I Married A Dead Man (27 page)

               
"If you'd only phoned up," she said accusingly. "If you'd only left word where I could reach you." And then she added, but more to him than to Patrice, "Daybreak. I hope the party was wuth it It sure must have been a good one. I know one thing, it sure coss more than any party you ever went to in your life. Or ever likely to go to."

               
Patrice screamed out within herself, wincing: How right you are! It wasn't good, no, it wasn't--but oh, how costly!

               
Dr. Parker accosted them in the upper hall. There was a nurse there with him. They had thought he'd be in with her.

               
"Is she asleep?" Patrice breathed, more frightened than reassured at this.

               
"Ty Winthrop's been in there alone with her for the past halfhour. She insisted. And when people are quite ill, you overrule them; but when they're even more ill than that, you don't I've been checking her pulse and respiration at ten-minute intervals."

               
"That bad?" she whispered in dismay. She caught the stricken look on Bill's face, and found time to feel parenthetically sorry for him even while she asked it.

               
"There's no immediate danger," Parker answered. "But I can't make you any promises beyond the next hour or two." And then he looked the two of them square in the eyes and said, "It's a bad one this time. It's the daddy of them all."

               
It's the last one, Patrice knew then with certainty.

               
She crumpled for a moment, and a scattered sob or two escaped from her, while he and Bill led her over to a hall-chair, there beside the sickroom-door, and sat her down.

               
"Don't do that," the doctor admonished her, with just a trace of detachment--perhaps professional, perhaps personal-- "There's no call for it at this stage."

               
"It's just that I'm so worn-out," she explained blurredly.

               
She could almost read his answering thought. Then you should have come home a little earlier.

               
The nurse traced a whiff of ammonia past her nose, eased her hat from her head, smoothed her hair soothingly.

               
"Is my baby all right?" she asked in a moment, calmer.

               
It was Aunt Josie who answered that "I know how to look after him," she said a trifle shortly. Patrice was out of favor right then.

               
The door opened and Ty Winthrop came out He was putting away his glasses.

               
"They back yet--?" he started to say. Then he saw them. "She wants to see you."

               
They both started up at once.

               
"Not you," he said to Bill, warding him off. "Just Patrice. She wants to see her alone, without anyone else in the room. She repeated that several times."

               
Parker motioned her to wait. "Let me check her pulse first" She looked over at Bill while they were standing there waiting, to see how he was taking it He smiled untroubledly. "I understand," he murmured. "That's her way of seeing me . And a good way it is, too. Just about the best"

               
Parker had come out again.

               
"Not more than a minute or two," he said disapprovingly, with a side look at Winthrop. "And then maybe we'll all get together to see that she gets a little rest."

               
She went in there. Somebody closed the door after her.

               
"Patrice, dear," a quiet voice said.

               
She went over to the bed.

               
The face was still in shadow, because of the way they'd left the lamp.

               
"You can raise that a little, dear. I'm not in my coffin yet."

               
Her eyes looked up at Patrice in the same way they had that first day at the railroad station. They were kind. They smiled around the edges. They hurt a little, they were so trustful.

               
"I didn't dream--" she heard herself saying, "We drove out further than we'd intended to-- It was such a beautiful night--"

               
Two hands were feebly extended for her to clasp.

               
She dropped suddenly to her knees and smothered them with kisses.

               
"I love you," she pleaded. "That much is true; oh, that much is true! If I could only make you believe it My mother. You're my mother."

               
"You don't have to, dear. I know it already. I love you too, and my love has always known that you do. That's why you're my little girl. Remember that I told you this: you're my little girl ."

               
And then she said, very softly, "I forgive you, dear. I forgive my little girl."

               
She stroked Patrice's hand consolingly.

               
"Marry Bill. I give you both my blessing. Here--" She gestured feebly in the direction of her own shoulder. "Under my pillow. I had Ty put something there for you."

               
Patrice reached under, drew out a long envelope, sealed, unaddressed.

               
"Keep this," Mother Hazzard said, touching the edge for a moment. "Don't show it to anyone. It's just for you. Do not open until--after I'm not here. It's in case you need it. When you're in greatest need, remember I gave it to you--open it then."

               
She sighed deeply, as though the effort had tired her unendurably.

               
"Kiss me. It's late. So very late. I can feel it in every inch of my poor old body. You can't feel how late it is, Patrice, but I can."

               
Patrice bent low above her, touched her own lips to hers.

               
"Goodbye, my daughter," she whispered.

               
"Goodnight," Patrice amended.

               
"Goodbye," she insisted gently. There was a faint, prideful smile on her face, a smile of superior knowledge, as of one who knows herself to be the better informed of the two.

