Once outside, Stratman hastened through the rain to the parking lot, where the coloured driver was waiting in the government car. He ordered the driver to return him to the Society building. As they passed briefly before the seemingly endless array of low-slung, dull, wooden barracks that were the Lawson General Hospital, Stratman thought how strange it was that this was the only place where Emily could have contact with men. She was in her early thirties now, and he had never known her once to go out with a man, not in high school or university or in their years in New York. And certainly not in Atlanta, where she had been more a recluse than ever, with her books, her records, her piano, her sewing, and her television. The more incredible, he decided, because she was so physically lovely and mentally bright.
As they drove through the rain, he tried to picture Walther’s Emily, his Emily, as she might appear to others of her own age. Her hair was brunette, glossy, cut back in a bob, semi-shingled, but grown long where it covered half her forehead and curled forward under her cheekbones. Her face had a delicate, exotic, Oriental flavour, the impression reinforced by slightly slanted green eyes, so often cast downwards when she spoke to a guest, a small tilted nose, and a pale, ethereal complexion. Her fragility was a rebuke to her German ancestry, and somewhere in the family tree, Stratman was sure, there had been an immigrant Siamese. Her body was slender, but fuller, more substantial than her features promised-the bosom young and deep, and the wasp waist exaggerating the full hips. About her there was an aura of one withdrawn from the turmoils of the world, one unbruised and unmarked by life, with the untouched and unused perfection of a new, life-sized doll. Her mind, and the wry humour seemed too frightened to surface often. Men, Stratman perceived, were enchanted by her. They desired her. Emily did not desire them. Her defences were many. When they approached too closely, she skittered off like a fawn. When they spoke too intimately, she retreated into a shell of silence, or sometimes resorted to sarcasm. She was made for men, but men were not made for her.
Her only contact with the opposite sex was at the Lawson General Hospital. Shortly after they had arrived in Atlanta, she had driven her uncle to visit Dr. Ilman. While her uncle was being examined, she had been taken on a tour of the amputee centre by the doctor’s nurse. Several months later, she had volunteered to do practical nursing at Lawson three times a week, and she did it still. She had learned the language of the amputees-‘amps’, she came to call them, as they called one another. She had learned that artificial limbs were ‘prostheses’, and an arm was an ‘upper extremity’, and a ‘BK’ was a soldier whose leg had been removed below the knee, and a ‘syme’ was one who had lost his foot but not his heel, and that ‘guillotining’ meant crude, immediate surgery of a limb on the field of battle. She mingled with the young men, with their T shirts, jock shorts, and cumbersome leather and metal prostheses, and worked with them, and conversed solemnly with them, and they adored her, and she adored them and was not repelled. If Emily did not understand her devotion to Lawson, or would not face its true motives, her uncle understood it completely. These were not males, and she was not a female. These were amps-physical cripples-and she was an amp-an emotional cripple-and harmony was natural.
‘Here we is, Professor.’ The chauffeur had spoken, and they had come to a halt before the Society building. Stratman emerged from his reverie, opened the door, and saw that the rain had ceased. He studied the leaden sky briefly, then closed the door, climbed the four stone stairs, and entered the foyer of the Society building.
The moment that he was inside, he heard his name. The switchboard girl removed her earphones. ‘Professor Stratman-your niece has called three times. She seems terribly anxious to get hold of you.’
Stratman felt his heart thump. Emily had called three times. Unusual and ominous. He asked the girl to connect him, and as he started for the telephone booth, he realized that his heart was still hammering and that Dr. Ilman would disapprove, for the T waves had been inverted, and he now had ‘a condition’. Closing himself inside the booth, he removed the receiver and listened. What he heard was an engaged signal. He opened the booth and put his head out, questioningly.
The girl shrugged. ‘Busy.’
Stratman left the booth. ‘Keep trying.’
For ten minutes, as Stratman paced the inlaid floor, the operator tried his number, and every time, the response was a busy signal. Stratman’s mind worried: she had fainted, and the phone was off the hook; someone was using the phone to summon an ambulance; the police were on the phone ordering all squad cars on the alert.
