But Gertrude and Alice were experts at pleasure. Everything they did was directed toward it. They loved to eat well (Alice was a great cook, and when they were in the country, they grew their own vegetables). They loved to talk and listen and entertain, laugh and eat in company. They read and wrote and walked and looked at art and bought it and decorated rooms and drove around the French countryside. Although they were not free from snobbery and the desire to impress, they and the other expatriate women were less concerned with impressing others than with enjoying life. Oh, I know I’m idealizing them, but if you compare their lives to the lives of the fathers who had earned the fortunes they lived on, or the brothers who had the privilege (and pain) of continuing in the fathers’ footsteps, the difference between a life lived to gain profit and prestige and a life lived largely for its own sake is clear. Some of these women worked, of course. Stein had to write to earn money; Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach built businesses, but their business was books, which yield more pleasure than profit.
Since the demise of a leisure class (which I do not lament), only a small elite live for pleasure. But nowadays it is not a group accidentally made rich by a forebear, but a self-selected group composed of ordinary people who make a determined choice to move to Vermont or some other rural area and live frugally by distilling maple syrup, or some such thing. They include graduate students on tiny stipends who make their fellowship a private aristocracy, academics who trade wealth for a life immersed in thought or art. I have lived this way since 1968, although I always worked hard and had no money until after The Women’s Room was published, in 1977. Those of us who choose pleasure without money lack the smashing high style of people of wealth, however. This is a loss, but I could not forget that while these women were striding around being brilliant and glamorous, my grandmother was working in a sweatshop and weeping every night for the children taken from her and put in an orphanage. Yet I hate ruining every image of style and ease by puritanical disapproval.
The next book I read served as a serious corrective to this lovely vision of life. Death Without Weeping, by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, describes a town the author calls Bom Jesus, a slum in northeastern Brazil, inhabited by cane cutters recently removed from their land, working wives, and their children. The author, an anthropologist, brought her own children with her on at least one stay in the town. Her motherhood was part of the impetus behind this book, an anatomy of horrible poverty and disease (owing to things like wages too low to feed even one person, much less a family, polluted water, lack of social services), because the author was so horrified at the fact that the mothers of Bom Jesus do not weep when their infants die—as they regularly do.
But what horrified me most in her vivid picture of the lives of these people, what remains with me still, is how their culture succeeded in brainwashing them, even without television. The people are black, and so poor that they are often starving. But they do not know it! They have lost touch with their bodies. Observing the Portuguese who lived in the city, they saw tall, straight-limbed, healthy white people. They concluded that their own problems with diseases they called nervos, gastos, and foma were a consequence of their race. Starving, they went to a doctor, who, although he had to know better, gave them prescriptions for tranquilizers! When their infants cried out of hunger, they gave them sugar water laced with tranquilizers. Of course the babies died.
On Tuesday, September 15, Rob and Gloria accompanied me to my oncologist’s. I had missed my previous monthly checkup because I was in the hospital. Gloria questioned the doctor far more intelligently than I could have; knowing she had telephoned Dr. Kelson, the head of the gastrointestinal department, some weeks before, he treated her warily. (I had not known about this and was privately delighted. Only recently have I discovered that he informed her the average survival time for patients with esophageal cancer was eighteen months—six months longer than my oncologist said. But never, then or later, did she indicate that she had been told this.) The oncologist directed me to have a CT scan to see if the chemo had shrunk the tumor, and I made an appointment for Thursday. I felt well enough on Saturday to go shopping with Jamie for a wig.
I knew from years earlier, when wigs were fashionable and my hair was long and I spent miserable nights sleeping in curlers, that wigs were hot and itchy. But appearing bald in public embarrassed me—even if privately I rather liked the look. The thing is, people stare. And a woman going out bald seems to be making a political statement, like the singer Sinead O’Connor. But Sinead O’Connor, bald or hirsute, is beautiful and young. If I looked like her—or if I had brown skin, a long neck, and a thin, beautiful face with strong cheekbones (like my acquaintance Yolande)—I’d happily go bald. As it was, I never went out of the house without a head covering.
