Three Weeks in Spring

Chapter 19

Joan lay on the bed after they left and read Movie Screen Mirror. What drivel, she thought. I love it. She read and drifted into sleep and woke and read and the adventures of Dick and Liz merged with her sleep and she wasn’t clear if she read about them or dreamed about them. Then Liz gave way to Helen Walsh and Joan was awake again.

“Hi, Helen.”

“Joan, I have good news for you,” Helen said. Other women were crowding in behind her. “We got the lab report back on the lymph nodes. There’s no involvement. It’s all negative. There’s no lymph node involvement at all.”

We weren’t supposed to know till Friday, Joan thought. The other women were in the room now. An army of women, it seemed to Joan. Laughing and hugging her and kissing her and hugging and kissing each other. Operating-room nurses, floor nurses, candy stripers, technicians, therapists. The female voices filled with pleasure, women’s laughter, excited and very glad, an emanation of tears long retained, now joyfully flowing, these things seemed to flood through her, seemed somehow the exterior manifestation of the posture of her own spirit. She had escaped. She was coming back.

“Oh, Helen,” she said.

Helen Walsh nodded, her eyes very bright. “I know,” she said, “I know.”

Joan wanted to hug them all, everyone who had been there with her, who had cared enough to cry with relief. Who now capered and whooped like Girl Scouts at a jamboree, unencumbered at this moment by men, unformed by the attitudes of husband or father, it was a moment of pure femaleness, of sisterhood much more profound and enveloping than genetic sisterhood could be. It was not a time for Ace or the boys or Benny, the respiration therapist, or Dr. Eliopoulos or Dr. Barry. It was we girls writ large. It was at this brief place their triumph. A triumph that no man could fully share. My God, Joan thought, I am a super broad. So are we all, all super broads. The euphoria was like something she’d felt before. After the babies were born she had had this same sense of personal and feminine triumph. She could still remember that feeling and she reveled in this one. By Christ, she thought, I have done a hell of a thing. I have produced two magnificent babies and I am a goddamned woman and a half. No one could have done it better. And the two achievements fused in her mind now. She never knew why exactly that community of sisterhood, and the fusion of childbirth and her own resurrection were so powerful. She was conscious of a great euphoric belonging and a sense of triumph shared with other women.

At bottom, in the pool of their collective unconscious, they all perhaps were gleeful in the ultimate feminine triumph, the life-bearing female victory over death. It was several minutes before she thought of Ace or the boys.

In Boston, Dave and Dan waited in his small square office decorated with David’s sketches, photographs of the boys, and a large round bird that Dan had colored in grammar school.

“I’m going to find Gary,” he said to them. “Kill a few minutes here while I do.” Often they would complain; Dan would say, I want to come too. But now they didn’t. It was as if they knew that their father had all he could handle. Looking back at the time later, he couldn’t remember them fighting, and they seemed more willing to do what he asked than was their custom. Down the beige hall, the old brick painted new beige, through the hollow-core swinging doors, Gary’s office was just like his, but windowless. “Seniority,” he always said to Gary. “I’m a big-deal Associate Professor. You are a pishika Assistant Professor. You’re lucky they give you a roof over your head.”

Gary was in. “Big Bobbo,” he said as Ace came through the door. “How is your sabbatical?”

“It sucks,” Ace said. “I’m going to tell you some stuff. Then I’m going to ask a favor.”

“Okay.” Gary was ten years younger, with a modish Caucasian Afro. He dressed carefully and currently. “What’s wrong?”

“There is no proper way to react to what I’m going to tell you. I know that. You don’t have to worry about how to act.”

“We discovered a week ago that Joan had breast cancer, and her left breast was removed yesterday morning. As far as we know she’s fine. We’ll wait for final biopsy reports tomorrow or Monday.”

Gary said, “Jesus Christ.”

“I know,” Ace said. “She’s doing fine. So am I. The thing is, it’s David’s birthday, and we are going to the Ritz for dinner. I need another adult.”

