The Eleventh Virgin · Part II · Chapter 2 1 (3/5)

No one knew how he had been educated⁠—how he had come by his knowledge of languages and literature. Nor was anything known of his family. (Most of the young men and women, in fact, that June came in contact with were remarkably reticent about families. For all she knew they might have been spontaneous growths with no background but their hall bedrooms and the newspaper office. June was engagingly frank about hers. Mother Grace and Adele often met her in the office around six for little dinner parties at which Ivan or Chester or Emil clamored to be the host.)

The Guillotine column, a special feature of the paper was run by Chester, who had a nose like that of Cyrano⁠—his favorite character⁠—keen eyes, a Rabelaisian tongue which June soon got used to, and ferocious ambition. He ran the column for the fun of it, and was paid for sitting at the desk as a copy reader from five in the evening until one in the morning. Outside of the office he toiled at a three-act problem drama, relaxing from his great work by writing verse and short stories that were usually rejected.

When the three of them could leave the desk at the same time it was usual for them to eat together. June protested at first, thinking of her diet. In spite of her attempt to satirize diet squads, she wanted to treat the matter fairly. “If I can get a dinner for a quarter, I’ll go,” she told them the first time she was invited. “That’s the most my budget allows.”

So the boys took pains to find cheap eating-houses and she overruled all their attempts to treat, and stuck to her regime as nearly as possible.

So far, June’s only dissipations had been at Child’s on lower Park Row when she sat with her three new friends and talked, over pancakes and coffee. There was no longer a chance to indulge in the ranting to which Adele and Mother Grace took exception. Everybody always wanted to talk at once and June was content to sit and listen, throwing in a word now and then to keep them at it. Often they sat till three, June smoking surreptitiously, although at that late hour the manager smiled leniently. Other newspaper workers came in and soon left. Pressmen with smudged faces came to eat and took away coffee in pails. Occasional trucks rumbled by through the cold night and every half hour a Third Avenue car clanged as it passed the Bridge. Diagonally across the street, a fruit stand with glaring lights kept busy. Continuously street cars came around the loop of the Bridge, received one or two sleepy night workers and went their fan-shaped way into Brooklyn. Paper boys shouted even at that sad hour of the morning, and newspaper wagons clattered along the cobbles to receive their load of papers and raced off.

And Ivan and Chester and June talked on and on. Emil, another reporter, usually rushed away after half an hour’s chat. “He’s got a girl uptown,” they told June regretfully. “But he’ll get over it in a couple of months and be a night owl once more. We all have our spells when we desert the pack for a while. Yours will come.”

“No, indeed,” said June, stretching luxuriously. “I intend to be free and have to answer to no one.”

Ivan was sympathetic but Chester ridiculed her. “In the newspaper and artistic crowd, nobody remains free. They are all the victims of their desire for love, and because they have so-called freedom⁠—to experiment and taste and try⁠—they are all the more victims of their passions.”

“Shut up, Chester! Don’t disillusion June. She’s too young. Besides all this talk of yours has just sprung up in the last couple of months. You’re the slave of a chastity ideal. If anyone ever had a complex, you have one now.”

What a complex was, June did not know at that time, but she soon found out where he got his purity ideal. One freezing night when she shivered at the thought of her cold little room, into which the breath of seven sleepers stole through the cracks around the door if she did not open the window, Chester insisted on her accompanying him to the flat of a friend of his, Ellen Winter.

“It’s steam-heated,” he told her, “and she’ll have coffee ready. She usually waits up for me if I let her know I’m going to stop in. I live on the next block.”

In a little book-lined sitting-room, Ellen received the three of them, sitting graciously behind an electric percolator. She had a mass of bright golden hair, prim features and a decisive way of talking. June felt immediately that here was one of those comfortable people who always know exactly what is right for them to do and whose principles never waver.

Ellen also was working on a play, and when June finally fell asleep curled up on the cushion-strewn sofa, talk of technique and criticism of everything that had been written for the last twenty years ran in her ears.

After that, Ellen often telephoned June in the evening and asked her to spend the night, an invitation June was glad to accept. Ellen was a self-reliant young woman with a sharp tongue and rigid ideals which kept other women at a distance. She took the woman of the world pose with June and the latter listened to all she had to say in silence. She was ten years older than June and she had a gratified feeling that June realized those ten years and looked up to her as an experienced woman.

June admired her abilities and secretly condemned her intolerance of other peoples’ morals. But then, she reflected, she had a reason for her condemnation. For Ellen, as she soon found out, was in love with Chester and was unable to marry him. Chester had referred darkly to a tragedy in his life on one occasion when June dined with him alone. Another time it came out. He had made an unfortunate marriage when he was twenty and had one child. (He was twenty-five now.) The girl was continually unfaithful to him, she admitted it, but he could get no proof that would procure him a divorce and give him the custody of the child and he had no money with which to hire a lawyer to conduct the case for him. As a consequence, whenever he and Ellen remembered it, they looked darkly on life and all women.

“A pure woman in these days is the rarest thing under the sun,” Ellen often told June solemnly. “Modern women think nothing of their virtue and sacrifice it without giving it a thought.

“My dear, your virginity is the only thing you have. Hold on to it.”

On reflection, June did not think the attitude a nice one.

