20

“I can find nothing in the record to show that Mr. Fletcher has neglected either the health or the education of his foster children,” said old Judge Bridges, pulling at his long, thin white nose with its red tip. “Except for a few anonymous and obviously malicious letters. The officers of the Children’s Aid Society have conducted a proper and thorough investigation.”

He glanced at the United States Immigration and Naturalization officer from Philadelphia, who said, “We find no real substance for any report that any of these children have become public charges, or that they were likely to become public charges at the time of their entry into this country.”

An officer of the Children’s Aid Society agreed to all this, after an inimical glance from Dr. McManus. “Mr. Fletcher has promised that when his foster children have reached their age-group level in the public schools, he will send them to these schools. We agree with him that to send them now would be harmful, psychologically, to these children, for they would have to attend classes with children much younger than themselves.”

The courtroom was bare, dreary, and filled with the shadows of the driving rain outside. A news photographer from the Press snapped Johnny’s photograph.

“I find,” said the judge, “that Mr. Fletcher has taken out fifteen thousand dollars insurance on his life, to provide for these children in the event of his death, and Dr. Francis Stevens of New York, a very prominent minister, has sent me an affidavit to the effect that he has established a trust fund for the benefit of these children. Moreover,” and the judge coughed, “Dr. Alfred McManus of this city has assured me that he has made a new will leaving these children a very considerable sum. They are very fortunate indeed.”

Johnny looked with amazement at Dr. McManus, who ignored him. The lawyer representing him and the children then rose and thanked the judge, gathered up his brief case, shook hands with Johnny and the doctor, and ran out. “There goes three thousand dollars,” muttered the doctor crossly. “Don’t bother me, son. I’ve got to get to the hospital. Shut up. I’m not going to talk to anyone as stupid as you about wills. How’s Jean getting along on the crutches?”

Johnny smiled at him, still amazed and confused. “You know how he’s getting along. You were with us last night. I still can’t get over how fast you medical fellows can heal bones these days, with pins and things.”

The clerk was calling another case, and they left. “Well, that’s over,” said Johnny, pulling on his raincoat. “I couldn’t help worrying. But after all—”

“God provides,” said the doctor gloomily. “It’s a good thing He has people like me around. I’d like to see how He’d get along if there weren’t so many suckers in this world—like me, for instance. Well, I have my price too. You know I’m coming on Thursday for Thanksgiving dinner? I haven’t had a Thanksgiving dinner in that house since I was a boy.”

Johnny, later in the day, appeared in County Court where he was given preliminary adoption papers. Here he encountered a small difficulty. A little brown woman he had never seen before rose up with a flash of eyeglasses and remarked that Mr. Fletcher was not married. The judge sarcastically called her attention to the fact that the unmarried state was not detrimental to adoptions, and that the court had investigated. He looked at Johnny and his eyes twinkled. “And there’s no guarantee that Mr. Fletcher will escape matrimony in the long run. He looks sound in wind and limb.”

Johnny went out into the dark wind and dark cold. As he was about to cross the street a young woman passed him with a long stride, her raincoat glistening, her blond head held high and proudly. Johnny’s heart jumped with unaccountable hope. But she could not be Lorry Summerfield! Now he was namelessly despondent, remembering his dream. A sense of profound loneliness and aching came to him. He found his ancient car, but did not start it immediately, looking through the streaming windshield at the mournful street. Why had he hoped, with that bounding of his heart, that the girl he had seen was Lorry? Why did the very thought of her make him tremble, and his face become hot? She was in New York; she was working with her brother. This Dr. McManus had told him.

“She wouldn’t even look at me,” said Johnny aloud, as he turned the ignition key. “There isn’t any place in her life for me. The idea’s ridiculous. And coming down to it, there isn’t any place in my life for her either.”

