Chicago 11, page 8
At the top of the stairs, Terry looked back over her shoulder and decided she would have time to reach and start her car before Harry and Solly, racing up from the edge of the lake, could stop her.
She ran to her car and yanked the door open. Fortunately, she’d left her key in the ignition. She started the car, then remembered Joe Joe and looked over one bare shoulder and saw him running back down the drive from the gate. Deliberately, she raced the motor of her car to make sure the maneuver wouldn’t kill it. Then she cramped the front wheels in a sharp U turn that took her out on the lawn so she could squeeze past the old Chevrolet the four boys had parked behind her car and clamped down on the accelerator.
Unfortunately the late winter snow and freeze and subsequent thaw had softened the lawn to a degree that caused one of the rear wheels to bog down and spin futilely, giving Joe Joe time to race up and grip the door on the driver’s side.
His face flushed from the heat and breathing hard from running so fast, he demanded to know, “Where the hell do you think you’re going mother naked? And what happened back there on the beach? What did you do to Frankie?”
Terry showed him the jagged piece of glass she was still clutching in one hand. “Let’s just say I don’t like to be laid without having any say in the matter.”
She made it as strong as she could,” So I waited until Frankie was good and hard, then I cut it off with this. And if you try to stop me or use that knife. I’ll do the same thing to you.”
“You wouldn’t,” the youth gasped.
“Try me,” Terry smiled sweetly.
By the sheer strength of her fear and determination she raced the engine until the wheel found traction and she was back on the crumbling brick drive and out through the wrought-iron gate, speeding south on the secondary road that would take her to the highway leading back to Chicago.
She’d driven less than a mile from the gate when reaction set in and her hands began to tremble so badly she could barely keep the car on the road. She glanced up into her rear-vision mirror to make sure the boys weren’t following her, then pulled off the road and braked the car, but kept her engine running, crying aloud now, her pentup sobs shaking her body.
Then recovering a modicum of composure, she took one of the scarves she kept in the car to use over her hair from the glove compartment and fashioned a halter of sorts. That would take care of her upper body for the present but there was nothing she could do about her more important lower exposure.
She giggled hysterically through her tears as she adjusted the narrow strap of her briefs to cover as much of her as it would. And would nosey Mrs. Mason blow a fuse when she saw her walk past her window in nothing but a makeshift halter and a pair of almost as transparent cotton bikini briefs. So would Miss Daly. And both of them were bound to see her. Mrs. Mason was always looking out her window and she couldn’t walk past the schoolteacher’s door without her popping out into the hall to make sure she was all right.
Her wet eyes looking into the rear-vision mirror, Terry sobbed violently for another moment or two. Not that she didn’t appreciate the teacher’s concern. She did. As she’d told her that morning, it was nice to know somebody cared.
Then, eager to be completely away from where she was and forestall any possibility of the boys following her in their car and finding out where she lived, she dried her eyes on a second scarf, folded the scarf over her lap and drove on as rapidly as the speed limit allowed. All she needed now was for some motorcycle officer to stop her for speeding and wind up running her in for indecent exposure and some juvenile-court judge to contact her father.
Intent on getting home as rapidly as she could, she suddenly realized, a short half mile from the highway, that she couldn’t go home. She couldn’t get into her apartment if she did. The maintenance man who had the master keys wasn’t on duty on Sunday. The only key she had was in her purse. Her purse was back on the beach. And if anyone thought she was going back to get it, he was out of his mother-loving mind. She’d had all she wanted of Frankie the Crud and Company.
The best thing she could do, Terry decided, was to drive directly to one of her girl friends’ house and honk her horn until the girl came out, then borrow a bra and a dress. A sudden thought appalled her. It might be wise if she asked the girl’s mother if she could stay all night. At least until she could have the locks on her front and back doors changed.
