“I’m sorry to intrude,” O’Sullivan said, smiling brightly. Beads of perspiration dotted his forehead, from which his blond hair was swept back in an insouciant wave.
“Oh, hello,” I said in surprise. “Have you run out of coffee? We have tons, if you need some.”
“I have sufficient coffee, thank you,” said O’Sullivan. “What I lack just at the moment is an editor.”
Avery and I stared back, uncertain what he meant by reporting this to us.
“What I mean to say,” Sherman added, offering me another warm smile—he tended to trust in his own boyish charm—“is that I would be very obliged if I could discuss the possibility of some …” He shifted his gaze to the floor and shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe the absurdity of his predicament. “Well. Emergency editing, I guess.”
“You need an extra pair of hands down the hall?” I asked.
“Yes, I do, I do need that,” he glanced about our office. “Of course I will arrange for suitable compensation. I don’t expect you to perform a favor.” He gestured vaguely back toward his own office. “I need a pair of experienced eyes. A read-through of my editor’s letter. Hilary would do it, but she’s up to her eyeballs, and Leonard was the one I always trusted with the task.”
I crossed my arms. “You want me to do this because I used to edit Paul Graham’s work in New York, is that why?”
O’Sullivan brought his hands together, tilted his head and smiled. “Suffice it to say that I would very much like to borrow you, Frances, for a bit of untended editorial business.”
I shot a questioning look at Avery, who bent his head and busied himself winding his watch.
“Alright,” I offered, tentative. It flew through my mind that the Moral Volcano might net me some extra cash, and that could not hurt me. Our own publisher, Iris McKeen, had turned eighty this year and paid little attention to the Dandelion Review beyond funding it in honor of her bookish deceased husband, Ed.
That night I stayed up late, sitting cross-legged on the fold-out futon couch in my living room, laboring over O’Sullivan’s column. He was pooh-poohing liberals, as was his wont.
“Apparently,” he had written, and I inserted punctuation as I read, “the liberal approach to foreign affairs leaves experienced warriors at the Pentagon cold. Shivering, one might even say. For this, if I may summarize, is liberals’ foreign policy: in military defeat, appeal to Europe. In military victory, run for a hug from the Russians. To capture terrorists, go crying to the French. When dictators are caged, turn them over to Europe’s princes of power for a slap on the wrist.” Whereupon he concluded: “Deep down, liberals are just Euro-weeny traitors. They yearn to surrender everything to the French.”
Rubbing my forehead, I thought about how to edit this for what we, in the business, call sense. Editing for sense. You put small queries in the margin, such as “Is this the right sense of ‘appeal’?” Although I wasn’t a foreign-policy analyst, I had not observed any American liberals attempting to appeal to the governments of Europe concerning American defense policy. Better to use a word like “noticed”? They “noticed” the Europeans? Or “consulted”? Or “thought to confer with” them? I provided these alternatives in the margin. Then I suddenly wondered, did he mean that liberals were appealing, were attractive, to Europeans?
Also, I worried over his last sentence: “They yearn to surrender everything to the French.” Could this be construed as accurate? The French once turned over Louisiana. Was this a turning-back over to them of Louisiana, and other territory, strictly speaking, or was “everything” a metaphor for turning over the reins of sovereign decision-making? In either case, it was a striking allegation. Getting up from the futon and shaking out my leg, which had fallen asleep, I decided that O’Sullivan was probably just speaking metaphorically. To err on the side of caution, though, I circled the word “everything” and wrote in the margin: “More specific?”
I went to bed, let my mind wander, and began wondering how Don Yancy would be greeted by a neo-conservative. Would the fellows down the hall applaud him for having found God? Were they religious? I had assumed that their tendency to describe daycare as “socialist warehousing” arose from some sort of cosmology. But in truth, I had never asked.
18
At last, a phone call from Bernice’s oncologist.
