I threw myself into my neglected correspondence, which included a request from the editors of my college paper for a brief statement of my philosophy of life. They wanted to publish it as one of a series of such credos from representative alumni. I fell with gusto to the drafting of a basic belief in two hundred words or less:
“I believe that man must learn to live without those consolations called religious, which his own intelligence must by now have told him belong to the childhood of the race. Philosophy can really give us nothing permanent to believe either; it is too rich in answers, each canceling out the rest. The quest for Meaning is foredoomed. Human life ‘means’ nothing. But that is not to say that it is not worth living. What does a Debussy Arabesque ‘mean,’ or a rainbow or a rose? A man delights in all of these, knowing himself to be no more—a wisp of music and a haze of dreams dissolving against the sun. Man has only his own two feet to stand on, his own human trinity to see him through: Reason, Courage, and Grace. And the first plus the second equals the third.”
Having dispatched this manifesto to the editors who had requested it, I flew with Carol for a few days’ vacation in Bermuda. There we basked among the bougainvillaea blossoms and dodged motor scooters and watched the lizards on the patio wall. One afternoon as we sat in the sun I noticed that Carol’s pleasure in these things was waning. She sat with her head against her hand, the postcard she had been composing to a friend back home fallen to the ground, and when I asked her what was wrong she complained of being tired and hot. I got a local doctor, who found her temperature to be a hundred and two and dosed her with another round of antibiotics. We flew back the next day, by which time the back pains had revived, and when we got home I realized how hollow her cheeks were and how waxen her color. Dr. Cameron’s next blood test was more fruitful than the others. It showed an elevated white count.
“I’ll tell you what I’d like to do,” he said. “I’d like to take a bone marrow specimen.”
“No …”
“Nonsense. There’s any number of things we make this test for. There’s—” And he proceeded to enumerate everything except the disease whose name had sprung into my mind.
I had to carry Carol to the car for this trip to the hospital. The conviction that one was being systematically tortured revived with the report from Dr. Cameron that the pathologist making the aspiration had used a syringe not precisely dry, vitiating the specimen. We went back the next day, with Carol in such discomfort that Mrs. Brodhag came along to hold the girl’s head in her lap and soothe her brow, while she told her stories and jokes. That evening we were rewarded with a telephone call from Dr. Cameron saying that he had been in touch with the pathologist and would be over directly with the report.
Mrs. Brodhag monkeyed about in her kitchen, from a window of which she could see the doctor drive up. She told me later she knew what he had to say from the way he sat in his car a moment before getting out, giving his coat collar a kind of adjustment. He entered the house swinging his bag, somewhat like a hammer thrower in a weight contest preparing to see how far he could hurl it, and he smiled as he marched upstairs first to see the patient. I waited in the living room with my hand locked around a glass of whiskey. When he returned, shouting bluff instructions about dropping those coloring books and keeping up with our homework, he noticed Mrs. Brodhag still hanging about. He dispatched her on some sickroom errand or other that left the two of us together. He hesitated a moment, giving some such flirt to his coat lapels as Mrs. Brodhag must have noted, but at last spoke the word whose utterance could no longer be postponed. We both remained standing for the verdict.
“Baxter and I have been going over these slides at the hospital,” he said, his voice slowing as he neared the name on which I knew now I was to be skewered, “and there seems to be a strong suggestion of leukemia.”
The future is a thing of the past. I still fancy that that was what went through my mind then, precisely in those words, though they were a remark of Stein’s, whom I was not to meet till a week later—“on the barricades,” as he called the parental get-togethers in the Children’s Pavilion at Westminster Hospital.
“Fix me one of those, would you? … Thanks … Now here’s the thing. We have the world’s leading authorities on its childhood forms right here in New York. You will take her in to Dr. Scoville tomorrow—”
“Can they do anything for it?”
“My dear boy, where have you been the last ten years? There are first of all the steroids—cortisone and ACTH—which give a quick remission. The minute she’s pulled back to normal with those, Dr. Scoville will switch her to the first of the long-range drugs, some of which he’s helped develop himself. If they should wear off, there’s—but let’s cross those bridges when we come to them.” Dr. Cameron cleared his throat in the emphatic manner of one too busy to concern himself with matters that far in the future. “Now the first thing is to see that Carol does her homework so she’ll pass into sixth grade without any hitch. Business as usual, that’s the ticket. There isn’t so much of the school year left that you can’t help her through, but if you want, the town will furnish a tutor. Mrs. Quentin is excellent and won’t talk. She won’t even ask any questions.”
“How long do these remissions last?”
