Dram of Poison

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “Darn shame,” said he, as he had already said twice before in the hospital, “a thing like this has to happen. Guess we never know, do we? Oh thanks, Rosie.”

  Rosemary was serving tea with trembling hands.

  “I guess you’ll be well taken care of, like me,” grinned Paul, “by a regular flock of females.” His big brown hands were startling upon a frail cup and saucer.

  “Waited on hand and foot,” said Mr. Gibson, accepting with his pale claw a slab of pound cake from Ethel. (She had always considered this a great delicacy, but Mr. Gibson rather enjoyed, although of course it wasn’t wise, some frosting on a cake.)

  “That reminds me,” said Ethel, “speaking of waiting on … About Mrs. Violette, Ken. She isn’t worth what she is costing.”

  “If both of you are going into trade,” said Mr. Gibson mildly, “who is going to wait on me, hand-and-foot, then, pray tell?”

  “But we aren’t going yet,” said Rosemary quickly. “Not until you are perfectly well again.” She was sitting on the edge of a chair and her attitude was like that of a new servant in a new situation, too anxious to find her place, and to please. He longed to say to her, “Sit back, Rosemary. This is your house.”

  Ethel was speaking. “Even so, when we do go off to work, Ken … I don’t like the idea of a foreigner left to her own devices. They all need supervision. They have little extravagances, you know. Things disappear from the icebox.” Her somewhat craggy face was rather amused by human frailty.

  Jeanie said, “We’ve had Mrs. Violette for more than a year. She keeps everything so clean …”

  “Ah,” said Ethel, “but there’s only you, dear. Your poor grandmother—whereas, here … why, there is nothing to keeping a house like this. I’ve kept my apartment and held a job for years. And with two of us to share off … both grown and able-bodied. Be a cinch.”

  Paul said, “Rosie’s fine, now.”

  Jeanie’s eyes glistened. “I like Mrs. Violette,” she said.

  “A waste,” said Ethel. “I prefer doing for myself.”

  Mr. Gibson, munching pound cake, knew with a pang that it would be impossible for him even to ask his sister Ethel how long she proposed to live in his house. After she had come so promptly, so generously, giving up all she had been doing for his and Rosemary’s sake? He could not ever suggest that she had better go. Mrs. Violette would go, instead.

  So the chairs would stand at angles that subtly annoyed him. The menu would include pound cake and certain other dishes. Rosemary wouldn’t be mistress of her own house, not quite. Ethel would sleep in the second bed in Rosemary’s room.

  He was ashamed. He wrenched at his thoughts. How mean he was! How petty, selfish! (What a fool he was, too!) Thirty-two from fifty-five leaves twenty-three, and no matter how many times he tried the arithmetic, he never got a better answer.) He had his place, his own bed he had made, cozy among his books.

  Ingrate! Here in this pleasant cottage, with two devoted women, both anxious to “take care” of him, why could he not count his blessings and give over, forever … wipe out and forget a foolish notion that he, Kenneth Gibson, was destined to love a woman and be loved, on any but the present terms? Which were fine … he shouted at himself inside his head. Admirable! His days would be sunny with kindness and good will and mutual gratitude.

  Paul Townsend got up and stretched. He couldn’t seem to help exuding excess health. He said he had to go, he’d left off in the middle of trimming his ivy. “And by the way, Rosie,” he said with his warm smile, “if you really want some cuttings there are going to be millions of them.”

  Rosemary said, “Thanks so much, Paul, but I don’t suppose I’ll have the time …”

  “Of course you’ll have the time!” cried Mr. Gibson, shocked. “Don’t let me be in the way …”

  She only smiled and Paul said he’d save a few dozen in water anyhow, and Jeanie, who had been seen but not heard most of this time, as she got up to go, said sweetly, “I’m awfully glad you are home again, Mr. Gibson.”

  By the tail of his eye, Mr. Gibson perceived on Ethel’s face a look he knew very well. It was the look she wore when she was not going to say what she was thinking. This was fleetingly disturbing. In just that moment, Mr. Gibson felt quite out of touch.

  “Forgot,” said Paul in the doorway. “Mama sends regards and all that. Say, why don’t you hob—come on over and sit with her sometimes. Gibson? She’d love it.”

