Storm Tide (17 page)

The doctor in charge of the chemotherapy was a woman about Judith’s age, slightly overweight, her hair straggling out of its do, the air of a worried mother. Dr. Sara Ripkin turned out to be the star, when they eventually came to her office. Besides her diplomas, she had a string of plaques for prizes. She worked with several of the oncologists.

“Chemotherapy is a little like cooking,” she said to them, resting her elbows on her desk and her chin in her cupped hands as if her head was heavy. “You try a mix and then you see how it tastes—to the tumor, to the cancer cells. There are a great number of possible chemicals and a great many possible combinations and dosages. If at first we don’t succeed, we try a different mix. We keep checking, week to week. It may seem tedious but that’s the formula for success.”

The first question was how much to tell the children.

“Ben’s what? Forty? If he can’t deal with it now, when will he be able to?” Gordon scowled.

“Forty-five,” she corrected automatically. As a good wife should, she had their birthdays memorized. She bought gifts and cards and sent them to his sons and daughters, his grandchildren. Their spouses. A reminder program on her computer told her when it was time to order a gift. Mostly she mail-ordered, except for Natasha, for whom she shopped personally.

“If we tell any of them, we must tell them all,” she said.

“Whatever.” He looked exhausted. “Can’t we just play it down? I have a touch of cancer.” He reached automatically for a cigarette.

Her hand was faster. She grabbed the pack and threw it in the fireplace. “No more. The price has been too high already!”

“Isn’t it a little late to worry? I might as well enjoy myself.”

“It’s never too late to worry. You don’t want the cancer to metastasize. What I’ve read suggests that smoking increases the risk. No more, Gordon. You’ve bullied me into putting up with it for the nine years we’ve been married, but guess what? My tolerance ran out yesterday. No more, not one.” She went to stand in front of him. “I love you, Gordon. You’re precious to me. I refuse, I refuse to give you up. We’re going to fight this. People have remissions. Some people are cured. And don’t think you can smoke out in your shack and I won’t know it. I can always smell it. Your puffing days are past.”

That night she called Natasha at school. There had been a price tag on her marriage all along: Gordon had said no more children. He had demanded that pledge from her, and she had given it. But she had a daughter. She had raised Natasha from late childhood, and Natasha was far closer to her than to her biological mother, Fern. Hannah and she had often talked about the advantages and problems of being involved with men so much older than either of them. But this cost was new and far higher.

Natasha was in her senior year at Brown, planning to go on to veterinary school. When Judith told her, Natasha was silent for a full minute.
“Sometimes I hate him!” she burst out. “I’ve been trying to get him to stop smoking since I was seven. I’ve heard you trying, again and again over the years. He’s so arrogant! He thought it couldn’t happen to him!”

“But Natasha, getting angry at him won’t help him—or you.”

“But I don’t want to lose my father!”

“I don’t want to lose my husband. He’s not dying, Natasha, he hasn’t even started treatment. We have to express hope, and to do that we have to feel it. They say that attitude has a lot to do with who survives and for how long. We have to be a cheering section. And for that we have to let go of anger and despair—do you understand?”

Squamous cell carcinoma had spread from the lung to the hilar nodes. Even the name was ugly. She had never heard of a squamous cell. Being married to an invalid was a different marriage. Sometimes Judith felt pushed to the wall. Her work was unremitting, full-time law that was now, besides Gordon’s pension and occasional royalties, their sole source of income; now full-time nursing as well. She wished she were a more patient woman. She wished she were a better person. She loved Gordon passionately, but now the major way to express that was through taking care of him. The chemotherapy and the radiation therapy sapped his energy and left him debilitated. He was often nauseous. She cleaned him up and cleaned up after him. Nursing did not come naturally to her. Gordon was cranky. He hated being ill. He was heroic in his own way, stoic, committed to the treatment. He had finally stopped sneaking cigarettes. What drove him crazy was not being able to work. He was simply too weak, too tired. His disease was his new career, he said wryly, but he meant it. He had to be taken to Boston twice every week and once to Hyannis. She could not meet those obligations and continue to practice law, so they found a young man to drive him back and forth on Mondays and a young woman who would do the Hyannis trip every Thursday.

