The Lady and Her Doctor (39 page)

She ignored Amory. “Two, I figured why shouldn't I run over to the Haunted House today instead of waiting for tomorrow. Why not? I had nothing better to do. I can't claim it was a hunch, Milt, I just went. Then when I ran into Mrs. Austen there and found this thing out, I had to come here with her while she was around to back me up; otherwise who would believe such a thing? Do you see, Milt?”

Amory saw one thing. Jenny was the type who bulldozed her way over other people's objections but at the same time wanted their approval. Dr. Fell's approval, anyhow. He had told her not to come, she had ignored his order but she was determined he should thank her for coming. Very interesting, Amory thought. So she is
cette type
, but where did that get one? Nowhere. “What is it I wouldn't believe, Jenny?”

“We'll get to it, don't worry. We're going to take our hair down, don't worry!”

“Shut up, Jenny!”

“No, Milt, let me talk. She's been dying to pin something on you. She knows it and I know it and now Mrs. Austen knows it and if you don't, Milt, it's just too bad about you!”

“Do go on and take your hair down, Jenny.”

“From the first minute you heard about Milt, you were looking for trouble. You didn't like Milt marrying your sister and I'll bet you didn't like him coming into her money, either. In spades: So you made up your mind there was something fishy about your poor sister and the best you could rake up was that Mrs. Austen hated Milt's guts.”

Mrs. Austen groaned and wrung her hands.

“I'm sorry if I'm too plain-spoken, Mrs. Austen, but better plain-spoken than a snake in the grass as far as I'm concerned. I was brought up to call a spade a spade and I'm going to do so.” Milt was waving his hand with the hamburger in it. “Just wait, Milt!”

“You wait, Jenny! Hold on a second. This is a party, or it was until you came in. You want to take your hair down, do it later. After the party you girls can get together all you want, but not now.”

“Now. Oh, for the love of Mike, Milt, you're just like the time with the impacted molar and you wanted to wait until after that benefit we had those tickets for. Didn't you tell me I was right and you wouldn't have enjoyed the show with it hanging over your head? This is the same thing. You want to go away with a clear mind, don't you? So let me spit it out and I'll butt out of your party!”

“Do let her spit it out, Dr. Krop!” Try and stop her.

“You know as well as I do she's trying to pin something on you—My God, he's so polite since he married into the Four Hundred! What I say is show her how nuts she is about Mrs. Austen, then she'll use her imagination on something besides you, Milt.”

Outside on the deck someone called, “Richard!
Rich
-ard!”

“I had no intention of coming here, Milt. I called her hotel—Amory's. When they said she was here, I had to come here.”

That's why she was peeping into the cabins, Amory thought. She was looking for my luggage. She thought I was going with him. What an extraordinary idea! Her face tightened with distaste, then she shook her head; not extraordinary when you were in love with a man. Jenny was in love with him, poor Jenny. Jenny was jealous, poor Jenny!

“Amory, Mrs. Austen is letting me tell you this because she's a good woman, God bless her.” Jenny smiled at Mrs. Austen. “She wouldn't be able to take it easy on the money Milt's giving her if she didn't give him a break when she could. She knows, even if you don't, that the only reason Milt is giving her the money is because he's a good Joe!”

“Your ladyship—”

“
Rich
-ard!” someone called again.

“Listen, Milt, this is good. You couldn't make this one up in a million years. Listen. Mrs. Austen tried to commit suicide in the Haunted House, when Sloane was living, I mean. You didn't know about that, did you, Milt?” He shook his head automatically, wanting only to stop her. “There's more you don't know, Milt!”

“O.K., but she's still with us, isn't she?” He was almost shouting. “I don't want to hear about a suicide! Haven't I had enough suicide to suit me? My God!” He waved the hamburger. “And Lady Constant had enough suicide to suit her, too!”

“Ask her if she's had enough?” Jenny pointed scornfully at Amory's face. “She's interested about suicide, don't worry!”

“I'm interested,” Amory said. She met Milton's eyes. “I'm afraid I am.”

The knock on the door came then.

