So Dies the Dreamer

by Ursula Curtiss

  The next morning, considerately out of uniform, Lieutenant Welk paid her a visit.

  v

  SARAH REMEMBERED the lieutenant from that otherwise lost night when Charles had died: a compact, lightfooted man with the most interested gaze she had ever seen. Even while his voice said soothingly, “Now, Mrs. Trafton . . ” his fascinated glance had been examining the ceiling, the few pictures on the walls, the cut of her suit, the titles in the nearest bookcase.

  What was it Vollmer had said as he left? “I thought you might best be prepared.”

  Sarah had not slept very much and looked it. She greeted Lieutenant Welk with a flicker of nervousness and, as her own third cup stood noticeably on the table in front of the couch, offered him coffee. Welk interrupted a piercing study of her narcissus shoots to say yes, if it wasn’t a nuisance. She was on her way out to the kitchen when the telephone rang.

  It was unfortunate that it should have been Mr. Eigel, of Daintease, who needed some rush copy for a trade paper ad and insisted upon having his girdle notes read back to him. Sarah tried circumspection, had to abandon it, and wondered rather wildly what the lieutenant was making of all this. She turned her head a little and saw him studying an old hunting print with such concentration that he would certainly have been able to pick up any of those choleric-looking gentlemen, pink coats or not, if he should find them in the neighborhood.

  She was able to hang up at last. Lieutenant Welk, supplied with his coffee, tore himself from Sarah’s book, which he had picked up and commenced reading, and said mildly that they had had a visit from a Dr. Vollmer, Mr. Trafton’s psychiatrist.

  Sarah said nothing. Her heart thudded.

  “Interesting,” said the lieutenant, “and, in a way, satisfactory from our point of view.” He gave her an apologetic glance and got up for another look at the hunting print—to memorize the fox this time? “When a man like Mr. Trafton —in good health, with a good job, nice income, new wife— commits suicide, we presume temporarily unsound mind. That is on your own testimony, and his doctor’s, and his office’s. It’s neater to have it officially endorsed.”

  What was he saying? That Charles’s unsound state of mind had not been temporary at all? Or that a conviction that his wife might be plotting his death was enough to drive any man to temporary insanity?

  Sarah said steadily, “It came as a complete surprise to me. I had urged my husband to go to a psychiatrist, but he never told me that he had.”

  Welk picked up his hat and gazed into it, apparently riveted by the size he must have been wearing for years. “How are you feeling now, Mrs. Trafton? Things settled down a bit?”

  That girdle ad. “I’m doing a little work again, copywriting, which seems to help.”

  “Take a while to get over a shock like that. To come home from a movie and find—” Welk shook his head in mute sympathy, and Sarah could almost have laughed at the transparency of the trap.

  “Not a movie, Lieutenant, a walk.”

  “Oh, a walk, was it?” He was imperturbably interested. “I thought policemen were the only people left in New York who walked.” They both smiled at this droll observation. “Well, thanks very much, Mrs. Trafton.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  Sarah did not immediately look it in the face. She had a fourth cup of coffee, one over her self-imposed limit, and went grimly to work on the trade ad. Mr. Eigel insisted on saying, not very originally, that Daintease girdled the world, but he might possibly be lured away from that by some reference to outer space. The phrase sounded a little unfortunate in connection with girdles, and she sat for a while staring absently at her notes. Formula from Venus? Diana Wore a Daintease . . . ?

  . . . And she was, she always had been, a point for the police to tidy up in Charles’s death.

  “Neater,” Lieutenant Welk had said, with the barest hesitation before the word; obviously it had not been neat enough before. It was equally obvious, now, that they would have thought about Sarah, and asked themselves where she had been during this fatal crisis in her new husband’s life. A walk was such a vague and, the lieutenant’s tone implied, peculiar thing.

  Had he learned in the course of his inquiry that Frank, the elevator operator whom all the tenants liked and shielded from the superintendent’s shrewish wife, was given to slipping around the corner for a quick beer on quiet evenings, leaving the elevator on self-service control? Had he been measuring Sarah for physical strength? Had he noticed that the alcove curtains were new? Of course he had, he noticed everything.

