“Oh, he’s such a baby,” said Barbara Mintner turning to half face her. “Afraid someone’s going to spoil his precious playthings.”
Eleanor Thorne scoffed. “I dare say. I’m only too glad you didn’t say workthings!”
The soft brilliance of the Pacific morning lay behind Barbara Mintner and etched a golden haze along the proud lines of her head and shoulders.
“Your hair is quite nice that way,” said Eleanor Thorne abruptly and, quickly rushing on with a gesture toward the low leather couch where Mr. Treevly lay: “How is he?”
“He’s coming around,” said Miss Mintner, “while ago his respiration—” and even as she pronounced the word, Mr. Treevly raised his head, then lowered it again very slowly.
“Feeling better?” said Nurse Thorne, walking briskly toward his couch against the far wall.
“It’s my head,” said Mr. Treevly, passing a hand over his closed eyes.
Near the window, Barbara Mintner muffled a snicker.
“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Nurse Thorne archly, after throwing a sharp glance at Miss Mintner.
“I’m going to lunch now,” she continued to the girl, turning and stepping precisely past her. “I’ll stop at the Dispensary and have Albert bring over some bromide. I’m going to the cafeteria, and then to Bullock’s . . .” She finished in a masculine tone over her shoulder in the open door: “If the bromide doesn’t bring it off, give him a sodo-injection. Two c.c.’s. I’ll be back at 12:20.”
“Yes, Miss Thorne,” said Babs Mintner, lowering her eyes as if she had been painfully kissed.
Mr. Treevly half rose as the door closed behind Eleanor Thorne. “What is it?” he said. His voice was strained and feeble, as though it hurt him to speak. “What’s up?” And now, he seemed to take account of his surroundings for the first time.
“It’s all right,” sighed Miss Mintner, “you just lie back and rest a few minutes. Everything is all right.” She continued to look out of the window, across the rolling lawn and through the trees beyond. She hummed softly to herself.
Mr. Treevly slowly pulled himself up, sat on the edge of the couch, his face in his hands. Suddenly he lurched forward, getting to his feet, then fell back bodily onto the couch, catching himself with one hand.
“Where is the Doctor?” he cried. “Where is Dr. Eichner? What happened?”
Miss Mintner gave a start, involuntarily shrank back toward the window; then, as quickly, she crossed the room to his couch.
“Now, please,” she was firm, “please lie quietly. Everything is all right.” She put her hands on both his shoulders and pushed down on him. Mr. Treevly resisted.
“What’s the matter?” he repeated, looking around rather wildly. “Where is the Doctor?”
“Nothing’s the matter,” Miss Mintner shrilled. “Now please lie back! I’m going to give you something and you’ll be perfectly all right.” She looked anxiously toward the door, speaking half aloud. “Oh, where is that boy?”
Mr. Treevly shook her away violently. “What’s going on here?” he cried. “What’s up!” There seemed to be pain and a certain desperation in his voice.
Miss Mintner dropped her hands and stepped back abruptly, so angry she could cry.
“Nothing happened I tell you! You had too-much-to-drink and now you’re acting like a baby!” Then in a burst of indignation, she came forward, cross enough with herself to slap him, and began to push on his shoulders again. But her anger was spent in the gesture and there only remained a tearful petulance. “Please lie back!” she said. “Please.” She drew the word out in a sob.
Mr. Treevly made an odd grimace, felt his head with outstretched fingers, then closed his eyes and lay back, one hand to his brow.
Barbara Mintner sighed, not quite audibly, touched her hair and dabbed lightly at her moist temples. Suddenly she shot a fearful glance to the window where she had whispered with Garcia. She moved as if to determine whether or not he was there now, listening.
“Is this the Hauptman Clinic?” asked Mr. Treevly without raising his head.
Miss Mintner stopped, stood looking at him from mid-floor. “Yes,” she answered, as caution and uneasiness crept back into her face.
“I’m a patient of Dr. Eichner,” said the young man evenly.
“Yes, that’s right,” said Miss Mintner. She glanced at the door. “Where is that little fool!” she said under her breath.
