So Dies the Dreamer
serenity was the retreat of a man who does not allow himself to become involved. His openness was, to some extent, emptiness.She didn’t say it to herself in so many words, she didn’t even consciously think it. And who could define the exact point where love turned into fondness and concern? But her nerves knew about it even if she didn’t, and played random tricks on her. Once she thought she saw Harry Brendan coming out of a theater lobby; another time she would have sworn that the tall man turning impatiently away from a piece of sculpture in an Indian exhibit was Hunter Gideon. Milo’s portentous, down-sliding, horn-rimmed glasses occurred on a number of faces glimpsed from the corner of her eye, but when she turned her head the face was always a stranger’s.
And, of course, if any of them had been in New York, he would have gotten in touch with Charles, and Charles would have told her.
Sarah went back to the apartment at a little after nine on a night early in December, and there were men waiting there to tell her that Charles was dead.
iii
HARRY BRENDAN came at once; so did Bess and Hunter and, a tactful day later, Kate Clemence. All of them urged their offices kindly on Sarah, but, apart from the throat-constricting task of asking Harry to pick out clothes for Charles, she handled everything herself, steadily, numbly, not thinking backward or ahead but only of the immediate detail to be settled.
The usual expressions of sympathy were a little awkward, because it was established—although the short newspaper account said “fell or jumped’—that Charles Trafton had committed suicide.
In the way that funerals can, it had at times the air of a very important party. There was the stir and bustle, the inspection of the liquor supply, the disposition of the flowers that came to the apartment—“I think there, don’t you, or is that table too small? Perhaps if we put the roses . . .”
It wasn’t any diminution of grief but a steadying factor, a needed crutch.
Bess Gideon, her handsome face becomingly haggard under her short gray curls, took businesslike charge of everybody’s hats and gloves, for which Sarah was grateful in a dimly amused way. “Kate, give Sarah your hat. It’s frightful on you and it’ll give her a veil without looking like weepers. Perhaps you ought to try Sarah’s on first, but I’m quite sure . . .I’ve two extra pairs of gloves here, and I think long ones, with that coat—”
Kate Clemence slept at the apartment the night before the funeral, apparently on Harry Brendan’s instructions. He said to Sarah flatly, “You can’t be alone,” and when she answered savagely, “I’d rather be,” he looked down the length of the room to where Bess Gideon was frowning over a note she was writing, Hunter was mixing a nightcap for all of them, Kate Clemence was swinging one long narrow foot and making quiet suggestions to Bess.
“Now you would be,” said Harry Brendan. “Later— I’ve been through this, and I know.”
And he was right. When he left a little later, and Bess and Hunter went back to their hotel, and Kate Clemence said to Sarah, “I’m going to run a bath for you. No, stay where you are,” the fact of Charles’s death broke upon her overwhelmingly.
Water rushed in the bathroom, but otherwise the apartment was remorselessly quiet. No one commenting on flowers, no more telegrams to send and none arriving, no one to call; everything that should be done had been done. Now was the time to realize that Charles had come home— at 8:05 p.m., and how official that sounded—and not found Sarah there and, probably, paced up and down for a while before he did what must have been in his mind for some time. Walked to the window in the dining alcove at the end of the living room, opened it, perhaps stood there briefly wondering what kind of welcome he would find in the icy killing space, and put himself—there was no other word for it—out.
He had grasped at the curtain very fleetingly; there was a break in the blue loose-woven cloth and a corresponding thread of blue under one of his fingernails. It wasn’t, said one of the large well-intentioned men Sarah had talked to, an uncommon gesture.
Apart from that, everything had been as meticulously neat as Charles himself. The elevator man remembered that Mr. Trafton had looked a little funny, coming up. He had had a drink; the bottle and glass were still on top of the bookcase in the alcove when the police entered the apartment, and upon the routine analysis the glass contained nothing but bourbon.
Sarah said that yes, her husband had been showing signs of emotional strain. His immediate superior at the publishing house said that Charles had looked “nervy,” and that he had advised him more than once to take a rest or see a doctor. The doctor in the building, looking at the whole affair with hindsight, said shrewdly that while Mr. Trafton had exhibited only a normal nervousness at the time of his only consultation, it was entirely possible that . . . and so forth; while he wasn’t a psychiatrist he had seen similar cases . . . and so on.
There had been no note, but then, thought Sarah somewhere in the reaches of the night, what could Charles have said?
It was all over with surprising speed; the ritual that took so long in the preparing ended with a back-to-work briskness. The limousine that had been driven with such hushed solemnity ripped back into the city at seventy miles an hour. Bess Gideon said as though it were a line from a play, “Sarah dear, come to us. Or is it too soon?” and marred the effect somewhat by asking for the long gloves which nobody had worn.
Kate Clemence looked white and ill, which didn’t surprise Sarah; she had known the moment she saw