human potential

Our lives read like straightforward narratives, but they live more like braiding. This happens, and then that happens, and then the other happens, seemingly without follow-up, and then something else happens that incorporates them; depends upon them; makes sense of them. We look back and say, “Well sure, it’s obvious.” But it isn’t obvious until after the fact. In the year after I graduated from college, four strands braided together to move me toward a future I could not have imagined.

Looked at thematically, they would seem to have little in common: a walk in a riot zone, an early death, a science-fiction novel, a final gathering of friends. But look how they braided.

1. The news

While in college, I never gave a thought to how I would make a living afterward. I couldn’t imagine a path. Just as well. It would have been a waste of time trying to imagine the path that did open up.

In April, 1968, the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee, sparked wild rioting in black neighborhoods in cites all across the country.  The western limit of the riot zone in Washington, D.C. was only a few blocks east  of campus. I was curious. I took a walk past police lines into the riot zone, wrote up my impressions, and sent them to the editor of my hometown newspaper, who printed some of it and sent me a note asking to see me next time I was in town. A year later, I began working for his paper as news reporter.

I was still taking it for granted that I would run for Congress in 1974, at age twenty-eight, though I did nothing to prepare for that far-off day. (That was entirely typical. I was very unworldly.) Meanwhile, I threw myself into becoming a reporter.

At first, it was fun. Being a reporter is a license to kibitz. As low man on the (short) totem pole, naturally I got the most routine, unexciting assignments: hospital admissions, police blotter, night court. But it was a change from sitting in class taking notes – not to mention quite a change from working in a factory or (as in college) working at a grocery store. And gradually other things came up. I never got what you could call training, but I stumbled along, and, as I say, it was interesting.

We were an afternoon paper, which means we put it to bed midday, which meant we had all morning (starting at 7:30 a.m.) to write our stories. And since I was living in my parents’ house, and for the first two months was unmarried, often I would return to the newsroom after night court and sit and talk to Al Wallitsch. Al seemed pretty old to me, but I suppose he was in fifties. He had seen and done a lot, and read a lot (he was a particular fan of Thomas Wolfe and Ben Hecht). He was a real reporter in a way I would never be, but he seemed to like shooting the bull with me That part was fun. But it didn’t take long before disillusionment set in.

Strike one. I wasn’t there long before I got thrown out of the police chief’s office. In my defense, I was innocent, sort of. We had heard on our police scanner that a couple of cops had gotten into a shoving match with three or four black kids. Nothing major, but not the first such incident. My editor told me to see if I could find out if we were building up to a race riot. So I combed through the incident reports at the station and didn’t see anything about it. When I asked the desk sergeant, he went through an elaborate search through the flimsies and said I had everything.

So I asked the police chief, and he said everything is fine, no incidents, no information on anything happening overnight. I could see the canary feathers sticking out of his complacent lying mouth, so I said, “What about the four black kids that put a crack in the windshield of car 308 Tuesday night. That didn’t happen either?”

Ralphie shouted, “Get out of here.” (A la Steven Leacock: “Shut up,” he explained.)

By the time I got back to the newsroom, Ralphie had already talked to both editor and publisher, and they had agreed to kill the story. I was hot. I asked if we were going to put up with letting the police lie to us and kill the story. My editor said, “Ralphie’s been police chief a hell of a lot longer than you’ve been a reporter.” In retrospect, he had a point, but at the time all I could see was the silent censorship.

Strike two. The paper sent me to cover a press conference with the president of the new four-year state college they were setting up in Atlantic County. I went there thinking of myself as a rookie next to these Philadelphia-area professionals. But every single one of them asked variants of the same question: “Is the college going to concentrate on offering a relevant education?” That was the buzzword of the time, relevance. I was the only one who asked other things: What kind of students were they looking for, what did they intend the school to specialize in, what kind of special needs and opportunities did they see in the South Jersey area. These media professionals never considered asking anything beyond the universal topic du jour. I had been thinking about becoming a real journalist, because after all, I was good with words. But did I want to become like them?

Strike three. And then there was the question of favoritism, something everybody else knew about from the cradle, but that I in my innocence didn’t consider. I was reporting night court, and six kids were getting charged with possession of marijuana. One of them was a kid I had known in school, but I when I wrote down the names for the police report, it never occurred to me to leave his name off the list. It wouldn’t have been ethical. But the next day, my roundup piece included his name, but not that of one of the others. Turns out that boy’s family and the publisher’s family were close friends. From that moment, I learned how to read the news in a different way. It became clear how some stories got slanted and some were smothered. It stank, and there was nothing I was ever going to be able to do about it.

