Three Weeks in Spring

Chapter 15

Monday, April 21 and Tuesday were a blur of tests. Body and bone scans were simply x-rays of various kinds from various angles. They were painless. Monday afternoon Edgar Mitchell, a plastic surgeon, dropped by and sat in the yellow plastic-covered armchair by the window and talked with Joan about reconstructive surgery.

“John asked me to stop by and talk with you,” he said.

It took Joan a moment to realize that John was Dr. Eliopoulos.

“Oh yes, I remember asking him about reconstruction.”

“Well, it is entirely possible,” Mitchell said. “I have not done it yet myself, but I would very much like to. It’s a very interesting trick.”

“They implant something, is that right?”

“Yes, a small sack of inert jell is anchored and the new skin is grafted over it. The jell can’t drift, not like an injection. It is, as far as I’ve heard, entirely safe, and not a very big operation.”

“How about the nipple?”

“That can be done too; not everyone bothers, but if you wanted it, we could graft skin from, say, the labia and rebuild the nipple and its areola.”

“When you say it’s not a big operation, how big?”

“Perhaps overnight.”

“How soon could it be done?”

“Oh, a year or so after the original incision has healed and everything is in order.”

“I don’t have to decide now?”

“No. I will talk to John about this and when he does the surgery he will keep it in mind. If he has to take the breast he will have reconstruction in mind.”

Mitchell was a stocky, solid, Scotch-looking man with dark hair speckled gray and dark-rimmed glasses. He smoked a pipe.

During the two test days Fred Shmaese dropped in as well. Shmaese was an oncologist from Lynnfield. They knew each other slightly at the time, and he came, informally, to talk with Joan. He sat on the edge of the bed, a solemn, formal, skillful man with strong opinions, and talked with her about breast cancer, and mastectomy and tumors in general and also about the state of education and the direction the world found itself running in.

Like Dr. Mitchell, Shmaese did not say she was going to undergo mastectomy, but it was tacitly assumed, and the calmness of the discussion with Fred, as it had been with Mitchell, was to make the illness and the surgical act seem more ordinary. The focus of all conversations on what-we-do-after-the-breast-is-gone. When the time came she was ready and fully prepared to wake up from anesthesia with the breast gone. Whether that was an artfully orchestrated preparation for surgery or not she was never sure. But by Tuesday night she was looking long past the surgery on Wednesday to concern for lymph node involvement. Her concern was steadily less with her breast and more with her life.

Monday morning Ace took the tapes and drove to Endicott College. Joan’s class was in a small white clapboard building surrounded by trees on the east slope of a hill. It seemed isolated from the rest of the campus. There were three classrooms in the building, one devoted to a children’s school and two for college courses. He went in carrying her two briefcases and the tape recorder. The department supervisor was a woman, the students were women. It was a very female place and he was struck by that. He was a bit out of place there. Judy Martin was uneasy with him, attempting to banter with him in a light girlish way. Is it because I’m male? he thought, or does she always do June Allyson? I hope not. She doesn’t have the build for it. In the classroom the girls looked puzzled. And he felt a little outsized, inappropriate.

“As you may have noticed,” he said. “I am not Joan Parker.”

No one smiled. They all stared at him solemnly.

“Mrs. Parker had to have some surgery,” he went on, “and she has asked me to cover for her for a bit. She’s taped her lectures and I’m here to play them and assist in whatever way I can. Which is not much, because I know less than you do about the subject.”

A hand went up. “What about the final exam?”

“We’ll worry about that when it’s time to. You won’t suffer for it, whatever the situation.”

Another hand. “When will she be back?”

“How quickly you tire of me,” he said. “I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see.”

“Could you tell us where she is, so we can send her a card?”

“Sure.” He wrote the address on the board.

“Can we visit?”

“Not yet. I’ll tell you when. Any other questions?”

There were none. “Now the good news. There will be no class Wednesday.” He took an extension cord from one of the briefcases and plugged in the tape recorder. “Okay,” he said. “Here we go.”

