My Mistake (28 page)

And the New York of the Forties and Fifties feels, in retrospect, just as rich and romantic. The nation and its culture seemed robust and coherent. Only 140 million people. Joe DiMaggio in center field, Roosevelt on the radio, Communists and Red-baiters, new forms of jazz,
King Solomon's Mines
in movie theaters, frozen vegetables, pea shooters. That blond girl on top of me. One evening, at 290 West 4th, there was a knock at the door and I opened it and there stood a truly ugly man. My parents had sublet the top floor of the brownstone to a Welsh children's-book author named Ruthven Todd. The ugly man asked for Mr. Todd and went upstairs to visit. The ugly man, a “boily boy” by his own description, was Dylan Thomas.

Even
Fortune
magazine had its romance. I often visited my mother's office on school holidays and threw paper airplanes out the window of the Empire State Building. She worked with John Kenneth Galbraith and Walker Evans and Dwight Macdonald and James Agee. She also knew the Ashcan artist Reginald Marsh, who did covers for
Fortune.
As I've said,
I believe she had an affair with him. There is a watercolor by Marsh in my apartment in New York of my mother modestly raising her skirt and wading in the ocean at Point Pleasant, New Jersey. Its inscription reads, “Mary Grace, at the shore, 1929.—R. Marsh.” There is that other Marsh in our living room—a painting of a garbage man with a broom and a white trash bin on wheels at a Greenwich Village corner—hanging like a high-culture reprimand above the flat-screen TV. We lived first at 50½ Barrow Street, in the Village. It was around the corner from Chumley's, a bar that had been a speakeasy and was hard to find—no sign. When it was a speakeasy, my handsome, charming, feckless Marxist father proposed there to my
WASP
y Bryn Mawr Classics-major mother.

I sit at the desk and remember: blackouts, which were practice for German air raids, and dim-outs, to save power and to keep ships in the harbor from becoming submarine-target silhouettes. My mother berating my father for bribing a butcher to get more meat than rationing allowed. FBI men—tall, rectangular, behatted—coming to talk to my father. High tension in the house. The sliding doors between the living room and dining room rumbling closed. That very tall FBI man named Tom McDade taking off his jacket and my staring at the huge gun in the shoulder holster he wore. His leaning over to me, from what seemed like a high, thin altitude, and asking me if I wanted to hold the gun. Tom found that my father's involvement with the Party was largely romantic and ineffectual, and I believe kept the House Un-American Activities Committee from calling him to testify. He became a friend of the family and built a house near my uncle's house, now my house, and his son and his family come up here to this day. When I was about fourteen, Tom showed me how to shoot that gun. It felt as heavy as an anchor.

I look at an old and out-of-tune upright piano. My father's side of the family had a musical gene. Uncle Enge learned how to play the piano from watching others do it. He could do it while being held upside down and backward to the keys. (He was short.) My father played the mandolin. I guess I inherited the gene, because at seven or eight I would sit in the living room listening to Beethoven symphonies broken up by the dropping of one of the stack of 78 rpm records on top of another, and I would get furious if I was disturbed. The interrupted music was bad enough. I took piano lessons and was good at them but insisted on stopping after a while. My mistake. I did learn to play the guitar a little from Enge and then in college. Folk music abounded in the Village in the Forties, especially at the Village Vanguard. Josh White, Leadbelly, Pete Seeger—who first didn't and then decades later did remember Enge—alone and with the Weavers, appeared all the time. I didn't understand it then, but Leadbelly taught me something about race and music that I didn't know and wouldn't really hear again until I found early rhythm and blues on the radio and then Bo Diddley.

 

When I was a kid, my mother, the
Fortune
editor, sometimes had to go out to Chicago to talk to one of the company's executives, whom I knew only by the name Fitz. I now feel certain that there was something going on. When she died, I found a stack of letters tied up in red yarn on the high shelf of her closet with a note on the top saying, “Please destroy.” They were lyrical love letters in elegant handwriting—“When I think of you, my lovely Mary, my heart thrills with excitement and I wish you were in my arms”—and I bet they were from Fitz, though none were signed. I threw them out—I was sure I threw them out, that is, until they surfaced again in one of the boxes when we moved from one apartment to another in New York. I don't know where they are now. Everywhere I turn these days, especially when I am here in the country, and the earth is thawing, and Maxwell, in many ways a puppy still, full of beans, has his nose down to it, appreciating its chilly aromas, and I wait for the results of some scary tests, I think of my mother and her lover and how quickly we and what we do and say and whom we love all come and go.

 

