The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man_ A Norman De Ratour Mystery - Alfred Alcorn [15]
The fact is, I want to more than hold the line against any university encroachment. For instance, once the chimpanzees are out of the Pavilion, I intend to remove the rest of the primates as well — the people, that is. Well, not entirely. What I want to do is to convert the space in the Pavilion into curatorial areas open to the public. Here, at designated times, people would be allowed to watch as the curators and restorers tease from the matrix of time and rock and neglect some priceless ancient object, reclaiming beauty and restoring to wholeness at least some fragment of our shattered past.
None of this vision would come to pass, I know, if the university were to succeed in getting its bottom-line, budget-obsessed bureaucrats in charge here. That’s what I am struggling against. That’s why these sudden dark happenings are a threat not just to my institutional survival, but to the fulfillment of a necessary dream.
6
We have had the worst possible news. I went with Elsbeth to the clinic this morning. We knew it wasn’t good the moment we entered Dr. Berns’s office. I sat next to Elsbeth holding her hand. The good doctor shuffled some papers, took off his glasses, and sighed. “I’m afraid,” he said, “the results are not good.
“We’ve found a tumor in the pancreas. A very aggressive form. The prognosis is not good even with treatment.” His words blurred. I clutched her hand thinking only that before long there would be no hand to hold. The doctor said we could try therapy, but he did not recommend it. He said he had some medication that would ease the discomfort and keep the symptoms at bay. “You have perhaps three months, perhaps less. I would try to live them as best you can.”
Elsbeth, I must say, took it rather well. After a few moments of quiet shock in which she let the reality of her situation register, she gave me a hug and turned to the doctor to discuss with him several salient points.
“I want to stay home,” she said. Then, “I’m staying home regardless. No tubes. No needles. No beeping machines. No endless tests to find out how badly I’m doing.” She laughed, inviting us to laugh, such is her generosity of spirit. She said she wanted “killer” drugs for sleeping, “but honestly, I don’t want to drowse my way into the next world.”
Dr. Berns, a large, bearded presence, said he would have all the tests run again. He wrote out a sheaf of prescriptions. He told her to call him any time of the day or night if she needed him. There was more than a trace of emotion in his voice, and he gave her a big hug when we left.
In the car, in the low-slung parking garage with the bright slabs of autumn light visible in the distance, she broke down and cried and cried in my arms. Then, composing herself, she said she had known about it for some time. Nothing specific, but something going fundamentally wrong. She said it had kindled within her a latent faith, “not so much in a personal God, Norman, but in life itself.”
What could I say? Words of comfort failed me. Because there really were none. Reassurances? Of what? We’ll make your death a nice one, Elsbeth, the best money can buy. Emotions, like words, can seem like clichés. I am devastated, of course, when I am not being incredulous. Life is a habit, after all, and it’s always a shock when death, that lurking, monstrous joker, reaches out his inevitable hand.
And what do you do when you have news like this? I feel constrained to call up friends and invite them over for a drink. For a lot of drinks. But we have no ritual response for such announcements. The prognostication of death is, culturally speaking, a recent phenomenon. But surely, we need the comfort of family and friends at these moments, more