  “I may do so, some day,” said Mr. Gibson as cordially as he could, and Rosemary let the Townsends out.

  “They have been so nice,” she said returning. “More tea, Kenneth?”

  “No, thank you.” Mr. Gibson dug about in his head for a topic to mention aloud. “Jeanie is a quiet one, isn’t she? Nice child.”

  “I don’t suppose she’s especially quiet with her contemporaries,” Ethel said. “Although she certainly does sit like a cat watching the mouse.… Deeply attached to her father. Unconsciously, of course, she’s scared to death he might marry again.”

  “Why do you say that?” inquired Mr. Gibson.

  “She’s bound to be,” said Ethel. “And of course, he will. That’s inevitable. Man in his prime and a very attractive man to women, or so I imagine. And well off, too. I doubt if he can help himself. Some blonde will catch him.” Ethel took up the last piece of pound cake. “I presume he is actually only waiting for the old lady to die. Although until he gets Jeanie launched off to school or into a romance of her own, he may sense there would be trouble from that quarter.”

  “Trouble?” said Rosemary politely.

  “The inevitable jealousy,” said Ethel. “A teenager, especially, can be so bitter against a step-parent.”

  “I don’t know Jeanie very well,” murmured Rosemary rather unhappily.

  “They don’t intend to be known, these teen-agers,” Ethel said. “They like to think they are pretty deep.” She hooted. They weren’t too deep for her, the quality of its tone implied.

  Mr. Gibson had known quantities of young people as they filtered through his classrooms. But the relationship, there, he reminded himself, was an arbitrary thing. They were supposed to respect him, on the surface at least. He had had many bright chattering sessions listening to the tumble of their inquiring thoughts. They’d show off to teacher. He would be the last to know them in a private or social capacity. He said rebelliously, nevertheless, “They feel deep.”

  “Don’t we all?” said Ethel with one of her wise glances. “Shall I tell you whom I am sorry for?” she continued. “That’s old Mrs. Pyne, poor soul.”

  “I don’t feel as if I know her well enough to be sorry or otherwise,” continued Mr. Gibson, for this was at least talk.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” said Ethel. “That to be old and ill and dependent upon, of all things, a son-in-law, is a pretty dismal fate? I see them wheel her out on that front porch of theirs every day and there she sits in the sun. Poor old thing. She must know, whether she lets herself admit it or not, that she is a nuisance. She must know it’ll be a relief to all concerned when she dies. If ever I get old and helpless,” said Ethel forcefully, “me for an institution. Remember that.”

  “I’ll make a note of it,” said Mr. Gibson with a touch of asperity. But he was doing anguished sums in his head. Take twenty years. Rosemary would be fifty-two, not many years older than Ethel was right now, and no one could be more the picture of strength than Ethel. But then he, Kenneth Gibson, would be seventy-five … ancient, decrepit, possibly ill … possibly—oh, Lord forbid!—another Professor James. Then would Rosemary be waiting for him to die?

  He said wearily, “I’m afraid I had better lie down for a while. I’m sorry.”

  They sprang to assist him to his own place, where, on his own couch, among his books—his long beloveds—he tried to rest and remember without pain the bleak, the stricken pity on Rosemary’s face.

  One of his legs simply was not the same length as the other one. He could never conquer that little lur
ch in his body. He was lame. Old. Done for. So he was.

  Chapter IX

  LIFE IN THE COTTAGE fell quickly into a pattern. Some weeks later Mr. Gibson mused upon this. One should, he perceived, kick like a steer (if steers really do kick) in the first hour of any regime, because habit is so easily powerful and it is so soon too late.

  Surely his sister Ethel had not meant to dominate. She was too fair and reasonable a person. But she had long been used to independence, to making decisions. He supposed he had been too physically weak (and too emotionally preoccupied) to notice what was happening. Of course Rosemary did not seem to think it her place to assert herself, for she was so abysmally grateful. Grateful to him. Grateful to Ethel.

  However it had come about, the hours they kept were Ethel’s hours. They ate on an early schedule, which made the mornings too short and too full of petty detail. Afternoons were consecrated to naps and too soon thereafter to the preparation of their early dinner. The menus reflected Ethel’s preferences if only because she had them and both the Gibsons were too amiable and too flexible.

