“ARSENIC AND OLD LACE”
The one word which perhaps best describes Joseph Kesselring’s classic 1940s farce, Arsenic and Old Lace, is “romp”—and the same word applies to Pauline C. Smith’s “The Pill Problem.” Like the play, this story has a dizzying, quietly mad plot, a good deal of rather macabre humor, and a memorable and wacky cast of characters; and it is a dandy McGuffin in the bargain. Mrs. Smith, a gentle lady who lives in Southern California, has to her credit an impressive list of sometimes bloodthirsty, uniformly excellent short stories, one of which was nominated for an Edgar in 1972 and several of which have been included in the annual Best Detective Stories of the Year. - B.P.
Phyllis Crenshaw was a slob. In an ordinary dining chair, her fat lopped over the seat and puffed against the back. However, Phyllis no longer sat in a dining chair, up to a table; not since the doctor had told her in no uncertain terms and with a concerned click of his tongue, “Mrs. Crenshaw, you are in terrible shape.”
That was obvious. She knew her shape was terrible.
Then the doctor added not only a word of advice, but an awful prognostication: “If you don’t take off some of that weight, you are going to drop dead.”
A brutal statement, but effective.
Phyllis went on an immediate diet, not the high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet the doctor had ordered and carefully written out, but one she herself devised, solidly liquid and sweetly noncaloric, consisting of tea loaded with saccharin. She drank this diet all day long, sometimes even at night when she awakened famished.
Horace Crenshaw, Phyllis’ husband, was toothpick thin and nervous as a cat. He leaped at sudden sounds and breathed fast when he walked more than ten steps. He looked miserable.
The doctor told him so. “Mr. Crenshaw,” he said, “you’ve got to take care of yourself,” and wrote out a prescription for nitroglycerin tablets, explaining how, at the first sign of tightness in his chest, Horace was to pop one of those tablets under his tongue.
The doctor’s diagnosis in each case was absolutely correct. Phyllis was appallingly obese and Horace’s heart posed a fluttering problem. His diagnoses, however, had embraced only the effect and not the cause of the Crenshaws’ condition, which had begun twenty-five years before when Phyllis, slim as a reed, married Horace, sturdy as an oak.
They were a handsome couple then, not too young and not too old for marriage, so everything might have been fine when they set up housekeeping in the Crenshaw family home except that they began to get on each other’s nerves.
Phyllis turned out to be coy beyond Horace’s belief, and Horace came up as a fuddy-dud, which was really too bad because they had everything going for them—the Crenshaw Lumber Company, the palatial house and the very first seven-inch television set in town that Phyllis named “Rover.”
She named things: the car, the rosebushes and the fireside chairs. She bounced and ducked her head when she chattered. She squealed and giggled. Horace took unsmiling refuge behind his cold pipe, beginning to hate her.
Early in their marriage, Phyllis shed her cutesy ways and settled down to a total involvement with food. She spent half her time in the kitchen turning out souffles, dumplings, chocolate chiffon pies, noodles, and sponge cake, and the other half eating what she had prepared. Every time she opened her mouth to stuff something into it, Horace’s heart murmured.
She ate through the next twenty years, growing so fat that Gertrude, who used to come two days a week to do the heavy cleaning, finally was needed six days a week to do everything, and Horace retired from the business (being only a figurehead anyway) to rest his jumping heart in his Morris chair in the den.
From then on, Horace emerged only occasionally at a slow walk to see if Phyllis might be in her usual place, overflowing the big fanback chair in the back parlor. She generally was—with a food tray fitted across the arms. He then walked slowly back to the den to sink down in the Morris chair and feel his heart hammer out an uneven hostility.
With Horace forever home, Phyllis chewed him up with her steaks and swallowed him with barbecue sauce.
Even Gertrude, somewhat slow-witted, noticed that this was a house divided against itself, and discussed it with her equally slow-witted husband in the evenings.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Don’t know what?” he asked.
“About them!”
“What about them?” he coaxed. “They sure are funny.”
It was after the doctor’s visit that Phyllis took her last waddle up the stairs to her bedroom to instruct Gertrude to cart down all her bedroom furniture and put it into the back parlor and cart all the back parlor furniture up to her bedroom (all except the fanback chair), then she went downstairs and stayed there.
