No Word From Winifred

by Amanda Cross

  “I’ll skip the author part, for the moment. We’d taken to going out and talking, about authors and other things, and then Charlie said she needed a job to make money. I was gallant enough to suggest living on me; I made enough money for two. But being independent was very important to her. As it happened, the woman who had been supervising our Wang room left, and Charlie told me she’d supported herself by office work for years, and would I mind if she interviewed for the job. To be frank, I didn’t think for a moment the partners would hire Charlie, simply because she was a writer in my eyes, and because she seemed so young to me; she’s in her thirties. But she had a good track record and makes a very good impression, and she got the job. Why didn’t we tell people at the firm we were, as they used to say, going together? God knows. The remnants of gentlemanly discretion? A natural bent for secrecy on both our parts? When we decided to live together, we didn’t tell anyone either, not even my sons. They’re of the generation that thinks it perfectly natural we were living together, but my being, as you will have understood with your great detective instincts, a basically old-fashioned guy, I didn’t want to have our relationship bruited about the office, especially since Charlie was planning to leave before too long to work on her biography. She was saving up to support her research, as she put it.”

  “Toby. Are you happy with her? Was deciding to live with her secretly a good idea? You don’t look happy, and I want you to be happy. If you’re miserable, say so please.”

  “Charlie has made me very happy. Odd, isn’t it, that I didn’t make that clear. I’m already taking her . . . it . . . our relationship, for granted, which is the best of all. Like health, you want it so you don’t have to think about it. I rather wish your niece hadn’t started all this business about Charlie’s disappearing. I used, when young, to have a great-aunt who called all children she liked “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” and I remember thinking if she said that I again, I would go out and find a bushy tail and swat her with it, but that’s how Leighton was: bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. The only comfort is, so far no one knows but you, and Leighton, and Leo.”

  “True enough; but we may have to let Leighton play Watson to keep her from making more trouble. Leighton is responsible, when trusted: I do feel confident of that. But if I say, ‘I can’t tell you anything,’ in pompous tones, she will probably go on investigating, and who is to blame her? On the other hand, we can hardly tell her what we’re investigating when we don’t know what it is. Or do we?”

  “Do I sense a bargain? If I let Leighton play Watson, you’ll at least listen to me? But do use discretion with Leighton. She must either do her word processing in another office or pretend she doesn’t know me. I can’t live much longer with these deep looks from underneath her long lashes.”

  “You seem better already, Toby. It must be the vibes from the elephant’s head. Why do I assume that he was a male elephant?”

  “Because they didn’t let women into the Harvard Club except under the most stringent rules. They certainly didn’t pin them to the walls. Kate, will you come and talk to Charlie and me together? We wish to hire you as a private detective in a case on which we are engaged. And I can’t say anything more; one is forbidden to do business at the Harvard Club. As everyone knows, these clubs are purely for social purposes.”

  “I’d love to meet Charlie,” Kate said. “May I tell Reed you’re living together?”

  “I seem to be relying rather heavily on all your relatives,” Toby said. “All right. But for God’s sake don’t tell Larry.”

  “I haven’t told Larry anything since I was five years old,” Kate said. “Why would I?”

  Kate did not hear from Toby about a meeting with him and Charlie. Just as she was beginning to decide that Toby had regretted his confidences—in her experience, a not uncommon result of uncharacteristic intimacy—she found Charlie waiting for her, as Leighton had done, at the end of her office hours.

  Charlie introduced herself. “Toby and I thought it would be better if we started by letting you see the documents,” she said, after she had seated herself, and the proper amenities had been observed. “I decided, in order not to take any more advantage of you than absolutely necessary, to come during your office hour and wait at the end of the line.”

  “Did you ask the students what they thought of me?”

  “God, no,” Charlie said. “Should I have?”

  “Hardly. I just wanted to reassure myself that there are certain impulses one outgrows. You’ve met my niece, Leighton, of course. She too waited one day outside my office door. Has Toby grown shy again?”

