Critical Mass

A Hint of Henbane

This is unlike the other stories in this volume in two respects. First, it isn’t science fiction. Second, it wasn’t left as an incomplete fragment. It was a finished story, which had somehow gone sour, and never sold. I thought I could see why, so I put it through the typewriter again, and gave it to Bob Mills as agent, and it was published at once in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

I USED TO THINK, not that it bothered me, that my wife systematically lied to me about her family, but one by one I met them and found it was all true. There was Uncle H______, for one. He earned his unprintable nickname on the day in 1937 when he said to the bank examiner, “Oh, h______!”, walked right down to the depot and got on a westbound train, never to return. He sounded like a wish fulfillment myth, but two summers ago we drove through Colorado and looked him up. Uncle H._____ was doing fine; brown as a berry, and gave us bear ham out of his own smokehouse for lunch. And, just the way the story went, his shanty was papered with color comics from the Chicago Sunday Tribune.

Uncle Edgar, the salesman, was real too. Sarah claimed that in 1942 he had sold a Wisconsin town on turning over its municipal building to him so he could start a war plant. Well, last year I visited him in his executive suite, which used to be the mayor’s office. He had converted to roller skates. Whenever anyone hinted to him that he might start paying rent or taxes or something he would murmur quietly that he was thinking of moving plant and payroll to Puerto Rico, and then there would be no more hinting for a while.

Grandma and Grandpa were right off the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, rocking and dozing on the porch of their big house. Grandpa, if pressed, would modestly display his bullet scars from the Oklahoma land rush, and Sarah assured me that Grandma had some too. Great Grandmother, pushing the century mark a couple miles down the road, gloomily queened it over five hundred central Ohio acres from her dusty plush bedroom. She had decided in ‘35 that she would go to bed, and stuck to this decision while suburban housing developments and shopping centers and drive-in movies encroached on the old farm, and the money rolled in. Sarah had a grudging respect for her, though she had seen the will, and it was all going to a Baptist mission in Naples, Italy.

There was even at last a strained sort of peace between Sarah and her father. He came out of World War I with a D.S.C., a silver plate in his skull and a warped outlook on civilian life. He was a bootlegger throughout most of the twenties. It made for an unpleasant childhood. When it was too late to do the children much good, the V.A. replaced his silver plate with a tantalum plate and he promptly enrolled in a theological seminary and wound up a Lutheran pastor in southern California.

Sarah’s attitude toward all this is partly “Judge not lest ye be judged” and partly “What the hell,” but of her cousin’s husband, Bill Oestreicher, she said dogmatically: “He’s a lousy bastard.”

We used to see more of bun than of the rest of her family, as an unavoidable side effect of visiting Sarah’s Cousin Claire, to whom he was married. Sarah was under some special indebtedness to Cousin Claire.

I think Claire used to take her in during the rough spells with Dad.

On the way to meet them for the first time-they lived in Indiana, an easy drive from Detroit-Sarah told me: ‘Try to enjoy the scenery, because you won’t enjoy Bill. Did I say you weren’t to lend him money or go into any kind of business deal with him?”

“You did.”

“And one other thing, don’t talk to bun about your own business. Uncle Edgar let him mail a couple of customers’ statements for him, and Bill went to the customers offering to undercut Edgar’s prices. There was hell’s own confusion for a month, and Edgar lost two customers to the Japs. To this day Bill can’t understand why Edgar won’t talk to him any more.”

“I will come out fighting and protect my chin at all tunes.”

“You’d better.”

Claire was a dark, bird-like little woman with an eager-to-please air, very happy to see Sarah and willing to let some of it splash over onto me. She had just come from work. She was a city visiting nurse and wore a snappy blue cape and hat. Even after eight hours of helping a nineteen-year-old girl fight D.T.’s, she was neat, every hair in place. I suspected a compulsion. She wore a large, incongruous costume-jewelry sort of ring which I concluded to be a dime-store anniversary present from good old Bill.

Bill’s first words to me were: “Glad to meet you, Tommy. Tommy, how much money can you raise in a pinch?” I came out fighting. I’ve got an automotive upholstery business with a few good accounts. The Ford buyer could rum me overnight by drawing a line through my name on his list, but until that happens I’m solvent. I concealed this from Bill. It was easy. At fifty-odd he was a fat infant. He was sucking on candy sourballs, and when he crunched them up he opened a box of Cracker Jacks. I never saw him when he wasn’t munching, gulping, sucking. Beer, gum, chocolates, pretzels-he was the only person I ever heard of who lapped pretzels-pencils, the ear pieces of his horn-rimmed glasses, the ends of his moustache. Slop, slurp, slop. With his mouth open.

Bill maneuvered me into the kitchen, sucked on a quartered orange and told me he was going to let me in on a can’t-miss scrap syndicate which would buy Army surplus and sell it right back to the government at full price. I told him no he wasn’t.

His surprise was perfectly genuine. “What do you want to be like that for?” he asked, round-eyed, and went over it again with pencil and paper, sucking on the end of the pencil when he wasn’t scribbling with it, and when I said no again he got angry.

“Tommy, what’re you being so stupid for? Can’t you see I’m just trying to give one of Claire’s people a helping hand? Now listen this time, I haven’t got all day.” My God, what can you do? I told him I’d think about it.

He shook my hand. Between chomps and slurps he said it was a wise decision; if I could pony up, say, five thousand we’d get underway with a rush; had I thought of a second mortgage on my house? “Let’s celebrate it,” he said. “Claire. Claire, Goddamn it!”

She popped in. “Case of beer,” he said. He didn’t even look at her. “The beauty of this, Tommy, is it’s Air Force money. Who’s going to say no when the Air Force wants to buy something. Tommy, what about borrowing on your insurance?”

