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.
The Meeting
A few years before his death, Cyril wrote a story about a school for “exceptional” children. It was not science fiction; it was not exactly a story, for that matter (being more description than event) and no one seemed to want to buy it. But it came out of Cyril’s heart, because one of his children was in just such a school. After his death I found the manuscript (or what was left of it, a page or two being missing) and it reached my heart as well. For the same reason. It lay in my files for years until I happened to come across it while looking for something else, and realized that it fit in well with a story notion that had been germinating in my mind, and “The Meeting” came out. It was awarded a Hugo at the 1973 World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto. It was my first writing Hugo (I’ve had some as an editor) and I was very glad to get it; but even more glad to be able to send the duplicate trophy to Cyril’s widow, as a long-overdue tribute to one of the most talented writers who ever graced our field.
HARRY VLADEK was too large for a man for his Volkswagen, but he was too poor a man to trade it in, and as things were going he was going to stay that way a long time. He applied the brakes carefully (“Master cylinder’s leaking like a sieve, Mr. Vladek; what’s the use of just fixing up the linings?”-but the estimate was a hundred and twenty-eight dollars, and where was it going to come from?) and parked in the neatly graveled lot. He squeezed out of the door, the upsetting telephone call from Dr. Nicholson on his mind, locked the car up and went into the school building.