  “Not really,” Charlie said. “Well, maybe, a bit. But the truth is, when he and I started going over this whole thing, we realized that the documents were all here. Enough of them, that is, to get you started on the problem, at least, to enable you to understand what the problem is. We did hire a private detective, by the way, a man who’s given up on the job. But he’s a nice man, and he said he’d be glad to tell you what he found: mostly negatives, I think, but that’s worth something.”

  “If he failed, why on earth should I succeed? I have less time, less experience, and probably fewer contacts in the world of investigations.”

  “True. Toby and I discussed all that thoroughly. He even went to England, this chap, and can tell you all about his investigations there. We’ll have to pay him his hourly rate to talk to you, but it will be worth it. We think that someone who understands the sort of woman Winifred was, and someone who is herself a woman, might do better. You do seem to have a sort of flair for this sort of thing.”

  “Who is Winifred?”

  “Winifred Ashby is the honorary niece of Charlotte Stanton, who was a famous author and principal of an Oxford college.”

  “Of course,” Kate said. “She wrote all those immensely popular novels about ancient Greece, Ariadne and Hippolyta.”

  “The very same. No, I shan’t say any more. I’ll simply leave all these things, if you feel up to it. I just happened to bring them with me.”

  Kate smiled. Charlie was a woman who might, by now, be nearing forty, pleasant-looking, immediately likable. She had short, wavy red hair, and was plump with a “this is how I am, and aren’t I pleasant to be with” air. It was not hard, Kate thought, to sense her attractions for Toby. His wife had been meticulously turned out always, with a certain rigidity of manner and an edge to her voice that was no easier to listen to because it was probably unconscious. She and Toby had worked out, as do most couples, a modus vivendi: they got along, they got by. But with Charlie, Kate guessed, things were easier, more unexpected, more fun, but also more dangerous.

  “I thought we’d just leave you these. Then, when you’ve read them, we can have a long consultation, you and me and Toby.” She placed on the desk before Kate one of those heavy paper folders, full. “What you have here is Winifred’s journal, or at least the piece of it that was later found on the farm. In addition to Winifred’s journal, there are all the letters I wrote to Toby from Massachusetts and while I was in England with Winifred. They’re only slightly edited to delete matters having nothing to do with the case. I think they give you a pretty good idea of what was going on. Later, I can fill in any mysterious gaps; I don’t think there are many.”

  Charlie rose. “These are copies, by the way. We’ve kept all the originals, so you needn’t worry about these—except, of course, that they’re frightfully confidential. So you won’t mention any of this to Leighton, will you? At least, not yet. Toby told me about that problem, and I do understand; I like Leighton. But just for now, in case you want to say ‘Forget it,’ or ‘I think this is a case for the police,’ or something, I’d rather you didn’t discuss it all with anyone.”

  Kate sat for a while after Charlie had left. She could, by now, recognize the last moment when she might, with decency, turn back, not go forward. Well, she thought, I’ll read the stuff. Then, gathering up
her new folder, her old briefcase, her purse, and her general sense of end-of-day confusion, she headed for home.

  Chapter Three

  Winifred’s Journal

  I had always known that one day I would be found out, yet when the visitors turned up I was unsuspecting and unprepared. Like anyone with a secret, I had allowed even a short passage of time to assuage my fear of discovery.

  Ted told me about them at the time, and I can now reconstruct the scene with the knowledge of hindsight as though I had been there. They would have followed directions from the town, counting the houses and noticing the mailboxes, but they had been told it was the first farm they would come to, so that part was not too difficult. They must, indeed, have wondered where to look, in the barn, or the house, or the fields—they entered the barn, Ted said, as though they had wandered onto a movie set. Or perhaps their idea of farmers was left over from an earlier time. Ted was mixing up powdered milk for the calves, and preparing to feed the pigs he is raising this year, and the pigs were squealing. The cows had not too long since been, milked, and I render up for myself the smell that must have greeted the visitors: warm milk, poured out for the cats; urine; manure; pig—though clean pigs smell a lot less than everyone supposes. Ted said the visitors stepped into some manure the spreader had not yet got to; I’m glad of that, anyway.

