Death Be Not Proud

by John Gunther

  During the next days he talked incessantly of schoolwork and the Harvard entrance examinations. He wanted to know why, if he had to stay on the diet, he could not go back to Deerfield, live on the diet in the infirmary there, and resume his classes. The diet was certainly a major worry and preoccupation. Yet we could not dare to stop it. No doctor, even the most orthodox, would let us even consider taking him off the diet now. We had comforted Johnny by saying that he could quit the diet in “June,” and day after day he would count the remaining weeks on his fingers. Gerson, of course, thought he might have to remain on the diet at least for a year and maybe for several years.

  Medically, the situation became more puzzling all the time. During March, Johnny was in good shape, though the bulge continued to grow very slowly and he had intermittent periods of seeming dazed and dopey and the hand and foot became somewhat worse and the lag in the mouth deepened. Also he was apt to drop things if he didn’t watch his left hand. But the eyes were better. There was no recurrence of papilledema. How, we wondered, could he get better in one direction and worse in another, at one and the same time? We took him to an eye specialist who said that he did not think Johnny’s eyesight would deteriorate further, and—blessed relief—that we need no longer fear blindness. But—suppose the partial numbness, the insidious creeping paralysis, should spread and so affect the right hand and foot in addition to the left? Some doctors said this was impossible. Others disagreed. If only the doctors would get together!

  Straight through March and April, despite everything, Johnny worked on and on. He was utterly obsessed about getting into Harvard in the fall. But to achieve this he had to complete making up his work at Deerfield and graduate as well as pass the college entrance exams, a double task that seemed impossible. Then on March 18 we learned that he had caught up with his history course at Deerfield—though he hadn’t been there for eleven months—and on April 7 he had a letter from Mr. Boyden that gave him radiant happiness: he had passed his English examination satisfactorily and so was abreast of this course too. I took him to the science room in the Public Library, where he did some advanced work, and he proceeded to write up no fewer than fifty-four chemistry experiments! Then Frances found out about the New York Tutoring School, where Mr. Matthew is a wise and considerate headmaster, and we enrolled him there. Johnny’s marks after six weeks were 90 in English, 95 in history, 95 in trig. This in a boy with half a brain!

  We made formal application for him to enter Harvard, and in his own handwriting, now wretchedly uneven, he wrote the following paragraph to answer the question, “What are your reasons for going to college and why do you wish particularly to come to Harvard?”

  I wish to go to college primarily to complete a sound general education and to prepare myself for the years to come. Also, I wish to prepare myself for research work in physical chemistry. I have chosen Harvard to atain (sic) these ends because I have been advised that it is the institution where I may most fruitfully attain these aims.

  On April 12 he took the college board exams. It had been arranged, through the courtesy of Dean Gummere of Harvard, that he could split these into two sessions, taking the Aptitude tests at this time and the Achievement tests later. Johnny said he preferred to do both together, and who were we to say no to him? He announced, “ I never felt better in my life.” But it was a grueling day. We drove him down to a school near Gramercy Park early in the morning, and he had to wait almost an hour, standing mostly, in a huge milling crowd of tough, husky youngsters—many of them G.I.’s who had seen combat abroad—and then squeeze his way inch by inch into elevators packed and jammed, and run down long confusing corridors. A couple of the other boys laughed at him, and he flinched. Johnny looked so pitiably frail. His gait was lopsided, and his bandage made his pallor even more striking than it would have been otherwise. Frances kept close by. The exams lasted six and a half hours. We didn’t get home till dinnertime, and Johnny flung himself on the couch, exclaiming, “Boy am I tired!” Then he eagerly snapped to the phone to compare notes with other boys who had taken the same exams.

  That morning Frances had picked up a benzedrine tablet from Traeger and she asked Johnny to take it, thinking it would stimulate him during the ordeal. He had never had benzedrine and he refused, couching the refusal in a quotation from Shakespeare to the effect that he preferred the terrors of the known to those unknown.

  There were other activities, too. The day he enrolled at the Tutoring School I took him to The Best Years of Our Lives as a kind of celebration, my sister took him to Brigadoon, and with Frances and me he saw matinees of Joan of Lorraine and Finian’s Rainbow (wearing glasses for the first time which made him look like a juvenile professor). He kept up his acute interest in politics and he still read the news of the day with great care. I took him to shop for a lot of clothes—he had grown at least three inches during all this time—and our friends dropped in and once or twice we played chess and of course he beat me. So that I might improve my game he wrote out a series of hints and precepts; any chess enthusiast will realize how sound they are, and at the risk of boring the non-chess-playing reader I will print them:

  Always try to maintain control of as many center squares as possible with pawns.

  Never bring out the queen early.

  If winning, that is if you are ahead in material, exchange pieces but not pawns, so as to make it easier to queen a pawn.

  If behind, exchange pawns not pieces.

  The Kings bishop pawn is a weak pawn and always try to protect the KB square.

  Never defend a piece by attacking another, since a good move by your opponent will mean that you will have two pieces to defend instead of one.

  In a Ruy Lopez, if the opponent does not move the rook’s pawn up, castle.

