Dream of Fair Woman Read online

  He went to the foot of the bed, ripped the coverings from their moorings and threw them back a little. He took hold of a small bare foot and shook it, almost roughly.

  Nothing happened. She slept on, seeming in perfect peace. Matt knew he held in his hand a strange thing, a perfectly unblemished woman’s foot, with straight little toes, well-kept but unpainted toenails, the smooth flesh tanned to the same faint gold of the face—a foot as beautiful as marble, but by no means as cold.

  He let it go, covered the foot quickly and turned away, achieving an air of decision. “No use getting tough, I guess. That seems to be that.’ He made for the door. He wanted to be out of here.

  Betty gasped behind him, as if she could not breathe properly, ‘It’s a little bit uncanny, you have to admit.’

  But he didn’t have to admit it, because the phone rang downstairs, and Matt leaped gladly to descend and answer.’

  Betty Prentiss drifted along to her own room, shook her head to Peg’s look of inquiry, and sat down on the edge of her bed again.

  ‘You know, Peg, it was so funny this morning …’

  ‘What was, dear?’

  ‘What I said to her. She was standing in there, with only her slip on, looking … Well, you know how she looked. So kind of fey? And I said to her, “Gosh, you look as if you could sleep for a week”.’

  ‘Did you really?’ said Peg softly. ‘That is funny!’.

  In their female minds moved a recognition of the strangeness of all things, the pure chanciness of the whole world, and the prevalence of omens, and a sense that the threads in the texture of life did not all run square. In the same eyeblink, they agreed that neither would mention this ‘funny’ remark to the men.

  Dr Jon Prentiss, having once upon a time introduced his brother’s fiancée’s house guest to a certain young Dr Cuneen of his acquaintance, was old-friend-of-the-family indeed. He was also wisdom and authority. His incisive voice soon told Matt exactly how they would proceed. The place for the girl was in the hospital. She should be examined there, and all possibilities explored. He would send for her. Meanwhile, would Matt take care of notifying her people?

  ‘I hate just shipping her off,’ Peg said.

  ‘Oh, come on, Ma,’ Matt argued. ‘You can’t take care of her here. You didn’t guarantee a nursing service. A contract to rent doesn’t say “in sickness or in health” like a marriage service.’ He must comfort his mother’s stricken air with cool reason.

  ‘Just the same, I don’t like it,’ she said, uncomforted.

  ‘It’s nothing to like or dislike,’ Matt lectured. ‘It’s something to do. And we’d better go rummage around in her things and find out who the devil she is and where she came from, so we can let her own people know.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Peg, without moving. She didn’t like the idea of rummaging either.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said her son. ‘We’ll do the dirty work. Come on, Betts.’

  Betty said, ‘We’ll take care of it, Peg. It’s the only thing to do.’

  ‘I know,’ said Peg. And yet … she knew more than she could say. She seemed, to herself, to be feeling something in the situation that the young folks didn’t feel at all.

  In the big dim room again, Matt glanced once at the girl, who slept as before. Then he forced a deep breath and began to look around. Betty went to pick up a black handbag from the dresser top and he left her to it. There was a grey suitcase, an old one, much battered, lying on a straight chair and, thrown over it, a short white wool coat. Over the back of the chair was spread a black dress of some sleazy material, and a white slip, which even to his eyes seemed very plain. On the floor, a pair of low-heeled black pumps lay drunkenly under stockings that coiled where they had been dropped.

  ‘This kid,’ he concluded to himself, ‘is neither rich nor tidy.’ He opened the closet door. Nothing hung in the closet.

  Betty said in astonishment, ‘Hey, Matt, there’s absolutely nothing in her purse but money!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look. Not a handkerchief. Not a lipstick. Just a roll of green money.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Two hundred and fifty bucks. No silver. No change.’

  ‘That’s peculiar. No I.D.? No licence? No credit cards?’

  ‘Not another thing!’

  ‘It’s un-American,’ he said. ‘Try the suitcase.’

  So Betty went over to the chair, lifted the white coat gingerly aside, and opened the case. She began to itemise in a low voice. ‘One nightgown. One cotton robe. Corduroy scuffs, pretty beat up. One, two, three panties. One pink toothbrush.’ She lifted both hands high. ‘That’s it!’

