Uncle Anton's Atomic Bomb

by Ian Woollen

  The ambassador, examining his pocket watch, said, “Anthony is just doing his job, like all of us. Unfortunately, I’ve got a plane to catch.”

  “Cut and run. That’s it? That’s all?” Ward jeered.

  He Who Remains Classified paused and considered. He unbuttoned and rebuttoned his vest. He leaned forward on his elbows to Anthony and said, “Okay, a favor in exchange for your cooperation. I’ll be your unnamed source. I’ll look into the Sakhalin incident. One of these days I’ll show up at your boat. You live at the marina near Potomac Heights. Will you be there alone?”

  “Yes, alone,” Anthony nodded.

  The ambassador departed. The Wangerts each sank into their own reverie. Utilizing the swivel function on their chairs, they spent the next few minutes slowly spinning full circles.

  Chapter 69

  Endgame

  A roiling anger at the icky taint of surveillance gradually gave way to a feeling of pity for Rusalka. She was just as much a victim, Ruby noted, forced into a double life. Ruby had known nothing of her partner’s mission.

  And what about Elbert? Was he in it too? Mary and Ward and Ruby talked it over and over, trying to remember any clues. Ward gave Rusalka credit for playing her role to the hilt. “Wait, no, was it a role?” Ruby countered, “I mean, in her own way, she behaved as if genuinely attached to us all.”

  They debated whether to tell Vincent and Kayla. Mary urged patience. She held out hope that with this new information and with their forgiveness, Rusalka could be convinced to return.

  Initially rattled by the Washington meeting, Mary came around to seeing it as a vindication of her peacemaking impulses. She pressed Ward to accompany her on a trip to Russia to make peace with Rusalka. “It’s an opportunity for us as a couple to return to Moscow and create closure on that episode too,” she said.

  Ward was skeptical, but thanks to all their recent travels, he was also a sucker for guidebooks. Mary bought every Moscow guidebook available.

  Tickets were purchased and the guidebooks pored over. Fodor’s recommended that American travelers to Russia receive immunization shots for cholera and typhoid. Three days after receiving his shots, Ward came down with the sorest sore throat he’d ever experienced. He assumed it was a reaction to the immunizations. The sore throat kept him up for two nights, at which point, groggy and irritable, he drove to the emergency room.

  The emergency room doctor prodded and poked and finally diagnosed an embolism underneath the right tonsil. He prepared for a surgical lancing. Ward’s blood tests came back without the expected high white cell count that typically signaled infection. The doc gave Ward some pain medication and an antibiotic and sent him home with an appointment to see an ENT specialist the next week. The soreness disappeared quickly and Ward almost forgot the follow-up appointment.

  Mary, peering down his throat with a flashlight, noticed a swollen lump.

  The ENT doc made a different diagnosis. He said, very matter-of-factly, “You have one extremely swollen tonsil, which I think we need to take out to make sure there isn’t a tumor inside.”

  Ward swallowed and asked, “Isn’t this probably just a reaction to my recent immunization shots?”

  The doctor said, “If that were the case, I think both tonsils would have reacted. Odd that it’s only one.”

  Ward said, “What about the antibiotic stopping the pain? I mean, antibiotics don’t work against malignancies, do they?”

  The doctor admitted, “That’s true. And I suppose we could try another round of antibiotics and see if the swelling comes down. If that doesn’t work, you should have it cut out.”

  “What about a biopsy?”

  “The problem with a biopsy,” the doctor explained, “is that it doesn’t give a complete picture. I could do a needle biopsy and it could come back fine, but I might have missed the tumor.”

  “Let’s don’t talk about tumors just yet,” Ward said.

  The trip to Russia never happened. Ward began to question if anything had ever really happened, which was sort of insane, but life had taken a turn for the mad, as he lay in his underwear on a table in the acupuncturist’s office with fifty needles stuck in his head, neck, and stomach. In a recurring dream he was Gulliver, beset with a thousand pinpricks of conscience.

