The knee improved. There was no more bleeding and a month later, following carefully graded exercises, Chris was able to walk without a limp. They had put off seeing Doctor O’Leary, but Debbie insisted they should at least “check in,” so that Chris would be known to the doctor in case of another emergency. She expected no opposition, because from the moment Con learned the hematologist’s name he had insisted that Chris needed that specialist’s care.
“You take him,” Con said. “You don’t need me. We finally got ourselves a doctor I can trust.”
“I want you there too,” Debbie countered, “trust or no trust. Doctor O’Leary’s going to be taking care of Chris for a long time. You should get to know each other.”
Doctor O’Leary had a large practice. Making an appointment with him meant waiting up to a month and, even then, sometimes having to reschedule because an emergency beckoned. It was not unusual for him to be called to the hospital during office hours to attend to a patient in a crisis. During their first visit to his office, the Flynns were given the option of waiting indefinitely for Doctor O’Leary’s return or making a new appointment, because a child had been admitted to the hospital in a sickle-cell crisis. The term meant nothing to either Debbie or Con. They rescheduled. So far they had not set eyes on Doctor O’Leary.
“Look, Debbie,” Con said as they got into the car, “I can’t keep taking time off just to sit twiddling my thumbs in that office. Next time, you go alone. If I’m really needed, you can make another appointment.”
Debbie didn’t like the idea. But she also knew that her husband resented everything having to do with Chris’s illness, and that it was better not to argue with him. So she agreed, albeit reluctantly. It turned out that Con’s strategy was not original. To her relief, when she described their arrangement to the receptionist a week later, she was met with casual assurance. “Our usual routine” (routine! as though everybody did it) “is to tell you when there are just two more before you. Is that enough notice, or do you need three?”
Debbie, flabbergasted, said: “Well, the problem is that we live in Edison and it would take Con a couple of hours to get here.”
The receptionist, a pudgy middle-aged woman with pink cheeks and violet hair, smiled. “Don’t worry. If your husband can’t make it in time, the doctor’ll just see the next patient out of turn; there’s always enough! He knows your time’s valuable and he’ll accommodate you any way he can.” In a more confidential tone, she added: “He feels guilty leaving his patients sitting here, but he’s so popular, everybody wants him.”
Debbie liked the receptionist, whose name was Julia; the woman was at ease with the patients and obviously admired her boss. Debbie also liked Doctor O’Leary, whom she had yet to meet. A half-hour after she had registered Chris for the second time, Julia offered Debbie the phone to call her husband. The next patient was called and, twenty minutes later, the one just ahead of Chris. Debbie knew they were minutes away from having Chris’s entire future laid out before them, and she felt a cramp in her abdomen.
“I’m just going to the bathroom,” she told Chris. To Julia she said, “If the doctor calls, or my husband arrives, tell them I’ll be right back.”
Her cramps held her up longer than she had expected. When she returned, Con was there, sitting with his coat in his lap; Chris was gone. Julia smiled at her.
“Feeling better? You were gone a long time.”
“I guess I’m OK. Hi Con, how did you get here so fast?”
“Set a new speed record, I think. The cops couldn’t keep up.”
“Where’s Chris?”
“The doctor called for him a couple of minutes before Mr. Flynn walked in,” Julia said.” He’s in there with him now. Mr. Flynn wanted to wait for you. You can both go in.”
They went through the door Julia indicated, expecting to see Chris on an examining table, bare-chested, and taking deep breaths with a stethoscope on his chest. Instead, Chris was sitting, fully dressed, at one end of a large desk. Behind the desk, facing the newcomers, sat a tall black man with glasses, wearing a white coat on which the name “Robert D. O’Leary, M.D.” was embroidered. Between the man in white and Chris was a checkers board. The man looked up at them and smiled, showing perfect teeth beneath a perfectly trimmed mustache.
“We didn’t want to start without you,” he said, “but there’s no sense in wasting time, is there? Right, young man?”
“Right, Doctor,” Chris said, matching the man’s smile.
Doctor, indeed! Con was not fooled by this public relations gimmickry. Besides, where did this man get the effrontery to wear the doctor’s coat? With name and all! “They called me at work and said Doctor O’Leary was ready for us.”
