Three Weeks in Spring

Chapter 17

Several times he called the hospital and Judy told him Joan was still asleep. Shortly before the boys came home from school, he called again and Joan was awake.

“How long I don’t know,” Judy said. “But why don’t you bring them down as soon as they come home. She’s lucid enough when she’s awake.”

It was nearly three when he drove with his sons to the hospital. When they had gone to school he had not yet known if Joan had in fact had a mastectomy. Now, after school, on the short drive to the hospital was the first chance he had to tell them. There was no easy way. Both boys were in the front seat with him.

“Mom is fine,” he said. “But she had her left breast removed.”

Dan said, “She did?”

David was silent.

“The cyst was cancerous, and they had to take the breast.”

“Did you know they were going to?” David asked.

“No, we thought they might, but we felt you shouldn’t have to deal with the possibility, only with the fact.”

Dan said, “Have you seen her?”

“Yes.”

“Does she look funny?”

“No, you can’t tell really. There are bandages, but they don’t show and your mother has never been known as Barbara Bosoom.”

David said, “Has the cancer spread?”

“No. They took tests Monday and Tuesday, body scans.”

Dan interrupted, “What’s a body scan?”

“X-rays of various parts of her body. X-rays of her bones, liver, lungs, that sort of thing. Anyway the tests all came out negative. That is, there is no cancer in other parts of her body.”

“So she’s going to be okay.”

“Yes.” He wasn’t as sure as he sounded. “Probably. There’s a couple of other tests they will take. But everything looks good.” The details of lymph-node involvement and its implications were more than he thought he should ask them to deal with. If there was involvement they would have to deal with it, as he would. If there were not, there was no point in anticipatory fear. He could spare them that. If it were bad they would have the chance to be afraid and to sample the full measure of its badness. But not until they had to, and unless they had to. And what he had answered was true. It will make my fear no less if they are afraid too. It is not their job to help me deal with fear. That is my job. John Waynesque phrases resonated inside him that spring. He was aware that they were trite, but they were there, inside him, and he found that in extremes they were true, and they worked. There are things a man must do served much better than woe is me.

“Can we tell people?” Dan said.

“Mom still has some impulse to keep this a secret, but I think that she will change her mind. It can’t be kept a secret. I see no reason why it should be. I think she has a right to require us to be secret until she does change her mind. As far as I’m concerned you can tell everyone you want to anything you want. Will either of you be embarrassed?”

“No.”

“No, why should we be embarrassed?”

“No reason, I simply asked. Sometimes a kid might find it embarrassing to talk about his mother’s boob. I don’t think you would be, but I thought I’d better check.”

They seemed sincerely puzzled at the prospect of embarrassment and he was relieved. At least that’s not a problem, he thought.

They wheeled into the parking lot at Union Hospital and went up to Joan’s room. The boys seemed okay. The loss of a breast didn’t seem to hit them much differently from, say, the loss of an appendix. I wonder, if they were girls would it strike them more? Or is it striking them more than they show? I always tell them to let their emotions out, to express them, let them show. But I always repress mine, and, then tend, I think, to learn more from what I do than what I say. He laughed at himself. Christ, Bob, you are a profound bastard. You really know kids.

When they went in the room Dan was frightened. He was scared to see Joan, for fear of how she’d look. When he saw her he thought she looked awful. Lying in the white bed, the IV in her hand, the white bedding rumpled around her. Her lip-sticked mouth a bright slash against her white face. Why did he tell us right before we came? Dan thought. She looks awful.

“Hi, Ma,” he said.

She was awake and animated. She seemed completely lucid now. They all knew that she would put out her best for the kids when they came, but even so it was convincing.

“Did Daddy tell you what the operation was?”

“Yes.”

“Well, easy come, easy go.”

“Besides,” Ace said, “now you can get bras at half price.” Once you got an act that works, he thought, you may as well keep playing it. Now is not the time to break in new material.

They already knew, between them in the soundless communication that had evolved out of twenty years together, that this was the handle they were going to grasp. They had already established, without once saying so, the basic joke, and they would work variations on it as long as there was need.

The boys’ visit was blurry to Joan. Later they all discovered that she forgot much during the April days that followed surgery. She was always lucid and rational when she spoke, but she sometimes repeated things and she forgot things.

