Ex Officio

by Donald E. Westlake

  Holt tried to stop himself, but couldn’t help saying, “A nice young man, I hope.”

  Evelyn laughed and said, “That depends on your attitude toward George.”

  “Your brother George?”

  “The same.”

  This time he did stop himself, refraining from saying, What’s a nice-looking girl like you having dinner with her brother for? Advice only when requested, he reminded himself, and then limited to the medical. He said, “My best to George. And to Marie, of course.”

  They both had the same attitude toward Marie. Evelyn’s smile was ironic as she said, “Of course.”

  iv

  IT WAS THREE HUNDRED twenty-two miles, door to door. Holt had clocked it one time. From the house it was just a quick jog through Willow Grove to the Turnpike, then due west for nearly three hundred miles across the bottom of the state to the Willow Hill exit, south on state road 75 to Metal, then back east on county road 992 to Eustace.

  Saturday dawned bright and clear and cold, perfect driving weather. If he left in the morning and returned in the afternoon, he would have the sun at his back in both directions, which was perfect.

  He had told Margaret about it at dinner last night, of course, and had asked her if she felt like making the trip with him, but she had something to do with the League of Women Voters today, so he traveled alone. Fortunately he liked to drive—when not in Friday afternoon traffic—and didn’t mind driving alone. It gave him time to think, to muse on this and that, to evolve ideas like that cemetery notion that had fallen flat on its face yesterday. He would spend much of today’s driving time dissecting that failure from various points of view; the generation gap, romantic vs. realist, religious-based political conservatism vs. humanistic-based political liberalism, on and on. It was his form of solitaire, and didn’t even require a deck of cards.

  He got to Eustace at just about one-thirty in the afternoon. He drove through the town—a shopping street backed up by a few rows of residences is all it was—and just on the other side he made the right turn onto the unmarked gravel road. He was immediately on Lockridge land, though it was a quarter mile before he reached the chain-link fence and the gate and the guard, an elderly man with a Swedish accent who’d held this job for nearly twenty years now.

  He recognized Holt at once, and nodded and waved to him as he walked flat-footed in his heavy boots to open the gate. He was saying something, but Holt had the window closed and couldn’t hear it. From the guard’s manner, it was merely some sort of greeting, so Holt contented himself with a smile and a nod in return.

  It was another mile and a half to the house, with woods on the left while on the right the trees gave way to the stables and exercise yards and then a part of the apple orchard, everything now under a lamina of clean white snow.

  Brad’s house was much more sensibly situated than Holt’s, being built on a low rise in the middle of a clearing. Holt had never asked, but he doubted Brad had trouble with a damp basement.

  The house was three and a half stories and mostly stone, a large house to begin with that had been added to in the hundred twenty years of its life with various ells and projections, all in the same architectural style and general appearance, so that by now it looked more like a castle than a house, even to a lone turret in the front left corner, added on by Brad’s father, who had numbered astronomy among his hobbies. All it needs is a moat, Holt thought, and parked the Lincoln where the moat would be if there were one.

  He was shown into the east parlor, a bright room but without direct sunlight at this time of day. He stood at the window looking out at Dinah’s garden, nothing at this time of year but a few black stalks and vague outlines under the snow. Brad had no real interest in a formal garden, but it had been Dinah’s abiding passion and Brad had continued to maintain it since Dinah’s death. That is, he had hired someone to maintain it, not being himself a man with a naturally green thumb.

  “So Evelyn’s been snitching on me, eh?”

  Holt turned around, for just a moment at a complete loss. He had worked out an elaborate story to cover his having dropped in unexpectedly this way, and he became hopelessly entangled in the choice between giving that story and acknowledging the truth. He could do neither, being unable to think clearly enough for a few seconds to come up with a decision, so all he did was offer a weak and confused smile as he watched Brad walking across the room toward him, smiling, his hand outstretched.

