Outer Banks (30 page)

After Stephen's first birthday party, as we sat on the darkening deck watching the citronella torches gutter in the sea wind, Stephen asleep in Alan's arms, I said, “Five years ago I was getting ready to get married and live in a house on the beach with a brilliant architect, and here I am. Only it's a different beach and a different architect, and now there's Stephen. Everything I ever wanted, and then some…and nothing I thought I would have. It's eerie, how things worked out. It makes me superstitious. It makes me afraid to wish for anything else; my wishes come true, and I must have used all of them up.”

“What else would you wish for?” Alan said.

“Nothing,” I said. “Except to be able to keep what I have. To keep on keeping on.”

And for a long time, we did that. Three years later we left McKim, Mead and started our own design firm, and after that we worked out of the house as well as lived in it. We did well, if I do say so myself; at that time, in that place, you would have had to be very bad indeed not to make an ample living designing beach houses and furnishings. We worked prodigiously, and I hired a housekeeper/babysitter for Stephen, and we made friends with some of the permanent residents of the Hamptons…writers, fishermen, nurserymen, artists, a lawyer or two, an overworked GP, the owners of small shops and businesses that sustained the villages during the long winter seasons. We did not know many of the new summer people. I did not mind. Many of them had too much money and too little else; the Hamptons were different places when they were in residence. We built and designed some of their beach houses…the best, I think; the ones that today look the least like silos for missiles…and we were asked to their
parties. I might have gone, dutifully, if Alan had wanted to, but he did not.

“Why should I like them kneedeep in the ocean when I don't like them in Manhattan?” he said. “If we get into that routine we'll have to get new clothes and a new car and start giving parties out here, and then old Stephen will be seduced by one of their snippy, airheaded daughters and marry her, and there we'll be.”

I laughed. It was no loss to me. I did not want Stephen to move in that world. I wanted him to live in the one we made for him, Alan and me, in the house by the sea.

He did that, too. For another three years he did just that, my dark little boy, and then, in August of his fifth year, he drowned in the swimming pool of our friends the Montags, in full view of their three children and their babysitter, who thought he was playing at snorkeling with the oldest Montag child's mask and fins. We were at a cocktail party over in Sag Harbor, one of the very few of the summer cocktail parties we had ever been to in all those years. When the call came for Alan, and he came out onto the terrace to me, his face somehow shrunken and mangled in the twilight, I was drinking a gin and tonic and talking to a woman named Haralson about Richard Nixon. She was a nice woman, I remember; we both hated and feared Nixon, and had found in each other a haven in that fervently Republican gathering. After that night I could never remember her name or face, though I ran into her many times in the village shops, and once at the dentist's, and she came to see me the next week with a lovely pot of dusty miller and white philodendrons. I soon came to hate the sight of her, quite literally, and to avoid her. I'm sure she always wondered why. I cannot say, except that in some irrational and arcane way, she was a lightning rod for the monstrous red pain of that moment.

It is useless for me to talk of the year after Stephen died. I do not have the words; no one does. I know that two things got me through the first days: the presence of Alan, who never left my side even in his own crushing grief, and the thought that when the
pain got too bad I could end it as my father had. As I have said, the suicide's legacy is not an unmixed curse. It helped save my life that fall and winter. So did my husband. I know that many marriages do not survive the anguish and guilt and outrage of a child's death, but it never occurred to Alan or me that ours might not. We clung together like survivors in a life raft. I remember something he said to me late in that first night, after they had taken Stephen's little blue body away to the funeral home and I had fought my way up out of the sedative our GP friend had given me.

When I got to the surface, Alan's was the face that I saw, and as memory swept over me like a cold, black salt sea, he held me fast and said, “One thing we will not do is blame ourselves. Of course it wouldn't have happened if we hadn't gone to that terrible fucking party, but I want you to remember this, Kate: neither of us wanted Stephen to die. Either one of us would have died to prevent it. So we can cry, and we can mourn, and we can stand it or not, but we are not going to blame ourselves or each other. And we are going to get through this one minute at a time, and one hour, and one day. Just like that. Together.”

