Girls' Dormitory (20 page)

"I had quite a talk with her."

"I didn't know she was here."

The lawyer nodded.

"She came down a couple of hours ago. I was talking to her while you were with the Sergeant. She says she doesn't want to press any charges about the coat."

"I see."

"She's a nice girl, Mr. Dixon. A very nice girl."

"Yes, she is."

"Don't let what Helen Lee said change your opinion."

"I won't."

The assistant district attorney removed the cigar from his mouth and nodded toward the door.

"You're free to go," he said. "You won't even have to appear against Mrs. Lopez. She has signed a full confession and that will hold up in court."

"Thanks."

Jerry left the room, walked down the short hall and on outside. The early morning air was cold and the sky was filled with the threat of snow. A big car stood at the curb, its engine running.

He had ruined everything, everything. He had found the one girl he could love and he had lost her. The fact that she had been something else, something that he did not fully understand, did not bother him. A girl could make a mistake and so could a man. Life was a little bit like a ball game where you could strike out more easily than you could hit a homerun.

He approached the car, walking slowly.

"Jerry!"

It was Peggy. He walked up to the car, leaned against it, and looked in through the open window.

"Hello," he said.

Her eyes were filled with everything that he wanted to see.

"I love you," she said simply.

"After everything?"

"After everything."

She pushed the door open and the heat from inside of the car rushed out at him.

"My father is waiting for us," she said.

"For what?"

"To talk to you about a job. And not at forty a week."

He slid in beside her.

"How much?" he wanted to know.

"Enough for a couple to live on. Enough for them to get started on."

He closed the car door. "That's good," he said.

"Harry was here," she said. "Harry Martin. He wants to help Helen. Do you think he can?"

"I don't know."

She came to him, her head tilted back and her eyes bright.

"I don't know either," she said. "There's just one thing that I do know." Her lips were wet and red. "I want you to kiss me," she said. "Kiss me hard."

Jerry did.

THE END

A new revolution was underway at the start of the 1940s in America—a paperback revolution that would change the way publishers would produce and distribute books and how people would purchase and read them.

In 1939 a new publishing company—Pocket Books—stormed onto the scene with the publication of its first paperbound book. These books were cheaply produced and sold in numbers never before seen, in large part due to a bold and innovative distribution model that soon after made Pocket Books available in drugstores, newsstands, bus and train stations, and cigar shops. The American public could not get enough of them, and before long the publishing industry began to take notice of Pocket Book’s astonishing success. 

Traditional publishers, salivating at the opportunity to cash in on the phenomenal success of the new paperback revolution, soon launched their own paperback ventures. Pocket Books was joined by Avon in 1941, Popular Library in 1942, and Dell in 1943. The popular genres reflected the tastes of Americans during World War II—mysteries, thrillers, and “hardboiled detective” stories were all the rage. 

World War II proved to be a boon to the emerging paperback industry. During the war, a landmark agreement was reached with the government in which paperbound books would be produced at a very low price for distribution to service men and women overseas. These books were often passed from one soldier or sailor to another, being read and re-read over and over again until they literally fell apart. Their stories of home helped ease the servicemen’s loneliness and homesickness, and they could be easily carried in uniform pockets and read anywhere—in fox holes, barracks, transport planes, etc. Of course, once the war was over millions of veterans returned home with an insatiable appetite for reading. They were hooked, and their passion for reading these books helped launch a period of unprecedented growth in the paperback industry.

In the early 1950s new subgenres emerged—science fiction, lesbian fiction, juvenile delinquent and “sleaze”, for instance—that would tantalize readers with gritty, realistic and lurid stories never seen before. Publishers had come to realize that sex sells. In a competitive frenzy for readers, they tossed away their staid and straightforward cover images for alluring covers that frequently featured a sexy woman in some form of undress, along with a suggestive tag line that promised stories of sex and violence within the covers. Before long, books with sensational covers had completely taken over the paperback racks and cash registers. To this day, the cover art of these vintage paperback books are just as sought after as the books themselves were sixty years ago.

With the birth of the lesbian-themed pulp novel, women who loved women would finally see themselves—their experiences and their lives—represented within the pages of a book. They finally had a literature they could call their own. Of course, that’s not what the publishers of the day intended—these books were written primarily for men… indeed shamelessly packaged and published to titillate the male reading public. 

Many of the books were written by men using female pseudonyms and were illustrated by cover artists who never read the content between the covers. However, a good percentage (primarily titles from Fawcett’s Gold Medal Books imprint) were written by women, most of whom were lesbians themselves. For lesbians across the country, especially those living isolated lives in small towns, these books provided a sense of community they never knew existed… a connection to women who experienced the same longings, feelings and fears as they did—the powerful knowledge that they were not alone.

We are excited to make these wonderful paperback stories available in ebook format to new generations of readers. We present them in their original form with very little modification so as to preserve the tone and atmosphere of the time period. In fact, much of the language—the slang, the colloquialisms, the lingo, even the spellings of some words—appear as they were written fifty or sixty years ago. The stories themselves reflect the time period in which they were written, reflecting the censorship, sensibilities and biases of the 1950s and early 1960s. Still, these lesbian pulp novels are a treasure in our collective literary history and we hope you will enjoy this nostalgic journey back in time.