They Call Me Patrice

Chapter Ten

She heard the brakes go on, and felt the car stop. She lifted her head from his shoulder and looked up. He took his sheltering arm from around her.

He’d stopped in front of their own house. His own. How could it ever be hers again, how could she ever go in there, after what had happened tonight?

“Bill,” she whispered, “I didn’t— You don’t think I—” His face swam before her eyes. She struggled to suppress her sobs. “How can I expect you to think otherwise—? I went there, and you found me—”

He took something out of his pocket, on the side away from her, something she couldn’t see. A hollow click sounded. Then he put it away again. “I know you didn’t, Patrice. I’ve been spared that added complication, at least. This gun’s been empty for years. It’s just a stage-prop, left around to make Mother feel more secure.”

She turned toward him with desperate urgency, forcing her voice to be steady. “Bill, you simply must listen to me!”

“Sh, Patrice,” he said soothingly. “You’ll wake them up in there.”

“My name isn’t Patrice. Bill, don’t stop me. I can’t go in there again. I can’t go in that house. It’s too late now, but at least let me tell you. Patrice Hazzard was killed on the train. I’d been married to this same man Georgesson—”

Again his hand went over her mouth, as it had in Steve’s apartment. More gently now. “I don’t want to know, I don’t want to hear,” he said stubbornly. “Can’t you understand, Patrice?” He looked around him helplessly. “This is no time for love-speeches, I know. Didn’t it mean anything to you, what I tried to tell you that night in the garden? What difference if there was another Patrice, a girl I never knew, some other place, some other time? A girl named Patrice came into my life one day. She would have only begun then — for me — no matter what her name was. I’m not in love with a name on a birth certificate, I’m in love with a girl who’s Patrice to me. My love calls her Patrice, and my love doesn’t want any other name.”

Suddenly he swept her to him violently. His lips found hers.

“You’re Patrice. You’ll always be Patrice. You’ll only be Patrice. What more can I say?”

“Bill, you knew, and you never—”

“Oh, not right away, in a flash. Life doesn’t go that way. It’s a slow thing, it’s gradual. I think I was pretty sure within a week or two. My first reaction was resentment, hostility. I didn’t say anything, because of Mother. And I wanted to see what your game was. I thought if I gave you enough rope — I gave you rope and rope, and there was no game. You were just you. And every day it became a little harder to be on guard against you, a little easier to look at you, and think of you, and like you. Then that night of the will—”

“You knew what you did, and yet you let them go ahead and—”

“There was no real danger. Patrice Hazzard was mentioned, and it would have been easy enough to prove— The law isn’t like a man in love, the law values names. But what it did for me once and for all, was show me there was no game, no ulterior motive. Patrice, the fright and unwillingness I read on your face that night couldn’t have been faked. That gave me the answer, the key. I knew from that night on what it was you really wanted — safety, security. It was on your face a hundred times a day. I’ve seen it over and over. Every time you looked at your baby. Every time I saw that look, it did something to me. And I loved you a little more than the time before.”

He stopped a moment, and then he added in a low voice. “And I wanted you to have that permanently, as my wife. And I still do.”

“I can’t now,” she said brokenly.

“You can, but we won’t talk about it any more tonight.” Abruptly he asked her: “What was he doing to you, Patrice?”

“Money.”

“I’m glad he’s—” he said grimly. He didn’t finish it.

“Bill, he made me re-marry him tonight — at Hastings.”

She saw his hand tighten up on the wheel-rim, until it seemed to be trying to wrench it apart.

“Did you give him any money?”

“A check, a month ago.”

He was talking more tauntly now. “You destroyed it, after it cleared?”

“It never came back, He must have it over there some place.”

She saw by the convulsive start he gave that she’d frightened him.

“Go inside, Patrice,” he said curtly. “Here, here’s the key. Hurry up.” He floored the accelerator, and the engine whined to life again.

She suddenly clung to his arm, “No, darling — what are you going to do?”

“I’m going back there. I have to. I have to find that check.”

She tried to hold him. “No, Bill! They’ll find you there! You’ll be involved—”

“Don’t you understand, Patrice? Your name has to stay out of this. That man’s dead. He’s been shot to death!”

He pulled her hands free. He opened the door and armed her out, with the side of his arm.

“Bill,” she pleaded. “Bill — for me — don’t go near that place again!”

“There may still be time, I may be lucky. No one may have found him yet. Patrice, was there anything else but that? Pull yourself together. Was there anything else?”

“No, only that.”

“Did you sign your name out at Hastings?”

“I had to. The Justice of the peace who married us out there is mailing the certificate to his address, in a day or two. Bill, they’ll hold you for it—”

“Let them,” he said. “I know I didn’t do it, and when you know that, you’re not afraid.”

Her helplessly-clutching hands slipped off the rim of the door as the car pulled away from her.

“Go back in the house, Patrice,” he said over his shoulder. “Keep watching from the window. Wait there in your room.”

She tottered a little, pulled forward by the momentum of the car, and then she was standing there alone, by the roadway, in the middle of the night.

All night by the window, until it grew light. Sitting there, staring, waiting, hoping, despairing, dying a little. Seeing the stars go out, and the dawn at last creep slowly toward her from the east, like an ugly gray pallor.

