The Lonely

by Paul Gallico

  She had not known. She had not dreamed what it would do to her, even after the inner struggle that had preceded her so blithely going off with him that June morning.

  Jerry was the first boy Patches had truly loved; he was the first man to whom she had given herself. She had made this gift out of love and generosity and the unstilled hunger of youth for youth—the yearning of love that needs an answering love to hush its cries—but she could not in truth have known or suspected what would happen to her because of the giving, the changes that were to be wrought upon her.

  She had thought to snatch a moment of happiness in a crumbling world, to give one brief instant of existence to her love for Jerry before she put him forever out of her life. She had known she would not forget him, that he would always be a sweet and tender memory, but she had counted upon time to help dim the dreams she had made around him. She had not foreseen what she now knew, that there was no longer anything in life but Jerry.

  She belonged to Jerry, everything that she was—her conscious thoughts, her person, her mind, her heart, the deep, swelling buds of womanhood that were bursting within her—awake, asleep, living, dying, breathing, walking, wherever she might be, to the ends of time, she belonged to him. He possessed her, and it was this knowledge of his possession of her that brought such a terror and trembling to her heart. Nothing was left of her to be recovered. She was utterly and hopelessly lost.

  There was now not even, as she had hoped, any refuge to be found in memories. For during the days that they had lived together and grown closer to each other, Jerry had come to be her husband in every sense. All the many attentions and courtesies and protections with which a man surrounds a woman had been hers. Kindnesses, tendernesses, little thoughtful acts of his that grew out of their living together, came to be unbearable to Patches as memories because they mirrored the perfection of their brief and total happiness. It was like the first time that Jerry had registered at the hotel in Inversnaid: “Lieutenant and Mrs. Gerald Wright,” and Patches could not bear to look while he did it. Now there was nothing but pain when she remembered the days and the nights when she had lived with Jerry, passing as his wife.

  She fought the past by trying to plan the future, and thought about what she would do if and when Jerry telephoned her. She remembered his smile in the station and his confident “See you when I get back to Kenwoulton . . .” The trip had indeed been nothing more than an episode to him, to be continued thereafter on the careless footing of friendship. She was not angry with him for this. He had never lied to her. But she wondered whether she would have the strength to deny him, when he called, to say: “I’m sorry, Jerry, but it’s best if we don’t see one another any more,” or to refuse to speak to him at all, to make the break clean and sharp.

  And yet she so longed to see him once more. The desire manifested itself in the fantasies she threw up against such denial, that Jerry had done nothing to deserve such treatment, that it would be kinder to see him once more, to remind him of the terms of their friendship and to point out that it was best for them both to stand by those terms. And while she was with him again for that last meeting, she could possess him once more with her eyes, see his smile, and hear his laugh, touch his hand, study again the strong angle of his jaw and the shape and color of his eyes that so touched her heart. She would memorize every dear line of his features and inflection of his voice . . . Patches realized that the telephone was ringing again and that she was listening.

  She covered her ears with her hands for a moment, so shocked and desperate was she at her own weakness. It was over, over, over! She had no right to think thoughts of seeing him again. She at once resolved that when he returned and called her, she would be out, or busy. There would be—there must be—a clean break. She called upon all the inner strength and dignity that had carried her through life and the bitter, difficult war years, and promised herself this. Her head came up, she breathed deeply, her whole body stiffened with resolve.

  “Coeeee, Patches! Are you there?” It was one of the girls calling from below. Patches went to the door and answered. The girl said: “Telephone. It’s for you . . .”

  Jerry! Perhaps he was calling her from Scotland. He might even have cut short his leave and come home. All resolves and promises and steeling of herself against this moment were gone. To hear his voice once more, his gay careless, infectious greeting: “Hi, Patches, what’s cooking?” She raced down the stairs breathlessly, in panic, lest something should happen to the connection to break the slender strand that for the moment would bind her to Jerry again.

  She picked up the receiver. “Hello, this is Patches . . .”