“I’m seeing Doctor O’Leary’s patients today,” the man said pleasantly, moving to the center of the desk. “Good of you to come all the way from Edison. I’m sure Chris appreciates the effort. But then, I can see that this young fellow’s worth it!”
Con got up to leave. “Let’s go. We’ll come back when the doctor’s in —”
Debbie was disappointed but resigned herself to seeing Doctor O’Leary next visit. “No, let’s stay,” she said. “We’ve waited all this time, and in any case it’s our second visit here. At least let this man examine Chris. It’ll save Doctor O’Leary some time.” To the man behind the desk she said: “I’m sorry, we don’t even know your name, sir.”
The man didn’t answer. Instead, he read aloud from Chris’s chart. “Let me see. ‘Hemarthrosis, right knee, secondary to football injury.’ ” He looked sympathetically in Chris’s direction. “Real shame. I like to watch football, even though I don’t play anymore, and I’m going to have to tell you it isn’t good for you. You could get hurt again and bleed into another joint — or the same one.” He turned a friendly gaze in Con’s direction. Con didn’t fall for it. Who was this guy, even if he liked football, to say Chris shouldn’t play? The nerve!
“I don’t care!” Chris said, laughing. “I never wanted to play, but Dad made me.” This caught the man off guard, but it took him only an instant to diagnose the dynamic between father and son. He continued to read. “ ‘Knee stable. No apparent ligamentous tear. Possible bleed into elbow in past.’ Coag profile typical for hemophilia A.” He looked up. Con was scowling, and the man was afraid Chris was in for some unpleasant talk.
“A question?” the man asked.
Con sat mute, conflicted between the man’s clear diction and the unlikelihood that he really understood what he was reading. “Let me help you,” the man said with a smile. “Nobody’s explained to you why I’m seeing Doctor O’Leary’s patients. Is that what you’re wondering about?”
“Yes,” Con answered. “I thought you’d be taking blood from Chris, not playing checkers. And playing doctor. Where is the doctor anyway?”
“Right here,” he answered. Con looked puzzled, so the man pointed to the name on his coat. “See?”
“Oh.” Con chose to be deflated, rather than challenge the man’s blatant mendacity.
“OK, let me explain. I’m from a very privileged line, direct descendant of Chief Nga-Nga, patriarch of the Oliri branch of the Senegalese royal family. You know where Senegal is? Want me to spell those names? It’s all described in James Michener’s The Covenant. You’ve read it, of course. A lot of good history in that book — in many of Michener’s books, in fact. “Anyway, the Oliris —you look puzzled. OK, that’s O-L-I-R-I-S — beat the MacAbbeys, M-A-C-A-B-B-E-Y-S, in the Battle of Kilimanjaro, 1793, and sold them to the highest bidder. Not surprisingly, the highest bidder was an American who’d got rich exploiting non-union labor.” Con nodded. He knew about unions. Luckily the staff of Edison Nissan wasn’t organized.
The man continued: “Some of the Oliris were invited to go along to keep order on the slave ships. Then the slave owner double-crossed us once the ships were out of reach of the African coast and put the Oliris in chains along with the MacAbbeys.” Con’s expression softened. He disapproved of double-crossing. “It wasn’t till we reached America that we had a chance to demonstrate our superiority over the MacAbbeys, and within ten years all of us had purchased our freedom. In fact, my ancestors were among the first free blacks in America. With the money they made, they sent my grandfather to Howard University. My father and I followed proudly in his footsteps.”
Whatever doubt Con might have had that he was being baited was dispelled by the name of the university, which he took for a mispronunciation of Harvard. He congratulated himself on not allowing his skepticism to show.
The man went on: “I was luckier than the rest. I got to go to Harvard Medical School.” Now it was unmistakably Harvard. The man made a sweeping gesture with his left arm, pointing to half a dozen diplomas on the wall. Con made out the names Howard University, Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital, New York Hospital, and some other name, with accents, in a foreign language. His face turned white and he moved forward in his chair as if to get up. The awful truth was beginning to dawn on him: This man was distorting some primitive tribal name to pass for Irish, then forging one certificate after another!
The man motioned him back down. “Please don’t get up. I’m just a plain doctor with a love of hematology — and football, and checkers, and children. Also classical piano. I studied at Eastman for two years before doing my premed. You know Eastman, of course.” Con had never heard of Eastman. Neither had he read any of James Michener’s books. Doctor O’Leary regarded Con with an expression of amused pity, which Con mistook for a friendly smile.
