After I graduated from MIT I went to Princeton, and I would go home on vacations to see Arlene. One time when I went to see her, Arlene had developed a bump on one side of her neck. She was a very beautiful girl, so it worried her a little bit, but it didn’t hurt, so she figured it wasn’t too serious. She went to her uncle, who was a doctor. He told her to rub it with omega oil.
Then, sometime later, the bump began to change. It got bigger—or maybe it was smaller—and she got a fever. The fever got worse, so the family doctor decided Arlene should go to the hospital. She was told she had typhoid fever. Right away, as I still do today, I looked up the disease in medical books and read all about it.
When I went to see Arlene in the hospital, she was in quarantine—we had to put on special gowns when we entered her room, and so on. The doctor was there, so I asked him how the Wydell test came out—it was an absolute test for typhoid fever that involved checking for bacteria in the feces. He said, “It was negative.”
“What? How can that be!” I said. “Why all these gowns, when you can’t even find the bacteria in an experiment? Maybe she doesn’t have typhoid fever!”
The result of that was that the doctor talked to Arlene’s parents, who told me not to interfere. “After all, he’s the doctor. You’re only her fiancé.”
I’ve found out since that such people don’t know what they’re doing, and get insulted when you make some suggestion or criticism. I realize that now, but I wish I had been much stronger then and told her parents that the doctor was an idiot—which he was—and didn’t know what he was doing. But as it was, her parents were in charge of it.
Anyway, after a little while, Arlene got better, apparently: the swelling went down and the fever went away. But after some weeks the swelling started again, and this time she went to another doctor. This guy feels under her armpits and in her groin, and so on, and notices there’s swelling in those places, too. He says the problem is in her lymphatic glands, but he doesn’t yet know what the specific disease is. He will consult with other doctors.
As soon as I hear about it I go down to the library at Princeton and look up lymphatic diseases, and find “Swelling of the Lymphatic Glands. (1) Tuberculosis of the lymphatic glands. This is very easy to diagnose…”—so I figure this isn’t what Arlene has, because the doctors are having trouble trying to figure it out.
I start reading about some other diseases: lym-phodenema, lymphodenoma, Hodgkin’s disease, all kinds of other things; they’re all cancers of one crazy form or another. The only difference between lymphodenema and lymphodenoma was, as far as I could make out by reading it very carefully, that if the patient dies, it’s lymphodenoma; if the patient survives—at least for a while—then it’s lymphodenema.
At any rate, I read through all the lymphatic diseases, and decided that the most likely possibility was that Arlene had an incurable disease. Then I half smiled to myself, thinking, “I bet everybody who reads through a medical book thinks they have a fatal disease.” And yet, after reading everything very carefully, I couldn’t find any other possibility. It was serious.
Then I went to the weekly tea at Palmer Hall, and found myself talking to the mathematicians just as I always did, even though I had just found out that Arlene probably had a fatal disease. It was very strange—like having two minds.
When I went to visit her, I told Arlene the joke about the people who don’t know any medicine reading the medical book and always assuming they have a fatal disease. But I also told her I thought we were in great difficulty, and that the best I could figure out was that she had an incurable disease. We discussed the various diseases, and I told her what each one was like.
One of the diseases I told Arlene about was Hodgkin’s disease. When she next saw her doctor, she asked him about it: “Could it be Hodgkin’s disease?”
He said, “Well, yes, that’s a possibility.”
When she went to the county hospital, the doctor wrote the following diagnosis: “Hodgkin’s disease—?” So I realized that the doctor didn’t know any more than I did about this problem.
The county hospital gave Arlene all sorts of tests and X-ray treatments for this “Hodgkin’s disease—?” and there were special meetings to discuss this peculiar case. I remember waiting for her outside, in the hall. When the meeting was over, the nurse wheeled her out in a wheelchair. All of a sudden a little guy comes running out of the meeting room and catches up with us. “Tell me,” he says, out of breath, “do you spit up blood? Have you ever coughed up blood?”
The nurse says, “Go away! Go away! What kind of thing is that to ask of a patient!”—and brushes him away. Then she turned to us and said, “That man is a doctor from the neighborhood who comes to the meetings and is always making trouble. That’s not the kind of thing to ask of a patient!”
I didn’t catch on. The doctor was checking a certain possibility, and if I had been smart, I would have asked him what it was.
Finally, after a lot of discussion, a doctor at the hospital tells me they figure the most likely possibility is Hodgkin’s disease. He says, “There will be some periods of improvement, and some periods in the hospital. It will be on and off, getting gradually worse. There’s no way to reverse it entirely. It’s fatal after a few years.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say. “I’ll tell her what you said.”
