Three Weeks in Spring

Chapter 18

Joan’s lunch came at five of twelve and she was just beginning to eat it when Ace and the boys arrived. She knew Ace had been there less than an hour ago. But she couldn’t remember exactly what they said. The boys had each brought her a get-well card.

Dan’s, illustrated with a series of drawings, said, “Some have two, some have a hundred, some have none, but we love you best with just one.”

David’s displayed a busty and sensuous Jane Russellesque woman on a gatefold card. When you opened the fold one breast disappeared. The card said,

The cards elated her. She felt a little high. Some of this perhaps was the waning effects of anesthesia, some was relief that surgery was over, some was a sense that the family was intact, the cards were loving and relaxed, and the boys were well. They would bear no scars, she knew. But there’s something in it for me, she thought. It’s a burden I won’t have to bear. I won’t have to scheme and work to see that this surgery doesn’t damage them. They are not shaken by it, and I don’t have that to deal with. That’s fantastic.

“I have a treat for you too, heart of mine,” Ace said. “So that your recovery time is not frittered away on daytime TV and gossip with the nurses, I have some reading matter.” He brought from behind his back another stack of movie magazines.

She was thumbing through the magazines talking with the boys as she did. Eunie came to take away Joan’s empty tray.

“Eunie, look at the cards the boys made.”

Eunie read them and laughed. She had children. She understood why Joan wanted her to see the cards. “That’s great,” she said. “That’s super.”

“Where did the flowers come from?” Dan asked. There were several plants and two vases of cut flowers in the room.

“I don’t remember,” she said. “I don’t even remember them arriving.”

“I’ll look,” Dan said.

“Do you remember us being here?” David asked.

“No, were you here yesterday?”

“Yes,” Dave said, “and we talked about how you felt and the surgery and everything. You don’t remember that?”

“No.”

Dan said, “Mom,” with exasperation.

“Well, I don’t,” she said. “The anesthesia makes you forget for a while. Helen Walsh told me that would happen. They had to keep me out for quite a while. And she said a big dose like that produces some loss of memory.”

“When David was born,” Ace said, “after I left from my first visit, where I stood there and she slept at me, they brought her lunch and she ate it and started eating the raspberry Jello for dessert, and fell asleep and the Jello melted and ran all over the spread.”

“I woke up,” Joan said, “and saw the red all over the sheets and thought I was hemorrhaging and called the nurse in a big panic.”

“Were they mad?” Dan asked.

“No, they laughed at me. I was trying to be so cool and under control. You know, ‘I beg your pardon nurse, I really hate to bother you, but I think I may be hemorrhaging here’.”

Dan said, “Here’s some flowers from Teddie and Kim.”

Ace said, “Are you loving the movie mags?”

“Yes. Do you remember the hairdresser I used to go to who found out I was a college professor and used to save the Atlantic and Saturday Review for me to read while I was in the chair? Everyone else was reading Screen Mirror and I had to read The New Republic.”

“Fine journal,” Ace said. “I got a good review from them last time out.”

“Well, I was dying. I wanted my movie mags.”

“Why didn’t you tell him you wanted the movie stuff?” David asked.

“I couldn’t bear to. He was so proud of having the intellectual stuff for me. I couldn’t bear to tell him that I was dying to read about Jackie and Ari and Liz and Dick.”

Ace stepped into the hall and looked at the clock. It was one o’clock. If we don’t leave now, Ace thought, we won’t make the theater. The boys were aware of the time too. Joan appeared not to notice. Ms. Pike, the head nurse, came in.

“I understand,” she said, “that there are some get-well cards here that I should see.”

“Oh, Ms. Pike,” Joan said, “look at these.”

Ms. Pike was a former Army nurse, a strapping woman with hard humorous eyes. As she looked at the cards she laughed silently, with her mouth closed. “I’d like to show these cards to a few other patients,” she said. “A lot of these people just go all to pieces after surgery. Not even surgery like yours either.”

