My Generation by William Styron

wouldpass down the line of victims, making his evaluations. He didn't waste a word, and his manner was frostily judgmental, as if these rogues and whoremongers were unworthy of even so much as a casual “Good morning.” Nor was his manner with me any less reproachful. As I stood stiffly at attention, I was thankful only that I didn't have to submit my dick to such a degrading scrutiny at that hour of the morning. During each tour of the ward, Klotz would glare at me briefly, ask the corpsman about my daily Kahn test—it remained at the highest (and therefore the most alarming) level, day in and day out—and then pass on to the nonvenereal patients.
    Early in the afternoon on that first day, however, Klotz did examine my penis. This was a procedure that I might ordinarily skip describing were it not for the monstrous effect that it had on my psychic balance, which had already been thrown badly out of whack. For it was Klotz's judgment regarding my penile history that helped crystallize my belief that I was doomed. I was summoned to his office, and, as I stood in front of him, he checked through my medical-record book and brusquely asked some routine questions. Any history of syphilis in my family? (What a question!) No, I lied. In the preceding weeks or months had I experienced any unusual rash or fever? I had not. Any swelling in the groin? No. Had I noticed any unusual growth on my penis? This would be a hard, painless ulcer, he said, called a chancre. I knew what a chancre was, everyone had heard about chancres (corpsmen were even known as “chancre mechanics”); but I had not seen one. During Klotz's interrogation, I held in view the eye-level portrait of a solemn, resolute Franklin D. Roosevelt, who kept looking back at me. I was grateful for the reassuring gaze of this surrogate father, my perennial president, the only one I had ever known, and I steadfastly stared back at him through most of Klotz's examination, which he carried out with cold, skeletal fingers.
    He twisted my penis, not very gently, gave it an unnecessary squeeze or two, and turned it upside down. I recall thinking that, though it had known various attitudes, it had rarely been upside down. Then he bade me to look down, saying that he had discovered, on the underside, a scar. Chancres leave scars, he murmured, and this looked like a chancre scar. I glanced down and, indeed, discerned a scar. A tiny reddish outcropping. Since the chancre had been painless, he added, it had come and gone, without my ever noticing its presence, leaving only that small scar. He seemed to have put aside, at least for the moment, his customary distaste. He said that the chance of my having been infected by nonvenereal contact was astronomicallyremote. The toilet seat was a myth. Syphilis usually created distinct symptoms, he went on—first the chancre, then, later, the fever and the rash—but quite often these symptoms never appeared, or appeared so insubstantially that they went unnoticed. Klotz surprised me by saying something that, in the midst of his dispassionate exegesis, sounded almost poetic: “Syphilis is a cruel disease.” And then, after a brief silence, during which I became aware that he was constructing an answer to the question that sheer fright kept me from asking, he declared, “What happens in the end is that syphilis invades the rest of the body.” He paused and concluded, before dismissing me, “We're going to have to keep you here and figure out just how far it's advanced.”
    I went back to my bed at the end of the ward and, in the cold midday light, lay down. You weren't supposed to lie on a bed in daytime, but I did anyway. The hospital was a venerable wooden structure, warm, even overheated, but I felt nearly frozen, listening to the windows creaking and banging in the bluster of an Atlantic gale. The sex maniacs with the clap across the aisle were noisily trading lewd adventures, and I gradually sank into a stupor of disbelief, beyond the