Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books)

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  She stopped. This was certainly not the time to tell him about the wall.

  “Finishing?” he prompted.

  She shook her head. “Just a vague notion, nothing.” Another yawn. “Did I make any noise?”

  “You cried out in your sleep,” Ricky said. He fiddled with the frayed end of his bathrobe belt. “In French.”

  “What?” she said, sure she had misunderstood.

  “I didn’t know you speak French, Dorothea.”

  “I don’t. I mean, I studied French as a schoolgirl, of course, and I used it in some art history courses in college, but I never learned to actually speak. What did I say?”

  “‘Ils vont tuer la loi;’ which translates, I believe, as t‘hey are going to kill the law.’ You spoke in a very agitated tone.”

  “What law?” she said stupidly.

  “No details were mentioned.”

  She gaped at him, blankets hugged to her chest.

  “And then you said, ‘Je n’ose pas prenner leur parts.’ Twice. Which means, ‘I dare not take their side.’”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “No pictures come to mind, no scraps of the dream?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Just as well, perhaps,” he said, sitting back again. The dawn scattered a brightness around the outline of his body. “Sun’s coming up. Shall we have some breakfast?”

  What an odd place Taos was, he reflected, sitting in the dining room of the inn on the southern edge of the town. She had brought him here — “You may as well begin getting the full flavor of the place, see if you can stand it” — for a cup of coffee. His appointment with her doctor had been postponed an hour because of an emergency case. Dorothea was chatting and laughing with the woman at the front counter.

  An odd place, a straggle of low, jumbled architecture, ragged dirt lanes, tumbledown fences and empty fields, all cradled in the great circular arm of the mountains at which he now gazed through the plate-glass window. At the center of the town were a few large, ugly, official-looking buildings, a plaza lined with a covered boardwalk fronting the souvenir shops, and lots of large-windowed galleries along the narrow side-streets. Then more straggle.

  In here, she had led him through a huge dark lobby, a sort of mummy-cave with sinister-looking objects hanging from the age-darkened beams of the ceiling — wrinkled leather saddles, harnesses, and stiff buckskin clothing; dusty Indian baskets, faded blankets, cow skulls, and shriveled, unidentifiable pelts, moccasins shrunk by dryness to fit dolls’ feet.

  Dry country, yet green. The low, bluish sage clung to the broad plain. Files of plumy trees marked the water-courses, and the shoulders of the mountains were dark with forest. It was the elevation, of course, that made the difference between this and the lower, parched country that he had crossed to get here. More plentiful rain must slant through the same dry and sparkling air.

  Two young people in shorts cycled by on the margin of the highway, the boy bent under a sagging knapsack, the girl carrying a bundled sheepskin in her basket. There came a honk of greeting from a pick-up truck trundling in the opposite direction carrying in the back three blonde girls and two black goats.

  So many young people; he had noticed that in town, too. The whole world teemed with them.

  He looked down at his skeletal hands, no longer young. But hungry. He knew he shouldn’t even think of laying these hands on Dorothea, not even in a last grasp at sensual joy. He did not want to claim her for his side, the gray side, the dying side, in this sunny country of the young where she had found herself a haven.

  On the other hand, she was not young herself (nor, to give her her full and honest due, did she pretend in the least that she was). Her silver hair was cut close and cap-like, no discreet curtains falling to hide the frank webbing of wrinkles at her eyes and the corners of her mouth.

  Here she came, leaving her friend who was white-headed herself and sunk into that squarish, squat sort of age that took some people.

  Not Dorothea. She would become slender as a deer, fined down to a ghost before she became a ghost. But I won’t live to see that happen: blessing, or curse? His lips twisted with disgust at his own self-pity.

  “So,” she said, smoothing down the cotton tunic she wore over her blue jeans and settling herself across the low table from him. “Marian says she thinks you look very distinguished, and where did I get you?”

  “What’s so distinguished about a walking bone-rack?” he said.

