Green Doors

“Hello! What’s up with you?”

Doctor Lewis Pryne was obviously surprised at the intrusion of a mere friend on office hours. “How did you persuade Miss Frazier to bring you in? You aren’t—or are you—looking for a doctor?”

Dick Wilder’s smile was tinged with awed diffidence.

“No, I’m not wanting treatment myself,” he said. “All the same, I did get a regulation appointment from your secretary via the telephone, and I’ve been out there in your reception office meekly waiting my turn for hours. But first I have a message for you, from Cynthia. They want you for the week-end in Meadowbrook. Harry’s counting on golf with you, and the children—”

Lewis broke in dryly. “Sorry, Dick, but I’m most frightfully busy just now. If you insist on staying to chat, I’ll send you a bill—regulation fee for a first appointment. But if you vanish at once, I’ll let you off. Give my fondest love to Cynthia, tell her I’ll call her up; thanks, good-by.”

But though the doctor rose, his visitor sat. “You’re hard, Lewis, hard,” he murmured. “But it’s all right with me. I expect a bill. I’m here to offer you a lovely new patient on a silver platter. It is rather—ah—private, though.”

His embarrassment was due plainly to the presence of the secretary, Miss Frazier. She had escorted him into the presence of the famous psychiatrist and she was now hovering near the door on tiptoes, it seemed, to escort him out again.

Lewis sighed, but with good nature. “Miss Frazier needn’t bother you,” he explained. “She is my confidential secretary and it saves time having her here to make a record as we go along. How many people are out there, Miss Frazier?”

“Only two, Doctor. Mrs. Dickerman and—”

“A sullen but gorgeous fellow who doesn’t want to be spoken to,” Dick finished for her. “Or is he one of the really unhinged ones and not responsible for his manners?”

Lewis smiled—fleetly—at his secretary. He said to Dick, “That will be Mr. Neil McCloud. He is perfectly sane. He’s lost the power of speech, that’s all.”

“Really? Somehow it didn’t look all to me. He has a flash in his eye,—well—a flash—. But I thought the dumb were deaf, Lewis. That fellow heard every word I said—listened as if he heard—and then coolly turned his shoulder. He might have wriggled his eyebrows or something, to show he couldn’t speak. I only asked him were you likely to keep us waiting much longer—assuming, do you see, that he was a regular patient and knew the ropes. What was there in that to antagonize any one?”

Lewis’ smile a moment ago had been very fleeting. Now his face had taken on its accustomed gravity. It was an unusual sort of gravity, however, lacking any element of heaviness. “That encounter will have been harder on McCloud than on you, Dick,” he said. “He isn’t deaf. Merely can’t articulate. Hasn’t been able to for some months. It’s a rather perplexing case of shock. Temporary, I’m certain, but awkward for him while it lasts. It’s after four, I think, Miss Frazier. Did McCloud or Mrs. Dickerman have appointments?”

“No, Doctor. Neither of them. Mrs. Dickerman telephoned yesterday and there was no time I could give her within a week. She came on the chance you might be able to work her in somewhere. Mr. McCloud dropped in in the same way. I had no idea how long Mr. Wilder’s appointment would take, so I rather encouraged them both to wait. Shall I tell them there’s no use now? It’s quarter to five.”

“No. Don’t do that. I’ll see them. Only let McCloud in ahead of Mrs. Dickerman.”

“Shall I? Mrs. Dickerman telephoned yesterday, as I told you! She came in several minutes ahead of Mr. McCloud too.”

“Did she? I suppose then you’d better convey to McCloud, somehow, that I won’t be long with Mrs. Dickerman. Tell Mrs. Dickerman that I will be free in another few minutes. Do that now, please, and then come back to take this record. Pardon all this, Dick. Have a cigarette?”

From the brief exchange between doctor and secretary, Dick had been able to form a pretty complete mental picture of what was back of it. Mrs. Dickerman must be some slightly neurotic lady of wealth who was falling over herself to pay fabulous fees to Lewis for a little mental coddling, while the rather gorgeous but definitely shabby dark-browed young giant was, of course, a charity case, and in real trouble. But supposing their needs had been equal, Dick suspected his friend still would favor the penniless down-and-outer, for Lewis was slightly snobbish in his mistrust of wealth and position. It was a little perverse in him. Even his own sister, Cynthia, thought so.

Dick frowned to himself. This matter of Lewis’ prejudice against paying patients was rather pertinent to himself at the moment on account of the errand which had brought him here. What could Petra Farwell seem to Lewis beyond what Dick himself thought her—a beautiful but dull ingénue whose psychic maladjustments (if that was the term) were the result of too much leisure and spoiling?

Dick took out his cigarette case, waving Lewis’ aside, for Lewis, he knew, was as economical when it came to cigarette brands as he was about clothes and office furniture. What a bare room this sanctum was! The reception office had been on the luxurious side, but that was Cynthia’s taste and doing. She had insisted on decorating it, and Dick could not doubt she had drawn on her own purse for most of the accessories. But even as he passed it up, Dick noticed that Lewis’ cigarette case holding the Luckies or whatever they were, was rather wonderful. Finest jade. You could see at a glance. Marvelous color. Some grateful woman patient, of course, had forced the gem on Lewis, and probably he did not dream what its value was; if he did, he would sell it, to give to the deserving poor....