Gertrude was still gasping from her labors when Horace decided that he too must never again tax his heart by climbing the stairs, and instructed her to exchange his bedroom furniture for that in the den (leaving the Morris chair where it was, of course).
“I never,” breathed Gertrude to her husband that night.
‘‘You never what?” he asked.
“I never seen the like. All that hauling and pulling. They must think I’m a horse.”
“What hauling and pulling?”
“The furniture. Upstairs and downstairs.”
“How come?’’
“She wants to sleep downstairs now—in the back parlor. He wants to sleep downstairs too—in the den.”
“Maybe they want to be close to each other.”
“YOU kidding?”
The grocery store delivered a case of tea and the drugstore delivered a bottle of 1000 quarter-grain tablets of soluble saccharin, and Phyllis took off on her diet, immediately establishing a pattern of twenty to twenty-five cups of tea a day, each loaded with so much sweetener that the drugstore made an automatic once-a-week delivery, packing the orders so that the prescription bottle of nitroglycerin tablets and the bottle of saccharin tablets could be sent on the same day.
“You wouldn’t believe it,” Gertrude told her husband.
“I wouldn’t believe what?” he asked.
‘‘Now they keep their pills in little saucers.”
“Who?”
“Both her and him. She has me dump ’em out of the bottle into this saucer and has the saucer right there in the back parlor so she can grab a handful for her tea. She says it’s easier. He does the same thing. He’s got a saucerful of his right next to him in the den all the time. He says that way he don’t have to unscrew the cap while he’s maybe having a heart attack and he might be dead before he gets it unscrewed.”
Phyllis’ diet told on her almost immediately, not that there was much noticeable difference in her weight, the puffy fat simply changing to droopy fat—but it was her strength that lessened, her only exercise being a weak totter from the back parlor to the downstairs bathroom at the end of the hall, a trip she was forced to make frequently because of all the tea she consumed.
Now and then she met Horace in the hallway, usually on his way to the dining room for a fulsome low-fat meal. At these times, she glared in resentful envy and he glared back with contemptuous hatred. It was after one of these silent glare-filled meetings that Phyllis, on her way to the bathroom, thought of killing Horace, and he, on his way to the dining room, thought how nice it would be if Phyllis were dead.
“They look just alike,” Gertrude said to her husband when she got home.
“Who?” he asked.
“The pills.”
“You mean her and him?”
“No. The pills they take. Hers for her tea and his for his heart. One of the bottles is littler than the other, but I always forget which is which because the pills look exactly the same. So I stop and look while I’m still out in the hall to see whose name is on what bottle, and then I put his little bottle in my left hand and her bigger bottle in my right hand so they’ll be all ready for when I go into the back parlor and empty hers out in her saucer and then on into the den to empty his out in his saucer.”
It was Gertrude’s weekly anxiety that she would, somehow, get those pills mixed. She soothed herself, however, with the comforting knowledge that should she confuse them and her employers found out, she could quickly correct her mistake by using the spares, since Mr. Crenshaw had two extra bottles of nitroglycerin tablets in his desk drawer in the den and Mrs. Crenshaw had two extra bottles of saccharin tablets in her dresser drawer in the back parlor.
Phyllis did not realize that the shape, size and weight of her saccharin tablets were identical to Horace’s nitroglycerin tablets until one delivery day when she happened to be tottering up the hall from the bathroom at the same time the doorbell rang. She opened the door, accepted the two bottles, closed the door and leaned against it, her eyes widening in the droopy folds of her cheeks.
“They look just alike,” she told Gertrude who appeared in the hall to answer the doorbell.
“Yes, ma’am,” Gertrude said, then she added, to indicate her astute alertness, “but one bottle is bigger than the other,” and hoped Mrs. Crenshaw would not ask her which bottle was which. “And they got your names on each one, see.”
The quarter-grain saccharin tablets in the larger bottle were about one-tenth the size of an aspirin and probably two-thirds the thickness. Phyllis held both bottles close to her eyes and studied their contents. The 0.6 mg 1/100 grain nitroglycerin tablets in the smaller bottle were exactly the same size, shape, and thickness as the saccharin tablets. The pills could be switched, Phyllis decided, and she would not know the difference outside the bottle, so if she would not know the difference, neither would Horace, and certainly not dumb Gertrude.
