Lemon in the Basket

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “Do that.” He nodded and got up, bumbling and striking his thigh against the table.

  “Are you all right?” she said. It occurred to her that he might be feeling dizzy.

  “Fine,” he said absently. “Fine.” He didn’t thank her for the coffee, although she had been the quicker to produce the money. Instead, he left her abruptly, went out and started down the corridor toward the street.

  Tamsen followed in a moment and turned the other way, toward the parking lot, the box of candy in her hand. It seemed to her to be a pathetic object. It was also, for her, an object to which clung an aura of inexplicable loathsomeness. There was a porter in a blue coverall hauling a very large wastebasket toward the back of the building. Tamsen slipped the candy box into the trash. “A little contribution. O.K.?” she said to the man, who grinned and went on.

  Tamsen herself went on, feeling relieved, yet puzzled and faintly alarmed, and trying to track down a reason for all these feelings. Then she heard him calling her name and she let the glass door settle without going through it. “Oh? Yes? Rufus?”

  “I changed my mind,” he said gruffly.

  “What?”

  “I’ll just take that candy. I’m sure you don’t care that much.”

  “Oh, but …” She swallowed. She was caught and no way out. Nothing she could do.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I … Rufus, I was very grateful for the thought, but I never do eat candy. And Duncan’s off sweets.”

  “Where is it?” He brushed all else aside.

  “Well, I …”

  “What did you do with it? You gave it to somebody,” he roared. “Some ‘nothing’ kind of menial, I suppose?”

  “No, no,” she said, feeling terrified. “I put it in the trash.”

  He stared at her. His full lips began to smile saucily. “Now, wasn’t that,” he said, “a stinking lousy thing for you to do?”

  “Yes, it was,” she said valiantly. “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

  “You are a phony, aren’t you?” he said, as if this statement had been made and was now ratified. “You don’t count, though,” he said thickly. He looked for a second as if he were going to cry. Then he turned and walked away, staggering slightly.

  Tamsen went outside, staggering a little herself. Oh, she was thinking, oh, what I just did to him! Me and my famous old tender heart! Rejected him, just like everybody else, but I had to go and lie about it. And make it twenty times as bad! I see. Do I? Do I begin to see what Duncan means about me?

  Duncan sipped his cocktail and listened to his wife explain herself. “I begin to see,” she was saying earnestly. She was pretty cute, he thought, when she curled up and turned her delicate face to him and spoke so earnestly. “I always feel that I ought to be kind. I ought never to hurt a human person’s feelings. So, if I think the truth is going to hurt I’ll soften it. So the result is, I just don’t tell the truth, do I?”

  “Let’s not get carried away, here,” he said with amusement. “I wouldn’t call you a dishonest woman.”

  “But I am,” she said, “and I’ve even thought I was right to be. Now I see it may be kinder to tell the truth.”

  “Well, it’s safer,” he teased her. “That way you don’t get caught telling pretty lies.”

  “Yes, I got caught,” she said soberly. “The point is, not to let it happen again. Wouldn’t you say?”

  He laughed and embraced her. He thought it was all very well for Tamsen to have had an insight into some of her ways. But it was just her combination of delicate conscience, dear gentle heart, and unexpected humor about both, that he loved, even when the combination sometimes led her where she didn’t always see herself going.

  “I guess I’d better brace myself,” he announced, “to have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, hurled into my teeth at all times. Do I deserve this?”

  “Oh, well, let’s not get carried away,” she said, and Duncan felt content.

  When, hours later, he looked up from his book to the clock and found his instinct to have been right (it was bedtime), he saw Tamsen on the couch over there, motionless, with one foot under her, evidently in a trance of thought. He had a telepathic flash.

  “So why did you put a gift box in the trash?” he said quietly.

  “Because the candy was poisoned,” Tamsen said.

  “Oh, honey, honey.” Duncan was much alarmed. He was alarmed for her. He thought, She can’t forgive herself for hurting my brother’s feelings, for having been so carelessly rude, against all her principles, so she is dreaming up a better reason. And this ain’t good! “Just forget it, why don’t you?” he begged.