  “We’re looking for Winifred Ashby,” they said.

  “Not here,” Ted said laconically. He tries to act like a rube if city types give him the chance. Ted’s grandfather used to own this farm, and he grew up on it, but he’s no rube, and his wife is no rube either. But as summer people have bought up the farms hereabouts, Ted and Jean amuse themselves with playing the fool. It does no one any harm, I suppose, and in this case, I’m glad he did.

  “Is your name Ted Wilkowski?” they asked.

  “Always has been,” Ted said. He finished mixing the milk for the vealers, and started carrying it out to them in the boxes they occupy by the side of the barn. The male calves are raised for veal, and they’re kept pretty confined in their boxes until they’re sold. But the boxes are big enough for them to stand up, or lie down out of the sun, and they have some wire-enclosed space outside the boxes, so it’s not as cruel as it might be. I don’t like it, but a farm is no place for sentimentalists about animals. The visitors were forced to follow Ted outside, into a good deal of mud, if they wished to continue talking to him, and, after exchanging a meaningful glance, they did so. Ted knew I didn’t welcome people, and he wasn’t going to offer undue encouragement.

  “The woman we’re looking for,” they said, “she’s not a very young woman. We were told she lived here with you, on this farm, and worked here.”

  “Now, who might’ve told you that?” Ted asked.

  The visitors realized by now that they were getting nowhere. “Is there a woman who lives and works here?” they asked.

  “Several,” Ted said. “There’s my wife, but she’s not here. There’s my hired man, but she’s not here. There’s my wife’s mother, but she’s not here either. My mother lives down the road a piece; she helps out from time to time.”

  Ted swears he said “down the road a piece,” having got carried away with his role, but I rather doubt that.

  “Did you say your hired man’s a woman?” they asked.

  “I didn’t exactly say, but she is.”

  “What is her name?” they asked.

  “Well now,” Ted said, “I reckon I’m not going to tell you that. You just wait till you find her, and you ask her yourselves any questions you got. But I’d be careful if I was you; she’s got a pretty fierce temper.”

  Then they got in their car and drove away, turning around in the barnyard. Just before they reached the car, one of Ted’s geese waddled up; the woman held out her hand to it, and it bit her, I’m glad to say, though not badly. Of course, that wouldn’t scare them away for long. But I was glad to know I had a substitute on the premises, acting as I would have liked to, had I been there.

  “Whatever it is you’ve done,” Ted said to me that evening, “I’m afraid they’ve tumbled to it. I acted as much like an escaped lunatic, rural variety, as I dared, but I think they’ve only gone as far as their motel, to regroup. Do you owe them money?”

  “I don’t owe them anything,” I said. “Or anyone else either. When I told you I had committed no crime, injured no one, that was the simple truth. All they want is to ask me questions. Maybe to do with a writer who’s still famous these days, someone I used to know.” (Did I believe that then?) “And I don’t want to talk about her; that’s all there is to it.”

  “Somehow it reminded me of the FBI coming after a long-sought criminal, in old movies.”

  I laughed, knowing what he meant. Most people like to fit things into stories they already know; it makes them feel a bigger part of life than they are. Writers do this more than most people. Why do I say that? Because I understand, being a sort of writer myself. What marks a writer is this: until she—or he, of course—writes down whatever happened, turns it into a story, it hasn’t really happened, it hasn’t shape, form, reality. I think so many women keep diaries and journals in the hope of giving some shape to their inchoate lives.

  “Well,” Ted said, “I don’t want any trouble. You know that.”

  “Have I given you any?”

  “Not yet. But there isn’t a hired man I’ve ever had who didn’t give me trouble in the end.”

  I knew that was true. It was why Ted kept on with our arrangement. Being a hired hand is about the hardest work there is, the loneliest, and the worst paid. But that is partly because most hired hands can’t work out their own deals, not knowing what they want. I had known.

