I Married A Dead Man (12 page)

               
"Here, let me try it a minute myself." Without warning he'd taken both pen and pad back again, before she could do anything to obliterate or alter what was on it.

               
Whether he saw it or not she couldn't tell. He gave no indication. Yet it was right there under his eyes, he must have, how could he have failed to?

               
He drew a cursory line or two, desisted.

               
"No," he said to the salesman. "Let me see that one."

               
While he was reaching into the case, she managed to deftly peel off the topmost leaf with that damaging "Helen" on it. Crumpled it surreptitiously in her hand, dropped it to the floor.

               
And then, belatedly, realized that perhaps this was even worse than had she left it on there where it was. For surely he'd seen it anyway, and now she'd only pointed up the fact that she did not want him to. In other words, she'd doubly damned herself; first by the error, then by taking such pains to try to efface it.

               
Meanwhile, his interest in the matter of pens had all at once flagged. He looked at the clerk, about to speak, and she could have almost predicted what he was about to say--had he said it--his expression conveyed it so well. "Never mind. I'll stop in again some other time." But then instead he gave her a look, and as though recalled to the necessity for maintaining some sort of plausibility, said hurriedly, almost indifferently, "All right, here, make it this one. Send it over to my office later on."

               
He scarcely looked at it. It didn't seem to matter to him which one he took.

               
And, she reminded herself, after making such to-do about her coming in with him to help him select one.

               
"Shall we go?" he said, a trifle reticently.

               
Their parting was strained. She didn't know whether it was due to him or due to herself. Or just due to her own imagining. But it seemed to her to lack the jaunty spontaneity of their meeting just a few minutes ago.

               
He didn't thank her for helping him select a pen, and she was grateful for that at least. But his eyes were suddenly remote, abstracted, where until now they had been wholly on her at every turn of speech. They seemed to be looking up this way toward the top of a building, looking down that way toward the far end of the street, looking everywhere but at her any more, even while he was saying "Here's your bus," and arming her into it, and reaching in from where he stood to pay the driver her fare. "Goodbye. Get home all right See you tonight." And tipped his hat, and seemed to have already forgotten her even before he had completed the act of turning away and going about his business. And yet somehow she knew that just the reverse was true. That he was more conscious of her than ever, now that he seemed least so. Distance had intervened between them, that was alL

               
She looked down at her lap, while the bus swept her along past the crowded sidewalks. Funny how quickly a scene could change, the same scene; the sunlit pavements and the bustling shoppers weren't fun any more to watch.

               
If it had been a premeditated test, a trap-- But no, it couldn't have been that. That much at least she was sure of, though it was no satisfaction. He couldn't have known that he was going to run into her just where he had, that they were going to walk along just as they had, toward that pen emporium. At the time he'd left the house this morning, she hadn't even known herself that she was coming downtown like this; that had come up later. So he couldn't have lain in wait for her there, to accost her. That much at least had been spontaneous, purely accidental.

               
But maybe as they were strolling along, and he first looked up and saw the store sign, that was when it had occurred to him, and he'd improvised it, on the spur of the moment. What was commonly said must have occurred to him then, as it only occurred to her now. That when people try out a new pen, they invariably write their real names. It's almost compulsory.

               
And yet, even for such an undeliberated, on-the-spot test as that, there must have been some formless suspicion of her already latent in his mind, in one way or another, or it wouldn't have suggested itself to him.

               
Little fool, she said to herself bitterly as she tugged at the overhead cord and prepared to alight, why didn't you think of that before you went in there with him? What good was hindsight now?

               
A night or two later his discarded coat was slung over a chair and be wasn't in the room with it at the moment. She needed a pencil for something for a moment anyhow, that was her excuse for it. She sought the pocket and took out the fountain pen she found clasped to it It was gold and had his initials engraved on it, some valued, long-used birthday or Christmas present from one of his parents probably. Moreover, it was in perfect writing order, couldn't have been improved on, left a clear, deep, rich trace. And he wasn't the sort of man who went around displaying two fountain pens at a time.

               
It had been a test, all right. And she had given a positive reaction, as positive as he could have hoped for.

22

               
She'd heard the doorbell ring some time before, and dim sounds of conglomerate greeting follow it in the hall below, and knew by that some visitor must have arrived, and must still be down there. She didn't think any more about it She'd had Hughie in his little portable tub at the moment, and that, while it was going on, was a full-time job for anyone's attention. By the time she'd finished drying and talcuming and dressing him, putting him to bed for the night, and then lingering treacherously by him awhile longer, to watch her opportunity and worm the last celluloid bath-duck out of his tightly closed little fist, the better part of an hour had gone by. She felt sure the caller, whoever he was, must already be long gone by that time. That it had been a masculine visitor was something she could take for granted; anyone feminine from six to sixty would automatically have been ushered upstairs by the idolatrous Mother Hazzard to look in on the festive rite of her grandson's bath. In fact it was the first time she herself had missed attending one in weeks, if only to hold the towel, prattle in an unintelligible gibberish with the small person in the tub, and generally get in the uncomplaining mother's way. Only something of importance could have kept her away.

