Stranger On Lesbos (8 page)

Bake's mouth was soft. She laid a comforting hand on Frances' arm. "You've had a rough time."

"It's all right."

"How come you didn't finish college? Miss Whatsername run out of money, or something?"

"My mother died. It took her a long time to die. Cancer."

Put like this, it seemed incredible that any human being could agonize as she had done in those gray barren weeks after her mother's burial, crushed under the load of housework and despairing of ever getting free, cut off from the education that was her only way of escape, loaded with the knowledge that if she had stayed at home, her mother's suffering might have been lightened. Not ended
no, it was too late for that
but sometimes, as she mopped endless floors and wrung clothes out of the soapy water, it seemed to her that no sacrifice would have been too much if it could have spared her mother one hour of that eating, animal-like pain.

"Then Ma's brother came to see us," she said slowly, "and took the kids home to his farm."

She had been scrubbing the kitchen floor when Uncle Will Schroeder showed up at the back door and announced, as if it were an everyday thing to work miracles, that he was restoring her to life. Frankie had fainted against his chest, and come to with his firm callused hand on her wrist, his honest eyes fixed on her face.

Her lips curved. "Then at college I met Bill. He was taking courses for extra credit
he was a case worker for the State Welfare Board."

"It sounds like a soap opera."

"I don't suppose people would listen to soap operas if they weren't real, sort of. I mean, these things happen."

"What I can't figure out," Bake said, "is how Bill ever talked you into marrying him. What happened
you get pregnant or something?"

Frances reddened. It was close enough to the truth; she needn't have worried, as it turned out, but she had worried for two solid weeks after that uncomfortable and embarrassing night in the local hotel, and Bill had gone on urging her, and
She sat upright. "Look, do we have to talk about me all the time?"

"I'm interested," Bake said. "Aren't you glad I'm interested?"

"Yes, of course. Only it's five o'clock, and I have to go home and cook dinner."

"And there may be someone there to eat it, or again, there may not." Bake's face was blank; she kept her voice flat, without expression.

Frances stood up. "I have to go, just the same."

"Meet me for lunch tomorrow? Same place."

"All right."

She was surprised, whenever she thought about it, to realize how little time they actually spent together. Bake had a job. Frances had forgotten how time-consuming even a freelance job can be, compared with the flexible schedule of a housewife whose child is in school.

Although Bake talked about her work slightingly, she took it seriously and devoted a great deal of time and effort to it. She was always going out at odd hours
late nights, Sunday morning
to interview people. She spent hours at the library, tracking down data and checking obscure details. In her spare time she attended a handicraft class and two University courses. She also gave an evening every week to the children's wing of a big hospital, working with post-polio patients. Her hands were strong and sure, she was unsentimental and brisk, and Frances was surprised to find that she seemed rather ashamed of this service.

"Always thought I'd like to be a physiotherapist," Bake said at lunch one day.

"You make me feel so useless. I don't have enough to do."

"I always thought these overworked housewives were kidding themselves," Bake said with a smile. She laid her purse and gloves on the table and leaned back, looking around the crowded dining room. "That's Robert Flynn, the public relations man for Midwestern Electric Manufacturing. The blonde with him is a secretary in a Loop law firm. I met her at a publishers' open house; one of her bosses had a book published a few years ago. He was interviewed on
Book News and Views."

"You know everybody, don't you?"

"Well, people are just people anyplace you go. I sort of like this crazy mixed-up town, though."

Frances shook her head. She felt that people who had their names in the paper were different, more important, more glamorous. Bake laughed. "You're as intelligent as any of them, more than most. I'll introduce you to some of the headliners if you want me to. You'll see."

She wanted to reach across the table and touch the hand that held Bake's glass, make some small mute sign of love.

As the weeks passed it seemed to her that the time she spent apart from Bake was time wasted, a dull passing of hours without meaning. She threw herself into housekeeping, hoping to find some degree of release in hard physical work, but the resulting backache reminded her too sharply of the hopeless days after her mother's death, and she gave it up.

She went to the big public library at the corner of Michigan and Washington, and spent hours reading the books Bake talked about: the journals of Gide and Proust, Malraux, the poems of Baudelaire and Verlaine. Only the things that had some bearing on her relationship with Bake held any meaning. Only the hours that pointed to their next meeting had promise.

It was best when they met at the apartment. Once she got up the steps and inside the building she could fall into Bake's welcoming arms and forget all the emptiness since their last time together. But she gathered up crumbs of companionship too
the minutes they spent walking together, the after-class drink that had become a ritual.

If it meant as much to Bake, she never said so. Gradually, as though testing Frances' ability to enter into her life, she began to include Frances in her plans. She arranged for her to meet other friends, and told her small things
trivial in themselves but important because they helped to fill in the years they had spent apart
about her own life. Gradually, Frances came to see that another world lay all around her, whose existence she had never even suspected.