Fic. The Right Thing: the origins of House's need to be right
TITLE:The Right Thing
AUTHOR: Waylandsmithy
PAIRING: None
RATING: Teen
Dried-out turkey was the least of it. Aunt Sarah was a terrible cook. No, that wasn’t quite it; she put together the right ingredients, in the right quantities but then she would become distracted, by talk, by an idea, by a recollection, by a joke, even. She was an inattentive cook; yes, he thought, that was it.
She was his favourite aunt and surprisingly, his father’s favourite sibling. John House became almost human in his son’s eyes when he saw how Sarah got away with teasing his often grim-faced father. Maybe it was because she was so different, almost a changeling in that solemn family. Certainly his mother would not have attempted the lack of ceremony with which Sarah treated her youngest brother, though she obviously appreciated it; the boy could sense her relax on their visits in a way she seldom did in her own home.
In his Uncle Matt, Sarah had chosen a man as unlike her brother as could be; a man who would have been scorned by John House as unmanly had he been anyone other than his sister’s husband. As it was, he tolerated him and later silently pitied him as the disease that had struck him down in his prime ate away at him steadily year by year.
For Greg, the times he spent with his uncle and aunt counted as the happiest of his childhood. Unlike his unbending father, Matt was funny, teasing; the atmosphere in their modest home welcoming to a small boy with a myriad of enthusiasms and endless questions. When John was sent on another tour in Vietnam and his mother was ill after the surgery that ended all her hopes of another child, Greg was as eager to stay with them as they were happy to have him.
With the agreement of his school and some relief on the part of his constantly challenged teacher, he had four whole months of summer weather in which to explore by himself, be spoilt by Aunt Sarah to make up for missing his Mom and, best of all, an uncle who would be interested in all the things he had found, not tell him off or worse for skipping some chore or tearing his clothes; an uncle what’s more who had a store of really great jokes to appeal to bright seven year olds.
It was this extended visit which cemented his love for his uncle and aunt and led to Greg’s spending as much vacation time as he could with them on his father’s rare home tours. When they were posted abroad, Matt’s enthusiasm for ancient history and the natural world made him a highly satisfactory correspondent for his bookish, rather solitary nephew. His study mantelpiece displayed several youthful efforts to capture exotic fauna in their surroundings.
Recognising that Greg would never make an artist, for all his efforts, he sent the boy a good camera and sufficient film to keep him busy over one long hot summer in Egypt. He suspected, rightly, that his brother in law would consider this an unwarranted extravagance which his son had not earned, but John knew that it would be noticed if the gift were unused and as he did not want to offend his sister and her husband, Greg got to keep it.
The first indication Greg got that all was not well with his uncle came with a letter to his parents in the fall of nineteen seventy.
“Uncle Matt is sick”, his mother told him. “They don’t know what it is yet; they’re doing tests.”
“Can we go see him? I mean when we get back to the States.”
“I hope so; though your father‘s not sure where he’s going to be posted. It could be San Diego, though Texas is not out of the question.” Blythe shrugged in the manner of one who had long since given up hope of any control over her life, at least as far as location was concerned.
“Great”, he groaned. Neither one of those is anywhere near.”
It was eighteen months before he finally got to see his uncle and what he saw shocked him greatly, despite the letters from his aunt which he read covertly, to escape his mother’s well meant but frustrating censorship. He had been to the library to look up his uncle’s condition in the most serious looking medical textbook he could find but it was a damningly short entry. The phrases ‘neurological condition’ ‘complete loss of motor function’ and ‘terminal within five-seven years’were what stayed with him.
Sarah and Matt received the three of them with their usual good cheer and for a few moments Greg could imagine that apart from losing weight, his uncle had not changed all that much. Then he noticed the subtle alterations to the room’s arrangement, how all the furniture had been shifted slightly to enable Matt to grab on to things when he moved, with some hesitation, around the place. His eyes fell on the walking frame, which he had only ever seen really old people use and afterwards, when he went into the bathroom, the handrails and the special seat in the shower.
It had been impressed upon him by his father not to ask questions, so he was unusually silent and awkward, something that was not lost upon his uncle. He had had a lot of that, in the last couple of years from family and friends alike and Greg was just a kid, even if a very bright one. When the chance arose, he beckoned the boy over and whispered a cripple joke in his ear. Greg choked with laughter and then drew back in astonishment. He stared at the man he knew had a death sentence hanging over him. How could he make jokes, and against himself too?
“C’mon, Greg. I’m not dead yet. No need to pull a long face around me.”
“I’m sorry, Uncle” he stammered.
“Nonsense, boy. Now where are those pictures you took in Japan? I hope you brought them.”
While his parents and Aunt Sarah caught up on all the boring family news, Greg relaxed once more in Matt’s attention and approval. He told him about his rock-climbing and the other boy’s accident, which led to his meeting with this weird guy everyone at the hospital despised because he was ‘unclean’ but whom everyone depended on because he was right and that, in the end, was all that mattered.
“Ah”, said his uncle. “Standing out against everyone, doing the right thing, is what makes a real man - or woman. It’s a tough thing to do and few people will thank you for it. It’s much easier to go with the crowd, be popular, fit in.”
He looked searchingly at Greg as he spoke. “I think you have it in you to be right.”