I could still do the job, more or less, but the thrill was gone.

 

David’s second operation, to go in and fix the tube, which had stopped draining fluid, was May 21^st, 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.

I saw Dr. Redding in his office. I said, very uncomfortable, “Dr. Redding, I sort of have to ask you for a favor.” I don’t know why I started out that way. I knew even as I said it that it would mislead.

“Do you?” Very dry, very reserved.

“It’s about a friend of mine, Dave Schlachter. He’s in your Negro History class.”

“Yes?”

“Well, I know Dave’s probably getting a good grade from you, he always works hard –.”

He waited me out, giving no clues. I couldn’t tell if he even knew who Dave was. It was a large class.

“Dr. Redding, we – a couple of his friends – we’re asking his professors to give him a passing grade without his having to take finals, so he can graduate.”

“And why are you doing that?”

“He’s in the hospital.” I didn’t know Dr. Redding. He was an old man, and I had only had him for the one course. I wasn’t about to give him any clues either. I said it as flatly as I could. “He isn’t going to be able to take finals. He has a brain tumor. The doctors say they can’t remove it. “

Dr. Redding seemed to be filled with indignation. “Do you mean to tell me there is a 21-year-old boy in the hospital with a brain tumor, and nobody can do anything about it?”

I couldn’t relate to his reaction. It felt as if he were blaming me. Besides, Dave was 22. “That’s about it,” I said, imitating what I imagined Dennis would say. It felt good to act hardened, tough.

I tried it with Dr. Sachar, too. I went up to him just as his class ended – it wasn’t a class I was taking – and asked if I could speak to him. He knew me, naturally. I had taken three of his courses. But he was still Sachar, brilliant, impatient, not  very approachable. I began in the same blunt, inappropriate way, saying I needed a favor. Like Dr. Redding, he stepped back, all but physically, waiting to hear the newest excuse for unacceptable work. But then he may have realized that I was not in any of his courses that semester, because I saw, or thought I saw, wariness change to guarded curiosity.

In a few words I told him about Dave’s situation. “So we’re trying to get him through his courses so he can get his degree,” I said.

“This type of request should come through his parents, I should think,” he said. Probably he was just thinking aloud, but I thought he was turning me down on a technicality. I shrugged impatiently and turned on my heel, something I would never have done ordinarily. I was a very well-mannered middle-class boy who had been taught to be polite to his elders.

Before I could take a step, Dr. Sachar said, “Just a minute, Mr. DeMarco. Tell me a few things about your friend. What hospital he is in, for a start. Where his parents are staying.” I still thought he was concerning himself with technicalities, but he had seen through the bravado to the pain.

 

“They say they don’t know how long,” I argued at supper that Friday. “How do we know it isn’t going to be 20 years?”

Dennis shrugged, skeptical, taciturn, depressed. He started to say something, changed his mind. He picked at the chicken on his plate. Andrews said, “Certainly I hope you’re right. I hope it’s fifty years! But I don’t see any realistic way we can nudge the scales. I wish I could. I hope you can convince me.”

I turned to Bill. “You certainly ought to know what I’m talking about. You know what Cayce said, mind is the builder.” Fiercely: “Let’s put our minds to building!” I could see that they weren’t merely unconvinced. They were embarrassed. “So maybe it won’t work. How do we know, if we don’t try? If the four of us put our minds to it, and we can get David to put his mind to it, do you mean to tell me that anybody can know for sure that we can’t do it? Isn’t it worth a try?”

Dennis still didn’t have anything to say. Bill cleared his throat. “After what we’ve seen this year, or I should say what you’ve seen, since I’ve been mostly providing the entertainment, I’d say we don’t know very much about what is possible and what isn’t.” He was talking about our summer’s experiments with hypnotism, where he had repeatedly come up with what seemed to be tales of past lives. “I mean, you were there. We all were. We have the sessions on tape.”

“Yes,” Dennis said, “We know the sessions happened, but what we don’t know is what they mean.”

“That’s my point. Nobody can say. We just don’t know enough.”

