The Door Between (2 page)

Now he looked appealingly at Karen, as a child looks at its mother in an emergency, wondering why everyone had stopped talking.

“Where’s Eva, John?” asked Karen quickly. She had a sixth sense for his moments of confusion.

“Eva? I think I saw her – ”

“Here I am,” said a tall girl from the step of the pavilion. But she did not come in.

“There she is,” said Dr. MacClure gratefully. “Having a nice time, honey? Have you –”

“Where have you been, dear?” asked Karen. “Do you know everyone? This is Mr. Queen – isn’t it? – Miss MacClure. And this –”

“We’ve all met, I think,” said Eva MacClure with a faint social smile.

“No, we haven’t,” said Mr. Queen truthfully, rising with alacrity.

“Daddy, your tie’s under your ear again,” said Miss MacClure, ignoring Mr. Queen and glancing coldly at the other men.

“Oh,” sighed Karen, “it’s impossible keeping him presentable!”

“I’m all right,” mumbled Dr. MacClure, backing into a corner.

“Do you write, too, Miss MacClure?” asked the poet hungrily.

“I don’t do
anything
,” said Miss MacClure in a sweet voice. “Oh, will you excuse me, Karen? I think I see someone …”

She went away, leaving a chastened poet behind her, and vanished among groups of noisy people being served outlandish edibles by a corps of Japanese servants recruited for the evening. But she did not speak to anyone and as she made her way to the little bridge at the end of the garden she was frowning very fiercely indeed.

“Your daughter is lovely, Doctor,” panted a Russian lady-writer whose bosom was swathed passionately in tulle. “Such a healthy-looking creature!”

“Ought to be,” said Dr. MacClure, fumbling with his tie. “Perfect specimen. Had proper care.”

“Glorious eyes,” said the poet unpoetically. “A little too distant for me, though.”

“Oh, Eva’s going through a stage,” smiled Karen. “Tea, somebody?”

“I think it’s wonderful how you’ve found time to raise a family, Doctor,” panted the Russian lady.

Dr. MacClure glared from the poet to the Russian lady; they both had poor teeth and, besides, he detested being discussed in public.

“John finds time for everyone but himself,” said Karen hastily. “He’s needed a rest for ages. More tea?”

“Mark of greatness,” said Karen’s publisher, beaming on everyone. “Why on earth didn’t you go to Stockholm last December, Doctor? Imagine a man snubbing the donors of the international medical award!”

“No time,” barked Dr. MacClure.

“He didn’t snub them,” said Karen. “John couldn’t snub anybody. He’s just a baby.”

“Is that why you’re marrying him, my dear?” asked the Russian lady, panting more than ever.

Karen smiled. “More tea, Mr. Queen?”

“It’s so romantic,” shrilled the New England novelist. ‘Two prize-winners, two geniuses, you might say, combining their heredity for the creation of – ”

“More
tea
?” said Karen quietly.

Dr. MacClure stamped off, glowering at the ladies.

The truth was, life was beginning for the good doctor at fifty-three. He had never thought of himself in terms of age, but neither had he thought of himself in terms of youth; and to have youth pounce upon him from behind both amused and nettled him.

The medical award he could accept without loss of equilibrium; it meant no more than a thickening of the annoyances always besieging him – newspaper interviews, invitations to medical functions, the conferring of honorary degrees. He had shaken the whole business off indifferently. He had not even gone to Stockholm, although he had been notified of the award the previous autumn. A new research had absorbed his attention and May found him still in New York, prowling about his empire at the Cancer Foundation.

But falling in love with Karen Leith so astounded and upset him that for months he had gone about in a resentful silence, plainly arguing with himself; and he was still a little irritable about the whole subject. It was so damned unscientific – a woman he had known for over twenty years! He could remember Karen when she was a sullen sprig of seventeen, annoying her patient father with unanswerable questions about Shakespeare in the Leith house in Tokyo, with Fujiyama towering like ice cream to the southeast.

