David’s second operation, to go in and fix the tube, which had stopped draining fluid, was May 21st, and there was all of it do again: the hospital sounds, the hospital smells, the hospital waiting-room furniture, the strain of waiting, the bad jokes, the silences, This time we brought our schoolbooks, for it was the beginning of finals week. but mostly we held up the walls, and griped about school, and wondered whether Nixon really did have a secret plan to end the war. We talked about pretty much everything except what we were there for.
We had been there perhaps an hour when Dr. Sachar came in, surprising me. I had known he’d talked to the Schlachters, and I had been there once when he visited David. But finals week was finals week for professors as well as students, so he couldn’t stay long. He visited, and he sat with them, and he expressed his prayers and mindfulness to them, and had a few kind words for “you boys” and left. It was a small thing, maybe, but I was touched at his kindness. Doubly touched when he reappeared at 11:30 just to reassure himself that the operation was over (which it wasn’t). I learned something of the different worlds young and middle-aged and old live in. I learned it as much by the difference in his voice and manner with the Schlachters as by anything he said. Plus, there was the difference between what he had done and what I had thought he would do. While I sat absorbing that, we learned that the operation had been successfully concluded. Another success. Why did it feel like failure? Why did it feel so much like nothing at all? Like numbness?
Somehow we got through finals, For Dennis and me, the last obstacles in four years of classes, jobs, fraternity, dating, drinking, and talk. We got through finals as we had gotten through so much else, on confidence, bluff, and a fine line of bullshit. Even as we were doing it, we laughed at ourselves and at the system we were manipulating. It could be funny to walk into an exam, read the questions knowing that there wasn’t one thing there that you really knew, and then write bluebook-length essays carefully crafted to sound like you knew more than you could say. It reminded me of the time in sophomore year I had picked up an English Lit midterm exam and laughed at the disparity between what I knew and what I was expected to know. (But, I had eked out a B in the exam.) Or the time I aced the final because its three questions referred to the only three pieces I’d read all semester.
Funny, yes. But it had the flavor of having been cheated, too. Of having cheated myself. Still, we got through finals as we had gotten through the rest, and our college career was effectively over.
Dave, still lying down in his hospital bed, looked up at me. By this time he could talk again, though haltingly. (Of course this is reconstructed, not remembered, but it went more or less like this. )
“So, greasy one. They are actually. Going to let you. Graduate. I can’t. Believe it.”
“A travesty, isn’t it? But it looks like that’s just what they’re going to do.”
“So therefore. You aren’t even. Going to show up. Next Sunday.” Dave was smiling, his smile pushed through with great effort.
“Oh, I’ll be back, just not for the ceremony. They got all that tuition money, they don’t need my presence too. I’m going to come down to tell you about my first week on the job.” I had gotten a job as news reporter in my home town, and my first day at work would be Tuesday.. My father was listening to the Schlachters praising his son.
I leaned closer. “Dave, I’ve got to go.”
“I know. Good. Luck in scenic. Vineland.”
“Thanks.” I made myself go on. “Don’t give up, Dave. It can’t lick you if you don’t give in to it, I’m positive of that.” (From this distance, it is clear that the certainty wasn’t wrong, but knowing that a thing can be done, no matter the source of the knowing, is not the same as knowing how to do it.)
“Well I. Guess we’ll see. A lot of work.”
“I know, but don’t give up, okay. I don’t want to wind up going to grad school by myself.”
That got a little smile, a tired smile. “Don’t kill yourself. On the road. Next week, Woppy. I want to hear. All about life in. The real world.”
I said, smiling, “I have the dismal feeling that it’s going to be GWU and SPE all over again. Maybe more so.”
Dad came over to see if I was ready to get on the road. I took Dave’s hand to say goodbye, shook hands with Mr. Schlachter, got a warm hug from Mrs. Schlachter, and then dad and I left. I did see Dave the following Sunday, and once or maybe twice more, and then at the end of July his parents took him back home to Iowa, and I didn’t see him again until the following March. the week he died.
In the parking lot was dad’s car, loaded with my things from college, waiting to begin the trip that would take me finally from college to whatever lay beyond.
