Dream of Fair Woman

by Charlotte Armstrong

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  Dream of Fair Woman

  Charlotte Armstrong

  CHAPTER ONE

  He went through the hospital lobby and out the front door, aiming himself like an arrow for home. He crossed pavement, and began to thud briskly along the path, worn into the ground by short-cutting feet across the shabby little park where, on either side, the lumps and tufts of neglected grass retained, in June, only a little green from winter rain. But Matt, broken out of routine into the late sunshine, moving fast, could not help feeling an inappropriate pleasure. There was nothing exhilarating about a prompt and resolute response to intimations of catastrophe.

  Poor Ma. Poor Peg. Tumbling out choppy sentences on the phone, without preliminary. Not exactly asking him to drop everything and hurry home, but needing his presence. ‘I’m all alone here,’ she had said. He hadn’t stopped for questions. He would be there in ninety seconds—to put in train whatever had to be done in these unhappy and undesirable circumstances. Poor Peg.

  Yet, to be reasonable, if his mother rented rooms to strangers she inevitably risked witnessing some stranger’s fate, sooner or later. He guessed his mother had used that weaseling phrase in her shock, softening shocking truth. At least she hadn’t said ‘passed away’—a euphemism which Matt particularly despised.

  He wouldn’t have expected Peg Cuneen to have called for someone to hold her hand, even in such circumstances. She had always lived with a gusto of her own. But one’s mother, Matt thought, must inevitably age and depend. In which case he would be, without question, dependable.

  So he raced the park, crossed pavement again, loped up the walk to the old stucco house on the corner. The familiar doorknob leaped to his hand. She called his name. He bounded up the stairs. There she was, sitting in Betty’s small arm-chair in the back bedroom, with her small feet flat on the floor. There was something odd and ominous about her sitting down.

  Peggy Marks Cuneen looked up at her tall son and said with bright shame, ‘I’m sorry, Matt. I’m all right, now.’

  They were a pair not much given to caresses, so he put his own brand of comfort into his voice. ‘O.K., Ma. Don’t you worry about a thing. I’ll stick around until the doctor calls back. What happened?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know.’ Her face pinched. ‘She rang the bell early, not five minutes after you left. She looked worn out—I thought she’d probably spent the night on some miserable bus ride. And she dragged her suitcase right up with her. So I don’t think she cared so much what the room was like, just that there was a room where she could rest.’ Peg darted a nervous glance at him. ‘She had the money. I didn’t take it. We didn’t settle much. There wasn’t time. The phone …’ His mother tilted her head and called out, ‘Betty?’

  Betty Prentiss thumped fast up the stair carpet and whirled into the room, where they were. ‘Oh, Matt, I saw you tearing across the park. Peg, what’s the matter?’

  ‘I’m all right,’ said his mother. ‘I’m all right, dear. It’s that girl.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Matt said, over his mother’s head to his contemporary, ‘Well, see, I guess this character just up and died.’

  Betty was a small girl with short dark hair, a freckled nose, and brown eyes, set deep. She had a mannerism, a way of lowering her head and looking up from caverns with an effect of intense attention. She didn’t pull this trick, in the moment. Her face was peeled of expression, bare in shock.

  Then Matt felt his mother’s small strong hand winding itself into the flesh above his wrist. ‘Oh, did she die?’ wailed Peg. ‘When did she die?’

  He looked down, all signals off. ‘I’m sorry, Peg. I thought that’s what you meant.’

  ‘Oh, no, no,’ cried Peg, letting him go and pushing at her own abundant dark hair. ‘The whole point is that I’m not going to have her dying. Not in my house. Not of neglect, anyhow. I told you. I said, “She won’t wake up.” I don’t know why she won’t wake up. It’s weird. It scares me.’

  Matt had the immediate impulse to go and see, but his mother grabbed for him; ‘Don’t you go in there. Who knows whether it’s catching?’

  Betty, who had rallied in a twinkling, said, ‘If it is, then I’ve caught it. I talked to her this morning. So I’ll go.’