“No, no!” says the doctor. “We don’t want to upset the patient. “We’re going to tell her it’s glandular fever.”
“No, no!” I reply. “We’ve already discussed the possibility of Hodgkin’s disease. I know she can adjust to it.”
“Her parents don’t want her to know. You had better talk to them first.”
At home, everybody worked on me: my parents, my two aunts, our family doctor; they were all on me, saying I’m a very foolish young man who doesn’t realize what pain he’s going to bring to this wonderful girl by telling her she has a fatal disease. “How can you do such a terrible thing?” they asked, in horror.
“Because we have made a pact that we must speak honestly with each other and look at everything directly. There’s no use fooling around. She’s gonna ask me what she’s got, and I cannot lie to her!”
“Oh, that’s childish!” they said—blah, blah, blah. Everybody kept working on me, and said I was wrong. I thought I was definitely right, because I had already talked to Arlene about the disease and knew she could face it— that telling her the truth was the right way to handle it.
But finally, my little sister comes up to me—she was eleven or twelve then—with tears running down her face. She beats me on the chest, telling me that Arlene is such a wonderful girl, and that I’m such a foolish, stubborn brother. I couldn’t take it any more. That broke me down.
So I wrote Arlene a goodbye love letter, figuring that if she ever found out the truth after I had told her it was glandular fever, we would be through. I carried the letter with me all the time.
The gods never make it easy; they always make it harder. I go to the hospital to see Arlene—having made this decision—and there she is, sitting up in bed, surrounded by her parents, somewhat distraught. When she sees me, her face lights up and she says, “Now I know how valuable it is that we tell each other the truth!” Nodding at her parents, she continues, “They’re telling me I have glandular fever, and I’m not sure whether I believe them or not. Tell me, Richard, do I have Hodgkin’s disease or glandular fever?”
“You have glandular fever,” I said, and I died inside. It was terrible—just terrible!
Her reaction was completely simple: “Oh! Fine! Then I believe them.” Because we had built up so much trust in each other, she was completely relieved. Everything was solved, and all was very nice.
She got a little bit better, and went home for a while. About a week later, I get a telephone call. “Richard,” she says, “I want to talk to you. Come on over.”
“Okay.” I made sure I still had the letter with me. I could tell something was the matter.
I go upstairs to her room, and she says, “Sit down.” I sit down on the end of her bed. “All right, now tell me,” she says, “do I have glandular fever or Hodgkin’s disease?”
“You have Hodgkin’s disease.” And I reached for the letter.
“God!” she says. “They must have put you through hell!”
I had just told her she has a fatal disease, and was admitting that I had lied to her as well, and what does she think of? She’s worried about me! I was terribly ashamed of myself. I gave Arlene the letter.
“You should have stuck by it. We know what we’re doing; we are right!”
“I’m sorry. I feel awful.”
“I understand, Richard. Just don’t do it again.”
You see, she was in bed upstairs, and did something she used to do when she was little: she tiptoed out of bed and crawled down the stairs a little bit to listen to what people were doing downstairs. She heard her mother crying a lot, and went back to bed thinking, “If I have glandular fever, why is Mother crying so much? But Richard said I had glandular fever, so it must be right!”
Later she thought, “Could Richard have lied to me?” and began to wonder how that might be possible. She concluded that, incredible as it sounded, somebody might have put me through a wringer of some sort.
She was so good at facing difficult situations that she went on to the next problem. “Okay,” she says, “I have Hodgkin’s disease. What are we going to do now?”
I had a scholarship at Princeton, and they wouldn’t let me keep it if I got married. We knew what the disease was like: sometimes it would get better for some months, and Arlene could be at home, and then she would have to be in the hospital for some months—back and forth for two years, perhaps.
So I figure, although I’m in the middle of trying to get my Ph.D., I could get a job at the Bell Telephone Laboratories doing research—it was a very good place to work—and we could get a little apartment in Queens that wasn’t too far from the hospital or Bell Labs. We could get married in a few months, in New York. We worked everything out that afternoon.
For some months now Arlene’s doctors had wanted to take a biopsy of the swelling on her neck, but her parents didn’t want it done—they didn’t want to “bother the poor sick girl.” But with new resolve, I kept working on them, explaining that it’s important to get as much information as possible. With Arlene’s help, I finally convinced her parents.
A few days later, Arlene telephones me and says, “They got a report from the biopsy.”
“Yeah? Is it good or bad?”
