They Call Me Patrice

Chapter One

She climbed the rooming-house stairs like a puppet dangling from slack strings. She was about twenty, with small, well-turned features, but her cheeks were a little too thin. Blond hair hung listlessly, as though no heed had been paid to it for some time past. The heels of her shoes were a little run over.

She managed the three flights, somehow, stopped at the door and took out a key. A wedge of white protruded under the door; it lengthened into an envelope as the door swept back above it. She picked it up. Her hand shook. She seemed to come alive a little.

Only her name, no address. She moved to the middle of the room, snapped on the light. She ripped hastily along the top of the envelope, and her hand plunged in. It held no message. She turned it over and shook it.

A flutter of paper came down on the table.

A five-dollar bill. Just an anonymous five-dollar bill, with Lincoln’s picture on it. And a strip of railroad tickets, running consecutively from starting-point to terminus, the way they do. The first coupon was marked “New York”; here, where she was now. The last was marked “San Francisco.” San Francisco, which she’d left one day two years ago.

There was no return. It was for a one-way trip.

The envelope fell to the floor. Her hands clasped each other nervously but somehow with purpose too. A little gold circle came off one of her fingers, and dropped to the floor. It rolled in a circle and came to rest under the edge of her foot. It was as though she were grinding it down into the shoddy carpet.

She brought out a battered valise, placed it on the bed, and threw back the lid.

Her face kept twitching intermittently, as if it were struggling to burst forth into some kind of emotion. For a moment or two it seemed that it might be weeping, when it came. But it wasn’t.

It was laughter.

Laughter should be merry and vibrant and alive.

This wasn’t.

The train had already left the Chicago station and she hadn’t yet found a seat. She struggled down car-aisle after car-aisle, swaying, jostled from side to side. The aisles were full of standees.

None of the seated men she passed offered her a seat. Their places had been too hard-won on a transcontinental train where anyone who stood, stood for hundreds of miles, through half-a-dozen states.

She’d been too late at the gate in the station, and too late getting on the train. The crowd had spilled past her. She’d been too slow, and too tired, and a little too helpless with her leaden valise. No more cars now. This was the last. Choked from end to end like all the rest. She stopped midway through the car. She could see there weren’t any seats vacant.

She set down the valise, and settled herself on its edge, the way she saw so many of the others doing. But it was lower than a seat would have been, and harder to settle down upon. She floundered badly and almost fell. Then when she’d settled down she let her head rest wearily against the nearest seat-back.

The tilt of her head gave her only a downward view into the little patch of floor-space in front of the seat. A pair of man’s brogues and a diminutive pair of kid pumps rested side by side. The brogues slung one above the other, the owner’s legs coupled at the knee. The pumps were cocked pertly, ankles crossed.

Nothing happened for a moment. Then one of the pumps edged over and dug sharply at the man’s ankle. A newspaper rattled. Both brogues swivelled slightly aisleward, as if their wearer’s upper body had turned in the seat to take a look.

Then they came down flat and he stood up. He came out through the seat-gap and motioned her in.

“Take my place for awhile.”

She tried to demur with a faint smile.

“No, go ahead,” he said heartily. “That’s quite all right.”

She stood up and accepted the offered seat.

The couple were both young, only a little older than she was, pleasant, friendly-looking. The girl had red-gold hair, fluffed out around her face. She had a beautiful mouth, which alone was sufficient to make her lovely looking, drawing all notice to itself as it did. When it smiled, everything smiled with it. Her nose crinkled, and her eyebrows arched, and dimples appeared in each cheek. She looked as though she smiled a lot.

She was smiling at Helen now, to put her at ease. Her fingers toyed with her wedding-ring. It had a row of diamonds, with a sapphire at each end of the row of stones. A lovely ring, one she was obviously proud of.

“I appreciate this very much,” Helen said.

The young husband said, “Guess I’ll go out on the platform for a smoke.”

His wife glanced around to make sure he’d left them. Then she dropped her voice confidentially. “I could tell right away. That’s why I made him get up.”

Helen didn’t say anything. What could she say?

“Me too,” the wife added. She turned her ring around a little more, gave it a caressing little brush.

They were both chatting away absorbedly by the time the husband reappeared ten minutes later. He acted mysterious. He looked cautiously left and right as if bearing tidings of highest secrecy, then whispered, “Pat, they’re going to open up the dining car in a couple minutes. One of the porters just tipped me off. I think we better start moving up that way if we want to make it. There’ll be a stampede on as soon as word gets around.”

The wife jumped to her feet.

He immediately soft-pedaled her with the flats of both hands, in comic intensity. “Sh! Don’t give it away, what are you trying to do?”

She tiptoed out into the aisle, as though the amount of noise would give away the secret.

She pulled at the sleeve of the girl beside her in passing. “You come with us,” she whispered.

“What about the seats? We’ll lose them.”

“Not if we put our baggage in them.” The girl still hesitated.

The wife seemed to understand; she was quick that way. She sent him on ahead, to break trail. Then as soon as his back was turned, bent low over the seat in whispered reassurance. “He’ll look after the check, I’ll see that he does.”

“No, it isn’t that—” the girl faltered.

“Hurry up, we’ll lose him.”

She guided Helen lightly forward with a friendly hand.

“You can’t neglect yourself now, of all times,” she remonstrated in an undertone. “I know.”

They secured seats together in the dining car, which was crowded as soon as the doors were opened, just as he had foreseen. The unlucky ones had to wait in the aisle outside.

