He sat slouched, with a neutral expression on his face, on the upholstered bench that curved around the Mellers’ newel post, staring at the changing pattern of the dancers and thinking that when he went home tonight he would take a look at his herb boxes in the garage and see if the foxgloves were up. He was growing several kinds of herbs now, repressing their growth by depriving them of half their normal sunlight and water with a view to intensifying their flavor. Every afternoon he set the boxes in the sun at one o’clock, when he came home for lunch, and put them back into the garage at three, when he returned to his printing plant.
Victor Van Allen was thirty-six years old, of a little less than medium height, inclined to a general firm rotundity rather than fat, and he had thick, crisp brown eyebrows that stood out over innocent blue eyes. His brown hair was straight, closely cut, and like his eyebrows, thick and tenacious.
His mouth was middle-sized, firm, and usually drawn down at the right corner with a lopsided determination or with humor, depending on how one cared to take it. It was his mouth that made his face ambiguous—for one could read a bitterness in it, too—because his blue eyes, wide, intelligent, and unsurprisable, gave no clue as to what he was thinking or feeling.
In the last moments the noise had increased a decibel or so and the dancing had become more abandoned in response to the pulsing Latin music that had begun to play. The noise offended his ears, and still he sat, though he knew he could have wandered down the hall to his host’s study and browsed among the books there if he had cared to. He had had enough to drink to set up a faint, rhythmic buzzing in his cars, not entirely unpleasant. Perhaps the thing to do at a party, or at any gathering where liquor was available, was to match your drinking with the augmenting noise. Shut the noise out with your own noise. You could set up a little din of merry voices right inside your head. It would ease a great many things. Be never quite sober, never quite drunk. Dum non sobrius, tamen non ebrius.A fine epitaph for him, but unfortunately not true, he thought. The plain, dull fact was that most of the time he preferred to be alert.
Involuntarily his eyes focused on the suddenly organizing pattern: a conga line. And involuntarily he found Melinda, smiling a gay catch-me-if-you-can smily over her shoulder, and the man over her shoulder—way over it and practically in her hair, in fact—was Joel Nash. Vic sighed and sipped his drink. For a man who had been up dancing until three last night, and until five the night before, Mr. Nash was doing very well.
Vic started, feeling a hand on his left sleeve, but it was only old Mrs. Podnansky leaning toward him. He had almost forgotten she was there.
“I can’t thank you enough, Vic. You really won’t mind picking it up yourself?” She had asked him the same thing five or ten minutes ago.
“Of course not,” Vic said, smiling, standing up as she got up. “I’ll drop around tomorrow at about a quarter to one.”
Just then Melinda leaned toward him, across Mr. Nash’s arm, and said almost in Mrs. Podnansky’s face, though she looked at Vic, “Fuddy-duddy! Why don’t you dance?” and Vic saw Mrs. Podnansky jump and recover with a smile before she moved away.
Mr. Nash gave Vic a happy, slightly tipsy smile as he danced off with Melinda. And what kind of smile would you call that? Vic wondered. Comradely. That was the word. That was what Joel Nash had intended it to be. Vic deliberately took his eyes from Joel, though he had been on a certain train of thought that had to do with his face. It wasn’t his manner—hypocritical, half-embarrassed, half-assed—that irritated him so much as his face. That boyish roundness of the cheeks and of the forehead, that prettily waving light-brown hair, those regular features that women who liked him would describe as not too regular. Most women would call him handsome, Vic supposed. Vic remembered Mr. Nash looking up at him from the sofa as he handed him his empty glass for the sixth or eighth time last night, as if he were ashamed to be accepting another drink, ashamed to be staying fifteen minutes longer, and yet a certain brash insolence had predominated in his face. Up to now, Vic thought, Melinda’s boyfriends had at least had more brains or less insolence. Joel Nash wouldn’t be in the neighborhood forever, though. He was a salesman for the Furness-Klein Chemical Company of Wesley, Massachusetts, up for a few weeks of briefing on the company’s new products, he had said. If he had been going to make a home in Wesley or Little Wesley, Vic had no doubt that he would take Ralph Gosden’s place, regardless of how bored Melinda became with him or what a fluke he turned out to be in other respects, because Melinda was never able to resist what she thought was a handsome face, Joel would be more handsome than Ralph in Melinda’s opinion.
Vic looked up and saw Horace Meller standing beside him. “Hi there, Horace. Looking for a seat?”
“No, thanks.” Horace was a slight, graying man of middle height with a narrow sensitive face and a somewhat bushly black mustache. His mouth under the mustache wore the polite smile of a nervous host. Horace was always nervous, though the party was going as well as any host could have wished. “What’s happening at the plant, Vic?”
“Getting Xenophon ready,” Vic replied. In the din they could not talk very well. “Why don’t you drop around some evening?” Vic meant at the printing plant. He was always there until seven, and by himself after five, because Stephen and Carlyle went home at five.
