Seventeen Widows of Sans Souci

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “You could,” said Nona. “Good night, then.” She turned, but rage caught her. “What’s the matter with you?” she blazed. “That was a brutal thing! Do you like it when your boy friends beat you up and throw you out of automobiles?”

  Winnie said, “Would you help me?” She said it wonderingly, as if the very idea that any woman of Nona’s generation could possibly be her friend was quite new to her.

  Nona softened. “Yes, I would help you. That’s what I came running down to do.”

  “Promise, if I tell you, you won’t tell?”

  Now the girl was quivering. She might be in shock, Nona thought. She was surely in trouble. Deep trouble.

  Nona simply could not visualize herself going away, into the building, up to her apartment. And so to bed? But that was not possible.

  “I promise,” she said solemnly.

  “Well—see—he’s—my husband,” Winnie said. Her hand grasped Nona’s hand involuntarily. “And if my mother knew she’d—I just can’t tell her—or call the police. See? Do you see?”

  Nona felt shock. But she rallied. “I think we can get upstairs,” she said, “without being seen. I can lend you some stockings. You can wash and get your breath. What was this? A lover’s quarrel?”

  Winnie sobbed once.

  “Come on, then,” Nona said stoically.

  She took the girl’s arm and they went along the outside of the wall, ducked under the arch and into the shadows quickly, then along the inside of the wall to that fire door.

  Nobody was stirring in the lower corridor. Sarah Lee Cunneen must be gadding about. Nona hoped so. Ida Milbank’s ex-apartment, III, was vacant. Ida was in 109, and her door was still. Harriet Gregory, across the hall on the patio side, could have heard nothing.

  They went along swiftly. They went up the stairs.

  Nobody was in the upstairs corridor either.

  Nona pushed the bedraggled girl through her own door, closed it, locked it.

  Tess had a key. Tess wasn’t in yet. The theatre was not over until eleven or so, and it would take time for her to get here.

  So Nona pushed the girl into the bathroom. “Wash,” she directed. Winnie washed her face and hands, stripped off the ruined nylons, washed her legs. Nona inspected the cuts and scratches, put an antiseptic powder on them, found stockings of her own, all silently. Handed the girl compact, lipstick and comb.

  Then they were sitting in the living room. “Do you smoke, Winnie?” The girl shook her head. Nona lit a cigarette. “Now then. You are secretly married? Is that it? But you are only … what? Seventeen?” She would be calm and wise.

  Winifred Lake was watching her with bright eyes. The period of silence had puzzled and intrigued her. “We went to Mexico, during Christmas vacation.”

  “I see.”

  “My mother thought I was at Laguna.”

  “I see. I suppose that is one reason you needed money?” Nona was cool.

  Winnie said, humbly, “Yes.”

  “And now,” said Nona, hard and bright, “what is your idea of your future?”

  “We had a fight,” said Winnie in a low voice. “That’s all.” Her head moved … and it was pitiful. Her eyes were trying to be on top of this trouble, but the head despaired.

  “You will have to tell your parents, sooner or later, won’t you?” Nona was calm.

  Winnie said, “My mother will just … just blow her top.” Her hands clenched. She looked scared.

  “Your father, then? You might tell him—privately.”

  Winnie’s teeth caught at her lower lip. She let it go and said explosively, “Dad’s got a whacky heart. He’ll tell her … I know that … and then she’ll just … She’s going to kill him, Mrs. Henry.”

  “Kill him?”

  “She will,” sobbed Winnie. “You don’t know! She’s just going to kill him, one of these days. And he’s always been so good … I mean, he is good …” Winnie’s head began to go down. “I don’t want her to kill him because she’s upset about this … about me. But she will! Honest! He’s not my real father. But I don’t want … I can’t tell …” Winnie wept.

  “Not your real father?”

  “No, he married my mother when I was a little kid. So she won’t let him … I mean, he can’t …”

  This child was mixed up in some domestic tensions. And, of course, she might be dramatizing. Must be exaggerating. Yet … Nona Henry remembered the night of the fire, and how this girl had come up behind her, and how she, Nona, had been touched by the girl’s fear for the man. No, there was some truth in this. There was some reason to fear for his heart’s health. Or at least this girl believed there was.

