“You make it sound awfully sinister, but yes, that sums it up.”
“And what if the web gives a promising jiggle or two while I’m crouching in it?”
Uncle Frosty laughed. “If you see or hear anything incriminating, by all means phone headquarters. Though not from the boardinghouse! I meant to warn you—you’ll have to be careful not to mention any connection with me. The legatees have no idea yet that the will might be contested. It’s my secret weapon.”
“Oh, lovely!” I sank into his easy chair, enjoying this more and more. Then a thought struck me. “My word! I shouldn’t even be seen with you, should I? And we might already have been seen—at lunch.” Automatically, my hand went to my hair. “You know, that’s a problem. People remember me; I’ve often noticed it.” I broke off as my mind began to work at this.
“Now, Shan—” Uncle Frosty was watching me uneasily. “Don’t take the bit in your teeth. There’s no need whatever for any false moustache, or whatever you’re cooking up. This isn’t a spy movie. It’s a perfectly prosaic—”
By then I had the answer. “How soon do you want me in that room, Uncle Frosty? Would tomorrow evening be soon enough?”
“Oh, any time in the next few days. Spring term doesn’t end for a week or so; we’re safe till then.”
“Good, that gives me plenty of time. I’ll get a dye job.”
“You’ll what?”
“Have my hair dyed. Black, maybe. That would—”
Uncle Frosty exploded—almost like Dad. I was surprised at him, and told him so. He informed me it was times like these he felt great sympathy for Dad, and if I dyed one hair of my head, I’d lost my job, and no, he would not listen to reason. So I had to give in on that. Of course, I knew I’d think of something else. I’d begun trying to when suddenly the whole thing collapsed on me—I couldn’t believe in it at all. “Uncle Frosty, none of this is actually going to happen, is it?” I said dismally. “We’re just making it up. A week from today I’ll be on that plane to London.”
“I don’t see why you should be.”
“Dad, that’s why. He’ll say I got my way last year, and look what happened; now he’ll jolly well get his. The minute you get that call through—when is it going through?”
“Within an hour, they told me.”
Within an hour. The day was no longer glorious, the job and the bargain were idle fancies, my trap was still tight around me, and my head ached again. I said, “I wish I hadn’t asked that.”
“Don’t stew about it, Shan—it’ll be all right.” The front-door latch clicked, and his head turned toward the sound. “There’s Mona. Go tell her she has a house guest.”
This seemed only fair, and I gathered myself together again. I don’t know Mona well—never will. Uncle Frosty was a bachelor until age forty, then surprised everybody by his choice. Mona is a handsome woman, cool, chic, imperturbable, and to me impenetrable. Uncle Frosty told me once that he was aware Mona was hard to know—and added that he had found the effort supremely worth his while. I must say she’s always been perfectly gracious to me. I went into the hall to say hello to her, then on upstairs to dither in private about the phone call, to wonder what anybody could want with a weed garden, and to see what fate had allowed me in the way of a summer wardrobe.
Not much. I found the usual mad jumble of odds and ends that always winds up in the camel-bag—underwear, toiletries, my gray seersucker frock but not the jacket, my blue cotton but not its belt, a paperweight, a couple of wash-and-wear shirts, my winter dressing gown, an elderly cardigan lacking two buttons, an old journal I hadn’t written in for years, a skirt or two, a frightful raincoat I got once in Petticoat Lane for ten-and-six, a bottle of ink, a shoehorn but no shoes. I was wearing my sleeveless yellow linen and my white pumps, and to keep down air weight, I’d carried my winter coat, an Irish tweed about right for Poland in December. Oh, well. I’d probably be going straight to London anyway.
I abandoned all that and went back downstairs to pace the floor. This I did for the next half hour, making nervous conversation with Mona, who returned tranquil replies, and looking at my watch and the phone so many times that Uncle Frosty finally escaped into his study with a book. I even got on my own nerves. But underneath all, my mind was still playing with that improbable will, like a cat with a catnip mouse, and five minutes before the scheduled hour was up, I suddenly had a quite brilliant explanation for that weed garden. Dazzled, I rushed into the study and announced it to Uncle Frosty, who emerged from Marcus Aurelius and frowned at me uncomprehendingly.