Dr. MacClure had been young then, in Japan on a wild-goose chase connected with his early cancer researches; but even in those days he had not thought of Karen except in disapproving terms. Her sister Esther, of course, had been different – he often thought of Esther as she was then, with her golden hair and dragging leg, like an earthbound goddess. But Karen – why, between 1918 and 1927 he hadn’t seen her at all! It was infantile. Naturally, for sentimental reasons he had become her physician when she left the East to settle in New York – old times, that sort of thing. Proved something. Bad business, sentiment. Being Karen’s physician should have drawn them apart … the professional relationship …

It had not. Dr. MacClure, cooling off as he idled through the groups in the Japanese garden, chuckled despite himself. He had to admit to himself, now the die was cast, that he rather enjoyed the experience of feeling young again. He even looked up at the moon and for one mad, unscientific moment wished he were alone with Karen in this impossible little garden with its queer, tangy Japanese blooms.

The little bridge was convex and snubby; it bulged in absurd fashion, and Eva MacClure stood on the bulge leaning on the rail and staring darkly down.

The tiny water was black except where the moon lay, and there was so little of it that when something hungry came up in the middle of the moon and gulped, the gulp sent circles to the boundaries of the pool in three seconds. Eva knew it was three, because she counted them in one corner of her mind.

Everything was tiny here: the gnarly dwarf trees of
ume
– plum – with their sweet blossoms in the shadows beyond the bridge, the pool, the voices of Karen’s guests piping thinly out of the clothing gloom, the crinkly Japanese lanterns like miniature accordions strung overhead on invisible wires. Among the meticulous cameos of
tsutsuji
and
shobu
and
fuji
and
botan
– azalea, iris, wistaria, peony, all the Japanese flowers Karen loved – Eva felt like an overgrown schoolgirl in toyland.

“What’s the matter with me, anyway?” she thought despairingly as she watched a circle widen.

It was a question she had been asking herself for some time. Until recently she had been a healthy young vegetable ripening underground. She had felt no real sense of pain or pleasure; she merely grew.

“Biting people’s heads off!”

It was good soil Dr. MacClure had provided. Eva grew up in a Nantasket paradise, laved by salt winds made pleasanter by the lavish acrid smell of wild flowers. The doctor sent her to the best schools – schools he investigated suspiciously beforehand. He provided money, good times, wardrobe, the care of hand-picked women for her. He had made his motherless house a home for her; and he had inoculated her character against infection with the same sure knowledge with which he supervised the hygiene of her body.

Yet those were formative years and Eva experienced no biting emotion. She knew she was forming – even a plant must have a vague sensibility of its growth: like all growing things she felt life tracing its course through her body, doing extraordinary things to her, shaping and building her, filling her full of meanings too green for expression and destinations too far away to be more than glimpsed. It was an interesting time, even an exciting time; and Eva went about in a glow, happy only as a plant is happy.

But then, suddenly, something went dark about her, as if some monstrous light-organism had swallowed up the sun and bathed the world in evil, unnatural colors.

From a gay and lovely vegetable she became overnight a creature of moods, chiefly black. Food lost its savor. Fashions, which had always been exciting, became dull – she quarreled bitterly with her dressmaker; her friends, whom she had always managed beautifully, became intolerable – she lost two of them forever by telling them some plain truths about themselves.

It was all very mysterious. The theatre, the books she loved, the witcheries of Calloway and Toscanini, cocktail parties, the fascinating quest for bargains in the Boston and New York stores, the gossip, the dancing, the Causes she was always championing – all the interests and activities which had filled in the outline of her pleasant existence inexplicably began to fade together, as if there were a conspiracy against her. She even took it out savagely on Brownie, her favorite horse at the Central Park stables; and Brownie was so outraged that he dumped her unceremoniously into the middle of the bridle-path. It still ached where she had fallen.

All these wonderful symptoms, coming to a head in an unusually insidious spring in New York – Dr. MacClure had long since given up the Nantasket house except for occasional weekends – really reduced themselves to a simple diagnosis, if only Dr. MacClure had been ordinarily observant. But the poor man was too obsessed with his own excursions into romance these days to see farther than the end of his nose.

“Oh, I wish I were dead,” said Eva aloud to the little gulps in the pool; and for the moment she really did.

The bridge creaked, and from the way it trembled underfoot Eva knew a man had come up behind her. She felt herself growing warmer than the warmness of the evening warranted. It would be too silly if he –

“Why?” asked a young man’s voice. It was not only a man’s voice, it was a young man’s voice; and what was more embarrassing, the voice was quite hatefully amused.

