by John Gunther
Frances said, “Johnny has a headache. Here, talk to him. He wants to talk to you.”
I asked, “Have you much of a headache, Johnny?”
“And how! I’ve just called Connie to send over some morphine.”
Frances was very much alarmed but she did not want to alarm me; she said there was no need to hurry over, but I might call Traeger to see if the morphine was on the way. I had no premonition at this point, so far as I know, but I told Walter that if he would excuse me I would run along without coffee, since Johnny wasn’t so well. This was the first time since the period before the first operation, fifteen months before, that he had had severe pain. I called Traeger, and a drug for arresting pain, not morphine but a caffeine derivative, was indeed en route. Then I hiked back to our apartment. Johnny had taken a caffeine pill and then vomited propulsively, something we had always been told to watch for and which had never occurred before. I gave him another pill and this one stayed down. Frances told me what had happened. T o her he had said little. But she overheard him on the phone to Traeger and was dramatically shocked by the sharp command in his voice, “Send some morphine, quick?” It was now about 2:35 P.M. Frances wanted me to move him from my room, where he had telephoned, back to his own room. But he seemed too exhausted to walk and he was limp and very heavy. I had a quick thought and lied. “Oh, by the way, Johnny, your papers came through from Harvard today!” He replied, “Am I admitted?” and then yawned in a relaxed, superior, lazy sort of way. Frances had been reading him Arrowsmith. The book lay there beside the bed, open like a broom.
Still I was not really worried. We had gone through so many crises seemingly much worse. Marie made coffee and Frances and I sipped it in the living room. I had an appointment with my dentist at four, and I had no thought of calling it off; I told Frances that I’d be back at five or so. Then I went in to say “S o long” to Johnny and I did not like the way he looked. He was very pale indeed, and the skin was cold and moist. I called Traeger at once but even then it did not occur to me that the end had come. In fact, Traeger had stepped out and when his nurse asked me if he should be located and should come over right away, I said that I didn’t think this was necessary but that I hoped he would drop in late in the afternoon, perhaps at six when he finished work. Then I went back and looked at Johnny again. He said to Frances something she could not quite make out and then something about Mr. Haynes at Deerfield, and Marie told me later that when she peeked into the room while we were having coffee, he murmured loudly “Mother” and then “Father.” I walked to the phone and called off my appointment with my dentist and the next second Traeger called back and I said, “Come right over—hurry!”
He stayed with Johnny a brief moment and took me aside, pale and with a stern expression. “He’s dying. Shall we do anything or not?”
Apparently Johnny had had a cerebral hemorrhage. That tumor had eroded a blood vessel. Of all the doctors who sketched to us so many times how the end might come, none had ever suggested that it might be this.
The rest of the afternoon is full of harsh conflicting lines and shadows. Traeger called Mount and another doctor and Mount called back and promised to rush down from Medical Center; he had just been stepping out of his office for his summer holiday. He arrived—I do not know how he could possibly have done it that fast, all the way from the George Washington Bridge and across town—before five. Johnny recognized him, which was remarkable. But once more, and for the last time, I knew everything from a doctor’s face. Mount went absolutely black and white, in blotches like a woodcut on soft paper. He took Frances across the room and whispered, “I’ m afraid Johnny’s condition has become very much worse since Dr. Traeger telephoned.” To me he said, “In my whole experience I have never known a tumor of such fierceness and rigidity.”
The ambulance men came and we moved Johnny to a nearby hospital rather than Neurological, since Mount did not think that he could survive more than a very brief trip, and the hospital was just around the corner. Everything went wrong. First there were laborious and cruel negotiations on the phone. It was as if the whole fabric of our surroundings and even the most commonplace things had broken at last under this unendurably brutal strain, as if nothing at all would work, as if everything had been torn apart. It was a kind of revolt both of nature and the animate. The emergency door was locked at the hospital; its phone switchboard went to pieces crazily; a helpless nurse did not know what to do about anything; one of the attendants downstairs was hysterical; at the end, the taxi driver who took us back reeled and drove like someone very drunk, which indeed he was.
Johnny went under oxygen, of course; he was given every known medicament that could possibly help, and a youthful doctor explored, as always with difficulty, the veins in his leg for the glucose infusion and transfusion. We got to the hospital at a little after six. Frances and I sat with Johnny or paced the hall or talked on an open terrace at the end of the corridor for a series of long, vacant hours. It was a very hot, clear, dark night. Johnny slept on his side, restfully. He never regained consciousness. He died absolutely without fear, and without pain, and without knowing that he was going to die.
At a few minutes to eleven we thought we ought to go into his room; we had stepped out on the balcony for a brief second, and presently, with infinite depth, very slowly and at spaced intervals, three great quivering gasps came out of him. He had regained color just before; he had some final essential spark of animation; he was still fighting. But now these shatteringly deep breaths, arising from something so deep down that his whole body shook and trembled, told us their irrevocable message. Someone started ringing an emergency bell. After all those months of doctors and doctors and doctors, it happened that no doctor was there at that precise moment. Not that they could have done anything. Traeger had just gone home, and he came back of course. Another doctor was in the internes’ room, and he slipped up briskly. All the doctors!—helpless flies now, climbing across the granite face of death.
