No Word From Winifred

by Amanda Cross

  “Will you have dinner with me?” Kate finally asked. “Tonight, or tomorrow? Or lunch, perhaps?”

  “I’ll call you at the motel,” Biddy said. “I’ll make up my mind and call you. By tomorrow morning, I promise. Leave me the number.” And Kate, invited to depart, gave the number and did so. She decided to spend the rest of the day exploring the campus and the town. Disheartened, she got into her car, and drove disconsolately about, trying to arouse herself to some interest in Kresge College, and the others that she had read about in an architectural magazine unearthed for her by Leighton. It was no use; she didn’t care. In the end she went back to the town, and simply wandered, finally buying herself a sandwich and eating on a bench on the sidewalk, watching the world go by.

  Leighton had talked lightly of a change of life, which Kate did not anticipate for years; the women she knew were into their fifties when this occurred. Was it, anyway, such an important change? It seemed to her that something more profound had shifted in her life: the growing importance of moments like these, moments between events, as at the convention, when with so much to be done, there seemed, at the moment, nothing to do. No doubt people with ordinary, full-time jobs, nine-to-five jobs that often extended, like Leo’s and Toby’s, at either end, did not suffer this peculiar sense of displacement. I didn’t use to find myself at a loose end, no matter where I was, she thought. There was always something to go off and do. But what was there to do here, in this strange place? It was all very well to leap on a plane and arrive on the other edge of the continent because a woman there might have something to tell. But, of course, the woman might not wish to tell it. People did not rearrange their lives to suit one’s imperious self. And it occurred to Kate that she and Reed had lives more malleable than most, more able to be rearranged. No, many people their age, their children grown, had the same flexibility, but somehow seemed locked into schedules or self-imposed demands. We are less rooted, Kate thought, more easily distracted, perhaps; more given to investigations, more likely to find time on our hands.

  Impatient with these thoughts, she started walking again, ending up, as was inevitable, in a bookstore. The fact that several persons, dressed with an extreme casualness bordering on dishevelment, sat on the floor in the aisles reading books was all to distinguish this bookstore from the many others Kate had browsed in. She bought a novel that had been recommended to her recently, Tirra Lirra by the River, by an Australian woman. A quotation from the “Lady of Shalott,” who was allowed to see reality only in a mirror or die. There was, it seemed, also a new P. D. James and Kate bought that. With little prospect of sleep, she needed two books at least to hold her for the night. Tomorrow, she would have to decide to sight-see or to say the hell with it.

  Returning to her motel, Kate found a message to call Biddy. She did so with her heart pounding, as though she were waiting to hear if she or Reed had a terrible disease or only silly symptoms. Biddy answered the phone graciously enough. “I’ll meet you for lunch,” she said, “but not in a restaurant. Let’s have a picnic in a lovely hidden field I’ve found on the campus. Let’s meet at my house at noon. We can walk from there. I’ll bring the food. Perhaps you would bring a bottle of wine and a corkscrew.”

  To this Kate agreed happily. If Biddy was willing to share a bottle of wine, that must be a good sign. Bread and wine: the symbols of companionship—and of consecration, if it came to that. Kate looked forward to reading her two books on the plane, and fell immediately asleep.

  Chapter 13

  Kate followed Biddy through a wooded path that gave suddenly onto a sunlit meadow. One had the simultaneous sense of seclusion and pace. Biddy dropped to the ground and Kate did too, placing her bag with the wine bottle in it next to Biddy’s hamper, as though Biddy were the leader in a child’s game. First Biddy and then Kate stretched out, shading their eyes with their arms and watching the swallows. Kate thought. This is beauty and peace, but she said nothing; it was up to Biddy to speak. The silence between them was not tense, or limited by impending demands on their time. Kate waited.

  When Biddy spoke it was without any of the fear or confrontation of yesterday. Kate was reminded of a novel by E. M. Forster, in which friends at Cambridge met in a kind of dell; the dell had been an image of Charlotte Brontë’s also, in Villette. Kate did not know if she and Biddy would ever be friends, but they both felt, she was sure, in the presence of friendship, or at the least the possibility of communication.