  Sarah put her hands to her closed eyes and rubbed hard, and when she opened them again it was with the feeling of something erased, not permanently, but at least for now.

  By one o’clock she had finished the trade ad and sent for a messenger. She knew perfectly well that her own headline would not appear—Mr. Eigel’s ideas had always been handed down to him on stone—and that the air-brush lettering would say that Daintease girdled the world. As Mr. Eigel was Daintease, it was his privilege.

  When the messenger had quavered off, Sarah went out herself. Her surface goal was lunch, but underneath that was the necessity for getting out of a dangerously closing shell. She walked north on Fifth Avenue, pausing to glance into shop windows, absorbing fragments of faces and moods, knowing herself to be like a very dry house plant. At the corner of Fifth and Thirty-ninth, waiting for a light to change, she met Jess Bertram.

  Jess was a group head at the agency, and looked it. She had a smart, huddled, harried walk, and at the moment she w^as crouched into what fashion magazines were wont to call a Small Fur. Her dark dandelion head was bare—you could get away with that in a Small Fur—and she wore bamboo earrings and gloves that looked like mustard silk. Her opulent black-and-white coloring had always reminded Sarah of a very feminine skunk.

  They knew each other with the false intimacy of women who meet only in conferences and elevators. “Sweetie!” said Jess, narrowing her eyes fondly at Sarah and then peering across the street in search of someone. “How is the bride? You look absolutely . . .” Wisely, she let that dwindle off. “We miss you terribly. They dredged up some journalism-school character for Supersheen and she’s so fearsomely earnest that she’ll have us all back on our ulcer diets yet.” Having raked the opposite street corner, she was now gazing inquisitively at Sarah. This was what Sarah had dreaded, this was the jump that had to be taken at once. “Jess, I’m sorry I didn’t get around to telling people sooner. Charles is—he died in December.”

  But the light had changed at last, and a revving of motors and a chorus of horns drowned out the last of that. “He’s absolutely stunning,” said Jess Bertram, giving Sarah a look of respect. “I saw you both not long ago at that new place in the Village, but you were so wrapped up in each other that I didn’t—” The face she had been waiting for caught her eye and she shrieked a greeting across the street, said hastily to Sarah, “Take care, sweetie,” and was gone.

  Sarah walked numbly away. People like Jess Bertram never waited for explanations, which was perhaps just as well. “That wasn’t my husband, that was his best friend.” Or, “We were actually talking about Charles’s insurance.” Nevertheless, even knowing what it had been—a flight from shock on her part, a quiet Good Samaritan role on Harry Brendan’s—she felt peculiarly appalled.

  She was back at the apartment at a little after two, and in the lobby she met the superintendent’s wife. Mrs. Carminio said anxiously, “What did he say?” and after a few blank inquiries on both sides the question resolved itself.

  Mrs. Carminio’s expert eye had seen through Lieutenant Welk’s civilian clothes, and she had thought him a “higher-up,” someone to check on the sergeant who had come the day before in response to her own report that the basement storeroom had been broken into.

  “Or they tried to break in,” said Mrs. Carminio with a vengeful air. “That’s Mr. Carminio’s night to—his night off, but he had a little touch of the flu and he came back early, and he heard them al
l right. He’s got ears like a hawk. They was gone when he got there, but we can’t have that, not in this building.”

  Sarah went on into the elevator, bemused at the suggestion that Mr. Carminio superintended other buildings in his spare time, and wouldn’t mind their being burgled at all. It must, she thought, be a delicate decision to make. On the heels of that came the reminder that she must, some day, do something about Charles’s things. She called them “things” to herself; she shrank away from the more exact itemizing. But what did people do? Give them to the superintendent? Call up a charitable organization?

  In the apartment, by association, she went to the bedroom closet and took down Charles’s briefcase and opened it.

  It was stamped C.T. in small gold letters. His office had sent it home after, presumably, extracting what was necessary to the firm. There were a number of old letters to and from writers, and there was the handsome engagement book Sarah had given him.

