The Lady and Her Doctor (9 page)

He put down the letter opener and shoved his chair back. “Go to the cops or shut up, I don't give a damn what you do. No, wait a minute, there's just one thing. Sloane isn't a doctor or a nurse. If you go to her and tell her about me—you know—if you tell her about my blood pressure, she won't believe it doesn't make a damned bit of difference what I do, within reason, with the time I have left to live. She—cares for me, Jenny. It's no suicide pact, it's love. If you tell her about my condition, she'll make an invalid out of me. Some honeymoon with the bride scared every night she'll wake up and find hubby dead in the bed! I have enough liabilities as it is, maybe she won't even marry me if she knows that. So if you tell her that, if you go there and open your big mouth and tell her that, until I give you permission, anyhow, if you blab, whether it breaks it up between us or not, you won't get one penny from me. There's no way you can get a cent out of me unless I want to give it. Bud can get a job and support you, he'll be sixteen. Maureen can have a latchkey and make her own peanut butter and jelly sandwiches after school every day. She can have a Coke by herself and you can go back to nursing, Jenny. You're healthy if I'm not.” He stood up and walked toward the door.

“Milt,” Jenny said, “I wouldn't. Milt, I wouldn't.” He opened the door of the consultation room. “Milt, I wouldn't, anyhow,” she said.

“Hello, I would like to talk to Dr. Mayberry, please.”

“Dr. Mayberry? Dick? This is Jenny Krop, Dick. Phil's widow. Phil Krop, Dr. Philip Krop. Yes,” Jenny said, “still Phil's widow. No,” she said, “I never got married again. Oh,” she said, “you mean Milt, Phil's younger brother? No, he just lives here with me and the kids, or rather we live with him. What? Go on! Is that a proposal, Dick, or a proposition?”

“Well,” she said, “I didn't call you for an offer, Dick. You've got a good wife and you're no marriage bureau that I know of. It's a medical question, Dick. What? Oh, ‘shoot,' you said. It's funny you should say ‘shoot.' You'll see what I mean. It's this way. You know how it is if you were a nurse and married to a physician, people always think you should know medicine. Well, I have a friend, she's a writer, Dick, and she wants to know—She writes those detective stories, she wants to know is it possible to poison someone with something so it can't be found out?”

“Yes,” Jenny said, “undetectable. Somebody is poisoned in the book and she wants to know is there such a thing as a poison they can't find out.”

“Thank you, Dick,” she said, “I'll tell my friend. Thanks a million. If poison is suspected, if it isn't a case of a dumb coroner passing anything up—yes, I remember the Faulkner case, that's right. So if the body is actually autopsied by some medical examiner who knows his business, as far as you know they can't get away with it. Have I got it straight?”

“Who?” she asked. “Milt? Oh, Milt doesn't want to be bothered with my questions these days. Milt's going to be married October fifteenth.”

Chapter III

The wedding was the only ceremony. Milton had figured there would be a “reading of the will” but Sloane said it hadn't been necessary. She knew what was in the will. If Milton was interested—“Not interested,” he said. The letter with the nice round $110,000 figure was enough for him, enough for a merry life if a short one, and that was all he was interested in. Jenny, of course, was interested in everything. She wanted to give a dinner for Sloane. She said a dinner would not only show Sloane she, Jenny, had nothing against her, but for the kids' sake, so they wouldn't think it peculiar, their uncle marrying a stranger, all of a sudden.

“Maureen cried,” Jenny said. “You know how she adores you, Milt!”

Maureen cried again when she found she wasn't going to be a flower girl at Uncle Miltie's wedding. It wasn't going to be that kind of wedding, Jenny explained, just a civil ceremony at City Hall because Sloane's mom had just died.

Jenny asked Milton if Sloane would like to have her go with her shopping for the wedding gown.

