I Married A Dead Man (9 page)

               
The woman pointed to her. She called out in jubilation, for the benefit of someone else, unseen. "There she is! I've found her! Here, this car up here!"

               
She raised her hand and she waved. She waved to the little somnolent, blinking head coifed in the blue blanket, looking solemnly out the window. Made her fingers flutter in that special wave you give to very small babies.

               
The look on her face couldn't have been described. It was as when life begins all over again, after an interruption, a hiatus. It was as when the sun peers through again at the end, at the end of a bleak wintry day.

               
The girl holding the baby put her head down close to his, almost as if averting it from the window. Or as if they were communing together, exchanging some confidence in secret, to the exclusion of everyone else.

               
She was.

               
"For you," she breathed. "For you. And God forgive me." Then she carried him over to the door with her, and turned the latch to let the harassed porter in.

14

               
Sometimes there is a dividing-line running across life. Sharp, almost actual, like the black stroke of a paintbrush or the white gash of a chalk-mark. Sometimes, but not often.

               
For her there was. It lay somewhere along those few yards of carpassage, between the compartment-window and the car-steps, where for a moment or two she was out of sight of those standing waiting outside. One girl left the window. Another girl came down the steps. A world ended, and another world began.

               
She wasn't the girl who had been holding her baby by the compartment-window just now.

               
Patrice Hazzard came down those car-steps.

               
Frightened, tremulous, very white in the face, but Patrice Hazzard.

               
She was aware of things, but only indirectly; she only had eyes for those other eyes looking into hers from a distance of a few inches away. All else was background. Behind her back the train glided on. Bearing with it its hundreds of living passengers. And, all unknown, in an empty compartment, a ghost . . . Two ghosts, a large one and a very small one.

               
Forever homeless now, never to be retrieved.

               
The hazel eyes came in even closer to hers. They were kind; they smiled around the edges; they were gentle, tender. They hurt a little. They were trustful .

               
She was in her fifties, their owner. Her hair was softly graying, and only underneath had the process been delayed. She was as tall as Patrice, and as slim; and she shouldn't have been, for it wasn't, the slimness of fashionable effort or artifice, and something about her clothes revealed it to be recent, only the past few months.

               
But even these details about her were background, and the man of her own age standing just past her shoulder was background too. It was only her face that was immediate, and the eyes in her face, so close now. Saying so much without a sound.

               
She placed her hands lightly upon Patrice's cheeks, one on each, framing her face between them in a sort of accolade, a sacramental benison.

               
Then she kissed her on the lips, in silence, and there was a lifetime in the kiss, the girl could sense it. The lifetime of a man. The many years it takes to raise a man, from childhood, through boyhood, into a grown son. There was bitter loss in the kiss, the loss of all that at a single blow. The end for a time of all hope, and weeks of cruel grief. But then too there was the reparation of loss, the finding of a daughter, the starting over with another, a smaller son. No, with the same son; the same blood, the same flesh. Only going back and starting again from the beginning, in sweeter sadder sponsorship this time, forewarned by loss. And there was the burgeoning of hope anew.

               
There were all those things in it. They were spoken in it, they were felt in it, and they were meant to be felt in it, they bad been put into it for that purpose.

               
This was not a kiss under a railroad-station shed; it was a sacrament of adoption.

               
Then she kissed the child. And smiled as you do at your own. And a little crystal drop that hadn't been there before was resting on its small pink cheek.

               
The man came forward and kissed her on the forehead.

               
"I'm Father, Patrice."

               
He stooped and straightened, and said, "I'll take your things over to the car." A little glad to escape from an emotional moment, as men are apt to be.

               
The woman hadn't said a word. In all the moments she'd been standing before her, not a word had passed her lips. She saw, perhaps, the pallor in her face; could read the shrinking, the uncertainty, in her eyes.

               
She put her arms about her and drew her to her now, in a warmer, more mundane, more everyday greeting than the one that had passed before. Drew the girl's head to rest upon her own shoulder for a moment. And as she did so, she spoke for the first time, low in her ear, to give her courage, to give her peace.

               
"You're home, Patrice. Welcome home, dear."

               
And in those few words, so simply said, so inalterably meant, Patrice Hazzard knew she had found at last all the goodness there is or ever can be in this world.

15

               
And so this was what it was like to be home; to be in a home of your own, in a room of your own.

               
She had another dress on now, ready to go down to table. She sat there in a wing chair waiting, very straight, looking a little small against its outspread back. Her back was up against it very straight, her legs dropped down to the floor very straight and meticulously side by side. She had her hand out resting on the crib, the crib they'd bought for him and that she'd found already here waiting when she first entered the room. He was in it now. They'd even thought of that.

               
They'd left her alone; she would have had to be alone to savor it as fully as she was doing. Still drinking it in, hours after; basking in it, inhaling the essence of it, there was no word for what it did to her. Hours after; and her head every now and then would still give that slow, comprehensive, marvelling sweep around from side to side, taking in all four walls of it. And even up overhead, not forgetting the ceiling. A roof over your head. A roof to keep out rain and cold and loneliness--Not just the anonymous roof of a rented building, no; the roof of home. Guarding you, sheltering you, keeping you, watching over you.