“Go away,” said Eva.

“And have you on my conscience for the rest of my life?”

“Don’t be unpleasant, now. Go away.”

“See here,” said the voice, “there’s water right under you and you look pretty desperate. Were you thinking of suicide?”

“Don’t be absurd!” flared Eva, swishing around. “The pool isn’t two feet deep.”

He was a very large young man, almost as large as Dr. MacClure, Eva was chagrined to notice; and he was despicably good-looking. Not only that, he was dressed in dinner clothes, which somehow made matters worse. The same piercing keen-puckered eyes people remarked in Dr. MacClure beamed down at her; and altogether Eva felt like a child.

She decided to snub him, and turned back to the rail.

“Oh, come now,” said the large young man, “we can’t let it go at that. I have a certain social responsibility. If it wasn’t drowning, what was it to be – cyanide by moonlight?”

The obnoxious creature moved up to her side; she felt him. But she kept looking at the water.

“You’re not a writer,” said the young man reflectively. “Although the place is crawling with them. Too young, I’d say, and too desperate. The breed here to-night’s well-fed.”

“No,” said Eva icily, “I’m not a writer. I’m Eva MacClure, and I wish you would go away from here as fast as you can.”

“Eva MacClure! Old John’s daughter? Well!” The young man seemed pleased. “I’m glad you don’t belong to that crowd out there – I really am.”

“Oh, you’re glad,” said Eva, hoping it sounded as nasty as she meant it to sound. “Really!” It was getting worse and worse.

“Detest writers. Mumbo-jumbo artists, the whole crew. And not a good-looker in the crowd.”

“Karen Leith is very beautiful!”

“No woman’s beautiful past thirty. Beauty is youth. After that, make-up. What they call ‘charm’ … I’d say you could give your future stepmother cards and spades.”

Eva gasped. “I think you’re the most – the
rudest
–”

“I see ’em with their clothes off,” said the young man negligently. “Same as the rest of us that way – more so.”

“You – what?” faltered Eva. She thought she had never met a more detestable person.

“Hmm,” he said, studying her profile. “Moon. Water. Pretty girl studying her reflection … Despite the gloomy philosophy, I’d say there was hope.”

“I don’t know why I’m talking to you,” said Eva in a muffled angry voice. “I’ve been watching the goldfish and wondering when the creatures sleep.”

“What!” exclaimed the detestable young man. “Then it’s a worse case than I thought.”

“Really –”

“Looking into a pool under the moon and wondering when goldfish sleep! That’s a worse sign than wishing you were dead.”

Eva turned to give him her most freezing stare. “May I ask just who you are?”

“That’s better,” said the young man with satisfaction. “We always take a positive emotion, like anger, as a good sign in the morbid cases. I’m a man named Scott.”

“Will you go away,” said Eva rudely, “or shall I, Mr.
Scott
?”

“You needn’t turn that pretty nose of yours up so. It’s the only name I ever had. Scott, Richard Barr. And it’s ‘Doctor,’although you may call me Dick.”

“Oh,” said Eva in a small voice. “
That
Scott.”

She had heard of Dr. Richard Barr Scott. She could not have helped hearing about Dr. Richard Barr Scott, unless he had gone off to Patagonia. For some time her friends had been frothing slightly at the mouth over Dr. Richard Barr Scott, and it had become a cunning habit in many feminine quarters to visit Dr. Richard Barr Scott’s luxurious offices on Park Avenue. Even vigorous mothers had been known to come down suddenly with the most complicated ailments although from the way they all dressed for a visit to Dr. Scott’s one would have thought they were going to a cocktail party at the Ritz. The reports which reached Eva’s moody ears had been most enthusiastic.

“So you see,” said Dr. Scott, looming over her, “why I was concerned. Purely professional reaction. Bone-to-a-dog business. Sit down, please.”

“I beg your pardon!”

“Sit down, please.”

“Sit down?” murmured Eva, wondering how her hair looked. “What for?”

Dr. Scott cocked an eye about. But except for the myriad fireflies and the tiny dinning voices, they were alone in that part of the Japanese garden. He placed a hard cool hand on Eva’s bare hand, and she was annoyed to feel goose-pimples. She rarely felt goose-pimples. So she froze him again and snatched her hand away.