I had drawn up a list of wig shops in the area of Fifty-seventh Street but soon discovered that only one specialized in cancer patients—Edith Imre, where I was treated well. The other shops were staffed by glamorous young women who were horrified by the sight of a bald head and gave me sullen, lackadaisical attention. I chose a plain brown wig that looked natural (and was insulted when people took it for my own hair). Then Jamie and I went to a gallery down the street to see a Lucien Freud show. Since it would turn out to be my last such event for years, I am glad Jamie was willing to accompany me, despite her profound dislike for the artist. I respect my daughter’s convictions and would normally not have asked her to go to a Freud exhibit.
The next day, Sunday, I had another lovely day in the country. This time, Perry Birnbaum, a pal from college days, picked me up and drove me out to Sag Harbor to visit another college friend, Gloria Beckerman. I hadn’t seen Perry in over a year, and we talked volubly, catching up; Gloria served us lunch on a patio overlooking the water. It was a beautiful day, my friends were fun, and we dished—or they did and I listened, pleased that I could chew and swallow even meat and bread (with care), thrilled to be there, under a tree embracing us with shade, the water a deep blue.
On Tuesday, Rob and I went to my oncologist to hear the results of my CT scan. We waited, as usual, an hour or so, then were ushered into his consulting room. The doctor entered, speaking as if he had already examined the X-ray, but clearly he had not. He turned away from us to study it, talking all the while. I, too, was studying the CT scan, but I could not find the tumor. (I knew where it had been.) Still talking about what can be expected from a mere two months of chemotherapy—“a little shrinkage, perhaps, if we are lucky”—the oncologist paused, peered more closely, then announced in a tone of shock, “Your tumor appears to have disappeared.”
Because of his tone of voice, I had little reaction to this at first—he sounded appalled by what had happened. Finally, I did some thinking for myself, and joy leaped in my heart. “Does that mean I can have less chemotherapy?” I asked, smiling.
“No! No!” he cried angrily. “If anything … well, you’ll have to go through at least the regular course.” He sounded as if he wanted to punish me with an even longer course of treatment. Perhaps he was irritated because his expectations had not been met; the scientific predictability of his work was more important to him than I was. I am sure he did not wish me ill, but I was just one more in a series of dying patients. How dare I confute the statistics? Besides, it would surely grow back. There was no reason for me to be elated: the cancer would recur, and I would still be dead in a year, or a year and a half.
So pervasive and powerful was his negativity about the vanishing tumor that I did not allow my spirits to rise. But I teased him (perhaps I was angry, too). Fingering the beaded leather bag of herbs I wore around my neck (which Gloria had brought me from her last trip to the Cherokee Nation), I said, kidding, “It’s the sweat lodge ceremony that did it.” He turned swiftly, a little wild-eyed. “What?”
I held it out to him. “Smell it,” I urged. It was fragrant with sage and other herbs.
Hesitantly, with distaste, he lowered his nose to within six inches of the bag, then moved awa
y. He said nothing and left soon afterward, having reminded me to show up for my next course of chemo on September 29, a week from that day.
Rob and I went out to lunch, giggling and, like the doctor, wild-eyed, but with wild smiles beneath. I did not know how much hope to attach to the disappearance. The doctor had insisted that the cancer would recur; it was expected to recur; he did not want me to get my hopes up. But why should I not? How often did this happen? Wasn’t it at least a sign? Rob was so happy that I suddenly realized how depressed he’d been. It was a good development, wasn’t it, despite the doctor’s behavior?