  “I think Marian is a little jealous,” Dorothea said mischievously.

  “Jealous! What have you been telling her?” Do you read my mind, my silver-headed dear? Lord, how embarrassing…

  “Only that you’re staying with me for a while. She infers more from the sparkle in my eye and the rose in my cheeks, or is that roses, one for each?”

  This has gone far enough, he thought. “Dorothea, I don’t want to make problems by staying with you. It is a small town, after all —”

  “Tut,” she said. “They had their chance to stone me to death when I came and lived here with Nathan. Actually, we’d have to do a hell of a lot more than drive sedately into town for a cup of coffee together to get noticed around here. You forget, if you ever knew it, that this is one of the nation’s major centers for old hippies, and they do their best to uphold the reputation of the breed.”

  “Didn’t think they had those,” he observed. “It’s an oxymoron, isn’t it, an old hippie?”

  “No, it tends to be a pseudo-or-even-really-intellectual drunk, at least around these parts. With beads and feathers and as much hair as they can manage to hang onto.” She made a face. “Sorry, the inn always brings out the worst in me. Something about the place. Did you order our coffees?”

  “Couldn’t. Nobody’s come.”

  She leaned back perilously in her chair and shouted, “Marian! Can’t you send somebody with a couple of cups of coffee for us?”

  There came a hail in return, and Dorothea thumped down the front legs of her chair again.

  “The service in town tends to be amateur and terrible,” she confided. “They hire these kids, very cheap, who’ve come wandering out here for a taste of the high, free life, or the skiing, or whatever. You just have to try to get their attention as best you can.”

  “You know,” he said, “I didn’t come for the place. I came for you. I might as well tell you. I could easily have lived and died without seeing Taos and its old hippies and its young ones, but I had a compulsion to come and see you while I still could.”

  She said quietly, “I’m glad you did.”

  “You were smiling, and I made you stop.”

  “The hell you did,” she sighed, looking past him at the doorway. “George did, and, damn it, here he comes to do it some more.”

  Ricky turned to see a tall fellow in a three-piece brown corduroy suit and cowboy boots, wild brown hair frizzing electrically in the air, come loping down on them with a wave and a grin. Dorothea put on a soberly pleasant face but did not smile. Ricky thought of all the women he’d known to smile automatically when a man, any man, approached. It seemed suddenly not charm or courtesy in them but weakness and manipulation.

  “George, this is Ricky Maulders, an old friend,” Dorothea said. “Ricky, George Willis.”

  Ricky shook hands and sat back, already not liking George.

  George snagged a spare chair from the neighboring table and swung it round so that he sat spraddle-legged facing them, his arms folded across the top of the chair-back.

  “Have you heard?” he said. “They’ve thrown Rankovitch in jail. Well, dumped him in a psychiatric hospital with a ‘breakdown,’ which is the same thing.” George rushed on, full of outrage, pausing only when a blond boy with a sleepy look ambled over to take their order, at last.

  Ricky took advantage of the gap. “Excuse me, but are you speaking of Yuri Rankovitch, the pianist? Hasn’t he scheduled a tour of Canada and the United States next winter?”

  �
�Exactly!” cried George, giving the table a thump. “And we’d arranged for him to come out here as a special engagement and play at our New Western Music Festival afterwards.” And so on — much enthusiastic verbiage about the festival, the benefits Rankovitch would have contributed and gained in return, the loss his absence represented. But George had an idea. George wanted to dedicate the festival to Rankovitch and to oppressed artists everywhere.

  Clever George. What a puffed up ass, Ricky thought. How does Dorothea stand him? But of course it was obvious: this was probably one of Nathan’s acquisitions, just the sort of hanger-on that he used to attract, and now Dorothea was too polite to tell him to buzz off and leave her alone.

  But not too polite to deal with him, Ricky was pleased to note. “You want something from me, George,” she said. “What is it?”

  George grinned engagingly. Spoilt by his mother, no doubt, thinks his charm makes the world go round. Ricky wished he had insisted on waiting at the doctor’s office after all.

