his own saliva, which came foaming out of his clenched jaws. He was quivering like a vibrator machine and groaning uncontrollably while the white suds oozed from his mouth. It was a ghostly wail that made Beebo shiver. And yet she knew that a seizure—even one as alarming to see as this one—shouldn’t be a cause for panic. Aside from his contortions, it was the blow on his head that worried her, but she couldn’t get a look at it.
Toby’s feet were pointed downward, tight and hard as a toe dancer’s, and his arms were glued to his sides. Beebo was relieved when finally she felt him go limp. But it was then that she saw his forehead and gasped. There was a gash in it, deep and ragged. She began to tremble with alarm. Now that Toby was relaxed, the wound opened like a fountain. Such quantities of blood flowed over his face and onto Beebo and the ground beneath them that she felt almost sick.
She tried to pick him up, but her legs failed her momentarily and she collapsed beside him, sweating frantically.
“This won’t help him, idiot!” she berated himself. “Get up!” She tried again and made it, desperate to get him in the house and clean the wound. She wanted help, anybody, a doctor—Mrs. Sack. “Mrs. Sack!” she shouted suddenly, but there was no sound from the house. Mrs. Sack’s room was on the other side on the top floor and she would never hear Beebo calling from the lawn below.
Beebo lifted Toby and carried him into the house. She put him down on a satin-upholstered sofa, watching with pity and fear as the red blood soaked into the pink silk. She pressed her bare hand down hard on the wound and the flow abated slightly. Nearby was one of the house intercom phones, and Beebo reached it with her free hand.
“Mrs. Sack,” she said breathlessly. “I’m in the living room with Toby. He had an attack and hit his head. Call the doctor and then get down here—fast!”
Mrs. Sack rushed into the living room moments later, armed with rolls of gauze and tape and disinfectants. She stopped at the sight of Toby, so limp and colorless, except for the scarlet stains on his face and the sofa.
“I’ve been waiting for something like this all my life,” she said grimly. Beebo was astonished to see how firm and fearless she was; not at all the comfortable muffin she seemed when all was well with her boy. “We’ve had some bad falls before, but not like this.”
“Is the doctor coming?” Beebo asked.
“Yes, in ten minutes.” She knelt by Toby, washing the wound while Beebo watched.
“Shall I call Venus?” Beebo said.
“No,” said Mrs. Sack emphatically. “She’s worse than nothing in a crisis. She goes all to pieces. It doesn’t help Toby and it certainly doesn’t help the doctor.”
Beebo thought, I should be grateful she’s here—she knows just what to do. And yet she was distressed to think that Venus should be playing goddess at a party while her son lay hurt and bleeding—and no one was making a move to tell her.
“She has to be told, Mrs.
Sack,” Beebo said.
“Go and tell her, if you must,” Mrs. Sack said. “She can meet us at the hospital. At least over there they can give her a sedative.”
Beebo stood uncertainly by the phone, trying to picture herself walking in on the fancy party in her bloody slacks; infinitely preferring to call.
Mrs. Sack looked around. “Beebo, this boy is more my child than hers—she says so herself,” she said unexpectedly. “All his life he’s come to me when he was hurt, and I’m the one who knows how to care for him. Not her. It’s my job. My life.” She was as proud and strong in her words as a soldier bristling with defense.
To Beebo, staring at her, it became clear that Venus didn’t just give Toby up. Toby was deftly taken from her by this plump, kind-hearted woman who never had a child of her own, but was obviously made to mother one. She believed Toby was truly her child because Venus had forfeited her right to him, even the right to be there to comfort him and patch his wounds.
“Mrs. Bogardus could have had him when he was born,” Mrs. Sack went on, ministering to Toby. “But she practically threw him at me. And I was overjoyed to have a little son to raise and love. She can’t walk in here like a queen and demand him back, just because he cuts himself and scares her.”
