No Word From Winifred

by Amanda Cross

  “May I safely assume,” he asked Kate, “that you’re not looking for evidence in a divorce case?” Kate stared at him. “I thought not,” he said, “but one must be sure. Bitch that the woman is, I wouldn’t want to aid her in taking her husband for a bundle.”

  “Can there be some misunderstanding?” Kate asked. “I have the sense we’re not talking about the same people.”

  “Ashby, you said in your cute little ad. Winifred Ashby. Do you suppose there are more than one of them, both connected to the tacky Miss Charlotte Stanton?”

  Kate still couldn’t believe it. “What age is your Winifred Ashby?” she asked. Surely this man must be speaking of a young woman.

  “Pushing fifty, if you ask me. Well, forty-four or forty-five. I’ll say this for the guy, he doesn’t go for them young and cute. Unlike some of us,” he added with a complicitous grin. Kate, who was glad to hear it, said nothing.

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” he said, holding out his glass for a refill. “While my motives are definitely sinister, I can probably help you to find your Ashby woman. But I do need a little encouragement. Besides alcohol,” he added, as Kate took his glass. Not for the first time in a long academic career, Kate found herself in the position of wanting information from a person to whom she would dearly have loved to convey her true opinion. Uncertain whether she was about to be blackmailed or merely appealed to as a womanly woman, Kate remained silent, an attitude in women, she had noticed, that men tended to interpret in their own favor.

  “Okay,” he said. “I see you’re in a tough spot. The fact is, so am I. Maybe we can help each other.” Kate’s silence now was true, unfeigned amazement. “The fact is, I badly want library privileges at your university, and I think you could get them for me if you put your mind to it. Either you could shoehorn me into one of the famous university seminars or you could sponsor me as a visiting postdoctoral scholar; I’ll leave the method up to you. And even,” he added with, Kate had to admit, a certain perspicacity, “though you probably consider me the lowest form of life, I promise not to steal any library books. My intentions toward libraries are strictly honorable.”

  This, Kate thought, is not happening to me. These things don’t happen in real life, we all know that. “I don’t even know your name,” she said, since some response was required. And, she would have liked to add, since you are given to sending anonymous letters, to say nothing of this conversation, I’m not sure I want to.

  “I see your problem. Actually, I came to sum you up. Clearly, you’re an honorable type. If you promise something, you perform it, however awkward it may be. I have an aunt by marriage like that. Her cat had kittens, and she insisted upon keeping the ugliest one. She said, when asked why, that she had promised it when it was born to keep it. That’s your type, I’d say at a guess.”

  Kate found herself remembering her early views of academe, the reasons she had wanted so fervently to be a part of it. Because all the men (her teachers then had been all men) seemed so honorable, so finely tuned to the niceties of courtesy. And nothing that has happened seems to change that expectation, she thought. I’m like a woman who goes on believing in romance, having been deserted by fifteen men at regular intervals. “I might have another,” the man said. “Can I fix you one?”

  “Thanks,” Kate said, “I don’t drink.” With the likes of you, she silently added.

  “Okay. Well here’s my bit of news, for what it’s worth, and you know what I hope it’s worth. You might look up a dame called Mary Louise Heffenreffer, Biddy to her friends—of whom she has damn few. She’s maybe forty-five and, though I hate to say it, gorgeous. One of those bodies.” He glanced at Kate. “Not unlike yours, I have to admit, except fuller in certain places. And she’s a dresser. Do you know those stores here called Charivari? She looks like any moment of any day, she might be in their window. And their clothes are not cheap, let me tell you. In short, she has style. And sex.” And, Kate thought, she wanted no part of you, which suggests that she has taste as well.

