Dream of Fair Woman

by Charlotte Armstrong

  ‘Publicity,’ said Leon Daw, ‘is just exactly what I do not want. So I think I shall find another telephone and make some arrangements that will not be disclosed to the Press.’

  ‘Now you see here!’ Mrs Hopkins heaved herself out of the chair. ‘Mr Atwood! Dr Prentiss! I won’t sit still for this! Nobody is going to take my own daughter away from me and you’d better not …’ She threatened a fit of screaming. ‘You’d better not!’

  Dr Prentiss said coldly, ‘Sit down. Both of you.’ He was accustomed to being obeyed. They obeyed.

  Atwood said, ‘Now, Mr Daw, suppose you tell us how you think your niece came to rent a room from Mrs Cuneen?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that,’ said Leon Daw promptly. ‘I am telling you that the girl is Dorothy Daw, who, by the way, never did arrive at the place where I had been told she intended to go.’ He was sitting down, holding himself calm. Sweat shone on his face, but his voice was steady. He went on to tell the rest of it, succinctly, and rather well, Matt had to admit.

  Meantime, Mrs Hopkins heaved herself to and fro in her chair making mindless gasps of outrage.

  ‘So now,’ said Leon Daw finally, ‘I think we all have the … er … tolerance and human understanding to … er … perceive that this lady—because of a resemblance which, obviously, there must be—is finding herself in an embarrassing position. Unless,’ he added with sudden cruelty, ‘she is deliberately exploiting that resemblance for the sake of the newspapers.’

  ‘I,’ howled Mrs Hopkins, ‘am a mother!’ She was up on her feet. ‘So don’t you call me a phony, you phony! I don’t know what you want with my girl, but you won’t get her. I may not have much money, but I can make a lot of noise. If you let him take her off and hide her from me,’ she howled at the men, ‘I’ll raise the biggest stink you ever saw.’

  ‘On the other hand,’ said Leon Daw more coolly, ‘if you let this woman claim her, for even one moment, this hospital will be in quite some trouble.’

  Atwood spread his hands. The folds of flesh on his face lifted as he put his brows high. ‘This hospital,’ he said finally, ‘has accepted her as a patient. It is not our duty to find out who she is, except insofar as that would aid us to find out how to make her well. Neither of you are helpful in this respect. I suggest that you settle the question of her identity between you, if you can. And subsequently, one of you must prove it to the hospital’s lawyer, so I should think.’

  ‘And to me,’ said Matt.

  ‘And to me,’ snapped Dr Prentiss. ‘In the meantime, I want no visitors for our patient this evening, and I would advise you both, very strongly, not to interfere with our efforts on her behalf. Now, I have work to do.’ A few strides, a wag of the door, a waft of air, and he was gone.

  Leon Daw purred to the Administrator, ‘Who is paying her bills, may I ask?’

  Atwood did not answer.

  ‘I grant you mean to be cautious,’ said Daw getting up, ‘but you are both obstructive and insulting. How can you take seriously this freak of a stage-mother—’

  ‘Can’t you see he’s a big fat liar?’ shrieked Mrs Hopkins. ‘And he’d better not call me names!’

  Atwood had become strategically deaf.

  Matt said loudly, ‘It’s plain enough, isn’t it, that my mother and I are going to stay responsible until this is cleared up?’

  And Atwood said quickly, ‘Why don’t you both quietly bring these other people or whatever proof you have? In the morning.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Leon Daw. ‘Meanwhile, I agree and insist that nobody is to see her. No more newspaper photographers. The Press is not to get anywhere near her.’

  Atwood seemed to be listening, but he did not speak.

  ‘You can’t keep this out of the papers!’ cried Mrs Hopkins.

  Leon raked her up and down with a look. ‘If you talk to the newspapers,’ he said scathingly, ‘my lawyer will be in touch with you, too.’ His face was pale now. His forehead wet. He seemed to have come to the end of some rope. He flung the door open and in a somewhat feeble imitation of Dr Jon’s departure, he departed.

  Atwood rose and stood a moment, listening to the woman’s noises. Then he said, aside to Matt, ‘See her out. Get her a cab if she needs one.’ He left them.

  So Matt waited out a fit of weeping and wailing. At last the woman peered at him from one ruined eye and said, ‘Who is that man? Who is his damned niece, anyhow?’

