Seventeen Widows of Sans Souci

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “Winnie’s my hobby,” Rose said. This was most apparently and terribly true. She was a turbulence in the room. She exuded a pressure. She was over the girl like a cloud. She sat on, did not move to go. So Nona began to show her the patterns for the two dresses and the blouse; she kept prattling. “My girls sew, of course.”

  “You have daughters?” Rose looked at her.

  “Oh, yes. I have two. Both married.” (Nona need not speak of Milly’s death.) “In fact, I now have two little granddaughters.”

  “You are older than I am,” Rose Lake said.

  “Well, I’m sure of that,” said Nona merrily. “You must have married very young.” (Flatter this creature. This sick, dark heart, this oppressing spirit, this oppressed unhappy woman.)

  “I was seventeen,” said Rose, with a vicious slant on her mouth. “And what a little fool I was!”

  Nona saw the scissors falter and she could not blame them. She said quickly, “Mrs. Lake, you really think that’s going to be a dress? All those little bits and pieces?”

  Rose could not respond to mock despair.

  “It will,” said Winnie. “Don’t worry.” She looked up, strong with Nona’s strength. Eyes caught in a fleeting secret communication.

  “What about your homework, sweetheart?” said Rose Lake, stirring in the chair. (Did her dark intuitive passion take note?)

  “Oh, I can do that tonight,” said Winnie blithely.

  Rose said, “No date?”

  “Well, gosh,” said Winnie, all innocence, “if I’m going to help Mrs. Henry with these dresses in the afternoons, I’ll have to stay home and study every night. But I don’t mind. I thought I’d make a kind of semiformal … I mean with that stuff I saw. It’s green, Mom. And oooh … yummy!”

  Nona perceived in this girlish chatter the manipulation. The practiced skill of it. The bribery. Rose Lake would settle for this in the afternoons, if she thought she would have Winnie home every evening. But this was pitiful!

  Now Winnie lifted a piece of the cutout dress with the pattern still pinned to it. “The next thing is to mark the darts. The way I do …”

  “Darts?” Nona feigned ignorance.

  “Well, I guess I’ll go,” said Rose Lake. “I hope the dress turns out O.K.” Her spirit had lightened. “Be down by quarter of six, darling?”

  “Oh sure, Mom.”

  When she had gone, neither Winnie nor Nona found it necessary to speak. My God, the poor kid! Nona was thinking. And there went a pure lie-ee, she thought with illumination. One absolutely had to lie to Rose Lake. Winnie does. I did. What else can you do?

  Then Nona thought, prophetically, That woman will drive her child away and kill her husband and when she’s a lonely widow … will she know?

  Winnie was folding the pieces of the dress neatly into a pile.

  “Come, sit,” said Nona warmly. “We’ll talk. You’ve got a little while.”

  My God, the loneliness! she was thinking. This lonely child! Her heart was toward the liar.

  “Your mother was married at seventeen?” Nona meant to turn listener. “Was that to your real father?”

  “Yes, it was,” said Winnie. She sat in a chair and her hands were listless now. She seemed weary but relaxed. As if she felt safe, as if she leaned, she rested now.

  Rest on me, thought Nona. I will listen and I will hear you, and I will give you leave to be.

  “Do you remember him at all?” she asked, her voice casual.

  “Well, not too …” Winnie said. “I was only four when he … well, I guess they were divorced. I don’t think he died or anything.”

  “You don’t know?” Nona kept disapproval out of her voice and tried to let pure interest, close attention, sound. “That’s hard for you, I imagine.”

  “Well …” Winnie looked down at her hands. The girl was sensing what Nona was trying to send to her. The feeling-with, so close to love, was almost too much for her hard little soul. Tears slipped upon her lashes. “My mother doesn’t like questions,” Winnie said.

  Nona said briskly, “Don’t cry.” (She was really saying, I am here.) “It just occurred to me to wonder if he is alive. But you don’t know where your real father might be?”

  “No. His name was Quinn,” said Winnie Lake. “That’s all I know.”

  Chapter 20

  “Do you mean to say one shouldn’t keep a secret, ever?” said Nona brightly. “What do you two philosophers have to say about that?” Her hands were busy. She was able to look down at them and pretend to have thrown an abstract question into the conversational pot.

