The Orphan's Daughter

by Jan Cherubin

  I finished the Greyhound story and started a new one, a story I had been thinking about writing for a long time, about Johnny. But I was struggling. I couldn’t even think of a fictional name for him. Bobby wasn’t right. Tom was close, but I didn’t want to give him my childhood friend’s name. Not finding a name for him felt like a sign. Don’t go there, everything about Johnny is too weird.

  With nothing to work on, I got agitated. I called Cedar Drive every day, always with the same two questions: How is my father and have you heard from pathology? He’s fine and I haven’t heard anything, Brenda always said. After a week of this, I suggested instead of waiting, she ought to call pathology herself.

  “I’m sure they’ll call when they have anything to report,” said Brenda.

  Take care of yourself during the break, my mother said. Be good to yourself. Get a massage or something, Susan said. So I got a haircut, and decided to go really short. It was a reckless decision. My small face looked smaller and my nose looked bigger with no hair to hide behind, but I tried to embrace it. I did feel lighter. That was good. I felt I could levitate if I wanted. I was a warrior, ready for battle, at least on behalf of my father, if not for GQ. To further my self-care, I went to see my gynecologist for a checkup and we chatted. She said, “Undifferentiated cells? That’s bad. I’m sorry.” I was shocked. I shouldn’t have been, but I was. Why hadn’t his doctors told me undifferentiated cells meant a poor prognosis? I’d done my own research, but the books about cancer I’d taken out of the library used the same language as the doctors, in the same way, talking about the cells as if they weren’t attached to people, telling me nothing, allowing my massive denial. I cried to Fred, and he cried, too. After a while, I squirmed out of his arms and I went and watered the flowers on the patio and deadheaded the wilted blossoms and sprayed the lemon tree with biodegradable soap and that calmed me down. I saw a few movies with Fred during that week and I had lunch with friends, but I wasn’t really present. What could the holdup possibly be about? I figured if I wanted to find out I’d have to call pathology myself. I was put through without delay. No one asked what kind of kin I was, and I was told immediately they had results. I felt regret and shame for not calling sooner and fury at Brenda for not calling at all. Our détente had come to an end.

  The final results were a surprise, not at all expected. He did not have nasopharyngeal carcinoma. The undifferentiated cells were adenocarcinoma, not squamous cells. Primary head-and-neck cancers were not adenocarcinomas. The name they gave us was the wrong name. The mass pressing on his cranial nerves was a metastasis. It had traveled from a distant site. But what distant site? The doctors scratched their heads. They were clueless. All they had to go on was his history of prostate cancer. Prostate cancer was an adenocarcinoma.

  I expected Brenda to be angry I went over her head, but she didn’t seem to mind. She called Dr. Cromwell with the news and he spoke to Dr. Jelinek and they agreed to give him DES, the notorious drug prescribed to prevent miscarriages that was found to cause cancer in the children born to mothers who used it. DES was banned for women, but still used to curb testosterone in men with prostate cancer. I couldn’t believe we were taking this giant step backward. Hadn’t we been told months ago prostate cancer traveled to the bones first and foremost? And my father’s bones were fine. Hadn’t we been told prostate cancer was not known to travel to the sinus? Like, never. I called Jelinek’s office and shared my concern. “That’s all true,” Jelinek said. “But he had prostate cancer once, so we’re going with that.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Had Brenda always lacked compassion? I couldn’t say, since I had childishly ignored her for so many years. Had she always possessed such steely self-interest? That was even harder to figure out, since to my mind, she had no self to be interested in. She was a zero, a cipher. Ignoring her had always been so easy. I thought of the time a couple of years ago when my mother, Susan and I were at the house, and my father, perhaps meanly, brought out the slides from Ireland and set up the projector using the living room wall for a screen. Brenda dragged in a dining-room chair and placed it in a corner slightly behind the four of us crowded onto the sofa, and she sat with her hands folded in her lap, the way she must have sat for the nuns at school, while we excitedly called out the names of towns and castles our younger selves were posed in front of. I had the usual smug sympathy for Brenda then. But we were the dupes, not her. She was the winner, lawfully wed. The second my father got sick, she came out of the shadows to claim her rightful place and it was jolting, as if she had flipped on the lights during our slide show and turned our Kodachrome memories back into a blank living-room wall.

