by Ann Bannon
“No, but—”
“Do you deny you’re gay?”
“No, but—”
“Do you deny Venus would lose everything if she went with you? Do you love her so much you can’t wait to destroy her?”
“Leo, for the love of God—”
“For the love of my wife I say these hard things!” he shouted at Beebo. “You were warned. You have no business standing there now with a slack jaw. What will you do, take a cold-water flat in Greenwich Village and live on love till you get hungry and cold? Do you think Venus Bogardus can go anywhere in the world right now with the papers headlining her lewd romance with another woman? ‘Venus Bogardus, queen of hearts, has found a queen of her own.’” He was quoting, unknown to the two women, the morning’s gossip columns.
Venus, thinking he had made it up, turned all her famous fury on him. “Get out of this house, you stinking dog!” she cried. “I never want to see you or hear your filth again!”
“I’ll be over at Sam’s when you’re ready to call me,” Leo said, referring to the friend who took him in whenever Venus turned him out.
“I’ll never call you!” she screamed at his retreating back. It was always her parting shot. Later in the day she would pick up the phone and tell him that even though he was a sonofabitch, she guessed he’d better come home. Miss Pinch had just squeezed a batch of fresh orange juice.
At the door Leo picked up a stack of newspaper columns, torn from the morning papers, and held them out to Venus. “These will pass the time while Beebo is packing,” he said, but Venus refused to glance at them. Beebo, in the grip of a spiraling alarm, took them instead.
Leo looked at her. “I’m sorry I had to hurt you,” he said. “If you weren’t so young you might have handled things better. I got hurt too, Beebo. The most I can hope for now is to save Venus and Toby. It’ll take all my ingenuity—and maybe all my money. And I have to start at once. Just like you have to get gone.”
She didn’t answer him, but she felt moved, realizing slowly that he needed her pity as much as she needed his. She could never forgive him for calling her a freak, and yet it had been a valuable lesson in the prevailing attitude toward mannish women.
Jack had been sympathetic and patient with her. Pat, himself quite feminine, had responded to her much the way that the Lesbians who liked her did. Even the people back in Juniper Hill had been pretty used to her most of her life. They watched her grow up and while they laughed unkindly and sometimes lied about her, still they had never said to her face the things Leo Bogardus had said. Beebo damned well had to stand up and fight back, or lose her self-respect forever.
Her gaze fell on the pile of columns in her hand, as Leo left them alone. Venus tried to throw them all in the wastebasket, till she saw the spreading shock on Beebo’s face. She read over Beebo’s shoulder, holding her breath:
“Venus Bogardus, ruler of the heart of men the world over, is ruled herself, it seems: by a WOMAN! Is this true, or just vicious gossip? Readers of my column know I never use any but the most carefully validated tips from reliable sources. This one has been double-checked and we can say positively: the handsome youngster sharing the Bogardus manse as companion to Venus’s son is really the apple of the movie star’s eye. Is Venus Bogardus really one of those unfortunate misfits, a LESBIAN? Leo, do you know about this? Does your stepson know it? Our hearts are with you in this difficult situation.
“Readers who doubt me may ask themselves if I would dare to print such an accusation under the threat of legal action from Miss Bogardus, if it were false. No! I would never, etc., etc….”
Beebo shuffled through the others quickly. It was the top story in all the trades and made full columns in the big L.A. dailies. She looked at Venus and saw such a pallor on her face that she was afraid Venus would drop where she stood. Beebo helped her to her satin-draped bed, where Venus deflated in a heap.
Beebo stood beside her, her hands crammed into her pockets, afraid to touch her. At last she asked, “Does this mean I have to go right now? Alone?” She knew it did; she had known all along it was coming. Yet here they were, and the time was upon them, and it was abysmally hard to do. Strangely, she found herself picturing Paula again. It comforted her. Not that she had any illusions about a warm welcome from Paula. But even the thought of a fight with the little redhead was better than the thought of not seeing her at all.
Beebo touched Venus’s long hair gently. “A few minutes ago you were telling Leo he’d have to kick you out, too, if he wanted me to go.” It wasn’t kind to remind Venus, and yet it was a relief in a way.
