Seventeen Widows of Sans Souci

by Charlotte Armstrong

  Felice depended upon Agnes to notice, as they both knew.

  “That’s good.” Felice was vague. “I still think that judge …” Her attention wandered to her own affairs.

  “Forget it,” said Agnes Vaughn. “Somebody bumped your car, somewhere. You’ll never prove where.”

  Felice sighed. Her whole bulk sighed.

  “Say, Nona Henry’s gotten pretty chummy with young Winifred Lake,” said Agnes. “You seen them? Listen, just a while ago Nona Henry was in the patio reading her mail. She was out someplace all day. And Winnie Lake comes along. Well, Nona Henry didn’t even finish her letters. Got right up and they went off together.”

  “Off?”

  “In,” said Agnes. “They’re up in 208 right now. Um, boy! If Rose Lake ever catches on, she’ll pop.”

  “Rose Lake,” said Felice dully.

  “You know Rose Lake,” cried Agnes. “Jealous as a cat. She’d throw a fit if she thought her precious Winnie was getting a crush on somebody in the building. Be some fireworks!” Agnes sipped.

  Agnes Vaughn didn’t miss much.

  It was true that Nona Henry had been sitting in one of the nylon-webbed patio chairs. She had read the first page of Dodie’s letter and she had been staring at it, omitting to turn the paper and read on.

  DEAR MOTHER:

  Guess what? We’re coming to California! Si and I! About the third week in March. He says we can afford it and he can take the time.

  (Oh, he can afford it? thought Nona bitterly.)

  Si’s mother is all set to take care of the baby and we’ll fly. Can’t stay but a day or two. But I’ve got to see you, Mother.

  Dodie’s handwriting went sprawling as it always did when Dodie felt what she was writing.

  You won’t say when you’ll be back, or what your plans are, or anything, and I’ve got to see you myself and be sure you’re O.K. So as soon as we …

  Nona felt dismay. Dismay! They shouldn’t come. It was too expensive! It wouldn’t be satisfying. It wouldn’t do any good. A waste! An ordeal! But how could she stop them?

  Then Winnie Lake’s voice had said, “Mrs. Henry, could I talk to you? I’ve got to talk to you. I’ve just got to.”

  Nona had looked up and seen a desperate need naked in the girl’s eyes.

  She and Winnie Lake had spoken, rather often, in the last week. Cordially but casually, in passing. But not by chance. Nona felt sure that Winnie was contriving all these casual meetings. She sensed that the girl had developed an admiration, a devotion, a crush (perhaps because Nona had told nobody the secret). Nona was sure she had not wanted this, and not sure at all what she ought to do with it, now that she had it. It was a responsibility, in a way. (In a way it was life. It was a connection.)

  But on the first day of March, when she had looked up and seen that desperation, Nona knew that this girl was on the edge of screaming. That she had held some hysteria in only long enough to get here.

  So Nona had folded her letter, part unread. She was well aware of the eyes of Sans Souci. The patio was not a good place for confidences, and certainly no place for emotion. Better go in. But Morgan Lake was in the lobby.

  Nona had risen, with her wits working. “You sew, don’t you, Winnie? Those pot holders? You make clothes?”

  Winnie had nodded.

  “Then leave this to me.”

  So she had walked Winnie inside. Had gone by Morgan Lake in his wooden pen with a smile. “I’m taking your daughter upstairs, Mr. Lake,” gaily. “She’s going to show me how to fix a dress.”

  “I’m sure she can,” he had said, gracefully.

  Winnie, walking the other side of Nona, had not been able to speak. Nona had not lingered to notice the intuitive alarm on the man’s face. They had taken the elevator, since it happened to be waiting. In it, Nona had caught hold of the girl’s shoulders and felt their deep quaking. She had held hard, until they disembarked. Then Nona had led the way briskly.

  Inside 208, the door shut, Nona said, “What’s wrong?”

  Winnie had flung herself upon Nona’s couch in a terrible necessary abandon. Sobbed, “Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!”

  “Hush …”

  “Oh …!”