  My break came to an end and I flew to Baltimore. My mother and Marty picked me up at the airport. I dumped my bag into the trunk and slid into the back seat. My mother swiveled around so she could look at me. “Your father is not the man you left two weeks ago,” she said. “I’m warning you. Be prepared.”

  “So Brenda did nothing the whole time I was gone?” I said.

  “Nothing,” my mother said miserably.

  I stared out at the woods along the parkway. The pavement hummed as we drove over the Patapsco River, and then we were flanked by woods again. A white-tailed deer darted between the trees as we flashed by.

  “Whatever you may think of me and my faults,” my mother said, “the way Brenda’s treated him since he’s been sick is appalling. We’ve got to get some food into him. We’ve got to get him into the hospital again. Somehow, some way, they’ve got to feed him. Stick an IV in his arm, whatever they do.”

  “Big snowstorm on the way,” said Marty.

  “Shana says they don’t admit people for malnutrition,” my mother said. She turned to Marty. “Shana Bloom’s son’s a doctor. You met Mike. He says we should say Clyde’s having a heart attack.”

  I was pleased my mother was getting involved. I needed her help, and I welcomed Shana’s advice, too, and Mike’s, of course. I leaned forward to see Marty’s reaction, but his face was blank. He thought my mother was too involved to begin with.

  “We were in Washington yesterday,” my mother said, “and I bought your father some Senate bean soup.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You never heard of Senate Bean Soup? It’s great. He’ll be able to eat soup. It’ll slide right down.”

  “Thick, sticky bean soup?” I said. I was already losing confidence in her. “He can’t even swallow Jello.”

  “He’ll like this. It’s famous.”

  My mother said she would stay only a minute. Marty waited in the car. They had to beat the snowstorm home, but she wanted to give my father the soup. Brenda opened the kitchen door. I had forgotten the dry smell of smoke, of nothing bubbling on the stove. My mother grabbed my arm to slow me down, to remind me with the pressure of her hand about what she had said. He is not the man you left two weeks ago. I slid my palm along the wall from yellow to white—the demarcation where the kitchen ended and the hall began. I went slowly and stopped at the opening to the living room.

  “Oh, Daddy.” I put my hand to my mouth. He was thin when I left but this was different. His cheeks were hollow. Parchment skin hung on his bones. His once straight, fleshy nose was a bony hook. The concentration-camp victim comparison was inevitable. I dropped my bag on a chair and went to him and put my arms around his bony shoulders and my face in his scrawny neck. How could Brenda have let this happen? How could anyone? “I’m back,” I whispered into the fabric of the chair.

  “My Joanna came back,” he said quietly.

  “Senate Bean soup,” my mother said. She held the can up to show him. “Joanna can heat it up. It’s gourmet, you’ll love it. You’ve heard of it, haven’t you, Clyde? Look,” she said, bringing the can closer.

  “Shut up, Ma,” I whispered into his ear.

  “Yeah, Evie,” he said. “Shut up.”

  My mother put the can on top of the television set. “Well, if that’s the way you feel about it,” she said.

>   I straightened up. “I told you he couldn’t eat that stuff.”

  “He could give it a try.”

  I crossed over to the TV and picked up the can. There was a picture of the U.S. Capitol on the label. “Oh,” I said. “Senate Bean Soup.”

  “Well, what did you think I was saying?” My mother made a sputtering exasperated noise.

  “They serve it in the Capitol cafeteria,” Brenda said.

  “There you go,” said my mother. “At least somebody appreciates what I’m talking about.” She buttoned her fuzzy purple coat, and patted my father on the hand. “Anyway, I brought your daughter, Clyde.”

  “A saint,” said my father.