“Anyway,” the doctor continued after a pause, “I’ve rambled enough. You didn’t come to hear my autobiography. Wasting your time isn’t the way to establish a good patient-doctor relationship, especially with a fellow Irish-American.” A twinkle, magnified by his glasses, accompanied the last phrase. Con looked as if he was coming out of general anesthesia, and Doctor O’Leary decided to put a stop to his little game.
“Just for the record,” he said seriously after a pause, “there is slavery in my background. Like many others in the same position, we ended up with the names of our masters. Now to the business at hand —”
“You mean, you are Doctor O’Leary?” Con asked, swallowing hard.
Doctor O’Leary laughed aloud. “Oh dear, oh dear. Yes, I am. Shall we proceed?”
Con was speechless and Doctor O’Leary proceeded.
“I imagine that Rick and Amaya, between them, have pretty much explained hemophilia to you. But it’s a changing field, and we can look forward to young Chris enjoying some of the benefits of progress in the foreseeable future.” Con took note of the doctor’s crisp yet unexaggerated articulation. Talks just like real people, white people, he thought. Must have taken speech lessons. He almost missed the next point. “If they can concentrate albumin and gamma globulin,” Doctor O’Leary was saying, “then surely they can do the same for coagulation factors. I actually worked for a while in plasma fractionation. Fascinating processes.”
“Doctor Prasad talked about injections. Isn’t there something he can take by mouth?” Debbie asked, giving Con a respite to clear the fog in his mind.
“How I wish there were. But that’s so far off I can’t even picture it. Actually, I hope the geneticists come up with the answer.”
“How would that be?” Debbie asked.
“We know it’s hereditary. Maybe the gene could be identified and fixed. But that’s also pie in the sky. Still, while we’re on the subject of genes . . . Hold on a minute.” He buzzed the receptionist. “Who’s still waiting?”
“Mrs. Armstrong, Lola Taylor, and Jerry Blackwell,” the voice announced.
“Thanks.” He switched off the intercom. “Listen,” he said to Debbie, looking briefly at Con as if by afterthought, “I don’t want to keep those folks waiting forever. But we have quite a bit of ground to cover yet, and there are some aspects of genetics I want to tell you about. Do you have time to sit around, or shall we make another appointment? Chris doesn’t need any treatment right away.” Doctor O’Leary did not offer all his patients late hours for talking about non-urgent matters, but he was feeling a bit sorry for Con.
Debbie looked questioningly at Con, who shrugged. Chris was contentedly playing against himself at checkers. “Could we go downstairs and get a snack, and come back?”
“Good idea. Give me about an hour. OK?”
“Come on, you guys, let’s get something to eat. Then we’ll come back up.”
“Am I going to get stuck with a needle?” Chris asked.
Doctor O’Leary answered. “No, don’t you worry about that. No needles today.” Chris got up and skipped to the door.
An hour later they were seated once more in the doctor’s office.
“Let me tell you first of all,” the doctor began, “how we usually treat a child with hemophilia. Because of the technical difficulties, not to mention the risk of hepatitis, we cannot inject plasma continually. In other words, there’s no way to protect him from bleeding without some attention to his activity level. He can run, climb, jump, swim, anything that’s not guaranteed to result in bruising. Because bruising is bleeding. And I’m not just talking about the black and blue stuff, but twisting joints, getting punched in the stomach, even excessive muscle strain. You already know about the joints, but it’s also possible to have internal hemorrhages, particularly in the back of the abdominal cavity. That hurts. He may bleed into the urinary tract.” He gave them a few seconds to digest what he had said. “And — now listen carefully — no surgery of any kind, including tooth extraction, without getting plasma first. Is that clear? I’ll be glad to go over it again if you want.”
He looked at Debbie and Con in turn. Neither had any question. Doctor O’Leary went on.
“The less he gets transfused, the better. However, if he needs it he needs it. The slightest suspicion and either you call here or go straight to the local emergency room. I don’t want to alarm you unduly. Except for surgery, the hemorrhages are rarely life-threatening, but they do cause discomfort, and in the joints — or, God forbid, the brain — they can do a lot of damage.”