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ Matt said, rubbing his head. ‘You know that?’

  ‘It’s pretty wild.’ Betty began to feel in the coat pockets. ‘One grubby handkerchief,’ she announced, ‘and positively no monogram.’ She whirled to the dresser and began to open drawers.

  Matt pursued the idea of a monogram. ‘Does she have a watch on?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Betty made no move, so Matt went resolutely to the bed, groped in a warm place under the covers for the girl’s left arm and lifted it into view, exposing, as he did so, flashes of gentle other flesh. The arm in his grasp was relaxed, but throbbed alive. He looked down at the watchless wrist, the ringless fingers, the blunt unpainted fingernails. He let the arm and hand gently down, outside the coverlet.

  His mother spoke quietly from the open doorway. ‘Who is she?’

  Matt said, with too much breath, ‘Not a thing to say.’

  ‘Nothing?’ said Peg, as if she had half expected this. ‘Poor child.’

  Matt, who felt as if he’d put on blinders, who was cancelling his peripheral vision, who would not look again at the girl on the bed, saw his mother’s face begin to pinch. He said warningly, ‘Now, Peg!’ He thought she was going to cry.

  But Peg said, flatly, ‘Then I guess she’s mine.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Now don’t be like that, Ma. You’re not responsible.’

  ‘I am. Until we find her own people.’

  ‘Peg, there is no law—’

  She put up her chin and said, ‘I can’t help that.’

  Betty Prentiss, who was running her fingers around the edges of the white paper lining of a dresser drawer, felt as if fingers were running up and down her spine.

  Matt said crossly, because he was feeling a touch of panic and knew not why, ‘O.K., Ma, but try not to take it too hard. Will you, please?’

  They heard the ambulance in the street and Matt went tearing down the stairs to let the men in. Motion was relief. He didn’t like this, didn’t like it at all.

  When he had gone, Betty turned her head to look at Peg. Peg was looking back at her, dark eyes a little defiant. ‘If you don’t understand, then you don’t understand,’ they seemed to say. ‘But my life is my life, my self is my self, and I have to do what I see to do.’

  ‘I wish she hadn’t seen your sign,’ said Betty. She told herself it was too bad for Peg to have been so put upon by chance.

  CHAPTER TWO

  There was an old-fashioned, round, pedestal table in the corner of Peg’s big kitchen. That evening, Betty Prentiss sat sideways behind it, sipping coffee and contemplating the possibility that she was in love.

  Matt was at the table, too, just finishing his late supper. Tony Severson was there, bouncing with curiosity and pumping them as urgently as he could.

  But Betty wasn’t saying much. Do I want to marry Matt Cuneen? she was asking herself. If not, what am I doing here, anyway? Why don’t I take my own apartment or take one with another girl, or a whole flock of them, and live the life with the double dates and all the intrigues of my peers? Why do I hang around with a proxy mother like Peg? I don’t need a mother. And why haven’t I gone all out for summer travel, which is the thing for us schoolteachers to do? Why didn’t I arrange to go to Europe, like everybody else, with Kleenex and camera? Looks as if I want
ed to stay right here. And why is that?

  Something in the back of herself had evidently decided that Matt was the man for her. It wasn’t a new idea. Naturally not, with their mothers feeling as they did, and even Betty’s uncle simply assuming that one day a wedding would come to pass. To that generation, the match seemed so suitable, sensible, desirable, and safe that it made itself. As a match, Betty thought highly of it too. She and Matt were equal in status, as compatible in interest and in values as might be, and long acquainted. It ought to work.

  But now, she thought ruefully, to be just about the opposite of star-crossed lovers was not the most attractive thing in the world. Not for Matt. And not for Betty, either.

  It wasn’t suitability. She didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t that. How come she suddenly knew that it was, at all? She didn’t know how she knew. But now that she knew, what was to be done?

  There was another thing. Betty was well aware of a tradition that had grown up here in the last five years, since Dr Cuneen had died and Peg had resolved to stay where she was in the big house, to move herself and Matt down into the wing that ran off at the back, to rent her two upstairs rooms, and by this means, pay her house taxes. She had not been left destitute; neither was she affluent. But Peg managed, in her own way, very well. She enjoyed having young women in the house and invariably, if they showed any signs of wanting to be mothered, Peg mothered them.

