I Married A Dead Man (18 page)

               
"Shall I call back? Would you rather think it over awhile?"

               
He waited again.

               
"Don't do that," she said reluctantly, at last.

               
She could tell he understood: her meaning had been a positive and not a negative one.

               
She hung up.

               
She went upstairs again.

               
Mother Hazzard didn't ask her. They weren't inquisitive that way, in this house. But the door of her room was open. Patrice couldn't bring herself to reenter her own without at least a passing reference. Guilty conscience, this Soon? she wondered bitingly.

               
"That was a Steve Georgesson, Mother," she called in. "Bill and I ran into him there last night He wanted to know how we'd enjoyed ourselves."

               
"Well, that was real thoughtful of him, wasn't it?" Then she added, "He must be a decent sort, to do that."

               
Decent, Patrice thought dismally, easing the door closed after her.

               
She came out of her room again in about ten minutes' time. Mother Hazzard's door was closed now. She could have gone on down the stairs unquestioned. Again she couldn't do it.

               
She went over and knocked lightly, to attract attention.

               
"Mother, I'm going to take a walk down to the drugstore and back. Hughie's out of his talc. And I'd like a breath of air. I'll be back in five minutes."

               
"Go ahead, dear. I'll say goodnight to you now, in case I'm asleep by the time you're in again."

               
She rested her outstretched hand helplessly against the door for a minute. She felt like saying, Mother, don't let me go. Forbid me. Keep me here.

               
She turned away and went down the stairs. It was her own battle, and no proxies were allowed.

               
She stopped beside the car, on darkened Pomeroy Street.

               
"Sit in here, Patrice," he said amiably. He unlatched the door for her, from where he sat, and even palmed the leather cushion patronizingly.

               
She settled herself on the far side of the seat. Her eyes snapped refusal of the cigarette he was trying to offer her.

               
"We can be seen."

               
"Turn this way, toward me. No one'!! notice you. Keep your back to the street."

               
"This can't go on. Now once and for all, for the first time and the last, what is it you want of me, what is this about?"

               
"Look, Patrice, there doesn't have to be anything unpleasant about this. You seem to be building it up to yourself that way, in your own mind. I have no such-- It's all in the way you look at it. I don't see that there has to be any change in the way things were going along--before last night. You were the only one knew before. Now you and I are the only ones know. It ends there. That is, if you want it to."

               
"You didn't bring me out here to tell me that."

               
He went off at a tangent. Or what seemed to be a tangent. "I've never amounted to--as much as I'd hoped, I suppose. I mean, I've never gotten as far as I should. As I once expected to. There are lots of us like that. Every once in awhile I find myself in difficulties, every now and then I get into a tight squeeze. Little card-games with the boys. This and that You know how it is." He laughed deprecatingly. "It's been going on for years. It's nothing new. But I was wondering if you'd care to do me a favor--this time."

               
"You're asking me for money."

               
She almost felt nauseated. She turned her face away.

               
"I didn't think there were people like you outside of--outside of penitentiaries."

               
He laughed in good-natured tolerance. "You're in unusual circumstances. That attracts 'people like me.' If you weren't, you still wouldn't think there were any, you wouldn't know any different."

               
"Suppose I go to them now and tell them of this conversation we've just been having, of my own accord. My brother-in-law would go looking for you and beat you within an inch of your life."

               
"We'll let the relationship stand unchallenged. I wonder why women put such undue faith in a beating-up? Maybe because they're not used to violence themselves. A beating doesn't mean much to a man. Half an hour after it's over, he's as good as he was before."

               
"You should know," she murmured.

               
He tapped a finger to the points of three others. "There are three alternatives. You go to them and tell them. Or I go to them and tell them. Or we remain in status quo. By which I mean, you do me a favor, and then we drop the whole thing, nothing further is said. But there isn't any fourth alternative."

               
He shook his head slightly, in patient disapproval. "You overdramatize everything so, Patrice. That's the unfailing hallmark of cheapness. You're a cheap girl. That's the basic difference between us. I may be, according to your lights, a rotter, but I have a certain tone. As you visualize it, I'd stride in there, throw my arms out wide in declamation, and blare, 'This girl is not your daughter-in-law!' Not at all. That wouldn't work with people like that. It would overreach itself. All I'd have to do would be to let you accuse yourself out of your own mouth. In their presence. You couldn't refuse the house to me. 'When you were in Paris with Hugh, Patrice, which bank did you live on, Left or Right?' 'What was the name of the boat you made the trip back on, again?' 'Well, when I ran into you over there that day with him--oh, you forgot to mention that we'd already met before, Pat?--why is it you looked so different from what you do today? You don't look like the same girl at all.' Until you crumpled and caved in."