Greg pondered the precise meaning of Matt’s words over the following months. His own father certainly wouldn’t have agreed with his brother-in-law’s opinion. In his eyes his son could scarcely do anything right and his frustration at what he perceived as Greg’s thinly veiled contempt for all he valued, as well as his effortless intellectual superiority, led to increasingly frequent attempts to subdue the boy, break his spirit ‘for his own good’ with a regime of ice baths and sleeping outside in the yard.
The boy walled up his heart against his father’s conscious cruelty. What almost broke him was his mother’s seeming obliviousness. She professed to have every faith in him, was never found wanting in her open affection for him and yet to this she was blind. Greg could only believe that she shared with his father knowledge of some deep flaw in him that maternal fondness could conceal but not forgive. He must deserve this punishment.
This was how matters stood when a phone call alerted John House to his sister’s distress. Unusually for her, she had to plead with him to allow her nephew and sister-in-law ‘a last visit’, last that was before Matt’s condition, now rapidly deteriorating, would make it excruciatingly difficult to endure, for both fiercely independent patient and for them. Matt, she declared, when her brother demurred, particularly wanted to see Greg before he lost the ability to speak. Some days, that was already the case. John could not hold out against her evident despair at what was to come and so he bit back his refusal to let his son go and drove the three of them northwards, through the spring sunshine, to Vermont.
Sarah threw herself into her brother’s arms on their arrival; not with tears; she was, when all was said and done, a House, but with relief and gratitude. John unbent sufficiently to reward her with a slight hug and a grimace. He was expecting this to be a tough assignment and one look at Matt, shrunken and almost lifeless in his wheelchair, confirmed his foreboding. .” But where is Greg?” she said; “Surely he’s with you?”
“Unloading the car”, said John, flatly.
Blythe gave Sarah the spring flowers she had bought at a roadside booth a few miles back. A pointless gesture in a way as the little house and large yard were surrounded by flower-filled woods, but it gave the two women a chance to retreat to the kitchen in search of a suitable container and break the suddenly charged atmosphere that made itself felt as soon as Sarah uttered Greg’s name.
While his father made stilted conversation with Matt, Greg watched as Aunt Sarah began to prepare the evening meal, as always declining Blythe’s help. He knew his mother was itching to wrest the knife out of her sister-in-law’s hand as it wavered uncertainly over the vegetables and then lay abandoned while she described Matt’s latest round of tests at the hospital. Not for the first time he could share his mother’s well- meant desire to intervene. It was a long drive and the greasy roadhouse food that was all that they could find in their haste to arrive, seemed a very long time ago to a hollow-legged adolescent.
A couple of hours later and Greg could see why Matt was more than usually indifferent to the slightly scorched pot roast and dried-up vegetables. His food was a specially mixed preparation, sucked through a straw. Even that was accomplished with difficulty. Greg was not sure whether this remnant of a man really was his uncle. Observing him as closely as he dared without bringing unwanted attention upon himself, he was both repelled and fascinated by the physical changes he saw in him. What could do this to the healthy, energetic, amusing man he remembered from a few short years ago? Then he caught his uncle’s glance and beneath the gaunt yellowed features he saw the same expression of intelligence and comprehension that had always been there, overlaid now by suffering and resignation, but, in essence, still the man he knew and loved. The man he wished had been his father.
The following morning was bright and mild, sufficiently so for Matt , once helped over the bumpy kitchen threshold in his motorised chair, to exercise his last little bit of independence-a trip outside in the fresh air among the plants and trees he loved, with views stretching away to the hills, just now bursting with fresh green growth. As long as he kept to the specially laid track, Sarah assured them, he would be just fine. Her eyes warned her brother against intervening; she could tell he was just about to protest. They watched in silence as Matt’s chair whirred slowly away.
”I’m afraid I’ve nothing special planned for this morning”, Sarah said apologetically.
“In that case, Greg”, said his father, “You can wash the car. That is, unless your Aunt has any chores she wants done.”
Three pairs of eyes focussed on the vehicle. It was pretty clean considering some of the roads they had travelled and what was the point, with the return journey tomorrow, when John House had to head back to the base? The point was, to get Greg’s obedience. His father stared stony-faced at his son while his mother silently pleaded with him not to make a scene. Sarah’s gaze locked with Greg’s expression of sullen resentment and saw it soften slightly as she said cheerfully “Half an hour should be plenty. I’ll have a reuben waiting for you in the kitchen.”
A short time later, the reuben gratefully eaten, as much for the message it carried of unspoken sympathy as out of real hunger, Greg slipped out of the door into the yard, evading his father’s radar. It seemed as though the adults were engaged in a serious and none too cheerful conversation, from the glimpse he had caught of their faces through the living room windows as he sloshed water over the trunk of his father’s sedan. It took less intelligence and imagination than he possessed to guess what they were talking about.
He made his way along the cinder track in pursuit of his uncle. Matt was out of sight; the landscaping of the yard and the natural fall of the land combining to produce a series of small individual areas which made the property seem larger than it was. Greg thought his uncle probably wanted a rest from all that anxious care showered on him by others. He wasn’t sure why he thought this, he just was. At the same time Greg didn’t include himself amongst those ‘others’. He just wanted to talk to Matt freely while he still could.
