Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) by Suzy McKee Charnas

to you.
    “There is one field trip,” Miss Stern was saying loudly, glaring briefly at him and Angie to make them shut up, “that might work out, a really important one. I wasn’t going to tell you until it was a sure thing, but since the subject has come up —”
    She wanted them to go spend a day with some old lady painter living up in Taos.
    Not me, lady, Roberto thought. He stared at the worn blue carpeting. You want to get rid of me, this is sure a good way to do it. He was way past the stage of going to get permission from his mother to be away all day. This school-thing was just a joke anyhow, man. He was only along to keep Bobbie company and out of curiosity. He hadn’t dropped out of school to go on any stupid field trips.
    He’d had his field trip the day they closed Pinto Street, just like Miss Stern said. Too bad for the others that they missed it.

3
    She watched the man go to the window, and she saw with him what he saw. There they were, the mob outside, yelling and jeering and shaking their fists.
    She was aware of a terrible constriction, as of difficulty in breathing, although it was not really a physical sensation at all but a suffocating horror of seeing the same scene play itself out again.
    The man threw the casement wide, lifted something from his head — God, was he going to throw his own head to the mob? No, only his hat. He had on a cylindrical black hat with a strip of ribbon around the base. He threw it down and bowed to the crowd, now a group of men in frock coats who applauded.
    But what’s so horrible about this, she thought, confused. The scene was comic rather than awful, the figure at the window a caricature rather than a demon: stick limbs and a whiskery head sticking out of his absurd dark gown. But a caricature should not move, bend, wave to the crowd, act like a living being. It’s like the puppet in DEAD OF NIGHT, she thought, the ventriloquist’s dummy that speaks on its own — unspeakable —
    And he’s going to turn now and show me his face —
    She woke, gasping but triumphant with discovery. The figure at the window was lifted right out of a source she knew well, she was sure of it. Daumier, the Daumier prints satirizing the legal profession. That gowned and oddly-capped figure, so familiar!
    Ricky was in the chair by the window, head sunk on chest, gently snoring. Silently, not to waken him, she put on her robe and slippers, took her notebook and went into the chilly living room. She turned on a lamp and dug out her books on Daumier.
    Like that, she thought, squinting at a long-nosed tyrant leaning from the bench to bully a young witness. A judge? Come to judge me, my judgment on myself?
    But then what’s the French Revolution doing mixed up in it all? And why do I sometimes get traces of Claire?
    There came a scratching at the door to the kitchen. She let the dogs come in and curl up with her on the couch. Hugging their comforting largeness and warmth helped settle her mind again for sleep.
    Ricky’s going to love this, she thought. It’s almost worth waking him to tell him: here come de judge. She giggled. Brillo licked her ear.
    “And what do you dream of, my fine fellow?”

    Having Ricky at the wall with her was a pleasure; she’d been a fool to have feared it. He settled always in the shade of a thick, twisted juniper with her dream notebook and his yellow pad. After a while the dogs would get tired of snuffling around and go lie down with him.
    The wall, too, pleased her immensely. She had set the plastic hands. They were like small creatures from deep under the sea, some sort of cross between coral and sea anemones with their tendril-like pink fingers. But what next? She could not seem to see what was needed next. She walked back and forth, the shadow of her body and her wide-brimmed hat sliding over the sandy ground with her. The pleasure of looking seemed almost enough. Almost. Perhaps it was the habit of action that impelled her to do something, even if