by Amanda Cross
“One of the odd things I noticed,” Biddy added, after a pause, “was that we didn’t tell each other the stories of our lives straight off. We didn’t bother with anecdotes about the past, the way people do who are mainly happy to find a new audience for the experiences they’ve already processed. Our pasts emerged bit by bit, but only because we reconsidered them. I remember the first time Winifred mentioned England. ‘I never knew you spent a long time in England,’ I said. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I guess it never came up before.’ ” Biddy sat up and laughed at Kate. “What am I jabbering on about?” she said.
“About friendship,” Kate told her. “We—women, I mean—are beginning to tell each other about things, and we have to find the language; it’s not always easy, the words having been overused for other purposes.”
“Shall we walk?” Biddy asked, turning the wine bottle upside down and shaking it, to mark the end of their picnic. They gathered the remains together and stuffed them into the hamper; Kate put the empty bottle and the cups and corkscrew back in the bag. “There’s a nice walk this way,” Biddy said, “with a view of the bay when you arrive. Okay?” They set off.
It was necessary to walk single file, and talk was therefore desultory. They both thought over what had been said and heard. Kate thought: They discovered a friendship, and lost it. How? With the view of the bay achieved, Kate might hear the end of it. If it was the end. Biddy stopped by a refuse can, and Kate dropped her bag into it. “The view’s just ahead,” Biddy called encouragingly.
The view, when they got to it, was beautiful but very far away. The ocean was not nearby, as Kate had somehow expected from the other coast, but distant, beyond the land. “To get close to the sea, you have to walk near the shore,” Biddy said. “Down in Santa Cruz, beyond the town, you can see seals sometimes on a rock, and the water is full of divers in wet suits who look like seals just at first, at least to an eastern eye.” They sat side-by-side with their knees drawn up, looking outward.
“Martin found out?” Kate asked.
Biddy sighed. “I suppose it was inevitable. After a time, Winifred tried to break up with him. She still liked him as much as ever, but I think she felt duplicitous, dishonest. And she had to keep watching herself not to mention something about me or the kids he hadn’t told her. But I persuaded her to keep on with everything the way it was. She wouldn’t have been particularly bothered if we hadn’t met. What bothered her was that it was a situation there weren’t any stories about; we didn’t have any rules to go by; it was a new game. Of course, there we are again. I haven’t got the right language for it, and I didn’t then either. Besides, Martin was really attached to Winifred. I think it’s greatly to his credit that he appreciated her and knew what she was worth, that he loved her.”
“Well,” Kate said, “there can’t be many women who would be wholly satisfied with the situation Martin offered. She wasn’t asking for any more, and didn’t seem about to. Sorry if that sounds cynical.”
“You’re right; still, Martin isn’t Stan Wyman, which it’s just as well to know. I’m shocked often at how many of my male colleagues are on the make.”
“Agreed,” Kate said, “but I’ve noticed as a general rule married men either screw around or they don’t. Most of them belong to one side or the other. My niece Leighton, I ought to say, doesn’t think Stan Wyman is a very successful fornicator, but he’s still on the side of those who try.”
“Is your niece one of his students?”
“Not exactly; I’ll tell you about Leighton later. If you didn’t tell Martin, and Winifred didn’t, what happened?”
“He saw me and Winifred together. It was god-awful. I’m sure if I ever drown, I’ll just keep living that moment over and over, and never get any further back. I ought to say that Winifred at that time was living in a sort of cabin in New Jersey, near the New York line. It was on someone’s property, and they rented it to her very cheap. She was trying to write, and didn’t need a job to support herself just then. She got some legacy—I don’t know if you know about that . . .”
“Cyril’s mother must have died,” Kate said.
“Whatever it was, Winifred had saved up some money from the odd jobs she took, and now with this small income she was able to live there in the cabin. We used to meet on one side or the other of the Tappan Zee Bridge for our biweekly dinners. I think she rather missed the structure that a job, even a dull one, gave to her day, but she was determined to try to live without a routine, as she said. She saw Martin several afternoons or nights a week; it wasn’t a bad life. Winifred liked to be alone. She said her aunt used to tell her that most full lives are filled with empty gestures.
“Martin went up to the state university at Purchase one afternoon, to give a talk, and on his way back he stopped in at the restaurant where we were; he’d met an old acquaintance, and decided to skip his regular Tuesday seminar on modernism. Somehow, I see it always through his eyes: he looked up, and there Winifred and I were, talking and laughing, clearly deep into a longtime relationship. There are things you can tell at a glance, and sometimes you’re right. He didn’t say anything. He just stood and looked at us, and walked out of the restaurant. His friend ran out after him, and then rushed back in to pay the bill. It was quite a moment.”
Kate looked out over the bay. “What happened then?” she said. “I mean, in the following days.”
“Martin couldn’t find Winifred. She didn’t go back to her cabin, and he didn’t know where else to look. It turned out she’d simply checked into a motel, and waited till she knew he was teaching to clear out of the cabin altogether. It was then, I guess, that she moved to New England, where she lived in a sort of boardinghouse, and eventually got the job on the farm. You know about that; that’s where you found her journal, you or the detective.” Biddy waited a bit. Then she went on.
