The Sleep Walker

Doris Dumond—convent-bred, moonstruck—returns to a Manhattan tenement where her mother’s appetite for sparkle has mortgaged tomorrow: one glimmering installment on a rope of diamonds, the balance overdue, the wolf-dealer Hammond already sniffing at the door. Night swallows the girl; her body rises from the sheets like a marionette whose strings are pulled by unpaid guilt. She glides through gas-lit corridors, a somnambulant angel, and alights on the predator’s threshold. Hammond, half-credulous, half-aroused, locks the somber room; dawn finds mother, lover, house-dick hammering the panels, each face a tribunal. Words tangle; reputations plummet. Yet the city itself intervenes: a cooing child teeters on a cornice, pigeons scattering like torn confetti. Doris, still asleep, scales the façade, palms the void, pulls the infant back into breath. In that instant the ledger of blame is razored; Phillip presses pearls of apology into her palm, buys the sullied jewels, slips a circlet of gold onto the finger that once clutched only moonlight.