The Lady and Her Doctor (25 page)

“Milton!”

“Go to hell,” he called, standing at the big window, putting his palms against the glass, lifting them off.

She was right behind him. She stamped her foot. “Why do you want me to go to hell? Why does the manner in which Amory gets the money concern you?” She put her hand on his shoulder as if she could pull him around to face her and he flung off her hand. “Why do you want to bring Amory cash?” She stood next to him at the window, her hand on the pane beside his hand, her face turned, trying to read his averted face; then she gasped. “And I called you naïve! Infantile! I called you naïve when I have always known—always, always known—that your preference is for the girlies, the pin-ups, the girly-girlies! Froufrou! Why, Amory is your meat! My dear sister Amory is just your meat! How could I not have seen? The Lady Constant—when you drooled over her title, Milton, the
gentil, par-fait
Lady-lover!”

She began to bang her palms against the glass, making him blink. She'd go through the glass, he thought, cut herself to pieces, he thought, blinking, and turning to warn her he saw how her face had changed, the nose sharpened like her cutting voice.

“You couldn't walk off with the cash for Amory, how could you under the circumstances? I couldn't stop you if it was my money, how could I? My hands are tied, but dear sister Amory would be at the police station if you ran off with her money quicker than you could say Jack Robinson. And that would be too bad for you as well as for me since you're my accessory in crime, aren't you? But if you went off with Amory and the money? If you had arranged between the two of you that day to do that very thing? Cahoots,” she said, banging the pane, “cahoots, cahoots! You planned that day to—how would you say it, ishkabibble—double cross me! It was to be a double cross, wasn't it, Milton? You and Lady Constant!”

He took both her hands off the window so that they wouldn't go through it and dropped them. “Me and Lady Constant? You're nuts! You think she'd have me? Would you have had me if not for what happened? Did you ever look at me before it happened? Listen,” he said, “as far as I'm concerned, you and Lady Constant can both go to hell!”

The only reason he didn't leave the house then, that minute, walk out and leave the house then, was Jenny. He started upstairs, not pausing for breath at the half landing because there the bronze lady peered and grinned with the grin that would be on Jenny's face. Behind him he could hear Sloane following, but he made the bedroom next to theirs and shut the door in her face and locked it.

At least he would never have to undress and get into that bed in the next room again and wait for her to climb in and lie next to him and put her hand on his shoulder, slip closer to him, start that kind of talk.

He lay down on the bed and at first he thought it was that kind of talk, and through the door at that, touching the door instead of him, inching up on the door, pressing against it, because she was using that kind of voice, but actually all she was saying was she was sorry, he was right, she must have been mad, literally, completely unrealistic, always had been where Amory was concerned, he had guessed that, hadn't he? Mad jealousy where Amory was concerned, always. “Ah, darling Milton,” she was saying now, pawing the door that way she had, “I knew before the words left my lips how insane—”

Milton thought: No, kid, the last thing in the world—him and Lady Constant.
Last
, he thought, blocking out the pleading voice,
last chance
. By next Thursday, next maid's day off, Austen would probably be gone, but tomorrow, the way Sloane had talked, she'd still be here. Tomorrow, Friday, when he and Austen went to the clinic? How about it?

He sat up.

It wasn't really different from last Thursday's plan except lunch would be the “last” meal instead of supper. He and Austen would leave the house together to go to the clinic. He would call Jenny as soon as he got to the clinic, same as last time. All he had to do was figure out some way both he and Austen could eat before Sloane tomorrow. At the last minute, some way to keep Sloane from sitting down at the table with him so that when he and Austen left for the clinic, Sloane would be alone eating the lunch left by Austen for her.

“Milton, Milton,” Sloane said through the door, “you must give me a chance!”

Only if he had a chance, he thought; otherwise, the hell with her. She could stay outside that door until hell froze over because she refused to give him a chance. She took away his chance and laughed in his face. “
Preposterous
,” she said, laughing in his face. “Naïve, infantile, impossible!” He had to shut his ears against the real voice pleading outside the door and repeat his litany against Sloane: murdered her mother (as good as), wanted him to murder her sister for her, be the patsy, promised him a life with her and just lay in that bed there using him, using him in bed, in the garden, in the Haunted House, giving him nothing.

