Death Be Not Proud (13 page)

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, explaining 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.

Frances said, “Johnny has a headache. Here, talk to him. He wants to talk to you.”

I asked, “Have you much of a headache, Johnny?”

“And how! I’ve just called Connie to send over some morphine.”

Frances was very much alarmed but she did not want to alarm me; she said there was no need to hurry over, but I might call Traeger to see if the morphine was on the way. I had no premonition at this point, so far as I know, but I told Walter that if he would excuse me I would run along without coffee, since Johnny wasn’t so well. This was the first time since the period before the first operation, fifteen months before, that he had had severe pain. I called Traeger, and a drug for arresting pain, not morphine but a caffeine derivative, was indeed en route. Then I hiked back to our apartment. Johnny had taken a caffeine pill and then vomited propulsively, something we had always been told to watch for and which had never occurred before. I gave him another pill and this one stayed down. Frances told me what had happened. T o her he had said little. But she overheard him on the phone to Traeger and was dramatically shocked by the sharp command in his voice, “Send some morphine,
quick?”
It was now about 2:35
P.M.
Frances wanted me to move him from my room, where he had telephoned, back to his own room. But he seemed too exhausted to walk and he was limp and very heavy. I had a quick thought and lied. “Oh, by the way, Johnny, your papers came through from Harvard today!” He replied, “Am I admitted?” and then yawned in a relaxed, superior, lazy sort of way. Frances had been reading him
Arrowsmith.
The book lay there beside the bed, open like a broom.

Still I was not really worried. We had gone through so many crises seemingly much worse. Marie made coffee and Frances and I sipped it in the living room. I had an appointment with my dentist at four, and I had no thought of calling it off; I told Frances that I’d be back at five or so. Then I went in to say “S o long” to Johnny and I did not like the way he looked. He was very pale indeed, and the skin was cold and moist. I called Traeger at once but even then it did not occur to me that the end had come. In fact, Traeger had stepped out and when his nurse asked me if he should be located and should come over right away, I said that I didn’t think this was necessary but that I hoped he would drop in late in the afternoon, perhaps at six when he finished work. Then I went back and looked at Johnny again. He said to Frances something she could not quite make out and then something about Mr. Haynes at Deerfield, and Marie told me later that when she peeked into the room while we were having coffee, he murmured loudly “Mother” and then “Father.” I walked to the phone and called off my appointment with my dentist and the next second Traeger called back and I said, “Come right over—hurry!”

He stayed with Johnny a brief moment and took me aside, pale and with a stern expression. “He’s dying. Shall we do anything or not?”

Apparently Johnny had had a cerebral hemorrhage. That tumor had eroded a blood vessel. Of all the doctors who sketched to us so many times how the end might come, none had ever suggested that it might be this.

The rest of the afternoon is full of harsh conflicting lines and shadows. Traeger called Mount and another doctor and Mount called back and promised to rush down from Medical Center; he had just been stepping out of his office for his summer holiday. He arrived—I do not know how he could possibly have done it that fast, all the way from the George Washington Bridge and across town—before five. Johnny recognized him, which was remarkable. But once more, and for the last time, I knew everything from a doctor’s face. Mount went absolutely black and white, in blotches like a woodcut on soft paper. He took Frances across the room and whispered, “I’ m afraid Johnny’s condition has become very much worse since Dr. Traeger telephoned.” To me he said, “In my whole experience I have never known a tumor of such fierceness and rigidity.”

The ambulance men came and we moved Johnny to a nearby hospital rather than Neurological, since Mount did not think that he could survive more than a very brief trip, and the hospital was just around the corner. Everything went wrong. First there were laborious and cruel negotiations on the phone. It was as if the whole fabric of our surroundings and even the most commonplace things had broken at last under this unendurably brutal strain, as if nothing at all would work, as if everything had been torn apart. It was a kind of revolt both of nature and the animate. The emergency door was locked at the hospital; its phone switchboard went to pieces crazily; a helpless nurse did not know what to do about anything; one of the attendants downstairs was hysterical; at the end, the taxi driver who took us back reeled and drove like someone very drunk, which indeed he was.

Johnny went under oxygen, of course; he was given every known medicament that could possibly help, and a youthful doctor explored, as always with difficulty, the veins in his leg for the glucose infusion and transfusion. We got to the hospital at a little after six. Frances and I sat with Johnny or paced the hall or talked on an open terrace at the end of the corridor for a series of long, vacant hours. It was a very hot, clear, dark night. Johnny slept on his side, restfully. He never regained consciousness. He died absolutely without fear, and without pain, and without knowing that he was going to die.

At a few minutes to eleven we thought we ought to go into his room; we had stepped out on the balcony for a brief second, and presently, with infinite depth, very slowly and at spaced intervals, three great quivering gasps came out of him. He had regained color just before; he had some final essential spark of animation; he was still fighting. But now these shatteringly deep breaths, arising from something so deep down that his whole body shook and trembled, told us their irrevocable message. Someone started ringing an emergency bell. After all those months of doctors and doctors and doctors, it happened that no doctor was there at that precise moment. Not that they could have done anything. Traeger had just gone home, and he came back of course. Another doctor was in the internes’ room, and he slipped up briskly. All the doctors!—helpless flies now, climbing across the granite face of death.

Johnny died at 11:02
P.M.
Frances reached for him through the ugly, transparent, raincoat-like curtain of the oxygen machine. I felt his arms, cupping my hands around them, and the warmth gradually left them, receding very slowly upward from his hands. For a long time some warmth remained. Then little by little the life-color left his face, his lips became blue, and his hands were cold. What is life? It departs covertly. Like a thief Death took him.