“Well,” Ace said, “we probably ought to get under way.”

“Oh, no, not yet.” Joan said. “I really feel fine now. You don’t have to leave yet.”

She had forgotten the theater. All three of them knew that simultaneously. And all three of them knew simultaneously that they were not going to say anything. That they were going to stay with her and talk and not mention the theater. None of them said it, but all of them knew that the others knew and there was an unspoken unsignified agreement that they would stay with her as long as she wanted them. And they did.

Dan read off the names of the flower contributors. And they commented on them, not always favorably. Nurses came in and out, to look at the cards that Dave and Dan had made.

At two-fifteen Joan said, “Hadn’t you better be getting into Boston. You don’t want to miss the play.”

“Yeah,” he said, “you’re right.” Neither boy mentioned that the play had been under way already for fifteen minutes.

As they left he said, “We’re having dinner at the Ritz, and by the time we get back it will be too late to visit. I won’t see you till after your rotten class tomorrow.”

“Okay. Have a nice time. I’m sorry I can’t go.”

“You and me both.”

“Have a nice time at the theater, you guys,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” Ace said to her, leaning back in the door, “when I come tomorrow maybe we’ll know something.”

She nodded. They left. She wished he hadn’t said that. She had almost been able in the aftermath of surgery to forget the suspended lab report. Until they knew about lymph nodes they still didn’t know how bad it was. They still didn’t know if she was going to die. He’d been good. He had been, indeed a redwood tree where her fears had nested. But she wished he hadn’t shown his apprehension about the lymph nodes.

After surgery was much better than she’d feared. The pain was not anything like she’d feared it would be. In fact much less than the pain of childbirth. At worst there was discomfort. She didn’t feel mutilated. The bandages did not look ominous. The reality was so much less unpleasant than the anticipation that her postsurgical mood was up, and she had managed to smother the fear of metastasis.

One more thing. The lab report on the lymph nodes. Then it would be over, everything would be known. Or would it? Would it be that the lymphatic system was involved and there would have to be chemotherapy and radiation and maybe her hair would fall out. And wouldn’t it be just as uncertain. ‘Now, Mrs. Parker, we can’t say for sure. We hope it’s arrested. We’ll just have to take it a step at a time.’ God help me. I wish he hadn’t reminded me of the lymph nodes.

Ace and the boys drove into Boston. It was too late for the theater, but they could stop off at his office, kill a little time there, check his mail, and go to dinner at six when the Ritz opened its dining room doors.

“She didn’t seem to know the time,” Dave said.

“I know it,” Dan said, “and the clock was right there. Why is she like that?”

“I assume it’s the aftereffects of anesthesia,” Ace said. “This is a heavy dose. Maybe three or four hours’ worth, and she’s probably getting pain-killers too.”

“What are we going to do about the tickets?” Dave asked.

Ace shrugged. “I guess we eat them. I can’t go and exchange them after the play is already on, I assume. What we can do is stop at the theater right now and try. If they won’t, then I’ll just buy some for another time.”

As he drove into Boston the thought of waiting until Friday and perhaps Monday for the lab results pressed against his consciousness. To the boys the worst was over and he wanted them to stay that way. To him the worst might lie ahead. If only there was some goddamned closure. If only there was a point at which someone would say, ‘Okay that’s it. It’s over.’ It was the worry, the uncertainty, the dread that busts your halls. He felt tired, the evening looked very long to him, as he drove automatically through the city. He’d spent so much of his life in it, he drove in it the way he walked in his yard.

He left the station wagon running at the curb on Tremont in front of the Shubert and went into the lobby and bought tickets for another performance. He was embarrassed to ask about exchanging the tickets and he was tired. There was enough he had to make himself do without making himself do this. Sixty bucks, he thought. Sixty bucks won’t make much difference to me this time next year, whether I spend it or save it. But he was embarrassed by his reticence, and the sense he had that it was a weakness. And he told the boys that the theater would not exchange them.