Mr. Treevly raised his head, his eyes open wide. “You know then?” He had risen to one elbow.
“Yes, of course,” said Miss Mintner moving toward him, and again as if to prevent his getting off the couch, she put one hand on his shoulder. “Now please . . .” she said in the tone she had used with the gardener. “Please lie back!”
Mr. Treevly shook her off. “Where is the Doctor?” he demanded. “What’s up?”
“He isn’t here,” she cried irately. “I’ve told you that!”
“This isn’t his office!” Treevly said sharp, looking at her with such wild accusation, she could have surely thought him insane.
Miss Mintner started for the door, and stopped short. “Really,” she said, turning suddenly in tears at the unfairness of it, “I’ve never seen anything like it. You’re a bundle of never-ends! A person would think you’d been taking Benzedrine, instead of . . . instead of . . . whiskey . . . and goodness knows what else!” she added with forced contempt, her hand just touching the knob of the door as Mr. Treevly slumped back to a lying position on the couch, his hands covering his face.
Standing at the door in silence, putting a handkerchief to her soft wet eyes, she watched him narrowly. “I don’t care,” she said half-aloud in bitterness, “it just isn’t fair!”
On the couch, Mr. Treevly groaned painfully.
And watching his helplessness now, Miss Mintner began to feel herself once more at the helm of the situation. She eased toward him from the door, still clutching the small handkerchief in her hand. When she was quite near the couch, Mr. Treevly spoke in a broken whisper. “Something is wrong, do you understand? I have a pain in my head. Would you please tell me where Dr. Frederick Eichner is?”
Miss Mintner drew herself up. “Dr. Eichner has gone home,” she said imperiously. “He left full instructions about you, and if you will just lie quietly until the ward-boy comes from the Dispensary with something to make you feel a lot better . . .”
“Gone home!” cried Treevly bolting upright. “What do you mean gone home? What time is it?” He got to his feet unsteadily, warding her off with his hand. “What time is it?” he demanded.
“Listen,” said Miss Mintner in an outraged girlish threat, “I told you . . .”
“What time is it!” Mr. Treevly shouted.
Miss Mintner’s face grew scarlet; she looked as if she were going to burst. Then she turned on her heel and walked straight to the door. “All right! All right, if you won’t co-operate . . . then do what you want to!” She flung open the door and turned to face him, her great eyes terrible now, blinded with tears and rage. “Goddamn you!” she said and slammed the door behind her.
In the hall however, standing with the door behind her, she dropped her face in her hands. Her slight shoulders bunched and shaking with dry sobs, she leaned back against the door. Then, an extraordinary thing happened. The door, although she had violently slammed it shut behind her, had failed to catch, and had, in fact, by the force of the slamming, rebounded to a quarter-open position; so that the girl now, having already through sightless anguish improperly reckoned the distance between herself and the door, came tumbling backward into the day-room.
Mr. Treevly, standing by the couch in a wild daze, his fingers frozen half run through his thin hair, looked on at once in disbelief and then in something rising to savage reproach.
“What’s going on!” he demanded. “What’s up!”
But Miss Mintner, crying now as if her heart would really break, sprang out of the room without a word, clutching at her skirt with one hand as she
went, and hiding the streaming shame of her face with the other.
She tore through the outstretched hall, halfshadowed but shot dazzling with light at the far end ahead where a copper screen caught the sun in a spangle. The corridor opened onto a blazing patio and a maze of breezeways, all leading to other departments of the Clinic in the opposite wing, and holding, each at its end with the same screened door to the sun, a plaque of high burnished light.
