The End of Your Life Book Club

by Will Schwalbe

  Mom did have one other favor to ask me. Would I accompany her to her third chemo? I assured her that I wanted to go with her as often as I could. Over the course of her illness, my mother would ask all of us—my brother and sister and their partners, and David, as well as various friends—to accompany her to various appointments, of which there were many. I soon realized that this was a way for her to spend time with all of us—and to give us something significant to do for her. This strategy also allowed her to save Dad’s time and energy for the more complex procedures or hospital stays that might be in her future. As the weeks passed, accompanying Mom to her chemo treatments would become part of my regular routine with her.

  Mom was also eager to tell me about two resolutions she’d made. First, she was going to do more yoga. She loved it, and it relaxed her. And second, she was finally going to bring proper order to her desk, once and for all, while she still had the energy. Mom was particularly determined to remove all duplicates from her address book. I couldn’t imagine why—but she seemed so excited about it I didn’t question her. (Do you want to talk about why you want to remove duplicates from your address book?) “Clean is not; not clean is not.” So said Nagarjuna, as quoted by the Dalai Lama. I guess there are many ways of looking at tidiness, and isn’t it really all about removing that which doesn’t need to be?

  Mom also wanted more to read, now that she was finished with the Bolaño. I would drop off a copy of The Coldest Winter, David Halberstam’s final book, his epic about the Korean War, when I returned the Hosseini. It was a book I’d just published. Halberstam had been a friend of Mom’s from college days, when he’d dated a glamorous pal of hers, who was still one of Mom’s best friends. He and his wife, Jean, had become friends of mine over the course of my publishing many of his books. Six months earlier, David had been killed instantly in a car accident when a graduate student in journalism who had volunteered to drive him to an interview made a sudden, reckless left turn into oncoming traffic. Days before his death, David had finished this enormous book, on which he’d worked for ten years.

  Shortly after David was killed, I’d had to fly on business to Nashville, a city where Halberstam first made his name as a reporter on the civil rights movement. I was fine until right after I fastened my seat belt. For me, there’s something about planes that isolates and intensifies sadness, the way a looking glass can magnify the sun until it grows unbearably hot and burns. On that particular flight, I waited for the familiar lift of takeoff, and then, for the first time since David’s death, burst into tears.

  In the summer, Mom and I had read slender books. Now we were reading one long book after another. Maybe that was a way of expressing hopefulness—you had to have a lot of time left if you were going to start reading Bolaño, or Thomas, or Halberstam. Even the Hosseini had heft. I remarked to Mom how all the books we were reading then shared not just length but a certain theme: fate and the effects of the choices people make.

  “I think most good books share that theme,” Mom said.

  Mom was still worrying that Nina wouldn’t move to Geneva. “Remind her: She can always go and come right back. But she has to go.”

  I didn’t know what to say. So I looked at item three on my little Etiquette of Illness sheet and decided to say nothing. Then I called my sister.

  “I’m going to go,” Nina said. “I’ll talk to her every day. We’ll visit lots with the kids, and she says she’ll come visit lots. And we can always move back if we need to. But Mom insists that I go, and she’s going to be very unhappy if I don’t.” So Nina was going.

  Happy is not; suffering is not. Somehow Nina’s decision to go ahead with the move to Geneva made not just Mom feel better but all of us. Mom was sick, but life was going on. At least for the moment. When we had to make changes, we would.

  Permanent is not. Impermanent is not.

  Marjorie Morningstar

  November brought my first visit with Mom to chemo. And it also brought the chance to talk to her about family in a way we’d never talked about family—or, really, any subject.

  Mom sent over the instructions a few days before. I was to meet her at Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s outpatient center on East 53rd Street. There was a bookstore across the street, if I got there early. And a deli of sorts on Lexington Avenue, if I wanted to bring a snack. Though she didn’t think that would be necessary—there were both graham crackers and pretzels at the outpatient facility, she said. I was to take the elevator to the fourth floor and stake out seats if I arrived there before she did. She liked the chairs, not the long sofa that ran along the back of the room.