“Oh, darling, I’m such a coward,” Venus said brokenly. “I can’t bear it. Where in hell did they find out? Miss Pinch would never tell. The others don’t like me, but they wouldn’t do anything to ruin Leo. Besides, I was never around during the day and at night we were so careful. How in hell—?”
Beebo knew perfectly well how it got out. She touched the telegram in her pocket fearfully, and Venus saw her face change and guessed. “Your friends in New York?” she asked.
Beebo pulled out the wire. Jack had written: “Hope this catches you before the sky falls, pal. If not, chin up. We love you. I found out too late from Pat that Mona wired the Hollywood press. Come home and ride out the storm. This is a time for friends to help you, not lovers. Jack.”
Beebo folded it with the meticulous care you give to the oddments of life that happen to be in your hands when pain strikes; each fold careful, straight, and neat—as tidy as her life was not. There is an obscure comfort in smoothing a small piece of paper to its ultimate neatness. It seems a symbol of order and reason that must somehow rescue you from the chaos of suffering. It eases the misery that wants to pour out of your eyes and wail from your throat.
“My friends in New York,” Beebo said huskily, “are still my friends. My enemies in New York did this to me. Venus, Venus…” She shook her head. “I don’t know what to say. I’ve been trying to tell you, but I didn’t know how. I thought we could part lovers and come together again, still lovers, some day.”
Venus reached up for her, both of them admitting tacitly that it could never have lasted; neither willing to say the words outright.
But Beebo rejected her arms. “I have to confess something terrible to you,” she said. “I—I brought on Toby’s attack. I was telling him I thought I would have to leave here, so you wouldn’t be hurt by the papers. He got more and more upset and strange…he tried to answer me…and then suddenly he shot up and fell over.”
Venus looked away. “It might have happened anyway,” she said. “We know so little…. I’m going to lose him, Beebo. He’ll never get over this.”
“You’re wrong. You’ve got to be! You can’t lose all you worked for with him in one stroke like that,” Beebo said.
“Maybe Leo can help me,” Venus said, the dimmest spark of hope in her eye. “He always seems to put me back together. Maybe he can do it for Toby.”
Beebo could see that she was floundering at the prospect of losing the props that had supported her for so long: Leo, Toby, her money, mass love.
“One thing you have I’ll never have, darling,” Venus told her quietly. “Courage. I’ll bet you didn’t know how much till now. Maybe you’ve got it because without it you’d have been destroyed long ago. Well…I hate to admit it, but Leo is my courage. I can’t run away with you, even though my heart breaks to let you go.” She stopped talking for a minute till her voice steadied a little. “I thought you’d given Toby to me at last, but I’m afraid you’ve lost him for me forever.”
“I hope to God he has better sense than that,” Beebo said, kneeling by the bed with her face near Venus’s. “I hope he loves both of us more than that, and I think he does. He’s brighter and steadier than you are, Venus. Besides, he’s lived all his life with a condition that makes him different from ordinary people. Maybe that will help him understand me a little now.”
Venus stopped crying and embraced Beebo. “Forgive me,�
�� she whispered. “All I want to say to you is, thank you. For the time I had with Toby, for the love you gave me.”
For a moment Beebo wanted to stay so badly she was ready to sacrifice her life again—but only for a moment. It was easy to get carried away when you had your arms full of Venus.
“I love you, Beebo,” Venus said seriously. “Some day you’ll know how it feels when you’re my age, and the girl you’ll adore forever is yours. And you know it’s going to end before long and you’ll have to go on living somehow.”
Beebo caressed her shoulders without looking at her face. “You’ll never say you love me again, will you?” she murmured. “Will you say it to another girl?”
Venus’s arms tightened around her. “Will you?” she countered.
“You’ll say it to men as long as you live, won’t you?” Suddenly it seemed unbearable to Beebo; bad enough to know that other girls would follow her, even if Venus never loved any of them. But intolerable that she would keep on climbing into bed with men, too. Her hands hardened on Venus’s shoulders. “God, how I wish I could make you choose!” she said. “Be gay or be straight. Don’t be both. The only other girl I know who’s both is contemptible.”
