Seventeen Widows of Sans Souci

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “I don’t think,” said Georgia fastidiously, “that I will listen any longer. Please?”

  She was, Nona saw, armored completely. To her, Nona was an excited stranger, who might attack as much as she pleased, but Georgia Oliver heard no evil, saw no evil, and believed no evil—not even of Nona.

  “You don’t believe a word I’ve said,” cried Nona.

  Georgia kept smiling.

  “Why would I tell you this?”

  “I’m sorry for you,” Georgia said. “I don’t altogether understand, but I’m really sorry. You shouldn’t say such wicked things. You can’t hurt Robert and me,” said Georgia softly. “But I am so sorry that you want to try.”

  Nona looked at that tilted, haloed head a moment, then turned on her heel and marched out.

  She went along the corridor toward the corner, fuming. Lie-ee, she fumed. Doesn’t want it to be the way it is. So she won’t have it that way!

  Nona started around the corner, stopped. So much for Georgia Oliver. Reluctantly Nona recognized that, from Georgia’s point of view, Georgia was right. And that Nona herself had always envied or perhaps resented what was right about Georgia. Still, Tess Rogan was being wronged, and Nona did not propose to endure that. She turned back.

  She knocked on the door of Agnes Vaughn.

  “It’s open.”

  Nona opened. She had never been in Agnes Vaughn’s apartment. She saw that it was a place of wildest disorder. Agnes Vaughn had not stirred out of her corner. There she sat. She seemed to be chewing on a coconut bar.

  “Well, come in,” said Agnes Vaughn, hailing her with animation, at least. The old spider was all alone.

  Nona came in. She sat down on the edge of a chair in which there were three magazines, a tube of toothpaste, one stocking and a gray garment she could not even identify … already strewn. “I have come to tell you the truth about what happened the other night,” Nona said bluntly.

  “Go ahead,” said Agnes Vaughn encouragingly.

  So Nona told her. Rage sharpened her voice and clipped her phrases so that the whole thing was very bald. It did sound fantastic.

  But Agnes Vaughn listened carefully. Her little eyes kept wobbling rapidly, as if she looked first at one of Nona’s eyes, then at the other.

  When Nona had finished Agnes said, “Tell me your exact conversation with him beside the elevator.”

  Nona told her, repeating what had been said as best she could remember it. She was realizing with some surprise that Agnes Vaughn was checking evidence in a rather brainy fashion.

  Now Agnes Vaughn sighed with great satisfaction. “So that’s what really happened?”

  “You believe me? Georgia Oliver didn’t.”

  Agnes grinned. “She wouldn’t want to.”

  “But you do want to?” challenged Nona, having abandoned tact long ago. “Did you start this story about Tess Rogan being drunk?”

  “That was just a guess,” shrugged Agnes, without apology.

  “You don’t have to guess any more,” said Nona. She got up. She felt spent.

  “Is this a secret?” asked Agnes Vaughn slyly.

  “Would that matter?” retorted Nona insultingly.

  Agnes Vaughn grinned and said warmly, “Say, come and see me any time, why don’t you?”

  Nona didn’t answer. She left that place. As she closed the door she heard Agnes calling, “Any time at all. I’m always here and glad to have you.”

  Nona put her head down and pounded off to her own place. She wasn’t sure what she had done. But she felt spent. She had gotten rid of the anger, told the truth, refused to keep a stupid secret, defended the right.…

  Winnie Lake looked up with those adoring eyes.

  “Winnie,” said Nona abuptly, “we are going to have to tell your people. We cannot keep this secret. That’s just silly.”

  Winnie’s eyes filled with shock at this coldness, and with surprise.

  “A f-few more days?” she stammered. “I thought … you said … please, Mrs. Henry …?”

  Nona stood very still. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly after a moment. “The fact is, I am so spitting mad at some other people, I think I am taking it out on you. A few more days … all right. Yes, I promised.” Then, summoning attention, Nona asked lovingly, “How are you?”

  Tears were running down Winnie’s face.

  “Don’t cry. That was mean of me.”

  Nona sat down beside her. (Oh, God what am I?)

  Winnie’s head went down into her lap and Winnie wept there. Nona was motionless, except for the one hand that touched and moved very slightly against the dark hair. She felt herself to be somewhat tranced.

