Chapter 4

"Dear Ol' Dad"

Lisa Cuddy made the phone call as soon as she unlocked her office door and dropped her sweater and large hand bag beside her desk. The call was inevitable and necessary, and an important part of her job. The "necessary" part didn't make it pleasant.

She'd called from home to check on House's condition and to ask how he had fared through the night. The charge nurse said he had spent a comfortable night, which in "doctor-speak" meant that he had probably been medicated halfway into the middle of next week! Cuddy gave the nurse who answered the phone the benefit of the doubt though. She'd probably had a difficult shift. She thanked the woman and then rang off.

Now the phone was ringing at the House house in upstate New York. It was answered after the third ring by a gruff male voice with a tinge of familiarity in it.

"House residence …"

"Is this John House?" Lisa asked pleasantly.

"Yes it is. Are you calling from the hospital?" He had her pegged right away.

"Yes I am, Mr. House. I'm Lisa Cuddy, Hospital Administrator, and I …"

He cut her off. "Don't you have lackeys to do this kind of stuff for you?"

She decided to give him back tit for tat. (Like father, like son.) "Once in awhile, yes, I do. But this concerns my best doctor and your only child. Sometimes the message supersedes the messenger."

There was a short pause. Then: "Yeah … okay. Here, I'll let you talk to my wife."

There were muffled sounds on the line for a few moments, and then a female voice took up the conversation. "Dr. Cuddy? This is Blythe House. How is Gregory? We were just getting ready to leave and drive down there …"

"Good morning, Mrs. House. Yes, this is Lisa Cuddy. I have some good news and some news that's not so good … and I'm sure he will be very glad to see you" She wasn't sure about that last part.

"Will Gregg be all right?"

"Yes he will. He'll be fine … but it will take a long time. His injuries were serious and he's going to be laid up for awhile.

"Tell me, please … and call me 'Blythe', won't you?"

This was a no-nonsense woman. Cuddy realized that right away. She guessed she had to be, to stay married to a man like blunt-talking John House. She could easily understand where her own Dr. Gregory House got his rude demeanor. "Very well," she agreed, "if you'll call me Lisa in return." She paused a moment, waiting for acknowledgment, but the phone line between them seemed to crackle with impatience. She shrugged mentally and continued. "First, your son suffered a serious injury to his crippled leg, and that's what concerns us the most at this time."

A muffled groan came over the line, followed by a loud exclamation from the gruff male voice in the background. "What is it, Blythe? What's happened to Gregg?"

Lisa waited while Blythe House hushed him firmly. "John, you could have taken the message yourself, but you handed the phone to me. Now please wait until we're finished talking!"

Things grew very quiet. Presently, Blythe's carefully controlled voice continued. "I'm sorry about that … but I believe you can understand … I married one, and then I raised another one who turned out just like him! About the only way you can shut them up is to yell louder than they do! Please go on. What were you telling me about my son's leg?"

Lisa Cuddy found herself smiling, even at the woman's anticipation of the bad news to follow. Lisa was going to like her. Very much! (And House had tried to tell her his mother hated confrontation!)

"I was saying … when his car went over the embankment, he was thrown clear, which no doubt kept him from being killed outright. The police said he was not wearing a seat belt. When the front of the car hit the ground, it angled slightly. The dashboard buckled and split apart and the windshield shattered.

"Dr. House's right leg was lacerated deeply all the way from the center of his patella … that is, his knee cap … almost to his right hip. The edge of the dashboard, they believe, raked along his thigh, causing the injury.

"His right hand probably got jammed through the steering wheel when he was thrown forward, and it fractured the metacarpal bones to his ring and middle fingers and dislocated the one to his index finger. He has a laceration at the base of his thumb that they can't explain; possibly from the bottom edge of the dash. He took a glancing blow to the side of his head, probably also by the steering wheel. Just hard enough to disorient his thinking and blur his vision. The side of his face was scratched and cut by glass fragments and pieces of broken trim.

"Body scans revealed that his back muscles were wrenched badly enough that when he wandered away from the scene of the accident in a dazed state and finally collapsed, he was unable to move again, and lapsed in and out of consciousness until he was found.

