The Lady and Her Doctor (17 page)

“I certainly will put in a good word, but, according to what my wife told me, your girl friend already got what was coming to her and a lot more.”

“That's true, Doctor, except, of course, for the house itself.”

“According to my wife, her sister got her half of that, too.”

“Yes, she did, but the point is that Mrs. Folsom had come to believe that it was unfair for Amory to get only what it had been valued at ten years before. When she found she could get $110,000, she weakened, Amory says. At first she had been adamant when Amory asked for a more realistic fifty per cent but Amory believes that, had she not died when she did, she would have given in. Amory is quite sure that when she sold the house her mother would have given her the money, but, of course, she died.”

Of course she died. “The old lady was about to sell the house when she died? I didn't hear you.”

“That's right; that's what Amory thinks, anyhow. She can't prove it in the courts—not a hope. But although all the rest of her mother's estate was tied up for her sister, Mrs. Folsom could have given Amory the difference between what Amory got for her share of the house and what it could have been sold for. The reason Amory left Europe in such a tearing hurry was because it seemed peculiar to her that her mother should die just when she was having this change of heart, when she was ready to sell. It seemed too much of a coincidence to Amory—and this, of course, was all she had to go on before she found out her sister had married you. Well, you know what Amory believes. I don't, as I told you. I believe that Amory will find out that she's invented a murder out of the whole cloth. In my opinion there's a lot of projection involved.”

“Projection?”

“In the psychiatric sense.” He cleared his throat. “I dabble in psychiatry, as you may have guessed, and I really think that the—the
vigor
of Amory's imagination here is in part due to her projecting onto her sister some of her own death-wishes against the old lady, her mother. As a doctor, of course, you'd know more about that than I would! Are you there, Dr. Krop?” Dr. Krop made a sound between a gasp and a grunt. “Well, that's all I had to say, really, but, if you should need me.… I always have the use of a little
pied-à-terre
in New York. I'm in the telephone book: Dayton Mills. In case you should wish to send a Message to Garcia.”

“Thanks. She still won't touch me with a ten-foot pole, huh?” Milton tried to laugh. “Well, she'll change her mind in three weeks.” He hung up. Milton got his coat and hat and walked to the front door, which he was surprised to find locked and bolted. He unlocked and unbolted the door and walked out. He was so deep in thought he did not even notice Jenny and Maureen standing there.

“Milt? You going? Wait! You have to wait!”

He shook his head.

“Milt—you have to. Milt, wait, you forgot your bag!” She took his arm and led him back, whispering. “Don't go out there now, Milt. Mrs. Parker is there. Cissie's mother. She's going to make a big hullaballoo if she sees you!” It seemed to Jenny that Milt came to when she mentioned Cissie. “I'm in love with a wonderful girl,” she thought. Ha! Ha! Once inside the apartment, she sent Maureen to find Uncle Milt's doctor bag. “I think it's in the kitchen. You look.” It took Maureen a long time to find anything, even if it was at the end of her nose. “Milt, when I was standing out in the lobby, I ran into Mrs. Parker. She turned pale as a ghost and charged at me and said she thought so, she thought my brother-in-law was around! I would have denied it—on general principles the way she was so pale—but before I could shut her up, Maureen let the cat out of the bag. Mrs. Parker started to holler that she knew it, she knew it! I shut her up and made Maureen stand outside—I hope she doesn't catch her death—and Mrs. Parker started on me hot and heavy. She's a nervous woman, Milt. Her Cissie had a big date tonight, she was going to the Stork Club with this boy Mrs. Parker thinks is the cat's whiskers—such a future—Naturally, she boasts to me every chance she gets! Anyhow, Cissie was going out with him formal. She had her formal in a hatbox and she was going to a friend who lives in Manhattan to dress. I guess this boy Mrs. P. thinks is so wonderful doesn't own a car—and a taxi from here to the Stork Club! Anyhow, Cissie went to go to this friend's to dress up and all of a sudden she's home again with the hatbox and she isn't going to any Stork Club and all she would say was she changed her mind. Are you listening, Milt? Mrs. Parker is sitting in her window trying to figure out what made Cissie change her mind and she sees you—she thinks. She goes into the lobby, sniffing around, and then you throw me out of my house and I get Mrs. Parker's complaints right in the face.”