“She's not getting a wedding gown.” He, too, had wanted to go shopping with Sloane for her trousseau. It would be like in the movies, he thought, models parading in front of you, no looking at price tags. Jenny and Maureen staring at him in astonishment at this information looked comically alike. (He had also been astonished. “But Milton, darling,” Sloane had said, “I make my things. There's no dressmaker who knows me as well as I know me.” He couldn't see what knowing had to do with it, but she said she knew herself, she knew clothes. Like hell she knew. “Come on, Sloane,” he had said, making a joke of it, “you don't thnik you look like the pictures in
Vogue
, do you?” “The last thing in the world I want,” Sloane said, “is to look like the pictures in
Vogue
.” Whatever she wanted to look like, she looked like nothing in the world he had ever seen. For twenty-nine fifty you could buy a decent dress, but he had never seen anything like Sloane's dresses for any money, and nobody else had, either.) Jenny was talking to him again, asking whether he knew if Sloane had bought herself one of those new peignoirs they showed for trousseaus. He shook his head, not daring to tell Jenny that Sloane had goggled at him when he asked about her “trousseau,” as if she had never heard the word mentioned in the presence of a lady. “You know,” he had said, “white bride stuff, lacy—very-thin—” “Don't be vulgar, darling,” she said. Vulgar!

“That's good,” Jenny said, “then we'll get her a pretty one. You can come shopping with me for it, Maureen. We'll go to Saks Fifth Avenue and do it right. And should we get her a nightie to match?”

Buddy grinned, “Now that's what I call a good idea, Mom! A nightie is what a bride needs most!”

“Why, Bud?” Maureen saw him grinning. “Bud, why?”

“Murine, if you'd use some Murine for your eyes maybe you wouldn't have to ask so many questions. Right, Uncle Miltie?”

“Mom, why?”

Jenny said, “Now I already told you about things like that. I
told
you, Maureen!” She saw her daughter's whine forming, mounting. “Maureen, if you say ‘why' once more I won't take you to Saks Fifth Avenue!”

Since Sloane told nobody about her marriage, the peignoir was the only gift they received.

“How kind of Jenny,” Sloane said, but although Milton privately thought that Jenny had really “done it right,” all white and lace and white ribbons, and you could see through it when Sloane held it up, she held it up for one minute only, then folded it back into the Saks Fifth Avenue box, laid back the tissue paper which had covered it and that was the last Milton saw of the peignoir.

Milton was one hundred per cent for the marriage at City Hall with Jenny for one witness, an official hanging around and a couple who were there for their own license for the rest. Walking down the aisle dressed in a monkey suit wasn't his idea of a good time, but he certainly figured they'd have a honeymoon. Bermuda, he figured, or Florida, even, having given up the Riviera for the honeymoon since they had to wait for the house to be sold to get hold of money that wasn't tied up in the estate. He had looked up the names of the best hotels in Bermuda and Palm Beach. Once, at a medical convention in Atlantic City, Milt had stayed at the Traymore Hotel. A bride and groom had gone up in the same elevator with him. The groom said to the bride that he had had champagne and caviar sent up to their suite so they could have some before going down to dinner, O.K.? Milton was thinking about that bride and groom when he asked Sloane how about Bermuda for their honeymoon.

Sloane said, “I beg your pardon?” They were sitting together in the smallest room downstairs. She had ripped the blue wool which had been in the basket on the table the day her mother died, knitted it into a short thick cape, and now she was threading it with black velvet ribbon, making small black velvet bows.

“How about Bermuda, I said, for our honeymoon.” He saw her expression. “We are getting married, right? Bride and groom, honeymoon, it rhymes. It's in all the songs.”

“Do leave it in the songs, please.” She held up the cape, frowning at it.

“What do you call a honeymoon?”

“I say wedding trip, darling.”

So he said “wedding trip.” What hotel, where, for their wedding trip, and she said, “Oh, please, no hotel, darling!” She said hotels made everything that shouldn't be—public. People who went to hotels at these times invited the other residents in, she said, ugh—from the bellhops to the manager—and she threw the blue cape away from her in disgust and came to him, running her finger over his cheek. “It makes my blood run cold,” she said. “You don't want my blood to run cold, do you, blind Milton?”

He had not quite acknowledged to himself that it was his own blood running cold that he was afraid of, that he had counted on the hotel people looking at him the way they had looked at the couple in the elevator at the Traymore to give him a lift, a kick. That first time, that first day, he had been so sorry for her that day, he had believed she was like him, beaten down like him, hungry like him for life, and that first time he had wanted her. Without any trimmings, he thought.

