One day, Fritzi’s nineteen-year-old sister, Esther, came home from work, disoriented and complaining of a strangely piercing headache. Fritzi and her big sister, Rose, made Esther lie down, and Fritzi ran for a doctor. According to the story that was passed down from Fritzi to Mother and from Mother to Suzy and me, the doctor came, briefly assessed the patient, dashed cold water in her face, and told her frantic family, “She’ll get up.” Ninety minutes later, Esther was dead.
“Aneurysm, maybe. Or an embolism.” Mommy shakes her head when she talks about it now. “Nobody knew back then. Nobody questioned doctor’s orders.”
It’s not likely that they could have done anything to save Esther, but doing something would have saved Fritzi from having to live with the fact that nothing had been done. Fueled by rage over the way her sister had been treated, she started asking questions from that day forward. She demanded answers, staunchly advocated for those who weren’t in a position to stand up for themselves, and brought Mommy up to do the same.
My mother, Eleanor Tressa Newman, was born in 1920, effectively the only child of eight parents. Grandma Fritzi and Grandpa Leo (later affectionately dubbed “Boppie” by Suzy and me) lived in a big apartment with a constantly revolving cast of relatives, neighbors, friends, soldiers, and strangers—basically anyone who needed a place to stay. Growing up during the Great Depression, Mom was accustomed to sleeping in the dining room whenever some displaced drifter needed a bed for the night. When she was a little girl, if one of the uncles or a friend of the family was in the hospital, Fritzi would station her outside the hospital room and say, “Ellie, stay here while I dash home and make dinner for everyone. If anything happens, you run to the nurse’s station and tell them to call me.” Mommy took this responsibility very seriously. I think it brought out the guardian angel in her. Nothing was more important than looking out for each other.
Mom’s flamboyant Aunt Rose came and went between husbands, and the dashing uncles all spoiled and doted on their little Ellie. She loved to travel with them to Atlantic City, the Illinois State Fair, or anywhere else someone would take her. She went to visit Aunt Rose and her husband of the moment in California or New York. Once a year, the whole family traveled south to see relatives still living in Kentucky, where they’d been raising hogs since before the Civil War, and Mommy had her own little billy goats there.
Mom was beautiful and stylish, making the most of everything, even when there was little money to work with. Aunt Rose passed along an evening dress with a beautifully crafted pearl and rhinestone collar. The fancy gown was too big and not something Mother had occasion to wear, but she snipped off the collar and sewed it onto a plain black dress Fritzi had made for her. And when that dress became faded and worn, Mommy snipped the collar off and sewed it onto the next generation. Old photographs show her blossoming into that collar. At first, on a girl of twelve, it seems a bit much, but by the time she was in her late teens, it looks elegant and proud. Instead of the collar glitzing her up, she’s the one making the old hand-me-down look like something special.
When I was sixteen, the brilliant Betty Friedan published the now-legendary feminist classic The Feminine Mystique. Imagine how impressed I was to learn that Mommy and Ms. Friedan were actually classmates back in temple school. In my mind at the time, this was Mommy’s only brush with greatness. They didn’t dislike each other, but they weren’t pals. Mom was one of the It girls who probably left Betty chronically perplexed.
“She was whip-smart and very serious,” Mom says. “She didn’t have much use for girls who were breezy and frivolous and not deep thinkers.”
Mom went to college for a year, but there wasn’t money for her to continue, and she’s only a little wistful about that now. She met my father at a B’nai B’rith party when she was not quite twenty. He and his family had made their way to the Midwest. She’d just gotten home from California, where she’d been visiting Aunt Rose, and while she was gone, Fritzi had begun playing cards with Daddy’s sister, Ruth. Daddy waltzed over to Mom, orchestrated a quick exchange of partners, and was immediately smitten, but Mommy was on a date with someone else. By the end of their first dance, it was all settled. She abandoned her other suitor and stayed out with Dad until four in the morning.