Johnny died at 11:02 P.M. Frances reached for him through the ugly, transparent, raincoat-like curtain of the oxygen machine. I felt his arms, cupping my hands around them, and the warmth gradually left them, receding very slowly upward from his hands. For a long time some warmth remained. Then little by little the life-color left his face, his lips became blue, and his hands were cold. What is life? It departs covertly. Like a thief Death took him.
Aftermath
All that is left of a life! There Johnny was, so pale, so slim and handsome, in the tweed suit with a spot on the lapel, he always had a spot on his lapel, and a bright striped necktie— with what valor he struggled to tie that necktie in the last hopeless weeks—here he lay placidly in the small chapel full of flowers, with his face sweet and composed and without a trace, not an iota, of struggle or pain, and we said goodbye to him, Frances and I and a clustering group of friends. We said goodbye. But to anybody who ever knew him, he is still alive. I do not mean merely that he lives in both of us or in the trees at Deerfield or in anything he touched truly, but that the influence, the impact, of a heroic personality continues to exert itself long after mortal bonds are snapped. Johnny transmits permanently something of what he was, since the fabric of the universe is continuous and eternal.
People tell us that that brief noontime service was some-thing they will never forget. Frances is Jewish and at her suggestion we had a double ceremony; her friend Rabbi Newman and Mr. Neale of the Unitarian church joined to conduct the service, and in his magnificent voice Rabbi Newman read Johnny’s own short “Unbeliever’s Prayer.” Most of our close friends had scattered for the summer; their telegrams and letters poured in, but they could not get back in time. Mr. Boyden and Mr. Nichols came down from Deerfield; Mr. Matthew came from the Tutoring School and Mr. Weaver from Connecticut and Dr. Miller from Neurological and Dr. Gerson; Mary was there, and several schoolmates, and a throng of adult friends; even his dentist came. And the flowers—I have never seen such flowers! They made a foaming love
liness, many of them scarlet and white, crimson and white: I sent bright scarlet carnations because these were Frances’s favorite flower; then we saw the masses of pink and blue and tawny flowers, and a spray of golden flowers tall and spreading like a glowing bush.
When Johnny died, nature took note. There were violent squalls of hot wind, the apartment building rattled that night, and the windows shook in their steel casements. But the day of the funeral was a wonderful peaceful day, warm and with the sky very blue, clear and high and without a cloud. Frances and I drove up alone to Ferncliff and on the way back the wind came up sharply, keen and cutting but cool in the brilliant sunshine; we drove along the Hudson where we had driven with Johnny so many times, and the snapping wind under a calm sun whipped it into fresh ridges—they looked like sharp white icecaps dancing across the majestic avenue of the river.
The whys of this story, why Johnny should have been struck just in that part of him that would have been most fruitful, why his clock should have broken just at this particular time in his life, the why above all whys which is why any child should die, the whys and wherefores of the celestial bookkeeping involved, if any, I will not go into here. There are other criteria for measuring a life as well as its duration— quality, intensity. But for us there is no compensation, except that we can go to him though he cannot come to us. For others, I would say that it was his spirit, and only his spirit, that kept him invincibly alive against such dreadful obstacles for so long—this is the central pith and substance of what I am trying to write, as a mournful tribute not only to Johnny but to the power, the wealth, the unconquerable beauty of the human spirit, will, and soul.
Letters came in like an avalanche, until we counted them by the hundred. He was just a boy of seventeen; yet what an imprint he made on anybody who ever met him! There were condolences from camp counselors who had not seen him for years and from a barber in a downtown hotel; from the Negro elevator boy in my office building and the proprietors of a friendly restaurant on Madison Avenue; from playwrights, judges, politicians, old Chicago friends whom we had not seen in years, from teachers and doctors and newspaper folk, old schoolmates, several of those who had seen him graduate at Deerfield, movie people, poets, acquaintances from faroff days in Vienna, physicists, his godfather in Washington, the doormen at our apartment building, refugees from Europe, his devoted governess Milla, scores of writers, and above all people who had never met him or us—parents whose sons had also died.
Of these hundreds of communications I will give only three, all from doctors.
DEAR JOHN,
Word has just reached me of poor Johnny’s death—“He hath outsoared the shadow of our night”—what a gallant soul, and what an unfulfilled promise! The fact that this was to be expected makes it no easier to bear, and I hope that you and Mrs. Gunther know that you have all my deepest sympathy. Now I suppose we shall never know whether lithium anhydride will ionize in liquid ammonia—nor what ecstasies and sorrows might have befallen Johnny had he lived.
I wish I might have been of more help.
Sincerely and cordially,
TRACY PUTNAM
DEAR MR. AND MRS. GUNTHER:
What a heroic battle Johnny fought! A gallant spirit like his cannot be destroyed by a mechanical defect in the body which was given him.
Knowing him and thinking of his stubborn refusal to accept defeat makes me believe that that spirit will live on. For such there must be an immortality which we who tinker at the body may guess at but not understand.
You two, by your restless effort, kept him alive a year longer than should be expected. You could have done no more. It was worth while.