Aftermath

All that is left of a life! There Johnny was, so pale, so slim and
handsome, in the tweed suit with a spot on the lapel, he always had a spot on his lapel, and a bright striped necktie— with what valor he struggled to tie that necktie in the last hopeless weeks—here he lay placidly in the small chapel full of flowers, with his face sweet and composed and without a trace, not an iota, of struggle or pain, and we said goodbye to him, Frances and I and a clustering group of friends. We said goodbye. But to anybody who ever knew him, he is still alive. I do not mean merely that he lives in both of us or in the trees at Deerfield or in anything he touched truly, but that the influence, the impact, of a heroic personality continues to exert itself long after mortal bonds are snapped. Johnny transmits permanently something of what he was, since the fabric of the universe is continuous and eternal.

People tell us that that brief noontime service was some-thing they will never forget. Frances is Jewish and at her suggestion we had a double ceremony; her friend Rabbi Newman and Mr. Neale of the Unitarian church joined to conduct the service, and in his magnificent voice Rabbi Newman read Johnny’s own short “Unbeliever’s Prayer.” Most of our close friends had scattered for the summer; their telegrams and letters poured in, but they could not get back in time. Mr. Boyden and Mr. Nichols came down from Deerfield; Mr. Matthew came from the Tutoring School and Mr. Weaver from Connecticut and Dr. Miller from Neurological and Dr. Gerson; Mary was there, and several schoolmates, and a throng of adult friends; even his dentist came. And the flowers—I have never seen such flowers! They made a foaming loveliness, many of them scarlet and white, crimson and white: I sent bright scarlet carnations because these were Frances’s favorite flower; then we saw the masses of pink and blue and tawny flowers, and a spray of golden flowers tall and spreading like a glowing bush.

When Johnny died, nature took note. There were violent squalls of hot wind, the apartment building rattled that night, and the windows shook in their steel casements. But the day of the funeral was a wonderful peaceful day, warm and with the sky very blue, clear and high and without a cloud. Frances and I drove up alone to Ferncliff and on the way back the wind came up sharply, keen and cutting but cool in the brilliant sunshine; we drove along the Hudson where we had driven with Johnny so many times, and the snapping wind under a calm sun whipped it into fresh ridges—they looked like sharp white icecaps dancing across the majestic avenue of the river.

The whys of this story, why Johnny should have been struck just in that part of him that would have been most fruitful, why his clock should have broken just at this particular time in his life, the why above all whys which is why any child should die, the whys and wherefores of the celestial bookkeeping involved, if any, I will not go into here. There are other criteria for measuring a life as well as its duration— quality, intensity. But for us there is no compensation, except that we can go to him though he cannot come to us. For others, I would say that it was his spirit, and only his spirit, that kept him invincibly alive against such dreadful obstacles for so long—this is the central pith and substance of what I am trying to write, as a mournful tribute not only to Johnny but to the power, the wealth, the unconquerable beauty of the human spirit, will, and soul.

Letters came in like an avalanche, until we counted them by the hundred. He was just a boy of seventeen; yet what an imprint he made on anybody who ever met him! There were condolences from camp counselors who had not seen him for years and from a barber in a downtown hotel; from the Negro elevator boy in my office building and the proprietors of a friendly restaurant on Madison Avenue; from playwrights, judges, politicians, old Chicago friends whom we had not seen in years, from teachers and doctors and newspaper folk, old schoolmates, several of those who had seen him graduate at Deerfield, movie people, poets, acquaintances from faroff days in Vienna, physicists, his godfather in Washington, the doormen at our apartment building, refugees from Europe, his devoted governess Milla, scores of writers, and above all people who had never met him or us—parents whose sons had also died.

Of these hundreds of communications I will give only three, all from doctors.

D
EAR
J
OHN
,

Word has just reached me of poor Johnny’s death—“He hath outsoared the shadow of our night”—what a gallant soul, and what an unfulfilled promise! The fact that this was to be expected makes it no easier to bear, and I hope that you and Mrs. Gunther know that you have all my deepest sympathy. Now I suppose we shall never know whether lithium anhydride will ionize in liquid ammonia—nor what ecstasies and sorrows might have befallen Johnny had he lived.

I wish I might have been of more help.

Sincerely and cordially,

T
RACY
P
UTNAM

D
EAR
M
R
.
AND
M
RS
. G
UNTHER:

What a heroic battle Johnny fought! A gallant spirit like his cannot be destroyed by a mechanical defect in the body which was given him.

Knowing him and thinking of his stubborn refusal to accept defeat makes me believe that that spirit will live on. For such there must be an immortality which we who tinker at the body may guess at but not understand.

You two, by your restless effort, kept him alive a year longer than should be expected. You could have done no more. It was worth while.

Sincerely,

W
ILDER
P
ENFIELD

LIKE EVERYONE WHO KNEW JOHNNY I HAD A SPECIAL PLACE IN MY HEART FOR HIM. HE WAS THE MOST GALLANT AND SOULFUL CHILD I EVER MET.

DAVID M. LEVY, M.D.

Traeger came over a few evenings after the funeral. He had the preliminary autopsy and he told us that slides from Johnny’s brain would in time be in every important neurological institute in the world, because it was unique that a child with such an affliction should have remained so comparatively well right to the end. So perhaps Johnny will have aided science after all. Small comfort! It was his courage—the indomitable quality of his simple unquestioning courage— that I hope people will remember him for—that and perhaps for his sweetness too. But what Traeger told us made us glad that he died when he did, so resolutely and peacefully, if he had to die at all, because he would probably have become blind in a short time, and perhaps he would have lost his ability to associate. Even Johnny’s gallantry could not have stood up under that. Traeger said, “He had the most brilliant promise of any child I have ever known.”