"I can't tell you more than that right now, but I'll be available to get with you when you arrive here. You said you were leaving immediately, correct?"

"Yes," Blythe House said. "We were ready to walk out the door when you called. We would have come down last evening, but we spoke earlier to Gregg's friend Jim Wilson, and he told us it would be useless to arrive before he woke up … and they hadn't finished with his surgeries yet. We should be there in three hours or less."

"I'll be here. Come to my office on the first floor … across from the main entrance."

"Okay then. And thank you Lisa. I appreciate this very much."

"You're welcome, Blythe. Goodbye."

As she hung up the phone, Cuddy wondered how Gregg's parents had come to know James Wilson …

"John, go ahead and load our suitcases in the back of the truck while I get the thermos of coffee from the kitchen and check around to be sure we haven't forgotten anything."

He was bent forward and down with both palms on the handles of the large suitcases, ready to heft them. He rolled his eyes and crunched his face sideways until his left eye squeezed shut. He paused and looked up, glaring at her for a moment with what passed on his part for pained forbearance. "Woman, what the hell does it look like I'm doing?"

"Don't swear, John. It doesn't become you," she said. Her voice was a little unsteady, and he knew her thoughts were with their son. He also knew she wasn't talking directly to him anymore, but to herself; that way she had of reassuring herself when things got difficult. "We should probably have done all this yesterday as soon as Dr. Cuddy called to tell us the police had found Gregory. I don't know why we didn't. But we didn't! Then Jim Wilson called, and again we waited and still didn't get things ready."

"Blythe … " John spoke softly, trying to get through to her. "Wilson said Gregg was still in surgery and it would be useless for us to show up at the hospital at night before they knew anything. It's much better this way. You talked to Dr. Cuddy and she said Gregg is going to be perfectly all right …"

Her head snapped up. He had her attention now. "Oh John, how can you say such a thing? Gregg will never be … 'all right' … and now this on top of everything else. He was in constant pain before … and God only knows what this accident will do to him. His crippled leg is hurt again … his cane hand is fractured and he can't use the other one because of that stupid LaCrosse injury he never reported! Can you imagine what it will be like for him? Jim didn't say it in words, but Gregg isn't going to be able to walk for … months!"

"We don't know that …"

"Yes we do! I do! I'm his mother."

"Yeah, and I'm his father. Please don't turn this into a 'which-of-us-loves-him-more' contest!" John House knew he couldn't win. Where Gregg was concerned, he'd never had a chance. He'd spent too much time being an absentee Dad. He hefted the two suitcases, loaded with everything the two of them would need for a week, and started toward the front door.

Behind him, his wife's eyes bored into his back. He could almost form a perfect mental image of the bleak defiance in her eyes. Resigned, he kept walking and elbowed his way through the screen door.

The big 2005 silver Dodge Ram 1800 stood like a guardian in the driveway next to the front porch. John put the suitcases on the ground next to the tailgate, reached to his pocket and extracted the keys. He beeped the vehicle open, put the keys back in his pocket and lifted the rear window of the cap. He put the tailgate down and stretched the cargo net across the box. He slid both suitcases across until they nestled against the net, and then closed everything and went up front to pull the hood release.

John "Blackjack" House knew he didn't really need to do this. The truck was barely a year old, and did not have that many miles on it. He had bought his first one with part of his separation pay the day he'd retired from the military. A year ago, he'd finally traded that 1991 model for this one. This brute would be his stand-in for the "F/A-18E Super Hornet" now!

He did not need to check the water level, or the oil, or the tautness of the belts, or the transmission or power steering fluids, but he did it anyway. The gas tank was topped to the point that the needle gauge stood way to the right of the "full" mark. He had been a U. S. Marine, after all, and there were deeply ingrained rituals in him, instilled there by the military, that he would adhere to religiously for the rest of his life.

Semper Fi!

They came off Route 6 and headed onto 206 South, which would take them on a straight shot right down the middle of New Jersey. They should be in Princeton by noon, depending on traffic. Scenery shot by the big silver Dodge in a multi-colored blur. The highway was dotted with billboards, roadside signs, unsightly advertisements, and every possible method the human race could think of to defile the work of nature.

