The Huntress

by Alice Arlen

  Patterson was returned to her room on the tenth floor, with its view of the East River and its Manet prints. Her temperature was now back to normal, her pain was less. Sister Josephine had flown in from Chicago, and now sat in the room with Alicia as she recovered, both of them drinking the luscious eggnogs for which the Doctors Hospital kitchen was famous, both under the impression that Alicia’s problems had been largely resolved; Dr. Rawls, the only visible physician on the case, stopped in once to take Patterson’s pulse, pronounced it “a fine pulse,” and suggested she order the eggs Benedict, another favorite from the hospital kitchen.

  But Patterson herself was not fine. Unfortunately Doctors Hospital, while strong in the kitchen, didn’t have its own diagnostic laboratory, at least not an up-to-date lab for cancer cell diagnosis; thus several days elapsed before the results came back from Dr. Aldridge’s D & C procedure. In fact Aldridge already suspected that eight years before, when Patterson had been given radium treatment for “female abdominal problems” (her insides packed with radium isotopes, as was then the practice), the doctors might have packed in too much, or in the wrong place. On October 1 he noted, “Tissue removed from the uterus appear mixed with fragments from the bowel wall.” And: “In view of these findings there is some suspicion that the patient has a carcinogenic involvement of the sigmoid.” While Alicia and Josephine watched television, special-ordered from the menu, and passed the time waiting for clearance to leave, Dr. Aldridge in the meantime called in a second surgeon, Dr. Henry Cave, to assist him on the case.

  On the morning of October 3, Patterson was taken down to the fourth floor and another operating room. Once again Aldridge was in charge, though with Cave assisting; Aldridge started things off by making a six-inch incision on the lower abdomen. “When the abdomen was opened,” Dr. Aldridge noted, “it was found that this patient had an extensive carcinoma of the sigmoid, furthermore the sigmoid was firmly adherent to the left lateral wall of the uterus. There was apparently some thinning of the wall and in doing a curettage on Sept. 27 it was obvious that the curette had passed through the thin uterine wall and removed some of the tissue from the bowel itself.” Cave then stepped in and “mobilized the sigmoid…following this, the entire uterus and left ovary were removed by Dr. Aldridge, employing the Aldridge modification of the Worrell technique.” Much stitching was then done (“No. 2 chromic catgut for the mucosa and musculature”); also some minor patching (“No. 4 chromic catgut to attach the bladder flap of the peritoneum”); and then some decidedly not-so-minor repairs: “Following the hysterectomy,” the careful notes read, “Dr. Cave did a Mickulicz type of bowel resection, bringing the loop of bowel out through the lower angle of the wound.” Apparently a further look into Alicia’s abdomen had revealed intestines abnormally twisted together, a section of lower intestine actually stuck to the colon, with “a large cancerous tumor completely encircling the sigmoid,” which was removed, along with her uterus for good measure, after which she was returned to room 1005, semiconscious, with a colostomy bag attached to her stomach for the emptying of fecal waste.

  Surgery is seldom easy on a patient, even nowadays, when medicine is so much more evolved than in the middle of the last century. Back then, in 1952 (a time when medical techniques in the better American hospitals were regarded as the most advanced in the world) pretty much every aspect of an operation was assaultive to the body: Incisions were longer, instruments were larger and clumsier, stitching material was thicker, needles of all sorts were wider, and the anesthetic of choice, sodium pentothal, had the kind of sledgehammer effect that often took days of headaches and nausea to dissipate. And then, for Patterson, there was the ghastly surprise on waking up of the colostomy bag (which fortunately could be removed in six weeks or so when the “bowel resection” healed). In addition there were all the tubes: tubes down the throat, tubes up the nose: rubber tubes (there being no plastic), relatively thick and minimally pliable, which a parade of nurses were regularly inserting, then removing, then sticking and poking back in. Patterson was now in real pain again, mainly from her insides healing, but she seemed to hate the business with the tubes most of all; her throat was narrow, as were her nasal passages, which added the pangs of claustrophobia to the duress of the whole situation. Granted she hadn’t died; in fact the surgeons appeared to have found and excised a threatening cancer; but for many days she despaired, and told Josephine she felt like dying.