Joan’s voice came from the recorder. “Good morning, ladies...” He realized he could not stand to listen. “I’ll be back in a while,” he said over the tape, and headed for the door. Her voice had a hoarse faintly shaky sound to it, as it drifted out with him. He shut the door behind him.

As Joan waited outside of X-ray she thought about James Stacey. Sitting alone her first day in the hospital and reading People magazine she had come across a picture of James Stacey, young movie star, who had been badly maimed in an accident, losing a leg and an arm. The picture stayed with her. There he was on one leg with one arm balancing on skis on a steep slope. The empty leg of his ski pants was pinned up and the poles were of an unusual kind that would help him balance, and on his face was a broad smile. Just the biggest smilingest face, she thought, out on the goddamned slopes in Vermont or someplace and he’s obviously having a hell of a good time. She remembered her talk with Ace about not being hacked to bits, and his promise. Well, maybe I could take some hacking. Look at Stacey. He took a hell of a lot and was still extracting pleasure from life. Maybe if they do have to cut away at me. Maybe if it’s spread out I could go on. I could have some fun. I would have a different kind of life. I would have to set an example for people. I’ll have to be a different kind of Joan. A Joan people don’t like to look at. A Joan people would feel funny about. People would be saying, ‘Jesus-I-don’t-want-that-to-happen-to-me!’ But maybe I can use myself as an example. Maybe I can find a way to have some kind of dignity and a way of life that is somehow productive even though it may be in a whole other direction than I ever intended to go. Maybe I can do that. Could do that if it happened. It always struck her that she owed James Stacey something and they’d never met and he’d never know.

For such introspection there was little time, however. Every nurse who came in to escort her to X-ray or take a blood sample or take her temperature or bring her lunch went far beyond the necessities of her work. They talked with Joan. They initiated conversation. They told her about aunts and mothers and sisters and former patients who had undergone breast surgery and whose recovery had been comfortable and complete. It’s like everyone loves me. I feel, for God’s sake, I feel loved in here.

And Benny, the respiration therapist. He was there from the first day. Under the stress of panic in Dr. Eliopoulos office that first day, she had smoked two cigarettes which Ace had bummed for her from the receptionist. Under the impression that she was a heavy smoker, Eliopoulos had prescribed presurgical respiration therapy. Benny was a short heavy cheerful man who wheeled his respiration machine in three times a day on Monday and another three on Tuesday and talked and joked with her, and taught her how to use the machine, and seemed to care how she felt, not professionally but in fact. They talked a bit of her fears, although mostly she breathed in and out according to his instructions and he talked to her. He talked of certain postsurgical black periods in his own life and how he’d gotten through them. He was a very kind man and Joan looked forward to his visits.

On the floor below was Gerry Wilkinson, a neighbor who had the previous week fallen from a stepladder and broken her ankle. It was a bad break for a woman in her fifties and she would be a long time bedridden. Joan went down to visit her frequently during her free moments and drew strength from Gerry’s calm acceptance of what might be a crippling injury.

“I will pray for you, Joan,” Gerry had said. “And I will ask Warren and the children to pray for you too.” Gerry’s God was Catholic and immediate, a God whose eye was on the fall of a sparrow and she gained strength from Him. Joan didn’t believe, but she gained strength in some odd way from Gerry’s belief. It was comforting to think that people were praying for her, to a God they believed in. Joan always felt calmer after talking with Gerry Wilkinson.

Across the hall Mrs. Bacheldor and her roommate Helga were good to talk with. Mrs. Bacheldor promised to put Joan in touch with a friend who had survived a mastectomy in flourishing health. She promised to put Joan in touch with her after the operation.

While Joan’s tapes were running, Ace drove into Beverly, looking for a cup of coffee. He found a Dunkin’ Donut stand and got a large black to go. He drove to a drugstore and bought a copy of the Boston Globe. He drove back to the campus and sat in the car and drank the coffee and read the paper. The children from the Lab School kindergarten came out while he sat there and played and ran about, under the supervision of a head teacher and some students. He noticed that several of the children staved by themselves and he felt bad for them.

