Seashells Ch. 06

Several quiet conversations took place around the table and Jack did his best to ignore all of them, preferring to put his attention to his dinner. Finished with his roast, he surprised himself and asked Susan for another helping.

After dinner, he took his cherry pie into the next room to listen to the radio. When it came in clearly, he enjoyed the San Francisco Opera. Startled, he looked up.

"I asked, 'would you like some ice cream'?"

"Yes, thank you, Susan. I would."

"Did you have a nice holiday? It was different... with you not here, I mean. Someday, I hope to travel. I've never really seen anything outside of Carmel and the orphanage. Have you traveled much?"

"Lately, yes. I've been down to San Diego and of course, San Francisco and I lived in Los Angeles... and there's Monterey."

"I'd like to see San Diego someday. Is it pretty?"

"Yes, very much and warm most of the year. So much more than here."

"Do you plan on returning?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact, I do."

She touched his arm.

When did she get so close? He tried hard not to jerk himself back.

"Thanks for the ice cream. You made a nice dinner, tonight. Thank you."

Susan backed away and walked out of the room, a faint smile on her lips.

Georgia slipped beneath the covers and snuggled up against him. "Penny for your thoughts," she whispered.

"I'm in love with you," Jack whispered back, sliding his head under the sheet, his tongue lightly flicking her breast.

"Mmmmmmm," she moaned. Her hands went to the back of his head and forced him against her as his lips opened to suck in her nipple. "Ah, Jesus..."

As the morning sun flooded the room, Jack turned to Georgia and asked, "Would you like to go to San Diego?"

"Oh, yes," she answered, her hand reaching for him, feeling him harden within her touch.

He moved again, this time behind her, his lips on the side of her neck, just below her ear, kissing, licking softly, sucking enough that he knew it would leave a mark.

"God, you know what that does to me," she tried to say, her words lost as her moans gained control and overcame them.

He pushed closer, his hands moving to her breasts, comfortable in his touch, his fingers arousing her enough that her nipples hardened and stood proud.

"We can go soon enough, I think. I'll have to arrange for tickets. I don't think we could just show up and hope for a sleeping compartment.

Chapter 22

Two days later, a mud-splattered truck arrived in the early afternoon, splashing dirty brown water out of deep ruts as it went and Jack left the house to greet it as several of the girls came onto the large porch to watch its noisy approach.

"Lester," he said to the driver as the man was leaving the truck's cab.

"Mr. Crawford." He tipped his hat and pointed to the men in the back. "I've got your workers and your supplies. Couldn't get them out any sooner, what with the rain and all. Your propane will be along next week."

"That's OK, I was out of town, anyway. Can you wait around a little, you know, in case one of them changes his mind or something?"

"Sure, Mr. Crawford, whatever you want."

Jack looked at the group, a mix of white, colored and Mexican men, all in their mid-twenties, and hoped that they would work out for what he had in mind, both inside and outside the house. While the girls unloaded the truck, he showed the men around the property, outlining their duties and then introduced them to the girls. When everyone was in agreement, the driver had lunch with them and finally returned to Carmel.

Jack had told Georgia to get them situated in the bunkhouse and then back in the house in time for dinner. When they came into the kitchen, they found the girls sitting at the large table there, waiting for them. Sitting down, they did their best to pass the time, telling tales of travels, the war and other jobs while Susan and Ellen brought the pot roast out to the dining room where Jack, Bill and Georgia were.

After dinner, Jack and Bill put on their coats and went out onto the front porch. Bill took out and lit his pipe while Jack patiently waited for him to say what he wanted.

"Uh, I'm, uh, interested in Catherine, have been ever since she came here. Is that going to cause a problem with you?"

"Don't see why it ought to... you're your own man and she's old enough to know what she wants."

"Thanks. I know that things are..."

"What?"

"I'm not stupid, Jack. You brought in these men to romance the girls." Bill took a deep pull on his pipe. "What about you and Georgia? Did you have a nice trip? There was plenty of talk after you left."

"Oh?" Jack looked closely at his friend.

"Yeah, for a while Susan was fit to be tied, that's for sure. This should stop that, I think, provided she likes one of the guys you brought in."

