“I can prove it, all right I wasn’t living with Eddie. He said I was making him nervous so I went to stay with my sister for a while. That’s how he knew the baby wasn’t his.” She touched the scar on her forehead with the tip of one finger. “He hit me with a lamp. I stood it for two months after that and then I left him. He said such terrible things to me. I didn’t mean to be bad.”
The girl started to cry again. Charlotte looked at her crisp and businesslike. (“Does nothing move you, Charley?” Lewis had asked her last week before he left. “In my profession I can’t afford to be moved,” she had told him. “I would be weeping all the time, and quite useless, don’t you see?” He didn’t see. In spite of his sophistication he judged the weight of an emotion by the amount of tears or laughter it displaced.)
She said, “I gather that the man involved doesn’t want to marry you.”
“He couldn’t anyway.” She fumbled in her coat pocket for a piece of Kleenex. She found one, sodden with previous tears and stained with lipstick. “He’s married already.”
“Did you know that when you...?”
“Yes. He told me. But I didn’t care then. He was so different from anyone I ever met.”
“Older than you?”
“I guess, about forty.”
“Had you known him long?”
Violet uttered a sound that was almost like a laugh. “I never saw him before in my life.”
“Yet you...?”
“Yes. Yes. I... oh, you wouldn’t understand.”
“I’ll try,” Charlotte said gravely.
“Well, he came in the bar where Eddie works — Eddie’s my husband. He began talking about the big redwood trees, how it was such a crime to cut them down. He said some of them were four or five thousand years old and two hundred and fifty feet high, and how they were almost human. I don’t remember his exact words but he talked like — like poetry.”
Charlotte watched her in silent pity.
“Well, Eddie said that was a lot of baloney about the trees, and when I started to talk he told me to shut up and go back to my sister’s. I was scared not to. Eddie is — is tough.”
“Tough?”
“He used to be a pro fighter until his appendix burst. I didn’t want no trouble, so I left.”
“But not to your sister’s.”
She shook her head. “I went out and waited beside his car. It was the only car there with a California license. I... I really only wanted to apologize to him for Eddie’s bad manners. We talked for a while and then he said he had to go back to his motel because he was leaving in the early morning, going home.”
“That is, coming here, to Safinda?”
“Yes. I was awful disappointed. I mean, didn’t you never go to a big city like Portland and maybe catch someone’s eye when you were walking along the street — and you knew right away that you had something in common, a lot in common? I felt like that about him... I guess you never been to Ashley.”
“No.” She had never heard of it.
“It’s a little town where people never stay. They go through it, heading east or north or south. No one stays.” She raised her head and said passionately, “I hate it. I hate Eddie, too.”
And out of the hatred, Charlotte thought, had come Violet’s union with the man who talked like poetry. To her he was probably a symbol of all the romantic and exciting people who passed through the town, heading east or north or south, but never stayed.
“I don’t know how it happened after that. I don’t know. I... oh doctor, please. You’ve got to help me.”
“I’m sorry I can’t, not in the way you mean.”
The girl let out a cry of despair. “I thought — I thought being you was a woman like me — being you...”
“I’m sorry,” Charlotte said again.
“What can I do? What can I do with this — this thing growing inside of me, growing and growing, and me with no money and no job and no husband. Oh God, I wish I was dead!” She struck her thighs with both fists. “I’ll kill myself!”
“You can’t, Violet. Stop now and be sensible.”
Miss Schiller appeared. She’d been listening at the door. She liked excitement, and violence was always cropping up in her dreams.
“Did you need me, doctor?”
“Why, no,” Charlotte said coolly. “As a matter of fact you may go home. I’ll lock up.”
“Well, I thought...”
“Good night, Miss Schiller.”
The door banged shut again.
Violet’s face was blotched with white. “She must of heard me. She’ll go around telling everyone.”
“She has no one to tell, only her cat.”
“C... cat?”
“She has a big tomcat; the two of them gossip together for hours... Are you feeling better now, Violet?”
“Why should I? Nothing’s been changed.”
Charlotte felt a little foolish. Ordinary tact seemed silly in the face of such simple and direct reactions as Violet’s: How can I want this child? Why should I feel better when nothing is changed?
“Such operations are illegal,” Charlotte said bluntly, “unless they’re necessary. That is, medically necessary, in the case of a mother’s life being at stake.”
“My life is at stake.”
“You only think that now. Later on, when you adjust to the...”
“Please,” Violet said. “Please. Give me some medicine.”
“I can’t. Even if I could it wouldn’t work. Your pregnancy is too advanced. How far along are you?”
“Four months.”
Charlotte thought of the child secure inside Violet’s reluctant body, impervious to the violence of her fists and the animosity of her mind. It would be recognizably human by this time, the arms and legs well-formed, the cervical flexure gone, the head nearly straight, the nose and lips and cheeks already distinct. Four months — how could the girl be sure?
“I’m sure,” Violet said. “It only happened once.” She raised her head and looked at Charlotte, half-hostile, half-anxious. “I guess you don’t believe that no more than Eddie did.”
“I believe it.”
“Just once, it happened. Just for a minute, and now look at me. It ain’t fair. I don’t deserve it.”
“I know... I know... This Eddie you mentioned, your husband... Perhaps your best bet, for the time being anyway, would be to go back to him if he’ll take you?”
“Oh, he’d take me, all right. He likes to have me around, somebody to cook for him and to bully. Oh, what’s the use sitting here talking? You won’t help me.”
“I can’t.”
“You can, but you won’t, because you’re afraid. Well, I’m afraid too, worse than you.” Violet’s eyes were bleak. The crying had washed away their softness; they glared like marbles. “Doctor — you don’t know anybody else who’d...”
“I’m sorry, I don’t,” Charlotte said honestly. There were rumors, of course, about old Dr. Chisholm, but then there were about many doctors, off and on, herself included. Most of the rumors originated with disgruntled patients or chronic cranks.
Violet was watching her, sadly, bitterly. “I guess you’ve never been desperate like I am.”
Charlotte was patient. “Now Violet, let’s not make this a contest between you and me, who’s more afraid or who’s more desperate. This is a practical problem. We can’t solve it with emotions. Tell me, have you any place to stay?”
“My step-uncle keeps a boarding house downtown. He’s letting me stay in the back room upstairs until — until things are settled.”
“What things?”
“He thinks I should get money from this man — the father.”
“Have you tried?”
“Yes. But he wasn’t home. He was out of town.”