  Hospitals are interruption factories. Someone is always bursting in to hook you up to something, unhook you, ask you how you’re doing, check on you, remind you. On this first visit with Mom, as on all the others, we would eventually be summoned, after Mom had her blood taken, to the treatment rooms, which reminded me of a boarding school dorm with cubicles that don’t quite reach to the ceiling. Every few weeks she saw the doctor first; other times she just went to have her blood taken and the treatment given. Once she was in a cubicle, a nurse would appear and ask questions, both medical ones and others related to Mom’s comfort (Would she like a pillow for her arm? A blanket? Some more juice?), and then have Mom recite the hospital version of name, rank, and serial number (name, date of birth). Next came the torture of finding a vein, followed by the shout for a chemo check, which involved a second nurse coming in to confirm that it was the right patient (name, date of birth) and the right medicine.

  But the interruptions didn’t stop there. Especially at the start, there were social workers and people conducting studies and others needing consent forms for those studies.

  Mom didn’t like being interrupted. For several years I’d been in the habit of calling Mom most mornings at eight A.M. or so—not every morning, but most. She and Dad had call waiting, but it was a constant source of irritation to her. I’d be talking to her and what she called “the clicker” would go off, and she’d say, “Darn, there’s someone on the other line,” in a more than slightly aggrieved tone.

  I don’t like being interrupted either—but I interrupt other people. I often forget that other people’s stories aren’t simply introductions to my own more engaging, more dramatic, more relevant, and better-told tales, but rather ends in themselves, tales I can learn from or repeat or dissect or savor. Mom, on the other hand, rarely interrupted other people and wasn’t given to topping other people’s tales. She would listen and then ask questions—and not just the yes-or-no or numerical questions people ask to feign interest (“How many days were you in Phoenix?”). She used her questions to get people to talk more about how they felt or what they’d learned or who they’d met or what they thought would happen next.

  Even though my first visit to the outpatient center was only Mom’s third, she was already on nodding acquaintance with quite a few of the people there, staff and other patients. She had a favorite nurse, one who’d succeeded in finding a vein where two others had failed. And she didn’t even seem to mind all the interruptions.

  I was feeling extremely cranky about my job that morning. I tried not to dwell on it. It seemed an odd thing to complain about when surrounded by people battling cancer. So we sat silently.

  “You really don’t need to stay with me, Will. I’m fine. You have so much to do.”

  “But I’d like to,” I said. “Unless you want some time alone?”

  It was then, on that November day, that Mom told me she was reading Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, the book I’d flown around the world, and then that I said I would finally read it myself.

  “I guess if we keep reading books at more or less the same time, then it’s sort of like being in a book club,” I added. I’d once been in a traditional book club. Mom never had.

  “But you don’t have time for a book club!” Mom said.

  “I have time to read. And we’ve always talked about books. So if we’re reading the same books
, and talking about them, why can’t we call that a book club?”

  “But don’t people in book clubs cook things?” Mom asked.

  I laughed. “We’ll have the world’s only foodless book club.”

  ONE OF THE first things people in book clubs tend to do is tell one another about their childhoods. I mentioned this to Mom—who smiled quizzically—and then I asked her to tell me again about hers. I’ve never even thought of calling my parents by their first names, so it’s hard to write of Mary Anne being born in 1934 and not of Mom being born that year, but, of course, Mom wasn’t born then—Mary Anne was.

  Mary Anne and her younger brother, Skip, had a beautiful and very unhappy mother, who was born in America but had grown up in Paris. Their father was dapper and in the family textile business, which he sold for a healthy sum while still young. By all accounts, it was a very unpleasant marriage. It ended after more than thirty years with a nasty divorce. This chemo session was one of the few times I ever got Mom to talk about her childhood, and the first and only time she ever told me how bitterly unhappy her parents were with each other, and how it made her determined not to complain about anything if she was ever lucky enough to have her own family. Mary Anne went to public school and then to an excellent girls’ school, the Brearley School, on the Upper East Side of New York, where she made friends she would keep for life, and where she fell under the spell of Mildred Dunnock.