  She went with a flash of legs and whirl of skirt. But Matt, who couldn’t believe that whatever-it-was was ‘something catching,’ stayed and studied his mother.

  Peg said to his puzzled scrutiny, ‘I guess I’m being pretty silly.’

  Matt grinned at her. ‘Well, I’ll tell you. If this character is pouring off any such powerful germs as you’re imagining, then the whole town is already in epidemic. Where had she come from? Where had she been?’

  ‘I don’t know, dear.’

  ‘She came on a bus, you say?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know that.’

  ‘We’re not exactly on any transcontinental bus lines. How come she came here?’

  ‘She saw our sign. She might have been all night on a train.’

  ‘We’re miles from any railroad station. Not likely.’

  ‘Well, she did come here,’ said Peg tartly, ‘so that much has to be likely.’

  ‘She came on foot?’ Matt didn’t correct her logic but dug for facts. ‘With a suitcase? Not in a car?’

  ‘I didn’t see or hear a car.’

  Then Betty said nervously from the doorway, ‘She just seems to be sleeping. Did you call Uncle Jon?’

  ‘Yes. He’s going to call back.’

  ‘Well, then, you’ve done all we can do,’ said Betty soothingly.

  Matt was inclined to agree. He struggled to begin at the beginning. ‘You didn’t think she was ill, when she came? No visible symptoms?’

  ‘I thought she was just terribly, terribly tired,’ Peg said and added with nervous irritability, ‘I told you.’

  ‘I thought so, too,’ said Betty gravely. She crossed this spacious room, that had been Matt’s own when he was a little boy and sat down on her bed, winding her good legs around each other. ‘See, when Peg had to go down to answer the phone, I took over. Well, I mean, I told her about sharing the bathroom, and which towel bars she could use and where Peg keeps stuff, and all that. I thought she was exhausted. Or else—preoccupied.’

  ‘What do you mean, Betts?’

  ‘Oh, kind of not quite all here. I had the feeling that she wasn’t quite getting my messages. Or else she didn’t quite care, you know?’

  Matt was listening intently for some facts, not impressions. ‘What did she do?’

  ‘Well, she closed the bathroom door,’ said Betty with a drawl, ‘and used the facilities, I presume. When I heard her come out, I was ready for school. So I put my head in at her door to say I’d see her later.’ Betty’s eyes flickered. She put her head down. ‘That’s about it.’

  Matt said, ‘What I can’t figure out, Peg, is how come you decided that this girl absolutely had to wake up. You thought she was pretty beat and needed to rest. So why didn’t you just let her alone to sleep it off?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ his mother said.

  ‘That,’ said Matt promptly, ‘is what I just intended to convey.’ And he grinned at her, fondly.

  They were nothing alike, mother and son. Peg was not tall, and on the plump s
ide. Her features were, however, strong and sharp. She had a long and pointed chin, a fair-sized straight nose, and bright brown eyes under well-defined brows. Matt was tall, and in the body, on the slender side. But he had a round head, well covered with sandy hair that insisted, unless he had it cut to a mere bristle, upon curling riotously. His nose gave a first impression of being stubby but in profile it was seen to be straight and well cut, but set at a slightly flattened angle to his face. He had blue eyes, set merrily, and a good mouth that grinned often. Peg wore a keen and driving air. Matt appeared to be easygoing. But they knew themselves to be essentially the other way around.

  Peggy Marks Cuneen had, long ago, abandoned a warm clan in New York to marry Dr Peter Cuneen of Southern California, with whom she had fallen permanently in love one summer, when she had been very young and visiting her college room-mate. She had not regretted one moment of her choice, had made a cheerful and resilient doctor’s wife, borne a fine son, had always been able to settle cosily into her surroundings, informing them with her own spirit. Now that she was a widow, Peg did no moping but kept busy with good works, liking nothing better than the bustle and confusion of group activities.

  Matt, who considered his mother just a touch scatterbrained, and soft to a fault, to let herself in for so many committees and chairwomanships, was not convinced that she could understand him by methods of her own. She had lived, before he was born, with a man who kept himself also in the aloof position of one who was fascinated by sequences and consequences in nature and delighted in sorting them into coolly observed patterns.