“What do you mean, it’s a euphemism?”
“Pure double-talk. Marijuana is a weed!”
He looked startled, then amused. “So it is. You’re postulating a College Street crime ring? I suppose it’s possible. Have you figured out how the scholarships fit in?”
“Well, no, I’ve only just this minute—”
“Or the doctor’s time-machine visit to ancient Greece?”
“The what?”
“Didn’t I mention that? I guess there are several bequests you don’t know about. Why not read the will? Open that briefcase and ferret around in the right-hand side. You’ll find a carbon in there somewhere.”
I’d just located it when the phone went. It was the overseas operator. I dropped the carbon, forgot the weed garden, and fled. An unconscionably long ten minutes later, Uncle Frosty peered into the sunroom, where I was staring through the big window at Portland spread out below, and came over to me, saying calmly, “It’s all right.”
I let out my breath and turned. “Really all right? The whole plan?”
“Yes. He saw my point about the necessity of a time-out for both sides in the tug-of-war. Reluctantly, but he saw it. And he agreed.”
I could scarcely believe it. “Was he very angry?”
“Just badly worried, under the surface fireworks. He loves you, Shan, and hates to see you follow a course he thinks a mistake. That’s all. Now start forgetting the whole thing—that’s your end of the bargain.” I nodded shakily, smiled even more shakily, and he added, “You look bone-tired. It’s been quite a day—in fact, quite a ten months, hasn’t it? Go up and stretch out a while—I’ll call you for dinner.”
It struck me as the best idea anybody’d ever had. I was suddenly so done in that I wondered if I could even make it upstairs. “I don’t want any dinner,” I told him as I started the long trek. “All I want in the world right now is to sleep a week.”
2
Shannon
1
I awoke, for the first time in ten months, to a perfectly silent house. In Mary’s Creek there were always the turtledoves in the eaves outside my dormer window—then Uncle Syd’s shaver whirring from the bathroom, then the percolator thumping in the kitchen below me, and Aunt Doris pattering about. I used to long for those sounds in Europe when I woke to taxi horns or chattering foreign voices instead. But then, in Europe I started off every morning homesick.
I started this one off puzzled—couldn’t think where I was. Then I remembered, and it brought me bolting out of bed. I’d slept eighteen hours instead of a week, but I felt wonderful anyhow, hungry as a navvy and eager to start planning my day. I nipped downstairs in my dressing gown and found the house empty—Uncle Frosty gone to his office, and Mona probably at the Crippled Children’s Hospital or out raising funds for something. It’s not a house I feel much at home in—all polished and smooth, like Mona, with pale carpeting and professional draperies—so I went straight through, devoured some buns and milk in a glacially tidy kitchen, and afterward stopped by Uncle Frosty’s study to get the carbon of that entrancing will. Reading it would have to wait; I took it back upstairs with me and tucked it into my handbag. Then I faced the looking glass and considered. Regardless of Uncle Frosty’s staid remarks about false moustaches, I’d no intention of going to College Street as I was. Too prosaic by half. Besides
, the ideal spy, as I understand it, is either so well disguised that he could fool his own wife, or a creature so colorlessly just like everybody else that nobody remembers him ten seconds. I had handicaps on either count.
Clothes were not one of them; I put on my gray seersucker, which was completely forgettable without the missing jacket. At the moment I couldn’t think what to do about my alleged accent—except fake a different one or try to hold my tongue. There remained my hair. For years I’d worn it very plain, just brushed off my forehead and caught with a silver sidecomb Dad found once in an Istanbul bazaar. But it was half a yard long and, from the back, about as inconspicuous as a red flag. Something had to be done about that.
I caught a bus to town, the will in my handbag, and got off down among the big shops. After a bit of searching, I discovered a doorway on a side street labeled The Poudre Puff Salon of Beaute, went in, and asked the woman at the desk what could be done right away about transforming me. “I don’t care how. I just want something to make me look like somebody else, as nearly as possible.”
“You mean something like a bleach job?”
