Green Doors

by Ethel Cook Eliot

Lewis found his vacant bench in the garden and lit a cigarette. A squirrel, boldest and most insensitive of all animals to the moods of humans, came rollicking up to his feet. A motion picture of a squirrel’s gyrations, slowed down, ought to be excitingly beautiful. Lewis had long intended to buy a moving-picture camera for the one purpose of taking organic life in motion,—flowers opening, horses trotting, unconscious children playing. But so far he had not had the price,—not been willing to give it, anyhow. At this very minute the clinic was in crying need of a new ceiling. If he didn’t scare up the money for that and set them to work on it, the plaster would be coming down on people’s heads. You couldn’t wait for the hospital trustees to get around to vote the money. The psychological effect of such dinginess was bad for the patients too....

The Little Flower! Saint Thérèse of Lisieux! It was precisely as if a friend of some of Lewis’ best friends had stepped in between him and his patient this afternoon, curing the patient. For the Little Flower was no far-off legend-enshrouded figure in Christian myth. She was of modern times. She had died, in fact, a girl then of twenty-five, only half a dozen years before Lewis was born. His mother’s contemporary! And in dying she had asked the privilege of spending her heaven doing good upon earth; and since then countless miracles had been credited to her interventions. Joseph Duffield, Lewis’ one greatest friend, had had, during the last few years of his life, what he in his Catholic terminology called a special devotion to this particular saint. Joseph had died, as it happened, midway in a novena he and his wife were making to the Little Flower for the cure of his angina. Strangely, her husband’s death and the unhealing grief it had brought her had not shaken Laura Duffield’s faith in the Little Flower’s loving goodness. There was even now a framed picture of the Little Flower on the bookcase in Laura’s bedroom where she had moved Michael when he fell so ill. Lewis had often looked across the suffering, paralyzed little form during his long watches this past week, and himself taken heart from the pure smiling face of the young saint.

Michael, too, knew Thérèse and loved Thérèse best after Mary and Joseph of all the saints his grandmother had taught him to reverence. The boy had told Lewis that first night he spent with him in his rooms, that he had begged the Little Flower—begged her over and over—to make his grandmother well again, right up until his separation from her at the clinic that afternoon. And when that did not happen, Michael had gone on praying and loving Thérèse all the same, as soon as the first spasm of homesickness passed a little. Laura Duffield, when Lewis had remarked on this persistence of the boy’s faith in this particular saint, had smilingly said that to her mind that was one of the Little Flower’s favorite miracles, preserving and even increasing faith in the hearts whose dearest desires she could not, in God’s mercy, answer.... It was the miracle beyond miracles, Laura had said, this increased love and faith in the face of denial. Didn’t Lewis himself see that?

The squirrel was now actually on Lewis’ knee, begging with nose and paws and eyes for nuts. But Lewis looked through the avid little beggar as through a bit of glass. Shock of some sort—he had made up his mind to that weeks ago, hadn’t he!—was the best hope of restoring McCloud’s speech. The only question had been how to procure a shock that would not be calamitous. Well, this afternoon, McCloud had had his shock. Two of them, in fact, one right on top of the other. First, the most violent sort of anger at finding his doctor betraying his confidences. Second, Petra’s reminding him with such unexpected suddenness of the Little Flower—a person intimately connected with the brother for whose death McCloud held himself responsible. It was possible even that “the kid” had spoken Saint Thérèse’s name while dying. In any case this afternoon had shown that she was all bound up with memories of “the kid” in McCloud’s tortured mind. So there were the two shocks, either one of which might easily account for the cure. Lewis admitted the possibilities. But all the same, he was not convinced of the rational explanation. Nor was he exactly convinced of the supernatural explanation. He simply felt no compulsion to decide between them. Who was he, to dare to say!

One thing only was certain. The McCloud records should be abstracted from the files at once and burned; for no psychiatric theories, no pages for a new book, would ever be forthcoming from this particular case. That was Lewis’ only certainty.

The squirrel sprang away as Lewis got up. The ten minutes he had given Petra and McCloud alone together must be up. He threw away his cigarette and went back to the office building.

The door into his reception room was locked. That was surprising. Lewis remembered, distinctly, that the latch had been off when he came out. It was always off, in fact, until the place was finally shut up for the day. He got out his latchkey, wondering.

The rooms were deserted. No Petra. No McCloud. They had both gone. But surely Petra had interpreted Lewis’ final look at her before he closed the door to mean he would be back almost at once. She must have known he would want to keep McCloud in his care for the next few hours. Why, he had left his hat there on the desk even, and his papers lay scattered. Petra could see, if she couldn’t reason, that he was coming back.

He looked his desk over, thinking she might have left a note of explanation for him. But she had not even done that. Then Lewis thought he understood. She must suddenly have realized that Dick was very late, called the architect’s office, found that Dick had left it some time ago, decided that he was not, after all, coming for her, and dashed for a train. But where would McCloud have gone off to, so quickly, without a word, or a note? His room, most likely. Quickly Lewis looked up the address. There was a telephone number, but Lewis dared not submit the stability of the young man’s cure to such a drastic test. So he started off in search.

A little after seven o’clock Lewis was back in his own rooms in the apartment hotel where he lived. He had waited in his car outside McCloud’s rooming house for something over an hour, watching for McCloud’s return, after first making sure he was not already at home. Then he had dined in anxious solitude in a humble restaurant and now he was here to telephone Green Doors. He got Dick, but only to discover that Petra had not come on the train, hadn’t showed up at all.