  There was a moment of silence in the telephone while every fibre of her vibrated with the expectancy of hearing Jerry’s voice; in her mind she was already hearing it, and her heart was framing her reply, preparing the softness and tenderness in her voice . . .

  “Hello, hello . . . I say, Patches, you’re back, aren’t you? That’s jolly good. What about a turn at the flicks tonight?”

  Patches thought she would die from disappointment. It wasn’t Jerry. She knew the voice, but for the moment could not even think who it was.

  “Hello, hello? I say, are you there, Patches? This is Allan.”

  She knew now and said faintly: “Hello, Allan.” It was one of the RAF pilots, Allan Peters, from the nearby Spitfire base where Patches worked as a radar technician in operational headquarters. He was a nice and rather innocuous boy with whom she had had occasional dates in the past.

  He was saying: “There’s a new flick with Lana Turner at the Kensington. I thought we might pop over . . .”

  “I . . . I don’t know, Allan . . .” Patches was sick with disappointment and with shame at her own weakness. What had happened to her determination to break off with Jerry? At the first slender hope of hearing his voice she had come rushing to the telephone.

  “Quite all right, Patches. I just thought if you weren’t doing anything . . .”

  Patches did not want to see Allan or go to the pictures. She could not bear the thought of being with anyone; she did not even wish to leave her room and the safety of its walls and familiar objects. And then the reaction to her own weakness set in. She had always gone with Allan before when he had asked her. Somewhere life must begin again, somehow the old threads be picked up. But it was more to punish herself for having given in to her longing for Jerry so quickly that she said: “All right, Allan, I’ll go with you.”

  “Right-o, Patches. I’ll be around for you at the usual. Cheerio . . .”

  Allan Peters called for Patches, and they saw the picture at the Kensington and then went for some fish and chips and sat in a booth, where Allan found himself studying Patches with a kind of puzzled interest. He was of the breed—pink-cheeked, with curly sand-colored hair, weak chin and weak mouth, over which he had raised an edge of RAF moustache—one of those boys who looked footling, silly, and rather useless and who was a holy terror in a Spitfire in combat.

  Allan had known Patches for some time as a girl who was pleasant to talk to, or take for a walk in the country, or have as a neighbor in a movie theatre. But he had never been aware of her in any sense as a girl who might be desirable. Now he found himself unable to take his pale eyes from her face. Something about her that he did not understand, that he had never noticed before, was stirring him queerly, making him uneasy and yet excited. He sat more closely to her and sometimes carelessly let his hand rest upon the table so that it touched hers. And he kept searching her face, and once when she bent her head to his proffered cigarette-lighter, he quickly breathed in the fragrance from her hair.

  He enquired about how she had spent her leave, and when she satisfied him with generalities, he said suddenly: “I say, Patches, what’s come over you? Do you know you’ve changed a lot since the last time we were together?”

  “Changed, Allan? What do you mean?” She turned her eyes on him, eyes that were wide with alarm, though he did not interpret the look sinc
e he could not know of the panic his confirmation of her fears inspired in her. For a moment Patches had the terrible sensation of being stripped naked and bound hand and foot in the market place to be stared at. Dear God, could everyone now see?

  “Oh, I don’t know. I mean you’re quite different, you know. Almost as though you . . . I say, Patches, would you mind very much if I kissed you?”

  Patches was feeling sick and dizzy inside and did not know what to do or say. “He knows . . . he can tell . . . he feels it . . .” was going through her mind. This was a part of what was to be from now on, the things she had brought upon herself, things she would be called upon to face. Allan reached over and kissed her awkwardly on the side of the head and took her hand in his. He said huskily: “Damn it all, Patches! Am I going to fall in love with you?”

  Patches murmured: “Don’t fall in love with me, Allan,” but did not have the strength or the fight to disengage her hand from his.

  But it was on the way home in the dark alley of Bishop’s Lane that Allan suddenly said her name, “Patches,” and turned and took her in his arms, pressing his mouth on hers, keeping it there, holding her imprisoned by the desire of his body.

