Ex Officio Page 3

  And yet, the conservative youngsters were not really very different from the radicals. Youth tends to be self-righteous and autocratic, whatever its political beliefs, and people past their first youth tend to be made irritable by the sound of a loud self-confident young voice, even if it is agreeing with them.

  Fortunately, this young man was not of a missionary type, and except for an expression of gratitude at having been given the lift he kept silent while Holt negotiated the gauntlet of St. Paul Street.

  In fact, it was Holt himself who broke the silence, just after making the turn onto North Avenue. “I tend to think of this route,” he said, “as a visual cautionary tale for doctors.” He glanced at his passenger. “And doctors-to-be.”

  “Sir?”

  “You’ll see what I mean.”

  They drove a few blocks in silence, the young man looking alert, and then Holt said, “On our right, chapter one.”

  “The cemetery?”

  “Green Mount Cemetery, yes.”

  The young man waited, but Holt said nothing more yet, so he looked curiously out at the cemetery instead, obviously hoping to find some sort of explanation there, and just as obviously failing to find it.

  Holt was all at once feeling embarrassment. This was the first time he’d mentioned his Baltimore-cemetery theory to anyone, and bringing it out in the air like this it suddenly looked absurd. Particularly given the blank expression on the young man’s face. Youth is notoriously literal and unimaginative, and it was more than likely a grave mistake for a fifty-one-year-old man to try to share a private conceit with a twenty-year-old.

  Still, he’d started it now, there was nothing to do but go on with it. A few blocks later, therefore, he said, with somewhat less conviction, “And on our left, chapter two. Holy Cross Cemetery.”

  This cemetery was smaller and more quickly passed. The young man studied it the whole time they were going by, and then said. “You said, especially for doctors?”

  “A visual cautionary tale for doctors,” Holt said, but by now he’d lost the feeling so completely he had to start undercutting himself. “You know, when you’re stuck in traffic jams week after week, you start looking for meanings in the things around you. And all these cemeteries along here, it seemed to me they had something to say. And since I’m a doctor—at any rate, I call myself a doctor—I took a sort of lesson for doctors out of what they said. Here comes chapter three, by the way. Dead ahead, you might say.”

  Baltimore Cemetery was directly in their path, and their route took a jog to the left, then a half-right onto Sinclair Lane. Baltimore Cemetery was now on their right, and Holt said, “With chapter four on our left. Hebrew Cemetery. You can’t see it, but chapter four has a footnote just the other side of it. Saint Vincent’s Cemetery, in Clifton Park.”

  The young man said, “Do you mean doctors should be careful what they do, or their patients will end up here?”

  “Not exactly,” Holt said. He was strongly regretting all this by now, but there was no longer any choice. He was kicking himself for not having kept his mouth shut in the beginning. “In fact,” he said, maintaining a cool and confident exterior despite himself, “I think it means just the reverse. I think it means, no matter how careful a doctor is, no matter how brilliant or learned or devoted, his patients will end up here anyway.”

  The young man frowned in disapproval and surprise. “That’s an awfully negativistic attitude, Dr. Holt.”

  “Not at all. I’m simply saying that doctors are human, just like everybody else. We aren’t gods. Our cures aren’t miracles, our failures aren’t cosmic defeats. We are men and women, frail and prone to error. If we start believing our diplomas, we are in serious trouble.” He had warmed to the thought after all, losing his self-consciousness in the explanation. “Those cemeteries,” he said, “serve to remind me that doctors aren’t perfect, because nobody is perfect. The thought helps me keep my equilibrium.”

  The young man studied Holt’s face, blinking slowly as he made an obvious attempt to understand, to fit Holt’s cemetery observation into the pattern of everything he’d been taught before this. Because Holt’s idea had a different shape, and was angled in a different direction, the young man couldn’t absorb it, and the struggle deepened his frown until he discovered a possible relationship between what Holt had said and something he did know. “Still,” he said, the frown relaxing somewhat, “we all have to do our best.”