The doctor described a circle so large the ice cubes rattled in his glass. “Years …”
“And by that time—”
“Of course! They’re working on it day and night, and they’re bound to get it soon.” He jerked his head toward where he knew the telephone to be, and with an almost barroom-buddy solemnity said, “Chances are when I call Scoville to make an appointment for you he won’t be home but at the laboratory with his rats. Oh, they’ll get it! It’s only a question of time, and that we’ve got on our side. As I say, ten years ago, nothing. Now a great deal. Look. Get this picture firmly fixed in your mind to the exclusion of everything else: Carol going off to school again next September. I promise it on my solemn oath.”
We stood side by side at the window, where he paused a moment to distill if possible a greater degree of optimism between us, hitting thereby upon a tender little irony which he hoped would please me as much as it did him.
“When she graduates from junior high, you’ll still be a worried father.” He took a copious pull on his drink and gestured toward the playground at the bottom of the yard on which the view here gave. “You might make sure those swings and things are in good working order. And the porch of that playhouse looks a little rickety to me. Have a carpenter check it if you’re not a do-it-your-self man. After all, we don’t want anything to happen to our girl,” he said, and, turning, gave me a shy, almost boyish smile, as though he were offering me the key to courage.
thirteen
Dr. Scoville was standing at his desk in a white hospital coat drying his hands on a paper towel when I entered his office on the fourth floor of the Westminster Hospital. He was an old thirty-five or a young fifty, it was hard to tell. Too much window sunlight bathed a face too recently burned in some three-day medical conference at a Southern seaside resort, and wreathed, just then, in a smile of greeting which converted both lines and color into what one suspected to be a caricature. There was a thatch of gray hair, but it was crew-cut. He discarded the towel and extended one of the hands with which he had just examined Carol in an anteroom separated from the consulting room by thick walls and closed doors. Toils reported to be unflagging had bent his shoulders into a stoop that, however, the nature and persistence of his smile caused to appear servile. It was a shopkeeper’s smile. But at the same time the apologetic and disclaiming smile of one who begged you to remember that he was not the owner but only worked here. The smile of a man who knew that everyone who came through that door would be short-weighted.
“The spleen is beginning to be felt, so the disease is coming along,” he said, when we had both sat down. “Her hemoglobin is”—he consulted a paper a receptionist had put on his desk—“just a thousand. Down almost three hundr
ed from the test Dr. Cameron ran Tuesday. So things are getting touch-and-go.”
He laced his hands behind his head and blinked into the sunlight a moment.
“The two best drugs we have for acute leukemia are 6-mercaptopurine and Methotrexate. I’d like to start her on the 6-MP, but it needs a few weeks to take hold, and I don’t know whether we have the time. She’s pretty explosive. But let’s try it. If things get tricky we’ll just pop her into the hospital and dose her with cortisone. We like to keep the steroids for later, an ace in the hole, but if we need them now to pull her into shape for the 6-MP, we’ll have to use them.”
“What do you mean by things getting tricky?”
“Watch her for bleeding. What the disease does is destroy the platelets in the blood, which do our clotting for us. It’s important she doesn’t fall down or bump or cut herself in any way. No playgrounds or such till we get her into remission. If she goes to school, no gym, and tell the teacher to watch her.”
“What shall I tell the teacher she has?”
“Say it’s anemia. Tell Carol the same thing. That’s part of it, after all. Why not keep her out of school till we’re over the hump? I’ll give you some 6-MP to start her on, and we’ll keep our fingers crossed. If she springs a nosebleed, pack it tight with this hemostatic yarn I’ll give you. If it doesn’t stop, shoot her into the hospital and we’ll put her on the steroids.”
“How long do the remissions last?”
“From the steroids, not long. From the other two drugs, anywhere from six months to a year or two. It’s impossible to predict. About fifty per cent respond to the drugs.”
“There are no cures?”
He smiled very tenderly across the desk. “That depends what you mean by a cure. I have a girl, now fifteen, who’s been in the clear on 6-MP for over three years now. I’m sure in the end the cancer cells will develop a resistance to the drug.”
“And then you’ll switch to Methotrexate.”
“And then we’ll switch to Methotrexate.”
“And by that time …”
“We hope so! Chemotheraphy—drugs—is the scent we’re on now, and it’s only a few years ago we didn’t have anything at all. It’s quite a game of wits we’re playing with this beast. The 6-MP, for example, breaks the cells up nutritionally by giving them counterfeit doses of the purine they like to gorge themselves on. I hope we’ll have some other pranks to play on him soon, and if there are, you may be sure the clinic downstairs will be the first to try them out. There’s nothing hot at the moment, but who knows? It’s an exciting chase, though I can’t expect you to look at it that way at the moment.”
“Do you believe in God as well as play at him?”
“Between my work at the clinic and tearing around to every other hospital in the country, I sometimes go for weeks without seeing my own children. I have no time to think about such matters. Now when I take you downstairs to the clinic, where we’ll see Carol from now on, I think we’d better run another bone marrow. As you probably know, that’s where blood is manufactured and where the villain’s headquarters are. We’ll only trouble her for a specimen every few weeks, once she’s stabilized. I think we’ll make a date to see her there on Monday.”