Luckily nobody saw Connor blanch, and he was not obliged to explain his reaction. But he could not protect himself from the memory of Jill lying motionless, seemingly at peace, that last Sunday morning in the hospital — and their walk together that would never be more than fond fantasy.
Debbie’s eyes were downcast. “Doctor O’Leary, I know you said you’d talk to us about genetics, and I appreciate your taking the time. But could we do it another day? I feel overwhelmed. There’s so much adjusting to do.”
“Of course. Suppose we see you back in a month. I think Julia’s left for the night. Call tomorrow and get an appointment. And let me say it once again: Any trouble at all, call me. If I’m not here, have me paged at the hospital. . . . And Chris,” pointing at the checkers board, “practice! Challenge your dad to a game.”
“OK,” Chris said with a smile. Dad sat expressionless. Of the three Flynns, Chris alone felt good after the visit.
❖❖❖❖❖
“He wants to see Chris in a month,” Debbie said next evening after Chris had been put to bed. “Do you care what day?”
“You don’t need me, do you?” Con answered, looking up from the advertising copy of next year’s new Nissan models. She decided to get used to being responsible for Chris’s practical needs and not to involve Con unless absolutely necessary. And she was determined to accept Doctor O’Leary, if for no other reason than that Chris liked him.
“I’d rather have you there, but I guess I can take him by myself.” There was something she felt she ought to add. “You know, Con, we’re lucky to have only boys.”
“Yeah, I’ve already figured. Isn’t it ironic, girls don’t have the bleeding, and only half of them would be carriers, but we’re lucky not to have any? Whereas —”
“Whereas Chris definitely is a carrier,” Debbie finished his thought, “and all his daughters would be too, so he should be advised not to have children of his own — he’d have to adopt.”
“He could just have boys. Good grief, you weren’t paying attention to that fake Irishman at all!”
“Did you hear that fake Irishman explain how Chris could choose the sex of his natural children before they were conceived?”
“You know perfectly well what I mean.”
“So help me, I don’t. Do you?” But Con just pretended he had won the argument and turned back to his magazine. After a while he looked up and said:
“Call Rick and ask him.”
Debbie, likewise finished with the conversation, signed off with a casual remark as she left the room. “I’ll take it up with Doctor O’Leary next time I take Chris. I’ll make the appointment in the morning.”
“What’s wrong with calling Rick? For that matter, why can’t he take care of Chris?”
Debbie, in the doorway, turned round. “As far as I’m concerned, he probably could. But it was his idea to refer us to O’Leary. He must figure O’Leary knows more about hemophilia than he does. And in case you’ve forgotten, you yourself insisted on Chris seeing a specialist.”
Con laughed. “Come on, now! That was before we were told the specialist’s name. O’Leary. That . . .?”
Debbie raised her eyebrows and shrugged. “O’Leary is a specialist. Did you see all those diplomas?”
“Diplomas are a dime a dozen,” Con snorted. “You can get them from mail-order houses. You can have them printed. That’s how people fool you. But nobody fools Connor Flynn.”
“Well, I’m not smart enough to tell a real diploma from a fake one. Show me sometime how you do it. Did you see? ‘American Board of Internal Medicine. . . .This is to certify . . .’ And so on. ‘Robert Douglas O’Leary . . .’ It even said ‘Hematology.’ Are you saying it’s forged — even with Rick recommending him?”
“You don’t have to call it forged. Sometimes those boards, or whatever they are, don’t hold everyone to the same standard. They have to give away a certain number of diplomas to people who aren’t qualified, so they don’t get sued for discrimination.”
Debbie looked at him steadily for a full ten seconds. “Are you going to sit there and tell me that a black man can’t be a certified specialist by the same standards as every other doctor?”
Con laughed derisively. “Sure he can. And I can win the Irish sweepstakes. You know what gets in the way?”
Debbie did not ask what, and Con did not need to be asked.
“Statistics!” Now he savored the word. “Statistics! Ask Rick. Why, you can even ask Prasad. They’re all statisticologists, or whatever the word is — these doctors.”
Debbie had no hope of convincing her husband of his irrationality. But she had an instinct that cut through the intellectual block, and it told her that Con was suffering and needed to take out his frustration somehow. So let it be statistics and let it be black doctors, or Indian doctors — so long as he did it in the privacy of their home. She was willing to gamble that he would not insist on switching doctors — might even be embarrassed to be reminded of his remarks. So she took a deep breath and determined to make the appointment without discussing it further.
