by Julius Fast
Copyright 1969 by Julius Fast
All rights reserved
Second Printing
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-85112
For Barbara, who is telepathic with no errant gene
The League of Grey-Eyed Women
Chapter One
From the very beginning, in a distant corner of his mind, Jack Freeman had known what the tests would show, but he had pushed the knowledge aside, refusing to accept or believe it. Now there was no alternative to belief except refuge in fantasy, and he knew he was too strong for that.
He took a little cigar out of his inside jacket pocket and lit it, drawing in the smoke gratefully, then staring at the match. "I'm glad you leveled with me."
Dr. Turel spread his hands helplessly. "What choice did I have? If you had a wife or a family, I might have asked them first. A lot of people want the truth kept from them—a lot of people should have the truth kept from them."
"I've spent my life avoiding the truth," he said slowly, trying to keep any bitterness out of his voice. "At my death I think I should face up to it." He hadn't stumbled over the word death, and he drew some small comfort out of that. His cigar had gone out and his hand shook as he lit it again. "I suppose there's no need to give up smoking now." The joke fell flat.
Had the truth really penetrated, or was this complete lack of emotion stunned shock? He had just been given his death sentence. A man should react to that, with disbelief, with terror or fear—he felt nothing.
"If I could offer you any hope," Dr. Turel went on slowly, "some change, even some farfetched possibility..."
"What about surgery?"
"It's too far gone for that, Jack. It's metastasized in too many areas."
"What about drugs? I keep reading about chemotherapy." Wonderingly, he asked himself how he could sit there so calmly discussing his death.
After a long silence Dr. Turel said, "There are pain-killers. After a week or two you'll start to need them. But nothing has proved effective against this type of cancer."
"What about radiation therapy?"
"We can use it palliatively. The results are sometimes worse than the cancer, and at best it's a poor stopgap. It might give you a week or two more." As the doctor talked, Jack noticed the fine sweat that covered his forehead, his constant handling of the plastic paperweight on the desk. "If I'm honest, I must be cruel. You have two months, at the outside three. Not anything that's known to medicine today can change that—or prolong it. We can help with the pain and make the end easier to bear. There are tranquilizing agents..."
"To make me think I don't mind dying?" Jack closed his eyes, his face suddenly drawn. "I mind it." He stubbed out the cigar violently. "What do I do now? Try to crowd a lifetime into two months?"
"I'm sorry, Jack." The doctor leaned back, his deeply tanned face contrasting with his thatch of white hair. "What can I say? It's an agony for me to even tell you this. But I'm not the one who's sentencing you. Don't make me feel that I am! What can I tell you? Can I hold out hope that doesn't exist?"
"No." He chewed his lip, suddenly sorry for the doctor in front of him. He could see the clenched fists, the tightness around the mouth. A part of him wanted to help, to make things easier for Turel, but another part reacted with anger born of desperation. What the hell was Turel's guilt compared to his own problem?
"Shall I try another specialist?" he persisted. "Is there any point, any possibility that you're not up on the latest drugs?"
"I'm not wrong, Jack. I've taken enough biopsies to know that." Suddenly he burst out, "If it were thirty years from now, even twenty! We're on the edge of a breakthrough in cancer. Stiener's work could be leading there, but it's too soon, too damn soon!"
"What about Krebiozin?"
Turel wiped the sweat from his forehead. "Jack, if you must have hope, go on hoping. I guess men must live by it, but believe me. There is nothing that can help. There's nothing medicine can do. I can't offer you even the ghost of hope. The pain will get worse. There'll be no letup, but we can control it with drugs. I respect you, Jack, and I've been this honest because I feel a man has the right to face his own death. This last month or two belongs to you, Jack. I wouldn't take it away with a lie or a deception, and I won't with false hope."
Jack sat there in silence for a long while. Then he stood up. "Who's Stiener?"