  “Have you ever cried for the boy?” she asked, slowly, dreamily.

  “One night,” choked Winnie. “I cried all night. Oh, Mrs. Henry …”

  After a while Nona advised her to brace up. “We’ll go along with the sewing. I’ll make some cocoa.”

  The girl responded immediately. The head came up and left Nona free. “That’s a good girl,” Nona said.

  And to hell with the Widows of Sans Souci, thought Nona Henry. I am me, and I’ll do as I do!

  She flamed with energy. (Who was this, so to flame?)

  Chapter 25

  Two days later, Morgan Lake rang a bell, and waited. Oppie Etting had just taken over the desk to release him. So it was getting toward dinnertime. Along the stuffy upper, inner passage of Sans Souci, he had walked through a rainbow array of odors. Morgan Lake knew that Agnes Vaughn was cooking cabbage, and Georgia Oliver was having fish. Daisy Robinson? Something with cheese.

  Tess Rogan, who opened her door now, let out a scent of cinnamon and apples.

  “May I speak to you a moment, Mrs. Rogan? I won’t be keeping you …?”

  “No, no. Please do come in, Mr. Lake.”

  “I came to say …” Morgan Lake was very tired and an assortment of worries had been nagging him, all day long. His courteous voice was weary. “Kelly Shane, unfortunately, isn’t able to fix your bathroom door. We’ll have to have the door replaced, I’m afraid. It may be a day or so?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Tess Rogan said. “Come in, sit down.”

  Morgan Lake came in. He was so tired. It was relaxing to hear a tenant say that anything didn’t matter. The door closed and he was within. If only he could sometimes be within, and not just the buffer who belonged nowhere inside. He sat down. 201. He knew it. The same old Sans Souci, shabby, genteel. And yet with two lamps lit against the winter dusk, this room was peaceful.

  Elise, the older of the two chambermaids, came out of the bedroom. She had some clothing on her arm. “Mr. Lake.”

  “Elise.” He nodded. He noted that she was a little late to leave. No matter.

  “Miz Rogan, she done give me these things.” Her brown face reflected anxiety lest he think her a thief.

  “That’s right,” Tess said. “You just take them along.”

  “You sure about this here coat?” Elise was still anxious.

  “That coat,” said Tess, “has been with me a long time—too long.”

  “It’s sure a nice coat, Miz Rogan.”

  “It won’t wear out,” said Tess cheerfully. “Good night, Elise.”

  So Elise left, with Tess Rogan’s long red coat upon her arm.

  Morgan Lake, meanwhile, had been trying to bash his worries down.

  There was Ida Milbank. Senility? (A haunt here. It had been here before.) Always a stupid woman, she was really becoming dangerously stupid. Some of Ida Milbank’s recent “purchases” seemed not to have been wrapped. It worried him.

  There was Marie Gardner. Elise had reported to Mindy Shane …

  (There was Mindy Shane, that strong and competent woman without whose cheerful energies the building would have decayed long since. She, alas, languished at home, ill of a virus. Sans Souci was staggering along without her, at the moment. A worry …)

  Mindy Shane had reported to him, in turn, that Elise said that Mrs. Gard
ner wasn’t friendly any more. Withdrawing? Finally? Completely? It worried him.

  And Leila Hull had not come back.

  And Elna Ames was dying—somewhere else, with her rent paid only to the first of the month and her things still there and what was Morgan Lake to do?

  The owner, Avery Patrick, refused to worry about anything but his own problems. He had had a loss, some deal gone sour. He was as touchy as a hornet’s nest, these days. Avery Patrick was not even listening to any detailed needs for any kind of repairs. He was against doing anything for anyone. He said savagely, “Lay off, Morgan. I’m telling you. Keep the bills down. Keep that gas bill down, can’t you?”

  “How?” Morgan had asked him. “If I turn off the heat earlier or put it on later … you know what happens. Every woman in the building lights her oven and opens the door. You know that.”

  Avery Patrick had glared at him. “You keep the bills down, somehow. I don’t give a damn how. I haven’t got it!”