  Acupuncture was Ruby’s idea. Mary agreed it was worth a try, while waiting ten days for the second round of antibiotics to work. The acupuncturist, with a perpetual smile, assured Ward that the swollen tonsil was most definitely a reaction to the immunizations. She predicted the swelling would come down in three months and that the tonsil’s pinkish color revealed its essential health; whereas a malignancy would have given it a darker color. Ward’s hours in her tiny examining room were complicated by antibiotic-induced diarrhea and by the extremely thin walls between the examining rooms.

  Mary adopted a blindly optimistic stance. She purchased a small penlight that made it easier to look down Ward’s throat, which she and Duncan did several times a day.

  “I knew there was something different about you,” Mary said. “Everybody else in our generation had their tonsils cut out as children.”

  “I want the surgery,” Ward announced.

  “The acupuncturist said it would take three months for the swelling to come down.”

  “I can’t wait that long,” Ward said. “It’s a cut and a snip, a routine procedure. If it turns out nothing is wrong, no big deal. I’ll have my tonsils out, just like everybody else.”

  A tonsillectomy for an adult is harder, because of the increased risk of bleeding. Ward’s surgery lasted five hours. The cauterization did not take.

  Duncan spelled Mary in the waiting room. He goaded the nurses into sending faxes and fired off emails to Kathryn. She was away singing a premiere in Houston.

  Ruby helped Mary stock the refrigerator at home with all the special post-surgery foods.

  They made the mistake of mixing up a blender of fresh blackberry smoothies for Ward’s first meal. Ward liked blackberries, but the tiny seeds in the drink scratched the wound and caused more bleeding. At least the pain meds did their job, knocking Ward into a daylong trance while they waited for the results from the pathology lab.

  Everyone felt hopeful. The ENT doc briefed Duncan at the hospital and reported that the excised tonsil looked and felt okay and that if the pathologist found a tumor inside, it would probably be benign.

  “The older I get, the more I think that ‘benign’ is the most beautiful word in the English language,” Mary said.

  “Begin the benign,” Ward mumbled.

  “Quiet, old man. You’re not supposed to talk,” Duncan ordered.

  “Where’s Kathryn? Did I see her at the recovery room?” Ward asked, woozily.

  “I told you; she’s out of town on a gig,” Duncan said.

  Mary took the call from the pathologist. It should have been Duncan. Mary fell into a slow-motion state of nervous muttering, attempting to make notes … “clear margin,” she said. She asked the pathologist to repeat everything twice. She stiffly delivered the update:

  Ward’s tonsil contained a malignant tumor that housed two kinds of cancer, one a very aggressive small-cell lymphoma, and the other an extremely rare sarcoma, follicular dendritic, which usually appeared in muscle tissue, not in the lymphatic system. The pathologist stated that he knew of only fifty cases of follicular dendritic cell sarcoma in the literature and only seven documented cases of such a dual manifestation.

  “Leave it to me to get a very sophisticated cancer,” Ward said.

  “Maybe if it gets written up, you can collect royalties,” Duncan said.

  “Not sure I’ll be around for that,” Ward rasped.

  Mary threw her reading glasses against the wall. Ruby pulled her close for a mutual sob. Duncan clapped his hands and resolutely announced, “The pathologist reported a clear margin. Even if it’s not curable, it can be treatable. We’ve got a lot of tricks up our sleeve, including a freezer full of ice cream which we are goi
ng to eat and enjoy!”

  The information avalanche began. On staging, on treatment and its side effects, on alternative treatments, diet, support groups, and all the subtle insinuations that Ward had unconsciously brought this cancer on himself. They parsed every word spoken by the oncologist. Hope rose and fell several times a day and latched onto random signs, such as a goldfinch landing on the windowsill during Ward’s CAT scan. The clear margin turned out to be not so clear, and neither was the staging, relative to the sarcoma and distinct from the lymphoma. Either way, the cancer had spread into his armpits and intestines.

