Seventeen Widows of Sans Souci

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “Is that why Harriet Gregory says you are odd?” mused Nona. “Of course, you are odd.”

  Tess said, “Oh, I made a guess about her. She was offended.”

  “I’ll bet it was a good guess.” Nona’s voice was rippling out with her very light head seeming not to be involved with what the voice was saying. “What did you ever do to Mrs. Fitz that put her back up? Before the party?”

  Tess did not deny that this had happened. “I’m not sure. Let me see. We talked about children one day in the patio. And devotion.”

  “Um hum.”

  “I said it was no bargain and no reward. Love is for free, I said, by definition.”

  “Ouch!” said Nona.

  “I told you I talk too much.” Tess sighed. “Let’s be quiet. Turn off the light.”

  “Shouldn’t we yell some more? Maybe Daisy Robinson is in the hall, right now, for all we—”

  “No, no, just be quiet,” Tess Rogan said. “Do us more good to pray.”

  Nona got up and turned off the light. She hunkered down again in darkness.

  “This shower curtain is long enough. Pull it over you, too,” Tess said.

  “All right.” The canvas curtain rustled loudly in the dark.

  Nona said in a moment, “Have you been praying, Tess?”

  The old woman’s voice came, sharp, from her invisible mouth, “Sometimes I think you are the one who is detached, Nona. Haven’t you any connections?” she snapped. “Of course I’ve been praying.”

  The dark sweet-smelling air swirled and settled.

  Nona said, “I hesitate … I mean, to pray only when in trouble …”

  “How vain you are!” said Tess, like a whiplash. “Take note of this, oh God. If I can’t handle it, why, I am much too proud to ask you. What kind of God do you pray to, anyhow?”

  Nona’s cheek burned against her knee. “Let’s be quiet,” she said.

  Six o’clock, Saturday morning, Nona sprang up and turned on the lights. She had dreamed … or else she had analyzed. Either way, she knew now, there was no use baring the metal casings of the lock or the lock’s tongue. She knew that she could not excavate the hinges from the wood, either. But it had occurred to her that the door was paneled. The three sunken panels were surely made of thinner wood. What if she could cut through enough so that a hard kick, say, could break off one piece, another, more and more? The vision of success was clear in her imagination. This was the thing to do. And not with the nail file. In that medicine cabinet there was a packet of razor blades.

  She got them out, stepping over Tess who looked up sleepily.

  “Idea …” Nona said.

  She went to the door and began, very carefully and gingerly, to try to nick the panel, just in a corner, where it was framed with thicker wood.

  All went fairly well, for ten minutes or more.

  Tess stirred behind her. “What time is it?”

  “Six o’clock.”

  “Still dark?”

  “Yes,” said Nona. Now it came to her forcefully that there was no light to gleam through any crack because Mrs. Fitz had turned off that bedroom light! Who else? And why?

  A wave of anger came upon her. Her hand shook, and suddenly her blood poured down the white wood of the door.

  They had the means to dress the cuts that the naked razor blade had made in the first two fingers of Nona’s right hand. The cuts were deep but clean. Nona held her hand under the cold water and watched it swirl pink into the basin. Tess got out the antiseptic. Finally, the hand was bandaged and the bleeding seemed to be under control.

  Nona sat down upon the floor, feeling weak. The hand throbbed some. It would not be much use until it had healed awhile.

  “Saturday?” she said aloud. It was a name for a day. It had no particular meaning. It was a word.

  Saturday at Sans Souci was different from the days of the working week even if, for most of the widows, this was only a reflected difference.

  For Joan Braverman and Kitty Forrest, of course, it was their day off.

  This Saturday, however, Joan Braverman was in a state of shock. She didn’t believe it! She didn’t believe it! It didn’t seem possible. If possible, if true, then the basic ground of her life had shaken and fallen in.

  Kitty Forrest, the worrying kind, said all she could. Joan would get another job, a better one. With all her experience—and so on. Joan Braverman had been fired.

  The two of them were holed up in Kitty’s apartment and in a spiral, round and round, they went. Joan’s shock and disbelief, Kitty’s brave words, and around again. Over them both hung fear. Joan Braverman was fifty-six years old. Kitty herself was fifty-nine. (And did not have cancer, yet; sometimes she also wondered about her heart, her liver, her gall bladder.)

