The Lady and Her Doctor (28 page)

“Of course, Milton. Certainly I remember.”

“This Krop doesn't want a foundation. I told you what I want!” He pulled the two ends of pajama tight across his quivering abdomen and knotted them together. “Sloane,” he came toward her, “you can't do this. You can't renege. I told you what this means to me. Listen, this means everything to me. Put the foundation second. Later. We must go away first.” He stopped a few feet from her because she stamped her foot.

“You must not be so childish! You can't run away from yourself, surely you know that? Running away to the Côte D'Azur, the Blue Coast, to a mythical Blue Coast, Blue Bird! The bluebird isn't in Antibes, Milton!” She pointed out the window. “The bluebird is right there in your back yard! The blue coast, the azure coast is here in Queens!”

Beg her, grovel, kiss her feet? She wouldn't hear him begging, only her voices. Saint Sloane! What did she care what he wanted, what he was going to have was what her voices said, a golden crown, a halo, and how could the things he wanted stack up against that? Milton sat on the bed and began to beat his open palms against his thighs. “You were kidding me, weren't you? You were just sticking a pacifier in my mouth to shut me up? All this about inspiration while I was out—you never intended for one second to do what you said!”

“You're quite mistaken.” She came toward the bed but his beating hands frightened her a little, her voice became more supplicating. “Darling, I was swept off my feet by your story—I lost all my sense of reality to your Côte D'Azur dream of never-never land. It took Jenny to bring me to my senses!”

“Jenny?” he said, springing up,
“Jenny?”

She said, “Jenny assured me idleness would be the worst thing possible in your position.”

“I might have known.
Jenny!
”

“I called her, Milton, after Amory phoned because I couldn't think where else you might be. Oh, that doesn't matter, does it? The point is, Jenny knows—tragically knows—your situation—tragic firsthand knowledge of predicament—knows what helped your poor brother—”

“I might have known. I might have known.
Jenny!”

“—idling on the Riviera the very worst thing you can do—You will thank Jenny someday … didn't have a foundation in mind, of course—her idea much more modest—Jenny said that after her husband died you carried on his work for a time at the clinic, some special clinical research in the problem he was involved in—Queens General Hospital—experimenting with his drug on some of the clinic patients there—”

“Jenny. Jenny. Jenny!”

“—says she has always known, since you first suspected you had the same constitutional disease her husband had, that the only salvation lay in continuing his work. A blessing if you could continue—not merely earning a living—not enough to merely earn a living—punch a time clock—Jenny blames herself for thinking of the years when there would be no one to help her and the children so that every dollar you could earn was welcome—She blames herself. She feels guilty and that was why she gave me this advice the moment you released her from her promise not to tell me about your—illness—until you told me about it—Where are you going, Milton?

“Milton, ah, don't go off and sulk!

“Milton, if you mean to sleep in the next room, you will not only have to make up the bed—and I most certainly will not help you—but Mrs. Austen showed me some moth eggs in the carpet and I sprayed it with that smelly stuff.

“Ah, that's better, Milton. Milton.

“I am sorry. I simply cannot stay on my side of the bed. Ah, Milton, there is one immortal line from Hemingway where the heroine says the hero has such a lovely temperature. (Or was it the hero said it to the heroine?) Well, I feel such a heroine tonight, Saint Sloane! I say it to my hero: You have such a lovely temperature! You're such a hero! Don't think I don't know it. Such a hero, but not unsung, you won't be unsung, Milton darling, doesn't that matter to you at all? Don't deny me your lovely temperature!

“Still sulking? Darling, only shopgirls and clerks dream of the Riviera. Antibes is really only one step removed from Coney Island, Milton! The Coney Island of the well-heeled, believe me. Common!”

He clamped both hands onto the edge of the mattress and pulled himself away from her clinging body.

“Milton, I warn you! ‘Then worms will try that long preserved virginity.'” She flung herself at him, weeping. “Oh, forgive me, forgive! That was unforgivable, Milton! You make me so beside myself when you deny me! Don't lie there, beat me! I deserve it! Kill me,
kill me
, Milton!”

