The Dream Walker

by Charlotte Armstrong

  I said it was plain burglary, which, after all, is a crime. But Cora only wrung her hands and said she couldn’t fuss. That would only make it worse.

  So, on January 6, Mildred ran a whole column about Cora and her dreams of being elsewhere and the strange “fact” that people did indeed see her elsewhere, although she was here. Mildred invented the phrase The Dream Walker.

  Well, Josephine Grain was fit to be tied. Angelo Monti was also annoyed. They were above suspicion. Their annoyance and reluctance rang very true. It helped a lot.

  The story was not exactly believed, of course. It was discussed. People got into arguments over such things as the relation between a supernatural manifestation and a time zone. These, however, were people in show business, a flamboyant few. Not the general public.

  Yet Ned Dancer, no theatrical gossip columnist, he, was quietly asking some searching questions.

  From this time forth (although we didn’t know it) Cora was carefully watched. Mildred had permanently bribed the maid to look at her mail and listen to her conversations. Ned Dancer had bribed the switchboard operator downstairs to listen in on her phone calls. But nothing suspicious came in the mail or turned up in her conversations or transpired on the telephone. Kent Shaw was smart when he cut off communication.

  Now he had dropped out; he’d washed his hands of the whole thing. He didn’t come around anymore.

  “If this is a stunt,” Mildred said to me, “it’s a dilly, is all I can say.”

  Cora wasn’t ill, of course, and if her nerves twitched she bore up well. With callers who wanted to be told all about this business, Cora was terse, tense, and subdued. With me alone, she didn’t discuss it at all. We were a pair of old acquaintances who had our secrets and were at once a little hostile and a little relaxed together.

  On January 9, she rehearsed and performed in a radio drama, going about, her business as usual. So I went home. Cora didn’t need her hand held. Or, if she did, Charley Ives was underfoot enough, hanging around, big and rather taciturn, watching us both, and suffering Cora to tease and command him. I pleaded my job. I was glad to get away.

  But I was disconcerted when my girls began to ask me questions. “Miss Hudson,” one said, “if you tell us all those statements are accurate, we’ll have to believe them.”

  “They are accurate, as far as they go,” I said, “but of course there is a great deal that’s unknown.”

  “Miss Reynolds says it’s a publicity gag.”

  “It may be,” I said and kept smiling.

  “And that it’s cheap and dishonest.”

  They waited for my judgment to be pronounced. I said, “A publicity stunt may get an actress noticed. It can’t make her a better actress. Only work can do that.” (Always the teacher.)

  “Cora Steffani must be pretty good,” one said didactically, “or else you would see she was faking. Maybe you do, Miss Hudson.”

  Those kids can really get you into a corner. “I don’t easily accept the supernatural,” I said. “Let’s leave it at that.”

  But then, of course, one brought up extrasensory perception. And another spoke solemnly of one’s duty to keep an open mind.

  I had to say that we weren’t there to decide between such alternatives and could not, without more knowledge. I reminded them that what you kept your mind open for was not idle amazement, but more knowledge. “Don’t open your minds so wide that they hold nothing,” I told them severely. “And don’t be sheep, either.”

  “We aren’t sheep,” one said.

  “Then why is every girl in this room wearing her hair short and brushed upward all around her head?”

  “Because you do, Miss Hudson,” one said sheepishly.

  “Then I’m a poor teacher,” I said.

  Next day their heads were riotously different, each from the others. Oh, I suppose it’s a backwater, it’s unimportant, this work of mine. I did enjoy them, my innocent imps, my frivolous angels, my worried ones, my sly ones, and the few with shining eyes.

  Chapter Five

  The fifteenth of January was Marcus’ birthday. We flew down that morning. I wouldn’t let Charley Ives call for me but it seemed perverse of him to make the airport at the last minute. As we went aboard, bearing gifts, Charley said if he’d thought of it he’d have brought me an orchid.

  “You are thoughtful,” I said, “but since I think an orchid is a floozy, it’s just as well.”