  She did not resist. She let it happen as a punishment to herself. It took all of her courage, but she spared herself nothing. She felt the warmth and rapidity of his breathing, and, in the wan light of the semi-blacked-out street lamp, saw the moist glitter of his eyes, and in the horrible, endless moment of the embrace she came to know the meaning of hell on earth.

  He relaxed his hold for a moment to look at her, his throat working, his face pale; then his hands were reaching for her again, crying hoarsely: “Patches . . . I say, Patches, I . . .”

  But she was running now, running as fast as she could through the street, her feet barely touching the curved cobblestones, running and sobbing, with the darkness all through her, inside as well as outside, as though she were a part of the heavy blackness that would never know the light again. She heard him cry her name once more, and the heavier drumming of the footsteps on the pavement, before she reached the house and safety inside.

  She ran up the stairs to her room, where she locked the door and then threw herself on to her bed and cried terribly for Jerry. Her crying was the miserable, hopeless weeping of the abandoned, of the woman denied the protection of her man.

  She spoke his name, calling upon him again and again and again: “Oh Jerry, Jerry . . . Jerry!” Why wasn’t he there to shield her? If he loved her, he would be there with her, and nothing could happen to her. Into her crying crept the hysteria of the fear that had been with her ever since she had come back, when she had known that her security was gone, her safety assailed, her citadel destroyed. Allan had read it on her that she was now prey to all men. There was no one to whom she could turn.

  Her crying now was like that of a fear-stricken child calling wildly in the darkness. She beat on the mattress with her fists and called: “Jer-reeeee, Jer-reeeeee! Please, Jerry . . .” She cried for him to come before it was too late and take her out of the darkness that was engulfing her. “Oh, please, Jer-reeeee! . . .”

  The lights in the house on the other side of Severn Avenue exercised a kind of compulsion upon Jerry as he stood by the window of his room and stared across the quiet, deserted street, letting his thoughts wander where his feet would not go, across the few yards separating the two Long Island homes.

  He had been standing there thinking for a long time. The hour was past eleven. Through the summer-green curtain of trees he had seen the lights in Catharine’s house shift from the ground floor to the upper storey. Soon they would blink out, and then he would feel rather than see the dark mass as he had all through his boyhood.

  It was there, with its white-painted shingle sides and dark, slanting roof with the square, flower-bordered balcony over the conservatory with the New England wing featuring the huge studio window opening out from the end on to the bordered brick walk. For the moment it was inescapable. It was as firmly implanted in his mind as it was affixed to its foundations. He knew every beam and stone in it as he knew his own. It had acquired a living personality through having sheltered Catharine, and, through her, his hopes for so long. He had lived and grown with this house from the day, so many years ago, that the Quentins had moved there.

  It was there he had gone to play, first as a child, later as an adolescent. Inside those walls he had attended Catharine’s first birthday party after her arrival. From that day on, a glamor had settled upon the house that had never been dispelled.

  Jerry remembered Catharine on her seventh birthday—he had been eight—and how she had looked in her blue organdie dress, puffed at the shoulders so that she seemed like a winged angel. Her shining hair hung down to her waist and was tied with a big blue bow.

  These were the pictures, recollections, and sensations that filled his mind now with startling clarity and vividness, and he felt again something of the thrill and sweetness of that day when he had experienced the first faint tap of manhood upon his shoulders, and the world was filled with lovely creatures, all pink and blue and white and scented with silken hair and starched ribbons and soft dresses, candlelight and games and good things to eat, and above all the fairy presence of the dearest and most enchanting of them all—Catharine.

  There had been a new and wholly unforgettable emotion encountered when, with the almost imperceptible yet unmistakable signals of childhood, Catharine had singled him out as her favorite at the party. With a shy glance, or a momentary return to the present he had brought her, or in the way in which she manoeuvred when sides were drawn for the games, she managed to let him know she liked him best and wanted him near her.

