Beebo Brinker

Jack studied her, perplexed. He would have been gently amused if she hadn’t seemed so stricken by it all. “Well, honey, it only happens to the best and the worst,” he said. “The worst get canned for being too stupid and the best for being too smart. They damn near kicked me out once.… I was one of the best.” He grinned.

“Best, worst, or—or different,” Beebo said. “I was different. I mean, I just didn’t fit in. I wasn’t like the rest. They didn’t want me around. I guess they felt threatened, as if I were a nudist or a vegetarian, or something. People don’t like you to be different. It scares them. They think maybe some of it will rub off on them, and they can’t imagine anything worse.”

“Than becoming a vegetarian?” he said and downed the rest of his beer to drown a chuckle. He set the glass on the floor by the leg of his chair. “Are you a vegetarian, Beebo?” She shook her head. “A nudist?”

“I’m just trying to make you understand,” she said, almost pleading, and there was a real beacon of fear shining through her troubled eyes.

Jack reached out his hand and held it toward her until she gave him one of hers. “Are you afraid to tell me, Beebo?” he said. “Are you ashamed of something? Something you did? Something you are?”

She reclaimed her hand and pulled a piece of tissue from her bag, trying to keep her back straight, her head high. But she folded suddenly around a sob, bending over to hold herself, comfort herself. Jack took her shoulders in his firm hands and said, “Whatever it is, you’ll lick it, honey. I’ll help you if you’ll let me. I’m an old hand at this sort of thing. I’ve been saving people from themselves for years. Sort of a sidewalk Dorothy Dix. I don’t know why, exactly. It just makes me feel good. I like to see somebody I like, learn to like himself. You’re a big, clean, healthy girl, Beebo. You’re handsome as hell. You’re bright and sensitive. I like you, and I’m pretty particular.”

She murmured inarticulately into her hands, trying to thank him, but he shushed her.

“Why don’t you like yourself?” he asked.

After a moment she stopped crying and wiped her face. She threw Jack a quick cautious look, wondering how much of her story she could risk with him. Perversely enough, his very kindness and patience scared her off. She was afraid that the truth would sicken him, alienate him from her. And at this forlorn low point in her life, she needed his friendship more than a bed or a cigarette or even food.

Jack caught something of the conflict going on within her. “Tell me what you can,” he said.

“My dad is a veterinarian,” she began in her low voice. “Everybody in Juniper Hill loved him. Till he started—drinking too much. But that wasn’t for a long time. In the beginning we were all very happy. Even after my mother died, we got along. My brother Jim and I were friends back in grade school.

“Dad taught us about animals. There wasn’t a job he couldn’t trust me with when it came to caring for a sick animal. And the past few years when he’s been—well, drunk so much of the time—I’ve done a lot of the surgery, too. I’m twice the vet my brother’ll ever be. Jim never did like it much. He went along because he was ashamed of his squeamishness. But whenever things got bloody or tough, he ducked out.

“But I got along fine with Dad. The one thing I always wanted was to live a good life for his sake. Be a credit to him. Be something wonderful. Be—a doctor. He was so proud of that. He understood, he helped me all he could.” She drained her glass again. “Some doctor I’ll be now,” she said. “A witch doctor, maybe.” She filled the glass and Jack said anxiously, “Whoa, easy there. You’re a milk drinker, remember?”

She ignored him. “At least I won’t be around to see Dad’s face when he realizes I’ll never make it to medical school,” Beebo said, the corners of her mouth turned down. “I hated to leave him, but I had to do it. It’s one thing to stick it out in a place where they don’t like you. It’s another to let yourself be destroyed.”

“So you think you’ve solved your problems by coming to the big city?” Jack asked her.

“Not all of them!” she retorted. “I’ll have to get work, I’ll have to find a place to live and all that. But I’ve solved the worst one, Jack.”

“Maybe you brought some of them with you,” he said. “You didn’t run as far away from Juniper Hill as you think. People are still people, no matter what the town. And Beebo is still Beebo. Do you think New Yorkers are wiser and better than the people in Juniper Hill, honey? Hell, no. They’re probably worse. The only difference is that here, you have a chance to be anonymous. Back home everybody knew who you were.”

Beebo threw him a sudden smile. “I don’t think there’s a single Jack Mann in all of Juniper Hill,” she said. “It was worth the trip to meet you.”

“Well, I’d like to think I’m that fascinating,” he said. “But you didn’t come to New York City to find Jack Mann, after all. You came to find Beebo Brinker. Yourself. Or are you one of those rare lucky ones who knows all there is to know about themselves by the time they’re seventeen?”

