Old Sins

by Penny Vincenzi

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘And what about your little boy? Can he go to friends?’

  ‘Oh, yes. That’s no problem.’

  ‘Good. Well, I’ll have a word with my secretary, and let you know. I expect by this time in a fortnight, you’ll be out and about and feeling just wonderful. Now I don’t want you to worry, Mrs Wilburn. I’m just taking precautions.’

  ‘Oh, I won’t worry,’ said Lee. ‘Thank you very much.’

  So what was it like, to lose a breast? What did it look like, before the wound healed? Was it a huge, gaping hole? How did they get the skin over it? How hideous did it look, even when it had healed? What would you do, under your clothes? Stuff out a bra with socks or something? Or would they give you something? Would people know? How could you bear to touch yourself? Look at yourself? Could you ever go on the beach again? Thank God Dean was gone. He would have hated it, loathed it, been revolted by it. What about Miles? How would he cope with the thought of a maimed mother? What would it do to his sexual development? What would the other kids say? They would be bound to hear.

  How much would it hurt? Would the pain be awful? Would they give you morphine just when you asked them, or would you get it anyway? Would she be able to bear it? Would she scream? Was it that kind of pain? Like childbirth, ripping-apart pain? Only that was bearable because it was good pain. This was evil, destructive, deadly pain. Suppose it was in other places already, the cancer? In her uterus, in her stomach? How could they treat that? They could take the uterus out, but what of the stomach? Would she have to have one of those bag things like old Mrs Thackeray, that gurgled all the time? Better to die. No, not better to die.

  Who would look after Miles if she died? Hugo couldn’t, that would be asking too much. Her friends couldn’t. Dean had no parents. She only had her distinctly difficult and eccentric mother, who lived in Ohio and only came to visit once a year at Thanksgiving, and anyway, she was sixty-five. He would be alone. Would he have to go to an orphanage? One of the refuge places? How would he ever grow up adjusted now, with two parents dead? Who would ever drive him to do his school work, see he didn’t get too full of himself, discipline him, love him, praise him, cuddle him?

  At half past six next morning, when the sun was just beginning to break into the shadows of the Santa Monica Mountains and tinge the sea with a faint shy blush, Lee was still awake.

  The lump proved to be absolutely harmless. ‘Just a tiny cyst,’ said the doctor, smiling at her in pleasure and self-justification. ‘You see how right we were to take it out.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Lee, tears of relief and weak joy pouring down her face, ‘oh, thank you, Doctor Forsythe, thank you very, very much. When can I go home?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Only you must take it easy. You’ve had a general anaesthetic. Promise me you won’t go rushing off stocking up for Thanksgiving.’

  ‘I promise. I promise.’ She was laughing and crying at the same time.

  That night Miles came to see her with Amy. They both had armfuls of flowers.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Lee, beaming at them ecstatically. ‘Everything is all right. It was nothing. Just a cyst. Isn’t that just the most glorious news ever? I don’t have cancer. I’m not going to die.’

  ‘Hey Mom,’ said Miles, reaching for her hand, ‘you never told me that was on the cards. You said it was just nothing.’

  ‘Well, it was nothing,’ said Lee, stretching forward and kissing him, ‘nothing at all. Thank you for the flowers, honey. Are you OK?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

  ‘Did you go to school?’

  ‘Of course I went to school, Mom. Don’t insult me!’ He was laughing at her.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I have two messages,’ said Amy, who had stayed over the night before to keep Miles company. ‘One from your English gentleman friend. He said he just called to say hallo, and how were you. I said you were fine, just having minor surgery, and you’d be home tomorrow. He said he’d call you then. He must be pretty keen on you, Lee, to keep calling you from New York.’

  ‘Oh, not really,’ said Lee airily. She was not to be drawn on the subject of Hugo, not even by Amy. She knew Amy was consumed with curiosity on the subject, but she just left her permanently consumed. She knew this hurt her friend, but she couldn’t help it. Miles and Hugo himself were more important to her than anyone in the world. And every single person who knew anything more about Hugo than that he was an old business friend of Dean’s, which was what she told everyone, made the situation a hundred per cent more dangerous.