  For days afterwards Jerry had walked on air. He lived and dreamed on Catharine’s radiance and the bright, rosy memories of each crowded minute he had spent in her presence. Day and night were devoted to the rearing of glorious battlements in the sky and the rescuing of Catharine in fantasy from magnificently invented and horrible dangers. He dwelt upon the time when he would grow up and marry her, and saw her always at his side, unchanged in her blue dress with the angel-wing sleeves, her heavy, gleaming hair swinging, as she moved her head, or brushing softly against his face or hand.

  During the long years of his journey from childhood to adolescence there had been other interests, and girls had drifted temporarily into the background, but even in that period when, outwardly, girls were beneath his notice, he would sometimes in his mind steal back to the day of the party and recapture the glow and the sweet dizziness that had beset him. And always her house was standing there so comfortably across the street. He saw it every day as he went to school and came home.

  The memories persisted. Jerry could not bar them from his mind, because every object that surrounded him, even the light and shadow of the gentle night, was a part of them. He was home; he was doubly home, and the spirit and the presence of Catharine were something living, beckoning across the tiny gulf of the asphalt street, calling with a thousand voices to which he could not close his ears. It was on just such a summer’s night as this in Westbury, when the elm leaves were rustled into changing their shadowy patterns on the ground by a cool breeze from the ocean side, and there had been soft starlight, distant music, and distant laughter, that he had first dared to kiss her.

  He was seventeen then. She had not kissed him back, but, after a moment of silence, had got up from the swing on the porch and gone into the house, and he knew that he had offended her. He remembered the hell through which he had gone, how he felt that he had placed himself beyond the pale by offering her a mortal insult, and had tortured himself until she forgave him and they had made up.

  Rooted there by the window in his room, Jerry found himself reliving, step by step, emotion by emotion, his romance with the girl across the way, until it seemed more and more fantastic that he should be there and she so near him, separated only by the width of the darkened street.

  But for all the memories, the yester
day still ached powerfully in his heart, and Jerry found himself confused and baffled by the presence of the two emotions. For Patches, even though he could not see her clearly, was not so much a memory as someone who had come to live within him and whose absence created a void that nothing could fill.

  It was this recollection of the feeling that a union had taken place between them—something beautiful, strong, harmonious, and indissoluble—that turned his disturbed mind to summoning her again, if only she would come. Why was it he could not place Patches beyond the misery and dulled yearning that permeated him? Why were there only fragments of her to be snatched at—the straight line of her back, the tender slope of her shoulders, the way her eyes would steal a look at him when she thought he wasn’t watching, her little skip when she was happy, or perhaps no more than the deep breath she drew in before she began to tell something important—when every detail of Catharine was as clear as though she were standing there in the room beside him?

  Could it be true, as his father had intimated, that in the end he would never regret marrying Catharine, and that as he grew older, lived and prospered amongst his own people and his family, the strains of Patches would become fainter and fainter and in the end die away, that he might some day speak of her as his father had of Adrienne?

  Jerry went over to his desk and opened a drawer, searching for a moment until he found what he sought—a newspaper clipping, with a picture of Catharine, announcing their engagement. It was the same photograph of her that stood on his bureau, and her clear, level gaze was upon him as he reread the short paragraph:

  Mr. and Mrs. Frederic Quentin, of No. 15 Severn Avenue, Westlake Park, Long Island, announce the engagement of their daughter Miss Catharine Rowland Quentin, to U.S. Army Air Forces 2nd Lieutenant Gerald H. Wright, son of Mr. and Mrs. Harman Wright, of No. 12 Severn Avenue, Westlake Park. Miss Quentin attended Rosemary Hall and the Seton School, of Noroton, Conn. She is a member of the New York Junior League and is prominent in Red Cross and blood-donor work in Westbury. Before enlisting in the Air Forces, Mr. Wright graduated from Westbury High School, and was attending Williams College where he was a member of the football and track teams, the Ionian Club, and the Alpha Delta Phi Fraternity. He is leaving for advanced training at Camp Stickney, Texas.