The desk on which Sloane's suicide note had lain that first morning was covered, this morning, with papers. Sloane, wearing the glasses she used for reading, was sitting at the desk. A tray with the coffee pot and a cup and saucer were at her right hand, the cup stained with the brew. When she saw Milton in the hall, she called to him. “Good morning, darling! I've been up since dawn. No sleep at all. It was more restful to get out of bed and just jot down my ideas than lie there and let them dance in my head—like sugarplums!” She waved the batch of papers at him. “These are my sugarplums, Milton!” She took off the reading glasses to see his expression. “All forgiven? Please, please, I need you to help me get the plans all down so that on Monday I can take them to my lawyer and get him started drawing them up. You must help, Milton—there's just today and Sunday to get it all down. And then, after the lawyers on Monday, I have a luncheon appointment with Jenny—What is it, Milton? No, my dear, it will take too much time, obviously, to get the Foundation rolling, and—and obviously, we need something for you to occupy yourself with. At lunch, Jenny is going to explain to your ignorant wife, in words of one syllable, exactly what you did at the clinic. What is it, Milton?”

Not in words of one syllable, he thought, in three syllables. Pla-ce-bo. “Nothing. It's nothing.”

“Jenny and I are going over the technique by which you tested this wonderful drug of her husband's so that I can work side by side with you in your clinic!”

Jenny, he thought. Jenny, Jenny, Jenny! “Monday. Yes.”

Chapter IX

SATURDAY MORNING

While Jenny waited impatiently for her son to open the front door of the apartment, Maureen showed her the step she had just learned in tap class. “Looka this, Mom!”

“If that boy went out! He knows perfectly well we have to catch that train. We would have been there already and had the whole weekend if you hadn't had your tap class this morning!”

“What will I do if there's no tap class out with Uncle Frank?”

Jenny pressed her finger on the bell and kept it there. “You'll become an opera singer.” The door opened. “For the love of Mike, Bud!”

“For the love of Mike, Mom, I just happened to be
occupied!
”

“Maureen, go on now, you better pack your little bag and don't forget the toothbrush. Are you all packed, Bud?”

He nodded. “Mom, while you were out, Uncle Miltie called. He wants you to call right back. A matter of life and death!”

“What? Oh, you're just kidding! You trying to scare the life out of me, Bud? Maureen, I give you three minutes to pack. Don't forget the toothbrush, you know what the teacher told you about cavities!”

“Aren't you going to call Uncle Miltie back, Mom?” Bud, watching his mother hurry to the bedroom, was genuinely startled. “Right away, he said.”

“Right away we have to catch a train. We have to walk to the subway and go all the way to Penn Station, and get to Uncle Frank's. He's meeting the train.” She had no intention of missing the train just to let Milt burn up the wire telling her what he thought of her nerve for doing him the best turn anyone could. Someday Milt would thank her, but not yet. “Look at those fingernails, Bud! You can plaster your hair down all you like, but it doesn't help much with black fingernails! Two minutes, Maureen!” Bud was like Milt. You had to do what had to be done and not expect to be thanked. “Don't answer that phone,” she told Bud. “Let it ring!” He and Maureen, dressed in their best, looked at her with big eyes. “This isn't a doctor's office any more so we aren't obligated to answer the telephone and miss that train.” If it was Milt again, it wouldn't hurt him a bit to stew in his own juice a while and simmer down.

“It will be nice getting into the country at that,” Jenny said, sitting between her two children on the hard subway seat. “I don't know what they use for air in these subways but it isn't air. Nice to breathe air for a change.”

