The Rabbi (38 page)

“What?”

He repeated it, and the grin slowly faded from Sheldon's face. “Hey, Dick. You all right, Dickie boy?”

He said something else and Sheldon took him by the elbow and shook him a little bit. “What's the matter, Dickie?” he said. “You're white as a sheet. Sit down. Right here.”

He sat on the ground and the Redhead came and nuzzled his face with a cold wet nose and in a few minutes his fingers opened and he was able to feed the dog the candy. His hand remained curiously numb but he said nothing of this to Sheldon. “I feel better now, I guess,” he said instead.

At the sound of his voice Sheldon looked relieved. “Are you sure?” he said.

“Yes.”

“All the same,” Sheldon said, “we'd better go in.”

“I feel fine,” Dick protested. “Why quit this early?”

“Dickie, back there a few minutes when your face went so white. Do you remember saying something to me?”

“Yes. I guess so. Why?”

“Because it was . . . completely unintelligible. You were incoherent.”

He felt a small fear, like an annoying insect that he chased away with a laugh. “Come on. You're giving me the business, right?”

“No. Honest to God.”

“Well, I feel fine now,” he said. “And you understand me, don't you?”

“You've been feeling all right lately, haven't you?” Sheldon asked.

“Jee-zuz, yes, it's been five years since I had that operation,”
Dick said. “I'm as healthy as a horse, and you ought to know it. When does a person stop being an invalid?”

“I want you to see a doctor,” Sheldon said.

His cousin was a year older, as close to a big brother as he would ever have. “If it will make you feel better, dammit,” Dick said. “Look at this.” He held out his right arm. There was not the slightest sign of tremor. “Nerves of plutonium,” he said, grinning. But the numbness was still there he noticed as he walked with Sheldon and the dogs through the pine woods toward the car.

He went to the doctor's on the following morning, and he told the old doc what had happened.

“Anythin' else been botherin' you?”

He hesitated and the doctor glanced at him appraisingly. “Lost some weight, haven't you? Hop on the scale.” It was nine pounds. “Nothin' else been givin' you pains?”

“A couple of months ago I had a swollen ankle. It went away after a few days. And a pain down here.” He indicated the right side of his groin.

“Been sportin' the girls a little too regular, I suspect,” the doctor said, and they both grinned. Nevertheless, the old doc picked up the telephone and had him admitted to the Emory University Hospital in Atlanta for tests and observation.

“On the afternoon of the Alabama game?” Dick complained. But the old doc only nodded.

At the hospital, the medical resident who did the work-up observed for the record that the patient was a slightly pale, well-developed male of twenty, with right-sided facial weakness and some thickening of speech. He saw with a quickening of enthusiasm that there was an interesting history. The records showed that an exploratory laparotomy had been performed when the patient was fifteen years old, resulting in discovery of adenocarcinoma of the head of the pancreas. The duodenum, the distal portion of the common bile duct, the head of the pancreas, and a small section of the jejunum had been resected.

“They cut away some bellyaches for you when you were a kid, huh?” he said.

Dick nodded and smiled.

The patient's hand was no longer numb. There was a right-sided Babinski sign; neurologic examination otherwise revealed nothing.

“Can I get out of here in time to see the game?” Dick asked.

The doctor frowned. “I don't know about that,” he said. His stethescope revealed that a soft systolic murmur was audible over the precordium. He had the patient lie down and began to probe his abdomen with searching fingertips. “Do you think we can take 'Bama this year?” he asked.

“That kid Stebbins will pass them to death,” Dick said.

The searching fingers located a firm, lobulated mass that was palpable midway between the umbilicus and the xiphoid and slightly to the left of the midline. It seemed to overlap the aorta. Every time the heart pulsated the mass pulsated with it, until it was as though two hearts beat in the boy's body beneath the doctor's hands. “I wouldn't mind seeing that game myself,” the resident said.

