by Jim Thompson
“Just ’at one drink you saw. The one they was waitin’ to have with you. Mistah Jeff, he didn’t have none. Just fixed ’em for the General an’ Mistah Bernie an’ Mistah Holcomb.”
Doctor Murphy stared, incredulously. “Now, wait a minute! I saw two empty bottles under the…oh,” said Doc. “Of course.”
“Yes, suh. Reckon them must’ve been old ones.”
“But”—Doc spread his hands helplessly—“what’s it all about? What were they all doing there together?”
“They talkin’ about the book—how they goin’ to make it into somethin’ that is somethin’. Miz’ Baker come in while they talkin’, an’ she say, Oh, ’at’s fine, an’ they can all have a drink, and she gives ’em that quart. She say she tell you the good news, an’ you be right in, an’—” Rufus paused, reproachfully. “What you ’spect, anyway? What you ’spect me to do? She my boss. You always tellin’ me to min’ my own business, an’ do what I’m told. You always fussin’ about me buttin’ in on things I don’t know nothin’ about.”
“But the book,” said Doc. “What book do you mean?”
“ ’At book the General wrote. What you ’spect me to do, doctuh? Tell Miz’ Baker she ain’t doin’ right? Run an’ ask you if she is? They wasn’t drinking nothin’. Just talkin’ an’ waitin’ for you to come. Looked to me like ’at was what I’d better do. Don’t do no nothin’—don’t do no thinkin’. Just stay there an’ wait for you.”
“Rufus”—Doc hesitated. “I’m sorry, Rufus. You did exactly the right thing. Miss Baker—uh—Miss Baker acted a little thoughtlessly, and she owes you an apology, also. And you’ll have it from her, Rufus. But—”
“Yes, suh?” Rufus looked at him anxiously. “Everything all right, then? You ain’t goin’ to close up the sanitarium?”
“I don’t…” Doc turned away, leaving the sentence unfinished. He did know, of course. And he should have given Rufus and the others some warning before this. But as long as he had waited this long. “I want to know more about that book,” he said. “Have Mr. Sloan come to my office, will you?”
“He waitin’ for you there now, doctuh. You say you ain’t really—?”
“I’ll talk to you later,” said Doctor Murphy, and he hastened across the dining room and entered his office.
Jeff was seated on the lounge, thumbing through a medical magazine. He arose as Doc came into the room, his boyish good-natured face set in an expression of defiant reproach.
“Boy,” he said, “do you ever go off half-cocked! Just because you see a guy with a glass—”
“I know, I know! I’ve talked to Rufus.” Doc dropped down on the lounge, drawing Jeff down with him. “Now, what’s all this about the General’s book?”
“Why we’re going to go to town with it, that’s what!” said Jeff. “Bernie’s going to rewrite it, under the General’s by-line, of course. And I’ll do the promoting, and the Holcombs will handle the sale. On their own—outside of their agency. I’m telling you it’s a natural, Doc! Everyone’s heard of the General! With Bernie to put his stuff in shape, and the rest of us to push and peddle it, I’ll bet we have a million-copy sale.”
Doc nodded slowly. “You might, at that,” he said. “I think you will. What I’m wondering is…”
“Yeah?”
“Why didn’t I think of something like this myself. It’s been right in front of me all along. I’ve watched the General sliding further and further downhill every day. I’ve watched the same thing happen to John and Gerald and Bernie. All essentially because of the lack of any real interest in life. And I didn’t know what to do about it. I had all the pieces in my hands and I was too damned stupid to put them together. You, now, you’re in here less than two days and you—”
“I saw it,” Jeff shrugged. “Why not? I’m not outside the boat looking in. I’m right in there with the others. But I’ll tell you something, Doc.” He tapped Doctor Murphy on the knee. “Before a guy can see anything, he’s got to have his eyes opened. He’s got to want to see.”
Doc shook his head. “I’m afraid you’re giving me too much credit, Jeff. Naturally, I like to think that what I said helped, but I’ve talked myself blue in the face to hundreds of other patients. And for all the good it did, well…”
“How do you know it didn’t do any good? How do you know it won’t do some good eventually?”
