So Dies the Dreamer
must know.”“But I don’t know,” said Charles in a mimicking voice, and looked at her face and sat instantly upright. “Sarah-sweet—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t be silly.” She smiled at him stiffly and consciously, as she might have smiled at some effortful stranger. “It’s just that I’m worried, a little. It can’t be awfully good for anybody to keep dreaming like that, and it’s not, if you follow me, very flattering.”
“It has nothing to do with you,” said Charles sharply, and, after a moment’s total silence, “You’re right. Tell you what, I’ll have a check-up when we get home. It’ll ease your mind if nothing else.”
But he didn’t. When they were settled in the apartment in New York’s East Thirties, he said, “Yes. Tomorrow, remind me,” and Sarah reminded him to the point of naggery, but he always slipped out of any positive appointment.
The nightmares—call them that although it was like calling a hurricane windy—went on, and settled into a dreadful pattern. If he drank a great deal, he slept the night through, but was accordingly edgy in the morning. Three cocktails did it at first, and then three cocktails and wine with dinner; at length a nightcap had to be added, and then increased to two.
On the nights when he didn’t drink, Sarah went shrinkingly to sleep, knowing that she would be waked, and how. No matter how steeled she was, the impact was always just as frightful. It was like standing outside a torture chamber, knowing what must be going on inside, powerless to help.
And Charles changed in other ways.
Sarah had never analyzed her reasons for marrying him, but they were there. By the time she was twenty-two, both her parents were dead. Her only brother had been killed in Korea, her sister was married and living in San Francisco. Inevitably, and with the help of friends in the Connecticut town where she had grown up, she had gone to New York to look for a job.
It was a typist’s job to begin with, and then a secretary’s, and then a secretary’s in an advertising agency. With some talent and a great deal of luck, she had ended up in the copy department. She was well-bred and quick and attractive, an ornament to trot out for clients, and another two years went by before she realized the sterility of this small particular world.
The women she knew were dedicatedly smart, witty, beautifully dressed, intensely clever, and knifingly ambitious. The men she knew were witty, charming, helpful, and married, seldom less than twice. Some of them took her out for cocktails after work, waving a negligent hand at the train their wives would be meeting in the suburbs, before she realized quite what was going on.
Through a fabrics account, she met Charles Trafton. He wasn’t the client but a friend of the client’s, and he came from somewhere on Boston’s South Shore. He was almost apologetically good-looking: narrow lively face, fairish hair, spare nonchalant height. He didn’t speak the sparkling advertising liturgy, and to Sarah, reacting violently from an attachment to an art director who had kept his third wife and four children under wraps, he was a good deed in a naughty world. He was sunny, he was open, he didn’t need to bolster himself up with a lot of fifty-dollar-an-hour complexes. He worked in the New York office of his late uncle’s Boston publishing house, and he had no plans for advancement over the prone bodies of his colleagues.
He said the second time he took her out to dinner, “Do you like pheasants?”
“I’ve only had pheasant once, but then it was— What are you laughing at?”
It took him some time to recover. “I meant live ones, you know, walking around. Tame. I have an aunt who keeps them, and Id like you to meet her.”
So tame himself, or rather, trusting, so blessedly open; all she had to do was say, with becoming modesty, that she would like to meet his aunt, too. Sarah gazed at him through her lashes, realized with irritation that it was a trick she had picked up from her group head, and looked at him honestly.
“What pretty eyes you have,” said Charles Trafton dreamily. “Green. Someone with blue eyes started that business about the green-eyed monster.”
It was really settled then and there, although another five weeks went by before they became engaged. Sarah and Charles drove up to Massachusetts that Saturday to see his aunt, a startling sixtyish woman who looked like a retired actress but was really the widow of a railroad executive. Her name was Bess Gideon, and the wooden legend at the foot of the driveway said “Pheasant Pharm,” which Sarah loyally did not flinch at.
There were other people in the old, expensively restored farmhouse. Bess’s son, Hunter Gideon, was perhaps forty, tall, brusque-faced, sun-reddened; give him a mustache, thought Sarah, and he would look like a television lawman of the early West. By contrast, Bess’s nephew Milo was an owl, plump, secretive, with an air of malicious wisdom. His wife, Evelyn, was dismayingly unsecretive; before ten minutes had gone by she had commenced with energy on a list of her—could it really be sixty-four?—separate allergies.
Sarah, composing her features to the proper blend of fascination and sympathy, gazed back into the busy protuberant blue eyes and had a moment’s faltering. It was true that she was not marrying any of these people, not the lawman nor the owl nor this sandy woman who talked as though her life depended on it, but they were Charles’s background, the only family he had, and he must have been conditioned by them to some extent. Would he expect her to be like Evelyn, for instance, or his rather daunting aunt; would he expect. . . ?
At that all-important moment Charles caught her eye, gave her a very small rueful smile, and turned back to his conversation with Hunter.
And there were the pheasants. Sarah, wrapped up in Charles, bothered by his relatives,