The Widower's Tale (42 page)

I made her sit on one of the couches. I went to the reception desk. Next to the sign-in sheet sat a vase of pink roses out of which protruded a large heart-shaped card covered in glitter. LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED! it proclaimed.

"Oh is
that
all?" I said. "What a relief! I thought we were here for intravenous warfare."

Chantal allowed silence to linger a moment before she looked away from her computer screen. She offered me a scolding smile. "Perhaps you'd like to add a footnote. A petite little asterisk after that
all
. List the many exceptions."

"Literalists are boring, aren't they?" Already I was failing to follow Trudy's recent advice: to "behave like a normal human being," at least in this context. Trudy had informed me that my particular brand of humor might prove tiresome for someone with a compromised immune system.

Chantal turned to Sarah, who had joined me. "Honey, I can tell you're terrified. But we take
such
good care of you here. That is a promise. Now put your hand out." When Sarah obeyed, Chantal put something in her palm. "For later. Little pick-me-up."

In Sarah's hand lay three chocolate kisses.

"Best medicine I know of," said Chantal. She stood. "And so. We begin with bloods. Come meet our world-class phlebotomists."

Sarah handed the candy to me. I slipped it into a pocket of my raincoat. She gave me a look I did not need help to interpret.
Now is when you leave
.

"When will she ... when do I pick her up?" I asked Chantal.

"Not staying, Mr. D?" Chantal looked at Sarah.

"He's not. That's my choice."

Chantal patted Sarah on the shoulder. "A go-it-aloner. Good for you. I see you have spunk, and spunk is a powerful weapon." She pointed Sarah toward the nether reaches of the suite, but turned to me before leading her away. "Come back between three and four. But hang tight for a minute. Dr. B wants to see you."

The three women waiting on the couches stared at me. No smiles today.

At least I'd remembered my book this time. Revisiting the greatest hits of Henry James, I was halfway through
The Spoils of Poynton
. But after reading the same paragraph several times over, I closed the book. The woman sitting across from me was whispering loudly into her cell phone, describing the sores in her mouth.

I closed my eyes.

"Mr. Darling?" A nurse I had not met before leaned over me.

"I am just fine!" I said, too loudly.

"I know you're fine. Dr. Barnes is ready to see you." She spoke so quietly that my outburst felt like a crime.

A new clutch of female patients took over the staring. This time, one of them did smile. She pointed at my feet. "Your book." I picked it up and thanked her.

"Good luck," she said.

I looked at a clock as we passed through the halls. I had been asleep for half an hour. Quite likely I'd been snoring.

This was only my second visit to Trudy's little kingdom; would there come a time when I'd been here so often I'd know these mazy hallways as if they were mine? How strange that this is what I hoped for. Sarah had told me the stunning news that she would be coming here at least every two or three weeks for a year.

As if to underscore my lack of orientation, I was shown into a strange room, not the one in which I'd seen Trudy the month before. An exam table stood center stage, while two chairs lurked against a wall. At the far end, Trudy sat on a rolling stool at a computer, her back to me. When she heard me enter, she pirouetted neatly, without rising, and pointed to one of the chairs.

"Dad, I'm about to go in and get Sarah started. She asked me to go over her treatment with you. The big picture."

"She's explained it to me. The pathology and whatnot. The heart tests she had. This 'her-two' business."

"Don't get all bristly, Dad. Sarah needs to know you got this information from me. She has enough on her plate without having to answer all your anxious questions. That's what I'm here for."

The next ten minutes felt like a flashback to high school science. Would there be a test demanding that I discriminate hormone receptors from monoclonal antibodies, adjuvant therapies from axillary nodes, neuropathy from neutropenia? (Was Trudy showing off?) The evil "her two" was, in simple terms, a protein that Sarah's tumor was "over-expressing."

I cut in. "Like a bad Shakespearean actor?"

"Cute, Dad. I'll keep that in mind for my show-business patients."

Trudy and Dr. Wang did not like the aggressive nature or the size of this cancer. (I pictured a fat playground bully: Lester McClintock from second grade.) Sarah would require a mastectomy, but first, they would attack the tumor systemically. "This means six months of chemo, plus antibody therapy that targets the her-two factor," said Trudy. "Then comes the surgery, and after that, probably radiation and hormone therapy. The bad news is that Sarah's cancer has spread to her lymph nodes. The good news--very good news--is that her scans show no metastis." Watching Trudy's face, I saw her change from doctor to daughter. "I'm summing it up for you, Dad. It's a long haul."