  ‘His niece is supposed to be the tenth richest young woman in the world,’ Matt told her.

  Bobbie Hopkins opened her bag to reach for the tools of repair. Her face was ruined and old, the eyes were bleak. ‘Well,’ she said flatly, ‘too bad for him. That’s my daughter in there, and can I help it if this is going to get in the newspapers?’

  The eyes met Matt’s. Hers were both shrewd and frightened. They veiled and fell, coquettishly. ‘You seem like a very nice boy.’

  ‘May I call a cab for you?’

  ‘No, no, I got my car. But thanks a lot, honey.’ The underlying face, with its knowledge of defeat, was hidden now. ‘Listen, you stick to what you said, hear? Don’t you let that rich bastard get my Alison. And you tell your mother, listen—I’d really like to stop by and all.’ She moved her mouth. Matt felt her thirst in his own mouth, suddenly. ‘She’ll understand,’ said Bobbie. ‘She’s a mother, too.’

  Matt said nothing. Bobbie Hopkins, having done a quick job, taken a swipe or two at eyes and lips, gathered up her handbag. ‘It certainly, certainly is,’ she said with strange detachment, ‘a crazy crazy situation.’

  And Matt felt wild. He said deliberately, ‘It is strange that her own mother can’t tell the doctor anything that will help him save her life.’

  The blue eyes fled to the corners of the room. ‘I don’t know. I just can’t think. Listen, she don’t live with me, you know, except since she got back from that lousy deal in Spain.’ Bobbie Hopkins pulled her image together. ‘But she’ll be all right,’ she said in a high sweet voice of pious hope. ‘The good Lord isn’t going to take my little girl away so soon. You’ll pray for her, too, won’t you, dear?’

  Matt stepped aside to let her through the door. He was trying his best to feel sorry for her. He thought, savagely, that her brain must be the size of a peanut.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Tony Severson, that evening, was preening himself. His story, with its intriguing developments, was being picked up far and wide. It would be on the late news on TV this very night. He was filled with naïve proprietary pride. He marched to and fro in Peg’s kitchen, spreading his tail feathers, too exhilarated to sit down.

  Matt, with a dampening air of austerity, kept reminding him that the power of the Press had promised the truth.

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ said Tony. ‘There’s a pack of hounds on this thing now, and you couldn’t conceal your own navel. It’s my story.’ He looked at Matt defensively. ‘The cops aren’t going to move on it. You said so yourself. And you say the hospital isn’t going to hire any private investigator. So who is it up to, whom? Yah. Yah. It’s up to little old me. Because our readers are going to have their tongues hanging out for the real truth.’

  Matt wished he wouldn’t keep saying ‘the real truth.’

  Peg was there, quietly dismayed but disputing nothing. Betty was there. Matt had a feeling that good old Betty was seeing his points.

  He said, ‘Since when do your readers pant after the “real” or any other kind of truth? Don’t they prefer a story?’

  ‘Oh wow!’ cried Tony. ‘So it’s a story! I love it. I love it. Is the Sleeping Beauty a missing heiress? Or a poor young struggling actress of humble origin?’

  ‘Or neither one,’ snapped Matt. ‘The hospital’s had half a dozen more phone calls from people who think they know who she “really” is.’

  ‘I’ve had them, too,’ said Peg unhappily.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Tony cheerfully. ‘You’re always going to get the nuts. You knew that.’

  I knew it, Matt thoug
ht. But Dr Prentiss, in his innocent integrity, hadn’t known it. The doctor, much annoyed, had sternly banned any visitors and had slapped a sign on the hospital room and told Atwood that he would have peace or know the reason why. Atwood had met with the lawyer and the PR man and members of the staff, to no conclusion Matt knew about. He shuddered to think what might happen tomorrow when the papers ran the story of two possible identities. And such gaudy ones, at that.

  So he was viewing Tony Severson with uncontrollable distaste.

  Tony had turned up a good deal of past news about Dorothy Daw. She had been brought up on her mother’s Long Island estate. The father had died years ago. Inevitably dubbed the ‘madcap heiress,’ Dorothy had been a celebrity very young. When the mother died, Dorothy, then eighteen, had gone abroad to school, had turned up in smart resorts—with assorted escorts and rumours flying—here and there around the civilised world. But for the last two or three years, she had moved out of the news. She was getting a little old to be the newspapers’ pet. She hadn’t done anything very startling. She had been living, more or less quietly, among people who were exiles of one sort or another, but exiles with incomes, Tony would bet. Tony said the paper hadn’t got on to anyone in Africa who was willing to gossip. Or at least they hadn’t yet. So her recent doings lay in obscurity.