  “Naturally,” Holt said. He let it go at that, and was relieved when the young man also showed no inclination to carry it further. He had just been reminded again of something it was easy to forget; that aside from simple memory items like numbers and names, no one can be taught anything they don’t already know. Some day the fist of experience would thud Holt’s thought into the young man’s head, but until then he could not effectively be told it.

  And would he, when it finally did occur to him, suddenly snap his fingers and exclaim, “So that’s what Doctor Holt meant!”? Unlikely.

  Ahead at last was the on-ramp for route 95, John F. Kennedy Memorial Highway. Frequently, when he saw that name, Holt found himself comparing the Presidencies of Kennedy and Lockridge, and he believed it was not entirely familial bias that left him with the conviction that Lockridge had left the greater legacy of accomplishment. But it was Kennedy’s name that filled the road maps, and all because Kennedy had managed the supreme achievement of any American President; he had died in office. Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.

  Holt knew the thought was unworthy, but he also knew it was true. No President could ever accomplish any act, any feat, any dream that would be as hailed and rewarded and commemorated as his failure to survive his term of office. The mass of people preferred sentiment to accomplishment any day.

  Come to think of it, that was why the young man’s mind had been forced to reject Holt’s parable of the cemeteries. It was anti-sentimental in the worst way, and the young man had been unable to digest it until he had reduced it to an old sentimental standby: “We all have to do our best.”

  And it’s never good enough, Holt thought, and drove north on John F. Kennedy Memorial Highway.

  ii

  NEAR BETHAYRES, NORTH OF Philadelphia, the houses are large, old, rambling, but in excellent repair, set on plots of four or six or ten acres, frequently set far enough back from the road, and so screened in any case with trees, that people driving by, on their way up to New Hope or down to Philadelphia, can never be sure there’s a house there at all. Only the trees, perhaps a stone or iron fence, a blacktop driveway winding in amid the trees, a rural delivery mailbox with a name or just a number on it, and almost invariably some variation on the sign PRIVATE ROAD—NO TRESPASSING.

  Holt was alone in the car now as he made the slow turn into his driveway and brought the Lincoln to a stop. He’d dropped the young man off in town, after having recouped from the cemetery error by engaging in an animated discussion on the professional football season just past, a subject in which they both had a true interest. Holt was one of the last true believers in the eventual arising from the grave of the Philadelphia Eagles, and the young man had wanted to know if it was really true what he’d heard of the Green Bay Packers while Vince Lombardi was the coach. “Before he went to Washington,” the young man said, but whether with disgust for the city or the football team it was hard to say.

  Holt thought it was both sad and funny that he’d reconstructed himself in the young man’s estimation via football, and he’d mused on the subject most of the way from the city home. Now he stopped the car just in the entrance of his driveway and got out to see what mail had come today. It would have been lying in the box since noon, but Margaret knew how much pleasure he took in finding the mail for himself, and always left it there no matter how late he was due to come home. Margaret indulged him, she humored him, and he was aware of it in a slightly guilty way, and he was delighted by it.

  The Fellowship of Reconciliation was after him again. Ther
e was an appeal for Haitian relief, this one putting its squatting starving child-with-bowl right out on the envelope, apparently acting from the realization that most of these envelopes would be thrown out unopened. There were bills. There was a letter from Gregory, wonder of wonders! A medical journal he usually found unreadable was there in its brown paper sleeve. And Sears & Co—didn’t they used to be Sears Roebuck?—wished to announce its Spring Sale. On February 23rd?

  Holt carried it all back to the car and drove on to the house, which couldn’t be seen until one was almost on top of it, sitting as it did among dense shrubbery and in a slight depression, the cause of a perennially damp basement. Today, when he rounded the last curve and saw the house—two-story, large, white clapboard and fieldstone—he saw also a dark green Ford Mustang parked on the blacktop in front of the door.

