Ex Officio Page 14

  The stroke began with a sudden blockage in the anterior cerebral artery, that artery which, through its cortical branches, furnishes the blood supply to the frontal four-fifths of the middle surface of the cerebral hemisphere, a vital sensory and intellectual area of the brain. The anterior cerebral artery also supplies the medial part of the orbital surface of the frontal lobe, the frontal pole, a strip of the superomedial border, and the front seven-eighths of the corpus callosum, those white fibers which connect the two halves of the cerebrum.

  The blockage attacked the anterior cerebral artery along its narrowest part, where it curves upward over the corpus callosum. Atherosclerotic formations had been building in that area for some time, narrowing the artery further and further, causing those prior temporary attacks, Dr. Holt’s “coming attractions.” In the previous attacks there had been only very short-term blockage before the blood pressure forced a re-opening, so that damage to brain cells from blood starvation had been minor, and the effects both temporary and comparatively small in scale. But this time the blockage was much more severe. In addition to the atherosclerotic formations narrowing the artery walls, a full thrombus had formed, a fibrous clot, which now became wedged by the pressure of blood behind it into the too-narrow segment of artery, and in less than one minute all blood flow in that area came to a stop.

  Bradford was lying on his back. It was two nights since the full moon, and clear thin white light spread in a pale trapezoid on the floor near the window. In the dim uncertain reflection of that light, Bradford’s head on the pillow looked essentially unchanged, except that his expression was slightly frowning as though in disapproval. For two minutes, three minutes, he did not move, he gave no exterior sign—other than the frown—to indicate that anything was breaking down within.

  In the infracted artery, blood strained against the thrombus like water in a tunnel pressing against a wall of sandbags, but the blockage held, and in fact became wedged even tighter against the soft deposits that had been building up within the inner membrane of the artery. Beyond, the emptying artery sagged slightly in on itself, striving against vacuum. The brain cells fed by the artery and its branches began to dry, began to feel the lack of oxygen and blood, began to wither.

  In the pale moonlight, Bradford’s face could at last be seen to change, but only slightly. The right cheek seemed somehow flatter, the closed right eyelid was depressed just a little deeper, and the jawline became gradually softer and less clearly defined. The right corner of the mouth sagged, and a few seconds later a thin trickle of saliva ran from the right corner of Bradford’s mouth and down the line of his jaw, to become absorbed in the sheet.

  The stroke is silent. It is violence without noise, a sledgehammer without sound. The middle area of the left cerebral hemisphere in Bradford Lockridge’s head was starving, it was strangling, it was dying for lack of blood and lack of oxygen, but there was no trace of sound, no murmur, no cry, no crack, no rattle. After that first groan at the very beginning, a sound that had been more petulant about sleep disturbance than anything else, Bradford lay silent while the silent stroke sliced its way through his brain.

  Bradford’s right arm was lying straight down at his side, under the sheet and the light summer blanket. Three minutes into the stroke, the covers were agitated in a small way, as though a mouse were ducking and rising under there. It was Bradford’s right hand, grasping. Opening and closing, grasping at the sheet, grasping at air, just grasping.

  Starved cells begin to die after three minutes. If a cut-off supply of blood and oxygen is started up again in less than three minutes there will probably be a nearly complete recovery, which is the meaning of the term transient ischemic attack. But if the supply remains cut off longer than three minutes, brain cells begin to die. The knowledge, or training, or instinct, or motor control, or memory that they contain die with them. The process is irreversible, if the blockage lasts more than three minutes.

  The area covered by the anterior cerebral artery contains cells charged with a variety of missions. The sensory area for the foot and leg are there, as well as the motor area for the foot and leg and urinary bladder. The supplementary motor area for the grasp reflex and the sucking reflex are here, and so are memory areas, and areas of thought processes. The supply of oxygenated blood to all of these areas had been cut off now for nearly four minutes.