❖❖❖❖❖
“Yes, Mrs. Flynn. Friday afternoon will be fine,” Julia said. “Hours are 2-5 o’clock. Doctor O’Leary wants to give you the last appointment of the day. Is a quarter to five OK?”
Debbie agreed, wondering whether that was the only opening left or whether Doctor O’Leary had a reason. After she hung up, she realized she might still be out when Con came home, and dinner would be late. That Thursday evening she told him about the appointment. He shrugged, indicating that late dinner would be no problem. Still, there must be a reason.
“He wouldn’t make us wait if we were colored.” Con wondered why that wasn’t obvious to Debbie.
“Oh, come on, Con! I bet more than half his patients are white. You saw the waiting room. Maybe he can smell your antagonism.”
“I just hope he knows what he’s doing. If he messes Chris up, there’s going to be the biggest lawsuit you ever saw.”
“Rick wouldn’t have referred us to him if he weren’t competent, and I have no problem with him. . . . And just in case you’re serious about that lawsuit, I’ll tell you right now I’m having no part of it if you’re going to bring that into it.” She didn’t have to explain what that was. He turned the page of the newspaper and said no more. In fact, Debbie was a little uneasy herself about Doctor O’Leary, just as she had been about Doctor Prasad, but hearing Con’s rantings made her feel virtuous by comparison.
❖❖❖❖❖
Just before five o’clock, Julia motioned Debbie and Chris into Doctor O’Leary’s office.
“How’re we doing?” the doctor asked with a smile, looking briefly at Debbie before letting his eyes rest on Chris.
“OK,” Chris answered. “My knee’s fine.”
Doctor O’Leary pressed on the knee and put it through its range of motion. The examination did not hurt Chris. “Just a wee bit swollen still, but it hasn’t bled any more. Good.”
“So I can play?”
“Not too hard, but you can play. No football though.”
Debbie nodded and looked at Chris. Chris was smiling, evidently pleased with all aspects of the doctor’s prescription. She got up to go, but the doctor motioned her to sit down.
“We haven’t finished.” He opened a side drawer in his desk and produced a checkers game.
“Black goes first. You’re black.” Four games later, when they left the office, it was six o’clock. Julia had left and the waiting room was empty. Now Debbie understood why Doctor O’Leary had given them the day’s last appointment. She would learn in due course that this was to be the pattern for years to come, the only variation being the introduction of chess when Chris was ten years old. By the time he was twelve, he was taking the train to Philadelphia, unaccompanied by his mother. It was not unusual for Debbie to pick up the phone at six to hear her son’s voice, “One more game, Ma,” whereupon she and Con would eat and save Chris’s dinner. Con did not like the friendship that had sprung up between his son and the black physician, but he no longer dared object because he had no allies. C.J. didn’t concern himself with Doctor O’Leary or, for that matter, with Chris’s disorder except to avoid injuring him.
❖❖❖❖❖
There was one more matter to take care of. Doctor O’Leary waited till he judged Debbie to be comfortable with him as Chris’s doctor. He didn’t think that Con would ever accept, far less welcome, him. In setting Chris’s appointment times at the end of the day, he had had in mind not only the board games with Chris but also the hope that once in a while, at least, Con would accompany Debbie or even bring Chris in himself. But it never happened. He knew there was more to Con’s elusiveness than the demands of the auto showroom. Considering the importance of sports to Con, his failure to appear meant either that he was abandoning his son’s care or that he didn’t like his son’s doctor. Doctor O’Leary preferred to think it was the latter.
Hemophilia causes disability not only through the physical effects of bleeding, but also through the psychological effects of chronic fear and limitation. By a cruel accident of genetics, the afflicted are almost all males, who seem to be both born and bred for injury. To curb physical activity in a boy is to challenge his wholeness. The boy himself reacts to the restraints imposed on him depending on how active he wants to be. The parents suffer along with the child, each reacting according to their own ambitions and fears. It is not unusual for the father to join with his son in a conspiracy of denial, letting the boy take unwise risks, and for the mother to be overprotective. Avoiding counterproductive behavior requires that both parents understand not only their child’s disorder but their response to it.
