Sarah said no, and thanked him for everything. There was no one to watch them except a white marble bust which bore a suspicious resemblance to the renting agent, but they were both too conscious, and not quite formal enough, to even touch hands. The elevator came, and the last she saw of Harry Brendan for almost three months was his quiet unsmiling face and his hand lifted in salute.
They had spent a good part of the past forty-eight hours together, but at no time, beyond the briefest shrug and head-shake, had they touched upon what could have driven Charles to suicide. Harry seemed to be waiting for Sarah, and to Sarah it would have been bitter beyond words to try and extract from Charles’s friend the burden Charles had chosen to die with rather than to share it with his wife. She might be able to do it later; she couldn’t do it now. It would make the whole thing too—pitiable, like opening a lifesaving letter that had come too late.
But she wondered, through the days and the nights.
She kept the apartment, because she didn’t know what else to do. Somebody, probably Bess Gideon, had tactfully put away Charles’s things, and Sarah was queerly relieved that the framed snapshot of him that she had kept on her dressing table had been removed, although she could not have done it herself.
Could Kate Clemence have . . . ? Sarah put that out of her mind at once, along with the realization, new for some reason, that Kate must hate her, must have found it very difficult even to be near her.
After a week or two, in desperation, she started working again. Not at the agency; although she might have gotten her job back, she flinched from the cheerful teasing inquiries of people who wouldn’t have seen the brief obituary. On a deeper level, she flinched from being whispered about as the brand-new widow of a suicide; eyebrows couldn’t help being raised, lightly cruel theories being advanced. From time to time, to pad out her income, she had done free-lance copy for a lingerie house, and it meant no more contact than telephone calls and envelopes exchanged by mail or messenger. They were delighted to hear from her, and they sent her a number of lavish garments to start extolling at once.
It didn’t get her out of the apartment, but it put up a merciful smoke-screen in her mind. Instead of Charles’s pleading eyes, she stared at satin rosettes, insets of lace, cunning panels of elastic that would theoretically make nymphs out of nonagenarians. She would think desperately, “Why? . . .” and then her gaze would fall on a scrawl from the manufacturer: “Positively can’t ride up.”
When Charles’s will was probated, she owned the pheasant farm.
Sarah had never realized that it was his. It must have been left by his father to his stepmother, and gone to Charles upon her death. When she thought of all the people housed there—Bess and Hunter, Evelyn and Milo—and their absorption in the place, the disposition of it seemed uncomfortable and unfair. Sarah wrote a brief and awkward note in response to Bess Gideon’s long formal letter proposing to buy the farm: she had never considered its coming to her, wouldn’t know what to do with the pheasants or the bantams, and couldn’t things go on as they were for the time being at least?
No indeed, Bess Gideon wrote back, delicately hostile. They could none of them consider taking advantage of Sarah’s generosity. If she would name a price, they would try to meet it. In case their own resources fell short, Kate Clemence was interested in investing money in it.
Kate Clemence, who walked about so calmly and superbly in her man’s white shirt and dungarees, who had “often helped Bess doctor an ailing cock,” who had been in love with Charles. It was right, it was eminently proper. Kate had known all those people for years and would know exactly what to do with the pheasants and the bantams. Sarah ripped a nightgown ad from her typewriter and wrote back, shortly and unequivocally, that she didn’t want to sell the farm.
And there, apparently, it rested. Bess Gideon did not write again. The days somehow turned themselves into next-days, and certainly no writer for Daintease had ever put more passionate energy into the account.
But at night, unavoidably, Sarah had to walk through the dining alcove into the kitchen. That end of the room changed every night after dark, in spite of the fact that she had bought new fabric for the window, a rough red sailcloth Charles had never seen, and didn’t bear the imprint of his last unavailing impulse. But the view was the same: the high windows opposite, the topplingly foreshortened ground-floor apartments, the hats with shoes striking out from under them as people passed on the pavement below.
Sarah paused there one night with a curious forcing of muscles, and made herself press her forehead against the cold glass pane. She did not dare open the window to step deeper into Charles’s mind. Grief had long since gone, to be replaced by pity and a piercing wonder. How could he . . . why had he?
