Whisper Their Love (2 page)

"Go screw yourself," Mary Jean muttered after Mrs. Abbott's broad retreating back. "Don't look that way, honey. She makes me sick, too."

"Which one's Miss Bannister?"

"Dean of Women. That's a silly name for it. What else is there to be dean of in this nunnery?" Mary Jean steered her around clusters of talking girls. There were six or seven long tables, each set for twelve, and they were something: damask shiny with ironing, hanging in folds to the floor; candles burning with straight flames, silver bowls with pink roses in them. She gave a worried look at the line of flat silver alongside her plate and stood behind her chair, like the others.

Miss Edith Bannister, Dean of Women, was at the head of the table. The only dean she had known was Ma Henneberry, unmarried, at Community High, who lectured the girls about purity and was built on the lines of Uncle Will's morris chair. This one was like tubular steel. Slender, erect, rather pale, all in beige, with one big splashy ring. She turned her head and looked down the length of the table.

Something stirred in Joyce. She looks like Mimi. No, she doesn't either. Maybe if Mimi wore her hair like that, plain. Still, there's something. The old longing rose in her. She was caught and held by smooth-lidded eyes, neither gray nor brown but something between. Miss Bannister smiled a little, turning her hand so that the light winked on her ring.

Somebody rattled off a blessing, and chairs scraped on the parquet. Joyce sat down, copying the others. A dark-brown hand reached over her shoulder and set down a glass of tomato juice, and suddenly she was hungry.

Miss Bannister was listening to one of the girls, her head bent. She didn't exactly look like Mimi, but still—Joyce reached for her glass without looking, and tipped it over. The girl next to her squawked and jumped up, shaking out her flounces. Joyce got mixed up in a flurry of apologies and pushed Mimi out of her mind, the first time since the news of her engagement to Irv Kaufman had come to the farm.

Chapter 2

The shrilling of an alarm clock broke through the humming of insects in the roadside grass. Joyce pried her eyes open, then shut them again and was immediately back on the farm, standing beside the RFD box at the end of the lane. Gray velvety dust rose up from between the clover and dandelion stems and powdered her ankles, smudging the white socks and dulling the patent-leather slippers she had sneaked out of her closet while Aunt Gen was busy in the kitchen.

Heat waves shimmered over the cornfields, distorting Uncle Will's stocky figure atop the tractor. The soy beans were too dry for the time of year, and the big elephant-ear leaves on the catalpa trees hung down dry and lifeless. Sweat ran down Joyce's face. She wiped it away with her starched sleeve.

She was so hot her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth, and she'd torn her skirt rolling under the barbwire fence. Aunt Gen would be awful mad at her for putting on her Sunday dress. Her lips would get thin and straight, and a double crease would come between her eyes. Joyce could hear Aunt Gen's voice already, sharp with exasperation. "Do you think I haven't got anything to do but wash and iron?" She kicked at a pebble. Seemed as if nothing she did was right; either she forgot to shut the bathroom door—"a big girl like you!"—or she didn't wipe the dishes dry, or something. Now she'd ripped a big three-cornered tear in her brand-new dress, after Aunt Gen sat up late to finish it in time for Children's Day.

Mimi wouldn't care, though. Mimi would hug her tight, smelling of tobacco and perfume and Doublemint gum (Aunt Gen smelled like white soap and cookies baking). Mimi would say, "Hi there, baby, how's everything?", and everything would be fine. Joyce stretched on tiptoe to see over the rise in the road. The sound of a car coming nearer filled the whole air.

It was the mailman's car, with packages and rolled newspapers piled on the back seat and Mimi sitting erect and taut beside Mr. Kellar. Joyce ran out on the road, and now she was barefoot and the gravel stones were burning her summer-tough soles. "Stop, stop!" But the car kept coming on, headed straight at her; then it was on top of her and she couldn't run. Her feet were stuck to the ground. She opened her mouth to yell for help, but no sound came out.

* * *

"I've been a hell of a mother," Dean Bannister said. She sat on a drugstore stool with a coke straw in her hand; there was lipstick on the flattened end. "Things are going to be different from now on. Look, baby, this is Irv; he's a model." But it was Mr. Kellar in the snapshot, with a douche bag in one hand and a Sears Roebuck catalog in the other. "I saw it in
Harper's Bazaar
and made it myself," he said. "How do you like it?"