  A Mustang? Holt frowned at it, his diagnostic instincts aroused. Who would be here in a Mustang? Not a workman, no carpenter or plumber or electrician would drive a Mustang. Not a member of the family, the family’s cars were invariably either big or foreign, Holt himself driving this Lincoln while Margaret had the MG. No friend he could think of.

  An Avon lady! The idea came to him with the force of revelation, and he could actually see her in the front room, perched on the edge of the gray sofa, nyloned knees together. A beige suit, some lace at the throat, and one of those hats that even women who know better buy at Eastertime.

  Holt was so delighted with his deduction that he nearly forgot the mail in his haste to go indoors and have his diagnosis proved correct. He remembered it halfway, and trotted back to get it, then hurried to the front door. In some silly way, he was very happy.

  Margaret met him in the entrance hall, and didn’t respond to his smile. She looked somber, and she said, “Evelyn is here.”

  “Evelyn?” For just a second his mind was a blank, he couldn’t think of anyone he knew named Evelyn. The image of the Avon lady was still too central in his imagination.

  “Evelyn Canby,” Margaret said. “From Brad.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, of course!”

  “She’s in the front room,” Margaret said. “She phoned first, and I told her you’d be here around five.”

  “When did she get here?”

  “Twenty minutes ago.”

  Holt looked at his watch. Not quite ten past five. He said, “What’s the problem? Something with Brad? Or Dinah?”

  “She said she preferred to tell you.”

  “A female complaint,” Holt said, and raised his eyes to heaven.

  “No, she said she wanted to talk to you about Bradford.”

  “Oh. All right, I’ll go see her.” He took a step, then remembered the mail he was still carrying, and turned back to hand it to her. “There’s a letter from Greg, believe it or not.”

  Her mood lightened at once. “Oh, good! Did you open it?”

  “Of course not. I get to bring it into the house, you get to open it. That’s what makes this a working marriage.” He kissed her on the cheek, and went in to see his niece Evelyn.

  iii

  SHE WAS SITTING IN the dark. Outside, daylight was clinging on in its pale February way, but the front room was in semi-darkness. Why hadn’t the girl turned on a light? The switch beside the door controlled several lamps around the large room. Holt pressed it, and the room leaped into sudden yellow definition, with pockets of shadow. Evelyn, who had been seated near the window and apparently lost in thought, started, then got to her feet and came toward Holt across the Persian carpet.

  Something in her face and mood—and in the darkness in which she’d chosen to wait for him—told Holt the current problem was more serious than he had at first supposed.

  “Hello, Evelyn,” he said. “Margaret said you wanted to talk to me about Brad.”

  “Yes.” She stopped a few feet from him, her expression troubled and uncertain. “He doesn’t know I came,” she said. “He didn’t want any fuss.”

  “He wouldn’t. Sit down, sit down. I’m losing my manners. Would you care for a drink?”

  “No, thank you.” But she did sit down, in the green wing chair, and folded her hands in her lap.

  “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I will. I’ve had two hours of weekend traffic, and I need to unwind.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  The bar was to the left. Turning to it, he said, “I don’t mean to interrupt you. If you drove all this way, and particularly without Brad’s approval, it must be important.” He put ice in a short glass and reached for the bourbon.

  “I’m not sure whether it is or not.” When he wasn’t looking at her, her voice sounded too frail, almost the voice of an invalid. “He fainted yesterday.”

  Holt was already pouring the bourbon. He half-filled the glass, recorked the bottle, and turned to look at her. “Fainted? Brad?”

  “In California. You knew we were going out for Uncle Harrison.”

  “The supermarket opening,” Holt said, remembering Howard’s description of it. Howard had been opposed to the expedition, to the point of asking Holt to forbid Brad to go on medical grounds. There had been no medical grounds, though, and Brad would have ignored him in any case, and he really didn’t take the affront to Brad’s dignity as seriously as Howard, so he’d refused.

