The Lady and Her Doctor (5 page)

Milton was aware, as he left her in the dim hall and went down over the path—keeping his eyes on it because the long grass might trip him and, in case she was watching from one of the windows, make him ridiculous—that he had not asked her to call or said he would get in touch with her. He hadn't deliberately done so, but now he thought he wanted it left up in the air. He, anyhow, was certainly up in the air. What would happen now? He didn't know. “Hold over her” was for a professional blackmailer, not for him; not, with his blood pressure, for him. For him, it couldn't be, “You give me XX dollars, or else—” For him, it had to be nice. So what? So he just didn't rightly know what the program was from here on. Search him. The prognosis, he thought, he didn't know the prognosis here. It wasn't one of the subjects he'd studied in medical school.

His face must have shown something because, the moment he pulled the gate to, behind him, Mrs. Antenelli said, “Anything wrong in the Haunted House, Doc?”

“The old lady is dead.” He lowered his voice, frowning at the brilliant sunshine as though it should have dimmed in respect. “Mrs. Folsom was dead when I arrived,” he said.

“Rest in peace. Oh, is that the name? Folsom?”

“Folsom.”

“Rest in peace. What did she die of, Doc?”

He hadn't time to answer before Mrs. Levinson told Mrs. Antenelli that doctors weren't allowed to divulge about people's sickness.

“There's a law, isn't there, Doc?”

“Yeah, the unwritten law, isn't it, Doc?”

Mrs. Levinson was the first to stand and kick up the brake of her baby carriage, which she had been gently shaking, and then fold her canvas stool and hitch it behind the handle of the carriage. The others began lifting their charges from the sidewalk where they had been playing. Either they did not find it proper that their children's play should desecrate the house of mourning, or they instinctively wished to remove their kids from death. No one wanted to be near death if he could help it. No one wanted to be contaminated by death; no one wanted to die.

Milton stood at the edge of the sidewalk, studying his watch, while the women, for once silenced, gathered the toys the kids had scattered around and moved away. When Milton got into his car and started the motor, he twisted around to see the old house in the sunlight. He wondered if the girl was thinking about him. Walking up and down the big dim rooms, perhaps the one with the money desk in it, stopping at the desk, touching the heavy carved flap with her thin flat-end fingers, wishing she could turn back the clock and have it that morning before she gave the old lady those pills? (He took one hand off the wheel to feel the bottle in his pocket, then, remembering, touched the breast pocket into which he had thrust her suicide note.) Well, she couldn't turn back the clock; only he could do that. This time—for once, that is—he was in control.

He turned into Roosevelt, now reasonably full of women on domestic business. He could not hear what the girls were saying, just their lips moving, but whatever it was each of them looked out for number one, so looking out for number one, for a change—what next? “Hold over” meant everything or nothing depending on what you did about it. The handshake she had just given him could be the kiss-off as far as Miss Folsom was concerned, if he let it be, so what it came down to was, was he going to let it be? Did he intend to let the girl sell the house for $110,000, go off to Antibes and lie on that beach in the picture there in one of the bikinis they wore in France and remember him in her prayers? Leave him something in her will, say?

Which was a hot one. Anybody leaving him something in their will had better kick off very soon.

He moved and heard the rich money-crackle of the paper on which she had written the suicide note. What had he taken that for? The bottle of placebo, yes, but why the suicide note?

To be on the safe side. If he had the note, he had the proof the girl had done it by herself.

But she hadn't done anything.

Just leave it that the letter was an ace in the hole. He didn't have to figure it out, just hold onto it and let it ride.

Let it ride? Yes, he thought, for once let it ride. Let it rip.

He found that he had driven back to the apartment without thinking. His car, like himself, kept in line. It wasn't in the Studie to go off on any joy ride, even on a day like this.

If all she was going to do, he thought, was leave him something in her will, then she had better try suicide a second time and with something more potent than a bottle of placebo.