  Tamsen seemed to wake and blink. “Did I say that?”

  “I wish you hadn’t.”

  “I suppose I’d … better not spare your feelings?”

  “No,” he said tenderly.

  “All right. I think Rufus is in a bad state. I think he is mentally ill. I think he had it in mind …”

  “Go on.” Duncan wasn’t being reassured.

  “To poison Prince Saiph.”

  “Well!” said Duncan, faking objectivity. “That’s a mouthful. For what on earth reason would Rufus want to poison Prince Saiph?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Duncan himself could not imagine any reason. Rufus? All right, Rufus might not have the most brilliant mind in the world, and Rufus might, on occasion, feel discouraged not to have found a talent in himself that he knew how or where to employ, but Rufus was (although bumbling) an amiable soul. There was no meanness in him. Nothing vicious. Why should there be? He was beloved. He belonged.

  No, no, the problem here was Tamsen.

  “But he couldn’t manage, eh? So he figured to assassinate you instead? Just while he was up, eh?” Duncan might reduce this to absurdity.

  “He does hate me, in particular.” She seemed serious.

  “I should think,” said Duncan carefully, becoming more or less serious himself, “that if I had given somebody a gift, and been prettily thanked, and then found out that she had quickly thrown it in the trash, I would be somewhat annoyed.”

  “No, that’s backwards.”

  Duncan began to feel like shaking her. He said, “But he did think better of it? He did decide not to poison you today? How does that go, again?”

  “He stopped to think, and I didn’t count,” said Tamsen.

  “Honey, honey—” Duncan went to her and took her hands and looked into her eyes, those brilliant eyes. “I don’t think it’s very good for you to go there every day, with all those Secret Service monkey-shines, and all that suspicious protective stuff. You have too much imagination. You’re too suggestible.”

  “Oh, don’t,” she said. “If you think I’m crazy, just say so. I’d be very glad to know it.”

  “Not crazy. That doesn’t mean anything. See here, can you get hold of that candy? Have it analyzed? Prove something?”

  “I doubt it exists. It went to be burned.”

  “Nobody would have retrieved it, and eaten any?”

  “Nobody eats the trash, in a hospital.”

  “Then you can’t prove it?”

  “Of course not. If I could prove it, I might know what to do.”

  “Do you even believe it?” he asked gently.

  “But it’s not like believing. It’s more like knowing.”

  “Honey,” he said, “could you possibly try to take it, right on your little old chin? Try this on, for size?”

  “All right,” she said trustingly.

  “You don’t like Rufus. I won’t say you ‘hate’ him. But you loathed the idea of putting his nasty old homemade candy, full of fingerprints and all, into your dainty mouth.”

  She was hit. She winced. He saw it.

  “So you threw it where you ‘felt’ it belonged. But you got caught. And you don’t like the looks of yourself in this matter very much. You’d rather see yourself ‘forever kind.’ You wouldn’t mind one bit, if y
ou had a better reason to have done what you did. Do you think this is possible?”

  She took it. Her chin quivered only a little.

  “I’ll agree it was an irrational act. And to say such things, to think such things now, is not rational, either.”

  Duncan, however, got the message. “Intuitional, eh? O.K. Even if you are right, I wouldn’t fret. Rufus is too … well, we’ll have to say it … too dumb to pull it off. Would you know, for instance, how to poison a batch of candy? With what? Believe me, I don’t know. And Saiph never would have the chance to put it in his mouth. It wouldn’t have got to him. Nothing happened. Nothing will. Sweetheart, let it rest? Your intuition could be wrong.”

  “Oh, Lord, I can be just as wrong as anybody else,” she sighed. “But I don’t think Rufus is well. I really don’t.”

  “That much,” he said, “I’ll take from your intuition. You may very well be right. Trouble is, I’m not the doctor.”

  11

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” the Doctor said. “Haven’t seen Rufus myself since the big night at Maggie’s. Which was a while ago.”

  He sat behind his desk, courteously relaxed, but Tamsen knew she had been squeezed in between appointments; she must not linger.

