Three Weeks in Spring

Chapter 20

That’s another one, he thought as he hung up. He had a kind of mental hall of fame where he collected great moments in his life.

“What did Mom want?” Dan asked.

There was when Joan agreed to marry me, and when I came home from Korea, and when we were married, and when the boys were born, and when the first novel was published. And now there’s this.

Dan said, “Dad?”

“Mom just wanted to tell me that her last tests came back negative.”

Dave looked up from his drawing.

“What’s that mean?”

Ace felt a physical effort at control. He had a wordless sense that to overplay his relief would scare them retrospectively.

“It means that the cancer hasn’t spread anywhere.”

“So she’ll be all right,” David said.

“Yes, as good as ever, except a few ounces lighter.”

“When will she come home?” Dan asked.

“I don’t know yet. Next week sometime, I imagine.”

“Were you worried about the cancer spreading?” David asked. He doesn’t miss a lot, Ace thought. Both of them are more aware than they’ve let themselves show.

“I’m glad the tests were negative,” he said. “There will be some time in here when Mom may be kind of depressed.”

“Why? She’s all right now, isn’t she?” David said.

“David, she lost a boob, you know,” Dan said. He was angry.

“So what. No one can tell.”

“Oh, David...”

“Okay, don’t argue about it, for crissake. Just listen to me for a minute. For a woman to lose a breast is like, well, there is no masculine equivalent. A breast is largely ornamental if you don’t breast-feed. But it is part of a woman’s sense of who and what she is.”

“What’s that mean?” Dan asked.

“When a woman is a little kid, she thinks of growing up and becoming a woman. One of the symbols of that is when she begins to get boobs. Boobs tend to make her feel adult and womanly, the object of sexual affection.”

“Yes, but you don’t care, do you? She’s no less sexy to you, is she?” David said.

Jesus, this is tough. “No, but she fears that she might be, and might be less sexy to other men.”

“But she’s not going to screw with other men,” Dan said.

“You bet your ass she’s not. But that doesn’t matter. She needs to think of herself as sexually desirable, maybe the way I need to think of myself as strong. If something happened somehow and I had to be weak. Maybe that’s an analogy. It’s not that I need the physical strength all that much. It helps a little maybe when I do carpentry, or for picking up one end of something. But mostly it’s ego and sense of self. And it helps fill my shirt sleeves out.”

“But she’s not a woman because she has two boobs,” David said, “anymore than you’re a man because you have big muscles.”

“That’s true. That’s logically so. But logic matters less than feeling, and feeling is what we’ve got here. I think she’ll deal with this fine. But I’m telling you it is going to be something she’ll have to deal with.”

Neither of them looked persuaded. “Take my word for it,” he said. The refuge of parents. Take my word for it. They’ll take my word for things about as often as I took my parents word for things.

Joan hung up the phone and lay back in the bed, alone now. It is the light at the end of the tunnel. We won. We beat it. I know I had no control over the fact that the cancer didn’t spread. But I feel like I did. I feel like somehow I was a good kid and didn’t bitch a lot. I know that’s nonsense. I’m just delighted with myself. Okay, I’m going to show them. I can deal with a mastectomy. A mastectomy, that’s nothing. Boy am I lucky and am I gonna show them. I’m not sure who them is. The world. Or God who I’m not sure is there. Or the doctors, or I don’t know. But I’m gonna show them. Okay, they dealt me this hand with a mastectomy in it. Can I take that? Yes. But the other, the involvement with the rest of the bod. I’m not so sure I could have taken that well. But for now at least I don’t have to. So now they’re going to see something that will make Betty Ford and Happy Rockefeller eat their hearts out, because I’m going to be wonderful. No chemotherapy. No radiation. I’m going to do just fine now that I know where I stand.

She pulled her makeup case from the bedside table and opened it. The inside of the cover was a mirror and she held it up away from her to look at her chest. She had her robe on, zippered up and she didn’t unzip it. She had no desire yet to unzip it. The bandages made a slightly rounded effect on the left side under the robe and balanced quite equally with the right side of her chest. Well, if someone comes to visit me they’ll barely be able to tell which side is which. The boob that’s left is hardly different from the small lump the bandages make. Not being heavily endowed has its advantages.

The news of her escape changed Joan’s entire impulse. Until then she had wanted secrecy. She had wanted to avoid the weight of her cancer and her surgery falling on another person, making them awkward and discomforted. She had dreaded people meeting her and looking surreptitiously and asking themselves, “Which side is it?” Or having her friends think, “Oh, here comes Joan, we’d better be careful what we say.”

Now I don’t much give a shit about that. I feel so exhilarated. I’m going to feel so good as I recover from this surgery, and the surgery isn’t that bad. She wanted to get hold of the feelings. She wanted to be on top of them and keep the feeling of positiveness and strength that she felt now.