44

               
Lonely vigil by the window, until long after it had grown light. Sitting there, staring, waiting, hoping, despairing, dying a little. Seeing the stars go out, and the dawn creep slowly toward her from the east, like an ugly gray pallor. She'd never wanted to see daybreak less, for at least the dark had covered her sorrows like a cloak but every moment of increasing light diluted it, until it had reached the vanishing-point, it was gone, there wasn't any more left.

               
Motionless as a statue in the blue-tinged window, forehead pressed forward against the glass, making a little white ripple of adhesion across it where it touched. Eyes staring at nothing, for nothing was all there was out there to see.

               
I've found my love at last, only to lose him; only to throw him away. Why did I find out tonight I loved him, why did I have to know? Couldn't I have been spared that at least?

               
The day wasn't just bitter now. The day was ashes, lying all around her, cold and crumbled and consumed. No use for pinks and blues and yellows to try to tint it, like watercolors lightly applied from some celestial palette; no use. It was dead. And she was sitting there beside its bier.

               
And if there was such a thing as penance, absolution, for mistakes that, once made, can never be wholly undone again, can only be regretted, she should have earned it on that long vigil. But maybe there is none.

               
Her chances were dead and her hopes were dead, and she couldn't atone any further.

               
She turned and slowly looked behind her. Her baby was awake, and smiling at her, and for once she had no answering smile ready to give him. She couldn't smile, it would have been too strange a thing to fit upon her mouth.

               
She turned her face away again, so that she wouldn't have to look at him too long. Because, what good did crying do? Crying to a little baby. Babies cried to their mothers, but mothers shouldn't cry to their babies.

               
Outside, the man came out on that lawn down there, pulling his garden-hose after him. Then when he had it all stretched out, he let it lie, and went back to the other end of it, and turned the spigot. The grass began to sparkle, up where the nozzle lay inert, even before he could return to it and take it up. You couldn't see the water actually coming out, because the nozzle was down too flat against the ground, but you could see a sort of irridescent rippling of the grass right there, that told there was something in motion under it.

               
Then he saw her at her window, and he raised his arm and waved to her, the way he had in the beginning, that first day. Not because she was she, but because his own world was all in order, and it was a beautiful morning, and he wanted to wave to someone to show them how he felt

               
She turned her head away. Not to avoid his friendly little salutation, but because there was a knocking at her door. Someone was knocking at her door.

               
She got up stiffly and walked over toward it, and opened it.

               
A lonely, lost old man was standing out there, quietly, unassumingly. Bill's father was standing out there, very wilted, very spent A stranger, mistaking her for a daughter.

               
"She just died," he whispered helplessly. "Your mother just died, dear. I didn't know whom to go to, to tell about it--so I came to your door." He seemed unable to do anything but just stand there, limp, baffled.

               
She stood there without moving either. That was all she was able to do too. That was all the help she could give him.

45

               
The leaves dying, as she had died. The season was dying. The old life was dying, was dead. They had buried it back there just now.

               
"How strange," Patrice thought "To go on, before one can go on to something new, there has to be death first Always, there has to be a kind of death, of one sort or another, first Just as there has been with me."

               
The leaves were brightly dying. The misty black of her veil dimmed their apoplectic spasms of scarlet and orange and ochre, tempered them to a more bearable hue in the fiery sunset, as the funeral limousine coursed at stately speed homeward through the countryside.

               
She sat between Bill and his father.

               
"I am the Woman of the Family now," she thought. "The only woman of their house and in their house. That is why I sit between them like this, in place of prominence, and not to the outside."

               
And though she would not have known how to phrase it, even to herself, her own instincts told her that the country and the society she was a part of were basically matriarchal, that it was the woman who was essentially the focus of each home, the head of each little individual family-group. Not brazenly, aggressively so, not on the outside; but within the walls, where the home really was. She had succeeded to this primacy now. The gangling adolescent who had once stood outside a door that wouldn't open.

               
One she would marry and be his wife. One she would look after in filial devotion, and ease his loneliness and cushion his decline as best she could. There was no treachery, no deceit, in her plans; all that was over with and past.

               
She held Father Hazzard's hand gently clasped in her own, on the one side. And on the other, her hand curved gracefully up and around the turn of Bill's stalwart arm. To indicate: You are mine. And I am yours.

               
The limousine had halted. Bill got out and armed her down. Then they both helped his father and, one on each side of him, walked slowly with him up the familiar terraced flagstones to the familiar door.

               
Bill sounded the knocker, and Aunt Josie 's deputy opened the door for them with all the alacrity of the novice. Aunt Josie herself, of course, a titular member of the family, had attended the services with them, was on her way back now in the lesser of the two limousines.

               
She closed the door in respectful silence, and they were home.