“When my date arrived, Franklin sent him home. Mother told me he did it very nicely, but of course that didn’t matter. I was completely humiliated, thought my life was over.” Ginny gave Greg a rueful smile. “You can see that I was a completely normal adolescent.”
“Yes.”
“You understand that it didn’t occur to me that my father’s behavior was anything more than the usual fuss parents make over their kids’ first dates.”
Greg chewed on that for a moment. “Uh-huh.”
“In any case, one week later Franklin arrived back at the house and told us he’d sublet his apartment in New York City. The car was packed to the roof with all the clothes he’d kept there, and he took us out to show it to us, as if he’d performed an amazing feat. ‘Behold, the Prodigal returns!’ he said and insisted we get dressed and go into Albany for a celebratory dinner. Of course Mother and I were simply dazed. Neither of us was sure we had anything to celebrate, but we had no choice in the matter.
“Oddly enough, Franklin seemed to be a truly changed man. There were no more affairs. To all appearances, he became a devoted husband and parent. He embraced the life of a country gentleman, dressed in tweeds, bought himself boots and a shotgun. These were all the things I’d prayed for when I was younger, and I tried hard to believe that we were now just an ordinary, happy little family, the way I imagined other families were. But there was something chilling and strange about what he was doing. It was too much, too perfect, too theatrical—but of course we couldn’t complain about that. We couldn’t even mention it. For my mother’s sake, I pretended everything was wonderful—and I’m sure she did the same for my sake. At least in the beginning.
“My mother started to come apart after a few months. This seemed very unfair to me at the time. You know how kids are at that age—everything looked perfect, and that’s what counts. So she should have been playing along with it, should have contributed to the communal image of bliss. Instead she started drink-ing heavily, started popping pills, turning herself into a zombie. Everything started falling apart—and suddenly it was Franklin who was keeping it all going.”
Ginny shuddered.
“It was as if we were all under some horrible enchantment. Mommy, who’d always been the strong one in the family, was suddenly and unaccountably ‘sick,’ and Daddy, who’d never given a damn about his family, was suddenly taking care of poor Mommy and poor neglected little Ginny. You remember the gruesome snapshot Bruce Eddison showed us of that Russian family? We were like that—smiling into the camera through our derangement—and I didn’t have any idea what was going on.
“Mother got worse. Have you ever known a paranoid? I don’t just mean someone with paranoid leanings, someone who tends to think people are against him. I mean a real one.”
Greg nodded. “A friend of mine once went that way. I spent an evening with him just before he was committed. It was an unforgettable evening.”
“Yes. Well, my mother went that way too. At least that’s the way it seemed at the time. She began taking me aside. Ugh. That’s an understatement. We had to hide. She took me into the woods, till Franklin put a stop to it. After that, she took me into the cellar, into a closet. The things she told me Franklin was doing to her were breathtaking, unbelievable—but she believed in them absolutely.”
“I know. So did my friend.”
“You probably had the advantage of knowing they weren’t true. I didn’t. I didn’t know what to believe. If what she was saying was true, then my father was a monster. I didn’t want to believe he was a monster, but he already seemed like one. He had popped into the house like some horrible creature in a Grimm’s tale, all charm and smiles, and the more he smiled the more nightmarish everything became. In the end it nearly tore me to pieces. If I listened to her, I became terrified of him—and if I listened to him, I became terrified of her.”
“What exactly was she accusing him of?”
“Of trying to drive her crazy.”
“Why was he doing that?”
“She told me, and I didn’t understand. You see, he couldn’t just get rid of her with a divorce, because she’d inevitably get custody. He had to drive her crazy.”
“I don’t get it.”
Ginny closed her eyes as if in pain. “It was me he wanted, Greg—me without her. All for himself.”
“Good lord.” He stopped and frowned. “Wait a second. Was this for real or just your mother’s fantasy?”
“I didn’t know, Greg. He didn’t rape me. He didn’t even paw me. The things he did do could have been just affection. I simply didn’t know.”
