Right to Die

to avoid the appearance of favoritism or sexism. I call my secretary Inés, but even after six months on the job, she can’t get over using Professor for me. Something from the respect someone her age in the old Cuba was supposed to show for university teachers. So be it. For us, how about Maisy and John?”
    “It’s still your nickel.”
    The face hardened a little. “Yes. Yes, it is. Tell me, John, what do you think of my position?”
    “Your position.”
    Andrus dropped the pencil and all of the smile. “What do you think of my position on the right to die?”
    “You think that’s relevant to my working for you?”
    “No, I don’t. But I am curious.”
    I cleared my throat. “You know about my wife.”
    “Alec told me that she died of cancer.”
    “Brain tumor. She lingered for a long time, months. In and out of awareness, a lot of pain. We didn’t end it, the doctors and I.”
    I had the feeling that I’d stopped too soon, that Andrus was hanging on my starting again.
    I said, “That’s it. We waited, and she died.”
    “What did you... feel about that?”
    “About her dying?”
    “Yes.”
    None of your business. “I think I’d still like to keep my own counsel on that.”
    Andrus smiled sympathetically, but in a practiced way. “Then let me tell you about my spouse, John.” She squared the chair around, elbows on the desk.
    “Working for a large law firm in Washington , D.C. , I represented hospitals, among other clients. I met Enrique at an interdisciplinary conference in London . Medical-legal issues, that sort of thing. Enrique was fifty, a respected doctor in northern Spain . I was barely thirty, only fifteen years older than his son. I had no Spanish, no ear for languages at all. Enrique’s English was wonderful, and if I’d still been a virgin, the romance novels would say he carried me away on a wave of passion. But that really was how it felt. I left the firm for a teaching position at a law school in a D.C. suburb, just to have summers off to be with him.”
    “You and he were married but didn’t live together?”
    “During the school year. At Christmas and summers I’d fly to him, or he’d somehow make time to fly over to me. Anyway, we’d been married for two years, doing this transatlantic shuttle—money was no object, we were both quite comfortable—when Enrique had a stroke. Now, you have to understand, he had been a saint to the poor people of his area, noblesse oblige, during much of Franco’s dictatorship. Manolo is a good example.”
    “The guy in the anteroom?”
    “Yes. Manolo was born deaf. His parents cast him out. Literally. Enrique took him in, taught him rudimentary signing, and made him a sort of houseman/orderly to help with the patients he saw. In any case, Enrique had the stroke. Incapacitating. He was paralyzed, could barely sign to Manolo, seemed to forget his Spanish, and only I could understand him, in terribly garbled English.”
    “Where was his son?”
    A muscle jumped in her jaw. “His son, Ramón, was over here, in the States. Studying. I told him he should come back, it was his duty. But he didn’t, not until almost the end. And then...”
    I gave Andrus time.
    “Sorry. Enrique was deteriorating, horribly. Bodily functions... as a doctor, he knew exactly what was happening to him. He knew he couldn’t get any better, and he had too much pride, too much respect for the human spirit, to drift into getting worse. One night, he asked me, begged me to end it for him. I refused. For weeks I watched him decline, his begging now reduced to a single word, John. ‘Needle.’ ”
    The tic again. “Ramón finally arrived. Repelled by his father’s condition, he couldn’t even sit in the same room with him, his own father. I wasn’t getting much sleep, but I was doing a lot of thinking. I decided that what Enrique was asking me to do was illegal but not immoral. Finally, one night, I found a bottle with a label on it that I could read, and I injected him.”
    Her voice quavered. “Enrique was aware of what I was doing. He smiled at me, John. He slipped away blessing me.”
    Andrus used the edge of her index finger to wipe her eye. It was so like Nancy ’s gesture that I started a little in my chair, but the professor didn’t notice.
    “That should have been the end of it. But I didn’t know much about Spanish politics. General Franco had just died, and the leftists were trying to push the Franquistas out of government. The undertaker