“All right, I will,” Horace said. “Is your drink all right?”
Vic nodded that it was.
“I’ll be seeing you,” Horace said, moving off.
Vic felt a void as soon as he had left. An awkwardness. Something unsaid, and Vic knew what it was: Horace had tactfully refrained from mentioning Mr. Joel Nash. Hadn’t said Joel was nice, or welcome, or asked anything about him, or bothered with any of the banalities. Melinda had maneuvered Joel’s invitation to the party. Vic had heard her on the telephone with Mary Meller the day before yesterday: “…Well, not exactly a guest of ours, but we feel responsible for him because he doesn’t know many people in town…Oh, thanks, Mary! I didn’t think you’d mind having an extra man, and such a handsome one, too…” As if anyone could pry Melinda away from him with a crowbar. One more week, Vic thought. Seven more nights exactly. Mr. Nash was leaving on the first, a Sunday.
Joel Nash materialized, looming unsteadily in his broadshouldered white jacket, bringing his glass. “Good evening, Mr. Van Allen,” Joel said with a mock formality and plopped himself down where Mrs. Podnansky had been sitting. “How’re you tonight?”
“Oh, as usual,” Vic said, smiling.
“There’s two things I wanted to say to you,” Joel said with sudden enthusiasm, as if he had at that very moment thought of them. “One is I’ve been asked to stay a couple of weeks longer here—by my company—so I hope I can repay both of you for the abundant hospitality you’ve shown me in the last few weeks and-- ” Joel laughed in a boyish way, ducking his head.
Melinda had a genius for finding people like Joel Nash, Vic thought. Little marriages of true minds. “And the second?”
“The second—Well, the second is, I want to say what a brick I think you are for being so nice about my seeing your wife. Not that I have seen her very much, you understand, lunch a couple of times and a drive in the country, but--”
“But what?” Vic prompted, feeling suddenly stone sober and disgusted with Nash’s bland intoxication.
“Well, a lot of men would have knocked my block off for less—thinking it was more, of course. I can easily understand why you might be a little annoyed, but you’re not. I can see that. I suppose I want to say that I’m grateful to you for not punching my nose. Not that there’s been anything to punch it for, of course. You can ask Melinda, in case you’re in any doubt.”
Just the person to ask, of course. Vic stared at him with a calm indifference. The proper reply, Vic thought, was nothing.
“At any rate, I wanted to say I think you’re awfully sporting.” Nash added.
Joel Nash’s third affected Anglicism grated on Vic in an unpleasant way. “I appreciate your sentiments,” Vic said, with a small smile, “but I don’t waste my time punching people on the nose. If I really don’t like somebody, I kill him.”
“Kill him?” Mr. Nash smiled his merry smile.
“Yes. You remember Malcolm McRae, don’t you?” Vic knew that he knew about Malcolm McRae because Melinda had said that she had told Joel all about the “McRae mystery,” and that Joel had been very interested because he had seen McRae once or twice in New York on business matters.
“Yes,” Joel Nash said attentively.
Joel Nash’s smile had grown smaller. It was now a mere protective device. Melinda had undoubtedly told Joel that Mal had had quite a crush on her. That always added spice to the story.
“You’re kidding me,” Joel said.
In that instant, from his words and his face, Vic knew two things: that Joel Nash had already made love to his wife, and that his own dead-calm attitude in the presence of Melinda and Joel had made quite an impression. Vic had frightened him—not only now, but on certain evenings at the house. Vic had never shown a sign of conventional jealousy. People who do not behave in an orthodox manner, Vic thought, are by definition frightening. “No, I’m not kidding,” Vic said with a sigh, taking a cigarette from his pack, then offering the pack to Joel.
Joel Nash shook his head.
“He got a bit forward, as they say—with Melinda. She may have told you. But it wasn’t that so much as his entire personality that irked me. His cocksureness and his eternally passing out somewhere, so people’d had to put him up. And his revolting parsimony.” Vic fixed his cigarette in his holder and clamped it between his teeth.
“I don’t believe you.”
“I think you do. Not that it matters.”
“You really killed Malcolm McRae?”
“Who else do you think did?” Vic waited, but there was no answer. “Melinda told me you’d met him, or knew about him. Did you have any theories? I’d like to hear them. Theories interest me. More than fact sometimes.”
“I haven’t any theories,” Joel said in a defensive tone.
Vic noticed a withdrawal, a fear, just in the way Mr. Nash was sitting on the bench now. Vic leaned back, raised and lowered his shaggy brown eyebrows, and blew his smoke out straight in front of him.
There was a silence.
Mr. Nash was turning over various remarks in his mind, Vic knew. Vic even knew the kind of remark he would make.
“Considering he was a friend of yours,” Joel began, just as Vic had known he would, “I don’t think it’s very funny of you to joke about his death.”
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