  “Yes,” he said, “exactly what you’re thinking. Maybe women scorned are dangerous, but that’s because Shakespeare didn’t get around to describing men who’ve been . . .” He decided not to use the phrase that came readily to mind, though Kate could have supplied it. Despicable men were frequently mealymouthed when not with their buddies. “She could have her choice, I grant you that. But she couldn’t keep her husband in tow. They’re both professors, by the way, in some artsyfartsy college near here. And you know who she lost her husband to—not legally, of course, but in body and spirit, which is what matters? Your, or somebody’s, Winifred Ashby. Now, how’s that for an unexpected answer to an ad in the MLA Newsletter! My name, by the way, is Stan Wyman, in case you need to check me out, to establish that I’m not an unaffiliated madman.” And knowing, Kate had to grant him, the line on which to leave, he walked through the door, snapping it to behind him.

  Kate sat in her chair, stunned. Winifred Ashby as the object of a jealous wife, and a gorgeous one at that? Could Stan Wyman be quite simply a lunatic? Well, as they used to say, “It pays to advertise,” a phrase, as Kate was fond of pointing out, invented by Dorothy L. Sayers, but widely credited, like many of Sayers’s observations about Dante’s Inferno, to American entrepreneurs. Removing the bedspread, in the light of Susan’s strictures, and leaving her case prominently displayed, Kate put the liquor in the closet (another Susan suggestion), and departed the room with loving thoughts of Reed, with whom she decidedly would like to have a drink. On her way out of the hotel, she paused to leave a message for the Ohio letter writer that she would meet him for breakfast in his suite on December 29th. Tomorrow morning, at least, she would not have to rise at dawn, but once having risen, would be free to attend a session on something or other—perhaps, in deference to the unfailingly helpful Susan, on the further ranges of semiotics.

  Chapter 11

  Kate arrived home to find Reed and Leighton deep in conversation. With infinite tact, they greeted her as a returned warrior, and plied her with spiritual and material reinforcement: conversation and drink. Kate always found it cleared her brain to tell Reed what had happened, and Leighton, after all, was entitled to know. Suppose Holmes had had a wife? Watson, of course, did have one, but since he deserted her for the hearth and company of Holmes, the question of her part in the detection never arose. The hell with it, Kate thought; I hate analogies. She told them all that had happened, especially about the detestable Stan Wyman, who had, of a sudden, cast Winifred Ashby in a wholly unexpected and uncharacteristic light.

  “That awful man is probably making the whole thing up,” Leighton said, with all the knowledge of a generation widely I experienced in these matters. “He sees it as a way to make you feel beholden so he can get his damn library card, and crawl his way into your acquaintanceship. It will probably turn out he wouldn’t know Winifred Ashby from Chris Evert Lloyd. No doubt,” she added, as Kate opened her mouth, “he’s got it in for the Heffenreffer dame. But if I were you, I’d be damn careful about falling into his kitten-anecdote trap: honorable type indeed. The man is infuriating.”

  “He certainly sounds it,” Reed agreed. “Perhaps this is one of the less beneficent effects of personal ads. For years, it’s been a well-known ploy. You remember that Holmes used to follow the personals column with great interest.”

  “Is everyone around here becoming a Holmes nut?” Kate rather ungraciously asked. “Because, frankly, I’m getting rather tired of the old boy. It’s all very well for you two to sit here discussing the world and chortling away, but you’ve no idea what it’s like at one of those conventions. Unless one is madly gregarious, with appointments for every moment, or interviewing all through the day—most of the department chairpersons are chained to the radiator, poor dears—or on the sexual prowl, conventions force one to alternate wildly between crowds and the most depressing kind of solitude, as though one were in a foreign country with no
proper money, and no place to sit except in one’s hotel room. I’m going to bed, and I don’t wish to be awakened for anything less startling than the reappearance of Holmes himself. If you two think of something profound, leave me a note, which I’ll read upon awakening.”

  Leighton blew her aunt a kiss.

  On the next day Kate, as she had predicted, awoke very late indeed. There was a cheerful note from Reed, to wish her well and tell her that he and Leighton had agreed upon the suggestion that she simply skip the rest of the convention; it wasn’t, they felt, doing anything positive for her disposition or for the investigation. She had succeeded only in encountering one of the more unfortunate types who haunt such events, and had accomplished little else. Reed, concluding on an affirmative note, looked forward to seeing her for dinner.