  Evenings they spent à trois. These were long and dedicated to music, Ethel’s choice—all severely classical, and sometimes listened to in learned solemnity. Or they conversed, about the music, Ethel leading. Ethel had many opinions and it was difficult not to listen and agree. Mr. Gibson hated arguments.

  Then, Ethel liked a game of chess. Rosemary did not play. Once Mr. Gibson tried reading aloud for half an hour, but when Ethel capped the reading with a sharp and knowledgeable sketch of Mr. Browning as a Victorian lady’s man, while he couldn’t dispute the truth of all she said it yet made such a ridiculous picture in Mr. Gibson’s mind that he put the book back upon the shelf with apologies to an old friend.

  In fact he now lived with his sister Ethel.

  Ethel in her long years in New York had got out of the habit of expecting social gatherings. Ethel reveled in being one of three. For her, this was a crowd. They had few callers. Paul Townsend, or Jeanie, dropped in once and again. Their visits were not especially stimulating. Paul was casual. Jeanie was all manners.

  Mr. Gibson’s old acquaintances did not drop in. He seemed divorced from the college completely, so far out in this little house, and all the work going on without him.

  So he lived with Ethel, and Rosemary was there in the same house. For instance, it was, quite properly, his sister, Ethel, and not the comparatively new, the stranger female, who attended to what nursing Mr. Gibson needed, for she, of course, was better able to cope with certain physical indecencies.…

  Mr. Gibson had begun to feel that he was in a soft but inescapable trap. He was unable to fight out of it. He didn’t know that he ought to try. Rosemary deferred to Ethel in all things. Rosemary did not seem to want to be alone with him. He sometimes wondered whether anything was amiss with Rosemary. Oh, she was well and busy, willing and agreeable … but he and she seemed locked away from communication and he, covering his seething doubts, wore the same armor of perfect courtesy.

  Mr. Gibson sat in the sunny living room one morning, which was where he tended to sit. He did not often sit out of doors, where Mrs. Pyne was to be seen a lonely figure in her wheel chair on the Townsends’ porch. He had found he did not enjoy it. Perhaps the light was too cruel, and fell too harshly from the sky. Perhaps he had become used to a more cloistered effect and in physical weakness preferred it. At any rate, he sat indoors and thought to himself, this morning, that he had never met anything so grueling, so nearly maddening, as this adult atmosphere of mutual forebearance and perfect meaningless harmony.

  While he pondered ways and means of rebellion, with only half a heart that ached obscurely but all the time, Mrs. Violette was dusting. (Both Ethel and Rosemary had asked him whether he minded, and he had said of course he did not mind.) He watched her swift coordinated motion with a little idle pleasure. There was no air of good will about Mrs. Violette particularly. She did her job, in her cool silent way, not caring whether he minded. She rather refreshed him. She was shifting the ornaments on the mantelpiece when she suddenly seemed to become aware of something behind her. She jerked her head around and with that abrupt movement the cloth in her hand flicked out at a small blue vase and it fell. It smashed.

  “Oh dear,” said Ethel, who had come in on quiet feet, “and that belongs to Mr. Townsend.”

  “We can find another,” said Mr. Gibson automatically.

  Mrs. Violette ducked down and began to pick up the pieces. He noted the easy crouch of the knee, the slim straight back.

  Ethel said, “Such a lovely blue! Didn’t I speak of that only yesterday?”

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” spat Mrs. Violette with an astonishing burst of anger.

  “Of course you didn’t mean to do it,” said Ethel soothingly. “You couldn’t help it.”

  Mr. Gibson watching Mrs. Violette’s face found himself beginning to blink. Why was she so furious?

  Rosemary came, called from her bedroom by the noise, “Oh, too bad … I don’t suppose it costs much, do you?”

  Ethel said, “No, no, I’ve seen them in the dime store. If’s not expensive.”

  “Please don’t worry about it, Mrs. Violette,” said Rosemary at once. “I just hope you haven’t cut yourself.”

  “No ma’am,” said Mrs. Violette, rising. She looked boldly at Ethel for a moment “I’ll pay for it” she said contemptuously. She walked across the room with the bits of pottery in her hand and disappeared into the kitchen.