  My mother hurried outside under the heavy sky and drove off with Marty. I was left with my starving father and Brenda who wasn’t showing the mildest concern. I understood that she wasn’t me, that I was as abnormally devoted as she was abnormally repressed, but I was unprepared for the bizarre turn things were about to take.

  “We have to get my father admitted to a hospital.”

  “Oh, really?” said Brenda. A small smile of superiority lit her face and for the first time I saw that while I pitied Brenda, she pitied me. The overwrought care, the pointless racing around hospital hallways, it was pathetic to her. “What’s all the who-struck-John?” she said, one of her favorite expressions. “He’s been in and out of the hospital and it hasn’t helped one bit.”

  “He’s going to die of hunger.”

  “Don’t blame me. You know he won’t eat,” Brenda said. She raked her fingers through Hoffman’s fur, and fed him a Snausage-in-a-Blanket from the box on top of the fridge.

  “Have you spoken to anyone about how much weight he’s lost—Jelinek or Geest?” I said.

  “I spoke to Dr. Cromwell.”

  I tried not to react negatively, to stay focused on my goal. “OK. That’s good. Let’s call Dr. Cromwell and tell him we think my father’s having some kind of heart trouble,” I said, taking my mother’s and Shana Bloom’s advice.

  Brenda eventually turned her attention away from the dog. “I suppose we could say he’s having chest pains,” she said. “I’ll call Dr. Cromwell in the morning.”

  “Thank you.” So she wasn’t a complete monster.

  Brenda put my father to bed and he went willingly, like a horse led back to the barn, his head down, resigned.

  When I woke up the world was white. Snow had tumbled out of the sky while we slept, transforming the lawns and street and sidewalks into massive rolling drifts that reached past our windowsill. Icicles a yard long dripped from the overhang. Trees loaded with snow were not just outlined, but blotted out. Cars were snowdrifts with side-view mirrors peeking out like little ears.

  I had never regarded snow from this window with such anxiety. It was always delight, schools closed, the promise of snow forts and sledding. Marie, Marie, hold on tight. But now looking out at the veritable winter wonderland, my heart sank. How would we get to the hospital? I went and took a shower, dressed, and dried what was left of my hair. It was early but Brenda was already waiting expectantly in the swivel chair—her chair—when I came out. She was wearing a skirt and blouse, stockings and pumps and seemed ready to go out, but I doubted her office was open with so much snow on the ground.

  “Good news,” Brenda said cheerfully. “I got your father admitted to the hospital.”

  “You did?” A big smile spread on my face. I was silly with relief and gratitude, and surprise, too. She let him starve for two weeks, was seemingly incompetent, and now here she was making things happen before I was even out of the shower. She must have gotten some perspective last night. She’d been too close, living with him day to day. But last night, she must have seen my father through my eyes and realized how bad he looked. My impulse was to hug her and I came toward her, but Brenda’s rigid posture held me back.

  “Did you tell them chest pain?” I asked. We agreed “chest pain” was the best wording.

  “No, said Brenda. “I got him in for an orchiectomy.” She patted the yellow telephone on the table in between her chair and the recliner. “Surgery tomorrow morning at 7 a.m.”

  I told her I didn’t know what an orchiectomy was, and Brenda seemed pleased that for once, she understood the medical terminology and I didn’t. “It’s castration,” she said. She watched me, an amused smile playing on her lips. “Get him in anyway you can, you said. So there you are, Joanna. You should be happy.”

  I wasn’t happy.

  “I believe it’s frequently done to men who have prostate cancer,” Brenda said. She raised her eyebrows for emphasis.

  “But prostate cancer is just a theory,” I said. “Because they can’t think of anything else.”

  “Tomorrow morning, 7 a.m., he’ll be castrated. Surgery’s always bright and early, have you ever noticed that?”

  “You’re not joking, are you?”

  “I got him back into Hopkins,” Brenda said. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, a good girl, a pious woman. The bright white landscape out the window was like a wintry scene in a fairytale. “That’s what you wanted,” she said. “It had to be Hopkins. And let me tell you it wasn’t easy setting this up. Dr. Cromwell doesn’t have admitting privileges there, but his friend does.”

