Dream of Fair Woman

by Charlotte Armstrong

  ‘It sounds a little … uh … medieval,’ Matt said, taking care to speak dryly.

  ‘It’s a little impossible … to dream about today’s woman.’ Betty was bitter. ‘Providing she’s awake and walking around, that is.’

  Matt was rocked. ‘Honey, women are supposed to be people today,’ he chided, as gently as he could.

  ‘Oh, sure, they’ve established that. At great expense.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked her lightly. (He was afraid he knew.)

  ‘I’m mourning the myth,’ she said. (Because what did it matter what she said to him?) ‘I took a course once. The triple goddess. Maybe you haven’t heard?’

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘Birth, love and death,’ said Betty. ‘Mother, bride and wise old crone.’

  ‘Must have been quite a course you took,’ he muttered, threshing.

  ‘It’s the only way you’d even hear of such a thing today.’ She looked straight at him, brilliant-eyed.

  ‘Oh, come on. Everybody’s got a mother, for instance.’

  ‘Kids get born, I will admit. And raised by the book and run to the psychiatrist. It’s the husbands who get mothers. The mother-wife, to watch over his little ego and patch it up, from time to time. She reads magazines, today, to find out how to do that.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Matt stretched out on the sofa where he need not look at her. ‘There’s brides.’

  ‘Brides! Ho! Right away she has “my marriage” to analyse and she starts to figure how to express herself, though married.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Matt.

  ‘So who can blame you if you can’t dream … much?’ she said.

  ‘What’s this about old crones?’ He was keeping it light, he hoped.

  ‘Oh, it goes all the way. All the way,’ said Betty in despair. ‘Where are the wise old women, the magical ones?’

  ‘Witches, eh? You mean like Megan-baby? Or Bobbie Hopkins?’

  ‘Where are the good ones,’ Betty rushed on, ‘that used to be handy with potions and cryptic advices? Now they’re like your darling mother, and she’ll be one of the best of them. “Hands off,” says Peg. “I’ll be me and you be you.” My mother, too. They don’t tell. We don’t ask. Or else, they’re sweet little old ladies in rest homes, where nobody listens to a word they say.’

  She was crying—for the destiny of woman? Matt felt like crawling into the upholstery. He didn’t know how to stop her. He rolled over and said, ‘Don’t do that, Betts, please? Look, why don’t we …’

  ‘So how can you dream of fair woman?’ She wept. ‘Who gets dreamed about, unless she’s one of those sex-symbol celebrities. Her you dream about, sexwise.’

  ‘Why, sure,’ he said, amiably.

  ‘But what you get,’ Betty threw down her sewing, ‘if you’re bourgeois and respectable, is the jolly old suburban pal with the station wagon and the Cub Scouts. Of course, sometimes a woman teaches school.…’

  Betty sprang up. ‘Poor Matt. Don’t look so pale. Fear not. I’m going home as soon as this mess is over and I’m not needed, even to provide a car. Excuse me for blasting off?’

  ‘Well, sure.’ He squirmed. He was flummoxed. He said, ‘But you’re not making too much sense to me, Betts. Are you mad at me?’

  ‘Sure I am,’ she flashed. ‘You’re a man, aren’t you? I’m mad at all men, let me tell you. What have I got to dream about? Somebody should make a survey. Suppose I want a bridegroom, to cherish me. A man, with whom to have a marriage and make children. I may even need, and deserve, a part-time father-figure for the days when I’ll feel like an ornery little girl. Suppose I want to grow up and be wise, because I’ve had a life?’

  ‘Well, look …’ he said awkwardly.

  ‘Oh, I’m civilised. Why, I’m one of eighty-two million female college graduates. I’ll conform. I know. I’m going to settle for the first reasonably neat and clean young organisation man that I can find. And that’s what today’s woman, good old Betty Prentiss; is going to do. What else?’

  He knew what she was saying, now. He started to say that he was sorry but he couldn’t say that.

  ‘Don’t bother me,’ she said fiercely. ‘I’m going upstairs to cry. Release my tensions. I’m entitled. Hysteria? Pertaining to women?’ She danced away.

  She’d done it. She’d let everything out. That tore it. It was finished. She went upstairs and sat down quietly and did not cry at all.

  And if he didn’t understand a word of it, she thought, what do I want with him?

