Dan Milliard closed the door behind him and paused a moment in the hall, struck again by the radiance that he had caught in his daughter's face. His body was tired, but his mind was not. He started down the hall. Had he said what he came all this way to say to Chuck Wright? Probably not. There were things you didn't say, that's all. But there were things you knew, without saying. And there were changes that took place in you without your ever being aware of them.
He reached his wife; she was alone now. She stood up and took his arm. "You," she said, in that same bullying way of her daughter back there, "you're going to bed now. You're going to sleep for three solid days. I mean it, Dan. I mean it, too."
They went down in the tiny elevator and then through the stone-and-marble entrance hall of the hospital.
In the sunlight that poured down on the wide steps outside, Ralph Hilliard was surrounded by three men who looked suspiciously like newspaper reporters to Dan. One carried a camera. Ralph stopped talking when he saw his parents, and he waited for them, very still, very grave, very adult for his ten years. Then he said, out of the corner of his mouth, to the three men: "Only if you tell him I said so, I'll sue you for libel."
Dan didn't inquire what his son had told the reporters. Eleanor, too, said nothing. After the picture had been taken and they were in the taxi, she turned her face to Dan Hilliard and kissed him full on the lips and held him like that, but without any desperation, for a long time. Ralph Hilhard, embarrassed, stared out the window.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Although Joseph Hayes has been writing on a full-time basis since ig4$, The Desperate Hours is his first novel. Born in Indianapolis in igi8, he spent two years in a monastery and eighteen hitchhiking through the South, and at all sorts of odd jobs, such as pushing wheel chairs at the Dallas Fair, managing a small icehouse, farm work and warehouse work. At twenty he was married to Marrijane Johnston, and together they worked their way through three more years at a Midwestern university by editing a drama magazine, typing and editing doctorate theses for correct English usage, directing amateur theatricals and radio acting. The Hayeses moved to New York in ig4i and for the next two years Mr. Hayes was employed in the editorial department of a play-publishing house — until he decided that he, too, could write plays. As soon as the first, co-authored with his wife, was published, he gave up employment promptly, and for the last ten years he has been free-lancing successfully. His work has appeared on many television screens and in the national magazines. A play. Leaf and Bough, was produced on Broadway in 1949. He now lives in Brookfeld Center, Connecticut, with Marrijane and their two sons, Gregory and Jason — with frequent jaunts in as many directions as possible. He is now at work on another novel and has completed a new play for Broadway.
The desperate hours, a novel Page 23
