Served Cold
The Fateful Consequences of Going to Dinner Parties

2,016 words

Part 2 (Read Part 1 here)

Tiberius vs. Agrippina (AD 27-33)

There were few imperial tables more treacherous than a Roman emperor’s. The less one ate at those gatherings, the better – except if one’s name was Agrippina, granddaughter of Emperor Augustus. According to ancient historians, “discord shook the Prince’s [Emperor Tiberius] family” after a series of military embarrassments against some “barbarians” near Thrace. Eager to deflect attention from his own failures, an ex-praetor “alleged against [Agrippina] the ‘crimes of prostitution, of adultery . . . of magical execrations and poison prepared against the life of the Emperor.’” The Roman author Tacitus claimed that these accusations filled Agrippina with a “vehement” fury. Thinking that he was the source, she “flew to” Emperor Tiberius as he was performing sacrifices and ritual adorations in memory of his step-father, Augustus. She seized on “this handle for upbraiding him” and declared “that it ill became the same man to slay victims to the deified Augustus,” while at the same time he “persecute[d] his children.” The late Emperor’s “divine spirit was not transfused into dumb statues,” she reminded him, for “the genuine images of Augustus were the living descendants from his celestial blood” – and she herself was one of them. Tiberius was unimpressed. None of these bitter words drew an answer from his “dark breast,” save the quotation of a Greek verse: “That she was therefore aggrieved, because she did not reign.”[1]

But her supposed intemperance during this episode contradicted her behavior at later dinners, the place-setting suddenly transforming Agrippina into a guest who remembered that the table was an ordeal as fraught as any physical duel. A court gall had falsely whispered in her ear that the insulted Tiberius planned to poison her, and that “she must [therefore] shun eating at her father-in-law’s table.” Yet, she could not show any sign of her fears. While at a particularly fine banquet, held like Tilsit, as a sort of truce between rivals, she sat near Tiberius and “continued stately and unmoved; not a word, not a look escaped her.” Neither did she do much but pick at the food.[2] Because such meals were not for eating, but for observing, Tiberius noticed her lack of appetite. An altogether different kind of digestion occurred that evening.

Whether he was surprised at her behavior, or if someone (perhaps the same double agent who’d lied to Agrippina) informed him of his daughter-in-law’s suspicions, Tiberius decided to conduct an experiment. After removing an apple from the bowl in front of him and taking a hearty bite, Tiberius praised the fruit for its crispness. He took up another and offered it to Agrippina. It was then that she made her great mistake: before accepting the apple, she blinked – a mere moment’s hesitation, but a moment’s hesitation too long. For his part, “the reserved Tiberius let not a word drop from him openly,” but from that dinner onwards, Agrippina’s fate was sealed, her doom contrived. While Tiberius did not dare pursue her murder publicly, he “chose to have her dispatched in secret.” Those were the widely accepted rumors, anyway.[3] Agrippina soon found herself exiled from the emperor’s table, from the city of Rome, and then exiled from life under dubious circumstances. One suspects premeditation.

• Ghost at the Feast

I will find Where truth is hid, though it were hid, indeed, Within the center.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Hamlet (ca. 1600)

Agrippina was aware of the dilemma posed by sitting at an emperor’s table. She knew that it was an invitation to surrender to sensory delight – the Romans were famous for such indulgences. She also knew this was a pretense. In fact, the table was a place where she had to don a mask; where she must not be conspicuous; where she must not indulge too much or refuse too much. But as she learned, deceptions at dinner could, despite guests’ best efforts, backfire and unmask them.

Consider Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the complex layers of deceit that Denmark’s prince served up in order to ascertain the truth about his father’s death. Hamlet made the purpose of dinner party entertainment explicit – that it was art reflecting life, “For anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold . . . the mirror up to nature.”[4]

One scene featured a play-act, within a contrivance, within a performance that nevertheless goaded honest responses from the consciences of liars. In Hamlet, the titular character had long suspected his uncle, King Claudius, of regicide. The ghost of his late father had told him so. But how to know for sure? How could he see beyond Claudius’ show of innocence – of his play-acting “the good brother?” With yet another layer of artifice that might uncover the sham, Hamlet planned an après-repas entertainment: a troupe of actors would perform a play in front of Claudius and his court, the plot revolving around a treacherous king who’d poisoned his brother and usurped the throne. Hamlet hoped it would literally hit close to home. While having “these players Play something like the murder of my father Before mine uncle,” the prince would “observe his looks” and conjure a ghost at the feast.[5] Secret “murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ.” Should Claudius “blench” like a guilty man, thunderstruck at watching his own crimes pantomimed on stage, Hamlet would “know [his] course.” Indeed, “the play’s the thing wherein [he’d] catch the conscience of the King.”[6]

Once food and drink had time enough to loosen inhibitions, Hamlet summoned his actors, and “the dumb-show” began. What is the name of this play, Claudius asked. “The Mousetrap,” came the reply. Not to worry, Hamlet reassured him, “they do but jest, poison in jest. No offense i’ th’ world.” His countenance schooled in a mask of nonchalance, the prince waited for Claudius’ mask of innocence to fall away. After the theater troupe acted out the murder “in such the method” that he had killed the late King, Claudius went livid, sprang to his feet, then stormed out of the hall: “Give me some light. Away!”[7] The words of the ghost proved true, as did the words uttered from the mouths of artificers. The “knavish piece of work” the pretenders performed was never the real show, but the Pretender who watched it.