At home, I immediately telephoned my friends. Charlotte went over the moon: she leaped to the conviction that my cancer was gone forever. I was cured; it was a miracle. Her assurance shocked me. She was so uncompromising, so absolute, she could not even hear me say that the oncologist had almost promised it would return. Her relief made me realize how heavily my illness had weighed on her, what a reprieve it would be for her if I recovered. I did not know until years later how distraught she had in fact been. Charlotte was my agent, had been for sixteen years; but almost from the start we were also friends. She was as close to me as a sister; I loved her deeply. And she seemed to feel the same. Dazed, I had not noticed that during these past three months, Charlotte had been a wreck. She “looked like hell,” her more observant friends said; she often went without eating and slept in her clothes; and in this frenzied state, she had run her business, appearing sane and in control.
The coven, overjoyed, planned a celebration dinner for the next night. I said we could have it at my house—I had not hosted one of our dinners in a long time; Gloria had had them all (Esther had a houseful of people living with her, and Carol had moved to Westchester). I called a caterer and ordered a lovely meal.
The next evening, Wednesday, September 23, the waiter arrived early, bearing dinner, and set the table in the dining room. He had forgotten to bring wine, and I had none in the house, so he called his kitchen and asked someone to deliver a couple of bottles. Esther and Carol arrived around seven; we were sitting in the study, eating hors d’oeuvres and sipping drinks, when the boy arrived with the wine.
Suddenly, all the lights in the building went out. The electricity died, which meant that not just the lights, but the stove, the refrigerator, and the elevator were not working. And I was on the twentieth floor. We all crowded onto the front terrace and, looking down, saw fire engines below. The telephone rang (I later discovered that my telephone was the only one working in the building): it was Gloria. She had arrived a little late because she had been working on strategy with Bella Abzug, who was campaigning to fill the seat of a just deceased congressman. The firemen would not let her come up. (She would have had a terrible time walking up forty pitch-black airless staircases—two to a floor.) Actually, she was some blocks away, because there was no phone on my street. She said she would walk back and wait, and perhaps they would get things under control and allow her up.
The waiter was beside himself. He worried, he paced, he called his kitchen. The delivery boy just shrugged. I did not understand why anyone should feel frightened; I felt no fear myself—after all, clearly there was no major fire, and if there were, surely we could be rescued from one of my terraces by helicopter. It would be an adventure! Carol, well-known to all city officials, got on the phone. Calm and gracious, the complete professional, she spoke on and off all evening to a pleasant, patient fire chief. It was only because of Carol that we learned anything that night. No one took responsibility for informing residents; there was no announcement in the building; no one visited the elderly to calm them and make sure they were safe.
There had been a small fire in the laundry room, which was being refurbished. It was quickly extinguished, and the rest of the building was in no danger, but the laundry room contained asbestos tiles—in ceiling or floor—and so the EPA had to be called in. Part of the refurbishment was the replacement of these tiles. In fear of asbestos contamination, the firemen kept people out of the building. And indeed, they never let them in. Gloria told us she did not see anyone coming out of the building, either—which did not make much sense. She kept calling, giving us whatever information she picked up from the rescue trucks and the many residents milling around in the streets, even from as far away as Broadway. She called from a phone in front of a McDonald’s, where she had gone for coffee, and later from a Chinese restaurant, where she had gone for dinner. We had no dinner: it could not be heated. We filled up on the cold hors d’oeuvres.
In our attempt to distract the poor waiter, Esther discovered that he was an aspiring singer and encouraged him to sing to us, which he did, beautifully. Unfortunately, he was ignorant of the reason for our celebration that night, and he sang about death and graveyards. I asked Esther to stop encouraging him, and he retreated into the dark kitchen, where he sat with his head in his hands, near tears. The stoical delivery boy simply gazed at him, expressionless.
I gathered the chimney candles that were scattered around my house. Being a writer-reader and having endured many electrical storms, I have learned that you can read by candlelight only if the light stays still—which requires a chimney. We lit candles in the kitchen and the study, although the study, where we sat, was already fairly bright, its large window facing Central Park and the rising moon.
