“I’ve been thinking,” she told him the next day, “that I’d like to take a trip.”
“A trip?”
“Yes. To forget. To think about something else. I want to see some new places, Uncle John. I want to roam a little. I think it’d do me good.”
He appeared unconvinced. He was a cautious man by nature and a provincial. If you could stay at home with your own comfortable bed and the food you liked, why go anywhere? His days of patient silence weighted his spirits down, too, and he suddenly asked his niece, with straightforward concern, “Beth, what about your children? How can you go traveling and just leave them?”
“They’re all right,” she said, looking away.
“How do you know? How long do you intend to be away from them? Is that good for children? Damn it, you haven’t explained any of this to me yet. I don’t like it.”
“Uncle John, quit worrying!” she cried irritably. “The kids are with their father. They’re better off with him, you must understand that.”
“Why don’t you take them away from him? You’re their mother, for God’s sake. If you’re going to divorce Charlie you’d better start doing something about it instead of running around the country. Are you going to go through life married to a man who’s unworthy of you, who won’t let you keep your own children?”
“That has nothing to do with it. I told you it was all my fault!” she cried.
“What did you do, then? Just what, exactly, did you do? What’s the matter with you, Beth? I have a right to know. I’m feeding you and sheltering you—I’m supporting you. Your husband should be doing this.”
“You mean if I don’t tell you everything you don’t want me here?” she demanded, stunned.
“I mean you owe me an explanation!” he said, and she saw that his slow temper was finally roused. His balding head reddened. “Are you in love with some other man?”
“No!”
“Did you disgrace yourself? Or Charlie?”
“No!”
“Do you want your children, do you love your children?”
“Yes!” She was furious. Her voice broke.
“Then why in God’s name don’t you get them? It’s unnatural! How is it that Charlie can keep them from you?”
“I gave them up!” she shouted. “I gave them up in exchange for my freedom. There! Make sense out of that if you can!”
She ran upstairs to her room and began to pack.
She made a one-way reservation to New York City and then she sat down and wrote a letter to Nina Spicer, the writer whose books about Lesbian life in New York had attracted her. She had almost forgotten Nina until her talk with Merrill Landon. Now, suddenly, the writer appeared to her as a possible starting place in her search. Nina knew New York; you could tell that from the books she wrote. She knew the Village, and she knew gay life both in and out of the Village. There was no reason to suppose she knew Laura, but perhaps she knew of her, knew where she could be found.
Beth had been candid, in a way, with Nina. She pretended she was gay, even when she wasn’t sure of it herself. She painted a picture of herself as beautiful, lost, misunderstood, yearning for a passionate romance with any compatible female. When she wrote the words she believed them true and her belief carried conviction, for Nina answered her with a certain condescending kindness and sympathy.
So Nina Spicer had a passel of half-facts from which to form an opinion of Beth. And Beth knew even less of Nina—only what she could guess from the books: a half-dozen violent, lively, coarse stories, loaded with deaths and beatings and perversities. They had some of the interest of good newspaper reporting, with a sort of gusto in the gory details and a lot of tormented screwballs for characters. Occasionally the love scenes were moving; more often, blunt case histories, skillfully dissected.
Beth pictured her as a casual hardheaded girl, fast to take up an affair, fast to drop it; hard to know and only partly worth the effort. But she was grateful, terribly grateful, to Nina for her letters. She wished there were some way to know her without having to meet her, for she sensed a bridgeless difference between herself and Nina that might make enemies of them. But she needed help now and Nina was the only person she knew who could give it to her.
Beth escaped at midafternoon the next day, taking a bus from the Conrad Hilton on Michigan Boulevard to the airport. It was that simple. No one even saw her leave the house.
There was no crushing despair, no gnawing panic and indecision this time. This time she was on the last leg of the journey, the all-consuming quest to find Beth Cullison Ayers and make a human being out of her. Laura was at the other end.
But Laura was not in the Manhattan directory when Beth checked it at the airport.
What if she died? What if she got sick and died, or left the country, or went to jail? What if she can’t stand the sight of me? But she banished such painful musings as fast as they came up. She couldn’t really believe in them or there would be more point in jumping out of the plane than riding it to New York.
She went directly to the Beaton Hotel on First Avenue near the U.N. Building. She remembered the name from the time she and Uncle John and Aunt Elsa had stayed there when she was a youngster of ten. It had seemed like the marvelous castle in the fairy tales to her then, and the name remained in her memory.
They gave her a room on the fourth floor. She took the least expensive one they had, the kind where