  “We can’t let her pay for it,” said Mr. Gibson, “when it was just an accident.”

  Ethel was smiling a peculiar smile. “She seems to know it was no accident,” she said musingly. “How odd!”

  “What do you mean, no accident?” said Mr. Gibson in surprise.

  “She did it because she dislikes me, of course.”

  “Ethel …!”

  “She does, you know. And I did admire the color of that vase in her hearing only yesterday. She dislikes me because I check up on her, which is more than either of you seem to do.”

  “But … what need …?” he said bewildered.

  “What need? Oh me,” sighed Ethel seating herself. “I believe a servant could steal you blind and you’d never know, either of you.”

  Mr. Gibson felt like a Babe-in-the-Wood. Such a thought had never occurred to him.

  “I don’t think she’d steal,” said Rosemary in a low voice, hesitantly. “Do you, Kenneth?”

  “Of course not!” he exploded.

  “Of course not,” mocked Ethel. “No ‘of course not” about it. These foreigners don’t have the same ideas of honesty as you do. She wouldn’t call it stealing … but you would, and so would I.”

  “What has she stolen?” said Rosemary, looking a bit flushed.

  “She takes food,” said Ethel, looking mysterious. “All foreigners take food. They don’t think of it as property.”

  “She eats,” said Rosemary. “That is true.”

  They were in conflict Mr. Gibson held his guilty delighted breath.

  “Nor any small loose-lying thing,” Ethel went on, drawling. “Don’t you ever take precautions, you dear sheltered people? Don’t you believe in the fact of theft? I hate to think what would happen to you in less bucolic places. There is wickedness in this world.”

  “Really,” said Mr. Gibson much annoyed. “I see no more reason to believe that Mrs. Violette would steal than to believe she broke that vase on purpose. And I was right here, Ethel. I saw what happened.”

  “You think you did,” said Ethel, as to a very young child.

  He felt shaken.

  “It’s the first thing she has broken,” began Rosemary. “She’s been quite remarkable …”

  “Quite so,” said Ethel with satisfaction. “Of course, it is the first thing. Don’t you see she resents me, and has, since the moment I came? So she breaks something I liked. I am not blaming her. I merely understand.”

  Mr. Gibson had a faint sense of somethin
g fading out of his peripheral vision. “For heaven’s sakes, Ethel,” he sputtered. “Anyone can have an accident!”

  “There is no such thing as an accident,” said Ethel calmly. “Honestly, Ken, you are ignorant in some fields. Subconsciously she wanted to spite me. She likes to be let entirely alone the way you let her be. But, of course, I am not such an easy mark.”

  “What on earth are you saying?” said Mr. Gibson in amazement. “Of course, there is such a thing as an accident. She turned to look because you startled her … and then her hand …”

  “Oh no,” said Ethel.

  “Wait a minute.” Mr. Gibson turned to see what might be on Rosemary’s face but Rosemary was no longer in the room. She was gone. It was disconcerting.

  Mr. Gibson turned back and said severely, “I don’t agree with your suspicions, Ethel.”

  “Suspicions?” sighed Ethel, “or normal precautions? The fact is, old dear,” she continued affectionately, “all of us can’t live in a romantic, poetical and totally gentle world. Some of us have to face things as they are.” Her bright eyes were direct and honest and he feared they were wise. “Face reality,” she said.

  “What reality?” he snapped.

  “Facts,” said Ethel. “Malice, resentment, self-interest—the necessities of the ego—all the real driving forces behind what people do. The conscious mind, old dear, is only the peak of the iceberg. You believe so easily in the pretty surfaces …”

  “I do!”

  “Yes, you,” said Ethel kindly. “You don’t know a tenth of what goes on, Ken. Your head’s in the clouds. Always has been. Of course I love you for it.… But for every saint with his head in the clouds,” sighed Ethel, “I suppose there has to be somebody to take the brunt of things as they really are.”

  “I see no reason,” said Mr. Gibson with stubborn lips, “to mistrust Mrs. Violette.”

  “You wouldn’t see a reason to mistrust anyone,” said Ethel indulgently, “until the deed popped up and hit you in your nice fastidious nose. You have always sidestepped the nasty truths of this earth, brother dear. More power to you.”