The Lady and Her Doctor (3 page)

“Good morning, Doc.”

“Good morning.” Mrs. Levinson. False croup. She expected him to ask about her little Michael. “How's Mike been?”

“If he'd had any more trouble, Doc, you'd be the first to know.” She had a tooth missing in the front and before laughing always covered her mouth with her hand. She did so now. “You're the doctor, Doc!”

He was supposed to laugh at the joke. “I guess I would at that.” Was he really just going on doing what was expected of him?

“You're going into the Haunted House, huh, Doc? What's it like inside?”

“You want more inside dope, you go see the doctor. There's just the old lady and her daughter in all those rooms, is that right, Doc?”

He nodded.

“What's the daughter like? Somebody, I forget, told me she used to see the old lady around before she was bedridden, a regular Maggie Sugarbum—How about the girl? What kind of girl lives like that in a house like that?”

“What kind of girl?” He thought for a minute: hair skinned back, big nose. Skin color like a mushroom from being under glass all the time. Cat had her tongue when he was around. “Well,” he said, “she's always reading poetry.” The women started shaking their heads at each other when they heard that. Milton realized that each time he came to see the old lady and wanted to sit down on the chair pulled up to her bed and had to lift one of Miss Folsom's little brown books of poetry off it, he shook his head the same way. The house was crammed full of furniture. Once he asked the old lady why she didn't sell it. “My dear man,” she said, “you couldn't. At present it is in disrepute.” That meant it was old but it wasn't antique. It certainly wasn't “colonial,” he knew that much.

“Mrs. Levinson, we're keeping Doc out here talking and meanwhile the old lady could be dying in there.”

“Better get to my patient,” Milton said and opened the gates. He walked briskly, putting on a doctor act for the
Kaffeeklatsch
.

What they had called the Haunted House was a brownstone turreted pile with bay windows bursting through the flat face like boils. (Jenny went to a place and bought magazines secondhand for the waiting room.
The New Yorker
magazine had the Charles Addams cartoons, like this house. It was like a Charles Addams cartoon.) The Haunted House had been left over from the old time before Jackson Heights had been built up. If it had once had companionable neighbors, it had none now; what were not big apartment houses were small five-room bungalows built in the twenties. It had about three acres of grounds, with a brick path and a brick drive and the remains of landscaping, a fountain, statues, even the ruins of a little wooden gingerbreaded bridge over the ghost of a stream. The old lady said her grandfather had built the house for his wife, so the grandfather must have had plenty; but now, Milton thought, the old lady and the girl were probably living on the remains of the last mortgage or on the charity of the bank or whoever held the mortgages, until they decided to foreclose and throw them out of this pile and build another apartment house on the site. Now the old lady lived on bread and water and family pride and, one of these days, today, tomorrow, next year, five years from now, the old lady would be carried out feet first. (But she didn't know, Milton thought, stumbling. She didn't know for sure that it would be within a couple of years, so it wasn't the same thing.) He walked more carefully up the overgrown path, hearing the murmur of the women's voices behind him. When he had seen the pictures of the villa in Antibes lying on the old lady's bed that time, he had even figured she'd dreamed she'd be well enough sometime (and rich enough) to take a trip to the Riviera. The pictures had been cut out of some magazine—“steps cut into the living rock descend from the cliff-top house down to the sea,” he remembered. He had figured the old woman had dreamed—and asked her, but she said, “Oh, that's my daughter's.” So the daughter, poor kid, was the one who wanted to go down to the sea in dreams. So the daughter and the doctor had that in common, he thought—dreams.

