The Lady and Her Doctor (13 page)

Sloane whispered, “Well? Well?”

“She didn't want to talk to me at all at first.” He heard Sloane draw in a sobbing breath. “She said because she isn't feeling well right now, but if that was a lie it was dumb; I didn't let Lady Constant get away with that. ‘Then I'm just the one you should talk to,' I told her, not fazed in the least. ‘You're forgetting I'm a doctor, aren't you, Lady Constant?'” Sloane was watching his mouth as if she needed to lip read, as if she were deaf. “‘I'm coming over, Lady Constant,' I said. ‘I'll look you over.' I wouldn't take no for an answer. After all, it's up to the doctor, isn't it? It's in the doctor's hands, I mean. I put it over, I'm going there now.” He moved to the big wardrobe and when he opened it the door creaked as in a ghost story. He reached in and took his medical case from the floor of it and turned, holding it toward Sloane, blowing on it as if it were dusty. “So I'm going right now to take care of your sister.” He set the bag down on the bed and opened it, his fingers touching the bottles lined up against the sides, each in its leather slot, then his sphygmomanometer, his stethoscope and his hypodermic case. He took out the stethoscope and, folding the rubber tubing, thrust it into his pocket. “Do I look like a doctor again?”

Sloane nodded.

“That's what I've got to look like.”

“Milton—”

“She's waiting, Sloane. I don't think I'd better drive in—parking in midtown—the subway will be quicker. You lie down, go on.”

She moaned, “How will I wait?” and threw her hands over her face.

On the dresser near the door there were a couple of her books. Milton tossed one onto the bed. “Read some poetry. Relax. Leave it all to me, Sloane, that's what I'm here for.”

She lay where she was, hearing his steps down the hall, along the lower hall, hearing the door slam after him. She sat up on the bed and her hand went over her mouth. She felt for the book and found it, and touching the limp leather binding knew it was her Shakespeare.

O! my offence is rank, it smells to heaven;

It hath the primal eldest curse upon 't,

A brother's murder.

She held the book for a moment more, then let it drop and moved her body to the far side of the bed so that she would not touch it. She thought: mother's, brother's, primal eldest curse. The syllables racked her throbbing head.

“
Entrez!
Oh, come in, do!”

She looked so startled, sitting there in bed, that he actually took out his stethoscope to introduce himself. “Dr. Krop,” he explained, waving the stethoscope. “I said I was coming right over, didn't you expect me?” He took a step into the room and she jumped out of the bed.

“I expected you to be announced.”

“Them to first call up from downstairs, you mean? Well, I just said Dr. Krop and they rushed me right up here by elevator. I guess they thought it was an emergency. You know—doctors, priests, privileged characters.” He closed the door with one hand and pointed to the bed with the other. “You'll freeze your tootsies. Go on, get back in bed, you look shaky.” What she had on must be a peignoir set like Jenny had bought Sloane for a wedding present; except in the movies he had never seen stuff like that on anyone, not on his type patient!

“I do feel rather shaky.”

Her hair must be tinted. Dyed was too harsh a word for the little that had been needed to change it from Sloane's mouse color to this; not blond, not red, not platinum. And, for the love of Mike, with some curls and waves in it, no matter what interior decorators said! Cut short, of course. He remembered Jenny telling Maureen about the razor cut. Razor cut. She probably had Sloane's eyes—too light blue for his taste—not really darker, just darkened, he thought. Wasn't there a black line drawn all around her lids? Did that do it?

She shivered under his stare and pulled the covers higher. “If you look at me that way, I'll think I'm very sick.”

“It's that you look so much like my wife.” He looked around for a chair to sit on. “So you're Sloane's sister!” The chairs were all covered with stuff, filmy, flyaway stuff like what she was wearing, dresses, a fur thing, another fur thing. Everything was covered with her stuff.

