The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (33 page)

At home, my mother seemed to unravel before my eyes. She sat at the kitchen table, penning letter after distraught letter to Suzette in California, pleading with her desperately to come home, to come home
at once and help her to cope with the crisis. My father did nothing but pray, all day long and late into the night. Our apartment became his very own house of worship. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, staring at my leg, unable to figure out what to do.

My sister, on the other hand, was a maelstrom of activity. In L.A., she was both in close touch with us and yet mysterious about what she was doing. I only knew that she would phone at any hour of the day or night, saying I should trust no one and listen to no one. I didn't have Hodgkin's, my older sister insisted, confident as ever; all I had was a virus. The doctors were wrong, the hospitals were wrong, the tests were wrong, the biopsy results were wrong, my parents were wrong, everyone around me was wrong and not to be trusted.

She urged me to leave at once for California, where she vowed to take me to proper doctors. New York was like Cairo, she said contemptuously. Stanford in Palo Alto, the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota—
those
were the places I needed to go for care, she said, warning me not to be ministered by some hacks at a Brooklyn hospital named after a dead mystic.

I had trouble walking to the corner bakery—I wondered how I would get to Stanford. The exchanges drove my mother to distraction.

Occasionally, my sister offered advice that seemed to make sense. When she advised us to get rid of the cat, Pouspous Jaune was immediately banned from the house. For days, even weeks, thereafter he would try to return, meowing at the window of our ground-floor apartment, clamoring to be allowed back in. I would see him wandering around the neighborhood and wonder how he was faring, this spoiled house cat
used to being hand-fed bits of cheese by my father, and now forced to scrounge around for his supper. He seemed so lost—as lost as I felt.

My mother was resolute, and never let him in the house again. He was the last Pouspous I ever owned.

My family located a specialist, a Hodgkin's expert named Dr. Lee. He worked in Manhattan, a place so foreign and remote my friends and I called it “the City,” at a hospital called Memorial. It was a major cancer center even then, but that was before it reinvented itself and wanted to be known only by the crisper, clinical-sounding name of Sloan-Kettering, when it touted the supremacy of its laboratories and research scientists over the more human mission of its doctors and clinicians.

One morning, my parents and I clambered into a private car for the drive to Manhattan's East Side. We had almost stopped taking subways: my parents weren't letting me walk anywhere. I worried that their entire savings were now being spent on taxis to and from my doctors' appointments.

I was used to doctors with ethnic names, mostly Jewish. I couldn't get my mind around Dr. Lee's identity, which only fueled my anxiety. Dr. Lee had to be Chinese, I decided. As we crossed the bridge into Manhattan, I began chatting amiably with the driver.

“Loulou, ne parles pas avec le chauffeur,” my father said in a chiding tone. I wondered how even in these desperate circumstances, he could still manage to be so class-conscious that he felt it necessary to tell his daughter to stop talking with a cabdriver.

What class did we belong to, anyway?

By my father's template, we were still members of an elite, a ruling aristocracy. He was the Captain, and I was his Egyptian princess, even though all trappings of our former life were gone, and the closest we came to royalty these days was Kings Highway, the shopping strip near Ocean Parkway where Mansoura's and other Oriental grocers were located.

The driver dropped us off at the wrong address. Bedpan Alley, as this sliver of Manhattan's Upper East Side is called, is a beehive of medical institutions, research laboratories, clinics, and medical schools. We wandered, lost and hopelessly confused. After going from one building to another, we finally found our way to Memorial's lobby.

We were still early, and my parents were anxious for me to have lunch. Ever since they'd realized I was losing weight, they had become obsessed, my mother in particular, with my diet. She'd push large plates of food on me.

Memorial's cafeteria was minuscule, more like a take-out counter. Among the few offerings on the sparse menu was vegetable soup, and I agreed to my father's offer to purchase a small bowl for me. Once I began stirring the hot broth with my spoon, I noticed small chunks of meat swimming alongside the celery, carrots, peas, and onions.

I realized at once that I couldn't eat it.

“Ce n'est pas kasher,” I cried. I pointed out the pieces of forbidden beef to my dad. I was sure he would be as upset as I was. Hadn't he railed against my siblings for having abandoned the Jewish dietary laws shortly after we arrived in New York? In all the years I had known him, the opulent years, the struggling years, the desperate years, the years of exile and flight, the years of personal and financial ruin, the years selling ties in the street and the years seated in an armchair at home, I'd never once known him to cut corners, to sidestep the faith that was the centerpiece of his life.

“Loulou, manges,” he said very simply; Please eat.

He had reverted to that eerily mild-mannered tone he used to convey only what was most important. As I pushed the cup of soup away, he pushed it back to me and nodded his approval.

I took a sip of the broth. I felt unbearably sad; only at that moment did it finally dawn on me how sick I must be.

At last, it was time to go upstairs for my doctor's appointment. When the receptionist called out my name, I was taken to a small examining room and asked to sit on a table. I wasn't even expected to change into a dressing gown but could remain in my own clothes.

After a few minutes, the door opened and a tall man walked in, wearing dark gray trousers and a blue cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He looked nothing like a doctor. He wasn't wearing a white coat. He didn't carry a stethoscope. And he wasn't Chinese. When he reached out to shake my hand, he introduced himself as Burt Lee.