  “They’re threatening to build here,” Biddy said after some moments. “I suppose it’s inevitable. I sometimes think the preservation of space not dedicated to a particular use, impractical space, is one of life’s lost causes. Shall we eat, while the meadow lasts?” She smiled at Kate and opened the hamper. Kate extracted her bottle of wine and the corkscrew the man in the wine store had given her. She looked at it and chuckled. Biddy looked up questioningly: as Leighton would have said, the vibes were right.

  “That corkscrew reminded me,” Kate said, “of a time when I was staying in Cambridge, at Radcliffe. A few of us went on a picnic like this to the Mt. Auburn cemetery—the only meadowlike spaces in Cambridge, reserved for the dead. We had a corkscrew like this, and it broke. One of the women had an umbrella with her—it had looked like rain that morning—and we used the umbrella’s tip to push the cork into the bottle. A wine connoisseur would have joined the dead from the shock, but we felt triumphant. This corkscrew, however, seems to work.” The cork emerged with a pop; Kate had had to stand up for the task, to grasp the bottle between her knees. She poured the wine into paper cups. They ate and drank in silence, waving away the gnats and feeling the earth beneath them.

  “Winifred would have liked this,” Biddy at last said. “When I think of her, she’s stretched out on grass somewhere, chewing on some long stem she’s pulled up, and laughing.”

  “I wish I had known her,” Kate said. “Everything I hear of her is promising.”

  “It wasn’t always summer, of course, or in California; I’ve never been here before, in fact.”

  “It sounds like childhood memories,” Kate said, “when it’s always summer. And for Winifred, I think summer was the best time when she was a child.”

  “In England, you mean,” Biddy said. “There’s a beautiful copper beech near where I used to live; very old. It reminded Winifred of one in Oxford. I still don’t understand,” she added in a different tone, offering Kate another sandwich, “how you came to connect me with her. How did you hear of me at all?”

  Kate took the sandwich, and refilled their paper cups. “I heard about you at first from a perfectly awful man named Stan Wyman. Does the name ring a bell?”

  “A warning bell,” Biddy said, chuckling. “He is the most awful man. Particularly awful because, just as you tell yourself that he’s not really so bad, he does or says something both frightful and unexpected.”

  “I know the sort,” Kate said. “When I saw him he was just plain awful. I gather he made a play for you that was not well received.”

  “I tried not to be too off-putting,” Biddy said. Kate, looking at her, imagined she had acquired through long experience the delicate nuances of refusal. “Subtlety isn’t his long suit,” Biddy added. “I don’t always say no to everyone,” she said, after a pause, as though laying her cards on the table. “Martin and I are separated; we haven’t exactly been in great shape for quite a while now. Don’t worry,” she said, as Kate seemed about to speak, “I’m not confessing for the joy of it. It all has to do with Winifred. Be patient.”

  Kate, who had been going to say that she meant to probe only so far, nodded. After a time, Biddy spoke again.

  “Martin and I weren’t getting on very well as far back as seven or eight years ago—something like that, I’m not very good at dates except b.c., before children, and a.d., after disenfranchisement. I figure things out by saying: ‘Teddy was two, and Fanny had just been born,’ that sort of thing. Martin and
I were fine before the children were born, which was almost ten years. Not that we didn’t want them; they just changed our lives. We’d decided only to have the one, when I got pregnant again. Probably one of those accidents that wasn’t an accident. And once the children were there, and of course I kept on teaching, my life shifted. They became my personal life. I’m afraid I’m not putting this very clearly. Do you have children?”

  Kate shook her head. “I married late,” she said.

  “Odd things happen to people. I suppose there just wasn’t enough attention or energy, or desire, left in my life for Martin. I had the children, about whom I felt intensely; I had never imagined I could enjoy children so much. And then there was my work, because I needed intellectual stimulation too. Sorry, I seem to be putting this stupidly, as though it were a prescription for the good life in one of those ‘how to live’ books, which clearly it isn’t. It was fine for me, but there didn’t seem to be anything left for Martin. Oh, he was eager enough for sex, but I wanted conversation. And if he was really passionate, I wanted to get it over as fast as possible and go to sleep, as I knew he would. Can you possibly understand all this?”