On Thursday, April 24, when they went to visit, she did not know whether they had been there Wednesday. She had a sense of Ace’s presence. Not so much a memory of his visit but an instinct that he had been there. But she always knew the breast was gone. It was as if she had never discovered it, simply that she had awakened knowing it. The way you know that you have a nose, or that you breathe. It was simply a part of her consciousness.

She felt all right. Wednesday night, after visiting hours, she had felt some little nausea. She had mentioned it to a nurse, and almost at once there was a small shot in the buttocks and the nausea was gone. It never came back.

Ace came right after the boys went to school. She was awake when he came in and sitting up.

“How is it?” he said.

“Fine, really, I feel okay. The incision isn’t bad at all. But my goddamned left arm hurts like hell.”

“That’s dumb,” he said. “They did not remove your arm, they removed your boob. Your boob is supposed to hurt.”

“Well, it doesn’t.”

“You can’t do anything right,” he said.

“Did you cover my class yesterday?”

“Of course not. I stayed home and waited for Eliopoulos to call.”

“Did you let them know?”

“I canceled it Monday.”

“Jesus, they won’t like that.”

“They should feel free to discuss it with me when I go in Friday.”

“Don’t get mad at anyone. Please, I don’t want that. I have to work there.”

“Me, Mr. Warm?”

“Yes.”

“Oh for crissake, Joan. I’m not a goddamned animal. Of course I’ll be pleasant. What do you think I am?”

“I know what you are, and I know sometimes if you get mad you can be really lousy to people. And it would just make it harder for me if you blow up at any of the people down there.”

“How about I give the whole administration an hour to get out of Beverly?”

“Besides,” she said, “I like some of those people.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“How are the boys?”

“Good, they’re okay. They seemed not too shook about it.”

“Were they here yesterday?”

“Yep. You talked to them terrific. You were good.”

“Good. When are you going to do David’s birthday?”

“Today. I got the tickets and everything. I figure we’ll just go ahead and do what we were going to do.”

“Yes.”

“Have they given you anything for the arm pain?”

“I don’t know. It’s not bad unless I move a certain way.”

“What do they say it is?”

“Oh, they talk about lymph nodes and certain glands being removed. But to me it feels like a pinched nerve. You know. Like a hot needle sticking me if I turn a certain way.”

“How about the rest of you. The boob area and such?”

“The discomfort is really very minimal,” she said. What a pleasure to listen to her talk, he thought. How come I’m a writer and she’s not and she talks beautifully and I don’t. Her expressions were so graceful, and her sentences were so full and complete. She seemed always to know ahead of time exactly what she wanted to say. And yet the language rolled out spontaneous and fresh. Funny. When she tries to write things it doesn’t come out. Speaking and writing appear to be different gifts. Another insight. Mr. Deep.

“All I can compare it to is a sunburn. I don’t mean it burns like a sunburn. The sensation is different. But the level of aggravation is about the same. You know. You go to work or clean the house or drive a car when you have a pretty good sunburn and you say to yourself, ‘Oh, this sunburn is really annoying.’ It never keeps you from functioning. It’s just sort of annoying. And you’ll be glad when it’s better. You know?”

“Is it tight?”

“A little. They took some tissue and the skin is sort of right against the rib cage. There’s no padding, and until that rebuilds it will be sort of tight.”

“When you come home we can do a little weight work and build that up,” he said. “It’s just pectoral muscle and if it’s slow coming back we can build it up with some bench presses or flies.”

“Oh, flies sounds super.”

“I got a fly for you,” he said.

“They got me up this morning.”

“How was that?”

“Okay. Moving around makes my arm hurt but other than that it was okay.”

“Want to get up with me?”

“Not right now. Maybe before you go I’ll go to the bathroom.”

“You want visitors?”

“Yes. I get tired sometimes, but otherwise I’d like them.”

“Want me to tell the students to come?”

“You can tell them they can come if they want to.”

“Want me to tell them what happened?”

“No. I will do that. I should. They should hear it from me.”

“What time do you have to be at the theater?”

“Matinee begins at two o’clock. I’ll get the kids out of school early. I already sent a note. We’ll come down here around noon, visit you for an hour and then go into town.”

“Are you eating out?”