“Oh, there isn't any place cleared, is there? Well, I'm a lazy slut even when I haven't just gotten off a boat and even when I'm in health. But you know that, I'm sure; how Amory never lifts a finger and the maid here won't lift a finger for me. How do they know when you're stony? The stewardess from the boat must have checked a mark on my luggage after she had my tip—as tramps do on houses. Please just shove what's on that chair on the floor, Dr. Krop. How I miss Paulette—my faithful maid. Damn it, faithful unto debt, not death! You're not smiling! Don't you think that's a
mot
, Doctor Krop—faithful unto debt? It's the best I can do for the present, I'm afraid.”

He could barely hear what she was saying, the mélange of the textures he was lifting off the chair, the softness, crispness, clinging, the very colors themselves made his fingertips tingle. “You just got off the boat, you said?”

“Fresh from Antibes. Oh,” she said, “do you know Antibes?”

“The houses are up on cliffs and they have stone steps cut in the living rock down to the beaches there—”

“You've been to Antibes?”

“In my dreams,” he said, “but we're going there, me and Sloane.”

“Not Sloane! Surely not Sloane?”

“Why not? Now your mother is gone Sloane can go wherever she wants to, can't she? This Antibes, it's what it's cracked up to be, isn't it?”

“Cracked up?” She stared at him. “Well,” she said, “if you're a romantic. The whole Riviera is polluted, of course—like the whole world, Dr. Krop—but still …” What it was to wake up in the big bedroom there, early-morning chocolate brought by the faithful unto debt Paulette. When she drew the curtains—they were curtains in the theater sense—when Paulette drew the curtains and revealed the set … Oh, modest except for the set. One made plans, she said, half of which one never troubled to carry out. “The swimming. Air like a fin—in the alcoholic sense—a state of constant semi-intoxication—pixilated so that the merest pubcrawling became enchantment—”

Milton sighed, then shook himself like a dog to free himself of the enchantment, the pixilation. “Why did you come back then? Why leave?”

She laughed. “Why indeed! My dear man, for the only reason I ever do anything, because I'm stony. Surely Sloane told you that elemental fact about me. How is Sloane?”

“She's out. Doesn't know you're in the United States yet. I came home and found your message. Sloane's all right. I was forgetting this isn't a social call. How you are is more the point, isn't it? Now, exactly what's bothering you?” He couldn't get “Lady Constant” out.

“I'm dizzy and nauseated.”

“I see.” He opened his medical bag and took out his thermometer, shook it down and, rising, gave it to her. When he began to examine her, she took the thermometer out of her mouth and tried to tell him, don't bother, just dizzy, just nauseated, but he stuck the thermometer back in her mouth and did a superficial examination. Her eyes dilated, staring at him, and he thought that she was going to work up quite a temperature if she didn't look out. He went to his bag and touched the little bottles, one after another, then the tubes, then removed the thermometer and read it and shook it down. “You take two of these,” he chose the tube, opened it, “and you'll feel much better in half an hour.”

She held out her hand for the pills and he gave them to her. There was a bottle of water by the bed table and he poured some of it into a glass and held the glass toward her. She took the water but set it down on the table again.

“You've been very kind, Dr. Krop. It was very good of you.”

“You won't know how good until you take those pills.” He lifted the glass again.

“Later. It really was very good of you to—” He moved the glass toward her. “Don't bully me, Dr. Krop!”

“Bully? I call it curing you. Come on, get them down.”

She shook her head, smiling grimly. “Not now.”

“I know how to shove pills down balky patients if I have to.”

He smiled the same way she did; both of them smiled at each other, then she gave up.

“I'm not very good at being tactful, am I, Dr. Krop? I hated to tell you after dragging you up here like this, but I don't need the pills. You see, I had a brainstorm after you kindly—I'm an idiot to have forgotten, but one does, doesn't one? I'm perfectly sure that the dizziness and nausea are only what always happens to me the first day off a boat or a plane.” She put the two pills on the bed table, holding her hand over them. “If I'm wrong, I'll take these later.”

“I'll take them now.”

“But, Dr. Krop—in case my diagnosis is wrong?”

“Uhuh. Back to Papa.” He pulled her hand, which was so much like Sloane's, off the pills and took them away, dropping them into the tube again, screwing on the cover, shoving the tube back into its leather holder in the medical bag. “A first-year medical student knows better than to leave unidentified drugs around. It can lead to trouble.”