  He said that, offhand, he couldn’t think of an intellectual-type flower. Could I? I flounced onto that plane. I had plenty of physical room in my seat, next the window, but Charley filled that plane, of course. I felt barricaded by his body from all the near world and on my other side the world fell far. I watched the city go by under and then there was New Jersey. “I’m going to doze,” I said firmly and wedged the little pillow under my neck.

  “Cousin Ollie,” said Charley. I was wide awake. “A question will have to be asked. I don’t want to fight, mind you. But what do I do, that you haven’t any patience with me?”

  I said, “Nothing.” A look of long-suffering came upon his face. “I mean that,” I said indignantly. “What do you do for a living?”

  “For a living?” he drawled. “Why, nothing much.”

  “So I’ve seen,” said I. My heart was pounding. I didn’t want to fight.

  “Where did you get this Puritan idea?” asked Charley after about a hundred miles of earth had turned and put itself behind us.

  “I’m no Puritan.”

  “About work. Work, for the night is coming.”

  I got it from you, I thought, outraged. But I said wearily, “I suppose I’ve found out there’s no other way to be even moderately happy.”

  Charley said, after pondering, “You may be right, Teacher.” Then he grinned down, the maddening way he does. “You mean to say, whenever I got up the nerve to ask you this, you’d have answered?”

  “Let’s not have questions and answers, please. Teacher’s tired.”

  “Doze,” he said. “Doze, by all means.”

  I couldn’t even shut my eyes.

  “If you made a promise,” Charley said to the plane’s ceiling, “you wouldn’t break it.”

  “Not if I could help it.”

  “Hard work and high principles,” he muttered. “All this and Art, too.”

  Now I shut my eyes tight because they were stinging with the start of tears. “You make me sound like a prig,” I said. “All right. Maybe I am.”

  “There are those who would say so,” said Charley Ives, and I had a distinct vision of Cora Steffani’s mocking face.

  “Have you promised to marry Cora again?” I said loudly, to my dismay.

  “Uh uh,” said Charley. His eyes flashed blue.

  “Why not?” I cried idiotically.

  “Now, really,” drawled Charley with an eyebrow cocked.

  “Sorry,” I said, looking out at New Jersey or whatever it was. “Just vulgar human curiosity.”

  Charley was as quiet as a mouse. After a while he stirred in the seat. “You’ve got everything hindside forward,” he began. “You always had.”

  “Charley,” I said in something like panic, “truly, I can’t be your confidante.”

  In a moment he asked, “Why? Are you Cora’s? Just in a spirit of vulgar human curiosity, has Cora told you this trance business is a fake?”

  “No. She has not.” I was all prepared to be a little bit hurt.

  “Nor me either,” said Charley. “But, Ollie, you know it’s got to be.”

  I looked at him and sighed. We both smiled. “She’d do it,” he said, “just for the hell of it.”

  “I know. But how can she be working it?”

  “Beats me.”

  “She’d have to have a double,” said I. “They could have figured that Jo Crain would be on that beach. But I can’t understand that Chicago business.” (We didn’t know about Mr. Gallo at this point.) “How could they figure out that one?”

  “Couldn’t,” said
Charley, “without signals. What signal is instantaneous over a thousand miles?”

  “The common ordinary household telephone, for one.”

  “True. True. But there was no phone call. Was there?”

  “Not that I know.”

  “She may go on with it and pull another one.”

  “No telling when or where, either,” I said.

  “Well, I suppose the sky’s not going to fall if Cora gets a little newspaper space.”

  “It isn’t hurting anyone,” I agreed, just as ignorantly.

  “Interesting character, my ex,” said Charley lazily.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Do you like rascals, Ollie?”

  “Some.”

  “Energetic ones, eh?”

  I looked out the window.

  “I expect you wouldn’t hurt anyone,” Charley said after a while. “Scruples, you’d have.” I stiffened. “But don’t you ever get tangled up among your principles?” he teased me. “Loyally, you come when Cora calls. Although you’re pretty sure she is a fraud.”

  I started to say, I came when you called. “We’ve known each other a million years,” I said instead. “Once, we were young—”

  “Poor … old … thing,” said Charley softly.

