The Simple Way of Poison (3 page)

She quit coming, after a while, and I learned from Iris that she’d taken to seeing her mother. I remember Iris saying “Randall’s been chucking his weight about, he’s forbidden her to go there. But he’s wrong, and he can’t stop her anyway. And I’m glad of it. I think a girl ought to have… well, a mother—if possible. Certainly somebody she’ll listen to— don’t you?”

I hadn’t the moral courage to say the less Lowell listened to Marie Nash the better for everybody. I lit a cigarette and said I hoped she was going to like Georgetown.

The result of all of it was a sort of armed truce in the Beall Street house, with a considerable amount of what Sergeant Buck calls gorilla sniping going on. Iris was definitely holding her own, or more, I thought, with Lowell so far as I knew the only completely intractable force. The job of a second wife isn’t an easy one at best, however, and like everyone else when they first saw Iris I shook my head. She was too young and too lovely for Randall Nash and Georgetown… she must have married just because he was rich and she wasn’t.

I didn’t learn better than that until one summer night when we two were walking in the garden, breathing in the eerie fragrance of the old boxwood, barely perceptible under the heavy sweetness of the great waxen magnolias, and she suddenly stretched both her cool bare arms to the blue starlit sky.

“I never thought I’d ever be happy again, Grace,” she whispered. “I never believed the life I’d mangled so could ever raise its head again and smile. I married Randall feeling that way. He knew it. I told him all there was about me… and Gilbert.”

She smiled suddenly.

“It sounds like the birds and bees, but it wasn’t quite that bad… just that I’d been awfully in love with him. He said it didn’t matter, he was willing to chance it. And he was right, Grace. It
doesn’t
matter. I was terrified at ever seeing him again, afraid it would all come back… and last night I did see him.”

Her arm resting on mine pressed it to her side.

“I could have died of joy!” she breathed.
“Nothing
happened. We shook hands. There was
nothing.
It was just as if the woman I’d once been had gone out of my body completely, and the woman I am had never been in love with him at all—scarcely knew him to nod to.”

She threw back her bright head and laughed. “I came home, Grace. I stepped inside feeling for the first time this
is
my home. I was so happy. Randall asked me why, and I told him, because I’d seen Gil, and then I had to explain quickly what I meant. I’m not sure he understood… but it was almost as if Td drunk a whole bottle of champagne. I’m a new woman, Randall’s my man… and Lowell—well, maybe someday I can even convince Lowell that I adore her father and that… well, that this is—my life.”

I couldn’t bear to think that all that had gone sour. Certainly it hadn’t when I left Georgetown in June. The people who took my house leased it for a year, and I didn’t come back from April Harbor in the Fall except to put the boys on their trains for school. I didn’t even go to Georgetown, for fear my tenants would have found seventy-one things the house lacked, the way tenants do. I did, however, run across Marie Nash at Pierre’s where she was lunching with some political big-wigs. She waved a heavily beringed hand with bright Vermillion nails to me. “My dear, you
must
keep them all from tearing each other’s throats out!” she wailed, in a loud voice fairly bristling with delight. “Randall’s taken to drink again—would you believe it! After what all the doctors told him. The place must be a madhouse, my dear, from all I hear, and poor dear Lowell, she’s such a high spirited child! Really, my dear, you
must
do something, and they say she’s seeing a lot of Gilbert St. Martin—oh dear!”

She drained her cocktail, fished the olive out with two fingers and popped it into her heavily rouged mouth.

“I’m afraid I’m awfully old-fashioned! You know of course she was engaged to him a long time, and it was shocking, he jilted her for Edith’s money—frightful taste, really! And she’s
very
decorative, rather cold but
definitely
decorative, don’t you think? Goodbye my dear, do come in and see me!”

As that was on the whole the least spiteful monologue on the subject of her divorced husband I’d ever heard Marie Nash deliver, I thought nothing of it. In fact I’d completely forgotten it until just this very moment, when I’d left Gilbert’s shoppe and was going up the snow-carpeted steps between the old-fashioned gas lamps, very dressy with their turbans of snow and their small pencil flames burning darkly at the top, to the Nashes’ yellow brick house.

