I Married A Dead Man (20 page)

               
He braked. "You can get out here, Patrice. This is close enough." And then he chuckled a little, watching her flounder to the pavement. "Are you sure you're able to walk steady? I wouldn't want to have them think I'd plied you with--"

               
The last thing he said was, "Make sure your clock isn't slow, Patrice. Because the United States Mail is always on time."

38

               
The headlight-beams of his car kept slashing up the road ahead of them like ploughshares, seeming to cast aside its topsoil of darkness, reveal its borax-like white fill, and spill that out all over the roadway. Then behind them the livid furrows would heal again into immediate darkness.

               
It seemed hours they'd been driving like this, in silence yet acutely aware of one another. Trees went by, dimly lit up from below, along their trunks, by the passing reflection of their headlight-wash, into a sort of ghostly incandescence. Then at times there weren't any trees, they fell back, and a plushy black evenness took their place--fields or meadows, she supposed--that smelled sweeter. Clover. It was beautiful country around here; too beautiful for anyone to be in such a hell of suffering in the midst of it.

               
Roads branched off at times, too, but they never took them. They kept to this wide, straight one they were on.

               
They passed an indirectly lighted white sign, placed at right angles to the road so that it could be read as you came up to it. It said "Welcome to Hastings," and then underneath, "Population--" and some figures too small to catch before they had already gone by.

               
She glanced briefly after it, in a sort of fascinated horror.

               
He'd apparently seen her do it, without looking directly at her. "That's across the State line," he remarked drily. "Travel broadens one, they say." It was nine forty-five now according to her wristwatch. It had taken them only half an hour's drive to get here.

               
They passed through the town's nuclear main square. A drugstore was still open, two of the old-fashioned jars of colored water that all drugstore-windows featured once upon a time flashing emerald and mauve at them as they went by. A motion-picture theatre was still alive inside, but dying fast externally, its marquee already dark, its lobby dim.

               
He turned up one of the side streets, a tunnel under leafy shade trees, its houses all set back a lawn-spaced distance so that they were almost invisible in the night-shade from the roadway. A dim light peering through from under the recesses of an ivy-covered porch seemed to attract him. He shunted over to the walk suddenly, and back a little, and stopped opposite it.

               
They sat for awhile.

               
Then he got out on his side, came around to hers, and opened the door beside her.

               
"Come in," he said briefly.

               
She didn't move, she didn't answer.

               
"Come on in with me. They're waiting."

               
She didn't answer, didn't move.

               
"Don't just sit there like that. We had this all out before, back at Caulfield. Move. Say something, will you?"

               
"What do you want me to say?"

               
He gave the door an impatient slap-to again, as if in momentary reprieve. "Get yourself together. I'll go over and let them know we got here."

               
She watched him go, in a sort of stupor, as though this were happening to someone else; heard his tread go up the wooden plankwalk that led up to the house. She could even hear the ring of the bell, from within the house, all the way out here where she was. It was no wonder, it was so quiet. Just little winged things buzzing and humming in a tree overhead.

               
She wondered: How does he know I won't suddenly start the car and drive off? She answered that herself: He knows I won't. He knows it's too late for that As I know it. The time for stopping, for drawing back, for dashing off, that was long ago. So long ago. Long before tonight. That was in the compartment on the train coming here, when the wheels tried to warn me. That was when the first note came. That was when the first phone-call came, the first walk down to the drugstore. I am as safely held fast here as though I were manacled to him.

               
She could hear their voices now. A woman saying, "No, not at all; you made very good time. Come right in."

               
The doorway remained open, lighted. Whoever had been standing in it had withdrawn into the house. He was coming back toward her now. The sound of his tread along the wooden walk. She gripped the edge of the car-seat with her hands, dug them in under the leather cushions.

               
He was up to her now, standing there.

               
"Come on, Patrice," he said casually.

               
That was the full horror of it, his casualness, his matter-of-factness. He wasn't acting the part.

               
She spoke quietly too, as quietly as he, but her voice was as thin and blurred as a thrumming wire.

               
"I can't do it. Georgesson, don't ask me to do this."

               
"Patrice, we've been all over this. I told you the other night, and it was all settled then."

               
She covered her face with cupped hands, quickly uncovered it again. She kept using the same four words; they were the only ones she could think of. "But I can't do it. Don't you understand? I can't do it."

               
"There's no impediment You're not married to anyone. Even in your assumed character, you're not married to anyone, much less as yourself. I investigated all that in New York."

               
"Steve. Listen, I'm calling you Steve."

               
"That doesn't melt me," he assured her jocosely. "That's my name, I'm supposed to be called that" He lidded his eyes at her. "It's my given name, not one that I took for myself-- Patrice ."

