He followed her into a room crammed with furniture that looked too heavy for the narrow space and gave off the musty smell of overstuffed mohair. In a corner of the room a child lay uneasily asleep in a crib. The child was thin, pale, unlovely.

The woman asked him to sit down. Lowry lowered himself into a creaking overstuffed armchair. The woman sat down facing him. One of the middle buttons of her blouse was open, but she did not seem to notice. She seemed glad to sit down.

21

21

“That night, Mrs. Lawrence,” Lowry began. “How did you happen to call Dr. Clayton?”

She looked sadly in the direction of the crib, a glance that told Lowry a great deal. The columnist felt sorry for her. There are tragedies outside of saloons and dance halls, he thought. Small tragedies, except for the people crushed by them. And people simply like to read about the saloon tragedies, not about the other kinds. That was why he wrote about them.

“He has asthma,” she said. “A bad kind, the doctor says. He’ll choke to death some night when I’m asleep, I know it.”

There were tears in her eyes.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Lowry said.

“We haven’t much money.”

He admired the fortitude that showed in the understatement.

“I’ve been taking him to the clinic,” she went on. “We couldn’t afford to have a private doctor, of course. Dr. Clayton was the one who took care of him at the clinic most of the time.”

“I see.”

“When he got that terrible attack that night I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to pick him up and rush to the hospital. I had no money to pay a doctor with. I was desperate. I called Dr. Clayton and told him what happened. He was very sweet and said he would come. He saved my baby’s life, I think.”

“What time did he come?”

“About three in the morning, I guess. I don’t know exactly. It seemed like the night had lasted for a million years.”

“You were very anxious while you were waiting,” Lowry said.

“I was dying with the baby,” she said with sharp brevity.

Lowry kept his voice gentle, trying not to upset her. “You must have been looking through the window every once in a while to see if the doctor were coming, weren’t you?”

“Yes. I was up and back a million times.”

“Did you see anybody around the house, anybody on the street?”

“No, but McKay got into the car after the doctor parked it,” she said. “He needn’t have been around here before then.”

“Not McKay,” Lowry snapped irritably, nearly losing his temper at the woman’s calm assumption of his friend’s guilt.

“I beg your pardon,” Mrs. Lawrence said. Despite the shabbiness of the house and her own worn condition, she drew herself up haughtily, insulted at his contradiction.