Puzzle for Pilgrims
Page 21
The future strangely was Marietta. Sally, Martin, Iris, death, and danger were all in the past. Something new was to begin for me. I tried to recapture those moments, so long ago in memory though not in time, when I had held Marietta in my arms and reacted exultantly to her humble, half-sobbed request to marry her. Somehow the memory was blurred. I found I could not even reconstruct Marietta’s face in my mind. At some moment, there in Iris’s room, the image had slipped away. I felt obscurely nervous, almost embarrassed.
Some time later the door opened and Marietta came in. The instant I saw her she was alive again to me. She was wearing a green blouse and a white skirt. It is strange what a potent effect clothes have. She had been wearing those things on the night in Taxco when I had found her on Paco’s balcony with the garish firework lights bringing her profile in and out of illumination. And suddenly it was the same as it had been the other time. Her beauty intoxicated me. Beneath the shining rook-dark hair, her face was radiant as it had been that night when she had come to me with her sheaf of white stock.
“Peter.”
I had risen. She took my arms. Her hands slid up to my shoulders. She kissed me, and I could feel the excitement quivering in her. This was new and strange, wildly removed from the sad tenderness I had felt for Iris and which, a few moments before, had seemed so powerful. Strange and unreal as something you dream of happening when you’re alone on a dark, rainy night.
I said, “It’s okay with the doctor, Marietta. It’s all fixed up.”
“I know. I know. Martin told me.”
She was holding me tightly, but with the mention of Martin’s name some of the contact between us seemed to go. I felt a strange stirring of anxiety.
“You’ve seen Martin?”
“Yes.”
She moved in my arms so that she was looking up at me. The radiance was there in the green eyes, but something was marring it.
And I knew suddenly what it was. The radiance wasn’t for me.
I said, “He’s going away.”
“I know.”
“And Iris isn’t going with him.”
“No.”
Feeling tired and old, I said, “You’re going, too. That’s what you’ve come to tell me.”
The green eyes were still smiling, clear as the sunlight.
“He needs me.”
“Marietta, you’re mad. If you go, you’ll destroy yourself.”
She wasn’t listening. I saw now that she wasn’t the same person as that crushed, tormented girl who had bared her heart to me with the mercilessness of a Nazi surgeon. That had been Marietta down, out of favor with Martin. This was another Marietta—the Marietta whom Martin had summoned into the Presence, Marietta up.
I knew then that I had lost her already, if I’d ever had her. This was something beyond argument. And with the clarity of a drowning man, I assessed my love for her. I did love her. In a way that had practically no kinship with my love for Iris. I loved her as, perhaps, a fisherman in a folk legend loved a mermaid, with a love that was doomed never to reach an earthy fulfillment with breakfast cups and morning newspapers.
“Now he has the thing he did to Sally to remember, he needs me. He’s always going to need me.”
The mermaid image was still there. Her hair, brushing my cheek, was like seaweed. Part of me longed for her and felt a desire to shout out that Martin had not killed Sally, to break through the excuse she had manufactured to justify this ultimate yielding to her obsession.
But I didn’t speak. Perhaps that was part of my love too. Perhaps its whole existence was based on the fact that I had known from the beginning it could never reach attainment.
A sardonic twinge of humor mocked me. I had not told the truth about the deaths to save Iris from Martin. As a result I had lost Marietta. But it wasn’t really as tidy as that. Marietta would have gone anyway. I saw it now. She had always been tied to Martin as irrevocably as the mermaid is tied to the sea.
She said, “I love you, Peter.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, yes.” Her face was without sunlight, forlorn. “Yes, Peter.”
I looked at her, almost impersonal now, and feeling a pity for her that was stronger than my pity for Iris—or for myself.
“You can’t help it, Marietta?”
She shook her head.
“It’s gone that far?”
She buried her face against my shoulder. “Don’t, Peter. Don’t talk about it. Don’t talk. Kiss me.”
Her lips stumbled to mine. They clung. They were cool and wet as if with ocean spray. Even then, while she kissed me, she had gone from me.
“Remember me, Peter.”
“I’ll remember you, Marietta.”
She slipped out of my arms. In a moment she was gone.
I stood still, the morning sunlight striking warm on my face. I felt as if somewhere in me was a wound. But I felt oddly tranquil too. Did the fisherman feel that way when there was a flash of silver scales and the shore was suddenly empty?
I went to Iris’s room. My wife was combing her hair at the mirror. The domestic triviality of the act brought a queer constriction to my throat. She turned, the comb in her hand, shaking back her hair.
“Marietta’s going with Martin, Iris.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
She moved toward me. “And you?”
“Me?” I shrugged.
She said, “It feels bad, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know.”
She was trying to be bright and casual. She was terrified of having me think she would make demands on me now. I knew that.