  She had brought her knitting around to Tess Rogan’s apartment. Work in the hand was a good thing. (She could have been turning the cuffs on one new dress, but it would not do to finish the sewing project too soon.)

  Daisy Robinson was calling on Tess this evening also. There had been much throwing about of brains. Daisy, smoking, gesturing, had just described some Little Theatre production of Romeo and Juliet. “Of course the old plot creaks distressingly,” she had said. “The girl was properly married. Why couldn’t she just say so? A secret is stupid,” she added scornfully.

  Now she answered Nona. “Most secrets are stupid, Nona. You’ll have to admit that there is hardly a piece of fiction on television, for instance, that could happen at all if some character in it weren’t stupidly keeping a secret. There’d be no plots if people were frank and open to each other.”

  Is that so? thought Nona rebelliously. If I were to march downstairs and tell a secret I know, to an unbalanced woman who may have been tried for murder once, who might go off her rocker now, and cause such uproar and anguish that a very nice man with a touchy heart could die of it … No plot? I don’t know that there would be no plot, she thought. No tragedy. How can I know?

  She said aloud, “I doubt if that is always true.”

  Tess Rogan had turned her eyes. “Come now, Daisy,” she challenged. “We all skate on an agreed crust called ‘manners’ or maybe even ‘civilization’ and keep our secrets decently under. Otherwise there might be entirely too much plot.”

  Daisy bristled. “I don’t agree.”

  “What if the three of us were to say exactly what we think of each other?” said Tess mischievously.

  Daisy grinned her wolfish grin. “I’m willing. I am an honest woman, I hope. And the truth shall make us free.”

  Nona felt a wave of nervousness.

  “Oh, well—honesty,” said Tess Rogan thoughtfully, “is one thing. Truth is another.”

  “Oh, come,” said Daisy. “Honesty is simply all the truth you know.”

  “Or think you know,” Tess said.

  Nona rose. “Excuse me. May I …?” She needed to be hidden for a minute or two.

  “There’s something wrong with that bathroom door,” Tess called after her. “The painters or the firemen—somebody has done something. It’s been knocked crooked. Don’t close it, Nona.”

  “Have you told Mr. Lake?” Nona heard Daisy put in officiously.

  “Oh, yes. Kelly Shane is coming to fix it.”

  “‘What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate.” Daisy was quoting as Nona went into Tess’ bedroom and into the bathroom. The door did look out of kilter; the doorknob had a peculiar feel. Nona did not altogether close the door.

  She drew a breath into the bottom of her lungs and sighed it forth. Trapped in a secret. And no secret of her own, either. (She had written to Dodie with enthusiasm. Oh yes, do come! Some one of her own would be good to see. Nona was trapped in a secret about a stranger and she couldn’t see how to get out.

  (“What is truth?” said jesting Pilate.)

  Nona winced to remember that after her own demand upon Winnie Lake—“Never lie to me”—Nona herself had been less than frank and open. That quiver of the nerves at the name Quinn Nona had covered cleverly, saying that she’d had dear friends named Quinn. Been startled.

  How could she have told Winnie, poor child, what the name of Quinn was meaning in Sans Souci? T
hat her mother might have been involved in a crime somehow? Was it Nona Henry’s place to tell the girl this? When it might, after all, be just a coincidence? How could she even warn the girl to keep the name unspoken? Nona had not been able to think what else to do but keep herself quiet. Perhaps Tess Rogan is right, she thought hopefully. Nona did not know enough, and therefore was right to do nothing but carry on, keeping her original promise, which was honorable—and all these secrets under.

  How could she, after all, go to Rose Lake, now that she had seen the woman, heard her—and now that Nona suspected her past? How could she go to Morgan Lake? Say, “I realize your wife is not quite normal”? Nona quaked.

  Oh, how could Morgan Lake, that smooth and courteous gentleman, have got himself into this picture? Whatever unhappy picture it was. Nona’s mind was going around the same old circle. If Rose Lake was Mrs. Quinn, then she couldn’t be guilty of murder. Surely Morgan Lake would not have married a murdering woman! The law would not have left her free to marry again.

