In Pasedena she stopped and called Cleve. It was past eleven o’clock and she hesitated, but she had to talk to somebody about Vega and had to make some arrangements about Charlie, and there plainly wasn’t anybody she could turn to but Cleve.
“I’m in a little all-night joint on Fair Oaks, at Colorado,” she said.
“God, Beth, you’re on Skid Row!”
“Sh! Don’t wake Jean up! Can you come down?”
“Sure, but you’d better find a cop to protect you till I get there.”
“It’s not a bar, it’s a coffee place,” she said. “Hurry, Cleve.” And the catch in her throat warned him to heed her words.
He got there in less than fifteen minutes. She was waiting out in front and when he arrived they went in and took a booth and had a cup of coffee in the dirty brilliance of the fluorescent light.
“Cleve, it’s not fair of me to dump my troubles in your lap,” she said, “but you’ve got to help me. You’re the only one who can.”
He was alarmed by the look of her. Her eyes were heavy and scared, red with weeping, and her hair hung about her pretty face in neglected confusion. She breathed fast, as though she had been running, and she stammered—something Beth, with all her poise, had never done.
“If you’re in trouble—”
“It’s private trouble, Cleve. I’m leaving Charlie.”
His jaw went slack and he stared at her amazed while the waitress placed the coffee in front of them. After a moment he lighted them each a cigarette, passing hers to her, and then he said to the coffee cup, “I’m really sorry. God! I thought you two were sublimely happy.”
“Not everybody’s as happy as you and Jean!” Beth said, and there was more wistfulness than envy in her voice.
“Thank God for that,” he said wryly, but she was too wrapped up in her pain and perplexity to notice it. “Tell me about it?” he said.
“No,” she said, shaking her head and making a tremendous effort to control herself. “You wouldn’t understand any better than he did.”
“What about the kids?” His voice was cautious. He had been handling Vega’s flare-ups so long that frantic women were not new to him. He had some idea what to do.
“I—I left them. I’m no proper mother, Cleve. It was cowardly but I swear I think they’ll be happier.”
Like Charlie before him, Cleve was shocked. “But what in hell will Charlie do with them?”
“I don’t know. I came to talk to you about Vega,” she said quickly. If he persisted in that obvious shock she would go to pieces. His sister’s name silenced him, threw him off the track.
“I went ahead and saw her, Cleve. I’ve been seeing quite a lot of her lately.” She didn’t know how to proceed. She couldn’t blurt out the truth to him, and yet she had to say something. In her frayed emotional state Vega was likely to do anything, even scream the facts to strangers, unless she could be reassured that Beth at least thought of her before she left.
“I know,” Cleve told her.
“You know?” Beth gasped. “What do you know?”
“That you’ve been seeing her,” he said, and he was not pleased. “Who do you think gets the brunt of her bad temper?”
“I thought I got all of it.”
He shook his head. “You don’t even get half.”
After an embarrassed pause she said, “I’m sorry, Cleve.” She wondered how much of the truth he knew.
“So am I.”
“She thinks she owns me. We’ve gotten pretty close. I can’t disappear without giving her a message. Tell her I’m sorry, will you?”
“Okay.” He looked at her. “Is that all?”
And she knew from his voice, his face, that he was disappointed in her; perhaps his feelings were even stronger.
“Vega took it all wrong, Cleve. She took it too hard.”
“She did that with Beverly, too. The girl P.K. Schaefer took away from her.”
It took Beth a moment to place P.K.
“I don’t want her to do anything awful, Cleve,” Beth said, pleading with him.
“Neither do I,” he said and gave her a twisted little smile.
“I guess I loused things up for you, didn’t I? I never meant to. It just happened. It got away from me. Will you talk to her?”
“I’ll try.” He was already bracing himself for another siege of fury and erratic temper and threats. When things like this happened to Vega he always had to nurse her through them. Her mother was too sick and Gramp was too frail and neither of them understood the problem. Mrs. Purvis, to judge from Cleve’s description of her attitude, would have disowned her daughter at the very least had she known her true nature.