  “Easily,” Kate said, thinking: So Martin found Winifred.

  “I suppose Martin was bound to find another woman,” Biddy went on, as though she had heard Kate. “After a while, it became clear enough he had, and here’s the awful part: I was glad. Well, not glad exactly, but relieved, like those Victorian women who were afraid of getting pregnant yet again, and were glad when their husbands shifted to other objects of desire. If anyone had told me b.c. that I would have felt inadequate to male desire, I would have hooted. But I had found a life which suited me: my profession, the children. Not that I wanted to break up the marriage. We worked well together at our life, keeping it—the house, the car, the finances—going. Martin is a good father; he was devoted to the children, and they needed him. On weekends, he spent almost all the time with them. It was a fine arrangement, as far as I was concerned. I think Martin thought I didn’t know there was anyone else, and we didn’t discuss it. One of the odd advantages of men not going in for long, confidential conversations is that you can get away without discussing things, and they don’t mind; they may not even notice.

  “Anyway,” Biddy went on, “I had what I wanted. Maybe, I thought, the other woman has what she wants. I found Martin and I quarreled a great deal less, as though we were both trying harder to keep our relationship on an even keel. It’s odd, isn’t it, how no one ever talks about this sort of thing? I’ve since discovered it’s not uncommon, but I thought we were unique.”

  “That’s the way with women,” Kate said. “We’re separated each into her own home, each feeling a monster if she isn’t happy every minute with the company of her small children and her microwave oven. Women need to talk to each other—sometimes, I think it’s more important than the ERA—talk to each other honestly, discover we’re none of us unique monsters.”

  Biddy smiled. “We haven’t got to Winifred yet; I realize that.”

  “Am I wrong in guessing that Winifred was the other woman?”

  “I suppose that’s obvious enough. She met Martin at some sort of miniconference somewhere on Charlotte Stanton; his contribution was the connection with Graves and the other men who were at Oxford after the First World War. I admit to having been surprised, when I first met her. She wasn’t at all what I would have guessed. Somehow, one always pictures men going for much younger, sexier women, though I suppose that’s just one more idea we pick up from soap operas.”

  “For certain men, it’s probably true. Stan Wyman, I’d guess, and that congressman, the Fundamentalist who turned out to be sleeping with a sixteen-year-old pagegirl. Certainly we’ve all been trained enough to conventionality not to spot Winifred as someone’s dalliance.”

  “Anyway,” Biddy said, “Winifred went to Houston in 1980 to be with Martin. It was the ideal opportunity. She could say she was going to hear the paper on Stanton in the same session as his. I wasn’t going. They would be miles from home and free to have a fine and carefree week. I remember Martin said he was staying on to visit the university at Austin, which had papers he needed to see. I was at home with the children, living the sort of life we manage when he’s away: none of us has a schedule; we live easily, spontaneously, without routine.”

  Kate took a piece of fruit, and refilled their cups. She stood for a moment, stretching her legs, and then sat down again. “When did you meet Winifred?” she asked.

  Biddy sipped her wine. “You can’t imagine the relief,” she said, “talking about this, and to someone who seems to understand. I’m sorry I was so defensive yesterday; you rather took me by surprise. I’d always thought of Winifred as there, wherever she was, as being; it was such a shock to hear she’d disappeared.”

  “I put the whole thing badly,” Kate said. “Never mind; we’ve made up for it. Now, if we can only find Winifred. . . .” She let the sentence trail off. “Go on with your story.”

  “There isn’t terribly much more. I met Winifred entirely by accident, crossed wires; we both turned up at the same lecture. An English Renaissance scholar was speaking in New York, and I badly wanted to hear her. Winifred went because she’d been a woman Charlotte Stanton had known, and either Winifred meant to meet her at the end or just wanted from nostalgia to hear an Oxford accent. Believe it or not, we sat next to each other. Oh, I know, truth is stranger than fiction, that sort of thing; but it really wasn’t all that unlikely when you thought about it. Most of the seats were taken early, and we both arrived late and were let into a section they opened at the last minute.

