The Simple Way of Poison (5 page)

“I noticed this morning it was crumbling again.”

“Your tenants wouldn’t let me point up your side because of the trumpet vine.”

I had followed him to the end of the long room. We stood there looking out over the snow-mantled garden at the slump in the center of the wall. My own house beyond it was warm and friendly with its lighted windows and the wreath of white smoke curling up from the broad chimney above the snowtopped roof. I had a sudden sharp longing to be there— not here beside this bitter old man whom I felt I scarcely knew anymore.

“It’ll grow again,” I said.

“I’ll foot the bill of course.—It’s the bit over the vault that’s down.”

Lowell’s voice, suddenly crisp and clear in the room, sent a cold shiver down my spine.

“Do tell Steve what charming people the Nashes used to be, dad,” she said.

I turned. She was standing by the Christmas tree with the roll of tinsel again, her smart brittle finish so completely restored that it was Hard to believe that not three minutes ago she was a frightened crumpled youngster on the verge of tears. She was feeding the tinsel up to Mac, balanced again precariously on the kitchen steps, waiting for orders.

“Over the big blue one. No, no! Don’t you know blue when you see it, stupid? That’s swell.—Go on, dad. Tell Steve about the family skeleton—I mean family skeletons.”

The cold shiver ran down my spine again. I looked uneasily at Iris, wondering if she knew what was coming. If she did, there was no sign of it in her face, although, when our eyes met briefly, it seemed to me hers were smoldering, a little nearer the blazing point than they had been before. Beyond her Steve Donaldson had taken his pipe out of his mouth.

“I’d like to hear it, sir,” he said.

“That’s what you think,” I said shortly.

Randall Nash glanced at me. He had a thin curious smile on his face.

“It isn’t exactly a Christmas story,” he said. “But it’s interesting… just to show how shallow the veneer of civilization is. Even the civilization that produced houses like this.”

He looked around the long room with its carved chair rail and handsome cornice, with the broken pediments over balancing doors and the beautifully simple carved overmantel. Iris was still sitting on a low stool by the hearth, staring down into the fire. The flames made her hair a rich burning copper. Her face was as expressionless as if a pale gold mask had been placed there for this scene.

“My great-great-grandfather built this house,” Randall Nash said quietly. “He brought the mahogany for the doors from Honduras in his own ships. He was one of Georgetown’s leading citizens in the great days, when Georgetown was a seaport, long before they built the Federal City they later called Washington. Washington himself frequently dined here.”

His eyes rested, in a kind of cold courtesy, on Stephen Donaldson.

“He married a young woman who’d been his children’s governess, after their mother died of what they called then a galloping consumption. He had a secretary, a red-haired young chap not long down from Oxford, who’d come over here to make his fortune. One night they ran off together, his wife and the secretary, and her body servant, a colored girl of sixteen. He moved heaven and earth to find them. You can still read the advertisements in papers as far afield as the London Times and the French Court Circular. They were never found. He became a recluse.”

I looked at Lowell. She was calmly engrossed in hanging thin bits of silver foil like icicles on the few remaining bare spots on the tree. Her face had that perfectly blank stare that’s fashionable now. I could gladly have wrung her neck at that moment with every feeling that I’d done a distinct social duty.

“It was not until they graded Beall Street,” Randall Nash went on deliberately, “—which is what makes us perch up on a hill—and we had to put in a proper sewage system, that the workmen found a bricked passage. My father had them follow it. They came to a vault just under the wall there. It had a locked iron grill. Hanging to it, its finger bones still round the iron bars, was the skeleton of a man, a few red hairs still clinging to his skull. Inside on the ground were the skeletons of two women, one a young negress, the other a woman with a wedding band engraved with my great-great-grandfather’s initials and the date of his second marriage.”

“Oh, damn!”

Lowell’s expletive punctured the sharp silence. A large red ball fell from the tree and splintered on the polished pine floor with a silvery tinkling crash.

Iris did not move. I saw Steve Donaldson’s pipe give a sudden jerk between his clenched teeth. The only sound in the room was the obese obscene snoring of Senator McGilvray under the sofa.

