So Dies the Dreamer

by Ursula Curtiss

  A number of people came in, were introduced to Sarah, and drifted about Bess Gideon’s long, vivid living room with the two sweeping pheasant feathers poised with an air of significance over the doorway. There was an old bull’s-eye mirror over the fireplace, its gilt framed inside with a circle of black, and after a while Sarah watched all their expertly reduced figures in that. It was something of a shock to meet the reflected gaze of a man who, from his entrenchment in a corner and the drink in his hand, had obviously been there for some time.

  He was Harry Brendan, Sarah knew that at once. He must have come in very quietly, with someone else, and something about the steady quality of his gaze suggested that he had been observing Sarah at his leisure. She glanced away without hurry, feeling her face grow hot for no reason, and then, disastrously, she glanced back.

  As he must have known she would; his waiting eyes made it like a door re-opened, an appointment kept. Later she knew it for one of those freakish exchanges between strangers, the second of perfect contact that can happen in a crowded restaurant or a milling railroad station; at the moment she was conscious only of resentment and an obscure feeling of disloyalty to Charles.

  By the time Charles introduced them, the moment was gone and she could wonder that it had ever existed. Harry Brendan had lost his magic; he was only Charles’s friend, a few years older than Charles, darker, leaner, fractionally less tall. Sarah smiled and said how nice it was to meet him; Harry Brendan smiled back and said did she know Skitter Schofield, who was the account executive on Supersheen?

  Later, Charles said anxiously, “How did you like Harry? Of course you didn’t really get a chance to talk to him.”

  “He seemed very nice,” said Sarah.

  That was the first of several weekends at the farm. She and Charles were married in October. Harry Brendan was to have been best man, but at the last moment he sent word that he had come down with something indefinable and a man named Tom Proctor, whom Sarah had never seen before and never saw again, took his place.

  She could have coped with or at least understood Charles’s drinking. What left her weaponless was the inner and deeper change in him, the darkening of the sunniness she had fallen in love with, the sharp new cynicism. It was a little indecent, as though she had married one man and was now living with another.

  She said one day in November, with the quiet of desperation, “Charles, if you’d only tell me.”

  “Tell you what?” asked Charles with the edge of his fourth cocktail. “The time? A story?”

  She must keep her temper at all costs. “What’s worrying you. What wakes you up at night—and me too—with those horrible nightmares.”

  Charles stared meditatively into his drink and then up at her. He said with distinctness, “Do you know, I think you’re the last person I’d tell?”

  “Thank you,” said Sarah, white, but in the pause it took her to get that out, Charles was on his feet, holding her, saying inarticulately over her head, “Sarah, I didn’t mean— I don’t know what made me— Look, I’ll go see what’s-his-name, on the first floor, tomorrow. You’ll see, all I need is Vitamin P or something. He’ll make a new man of me and we’ll have to get married again. Sarah?”

  She managed to smile at him; she told herself that she had forgotten the clear considered rejection of a moment ago.

  And he did go to see the doctor this time, and came back with a small bottle of white tablets which he displayed with an air of triumph. “Snakeroot,” he said cheerfully. “I take one before retiring, and when I start to hiss and dart my tongue at people I discontinue the prescription.”

  Sarah was not quite satisfied; when he had gone to his office she called the doctor. He told her, after some preliminary confusion with the file of a man who had gallstones, that her husband was in very good shape physically, pulse a little fast, blood pressure a little high, perhaps, but those were quite usual reactions in people who were worried about a visit to the doctor. For the trouble in sleeping, he had prescribed a mild sedative which ought to establish a sleep pattern—

  “But the nightmares,” said Sarah. “If they haven’t a physical cause . . .”

  “Nightmares?” said the doctor blankly.

  Charles took his pills, or said he took them, and for the first few nights he did not cry out but thrashed about a good deal and took gaspingly deep breaths which were almost as frightening to listen to. It was as though his private demon had been muzzled and might break free in some new revengeful form.

