by Janet Elder
I asked what the chances were that the mass was cancer. The doctor answered, “I’m going to be honest” (as if there were another option). “There is a 75 percent chance that it is malignant. We’ll need a biopsy to be sure.”
I said I wanted it done that day. I didn’t care how long I had to wait. Fortunately, whoever had a biopsy scheduled for that dreary morning had canceled. The machinery and the staff were available. I could have the biopsy done right then and there.
The doctor asked if I wanted to call someone. She didn’t say, “You might be a little uncomfortable. Do you want to call someone to pick you up in case you’d like help getting home?” Not even “Do you want to call and let someone know what’s going on?” Just “Do you want to call someone?” I felt like a prisoner making my one allotted phone call.
Rich was so cheerful when he answered the phone. “Hi, sweetie, everything go all right this morning? I was beginning to worry when I hadn’t heard from you.”
Rich and I had been married for twenty years. I knew that no matter what I said next, or what tone of voice I used, he would know that something was seriously wrong. I could have said I was fine and he would have known that I was not.
I wanted to stay on the phone with Rich and hurry him off at the same time. “I’m still in the doctor’s office. They found something,” I managed to say without crying. “I have to have another test. Can you come right over?”
I kept staring down at my shoes, fixing my eyes on something so I would not get dizzy and fall. They were the same shoes I had on just days earlier, sitting at Caffè Quadri, where Rich and I had sat enjoying the sun’s warmth and watching Michael feed pigeons. Our waiter, Nicolai, had spun stories for us about life in Venice and was as content as we were to have us linger for hours over a cappuccino.
“I’ll be right there.” Rich knew to just come and not ask me any questions.
There was a flurry of paper signing, absolving the doctor if anything went wrong. The procedure was called a core biopsy and involved taking five specimens. For the first time all morning, there was no waiting. I did not have a chance to see Rich, to have him hold me before being summoned for the biopsy.
I lay down on the same steel table I had been on for the sonogram. The doctor used the sonogram to guide the needles one after the other into my breast and into the suspicious mass where cells were withdrawn for analysis. There was an instrument that looked like a gun, and it made a popping noise each time the cells were withdrawn. I looked away.
I wasn’t scared. I didn’t feel like crying. I didn’t mind the pain. I was still reporting the story, still fact gathering. I was keeping my emotions at bay. In that moment, I tried not to think about Rich or Michael. I tried not to think about the fact that Michael was only eleven years old. I tried not to think about the devastating effects a parent’s deteriorating health can have on a child, how it can rob them of innocence and make them grow up too soon, something I knew firsthand. Instead, I focused on whom I knew who could help me find the right doctors, the best care. I started making mental lists of the people I could turn to for help.
At the same time, I was growing impatient with the detached, morose mood of the doctor and the technician. These were clearly people who had spent too much time with machines. If I had relied on their demeanor to give me insight into my own situation, I probably would have assumed I was near death. When she was about to insert the fifth needle into my breast, the doctor finally had a rare human moment and asked if I was “all right.”
The biopsy was over quickly. Three hours after I had first put on the shabby pink gown, I was told to get dressed. The doctor said she would know the results of the biopsy in three days and I could call her at four o’clock on Thursday—just what I was hoping for, more waiting.
I got dressed, thinking only about what I could do to get more information. But when I went up the stairs to pay my bill and saw Rich sitting by the desk, my detached journalist mode gave way and I wanted to cry. But I didn’t. I paid my $1,500 bill with Rich standing next to me. He took my hand and we left the office.
Once the elevator doors closed, Rich took me in his arms and said “I love you,” as he held me tight. “Whatever it is, we’ll get through it. I promise.”
And then, finally, we walked out into the cool, moist afternoon air.
I met Rich Pinsky when I was twenty-three years old and he was thirty-one. I had now known him for more years of my life than I had not known him. We met while working temporary jobs at a social service agency, each of us on our way to writing careers. My memory is that Rich said something to me about my smile; his memory is that I updated him on that day’s political news, that Jimmy Carter had appointed Edmund Muskie secretary of state.
Neither of us had any money then. We spent a lot of time getting to know each other on a tight budget—walking through Central Park, sitting in coffee shops, wandering around the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and taking the PATH train to Hoboken, New Jersey, where at night you could sit and look across the Hudson River at the glittering Manhattan skyline.
In the years we had been married, we had our share of trials—my father’s death, Rich’s hip replacement surgery, periods of financial struggle, the death of close friends. But we had never faced a health matter that threatened to take one of us from the other.
There was not much to do at this point but pray. We walked home, hand in hand. I explained to Rich about the morose doctor and the sonogram and the needle that made a popping sound. I told him I really had no information beyond the doctor saying that she thinks the mass she saw is likely to be cancerous. He reacted the way I did—he pushed his emotions to some far corner of his heart. “Let’s wait and see,” he said. “Let’s wait until we know what if anything we are dealing with and then we’ll figure out how to proceed.”