  “Charley, my boy,” I said, “will you please not needle me all the way to Washington? I knew I shouldn’t have got on this plane with you.”

  “I’m just a grasshopper, trying to get along with an ant,” said Charley cheerfully. “Though it seems to me, once it was the other way around.”

  “It never,” I began indignantly. Then he kissed me. “What—!” I sputtered.

  “Go to sleep,” said Charley Ives. “Improve the shining hour.” He settled back, looking pleased with himself.

  I rode the rest of the way with my eyes closed but my mind was frantically trying to figure out what promise he had made to whom, and if not to Cora, then why did he let her act as if she owned him? Isn’t it a strange thing that you can get to be thirty-four years old and presumably mature, and still catch your mind carrying on as if it were in high school? I was consumed with vulgar curiosity. I couldn’t ask.

  When we got to Marcus’ big, gracious, and delightfully shabby house, the clan had gathered, sure enough. Charley promptly disappeared. Since he fills a room, the big lug, by the same token when he isn’t there he leaves an awful space. He didn’t turn up again until dinner time and he didn’t explain. Marcus seemed to know where he had been. But then Marcus seems, sometimes, to know everything.

  God bless him, dear Marcus. He’s not a large person physically. He is rather slight and rather small. Whatever his features were when he was young, handsome or otherwise, by now, in the years of his life, he has carved his own face. And it is beautiful. I suppose that’s true. Every thought and every feeling that seems to run through the brain and the body so swiftly and briefly still leaves the mark of its passing. Just as water drops that have long reached and disappeared in the sea, each and all made the riverbed through which they came. It’s a terrible true thing.

  It did you good to look at Marcus. His face was his biography.

  He was pleased with the gaudy brace of thrillers I’d brought. He said only Charley catered to his sneaking passion for blood and detection. “Charley!” I was surprised. “Tries to keep me supplied,” Marcus said, “but it’s peanut reading. You can’t stop till they’re all gone.”

  Marcus isn’t grim. He’s easy. He’s tucked into life as if he enjoys it, just as it is. So, while Marcus can talk to you about any subject at all, still, when you are with him—I don’t know—the wind blows wider.

  The puzzling business of a woman who seemed to be able to be two places at once fell out of my consciousness until Charley Ives, after dinner, chose to tell about it. The company (oh, there was Charley’s mother, Virginia Ives, and his sister, Joanna, and Sally Davies, Charley’s first cousin, and her husband, Sig Rudolf, and my parents, Millicent and George, and Charley’s brother, J.P.; and there was the help, Johnny Cunneen, Marcus’ secretary, and the little sub-secretary, Ruthie Miller, and his stately housekeeper, Mrs. Doone) all of them, it seemed to me, began to argue.

  Those who scoffed and wanted to dismiss an unimportant bit of nonsense met a stern demand for a reasonable explanation. Whoever tentatively got wistful about ghosts ran into hard-headed laughter. That was the way it worked, of course.

  Marcus himself said little. He did say that if it was a trick, it must have been planned for a long time and it must cost something (money and brains). “Is publicity of that kind worth so much, Ollie?”

  “I can’t see that it is, Uncle John.”

  (But of course Marcus sees clearly. Money, brains, and a purpose. Yet nobody, not even he, could have guessed, in January, what the purpose was.)

  Sally and Sig Rudolf flew back with us and she bent my ear all the way with what she calls problems. They dropped me at my apartment. Marcus was safely seventy-six, and it had been a good day.

  I suspect I ramble. The plot. The plotters.

  I suppose Raymond Pankerman, seeing Mildred’s column, was gratified as the plot sprang to life. Cora was probably hugging herself with wicked joy. Kent Shaw, however, must have been devastated by anxiety.

  Who was the stranger who thought he recognized Darlene? And had he recognized Darlene? Or Cora? It made a difference. If he recognized Cora (and Darlene got away) well and good. But, in either case, if Darlene hadn’t got away, then there was someone who had seen too clearly into the hocus-pocus backstage. Kent Shaw, that dark, bitter, driving little man, exiled by his own cold cleverness from the middle of the excitement, hard-headedly keeping away—how he must have suffered! For Darlene, who could have communicated (since they had a device arranged for an emergency) did not.