“Please forgive me, Milton!”

Tomorrow morning put the picrotoxin in the saltcellar after breakfast, work with her getting the specimen bushes ready for shipping. Keep at it and keep her at it. Make out he forgot about the clinic in the afternoon. Dig out a lot more bushes than he could ball the roots of, say it was last chance before a real freeze. Get her to work wrapping them up so they wouldn't freeze. Why not lunch later for her? She didn't have to go to clinic. Tell Austen why madam was working while he ate. Eat salt-free lunch. Tell Austen madam had worked outside in the cold enough. Dish out for her. Call Sloane in and leave with Austen. It should work, why not?

“Oh, Milton!”

She was going to cry now. He went to the door, turned the key, turned the knob.

“Oh, Milton, Milton!”

Milton was awakened at four by a bad dream. He was in Paris watching the genuine can-can dancers. One of them came off the stage to where he was sitting on the aisle and danced especially for him, but laughing at him, and when he saw her face close it was Jenny laughing. When the dancer saw he recognized her, she turned her back and flipped the billowing skirts insultingly, hitting his face with the ruffly edge of them. He woke with his heart pounding and found that the can-can skirt was Sloane's hair which had drifted over his face. He moved away from Sloane and lay quietly, going over the part of the plan which concerned Jenny. (To make her laugh on the other side of her face!) Having called her the minute he arrived at the clinic, told her he must see her right away, having given her the spiel about Sloane being psychotic, maybe requiring psychiatric help immediately, having timed it so their arrival coincided with the fatal action of the picrotoxin, they come to the Haunted House. Leaving Jenny in the hall near the two suits of armor, he goes into the rooms downstairs to find Sloane. In the dining room, he picks up the silver saltcellar with his handkerchief, to preserve fingerprints, and puts it in handkerchief into his pocket. She is not downstairs, so he goes up to look for her. Call Jenny upstairs, show her, then say, “Excuse me—” Lurch out of bedroom, head toward the john. Jenny would ask where he was going. Tell Jenny. In the safety of the john, get rid of stuff, flush toilet. He would have the real salt in an envelope in his pocket. Refill saltcellar three quarters full, put it back in his pocket, fingerprints intact. All he had to do which mustn't be seen was put the saltcellar back where it belonged and that shouldn't be hard.

The morning came gray and damp, but soft, Sloane said. “Soft as forgiveness. You really have forgiven me, Milton?”

He was dressed for working on the grounds. Would he be willing to dig up those damn bushes if he hadn't forgiven her? he asked. “Finish your coffee and let's get going. There aren't going to be many days as warm as this.”

“Yes,” Sloane said, “
but
—”

But first she had to go over the linens and see what was to be kept and what given away. It wouldn't take long, Sloane said, and it couldn't wait. She would join him outside the moment she finished.

The reason that Milton went up to the linen room an hour later to get Sloane was, he knew as well as the next one, to recharge his battery of hatred. Working with plants, spading up bushes, neatly balling the roots had its inevitable philosophical effect. It softened him up too much. (If his mother hadn't made a doctor out of him? If he'd stayed on the farm the way he should have?)

Even the voices of the baby carriage brigade outside the gates began to sound like birds did.

Sloane was sitting on a stepladder stool near the high window. The gray day flattered Sloane, endowing her momentarily with color. Sloane raised her head as Milton entered and smiled.

“Have you come to collect me? I've been longer than I expected.” She smoothed the sheet she was examining and began to fold it back along its creases, then let it drop onto the floor. “I find it so difficult to condemn them, Milton—the older the more delicious—but the reason I'm still at this is I took the opportunity of trying to make my peace with Austen.” She waved at him to close the door because the linen room was on the third floor, near Austen's bedroom.

“She's in the kitchen,” Milton said. “She's not mad at you any more for not calling in the cops?”

“You're the one she's furious with.”

“What did I do? Did she tell you what I did?”