  But her friends and neighbours had made a running joke of the fact that almost every one of Peg’s girls had, in her day, rolled a speculative eye at the son of the house, the so personable and eligible son who lived there too. So Betty knew that she had fallen heiress to a pattern that might take some breaking. How many counts were there against her? One of his mother’s roomers, playmate from the cradle, recommended by their elders, no surprises.

  How could Mr Matthew Marks Cuneen, boy scientist, not in the hunting mood, evasive by long practice, and feeling like her big brother, besides, be enticed to realise that Betty was the one for him?

  Some old-fashioned methods were just too corny to consider. For instance, she was not going to try to ‘make him jealous’ because of Tony Severson, who came around from time to time. Tony worked for a newspaper, not a big-city paper but a semi-local sheet that had its yellow tinge. Young Mr Severson was not spending any of his traditional pittance to take Betty to shows or nightclubs. He liked to come by casually and pick her up of an evening, ramble around the town with a good companion, drop by a pizza parlour or a hamburger stand, or often just to drop in and sit here in Peg’s kitchen and talk. He didn’t want to marry Betty and nobody was going to think so.

  Hmm. Well, now. The solution of this problem was going to take a little serious planning and effort, now that she seemed to know what the problem was. She stole a glance at Matt’s face. Yes, she liked his face. She liked his hands. She liked …

  Sex? she presumed. Well, sex was all right with her, but she didn’t quite know how to begin to flirt with him, if that was the word. He could be, she guessed, rather impervious to signals of that sort. From good old Betty Prentiss.

  She wasn’t sending any such signals at the moment, not being decked out at all. She had on a pair of blue capris, an old white shirt, and no shoes. Her dark hair lay wild on her head. She was just good old Betty, at home in his mother’s kitchen, with her bare feet on the rounds of the chair.

  She wasn’t beautiful and strange. Betty blinked and began to listen to the conversation.

  Tony Severson was the kind of young man who turned a wooden chair around, sat astride of the seat, and rested his arms upon the back rail. His reddish hair stood up and his little hazel eyes roved foxily from face to face. Peg had told him about the mysterious stranger and Tony was bound that there was more to know than he had been told.

  ‘You guys aren’t expert room-searchers,’ he was arguing. ‘Why won’t you let me go up there with ye olde fine-tooth comb? You’ve missed something. There has got to be a clue to this dame’s identity.’

  ‘There hasn’t got to be,’ Matt said, ‘and there isn’t. So you won’t go up and snoop around, because who needs you?’

  One had to be rude to Tony. He invited it. He was always cheerful in the face of rudeness.

  ‘Take a matchbook cover,’ he went on arguing. ‘That could be a clue, for instance, to where she’d just been. Does she smoke, by the way? And say, has anybody scraped under her fingernails?’

  ‘For her name and address?’ inquired Betty.

  ‘Ah, come on. A clue to her occupation, maybe. You guys got no Sherlock blood? Does she look like an office worker? Or maybe, you should pardon the expression, like a schoolteacher? What does she look like, anyhow?’

  Matt was poking at the sweet roll that was his dessert and he neither spoke nor looked up until Betty’s silence seemed to surprise him.

  So Betty looked away and answered in a deliberate drawl, ‘Well, I’ll tell you, Tony—she is absolutely gorgeous.’

  ‘Hey! Hey!,’ said Tony, between delight and suspicion. ‘You’re putting me on? How? How do you mean?’

  ‘A beeyootiful blonde,’ said Betty and thought, Listen to me sound pure cat. She glanced slyly at Matt. He was munching his roll.

  ‘A real doll, eh?’ said Tony, making gestures that outlined huge breasts in the kitchen air. ‘I mean with all the standard equipment, yes?’

  ‘I presume so,’ said Matt with the regulation leer.

  So Betty let her breath in slowly and deeply. She now perceived, with a little hoot of silent laughter, that fate had played the old-fashioned ‘jealous’ trick on her. It had worked very well. This was, suddenly, how she knew that, in love or no, she certainly did not want anybody else to have Mr Matthew Cuneen. Well, well, she said to herself, mysteriously smiling.

