I Married A Dead Man (16 page)

               
Patrice pointed. "This pattern, right here. The first one. Isn't it-- attractive?"

               
Behind her back, held in one hand, the abducted missive slowly crumpled, deflated, was sucked between her fingers into compressed invisibility.

29

               
Quietly and deftly she moved about the dimly lighted room, passing back and forth, and forth and back, with armfuls of belongings from the drawers. Hughie lay sleeping in his crib, and the clock said almost one.

               
The valise stood open on a chair. Even that wasn't hers. It was the one she'd first used on the train-ride here, new-looking as ever, the one with "PH" on its rounded corner. She'd have to borrow it. Just as she was borrowing the articles she picked at random, to throw into it. Just as she was borrowing the very clothes she stood in. There were only two things in this whole room with her now that were rightfully hers. That little bundle sleeping quietly there in the crib. And that seventeen cents lying spread out on a scrap of paper on the dresser-top.

               
She took things for him, mostly. Things he needed, things to keep him warm. They wouldn't mind, they wouldn't begrudge that; they loved him almost as much as she did, she reasoned ruefully. She quickened her movements, as if the danger of faltering in purpose lay somewhere along this train of thought if she lingered on it too long.

               
For herself she took very little, only what was of absolute necessity. Underthings, an extra pair or two of stockings--

               
Things, things. What did things matter, when your whole world was breaking up and crumbling about you? Your world? It wasn't your world, it was a world you had no right to be in.

               
She dropped the lid of the valise, latched it impatiently on what it held, indifferent to whether it held enough, or too much, or too little. A little tongue of white stuff was trapped, left protruding through the seam, and she let it be.

               
She put on the hat and coat she'd left in readiness across the foot of the bed. The hat without consulting a mirror, though there was one right at her shoulder. She picked up her handbag, and probed into it with questing hand. She brought out a key, the key to this house, and put it down on the dresser. Then she brought out a small change-purse and shook it out. A cabbagy cluster of interfolded currency fell out soundlessly, and a sprinkling of coins, these last with a tinkling sound and some rolling about. She swept them all closer together, and then left them there on top of the dresser. Then she picked uj the seventeen cents and dropped that into the changepurse instead, and replaced it in the handbag, and thrust that under her arm.

               
She went over beside the crib, then, and lowered its side. She crouched down on a level with the small sleeping face. She kissed it lightly on each eyelid. "I'll be back for you in a minute," she whispered. "I have to take the bag down first and stand it at the door. I can't manage you both on those stairs, I'm afraid." She straightened up, lingered a moment, looking down at him. "We're going for a ride, you and I; we don't know where, and we don't care. Straight out, along the way the trains go. We'll find someone along the road who'll let us in next to him--"

               
The clock said a little after one now.

               
She went over to the door, softly opened it, and carried the valise outside with her. She eased it closed behind her, and then she started down the stairs valise in hand, with infinite slowness, as though it weighed a lot. Yet it couldn't have been the valise alone that seemed to pull her arm down so, it must have been the leadenness of her heart.

               
Suddenly she'd stopped, and allowed the valise to come to rest on the step beside her. They were sthnding there without a sound, down below her by the front door, the two of them. Father Hazzard and Doctor Parker. She hadn't heard them until now, for they hadn't been saying anything. They must have been standing there in a sort of momentary mournful silence, just preceding leavetaking.

               
They broke it now, as she stood there unseen, above the bend of the stairs.

               
"Well, goodnight, Donald," the doctor said at last, and she saw him put his hand to Father Hazzard's shoulder in an attempt at consolation, then let it trail heavily off again. "Get some sleep. She'll be all right." He opened the door, then he added: "But no excitement, no stress of any kind from now on, you understand that, Donald? That'll be your job, to keep all that away from her. Can I count on you?"

               
"You can count on me," Father Hazzard said forlornly.

               
The door closed, and he turned away and started up the stairs, to where she stood riveted. She moved down a step or two around the turn to meet him, leaving the valise behind her, doffed hat and coat flung atop it now.

               
He looked up and he saw her, without much surprise, without much of anything except a sort of stony sadness.

               
"Oh, it's you, Patrice," he said dully. "Did you hear him? Did you hear what he just said?"

               
"Who is it--Mother?"

               
"She had another of those spells soon after we retired. He's been in there with her for over an hour and a half. It was touch and go, for a few minutes, at first--"

               
"But Father! Why didn't you--?"

               
He sat down heavily on the stair-step. She sat down beside him, slung one arm about his shoulders.

               
"Why should I bother you, dear? There wouldn't have been anything you could have-- You have the baby on your hands all day long, you need your rest. Besides, this isn't anything new. Her heart's always been weak. Way back before the boys were born--"

               
"I never knew. You never told me-- But is it getting worse?"

