Secrets, part six

In a very short time, Leta began to develop new friendships. This was unexpected in her life. For slightly over a year, she had been married to Ora Freeman, a house painter, who had been graciously attentive to her and her children Vivian and Dale, after the shocking murder of her husband Albert. Ora’s kindness and attention won Leta’s aching and empty heart and satisfied her need to provide a stable and secure home for her children, and she married him.

However, Ora’s receptiveness, and his financial security, were fleeting. Shortly after she and the children moved into his house, he had reverted to a somewhat bachelor life-style, transforming Leta into a housekeeper and her children into little servants he demanded call him daddy. Money was almost always in short supply, and Ora had no understanding of how much it cost to raise a family, even though he promised her he would take care of them.

For her part, she anticipated that her warming heart would continue to grow in fondness and desire for him as married life proceeded. But his subtle transformations wore on her and left her feeling more lonely than she had after she lost Albert. Ora had not made love to her in weeks, and she was beginning to feel unappealing and forlorn. Her girlfriends and her sisters all started to notice. Her growing unhappiness began to affect her children, as well. Always a polite scholar and conscientious companion, 15-year-old Vivian began to become irritable and unpleasant, particularly to her 13-year-old brother Dale and their cousins. Dale was becoming disobedient, lazy and sloppy, like his step-father. Although only 34 years old, Leta felt like her life had turned into an elongated evening of sitting in an empty living room.

Then something unexpected happened. One evening after Ora had behaved abominably, Leta had left the house in a fury to gather herself at their local establishment. While sipping her drink, she had been approached by an attractive younger man, and suddenly, she realized that she was a woman with feelings and passion. This realization led her to her current behavior. Twice a week, since Ora was working steadily and arriving home late, she would bathe, dress and take the streetcar across the river to a elegant speakeasy.  

A vivacious person, Leta quickly made friends and became comfortable in the establishment. That could have been enough, except she was a woman with needs. The single, and even some married, men began to catch her eye, and vice versa. She couldn’t explain how it happened—perhaps with a smile across the room or an “is this seat taken?”—but during her ventures, she became a different person, a flirtatious, friendly, laughing, affectionate companion. No one at the speakeasy knew she was miserably married, occupied her days cleaning and attending to an unhappy household and spent her limited free time lamenting her life. They knew her as a woman with personality, wisdom and humor with an exquisite taste in hats.

The more comfortable she became the more she attracted men to her, and Leta revelled in the attentions. At least twice per evening, she would gently rebuke the advances of men who were infatuated with her and wanted to take another step. She never told them she was married, she claimed she was a widow, but she did use her children to keep her suitors at bay.

“I have children,” she would share, “and after the death of their father, they’ve been having a hard time. They’re just not ready. It’s been too hard.”

And then she met a man, who wouldn’t take her gentle rejection as a absolute.

To be continued.

Secrets, part five

If her husband Ora noticed, he never said. He never asked her where she had been or what she had been doing until late in the evening. Even though she didn’t smoke, he never inquired why her clothes smelled of cigarettes. That could have been partly because he smoked cigars and he was so accustomed to his own odor that hers never reached his weak olfactory glands. It wasn’t as though he touched her or came that close anyway.

As for her children, Vivian (age 15) and Dale (age 13), she took great care to wash before they would be exposed to her own transgressions. Previously, this was her habit anyway. After all, Ora’s own stench permeated their bed, and she had been washing it away every morning since shortly after their marriage.

However, there was more to her more recent fixation on cleanliness, and she knew it. She wanted to wash away any trace of her transgressive activities. She always felt guilty afterward, sometimes waking up in the middle of the night with her heart racing and her nerves rising like goose bumps. Still, she never vowed to stop, because the two evenings per week that she took the streetcar across the river to a slightly nicer part of the city to spend an hour or two talking to strangers in a speakeasy had become her only means of having any peace with her life.

Actually, after three weeks of this, she had started to make friends. While the establishment, as many were during the height of Prohibition, was usually crowded with both men and women, the regulars, she learned quickly, mostly occupied a section nearest the escape exit.

Leta told herself that she went for the company. While she had friends and family in close proximity, she sorely lacked the kind of attention her husband was not providing. While sipping her gin amongst the mostly happy and always lively crowd, she felt attractive and jolly.