               
And somewhere downstairs, dimly perceptible to her acutely attuned ears, the soothing bustle of an evening meal in preparation. Carried to her in faint snatches now and then at the opening of a door, stilled again at its closing. Footsteps busily crossing an uncarpeted strip of wooden floor, then coming back again. An occasional faint clash of crockery or china. Once even the voice of the colored housekeeper, for an instant of bugle-like clarity. "No, it ain't ready yet, Miz' Hazzard; need five mo' minutes."

               
And the laughingly protesting admonition that followed, miraculously audible as well: "Sh, Aunt Josie. We have a baby in the house now; he may be napping."

               
Someone was coming up the stairs now. They were coming up the stairs now to tell her. She shrank back a little in the chair. Now she was a little frightened, a little nervous again. Now there would be no quick escape from the moment's confrontation, as at the railroad station. Now came the real meeting, the real blending, the real taking into the fold. Now was the real test.

               
"Patrice dear, supper's ready whenever you are."

               
You take supper in the evening, when you're home, in your own home. When you go out in public or to someone else's home, you may take dinner . But in the evening, in your own home, it's supper you take, and never anything else. Her heart was as fiercely glad as though the trifling word were a talisman. She remembered when she was a little girl, those few brief years that had ended so quickly-- The call to supper , only supper , never anything else.

               
She jumped from the chair and ran over and opened the door. "Shall I--shall I bring him down with me, or leave him up here in the crib till I come back?" she asked, half-eagerly, half-uncertainly. "I fed him already at five, you know."

               
Mother Hazzard slanted her head coaxingly. "Ah, why don't you bring him down with you just tonight, anyway? It's the first night. Don't hurry, dear, take your time."

               
When she came out of the room holding him in her arms moments later, she stopped a moment, fingered the edge of the door lingeringly. Not where the knob was, but up and down the unbroken surface where there was no knob.

               
Watch over my room for me, she breathed unheard. I'm coming right back. Take care of it. Don't let anyone--Will you?

               
She would come down these same stairs many hundreds of times to come, she knew, as she started down them now. She would come down them fast, she would come down them slowly. She would come down them blithely, in gayety. And perhaps she might come down them in fear, in trouble. But now, tonight, this was the very first time of all that she was coming down them.

               
She held him close to her and felt her way, for they were new to her, she hadn't got the measure of them, the feel of them, yet, and she didn't want to miss her step.

               
They were standing about in the dining-room waiting for her. Not rigidly, formally, like drill-sergeants, but in unselfconscious ease, as if unaware of the small tribute of consideration they were giving her. Mother Hazzard was leaning forward, giving a last-minute touch to the table, shifting something a little. Father Hazzard was looking up toward the lights through the spectacles with which he'd just been reading, and polishing them off before returning them to their case. And there was a third person in the room, somebody with his back half to her at the moment of entrance, surreptitiously pilfering a salted peanut from a dish on the buffet.

               
He turned forward again and threw it away when he heard her come in. He was young and tall and friendly-looking, and his hair was-- A camera-shutter clicked in her mind and the film rolled on.

               
"There's the young man!" Mother Hazzard revelled. "There's the young man himself! Here, give him to me. You know who this is, of course." And then she added, as though it were wholly unnecessary even to qualify it by so much, "Bill."

               
But who--? she wondered. They hadn't said anything until now.

               
He came forward, and she didn't know what to do, he was so close to her own age. She half-offered her hand, hoping that if it was too formal the gesture would remain unnoticed.

               
He took it, but he didn't shake it. Instead he pressed it between both of his, held it warmly buried like that for a moment or two.

               
"Welcome home, Patrice," he said quietly. And there was something about the straight, unwavering look in his eyes as he said it that made her think she'd never heard anything said so sincerely, so simply, so loyally, before.

               
And that was all. Mother Hazzard said, "You sit here, from now on."

               
Father Hazzard said unassumingly, "We're very happy, Patrice," and sat down at the head of the table.

               
Whoever Bill was, he sat down opposite her.

               
The colored housekeeper peeked through the door for a minute and beamed. "Now this look right! This what that table been needing. This just finish off that empty si--"

               
Then she quickly checked herself, clapping a catastrophic hand to her mouth, and whisked from sight again.

               
Mother Hazzard glanced down at her plate for a second, then immediately looked up again smiling, and the hurt was gone, had not been allowed to linger.

               
They didn't say anything memorable. You don't say anything memorable across the tables of home. Your heart speaks, and not your brain, to the other hearts around you. She forgot after awhile to notice what she was saying, to weigh, to reckon it That's what home is, what home should be. It flowed from her as easily as it did from them. She knew that was what they were trying to do for her. And they were succeeding. Strangeness was already gone with the soup, never to return. Nothing could ever bring it back again. Other things could come--she hoped they wouldn't But never strangeness, the unease of unfamiliarity, again. They had succeeded.