So Dies the Dreamer
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