Andrews said, laughing, that his grandmother had always said you can do anything you set your mind to, “but I’m not sure this is the kind of thing she was talking about.” In a conciliatory way, “Still, you read about people dying when they want to and not a moment before. I suppose you could look at this as a special case of the will to live.”

I said, “I was talking to Dave this afternoon, and I put it to him that maybe it all comes down to how hard he’s willing to fight.” I had waited until his parents were out of the room, getting an early supper. “He said,  that under the circumstances, he was in no position to care who prayed for him, even him. ” I tried to carry Dave’s humorous intent, but somehow it only emphasized the odds against him. “Anyway,” I said, it’s worth a try. Isn’t it worth a try?”

 

I can furnish certain exact phrases, even sentences, from what Dr. Tenley said, because for weeks afterward, at times chose my no logic I could ever figure out, odd bits would play back. Finally I wrote down what I was hearing, and they ceased coming.

“David is afflicted with a tumor about the size of a pea, located on the pineal gland [sketching rapidly on the chalkboard], which is …”

“The paralysis and vision-blurring he experienced were due to the pressure exerted on the brain by the growing tumor, pus fluid which has been building up in the area. We have drained the fluid and removed the pressure for the moment …”

“… whether there is a high degree of malignancy. Quite possibly it may prove to be benign. However …”

“… inserted a tube which will ease the pressure by allowing the fluid to drain. This is, however, only a staying process.”

“Due to the position of the tumor, it is inoperable [inoperable, inoperable, inoperable] and must eventually prove terminal.” (Memory says that this statement was followed by a long blank silence, but I don’t think it was, really.)

“It could be two days, or two years, or possibly longer, but the tumor must eventually grow to the point that it will fatally affect the operation of the brain …”

“The tube which we have inserted to drain the fluid and thus to relieve the pressure on the brain will give David some time. He will probably walk out of the hospital in two or three weeks. But I must caution you against any sort of optimism. There is no hope of ultimate recovery….”

And that was that. The efficient, impersonal doctor (so he seemed to me) said, “I am very sorry,” the first and only crack in the professional façade that we were allowed to see. Mrs. Schlachter was crying, silent devastated tears. The rest of us were stony-faced. Dennis met my eyes once and then we each looked somewhere else. I realized that my teeth were clenched. David was going to die? Like hell he was!

 

Somebody would have to tell the house, and Dennis didn’t want to be the one. I decided it might as well be me. I thought I could get through it okay. But I was supposed to go to work at four, and it was already nearly 3:30. I called the house and told one of the brothers that I was calling a special house meeting in half an hour and asked him to post a notice on the bulletin board and otherwise pass the word.  I called Mr. Berkeley, the store manager, and told him I’d be an hour late to work and I’d tell him why when I got there. Then we left the hospital, and I wondered if  the Schlachters were sorry or relieved to be by themselves awhile. I could feel the pain it gave them, seeing ordinary life going on around them.

Ordinary life going on. Walking down G Street, we found ourselves in the middle of crowds of students changing classes. It was hard to realize that for them it had been just a normal Monday. It was still considerably less than 24 hours since we had returned from the Jersey shore.

Ordinarily I would have no business calling a house meeting, not being one of the officers, but the brothers knew it had to concern Dave’s operation. When I walked into the house, .it looked like a real house meeting, only quieter. Every seat was taken, and several brothers were sitting on the floor or leaning on the wall around the entryway.

I thought it would be easy, and at first it was. I used my tough-guy, man-of-the-world voice, my great stone face.  I told them I’d make it short.

“You know they operated on Dave today. It was a success in one sense: They removed the pressure and that removed the paralysis. But he has a tumor, a damned little thing the size of a green pea, they say, and it’s in a place they can’t get at. So, they can’t take it out.”

The brothers were silent.

“The doctor said it could start growing again at any time, and when it does” (I paused to steady my voice) “he’s dead. A couple of days, a couple of months, a couple of years. And there isn’t anything anybody can do about it.” Sudden tears, unexpected, blinding me. I walked out of the room, ashamed to let them see me cry.

 

Fortunately, we all had immediate problems to tend to. The Schlachters needed to rent a place nearer the hospital, and Dale and Bill offered to help them find it. Dennis and I would concentrate on getting Dave graduated. He’d take three of Dave’s professors and I would take the other two, professors I had had classes with.

