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  Collier’s

  November 26-December 24, 1954

  Vol. 134, Nos. 11-13

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  Jerry eBooks

  March 2020

  IT WAS around six o’clock on Thursday evening when I let my last patient—a sprained thumb—out the side door of my office. But I had a feeling the day wasn’t over for me. And I wished I weren’t a doctor, because with doctors that kind of hunch is usually right.

  When I heard a light rapping on the locked door of my reception room, I just wanted to stand there motionless till whoever it was went away. In any other business you could do that, but not in mine. My nurse was gone—she’d probably raced the last patient to the stairway, winning handily—and now, for a moment or so, one foot on the radiator under the window, I stood looking down at the street, pretending I wasn’t going to answer the door.

  Then the rapping sounded again and I walked out, unlocked the door and opened it. I guess I blinked a couple times, my mouth open foolishly; Becky Driscoll was standing there.

  “Hello, Miles,” she said and smiled, pleased at the surprise and pleasure on my face.

  “Becky,” I said, stepping aside to let her in, “it’s good to see you. Come on in.” She walked in past me, and on through the reception room toward my office. “What is this,” I said, closing the door, “a professional call?”

  “No”—Becky stopped and turned toward me—“this isn’t a professional call—not exactly.” And then she sobbed, a dry, down-in-the-throat gasp, her breath sucking in convulsively. Her eyes brimmed with sudden bright tears, and she turned quickly away, her shoulders hunched, her hands over her face.

  I said, “Sit down,” speaking very gently, and Becky slumped into the leather chair before my desk. Then I walked around the desk and sat down facing her, leaning back in my swivel chair, giving her a few moments to get hold of herself.

  Now I could really look at her face again, and I saw how little she had changed: the bones prominent and well-shaped under the skin; the kind and intelligent eyes, the rims a little red just now; the full, good-looking mouth. Her hair was different—it was shorter, or something—but it was the same rich brown, almost black, and looked naturally wavy, though I remembered it wasn’t. She’d actually changed of course; she wasn’t eighteen now, but into her twenties, and looked it, no more and no less. But she was also still the same girl I’d known in high school. I’d dated her a few times in my senior year.

  “It’s good to see you again, Becky,” I said. I wanted to get her talking on something else, before she got down to whatever the trouble was.

  “Good to see you, Miles.” Becky knew what I was doing, and went along with it.

  I said, “Becky, I heard about your divorce, of course, and I’m sorry.”

  She nodded. “Thanks, Miles. And I’ve heard about yours. I’m sorry too.”

  I shrugged. “Guess we’re lodge brothers now.”

  BECKY and I had both left Santa Mira after high school, she to work in Chicago and I to go to medical school. We had both married, neither had been able to make it work, and now we were back in our staid little home town.

  “Well,” she said, getting down to business, “Miles, I’ve come about Wilma.” Wilma’s her cousin.

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “I don’t know. She has a—” She stopped, hating to say what she had to. “Well, I guess you’d call it a delusion. You know her uncle—Uncle Ira?”

  “Yes.”

  “Miles, she’s got herself thinking that he isn’t her uncle.”

  “How do you mean?” I said. “That they aren’t really related?”

  “No, no.” She shook her head impatiently. “I mean she thinks he’s”—one shoulder lifted in a puzzled shrug—“an impostor, or something. She says he looks like Uncle Ira, talks like him, acts like him—everything. She says she knows it’s not Ira. I’m worried sick!” Tears came to her eyes again.

  I sat back in my chair, thinking about this. Wilma had her problems, but she was tough-minded and bright, about thirty-five years old. Redcheeked, short and plump, she had no looks at all: she had never married, which is too bad. I’m certain she’d have liked to, and I think she’d have made a fine wife and good mother, but that’s how it goes. She ran the local rental library and greeting-card shop, and did a good job of it. She made a living out of it, anyway, which isn’t so easy in a small town. I looked at Becky. “What do you want me to do?”