"A Canadian geneticist who's working with DNA. But it's experimental work. There are others, on the verge—there isn't time." He looked down at his hands on the desk. "My mother died of pernicious anemia six months before they discovered the factors of Castle. She'd be alive today if she had lived six months more."
Jack took his topcoat and walked to the door. "How much longer would I have to live for a cure?" The doctor didn't answer, and Jack opened the door, then turned with an effort and managed a smile.
"I'm sorry. Believe me, I know what a hell of a thing this must be for you." Dr. Turel shook his head. "See me again in three days. Make an appointment with Miss Ellis."
"Why? What will three days do?"
Jack closed the door behind him, and Maury Turel shook his head and drew in a deep breath, letting it out with a heavy sigh. He reached out and absently handled the twelve-sided plastic paperweight one of the drug companies had sent him. We all die, each one of us, sooner or later. While you could, you held off death, or you made life easier to live. If death came tomorrow or in a month, was a man any deader than if it came twenty or thirty years from now?
He ran his fingernail over the dates cut into the plastic of the paperweight, suddenly aware of what he was handling. November, December, and with some luck, January. Two months, perhaps three. He put the weight down with a grimace of distaste. It wasn't the fact of death. It was knowing when you would die. Some things must never be known. The date of a man's death was one.
He had read an article in the New England Journal of Medicine only two weeks ago. "What to Tell the Terminal Patient." So calm, so logical and with so much dignity. But it was all a facade, the calm and dignity of the funeral home, the scent of flowers and dark-suited men to hide the stink of death. What the hell did any of them know?
In the waiting room Jack Freeman stopped at the desk automatically. Because he had always obeyed a doctor's order, he made an appointment with the receptionist.
Outside it was a crisp, cold autumn day and he was fifteen minutes past the allotted time for lunch. He flagged a cab and settled back with a little groan. The pain in his side, the thing that had started this whole business, was still there, and he hadn't even asked the doctor for something to get rid of it.
But maybe it wasn't to be gotten rid of? Maybe that was the point—an annoying, nagging pain that would spread and grow and eventually consume his entire being. Were the months ahead going to be like that?
Two months. Two months of life. Sixty days. What did you do in sixty days? What could you begin to do?
The cab arriving at the office building cut off his train of thought, and he welcomed the interruption. He rushed into the building and just managed to catch an express to the eighteenth floor. Miss Winkler, his pretty little secretary, was fussing with the papers on his desk, and she looked up at the clock with exasperation. "You forgot about it. I knew you would. You deliberately blocked it out."
"Stop fussing and leave off the penny analysis. What did I forget?" He hung his coat on the clothestree and sat down at the desk. "What did I block out?"
"Today's meeting. The new product conference. Dr. Fleming flew in from Chicago, and Mr. Mills and the copywriters are in the conference room already."
"Oh, damn! I did block it out. Where's the ag
enda?"
"I've got all the papers ready and a few embarrassing pertinent questions for you to ask. I've researched three of the products, and the premenstrual formulation is an old dog with an amphetamine added."
"You're an angel." He gathered the papers together and hurried out the door, Miss Winkler rushing behind him. "Now don't forget, if Mr. Mills is in one of his good moods you can push just about anything through, but for heaven's sake, watch out for that junior copywriter, Elkins."
He walked through the corridor quickly, wincing at the pain in his side, then he paused for a moment outside the conference room. He stared at the mass of papers in his hand, then, drawing a deep breath, he pushed the door open and walked in.
The long teak table was carefully set up with pitchers and water glasses, fresh yellow pads and sharpened pencils, and a scattering of men. As he nodded greetings and sat down, he realized that they were all turned out of the same mold, all with the same dark, tight suits, the same muted ties, the same hair cuts and cautious faces—"And you," he told himself sourly, "are one of the assembly liners."
Evans Mills, white-haired and heavyset, was cut from a different pattern, but a no less conventional one. "You're late, Jack," he stated mildly, glancing up at the wall clock.
