by John Gunther
That evening we talked of Harvard. Some of the boys were getting their admission notices, and Johnny, now that he had actually been graduated, wondered when his would come. He was impatient. He had a great sense of the passage of time.
Everything that Johnny suffered was in a sense repaid by the few heroic moments of that walk down the center aisle of that church. This was his triumph and indomitable summation. Nobody who saw it will ever forget it, or be able to forget the sublime strength of will and character it took.
Back in New York we pressed on ceaselessly with medical affairs. It was simply impossible to let this child die. The bump, that criminal marauder, was growing out again, not with so much pace as before, but it was harder and more tense. We had long ago ceased to think of expense; I was very heavily in debt, but my book would make it up, I hoped. We gathered ourselves for a final assault. Mrs. Albert D. Lasker gave me some special leads, particularly in regard to the use of hormones. Traeger went to a convention at Atlantic City, and there talked with every brain man he could find. A chase began like that of the year before, with calls to specialists in little-known procedures in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and the University of Michigan. We heard of an extremely orthodox man on ordinary cancers who, after he had given up hopeless cases, found the patients responding to a therapy based on estrogen. Frances and I talked to Craver at Memorial, and after a long conversation in which nothing much developed he popped out at the last moment, as doctors will, with news of a folic acid derivative that just conceivably might be useful. As always, the great obstacle was that whatever the effect of new medicaments on other types of tumor, they had never been tried on the brain, and experimentation in this area was, to say the least, risky. Still, even more so than before, there was nothing to lose. One morning Johnny himself tore a clipping from the Sunday Times and—mutely—showed it to Frances, The appeal in his eyes was terrible.
It described an experimental treatment for cancer and leukemia announced in Chicago; I talked to the young physicians handling it, but there seemed little possibility of applying their technique to a brain condition. Then I went out to Montefiore for a long conversation with Davidoff, a celebrated neurosurgeon to whom I tried to outline the entire case. I asked him flatly if he had ever known a glioma multiforme to be cured. He hesitantly adduced recessions, but not cures. How long, I wanted to know, had the longest case in his experience lasted. Four years, he replied. Then he talked wisely about the mysteries of the body, “miracles” such as those at Lourdes, and the inscrutable quality of some diseases, and suggested that, since diagnosis was so important, we should send Johnny’s slides to two supreme pathologists, one in Illinois, one in Connecticut, for a final verdict. I asked him to what he attributed the improvement Johnny had indubitably shown during the spring. He was convinced that the diet could have had nothing whatever to do with it, and that almost certainly—this was a surprise—the amelioration had been the consequence of last year’s X-rays. He told me some frightening and marvelous things about X-rays. Yet I had conferred with the radiologist at Neurological when Johnny was better and the radiologist had disclaimed any credit for the improvement. Moreover all our doctors had forbidden more X-ray. But, Davidoff said, there were million-volt machines that, so to speak, skipped the scalp, and might conceivably be useful. He didn’t give us any hope, but he suggested that we have a try.
People may ask if it would not have been better if we had had fewer doctors and less treatment. Perhaps we tried to do too much. But Johnny loved life desperately and we loved him desperately and it was our duty to try absolutely every-thing and keep him alive as long as possible. Might he have had a better chance to live with less attention? No. That tumor, untended and unchecked, would simply have eaten away all his brain. Always we thought that, if only we could maintain life somehow, some extraordinary new cure might be discovered. We thought of boys who died of streptococcus infections just before sulfa came into use. Our decisions were almost always dictated by successive emergencies, with one delicate consideration poised against another, and they were not taken lightly, I can assure you.
Now Johnny was steadily becoming more aware of how sick he was. Did he know he was going to die? I leave it to the evidence of his own conversation. He was lethargic and some-times testy during these last declining weeks. He demanded several times to know the result of Mount’s last laboratory report; we had to equivocate, of course. He demanded to know then, “I f Mount’s report is satisfactory, why is further treatment still necessary?” He demanded to know, was the bump bigger, or smaller, or what, and was it fluctuant or not. I said, “Leave it to the doctors’ judgment.”
Johnny: “Their what?”
One morning he said to the technician who took his blood count. “What’s the point of going on with this? What does it all lead to?”
He had to take a lot of yeast and, finding the taste offensive, he took to putting it in capsules. I protested at how laborious this was. He answered softly, “Occupational therapy.”
We decided finally to repeat each factor that might have led to the earlier improvement—X-ray, mustard, diet, and, conceivably, another operation if he could stand it. We chose to begin with the mustard, largely on Penfield’s urging and also because we remembered how strikingly he had picked up after the first mustard the year before. And certainly HN has remarkable effects in shrinking some types of tumor. After the mustard we would try X-ray and finally, late in summer, go back to Gerson. This order was prompted in part by consideration of the strain and discomfort to Johnny; X-ray and diet were the hardest things for him to bear, so we would do these last.