Drawing a blank in his favourite spots, Greg made his way to the small gate which led by mutual agreement to the neighbouring property. He had been here with his uncle before. There was a path through a little copse, leading to a large swimming hole where he and Matt had splashed among the huge toads one blisteringly hot summer. Was it possible for his uncle’s chair to negotiate the uneven ground? Faint wheel marks on the soft turf suggested that it was. Impelled by who knows what sense of urgency, Greg broke into a run and reached the steep bank of the swimming hole just as his uncle’s weakened fingers struggled to engage the forward gear on what he called his ‘cripple cart’.
“Stop! Uncle! What are you doing?” Breathlessly, Greg hung on to the chair with all his might, lest it topple into the water.
“Clear enough, I should think.” The words were faint but Matt looked straight at his favourite nephew. This was very hard for the boy but he was beyond pulling his punches. Somehow Greg had to be made to understand, to go against every urging of instinct and not scotch his carefully planned exit by calling his aunt and parents. It took all Matt’s self control not to buckle under the appalled expression of those clear blue eyes but his desperation and fear of what he knew was coming if he left it to the medics to dictate his end was such that he crushed all compassion.
His breath rasping with difficulty on every word, he told Greg that he had already taken what should be a fatal dose of the painkillers he had been saving up for months and that the swimming hole was just in case it wasn’t enough. Also he’d been hoping to fool everyone into thinking it was an accident, Sarah especially.
“I don’t think that would have worked”, Greg said, in rather wobbly tones.
“No, you’re right. Stupid, really. Pride, that’s all.”
Matt allowed Greg to move him away from the edge of the water. Drawing an obviously agonising breath, he told the boy what he wanted him to do. Nothing. Walk away and forget he ever saw his uncle. If he took the long way back to the house, no-one would ever know he’d been here and by the time the others realised Matt had been gone for too long and came looking for him, it would all be over.
“I’m sorry, Greg. I never intended you to find me. I just didn’t want Sarah to be alone when I did it.” His voice was already slurring, his eyes unfocussed. His final words were a plea, to be allowed to slip away.
Greg was crying openly. He was terrified by his uncle’s request and its possible, even likely consequences for him if his involvement became known but all he could think of at that moment was the suffering this man he loved had already bravely borne. He could not sentence him to more just because he lacked courage. His uncle’s words when he had told him about the ‘unclean’ Japanese doctor came into his head. He made up his mind.
Picking up Matt’s unresisting hand, he held it to his face for a moment, and then fled into the trees.
After a stumbling run of about ten minutes, he slowed, knowing that to escape the eagle eyes of his elders he needed to wash his face and compose himself before showing up, in all apparent innocence, for a lunch he knew he couldn’t eat. At that point, he felt he might never eat again. His stomach churned, and in a few moments his Aunt’s carefully prepared reuben was splattered at his feet. Wiping his sneakers on a tuft of grass, he set off again, this time at a deliberately casual pace; he was approaching the road and did not want to be seen acting other than as a would-be-cool kid, by any passer-by.
His father was standing on the front porch inspecting his son’s handiwork when Greg arrived back at the house. “There’s a smear on the rear fender”, he said.
Greg bit back an hysterical laugh. His father shot him a narrow look but as the boy fetched a damp rag from the bucket and proceeded to wipe off the offending mark without a sullen look for once, he let it pass. Perhaps, just perhaps, the boy was finally learning who made the rules around here, he thought.
A moment later Blythe emerged from the hall, telling him that Sarah wanted Greg to help her find his uncle as it was time to eat. On hearing this, all the colour drained from Greg’s face. “I’m sorry Mom”, he stuttered. “I have to go to the bathroom.” He rushed off, leaving his Mother with a faint look of concern on her face as she took in his ashen features.
“Any excuse”, said John House, irritably. ”That boy is goddam lazy.”
Blythe placated him in her usual manner. “I really think he may be sick, “she said. “He looked dreadfully pale.”
Whatever her husband might have said next was lost in an unearthly cry that made them start and begin running as one to the rear of the house. Sarah, face contorted with shock and grief, led them both dumbly down the track and through the gate earlier passed through by her husband and her nephew, to the edge of the swimming hole. There, head back to the sky, as if to try for one last glimpse of the universe which had fascinated him, lay Matt, or rather Matt’s poor shell of a body, for he had clearly gone.
While Blythe did her best to comfort Sarah, John did what he was best at, organisation. He called 911 though Matt was obviously beyond their help but protocols were there to be followed. Matt’s primary care physician was called, key family members contacted. His senior officer granted him an extension of leave, upon request. It was only after the initial shock had worn off that any thought was given to Greg.
His mother found him huddled in an almost foetal position, long legs drawn up to his chin, in a corner of the couch in his Uncle’s study. One look at his white, drawn features and she knew how badly he was taking this. It was, despite the inevitability of the eventual outcome, a sudden, unexpected death. She wanted, desperately, to take his pain away. The knowledge that she couldn’t and the revelation that this loss was more hurtful to him than anything his father’s harshness could inflict, caught her by the throat. Realisation of her complicity landed like a blow in the solar plexus.
“Too late,” she thought, “it’s too late”, as she reached out her hand to his hair. He burst into sobs as she held him to her and soothed him as she had when he was a little child.
By the following morning, Greg’s parents and his Aunt were more or less prepared for the news that Matt had taken his own life by storing up the strong opiates that he had been prescribed and then taking them all at once. This had been the subject of painful speculation the previous evening, after Greg had excused himself and gone to bed.