Calvin answered in the kitchen, and I listened on the extension in our bedroom, lying down, legs scissored half in and half out of my duvet, watching CNN with the sound off. Lester made roaring noises in the hall, where he’d set up his African animals with a roasting pan full of water for the hippos. The news scrolled by on the bottom of the TV screen, out of synch with Wolf Blitzer’s dour expression, since he was apparently divulging news about Iraq, whereas the bottom of the screen was revealing that Paris Hilton had lost her chihuahua.
“Alright,” said Dr. Pereira, in a voice that sounded hoarse with fatigue, “sorry for the delay, but I am one of only two oncologists on the island of Cape Breton, which has, as you may know, the highest cancer incidence in Canada. If you wish, you might complain to your MP. I have certainly done so, myself.” He paused, perhaps scanning the chart in front of him. “So. Ah yes. Your mother. I see. She did very well in the surgery.”
“The surgery,” Calvin repeated dryly.
“Yes, of course, the surgery.”
“And what surgery would that be?” I could picture Calvin slouching over the table in the kitchen below me, trying to swallow his raging frustration.
“Oh,” said Dr. Pereira, sounding surprised. “I see. Your mother did not discuss this surgery with you?”
“Uh, no. She didn’t mention it the other day.”
“I see. Well, she is recovering very well. We removed her right arm from immediately below the humerus, and, I believe, successfully excised the malignancy from its primary site in the bone.”
“You cut my mother’s arm off?”
“Yes. Oh. No.” Dr. Pereira clucked his tongue. “I see. Your mother is not Bernice Potter?”
“No.”
“Oh. Yes. No. One moment. Forgive me. I have not been reviewing the correct chart.” There was a rustling of paper. “If I may clarify, your mother still has two arms?”
“Yes! She does! As a matter of fact, I was really hoping that I could finally have a conversation about my mother and what’s wrong with her that didn’t revolve around her fucking arms. You have no idea how sick to death I am of my mother and her arms. So, please, find the chart for Bernice Puddie, and tell me something that does not include the word ‘arm’.”
“But we can certainly talk about her legs,” I interjected, worried that Calvin’s outburst would put the oncologist off of limbs generally, and there Bernice was all swollen up and hobbled.
“I see,” Dr. Pereira said after a paper-rustling pause. “Have I removed your mother’s legs, then?”
“Oh for Chrissake,” said Calvin, “can you just consult your notes?”
“Yes, yes, of course. I can review the correct chart and call you back. That’s no trouble.”
“NO!” shouted Calvin. “No, please don’t hang up. If you hang up, you’ll get busy and you won’t phone me back for weeks, and I’ve got a job, and I need to figure out my schedule, and my aunt is being useless, and I can’t—I need to know what is wrong with my mother. Now. That doesn’t involve her arms.”
Dr. Pereira complied. For a while, all we heard was the contemplative in-and-out click of his ballpoint pen. At last, he exhaled loudly and began.
“So. Yes. Your mother’s primary cancer has metastasized from the breast, and the CT scans tell me that it has now seeded throughout her abdomen. Into a number of organs. This is a difficult predicament. We treated her with tamoxifen, and that eventually ran its course of efficacy, and then I assigned her Femara, which also ceased to work after a time, so I am now recommending fulvestrant, which sells under the brand-name Faslodex. This is a treatment for hormone-receptor-positive metastatic breast can
cer in post-menopausal women whose disease has progressed, following anti-estrogen therapy. You should know it has certain side effects, the most common of which are pharyngitis, peripheral edema, vasodilatation and asthenia. But there are a variety of drugs I can prescribe that will counter these effects, also.”
“What do you mean?” Calvin asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“I’m literally trying to get the gist of this. You’re saying that my mother is riddled with cancer, and you’re proposing to riddle her with drugs?”
“Yes, well, Faslodex has only recently been approved, so it is difficult to predict its long-term efficacy, but your mother has responded well, for periods of time, to hormonal therapies, so it is certainly the best course of treatment in her case.”
“She hides her Gaviscon in her shoes,” I interjected, hoping to sound informed. “Is that okay? Or should we be pushing her to take that, as well?”
“Gaviscon is for her comfort, only. If she does not wish to take it …”
“And I just have another quick question,” I added. “Bernice thinks she has asthma and it’s swelling up her legs. That’s not right, right?”
