No Word From Winifred

by Amanda Cross

  It seemed a good sign that a very large dog greeted Kate as she emerged from her car. She thumped it happily, as she would have liked more often to do, and mentioned her pleasure at the canine greeting to Biddy, who came from the house to greet Kate.

  “We’re all glad to be back,” Biddy said, “but none is as glad as Daffodil. She was boarded out with friends while we were on the West Coast. She’s a good girl.” Since Daffodil was a very large, black Newfoundland, Kate assumed, while deciding not to ask, that her name had been chosen either despite its irrelevance or for its inappropriateness: it was a nice name.

  “Let me show you the house,” Biddy said. “I’m really very fond of it, and am glad Martin was nice about it—my keeping it, I mean. We fixed it up together, and added on to it; it’s on all different levels,” she added, ducking her head, as did Kate, who was tall. “We’ve fixed up the attic for the kids, of which we’re rather proud. Would you like to see that?” Kate said she would, and followed Biddy to the top of the stairs, from where she could see two large rooms filled with the usual children’s paraphernalia, a little room with a TV set, and a bathroom. “The children and I could never have afforded all this space anywhere else now. Downstairs,” Biddy said, following Kate back down the stairs, “on this level, we have—I have—my bedroom, and here’s my study. Martin used to have a study on the next level,” she said, going further down, “but he got too cramped and moved to the basement, where he fixed up one room. We haven’t done anything with the rest of the cellar yet; we just use part of it as a laundry and storeroom. No sense going down there, unless you’ve got a thing for cellars. My father has: he says, don’t show him any part of the house till he’s seen the cellar and seen if there’s water there. And here’s the living room, and kitchen. Can I get you anything?”

  “I’d love some coffee,” Kate said.

  “Good,” Biddy said. “It will only take a minute. Sit down in front of the fire.” Kate sat down, thinking how nice fires were, and shouldn’t she and Reed get a country place complete with fire-making possibilities, and Daffodil sat down on the floor next to her and Kate thought: A photographer from some magazine about the modern woman is going to appear at any moment. She could hear Biddy grinding coffee beans, and, in vast contentment, told Daffodil how much she admired her. “I assumed there was no news of Winifred,” Biddy said when she entered with the coffee, “since you had promised to pass on any. Do you take milk?”

  “No thanks. ‘No news’ has a more positive ring than is wholly appropriate to my lack of progress in that quarter. How are the children?”

  “Fine, thanks. Glad to be back. They’re spending the night with friends, by the way, so don’t worry about them. We’ve got plenty of time.”

  “I shall probably just sit here with Daffodil until you throw me out. Homes like these seem so delicious when visited in this way; yet I know I would be miserable anywhere but in New York. Do you and Daffodil sit in front of the fire when you’re alone?”

  “Of course not. I only make the fire when someone’s coming.”

  “I wish you weren’t a Renaissance specialist,” Kate said. “I always feel so ignorant and dismally modern in the company of those in the early periods, though I guess a medievalist would be worse.”

  “I have picked up a certain amount about modern lit from Martin, if that’s any use,” Biddy said. “Actually, the real problem of being in an early field is the tendency of modernists to think life was simple then: no anxiety, no questioning of God, a world somehow together and unchallenged.”

  “Untrue?”

  “Untrue. I imagine being human is pretty much the same at all times. And when modernists say, ‘But they didn’t have nuclear weapons threatening the world,’ I say: ‘Ah, but they did think the world could end all the same—plagues, tidal waves, eclipses, wars.’ It’s never a very enlightening conversation.”

  “One would have thought, however,” Kate said, “that it was easier for someone to disappear in the Renaissance than now. It’s not supposed to be all that easy to disappear today.”

  “I’ve been brooding about that a good deal,” Biddy said. “I suppose it’s just as easy, especially for someone not looked for on a daily basis.”

  “I see what you mean. Winifred, as far as we know, was looked for on a daily basis only on that farm.”

  “Kate,” Biddy said, “we’ve got to do something. You’ve got to let me help you. I accepted the loss of Winifred when Martin found out about us; we couldn’t go on meeting in secret, corresponding like a guilty couple. But now that she doesn’t seem to be anywhere, it’s a different matter. I can’t seem to think about anything else. Oh, I do my work, I live my life, but it’s always there, just below the surface.”

  “I know how you feel, and I never met Winifred or had her as a friend. But do remember, Biddy, that Winifred is very much a rolling stone. I admit it’s hardly characteristic of her to let those farmers down, but she may have had powerful reasons. She lived very much a secret life, hidden not open to scrutiny, not because she had anything to conceal, but because she was a solitary. She mav be somewhere, and she may reappear any day now. We might try advertising. I’ll have to find something a little broader-based than the MLA Newsletter.”

  When Kate was ready to leave, Biddy and Daffodil accompanied her to the car. Kate, her good-byes said, had already started the engine when Biddy leaned in at the window. “Kate,” she said, “tell me the truth. Do you believe in your bones that Winifred is alive?”