  The surreal onslaught of decisions and prognoses—maybe one year, maybe more—and the stupefying transformation of his body into a pin cushion, with substances constantly being extracted or injected, pushed Ward into a mental pit. As he managed to explain to the chemo support group, “Personally, I can accept that such an affliction might occur to me as an individual, but in my roles as husband and father, cancer makes me feel like a failure.”

  “I’m letting you all down,” he confessed to Duncan. “Even if I’m just a figurehead, I’m supposed to be a healthy one.”

  “No, Dad, please, listen,” Duncan said. “You’ve been my teacher all along and now you’re teaching me how to go through this.”

  Duncan’s involvement was a silver lining. His organizational skill was well-known, but his willingness to devote it wholeheartedly to the care of his father was a godsend. He established and ran command central. He scheduled and transported and researched and sat around for hours in the infusion center during chemo treatments. He accompanied Ward for slow walks along the towpath. He drove Ward out to tour his new house. He bought a gigantic television and something called a VCR and hooked it up in the bedroom so they could watch movies.

  Duncan handled all communications with the public and his brothers. In this area, his control verged on the possessive. He dictated to Mary what could and could not be said to others. Rationalizing that Anthony and Rob had their own issues, he conveyed an overly rosy picture of Ward’s condition, so that no one felt compelled to fly home just yet. With the public, for all his cheerleading about cutting-edge advancements, Duncan still operated as if news of his father’s illness would be bad for business. He turned away the old ladies from the church’s Caring Committee.

  Whenever Ward or Mary thanked Duncan for taking so much time out of his domestic life with Kathryn, they received a vaguely enunciated “no-problem” comment about his wife being out of town, singing at this or that festival. These exchanges slowly shifted to invitations, both spoken and written, for Kathryn to come visit when she could. Duncan replied with more complex explanations for Kathryn’s ongoing absence from Indianapolis.

  As the cancer and the cancer treatment drained Ward to the point where he no longer minced words, because he did not have energy for mincing, he asked, “Is she afraid to visit my sickroom? Is it like with Trip’s AIDS? She thinks I’m contagious?”

  Duncan went off message. He thrust his hands into his back pockets and confessed, “That was a big weekend for her, when Trip visited and Mom spilled the truth about Anthony. She got to thinking more about her own biological mother. Things are different now with computers. You can find people with computers. What with all the increased options for tracking down that kind of information, she got into it and one thing led to another. She apparently found her birth mother, working as a hairdresser in Elmira, New York. That’s where she is now, in Elmira with her birth mother.”

  “Good for her! But, why do you say ‘apparently.’ ”

  “Because that’s all I know about it. I’m being shut out. She doesn’t want me to meet her mother. She wants lots of time alone together before anybody else can meet her. Everything that happened before Kathryn met this woman is a closed chapter. It doesn’t count anymore. Her life is starting over, and I’m afraid that means without me.”

  Ward said un-mincingly, “At least you and Rob can pick up again.”

  Successive rounds of chemotherapy and radiation brought Ward lower and lower. Nerve damage tingling in his fingertips and toes required a large dose of B6. The nausea worsened each time. Mary only half-jokingly suggested summoning Rob home with some marijuana. “Duncan and Rob could commiserate,” she said, “and I’d make a big batch of pot brownies and you could let your inner hippie loose.”

  “I thought you said Rob quit smoking pot,” Ward whispered.

  Mary shook her head. “He phones me from the mainland where he supposedly goes for a twelve-step meeting. I can always tell when he’s high. He rambles on about how the winter storms remind him of Pluto.”

  Ward rasped, “I’m okay just enjoying the time I have left. Some day Anthony will write our story and we’ll be enshrined as a very curious footnote to the history of the Cold War.”

  Mary glared, as if he’d just insulted her. She refused to brook any negative thinking. She was grateful to Duncan for his staunch resoluteness and for all the time that his attention to Ward afforded her. She and Ruby researched a variety of alternative approaches to cancer. They summoned healing energies.