We talked late, laughed a great deal, and lamented when Gloria called to say she was giving up and going home. I made sleeping arrangements: there were enough beds (and rooms) for three women and the waiter; the delivery boy could lie on a couch. Out of blankets, I gave him my fur coat to keep him warm. But the waiter was afraid to sleep, and he sat up on another couch in the same room. Esther and I went to bed. But Carol sat up all night long to stand guard over Esther and me, to protect us from anything that threatened. Later, when everything was over, Carol said, “There has to be a force field protecting you. Otherwise, why were you the only person in the building whose phone worked?”
The next morning, Isabelle, my assistant, appeared for work as usual, and no one stopped her, although she had to use the stairs. She responded to my guests’ pleas by going all the way downstairs again, fetching coffee for everyone from a restaurant on Broadway, and carrying it back, climbing twenty flights again. Inspired by her example, the waiter and the delivery boy plucked up courage and left. Yura, the caterer, never sent a bill, although I urged her to: none of what had happened was her fault, and she had provided a fine dinner (which went bad, of course, the refrigerator being off). Catastrophes, even minor ones, do tend to illuminate character.
We three of the coven had had a wonderful time, as people often do in crises that are not seriously threatening, and my fellow witches often retell the story of that evening with great gusto. This may be the reason that I never took action against my building, the Ardsley, for its negligence during the crisis. No one ever offered an explanation for the events, and the next morning, during one of poor Isabelle’s treks up and down the dark, stifling back staircases, she encountered a bent-over, aged woman peering out of her kitchen door. Quaveringly, she asked what was going on.
Because of the EPA’s involvement, the matter took weeks to resolve. There was no electricity, and therefore no way to live in the building, until well into October. I had to call the doormen every day to ask if the electricity had been restored yet: no one took responsibility for informing the residents about that, either. And although I put in a claim, the building’s insurance never repaid me for the nights I spent in a hotel. I stayed at the Mayflower for one night, then the kids drove me to the Berkshires for the weekend; on my return, I stayed at Gloria’s for a night and the next day, September 29, reentered S-K for my third course of chemotherapy. Released on October 4, I returned to the Mayflower, but was able to go home the next day.
The day after the fire, Isabelle helped me move to the hotel (chosen because it was near my home and garage) with some clothes and my laptop, books and the bag I kept packed for the hospital. I was abl
e to help her: I could still carry things and walk with energy. I felt buoyant, high on my friends’ laughter the night before and on my latest CT scan. There was a PEN board meeting that evening, the first of the season, and I made the long trip downtown to attend. I felt confident that attending this meeting would mark the resumption of my old life, that now I would be stronger between hospitalizations.
But it was a sorry meeting for me. A couple of women made nasty cracks about my mousy hair color, not realizing I was wearing a wig. I was incredulous: did they want to hurt my feelings? If so, why? I must be showing vulnerability (something I’d managed for years to avoid); nothing like that had ever happened to me before. I’d heard girls in school talk of other girls’ cattiness, and I was familiar with supposed female cattiness from movies and plays, but in my sixty-two years, I had never encountered it firsthand. I didn’t understand why they found it necessary to say anything.
Then I saw Sibyl. I was so happy to see her, I rushed toward her. We had not seen each other since February, and she wanted to know how I was—she knew I, too, had cancer; Grace Paley had told her. I told her the chemotherapy had made me quite ill but had also made my tumor disappear, though the doctor promised it would recur. She wished me luck, but her mind was elsewhere. She had been a connected, gracious woman, and she looked at me while we talked, but I sensed she was not seeing me.
And how was she feeling? This aroused no greater interest in her. She was all right, she said indifferently. She had gone to a hospital on the Cape for treatment three times a week and had the rest of the time to herself. She’d played tennis all summer. The chemo had not made her sick. I wondered why her treatment and mine were so different, and our responses too.
Sibyl said she felt great bitterness toward her body for inflicting this terrible disease on her. She hated her body for it. And the chemo wasn’t working; her tumor had grown and spread. It was in her lymph nodes now.
A Season in Hell Page 8