Shortly after Dr. Alain removed Margaret’s sutures, I asked him about a call I had received from a friend in the city suggesting that there were new targeted therapies for melanoma, and wondering whether this was something Margaret should pursue. Dr. Alain replied that what I was referring to was immunotherapies for melanoma, and that it would be a good idea to get an appointment with Dr. Harriet Kluger at Yale, who was the expert in that field, and in fact he had already discussed her case with Dr. Kluger. I floated this idea to Margaret, but she had no interest, she shook her head angrily, it was hard enough to get her to focus on the Gamma Knife radiation, the scheduling of which was a source of disagreement between Dr. Alain and the medical director at Burke. There was no love lost between Margaret and the medical director, she regarded Dr. Alain as being in charge of her case, top of the chain of command, although he had no particular authority at Burke. Dr. Alain wanted her to have the Gamma Knife radiation as soon as possible, the medical director did not think she was ready to leave Burke, but a compromise between them was eventually reached. Speech was still difficult for Margaret, but she managed to express herself forcefully about the medical team that had to decide when she was ready to be discharged as if it were “the Politburo,” as she put it.
In the afternoons, after the therapy sessions were over, I pushed Margaret around the grounds in her wheelchair, an outing we both enjoyed. At some point in the past, perhaps when Burke had been a private house, somebody had gone to a good deal of trouble and expense to create an Italianate cloister enclosing a formal garden. It was a pleasant enough place, with trees, bushes, flowers, lots of birds; not exactly a beauty spot, but at least it was outdoors, and even on rainy days it was possible to go around and around the cloister, breathing in the open air without getting wet. Margaret saved the little plastic packages of oyster crackers that accompanied her soup and I crushed them up to feed the birds. She had never been an indoor person. Even at home she was not good about being cooped up, as she put it, in bad weather, and chafed at the short winter days when the sun in our part of the world set by four o’clock in the afternoon. It was not just a psychological problem, it actually affected her physically, the way certain plants open up in daylight and close at night. Being wheeled through the garden—it was almost always deserted, apparently all the other patients were watching television or chatting with visitors—did her almost as much good as the physical therapy, but she dreaded the long nights alone in a strange place.
“I’m never going to come back here,” she said to me one afternoon. “If I get sick again, or if I don’t get better, I want you to just let me go.” I told her she was going to get better, it was just a question of time, that she was making good progress, but she squeezed my hand hard and said, “I mean it.”
The general opinion had been that Margaret would need at least ten days of rehabilitation before she was ready to go home, but by the end of a week she had made enough progress that there was no reason to keep her longer. She could make her way using her walker, she could go up and down stairs, she still had a long way to go when it came to speech and the use of her right hand, but thanks to Colleen I had already ascertained that she could get outpatient speech and occupational therapy at MidHudson Regional Hospital in Poughkeepsie, only a quarter of an hour’s drive from home, and continue her physical therapy there as well.
She was more than ready to go, indeed she chafed at every delay, at all the paperwork, and she was terrified that the medical team at Burke might at the last minute find some reason to keep her there, but eventually it was all done and a nurse pushed her wheelchair out the front door to the waiting car. I had been assured by Dr. Alain that Margaret no longer needed to be transported by ambulance, so Rob Tyson helped her out of the chair and into the front seat of her own car. Her gym clothes hung loosely on her—she had lost nearly twenty-five pounds, and had been thin to begin with; when she managed to get on the scale at home she weighed 103 pounds. She closed her eyes and gave a sigh of relief. Thanks to Medicare, she had been given a parting gift of a walker, and a cane for when she could give up the walker. I stowed them in the trunk and we left for home.
