The doctor, who would know of and wonder at Feldman’s generous act, could serve as an emotional check to the whole affair. He could represent, in a way, the world; thus Feldman, by observing the doctor observing him, might be in a better position to determine whether or not he was going too far.
While Feldman had known with certainty the exact dimension of his heroism, it was almost a disappointment to understand that heroism, in his particular situation, demanded nothing, and therefore everything. It demanded, simply, acquiescence. He must, of course, tell no one. But this was not the drawback. It was, indeed, the one advantage he was sure of, since heroism, real heroism, like real treachery, was the more potent for being done in the dark. He knew that the hero who performed his services before an audience risked a surrender to pride, chanced a double vision of himself: a view of himself as he must appear before those who would judge him. All that frightened Feldman was his awareness that his peculiar situation allowed him the same opportunity for change that might come to ordinary men during the course of normal lifetimes — permitting it, moreover, to occur in the split second of his essentially unnatural act. His chance for heroism, then, stretched-out as it had to be by the doctor’s pronouncement that he had still one year to live, was precariously and unfortunately timed. For a year he must go on as he had gone on, work for what he had worked for, talk to others as he had talked to others. In this way his heroism would be drawn out, but there would be the sustained temptation to self-awareness, to sweet but inimical self-consciousness. Since the essence of his role was to pretend that he was playing none, he would have to prevent any knowledge of the wonderful change wrought in himself, even at the moment of his death.
Feldman set upon his course and performed conscientiously everything he thought was required of him. That is, he did until the others found him out. They had, seeing signs of his physical discomfort, pressed the doctor for information. Urged from the beginning by his patient to say nothing, the doctor told them some elaborate lie about ulcers. So, on top of his other discomfitures, Feldman’s family saw to it that he remained on a strict diet, directed toward dissolving a nonexistent ulcer. When his family saw that his pains continued, and the doctor refused to carry the joke to the uncomfortable extreme of operating on what did not in fact exist, the family realized that far graver things than they had been led to believe were wrong with Feldman.
The doctor, under pressure and understandably unwilling to invent further (and anyway he himself, though old, though experienced, though made accustomed by years of practice of his art to the melodramatic issue of his trade, had, despite his age, his experience, his familiarity with crises, still maintained a large measure of that sentimental attachment which the witness to-tragedy has toward great rolling moments of life and death: an attachment which, indeed, had first attracted him to medicine and had given him that which in his superb flair for the dramatic would have been called in men of lesser talent their “bedside manner,” but which, in him, soared beyond the bedside — beyond, in fact, the sickroom itself to the family in the waiting room, the nurses in the corridor, to the whole hospital, in fact), thought it best that others learn of Feldman’s sacrifice, and so went back on his promise and told the anxious family everything. They were, of course, astounded, and misread Feldman’s composure as a sign of solicitude lest he might hurt them. Feldman’s anger at having been found out was badly translated into a magnificent display of unselfishness. They thought, in their innocence, that he had merely meant not to worry them. Had they had any insight, however, they would have realized, at some cost to their pride, that far from the secrecy of his suffering being unendurable to him, contemplation of it had provided him with his only source of comfort (he had gone back that quickly on his resolves), and that what they had mistaken for unselfishness was Feldman’s last desperate attempt to exploit the self. But in a game where certain feelings, of necessity, masquerade as certain others, what is so is hardly to be distinguished from what is not so. What they, in their blindness, had forced upon Feldman was the one really unendurable feature of his illness. What had come to him gratuitously — his immediate, heroic reaction to the prospect of his own death — had now to be called back, reappraised, withdrawn.
Feldman had now to compose himself and deliberately scheme out what he was to do with the remainder of his life. He was now the prisoner of his freedom of choice. Further heroism (pretending that death meant nothing) would be ludicrous with all of them looking on, their eyes shielded by impossible lace handkerchiefs. It was almost better deliberately to impale himself upon their sympathies, to cry out for water in the middle of the night, to languish visibly before their frightened stares, to call to strangers in the street, “Look, look, I’m dying.”
With their discovery of his situation, what he had hoped would be the dignified end of his life threatened in fact to become a stagey, circusy rout, rather like the disorganized, sentimental farewell of baseball fans to a team moving forever to another city. And since he would not soon die (the one year he had been given had already extended itself to sixteen months and there were no visible signs of any acceleration of his decay) he became rather annoyed with his position. He quickly discovered that planning one’s death had as many attendant exigencies as planning one’s life. Were he a youth, a mistake in planning could be neutralized, even changed perhaps to an unexpected asset; the simple fact was that he had no time. That he was still alive four months after his year of grace indicated only a mistake in calculation, not in diagnosis. Strangely, the additional four months served to make his expected end more imminent for him.
He found himself suddenly an object. On Sundays, distant cousins and their children would make pilgrimages to his home to see him. They meant no harm, he knew, but in a way they had come for a kind of thrill, and when they discovered this they grew uncomfortable in his presence. Ashamed of what they suddenly realized were their motives, they secretly blamed him for having forced their tastes into a debauch. Others, not so sensitive, made him a hero long after he himself had dismissed this as a possibility. A nephew of his, who consistently mistook in himself as legitimate curiosity what was only morbid necrophilism, would force him into ridiculous conversations which the boy considered somehow ennobling. On one occasion he had completely shocked Feldman.
“Do you find yourself believing in an after-life?”
“I think that’s in poor taste,” Feldman said.
“No, what I mean is that before it happens, lots of people who had never been particularly religious before suddenly find themselves slipping into a kind of wish-fulfillment they call faith.”
“Stop that,” Feldman told him angrily.
After his conversation with his nephew Feldman realized something he found very disturbing. He knew that he had not, after all, accepted his death as a very real possibility. Though he had made plans and changed them, though he had indulged in protean fantasies in which he had gone alone to the edge of sheer marble precipices, he had been playing merely. It was as if he had been toying with the idea of a “grim reaper,” playing intellectual games with chalky skeletons and bogeymen; he had not in fact thought about his death, only about his dying: the preoccupied man of affairs casually scribbling last words on a telephone memorandum pad. His nephew’s absolute acceptance of the likelihood that one day Feldman would cease to exist had offended him. He had considered the boy’s proposition an indelicacy, the continuance of the familiar world after his own absence from it a gross insult. He knew the enormity of such vanity and he was ashamed. He thought for the first time of other dying men, and though he knew that each man’s cancer was or should be a sacred circumstance of that man’s existence, he felt a sudden urgency to know such men, to submerge himself in their presence. Because he could think of no other way of doing this, he determined to speak to his doctor about having himself committed to a hospital.