She handed Gertrude the smaller bottle with a warning, “You be careful now,” and tottered off to the back parlor with her bottle of saccharin tablets to think things over.
“Now I’m worried,” Gertrude confessed to her husband.
“What are you worried about?” he asked.
“She’s got me so nervous about the pills I almost forget, even before I get to the back parlor, which one’s in my left hand and which one’s in my right, and which one is the big one and which is the little one. Even reading the names, the writing gets so blurred with my nervousness I’m not sure which is Mr. and which is Mrs.”
“Maybe if they look all that much alike, it don’t make any difference,” soothed Gertrude’s husband, who wasn’t very smart.
“Maybe it don’t,” answered Gertrude, a little on the dull side herself. Then she added later, after profound contemplation, “But I think maybe it does.”
She continued to worry, particularly after Mr. Crenshaw answered the doorbell on a pill delivery day while she was out in the back yard hanging up clothes, and greeted her with essentially the same expression of dawning inspiration on his face as had been on his wife’s, and the same cautionary tone in his voice she had used. “Gertrude,” he said, “the pills in these bottles look exactly the same. I want you to be careful.”
“I know, sir. I will, sir,” she answered, trembling, and pointed out the difference in bottle size and the individual names on the bottles, to which he did not appear to be listening. Instead, as he walked toward the den with his smaller bottle of nitroglycerin tablets, he seemed to be greatly absorbed in his own thoughts.
“I just hope,” Gertrude said to her husband, “that I don’t get rushed when I have to dump out those pills someday.”
“What would rush you?” her husband asked.
“Well, I don’t know,” she said, distracted. Then, calmer and after due reflection, “Nothing, I guess.”
But something did.
The drugstore always delivered the Crenshaw order late in the morning or during the early afternoon; but on a damp spring day with half the town down with the flu, including one of the pharmacists and the store’s only delivery boy, the Crenshaw order was necessarily late. So late, in fact, that Gertrude, anxious to be off and home before the brewing storm set in, leaped timidly in startled recollection of her fearsome duty when the doorbell rang, almost dropping the coffee service she was carrying into the dining room to Mr. Crenshaw.
She set down the tray, streaked up the hall just as Mrs. Crenshaw tottered down it toward the bathroom, opened the front door, snatched the two bottles and stood in the twilight-shadowed hallway in an agony of indecision, the Mr. and Mrs. labels of identification a blur before her nervous eyes.
Coming to a sudden, irresolute compromise, she switched the small bottle to her right hand, clutched the larger one in her left, scurried into the back parlor, dumped the nitroglycerin tablets into Mrs. Crenshaw’s saucer, scampered across the hall to dump the saccharin tablets into Mr. Crenshaw’s saucer and was back in the kitchen before Mr. Crenshaw had barely sipped at his first cup of after-dinner coffee in the dining room.
Phyllis tottered from the bathroom, feeling the immediate need of a sweet cup of tea. Remembering the ring of the doorbell, she glanced through into the dining room, glared at Horace’s back as he sat at the table polishing off a satisfying meal, gnashed her teeth, tottered to the back parlor, whisked up the saucerful of fresh nitroglycerin tablets placed there through Gertrude’s error, tottered to the den, switched the saucers, thus mistakenly correcting Gertrude’s error, tottered to the bathroom, flushed the saccharin tablets from Horace’s bedside down the toilet and emerged with the empty saucer clasped to her drooping bosom.
Phyllis then tottered to the back parlor, emptied a spare bottleful of saccharin tablets from her dresser drawer into the den saucer, poured a steaming cupful of tea, laced it liberally with saccharin, and enjoyed the sweetness of her labors.
Gertrude tidied up the kitchen, called a good night to Mr. Crenshaw, who was still at the table, called nothing to Mrs. Crenshaw, supposing her to be in the bathroom, and gave no further thought to the pills until after she had plowed through the rain and reached home.
“My gracious!” she exclaimed to her husband.
