No Word From Winifred

by Amanda Cross

  “That’s unkind. Wait till I tell cousin Leo what you said.”

  “Cousin Leo works all day like a slave piling up billable hours in a corporate law firm. He does not dally around with professors of questionable motives and worse morals.”

  “My plan,” Leighton said, “is to try and get to know Heffenreffer, male. He’s not at this convention; I’ve already checked that out. But if he teaches near here, I could scrape up an acquaintance on any number of excuses. It’d be much harder for you, you know. What with your reputation and eminence, he’d be about to suspect something. But I could just consult him about any number of things, and he’d find me indistinguishable from all the other young women he encounters.”

  This, Kate realized, was probably true. But what would Leighton be able to learn? That Heffenreffer was or wasn’t the Stan Wyman sort; that he was or was not an adulterer, a compulsive fornicator, or the sort of scholar who, having married a gorgeous and brilliant wife, is or isn’t content to devote himself to academic matters?

  “All right,” Kate said, “but on one condition, and I mean it, Leighton. You are not to mention Winifred Ashby to him. I don’t want to let him know that anyone even knows of her existence. Can I trust you about that?” And Leighton promised.

  Kate had arranged to dine with some friends from the West. She enjoyed the evening, and arrived home rather late to find Reed still at work in his study. Before joining him for a nightcap, she went to her own study and rooted out the photocopies she had made that day at the MLA with Elmira. Sure enough, the 1980 session entitled “Oxford Novelists” carried four names, that of the respondent, and the three presenters of papers: Alina Rosenberg, another whom Kate had never heard of, and Martin Heffenreffer, whose paper was on Robert Graves. Alina had not particularly mentioned him, except as one of the men on the panel little interested in Charlotte Stanton. Had that “little” interest been genuine?

  Reed, having fixed them each a whiskey, sat on the arm of her chair and placed his open hand on her head. It was an old gesture of his, and it always seemed, to Kate, that strength and comfort passed from him to her, through her brain and down. She leaned her head back against him after a moment, and mumbled into his chest.

  “I can’t hear you,” he laughed, “but I know what you’re asking: ‘Why, when life is so good, do I complicate it with these detective pursuits?’ And I know the answer. Because a life that does not go out to encounter new experiences when they offer soon becomes routine and tiresome. People who are genuinely involved in life, not just living a routine they’ve contrived to protect them from disaster, always seem to have more demanded of them than they can easily take on. But complain or not, you know this is what living is; it’s not just holding your breath until life settles down. Reed Amhearst’s creed for today.”

  “But what do those who take risks and live on the edge do when they haven’t you to come home to?”

  “That’s a nice question, Kate; I like it. But you know it’s perfect nonsense. If we are fortunate, we have friends or spouses who listen and support; if not, we are lonely and cope alone. But I really doubt that, in the end, there is ever anyone to come home to. Home is just a place to put up your feet.”

  “And what is marriage then, Oh swami?”

  “Marriage is like the silent partner in that Dickens novel, only instead of taking the blame, the partner in a marriage supplies the status. I am married, therefore I am a responsible person and a good citizen.”

  “That’s a remarkably cynical definition of marriage.”

  “It’s not far off from Jane Austen’s, all the same, if we leave children out of it, which, speaking as ourselves, we must.”

  “I can’t think why you wanted to get married, in that case. Somehow, at the time, I thought you had other reasons.”

  “Of course I did. I couldn’t imagine my life if you were not a part of it. Marriage seemed the best sort of partnership offered, and still does. Now I only know that I like to put up my feet in good company, and yours is the best I know. Did you want to discuss marriage, by the way, or Winifred Ashby?”

  “It isn’t Winifred, really, it’s that Stanton woman. She’s like Rebecca, haunting everyone’s life, and I don’t know if it’s going to turn out in the end that she was loved or hated, nasty or nice. Do you think Winifred’s rather like the second wife, doomed to live in her shadow?”

  “The second wife lived on with her enfeebled husband. Do you think Winifred lives on?”

  “Reed, my sweet, what can I think? Is it really possible for a grown woman to disappear clean off the face of the earth, and no one happened to notice except Charlie?”