We were tired before the waiting even began. We had gotten up at 7 a.m. Sunday, had driven five hours to arrive at 11 p.m.,  and hadn’t gotten out of the hospital till after 1 a.m. Monday. It was close to 2 a.m. before I escaped into sleep, and it was only a little after 7 a.m. when my alarm woke me up. And Dale had spent the night sleeping in his clothes on one of the couches in the living room.

We got up, washed our faces, had a tense, silent breakfast of eggs and toast and coffee at the People’s Drug Store counter, and were reassembled in the fourth floor waiting room – still outside of visiting hours – by 7:30. Dannis was there when we arrived. The Schlachters were in with David.

Three orderlies came by with a bed on wheels. They came back with Dave lying on it. I got the merest glimpse of him. They had shaved his head.

The Schlachters came out to the waiting room, because another patient was being admitted to Dave’s semi-private room. Now the little waiting room held six of us, two in their sixties, four in their twenties. And now we really began to wait.

Silence wasn’t very comfortable. Neither was speech. Long spells in which nobody said anything, then someone would make a comment and someone would seize on it, and someone would extend it, and extract a reply. When it could no longer be maintained, the painful silence would resume as if it had never been interrupted, as in fact it hadn’t.

At nine, we asked the nurse at the desk if the operation had started. She didn’t know and said she couldn’t find out.

It didn’t take long for the chairs to become very uncomfortable. “Of course you couldn’t expect the chairs to be comfortable,” Dale said, getting up to stretch. “This is a waiting room, nobody could have expected that people might have to wait in them.” It earned him some feeble smiles, which is pretty much what all our attempts at gallows humor met that day.

Was it ten-thirty? Possibly later. No word.

“The décor isn’t much,” Toutant said, “but you have to admit, at least we don’t have to pretend to be awake while somebody is lecturing.”

Eleven. I started to pace, then thought it might annoy the others. Stopped. Started again, unconsciously. Stopped. Made myself sit down.

“You boys are missing a lot of class.”

“Yeah,” I said, “Isn’t it great?”

Andrews said this was the closest thing to a legitimate excuse for cutting classes we had ever had.

I suddenly realized that I was scheduled to work at the Safeway Jr. from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. I wondered how I would manage to stay awake.

Eleven thirty. Dennis stretched, and looked at his watch for the thousandth time.

Noon. Mr. Schlachter straightened out of his chair and announced that he and “the boys” were going to have lunch across the street.

Breakfast at People’s. Lunch at People’s. a monumentally joyless lunch. We stretched it out as long as we could, and still we were back in 40 minutes. No word.

Mrs. Schlachter said she was going to get something to eat downstairs. She was back in 15 minutes. She smiled wanly and said she’d found she wasn’t very hungry.

More waiting. By now I hated the walls, the chairs, the public-address system.

One-thirty. Dennis got up abruptly, left the room. He was back a moment later. “I know that nurse,” he said. “She’s in one of my classes. I asked her to find out how long now.”

Andrews snorted. “That figures. The amazing thing, when you come to think of it, is that it has taken this long for Crabb to find a woman here he knows.”

We all grinned at that, tired, half-hearted grins.

Dennis got up again when he saw her coming, and went out to meet her. He returned looking a little less tense. “She’s an O.R. nurse,” he said, “so she could go on in. She said they’re finishing up now. ” Mrs. Schlachter redoubled her attack on her handkerchief, but I thought, maybe this was good news. Hadn’t they said it was life or death? And he wasn’t dead. And they had been working on him for a long time, long enough to find the problem and get rid of it.

More waiting.

Finally at 2:30, Dr. Tenley entered the room and asked to see the Schlachters in the consultation room. When we all rose to accompany them, he said this was for family members only. Mr. Schlachter said, “After last night and today, they’re family,” and Dr. Tenley gave in, and we all filed into the little consultation room with its blackboard, and its grey walls, four incongruous red plastic chairs. Bill and I stood against the wall as the doctor explained. It wasn’t good news.

As soon as the elevator doors closed and I had had time to count to 30, I walked over to the nurses. “My name is Frank Schlachter, and this is my cousin Bill Toutant. My brother David is in 406. Our parents are flying in from Iowa and should have landed at National just about now. The doctor said it would be all right for us to wait until they get here.”

I don’t know if they believed me, but they didn’t make us leave. Maybe we looked shocked enough, strained enough, that they thought I might be telling the truth. So we began to wait.

