The Seventeen Widows of Sans Souci by Charlotte Armstrong

Author:Charlotte Armstrong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Head of Zeus Ltd
Published: 2014-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

The sun came up, the sun went down; February rolled over Sans Souci. Then it was the first of March. The Unholy Three were in session.

Felice Paull had lost a lawsuit against a parking lot and brooded and was not reconciled to defeat. Ida Milbank sipped tea. Her wits were a bundle of untied threads. Agnes Vaughn was running her tongue over the inhabitants of the building.

“One of these days,” Agnes said darkly, “Marie Gardner is going to pass out in there, and it will be a week before the maid comes and finds her. She’ll decay! You’re the boy who cried ‘wolf,’ Felice.”

“It’s not likely,” said Felice. “Mr. Lake has Elise going in there once a day to check. Didn’t I tell you?” Felice looked wronged, rather automatically. She was thinking about that lawyer.

Agnes had lost a point. But she grinned and picked the frosting off a piece of chocolate cake and inserted it into the middle of her grin. (Felice had told her. She had forgotten. Never mind, one day somebody would die and not be missed.)

Elise, the colored woman, felt the burden. But when Mr. Lake asked her and when Mindy Shane, the housekeeper, had counseled her (with understanding), she began to go in there, for a minute, every day. Mindy Shane knew, of course (and elsewhere Elise’s people said bluntly), that it didn’t do to get a white woman hanging onto you. Didn’t do, they told her, wasn’t so good. Lily, the other chambermaid at Sans Souci, was young and a second-generation Californian. She had no real memory of any bonds reaching from black to white, or devotion, either way. She said Elise was crazy. You wouldn’t catch Lily! Mindy Shane understood. It wasn’t wise. Yet Elise was caught and couldn’t help it. Poor lady, locked in, and scared of everything in the whole world. If you were the only thing in the whole world she wasn’t scared of, then—black or white—what were you going to do? Not everything, Elise knew uneasily, was black or white in this world.

In the apartment over the entrance door, Agnes Vaughn went on. “Say, Bettina Goodenough is about ready for a nervous breakdown. She’s got something on her mind. Notice?”

“What?” asked Felice vigorously, yet rather absently. Maybe she ought to have had a different lawyer.

Agnes hadn’t been able to figure out “what” so she veered again. “It’s eating her, all right. Say, did you know Caroline Buff asked Tess Rogan to have tea with her yesterday afternoon?”

“She did!” Felice Paull responded to this. World politics could not have roused her more.

“Right,” said Agnes, “and Tess Rogan went. Ida saw her.”

“I saw her,” Ida said, very pleased.

“Nobody else was asked. Who’s been in that apartment? Well, two of a kind, maybe …”

“I don’t see that.” Felice frowned.

“Don’t you?” said Agnes mysteriously. (She didn’t either. Agnes was simply restless.)

Caroline Buff had had an impulse. Perhaps because Tess Rogan had been left out of Georgia’s party. So Tess Rogan and Caroline Buff had taken tea and compared children and grandchildren, each frankly praising her own.

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