I owe somebody something for this. I have gotten a great gift and I owe for it. I wonder whom I want to pay? God, in whom I don’t believe? Fate? Mother Nature? I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter. I need to repay.

‘Listen,’ she could say, ‘it isn’t that bad, or at least it wasn’t for me. Chances of your developing breast cancer are one in fifteen. But you can catch it early. There are ways. You can examine your breasts. You must learn to do that.’ In her mind she was standing before them. All the women. Lecturing. And she realized that the image was from her classroom. She had a special opportunity, she knew. In touch, as she was daily, with young women, at an all-woman’s college. ‘You must learn to examine your own breasts. And you must do it regularly. You must have a regular checkup and you must demand breast examination.’ The classroom was enormous and all the women gazed at her and listened intently. ‘And you must remember if it should happen that you knew someone who had it and she was okay. How scary can it be? You should say to yourself, “Look at Joan Parker. She handled it wonderfully”.’ She could almost hear the applause, swelling, sustained, heartfelt. She felt good. She could make her contribution. She could have her impact. The idea that the force of her personality could influence others was a very seductive idea. It had always been seductive to her. It was always the source of her greatest self-satisfaction to touch someone’s life through the force of her feeling and personality, and to make that life different because of the contact. I love to be able to do that, she thought. That is just the biggest ego trip for me and I have a chance to do this now.

High-ceilinged and thick with servants, the dining room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel looked out over the Public Garden, and the lights of cars on Arlington Street. Gary was a good talker and the boys liked him. Ace was able to regroup, as he thought of it, as the meal progressed. He always ate and drank with pleasure and attention, but tonight he was unaware of much that he ate. He thought of something that Winston Churchill had said, ‘Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result!’ The phrase stayed in his mind. It lingered in the background of his thoughts and feelings, like background music. He and Gary split a bottle of wine. David wore a pale green leisure suit. Dan had on a double-breasted blazer, light blue with brass buttons. That suit’s getting small for Dave. Shot at without result. Goddamn.

“Where’d you eat in London?” Gary was asking.

“We ate at Simpson’s,” Dave answered.

“And lunch at the London Zoo.” Dan said. “Yuk.”

There was a bottle of Rhine wine in the bucket by the table and one of the waiters poured a bit more in his glass. When she’s out, I’ll bring her here. Just the two of us. And we’ll have anything we want and a bottle of wine and maybe two. And we can walk in the Public Garden in the early evening. Before the muggers get active. He smiled inside at his own sense of disproportion, as if he’d shared it with her. He realized suddenly that it was the first time he’d thought about doing something in the future since she’d gotten sick. ‘It better be a big mugger,’ he said to her inside, and laughed out loud inside. That’s one aspect of the excitement. I can start thinking ahead, again. I can plan. I don’t have to focus entirely on this day and repel anticipation. He felt orderly again, but very inward. ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes.’ It’s not what Emily Dickinson meant, but the phrase is good. The voices of his sons and his friend seemed to come from outside; there was an echo to them. The check came and he paid it and they drove Gary home to Belmont through the new-darkened April night. The car emphasized the containment and new structure of his resurrected life. He looked at Daniels profile beside him as they drove, lit by the city and the dashboard lights. Dan looked just like him. Even he could see it. It was like looking back at himself sometimes. There I am starting over.

They got home too late for the hospital and the boys went to bed. He sat alone for a while at the kitchen counter and drank two cans of beer and thought barely at all. He looked very carefully at the workmanship in the kitchen. At the beams he’d installed in the ceiling, at the stained-glass window in the brick wall. His eye traced the miter line on the molding that framed the window, and he traced along the squared corners of the cabinets that he’d built. He could still feel the contour of the saw handle and the balance of the hammer in his hand. Things fitted smoothly. There were flaws, but they were hidden and the construct was a balanced and serviceable one. The lines were straight. The room was clean. And well-lighted, he thought. And it heals stronger at the break, and all that stuff. Me and you, Ern. He could let himself drink a little now. He could get drunk now. He didn’t need to be sure of his control. So necessary had it been that it occurred to him now that he hadn’t even wanted to drink. So compelling was the need for holding the center intact that he had instinctively avoided anything that would relax his will. Well, we’ve established that. When it gets bad I won’t turn to drink, as they say. He looked at the dog. The dog looked back with that slightly apprehensive alertness he always showed if you stared at him. “I’m okay, kid,” he said aloud to the dog. “We’re all okay. You too.” His voice seemed normal and pleasant to him. It was at home in the room. He felt comfortable talking aloud to the dog. It was as close as he would come to praying.