So Dies the Dreamer
mutual dislike. Sarah’s came in part, and unjustly, from the man’s appearance: the square measuring face, very white, the full button mouth, the humorless examination he gave her and then, with a slow deliberate turn of his head, the apartment. It seemed quite possible that his slim leather case held scales and a blindfold.Probably he hadn’t liked her face either, or was it simply an automatic prejudging? Pet breeders looked darkly upon children, pediatricians looked darkly upon parents. A psychiatrist would be almost bound to view with disapproval the widow of a patient.
If it had only been that. After a few introductory skirmishes, Vollmer told Sarah the basis of her husband’s nightmares.
Charles had been afraid of her, literally and physically afraid of her. In his recurrent dream he stood on a height, and Sarah, behind him, threw something blue and muffling over his head and began to push him toward the edge.
(And she had said to Charles on that last night in Bermuda, “But you must know what they’re about. Everybody does. They’re falling, or . . Might as well remember it all, his sweat-damp forehead, the bitter mimicry of his voice, his instant, shaken apology . . .)
Blindly, as she was apt to do in moments of stress, Sarah lit the wrong end of a filter cigarette and took a lung-scorching breath of it while Vollmer watched with clinical interest. When she could speak again she said fairly steadily, “I’m afraid I don’t quite . . . It seems a little late in the day to explain that I loved my husband. I was also,” she knew this was a mistake, but an incredulous hurt and a growing anger at Vollmer’s calm precise black-and-white face drove her on, “fond of my father. Not unhealthily, if that’s possible any more, but I certainly have no hidden urges to push adult males over cliffs.” Except perhaps right now. “Or are you telling me that my husband was insane?”
She was instantly aware of having fallen into a trap. Vollmer said with satisfaction, “Insanity is a term which we now . . .” and Sarah rebelliously stopped listening. Her heart still pounded with shock; she felt that it must be shaking her visibly. She emerged to hear the pedantic voice saying, “—has its cause. Perhaps an incident in childhood, involving someone whom he subconsciously indentified with you, or his feeling for you. Perhaps a phrase or a reference from you yourself, which at the time . . .”
And all at once Sarah knew.
She had to listen to a great deal more before she managed to get them both on their feet and edging toward the door: Charles’s relationship with his stepmother—this was something a psychiatrist could really get his teeth into; his preoccupation with the beautiful and useless pheasants, his concern over the death of the nurse. “Perhaps something quite interesting there,” said Vollmer musingly. “The failure—you follow me?—of the nurse to save the stepmother’s life. A feeling of bitterness and even of vengeance on Mr. Trafton’s part. Her death at someone else’s hands following upon that. . .”
He looked at Sarah’s withdrawn, unlistening face. He said, “Perhaps you wonder why I was anxious to get in touch with you, Mrs. Trafton. I felt it only fair, as of course it was my duty, as soon as I learned of the sad event, to let the police know that Mr. Trafton had been a patient of mine.”
And why, thought Sarah, crystally alert again. She said, “Of course. Very thoughtful of you, Doctor, and very conscientious.”
They were sworn enemies now.
“I thought you might best be—prepared,” said Vollmer.
He occupied the surface of Sarah’s mind only briefly after he had gone. No profession could guarantee its every member; there were bad dentists, negligent doctors, unscrupulous lawyers. She had just been visited by a man who was, she suspected, so much in love with the trappings of the profession as to obscure its purpose.
Vollmer didn’t matter, nor the fact that, at nearly seven o’clock, she would have liked a drink and ought to be doing something about her dinner. Nothing mattered except the astounding thing that she had remembered.
It had taken place on the last weekend she spent at the farm before her marriage. A friend of Evelyn’s had dropped in with five children who demanded refreshments in loud whispers, fought in doorways, teased Milo’s pet crow and then, having inspected the lawns and pheasants and let clouds of flies into the house, began to demand to go home. Their mother sat there like an untidy rock. Charles and Sarah, with the abstracted air of people who were only slipping into the next room for an ashtray, fled.
The afternoon was gray and windy. Although it was only late September, and asters and zinnias still blew about in the borders, a few crisp nights had begun to gild the huge hickory tree in the field where they stopped for a cigarette. Sarah knew that the mink farm lay somewhere off in the distance on their right; out of a reluctance to return to the house so soon she nodded at a rise behind trees to the left. “Where does that go?”
“Well, we used to call it a cliff,” said Charles, smiling, “and then it shrank to a bluff and now I think it’s only a hill. Let’s have a look.”
The wind came up sharply when they emerged from the band of trees, spinning Sarah’s hair against her face and blowing it into her eyes. Charles went up the mossy rock-strewn slope ahead of her with a stick poised; he had remembered stepping into a nest of blacksnakes here. Sarah felt in her pocket for a scarf which she began to put over her hair as she walked, and just as Charles turned to say something to her the wind whipped the silk square from her fingers and pinned it against his face.
His head went back instinctively, and the sudden motion threw him off balance. Sarah ran up,