  But Kate, despite this excellent advice, went off to the convention, though not to attend a session on semiotics or anything else of her choice; she had decided to stalk Mary Louise Heffenreffer, known to her friends as Biddy. Consulting the list of “Program Participants,” Kate discovered that Heffenreffer, Mary L., was delivering a paper on Pulci in a session on historical aspects of the Italian Renaissance epic. Kate, who was beginning to feel that the major revelation of this convention was her ignorance of everything, could only learn that Pulci had written an epic called II Morgante, of which Byron had translated the first canto. She was driven to telephoning a colleague, fortunately a man of humor and generosity, who told her a bit more about Pulci, adding that no one but Italian scholars knew anything about him, and that no doubt the Heffenreffer paper would be exceedingly interesting in taking up the historical aspects of Pulci’s work and its influence on Ariosto and sixteenth-century comic epics. Thus armed, Kate went off to the session expecting the whole proceedings to be conducted in Italian. But Ms. Heffenreffer spoke not only in elegant English, but clearly and, it appeared from the discussion, somewhat controversially. Kate, who, like so many modernists, found it difficult to understand how anyone could get herself excited over the motives of a writer dead five hundred years and writing about a society wholly mysterious, pondered Heffenreffer rather than Pulci. Kate’s visitor of last night had been right: she was gorgeous, though Kate had long since become accustomed to the fact that women scholars were no longer dowdy by definition, nor unsexy by decision. Still, by the age of forty-five most scholars of either sex, like most people in any profession, began to sag a bit and let their belts out. Not Heffenreffer.

  It had never been Kate’s intention to speak to Heffenreffer, or even to declare her, Kate’s, presence. Leaving the session while everyone was involved in defenses of Pulci as a comic rather than an historical writer, Kate made her way back to her room, where the spread had been replaced, stretched out on the bed with several pillows behind her head, and brooded. Those not passionately devoted to the earlier periods are likely to find them soporific. Kate dozed.

  She was awakened in the late afternoon by the telephone. It was Leighton. “Have I got news for you!” she announced.

  Kate, who almost never napped, and who therefore woke in the afternoon disoriented, gazed frantically about her. “Where are you?” she asked, just avoiding saying, “Where am I?”

  “In the goddamn lobby,” Leighton said. “They wouldn’t give me your room number, only said they’d ring it. Protecting you from the criminal element, I guess, the ones who don’t reach you by letter. Can I come up?” Kate told her the room, and went into the bathroom to splash water in her face.

  Leighton turned up looking triumphant, which to Kate boded no good, and threw herself into a chair. “How about offering me some booze?” she said. “I deserve it.” Kate stared at her; this was not Leighton’s usual way of talking.

  “What would you like?” Kate warily said.

  “Oh, skip it. I’ll let you take me home for dinner and I’ll have one of Reed’s martinis there. I’ve bearded your Stan Wyman, that’s what I’ve done, and is he ever straight from central casting. I haven’t seen anyone come on that way since my section man at Harvard in some damn literary course. I wonder if he ever makes it, I really do.”

  “Leighton, what are you talking about?”

  “Well, obviously, someone had to find out if your Stan Wyman just floated around these conventions looking for action, or if he really was a professor, or, as I suspected, both of the above. So last night, after you drifted off to bed in that supercilious manner—I must say, I don’t think your personality is improved by conventions—I looked around in your study and found the MLA Directory, and looked, clever girl that I am, under the Ws. And there he was, professor of English at Hofstra. So I did a little more detective work, and tracked him down. I’ll spare you the boring details. He was about as hard to pick up as cat hairs. What gave me the idea, really, was that Sherlock Holmes story where the stepfather pretends to be the fiancée, to keep his stepdaughter from marrying; I pretended to be on the make to keep you from selling your honor dear. I do hope you’re pleased, but if you growl, I shan’t tell you what I found out.”