  Kate stared in front of her for a while. Then she looked at Biddy. “That’s not a fair line to ask me to leave on,” she said. “But I understand; you want to deal with my answer alone. My bones are giving me one signal, my hopes, my sense of the general decency of the world, another. People aren’t just wiped out, whatever happens on the TV.”

  “You’re babbling,” Biddy said.

  “In my bones I think she’s dead,” Kate said. “But I don’t know why. My bones have been wrong before now.” And she drove off.

  “Leighton,” Kate said, later in the month, “could you go back on the payroll again?”

  “With a song in my heart,” Leighton said. “I lay down my word processor with thankfulness, and take up my Watson suit.”

  “You’ve really got to be careful. Reactivate that connection with Martin Heffenreffer.”

  “The friend of a friend of a friend?”

  “That’s the one. But you mustn’t be obvious. Even if you have to take a good while to establish a relationship. What I want you to do is find out about Heffenreffer’s current love life: is he living with someone, what is she like, what age, how serious is it? But you mustn’t just ask. You’ve got to let it come out as part of a whole string of gossip. Do you think you can do that?”

  “And the management is bearing the expense of all this dillydallying, this series of girlish heart-to-hearts?”

  “Of course. The same rate, no matter how long it takes.”

  “Kate, if you wanted to offer me an allowance, why not just do it? First you pay me for reading, then for gossiping. The mind reels at what you may be paying for next.”

  “This is the most serious thing I’ve ever asked of you. Don’t muff it, Leighton. Use to the highest those instincts that made you ask the students outside my office how they liked my class.”

  “Still rankling, is it?”

  “I use what the Lord offers,” Kate said, “and we all know what high quality that is. Leighton, I’m serious.”

  “You are always serious,” Leighton said. “Your marvelous use of persiflage has never fooled me for a moment.”

  “Well, be careful; take your time.”

  “At these rates,” Leighton said, “I may take forever. Martin Heffenreffer may have carnally known at least fifteen teenyboppers.”

  “Exactly the information I want,” Kate said, waving her away.

 
; The semester ground on. Not that Kate now or ever found it tedious. But she had a sense of letting time pass, not because time would produce anything, but because it did not matter that it passed; meanwhile, as a professional, she had a job to do.

  Toward the end of the semester, she sent a note to Stan Wyman, asking him if he could conveniently meet her at the Faculty Club to talk about the possibilities of his getting a library card. She couldn’t say what would be possible on a permanent basis, but he could probably get a card as a postdoctoral fellow under her sponsorship.

  Then she made an appointment with Charlie. Kate stopped in again on her way home, as Charlie emerged from her study looking like someone who had just returned from an outing with Pantheus’s mother. She kept running her fingers through her hair, accomplishing a perfection of which a punk hairstylist might despair.

  “Do you mind if I ask a few repetitive questions?” Kate said. “I’m sure we’ve been all over this before, but I’ve emptied out my mind, and have to begin filling it again.”

  “Kate, have you thought of something?”

  “I have thought such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. Anyway, I’m asking the questions. You did trace Winifred’s birth certificate?”

  “I told you.”

  “Good; tell me again.”

  “The child was registered in her father’s name. That is, his name was genuine; the mother’s was not.”

  “That’s what I’m getting at. How can you be sure of that?”

  “Because there’s no such person. Mr. Fothingale found a few women of that name, to be sure, but they weren’t she: wrong age, clear histories. It was all very obvious.”

  “Okay. (I’ve taken to saying ‘okay’ lately; I think it has to do with the fact that nothing is in this case.) Did you ever check up on Charlotte Stanton’s medical history?”

  “Her medical history? Not especially. I know what she died of. Kate, you’re not suggesting that someone did away with her.”

  “No, you fool, I’m suggesting that if you can find her medical records, they might indicate if she’d ever had a child. I think doctors can tell if a woman has given birth by the state of something or other. It just struck me as a way of establishing once and for all if Winifred could possibly have been her child.”

  “Kate, that’s brilliant. Why didn’t any of us think of that?”

  “No doubt because there are no such medical records, no doctor conveniently jotted down the fact in his bloody little notebook. Still, you might try. It sounds exactly up Mr. Fothingale’s alley to me, if you can afford to send him back to England. Do you know anything about the going-down plays at Somerville in Stanton’s time?”

  “The what?”

  “The plays the students wrote and performed in their final year. Actually, through the efforts of Leighton, I came on a reference to it. It’s not important, except that Stanton was in the leading group who might have put it on, and I wondered who was in it. Maybe Fothingale, if he goes, could find out with a discreet little visit to Somerville. But it’s not really necessary. I’m sure one could do all this by mail. Or I could send Leighton, except she’s on another assignment just now. Don’t interrupt,” she added, as Charlie seemed about to speak. “My thoughts keep escaping me; perhaps it’s age, but I think it’s desperation to get the unconnected facts, if you can call them facts, into some kind of order. Next question: I want to know all the ins and outs of English citizens making wills in this country: Why do they do it if the heir is American? Has it some connection with taxes, or with international exchange, or nothing to do with anything? Also—well, I better ask Toby that one. Back to the Harvard Club, I can feel it coming. Well, so long, Charlie. See you.”

  “You aren’t going!”

  “That was the idea.”

