I Married A Dead Man (26 page)

42

               
She heard the brakes go on, and felt the motion of the car stop. He got out and got into the back next to her. They stayed just the way they were for several long moments. She with her face pressed against the bosom of his shirt, buried against him as if trying to hide it from the night and all that had happened in the night. He with one hand to the back of her head, holding it there, supporting it.

               
They didn't move nor speak at first.

               
Now I have to tell him, she kept thinking with dread. Now the time is here. And how shall I be able to?

               
She raised her head at last, and opened her eyes. He'd stopped around the corner from their own house. ( His own. How could it ever be hers again? How could she ever go in there, after what had happened tonight?) He'd stopped around the corner, out of sight of it, and not right at the door. He was giving her the chance to tell him; that must be why he had done it

               
He took out a cigarette, and lit it for her in his mouth, and offered it to her inquiringly. She shook her head. So then he threw it out the side of the car.

               
His mouth was so close to hers, she could smell the aroma of the tobacco freshly on his breath. It'll never be this close again, she thought, never; not after I'm done with what I have to tell him now.

               
"Bill," she whispered.

               
It was too weak, too pleading. That feeble a voice would never carry her through. And it had such rocky words ahead of it

               
"Yes, Patrice?" he answered quietly.

               
"Don't call me that." She turned toward him with desperate urgency, forcing her voice to be steady. "Bill there's something you've got to know. I don't know where to begin it, I don't know how-- But, oh, you've got to listen, if you've never listened to me before!"

               
"Sh, Patrice," he said soothingly. "Sh, Patrice." As though she were a fretful child. And his hand gently stroked her hair; downward, and then downward again, and still downward.

               
She moaned, almost as though she were in pain. "No--don't-- don't--don't"

               
"I know," he said almost absently. "I know what you're trying so hard, so brokenheartedly, to tell me. That you're not Patrice. That you're not Hugh's wife. Isn't that it?"

               
She sought his eyes, and he was gazing into the distance, through the windshield and out ahead of the car. There was something almost abstract about his look.

               
"I know that already. I've always known it. I think I've known it ever since the first few weeks you got here."

               
The side of his face came gently to rest against her head, and stayed there, in a sort of implicit caress.

               
"So you don't have to try so hard, Patrice. Don't break your heart over it There isn't anything to tell."

               
She gave an exhausted sob. Shuddered a little with her own frustration. "Even the one last chance to redeem myself, you've taken away from me," she murmured hopelessly. "Even that little."

               
"You don't have to redeem yourself, Patrice."

               
"Every time you call me that, it's a lie. I can't go back to that house with you. I can't go in there ever again. It's too late now-- two years too late, two years--but at least let me tell it to you. Oh God, let me get it out! Patrice Hazzard was killed on the train, right along with your brother. I was deserted by a man named--"

               
Again he placed his hand over her mouth, as he had at Georgesson's place. But more gently than he had then.

               
"I don't want to know," he told her. "I don't want to hear. Can't you understand, Patrice?" Then took his hand away, but now she was silent, for that was the way he wanted her to be. And that was the easier way to be. " Won't you understand howl feel?" He glanced about for an instant, this way and that, as if helplessly in search of some means of convincing her. Some means that wasn't there at hand. Then back to her again, to try once more; speaking low and from the heart.

               
"What difference does it make if there once was another Patrice, another Patrice than you, a girl I never knew, some other place and some other time? Suppose there were two? There are a thousand Marys, a thousand Janes; but each man that loves Mary, he loves only his Mary, and for him there are no others in the whole wide world. And that's with me too. A girl named Patrice came into my life one day. And that's the only Patrice there is for me in the world. I don't love the name, I love the girl. What kind of love do you think I have, anyway? That if she got the name from a clergyman, it's on; but if she helped herself to it, it's off?"

               
"But she stole the name, took it away from the dead. And she lay in someone else's arms first, and then came into your house with her child--"

               
"No, she didn't, no," he contradicted her with tender stubbornness. "You still don't see, you still won't see; because you're not the man who loves you. She couldn't have; because she wasn't , until I met her. She only began then, she only starts from then. She only came into existence, as my eyes first took her in, as my love first started in to start. Before then there wasn't any she. My love began her, and when my love ends, she ends with it. She has to, because she is my love. Before then, there was a blank. A vacant space. That's the way with any love. It can't go back before itself.

               
"And it's you I love. The you I made for myself. The you I hold in my arms right now in this car. The you I kiss like this, right now. . . right now. . . and now.

               
"Not a name on a birth-certificate. Not a name on a Paris wedding-license. Not a bunch of dead bones taken out of a railroad-car and buried somewhere by the tracks.

               
"The name of my love is Patrice to me. My love doesn't know any other name, my love doesn't want any."

               
He swept her close to him, this time with such quivering violence that she was almost stunned. And as his lips found hers, between each pledge he told her:

               
"You are Patrice. You'll always be Patrice. You'll only be Patrice. I give you that name. Keep it for me, forever."