Maureen became excited and began to ask a slew of questions about the country. It was hard to realize, Jenny thought, setting Maureen's brown felt sailor straight on her head, that her kids were city kids through and through. You didn't get to know about cows and chickens through your mother's milk. Bud was trying to act sophisticated about going away for the weekend, but he was excited too. Jenny had to turn her face away so Bud wouldn't see her grinning at some of the information about farm life he was handing out to Maureen. “Mr. Know-it-all,” she thought fondly, “Mr. Man!” She thought about Milton who looked, if you asked her, quite a bit like the man in the Calvert ad there. The girl in the Life Bra ad could have been Cissie, too. It was then, just as the subway was approaching Fifty-ninth Street, that Jenny realized she could have been mistaken about Milt calling just to burn her ears off. It could have been that Mrs. Parker had told Cissie about the Chanel Five; from that it followed that Cissie, who need not be dumb just because she looked like the girl in the ad, could have figured out for her little self why Jenny had come upstairs with the present. Cissie didn't even need to have figured it out; all she had to know was that Jenny had been up there asking questions. Then—it was natural—Cissie could have contacted Milt some way and reported. It didn't take a genius to suspect Jenny might have guessed he and Cissie had been out together. The call could have been about that.

“Mom, when you were a little girl did they have tractors?”

“I'm not Methuselah, Maureen!” If Milt didn't know her well enough to know she wouldn't tell his wife a thing like that! No matter how often it should have been proved to him that when she did stick her two cents in it was only for his good, he still wasn't convinced. (She remembered, blushing, the nasty cracks he had taken at her!) Suppose Milt didn't take it for granted that if she had a date with his wife on Monday, it would be for his good only?

“Bud, when we live there, we'll get to go to the movies! Mom, Bud is just trying to tease me, isn't he, Mom? Mom, when we go live with Uncle Frank, we will too get to go to the movies, won't we?”

“Don't worry, you will, although if you ask me it would be all to the good if you didn't. What do you get out of those movies but a lot of killings!” Jenny turned sharply to stare at the Calvert ad man again, searching his face as if he could reassure her that if she let Milt stew in his own juice over the weekend nothing much would happen. If Milt couldn't reach her and thought she was purposely not calling him back because on Monday she intended snitching to his wife about his little girl friend Cissie?

“Next stop, Mom!”

“I know, I know!” When there's a pile of money concerned, do I know? For sure? If Milt really thinks that by Monday the truth will be known? Money is the root of all evil, she thought, I don't know for sure. I didn't know he'd ever get involved with a girl like Sloane in the first place. I didn't dream he'd marry her! “Get up,” she said, standing, swaying,” don't forget the bag, Maureen!”

“Mom, the next station!”

“There's a telephone somewhere on this platform,” Jenny said. “If you would stop asking questions and use your eyes and find the telephone we'd waste that much less time, Bud!” She slapped Maureen's clutching, nagging hand off her coat. “Stop hanging on me!”

Milt must have been hanging on the telephone. “I can't hardly hear myself think here, Milt. I'm calling from a phone on the middle of the station platform on Fiftieth Street. Milt, I don't want to yell and I don't want to spell it out, so will you just listen to me, Milt!

“All I want to tell you is that on Monday, when I see Sloane, it's to talk business, do you get me? Business,” she repeated, “just
business
, Milt! Plain business, not monkey business, do you get me? So don't worry your head about Monday, Milt!

“I can't hear what you're saying, Milt, and it doesn't matter. I just wanted to get that point across. All I'm going to do Monday is bring Sloane Phil's publications and explain to her how you were carrying out the clinical experiment in Queens General. You got to lose yourself in work, Milt, you can't bury your head in the sand on some foreign beach like an ostrich, Milt. I know whereof I speak. Whatever you do on the side, Milt, that's between you and your conscience! I can't be any plainer,” she said.

Milton ground his teeth. “Listen! Suppose you let me be plainer! It's all right. My wife is in a room a mile off. Nobody's here. I can talk.”

“O.K. I have no intention of telling her about Cissie Parker, Milt. As I said, what you and Cissie do is your own business.”

“What she does is her own business! You've got her on the brain, I tell you! Listen, I have to see you today or tomorrow. Before Monday.”

“Now, Milt!”

“Shut up for a second, will you? Why are you calling from the subway?”

“For the love of Mike, Milt, don't you remember? We're on our way to my Uncle Frank's. I wouldn't give my final say-so whether I'd take up his proposition to live there without trying it, so we're trying it this weekend.”

“Go home. I got to talk to you.”

“Did I hear you? Milt?”