The Yellow Iris (1937)

Apart from masking intent, sometimes the food, drink, and festivities become tools to unmask true intent. The more one eats, or takes in, the more he gives away. At a table, one sits across from a fellow-diner, often eating the same sort of dish and drinking the same beverage – a mirror-image of sorts. But like a window, it is also a frame that hides certain things from view; that maintains one’s focus on certain people. In Agatha Christie’s short story, The Yellow Iris, these qualities enabled a murderer the means to kill unnoticed. At the same time, it enabled private detective M. Hercule Poirot to solve the crime.

Years before the story’s events, a group of six people had come together at a New York “supper party.” The attendees included young heiress Iris Russell, her husband Barton Russell, her little sister Pauline, South American dancer Lola Valdez, diplomat Stephen Carter, and houseguest Tony Chapell. At one point, they’d all turned their attention from one another to the evening’s entertainment. Meanwhile, a servingman circulated the floor and refreshed their drinks. The song ended, everyone applauded, and the lights brightened again. But to their horror, the group saw that Iris Russell had slumped over her plate, dead of apparent self-poisoning.

Programme advertisement for the first radio performance of “The Yellow Iris” in the Radio Times, November 2, 1937

Now, it was four years later “to the date.” As per Iris’ husband’s request, they’d all met again at a glamorous restaurant in London, the Jardin de Cynges (Swan Garden). At the center of the table sat a vase of yellow irises, placed there as an homage to the dead woman. Barton explained that this was not a reunion to remember the good old days. “It may seem odd to you all that I should celebrate the anniversary of a death in this way — by a supper party in a fashionable restaurant. But I have a reason — yes, I have a reason.” For those four years, he’d done little else but “thinking and brooding . . . I don’t believe Iris killed herself,” he said with a queer light in his eyes. No, “I believe . . . that she was murdered by one of you lot!”[8] Though the killer must have been hiding in plain sight when he’d emptied a capsule of cyanide into Iris’ drink – must have been one among the five companions seated around her that night – no one had seen or solved the mystery of her death. But this evening, Barton planned to unnerve the true perpetrator into admitting his or her guilt. Everyone looked uneasily at the sixth table-setting, left empty in memory of a ghost.

Cue the appearance of the famous Belgian detective, M. Poirot, who took the unoccupied seat at their table as the lights dimmed. “Excuse me,” Barton stood up, “I have a surprise for you all . . . I’ve got to go and speak to the dance band. Little arrangement I’ve made with them.” The first bars of a song began to sluice its molasses-dark melody between the tables and chairs and the already oppressive room. Pauline gasped, “No!” Turning to her, Poirot asked what was wrong. “It’s horrible! It’s just like it was that night —” she began. “My God, listen,” cried Lola: “It’s the same tune — the same song that they played that night in New York. Barton Russell must have fixed it. I don’t like this.”[9] Barton had “fixed it,” all right.

Six pairs of eyes were once again riveted on the performer who appeared in the middle of the Jardin‘s dining-room. This time, the singer was “a coal black girl with rolling eyeballs and white glistening teeth,” and she began to moan a melancholy, hypnotizing song. Among those assembled, “the sobbing tune, the deep golden Negro voice” was a snare that even the waiters were powerless to resist. It oozed with a “thick, cloying emotion,” dark and humid as the jungles of her ancestral Africa.[10] The killer, as he had once before, used the distraction to recreate the conditions of a perfect murder, masking his familiar crime and familiar face amid the dark, alien spell cast upon all the diners. All, that is, save Poirot, who only acted the part of an enthralled listener. He secretly tracked the movements of a criminal. These double-dinners, the one in New York and its mirrored twin in London, were intended to be double-murders. Both were carefully staged and layered with performance and diversion; with fatal doses of poison and a different kind of drug brewed by that “Negro voice,” the vocals made mind-numbing by a chemical effect that blended horror and fascination.

The story ended with another song just as irresistible to the pairs of men and women dancing like marionettes to its measure:

There’s nothing like
Love for making you miserable
There’s nothing like
Love for making you blue
Depressed
Possessed
Sentimental
Temperamental
 
There’s nothing like
Love for making you crazy
There’s nothing like
Love for making you mad
Abusive
Elusive
Suicidal
Homicidal

There’s nothing like Love . . .[11]

Perhaps substituting “Love” with “Dinner” would also be true, for as the self-satisfied detective said, “The safest place to commit a murder is in the middle of a crowd.” [12] Agatha Christie’s mysteries were all characterized by the genteel racialism of yesteryear that was neither ugly, nor dishonest – even if dishonesty at parties was their signature dish.

Notes

[1] Tacitus, The Reign of Tiberius, Book IV, Thomas Gordon, trans., Arthur Galton, ed. (Project Gutenberg, 2005); the Greek verse rendered in Tacitus’ original Latin reads: Dum fessa mente, retinet silentii inpatientiam.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library Online) III, ii, 21-24.

[5] Hamlet, II, ii, 23-25.

[6] Ibid., II, ii, 626, 633-35.

[7] Ibid.,, III, ii, 295.

[8] Agatha Christie, “The Yellow Iris” in Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories (New York: William Morrow, 2013), 896.

[9] Ibid., 896-97.

[10] Ibid., 897-98.

[11] Ibid., 904-5.

[12] Ibid., 901.