A Right To Die Read Free Page B

are you?”
    “And I would just say no. At first, when people tried to ask me if I was a Communist without really asking it I got indignant, but I soon saw that was silly. I handle it better now. Are you a Birchite, Mr. Goodwin?”
    “I refuse to answer. I’m indignant.”
    She laughed a little. “You’ll get over it. As for Dunbar Whipple, he’s special. He’s young and he has a lot to learn, but he’ll be the first Negro mayor of New York City.” She turned. “I warn you, Miss Rowan, some day I may ask you for a different kind of contribution-to the Whipple for Mayor campaign fund. Would you vote for a Negro?”
    Lily said it would depend, that she voted for Democrats only, in respect to the memory of her father. I arose to pour coffee, but Miss Brooke looked at her watch and said she had an appointment. Lily gestured toward the terrace and said it was a day to ignore appointments, but Miss Brooke said she couldn’t, it was a meeting about a school boycott. She gave Lily a healthy thank-you handshake, but not me, which was proper, since I hadn’t said definitely that I wasn’t a Birchite. As Lily convoyed her to the foyer I filled my cup and took it to the glass doors to admire the weather.
    Lily came to join me. “Quite a gal,” she said. “Fighting her way through that to talk school boycott. If she’s fascinating, it’s lucky for me I’m not.”
    “It’s one of your best points,” I said, “that you’re not fascinating.” I put the cup on a plant stand.
    “And that I’m rather selfish. Look me in the eye, Escamillo. Take that back about making you secure and happy and comfortable.”
    “Not me. I merely said a man.”
    “Name one.”
    “Nero Wolfe.”
    “Ha. What will you bet I couldn’t?”
    “Not a dime. I know him, but I know you too. No bet.”
    “You would have to move out.” She had a look in her eye, I would say the look of a tiger stalking a herd of deer if I had ever seen a tiger stalk deer. “We would fire Fritz, and of course Theodore. He would read aloud to me. We would ditch the orchids and take out the partitions in the plant rooms and have dancing parties, and you wouldn’t be invited. For lunch we would have peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and-“
    I clapped a palm over her mouth with my other hand at the back of her head. With no effort to break away, she tried to bite. I said, “When you’re ready to discuss the subject, shut your right eye.”
    She shut her right eye, and I took my hands away. “Well?”
    “I stand pat,” she said. “She’s fascinating.”
    “To you. It’s perfectly simple. She’s a status-seeker. She wants to be the mayor’s wife.”
    “Uhuh. I always laugh at your cracks to make you secure and happy and comfortable, but may I skip that one'You’re trying to get something on her that will keep that colored man from marrying her. Right?”
    “That’s the idea.”
    “Then two things. First, I don’t think you’ll get anything unless you invent it, and I know you wouldn’t. I don’t think there’s anything to get-anything bad enough to count. Second, if there is, I hope you don’t get it through anything you heard here. I couldn’t blame you, but I would blame me. If she and that Negro want to get married they may be darned fools, of course I think they are, but it’s their lookout. So do me a favor. If you stop it, and something you heard here got you started on what stops it, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. That’s me. You know?”
    “Sure.” I looked at my wrist: a quarter to three. “If I had any personal feelings about it they would be about the same as yours, but I haven’t. Rights all over the place. She has a right to marry him. He has a right to marry her. The father and mother have a right to butt in, they’ve been doing it for ten thousand years. Nero Wolfe has a right to meet an obligation to a man. I have a right to earn my pay by doing what I’m told, providing it doesn’t clash with my right