She had thought uncertainty was frightful, but under that, unadmitted, was the notion that the truth might not be possible to live with. Suppose, for instance, that an understanding word or glance, an interview with someone, would have drawn Charles back from that killing plunge? Suppose she had had the strength to pretend that those frightful sounds had not waked and tormented her, that they were a passing thing, and dismissed them accordingly; might Charles then had dismissed the cause of them, too?
She found out early in January that she could not have hit upon anything more ironic.
iv
IT WAS A woman who called her. Even before the emphasized “Mrs. Charles Trafton?” and the more distant, “I have Mrs. Trafton for you,” Sarah’s ear had identified her as a trained intermediary. Someone from the publishing house? Something to do about Charles’s estate?
It turned out to be a Dr. Jonas Vollmer, a psychiatrist whom Charles had consulted on three separate visits.
Sarah took the receiver away from her ear and looked astoundedly at it as though she expected to see Dr. Vollmer, bearded and meditative, peering out of it. She put the receiver back, and said tentatively, “I wasn’t aware that my husband had seen a psychiatrist. Are you sure you have the right. . . ?”
He sounded taken aback himself. “Sarah Trafton, nee— here we are—Fitzpatrick? Married to Charles Andrew Trafton on October nineteenth of last year in St. Anselm’s Church? Let me see, first visit on November—”
Sarah lost the date, and the two subsequent dates, in the somehow stunning surprise that Charles, whom she had urged to see a psychiatrist, had done so without telling her. Perhaps he had wanted to come to her with results, and three visits, she knew from a number of people at the agency, were hardly sufficient for recounting the people who had slighted you in infancy. Or was this something about a bill, overlooked in the general confusion?
She said, “Yes, I see,” still trying to recover herself. “I don’t know whether you’re aware that my husband . . .?** It was so hard to say, but he was expertly ahead of her. “Yes, Mrs. Trafton. Very sad. Very,” there was a rustling of papers, “unnecessary, I’m sure. I only learned of this development on my return from an extended trip abroad, and I may say that on the basis of what I learned from Mr. Trafton I am—dismayed.”
There was a profound pause. Sarah pondered with amazement the word “development”; surely, even to a student of the mind, it was more than that? Dr. Vollmer said, “It occurred to me that you might care to see me,” and Sarah said, “I certainly would, Doctor. When?”
He quoted her address at her, said that he lived only a few blocks north, and that if she would have a few minutes free at six o’clock he would call on her then. Sarah hung up, her stomach fluttering, her nerves in a tangle. Did psychiatrists make it a habit to drop around and visit the—what was the word—relict? She had never had any experience of them, but she didn’t think so. And the measured gravity, the caution . . . of course, it was hardly a feather in a psychiatrist’s cap to have a new patient commit suicide.
Nervously, she tidied up the apartment. He would undoubtedly think it meaningful that she was writing copy for feminine undergarments after her husband’s death, so she covered her typewriter, folded the wings of th
e table, and pushed it into a corner. There was probably something equally significant in putting freesias in a low silver gravy bowl, but she refused to move that. Lastly, she looked at herself, six pounds lighter, face so much paler and thinner that only her peaked dark brows and green gaze stood out of it. Of course, lipstick; she put that on and regained a little self-possession.
Would he have a drink, or, if offered liquor, think that that she had lured Charles into alcoholism? If she offered him tea, would he think she had driven Charles into alcoholism by default? If she offered him nothing, would he find her hostile, negative, not out-going, or whatever the current phrases were?
At the back of her mind Sarah had a comforting notion that this was all nonsense and he would not be difficult at all. She was wrong. He was.
In the time it took to say, “Mrs. Trafton. How do you do?” and “It’s kind of you to come, Doctor,” they had arrived at a mutual dislike. Sarah’s came in part, and unjustly, from the man’s appearance: the square measuring face, very white, the full button mouth, the humorless examination he gave her and then, with a slow deliberate turn of his head, the apartment. It seemed quite possible that his slim leather case held scales and a blindfold.