“You're very—careful.” He was coming toward her with another bottle from his bag.

“Dramamine,” he said, “if what you have is landsickness, someone should have told you about Dramamine.”

“But I know about it! My dear man, I lived on it! I wouldn't have survived.” She pushed away the glass he was holding toward her.

“Whoever told you should have told you to take it a day before you got on the boat and continue at least a day after. What's the matter? Do you like being dizzy and nauseated?”

She said, “Of course not, no, of course not!”

“Water stale?” He looked at the glass of it she would not accept. “I'll get you—”

“We'll ring,” she said, jumping up. “I'll ring for ice water.”

“I thought in Europe they didn't go for ice water.” But he didn't open the bathroom door to get her the water. The door opened, startling him so that the water he was carrying slopped over his sleeve. “What the hell is this?”

The young man walked to the bed, pulling out a handkerchief so that Milton first figured he'd gotten some of the water; but, no, the handkerchief was to put the two Dramamine capsules in, to carefully wrap them in, to tuck them away in his pocket.

“So it's not the B.F.,” Milton said slowly. “I thought B.F., but why you'd have to hide the B.F. from me—I'm your brother-in-law, not your hubby. So it's protection! A bodyguard, not a B.F.!” He wiped his face with his handkerchief and then wiped his wet sleeve. The two of them were staring at him. “I'm just going to sit down,” he said to the man who had moved in front of Lady Constant because he had pulled something out of his pocket. “Now I feel—dizzy and nauseated, too. I'll let you know how I feel after you tell me why anyone needs protection from Milt Krop.”

“Come now, Dr. Krop!” Lady Constant said, adding to the young man, “I keep thinking ‘Dr. Fell.'”

“Amory!”

“Who's Dr. Fell?”

“Didn't you learn Dr. Fell as a child? ‘I do not love thee, Doctor Fell, the reason why I cannot tell.'”

“I didn't ask you if you loved me; you don't have to love me, it's a free country. I'm asking why you have him hiding in the john? Why did he wrap up the Dramamine tablets like they were two-carat diamonds, as if I didn't know!”

“You do know then?”

“You don't have to be Einstein. That guy was here when I telephoned you. You tell me you're under the weather and being a good-natured slob as well as a physician, I dust off my little black bag and come running here—and that guy's in there so it's perfectly safe. Now tell me why he has to be there.”

“You have a good nature and I have a suspicious nature, Dr. Krop. I'm afraid I was suspicious of your good nature. I suspected that your forcing your attentions on me—your purely medical attentions on me, I mean—might conceivably have significance.”

“It had significance. Helpful Milt. Trying to help a lady out.”

“Out,” Lady Constant said. “Way out? All the way out?” She reached forward and tapped the pocket in which the young man had put the Dramamine.

“With Dramamine? The A.M.A. will be very surprised to hear that it's fatal.”

“And Day and I will be very surprised to find it is Dramamine, won't we, Day?”

The young man had a habit of settling his jacket over his shoulders before he spoke; he did it now. “Dr. Krop, I would say that you know what this is all about. It seems to me you do know why Amory should feel she must protect herself against you. You certainly haven't suggested that her suspicion is a surprise to you.”

Princeton boy. Talking through his nose. Brooks Brothers. “I haven't suggested it because it isn't true.” He spoke to Lady Constant without using her title. He was damned if he was going to use that title. “How did my wife know you were in the United States before I did? When did you talk to my wife?”

“I haven't talked to Sloane.”

“Is that the honest truth? I get it—she wrote to you! No? She telephoned you? I forget all you have to do to telephone the Riviera is pay the telephone bill.”

“Except for a cable telling me of my mother's death and funeral I haven't heard from Sloane in any shape or form.”

“You haven't?” Milton deliberately scratched his head. “Wait a sec—wait. I get it—at three o'clock today you spoke to Jenny, my sister-in-law, Mrs. Krop.” Milton guffawed. “My other sister-in-law! Oh, my God, don't tell me it was Jenny who put these funny ideas into your head!”

“Has she funny ideas?”

“She's full of them usually; in this case I don't know. I'm not my sister-in-law's keeper.”