Frankie the Crud didn’t need to follow her to find out where she lived or that she lived alone. They knew that by now. Along with the keys to her apartment, her I.D. cards and her driver’s license and the last letter from her father saying how much he worried about her living alone were also in her purse.
Terry pursued the line of thought. It would be just like Frankie the Beard to try to give her a bad time in an attempt to get even for what she’d done to him. Just thinking about what had happened incensed her. That nasty little mule-membered stud thought he was God Almighty in a Goldblatt’s bargain-basement blazer. He hadn’t even taken it off to rape her. Well, she hoped he’d had a good time. She’d heard that boys could die if they were interrupted at the psychological moment. If so, she hoped he was dead. God knew he’d been breathing hard and digging for pay dirt when she’d done what she had.
She drove up the road leading to the highway and merged with the southbound traffic. And that brought up the matter of Paul. Should she or shouldn’t she tell him what had happened. For that matter where had Paul been while it was taking place? This was the first time he’d ever been late. Up until today he’d always been waiting for her.
A vague but gathering suspicion clouded her troubled mind. Now that she thought of it, Paul hadn’t been over-eager to go out to their beach today, especially after she’d told him on the phone that she had something very important to tell him, something concerning their future, and she hoped he’d be as happy about it as she was. He’d thought up all sorts of excuses.
Today was a holiday. The traffic would be bad. He really should go out to the cemetery with his folks. When he’d finally agreed to meet her, his voice had sounded strange and strained as he’d said:
“Okay. All right. I’ll be there.”
So where was he?
Sensing someone looking at her, Terry looked up and realized the wind had blown the folded scarf off her lap and the pleased but slightly incredulous driver leaning out of the high cab of the loaded produce semitrailer rumbling along beside her open car was so intent on what he could see that be was driving erratically.
After what had happened to her, in the mood she was in, she was tempted to tug the narrow strap aside and give him a really good look. Then maybe the dirty-minded old bastard would run his rig off the road and drown himself in a truck full of tomato puree.
The only trouble with that was he might kill someone else in the process or jackknife his rig across all the lanes and the in-bound traffic would be stalled for hours. In the interest of safe driving, to keep from becoming a Memorial Day weekend statistic, Terry gave him a dirty look, then covered her lap with the scarf and began looking for a turnoff where she could stop long enough to operate the mechanism that raised the convertible top.
She might be wise, Terry reflected, to keep a spare dress or a pair of slacks in the back of her car, along with the spare tire, just in case she ever lost her pants again.
Not that she’d really lost her pants. She knew right where they were. They were back on the beach which Paul and she had called their own. Along with the twenty-dollar medical book, telling all about prenatal care, a brand-new, fresh-out-of-the-carton F.M.-A.M. transistor radio, her sunglasses, her cigarettes, a fifteen-dollar blanket, a ten-dollar beach bag and a purse containing seventy-six dollars, her home address and the keys to her apartment.
Terry wished she had a cigarette. She wished she had a dime so she could call Paul from a pay phone. She wished she knew where she was going.
When she’d started out this morning everything had been so crystal clear. Now everything was muddled. She didn’t know what to do or where to go or where she stood. She didn’t even know if Paul wanted the baby.
All she knew was she was pregnant.
“And I know you and your husband will be very happy, Mrs. Szabados,” the doctor she’d gone to had told her. “There are no signs of complications and it should be a perfectly normal birth.”
BOOK TWO
CHAPTER 9
To everything there is a season, and a
time to every purpose under the heaven;
A time to be born, and a time to die; a
time to plant, and a time to pluck up
that which is planted; a time to kill,
and a time to heal; a time to break down,
and a time to build up . . .
ECCLESIASTES III: 1-3
It was nice, Mike Adamowski thought, to have Althea out of jail and home for Memorial Day, even if she was spending most of the day in the tub, attempting to soak away the at least mentally accumulated dirt that had encrusted her slim, firm-breasted young body during her ten-day sentence for contempt of court.
