Dram of Poison

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “Thirty minutes on the bus. You don’t drive a car?”

  “Rosemary has a car of sorts. An old monster. Not even worth selling.”

  “Well, then! There’s a garage for it. How does this sound? Living room, bedroom, bath, big den—lots of bookshelves in there—dinette, kitchen. There’s a fireplace …”

  “Bookshelves?” said Mr. Gibson. “Fireplace?”

  “And a garden.”

  “Garden?” said Mr. Gibson in a trance.

  “I’m a nut on gardening myself. You come and see.”

  Mr. Gibson went and saw, and succumbed.

  The wedding took place at three in the afternoon in a drab office with no fanfare and not much odor of sanctity. The justice was a matter-of-fact type who mumbled drearily. No one was present except the necessary witnesses. Mr. Gibson had thought it best to ask none of his colleagues to watch him being married, in this manner, to this white-faced woman in her old blue suit who could scarcely stand up, whose gaunt finger shook so that he could scarcely force the ring over the knucklebone.

  Then of course Rosemary had no people. And Mr. Gibson’s only sister Ethel, although asked, for auld lang syne, could not come. She wrote that she supposed he would know what he was doing at his age, and she was happy for him if he was happy—that she would try to come to visit one day, perhaps during the summer, and then meet the bride. To whom she sent love.

  It was an ugly dreary wedding. It made Mr. Gibson wince in his soul, but it was quick, soon over. He was able to take it as just necessary, like a disagreeable pill.

  Chapter IV

  PAUL TOWNSEND lived, together with his teenage daughter and his elderly mother-in-law, in a low stucco house of some size on a fair piece of land. Beside his driveway lay the driveway pertaining to the cottage. The cottage was built of brick and redwood and upon it vines really did grow. Mr. Gibson’s books and papers (although still in boxes), and his neat day-bed, were already there in the large square shelf-lined room off the living room, and the lumbering old car that Professor James had bought years ago was already standing in the neat little garage when Mr. Gibson brought his bride home in a taxi. He opened the front door and led her in, making no attempt at the threshold gesture. He sat her down in a bright blue easy chair. She looked as if she were going to die.

  But Mr. Gibson had his own ideas of healing and he plunged in, heart and soul. He had wangled a week away from his classes. He proposed to use it to settle. But the cottage had aroused in his own breast some instincts he’d never known about. He also proposed to make a home.

  So, during that first hour, he bustled. He poured out his enthusiasms, all going forward. He made her look at color. Did she like the primrose yellow in the drapries? (He thought privately that the clean, fresh colors in this charming sun-drenched room would be health-giving in themselves.) Where would he put his record player? he wondered aloud, forcing her to consider the promise of music. Then he officiated in the kitchen. He was not a bad cook, himself, but he begged her advice. He did all he could to interest and tempt her.

  Rosemary could not eat any supper. She was not ready for a future. She was collapsing after an escape from the past. There would be a hiatus. He feared she’d die of it.

  So he insisted that she go at once to bed, in the soft-hued bedroom that would be hers alone. When he judged she was settled, he brought her the medicine. He touched the dry straw of her sad hair. He said, “Rest now.” Her head turned weakly.

  He spent the evening unpacking books and listening … sometimes toptoeing to her door to listen.

  The next day she lay abed, unable to move, as good as dead. Only her eyes asked for mercy and patience.

  Mr. Gibson had lots of patience. He was undaunted and took pains to make some very silly puns each time he brought her a snack to eat. He hooked up the record player and let music penetrate the whole little house. He believed in humor and in beauty and in color and in music and he mined the deepest faiths he had … for he knew he could heal her.

  On the second morning, he went in to remove her breakfast tray and saw that she was lying against the pillow with her face turned to the window. Between the dainty white margins of the curtains there was visible a patch of ground planted with roses. On her face, for the first time in his knowledge of her, lay a look of peace.

  “I used to love to sit on the ground with my hands in the dirt,” she said to him. “There is something about earth on your hands …”

  “Yes, there is. And something about light. And something about running water, too. Don’t you think so?”

  “Yes,” she said stirring.