He arrived home much depressed, to find only a few calls for him, none of them sick calls, to his relief. All matters referring to meetings and church affairs. He sighed, sat at his desk, and listened to the sound of the children’s voices in the dining room as they discussed lessons with Miss Coogan. He opened his desk drawer and took out Lorry’s golden box and held it tightly in his hand. It seemed to give out a tender warmth against his flesh. Mrs. Burnsdale, glancing in at him maternally, thought to herself that he needed a wife. He gave so much to everybody, but no one, she reflected, gave him anything. Except, of course, affection. But one of these days—and she knew how time passed—the children would be grown and gone, and he would be alone, and the children would have their own lives. She could see him, gray and lonely and old, in this very wretched room. He was still young, but tomorrow he would be middle-aged, then elderly, then aged, watching for the children’s letters, listening to the wind and the rain, getting up to visit the sick, returning to an empty dining room, reading alone, then going to a cold bed. And then, finally, a lonely grave in a forgotten cemetery, like too many ministers.

Driven by these emotions, she went as fast as possible into the parlor. The lamps had been turned on; Johnny was writing his sermon for Thanksgiving Day. The golden box was near his hand. He looked up and smiled at Mrs. Burnsdale as she came in so precipitously. “Anything wrong?” he asked. “Am I needed?”

She stood before him, her hands on her hips. “You know, sir, that’s what you always ask! Nobody asks that of you. Nobody!”

He put down his Army-issue fountain pen and looked at her, puzzled.

“How’s your cold?” she demanded, in an unusually loud voice. “After being out in the rain?”

“My cold?” he said. He coughed tentatively. “Why, it’s practically gone.” He smiled again. She came closer to the desk, and her blunt features worked. “Mr. Fletcher, I’m awfully worried about you. All the things that’ve happened here in this town. Mr. Fletcher, don’t you think you should get another parish, in another city?”

“Why, that’s what Dr. Stevens asked me in his letter the other day.” Johnny was amused. “He’s worried about me.”

“Well, I am too!” Mrs. Burnsdale suddenly gulped. “I’m afraid of this town, Mr. Fletcher.”

Johnny studied her contemplatively. “Well, I’m not. People are the same everywhere. And the children are putting down roots here. Pietro’s got friends from his church, and Kathy’s got friends from the Sunday school, and even Max has brought a kid or two home. He models them in his clay. You know, he’s going to be a sculptor! He’s always working in clay. He made a head of Rabbi Chortow, and it’s wonderful. And Father John Kanty sends over children to visit Jean. And Pietro’s in the choir of the church. They like the town. So do I.”

Mrs. Burnsdale was silent, but the terror did not leave her. “What’s wrong?” asked Johnny gently. “Are you afraid that there’ll be more trouble?”

She shook her head dumbly. Her small eyes implored him. Then she said, “I don’t know, Mr. Fletcher. I was thinking about you, in the kitchen, and I—well, I sort of saw you in this room, old, you know, and the kids gone and grown up, and you not having any wife, or anybody.”

To his distress, one or two tears ran down her cheeks. “Mr. Fletcher, we couldn’t get along without you. You’ve got to take care of yourself. It isn’t that I don’t trust God.” She pushed out her lower lip, then tossed her head defiantly. “Well, maybe I don’t, in a way. You trust God, and something awful happens, and you can’t see why. You’re supposed to trust Him, but trusting can sure be pretty hard on you.”

He patted her fat shoulder. Oddly, his loneliness had lifted. He walked with Mrs. Burnsdale into the kitchen, and sniffed appreciatively at the pots. “Ah! Spareribs and sauerkraut! And lemon pie.”

At this point Pietro marched into the kitchen, fixed his merry eyes with as much sternness as possible on the minister, and announced, “My name is Peter.”

“Why, so it is, Pietro,” said Johnny.

“I mean, Papa, I am not Pietro now, I am Peter. Pietro—poof!” He made a wide circle of contempt with his arms. “It is not American.”

“Who said so?” asked Johnny, approvingly inspecting another pot.

“Keep out of that pie!” shouted Mrs. Burnsdale, slapping Pietro’s wandering hand. He sucked the meringue from his fingers and said, “I say so, Papa.”

“A man called Petrus, or Pierre or Pietro, is still Peter,” said Johnny. “Besides, I like your name. Why should you have a name that’s no different from anyone else’s? Don’t you want to be different?”

Pietro looked longingly at the pie, then at Mrs. Burnsdale’s threatening face, then with bright interest at the stove. Like Johnny, he inspected the savory pots. “No,” he said.

“Why not?”

Pietro was uncertain, now. Then, after a long contemplation, he said, “Okay. Pietro. I am going to be a priest, Papa. Do you believe it?”

