Do Evil In Return Read Free Page B

platonic relationship, that’s rather funny.”
    “You aren’t laughing. What would you do?”
    “Oh, come off it,” he said. “You wouldn’t get pregnant.”
    “It’s possible.”
    “Not with the proper insurance.”
    She smiled, a little bitterly. “That’s a funny analogy. When you take out earthquake insurance it means you’re protected financially against an earthquake. It doesn’t guarantee that there won’t be an earthquake. The sense of security is false.”
    “Now earthquakes. God, Charley, what’s got into you? You’re becoming a neurotic.”
    “Am I?” She averted her face. “I think you’d better leave.”
    “Certainly,” he said. “Certainly.”
    He crossed the room towards the door, slowly, giving her an opportunity to call him back. She didn’t. She stood at the window until she heard his car roar out of the garage. The furious racing of the engine indicated that Lewis was taking out his temper on the car.
    His cigarette was still smoldering. She carried the ash tray out to the kitchen and washed it, moving awkwardly because she was angry. Hers wasn’t a hot and immediate anger like Lewis’; it couldn’t be satisfied, as his could, by racing the engine of a car or breaking a golf club. Charlotte’s anger was slow and cold; it crept gradually through her body, depressing the nerves, making her almost incapable of moving and talking.
    She thought of all the things she should have said. Then she said them silently to herself, rephrasing and cutting them until they were sharp and elegant as diamonds. It was the land of childish satisfaction that she seldom permitted herself.
    She looked at the dock. Nine-thirty. Lewis would be home by now, making up a lie for Gwen. Miss Schiller would be putting up her hair and talking to her cat, perhaps even telling it about Violet: “ Today a bad girl came in, bold as you please, and wanted doctor to get rid of the baby — oh, the things that happen! And the people you meet!”
    Yes, the things that happen. Charlotte felt a stab of regret. I should have helped the girl, she thought I meant to do something for her, but she’d already gone.
    She stood at the window, locking and unlocking her fingers. A low gray fog hung over the distant housetops and gave them the contours of a dream. Under one of the housetops was the girl Violet worrying out the night, friendless, penniless, thinking of death.
    916 Olive Street. The address had stuck in her memory as the girl’s grief and terror had stuck in her throat.
    With a decisive movement Charlotte turned from the window and went to the hall closet for her coat and hat.

3
    Olive Street threaded north-south through the city. At one end there was an imposing hotel that rented ocean views at twenty dollars a night, at the other a flour mill. In the center, once a select suburb, the grandiose old three-storied Victorian houses had been gradually debauched by slums and abandoned. The slums had pushed ahead like an army of grasshoppers destroying everything that grew in its path. Nothing would ever grow again in that concrete wilderness except people. More and more people, whites and Negroes, Mexicans, Chinese, Italians. They kept alive and multiplied. They worked on the dock or at the freight yards; they were gardeners, busboys, charwomen, bookies; they took in washing and roomers; they sold tamales, green tea, religion, firecrackers, used furniture, souvenirs, rose bushes, and Mexican silver jewelry.
    Olive Street was never empty or quiet. It had no set hours of work and rest like the middle-class parts of town. It was awake all day and all night. After dark there were fights and crap games, police sirens and recriminations.
    Charlotte knew the section well. She had two regular patients within a block of 916. Though she wasn’t apprehensive about visiting Olive Street, she took the precaution of locking her Buick and removing the radiator cap that the garage man had fixed so that she could take it off and