Two great black magnolias with their broad shiny leaves almost free of the snow that weighted down the box and cedars were hung with Christmas lights, two silver candelabra burned in the narrow windows on either side of the cedar wreath on the great white door. Across the street a door opened for a moment and I heard a high sweet voice caroling “Peace on earth, good will to men,” and people laughing, before it closed again. I stood looking out over the snow, listening for a moment to the warm Christmas sounds that seemed almost to vibrate through the silent street and glow from candle-lit holly-hung windows. Then I turned back and pressed the bell.

In a moment the door opened. Instead of the friendly grinning Muratogo who’d been there when I left in June, I found myself confronting a sallow moon-faced butler with lank blond hair and pale frog-lidded eyes, who invested the business of crossing the Nash threshold with a special unfamiliar solemnity. I gave him my coat, vaguely noticing his fat white hands in the brown fur, and thinking it a little odd that I should notice him at all. If I had known as much then as I do now, I’d have noticed him a great deal more.

It occurred to me as I went on in that whoever said present fears are less than horrible imaginings was a very wise man. There was certainly nothing ominous or alarming, or unfamiliar even, at first sight, in the gay scene in the Nashes’ parchment-and-gold drawing room, with its wood fire crackling and the enormous Christmas tree gleaming in the bow of the front windows. Lowell was at the foot of the tree, her arms full of bright-colored balls and rolls of glittering furry tinsel, handing them up to a young man balanced dangerously on a pair of kitchen steps, both of them having a very good time indeed. Another man I didn’t know was cheering from the sidelines, his pipe in his mouth and his hands in his pockets. Iris Nash in a green brocaded housecoat was sitting on a gold-damask sofa at right angles to the fireplace, with Senator McGilvray’s ancient obese old form asleep under the folds of her skirt. But the surprising thing, that seemed pleasantly to belie all the tales of discord I’d been hearing, was the young man with sandy hair and freckled face sitting on the floor in front of the radio. It was the first time since Angus Nash had decided to go with his mother at the time of the divorce six years before that I had seen him in the Beall Street house.

“This is marvelous!” Iris Nash said, as soon as I’d untangled myself from Lowell. “You know everybody, don’t you? Mac, of course.”

The tall good-looking chap with blue eyes and blond wavy hair had disengaged himself from yards of tinsel and climbed down the ladder. He ambled cheerfully toward me. “Hullo, Mrs. Latham!”

“Hello, Mac. You change so fast I didn’t know you. It’s grand to see you.”

There was something warm and definitely reassuring in the pressure of his strong friendly brown paw. I was surprised to find I still recognized the need of reassurance.

“And you don’t change at all,” he grinned.

“And Angus you know.”

Iris Nash slipped her hand in her stepson’s arm and smiled affectionately at him. He blushed and grinned, as if he knew I must be thinking how odd it was for him to be there. And in fact it was even odder than Gilbert St. Martin’s story of Randall Nash seeing Angus’s mother, anywhere but in a law court. The concentrated wrath and venom that Randall had poured on his son’s head had made my blood run cold. By some curious psychological twist poor Angie had become the viper dwelling at the root of all evil. Nothing he did was tolerable. Randall hadn’t even let Lowell go to parties that Angie would be at when he was back for the holidays.

I looked at Iris, smiling, cool and lovely, with her burnished hair and grey-green eyes. It didn’t seem strange that if miracles could be worked, she should be the person who worked them. I must have started to say something quite unconsciously, for she gave me a warning smile. Before I had to cover my tracks Lowell broke in.

“And this, Grace, is Stephen Donaldson. He’s the most marvelous person in the world. He can get parking tickets cancelled, and seats to the Army-Navy game, and… anything.”

Stephen Donaldson took his pipe out of his mouth and smiled. He had nice steady grey eyes and thick irregular brows, and a firm quick grip as we shook hands that went very well with his lean hard face and tight jaw. About thirty-six, I thought, thinking he was a bit old for Lowell, and wondering about it because of the way she was smiling up at him, a little flushed, with sparkling eyes.

“I’ve heard a lot about you, Mrs. Latham,” he said. “Weren’t you in on a murder, or something, last summer?”

“I’m always in on murders,” I said. “It’s a form of genius.”

“Then stick around,” Angie said. He nodded toward Mac. “There’s going to be one.”

“Shut up, Angie,” Lowell said cheerfully. “Don’t pay any attention, Grace.”