John House set the cruise control at 70mph and leaned back in the driver's seat. Across from him, his wife sat erect, held stiffly in place by the seat belt. Her head was turned slightly toward the passenger-side window, her eyes averted. John noticed they were suspiciously moist. He reached his hand across the wide seat and clasped her small hand with his big paw, not knowing what to say that would comfort her, but knowing she was suffering in silence for their son.

"Hey woman …" he began. "Penny for your thoughts …"

She looked across at him angrily for a moment, and then schooled her features, and her expression softened. Her husband was suffering too. Blythe returned the pressure of his fingers on hers, and let a smile find her lips, if not her eyes. At that moment the tears overflowed and she bit down hard on her lip. "Oh John, I promised myself I wouldn't cry … stiff upper lip and all that … but I guess it isn't working. I'm so worried about Gregg …"

"I know," he said. "Me too. But we have to remember he's a grown man. He'll take this like a man and he'll handle it like a man … the same way he handled it the last time."

Blythe clenched her eyes shut, suddenly thrust back into remembering the "last time." Not one single person involved in the drama of the leg infarction had "handled it like a man". That terrible life-changing year had aged them all and changed the course of Gregg's life forever. He had gone from a healthy, brilliant rebel to a silent, bitter recluse in less than a heartbeat.

That painful first year had seen Gregg struggle to maintain his dignity beneath the harsh scrutiny of friendly sympathy and pity. His friends had watched him, appalled, as his attitude went from brilliant sarcasm to all-consuming anger. He cast aside all offers of assistance and reassurance while he battled to regain use of a limb that no longer worked; no longer even held him up. They watched him battle with himself over the necessity of walking with crutches, mortified and embarrassed to be caught depending on them for mobility in front of anyone else; as though it was entirely his fault that they'd had to become a part of his existence!

Blythe and John had stood by their son stubbornly, even as he tried to push them away along with everyone else. They watched sadly, even as Gregg's former friends finally abandoned him one by one; even Stacy, the love of his life … disheartened at being told again and again to: "Get the fuck out of my life! I don't need you to stare at me and I don't need your sympathy!"

Finally there were only three people remaining: Gregg's parents and Dr. James Wilson!

After that, when Blythe had called Gregg's place in the evenings to ask how he was, the phone would almost always be answered by Wilson who, in turn, would hand it to Gregg so he wouldn't have to get up. It wasn't long after that that Gregg began to refuse to take her calls …

Now it was happening all over again.

Blythe held fast to John's hand as the truck sped toward Princeton. Her husband had always been a rock to lean on, and she believed he had loved her unconditionally, their son too, in spite of the nomadic life and the unrelenting military regimen.

Her mind traveled back to the beginning.

1956.

They were freshmen in college. Penn State. They were both a long way from home, both homesick. They were still getting used to university life, learning a whole new set of study habits, a whole new social structure, a whole new and frightening world opening up for both of them.

They were in the same physics class and they became friends their first week on campus. She was in the Blue Band. He was on the Nittany Lions football team. She played clarinet, flute and sax. He was a lowly freshman and not quite big enough to be on the first string. He did manage to get enough game time to sport a few black and blue marks and sore muscles now and then. He idolized Joe Paterno and she made fun of him for that. Her hero was Elvis, who had climbed meteorically to the top of the charts and made quite a splash. John made fun of "Elvis the Pelvis" and swiveled his hips dramatically. She glowered at him. By mid-term they were going steady. They campaigned for Adlai Stevenson, but that didn't work out. By year's end, they were engaged.

They were married in June of 1958 at the end of their sophomore year, and honeymooned in Bermuda. That island was all the rage that year! They listened to the Beatles, Santo and Johnny and Slim Whitman, and danced to Perry Como and Tony Bennett and Patti Page and Rosemary Clooney.

When they returned to campus for their junior year, Blythe discovered that she was pregnant. They were surprised and a little scared. She finished out the year, but Gregory Alan House made his debut to the world on June 11, 1959, at five in the morning.