Dr. Lee didn't say much, which added to my confusion. He seemed cold and somewhat forbidding. There were none of the pleasantries
doctors engage in, not even the obligatory smile, but that was fine, since I didn't feel much like smiling either. I noticed that he was eyeing me very carefully, taking in my hair and face, even studying my clothes. I looked a sorry sight in the baggy brown pants and pale blue T-shirt that had become my daily uniform. Who needed to dress up for a doctor, anyway?

Dr. Burton J. Lee III, M.D., of Park Avenue, Yale, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering.

If he held back on some of the niceties, he also spared me the endless questions I had been asked in recent weeks. As doctors struggled to make a diagnosis, they would confront me with a litany of tedious inquiries. With Dr. Lee, I didn't have to say whether I had lost weight, or had trouble sleeping, if I felt weak or tired, or had noted other troubling changes in my body.

He seemed able to tell at a glance that the answer to all of these questions was yes.

Instead, as he examined me—rapidly, with a sure, firm, confident hand—he asked questions no other doctors had. He wanted to know what I liked most about school and if I had any hobbies. Was I planning
to attend college? What were my favorite books and authors? He almost had me chuckling as he spoke about attending Yale in the 1950s, and going to Vassar, where I had been accepted, to meet women.

I had only one question for him: “Do I have Hodgkin's?”

“You might,” he replied, as lightly and noncommittally as if I'd asked him whether I had a cold. “You might.”

We returned a few days later. As I waited for him in the examining room, he met with my parents in an adjoining office. After a few minutes, I heard what sounded like a scuffle. I opened the door a crack.

There was my father, tears streaming down his face, pleading with Dr. Lee. “S'il vous plaît, Docteur,” he kept saying, “s'il vous plaît, monsieur.” It was the first time I had ever seen my father cry. He sounded desperate and submissive, and I had never known him to be either.

But pleading for what? I had no idea what was going on, only that the formidable man in rolled-up shirtsleeves looked angry. Burton James Lee III of Yale, Park Avenue, and Greenwich seemed troubled by the display of this old man in a shabby raincoat and straw hat.

“This will not do, sir,” he said in his most patrician tone, and ushered my father and mother to the reception area.

Dr. Lee came to see me in the examining room. Without fanfare, he began to describe some of the tests he was ordering. I noticed that he used the same mild tone of voice that my dad used when he talked about grave subjects. He only sounded urgent when he leaned over to deliver one piece of advice. “Don't listen to your father,” Dr. Lee told me. He repeated the warning in his clipped upper-class English, enunciating every single word: “Don't listen to your father.”

And so, in the middle of my fears about my illness, and the perils the treatment would bring, and whether I would even respond, and if I would ever feel like myself again, I wondered what on earth this strange doctor—who didn't look like any doctor I'd ever known—was trying to tell me.

Why did he want me to steer clear of Dad? Why not warn me about my mother, instead, who constantly feared the worst? Or Suzette, who kept insisting I wasn't even sick?

I began going to Memorial every day for a flurry of tests. There were countless X-rays to be taken. I would be in and out of changing gowns, hustled into dark cold rooms with gargantuan metal machines I had
never seen before. I took tests that lasted minutes and tests that took hours to perform, and made me ill. Everywhere I went, I learned to identify myself as a “clinic patient,” and flash a plastic ID card that identified me as such.

I realized early on that in the world of Memorial Hospital, there were two kinds of patients, private and clinic, wealthy and poor. The private patients had a special plastic card and enjoyed all kinds of amenities, the most important one being access to a single physician for their care. The clinic patients, most of whom were covered by government programs such as Medicaid, were assigned a senior supervising physician, yet in my eyes, they seemed to be at the mercy of whichever young doctor or fellow picked up their chart when they showed up for their appointments.

I noted one more odd class distinction. Each day, patients were expected to have their blood drawn for a count of red and white cells. As a clinic patient, I had been directed to a second-floor laboratory that insisted on taking a full tube of blood from my arm. But private patients could have a simple prick of the finger that yielded the needed drop of blood that was then smeared on a slide; the procedure was done in the modern efficient fourth-floor laboratory. I learned to appeal to the amiable laboratory staff to have them do the pinprick and spare me the elaborate blood draw.

There was also extreme kindness from the most improbable quarters, and a sensitivity to our financial plight. In a culture that would change drastically at Memorial and other hospitals, there seemed to be little concern about payment. A billing clerk was always trying to reassure me: “Worry about getting well,” he would say, “not about the bills.” At the end of each treatment, another staffer would call a taxi, and give my parents the money to pay to take me home to Brooklyn.

I used most of my wiles to maneuver into being seen by Burton Lee. I'd ask in advance what days and hours he'd be on duty and make appointments only for those times. At the reception desk, I'd brazenly assert, “Oh, I am a patient of Dr. Lee,” and if he was busy, I'd say that I was happy to wait. I always held my breath for fear I'd be told I had to be seen by some other doctor. I knew, intuitively, that I had found my “Bon docteur.”

With my medical treatment at Memorial set, my parents still felt
they had to take some more steps to absolutely guarantee my well-being.

In Cairo, faced with similar circumstances—a sick daughter, possibly in mortal danger—they had known exactly what to do. I had been scooped up and taken around to visit every holy shrine and mystical enclave in the ancient city. Every rabbi, living or dead, had been summoned to help in my recovery. Any prophet known to have resided or passed through Egypt—Moses, Maimonides, Jeremiah, Elijah—was beseeched to come exert his magical curative powers.

There were no shrines here in America, or none that we knew of, and mysticism seemed in short supply. The prophets were invariably false.