The Dream Walker Page 4

  Kent Shaw said, “That’s where you’re wrong. It’s not unknown. What I can’t swallow is that it could happen to Cora Steffani.”

  “When has it been known?” Charley wanted to know.

  “Why, there was a Saint … Anthony, wasn’t it? Don’t remember the details, but he managed it. Then there was Maria Coronel. You never heard of her? A lady of Spain who would fall into such trances and wake up, claiming she’d been busy converting Indians. No doubt they thought she was off her sixteenth-century rocker. Only thing, when some Spaniards got into Mexico somewhere, they kept hearing from the Indians about a mysterious lady in blue who had come around preaching. Point is,” Kent Shaw grimaced, “such a thing happens to a saint or a religious type. Not to an aging and not very successful actress who has no religion at all.”

  I waited for Charley Ives to resent this. “You’re talking in terms of miracle?” inquired Charley with an interested air.

  “What else?” Kent said. “Now, if it had happened to Olivia—”

  “Oh, for pity’s sakes!” I said.

  “I don’t say you are a religious,” said Kent, as if he apologized for calling me a dirty name, “but just the same, you’ve got a dedicated air about you, something as honest as the sun,” said Kent Shaw solemnly (That little fake!), “a little bit out of this world. Whereas Cora Steffani.…” His whole face was a sneer.

  “Charley and I are both very fond of Cora,” I said stiffly.

  Kent Shaw drew back his lips in that smile that was so unpleasant. “Still, I think I’ve made my point.”

  Charley sat, looking at him. Charley has long tan eyelashes. He keeps his face tanned, I don’t know how, and his eyes are so vivid a blue that they startle you, framed in those lashes in that browned face so near the color of his hair. Charley’s not a handsome man. But he is not one that goes unnoticed. He filled that chair. Kent Shaw looked back, as saucy as a terrier.

  “In the case of this Cora,” said Mr. Gray soothingly, “at least there is evidence that isn’t mere legend.”

  “Evidence!” scoffed Kent Shaw. “Oh sure. A tape recorder beats the word of a saint. Naturally. Naturally.”

  “A legend is not the same thing as a record.”

  Well, they argued until a newspaper man named Ned Dancer came in and Kent whistled to him. As Ned came over, Kent dropped the subject, but this Bud Gray was full of unused ammunition. “I still say,” he said, “that if this Maria of yours had had a tape recorder and a flock of affidavits from those Indians, then you’d have a comparable basis.”

  “Affidavits!” scoffed Kent. “You can have them. I’m willing to believe in Maria Coronel because it’s charming. But in Cora Steffani I am not willing to believe.”

  “What was it then? Coincidence?” asked Gray. “You’re willing to believe that?”

  “Or was it prearranged?” asked Charley.

  “What was what?” Ned Dancer wanted to know. So he was told. Perhaps he thought his leg was being pulled. He shut his mouth and refused comment. But, of course, now he had heard about it.

  Charley asked me, after Kent Shaw had gone, what I really thought. I said I tried not to think about it and I must go.

  I didn’t want to answer if he asked me whether Cora was a liar. I was trying so hard to mind my own business.

  The second incident happened on January 4 or January 5, depending.…

  Chapter Four

  Last night I stopped without finishing a sentence. I thought my voice was failing. Come now, my voice will not fail if I use it properly and I can’t stop. I don’t know how long I will have.

  On the night of January 4, a group of us had been to a preview. We drifted back to Charley Ives’ place for the necessary chewing over of our impressions. I suppose there were ten people, Charley, Cora, me and a beau of mine who doesn’t matter, and others. Kent Shaw was among those present. I don’t know how he inserted himself but we were all used to Kent’s turning up and tagging along. What seemed more important, Mildred Garrick was there.

  Cora sat in one of Charley’s big fat chairs. Half past midnight, which brought us, in New York, to January 5, she put aside her glass. I saw her give a little sigh. Mildred, who had been pumping me for my opinion of the play we’d seen, soon nudged me. “There she goes! Look! Look at Steffani!”

  Charley was already bending over her.

  “Wait a minute,” cried Mildred. “Let her alone, everybody. Who’s got the correct time? Ah, there, Kent darling, I suppose you just happened to bring your tape recorder?”