  There was a brief surcease the week before Thanksgiving. Sarah was walking down Fifth Avenue in the late, cold afternoon when she paused, looked again at the woman waiting for a taxi, and said incredulously, “Kate!”

  Kate Clemence, oddly diminished in tweeds, with pearls at her ears and a gray felt flowerpot that she kept giving vain little pushes to, seemed equally surprised to see Sarah. She said she was in town to do some shopping, was staying at a friend’s apartment, and hadn’t gotten in touch with Sarah and Charles because they wouldn’t want to be bothered by callers so soon. Sarah looked wonderful, and she needn’t ask how Charles was.

  Nevertheless her large calm gaze did ask, and Sarah said instinctively, “Oh—fine, but he’ll never forgive me if I let you get away. You’ll have dinner with us tonight, won’t you, Kate?”

  She was already casting ahead to the difficulties of that, the tenseness in Charles, the too-many cocktails, when Kate Clemence said firmly, with thanks, that she couldn’t. She had undertaken to meet her friend’s visiting aunt at Grand Central, and dinner had been all planned somewhere, but she had time for a cup of tea if Sarah had.

  Over the tea, Kate said, “Are you coming up for Thanksgiving? Bess had an idea you might, and I know she’s looking forward.”

  “We’d love to,” said Sarah, “but unfortunately . . .”

  She launched into a long effortful lie, because that was something else new in Charles—his withdrawal from people and places he had always been fond of. Only a week ago, when he had come home from his office paler and tenser than usual, Sarah had suggested a weekend at the farm. Instinct made her hesitant when he was in this mood, but she was totally unprepared for his brilliant, gradually-focussing stare, the mocking twist of his mouth. “Now that’s a thought. So,” said Charles, dropping ice cubes into a glass and splashing bourbon, “is this. Here’s how.” And now it was the drink that held his stare. “Here’s how . . .”

  He didn’t even want to see Harry Brendan. Under other circumstances it might have been flattering; as things were, it added one more depth to Sarah’s worry.

  “Oh, what a shame,” said Kate sympathetically when the tale of business commitments was finished, but as her clear gaze never altered by a hair it was impossible to know whether she believed the lie or not. “By the way, tell Charles, in case Bess hasn’t written yet, that they’ve caught the man who killed the nurse. He’d been fired from the mink farm a few days before, and apparently he’d been holed up in a hut on the property, drinking steadily, ever since. Heaven knows what he was planning, but they think he mistook the woman for somebody else.”

  Sarah told Charles that night. His gaze turned intense, first on her and then on the rug. “Peck, was it?”

  “Kate didn’t mention his name, just that he’d worked on the mink farm. She said you’d know.”

  “Peck,” repeated Charles with the barest of sighs. “My God, poor Peck. He’s been panhandling and odd-jobbing around the town for years, just because he’s got a face he can’t help. I suppose that kind of thing comes to a head some day—” He rubbed his eyes with a kind of relieved violence. The news seemed to have sobered him, although he had never mentioned the nurse’s death to Sarah after that first day at the pheasant pens. He had a weak highball after dinner, took his tablet without the usual mockery, and slept all night without stirring.

  So that was it. Something to do with Charles’s deep fondness for his stepmother, and shock at the tragedy that had overtaken the nurse who had seen
her through her final illness—Sarah was too relieved to try and reason it out beyond that.

  The mood of peace lasted for two days.

  On a snowy late-November night, the apartment deceptively tranquil and flowery with light, Sarah said quietly, “Charles, you seem to be able to stand this, but I can’t. I know you won’t tell me what it’s all about, but will you see a psychiatrist?”

  It was the last thing she had ever expected to say to the clear open man she had married, and Charles found it equally bitter. He didn’t turn from the window where he stood staring down into the street; he said with a short angry laugh, “Get thee to a nuttery?”

