When Beebo asked her later if she could take her home Beth agreed without thinking. But suddenly she had to admit, “I don’t really know where I’m going. I don’t have a home.”
“Back to the hotel?” Beebo said.
“I guess so.”
“That’s no place for you at a time like this,” Beebo told her. “Come home with me. It’s not luxurious but it’s a hell of a lot friendlier.”
“Thank you,” Beth said quietly, without even arguing. “I’d like to.”
They said goodbye to Laura with promises to call her soon and went down together in the elevator. “It’s funny,” Beth said. “I was coming up in this same elevator a couple of hours ago and wondering how I’d feel when I went down again. Scared and ashamed, or just glad it was all over.”
“Which is it?” Beebo said, leaning against the wall of the elevator and looking down at her.
“Neither,” Beth admitted, smiling.
“What, then?”
“I guess it’s closest to…a sort of happiness,” she confessed shyly. “Or hopefulness, maybe.”
Beebo touched her face gently with her hand, a gesture she had used once before and that delighted Beth. “You’ve been through enough to whip anybody,” Beebo said. “I don’t know if it’ll help to think of this, but you know, a lot of strange things have been done in the name of love. In the search for love. And for the love of women. Crazy, silly, unreasonable things, some of them. You’ve just made a journey across the continent to find yourself. But the real journey was into your own heart. Isn’t that so?”
Beth nodded as the sliding doors opened, and they walked into the lobby. Beebo pulled her aside and talked to her. “Let me finish,” she said. “I want you to understand this. For the love of women I’ve made a fool of myself, just like most of the men I know. And a lot of the girls. I’ve suffered like an idiot. At least what you suffered had purpose and reason to it. You’ve learned from it. I’ll tell you one thing,” she added with twinkling eyes, “the silliest goddamn thing I ever did was fall for a girl I hated for years.”
“Who was that?” Beth said.
“You.”
Beth dropped her gaze and a warm thrill suffused her. She could feel her face turning pink and she didn’t mind at all. Perhaps it was real or perhaps it was all a dream. She didn’t know or care. All she knew was that Beebo was offering her a chance at happiness and she asked only that chance. It might work out, it might not. But she had life and youth and even courage now, and looking into Beebo’s fine, worn face she felt a solid reassurance. Beebo’s eyes promised shelter, they promised love, they promised that glorious undeserved chance at contentment that Beth had no right to expect from fate. But there it was.
Beebo’s strong hands held her shoulders. “I understand, baby,” she said softly. “I understand. If that makes any difference to you.”
“It does. All the difference in the world.”
They walked out of the lobby together, hand in hand.
THE END
Beebo Brinker
Beebo Brinker
by Ann Bannon
Copyright © 1962 by Ann Bannon
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in the United States by Cleis Press Inc.,
P.O. Box 14684, San Francisco, California 94114.
Printed in the United States.
Cover design: Scott Idleman
Text design: Karen Quigg
Cleis Press logo art: Juana Alicia
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“Looking back from the mid-80s to the distant 50s and 60s, let me share a thought with you. The books as they stand have 50s flaws. They are, in effect, the offspring of their special era, with its biases. But they speak truly of that time and place as I knew it. I would not write them today quite as I wrote them then. But I did write them then, of course. And if Beebo is really there for some of you—and Laura and Beth and the others—it’s because I stayed close to what felt real and right.” —ANN BANNON
Beebo Brinker
Jack Mann had seen enough in his life to swear off surprise forever. He had seen the ports of the Pacific from the deck of a Navy hospital ship during World War II. He had helped patch the endless cut and bloodied bodies, torn every which way, some irreparably. He had seen the sensuous Melanesian girls, the bronzed bare-chested surfers on Hawaiian beaches, the sly stinking misery of the caves of Iwo Jima.
A medical corpsman gets an eyeful—and a noseful—of human wretchedness during a war. When it was over, Jack left the service with a vow to lead a quiet uncomplicated life, and never to hurt anybody by so much as a pinprick. It shot the bottom out of his plans to enter medical school, but he let them go without undue regret. He’d be well along in his thirties by the time he finished, and it didn’t seem worth it any more.
So he completed the course he started before the war: engineering. And after he got his degree he took a job in the New York office of a big Chicago construction firm as head of drafting.
During those war years, when Jack was holding heaving sailors over the head and labeling countless blood samples, he had fallen in love. It was a lousy affair, unhappy and violent. But peculiarly good now and then. Good enough to sell him on Love for a long time.
He organized his life around it. He earned