Blythe dropped out of college to care for her baby, a strapping eight-pounder with the lungs of a Banshee and the appetite of a sword swallower. "Greggie" was a restless child from the moment he escaped from her womb, yelling at the tops of his lungs. She encouraged his inquisitive nature and soothed his bumps and bruises when he got himself in trouble for sticking his little bitty nose where it didn't belong.

John didn't play football during his senior year, but buckled down to study, while still juggling a part-time job as a mechanic at a local Chrysler dealership. He was displaying an interest in the military, and pouring over Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps literature. The prospect of being a military wife and raising a child within that gypsy way of life intimidated Blythe a little, but if that was John's destiny, then so be it. She would handle whatever came with it.

Two weeks to the day after he'd graduated from Penn State, not on the Dean's list, but close, John announced that he'd spoken to the Marine recruiter. Within the month he would be off for Officer Candidate School and flight training, and then to pursue a career as a Marine Corps pilot.

At first, Blythe was shocked. She had not expected his decision to come so soon. Then she threw her arms around him and told him she would support him without reservation in any ongoing career decisions he made. John reached down and picked up his eighteen-month-old son and swung him gleefully in the air, while Greggie gurgled in delight.

John "Blackjack" House won his wings and his lieutenant's bars easily. They were shipped immediately to Marine Corps Air Station, Iwakuni, Japan.

It was a beautiful country, but Blythe was lonely at first. John was away flying sorties a lot, while she remained with Greggie at the base housing. Other military wives were friendly, but it wasn't the same. She missed John, and spent increasing amounts of time with her son, taking him here and there to sightsee and mingle with the native people. By the time he was three years old, he was already speaking as much Japanese as English.

When Greggie was three years old they were transferred back to the states … Marine Corps Air Station, Cherry Point; Havelock, North Carolina. It wasn't long before the child picked up a southern drawl that had his hard core Marine Dad in stitches. He was not only a smart child, well above average, but a talented mimic as well.

A few weeks after his fourth birthday, he looked up defiantly at his mother and said: "Mommy, don't call me 'Greggie' anymore. That's a baby name, and I'm not a baby!"

Blythe saluted solemnly and said: "Yessir. As you wish, sir."

Gregg returned the salute and said: "Very well, cadet! As you were!" The baby nickname went, after that, the way of the dinosaur.

As the years passed by and their family moved from country to country and state to state, something changed so gradually that none of them had any inkling what it was until it was far too late to change it back. John and Blythe talked sometimes about trying to have another child, but nobody mentioned it when, month after month, it didn't happen.

The United States, it seemed, had become the world's watchdog. Its military was ordered here and there to act as hall monitors for the entire planet. Where conflicts arose, the United States sent a patrol of nuns armed with rulers to smite the knuckles of the perpetrators and send the violators to the principle's office for time out. It seemed as though no country could express a legitimate beef with a neighbor anymore without "Big Brother" peering over its shoulder and shaking a finger and saying, "Tut tut now! Mustn't do that! Big Brother doesn't like it!"

More and more, Captain Blackjack House found himself in the role of Big Brother. He didn't care much for the assignment and voiced his opinion. Some of it rubbed off at home.

Gregg House, always curious, always reaching out with a youngster's inquisitive mind and voracious appetite for knowledge, questioned every unclassified order and challenged every restriction and every rule. He had turned into a loner who made few friends. That endeavor, he'd found very early on, was rather useless. Every time he found that he liked someone, the Marine Corps stepped in with new orders and a new promotion for his Dad, and they were off to far horizons yet again.

After a time, he began to avoid his father and everything to do with the military. He played every sport he could put his hand to, and excelled at them all. He read volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia for fun, and memorized topographical maps of every country in which he set foot. By the age of twelve, he was fluent in three languages and could compose in two of them.

Anywhere he saw a piano he would sit down before its keyboard and pick out melodies that unfurled from within his own head. Other kids avoided him. He was different. He was way smart, and the "in" crowd was beginning to shy away from that stuff.

Gregg could have cared less. "Got the world by the tail on a down-hill drag," he would brag. But he didn't. Not really.