  Peg came bustling and found Matt standing in the middle of the floor. She took one look at him and said smoothly, ‘It’s after seven-thirty. Shall we walk?’ All the way across the park, in the dim evening, she kept chattering along about nothing much. How could she help him? What could she tell him?

  Matt stubbed his toe on the hospital steps. He wished he could ask her. But you don’t ask your mother what to do about a girl who wishes you felt what you do not feel. Or what to do about yourself, when she’d made you feel like a heel, and you weren’t. And you didn’t mean to be.

  There was nobody in the lobby, seeking to see the sleeping girl.

  Up on the second floor, Mrs Marsh was no longer on special duty. Matt and his mother and the tall guard went, in their gowns, inside the room where she lay sleeping. Peg’s head inclined with solicitude. Matt couldn’t see her face. No one could see his face, either.

  So Matt looked at the sleeping one and held his breath. Full woman—but young and so fair. (What are you, what are you—that you trouble me?)

  He didn’t speak and neither did his mother. When she touched his arm, signalling that she was ready to go, he turned away obediently. The tall guard in his mask and gown let them go first.

  The man pulled down his mask in the corridor and said, ‘It’s sure peaceful in there.’

  Matt looked at him, startled. The man had spoken as if he were dreaming.

  Peg trudged home beside Matt, thinking that her son had become enchanted. Enchanted as ever was. Who could break the spell? Not she.

  ‘I thought you’d never come back,’ said Alison to her mother that same night. ‘Where the hell have you been? I can’t put my face out the door, you know. What’s going on? I’m practically climbing the walls.’

  Bobbie’s girdle squeaked as she sat down. ‘I dunno what’s going on, I’m telling you, baby. I been climbing the walls, too. I been trying to raise a little dough. Yah, my fair-weather friends! I was thinking you ought to get away on a little trip.’ Bobbie’s face twisted as if she were going to cry.

  ‘Suits me,’ said Alison. ‘You bring cigarettes? Because if you didn’t you can go get some.’

  ‘I brought them. Here.’ Bobbie fished a carton out of her voluminous straw bag.

  ‘Gee, thanks, Mom.’

  ‘You got enough food? I brought this and that.’

  ‘I don’t feel like eating much. There’s stuff around. No butter.’

  ‘I forgot butter.’

  ‘Who cares? Listen, Mom, what’s up, huh? How’s Lilianne?’

  ‘I don’t go down there. It’s in the papers. She’s just the same.’ Bobbie wriggled. ‘But listen, Ally, you were right.’ Bobbie lit a cigarette. ‘I got a lot to tell you.’

  Alison jumped to fill a glass for her, avid to please, to get the news.

  Bobbie told her about the body in the morgue. ‘You don’t know what I been through. I had to go see her.’ Bobbie’s voice went into a squeak. ‘She’s mine,’ wailed Bobbie.

  Alison frowned at her as Bobbie began to cry in earnest. ‘I never told you,’ she sobbed, out of control. ‘I didn’t ever tell. But I had a baby I gave up, one time. A year and a half before you and Lilianne was born. Me and your daddy, see, wasn’t married at the time. My God, I was only fifteen years old. So they sent me back east, to Aunt Milly, in New Jersey. And I gave my little baby up. So later on when Charley and me—’

  ‘When he got you pregnant again,’ said Alison nastily
, ‘next time, you got married. Well? So what?’

  ‘So I never did know what became of my first little baby girl. Now I know, Ally. Now, I know. Dorothy Daw was your own sister. Your own sister.’ Bobbie howled.

  Alison said, ‘Go on!’ But she believed it.

  ‘Baby, I can’t help it.’ Bobbie sobbed. ‘Gee, it hit me terrible! But I said she was you. I mean, I said it was you, so you’d be O.K., anyhow.’

  ‘Are you out of your mind, Mom?’ Alison’s face was rumpled angrily. ‘Why did you say it was me, for God’s sakes!’

  ‘Well, if you’re dead, who’s going to try to kill you?’ Bobbie began to pull whatever there was of herself together.

  Now Alison began to wail. ‘How stupid can you get, Mom? They killed this Dorothy, whoever she was. So THEY got to know she wasn’t me. You’ve just messed everything up worse.’

  ‘I don’t see it that way,’ said Bobbie stiffly.