We stopped by my local church, St. Ignatius Loyola. We slipped in through a side door of the Roman basilicalike church and walked down a long aisle, past the baptismal font and depictions of the first seven Stations of the Cross, to a small altar. I lit a candle and prayed for strength. I don’t know if I felt the closeness of God or the closeness of childhood, but I felt calmed.
I sat down in a pew with Rich beside me and I thought about my childhood, the happiest days of which were spent in Fairfield, Connecticut, where I lived with my parents, two sisters, a brother, and a dog in a white colonial house on a dead-end street with a brook at one end and a hill at the other. At the top of the hill, a stone fence and two white boulders marked the divide between our street and the property of an adjacent country club. When I asked my father why we didn’t belong to the country club, he told me it was because “Clubs are designed to keep people out, and I don’t think that’s something we’d want to be a part of.”
It was a close-knit neighborhood. On hot summer nights, the kids on the block stayed outside playing kick-ball in the middle of the street until it was so dark we could no longer see the ball. We went sled riding and ice-skating in the winter. In spring, we rode our bicycles down the hill, daring each other to do it without holding on to the handlebars and without falling off at a spot where tree roots pushed through the concrete.
My sister Barbara and I used to play “train” on the winding steps leading to the attic bedrooms. Barbara had been given some toy suitcases one Christmas. We’d pack them full of our dolls’ clothes, take the luggage and the dolls, and board the train. Our imaginations took us all over the world to places we had only heard of but never been—Paris, Rome, and New Haven.
Another of our favorite games was “school,” with each of us having a classroom full of imaginary students. Our older sister, Louise, had beautifully illustrated fairy-tale books. We’d pile into her bed, and she’d read to us. Our brother, Bill, collected baseball cards and taught us how to play a game where you would stand the cards against the floor molding and flick others to knock them down.
During my grade-school years, my two best friends were Betsy Weldon, who lived next door
, and Mary Beth Quinn, who lived at the end of the block. We’d sleep over at one another’s house. Often, when it was my turn to sleep at Betsy’s or Mary Beth’s, darkness would fall and I’d decide that life was really better back at my own house. The unfamiliar, creaking floors, the shadows on the walls, the intimidating parents in the next room, all made me long for the comfort of my own room and my own bed.
I’d sneak out of bed and dial 336-5148, hoping the click, click, click of the spinning dial would not be overheard. The voice on the other end always said the same thing: “I’ll be right there.” My father would come and take me and my Raggedy Ann doll and my pillow home without making me feel embarrassed about being too homesick to stay the night at someone else’s house.
Mary Beth’s family was the first on the block to get a color TV. She had Barbie dolls. Betsy’s family had the cast album to The Sound of Music, and a little room in the basement stocked with cans of food in case war broke out. They ate white toast with butter and cinnamon and sugar on it. I envied them all those things.
But neither Betsy nor Mary Beth had a younger sister to boss around, or a brother who was a ham radio operator and could talk to people from all over. Through my eight-year-old eyes, they were not taken into New York City as often as we to see plays, or to have fancy dinners in restaurants where the waiter came over with a giant pepper mill. Their mothers did not play “Clair de Lune” on the piano, and I don’t know if their fathers packed all the neighborhood kids into the family station wagon to take them for ice cream as often as mine did.
Everyone in the neighborhood did have a dog and we did, too. He was one of the largest on the block, a golden retriever, a birthday present for my brother, Bill, who named him “Scout.”
On occasion, Scout would sneak out the back door, sending the entire neighborhood into a panic. “Scout’s loose! Scout’s loose!” The screams could be heard from front porches up and down the block. Sooner or later, Scout wandered home, having taken a swim in the brook or a run through the country club. Sometimes my father would take the family station wagon out, park it by the brook, and call to Scout, who sooner or later would come running. Even though the scenario was oft repeated, I was always scared when it happened. Surely the day would come when Scout would run away and not find his way home.
As adults, my siblings and I all look back on those Connecticut days as the happiest, most stable time of our childhood. Eventually my father had some shattering financial setbacks, and his heart disease went from a disease he could live with to a disease likely to kill him. He often could not work.
When he’d fall asleep in front of the television, or reading a book, or close his eyes while listening to music, I’d stare at him to see if he was still breathing. When I left for school each morning, I wondered if he’d be alive when I got home.
For all of us, life became unmoored and stayed that way for many, many years. My mother struggled single-handedly to support four kids and a sick husband. She was a nurse, though she had started her career as a research physicist. In her early twenties, she turned down the government’s invitation to work on the Manhattan Project, standing firm in her belief that nuclear weapons would only lead to more war. It was a brave thing to do. She thought about becoming a doctor, but loved the world of books and characters drawn from the imagination more than she did science. She set out to teach English literature. But life circumstances and World War II led her to nursing. She helped the wounded heal body and soul. It became her life’s work.
My parents’ changing financial fortunes in general, and my father’s search for an employer interested in hiring a man with a razor-sharp mind but declining health, caused us to move around a lot.