Sheldon came to see him, and some of the boys from the House, and Betty Ann Schwartz, wearing a tight white sweater with long hairs of wool all over it. Nobody else came to see him the evening she was there, so there was nowhere else he could look, and the sight of her almost made him unglue. “No matter what anybody tells you,” he said, “they don't put anything in the coffee here.”

He had expected the remark to float up over her head, but she looked right into his eyes and smiled, as if what he said had pleased her. “Perhaps you can take up the problem with a nurse,” she said, and he made a mental note to date her as soon as he was released.

His Uncle Myron came on his fifth night in the hospital.

“What did Sheldon have to tell you for?” Dick said in annoyance. “I'm feeling perfectly fine.”

“This isn't a sick call,” Myron said. “This is a business meeting.” For years Myron Kramer and his brother Aaron had run identical businesses in different towns, manufacturing hardwood dining room sets. With Myron in Emmetsburgh and Aaron in Cypress, they enjoyed the independence of nonpartnership, yet as brothers they felt free to enjoy such economies as sharing the same furniture designs and employing a single sales representative to push their twin line at the national furniture shows. When Aaron had died of a coronary two years before, Myron had taken over the management but not the ownership of his brother's business, with the understanding that Dick would assume
this responsibility when he was graduated from the University.

“Something wrong with the business, Uncle Myron?” Dick asked.

“The business is fine,” his uncle said. “What should be wrong with the business?” They talked of football, about which the elder Kramer knew almost nothing.

Myron Kramer sought out his nephew's doctor before he left Atlanta. “His mother died when he was a little boy. Cancer. My brother went a couple of years ago,” he said. “Heart. So I'm the only one. I want you to tell me how my nephew is.”

“There is a mediastinal mass, I'm afraid.”

“Tell me what that means,” Myron said patiently.

“There is a growth. In the back of the chest, behind the heart.”

Myron grimaced and closed his eyes. “Can you help him?”

“I don't know how much, with a tumor of this type,” the doctor said carefully. “And there may be others. Advanced cancer is a plant that seldom throws a single seed. We want to determine where else in your nephew's body there may be trouble.”

“Will you tell him?”

“No, at least not yet. We'll wait awhile, and watch him.”

“And if there are other . . . things?” Myron asked. “How will you know?”

“If metastasis has occurred,” the doctor said, “it will be too easy to tell, Mr. Kramer.”

On the ninth day Dick was released from the hospital. Before he put on his clothes, the doctor gave him a supply of multiple vitamins and pancreatic enzymes. “These will build you up,” he said. Then he added another bottle of capsules. “These pink ones are Darvon. Take one anytime you feel pain. Every four hours.”

“I don't have any pain,” Dick said.

“I know,” the old doc said. “But they're good to have in the house, just in case something comes up.”

He had missed six days of classes and he had a lot of work to make up. For four days he crammed. Then he ran out of steam. That afternoon he telephoned Betty Ann Schwartz, but she had a date.

“How about tomorrow night?”

“I'm dated tomorrow, too, Dick. I'm sorry.”

“Well, okay.”

“Dick, it's not a brushoff. I want to go out with you, awfully. I'm not doing anything Friday night. What do you say? We can do anything you like.”

“Anything?”

She laughed.
“Almost
anything.”

“I heard you the first time. It's a date.”

By the next afternoon he was too restless to study. Although he knew he couldn't afford it after missing school all the previous week, he cut two classes and drove out to the rod and gun club. There was a skeet shoot. Using the over-and-under for the first time in competition he hit forty-eight clay pigeons out of fifty, standing in the warm sun and knocking them off one after another,
bam, bam, bam, bam, bam
, to take first prize. Driving home, he felt that something was missing, and with puzzlement he searched for whatever it was. Then with a small laugh he realized that it was the sense of elation that usually accompanied winning. For some reason he felt down, not up. In his right groin there was a faint throbbing.

