by Leslie Ford
“No. I’d say they’re neck and neck,” he agreed with a judicial nod.
“Then why blame a spiteful malicious thing like this on her?”
“Because, darling, I think that’s exactly what she is—a spiteful, malicious little bitch.”
“Rot,” I said.
He raised his brows.
“I suppose you’re aware, of course, that she loathes and despises her stepmother? And that her own mother eggs her on unmercifully?”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” I said—knowing all about it.
“Really?” He put his hand in his jacket pocket and took out his gold cigarette case. His eyes were fixed on mine, rather in the way a philosophical cat fixes an unpredictable and possibly recalcitrant mouse. “I suppose it wouldn’t even interest you to know that Randall Nash was over at Massachusetts Avenue this afternoon, seeing his former wife?”
“It would interest me very much,” I said, “if it were true. Which it isn’t.”
“Oh yes it is. My wife saw him coming out of her place around three. She’s got flu or something.”
“It must have been three other people, Gil,” I said.
Randall and Marie Nash’s divorce in 1930 was one of the bitterest domestic battles Washington has ever waged in the white court house at 5th and D. Lowell Nash had stayed with her father, and Angus, who’s twenty-two now, had gone with his mother. The bitterness hadn’t ended then; it had grown as the children grew. To my certain knowledge neither of them had seen the other since their final meeting at my house in P Street.
Gilbert St. Martin shrugged again.
“A lot of things have been going on this winter, while you’ve been in Nassau getting that sun tan.—It’s stunning, by the way.”
He looked me up and down with a critical eye.
“You carry your thirty-four years remarkably well, Mrs. Latham.”
“Thirty-eight,” I said. “As you know very well. Thanks just the same.”
“Not at all. I really thought it was forty and your dressmaker,” he replied. It’s that sort of thing about Gil that brings cats to mind.
“Well, thanks anyway,” I said. I hesitated. I wanted to ask him what, for instance, had been going on while I’d been away. But something in the lift of one dark eyebrow and the sardonic twist to one corner of his mouth made me stop. The stiff charred mass in the pewter basin gave a final crackle and fell apart, leaving one tiny bit of white that the flame had not touched. It was almost like a warning.
“I just got back yesterday,” I said casually. “I haven’t seen anybody yet.”
“Why don’t you drop around?—She’d be glad to see somebody.”
That in itself, of course, should have warned me. It did occur to me that it needed explanation. But just then there was a flurry at the door. A uniformed chauffeur opened it, a large lady in a vast quantity of black broadtail with a cascade of purple orchids on her bow steamed in to the jingle of the silver sleigh bells, on an icy wave of one of those heady perfumes made not for ingénues.
It was my chance to escape and I took it—regardless of the chintz and the Cape Cod lighter. But not before I had a final look at Gilbert St. Martin. All trace of the guile that had seemed to me to color his last remarks had vanished. He was too perfect. You knew that the vexing problem of whether the canary-yellow hall should be done in silver stencils with modernist furniture or in white with Empire would be solved with just the proper mixture of gravity and badinage, over a perfect number of champagne cocktails, with money no object—to the lady. I could see—if I’d not already known—why Lowell Nash hated Gilbert; and also, though perhaps it was a little harder, why Iris Nash was supposed to have felt very differently about him, once.
The flakes of snow struck sharp and cold against my face as the bells jingled behind me. A man with a live turkey in one hand, a red kiddie car in the other and several things under his arms barged into me and said “Merry Christmas!” I picked up his bundles while another man picked up mine and said “Merry Christmas, lady!”, and we all shook the snow out of our eyes and hurried away with that worried preoccupied air that seizes all family men on Christmas Eve.
2
My preoccupation as I turned into Beall Street was rather different. I don’t think I’m more of a busybody than most people, and if it hadn’t been for the heap of charred paper back in Gilbert St. Martin’s shop I doubt if I would have thought again of what he’d said. It isn’t that I dislike Gil; I don’t at all, really. It’s true he’s not the sort of man I’d go mad about. He’s too carefully done up for one thing, so that I find myself thinking I ought to be more careful about keeping the dogs out of the living room and wearing gloves when I’m in the garden. Or possibly it’s that indefinable malicious faculty he’s got for leaving a polite barb—better concealed at some times than at others—in virtually everything he says about women, or men either. But gossip, even apart from Gilbert St. Martin, is one thing; anonymous letters are quite another. They inject a psychopathic element into human relations that has pretty ghastly possibilities.
Even at that, it wasn’t the letters actually that bothered me. After all, Iris Nash is old enough to know what it’s all about It was the fact that Gilbert St. Martin thought, or said he thought, that Lowell Nash had written them. Because there’s very little doubt that Lowell on occasion can be capable of almost anything, and none whatever that she hates her father’s second wife with all the bitter intensity that the Nashes as a family—except young Angus—have a positive flair for. The pity of it is that it might have been so different. If her father had told her, for instance, that he was going to marry again, I think her loyalty and devotion to him would have got the best of a sort of natural jealousy. But he didn’t. She came home from Bar Harbor one summer and there was Iris, newly mistress of the house in Beall Street. More than that, Iris was only thirty and quite astonishingly beautiful with her dark burnished-copper hair and grey-green eyes and white skin. Lowell was fifteen, and a little gawky and immature, and black as a darkey from the summer sun.
I knew the hell she’d gone through during her parents’ divorce, too, when she’d decided to stay with her father and her brother Angus had gone with Marie Nash. She was twelve then, and I’d known her since she was four and my elder son three and they ran afoul of the law swiping a fine wreath of violets and lilies of the valley, after the captains and the kings had departed, from Senator McGilvray’s last caucus in the old cemetery up the hill in Rock Creek Park. That began my acquaintance with her parents too, and I’m quite sure the reason I never liked Marie Nash from the beginning was that she spanked Lowell and took away her liver-and-white spaniel puppy—not so much for taking the flowers as for saying she didn’t see what good they did the Senator. Equally I suspect the reason I’d always been fond of Randall Nash—a little, in spite of a lot of things—was that he stalked out of the house slamming the door and returned in half an hour with another liver-and-white spaniel and one of the finest funeral wreaths I’ve ever seen. Its skeleton still adorns Lowell’s bedroom in the house in Beall Street. The spaniel’s still there too—not that he adorns anything, but far from it. No fourteen-year-old spaniel is particularly beautiful, and Senator McGilvray is a horrible wheezing ill-tempered little beast… and one of the innumerable molehills that became insuperable mountains in the house when Iris Nash came there to live.
I wasn’t the only person who liked Randall Nash at times and disliked Marie always. In fact, though she did have friends, and very important ones, I never knew anyone who liked both of them. She was rich and he’d been poor when they married, and she never let him forget it even after he’d made a lot of money himself. Then, when the depression came and Randall lost virtually everything, he came home one day and found she’d moved out practically everything else— everything but his bed and a couple of chairs and Lowell. Lowell was eleven and Angus, aged fifteen, was at St. Paul’s. They spent that night at my house—I live just behind them; our back gardens adjoin—and
I helped Randall Nash refurnish the old house, antiques being cheap then. Since that day Lowell had meant a lot to me, in spite of times when I could happily have wrung her neck. Especially those first months when Randall brought his second wife there, and Lowell used to spend most of her time at my place.
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 concentra
ted 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.