  She had to steel herself to open it, but she needn’t have worried. Although she might have asked Charles to pick up bitters on his way home, or mail one of her letters, or do any other small personal thing, there was no trace of it here. This contained appointments and notes about appointments, and that was all.

  “Photo Herzogs. With cats? Williamson. Mrs. Armstead lunch, new biog. See Henrick.”

  There were a number of notes about Hollister, the bestselling inspirational writer on whose publicity Charles had worked so hard and so late during that last week. Or most of the time; on at least one occasion, the day he had told her he was going to Chicago to see Hollister, he had visited the psychiatrist instead. Sarah’s mind presented her cruelly with the memory of how serene he had been after that, and how soundlessly he had slept—not because of exhaustion, as she had thought, but because he had shifted his burden, and told his tale of terror to someone whose business it was to take terrors apart and show their harmless component parts.

  It was hard to get used to the fact of her name in Vollmer’s full button mouth, the questions he must have asked Charles about her . . . No wonder Charles had given that hard explosive laugh when Sarah had asked him to see a psychiatrist, no wonder he had said, after his fourth cocktail, “Do you know, I think you’re the last person I’d tell?”

  This wouldn’t do, it was only giving new life to the helpless bitterness she had thought was dead. Sarah turned a page as calmly as though she were being watched, and came upon “Lunch, H.” Or was it a careless “K”?

  Harry Brendan? Hunter Gideon? Kate Clemence? It was the first use of an initial she had come upon so far; all the other names had related to business and were meticulously written out—for his secretary’s use, Sarah supposed. Her heart had begun to quicken, because this was the day of Charles’s death.

  She must be mistaken about its being one of them, because no one had said anything about having seen Charles only hours before he died. And it would be instinctive to say it, in exactly that way: “But I saw him only that day, at lunch . . .”

  Someone in the office, then, whom Charles lunched with so frequently that an initial sufficed. Harold, Henry, Karl, or possibly a surname.

  There were three other names below that, or rather two; one had been crossed out. Reeves, and then the indecipherable scoring of black pencil, and then Elliot.

  Reeves. Elliot. Something twitched at Sarah’s memory and then let go. For no good reason she thought of the woman murdered on the mink farm—but her name had been Braceway, and the man who had killed her was someone called Peck. Elliot was often a Christian name, but Reeves . . . betrayingly, her mind began to outfit them with other names and contexts, seen in the street or in newspaper ads. And who was the crossed-out man in between? Not that they mightn’t as easily be women, but Charles had written Mrs. Armstead and, in another place, Miss J. Wing.

  Why was she sitting so transfixedly still, wondering whether the police had seen this particular page in their routine investigation? They must have; they would have wanted to know about Charles’s state of mind that day, and whether there had been any unusual development in that area of his life. And she already knew that they had checked with his office.

  Nevertheless. . . it was not quite three-thirty. Sarah knew as she went to the phone exactly what she was doing: she was trying to get out from under. She wanted to prove, only to herself, that the thing Charles couldn’t face, the thing that had snapped his reason, lay much deeper than the episode on the bluff, and she had been only an unconsciously-furnished scapegoat. An old tragedy, perhaps, in which people named Reeves and Elliot had been equally involved; a scar of some kind that his stepmother’s death, and then the nurse’s, had reawakened. . . .

  She said to the switchboard voice that answered her, “Miss Ehrhardt, please.”

  Charles’s secretary had been with him a number of years and she was, perhaps understandably in view of the circumstances, disposed to be cool to Sarah. She said that Mr. Trafton hadn’t kept any lunch date that day because a conference had been called at shortly before twelve. He had asked her to bring his notes up to the conference room for him and when she left the office he had been dialling a number, presumably to cancel his lunch. He had gone out afterwards, well after one-thirty, but she really couldn’t say. . . .

  Sarah thanked her, and went transparently on. “There seem to be so many people to write, and a lot of details . . . have you an address for Mr. Reeves, or Mr. Elliot?”