  Josephine, the good sister, kept a constant vigil, seated day after day in room 1005, sometimes on the sofa, sometimes in the armchair with its view of the gray river, and its barge traffic, reading aloud from the cornucopia of the city’s newspapers, whether Alicia could hear her or not; also listening, with dismay and some surprise, as her older, tough-guy, tomboy sister, the one who was never scared of anything, who was always quickest to “get back on the horse,” lay abed, complaining about the tubes and the pain and just wanting to die; until one afternoon Josephine, having heard enough, in a voice loud enough to get the patient’s attention, told her sister she was sounding “like a yellow-belly quitter,” there being no greater insult one could give to one of Joe Patterson’s children, after which Alicia reportedly settled down somewhat and let the healing process take its course.

  Another feature of medical care in those days was the length of time that people were kept in hospitals; for example, one week for a routine appendectomy, which is now usually treated as an outpatient procedure. Patterson remained in Doctors Hospital almost a month, and as she recovered her strength and spirits a small number of visitors were logged in on the nurses’ records. Her older sister, Elinor, wasn’t one of them, staying close to her garden in nearby Greenwich; her mother, too, stayed away in Chicago, her mother whose shamefaced approach to her own hospitalizations caused her to undergo them in grim, determined secrecy. Harry Guggenheim, noted on the record as “husband,” visited four times, although not right away, taking his time getting back from Cain Hoy. Other names in the visitors’ book were Dorothy Holdsworth, Virginia Pasley, also big old Joe Brooks, currently a little the worse for wear but apparently as moony over his former wife as ever. One afternoon, in fact just before one of Harry Guggenheim’s planned visits, Governor Stevenson showed up between campaign stops, seated briefly at her bedside, alternately tongue-tied and overtalkative, before Josephine pushed him unceremoniously out the service door to avoid the arrival of the “husband.” Doubtless Alicia could have received many more visitors, certainly toward the end of her stay, when she was feeling much better, reading, watching television, dining on the hospital’s famous rib-eye steak and baked potato, washed down with Johnnie Walker. But this was an era when cancer was still, by and large an unmentionable illness, something close to leprosy, an ill omen, a black mark of a disease; in fact the word “cancer” almost never appeared in obituaries at the time, being replaced by the euphemism “died of a long illness.” Patterson herself, forthright in so many other matters, seemed no more eager to advertise herself to the world as a cancer patient than she was to acknowledge that cancer was the cause of her hospitalization, rather than some more generalized, abstracted “internal problem.”

  She was discharged on the morning of October 25, not quite four weeks after the Stevenson dinner, and was advised to go directly home, continue resting. But she’d been away from Newsday a long time, an important month, and so, instead of going back to Falaise, she had herself driven out to Garden City in time for the daily editorial meeting, at which she dictated the concluding editorial on the presidential campaign, thus keeping an earlier promise to Harry, while doing the best she could by Stevenson. “Both General Eisenhower and Governor Stevenson have turned out to be good, hard-working campaigners,” the editorial declared. “But the major issue today is the need for a change. Because of this, and not because one man is more able than the other, we give our continued backing to General Eisenhower. Stevenson is a Democrat and, despite his skill and devotion, the corruption of the Truman administration, with all its was
te, bungling and toleration of Communism, would be so much harder for him to deal with than for Eisenhower. In reaffirming our support of General Eisenhower we also reaffirm our high esteem for Governor Stevenson, who deserves much honor and a high place in government.” And then she went home.

  · 61 ·

  JUST BEFORE PATTERSON entered the hospital, with a health issue she rightly suspected might turn into something serious, the one person most in her thoughts, and to whom it turned out she had written a kind of deathbed letter for posthumous delivery, was her old friend and sometime lover, Adlai Stevenson, in whose honor she had been giving that big River Club party; and yet at no time in the course of that evening had she told him how sick she was feeling, that anything was wrong, that she was entering the hospital. In fact, only ten days after entering the hospital did she allow Josephine to get word about her to the traveling candidate, and then no more than a brief note in the mail, with a deliberately nonspecific, almost evasive message as to the actual situation. Even then, although still weak and miserable in her hospital bed, she explained to Josephine that she didn’t want to burden Stevenson, didn’t want to distract him from what was proving to be an uphill campaign.

