Not to say that he resembled omniscient patriarch in any but the most glancing fashion. His military stint had gifted him with that strange combination of maturity and childishness that seems to be trained into most soldiers of today; a case of arrested social development which, while serving the Army superiors in an unknown fashion, put him on a similar emotional footing with the loose collection of semi-collegiate people MC spent most of her time with. He talked to the landlord and bought the firewood, and that was enough to put him in charge, at least as far as the house was concerned.
Socially, his presence was subtle. Each of the people whose lives touched his would have counted him as a friend, but none of them understood his connecting power until he wasn't there. Vonnegut made a word for someone like this, someone around whom people and events orbit, often without the awareness of the orbit's focus. The pity thing of being one of these foci was a sort of isolation, and a lack of reciprocity of thought: people he was careful to include sometimes failed to think of him when planning their events.
MC was another of these foci, and she sometimes wondered why they weren't together - why, as fellow outcasts pursuing impossible dreams, they shouldn't settle (for the interim at least) for some comfort with each other. But in spite of socio-biological theories of proximity, they never quite clicked. Certainly part of it was they were both far too shy to broach the subject; another reason was, as incurable romantics, they both wanted passion to strike them at their roots and consecrate them to "the One." Neither one of them was the settling type, at least not then.
It all came clear, to her at least, one summer week. Life in the clan had been ticking along, people doing their thing - working or slumming or attending summer quarter - with no more than the usual number of hitches. One afternoon, MC stopped by Katehaus only to find the door shut, the lights off. Making her way back down the path to the sidewalk, she noted the absence of Patrick's old red Volkswagen van, and assumed he'd gone out to the store, or down to the GameShop, or something. Walking further down the hill, she encountered Beth and Mark. They exchanged the usual round of "hey, what's up?" and Mark revealed they were on their way to Katehaus. "Oh, no-one's there right now," MC informed them. "That's all right," Beth said. "We'll just hang out on the lawn 'til someone comes home. See you later." They parted ways, MC continuing on down the hill towards her apartment.
When she got there, she phoned Katehaus to see what was going on. There was no answer. So she called Mary, who didn't know of anything exciting happening - what was going on at Katehaus? "Nobody's home right now," MC answered, "or at least nobody's answering the phone." "Hmm. Well, I'm just going to hang out here for a while," said Mary. "Talk to you later." A few minutes later, with similar responses from everyone she called, MC turned on the television and flopped down on the couch with a microwave burrito, and was soon engrossed in a re-run of Escape from New York.
Three or four days later, when she realized she was starting to memorize the evening TV line up, MC started thinking. Everyone she talked to about getting together in the evenings seemed somewhat at a loss. They were all bored, and all wanted to do something, but they didn't know what. Patrick wasn't back from where-ever he'd gone, and robbed of the default hangout, people seemed to lose all motivation.
It wasn't that Katehaus was the only place people went when Patrick was in town, or that no-one ever did anything without him... in fact, MC had stopped by the place yesterday and found Andrew home from work. She'd stayed around for a while, but it hadn't quite felt right. Andrew was involved in his book, and after a while she got bored and went home. Three phone calls later, she was back in front of the television again, vaguely dissatisfied without quite knowing what to do.
What clinched her theory, though, was his return. One evening a few days later, the phone rang. "Hi, MC, what's up?" "Not much, Pat, how're you?" "Oh, fine - hey, want to come up and watch Miller's Crossing? I rented it and La Femme Nikita." "Okay, I'll be there in half an hour. G'bye." A conversation she's had a dozen times before, she knows, but suddenly the world is back in kilter. And sure enough, after that evening, with seven people crowded into the Katehaus living room, shushing Ann when she asked annoying questions, things were back on track. People planned things again. Katehaus wasn't the exclusive jumping off point, but it was a damn common point of reference...
Blind as the Group may have been to the strange physics of their social lives, Patrick was the sun, and without him they floundered in the dark.