  BECKY leaned forward across the desk, pleading. “Come out there tonight, Miles. Right now, if you possibly can, before it gets dark. I want you to look at Uncle Ira, talk to him: you’ve known him for years.”

  “What’re you talking about, Becky? Don’t you think he’s Ira?”

  She flushed. “I don’t know, Miles. I just don’t know. Certainly he’s Uncle Ira! Of course he is, but—it’s just that Wilma’s so positive!”

  “Well, let’s go see,” I said gently. “Take it easy, Becky. Whatever’s happening, there’s a cause; we’ll find it, and fix it.”

  I dialed telephone-answering, told them where I was going, and we left the office to go take a look at Uncle Ira.

  Just to get the record straight, my full name is Miles Boise Bennell, I’m twenty-eight years old, and I’ve been practicing medicine in Santa Mira, California, for just over a year. Before that I interned, and before that, medical school at Stanford. I was born and raised in Santa Mira, and my father was a doctor here before me, and a good one, so I have a good practice.

  I’m five feet eleven inches tall, weigh one sixty-five, have blue eyes, and black, kind of wavy hair. I play golf and swim whenever I can, so I’m always pretty tanned. Since I was divorced, I’ve been living here in Santa Mira, alone in a big old-fashioned frame house, with plenty of big trees and lots of lawn around it. It was my parents’ house before they died; now it’s mine. That’s about all . . .

  We turned into Dewey Avenue, and Uncle Ira was out on their lawn. I had the top down, and when we drew into the curb, Uncle Ira looked up, saw us, and waved. “Evening, Becky. Hi, Miles,” he called, smiling.

  We answered, waving back, and got out of the car. Becky went on up to the house, and I strolled across the lawn toward him. “Evening, Mr. Lentz.”

  “How’s business, Miles?” He grinned as though this were a brand-new joke: “Kill many today?”

  “Bagged the limit,” I said. This was the usual routine whenever we ran into each other around town, and now I stood, looking him in the eyes, his face not two feet from mine.

  It was nice out, and the light was good—not full daylight, but still plenty of sun. I don’t know just what I thought I might see, but of course it was Uncle Ira, and the same Mr. Lentz I’d known as a kid, when I delivered an evening paper to the bank every night. He was head teller then—he’s retired now—and was always urging me to bank my huge profits from the newspaper route. Now, he looked just about the same, except that it was fifteen years later and his hair was white. This was Ira, no one else, standing there on the lawn in the early evening, and I began to feel scared about Wilma.

  We chatted about nothing much—local politics, the weather, business, the new state highway they’d been surveying for—and I studied every line and pore of his face, listened to each tone and inflection of his voice, alert to every move and gesture.

  Hell, it was Uncle Ira—every hair, every line of his face, each word, movement and thought—and I felt like a fool. Becky and Wilma came out of the house and sat down on the porch
swing, and I waved to them, then walked on up to the house.

  Wilma sat waiting on the swing with Becky, smiling pleasantly till I reached the steps. Then she said quietly, “I’m glad you’ve come, Miles.”

  “Hello, Wilma, nice to see you.” I sat down on the wide porch rail, my back against a white pillar.

  Wilma glanced out at her uncle, who’d begun puttering around the lawn again. “Well?” she said.

  I glanced at Ira too, then looked at Wilma. I nodded. “It’s Ira, Wilma. It’s your uncle, all right.”

  She just nodded, as though expecting exactly that answer. “It’s not,” she said, not arguing, just asserting a fact.

  “Well,” I said, “let’s take this a little at a time. How do you know he isn’t Uncle Ira? How is he different?”

  “Miles, there is no difference you can actually see,” she said, leaning toward me. “I’d hoped you might find one, when Becky told me you were here—that you’d see some sort of difference. But of course you can’t, because there isn’t any to see. Look at him.”