"Yeah, well, she..." stammered Jack.

"What?"

"Ah, the hell with it."

Late the next morning Jack watched the new men working outside, a few tending to the growing garden, planting onions and strawberries while several were building a larger henhouse and enclosure. He wondered if his plan to find boyfriends for the other girls would work out; it would be a shame to let anyone go but he considered this Susan's last, unspoken chance.

As lunchtime approached, Susan and Ellen brought the men's food to the tables beneath the shady eucalyptus trees. The men made small talk, attempting to interest the two women but to no avail.

As they walked away, Ellen heard one remark that he saw warmer ice at the drug store. She looked at Susan, wondering if the other girl had heard. Probably not, she thought, finding no response from her companion.

With the arrival of all the men, it soon took all day to prepare the meals, and Susan and Ellen rarely left the kitchen to do anything else. Picnic tables and benches were soon constructed so that as the weather improved, outdoor eating became the norm.

Jack looked out the window at the men settling down to an early supper. Georgia came up behind him and rested her hand on his shoulder, wondering what he was thinking.

"What?" he started to ask as her hand dropped down. His gaze stayed, following the men as they sat down to eat. Except for Georgia and Catherine, all the girls now ate outside. From what he could tell, there were three men actively pursuing Susan's attention and he wasn't sure which one she would choose, if anyone at all.

"Did you sleep well?" she asked him in a soft, husky voice.

He shook his head, his expression unusually somber. "I had things on my mind."

"Such as?"

"Remembering things. The way you look when you're sleeping. The way your pulse throbs just beneath your ear. The way your hair surrounds your face like a cameo. The world is beautiful when you're in it."

She studied him with her deep, dark eyes, a flush of love marking her cheeks. "Have you ever thought what your children would look like?"

No, he realized, he hadn't. The question of children was something that had never entered his mind. "No, not really..." When he saw the look on her face, he asked, "Is that strange?"

"No, just... well, I always thought everyone else was like me, thinking about their babies and wondering what they would be like... to leave something of yourself in the world when your time is over." She paused for an uncertain moment, wondering if she should say what was on her mind. Then she thought of the intimacies they had shared and decided their relationship was strong enough to allow her to be honest. It wasn't in her nature to hide her emotions. "Every time I look at you, I wonder what a child of ours would look like. I would like a daughter." Georgia smiled faintly, reaching out her hand and touching his face.

Jack was silent, unable to speak. His eyes grew dark and deep, his skin quickly becoming cold. He had never thought about children because he sincerely doubted he would ever have any.

"It's late," he said abruptly.

Georgia's eyes drew together in a little frown. "Jack? I wasn't... I didn't mean..."

"I know. It's fine, really." Now Jack knew firsthand why a love affair was called an idyll, when you pushed every logical thought from your mind and reacted only with your heart, a suspended moment in time when you pretended nothing could go wrong. It was fleeting and fragile. He wondered if his time with Georgia was running out.

He looked out the window again, watching the people outside sitting at the tables. He envied them for that. He never thought he would covet the life of an ordinary laborer. He couldn't remember feeling bored with his own life but neither did he know what it was to be truly content. His love affair with Georgia was fraught with problems, all based on the color of her skin.

During supper, he barely took his eyes off her, filling his mind with the look of her face. When she laughed, she wrinkled her nose. When he had kissed her in the morning, there remained the rough burn from his stubble. If there was anything wrong in her world, he couldn't see it by looking at her.

Jack began to feel a little uneasy. Before, he always knew what he had to do to solve his problems and he had always been capable of doing it. Even with his uncle's money, his attitude remained the same, even more so. But how on earth could he ever solve this? It was impossible.

A man of principle would not have entered this no-win situation to begin with.

His decisions no longer affected only him. He was facing the destruction of a lifetime's assumptions about himself and his role in the world. Actions that had always seemed so simple were now rather blurred and confusing. He had discovered, too late, that he was just as human as everyone else and didn't know what to do.

"Jack?"