“No,” said Johnny.

Pietro laughed. “No. I shall be the great singer. I shall make a lot of money.”

“No doubt,” said Johnny.

“And the ladies will love me,” said Pietro with satisfaction.

“Now where does that kid get his awful ideas?” asked Mrs. Burnsdale disapprovingly.

“He comes by them naturally,” said Johnny. “The Italians are the one race who really appreciate the opposite sex.”

“I have thought of marrying Miss Summerfield,” said Pietro seriously. “But then she is too old. Kathy has hair like hers. I think,” he said, giving the matter thought, “that I shall marry Kathy. I like yellow hair.”

“If you don’t get away from those cookies,” said Mrs. Burnsdale, lifting a ladle menacingly, “you’ll have a different color on your behind, young man.”

“What is a cooky?” said Pietro, disdainfully, as he chewed it with appreciation. “Yes. I shall marry Kathy. For her hair.”

Kathy, who had heard her name mentioned, came briskly into the kitchen. “What’s the matter with my hair?” she demanded.

Pietro studied her admiringly. “I have just seen you are pretty,” he said.

Kathy gave him a formidable stare. “A kid like you,” she said, scornfully. “By the way, Papa, I have another name.”

“You too?” said Johnny.

Kathy, seeing that Mrs. Burnsdale was washing some dishes, automatically took up a dishcloth, and Mrs. Burnsdale gave her a loving glance. “I have met a girl, in Sunday school,” she said. “Her name is Charmenz. We all call her Charm. So, I am now Charm. At home, of course. There is no use having two people with the same name in Sunday school; it’s confusing.”

“It’s stupid,” said Mrs. Burnsdale severely. “I don’t know what’s got into you kids. Pietro wants to change his name, and then you do.”

Kathy was startled. She looked at Pietro, who was reaching slyly into the cooky jar again. She screamed, “Stay away from those cookies! You eat everything, you pig!”

Mrs. Burnsdale, who was an expert in these matters, swiftly folded a towel into a deadly length and slapped Pietro heartily about the legs. This delighted him. He made high short leaps around the kitchen, stuffing cookies into his mouth, while Mrs. Burnsdale pursued him. Johnny laughed at the sight of this dark faun skipping ahead of the not very agile Mrs. Burnsdale, while he ate with measured enjoyment. Finally he gave a very long leap, and in the very midst of it he pushed open the dining-room door and disappeared.

“I think,” said Kathy coldly, “that I’ll still be Kathy. Anything Pietro wants to do is wrong. Of course.”

“You are such a sensible girl,” said Mrs. Burnsdale. There was a small mirror over the sink. Kathy studied her reflection, preened a little, saw with pleasure that in the steam of the kitchen a curl or two had developed around her temples, and that her round cheeks were satisfactorily pink. “I hope not,” she said.

Johnny, unaccountably lighthearted now, went out into the rain. There was nothing like children! Nothing! Especially his. And how they had changed these many weeks. It was rare, now, to see the old gleaming hatred in their eyes, the old fear. Sometimes they reacted a little too strongly to situations, but even these occasions were becoming fewer. They were devoted to their lessons; they learned with a kind of consuming avarice. The head-shrinkers, thought Johnny, would say they are becoming adjusted. They are only becoming aware that love will never fail them.

He went through the church, where the great candelabra stood on the altar, the candlelight dissipating the dark and surging against every wooden pillar. Fresh flowers stood beside them. Above the altar gleamed the faded gold of a large cross. No one had protested, to Johnny’s knowledge. He had paid twenty-five dollars for the cross, secondhand. “Lord,” he said, “I know it doesn’t matter where a man prays, but I’m glad Thy House is bright.”

Humming to himself, he went down into the basement, the parish hall, where a great deal of hammering was going on. Bookshelves lined the old plastered walls; the wood was a soft and lustrous pale tint, faultless and exquisite. Johnny vaguely assumed it was pine, but it was, in fact, the best mahogany, unstained. Several men, and boys, were in the process of making tables. The basement smelled of sawdust. Among the men was George Harding, Lon’s father, and among the cropped-headed, thin-faced boys, was Lon himself. They greeted Johnny with friendly reserve, and went on with their work. Johnny said to Lon, “How’s the new school these days?”