  Now, Nona sat on a footstool beside the hysterical girl and touched her dark hair with stroking fingers. “I’ve had daughters,” she said soothingly. “You better tell me what is wrong, Winnie. You know I will help you, if I can.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Henry.” Winnie writhed. Her stricken face came out of the cushion. “Len is dead! He is dead! He died!” The young one? The boy! Dead?

  “Hush,” said Nona. It crossed her mind freakishly in this moment that here was a widow for Sans Souci. Incredible!

  “What happened?” she crooned. “Just tell me, Winnie. I want to know so that I can help you.”

  This girl was only seventeen years old!

  “He cracked up,” Winnie sobbed. “In his car. This afternoon. It’s all over the school. I just heard … I thought I’d die! I thought I’d never get …”

  Her voice stopped. Nona’s fingers kept stroking.

  “… home,” gasped Winnie and clutched at the couch.

  Nona rummaged her memory for any phrase that one could say. Nothing really helped. Perhaps one thing. “Hush. I am here,” she said.

  “You are not entirely alone.” That was comfort for a widow, a genuine widow. But this child, who still had mother, father, who had never really left them and was not yet eighteen years old. Loneliness was not her trouble. Or was it?

  Winnie said, “What am I going to do?” She raised up on her forearms, a young lizard, the slender length prone on the couch. “I don’t know what to do!” she said. “What I didn’t tell you … When Len got so mad at me … that night … he said … he said it wasn’t a real wedding … in Mexico.”

  Nona rocked backward.

  Now she perceived that it wasn’t grief she had to deal with. It was terror.

  “But you thought it was a wedding?” she asked sternly.

  Winnie did not say, “Of course.” She did Nona the honor of saying a plain yes.

  “And then you …?”

  Winnie said quickly, “Yes, and I don’t know … don’t know …”

  Nona Henry pulled out all the steadiness she could muster. She said, not harshly but not so very tenderly either, “You may be pregnant, is that it? You are not sure you were really married? And the boy is dead?” Winnie’s head trembled affirmatives.

  So Nona began to make clinical inquiries. Winnie, in her terror, was frank about everything.

  Finally Nona said, “Well, you may or may not be pregnant. It will take a little time to tell.”

  Winnie moaned.

  Nona said, “If you are, then someone will have to go to Mexico and find out. Do you know names? Where was all this?” She made inquiries about fact, but Winnie’s answers were moon-struck, vague and, Nona realized, fairly useless.

  “A man will have to go,” said Nona firmly. “I can’t do that for you, Winnie. A lawyer would be best.”

  Winnie whimpered.

  “If this marriage is legal …”

  Nona’s eye struck upon the girl’s face and her heart turned over. What good was analysis, logic, common sense, law? What good these quibbles? This girl had mated and her mate was dead (having cast her off first, as Nona remembered), and now what was the question? The real question?

  Whether she was pregnant or not. That was the question, God knew.

  If she were not, Nona could see that all of this could be lived over and, someday, nearly forgotten. But if she were, this was going to be rough on several people.

  But here the girl was, human, in deep trouble—and who is not human? What woman, thought Nona, is not her kin?

  “Somebody is going to have to stand by you,” she said aloud, musingly.

  “You will,” sobbed Winnie. “I know you will. You’re so wonderful!”

  “I’m not wonderful,” said Nona with distaste. “I made you a promise that I
shouldn’t have made. Winnie”—she tried to make this gentle—”I truly think you will have to tell your folks.”

  Winnie burrowed her head. No, it rolled upon the cushion. No, no, no.

  “Be still,” said Nona. “One thing, carrying on like this won’t do any good. Try to stop that.”

  Winnie was motionless at once. Pathetically obedient.

  Whatever am I going to do? thought Nona in panic.

  “Can you tell me quietly,” she asked, “how you think your mother would take it? Surely she loves you—and after all, you believed that it was a marriage.”

  Winnie got up on all fours. “My mother is not normal about me,” she cried out. “She’d— No!”

  “Do you think that your Dad …?”

  Winnie said, “She’d kill him! This would kill him. I’d be killing him.” Her body collapsed. Her head went back to the rolling movement in the cushion.

  Nona was thinking now, Is there any truth in this? Or is she still dramatizing? Nona could not forget the night of the fire, the girl’s face that night. No, Morgan Lake was, in some way, vulnerable, and the girl did fear for him.