  Bradford’s face, even in the uncertain pale reflected moonlight, now showed clear and distinct signs of the brutalization taking place within. The two sides of his face no longer matched. Whereas the left side looked much the same as it always had, the right side was a different face, and belonged to a far different man. A less intelligent man, a less confident man, a less healthy man. That side sagged, the skin looked gray and lumpy and not quite real, the mouth drooped down so much it looked like an expression of twisted bitterness, and saliva still trickled down into a growing damp circle on the sheet.

  Bradford’s bowels and bladder released.

  His right hand continued to scratch and contract under the covers, making a tiny gray sound in the silence.

  The pressure of blood against the thrombus was pulsating and unyielding, it made a kind of soundless roar within the artery. From time to time the thrombus was pushed a tiny jerk forward, or around, but not free.

  In the fifth minute, the thrombus gave ground again, and this time a thin trickle of blood found a channel between the blockage and the artery wall. A dribble of blood moved through the depleted artery, finding some cells dead, some dying, some severely injured, depending how close they were to other sources of blood. This fresh streamlet of blood drained off into brain cells and into sub-arteries.

  The push of blood through the new channel increased, forcing the channel wider and wider. The clot was being slowly broken up, like an ice floe in spring. More blood rushed through the artery and across the surface of the brain, oxygenated blood bringing rescue where there was still life, bringing nothing where the cells had died.

  For a long while, there was no visible change in Bradford’s exterior. The moon moved across the sky, changing the shape and position of the gray-green-blue-white trapezoid of light on the bedroom floor, but for a long while Bradford did not change in any way. His face remained two faces, and his right hand grasped at nothing.

  Toward four o’clock, the right hand eased and slowed, and finally stopped. And very gradually the right side of Bradford’s face was beginning to regain its former appearance, the flesh slowly firming again, the twisted sagging mouth inching upward to its normal expression, the trickle of saliva ceasing.

  By five o’clock, the stroke was over. Most of the thrombus had broken up and had been carried away on the now-normal stream of blood. The remainder of the clot had become too firmly wedged into the soft atherosclerotic formations on the artery wall, and would remain there until gradually worn away by the flow of blood, or until it hooked another thrombus traveling through the bloodstream, perhaps caused another attack, that one perhaps larger or smaller than this, perhaps fatal.

  At eight-fifteen, Bradford awoke. He was annoyed to discover he’d soiled the sheets, but no more than annoyed. Not frightened, not surprised, not even very aware in any useful sense of what had happened. He stripped the bed, put his pajamas in with the rolled-up sheets, and took a shower. His limp was back, worse than at any of the other times, and it seemed as though he could feel the hot water less on his right leg and the right side of his face. But he paid no particular attention. And when he couldn’t seem to shave with his right hand, he simply did the job with his left, not even questioning the disability that had caused the change.

  Before breakfast, he took his soiled linen to the laundry room off the kitchen and started it through the washing machine himself. Naturally, he spoke of it to no one.

  The Last Race

  1

  THE HOUSE WAS A flurry of clean linen, the gravel drive was full of delivery vans, the cook was threatening to quit. She had lived through descents of Harrison
and his tribe before, and she swore she would never go through it again. She stood in the kitchen, a buxom aggrieved Swedish woman all in white, and shook a wooden spoon under Evelyn’s nose. “No! Definitely no!”

  A maid was simultaneously trying to tell her the men were here with the meat. “Well, you know where the freezer is,” Evelyn snapped at her, and as the maid went off biting her lips and blinking back tears Evelyn turned back to the cook and said, “I promise you we’re getting extra help. I promise you.”

  “Extra help! Always! Never!”

  Evelyn understood the cook to mean she was always promised extra help in emergencies but that the extra help never arrived. “This time,” she said, “we went straight to an agency in New York, and they guaranteed us help. From Wednesday, the day they get here, till Saturday, the day after they leave. One extra cook and four extra helpers. They guaranteed it, I promise they did. We’re even sending a car all the way to New York to get them and bring them here.”

