The Prize (7 page)

‘Here we is, Professor.’ The chauffeur had spoken, and they had come to a halt before the Society building. Stratman emerged from his reverie, opened the door, and saw that the rain had ceased. He studied the leaden sky briefly, then closed the door, climbed the four stone stairs, and entered the foyer of the Society building.

The moment that he was inside, he heard his name. The switchboard girl removed her earphones. ‘Professor Stratman—your niece has called three times. She seems terribly anxious to get hold of you.’

Stratman felt his heart thump. Emily had called three times. Unusual and ominous. He asked the girl to connect him, and as he started for the telephone booth, he realized that his heart was still hammering and that Dr. Ilman would disapprove, for the T waves had been inverted, and he now had ‘a condition’. Closing himself inside the booth, he removed the receiver and listened. What he heard was an engaged signal. He opened the booth and put his head out, questioningly.

The girl shrugged. ‘Busy.’

Stratman left the booth. ‘Keep trying.’

For ten minutes, as Stratman paced the inlaid floor, the operator tried his number, and every time, the response was a busy signal. Stratman’s mind worried: she had fainted, and the phone was off the hook; someone was using the phone to summon an ambulance; the police were on the phone ordering all squad cars on the alert.

At last, he could endure the suspense no longer. ‘Send for my car,’ he commanded the operator.

In short minutes, the automobile was waiting for him. The drive from the Society building along
Peachtree Road
to the five-room bungalow on
Ponce de Leon Avenue
that he and Emily rented was fifteen miles. To Stratman, it seemed fifty miles, especially since the chauffeur refused to speed over the rain-slicked asphalt highway.

It was twenty-five minutes before he saw the bungalow. Then, as they approached, he saw Emily. She stood on the small porch, a scarf around her head, a leather windbreaker over her blouse and skirt. He felt the knot in his abdomen unwind. She was alive. She was well. Nothing else mattered.

As they drew up before the bungalow, he dismissed the chauffeur. Stepping out of the car, he saw Emily running down the walk towards him.

‘Uncle Max—!’ she cried.

He slammed the door and waited, again concerned. But he saw that she was beaming, and that was unusual, too.

‘Uncle Max!’ She reached him breathlessly, and blurted the next. ‘You won the Nobel Prize!’

He stood, head cocked sideways, uncomprehending. ‘What? What? I do not—
wiederhole
,
bitte
—’

‘You won! The telegram came an hour ago!’ She fished inside the windbreaker and showed it to him.

He held it in both hands, close to his nose, for his spectacles were still in his pocket.

‘Oh—Uncle Max—imagine—the Nobel Prize!’

He lowered the telegram and looked at her, dazed.

‘I—I cannot believe it,’ he said.

‘But it’s true. All the newspapers know. They’re all in the living-room right now—reporters, photographers—they say it was announced from
Stockholm on the news wires.’

He tried to focus on the telegram again. ‘Fifty thousand three hundred dollars,’ he murmured. ‘
Gott im Himmel
.’

‘You’re rich—’

‘We are rich,’ he corrected, meticulously. And, at once, he realized that he could call the Secretary of Defence tomorrow and turn down the new job—that it was not necessary any more, that he had won Emily’s buffer against life, that Walther would rest in peace, that he could keep his old sedentary cubbyhole with its promise and contentment—and he knew that Dr. Ilman would be pleased.

Suddenly, something occurred to him. ‘Where do we get this prize? In
Stockholm?’

‘Oh, yes. You must go. The newspapermen said so. It’s a rule you must pick up the money within one year—except if you’re sick—or you can’t have it. Several Germans couldn’t pick it up once, because of Hitler, and later, they couldn’t get it.’

Stockholm
was a long way, Stratman realized. The journey, the activities, the ceremony would be strenuous. By all rights, he should consult Dr. Ilman first. But then he remembered what awaited him in
Stockholm, and he saw Emily’s enthusiastic face, and he knew that no imminent heart attack or stroke could keep him from the prize that would solve everything.

