(‘With whiskers!’)

‘ . . . that got them all confused and milked ’em.’

‘Foreigners? Yes, possibly. Foreigners are often crooked. But Dr. Janissary is a real American. And he speaks five languages and plays the violin and goes trout fishing.’

‘The fishing part sounds fine,’ said Dr. Kamerkink.

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Last updated Sunday, March 27, 2016 at 11:57

The Prodigal Parents, by Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 33

Fred was flattered to a point of grinning when Sara invited him to accompany her to New York City on a buying trip for Swazey & Lindbeck. He accepted with zeal and with the notion that he would show the little girl a thing or two: the best restaurant in New York, and how a real salesman could order. He swallowed her statement that she wanted the aid of his common sense in buying furniture for game rooms — those assemblages of pool tables, card tables, private bars, and grills for cooking chops which were decidedly the thing in Sachem domestic architecture. But on the train she so buttered his good taste that, remembering the Louis Quinze into whose chill lap he had been enticed, he became suspicious.

In the city he was so lulled by the toe-tapping music of ‘Kiss Me Quick’, so youthfully enchanted by an Italian café and by memories of the Paris boulevards which he had never seen, that he trusted her as though she were not a relative, and he agreed gaily, next morning, when she invited, ‘Come along with me, will you? I want you to meet such a nice man.’

Their taxicab stopped at an uptown apartment house. A chaste bronze sign in the lobby announced that the Janissary Sanatorium occupied Floors 7–10 Incl. & Roof. Still was he gullible . . . Some pleasant man living upstairs whom Sara had known in New York days, or met in this decoration game? . . . Would he be married? Oh, surely . . . Would he have a handsome flat? . . . Would he offer Fred a drink, and would Fred take it, so early in the day? . . . Probably!

They entered a room which didn’t in the least suggest a friendly flat, nor yet a drink. At first, indeed, it suggested nothing whatever to Fred except quantities of money. It seemed to be a combination of a baronial hall in the North Riding, an operating room, and a beauty parlour in Hollywood. On either side of a high oak Tudor fireplace were oak thrones, but at one end of the room, modestly, was a young woman in a white uniform at a desk of white-enamelled metal, with a glass top, uncomfortably hinting of surgical knives. And the lulling voice with which she sang ‘Your names, IF you please!’ wafted the sweet fumes of ether.

They waited ten minutes.

‘What the deuce are you up to?’ protested the aroused Fredk Wm.

‘I wanted you to meet Dr. George Janissary, the psychiatrist — the grandest man — you’ll love him.’