She didn’t make much headway at first. Then she got an idea — there was one person in the world who could help her, one person in the world who would know exactly what to do.
One person.
Chapter Twelve
The phone rang three times before he answered it. Then she heard him lift it from the hook and say: “Hello.”
She took a deep breath.
“This is Linda,” she said. “Linda Shepard.”
He didn’t say anything and for a moment she was afraid he was going to hang up on her. She listened to the silence, her fingers trembling once again, her throat tight.
“I have to see you,” she said desperately.
“What for?”
“I don’t want to say over the phone.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “The line’s not tapped.”
“This one might be.”
He laughed at that. “C’mon over,” he said.
Then there was the sound as he replaced the receiver. She didn’t hang up right away, however. For a long moment she stood with the receiver next to her ear and listened to the silence, hardly able to believe what she had heard, hardly able to believe that Donald Gibbs had just gotten through telling her that it was all right for her to come over to his apartment. Then, hardly aware of what she was doing, she hung up the phone and drifted down the staircase and out the door.
He was waiting for her and the first thing she thought was that he looked the same as ever. His hair was still cropped close to his head and his beard was neat and well-trimmed. His eyes looked impossibly tired and there were deep lines in his forehead and around the corners of his mouth. She wondered how long it had been since he had had some sleep; the combination of the Record and final exams must have been keeping him awake constantly.
“Come on inside,” he said. He led the way and sat down on the edge of his bed; she took a seat in a chair across the room from him. He didn’t say anything and she didn’t know just where to begin.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Let’s have it.”
She still didn’t know what to say. Her nerves were on edge both from what she had to talk to him about and from the experience of seeing him again, of being with him at his apartment. She had passed him in halls during the past few months and had run into him in the cafeteria from time to time but they hadn’t spoken before, not since they broke up.
“You’re so tense you’re shaking,” he told her. “You better let me have it.”
Abruptly she said: “I’m going to have a baby.”
Nothing registered in his face. He didn’t seem particularly surprised or shocked or upset.
He said. “Whose?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long have you known?”
“I just found out today.”
“When’s the happy day?”
“I’m about two months gone. Maybe a little more.”
He nodded. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit one for himself, offering the pack to her more or less as an afterthought. She took one and lit it herself, dragging deeply on it.
“What do you want from me?”
“I don’t know.”
He stared at her thoughtfully. “You must want something,” he said. “We haven’t spoken to each other in months. What is it that you want?”
In a small voice she said: “Help.”
She couldn’t look at him now. She turned away and looked at the wall instead, then puffed nervously on the cigarette. She tried to blow smoke rings but the smoke refused to form circles and trailed to the ceiling in shapeless wisps.
“Linda—”
She turned to him.
“Do you want to find a guy and get him to marry you?”
She shook her head.
“Sure?”
“I don’t want to marry anybody.”
“Then what do you want?”
Help, she started to say again. Instead she said nothing and started to turn away from him once more. Maybe it was a mistake coming to see him, maybe he couldn’t help her at all. She didn’t know what to do or what to say.
“I’d heard you reformed,” he said lightly. “I heard you stopped trying to set local bedroom records.”
She nodded dully.
“How come?”
She shrugged.
“Are you coming back here next year?”
She shook her head.
“Why not?”
“They threw me out.”
“Grades?”
“Partly.”
“What else?”
She tried to smile but it didn’t work. “Local bedroom records,” she said.
“Oh.”
“I’m going to pass my courses,” she offered. “I’ve been studying day and night and I’m going to pass everything. I told the dean that but he said it didn’t matter.”
“Dean Maples?”
She nodded.
“He’s a son of a bitch.”
She nodded again, thinking that she ought to say something but not having anything to say.
“What are you going to do next year?”
“I don’t know.”
“Going home to Cleveland?”
“No.”
“Transferring somewhere else?”
“I’d like to,” she said. “If there was some place where they would take me. I don’t think there is.”
“If you pass your courses—”
“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “That’s secondary. First I’d have to find a college that admits unwed mothers, and that knocks out a lot of them.”
“Oh.”
She put her cigarette out in an ashtray. She didn’t stub it out viciously but ground it out gently, methodically. She wasn’t as nervous as she had been now; somehow talking to him was very relaxing. Just the fact that someone else knew was a help, and Don wasn’t scolding her or condemning her or berating her for her condition. He was listening to her, questioning her and, indirectly, helping her.
She felt a little better already.
“Linda—”
She looked up.
“Are you positive that—”
She told him about the test and the examination.
“Who knows that you’re pregnant?”
“The doctor,” she said. “But he doesn’t even know who I am and he wouldn’t care if he did.”
“Nobody else?”
“You — that’s all.”
He closed his eyes for a minute or two, thinking. Then he opened them and stared fixedly at her for several seconds.
“Linda,” he said levelly, “you are not going to have that baby.”
He stood up, walked to the telephone and sat down in a chair next to it. He put the receiver to his ear and dialed the operator.
“New York,” he said.
When the New York operator was on the line he said: “Person-to-person to Mr. William Norment, ORegon 4-0527.”
He waited while the call was placed.
“Bill?” he said after a moment. “This is Don Gibbs... okay, thanks. Look, Bill — I don’t want to talk much. I want to ask you for a name and number.”
Silence.
“The name is that of one of your benefactors,” he said. “As I understand it, he’s a fairly big operator.”
He smiled then and began writing something on a pad next to the phone. “Swell,” he said when he had finished. “Give my love to everybody, fellow.”
He hung up the phone.
“You’re not going to have that baby,” he told Linda. “Bill’s an old buddy of mine. When a girl he knew got into some difficulty due to the spontaneous failure of a piece of rubber goods, Bill had to do something about it. Rather, he had to find somebody who would do something about it. I just got the name and number of the somebody.”
She didn’t understand.