Burchenal wanted to hospitalize Johnny this time, and so on June 12 he went to Memorial. He swam through this experience, which was short, quite easily. There were no ill effects. But so far as we know, no good effects either. Johnny was alarmed, though. A merciful doctor who found a way to inject the mustard in tiny veins on the back of his hand, so that there was none of the usual difficulty getting into his arms, told him, “You’re doing fine.”
Johnny: “So far.”
This doctor, Ursalof, was so impressed by his agreeableness that he called him, with affectionate mild irony, “Mr. Aggressive.” Johnny joked with his mother about why he had to be in the hospital at all and said, “Oh, you’ve just succumbed to Burchenal’s charm, as usual.” He told one of the nurses, “I’ m here only to get the last little lump of that tumor out, the very last small little bit.” But when he vomited the first evening he grunted, “Puking? That’s the least of my worries!” One afternoon he asked briefly, “Is there a crematorium handy here?”
We came home, and again Johnny was distinctly better; he had two or three splendid hearty days. I took him to see Great Expectations and he loved it. Walter Duranty, bless him, dropped in for two long afternoons and enchanted Johnny with his conversation, making him laugh almost till he cried with anecdotes of his own schooldays at Harrow and how he had played hooky to see the Grand Prix in Paris, and with questions like, “Well, my boy, and what do you think of women?”
Later there was some dialogue about education. Johnny said, “Schools in this country make you callous and cynical.”
The doctors thought it would be safe in a few days for him to go to the country, and Frances went up to Madison to get the house ready; I spent most of the last ten days with him alone. We knew he would not be able to manage the stairs, and so Frances converted a downstairs room to his use, painting it a bright robin’s egg blue, hanging cheerful curtains, and putting in order his books and chemicals. I tried, at her suggestion, to work out some plausible arrangement with Dean Gummere whereby we could tell Johnny he had been admitted to Harvard even if he could not go. This good and decent man cooperated beautifully but, as it worked out, too late.
Johnny was busy meantime in several fields. Mrs. Luce sent him du Noiiy’s book, Human Destiny, and he read it with close interest; his final comment was, “Well, he presents a case.” Then she gave him anothe
r book, the name of which I have forgotten, an outright tract. Johnny said, “It says just what du Noüy says, but not so well. You distrust it because it’s propagandistic.” Then after a pause, “ I hate unscientific books!”
Putnam returned to town, and he came to see Johnny, with Traeger in consultation, on Monday, June 23. Now we had another surprise. Putnam—I hope I am not foreshortening too bluntly the impression his subtle, sensitive mind gave out—was a slight shade optimistic. Traeger alluded to the bump, saying, “Nobody knows what’s inside that thing!” and Putnam’s reply was a shrug. “We must always keep in mind that this is a very peculiar tumor indeed.” Johnny was marvelously amusing with both doctors, teasing them, anticipating their tests and questions, and trying to talk them into things. Putnam told him where he could get something he wanted badly and that was hard to find, test tubes of transparent fused quartz. When Johnny had skidded from the room I said, “The tumor did incontestably disappear for a while. Where was it?’ We talked all over and around this again and again. Putnam said that he had, out of several thousand cases, known two, just two, glioma multiformes that had recovered. But I did not pursue the subject further when it became apparent that these two persons had not survived with much to live with. Finally, like Davidoff, Putnam strongly urged more X-ray treatments as soon as Johnny was well enough to take them. “But why,” I protested, “didn’t you insist on X-rays before?” Because, he explained, the broken-down skin of the scalp, which could never have with-stood X-rays, had been removed by Mount’s operation; now, because Mount had pulled the flap together, there was tougher, healthier skin to deal with. Traeger listened closely and said little. A fleeting idea crossed my mind: that the sturdiness of this new scalp might be forcing the tumor inward, which would account for the recent accentuation of the paralysis. Still, despite everything, Johnny’s condition was pretty good. Putnam’s last word was, “Let’s keep on struggling.”
Johnny came out of his room and walked the two doctors to the door. His goodbye to Putnam was, “So long. You didn’t bang me up as much as Mount did. Thanks for finding out where I can get that quartz.”
Johnny caught the reflection of Putnam’s good spirits, and we had a happy dinner. “Father,” Johnny said, “this is better than the Colony.” He called up his mother in Madison with exuberant glee; she asked, “Ho w do you feel?” and he answered, “Great!” Then he telephoned Mary but her line was busy for a while. He shut the door so as to talk to her privately from my room. When he couldn’t get the connection the second or third time he came out and murmured with great zest, “God damn it!”
Came an awful morning, on June 27, when Johnny turned to me across the breakfast table and spoke as if very casually:
“Where’s Mother keeping herself these days?”