  Charley gave her a chilly glance. “There is no tape recorder here.”

  “No?” said Mildred mockingly. “Well, well.”

  Kent Shaw got all the implications, bared his teeth in a voiceless snarl, went far across the room and sat down, looking venomous.

  “Who here takes shorthand?” Mildred demanded. A girl named Helen said she did. “All right.” Mildred had taken over. “Now Cora is going to come out of it, and mark the time, somebody, when she does. And you, Helen, dear, take down everything she says.”

  “Why, Mildred?” asked Charley.

  “Because,” said Mildred, “if this is a stunt, it’s a damned good one, is all as I can say.” Mildred had a row of pink seashells mounted on a comb thrust behind her crown of braids. She wore a pink crepe evening dress and she stood belligerently, with her feet apart, the crepe clinging to some bad bulges along her hip bones. Charley turned his back on her.

  He lifted one of Cora’s very limp hands, very gently. I went near. Cora’s head lolled on the chair. She looked completely out. She was wearing red, a dress that came up high around her throat and was topped with a necklace of jet. She wore tiny jet earrings. Her lipstick looked cracked and raw on the limp silence of her mouth. I looked down on her with nothing but bewilderment.

  Charley said softly, “Don’t worry, Ollie. We’ll wait a little.”

  It lacked a few seconds of 12:40 when Cora came to herself abruptly, as before, in a ring of watching faces. This Helen sat on the floor with pencil and paper.

  “Dreaming, dear?” said Mildred with a nasty little edge to the question.

  Cora swallowed and the jet choker gleamed.

  “Don’t say a word if you don’t want to,” I said. “Maybe we should get a doctor.”

  But Cora paid me no attention. Her gaze went through me to the wall. “I walked into a restaurant,” she said, “with dark walls, hideous oil paintings. I had on my brown broadcloth suit and my beaver collar. I seemed to be standing there alone. People at the tables. Then I saw one face I thought I knew. I walked up to his table.…” Her face showed us a flash of fear. “I said, ‘Pardon me, sir, isn’t your name Mr. Monti? I know I’ve seen you. I’m Cora Steffani. I seem to be confused. Where is this place?’”

  Cora stopped talking.

  “And where was it?” snapped Mildred.

  “The Boar’s Head Tavern,” Cora muttered.

  “Where?”

  “In Chicago.” Her voice rose. “In Chicago.”

  “What did the man say?” asked Charley Ives calmly.

  “He … didn’t know what to make of it.” Cora raised her hands as high as her shoulders. Now she looked at our faces fearfully. “I don’t either.”

  “What happened?”

  “They wanted to help me,” said Cora impatiently. “But I ran. I went through a revolving door. It was cold. And then it was over.”

  She began to shake.

  “Who was the man?”

  “His last name is Monti. He’s a cellist. Plays with the Mannheimer Symphonic. I don’t know the man. I know who he is. Why should I dream about him? It wasn’t a dream.” Cora’s thin hands, that betray more age than her face, were clenching and twisting.

  Mildred Garrick and some of the others pressed her with more questions but Cora only shook her head and would not answer. She looked on the verge of hysteria.

  Charley said to me, “I’m going to get rid of these people and call Doc Harper. You stay, wil
l you please, Ollie? I think she ought to go to bed, right here. Help me, will you?”

  Of course I said I would. So Charley picked her up out of that chair and carried her back through a long hall into his bedroom and I trotted after. Charley went to block people out. I helped Cora undress and got her into Charley’s huge pajamas.

  I said, “Cora, if you need to talk you know you can talk to me.”

  “Oh, Ollie, it’s gone,” she said. “It goes just as a dream goes. I think there were several other people, but it fades. It’s gone, now. All I sharply remember is as much as I said out loud. You know. Didn’t you ever tell a dream, at breakfast? You can’t tell any more of it, ever. Only this isn’t dreaming. There’s something wrong with me, Ollie. It’s a relief when everything fades.…” She kept up that shaking. But when I touched her, she wasn’t cold.

  I got her into Charley’s bed and she turned her face to the wall. When the doctor came, I left them and went back to the living room.