  So now Peg gathered her wits to present her memories of this day in a way that would sound ‘reasonable’ to him.

  ‘Well, it was Mrs Ransom on the phone about the Red Cross and in a terrible twit …’ Peg groped for order. ‘Let me see. Betty went off to school. I was buzzing around downstairs until time for my luncheon. I came up, of course, just before I left, but she didn’t answer my tap on the door. I didn’t like to disturb her. So I left a note and her house key on the hall table. Well, when I came back, about three o’clock, the key was just exactly where I had put it. So I came up to see if we could, you know, get straightened around. She hadn’t said how long she’d want the room and all.’ She gave Matt a guilty, defiant lick of her eye.

  ‘When she didn’t answer, I cracked the door, and she was sound asleep. So I let her be. I changed my clothes and put the roast in … Oh lord, the roast …!’ She looked at her wrist. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, seeming to comfort them. ‘The oven’s on low. Where was I? Yes, then, about four o’clock, I got to thinking that she hadn’t had a drop to eat all day long. So I fixed a little snack.…’

  ‘She wasn’t going to board here, was she?’ her son said. (Betty boarded here, but Betty was different.)

  ‘I don’t fancy anybody starving,’ said Peg indignantly.

  ‘O.K. O.K.’ Matt winked at Betty, but Betty didn’t twinkle back. She was wound up in a leggy knot, seeming rather tense and solemn.

  ‘Well, she was still sleeping.’ Peg’s hand began to be dramatic. ‘And that was the first time I really tried to wake her up. Well, she wouldn’t! So I left the tray. But it was beginning to make me nervous. A little later, I came up and tried again and’—her right hand made a violent slashing motion—‘I tried hard.’ Peg fixed a stern gaze upon her son. ‘And the point is, Matt, of course, I wouldn’t have tried to wake her up if I thought I could.’

  Matt jingled some change in his pocket. This was the kind of remark that always surprised him by making sense. ‘O.K.,’ he said indulgently. ‘Go on.’

  ‘So I called Jon Prentiss. He wasn’t there. Betty hadn’t come in. I guess I panicked. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called and taken you away.’

  ‘Why not?’ Matt was very calm. ‘Tell me, did this dame speak up, at all? Did she, by any wild chance, tell you her name?’

  Peg said, ‘Her name is Dolan. Wasn’t that it, Betty?’

  ‘Oh, Peg, I don’t know. Seems to me that’s close, but not quite right. Olin?’

  ‘It could have been,’ said Peg, with an air of gracious tolerance for the opinion of another.

  ‘Did she have a first name?’ inquired Matt, a little too patiently.

  Betty folded in her lower lip and shook her head at him, ruefully.

  ‘She didn’t say,’ Peg told him.

  Matt put his hands in his pockets and lounged against the wall. ‘To recapitulate. She told you her last name but you aren’t sure what it is. You don’t know where she came from or how she came or why. You didn’t ask her how long—’

  ‘She needed a place,’ his mother interrupted. Then she added from no train of thought that Matt could follow, ‘I don’t say I took to her, especially.’

  Betty said, ‘Maybe we should have been able to guess that she was coming down with something. But we didn’t. So don’t pull any hindsight on us, huh, Matt?’

  Betty was sticking up for Peg. She was almost family. Her mother was Peg’s room-mate of old, the very one that Peg had visited so fatefully, long ago. Betty, whose parents had moved away north, was just finishing her first year of teaching in an elementary school not too far from Peg’s house, where she was a paying guest and a courtesy niece. She stood to Matt as almost a sister, since in some long-gone days they had played together as children.

  There had been a hiatus while Matt was off to one college, and Betty, in her time, to another. But the ancient friendly entanglement of two families had even found Matt his marvellously convenient part-time job, as a lab technician, in the little private hospital across the park from his mother’s house. It was Betty’s uncle, Dr Jon Prentiss, who had found the job for him, the doctor being on the staff and a close personal friend of the Administrator, a certain Fred C. Atwood. So that Betty was, in a sense, also something like the boss’s niece.

