“Yes. Naturally.”
“When I hold you, you draw away as if I had a bad smell.”
“Oh Lewis, for heaven’s sake,” she said sharply, pulling away from his grasp. “I told you, I’m not myself tonight. Everything’s wrong, out of focus.”
He looked grim. “Because of this girl?”
“I suppose that started it.”
“Why?”
“She’s in trouble. I refused to help her.”
“Why should you help her? She’s probably just an ordinary tart who got caught.”
“No. She’s a nice girl, sensitive, and very bewildered.”
“You’ve had cases like that before. Why does this one worry you?”
“Because of us, Lewis. Don’t you see...?”
“No.”
“If we go on together, if we become lovers, I might accidentally end up in the same boat she’s in.”
He let out a snort of disgust. “I see now. For some extraordinary reason you’ve identified yourself with this girl, and me with the man who got her in trouble, the callous, bestial male.”
“No, I haven’t.” She looked up at him, searching his face for some sign that he understood. “What would you do if I got pregnant?”
“Considering our present platonic relationship, that’s rather funny.”
“You aren’t laughing. What would you do?”
“Oh, come off it,” he said. “You wouldn’t get pregnant.”
“It’s possible.”
“Not with the proper insurance.”
She smiled, a little bitterly. “That’s a funny analogy. When you take out earthquake insurance it means you’re protected financially against an earthquake. It doesn’t guarantee that there won’t be an earthquake. The sense of security is false.”
“Now earthquakes. God, Charley, what’s got into you? You’re becoming a neurotic.”
“Am I?” She averted her face. “I think you’d better leave.”
“Certainly,” he said. “Certainly.”
He crossed the room towards the door, slowly, giving her an opportunity to call him back. She didn’t. She stood at the window until she heard his car roar out of the garage. The furious racing of the engine indicated that Lewis was taking out his temper on the car.
His cigarette was still smoldering. She carried the ash tray out to the kitchen and washed it, moving awkwardly because she was angry. Hers wasn’t a hot and immediate anger like Lewis’; it couldn’t be satisfied, as his could, by racing the engine of a car or breaking a golf club. Charlotte’s anger was slow and cold; it crept gradually through her body, depressing the nerves, making her almost incapable of moving and talking.
She thought of all the things she should have said. Then she said them silently to herself, rephrasing and cutting them until they were sharp and elegant as diamonds. It was the land of childish satisfaction that she seldom permitted herself.
She looked at the dock. Nine-thirty. Lewis would be home by now, making up a lie for Gwen. Miss Schiller would be putting up her hair and talking to her cat, perhaps even telling it about Violet: “Today a bad girl came in, bold as you please, and wanted doctor to get rid of the baby — oh, the things that happen! And the people you meet!”
Yes, the things that happen. Charlotte felt a stab of regret. I should have helped the girl, she thought I meant to do something for her, but she’d already gone.
She stood at the window, locking and unlocking her fingers. A low gray fog hung over the distant housetops and gave them the contours of a dream. Under one of the housetops was the girl Violet worrying out the night, friendless, penniless, thinking of death.
916 Olive Street. The address had stuck in her memory as the girl’s grief and terror had stuck in her throat.
With a decisive movement Charlotte turned from the window and went to the hall closet for her coat and hat.
3
Olive Street threaded north-south through the city. At one end there was an imposing hotel that rented ocean views at twenty dollars a night, at the other a flour mill. In the center, once a select suburb, the grandiose old three-storied Victorian houses had been gradually debauched by slums and abandoned. The slums had pushed ahead like an army of grasshoppers destroying everything that grew in its path. Nothing would ever grow again in that concrete wilderness except people. More and more people, whites and Negroes, Mexicans, Chinese, Italians. They kept alive and multiplied. They worked on the dock or at the freight yards; they were gardeners, busboys, charwomen, bookies; they took in washing and roomers; they sold tamales, green tea, religion, firecrackers, used furniture, souvenirs, rose bushes, and Mexican silver jewelry.
Olive Street was never empty or quiet. It had no set hours of work and rest like the middle-class parts of town. It was awake all day and all night. After dark there were fights and crap games, police sirens and recriminations.
Charlotte knew the section well. She had two regular patients within a block of 916. Though she wasn’t apprehensive about visiting Olive Street, she took the precaution of locking her Buick and removing the radiator cap that the garage man had fixed so that she could take it off and put it on herself. (She’d lost two before she caught on to the fact that you couldn’t make people trustworthy by trusting them. It was better to withdraw the temptation.)
916 was a relic. Built to last, it had lasted stubbornly through sixty years and a major earthquake and a succession of owners and tenants.
The present tenant, according to the crudely printed sign in the right front window, was Clarence G. Voss. The sign read, in fulclass="underline" clarence g. voss. phrenology and palmistry. fresh-out flowers for sale. piano lessons.
Inside the house someone was playing, not a piano, but a harmonica, with brash inaccuracy. An elderly Italian sat rocking on the front porch, his hands pressed tight over his ears.
Charlotte nodded and said, “Good evening.”
He lowered his hands, scowling, “What’s that?”
“I said, good evening.”
“Cold and noisy.”
“Perhaps you could tell me if Mrs. Violet O’Gorman is at home.”
“I pay no attention to other people.”
He replaced his hands over his ears and withdrew into his world of silence. He kept his eyes on her, though, as if there was a remote possibility that she might do something interesting.
Charlotte pressed the doorbell.
“Out of order,” the Italian said.
“Thanks.”
“Nobody fixes anything around here.”
“I think the button is jammed.”
“You’re wrong.”
It was jammed. She fixed it in three seconds with a bobby pin while the Italian watched her with grudging approval.
Inside the house the harmonica stopped abruptly at the sound of the bell.
A man opened the door, a small, middle-aged man with a red baseball cap pulled down over his forehead. His ears jutted out from under the cap, extraordinary ears, pale as wax and enormous. His chin and nose were elfin and sharp, his eyes were like small black peas. Charlotte could see the outline of the harmonica in the pocket of his Hawaiian-print shirt.
Charlotte didn’t smile or even attempt to look pleasant. He was the kind of man who would immediately construe a smile from a strange woman as an invitation to intimacy; a man as quick to take offense as to take liberties.
“I’m looking for Violet O’Gorman. Is she at home?”
“I don’t know.” He had a surprising voice for his stature, deep and resonant. “Who wants her?”
“I do.”
“Sure, sure, I know that, but what name will I say is calling?”