“The ghastliest part of it was putting the poor colored maid in with them, so they couldn’t be alone even when they were dying.”

I hardly recognized Iris’s voice. She didn’t turn her head or move her body. Her low husky tones were vibrant with passionate protest, trembling and deep, like a single chord struck suddenly on a cello.

“Isn’t that strange,” Lowell said quickly; “I never thought of that!”

She looked up from where she was picking up the bright flimsy pieces of the broken ornament.

Steve Donaldson spoke quietly. “You wouldn’t,” he said. “There are probably lots of things you don’t think of, my child.”

She looked at him sharply, her lips parted for an instant, I thought for some violent retort. Then she bent her head and picked up the last bits of the red ball, her face flushed.

Randall Nash moved his eyes slowly away from Iris.

“No,” he said coldly. “I’m afraid that is a refinement of cruelty that one has to have been—or be—deeply in love to understand.”

It was then that I realized with a sick feeling In the pit of my stomach what that curious thin smile on his face had meant. He had intended from the beginning to tell that story, even before Lowell had given him that perfect cue.

He lighted a cigar and blew out the match, still smiling a little.

“Well,” I said, “I think I’ll go home.”

It was more abrupt than I’d meant, but I was afraid if I’d stayed there much longer I’d have started taking pot shots at people myself.

Iris got up and followed me out into the wide handsomely designed hall with its hanging staircase rising gracefully to the Palladian window at the broad landing. “Perfect for a wedding, my dear!” as the women invariably say who troop in there every Spring when the house is opened for the Garden Club Pilgrimage. It looked to me riper for a funeral just then.

Iris helped me on with my coat.

“Don’t let them get you down, honey,” I said, repeating Angie’s parting words. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Are you going to the Assembly Tuesday?”

“I suppose so,” she answered dully. “Why don’t you go with us?”

“I’d like to,” I said. “I haven’t got a beau, unless somebody turns up before then.”

I suppose I should have thought more about the Nashes that evening than I did if it hadn’t been for the business of getting my two sons’ ties tied and having their two pretty blank-faced girls for dinner and getting them off at ten o’clock for their party. The old-fashioned days when parties began at eight-thirty and ended at twelve seemed very remote as I waved goodbye to them and went back into the drawing room to put a last finishing touch on the tree and arrange the presents from distant relatives that Lilac brought out of hiding.

“Ah didn’ get a chance to tell you, Mis’ Grace, but the Colonel was ovah, this evenin’.”

I looked up with a start.

“Colonel Primrose?”

Lilac beamed. “Yas,
ma’am.”

I felt myself blushing.

“Yas’m, it sho’ was. An’ ’deed, Mis Grace, he lookin’ mighty fine.”

She started out, and turned back at the door.

“The Sergeant, he wasn’ with him. Ah guess the Sergeant don’ lak the Colonel cornin’ see you all time, Mis’ Grace. Law, ’sif you’d marry Colonel Primrose, pretty an’ stylish as you is.”

I just stopped myself in time from demanding what was wrong with Colonel Primrose, seeing from the wicked look in her saucer-white old eyes that that was exactly the trap she’d set.

“We’ll have hot cakes and that country sausage for breakfast, Lilac,” I said with dignity. “Downstairs, about half past nine if the boys are up.”

“They’ll be up all right, Mis’ Grace. That’s one consolation. ’Night, Mis’ Grace.”

Lilac’s habit of finding consolation in odd and sometimes quite unconsoling things always manages to cast a grave and sinister aura about the immediate future as well as the immediate past, and in fact to raise doubts about the entire stability of human experience.

I said “Goodnight,” put the last gaily wrapped package on the low table by the Christmas tree, and changed a green bulb that had burned out for a red one. I stood there looking at the frosty glittering tree with the vague aching nostalgia I always have for long lost Christmases when the tinsel was brighter silver, when there were reindeer feet in the snow on the roof and soot on the hearth, when the cotton angel at the topmost tip was as far away as the stars and a hallowed breathtaking mystery stole out of the dark and fragrant branches until the child’s heart almost broke for the strange loveliness. Nostalgia, I suppose, for lost innocence, when love and death and joy and pain were unknown far-off things, their poignancy yet undreamed.