“Did you ever see him do anything that seemed plainly calculated to drive your mother crazy?”
“No. Whenever I saw them together, he positively oozed benevolence and solicitude.”
“But you believed what she was telling you?”
“Greg, how many times do I have to say it? I didn’t know what to believe.” He told her to go on.
“We had a housekeeper and a sort of general errand runner,” she continued. “Franklin himself almost never left the house now, and when he did he’d call every few hours to make sure everything was all right. One day in the summer after I graduated from high school, he had to see his lawyer in New York. He drove to the station to take an early train and expected to be back by midafternoon. As soon as his car was out of sight, Mother told me she was getting me out of there, sending me to Chicago to stay with a friend. I was completely dumbfounded, of course. I didn’t know what to do, but she took me by the arm, led me upstairs, and told me to start packing. I said, ‘But when am I coming back?’ and she said, ‘You’re never coming back.’ Then I started crying and she shook me till my teeth rattled. ‘This is your only chance of getting away from him,’ she said, ‘and you’re going to take it.’
“I still didn’t know what to do, whether I should go along with what she wanted or run away and hide till Father got back home. But she was standing right there waiting for me to pack, so I packed. When I was done, we took my suitcases to her car, then went back to wait by the phone for Franklin’s call. It came at noon, and I said what she’d told me to say, that she was in her room zonked out on pills. Then she drove us into Albany and started withdrawing money from all her accounts. Finally I had a wad of traveler’s checks worth almost fifteen thousand dollars.
“‘That won’t put you through school,’ she said, ‘but your father will send more.’ I said, ‘He will?’ She told me he would. ‘Don’t you understand yet?’ she said. ‘Franklin’s in love with you. He’ll give you anything you want—as long as he believes he can get you back.’
“’Then why do I need all this money?’ I asked her. “She shook her head as if I were being very stupid. ‘This money forces his hand. Since he can’t starve you into submission, he’ll have to try to indulge you into submission. It’s the only way he can hope to keep you. Play along with him until you can stand on your own feet, but don’t ever come back—for anything.’
“‘But what’s going to happen to you?’
“‘Don’t think about me,’ she said. ‘None of this was your fault.’
“Then she took me to the airport and put me on a plane to Chicago. She’d told me a little about Nelson Herne, the man who’d be meeting me there. He was a friend from college days—a man she probably would have married if it hadn’t been for Franklin. He was an attorney and turned out to be a very nice man indeed. He took off a whole day to go apartment hunting with me, and finally installed me in a Michigan Avenue high-rise.
“I didn’t know what Mother had told him, and he didn’t seem to want to say. I asked him if he knew my father. He made a face and said he did. Then he started asking me questions—very guarded questions. It wasn’t till later that I realized that he was trying to find out how much I really knew about Franklin.
“There was one thing I hadn’t thought to ask Mother—whether I should send her my address in Chicago. I asked Nelson Herne what he thought. He made a
nother face and said, ‘Don’t bother. Franklin will know soon enough where you are.’
“I asked him how he’d know, but he just shook his head. Evidently he was right, because a few weeks later, after I’d started classes at the Art Institute, I got a call from my father to tell me that Mother had committed suicide. I wasn’t really shocked; I guess subconsciously this is what I’d been expecting. Naturally he wanted me to come home for the funeral, but I told him I couldn’t. You see, as soon as he told me that Mother had killed herself, I knew that this is what she’d been thinking of when she told me not to come back for anything.
“Of course it didn’t stop with that. He tried every sort of moral blackmail on me, from saying that I’d shame him before the neighbors to pleading that he needed my support to survive this tragedy, but I held out. I still wasn’t sure what the truth of all this was, but I felt I owed my mother this loyalty—at least until I was sure.