Venus answered quietly. “Beebo, you knew what you were early in life. Some of us don’t find out till after we’ve committed ourselves to a man and children. You’re one hundred percent gay. You never doubt it. You breathe such easy contempt for me. But darling, believe me, you’re the lucky one. You knew yourself in time to save yourself from housewifery and husbands—things the rest of us have to live with.
“But I didn’t know till it was too late. It wasn’t just all the men I’ve known that confused me. It was the way I was raised, too, and the girls I knew. It was having a man and a child and a career in my life to defend before I knew I wanted anything else. It was a paralyzing fear of the truth. I didn’t have a body like yours that threw the truth at me whether I wanted to see it or not. I could pretend. I pretended with men and men and more men.
“And the more clearly I realized I was gay, the more terrified I was to admit it to myself, and the more I had to lose. Do you have to loathe me for it, Beebo? Am I a sort of second-class Lesbian, is my love a second-class love, because I live with a man and I’ve borne a child?”
Beebo shut her eyes. “I’m your lover, not your judge,” she said, pulling Venus’s head down on her shoulder. “All I know is, I hate it—sharing you. If it were another girl, I could fight back on my own ground. But Leo confronts me with marriage and motherhood and morality and…God, what can I say? Tell all of society to go to hell?” She kissed Venus disconsolately. “If you’d known what you were when you were young, would you really have given up all this for the life of a Lesbian? The kind of life I’ll lead?”
“If I’d known I could be as happy with a girl as I’ve been with you, Beebo…and I didn’t have my son or a name to worry about…I could have given up anything to be with you.”
Beebo couldn’t hate her, in spite of the distressing knowledge that she had been used. Venus was no Mona Petry. Venus proved her love and did her utmost to go beyond her limitations for the sake of that love. But she had lived too long in the world of safety and social acceptance that is the normal woman’s—a world Beebo would never know—to leave it now. She was imprisoned in the only security she knew, just as Beebo was imprisoned in her body and her strong emotional needs.
“You despise me a little for hiding behind my husband and child,” Venus said, seeing it in Beebo’s face. “What do you want me to do with them, darling? I love Toby and I need Leo. I can’t wish them out of existence. They existed for me long before you did.”
“Venus, I don’t know what’s right or wrong,” Beebo said. “I only know I love you—and it’s made me miserable. God spare either of us another affair like this one.” She caught Venus in an impassioned embrace, holding her hard enough to hurt her and crying soundlessly against her cheek.
Then she released her, walking swiftly to the door. Venus gave a small scream and rushed after her. “Oh, not like this! Wait, stay with me a while. There’s no need to go just yet. I need you more than I ever did. Beebo!”
“Don’t make it hurt any worse, Venus,” she said. “Let’s not cut it off an inch at a time.” Beebo was the strongest and it was up to her to make the break physical and final.
“Say it one last time, then,” Venus pleaded wildly. “I’ll never see you again! Beebo, darling—say it!”
“I love you,” Beebo said huskily. “Goodbye, lover.” She reached out and put her hands on Venus’s shoulders to draw her near; kissed her ardently on the lips and then chastely on the brow.
Venus gazed at her, afraid to believe it for a minute, and then dropped her face into her hands with a sob. Beebo left her, running down the curving stairs to the front door. If she were to move at all, it had to be at top speed.
It was raining in New York when Beebo landed at Idlewild, a standard, sharp November rain: liquid ice tumbling out of a dirty sky. She reached Jack’s familiar door early in the evening and rang his bell. The answer was immediate, as reassuring as a personal word.
She dashed up the stairs and saw him leaning in the open doorway, waiting for her. Neither of them said a word. Beebo went up and hugged him against her damp jacket. He fit neatly under her chin, letting himself be squashed in the name of friendship.
“Come in, pal,” he said.
“I should have wired you. I left in such a damn hurry,” she said. “Jack—you aren’t even surprised to see me!”