He took Emily firmly by the elbow and started her toward the house. ‘Tell me,
liebes Kind
,’ he said happily, ‘what are you going to wear when you curtsy before the King?’

It was 1.51 of a hot, sunny afternoon when the telegram from the Swedish Embassy in
Washington,
D.C.
, automatically typed itself out on the tape of the electric receiving machine in the telegraph room located on
Colorado Street
in
Pasadena,
California
.

The harassed fat girl at the machine hardly read the message, as she snipped it free. Expertly, using the cutter on her finger, she sliced the message into short lines, moistened them, and neatly glued them to the blank. The message formally prepared for delivery, and before her, she suddenly realized the import of its contents.

‘Migawd,’ she said aloud, ‘twenty-five thousand dollars!’

The two men at the counter overheard her. One, the skinny young man in frayed blue suit who was an employee of the telegraph office, turned away from the pencilled words he had been counting and asked, ‘Who got rich?’ The customer, across the counter, a middle-aged man with rimless glasses who resembled a lesser bank executive, also displayed interest.

The fat girl lifted herself from her chair with a grunt. ‘It says here—somebody in
Pasadena—never heard of him—just won the Nobel Prize.’

She went to the counter and showed the telegram to her skinny co-worker. As he read it, he whistled. He handed the wire to the customer, who pushed his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose, and said, ‘If I were you, I would not wait to deliver a message of this importance. I would telephone it to the party concerned.’ Importantly, he began to read the telegram.

FOR YOUR PART IN THE DISCOVERY OF ANTIREACTIVE SUBSTANCES TO OVERCOME THE IMMUNOLOGICAL BARRIER TO CARDIAC TRANSPLANTATION AND YOUR INTRODUCTION OF SURGICAL TECHNIQUE TO SUCCESSFULLY PERFORM A HETEROGRAFT OF THE HEART ORGAN INTO THE HUMAN BODY THE NOBEL FOUNDATION OF STOCKHOLM ON BEHALF OF THE ROYAL CAROLINE MEDICO CHIRURGICAL INSTITUTE OF SWEDEN IS PLEASED TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU HAVE TODAY BEEN VOTED THIS YEARS NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSIOLOGY AND MEDICINE STOP YOUR SHARE OF THE PRIZE WILL BE A GOLD MEDALLION AND A CHEQUE FOR TWENTY FIVE THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS STOP THE AWARD CEREMONY WILL TAKE PLACE IN STOCKHOLM ON DECEMBER TENTH STOP DETAILS FOLLOW STOP HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS STOP

The message was addressed to DOCTOR JOHN GARRETT NUMBER FOUR HILLSIDE TERRACE PASADENA CALIFORNIA. . . .

As usual, the drive from
Pasadena on the ever-crowded freeways to the Miracle Mile section of
Los Angeles took Dr. John Garrett longer than he had expected. What made the trip even slower, this early afternoon, was the fact that Garrett was deeply engaged with his thoughts, with the new speech that he intended to deliver tonight, and with the rights and wrongs of it.

By the time he had arrived at Western Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard, and parked the black Jaguar (his first lavish purchase, on payments, after his sudden ascent to prominence) in the familiar petrol station, he had made up his mind (no matter what Dr. Keller advised him) that he would present the new speech unedited and unexpurgated.

Striding the short distance to the seven-storey medical building, Garrett observed his reflection several times in shop windows. He was not displeased with what he saw: an arresting, forceful young man of resolution. He had almost forgotten his pleasure, a decade before, when Saralee had shown him an article based on a poll taken by the American Institute of Public Opinion on the average American male, and he had learned that he conformed almost exactly to the norm. According to the statistics, the average American man was five feet nine inches tall, weighed one hundred and fifty-eight pounds, had brown hair, wore spectacles, caught one and one-half colds in winter, smoked cigarettes, drank liquor socially, preferred brunettes to blondes, demanded that his wife be a good companion rather than a good cook, enjoyed baseball above all other spectator sports, liked beefsteak and French fried potatoes more than any other single dish, awoke at six-thirty on weekdays and went to bed by ten at night, and would rather live in California than any place on earth. Incredibly, John Garrett had found that these statistics described him almost exactly—the one exception being that he preferred French fried onion rings to French fried potatoes.