  “I hadn’t seen him again either, until yesterday,” she said. “And it struck me so … well, so urgently … how he has changed. Duncan says he’s not the doctor. Neither of us—or anyhow I don’t—know what to do.”

  Mitchel Tyler smiled at her. “Neither am I the doctor, in this case. What about Lurlene. Is she concerned?”

  “I don’t know. She may be. I can’t, you see, just go there and be direct. I’m pretty much off on the wrong foot with both of them. The trouble with me is, I busybody too much,” said Tamsen miserably, “just as I’m doing right now.”

  “How about Maggie and the Judge? I suppose they are entitled to go and be direct.” The Doctor cocked his head. “Why isn’t it good of you, Tamsen, to take notice and be concerned?”

  “No, that’s my failing,” she said. “I am, believe me, an awful nuisance, to myself, too.”

  “We’re very fond of him, you know,” the Doctor said, his fine hands playing with a pencil. “But it may be true that the rest of us become so engrossed, so meshed into our own marching affairs, that we never do find time to stop and hold his hand.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t hold his hand,” she said promptly. “It’s only that he scared me. You see …” She had not told Mitch about the box of candy. She was tempted to do so now. But the Doctor had made one involuntary restless motion of his hand, so she rose. “No. I certainly mustn’t hang around and ask you to hold my hand.”

  “Then I’ll say thanks for alerting me.” He rose and was smiling.

  “Thanks for letting me in.”

  “Aren’t you on my staff?” He walked with her to the door. “How did you find Saiph today?”

  “Oh, he’s making leaps and bounds.” It struck her as absurd that she should be telling the Doctor. “Isn’t he?” she challenged.

  “He should make very rapid progress from here on,” Mitch said, with obvious pleasure. “No use saying ‘Don’t worry about Rufus.’ The most ineffective advice in the world, eh? But I’ll give him the hard eye, next time I see him.”

  And you can’t ask fairer than that, thought Tamsen in her car. She felt that she had made enough of an intrusion, without burdening the busy man with her “irrational” details. Mitch is decisive, she thought with admiration. He says he will cast a hard eye, and he will.

  Well, then, she had done it. Duncan had approved. He seemed to think it was not too unreasonable a thing, for her to talk to Mitch about his brother. It was supposed to be off her mind, now. Maybe that was what Duncan had approved.

  Of course, Mitch wouldn’t hurry.

  Tamsen found her car to be turning the other way from home.

  There was a guard on the entrance to the grounds in San Marino, but Tamsen was let through at once. Sam, who opened the door, told her that Mrs. Tyler was out. The Judge was out, also. But the Princess was on the pool deck, if Mrs. Duncan would like to come on through?

  So Tamsen went on through the house and out at the other side, asking herself why she had been cursed by this compulsion to be so torn between duty and fear-to-offend, between heart and conscience, and always guilty, either way. Always torn, and never decisive, and unable to mind her own business. How could she, the youngest and newest Tyler wife, go to Maggie and say that Maggie’s second son was, in her opinion, losing his mind? On the other hand, how could she refrain from mentioning, to another mother, that her son might be in danger from an unsuspected quarter? Yet how could she, a Tyler, tell an outsider that a Tyler was a potential madman? On the other hand, if she did not tell somebody …

  But she had.

  She drifted across the terraces and down the steps to the pool deck where Jaylia, in two scraps of white, was lying on a long white chaise, her flesh oiled to receive the sun.

  “Tamsen! How nice to see you! Come and sit down. How is my child?”

  Tamsen sat down on a white-webbed chair, in a spot dappled with shade. “Oh, just since yesterday,” she said, “his energy has been seeping back. You can see it coming in, like the tide.”

  “I thought so, too, this morning,” said Jaylia, yanking at the mechanism of her chaise to pull up the back and be able to sit, rather than lie. She was a pleasant color, Tamsen thought, the shade of a lightly browned biscuit. Her teeth seemed very white when she smiled.

  “How am I going to thank you?” the Princess exclaimed. “It’s Tamsen-this, and Tamsen-that, when I am there. He is just delighted with you.”

  “Likewise, I am sure,” said Tamsen happily.