“A month later he sent me a letter full of saintly paternal understanding. It wasn’t my fault that I’d let my mother turn me against him; I was too innocent to realize that she was demented. I’d see things in their true perspective eventually, and he’d be there to welcome me with a brave, sorrowing smile. To show me he wanted nothing but my happiness (however cruel I might be to him), he enclosed a check for fifteen hundred dollars and said he’d arrange with his bank to have one sent every month. So Mother’s estimate of the situation proved to be exactly right.
“In the spring he wrote again, urging me to come to home for the summer break. He didn’t want to rush me, but didn’t I, in all fairness, owe him a chance to sponge away some of the mud my mother had thrown on him? I told him I still wasn’t ready. This was the pattern for the next few years. Then he decided it was time for a new approach. On my twenty-first birthday he sent me an incredible diamond necklace from Tiffany’s—and this.” She patted the videocassette she’d brought from the bedroom.
Greg looked at her with raised eyebrows, and she gazed back as if willing him to do something he couldn’t guess at. Then she wheeled over a television set and VCR, inserted the cassette, turned it on, and sat down.
For a few moments the set was silent, the screen blank, then a man’s voice said, “Dearest Ginny . . . Just in case you’ve forgot-ten what your home looks like.”
Abruptly a picture of a house appeared, obviously taken by a hand-held camera. It wobbled for a moment, grew steady . . . and Greg’s jaw dropped. It was a stately old hip-roofed Georg-ian mansion—and, except for the fact that it had no dome on top, it was the house of his observatory dream.
The front door stood open, and the camera moved toward it unsteadily, mounted some stairs, entered, and panned across a broad hallway. A handsome staircase rose at the left, and Greg, too fascinated to speak, recognized it; he’d mounted that stair-case in the dream that had ended with his gunshot suicide. Then the camera passed through a doorway and entered a large living room. After scanning the room’s undistinguished furnishings, it approached a waiting tripod. The picture juddered wildly as the camera was set in place and made fast; then it was turned to focus on a leather wingback chair a few feet away.
A tall white-haired man in a dark green smoking jacket (presumably the camera operator) appeared at one side of the screen, went to the chair, and, with his back to the camera, attached a miniature microphone to his shirt-front. Then he sat down, turned his matinée idol’s face to the lens, and smiled.
“Wait, wait, wait!” Greg shouted. “Turn it off!”
“My dearest Ginny,” Franklin Winters managed to say before she hit the pause button.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“I know this man,” he said, staring at the face frozen on the screen. “I mean . . .”
“Yes?”
“I mean, I’ve dreamed about him.”
Ginny sat down again. “Go on.”
“You remember the night we met, I told you I’d been dreaming about you. You thought I was kidding, but I wasn’t. It was a whole series of dreams, and in the last of them I found you there in that house . . . in bed with that man. Unmistakably that man.”
Ginny nodded. “I told you, Greg. That’s what he wants.”
He blinked at her. “What are you talking about? What he wants? What the hell does that have to do with what I dream? I don’t understand.”
“You will.”
She turned the videotape back on.
XXIV
FRANKLIN WINTERS’S FACE CAME TO LIFE as if he’d been startled from a reverie. Although his long, fine features were blurred with age, they still composed a face that would draw attention in a crowd. It bespoke wit and charm, but it wasn’t the face of a man you expected to like; his wit would be sardonic and his charm would be calculated to expose your own gaucherie. There was altogether too much calculation in Franklin Winters; he wanted you to see the self-confident set of his broad shoulders, the glittering awareness of superiority in his eyes, the gracefulness of his long, elegant hands.
He frowned with good humor and spoke with an actor’s voice, in a pleasant mid-Atlantic accent.
“I hope this damned contraption is working, my dear. You know how little use I am around gadgets. Since you steadfastly decline to send yourself to me, it seemed the best way for me to send myself to you. If I’d come in person, you might have found my very presence a threat and refused to see me. This way, I am flattened, miniaturized, and reduced to a mere shadow of myself—and, best of all, you can banish me to nothingness with a flick of your finger. With all these reassurances, I trust you will not find my brief visit too onerous to bear.”