  I had searched out Ted’s farm and its routine and conditions with great care, having made up my mind that work on a farm was what I wanted: hard work, but not all day, even if every day. That’s the thing about cows. When I first rented a small house here, I didn’t know much about cows, though I had romantic ideas about farming. Romantic, in my lexicon, means unreal, glossed over with a false attractiveness to entrap those who will not see through the gloss to the truth beneath. Advertising is wholly dependent on romance; so is the position of women in our society, or (to take an example of male romance in the United States) the life of cowboys. You take the worst feature of the life—subservience for the wife, isolation for the cowboy—and you glamorize it, you give the wives or cowboys the language in which to describe to themselves the romance of their situation.

  I used to be romantic about loneliness, about living alone and having nothing to do but write and read, no demands to meet, no superficial society, no chitchat, no tiresome job. Perhaps those utterly in the throes of their art find such solitude productive. I read once of a philosopher, Suzanne Langer, who went away to an isolated cabin in the woods to finish a book. I can understand that, the surge of energy required to get onto paper the ideas slowly formed, slowly learned. But solitude works, I suspect, only in special cases. Simenon, for example, used to shut himself up for the ten days it took him to write a Maigret novel. Of course, his loving wife, his well-trained household, left his food at his door and cleaned his bathroom. I understand now there are colonies—MacDow-ell, Yaddo—that provide such service and solitude for those large with book or concerto. But for all these, the point was they were famous: demands were made upon them. Solitude meant escape from the importuning of strangers. I was, at the time I first settled down alone, as unimportuned as a human being can well be.

  When I first came here to Massachusetts I began to notice cows. They lined up each day at about four or earlier—they lined up also in the morning; no, not lined up, crowded round, though they knew their order, they knew their time to be serviced, but it was to be a while before their morning actions involved me—and milk was extracted from, unlikely as it seemed, a hundred cows, more or less. I walked to farms, I spied on them. There was one far
mer on the road I knew I would never work for. He had no real use for animals; he treated them with just that added degree of indifference for living things that is a fine line, but unmistakable. But he liked to talk, and I found, as he harrowed, or sprayed, or planted the fields near me, that if I came out with iced coffee, he would stop to drink it and hold forth. Everyone likes to talk shop, which is the most interesting talk in the world, in the beginning.

  Two compelling facts about dairy farming declared themselves: the cows had to be milked morning and night, every day, no, exceptions, ever. And you had to know how to work and fix machinery. If every time a tractor, hay elevator, milker, cooler broke down you had to wait for a repairman, you would be out of business in a week. Some machinery, collapsed, required professional attention, but on a day-to-day basis one had to understand the internal combustion engine, simple mechanics, and electricity, if one was to be any use on a dairy farm. With the joy of a new commitment and a schedule, I set out to learn the mechanics. My small income went to taking courses in mechanics; I was smart, concentrated, and I read. The other students were young, their attention still diffuse. Thus, if I stayed late to tinker, even to ask questions, I was not disdained. Machines are often endowed by their owners with personality, but in fact, they have none: only inherent defects or strengths that are unchanging. I liked machines, partly for this, and partly because caring for them was not “woman’s work.” If men’s superior strength had ever been a factor, it was no longer. The machines had the muscles, strength beyond that possessed even by the strongest man; one provided patience and mechanical skill. In exchange one found a firm schedule, and a lonely life, rural, camouflaged.

  The beauty of the world around me mattered most of all, but do not look for an account of that here. I was amused to read once, in an interview with Joseph Campbell, who had written on myths and archetypal stories, that he knew himself not to be a novelist. “You know,” he told an interviewer, “a novelist has to be interested in the way things look, the way the light falls on your sleeves and that kind of thing. That’s not my talent and I found that everything I did was stiff and I quit.” I am amused and envious of those who go to live alone, and write of how a cardinal feeds its mate, or of how a raccoon comes to the door, or of the mixed pathos and joy of trees against the sky just before the light fails. But I, committed to solitude and a rural life, write only of civilization, which I, with fascination, hate. My love for nature is full of pain and fear for its demise.