By two o'clock in the morning it had grown into a pain. He went to his bureau drawer and took out the bottle with the pink capsules. He shook a Darvon into his palm and looked at it.

“Screw you,” he said.

He put it back into the bottle and put the bottle away in the drawer, under his jockey shorts. He took two aspirin tablets, and the pain went away.

Two days later it returned.

That afternoon he took the Redhead into the woods after birds but came home because his hand grew so numb he couldn't load the shotgun.

That night he took a Darvon.

Friday morning he went to the hospital. Betty Ann Schwartz visited him that evening. But she couldn't stay very long.

The old doc explained it to him, very gently.

“Will you operate,” Dick said, “the way they did before?”

“It's a different kind of case,” the doctor said. “There's something new that they've been having some success with. It's nitrogen mustard, the stuff they once used for war gas. Only this kills cancer, not soldiers.”

“When do you want to start the treatments?”

“Right away.”

“Can it wait until tomorrow?”

The old doc hesitated and then smiled. “Sure. Take the day off.”

Dick left the hospital before lunch and drove the sixty miles into Athens. He stopped at a lunchroom but he wasn't hungry, and instead of ordering he stepped into the telephone booth and called Betty Ann Schwartz at the sorority house. He had to wait while they called her out of the dining room. She was free that evening, she said, and she would love it.

He didn't want to run into any of the boys from the House and he had all afternoon to kill. So he went to a movie. There were three motion-picture theaters in Athens, not counting the colored one, and two of them had horror pictures. The remaining one offered
The Lost Weekend
, which he had seen before. He sat through it again, eating cold buttered popcorn and scrounching down in the dark in the stale-smelling plush chair. The first time he had enjoyed the picture, but the second time around the dramatic parts seemed full of bathos, and he despised Ray Milland for wasting all that time searching for hidden bottles of booze when he could have been banging Jane Wyman and writing stories for
The New Yorker
.

After the movie, it was still too early and he bought a pint of bourbon, feeling like Milland, and drove out of town into the country. He looked carefully and found an ideal parking spot in the woods overlooking the Oconee River, and he simply sat there for a long time. The pain was very bad now, and he felt faint. That was because he hadn't had lunch, he told himself, only the lousy popcorn, and he felt disgusted that sometimes he was such a goddam fool.

When he picked up Betty Ann he took her to a good restaurant, a place called Max's, and they each had a brace of drinks and a beautiful sirloin for two. After dinner they had brandy. When they left the restaurant he drove straight to the parking lot overlooking the river. He took out the bourbon and she accepted the bottle when he opened it and she took a long swig and then gave it to him and he did, too. He turned the radio on softly and got some music and they had another drink and then he began to kiss her, and there was no resistance, only encouragement on her part, and soft nibblings all over his face
and neck, and he felt a wild disbelieving realization that this was it, that it was finally going to happen, but when the time came he didn't react the way he should have, nothing happened, and finally they stopped trying.

“I think you'd better take me home,” she said. She lit a cigarette.

He started the motor but he didn't drive off. “I want to explain,” he said.

“You don't have to explain anything,” she said.

“There's something wrong with me,” he said.

“I can see that.”

“No, something really wrong. I've got cancer.”

She sat in silence, smoking. Then she said, “Are you kidding me? Is this some new kind of line?”

“This would have been important to me. If I die, you might have been the only one.”

“Jesus Christ,” she said softly.

His hand moved to the shift, but she touched him with her fingertips. “Do you want to try again?”

“I don't think it would do any good,” he said. But he switched off the motor. “I'd like to really know how a girl is made,” he said. “Can I look at you?”

“It's dark,” she whispered, and he turned on the dashboard lights.

She lifted her heels to the edge of the seat and leaned back with her eyes shut tight. “Don't touch me,” she said.

After a little while he started the motor again and when she felt the car begin to move she put her feet down. She kept her eyes closed until they were halfway home, and she turned her body away from him as she finished dressing.

“Would you like some coffee?” he asked as they neared a diner.