Milton kept his eyes on Amory's face an instant longer, then shrugged. “Come in.” He went to meet the steward, who had a saltcellar on a tray. Milton threw a crumpled bill onto the tray. “Thanks.” He took the salt, lifted the top half of his roll off the hamburger and ostentatiously salted it. “Now it will taste like something.” Turning his back, he walked to the table where the Hamburger Heaven box was. “You girls can gab. I'll eat.”

To show her how to be discreet, Amory thought. (
Pas devant les domestiques
.) Jenny waited until the steward closed the door after himself.

“The whole point, Milt,
is
that Mrs. Austen is still here! Anyhow, she tried to take her life. Why is her own business. Let me say this much, Mrs. A.—The way she blames Milt for everything—Mrs. Austen tried to take her own life because your own sister let her down.”

“I understand now, your ladyship, but at the time—Oh, your ladyship, it turned me against the whole world at the time!”

“What did Sloane do?”

“It was what she didn't do. Mrs. A. can tell you later if she wants.” Milt wasn't eating, he was listening, all rightie. “As far as Milt is concerned, it was what Mrs. A. took to kill herself with that counts.” Jenny hoped for encouragement from Milt, but he wouldn't give her any, just set the salt shaker down on the table next to the Hamburger Heaven box. “Just by luck, just by dumb luck, Milt, I found the bottle when I was going through her stuff for her. If you hadn't been in such a rush to get to the party here, Milt, you'd have found it and you wouldn't have needed me putting my two cents in, but, no, you wouldn't be bothered. Would he, Mrs. A.? By dumb luck I came back to the house and when Mrs. A. asked me, I bothered. I didn't have any party I was in a hurry to get to. What Mrs. Austen took happens to be Milt's business because she got the particular medication from Milt. I recognized the label.” No sign from Milt. Jenny sighed. “Well, it says right on the label,
POISON
.
CAUTION
.
DO NOT OVERDOSE
. So, because Mrs. A. wanted to overdose she took—how many, Mrs. A.?”

“Eleven,” she whispered. Ten, eleven, go to heaven. She was back on the third floor again. Ten. Eleven. Heaven. Now I lay me down to sleep. Like a child. Treating her like a child. Her voice trembling with retrospective anger, Mrs. Austen took up the explanation. “I had this bottle which Dr. Krop had given me. I kept it because it was a—comfort to me.” She glared at them. “Many the time when the investigator person called I would think little do you know, young woman! I don't have to sit here and answer all those questions if I don't choose to! It was a comfort,” she repeated furiously. “So when I took them—when I woke up, still in that lumpy bed—”

“Do you get it now, Milt? Are you beginning to see the light? The label said more than three was an overdose and she took eleven and she's still with us as you said, Milt!” Jenny turned to Lady Constant. “Let me tell you, if you are under the impression that because Milt's medication didn't kill her she should be grateful to him, that shows you've never been a nurse! You should hear them in emergency when someone stops them—Grateful!”

“I thought he made sport of me,” Mrs. Austen said. “No one had the right to make sport of me!”

“Now, Mrs. Austen,” Jenny said. “Are you convinced, Duchess? Even thinking about it after I explained it all to her, she still sees red!”

“Sir,” Mrs. Austen said, “excuse me, please. I thought it was because I was a charity patient.”

“She's sensitive, Milt. But now I explained it all, it's okay.”

Amory could not see how Mrs. Austen and her abortive suicide was going to help her but when she glanced at Milton's stricken face, she said hastily, “You haven't explained it to me, I assure you!”

“Placebo,” Jenny said.

“And what is that?”

Jenny smiled. “I guess they don't teach you everything in college, do they? Your sister didn't know, either.”

Sloane didn't know? Sloane?
Now,
Amory thought. She didn't dare speak.

Jenny's eyes filled. “I thought I'd be explaining placebo to your sister. I was going to tell her Monday—and on Monday—”

“On Monday Sloane was dead.”
Now
. “Tell me about placebo, Jenny.”

“Nothing.” She took out her handkerchief and wiped her eyes. “Sugar pills.”

“But why would they give Mrs. Austen sugar pills?” Why was Dr. Fell's Adam's apple sticking out that way?

“I thought it was because I was charity, your ladyship—but Mrs. Krop explained it all to me. I thought they never would give such things to regular clients.”