Dennis and Mr. and Mrs. Schlachter got to the hospital about 40 minutes later. They were both shorter than Dave. Mr. Schlachter looked very tired, very old. Dave’s mother’s face was very set and determined, rigidly composed.

“Frank DeMarco and Bill Toutant,” Dennis said, introducing us.

“Hello, boys,” Mr. Schlachter said, making an effort to smile and shake hands. “It is very good of you to be here.”

“David has talked to us about you,” Mrs. Schlachter said as I shook her hand. But she didn’t seme able to say anything else. The formalities accomplished, we stood there. It was awkward. “The doctor is on the way up,” Dennis said. “Mr. Schlachter had him notified when we arrived. I have to go move the damned car again.” He left.

I was avoiding the nurses who had just heard me introduced to my “parents.” They suggested to the Schlachters that we wait in the waiting room, tastefully decorated with a few hard red molded-plastic chairs and a table and some magazines of no interest. We sat. Mr. Schlachter tried to make conversation. Mrs. Schlachter did too, glancing at us and at the corners of the room and at the ceiling, and all the while twisting a handkerchief in her hands. Every time we heard a noise that might be an elevator or the door from the stairs, we all looked up.

Mr. Schlachter roused himself. “But where did Dennis go?”

“He had to move the car,” I said. “He didn’t want to get it towed.”

“Why didn’t he just put it in a lot?” He started to reach for his wallet, I think..” It can’t be so much.” I told him Dennis would park the car behind the fraternity house and wouldn’t notice the few blocks he would have to walk back to the hospital. “Well, the next time, he can put it in the lot here. All that walking it isn’t necessary.” I realize now that he was grasping for something  practical to occupy his mind. After a few minutes: “This close to exams, you shouldn’t be studying?”

“Oh, I’ve gotten through four years this way,” I said. “Too late to change now.”

“But this is important for your future. And you, Bill Toutant, the music maker. David says you are going to be our new Beethoven. You shouldn’t be studying?”

“I’m all right,” Bill said, uncharacteristically serious. “Music isn’t something you can cram for. You know it or you don’t.”

“Still, I hope you boys aren’t using up time here that you should be using to study.”

Silence again. Bill asked about their flight, and Mr. Schlachter outlined their route in detail. Neither Bill nor I nor Mrs. Schlachter nor he himself, really, absorbed a word he said.

The doctor arrived. He didn’t say Bill and I had to leave, so we stayed. He and David’s parents went off toward David’s room.

“We got up at seven in Avalon,” I said, “and here we are.” Bill nodded unhappily. Dennis arrived, and we told him that the doctor was in with Dave’s parents. Andrews arrived, all the way form their apartment on a D.C. Transit bus in the middle of the night. We filled him in on the little we knew, and we waited, and waited some more.

The doctor came out of Dave’s room with Dave’s parents, said a final few words, and disappeared into the elevator again. We introduced the Schlachters to Dale.

Nobody sat down. “Boys,” Mr. Schlachter said without preamble, “it is time you should get to bed. Dr. Tenley is planning to do exploratory surgery tomorrow morning.” Absently, almost off-handedly, he said, “He thinks there is some kind of growth pressing on David’s brain. He said the operation could not possibly be more critical.”

“He said it is life or death,” Mrs. Schlachter said, almost choking it out.

Dennis said he would go get the car, and would be sure to get them back to the hospital by eight.

“Seven thirty,” Mrs. Schlachter said.

“Tell you what,” Andrews said, thinking quickly. “I’ll stay at the fraternity house. That way, you’ll have two beds at the apartment. Dennis, just remember to bring me a change of clothes and my toothbrush, will you?”

Sure,” Dennis said softly. We were uncommonly thoughtful and kind to each other that week.

Dave

It was Sunday nigh, late.t May, 1969, the final month of my college career at George Washington. I was standing in the empty living room of the fraternity house when Dennis came in. “Yo, Crabb,” I said. “What happened to you guys?” He and Dave Schlachter had been expected to join us – Dale, my roommate Bill, me, my fiancé, and my brother Paul and sister Margaret – for a weekend at my uncle’s place on the Jersey shore. But they hadn’t come.

I expected a casual apology, or sincere regrets, or a good-natured insult, any or all.  Instead, he came to a dead halt and chilled me with a sober question. “Nobody told you?”