  “The farmers noticed. And you’d be surprised how many grown people vanish and stay vanished. Sometimes they disappear into another life, and never reemerge. Sometimes they’re dead. Your Winifred sounds as though her whole life were organized for fading into another life.”

  “You mean she stayed loose. Not many possessions, no entanglements. Reed,” Kate asked after a pause, “how much do you know about Toby? And don’t answer by asking how much we know about anyone; you know perfectly well what I mean.”

  “Marriage might be called the capacity to finish one another’s sentences. I suspect it succeeds to the degree that this capacity fails. My sense of Toby is that I would trust him with my life, but if you asked me why, I couldn’t say. We all know very little of Toby—less, I mean, than of most people. He’s simply Toby, which isn’t really simple at all. Do you know, I think I sound like you. Maybe a good marriage is a contagion of observations and sentence structure, while a tired marriage is the recognition of opposing attitudes. I like defining marriage; it’s almost as challenging as Scrabble.”

  “I don’t know what to do next. Reed. About this case, I mean,” she added, forestalling him. Rapidly, she recounted the day’s events.

  “Why don’t we wait to see what Leighton produces in the course of vamping Heffenreffer, and what you learn at breakfast tomorrow about the young Winifred in Ohio? Maybe Winifred vamped him.”

  “You have vamping on your mind,” Kate said.

  “It’s the sort of thing you don’t have to be married to notice,” Reed laughed. “And what’s more, I’ll see you’re up with the lark for your exciting breakfast, owl that you are.”

  Breakfast in the suite of a large, midtown hotel was Kate’s idea of madness, but she had to admit that James Fenton, who clearly agreed with her, was at least not likely to be jolly at an early hour. He had ordered juice, coffee, and sweet rolls (“I hope you can eat them; they’re all the hotel provides in room service. I’m a toast man myself.”), and apologized pleasantly for bringing her out at this hour. “We interview all day, and I’m booked up seeing potential tenured acquisitions at night. We’re in one of those departments where everyone is going to retire in about four years, and the administration has finally woken up to the fact. I’m sure it’s a universal academic condition, but some places respond to the obvious with a little more speed than others. I’m practically the only member of my generation in the department. But you didn’t come here to discuss that.”

  “We’re in the same position,” Kate said, accepting coffee. “I suppose everyone is. And none of this is helped by the fact that we lost a whole academic generation when there were no jobs, or everybody thought there were no jobs, which came to exactly the same thing. You were good to make time for me. I’m consumed with interest in Winifred Ashby, and am eager for anything you have to say.”

  “What a pleasure to have someone hanging on my words other than in hope of employment.” James Fenton smiled. “I haven’t thought of Winifred in decades and yet, when I was young, she was a very good friend indeed. We were both outcasts in a stinking Ohio town, whose only blessing, I at least can say, was that we found each other. As you’ve probably noticed, I’m lame.” Kate nodded. His limp was very pronounced, causing him to dip largely at each step.
Yet his limp did not greatly impede his progress.

  “I had polio as a small kid,” he went on. “Therefore, I wasn’t a ‘boy’ in the meaning of that term in darkest Ohio. And if you know anything about Winifred, you know that she wasn’t a ‘girl’ within the same meaning. Oh, I don’t mean we weren’t each a ‘normal’ boy and girl, to use my absolutely favorite word: normal. Anyway, we joined ranks, I think, because we both saw ourselves as different from the rest of the town, and proud to be outcasts, if the truth be told. You know, it’s funny about kids. Mine are all boys—I have to admit the third was a bit of a disappointment to my wife and me, though in our more confident moments we think we haven’t let him know it—and I was ready to make them feel just fine no matter how lousy they were at sports or how much they liked poetry—you can guess the sort of thing. But of course, life being what it is, they’re all three little macho bastards, dearly as I love them. My wife says it’s just a phase, but I think it’s peer pressure. If you limp, however, peer pressure doesn’t operate, and I limped. More coffee? I seem to be talking about myself and not Winifred, but I’m sure you can see why.” Kate smiled, and held out her cup to be refilled.