He told her right up front that he intended to be the head of his household and provide for his family; he envisioned a wife who’d devote herself to making a pleasant home, raising well-groomed, well-behaved children, and actively participating in community and charity projects. Though Mommy and Betty Friedan had more in common than either of them would have believed back in temple school, this proposal fit perfectly with Mom’s vision for her own life. She understood the difference between service and servitude and wore her traditional role the same way she always wore perfect shoes: she liked feeling comfortable, functional, and beautiful. Mom never questioned or denigrated the different choices made by other women, but this was her choice, and she never regretted it. An unquestionably liberated woman, my mother did exactly what she wanted to do. Her parents loved my father. The uncles, impressed with young Marvin Goodman’s entrepreneurial spirit and cast-iron work ethic, gladly brought him into the family real estate business.
A few months before my parents were married, Grandma Fritzi took ill with a kidney infection. A simple thing, these days: usually little more than an inconvenience. Ten minutes in the physician’s office. Ninety seconds at the pharmacy drive-through. Penicillin, the drug that would have saved her, was discovered quite by accident in 1928 and first tested on human subjects in 1939. In 1940, when Fritzi’s fever drove her to the hospital, that simple but effective remedy was in the pipeline and would be commonly available just a few years later—barely a breath in the scope of history. Meanwhile, sulfa drugs were all the rage, the most potent weapon there was against battlefield infection; soldiers were issued a powdered form in their first aid kits. But because of its low solubility, sulfanilamide tended to crystallize in the kidneys when taken internally. Fritzi’s doctor—drunk, Mother maintains to this day—accidentally gave Fritzi a toxic dose.
Poor Mommy crouched in the corner of the hospital room as her mother, this angel of mercy, died in twisting agony. It left her grief-stricken, infuriated, and radicalized. From that day forward, contrary to the “doctor’s orders” standard of the times, Mom was unfashionably fearless about questioning the judgments of God and doctors who think they’re God’s golf buddies, and she was utterly committed to the temple definition of stewardship Fritzi had instilled in her.
“Don’t let the world fall apart on you, Ellie,” Fritzi said before she died. “Just do those things that need to be done.”
Mother had been Fritzi’s right hand from the time she was little. Now it was her responsibility to clean, cook, and care for Boppie and the bachelor uncles, attempt to keep Rose on the straight and narrow, and tend to whatever strays and strangers needed her help.
She and Daddy got married later that year. Suzy and I came along on the leading edge of the baby boom. The war was over. Patriotism was a fervor. Optimism was a fever. Two weeks after I was born, movie theaters across the country were showing It’s a Wonderful Life, and in Peoria, Illinois, this was most certainly true.
It was Boppie who taught me the gentle art of strong-arming when I was just a little girl. Every year he took me by the hand and escorted me through the buildings he managed, selling Girl Scout cookies. He was a jolly, beneficent landlord, and his tenants were always pleased to see him, but even I could see that my cookies enjoyed a whole different reception when I walked into the room under Boppie’s corporate umbrella.
“Why, Leo!” the tenant would say. “Hello! How are you?”
“Very well, and you? How’s your wife and the new baby? Of course, you remember my granddaughter, Nancy.”
“Oh … is it that time of year already?”
My cue to pitch the Thin Mints, sandwich cookies, and shortbread squares stamped with the Girl Scout emblem along with a brief recitati
on on the illustrious history of the Girl Scouts of America and a couple of talking points on how the community would be served by a thriving population of healthy young women, all outfitted with skills in life and archery from Camp Tapawingo.
I learned a lot from our cookie sales excursions, and I loved being squired around by Boppie. His laugh was thunderous. His presence was huge. Doors seemed to open magically in front of him. He was no tycoon; Fritzi’s brothers were the driving force behind the family business. But Boppie brought a healthy soul to their endeavors. He fostered good will and intangible assets that are just as bankable as wheels and deals at the end of the day—which is essentially what he did during our shortbread sorties. Boppie didn’t sell any cookies for me; he just got me in the room. But it’s amazing what a motivated person can do when partnered with someone who has the clout to get her in the room. And I was very motivated. Back then, there were no incentives or rewards for selling Girl Scout cookies; our reward was having Girl Scouts, and that meant a lot to us.
