What's for Dinner? by James Schuyler (diy ebook reader txt) 📗

why I should be here. Now I can see it was an important step. I’d gotten so I was driving myself so hard I couldn’t slow up. I couldn’t see that I needed to slow up. Mrs Mulwin saw it, but I didn’t. Shock therapy helped me, maybe it would help you. It breaks the pattern. Sure takes it out of you too, I must say. I’m still pooped.”

“They wouldn’t dare!” Mrs Judson screamed.

“You’re alarming my wife needlessly,” Sam Judson said. “I don’t mean on purpose, but my wife’s course of treatment is up to her doctor, not an uninformed layman who is a patient himself.”

“What I’d like to know,” Mrs Judson said to Lottie, “is the kind of things you and that Mrs Brice say about me when you’re both muttering away in the sun room.”

“Nothing unkind, I assure you,” Lottie said. “I did observe to Mrs Brice that you seemed to have become overwrought. That was the extent of it.”

“You see?” Mrs Judson said. “They do talk about me. No wonder I’m overwrought. I lead a very private personal life and don’t need any intruders in it, thank you. Even if I did take things when I was a little girl, that was just childishness. And after they punished me, I never did it anymore.”

“After who punished you?” Norris asked quietly.

“My mother, with a strap.” Mrs Judson was racked by a sob. “It wasn’t such an awful thing for a little child to do.”

“I remember once,” Mrs Brice said, “I wanted some candy so badly, and I knew I wouldn’t be allowed to have it. So I went into my mother’s purse and got some change and bought my candy. Then I was terrified I’d be found out—so terrified I never did it again. Not that I wasn’t tempted.”

“You never told me that, mother. Remember the time the boy . . .”

“No, let’s not remember that. I only want to remember the good things about our boy.”

“There weren’t many that were at all bad,” Mr Brice said.

“No,” his wife agreed, “there weren’t.”

“What was it you took?” Bertha asked Mrs Judson.

“Money. Just a little and just a few times.”

“What did you want it for?”

“To buy Nancy Drew mystery stories. I pretended I borrowed them from a girl friend. Then my mother said I ought to return them, so I had to give them away to get out of it. It was awful—even my favorite, At the Sign of the Twisted Candles.”

“If you were old enough to read Nancy Drew,” Bertha said, “you weren’t all that little a child. I thought you meant you were about five or six.”

“She beat me and beat me and then she said she was going to put me in a home.”

“And here you are,” Norris said.

“I imagine,” Lottie said, “that you feel it’s your mother who’s put you here, and that’s what makes you so resentful of the hospital. It’s touched on an old nerve.”

“I don’t steal things now,” Mrs Judson said. “I never took anything after that that didn’t belong to me. I’m not a thief, am I Sam?”

“Of course not dear, you’re as honest as the day is long.”

“You see?” Mrs Judson said to the nurse.

“I’m sure the nurse never meant to accuse you of theft,” Dr Kearney said, “but simply of practicing a small deception.”

“You mean I’m a liar,” Mrs Judson said.

“I think we all are,” Norris said, “when the small occasion arises. Wanting to trim your nails in the sun room doesn’t strike me as a major crime.”

“I don’t steal and I don’t tell lies,” Mrs Judson said. “That’s that.”

“I believe you on both scores,” Norris said. “I wish I could say the same for myself. I’m always asking my secretary to tell some bore or other that I’m out or tied up. That’s lying. I don’t think I could get through a business day without a few small falsehoods. They grease the wheels.”

“Oh, if that’s what you mean by lying,” Mr Mulwin said.

“It’s plain to see,” Mrs Brice said, “that the Second Coming has not yet occurred.”

“Do you think it will occur?” Dr Kearney asked, smiling.

“I do indeed. It’s a tenet of our church. I don’t believe in giving mere lip-service to my faith.”

“Personally,” Bertha said, “I think it’s an open question. And I don’t know what all this fuss about taking a little money is all about. I knew kids in college who would rip off somebody’s phonograph and pawn it to buy dope.”

“Why Bertha,” her mother said, “I had no idea the university was like that. I hope you never . . .”

“No,” Bertha said, “I never. But I might have if I hadn’t had such a good allowance.”

“What’s past is past,” Bertha’s father said. “We must cast our eyes to the future.”

“When I was a boy,” Mr Mulwin said, “I got to be quite an accomplished shop-lifter. I’d work with one of the guys in my gang. He’d distract the clerk and I, bold as brass, would pick up some little thing. Finally we got careless and the manager of Woolworth’s almost cornered me. Boy, did I hoof it! Never set foot in that store again, even when I was grown up. It taught me a lesson: I teach all my clerks to keep their eyes skinned when a couple of kids come into the store and split up. I tell them, ask, ‘Do you want something, boys?’ And if they don’t answer up, ask them not to hang around. Not that it’s just kids. I personally caught a lady trying to slip a big box of imported soap into her handbag. I took her into the back of the store and put the fear of God into her—one of our best charge customers, would you believe it.”

“At this point,” Lottie said, “I’ll believe about anything.”

“Now I can see,” Mr Mulwin went on, “I should have gotten in touch with her husband. She was sick. Belonged here. There’s a word for it.”

“Kleptomania,” Norris said.

“Yes, that’s the