In the past two years, however, John Garrett had taken less pride in regarding himself as average, much to Saralee’s bewilderment at the sudden change of party line. More and more often, Garrett liked to think of himself as a unique entity, special, nonconforming, and somewhat set apart from ordinary specimens of
homo Americanus
. Whether or not this personal rebellion against the average was due to his recent renown in professional circles, or due to his liberating sessions with Dr. Keller, Garrett could not say. On the other hand, his wife Saralee could say, but she said it only to herself: John deserves to be bigheaded once in a while, because he discovered something that will help ‘the human community’—the last she had read in a magazine—but in her eyes, and most of the time in his own, she suspected, John Garrett was still five feet nine, one hundred and fifty-eight pounds, and hair brown as ever at forty-nine, and he was still as unsure and insecure and dependent upon her as ever, thank God.

Having reached the entry arch of his destination, John Garrett quickened his pace, rapidly climbed the single flight of stairs, and found himself face to face with the glass-paned door that bore the black legend,L. D. KELLER, M. D. As before, he wondered why psychoanalysts did not printPSYCHIATRIST instead ofM. D. beside their names, and then decided that as long as there remained so much fear and resultant hostility toward analysts, discretion was the better part of honesty.

Opening the door, Garrett stepped into the office, then paused to close the door softly behind him. He moved through the empty blond reception room, and entered the spacious main office as unobtrusively as possible. He could see at once that they were all present, sitting, compulsive and neurotic, in the same chairs as ever, and that the session was in full swing. No one turned to greet Garrett as he tiptoed to his chair, for it was understood that he was always late (‘tardiness may often be a resistance to the embarrassment of discussing taboo topics in the presence of others,’ Dr. Keller had once remarked), but now Dr. Keller, from behind his oak fortification of a desk, acknowledged his arrival with the slightest flicker of his eyes.

Garrett sat stiffly a moment, then consulted his watch. The group therapy session always lasted precisely one hour and twenty minutes. Since Garrett paid ten dollars for his weekly attendance, this meant that he was paying twelve and a half cents a minute. Because he had been sixteen minutes late, there remained only one hour and four minutes. The delay had cost him two dollars. Still, there was eight dollars’ worth of time left. He needed part of that time, today, especially today, but there were six others who needed it, too. Perhaps a close search of the faces of his fellow patients, he decided, would tell if their urgency matched his own.

They were seated in a crooked semicircle before Dr. Keller’s desk, and Garrett began reading from left to right. On the beige divan to the far left were Mr. Lovato and Mrs. Perrin. Mr. Lovato, a slight, homosexual artist with a growing reputation for painting children in the chocolate box style of Thomas Gainsborough, sat with his knees awkwardly crossed. Garrett recalled that when he had first come into group therapy four months ago, Mr. Lovato had always sat with his knees pinched together, like a prim parochial-schoolgirl. But a month ago, apparently somewhat liberated by analysis, he had begun to cross his legs in the more masculine manner. Mrs. Perrin, a top-heavy matron in her fifties with purple grey hair, sat with lips compressed, worrying a small handbag with her hands. She was recovering from a nervous breakdown. Although married to a wealthy citizen of Van Nuys, her problem was a neurotic inability to spend a penny, even on the necessities of life, even on laundry or a loaf of bread, without becoming agitated. She rarely spoke, perhaps once in three weeks, but when she did speak, it was about her tiny triumphs in managing a purchase for fifty cents or a dollar.