Sarah, strangely buoyed up by the possibility that Matt had done what he had planned rather than being suddenly terminated by some impersonal ‘power outtage’ as she put it, admitted that Matt had talked to her about euthanasia. She had tried to dissuade him, appalled by the idea of having to choose a moment, knowing how impossible for her it would be to help him when it came down to it. At length, they had abandoned the subject, or rather, as it now became clear, she had.
Her brother did not mince his words in telling her that she had done the only thing she could have done, that to assist in her husband’s suicide, however much she wanted to spare his suffering, was illegal. While he would not have used religion to justify his attitude, for he was not an avowedly religious man, John House felt that there was something essentially cowardly in taking what he saw as the easy way out. He would not aggravate his sister’s grief by expressing his opinion but Blythe felt he was getting dangerously close to it, and steered the conversation into the safer waters of practical matters.
Sarah had taken charge of all the arrangements with the funeral home. She and Matt had talked all this through a long time back and as she was happier with tasks to do, there was little point in the others staying on. They would return for the funeral, of course and in the meantime, Sam, Matt’s brother and partner in the family printing business, would make sure she was not on her own too much. He was flying in from a work trip to Amsterdam and would help her through the mire of paperwork which attended any death.
“We’ll head back before mid-day, then,” said her brother, “if you’re sure there’s nothing we can do. I am needed back at the base but Blythe could…”
“No, really Thank you John, but I’ll be fine.”
“In that case I’ll just take a walk to stretch my legs before the journey. It’s a long drive.” He looked at his son, who sat silent and seemingly in another world. ”Put the bags in the car, Greg, would you?” For once, his voice sounded slightly softer as he addressed his son. Even he could see the boy had taken a hard knock. Fifteen minutes later, when he returned from his walk, there was an altogether different note in his voice.
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“I’m asking you again, what were you doing at the swimming hole? And don’t tell me you weren’t there, do you take me for a fool? When I took a walk down there just now I saw what none of us noticed yesterday - the print of Matt’s chair wheels on the very edge of the water and the signs of some kind of scuffled drag marks. He could barely move the lever on his hand control; there’s no way he could have done that himself. You were the only one outside, apart from him.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.” Greg’s boyish, uncertain baritone sounded strained but quietly emphatic. He met his father’s interrogatory glare more openly than usual.
“Don’t lie to me.” John’s hand rose along with his voice, as if to strike his son but was interrupted by Sarah’s cry of “John! Don’t do that. Whatever is the matter?”
“I believe that the boy knows more about yesterday than he’s letting on”, said John. Greg looked at his Aunt and then at his mother, who had followed her out of the house on hearing her husband’s voice raised in anger. He swallowed hard but said nothing. John told the two women about the marks he had seen at the water’s edge. “Couldn’t the paramedics have made them?” queried Blythe.
John shook his head. “Matt’s chair was some distance away when Sarah found him. Somebody,” he looked at his son, “moved it.”
Greg was unable to withstand the combined questioning looks of both his mother and his aunt. The burden of his secret was too heavy for his fifteen year old self to bear alone any longer. He stumbled in retelling the story but the essential fact was clear: he had had the opportunity to call for help when he realised what his uncle had done, and he had not taken it. His mother was stunned, his father incandescent with rage. Sarah looked shaken, but said nothing.
The dam of his father’s fury burst over Greg’s head just as the spring thunderstorm threatening since early morning, disgorged itself in a torrent of water that made all four of them scramble indoors. The anti-climax if anything gave added bite to John’s verbal attack. As far as he was concerned his son was little better than a murderer. It was not his decision to make, whether Matt should live or die and the idea that a kid should take it upon himself to make that decision showed breathtaking arrogance as well as a total disregard for the law and for his elders and betters. He could think himself lucky if they didn’t call the police and have him arrested.
Greg braced himself under the hail of his father’s words, trying to concentrate on his memory of telling Matt about the buraku and what his uncle said about being right. He was utterly miserable and yet some small, obstinate part of him held out against his father’s condemnation. He looked at his mother, and read disbelief in her eyes. She was torn, as always, between husband and son. Greg knew who usually won these encounters and didn’t expect things to be different this time, but mention of the police drew a sharp breath from her.
“That’s enough. John.” It was not his mother but Sarah who spoke for the first time since Greg revealed what had happened. “What Greg has done, he will have to live with. If you insist on calling the police I will deny everything I’ve just heard and I hope Blythe will too. The rain will have washed your ‘evidence’ away."
She was sore at heart for the burden Matt had placed on him and both awed and a little scared that Greg had had the nerve as well as the love to honour Matt’s plea. Greg had been sparing in the details of that final conversation but she knew it must have been an intolerable decision for him to make. She had never been so little in sympathy with her brother as she placed her hand on Greg’s shoulder and said “You were right, Greg. You did the right thing.”
“I will never forgive him,” came his father’s response. He was as good as his word.
----------------------
So she saved him twice really, once from his father’s uncomprehending (and unending) anger and once from himself, for the image of her face, wet with tears and yet composed, looking at him with compassionate understanding, suddenly rose up before him and induced in him such nausea for his self-pity, that his stomach, already in revolt against the combination of pills and alcohol he had consumed, emptied itself along with much of Mr Zebalusky’s final prescription before he slid into unconsciousness.