  “We smiled at each other, and at the end of the talk and during the question period, we chatted. I asked her if she’d like to have a cup of coffee with me before I headed back home. Most of the people at the talk seemed to have come with someone, and we were glad to leave together and continue our conversation about English scholars. At some point, of course, probably on our way to the coffee shop, we introduced ourselves. When I said my name was Biddy Heffenreffer, it must have been a god-awful shock for her, though I noticed nothing at the time. After we’d ordered, she asked me if I was married, and I said yes, to Martin Heffenreffer.”

  “She must have felt like someone in a movie from the 1930s,” Kate said.

  “Later, when we talked about it, she said hers was the role that should have been played by Bette Davis. Like me, she’d gone to the movies a great deal in her youth, and not much afterward. The children come home with names now I’ve never heard of, and I think: There’s a difference. My parents had certainly heard of Bette Davis. Movies are much more generational now.”

  “Speaking of generations, you didn’t decide to keep your own name?” Kate asked.

  “I guess I was just a bit early for that. I wish now I had. For one thing, with Martin and me in the same profession, it would have been much better. I wonder how long it would have taken Winifred and me to find out the truth, in that case. Because, you see, we liked each other from the beginning. It’s odd, really; neither of us had many friends—women friends, I mean—who were interested in ideas and in reconsidering the set boundaries of women’s lives.

  “Well, of course, Winifred didn’t try to get in touch with me. But I knew nothing of her connection with Martin. I was lonely for women friends—most of the women in my community were fine, but they weren’t like me; they didn’t explore in the same way, they accepted what they were told, and they chatted too much about domestic details. I called her. She’d given me her phone number when I asked her for it; she couldn’t think of a good reason not to. Later, we talked about how she felt at that time. The odd part was, of course, that she was so worried about how I would feel, she never even considered the zaniness of her own situation, except that she was getting to care very much about two people who were married to each other. In the end, she took the only way out for a Winifred: she told me th
e truth. By then, we’d met quite a few times, and I’d offered to read something she was writing, and she listened to my academic woes, and supported me, and cheered me on. Perhaps you understand how important the relationship was to me; not many people would, I expect.”

  “That’s because they’re too young,” Kate said. “The scarcity of women friends—I mean friends who were out in the world and had more to talk of than recipes and toilet training and what to wear—well, that’s known only by the few of us who had only male friends in those days. Women who are always sneering at the woman’s movement don’t seem to mind having only male friends, or perhaps they take the women friends who came along in the seventies for granted. The shift from a male-centered life to a life where love for men was still possible but not exclusive—who speaks of that? Yes, I can imagine what it meant to meet Winifred. But how did she cope?”

  Biddy laughed. “It’s so easily said: she learned to accept it. It took nearly forever, but in the end she did. Because she couldn’t doubt what I wanted, or what Martin wanted, of course, or what she wanted. I know sharing a man is supposed to be impossible, unless one is in a harem. All the fairy stories, all the old tales tell us that. But I think they’re stories made up by men, or meaning something else. Martin and I were good parents, we were good at marriage, however funny that must seem to most people. Winifred wanted a part-time man; she wasn’t interested at all in domesticity, or children, or cooking or sewing or interior decoration or even in gardens. She liked sleeping with a man, and exploring strange places with him, and waking up to find him gone and knowing the whole day was her own. The point was, I guess, most people could see it working out just fine. What made it seem eccentric, if not unhealthy, was that Winifred and I became friends.”

  “Did you talk about Martin?” Kate asked.

  “From time to time; if he seemed unwell, or worried, or, as did happen, Winifred had heard some concern he had about the children, we might mention it. I often think how few people have ever written well about friendship, let alone friendship between women. Here’s an odd factor about it. Most people one likes, one sees intermittently; one catches up, one talks about the major changes. But because Winifred and I met regularly—every other Tuesday night, as it happens—when I had a regular sitter, and Martin had a regular seminar meeting on modernism, I found that I lived my life in anticipation of those meetings, almost as though I were keeping a journal. One not only lived life, one inscribed it, got it into form for Winifred. And the knowledge that we would see each other, and be able to talk something out, made it more bearable; one was able to sustain oneself.