I Married A Dead Man (17 page)

               
" Who'd he say you were?"

               
Her feet faltered, missed.

               
"Don't make me keep on doing this, I can't. Help me--outside someplace--or I'm--"

               
"Too warm for you?" he said politely.

               
She didn't answer. The music was dying. She was dying.

               
He said, "You went out of step, just then. My fault, I'm afraid."

               
"Don't--" she whimpered. "Don't--"

               
The music stopped. They stopped.

               
His arm left her back, 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--go ahead talking."

               
She hardly knew what she was saying. "I can't--You don't understand--" Her neck wouldn't hold firm; her head kept trying to lob over limply.

               
"I think I do. I think I understand perfectly. I understand you, and you understand me." Then he added with a grisly sort of emphasis that froze her to the marrow: "I bet we two understand one another better than any other two people in this whole ballroom at the moment."

               
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.

               
He didn't let go her wrist; he transferred it to Bill's keeping, as though she were something inanimate, a doll, and bowed, and turned, and left them.

               
"Seen him around a few times. Came here stag, I guess." Bill shrugged in dismissal. "Come on."

               
"Not this one. The one after."

               
"Are you all right? You look pale."

               
"It's the lights. I'm going in and 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 from just outside the doorway. He went out front toward the bar. She watched him go in there. She watched him sit down on one of the tall stools. 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 fountainpen-ink blueness of the night. There were wicker chairs, in groups of twos and threes, spaced every few yards, encircling small tables.

               
The red sequin of a cigarette-coal had risen perpendicularly above one, all the way down at the end, imperiously summoning her. Then it shot over the balustrade laterally, cast away in impatient expectancy.

               
She walked slowly down that way, with the strange feeling of making a journey from which there was to be no return, ever. Her feet seemed to want to take root, hold her back of their own volition.

               
She came to a halt before him. He slung his hip onto the balustrade, and sat there askew, in insolent informality. He repeated what he'd said inside. " Who'd he say you were?"

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

               
"You abandoned me," she said with leashed fury. "You abandoned me, with five dollars. Now what do you want?"

               
"Oh, then we have met before. I thought we had. Glad you agree with me."

               
"Stop it. 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 down here?"

               
"Well, for that matter," he said with insolent urbanity, "what are you doing yourself down here?"

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

               
"Can't a man show interest in his ex-protégée 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.

               
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. She heard him light another cigarette, saw the momentary reflection from behind her own shoulder.

               
He spoke at last, voice thick with expelled smoke. "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, a year ago last June fifteenth. I went to considerable expense and trouble to have the exact date on the records there verified. But a year ago last June fifteenth you and I were living in our little furnished room in New York. I have the receipted rent-bills to show for this. How could you have been in two such far-apart places at once?" He sighed philosophically. "Somebody's got their 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, her body still remaining turned from him. Like one who listens hypnotized, against her will.

               
"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 down there and 'identified' you, 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 down 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 yourself."

               
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 at her dictate. 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 don't fall; you don't seem very steady on your feet, and I don't want to have to carry you bodily inside in front of all those people."

               
She put her hands to the top of the chair-back and stood quiet, head inclined.

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

               
"Patrice, this is our dance."

               
Georgesson rose for a second from the balustrade in sketchy etiquette, immediately sank back against it.

               
She made her way toward him, the blue pall of the terrace covering her uncertainty of step, and went inside with him. 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 dropped to rest on his shoulder.

               
"He isn't very good company," she agreed sickly.

33

               
The phone-call came at a fiendishly unpropitious moment.

               
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 in the family were out. She'd just finished putting Hughie to sleep. She and Mother Hazzard were both up on the second floor, separately. Which meant that she was the only one fully eligible to answer.

               
She knew at the first instant of hearing it who it was, what it was. She knew too, that she'd been expecting it all day, that she'd known it was coming, it was surely coming.

               
She stood there rooted, unable to move. Maybe it would stop if she didn't go near it, maybe he would tire. But then it would ring again some other time.

               
Mother Hazzard opened the door of her room and looked out.

               
Patrice had swiftly opened her own door, was at the head of the stairs, before she'd fully emerged.

               
"I'll get it on this phone, dear, if you're busy."

               
"No, never mind, Mother, I was just going downstairs, anyway, so I'll answer it there."

               
She knew his voice right away. She hadn't heard it for over two years, until just last night, and yet it was again as familiar to her as if she'd been hearing it steadily for months past. Fear quickens the memory.

               
He was as pleasantly aloof at first as any casual caller on the telephone. "Is this the younger Mrs. Hazzard? Is this Patrice Hazzard?"

               
"This is she."

               
"I suppose you know, this is Georgesson."

               
She did know, but she didn't answer that.

               
"Are you--where you can be heard?"

               
"I'm not in the habit of answering questions like that. I'll hang up the receiver."

               
Nothing could seem to make him lose his equanimity. "Don't do that, Patrice," he said urbanely. "I'll ring back again. That'll make it worse. They'll begin wondering who it is keeps on calling so repeatedly. Or, eventually, someone else will answer--you can't stay there by the phone all evening--and I'll give my name if I have to and ask for you." He waited a minute for this to sink in. "Don't you see, it's better for you this way."

               
She sighed a little, in suppressed fury.

               
"We can't talk very much over the phone. I think it's better not to, anyway. I'm talking from McClellan's Drugstore, a few blocks from you. My car's just around the corner from there, where it can't be seen. On the left side of Pomeroy Street, just down from the crossing. Can you walk down that far for five or ten minutes? I won't keep you long."

               
She tried to match the brittle formality of his voice with her own. "I most certainly can not."

               
"Of course you can. You need cod-liver-oil capsules for your baby, from McClellan's. Or you feel like a soda, for yourself. I've seen you stop in there more than once, in the evening."

               
He waited.