  But on a different level of his mind, Holt was perfectly aware and sensible. He noted Bradford’s walk, his face, his eyes, his stance. He saw that there was no limp, that there was no immediately noticeable change in the appearance of Brad’s face, that both eyes seemed clear, that there was no visible immediate difference to be noted of any kind. So it wasn’t a bad one, he thought. At least, not yet.

  Which conclusion at once unblocked the other part of his mind, and he smiled broadly, taking Brad’s hand as he said, “Hello, Brad. I don’t suppose there’s any point telling you the story I made up.”

  Brad’s handshake was as firm as ever. “If you think you can get it past me,” he said amiably, “go right ahead.”

  “No, thanks,” Holt said. “I’ve never seen anybody get anything past you. But let Evelyn think we pulled the wool over your eyes, all right?”

  Brad grinned. “I still go for intrigue,” he said. “But nevertheless, the trip was a waste.”

  “Not if it puts my mind at ease,” Holt told him.

  “Because I fainted? Come on, Joe, I’m an old man, I’m entitled to a faint every now and then. Have you had lunch?”

  “Of course not. I know your cook, remember.”

  “Come along, then.”

  The dining room was on the other side of the house. As they walked, Brad said, “I ate an hour ago, but I’ll have a bite with you.”

  “Fine.”

  Brad stopped off to put in the order, and then they walked on to the dining room, a smallish green and white room with a wall of tiny-paned windows overlooking a good part of the orchard, the rows of pear and peach and apple trees now naked black stick figures against the snow, like an assembly line of impressionistic spider sculptures. Sunlight streamed in on this side, gleaming on the white tablecloth between them.

  Brad repeated his question. “Do you really need your mind put at ease simply because I fainted?”

  “Not entirely,” Holt said. “There was another element of it that bothered me more.”

  “What other element? The fact that I hurt my leg?”

  “No. Do you have a bruise on your leg, a cut, anything like that?”

  Brad shrugged. “I haven’t noticed. I don’t think so, but I just haven’t noticed.”

  “That’s the element,” Holt told him.

  “The fact that I don’t have a bruise?”

  “No, the fact that you haven’t bothered to look.”

  A maid came in with table settings, and they both waited till she was done and had gone again. Then Holt picked up the salad fork and watched his fingers turn it as he said, “Have you ever heard of a thing called anosognosia?”

  “Good God, no. Sounds like an Arabian perfume.”

  Holt was surprised and amused. “It does?” He glanced at Brad, and saw that he was frowning at him in some concentration, so he said, “No, it’s a symptom, a very peculiar kind of symptom.”

  “Yes, I suppose it would have to be. A symptom of what?”

  “Let me tell you what the symptom is first, and then I’ll tell you what it’s a symptom of.”

  “You’re the doctor,” Brad said, smiling.

  Salads were brought, a large one for Holt and a small one for Brad. Neither man started to eat. Holt said, “Anosognosia is a refusal or an inability to recognize the existence of one’s other symptoms. It can be a very difficult thing for a doctor to have to deal with.”

  Brad frowned. He picked up his fork, poked it into the salad, then put it down again. “That sounds like a symptom of mental illness, not phys
ical illness,” he said.

  “The two can be related,” Holt told him. “Look,” he said, “don’t get overly worried about this. You’re obviously healthy right now. Have some salad.”

  “You,” Brad said.

  So Holt obediently ate some salad, and then Brad followed suit, eating one forkful, and after it was swallowed saying, “Now we get to part two of the answer. What is this symptom a symptom of?”

  “It can indicate a stroke,” Holt told him.

  “I was hoping you weren’t going to say that word,” Brad said, “but I had the horrible feeling you were. I’ve known men who went out by way of stroke.”

  “It can hit in different ways,” Holt said.

  “But once it hits,” Brad said, “it doesn’t let go. Am I right?”

  “If I’m right,” Holt said, “what you just had was not a full-fledged stroke but a kind of dress rehearsal. You could call it the coming attractions of a stroke. It’s called a transient ischemic attack, meaning a stroke slight enough and brief enough for the damage to be only temporary and either completely or mostly reversible.”