AUTHOR: Waylandsmithy
PAIRING: None
RATING: Teen
Dried-out turkey was the least of it. Aunt Sarah was a terrible cook. No, that wasn’t quite it; she put together the right ingredients, in the right quantities but then she would become distracted, by talk, by an idea, by a recollection, by a joke, even. She was an inattentive cook; yes, he thought, that was it.
She was his favourite aunt and surprisingly, his father’s favourite sibling. John House became almost human in his son’s eyes when he saw how Sarah got away with teasing his often grim-faced father. Maybe it was because she was so different, almost a changeling in that solemn family. Certainly his mother would not have attempted the lack of ceremony with which Sarah treated her youngest brother, though she obviously appreciated it; the boy could sense her relax on their visits in a way she seldom did in her own home.
In his Uncle Matt, Sarah had chosen a man as unlike her brother as could be; a man who would have been scorned by John House as unmanly had he been anyone other than his sister’s husband. As it was, he tolerated him and later silently pitied him as the disease that had struck him down in his prime ate away at him steadily year by year.
For Greg, the times he spent with his uncle and aunt counted as the happiest of his childhood. Unlike his unbending father, Matt was funny, teasing; the atmosphere in their modest home welcoming to a small boy with a myriad of enthusiasms and endless questions. When John was sent on another tour in Vietnam and his mother was ill after the surgery that ended all her hopes of another child, Greg was as eager to stay with them as they were happy to have him.
With the agreement of his school and some relief on the part of his constantly challenged teacher, he had four whole months of summer weather in which to explore by himself, be spoilt by Aunt Sarah to make up for missing his Mom and, best of all, an uncle who would be interested in all the things he had found, not tell him off or worse for skipping some chore or tearing his clothes; an uncle what’s more who had a store of really great jokes to appeal to bright seven year olds.
It was this extended visit which cemented his love for his uncle and aunt and led to Greg’s spending as much vacation time as he could with them on his father’s rare home tours. When they were posted abroad, Matt’s enthusiasm for ancient history and the natural world made him a highly satisfactory correspondent for his bookish, rather solitary nephew. His study mantelpiece displayed several youthful efforts to capture exotic fauna in their surroundings.
Recognising that Greg would never make an artist, for all his efforts, he sent the boy a good camera and sufficient film to keep him busy over one long hot summer in Egypt. He suspected, rightly, that his brother in law would consider this an unwarranted extravagance which his son had not earned, but John knew that it would be noticed if the gift were unused and as he did not want to offend his sister and her husband, Greg got to keep it.
The first indication Greg got that all was not well with his uncle came with a letter to his parents in the fall of nineteen seventy.
“Uncle Matt is sick”, his mother told him. “They don’t know what it is yet; they’re doing tests.”
“Can we go see him? I mean when we get back to the States.”
“I hope so; though your father‘s not sure where he’s going to be posted. It could be San Diego, though Texas is not out of the question.” Blythe shrugged in the manner of one who had long since given up hope of any control over her life, at least as far as location was concerned.
“Great”, he groaned. Neither one of those is anywhere near.”
It was eighteen months before he finally got to see his uncle and what he saw shocked him greatly, despite the letters from his aunt which he read covertly, to escape his mother’s well meant but frustrating censorship. He had been to the library to look up his uncle’s condition in the most serious looking medical textbook he could find but it was a damningly short entry. The phrases ‘neurological condition’ ‘complete loss of motor function’ and ‘terminal within five-seven years’were what stayed with him.
Sarah and Matt received the three of them with their usual good cheer and for a few moments Greg could imagine that apart from losing weight, his uncle had not changed all that much. Then he noticed the subtle alterations to the room’s arrangement, how all the furniture had been shifted slightly to enable Matt to grab on to things when he moved, with some hesitation, around the place. His eyes fell on the walking frame, which he had only ever seen really old people use and afterwards, when he went into the bathroom, the handrails and the special seat in the shower.
It had been impressed upon him by his father not to ask questions, so he was unusually silent and awkward, something that was not lost upon his uncle. He had had a lot of that, in the last couple of years from family and friends alike and Greg was just a kid, even if a very bright one. When the chance arose, he beckoned the boy over and whispered a cripple joke in his ear. Greg choked with laughter and then drew back in astonishment. He stared at the man he knew had a death sentence hanging over him. How could he make jokes, and against himself too?
“C’mon, Greg. I’m not dead yet. No need to pull a long face around me.”
“I’m sorry, Uncle” he stammered.
“Nonsense, boy. Now where are those pictures you took in Japan? I hope you brought them.”
While his parents and Aunt Sarah caught up on all the boring family news, Greg relaxed once more in Matt’s attention and approval. He told him about his rock-climbing and the other boy’s accident, which led to his meeting with this weird guy everyone at the hospital despised because he was ‘unclean’ but whom everyone depended on because he was right and that, in the end, was all that mattered.
“Ah”, said his uncle. “Standing out against everyone, doing the right thing, is what makes a real man - or woman. It’s a tough thing to do and few people will thank you for it. It’s much easier to go with the crowd, be popular, fit in.”
He looked searchingly at Greg as he spoke. “I think you have it in you to be right.”