“They sure work hell out of you,” said Lon earnestly. “Hey, I’m sorry, sir. I mean, there’s no fooling around. I really have to work.” He grinned. “I’m learning a lot.” Now his opaque eyes looked at the minister with intense affection; he picked up his hammer and began to pound on a table. Johnny smoothed his hand over it. It was darker wood than the bookshelves, so sleek, so blond, so well made. It was oak. Well, oak was even better than pine for tables; it didn’t splinter. Again Johnny looked proudly at the bookcases. “Best pine I’ve ever seen,” he said.

One of the boys made a choking sound, then coughed abruptly, and with convulsive movements of his shoulders. Johnny gave him a cough drop, absently. He hoped to have his “school” ready after Christmas. Huge cartons of books stood in the corners of the hall, under the raw bulbs, and there were other cartons, containing student lamps which Johnny had bought secondhand. He could see the shelves filled, the lamps glowing, the heads of young boys and girls bent seriously over the books, the teachers sitting among them, piles of neat white paper and many pencils close at hand. He went to a bookshelf and smoothed his hand over the satin finish. The wood had been donated by three friends of George Harding’s, who worked in Ben Guston’s lumber mills. He turned to them, smiling, and caught sudden and anxious expressions, before they bent their faces over their work again. “I hope it didn’t cost you fellows too much,” he said. “And I don’t have to tell you how grateful I am.”

Miss Coogan was going to help in the evenings, though Johnny had protested. The Ladies’ Aid had, with grim determination of which Johnny knew nothing, literally impressed three elderly retired women teachers into service.

Dr. McManus was again thinking of Johnny as he sipped his after-dinner brandy in the living room of MacDonald Summerfield’s home. He was also unusually irascible. “That confounded head-shrinker,” Dr. Somer Granger, the psychiatrist, was present, and he was indiscreetly, and with amused and superior laughter, relating tales of his patients, who were all known to his host and hostess. Dr. Granger called a spade a spade, but his frank mention of delicate places of the human anatomy did not offend Mrs. Summerfield, who smiled. Everything in a man or a woman’s life, Dr. Granger always insisted, was directly connected with these delicate areas, and he proved it in his stories.

“Well, there’s been a short circuit, then, in your own life,” Dr. McManus often remarked sourly. Dr. Granger was a bachelor. Esther Summerfield, at this, would look casually amused. Though her husband and daughter, and most of her friends, considered her a harmless and not very bright faddist, Dr. McManus knew better. She’s the only one in the house who isn’t a fool, he would remark to himself. There was only one thing that he could not understand about Esther, and that was her affection for her husband.

Dr. McManus, tonight, tried to get his mind off Johnny. He said, as he had said many times before, “Somer, one of these days I’m going to remember my medical ethics and report you to the AMA for revealing your patients’ names, and that’ll be one idiot less in the medical profession.” Dr. Granger laughed heartily at this; he was a close friend of Mr. Summerfield. “Can’t doctors talk about patients with each other?” he had asked. “Besides, we’re all friends here, and not gossips.”

“Well, you are, you damned old maid,” said Dr. McManus, and shifted in his chair. It was not a Chinese chair. The Chinese motif had vanished suddenly from this large room. Now it was all Hindustani, which the doctor considered even worse. Esther Summerfield was swathed in a sari of a light pink, bordered with gold, with a headpiece, “like an infernal swami,” the doctor commented to himself. She had talked of yoga that night, with considerable animation. She was taking lessons, by mail, from some organization in Los Angeles. Her tilted dark eyes danced on Dr. McManus. “Imagine, Al. Later on I’ll be able to sit in absolute and motionless silence for hours, hardly breathing, if even that.”

“Why don’t you teach it to Somer?” asked the doctor. The psychiatrist was jeeringly announcing that he expected one of his more distressed patients to commit suicide at any time. Dr. McManus said, “Maybe he’ll stop breathing forever.”

Dr. Granger, hearing his name, said impatiently, “What? What?”

“I’m wondering when I’ll have the pleasure of signing your death certificate,” said Dr. McManus. “We were talking about yoga, Esther and I. From what I hear, I think you should take it up, yourself.”