  Their first intervention went awkwardly awry. Mary bought an enormous, fluffy pillow and an orange plastic baseball bat. She invited Ward to strike the pillow with the bat, because “cancer can be caused by repressed anger.”

  “I thought you told me that was an outdated theory,” Ward said.

  “Maybe not,” Mary replied.

  “Please, explain what’s supposed to happen here,” Ward asked.

  “You hit the pillow with the bat and the repressed feelings come up and become conscious, for example, old resentments at your mother and—”

  “We drive out to her nursing home and I unload on a senile, ninety-five year old woman?”

  “You’re not cooperating,” Mary said.

  “Sorry, but I’m just not as interested in the cause of this disease. Smoking for as long as I did certainly didn’t help. It could be something in the water or in the air. As a Wangert, I certainly got hooked into the ‘it can’t happen to me’ syndrome. The big lesson here is nobody more, nobody less.”

  “Nobody more, nobody less,” Mary repeated. “I don’t get it.”

  “Why don’t you try hitting the pillow,” Ward suggested.

  She picked up the bat and struck once, twice. Five minutes and many strikes later, bits of stuffing material flew around the room.

  “Any feelings come up?” Ward asked.

  She paused to catch her breath and pull the hair back from her face. The thoughts were too awful. Mary hurried out of the room, before the words spilled out like vomit. She found Ruby waiting in the kitchen. “I used to think that the sudden manner of my brother and parents’ deaths was terrible,” she said. “In some ways, it’s easier when people go quickly.”

  The Qigong intervention brought some partial help. Ward already knew basic tai-chi postures. The gentle bellows and bird-wing gestures of Qigong were kinder on Ward’s emaciated limbs. Ruby explained that thousands of cancer patients in China practiced Qigong daily in public.

  Mary and Ruby did it with him in the yard, mirroring his infinitesimally gradual sweeping steps and hand motions. Pedestrians waved from the sidewalk. Ward practiced the slow circle walk and the animal frolics in the shade of the walnut trees. The next afternoon they went to the towpath and performed for the ducks.

  It turned into a farewell tour. Each day he requested a familiar destination, the site of the Morace and the old Wangert Building and Union Station. Mary and Duncan hoisted him out of the car, and for a few minutes Ward raised and lowered one arm, one leg, bobbed and pivoted and gracefully waved goodbye to his ancestral city.

  After his tenth round of chemo, his white cell count plummeted, which landed him in bed with a bad flu. Treatment was suspended indefinitely. His bedridden status limited his activities to crosswords and watching Super-8 movies of the kids.

  “I’ve been thinking about Kayla,” he croaked, “and that steamer trunk she used t
o play in.”

  “Why Kayla?” Mary asked. “You haven’t seen her for a long time.”

  “Please tell her that she’s not radioactive,” Ward smiled.

  As long as Ward could still follow and participate in their nightly storytelling, Mary believed an upturn was possible. The reality of his situation finally hit when Ward suggested she wrap up their nighttime tale, because he wanted to know how it ended. “Give me the last installment,” he said.

  “What?” Mary sputtered.

  “Tell me how the story ends.”

  “Do you want the light on or off?” she whispered.

  “Off,” he said.

  * * *

  PART X

  * * *

  Chapter 70

  Mary and Ward’s Nighttime Tale

  And so, with lights off, Mary leaned in from the chair at the side of the bed and spoke with great tenderness. Ward did his best to give her his undivided attention:

  Carrying a wicker basket, Lubya and Mikel walked out to the pond to pick gooseberries for the diplomat’s favorite dessert. Far ahead they saw the windmills of the village. To the right stretched away a line of telegraph posts along the railroad bed. They took a short cut to the pond over a stubble-field.

  The wild gooseberry bushes grew among the rocks on the shore. Mikel offered Lubya his leather gloves to protect her fingers from the thorns. The hard green fruit disguised itself in the leaves. Lubya showed Mikel how to carefully lift up a spiny branch to discover the berries hanging in a row underneath.