Promise Me

by Nancy G. Brinker

  Copyright © 2010 by Nancy G. Brinker

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brinker, Nancy

  Promise me / by Nancy G. Brinker; with Joni Rodgers

  p. cm.

  1. Brinker, Nancy. 2. Komen, Susan G.—Health. 3. Breast—Cancer—Patients—United States—Biography. 4. Breast—Cancer—Popular works. 5. Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. I. Rodgers, Joni, 1962– II. Title.

  RC280.B8B7287 2010

  362.196′994490092—dc22

  [B] 2010008731

  eISBN: 978-0-307-71814-3

  v3.1_r2

  To Suzy … with love forever.

  And to Mommy, Daddy, and Eric.

  I dedicate my life’s work to my fine colleagues and friends who’ve made Susan G. Komen for the Cure come alive.

  And to Norman.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Note from the Author

  Note from the Coauthor

  PART I - SUZY

  1 Where Will Meets Way

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BEAST

  2 Founder Effect

  THE STORYTELLER’S MASTECTOMY

  3 The Goodman Girls

  LITTLE PEARL HARBOR

  4 Women of the World

  FOREVER BLONDE

  5 May Queen at Neiman Marcus

  CENTS AND SENSIBILITY

  6 We All Fall Down

  MYSTERY AND METHOD

  7 Wake Up, Little Suzy

  SEMPER PINK

  8 Make It Last

  PART II - EVOLUTION

  9 A Seal Upon Thy Heart

  WHEN YOU HEAR HOOFBEATS

  10 Flying into Love

  LOVE AND OTHER CANNONBALLS

  11 Outside the Box

  I HOPE YOU DANCE

  12 Follow the Leader

  THE FIRST LADY

  13 Run the Good Race

  LIVING ONE STEP AHEAD

  14 Purpose in Perspective

  LOVE WILL FIND A WAY

  15 To Market, To Market

  FROM POINT A TO POINT B

  16 My Kingdom for a Horse

  PART III - REVOLUTION

  17 Bridge of Light

  HIGHER LEARNING

  18 Pride and Protocol

  WHERE WE AREN’T, WHERE WE ARE, AND WHERE WE WANT TO BE

  19 Promise Me

  Breast Cancer Timeline

  Resources for Families Dealing with Breast Cancer

  About the Authors

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  This book captures the spirit of my experiences to the best of my recollection with the help of letters, journals, press clippings, photos, and interviews. To create a readable story of manageable length, it was necessary to condense and combine some events and characters. Suzy’s dialogue is based on her own words in letters to my family. Other dialogue was re-created for dramatic effect, based on interviews, letters, press clippings, and my recollections. Others may remember or interpret certain events and conversations differently. I don’t pretend to remember every exchange verbatim, but I’ve done my best to remain true to the spirit of conversations and events.

  Nothing in this book constitutes or is intended as a substitute for medical or legal advice. The opinions expressed are my personal opinions and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of Susan G. Komen for the Cure®, Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure®, Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure®, private donors, corporate sponsors, local affiliates, or associated researchers and other medical professionals, or that of any corporate or nonprofit entity for which I serve, have served, or will serve as a board member now, in the past, or at any time in the future.

  There’s no such thing as a “tell all” memoir. Some things have to be omitted to protect the privacy of those involved. The people who’ve contributed time, energy, and rich experience to my life are far too many to mention by name in this book, but I would like to express my deepest thanks to the board of Susan G. Komen for the Cure for their dedication and insight; Alexine Clement Jackson, board chair; the staff at the SGK offices in Dallas and Washington, D.C., for their hard work and good hearts; the leadership at all our local affiliates worldwide for their passion and energy; my fabulous friends in Dallas, especially the founding members of SGK, who were there in the beginning and made this organization what it is; my family and friends in Peoria, the Land of Milk and Honey, and in Palm Beach, where Mommy and I have found a warm circle of laughter and love. I’d also like to thank everyone who helped make this book a reality: my brilliant literary agent, Dorian Karchmar at William Morris; our terrific editors, Lorraine Glennon, Sydny Minor, and Diane Salvatore; our publisher, Tina Constable, and everyone at Crown Archetype; my mother, who provided a wealth of photographs and memories; my son, Eric Brinker, who was a tremendous source of help and information; Barbara Rogoff, who participated in the live read and curates my Hungarian art collection; Jonathan Blum, Emily Callahan, Susan Carter Johns, Katrina McGhee, John Pearson, Pam Stevens, Elizabeth Thompson, Matt Wendel, Mike Williams, Dr. Eric Winer, and all the very special people who shared their stories.