“Ten days,” Judge Harold Tyler Green had said.
And ten days she’d done. With no nonsense about it. After all, there wasn’t much that he or any other lawyer could do about a contempt-of-court sentence. A contempt-of-court situation usually wasn’t subject to appeal or a writ of habeas corpus or any of the other gambits and subterfuges in the field of legal jurisprudence. In the current instance, being as he was on the wrong side of the local political fence, there’d been nothing he could do but see that Althea was amply supplied with cigarettes and reading matter and, as her husband and her lawyer, visit her as often as regulations would permit.
Still, what could a man expect when he married a twolegged bleeding heart with an overdeveloped social conscience?
In the hope of finding cooler air, the lawyer carried the miniature television set to the table beside the easy chair in front of the window overlooking the parking space reserved
for the tenants of the building and continued to fiddle with the vertical hold as he tried to clear up the ball game he was watching, wondering, as he’d wondered a hundred times during their three-year marriage, how long this thing could continue.
There were times when he also wondered, and today was one of them, how he’d ever become so deeply involved in a world so entirely foreign to the one in which he’d once practiced law. This wasn’t at all what he’d expected his life and career to be. And it had all happened so innocently.
There he’d been, three years ago, walking along LaSalle Street, wearing a smart Brooks Brothers’ summer suit, a Countess Mara tie, and a new Abercombie & Fitch leghorn, perfectly content with things exactly as they were, with a small but profitable and rapidly growing practice in corporate law, when Althea had happened io him.
And “happened” was the word. All he’d done was stop to watch a squad of overworked, perspiring policemen attempt to disperse a group of youthful, but very articulate, bearded young male and long-haired female demonstrators who were staging a sitdown on the steps of the Board Of Trade.
All he’d been was curious. He remembered wondering, with some distaste, why the girls who participated in such demonstrations were usually such dogs and why they didn’t go home and take a bubble bath and wash their hair. Then, suddenly, there Althea had been. A rose in a garden of thorns. With her skirt up to her waist and nothing under her skirt but her, and very embarrassed about it, as four equally embarrassed husky Irish-American policemen, their red faces even more florid than usual from trying to ignore the obvious, attempted to carry the struggling girl to a waiting paddy wagon.
Then Althea had seen him standing on the curb admiring her and it had been the one and only time he’d ever heard her be coarse or profane.
“Well, look, you frigging goddamn capitalistic fink,” she’d cursed him. “If you’ve never seen one before, be my guest. How was I to know when I started out this morning that four Irish Cossacks were going to turn me upside down? Go ahead. Have a ball. But believe me, the next time I go limp in a sitdown, I’m going to stop off at the Art Institute first and borrow a pair of tin drawers from one of the knights in armor.”
That was all there’d been to it. All except that he’d been sufficiently impressed by her beauty and candor and curious enough to wonder what a girl like Althea was doing with a bunch of unwashed wild-eyed radicals to whistle down a cab and spend a dollar and twenty cents to follow the paddy wagon she was in to the South State Street police station.
Then after Althea and the others had been booked for disorderly conduct and trespass, and he had managed to convince her he wasn’t a run-of-the-police-court ambulance chaser, or interested solely in that portion of her anatomy she’d so charmingly, if unwillingly, displayed, she’d accepted him as her legal counsel. And after he had arranged to have her and her fellow demonstrators released on their own recognizance, one world had ended for him and another had begun.
During the weeks that followed, she’d allowed him to take her to dinner and to the races at Arlington Park, and to a ball game, and to see Anna Karenina at the Goodman Theatre and Gertrude Berg in, Dear Me, The Sky Is Falling.
Adamowski grimaced at the memory. Also to walk beside her, feeling like a goddamn Polish-American fool and hoping that none of his clients or any of his fellow officers in the Active Air Force Reserve saw him, in a very noisy United Mothers for Peace demonstration.