  Not that Josephine really needed an explanation, for both sisters shared the same idiosyncratic brand of feminism—what might be called Pattersonian feminism—whereby you brooked no nonsense, took no guff, considered yourself fully equal to the ordinary male. With the extraordinary male, however, the special man, the gifted man, you stepped aside when needed, you always tried to make the path of genius easier, smoother. Adlai Stevenson, very much a man of his time (despite a tendency on occasion to confuse both himself and others with the new language of the-man-who-cares-about-women), took all too easily to the role of this special man, for whom women naturally fetched and carried, did the scut work, for whom they even pushed their inconvenient illnesses out of sight. When Stevenson belatedly had showed up at Doctors Hospital one afternoon—hurried, distracted, shy to the point of awkwardness—Patterson never once talked about her condition, and Stevenson (the man who ten months before had written her, “I want details!” about her supposed ulcer) didn’t ask. By mutual consent, seemingly, they talked about the campaign, then entering its final days, with Stevenson trailing badly in most of the polls. History, of course, shows that Ike won big on November 2; also, that Stevenson, despite a large loss in the Electoral College, emerged with enough popular votes to assure himself a major presence in the Democratic Party. What there’s no record of, either in letters, reminiscences, or the recollections of the few people she confided in, is what Alicia Patterson thought at that point about the roller-coaster ride she’d been on the past few years.

  Once upon a time, six long years earlier, on her mother’s lawn in Libertyville, Patterson had been the solid one; placée, as the French say, not merely established but empowered, as Harry Guggenheim’s wife, as editor and copublisher of Newsday, and with Stevenson not exactly on the outside but definitely not placé, a Chicago salaryman with a bad marriage and muddled prospects, with dreams of this and that, and no strong sense or confidence of how to move forward. Back then, the easy part for her had been providing confidence: spurring his ambition to match her own, urging him forward when he wanted to stay put or back off, telling him to commit, to get out there, when he so sincerely (or so it seemed) wished to achieve some private state of grace by hanging back. Four years before, there had been the narrative of the reluctant candidate for governor, the man who had eyes only for Washington, where nobody wanted him, who was ready to turn down Springfield where he was wanted. Once ensconced in the statehouse, then came the multiyear drama of the governor who couldn’t or wouldn’t quit the Governor’s Mansion to run for president, even to please the sitting president, the head of his own party; soon followed by the “Let this cup pass from my lips!” national candidate. Patterson had seen him through so much of his unlikely adventure, sometimes from the distractingly close perspective of the bedroom, for the most part from the perhaps-truer intimacy of all those letters, messages, notes, with their handwritten pen-or-pencil scrawls, their potpourri of romantic effusions and scheduling details. But for a woman who prided herself on the sharpness of her intuition, on her quickness on the uptake, she had been slow to read the signals. Had she really thought he would be content to stick on as governor, as he kept insisting? Hadn’t she somehow guessed that already he was massing his battalions, planning his strategy, somewhere out of sight, in his own head, a politician who was bound to be keeping secrets from himself as well as others? Only a year earlier, give or take, when she’d launched herself out to Wyoming, hadn’t she known that something was off, something was up?

  Now, in the aftermath of the great election, far from letting the cup pass from his lips, it seemed that Stevenson had grabbed it, drunk deeply, and was in no hurry to give it back. He might have lost the race to Eisenhower, and by a sizable margin, but it turned out that Hamlet loved the stage. “Did you see that Salisbury in the Times called me the ‘Democratic Party’s standard-bearer?’ I don’t mind that at all, I quite like it,” he told Patterson in mid-November, in the first of a sequence of letters he wrote her as he traveled the world on a grand consolation tour. From London: “Please not to worry too greatly on my account. Weekend at Chatsworth….How warm some of the people over here are to me, warmer than some at home I could mention….And you? Are you are mending rapidly?” From Barbados, in January, where he was visiting Marietta Tree and her husband, Sir Ronald Tree, at their grand Palladian beachfront villa, he wrote: “I’ve no regrets, I did the best I could. At least I didn’t betray my principles….Someday soon maybe we can talk again, who knows beside the Black River…get better, be well.”

