They Call Me Patrice

Chapter Six

Quietly and deftly she moved about the dimly-lighted room, packing her clothes. Hugh lay sleeping in his crib, and the clock said almost one. There’d been movement and voices in the halls until about 11:30 and she hadn’t dared move any sooner.

She put on the hat and coat she’d left in readiness across the foot of the bed. She picked up her handbag, fumbled in its contents until she found 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. A much-folded cluster of currency fell out, and a sprinkling of coins. She swept them all together, and then left them there on top of the dresser, all but a five-dollar bill.

She went over to the crib and kissed the child lightly. “I’ll be back for you in a minute,” she whispered. “I have to take the bag down first. I can’t manage you both on those stairs, I’m afraid.”

The clock said a little after one now.

She softly opened the door, and carried the valise outside with her. She started down the stairs valise in hand, with infinite caution.

Suddenly she stopped, and allowed the bag to come to rest on the step beside her. Father Hazzard and Dr. Parker were standing in the lower hall by the front door. She hadn’t heard them until now, for they hadn’t been saying anything. They broke the silence now, as she stood there unseen, above the bend of the stairs.

“Well, good night, Donald,” the doctor said, and she saw him put his hand to Father Hazzard’s shoulder as though in consolation, then let it fall heavily away 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 several steps around the turn to meet him, leaving the valise behind her, with her hat and coat hastily flung over it.

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’s had several spells over the past few years. A bad one when — when Hugh died. But she always has been touchy about them. Won’t admit they’re serious, or let anyone know she’s ill. Well, tonight she had another soon after we retired. The doctor’s been here for over an hour and a half. It was touch and go, for a few minutes at first—”

“But Father! Why didn’t you tell me?”

He sat down heavily on the steps. She sat down beside him.

“Why should I bother you, dear? I know what to do, and it was a matter for a doctor’s care anyway. This isn’t anything new. The spells have come before. And her heart’s always been weak. Way back before the boys were born—”

“I never knew. Why didn’t you tell me? Is it getting worse?”

“She’s sensitive about it, and won’t talk about it. But, of course, things like that don’t improve as you get on in years,” he said gently.

She put her head against his shoulder, in silent sympathy.

He patted her hand consolingly. “She’ll be all right. We’ll see that she is between us, won’t we?”

She shivered a little, and could find no words to answer.

“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 there is for her. Just having you around—”

And if in the morning she had asked for Patrice, asked for her grandchild, he would have had to tell her they had deserted her. If she’d come out of her room five minutes later, she might have been responsible for bringing death into this house. A poor repayment for all the love that had been lavished on her. She might have killed the only mother she’d ever known!

He misunderstood her abstraction, and patted her chin comfortingly. “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 her illness. 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 on the cheek. Then she stood up.

“I’m going up,” she said quietly. “You forgot to put out the hall light, Dad.”

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

She closed the door softly behind her, 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.”

The anonymous notes stopped suddenly. The days became a week, the week became a month. The month lengthened toward two. And no more plain white envelopes came. It was as though the battle had been broken off, held in abeyance, at the whim of the crafty, shadowy adversary.

She clutched at clues — any little bits of news that would give her 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. 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, tentatively, reassuring — incomplete, but there.

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

Mother Hazzard knocked on her door just as she’d finished tucking Hugh in. The filching of a last grandmotherly kiss just before the light went out was a nightly ritual. Tonight, however, she seemed to want to talk to Patrice herself. And she didn’t know how to go about it.

She lingered on after she’d kissed the little boy and the side of the crib had been lifted into place. 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 to find out if you’ll go.”

Patrice was so completely surprised she didn’t answer for a moment, just stood there looking at her.

“He told me to come up and ask you.” Then she rushed on, “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 on a coaxing note.

“But I... I—” Patrice stammered.

“Patrice, you must begin to go out sooner or later. It isn’t good for you not to be with young people more often. You haven’t been looking as well as you might lately. We’re a little worried about you. Hugh wasn’t the kind— He’d be the last one to want you to become a recluse. You do what Mother says, dear.” It was an order. Or as close to an order as Mother Hazzard could summon.