"Sorry. I wanted to check my notes on some of the product researching," he lied automatically. Then, glancing down at the questions Marion had outlined, "This premenstrual formulation, now—" He let his voice trail off as he sat down. There was a flurry of life among the copywriters as they sensed trouble in his voice.
Mills pursed his lips, reluctant to let the reprimand die. "We've got a research staff to take care of that, Jack."
"When I want an adequate job done, I do it myself," he mouthed the cliché blandly as he spread out his papers. "If the research staff had picked up the problem in the first place—"
"What problem?" Elkins, a lean, tight-faced young man with tired eyes, looked up sharply. "Just what is the problem with the premenstrual formulation?"
"That's later on the agenda," Mills interrupted. "Let's start at the beginning. Ah!" The door opened and Dr. Fleming came in, his tweed suit, curved pipe and general air of uncertainty completely out of place in the conference room.
And he, Jack decided with a sigh, is even more of a stereotype than the rest of us.
Dr. Fleming's lateness received no reprimand from Mills; his position as the agency's Medical Director put him in a different category. The meeting proceeded as usual, as a hundred other meetings were proceeding, Jack thought, in God-knows-how-many-other advertising agencies, the jockeying for position, the alignment and realignment of forces, the subtle attacks and fencing and the not-so-subtle cuts.
Mills, the grizzled bear, watched the pack fight among themselves, while Dr. Fleming (the owl?) sat wisely by and rendered judgment on each clash.
And what role did he have? Where did he belong? Surely outside the wolf pack, and yet with his nonsense about the premenstrual product he attacked first? Wasn't it always attack first— let them defend!
He remembered Dr. Maury Turel's statement. "A lot of people want the truth kept from them."
And he had answered, "I've spent my life avoiding the truth."
"And," he added grimly, "you will keep it from yourself for the rest of your life, for those brief months you have left."
He felt a sudden wave of nausea, a conviction that if he sat here for another moment, said another meaningless word, he would be violently, physically sick.
He stood up and gathered his papers together while a surprised hush fell over the conference table. He was halfway to the door before Mills rallied. "Where the hell are you going, Jack?"
He paused and looked back at them, and the antagonism and depth of feeling of a few seconds past washed out of him and he felt nothing but a confused pity for all of them. "I'm bored, Mills," he said softly, "just bored stiff with it all. I've got to get out." He looked at the papers in his hand, and then tossed them on the conference table in front of Dr. Fleming. "Here are some questions about the new products." He hesitated, wanting to add, "Actually my secretary researched them for me." But even now he couldn't go that far. He shrugged, then turned and walked out of the room.
He felt a curious lightheadedness as he walked down the corridor to his office, but as he reached to open the door his hand shook. Miss Winkler looked up, startled. "Is it over already?"
He looked at his desk and the walls, at the David Stone Martin drawings he had framed five years ago, at the brightly colored sales chart—seven years. Seven meaningless years of boredom, frustration and—yes, whoredom! Where, by all that was holy, had it gotten him?
"I was bored, honey, and I walked out." He took down his topcoat and slipped it on, then smiled down at her. "I need some fresh air." Then, as she still didn't answer, just stared at him in bewilderment, he bent and kissed her lightly. "Take care."
He took the elevator down and walked out into the wild flurry of Lexington Avenue in the Fifties at one-fifteen. He hesitated for a moment, then cut crosstown and walked along slowly, staring at the shop windows and the hurrying crowds, till he reached Fifth Avenue, a few blocks from the park.
Passing the Plaza he hesitated, thinking of the cool of the Oak Room and the clean, dry taste of a Martini. Then he shook his head and walked on, into the park. In the space of a few feet he stepped into another world, the grassy lawns and trees with autumn foliage, the sky somehow a little bluer, the air cleaner and fresher.
