Prizes

by Erich Segal

  I had a terrible nightmare last night, and when I woke from it, I couldn’t get back to sleep. I dreamed that I forgot my multiplication tables. I mean I couldn’t even do two times two. Dad got so angry that he made me pack and leave home.

  I wonder what it means.

  6

  ADAM

  After his return from Washington, Adam had wondered whether to tell Max about that final conversation with Hartnell. But his mentor had already been upset to learn that the man for whom he had compromised his principles was not, after all, the President of the United States. The fact that someone like the Boss had offered to help obtain him a Nobel, might stigmatize the prize forever in Max’s scrupulous estimation.

  In any case, whenever the Nobel had come up in casual conversation and someone suggested that Max had long ago earned it, he always commented dismissively, “Well, if it must come, let’s hope it’s not for a while. T. S. Eliot was right when he said, ‘The Nobel is a ticket to your own funeral. No one’s ever done anything after he got it.’ ”

  “In that case,” Lisl playfully called his bluff, “if the Karolinska Institute should telephone tomorrow, are you in or out?”

  “Well,” he continued to equivocate, “Did you know that some of their smorgasbords have more than twenty different kinds of herring? Not to mention smoked reindeer steak.”

  “Then by all means you have to accept,” Adam interposed, “if only for gastronomic reasons.”

  That round was over. The trio exchanged silent smiles for a moment, then Max said earnestly, “Anyway, they’ll never choose me—I don’t go to conferences. I don’t play the game.”

  Lisl beamed. At times like this he would only accept her reassurance. “Darling, granted you’re not a politician, but on rare occasions simply being a genius is enough for the Nobel Prize.”

  The evening continued with small talk—although in the Rudolph household no talk was really “small.” After a heated debate on the artistic virtues of Sarah Caldwell’s revival of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Lisl brought out some more glasses of tea and asked casually, “Now that you’ve cured your mysterious patient, what are you whiz kids going to do for an encore?”

  “Lisl,” Max explained, “this lymphosarcoma was out of our line anyway. They were just borrowing our mice to test other people’s research. After all, the sign on my door does say ‘Immunology,’ and there’s no shortage of autoimmune diseases to investigate. And of course we still have the ongoing pernicious anemia project.”

  “I know,” she countered. “But your lab is like a circus, and where you two choose to work is always the center ring.”

  “Don’t worry,” Max uttered with mock exasperation. “When we decide, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “No,” Max shouted, “I absolutely refuse—you’re a sadist!”

  “Come on, get in, it’s good for you. Remember, I’m a doctor.”

  “No—it’s insanity to make a normal person jump into freezing water at the crack of dawn.”

  Adam, treading water, continued to coax the distinguished professor to join him.

  “Listen, you did your medicine back in the Stone Age. They didn’t know that exercise was so important for your health.”

  “Very well,” the older man capitulated, “but I’m coming down the ladder.”

  As Max—no picture of grace—huffed and puffed through the water, his self-appointed trainer swam in the adjacent lane shouting encouragement.

  “Good going—the first ten laps are the hardest. How do you feel?”

  “Like an old fish,” he gasped as he struggled along.

  “Great. You’ve never seen an overweight fish, have you?”

  Afterward, as they sat in the locker room drying off, Max confessed, “I hate to admit it, but I actually feel wonderful. Now I only hope nobody from the lab saw me. I feel undignified without a tie.”

  “By all means bring one to the pool next time. Didn’t you notice those two lab technicians who waved at us?”

  “How could I tell what they were, they weren’t wearing white coats.”

  “They certainly weren’t,” Adam grinned. “Still, they were sending very friendly smiles in our direction.”

  “Your direction. I’ve no illusions about my looks. But let’s get upstairs. I want to talk to you about an important project.”

  “Something new? How long have you been hiding it from me?”

  “Oh, about ten years.” And there was something about Max’s tone of voice that sounded as if he was not exaggerating.

  Thirty minutes later they were locked within the glass-walled partitions of Max’s office.

  “This is very difficult for me to discuss,” the older man began uneasily. “Tell me truthfully, have you come across any rumors about why Lisl and I didn’t have children?”

  “That’s none of my damn business.”

  “Decency never slowed the circulation of juicy gossip, my boy. Do you mean to tell me that you’ve never heard it whispered in the corridors that I didn’t have a family because it would distract me from my research?”

  Adam looked his boss in the eye and said with conviction, “First of all, I’ve never heard it—and most of all, I don’t believe it for a minute.”

  “I’m glad,” Max responded, “The truth is, we both desperately wanted a baby. And in fact Lisl was pregnant at least fourteen times.”

  “Fourteen?”

  “Well, a great number of them ended so early that only a doctor could have determined that she’d been pregnant at all. There didn’t seem to be anybody in our illustrious OB/GYN Department who could shed light on the matter. So I took the investigation into my own hands.

  “I soon discovered that there was a sizable number of women who go through this agony many times before giving up completely. It’s a catastrophe that haunts them through their whole life. And a mystery which, to this day, remains unsolved.” He looked up for a moment, his face flushed with emotion.