“I don’t know. Come over and let’s talk about it,”
When I got to her house, she showed me the report. It said, “Biopsy shows tuberculosis of the lymphatic gland.”
That really got me. I mean, that was the first goddamn thing on the list! I passed it by, because the book said it was easy to diagnose, and because the doctors were having so much trouble trying to figure out what it was. I assumed they had checked the obvious case. And it was the obvious case: the man who had come running out of the meeting room asking “Do you spit up blood?” had the right idea. He knew what it probably was!
I felt like a jerk, because I had passed over the obvious possibility by using circumstantial evidence—which isn’t any good—and by assuming the doctors were more intelligent than they were. Otherwise, I would have suggested it right off, and perhaps the doctor would have diagnosed Arlene’s disease way back then as “tuberculosis of the lymphatic gland—?” I was a dope. I’ve learned, since then.
Anyway, Arlene says, “So I might live as long as seven years. I may even get better.”
“So what do you mean, you don’t know if it’s good or bad?”
“Well, now we won’t be able to get married until later.”
Knowing that she only had two more years to live, we had solved things so perfectly, from her point of view, that she was disturbed to discover she’d live longer! But it didn’t take me long to convince her it was a better circumstance.
So we knew we could face things together, from then on. After going through that, we had no difficulty facing any other problem.
When the war came, I was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project at Princeton, where I was finishing up my degree. A few months later, as soon as I got my degree, I announced to my family that I wanted to get married.
My father was horrified, because from the earliest times, as he saw me develop, he thought I would be happy as a scientist. He thought it was still too early to marry—it would interfere with my career. He also had this crazy idea: if a guy was in some difficulty, he used to always say, “Cherchez la femme”—look for the woman behind it. He felt that women were the great danger to a man, that a man always has to watch out and be tough about women. And when he sees me marrying a girl with tuberculosis, he thinks of the possibility that I’m going to get sick, too.
My whole family was worried about that—aunts, uncles, everyone. They brought the family doctor over to our house. He tried to explain to me that tuberculosis is a dangerous disease, and that I’m bound to get it.
I said, “Just tell me how it’s transmitted, and we’ll figure it out.” We were already very, very careful: we knew we must not kiss, because there’s a lot of bacteria in the mouth.
Then they very carefully explained to me that when I had promised to marry Arlene, I didn’t know the situation. Everybody would understand that I didn’t know the situation then, and that it didn’t represent a real promise.
I never had that feeling, that crazy idea that they had, that I was getting married because I had promised it. I hadn’t even thought of that. It wasn’t a question of having promised anything; we had stalled around, not getting a piece of paper and not being formally married, but we were in love, and were already married, emotionally.
I said, “Would it be sensible for a husband who learns that his wife has tuberculosis to leave her?”
Only my aunt who ran the hotel thought maybe it would be all right for us to get married. Everybody else was still against it. But this time, since my family had given me this kind of advice before and it had been so wrong, I was in a much stronger position. It was very easy to resist and to just proceed. So there was no problem, really. Although it was a similar circumstance, they weren’t going to convince me of anything any more. Arlene and I knew we were right in what we were doing.
Arlene and I worked everything out. There was a hospital in New Jersey just south of Fort Dix where she could stay while I was at Princeton. It was a charity hospital—Deborah was the name of it—supported by the Women’s Garment Workers Union of New York. Arlene wasn’t a garment worker, but it didn’t make any difference. And I was just a young fella working on this project for the government, and the pay was very low. But this way I could take care of her, at last.
We decided to get married on the way to Deborah Hospital. I went to Princeton to pick up a car—Bill Woodward, one of the graduate students there, lent me his station wagon. I fixed it up like a little ambulance, with a mattress and sheets in the back, so Arlene could lie down in case she got tired. Although this was one of the periods when the disease was apparently not so bad and she was at home, Arlene had been in the county hospital a lot, and she was a little weak.
I drove up to Cedarhurst and picked up my bride. Arlene’s family waved goodbye, and off we went. We crossed Queens and Brooklyn, then went to Staten Island on the ferry—that was our romantic boat ride—and drove to the city hall for the borough of Richmond to get married.
We went up the stairs, slowly, into the office. The guy there was very nice. He did everything right away. He said, “You don’t have any witnesses,” so he called the bookkeeper and an accountant from another room, and we were married according to the laws of the state of New York. Then we were very happy, and we smiled at each other, holding hands.
The bookkeeper says to me, “You’re married now. You should kiss the bride!”
So the bashful character kissed his bride lightly on the cheek.