  He had said this in Morgan’s apartment which was a place of tension, where Rose Lake alternated between deep gloom and a terribly gay extravagance, pursuing Winnie, while Winnie kept slipping, slipping, surely, steadily away. And Morgan Lake kept buffing, between he knew not what.

  The whole place …!

  The entire building was in an uproar. There was a feud on.

  Two stories were current, two versions of a certain event. The first version, that of a drunken Mrs. Rogan, collided with the second version that came rippling out of Agnes Vaughn’s apartment with all her weight behind it. Georgia Oliver, who had wished to spare Mrs. Fitz, was forced to tell her everything that poor little mixed-up Nona Henry had said to her. For even Mrs. Fitz was unable to ignore the hints, the gasps, the snubs, the leers, the indignations, the very loyalties, that seeped through the whole building, and nipped at her.

  (Mrs. Fitz had been outraged, really angry. She had wanted to go at once to Nona Henry. But Georgia had talked her out of that. “Don’t dignify such nonsense. Try not to be angry. Poor thing is so wrong. She can’t hurt us! You have the faith to know that.”

  “Georgia, darling …”

  “Come, we must be bright for Robert’s sake.”

  “Yes, dear, we must rise above it. Of course, you are wise.”)

  But there was a feud on, all right, and Morgan Lake knew it. A real schism. A stirring-up of passions such as he had not seen, although he had seen many little feuds at Sans Souci. They tended to rise, to die down, reform, revive. Feuds were a lively part of the life here.

  But this one … it worried him.

  The lines were drawn.

  Mrs. Fitz and

  Georgia Oliver versus

  Nona Henry and

  Tess Rogan

  Sides had been taken. Oh yes! Morgan Lake could have written down firm lists.

  For Mrs. Fitz: For Nona Henry:

  Harriet Gregory (always pro-aristocrat) Agnes Vaughn

  Bettina Goodenough Felice Paull

  Sarah Lee Cunneen (for tradition) Ida Milbank (the Unholy Three!)

  Joan Braverman

  Kitty Forrest (for the majority)

  Daisy Robinson (simply, on the side of the least melodrama)

  Who was neutral, he reflected, except poor Marie Gardner in her prison? (And Leila Hull in the sanitarium, Elna Ames on her deathbed.) Was that all seventeen?

  Not quite. There was still Caroline Buff, who came and went as busily and confidently as ever. She was possibly the only real and deliberate neutral in the place. Except himself, who did not feel he knew what had really happened and so was not judging.

  The issue was as follows:

  Mrs. Fitz’s faction claimed that Robert Fitzgibbon was a hero who had almost died of a noble chivalrous rescue, in the deed of lifting a weighty drunken old woman from where she had fallen down.

  Mrs. Henry’s faction claimed that, on the contrary, Robert Fitzgibbon was the villain who in a drunken suicidal fit had first asked the old woman to marry him (Tongues flapped. Marry him!) and then had knocked her down!

  As for Robert Fitzgibbon, he lay in the hospital, keeping quiet, not to be bothered—by doctor’s orders.

  While Sans Souci was ready to explode!

  Oppie Etting was in on this, somewhere, Morgan Lake felt sure. He had scolded Oppie blindly and severely, but too late, and to what good end?

  Now, he looked at Mrs. Rogan. The feud was for or against her. But she herself? She was a question mark.

  Tess sat down. “I’ve been weeding out,” she explained.

  He said, “I see,” pleasantly. Then Morgan Lake went on smoothly, “I’d like to say how sorry I am for all this … trouble, Mrs. Rogan. I don’t know what happened here that night. I am sure it was nothing terrible. But I do wish I knew how to stop the talk.”

  Tess said, “Yes, I wish I could stop it.”

  He believed this. “Sometimes I wonder …” Morgan Lake here surprised himself. “Could Robert Fitzgibbon put a stop to it?”

  “Oh, I doubt … he isn’t well, you see,” Tess said.

  Somehow this did not make Morgan Lake doubt her. It made him believe. His intuition took the jump, reading compassion and understanding instead of fear and evasion. “Did he really knock you down?” he asked, surprising himself again, for he did not ordinarily pry.

  “No,” said Tess. “That is, he swung his arm and it caused me to fall, yes. But he had no such intention.”

  “I see,” said Morgan Lake. Yes, he believed.