He looked up from the newspaper he had been pretending to read. At least he wasn't holding it upside down. He was painfully preoccupied, intensely sensitive to the thick mood in the dining room. Georgia's cheerful banter had ceased abruptly as soon as he looked up. Apparently she had noticed his uncharacteristic reserve. In the space of just a few short months, he had become frighteningly easy for her to read. I'm happy. I'm depressed. I'm confused.

Jack muttered. "Some things never change." His eyes followed Georgia as she put the dinner dishes into the kitchen sink. The atmosphere in the room was awfully heavy for two people who were supposed to be in an ecstatic romance.

He watched Georgia's shoulders stiffen as she worked at the sink with her back to him. His eyes slowly closed. He felt hollow inside, scraped out by an old, rusty knife.

A glass dropped in the sink, shattering. Still she kept her back to him, bracing her palms on either side of the sink. He looked at her. She was wearing a simple, loose white dress that foamed around her dark, bare legs with a casual flirtatious air at odds with the emotion crowding the kitchen. Her hair was tied with a narrow white ribbon at the base of her neck. All these details Jack memorized, filled with a frantic sense of impending doom. Children. He wasn't planning on having children. He knew it and she knew it.

Jack stood up, moving in slow motion. He pushed his hands into the pockets of his dark blue denims, keeping his back to Georgia until he felt the touch of her hand on his arm.

"Tell me," she said tonelessly.

Jack turned to face her. He had never seen her eyes look so dark or so deep.

"Children... I hadn't thought about children."

"Is that all?" she asked with a stiff, unconvincing smile. "Here I thought something terrible had happened. You had a life before you met me. Right?"

She met this like she had everything else she had since he met her. Straightforward, consequences be damned. He could see more than he wanted to in the stiffness of her posture, the unnaturally high set of her head. He had taught her to love him and she did. The pain they were both feeling was a product of those lessons.

He felt like someone had pulled the world out from under his feet without warning. Even as he tried to identify his emotions, his mind was analyzing the black-and-white facts. And they were black and white.

And so, it comes down to this, he thought. He was white and she wasn't.

"I suppose we should be grateful for what we had," she said, quietly. Without either of them being consciously aware of emotionally prepared, a decision had been made. The only decision they felt qualified to make.

She was very, very still. Life continued around them in the kitchen; the gauze curtains at the window billowed with the afternoon breeze, the clock on the wall ticking away silent seconds. Her fingers were shaking; she hid them away in her dress. She hadn't felt pain like this since... since forever.

Jack felt like he had demons in his skull, each and everyone cutting away at him with vicious little knives. For her sake, there could be no vacillation on his part. The pain he was causing her now was at least finite... there would be an end to it when enough time had passed.

Why hadn't he been more careful at the beginning? He didn't mind the hurt he caused himself; he deserved it. But the look on her face was unbearable.

"I suppose nothing lasts forever," she said. She lied. What she felt for him would last forever. She knew it as she knew the sun would rise in the east and set in the west. For a full minute, the communication between them took place in silence.

"What happened between us... it wasn't planned. If I'd know... if I'd known..."

"What, Jack?" Georgia asked so softly. For the first time since he met her, her eyes looked flat and completely lifeless. "If you'd known what was going to happen, if you'd known I was going to fall in love with you, would you have acted differently? Would you have let me go that first night and forgotten about me? Is that what you're trying to say? Are you feeling trapped now, like you don't quite know how to slip out the door?"

"It's not like that," he snapped. "That's not what happened with us and you know it."

"What did happen with us? Explain it to me." She was looking at him in the way she would have looked at a total stranger. "Things get confusing at the end, don't you think?"

Jack took her hands in his. They felt cold to the touch, stiff and unresponsive. "You know damn well it wasn't... all my life I've tried to be honest. I've known who I was and what my life would be like from the beginning and then, I met you."

"Then," Georgia said with sudden fire in her voice, "that's where you failed."

"Failed?" Jack thought he was losing his mind. He thought it was so rational. He knew how he felt, even if he couldn't explain it. She just didn't understand. "I'm trying not to destroy your life any more than I already have. I'm trying to protect you."

"If you believe that, then you're a fool." In that moment, there was a clarity and maturity in her eyes that Jack had never seen before. "There's one thing I know about love, Jack. Real love. It takes away all your fear, giving you the ability to face anything. You're wrong if you think you know what life would be like, you and me."