Doctor O’Leary had counseled numerous parents of children with debilitating diseases of the blood, including leukemia, hemophilia, and that all-too-common scourge of black children, sickle-cell disease. It was never easy, but in Connor Flynn he saw an insurmountable obstacle. Had it not been for Debbie’s acceptance and the rapport he had established with Chris, he would have referred the family to another hematologist — a white one. It would not have been the first time, and probably not the last. Weighing the circumstances, he decided to leave it to the Flynns to make the first move in that direction. He could afford to take that position because he knew he could competently handle Chris’s bleeding problem, and he didn’t need Con’s trust so long as he had Debbie’s. Besides, he saw an opportunity to sow in Chris a seed of racial harmony that might have the barest chance of germinating even in the hostile climate of Con’s fathering. On the contrary, Con’s attitude might even help: When Chris reached the age of challenging his parents, here was one issue he could get his teeth into. He would demand better reasons than his father offered to discard the doctor’s friendship.
Doctor O’Leary smiled with satisfaction as he reflected. He had no qualms about exploiting his position as a black physician in a predominantly white community.
In the matter of family counseling, however, where individual trust was everything, there could be no thought of driving a wedge, no matter how subtle, between son and father. Accordingly, he spoke with Debbie only long enough to demonstrate his sensitivity to the emotional fallout of hemophilia and suggested that she and Con together visit a counselor. He gave Debbie a business card bearing the name Irving Horowitz, M.S.W. The thought occurred to him to assure Debbie that Irving was not the great-grandson of Isaac Horowitz’s slave, but decided against it. In any case, Horowitz was white.
“Just talk with him informally. There’s no implication of any mental disorder, please understand that. Just a matter of dealing with a circumstance that affects your vision of the future and needing some adjustments on everybody’s part.” Debbie accepted, thanking Doctor O’Leary for bringing the subject up.
Con refused outright. “I don’t need a shrink. I’m not crazy. If you want to go lie on that Jew’s couch, go right ahead —”
“What’s being a Jew got to do with it?” Debbie countered. “Lots of shrinks are Jews, aren’t they? And, in case you’ve forgotten, my parents and my brother are Jewish too. Not to mention myself.”
“Well, there are exceptions. Some Jews are nice. You’re OK, see? But I don’t want ’em digging around in my brain. . . . Then, maybe he isn’t even a real Jew. Maybe he’s a Jew like O’Leary’s an Irishman.” Debbie thought she detected the faintest hint of a smile. She hoped he was done, but he wasn’t.
“Just make sure you can see him from where you lie. Those guys creep up on you from behind. I know. I’ve seen pictures.”
“So have I,” Debbie said, her voice weary with disgust, “— in cartoons. In real life, you sit in a chair across from them. This guy’s not a psychoanalyst, just someone to talk things over with. If you don’t want to go, I can’t make you. But I can use all the help I can get.”
Con’s smile was gone.
“I don’t need a shrink to tell me how to raise my son. So he doesn’t play football, OK. But I’m not going to sit by and watch him grow up a sissy.”
They were at an impasse. Both wanted to do right by their child; they simply did not see right the same way. Debbie went alone to see Irving Horowitz.
“My husband’s proud,” she told him, explaining why he wasn’t there. Nothing was to be gained by going into the other reason.
“Understandable,” Mr. Horowitz answered, “and unfortunate. I can only hope that the same pride that keeps him from coming here won’t keep him from taking the necessary precautions with your son. That kind of denial can do a lot of harm. You’re going to find yourself watching not only the boy but his father too, and without meaning to you’ll become overprotective.”
“I’m already afraid of that. But where’s the line between doing the right thing and being overprotective?”
Mr. Horowitz shrugged. “I know this sounds vague, but the best answer I can give you is to be aware.” Yes, she thought, awareness would keep the over from sidling up to the protective. “Ask Doctor O’Leary about specific activities. He knows what’s safe and what’s risky, and make sure your husband understands how important it is to comply. Dump the responsibility on O’Leary. And of course the school must be told.”
All things considered, she was optimistic. After all, Chris wasn’t dying to play football and, besides, it wasn’t till he was six years old that he had his first bout of real trouble; the elbow hadn’t been that bad. Maybe his case wasn’t as serious as it might have been.
And Mr. Horowitz seemed like a good resource, to whom she could turn without embarrassment anytime she felt the need. Maybe, once cooled off, even Con would agree.