Dr. Granger knew all about yoga. He was an authority on it, he said. He was an authority on everything. Pompously, he gave a brief lecture which embraced the mysteries of Hinduism. Mrs. Summerfield listened idly. Dr. McManus suddenly remembered, as Dr. Granger’s voice droned on, that someone had told him Granger “had something” on Summerfield. He stared at Mr. Summerfield intently. He had always thought of Mr. Summerfield as a wealthy man, who, perhaps for reasons of ennui or something slightly more sinister, was trying to play Machiavelli in Barryfield. But all at once the doctor thought that he discerned a change in his old acquaintance’s face and manner, a dimly distraught, confused, and faintly agonized change. Nonsense, he said to himself. He’s just the same as ever. Then he stared harder at Mr. Summerfield, and told himself, with wonder, that this was no change at all, but something which had always been there. Now I’m fanciful, said the old doctor irritably in his mind. Just gossip.

“Now,” said Dr. Granger, “there is the Gita.”

“Oh, shut up!” said Dr. McManus. “You don’t really know a damned thing about the whole subject. I do. I spent two years in India, trying to find out why in hell the poor devils who bathe in the filthy Ganges not only don’t pollute the water with their disease, but actually get cured of it. Never did find out; medical mystery to this day.”

“Psychosomatic,” said Dr. Granger, unoffended. “They aren’t really ill, they—”

“Never heard of a psychosomatic germ yet,” said Dr. McManus. “By the way, not to change this fascinating subject, what happened to Sloan Meredith, who went to you when I told him he ought to have his gall bladder out?”

Dr. Granger waved a large and meaty hand in derision. “He stopped treatments, against my advice, about six weeks go. I was just getting deep into his subconscious, and his wife was reporting that he was having fewer of his alleged attacks at night. It seems that he and his mother—”

The doctor’s eyes sparkled like hoarfrost. “Never mind about Sloan’s mother. I’m asking you about Sloan.”

“I told you, Al. He suddenly stopped coming. His wife said that he was beginning to feel worse. That was because I was probing too deep for him.”

“With what? A scalpel?”

Dr. Granger paused. “What do you mean?”

Dr. McManus moved in his uncomfortable teakwood chair, which was inlaid with ivory. “Well, it turned out that one big gallstone he couldn’t pass perforated last night. He died on the operating table this morning. I couldn’t save him.” With satisfaction, he watched the younger doctor pale. “It was gallstones all the time, not his subconscious.”

Dr. Granger’s authoritative voice faltered. “But—but—he was very disturbed—”

“Sure he was! Ever have a gallstone attack, Somer? No? Well, I’ll remember to ask for a few for you in my prayers. Nothing like a gallstone attack to make even a psychiatrist crawl all over his bed, whimpering and screaming like a wounded puppy. Give you an idea of what a psychosomatic stone can do to your nerves, and your subconscious!

“Somer,” said the old doctor as he pulled his massive body upright, and shook his finger at the psychiatrist. “You knew damned well that I’m a conservative surgeon; never advise an operation unless it’s a matter of saving a man’s life. I don’t usually operate even to cure moderate discomfort; a man can get along with that, with a few aspirins now and then. And what’s discomfort? I’m not one of those money-hungry fellows who rush a patient to the hospital with an appendix which is acting up a little for the first time. So, when I heard Sloan’d gone to you, I called up and told you the whole story, and I sent you his X rays. A thing I never did, without being asked, any time before in my life. You’re a medical man, as well as a damned head-shrinker. You can read X rays. Yet, just because Sloan was making a lot of money in his foundry, you took him on, though you could see with half an eye what was really the matter with him.”

The others listened avidly. Dr. Somer Granger swallowed visibly a few times. He was a big man in his early forties, athletic and swift of movement, with a long, rectangular face, narrow blue eyes, a bald head, and an absurd pug nose. Always fluent in speech, he could not speak now.

“You killed him, Somer. Oh, you can’t be hanged for it. I know. They used to hang medical men in the healthier times of the Middle Ages when they were guilty of malpractice. Not now, unfortunately. Look, I’m not saying that psychiatry doesn’t have its place. It does, emphatically, but it should always be under the close jurisdiction of the family physician; it should only supplement general medicine, not replace it. And I’m dead sure, from my experience, that a priest or a minister or a rabbi could work better in that direction than you fellows. You’ve become the high priests of esotericism; you’ve got a yoga jargon of your own, and it’s dangerous—for fools. You should be forced to wear the peaked hat and the yellow zodiacal robes of the wizards of the Dark Ages. Just so people could recognize you for what you are.”