She sat stiffly, her bandages hidden by a baseball cap that she had asked me to bring from home embroidered with “Kent School Horse Trials,” where she had competed and won so often over the years. “I always had good luck there,” she said when she put it on, and perhaps she hoped it would bring her good luck now. I had thought she would go straight to the barn when she got home to look at her horses, but once we had unfolded her walker she made straight for the front door, slowed by the fact that the wheels bumped and snagged on the uneven stones just as I had been warned. There was one big step up from the porch, which required lifting the walker up, then another from the dining room to the hall—no house could have been more poorly designed for an invalid. She paused there for a moment, a look of determination on her face, then she pushed the walker over to the foot of the stairs, grabbed both banisters, and slowly climbed up on her own step by step while I came up behind her in case she fell backward. I knew exactly how many steps up there were, I had counted them, thirteen, not an auspicious number. Given the age of the house, the steps were not as even as the ones in the fire stairs at Burke, and the staircase here was narrower and steeper as well. Nevertheless, she kept going, pausing for a moment once she had both feet firmly planted on each step.
When you think about it for a moment, we go up stairs by placing one foot on the next step as we climb—it is an automatic, sequenced movement—but Margaret could only go up one individual step at a time, so each was a separate challenge. By the time she was upstairs I was sweating myself as I counted to thirteen, from anxiety rather than from physical effort. I had bought a second walker to keep at the top of the stairs, so she was able to move herself from the banisters into the bedroom, where I helped her sit down on the bed.
“A triumph,” I said.
“It doesn’t seem like much of a triumph to go upstairs to my own bedroom,” she replied, but in fact it was—a small one, perhaps, but a necessary first accomplishment. I wondered if she would ever be able to go up and down the stairs on her own, but put it out of my mind. The fact that she was home was already a big step forward, the first part of the healing process. I understood why she had not gone to the barn when we arrived, much as she must have wanted to see her horses—she would tackle one challenge at a time, at her own pace.
“We’ll get you downstairs for tea,” I said.
“Yes, perhaps.”
“And tomorrow out to the barn.”
She nodded. I untied her sneakers and took them off, then she got her legs up on the bed and leaned back on the pillows—her pillows. She took her hat off and handed it to me. “For God’s sake, don’t put it on the bed,” she warned—it is an old English superstition: a hat on the bed brings death into the house.
Until I met Margaret I had been tossing my hat onto the bed for years without giving it a second thought. For somebody who was irreligious, she cherished a wealth of rural English superstitions: magpies brought bad luck like a black cat crossing your path, a peacock feather in the house brought death, spilling salt or opening an umbrella indoors were both bad luck, as was seeing a priest or a nun walking alone. My years in the Royal Air Force had inured me to superstition; most air crew are deeply superstitious, devoted to a lucky charm or to the belief that it is good luck to piss on the tail wheel, or the nose wheel of a more modern aircraft, before taking off, and horse people are just as superstitious. I suppose doing anything in which you risk your life or your neck tends to make you superstitious. At any rate I never flew in the RAF without making sure I had my lucky coin, a gold sovereign given to me by my Aunt Alexa, stowed in a zippered pocket of my flying suit. Now I carefully put Margaret’s hat on top of the chest of drawers in the dressing room. I respect other people’s superstitions even when I do not share or understand them.
I went downstairs to bring up Margaret’s bag, and when
I came back both the housecats were lying beside her: Ruby, the gentle one, curled up against her legs, the more aggressive Kit Kat purring noisily at her feet. They looked like sisters, though they were not. Considering that Ruby had spent most of the time while Margaret was away hiding in the linen closet, and that Kit Kat seldom ventured upstairs, regarding the ground floor as her own domain, this current arrangement was unusual: they would not normally have been lying on the bed together. I do not like to anthropomorphize, so I don’t pretend to know what the cats thought, if they thought anything, but a degree of empathy, perhaps even sympathy, was unmistakable here. They knew Margaret needed comfort—and a welcome home—and they supplied it. Clearly, they had missed her as much as she had missed them.