  Mildred was still there. She turned from the phone. “Got them. A milk plane, or something.”

  “Got what?”

  “Seats to Chicago. Charley and I are going to fly out, right quick.”

  “What for?”

  “To talk to this man, of course. This Angelo Monti. He’s in Chicago, tonight, all right. I’ve checked that.”

  “You don’t mean you are going to all that trouble?”

  “Somebody,” said Mildred, putting her finger on it, “is going to a lot of trouble to fool us, if that’s what it is.”

  “Well?” said Kent Shaw from where he still sat in the corner. “You’re willing to be fooled?” His little dark face was furious.

  “Sure. I’ll be fooled in a good cause,” said Mildred. “If this checks out like Jo Crain did, what a darling story!”

  “Ollie, you’ll stay here with Cora?” Charley said to me, looking as if even he might be on the verge of getting worried. “Keep her doing whatever the doctor says. Tell her where I’m going and why.”

  “You tell her,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  Kent Shaw said, half screaming, “Why? Yes, why are you two fools going to bite on this bait? Spend your money? Go roaring off?”

  “None of your business,” said Mildred indifferently, “is it, little man?”

  “I don’t want any part of it. I want out! You’re never going to make me believe any cheap second-rate—”

  “The way out is straight ahead of you,” said Charley Ives.

  Kent pranced nervously the length of the room to the foyer. He looked back. Couldn’t resist it. “Angels and ministers of grace,” he began to declaim. Then he seemed to choke and ducked away.

  “You know what?” said Mildred. “I think the little fella is scared just about sick. Superstitious. Well, well.”

  I said lightly, “That or he’s mad with jealousy because somebody else cooked this thing up.”

  Then I was sorry. I hadn’t meant to say “true” or “false” about Cora Steffani. I saw Charley let his lashes down. He was going to fly off, affording the time, affording the money. He wouldn’t say “true” or “false.”

  “Which is what Kent Shaw would think,” I amended lamely.

  I, too, would stand by.

  We forgot Kent Shaw. Actually, he had just stepped off stage and that was his exit line. It took control to walk out before he knew if he’d won the second toss. But he had written it that way. Now he had played all the bit part he had written in for himself.

  Dr. Harper, classmate and friend-of-old to Charley Ives, found nothing apparently wrong with Cora. He gave her a sedative on some kind of general principle. Three of them bustled off. It was after 2:00 A.M. Charley’s spacious apartment, a whole floor of an old house, was silent. Cora seemed asleep in Charley’s bed. I prowled the silent place. I lay on the couch in my slip with a blanket over me. I looked at the dim tall ranks of Charley’s books on the walls. I, as they say, tossed.

  Charley was out in the town getting checks cashed by friendly bartenders, picking up Mildred, making that plane.

  What did I honestly think, at that time? Why, I had no doubt at all that it was a prearranged trick between Cora and someone. I couldn’t see how it was done. But I didn’t think it was supernatural. I thought it was a slick silly trick and she’d get her name in the papers and I didn’t mind if she did. Or didn’t. I wasn’t losing sleep over that.

  Cora was resting easy in Charley’s bed in the bedroom I’d never seen before that night. On his dresser stood a photograph in a chaste and narrow golden frame. It was a photograph of me. And I was a little bit upset. I didn’t like it.

  In the case of the Chicago incident, Kent Shaw hadn’t taken much of a gamble. The proprietor of the Boar’s Head Tavern happened to be no Englishman, but one Gallo, boyhood chum and compatriot to Angelo Monti. If the Mannheimer Symphonic Orchestra played in Chicago on the evening of January 4, as it had long ago contracted to do, it was certain, barring serious illness or death itself, that Monti would be at the Boar’s Head after the concert. Not to have appeared there would have shattered a long sentimental tradition and broken an unwritten law with its roots in two warm hearts. Which was unthinkable. So it was very close to a sure thing.

  It paid off. Angelo Monti was in his place when the curtain went up on Scene Two.

  Darlene Hite got into Chicago about noon that day (she spent the intervals taking quiet and lonely “vacations” in various country places) and went to a small obscure hotel in her decorous way. When the time came, she got into costume, the suit like Cora’s, did her hair up in Cora’s fashion, put on another long loose garment, this time a coat with a hood. It was cold in Chicago.