“I see. Well, a bilateral edema could be caused by systemic vasculitis, renal or liver failure, protein-losing enteropathy, or, as I mentioned, it could be a side effect of drug treatment.”
“Look, Dr. Pereira, I need to get to the bottom line, here. Are my mother’s chickens coming home to roost?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Is my mother dying, or is she not dying?”
“In the long run, yes, I think that you will find that Falodex is not a cure, although it is possible. But mainly I am hoping that it will give her some time.”
“Time for what?”
“For what?” Dr. Pereira reiterated, sounding puzzled.
“For what?”
“For what.” The doctor seemed to consider this question for a spell, and then he took a deep breath and answered, his voice soft and almost rueful, “I believe that is a question you will have to put to your mother.”
19
“Endless invention, endless experiment, brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness…. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?”
It was Monday morning, and Avery was indulging in his typical routine of quoting authors out of thin air in response to my account of the weekend.
“So, who are you copping from this morning?” I asked, attempting to roll up the rim on my Tim Hortons coffee cup to see if I’d won a prize.
“T. S. Eliot,” he said, ordering the papers on his desk. “‘The Rock.’”
“Oh, interesting,” I mused, “I was thinking about Eliot when I was out in Cape Breton at Christmas. How he made more sense to me when I was a teenager than the Church did.”
“Well, Eliot was a great devotee of the Church of England,” Avery offered, “but in his later years. At some point, he came around from, I suppose, agnosticism, I’m not entirely sure.”
“The bastard died of emphysema, did you know that? It is perfect.” So announced Goran, who was fixing himself an espresso, his wavy gray hair falling into his eyes as he bent over the little machine beside his design table. It was one of his rare days in the office.
“What do you mean, ‘perfect’?” I asked. You never knew with Goran. He was fluent in English, technically, but his use of idioms was somewhat unpredictable. I’d heard him employ the word “perfect” as a catch-all for a variety of meanings, ranging from “amazing” to “ironic” to “feeling well.”
How are you today, Goran? “Perfect.”
How was the Pixies concert? “It was perfect”.
Would ya look at that, it’s snowing in August. “Yes, it is perfect.”
“I mean,” he said, fixing me with deep-set gray eyes that drooped along with his jowls so that he had a slight basset-hound look, “that Eliot knocked five, maybe ten years off his life by smoking. But he is memorial! The whole world knows of this man! What if he had quit smoking, like good boy, at my age?”
I wasn’t sure how old Goran was. I thought perhaps forty-five, although he carried on with women and dressed like a man in his twenties.
“I ask you,” Goran continued, “would he have written Murder in Cathedral? ‘Ash-Wednesday’? Or bounced off walls for wanting to smoke, and offered nothing of genius to world?”
Goran was an adamant chain-smoker of Camels. Come to think of it, I had yet to meet an Eastern European intellectual in Toronto who gave a rat’s ass about healthy living. “This mother-in-law you have,” he argued, “why should she take these drugs? You say she is religious. Why not let her go to her God? She has lost her husband, you said? So, it’s perfect. Don’t listen to technocrats. Life should be full, and short. Write your poems, love your lovers, drink your fill. And smoke.”
“Do you believe in God, Goran?” I asked, cupping my chin in my hand.
“I believe that people have right to believe in their God. My God, I have not met yet. He looks after my parents, and He waits my arrival. I look forward to our introduction.” On that note, he strode off to suck on a Camel in the stairwell.
“What about you, Avery?” I asked, feeling bold, for we usually leapt away from intimate questions and communicated, instead, through anecdote and quote.
“Well, uhh,” he replied, his arms beginning to make their serpentine moves, “it’s a complicated subject for Monday morning, Frannie.”
“Oh, sure, and that’s coming from you, who throws poetry at me before I’ve finished my coffee,” I retorted. “Can’t you just say yes or no?”
Avery tilted back in his chair and wouldn’t look at me. He was discomfited. He didn’t want to discuss this, which made me regret that I’d pressed.