“Well…”
“I’ll tell you the way I see it, Doc. It’s kind of like my game. You call on a guy with a proposition, and maybe you hit him with exactly the right line at the right time, like you did me, and he goes for it. But the chances are that you won’t. You have to keep pounding at him, day after day, and even then you miss out on the deal. But that doesn’t mean, Doc, that absolutely doesn’t mean that you haven’t done any good. He’ll remember you, if you’ve done your job right. He’ll pick you up on your deal later, or maybe he’ll mention you to a friend who is ripe for your proposition.”
Doc sighed, and shifted on the lounge.
“The point is, Jeff, that I don’t know my job. Not in anything resembling the way that you know yours. It’s all pretty much hit or miss, shooting in the dark. You don’t know where to aim or what to aim with.”
“So?” said Jeff. “What’s the difference? You just aim at and with everything.”
“Jeff, you just don’t understand.”
“Yes, I do, Doc,” said Jeff earnestly. “I can be a pretty lousy bastard when I’m drinking, but there’s nothing wrong with my head—yet. You asked me earlier today why I’d decided not to drink anymore, and I couldn’t tell you. Now, I can. It’s because you believed I could and would stop.”
“Yes?” Doctor Murphy turned on him sharply. “How do you figure that?”
“You believed I could and you believe these other patients can. You’re sure that eventually you can get them back on the track. Don’t you see, Doc? You have to believe or you wouldn’t be doing what you are. You wouldn’t have gone into this kind of practice in the first place.”
“Umm,” said Doc. “And what if I’m all wet for believing that way?”
“But you know you’re not. Everyone else might think so, even the alcoholic himself may have given himself up as hopeless. But you don’t. You stay right in there pitching, giving it everything you’ve got, because you believe you’re going to win out. Do you see how important that is, Doc, to have someone to believe in you? Do you see how it would be if you gave up—if you stopped believing along with everyone else?”
Doc grimaced wryly. “You aren’t a very hard-bitten case, Jeff. You might have made the decision to stop drinking by yourself.”
“Leave me out of it, then. What about the others? I feel that I’ve got to know them pretty well today—better than you, maybe, because they’ll let their hair down with another drunk. You can’t give up now, Doc, just when you’re on the point of succeeding. Those guys would hit the bottom and keep right on going.”
“You think, then”—Doc’s tone was deliberately cynical—“that they’ll be all right, now? They won’t drink anymore, and the prince will marry the princess, and they’ll all live happily forever after?”
“I think,” said Jeff, “that they’re nearer to being permanently sober than they’ve ever been before. I think they’ve stopped sliding and started climbing. I think they’ll start sliding fast if you throw in the sponge here.”
“Well…” Doc spoke the one word, and was silent.
“They were pretty badly upset, Doc. I told them you didn’t mean what you said, that everything would be all right as soon as you understood what had happened.”
“Did you?”
“I did,” said Jeff. “Look, Doc”—he frowned—“what gives with this Miss Baker, anyway? Why did she give them that booze? Why crack down on the boys because of something she did?”
“That was my fault,” said Doc curtly. “Miss Baker has been ill, and I knew it. She should be all right from now on.”
“Well.” Jeff lo
oked at him puzzledly. “I guess I don’t get it, Doc. Everything’s fine, and yet you—you—”
Doctor Murphy leaped to his feet.
“I’ve had enough, get me? That’s what’s the matter. It’s just been one goddam headache after another, and now I can’t take anymore. You’ve heard the news about Suzy Kenfield? Well, that’s a small sample of what I’ve been up against ever since I opened this place. She might have died. The baby might have died. And all because she didn’t and doesn’t give a damn about anything so long as she can stay sozzled. I tell you—”
“We all went in to see the baby,” said Jeff. “Miss Kenfield said she’d never felt better in her life.”
“Sure. The damned selfish bitch is indestructible, but I’m not! I—”
“We were there,” said Jeff, “when Rufus offered her the whiskey.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ve worked for years without making an inch of headway, and now everything’s popping at once. Of course, it may all be a fluke, but I don’t think so.”
