“I love you,” Laura told her simply.
And Beth turned around and walked out of her bedroom and across the living room. She stopped a moment, remembering Jack’s messages. “Call McCracken and cancel the order,” she called back to Laura in an unsteady voice. “And send a check to Dr. Byrd.” Then she went out the front door.
Chapter Eighteen
SHE WALKED. SHE SPENT MOST OF THE DAY WALKING, AND WHEN she got tired she went to the library and sat at a table in a corner of the Social Sciences room and stared ahead of her. She didn’t consciously try to understand everything. She just let her mind wander from one peak of recollection to another, too worn out to steer her thoughts or make sense of them.
When it began to darken outside she got up and left, stopping by the post office on her way back to the Beaton Hotel. There was nothing for her, nor did anything come for the next several days. She didn’t know what to do with herself. She felt desperately scared most of the time, lost between those two worlds, one renounced, the other closed to her. One was normal, ordinary, reassuring, with a home and a husband and children. And it had failed her. The other was gay and strange, exotic and dangerous, painful and, possibly, wonderful. But it was still untried, inaccessible somehow. And Beth, caught dead center between the two, was afraid she had lost both forever and would wander in limbo the rest of her life.
She couldn’t go back to Charlie, even if he would have her. Her pride, her shame, her very nature, forbade that. And, having taken Laura’s words as a rebuff, she felt almost as unwelcome in the gay world as the straight.
So she spent nearly a week in a fog of confusion and fear. She refused to take any phone calls, though there were several. All from Laura, she thought, and it gave her a bitter satisfaction not to answer, to keep Laura worrying and anxious.
Whenever she thought of her children her heart contracted. Something in her character prevented her from loving them openly, easily, naturally, like other women. Did a woman like her have a right to any children? She could hardly bear to think of it. At the worst moments she tried instead to think of what it would be like living with a desirable woman, with someone affectionate and understanding, someone who was all she had hoped to rediscover in Laura. Then it seemed like the only life for her. She was sure she wanted it, whatever it cost in pain and regret.
She remained shut up in a cocoon of private suffering and wondering for nearly seven days, meandering around New York in the afternoons and lying on her bed at night, sleepless. She drank quite a bit of whiskey. It seemed to ease her.
Every day she stopped at the post office, until at last there was a letter waiting. It was from Cleve, but she hadn’t the heart or the interest to open it right away. She was curiously without feeling, as if she had lost her capacity to care.
Her feet were stiff and aching in their heeled shoes when she finally reached the hotel. She started to walk past the desk but the clerk called to her and held up a letter to catch her eye. For some reason it alarmed her and brought her back to life. A letter from Cleve was all right, but not two.
It was from Merrill Landon, of course. He had her hotel address; there had seemed no reason to hide it from him. The odd feeling of foreboding, of distress at the sight of the letters, stayed with her and settled in her stomach. She threw them on the dresser in her small stuffy room, placed a newly purchased bottle of whiskey beside them, threw off her clothes and showered, before she tried to read.
She opened the letter from Landon first. He was a reserved man, a cautious man, and he expressed himself carefully, but his pleasure was evident even in the controlled phrases that thanked her for having found his daughter.
“I owe you any joy there may be left in my life,” he said, and the admission touched her. His note was brief. But at the end he added a shocker, in his terse sensible prose. “By the way, your husband is in Chicago. I found out through my ‘spies’ on the paper. Sorry I can’t tell you more.”
Beth sat on the bed with a stiff drink in one hand and the note in the other. Charlie in Chicago! Why? What in God’s name for? He knew then, from her aunt and uncle, that she had run away. What else did he know?
She jumped up and grabbed Cleve’s letter with quivering hands. Maybe it would explain, maybe it was a letter of warning about Charlie.
It was.
“Dear Beth,” he wrote. “I just found out about this—hope it’s not too late to tell you. There’s been a detective following you ever since you left Chicago. Your uncle John and Charlie have gotten together. John told Charlie everything he got from the detective so all our little precautions have been for nothing. Charlie has known all along where you are and what you are doing—more than I know by a long shot. He left yesterday for Chicago. I don’t know what will happen now. He has the kids with him—they’re both fine.”
The little domestic interjection almost threw her for some reason she couldn’t fathom and she had to stop reading to clear her mind of guilty thoughts of her children.
“One last thing,” Cleve wrote. “Just to make everything perfect. Vega has disappeared. She had been spending the weekends with us and seemed so much better. Sunday night I was going to drive her back to the hospital, but Mother called in a panic and said she was gone. Went out in back to help Gramp feed