  But she wasn’t well or better; in fact she was down beside the Black River herself, on her own, recovering after yet another three weeks in the hospital, this time from an infection brought on when they’d removed her colostomy paraphernalia. She spent much of that winter, the first months of 1953, virtually hiding out in her house by the St. Mary’s, “dragging herself around like an old dog,” as she described it to Josephine. Harry Guggenheim urged her to move north to Cain Hoy, where he was readying a new thoroughbred for the year’s racing season, but in no mood to move, least of all to Cain Hoy, she found a dozen reasons for staying put. From chilly Long Island, Newsday managing editor Alan Hathway spoke with her by telephone almost daily (on her end, a scratchy rural party line, with the drawly voices of Georgia neighbors cutting in and out in the background), sending his own mixed messages: one moment urging her to come back soon, the troops needed her, he needed her; the next moment telling her more or less the opposite, everything was fine, stay down there as long as you need. Her secretary and all-purpose assistant, Dottie Holdsworth, came down for a week, supposedly a working visit; Patterson had said she wanted to “get some planning done,” to put her recovery time to good use. But once there, Dottie found her normally hard-charging, talkative boss dismayingly muted, almost lethargic, uninterested in work, in planning, in much of anything. Before returning North, Holdsworth reported back to Josephine that her sister was “in a funk,” that dread zone somewhere between malingering and melancholy (what people in due course would learn to call depression), needless to say a state of mind or body seldom visited by Alicia Patterson.

  · 62 ·

  A CHANGE IN PATTERSON’S SPIRITS, or condition, or in some interior weather system of her own took a long time in coming, but when it came she seemed to turn around as on the proverbial dime. April on the banks of the St. Mary’s, sunshine, soft warm winds blowing up the Florida coast, camellias beginning to bloom, egrets and cormorants in the air. Josephine came down for a post-Easter visit, to bring cheer or at least companionship to her drooping, ailing, perhaps permanently melancholic sister, also to get away from the still frozen Midwest, but instead found Alicia already on the bustle, a spring in her short steps, full of talk, plans for Newsday, though at the same time second-guessing herse
lf about her strength and nerve: Did she still “have it”? Was she ready to go back and run a paper, a staff, a newsroom? One morning, after Alicia had led them on a panting, spirited hike through the woods, the two sisters were relaxing on the little dock by the river, talking of this and that, when up from the dark waters beneath them, climbing one of the support poles, appeared one of the river’s many water moccasins, sleek, glistening, deadly; Josephine could see the snake, now gliding in their general direction across the gray wood planks of the dock, but didn’t know if Alicia had seen it; Alicia, still talking, rose to her feet, grabbed a nearby oar, raised it, smacked the snake to snake heaven; “You’re ready,” Josephine told her. “Go back to work.”

  Two weeks later, halfway home so to speak, she joined husband Harry in Louisville for the seventy-second running of the Kentucky Derby; a day in the sun in the company of the country’s horse-racing ton, those grimly beaming men in linen suits, their blondish wives in floral-print dresses, wide-brimmed hats, drinks in their hands, a military band playing “My Old Kentucky Home” over and over again. As it happened, this was the year Harry Guggenheim’s horse won the Derby. There’s a photo of the four of them in the Winner’s Circle: From left to right, Mr. Harry Frank Guggenheim, splendid in a double-breasted linen suit, sporty fedora on his head, racetrack binoculars hanging from one shoulder, proudly holding the reins of his Cain Hoy Stables thoroughbred Dark Star; the fine bay horse himself, sternly handsome as a matinee idol despite the frilly necklace of flowers around his neck; his rider, the tiny, fierce Panamanian jockey Manuel Ycaza; and then the owner’s wife, Mrs. Harry F. Guggenheim, not looking too bad at all, in fact looking pretty good, all things considered seemingly happy to be where she was, at least for the time being.