Tuesday, July 19,
1966
My name is
Victoria Winters. There is no sound in Collinwood. There’s only the strangeness
of the people around me. The strangeness of the woman who’s brought me here,
the woman who has not left her house in eighteen years. The strangeness of a
small boy too and the merciless devils that torment him.
David is crying out “I
didn’t!” and “No!” in his sleep. He tries to climb out the window. Liz comes in
and stops him, telling him to wake up. David shouts, “I didn't kill him!” over
and over, and “I didn't mean to kill him!”
Bill Malloy asks the doctor
treating Roger if it’s okay for him to take off for a while. He wants to take a
look at the wreck.
The doctor is the folksy small
town type. He’ll be there unless he gets called away to deliver Lucy Cameron’s
baby.
Roger doesn't want to be
treated like an invalid. He tells the doctor about the accident. The brakes
worked until he got about halfway down the hill. He tried to keep the car on
the road, but when he “got to that big curve about a hundred miles from—a
hundred miles; it seemed like a hundred miles—a hundred feet from the bottom of
the hill, then [he] went right over the edge.”
Then Bill came along.
The doctor says it’s lucky
Malloy wasn’t walking up the hill or they might have had another death like ten
years ago. Roger says that had nothing to do with him.
“I know,” the doctor says. “I
was at the trial.”
David has gone back to sleep
but wakes up again when the wind blows his window open. He wants Liz to stay
with him. He asks her not to tell his father about his nightmare. He asks her
not to let anyone hurt him. It’s reminiscent of Patty McCormack’s performance
in The Bad Seed.
Bill returns to the doctor’s
office. He saw what he wanted to see at the accident site—he won’t say what.
The doctor says someday he’ll write a book about down-Easterners and all the
things that never get said. Like everyone else, the doctor has plenty to say
about Burke Devlin’s return.
When they go to the doctor’s
waiting room, Bill be tells Roger it wasn’t an accident. He explains that the
bleeder valve was missing and that’s what caused the brakes to fail.
Roger thinks Devlin lured him
to town so he would drive the car and be killed. Which isn’t a bad theory, even
though we know it’s wrong.
Liz tells David about Isaac
Collins. “Imagine having a town named after you.”
David asks Liz if she hated
her father.
No, she loved him very much.
David thinks if you love your
father, you never have nightmares.
When Roger and Bill return,
David runs to his room.
Roger makes light of his
injuries. His arm in a sling (“just a sprain”) “looks rather heroic, don't you
think?”
David eavesdrops.
“He said I’d live,” Roger
tells Liz, “and that’s the whole sad story.”
Bill, Liz, and Roger discuss
Burke’s possible culpability. Liz tells Roger that Vicki saw Burke in the
garage. Roger wants to talk with her, of course. He advises Liz to get some
sleep.
And what will he do?
“Oh, I might have another
drink, commune with my ancestors, meditate over my past mistakes and try to
correct them.”
Liz advises Roger that
correcting past mistakes doesn't mean making others.
After Liz and Bill leave him
alone, Roger muses to the portrait, “Well, Isaac, what would you do if someone
tried to kill you?”
Bill comes back to check on
Roger before he goes. He’s going to look for Carolyn in town.
David the eavesdropper continues
to hide nearby.
Cast,
In Order of Appearance
Victoria Winters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . Alexandra Moltke
David Collins. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . David Henesy
Elizabeth
Collins Stoddard.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joan Bennett
Bill Malloy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . .Frank Schofield
Dr. Reeves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . .Fred Stewart
Fashion by Ohrbach’s
Directed by Lela Swift
Story created
and written by
Art Wallace
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