The trip home and the climb upstairs had exhausted Margaret emotionally and physically, and she slept for a while, which was fine with the cats, it was pretty much what they wanted her to do—cats are big believers in an afternoon nap. I woke her at tea time, pulled on and tied her sneakers, then we made the trip downstairs for the first time. It was slow work. Going down was more challenging than going up, I had to go down backward step by step in front of her, since otherwise I would be unable to catch her if she fell. Going down a flight of stairs backward felt odd, in fact seemed like just the kind of thing a person my age shouldn’t be doing. We always used to joke about my doing foolhardy things that might send me to the emergency room, like taking a fence that was too high for me while we were out riding, and that somebody in the ER when I was brought in on a gurney would say, Silly old fart, what was he doing on a horse at his age anyway? Or going downstairs backward with my hands outstretched to catch Margaret if she fell, I thought.
It seemed like a recipe for disaster. Still, Margaret made it to the bottom, grasped her downstairs walker, took the one treacherous step to the dining room thanks to Sam Reichelt’s deftly placed handholds, and on into the kitchen, where she made a pot of tea despite her trembling hands. Getting a milk carton out of the refrigerator was harder than anticipated despite all the occupational therapy, but Margaret at last succeeded in making a cup of tea without a tea bag, and with real milk instead of one of those little plastic containers of creamer. We’re English, we don’t have the equivalent of the Japanese tea ceremony, so there’s nothing sacred about the making of tea. But from her childhood Margaret knew that the teapot needs to be warmed first with boiling water, as well as exactly how many caddy spoons of PG Tips she needed to put in it (including the vital “one for the pot”), how long the tea had to steep after it was stirred, and to pour milk in last. Tea is as near to a ritual as English daily life produces. She held her mug up to her face with both hands and breathed deeply, while I unwrapped a straw for her and put it into the mug. She took a sip and gave a sigh of relief. She was home at last.
One by one over the next few days Margaret took her first steps back toward the life she had left two weeks ago. She had a bath after tea, which turned out to be just as difficult as predicted, in fact even worse. It took nearly an hour, left us both exhausted, and made me begin to question my respect for Margaret’s strong feeling that she didn’t need or want a nurse living in the house. As it turned out, our bathtub was lower than the one at Burke and therefore easier for Margaret to get into; on the other hand, just as I had expected, it was hard to get her out of the tub. Also it had a more rounded rim, and so it was precarious when Margaret sat on it to dry herself. The bathtub chair was not a success since using it meant that Margaret was essentially sitting above the water rather than in it, but on the other hand the non-slip mat—it had little suction cups to keep it in place—worked well enough. I could see that clearly Margaret’s bath was going to be one of the more difficult moments of the day for both of us. It was not just the bath itself; Margaret’s fingers were still unresponsive, so she was unable to manage buttons, bra hooks, or zippers. My attempts to do these things were slowed down by poor eyesight and stiff, clumsy fingers—I had reached the stage at which I had already given up on the tiny buttons of my button-down shirt collars, as well as cuff links and collar stays. When it comes to looking after somebody, willingness will only get you so far; certain basic skills are required, and I wasn’t sure I still possessed them. Her illness would certainly bring us closer together, although in ways neither of us could have foreseen.
Margaret didn’t eat much of the chicken quesadilla I had brought in from a nearby Mexican restaurant she liked. Nothing tastes quite the same after it has been chopped up into tiny pieces—in no time at all the quesadilla turns into unappetizing lukewarm mush. But she sipped a bit of her first vodka tonic with half a lemon squeezed into it since her surgery, and waited patiently while I assembled her prescriptions for the night against a carefully prepared checklist—it took a dinner plate to hold all the bottles of her medications—and went to sleep in her own bed at last.
The next morning demonstrated what I had already begun to perceive as a basic fact about home health care. Everything takes at least twice as long as you had supposed it would. Getting Margaret’s teeth brushed and dressing her for the day took an hour before she was ready to make the trip downstairs, plus time for pills and breakfast, so she didn’t make her first trip to the barn until the regular morning coffee break in the tack room, which takes place after the horses have been ridden and somebody has driven down to the Dunkin’ Donuts in Pleasant Valley.