“I read the garbage in this morning’s paper,” he said. “I didn’t think Venus would keep you around long after that. But I have to admit I wasn’t prepared for her phone call.”
Beebo’s mouth fell open. “Venus called you?” she said.
“About four hours ago. Said you were flying back. She remembered my name and had her secretary try every Jack, John, and J. Mann in the Manhattan directory,” he chuckled. “She sounded very sweet and sad. I was impressed with her—I really was. She said to tell you she loves you.”
Beebo leaned forward on the sofa. “Poor Venus,” she said, too tired even to feel surprise at her compassion. “She’s so afraid I won’t believe her. You know something, Jackson? She does love me. That’s the craziest part of it. She just isn’t strong enough to snap her fingers at the world. And God knows she had more at stake than I had—mostly a son she’s just beginning to know and love. I have no business condemning her. But oh my God, it hurts so much. She was so lovely.”
Jack sat down beside her. “I know the feeling,” he said. “I guess it’s the one pain on earth you can always remember perfectly, down to the last mean twinge.”
Beebo smiled a bit, putting her head back on the sofa and accepting gratefully a lighted cigarette from Jack.
“How about a peppermint schnapps?” he said. “Or would you prefer Scotch and water?”
“That’s more like it.”
“It’ll warm you up a bit. What a rotten day for a homecoming.” The rain pelted the roof and windows with an endless muted rattle. He handed her the drink, making one for himself.
“Thanks, Jack,” she said. “You know, it was sunny in California. Eighty-two degrees and not a cloud in the sky.”
“I was stationed there a while during World War II. I remember that weather.”
The small talk comforted Beebo and the drink relaxed her. They had another, and it wasn’t till Beebo had been there several hours and told Jack all the highlights of her life with Venus, that she became aware at last of a void in the room. She sat up. “Where’s Pat?” she said.
Jack glanced down into his drink. “Pat left,” he said simply.
“Left?” Beebo looked at him incredulously. “Jack, he couldn’t just leave, he was so fond of you!” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“So am I. But it’s winter, after all. Spring will bring somebody new. It always does.”
Beebo’s heart turned over for him. “But you�
�really loved him. Oh, Jackson,” she sighed. “And you let me deluge you with my problems.”
“Yours are worse than mine, pal,” Jack said kindly. “And newer. Pat left me about four weeks after you did. First of October.”
Beebo shook her head, still half-disbelieving. “Why?” she said.
“He found somebody else,” Jack said, and when Beebo exclaimed in protest, he added, “A woman.” Beebo stared at him. “I guess you put that bug in his ear,” Jack said wryly. “He began to brood about being gay. He thought if he could be so attracted to you, maybe it would work with another aggressive girl. And he was a bit lost when you left, anyway. Then he met Sandra and got quite a crush on her. She took him on. It all happened in a few weeks’ time. They’re living upstate, running an antique shop. She’s teaching him the business. And I guess he’s exterminating her termites. Now and then he comes down to see me. We get along fine.”
“And I thought he was so happy here,” Beebo mourned.
“I think you meant more to him than we realized. He moped around after you left and wanted to follow you to L.A. I talked him out of it, but it seemed to relieve him to talk about you. Frankly, he talked too much. I warned him, and he really tried to stop, but he’d have a drink or two and open up. And he always got around to you. It was complimentary—what he said—but there was too much of it. Mona or Pete managed to get most of the dope.
“And when Pat realized he was hurting you, he began to blame himself for all your troubles. He felt guilty about living with me—‘off me’—when he couldn’t give me his whole love. He’s a damn nice kid, Beebo. It’s best for him that he look around a bit more.”
“What’s best for you, Jackson?” Beebo asked fondly.
“Somebody new, I guess.”
“I hope you don’t have to wait till the spring.”
“I’d rather. It’ll give me time to get over Pat. Besides, I’d rather fall in love in the sunshine than the rain.”
He fixed another round while Beebo mused, “I hope Venus’s son gets through this all right. It’s tough enough on Leo and Venus…but Toby. I was his best friend. He thought if I ever left he’d lose his mother again.”
