Free Eleven by Patricia Highsmith

the streetsthat would be even then full of sailors, some up early and some still out and maybe drunk, but by and large, she’d still say they were the finest, cleanest young men she’d ever met. There were always sailors in the restaurant for breakfast, and she and Marianne would tell them they were going to work in the marine supplies factory in five weeks, and the sailors would probably ask them for dates, and if they were especially nice looking, she and Marianne would accept.
    Then Marianne married a chief petty officer, and she’d had to give up the apartment. She’d known Douglas Ellison, a pharmacist’s mate from Connecticut, for about three weeks then, and they intended to marry, too, when they were absolutely sure they loved each other. She hadn’t yet found an apartment, so Doug had got her a room at the Star Hotel and paid a week’s rent for it. And he stayed with her a couple of nights—the first fellow she’d ever had anything to do with, despite what most girls in Mobile were doing, Marianne included. His ship had been leaving at the end of the week, but he was due back in a month, and then they were going to be married.
    That was also the month the job was to have been open at the factory, but wasn’t. And then—it never rains but it pours—she lost her job at the restaurant, because the girl who’d had it before came back, or so they said, from the marine supplies factory that was laying off instead of hiring. And suddenly there were so many people unemployed, one couldn’t even get a job washing dishes in exchange for three meals.
    She’d been ready to go back to Montgomery, when the Star Hotel told her they couldn’t get her trunk out of the basement for several more days, and upped the bill twice what it should have been so she wouldn’t be able to pay it, and when she threatened to call the police,told her if she did, they’d have her in jail. She’d gone out to tell the police anyway, and the doorman had stopped her. Didn’t she know the Star Hotel was a house, he said. Oh, she’d known a lot was going on at the Star Hotel, what else could you expect with the fleet in and right on the waterfront, but she hadn’t known it was a common brothel. And suddenly there were strangers standing all around her, pretending to take it for granted she was one of those women, too, laughing at her when she said Doug Ellison was her fiancé. They dared her to talk to a policeman, the police would have her in for ten years, they said, and she got terrified. Some of the other girls there said they’d been in the same boat, but didn’t mind now, because what work was there to be found outside anyway, and it was easier than a lot of work, whereupon she lost the bit of dinner she’d just eaten. She couldn’t eat and barely slept, and they started sending sailors into her room as if she’d have anything to do with them after Doug Ellison. But no letter ever came from Doug, she knew because Connie, one of the girls there, promised she would see she got it, if it came. They watched the girls’ mail, especially the outgoing, and she had to keep writing to her mother that she was still working at Carter’s Restaurant and very happy, hoping her mother would read between the lines, but her mother’s cancer was getting worse then, and she never did. The sailors that came into the Star Hotel, even if they were fairly decent looking, made her sick that she’d ever felt gay hearing Marianne yell in the mornings, and sicker that she’d ever thought she’d tell her grandchildren of the most exciting period in her life, stories that began, “When the fleet was in at Mobile, I was just eighteen . . .”
    And if anyone chose to cast the first stone at her because she finally yielded, she would relate how they stopped putting enoughfood on her trays, and how all the girls, even Connie Stegman, advised her to co-operate and lay a little money by, because they didn’t give a snap for her life itself. But when