So Dies the Dreamer
white shirt and dungarees, who had “often helped Bess doctor an ailing cock,” who had been in love with Charles. It was right, it was eminently proper. Kate had known all those people for years and would know exactly what to do with the pheasants and the bantams. Sarah ripped a nightgown ad from her typewriter and wrote back, shortly and unequivocally, that she didn’t want to sell the farm.And there, apparently, it rested. Bess Gideon did not write again. The days somehow turned themselves into next-days, and certainly no writer for Daintease had ever put more passionate energy into the account.
But at night, unavoidably, Sarah had to walk through the dining alcove into the kitchen. That end of the room changed every night after dark, in spite of the fact that she had bought new fabric for the window, a rough red sailcloth Charles had never seen, and didn’t bear the imprint of his last unavailing impulse. But the view was the same: the high windows opposite, the topplingly foreshortened ground-floor apartments, the hats with shoes striking out from under them as people passed on the pavement below.
Sarah paused there one night with a curious forcing of muscles, and made herself press her forehead against the cold glass pane. She did not dare open the window to step deeper into Charles’s mind. Grief had long since gone, to be replaced by pity and a piercing wonder. How could he . . . why had he?
She had thought uncertainty was frightful, but under that, unadmitted, was the notion that the truth might not be possible to live with. Suppose, for instance, that an understanding word or glance, an interview with someone, would have drawn Charles back from that killing plunge? Suppose she had had the strength to pretend that those frightful sounds had not waked and tormented her, that they were a passing thing, and dismissed them accordingly; might Charles then had dismissed the cause of them, too?
She found out early in January that she could not have hit upon anything more ironic.
iv
IT WAS A woman who called her. Even before the emphasized “Mrs. Charles Trafton?” and the more distant, “I have Mrs. Trafton for you,” Sarah’s ear had identified her as a trained intermediary. Someone from the publishing house? Something to do about Charles’s estate?
It turned out to be a Dr. Jonas Vollmer, a psychiatrist whom Charles had consulted on three separate visits.
Sarah took the receiver away from her ear and looked astoundedly at it as though she expected to see Dr. Vollmer, bearded and meditative, peering out of it. She put the receiver back, and said tentatively, “I wasn’t aware that my husband had seen a psychiatrist. Are you sure you have the right. . . ?”
He sounded taken aback himself. “Sarah Trafton, nee— here we are—Fitzpatrick? Married to Charles Andrew Trafton on October nineteenth of last year in St. Anselm’s Church? Let me see, first visit on November—”
Sarah lost the date, and the two subsequent dates, in the somehow stunning surprise that Charles, whom she had urged to see a psychiatrist, had done so without telling her. Perhaps he had wanted to come to her with results, and three visits, she knew from a number of people at the agency, were hardly sufficient for recounting the people who had slighted you in infancy. Or was this something about a bill, overlooked in the general confusion?
She said, “Yes, I see,” still trying to recover herself. “I don’t know whether you’re aware that my husband . . .?** It was so hard to say, but he was expertly ahead of her. “Yes, Mrs. Trafton. Very sad. Very,” there was a rustling of papers, “unnecessary, I’m sure. I only learned of this development on my return from an extended trip abroad, and I may say that on the basis of what I learned from Mr. Trafton I am—dismayed.”
There was a profound pause. Sarah pondered with amazement the word “development”; surely, even to a student of the mind, it was more than that? Dr. Vollmer said, “It occurred to me that you might care to see me,” and Sarah said, “I certainly would, Doctor. When?”
He quoted her address at her, said that he lived only a few blocks north, and that if she would have a few minutes free at six o’clock he would call on her then. Sarah hung up, her stomach fluttering, her nerves in a tangle. Did psychiatrists make it a habit to drop around and visit the—what was the word—relict? She had never had any experience of them, but she didn’t think so. And the measured gravity, the caution . . . of course, it was hardly a feather in a psychiatrist’s cap to have a new patient commit suicide.
Nervously, she tidied up the apartment. He would undoubtedly think it meaningful that she was writing copy for feminine undergarments after her husband’s death, so she covered her typewriter, folded the wings of the table, and pushed it into a corner. There was probably something equally significant in putting freesias in a low silver gravy bowl, but she refused to move that. Lastly, she looked at herself, six pounds lighter, face so much paler and thinner that only her peaked dark brows and green gaze stood out of it. Of course, lipstick; she put that on and regained a little self-possession.
Would he have a drink, or, if offered liquor, think that that she had lured Charles into alcoholism? If she offered him tea, would he think she had driven Charles into alcoholism by default? If she offered him nothing, would he find her hostile, negative, not out-going, or whatever the current phrases were?
At the back of her mind Sarah had a comforting notion that this was all nonsense and he would not be difficult at all. She was wrong. He was.
In the time it took to say, “Mrs. Trafton. How do you do?” and “It’s kind of you to come, Doctor,” they had arrived at a