In spite of his preoccupation, Mr. Summerfield suddenly looked amused. Esther laughed.

Dr. Granger had not recovered his color, but only his bumptious aplomb, which rarely failed him. He said, “Now, Al, that’s going too far. You surgeons are all for surgery. Yes, I looked over Sloan’s X rays, and your report, very carefully. But I’ve known dozens of cases where gall-bladder trouble was psychosomatic in origin; in fact, I’m sure that practically all cases are such. Aggressive, hostile personalities, most of them, suspicious and usually obese, for they try to alleviate their tensions by overindulgence in rich foods. In many cases psychiatric treatment has completely cured their trouble. How was I to know that Sloan’s wouldn’t too? He was getting along all right; reduction in weight, less insomnia, general well-being. It wasn’t until I started probing about his mother—well, I’m sorry. I’ll go to see Molly first thing in the morning.”

“I wouldn’t,” said Dr. McManus. “She was against you from the start. And she’s got three big brothers, who kind of liked Sloan. No sir, I wouldn’t go, if I was you.” He regarded the psychiatrist somberly.

He said abruptly, “Do you believe in God, Somer?”

“What? What?” Then the psychiatrist smirked indulgently.

“I see you don’t. You know what I’d do if I had the power? I wouldn’t let a psychiatrist practice his art, if you can call it that, unless he was convinced of the existence of a God. Too many of you have contempt for your patients; you wouldn’t have, if you believed in the existence of God. You’re dangerous.”

Mr. Summerfield said smoothly, with no expression on his face, “Al has gotten religion since he installed that troublemaking minister of his in his church. He’s gotten soft in the head, our old reactionary Al.” He gave Dr. McManus a long, pale-blue glance.

“Keep away from my minister, Mac,” said the doctor, with cold anger.

Mr. Summerfield laughed. “I told you that Al’s gotten religion! If it weren’t for him, that rabble-rousing minister would have been thrown out of this town by now.”

“When did he ever rabble-rouse?” asked Dr. McManus with rage. “You helped send that mob to the parsonage!”

No one answered him.

“You stay away from my boy!” shouted Dr. McManus, turning purple.

“Curious case,” said Dr. Granger. “Here’s a young man, not married, and apparently not showing any interest in getting married. In some way he acquires five children, from different backgrounds. He brings them to this country, sponsors them, gets ready to adopt them. I never met him, but he interests me, as a psychiatrist. I’ve talked with a lot of people who’ve met him. Very strange. I talked with old Judge Bridges and the head of the Children’s Aid Society, adoption division. They were uneasy about him.”

“That’s a lie,” said Dr. McManus.

Dr. Granger shook his head soberly. “No it isn’t, Al. Somebody, though, put pressure on them. Maybe we don’t have to look far to find out who it is. From what I’ve heard, the man isn’t quite normal. Normal men don’t get stoned, don’t incite mobs against them, don’t stir up people.”

“Christ did,” said Dr. McManus.

Dr. Granger waved his large hand indulgently. “Well, we psychiatrists have a theory about that too. Normal men are adjusted, well-balanced, integrated. This man isn’t, or he wouldn’t have aroused such controversy in Barryfield. He would have settled down here comfortably, set about the business of raising those children under average and peaceful circumstances, and no one would have heard about him at all. The children, I understand, are completely abnormal.”

Dr. McManus sat utterly still, his eyes stiff and unwinking.

“You see, Al,” said the psychiatrist smugly, “I’ve investigated. It comes from my training in normal and abnormal behavior. There was one of the children who got his throat cut by another child. Normal children don’t arouse that kind of hostility. I talked with some of the nurses in the hospital where one of the boys had had an operation—you operated, Al? They said he was completely out of his mind. Talked about his dead mother coming to see him every night, and jabbered in French when under sedatives, and sometimes screamed about soldiers coming to kill him. Delusions. He definitely had a persecution complex; I’d say he was suffering from schizophrenia. He sometimes blabbered to the nurses about his mother having been kicked to death, or something equally absurd. Definitely suffering from delusions.”