  “You’re way ahead of me, Dorothea,” George admitted ruefully, “as usual. I’d like something only you can give me: a picture for our posters, our program cover, all our publicity. One real knock-out of a picture for a knock-out, nation-wide campaign.”

  Dorothea looked taken aback. “But George, you know I’m not political. I don’t do protest art. Why not try Ernest Stimme, or some up-and-coming young Indian or Spanish painter who could use the boost?”

  “Because their stuff wouldn’t pack the punch that yours would,” George said. “Face it, Dorothea: the retrospective show in New York has made you, well, a leading figure, like it or not. And you are an artist who’s part of a sort of oppressed population. The feminist slant would mean something.”

  “Um,” Dorothea said drily, “happy housewife who left her family for art, led a wild Bohemian life, and now lives in the wilderness heroically gives up her hard-won peace and quiet to come to the support of the Rankoviches of this world. Inspiring.”

  “Your don’t have to be so negative,” George said plaintively. “What do you think, Rick? Doesn’t Dorothea owe it to her own career, if nothing else, to get in on this? I’m talking about nation-wide publicity, tremendous exposure for a piece of her work.”

  “Very valuable, I’m sure,” Ricky said, “to someone who wants it.”

  “I am not in the message business,” Dorothea said. “Matter of fact, I’m not in the picture business any more. I don’t have anything to offer you.”

  “Yes you do. I’ve seen it.”

  To Ricky’s astonishment and alarm, Dorothea blanched.

  The odious young man pressed on, oblivious, “One time when I was out at your old place to talk to Nathan, this was just a little while before you two broke up, I saw some pictures tacked up in there — drawings, ink and wash I think, I’m not sure now, a series: cliffs and stones and light, a few gnarly trees. Simple, powerful stuff, a perfect statement about the toughness of creativity under pressure.”

  Dorothea laughed. Ricky felt relieved for her. Whatever the threat was, it had not materialized. He hugged to himself the pleasure of knowing there was some sort of secret, and that it was for the moment safe from George.

  “What you saw was old work, trivial work,” she said with a shrug of dismissal.

  The coffee came. George waited out the waiter.

  Ricky saw George take a breath for a renewed attack and thought, why am I so angry? Jealousy. I’ve come all this way, and there is only so much time, and here is this oaf crashing our private party. She is beautiful, my fox-faced friend, she is self-possessed and patient and alert, and everyone wants their piece. I’ve got my bit — the cheek of it, landing myself on her like this! — why grudge this twit a try for his? Especially when he’s doing so damned badly. You don’t want to let yourself turn possessive, old boy, not when you’re within hailing distance of having to surrender the lot.

  They wrangled on, but Ricky didn’t listen. Dorothea could hold her own. She didn’t need his creaking defense of her.

  To his delight, as he gazed out the window, a rider came galloping up the shoulder of the highway outside, a young man on a buckskin horse. He wore overalls, a t-shirt, and an open-backed billed cap, and in his free hand he carried a coiled lariat. Ricky felt as if a breeze from a wilder, simpler time had brown briskly through his thoughts.

  If he turns from the window, she thought in terror, I’ll see his face.

  She floated in a miasma of dread that indeed the figure at the window would turn, a warm glow of lamplight shifting among the folds of his black gown and then falling along jaw and brow and the rise of his cheek.

  Some huge effort on her part, rooted in the knowledge that to continue this thought was to bring it into being, shook through her with the sensation of a silent explosion. She was conscious of being without form in the sense that this man at the window had form, although she felt physically housed in some minimal way. Her senses functioned well enough. She heard voices, shouting, and clattering footsteps.

  She was at the window herself now, right beside him, not daring to turn her head for fear of seeing his face.