  “The man was very unhappy and upset, that night,” Tess continued, “and he had had too much to drink. It was a kind of breakdown, I suppose. A nervous explosion. It would have been better …”

  “Mrs. Henry means well, I’m sure,” he said. Their talk seemed to be jumping whole paragraphs.

  “Yes,” said Tess. “Of course, she does. She means to do well. I’m very fond of her. If she doesn’t perceive that my having been hit was accidental, really, well, it wasn’t easy to perceive at the time. She had been standing by me, all through it. A painful scene. So you see, she was thinking of me as a woman, and old …”

  Morgan Lake stretched his eyes.

  “Whereas, I was thinking of myself as just a person,” Tess said with a little laugh, “which is to say—isn’t it?—a factor, and therefore a risk-taker, and therefore, I should think, knock-down-able?” She was smiling. He was absolutely astonished that he understood her perfectly.

  “I may go off to my son’s, in San Francisco,” Tess said, “for a visit. I have been wondering whether that might not be wise. Or do you think this … story, in the building, will just naturally blow over, cease to be interesting … and disappear?”

  Morgan Lake said rather absently, “It will, eventually …”

  “Mrs. Henry is good for your youngster,” said Tess, jumping paragraphs, plucking thought from his mind. “Or so I should think. She tries very hard to be honest and fair, and to correct herself. Of course …”

  “Yes?”

  “One day,” Tess said, “she may find she needn’t try as hard as all that.”

  “I’m glad if Winnie has a woman friend,” said Morgan Lake in a low voice.

  Tess said, “I’m sorry …”

  And he knew she was sorry about Rose Lake. It was a jump. But easy. If he were glad that Winnie had a woman friend, then he had confessed that Winnie needed one. He knew that he could tell Tess Rogan all about everything, all about it, here and now, and she would listen. Yet Tess would rather he didn’t, for she, as well as he, perceived that he would regret having told.

  So he did not tell.

  He breathed five more breaths of a peace that jumped paragraphs. Then he rose with courteous farewells, to go.

  Rose Quinn. Little Rose Carter, she had been once, born and raised in the same small midwestern town, on the same street and only three houses away from where Morgan Lake had lived as a boy.

  He had been horrified at her predicament when he had found out that it was little Rose Cart
er who was on trial for murder … there in New Jersey, where he was at that time.

  He had gone to see her in the jail, for Auld Lang Syne.

  Young, beautiful, beside herself in trouble, with no one to stand by her. Her people dead. Her husband now her bitterest enemy. And with a tiny child, too. Poor girl! Poor thing! Poor Rose Carter! Why, he had known her for years! So Morgan Lake had gone to her attorney to offer himself as a character witness. Anything.

  Morgan Lake had attended the trial every day, hoping and fearing.

  For how glad she had been to see him! How she had clung to him, wept upon his shoulder. She hadn’t pushed the other woman down the cellar stairs. No, no. Never. He had believed her.

  The jury had believed her, too. The prosecution had not been able to prove that she had done it. It wasn’t a deed that could easily be proved or disproved.

  So Morgan Lake’s partisan heart had rejoiced at the verdict. But the verdict had not been enough. Thereafter, he had seen Russell Quinn cast her off, in bitterness and hatred. Rose had clung to him. She had no one else. No one at all. He had helped Rose Quinn through the divorce.

  Morgan Lake was a good deal older than she. He was not, he thought, much. No great talent, or drive, and a heart that the doctors “didn’t like the sound of.” Such as he was, he had offered her himself … for that was all he had. And she was little Rose Carter, whom he had known years ago, and around her lingered (for him) the perfume of better days, the scents of home.

  So he married her. Or, Rose Quinn married him.

  He took her away, as he had promised to do.

  Simplehearted, meaning well … but things had not gone very well. The marriage had never been much of a mating.

  Rose soon turned her dark heart all upon her child (and never let him near the child). He was only the buffer … between Rose and the world, perhaps.

  By now, Morgan Lake was not certain whether Rose was haunted by the memory of a great injustice, or the memory of guilt. He was quite sure that she had not, in malice or impulse, pushed the “other woman” down those stairs so that she cracked her head upon the concrete floor and died of it.

  Rose was not a murderess. He would have been told, in the years. Rose had no control.