  “What was your idea”—Nona spoke in that same hard bright way—”when you and this boy, whoever he is, got married? What thought was in your mind then, about the future?”

  Winnie looked up, tears streaking her cheeks. “I don’t know,” she wailed. Then she put her head all the way down to her thighs and Nona was able, in the midst of shock, to notice how lithe the young torso must be.

  She said sharply, “Now stop that! Get your eyes red and then you will be forced to explain.”

  Winnie choked. The crying stopped.

  “I’m glad to see you have some control,” said Nona grimly. “Now then, you had better be downstairs by eleven or so?”

  The girl raised her head and nodded it, looking surprised that Nona Henry knew the drill.

  “I think,” said Nona crisply, “that you have been a fool. I think the sooner you get yourself out of any marriage to that particular brute the better off you will be. You are going to have to tell somebody, some adult, who can help you on the legal side. Now, maybe if you could tell your stepfather without breaking into hysterics …? Perhaps you don’t realize,” said Nona severely, “what it means to be grown-up. I daresay your stepfather has more self-control than you can imagine. Pull yourself together and figure out how to tell him quietly. He will help you.”

  Winnie said, “Yes, Mrs. Henry,” with young lips parted, with young eyes grateful—and sliding just a bit to one side.

  Nona said, “I see you haven’t told me everything.” She watched the eyes grow round and innocent and false. “Well?” Winnie said nothing.

  “All right. Do you feel you can make it home?” said Nona tartly.

  “Oh, Mrs. Henry, I don’t know how to say thank you. For the stockings. And everything. I mean— Gee, you’re swell!”

  You are not like other women your age, the eyes were saying.

  “You’ll have to come to terms with the truth here,” said Nona, exasperated. “There is nothing else for you to do.”

  “But I know you won’t tell,” said Winifred. “Because you promised!” Her slightly slanted eyes had taken on a glow. They were standing now, and Winnie picked up Nona’s hand. Her young hand felt feverish. It squeezed. “I know I’ll have to tell … I know you won’t, though.”

  Nona said shortly, in a moment, “I promised. Go along now.”

  No more was said. Nona let her out. In a few moments from her window she saw the girl’s figure pass through the patio, for she had gone out that fire door or got around the lobby some way. Winifred Lake looked much as usual.

  Nona went and sat down on her bed in semidarkness. What had she got herself into? She was appalled. The father, the mother, ought to know. Ought to be told this secret. Nona’s promise ought to be broken! What was she to do?

  When Tess came softly in, Nona was still threshing upon her bed. Tess slipped in and out of the bathroom and into her bed like a wraith, while Nona made herself rigid. Wished she could ask Tess Rogan what to do. But had promised not to tell. Shouldn’t have promised. Had.

  She lashed herself over upon her other side. Face it. Winifred Lake was nothing to Nona Henry. A wild, a silly seventeen-year-old, and no kin.…

  But what was it to be kind?

  When Winnie slipped in, it was still only ten thirty. Rose called out immediately, “Winnie? Have fun, dear?”


  “Unhum.”

  “Come here, darling.”

  So Winnie went past Morgan Lake, where he sat with a book, and presented herself at the door of her mother’s bedroom. Rose was brushing her abundant hair. “Was it a good picture?”

  “Oh, not too,” said Winnie, discontentedly. “We left a little bit before the end.” She leaned on the doorjamb. Her legs were out of Rose’s line of sight and Winnie took care to keep them there. She was so used to this sort of thing, this telling-mother-the-news, that her voice kept answering the questions, her mind kept improvising the answers, freely and easily.

  But Winnie’s heart was trembling in her breast. She had known about life. To get married in Mexico! Ah, what a kick! To get away, to work it so that her mother wouldn’t check on her by telephone—what fun to have been so clever!

  And in that motel, she had lived, surely.

  But now she knew that she had a tiger … Len’s very charm was his brutality. He was a wheel, at school. Powerful. Ruthless. To be feared and therefore to be courted. And if any girl could, kittenwise, twine herself into his life and his attention—that made her important.

  Winnie had told herself she was in love, but now she knew that it had not been love, or anything like it, but rather that exhilarating sense of gaining power over what had power. Entangling this male. And all secretly. (Getting free of Rose had been the victory, the self-assertion, the need, and the compulsion. But Winnie did not know this.) Winnie had not imagined that Len’s brutal arrogance would turn against her.