  To all those who aren’t mentioned: Please know that I’m deeply grateful for your presence in the full story, which is written in my heart.

  Nancy Goodman Brinker

  September 2010

  NOTE FROM THE COAUTHOR

  Thanks to my agent, Wendy Sherman; my project assistant, Jerusha Rodgers; Gary and Malachi Rodgers, who provided help and support; and Colleen Thompson, Barbara Sissel, and Fred Ramey, who offered insightful critique on early versions of the manuscript. Much of this book was written at the Dakota Ramblers Writing Retreat in Montana. Thanks to the staff for their music and hospitality.

  Joni Rodgers

  September 2010

  I

  Suzy

  ∼ 1 ∼

  Where Will Meets Way

  My waking memories of my sister have grown hazy over the years, but Suzy still passes through my dreams as animate and vivid as a migrating butterfly. Her face is fresh and full of energy, her hair windblown but still beautiful. In a freshly ironed skirt and patent leather ballerina flats, she defies gravity, scrambling over a pile of slick rocks, Roman ruins stacked like unclaimed luggage on a hilly roadside in southern Spain.

  Suzy, be careful, I call as she climbs higher.

  Oh, Nanny, she waves me off, mugging for the boy with the camera. (Boys could never keep their eyes, or cameras, off her.) He tells Suzy to smile. Say queso! But she’s already smiling. In studio and fashion photos, she was always slightly Mona Lisa, never haute couture haughty. Almost every candid photograph I have of Suzy seems to have been snapped just as she’s bubbling up to giggle, that precise moment when you can see the laughter in her eyes and feel the active upturn of her mouth, but the not-quite sound of it is forever suspended in the air, teasing like the un-played eighth note of a full octave. Even in the dream, I ache for the unfinished music of her life.

  Back home, Suzy would write something silly on the back of the photo of the Roman ruins—I swear, it was like this when we got here!—while I’d carefully record the date and precise location where the picture was taken. I’m simply not gifted with silliness like Suzy was. I appreciate it as an art form, and I try not to be frustrated by it, but gifted with it? No. I am not.

  Suzy wasn’t serious or “bookish” like me, but all her teachers loved her, and I always thought of
her as the smart one. In addition to her savant silliness, she was gifted with emotional intelligence, empathy, our mother’s generous heart, an unfairly fabulous sense of style, and a humming, youthful happiness that made her naturally magnetic. She had a shy side, but people loved her to her dying day because she was just so much fun to be around.

  I can be a bit of a task to be around, I’m afraid. I have no talent for sitting still. I’m not capable of pretending something is fine and dandy, when in fact it’s not. If something needs to be said, I’m compelled to say it, and I do it as diplomatically as I can. But let’s face it, candor’s less endearing than coquettishness on any playground. My gifts were sturdy construction, a stalwart sense of justice, and the ability to whistle, ride horses bareback, and skip stones over water as well as any boy. I was a natural bridge builder. Even as a little girl, I was the ambassador between my high-spirited sister and our rightly starched father. She was three years older, but when Suzy was grounded, I was the hostage negotiator. When Suzy exceeded her curfew, I was the peace envoy.

  When Suzy died, my life’s work was born. Her meaning became my mission.

