Girls' Dormitory (2 page)

"Not tonight."

"You're leaving early?"

"On the seven o'clock bus."

"Why don't you let me drive you?"

"I'd rather go by myself."

He drank and they talked and nothing that they said meant anything at all. It was the same as before, always the same. He wanted to marry her and she didn't want to marry him. He wanted to kiss her and she didn't want to kiss him. But she let him kiss her and it wasn't until he began to paw her that she resisted.

"No, Frank," she said.

"Please!"

She tried to twist away from him. "No, Frank. No. Let's be sensible."

He pressed her tightly against him and one of his hands moved up and down her back, lingering at the spot where her bra cut into her flesh.

"Who wants to be sensible?" he demanded. "Besides, the way you've been acting isn't sense."

"Don't, Frank."

He kissed her mouth, her face, her neck and he would have kissed her lower if she had let him.

"I won't see you for a long time, Peggy. You know that. A long, long time."

"We can write."

"Write? What's the good of writing? You can't get any charge out of reading a letter."

"Frank—"

"Hell, I mean it." His tone was almost brutal. "Either you're kidding yourself or I'm being kidded and somebody is getting taken in."

"Frank—"

"You're no baby. You're almost nineteen and you know what it's all about. A guy goes with a girl and if he's a normal guy he looks for a little more than just a kiss or —well, you know. A guy wants the real thing from a girl, the real thing. And a girl, if she's normal, she wants him to have it."

Normal! How many times had she heard that from Frank, from her father? And how many times had she asked herself, blindly and helplessly, the same thing? Not once but a thousand times this question had pounded at her brain, numbing her body, making her cold all over.

When she looked at a man she saw nothing but ugliness. But when Peggy looked at a girl, a girl fresh and I young, she saw all of the beauty in the world. She knew that it wasn't right, not right at all, but there wasn't anything she could do about the way she felt. Perhaps after she got away from home, away from those she knew, she would find herself. Perhaps.

"Don't," she whispered as he tried to put his hand inside her dress. "Don't, Frank!"

"You let me once."

"That was a mistake." She had wanted to that night, wanted to prove something to herself, and then she had become afraid. "Don't, Frank. Don't."

"There's nothing wrong with you that a man wouldn't cure," Frank told her huskily. "And there's nothing wrong with you that I can't fix."

"Frank—"

"I ought to rip the dress off you, that's what I ought to do. I ought to strip you naked and then I ought to—"

"Frank!"

She kicked him in the shins. He grunted and she slipped out of his arms.

"Oh, Frank!"

She started running for the stairs. Why had Frank ruined everything? Why did men always seem to ruin everything? Why couldn't men be like women, soft and gentle, bringing to love a meaning that was deeper and finer than any physical act?

She ran, sobbing, up the stairs. He called after her, begging her to stop, but she paid no attention to him. He was like her father, like all men. He drank and wanted sex, drank more and wanted more sex. It was crazy, crazy, crazy. There was something more in life than that, something better.

She plunged into her room and flung herself on the bed, still crying. She wondered if he would follow her and hoped that he would not. Maybe she was being foolish, childish, but she couldn't bear the thought of him touching her—that way.

Moments later she heard the front door slam and she knew that he had gone.

She continued to cry.

Yes, there was something wrong with her, something terribly wrong.

She wondered, her face buried in the pillow, just what it was.

Jerry Dixon yawned and sat up on the edge of the bed, rubbing his eyes and wishing that he could go back to sleep. "Hell," he said.

Sleepily, he glanced at the clock. It was only a little past five, just a few minutes, and he didn't have to start work until eight. Nobody would bother him if he laid down again and even if he slept past eight o'clock Mrs. Reid wouldn't raise a fuss with him. He grinned, thinking about it. He had such a lousy job that nobody else would want it and Mrs. Reid was well aware of that. What Mrs. Reid didn't know was that he liked his job. During the school year there were twenty-two girls in the house and some of them got lonely. Plenty lonely. Some of them got so lonely there was only one thing they could think of to do to pass the time.