  And how long? They would not die of want. There was Social Security. The children would sacrifice. There were Homes. If they would rather die, they could not choose. And how long would Fate allow … how many more weeks in this lovely place, dear Sans Souci?

  Neither would speak of this trouble. Nobody needed to know what specter haunted them.

  Nobody yet suspected that Mrs. Braverman had been discharged.

  Morgan Lake had certain suspicions. He knew that the Gadabouts and Harriet Gregory were off to the Farmers’ Market. They, who could go any morning, perversely went on Saturday. What he suspected was that Bettina Goodenough was financially embarrassed. She had not yet paid her rent for March. She had been laughing her way through the lobby for days, now. Morgan Lake knew what he was supposed to think. (She had forgotten. It had slipped her mind.)

  What he really thought was that she would pull out of it, by some method of her own. He had a shrewd idea of her income. It should be adequate.

  Bettina Goodenough, however, was racked between pride and panic. She must appear to be as gay and carefree as ever. It would be too humiliating if anyone knew. Just the same, she was edgy. Sarah Lee Cunneen had wanted to go to the Farmers’ Market. Bettina Goodenough had not refused but she had invited Harriet Gregory.

  She knew she had enough gasoline in her car to get there and back again. But she knew very well that she dared not buy anything, and this was going to be difficult in that seductive place. She thought that Harriet Gregory would buy, and if so, perhaps Sarah Lee Cunneen would make little of it when Bettina pretended not to see anything she really wanted.

  Nobody must know in what desperate straits she was. Not the family. She would not write or ask for help. She was too proud. She would not give up her prize corner apartment and settle for something less expensive. She would not give up her car.

  No, she would squirm through this trouble. She would turn and she would twist and she would economize and catch up and nobody would ever know.

  Meantime, she could not give up her image of herself—the Merry Widow.

  Morgan Lake thought that he could feel already, that Saturday morning, a certain letting down of tensions as far as the feud was concerned. After all, the principals on one side had gone away. This left the Unholy Three in opposition to the rest of the house, but they were that, normally, by temperament alone.

  He also felt a certain emptiness. Sans Souci was lacking how many? Leila Hull, Elna Ames, Nona Henry, Tess Rogan.

  Then, about nine thirty in the morning, down came Daisy Robinson, suitcase in her hand.

  “I’m off for the weekend,” said she, “and I’m going to walk around to Hunt’s for breakfast. May I leave this here?”

  “Of course, Mrs. Robinson.”

  She would make five missing, out of seventeen, he thought.

  By noon, Kelly Shane and both the maids would go off duty. Morgan Lake anticipated a very quiet Saturday and Sunday.

  When Daisy Robinson came back from breakfast, Georgia Oliver was sitting alone in the patio. It was strange to see her there, alone. She looked somewhat forlorn. Daisy approached, glanced at her own wrist, sat down beside Georgia. “How are you, out so early in the morning?”

  “I’m
just fine,” said Georgia who did not look fine. “Just for some air.”

  “And Mrs. Fitz?” Daisy raised her unpruned eyebrows.

  “Oh, she is resting.”

  “And your ‘intended’ is better, is he?”

  “Much, much better. He’ll be out of the hospital soon.”

  “You’ll want to take care of him,” said Daisy Robinson benignly. “I suppose you’ll marry. Will Mrs. Fitz live with the two of you? I must say, you seem to be compatible.”

  “We haven’t quite decided,” said Georgia, vaguely.

  Daisy Robinson had been seized by the impulse to comfort Georgia’s loneliness, to indicate human sympathy for Georgia and her patients. But now Daisy zoomed off into theory; she couldn’t help it. “You know, in our grandmothers’ day, the elders lived with the middle-aged, quite naturally. (There was nowhere else for old people to go, for one thing.) What occurs to me … they used to combine the generations in one big house, quite early. Before the elders became decrepit. Therefore, everyone was thoroughly accustomed to the combination before there was any physical problem. So a family decayed gently, all in one place.” Daisy showed her teeth. “Interesting?”

  Georgia Oliver was staring, a little stupidly, straight ahead.