  Born on Halloween, 1943, in Peoria, Illinois, a gentle and generous place that embodies the very soul of Americana, Suzy was three when I came along in December 1946. Mom says she peered at me over the edge of the bassinet and said, “Well! She’s quite a character.”

  We were thick as thieves from that moment on. Suzy was always a queen bee in the neighborhood gang, and I was thrilled to be Suzy Goodman’s little sister. I was her entourage, her liege, her cheerful sidekick, ambitiously pedaling my tricycle in the wake of her fleet-footed, inventive escapades. I can’t remember a single instance of her telling me to buzz off or leave her alone or go play with the other kindergarten babies so she could hang out with the big girls who had more sophisticated things to do.

  As our mother ages so gracefully, I can’t help thinking what a couple of grand old ladies Suzy and I would have been together. That was our plan from the time we were little girls. My sister and I expected to age gracefully, set up housekeeping, cultivate a nice cutting garden, and sit in lawn chairs, watching our grandchildren play. We never discussed the fate of our beloved spouses; we just naturally assumed we’d outlive them in some “God’s in his Heaven, all’s right with the world” kind of way. It never crossed our minds that we’d be hip-broken or infirm. Not us. We’d be the spry old dames delivering Meals on Wheels, organizing holiday toy drives, knitting mittens for the underprivileged, quilting lap robes for all the tragic polio children.

  The muggy summer of 1952 teemed with mosquitoes and clingy midwestern humidity. The school year ended (I was fresh out of first grade, Suzy liberated from fourth), but instead of that lazy, hazy wide-open summer feeling, we found ourselves in a world of closed doors and shuttered windows. It seemed to Suzy and me as if the city of Peoria had pulled into itself like a turtle, afraid to poke so much as a toe out to do anything. The ice cream parlor and candy store closed up shop. The streets and sidewalks felt muted and unfamiliar. Women hurried through the grocery store, holding the cart handle with a fresh hanky or dishcloth. We’d already been told there would be no movies, no carnivals, no concerts in the park. When Mother told us the municipal pool was closed, Suzy groaned.

  “What about the lake?” she asked.

  “They’re letting a few people swim there,” said Mother. “Invitation only.”

  I raised the possibility of the swimming pool at Uncle Bob and Aunt Helen’s house or the wading pool at the park or even our little plastic pool in the backyard, but Mother shook her head.

  “Dr. Moffet says children can get polio from going in the water.”

  “Clean water right out of the hose?” I said skeptically. “How would that give a kid polio?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Mom. “It’s a virus, and it’s very contagious. Now scientists are saying not to swim. I saw it in the newspaper. You girls should tell the other kids. Help spread the word about that. Even if it looks perfectly clean—and I don’t care how hot it is—you girls don’t go near the pool. Understand?” And knowing us as well as she did, she added, “Nancy, I’m counting on you to obey me.”

  Suzy tucked her knees under her chin, wrapping her arms around her legs, and I put my arm across her shoulders. She wasn’t pouting; it made her sad to think about the poor polio children with their wizened limbs and squeaky little wheelchairs, their drawn curtains and dilated eyes longing for outside. It terrified her and broke her heart whenever we heard of another child in our neighborhood tumbling into the bottomless well of his own little bed.

  These days we’ve all but forgotten what a scourge it was, but in 1952, there was a global epidemic. “Infantile paralysis” was a malevolent phantom that shadowed every summer day and haunted every cricket-filled night, poised to cripple and kill with one touch to the spine, the most deeply dreaded childhood disease of the twentieth century worldwide.

  Mom stroked Suzy’s strong shinbone.

  “Right this minute, scientists are working to develop a vaccine,” she said. “We have to do everything we can to help. Like this bake sale.” She set a Tupperware container on the table. Through the milky-opaque plastic, we could just make out mounds of pink-tinted frosting topped with maraschino cherries. “Every little cupcake will do its part to end the epidemic. The money helps the scientists, the scientists help physicians, and if lots more mothers and daughters collect lots more money, and the scientists keep working, someday, they’ll be able to give people a shot and—” She snapped her fingers. “No more polio.”

