Stanley Uris and Patricia Uris

Stanley Uris and Patricia Uris were married for thirteen years, living in a comfortable Atlanta suburb, until a phone call from Mike Hanlon on May 28th, 1985, triggered Stanley's suicide. Their relationship was built on mutual love and Stanley's quiet, preternatural confidence, but it was shadowed by their inability to conceive a child and by Stanley's buried, unspoken trauma from his childhood in Derry. Patricia discovered his body in the bathtub after he slit his wrists, leaving a single word written in blood on the tiles.

Identity and Background

Patricia Uris, née Blum, was a woman who had never fully escaped the sting of anti-Semitism she experienced as a teenager. At eighteen, she was refused entry to an after-prom party at a country club in Glointon, New York, because her last name "rhymed with plum." The memory of walking back to the car with Michael Rosenblatt, feeling "oily, long-nosed, sallow-skinned," and hearing a "high shrill tittering laugh" haunted her for years. She met Stanley at a sorority party when he was a scholarship student at New York State University. Despite her parents' initial anger and his own parents' concerns about their haste, Stanley's quiet confidence in their future proved justified. They married on August 19th, 1972, and Patricia went to her marriage bed a virgin, whispering, "Don't hurt me, dear." Stanley promised, "I will never hurt you," a promise he kept faithfully until the night of his death.

Life and Marriage

The Urises built a prosperous life together. Stanley worked as an accountant, first for H & R Block, then opening his own business. A pivotal opportunity came when Corridor Video, a pioneer in the videotape business, hired him for an independent marketing survey, leading to a full-time position with a starting salary of $30,000 a year. By 1983, their income had entered the "fabled land of SIX FIGURES." They owned a home purchased for $87,000 in 1979, a Volvo for Patricia, and a Mercedes diesel for Stanley. Patricia sometimes drove back from the Fox Run Mall and saw her house set tastefully back behind low yew hedges, thinking with fierce pride, "Who lives there? Why, I do! Mrs. Stanley Uris does!" Yet this pride was mixed with a lingering unease, a feeling that her success was somehow precarious. Stanley's confidence in their path was almost preternatural; when Patricia was puzzling over teaching applications, he tapped the letter from the Traynor Superintendent of Schools and said, "Because it's right," a certainty that made her feel a "ripple of unease." He once said, out of the blue, "The turtle couldn't help us," a phrase that would later haunt Patricia's dreams.

The Shadow of Childlessness

The single cloud over their otherwise pleasant life was their inability to have children. Patricia's mother, Ruth Blum, first raised the "Dreaded Question" in a letter in the fall of 1979. Both Stanley and Patricia wanted kids. They saw a doctor in Atlanta in 1976, who found no physical problems with either of them, suggesting it might be "just nerves." The doctor told them they would have to relax and forget about procreation when they had sex. Stanley, grumpy on the way home, admitted he never thought of procreation during sex. That night, he spoke in the dark, his voice flat and choked with tears: "It's me. It's my fault." Patricia felt a cold conviction that he was right. Stanley spoke of bad dreams, waking up and thinking, "My whole pleasant life has been nothing but the eye of some storm I don't understand." The extra room in their house remained an extra room, and Patricia once looked at a box of Stayfree pads and thought, "We are your children. We are the only children you will ever have, and we are hungry. Nurse us. Nurse us on blood."

The Night of the Bath

On the night of May 28th, 1985, Stanley and Patricia were sitting in the den. Patricia was watching Family Feud and sewing, while Stanley was reading a new William Denbrough novel. The phone rang. Stanley answered, and Patricia saw a frown line delve between his eyebrows. He spoke to someone named Mike, his smile fading into an analytic expression. After a long pause, he said, "All right, I understand." He hung up and told Patricia, "No one, really. I think I'll take a bath." Patricia found this odd—Stanley never took baths in the early evening. She let him go, absorbed in her show. Later, she went upstairs with a can of beer and found the bathroom door shut and locked, something Stanley had never done. She heard only the steady drip of the faucet. Panic rising, she fetched the spare key from the kitchen. When she opened the door, she saw Stanley lying in the tub, the water bright pink. He had slit his inner forearms open from wrist to the crook of the elbow, crossing each cut to make a pair of bloody capital T's. A package of Gillette Platinum Plus razor blades lay on the rim. He had dipped his right forefinger in his own blood and written a single word on the blue tiles above the tub. Patricia began to scream.