I had an exhilarating vision of golden tresses, then a dampening one of Uncle Frosty’s face when he next saw me. “No,” I said reluctantly. “More like cutting a lot of it off. But I want to look quite different.”
“Well—I couldn’t arrange a cut until tomorrow.” The woman, whose own hair was a rich ash-lavender, thumbed dubiously through her appointment book, then studied me. “I tell you, honey—whyn’t you let us just restyle it for you? You’d be surprised how different that’d make you look. Opal’s free now; she’s a nawfully good stylist. Let her create something real unusual, why not?”
“Yes, all right, why not? If you think it’ll work.”
The woman assured me it would and touched a bell.
Opal was a tiny, brisk blonde with a towering coiffure and white-gold bangs that nearly hid her bright-blue eyelids. She was remarkably pretty under the overemphasized makeup, expressionless as a kitten, and completely self-assured—just the type that makes me feel all legs and misgivings. I trailed her across the busy workroom like a daddy longlegs towed by an ant, and feeling homelier than usual, subsided before the looking glass in her cubicle. She picked up a strand of my hair and let it drop, then studied my reflection dispassionately, chewing her gum.
“How d’you want it?” she said.
“I don’t really care, just so it’s as different as possible from this. The lady at the desk said—”
“You like mine?” Opal asked, switching her gaze to herself and giving a disciplinary yank to a cheek curl.
Surprised into automatic hypocrisy, I assured her it was very smart.
Without comment and before I’d comprehended that we’d reached an agreement, she enveloped me in pink plastic and went to work. After a steel-fingered shampoo that left me wondering if I’d ever really been clean before, she reinstated me in the cubicle and announced that she’d have to cut some bangs. I said, “Yes, all right,” but it would have made no difference what I said. Opal’s hand was firmly on the controls. She combed a wet veil over my face and cut a window in it, then began winding my head full of rollers, jabbing clips home with machine-like precision and occasionally snapping her gum. By this time I was far too fascinated by her to care what she was creating.
“Quite a decent day out, isn’t it?” I remarked, hoping to get her talking so I could find out what she’d say.
She glanced up in mild surprise, as if the wig form on her shelf had spoken, then murmured “Mm-hm,” and went on chewing gum.
I tried again. “My hair’s frightfully heavy. I expect you find it rather a nuisance to handle?”
She didn’t look up this time, just said, “Hmp’mm,” and stabbed in another clip. After a silence I couldn’t think how to break and she wasn’t trying to, she added suddenly, “George’s is lots worse’n this, and longer besides.”
“Oh, is it?” I faltered, my imagination boggling. “Did you say ‘George’?”
“Mm-hm. My sister, Georgetta. That one.” She bobbed her head toward the shelf in front of me. On it, flanked by the wooden wig form and a bouquet of combs, were two diplomas from the State Board of Cosmetic Therapy Examiners. One was made out to Shyrle Opyl Dagweiler, the other to Jorjetta Dagweiler Jones.
“Oh,” I said, trying over possible pronunciations of “Shyrle” in my mind. “Your sister works here too?”
“Only on my day off. She can’t spare the time to it any more—she’s married and got three kids. Tip your head, honey.”
“Three children? She must be a lot older than you.”
“Hmp’mm. Just easier to please,” said Opal—Opyl—without the slightest change of expression. “Why, gee, she took the very first fella that came along. But you can’t tell her anything. Only time she ever listened to me was about her name.”
“About her name?”
“Mm-hm, Georgetta. She never could stand it, always said it sounded like dress goods. Of course, what’s it matter—everybody calls her George anyhow. But I says, if you feel that strong about it, whyn’t you spell it a little different? Like with j’s? And sure enough she took the hint. Was I surprised.”
“Well. I think it’s quite distinctive,” I said truthfully.
“Mm-hm. Gives it a little more zing.” She dabbed a bit of glue or something on a side curl and stuck it to my cheek, then began coiling up stray locks at my nape and skewering them.
“Have you just the one sister?” I asked, wishing she wouldn’t work so fast.