  “. . . No,” said Miss Ehrhardt’s hesitating voice, with a frown in it. “I’ve been asked about that, but I really don’t know. We published a Mr. Vernon Chase Elliot years ago, but he’s with another house now and living in Santa Monica. In any case he was before Mr. Trafton’s time, and there hasn’t been any correspondence. I have no record at all of a Mr. Reeves.”

  But it was there in her voice, as it had been in Sarah’s mind: the tiny bothered pause before certainty. Sarah said, “Well, thanks very much,” and her disappointment must have been clear because Miss Ehrhardt, thawing rapidly, said, “I’m sorry I can’t help, Mrs. Trafton. If there’s anything else I can do . . .”

  Sarah had not realized until she hung up how much she had been building on the identification of the two names in the appointment book. With a mind trained to the embroidering of fact, she had even evolved a situation that would have gnawed at Charles years after it happened: a fatal fall, the result of a joke or a dare, by a member of a party that had included Charles and Reeves and Elliot. Or any set of circumstances ending in a tragedy which he might have averted if he had not turned his back on it.

  H, she thought, going back to the lunch date; H, or K. In the face of all her sensible arguments it was still Hunter or Harry or Kate Clemence. On closer inspection, she could see why Kate might have kept quiet about that. If she had been in New York again, and phoned Charles at his office instead of the apartment, it might have seemed a little awkward.

  Hunter needn’t have had any such scruples, nor Harry Brendan. But could Harry have spent that peculiarly indelible time with Sarah without mentioning the fact that he had seen Charles, or at any rate arranged to meet him, earlier that day? Yes, thought Sarah surprisedly, he could. He was a man who kept his own counsel; there was nothing sunny or open about him at all. It was, in fact, hard to conceive the authority to which Harry Brendan would feel obliged to explain anything.

  Again, she had forgotten to thaw the lamb chops. Sarah looked hopelessly at them at five o’clock and, mindful of last night’s frightful meal, went out to the delicatessen on Lexington with a small shopping list. On her way in she opened her mailbox. There was an anxious note from her sister in California, asking her to visit them, three advertisements which she dropped unopened into the wastebasket, and the letter from Bess Gideon which, if she had received it a day earlier or a day later, might have had quite a different effect.

  vi

  THE LETTER was typed, a detail which made Sarah instantly and unfairly suspicious. She typed most of her own letters—she had grown so u
sed to thinking on a typewriter that the only things a pen would write readily for her were a check or a grocery list—but every other communication she had had from Bess Gideon had been in a round backhand.

  As crisply and practically as though Sarah had never written to say that she did not want to sell the farm, Bess offered thirty thousand. True, Charles’s father had paid only twenty-three when he bought it, but in view of all the improvements and the rising real-estate values on the South Shore, she thought thirty was fair. If Sarah would care to speak to her lawyer so that the necessary arrangements could be put in train . . .

  That took care of the first paragraph. In the second, Charles’s gold pocket watch had belonged to four generations of Traftons or Gideons. Of course, if Sarah had a particular attachment, they would all understand.

  New paragraph. Perhaps Sarah remembered that Bess had given Charles her small overnight case some time ago, to have the lock repaired at the shop where Charles had bought it. Bess didn’t know when she might be in New York, but if Sarah would leave the case with the superintendent she could have someone pick it up without troubling Sarah.

  The letter ended with the somehow preposterous suggestion that whenever Sarah happened to be up that way—on one of my periodic trips to Boston to buy a hat, perhaps? wondered Sarah—they would all be so glad to see her.

  It was like a letter to a caretaker, polite but brisk, full of commissions and reminders. Or at least Sarah’s tight nerves saw it that way.

  Her first reaction was to stalk into the bedroom and get the gold watch from the bureau drawer where Charles had kept it, as though Bess Gideon were actually waiting there with her palm outstretched. And here was the overnight case, alligator and very handsome. What tremendous nuisances people could suggest in that offhand way. If Sarah left it with the superintendent and something happened to it—a scratch from one of their Siamese cats, for instance— or if the would-be burglar succeeded on his second try, Bess would hold her responsible until doomsday.