  “Oh, stop that,” said Sarah, holding her voice and her despair on a perilously short leash. “Go talk to some competent man—that’s what they’re there for—for my sake if not for your own. I can’t—”

  The leash snapped suddenly under weeks of strain and she turned away, blinded by tears. She would have liked to walk out of the apartment, coatless, hatless, into the bitter wind and snow; she would have gotten some release from inflicting on her body a little of the battering that her mind was taking. But Charles said her name beseechingly, and when she turned back and looked at his face she would not have dared to go out now and leave him alone.

  Neither of them mentioned a psychiatrist again. In the week that followed, salvation came from an unexpected source. Charles’s publishing house was putting on a publicity campaign for a new book of pseudo-spiritual counsel— “A collapsible halo comes with it,” said Charles—and he stayed late at his office, working. Exhaustion did what neither the sedative nor the liquor had been able to do; that and the new, if temporary, preoccupation. He slept for fewer hours, but he slept soundly. He went to Chicago to see the author and came back looking more cheerful than he had in days.

  Sarah was accordingly alone a good deal. She fell into the habit of having her own dinner early and then, because Charles would not be home until nine o’clock or so, going out to an early movie or any exhibition that was open or just for a walk.

  She had come to the shocking realization, on that last bad evening, that Charles was and always had been weak; that his air of cloudless serenity was the retreat of a man who does not allow himself to become involved. His openness was, to some extent, emptiness.

  She didn’t say it to herself in so many words, she didn’t even consciously think it. And who could define the exact point where love turned into fondness and concern? But her nerves knew about it even if she didn’t, and played random tricks on her. Once she thought she saw Harry Brendan coming out of a theater lobby; another time she would have sworn that the tall man turning impatiently away from a piece of sculpture in an Indian exhibit was Hunter Gideon. Milo’s portentous, down-sliding, horn-rimmed glasses occurred on a number of faces glimpsed from the corner of her eye, but when she turned her head the face was always a stranger’s.

  And, of course, if any of them had been in New York, he would have gotten in touch with Charles, and Charles would have told her.

  Sarah went back to the apartment at a little after nine on a night early in December, and there were men waiting there to tell her that Charles was dead.

  iii

  HARRY BRENDAN came at once; so did Bess and Hunter and, a tactful day later, Kate Clemence. All of them urged their offices kindly on Sarah, but, apart from the throat-constricting task of asking Harry to pick out clothes for Charles, she handled everything herself, steadily, numbly, not thinking backward or ahead but only of the immediate detail to be settled.

  The usual expressions of sympathy were a little awkward, because it was established—although the short newspaper account said “fell or jumped’—that Charles Trafton had committed suicide.

  In the way that funerals can, it had at times the air of a very important party. There was the stir and bustle, the inspection of the liquor supply, the disposition of the flowers that came to the apartment—“I think there, don’t you, or is that table too small? Perhaps if we put the roses . . .”

  It wasn’t any diminution of grief but a steadying factor, a needed crutch.

  Bess Gideon, her handsome face becomingly haggard under her short gray curls, took businesslike charge of everybody’s hats and gloves, for which Sarah was grateful in a dimly amused way. “Kate, give Sarah your hat. It’s frightful on you and it’ll give her a veil without looking like weepers. Perhaps you ought to try Sarah’s on first, but I’m quite sure . . .I’ve two extra pairs of gloves here, and I think long ones, with that coat—”

  Kate Clemence slept at the apartment the night before the funeral, apparently on Harry Brendan’s instructions. He said to Sarah flatly, “You can’t be alone,” and when she answered savagely, “I’d rather be,” he looked down the length of the room to where Bess Gideon was frowning over a note she was writing, Hunter was mixing a nightcap for all of them, Kate Clemence was swinging one long narrow foot and making quiet suggestions to Bess.

  “Now you would be,” said Harry Brendan. “Later— I’ve been through this, and I know.”

  And he was right. When he left a little later, and Bess and Hunter went back to their hotel, and Kate Clemence said to Sarah, “I’m going to run a bath for you. No, stay where you are,” the fact of Charles’s death broke upon her overwhelmingly.