My hair has grown thicker and curlier, the way it was before I started chemotherapy, and after I finished the subsequent stereotactic body radiation therapy, more than eight months ago now. It has been close to a year of treatments for the four malignant nodules in the lower lobe of my left lung. I'm not sure there is anything left to be said or even thought about cancer and its world, but, well, write what you know, and anyway, the experience of serious illness is always as varied in its complexities as its victims: the violent leg cramps at night after treatment with cisplatin, when you feel demons in the back of your thigh tying the muscles there into Ashley's stopper knots, the manic episodes caused by steroids administered to lessen the toxic effects of chemotherapy—I bought this computer when I was first on steroids (when my wife took them for hearing loss, she tried to buy an apartment)—the awkward and moving moments of support and renewed friendships, the discreditable angry suspicion of charity that accompanies gestures of fence-mending, the beautiful nurses with their expert IV techniques and their $10,000-a-dose, ten minutes' worth of pemetrexed, the endless repetitions of full name and date of birth, the nausea suppressed by superb new medicines (Emend—$310 for three pills—and ondansetron), the pure and purely random luck of being able to afford the best doctors and hospitals, the learning, finally, of patience, which is what must be the reason for our being called “patients,” the weirdness of surgeons with their scrawled third-grade-level drawings of what they're going to cut out of you, the huge, futuristic radiology machines with rotating round cyclopean “eyes” that look like white sunflowers from another planet and whose radiation not only targets lesions in the lung and conforms to their shapes, thus sparing healthy tissue, but by means of instant feedback
moves
in order to adjust for breathing, the claustrophobia of some of those machines, especially the whole-body obese-cannon-like PET scanner, which takes almost an hour to ferry you through its noisy tube, halting for minutes and minutes and minutes at a time while one benzo or another just barely keeps panic away, the Pandora “stations” you request during radiation sessions (choose Hank Williams, I say), the recognition that ultimately, like the rest of us, the doctors sometimes don't know what they're doing, the botching that is almost bound to happen at one point or another—in your case, a second percutaneous needle biopsy (through your back and into your lung, to sample a lone nodule slightly removed from the others), which led to a pleural effusion, fluid outside the lung, which held up radiation therapy because with the fluid sloshing around outside, the nodules weren't stable enough to target, and which, when it was aspirated—by a handsome doctor from India who tucked his tie in between two of his shirt buttons, thus precipitating a huge crush on the part of your wife, who actually wanted to
watch
the needle go into your back—turned out to be six ounces of stuff that looked like cherry Kool-Aid, the question of when to tell your kids about what's going on, the insurance paperwork, the small vacations, like sabbaticals, between treatments, the alternating mortality depression and exhilaration, the latter, according to your therapist friend, proceeding from the unconscious conviction that you now have finally been punished enough for your sins, the increased recklessness of your discourse, the taking of taxis when you could easily take the subway or a bus, the miserliness you often feel about giving time to help others.

Some common perplexities: how to respond to the searching “No, really, how
are
you?”s after you've already answered “OK,” the medical conversations in advance of which you write down and then during which ask every possible question, only to have seventeen more, proceeding from the answers you've just gotten, occur to you after you leave the doctor's office, one “How long?” after another from you, the interpretation, even by non-hypochondriacs, of lumps, bumps, sore throats, headaches, backaches, and rashes as possible metastases, the effort to keep up with new scholarly journal articles, of which you understand maybe fifteen per cent, the belief in statistics when they're in your favor and their dismissal when they're not.

And then there's the intense cherishing of the spring when it comes—it is in full swing as I write this, with cherry blossoms in Riverside Park which look like white and pink lace from far away—the effort to forgive enemies, the savoring of sweets and other dietary easements, the dear children, your own and others' but especially your own, the gratitude for their virtues and the gratitude for their flaws, the simultaneous detachment from and appreciation of the quotidian, the intensified appreciation of great literature and good crappy movies, the strengthened fellow-feeling with the soil as you turn it over for planting, accompanied, paradoxically, by heightened wonder about abstractions: consciousness, will, randomness, time, the existence of anything rather than the far more logical nothing. Almost more than anything else, the sudden and almost absolute inconsequentiality of most daily decisions—whether to start the dishwasher now or later, accept or decline an invitation, watch
The Good Wife
or that other thing on AMC, cancel a dentist appointment, forswear steak for salmon, finish reading a book, let the dog off the leash, wear the same shirt again, allow a tepid friendship to dissipate, fill the car with gas when the tank is half empty, shop, cook, or order out, worry about the stock market, file for an extension, seek others' good opinion in small transactions, return a call, work out, sleep in, man up, lie down, give to, accept from, go before, follow after, think through, act on, let lie.

Which seems like a good idea at this point. Except maybe for a health update in an Epilogue. I don't have the years needed to do a thorough job of research and confirmation. The New York Public Library archives and my personal memorabilia frightened me with their subatomic detail. Anyway, a full autobiography, which such a substantiated work would be, differs greatly from a memoir. Memwah. Memoirs by their very etymology depend not on paper and physical artifacts but on memory. No wonder we don't trust them entirely, even when their authors do their best to be honest, as I have done here. Do we trust our own memories? We may when we're young, before they've piled into our brains and started bickering with each other, but we don't when we're older. Which I am. I remember sitting in the kitchen of The Farmhouse last spring—the kitchen where my uncle fried cottage-cheese blintzes on a huge, black Garland stove and railed against profit—and hearing someone on the radio reminding all of us to set our clocks ahead for Eastern Standard Time. He said, “The sun stays with us an hour longer today than it did yesterday.” But of course it didn't—the sun pays no attention to us whatsoever.

 

 

 

Epilogue

 

 

 

 

Seventy-one

 

A three-bay open carriage shed stands about thirty feet south of the house—“The Country House,” as Will refers to it. It always sounds like an official name. I
still
think of it as The Farmhouse or, just as often, Enge's House. The carriage shed, like the ancient corn crib near it and the huge red barn out in back, has seen better days. For some time, the four white posts that held it up in front were rotted at the base, like incisors going bad. The roof swooped down toward the middle, graceful but lowering. My wife and I finally decided that with some money to spend and with my medical circumstance and with our kids employed and with the imagined avuncular disapproval of the shed's condition reaching us from the Other Side, the Workers' Paradise—“I knew you couldn't keep this place up, boy”—we would have the building fixed.

I call the guy who has done some work for us in the past. He says it's not for him, but he knows the perfect person for it. Another guy, named Bruce, who loves to work on shoring up old buildings like this.