  “But you haven’t told me what all this is about.”

  “When I discover what it’s about,” Kate said, putting on her coat and gathering up her belongings, “you shall be among the first to know. An event which in all likelihood will never take place. Bye.”

  No one seeing Kate at this time would have had the smallest inclination to compare her to Sherlock Holmes.

  Two weeks later, Stan Wyman turned up at the Faculty Club, where Kate bought him a drink. “Nice place,” he said, stretching out his long legs. Kate had no intention of wasting time by challenging that observation.

  Stan Wyman was well into his third drink when Kate asked the question she had been mulling over for months. She led up to it in what she hoped was a mildly flirtatious manner. “We might never have met,” she said, “if I hadn’t put that ad into the MLA Newsletter, and you hadn’t happened to know about Martin Heffenreffer’s relationship with Winifred Ashby.”

  “Now, don’t get me wrong,” Stan said. “I didn’t exactly say it was a relationship. All I said was, Martin Heffenreffer was seeing someone, and she happened to be the one you were advertising about. I never asked you why, by the way.”

  “What do you mean by ‘seeing’?” Kate asked, skipping over, she hoped forever, his last question.

  “Oh, for God’s sake. I just mean they were having a drink and an intense conversation, the way men do with women if they’re really turned on. I only took note of it because Biddy Heffenreffer had made such a point of how hers was a devoted marriage, neither of them ever wandered further than the corner grocery; I didn’t really believe her, and here was proof I was right.”

  “How did you know it was Winifred Ashby?”

  “I didn’t, of course. I went up to Heffenreffer just to have a private gloat. I held out my hand to her and said, ‘Hi, I’m Stan Wyman,’ so of course she had to shake my hand and tell me her name. I admit it kind of stuck in my mind for future use, but I haven’t seen Biddy again, worse luck, and I might I have forgotten all about it but for your ad.”

  “And my ad might have led to a faculty card?” Kate said. Stan nodded. And to the kind of intrigue you batten on, Kate thought but did not say.

  “Now, about that card?” Stan said, waving his empty glass.

  “Do fetch yourself another drink,” Kate said. “And, about the card, you apply to the dean for a postdoctoral fellowship, and I’ll write supporting it. Here’s his name and address.” And may the university forgive me, she silently added.

  “Can I get you anything more?” Stan asked.

  “No thanks,” Kate said. And then, as he walked off toward the bar, she stopped him for a moment. “Where was it that you met them,” she asked, “Martin and Winifred?”

  “The airport,” Stan said. “I was off to visit my old ma in Colorado. I don’t know where they were going. Hold on just a moment,” he said, waving his glass.

  Kate felt ready to wait forever.

  Chapter 15

  By the end of the semester, some answers had come in none of them mind shattering. In fact, they were all either negative or expected, as Kate complained to Reed. Leighton had discovered with much less trouble than Kate had anticipated, and without arousing the slightest suspicions in anyone—gossip was gossip, and would ever be, and where would we be without it?—that Martin Heffenreffer had been involved for the last year or so with a young woman not easily identifiable—she wasn’t a student or in any way in the academic world, nor any other kind of professional. All Leighton could report was that she was rumored to have been the girl friend of some Mafia type, but Kate decided to take the general impression for the fact. One knew, at least, what sort she seemed to be.

  Charlie, using a transatlantic reference from Mr. Fothingale, had had a search made for Charlotte Stanton’s medical records. Oddly enough, this turned out to be ridiculously easy. Stanton had had a gall-bladder operation during her term as principal of her college, and the hospital records were still available at the nursing home. They included, in addition to her other medical history, the fact that she had never been parturient, which s
eemed to settle that.

  “But she might have lied to the question. I mean, they might just have asked her, or whoever examined her may have been wrong,” Charlie, a last-ditcher by nature, said when she heard this. Charlie believed Stanton was Winifred’s mother, and would, Kate suspected, go on secretly believing it forever.

  And, it had transpired, Stanton had taken part in the going-down play her year at Somerville, and guess what: Sinjin had been in it too; they had written it together. Really, Charlie said, Kate was clever, though of course she, Charlie, when she went to England for further research, would have found all that out. Kate said she had never doubted it, but just happened to be wondering now. “And what Somerville can have made of a detective inquiring about going-down plays, I can’t imagine,” Charlie had added. Kate merely supposed that Stanton’s fame, to say nothing of other well-known graduates, must have long since inured them to this sort of thing.

  Toby, glad to have lunch again with Kate, had been happily vague about the will. “It was a sensible thing to do, if you knew the heir was an American citizen, living in the States.”

  “But in the first will, Stanton’s, her heir was Sinjin, who wasn’t an American citizen and wasn’t living in the States.”

  “But that was different. She became terribly ill here, and like many people hadn’t made a will in years. She probably thought she had heart trouble; maybe it was just that gallbladder condition Charlie found out about. That was clever of you, by the way.”

  “How are you, Toby?” Kate had asked.

  “Never better. Charlie and I are going to get married, and we can tell everyone all about it. They’ll give us a party; it will really be quite an event. By the way, I haven’t seen much of Leighton lately. Has she given up word processing?”