  “Oh, well, other times, other manners,” said Daisy Robinson. “But I was, only this morning, thinking of the rearing of children, too. Now you take the sixteenth, seventeenth century (as I was just reading). Children, of the noble class at least, almost never even saw their own parents. As infants they were turned over to servants. Who simply swarmed. Servants, by the way, make the difference, of course. Well, then, when they were a little grown, they were sent off to be raised in some other noble house, to be pages and so on. I wonder what that did to their psyches?” Daisy chuckled. “It may have been psychologically healthy, for all we know.” Her shrewd eye knew that Georgia Oliver wasn’t following. Oh well, Daisy was used to ignorance. She rattled on.

  “James the Sixth (he was the man whose life I was contemplating). Now, there was a childhood and an upbringing for you! His father helped assassinate his mother’s lover before her eyes, while she was carrying our James. Afterwards, she did the father in, or so one suspects. Blew him up. Remember? Certainly son James didn’t find it too difficult to accept the chopping off of mother’s head.”

  Georgia said, “What dreadful things you read, Daisy!”

  “History? James the Sixth of Scotland? James the First of England, of course.”

  Georgia Oliver looked as if she had never heard of him.

  “Not that you could call James psychologically healthy,” Daisy continued. “Funny thing, this morning I was thinking about his belief in witchcraft, you know? I was thinking about Macbeth, and about Hamlet’s father’s ghost, and wondering what effect the stage device had on an audience who believed—you see? And just then I heard a sound. Just suddenly, a very weird, very peculiar, far-off, wailing sound. I must admit that I suffered a ‘cauld grue.’” To Daisy this was hilarious.

  “You heard a sound?” said Georgia politely. “Where was this, Daisy?”

  “Right here. It came so pat into my mood,” explained Daisy. “For a minute, then, I think you could have convinced me that Sans Souci was haunted.” Daisy tipped her tousled head and looked up at the stucco walls. “However, I doubt that we shall ever see a ghostess trotting in these halls, with her ‘head tucked underneath her arm.’”

  Georgia was staring at her.

  “Has it ever occurred to you how well-born most specters seem to be?” asked Daisy. “It’s like reincarnation. Almost nobody, in an earlier life, was less than a princess of Egypt.”

  Georgia didn’t return her grin. Georgia had been left behind, long ago. Oh well … Daisy sighed. Too bad to waste this mental fun on this desert air. Georgia just wasn’t following. Now, Nona Henry would have followed, thought Daisy. She got up.

  “Well, I’m off. A goodish drive, out to the end of the valley. I won’t be back until tomorrow evening.”

  “Do have a nice weekend,” said Georgia. “You heard a sound, you said? But what was it that you heard? You say, a wailing sound?”

  “Oh, somebody turned up her television set, I presume,” said Daisy. “Gave me a turn.” Daisy laughed. Her laugh was a loud gasping in of air. Then Daisy barged off, in her own abrupt way, to go in and pick up her suitcase, bid Morgan Lake farewell, descend into the garage, and sally forth.

  When Georgia Oliver came in, Morgan Lake looked at her sympathetically. “You are very busy these days, Mrs. Oliver, with two patients to look after. How is Mr. Fitzgibbon?”

  “Much better. Almost ready to be discharged from the hospital.”

  “Ah, that’s good, isn’t it?”

  “The question is,” Georgia drew in her breath, “where shall he go? He will need some care. I had thought, perhaps—isn’t Apartment III vacant still?”

  “Yes.” Morgan Lake felt a bit of a shock. A man in Sans Souci! Or even a married couple?

  “However,” he went on apologetically, “the oven in there needs some work and unfortunately we haven’t been able …” He was thinking resentfully of Avery Patrick’s wild economies which were just as unsound as his extravagances.

  “Dear Mrs. Fitz depends on me a great deal,” said Georgia. Now her blue eyes did look troubled.

  “I do see,” said he at once. “It would be simpler for you. The same building. Perhaps, even if the oven is not yet in condition … it will be, of course.”

  “That’s true,” said Georgia. “I will talk it over …” But she did not leave the desk. “Mr. Lake, may I ask you something?”

  “Certainly, Mrs. Oliver.”

  “Mrs. Henry and Mrs. Rogan are away, I hear. Have they moved away?”

  “Why, no—not that I …”

  “Then, it’s awkward,” said Georgia Oliver. “Mrs. Fitz is very happy here. Or has been.”