  ‘Who else phoned?’

  ‘Your mom.’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘Yeah. I told her the same, and she said she would be down next week for Thanksgiving and she’d look after you then.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ said Lee. But she didn’t really mind. She didn’t mind anything. She was not going to die.

  Forty-eight hours later she was pushing her cart through the market, getting the weekend groceries, when she suddenly felt a huge and terrible weakness, and a hot, fierce pain in her belly. She fainted and came round, in the manager’s office, a wad of towels between her legs. She was haemorrhaging.

  That night she had a hysterectomy; a malignant uterine tumour had been discovered.

  Lying, weak and tearful, in the bed she had left so happily three days earlier, she asked Doctor Forsythe what might lie ahead. ‘Is – is that it? Might the cancer be anywhere else?’

  ‘It might,’ he said, patting her hand gently. ‘But uterine cancer is the easiest to contain. We may be lucky.’

  She noticed he did not meet her eye.

  ‘Amy,’ she said next day. ‘Could you call this number? Just leave a message to say I called.’

  ‘Sure.’ Amy looked at it. ‘New York, huh? Is this your beau?’

  ‘He’s not a beau,’ said Lee, managing to smile faintly. ‘Just call him, Amy. No, on second thoughts, don’t. I don’t want to worry him. But Amy, I do think you’d better call my mom. Get her down sooner. I won’t be home for a week or so. She’s coming anyway, so she can’t complain. Miles won’t like it, but he’ll have to put up with it for a bit. And could you tell Mr Phillips too, that I won’t be back for a week or two?’

  ‘Honey, you won’t be back that soon. You have to rest up for a long time after a hysterectomy. Otherwise you just won’t get well again.’

  ‘Well, never mind,’ said Lee. ‘We’ll just take it one day at a time. Tell him two weeks for now. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ said Amy.

  She was home in two weeks; relieved and happy to be there, she lay obediently on the couch all day, directing operations, running her small household. Her mother, eccentrically vague but deceptively spry for her sixty-five years, needed directing, but coped physically extremely well. She kept telling Lee she couldn’t stay long, and that her hens and her goats needed her more than Lee did, but she promised not to go home until things were back under control. It was a promise she had some difficulty keeping.

  Six weeks after her operation, when Lee was just beginning to feel stronger, and thinking that very soon she would be able to go back to work and let her mother return to the goats, she developed a stomach bug.

  ‘It’s just because I’m run down,’ she said shakily to Amy, returning to her couch after a prolonged session in the toilet. ‘I’ll be better soon.’

  ‘You’d better be,’ said Mrs Kelly from her corner, where she was working on a petit point picture of some hens in a barnyard, ‘I have to get back to my family real soon.’

  ‘Mom, we’re your family,’ said Lee mildly, sinking back on her pillows with a grimace of pain, ‘surely we matter more than a few old hens.’

  ‘That’s arguable,’ said Mrs Kelly, ‘and they’re not old, they’re young and at the peak of their laying capability. I dread to think what young Terence is doing with those darlings; giving them under-cooked bran mash, cutting down on their greens. Oh, it just turns my mind thinking about it.’
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  ‘Mrs Kelly, I’m sure the hens are all right,’ said Amy, ‘but if you’re really worried why don’t you go home and I’ll stay with Lee till she’s over this. It won’t be more than a few days.’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Kelly firmly, her face starched into a martyred mould. ‘I promised my daughter I’d stay till she was on her feet, and I will. I’m not a one to go back on a promise. Besides, Amy, I’ve noticed you are far too indulgent with Miles, that boy is running wild and I see it as my duty to bring some discipline into his life. He may not like it, but he will thank me when he’s older. No, my hens will just have to wait. It’s tragic, when I think how much they must be missing me, but there it is. I know my duty.’