               
He was capable of it. He was too cold about the whole thing, that was the dangerous feature. No heat, no impulse, no emotion to cloud the issue. Everything planned, plotted, graphed, ahead of time. Drafted. Charted. Every step. Even the notes. She knew their purpose now. Not poison-pen letters at all. They had been important to the long-term scheme of the thing. Psychological warfare, nerve warfare, breaking her down ahead of time, toppling her resistance before the main attack had even been made. The research-trip to New York in-between, to make sure of his own ground, to make sure there was no flaw, to leave her no loophole.

               
He skipped the edge of his hand off the wheel-rim, as if brushing off a particle of dust. "There's no villain in this. Let's get rid of the Victorian trappings. It's just a business transaction. It's no different from taking out insurance, really." He turned to her with an assumption of candor that was almost charming for a moment. "Don't you want to be practical about it?"

               
"I suppose so. I suppose I should meet you on your own ground." She didn't try to project her contempt; it would have failed to reach him, she knew.

               
"If you get rid of these stuffy fetishes of virtue and villainy, of black and white, the whole thing becomes so simple it's not even worth the quarter of an hour we're giving it here in the car."

               
"I have no money of my own, Georgesson." Capitulation. Submission.

               
"They're one of the wealthiest families in town, that's common knowledge. Why be technical about it? Get them to open an account for you. You're not a child."

               
"I couldn't ask them outright to do such a--"

               
"You don't ask . There are ways. You're a woman, aren't you? It's easy enough; a woman knows how to go about those things--"

               
"I'd like to go now," she said, reaching blindly for the door-handle.

               
"Do we understand one another?" He opened it for her. "I'll give you another ring after awhile."

               
He paused a moment. The threat was so impalpable there was not even a change of inflection in the lazy drawl.

               
"Don't neglect it, Patrice."

               
She got out The crack of the door was the unfelt slap-in-the-face of loathing she gave him.

               
"Goodnight, Patrice," he drawled after her amiably.

34

               
"--perfectly plain," she was saying animatedly. "It had a belt of the same material, and then a row of buttons down to about here."

               
She was purposely addressing herself to Mother Hazzard, to the exclusion of the two men members of the family. Well, the topic in itself was excuse enough for that.

               
"Heaven sakes, why didn't you take it?" Mother Hazzard wanted to know.

               
"I couldn't do that," she said reluctantly. She stopped a moment, then she added: "Not right--then and there." And played a lot with her fork. And felt low.

               
They must have thought the expression on her face was wistful disappointment. It wasn't. It was self-disgust.

               
You don't have to ask openly. There are ways; it's easy enough. A woman knows how to go about those things .

               
This was one of them now.

               
How defenseless those who love you are against you, she thought bitterly. How vicious and how criminal it is to trade on that selfimposed defenselessness. As I am doing now. Tricks and traps and wiles, those are for strangers. Those should be used against such only. Not against those who love you; with their guard down, with their eyes trustfully closed. It made her skin crawl in revulsion. She felt indecent, unclean, obscene.

               
Father Hazzard cut into the conversation. "Why didn't you just charge it up and have it sent? You could have used Mother's account. She deals there a lot"

               
She let her eyes drop. "I wouldn't have wanted to do that," she said reticently.

               
"Nonsense--" He stopped suddenly. Almost as though someone had trodden briefly on his foot under the table.

               
She caught Bill glancing at her. He seemed to be holding the glance a moment longer than was necessary. But before she could verify this, it had stopped, and he resumed bringing the suspended forkful of pie-fill up to his mouth.

               
"I think I hear Hughie crying," she said, and flung her napkin down and ran out to the stairs to listen.

               
But in the act of listening upward, she couldn't avoid overhearing Mother Hazzard's guarded voice in the dining-room behind her, spacing each word with strictural severity.

               
"Donald Hazzard, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Do you men-folk have to be told everything? Haven't you got a grain of tact in your heads?"

35

               
In the morning Father Hazzard had lingered on at the table, she noticed when she came down, instead of leaving early with Bill. He sat quietly reading his newspaper while she finished her coffee. And there was just a touch of secretive self-satisfaction in his attitude, she thought.

               
He rose in company with her when she got up. "Get your hat and coat, Pat, I want you to come with me in the car. This young lady and I have business downtown," he announced to Mother Hazzard. The latter tried, not altogether successfully, to look blankly bewildered.

               
"But what about Hughie's feeding?"

               
"I'll give him his feeding," Mother Hazzard said serenely.

               
"You'll be back in time for that I'm just borrowing you."

               
She got in next to him a moment later and they started off.

               
"Did poor Bill have to walk to the office this morning?" she asked.

               
"Poor Bill indeed!" he scoffed. "Do him good, the big lug. If I had those long legs of his, I'd walk it myself, every morning."

               
"Where are you taking me?"

               
"Now just never you mind. No questions. Just wait'll we get there, and you'll see."