  Down below the crowd moved along Sixth Avenue. She saw rapid shifts and the bob of colorful bits of clothing. It wasn’t exactly Sixth Avenue because the buildings were of stone and not very large, and there was a hollow sound of wooden shoes on cobbles. In the middle of this thoroughfare, which seemed to have no sidewalks, some sort of clumsy cart was stuck while traffic honked around it.

  Behind her a voice — a young voice, the voice of her daughter Claire — said scornfully, “You have already fallen.”

  The one beside her, whose confusion of anger and hurt she sensed as if it were her own, stirred, about to turn. His dark sleeve brushed her somewhere as if on the bare skin of her elbow.

  Tearing herself free in a panic, she fled into the sky, struggling to fly higher, faster, to soar free, but feeling the her strength fade.

  She woke drenched and panting. Her nightgown clung coldly to her back as she sat up and groped shakily for the bedside lamp-switch.

  Safe in light, she sat hugging her knees and trying to calm her heart. She went over and over the dream in her mind, tasting each time a more faded echo of the terror, a more tolerable fear. She was too old to start upright in a sweat of horror in her bed at three in the morning!

  What, after all, was she so afraid of in the dream? An ugly face? Something scarred, modeled on news photos glimpsed before she could get the page safely turned?

  And what in the world was Claire doing in her dream? After today’s conversation she could have understood an appearance by George, come to badger her even in her sleep, but Claire? Hadn’t spoken to her in weeks.

  Never mind, it’s only a dream, remember? Claire is firmly embedded in her own life, her own dreams, and here you sit safe in your own home, your dogs snoozing in the kitchen, your old friend asleep in the guest room.

  On the other hand, best, maybe, not to try to go back to sleep at once. She got up, threw on her robe, and wrote down the details she could remember from the dream.

  Only that morning Ricky had asked her, oh so diffidently, whether she would consider letting him look over some of her dream-notes on the off chance that he might be able to help. An outsider with a fresh viewpoint might be able to shed light on what was happening to her.

  She was touched that he had offered her his time this way, his most precious possession: to throw it away on her nightmares seemed an act of generosity bordering on profligate madness. Why in the world should she allow him to involve himself in this?

  Well, because he had asked, of course, and because without asking he had in a way already involved himself. Now and again, since that first night when he had been summoned to her bedroom by her outcries in French, he would keep a vigil by her bed at night. Nothing formal, nothing acknowledged openly by either of them; but she had wakened several times now to find him sitting on the big blanket-chest by the window, just sitting in the d
ark, breathing softly, sometimes rubbing nervously at the nape of his neck, with a faint dry sound of skin on skin.

  To avoid embarrassing him or herself she had said nothing and given no sign of having noticed. But she was moved by his watchfulness, and his silent companionship made it easier for her to get back to sleep.

  Now, casting over the accumulation of her night-time scribbles, she felt embarrassed and foolish to have agreed to let him read her notes. And a little bit afraid.

  One thing was clear. It was always, in its essentials at any rate, the same damned dream.

  Here was her first account of it, which now seemed to her curiously naive and chilling at the same time.

  I’m watching a little scene. A man sits writing at a desk, wearing a dark sort of gown with a frilly white tie or something at the neck. A parade goes by in the street below — but it’s not a parade, it’s a noisy crowd, as if at some kind of holiday celebration. A face appears at the window in front of the desk, which is impossible because the window is, I realize, two storeys up. The writer looks up, opens the window, and I see through his eyes that the greenish face with its gaping jaw is a human head fixed on a pole, one of several carried by the baying mob below. The people are looking up; they want something from him. If he doesn’t respond, he is in danger. He throws something out to the cheering mob, who are now in uniform, like soldiers of some kind, but very old-fashioned. I see suddenly that he’s throwing his own inner organs, his guts, just scooping them out and heaving them down to the delighted crowd. Then I look down, and it’s my own fingers that are red and slick.

  Lovely.

  Lying again in the dark and seeking sleep, she took refuge in thoughts of the wall. I miss it, she thought. I should be working, my mind is all at loose ends, restless, for want of occupation for my hands. No wonder I dream.