“I have to go home. I'm not responsible for Mrs. Parker, Jenny.”

“And you're not responsible for Cissie, either.”

“Are you on that again? No, I'm not responsible for Cissie, either.”

“That's what I told her mother. It's a free country, I said. You can come to see your sister-in-law, what's that got to do with her daughter, but according to Mrs. Parker, Cissie is still head over heels about you and if she saw you that was all she needs. (Probably in the subway, right, Milt?) To hell with the Stork Club and this nice steady boy with a future and Cissie is sitting upstairs in the apartment now. Here's Maureen with your bag, Milt. Wait now—Maureen, you go to the front window and tell us when Mrs. Parker goes inside the house.”

“Like the F.B.I.?”

“Like the F.B.I. Hurry up, Maureen. You better wait a little, Milt. It won't look good if she starts accusing you right in the street at the top of her lungs. It could get to your wife; you know how people are.”

“I'll wait a couple of minutes.”

Jenny brushed a thread off his lapel. “Milt, that's one reason I feel so responsible. I wish I'd let you and Cissie, Milt—” He didn't register much. He was filing the thought of Cissie away, she thought, like Maureen stowing away candy bars in her dresser drawer for when she needed something sweet.

“I'm going now.”

“Wait for Maureen, Milt. Take my advice.”

“Take my advice, take my advice, you're like a broken record.”

“Mom—she went away. Mrs. Parker. Not into the house, Mom.”

“Thanks for the lamb stew, Jenny. You make a good stew.”

“Any stew I make, you can eat it without worrying. I wish I could say the same for the stews you make for yourself, Milt. One of these days, you're going to get yourself in so deep—”

Chapter V

The telephone rang only four times before it was picked up. Milton, who expected to wait long enough for Mrs. Austen to come downstairs, who had prepared for her and not for Sloane first off, was thrown off balance, so that all he could think of was to ask where Mrs. Austen was.

“It's quite all right. She's not about. Oh, Milton, Milton, I've been waiting!”

“Yes. First of all, Sloane, you were right. She was suspicious.”

“Tell me,” she said, as if he hadn't spoken at all. “Tell me!”

“What do you think I'm doing?”

“Tell me.”

He began to talk rapidly and with increasing forcefulness, what he said coming to him as he said it, repeating, enlarging what the Mills guy had told him, sounding, he thought, good. “I'm no psychiatrist, Sloane, and I don't pretend to be but—Well, first I listened to her spiel—you know how a doctor does when the patient reels off his symptoms. They're all new to the patient but to the doctors it's an old, old story. That's how I listened, as if it was nothing but what I expected, as if I was diagnosing. You know what projecting is, don't you, Sloane? You put onto someone else, or to something else, what you feel yourself. Your sister certainly had plenty death wishes against your mother. What I did was read her the riot act with the projection idea as a base.”

“Milton,
will you tell me!
”

“I just told you, Sloane. She was suspicious. I just told you how I handled it.”

“How you handled it! How you handled it!”

She sounded as if she were choking and then, bang, she hung up! She hung up on him. Milton closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the telephone, tamping down the heat which was rising in him, the beat. When he had himself in hand again, he found another dime in his pocket and put it into the slot. He was about to dial when he saw Cissie standing there, right outside the glass of the door. In the subway she had saved his life, she had stopped him—now what? What was she going to change now? He dialed his number, smiling at Cissie while he waited. “Sloane? What's the big idea hanging up? You didn't let me finish. I know what to do but you didn't let me finish.”

“Finish then,” she said, as if she weren't at all interested any longer.

“This explanation I gave her shook her, but even if she thinks it could be projection, that wouldn't be enough and I never thought it would. What do you take me for?”

“Please get on with it. I think I'm more—shaken up—than Amory is.”

“God, you've got faith in me, haven't you?”

She said, “I had.”