               
They lay that way for a long while; one now, wholly one. Made one by love; made one by blood and violence.

               
Presently she murmured, "And you knew, and you never--?"

               
"Not right away, not all in a flash. Life never goes that way. It was a slow thing, gradual. I think I first suspected inside of a week or two after you got here. I don't know when I was first sure. I think that day I bought the fountain pen."

               
"You must have hated me that day."

               
"I didn't hate you that day. I hated myself, for stooping to such a trick. (And yet I couldn't have kept from doing it, I couldn't have, no matter how I tried!) And do you know what I got from it? Only fear. Instead of you being the frightened one, I was. I was afraid that you'd take fright from it, and that I'd lose you. I knew I'd never be the one to expose you; I was too afraid I'd lose you that way. A thousand times I wanted to tell you, 'I know; I know all about it,' and I was afraid you'd take flight and I'd lose you. The secret wasn't heavy on you; it was me it weighted down."

               
"But in the beginning. How is it you didn't say anything in the very beginning? Surely you didn't condone it from the very start?"

               
"No; no, I didn't. My first reaction was resentment, enmity; about what you'd expect But for one thing, I wasn't sure enough. And the lives of too many others were involved. Mainly there was Mother. I couldn't risk doing that to her. Right after she'd lost Hugh. For all I knew it might have killed her. And even just to implant seeds of suspicion, that would have been just as bad, that would have wrecked her happiness. Then too, I wanted to see what the object was, the game. I thought if I gave you enough rope--Well, I gave you rope and rope, and there was no game. You were just you. Every day it became a little harder to be on guard against you. Every day it became 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 the name they put down in black and white. If it became necessary, it would have been easy enough to break it, or rather restrict it to its literal application, I should say. Prove that you and Patrice Hazzard were not identically one and the same and, therefore, that you were not the one intended. The law isn't like a man in love; the law values names. I pumped our lawyer a little on the q.t, without of course letting on what I had on my mind, and what he told me reassured me. But what that incident did for me once and for all, was to show me there was no game, no ulterior motive. I mean, that it wasn't the money that was at the bottom of it Patrice, the fright and honest aversion I read on your face that night, when I came to your door to tell you about it, couldn't have been faked by the most expert actress in creation. Your face got as white as a sheet, your eyes darted around as though you wanted to run out of the house for dear life then and there; I touched your hand, and it was icy-cold. There is a point at which acting stops, and the heart begins.

               
"And that gave me the answer. I knew from that night on what it was you really wanted, what it was that had made you do it: safety, security. It was on your face a hundred times a day, once I had the clue. I've seen it over and over. Every time you looked at your baby. Every time you said, 'I'm going up to my room.' The way you said 'my room.' I've seen it in your eyes even when you were only looking at a pair of curtains on the window, straightening them out, caressing them. I could almost hear you say, 'They're mine, I belong here.' And every time I saw it, it did something to me. I loved you a little more than I had the time before. And I wanted you to have all that rightfully, permanently, beyond the power of anyone or anything to ever take it away from you again--"

               
He lowered his voice still further, till she could barely hear the message it breathed.

               
"At my side. As my wife. And I still do. Tonight more than ever, a hundred times more than before. Will you answer me now? Will you tell me if you'll let me?"

               
His face swam fluidly before her upturned eyes.

               
"Take me home, Bill," she said brokenly, happily. "Take Patrice home to your house with you, Bill."

43

               
For a moment, as he braked and as she turned her face toward it, her overtired senses received a terrifying impression that it was on fire, that the whole interior was going up in flame. And then as she recoiled against him, she saw that bright as the light coming from it was, brazier-bright against the early-morning pall, it was a steady brightness, it did not quiver. It poured from every window, above and below, and spilled in gradations of intensity across the lawn, and even as far as the frontal walk and the roadway beyond, but it was the static brightness of lighted-up rooms. Rooms lighted up in emergency.

               
He nudged and pointed wordlessly, and on the rear plate of the car already there, that they had just drawn up behind, stood out the ominous "MD." Spotlighted, menacing, beetling, within the circular focus of their own headlights. Prominent as the skull and crossbones on a bottle label. And just as fear-inspiring.

               
"Doctor Parker," flashed through her mind.

               
He flung open the door and jumped down, and she was right behind him.

               
"And we sat talking back there all this time," she beard him exclaim.

               
They chased up the flagstone walk, she at his heels, outdistanced by his longer legs. He didn't have time to use his key. By the time he'd got it out and put it to where the keyhole had last been, the keyhole was already back out of reach and Aunt Josie was there instead, frightened in an old flowered bathrobe, face as gray as her hair.

               
They didn't ask her who it was; there was no need to.

               
"Ever since happass eleven," she said elliptically. "He's been with her from midnight straight on through."

               
She closed the door after them.