Gordon actually liked having two drivers. He was used to enjoying an intense social life. His illness, at least during chemotherapy, curtailed that. He got involved in the lives and problems of Tim, the son of a fisherman serving time for bringing in marijuana, and Camilla, who had moved into her parents’ summer house when she lost her job. He knew all about their loves, their family squabbles, their financial burdens, their fantasies and unlikely plans. Judith listened to his reports with as much interest as she could muster, because she was touched by his involvement and she understood what this was in lieu of: his intellectual, professional, political and social life.

Some of the drugs worked and some didn’t. It seemed highly experimental. They were throwing drugs into his system to see what happened. He got very sick from some of them. The doctors monitored his white blood cells, the tumor, his blood chemistry. He was losing weight but his face was somewhat swollen, along with his neck. When he was wrapped up in a tweed jacket or sweaters, for he was often chilled, he could even look as if he had gained weight. But she saw his wasting body. She massaged him. Some days she had to dress and undress him. About two weeks after the radiation therapy stopped, his throat was so painful he could swallow nothing, not even water. His hair came out in handfuls. Soon he was bald, Gordon who had always had a full lush halo.

The doctors threw drugs into him and she threw random food in front of him. Finding food he could endure eating was a constant experiment of another sort. His sense of taste was off. Foods he had always loved tasted burnt or spoiled. Some smells disgusted him. She had to stop wearing perfume. Even her hand lotion irritated him. He was always thinking the milk had turned. He developed a taste for something called junket, an old-fashioned pudding made of rennet and flavored with raspberry. She could only find one mail-order source for the stuff. He also liked vanilla tapioca pudding and chicken soup. Childhood foods, perhaps. She would do anything to make him less miserable. Discomfort, the doctors called it, you’ll be experiencing some discomfort. They never said pain. Agony. Terror. He was on the chemotherapy for a week and then off for three weeks. Then just as his weakness was lessening, another cycle began.

She slept badly. Insomnia had never been a problem of hers. In law school she had been constantly exhausted, but that was because she only had three hours to waste in bed every night. Now she lay down beside him but rarely slept. She was secretly relieved when he suggested they have separate bedrooms. He found it painful when she bumped against him or curled into his side during the night. Still, it seemed an ominous change, to move out of the bedroom they had shared. It was a long winter and a slow spring. Fern arrived for a week and tried to teach Gordon visualization. At first he was forbearing and went along with her exercises. It made sense to Judith that the mind should be able to infiltrate the immune systems, but it was too New Age for Gordon. Why had he ever married Fern? Fern was not a difficult guest. She was used to living in group situations, and did not spread out through the house and always cleaned up after herself. Actually, Judith rather liked being able to share some of the nursing chores. She could imagine, briefly,
the advantages of polygamy. But Fern and Gordon always ended up arguing, as she was sure they had when they were married to each other. That is, Gordon argued and Fern sighed and looked pained and quoted her experts.

“My good body has betrayed me,” he told Judith. “Always I’ve been vigorous, able to stay up all night and dance and fuck and drink, and still work the next day. It’s like a great battle horse that suddenly stumbles, and you wonder if you’ll have to shoot it. My body is all I think about now. It’s a new kind of narcissism.”

“It’s not narcissism, Gordon. You’re trying to recover from a dangerous illness. It takes all your time and all your energy.”

Gordon was sitting in his favorite chair in the living room with Portnoy on his lap, the big gray cat who had become his constant companion. Seven years before, Natasha had found him beside Route 6, a discarded, starving kitten with a broken leg. Now Portnoy had decided to take care of Gordon, according to his lights, washing his hands, cuddling against him, keeping the other cats and dogs away. “It is narcissism, Judith. I’m obsessed with how I feel day and night. I keep a journal about my symptoms and my responses. I go through litanies of my aches and pains. I am obsessed with the chemicals, the poisons they put into me. The idea of taking platinum as a drug is fascinating. My body is becoming this expensive and useless artifact.”

