Three Weeks in Spring

Chapter 10

Saturday, April 19

The bicentennial Patriot’s Day. Concord and Lexington and Jerry Ford coming to call and a mass of tourists. It was the kind of event Joan never went to. It was the kind of event that Ace went to with the boys and she stayed home. Eight days ago she was not planning on this one either. But the fear was growing that they were not talking merely about her breast, that perhaps they were talking about her life. Is it possible, she thought, is it possible that my days are numbered... The quaint phrase, out of a nineteenth-century melodrama, seemed so inappropriate to the reality she faced. And yet it was the phrase that had popped into her head.

It’s something I should do. The family together, the nation’s birthday. There was a vague sense of heritage and tradition as a stay against impending dissolution that propelled her. It would make a good memory. It will also reassure the kids. How sick can Mamma be if she goes to the parade with us? They didn’t seem worried, but they would be at some point and this would help.

The big events were in Concord, but Ace said it would be too crowded and they went instead to Boston for the parade and festivities at City Hall Plaza. Had Joan been well he might have made a stab at Concord and Lexington, but he couldn’t say that and merely insisted that it would be too crowded.

The crowds were not a problem in Boston. They parked near the Old State House and walked up across City Hall Plaza and over Beacon Hill to Boylston Street. It was a good day in April. Sunny and filled with a sense of festival. Street vendors sold balloons, and hot dogs, and frozen yogurt on a stick, and macrobiotic rice and lentils, and Granny Smith apples, and toy colonial sabers, and three-cornered hats. It was not yet nine o’clock and the city was pleasant and uncluttered, the way it is early on a nonworking day.

Joan had on her new raincoat, light poplin, and stylishly cut. She walked, like Napoleon, she thought, with her hand inside her coat, feeling the lump unconsciously over and over, always hoping futilely and below the ordinary level of her consciousness that if she felt it enough it would go away.

Ace loved the city. When he was working at home he would often invent an excuse to go in and drive around. He needed contact with it, and was always persuaded that if he lost contact with it his creativity would dwindle. Is that hokey? That’s the kind of crap they say at suburban poetry clubs. Erich Segal would probably say that. Or Rod McKuen. Arf! But he felt it, and he felt it now.

He knew why she was here. She hadn’t said and neither had he, but he knew. And it pleased him. He always wanted her to come along when he went places and he always wanted to go places. She did not enjoy going to places and she didn’t enjoy traveling. Sort of extreme provocation, he thought, but you take what you can get.

He considered whether he ought to be guilty about being glad she’d come, even though what caused her to come was dreadful. He decided he ought not to feel guilty. We letter take what we can out of whatever comes our way. And we better feel what we can feel and not fuck it up with worrying about whether what we feel is right.

He was more at home with randomness than she was. He planned what he could: trips, building projects, that sort of thing. He outlined the novels carefully. But he knew the world to be essentially haphazard and he tried hard to take it as it came. And he knew that he was imperfect and would fail often and that, too, he would have to live with.

So he felt glad about her being along and paid attention to the parade. It came in a flourish of pennants and batons and braid and Ancient and Honorable Artillery companies. There were militia companies from around the Commonwealth, and drum and bugle corps in bright sateen costumes, led by plump-legged majorettes in white boots. There was a good deal of humor at the expense of the plump-legged majorettes.

“Look at this one,” Dave said, as a particularly sturdy set of cheerleaders led a high school band past them.

“Look at the one in the middle.” Dan shrieked with laughter.

“I think the band motto may be Bow Wow,” Ace said.

“Sexist bastards,” Joan said.

“It’s Phil Spitalny and his all-hound orchestra,” Ace said.

After the parade had passed they walked up Boylston Street and ate lunch in Ken’s restaurant. Their table was on a second-floor balcony that looked out over the plaza in Copley Square. The fountain was working and the rush of its waters patterned the plaza and modified Boylston Street. Things quickened about it.