Miss Frazier was back and ready with her shorthand pad. Since they were smoking, Dick offered her a cigarette, one of his own Club variety. But she refused it, coldly, her eyes on her pad. Dick did not so much get the idea of having been put in his place as of the secretary having insisted on keeping hers, which was that of an invisible, impersonal automaton—a dicta-phone with judgment. Suddenly Dick did not mind talking before her.

“It’s a stepmother stepdaughter situation,” he explained to Lewis. “The stepmother is my friend. She is a wonderful person. She knows that you and I are related in a way. (The relationship between them consisted in the fact that Lewis’ sister, Cynthia, was married to Dick’s first cousin, Harry Allen.) And she got the idea that because of the relationship I might have some sort of a pull with you, do you see? But perhaps that’s stupid. Perhaps nobody has a pull with you in that sense. I warned her. Is it stupid?”

Lewis smiled, that peculiar fleeting smile of his. But it was for himself this time. He had assumed the position he kept through all these office interviews. His chair was swung half around on its pivot so that he did not directly face the patient, and his eyes, for the most part, were on the knob of the door leading into Miss Frazier’s little private office. “Of course you have pull, Dick, all the pull in the world. But I don’t see what that has to do with it. When it comes to taking on patients, one does it on the merits of the cases themselves, naturally. Let me hear.”

“Well, it’s the stepdaughter who is—funny. Clare, who is my friend the stepmother, do you see, is utterly devoted to the girl. In fact, to my mind, she is almost obsessed with the idea that it’s up to her to make the girl happy. That’s far-fetched, of course. You can’t do that for any one. But Clare tries desperately. And all she gets for her pains is very nice polite manners and nothing under ’em. It is absurd. You would think so—you will think so—when you see Clare. But even if Clare weren’t so wonderful as she is, the girl’s indifference would still be absurd, for just on the material side she owes Clare everything she’s got in the world. She and her father were as poor as poverty until Clare came into their lives, married the father. Now that she is there, their lives are all luxury.—Charm.—Beauty too. But what good does it do? Clare is only getting her heart broken.

“But I ought to tell you,” Dick went on quickly, after a second’s pause in which he had suddenly remembered some last admonishments of Clare’s, “Clare doesn’t mind personal heartbreaks and things like that. That is not why she wants you to psychoanalyze the girl. It is for the girl’s own sake and her father’s sake. She doesn’t want those two to become estranged. And it is bound to happen if things go on the way they are going. The girl must be more responsive to Clare, return some of her devotion, or the father is going to begin to feel the antagonism in the air and blame his daughter for it. For, in a choice of loyalties, the man is Clare’s. It isn’t Clare’s fault it’s that way, though. From the very beginning she has worked to preserve—even to create—a fine relationship between her husband and his daughter. She is big enough, detached enough, to keep herself and her personal disappointments out of the situation and think only of those two. And that’s why she sent me here, at dollars a minute, I suppose, to ask you to see the girl and straighten her out. She has an idea that there is some deeply hidden resentment—some mix-up, anyway—in the girl’s subconscious mind and that it only needs you to excavate it. She thinks—”

But there Dick faltered. Lewis was smiling and no longer fleetingly. Miss Frazier, noticing Dick look around for it, pushed an ashtray along the desk toward him. He crushed out his cigarette stub in it, looking miserable and a little angry. “I can see what you’re thinking, Lewis,” he exclaimed. “You think that it is a simple case of stepdaughterish jealousy and that Clare and I are just too ingenuous for words to have come bothering a top-notch psychiatrist with it. But you happen to be wrong. You don’t know the people. Petra’s not jealous. Not for a minute. She hasn’t enough warmth in her for such a passion, if it comes to that. Really, she’s no jollier with her own father than with her stepmother. But Clare doesn’t see that. She thinks it’s only herself Petra pushes off. And what is there so absurd in her getting the idea that you might help?”

But if Dick had only noticed, his belated mention of the girl’s name had effectually changed his friend’s expression.

“Is it Petra Farwell you’re talking about?” he asked quickly. “Daughter of Lowell Farwell, the novelist?”

Dick hesitated an instant, glancing a little painfully at Miss Frazier’s efficient hand with its pen poised but so far idle—above her pad. But after all, Miss Frazier’s presence at this conference was Lewis’ responsibility, and one had to trust Lewis.

So he said, “Yes. It’s the Farwells. I thought you would guess. You know I built their house, Green Doors. We started it the minute they were back from the honeymoon. Clare made Featherstone’s give me a free hand with it. It was my first real chance at self expression. But Clare had as many ideas as I had and the nice part was that our ideas didn’t clash—merely supplemented. Until that summer I had only known Clare socially and even so not very well. She is in an older crowd. It’s an interesting crowd. The Lovings, you know,—the Stracheys, Jim Strange, Isabell Peters Clough. Rather exciting, being accepted by them! Clare sees to it that I am. And Lowell Farwell is the lion of the lot, I suppose. Clare herself ought to be. Wait till you meet her!”