"I gather you doubt my stamina."

Trudy moved to the chair beside mine. "Sarah's a tough cookie, but she has a lot of things to face here. Personal as well as medical. You guys haven't been together that long; you're not her husband."

"She doesn't have one, in case you hadn't noticed."

Trudy stared at me tenderly. Did I read pity in her expression?

Finally I said, "Are you trying to tell me I should abandon her? 'Break up'? I'm not a catch-and-release type of fellow, in case you wondered."

"There's no need to get hostile, Dad. I just want you to know what you're up against. I'm thinking about her child, too. Her son. His life should be as consistent as possible now, around the margins of all these changes."

Norval had recently expressed the opinion that doctors, like lawyers, were well trained, sometimes unwittingly, as master practitioners of euphemism and obfuscation. "So," I said, "is this tumor going to kill her? Is that what you're preparing me for?"

"I am absolutely not saying that, Dad. There are factors we don't know yet, but I will tell you this: that tumor's not one I'd like to meet in a dark alley, even in broad daylight."

"Very funny." Lester McClintock morphed into the far more sinister Reggie Kosinski, captain of the high school ice-hockey team.

"Dad, you're the one who brought up the Shakespearean actor." She touched her pager, letting me know my time was up.

"Did she mention the insurance business to you?" I asked. "She's losing a lot of sleep over that." Sarah had told me that just one of her drugs, if you could run down and buy it at the CVS, would set you back forty thousand dollars for a year's supply.

Trudy shook her head. "Can't discuss that with you, Dad. She'll have to work it out with financial. I'm going to help her as much as I can. And that, by the way, is a favor to you."

"I want you to know that I'll pay for anything she can't. Anything."

"I'm not going to discuss the money stuff with you, Dad. And right now, I have to catch up with my patients. Including Sarah, who's getting hooked up as we speak."

When I stood, I had to steady myself with a hand on the wall. My legs tingled slightly.

"I had a dream about your mother while I was waiting. And you."

Trudy's formal smile faltered. "Mom?"

"I dreamed I was taking your mother out to dinner for Valentine's Day. We were at that Thai restaurant, where we had your sister's birthday dinner. We had our own table--I had so much to tell her, after all this time apart--but people all around us kept crowding in, interrupting. The waitress. That teacher Ira from Elves and Fairies. Norval and Helena--who said she wanted to paint your mother's portrait. I was very angry and lost my temper. I told everybody to get out, leave us alone. But your mother told them to stay. She acted as if it were any other day, as if she'd never left us. I wanted to ask if she was back for good, but I knew that would be a mistake...."

"Like Orpheus." Trudy had turned away from the door and faced me fully, hands in her pockets.

"So then," I said, "along
you
came. You were wearing your doctor regalia"--I gestured at what she wore--"and you sat right down at our table without so much as greeting me, and you held your stethoscope to your mother's chest, and you said, 'Mom, your heart is still beating. Mom, please order something healthy and we'll split it.' So there I was, my reunion with my wife after all these years invaded right and left, when who should walk through the door but
my
mother. And she walked right up to me and said--"

"Dad?" Trudy put a hand on my shoulder. "Dad, would you sit back down for a second?"

I felt her fingers on my wrist, checking my pulse.

"Daughter, there's nothing wrong with me. I'm sharing a dream."

Having forced me to sit, she sat beside me again. "Okay, Dad. Finish the dream. You're looking a little pale, that's all."

"Your grandmother told me to calm down because she had something to tell us. She said, 'Trudy always passed her exams. She passed with flying colors. She was at the top of her class.' I hadn't seen my mother look so happy in ages."

Trudy sighed. "I don't have to be Dr. Freud to interpret this one," she said. "Let me tell you right now that Sarah is in the best possible hands."

"As if I thought otherwise." Hastily, I wiped my eyes.

"I'm not just bragging. I'm not the only one treating her. I'm sorry, Dad, but I really have to go. Chantal has paged me three times already. Where are you going now? I want you to take it easy."