Then he felt the bump. He wasn’t bandaged now. His hand played on it, shocked. “What on earth is that?” I stared at him. Then:
“How long has this been going on?
“What year was I at Deerfield?
“What day is this?
“What are these pills for?
“Where was I last week?”
Then he had a short, sharp attack of shivers.
He hated to be helped. That evening at dinner, when his memory was quite right again, he tried out a system whereby he would stick his fork up the sleeve of his jacket, pinning it that way with the elbow bent, so that with his whole arm he could hold the tines straight. “ I will learn to manage this!” he ground out between his teeth.
We were very relaxed later. But he was chilly. For some time now it had been obvious that the temperature-regulating mechanism in his brain was deranged slightly. He talked vividly about Harvard, and then about getting a plate for his skull. “By that time my hair will have grown back, too.”
He was very drowsy the next day. His grip on life was lessening, though I did not yet think in terms of emergency. On the twenty-eighth he slept most of the afternoon, but, after all, he had been taking naps during most of the course of his illness, and I was not alarmed. He said that evening, with his usual careful choice of language, “Father, I hope you don’t mind my being somewhat glum.”
I called Frances in Madison and told her I thought she ought to come in, though there seemed no real reason for her to make a troublesome trip inasmuch as I would be driving him out in a day or two. This was a Saturday night and we planned to go to Madison on Tuesday. Frances said she would wait to hear from me Sunday at noon. I felt a persistent apprehension now, very deep and pervasive, though there seemed to be no specific reason for it. Johnny was much better on Sunday, but even so I called Frances again and insisted that she return, and she arrived that evening.
In actual fact this Sunday was one of the best days he had had since he first became ill. He was exhilarated and very close to me; he kept following me around and once or twice grabbed my hand. I almost picked up the phone to catch Frances and tell her that it would not be necessary to come in after all. Johnny talked about many things. We discussed Sinclair Lewis and I told him about the ups and downs in the life of an artist, of the deep, perplexing downdrafts a writer may have. He read in A Subtreasury of American Humor, chuckling, and then, some-thing he didn’t often do, he read aloud to me, picking up the small-type anecdotes from a recent Reader’s Digest. One, it happened, was about a hanging. Then he said, “Inasmuch as we’ll go to the country Tuesday, I think I’ll pack.”
But steadily he kept returning to me, as if he wanted to be particularly intimate and affectionate. All his sweetness, his remarkable goodness and pure, ineffable niceness, seemed to be bursting out of him all this day. By mid-evening, not at all tired, he had finished a neat job of packing his books and things for the summer. Here is what he chose:
Atomic Physics, by the physics staff of the University of Pittsburgh
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, by the Liebers, and their book on the theory of groups
“A Poet in the Making,” by Laurence Housman, clipped by Frances out of the Atlantic Monthly
Some lab manuals, folders, a dictionary, the Deerfield Roster
Outline of First Year College Chemistry and another chemistry text
Beginning German
Sprague’s Plane Trigonometry
What Is Life? by Schroedinger
Frances arrived; they had not seen each other for ten days. I had already put him to bed but he was not asleep. “Hello, Mother, I’m so glad you’ve come back!” he all but shouted. They talked and laughed about everything. He woke once during the night and again they talked and he whistled one lullaby.
The next morning, Monday, June 30, she gave him a bath and washed his hair. He seemed too tired to get out of the tub. I called for him early and took him to Memorial for a blood test and a last clearance before his trip to the country. Nobody at the hospital saw anything amiss, though over the phone during the weekend I had talked to Burchenal, and he was worried that Johnny’s fatigue might be caused by mounting intercranial pressure. Most of the Memorial doctors are scientists rather than physicians as such. Nobody at all saw any marked change or reason for alarm; there was certainly no intimation of impending disaster. But Johnny could hardly drag his left foot out of the car. Normally he would have scorned a wheelchair but today he welcomed it when I had the sudden idea to get one for the long trip down the corridor, and after a while, sitting there, he spoke suddenly. “Say, have they got a thing around here I could lie down on?” We had a lengthy wait. The heat and the smell of the laboratory animals disturbed him. There was another tedious wait while Burchenal filled out a prescription for some medicine we might need in the country. In the car, returning home, Johnny seemed hazy, and he asked whether or not Mary had come to lunch, and how his pet turtles were, one of which had died recently. But back home he was all right again, though tired.
Some things I do not understand. Traeger, it happened, was spending a brief holiday with Sinclair Lewis at Williamstown. He got on a plane suddenly and returned to New York, ex
plaining to Lewis, as I heard it from Lewis him-self later, “ I have a feeling that Johnny Gunther will die this weekend.”
I had a luncheon engagement at the Alrae with Walter Duranty and I walked over there. We were ordering coffee when I was called to the phone.