When she wasn’t there, she missed her late husband Albert—his sparkling blue eyes, his smiles, his laugh, the way he would grab her around the waist and pull her close to him for a kiss, how he would don an apron to wash the dishes and insist she sit at the kitchen table to entertain him with gossip, how his skin always smelled of fresh soap and shaving cream, how his muscles glistened with perspiration when he was firing up the whiskey still they had in the basement, the way he always seemed to have some part of their bodies touching in bed.

The contrast of being with her current husband Ora was palpable and weighed heavily on her. There were entire days when they didn’t share a word. She would rise early and start her child rearing and housework. He would saunter in, swallow a cup of coffee and two pieces of toast with strawberry jam, grab his lunch pail and head toward the door, belch in the middle of the living room, pick up his paint materials and leave. Later in the evening, he would return, drop his lunch pail on the dining room table, shuffle through the house to the small tub in the back porch to wash his paint brushes, then drip his way into the kitchen for whatever supper she had waiting, slurp and chomp it down with beer, belch with satisfaction and then shuffle back through the house and into their bedroom. Depending on his mood, he would shed part to all of his clothes and flop onto bed. An hour or so later, he would awaken, use the toilet and then return.

If he even noticed she was there, he never acknowledged her, making it very easy for her to leave his supper on the stove and pursue her own interests.

To be continued.

Secrets, part four

When Leta stormed out of the house a week previously, having become fully disgusted with her husband Ora, she had not considered that a simple drink to soothe her nerves at their regular haunt would result in a resurrection of feelings she had not experienced since her previous husband Al had died 16 months earlier. While working in the house or yard, she would frequently feel waves of heat flowing through her, followed by a tingling sensation and then a slight burst of excitement. Finally a soft coating of perspiration would escape from her skin.

Florence suggested that she might be going through menopause.

“But I’m only 34 years old!” Leta protested.

“Well, it isn’t the flu,” Florence countered. “What else could it be?”

Leta was beginning to formalize the answer, and if she was correct, she could never tell her prim sister-in-law.

She began to notice that these flashes were frequently triggered when she was reading the newspaper or when she passed a group of men working or even when she was sitting in the café having coffee with one of her friends. A man would catch her eye, and she would feel flush. Or she found herself stopping simply to watch a man at work. Or even turning back the newspaper to look at an advertisement.

The man who had approached her in the blind pig had awakened in her desire, which she had not felt fully since her husband Albert was alive. This powerful, distracting and sometimes even debilitating sensation never happened when she was with Ora, but almost any man on the street could trigger it.

At first, she tried to avoid situations where the wave of desire might occur, but this soon proved to be fruitless. Like an adolescent boy, her sensation could be triggered by nearly anything or anyone. She fought it, but felt it anyway. Ora was no help. He was neither romantic nor erotic. He rarely touched her or was affectionate. Even in bed, he kept to his side, ensuring that their bodies never grazed each other, even unexpectedly. This left her feelings ample opportunity to continue to grow away from him.

On a Saturday night, Leta was sitting with her friends Hazel and Mark Kruper at their local haunt. Ora had worked late, then collapsed, and her children were with their father for the night. She had been agitated and anxious all day, and she and Hazel agreed that  a drink might do her good.

Understandably for a Saturday night, the place was filled with merry people—individuals, couples, groups of younger people seeking romance—and they were forced to stand in the smoke-filled room. As Prohibition was still the law, the space was closed tight, so they couldn’t help but breathe it in. The proprietor had set up a couple of electric fans, but they did little more than to keep the room from becoming unbearable.

Leta was not sure if she noticed the fellow first or the other way around, but every time she would look in his direction, she would see that he was looking at her. Once he even raised a glass, and she smiled.

“What was that?” Hazel asked.

“What was what?” Leta replied innocently.

“You just made the kind of expression my daughter does when she sees a boy she knows.”

“Really, Hazel,” Leta remarked, “I’m a married woman. Why would I be smiling at other men?”

“I don’t know, Leta. You tell me.”

Leta rolled her eyes and turned her gaze.

“Oh, look,” she noted. “Mark found a table.”

“Thank goodness!” Hazel exclaimed. “My feet are killing me.”

While she lost that particular fellow in the crowd, Leta’s senses had been awakened, and sometimes when Ora was out with his friends and the children were safely tucked in bed, Leta would take the bus to a speakeasy she knew about outside of her neighborhood. She told herself that she needed a break from the challenges and discomforts of her life, and the only way she could feel like she was getting one was to travel a distance to where no one knew her. But she could not fool herself, not fully. She desired the romantic and lascivious attentions of men. She needed a relatively safe location in which to experience this.

To be continued.