Jerry reached for his shirt. In a place like Mrs. Reid's a guy made his rounds early in the morning before anybody else was up. He grinned again. Sometimes he changed beds faster than a chambermaid working at triple speed.

He buttoned the shirt across his broad chest and thought about Mrs. Thelma Reid. She wasn't too old, under forty, and she was rather nice looking in a sharp, refined sort of way. Maybe sometime if he got the chance—but, no, he wouldn't do that. Why should he knock himself out on an old hag like that when he could have something young? Anyway, she probably never thought about anything except collecting rents from the girls, and of her husband who had died and left her without any insurance.

"Not a dime," she often said. "Not a dime. It was a good thing for me when they started this community college or I'd have been out on the street."

Jerry had been with her two years, ever since he had come out of the army.

"You'll like it," she had told him. "You do the heavy work around the place and keep the yard cleaned up and I'll give you your board and room and forty a week."

It wasn't much, of course, but when he added it all together, the room and the board and the forty dollars, it was more than he would have made in a factory. He wasn't trained to do anything, except in the use of missies, and civilization didn't pay off on that, not a cent to a twenty-two-year-old guy who didn't know right from left.

Of course, he had graduated from high school but that didn't mean much. Everybody graduated from high school these days. He could run a typewriter but didn't want to run a typewriter. He could keep a simple set of books, if they were real simple, but he didn't want to keep books for anybody. He didn't, as a matter of fact, know what he wanted to do. And Mrs. Reid's was a good place for him to be, a wonderful place to remain stupid and have fun.

Down along the river, where he had been born and raised, he had been known as Studs. But up here on the hill, where the girls were more discreet in their language, he had lost the name and he was glad of it. Maybe it fit and maybe it didn't but it was a heck of a thing to have people shout at you along the street.

He had been seventeen when his mother and father were burned to death in a tarpaper shack. The only reason he had escaped the same fate was because he had been out on the river fishing for pike. There had been no other relatives, no aunts or uncles, no brothers or sisters, and during his last year in high school he had lived in a tiny room in the slums, cooking his own meals over a sterno stove and working nights in the stinking fur factory, sometimes until midnight and sometimes until three or four, never getting enough sleep, never getting enough to eat, never getting enough of anything—except Ellen.

Ellen had been good and soft and sweet and he guessed he had loved her. She had been a child of the river front, too, a beautiful child with wide blue eyes and soft blonde hair and a lovely, lovely body. She was sixteen when he met her, a little wild and looking for the love away from home that she had not been able to find there. On their third night together he had taken her to his room and he made love to her. He was the first. She had come to him every night after that, loving him, and when he went into the army she had cried. Four months later, when he learned that she had died as the result of an attempted abortion, it became his turn to cry. Her death had taken something from him, left him empty. No one since, and nothing that he had done, had completely filled that hollow spot. He supposed it was one of the reasons he lived on at Mrs. Reid's, that he didn't give a damn, that he went from day to day as though tomorrow would never come.

He worked his way into his pants and sat down on the bed and put on his shoes. He had to forget about Ellen. She was dead and nothing could change that.

He left his cellar room, just off the furnace, and climbed the stairs to the kitchen. He was glad that it wasn't cold or he'd have to start shoveling coal into that furnace. And that furnace used up coal fast. It went through coal the way the sun cut through a cake of ice.

The kitchen was big and far from modern, with a high ceiling and yellow walls and wooden cabinets all over the place. Beyond the kitchen was the dining room where some of the girls ate. Not all of the girls ate at the house; a few of them took their meals in restaurants and diners downtown. But the girls who wanted to live reasonably, who had to cut corners, ate at the house. Mrs. Reid, who had had a maid before her husband's death, wasn't much of a cook. She bought a lot of canned and frozen stuff and she managed to throw something together.

"I make good coffee," she frequently bragged. "The best in Youngsville."