  “Max, think of all the nights we’ve worked together in the lab, spilling out our hearts to each other. How come you never once mentioned this to me?”

  “I didn’t want to burden you with something that neither of us could do anything about. But I’ve been gathering data over nearly ten years.”

  “All that time behind my back?”

  Max nodded. “I’ve been moonlighting in the Marblehead Gynecological Clinic, specializing in patients with repeated miscarriages.” He patted his computer and said, “Everything’s in here. All I need is the benefit of your brain.”

  “Okay, boss. But I still sense that if Batman’s calling Robin, it means he’s already on the trail of a solution.”

  “As a matter of fact, I am, Boy Wonder. Naturally, I’ll give you the printouts, but I think you’ll agree with my basic hypothesis: that these unexplained miscarriages might result from the woman rejecting the fetus as a foreign body, the way early transplant patients rejected hearts and kidneys.

  “My experiments with mice have shown that certain females carry their own antigens, which are toxic to the baby.” He lowered his head sadly and murmured, “I am afraid my little Lisl is that kind of mouse.”

  “You must have suffered a great deal,” Adam whispered, unable to hide his sadness.

  “No. She suffered—I just endured.” And then, regaining his gruff tone of voice, he ordered, “Now, let’s get to work, shall we? Your computer’s already hooked to my database, so all you have to know is the password.”

  “Which is?”

  “You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that one out.”

  “ ‘Blintzes’?”

  “You have great scientific instinct.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What are you thanking me for, dear boy? I’ve just saddled you with a problem of enormous magnitude.”

  “I know,” Adam conceded, “but it makes a difference to be working on an experiment and being able to visualize the human being involved.” To which he added softly, “Even tho
ugh it’s too late for Lisl.”

  With the data, the technicians, and the mice already in place, it was relatively easy for Adam to move his investigation from the confines of Max’s obsession to the open benches of Immunology Lab 808. Also, the information already gathered had given them leads with which to begin.

  Moreover, there had been progress in other areas of the field, as Max explained. “I have it on good authority that researchers at Sandoz are well along the way with an immunosuppressant that will transform organ transplants into everyday occurrences.”

  “Great,” Adam responded. “Now all we have to do is discover an analogy that would suppress the autoimmune reaction in pregnant females.”

  “Right.” Max smiled. “And then we’ll go for lunch.”

  Adam worked demonically. Whenever he was not seeing patients or delivering babies, he was in the lab.

  Late one night, the lab phone rang, shrilly interrupting the quiet contemplation of those few still present and working.

  “Hey, Adam, it’s for you,” called Cindy Po, a microbiologist from Hawaii. “Female—and very sexy.”

  So immersed was he in what he’d been studying, Adam did not at first react to someone “sexy” calling him at this time of night. He merely walked like a somnambulist to the phone and said, “This is Dr. Coopersmith.”

  “Hi, Doctor,” came a cheery voice.

  “Toni,” he responded with pleasure. “It’s nice to hear from you. What made you call me at this ungodly hour?”

  “The whole truth? I’ve been pining here, hoping you’d make a house call. Since it didn’t look like it was going to happen, I phoned your apartment. When I got no answer, I decided to find out whether you were on a heavy date or buried in research. Is there someone else in your life yet?”

  “Listen, now that you know where I am on a Saturday night, you must realize the only creatures I’m involved with are furry and have tails. It was you who was otherwise … engaged.”

  “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that. How about coming to Washington next weekend?”

  He challenged her. “How about you coming to Boston?”

  “Fine. Thanks for the invitation.”

  A few moments later Adam hung up and smiled broadly.

  “Well, well, well,” Cindy remarked from a proximity that left no doubt that she had overheard the entire conversation. “It looks like you’ve blown your cover.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Your ostensible indifference to the female sex—at least the species that works in this lab.”

  “Cindy,” he chided good-naturedly, “my private life is nobody’s business.”

  “On the contrary, Prof, it’s probably the best source of gossip we’ve ever had. You’ve been voted the cutest doctor every year I’ve been here.”

  “Come off it, Cindy. Go back to your amino acids.”

  “Yes sir,” the young post-doc replied with playful deference, tossing off a final comment as she left. “We’ll take a straw vote to see if she’s worthy of you.”

  Max Rudolph lived by his own rules. And they included surprise visits to the lab. Late the next afternoon, he discovered his protégé hard at work. Eyeing him with disapproval, he demanded, “How many hours of sleep did you get last night?”

  “A few.”

  “ ‘A few’ is not a scientific answer,” he admonished. “And did you take in a movie as you promised?”

  “Actually, I got carried away and missed the last show.”

  The professor frowned. “I don’t like disobedience on my staff. Even your great brain has to recharge. So finish what you’re doing and we’ll go out to Newton and get some decent food into you.”

  Adam was grateful for the invitation, and twenty minutes later they were in Max’s vintage Volkswagen Beetle, sputtering along Commonwealth Avenue in the growing winter darkness.

  As the older man failed to stop for the second red light in a row, Adam scolded, “Pay attention. Your mind’s a million miles away. You shouldn’t be driving at the best of times.”