After the war, Mom banded together with a small group of friends to start the Girl Scouts chapter in Peoria. Boy Scouts had been going strong for decades, and it rankled Mommy that there was nothing like that for girls, but she heard the same dismissive arguments Girl Scout leaders had been getting since the 1920s. Conventional wisdom said girls didn’t need the self-reliance skills boys needed. No money was going to be invested in that. So the mothers of invention came up with the Girl Scout cookie. Once the Peoria chapter was up and running, Mom ascended the ranks in the Kickapoo Council, participating as a leader at the regional and national levels.
Mommy was deeply offended by racial segregation, which persisted through the 1950s. She made sure we understood how wrong it was when we came upon restrooms and water fountains marked “White” and “Colored.”
“Think how you’d feel if that sign said ‘Jew,’ ” she said. “We don’t spend our money in a place that does that, and it’s our duty to let them know it.”
She didn’t want Suzy and me to participate in racially segregated play groups or summer camps, so she spearheaded the efforts that eventually resulted in the acquisition of 640 wooded acres that became Camp Tapawingo, a culturally inclusive oasis of unabashed Girl Scout power.
“When you see a wrong, right it.”
That’s Mommy.
I lived for Camp Tapawingo every summer. Suzy wasn’t much of a camper, so it gave me an opportunity to take the lead, and it was a powerful incentive as I trudged through each school year.
My first day of kindergarten, the teacher called my mother to report that I’d left the building, climbed a tree in the schoolyard, and refused to come down. Mommy hustled right over, and stood beneath the branch where I’d perched myself.
“Nancy? What on earth is going on?”
“This is stupid,” I told her. “They’re not doing it right.”
“Come down,” said Mom. “Tomorrow will be better.” But it wasn’t. It didn’t take me long to figure out that everyone else saw things differently from the way I did. I realized that I was the one not doing it right and assumed I was the only one for whom learning was such labor. Numbers turned to a tangle of hieroglyphics and barbed wire somewhere between my eyes and the back of my brain. Back then, there was no testing, no diagnostics to identify the way numbers knotted in front of my eyes. Lacking any other terminology, I diagnosed myself as dumb. I knew I’d have to work harder than everyone else in order to compensate for that—and to conceal it.
I loved how proud it made my father when I did well in school; that alone was worth the struggle. I was willing to work as hard as I had to, but ultimately the effect of all that was a restless feeling that my nose would be forever pressed to the glass, that I’d always be double-tasking and still never quite measuring up.
It also trained me to think outside the box.
Daddy used to tell (with great amusement) the story of that particular Halloween. Mom had gone to Chicago for a national Girl Scout leadership conference. Dad had some important matter rumbling in his office, and Suzy and I were too small to go trick-or-treating on our own, so it was decided that she and I would stay home, staffing the front door and handing out candy to all the lucky little children with nice parents—children whose world had not collapsed into a wretched coal hod of inequity, as ours clearly had.
When the house was built, our resourceful dad had installed an intercom system at the front door, and equally resourceful, I hatched a brilliant plan just as a merrily costumed pair of trick-or-treaters skipped up to the door and rang the bell. Before they could shout the customary threat of extortion, I cranked up the intercom and mustered my deepest, most ferocious voice.
“This is God,” I intoned. “Drop your candy and run.”
Suzy’s eyes went as big as saucers. There was a shriek and hasty scuffling out on the front stoop. After a moment, I opened the door a crack and—victory!—the spoils were mine. I quickly gathered the scattered candy into the abandoned bags and clapped the door shut as my next victims rounded the corner at the end of the block. I repeated my brilliant trick, gathering bag after bag of ill-gotten treats until—
Ding-dong.
“This is God! Drop your candy and—”
“Nancy.”