  ‘You don’t see, period.’ Her daughter was sitting with her legs apart. She looked shrewd and vulgar. ‘Now what? You’re trying to raise money. So you dig up a little dough, what does it buy me? Plastic surgery? What am I supposed to do with my life, now that I’m dead?’

  Bobbie said, ‘They’re looking for Larry. The cops are. He ran out.

  ‘Too bad for him,’ said Alison. ‘So what about that?’

  ‘Well, listen, baby, it gives us a little time.’

  ‘Time for what? For what?’ The girl screamed frustration.

  ‘O.K. I’ll go to the cops, if that’s what you want. I’ll tell them it’s Lilianne in the hospital, and they’ll have you, so now they’ll believe the dead one is Dorothy. And that gets Mr Leon Daw in the soup, that does. He thinks he’s going to get all the money. Oh, sure. When her real mother and her real sister aren’t going to get one cent. But I guess I’ve got to go to the cops and tell them the whole bit.’

  ‘What makes you think they’re going to believe what you say?’ said Alison viciously. ‘First, you say it’s me in the hospital. Now you say it’s me that’s dead.’

  ‘They’re going to believe you’re alive if they see you alive.’

  ‘I don’t want to be seen.’

  ‘Baby, listen now, you got to do something.’

  ‘Sure. Drop dead.’

  ‘I’ll go to the cops,’ said Bobbie, looking pious. ‘I guess that’s the right thing to do.’

  ‘And they’ll put me in jail,’ cried Alison, ‘when I didn’t do a thing and I suppose that’s right? What I can’t get through your head, I helped them. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know what I was doing. But I helped them. For five hundred lousy bucks, I got myself mixed up in a murder.’

  ‘The cops will believe you didn’t know about it.’

  ‘Oh, come on. I’ve got a record.’ Alison fell on her face. ‘You know what’s got to come out. You know that’s the end. Better I murdered eighteen people than beat up one baby. The kiss of death! I can’t put it all on Larry. I tried that already.’

  ‘What else can I do?’ said Bobbie. ‘Of course maybe I’m crazy—but I did think of something.’

  ‘I’ll bet you did.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you be Dorothy Daw?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, listen now for a minute. She was your sister. You got some right. Why can’t you show up and say you lost your memory or something like that?’

  ‘Because I couldn’t get away with it. Because I haven’t lost all my marbles yet, like you.’

  ‘But don’t you see, baby, they’d absolutely have to help you.’

  ‘They would, eh?’

  ‘Sure. They got to have her alive. Why do you think they took you to lunch? Why do you think they keep on saying Lilianne is Dorothy? They know she isn’t. You said that yourself.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So I go, I say the sick girl is Lilianne.’ ‘And everybody’s going to believe you, right off the bat.’

  ‘And you say you’re Dorothy Daw. They’ll be glad to hear it.’

  ‘And how do I live?’

  ‘Pretty high on the hog,’ said Bobbie slyly, ‘I should think, wouldn’t you? They couldn’t do anything. You’d have them in a bind.’

  ‘Mom, I’m so scared,’ wept Alison. ‘I feel like screaming, all day and all night. They killed her. They did it. Then they made me into their alibi. If I show my little toe, the cops put me inside. Or else they get rid of me. Why can’t you see that?’

  ‘Well, I’m only saying—not if there was to be a deal.’

  ‘I won’t do it. I’d be helping them again. I’m not going to be mixed up in a murder.’

  ‘Looks to me,’ said her mother coldly, ‘like you are.’

  ‘Don’t try and get smart, please, Mom?’ Alison pleaded. ‘Just let them keep thinking it’s me in the hospital. Let it alone. As long as they think that, they’re not looking, anyhow.’

  ‘Yes, but we haven’t got any money,’ said Bobbie. ‘And they got it. I mean, let’s face it. You might not get to be a star.’

  Alison looked at her sourly.

  ‘So, say they’d go for it. Say you’d show up and guarantee to play you’re Dorothy. For a couple of weeks, maybe. I mean, talk to the Press and all that. Put them in the clear, but good. So, then you can take a big old trip. That’s what Dorothy always does. And say I’d meet you some place, like Paris. They’d pay off big, see? And you and me could kinda travel.’