  Water rushed in the bathroom, but otherwise the apartment was remorselessly quiet. No one commenting on flowers, no more telegrams to send and none arriving, no one to call; everything that should be done had been done. Now was the time to realize that Charles had come home— at 8:05 p.m., and how official that sounded—and not found Sarah there and, probably, paced up and down for a while before he did what must have been in his mind for some time. Walked to the window in the dining alcove at the end of the living room, opened it, perhaps stood there briefly wondering what kind of welcome he would find in the icy killing space, and put himself—there was no other word for it—out.

  He had grasped at the curtain very fleetingly; there was a break in the blue loose-woven cloth and a corresponding thread of blue under one of his fingernails. It wasn’t, said one of the large well-intentioned men Sarah had talked to, an uncommon gesture.

  Apart from that, everything had been as meticulously neat as Charles himself. The elevator man remembered that Mr. Trafton had looked a little funny, coming up. He had had a drink; the bottle and glass were still on top of the bookcase in the alcove when the police entered the apartment, and upon the routine analysis the glass contained nothing but bourbon.

  Sarah said that yes, her husband had been showing signs of emotional strain. His immediate superior at the publishing house said that Charles had looked “nervy,” and that he had advised him more than once to take a rest or see a doctor. The doctor in the building, looking at the whole affair with hindsight, said shrewdly that while Mr. Trafton had exhibited only a normal nervousness at the time of his only consultation, it was entirely possible that . . . and so forth; while he wasn’t a psychiatrist he had seen similar cases . . . and so on.

  There had been no note, but then, thought Sarah somewhere in the reaches of the night, what could Charles have said?

  It was all over with surprising speed; the ritual that took so long in the preparing ended with a back-to-work briskness. The limousine that had been driven with such hushed solemnity ripped back into the city at seventy miles an hour. Bess Gideon said as though it were a line from a play, “Sarah dear, come to us. Or is it too soon?” and marred the effect somewhat by asking for the long gloves which nobody had worn.

  Kate Clemence looked white and ill, which didn’t surprise Sarah; she had known the moment she saw her that the other woman was in love with Charles. Hunter Gideon, restlessly anxious to be gone, took Sarah’s hand with a gentleness that astonished her and gave her one of the fierce looks he couldn’t help. “Take my advice and get yourself out of here. A hotel, anyplace.”

  And then they were gone. Harry Brendan had not even bothered to say goodbye. Sarah, widowed after six week
s of marriage, went back to the wilting flowers, the clock-ticking silence, the letdown, and found Harry sitting on her living room couch, turning over the pages of a magazine.

  He would have used Charles’s key, of course. She couldn’t remember giving it to him, but there were a lot of things that had escaped her in the past few days. He stood up at once, saying briskly, “Do you want to change your hat or wash your face or anything before we go to lunch?”

  “But I’m—”

  “What,” said Harry with an air of detached interest, “were you planning on having for lunch? That skinless lemon? A few ice cubes? I had a look at your icebox, which I hope you don’t mind, and that’s it.”

  He took over, sweepingly, impersonally, that day and the next, and got Sarah through the first few dreadful hours. He knew restaurants she had never heard of before, and his quiet and faintly morose air brought waiters running. He was good for her, because although he did not attempt to shut her out from reality—he asked her point-blank about Charles’s insurance—he cushioned it a little. It was like being escorted by a male nurse, or so Sarah thought until the proprietress of a small Village restaurant sent them, with a knowing twinkle, a cordial on the house.

  It was peculiarly embarrassing. The waiter cocked his head smilingly and glanced from Sarah to Harry, the proprietress waited beamingly in the distance. Harry lifted his glass to Sarah after the smallest pause. “They know me here,” he said.

  But what had been effortless became instantly a burden. Harry saw Sarah into the apartment house and said, gazing at the faded oriental rug in the lobby, that he would be going up to Boston the next day. Was there anything further he could do, any messages he could take?