  There’s a great difference between attacking and just exchanging pieces.

  Storm your opponent by attack by pawns on the opposite side to the one he’s castled on.

  Castling on the opposite side to your opponent and attacking when your position is mature will usually win.

  In queening a pawn, keep the king in front of the pawn while moving.

  He was very pleased and proud when, in the middle of March, I finally finished Inside U.S.Á., and then he went bleak with horror when I had some mild fun writing a blurb and helping with the ads. “Oh, Father, you wouldn’t!” he groaned. Later I read him a fine puff that Bill Shirer wrote. Johnny winked at me cynically. “It’s swell—sure you didn’t write that yourself?” He was delighted, but skeptical, about my plans for Inside Washington, the sequel I was outlining. I showed him the list of chapters, and half a dozen times he went over it and referred back to it, proving that I could not possibly squeeze all I wanted in my projected thirty chapters. I had insisted to him that I was never again going to produce such a monster as Inside U.S.A., and that this successor would be much shorter. “Each chapter will end up two,” he smiled. “ I know you.”

  The continuing diet gave him moments of real desperation. Once he pleaded with us to invent or concoct somehow some sort of soft drink. We appealed to Mrs. Seeley, and she sent over a sugarless raspberry juice out of which Frances made a kind of lemonade. He sipped it greedily. One day, having finished a glass of one of the regular apple and carrot juices, he tossed the glass right out the window. It fell sixteen stories and tinkled. Johnny smiled.

  The aftermath of writing a long, difficult book is almost as trying as writing the book itself, and I was very busy. I said one evening that all I really wanted in life was one full day in which there should be absolutely nothing I had to do. Johnny: “Try jumping off the Empire State Building.”

  Once Frances helped him straighten out his desk. Usually he loathed having her do this. But it was becoming increasingly difficult for him to find things, and so he was torn between resentment at being helped and the desire to get on with his work efficiently. When he did allow her to help him, he was very bossy. Once, to make things easier, she suggested that he pull out a drawe
r. Johnny: “Mother, I am utterly oblivious of such trivia.”

  Meantime our assault on what seemed to be the entire medical profession of New York City was continuing. There was no doubt—brutally, inexorably, that damned murderous bump was getting bigger, which meant that the tumor had started to grow again. To try to get a fresh over-all approach, Frances and I went to a new neurologist, laying the whole case before him, but aside from sympathy he had nothing to offer, and he did not think that the diet had anything to do with the temporary recovery. I went to a psychiatrist to get advice as to how matters should be broken to Johnny, in case the paralysis should get much worse. We saw Traeger and Gerson every week, and tried to step up the regime with hormones. Johnny said, “Look out or you’ll make a sex maniac out of me!” It seemed that another operation would be necessary very soon, or the skin around the bump would break down again, this time beyond repair. Finally, when the bump was as big as an apple again, Mount decided to make an exploration, and I took Johnny up to Neurological for a two-day visit. He was annoyed as usual at this interruption to his studies. Mount and Miller slipped into Johnny’s room and remained there two and a quarter hours, while other doctors and nurses constantly went in and out. I knew the procedure could not be dangerous because I had not been asked to sign the usual waiver of responsibility, yet I paced the corridor for those two and a quarter hours with extreme uneasiness. Mount hoped that, as in December, he could go in and release a lot of fluid. Anyway he was going to take a sample of what he found and the pathologist was waiting. It was done under local anesthesia and through the door I could hear Johnny grunt once or twice. The job was finished finally and then I knew it was very bad, because both Mount and Miller backed away from me in the corridor and would not talk. I went inside.

  With an infinitely slow, hopeful, almost caressing gesture Johnny put his hand up to his head. “ I wonder how the bump is,” he murmured. A desperate charging hope shone in his eyes. Very slowly the hand went up. He felt his head tentatively, felt it again with full palm, and then, limply, helplessly, hopelessly, the hand fell down, and this was the only time I ever saw his eyes actually spill over with tears. He lay there silent for a long moment. Then he sighed, with his eyes closed. “ I daresay it will take a little time to deflate.”

  The bump was like a stone again, and Mount had scarcely been able to evacuate a drop.

  The next day Johnny telephoned us early. “Bring poker chips. And money.”

  I left the hospital at 4:35 that afternoon and went to work; I had been asked to review Ernie Pyle’s last book for the Herald Tribune and was very late with it. I called Johnny at 7:30 to tell him, rather boastfully, I fear, that I had read the book and done a short review. Johnny: “Oh, Father, how could you possibly read a book in that time? What if someone reviews Inside U.S.A. after reading it that way?”

  He asked Mount the next morning, “Did you go deep enough so that you could make me twitch?” He tried to sound cheerful, but his voice was weak and quavering. Then he asked why he had to continue on the diet if it were not doing what it was supposed to do. He added quickly, “But don’t let anybody know that I’m impatient.”