Greg pondered the precise meaning of Matt’s words over the following months. His own father certainly wouldn’t have agreed with his brother-in-law’s opinion. In his eyes his son could scarcely do anything right and his frustration at what he perceived as Greg’s thinly veiled contempt for all he valued, as well as his effortless intellectual superiority, led to increasingly frequent attempts to subdue the boy, break his spirit ‘for his own good’ with a regime of ice baths and sleeping outside in the yard.
The boy walled up his heart against his father’s conscious cruelty. What almost broke him was his mother’s seeming obliviousness. She professed to have every faith in him, was never found wanting in her open affection for him and yet to this she was blind. Greg could only believe that she shared with his father knowledge of some deep flaw in him that maternal fondness could conceal but not forgive. He must deserve this punishment.
This was how matters stood when a phone call alerted John House to his sister’s distress. Unusually for her, she had to plead with him to allow her nephew and sister-in-law ‘a last visit’, last that was before Matt’s condition, now rapidly deteriorating, would make it excruciatingly difficult to endure, for both fiercely independent patient and for them. Matt, she declared, when her brother demurred, particularly wanted to see Greg before he lost the ability to speak. Some days, that was already the case. John could not hold out against her evident despair at what was to come and so he bit back his refusal to let his son go and drove the three of them northwards, through the spring sunshine, to Vermont.
Sarah threw herself into her brother’s arms on their arrival; not with tears; she was, when all was said and done, a House, but with relief and gratitude. John unbent sufficiently to reward her with a slight hug and a grimace. He was expecting this to be a tough assignment and one look at Matt, shrunken and almost lifeless in his wheelchair, confirmed his foreboding. .” But where is Greg?” she said; “Surely he’s with you?”
“Unloading the car”, said John, flatly.
Blythe gave Sarah the spring flowers she had bought at a roadside booth a few miles back. A pointless gesture in a way as the little house and large yard were surrounded by flower-filled woods, but it gave the two women a chance to retreat to the kitchen in search of a suitable container and break the suddenly charged atmosphere that made itself felt as soon as Sarah uttered Greg’s name.
While his father made stilted conversation with Matt, Greg watched as Aunt Sarah began to prepare the evening meal, as always declining Blythe’s help. He knew his mother was itching to wrest the knife out of her sister-in-law’s hand as it wavered uncertainly over the vegetables and then lay abandoned while she described Matt’s latest round of tests at the hospital. Not for the first time he could share his mother’s well- meant desire to intervene. It was a long drive and the greasy roadhouse food that was all that they could find in their haste to arrive, seemed a very long time ago to a hollow-legged adolescent.
A couple of hours later and Greg could see why Matt was more than usually indifferent to the slightly scorched pot roast and dried-up vegetables. His food was a specially mixed preparation, sucked through a straw. Even that was accomplished with difficulty. Greg was not sure whether this remnant of a man really was his uncle. Observing him as closely as he dared without bringing unwanted attention upon himself, he was both repelled and fascinated by the physical changes he saw in him. What could do this to the healthy, energetic, amusing man he remembered from a few short years ago? Then he caught his uncle’s glance and beneath the gaunt yellowed features he saw the same expression of intelligence and comprehension that had always been there, overlaid now by suffering and resignation, but, in essence, still the man he knew and loved. The man he wished had been his father.
The following morning was bright and mild, sufficiently so for Matt , once helped over the bumpy kitchen threshold in his motorised chair, to exercise his last little bit of independence-a trip outside in the fresh air among the plants and trees he loved, with views stretching away to the hills, just now bursting with fresh green growth. As long as he kept to the specially laid track, Sarah assured them, he would be just fine. Her eyes warned her brother against intervening; she could tell he was just about to protest. They watched in silence as Matt’s chair whirred slowly away.
”I’m afraid I’ve nothing special planned for this morning”, Sarah said apologetically.
“In that case, Greg”, said his father, “You can wash the car. That is, unless your Aunt has any chores she wants done.”
Three pairs of eyes focussed on the vehicle. It was pretty clean considering some of the roads they had travelled and what was the point, with the return journey tomorrow, when John House had to head back to the base? The point was, to get Greg’s obedience. His father stared stony-faced at his son while his mother silently pleaded with him not to make a scene. Sarah’s gaze locked with Greg’s expression of sullen resentment and saw it soften slightly as she said cheerfully “Half an hour should be plenty. I’ll have a reuben waiting for you in the kitchen.”
A short time later, the reuben gratefully eaten, as much for the message it carried of unspoken sympathy as out of real hunger, Greg slipped out of the door into the yard, evading his father’s radar. It seemed as though the adults were engaged in a serious and none too cheerful conversation, from the glimpse he had caught of their faces through the living room windows as he sloshed water over the trunk of his father’s sedan. It took less intelligence and imagination than he possessed to guess what they were talking about.
He made his way along the cinder track in pursuit of his uncle. Matt was out of sight; the landscaping of the yard and the natural fall of the land combining to produce a series of small individual areas which made the property seem larger than it was. Greg thought his uncle probably wanted a rest from all that anxious care showered on him by others. He wasn’t sure why he thought this, he just was. At the same time Greg didn’t include himself amongst those ‘others’. He just wanted to talk to Matt freely while he still could.