He paused, and his lighthearted manner slipped away like breath on a mirror.
“It’s time,” he said, “that you knew who and what I am. If that sounds pompous, I make no apology for it. Thanks to a strange fate, I belong—thank God—to a class apart from the common herd of mankind, and there’s nothing in that to be ashamed of.”
The old man squirmed into a new position in his chair and for the first time seemed less than completely self-assured. He went on: “In the past three years I’ve spent many hours considering how I could tell you what must be told without arousing your scornful incredulity. In the end, I admit, my ingenuity failed me. I could contrive no explanation one-tenth as convincing as a simple demonstration. And so I decided to break a solemn vow I made to myself long ago.
“This vow,” Franklin said, looking directly into Greg’s eyes, “was designed to preserve your innermost privacy. I vowed never to trespass upon your dreams until such time as I might be invited to do so. Last night I broke that vow.”
“Wait!” Greg cried, and Ginny paused the video. “What in hell is he talking about—‘trespassing on your dreams’?”
“Just listen,” she said through gritted teeth.
Franklin went on: “For you, this will not of course have been last night but rather several nights ago, depending on how long it takes for this cassette to reach you and how long you wait to view it. Nevertheless, you will remember the dream. I made sure of that.
“When I came to you in my own shape in the realm of dreams, you and a young companion were following a stream bed, looking for something. You didn’t recognize your companion, but it was yourself as a child. Nearby was a pool of luminous blue water, and I guessed she was leading you there to show you something in its depths. I intercepted you. You were startled. I could see that you wanted to come to me but were fearful. The little girl said, ‘What have you done with my mother?’”
Franklin smiled. “Of course this brave child was simply verbalizing the question you’ve been afraid to ask me yourself. I asked her if she wanted to visit her mother, and she said, ‘Oh yes, please!’ I looked up into the sky, summoned down a goose from a flock passing by, and sent the little girl flying away on its back.”
Greg took his eyes off the screen and sent them to Ginny. She caught his glance and nodded.
“By now you know I’m speaking the truth, so I won??
?t bother recounting the rest of our adventure. It was all enchanting, and all the result of my own mastery. You see, my dear Ginny—and as you see from this demonstration—I am a walker in the realm of dreams.”
Franklin Winters settled back in his chair with a sigh, as if the hard part were done.
“My dear, I can well imagine your bewilderment over this bizarre concept. The realm of dreams? It would be difficult to imagine anything more alien than this to your pedestrian education, which confidently teaches that our dreams take place strictly within the confines of our individual skulls. However, if you consult the knowledge and experience of ten thousand older cultures scattered all over the world, you will learn something different. In all these cultures, it’s accepted without question that in dreams we inhabit a separate realm of reality that exists as surely as the one we inhabit in waking life.
“But I mustn’t rush ahead to the conclusion of the story. I knew none of this when I began my sojourn into the unknown, half a century ago.”
He paused, frowning over his next words.
“It seems to me important that you should understand something of the milieu in which it began—Princeton University in the middle of the Great Depression. It was a strange time for the children of the wealthy—and we were almost all children of the wealthy. We had, for some reason, been spared in the plague of poverty that was sweeping the world. We’d seen it carry off any number of friends, who could no longer afford to live in quite such large houses or attend quite such excellent schools as they used to. Though the plague spared our wealth, it carried off much of our enjoyment of it. Burdened by the survivor’s vague sense of guilt and unworthiness, we couldn’t give ourselves over to the pleasures of collegiate life with the sybaritic abandonment of our older brothers during the twenties. As a class, we were terribly nice, wholesome boys. I say ‘as a class,’ but I definitely was not one of them. I shared none of their feelings of guilt over my family’s wealth—and I was very far from being a nice, wholesome boy. On the contrary, it was universally suspected that I had crawled out of one of the nastier stories of Arthur Machen or H. P. Lovecraft. “You see, my dear, in those innocent days I was accounted a dope fiend.”