He got out of his car and locked it, nodding professionally as he passed in answer to the greeting of the small gossiping group of housewives gathered in front of the big apartment house. All the women said “Hello, Doc.” They all knew the Doc. Maybe no one knows the Doc, Milt thought, maybe they just think they know the Doc. He went into the house and paused before the rows of bells in the front vestibule, pressing the Doctor's Bell, which was different from all the others. Maybe the Doc was different from the rest of them at that, he thought. They're all sheep led to the slaughter, but maybe not the Doc, at that. The clicking started immediately and he let himself into the inner lobby.

Jenny was standing by their open door, waiting for him. She knew his ring. Because Jenny was in her “nurse's” uniform, she deferred to Milton, standing back and permitting him to go first, following him up the hall into the room in which he had slept and where now four patients waited. They all greeted him and Milton nodded and walked through to the door which, had this not been rented as a doctor's apartment, would have been the dining room. Jenny followed him in and held out her hands for his jacket. She picked up the white office coat to hold for him while he put it on. Jenny was putting on an act that nothing had happened because what else could she do? No matter how big she talked about everything being for his good, she was thinking of number one. There was no law that said he had to provide for Jenny and the kids. He could walk out on her—and did, leaving her holding the jacket. Jenny, the jacket still in her hands, followed him and he told her she'd better call the patients he was supposed to have seen that morning and tell them he had been delayed by an emergency call. She asked what emergency call but he said he'd tell her after she telephoned the patients. When Milton saw that she was at the telephone, looking up numbers, he went through the kitchen and into the hall near the bathroom, to “his” closet. His valise, where Jenny stored his woolen stuff in the summer, was up on the top shelf. He took it down, listening to Jenny's voice telling Mrs. Antony why he hadn't visited her that morning, opened it and felt the slit in the lining to make sure the note would go in without creasing. Then he wrapped the note in one of the clean handkerchiefs from a lower shelf and slipped it into the slit. The bottle he shoved into the pocket of an old pair of blue serge pants, then fastened the valise again and put it back where it belonged. (My God, even “his” valise had been Hut's valise first!)

As Milton walked back to the examining room, he heard the telephone ring. He got there in time to see Jenny put the phone back in its cradle and hunt for another number in the directory.

“That was Miss Folsom just now, Milt. Now she wants to
talk
to you. Free advice.” Jenny sighed. “Honestly, Milt, no matter what they say about modern progress, doctors had it better before they invented the telephone. If you came to a doctor's office and took up his time, you felt some obligation at least. To a doctor the telephone will never replace the horse!”

“Well, she won't be wanting much more advice—free or otherwise—about the old lady. She was dead when I got there. D.O.A. That's where I spent most of the morning.” Jenny “tsched.” He knew she was subtracting the eight dollars a week from their regular income.

“That's how it goes,” she said. “It was only to be expected with her. I told Miss Folsom you'd call back as soon as you could, but if the old lady's dead, what's the hurry?” In order to prevent Milton from calling the girl even if there was no hurry, she went to the waiting room and told the first patient to come in, the doctor would see him now.

The history charts of the four patients were laid out on the desk. While the first one was getting undressed, Milton could have made the telephone call, but he didn't want to, not knowing what to do next. Manna had fallen at his feet and he had bent and picked it up, yes, but what to do next he didn't know and he was scared he'd do the wrong thing. So he saw the four patients and that took an hour and a half. It was after twelve when he let the last one out the front door. Standing there, he could hear Maureen's whine, home for lunch and to beg Jenny to let her buy a new costume for tap dancing. He couldn't blame Jenny for giving in to the kid, he thought. You'd have to be made of iron to stand up against that whine, whine. Although since Jenny was Maureen's mother it might not sound so bad to her. Jenny, being their mother, thought that he or anybody else should be happy to slave his life away providing for Maureen and Bud. She had another think coming.

The telephone rang and he hurried back into the consultation room to answer it, calling to Jenny that he was getting it. If it was Miss Folsom calling again after he hadn't called her back, well, she would certainly think that as far as he was concerned he'd be satisfied to be remembered in her prayers. “Hello,” he said, “Dr. Krop speaking.”