  Millie, as she asked to be called, was a drama teacher who inspired ferocious loyalty in her girls, and already a well-known stage and movie actress. She went on to create the role of Linda Loman, Willy’s wife, in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (“Attention must be paid”) on Broadway (which is why Mary Anne was there at the opening, which she said was the most thrilling night of theater she would ever see) and was nominated for an Oscar playing the same role in the 1951 film. Mary Anne had always loved to go to the theater, but after studying and performing with Millie, she decided that she had to be an actress.

  It was also at Brearley in the early 1950s that Mary Anne and her classmates were told something no generation of women prior to theirs had ever heard, and by the headmistress herself: that they could do anything and be anything—and have a husband and children to boot.

  Most people and most other institutions said otherwise. Mary Anne went to Radcliffe, and when she attended services at Harvard’s Memorial Church, she told me, she had to wear white gloves and sit in the balcony and wasn’t allowed to join the men in the pews. When we lived in Cambridge, Mom always made a point of sitting in the pews downstairs and right at the front.

  I knew most of that. As Mom and I sat in the treatment room, waiting for the next interruption, I asked her to tell me more.

  “Well, what do you want to know?”

  “Well, what were your favorite books?”

  “When?”

  “As a young girl.”

  “Nancy Drew. I read dozens of them. I loved the idea of a girl detective.”

  “And of all time?”

  Without a moment of hesitation, she said, “Gone With the Wind.” I’d never known that. “I just loved it. I still do,” Mom added.

  “What else?”

  “Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk.”

  I didn’t read Marjorie Morningstar until after Mom died, but I did know that it was about a good Jewish girl who wants to be an actress and who falls in love with a composer-director she meets at a summer theater. At the heart of the book is their carnal dance, which turns into a scandalous affair. Herman Wouk, who was born in New York in 1915, is also the author of other best sellers such as The Caine Mutiny, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and The Winds of War. In Marjorie Morningstar he created a huge, all-enveloping book that sucks you in like Gone With the Wind. It’s even got a young, at-first-naïve female protagonist (though it’s fair to say that Marjorie is a good deal more likable at the start than Scarlett), and you want her to find love and success and happiness. She begins life as Marjorie Morgenstern but renames herself Marjorie Morningstar because it’s a better stage name (and also less Jewish).

  I can see how my mother’s generation fell in love with this book, which is set in the late 1930s, the time of their mothers, and which depicts not just America but the whole world on the eve of great change. It was a huge best seller. Wouk moves Marjorie first from her life in privileged Jewish New York to the more decadent environs of the theater camp but then to Paris and Switzerland, where she finds a new love, a man who is working to help Jews flee Europe—a man somewhat like a real historical figure, Varian Fry, who was one of the key figures in the early history of the International Rescue Committee, where Mom would eventually work.

  Like Hosseini with his The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, Wouk is the kind of popular writer who is always teaching you something, but who knows how to tell a story and involve you in the lives of his characters. Both are also much better prose stylists than critics often acknowledge. You could say that they are thoroughly old-fashioned in their storytelling techniques—which might explain their tremendous popularity among people of different backgrounds and ages. People like stories. Yet the two of them also thoroughly engage contemporary themes. Marjorie Morningstar is a book about assimilation, anti-Semitism, and women’s rights. While it ends with what many readers would regard as a bitterly disappointing outcome for Marjorie, I believe that’s an essential part of Wouk’s critique of the world in which Marjorie was raised. In the end, Marjorie can’t overcome the expectations that have been set for her, and the book is more powerful for that than it would have been had she triumphed on the stage as she always thought she wanted.