Jerry looked for coffee and found none. He hadn't expected to find any. Mrs. Reid cleaned up everything before she went to bed, which was seldom before one or two in the morning. He wished that she went to bed earlier, or that she watched television, or that she went out, or that she did anything except run all over the house. A guy couldn't skip around the bases during the early evening in the Reid house; if he tried that he'd get thrown out almost before he left home.

He walked through the house, down the long, high hall to the stairs. At one time the stairs had creaked but he had fixed them and he didn't have to worry about that any more. Mrs. Reid slept in the rear of the house, over the kitchen, and she always kept her door closed.

He climbed the stairs and paused at the second floor landing. There were twelve rooms on this floor, not including Mrs. Reid's, and none of them were occupied yet. The ten girls who had arrived early were already assigned to rooms on the third floor. He had carried up all of the luggage and knew where each girl was located. That, of course, was important. There would be the devil to pay and nothing to pay him with if he got into the wrong room.

Jerry grinned and started up the stairs again. He knew where he was going. She would be waiting for him, just as she had waited for him during the past year, and now he could start making some money again. Real money. And boy, he could use it. The dame over on the West Side, a girl whose family had dough, was costing him a fortune. But she was worth it. Marrying her, love or not, was the only chance he had of getting any place at all.

He reached the third floor and walked down the hall, moving slowly. Mrs. Reid had been there when he had brought up the girl's things and they hadn't had a chance to talk, but he wasn't worried. Girls like Helen never changed. Once they started working their way through college on the flat of their back they graduated on the flat of their back. He smiled as he considered the situation. A girl with Helen Lee's talents should get a degree in sex, a degree that said she knew as much about sex as there was to know.

When he reached room thirty-three, he entered without knocking, closing the door behind him and throwing the bolt. Not many girls prowled around the house at five in the morning but a guy could never be sure. Once he had been caught in bed with a girl, by another student, but he had solved that problem and taken the second girl to bed, too. There was, however, no sense in pressing his luck; a locked door was safer than an unlocked door.

Except for two windows instead of one and the big double bed pushed up against one wall, room thirty-three was the same as the other rooms—blonde birch dresser, red rug on the floor and a chair that could break a person's back in one brief sitting.

He walked to the side of the bed and stood looking down.

Even in the dim light he could see her red hair, long and flowing around her face. One of her arms was outstretched, palm upward, and the sheet was low enough so that he could see that she was sleeping in the raw.

"Hey," he said, bending close. "For Pete's sake, wake up."

The girl stirred.

"You aren't asleep," Jerry said, "Stop trying to make it romantic. It doesn't become you, baby. It just doesn't."

Helen yawned and opened her eyes.

"You'd spoil anything," she said. "You're the world's worst."

"What's there to spoil?" Jerry wanted to know.

The girl sat up, careless about the way the sheet fell down around her middle.

"Nothing," Helen Lee said. "You saw to that."

Jerry sat down on the bed and reached for cigarettes. He lit two and put one between her lips. She inhaled and watched him through the smoke.

"I didn't teach you anything that you didn't already know," Jerry reminded her. "It was you who asked me, not me who asked you. Just remember that."

"Let's not fight," she said.

"All right."

She took one of his hands and kissed the back of it.

"What kind of a summer did you have?" she asked him.

"Lousy."

"Miss me?"

"Sure. And the dough," he admitted frankly. He filled his lungs with smoke. "The guys have been asking for you, lots of them. You can keep busy every weekend and every night that you can get free."

"That's good."

"I'll get you the same room on Kennedy Street and you can use that."

"Fine."

He tried not to look at her, but he couldn't help himself. She was anybody's woman for a price. But she was his for nothing.

"You have a good summer?" he wanted to know.

"So-so. I worked in Sullivan County."

"That should be a hot spot."

"It was in some ways but I would have done better in Atlantic City. Up there you've got every dame in the country chasing men and during the week the loose wives are all around. But it was okay. I could have done worse, but I sure could have done better."