Stranger On Lesbos (2 page)

It felt good, having something to plan for. She caught herself humming as she zipped her skirt.

The grounds of the University of Chicago had never seemed like a campus to her, as she glimpsed it from the windows of a bus or a train. A college ought to be a green tree-shaded expanse shut away from towns, with ivy-grown buildings and a cloistered atmosphere. Here a series of quadrangles were flanked by the Illinois Central tracks on the east, hemmed in by grimy apartment buildings, surrounded by the moldering slums of a great industrial city. But there was the same feeling of youth and optimism that had overlaid, like sunshine, the small denominational college of her youth.

A group of faculty children played around the statue at the east end of the grassy plot, shepherded by a young wife joggling a baby buggy. Boys and girls walked slowly, hand in hand, among the stone buildings. She wondered which building housed the library, the old hunger for books stirring within her like a physical appetite. I belong here, she thought.

So here she was, tuition paid, a student again. It wasn't what she wanted out of life. It wasn't enough. But it was a beginning.

The instructor's voice dwindled away. She looked up from her empty notebook. The people around her were stirring, turning to speak to friends. Frances looked at her watch, a birthday gift from Bill. The hour was over. It was hard to believe, but she had wasted fifty minutes of classroom time daydreaming
about a past she wanted to forget, and a future full of problems without evident solutions.

She might as well, she thought, have gone to the movies. I'd have been half-crazy with excitement in the old days, she reproached herself, remembering her arrival at Wallace with her belongings in a borrowed suitcase (and a black eye
yes, but that was a symbol of the evil and ugliness she was leaving behind, and so it had a part in her new freedom, too). In her shabby purse was a neatly typed envelope with the return address of the college in the corner, in it the letter confirming her scholarship. She carried the same purse three years later, when she stood before a strange minister with Bill Ollenfield and promised to love, honor and obey.

Now she got to her feet, gathering up her belongings. I was young then, she thought sadly, and in love. Love. At twenty, it's thrills in the moonlight. At thirty-five it's remembering to send his shirts to the laundry.

Going out into the talk-echoing corridor, she fell into step with the dark-haired young woman she had noticed earlier. They looked at each other intently for a moment and Frances felt the color rise in her cheeks. She smiled uncertainly. The other girl gave her a questioning look, then smiled back and walked swiftly away. Frances stood watching her until she was lost in the crowd, wondering who she was and why she was in school.

CHAPTER 2

Her only worry when they had moved to Chicago a year earlier, had been about Bob. Not about Bill who was wrapped up in his job. His work for the welfare board had become more and more perfunctory over the preceding four or five years, the people listed on his neat index cards were only case histories to him, and he was tired of trying to stretch a social worker's salary to cover the increasing cost of living. He was a young man still, but the early zest, the bounce, had gone out of him.

True, he had been first indifferent and then undecided when his Uncle Walter had offered him a job as sales manager for Plastic Playthings, at approximately twice what he had been earning; but he had decided for it, as he surely would not have done five years earlier. And she had to admit, dubious as she had been at first, that he was making good. He got along with the gray-flannel-suit people, the Martini-with-lunch crowd; and his two salary increases had had little to do with his being the owner's nephew. He was in. As for her
well, you can wash dishes anywhere. The child psychology books all emphasized the importance of security for a child, especially during adolescence. She laughed, pulling a soft sweater over her head. Bob, entering high school as a sophomore, had fitted into the new life with no bother at all. Now he looked and acted just like his classmates at South Shore High (flat-top haircut, cord-sole shoes, Friday night basketball) and was hardly ever at home.

Adolescence, she thought a little bitterly, stooping to choose a pair of shoes from the closet floor. I don't have to worry about him. He doesn't need me, any more than his father does. Anybody who could cook would do just as well. Good old mom, a standard piece of household equipment.

The thought sprang into her mind, unwelcome: nobody needs me. Bill's at the office or out with a customer most of the time, mixing business and pleasure. He never opens a book any more, doesn't care about the theater, doesn't even talk about getting a hi-fi, now that we could afford one. And how long has it been since we really talked together? You can't count all those arguments about the grocery bills.

She picked up her handbag, decided against a jacket, and ran lightly down the stairs. Her work was done. The house was in order. It was an easy house to care for, smaller than the one Bill had wanted
he'd been all for buying a place in the suburbs, where they could have a garden and an outdoor grill, and entertain his business contacts. That meant living a little beyond their means and being always worried about the unpaid bills, like most of the couples she had met since they moved. She was glad that she'd stood firm. The bank account for Bob's education was more important than anything else.

Bill had gone ahead and bought the new car, the wide-screen TV, and the three new suits
after all, a sales manager can't wear slacks and an old tweed jacket. But she had won on the question of the house, which stood in a decent but not smart neighborhood, and had only two bedrooms.

We don't even have enough in common to quarrel, she thought. What Bill really needs is somebody like Betty Flanagan, who really likes backyard barbecues and doesn't mind when someone tells traveling salesmen stories. Who tells them herself, for that matter, and kisses other people's husbands at parties.

It would be so nice to have someone to talk to. The autumn air was like wine. That's trite, Frances admitted
but it really was. Sunflowers rose proudly in a vacant lot above a tangle of village weeds: plantain, sorrel, dandelions gone to seed, dock and fennel. She passed a brick house set on a triangular scrap of lawn; the walks were edged with late-blooming petunias, and against the wall a rosebush held one yellow rose with scrolled petals. Frances smiled, wondering who tended the flowers. Somebody in this noisy, smoky, dirty city who thought growing things were more important than concrete and glass brick, and liked the feel of moist earth in his hand. A woman, maybe, displaced and finding nobody of her own kind to talk to, had turned to this bit of outdoors that was all she had for comfort.

She stepped up into the bus and dropped her quarter into the fare box.

This time the campus seemed to welcome her, as if she had a right to be there. She walked along briskly, pleased and a little excited at the prospect of the hour ahead, and wondering if she would recognize any of her classmates, if she would ever come to know any of them as friends.

The dark-haired girl she had noticed the first day was already there, reading. She welcomed Frances with a smile and motioned to an empty chair beside her own. Frances sat down and said, "Hi. How are you getting along with the reading list?"

"It's mostly review," the other said. She closed the book, keeping a finger in her place. Frances noticed that it wasn't a library copy, but a paperback volume that looked as though it had been read not once but many times. "He's good, though
Kemper, not Lawrence. Have you had him before?"