               
"Things like that don't improve as you get on in years," he said gently.

               
She let her head slant to rest against his shoulder, in compunction.

               
He patted her hand consolingly. "She'll be all right We'll see that she is, you and I, between us, won't.we?"

               
She shivered a little, involuntarily, at that.

               
"It's just that we've got to cushion her against all shocks and upsets," he said. "You and the young fellow, you're about the best medicine for her there is. Just having you around--"

               
And if in the morning she had asked for Patrice, asked for her grandchild, and he'd had to tell her--She fell strangely silent, looking down at the steps under their feet, but no longer seeing them. And if she'd come out of her room five minutes later, just missing the doctor as he left, she might have brought death into this house, in repayment for all the love that had been lavished on her. Killed the only mother she'd ever known.

               
He misunderstood her abstraction, pressed her chin with the cleft of his hand. "Now don't take it like that; she wouldn't want you to, you know. And Pat, don't let her know you've found out about it. Let her keep on thinking it's her secret and mine. I know she'll be happier that way."

               
She sighed deeply. It was a sigh of decision, of capitulation to the inevitable. She turned and kissed him briefly on the side of the head and stroked his hair a couple of times. Then she stood up.

               
"I'm going up," she said quietly. "Go down and put out the halllight after us, a minute."

               
He retraced his steps momentarily. She picked up the valise, the coat, the hat, and quietly reopened the door of her own room.

               
"Goodnight, Patrice."

               
"Goodnight, Father; I'll see you in the morning."

               
She carried them in with her, and closed the door, and in the darkness on the other side she stood still a minute. A silent, choking prayer welled up in her.

               
"Give me strength, for there's no running away, I see that now. The battle must be fought out here where I stand, and I dare not even cry out"

30

               
Then they stopped suddenly. There were no more. No more came. The days became a week, the week became a month. The month lengthened toward two. And no more came.

               
It was as though the battle had been won without striking a blow. No, she knew that wasn't so; it was as though the battle had been broken off, held in abeyance, at the whim of the crafty, shadowy adversary.

               
She clutched at straws--straws of attempted comprehension--and they all failed her.

               
Mother Hazzard said: "Edna Harding got back today; she's been visiting their folks in Philadelphia the past several weeks."

               
But no more came.

               
Bill remarked: "I ran into Tom Bryant today; he tells me his older sister Marilyn's been laid up with pleurisy; she only got out of bed for the first time today."

               
"I thought I hadn't seen her."

               
But no more came.

               
Caulfield: Population, 203,000, she thought. That was what the atlas in the library said. And a pair of hands to each living soul of them. One to hold down the flap of a letter-box, on some secret shadowy corner; the other to quickly, furtively slip an envelope through the slot

               
No more came. Yet the enigma remained. What was it? Who was it? Or rather, what had it been? Who had it been?

               
Yet deep in her innermost heart she knew somehow the present tense still fitted it, none other would do. Things like that didn't just happen and then stop. They either never began at all, or else they ran on to their shattering, destructive conclusion.

               
But in spite of that, security crept back a little; frightened off once and not so bold now as before, but crept tentatively back toward her a little.

               
In the mornings the world was bitter-sweet to look at, seeming to hold its breath, waiting to see--

31

               
Mother Hazzard knocked on her door just as she'd finished tucking Hughie in. There wasn't anything exceptional about this, it was a nightly event, the filching of a last grandmotherly kiss just before the light went out. Tonight, however, she seemed to want to talk to Patrice herself. And not to know how to go about it

               
She lingered on after she'd kissed him, and the side of the crib had been lifted into place. She stood there somewhat uncertainly, her continued presence preventing Patrice from switching out the light

               
There was a moment's awkwardness.

               
"Patrice."

               
"Yes, Mother?"

               
Suddenly she'd blurted it out. "Bill wants to take you to the Country Club dance with him tonight He's waiting down there now."

               
Patrice was so completely taken back she didn't answer for a moment, just stood there looking at her.

               
"He told me to come up and ask you if you'd go with him." Then she rushed on, as if trying to talk her into it by sheer profusion of wordage, "They have one about once each month, you know, and he's going himself, he usually does, and--why don't you get dressed and go with him?" she ended up on a coaxing note.

               
"But I--I" Patrice stammered.

               
"Patrice, you've got to begin sooner or later. It isn't good for you not to. You haven't been looking as well as you might lately. We're a little worried about you. If there's something troubling you-- You do what Mother says, dear."

               
It was apparently an order. Or as close to an order as Mother Hazzard could ever have brought herself to come. She had opened Patrice's closet-door, meanwhile, and was peering helpfully inside. "How about this?" She took something down, held it up against herself to show her.

