They Call Me Patrice

“Get out,” he said.

She didn’t move; she didn’t answer.

“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’re here.”

She watched him go, in a sort of stupor, as though this were happening to someone else.

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. 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.”

Steve was at the car door now, standing there.

“Come on, Patrice,” he said casually.

“I can’t do it. Steve, don’t ask me to do this.”

“Get out.”

“Steve, I’ve never pleaded with you before. In all these months, I’ve taken it without whimpering. Steve, if there’s anything human in you that 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 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 charms for me. That went long ago. I’m dumping you on the doorstep of your ever-loving family just as soon as we get back to Caulfield. Our second marriage 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 raised the back of her hand to 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 by stalling.”

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 and 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 as if I were kidding?”

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 and went up the plank walk again, more forcefully, more swiftly, than before.

“Excuse me, but I wonder if I might use your phone for a minute—” she heard him say as he entered the open doorway. Then the rest was blurred as he went deeper within the room.

She struggled out, clinging to the flexing car door like a woman walking in her sleep. Then she wavered up the plank walk and onto the porch. The ivy rustled for a minute as she brushed against it. Then she went on toward the oblong of light projected by the open doorway, and inside. It was like struggling through knee-deep 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 out his threat.

A choking sound broke in her throat.

He looked around again, almost casually. “Have you decided once and for all?”

She didn’t nod, she simply let her eyelids drop for a minute. The ultimate defeat.

“Operator,” he said, “cancel that call. It was a mistake.” He replaced the receiver slowly and smiled at her.

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 opened them vigorously.

“We’re ready,” he called into the study across the hall.