“We just got in three minutes ago,” I said. “I haven’t seen anybody. We dropped Dale off at the apartment. We were going to tell Dave and you what you’d missed, but you weren’t there.” I could hear the words rattling out, and I made myself stop. “Dennis, what’s wrong?”

He was looking at me steadily, almost without blinking. “Dave is in the hospital. I just came over here to get his car. I have to pick up his parents at National, their flight comes in at 11:25.”

Flying in from Iowa? “What the hell happened?”

“He started seeing double.”

I said, “I suppose that explains the headaches, but what’s he doing in the hospital? Why not the eye doctor?”

“Frank, when people start seeing double, doctors think brain tumors.” He started down the hall toward the back door. “I took us to the hospital in Dave’s car, but I had to leave it here or I would have had to move it every couple of hours.”

Apparently Dave had gone to bed without supper on Friday night, plagued by another of the monster headaches that had haunted him all semester. Saturday morning, he had awakened seeing double, and had had Dennis dial the phone so he could talk to his parents, who of course had told him to get seen right away. Dennis had helped him get trousers and a sweater over his pajamas, and had put socks and loafers on his feet, and had driven him to the emergency room at GW Hospital, a mile or two from their apartment, though only a few blocks from campus. After an endless wait in the emergency room, the doctors had admitted Dave “for observation.”

I said, “So why are his parents coming? Why aren’t they waiting for something definite?”

His mouth was a harsh expressionless line. “Because I called them and told them that now Dave can’t even move.”

“Jesus.” That was all I seemed able to say. Dennis got into Dave’s car. “You want company?”

He hesitated. “Yeah, I guess I do, but it would be nice to have somebody at the hospital until I get his parents there.”

“You mean Dave’s alone? Where are all our beloved brothers? Do they even know?”

He turned the key in the ignition. “Of c—. I don’t know. It seems like I told somebody, but I couldn’t absolutely swear to it.”

“Okay, I’ll get the word out, and I’ll get over to the hospital. Got to tell Bill and Dale, for sure.”

“I left Andrews a voice-mail message. He’s probably on his way.” He started to back the car.

“Hey Dennis, what room? And will they even let me in, do you think?”

“They might, if you think up a good enough story. Room 406.”

“406, okay. Dennis –” It embarrassed me, but I said it anyway. “Be careful, okay? We don’t need any more complications.”

“Yeah,” he said, and he was gone.

Visiting hours were long over, of course, so when Bill and I walked into the lobby, we went right for the stairs instead of standing waiting for the elevator. If anybody noticed us, they didn’t say anything.  We stepped out onto the fourth floor hallway, entirely too close to the nurses’ station. There were two nurses sitting there, one writing, one filing. We walked off in the other direction. I concentrated on trying to make my footsteps sound authoritative and confident.

Fortunately, 406 was just two doors down, its door half open. It could just as easily have been  on the far side of the nurses’ station. Carefully, quietly, we entered the darkened room. A figure standing beside the near bed looked up.. a doctor. Sharply: “Yes?”

“Th- that’s my brother,” I said. Well, he was, wasn’t he?

“Wait outside, please,” the doctor said firmly. When he came out, he was looking tired. “Now then, how did you boys get in here?”

“Doctor, that’s my brother in there,” I said again. “His – our parents live in Iowa. They’re are on the way in, but I don’t want him to have to wait for them alone. We won’t make any noise, and we won’t disturb him.”

He looked at me from the height of 40 or 50 years. “His brother?”

“Yessir. I’m visiting him this week.”

One side of his mouth turned up, just a bit, skeptically. “And I suppose this is another brother?”

“Cousin, sir,” Bill said promptly, all sincerity and humility.

“No doubt. Well, boys, listen to me. Your – ah – relative is very sick. He is much too sick to have visitors at the moment. He needs all his strength. Your seeing him can’t do him any good and might easily do harm. Do your understand? Your wanting to be here with him does you credit, very commendable – but you cannot see him. I suggest you go home.”

He had been walking toward the nurses station, us following. I said, “Thank you, doctor,” for the nurses benefit. “We understand.”

“Yes, well, nurse, just so there is no question about it, the patient in 406 is not to receive visitors. Good night, boys.” He stabbed the elevator’s “down” button and did not insist that we accompany him. Later, thinking about it, I took that to be an extraordinarily kind gesture, but maybe he wasn’t going to the ground floor, or maybe he figured it wasn’t his business to act as policeman, so long as we stayed out of Dave’s room.