  WE ALL glanced at the lawn again; Uncle Ira was kicking at a weed or pebble or something embedded in the lawn. “I’ve been waiting for today,” she whispered. “Waiting till he’d get a haircut, and he finally did. There’s a little scar on the back of Ira’s neck. You can’t see the scar unless his neck is shaved. Well, today—I’ve been waiting for this—today he got a haircut—”

  I sat forward, suddenly excited. “And the scar’s gone? You mean—”

  “No!” she said, almost indignantly, eyes flashing. “It’s there—the scar—exactly like Uncle Ira’s!”

  I didn’t answer for a moment. I couldn’t look at poor Wilma. Then I said, “Look, Wilma, he is Uncle Ira. Can’t you see that? No matter how you feel, he is—”

  She just shook her head, and sat back on the swing. “He’s not.”

  “What about his habits, Wilma?” I said. “Little mannerisms?”

  “All the same as Ira’s. Exactly.”

  “Wilma, what about memories? There must be little incidents only you and Uncle Ira would know.”

  “I’ve tested that too,” she said quietly. “Talked to him about when I was a child.” She sighed, trying uselessly, and knowing it was useless, to make me understand. “He remembers everything. Just as Uncle Ira would.” I’m a general practitioner, not a psychiatrist, and I was out of my depth and knew it. For a few moments I just sat staring down at my interlaced fingers and the backs of my hands, listening to the chains of the swing creaking gently overhead.

  “Listen, Wilma,” I finally said, leaning far forward, looking into her eyes. “Your Aunt Aleda would know! Can’t you see that? She couldn’t be fooled, of all people! What does she say? Have you talked with her?”

  Wilma just shook her head again, turning to stare across the lawn at nothing.

  “Why not?”

  SHE turned slowly back toward me.

  For a moment her eyes stared into mine, and then suddenly the tears were running down her plump, contorted face. “Because, Miles, she’s not my Aunt Aleda!” For an instant, mouth open, she stared at me in absolute horror; then, if you can scream in a whisper, that’s what she did. “Oh, Miles, am I going crazy? Tell me, Miles, tell me, don’t spare me, I’ve got to know.” Becky was holding Wilma’s hand, squeezing it between her own, her expression an agony of compassion.

  And then suddenly Wilma stood up, smiling, and said, “We’d better break this up, or”—she nodded toward the lawn—“he’ll begin wondering.”

  “Wondering what?”

  “Wondering,” she said patiently, “if I don’t suspect.” Then she held out her hand, and I took it. “It’s helped just to tell you, Miles, and I don’t want you to worry too much about me.” She turned to Becky. “Or you either.” She laughed. “I’ll be all right. And if you want me to see a psychiatrist, Miles, I will.”

  It was all very eerie and I nodded and said I’d make an appointment for her with Dr. Manfred Kaufman in Valley Springs, the best man I knew of, and that I’d telephone her in the morning. I muttered some nonsense about relaxing, taking it easy, not worrying and so on, and Wilma smiled gently and put her hand on my arm, the way a woman does when she forgives a man for failing her. Then she thanked Becky for coming over, said she wanted to get to bed early; and I told Becky I’d drive her home.

  In the car I asked Becky if she’d like to do something, have dinner somewhere, maybe, but I wasn’t surprised when she wanted to get home. When we stopped at the curb, Becky said, “Miles, what do you think? Will she be all right?”

  I hesitated, then shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m a doctor, according to my diploma, but I don’t really know what Wilma’s trouble is. I could start talking psychiatrical jargon, but the truth is that it’s out of my line, and in Mannie Kaufman’s.”

  “Well, can he help her?”

  Sometimes there’s a limit to how truthful you should be, and I said. “Yes. If anyone can help her, Mannie’s the boy to do it. Sure, I think he can help her.” But I didn’t really know.

  At Becky’s door, without any advance planning or even thinking about it beforehand, I said, “Tomorrow night?” and Becky nodded absently, still thinking about Wilma, and said. “Yes. Around eight?” and I said, “Fine. I’ll call for you.”

  You’d think we’d been going together for months—that’s just the way we acted, not giving it a thought—and walking back to my car, it occurred to me that I was more relaxed and at peace with the world than I’d been in a long, long time.