  Darlene, in fact, was having a difficult time. This Edward Jones had conceived the perfectly sound idea that Darlene had tried to brush him off. But, stubborn and perverse as he was, hard-to-get meant had-to-get to him. And Darlene knew, even better than Kent Shaw knew yet, that Ed Jones certainly could blow up the machinery of the trick anytime he chose. So she knew it had been a mistake—it wouldn’t be smart at all to brush him off.

  She let him follow her to the ranch in Texas where she was taking another of those “vacations.” In fact, she teased him and tried to keep him near. She was worried. It was all right, so far, because he hadn’t seen Mildred’s column, not being interested in her kind of gossip, and no discussing was being done in Texas. Yet. But Darlene knew that if all went as planned, there would soon be pictures, pictures of Cora Steffani. What could prevent Ed Jones from popping up to say not only that he knew the same nose on another woman’s face, but that he knew it was the other woman, Darlene Hite, who had been in a tavern in Chicago, saying she was Cora Steffani.

  Darlene finally made a decision on her own. She was forced to do so. The third incident nearly ran them into disaster.

  Chapter Six

  Kent Shaw was really clever. I had already heard some people say that it seemed significant, how Cora dreamed in a crowd. “Makes sure she has an audience, doesn’t she?” some said.

  So when she dreamed and walked in the dream for the third time, she dreamed in quite different circumstances.

  This was not solely for variety’s sake. This time it was a wild throw. The risk of failure was great. Even with success, the timing could not be exact. It had to be left somewhat vague so that there would be a safe margin. Therefore, this time no tape recorder and no shorthand could be allowed and no witness, either, who would have any idea what was supposed to be happening. The two witnesses were unimpeachable, just the same. A cabdriver drawn from the traffic’s grab bag, and a cop who happened to be by.

  Two solid citizens, then, who thought they had a fainting woman on their hands. Who exchanged glances when Cora sat up suddenly in the cab, early in the afternoon of February 10, took paper from her purse, and began to scribble on it.

  The driver had gone to t
he curb and hailed the cop. The cop had opened the cab’s door. They wanted name, address, and diagnosis. Scribbling they couldn’t wait for.

  “Lady,” the cop said, “if you’re okay, the driver will take you home. If you want a doctor … Lady … Listen, ma’am …”

  “Don’t speak,” cried Cora, scribbling.

  “Don’t get mad,” the driver said. “You was out. So what was it? A fit or something? Hey, lady!”

  Cora, of course, stopped her scribbling exactly when she chose to stop. The cab took her home. She called me. The maid heard her and called Mildred Garrick. The operator downstairs called Ned Dancer. I called Charley Ives because Cora asked me to.

  So there we were.

  Cora was still huddled in her camel’s hair topcoat. “Happened again and it’s gone,” she told us. “It’s lost. I tried to write it all down but they were so impatient. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s just as well. Only I’d rather know.” She seemed to be in a state. While Charley comforted her, I took the piece of paper. She’d scribbled on the back of an old script and the writing was big and agitated.

  “Snow,” I read. “Everything white. Cold. Galoshes, Blue ski suit. Mittens and cap. Wild country. Empty. Man on the path. Bundled up. Dark clothes. White hair. Long, long jaw. Gray eyes. Said, ‘Is there anything at all I can do for you?’ Irish. I said, ‘I’m lost. When did it snow? Which way is New York?’ He pointed. I ran. Slipping in snow. Trees. A mountain. Voice calling after me.…”

  “That’s all there is,” I said. I sorted out those disjointed words and made a scene of them in my mind.

  “What did the voice call?” Charley wanted to know. I thought his question was an odd choice out of all the possible questions.

  Cora just shook her head and wailed. “I’ve told you and told you how it fades.”

  “Where did this happen?” asked Mildred.

  “I took a cab down from NBC. I must have passed out. I don’t know where.”

  “When?” Ned Dancer demanded.