Beebo went over and patted Mrs. Sack’s shoulders. “I’m sorry,” she said gently. “Nobody’s criticizing you, Mrs. Sack. But Venus is his mother, no matter how much you’ve done for him or how much you love him.”
“If you call that woman,” Mrs. Sack said, turning around and standing up to italicize her words, “I will not be responsible for the condition of this boy. Beebo, you’re a nice youngster and you’re his friend. It’ll be bad enough for Venus to see him at the hospital, but if she comes racing in here shrieking bloody murder, she’s likely to make Toby believe it. Do you want a sick boy or a dead one on your conscience?”
Beebo ran a distraught hand through her hair. “But Mrs. Sack, I can’t go get her.”
“Nonsense. Just change your clothes and drive over. It should take you about half an hour, and by that time the doctor will be with us and Toby will be at the hospital.”
“But the papers…” Beebo muttered.
“I don’t read the papers, Beebo. But I’m quite sure they’ll forgive you for getting the mother of a sick boy from a party.” She had turned back to Toby. “It’s an emergency and there’s no one else to go.”
“What about Rod—her secretary?”
“He doesn’t drive. And besides, he overdramatizes everything. He’d really fix Mrs. Bogardus.” Mrs. Sack didn’t seem to care whether Beebo ever got there. But Beebo knew Venus had to be told at once. Venus herself had admitted to hysterical behavior in the face of Toby’s attacks. Perhaps the only way then was to pick her up and drive her to the hospital, as Mrs. Sack suggested.
Beebo put on some clean clothes in her room, and as she ran down the stairs again, headed for her car, she heard the newly arrived doctor saying on the phone, “Yes, a concussion. Get an ambulance over here.” He looked up and saw Beebo.
“Are you Miss Brinker? Get his mother, will you? Tell her not to worry—I don’t want two patients on my hands tonight. Better not say much about the wound. Just tell her it’s a bump. We’re hospitalizing him till the risk of hemorrhage is passed.”
“Yes, sir,” Beebo said, and ran out to the garage.
She left her car directly in front of the main entrance to the house where the party was, and went in.
“Excuse me, this is a private party—” said a doorman, but Beebo, with that peculiar air of authority that came to rescue her from various crises, interrupted him calmly.
“Where’s Miss Bogardus?” she said, scanning the living room. “It’s an emergency.”
The butler, who read the gossip columns like everyone else, gazed at her with new interest. “I believe she’s occupied,” he said with a venal smile. Beebo gave him a twenty-dollar bill, too worried even to begrudge it.
“You’ll find her in the back gardens. Out the French doors,” he said, gesturing toward them.
Beebo strode through the champagne-stained living room. Many a famous face glanced at her, and a columnist whispered to his scribe to take notes.
She slipped through the heavy shadows bordering the spotlighted garden. Venus was at the farthest corner. Beebo simply looked for the heaviest concentration of men. In the center, slim and straight in her coruscating sequins, stood Venus Bogardus: a silver exclamation point in the purple dark.
Too much shivaree had followed Beebo out of the house for Venus to be unaware of it. Leo alerted her at almost the exact moment her eyes fell on her lover. There was a half-second of undressed fury visible in her eyes, flashing brighter than her dazzling gown. And then she pulled her pride across her face like a veil.
Beebo walked toward her, her mission making her impossibly sure of herself. The two women eyed each other as Beebo approached down an aisle of staring men, like an infernal bridegroom passing through an honor guard of devils. Luckily, neither Beebo nor Venus were people to collapse in the face of public shock.
Silence fell, except from Leo, who said clearly, “I’ll tell you just once, Beebo. Leave. You’re fired, and I never want to see you again.” He spoke softly but in the hushed garden his voice carried to the audience of Hollywood topnotchers.
“Fired? I never worked for you, Leo,” Beebo said.
“Venus, tell her to go,” Leo ordered his wife.