“We would hardly discuss her feelings toward my husband, Milton, no, but it was quite obvious. Why, she won't even go to the clinic with you today! I don't mean merely not ride with you; won't go, won't attend!”

Milton turned to stone.

“What Austen said was that now she is being paid a wage, she will go to a private doctor, not be a charity patient any more.”

Milton made the enormous effort required to speak. “That's nuts! Listen. We understand her condition at the clinic. She'll go to some ignoramus—I can imagine—He'll kill her, Sloane, you've got to explain that to her!”

“My dear! I did!” Sloane stood up. “She wouldn't listen to me. All I could get out of her was that you had made a fool of her at the clinic.”

His gesture meant “how?” Sloane shrugged. Sloane smiled. Milton forced his legs to move toward the door. “I'm going to ask her.”

“You'll get nowhere, Milton. She's set her mind against you and the clinic and nothing will shift her.” Sloane moved toward Milton, easily. “Oh, come, Milton, you've done everything you can for Austen. If you argue with her, she'll walk out on us. Let her be, your conscience is clear!”

“Yes,” he said, “my conscience is clear, all right, my conscience is clear.”

Sloane picked up the sheet she had dropped and handed the two corners of one end to Milton. “Here, be useful, darling!” She backed away with her two ends of the sheet, folded the sheet lengthwise, signaling Milton to do the same, then walked up to him and handed him her folded ends, then backed away, again.

The room was perfectly quiet and tinted with the inimitable, never-to-be-forgotten smell of clean linen. It wasn't until Sloane had put the folded sheet on the shelf, touching it lovingly the way she touched all old things, and picked up the next one to be folded that she broke the silence. “What is it, Milton?” She gave him the two ends of the sheet. “Tell me!”

“Nothing.” If Austen won't come to the clinic, I can't do it.

“Something. Tell me.”

He was so afraid that he might tell her that he said the first thing that came into his head. “I used to do this with my mother. In the kitchen at home.” Tenderly touching, Sloane gave him her folded corners, blacked away from him, softly. She had never before looked so feminine to him as she did now, motherly. If she had conceived—

“You've never told me very much about your family, Milton.”

“It wasn't because they weren't Folsoms. Nobodies.”

She came toward him with the soft sheet. “Of course not. Tell me now.”

He told her about the farm. What it had looked like, how neat, everything old but in good repair. When you bought stuff thirdhand to start with you had to keep it in good repair. The hours the boys had spent on the pickup truck. They could do anything, the boys. One fall—it was snowing, too, on the way to market with winter produce—the Ford had broken a rear axle and the boys had built a fire by the road and forged an axle.

“Yankee ingenuity,” Sloane whispered. “You should be so proud.”

“Proud?” He broke the softness with harsh laughter. “You know what I think when I think ‘farm'? Cold. That's my word association: cold, frozen feet, my ears burning with cold. I can see my breath on the way to the school bus, stamping and flapping my arms to keep the circulation going. Cold. Being the youngest, I always warmed the bed up for the others, and for later—for medical school—hot! Sweating in the apartment, in the tenement.… We were only four blocks from Sutton Place, what do you think of that? You say medical school and I say ‘hot.' I froze my way through childhood and sweated through medical school!

“Working your way through, they say! Through school, after school, all summer vacations working for other people who didn't need to work so they could go back to school when it opened! Four in the morning to get the farm chores done so we could get off to school!” He told Sloane how his father had died of high blood pressure when he, Milt, was four. If you were sentimental you would say his father had died in his mother's arms, but it hadn't been his mother's arms, it had been on the floor of the old barn, lying there in the cow droppings he had been cleaning up when he had his stroke. He, Milt, had been the only one home, the youngest, so he had been the only one to see his father lying there in the cow droppings, something to be proud of! His mother had sent him to the Clarkes' down the road where they had a telephone, but his father was cold by the time the doctor got there. When he came back, his mother took him on her lap and he smelled the cows on her, too. Maybe other people associated death with fancy flowers, but he, Milt, associated with cowflop, dung, with the tangy smell of urine. Proud!