The grass which had forced itself up between the bricks was tall enough to bend and wave in the breeze. The lawn looked like a wheat field. What had been plump rhododendron bushes were so tall and stringy that they were like withered, arthritic arms with leaves clutched in the deformed fingers. Why couldn't the girl get herself a pair of blue jeans and get out here and clean up the grounds for exercise? It would do her a world of good to get out from under, to get away occasionally from the old lady's beck and call. He played with the idea of giving the old lady a good talking-to about the daughter being indoors so much. He remembered his mother reading from the Bible: “Honour a physician.… For of the most High cometh healing.” The old lady didn't know her Bible very well because she certainly didn't honor him. He walked up the stone steps carefully for he always had the feeling the stone was ready to crumble, and the whole house, in fact, give way. With the old lady, he thought, he had no authority. He had a lot of foreign patients from the old country where they were supposed to bargain but they didn't, not about his fees, anyhow, while the old lady, the blue blood all-American family, did. “For of the most High cometh healing.…” Man in white. She probably called the Good Humor man a man in white. His mother must turn in her grave at the honoring the old lady did to him. Oh, God, he thought. Oh, God, if only his mother hadn't believed being a doctor was the greatest honor. Four years in college. Four years in medical school. Interning. All the Krop boys … And now that he knew for sure, what was he going to do about it?

He was just about to ring the bell when he saw that the door had been left slightly ajar; for him, no doubt, so the old lady must be really in a bad way, he thought, because they never left it open. The girl must not have wanted to leave her mother even long enough to answer his ring. He stepped inside, reminding himself not to be startled this time by the two suits of armor which stood one on either side of the wide hall, just inside the door, challenging him: Who goes there? It was dark inside. When the girl came down to open up for him, he generally heard her putting the light on along the way, for him, that is. She, he was sure, could find her way around without lights. Knew every inch by heart. Born here. Knew where the thin rugs scattered on the dark floor had tears in them. He moved cautiously down the hall, transferring his medical bag to his left hand so that with his right he could feel along the wall for the wall light he remembered was somewhere in the neighborhood, but he couldn't find it. Be damned, he thought, if he was going to die of a broken neck here. He called, “Miss Folsom! It's the doctor, Miss Folsom!”

He never did know what it was, what small sounds heard and translated subconsciously, or what sudden vacuum, what sounds indrawn, made him forget about breaking his neck and hurry along the dim hall and turn to the right into one of the dim rooms off it just in time to catch her tipping the bottle, spilling the pills into her palm. She was not looking at him but at the glass of water ready on the desk to wash the pills down with. Milton dropped his medical bag and ran across the room and grabbed the bottle with one hand while he held her hand with the other. He then set the bottle down on the desk that had the water on it and took the pills she had spilled on her palm and transferred them to his left hand. Then he retrieved the bottle and, bending over to put the pills back, saw the suicide note. It read:
Amory, I am committing suicide because I poisoned Mother. It was signed Sloane
.

Milton discovered that while he had been reading the note he had put the six pills she had spilled out back into the bottle and screwed the top back on. Now he put the bottle into his jacket and the suicide note into the inside breast pocket where he kept papers, as if a suicide note was as dangerous to leave in her possession as pills. Then he turned back to the girl and said, “What's been going on here?” It seemed to him that his voice broke a long silence but actually it had been only a few minutes since he had called her name in the hall. “Well,” he said, “come on, tell me, what's been going on here?”

She licked her lips. “You weren't coming until noon,” she said.

It wasn't that he had walked in just as she was going to do it, not a coincidence, that is, and not a fake suicide, he was somehow sure of that. She had left the front door open because she didn't expect him until noon, when it would be all over and done with, and then she had heard him call and tried to get it over with. “Too bad I came earlier, isn't it?” Her lips began to tremble, then her whole body. He went to her and grabbed her arm, which stiffened at his touch and pulled her after him while he moved back into the hall again and toward the stairs.

He was hurting her arm. She said, “Please.”

“No,” he said, “come on up with me. I'm not going to leave you alone down here.” He saw that her eyes were blurred with tears and set her hand on the banister rail so that she could guide herself up. “Come on.” She started up obediently and he came after her, one step below. When they reached the half landing, he put his hand under her elbow and helped her up, then turned her toward the big room which was the old lady's and she came along nicely until they reached the open door; then she balked.

“Please,” she said, “please.”