Drawing a blank in his favourite spots, Greg made his way to the small gate which led by mutual agreement to the neighbouring property. He had been here with his uncle before. There was a path through a little copse, leading to a large swimming hole where he and Matt had splashed among the huge toads one blisteringly hot summer. Was it possible for his uncle’s chair to negotiate the uneven ground? Faint wheel marks on the soft turf suggested that it was. Impelled by who knows what sense of urgency, Greg broke into a run and reached the steep bank of the swimming hole just as his uncle’s weakened fingers struggled to engage the forward gear on what he called his ‘cripple cart’.
“Stop! Uncle! What are you doing?” Breathlessly, Greg hung on to the chair with all his might, lest it topple into the water.
“Clear enough, I should think.” The words were faint but Matt looked straight at his favourite nephew. This was very hard for the boy but he was beyond pulling his punches. Somehow Greg had to be made to understand, to go against every urging of instinct and not scotch his carefully planned exit by calling his aunt and parents. It took all Matt’s self control not to buckle under the appalled expression of those clear blue eyes but his desperation and fear of what he knew was coming if he left it to the medics to dictate his end was such that he crushed all compassion.
His breath rasping with difficulty on every word, he told Greg that he had already taken what should be a fatal dose of the painkillers he had been saving up for months and that the swimming hole was just in case it wasn’t enough. Also he’d been hoping to fool everyone into thinking it was an accident, Sarah especially.
“I don’t think that would have worked”, Greg said, in rather wobbly tones.
“No, you’re right. Stupid, really. Pride, that’s all.”
Matt allowed Greg to move him away from the edge of the water. Drawing an obviously agonising breath, he told the boy what he wanted him to do. Nothing. Walk away and forget he ever saw his uncle. If he took the long way back to the house, no-one would ever know he’d been here and by the time the others realised Matt had been gone for too long and came looking for him, it would all be over.
“I’m sorry, Greg. I never intended you to find me. I just didn’t want Sarah to be alone when I did it.” His voice was already slurring, his eyes unfocussed. His final words were a plea, to be allowed to slip away.
Greg was crying openly. He was terrified by his uncle’s request and its possible, even likely consequences for him if his involvement became known but all he could think of at that moment was the suffering this man he loved had already bravely borne. He could not sentence him to more just because he lacked courage. His uncle’s words when he had told him about the ‘unclean’ Japanese doctor came into his head. He made up his mind.
Picking up Matt’s unresisting hand, he held it to his face for a moment, and then fled into the trees.
After a stumbling run of about ten minutes, he slowed, knowing that to escape the eagle eyes of his elders he needed to wash his face and compose himself before showing up, in all apparent innocence, for a lunch he knew he couldn’t eat. At that point, he felt he might never eat again. His stomach churned, and in a few moments his Aunt’s carefully prepared reuben was splattered at his feet. Wiping his sneakers on a tuft of grass, he set off again, this time at a deliberately casual pace; he was approaching the road and did not want to be seen acting other than as a would-be-cool kid, by any passer-by.
His father was standing on the front porch inspecting his son’s handiwork when Greg arrived back at the house. “There’s a smear on the rear fender”, he said.
Greg bit back an hysterical laugh. His father shot him a narrow look but as the boy fetched a damp rag from the bucket and proceeded to wipe off the offending mark without a sullen look for once, he let it pass. Perhaps, just perhaps, the boy was finally learning who made the rules around here, he thought.
A moment later Blythe emerged from the hall, telling him that Sarah wanted Greg to help her find his uncle as it was time to eat. On hearing this, all the colour drained from Greg’s face. “I’m sorry Mom”, he stuttered. “I have to go to the bathroom.” He rushed off, leaving his Mother with a faint look of concern on her face as she took in his ashen features.
“Any excuse”, said John House, irritably. ”That boy is goddam lazy.”
Blythe placated him in her usual manner. “I really think he may be sick, “she said. “He looked dreadfully pale.”
Whatever her husband might have said next was lost in an unearthly cry that made them start and begin running as one to the rear of the house. Sarah, face contorted with shock and grief, led them both dumbly down the track and through the gate earlier passed through by her husband and her nephew, to the edge of the swimming hole. There, head back to the sky, as if to try for one last glimpse of the universe which had fascinated him, lay Matt, or rather Matt’s poor shell of a body, for he had clearly gone.
While Blythe did her best to comfort Sarah, John did what he was best at, organisation. He called 911 though Matt was obviously beyond their help but protocols were there to be followed. Matt’s primary care physician was called, key family members contacted. His senior officer granted him an extension of leave, upon request. It was only after the initial shock had worn off that any thought was given to Greg.
His mother found him huddled in an almost foetal position, long legs drawn up to his chin, in a corner of the couch in his Uncle’s study. One look at his white, drawn features and she knew how badly he was taking this. It was, despite the inevitability of the eventual outcome, a sudden, unexpected death. She wanted, desperately, to take his pain away. The knowledge that she couldn’t and the revelation that this loss was more hurtful to him than anything his father’s harshness could inflict, caught her by the throat. Realisation of her complicity landed like a blow in the solar plexus.
“Too late,” she thought, “it’s too late”, as she reached out her hand to his hair. He burst into sobs as she held him to her and soothed him as she had when he was a little child.
By the following morning, Greg’s parents and his Aunt were more or less prepared for the news that Matt had taken his own life by storing up the strong opiates that he had been prescribed and then taking them all at once. This had been the subject of painful speculation the previous evening, after Greg had excused himself and gone to bed.