               
"I haven't very much--"

               
"It'll do nicely." It landed on the bed. "They're not very formal there. I'll have Bill buy you an orchid or gardenia on the way, that'll dress it up enough. You just go and get the feel of it tonight. It'll begin coming back to you little by little." She smiled reassuringly at her. "You'll be in good hands." She patted her on the shoulder as she turned to go outside. "Now that's a good girl. I'll tell Bill you're getting ready."

               
Patrice overheard her call down to him from above-stairs, a moment later, without any attempt at modulating her voice: "The answer is yes. I talked her into it. And you be very nice to her, young man, or you'll hear from me."

               
He was standing waiting for her just inside the door when she came downstairs.

               
"Am I all right?" she asked uncertainly.

               
He was suddenly overcome with some sort of awkwardness. "Gee, I--I didn't know how you could look in the evening," he said haltingly.

               
For the first few moments of the drive, there was a sort of shyness between them, almost as though they'd only just met tonight for the first time. It was very impalpable, but it rode with them. He turned on the radio in the car. Dance music rippled back into their faces. "To get you into the mood," he said.

               
He stopped, and got out, and came back with an orchid. "The biggest one north of Venezuela," he said. "Or wherever they come from."

               
"Here, pin it on for me." She selected a place. "Right about here."

               
Abruptly, he balked at that, for some strange reason. All but shied away bodily. "Oh no, that you do yourself," he said, more forcefully than she could see any reason for.

               
"I might stick myself," he added lamely as an afterthought. A little too long after.

               
"Why, you great big coward."

               
The hand that would have held the pin was a trifle unsteady, she noticed, when he first put it back to the wheel. Then it quieted.

               
They drove the rest of the way. The rest of the way lay mostly through open country. There were stars overhead.

               
"I've never seen so many!" she marvelled.

               
"Maybe you haven't been looking up enough," he said gently.

               
Toward the end, just before they got there, a peculiar sort of tenderness seemed to overcome him for a minute. He even slowed the car a little, as he turned to her.

               
"I want you to be happy tonight, Patrice," he said earnestly. "I want you to be very happy."

               
There was a moment's silence between them, then they picked up speed again.

32

               
And for the next one, right after that, the tune they played was "Three Little Words." She remembered that afterward. That least of all things about it, the tune they had been playing at the time. She was dancing it with Bill. For that matter she'd been dancing them all with him, steadily, ever since they'd arrived. She wasn't watching, she wasn't looking around her, she wasn't thinking of anything but the two of them.

               
Smiling dreamily, she danced. Her thoughts were like a little brook running swiftly but smoothly over harmless pebbles, keeping time with the tinkling music.

               
I like dancing with him. He dances well, you don't have to keep thinking about your feet. He's turned his face toward me and is looking down at me; I can feel it. Well, I'll look up at him, and then he'll smile at me; but I won't smile back at him. Watch. There, I knew that was coming. I will not smile back. Oh, well, what if I did? It slipped out before I could stop it Why shouldn't I smile at him, anyway? That's the way I feel about him; smilingly fond.

               
A hand touched Bill's shoulder from behind. She could see the fingers slanted downward for a second, on her side of it, without seeing the hand or arm or person it belonged to.

               
A voice said: "May I cut in on this one?"

               
And suddenly they'd stopped. Bill had stopped, so she had to, too.

               
His arms left her. A shuffling motion took place, Bill stepped aside, and there was someone else there in his place. It was like a double exposure, where one person dissolves into another.

               
Their eyes met, hers and the new pair. His had been waiting for hers, and hers had foolishly run into his. They couldn't move again.

               
The rest was horror, sheer and unadulterated. Horror such as she'd never known she could experience. Horror under the electric lights. Death on the dance floor. Her body stayed upright, but otherwise she had every feeling of death coursing through it.

               
"Georgesson's the name," he murmured unobtrusively to Bill. His lips hardly seemed to stir at all. His eyes didn't leave hers.

               
Bill completed the ghastly parody of an introduction. "Mrs. Hazzard, Mr. Georgesson."

               
"How do you do?" he said to her.

               
Somehow there was even worse horror in the trite phrase than there had been in the original confrontation. She was screaming in silent inward panic, her lips locked tight, unable even to speak Bill's name and prevent the transfer.

               
"May I?" Georgesson said, and Bill nodded, and the transfer had been completed; it was too late.

               
Then for a moment, blessed reprieve. She felt his arms close about her, and her face sank into the sheltering shadow of his shoulder, and she was dancing again. She no longer had to stand upright, unsupported. There, that was better. A minute to think in. A minute to get your breath in.

               
The music went on, their dancing went on. Bill's face faded away in the background.

               
"We've met before, haven't we?"

               
Keep me from fainting, she prayed, keep me from falling.

               
He was waiting for his answer.

               
Don't speak; don't answer him.