“You don't want to go in?” She nodded, then she couldn't stop nodding and the violent trembling began again. “None of that,” he said. “Listen to me. None of that!” He looked around the hall and saw the bathroom directly ahead and led her that way, then shoved her into it and came in after her. “Wash your face. Let the water run cold over your wrists.” (What a bathroom—a museum piece!) He turned on the cold faucet and put her wrists under it and she stood that way, catatonic, bent over the sink. He opened the big brown door of the medicine cabinet and looked over what was in there. At first, in the trance she was in, she didn't understand; then she said, “Don't trouble, there's nothing poisonous there. Just what I gave Mother. I was going to take the rest of them.”

He reached into his pocket and showed her the bottle. “This?” She nodded.

“Then what happened?”

She looked down at her wrists. “She hasn't—hadn't been feeling well. She said she was feeling very ill. Since yesterday, oh, groaning—
breathing
—” She lifted one hand to cover her ear, but when the cold water dripped, she shivered and put her hand back under the faucet. “Since yesterday—groaning—all night.” She looked at him. “This morning, I gave her three of the pills. She wouldn't stop. I kept on giving them to her. Four more. Seven. I was going to take the rest.”

“Can I leave you alone while I have a look at your mother?”

She nodded again. “It's not so easy—twice.” She smiled at him. “One loses—momentum.… One wants to live.”

One wants to live. Two want to live. Me, too, he thought. He said, “Yes, one wants to live. Just let that cold water run. I'm going in to have a look at her.” He left her staring down at the water running over her thin wrists.

From the doorway it was obvious that the old lady was dead. Milton went to the bed and examined the body briefly, then pulled the sheet up over the head. Considering how to handle the girl, just standing there figuring out how to handle her, he noticed the pile of papers lying on the chair pulled up to the bed where the girl generally sat, where the brown books of poetry usually lay, and he picked the papers up. Partly because the papers might give him a clue, partly to put off the moment when he must face the girl, he went to the window and took the papers with him. The top paper was a letter from the Brown Realty Company and offered Mrs. Folsom $110,000 for her property and requested, this time, the letter said, the courtesy of a reply since if Mrs. Folsom was determined not to sell at this date, the Brown Realty Company would negotiate for other equally desirable property in the vicinity. Then, of course, Milton got it. (He glanced around for the pictures of the house on the cliffside at Antibes, France.) The house didn't belong to the banks, for the love of Mike, it belonged to the old miser! She had had this offer from this firm. Not even “the courtesy of a reply” did it say? Miser, one of those misers! He looked back at the sheeted figure on the bed. “One wants to live.” You bet. One kills to live, too. The old lady wouldn't let the girl live. She wanted the girl to go on in this rock pile, rat hole here. She wanted the girl to stay in this rut just like Jenny wanted him to stay in his rut, until the girl died, until he died!

What he felt first was sympathy for the girl, he told himself later, the first thing he had felt was sympathy for the girl.

Cautiously now, he tiptoed away from the window, the papers rustling richly, and set the papers back on the chair where they had been. He listened, but except for the running water there was no sound. Then he tiptoed back to the window, took the bottle out of his pocket again and studied it carefully. He screwed open the top and spilled the pills onto his palm. He smelled them, tasted them, made absolutely sure, in other words, that these were the ones he had dispensed to the old lady himself. The bottle of course was the same. The label was in his own handwriting.
CAUTION
.
POISON
.
DO NOT OVERDOSE
. “Now wait a sec,” he told himself. “Hold on a sec. This is it! Look before you leap, Milt. Look the ground over and see what we're getting into, boy. It may seem foolproof but let's look before we leap.

“I'll start from the beginning, O.K.?” he told himself. “No druggist knows about these. I had them around the house. I dispensed them. I know the old lady didn't die of poisoning, so I'm O.K. in case anything happens. I'm in the clear. I'm no accessory to any crime, I'm an accessory to innocence, if there is such a thing. If there is any such animal! The old lady died a natural death, no matter with what provocation, or whatever the girl thought; about that there is no question. The only question is, what do I gain?