not want to help you." This reasoning seemed a little lopsided but Joyce got it, finally: if you weren't married, people were likely to think it served you right. Maybe one doctor could do the diagnosis and another one the operation, she suggested. Mary Jean looked dubious.
This waiting room wasn't as slick and clinical-looking as the others they had tried. It was as dingy as the outside of the building. The others had been brightly lighted, two by tubular fluorescent fixtures, the third by an abundance of little modern lamps. Two had amateur paintings on the walls—one was a seascape with sailboats, the other an abstract that reminded Joyce sickeningly of Mimi's apartment. "Do all doctors paint in their spare time?" she asked, and Mary Jean said lifelessly that she didn't think doctors ever had any spare time and probably the pictures were gifts from grateful patients.
"Or maybe their wives do it, waiting up nights for them," Joyce suggested, but there was no answering smile.
The patients in the other places had looked bright and prosperous too. Young mothers with healthy-looking little children, there for shots or a routine checkup. A couple of middle-aged men, and young wives in smocks. You couldn't imagine any of these folks ever being scared, or having anything to hide. Nor could you imagine any of the doctors, two of them youngish and partly bald, the third middle-aged and tonsured like a monk, doing anything illicit.
That was the trouble, they were all too respectable. The first two young men had sized the situation up before Mary Jean could make any disastrous confessions and had said they didn't have time to take any new patients, they were awfully busy right now. The third said he was full just now, but why don't you come back this evening, Mrs. Uh, and bring your husband. He was nice about it, but firm. Still, it was his office nurse who had stopped them on the way out and given them this man's address.
This room—well, you could imagine the people collected here being involved in almost any kind of furtive circumstances. Shot by gangsters, or infected with the kind of diseases they told you about in the back of those street-guide books. Or getting rid of babies.
She sat down on an old wicker couch covered in faded cretonne and picked up an old Saturday Evening Post from the pile on the table. Then she realized that she was still hanging on to her list, copied that morning from the Red Book in the depot phone booth. She folded it and slipped it into the pocket of her suit jacket, and looked at her watch. Forty minutes till train time, and we haven't bought a thing to take back. Even if Abbott doesn't get suspicious, Edith is going to ask questions. She shied away from that thought and looked at Mary Jean, who was sitting absolutely still on a straight chair with dusty rungs.
The doctor came to the door. This one was an old man, not just on the other side of middle age, but really old, maybe seventy-five. He had no hair at all except a few oily wisps combed over the bare top of his head. He was thin, and dressed not in a professional white jacket but in old wash pants and a short-sleeved shirt with a bar of rust across one shoulder, as if it had been dried over a radiator. He walked slowly, stooping. He had a neck in folds like a turtle's and. his eyes were hooded like a turtle's too—or like a cobra's, she told herself in unreasoning terror. There was something really reptilian about him and also something dingy, not quite clear, like the room. He beckoned to one of the waiting women, and she got up heavily and followed him into the inner office.
Mary Jean leaned over. Her cheeks were sallow. "Let's go, kid. I can't—"
The others watched them leave, incurious, wrapped up in their own troubles. Their heels were loud on the wooden stairs. Out in the street, electric signs were coming on and after-work crowds thickening. Mary Jean puffed for breath, leaning against the outside wall of the building. "I'm
This waiting room wasn't as slick and clinical-looking as the others they had tried. It was as dingy as the outside of the building. The others had been brightly lighted, two by tubular fluorescent fixtures, the third by an abundance of little modern lamps. Two had amateur paintings on the walls—one was a seascape with sailboats, the other an abstract that reminded Joyce sickeningly of Mimi's apartment. "Do all doctors paint in their spare time?" she asked, and Mary Jean said lifelessly that she didn't think doctors ever had any spare time and probably the pictures were gifts from grateful patients.
"Or maybe their wives do it, waiting up nights for them," Joyce suggested, but there was no answering smile.
The patients in the other places had looked bright and prosperous too. Young mothers with healthy-looking little children, there for shots or a routine checkup. A couple of middle-aged men, and young wives in smocks. You couldn't imagine any of these folks ever being scared, or having anything to hide. Nor could you imagine any of the doctors, two of them youngish and partly bald, the third middle-aged and tonsured like a monk, doing anything illicit.
That was the trouble, they were all too respectable. The first two young men had sized the situation up before Mary Jean could make any disastrous confessions and had said they didn't have time to take any new patients, they were awfully busy right now. The third said he was full just now, but why don't you come back this evening, Mrs. Uh, and bring your husband. He was nice about it, but firm. Still, it was his office nurse who had stopped them on the way out and given them this man's address.
This room—well, you could imagine the people collected here being involved in almost any kind of furtive circumstances. Shot by gangsters, or infected with the kind of diseases they told you about in the back of those street-guide books. Or getting rid of babies.
She sat down on an old wicker couch covered in faded cretonne and picked up an old Saturday Evening Post from the pile on the table. Then she realized that she was still hanging on to her list, copied that morning from the Red Book in the depot phone booth. She folded it and slipped it into the pocket of her suit jacket, and looked at her watch. Forty minutes till train time, and we haven't bought a thing to take back. Even if Abbott doesn't get suspicious, Edith is going to ask questions. She shied away from that thought and looked at Mary Jean, who was sitting absolutely still on a straight chair with dusty rungs.
The doctor came to the door. This one was an old man, not just on the other side of middle age, but really old, maybe seventy-five. He had no hair at all except a few oily wisps combed over the bare top of his head. He was thin, and dressed not in a professional white jacket but in old wash pants and a short-sleeved shirt with a bar of rust across one shoulder, as if it had been dried over a radiator. He walked slowly, stooping. He had a neck in folds like a turtle's and. his eyes were hooded like a turtle's too—or like a cobra's, she told herself in unreasoning terror. There was something really reptilian about him and also something dingy, not quite clear, like the room. He beckoned to one of the waiting women, and she got up heavily and followed him into the inner office.
Mary Jean leaned over. Her cheeks were sallow. "Let's go, kid. I can't—"
The others watched them leave, incurious, wrapped up in their own troubles. Their heels were loud on the wooden stairs. Out in the street, electric signs were coming on and after-work crowds thickening. Mary Jean puffed for breath, leaning against the outside wall of the building. "I'm
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