She had opened Patrice’s closet-door, meanwhile, and was peering helpfully inside. “How about this?” She took down a flowered linen with a gay contrasting jacket, and held it up appraisingly. “It’ll do nicely.” The dress landed on the bed. “They’re not very formal there. Bill will buy you an orchid or gardenia on the way, that will dress it up enough. You just go and get the feel of the place tonight. You’ll get back in the swing of things little by little. I’ll tell Bill you’re getting ready.”

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

“Am I all right?” she asked.

He was suddenly shy with her. “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 tenseness between them, almost as though they’d met tonight for the first time. He turned on the radio in the car. Dance music rippled back into their faces. “To get you into the mood,” he said, a little self-consciously.

He stopped, and got out, and came back with a corsage of gardenias. “Somehow these seemed to suit you better than an orchid,” he said with a grin. “Mother always did think orchids wow the girls... ”

“They’re beautiful Bill. Here, pin them on for me.”

Abruptly, he balked at that — all but shied away. “Oh no, that you do yourself,” he said. “I might stab myself,” he added lamely as an afterthought. The pause was a little too long.

“Why, you great big coward.”

His hands were a trifle unsteady, she noticed, when he first put them back to the wheel. Then they quieted.

They drove the rest of the way through open country, the stars only finger-tip distance above them.

“I’ve never seen so many!” she marveled.

“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 slowed the car a little, and turned his head toward her.

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

“I’ll try, Bill,” Patrice said. “And I know I will be.”

And she was happy. For dance after dance. She always remembered that afterward. She was dancing with Bill. For that matter she’d been dancing 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 know 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? 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, without seeing the person they belonged to.

A voice said, “May I cut in on this one?”

And suddenly they’d stopped. Bill’s arms left her. A shuffling motion took place, Bill stepped aside, and there was someone else there in his place. Someone like a bad dream out of the past. It was like a double exposure, where one person dissolves into another.

Their eyes met, hers and the new pair. They had been waiting for hers, and hers had foolishly run into them. They couldn’t move again after that.

The rest was sheer horror. Horror such as she’d never known.

“Steve 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.

She felt his arms close about her, her face sank into the concealing shadow of his shoulder. Bill’s face faded away in the background.

“We’ve met before, haven’t we?”

Keep me from fainting, she prayed.

“Who’d he say you were?” he asked sardonically.

“Don’t—” she whimpered. “Don’t.”

The music stopped. They stopped.

His arm released her, but his hand stayed tight about her wrist, holding her there beside him for a moment.

He said, “There’s a veranda outside. Over there, out that way. I’ll go out there and wait for you, and we can — talk.”

She hardly knew what she was saying. “I can’t— Don’t ask me to.” Her neck wouldn’t hold firm; her head kept trying to lob over limply.

“I think we can. We were once married to one another, remember? Perfectly proper for an ex-husband to talk over old times with his ex-wife.”

Bill was coming back toward them from the sidelines.

“I’ll be out there where I said. Don’t keep me waiting too long, or— I’ll simply have to come in and look you up again.” His face didn’t change. His voice didn’t change. “Thanks for the dance,” he said, as Bill arrived.

“Are you all right?” asked Bill. “You look pale.”

“It’s the lights. I’m going in to powder. You go and dance with someone else.”

He grinned at her. “I don’t want to dance with someone else.”

“Then you go and — and come back for me. The one after.”

“The one after.”

She watched him head for the bar. Then she turned and went the other way.

She walked slowly over to the doors leading outside onto the veranda, and stood in one of them, looking out into the blueness of the night. Wicker chairs, in groups of twos and threes, circled small tables.

The red sequin of a cigarette-tip rose high in a beckoning motion from far down at the end of the porch.

She walked slowly down that way and came to a halt before him. He perched sidewise on the ballustrade, in insolent informality. He repeated what he’d said before. “Who’d he say you were? I didn’t quite get the name.”