  She said sadly, in a moment, “No use to point out that you should have thought of this. Hush.”

  “If there was some doctor …” Winnie said drearily, into the cushion.

  “I am not going to be a party to an abortion,” said Nona sharply, “so forget that. Right now.”

  The head turned. One of Winnie’s eyes came away from the cushion. It was astonished.

  “Oh, you are an idiot,” cried Nona, guessing why she was astonished. “You youngsters! You think your elders are all ignorant and purely innocent. Don’t you? Nobody heard of sex or sin or any seamy side of life until you. You discovered … why you practically invented all that, this year? And the old crocks mustn’t hear about these things? Listen, we heard—long ago, long ago. We were keeping it from you.”

  Winnie blinked. Her whole face came up. Lines changed on it subtly.

  “Tell your parents,” Nona said more gently, “with a little composure, if you can.”

  “I can’t,” said Winnie with the composure of certainty and despair. “I could run away,” she added calmly, even thoughtfully. “I guess I could die.”

  “Either one would please your folks a lot. Now wouldn’t it?” snapped Nona. “Well, I can see you’ve had no practice thinking about other people’s feelings.” This hurt, and Nona saw that it did.

  So now, although she was feeling frantic herself, she wondered what good it was doing to blast the child. She said, without willing to say it but rather as if this tumbled out of itself, “If you’ve got any guts, there is one thing you could do. You could wait.”

  “W-what?”

  “Wait. Just wait. You can’t be sure yet. Time will tell. You’ve been living to yourself, secretly. (All right, maybe I understand that.) So why don’t you keep on? Do this yourself. Wait it out.”

  Nona’s voice had become challenging.

  Winnie’s eyes turned as if to help her ears to listen better.

  “If you aren’t pregnant,” Nona rushed on—she was swept on—“the worst you’ll have to reckon with … you will have had what is known as an ‘affair.’ All right. A sin. A mistake. A bad one. You’ll have to figure what you really believed about that wedding.”

  Winnie took no hurt this time. The ears were pricked up, the eyes were strangely steady.

  “All right,” said Nona. “People have had affairs and survived. People have even been fooled and betrayed, and they have survived that, too. You might even have learned something.” The girl was listening. “If that’s the way it is, you can keep a secret awhile. Oh, I’ll warn you, it will be a load! A cross to bear. And one day, when it’s over, when you feel that your people can take it … when you have survived … you will tell.”

  Winnie was swinging her feet to the floor to sit up, hear better.

  “However, if you are pregnant right now, that’s different,” said Nona. “And you’ll be for it, whatever comes. You’ll just have to take it. Well? Are you game to wait and see which way it is going to be?”

  The girl didn’t answer, so Nona rushed on. “And keep quiet, remember? So that the things you say you fear will hurt your folks won’t hurt them, yet. You can’t cry, can’t mope. You’ll have to stand up to the worry of it secretly. With no dramatics. Well? Can you?”

  “Yes,” said Winnie, putting her head up. “Yes, if I can only come and talk to you.”

  “You want me to help you?”

  “If you let me be with you, sometimes, I can do anything,” cried Winnie. “I can wait and let nobody notice … I can wait.”

  “And if,” pressed Nona, “you find out that you’re for it?”

  “Then I’ll do whatever you say,” said Winnie Lake.

  Nona closed her eyes. Ah yes, she, Nona Henry, was going to be the one who would eventually tell the Lakes about all this. Nona could see that coming.

  But Nona seemed to be for it.

  She opened her eyes. “Is that a promise?”

  “Yes, that is a promise.”

  It won’t be long, thought Nona. I’ll make her tell. “You’ve lied to your mother all your life,” said Nona fiercely. “Never lie to me, mind!”

  “No,” said Winnie, her eyes glowing, worshiping. “No, Mrs. Henry. Never,” she promised. “Never.”

  There followed a quick discussion of a way.

  Afterwards, alone, Nona found herself trembling. Foolish, she thought. Oh, what a fool I am! Why am I doing this? For power? The girl asks me for something. I have to give. I have to give. My vanity has to give. Oh, great sport, she thought bitterly, as Tess Rogan says.