It’s like being glazed over, Ace thought. It’s like having a thick layer of polyurethane varnish which seals you off from the elements. The fountain and the plaza are beautiful and the lunch is good and the family’s together and my wife has a cancer growing. And we go along on two simultaneous levels and feel both things and they don’t seem to connect The two levels. They just seem to coexist laminated, separated by an invisible shield. Emotional Gardol.

Walking back to the car after lunch, across the Common, they saw fragments of the parade now over, groups of bandsmen and majorettes, and sections of bugle corps and muster companies wandering at easy random back toward buses and cars that would take them home. Church bells rang periodically around the city. Family groups were frequent. The sun shone. The temperature was mild. In City Hall Plaza in front of the magnificent Stonehenge of the new City Hall there were thousands sitting on steps and standing on the bricked piazza waiting for Arthur Fiedler to conduct the Pops, and for a horde of pigeons to be released, and for the first of many speeches. The vendors were among them. Joan and Ace and the boys waited and watched for a while, but no pigeons appeared and Arthur Fiedler wasn’t leading the Pops and Ace could see the tightness in Joan’s face. Over some objections from the boys, they finally left in midafternoon and drove home.

She was alone in the house that Saturday afternoon. Her husband and her sons were out together. She knew the absence was contrived. Ace felt she needed to be alone. The strain was greater in front of the boys, not looking worried, not seeming down, not being snappish. Now there was less strain. But the panic moved in, as if to replace the strain. Nature hates a vacuum. She was busy, very busy: her notes, her tapes, her cleaning. And always the panic, seeming always to be intensifying, thrust back, pushed down yet growing, growing.

She was plugging in the vacuum cleaner when Norma came across the street and stuck her head in the front door.

She said, “Joan?” and her face had a look of great sadness. “How are you doing, Joan?”

Joan began to cry. “Norma, oh God, Norma I’m so scared.”

“I know, honey. I know, I know.” She put her arms around Joan and patted her and Joan cried against her as she hadn’t since she’d found the lump.

They sat on the couch in the living room. “I’m sorry,” Joan said. “I’m sorry I’m crying, but I’m so scared.”

“I knew from the mammogram,” Norma said. “I knew you’d be upset.”

“Norma, what the hell is happening to me?”

“What’s the next step?” Norma said. “What happens now?”

“I go in tomorrow and they do some tests. Wednesday they do a biopsy and if it’s bad they do a mastectomy right then.”

Norma nodded. Joan had the crying under control now. She could talk. “But I need to know what it means, Norma. I need to know what the hell it’s like, what really happens, you know? I mean they are all nice as hell. Eliopoulos, Barry, everybody, but what’s it going to be like? How bad will it hurt? What’s it like without one? Will I be all right? Jesus, Norma, it’s so scary.”

“I’ll put you in touch with a woman I know,” Norma said. “She had it done about a year and half ago.”

“Who?”

“Gretchen Benjamin. She would be terrific for you to talk with, because she took it really well. Like nothing. It really didn’t seem to bother her that much.”

“Oh, Norma. My God, where did she get the courage?”

“She may have been putting on a wonderful show, but it didn’t seem to bother her. And she made a good recovery.”

“Is she all right now?” Joan said.

“Fine. She’s a little tired sometimes, but otherwise she’s doing fine,” Norma said.

A little tired. That’s not bad. They say Betty Ford’s a little tired. If I have to feel a little tired that won’t he so bad. Gretchen Benjamin actually had a mastectomy and survived and is walking around leading a normal life.

“How long did you say it was?” Joan asked.

“About a year and a half ago,” Norma said. “And then later, of course, she had a hysterectomy.”

Joan said, “What do you mean? She had a hysterectomy as a result of her mastectomy?”

“Well, yes, in a sense,” Norma said. “They do that quite routinely. It’s the hormones. They don’t want the ovaries pumping out hormones, so they have to remove the ovaries. It’s quite common.”