“My gracious what?” he asked.
“I was in such a hurry when they came.”
“Her and him?”
“Their pills. I think I got it all straight, though.”
“Got what straight?”
“The pills. The ones that go to her and the ones that go to him.” She pondered, attempting to recapture her thoughts and actions during those crucial moments with the pill bottles in her hands after they were delivered.
“At least I think I got it straight,” she qualified.
Phyllis lay back, warmed and energized by her over-sweetened tea, allowing pleasant pictures to flicker through her mind...all of Horace. As soon as all the coffee had begun to swell the food in his stomach, tightening up his chest, he would push from the table, stagger to the den and reach in desperation for a pill from his saucer, place it under his tongue and get no relief. She pictured his panic, his passionate and futile snatch at pill after pill, reaching out for his ebbing life as he gagged and clutched at his heart.
The pictures were as sweetly bitter as the taste of saccharin still on her tongue, and she drifted into dreamless sleep as they faded out.
“But what if I didn’t?” Gertrude worried later that evening.
“What if you didn’t what?” asked her husband.
“What if I didn’t get those pills straight? What if I gave her his and him hers?”
“If they look alike,” he explained, “they probably taste alike. So it’ll be all right.”
Gertrude was not sure; but, then, Gertrude was unsure about everything.
Restless, unable to sleep, Horace was acutely aware of Phyllis’ heavy breathing. It resounded from the back parlor, beat against the walls of the hall and entered the den in an explosion of cacophonous sound that triggered his fingers for the saucer and the correct pill, since Phyllis mistakenly had corrected Gertrude’s error. As the nitroglycerin tablet dissolved under his tongue, easing his erratic heart to a slow and steady hammer of hatred, Horace remembered his inspirational thought the day he discovered his heart-steadying tablets to be identical to those that Phyllis packed in her teacup—in size, shape, and weight.
The snore thundered as Horace rose with determination and, shuffling on bare feet, carefully picked up his saucer-filled nitroglycerin just-alike pills. It was raining and dark, the hall patterned with small far-apart circles of night lights marking a path for his slim, white, groping feet.
The back parlor was a well of darkness filled with sound. He made his way around the fanback chair and the bed, holding his elbows close to his pajama’d sides, cupping the saucer in two hands as if it were the Holy Grail—or a Borgia cup.
The snoring intake of breath in the darkness and the whistling outpour, sent his heart to a crescendo accompaniment. He paused, felt in the saucer with delicate thumb and forefinger, lifted a tiny pill and popped it under his tongue, smiled in the dark, and reached for the saucer by the side of the sleeper.
He set down his own saucer and picked up the other. The snoring halted, quivered on the air, and resumed a fine, rich obbligato.
Almost youthfully, nearly healthfully, Horace left the room nimbly and on his toes. He walked the faint light-circled hallway quickly, entered the bathroom and flushed the saccharin pills that Phyllis had so carefully supplied from her dresser drawer bottle, down the toilet. Then he returned to the den, opened his desk drawer, plucked out one of his spare bottles of nitroglycerin, filled the saucer, and lay down slowly to think about Phyllis.
Immediately upon waking she would, he knew, reach for the teakettle, put it on the hot plate and pour herself a cup of tea, tossing in a handful of death. He curled in a fetal position, hugging his chest and his knees, his heart steady and strong against his arms as he thought of what would happen then.
First, her fat face and padded neck would flush, she would feel the heat like fire. Then would come the headache, during which she would probably cry out…to no one, for he would be asleep and would not hear. She would flounce and flounder, attempting to rise, to reach the hall—and him, which would do her no good—or the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, which would do her no good either. Dizziness would then send her reeling back to the bed or crashing to the floor in a faint—and no one would hear the crash, for he would sleep soundly, and Gertrude would not yet have arrived. The pupils of her eyes would dilate finally—blue eyes staring black just before cyanosis, collapse, and death.
Horace slept, a smile on his face.
Gertrude poked her husband in the darkness just before dawn. “Huh?” He half woke, dazed.
“I’ve been thinking. I woke up thinking,” Gertrude said.
“Huh?”
“I’m pretty sure I got them mixed.”