“Sure,” Garry said. “Of course. What time are you going?”

“Reservations are for six. I’m just killing time till then.”

“Jesus Christ,” Gary said.

“I wouldn’t have anything to say either. Don’t try. We’ll just go along like we always do. I’ll be Leo Gorcey, you be Huntz Hall.”

“Oh, swell,” Gary said. “Do I have to pay for dinner too?”

“If you paid for dinner wed end up at Ugi’s famous onion Sub Shop. I’ll pay, for my kids’ sake. How do you think they feel having dinner at the Ritz with an Armenian?” The banter was as it always was in their friendship, but it was not easy this time for either of them.

“Why don’t you go home and change,” Ace said. “And I’ll get the kids and pick you up at your place.”

“Aren’t you going to dress up?”

“I am dressed, turkey.”

“But for what?”

“Try not to look like the lead singer in a rock group, okay. This is your basic Ritz.”

Gary left and Ace went back down the hall to his office.

Dan was typing and Dave was looking at the books.

“Gary’s going to join us tonight, okay?”

Dave nodded. Dan said, “Yes.” They both liked Gary. He was ten years nearer their age and very open and easy.

Dan picked up the phone and said, “Let’s call Mom.”

His impulse was to say no, impatiently. But he knew Dan needed reassurance and he knew there wasn’t much to do till six, and he knew Dan would like the idea of calling his mother in a hospital room from his father’s office. He could remember himself wanting to do things like that. It was the differentness of it. “Yeah, sure, go ahead. You dial nine, then the number. Here I’ll write it down for you.”

While Dan dialed he went to check his mail. There was a notice that someone had been named Director of Placement and someone else Supervisor, Buildings and Grounds. There was a flyer from a publisher that proffered a new book to solve the students’ writing problems, and there was a short round mailing tube from his London publisher containing advance copy of their dust-jacket design for the English edition of his new novel.

“Hey, I’ve,” he said to the department secretary. “How’s that grab you?” He showed her the jacket. She was a handsome girl with dark hair and black eyes and a mobile face. She twisted the face into a gesture of noncommittal. He turned the jacket over and showed her his picture on the back. It was the same picture that was always used. One of the running jokes among his friends was about how sick everyone was of his picture. “Okay,” he said, “how’s that one grab you, Cookie?”

She said, “Did you know that you are the same age as my mother?”

“Oh,” he said. “That’s how it grabs you.” They both laughed. She doesn’t know, he thought. That’s a kind of dividing line in my life. Those who know and those who don’t.

Dan came through the lounge and into the main office where his father was talking to Ivy. “Dad, Mom wants to talk with you.”

Ivy said, “Hi, Daniel.”

Dan said, “Hi.” As Ace went back to his office he could hear Daniel talking to Ivy. He loves that. He loves adults and being in with them. He’s really quite charming sometimes, too.

When he went into his office Dave was sitting at his desk, drawing on a lined pad he’d found. The phone, off the hook, lay on the desk. He picked it up without disturbing David and spoke standing. He dropped his voice very deep and said, like a ham actor, “Yes, my dear?”

Joan’s voice on the other end said, “No nodes.”

Daniel had come back in his office too. Ace was very aware of the boys there. They hadn’t known of the degree of danger. He shouldn’t overreact now.

He said, “None?”

“None. Zero node involvement.” A picture of himself at the Ritz eating well. A sense of having sighed very deeply, a sense almost detumescent. How fine it was that Dan had called.

He let his breath out audibly in a long slow sound. “That is a very good thing,” he said.

“No chemotherapy. No radiation. Isn’t it wonderful?”

“Yes. The boys are right here.”

“And you can’t talk,” she said.

“That’s right, but if I could you know what I would say.”

“Yes.”

“We have here, I think, the light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I’ll be in tomorrow morning after class, to see you. We’ll speak of this then.”

“Yes.”

“Love,” he said.

“Love.”