Fourteen
A nurse with a heavy, placid face met him at the door of Patrice’s cottage on the fenced grounds of Glendon Farms and took his visitor’s card and asked him politely to follow her. Her starched uniform rustled, blinding white in the sunshine.
There was a long slope behind the cottage, down to a small formal garden. Patrice lay on a dark blue blanket spread on the tailored grass. She wore a brief black sun-suit.
The nurse paused with him, out of earshot, and said, “Please don’t say anything to disturb or excite her. If you see her beginning to get nervous, call me. I’ll wait here.”
Dake walked down to her. Patrice was face down, her back deep gold in the sunlight. He sat on his heels beside the blanket and said, “Patrice?”
She turned quickly, raising herself on her elbows, a sheaf of the bright hair masking her eye for a moment before she threw it back with a toss of her head.
“Dake, darling,” she said warmly. “How good to see you!”
“You look well, Patrice.”
“I’m very well, dear.”
He studied her curiously. There was something subtly wrong about her face, about her expression. A bland childishness. Her mouth and eyes were soft, but something had gone, utterly. He saw what it was. There was no firmness, no resolution, no strength of will or character left.
“Patrice,” he said uneasily, “do you remember the... last time we saw each other?”
“That night when I got sick? They told me you were there, dear. Was I too awful?”
“No. I mean, you weren’t really sick, Patrice. You just saw something you couldn’t explain to yourself. But I could explain it to you.”
She glanced up to where the nurse stood fifty feet away, guardian white against the green of the clipped grass.
She said in a low tone, “Don’t let her know that I wasn’t really sick. They’re doing this for the money.”
“What do you mean?”
She gave him a childish smile. “Don’t be dull. If they find out I know what their little game is, they’ll kill me. You certainly know that.” Her voice was perfectly calm, matter-of-fact.
“What... do you plan to do?”
“Oh, there are too many of them! I can’t do anything. You know that! But I have to let them all think I believe them. They give me warnings, you know. They put electricity in my head, and keep telling me it’s going to help me, but it’s just a warning about how they’ll kill me if I don’t do exactly what they say. Now you’re in here and they won’t let you out either. Because now you know, and you could tell about what they’re doing. You were silly to come here, Dake, dear. Terribly silly. There are too many of them.”
“Patrice, I...”
She sat up all the way and her voice became shrill, and her eyes were filled with sharp excitement. “Run, Dake! Run before the men come!”
The nurse came quickly down the lawn. Dake stood up and backed away from Patrice. The nurse said, “Now lie down and get some more sun, Patrice. That’s a good girl.”
Patrice smiled at her and stretched out obediently. She yawned and closed her eyes, said in a sleepy mumble, “ ’Bye, Dake, darling.”
He walked back to the cottage with the nurse. “How is she?”
The nurse shrugged. “She’ll improve for a time, and then retrogress overnight. There seems to be something, some memory she won’t face up to. She’s had two full series of shock treatments. They seem to help for a time, but the effects aren’t lasting. She’s sweet, really. Mild and cooperative. We never have to use restraint, except when she realizes she’s due for another shock treatment. She thinks she’s some sort of a prisoner here. That isn’t uncommon, you know.”
“She always had such... enormous energy.”
“She seems quite content to vegetate, sir. That is common, too. A complete avoiding of decisions, or the reasons for making any.”
He went back to Philadelphia, back to the cheap room. Branson might have understood. He was gone. Patrice was gone. Oliver Krindle was gone. In a sense, Karen was gone.
He sat on the corner of the desk, lean ankles crossed, and tried to plot his future actions. “They” would be spread quite thin. There would be many places in the world, many places in this country, where he’d be out of range, free to work out some plan of what to do with the rest of his life.
Someone had to believe! Odd, how important that had become. He could not risk it with anyone he had known. It would have to be a stranger. Someone carefully selected. And the demonstration of his abilities would have to be carried on where the chance of detection was remote.
He walked in the city, looking at faces, looking into the eyes of strangers with an intentness that made them uneasy. His training had made faces more readable. He saw shallow concerns, and fear, and aimlessness. He walked long miles through the city. He found no one in whose stability he could believe. At dusk he walked out on the rusting mass of the Delaware River Bridge, wondering if all the cities would be like this, if there would not be a face in all the world to trust, instinctively.
The bridge lights were out and the girl was a vague gray shadow a dozen yards away. There was a pale hint of her face, and then she began to climb the parapet. He ran as quickly and silently as he could. She heard him and tried to move more quickly. He caught a thin wrist, pulled her firmly back and down to stand by him, his arm around her slim body. She stood very quietly, her head bowed, trembling slightly.
“Are you certain you want to do that?”
“Yes.” It was a whisper, barely audible.
He took out a match, struck it, shielding it from the fitful wind, tilting her chin up calmly to study her face. It was a young face, haggard, frail, vulnerable. She turned away from him.
“I’ll do it anyway,” she said. “Sooner or later.”
“The reason is good?”
“Of course.”
“I won’t try to question you about it. I’ll accept that. Your reason is good. Do you have a name?”
“Mary.”
“Suppose you were given a chance to do something... that might be constructive, and then be permitted, later, to destroy yourself. Would that interest you?”
“Constructive. That seems an odd word for you to use.” Her voice was low, the inflection good, articulation crisp, clean.
“You would have to take it on faith. I can’t explain, yet.”
“Hold a light by your face. I want to look at you.”
He lit another match. She looked up at him. “The heavy sorrow of all the world,” she said softly.
“What do you mean?”
“In your face. In your eyes. I work... used to work, in wood and stone and clay, and anything else that will take a form.” In the last dusk light he saw her hold her hands out, clench her fists. “Your face would fit a heroic figure. There aren’t many faces left like that. It’s a good face. Do you have a name?”
“Dake.”
“I’ll do what you want. But no questions. Will it take long?”
“A week, perhaps less. I don’t know.”
“I didn’t know it would take that long.”
“I have to tell you one thing, Mary. You have to be a person who... has very little to lose.”
“I have one question. Is it something criminal?”
“No.”
“All right. But first you better buy me something to eat. I’m pretty shaky.”
In the small, lamp-lit restaurant he had his first chance to look at her. Her hair was straight, dark, worn long. She wore a gray suit, a white blouse, both of casual good quality, but rumpled. She wore no makeup. He sensed her lack of pretense and vanity. She had a style of her own, a directness. It was her hands that interested him most. Good square firm hands, with short, competent-looking fingers. They were as immaculate as a surgeon’s.