"You don't understand. I'm not willing to put you through something like this, let alone any children we might have."

"You made that clear. We all know who and what we are. But some of us aren't willing to remain that way all our lives. Where you come from and what you were doesn't have to be where you end up. Haven't you figured that out, Jack?"

"You don't understand I'm making a sacrifice here! Because I love you!"

"You don't understand I'm not interested in your sacrifice! I don't need it. Do you have any idea what would have happened to me if I'd accepted what life handed me in the beginning? I'd be stuck somewhere doing God know what. But I waited and hoped and worked and gradually it all came true for me and even when my parents died, I refused to think my happiness went with them. I had their memories to keep me warm and I had my friends and what I was doing before I met you. It would have been easier to just give up but I didn't. It's always easier to give up but it's never right."

"Don't tell me what's right and what's wrong," he said softly. "Do you think I want to walk out of your life?"

"Yes." She was fast losing control of her feelings and the situation, feeling tears stinging her eyes. The last thing she wanted right now was to let him see her cry. "Because that takes the pressure away from you. You don't have to prove what you're made of. It's so much easier to just run away."

Instinctively, he reached for her then let his hand drop to his side. She didn't want his touch, not now. And it seemed that the only thing he could give her was the gift of his absence. He hated himself for allowing her to be put in such a vulnerable position. It was thoughtless. It was cruel.

"Georgia... I'll always love you," he said haltingly.

"Don't. If loving me means you have to leave me, then I'm not interested," she said coldly. "That kind of love I don't need. I will leave. I'll be fine, I really will. I always am."

"I know you will." Blind with tears, he turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

Chapter 23

Her arms hung limply at her sides listless and tired. She wasn't sleeping any more than she was eating. When Jack left Windcliff, he took her energy, her joy and her heart with him. Still, she was a fighter. She wouldn't let this make her bitter or resentful. If she knew then what she knew now... she would have loved him anyway. God help her, she would have. She winced at the thought.

"Are you all right?" asked Catherine quietly. "You don't look so good." Catherine realized that wasn't probably a sympathetic remark but she only spoke the truth.

"Fine... I'm fine," Georgia muttered, scattering her thoughts like dust in the wind. She hadn't said much about Jack's departure beyond a simple "He's gone." How did something that had felt so perfect end so badly. She had been so certain that Jack had felt what she had felt.

Unconditional love. It had turned out to be an empty dream, a wishful fantasy that had disappeared just as he had.

Even Susan had tried to speak to her, to no avail. "I knew he was a fool the first time I saw him," she had said, knowing it wasn't true but had to be said.

Georgia had asked Bill if he knew where Jack had gone. "All I know is that he said he had to return to Los Angeles. I would do anything to help you but I don't know what's going to happen. I wish there was something I could do."

"I have to leave," she finally said, weeks later. "I can't stay here any longer."

No matter what Bill said, he couldn't convince her to stay at Windcliff and so, resigned that she would soon leave, gave her several hundred dollars to help her.

The next morning, he drove her to Carmel to catch the train.

Georgia, holding her few possessions in a small case, stood on the platform and eventually boarded the coach as the engine farther ahead chuffed its billowing dark smoke into the cool morning air.

"You'll have to move," said the conductor. "You're in the wrong car."

Georgia looked at her ticket. "But..." she started to say.

"Look, you have to move. Follow me."

She could feel the blood rush to her face as she stood, picking up her small bag and following the man into the next car. "I don't understand," she said. "This is a sleeper compartment."

"Yes," he said, his fingers touching the hundred-dollar bills in his pocket. "In here, please." He knocked on the door and stood back as it opened. A hand reached out and grabbed her, pulling her into the compartment.

"What?" she screamed. "Jack?! What are you...?"

Jack covered her mouth with his as he kicked the door shut. "I saw you on the platform, waiting. I've been such a fool. I only ask one thing, Georgia."

"What do you want, Jack?"

"Forgiveness," he whispered, carefully lowering her onto the fold-down bed. "I came back for you. We're going to New York."