“Maybe there’s a God,” he allowed, “but if there is, then He or She took away my mother, and didn’t leave a note. I’m not looking as forward as Goran is, I suppose I could say, to being introduced to this Mighty Being.”
“Right,” I said, dropping my eyes to my desk.
At lunch, alone in the diner and bored by the paper, I began thinking about T. S. Eliot again. How he’d once filled the void I felt between the inanities of my secular culture—where we all swung our teen heads, drunk on vodka, to Joan Jett belting out “I love rock and roll”—and the Church’s bland counterpoint. I was adrift until I came ashore at the elegant cri de coeur that was Eliot’s The Waste Land. A call to arms. Or a great huge sigh. Not that I had a nitwit’s grasp of what he was saying. I came across Eliot in grade twelve English, at the same time, by coincidence, that the sweaty mound of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now quoted from “The Hollow Men,” which instantly reinforced my attraction to Eliot by indirect association with my crush on Martin Sheen.
“We are the tin men, we are the hollow men, foreheads stuffed with straw. Ha ha.” I can’t remember exactly how it goes.
Eliot appealed enormously to my overblown sense of alienation at the time. I quoted him sagaciously to my friends whenever we complained of the weather: “April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land.” Nods all around. That was, like, so true! You kept thinking, okay here comes spring, and then not!
Of course, Eliot was all about the ambiguous conflation of offended intellect and bad mood, and that wasn’t, technically, the same thing as religion. But there was his evocation of despair—sterile thunder, dry bones rattling, the polluted Thames, the jarring emptiness of a one-night stand. I made great, teenaged hay out of those images, flinging them about as melodramatic retorts to lousy dates and high school cliques. And somewhere within it all, I had a glimpse, however confused and hesitant, of the divine: “Who is that other walking beside you?”
The idea that there was more than earthbound life—a sparkling heaven, a sense of grace—was something that I understood, but could make no sense of. Heaven seemed far too convenient. It was my Protestant roots that entangled me with skepticism, I felt. Protestantism
confounded itself by being too suspicious of reward. Cake, maybe, if you bake it yourself and don’t waste a crumb. Otherwise, dry bones rattling.
It would be years and years—in fact, until I was confronted by Lester—until I began to get a certain idea that had eluded me before: that you had to work, spiritually, to reach a state of grace. It wasn’t like Santa Claus handing me the gift of eternity. It wasn’t about me at all.
20
Here is a hard-earned mother’s tip. I shall whisper it, for fear of hurting Calvin’s feelings.
If your child is experiencing a transition, such as attending a new school, moving into a new house, or witnessing an illness in the family, do not shave your head.
This was Lester’s reaction to Calvin’s whimsical styling choice:
“Daddy, where’s your hair?” he burst out in shocked horror when I brought him home from daycare and he spied his father in the kitchen, reading Rolling Stone. Calvin’s thick nut-brown locks had been shorn at the barber by impulsive request.
“You’re disgusting!” Lester wailed, thoroughly undone. He fled the kitchen and shut himself in the bathroom, still in full winter apparel, sobbing. “Go away!” he shrieked, when I tried to follow him.
Perhaps a less extreme haircut had been in order.
“What did you do that for?” I demanded of Calvin, returning to the kitchen in a fury. I’d caught Lester’s reaction like a flu bug.
“What?” he protested in dismay, patting his bald pate. “I hate having hat hair in the winter, it drives me nuts. So I shaved my head for the time being, so what?”
“So what?” I echoed, incredulous. “It looks totally alarming!”
“What on earth did you do to your head?” asked my mother, who walked in a few moments behind me carrying a bag of books.
“I see I’m a big hit,” Calvin muttered, getting up to retrieve his Toronto Blue Jays cap from the hook behind the door.
My mother, bundled up in her camel-hair coat and a fur-trimmed hat that looked like a winterized trilby, brushed snowflakes from her shoulders and placed her bag on the table. “Here are some more library books for Lester. Frannie, have you read him Roald Dahl yet? I was hoping not.”
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