Jenny saw Milt's Adam's apple sticking out, too. “Patients, not clients,” she said mechanically, “the word is
patient
.”

“They do give them to other patients, your ladyship; madam explained. If only I had known before! Madam explained that they give sugar pills to—Madam?” she turned to Jenny.

“To chronics, I said. To a certain type of chronic. Some people know they can't have relief all the time, but when they're the type insists—You have to give placebo or else you'd have cases of drug poisoning on your hands right and left.”

What's with Milt? Jenny wondered.

“If only it had been explained to me before, your ladyship! I understand now that in the clinics such pills are given to help others, madam, for medical research. I would be the last one not to want to help others! Madam said that these particular pills were the same size and color and taste as the medicine her own husband was discovering and sometimes in the clinic we were given these, and sometimes the sugar pills, so that the doctors would know definitely whether the new medicine really worked.”

“When you're testing out a new medication you have to rule out how people fool themselves.” Uneasily, Jenny attempted a laugh. “Some people fool themselves about medication and some people fool themselves about other things!” She glared at Amory, but feebly. She was beginning to be frightened.

Mrs. Austen was very animated about it. Her cheeks had become pink with animation. “Madam explained that they could not tell us—why, even madam didn't know when she was giving sugar pills or the heart medicine. Madam explained that if she knew she might convey something in the way she gave it. Imagine!”

“You can give away a lot in a look,” Jenny said. If Milt would look at her. If he'd
give!
She could only see that he was like a cat on a hot roof, but why? In order to give herself a minute to think, she walked to the porthole, pulled aside the pretty curtain, and began working the catch open.

Amory walked toward Milton; reaching the table, she turned to it and picked up one of the hamburgers and began to undo the wax paper wrapping. She spoke very fast, in a low voice. “Mother was a chronic—patient—wasn't she? And definitely the type who would not suffer patiently. So you could have given Mother placebo, couldn't you?” She crumpled the wax paper. “And—if you wouldn't tell Jenny when she was giving it, you wouldn't tell Sloane, either!” Jenny's head was out the porthole.

“Warm in here,” Jenny said, pulling her head back inside the room, smoothing her hair. She saw Amory standing next to Milton. “What are you talking about?”

Amory wadded the wax paper and threw it at the wastepaper basket. “Placebo. It's very interesting. I never knew doctors were so—devious. Jenny, why were you going to tell Sloane about placebo the morning after she died?” She saw Jenny's glance at Milton and moved in between the two of them. “That's what you said, Jenny—” She lifted up the top half of the hamburger roll and studied it. “Why?”

“Why? Why?” Milt wouldn't even look at her. Milt was busy now putting salt on the Duchess' hamburger for her so of course he couldn't pay any attention to her! Couldn't she put salt on herself?
Helpless? “Why?”
When she began to talk about why Sloane was interested in placebo, the work Phil and Milt had been doing, the bottles of placebo in Milt's closet, waiting, she was really referring to herself. What she had done for Milt. How she knew better than he did what was good for him, how she intended to see he did what was good for him. Sloane, she said, meaning herself, had to know about placebo so she could talk Milt into getting back to work again. Sloane cared for Milt's best interests—Then, her anger having satisfied itself, Jenny took another look at Milt, at his back, rather, because now he had his back turned, seeing him as he was rather than as she wanted him to appear, and forgot about herself. “Your sister cared about Milt, whatever you think! We were going to talk on Monday for Milt's own good!” Be good to him, she meant. “Little did I know.” She could not look at his back any longer. She had to see his face. “Hey, Milt, turn around, hey? Turn around and let us see your face. Maureen plays a game that goes like that.
Turn round, turn round, and let us see your face
—Milt!”

Maureen.
Funeral marches to the grave. Still, like muffled drums, are beating.
Still beating! He had to turn around and face them as if nothing was wrong. He had to.
Still
. He turned around. “O.K., Jenny? Now has everybody got everything off their chest? Now, is this a party or is this a party? Live it up a little. Jenny, have a hamburger.” He motioned toward them. “Live it up!” He stuck his own hamburger in his mouth and began to work on the beer bottles with an opener.