Joan’s first class ended at ten-fifteen and he went in to shut off the tapes. The students were already starting to file out. He smiled at them vaguely as they passed, his mind busy with other things, impatient that he must be here.

During the second class he drove down along the shore road into Manchester and back, sightseeing, listening to the radio, remembering when they were very young and not yet married how the two of them had driven down to a club in Magnolia to hear Sarah Vaughan. He noticed that thinking about it neither increased nor decreased the ache of anxiety in him. Generally he didn’t like to remember the time before they were married, for those were times when he didn’t have her and she was still uncertain if she would marry him and he felt retrospective fear that a matter of such moment to him had been entrusted to such unskilled hands as his had been at nineteen. I could have lost her. What would have happened to me if I had lost her? If I lose her now at least I’ll have had her. I’ll have had eighteen years and eight months. And now I have my sons. Then I would have had nothing and I wouldn’t have even been what I am now. I had potential hut I was an awful turkey. She took a chance and she knew it. She was always more pragmatic than I was. She calculated and weighed and said, ‘Okay, it’s my best shot.’ And she did it, and she was right. But it was a gamble and at that time in her life she wasn’t a gambler. Jesus Christ. It’s like remembering when you were shot at and missed.

Thinking of the past depressed him. And he drove in silence, trying to concentrate simply on the music and the August houses that rolled by on the winding road. Thinking of the future isn’t an upper either. Carpe diem, babe.

It was nearly lunchtime when Joan heard him coming down the hall. She knew from the time that he was stopping off directly on the way home from Endicott. When he came in the room he was dressed as he was always dressed. Blue corduroy Levi jacket, blue Adidas with a white stripe, sunglasses. He was carrying her briefcases.

“They prefer me,” he said. “They claim I’m better looking and smarter and they want me to stay.”

“How did it go?”

“Fine.”

“Did they ask much about me?”

“Yeah, some. Where were you, could they send a card, what were visiting hours, like that.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them you had to have some surgery, that you were here, and that I’d let them know about visiting hours and when they could come.”

“You didn’t tell them about the mastectomy?”

“No.”

“Did anyone ask what the surgery was?”

“No.”

“Did anyone tell you I was wonderful?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

He unpacked the briefcases and set the tape recorder up on the windowsill so that she could do more taping if she had a chance. A nurse came in with lunch under the covered dishes on a tray. Served that way it always looks tasty, he thought, even when it isn’t. Joan asked about a low-calorie diet.

“I’m eating like a pig in here, Norah,” she said. “I’ll look like the Goodyear blimp.”

“I’ll ask the dietician to come by later,” Norah said. “She can help you work out what you want. Remember you’ll need a lot of nourishment after surgery. This isn’t a time to starve yourself.”

“I know,” Joan said. “But I’m so hungry. I’m hungry all the damn time.”

“Now you know how I feel,” Ace said. “That’s the story of my life. I’ve been hungry and thirsty and horny since I was eight months old.”

“No wonder you wanted a private room,” Norah said. All of them laughed. The nurse left. He reached over and took the cover off one of the dishes. Tuna salad. There were two pickles on the plate with the salad. He took one. “Why don’t I run down and get a sandwich and a coffee from the cafeteria and bring it up and eat lunch with you?” he said.

“Okay, but make it quick; I’m having a hunger tantrum now.”

He got his sandwich and a black coffee to go and carried it back up to her room. They ate in relative quiet. There was little to say. But they had been together long, and having nothing to say was not awkward. When they were through he left.

“I’ll come back around suppertime with the kids and we’ll, like, have supper with you.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to bring food in.”

“No, we’ll eat at home, but early, so we can come down and be with you while you eat. I assume you have stuff this afternoon.”

“Yes.”

“Okay, see ya.”

“Bye-bye.”