“Leave it to me. Now, your sister is crazy for this place, Antibes. She raved about it and maybe it wasn't raving—not talk, see what I mean? Maybe she was hinting. Now, we give her some money and send her back where she came from. My psychiatric explanation will hold out a good deal longer if she's busy doing what she likes and isn't sitting in a hotel room here staring at the four walls, going over and over what I said, what I didn't say.”

While Milton waited for Sloane to respond he nodded to Cissie. Sloane would get it. He would tell her he wasn't going to let her come face to face with her sister at all. He was going to handle the whole thing the way he had promised her. He'd be the go-between, and then, when she gave him some money—her hands would be tied. She couldn't possibly go to the cops and tell them he'd walked out with her money. (And he was her husband, don't forget that!) What she would think was that he had gotten cold feet because her sister had come on the scene and had walked out on her and what could she do? All she could do was wait, then when the ax fell in three weeks—In three weeks you could cover a lot of territory if you had enough money! You could find a house on a cliff in the sun on a beach nobody ever heard of! Cissie was looking at him with her heart in her eyes—three weeks with Cissie, Cassie in a bikini on a beach? She was leaning against the soda fountain, folding a straw nervously into accordion pleats. Still Sloane said nothing. “Well, the next thing is you get hold of some dough and give it to me. I give it to your sister. I see her and her projections off on the next plane out. How does that sound, Sloane?”

“Preposterous.”

“Now, wait a sec!”

“Idiotic. If she is suspicious now, she'll be sure then!”

“Now that's just where you're wrong; why don't you give me credit for some brains? If she could take it for bribery, of course not. Out of a clear blue sky, dough—of course not! But that doesn't happen to be the case, does it? I'm suggesting that you give her just what she thinks is coming to her legitimately, what she thinks is owing her, what your mother was going to give her from the sale of the house. You give her the difference between what she got as her share of the house and what you can get for it, anyhow what your mother expected to get for it—” Now came the picture of Sloane the prisoner in the Haunted House, her mother's prisoner in the Haunted House, the little bird unable to get out of the cage. He smiled at Cissie and waited. Maybe the whole story about the mother and the sale of the house was a put-up job; if Sloane now told him so, he'd go into another spiel about projection, the sister indulging in wishful thinking, projecting what she wanted onto truth—In the closed-up telephone booth, he was inside the muffled drum beating funeral marches to the grave.

“I won't give her a penny.”

“But if your mother was going to sell the house—was she, Sloane?”

“Of course. As if a person can sell his share of the—the pottage and then years later—To sell is to sell, once and for all, isn't it?”

“I was under the impression your mother wouldn't sell.”

“Were you?”

“I figured you were the one—” He remembered how he had told her that he knew all about it, knew what life had been for her in the Haunted House. He understood her, he had said, both of them two of a kind, he had said. Like the biddies in the neighborhood were saying, she'd been laughing up her sleeve at him the whole time. Using him. They were all laughing at him except Cissie. He looked straight at Cissie and she raised her eyes to him. Cissie the little bird, Cissie. He wanted the money to fly away with Cissie. “Sloane, what difference does it make whether your sister sold her birthright for a mess of pottage or not, whether it's right she should want more or not; we're entitled to a little peace of mind, aren't we? Listen, this could be a life and death matter, couldn't it? Give me the money. The hell with the money, you have enough left. Let me take it to her!”

“Preposterous.”

He said, “Well, that's my best suggestion.” She gave such a peculiar laugh—like hell,
laugh
—that he found himself staring at the earpiece from which the sound had come.

She said, “Is it?”

“You have a better suggestion?” This time she was really laughing. Crying? “Well, come on, you're so smart!”

“I'm so smart? I'm stupid, incredibly, abysmally stupid, Milton!”

Then she clapped down the receiver again, leaving Milton still staring at the earpiece, hearing, “
Stupid
, Milton!
Stupid
, Milton!” StupidMilton, stupidMilton, hearing the speech she hadn't made, everything she hadn't said but had thought he understood from the first time he had told her he did understand, from the time he had promised her he would “handle” her sister, don't worry! What she had understood the whole time was that he meant he would kill her sister. She had figured, had understood he would become a murderer, just like her! “Birds of a feather,” he had called them, himself, he had said it, stupidMilton! Birds of a feather flock together, he had told her.