Margaret bumped her walker along the stone pathway, across the driveway, and up the one big step into the tack room, which was, in a very special way, her space, as much a reflection of herself as my office is to me. On one wall above a bench with a generous pillow were the plaques of her national victories, and on the others were photographs of her favorite horses, some retired, some dead, along with two neat rows of bridle hooks and saddle racks. There was a big, sturdy rack for cleaning saddles, an overhead hook for cleaning bridles and reins, a glass-fronted medicine cabinet, and two old-fashioned tack trunks. Some tack rooms are so expensively decorated that they look like extensions of the house, but Margaret’s had evolved over the years from primitive beginnings into a place that was at once cozy and functional—everything was where she wanted it, from her boots and spurs to the big chest on which she kept her daily planner and wrote down which horse was to go into which paddock, and the time it went out and came in. Everything metal—buckles, bits, and spurs—was gleaming, everything leather was carefully cleaned with saddle soap or oiled with Lexol, there was a kind of solid, old-fashioned comfort in the sight of so many things that were honorably well used, worn by her knees or her boots, and perfectly looked-after for years or decades. Some tack rooms look as if they had been designed by a fashionable decorator, others are such a complete mess that you might hesitate to sit down. Margaret’s was neither. It was home to the barn cat Tiz Whiz and a nice, unpretentious place for a dog to cool down or warm up depending on the season. Miguel, the barn manager, had brought her usual morning coffee, a small French vanilla with one cream and one Sweet’n Low, and had already put the straw in it for her. She sat for a while on the bench and brushed Tiz Whiz, as soothing for Margaret as it was for the cat, then she got up and wheeled her walker into the aisle in the barn to visit her horses.
Miguel cut up an apple for her from the barrel in the feed room and she gave a piece to each horse. They recognized her instantly. Horses don’t have the possessive qualities of a cat or the soulful gaze of a loyal dog—you visit them, they don’t visit you—but you could tell by the way they whickered softly and held out their nose to be patted that they knew her, even Logan go Bragh, her big black event horse, who is inclined to be standoffish.
She stood there for a while, breathing in the stable smells, and said, “I wonder if I will ever ride them again.”
6.
“THE THING YOU have to understand about Margaret,” I once told a friend of ours, Dr. Avodah Offit, a New York City psychoanalyst, “is that despite appearances she always remained a country girl at heart.” When her marriage to “
Gorgeous Don” broke up in 1960, she moved from Nyeri to Nairobi, where she met her second husband Burt, who was in Kenya photographing a travel story for one of the big magazines, and returned to the UK with him, and from there to the U.S. in 1961. She and Burt married as soon as her divorce from Don was decreed final, by then she was living in the big apartment on Fifty-Seventh Street and First Avenue near Sutton Place that Burt shared with his friend Clay Felker, founder of New York magazine and visionary godfather of “New Journalism,” who did much to launch the careers of Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Gail Sheehy, and Gay Talese. Although Clay would marry the movie star Pamela Tiffin in 1962, the atmosphere of the luxuriously furnished apartment, with its baronial fireplace and a dining table that could seat fourteen, remained somewhere between that of a rowdy frat house and the newsroom of a big-city newspaper. Both Burt and Clay were cigar smokers who tended to leave their clothes scattered around the apartment, as well as newspapers, magazines, and photographs. They were both dressy men who spent a fortune at the best tailors in London and New York, but neither was neat—Clay often looked as if he had slept in his clothes, Burt was apt to toss his beautifully tailored jacket carelessly on the nearest chair. They loved good company, the more of it the better, and liked to eat out every night at whatever the “in” media restaurants of the time were—in fact, Clay once boasted to Tom Wolfe that he had only eaten dinner at home eight times the past year, he had gone to the trouble of looking it up—and neither had any apparent interest in, or gift for, domesticity. How Margaret managed to survive this baptism of fire in the red-hot center of New York’s journalistic elite during what would later be looked back on as the “Swinging Sixties” is hard to imagine, let alone how she managed to get Burt out of that apartment into one on Central Park West overlooking the park, but she transformed herself overnight into a glamorous clotheshorse—with closets full of haute couture—who traveled all over the world as Burt’s model.
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