How Awful It Is to Be Milt

THE LADY AND HER DOCTOR (310 pp.)--Evelyn Piper--Harper ($3.50).

"I am committing suicide because I poisoned Mother."

Now that's a hell of a note, thought Dr. Milton Krop, as he read it. The note was certainly not what he had expected to find when he made a routine call at the "Haunted House," a Victorian horror in Jackson Heights, on the Long Island reaches of New York City, where old Mrs. Folsom lived with her daughter. He stared at the bottle marked Poison that he clutched in one hand, and then at the terrified young woman whose wrist he held firmly in the other. The bottle, as the doctor had reason to know, contained a placebo--sugar pills. And the mother, as he soon discovered, had not been poisoned; she had died of natural causes. Nevertheless, the girl apparently believed that she had murdered her mother.

Bales of It. Dr. Milton Krop was not the brightest penny that ever came out of the gutter, but for once in his life he thought fast: with that heart of his, he could hardly last more than two years, but he was still young enough to have a little fun before the finish. Fun costs money. Well, the girl would have money, bales of it, as soon as the estate was settled. He looked her over. "Hair skinned back, big nose. Skin color like a mushroom . . . nothing clothes." He thought: "What have I got to lose? I'm an accessory to innocence . . . This is my chance. I'm taking it." He turned to the girl. "I'm going to write out a death certificate," he told her gently. "Death by natural causes . . . Don't you get it? I'm going to bat for you."

Several weeks later they were married, but the marriage did not turn out to be what the doctor ordered. Milton was all set to live it up, but his wife proved to be an almost pathological stinge. Milt was a low-born lunk who still crossed his knife and fork on the plate when he finished his dinner, but his wife was the sort of girl who lusted after little French restaurants, where the soup tastes "like a prism," and she was always happy to tell him what Whistler had said to Oscar Wilde. She teased his tastes ("Does it want wose-colored silk shades on the . . . wamps?"), and she caught him up briskly when he lapsed into vulgar speech.

Lint off the Mind. Straws in an ill wind, and then came the last straw: crime. Or was it punishment? Only a close reader of this closely written tale will be able to tell. The author does not scissor the story neatly out of whole cloth to a preconceived pattern; she rather lets the story woolgather its facts, like lint, off the top of Milt's mind. Milt's mind, it is true, often seems a mighty dull place to spend 310 pages, but even the dullness has its fierce effect. Without it, the author could hardly convey how awful it is to be Milt, how vile it is to run from life like a frightened pig, to crush everything in the path, and in the end (as a pig's sharp trotters sometimes will) to slash your own throat as you run.

In meeting such a character, the reader may frequently stop worrying about whodunit, and start wondering who wrote it, for Evelyn Piper is a pen name. Real name: Mrs. Merriam Modell, author of five other novels, e.g., The Sound of Years, and wife of a New York doctor.

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