  ‘OK,’ said Amy, diplomatically tactful for the sake of her friend. ‘That’s really nice of you. Lee, can I get you anything, honey? Some iced herbal tea? Some lemonade? I’ve made some fresh. I know exactly what’s the matter with you, Lee Wilburn, you’re just stuck full of additives and preservatives, you’ve been living on that stuff for far too long. You need a totally organic diet for a while and you’ll be just fine.’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Mrs Kelly. ‘I wouldn’t give my hens chemically produced food, wouldn’t dream of it. It affects them and it affects their eggs. It’s a whole dreadful cycle. Amy’s right, Lee, your diet is just awful, no wonder you’re ill.’

  ‘Oh, could you both just shut up and help me back to the toilet,’ said Lee, her face twisted with pain. ‘I’m getting rid of every bit of artificially grown food in my body just as fast as it’ll go. Please, Amy, please!’

  ‘I think,’ said Amy later to Mrs Kelly, looking at Lee’s ashen, slightly waxy face as she dozed fitfully on the couch, ‘we should get hold of Doctor Forsythe. I think this is more than additives.’

  It was. Doctor Forsythe had Lee back in hospital, ran some tests and scans, and pronounced cancer of the liver and the bowel. ‘Inoperable. I’m sorry, Lee. So very sorry.’

  He held her hand. She clung to it, as if she could drag some of his own strong life into her.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said, politely, as if seeking to put him at his ease.

  ‘No. Nor yours.’

  ‘Of course not.’ She was surprised.

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised. A lot of people feel guilt. Feel they could have prevented it. Feel there was something they should, and indeed could, do.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lee. ‘Yes, Amy will say it’s the additives.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Yes, a favourite scapegoat right now.’

  There was a silence. He looked at her tenderly.

  ‘You haven’t had much luck lately, have you, Lee?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I haven’t. Will – will it . . .’

  ‘Hurt? No, no more than you can bear. Pain control has become very good. You have only to ask.’

  ‘And how long?’

  He looked at her very steadily. ‘Not long. Perhaps three months.’

  She gasped, reeled back as if he had hit her. Then she started to cry, huge wracking, childish tears, on and on; she hit the pillow, bit her fists, screamed. ‘It’s not fair, it’s not fair, I’ve tried so hard, so hard, why should it be me, why why why? I hate it, I hate it, I hate everybody, everything. Go away, go away, I hate you, why couldn’t you have seen it, helped me, done something, you told me it was nothing, just a cyst, and now I’m dying and you can only give me three months. You’re cruel and you’re an idiot, you’re a lousy, fucking, useless doctor, and I hate you. Go away, go away.’

  He didn’t go away, he stayed and listened to her, and when she would let him, held her, held her hand, held her in his arms, like a lover, like a father; gradually she calmed.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I know. Can I do anything?’

  ‘Yes. Could you ask Father Kennedy to come and see me? And could you ring this number, this man, and ask him to come? Explain why. Soon. Please.’

  Father Kennedy came first. Lee was frightened, as only a sinning Catholic can be frightened.

  ‘Father, I have to confess.’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘No, not in church, here now. Will you listen?’

  ‘I will.’

  She told him. She told him everything, about Hugo, about Miles, about Dean. He listened.

  ‘May God forgive you.’

  ‘Do you think he will?’

  ‘Christ came to the world to save sinners.’

  ‘I know. But sinners like me?’

  ‘Exactly like you. And me. We are all sinners.’

  She looked at him and smiled. ‘Father, I don’t think you rank as a sinner.’

  ‘In the eyes of God I do.’

  ‘Well, he must have pretty sharp eyes.’

  ‘Merciful eyes also.’

  ‘Father, will you come?’

  ‘He understood at once.’

  ‘Of course. Whenever you feel it is time.’

  ‘Suppose I don’t know?’

  ‘You will.’

  ‘Will you tell Doctor Forsythe to call you? Just in case?’

  ‘Of course. He always does.’

  She was comforted.

  ‘Father, what can I do about Miles? I only have my mother, and she is so – well, so unsuitable.’

  ‘She is his grandmother, though. And she is willing to take care of him.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘She told me.’

  ‘Heavens above,’ said Lee, shocked out of her submissiveness. ‘When?’

  ‘She came to see me. She said she thought it was her duty. Lee, I wouldn’t call her unsuitable. She’s a good woman. She’s strong, for her age. And she loves Miles. She might even be good for him. A little old-fashioned discipline.’