“Martin went crazy when he got home. As though I’d betrayed him with fifty men, all laid end-to-end as Dorothy Parker said. Martin used to be jealous of me; I attracted men, and it took him a while to come to terms with that. And I did sleep with someone else once, and made the fatal mistake of telling him. That was in the days when I thought honesty was another word for shifting guilt. He’d been horribly hurt, but not as bad as this. Or perhaps it’s only fair to say the old wound reopened with this new one. I couldn’t seem to make him see sense. I said I knew it was odd, but we hadn’t planned it, it just happened that way, and hadn’t he been glad enough the way it worked out? In the end he said he wasn’t going to see Winifred anymore, and we tried to take up our life, but we couldn’t. All the parts of our life together that had worked so well didn’t anymore. We kept arguing, and hurting each other, and the children took it all very badly. So in the end we separated. He’s told me he’s got someone new. I guess that’s the end of that.”
“Are you thinking of moving here to California?”
“I was. That’s why I came here as a visiting professor. But Martin just wrote me and said he would fight for custody if I took the children so far away. So I think I’ll have to go back. He’s said I can have the house. He’s hoping to get another job nearby, but who knows if that will work out?”
“And you haven’t heard from Winifred in how long?” Kate asked.
“Close to two years, I guess; maybe a little less. That’s how she wanted it; another reason I came to California. She wrote: ‘I’ve got a good job on a farm and am moving into a house they have. Let me try the farm bit awhile, and when I get a sense of where I am, I’ll be in touch.’ The friendship just wasn’t possible anymore, not for a while. Our whole relationship had been transformed. I find it ironic, to say the least, that it worked fine when we were both making Martin happy, and that we lost it when he’d lost his love for both of us; it makes you feel men really are inevitably the center of women’s lives.”
“With all this going on, I guess it’s no wonder neither of you responded to my ad. It must hav
e been a shock to you or Martin if you saw it.”
“I didn’t see it,” Biddy said. “Where was it? Was it about Winifred?”
“It was in the MLA Newsletter with her name in big letters and it asked anyone who knew anything about her or Charlotte Stanton to get in touch with me.”
“Well, I never even looked at the Newsletter. Maybe Martin saw it and wafted it away. We have—had—a joint membership. I expect it must have rocked him if he did see it, but I was too busy trying to keep my life together to read much of anything. I take it none of all these efforts have given you a clue about what happened to Winifred. Will you promise to keep me up-to-date on whatever you find?”
“That’s easy to promise,” Kate said. “The question is, what will I ever find and when? The list of people who don’t know where Winifred is seems to include everyone she’s ever met. Have you thought of that?”
“How did you ever connect her with Martin or Stan Wyman or any of us?” Biddy asked.
“I found a piece of plastic with a pin on it,” Kate said, “and I didn’t know what it was. She registered for the MLA convention in Houston, of course, and wore her name tag in it. Probably she didn’t wear it all the time—Alina Rosenberg didn’t remember seeing it—but she had it to show when she wanted to get in somewhere, when she was asked for it. It wouldn’t have been like Winifred to crash.”
“She kept her name tag?”
“No. Just the piece of plastic. Maybe she thought it would come in handy. Maybe she failed to notice it. Without it, we wouldn’t have met. I hope you do come back east,” Kate said, as they turned their backs on the view and walked away.
“The children will be home about now,” Biddy said.
Chapter 14
Kate returned to New York and to her university; the winter settled in, and the semester drew toward midterm before, as it always seemed to Kate, it had really begun. Winifred continued to haunt her, but to no greater purpose than before. Kate, after brooding for weeks, as was her habit, suddenly decided to clear her head by reviewing it all under Reed’s baleful eye. She had, upon returning from California, mentioned this detail and that. But, as Reed had learned long ago—soon after he had met her, in fact—questions before she was properly organized in her own mind were wasted on Kate. What manifested itself as a reluctance to answer questions was really a recognition that she did not begin to have the answers.
It was in the middle of a committee meeting as one of the men was speaking, and he suddenly reminded her of Stan Wyman—so vividly, in fact, she wondered if she was having a hallucination—that something, as she later said to Reed, clicked into place. After a moment, her mind cleared, and she was back in the midst of a salacious anecdote about a distinguished professor whom they could hire, but didn’t want to, who had expressed interest in the position but not seriously. “Kate?” the chairperson asked her. “Should we test the waters?”
“Ask him on the phone how serious he is,” she said. They were repeating lines as though from a play. Different players said the hues at different times, but it was all in the script nonetheless. The secret of good committee work is knowing when to wake up. It is a narrow line, and many aging professors slip dangerously over it into somnambulation and vagueness. In this case, they were confirming what they all already knew and had agreed to. Kate used to think such meetings a waste of time, but she had learned their value: to expect every committee meeting to be productive, or to expect every conversation to be meaningful, is to leave no space for the routine out of which meaning grows. At the same time, routine, like cocaine, can become addictive, whatever the pundits say, and slowly crowd out life. I am turning philosophical, Kate thought, an indication that I am ready for consultation. But to what purpose?