  The cook lowered her wooden spoon to half-mast, but then frowned and said, “Strangers? In my kitchen? An extra cook?”

  But Evelyn was ready for that one. “Only for the children,” she said. “The extra cook will prepare the children’s food, so you won’t have to do any of that. And with Mr. Lockridge and myself there will only be nine adults.” And seven children, she didn’t add, hoping to keep the cook distracted from thinking about the youth invasion they were all about to undergo. She added quickly, “And you’ll remain in complete charge, of course. They all understand that, they’ve had that explained to them. You’ll be in complete and total charge.”

  The cook was weakening, and when Evelyn saw her glance sidelong around at her kitchen she knew she’d won. The woman had been here nearly twenty years, she couldn’t leave her domain to strangers and barbarians. “Well,” she said reluctantly, grudgingly, “we’ll try it. For one day only.”

  “That’s all I ask,” Evelyn said joyfully. “If it can’t be done, well, it just can’t be done. But anything you want, I’ll do my very best to get it for you. You know I’m on your side.”

  “I know,” she said fatalistically. “I know it ain’t your fault. Or Mr. Lockridge either.”

  “All any of us can do,” Evelyn said, propagandizing for the notion that they two were on the same team against the outsiders and should therefore stick together, “is our best.”

  “Yes, Miss,” the cook said doubtfully, and Evelyn left the kitchen before she could reconsider.

  It was amazing the turmoil the house was in, and doubly amazing when one considered the situation that had brought it all about. Except that it was the middle of the summer and the latter third of the twentieth century, they might have been in the middle of preparations for some sort of Dickensian clan-gathering Christmas feast. But all of this was merely because Bradford was engaged yet again in rescuing Harrison from the results of his folly.

  Why Harrison insisted on traveling only with his complete family no one, least of all Evelyn, could say for sure. Particularly since so many members of it couldn’t stand one another. But when the Harrison Lockridges traveled they invariably traveled en masse, which meant Harrison and his wife Patricia, his two daughters, Martha Simcoe and Patricia Chatham, their husbands Earl Chatham and Maurice Simcoe, and all the available grandchildren, being twelve-year-old Bradford Chatham and the five Simcoe girls, ranging in age from sixteen to eight, and named Pam, Robin, Barbie, Tamara and Jackie. That was a total of twelve people, six adults and six children, and this time there would be one more adult, since Herbert Jarvis, Harrison’s brother-in-law and business partner, would be coming along as well.

  Evelyn found herself grateful that Herbert Jarvis, now in his mid-fifties, had never married.

  For some reason it never really mattered what the purpose for a family gathering might be, the fact of it was inescapably festive. It might even be a funeral they were all gathering for, but the inevitable bustle and scurry of preparation couldn’t help but give an overlay of holiday to the affair. So the fact that Harrison was coming here with his tail between his legs, a felony indictment at his heels, didn’t matter. Seven adults and six children were coming, and an atmosphere of cheerful confusion and expectation was willy-nilly engulfing the house.

  Tomorrow. They were coming tomorrow, Wednesday, the eighteenth of July, and the house was nowhere near ready. Evelyn, trying to keep all the preparations in her head because she didn’t have time to sit down and write a list, prowled anxiously from room to room, knowing there were things she was forgetting. And to make matters worse, this time the whole thing was resting on her shoulders alone.

  Usually Bradford would take charge in a situation like this, and she would act as his adjutant and assistant, but this time he was having no part of it. In the week since he’d returned from Paris he’d been increasingly irritable and remote, wanting nothing to do with the preparations for Harrison’s arrival. Evelyn supposed it was the reaction to his disappointment over the Paris trip—which seemed also to have left him very tired, with a weariness he couldn’t seem to shake—so she left him alone and did what she could herself. Bradford meanwhile could usually be found in the back library, reading.