She heard his step recede down the corridor and heard him joke with Nurse Pike, the head nurse, as he passed the charge desk, and then he was gone. He always made her feel stronger. She knew he could do everything that had to be done. Absolutely everything, she thought. Take my courses, take care of the kids, whatever. He is always there. Always. There was about him a quality of massive stability. It was hard to remember when he hadn’t been there.

A half hour after Ace left, Dr. Helen Walsh, the anesthesiologist, came to visit. She asked Joan about allergies and loose teeth and things anesthesiologists need to know. But she had also come to talk. For Joan she was a pleasure, a doctor, a woman, and a warm concerned person.

“This is Connie Coward, Helen. I’m afraid of pain.”

“There will be medication,” Helen said. “We can deal with pain all right.”

“Will I be crazy, screaming, bothering people? I don’t want to do badly.”

Helen shook her head. “You won’t be. It won’t be that bad. Some discomfort yes, but not pain. Nothing medication won’t get you through fine. You really needn’t worry about that.”

It was true what Jude had told her, and now Helen had said it and Joan believed it. She seems to respect me. That helps. Her respect is helpful.

In the late afternoon Judy and John came to visit. John was a hockey coach, a muscular jock-ethic man who used humor as they themselves did as a means of concealment and a tool of communication.

For Joan he was in a way the symbolic male, the one who had to accept her loss of sexuality on behalf of all males. She dreaded the first meeting, fearing what she might sense, afraid he might feel something he could not conceal, conscious that she must put him at once at ease, nervous that perhaps she couldn’t. It was a real hurdle for her, and an indication of her postoperative state of mind. Her breast was still there, but already she acted as if it were gone.

As she waited for them to come she reflected partially about the degree to which being the object of sexual desire was one base of her relationship with men. It was not that she slept around or wanted to, though she’d always been as she said to Ace, “curious.” She had been only with her husband and it seemed very likely now that she only would be. But being desired seemed, now that she feared she wouldn’t be, to have been a larger part in her male friendships than she had thought. It was not so much that she perceived desire from them as that she felt herself desirable. John, because he was in some ways an extreme of masculinity, loomed to her as a test case. If John were not visibly put off, perhaps men wouldn’t be. Ace, for all his maleness, was no test. They both knew that. His feelings were irrevocable, as fixed as the sun.

The thing she had been saying to people about her upcoming surgery was, “Easy come, easy go.” And she used it on John and Jude when they came. It was a good start and John seemed to like the remark and treat her as before. He did not seem to see her as grotesque or as grotesque-to-be. If he did he concealed it so well that she got no sign of it. They talked as easily and humorously, their humor full of put-downs, as they always did. When they left her she was buoyed by their visit. No one seemed horrified, no one was full of pity. Everyone expected her to recover and be what she had been.

Monday afternoon David went to the library and looked up breast cancer. He’d had the feeling when his mother and father went yesterday to the hospital that more than a simple cyst was involved.

Dad didn’t seem like a man driving his wife to the hospital for a little cyst operation. He seemed like a man driving his wife to the hospital with breast cancer.

He spent an hour in the town library researching breast cancer and when he left he was certain his mother had it. But he said nothing to anyone.

In Tuesday’s mail there had come, also, a note from Billy Ganem — she had known him since she had known Ace — and the letter, like John and Jude’s visit, helped her through another day. It was an honest expression of pain at her illness and of love that would endure beyond any illness. It surely had been a hard letter to write. Billy, like John and like Ace, for that matter, was a product of the fifties, and of assumption about male behavior that limited displays of emotion. It was another piece in the structure of support that built up around her that spring, a structure as important to her as the medical skills that the hospital supplied and the capacities of Eliopoulos’s hands.

The boys and Ace came and stayed with her at supper, and watched television for some time afterward. It was little different than it would have been at home except that they all had to watch the same program, and Ace, who hated almost all television equally, got restless and walked around the room and up and down the corridors and bitched about the programming. At home he could retire to another room. Dan called weather and time on Joan’s phone, fascinated with a private phone of one’s own.

