Cornelius Ryan was one of my favorite historians and authors.  His trilogy of WWII histories, The Longest Day, The Last Battle, and A Bridge Too Far brought to vivid life the heroes and events of that conflict.

After finishing The Longest Day recently — having previously read the other two — I read up on Ryan and discovered that his final book was published posthumously, assembled by his wife Kathryn from tapes and notes she discovered after his death from prostate cancer in 1974.  A Private Battle tells the tale of his fight with the disease, and of his concurrent fight to finish A Bridge Too Far, whose research was completed before his diagnosis but whose writing took place entirely thereafter.

The book is out of print, but Alibris.com came to the rescue, and I received it late last week.  I picked it up early Sunday morning… and finished it Sunday night.  It is amazing… and terrible too, if you get my meaning.

This is going to be a long post, as will the next one,  because there are two passages that really hit home with me, which I’ll share with you here.  The first one — the focus of this post — demonstrates the kind of man Cornelius Ryan was, and why he’s even more a hero to me now (this section is told from Kathryn Ryan’s point of view):

Shortly after Geoff [the Ryans’ son] came home to live, Connie [Cornelius] was scheduled for a 9:00 A.M. bone scan.  That time the appointment was at Memorial.  Thanks to some fortuitous break in traffic and, again, a vacancy at the small garage next to the hospital, we were there a full fifteen minutes ahead of time.

By now Connie knew the corridors and turnings of Sloan-Kettering and Memorial as well as if he had spent all his working years there.  We went directly to the radioactive isotope department.  To our astonishment the waiting room was filled with patients.  None of them had seen any hospital personnel about.

Connie, notebook and pencil in hand, started down the line.  “What time is your appointment?” he asked each person.  “What time did you arrive?”  Finally he came to a childlike young woman in a wheelchair, accompanied by an elderly woman who turned out to be an aunt.  They spoke little English, and my rusty Spanish was almost more hindrance than help.  The girl’s dark eyes were beautiful, prominent in the wasted face.  Her hands, long-fingered, clutched the arms of the wheelchair.  Her aunt — the sole surviving relative, if my understanding was correct — stood anxiously beside her.

The two, we learned, had left their home in East Harlem a little after 5:00 A.M., traveling by subway, then down the long blocks to reach the hospital.  They had arrived by 6:00 A.M.  For over three hours they had waited for someone to come and do the bone scan.  Both women looked exhausted.  The girl in the wheelchair seemed as fragile as a feather borne on the wind.  Her huge, expressive eyes went from me to Connie.

Suddenly he looked up from his notes.

“Katie [Kathryn], every one of these people here today are welfare patients.  They were told to come in for bone scans and so they came.  I’m the only one with a definite time and appointment.”  He looked down at his watch.  “It’s now nine forty-seven.”  He wrote it down.  “No one’s turned up to take me in for my nine o’clock appointment and what about them?”  He gestured toward the line of people.  “Christ,”  he said, “it’s bad enough to have the bloody disease.  But to treat them like this –”

He knelt in front of the tiny figure in the wheelchair.  “Ask her, Katie, if she’d like something —  juice, tea, coffee –”  I translated.  Her eyes stayed fixed on Connie.  Shyly she declined.  “Tell her I’m going to have something,” Connie persisted.  “She and her aunt must join me.”  Again, I did the best I could, and this time she agreed.

The aunt, whose English was far better than my Spanish, was reluctant to leave, afraid they’d lose their place in line.  She said that other ambulatory patients had moved ahead of her neice.

As she was speaking, a man came into the room.  “Mr. Ryan?” he called.  “Mr. Ryan.”

Connie rose from beside the girl’s wheelchair.  Deliberately he looked at his watch.  The man said, “I know, sir, we’re running late.”

“Yes,” Connie said, “you sure as hell are.  These people are all ahead of me.”

The man looked blankly at Connie.  “Sir, I am sorry for the delay.  But we are ready for you now.”

“We’re all in line here,” Connie said.  “You take these people first.”

“They will be seen,” the man said.

“Damn right,” Connie said, “and now.”  He pulled out his notebook.   “This young lady was here first — shortly after six A.M.  And this lady was next.  Then this gentleman.”  He looked up — not at the technician — but at the line of men and women.  “Go by turns,” he told them.  “I’ve got your arrival times.  I’m last, aren’t I, Katie?”

“No one else has come in,” I said, “but him.”

“Mr. Ryan–” the man began and stopped.

Connie was moving toward him.  “Let’s get going, Buster, shall we?”

He turned again and came back to his young friend in the wheelchair.  He pushed her forward.  The hospital employee stood stock-still watching.  “Come,” Connie said to him in a low voice that I knew meant his patience was at an end, “you’re late enough as it is.”

Meticulously, he ticked off each patient in the room, giving them numbers.  Tiredly, wearily, they sat down but I don’t think they were frightened any longer.  I have already said that there is an affinity among cancer patients and their families.  It is not a question of who can afford to pay and who cannot.  It is a question of human dignity, and on that day Connie returned to them a value some of them perhaps had felt was lost forever.  He helped them be people again — not victims.

“It will probably take two or three hours — maybe longer — for the results of your tests,” he said to the group.  “Don’t stay here all that time.  Go walk around, sit in the park across the way, go back home and rest.  You don’t have to spend a whole day on your bone scan.  If you’ve not had breakfast, have it after your test is over.”  He stopped abruptly and was silent for a moment.

“What I’m trying to tell you is — don’t be afraid.  Not of hospitals or attendants or anybody.  You’re you — not a statistic.  Be yourselves, damn it.  Don’t be afraid.”

He was in the midst of an Irish story, groups clustered about him, when the dark-eyed girl came out.  The next patient went in and then another.  “The place is finally coming to life,” Connie said, and smiles broke out on faces that had not smiled all that morning.

He came back to the girl and her aunt and bent down again in front of her wheelchair.  “What would you like most of all to eat?” he asked her as gently as if she were the child she seemed.

“Ice cream.”  She knew those English words.

“I’ll be back, Katie,” Connie said and darted out the door.  He returned some minutes later with an ice-cream cone, a little the worse for its time in transit.  The girl reached out for it and then, impulsively, she took his hand and kissed it.

“Get her out in the sun and air,” Connie said, gesturing to me to speak to the aunt.

Her flood of Spanish was too much for me to understand and then the aunt said haltingly in English, “Senor, each day we pray for you.  It is all we can give.”

I tried to reply in kind but Connie’s kiss on the girl’s cheek was far more appropriate.  They left, the girl half turned in her wheelchair to look back on Connie.  Her eyes never left his face until she and her aunt rounded a corridor and were out of sight.