So Dies the Dreamer
at the woman waiting for a taxi, and said incredulously, “Kate!”Kate Clemence, oddly diminished in tweeds, with pearls at her ears and a gray felt flowerpot that she kept giving vain little pushes to, seemed equally surprised to see Sarah. She said she was in town to do some shopping, was staying at a friend’s apartment, and hadn’t gotten in touch with Sarah and Charles because they wouldn’t want to be bothered by callers so soon. Sarah looked wonderful, and she needn’t ask how Charles was.
Nevertheless her large calm gaze did ask, and Sarah said instinctively, “Oh—fine, but he’ll never forgive me if I let you get away. You’ll have dinner with us tonight, won’t you, Kate?”
She was already casting ahead to the difficulties of that, the tenseness in Charles, the too-many cocktails, when Kate Clemence said firmly, with thanks, that she couldn’t. She had undertaken to meet her friend’s visiting aunt at Grand Central, and dinner had been all planned somewhere, but she had time for a cup of tea if Sarah had.
Over the tea, Kate said, “Are you coming up for Thanksgiving? Bess had an idea you might, and I know she’s looking forward.”
“We’d love to,” said Sarah, “but unfortunately . . .”
She launched into a long effortful lie, because that was something else new in Charles—his withdrawal from people and places he had always been fond of. Only a week ago, when he had come home from his office paler and tenser than usual, Sarah had suggested a weekend at the farm. Instinct made her hesitant when he was in this mood, but she was totally unprepared for his brilliant, gradually-focussing stare, the mocking twist of his mouth. “Now that’s a thought. So,” said Charles, dropping ice cubes into a glass and splashing bourbon, “is this. Here’s how.” And now it was the drink that held his stare. “Here’s how . . .”
He didn’t even want to see Harry Brendan. Under other circumstances it might have been flattering; as things were, it added one more depth to Sarah’s worry.
“Oh, what a shame,” said Kate sympathetically when the tale of business commitments was finished, but as her clear gaze never altered by a hair it was impossible to know whether she believed the lie or not. “By the way, tell Charles, in case Bess hasn’t written yet, that they’ve caught the man who killed the nurse. He’d been fired from the mink farm a few days before, and apparently he’d been holed up in a hut on the property, drinking steadily, ever since. Heaven knows what he was planning, but they think he mistook the woman for somebody else.”
Sarah told Charles that night. His gaze turned intense, first on her and then on the rug. “Peck, was it?”
“Kate didn’t mention his name, just that he’d worked on the mink farm. She said you’d know.”
“Peck,” repeated Charles with the barest of sighs. “My God, poor Peck. He’s been panhandling and odd-jobbing around the town for years, just because he’s got a face he can’t help. I suppose that kind of thing comes to a head some day—” He rubbed his eyes with a kind of relieved violence. The news seemed to have sobered him, although he had never mentioned the nurse’s death to Sarah after that first day at the pheasant pens. He had a weak highball after dinner, took his tablet without the usual mockery, and slept all night without stirring.
So that was it. Something to do with Charles’s deep fondness for his stepmother, and shock at the tragedy that had overtaken the nurse who had seen her through her final illness—Sarah was too relieved to try and reason it out beyond that.
The mood of peace lasted for two days.
On a snowy late-November night, the apartment deceptively tranquil and flowery with light, Sarah said quietly, “Charles, you seem to be able to stand this, but I can’t. I know you won’t tell me what it’s all about, but will you see a psychiatrist?”
It was the last thing she had ever expected to say to the clear open man she had married, and Charles found it equally bitter. He didn’t turn from the window where he stood staring down into the street; he said with a short angry laugh, “Get thee to a nuttery?”
“Oh, stop that,” said Sarah, holding her voice and her despair on a perilously short leash. “Go talk to some competent man—that’s what they’re there for—for my sake if not for your own. I can’t—”
The leash snapped suddenly under weeks of strain and she turned away, blinded by tears. She would have liked to walk out of the apartment, coatless, hatless, into the bitter wind and snow; she would have gotten some release from inflicting on her body a little of the battering that her mind was taking. But Charles said her name beseechingly, and when she turned back and looked at his face she would not have dared to go out now and leave him alone.
Neither of them mentioned a psychiatrist again. In the week that followed, salvation came from an unexpected source. Charles’s publishing house was putting on a publicity campaign for a new book of pseudo-spiritual counsel— “A collapsible halo comes with it,” said Charles—and he stayed late at his office, working. Exhaustion did what neither the sedative nor the liquor had been able to do; that and the new, if temporary, preoccupation. He slept for fewer hours, but he slept soundly. He went to Chicago to see the author and came back looking more cheerful than he had in days.
Sarah was accordingly alone a good deal. She fell into the habit of having her own dinner early and then, because Charles would not be home until nine o’clock or so, going out to an early movie or any exhibition that was open or just for a walk.
She had come to the shocking realization, on that last bad evening, that Charles was and always had been weak; that his air of cloudless