Tuesday night they brought her an assortment of movie fan magazines. She had a passion for fan magazines but was embarrassed to buy them. She read them only at the beauty parlor.

“The clerk looked at me kind of funny,” Ace said when he gave her the magazines. “I bought one of every kind they had, except a whole issue devoted to Bobby Sherman.”

Dave said, “You don’t look like a teeny-bopper.”

Dan said, “How about a Big Bopper,” and everyone laughed.

Ace said, “There used to be a rock-and-roll singer named the Big Bopper.”

“How about Whale Bopper?” Dan said.

“Want to hear my Big Bopper impression?” Ace said.

“No.”

The kids fought a bit over what program to watch, and at nine the security guard came around, carrying his time clock and nightstick, and said that visiting hours were over.

“Be sure to meet my class tomorrow,” she said as they left.

“Of course,” he said.

When she was alone at night Joan thought about Jerry Wilkinson and her prayers. It must be a great comfort to have that kind of belief. I’m not sure I have no belief, but... I certainly don’t have any belief in a benevolent God that’s taking care of me, working out my life to the best advantage. What’s that line that Ace uses?... The ways of the Lord are often dark but never pleasant. Who said that originally? I’ll ask Ace. I know it’s not his. Anyway I could make some kind of bargain. But with whom? Maybe if I became a believer again? If I believe and promise to believe always you’ll make this just be breast cancer and spare the rest of my body. You can take the boob and give me the rest of my body. Balls. What kind of God is that who would say, Oh, okay. We were going to infuse your entire body with cancer, but as long as you agree to believe in me, we won’t. Well just take one boob. I can’t accept that God. If he’s up there I decline to accept him anyway. That’s no deal.

She was watching the “Johnny Carson Show.” The sound came from the small speaker by her bed, and it had fallen away and hung from its strap, turned away from her. She couldn’t hear what was being said, just a low entertainment noise and Carson’s face like a good-natured boyish Satan. He seems so good a man. How could all those divorces have happened? Why can’t he live with a wife? He can’t quit smoking either. But I can. I have. And I can make that deal with myself. I’ve been back-sliding, a cigarette here, a puff on someone’s there. I’m not becoming a smoker again, hut this situation makes smoking more needful. If I get out of this I won’t be a smoker again ever. I won’t start smoking a few cigarettes at parties and worrying about whether I’m creating lung cancer, and waking up with the terrible smoking taste in my mouth and he scared about that. I won’t smoke again if I get out of this. That’s a deal with me, not with God.

The pact with herself was something that made sense to her, and yet she knew there was superstition involved as well. Though she never felt a benevolent God by her side she was never able entirely to rid herself of the feeling that something was out there. Some presence. Maybe just a hangover from childhood belief, she thought, maybe superstition. But there was a sense of someone out there to whom she addressed remarks now and then without thinking about it. “Listen, you’ve got to help me through this. I need help with this. Get me through tonight. Give me the strength to endure this.” Who am I talking to? Is it really God I’m talking to? I don’t know. She thought about mysticism. About contacting those who had died before her. Her mother, her father. She had some acquaintances who were very much convinced of the reality of such extracorporeal matters. What do I do, start calling? Hello, out there. Hey, here I am. This is the time. This is when I need you. It seemed laughable to her. She had to reject that. But she was looking for something and she very much wanted belief. She needed some pattern to this. Some way to order the experience and impose meaning on it. But she couldn’t, and she had come, by late that night before surgery, to the simple realization that there was no order or meaning to it. She came to think of it as she did always thereafter as simply something that happened to her.

The meaning she found was in the mature and caring response of her children, the permanence of her husband, the commitment of her friends, the warm support of the nurses. I don’t know if there are any atheists in foxholes, she thought as she drifted into sleep. But there aren’t any misanthropes, I’ll bet. Sleep was sound and dreamless. She had expected to spend the night awake and frightened. She did not. She couldn’t remember getting a sleeping pill. She never did remember and she never thought to ask. Maybe Valium, she thought. Maybe it’s Valium that’s putting me to sleep.