  “You do realize the man might be a rapist. You got yourself into the perfect situation. Really, Leighton . . .”

  “I hate it when you start ‘really, Leightoning.’ Of course he might be a rapist, but I doubted he would grapple with me in the lobby or dining room. I did not follow him to his private quarters, you can trust me for that. And since I gave him a false name and room number in the Hilton—I told him I was in Spanish, and he told me I was at the Hilton-—I don’t expect to ever see him again.”

  “He might figure out you’re some connection of mine.”

  “Do you want to hear what he said, or not? I’ll only tell you if you stop playing the stern aunt of yore.”

  “I am a stern aunt of yore.”

  “Kate, come off it, okay? If you really want to know, I don’t think he’s a rapist; I don’t even think he gets his little victims into bed; he’s just one big come-on, if you want my valuable opinion. In any case, I have no plans to see him again, ever. Could we stop discussing sex, and get down to cases?”

  “And what,” Kate said, “are the cases?”

  “Well, naturally, I couldn’t ask him about Heffenreffer without fatally showing my hand, but I did establish who and where he comes from—I know, that wasn’t difficult—but also that he’s one of these incurable pass makers, complimenters, and general collectors of female pulchritude. That means he may well have come on to Heffenreffer if she’s half as gorgeous as he says.”

  “She is,” Kate said. “I’ve seen her.”

  “We’re both pretty slick operators, if you ask me,” Leighton said admiringly. “The only risk I dared take was to mention, in my most childlike tones, that I preferred men who liked older women, and he said he’d met one or two older women he didn’t think were half bad, and he wouldn’t kick them out of bed. That’s how he talks, so help me. I wondered if one of them was you.”

  Kate ignored this. “Leighton, I really think you have to act less precipitously. I don’t want to play the heavy aunt, but you must realize you’ve shown our hand a little soon. Suppose he establishes the connection between us.”

  “Suppose he does. Really, Kate, I don’t think you’re half the detective you’re cracked up to be, or else you’re slipping. He’s never going to see me again, so how can he connect me with you or anyone else? What I’ve established for you is that he is the sort who might have made a play for Heffenreffer, which means that what he told us was true. I mean, if he’d turned out to be some sweet, schleppy guy who was playing a trick or something, that would have meant something else, don’t you see? And,” Leighton added with the satisfaction of someone who has covered all possibilities, “if you’re thinking that you might need me to tail him and that now he knows me, don’t worry. I’m great on disguises, even if one were necessary. My guess is that all women look alike to him, if they’re good-looking, and that he never notices them if they
’re not, which shows you one of the advantages of that condition.”

  Kate gave up the argument. One had to hand it to Leighton; she had established the sort Stan Wyman was, not that there was ever very much doubt, but people play strange games for strange reasons. None of this explained, of course, how he had got to know of Winifred Ashby, but probably he had put himself in the way of being introduced to her. Or he may have made the whole thing up. But what could have been the point of that? Furthermore, his desire for a library card might have seemed farfetched to some, but not to Kate, who knew very well the lengths to which scholars would go to get a card to a major university library, which is why the major university libraries charged seven hundred dollars or more for a card if one was not otherwise entitled. Kate’s ad had roused his memory and suggested a scheme.

  “If you’re through brooding,” Leighton said, “I’ve got another plan. Now don’t veto it sight unseen,” she said, as Kate began to speak. “I could perfectly well not have mentioned this one to you either, but—”

  “Leighton,” Kate interrupted, “if you pull one more caper like that with Stan Wyman, you’re fired. And don’t tell me Holmes didn’t ever fire Watson, because that won’t wash.”

  “I thought you’d take that line, which is why I’m telling you, for gosh sake. You know, Kate, you’ve gotten awfully irritable; do you think it could be change of life?”

  “It is change of life. I’ve changed my life to include the next generation in my personal affairs, and I’m sorry.”