  Nona had thought of questioning Oppie Etting, who was the one man who had once claimed to have talked to a stranger. But she dared not. She felt sure that Oppie Etting had lied when he said it had all been a joke. She now believed there had been a stranger. Had he not been seen by Agnes Vaughn? But that Oppie Etting had decided, or been ordered, to suppress the story. How could Nona Henry’s questions induce him to stop lying, just to her? Unless she told too much, herself.

  Now she came round the circle, as always at this point. Reasonable doubt got murderers off. All the guilty are not always convicted. There may have been no proof. Was this a secret that Rose Lake was keeping? Was she a murdering woman, abnormal—for she was certainly abnormally centered on her child. Did Morgan Lake know and keep this secret? That courteous man? Yet she had heard that he was cold and stubborn, and for all his good manners, would not grant some most reasonable requests for repairs.

  One thing Nona knew. She, Nona Henry, was in a mess. No kin of hers, these people. No kin. This possibly pregnant, dubiously widowed seventeen-year-old. What was Nona Henry doing, meddling with birth, death, crime, risk? And other people’s secrets? Nona shuddered.

  And yet knew that however troubled, frightened and worried she might be, this was life. Someone, in her skin, felt alive and important and responsible. A possessor of secrets, of influence, of power.

  She mistrusted the pleasure in it.

  She was afraid.

  She would like to have had advice, but the promise she had given Winnie Lake still held her. And to whom could she apply? What wise person?

  There should be, in Sans Souci, some wise woman.

  But Nona found herself staying away from Ursula Fitzgibbon. Mrs. Fitz was so frail. One could not burden her. Also, Robert Fitzgibbon was there, too often, and his air of a secret between himself and Nona Henry was irritating.

  What about Georgia Oliver? Kind and good, Georgia would be tolerant, of course; she would also be confident and full of faith. But the Winnie Lake affair was a mess! There was nothing sweet about it. Nona had no faith.

  She sidled around Tess Rogan. But she could not ask her what was good or right or what was honorable or what was strong or even what was expedient. Feared to break her promise.

  I shouldn’t have said what I just said about secrets. Nona eyed her reflection angrily. What am I doing? Flirting with detection? Dropping hints? Hoping someone will be too smart for me, and then it won’t be my fault when I tell?

  An agony came over her. She was standing before the mirror, her hands up to her hair. “So you’ll poop out,” she said to her image in a low voice but aloud. “You damn phony!”

  Daisy Robinson’s voice made her jump.

  “Talking to yourself, eh?” Daisy’s voice and wolfish grin preceded the tap of her hand on the door. “I’ve got to go,” she announced, “in more ways than one.”

  Daisy had no false modesty.

  Feeling a little shocked and frightened, Nona sent glinting glances at her via the mirror.

  “Who can know the truth?” said Daisy, with an exalted expression. (She was seated now.) “We can only be honest,” Daisy went on, with a benign cock of the head. “You don’t seem to me to be a phony. What is the etymology …?”

  Daisy’s eyes were friendly and full of philosophy, but color rushed over Nona’s skin. She could neither laugh nor cry nor speak. She mumbled and went out of the bathroom, leaving Daisy enthroned.

  When Daisy had left, pelting by in her abrupt way (whether offended or not, who could tell?), Tess said, “I like her, don’t you? An honest woman! She’s willing, I suppose, to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth!” Tess sighed. “A large order for any one human being.”

  “I guess so,” Nona said humbly, sadly.

  “Philosophy is after the whole truth,” Tess mused on, “and cannot find it. Science is after nothing but the truth. That sometimes goes a little better.”

  She smiled at Nona, looking fond.

  “Who is after truth?” said Nona harshly.

  “Religion, I suppose,” said Tess gently. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’ve got myself in a mess,” said Nona. Tears came to her eyes. “But I can’t talk about it.”

  Tess opened her lips. She looked alert, on the very brink of speech. Something strong leaped out of her face. But no sound.

  “What were you going to say, please?” begged Nona. “I’m asking you for something.”

  “What you want can’t be given,” Tess said gently, in a moment.

  “What do I want?” cried Nona. “I want to be …” Her mind switched words guiltily. “I want to be comfortable!” she cried, and thought, That’s honest.