  He thought this particular “yes” had a most positive sound to it. He went softly, however. He took care not to nag at her, not to bother.

  On the third day Rosemary got up and dressed in a cotton frock. She began to make a brave effort to eat, as if she owed this to him. In the evening, he built a fire (for there is something about a fire, too) and he read to her. He read some poetry. It gave him such pleasure to realize that she was going to be the best pupil he had ever had. She listened so intently. It was lively to listen so. It was a spark of life which he would fan.

  Once she said to him, during that evening, with a look of pain, “You are so sane.” It made him wince to understand how eight years of her life had been spent alone with that which could not have been called sane. No wonder, he said to himself. No wonder it has nearly killed her.

  Now his week off began to go leaping by. She helped dust some books. She couldn’t, of course, dust many. Mr. Gibson had to go back to work on the Monday, so on Friday Mrs. Violette came in.

  Mrs. Violette was produced for them by Paul Townsend. She was a cleaning woman; she worked for the Townsends in the afternoons. But she was a young person, very slim and quick, with shining black hair and skin of a soft peach color and a countenance of a smoothness and design that was foreign. At least there was something odd, and not plain American, about her looks—Near Eastern perhaps. One couldn’t place her.

  Mrs. Violette didn’t concern herself with being placed. She was cool and detached, taciturn and competent. One knew that she could keep this little house clean with the back of one of her slim strong buff-colored hands. Mr. Gibson thought she would do admirably. She was not, thank heaven, some garrulous woe-loving old creature reduced to drudgery by adversities. She was fresh and self-respecting. She would be fine. Rosemary agreed, but wondered if it wouldn’t cost too much.

  “Until you are perfectly well,” he told her, “Mrs. Violette is an economy. Now that’s just sensible.”

  “At least you make it sound sensible,” Rosemary said with a touch of life and opinion.

  So Mr. Gibson went back to his classes on the Monday, convinced that Rosemary wasn’t going to die.

  He rode the buses. He wasn’t much of a driver, for an automobile was a thing he had known, all his life, how to do without. So he left the ancient car in the garage until such time as Rosemary might wish to use it. She understood it, which was more than he did, and he rode his thirty minutes, brooding and half-smiling to himself over little schemes. For he was possessed by the joy of nurture which is closely akin, if not identical with, the deep joy of creation. He had never known this in his life before. It absolutely absorbed him.

  Rosemary was eating well. She was stuffing herself to please him. (Ah, so it did!) When he came home, the little house would be shining from the administrations of Mrs. Violette, and Rosemary would recount to him how many eggs she’d had, how many glasses of milk, what toast.… And he’d say she’d be fat as a pig pretty soon and feel a sting behind his eyes.

  One afternoon he came walking home, the two blocks from the bus stop, to see her sitting on the ground at the far side of the house, near the roses. He altered his course and stepped softly toward her on the grass. She looked up and her face was dirty where she had swiped an earthy hand across her nose. She was patting and combing the earth around one rose bush with her bare fingers.

  This ea
rth was dampish and richly dark. She told him it was in good tilth. Mr. Gibson squatted down to admire and, at the same time, to taste and turn and enjoy a word that was new to him. What a wonderful word! Tilth. He understood it immediately.

  She said the roses needed mulching and he learned about mulch. She showed him how delicately she had pruned this one rose bush, how the buds must be left to grow outward. She seemed to understand what the plant needed. It seemed to him that she felt toward this one plant—all she could manage yet—much as he felt toward her, Rosemary. He didn’t say so. When he helped her to her feet, it seemed to him that she sprang up rather lightly. It made him happy.

  Then one Saturday morning, puttering in his room, he realized that, while he could hear Mrs. Violette in the kitchen, he missed another presence in the house. He looked out of all the windows and at last saw Rosemary sitting in the back-yard grass, in the sun, with a hairbrush in her hand. She was brushing her hair in slow rhythm and while he watched she did not cease to brush her hair. Something about the scene startled him. The rhythm, the sensuous rhythm, the ritual of it, the strangeness … Rosemary was a woman. She was a mystery. One day, when he had brought her to full life and health as he would do, why, he did not know with whom he would be living in this house! He did not know Rosemary, herself.…

  Paul Townsend turned out to be an ideal landlord. He was genial and easy, but he did not intrude. One day, however, when three weeks had gone by and the Gibsons could be presumed settled in, Paul invited them to supper.

