Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 9, No. 42, May 1947

Asphodel by Edwin Lanham

The author of “Asphodel” the curiously disturbing tale we now present, was born in Texas on October 11, 1904. He graduated from Williams College, then studied art in New York and Paris. In 1930 he became a newspaperman, and still belongs to that wondrous tribe of legend-making scribblers. His best-known serious novel is THUNDER IN THE EARTH, which he wrote on a Guggenheim scholarship. In past years Edwin Lanham has been a steady contributor to “Collier’s” — in 1946 his serial, IT SHOULDN’T HAPPEN TO A DOG, was filmed by Twentieth Century-Fox under the same title and emerged from the Hollywood assembly line as an extremely amusing picture starring Carole Landis and Allyn Joslyn.

Also last year Mr. Lanham published his first detective novel — SLUG IT SLAY. Howard Haycraft ranked it as one of the best mystery books of the year, and nearly every other critic agreed. It is interesting to note that Mr. Lanham wisely uses his own experience as the background of his stories. SLUG IT SLAY (provocative title!) is a newspaper story, authentically peopled with real newspapermen and newspaperwomen. And in “Asphodel” Mr. Lanham draws on his intimate knowledge of art (in this instance, sculpturing) to produce, in our opinion, one of the ten finest crime stories published during 1944.

Perhaps we should warn you: “Asphodel” — where souls unbodied dwell — will positively haunt you...

From Collier’s magazine, copyright 1944, by Edwin Lanham

Edward Peters sat rigid in his chair, with his arms folded across his chest, his head bent slightly, and his eyes fixed on the point of high light on the bronze figurine of a faun. By looking at the faun he could hold the pose, and also he could avoid his wife’s eyes.

Usually it was Elaine who avoided meeting his eyes. She had a habit of turning her head away, ever so slightly, so that her vision was out of line with his, so that her face was almost profile, and until recently he had thought it a trick of coquetry.

But as she worked, her eyes moved boldly because she was not looking at him at all. Her sure hands pressed the clay with precision and her eyes studied him with the curious, impersonal concentration of the artist. It was not this impersonal quality that disturbed him, but a strange intensity that was new, that had not been apparent in the first six months of marriage. He sighed, moving one leg nervously.

Instantly she asked, “Tired, darling?”

“Head still aches.” He realized that he had said it plaintively.

“One more sitting and I’ll be finished,” Elaine said. Her tone was formal, as if he were one of those who paid a thousand dollars for a bust by Elaine Peters. But their conversations had always been either formal or evasive, markedly so in the past few days, since he had found the letter in her handbag.

If he had been able to break through this impersonal barrier, this defense in depth she had developed, they might have talked about the letter and reached an understanding, but now it was impossible.

Before he married her he had known her nature was secretive, but he had thought it due to recent widowhood and to the engaging vagueness that artists seemed to have when not in the consuming concentration of their work. Now he knew that he had never understood this restrained, silent woman, nor the secret melancholy in her eyes that had first attracted him.

The first six months of marriage were, of course, the months and days and hours of knowing each other, of exploring character and emotion, and naturally there was a certain holding back, particularly in a woman who had suffered emotional shock.

But hers was such an instinctive, feminine manner of evasion that Edward had thought it entirely natural until that day in the small bar off Fifth Avenue when she had told him that she had been married twice — not once — before. It was an odd thing, he thought, that the only frank conversations he had with his wife were in public, over a cocktail.

That day he had said stiffly. “I wonder you didn’t tell me before. Not that it makes any difference, darling. But, still!”

Her cheeks had been pink and her eyes bright as needles. “Do you mind very much, Edward?”

“I don’t mind. But, darling, after all.” He had turned his glass in a little puddle of spilled drink. “Who was he? What was his name?”

“George Partland. He was rather stuffy.” Her laughter had been quick and so high that the noise seemed to make the glasses rattle on the bar. “Let’s don’t talk about poor George.”

He had said bitterly, “So you’re Mrs. Partland Rice Peters?”

It was unkind, and he remembered how abruptly the laughter had ceased, how the gray eyes had darkened as she said, “I shouldn’t have told you.”

He had tried to say that a man in love must know everything, every small experience and major suffering. A man in love had a relentless desire to know these things, he’d wanted to say, even if they hurt him. Instead he’d called the waiter and paid the check.

Edward had resolved to confine George Partland to the pigeonhole reserved in his ordered lawyer’s mind for the things he wanted to know but had no answer for.

Her age, for instance. She had told him she was thirty-one. Not that he cared, but she was young to have two marriages behind her and a successful career as a sculptor assured. And there were other things he wanted to know: her background, her schooling. She was an orphan, she had said. He did not even know the name of the town where she was born.

“Edward, please!” Elaine said sharply. “Your head is drooping.”