  “I am glad to hear you say so.” Was Georgia Oliver threatening something? He couldn’t imagine! He said courteously, “She is feeling better, today, I hope?”

  “We had Dr. Nelson in, you know. There is nothing really wrong. A bit run-down.” Georgia Oliver looked through him. “Her right hand has a weakness.”

  “Ah …?”

  “She can’t seem to turn off a light switch. There’s some muscular weakness. The doctor can’t quite understand.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he murmured.

  “Yes.” Georgia was still looking through him.

  He viewed her fair hair, her sweet face, and thought that Georgia Oliver had always seemed to him to be the merest nonentity. In fact, he prefered Rose Lake, with all her sudden tempers and all the difficulties she made, to this pallid soul in whom he had never seen until now a spark of human bewilderment.

  “She feels she can go to the hospital this afternoon,” said Georgia. “She is so anxious to see Robert.”

  “I can understand …”

  Still, Georgia Oliver did not go. She seemed to shudder.

  Morgan Lake said, and he could not prevent himself though he was ashamed of it afterwards, “Everything will work out, I’m sure.”

  Georgia did not recognize this mocking of her own phrase. “Oh yes, thank you,” she said vaguely. She turned away.

  Morgan Lake busied himself as best he could.

  Winnie Lake was studying in her own room, with her door shut. Rose Lake was prowling, outside that door.

  But everything was quiet.

  Elise had a husband who did not have to work on Saturdays, at all. So, although he was yawning mightily, he was there when she trudged up the incline from the basement of Sans Souci, with the week’s work over.

  He met her, on time, each Saturday. Weekdays, she always had to wait twenty or twenty-five minutes for him. In seasons when her quitting time was daylight, she waited on the sidewalk. Only in the winter months did Elise dare wait inside the patio where she knew a bench that was hidden.

  She got into the car beside h
im, careful of the folds of her long red coat.

  “Why you poking out your mouth?” he asked after they had gone a block.

  “I’m going to go ahead on and get me another job.”

  He said nothing. He waited for the reason.

  “I got to do Miz Shane’s work. That Mr. Patrick, he yell at me.” Elise’s voice now went hard and shrill. This was her idea of mimicking a white person’s voice. Any white person. “‘You ain’t coming in here with no vacuum cleaner. I’m trying to sleep,’ he say. Ten in the morning!”

  They rode along, silently. This was not the reason.

  “And I ain’t going in Miz Gardner’s apartment ever’ day no more,” said Elise. “Because she ain’t right.” Elise’s voice went high to put quotation marks around the next phrase. “‘Cain’t take my bath. Voices,’ she say. ‘Screaming at me,’ she say. ‘Ever’ time I go to wash myself.’ So she dirty. She’s a crazy woman.”

  Her husband strangled a yawn, and kept waiting. He did not think this was the reason, either. He was subtracting Elise’s wages from their joint income, in his head.

  Farther on still, Elise burst out again, “Poor Mrs. Henry—she ain’t coming back no more.”

  He rolled his eyes. This was it. “How you know?”

  “She ain’t taken her brush. She ain’t taken her comb. She ain’t taken her pocketbook. She dead.” Elise put her hands over her face.

  “You say anything?”

  She shook her head.

  He said no more. They drove on. He did not advise her, nor did she intend, to advance an opinion about a white woman to a white person.

  Not their business. Best for them to seem less perceptive and less intelligent than they were. The whites forgive a stupid Negro. A smart one they do not so easily forgive.

  After a while he said, “You tell that Lily?”

  “I tol’ Kelly Shane her bed ain’t been slept in. I didn’t tell that Lily nothing.”

  This was just as well. Lily thought she was smart.

  “If Mindy Shane don’t be back soon …” said Elise darkly. But her husband knew, now, that she wouldn’t quit her job, quite yet.

  Felice Paull might have seen, from her windows, the red coat come up out of the basement in full daylight on Elise’s back. But Felice Paull was, at that moment, around the other side of the building in Ida Milbank’s room, taking a firm inventory of the myriad of things there. Felice Paull had been impressed by her talk with Morgan Lake. Felice was plunging into her manifest and not unpleasant duty. She would rehabilitate Ida Milbank. Oh, very quietly, she would save her friend.