  As for her character, she had been publicised as the perennial stereotyped spoiled little rich girl. But Tony had to admit that she had never been in any serious scandals.

  He had a couple of old clippings, photographs. The resemblance was there. But the styles were strange. The impression was different.

  As for Alison Hopkins, she was, indeed, a minor kind of actress. She had, indeed, been ‘making a picture’ in Spain. That was about all Tony had on her. He couldn’t do everything in one day, could he?

  ‘Of course,’ said Tony now, ‘I’ve got a good hunch which one our little darling really is.’

  ‘Which you won’t publish,’ said Matt waspishly, ‘until you sell tomorrow’s papers?’

  ‘Listen,’ said Tony, looking hurt. ‘I can’t print it when I can’t prove it.’

  Matt threw up his hands.

  Betty said, ‘Look, Tony, you’re among us chickens. Don’t bother with your image, huh? You’re going to beef up this story if you possibly can, and everybody here knows it.’

  Matt kicked her in the ankle approvingly. ‘Was it your shenanigans upstairs that gave you this hunch? That you can’t prove? Excuse me. I should say “scientifically prove,” of course.’ (And sarcasm would get him nowhere.)

  He had been obliged to take Tony up to the front bedroom when first Tony had appeared. He had been obliged to watch Tony open the grey suitcase and take out every garment, hunting for cleaning tags and laundry marks, search the shoes for the manufacturer’s name, list the numbers on the money. Tony had gone about all this with an air of great efficiency which had leaked away as he proceeded. There were no tags or laundry marks unless they were visible only in a special light. The shoes had come from a cheap chain, the bills of money were in no special sequence. Tony had finally pronounced all this to be police business, needing the organisation.

  ‘All I say,’ Tony announced now, ‘is that I get the message myself. It’s intuition. You develop it with experience. Oh, this kid is Dorothy Daw, all right. And I’ll tell you why. Because this Bobbie Hopkins, well … she’s a type.’

  ‘A publicity-hungry stage-mother, eh?’ said Matt. ‘That type?’

  ‘Why, sure. So she jumps to a nice exciting conclusion when she sees the picture. O.K. When she gets there and looks at the girl, she wants to believe it’s her darling daughter because what sport? Right? So she utters. And after that, she’s stuck with it.’ Tony was confident. ‘She’ll back down. Want to bet? But meanwhile …’

  ‘Back in the headlines.’

  ‘Well, hell, Matt …’

  Peg said, ‘Wouldn’t she want that very sick girl not to be her daughter?’ And Tony looked at her as if he could not understand a word she was saying.

  Betty said vehemently, ‘The point is what are you going to do to find out the truth about this very sick girl?’

  And Matt keeping quiet, letting anger boil about in his blood, felt grateful for her sharp good sense.

  ‘Yeah, better tell us what you’re going to do,’ he said quite amiably. ‘We are the ones who have got to be shown, you realise.’

  ‘Or get stuck with the bills, eh?’ said Tony innocently. ‘O.K., listen.’ He bounced on his toes. ‘I got a line into the DMV. Say they had put their thumbprint on a driver’s licence. That would do it. Right? Also, I’m going after dentists. Say I dig up a chart of their teeth, either one. That would do it. Now, that’s the kind of thing has got to be done. Match up the old fangs. Right?’

  Matt’s own teeth began to ache where they were clenched.

  ‘You see,’ Tony went on, beginning to make a disagreeable kind of sense, ‘we don’t have any personality clues. This kid in the hospital is out like a light. So how can we tell what kind of kid she is? Now, if she’d have just lost her memory or something like that, we’d still have mannerisms and speech habits and stuff like that there.’

  ‘That should be so,’ said Betty calmly and thoughtfully. ‘But I heard her speak, you know. I saw her up and moving.’

  ‘Yah?’ Tony pounced on her. ‘Yah?’

  ‘But I guess,’ Betty went on slowly, ‘she couldn’t have been feeling like much. I thought she moved, well—sluggishly. She spoke very low and didn’t say much. She was … well … dull.’

  ‘She was ill,’ said Matt quickly.