Mac—whose actual name, though you seldom hear it, and I suppose he has dozens of friends who never have heard it, is Trevor McClean—gave the impression of grinning and glowering at the same time. I looked at Iris. She nodded, smiling a little. I gathered there was war of sorts between Mac, who I knew had been Lowell’s beau since she was about two, and Stephen Donaldson, about whom I knew nothing at all. As for Lowell, she was being outrageously provocative. With her short almost blue-black curls, dancing dark eyes and red lips, and her slim lithe body in a short dark wool skirt and scarlet wool sweater, I thought she was about the most extraordinarily alive young thing I’d seen for a long long time.

I glanced at Iris. She had turned away and was brushing the ashes from Angie’s cigarette into the fireplace with the hearth broom.

“He’s absolutely different from all the other people you meet, Grace,” Lowell announced positively. She looked impudently at Mac bringing me a cup of egg nog from the old silver punch bowl on the table in front of the garden windows at the other end of the room. He was a little sore, I thought, but took it remarkably well.

“Why don’t you sock her one, Mac?” her brother said, over his shoulder from in front of the radio.

“Mac doesn’t care,” Lowell retorted promptly. “He’d much rather talk to Iris than me… wouldn’t you, Mac?”

Iris Nash turned her head. I thought she was going to say something, but she didn’t. She simply shook her head at Mac and smiled. He gave her a rueful grin and kicked the log further into the fireplace. Iris came and sat down by me.

“Did you have a grand time in Nassau?” she said. But she didn’t listen to my answer. Her whole body in its green brocaded coat stiffened. I could see the muscles of her throat contract sharply. Her eyes were fixed on the hall door.

“Angie,” she said. I don’t know that if I hadn’t been so close to her I should have noticed the sharp edge of alarm in her voice. “Is that someone in the hall?”

Angus Nash leaned away from the radio and looked around the door. I could hear odd shuffling steps myself, now, though how anyone who didn’t know they were out there could have done, above the fitful changes Angie was ringing on the radio, I didn’t see.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Just old Lavinia. Come for her weekly hand-out from the old man, I guess.”

Iris took a deep breath. Her slim body relaxed against the back of the sofa. She gave me an ironic little smile.

“I’m nervy, I guess,” she said.

“I can’t see what the hell Father lets her come around for,” Lowell exclaimed, with such sudden and extraordinary violence that everybody started. “She’d make anybody nervy. She’s nothing but a horrible prowling old beggar!”

We all looked shocked, I think—all of us, that is, but her brother. He looked at her over his shoulder. “That’s the old Christmas spirit, Sis,” he said cheerfully.

“You shut up. You don’t have to live here and have her sneaking around the house all the time. Why can’t they put her away somewhere?”

Iris Nash got up. Her oval finely sculptured face was white. She went over to the small rosewood table on the other side of the fireplace and took a cigarette out of the tooled leather box.

“She’s just old and poor, Lowell,” she said quietly, in her rich slightly husky voice. “And it’s always a good idea to remember that there but for the grace of God go I.”

The silence that followed for an instant was so intense that I could hear the front door closing, very softly.

For a moment Lowell was stunned. Then she picked up her tinsel.

“I suppose that’s what you say, Iris, when you see Mrs. Gilbert St. Martin hobbling along the street in three-inch heels and dyed hair,” she said coolly, with I think as quiet concentrated cruelty as I’ve ever heard in anybody’s voice. “Come on, Mac, let’s finish the tree.”

The mother-of-pearl lighter in Iris’s hand stopped dead half-way to the tip of her cigarette, for just an instant. It was long enough to light up something pretty dangerous that darkened and snapped in her green eyes’. I saw then what must have been fairly obvious—that Iris Nash had a pretty iron control over her temper, in spite of her red hair and her stepdaughter.

Angus Nash looked up from the floor in front of the radio—on which at that moment a boy soprano was singing “Silent Night.”

“Don’t mind her, she can’t help it,” he said pleasantly. “The pretty lamb, she’s half hellcat.”

Lowell whirled round from the tree, her smoldering black eyes burning. She threw the roll of tinsel on the floor. Angie Nash got to his feet and took two swift steps toward her.

“Listen, my pet,” he said, in the cool controlled tone that I wish I could manage when I’m boiling with rage. “Iris’s affairs are her affairs—not yours… or our friends’ here.”