The Rat Race by Jay Franklin (book club books txt) 📕

"Dr. Folsom tells me, Mr. Tompkins," Potter continued in a sort of heel-clicking, stiff-bow-from-the-waist manner which was meant, I suppose, to reveal his Viennese training, "that you have reason to believe that your business partners are plotting against you, conspiring to throw you in the asylum? This sense of special persecution, sir, have you had it long? Perhaps when you were a child, you hated your father? It began then, not so? And, later at school, perhaps—"

I got out of bed and advanced on the psychiatrist.

"Dr. Potter," I informed him, "you are here for only one reason, to certify that I am sane in the legal sense. For this service I am paying the Sanctuary a fee of five thousand dollars. To which, of course, I will add a personal fee of one thousand dollars to you, Dr. Potter, assuming that you can sign a certificate of sanity with a clear scientific conscience."

Potter subsided in the arm-chair and cackled gleefully. "Boy, oh boy!" he exclaimed, "for one thousand smackers I'd certify that Hitler is the Messiah. Damn Folsom for sending me in blind! He didn't tell me it was one of those."

"Besides," I added, "I have a really serious loss of memory, which is worth your attention, though I haven't time to go into it now. So get ahead with your tests, please, and let's clean up this one."

"Cross your knees, either leg!" he ordered and gave me a few brisk taps just below the knee-cap with the edge of his flattened palm. My knee-jerks were all that could be desired.

"Good!" remarked Potter. "That's still the only physical test for sanity that's worth a damn. Hell! They have all sorts of gadgets but they all amount to the same thing: Is your nervous system functioning normally or is it not? What seems to be the trouble, Mr. Tompkins? Partners closing in on your assets or has your wife made book with your lawyer?"

"My only trouble," I informed him, "is that I'm damned if I can remember anything that happened before April second of this year. That's been getting me close to trouble and I'd like to clear it up. I remember all sorts of things before then, but it's about another man."

"Hm!" Potter suddenly looked formidably medical. "That's what I call schizophrenia with a pretzel twist. We could keep you here and give you sedatives and baths and exercises and analysis, but it would be just the same if we left you alone. You've had some kind of shock causing a temporary occlusion of personality, and the best thing you can do is wait. Sooner or later there will be another shock and everything will come straight again. What do you think you remember from the blank period?"

"Damned if I know," I replied. "I think I sank a battleship or killed a President, or something."

Potter laughed. "That's just a variation of the good old Napoleon complex—which is an inferiority complex gone wild. You ought to take up a hobby, like expert book-binding or watch-repairing. That would give you a sense of power and you wouldn't feel the need for sinking ships. Ten to one, you can't even shoot a decent game of golf."

"I'm pretty good at poker," I defended myself.

"That's not power, Mr. Tompkins, that's just shrewdness. You have a profound sense of physical inadequacy. The record says you're married. Any children?"

I shook my head.

"That's it," Potter declared. "We had a case like that in Jung's clinic—a baker named Hermann Schultz, who insisted that he was the Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa. We were baffled for a while, since Schultz was married and had three children. Then we learned that his wife was the girl-friend of one of the Habsburg Archdukes and that poor Schultz was not the father of little Franz, Irma and Ernst. We solved it for him with his wife's help. She agreed to have another child. Of course, it was the Archduke's but Schultz never guessed. He ceased to believe that he was the Barbarossa and became a highly successful baker. What you ought to do, Mr. Tompkins, is to father a child and then you will forget all this nonsense about battleships and Presidents. Not so?"

I grinned at him knowingly. "There's much in what you say, Dr. Potter," I complimented him, "but what the hell can I do about it bottled up here in the Sanctuary? Just give me a clean mental bill of health—in case any of my partners try to pull a fast one—and I'll go home to my wife and give earnest consideration to your suggestion. After all, if that fails, I can always take up wood-carving. Or try another girl."

"There are one or two around here—" he began, then checked himself. "Well," he continued, "I can't say that I see anything really abnormal about you. Sitting here, talking with you, I would have noticed any psychopathic tendencies. We psychiatrists develop a sort of sixth sense for the abnormal. I couldn't prove it scientifically, but I am sure as Adam ate little green apples that there's nothing wrong with you that can't be cured by a drink, a kiss and a baby."

There was a brisk knock on the door and the nurse appeared.

"Sorry to disturb you, doctor," she said, "but there's a man named Vail downstairs with a writ of habeas corpus for Mr. Tompkins."

Potter looked at me accusingly, as though Jung had never for-seen this kind of complication.

"Merry Vail," I agreed. "Yes, he's my lawyer. I told him to come here but never dreamed—just send him up, nurse. In the meanwhile, doctor, if you could get that certificate ready—"

Potter again gave the effect of heel-clicking, and withdrew.

Three minutes later Merriwether Vail and Arthurjean Briggs came bursting into my room.

"Glory be, you're still safe, old man," my lawyer announced. "When Miss Briggs phoned me your curious message, we put two and two together."

"And made it twenty-two?" I suggested.

"No, we made it four. We weren't going to stand for any nonsense from the F.B.I. and I owe them something for pulling me in for questioning. And when you spoke of fifteen thousand dollars and a doctor, I had a brain-storm. So I flew up here and swore out a writ from the Federal Court. I got a deputy to help me serve it—cost me all of twenty bucks—and here we are."