He straightened, fixed his eyes again on the high light of the bronze faun. His head ached steadily, and the crispness of her tone annoyed him and made him remember the day when he had asked her about her first husband, in spite of his resolve.

“Edward, you have no right to be jealous of my past,” she had said firmly. “Least of all of Larry.”

“But it isn’t jealousy,” he had protested. “What was that? Larry! I thought you said his name was George.”

For an instant she had actually met his eyes that day, and in their gray depths he’d seen a somber sadness. Her underlip had trembled noticeably.

“Good Lord,” he had said. “How many husbands have you had, Elaine?”

Her eyes downcast again, she had waited a long moment, as if pondering whether to give him an answer at all. Then her voice had come, low but steady, “If you must know, four.”

“Four?” Edward had dropped into a chair, staring up at her. He had tried a short laugh and accomplished a strange disturbing sound. He had asked, “You mean counting me?”

Again the hesitation, the low voice, “Not counting you, Edward.”

“But this is grotesque” was all Edward had been able to say, then he had lost his temper and said many things, while she had stood tensely by the fireplace, with one elbow resting on the mantel, watching him. The expression of her eyes had been the impersonal, appraising expression that was in her eyes now as she worked on his bust. When he quieted he had asked, “I know Rice died, but what happened to the others? Divorced?”

“No, Edward.”

He remembered the calm assurance of her tone, and it occurred to him now for the first time that she had met his eyes throughout the incident. She had never looked away, once she had told him there were four.

“They’re dead, Edward,” she had said flatly.

“All four? All four died on your hands?” he had exclaimed.

Thinking of it, Edward’s heart seemed now to rustle like autumn leaves and her answer still was brittle in his ears: “I should think, Edward, you’d be more considerate. It isn’t fair to cross-examine me about things past. I’ve had my share of misfortune and I’d like to forget it.”

“But look here, Elaine, I’m your husband,” he had said. “We were married to share our lives, not just a part of them. Marriage is a contract and all the facts should be set forth, all the...”

“You’re talking like a lawyer.” She had waved one hand impatiently. “Oh, Edward, you know you’d have been even more upset if I’d told you in the beginning. I didn’t tell you simply because I knew you’d mind.”

“Well, I do mind,” he’d said. “I mind like hell. I don’t mean about George and Larry and whoever else. I mean, damn it, you should have told me. You shouldn’t have kept it from me.”

But later he had softened. He’d been sympathetic and, holding her hand, had said, “Darling, you’ve had a lot of bad luck, I know. I suppose I can understand your being secretive about it, but please, let’s have no more of it. Let’s tell each other everything. What do you say? No more secrets.”

She had clung to him then and sobbed and whispered, “No more secrets, darling,” and the next few days had been the best of their marriage. But he had been unable to get those four out of his head. He had known that it was pointless to ask about them, but he could not keep them out of his thoughts. After all — four husbands! He had begun to form mental pictures of them, to assign physical characteristics and character traits.

The last one, that man Rice, he knew about. Elaine had met him out on the Coast, been his wife about a year. It was heart disease that had taken Rice, he remembered. Then there was George, who was stuffy. Edward conceived of George as a large man with a prominent chin and rather choking high collars. She had passed Larry off rather casually. But what was his last name? And who in blazes was the other fellow, the one somewhere in between?

It was the one between, the man without a name, who troubled Edward most. Several times he had been on the point of asking about him, but he had not dared return to those bitter days of distrust and evasion. Often he had tried to lead the discussion around to the subject, such as the time they’d been to a cocktail party downtown and had stopped for one more at the Brevoort on a fine spring day when the hedges were set out and sunlight fell on the tables.

“Darling,” he had said after the second Manhattan, “where were you born?”

“Where? In a hospital, I suppose. What difference does it make?”

“I mean what part of the country? What town?”

“I haven’t any idea, Edward. You know I’m an orphan.”

“But you know who your parents were, don’t you?”

“Just their names.”

“Then where were you brought up? In a foundling home?”

“Edward, are you going to pry again? Please. I had rather a rough childhood and I’d rather not talk about it.”

“All right,” he had said. “Sorry, Elaine.”

But it did seem, he had thought, that she would know her home town. It couldn’t be far from the foundling home. It would be in the same state, certainly. She must know the state.

That was the worst part of it, Edward reflected. He couldn’t stop thinking about it, even though he told himself that he ought to let the matter drop before he caused a barrier more serious than her secretiveness, than the four husbands, the four dead men.

He wondered now if he should have consulted a psychiatrist. It was unhealthy the way his thoughts had returned to those four men, and he had realized that it could not go on so indefinitely. But there were things he had to know and she should have told him. This other fellow, this in-between man, he had a name, and Edward felt he ought to know it.