  I can also see how Mary Anne might have recognized herself in young Marjorie. In college summers, Mary Anne had gone off with a few friends to a summer stock theater called Highfield in Massachusetts. By all accounts a beautiful young woman, with lively brown eyes and a constant smile, she became instantly popular, and some of her deepest friendships started or were cemented there. Every now and then, during my childhood, Mom would make an enigmatic comment about her time at Highfield, with a smile that was both sly and rueful. Then when I was fifteen and going to a summer stock theater myself, to be an apprentice, Mom told me, as she drove me up to the house I would share with four strangers, that she hoped I would have as much fun at my theater as she had at hers; but then added, almost as an afterthought, a not entirely convincing caution about taking care not to lead people on. I’ve always been sure that there’s a story that goes with that warning, but no matter how many times I asked her, Mom never said anything more specific about her theatrical summers.

  College was different—Mom had lots of stories about Radcliffe. She talked most about how she’d fallen madly in love with a professor of hers, Bob Chapman, who was glamorous and charismatic beyond measure. (Marjorie’s love interests couldn’t even begin to compare). Bob had graduated from Princeton, taught at Berkeley, been a naval officer in Morocco and Paris in World War II, and had dated F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie. He was a playwright, too, and with a friend adapted Herman Melville’s Billy Budd for Broadway and for a 1962 film.

  Mom’s love was reciprocated, but platonically, as Bob was, in the parlance of the time, a “confirmed bachelor.” Bob introduced her to his friends, and they became hers, too. Mom introduced Dad to Bob soon after she was engaged, and Dad wound up working with him for more than a decade, running Harvard’s theater, and sharing a fondness for drinking martinis and collecting postcards. Bob became my sister’s godfather and almost a sixth member of our family (the almost is because we would never dare argue or be mean to each other in front of him). He was the smartest and best-read person any of us had ever known, but he wore his learning so lightly and had such curiosity about other people that he had the ability to make everyone around him feel smart and well-read. He came over to our house for dinner every few nights—and we traveled with him as a family and individually through North Africa, Europe, and Asia. In 20
01, at age eighty-one, Bob had a sudden and massive stroke, and Mom and I flew down to Florida to be with him when he was dying.

  No one in the family has ever really gotten over Bob’s death. We talk of him daily, recounting stories and imagining what his reactions would be to new books and recent events. He remains for my family the perfect model of how you can be gone but ever present in the lives of people who loved you, in the same way that your favorite books stay with you for your entire life, no matter how long it’s been since you turned the last page. When I talked with Mom about Bob, I wondered if I would be able to talk about her the same way when she was no longer here.

  As Mom and I sat together in the chemo room, waiting for the next interruption, I tried to turn the conversation from Bob and Wouk back to her experience at summer stock theater.

  “It was a long time ago” was all she said, and all she was going to tell me. No one could be more stubborn than Mom when she didn’t want to tell you something.

  Maybe there was no great mystery to Highfield—maybe it was just a time and place Mom loved and wanted to treasure alone.

  Mom loved Marjorie Morningstar. That much I knew. How much she was or was not Marjorie Morningstar herself remained her secret.

  WE SAT SILENTLY for a while, listening to the sounds around us. The curtain to our little cubicle rustled as people walked by, dragging their IV towers with them on the way to the toilet. Mom’s drip dripped. It could take anywhere from two to four hours for the bags to drain. I thought of water torture (wrongly called Chinese water torture), the medieval torment in which you are supposedly driven mad waiting for the next drop of water to plunk on your forehead. Here the drops were supposed to make you better. I mentioned this to Mom, who looked irritated. It was the same look she gave my father and brother when they got overly boisterous after a third martini, and to my sister whenever the two of them went shopping for shoes: always a disaster because of Mom’s antipathy toward shopping and my sister’s chronic difficulty making up her mind. I usually earned the look for odd and inappropriate comments.