Dr. McManus stood up, his squat and powerful body shaking. “Who told you to investigate an obscure and poverty-stricken minister and his children, Somer?”

Dr. Granger paused. His eyes flickered.

“What made you, a rich-as-hell Philadelphia psychiatrist, take an interest in him?”

“Now, Al. Everybody’s talking about him. So I took on the investigation, naturally.”

“You’re a liar,” said Dr. McManus brutally.

He drew a long and trembling breath. He turned to Mr. Summerfield. He said in his low and squealing voice, and he spoke with slow emphasis, “Mac, I warn you. Keep your hands off Johnny. You hear? Keep your hands off Johnny from this time henceforth. For, Mac,” and he took a step closer to the other man, “if you don’t, you’re going to suffer for it.”

“Al, are you threatening me?” asked Mr. Summerfield, with genuine concern. “Come now. We’re old friends, though we don’t see eye to eye about some things.”

“I’m not threatening you, Mac. I’m just telling you. One of these days you’ll know something about Johnny. I’m not ready to use it against you, just yet. But when you do know, it’s going to break your heart, Mac. It’s going to make you grovel, Mac.”

Mr. Summerfield regarded him with narrowed eyes. “Look, Al, I don’t like your protégé. But I sympathize with him. You think I’ll sympathize with him more, when I know about him?”

“No,” said Dr. McManus, and now his tiny eyes warmed with pity. “You’ll sympathize with yourself, I think. Or others will feel sorry for you.”

He turned and stumped out of the room. They were accustomed to his abrupt departures, and only Esther Summerfield followed him and took his arm. “Let’s go down to the breakfast room, Al,” she said, and her usually idle voice was urgent. He went with her, and they sat down together in the only normal room in the house, in the doctor’s opinion, for it was all warm chintz and golden plain furniture. Esther, swathed in her diaphanous draperies, was incongruous there. She looked at her old friend gravely.

“You don’t know what it means to me, dear, to be able to meet Lorry at your house when she runs into town for a weekend now and then. I think I never really knew Lorry before. No, Mac doesn’t suspect that she is ever here. He writes to her in care of Barry, in New York, but she replies only to me.” Esther turned her head aside sadly. “You know how I’ve tried to talk to Lorry about her father, but each editorial he publishes, sneering about Mr. Fletcher, or even some small quip, hardens her even more against him. A stony emotionalism, I suppose you’d call it. In a way,” and now Esther smiled fondly, thinking of her daughter, “I can see her point, considering how much Mr. Fletcher has done for her. Who’d ever have believed it of Lorry, who only a few months ago jeered at pity and mercy and concern for others as weak sentimentality?”

The doctor chuckled. “Well, she wouldn’t be showing it now if she hadn’t had it in her to begin with. She was always one of those idealists; that’s how the trouble started between her and her father years ago. Y’know, I begin to think about her and my boy, the parson, and then I wonder if there isn’t what he’d call a pattern in human affairs after all. He’s stood this town on its ear, right out of his own innocence, and partly because he honestly believes most people are decent, and will go the decent way, if they’re shown. I don’t agree to that, but I’m watching!”

Esther looked thoughtfully at her long dark hands. “Al, about Lorry and Mr. Fletcher. I know she comes here to get personal reports about him from you. Do you think—?”

“Romance?” The doctor grinned. “It’s already there, but they’re both too stupid to realize it. Oh, you’re thinking of Mac. And Mac and Lorry, and the way they’re wound up together. I don’t know, Esther.” He paused. “Is it my imagination, or something, or is Mac changing? He was always kind of remote and aloof, all his life, and never swooped down to reality even once that I can remember. Lorry’s too much like him—all seething emotion under smooth white—what did you call it?—stone. But she’s got common sense, too. Now, Mac—he’s farther away from reality now then he ever was, seems to me. Abstracted. Looking at you, sometimes, as if he was both blind and deaf, and confused. Jumps, if you call him by name. Am I imagining things?”