I turned to Arthurjean. "Honeychile," I asked, "did you by any chance, think to bring me some of the office brandy? I've been moving so fast for the last three days that I'm out of training."

My secretary turned her back, gave a sort of dip-dive-and-wiggle and produced from God knows where a half pint bottle of what proved to be excellent brandy, well-warmed above room temperature. I heartlessly refused to notice Vail's pathetic signs of desperate thirst and passed the flask back to Arthurjean. "Thanks," I told her, "that just about saved my life."

"Mr. Vail was all set that the doctors had hijacked you and were holding you for ransom," she remarked, taking a short but deep drink herself. "Seems like there's been a mistake."

"Uh-uh!" I indicated strong disagreement. "I came here under my own power and am about to leave under the same and in my right mind."

"Whoever said you weren't?" Vail demanded. "God! we'll sue them for libel."

I shook my head. "It was the Secret Service and only God can sue them," I said. "They took a notion to have me thrown in the Washington asylum because they were sore at me on general principles. So I decided to beat them to the draw and produce a certificate of sanity."

Vail looked at me with amusement. "Worst thing you could possibly do, old man," he informed me. "If you start going around showing people proof that you're not crazy, first thing you know you'll be in Matteawan. Now if you want to prove to anybody that you're really in your right mind, you'll try to do the right thing by this little girl here."

In some bewilderment I looked at Arthurjean, whom nobody could accurately accuse of being little.

"What are you driving at, Merry?" I asked.

"I refer to my client, Miss Briggs," he replied with dignity. "We have strong written evidence of breach of promise."

"Sugar-puss?" I turned to my secretary, "Don't tell me that you've shown my letters to this legal lout?"

She nodded. "Sorry, angel, but a girl's got to take care of herself in this world. You remember where you wrote me, 'Be but mine and I shall buy you a porterhouse steak with mushrooms'."

"It was onions, darling," I insisted. "Onions aren't breach of promise. Damn it! they're cause for divorce."

"It was mushrooms," she repeated. "That was the same letter in which you promised me hearts of lettuce, and ice-cream and—" she broke down, sobbing with laughter.

I pulled her face down to me and gave her a kiss. "You big slob," I told her, "all you think about, with democracy at the crossroads, is food. Take that shyster downstairs and wait for me. I'll be down as soon as I collect my certificate. Even if I can't wear it on my coat like a campaign-ribbon it will be nice to hang in my den alongside my Harvard B.A. diploma and the moose I didn't kill—it was the Indian guide but they don't count—in New Brunswick."

Arthurjean laughed. "You sure do make your help sing for their supper, angel," she told me. "And just because I call you angel don't you start worrying about that nice wife of yours. From now on, I'll make like a sister."

So I smacked her on the porte-cochere and ordered her out of the room until I got dressed. As the door closed behind her and Vail, I rang for the nurse and asked to have my bags packed.

"Goodness, Mr. Tompkins," she exclaimed. "Don't you like it here? We understood that you wanted a rest-cure."

She stood just a fraction of an inch too close to me and I was aware of pretty brown hair under her starched nurse's cap, a whiff of something that smelled far more expensive than antiseptic, and a pleasingly rounded effect underneath the prim blouse of her uniform. So I put my arm around her, gave her a friendly kiss and said, "Name, please, and when do you get off duty?"

"Emily Post," she answered, "so help me, but don't let that stop you, and nine o'clock tonight."

"Good," I told her. "Will you join us for dinner and a drink at—what's the best hotel here now we've a war on?"

"The Governor Baldwin," she replied.

"Meet us at the Baldwin, then, as soon as you can get away. I'd like you to meet my friends socially and—"

She nodded brightly and hurried from the room, with a distinctly unmedical motion of her hips.

A moment later Dr. Folsom came lounging in, his strangler's hands dangling at his side.

"Sorry you feel you must leave, Mr. Tompkins," he told me. "Here's that certificate. It will stand up in any court east of the Mississippi if you have to use it. That will be five thousand, as agreed."

I sat down at the little writing-desk and laboriously made out three checks: one for five thousand to the order of the Sanctuary, one for one thousand to the order of Pendergast Potter, and another for one thousand to the order of—

"Any initials, Dr. Folsom?" I asked.

"A. J.," he replied, "but just make it to the Sanctuary."

"A. J. Folsom," I wrote on the final check and endorsed it with "W. S. Tompkins," as well as I could with my still bandaged fingers.

"What—" Folsom was startled. "Gosh! You're a white man, Mr. Tompkins. And Potter will be glad to have this, too. He is—"

"Think nothing of it!" I announced grandly. "The market's been working for me all week, and this won't even cost you income-tax; I'll put it down as a gift."

Folsom's face was positively transfigured with gratitude and a devotion that would not have been out of place in a stained glass window.

"By George!" he insisted. "You are a white man. I'd be proud to go before the Supreme Court of the United States and testify—" He stopped abruptly. "Are these checks good?" he inquired.

"Oh, come, doctor, who's loony now?" I demanded. "Why would I expose myself to a bad check charge just to keep out of a private asylum with my lawyer fully equipped with a writ?"

"That's so, that's so!" he beamed reassured. "Well, sir, it's been fine having you here and any time—day or night—if you want refuge from the stormy blast, just