Sincerely,
WILDER PENFIELD
LIKE EVERYONE WHO KNEW JOHNNY I HAD A SPECIAL PLACE IN MY HEART FOR HIM. HE WAS THE MOST GALLANT AND SOULFUL CHILD I EVER MET.
DAVID M. LEVY, M.D.
Traeger came over a few evenings after the funeral. He had the preliminary autopsy and he told us that slides from Johnny’s brain would in time be in every important neurological institute in the world, because it was unique that a child with such an affliction should have remained so comparatively well right to the end. So perhaps Johnny will have aided science after all. Small comfort! It was his courage—the indomitable quality of his simple unquestioning courage— that I hope people will remember him for—that and perhaps for his sweetness too. But what Traeger told us made us glad that he died when he did, so resolutely and peacefully, if he had to die at all, because he would probably have become blind in a short time, and perhaps he would have lost his ability to associate. Even Johnny’s gallantry could not have stood up under that. Traeger said, “He had the most brilliant promise of any child I have ever known.”
PART TWO
“Recontent with the universe,
discontent with the world.”
A Few More of His Letters
The first letter I have in Johnny’s own hand was written when he was about seven:
DEAR PAPA
how is your new book getting on, I hope it is getting on all right.
With love and kisses
from
JOHNNY G.
These are excerpts from letters we received while we were away in the Far East in 1937-38:
DEAR MUTTI AND PAPA
I hope you are fine. And so am 1. 1 miss you very, very much. I hung your picture in the bedroom so I can say “Good morning” and “Good night” to you. I made a puppet all by myself it is going to be a woman Detta is making a dress for her.
We read in the newspaper that a new star was discovered. It is nearly as big as the Solar System.
In school I saw a movie. It was called “If we were on the moon” It showed that there were many vulcanos on the moon. One was eighty-five miles wide, that one is one of the biggest. It showed that you couldn’t hear each other on the moon. It showed that if you weight one hundred and twenty-five pounds on the earth, you would weigh twenty-five pounds on the moon.
Our grade went to a Science laboratory. A man showed us lots of experiments. One of the experiments showed us that electricity would rather go through two feet without oxygen than a few inches with oxygen.
This weekend I went to the Van Alens. They had a big Pirate party. Seventeen boys were invited. A nice magician showed us some very tricky trickes. I also went riding on a pony named “Sassy Susie” I had a wonderful weekend I hardly can wait to hug you
He went to camp in the summer of 1939:
Lake Placid, N.Y.
DEAR MUTTI AND PAPA
How do the basoon double Bass and flute solo records sound.
Ray the science cousler, I and some other children (about 5 I think) banded a Northern Horned lark which is quite rare. He was a baby, the next day we banded 3 baby chipping sparrows.
I am starting to build a modle of the “Soveriegn of the Seas”
I’m fine. Ray caught a porcupine he is keeping him in a big cage there are 50 frogs in the house and at least 11 of them is hopping around lose on the floor. I caught 1 of them, there are four Garter snakes in the house.
I am making a banboo flute. Please send me the violin I have, with strings or no strings. Don’t forget the bow. Ray left. I played a littel tennis
Thanks alot for sending’ the violin I am learning how to play it. the orchestra played its first consert I swam 380 feet on the side strok
I am having fine time. Thanks a lot for sending the chines things, the camera came in a great big box, there was more wood shavings than camera in it.
I started weaving soming. I moved into a tent on monday one of the workmen caught a woodchuck. he was put in a cage, he escaped today.
Frances had a critically serious illness; I was in Europe covering the outbreak of the war and came home:
DEAR MUTTI
school has been fun. Papa is going to arive on the S.S. amsterdam Friday at 8:00 P.M. Miss chambers is taking Edgar and me to the dock, our teacher is miss Eakright lukaly our project this term is
going to be the Geological and sociological formations of USA I am fine, when can you leave the hospital
love
kisses
and
hugs
JOHNNY
DEAR MUTTI
How are you. I am fine. I am lisening to some good music on the radio by betoven. Yesterday I went to the museum of natural history, and so the hall of gems I so the amsterdam arrive. I hope you will soon be out of the hospitle
love and kisses
JOHNNY
He wrote me often while I was in Latin America in the winter of 1940-41 :
DEAR PAPA
I miss you very much. Thanks alot for your postcards and letters I like them alot. Are you still in Panama? I wonder how the lockes work? A week or so a go I heard Hifez he played a modern peice called “the hoxapocha” which is quite unusual I stayed up till about 12 that night I’m having lots fun I hope that you are
love and kisses
JOHNNY
DEAR PAPA
We went to Croton for thangsgiving I played a trio with Whit and peter. Sat. we went to Long Island to visit the Aliens Mutti nearly bought a house with ocean to go with it.
love
JOHNNY
Frances had a trip to Florida:
DEAR MUTTI
I’m beginning to finish or rather finishing the begining of that rondo I started compose. I wrote the first theme and a modulation.
When are you coming back? I would like the aligator alot but, I would like to give you the pleasure of letting it accompany you on the trip here.
love
JOHNNY