Miss Mintner crossed unerringly, rushing sightless through the right turns, only slowing herself when she was at last past the far screen and inside the other building. Here, she dropped her hands to her side and walked rapidly, eyes high and straight ahead, till she reached the ladies’ room where she turned in quickly, crossed the tile floor past the lavatories, entered a booth and locked the door behind her. There she sat, crying audibly for five minutes before she heard someone else come into the lavatories; and then she began to pull herself together. Eleanor Thorne? Barbara sat very still. She could just make out the hands of her tiny watch. 12:10. Nurse Thorne would be back in ten minutes. Outside the booth a lavatory tap sounded in a rush of water. Under the covering noise Miss Mintner leaned forward, her eye near the crack of the door. But too late! Whoever it was had stepped away, drying hands, and was now actually leaving. She heard the outer door open and close . . . or had someone else come in? She listened intently, staring at the black gloss of the door in front of her. Gradually she had the sensation that she could wee-wee. She leaned back quietly, listening. No one. They were gone. How quickly too! It must have been a patient, she thought, the nurses dallied so.
It was 12:15 when Miss Mintner came out of the lavatory, and she looked as fresh and sweet as ever, except that her eyes were pinched and red. But she had retouched her whole appearance, had even, within the limits of its required shortness, changed the order of her hair.
All smiles now on her way to the Dispensary, she passed several patients and two or three nurses from other wards; then, at one blind turning, she almost crashed into heavy Beth Jackson of gyno, senior service nurse at the Clinic.
They spoke together hurriedly, Miss Mintner in confidence, as a little girl breathless in the great woman’s presence, giving an awed account of what had happened in the day-room, and Nurse Jackson, understanding now and in genuine sympathy at what was inferred: the very deliberate unfairness of it. Shaking her head slowly, her small eyes darkly grave, she almost drew the child to her bosom. But they neither mentioned Eleanor Thorne by name.
Mr. Edwards, the pharmacist, was not at the Dispensary. His nephew, Ralph, was there, sitting behind the counter reading a book. Ralph Edwards was studying pharmacy in the University and often visited his uncle at the Clinic, but he had never, so far as Miss Mintner could know, been left there alone, in charge of the Dispensary.
She stood at the counter and pretended not to notice when the young man looked up, already smiling as if there were some joke between them.
“Hello there.” He lumbered forward, humorous with himself in the attitude of a clerk. “What will it be, aspirin or sodium chloride?”
Miss Mintner felt at once that what was supposed to be funny was the ridiculous (to him) idea of his being in a subservient position to her, and it came with the same shock as had he simply said outright: “Yes, this is something we have to do, but if I had you in the back seat of my room-mate’s convertible, you’d be panting hot by now!” It was intolerable.
“Mr. Edwards,” she said coolly, stating her business.
“That’s me,” said the young man, even half winking. He leaned toward her on the counter, arched his brow in mock disappointment. “I thought you knew.”
“I don’t know to what you’re referring,” said Miss Mintner, not looking his way. She fought down an urge to touch her hair. “Where is the pharmacist?” she said, and with a surprising effort, she rechanneled the other impulse into turning her head and giving the young man a very icy stare.
And so he began to cool, either in fear of causing his uncle some embarrassment, or in real offense. He straightened up. “He was called out,” he said moving back to the chair, “. . . on an emergency. He and Albert went with Dr. Evans. They should be back any time now.” He sat with the open book on his lap, pretending to regard Miss Mintner curiously, as she appeared not to be listening. “If it’s nothing that has to be compounded, of course,” he went on after a moment, “I can get it for you myself.”
Not wearing a tie, she thought, a grown man; and needing a shave. She guessed this without looking, only feeling at once a thousand stiff prickles on her own soft face.
“Bromide powder,” she said. “And a small bottle of distilled water.”
The young man stood up, setting a bottle of the water on the counter as he did. “How much bromide?”
Miss Mintner hesitated. “They’re right there,” she said, pointing and, painfully then, as at a loss with his dullness, “in that blue box on the second shelf. Just give me one of those packages.”
She averted her eyes from his smile as he crossed to the shelf and took a small glassine envelope from the box.
“Yes,” he said looking quizzical, “that would be about a half gram, wouldn’t it?” He handed it over giving her his devastating grin as he did. “Or seven-point-six grains.”
She took it from his hand at once, snatched up the bottle of water. “Thank you,” she said airily, as though it were only her breeding that said it, and she turned away with a toss of her head. With her hair so short, the gesture was grotesque.
