“McLuhan?”
“That’s the one.” Brad was beaming, shaking his head, pleased, and then he stopped and frowned and said, “Is that another symptom? Forgetting that man’s name?”
Holt paused with a final forkful of haddock halfway to his mouth. “Let’s not worry about any more symptoms,” he said. “We have enough to keep us going for a while. And will you give me a hospital date? Stall all you want, but I won’t forget it.”
Brad grimaced, and shook his head. “You get much above fifty, Joe,” he said, ignoring the fact that Holt was above fifty, “a hospital becomes a grim place. Any time you go into it, you can’t help but feel this is the time you come out feet first.”
“I don’t ever lie to you, Brad. This would be for tests only. And even if we decided you’d had a full-fledged stroke, and not a transient attack, you’d still be out in a few days. So when do you want to make it?”
“I don’t know, what’s today? February twenty-fourth. I have a speech in Cleveland next week, there’s a Look reporter coming around for some damn reason — Make it some time in early March.”
“First week in March?”
“I’d have to be out by the fifteenth. They want me around for a party conference in Washington.”
“You’ll make it,” Holt promised. “So I’ll put you down for the first week in March.”
“I suppose.”
“Done,” Holt said, and put that last forkful of fish into his mouth, and it was ice cold. He added wine, which was supposed to be cold, and sat back to say, “You still have the world’s best cook.”
“She stays with me,” Brad said, “because she gets to do a series in a woman’s magazine after I die.” Then he shook his head, and said, “I can see what’s going to happen now. Name a subject, any subject, and it will go straight into a morbid reference.”
“How about my boy Gregory?” Holt said. “We got a letter from him yesterday, first one in a month or more. He asked to be remembered to you.”
“I remember him,” Brad said, grinning. “How does he like the Navy?”
“According to the letter, he hates the Navy, but not as much as he hates the Mediterranean. And he loves his family, but not as much as he loves Audrey White.”
“Audrey White. Isn’t she related to somebody somehow?”
“I think she’s a cousin of a fellow that married a niece of Sterling’s wife,” Holt said, Sterling being Brad’s other brother.
“Of course, Jim White! Didn’t he die?”
Holt gave a rueful smile and said, “I’m afraid he did, yes.”
“There, you see? We just can’t talk about anything. Come take my blood pressure and go home to your wife.”
Holt had had no coffee, but he didn’t protest. Then, on their way out of the room, they met the maid, coming in with the coffee. Brad looked surprised, and said, “My God, you never got your coffee!”
“That’s all right,” Holt said, nodding to the girl to take it away again. “When I’m going to drive, I’m better off without coffee.”
Brad looked at him sharply, saying, “It is another symptom, isn’t it? Forgetting things.”
“Possibly,” Holt admitted.
“And not a good one, either. It’s lingered. Are there any books on this subject?”
“Strokes? There are some, yes.”
“Do you have any?”
“One or two. You want to borrow them, I suppose.”
“Know your enemy,” Brad said, smiling, but with an edge to his smile.
“Evelyn is stopping in tomorrow,” Holt said. “I’ll give them to her.”
“Fine.”
v
Evelyn arrived at about three, and Holt had no doubt that her always seeming to show up just at the wrong time to be invited to a meal was not haphazard, but deliberate, a part of that self-effacement that threatened to make the girl completely invisible before long. Holt, who was still ruminating on that instant character analysis given him by Brad yesterday, wondered why Brad didn’t stick a couple of those darts under Evelyn’s skin, get her moving again. But perhaps he did, and they just had no effect.
In any event, it was another sunny day, and this time Holt saw to it that he steered the girl into a room with sunshine in it. He had strong feelings that she should be kept from dark corners as much as possible. He browbeat her into taking tea, he forced Margaret to join them in order to give the occasion as social a patina as possible, and then he told her the situation:
“Brad more than likely has had either a slight stroke or a lesser form of the same thing. His blood pressure is up a little, but it isn’t bad. He seems to have had no permanent effects from this one except a very slight tendency to forget things, and that will probably disappear in time.”
Evelyn, sitting there as prim and plain as though she really were an Avon lady, knees together, holding her teacup in one hand and the saucer in the other, said, “You said, from this one. You expect it to happen again?”
“It can. There’s a fifty-fifty chance. I want to run some tests on him. I’ve booked him into the hospital for three or four days starting Tuesday, the sixth of March. That’s a week from this coming Tuesday, will you tell him that?”
“It’s quite serious, then,” she said quietly.
Margaret, who hadn’t wanted to be present because of her tendency to be overly receptive to other people’s pain, said, “I asked Joe about it last night, Evelyn, and he promised me it’s really unlikely to be serious.”
“It can be serious,” Holt said, he felt he had to say, “but we’ve caught it early and we should be able to protect Brad from the worst effects of it.”
“From dying, you mean,” she said.
“That, too,” Holt said, and immediately regretted it when he saw Margaret give him a quick disapproving look.
Evelyn had caught it, too, and she looked at him in bewilderment, saying, “What else did you mean?”
“Well, any illness, I meant,” he said lamely.
“Oh,” she said faintly, her eyes widening. “This is the sort of thing that can paralyze people, or make them drooling idiots, or drive them insane. Isn’t it?”
“If we don’t protect ourselves against it,” Holt said, trying to reassure her.
“Can we protect ourselves against it?”
An over-simplification would have settled the discussion right there, at least for the moment, but Holt was unable to do that condescending sort of reassurance. “We’re coming to it early,” he said, “which is always good. And there are things we can do.”
“But we can’t be sure.”
“As with everything else in life, Evelyn,” Holt said, “we can’t be sure, no.”
Evelyn looked from Holt to Margaret, her face even paler than usual, her cheekbones more prominent. “God help him,” she said.
3
The theater was bad enough, but Evelyn knew that dinner afterward, in a restaurant with a bordello motif, would be worse. And she was right.
“How many?” the captain asked, and George answered, “Six.” A large enough group to be cumbersome, but too small to hide in.
Marie, naturally, made trouble about the table. They were such a large and conspicuous group, and Marie had such a large and conspicuous voice, that Evelyn would almost have wished at that second for a bulletin from the hospital to whisk her away. Perhaps a nice false alarm?
Marie had said, a few days ago, “Of course you’ll stay with us,” so there was nothing to be done about it, even though Evelyn would have preferred to be alone, to stay at a hotel these four days in New York. She’d wanted it for no real reason that could be defined or justified, but only because if one were alone there was still some faint possibility of something happening. Something vague, unpictured, unplotted for. Unlikely, too, of course, but nevertheless possible. Staying with George and Marie defeated all possibility.