"Meeting Norval at the museum. He said he's in the mood for Monet. Haystacks. Water lilies. France without the French."

"Good idea," said Trudy. She spread a hand against my back and urged me gently down the hall, up from the underworld, back toward the sunlit region of benignly, symmetrically flourishing cells.

"I suspect we married our wives for the same reason," I said, breaking our comfortable silence. "Or have I mentioned this theory before?"

Norval laughed. "Can't remember. Tell me again."

"Camouflage."

He frowned at me, taking mock offense. "We stand out too much when we're on our own? Now that's a good one."

"Quite the opposite," I said. "We risk invisibility without a colorful, earthy woman tethering us to the here and now. The practicalities and limitations."

We stood before a glass case displaying three exquisitely vibrant kimonos. We'd had our fill of Parisian nudes, blue cathedrals, and the bourgeois blossoms of Giverny. So we'd paused for lunch in the cafe (a glass of Burgundy each), then wandered on sleepy autopilot into the Far East. Long ago, Poppy and Helena had agreed on the kimonos as their favorite collection at the museum.

Norval leaned closer to the case to read the label describing the kimono swimming with koi, orange and gold on silvery, striated blue. I could imagine what he was thinking: that if this were so, what had kept me anchored all those years since Poppy's death?

"You know," I said, "for most of my life, I've fancied myself a passenger on a train as it moves along through various landscapes. Some are repeated, some are unique--some ugly, some magnificent. But now ... now I feel as if I'm a fixed point in the landscape itself, the trains passing me by. Each one faster than the one before."

"That's rather maudlin. So what sort of landscape are you?"

"I haven't the faintest idea," I said. "A field. Overgrown and weedy."

"Or a very large, gnarled tree."

"Hollow and half rotted."

"Inhabited by wild creatures of a dozen species."

"A zoo."

"A healthy ecosystem."

I turned to my old friend. "Norval, we are sounding perilously gay."

He put a restraining hand on my shoulder. "You wish."

"We shouldn't have had that wine."

"Nonsense. We deserved it."

We left the kimonos behind. "Speaking of gnarled trees, where is that Chinese scholar's room?" I said. "Do you remember that exhibit?"

Norval led us onward, pretending to know the way.

When we met that morning, in the museum lobby, he had asked me just enough about Sarah's predicament to know that I needed a distraction, not a confidant. Helena would be annoyed, like all wives who want the most dire, intimate news, who can't imagine what else two friends would discuss in the middle of a crisis. As we meandered through hallways, across centuries and oceans, I put my hands in the pockets of my coat. The fingers of my right hand encountered the three foil-wrapped candies. I tumbled them gently, reminding myself to return them to Sarah when I picked her up.

Norval and I became friends during the temptestuous days in the spring of 1969. I was new to Reference; Norval, five years older than I, was already a seasoned, elite bibliographer. We'd crossed paths in the stacks, but we'd had no reason to converse. And then came the night of the bonfires and the chanting, the Yard filled with angry students clamoring for Afro-American studies--or using that cause as a colorful reason to voice their double discontent: that of any young person lusting for change in the stodgy status quo and that of Americans who'd had enough of the political malevolence that hung about us all like a dank, stifling fog. Partly out of devotion, partly out of curiosity and a sense of youthful sport--wanting to be part of whatever "action" might play out--Norval and I joined the tweedy, professorial group who decided to guard the library round the clock against the possible incursion of the youthful barbarians. They would not burn the books or deface the Sargent murals; we would protect these musty treasures with our very flesh!

Norval had a flask of some beastly fruited brandy that he shared with me and the one other staff member who stayed up that night. The professors formed their own vigil: a bow-tied brigade including a handful of liberal luminaries. That was also the spring when Norval met Helena, a graduate student in Slavic studies. Poppy and I loved her the moment she set foot in our kitchen.

So I felt a piercing sense of deja vu when, the first time I saw Norval after Thanksgiving, he told me that Helena was "tickled pink" about Sarah. She couldn't wait for an occasion when the four of us might share a luxurious meal; maybe Sarah would drag me from my lair just long enough to get me up to Vermont for a weekend. Of course, her little boy was welcome, too.