He sat down on a bench and stared at the little pond with its flock of ducks. One or two months. He looked up at the trees, at the sky beyond them. Was this how he'd spend them? In self-satisfying little revolts against his job—against what else?
He thought of Anita, and as always the thought brought pain. After five years he could still feel pain when he remembered. And yet it had been his fault.
"I don't know why, Jack. It hasn't worked out—what else can I say?" She had been packing before the trip to Reno, the baby safely off at her mother's, everything arranged, neat and logical.
He had sat on the edge of the bed watching her, his eyes sick, half scared and half relieved that it was ended. "Nothing that I can say or do will change your mind?"
She straightened up. "You don't want me, Jack. You haven't ever wanted me. Why should you want to change my mind now?"
"There's the baby."
She nodded. "That was a mistake too, wasn't it? Neither of us was ready." She ran her hand through her hair and looked around the room distractedly. "Everything was wrong, from the very beginning."
He couldn't keep the hurt out of his voice. "We had some good times."
"Sure we did." She stared at him a moment, then smiled, a smile that didn't pass her lips. "You'll be a lot happier single, Jack."
He hadn't been any happier—but no less happy either. W T hat he couldn't bear to face was that it hadn't made any difference. He had seen his little girl at first, but then, when Anita married again, he had agreed to having her second husband adopt the child, and he had stopped even those rare visits.
Five years of living alone, like water running out between his fingers, and now this. But how do you end a life, he thought brutally, that had never been lived?
He slammed his hand down against the hard boards of the bench and then cried out at the pain. He felt. Damn it, he could feel pain, he could be hurt. He had known fear and joy too— the luxury of the sun on his bare body, the comfort of bed, the taste of good food, the agony of perfect music and the joy of women—all of it felt and absorbed, and yet none of it had mattered.
Had there ever been anything he could not do without? Anything he had ever wanted so badly that he would stop at nothing to get it? No, not really, not even as a little kid, not the toys at Christmas or birthdays—nothing that had really mattered.
He saw a little grey woman in a dirty torn coat and carpet slippers patter down to the lake's edge and feed bread crumbs to the ducks. Next to him, on a bench that cau
ght the weak sunlight, a gaunt, drunken man slept noisily, one hand hanging down, the palm cupped on the ground.
Suddenly chill in the autumn air, he stood up and started walking through the park, heading west around the zoo and along the broad Mall. The afternoon sun cast the shadows of the statuary and trees across the path in hard black strips, black shadows and sunlight, alternating like the rungs of a ladder, till he passed the music shell and went down the flight of broad stone steps at the Bethesda Fountain through the dark of an underpass and out into the cold sunlight spilling down on the red brick plaza, a great stone fountain and an enormous green bronze angel with furled wings poised high above the fountain.
The light hurt his eyes and he narrowed them, unconsciously pressing his hand against his side to ease the pain. Where now? The plaza ended at the lake shore, two or three steps leading down and into the water. Walk down and float away, arms outstretched—how easy!
He shivered. No, not easy. The cold sunlight made death ridiculous, abstract and far off. Death was for the night, for darkness and warmth, where the shame of it would be hidden, and in the end he supposed it would come to that.
He felt a cold breathlessness touch his chest. He knew enough of terminal cancer to anticipate the pain. Would he have the guts to end it then?
Abruptly he looked at his watch. Two-thirty. But surely he had been walking for hours. What street was he at? He looked around the deserted plaza uneasily, righting down a quick anxiety. The job, the New Products Development meeting, the hundred and one loose ends that must be tied up.
"But I won't," he said softly, the words falling into the frozen sunlight. "There are no ends worth tying up, no job that really has to be done."
He started walking again, towards the avenue. That was the hell of it, the hardest thing to bear. His life would end and no one would be the sadder, nor would it matter. A stone dropped in the water without a ripple. Anita would read about it, or Carol, his daughter, and they might talk about him for a moment—let it be without malice!