  Now, both mothers were delighted to have Betty living under Peg’s loving wing. Both mothers took care not to utter, by word or pen, one word on the subject of the desirability of a romance between their children. Neither mother had fooled anybody.

  But there was no romance. Or even dates. Matt, who was earning himself a Ph.D. in bacteriology the hard way, had no funds for squiring girls, especially not almost-sisters.

  He grinned at Betty now and said, ‘Just lining up the facts. And here’s one we had better be sure of. Is it true that this person in the front room won’t wake up? I guess we’d better let the doctor determine that.’

  ‘Oh, I wish she would! I wish she would!’ said Peg emotionally. ‘Go and try. You try. Both of you.’

  Matt met Betty’s eyes. There was nothing to do but obey. Betty unwound her legs and jumped up. Matt followed her.

  Matt understood his mother better, now. Having been a doctor’s wife, no doubt Peg could guess at some of the possibilities here. If, indeed, this stranger had fallen into some kind of coma, then one had to consider the brain, and disease of the brain was no common cold. The fact that a stranger in the house was very possibly going to die was an idea more upsetting than a stranger already dead. It was just like Peg to feel that she could not allow it.

  At the half-opened door of the front room, Betty hesitated and looked up at him from under her brows. He brushed it off as just one of her looks, not stopping to catch and consider his brief impression of some kind of warning, some kind of foreboding, some quality of presentiment that had nothing to do with the possible mortal illness of a stranger. He winked at Betty, pushed at the door and went in.

  This was a big square room with one side to the park and one to the cross street. It was dim, the shades being drawn, but by no means dark. Matt realised that he had become rather unfamiliar, these days, with the upstairs regions. He never came here anymore, unless it was to carry out some necessary repair. When his father had been alive, this room had been his parents’, and, he realised now, rather a holy place to him. Now he went tiptoe, feeling helplessly intrusive, toward the double bed.

  There was a gi
rl lying on her back in the very middle of the bed, the covers drawn discreetly up to a point just below bare shoulders. She seemed to be soundly and sweetly asleep. Her breathing was slow and easy, her face serene. He could not see her hands. Nothing but the face and the hair, which was spread upon the pillow, a medley of blonde streaks, some butter-colour, some gold, some almost white. Her eyes were closed. He could not see the colour of the eyes. She was young, but no teenager. She was full woman, but young and fair. The skin was without blemish, smoothly tanned to a soft gold. The mouth was a perfect mouth, healthily pink, unpainted. The nose was small and straight, the line of the cheek smooth and perfect, with the cheekbones stunningly placed to give the whole face a dainty elegance.

  Matt caught himself not breathing. He forced a swallow. He could feel, behind him, a kind of pressure from Betty, from her silence. He, then, was to act? But it was impossible to call out ‘Miss? Miss?’ The English language needed a word like Mademoiselle or Fräulein. Matt went close to the bed.

  He wished, now, that he had kept on his white lab coat. He more than half expected, or at least hoped, that the girl would waken after all, at which time strange-man would be one thing but strange-man-in-a-white-coat quite another. Matt was no doctor, having changed his mind about that, but he had the dangerous little knowledge. He did not know quite how to go about this. Mustn’t be violent, surely.

  He bent and took hold of one of those bare shoulders. It felt like satin to his suddenly coarse fingers. He shook her by her shoulder, gently. The girl slept on. She seemed limp, but not a lump. She was living.

  He put his mouth down close to her ear. ‘Hey, you? Wake up! Come on, please? Wake up, will you?’

  It was absurdly embarrassing. His voice hung out there. Nothing happened. Matt straightened, feeling unnaturally flustered. He didn’t like any part of this, didn’t like this sense of having intruded upon a shrine. He didn’t like something in the quality of Betty’s attention. He didn’t like not knowing whether the girl was naked. And he wasn’t going to ask his mother!