There was a heavy hand on my shoulder. My almighty father. He’d come out of his office to check on us. When Mother came home in the morning, she was surprised to find a row of candy bags banked against the wainscoting in the dining room and me, waiting in shame on a side chair. Needless to say, she was appalled to hear what had happened, and after a resounding lecture on the moral consequences of envy, fear-mongering, and too much sugar, she sent me off on an all-day walkathon, schlepping those bags of candy all over the neighborhood until I’d returned every single one to its rightful owner.
Beyond reinforcement of the single overarching theme of my upbringing—“Do the right thing”—I’m not sure I learned any great lessons from this experience, but I try not to mess with divinity. I’ve met such a wealth of good people in my time—sincere, faithful, salt-of-the-earth people from every corner of the world, every conceivable religious tradition—that it’s not possible for me to see any one cut-and-dried dogma that encompasses the human spirit. I have faith and doubt in equal parts most of the time. Having walked beside two popes and the Dalai Lama, I would never presume to question someone else’s vision of God, and I’m immediately skeptical when I hear a voice saying the big-world equivalent of “This is God. Drop your candy and run.”
For one thing, the Jewish faith doesn’t include any threat of eternal damnation. To my mind, Hell is a place where people don’t care about one another. Hell is the squandering of one’s life on Earth without any good purpose. I don’t believe cancer in general or Suzy’s death in particular are part of God’s plan. That puppet-master brand of theology removes responsibility from human hands, even as science persistently whispers that many cancers are caused by environmental and behavioral factors largely within our ability to control. I think God’s plan (or at least His or Her desperate hope) is that we, the great and industrious anthill that is humanity, will love each other enough to apply ourselves to the scientific effort and figure out how to solve this problem.
Likewise, I’m skeptical when any scientific voice—be it physician, researcher, or school of thought—makes any sweeping declarations of what is true or untrue, absolutely right or absolutely wrong, in the arena of cancer research or cancer care. I’ve witnessed the lifesaving value of both chemotherapy and prayer, mastectomy and lumpectomy, allopathic medicine and complementary therapies. The only singular truth about breast cancer is this: There is no singular truth about breast cancer. Our best strategy is to respect and listen to one another, share what we learn, reach across the aisle, and make women’s lives a higher priority than political agenda. Because I guess there actually is one absolute truth about breast cancer: There shouldn’t be any.
Fear is a powerful weapon, and the rationaliza
tion that it’s being wielded in the service of some imagined greater good doesn’t make it any less immoral. Waiting in shame for my mother to come home, I suppose I sat there rationalizing that too much candy was terribly unhealthy for those little children, so in reality, I’d done them a healthy good service taking it away from them. Similarly, there are those who assert that routine mammograms are “uncomfortable” and cancer awareness is “depressing.” There are still a few old-fashioned physicians out there who discourage women from seeking second—or third or fourth—opinions. In many cases, women would seek a second opinion but don’t have access to it because of restrictions in their insurance policy, dictated by someone who isn’t even a physician.
When Suzy and I were growing up, there were very few women physicians, and that undoubtedly contributed to the unwritten but unquestionable authority of male physicians over women patients. When a woman tried to assert some right of proprietorship over her own body, she was usually cowed with some variation of “I am God. Drop your candy and run.”
Mom was wonderful about teaching Suzy and me to respect and care for our bodies. When my weight topped a hundred pounds during second grade, she gently intervened. Enlisting the guidance of our dear Dr. Moffet, the kindly family physician who’d expertly cared for us since we were born into his hands, she educated herself on the matter, and without making me feel ugly or obtuse, firmly guided me in the healthiest possible direction. In addition to a balanced diet, she encouraged my interest in competitive swimming, horseback riding, and other activities that nurtured my sporty side.
As Suzy and I grew, Mom encouraged our independence. We were active in Girl Scouts and B’nai B’rith, various charities, and temple activities. I begged for riding lessons, and once I discovered what it felt like to fly along at a full gallop, there was no stopping me. Suzy rode too, but she rode like a duchess in a parade, while I turned into an unbridled cowboy.
Promise Me Page 3