  Lee frowned. ‘I know everyone thinks I spoil Miles. But it’s almost impossible not to.’

  ‘I know.’ He patted her hand. ‘He is a beautiful and charming boy.’

  ‘But he’s so young. Such a baby. So little to be left alone. I can’t bear leaving him, Father, I just can’t. Never to see him grow up, how will he manage without me?’

  He watched her, weeping silently, struggling to control herself.

  ‘He won’t be alone, Lee.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, angry suddenly. ‘Oh, I forgot. Of course, God will be there. He’ll see to his packed lunch, and comfort him when he skins his knees and cheer him on when he plays baseball and watch he isn’t out after dark, and listen to him when he’s worried, and have fun with him on Sundays, and ask his friends round and cuddle him and tell him he’s a great guy when things go wrong and be on his side when the teachers pick on him, and try to make sure he gets to college so he doesn’t have to go to Vietnam. Oh, good, I don’t need to worry at all.’

  ‘God will do some of those things, Lee. Your mother will do others. Some he will have to manage on his own. You must have faith, Lee, to save your own happiness during these weeks. They’re too precious to waste in misery and doubt.’

  ‘I just don’t know how you can talk like that. Think like that.’

  ‘Talking is easy. Thinking, believing is more difficult.’ He smiled at her. ‘Tell me, is your English friend coming to see you?’

  ‘Yes. Tomorrow he arrives. I suppose you think that’s terribly wicked.’ She looked at him, half tearful, half hostile.

  ‘No. I don’t think love and comfort are ever wicked. Given in the right way at the right time. I’m glad he’s coming. Perhaps I shouldn’t be, but I am.’

  ‘Thank you, Father.’ She smiled at him, easier, happier again. ‘Thank you. Please come again. Before – before you have to.’

  ‘I will. Often. I shall enjoy it. The company of a pretty young woman is always pleasant.’

  She looked in the mirror at her pallid face, already tinged with yellow, her distended stomach, and grimaced. ‘Pretty!’

  He bent and kissed her cheek. ‘Very pretty. Now rest. And enjoy your visitor.’

  Hugo was shocked at the sight of her. She could see it
in his eyes. He hadn’t seen her since she had had the cyst out – well, it had only been six weeks altogether – and he winced as he looked at her. It hurt her.

  ‘Hi, Hugo. Here I am then, your golden California girl, turned a little tarnished. I’m sorry I look so hideous. I can’t help it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You don’t look hideous. You couldn’t. Not exactly glowing, but not hideous.’

  She was sullen, hostile.

  ‘Don’t lie to me. I look hideous.’

  ‘OK,’ he said agreeably, ‘you look hideous.’

  ‘You didn’t have to come,’ she said, and started, once again, to cry. Every fresh visitor, fresh intruder into her safe, sick world, made her cry, forcing her as they did to confront her sickness, her imminent death.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘But I did come. I wanted to come.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  She was silent. Then: ‘Have you come from England or New York?’

  ‘England.’

  ‘Ah. How’s Alice?’

  ‘She’s fine.’

  ‘How very nice for her,’ she said bitterly. ‘How very nice.’

  ‘Lee, don’t.’

  ‘Don’t what? Don’t care?’

  ‘Don’t be angry.’

  ‘But I am angry,’ she cried, ‘you would be angry too. Losing half your life, losing your child, being in pain, being afraid, of course I’m angry, fuck you, I’m furious.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yes, I expect you are. I expect you thought you’d find some peaceful, madonna-like figure lying back on her pillows, smiling serenely, telling her rosary. Well, death isn’t like that, Hugo, I’ve learnt. It’s hard and it’s painful and it’s elusive and it’s ugly. And it makes you angry. So angry.’

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘Yes, I do. I told you once, don’t you remember?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That death wasn’t so bad.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘oh, yes, yes, I do. Tell me about it, Hugo, tell me about the people you have seen die.’

  ‘Mostly men,’ he said. ‘A few women. In the war. People are nearly always brave. Almost welcoming. Usually very calm.’

  ‘And afterwards?’