“Yes. I have dinner reservations at the Ritz.”

“I feel bad not being there for Dave’s birthday.”

“I think it was very selfish of you to have breast cancer on your son’s sixteenth birthday.”

“I went to the bicentennial Patriot’s Day parade though.”

“You’re not all bad,” he said. “Have you seen your incision yet?”

“No. Maybe today. I’m kind of afraid to look. How bad could it be though? The bandage isn’t that big. Eliopoulos is very happy with it. He says it’s one of the best jobs he’s done.”

“I like a man that takes pride in his work,” Ace said. “I would think that the sooner you looked the better off you’d be. Same for me.”

“I don’t want you to see it. Not yet anyway.”

“I should see it sometime. It’s not curiosity. It’s simply better to know than not to know.”

“Not yet.”

“Sure, not yet. But when you can. When you’re ready. The thought doesn’t appall me. It doesn’t excite me either. I mean I’m not a scar freak. I just think it should be like everything else, something that we share. I know you got cut, but it’s still our surgery, not just yours. It’s been harder on you, but only a little.”

“I know. Eunie said today they’d change the bandages and she’ll tell me if it’s okay to look.”

“What do you mean okay?”

“Eunie will look and tell me if it’s too yukky for me to look at still.”

“Yeah, okay.” He felt slightly jealous of Eunie. He wanted to be the one to look first and decide on such matters. But he was also a little relieved. Maybe it was quite yukky. Maybe it was better for Eunie to look first. He also knew that there was a matter of shared femaleness there that he could not violate, even if he wished to, and part of him did.

“I think I’ll try walking to the bathroom. You want to stand over here.”

She sensed his jealousy, his sense of exclusion. She wanted him to help her now, to let him participate, to feel important. For all the mature strength he had, she knew also there was a lot of small boy in there as well. It would help him if now he took her arm and helped her walk.

He stood by her as she moved very carefully to swing her feet off the bed. “Let me take your arm,” she said. “You just stand still and I’ll hold on to you, okay.”

As she got out of bed her arm had the sharp pain in it for a moment until she was upright. She held his arm and pulled herself upright. He was heavy and thick and easy to lean on. As she moved with him toward the bathroom an object like a canteen bumped against his leg. He could see it hanging from her shoulder. “What the fuck is that?” he said.

“It’s a, if you’ll pardon the expression, drain.”

“Yargh.”

“I know. Isn’t it gross?”

“There’s a tube from the incision?”

“Yes, keeps blood and fluid from collecting.”

“Okay, okay. I know all I want about that. Does it hurt?”

“No, not all, I don’t even notice it.”

With her leaning on his arm and him wheeling the IV apparatus besides her, they moved across the room to the bathroom, where she used the toilet, and then he brought her back.

In bed again she felt tired. As if she had walked a long way at a fast pace, and needed now to rest.

“Eliopoulos been in this morning?”

“Yes, early, I think. I’m very blurry.”

“What did he say?”

“Everything’s fine. They will have to wait for the lymph node biopsy to come back, but everything else is fine.”

“How long for the lymph nodes?”

“Two or three days, they said.”

“Naturally that takes us into Saturday and naturally that means not till Monday.”

“Maybe Friday.”

“Not likely,” he said.

“Well, we just have to wait.”

“Yep. We’ve come this far. I guess we can go a little farther.”

A nurse came in. She was their age, dark-haired and tall, her uniform very crisp. Joan said, “Ace, have you met my friend Eunie. Eunie, this is my husband.”

“Hello.”

“Hello, Eunie.”

“Your wife is the hit of the floor,” Eunie said.

“Laugh a minute,” he said.

“She really is. She’s a super patient.”

“You should see her whine when you’re not around, Eunie.”

“Not me,” Joan said. “A little soldier.”

“We’ve got some things to do,” Eunie said. “You’ll have to step out for a little while.”

“What time is it?” He never wore a watch.

“Eleven-ten,” Eunie said. “It’ll only take a few minutes. You could go down in the coffee shop.”

“No, that’s okay, I’ve got to get my kids anyway. I’ll pick them up and come back around noon.”

“Okay,” Joan said. “Bye.”

He gestured goodbye with his hand and went out. Eunie closed the door behind him and he went down the corridor, feeling again vaguely shut out.