“You know it isn’t, Doc.”
“All right, I know it. And I wish I didn’t. It would be easier if I knew that I’d failed. It would have been better for my patients if I’d done a complete flop. As it is, well just when they’re getting their foot on the ladder I yank it out from under them.”
“But, Doc—why?”
“You know why, Jeff. I can’t do that to Van Twyne. I wouldn’t be any good as a doctor if I did do it.”
“But,” Jeff hesitated uncertainly, “I know how you feel, but you didn’t have your mind made up then when you took me up to see him. You were undecided then, when you didn’t have any real reason to go on here, and now that you do have—” He paused again, looking down at the floor uncomfortably. “I’m not trying to talk you into it, understand.”
“I can’t do it, Jeff. I’ve known all along that I couldn’t. So long as I had any time at all left, even a few hours, I ducked the facts. I’ve tried to kid myself that there was some other way out. Now, my time’s run out and I know there isn’t any other way. It’s that way or none, so it has to be none.”
“Well,” said Jeff. “I—well,” he repeated.
“Yes,” said Doc, “I’ve screwed it up good. It’s pretty generally known that I was having a hard time financially, but no one’s known how bad things really were. Alcoholics are sensitive as hell. The majority of my patients are on their uppers. I was afraid that if I told them the truth, they’d hesitate about coming to me. So I’ve just gone on, getting in deeper and deeper, and now…”
“You’re sure there isn’t some way, Doc?”
“I’ve told you.”
“Positive?”
“Dammit,” said Doctor Murphy, “how many times do I have to tell you? Van Twyne was my only chance. That was why he was brought here, get me?”
“No,” said Jeff, blankly, “I don’t.”
“His family’s got a finger in every financial pie on the West Coast. Real estate, banks—every damned thing. They looked around for a good reputable sanitarium to bury Humphrey in, and when they came to mine they stopped looking. They knew how much this place meant to me. They knew I had to have big dough right away, or else. And they knew that if I didn’t get it from them, I just wouldn’t—” Doc paused abruptly. His eyes narrowed. “If I didn’t get it from them,” he murmured. “If I did get it from them, and…”
“Yeah, Doc?”
“Nothing,” said Doc.
“That’s a pretty dirty thing to do to you, Doc. Forcing a choice like that on you.”
“Yes,” said Doctor Murphy. “I thought it was myself.”
He slapped the cigarette ash from his knees, and stood up. Hands jammed in his pockets, he stood in front of the window, looking down across the shrubbery and gardens and lawn to the highway.
A car was turning into the driveway at the foot of the slope. The afternoon sun sparkled blindingly on its long black hood, and the chrome flashed and sparkled like the dazzling, limitless millions which in a way it represented.
Doctor Amos Perthborg was arriving. Doctor Perthborg, physician to the Van Twyne family.
Doc turned away from the window.
“You’ll have to excuse me now, Jeff.”
“Sure,” said Jeff, and turned slowly toward the door. “I hate to keep asking you, Doc, but are you dead sure there isn’t some way to—?”
“The Van Twynes. That’s the only way.”
“Shall I—what shall I tell the guys, Doc?”
“Don’t tell them anything. Tell them I was too busy to see you.”
“But, Doc, that’s—”
“You heard me,” said Doctor Murphy, and he drooped a lid over one bright blue eye. “Now, get the hell out of here.”
17
Long, long before, when a youngster with the impossible name of Pasteur Semelweiss Murphy was still in knee pants, the annual income of Dr. Amos Perthborg was approaching the six-figure mark. Not, you will understand, because his practice was a particularly large one. And not—very definitely not—because of his excellence as a physician. It was, rather, because of an attribute which many claim, but which, happily, very few possess: the trait of making no move which did not somehow contribute to his personal advancement.