  Yet …

  Something struck her suddenly.

  Who had spoken as she had spoken? Who had said those things? Not Nona Henry, the Poughkeepsie housewife from the nice neighborhood—mother, grandmother, respectable widow.

  No. It must have been Nona O’Connor speaking, surely. Or had it? No. Nona O’Connor had been a child herself.

  Then who had spoken?

  The next day Nona went out early to buy patterns and yard goods. She also rented a sewing machine. Winnie was to come up after school.

  Nona told herself that whichever way the question was answered, she would still induce Winnie to tell her parents, as she ought to do. Nona could teach her, surely, that this was right and must be. A week, ten days’ delay, was not going to matter, surely. (Who kept saying “surely”?) She hoped the girl was not pregnant, so that to confess would not be so difficult. Mercy and understanding might be given.

  But Nona was nervous and could not pray for mercy.

  She felt she did wrong.

  But she was for it.

  Chapter 19

  When Winnie appeared the next afternoon she seemed calm and in control of herself.

  The boy was dead. Someone, presumably, mourned him. Winnie Lake did not seem to mourn. Did not dare? She was calm and eager to begin the sewing project. She laid out the material upon the living-room floor and pinned the pattern. She took the scissors.

  Nona, who had been sewing for thirty years for herself, for Milly, for Dodie, for the babies, let the girl proceed. She herself was otherwise occupied. She was being pressed to be strong and wise. Here was a young person who listened. And Winnie Lake was calm with Nona’s strength. (Or what Winnie thought was Nona’s strength.) There was nothing that Nona could do but give. Only try to give what was honest, and give that humbly.

  There was anxiety in this. There was also pleasure. And in the humility, and in the effort to be honest, there was a strange release.

  About five o’clock the bell pinged and Nona went to the door.

  Rose Lake said, “My daughter is up here, isn’t she?”

  “Oh yes, Mrs. Lake. Won’t you come in?”

  Rose Lake was handsome, Nona conceded. That mass of dark hair was lovely. The faintly olive skin was still neat to the bone. But the dark brown of the eyes held amber
flashes; the full lips were pouting. Rose Lake did not smile while she sent her suspicious, probing gaze over the entire room.

  “Hi, Mom,” Winnie said cheerily. She was on all fours, still busy scissoring.

  “Alice Carmichael called you,” her mother said.

  “Oh? Does she want me to call her back?”

  “She didn’t say.” Rose’s eyes had finished with the room and now came to Nona Henry.

  “Won’t you sit down a minute, Mrs. Lake?” Nona put manners on like a shield. “It is so good of Winnie to help me. Do you sew, too?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Rose. She sat down heavily. She sent a brooding projection upon the girl on the floor. It was a possession, a greedy darkness.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Nona fluttered on, “that Winnie has promised to show me how to make these dresses. Of course, I’ve told her …”

  Winnie looked up, smiling. “Mrs. Henry says I can earn some yard goods for myself—and I saw the yummiest stuff!”

  “I wouldn’t ask her to do it without some—some thanks,” Nona said. “I suppose you taught her to sew, Mrs. Lake?”

  “Yes,” said Rose carelessly.

  The end of Winnie’s eyebrows moved. Nona thought, Well, that’s not true. “You must be so capable,” sighed Nona with her prettiest air of helplessness.

  “She’s a terrific cook, too,” Winnie said. This was guidance. Nona was on the track, Winnie was saying. This woman had to be praised.

  “See, Mrs. Henry?” Winnie pointed with the scissor blades. “You clip all the way in, on this line.”

  “I don’t see how those little pieces go together,” sighed Nona. “But I guess I’ll find out. Would you like a cup of tea, Mrs. Lake? I cook, of course … but not terribly well, I’m afraid.” (Nona wasn’t a bad cook, really.)

  Rose was looking softened. Her lips had flattened to a less discontented line. “I don’t care for any tea, thank you. I have to go down in a minute. Time to start dinner.”

  But she did not rise and Nona said brightly, “Do you have other hobbies, too?”

  “What?”

  “I suppose you can do all sorts of things.”