  It was their first social event.

  Rosemary wore her best dress. Mr. Gibson admired it aloud. It was a dullish blue, a pleasant enough dress. But he fussed a little. As soon as ever she felt just like it, he told her, she must buy at least two new dresses … maybe three. Rosemary quietly promised that she would. She accepted everything he urged upon her these days with no more weak spilling of grateful tears. In fact, she was full of grace in the matter of receiving.

  They walked across the double driveway to Paul Townsend’s house.

  While not grand, this was certainly the home of a solvent man. Paul Townsend, a chemical engineer, owned the plant and laboratory down near the college, and it must return him if not a fortune at least a pleasant living.

  He was a widower. Mr. Gibson had never known his wife, alive. Her picture was in this house many times. It was a little sad to see how young the pictures were. She did not look as if her daughter could be this tall Jean, fifteen, and in high school. A pleasant child, with a cropped and tousled dark head, fine white teeth in a ready smile, excellent company manners. Then there was Paul’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Pyne, a cripple, poor soul, who inhabited a wheel chair.

  Supper was not formal but nicely served and stiffly, politely eaten. Mr. Gibson watched Rosemary. Was she nervous about these people? Was it a strain? Was she strong enough?

  The old lady asked kind commonplace questions, and told kind commonplace statistics about herself and the family. She had a thin, rather delicately boned face, and the tact not to mention her own disabilities. The young girl kept her place among her elders, served the meal, cleared the table afterward, and then excused herself to do her homework. Paul was a considerate host, full of good will and social anxiety.

  But there are just so many commonplaces. Mr. Gibson set to work to dissolve the stiffness of this first meeting of Rosemary and her nearest neighbors. He was bound Rosemary was going to find it easy and pleasant to move into a world of friendly give and take. In fact, he talked a good deal for a while. At last, by prying and prodding for mutual interests, he discovered how to egg Paul on to talk about his garden. Rosemary began to listen and contribute. Mr. Gibson was eager to learn. Once Paul asked a silly punning question … whether Mr. Gibson had a sense of humus. Mr. Gibson was inspired to reply, “Not mulch.” And Rosemary giggled. The old lady smiled indulgently and kept listening pleasantly as the session grew quite animated.

  At ten o’clock they took their leave, for Mr. Gibson did not want Rosemary tired out. After the good nights and the kind parting phrases, they crossed the roofless porch at the front of Paul’s house. They came down the five steps and crossed the double driveways in the soft chill air of night time. They went in at their own back door, skirting the shining new garbage cans, symbolic of a functioning house. They crossed the pale dim orderly kitchen and entered the living room, where a lamp had been left burning. The sense of home flowed into Mr. Gibson’s heart.

  “Wasn’t that fun?” said he. “I thought you were having a good time.”

  Rosemary stood there, in the blue dress, slowly shrugging off the dark sweater from around her shoulders. She looked brooding and intense. “I have never known,” she said vibrantly, “it was possible to have so good a time. I never, never, knew …”

  It rather shocked him. He could think of nothing to reply. She tossed the sweater into her chair and sat down and looked up at him and smiled. “Read to me, Kenneth, please,” she said coaxingly, “for just ten minutes? Until I simmer down?”

  “If you drink your milk and eat your cookies.”

  “Yes, I will. Bring four.”

  So he fetched the nourishment. He opened a book. He read to her.

  Afterward, she licked a cookie crumb from her forefinger. She thanked him with a drowsy smile.…

  Kenneth Gibson went into his room, which had by now acquired the look of all the places he had ever lived for long, the mellow order, the masculine coziness. He went to bed a little bewildered. He was beginning not to understand her.