               
She thought they were being unusually quiet below, when she finally came out of her room and started down the stairs. There was a single, droning, low-pitched voice going on, as if somebody were reading aloud, and no one else was audible.

               
They were all in the library, she discovered a moment later; a room that was never used much in the evenings. And when it was, never by all of them together, at one time. She could see them in there twice over, the first time from the stairs themselves, as she came down them, and then in an afterglimpse, through the open doorway at nearer range, as she doubled back around the foot of the stairs and passed by in the hail just outside.

               
The three of them were in there, and there was a man with them whom she didn't know, although she realized she must have seen him at least one or more times before, as she had everyone who came to this house. He was at the table, the reading-lamp lit, droning aloud in a monotonous, singsong voice. It wasn't a book; it seemed more like a typed report. Every few moments a brittly crackling sheet would sweep back in reverse and go under the others.

               
No one else was saying a word. They were sitting at varying distances and at varying degrees of attention. Father Hazzard was drawn up to the table with the monologist, following every word closely, and nodding in benign accord from time to time. Mother Hazzard was in an easy chair, a basket on her lap, darning something and only occasionally looking up in sketchy aural participation. And Bill, strangely present, was off on the very outskirts of the conclave, a leg dangling over the arm of his chair, head tilted all the way back with a protruding pipe thrust ceiingward, and giving very little indication of listening at all. His eyes had a look of vacancy, as though his mind were elsewhere while his body was dutifully and filially in the room with them.

               
She tried to get by without being seen, but Mother Hazzard looked up at just the wrong time and caught the ificker of her figure past the door-gap. "There she is now," she said. A moment later her retarding call had overtaken and halted her. "Patrice, come in here a moment, dear. We want you."

               
She turned and went back, with a sudden constriction in her throat.

               
The droning voice had interrupted itself to wait. A private investigator? No, no, he couldn't be. She'd met him here in the house on a friendly basis, she was sure of it. But those voluminous briefs littered in front of him--

               
"Patrice, you know Ty Winthrop."

               
"Yes, I know we've met before." She went over and shook hands with him. She kept her eyes carefully off the table. And it wasn't easy.

               
"Ty is Father's lawyer," Mother Hazzard said indulgently. As though that were really no way to describe an old friend, but it was the shortest one for present purposes.

               
"And golf rival," supplied the man at the table.

               
"Rival?" Father Hazzard snorted disgustedly. "I don't call that rivalry, what you put up. A rival has to come up somewhere near you. Charity-tournament is more what I'd call it."

               
Bill's head and pipe had come down to the horizontal again. "Lick him with one hand tied behind your back, eh Dad?" he egged him on.

               
"Yeah, my hand," snapped the lawyer, with a private wink for the son. "Especially last Sunday."

               
"Now, you three;" reproved Mother Hazzard beamingly. "I have things to do. And so has Patrice. I can't sit in here all night"

               
They became serious again. Bill had risen and drawn up a chair beside the table for her. "Sit down, Patrice, and join the party," he invited.

               
"Yes, we want you to hear this, Patrice," Father Hazzard urged, as she hesitated. "It concerns you."

               
Her hand tried to stray betrayingly toward her throat. She kept it down by sheer will-power. She seated herself, a little uneasily.

               
The lawyer cleared his throat "Well, I think that about takes care of it, Donald. The rest of it remains as it was before."

               
Father Ha.zzard hitched his chair nearer. "All right Ready for me to sign now?"

               
Mother Hazzard bit off a thread with her teeth, having come to the end of something or other. She began to put things away in her basket, preparatory to departure. "You'd better tell Patrice what it is first, dear. Don't you want her to know?"

               
"I'll tell her for you," Winthrop offered. "I can put it in fewer words than you." He turned toward her and gazed friendlily over the tops of his reading-glasses. "Donald's changing the provisions of his will, by adding a codicil. You see, in the original, after Grace here was provided for, there was an equal division of the residue made between Bill and Hugh. Well now we're altering that to make it one-quarter of the residue to Bill and the remainder to you."

               
She could feel her face beginning to flame, as though a burning crimson light were focussed on it, and it alone, that they could all see. An agonizing sensation of wanting to push away from the table and make her escape, and of being held trapped there in her chair, came over her.

               
She tried to speak quietly, quelling her voice by moistening her lips twice over. "I don't want you to do that. I don't want to be included."

               
"Don't look that way about it," Bill said with a genial laugh. "You're not doing anybody out of anything. I have Dad's business--"

               
"It was Bill's own suggestion," Mother Hazzard let her know.

               
"I gave both the boys a lump sum in cash, to start them off, on the day they each reached their twenty-first--"

               
She was on her feet now, facing all of them in turn, almost panicstricken. "No, please! Don't put my name down on it at all! I don't want my name to go down on it!" She all but wrung her clasped hands toward Father Hazzard. "Dad! Won't you listen to me?"

               
"It's on account of Hugh, dear," Mother Hazzard let him know in a tactful aside. "Can't you understand?"

               
"Well, I know; we all feel bad about Hugh. But she has to go on living just the same. She has a child to think of. And these things shouldn't be postponed on account of sentiment, they have to be taken care of at the right time."