“Do you think that’s what it was? That you intervened? You said you only told him I couldn’t have children.”
“That’s true. It’s all I told him. But I have to ask myself, why? Was I trying to prepare him in some way for — I don’t know, for what he would either learn from you being together, or what you might have to tell him yourself someday? I felt like it was my obligation somehow, to say something. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I should have just let things unfold however they might.”
Now she was quiet for a while. Then she said, “I thought about that. Of course. I was angry at first. I thought you should have let me tell him. But you ought to know. I decided that I wasn’t at all sure I could even do that. I think maybe I was grateful to you, for at least giving him something.”
And then she told him about the afternoon when Elijah came to see her and she turned him away.
“Are you saying now I should have stayed?” Jane said. “That I should have just told Elijah everything, and risk it?” Just the thought, just saying the words, made her heart race as if in fear.
“I don’t know anything for sure, Janie.”
“But if he had been unable to get beyond the facts of what I told him, like you said back then, wouldn’t my heartbreak have been even worse? And maybe even his, too?”
“I don’t know,” he said again. “I did think so at the time.” He looked at her. “And you thought so, too, didn’t you?”
She didn’t reply for a moment, felt her heartbeat begin to slow to normal again.
“Yes,” she said then. “I did.”
“But the truth is, we can never really know.”
“Yes,” she said. “I suppose that is true.”
WHEN THE DRY-CLEANING business finally did fail the next year, in ’38, Jane thought she’d go home to the farm, but Grace told her, somewhat mysteriously, to give her a few days, she might not have to leave.
“I don’t know, Grace,” she said. “I kind of think that’s where I ought to be. Anyway, what can you do now? We, I mean?”
“I think I know what I can do. And as for you, we can think about that later, if what I think I can do works out.”
“Well, I hope it’s legal,” Jane joked.
Grace stopped. She was wearing what Jane considered to be a dress just shy of scandalous, was perfumed, in heels, and wore a lot of makeup, and sported a hat made of black cotton with a brim that practically covered one eye, hair down in bangs that practically covered the other.
“As a matter of fact, it’s not. You might just say it’s conditionally approved.”
And then she left. Got into her car, made a U-turn, and headed down the hill into downtown.
When she returned an hour later, she had a bottle of bootleg whiskey with her and told Jane to come sit with her in the kitchen while she had a drink. She poured herself a straight shot of it into a short glass, took a sip, cleared her throat, and removed the hat. Jane was mildly shocked to realize that Grace, with her bright red lipstick, milky pale skin, and yellow-blond hair, was actually a beautiful woman. Sexy, she’d have to say. She’d never realized that ever before. Whenever she’d looked at Grace, she’d only really seen what seemed to be the ugly side of her personality. It had effectively obscured her physical beauty, for Jane.
“What are you staring at?” Grace said.
“Oh. Nothing.”
Grace gave her a look, took another shot of the whiskey.
“All right, here’s my big secret. I’ll be starting tomorrow. Working for Miss Minnie. You know who I’m talking about?”
Jane shook her head.
“You ever heard of a brothel, sister?”
Jane shook her head again. Then nodded. “Well,” she said, “kind of.”
“It’s where men pay women to have sex with them. At Miss Minnie’s it pays well.”
Jane was just nodding slightly, knowing her eyes were big and no doubt plaintive and stupid-looking. As if to confirm it, Grace laughed, quietly and almost to herself.
“Okay, so I don’t want to sling hash or hamburgers, or clean rich people’s houses, or work in some filthy factory. Miss Minnie has always liked me. She’s been a customer for a long time, didn’t you know that?”
“Oh, that Miss Minnie. The tall one with the beautiful white hair.”
“Right. And the expensive clothes. And the Yankee accent. She’s from Michigan. And she is a lady, even if she does manage a house full of ladies of ill repute. And she is in good standing with the police and many well-heeled businessmen in this town.”
“And she runs a — what do you call it — a brothel? Grace. If Papa and Mama were to find out—”
“Papa and Mama have never really had any control over me, and you know it.”
“Yes,” Jane said.
“And there’s something else.”
“What?”
“She also agreed to do me another favor, and that is to hire you.”
“Me! What are you talking about?”
“Not to service the men, for God’s sake. Miss Minnie’s is a high-class operation. They don’t go in for, let’s say, the odd experience.”
They stared at one another a long moment.
“Anyway, I was teasing you. I’m not going to be a whore there.”
“Whore.”
“Right. The ones that do it with the men. Miss Minnie has admired my business acumen, my smarts. And she knows I mean business when I do business. I’m going to be what I guess you’d call her manager. Let her take it a bit easier from now on.”
“Oh.” Jane had been imagining Grace lying in a four-poster bed all day, naked or half naked, fanning herself with a Japanese fan, drinking gin, smoking cigarettes in between rutting with any stranger who walked through the door with his thing in his hand. But now she thought about it, Grace didn’t like people, women or men, well enough to have a job like that, with constant intimacy, be it phony and vulgar or not.
“Oh,” she said again. “Well, what is it you’d have me doing, then?”
“You might imagine there’s a whole lot of sheet-washing going on in a place like that,” Grace said. “Sex can be a messy business. They change the bedsheets on every bed several times a day. Now, you know how to run a big washing machine. The pay will not be near as good as what I’ll make but it will do its part toward keeping this roof over our heads and food in the pantry. I’ll be as skinny as you if all we keep eating is what vegetables you grow in the garden and one hunk of meat every week.”
“No. Grace. I don’t think I want to do it. I don’t think I could.”
“No? So, you just expect me to support you? Or Mama and Papa to just support you?”
“I can work a field. Cook and clean. I can earn my keep up there. I can tend cattle, need be. Papa needs help more than ever, nowadays.”
“Well,” Grace said. She poured herself another shot of the whiskey and lit a cigarette. Apparently going outside to smoke was too much trouble now. “Well, if you want to live on a farm, work a plow, weed a field, pick cotton, stick your arm up the ass of a cow, then I guess that’s your business.”
“How do you think I would like being in a house where behind every door a caravan of strange men were sticking their stinkhorns into the same women all day long? I wonder how long you will like it.”
Grace French-inhaled from her cigarette, squinting against the smoke, and blew it out the corner of her red lips.
“I guess I’ll find out,” she said. “But it’ll be them, not me. The only ‘stinkhorns,’ as you say, that I’ll see will be the ones I pluck for myself.”
Oblivion
But now there was the problem of how to go back home. Not the simple act of going home, which could be accomplished by calling and catching a ride with the doctor, or being packed and ready to go home next time her father came into town. The problem was that if she went home she would be questioned about why she was returning, and why now, and what was going on with Grace, and so on. And she had never lied to them, not exactly, and she wasn’t good at prevarication, anyway. Lying, or attempting to, or even considering it, embarrassed her, which felt like an oddly humiliating weakness.