Her husband pulled himself forth. “Who?” he asked. “Him and her?”
“Their pills. I remember now.” Her voice reached a high note of guilty hysteria. “I put the little bottle in my right hand and the big bottle in my left hand. But the little bottle was supposed to be in my left hand and the big bottle was supposed to be in my right.” She leaped from the bed.
Gertrude’s husband sat up in an attempt to sort out such an intricate statement.
Damp light streaked the sky as Gertrude, her raincoat crackling with movement, scampered through the alley, up the back walk and nervously fitted the key in the Crenshaw back door.
She dropped her raincoat on the kitchen floor and stood, frozen, listening to what was either a two-hour-earlier silence in the house or a several-hours-later death caused by her.
She began to whimper and crept from the kitchen through the shadowed dining room. Her frightened eyes took in the coffee service on the table, the coffee cup stained darkly, the chair pushed back… So Mr. Crenshaw lived through his coffee at least…
She had reached the hall when she heard the first sound. She jerked to attention. A familiar sound, the sound of the teakettle dragged from the hot plate in the back parlor.
She ran, and reached the room just as Mrs. Crenshaw scooped up a handful of nitroglycerin tablets placed there by Horace in the night.
Mrs. Crenshaw dropped the pills into the cup.
“Mrs. Crenshaw!” cried Gertrude.
She looked fine, just as unhealthily fat and diet-drooped as usual, still sleepy, ready for her first cup of tea.
“Mrs. Crenshaw?”
Gertrude shrank in the doorway in a torment of perplexity—how in the world could she get those little white pellets of death away from her employer without letting her know that she had committed an awful error? Her hands fluttered, tears sprang to her eyes as she watched Mrs. Crenshaw stir the tea, holding the string of the teabag from tangling.
Phyllis looked up in surprise at Gertrude’s dawn-early appearance, then in astonishment at her agitatedly twitching nose and the fingers that danced a perturbed tremolo—what in the name of heaven was the matter with that fool girl? Then she dropped the teabag string and clattered her spoon in her cup, remembering slowly, coming awake gradually after her fine deep sleep following her switch of the pills which she fondly hoped would give only sweet conclusion, not remedy, to Horace’s ailing heart.
“Mr. Crenshaw?” she cried and rolled from the bed with fantastic agility. “He’s dead?” she caroled with optimism, and tottered energetically past Gertrude, who had flattened herself against the wall.
Gertrude pounced. She dumped the pills into her apron pocket, those very nitroglycerin tablets Horace had so quietly deposited in the night which had reversed Phyllis’ mistaken correction of Gertrude’s original error. She yanked open the dresser drawer, took out the remaining bottle of saccharin tablets, dumped them into the saucer, and flew from the room, forgetting entirely the dissolved danger in the tea, and bumped into Mrs. Crenshaw in the hall.
“He isn’t dead,” Mrs. Crenshaw gritted through her teeth; then in awe, “He’s just as alive as you and me,” and finally in wonder, “What in the world went wrong?” and flounced, tottering, into the back parlor and reached for her teacup.
Gertrude, her mind still on the pills in her pocket, scurried down the hall to the bathroom and flushed them down the toilet, her corrective mission now half accomplished. Then she thought of Mrs. Crenshaw’s remark, not why she had made it, but that it had been made, and selected the one phrase that gave her comfort—Mr. Crenshaw was still alive, so she had not killed him. She rushed for the den to keep him alive and found him in a state.
‘‘Mr. Crenshaw,” she cried just as he popped a pill under his tongue. ‘‘Mr. Crenshaw,” as he muttered an incredible something about the “constitution of an ox,” and a garbled query of bewilderment as to what in hell went wrong? “Mr. Crenshaw,” as he pushed past her and shambled rapidly down the hall.
The bathroom door slammed, and a muffled crash sounded from the back parlor.
Gertrude raced across the den for the saucer pills she supposed to be the saccharin tablets she had so stupidly dumped there the day before, but which were, instead, the nitroglycerin tablets from Horace’s desk drawer that he had replaced for the nitroglycerin tablets Phyllis had exchanged for the saccharin tablets Gertrude had so stupidly dumped there in the beginning. Gertrude dumped the nitroglycerin tablets from the saucer into her apron pocket, yanked open the desk drawer and took out the remaining bottle of nitroglycerin tablets, dumped them into the now empty saucer, heard Mrs. Crenshaw’s plaintive call following the crash, closed the drawer, smoothed her apron, took several long, righteous breaths of rectification and marched down the hall to the back parlor.
