If Otis Creech thought he had changed Gwillam Forte’s outlook with his little lunchtime lecture, he was mistaken. But the ice that enveloped Gwillam Forte’s view of the world, and especially of himself, had been cracked, and slowly the thaw set in. He still didn’t talk much with his other hospital mates, but increasingly he listened to Creech, and imperceptibly the monologues became dialogues. He also watched Creech with the other men, admiring the man’s bulging muscles as he walked among them and wishing they were his own, wondering if he would ever be able to talk so easily, and joke, and make men laugh as Creech did with such grace. And always Creech kept urging him to get out of bed into a wheelchair, and let the doctors fit him with prosthetic legs and learn to walk with them. Forte, afraid they would only make his disability more unbearable-in bed, at least, he was practically indistinguishable from other men in bed-always put him off, saying that when his stumps healed better, perhaps then …
During the Christmas season of 1946, Creech’s wish that Forte would get out of bed and on his feet-or somebody’s feet-came to pass, but Creech wasn’t there to witness it. In November, he had died of a heart attack.
For some days, Gwillam Forte retreated into lethargy, his wakeful hours spent staring blindly at the ceiling. The doctors and nurses shook their heads, but resisted the impulse to pay the young man any special attention. They had helped him all they could; any improvement would have to come from him.
Their instincts proved correct. One day he decided that Otis Creech had been right, for wasn’t the black man now dead, and Gwillam Forte still alive? He had been the lucky one, after all. He stopped picking at his food and started eating again. By the second week in December he was being fitted with prosthetic legs, a simpler matter than it might have been because his stumps were below the knees. On Christmas morning he took his first steps in nearly two years. Just two steps they were, but enough to prove to himself that he could walk. That realization was his Christmas gift. It was a Christmas gift to his doctors too: it was the first time they had ever seen him smile.
By the summer of 1947, Gwillam Forte was a different person. No longer frightened, resentful, self-pitying, the child was on his way to manhood. He could get around on his prosthetic legs with reasonable speed and agility, and had mastered the two-pronged hook that served as a right hand to the degree that he could scrawl his signature, use a fork, pull a handkerchief from his pocket and blow his nose-carefully if he didn’t want it pinched-and tie his shoelaces. By then, he realized that his disability was only partly physical; perhaps worse was the atrophy of his mental faculties. Since he had run away from home some six years before, he had not attended a single day of school, read a book or newspaper, or taken any interest in what was going on in the world at large. Hitler and Churchill and Roosevelt were names he recognized, and he could locate Germany, England, the United States, and Mexico on a world map, but that was about the extent of his understanding of foreign affairs. His knowledge of other subjects was equally profound. He knew that he was dumb, but considered this a natural consequence of having little schooling, a lush for a father, and a bum for a mother. Mrs. Warren changed his mind about that, just as Otis Creech had changed his mind about being a bedridden invalid.
Virginia Warren was the hospital librarian, a kindly gray-haired woman of sixty whose only son had been killed in Normandy. All the patients were her sons after that tragedy, and none was dearer than Gwillam Forte. To her, he was a lump of clay that wanted shaping, and she began by trying to wean him from the ward poker game that started just after breakfast and continued nonstop until lights out at 10:00 p.m. The Hundred Great Books were her bait. Forte listened politely as she extolled their excellences, dropped A Tale of Two Cities she had left for him the moment she disappeared down the hallway, and clumped over to the poker table, where a pair of jacks exerted a more magnetic appeal.
Reflecting on the busted flush of her frustrated enthusiasm, Mrs. Warren decided to lower her sights. Her next offering was The Three Musketeers, who also misfired: Forte preferred three of any other kind. By stages, she retreated to Superman and Batman. They proved to be right on target. Gwillam Forte began to spend more time leaping off rooftops and into outer space, less trying to fill inside straights. Experimentally, Mrs. Warren inserted an illustrated children’s version of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table into the stack of comic books that he was now devouring at a single sitting. He read that, too. Reading, he found to his surprise, had become a habit.
Just in time, for comic books had begun to pall. For them, Mrs. Warren substituted the adventure stories of P. C. Wren, Raphael Sabatini, and Dumas. By the summer of 1948, he had soaked up all the blood and thunder the library contained, and was reading Conrad, Twain, Dickens, and Hugo, at the steady rate of a book a day. His interest in poker waned. Compared with the variety and vitality of the tales he was reading, poker was a bore.
When Mrs. Warren decided the time had come to expand Gwillam Forte’s horizons by introducing him to nonfiction, his resistance had disappeared. First she got his feet wet with the great voyages of discovery, then biographies of men who had shaped the world, and finally he found himself immersed in history, where he slowly became aware of the vast panorama that had been hidden in the mists of his ignorance. Whole days and nights were lost to reading. In one such stretch, he went without pause through the entire 817 pages of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, and never afterward wondered why Armenians hate Turks. He marveled at the ease with which he absorbed ideas that he would have loathed had he been subjected to them through lectures by bored and incompetent teachers. For the first time in his life, he realized how lucky he was to have been denied schooling, and only thus acquired an education.
That education was not achieved by books alone. The more practical aspects of Gwillam Forte’s intellectual development came from the intensive care lavished on him by patients as well as staff at the veterans hospital in Houston, beginning with instruction in poker. For it was at the poker table that Gwillam Forte learned how men conspire to deceive their fellows, their stratagems of word and expression, the psychological warfare of bluff and threat and seeming submission, the construction and baiting of traps-and how to avoid them-and the myriad other human elements that make the game of poker a microcosm of the larger game of life. Gwillam Forte learned it well enough to be able to make a living at it-honestly, if necessary-on the outside. His hospital mates had other contributions to make to his education, too, and once they observed his appetite for learning, imparted them freely.
John Overholzer, the Army veteran who occupied the next bed, was a thick-fingered old man who looked more like a retired bouncer than the certified public accountant he once had been. In the eleven months they were neighbors before Overholzer went to the Final Audit, the old man introduced him to the mysteries of creative bookkeeping, and some of the thousand ways to throw sand in the eyes of bank examiners, IRS snoopers, and other enemies of free enterprise.
C. C. Stong, a chronic drunk with a genius for stealing sickbay alcohol, passed on what he remembered of his days as a veterinary surgeon in the mornings, before passing out in the afternoons; from him, Forte learned mainly that he didn’t want to become a vet.
“Goatlips” McClanahan, a wily stocks-and-bonds mechanic who knew all about Wall Street but nothing about women, having throughout his long life transferred his profits from the one almost without pause to the other, taught Forte the intricate steps of the financial fandango.
Real-estate operator “Buzz” Battersby instructed Forte in the science of geoalchemy, by which elaborately engraved and wildly mendacious prospectuses, distributed to credulous maiden schoolteachers and Iowa corn farmers, can transmute forty acres of alligator-infested Florida farmland into fifty pounds of pure gold.
Al Barkeley, one-time road commissioner and senatorial campaign manager, lectured Forte in political science by the case method, reminiscing about unmarked envelopes stuffed with twenty-dollar bills, voting the city graveyard, rigging polls, awarding street-paving contracts to the generous faithful, applying muscle to unfriendly editors, making study trips to the French Riviera at taxpayer expense, and other democratic practices not envisioned by the Founding Fathers.