  Maybe that sounds heartless; maybe you think I should have been worrying about Wilma, and in a way I was, far back in my mind. But a doctor learns, because he has to not to worry actively about patients until the worrying can do some good; meanwhile, they have to be walled off in a quiet compartment of the mind. If you can’t do that, you give up medicine—or specialize.

  I know the local menus by heart, so I ate at Elman’s. Sitting up at the counter, I was embarrassed to catch myself thinking that now I had a girl, but what puzzled me was that nothing had happened between us tonight. And we weren’t reviving an old romance, either, because there’d never been any. I was a senior in high school when I knew Becky last, and we’d had a few dates, that’s all. I think I’d have seen more of her, but that summer she went away with her folks, and in the fall I went down to Los Angeles, to school, and I hadn’t seen her since.

  NEXT morning when I got to my office, a patient was waiting—a quiet little woman in her forties, who sat in the leather chair in front of my desk, hands folded in her lap over her purse, and told me she was perfectly sure her husband wasn’t her husband at all. Her voice calm, she said that he looked, talked, and acted exactly the way her husband always had—and they’d been married eighteen years—but that it simply wasn’t he. It was Wilma’s story all over again, except for the actual details, and when she left I telephoned the psychiatrist. Mannie Kaufman, and made two appointments.

  I’ll cut this short: by Tuesday of the following week, the night of the County Medical Association meeting, I’d sent five more patients to Mannie. One was a bright, levelheaded young lawyer I knew fairly well, who was convinced that the married sister he lived with wasn’t really his sister—though the woman’s own husband obviously still thought so. There were the mothers of three high-school girls, who arrived at my office in a body to tell me, tearfully, that their daughters were being laughed at because they insisted their English teacher was actually an impostor who resembled the real teacher exactly. A nine-year-old boy came in with his grandmother, with whom he was now living, because he became hysterical at the sight of his mother—who, he said, wasn’t his mother at all.

  WAITING for me when I arrived at the medical meeting were Mannie Kaufman and Dr. Carmichael, another Valley Spring psychiatrist. They were sitting in the front seat of Mannie’s car. Ed Pursey, my Santa Mira competition, was in the back seat. Mannie had the door on his side open and was sitting sideways on the front seat. He’s
dark, nervous and good looking—looks like an intelligent football player. Carmichael and Pursey are older and look more like doctors.

  “What the hell’s going on in Santa Mira?” Mannie said as I walked up. He glanced at Ed Pursey in the back seat to show he was included in the question, so I knew Ed must have been having some cases too.

  “It’s a new hobby over our way,” I said, leaning on the open door. “A cinch to replace weaving.”

  “Well, it’s the first contagious neurosis I ever ran into,” Mannie said; he was half laughing, half angry.

  “Most unusual series of cases,” Carmichael said judiciously.

  “Well,” I said, “psychiatry is in its infancy, of course.”

  “No fooling, Miles, these cases have got me stopped,” Mannie said. “You know what I’d say about any one of these cases, if it weren’t absolutely impossible? The Lentz woman, for example? I’d say there was no delusion at all. From every indication I’ve seen, I’d say she’s not particularly neurotic—at least not in that respect. I’d say she doesn’t belong in my office, that her worry is external and real. I’d say—just judging from the patient, of course—that she’s right and that her uncle actually is not her uncle. Except that that’s impossible.” Mannie looked up at me curiously, and added, “But it’s equally impossible for a total of nine people in Santa Mira to acquire suddenly and simultaneously a virtually identical delusion—right, Charley? Yet that’s what seems to have happened.”

  Charley Carmichael said, “These are not typical cases of delusion.”

  “Or anything else,” said Mannie.

  “Maybe we should try a little bloodletting,” I said.

  “You might as well!” said Mannie.

  It was time to go in, and they got out of the car. Mannie said, “Keep in touch, will you, Miles? We’ve got to work this out.” . . .

  Wednesday night, when I called for Becky, we decided on the movies.

  As we got into the car, I said, “You look swell.”