  “Afterwards,” Evelyn was saying, “we were sitting around talking with Uncle Harrison—Brad was arguing with him, really, about some things that might not be right about the town—and all of a sudden he just fell out of the chair. Fainted, right out of the chair.”

  Holt put his drink down again untasted. “What was the temperature out there? Very hot?”

  “Not really. It was sunny, but not bad. About seventy-five. And this was afterwards, when we were indoors.”

  “How long was he unconscious?”

  “Less than five minutes. It seemed terribly long, but it was only two or three minutes.”

  “Then he woke right up?”

  “Not really.” She frowned, trying to get the description right. “He woke up, all right. I mean, the faint was over and he could stand and everything, but he was still a little fuzzy.”

  “What do you mean, fuzzy?”

  “Well, he seemed confused about everything. Not amnesia or forgetting about things, just a little confused. As though he was distracted. And he was stuttering a lot.”

  “Has the stuttering continued?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “He’s perfectly all right today. It was only for about ten minutes after he woke up that he was confused and stuttering. After that he was fine.”

  “Any other symptoms after the faint? Anything besides the confusion and the stuttering?”

  She gave him a quick glance, and said, “You think it’s something serious.”

  “I think it could be a lot of different things,” he said, “some serious and some not so serious. I’ll have to know a lot more before I can narrow it down.”

  “There wasn’t anything else,” she said. “Not connected with the faint, anyway.”

  “Not connected with the faint? I don’t understand.”

  “Well, I told you he fell out of the chair, and he apparently hurt his leg when he fell. But it wasn’t bad, it’s fine today.”

  “What did he do, cut himself? Bruise himself?”

  “Well, I didn’t see it, exactly. He just had a little limp afterwards. But it was gone by the time we got off the plane in Hagerstown.”

  “When was that, last night?”

  “Yes. We flew right back, last night. It was after midnight before we were home.”

  “Did Brad seem unusually tired?”

  Evelyn offered a small smile. “We were all unusually tired. We’d crossed the continent twice in one day.”

  Holt returned her smile. “Pedaling all the way,” he said. “And you say Brad is all right today?”

  “He was when I left.”

  “You asked him to talk to me about the faint?”

  “Yes. He said it was nonse
nse, it was the result of the plane trip and the bad speeches, at his age he had to expect an occasional unauthorized absence. That’s what he called it, an occasional unauthorized absence.”

  “Did he mean it had happened before?”

  “I don’t know.” She sounded surprised, as though it hadn’t occurred to her to put that interpretation on his words. “I don’t think so,” she said doubtfully. “That isn’t what he seemed to be saying.”

  “You haven’t seen any of these symptoms before, in him? Not just the faint, but any of the others. The stuttering, the confusion, the limp.”

  “The limp? But that happened when he fell off the chair.”

  “Even so,” Holt said. “Has he limped before?”

  “Not that I remember. None of it before, the limp or anything else.”

  Holt nodded. “All right. He doesn’t know you’ve come here, is that it?”

  “That’s exactly it.” The brief lovely smile flashed again, and she said, “He’s going to be quite upset.”

  “Are you driving back there now?”

  “Oh, no. The idea was, I’m going to New York for two days. Shopping and visiting and so on.”

  “You’re driving back Sunday.”

  “Yes. Why, do you want me to drive you out there?”

  “No, not at all.” Holt smiled and said, “Not if you want to maintain security. If we can avoid letting Brad know you’ve come to see me, so much the better.”

  “Agreed,” she said.

  “I have a free day tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll drive out and see what the situation is.”

  “Thanks, Joe. It’s probably nothing to worry about, but I’ll feel better after you say so.”

  “Stop by here on your way back Sunday, and I’ll say so then.”

  “Fine.”

  Holt hesitated, then said, “Did Margaret invite you to dinner? If not, allow me.”

  “She did,” Evelyn said, smiling, “but I really do have a dinner engagement in New York.”