  Three rooms in the house had been set aside for books. Downstairs, in a windowless room in the middle of the house, was the room simply called the library, containing general non-fiction. Upstairs near the guest rooms, with windows overlooking the front drive, was the room called the upstairs library, the shelves lined with rapidly dating fiction. And also on the second floor, at the rear next to Bradford’s office, was the room called the back library, which was limited to books of a political nature.

  It was in the back library that Bradford had been closeting himself this past week, and whenever Evelyn had entered the room he’d been sitting in the brown leather chair by the window, one book in his lap and half a dozen others stacked open on the table beside him. He frowned as he read, and was angry when interrupted.

  Well, let him have his interval to himself. (He’d even managed to turn Howard away, via telephone, which no one had ever been able to do before.) He had had a disastrous time in Paris, and he was having an uncomfortable time coming up with Harrison, so he deserved this rest period in between.

  It would end tomorrow.

  ii

  HE SENT THE BUS for them.

  That had been a joke for years, that some trip he would send the bus for them, but he’d never seriously intended to do it, not till now. That showed more than anything else, Evelyn thought, just how troubled and angry Bradford was this time, and perhaps how much he was carrying forward his Paris disappointment and making Harrison pay for it.

  The bus was an anomaly, an old brown monstrosity from the White Corporation, old enough to have a hood. It seemed to have been in the Army at one time, which explained the color and the white numbers stenciled on it here and there. It had appeared at Eustace at some point in Bradford’s Presidency, he was no longer sure when or why, and had just stayed. The registration seemed to be in Bradford’s name, there was room for it in the garage, and it even proved occasionally useful, so they’d never gotten rid of it. But in the ten or eleven years he’d had it, Bradford had never before sent it to Hagerstown to pick up Harrison.

  He seemed to take a kind of angry pleasure in the thought of Harrison and the bus. “He’ll ride it,” he told Evelyn. “I wouldn’t ride it, I’d take one look and be on the next plane back home. Sterling wouldn’t ride it, he’d send it back empty and hire two cars right there at the airport and come on out here and never say a word about it. But Harrison will ride it.”

  Evelyn didn’t say anything. She knew Harrison could be taken advantage of, everybody knew that. He wouldn’t be coming here if it hadn’t happened to him again. But Bradford had never been angry enough at Harrison before to rub his nose in it, and if he was now it meant the three days of the visit were going to be even worse than she’d supposed. Because Patricia wouldn’t stand for it. Patricia, Harrison’s
wife, was the strength in the family, and she defended Harrison with grim fury and no regard for rules. She would take the bus, mostly because Harrison would be afraid not to, but she wouldn’t like it and she wouldn’t let it end there. And if Bradford’s treatment of Harrison was going to be harsh, Patricia’s treatment of Bradford would be a lot harsher.

  There were two Patricias coming, of course, the other being Patricia Chatham, Harrison’s older daughter. Here and there throughout the family were boys and men named after their fathers, from Eddie Lockridge in Paris to BJ in Washington; it was somehow appropriate that Harrison would have a daughter named after his wife.

  And the Patricias were as alike as two tigresses in the same cage, the daughter just as grim, just as wary, just as quick to offense as her mother. They hated one another, naturally; there hadn’t been one visit here that Harrison’s wife and older daughter had not had at least one screaming vicious up-and-down the stairs door-slamming fight. And all with Earl Chatham, the son-in-law, as ineffective at controlling Patricia junior as Harrison himself was with Patricia senior; Earl would be going around with a pained smile on his face while occasionally making inept passes at Evelyn. (He’d made them while Fred was alive, too.)

  Would the presence of the elder Patricia’s brother, Herbert Jarvis, alter the pattern this time? Evelyn doubted it; Herbert was Harrison’s business partner, who had somehow managed to remain uninvolved in the family squabbles over the years, living in the calm eye of the storm and concerning himself completely with business affairs, an arrangement he would have no reason to want to change now.