“With the end in sight of getting better, of being well again.”

“The stupidest thing is, I felt much better before they started on me. I keep thinking—and don’t yell at me, I’m not acting on it—that all that was wrong with me was a cough and a little fever and a pain in my shoulder. Now my whole body is screwed up. I can’t eat, I can’t drink, I can’t fuck, I can’t climb a flight of steps unassisted. I’m wondering if the cure isn’t worse than the disease.”

“Gordon, lung cancer kills.”

“But Judith, it may do that anyhow. And is this living?”

Finally Dr. Ripkin pronounced the tumor shrunk enough for Dr. Barrows to operate, to remove the tumor, affected lymph nodes and, of course, a good portion of Gordon’s left lung. Many new tests irritated Gordon. But he was pleased to hear he had a good heart. They always tested for cardiovascular problems before surgery. It seemed as if there was scarcely an inch of his body they did not test in some way, not a system they left alone. Judith had enough warning so that she put everything on hold, found another lawyer to cover for her and went into Boston with him. The surgery would take place at Dana Farber, where
they had done the biopsies on his lungs and lymph nodes. They had friends she could have stayed with, but she preferred a hotel. She did not want to have to chat with anyone. It was easier to be alone. She spoke to Natasha twice a day, to Hannah every night and usually also to her best friend on the Cape, her frequent antagonist in court, the assistant district attorney, Barbara Ashbaum. That was as much contact and conversation as she could endure. Most of the other children called the hospital or the doctor. Ben, the oldest, called her the night of the surgery.

Gordon hated the hospital. He was depressed by patients lined up in corridors waiting for X rays, waiting for scans, waiting for doctors. He found the standard ways that nurses and orderlies addressed him demeaning. He was used to admiration, deference, used to people knowing who he was. Here he was just bald Gordon the patient to whom things were administered and done. “They speak to me as if I had lost my mind with my tumor and had the mental level of a five-year-old. It drives me up the wall. Do you know what you mainly do in the hospital? You wait. You’re called a patient because you’re required to be endlessly, endlessly patient.”

She could not stay in Boston the next two weeks, but commuted when she was able. She could not drop her practice, or they would not survive economically. The nights she spent in the house alone were dreadful. When she was in Boston, Stumpy cared for the cats and dogs and the birds and random other animals Natasha brought home. The six cats and two dogs were some kind of comfort. They were worried. They came to her to give and take reassurance. She could not say that she slept alone, for there were up to five other mammals in her bed on any given night.

She was tremendously glad to bring Gordon back to the Cape. He was not to remain in bed, but to get up every day and walk as far as he could endure. He was to eat as much as he could, to regain lost weight. Gradually he began to regain his strength. They walked, slowly, but they walked together along the sand roads, over the hills, along the beaches on both sides of the island. They walked and sometimes they talked. He was short of breath and had to rest frequently, but he was no longer an invalid. His hair was growing back, all white and finer than it had been, like down. He had an appetite. Sometimes they were even able to make love. They tried new ways of pleasing each other, gentler ways of putting their bodies together.

She studied nutrition. Hidden in her office, she had six different tomes on cancer and cancer therapies. Now Gordon was freed from the doctors for a while. He saw Dr. Barrows once a month. Perhaps he was
cured; perhaps their life would really resume. His strength seemed to be seeping back. He was at work on his long overdue manuscript. The family came in bunches, and Gordon began to hold forth, as he always had, the hub of everything. She began cautiously, secretly, to hope. To hope that she would retain this man who was the center of her life, the only man she had ever really loved.

J
OHNNY

    Johnny Lynch had put back a few drinks after dinner and fallen asleep on the couch when the phone woke him. Twenty past midnight, said the ship’s clock in his den. Chief of police Smalley filled him in at once. “It’s a tragedy,” Johnny said. “Did the boy damage the dike?”