By the end of the second week he’d been so in love with her he hadn’t known a tort from a merger, especially with Althea keeping him at a distance until she made up her mind how she felt about him.
It hadn’t taken her long. That had been decided during the third week of his courtship. By then they’d been kissing good night, with Althea enjoying his kisses as much as he enjoyed kissing her, and equally as reluctant to say good night at her door.
But the catalyst that had brought them together had been her participation in a massive sit-in protesting the unfair hiring practices of a local wholesale bakery chain, said sit-in taking place in the firm’s personnel office. Legally it was trespass. And she and her fellow demonstrators should have, would have, gone to jail if he hadn’t come up with the technicality (since overruled by the court to which the decision had been appealed) that the particular law under which Althea and the others had been arrested and charged was applicable only to vacant and fenced-in land.
That night she’d allowed him to take her to the Pump Room for a victory dinner. And after they’d had an excellent meal and a half dozen equally excellent drinks, and he had taken her home and she’d invited him in for a night cap, one thing had led to another and they’d awakened in her apartment shortly after noon the next day, reluctant to get up even then. Then when they’d finally dressed, although Althea had insisted that it wasn’t necessary, he had insisted on driving down to Valparaiso and they had been married in a grimy room over a pool hall by a proletarian justice of the peace and they had lived, more or less, happily ever since.
After he’d adjusted the picture on the miniature screen to his satisfaction, Adamowski mixed a fresh drink for himself and one for Althea and carried them into the bathroom and exchanged one of the drinks for the empty glass on the rim of the tub.
“I thought you might be about ready. Compliments of the house and Ulysses S. Grant.”
“Thank both you and the general, darling,” the soaking girl smiled.
Adamowski kissed the lips she held up to be kissed, then sat on the closed lid of the facility, marveling as he always did when Althea was in the nude how even an omnipotent God, or nature, had managed to pack so much beauty and fire and femininity and social conscience into such a well-distributed one hundred pounds.
“What are you doing?” she asked him.
“Watching a ball game.”
“Any good?”
“I’ve seen better. You going to stay in there all day?”
“I may.”
“You’re going to look like a prune.”
“And you don’t like prunes?”
“I’m crazy for prunes.”
Althea laved water over her upper body with one hand as she picked up her drink with the other. “Could I ask you a personal question, mister?”
“Why not?”
“How long has it been since I told you how much I love you?”
Adamowski considered the question. “Well, that’s a leading question and I don’t think the court would allow it. But strictly off the record, I think I can say without fear of successful contradition, it was about two hours ago. Right after we decided to skip breakfast.”
“Would you rather have had ham and eggs?”
“Frankly, no.”
“After all, sweetheart,” Althea pointed out, “I was in jail for ten days.”
“How well I know.”
Althea continued to lave water over her breasts. “And while I don’t want to be pedantic about it, you have no idea how lonely a virtuous, heterosexual wife can get, or what sort of tensions can build up in her when she is forced to spend ten long nights in a four-woman cell with only two lesbians, one streetwalker, and an assortment of cockroaches for company.”
“Remind me to speak to Judge Green.”
“Maybe I ought to picket his court.”
Adamowski stood up and carried his drink to the door. “That would be all we need. Now you get out of there, hear me?”
The girl in the tub made mock obeisance. “To hear is to obey, oh lord and master.”
Adamowski returned to the ball game and the easy chair in front of the open window. Althea was attempting to be glib and cheerful about the incident, but the past ten days had made a profound impression on her. Outside of the several instances when as one of a group of arrestees she’d had to wait in a police-station booking office or in a woman’s detention tank for bail to be arranged, it had been her first experience with jails. Nor had it helped when she’d learned on her release that finks came in as large an assortment as cockroaches and that during her incarceration, obeying the first law of nature, self-preservation, the two noncapitalistic finks she’d been trying to protect had run out on her by copping a guilty plea in an exchange for a suspended sentence.
