The Simple Way of Poison Read Free Page B

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