And from that moment on, I knew that we would get through it, and just how we would…because he had given me the blueprint for it. Alan always knew exactly what I needed in order to live. When he could, he gave it to me.

After that our horizons shrank. Or mine did. I was not comfortable out in the world. I seemed to have lost all sense of context. I had been Stephen's mother for five years; now that he was gone, my arms, indeed, my very core, felt hugely empty and flaccid and useless. But I could not go back to being just Kate, wife of Alan, designer; it was too late for that, after I had been that other perfect thing. I did not know what I was. The world where I had moved with my son was not only unreal, it frightened me. I often thought, later, that if there had not been that vast, exposed emptiness inside me, the Pacmen never could have gotten a toothhold. It was a stupid fancy, of course; the real truth was that the
death that came into my emptiness was more the death of connectedness: I wanted little from the world where Stephen had died, and very gradually I built my secret, walled garden and drew away from it.

“I should have stopped it,” Alan said to me much later. “I should have seen where it was leading. I should have just plain made you stay in the world; I should have gotten Carl to ask you back to the firm, or gone back myself, and taken you with me. But we made such a good thing of it; I loved what we built out of that awful time. It was good, Kate, wasn't it?”

It was. After a string of blind, featureless white days where moving and breathing through the pain were, had to be, my only concern, I emerged into a too-bright, too-large, too-vivid world where it seemed that a little work might be possible, and Alan and I threw ourselves into that. Once in, the old, rhythmic sorcery of form and color and texture and space claimed me, and I let it take me down and under. I worked as I never have before, getting up in the pink sea-dawns, working over my board until far into the night. Alan, in the big studio wing, was working just as hard, just as singlemindedly. He urged me to set up my board there, to use part of the vast, beautiful, light-washed space as my own, but somehow I could not. I needed, at that time, enclosure, small spaces, minute and manageable slices of the world. I set up in the bay window overlooking the deck and the garden. By that time it was almost completely walled away; shielded by house, fences, windbreaks, dunes. There I made a new world for myself, one I could orchestrate and control. There I have stayed.

The firm flourished. We began to win awards, modest ones at first, and then one or two really lustrous ones; I have never ceased being amazed by that. Our work has appeared not infrequently in national design magazines, and once an international one. People with cameras and tape recorders began to come to the house on the dunes; after the first time or two, when I found myself sick and sweating from the intrusion, Alan and I worked out an
arrangement. He would handle the interviews and the photographs, and he would do it away from the house. The thought of my face, even my name, on a page for the world to examine, perhaps to remember, terrified me with the same superstitious terror an aborigine must feel facing a camera: the primal and awful fear that your soul will be stolen away.

“Don't you want any credit?” Alan would say. “At least half of it's yours.”

“Please,” I said. “Oh, please. Don't ask me to do that. We don't need that.”

And we didn't. We had all the work we could handle. Our arrangement included other divisions of duties: Alan did the outside contact work, and we designed on the board together, and he oversaw construction, and I stayed in my bay window and did specs and expediting and ordering and the overseeing of models and fabrics and details. When he was away, as he frequently was, I stayed behind and read and listened to music and walked on the beach and gardened. Mostly, I suppose, I gardened. Somehow I only felt completely safe with my fingers plunged directly into the rich earth I had brought to nourish my flowers and vegetables and herbs; I was, then, about as connected to life and living as I would ever be. Only a few very close friends saw the garden by then. I saw little else.

We talked of having other children, but somehow we did not do much about that. We didn't try not to have them; we just never went the route of tests and temperature-takings and calendars and all the rest of it. I've often wondered since if we did begin children, and the Pacmen ate them. They say that most cancers grow for years before they are found. But it is a thought I have not shared with Alan.

“I will not have you anthropomorphize that goddamned thing,” he said once. “It's tough enough to fight reality. I'm not going to let you stack the deck against yourself.”

He was really very angry, and so, even though I habitually
thought in terms of Pacmen and gobbling mouths, I rarely shared them with Alan. As he said, reality was burden enough for him.

Not in those good days after we built the firm, though. Once I asked him if he missed children, the fact of them, too terribly badly.