Esther looked at the wall, and her face became taut with distress. “It isn’t your imagination. Do you remember the first time MacDonald met Somer Granger? He met him, you know, in Philadelphia, and three years later induced him to open an office in Barryfield for one day a week. I—I never did think the association healthy. There’s morbidity in such men as Somer, and he brought out morbidity in MacDonald, a thing I didn’t realize he had. It was then that the trouble started between Lorry and her father; I hold Somer responsible for that. It’s something that doesn’t quite come out in the open; I can’t put a finger on it, but it’s there.”

The doctor frowned, then nodded. “You know, most doctors who’ve been practicing long enough to get an insight into human nature, and how it works through the body, mistrust psychiatrists. Doctors have known all about psychosomatic medicine since Hippocrates, and even before him, and have taken it into all their calculations. Then along come the head-shrinkers, thinking they have a bright new idea, and only the young medical graduates or doctors who don’t have confidence in themselves go for it. I often listen to the jargon. Worst of all, it’s getting into the vocabulary of fools, and doing all kinds of mischief. When it reaches into politics, then God help us all!

“I never knew a psychiatrist who didn’t have something mentally or emotionally wrong with him. It could be one or two of a million things; healthy people have quirks too, but they take ’em in stride. Psychiatrists can’t handle them; they get patients, and they ‘project,’ as they call it, their own secret terrors and guilts and suffering on their patients. Or, even worse, they find themselves most congenial with patients who are enduring their own horrors. Then it’s just an exchange between them, like ping-pong, or each one burrowing into the other’s psyche for relief. Of course, occasionally one or both of them go mad.”

Esther looked at him with sharp fear. “Yes, I’m sure you’re right! MacDonald is getting worse all the time. It’s—quickening—now. You know he never went in for all that radical business until he met Somer. Somer brought him to that; Somer directs what he does with his papers! How do I know? I don’t have any real proof, but there is always something vicious and inciting in his editorials after he’s had a session with Somer. No, neither one of them is a Communist. Somer’s an opportunist, and MacDonald thinks he’s God.”

She stood up, in her fear. “Al, MacDonald never speaks of his mother. Did you know her?”

“Why, yes, I did. A real nice girl, Esther. A healthy, witty girl. She used to think Mac’s father a pompous, pretentious fool, in a nice affectionate way. She died when Mac was about thirteen, I think. They’d already left here.” The doctor scowled, concentrating. “It was an accident. They’d just bought a big house in Philadelphia, and Evelyn was helping the servants get the house ready. It was a long time ago. She fell from the third floor, right down to the marble first floor. It was in the newspapers. They said she had been leaning over the balustrade, dusting off the big bright chandelier they’d just imported, and lost her balance.”

The old doctor stood up suddenly, and took Esther by the arm. She stared at him with a kind of still terror. “What is it?” he demanded, in a hushed voice. She replied faintly, “I don’t know. It’s just—well, for a long time MacDonald’s been muttering about his mother in his sleep. I think he hated her.”

The doctor shook her. “Esther! Don’t you get ideas now! Stop it, you hear? Stop it!”

She whispered, “Al, once I overheard MacDonald and Somer talking about Mrs. Summerfield. They were in MacDonald’s study. I just caught one word: ‘guilt.’ Al, I’m afraid.”

The doctor tried to laugh. “I know what Granger was up to. He was trying to convince Mac that he felt guilty for hating his mother, and maybe wishing she would die, or something, and then the accident happened, and he kept it in his mind, which hasn’t really grown up yet, that his wish about his mother had something to do with her death. I wonder,” he added, “how much Somer hated his own mother?”

Esther sighed. “Frankly, I think the whole world’s losing its collective mind. Either the war caused that, or it caused the war. Sometimes I have nightmares, wondering what the world will be like when governments go insane—like the Russian government. What will happen to the rest of us?”

“Oh, they’ll think up a whole series of wars then. And when they find clumps of sane people huddling together, they’ll murder them. They always have. But, somehow, a few sane people manage to survive.”

They moved together toward the shut door. Esther said, “Al, your minister’s in danger, and his children, too. MacDonald will never let up on him. He looks and acts demented whenever his name is mentioned. MacDonald’s ruined other men before, you know. Who will protect your minister?”

“Why,” said the doctor with a saturnine smile, “God will. That’s what the parson says. Hope he’s right.”