She said, “And what are you going to do?”
“Iris.”
I put my hands on her arms. She was trembling.
“Don’t, Peter. You don’t have to. Please, you don’t have to think of me.”
“It’s happened before,” I said. “People going back.”
My fingers knew her skin so well. There was nothing strange. It was like touching myself.
“You can go back a long way. New York, for example. Is New York too far for you? Together?”
She was still trembling, but her face was alight.
“No, Peter. I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s too far…”
FIN
PATRICK QUENTIN
Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge were pen names under which Hugh Callingham Wheeler (19 March 1912 – 26 July 1987), Richard Wilson Webb (August 1901 – December 1966), Martha Mott Kelley (30 April 1906 – 2005) and Mary Louise White Aswell (3 June 1902 – 24 December 1984) wrote detective fiction. In some foreign countries their books have been published under the variant Quentin Patrick. Most of the stories were written by Webb and Wheeler in collaboration, or by Wheeler alone. Their most famous creation is the amateur sleuth Peter Duluth. In 1963, the story collection The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow was given a Special Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.
In 1931 Richard Wilson Webb (born in 1901 in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, an Englishman working for a pharmaceutical company in Philadelphia) and Martha Mott Kelley collaborated on the detective novel Cottage Sinister. Kelley was known as Patsy (Patsy Kelly was a well-known character actress of that era) and Webb as Rick, so they created the pseudonym Q. Patrick by combining their nicknames—adding the Q “because it was unusual”.
Webb’s and Kelley’s literary partnership ended with Kelley’s marriage to Stephen Wilson. Webb continued to write under the Q. Patrick name, while looking for a new writing partner. Although he wrote two novels with the journalist and Harper’s Bazaar editor Mary Louise Aswell, he would find his permanent collaborator in Hugh Wheeler, a Londoner who had moved to the US in 1934.
Wheeler’s and Webb’s first collaboration was published in 1936. That same year, they introduced two new pseudonyms: Murder Gone to Earth, the first novel featuring Dr. Westlake, was credited to Jonathan Stagge, a name they would continue to use for the rest of the Westlake series. A Puzzle for Fools i
ntroduced Peter Duluth and was signed Patrick Quentin. This would become their primary and most famous pen name, even though they also continued to use Q. Patrick until the end of their collaboration (particularly for Inspector Trant stories).
In the late 1940s, Webb’s contributions gradually decreased due to health problems. From the 1950s and on, Wheeler continued writing as Patrick Quentin on his own, and also had one book published under his own name. In the 1960s and ’70s, Wheeler achieved success as a playwright and librettist, and his output as Quentin Patrick slowed and then ceased altogether after 1965. However, Wheeler did write the book for the 1979 musical Sweeney Todd about a fictional London mass murderer, showing he had not altogether abandoned the genre.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
As Patrick Quentin
A Puzzle For Fools (1936)
Puzzle For Players (1938)
Puzzle For Puppets (1944)
Puzzle For Wantons (1945) aka Slay the Loose Ladies
Puzzle For Fiends (1946) aka Love Is a Deadly Weapon
Puzzle For Pilgrims (1947) aka The Fate of the Immodest Blonde
Run To Death (1948)
The Follower (1950)
Black Widow (1952) aka Fatal Woman
My Son, the Murderer (1954) aka the Wife of Ronald Sheldon
The Man With Two Wives (1955)
The Man in the Net (1956)
Suspicious Circumstances (1957)
Shadow of Guilt (1959)
The Green-Eyed Monster (1960)
The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow (1961), short stories
Family Skeletons (1965)
As Q Patrick
Cottage Sinister (1931)
Murder at the Women’s City Club (1932) aka Death in the Dovecote
SS Murder (1933)
Murder at the ‘Varsity (1933) aka Murder at Cambridge
The Grindle Nightmare (1935) aka Darker Grows the Valley
Death Goes To School (1936)
Death For Dear Clara (1937)
The File on Fenton and Farr (1938)
The File on Claudia Cragge (1938)
Death and the Maiden (1939)
Return To the Scene (1941) aka Death in Bermuda
Danger Next Door (1952)
As Jonathan Stagge
The Dogs Do Bark (1936) aka Murder Gone To Earth
Murder by Prescription (1938) aka Murder or Mercy?
The Stars Spell Death (1939) aka Murder in the Stars
Turn of the Table (1940) aka Funeral For Five
The Yellow Taxi (1942) aka Call a Hearse
The Scarlet Circle (1943) aka Light From a Lantern
Death, My Darling Daughters (1945) aka Death and the Dear Girls
Death’s Old Sweet Song (1946)
The Three Fears (1949)
As Hugh Wheeler
The Crippled Muse (1951)