One of the darkest periods came during a brief move we made to New Orleans, where my father took a job expanding a wholesale drug company based in St. Louis. It was an odd fit. The boss didn’t know my father was the kind who would not join clubs. He was dismayed when my father put a television in the warehouse so the workers could watch the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. The relationship deteriorated quickly, and so did my father’s health. Now, forty years later, I can still vividly recall his gasping for air on the front porch on a thickly humid night. My father survived that episode and we moved back north, but life always seemed to teeter on the brink of catastrophe.
We moved back north in the middle of winter. I didn’t understand why we could not just return to our old house in Connecticut, where life had been so safe and happy. We were headed instead for New Jersey (which, in my mind, was at least close to Connecticut), but it wasn’t home. Still, I couldn’t wait to get back to the part of the country that was familiar to me. I missed the landscape of my childhood, the solid maple trees with their large leaves, the slender white birch trees, rolling hills, peonies, forsythia, and the beach. My sister Barbara and I prayed for snow, though we no longer owned sleds or ice skates.
Shortly before we moved, with our house in New Orleans full of boxes and commotion, someone went out the back gate followed by Scout. He took off. We all panicked. None of the neighbors knew us; there were no friends standing on their front porches screaming, “Scout’s loose!”
My father realized Scout would not know how to get back to our house on his own, since we had lived there for such a short time and the terrain was still unfamiliar. My father combed the neighborhood for days looking for him. But his effort was for naught. He was unable to find our beloved dog. We had to move, leaving Scout behind. The pain was searing.
On the day we moved, one of the last items to be loaded onto the truck was a mirror that had hung in the entrance hall in our house in Connecticut. “I’ll get it,” I volunteered. “You better wait for me,” my father said. “It’s too heavy for you.” I was then about twelve or thirteen years old; I thought he was wrong.
I wanted to surprise him and show him I could do it. I also wanted to spare him any unnecessary labor because of his heart. When the mirror slipped through my hands and shattered into hundreds of pieces on the floor, I was devastated. I was disappointed in myself, upset that I’d done something my father asked me not to. I thought I was surely in for seven years of bad luck.
A week later, on a bitter, dark January afternoon, the truck with all our possessions pulled up in front of our new house. It wasn’t Fairfield, Connecticut, but it would do. Nightfall came early; the truck was barely unloaded when the snow Barbara and I had been praying for started to softly fall. It did not stop for three days. The awkwardness of starting at yet another new school was put off. Barbara and I braved the frigid cold for hours on end, hurling ourselves into drifts, diving to the ground to make snow angels, packing tight snowballs with wet mitten-clad hands.
In time, we settled into our uncertain family life.
Before we left New Orleans, my father had put an ad in the newspaper offering a reward for anyone who could help us find Scout. Days after we arrived in New Jersey, someone called and said the man who lived next door to her had found Scout and was keeping him. My father hired a lawyer to get Scout back. Eventually, Scout made it to our new home. He arrived months after we did. Finally having him home, we all loved him more than ever, but he was no longer in good health, and he died soon after.
Despite the turbulence of those years, or maybe because of it, my sisters, my brother, and I learned to stick together. In a crisis, there would be no question about whether we would all show up. The only question would be who would get there first.
But sitting in that church pew with Rich, I didn’t want to tell them or my eighty-three-year-old mother that I might have breast cancer. I also did not want to tell any of our friends that Rich and I were waiting for potentially life-altering news. They were all waiting to hear about our fabulous holiday in Italy.
I thought about the struggles and sadness of my own childhood, how chaos and my father’s failing health hung over so much of it, and how badly I wanted something else for Michael.
As we walked home from the church, Rich said: �
�You know, it is still possible that the doctor is wrong.”
But I knew in my gut that the doctor was right. I think Rich knew it, too.
Rich is usually certain of his positions. He was certain Bill Clinton would defeat George H. W. Bush, even as the White House correspondent for The Times, our good friend Andy Rosenthal, told him how wrong-headed his thinking was. Rich was certain we’d return to Nantucket every summer, even though our finances suggested otherwise. He was certain I’d love Venice.
Rich also was certain that if the test results confirmed the cancer diagnosis, the disease would not take my life; we’d get through it intact and would only love each other more. I felt vulnerable enough that I put him in the awful position of having to tell me that several times over the next few days.
“You should try to stay home from work today,” Rich said when we were finally home from the doctor’s office and from our stop at the church. I considered the idea for a minute, but I knew the best thing for me was to go to work. Even if I had not been in Italy away from the paper for a couple of weeks, I knew it was better for me to sit at my desk, answer e-mails, return phone calls, gossip with my colleagues, and start putting my mind back into the vagaries of American politics than for me to sit home and tempt depression. I never appreciated the rituals of daily life more than I did at that moment.
I had to find a way to make the hours from Monday afternoon until Thursday afternoon feel like something less than eternity. I was too edgy even to sit and have a cup of coffee with Rich before leaving.