  Chapter V

  ON THE 19th of May, Rosemary got up before him to make his breakfast. She had on a new cotton frock, for “around the house,” she said. It was pink and a particularly springlike pink, somehow. She chattered away. She would like to try feeding the border with a new kind of fertilizer. Paul Townsend said it did wonders. Did he think $3.95 was too much to spend on it? And would he like roast lamb for dinner? Did he prefer mint sauce or a sweet mint jelly with his lamb? Wasn’t the early sun on the little stone wall a lovely sight! Pale gold on the gray. Why was sunlight, in the morning, so crisp—and then, by noon, more like cloudy honey?

  “Shadows?” he speculated. “Some day you should try to paint what you see, Rosemary.”

  She wasn’t good enough, she said, although to try … At least, she announced, tossing her head, Mrs. Violette must wash and starch the kitchen curtains. They’d be nicer crisp to match the mornings. Didn’t he think so?

  Mr. Gibson sat there at the table, watching her and listening, and his eyes suddenly cleared. Scales fell. He saw Rosemary, not as she had been, or as he had been thinking of her, but as she was, this morning.

  The crisp frock showed a figure that, while slim, certainly could not be called skinny any more. Neither was it bent and hollow with the posture of weakness. On the contrary, she sat quite upright and above her snug waist swelled a charming bosom, and the shoulder bones were covered with sweet flesh. Then her hair! Why, her hair was thick and shining and full of chestnut lights! Where had it come from? Whence this face? This face was not pasty white nor did the flesh droop in sad rumples. It was almost firm, and sun-gilded to a rosy-gold, and the lines in her forehead were a maturity (more interesting than the bare bold brow of youth could be). Her blue eyes were snapping with the range of her thoughts among her projects for this day. The odd little fold in the flesh at the corners was so characteristic, so significant of her fine good humor. Her whole face was so animated and … he didn’t know what to call it but … Rosemaryish. And that low bubbly chuckle of hers was constantly in her throat.

  His breast swelled. Why, she is well! he thought.

  Mr. Gibson hid this for a secret temporarily while he smiled and patted all her plans on the back encouragingly … and said goodbye.

  But he rode the bus with a joyful booming in his heart. She is well again! Rosemary is alive and well! He had as good as raised her from the dead.

  All day long, the miracle rang in his heart. He would come
back to it, back to it, and, every time, it boomed and rang like bells.

  When he came home, to admire the lamb and watch her dainty hunger, and hear how the day had gone and was already only a foundation for tomorrow, he said firmly, “Tomorrow night, Rosemary, we are going to celebrate.”

  “Are we? Why?”

  “Can you drive ten miles? Can the Ark go ten miles?”

  “Why, sure it can,” she said gaily. “I don’t see why not.”

  “Then we are going out for dinner—to a restaurant I know. Out on the highway. Oh, you’ll like it.”

  “But why?”

  “To celebrate.” He was mysterious.

  “Celebrate what, Kenneth?”

  “It’s a secret,” he said. “I may tell you tomorrow.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Never mind,” he said shyly. He almost hated to share his very miracle—even with her.

  In the evening of the next day (which was a Friday), the ancient car proceeded noisily out upon the highway, west of town. It rode high and old-fashioned, in a gait that was both stately and lumbering, like a stout matron who nevertheless has her dignity. Rosemary, in a new white dress with a splash of red roses on the bodice, with a big soft red wool scarf tied around the top of her, drove them without seeming to try too hard. She is equal to this, thought Mr. Gibson with pride, because she is well. And there is no doubt about it.

  Mr. Gibson had gone so far as to reserve a table, for this little restaurant was very popular, both on account of its fine French cooking and its atmosphere, which was dim and smoky and smelled deliciously of sauces. It wasn’t cheap either. But this was a celebration.

  They drank a little wine. They ate hugely of one delectable dish after another, and Mr. Gibson teased by refusing to explain the reason for the reckless expense of this expedition. It was delightful to be together in the midst of the smoke and the savory smells and the soft buzz of other people’s conversations. Mr. Gibson knew he was preening himself. He knew that Rosemary was, too. As if they were actors or masqueraders, and out of themselves and yet being themselves in a freer truer way. He couldn’t help feeling on the suave side, and a bit of a gay dog. He enjoyed it. Rosemary looked as if she felt that she was rather lovely. And so she was, he decided.