When Cleve made a move to get up she caught his hands, searching for the warmth, the desire to help her, that she so needed. But he was chilly, preoccupied with the problem she had thrust at him.
“Cleve, there’s one more thing,” she said and he paused.
“Beth, I told you not to get mixed up with my sister, but you went ahead and did it. Now you’re sorry but it’s too late. Don’t you think that’s enough?”
She was surprised and shamed by it. But not silenced. “I must ask you—you’re the only one. Write to me,” she implored. “Tell me about the kids and Charlie. He won’t write, I know that. Besides I don’t want him to know my address, if I should leave my uncle’s house. Oh, Cleve, please! You can’t turn me down!”
He looked at her a second longer, at her pale tremulous mouth and shaking hand, and then he took the address from her. It was one of Uncle John’s cards from her wallet. He folded it solemnly and put it into his pocket.
“Thank you, Cleve,” she said ardently. “You’ll be my only link with them.”
Cleve stood up. “I told Jean I had to go down to the corner drug store,” he said. “I’ve told her that so often she thinks it means the corner beer parlor. I’d better get home and give her a nice surprise. Nothing but coffee on my breath.” He was making an effort, at least, to be kind, to take the awful heaviness out of the atmosphere. She knew he would do as he said for her, and she was moved and grateful.
He took her arm and led her to her car. At the door he told her, “If this is half as hard on Charlie as it is on you, he’s going to crack up fast. You look like hell, Beth.”
“I know,” she said. “I never did anything so awful—so hard—in my life. I feel like I’m going to die of it.”
“Then you’re a fool. Whatever your reasons were, they aren’t worth it.”
“That’s what I have to find out,” she said.
“Sure you won’t tell me?”
“Yes, Cleve.” She held out a hand to him and after a minute he grasped it and squeezed it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “For you both.”
“Thank you. Goodbye, Cleve. And write to me.”
He nodded and then he turned and walked away and she watched him for a second, thinking how much he looked like Vega and what a hell of a mess she had handed him. Subconsciously she realized that her train of thoughts was enough to shatter her mind, her emotions. The load was already too great. She had to turn to something else, she had to move and do things and act ordinary and sensible or she would fly to pieces.
* * *
The plane took off three minutes behind time. She felt the ground fall away beneath her and the wide steel wings rise, heard the captain’s voice moments later and saw her seat neighbor light a cigarette—all with a feeling of eerie unreality reinforced by the small morning hour.
“We are circling over Catalina Island,” the pilot announced, “waiting for air traffic to clear over Los Angeles. In about five minutes we will be heading due east.”
Beth looked out of the window and saw a wavy ribbon of orange lights—the shoreline of Catalina Island—and a cluster of white lights winking around the town of Avalon. She was on the side away from the mainland and couldn’t see Los Angeles, but soon afterward the plane turned eastward and they headed inland again. She looked down, looking for landmarks in the night, and after a moment she recognized a few: the Colosseum, the brilliant green-white strips of the freeways, and then Pasadena with the winding pattern of Orange Grove Avenue discernible below. She followed it carefully with her eyes to where she supposed Sierra Bella began, and looked at the bouquet of lights there against the mountains, looked at it more with her heart than her eyes.
She closed her eyes then and for a short painful moment she could see the little town as it would look in tomorrow’s daylight, bright with the colors of early summer, the lavender flowers of the jacaranda trees glowing over the streets, the pink and white oleander with its pointed leaves, the long palmy street up the mountainside to their small house, the sun frosting the purple mountains in the early morning, the sounds of her children tumbling out of bed and shouting for their breakfast, Charlie shaving and grumbling at the mirror.
Beth lighted a cigarette and said softly to herself, “Laura, I’m coming for you. Don’t fail me. Be there, darling, or that’s the end of me. I’ll be destroyed, for I can never come back here.”