“She keeps harping on virginity,” she told her mother. “She talks of it as though it were a commodity, a thing we have to sell. We give up our virginity and a man gives us a home, and permission to bear his children and his name. If we haven’t got virginity, we’re to be cast into outer darkness. Nothing else we’ve got is of any account⁠—only virginity. Oh⁠—I’m sick of the word.”

“This Ellen takes the worldly attitude which is the only sensible one to take seeing the world is what it is,” her mother told her. “She’s probably a very fine woman and you can’t come to any harm through listening to her talk.”

June made another friend of whom her mother could not possibly approve. This was Billy Burton, a pert little artist, whose one idea in life was to follow the whim. That her whim often created situations bothered her not at all. Situations were the breath of life to her. As she herself often sighed rapturously, “Ah, that was a situation!” and she defined the word as a scene, a mass of complications, a melee, a ticklish moment⁠—in fact a mess.

She and Ellen Winter never spoke to each other if they could help it, but a conversation between them would have run something like this, didactically:

But a conversation of this kind could never have taken place between Ellen and Billy, for their intercourse was of the briefest. It could not have taken place between what the world considers a good woman and a not-good one because each has such conviction of truth that they would never argue.

June, being eighteen and of few convictions made her mind the battleground and often, unknown to themselves, Billy and Ellen fought it out there. That neither side had the victory, it is unnecessary to say.

June became acquainted with Billy through Ivan who was a special friend of hers, and the two girls became immediately fond of each other. The fact that Billy “sexed” as she called it, and June didn’t, was no barrier between them. June liked the little artist because she felt that at heart Billy had as few convictions as she did. Her proclaimed attitude towards sex was a justification for whatever she did, and June could not help but admire the ease with which she formulated a creed for herself.

After the diet squad had retired and June was living as precariously on her twelve dollars a week as she had on her five, she often made her way to Billy’s hovel of a room to find her still in bed, hair uncombed, unwashed, wrapped in a soiled kimono in which she had probably slept, puffing furiously at a cigarette in a long green holder that matched her eyes. This morning there was the usual pad on her lap and she was listlessly drawing one nude and decadent woman after another and throwing them on the floor.

“Hell, hell, hell!” she kept muttering softly to herself, as she saw June come in. Then, “Oh, you darling. Just in time to prepare me some moral support. I’ve been awake for an hour and haven’t had the gumption to get up and get it for myself.”

Curtained off on the other side of the room June found coffee and when she had put it on the little gas stove she sat on the edge of Billy’s bed and surveyed her work. The utter clutter in which the little artist lived had repelled her at first and she had wondered how it was that anyone so unaesthetically untidy could have so many friends. But dropping in of a morning when she always saw her at her worst, she soon became used to externals and devoted her attention to Billy’s whimsical gossip.

“You’re wasting enough paper there,” she remarked as another sheet fell to the floor.

“I can’t exactly get it. Is that the moral support which I hear boiling? If it is, you’ll find cream on the windowsill and an extra cup in the closet on the floor. Whew! That’s hot,” and she set the cup of coffee on the floor by her low bed. “And now I’ll tell you what else you can do for me. Just strip off your clothes⁠—the room’s warm enough, and while you’re drinking your coffee I’ll sketch you.”

Although June would not have thought of undressing before her mother or Adele, it was impossible to refuse Billy’s request. So June quickly slipped out of her clothes and curled up on the end of the sofa which was softer than the chair and solaced herself for the discomfort of unaccustomed nudity with a cigarette.

“You have just the sort of impalpable figure that I am expected to draw for that blooming magazine,” Billy said with satisfaction as she started to work. “Don’t try to sit still. Move around all you want to. I want just a general impression, anatomically correct and yet impossibly lissome. I really think you more nearly approach the sort of stuff I draw than anybody I’ve ever seen. You’ll probably have a beautiful figure by the time you’re thirty. Have the men around here started to make love to you? You’re just the type, you know.”

June didn’t know what the type was, but she told her friend, “Yes, very nicely. But not violently enough to be convincing.”

“What do you want them to do? Rape you? Violence has gone out of fashion, don’t you know that?”

“I enjoy it immensely until they try to kiss me. But there is a sort of futility about their love making. It’s purposeless⁠—as though they did it because everybody else does it. I don’t get half so many thrills as I thought I would when I became grown up and untrammeled.”

“Unawakened,” said Billy with her pencil in her mouth.

“No, pure, Ellen Winter would say,” June put in rather maliciously.

“It’s a lucky thing I don’t live at home now,” June told Adele on one of her frequent visits home. “I’d have so much to talk about that you’d never get a word in edgewise. It’s all about causes, too⁠—the poor working girl, the police system, homes for fallen women and how they should be run, birth control, pacifism and any number of other things. But all I have time to tell you about are my adventures.”

“We’d a great deal rather hear them than the conclusions you draw from them,” Mother Grace said. “They’re bad enough for a mother to hear about anyway. Can’t you manage to avoid some of these experiences of yours?”

“I don’t go out of my way looking for them,” June protested aggrievedly. “If they worry you, I won’t tell you any more.”

“Of course you’ll tell me. I’d rather know exactly what I’m worrying about. I should worry in any case. If you didn’t keep me informed as to what you were doing and where you were living, think how shocked I would have been when Mrs. Gunther called me up that time.”