"Made it myself," Mary Jean Kennedy said. She gave Joyce a tentative poke. "Hey, you haven't heard a word I said. Get up or you'll miss breakfast."

Joyce pried her eyelids open. Sunshine flooded in at the uncurtained window and lay over the heaps of clothes on the floor. "Gosh, it's hot."

"That's one thing about pajamas, they soak up the drips." Mary Jean slept raw. Now she stood on one foot, pulling on a pair of black and chartreuse pedal pushers. Her skin was clear cream, her breasts full and heavy with dark-ringed nipples.

Mine are prettier, Joyce thought, but hers are more—voluptuous. "Can you wear that to class?"

"First day, nobody does any work." Mary Jean buttoned her waistband. "You circulate around and get your books, meet the teachers and so on. What a bunch of squares!"

"All women?"

"You could call it that. Matson in science is supposed to be a man, but personally I think he's a fairy. The gym teacher's a dike." Mary Jean pulled a chartreuse middy over her head, knotted a black chiffon scarf around the collar. "They had a young prof here once," she said, "but he got two girls in trouble at the same time and the board fired him. I think prob'ly they knocked him down and took it away from him," she added thoughtfully. "This is no place for anybody with normal glands."

Breakfast was fruit and coffee, hot rolls and bacon and hominy grits. Joyce had read about hominy grits but she had never really believed in them before. They tasted like chicken feed, cooked. The meal was served by two young Negro women.

One was slim and had sad eyes; the other was cheerful and motherly-looking, with a roll of stomach under her starched apron. The girls ignored them. Joyce felt she ought to say good morning, or make some sign of recognition. At home she had been on the debating team with Betty Montgomery, the only colored girl in school, and they were good friends. Also Uncle Will always opened his Chicago
Tribune,
when it arrived a day late by RFD, to see how the Supreme Court was making out with the integration question. But she wanted to be like the others, so she made no sign.

After breakfast a small, bright-eyed freshman with her hair skinned back in a pony tail offered to walk to the registrar's office with her. Her name was Bitsy Harrison and she was the third generation of her family to be educated at Henderson Hicks.

Anyway, she knew her way around. The red brick buildings all looked alike to Joyce and she wondered how she would ever find her way from one to the other in time for classes. It was worse than the first day of high school in Ferndell when the big yellow bus rolled off down the street and left the country kids standing on the corner beside the big many-windowed building. For weeks, then, she had a recurrent nightmare of being lost in strange winding halls and blundering into strange classrooms. Now she stubbed her toe on the brick sidewalks, which went up and down hill following the terrain, and was glad to be following Bitsy. The very way Bitsy's heels hit the walk was sharp and independent-sounding.

"It's old-fashioned," Bitsy said with affection in her voice. "Hasn't changed much since my gramma was a girl. They had coal stoves in the dorm then. Imagine."

The buildings were comfortably familiar inside—long halls with white fountains (like bathroom fixtures) and fingermarked cream plaster walls. Classrooms with armed chairs, one in the back row for a left-handed pupil;
Webster's Unabridged
on a stand near the window; flattop desk on a little raised platform; pictures, Washington looking uneasy in his false teeth, some Roman orator in a toga. Smell of chalk and sweeping compound, mingled with Evening in Paris and Ecstasy. She signed registration cards and received an armful of books in a room like the one where she had taken her IQ test at Community, trembling with nervousness for fear of being classified for all time with the dumb pupils. Here there were no tests except being white and able to pay, but the old insecurity made her knees wobble as she waited in line.

The curriculum had been planned, or had grown, to develop attractive wives in the junior-executive, ten-thousand-dollar bracket. Joyce signed up for Art Appreciation, Elementary Spanish, and Design, then added up her credits and elected Hygiene rather than swimming or corrective gym. The hygiene teacher, who was athletic coach too, was a thin, flat woman in very long, narrow shoes that turned up at the toes. She had no figure, but her hair, surprisingly, was worn long and bundled up in a bird's nest under a net.

"That's to show she's female," Bitsy explained. "You'd never guess it otherwise." The teacher slapped an assignment on the board in an Egyptian scrawl and thumped off down the hall beside her student secretary, a giggling little girl in a pinafore.