  She walked into the restaurant at the appointed time, with the coat over her arm, and she said her lines. Angelo Monti struggled to extricate himself from his position among his friends at the center of the banquette. His kind heart was at once anxious to help the strange lady if he could. But the lady fled.

  There came into the show at this moment, however, an extra scene, a bit added by that old reviser of all the best-written scripts of men.

  From another table, as Darlene fled, a strange man rose up. He came swiftly over to Monti, who stood, napkin caught on his paunch, staring after the woman in brown. This stranger was tall, blond, and baldish, with a florid complexion. He asked if the lady was in trouble and what her name was.

  Monti said helplessly, “I don’t know her.”

  The stranger said, “Maybe I do.” So he threw money on his own table and he hurried through the revolving door.

  He caught her in the act of slipping into the coat and pulling up the hood. So he touched her arm. “Darlene! Say, what do you know! Doncha remember me? Ed Jones from good old San Diego,” and brayed in the cold street, “Sa-ay, long time no see!”

  Darlene had to recognize him because she had to move away from this spot without argument or delay. He wanted to know if there had been any trouble. She told him she’d made a mistake of identity. She made up a reason for being in Chicago. Darlene was competent and quick. She amiably made a date with him for the following day and let him take her “home” to the wrong hotel.

  Through it she walked to another exit.

  But Ed Jones was unlucky. It occurred to him that he must change the hour they had set for the morrow. He went in and discovered that she was not registered and someone had seen her walk through. So Ed Jones went to that side exit and while he stood, fuming, the cab returned. By sheer bad luck, Ed Jones found out where she had gone. In the morning, when Darlene checked out and started for the bus, Ed Jones fell in beside her.

  He was a stubborn and an unlucky man. A part for him had to be improvised.

  On the morning of the fifth I put on my beige-and-gold theater dress again. Cora was awake, looking lazy and well. I thought her fit of nerves, faked or not, was over. I told her I had classes and she let me go without protest. So I hurried uptown to change to sober clothing and go to work.

  Ten o’c
lock that evening, Charley called. “We got the dope. Cora’s still here. Come on down.”

  I’d been waiting, waiting for this call. Yet now that it had come, I didn’t want to be disturbed. “Tell me on the phone, Charley, my boy,” I said. “I’m tired.”

  Mildred had taken along a stenographer and they had Monti’s remarks on paper. He didn’t have the ear for lines that Jo Crain had. The correspondence was not perfect. But the time checked, the description checked, the nose had been noticed, Cora’s photograph had been accepted. The bit about the strange man was, of course, extra. Monti said the mysterious stranger had never returned to the restaurant.

  “I suppose she vanished,” I said, “and it upset him.”

  “Ollie, Cora’s pretty upset. She—”

  “Charley, I think I’d better not.”

  Cora had grabbed the phone. “Ollie, what can I do? Ollie, stay by me? Everybody is going to think I’m a freak! Please, Ollie, don’t you leave me!” I could hear she’d been crying.

  Charley took the phone. “Coming down?”

  “Do you really need me? Isn’t Mildred there? What can I do? I work, you know.”

  “I’m going to take Cora home,” Charley said briskly. “She can’t stay here.”

  Why not? I thought.

  “She wants you to stay at her place.”

  “Stay? Move in, you mean?”

  “She wants you, Ollie. Rather have you than anyone. Says you’re her oldest friend. She shouldn’t stay alone.”

  “Oh, me,” I sighed. “Oh, my.…”

  “You won’t do it?”

  “Of course, I’ll do it,” I said with foreboding. “But no point in coming there where you are. I’ll go directly to Cora’s.”

  “Thanks, Teacher,” said Charley. “I’ll be just as glad there’s some responsible—”

  “Glad to oblige, Charley, my boy,” said I heartily and he hung up suddenly. But I had the foreboding. I couldn’t do this and teach, too.

  When I got to Cora’s there was more uproar. Mildred Garrick had left Charley at the airport at 9:00, treacherously saying nothing about her immediate plans. She had gone directly to Cora’s apartment, bribed the maid, and searched the place. The only thing of any significance she had found was the tape. She’d made off with it.