Blythe finally got pregnant again, but lost the child in the second trimester. She had to have an emergency hysterectomy after hemorrhaging so badly they nearly lost her. She was in the hospital for two weeks while John and Gregg snarled at each other at home. Talk of another child dried up like a puddle in the desert.

By the time Gregg was old enough for college he knew more than most of his professors and was well into fluency in a seventh language. He had a collection of medical books that would amaze most doctors, and he and his father were almost completely alienated.

John was a Lieutenant Colonel now, but for all his rank, he did not know how to talk to his brilliant, arrogant son, and did not know how to handle the long silences. And so he didn't. Blythe watched them both, heavy hearted, but she had long ceased trying to make peace between them. They spoke to each other only when necessary and in one-word sentences, and avoided each other the rest of the time.

When Gregg finally left home, (he described "home" only as "that cracker box"), he did not write or call for months. Blythe kept up with his life only through contact with his college administrator. The man was not surprised. He had seen this confusing phenomenon in military families many times before.

Gregg graduated from college with highest honors and moved on to medical school. There he careened madly into the wonders of tobacco, drugs, women and alcohol. Shortly afterward, a series of medical school mishaps soon began to dog his heels while he fought his daily battles with the real world. He found himself thrown out of one university and enrolled in another. He began to guard his backside!

He was discovering there were a few people of his acquaintance whose intelligence did not match his own, but who were more than willing to lure him into trouble out of greed and jealousy, and who chose to celebrate when his arrogant demeanor brought him disgrace with members of the faculty. Gregg realized thereafter that he had to learn to spot the crap from his "lesser" peers, and either avoid it from the onset, or take it on head to head. After a few strains and sprains and bloody noses which he handed out, as well as suffered, he began to master the give-and-take of adult life.

Something his father had said to him early in his youth began to make sense in an ironic fashion: "Always cover your own Six, Gregory!"

And he did.

John House retired with the rank of Bird Colonel after a distinguished career of thirty five years. He and Blythe bought a home near Ithaca, New York.

They were still living there when Gregg suffered the infarction. Their son had fought the obligation of telling his parents about the seriousness of the injury every step of the way, and managed to delay their knowledge of his illness for more than a week. But the call finally came, and that was how they'd got to know Dr. James Wilson.

They had met Stacy once or twice, briefly, and liked her, but by the time they arrived in New Jersey, their son was becoming a bitter cripple and Stacy was gone, probably forever. Gregg had verbally abused her until she couldn't take it any longer, and fled. The only friend he had left was James Wilson, the young Oncologist who had been Gregg's sidekick for years, and the only person laid-back enough to let Gregg's vitriolic angst roll off his back like water off a duck.

For his part, Gregg barely tolerated his parents' presence. He hated for them to see him tethered to a hospital bed, pathetically fragile and pathetically helpless. He loathed the presence of the wheelchair no more than an arm's length away, and the crutches racked at the back of the chair. He hated the tubes and the urine bag and the med pumps and the nurses who administered them, and most of all, he hated himself.

He lay pale and feeble and exhausted and in torturous pain. The only thing that kept him going and kept him alive was his rage at everything and everyone that touched him or in any way tried to lend him support.

Only his mother could he tolerate by his bedside to touch gentle hands to his tear-streaked face and run her fingers lovingly through his tangled hair. Only Blythe was given the privilege of leaning her warm cheek against his swollen eyelids and whispering words of comfort where only his ears could hear them. Only she was allowed to shed the tears of a mother's devotion in return as she wiped his own wetness away with a corner of her blouse so that others could not see his humiliation and shame.

She was the only one to hear his whispered plea: "Oh God, Mom … I hate this! I hate it! Why, Mom? Why?"

There was no answer for either of them.

Not then.

There still wasn't.

Blythe looked across to her husband, sitting stiffly on the other side of the truck, hands braced on the steering wheel.

His face was rigid, his eyes wet, but fixed on the road ahead. His mouth was drawn downward at the edges, making him look older; clueless. She had never before in their entire married life seen Blackjack House look helpless. Hopeless.

She knew he loved his son more than that son had any idea. But he also had no hope of ever gathering within himself the simple grace it took to be able to tell him so …

ooooooooooooooooooooooo

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