“No,” he said. “I miss Stephen terribly, awfully, and I always will, but it's the particular little person I miss, Stephen himself, not the idea of a child per se. I don't think I've ever really wanted anything but this, this firm and this house and you, from the minute I met you.”

“Really?” I said. We were lying in each other's arms in a flood of white moonlight, on the big double chaise with the faded duck pad, on the deck. It was a September moon, but the air and water were still as soft as summer on our naked flesh. Sweat was drying slowly on our bodies.

“Really,” he said. “I still wake up and pinch myself to see if it's all real. Sometimes it scares me, though; sometimes I think…I don't know…there should be something more in our lives. Other people. Especially for you. This oneness stuff is almost dangerous. It's like it's too perfect, and the gods will take it away from us. I feel sometimes like we ought to share it, just on principle. Just to propitiate…them.”

“With who?” I said. “Who would you want to share this with?”

“That's just the point,” he said. “Nobody.”

“Well, don't worry,” I said, and nibbled his shoulder at the small hollow place where it joined his neck. “The gods are not going to get you.”

 

And they didn't. They got me. In my forty-second summer, I had a miscarriage, not even realizing I had been pregnant, and the resulting D&C turned up ovarian cancer. It is a terrible and insidious and secret cancer, and almost always does irreparable damage
before it is found; my gynecologist told me that my never-to-be-born baby probably saved my life.

“Or to look at it another way, the cancer murdered him,” I said.

“Maybe. I wouldn't have put it that way,” he said. “It's more that diseased tissue can't sustain life. You don't want to go putting a face on this thing, and giving it a name.”

Which is precisely, and almost at that moment, what I did. The Pacmen were born on that day, and their murderous, cheerful, gobbling images have been by far the hardest things to kill.

For they think they have killed the cancer. Ovarian is a dread and savage cancer because it shows no flags, causes no early symptoms to speak of. Even the later ones are vague and easily misunderstood and misdiagnosed; by then, usually, the cancer will kill you. Mine, though, was caught very early, in what they think of as the second stage…involvement in both ovaries, but no discernible metastasis…and they went after it aggressively, with a diagnostic laparotomy and a following hysterectomy, and enough chemotherapy to render me bald as an egg, weak and thin and nauseated most of the time, riddled from mouth to genitals with sores and a virulent kind of acne that sometimes seemed the worst of all. All to stop, so far as they can tell, the march of the Pacmen.

I have two doctors, John McCracken, my old, good friend on Madison Avenue, who saw me through my pregnancy and delivered Stephen, and Carter Hilliard, the flamboyant, handsome, immensely gifted medical oncologist who saw me through most of my cancer and delivered me of the Pacmen, and both went after the cancer with surgery and a pantheon of drugs, terrible, pragmatic-sounding things like Leukeran and Neosar and Adriamycin and Adrucil and Folex, that left me in infinitely worse physical shape than before I had had the miscarriage. After more than a year of chemo, there was another exploratory operation to “see where we stand,” and two years later still another, and after that I went
home to my secret garden and ripped out my perennials and planted annuals and waited to see if I would live or die. Now, in late October, I will have the last, the five-year one, the biggie. By now Alan and Carter and John are euphoric with shared certainty. And I have a blank white wall where November should be, and in that quiet whiteness, if I listen, I fancy that I hear the Pacmen gobbling.

This is not a story about cancer, and even if it was, other women with greater gifts of tongue than I have told about the terror, and the lethargy, and the moments of wild, cheeky elation and the subsequent dizzying plunges into despair, and the fury and depression and denial. I had them all, beginning with the moment in John's office on Madison when he told me, and the air seemed to brighten as if a small, silent, invisible nuclear blast had gone off, and the hanging plants seemed to tremble in the radiant air, and I stared at him for a long moment and then vomited into his wastebasket. But from the beginning I knew three things…I knew that the abyss lay under all, and always had; I knew how to find an abyss-denying world and live my way into it; I knew that I could always and literally die as my father had if I found that I could not live. No, make that five things: I knew also that in my house and garden by the sea, under the sun, there is pure timelessness, and I knew that Alan would never, for one moment of one hour of one day, leave my side.