Her voice trembled. “This is Sloane Folsom. They took—they just took her—but I didn't give them—the—certificate.”

“But then they can't—”

“I said you wanted me to come to your office and get it—the certificate—and then I would bring it to them. That you had to see another—” She paused. “I simply cannot allow—”

He said, “Now, now, now! I see you haven't taken the sedative I left, have you? You sound pretty hysterical to me, Miss Folsom.”

“I cannot permit you to—It is too—too much.”

“I better see you,” he said. “I'll be right over. I better.” He could not ask the girl to come over here, Milton thought, smelling the fish Jenny had cooked for their lunch, looking with distaste at his consultation room, hearing Maureen's high whine. Miss Folsom had never seen this place and he was glad of that. “Sit tight. I'll be right over.” He went into the kitchen and told Jenny that the Folsom girl was in hysterics. “I'm going over there now.”

Jenny shrugged. As he moved down the hall, she said, “Milt—no matter what, give her some medication, so she'll know it's not a social call. That's always the best thing. And then you better go to the clinic before you make your calls from this morning. They'll keep. Halloran, Demitric, Cohen, Antony. You should be back by five-thirty; there's a couple appointments in the office. You're going to be a little rushed since I gather you spent the whole morning at the Haunted House.”

Jenny always gathered. She gathered this and gathered that. Maybe, for a change, he would gather, too. He said, “Is that what you gathered, goosie, goosie, gather!”

Maureen looked up from her lunch, giggling.

Miss Folsom was wearing a thin black dress instead of the skirt and shirt, and that was new to him as was the smaller room she led him into, on the other side of the house; he had never been in there. As they had never been before to his knowledge, the windows were open in here, and because they opened onto the grass and bushes and trees, he smelled weather again instead of cement and cars and people, which was new, also. He stood at the window, breathing in while Miss Folsom repeated that she could not accept his sacrifice. She had thought it over and decided she had better go to the police. (It was a new voice.) He kept his face toward the window.

“What would they do to me?”

He turned. “That I couldn't say. I'm a doctor, not a lawyer. You could tell them the—mitigating circumstances,” he said, “the provocation—that it certainly wasn't premeditated.” He smiled. “You can tell I'm giving out with what I've read in the papers—the language—how should I know?”

“I've read the papers. Temporary insanity—”

“Temporary sanity,” he said with feeling, “that's my opinion, for what it's worth—that's how I felt about it. All my sympathy, I told you—”

“You are—very kind sounds absurd. All my words sound absurd, Dr. Krop, for what you are willing to do, but I cannot let you do it.”

“That's up to you,” he said. “In the final analysis, that's up to you. I took too much on myself when I came down the stairs and told you your worries were over and I'd sign the death certificate. Kindred spirits,” he said, the phrase coming to him, but sounding wrong, “kindred souls.”

“But it is so much more dangerous than you think, Doctor! You think there is just the offer for the house. There is much more and that makes it more dangerous.”

“Insurance?” Living on bread and water to pay the premiums, like he had to.

“No. The Folsom estate, Dr. Krop. Even now the Folsom estate does not merely mean this house—and the bulk of it goes to me. There are some bequests, of course, but the most part is mine. If there were no estate, I would allow you to—I don't want—I assure you, I don't want whatever will happen to happen.”

“You want to live. I know. One day I saw some pictures cut out of a magazine—a villa in Antibes, how it looked inside, outside, the beach—I asked your mother, as a joke, of course, whether she was planning a trip to the Riviera and she told me they were your pictures.” She looked puzzled, which astonished him because every detail of the pictures was clear in his mind, even the description, “engaging villa … life divides between rooms coolly devoid of color and terraces set against the flamboyant hues of the Mediterranean—” The taste of the description was fresh in his mouth. “Côte D'Azur,” he said, and she repeated “Côte D'Azur,” pronouncing it differently, he noticed.