Among his unsuspecting friends and associates, and they were, in the main, unsuspecting, Doctor Perthborg was regarded as whimsically eccentric, a man guided by his heart rather than his head. And to those whose looking-ahead was limited to days and weeks, instead of Doctor Perthborg’s years and decades, it did often seem that he was. So easily is the straightforward disguised by complex society. So easily is the straight path confused with the ambling terrain it traverses.
During the economic depression, Amos Perthborg had lent thousands of dollars to beginning practitioners—lent it without note or collateral and often at the necessity of borrowing himself.
At a time when his own professional position was none too secure, he had boldly denounced the president of the county medical society as an incompetent fee splitter—which, though it is hardly pertinent, the president was.
Compared to the supplicant young doctors he had literally booted out of his office, the ones he had aided comprised a mere handful. And these, a thoughtful observer (had such there been) would have noted, had been selected more for their catholicity than, say, precocity There was a heart man, an orthopedist, a gynecologist, a pediatrician, a brain surgeon, an eye-ear-nose-and-throat specialist…and so on. They were good but not brilliant men; Doctor Perthborg distrusted brilliance. As consultants, they had proved useful and lucrative for a great many years; not only by doing the work he was paid to do for a fraction of his fee, but in stamping his flagrant and sometimes fatal errors with their professional approval.
As for the president of the medical society, he had been old and the old lose the will to fight, and it is a basic principle of elementary politics never to vote no on a moral issue. The incumbent had been booted out of his post. Doctor Perthborg, elected by acclamation, virtuously refused the honor. His purpose had been accomplished, he said; he did not care to profit by it.
He did profit by it, needless to say. He had received hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of free advertising, and he winnowed the results carefully, narrowing them down to the choicest, fiscally strongest clientele. Moreover, having scared the daylights out of any competition, he and his protégés were left with practically a clear field in the consultant racket. Only for a time, of course, greed being eternal and fear ephemeral. But a very good time it was. It was during this period that Doctor Perthborg began his long association with the Van Twyne family.
Barbara Huylinger D’Arcy Van Twyne had got herself pregnant. Doctor Perthborg’s consultants consulted with Doctor Perthborg and agreed that she could not give birth without serious risk to her life. She should, in other words, be aborted. She was. Whereupon she reassumed the many duties incumbent upon a champion woman golfer, tennis player, swimmer and high diver.<
br />
That, as has been noted, was the beginning of the Van Twyne-Perthborg association. The ending…ah, the ending.
Just where, Doctor Perthborg had begun to wonder, would the ending be?
You had moved in a straight line, and got to where you were going. The men you had moved to move yourself now approached your own stature, and far from being disturbed you were pleased and gratified. You were friends, insofar as you were capable of friendship. They wanted nothing from you, nor you from them. There was no past.
That was you, then, after three score of your allotted three and a half: portly in a purely comfortable way, comfortably active, comfortably rich. You had got what you wanted—wealth, position, family. You had moved in a straight line to worry-free, honorable comfort.
And a beady-eyed old witch, ancient yet seemingly ageless, who had not got all that she wanted—and never would, damn her!—came along and booted you in the tail. And you couldn’t plead with her because there was nothing to appeal to, and you couldn’t reason with her because she wouldn’t argue. You could only move in the direction she indicated.
Seated across the desk from Doctor Murphy, Doctor Perthborg looked unhappy and was considerably unhappier than he looked. He had a feeling that however things turned out, the result for him would be disastrous. Yet there was nothing to do but go ahead. If he did not, if he so much as caviled—that was her word—the disaster would be immediate.
Doctor Perthborg beamed and nodded at Doctor Murphy, edging politely toward the subject of his visit. But, actually, he did not see Doc; his mind’s eye was turned on the image of her—hawk-nosed, bitter-mouthed, beady-eyed. A dried-up witch of a woman, perched in a chair that was like a throne, imperious, far more wealthy perhaps, than her namesake.
But my dear Victoria! You honestly can’t expect me to—
I’ve told you what I expected. And don’t dear-Victoria me, you sanctimonious old fake. You make me sick to my stomach!
But—but it’s completely unethical! In a sense, it’s murder. Surely you wouldn’t want your own grandson murdered.