Name Your Poison. Helen Inc. Reilly

talk—it was all very gay. Eleanor and Frances were discussing Brian’s man, Walter, and his periodic sprees, also the changes in the house that Brian was going to have to make. “There ought to be another room…They could throw out a wing…”

      Julie was sitting on the arm of the couch and Brian was standing behind her. “Four days…” he said quietly. She leaned back and looked up at him. “…will quickly turn themselves to night. Four nights…”

      Neither of them heard the doors open. They didn’t hear anything unexpected at all. The fire was the natural center of the room, and the entire group was clustered loosely around it. Their own voices and a laugh from Sam were cut across sharply. Another voice, a strange voice, said, “Good evening.”

      They swung in a united movement. A woman was standing between the partially opened glass doors. She had on a leopard coat, and a small leopard toque was tipped sideways over her black hair. It was the woman who had been with Bill Conroy in the Biltmore. She was smiling a little. It wasn’t a pleasant smile. Her eyes were making a circle. They rested on Julie, moved to Brian.

      Julie knew then what it was that Brian and Eleanor and perhaps Sam and Frances had been concealing from her. The lights didn’t dim or the walls fade. Instead a fierce brilliance beat whitely on the room and all the people in it, on Mouse crushed into the curve of the grand piano, as wooden as she had been when Bill Conroy had left her in Sarah’s little study, on Joe, his plain gaunt face knobby and mottled, on Sam’s carved immobility. Frances’s thin ringed hand was a balled fist on a crossed knee. As for Brian, something deep inside Julie twisted.

      Home is the hunter, home from the hill, and the sailor is home from the sea. The woman in the doorway was Brian’s wife. She spoke, and her words fell like little stones into the well of paralyzed silence her appearance had produced. Her voice was husky. It had a faintly foreign inflection. She said, “I’m back, Brian—for good. I should never have left you—never. Let’s kiss and make up, shall we? Brian—oh, my dear!” Her purse and gloves, tan suede gloves and a long brown alligator purse, fell from her fingers and she started across the floor, her arms out.