  ‘You’ve got it figured, haven’t you?’ the girl said sulkily. ‘Mom, I hate to tell you how nutty you are.’

  ‘You can act,’ her mother said.

  ‘Sure. Sure. But I’ll never get to be a star.’

  ‘Listen, I can handle them. I can feel them out, can’t I? I don’t have to say one word about where you are.’

  ‘You better keep still in eighteen languages,’ snapped the girl. ‘Don’t say anything. Or I’ll run out. I’m warning you. I’ll kill myself!’

  ‘Oh, you wouldn’t do that,’ said Bobbie.

  But the girl was suddenly limp and staring at the floor. ‘O.K., I guess that’s it. I got to go to the cops. I guess that’s the way it has to be. So I go, and that’s the end. And I go down the drain.’

  ‘You’re safe here,’ said Bobbie. ‘Wait a while, why don’t you? Huh, baby? You can take it, for a little while longer.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll get cancer,’ said Alison and whammed the carton of cigarettes on the day-bed and began to howl.

  When Bobbie left the little house she took her old car racketing along dark streets, turning and twisting. Finally she judged herself in the clear and headed home.

  She unlocked her door and listened to the silence of her house. She poured herself an enormous drink. She sat down, kicked off her shoes, and drank it all, thoughtfully, steadily.

  At midnight, she got up and went to the telephone. Her finger, with its cracked red polish, hesitated over the dial. Suddenly it pounced and dialled vigorously.

  Clicks and whirs. A voice said, ‘This is a recording. Mr Leon Daw is not here at this time. Will you leave a message? Speak slowly into your telephone when you hear the buzzer.’

  But Bobbie stood still, biting her lips.

  The voice said, ‘This is a recording. Mr Leon Daw is not here at this time. Will you leave a message? Speak slowly into your telephone when you hear the buzzer.’

  Bobbie gathered breath.

  ‘Mr Daw, this is Mrs Bobbie Hopkins. I have something to say to you, of mutual interest. I guess you don’t believe all you read in the papers, either. Call me, in regard to my daughter and your niece. That’s all for now. But you’d better,’ she wound up breathlessly.

  She hung up and went for her bottle.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  On Monday morning the paper had it, about the key and the suitcase. The girl asleep in the hospital was now presumed (by authorities, it said) to be Dorothy Daw, the tenth richest girl in the world. There was a drippy feature about poor little rich Dorothy, living simply nearby and doing good in a s
mall hospital in a far-off country. A photograph of a lonely-looking, but fairly modern structure with the figure of a man standing before it gave very little information about its subject. There was a pseudoscientific article on sleeping sickness. There was a note saying that Leon Daw was unavailable for comment, he having driven out of the city with an unidentified female companion.

  Under another headline—EX-HUBBY SOUGHT—there was news of the identification of the naked body of a blonde by her mother, Mrs Bobbie Hopkins, who was prostrated and unavailable for comment. Mrs Dolores Wimberholtz was under a doctor’s care and could not be reached.

  The stories were tied together by a page of photographs. The top three-quarters of the page ran assorted pictures of Dorothy, at all ages. Across the bottom ran the theatrical picture of Alison and the original shot of the girl in the hospital. All the faces on the page were alike, and also unlike.

  There was no mention of a third girl, a religious twin. Or, of course, poison.

  Matt passed the paper along to Betty, who had come down in her right mind, as pleasantly friendly as ever. It was as if she had never said all that bitter stuff. Matt felt grateful for a comfortable surface and took care to be as pleasantly friendly as ever. But warily.

  Then Betty announced that she had gone out with Tony after all, to a late supper at Nickey’s. ‘Dutch,’ she added with her old quick smile. She had spoken to the hat-check girl and the waiter, Russ Morgan.

  ‘Anything?’ Matt came to attention.

  ‘I don’t know, Matt. I doubt it. The hat-check girl knew from nothing.’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘I couldn’t ask the waiter much. He had to keep coming and going. So I just asked him if he had happened to overhear anything that the girl had talked about. I finally came right out and asked if she had said anything to do with Africa. He said, Yes, come to think of it, she had. They had talked about hunting animals. The other lady wanted to know if Miss Daw had ever seen a lion. Oh yes, she had seen lots of them. And tigers too.’ Betty went right on. ‘Also, they did talk about some show.’