  “At least I got some sleep last night,” Max replied with mock sanctimony. “Now sit back and listen to the second movement of this Schubert.” And with that he turned up the volume and hummed along.

  Adam relented. At that instant he took his attention off the road—a lapse for which he would castigate himself the rest of his life. As they reached the crest of Heartbreak Hill on Commonwealth Avenue and began to hurtle downward, two teenagers on bikes suddenly appeared directly in the path of the car.

  Max swerved to avoid them. Skidding on a patch of ice, he lost control and crashed violently into a tree.

  The silence after the accident belied its gravity. There was the crumpling of thin metal. Then the sound of the driver’s forehead striking the windshield.

  And then total quiet.

  For a moment Adam sat there motionless, in shock.

  He listened intently but could not hear any sound of breathing. Reaching over to feel the old man’s pulse, he knew this was merely a pretext to touch his mentor for the last time.

  Slowly he was gripped by an agonizing awareness. He’s dead. My friend, my teacher—my father—he’s dead. And it’s all my fault.

  A cry emerged from him like the howl of a wounded animal.

  He was still sobbing when the squad cars came.

  The cyclists, though horrified, were able to give a more or less coherent account of what had transpired.

  The senior police officer wanted to get his paperwork over with. “Do you know about next of kin?” he asked.

  “His wife. Lisl. She only lives a few blocks away. I could walk right there.”

  “Would you like us to drive you?”

  “No thank you, Sergeant. I need time to collect my thoughts.”

  Lisl took the news bravely. She murmured a few words about the folly of allowing her husband behind the wheel.

  “He was so headstrong, my Max, I should never have let him drive.”

  She then realized how shaken Adam was and touched his hand gently.

  “Stop blaming yourself. You have to accept that terrible things like this happen.”

  But why to Max? Adam grieved. Why to such a saintly human being?

  Lisl called one of her close friends, with whom she had done her analytical studies. The woman was more than willing to sit with her while Adam went through the grim procedure of making the funeral arrangements—which, in case of accidental death, had to wait for the obligatory police autopsy.

  At six P.M. Eli Cass, the press officer from Harvard, telephoned for details of the accident to add to the release he was rushing to complete for the next morning’s Boston Globe and the various wire services. Eli was pleased to speak to someone who could update the list of Max’s awards.

  “Dean Holmes said it was only a question of time before Max got the Nobel,” Cass remarked.

  “Yes,” Adam replied numbly. “He was probably the leading immunologist in the world.”

  In the living room, Lisl had been joined by Maurice Oates, the Rudolphs’ lawyer.

  “I wouldn’t be discussing Max’s will so soon,” he apologized. “Except that it’s very emphatic about there being no speeches at his interment. In fact, no service of any kind. Otherwise the testament is straightforward.” He paused, and then looked at the tall young doctor standing ashen-faced in the corner. “He wanted you to have his gold pocket watch.”

  “I’ll get it,” Lisl offered.

  “No, no,” Adam said. “There’s plenty of time for that.”

  “Please,” she overruled him. “If I don’t give it to you tonight, you’ll have nothing of Max’s to go home with.”

  And now, suddenly, heedless of the others in the room, she fell into Adam’s arms. And they both began to sob for the terrible loss of the noblest human being they would ever know.

  Though it was nearly midnight when he left, Lisl was still surrounded by several friends and neighbors who had come to keep her company. In
addition, the house was filled with palpable memories of Max: his office, his books, his clothes. His reading glasses placed neatly on the desk.

  In contrast, all Adam had was the silent gold watch, a more poignant token since it had been given to Max by his own father when he’d received his M.D. It had now become a symbolic way of passing the torch. Adam held the cold metal to his cheek.

  His phone rang. It was Toni.

  “It was on the eleven o’clock news,” she explained. “Are you okay?”

  “Not really,” he replied bitterly. “I should have been driving.”

  There was a silence. Toni did not know what to say. Finally she asked: “When’s the funeral?”

  “Tuesday morning. There’s not going to be any ceremony—he specified no eulogy.”

  “That seems wrong,” Toni objected, “there should at least be words—expressions of affection. Lisl may not realize how much she needs it too. You can’t just walk away without saying anything. Would it be all right if I came?”

  “But you didn’t even know him.”

  “Funerals are for the living, not the dead.”

  “I realize that. But I have to look after Lisl.”

  “I know,” she answered gently. “But somebody has to take care of you.”

  There was a momentary pause.

  “Thanks, Toni,” he whispered. “I’d appreciate that.”

  There were two dozen or so gathered around Max Rudolph’s freshly dug grave: the dean, colleagues, their wives, his lab teams and students. And standing discreetly among them was Antonia Nielson from Washington.

  The undertakers, experienced with “silent” funerals, had prepared cut flowers for the mourners to drop onto the lowered coffin as they passed by to pay their last respects.

  Finally, only Adam and Lisl were left. And as he held his flower, unable to let go, words emerged from his throat unbidden.

  It was the lines from Hamlet, which suddenly seemed so appropriate.

  He was a man, take him for all-in-all,