When she returned home, Reed was mixing a martini, always a good sign. Conversation rather than office work was anticipated. Kate gratefully accepted her martini, and stretched out on the couch. “Sometimes I think we should get a dog,” she said. “Imagine being able to come home and pound a large creature whose tail would be madly wagging. Couldn’t we get some huge dog, and hire someone to walk it during the day?”
“Whenever you return to a long-familiar discussion, to which the answer is already foreordained, I know you have something on your mind,” Reed said. “Can I help? About Winifred, he wisely guesses, being a man who knows you well.”
“Do you think the sign of a happy marriage is the knowledge of when the other is ready to talk?”
“I think it’s more the sign of friendship, to be honest. Occasionally, married people are friends.”
“Interesting how many friends Winifred had; yet when I first read her journal, and she says, after coming to the farm, ‘I had found a friend,’ I thought: A friendless person. But there has been one friend after another; Winifred had a gift for friendship from the start.”
“And not one of them knows where she is.”
“Just what I said. Reed, in California. Do you think it’s true about great minds?”
“I think it’s true that we may not know of all her friends. Because you have unearthed them does not make them the only members of a fairly exclusive club.”
“But I have to deal with what I know about.”
“Admitted. But there are huge gaps in Winifred’s life about which you know nothing. We don’t really know whom she saw when she was working on the farm; because she mentions no one not already in your cast of characters, you assume there was no one. I’m afraid that may be the problem, Kate. This isn’t a puzzle in which you’ve been guaranteed by the manufacturer to have all the pieces.”
“But if I put together what I’ve got, I may be able to see at least where the missing pieces ought to go. If it’s just a hunk of sky, why worry?”
“One uses metaphors with you to one’s peril; that’s something I haven’t properly learned after years of marriage. That’s because you’re a literary type.”
“And because everything is a story; one has only to discover what story one is in.”
“And suppose it’s a new story, never before told?”
“That’s what’s worrying me,” Kate said. “For one thing, we have a friendship between women, each involved with the same man, and not acting like Cinderella’s stepsisters. There’s a new story for you.”
“It sounds fascinating; am I to hear in orderly sequence what in the world you’re talking about?”
“Have you got all night?” Kate asked.
“What about dinner?”
“Well, if you’d rather eat than listen. . . .”
“Let’s say, I’d like to eat and listen.”
“It will be like that wonderful movie. My Dinner with Andre, where they certainly didn’t eat much.”
“If you plan only to tell me how you went off to swallow sand on the Sahara with a Japanese monk, I shall have nothing further to do with you.”
“I ate fruit and looked at a bay, and watched sunlight through the leaves in a meadow.”
“Sounds better already. Let’s have another martini, and we’ll wander out to a restaurant at some convenient moment, when you pause for breath.”
“Reed, are you certain I never bore you with these tales?”
“It is the only certain thing in an uncertain life,” Reed said. “I never know what you’re going to say, except that it will be amazing.”
“I think I’ll have two olives in this one,” Kate said.
Kate and Reed finished up their discussion of the elusive Winifred in the restaurant over their coffee. (As far as they knew, Kate and Reed were the only two people left in the world who still drank martinis and undecaffeinated coffee; when challenged on this eccentricity, they said that while waiting for fashions in diet to shift round, they were convinced that alcohol and caffeine, taken short of excess, were two of the chief blessings awarded humankind. This pomposity usually ended the discussion, as
it was designed to do.)
“If you’re not careful,” Reed said, “you’ll find another fall has come round, brother Larry will be giving another party, and Leighton will remark that Winifred has been vanished now for a year.”
“It’s more than a year,” Kate said. “Larry’s party was only when I heard she’d vanished. Along with Charlie, if you recall.”
“Do you think they’ll be Japanese two years in a row?”
“I hardly think so,” Kate said. “Probably the ethnic assignment rotates. You’ll be able to tell me, of course, when you get home that night.”
“Would you rather not have gone, and not have heard of Winifred, not have renewed your acquaintance with Toby?”
“You can never step into the same river twice. Who said that, Saul Bellow?”
“Sarcasm will avail you nothing,” Reed said, retrieving his credit card. “Let’s go home and have a brandy.”
Some weeks later, Kate had a card from Biddy; she had finished her stint at Santa Cruz, and was back in the family house in Putnam County. She would be glad to see Kate again, if Kate had the time. She added her address and phone number.
Kate called soon thereafter, and accepted the invitation she had hoped for to visit Biddy in her home. Although Winifred had been there seldom, if at all, it was where Biddy and Martin Heffenreffer had lived, and seemed more connected to Winifred than a New York restaurant chosen for the cuisine or ambience or convenience. Biddy sent directions, and Kate drove up on an uncertain and wintry Friday afternoon in early March.