Mary Jean was lying on the bed eating a Hershey bar when Joyce got back to the dorm. She looked over the schedule cards. "You sure aren't going to strain your brain."

Joyce didn't answer. She thought about Aunt Gen leaning over the dining table on her last night at home, dish towel in hand, the light shining on her glasses and wrapped-around braids. Aunt Gen had an idea she ought to be taking some solid subjects.

"Seems like she'd get more at the State U," Aunt Gen said, looking worried.

Mimi, chain-smoking and endlessly walking from window to window, said, "Oh, for God's sake, Gen! I know I've been a terrible mother, but honest, it's been all I could do to make both ends meet."

Uncle Will said with dignity, "We ain't complaining. We both think the world of Joy."

Mimi lit another cigarette, dropping her half-smoked stub in a saucer since there were no ashtrays at the farm. "Then you better be glad she has this chance. Girls from some of the finest families in the country go to Henderson Hicks."

She wasn't sure what Mimi expected her to get out of being here, but it wasn't history or Latin.

The girls from the finest families stood around her in the lounge, waiting for the lunch gong. Their clothes were casual to the point of sloppiness, they wore baby-pink lipstick and flat sandals, their faces were as composed as if charm depended upon impassivity. Joyce began to worry about her clothes, which had already taken a lot more time and attention than her courses. She and Mimi had picked them out with help from
Charm
and the
Ladies Home Journal,
and doubtful consultations with
Vogue.
Even her shorty pajamas had come from Ferndell's one specialty shop instead of Penney's or the mail order. Now she wondered. Too fussy? Too kiddish?

A small brunette said, "Ah'm just crazy about that skirt," and Joyce glowed. It was important to be accepted.

Lunch was like dinner the night before, beautifully served but not quite enough of it. There were bits of fat pork in the string beans and a side dish of some slippery green vegetable that was new to her. Okra, Mary Jean said. She didn't care much for it. But the dining room was attractive by daylight, too, and afterwards they went up to the lounge. It didn't seem quite fitting to sit on the floor in pedal-pushers, the way Mary Jean was doing, and she was relieved when a maid came to the door and said softly, "Telephone, Miss Kennedy."

"That was Bill," Mary Jean said when she came back. Her eyes were bright. "You want to go on a square date tonight? Blanket party?"

"Sure, I'd love to."

"I don't know this boy," Mary Jean said carefully. "He's a freshman. Pledge, you know. Bill has to look after him. He might have pimples or be feeble-minded for all I know."

"Well, he's taking a chance on me too."

"True."

"Freshman where?"

"Caton College. Relief station for lonesome women, you know. Bill's a senior this year, the dirty bird." Her voice deepened possessively. "The bum."

"You like him, don't you?"

"He has his good points."

The heat didn't lift. They spent the rest of the afternoon unpacking and putting away their clothes. That is, Joyce unpacked. Mary Jean put a few dresses on hangers and then stretched out on her bed, an arm over her eyes. "I'm going to catch me a little shut-eye. No tellin' when we'll get in tonight." The hall echoed with voices; footsteps clattered in and out of the bathroom; down the corridor someone was practicing "Minuet in G" on the violin, the first few "bars over and over. Mary Jean slept, snoring a little.

Even after the sun went down there was no breeze, only a sort of breathless hush. Either this climate is terrible or I'm tired out, Joyce thought, peeling off her damp clothes after dinner. She went into the washroom and waited her turn for a shower stall. The room was full of girls washing their hair and scrubbing each other's backs and all talking at the same time.

"Never saw so many happy drunks in my life," Sue-Ellen Levey shrieked. "So I told my mother I was staying all night with her, and she told her mother she was staying with me, and we went up to these kids' cabin," the redhead said. Her towels were purple, like her shorts. She paused to glare at Joyce, and Joyce felt good about having a date and said, "Well, excuse me for breathing," and set her soap and toothbrush down on the edge of the basin.

"That's Charlene Wilkens," Mary Jean identified the redhead from her description. "She's one of these professional honeychiles, the kind that makes a hit with college men up north." She pulled on pink shorts, a striped shirt. "She had a thing for a married man who worked in a fillin' station last year. I wouldn't go out with a married man, not even if I lived to be a dried-up old maid." Mary Jean completed her outfit with embroidered cloth flats. Joyce asked, "Don't you ever wear pants?"