  “Why do you think it was a stroke? Or a what-do-you-call-it attack? Simply because I paid it no attention?”

  “Not entirely,” Holt said. “It has the right pattern. You were briefly unconscious. When you awoke, you experienced a brief period of confusion and dysarthia. You developed—”

  “Wait a minute. Confusion and what?”

  “Oh. Sorry, I’m running through this in my own head, too. Stuttering. It’s called dysarthia.”

  Brad snorted. “Why isn’t it called stuttering?”

  “I’ve never been quite sure, to be honest with you. Nevertheless, you had a brief period of stuttering.”

  “Is it ano—whatever if I don’t remember that?”

  “Do you remember it?”

  Brad hesitated, then shrugged in brief annoyance and said, “No.”

  “That’s anosognosia.”

  “But I was fuzzy-minded,” Brad said. “I know that for the first few minutes after the faint I had the devil of a time concentrating my mind on things. I had a problem to discuss with Harrison, and I never did get back to it. If I did stutter, and I suppose you got that from Evelyn so I must have, couldn’t it just have been a part of the fuzzy-mindedness?”

  “It could have been,” Holt agreed. “At this stage, we have alternate explanations for everything. But we have enough symptoms pointing in the same direction to make it worth our while to try to make sure.”

  “What about the leg? That isn’t a symptom, is it?”

  “Definitely it is.”

  “My head is up at this end,” Brad said, pointing at it.

  “Of course it is. But it affects the running of the rest of your body. If there was a temporary blood clot in the left hemisphere of your brain, it would be quite natural for it to have an effect somewhere on the right side of your body. If you have no sign of a physical injury to your leg, then we have to include that among your symptoms.”

  “I see.” Brad turned his head to frown out the window at the snow and the bare trees and the sunshine, and Holt said nothing more, just letting him gradually get used to it at his own pace. Holt was truly very hungry, having breakfasted before eight o’clock, so he went back to work on his salad, and the main course—haddock, in a butter sauce—came before he’d finished the salad or Brad had finished his musing.

  The maid had a large portion for Holt and a small, token portion for Brad. She wasn’t sure whether to take Brad’s uneaten salad or not, and her hand hovered uncertainly over it until he became aware of her and made an abrupt nodding motion and a dismissing wave of his hand. He was frowning more deeply now, and when the girl had left the room he looked at Holt and said, “You called it coming attractions. A dress rehearsal.”

  “They frequently are, yes. If that’s what this was, a transient ischemic attack.”

  “Let’s assume that for the moment,” Brad said. “I’ve always taken it for granted you know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m flattered,” Holt admitted, “but I don’t necessarily agree.”

  “Yes, I know, you downgrade yourself, it’s probably hurt your career more than once. But for the moment, let’s talk about me.”

  Holt was taken aback once more. Every once in a while Brad threw one of those pocket analyses of his into the middle of a conversation, like a comic throwing away a one-liner, and Holt never knew quite what to do at those moments. Fortunately, Brad wasn’t one to linger with that sort of topic, so it was only afterward, when alone, that Holt would be able to study the latest message and take from it what he could of succor or advice.

  In the meantime, he said, “Of course we talk about you. You’re the patient.”

  “And my question is, dress rehearsal for what? Coming attractions for what?”

  “For a stroke. For the real thing, I mean, and of a specific kind. A cerebral thrombosis.”

  Brad frowned. “I’ve heard of coronary thrombosis,” he said.

  “Yes. A blood clot in the heart. This is a blood clot in the head. Not quite as fast, but just as sure.”

  “And they come with practice sessions?”

  “Frequently.”

  “How many?”

  “Any number, one to a hundred, even more.”

  “For how long?”

  Holt shook his head. “No set time. Usually a few months.”

  “Then the real thing.”

  “Usually. Sometimes there is no real thing, just a series of these temporary attacks. They come to an end, and nothing else happens at all.”