Outside a car drove slowly by with men and women in it singing carols in the clear frosty air. I turned off the lights and looked out the window. Down the block across the street I could see a corner of the yellow brick house where Colonel John Primrose lives with Sergeant Buck. A Colonel John Primrose attached to Washington’s staff built the house, a John Primrose has lived in it ever since. I don’t know whether each of them has had his Sergeant Buck, but I know they have all been bachelors—which the present Colonel has assured me is possible to figure out in a perfectly respectable way. I suspect strongly they’ve all had the same cook, a white kinky-headed Negro, unbelievably old and incredibly good at terrapin and beaten biscuits and syllabub, pottering about with his herbs and his brews. All service, I thought, ranks the same with God… and who shall say that Sergeant Buck, trying to preserve all that from the desecrating hand of a woman in the house, isn’t as much a handmaid of tradition and art as— for instance—the Rockefellers in Williamsburg?

In spite of Sergeant Buck it was comforting to see that house down there, and know that Colonel Primrose was in it if I should ever need him. The idea brought me back to the Nashes, and Lowell, and the anonymous letters burned in the pewter basin in Gilbert St. Martin’s shoppe. I looked at the telephone. In fact, I went into the hall and picked it up to call him. Then I remembered that he and Randall Nash had known each other a very long time, and that his loyalties would be with. Randall. There was no use in letting him know that Iris’s loyalties—so somebody thought—were getting mixed up. Heaven knows that if scenes like the one I’d witnessed there that afternoon were frequent, I for one couldn’t blame her… and yet I knew, as well as I know anything at all, and in spite of those letters, that no loyalties of hers could be questioned. But Colonel Primrose didn’t have that summer night to look back on, and he wouldn’t understand.

Or so I thought, not remembering that I have a genius for being discreet at the wrong time.

I turned out the light on my dressing table between the two windows overlooking the garden, and put up the shades. For a moment I stood there motionless. I had never noticed before what a clear view I had through the three high arches of the Nashes’ Palladian window. Perhaps the white space of our two gardens, I thought, made their house loom darker and more prominently clear in the night. Then I remembered the cherry tree that had been there until the September storm, and realized that that was what had divided us before. There was nothing between us now except the flat gardens and an eight-foot brick wall.

As I looked across there it was exactly as if my window was at the apex of a recumbent isosceles triangle with the Nash staircase forming its two sides. I could see down the longish stairs to the entrance hall on the one hand, and from the landing up the short stairs to the second floor on the other. And then, almost as if some master puppet player was showing me how neatly it all worked, two figures came out of where the living room door would be into the brightly lighted lower hall.

I recognized them even before I’d considered the ethics, if any, of my position. Iris was one, the other was Gilbert St. Martin. He had her hand in his, and I saw him raise it to his lips and keep it there a long moment. Then, before I could move—or at least before I did move—a door opened on the second floor landing. Randall Nash came out. I could see his long dark dressing gown and his gleaming white shirt front and black tie. He came slowly to the edge of the landing and stood, his hands on the dark mahogany rail, listening.

I saw the front door open, and Iris was alone in the lower hall. She stood there a long time, it seemed to me, both hands at her sides. Then she turned and came slowly up the stairs, almost as if she were too weary even to reach the first landing, much less the second, where her husband was waiting. I looked up at him. The place where he had been was empty, the door behind him closed again.

“That’s too bad,” I thought. And then I wondered quite suddenly; and it seemed immediately very strange to me that I hadn’t wondered before. Was he getting anonymous letters too… and did that explain why he had changed so much in so short a time? And was he driving her back to the very hell he’d saved her from?

I didn’t see Iris Nash the next day. I thought about her several times, a little curious and vaguely disturbed. I did, however, see Lowell. It was after eleven. We had just finished breakfast—stacks of golden brown cakes and sweet fresh country sausage—and the boys had gone upstairs to dress. I could hear the bath water running and their shouts back and forth. I was looking through a stack of telegraph greetings that had just come, and thinking that the company who invented a device that allows you to send greetings Christmas morning to all the people you’ve forgotten, and still appear specially thoughtful, really deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. I looked up to see Lowell standing in the door.