  Oh, but she would get him back, she thought. She went over her arsenal … the kitten moods, the pouts, the teasings, the little tricks. The trouble was, Winnie Lake knew somewhat more about life, in this moment, than she was willing to admit. She knew—somewhere, somehow—that all her arsenal was pitiful and weak and no weapon that she had was going to prevail.

  Len had said to her, “Dope! You thought that was a wedding? You’re not married to me, and don’t get stupid, either. I’ve had it. Far as you go! Just stay lost, understand?”

  Winnie’s thoughts veered away from the worst fear, the fear that lurked, the fear of life, life that would be. Life that did not care for ceremony or law or love or anything but its chance to be. She said to her mother, “I guess I better get to bed.”

  Rose said, “O.K., sweetheart. You sound tired. Take a good night’s rest.”

  So Winnie turned and saw Morgan Lake, who had been sitting in his easy chair, all this while, in a position to see her down the long hall and to hear.

  “Good night, Dad,” she called, raising one hand.

  “Good night, Winnie,” he replied serenely—this courteous gentleman who lived here.

  But Winnie knew that he was not now, and for a long time had not been, deceived. His eyes had communicated stolen glimpses of his concern, his hunch that Winnie was troubled—a communication that was forbidden. He and she never occupied the same room alone together, if they could manage to drift apart. He and she had both learned, long ago, that this was to be done, for otherwise Rose would come, suspicious, jealous, peering, prying, making everything unbearable and dirty with tension. So they waved to each other, now and again. If they might have been fond, or in some measure parent and child, or helpful to each other—Rose must not even know what might have been.

  Chapter 18

  The sun came up, the sun went down; February rolled over Sans Souci. Then it was the first of March. The Unholy Three were in session.

  Felice Paull had lost a lawsuit against a parking lot and brooded and was not reconciled to defeat. Ida Milbank sipped tea. Her wits were a bundle of untied threads. Agnes Vaughn was running her tongue over the inhabitants of the building.

  “One of these days,” Agnes said darkly, “Marie Gardner is going to pass out in there, and it will be a week before the maid comes and finds her. She’ll decay! You’re the boy who cried ‘wolf,’ Felice.”

  “It’s not likely,” said Felice. “Mr. Lake has Elise going in there once a day to check. Didn’t I tell you?” Felice looked wronged, rather automatically. She was thinking about that lawyer.

  Agnes had lost a point. But she grinned and picked the frosting off a piece of chocolate cake and inserted it into the middle of her grin. (Felice had told her. She had forgotten. Never mind, one day somebody would die and not be missed.)

  Elise, the colored woman, felt the burden. But when Mr. Lake asked her and when Mindy Shane, the housekeeper, had counseled her (with understanding), she began to go in there, for a minute, every day. Mindy Shane knew, of course (and elsewhere Elise’s people said bluntly), that it didn’t do to get a white woman hanging onto you. Didn’t do, they told her, wasn’t so good. Lily, the other chambermaid at Sans Souci, was young and a second-generation Californian. She had no real memory of any bonds reaching from black to white, or devotion, either way. She said Elise was crazy. You wouldn’t catch Lily! Mindy Shane understood. It wasn’t wise. Yet Elise was caught and couldn’t help it. Poor lady, locked in, and scared of everything in the whole world. If you were the only thing in the whole world she wasn’t scared of, then—black or white—what were you going to do? Not everything, Elise knew uneasily, was black or white in this world.

  In the apartment over the entrance door, Agnes Vaughn went on. “Say, Bettina Goodenough is about ready for a nervous breakdown. She’s got something on her mind. Notice?”

  “What?” asked Felice vigorously, yet rather absently. Maybe she ought to have had a different lawyer.

  Agnes hadn’t been able to figure out “what” so she veered again. “It’s eating her, all right. Say, did you know Caroline Buff asked Tess Rogan to have tea with her yesterday afternoon?”

  “She did!” Felice Paull responded to this. World politics could not have roused her more.

  “Right,” said Agnes, “and Tess Rogan went. Ida saw her.”

  “I saw her,” Ida said, very pleased.