  “No,” said Tess. “I don’t think so. I think you’re one who is looking for herself.”

  Nona was shaken violently.

  “It isn’t easy,” Tess said in her musing way, “to see that it really … isn’t very hard.”

  “That’s pretty cryptic,” flared Nona angrily.

  “I’m sorry,” Tess said (and she withdrew, far away). “I guess that’s age, and all this being alone. You sit alone and think a lot and little pieces without context sound cryptic if not crazy. I’m sorry you feel you are in a mess and you can’t talk. I shouldn’t preach, Lord knows. Shall we make coffee?”

  “I’d better run along, thanks,” Nona said dully. “It will all work out, I suppose.”

  “Somehow,” said Tess placidly.

  Time rolled.

  Winnie and Nona sewed on several afternoons. Nona feared that she was preaching and she reproached herself. But the girl listened so avidly, and it was seductive. It was irresistible.

  And the girl talked. Her lonely conclusions about so many things needed correcting, or at least (Nona corrected herself) re-examination. So Nona inserted differing ideas and writhed with her own doubt. For all her good intentions, she felt—she knew—that she was doing wrong. The girl was not her child.

  But Nona began to recognize a law that operated. She was becoming very fond of this girl who listened with such respect and seemed to learn. Attention is love, thought Nona, just as love is attention (not possession, but respectful attention). And which was cause, and which effect, she could not tell.

  Downstairs Rose Lake’s dark soul filled up with jealousy.

  Morgan Lake sent out feelers to understand. Looking into Mrs. Henry’s eyes each day as she came to the desk for her mail, he thought he could read good will there, and a troubled honesty. He did not think Winnie was going to come to any harm through association with this woman. Something in his soul, however, was prophetically sad, for it responded to a tinge of pity in Nona’s look, a troubled pity. Meanwhile he soothed Rose as best he could; he was the buffer. He waited politely for whatever would come.

  Nona was too preoccupied with her own dilemma to pay much attention to the other widows. So she was disconnected from the grapevine of Sans Souci, and it did not occur to her that she was one of its subjec
ts.

  Harriet Gregory thought it was very odd that Winnie Lake spent so much time in Nona Henry’s apartment. Really!

  “Oh, they’re sewing,” said Sarah Lee Cunneen, in good faith.

  “I suppose she’s paying the child,” Bettina Goodenough said (her mind was on money). “If not, she should be.”

  Georgia Oliver thought it was so nice to see such a friendship. Mrs. Fitz said she thought so too.

  Felice Paull, however, considered the affair unwise, and wondered if someone ought not to speak to Winnie’s parents, who might be psychologically naïve. Felice was willing to make the sacrifice.

  But Agnes Vaughn grinned evilly. She said it was pretty funny all right, but best keep out of it. (Ida Milbank didn’t know what they were talking about.) Agnes waited. She liked her scandals ripe.

  Time rolled and the widows of Sans Souci went in and out and Agnes Vaughn watched from her window and listened through her wall.

  Time rolled and Winnie’s question was due to be answered. Nothing happened. A margin was allowed.

  Chapter 21

  One night—it was ten o’clock—Nona’s phone rang. “Nona? I’ve just made coffee. It occurred to me that you wouldn’t be asleep yet. And coffee doesn’t keep you awake, does it? So will you?”

  Tess Rogan’s voice came in like a key to fit a lock. Nona was feeling tension, feeling lonely in it, and was expecting nothing but a lonely struggle with it. Ten o’clock at night, and she had long dismissed any thought of distraction or companionship, this day. An invitation at such an hour was pattern-breaking. An invitation from Tess Rogan, who was usually rather tantalizingly aloof, was intriguing in its own right.

  “I’ll be right there,” Nona said.

  And Tess said, “Good for you.”

  Nona powdered her nose, took her handbag, without which any woman feels vulnerable and unprepared, and set out around the corner.

  There was a man standing before the elevator.

  “Ah … going down?” he said. It was Robert Fitzgibbon. “Be my guest.” He bowed. There was something wrong with his balance.

  “Thank you, I’m just going around to Mrs. Rogan’s.”