“Just so we won’t sit down to the table still strangers,” the wife said, cheerfully unfolding her napkin, “he’s Hazzard, Hugh, and I’m Hazzard, Patrice.” The dimples showed up. “Funny name, isn’t it?”

“Be more respectful,” her young husband grumbled, without lifting his nose from the bill-of-fare.

“What’s your name?”

“Georgesson.”

She smiled at the two of them. It wasn’t a very broad smile, but it had depth and meaning.

“You’ve both been awfully friendly to me.”

She looked down at the menu card the steward had handed her, so they wouldn’t detect the emotion that made her lips tremble.

The lights had gone out in the car. All but those tiny, subdued ones over each individual seat. The three were already old friends by now.

“She just came out,” Patrice reported, eyes fastened watchfully on a door far down the aisle in the dim distance. “Come on, do you want to come with me, Helen? Quick, Hugh, the overnight-case.” She prodded him heartlessly in the ribs.

“All right, take it easy,” Hugh grunted sleepily.

“I’m going to make him take back his seat,” Helen murmured on their way down the aisle. “He can’t sit up all night on the edge of a suitcase.”

“You can’t either,” Patrice remarked, stepping carefully over somebody’s outstretched feet, and then stopping to give her companion a hand over the same hazard. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll take turns, all three of us; we’ll work it by relays.”

They closed the dressing-room door.

“I’m going to take as long as I want,” Patrice announced determinedly, snapping open the overnight-case and fumbling for facial tissues.

“We’re nearly the last ones in anyway,” Helen said.

After that they combed and creamed in silence for awhile, giving an occasional unsteady little lurch in unison.

“I hope Hugh’s people like me,” Patrice remarked suddenly.

“Haven’t you ever seen them before?”

“They’ve never laid eyes on me. I met Hugh in Europe, and we were married over there. We’ve lived there all this last year. We’re just coming from the other side now, you know. This is practically a continuation of the same trip. We went straight from the ship to the train. We made terribly close connections; we weren’t in New York more than two hours.”

“Didn’t you ever send them a picture?”

“No. I started to several times, but I was never quite satisfied with the ones I had. I knew I was going to meet them eventually, and snapshots are so... so— How on earth do you make this water stay in?” she interrupted herself.

“You push that thing down, I think.”

“I have a horror of losing this. It slipped down a drain on the Other Side once, and they had to take out a whole section of pipe.” She stripped off her wedding-band before plunging her hands in the water.

“It’s beautiful,” Helen said wistfully.

“Isn’t it pretty?” Patrice agreed. She held the ring pinched between two fingers so Helen could look at it. “See what it says on the inside? His name and mine, together.”

She ran a flimsy-scarf-like handkerchief through the center of the narrow band, deftly knotted it, and dropped the ring into the open dressing-case.

“Isn’t it supposed to be bad luck to do that? I mean take your ring off?”

“I couldn’t have bad luck.”

The train pounded on in silence for a few more minutes, its hurtling roar deadened somewhat in the closed compartment where they were.

Patrice stepped back, her toilette completed. She hugged her own arms in a sort of half-ecstasy of delicious, shivering fright. “This is the last night. By tomorrow night this time we’ll already be there, the worst’ll be over.”

Helen saw her nervously steal a look at herself in the mirror.

“You’ll be all right, Patrice. They’ll like you.”

“Hugh says they’re very wealthy,” Patrice remarked. “My father and mother weren’t. When they died I had just enough to stake me until I got the job with UNNRA that took me to Europe in the first place. I know Hugh’s father had to send us the money for the trip home. We were always on a shoestring over there. We had an awful lot of fun, though. But I didn’t want to have the baby over there, and Hugh didn’t want me to either.”

Suddenly she reverted to their mutual topic of interest again.

“Are you frightened? About it, you know?”

Helen made the admission with her eyes.

“I am too. I think everyone is, a little, don’t you? Men don’t think we are. All I have to do is look at Hugh—” She grinned companion-ably. “I can see he’s frightened enough for the two of us, so then I don’t let on that I’m frightened too. And it reassures him.”

Helen wondered what it would be like to be so treasured.

“Do they know about it?” she asked.

“Oh sure. Hugh wrote them. They’re tickled silly. First grandchild, you know. They didn’t even ask us if we wanted to come back. ‘You’re coming back,’ and that was that. Heady? Shall we go back to our seats now?”

Helen’s hand was on the door handle, tussling with the little hand-latch which was hard to turn with the train’s movement throwing her off balance. Patrice was somewhere behind her, replacing something in the open dressing-kit. She could see her vaguely in the chromium sheeting of the door in front of her. Little things. Little things that life is made up of. Little things that stop—

Her senses played a trick on her. She had a fleeting impression, at first, of having done something wrong to the door, dislodged it in its entirety. The floor shifted to become the wall upright before her. The door was hopelessly out of reach, a sealed trap overhead, impossible to attain.

The lights went. All light was gone, and yet so vividly explosive were the sensory images whirling through her mind, that it took her a comparatively long time to realize she was in pitch-blackness, could no longer see physically. Only in afterglow of imaginative terror. The car seemed to go up and down like a scenic railway. A distant rending noise ground nearer, swelling in volume. It reminded her of a coffee-mill at home, when she was a little girl. But that one didn’t draw you into its maw, crunching everything in sight, as this one was doing.

“Hugh!” The single word from somewhere below her. And then silence.