  “But this must be taking too much time away from your work. Your poor neglected paintings.”

  “They’ll be the better for it,” said Tamsen, her heart warming wonderfully, to her surprise.

  “I wish I could come and see what you are up to. But I can’t very well go running around.” Jaylia sighed. “I’m out of the habit, you know, anyway. I may have forgotten how to drive a car.” She had her chair and knees adjusted now. “Maggie’s off shopping. The Judge had an appointment. But here I am.”

  “Tell me,” said Tamsen. “Saiph wouldn’t … He wouldn’t, for instance, take candy from a stranger? Would he, Jaylia? It worries me sometimes.”

  “Does it?” said Jaylia. “Yes, I see it does.”

  “But it doesn’t worry you?”

  “I suppose it must. Although I’m so used to it, I forget. Oh, yes, Saiph understands that he must always be especially cautious. Is that what you mean?”

  “He is so young.”

  “Ah”—Jaylia stretched and spoke softly—“but he will grow up, now.”

  Tamsen had been, ever since the morning in the hospital, seeing this woman in a new light. Now there was full sun. Jaylia, here (half-naked, American fashion) in Maggie’s garden, seemed to have put off that allure, or whatever it was. Because there were no men around? No, thought Tamsen, maybe not. Jaylia looked, today, like a normal healthy young woman, a little too well-padded, but attractive, and friendly and easy and also (as a woman ought to be) a loving woman.

  “I think,” Jaylia was saying, “there must be different … um … call them life-styles?”

  “Explain that some more,” said Tamsen, feeling friendly and easy, and sinking back.

  “I suppose I always did enjoy a spot of danger,” Jaylia mused. “When I married, I moved into all this sort of thing. The peril, the swarms of protectors, the constant wariness, and the obligation to take chances, too. Saiph has never known anything else. Of course, it is a style of living that some people could not bear.”

  “I certainly couldn’t,” Tamsen said, with conviction.

  “Your husband couldn’t, either,” said the Princess, gazing afar.

  Tamsen was brushed by the wing of a resentful suspicion. Here! Here! Was Jaylia telling Tamsen that she was welcome to
her own husband? But then Jaylia laughed.

  “I was thinking that, of all of you Tylers, perhaps Mitch wouldn’t mind the cold-blooded risk-taking. But oh, how he would be bored by all the pussy-footing!”

  So Tamsen had to smile. “You haven’t met,” she said in a moment, seeing her opening, “the other son, Rufus?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Jaylia. “He was here, day before yesterday. Maggie gave us sandwiches and salads.”

  “Oh,” said Tamsen, enlightened. “Oh, then maybe I understand how come he was so knowledgeable about Alalaf yesterday.”

  “He does read the papers rather diligently,” said Jaylia, very innocently. “Yesterday?”

  “Rufus came to the hospital. He meant to call on Saiph. But, of course, he wasn’t let.”

  “I see,” said Jaylia. “A reciprocal gesture. Because Maggie … Oh now, come, come. I shouldn’t be gossiping about the Tylers. God knows what I owe them.”

  “I suppose I shouldn’t, either,” Tamsen said, “having become one of them. But I’ll bet you it was olive-branchy? Maggie would make some such gesture, bless her.”

  “She would, wouldn’t she?” said Jaylia warmly. “Poor man, he brought down so much wrath upon his head.”

  “Did you …” But Tamsen could not say “think he seemed crazy?” … “meet Lurlene, too?” she substituted.

  “No, she wasn’t here. We discussed Alalaf.” Jaylia leaned back. “Although I can’t really do that. It is too different. It isn’t anything like this. Not anything. Aljedi and I spent most of a year in Europe, you see. I have only begun to try to understand.”

  “You live there now, all year?”

  “My son lives there,” said Jaylia. “My son is not an American little boy.”

  “No, but he is a darling, and I adore him,” said Tamsen flatly.

  “Yes,” said Jaylia, “everybody does. But I don’t think you, or any other American, even including me, can ever really know some very deep part of his mind, or anticipate exactly how Saiph will react.”

  “Is he like his father, then?”