               
"Steve, I've never pleaded with you before. In all these months, I've taken it like a woman. Steve, if there's anything human in you at all I can appeal to--"

               
"I'm only too human. That's why I like money as much as I do. But your wires are crossed. It's my very humanness, for that reason, that makes your appeal useless. Come on, Patrice. You're wasting time."

               
She cowered away edgewise along the seat. He drummed his fingers on the top of the door and laughed a little.

               
"Why this horror of marriage? Let me get to the bottom of your aversion. Maybe I can reassure you. There is no personal appeal involved; you haven't any for me. I've got only contempt for you, for being the cheap, tricky little fool you are. I'm leaving you on the doorstep of your ever-loving family again, just as soon as we get back to Caulfield. This is going to be a paper marriage, in every sense of the word. But it's going to stick, it's going to stick to the bitter end. Now does that take care of your mid-Victorian qualms?"

               
She cast the back of her hand across her eyes as though a blow had just blinded her.

               
He wrenched the door open.

               
"They're waiting for us in there. Come on, you're only making it worse."

               
He was beginning to harden against her. Her opposition was commencing to inflame him against her. It showed inversely, in a sort of lethal coldness.

               
"Look, my friend, I'm not going to drag you in there by the hair. The thing isn't worth it. I'm going inside a minute and call the Hazzard house from here, and tell them the whole story right now. Then I'll drive you back where I got you from. They can have you--if they want you any more." He leaned toward her slightly across the door. "Take a good look at me. Do I look like I was kidding?"

               
He meant it. It wasn't an empty bluff, with nothing behind it. It might be a threat that he would prefer not to have to carry out, but it wasn't an idle threat. She could see that in his eyes, in the cold sullenness in them, the dislike of herself she read in them.

               
He turned and left the car-side and went up the plank-walk again, more forcefully, more swiftly, than he'd trod it before.

               
"Excuse me, could I trouble you for a minute--" she heard him start to say as he entered the open doorway, then the rest was blurred as he went deeper within.

               
She struggled out, clinging to the flexing door like somebody walking in his sleep. Then she wavered up the plank-walk and onto the porch, and the ivy rustled for a minute as she teetered soddenly against it. Then she went on toward the oblong of light projected by the open doorway, and inside. It was like struggling through kneedeep water.

               
A middle-aged woman met her in the hallway.

               
"Good evening. Are you Mrs. Hazzard? He's in here."

               
She took her to a room on the left, parted an old-fashioned pair of sliding doors. He was standing in there, with his back to them, beside an old-fashioned telephone-box bracketed to the wall.

               
"Here's the young lady. You can both come into the study when you're ready."

               
Patrice drew the doors together behind her again. "Steve," she said.

               
He turned around and looked at her, then turned back again.

               
"Don't--you'll kill her," she pleaded.

               
"The old all die sooner or later."

               
"Has it gone through yet?"

               
"They're ringing Caulfield for me now."

               
It wasn't any sleight-of-hand trick. His finger wasn't anywhere near the receiver-hook, holding it shut down. He was in the act of carrying it out.

               
A choking sound broke in her throat.

               
He looked around again, less fully than before. "Have you decided once and for all?"

               
She didn't nod, she simply let her eyelids drop closed for a minute.

               
"Operator," he said, "cancel that call. It was a mistake." He replaced the receiver.

               
She felt a little sick and dizzy, as when you've just looked down from some great height and then drawn back again.

               
He went over to the sliding-doors and swung them vigorously back.

               
"We're ready," he called into the study across the hall.

               
He crooked his arm toward her, backhand, contemptuously tilting up his elbow for her to take, without even looking around at her as he did so.

               
She came forward and they went toward the study together, her arm linked in his. Into where the man was waiting to marry them.

39

               
It was on the way back that she knew she was going to kill him. Knew she must, knew it was the only thing left to be done now. She should have done it sooner, she told herself. Long before this; that first night as she sat with him in his car. It would have been that much better. Then this, tonight's ultimate horror and degradation, would at least have been avoided. She hadn't thought of it then; that was the one thing that had never occurred to her. It had always been flight, escape from him in some other way; never safety in this way--his removal.

               
But she knew she was going to do it, now. Tonight.

               
Not a word had passed between them, all this way, ever since leaving the justice's house. Why should one? What was there to say? What was there to do, now--except this one final thing, that came to her opposite a white-stockinged telegraph-pole, about four miles out of Hastings. Just like that it came: click, snap, and it was there. As though she had passed through some electric-eye beam stretched across the road, there from that particular telegraph-pole. On the one side of it, still, just passive despair, fatalism. On the other, full-grown decision, remorseless, irrevocable: I'm going to kill him. Tonight. Before this night ends, before the light comes again.