  “Winifred and I were in the same class, and we both chose to take Latin, which was all but unheard of in that place at that time. We both would have liked to study Greek, or said we would, but that was past praying for. We became friends. Privately, really, because if we were seen together we were kidded. Not that it mattered if we were thought to be each other’s ‘love interest,’ but I think we both felt our friendship was simply demeaned if thought of in the only way they could think of it. I can never read the chapter called “The Red Deeps” in The Mill on the Floss without thinking of Winifred and me as Maggie and Philip Wakem, although Winifred never transformed herself from a tomboy to a beauty, and I like to think that I was a little less wimpish than Philip. But we were like that—friends, even into puberty. I don’t know what would have happened if we’d stayed friends. My family moved to New England, and after that, I didn’t see much of Winifred, though we wrote for a while, and then sort of stopped. I’ve always wanted to see her again, but the opportunity never arose. I didn’t think she was in the academic world. That’s why your ad shook me right down to my toes.”

  “You never saw her at an MLA convention, then?”

  “Winifred? Never.”

  “Can you tell me more about what she was like in Ohio?” Kate asked. “You’ve told me a lot already, I see that, but . . .”

  “What more can I tell you? We lived together in the middle of a spectrum whose ideal type was at either end; she had no interest in anything girlish, which I daresay she exaggerated, but then, so did the other girls, at that age. And while I in my heart of hearts might have wanted to be a ‘regular’ boy, that was not in my conscious mind. We lived in a sort of no-man’s-land, as though the definitions of boy and girl had no place for us. And yet, we thought we were the best there was; we were full of pride. What was she like? She could do anything a boy could do, but she had the delicacy not to flaunt this in front of me. Still, it was clear that she wasn’t going to claim femininity at the price of ineptitude. Do you know Cather’s My Antonial? The friendship between Antonia and Jim Burden, whose name is rather like mine, tells you something. But I seem always to be coming back to our relationship, and not describing Winifred. Maybe you could ask me some questions.”

  “Did she ever talk to you about England? Oxford?”

  “Yes. I’d forgotten that. She spent her summers there. She had a friend in England, a boy, of whom I remember feeling jealous. The impression I had was that that was where she belonged; not in Ohio. She was rather like Julien Sorel in The Red and the Black in that way: her parents weren’t her real parents. It’s a common enough fantasy, I know; only in her case it was true.”

  “Didn’t she think of her father as her real father?”

  “Maybe. It was more her stepmother and Ohio she was repudiating. She was extremely kind, and obviously lonely, much lonelier than I was, since I did have a better home, or at least, it suited me better. It occurs to me what a misfit Winifred was as a girl then, and how easily she would fit in now, as a child. In my kids’ school, the girls’ soccer team is as good as the boys’, and just as important. That kind of thing.”

  “Did she ever talk about her aunt, her so-called aunt, Charlotte Stanton?”

  “No. I wondered what the connection was when I read your ad. She talked about Oxford, and the colleges, but for the most part I had the impression that England was her secret life, apart from me. We had our being in Ohio. Excuse me a minute,” he added, as he got up to answer a knock at the door. Kate, since his back was to her, watched the limp closely. She had forgotten about it during their brief talk, and supposed that everyone else forgot about it also. James Fenton was clearly a successful human being, whatever that meant. Well, it meant he was self-assured and likable, doubtless also accomplished, though Kate didn’t know in what. He had been chosen to reshape his department not, she felt certain, because he was the right generation, but because of his personal qualities. He welcomed his colleagues and, as Kate rose to go, introduced her.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t been as helpful as I might have been,” he said to her at the doorway, the others having gone into the room. “Please let me know if you think of any more questions. I’ll give you my home number as well my office number; please don’t hesitate to call. I’ll tell you another odd thing. My wife is nothing at all like Winifred, and yet, talking of Winifred now, I suddenly saw a resemblance. They’re neither of them types; they both seem to have invented themselves. What an odd thing to say.” But Kate said she did not think it odd at all. “By the way,” he called, opening the door again as Kate was walking down the hall. “Did Winifred ever marry?”

  “Not that I know of,” Kate said. “But I don’t know much. Did you think she would marry?”