  “We were going to say chest pains,” I said. I was paralyzed, glued to the spot where I was standing when I decided not to hug her. “Don’t look so scared,” she said. “I already told your daddy about the operation, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  I shut my mouth, which had been hanging open. Was this some sick joke? Was Brenda not a cipher but a psychopath? I understood she was following their doctor’s advice, and at least from one vantage point, there was some logic in choosing this surgery as the way to get admitted to the hospital. But the idea was to find a vague, non-invasive reason. To run some tests! Not to admit him for a major unnecessary surgery, much less one weighted with meaning and reeking of vengeance. And really, if anyone were entitled to seek this sort of revenge, it would be me, and I wasn’t interested. I always suspected one of the reasons he married Brenda was to punish us. I hadn’t thought that it might be to punish himself, a little boy so bad his mother sent him away.

  I called my mother, and then Mike Bloom, and then the one doctor friend I had in New York. It was too early to wake up anyone in LA. I was advised to go along with Brenda and Dr. Cromwell and their demonic scheme simply in order to get my father into the hospital. He was supposed to check in today, so he could be prepped for the surgery tomorrow. The plan was, once checked in, I would question the wisdom of actually going forward with the procedure. When I got off the phone after the last call, I went down the hall. “We’re going to the hospital today,” I said. “You heard?”

  My father was sitting up in bed. “I heard,” he said.

  I put my coat and boots on and went out to the carport. The air was so cold it froze the inside of my nose. I pulled my gloves on and took the snow shovel from the utility room. The shovel scraped the bare concrete in the carport and then glided silently over a powdery drift. I trudged to the end of the driveway sinking up to my knees in snow, and looked down the street, squinting in the brightness. I began shoveling. The physical work was gratifying, the effort, the weight of the snow on my shovel, the satisfying loft and release, and after a while, the tan concrete showing through, the clank and scrape and loft again. Meanwhile, across the street, neighbors in long quilted coats worked on their sidewalk.

  Everyone on our block now was black, except my father, and Zucker who lived on the corner, and Lucky and his wife down the street. When the suburban neighborhoods of Baltimore were new, white people lived in the houses, and when the trees matured, the white people moved away and black people from the city moved in. During a brief period in the seventies, our neighborhood was integrated, but it didn’t last long. Fear-mongering prevailed. Children lived and breathed fear growing up off Liberty Road in Baltimore, not fed to me by my lefty parents, for the mos
t part, but by many around us. The local real-estate industry fostered much of it, hoping to cash in on white flight, redlining, flipping houses, creating new markets. So whites and blacks never even got the chance to try out living with each other. It seemed that white people like me unconsciously put the blame for our lost childhoods, our lost innocence, on the darker-skinned people who replaced us. When my mother used to drive us downtown into the past to show us where she grew up, we felt like outsiders, and now I was starting to feel like an outsider on Cedar Drive. I doubted the feeling even approached how black people must have felt, brutally treated as outsiders in most places from the start. As a result, everyone in Baltimore, black and white, seemed to have a chip on their shoulder. We drove over abandoned streetcar tracks looking for the entrance to the woods, to the candy store. This was our home, and yet we didn’t belong.

  Next door on the north side, Mr. and Mrs. Rollins came out with snow shovels and started clearing their driveway. They waved to me. In summer, my father gave them zucchinis from his garden. He believed in neighbors. The superficial talk over the back fence was an enjoyable necessity, exchanging news of a shared world down to the grass and ants. They looked out for each other, if it only meant noticing a rubber-banded Morning Sun that hadn’t been picked up.

  I wondered if Mrs. Rollins—Lydia was her first name—imagined me as a small girl playing under the apple tree where the wild violets grew between our houses. I wondered if she knew I had been inside her house many times when my friend Tom lived there. (Had she put carpet over the linoleum? Tom’s mother never had.) More likely, she saw me only as grown, a vague blur of a person coming in from some other city, with little connection to Cedar Drive. Now she came toward me sinking into her white lawn. “How’s your father?” she asked.