  Brad offered a thin smile. “I’ve never bet the long shots,” he said. “Eat before it gets cold.”

  “Right.”

  The haddock was delicious, but already starting to cool. There was white wine on the table, and Holt poured himself a glass, then raised an eyebrow at Brad, who said, “Can I now?”

  “Certainly. The only illness where wine is contra-indicated is alcoholism.”

  Brad laughed, and watched Holt pour. “In that case,” he said, “I’m glad I’m not an alcoholic. I like to drink too much.”

  Holt ate some more of the fish, washed it down with wine, and said, “I’ll want to do some tests.”

  “Naturally. You always want to do tests anyway, this is a perfect excuse.”

  “You’re probably right. When can you enter the hospital?”

  “Hospital? What sort of tests are we talking about?”

  “EEG, ECG, possibly a spinal tap. I have my bag in the car, remind me to take your blood pressure before we go. If it’s high, and it may well be, we’ll want to do something about bringing it down. We may also want to give you some anti-coagulants, see if we can keep that blood of yours flowing.”

  “Remind you to take my blood pressure.” Brad was smiling and shaking his head. “You’d be likely to forget, you would,” he said.

  “You’ve never heard of medical miracles?”

  “That’s what it would be, all right,” Brad agreed, then said, “Is that what it would take, Joe?”

  “What, to keep away from a stroke?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not at all.” Holt swallowed wine and said, “I’d guess we’ve caught it about as early as we can, and that’s in our favor. Have you had any other attacks like this recently?”

  “Not that I remember,” Brad said doubtfully. “But if I have—dammit, give me the word again.”

  “Anosognosia?”

  “That’s it.” Brad repeated the word aloud three times, reminding Holt once again of the reputation Brad had won during his Presidency for always having done his homework, for carrying off ad-lib press conferences with at least as much assurance and factual command as any other President, and possibly more. Brad had always hated the thought that there were things he didn’t know, and he’d always read voraciously, pumping facts into himself like a McCormick reaper gathering wheat. Now, after having finally committed anosognosia
to memory, he said, “If that’s what I have, I wouldn’t remember any other attacks, would I?”

  “You’d remember if you fainted. You might remember if you’d had problems with your right leg before.”

  Brad shook his head slowly. “I don’t believe so,” he said. “Ask Evelyn, she knows everything about me there is to know.”

  “I shall. And when do I book you into the hospital?”

  “Christ, Joe, I hate that hospital routine. Turn on the television set and see nothing but bulletins about my own condition. That can get creepy after a while.”

  Holt laughed, saying, “I bet it can. If you want, this time we’ll let you announce the statements yourself. Then, when you go back and turn on the news, you can watch yourself telling you how you are.”

  “What an idea! Joe, you’ve been reading that fellow Whatsisname, the Canadian. You know.”

  “McLuhan?”

  “That’s the one.” Brad was beaming, shaking his head, pleased, and then he stopped and frowned and said, “Is that another symptom? Forgetting that man’s name?”

  Holt paused with a final forkful of haddock halfway to his mouth. “Let’s not worry about any more symptoms,” he said. “We have enough to keep us going for a while. And will you give me a hospital date? Stall all you want, but I won’t forget it.”

  Brad grimaced, and shook his head. “You get much above fifty, Joe,” he said, ignoring the fact that Holt was above fifty, “a hospital becomes a grim place. Any time you go into it, you can’t help but feel this is the time you come out feet first.”

  “I don’t ever lie to you, Brad. This would be for tests only. And even if we decided you’d had a full-fledged stroke, and not a transient attack, you’d still be out in a few days. So when do you want to make it?”

  “I don’t know, what’s today? February twenty-fourth. I have a speech in Cleveland next week, there’s a Look reporter coming around for some damn reason—Make it some time in early March.”

  “First week in March?”

  “I’d have to be out by the fifteenth. They want me around for a party conference in Washington.”