The Lady and Her Doctor by Evelyn Piper Page B

the clinic since he started practice, and most of the old-timer patients knew him. As he and Miss Folsom walked down the corridor past the rows of patients on benches toward the examining rooms, he was greeted many times. Their clinic visit was a big event in these people’s lives, the doctors were VIP’s to them; the way they greeted him showed that. Milton took this for granted until he noticed Miss Folsom looking at him with real respect and then he realized that by letting her come here he was showing himself up against the best possible background. (Maybe I’m better at this than I know, he thought, maybe I’m smarter than I know.) There couldn’t be a better character reference than the way those patients looked up to him. It was only in the hospital clinic, where you worked for nothing, that there was any approximation of the glory that he and the boys had been promised by their mother in the kitchen in Brookfield when she started the four of them becoming doctors. Here Miss Folsom couldn’t see Jenny, or the greasy bills she collected for him, or the Hide-a-Bed on which he slept, or the bathroom where he dressed or the linen closet where he kept his clothes. (And her suicide note. And the bottle of pills.) Just as his mother had promised, Miss Folsom, walking next to him, was looking at him as if he was Somebody! He felt, however, that if he went on and introduced her to the other doctors and she heard their shoptalk, it would be a letdown. God knows there were no knights in shining armor in Queens General! He stopped and waved at the benches and asked Miss Folsom to sit down and wait, he had to start examining. Miss Folsom saw the clinic nurse, Miss O’Connor, hurrying to him—“Oh, Doctor!”—and heard the social worker asking when he could discuss—Good, he thought, swell. He shrugged at Miss Folsom, who was choosing a seat on the patients’ benches, and walked into the little cubicle and waited for the patients to be weighed and brought in to him.
    Half an hour later, when Milton came out to bring a chart which hadn’t been properly filled out, he looked for her and saw that of all the patients there, Miss Folsom had chosen to sit next to old Austen, the Limey, old sourpuss Austen. Old Austen was talking away and that struck him funny. (This was the day, all right!) In the four years that he had seen old Austen once every three weeks, he had never once seen her unbend to anybody. “Yes, Doctor; no, Doctor,” that was all Austen ever said to a soul until now. The other patients didn’t exist for her any more than the neighbors existed for Miss Folsom. (“Sloane,” he reminded himself, smiling at her, and she smiled back even if old sourpuss didn’t.) He left the chart on the desk with a note on it and returned to the cubicle examining stall.
    All the time he was examining patients, taking cardiographs, making notes on charts and writing out medication slips, he was trying to decide what the next move should be. Would it be better to take it for granted that now—after what happened—it would happen again, or act as if it had never happened? Wouldn’t that be the gentlemanly thing to do—act like what happened was “a closed book”? Talk about her mother? Never mention her mother? He examined, prescribed and listened mechanically to complaints. Shortness of breath. “If I didn’t have them four flights to climb, Doc. How can I lose weight? Eat a lot of meat, she says. I’d like to see her eat meat on what they allow me for food, Doc. My legs are all swole up, Doc. Are you going to give me the needle today, Doc?” Milton was still up in the air when he and Miss Folsom walked out of the hospital together and got into the Studie, still didn’t know. (He noticed, because it was so different from Cissie, how Miss Folsom climbed in, how she didn’t give a damn what she showed getting in. Miss