Probably he hadn’t liked her face either, or was it simply an automatic prejudging? Pet breeders looked darkly upon children, pediatricians looked darkly upon parents. A psychiatrist would be almost bound to view with disapproval the widow of a patient.
If it had only been that. After a few introductory skirmishes, Vollmer told Sarah the basis of her husband’s nightmares.
Charles had been afraid of her, literally and physically afraid of her. In his recurrent dream he stood on a height, and Sarah, behind him, threw something blue and muffling over his head and began to push him toward the edge.
(And she had said to Charles on that last night in Bermuda, “But you must know what they’re about. Everybody does. They’re falling, or . . Might as well remember it all, his sweat-damp forehead, the bitter mimicry of his voice, his instant, shaken apology . . .)
Blindly, as she was apt to do in moments of stress, Sarah lit the wrong end of a filter cigarette and took a lung-scorching breath of it while Vollmer watched with clinical interest. When she could speak again she said fairly steadily, “I’m afraid I don’t quite . . . It seems a little late in the day to explain that I loved my husband. I was also,” she knew this was a mistake, but an incredulous hurt and a growing anger at Vollmer’s calm precise black-and-white face drove her on, “fond of my father. Not unhealthily, if that’s possible any more, but I certainly have no hidden urges to push adult males over cliffs.” Except perhaps right now. “Or are you telling me that my husband was insane?”
She was instantly aware of having fallen into a trap. Vollmer said with satisfaction, “Insanity is a term which we now . . .” and Sarah rebelliously stopped listening. Her heart still pounded with shock; she felt that it must be shaking her visibly. She emerged to hear the pedantic voice saying, “—has its cause. Perhaps an incident in childhood, involving someone whom he subconsciously indentified with you, or his feeling for you. Perhaps a phrase or a reference from you yourself, which at the time . . .”
And all at once Sarah knew.
She had to listen to a great deal more before she managed to get them both on their feet and edging toward the door: Charles’s relationship with his stepmother—this was something a psychiatrist could really get his teeth into; his preoccupation with the beautiful and useless pheasants, his concern over the death of the nurse. “Perhaps something quite interesting there,” said Vollmer musingly. “The failure—you follow me?—of the nurse to save the stepmother’s life. A feeling of bitterness and even of vengeance on Mr. Trafton’s part. Her death at someone else’s hands following upon that. . .”
He looked at Sarah’s withdrawn, unlistening face. He said, “Perhaps you wonder why I was anxious to get in touch with you, Mrs. Trafton. I felt it only fair, as of course it was my duty, as soon as I learned of the sad event, to let the police know that Mr. Trafton had been a patient of mine.”
And why, thought Sarah, crystally alert again. She said, “Of course. Very thoughtful of you, Doctor, and very conscientious.”
They were sworn enemies now.
“I thought you might best be—prepared,” said Vollmer.
He occupied the surface of Sarah’s mind only briefly after he had gone. No profession could guarantee its every member; there were bad dentists, negligent doctors, unscrupulous lawyers. She had just been visited by a man who was, she suspected, so much in love with the trappings of the profession as to obscure its purpose.
Vollmer didn’t matter, nor the fact that, at nearly seven o’clock, she would have liked a drink and ought to be doing something about her dinner. Nothing mattered except the astounding thing that she had remembered.
It had taken place on the last weekend she spent at the farm before her marriage. A friend of Evelyn’s had dropped in with five children who demanded refreshments in loud whispers, fought in doorways, teased Milo’s pet crow and then, having inspected the lawns and pheasants and let clouds of flies into the house, began to demand to go home. Their mother sat there like an untidy rock. Charles and Sarah, with the abstracted air of people who were only slipping into the next room for an ashtray, fled.
The afternoon was gray and windy. Although it was only late September, and asters and zinnias still blew about in the borders, a few crisp nights had begun to gild the huge hickory tree in the field where they stopped for a cigarette. Sarah knew that the mink farm lay somewhere off in the distance on their right; out of a reluctance to return to the house so soon she nodded at a rise behind trees to the left. “Where does that go?”