Sarah, strangely buoyed up by the possibility that Matt had done what he had planned rather than being suddenly terminated by some impersonal ‘power outtage’ as she put it, admitted that Matt had talked to her about euthanasia. She had tried to dissuade him, appalled by the idea of having to choose a moment, knowing how impossible for her it would be to help him when it came down to it. At length, they had abandoned the subject, or rather, as it now became clear, she had.
Her brother did not mince his words in telling her that she had done the only thing she could have done, that to assist in her husband’s suicide, however much she wanted to spare his suffering, was illegal. While he would not have used religion to justify his attitude, for he was not an avowedly religious man, John House felt that there was something essentially cowardly in taking what he saw as the easy way out. He would not aggravate his sister’s grief by expressing his opinion but Blythe felt he was getting dangerously close to it, and steered the conversation into the safer waters of practical matters.
Sarah had taken charge of all the arrangements with the funeral home. She and Matt had talked all this through a long time back and as she was happier with tasks to do, there was little point in the others staying on. They would return for the funeral, of course and in the meantime, Sam, Matt’s brother and partner in the family printing business, would make sure she was not on her own too much. He was flying in from a work trip to Amsterdam and would help her through the mire of paperwork which attended any death.
“We’ll head back before mid-day, then,” said her brother, “if you’re sure there’s nothing we can do. I am needed back at the base but Blythe could…”
“No, really Thank you John, but I’ll be fine.”
“In that case I’ll just take a walk to stretch my legs before the journey. It’s a long drive.” He looked at his son, who sat silent and seemingly in another world. ”Put the bags in the car, Greg, would you?” For once, his voice sounded slightly softer as he addressed his son. Even he could see the boy had taken a hard knock. Fifteen minutes later, when he returned from his walk, there was an altogether different note in his voice.
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“I’m asking you again, what were you doing at the swimming hole? And don’t tell me you weren’t there, do you take me for a fool? When I took a walk down there just now I saw what none of us noticed yesterday - the print of Matt’s chair wheels on the very edge of the water and the signs of some kind of scuffled drag marks. He could barely move the lever on his hand control; there’s no way he could have done that himself. You were the only one outside, apart from him.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.” Greg’s boyish, uncertain baritone sounded strained but quietly emphatic. He met his father’s interrogatory glare more openly than usual.
“Don’t lie to me.” John’s hand rose along with his voice, as if to strike his son but was interrupted by Sarah’s cry of “John! Don’t do that. Whatever is the matter?”
“I believe that the boy knows more about yesterday than he’s letting on”, said John. Greg looked at his Aunt and then at his mother, who had followed her out of the house on hearing her husband’s voice raised in anger. He swallowed hard but said nothing. John told the two women about the marks he had seen at the water’s edge. “Couldn’t the paramedics have made them?” queried Blythe.
John shook his head. “Matt’s chair was some distance away when Sarah found him. Somebody,” he looked at his son, “moved it.”
Greg was unable to withstand the combined questioning looks of both his mother and his aunt. The burden of his secret was too heavy for his fifteen year old self to bear alone any longer. He stumbled in retelling the story but the essential fact was clear: he had had the opportunity to call for help when he realised what his uncle had done, and he had not taken it. His mother was stunned, his father incandescent with rage. Sarah looked shaken, but said nothing.
The dam of his father’s fury burst over Greg’s head just as the spring thunderstorm threatening since early morning, disgorged itself in a torrent of water that made all four of them scramble indoors. The anti-climax if anything gave added bite to John’s verbal attack. As far as he was concerned his son was little better than a murderer. It was not his decision to make, whether Matt should live or die and the idea that a kid should take it upon himself to make that decision showed breathtaking arrogance as well as a total disregard for the law and for his elders and betters. He could think himself lucky if they didn’t call the police and have him arrested.
Greg braced himself under the hail of his father’s words, trying to concentrate on his memory of telling Matt about the buraku and what his uncle said about being right. He was utterly miserable and yet some small, obstinate part of him held out against his father’s condemnation. He looked at his mother, and read disbelief in her eyes. She was torn, as always, between husband and son. Greg knew who usually won these encounters and didn’t expect things to be different this time, but mention of the police drew a sharp breath from her.
“That’s enough. John.” It was not his mother but Sarah who spoke for the first time since Greg revealed what had happened. “What Greg has done, he will have to live with. If you insist on calling the police I will deny everything I’ve just heard and I hope Blythe will too. The rain will have washed your ‘evidence’ away."
She was sore at heart for the burden Matt had placed on him and both awed and a little scared that Greg had had the nerve as well as the love to honour Matt’s plea. Greg had been sparing in the details of that final conversation but she knew it must have been an intolerable decision for him to make. She had never been so little in sympathy with her brother as she placed her hand on Greg’s shoulder and said “You were right, Greg. You did the right thing.”
“I will never forgive him,” came his father’s response. He was as good as his word.
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So she saved him twice really, once from his father’s uncomprehending (and unending) anger and once from himself, for the image of her face, wet with tears and yet composed, looking at him with compassionate understanding, suddenly rose up before him and induced in him such nausea for his self-pity, that his stomach, already in revolt against the combination of pills and alcohol he had consumed, emptied itself along with much of Mr Zebalusky’s final prescription before he slid into unconsciousness.