“You think that’s where they might have gone?” asked Molly, holding her white muslin nightgown bunched in her hand. She had quickly packed up this and a few other night things from the apartment she shared with her father, which now sat empty and tomb-like, the shattered window a jagged reminder of what had happened there, the concrete ledge outside still littered with splinters of broken glass.
Maggie nodded. “The police would have no knowledge of the place. Mama’s had hardly any contact with Uncle Whit since his divorce from my aunt. It would be the perfect spot for the two of them to hide out.”
“But for how long?” asked Molly.
“Long enough for us to go there and help them figure out what they should do. If it were me, I’d leave the country altogether and go to Canada.”
Molly got up. Her look had turned dark and angry. “Why would I even want to help Dad after what he’s done? And your mother is nothing like the M-O-T-H-E-R in that disgustingly saccharine Eva Tanguay song.”
“Let’s respect a rule here, Molly. You may vilify your father and I may vilify my mother but we aren’t permitted to cross-vilify.”
Molly laughed sardonically. “Even though that’s all you’ve been doing since those two discovered they had feelings for one another?”
Maggie took the bait. “And how right I was. I knew your father wasn’t over his drinking. I just didn’t realize how dangerous he became when he got himself totally sozzled.”
Molly shot daggers at Maggie, and Maggie shot daggers back. “Do you want me to go?” Molly finally asked between clenched teeth.
“Only if you want to. Let it not be said I turned my back on you in your time of need.”
A silence passed. Then Molly began to think aloud. “I probably should go. I’m not a baby. I am quite capable of spending the night in my own apartment alone. Besides, if Dad’s going to be sitting in a jail cell for the next twenty or thirty years, I should probably start getting used to being by myself.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t think they’d keep him in that jail cell for anywhere near that long.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because Pat’s probably going to die, so your dad will more than likely get the noose.”
“I hate you so much right now, Maggie, I can’t even see straight.”
“Then by all means rid yourself of me by leaving. Don’t let me stop you.”
“I’m going to ’phone for a taxi, if it’s all right with you. I’ll leave a nickel on the table.”
“You do whatever you like,” said Maggie, quickly turning away. Then just as quickly she swung back around. “You know, none of this would have happened if you hadn’t fallen for Pat — if you hadn’t done the very thing that sinister game expected you to do.”
“Pat wasn’t playing the game like the others. I just know it.”
“And just how do you know this, Molly?”
Molly brought herself to within a few inches of Maggie’s face. “Because Pat’s too stupid to play a game that thorny. There. I said it. I fell in love with a good-looking idiot. And I’ll deal with the consequences without any help from you.”
And with that, Molly, along with her night bag and her wad of nightgown, fled into the night.
At the hospital the clock in the corridor struck two. The men’s ward was dark and quiet save for the sound of a couple of patients snoring lightly and another man moaning, but not too loudly, in response to his nocturnal pain. Cain, sitting in his stiff, upright chair, dozed off. It was only for the briefest moment, but was still long enough to nearly topple him headlong from his chair. One of the nurses had asked earlier if he might not be more comfortable at home, or at least stretched out upon one of the divans in the solarium, which was often used to billet those who wished to spend the night close by.
“Maybe later,” he’d replied. “I’m fine right here for now.”
“Well, I’ll be at the nurse’s desk just outside if you need anything.” She smiled pleasantly. “You’re a good and devoted friend to sit up with Mr. Harrison like this.”
Cain nodded. Circumstances did not permit him to give an even more revelatory response to the nurse’s thoughtful observation.
At a couple of minutes past two, Pat Harrison woke from his morphine induced sleep of the dead. But he was hardly awake. Like each of the three other awakenings Cain had witnessed, Pat asked only for his mother, wondering in fractured words interposed between struggles for breath when she would come to see him. Each time, and not even knowing if Pat had understood a single word of his reply, Cain told his friend that he shouldn’t worry; she was on her way. Cain hadn’t the heart to divulge the hard truth: that Pat’s mother had died several years earlier after a lengthy bout with tuberculosis.
Cain supposed he could say the same thing he’d said before. And yet, something about the disconsolate way Pat asked the question — as if, in spite of his jumbled cognition, he was getting the strong sense that she wouldn’t be coming — motivated Cain to say something quite different this time.
At that instant, Cain’s mind flashed on a movie he’d seen a few years earlier. It was a D. W. Griffith picture starring Lillian Gish, The Greatest Thing in Life. There was a scene in the movie that had always haunted him. It took place during the Great War and involved a white officer and a mortally wounded Negro soldier. As the Negro was slipping away, he asked for his mother, and the officer hadn’t known what to say. He did know, though, that the soldier under his command would die easier if he thought his mother was at his side, easing him lovingly through the dark passage into death. Cain remembered vividly what happened in that next moment: the officer, pretending to be the dying soldier’s mother, reaching over and kissing the young soldier.
The scene touched Cain deeply, the image of that kiss resonating for him long after he’d left the theatre.
Cain raised himself up from his chair. He placed a cool hand on Pat’s feverish forehead. Pat, his eyes swollen tight from lacerations to his face, asked again if his mother was there. Had she finally come? The hand that touched him: was it hers?
Cain answered yes.
And then Cain placed himself halfway upon the bed so he could embrace Pat as a mother would embrace a child — holding him close and protectively in his arms. And then Cain, playing the part of Pat’s mother, kissed him on the lips.
Pat accepted the kiss. He held the kiss tightly upon his lips as Cain slid back from the bed and into the chair.
And then, most remarkably, the cloud lifted from Pat’s face and he smiled.
And then he spoke.
“Cain?”
Cain leaned in. “What is it, Paddy?”
With labored breath: “Tell my mother she needs a shave.”
And in that next moment the rising and falling of Pat’s chest, his attempts to breathe through lungs that were crushed and nearly useless, stopped.
Pat Harrison was dead.
Cain stared at Pat’s lifeless body for a moment. Then he got up and went out to the nurse’s desk to tell her what had happened. She telephoned the doctor who was on night duty, and went into the ward to confirm what Cain had reported. Cain stood next to the nurse’s desk. He watched the night doctor and one of the other night nurses racing down the corridor, listened to their shoes clicking isolate upon the linoleum. He watched them disappear into the ward. Cain walked over to the swinging doors and observed attempts to revive the patient. Then came a shake of the head and mumbled instructions to the nurses from the somber doctor.