listen to that horrible noise for the rest of my life?” They would both be in nightgowns, her snow-white hair in braids. She picked up the chamber pot and threw its contents at him. He kicked down the door of the locked bathroom, washed, dressed, packed a bag, and walked over the bridge to Mrs. Wallace’s place on the East Bank.
He stayed there for three days and then returned. He was worried about Molly, and in such a small place there were appearances to be considered?Mrs. Wallace’s as well as his own. He divided his time between the East and the West banks of the river until a week or so later, when he was taken ill. He felt languid. He stayed in bed until noon. When he dressed and went to his office he returned after an hour or so. The doctor examined him and found nothing wrong.
One evening Mrs. Wallace saw Mrs. Cabot coming out of the drugstore on the East Bank. She watched her rival cross the bridge and then went into the drugstore and asked the clerk if Mrs. Cabot was a regular customer. “I’ve been wondering about that myself,” the clerk said. “Of course she comes over here to collect her rents, but I always thought she used the other drugstore. She comes in here to buy ant poison?arsenic, that is. She says they have these terrible ants in the house on Shore Road and arsenic is the only way of getting rid of them. From the way she buys arsenic the ants must be terrible.” Mrs. Wallace might have warned Mr. Cabot but she never saw him again.
She went after the funeral to Judge Simmons and said that she wanted to charge Mrs. Cabot with murder. The drug clerk would have a record of her purchases of arsenic that would be incriminating. “He may have them,” the judge said, “but he won’t give them to you. What you are asking for is an exhumation of the body and a long trial in Barnstable, and you have neither the money nor the reputation to support this. You were his friend, I know, for sixteen years. He was a splendid man and why don’t you console yourself with the thought of how many years it was that you knew him? And another thing. He’s left you and Wallace a substantial legacy. If Mrs. Cabot were provoked to contest the will you could lose this.”
I went out to Luxor to see Geneva. I flew to London in a 707. There were only three passengers; but as I say the prophets of doom are out of work. I went from Cairo up the Nile in a low-flying two-motor prop. The sameness of wind erosion and water erosion makes the Sahara there seem to have been gutted by floods, rivers, courses, streams, and brooks, the thrust of a natural search. The scorings are watery and arboreal, and as a false stream bed spreads out it takes the shape of a tree, striving for light. It was freezing in Cairo when we left before dawn. Luxor, where Geneva met me at the airport, was hot.
I was very happy to see her, so happy I was unobservant, but I did notice that she had gotten fat. I don’t mean that she was heavy; I mean that she weighed about three hundred pounds. She was a fat woman. Her hair, once a coarse yellow, was now golden but her Massachusetts accent was as strong as ever. It sounded like music to me on the Upper Nile. Her husband?now a colonel?was a slender, middle-aged man, a relative of the last king. He owned a restaurant at the edge of the city and they lived in a pleasant apartment over the dining room. The colonel was humorous, intelligent?a rake, I guess?and a heavy drinker. When we went to the temple at Karnak our dragoman carried ice, tonic, and gin. I spent a week with them, mostly in temples and graves. We spent the evenings in his bar. War was threatening?the air was full of Russian planes?and the only other tourist was an Englishman who sat at the bar, reading his passport. On the last day I swam in the Nile over hand?and they drove me to the airport, where I kissed Geneva?and the Cabots?goodbye.
The End