“Eighteen,” she corrected. “No, I’m not one of the lucky ones. Just one of the rare ones.” Inexplicably, it struck both of them funny and they laughed at each other. Beebo felt herself loose and pliable under the influence of the liqueur. It was exhilarating, a floating release that shrouded the pain and confusion of her flight from home and arrival in this cold new place. She was glad for Jack’s company, for his warmth and humor. “You must be good for me,” she told him. “Either you or the schnapps.”

“You’re going pretty heavy on that stuff, friend,” he warned her, nodding at the glass. “There’s more in it than peppermint, you know.”

“But it tastes so good going down,” she said, surprised to find herself still laughing.

“Well, it doesn’t taste so good when it comes back up.”

“I haven’t had that much,” she said and poured herself some more. Jack rolled his eyes to heaven and made her laugh again.

“You know I could take advantage of you in your condition,” he said, thinking it might sober her up a little. But his fundamental compassion and intelligence had put her at ease, led her to trust him. She was actually enjoying herself a little now, trying to forget whatever it was that drove her into this new life, and Jack hadn’t the heart to stir up her fears again. He wondered if she had left a scandal or a tragedy behind her in Juniper Hill.

“I was going to be a doctor once myself,” he said.

She looked at him with a sort of cockeyed interest. “What happened?”

“Would have taken too long. I wanted to get that degree and get out. And I wanted love. But you can’t make love to anybody after a long day over a hot cadaver. You’re too pooped and the sight of human flesh gives you goose pimples instead of pleasant shivers. Besides, I spent four years in the Navy in the Second World War, and I’d had it with blood and suffering.”

Beebo drank the schnapps in her glass. “That’s as good a reason as any for quitting, I guess,” she said.

“You could still finish up high school and go on to college,” he said, trying not to sound pushy.

“No. I’ve lost it, Jack. That ambition, that will to do well. I left it behind when I left my father. I just don’t give a double damn about medicine, for the first time in my life.”

“Because a bunch of small-minded provincials asked you to leave their little high school? You make it sound like you were just squirming to be asked.”

“You’re saying I didn’t have the guts to fight them,” she said, speaking without resentment. “It isn’t that, Jack. I did fight them, with all I’ve got. I’m tired of it, that’s all. You can’t fight everybody all the time and still have room in your life to study and think and learn.”

“Was it that bad, Beebo?”

“I was that bad—to the people in Juniper Hill.”

Jack shook his head in bewilderment and laughed a little. “You don’t happen to carry the bubonic plague, do you?” he said.

She knew how curious she had made him about herself, and she hadn’t the courage to expose the truth to him yet. So she merely said, “That’s over now. My life is going to be different.”

“Different, but not necessarily better,” he said. “I wish to hell you’d come clean with me, honey. I can’t help you this way. I don’t know what you’re running away from.”

“I’m not running away from, I’m running to,” she said. “To this city, this chance for a new start.”

“And a new Beebo?” he asked. “Do you think being in a new place will make you better and braver somehow?”

“I’m not chicken, Jack,” she said firmly. “I left for Dad’s sake as much as my own.”

“I didn’t say you were, honey,” he told her gently. “I don’t think a chicken would have come so far to face so much all alone. I think you’re a decent, intelligent girl. I think you’re a good-looking girl, too, just for the record. That much is plain as the schnapps on your face.”

Beebo frowned at him, self-conscious and surprised. “You’re the first man who ever called me ‘good-looking,’” she said. “No, the second. My father always thought …” Her voice went very soft. “You know, it kills me to go off and—and abandon him like this.” She got up from the floor and walked a little unsteadily to the front window.

“Why don’t you write to him?” Jack suggested. “If he was so good to you—if you were so close—he deserves to know where you are.”

“That was the whole point of leaving,” she said, shaking her head. “To keep it secret. To relieve him.”

“Of what?”

“Of myself. I was a burden to him. He did too much for me. He tried to be father and mother both. He indulged me when he should have been stern. He never could bear to punish me.”

She stood looking out his front window in silence, crying quietly. Her face was still, with the only movement the rhythmic swell and spill of tears from her eyes.

“My father,” she said, “is no angel. Much as I love him, I know that much.” Jack sensed a whole raft of sad secrets behind that brief phrase.

He stood up, crushed his cigarette, and looked at her for a moment. She stood with her legs apart and well-defined by her narrow cotton skirt. Her hair was tousled and damp with sweat, and there was a shine in her wet eyes reflected from the lamplight that intensified the blue. She had left her schnapps glass on the floor and her empty hands hung limp against her thighs. She lifted them now and then to brush away tears. Her head inclined slightly, like that of a youngster who has grown too tall too fast and doesn’t want to tower over her classmates.