Cousin Claire came staggering up from the basement with a case of twenty-four bottles of beer. “Nice and cold,” she panted. “From the north corner.”

He said, “Giddadahere. Now the markup-“ She fluttered out. He turned to the case of beer, and his eyes popped. “How do you like that?” he asked me incredulously. “She didn’t open any. She must have thought I wanted to look at beer.”

“Well,” I said, “you know.” Martyred, he got a bottle opener from a drawer.

Driving back to Detroit I was in a state of shock for about twenty miles. Finally I was able to ask Sarah: “Why in God’s name did she marry him?”

She said hopelessly: “I think it’s because they won’t let you be an old maid any more. She got middle-aged, she got panicky, Bill turned up and they were married. He gets a job once in a while. His people are in politics. . . . She’s still got her ring,” Sarah said with pride.

“Huh?”

“The Charlier ring. Topaz signet-didn’t you see it?”

“What about it?”

“Bill’s been trying to get it away from her ever since they were married, but I’m going to get it next. It’s family. It’s a big topaz, and it swivels. One side is plain, and the other side has the Charlier crest, and it’s a poison ring.”

I honked at a convertible that was about to pull out in front and kill us. “You’ll hate me for this,” I said, “but there aren’t any poison rings. There never were.”

“Nuts to you,” she said, indignant. “I’ve opened it with my own little fingers. It comes apart in two little slices of topaz, and there’s a hollow for the poison.”

“Not poison. Maybe a saint’s relic, or a ladylike pinch of snuff. In the olden days they didn’t have poisons that fitted into little hollows. You had to use quarts of what they had. Everything you’ve heard to the contrary is bunk because everybody used to think everybody else had powerful, subtle poisons. Now, of course, we’ve got all kinds of-“

She wasn’t listening. “Somebody unwisely told Bill that the Ford Museum offered my grandmother a thousand dollars for the ring. Ever since then he’s been after her to sell it so he can ‘put the money into a business.’ But she won’t. . . . She doesn’t look well, Tommy.” I spared a second from the traffic to glance at her. There were tears in her eyes.

A week later began a series of semiliterate, petulant letters from Cousin Bill.

He was, or said he was, under the impression that I had pledged my sacred word of honor to put up $30,000 and go in with him on the junk deal. I answered the first letter, trying to set him straight, and ignored the rest when I realized he couldn’t be set straight. Not by me, not by anybody. The world was what he wanted it to be. If it failed him, he screamed and yelled at the world until it got back into line.

We saw them a couple of months later. He bore me no malice. He tried to get me to back a chain of filling stations whose gimmick would be a special brand of oil-filtered crankcase drainings, picked up for a song, dyed orange and handsomely packaged. He took to using my company name as a credit reference, and I had my lawyer write him a letter, after which he took to using my lawyer’s name as a credit reference. We saw him again, and he still was not angry. Munching and slobbering and prying, he just didn’t understand how I could be so stupid as not to realize that he wanted to help me. At every visit he was fat, and Claire was thinner.

He complained about it. Licking the drips off the side of an ice cream cone he said: “By God you ought to have more meat on your bones. The way the grocery bills run.”

“Has it ever occurred to you,” Sarah snapped, “that your wife might be a sick woman?”

Cousin Claire made shushing noises. Cousin Bill chewed the cone, looking at her. “No kidding,” he said, licking his finger. “For God’s sake, Claire. We got Blue Cross, Blue Shield, City Health, we been paying all these years, won’t cost a nickel. What’s the matter with you? You go get a checkup.”

“I’ll be all right,” said Cousin Claire, buttering a ‘ slice of pound cake for her husband.

Afterward I burst out: “All right, I’m not a doctor, I supply auto upholstery fabrics, but can’t you get her to a hospital?”

Sarah was very calm. “I understand now. She knows what she’s doing. In Claire’s position-what would you do?”

I thought it over and said, “Oh,” and after that drove very carefully. It occurred to me that we had something to live for, and that Cousin Claire had not.

My wife phoned me at the office a few weeks later, and she was crying. “The mail’s just come. A letter from a nurse, friend of Claire’s. Bill’s put her in the hospital.”

“Well, Sarah, I mean, isn’t that where she ought to-“

“No!” So that night we drove to Indiana and went direct to Claire’s hospital room-her one-seventh of a room, that is. Bill had put her in a ward. But she was already dead.

We drove to their house, ostensibly to get a burial dress for Cousin Claire, perhaps really to knock Cousin Bill down and jump on his face. Sarah had seen the body, and neither on the clawed finger nor in the poor effects I checked out at the desk was the ring. “He took it,” Sarah said. “I know. Because she was three weeks dying, the floor nurse told me. And Claire told me she knew it was coming, and she had Jiyoscine in the ring.” So Sarah had her triumph after all, and the ring had become a poison ring, for a sick, despairing woman’s quick way out of disappointment and pain. “The lousy bastard,” Sarah said. “Tommy. I want her buried with the ring.”

I felt her trembling. Well, so was I. He had taken the ring from a woman too sick to protect herself and for the sake of a thousand lousy bucks he had cheated her of her exit. I don’t mean that. I’m a businessman. There is nothing lousy about a thousand bucks, but ... I wanted to bury her with the ring too.

No one answered the front door, and when we went around to the pantry and found it open we found out why. Bill was slumped in a kitchen chair facing us, a spilled bottle of beer tacky on the linoleum, a bag of pretzels open in front of him and his finger in his mouth. You know what hyoscine is? They used to get it from henbane before they learned to put it together in a test tube more cheaply. It was a good, well-considered substance for a nurse to put in her ring because it kills like that. Slobbering infant, Bill must not have been able to resist taking the ring from her. And then he could not resist putting it in his mouth.