  Of course, in the oppressive heat of that long, sequestered summer, this grand vision sounded as ridiculous to me and Suzy as a cure for breast cancer sounds to all the naysayers presently telling me how impossible that is.

  But in that first prosperous decade following World War II, the idea was still fresh in the American mind that we could accomplish anything when we all pulled together for the good of our nation. An entirely new form of media—television—swept the country faster and more infectiously than any virus, creating (or perhaps simply awakening) a scaly but softhearted dragon, the mass audience, provoking awareness that a viable vaccine was agonizingly close. Mothers saw their children standing on knobby pony legs just this side of that tipping point, mothers who’d recently awakened to the idea that the hands of women—women’s voices, women’s work—could build bombs as well as grow roses. In that moment, a singular need met its cultural match. Grassroots philanthropy sprang up, money rushed forth, and before the clock ticked into the sixties, a solution was discovered, a bridge was built between science and society, and the phantom was vanquished.

  In the United States alone, 58,000 people were stricken with poliomyelitis in 1952. More than 3,000 died; another 21,000 were left disabled. Jonas Salk’s vaccine was licensed in 1955 and was being widely distributed by 1959. In 1962, there were fewer than 1,000 cases of polio reported. In 1963, there were fewer than 100. These days, polio is a quarter-page sidebar in a history book.

  Along the way, of course, skeptics in all their towering intellect persistently pointed out the many reasons the virtual eradication of polio could never be accomplished.

  My mother respectfully disagreed, efficient and undeterred in her daily purpose. Suzy and I were bundled into the family station wagon every weekend to accompany Mom on her various missions. It wasn’t up for debate; it’s what we did. I’m in the habit of saying Mom was a “tireless volunteer,” but putting that on paper, I realize it’s ridiculous. Of course, she was tired. She must have been exhausted by all she did, but she did it anyway, and without complaint, which makes her all the more remarkable. In addition to her organized charity work, there were always little personal mercies: a casserole for someone just out of the hospital, a freshly folded laundry basket of diapers, the weeding of a flowerbed, whatever she could do to lighten a neighbor’s load.

  That summer she had to be careful. Rather than risk bringing the virus into
our home, she’d put together a basket of food and other necessities and leave them on the recipient’s porch with a light tap on the front door. The lady of the house would move the curtain aside and wave, waiting to open the door until Mommy was safely out on the sidewalk.

  “Instead of dwelling on all the things you can’t do,” said Mother, “figure out what you can do. What you will do. My mother used to say, ‘If you have to ask what to do, get out of the kitchen.’ I’ll bet you girls could come up with something if you put your heads together.”

  We piled into the station wagon and set out on our appointed rounds. Sweltering in the backseat, Suzy and I complained and deviled each other like a couple of spiny pill bugs.

  “Girls, that’s enough.”

  Mom sent a few ominous warnings over the transom as she negotiated the stop-and-go downtown traffic, but Suzy and I kept at it until the old station wagon swung to the side of the street and lurched to a halt. Suzy and I rarely saw our mother’s patience fail. Every once in a great while, there might be a flare of angry words or a swift slam of the silverware drawer, but even that was as startling and incongruous as a griffin landing on the Sunday dinner table.

  Mother didn’t raise her voice, but her tone crackled with aggravation. “Out.”

  Suzy and I looked at each other, looked out at the unfamiliar neighborhood. Surely, she didn’t mean—

  “I said, out.”

  Our parents didn’t believe in corporal punishment; Mother disciplined by eye contact. We met her withering gaze in the rearview mirror for a tense Don’t test me moment, then Suzy opened her door. We shuffled out onto the curb, and I instinctively reached for Suzy’s hand, knowing she’d take care of me now that we were on our own in the world and would have to get jobs in factories or join the army or find a band of nomads to camp out with.

  Mother stood in front of us in the blazing sun, shielding her eyes with her hand.