She marched back to the day-room, saying to herself most of the way: What an absolute fool he is! Halfway down the West Wing corridor she saw the day-room door, open as she had left it; and slowing her steps now, she began to collect herself. She would take no more abuse from this one, nor yet would she lose control of herself again.
She entered the day-room with the grace of a virgin queen, sweeping directly to a side table where she set down the bottle and powder, only realizing then she had not brought a glass. But this was as nothing to the sudden certainty that she was alone in the room. She looked up slowly around her. At the windows the light drapes billowed in as before, though somehow now suggesting that this was how he had gone. Miss Mintner moved to the nearest window and looked out. Far across the lawns, Garcia was bent working, his slight figure stooped in the shadow of the pines.
She turned back to the couch where Mr. Treevly had lain. Briefly, in starting to sit down, she put her hand on the raised headrest, then her whole body went suddenly stiff, throwing up one hand to block the scream in her throat and slowly turning the other, palm up as she closed her eyes quickly tight against the heavy, covering blood on her hand where it had touched the couch. She made a strangling sound and tore out of the room a few steps west into the hall away from the dancing light, to a booth with an open phone inside. She frantically dialed Dr. Eichner’s home number. Waiting, she held off the offending hand, outthrust now against the door of the booth.
“Hello, Doctor? DOCTOR?”
As Miss Mintner waited, not understanding, the screen at the far end of the hall, like a rose window of thin spun copper, was burst aside, banging against the wall of the corridor, and Albert, the ward-boy, raced toward her from the patio, his white face strained to wildness.
A ward-boy, he was actually a middle-aged man, terribly dwarfed and stone deaf, with a speech impediment that agonizingly muddled his every word. He stopped short before Miss Mintner breathing like a tempest, his whole aspect shot with fear and panic.
“Dey lubing for ub!” he cried and began to rattle the handle of the door violently.
“Wait a sec, Bert,” said Miss Mintner, not bothering to take her mouth from the phone, “. . . something’s up. Hello! Hello, Doctor?” But she opened the door to Albert and held put one arm for him as though he were coming to nest. Without a word, he seized her around the waist with his tiny, thick arms and began to pull at her viciously. “Twenty-eight!” he shouted, “TWENTY-EIGHT IN HEMORRHAGE!
”
“Wait up, Bert,” said Miss Mintner, “it’s Fred—Dr. Eichner,” and for a minute she managed to keep his hold tentative; but suddenly his arms were locked around her waist like a steel garter, mouth shouting against her chest, his chin digging into the ribs. Miss Mintner clutched at the sill and the open door as she was torn bodily from the booth. The phone jerked out of her hand with a crash and they went reeling onto the corridor floor. Albert was on his feet at once, trying to get her up with short ineffectual kicks and little tugs at her hair and dress. Miss Mintner fought back like a cornered cat, threshing her tiny feet about and striking at his face with the blood-covered hand, until she was up and running for the door, with Albert behind, driving her on, arms flailing above, while now his blood-stained face was dead and impassive, like a wooden mask.
Chapter III
DR. EICHNER WAS a man of remarkable bearing, slightly above six feet, slender, with well-set shoulders and a magnificently gray, patrician head. He stood on the Clinic’s shaded front veranda, waiting for his car to be sent around.
Looking over the sweep of lawn and the gravel drive, past the tight footwalks and overhanging trees, he could see beyond to Wilshire Boulevard where the stirring smoke and dust of property improvements wound up unending through the day.
At the corner of the building then, the car appeared, a white-frocked garage attendant at the wheel, slithering the heavy car on the rounded curve. The Doctor raised his eyes like an alerted animal: the soft contusion of gravel under rubber wheels; he savored it, every sound and motion connected with an automobile, a low, heavy automobile.
Stopping directly in front of him, the attendant got out and held open the car door. Dr. Eichner studied his face keenly for an instant. He was evidently new at the Clinic’s garage.
“Good morning,” said the Doctor.
“Morning, Doc,” the attendant said, “swell car you got there.” It was a Delahaye 235.
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