  Jim Fenton shrugged. “It would have to be one unusual guy,” he said.

  Yes, Kate thought, waiting yet again for the elevators, and the world is hardly full of unusual guys. But Winifred had had two fine childhood friends, Kate thought, and had met another in the farmer Ted; that was three more than many people achieve in a lifetime.

  Chapter 12

  New Year’s came and went. Kate waited ten days for the new year to settle in, and then called Mary Louise Heffenreffer’s college to see if they might meet. Leighton, through the incredible network of the privileged young—certain schools, certain colleges, certain professional schools—had managed to arrange to meet Martin Heffenreffer at a social occasion. Someone knew someone whose wife taught at the same place. A party, Leighton had pointed out to Kate, was best, since one more young woman would not make a particular impression, less even than she might have made as the earnest pursuer of academic advice in his office.

  Martin Heffenreffer, however, unlike the terrible Stan Wyman, had made no overwhelming impression one way or the other. Leighton picked up that his marriage was in trouble; this was apparently common knowledge. But certainly he was not flinging himself at every available woman; quite the contrary, he seemed a quiet type, given to conversation and a male listener, what was more—a rare species, according to Leighton. Leighton thought he had a certain look of infinite sadness about him, but that Kate tended to put down to youthful fantasy: middle-aged men often looked infinitely sad to young women, perhaps because they were. Middle-aged women, on the other hand, with their own reasons for sadness, tended to see the opportunities for middle-aged men rather than their failures. Leighton, when this was pointed out to her, agreed. It was, therefore, altogether unclear where all this left the investigation; no further, clearly, than where it had found it. But Kate didn’t like to hurt Leighton’s feelings by making much of this. No doubt Watson’s rather bumbling reputation had to do with the fact that he was always stumbling about at the periphery. Who was it who had said Watson was a woman?

&
nbsp; When Kate called the English department at Mary Louise Heffenreffer’s college, however, she was only mildly surprised to hear that Mary Louise was on leave for the year. She had taken a visiting teaching position for a quarter at the University of California, at Santa Cruz. “California!” Kate all but shouted at the poor secretary on the other end of the phone. But she turned out, as do so many women who work in department offices, to have a sense of humor. “I know,” she responded, “we’re all still amazed. Professor Heffenreffer didn’t seem like the California type. But everyone tries it out, sooner or later. We hope she hates it, of course.”

  Kate got the address from the woman, and thanked her for her graciousness. “Well,” the woman answered, “she’s very nice. Professor Heffenreffer, and we all hope she gets tired of lying on beaches out there and comes back soon. Have a nice day.”

  Kate decided to take this advice to heart, and to call Mary Louise in California. There were two weeks left to Kate’s between-semester break. Why not spend some of it in Santa Cruz? She had always wanted to see Carmel, hadn’t she? Or was it Big Sur? Really, Kate sounded more like an easterner with every passing day; a condition in grave need of amendment. The overwhelming question was: Ought she to turn up in Santa Cruz and surprise Mary Louise, à la Leighton, or should she call first and ask for an appointment? Only a moment’s thought suggested the wisdom of the latter course. Mary Louise might be anywhere; she might have gone to Alaska for her holiday. Kate would telephone.

  A call to the English department of the University of California at Santa Cruz established the fact that there was no such thing. Professor Heffenreffer was a visiting lecturer in the history-of-consciousness program. Well, Kate thought, why not? Wasn’t that her point about Pulci, that we didn’t understand his consciousness? Come to think of it, wasn’t that what all French philosophy was about? The history-of-consciousness program, when she was transferred to it, turned out to be at lunch. A pleasant recording asked Kate to call back at one o’clock. At four o’clock, her time, Kate did, thinking. If whole offices in New York closed for lunch, what would happen? Maybe there was something to be said for California after all. The history-of-consciousness program was graciousness itself, offering Mary Louise’s home number. Wondering if Mary Louise was home for lunch, Kate called. Another machine answered, asking Kate to leave a message for Mary Louise, or Teddy, or Fanny. Kate hung up before the beep; she could hardly ask Mary Louise to call back a total stranger. This was one of those days.