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.

I’ve found my love at last, only to lose him. 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.

If there is such a thing as penance, absolution, for mistakes that can never be wholly righted she performed it and she gained it on that long vigil. The day was dead and her hopes were dead, and she couldn’t atone any further.

She could only watch and wait, somehow knowing that she would be waiting forever.

She turned her head and looked behind her. Her baby was awake, smiling at her. For once she had no answering smile to give him. She couldn’t smile, a smile would be too strange a thing upon her mouth after all she’d seen.

She turned her face forward again, so that she wouldn’t have to look at the baby too long. Because, what good did crying do? Babies cried to their mothers, but mothers shouldn’t cry to their babies.

The man came out on that lawn down there, pulling his gardenhose after him. He raised his arm and waved to her — why? How odd!

But he wasn’t looking the right way, somehow, to wave to her. He was turned too far around, as if looking somewhere past her.

Then quietly, unassumingly, the car glided to a stop in front of the door, directly below her. With Bill sitting in it.

He was so very real, so photographically real down there, that paradoxically, she couldn’t quite believe she was seeing him. The very herringbone weave of his coat stood out, as if a magnifying glass were being held to the pattern. The haggardness of his face, the faint trace of shadow where he needed a shave. She could see everything about him so clearly, as if he were much nearer than he was. Maybe it was fatigue. Or perhaps her eyes were dilated from long straining... from a watch she had thought would never end that somehow, incredibly, was ended now.

He got out slowly, and came in toward the door. And just before he took the step that would have carried him out of sight below her, his eyes lifted and he saw her.

“Bill,” she said silently through the glass, and her two hands flattened to the pane, as if framing the unheard word.

“Patrice,” he said silently, from down below. And though she didn’t hear him, didn’t even see his lips move, she knew that was what he said.

He didn’t smile, nor stop. He went on to the door, his face set, tired.

Suddenly she’d fled from the room, madly rushing. The baby’s wondering head turned after her far too slowly to catch her in her flight.

She ran, then she stopped short below the turn of the stairs, and stood there, unable to move any further.

He was standing talking to Father Hazzard, just inside the open doorway. Father Hazzard must have been downstairs already, and had let him in.

He left his father and came over toward the stairs, and came on up them to where she was standing.

His father went back into the dining room and closed the door.

The two of them were alone there on the stairs.

“Here, Patrice,” he said softly, “I found the check. God was very good to a fellow like me, over there in that room last night. Better than I deserved. I found it in the pocket of the coat he’d had on when he came in. I’ve had it on me all night, and if they’d put their hands into my pockets—”

He was here beside her, real and safe. But she couldn’t find a word to say. She couldn’t even question him. They stood looking at each other for what were endless minutes of silence.

Then he took out a crumpled ball of light-blue paper and put it in her hand and pressed her hand closed over it. She didn’t open her fist to look at it. She didn’t move. Just stood there against him, exhaustedly, gratefully.

“It’s a funny thing, Patrice,” he said. “You didn’t want me to go back there. And if it hadn’t been for what you told me about the check, I probably wouldn’t have. But when I opened the door and went in the second time there was my own hat, lying there on the floor just inside the door. Initials on the band and everything. I must have dropped it when I was getting you out of the room and never even missed it in the excitement.”

She shuddered. “But Bill— Now what will happen?”

“Nothing. It’s over already. They’ve already found her. I was still there, around six, when they brought her in.”

“Her?” she whispered.

“Some poor thing who had the misfortune to love him too deeply for her own good. They always do, that kind of a guy. Don’t ask me why. She must have followed him here, and not understood what he was up to. She never even gave him a chance to explain.”

“And they?” she faltered.

“The police? They won’t know about you. I drove all the way out to the other place, after I left Georgesson’s. To Hastings, to that Justice. I explained part of the situation, that duress was used and a town-wide scandal might result. The record itself can’t be altered, of course, but the certificate won’t be mailed out. He gave me his promise not a word will ever be said about the matter by him to anyone. Just forget it as if it had never happened, Patrice.”

“And you stayed in that room and waited for the police, Bill?” she marveled.

“At his flat? I was the one who notified them to come over there. I had to. That was what I naturally would have done if I’d actually happened to drop by there, to remind him he owed me five or ten dollars. That’s what I told them had taken me there. I wouldn’t have just walked out again and left him for somebody else to find.”

“Bill, you’re so... so honest and decent. And it’s time I tried to be too—”

She left him suddenly, went down the stairs and over to the closed door. He watched her go, watched her put her hand to the knob.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going in there now and tell them, Bill. About me, about that part of it. I should have long ago, I’ve waited too long.”

“Wait just a little longer,” he said. He came after her and took her by the shoulders and turned her away. “A day or two. We’ll go to them together and tell them then. When we tell them about — us.”

His arms slipped around her waist.

The sense of peace, of safety, of belonging, that had been woven about her when she had first come to this house, that had been torn so rudely asunder, was returning. Nothing would ever tear its fabric apart again. The world was made right.

“Come on, walk upstairs with me, Patrice,” Bill said. “I’d like to take a look at the boy before I turn in.”

His arm still about her, they turned together up the stairway.

“Our boy,” he added softly.