  “Nobody else was asked. Who’s been in that apartment? Well, two of a kind, maybe …”

  “I don’t see that.” Felice frowned.

  “Don’t you?” said Agnes mysteriously. (She didn’t either. Agnes was simply restless.)

  Caroline Buff had had an impulse. Perhaps because Tess Rogan had been left out of Georgia’s party. So Tess Rogan and Caroline Buff had taken tea and compared children and grandchildren, each frankly praising her own. They had discussed modern parenthood, as it differed from the old ways, and had parted with mutual respect but not much spark between them. Caroline Buff was thoroughly conventional and seemed to be moving toward her life’s end with a conviction of the perfect propriety of all things, including death. The two of them saluted each other. Caroline Buff kept her fears, if any, and Tess her wayward thoughts well hidden and apart from the “pleasant afternoon.”

  “Harriet Gregory is trying to butter up Mrs. Rogan again. Notice?” said Agnes Vaughn.

  “Is she? Well, who wouldn’t like to go around the world for free?”

  “Harriet would, believe me. And she’s not the only one. Guess who else?”

  “Who?”

  “Wonder-boy.”

  “Who?”

  “Robert Fitzgibbon. That’s who. Every time Tess Rogan’s in the patio he stops and talks …”

  “Well?”

  “Hoo! Hoo! She’s nearly as old as I am! But Georgia Oliver better watch out. Mrs. Fitz better watch out, too.” Agnes was delighted with any prospect of trouble for Mrs. Fitz; she always had been.

  “Mrs. Rogan’s back in her own apartment. I hear it’s fixed up nicely. The owner could paint for her,” said Felice sullenly.

  “But they’re thick. Very thick,” Agnes said.

  “Who?”

  “Tess Rogan and Nona Henry.”

  Ida Milbank said, “Can I hotten up your cup? Isn’t this good! What is it? Jasmine?”

  “Jasmine,” said Agnes kindly. (Poor Ida.)

  “You thought Robert Fitzgibbon would go for Nona Henry,” said Felice accusingly.
r />   “Ah, that Nona Henry!” said Agnes. Accusations of inconsistency didn’t ruffle her. “She’s a sly one! She’ll go around the world—you wait and see. Did you notice that nobody ever recognized any Mrs. Quinn at Sans Souci until right after Nona Henry moved in here?”

  Felice had a logical mind, or at least it could function logically. She said helplessly, “Well …”

  “I wonder if she’s a widow at all,” said Agnes, really soaring now. “Suppose she’d gotten rid of her husband’s girl friend (and got off, of course). Well, he’d be mad. Maybe she’d have to lie low someplace. She was pretty quick to get Mrs. Rogan in there with her. Maybe she’s afraid.”

  “I thought this crime was supposed to be years ago.” Felice squirmed, fascinated.

  “Oh, that Oppie Etting’s had his orders!” said Agnes. “Don’t worry. The owners wouldn’t let a little thing like murder bother them! Not if Nona Henry can pay the rent. I saw the man that day, you know. Listen, you know who else must have seen him?”

  “Who?”

  “Caroline Buff,” said Agnes. “Because I saw her come in.”

  Ida came to hotten up the tea. “Such a darling little kettle, Agnes.”

  “Thanks,” said Agnes. Her tiny feet crossed. She was pleased with herself and with the alarm that was flattening Felice Paull’s eyelids.

  “Leila Hull will be back before we know it,” she said mildly. “Getting ‘well.’ Hoo! Hoo! Getting ‘sober’ is what they mean.”

  “Have you heard how Elna Ames is?” Felice asked, sipping. “This is hot, Ida.”

  Ida beamed. “I let it boil!” (She could boil water.)

  “Oh, she’s bad,” said Agnes. “She’s a mess.” (Agnes always knew.) “Tess Rogan and Nona Henry went over to see her. They looked pretty sick when they came back, or at least Nona Henry did. You know those nursing homes,” she said brutally. “Foyers to the cemetery.”

  Felice shuddered.

  “Kitty Forrest thought she had it,” Agnes announced.

  “Ah, did she?”

  “Had what?” said Ida.

  “Well, she didn’t, it so happened,” Agnes continued, not bothering to inform Ida. What was the use? Ida’s mind was a sieve. “She’s spry as a spring chicken these days. Notice?”