  I took him home after a brief talk with Mount. It was all hopeless now. What Johnny had now, the pathologist said, was one of the worst of all forms of tumor, glioma multiforme; moreover the specimen Mount got showed many mitotic figures: i.e., the production of malignant cells was rapidly increasing. All neurologists are pessimists. I tried to argue with the diagnosis by pointing out how generally well Johnny still was. And indeed the doctors were astonished to the point of stupefaction that he had been able to take those college entrance exams. But Mount, so kind and decent, could offer no hope at all when we asked him what to do next. He said, “Let Johnny do exactly what he wants to do and die happy.”

  April 25 was a tremendous day. For some time Johnny had been working at the Tutoring School on a chemical experiment that was to end all experiments—and nearly did. Also Penfield telephoned from Montreal to say that he would be in New York and would like to see Johnny. The appointment was set for midmorning and I have never seen Johnny so choked with disappointment and indeed despair—this would mean that he would miss his precious chemistry hour and it might be weeks before he could get back to the experiment. Every moment was golden to him now. We called Montreal back and Penfield shifted his plans to fix the consultation for an earlier hour.

  Then—some modicum of hope again! Penfield, with his immense authority, was greatly impressed at how comparatively well Johnny still was, and seemed to think that all was not yet lost. I showed him what he had written on the chart the year before; he replied, “Well, the best of us can be mistaken.” He gave the impression that Johnny might still be saved; he urged giving up the diet, trying the mustard again, and above all having a second operation. He thought that the tumor might conceivably have a frontier and might be removable at this stage. Tumors in children are, he said, unpredictable, and this one seemed to be “weeping itself out” in fluid and it might not be “so frightfully big.” This was the best moment for an operation, too, since the ulcer had healed and the risk of infection was at a minimum. He urged Mount to do a “whopping big job “ and to risk everything by the most drastic possible operative procedure.

  I took Johnny off to the Tutoring School and fetched him later. He was agog with triumph and excitement. He had done his experiment, and it certainly had worked. I had bought him some metallic lithium out of which he made anhydrous lithium hydride. The stuff was, he knew, highly inflammable. He did not know that it would burn right through a Pyrex flask, through a metal laboratory desk, and through the floor. Luckily his teacher was close by.

  Steadfastly, all these months, we had held to the diet, but now there seemed no point in going on. Not only, despite the diet, was the tumor growing again; it was growing faster. It would have been heartless to have continued to impose on Johnny for no good end, a regime of such severity. He had been on the diet seven and a half months—yet the tumor was bigger now than ever before. Nevertheless we were grateful to this splendid human being, Max Gerson, for all he did for Johnny—and what he did was a lot—and we always will be. There were long consultations with Traeger and Gerson and finally we told Johnny the great news one morning and he asked suspiciously, “What strings are attached?” Only, we replied, that there ought to be a few intervening days, for weaning so to speak, when he would still avoid salt and fat. Frances and I had lunch out that day, and then we rushed to a butcher shop and bought a steak. We got home—and Johnny wasn’t there! He had slipped out of the apartment unnoticed by anyone and had walked by himself to a nearby Translux to take in a newsreel. This was the first time he ever did this. Of course it was a symbol of release. That evening he ate the steak and more or less anything he liked. He kept gripping a huge piece of hard cheese in his good hand and nibbling at it hungrily.

  We had a stiff fight about his going out alone. Frances usually took him to the Tutoring School, luckily not far away, and sometimes I called for him. He resented bitterly being accompanied, but we did not quite dare to let him go alone, even by taxi, because of the steep stairs at the school. It became a question of whether it was better to risk an accident—of course if he should fall and hit his skull, it would be fatal—or to damage his self-confidence by continuing to withhold permission. The matter was taken out of our hands promptly. It became clear that the operation, if it was to take place at all, must take place very soon, since the bump was now all but bursting out of the skin like a vicious cauliflower.

  I took him to see Odd Man Out one afternoon, and his friend Mary, his cousin Judy, and Edgar Brenner came over in the evening, and I sat in his room while the children played cards in the living room, and as always it was a struggle—between letting him do just what he wanted to do, and watching carefully to see that he did not get too tired. This was a dinner party all his own, and he was immensely happy. A little later Johnny sent Mary a graduation present, and he got from her a
key chain which made him inordinately proud.

  We went up to Neurological—once more that drive through the crosstown traffic and then skimming northward along the river—on the evening of April 29, just a year after the first outbreak of his illness. Johnny had not, of course, been told that any major operation was impending. We left after a while and the minute we arrived back at the apartment the phone rang and it was Johnny, indignant and very frightened. A nurse had come in to give him an enema. So he knew that something more than just a test was in preparation. Then he demanded to talk to me to find out whether, if there was to be an operation, we had cleared with Gerson what kind of anesthetic would be used, since he had heard him say that anesthetics were fatal to people on his diet. (In blunt fact Johnny was under anesthesia for hour after hour, and no damage occurred at all.)

  Johnny wanted to live, all right. But one of his mild remarks the next day was, “Maybe the next world will be a pleasanter place than this.”

  The barber, Tony, came into Johnny’s room at about 9:30 on May 1. Johnny took a look at him, remembered him from the year before, and with one swift continuous gesture reached for the phone and in an instant had Frances. He said, “The executioner is here. Oh, my! It’s Tony. The guillotine. No! Protect me!”