“Hmp’mm, I’ve got four. One brother. Say, is he spoiled. You don’t come from around here, do you? You talk kinda different.”
I murmured something about the East.
“I thought there was something. I’m from Kansas, myself.” She plastered my bangs to my forehead with a strip of scotch tape. “What’s your name, honey? If you don’t mind me asking?”
“Oh—it’s Shannon.”
“Hm.” Opyl snapped her gum thoughtfully as she crowned her labors with a pink ruffled hairnet. “Can’t do much with that.” Then, to my deep disappointment, she led me off to the dryers.
My forty-five minutes’ imprisonment passed almost without my noticing. For a while I was busy inventing names for Opyl’s other three sisters and watching her flying fingers and pretty poker-player’s face as she worked on other customers. But finally I got the carbon of the will out of my handbag and plunged into the trackless jungles of legalese.
Pruned of whereases and a rich undergrowth of relative clauses, Elizabeth Dunningham’s will was better entertainment than a lot of novels. It began by naming one Henry Bruce executor, and granting him a fee of $2,000 for his services. Then came seven bequests: (1) $3,000 to Wynola Jackson for lessons in sky diving. (2) $5,000 to Dr. William Edmonds for a journey to ancient Greece. (3) $7,500 to David Kulka for the establishment and maintenance of a weed garden. (4) “Enough money” (no special amount named) to buy Mrs. Sarah Hockins a plastic canopy that would cover one-quarter of an acre. (5) $4,000 to Emma Heater, in payment of a debt. (This sounded quite ordinary at first. Then I began wondering why Mrs. Dunningham would have run up a debt if she had all that money? And why make the repayment posthumous?) (6) $50,000 to be wisely invested and the yearly income granted to a student who wished to study subjects of no practical value to him. The first scholarship was already earmarked for one George Maynard Sherrill. Thereafter, grants would be made by the Scholarship Committee, who would also make and manage those wise investments. And guess who formed the Scholarship Committee. None other than Henry Bruce (already the generously rewarded executor) and Dr. William Edmonds (already a major legatee).
Then the grand finale: the “rest” of the estate was for Brick Mulvaney—to go fishing.
It was certainly a refreshingly original will and testament, and I could see why the daughter wasn’t h
olding still for it. Also I had a strong notion that Dr. William Edmonds, Mr. Brick Mulvaney, and Mr. Henry Bruce, who looked suspiciously like the masterminds behind the scheme, were going to wish they had never met Uncle Frosty.
I put the will away and sat blinking in the arid gale of the dryer, speculating about what Mrs. Dunningham could have been like, how she’d reasoned, even in her craziness, to hit on such very odd things to bestow on people. Or why the legatees had hit on them, if it were all a plot. People really are so queer and fascinating. Never what you expect.
I forgot all about what real unusual creation my hair might be drying into. It therefore came as a shock, when I was back in the cubicle and freed from my trappings, not to see my forehead looking its accustomed size and shape. When a few flicks of Opyl’s comb had loosed the full glory of my bangs, my eyebrows vanished, and as she teased and piled and built the rest of my mane into a sort of Albert Memorial tower, all semblance of my normal appearance and expression vanished, too. My face shortened, my neck lengthened, my cheekbones widened. I watched, electrified, while she chewed her gum and put the finishing touches on a stranger I scarcely recognized as myself.
“Ooo, nice!” the woman at the desk said when I walked out, dazed with my success, to pay my bill. “Opyl’s so clever, isn’t she? And you certainly look different.”
I certainly did. Moreover, I felt different, with the full weight of my hair on top instead of hanging. As I moved toward the door with my head poised on my new bare neck like a heavy tulip on its stem, I could even feel my walk adapt to the altered balance.
There was a brisk breeze blowing when I stepped outside. It didn’t ruffle a hair of my coiffure, which had been petrified into its baroque architecture by Opyl’s lavish use of hair spray. I stopped to study my reflection in a shop window. Well, I thought, that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? To look like somebody else? All right; you’re a reasonable facsimile of Shyrle Opyl Dagweiler—maybe of Jorjetta Dagweiler Jones, too. Only thing missing is the gum.