One day he had been reading Pope from a handsomely bound library set that Elaine had put in the shelves and he came across a marked passage in a translation from Homer that said:

He read it aloud, asked, “You mark it, dear?”

“I?” Elaine had raised her eyebrows. “Of course not. Why should I?”

“I wonder who did,” Edward had said. “Asphodel. That’s the flower of the dead that blooms in hell. Nice line, too... where souls unbodied dwell, In ever flow’ring meads of asphodel. Where did the book come from?”

She had moved her shoulders uneasily, her eyes turning aside in evasion. Edward had persisted, “Whom did it belong to? Rice?”

“I believe so.” She had risen. “Time for bed, Edward.”

“Yes, all right. In a moment.”

But Edward had closed the book on his knees and sat staring into the fire. It was an odd passage to have marked, where souls unbodied dwell, and he wondered if Rice’s hand had made the pencil lines in the margin, if Rice had known about the three before him, if those three had been unbodied, but present and accounted for, as all four were for Edward. It was a beautiful, exotic word, asphodel, and Edward had thought that it somehow suited Elaine. Then he had wondered if he had called her that, this fellow Rice. To himself he might have called her Asphodel.

It was that morbid line of thought again, running through his mind as he sat posing in the studio. That night he had tried to stop it by throwing the book to the floor. But sleepless in bed he had thought of Rice and found him as absorbing as the fellow in between, whose name he did not know. He’d been a newspaperman on the Coast, Edward knew, and rather small potatoes, at that. An obvious mismatch for Elaine. But the man had liked poetry and he had found that passage and marked it. Asphodel, the pale lily of the dead.

The word repeated itself in Edward’s brain now as he sat looking at the bronze faun, and his lips moved silently in saying it. Was it only three days since he had seen the letter in her handbag? It seemed like weeks.

They had been about to go out for the evening, and as Edward opened the door the telephone had rung. Elaine had answered it, and after a moment he heard her clear voice saying, “Wait, I’ll get a pencil and jot it down.”

She had returned. “Do you have a pencil, Edward?”

“No. Afraid not.”

“I must have one.” She had opened her handbag, found a pencil, and dropped the bag on a refectory table.

Edward had waited impatiently in the foyer. It had been one of those idle moments when the mind pauses and the eye strays, and for a long time he had looked at the sheet of green paper that had fallen from her bag before he bent over to pick it up. It was because of the letterhead, Greenvale Cemetery, that his eyes had dropped to the lines of type below. It was a bill for the upkeep of a cemetery plot in a small town fifty miles from New York. He had hardly digested the fact when Elaine returned.

“Edward,” she had said, and her voice had broken off as she stared at the green paper in his hand. Then she had taken it from his fingers and tucked it in her bag, saying, “Shall we go?”

Descending in the elevator he had noticed that her eyes were shining and her face was flushed. She did not explain, and he had asked no questions, but he had thought, which one was it? Was it Rice or George or Larry or the other one, the one in between, whose memory was kept verdant in the Greenvale Cemetery.

During dinner that night he had tortured himself. He should have asked her outright, he had thought. After all, an explanation was due. He hadn’t pried. The letter had fallen to the floor, and he had naturally picked it up. But since he’d seen it, the least she could do was explain. He had to know which one it was.

As he lit cigarettes for them both on the way home in a taxi she had said lightly, “Edward, do you know I haven’t a commission? Not a single commission.”

“Oh, one will come along.”

“Not that. I mean for the first time since we were married I’m free. I haven’t a commission and I can do what I want. Edward, I’d like to do a head of you.”

Edward had been pleased. Her work had always been something apart, and he had been happy to be included in it, flattered that she should wish to do a bust of him.

“So, darling, let’s get up early,” she had said. “I want to get started on it first thing in the morning.”

It was fascinating, he thought now to see the sureness of her strong fingers molding the clay. She was a small woman, with a high-bridged nose that gave her thin face a sharp, flat perspective in profile, and her gray eyes held a light of watchful perception, like a cat’s. It was surprising, he thought, that her work should be so powerful, almost monumental.

The first day he had been enthusiastic as he watched his own head taking shape in the clay in massive, oversize planes. But the following morning something had gone wrong and she had mashed his clay nose, saying, “That’s all for today, Edward.” She had left the studio and he had not seen her again until dinner, when she talked little. He had been depressed and kept thinking of the letter from the Greenvale Cemetery.

As they were having coffee he had asked her bluntly, “Elaine, why the bill from a cemetery?”

Her eyes had met his for an instant, with a gleam of anger. “Edward, what do you mean by going through my pocketbook? Really, I’ve had enough of your prying.”

“It fell out on the floor when you took the pencil. I simply picked it up. Darling, I wasn’t prying into your affairs.”

“Very well. Then let’s not talk about it.”