The stars were moving. They were making peculiar eddying swirls like blurred pinwheels all over the sky.

“You deserted me,” she said with leashed fury. “You divorced me without my knowledge, left me with only five dollars and a railroad ticket. Now what do you want?”

“What do I want? I don’t want anything. I’m a little confused, that’s all. I’d like to be straightened out. The man introduced you under a mistaken name in there.”

“What do you want? What are you doing out here?”

“Well, for that matter,” he said with insolent urbanity. “What are you doing down here?”

She repeated it a third time. “What do you want?”

“Can’t a man show interest in his ex-wife and child? There’s no way of making children ‘ex,’ you know.”

“You’re either insane or—”

“You know that isn’t so. You wish it were,” he said brutally. “That child is ours.”

She turned on her heel. His hand found her wrist again, flicked around it like a whip. Cutting just as deeply.

“Don’t go inside yet. We haven’t finished.”

She stopped, her back to him now. “I think we have.”

“The decision is mine.”

He let go of her, but she stayed there where she was.

“You still haven’t cleared things up,” he purred. “I’m as mixed-up as ever. This Hugh Hazzard married... er... let’s say you, his wife, in Paris, two years ago last June fifteenth. I went to considerable expense and trouble to have the exact date on the records there verified. But two years ago last June fifteenth you and I were honeymooning in our little furnished room in New York. I have the receipted rent-bills to prove it. How could you have been in two such far-apart places at once?” He sighed philosophically. “Somebody has his dates mixed. Either he had. Or I have.” And then very slowly, “Or you have,”

She winced unavoidably at that. Slowly her head came around; she moved as though hypnotized.

“It was you who’s been sending those—?”

He nodded with mock affability, as if on being complimented on something praiseworthy. “I thought it would be kinder to break it to you gently.”

She drew in her breath with an icy shudder of repugnance.

“I first happened on your name among the train-casualties, when I was up in New York,” he said. He paused. “I went there and identified a body as yours, you know,” he went on matter-of-factly. “You have that much to thank me for, at any rate.”

He puffed thoughtfully on his cigarette.

“Then I heard one thing and another, and put two and two together. I went back for awhile first — got the rent-receipts together and one thing and another — and then finally I came on the rest of the way out here, out of curiosity. I became quite confused,” he said ironically, “when I learned the rest of the story.”

He waited. She didn’t say anything. He seemed to take pity on her finally. “I know,” he said indulgently, “this isn’t the time nor place to — talk over old times. This is a party, and you’re anxious to get back and enjoy it.”

She shivered,

“Is there anywhere I can reach you?”

He took out a notebook, clicked a lighter. She mistakenly thought he was waiting to write as she dictated. Her lips remained frozen.

“Seneca 382,” he read from the notebook. He put it away again. His hand made a lazy curve between them. In the stricken silence that followed he suggested after awhile, casually: “Lean up against that chair so you won’t fall. You don’t seem very steady on your feet, and I don’t want to have to carry you inside in front of all those people.”

The rose-amber haze in the open doorway down at the center of the terrace was blotted out for a moment, and Bill was standing there looking for her.

“Patrice, this is our dance,” he said.

Georgesson rose for a second to bow.

She wavered toward Bill, the dim light of the terrace covering her uncertainty of step. She went inside with him and his arms took charge of her from that point on, so that she no longer had to be on her own.

“You were both standing there like statues,” he said. “He can’t be very good company.”

She lurched against him in the tendril-like twists of the rumba; her head drooped to rest on his shoulder.

“He isn’t,” were the only words she could find.

And she knew, inevitably and finally, that peace for her had ended.

The first phone call came the following evening, with remorseless precision.

He’d timed it well. He couldn’t have timed it better if he’d been able to look through the walls of the house and watch their movements on the inside. The two men were out. She’d just finished putting Hugh to sleep. She and Mother Hazzard were both upstairs in their own rooms. Which meant that she was the logical one to go down to answer.

She knew at the first ring who it was, what it was. She knew too, that she’d been expecting this call all day, that she’d known it was coming, it was surely coming.