and said, “Good night. Good night. I’m expecting him home next week.” She was not easily upset, but she suddenly felt that she had looked straight at stupidity and unfairness. Going down the stairs behind Mackham, she felt a powerful mixture of pity and sympathy for the stranger and some clear anger toward her old friend Mark Barrett. She wanted to apologize, and she stopped Mackham in the door and said that she had some cheerful memories of her own involving a public library.
As it happened, Mrs. Selfredge and Mayor Simmons were the last to leave the board room. The Mayor waited, with his hand on the light switch, for Mrs. Selfredge, who was putting on her white gloves. “I’m glad the library’s over and done with,” he said. “I have a few misgivings, but right now I’m against anything public, anything that would make this community attractive to a development.” He spoke with feeling, and at the word “development” a ridge covered with identical houses rose in his mind. It seemed wrong to him that the houses he imagined should be identical and that they should be built of green wood and false stone. It seemed wrong to him that young couples should begin their lives in an atmosphere that lacked grace, and it seemed wrong to him that the rows of houses could not, for long, preserve their slender claim on propriety and would presently become unsightly tracts. “Of course, it isn’t a question of keeping children from books,” he repeated. “We all have libraries of our own. There isn’t any problem. I suppose you were brought up in a house with a library?”
“Oh yes, yes,” said Mrs. Selfredge. The Mayor had turned off the light, and the darkness covered and softened the lie she had told. Her father had been a Brooklyn patrolman, and there had not been a book in his house. He had been an amiable man?not very sweet-smelling?who talked to all the children on his beat. Slovenly and jolly, he had spent the years of his retirement drinking beer in the kitchen in his underwear, to the deep despair and shame of his only child.
The Mayor said good night to Mrs. Selfredge on the sidewalk, and standing there she overheard Marcie speaking to Mackham. “I’m terribly sorry about Mark, about what he said,” Marcie said. “We’ve all had to put up with him at one time or another. But why don’t you come back to my house for a drink? Perhaps we could get the library project moving again.”
So it wasn’t over and done with, Mrs. Selfredge thought indignantly. They wouldn’t rest until Shady Hill was nothing but developments from one end to the other. The colorless, hard-pressed people of the Carsen Park project, with their flocks of children, and their monthly interest payments, and their picture windows, and their view of identical houses and treeless, muddy, unpaved streets, seemed to threaten her most cherished concepts?her lawns, her pleasures, her property rights, even her self-esteem.
Mr. Selfredge, an intelligent and elegant old gentleman, was waiting up for his Little Princess and she told him her troubles. Mr. Selfredge had retired from the banking business?mercifully, for whenever he stepped out into the world today he was confronted with the deterioration of those qualities of responsibility and initiative that had made the world of his youth selective, vigorous, and healthy. He knew a great deal about Shady Hill?he even recognized Mackham’s name. “The bank holds the mortgage on his house,” he said. “I remember when he applied for it. He works for a textbook company in New York that has been accused by at least one Congressional committee of publishing subversive American histories. I wouldn’t worry about him, my dear, but if it would put your mind at ease, I could easily write a letter to the paper.”
“BUT THE CHILDREN were not as far away as I thought,” Charlie wrote, aboard the Augustus. “They were still in the garden. And the significance of that hour for them, I guess, was that it was made for stealing food. I have to make up or imagine what took place with them. They may have been drawn into the house by a hunger as keen as mine. Coming into the hall and listening for sounds, they would hear nothing, and they would open the icebox slowly, so that the sound of the heavy latch wouldn’t be heard. The icebox must have been disappointing, because Henry wandered over to the sink and began to eat the sodium arsenate. ‘Candy,’ he said, and Katie joined him, and they had a fight over the remaining poison. They must have stayed in the kitchen for quite a while, because they were still in the kitchen when Henry began to retch. ‘Well, don’t get it all over everything,’ Katie said. ‘Come on outside.’ She was beginning to feel sick herself, and they went outside and hid under a syringa bush, which is where I found them when I dressed and came down.
“They told me what they had eaten, and I woke Marcie up and then ran downstairs again and called Doc Mullens. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said. ‘I’ll be right over.’ He asked me to read the label on the jar, but all it said was sodium arsenate; it didn’t say the percentage. And when I told him I had bought it from Timmons, he told me to call and ask Timmons who the manufacturer was. The line was busy and so, while Marcie was running back and forth between the two sick children, I jumped into the car and drove to the village. There was a lot of light in the sky, I remember, but it was nearly dark in the streets. Timmons’ drugstore was the only place that was lighted, and it was the kind of place that seems to subsist on the crumbs from other tradesmen’s tables. This late hour when all the other stores were shut was Timmons’ finest. The crazy jumble of displays in his windows?irons, ashtrays, Venus in a truss, ice bags, and perfumes?was continued into the store itself, which seemed like a pharmaceutical curiosity shop or funhouse: a storeroom for cardboard beauties anointing themselves with sun oil; for cardboard mountain ranges in the Alpine glow, advertising pine-scented soap; for bookshelves, and bins filled with card-table covers, and plastic water pistols. The drugstore was a little like a house, too, for Mrs. Timmons stood behind the soda fountain, a neat and anxious-looking woman, with photographs of her three sons (one dead) in uniform arranged against the mirror at her back, and when Timmons himself came to the counter, he was chewing on something and wiped the crumbs of a sandwich off his mouth with the back of his hand. I showed him the jar and said, ‘The kids ate some of this about an hour ago. I called Doc Mullens, and he told me to come and see you. It doesn’t say what the percentage of arsenate is, and he thought if you could remember where you got it, we could telephone the manufacturer and find out.’
“‘The children are poisoned?’ Timmons asked.
“‘Yes!’ I said.
“‘You didn’t buy this merchandise from me,’ he said.
“The clumsiness of his lie and the stillness in that crazy store made me feel hopeless. ‘I did buy it from you, Mr. Timmons,’ I said. ‘There’s no question about that. My children are deathly sick. I want you to tell me where you got the stuff.’
“‘You didn’t buy this merchandise from me,’ he said.