At last, he could endure the suspense no longer. ‘Send for my car,’ he commanded the operator.
In short minutes, the automobile was waiting for him. The drive from the Society building along Peachtree Road to the five-room bungalow on Ponce de Leon Avenue that he and Emily rented was fifteen miles. To Stratman, it seemed fifty miles, especially since the chauffeur refused to speed over the rain-slicked asphalt highway.
It was twenty-five minutes before he saw the bungalow. Then, as they approached, he saw Emily. She stood on the small porch, a scarf around her head, a leather windbreaker over her blouse and skirt. He felt the knot in his abdomen unwind. She was alive. She was well. Nothing else mattered.
As they drew up before the bungalow, he dismissed the chauffeur. Stepping out of the car, he saw Emily running down the walk towards him.
‘Uncle Max-!’ she cried.
He slammed the door and waited, again concerned. But he saw that she was beaming, and that was unusual, too.
‘Uncle Max!’ She reached him breathlessly, and blurted the next. ‘You won the Nobel Prize!’
He stood, head cocked sideways, uncomprehending. ‘What? What? I do not-wiederhole, bitte-’
‘You won! The telegram came an hour ago!’ She fished inside the windbreaker and showed it to him.
He held it in both hands, close to his nose, for his spectacles were still in his pocket.
‘Oh-Uncle Max-imagine-the Nobel Prize!’
He lowered the telegram and looked at her, dazed.
‘I-I cannot believe it,’ he said.
‘But it’s true. All the newspapers know. They’re all in the living-room right now-reporters, photographers-they say it was announced from Stockholm on the news wires.’
He tried to focus on the telegram again. ‘Fifty thousand three hundred dollars,’ he murmured. ‘Gott im Himmel.’
‘You’re rich-’
‘We are rich,’ he corrected, meticulously. And, at once, he realized that he could call the Secretary of Defence tomorrow and turn down the new job-that it was not necessary any more, that he had won Emily’s buffer against life, that Walther would rest in peace, that he could keep his old sedentary cubbyhole with its promise and contentment-and he knew that Dr. Ilman would be pleased.
Suddenly, something occurred to him. ‘Where do we get this prize? In Stockholm?’
‘Oh, yes. You must go. The newspapermen said so. It’s a rule you must pick up the money within one year-except if you’re sick-or you can’t have it. Several Germans couldn’t pick it up once, because of Hitler, and later, they couldn’t get it.’
Stockholm was a long way, Stratman realized. The journey, the activities, the ceremony would be strenuous. By all rights, he should consult Dr. Ilman first. But then he remembered what awaited him in Stockholm, and he saw Emily’s enthusiastic face, and he knew that no imminent heart attack or stroke could keep him from the prize that would solve everything.
He took Emily firmly by the elbow and started her toward the house. ‘Tell me, liebes Kind,’ he said happily, ‘what are you going to wear when you curtsy before the King?’
It was 1.51 of a hot, sunny afternoon when the telegram from the Swedish Embassy in Washington, D.C., automatically typed itself out on the tape of the electric receiving machine in the telegraph room located on Colorado Street in Pasadena, California.
The harassed fat girl at the machine hardly read the message, as she snipped it free. Expertly, using the cutter on her finger, she sliced the message into short lines, moistened them, and neatly glued them to the blank. The message formally prepared for delivery, and before her, she suddenly realized the import of its contents.
‘Migawd,’ she said aloud, ‘twenty-five thousand dollars!’
The two men at the counter overheard her. One, the skinny young man in frayed blue suit who was an employee of the telegraph office, turned away from the pencilled words he had been counting and asked, ‘Who got rich?’ The customer, across the counter, a middle-aged man with rimless glasses who resembled a lesser bank executive, also displayed interest.
The fat girl lifted herself from her chair with a grunt. ‘It says here-somebody in Pasadena -never heard of him-just won the Nobel Prize.’
She went to the counter and showed the telegram to her skinny co-worker. As he read it, he whistled. He handed the wire to the customer, who pushed his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose, and said, ‘If I were you, I would not wait to deliver a message of this importance. I would telephone it to the party concerned.’ Importantly, he began to read the telegram.