  Matt was trying to conceal his irritation. He had leered as he was expected to leer. But he was thinking morosely that if they had been able to say that the stranger was an ugly old woman with a moustache, Tony would have lost interest in the business. Matt didn’t think the girl in the hospital was any of Tony Severson’s business, especially since Tony’s business was always public business. Matt wouldn’t permit Tony upstairs, to poke at those few pitiful possessions. He didn’t fancy the helpless girl being made the centre of a circus, newspaper style. Let Tony go peddle his papers somehow else.

  The hospital, in the person of Dr Jon, had been somewhat dismayed when the girl’s identity had proven elusive. Nothing, of course; deterred the whole staff from the task of diagnosing and, if may be, curing her. So she was as safe as she could be, in good hands, and Matt wanted things to be let alone. He didn’t want Tony stirring up trouble. Not his kind of trouble. Matt rather wished his mother had kept her mouth shut.

  The dining-room door was swinging and in came his mother with Dr Jon Prentiss behind her. The doctor was a stubby man with broad shoulders aggressively squared, and a very straight broad back. His face was rugged and habitually stern. He was a no-nonsense man. But he greeted Betty with affection and endured an introduction to Tony with courtesy.

  ‘We don’t know yet,’ he said to their questions. ‘Tests tomorrow.’ He sat down and Peg poured him coffee and fetched him the saccharin. He and Peg were very fond, but there was no nonsense between them.

  ‘How old would you say she was, Doctor?’ asked Tony briskly.

  ‘About Betty’s age.’

  ‘Young and beautiful?’

  ‘Well designed,’ the doctor admitted.

  ‘And no idea who she is?’

  ‘Not unless somebody’s been around here, inquiring for her.’ The doctor took the negative answer from their silence and began to sip.

  ‘I think,’ said Tony, speaking from the position of a young man of The world, ‘you would be well advised to call the police, Doctor.’

  ‘Police!’ Peg exclaimed.

  ‘Well, sure, Mrs Cuneen. See, maybe somebody reported her missing. Missing Persons, see, is like a lost-and-found department and what you’ve g
ot here, you’ve got a “found” girl.’ Tony looked pleased with himself.

  Dr Jon was looking at him over his cup, fixing him with his stare that could scatter nurses like petals in the wind. But Tony said blithely, ‘I’d be glad to make the call for you, Doctor.’

  Dr Jon said, ‘The police knew nothing about her, as of three hours ago.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Well, sir,’ Tony was less patronising this time, ‘could I suggest something else? If you would like me to get hold of one of our photographers to take a few pictures, my paper would be glad to print them. Might be the way to find out who … uh … lost her.’

  Matt said lazily, ‘Why don’t you keep your nosy nose out, Tony? Nobody needs you.’

  ‘Ah ha,’ said Tony, shaking a finger. ‘Maybe you do, old boy. What about the power of the Press?’

  Dr Jon was looking at him thoughtfully. Betty said nothing. But now Peg slid into a chair beside the doctor and said, ‘It might be a way.’

  ‘Ma,’ said Matt. ‘Now, you don’t want that kind of thing. Believe me, you don’t realise what Tony and his paper can do to you.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do a thing in the world to her,’ said Tony indignantly. ‘I love her! Don’t I, Mrs Cuneen?’

  Peg clasped her hands and said, ‘I keep thinking of her people. How could they come here, to inquire? She just happened to see my little sign out on the lawn. How could anybody know she would see it?’

  ‘A point well taken,’ said the doctor. ‘I can tell you this. It is advisable to find her people quickly. We need her medical history.’

  ‘As a public service,’ crowed Tony, ‘I’ll get the photographer there first thing in the morning. I’ll come myself.’

  Matt said, ‘Don’t do it.’

  ‘Why not, dear?’ his mother asked. ‘I don’t want anybody thinking about trouble for me.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea for anybody,’ he said, unwilling to be more specific because he was not going to add any fuel to Tony’s highly inflammable imagination. So he offered an alternative to the doctor. ‘Why not let the police trace her?’