It had been a long day for Gertrude. She described it to her husband that night.
“It was a real long day,” she said.
“Sure,” he agreed. “It started early.”
“But I got them all fixed up.”
“Him and her?”
“Their pills. It was a good thing I went so early. She was fixing a cup of tea when I got there. With the pills in it. The wrong pills.”
“You mean his pills in her saucer?”
“I was lucky. As soon as she saw me, she got up to go to the den to look at him. She’s never done that before, but maybe she does it early in the morning before I get there. And this morning I got there early enough so I saw her do it. But while she was gone, I got rid of those wrong pills in her saucer, put them into my apron pocket and dumped in some right pills from a bottle in her dresser drawer. Then I went to the bathroom and flushed the wrong pills from my pocket down the toilet.
“I went to the den after that to see if he was alive and he was. I was lucky again, because he went charging off to the bathroom. He seemed to be mad about something. Anyway, while he was gone, I put his wrong pills from his saucer into my pocket and got his extra bottle of right pills out of the desk drawer to put in his saucer. Then I went back to the back parlor…” Gertrude paused to breathe heavily.
“Was she dead yet?” her husband asked.
“Was who dead?”
“Her. She had that cup of tea with the wrong pills in it. That’s what you said. You said you dumped out the wrong saucer pills. But you didn’t say anything about dumping out the wrong cup pills, see?”
Gertrude stared at her husband blankly. Then she clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes horrified. “My goodness!” she mumbled behind her hand, remembering at last how, in her eagerness to dispose of the killing saucer pills, she had completely forgotten the lethal cup of tea.
She jerked up from her chair, thinking she should go back to the Crenshaws and do something about that cup of tea, her mind pinpointed, caught at dawn as she realized her one sin of omission during the rectification of her original error. Then she sank back, slowly and limply, further remembering how it had been.
“She broke it,” she said with sudden thanksgiving, not knowing, until now, that she had this extra blessing to be thankful for.
“The pills?” asked her husband.
“The cup. The cup with the wrong pills in it. She broke it. That was the crash, and that’s why she called me. It was all over the floor in pieces, the cup and the tea with the pills in it. She was nervous—her hands were shaking about as bad as mine…” Gertrude held out her quivering hands and began to laugh, a laugh that quivered along with her hands. “She broke it with the pills in it, the wrong pills.”
“Well, now you can start all over,” said Gertrude’s husband. “And I’m sure not going to mix up those pills again. I’m going to keep everything straight from now on.”
“Sure you will.”
Gertrude heaved a sigh and hauled herself up out of her chair. “Shall I heat up some coffee?” she suggested, feeling the need of strength after her day-long ordeal and her just-realized, freshly-escaped burden.
“Sure thing,” said her husband.
She started for the kitchen.
“You flushed all them pills down the toilet all right?” asked her husband. “So her and him won’t get hold of the wrong ones?”
Gertrude paused and ground her brain into action. “Yes,” she said, thinking back. Then she felt the bulge in her apron pocket. “Oh, no,” she cried out contritely. “Oh, no. I forgot the last bunch. They were those wrong ones of Mr. Crenshaw’s. He was in the bathroom, and I went to clean up her broken cup with her wrong ones in it. I forgot—and here they are.”
“Which ones are those?”
“They’re the ones I got out of his saucer. The mixed-up ones. The ones that should have gone to her and went to him.” She looked critically at her husband, then patted her own ample hips. “We’re both putting on a little weight. What do you say we use these in our coffee, instead of sugar?”
“You’re sure they’re all right?” questioned her husband. “You sure they’re the right ones?”
“Of course I’m sure,” Gertrude said. “These are Mr. Crenshaw’s that were supposed to be Mrs. Crenshaw’s. Didn’t I tell you I’m never going to get mixed up again?”
Gertrude and her husband sat down to drink their coffee.