But Venus, watching Beebo, loved her enough to feel instinctively that Beebo would not come to humiliate her in public without a drastic reason. With her characteristic public calm, so different from the histrionics she indulged in private, she walked boldly to Beebo and said, “All right, what is it?”
Beebo hadn’t even time to take a breath before she heard Leo say, “By God, you get that kid out of here or I will.”
Venus ignored him, walking toward the house with Beebo coming close in her wake. But this was once that Leo would not let himself be flouted in front of his friends. He had to bring Venus to heel as a matter of pride, and not only because he considered her action self-destructive. It seemed as if Venus were making a donkey of him before God and the world as payment for the years of tolerance and love and patience he had spent on her. It was too much for him. He caught up with her, spun her around, and brushed Beebo aside.
“Tell her to get out of our lives, or I’ll take her apart,” he said. He so rarely threatened Venus that he scared her. But Beebo faced him. “Leo, why in hell do you think I’m here? I came—”
He didn’t let her finish. “You cocky little bitch, you want it all, don’t you? Even her ruination! After all I told you.”
“Let me explain!” Beebo said, alarmed now like Venus. But Leo reached out with icy rage and slapped her face. A red storm swirled up suddenly in Beebo, and she lit into him so hard that for several amazed seconds, he let himself be punched. But when he got his bearings he was after her with all the tornado fury of a cuckolded husband. Every man who had ever shared a bed with Venus Bogardus got a souvenir sock that night—and every girl. Only it was Beebo who took the blows.
She fought well enough, but Leo came on with a wild single-minded lust for vengeance that had her back in the grass before long, heaving for breath, cut and bruised. She would never surrender, and Leo, possessed by years of bitter grievances and pent-up vengeance, was in no mood to be merciful.
Beebo, sinking beneath his punishment, became aware at last that the blows had ceased. She heard Leo give a cry and opened her eyes to see Venus, shoe in hand, glaring at him. She turned to Beebo and her face softened. “Can you get up?” she asked. “I’ll take you home.”
Leo put a hand to the back of his head where the sharp heel had cut his scalp. He brought his fingers away, wet and red, and turned to look at his wife. But Venus, taking advantage of his brief confusion, had pulled Beebo to her feet and rushed her through the house toward the car.
The crowd surging after them deterred L
eo’s chase just enough to prevent him from catching them as they drove away. An uneasy silence settled on the party as the silver coupé sped off. Nobody knew what to say to Leo. But he left almost at once, making brusque apologies to his host.
“Well,” said the smug voice of a Hollywood observer, who wrote for one of the trades, “I guess it’s true, after all. I wasn’t going to print it.”
“Print what? What?” the crowd chorused eagerly.
“The tip I got from New York last week.”
“I got it, too,” a woman reporter piped up. “I thought it was sour grapes, but I have my people checking it.”
The guests began to rumble for enlightenment, but the first gossipist said, “Read it in the morning paper, friends.” And he left with several other members of the movie press, all chattering as they walked down the drive.
Beebo slumped in the front seat, her head against the window, mute with pain for several moments.
“We’ll take you home and clean up those cuts, darling,” Venus said, wincing at the sight of them when she stopped for a light.
Beebo shook her head. “Dr. Pitman has Toby at the hospital,” she said. “That’s what I came about.”
“What?” Venus was so shaken she almost lost control of the car. Beebo had to grab the wheel from her. “It’s okay, honey, he’s going to be all right,” she said quickly. “He had a seizure, that’s all.”
“God, I knew it was something awful the minute I saw your face,” Venus cried as the car moved erratically down the street. “And that sonofabitch husband of mine had to pound you to pieces—”
“Don’t blame Leo,” Beebo said, her voice soft and drained. “I don’t. It wasn’t me he was hitting so much as all the people who came before me.”
Venus was crying and Beebo tried to make her stop the car. “Toby’s had dozens of seizures in his life, but they didn’t put him in the hospital. What aren’t you telling me?” Venus said.