If he wanted to go away, Sloane was saying, Cousin Etta's place would be perfect. Cousin Etta would be delighted to have them stay as long as they chose. All they needed to do was ask. Cousin Etta kept the house staffed all year round and it was good for the staff to have people descend on them occasionally since Cousin Etta hardly got out there at all any more. “It's a lovely old place,” Sloane said, “and oh, Milton—Cousin Etta's beach!”

“A private beach?” When Sloane said it was a private beach, Milton saw a strip of white sand fenced off with big signs reading
PRIVATE
,
NO TRESPASSING
and innumerable public bathers crowded together with hardly room to stretch out in (like Coney Island) looking over the fence and envying him and Sloane, wondering who they were to rate a private beach, which would give the honeymoon the kind of lift he needed. But then he remembered the time of year. “Hey,” he said. “No one goes to beaches the middle of October, Sloane!”

“No one but us. October is when it is wonderful—the solitude, the wind, the whipped surf—undomesticated. When I was there last there was a windstorm; it had blown, blown.… It had a Brontë-ish, moorish quality otherwise sadly lacking on Long Island. Ah, Milton,” she said, touching his mouth, “Cousin Etta's place will be perfect for our honeymoon.”

She was riding him, saying “honeymoon,” of course, but you certainly couldn't call from Queens to Long Island a trip!

The house was big, all right, but it gave you the creeps. It was clean as a pin, nothing neglected or falling down, but the covering on the furniture, the drapes, even the pictures on the walls had had all the colors sucked out of them by years of sun, or maybe, he thought, blown off by the rough wind Sloane thought so marvelous. You could see patterns of flowers and leaves on the furniture coverings, but the flowers were now the same as the leaves. It all gave him the creeps and Sloane liked it. (No lipstick, no nail polish, no wedding gown, no color!) She said, well, perhaps a room should have—she said it in French; in English it meant “one spot of red”—so she marched into the kitchen, came back with a big orange cooking pot and stuck flowers in it. And he wasn't at all sure she did it to kid him. The bedroom Sloane chose for them had six windows and you could see the private beach from them and there was a private balcony you could step out on, but who wanted to step out when you had to clutch the railing to keep from being blown off the balcony just to see an empty beach? (Sloane wanted to. She made him come out and stand there in the wind and say, “Wild west wind.” An “incredible sensation,” she said.) The bathroom that went with the room, now that was incredible for you, Milton thought, and the staff was two old people (the man with a well-developed Parkinson's) who obviously resented Cousin Etta's little scheme for keeping them on their toes. They knew Sloane from the times she had stayed here, but although she told them he was her husband and a doctor, he was “Mr.” Krop and she was “Miss” Sloane. The staff fed them three meals a day and kept the place clean and made the bed up, but with no frills attached—which symbolized everything so far. He was plain married to Sloane with no frills attached. Sloane herself provided no frills—no lipstick, no frills. She certainly felt no need to be feminine. It astonished Milton—a girl who read poetry all the time. You would think a girl like that would be poetic, way off in the clouds somewhere, but she was anything but.

She left the lacy peignoir Jenny gave her at home and took what she called her “Jaeger.” Her Jaeger was the ugliest damned bathrobe Milton had ever seen. Sloane adored it. She even rubbed the sleeve of it against his cheek to show him how soft the wool was, and he gave it that; it was soft, but surely that wasn't all a bride's negligee was supposed to be, soft? And she was so proud that it was twelve years old. (Wasn't it the man who was supposed to be attached to old clothes?) Everything Sloane had brought with her was old: old flannel slacks, old mannish shirts to wear with them, the older the better. It was so sad to Sloane that just when a shirt got really good, it fell to pieces. The first night they were there, Milton had gone into the crummy bathroom and pulled off the new silk striped pajamas he had bought for the occasion because it turned out Sloane didn't have a nightie to her name. Never wore them, she said, and if she didn't wear nightgowns how could he wear pajamas?

As he had told her, Milton had put down what had happened the afternoon her mother died to hysteria, to shock; he had felt broad-mindedly that anything could happen on a day like that, but this didn't hold for Cousin Etta's place. He was no Romeo but he was no monk either; yet Sloane certainly surprised him. The second day they were on Long Island, an unexpectedly warm day, like June, so that they could go down to the private beach and lie in the sun, he was so—surprised at her—that she noticed. She rolled away from him and lay on the sand with her forearms under her head and said very calmly, “Now I've shocked you, Milton, darling.”