  ‘Yah,’ said Tony surprisingly. ‘Sicklied o’er. How about education? How about vocabulary? Grammar? Accent?’

  ‘She didn’t utter any sentence that needed any fancy syntax,’ said Betty. ‘No particular accent. Would you say, Peg?’

  Peg shook her head.

  ‘Well, now,’ Tony said, ‘I’ll tell you. This Dorothy Daw, she went to finishing schools all over the map and she’s been around the world a few times. Probably she’d have what you could call an International English. But this Alison Hopkins, she never went any farther than a high school in Arizona. Too bad it wasn’t the deep South.’

  Betty said, ‘I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t tell.’

  Matt said sharply, ‘Wouldn’t an actress have studied speech?’

  ‘Yah,’ Tony was frowning. ‘True for you. Could be. But see, we can’t ask her to speak up now—and that’s the’ problem. It has got to be something physical. Like say, if you’ll pardon the expression … her marital status?’ He looked at them bright-eyed and feeling clever.

  It was Peg Cuneen who replied to the word he had not used. She said calmly, ‘I don’t believe you can prove anything of that sort, in these days.’ She looked him straight in the eye. ‘Can you?’

  Matt managed to say in an amused tone, ‘You may be putting a little too much faith in “scientific proof,” old boy. A bit of a risk, wouldn’t you say? Suppose she wakes up and sues? Invasion of privacy?’

  Tony had put on a hangdog look. ‘So I can’t beef up the story with a bit of virginity.’ He was giving them hurt looks. ‘So how about some operation? Did one of them have her tonsils out or her appendix? Any objections? Did one of them ever break a bone? Should one of them have a nice big scar on her fair young hide? Hey, Matt, you can find out for me whether this kid in the hospital—’

  Matt said icily and evenly, ‘You do a little research on scars and let us know. Then I’ll be glad to see that it is checked out for you in some half-way decent way.’

  There was no scar. He knew that, already. Selma Marsh had told him. ‘Not a mark on her skin, anywhere. Honest, you know, Mr Cuneen, it looks like she never been awake. Like she’s been preserved someplace, in Cellophane.’

  Selma Marsh seemed to have established a bit of a cult. She acted as if only she and Matt belonged to it, as if they, in secret, worshipped what no one else quite saw.

  Matt didn’t di
scourage her. He didn’t know how. He had listened and made no comment.

  But he was not going to mention, in his mother’s kitchen, what he had been told. He felt that he had just sounded pretty stuffy, but he was too angry to care much.

  Betty said hastily, ‘But aren’t they going to bring people around? People to swear?’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ said Tony, whose foxy eyes lingered on Matt’s face. ‘Eye-witnesses. And that’s the worst kind. They can swear on their mothers’ graves that they saw something with their own eyes, and it won’t mean a thing. Oh, they’ll bring! Leon Daw, he says he’ll settle the whole business, his way, tomorrow. And more he will not say. Bobbie Hopkins, she isn’t letting anybody in either, which would be peculiar—if she wasn’t eight sheets to the wind and incoherent—or so I suspect. Or maybe she thinks it’s good to play hard-to-get. Which …’ Tony admitted ruefully, ‘it might be. Especially if she’s a phony. But she’s got a pack of nuts for neighbours, up there in them Hollywood hills, and they’d swear to anything, including saucers full of little green men. I talked to one whacky old biddy. She says this Alison has got an astral body or two of the faces of Eve. I can’t print everything I hear, you know.’ Tony was plaintive.

  ‘Was either of them married?’ Betty asked: ‘That should be possible to find out.’

  ‘You think so, eh? Well, not Dorothy Daw. You can just about bet your boots. Unless it was in far-off Africa under some thornbush and kept very, very quiet. I’ll have to try and find out about little old Alison. I did get to her so-called agent … and before he knew what was up, too. At first he had a little trouble remembering her existence. Seems much of an actress, she ain’t. When he finds out what’s going on he shuts up like a clam and starts thinking which studio he can peddle her to … I mean, presuming she comes to. He wants her to be Alison, see. There’s money in it for him, maybe. So much for the real truth. Hey? Well, I’ve got work to do, chums.’

  It was Peg who had the grace to say, if ambiguously, ‘I know you have, Tony, and I know you’ll do it the best you know how.’

  So Tony kissed her, gave the others a farewell glare, and went away.