Joan began to cry again. “Oh, my God, Norma. I don’t want a hysterectomy.”

For reasons she never understood, abdominal surgery had always seemed particularly fearsome. Dan’s appendectomy had frightened her badly. But it was more than the terror of abdominal surgery. My God, am I going to have a mastectomy, then a hysterectomy? What are they going to do to me? Are they going to chop away at my body? Is there cancer everywhere? I don’t want to live by being chopped into little pieces. One year we’ll take this, and another year we’ll take that.

But in the middle of the despair was the inevitable counterpoise. Gretchen Benjamin had handled it well. If she can, I can. She could feel the competitive flush in her. She can’t be a better person than I am. How come I’m not handling it well?

“Have you told Judy yet?” Norma said.

“Jude? I can’t tell Jude. I didn’t want to tell you, Norma. I don’t want anybody to know what happened to me.”

“Oh, Joan, you’re insane.” Norma said. “Judy would be the perfect person to tell. She’s your close friend. She’s a nurse. She works at the hospital you’re going to be in. She can special you on the surgery day. Wouldn’t you like to have Judy Marsh there when you wake up. Wouldn’t you want to talk to her?”

“Of course,” Joan said. “But I don’t want to burden anyone else with this knowledge. If I survive this I don’t want anyone to perceive me as deformed. To walk into the room and see me and think There’s One-Tit Tillie over there. Now which side was it? Which one is the fake?’ Norma, do you know how much of our humor is involved in boobs? I mean, Christ, it is a subject that comes up all the time. I don’t want people walking around saying, ‘We better not use boob humor, we better get off the subject of boobs.’ I don’t want people starting to joke and then smothering it and trying to cover it up by misdirection because it might make me uncomfortable. We are a boob society and everybody will have to watch their mouths because of me and cancer, and, you know, I’ll be a drag to have around.”

Norma was shaking her head. Joan plunged on. Elaborating an argument she’d had with Ace. “If nobody knows then nobody will have to feel that way. They can feel the same way about me. If nobody knows they don’t have to worry and I don’t have to worry. Gretchen’s walking around and no one would know, right, Norma? I mean she’s got full use of her arms?”

Norma said, “No, of course you wouldn’t know to look at her.”

And Joan said, “That’s it. That’s what I mean. Nobody is going to know. That’s the way I want it. Particularly the men. John Marsh, or Billy Ganem. I don’t want them to know. I don’t want them to perceive me as any less of a sexy person. Assuming they think I’m sexy now. I can’t bear to have people sorry for me, to limit their conversation when I’m in the room. And I can’t bear to be the kind of person that when they see me reminds them of cancer and dying. I can’t do it.”

Norma nodded. “Sure. I understand that, but look at it from this point of view. If you don’t tell Judy she’s going to find out. You’re going to Union Hospital. She works in Union Hospital every other weekend. There’s no way that she won’t find out. It’s inconceivable. One way or another she’ll know, and why not tell her now so she can help you?”

“Why does she have to know?” Joan said. “She’s not working this weekend, and maybe next weekend I’ll be home.”

“What about Grace down the street? Grace works in the operating room. What if Grace says to Judy, ‘How’s Joan recovering from her surgery?’ And Judy didn’t know. How will she feel?”

Joan said, “She’ll feel bad.”

Norma said, “That’s right. She’ll feel excluded, or whatever, that you haven’t told her, of all people. This is a very meaningful piece of information. Sharing it with her is a testimony to your friendship.”

“Maybe, Norma, maybe you’re right. I just don’t know. But I will think about it.”

Norma left to call Gretchen Benjamin and have her get in touch.

Joan walked around the house, crying again. Now that she had begun it was easier. She hadn’t cried before. Now I’m making up for it, she thought. Across the street was Judy’s house. As it had been for ten years. She’s in there and I’ve got to tell her.