“But I did see it, Elaine, and I’m curious. Why the cemetery plot? No reason why you can’t tell me about it, is there?”

“But I won’t tell you, Edward. I simply will not encourage your morbid curiosity. We’ve talked this all out and you promised not to pry.”

“We also said no secrets. Remember?”

She had risen to her feet and the angry shine of her eyes was almost hatred, surely contempt. She had said sharply, “Edward, we can’t go on like this. Really, I think you’d better do something about it. See somebody. How about that man Betty West goes to, Doctor Lewis? Why don’t you see him, Edward?”

He had banged his fist on the table. “I don’t need a psychiatrist. That’s a pretty shabby means of evasion, Elaine. That’s no answer to a direct question.”

“You need medical attention more than you realize, Edward,” she had said quietly. “And I don’t intend to answer any questions put like that. Good night.”

Now Edward frowned at the faun, rigidly holding his pose. It was the bottle of Scotch he had opened last night, after she left, that had given him the headache. He had known then, while drinking the Scotch, as he was sure now, that there was nothing wrong with his mind, that there was nothing morbid about his curiosity. Perhaps it was unhealthy to keep thinking about those three and the other one, the in-between one, but if she would talk about them openly and honestly he’d be able to get them out of his head. And that letter from the cemetery ought to be explained. He had the right to an explanation.

But her attitude had always bewildered him, her quick changes of mood. He had been surprised this morning when she prepared to work in the studio and came impatiently to ask if he was ready to pose. He had gazed at her, thinking that he would rather not sit another day staring at the high light on the faun, that he would rather not sit for his bust at all, and he had said, “Let’s skip it, Elaine.”

“Skip it? Why? I have a very good start, Edward.”

“I don’t feel so well, Elaine. I have a headache.”

She had come a step nearer him. “It will be restful just to sit there and relax. We’ll rest every five minutes, if you like.”

“But I simply don’t feel up to it, Elaine.”

She had examined him with hard, impersonal eyes, and there had been a strange authority in her bearing. All she had said was, “Please, Edward,” and he had shrugged his shoulders and followed her into the studio.

But now he thought uneasily that at some point in recent weeks their relationship had been reversed: he had taken the defensive and she had become increasingly dominant.

He stared morosely at the bronze faun, thinking that he must escape, he must free his brain of this absorbing doubt. If he was to be charged with prying, why not pry in earnest? Why not find out for himself? Go out to the cemetery and find out. Through the hours of posing he had become excited about it, and there was an anxious urgency in his mind that made him restless, unable to sit still.

“Time for rest,” Elaine said. “I’ll finish it by dark.”

“Finish it? Finish what?”

“The bust, of course.”

“Finish it this afternoon?”

“Edward, what’s the matter with you? Of course.”

“Nothing,” Edward said. “Nothing at all.” But he had a sense of dread. He could not wait; he must go at once. He could not wait for the bust to be finished. He said, “Elaine, I feel terrible. I’m going for a walk. Got to have some fresh air. I’ll be back in no time.”

He fled from the studio, caught up his hat in the hall. He found a taxicab at the corner and almost shouted, “Grand Central Terminal.”

On the train he was nervous and could not relax. As the afternoon sun sank lower he thought of Elaine in the studio, waiting beside the head of clay, the bust that would never be finished. Never, never be finished. Let her wait in the fading light of the studio with the shadows lengthening the planes of her face, he thought, until eternity. Maybe he was crazy, maybe he should have seen a psychiatrist, but he was determined that the bust would never be completed.

It was a quiet town and a golden glow lay over it as the sun’s rays slanted from just above the hills of the horizon. The caretaker was a strong old man with faded, incurious eyes and an irritating manner of deliberating over each word.

“The Peters plot? Don’t know it. Oh, Mrs. Edward Peters. Yes, Mrs. Rice that used to be. Just follow that path until you come to a big marble cross with the name Cowan on it. Turn right and the plot is along by the hedge, with dogwood around it.”

The Cowan cross loomed against the sunset sky. Edward turned right on the paved walk, his heels ringing loud in the graveyard. There ahead was the tall green hedge, to the left the grove of dogwood. He turned aside on a gravel path and came to a gladelike plot where the grass was very green and saw what he had come to see.

There were four niches and four urns, and looking down on the dark green grass in the shadowy gloom of dusk were the four heads of the four men, modeled in massive, brooding planes and cast in bronze.

They were here as Edward had known they would be, and he shivered, thinking that here bloomed asphodel, the pale flower of the dead, where souls unbodied dwelt, and was this an act of innocent sentiment or a monument to death? Why had they died and how?

He glanced fearfully around and knew that he would never learn the truth. He would never go back and there would be no fifth bust here amid the dogwood.

Then he walked gently forward over the turf toward the ashes of the previous four, to read the name of the man in between.