“Well, we used to call it a cliff,” said Charles, smiling, “and then it shrank to a bluff and now I think it’s only a hill. Let’s have a look.”
The wind came up sharply when they emerged from the band of trees, spinning Sarah’s hair against her face and blowing it into her eyes. Charles went up the mossy rock-strewn slope ahead of her with a stick poised; he had remembered stepping into a nest of blacksnakes here. Sarah felt in her pocket for a scarf which she began to put over her hair as she walked, and just as Charles turned to say something to her the wind whipped the silk square from her fingers and pinned it against his face.
His head went back instinctively, and the sudden motion threw him off balance. Sarah ran up, half-blinded herself by her hair, and caught at his arm so suddenly that they both staggered.
And that was all there was to it: a freakish current of air, a second of lost footing. Charles wanted to know, laughing, if she thought this was Lover’s Leap, and Sarah got her hair tied down and looked somewhat shakenly over the edge. It was still a very respectable bluff, the leafy drop perhaps twenty-five feet to what, from a glimpse of rocks at the bottom, had once been a brook bed.
To anyone who fell, it wouldn’t have presented any mortal danger. But to someone who was pushed with force and went outward, with no tough wiry bushes to check his plunge . . .
After a while, as stiff and strange to her own living room as though she had actually been to Preston and back, Sarah went out to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and gazed blankly at the lamb chops she had, as usual, forgotten to thaw. She had tried not to slip into the canned-soup routine of women suddenly left alone, but somehow she often ended up that way. Tonight the alternative was two eggs and a stranded-looking piece of cheddar cheese. She shredded the cheese for omelette and made herself a drink while she waited for the pan to heat.
Memory did not let go cleanly. There were other wisps of that gray afternoon: Evelyn running to the field to meet them, her face red with effort and irritation, crying distractedly, “Sarah, that dreadful child insists that you have her bracelet.”
Charles said, “You don’t mean to say they’re still here!” and Sarah, remembering, drew out the bracelet she had pocketed somewhat briskly after having it tobogganed from the crown of her
head into her lap several dozen times.
“They’re out in the car; they’re going,” panted Evelyn over her shoulder, and ran off.
The pheasants were still agitated by the unaccustomed invasion of pounding feet, bursts of giggling, and sticks thrust curiously into their pens. Some had taken refuge in piled fir boughs, others were pacing about with short darting steps, heads tipped vigilantly. A Silver cock, black crest erect above his proud red-felt face, gave loud grunting cries of rage while Bess Gideon tried to soothe him with pieces of tomato.
When they went inside, Milo was vainly trying to cheer up his depressed crow.
Sarah was secretly relieved that Hunter Gideon was not there for dinner; she always had a nervous notion that he might bark a military command at her without warning, which she would obey before she thought. She and Charles went for a drive later, ending up at a roadhouse for a drink, and Charles said, smiling at her across the table, “This time next week . . .”
Whatever he might have thought later, whatever curious twist his mind had taken, he had not thought then that Sarah had tried to push him over the bluff; he had not even remembered the incident. Sarah was sure of that. Something had nudged it into his mind after they were married, distorted it, given it credence.
Or some other secret thing had gnawed away at Charles until his reason was actually clouded, and he turned blindly on the nearest scapegoat.
How appalling to think that she had lived with Charles and never known that this was going on; how wincing the memory of waking him, hand on his shoulder—her hand— from that racking dream of the height, the something blue over his eyes, the gathering push.
Had her scarf been blue? It must have been.
So had the thread of curtain caught under Charles’s fingernail.
Sarah felt abruptly and physically sick. She forced herself to eat a little of the omelette which had burned on the bottom, and do the few dishes. She retreated to the living room with her coffee and picked up her face-down book, hating Dr. Vollmer for having led her to this depth, almost hating Charles, the stranger to whom she had betrayed herself so unknowingly.
So Dies the Dreamer Page 3