We were destined to return to Westminster before that. On Sunday evening, a nosebleed the packing wouldn’t stop sent us down the Parkway into New York at eighty miles an hour. In the back seat, Mrs. Brodhag kept the patient quiet with the game they had been playing all afternoon.
“My uncle has a grocery store,” she said as we swept on through pouring rain, “and in it he sells—C.”
“Carrots,” I said.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, would I give anything that easy? And you keep your two cents out of it. Carol?” she prompted the girl nestled in her sturdy arm.
“Clorox,” said Carol, who was on to the woman’s trick of stocking her uncle’s grocery store with everything but groceries. “Say, I believe it’s stopped. Why do we have to go to the hospital now, Daddy?”
“Just to humor me. If it’s really stopped I’d rather they took the packs out at the hospital anyway. Let’s get on with the game. Is it cookies, Mrs. Brodhag? If not, I give up.”
We had both given up by New Rochelle, where Mrs. Brodhag told us the terrible news. It was kohlrabi her uncle sold, which sent father and daughter into fits of choked laughter. By the time we had reached the city, the rain had stopped. Carol was promptly put to bed in the hospital, where a transfusion was begun and the first of the cortisone prescribed by a young doctor who had been in touch with Scoville, and who assured me we would have her out of there in a few days. Mrs. Brodhag and I walked down the hospital steps to the parked car, beside which we hesitated a moment as Mrs. Brodhag cast her eye up the dark street. I looked for a restaurant.
“Would you like a bite to eat?” I asked, for we had had no supper.
She shook her head, fixing her gaze on a building halfway up the block which I saw to be a church. Sensing her wish, I offered to wait and even to loiter with her there a moment. I expressed doubts as to the suitability of the building we approached, for it bore the name of St. Catherine of Siena and was surmounted by a cross, whereas my friend was a Congregationalist habituated to plain interiors and spare devotionals. “This will have to do,” she said as we entered all that splendor.
She knelt at the front to pray. I sat in a pew toward the middle. The silent cavern had at this late hour only a sprinkling of bowed heads. Mrs. Brodhag was a long time, and I rose and drifted to the back of the church, where my attention was caught by a separate small bank of trembling candles and a statue they dimly illumined. It was a shrine to St. Jude, the Patron of Hopeless Cases. I sank to the floor and, squeezing wet eyes to hands clenched into one fist, uttered the single cry, “No!”
I now mastered the art of remaining half drunk while having lost the joy of drink. Alcohol and barbiturates between them afforded a few hours of tumbling dreams, like those somersaults of men pictured in space fantasies as floating beyond the gravity of any world, life or death. One awoke from nightmares to a nightmare. Daybreak brought its jumble of bird songs that had once vouchsafed the happy dozer a fancy of inhabiting dense jungle, a game doubly available to those ignorant of the names of the creatures fluting away out there. But one bird we knew, that brown thrush with the sweetest sound on earth, if it is not the most unbearable. One nested near the house this season, spilling its liquid music among the cruel May boughs. I must have heard him in my sleep, for I awoke with the tears leaking from sealed lids.
I was glad to get to the hospital, where the corridor was as full of children as the woods had been of birds. I had seen it only in the ghostly gloom of midnight. Now it was a bedlam of colliding tricycles, bouncing balls, and shouts for nurses and the volunteer workers known as Bluejays, so named for the color of the uniforms in which they bustled about on nonmedical errands. A Negro nurse clutching a pan covered with a towel was with her free hand holding at bay a boy in pajamas who was trying to use her stomach for a punching bag. She was laughing uproariously. A mother wheeling a perambulator in which reposed a mummy with a sign pinned to its gown reading “Nothing by mouth” paused to smile at the scene. A priest blessed a lad in a wheel chair before trading taunts with him about the Dodgers as he moved off to other chores. Crawling toward us on all fours was an infant wearing a turban of surgical gauze, whom a passing nurse snatched up and returned to its crib.
Carol’s room was empty. The unoccupied bed was cranked up, and on the table beside it lay the storybook we had taken from home, closed, with a stick of gum for a marker. A nurse entering just then with some medication thought we might have better luck in the playroom. That was where she was, sitting in a wheel chair, working at a coloring book with one hand. High on a pole affixed to the chair dangled a bottle from which a thin tube of crimson led to a needle in her other hand, and there was no doubt its influence had already spread to her cheeks. Her bright “Hi” happily confirmed the impression, thou
gh its tone of welcome soon dissolved into one of complaint. There were a number of things, one major. Some “society lady” had braided her hair into pigtails, which were both libelous in effect and ruinous to the waves she was trying to cultivate. I complied instantly with the order to remove the rubber bands, and brushing the precious fleece, I asked why she had submitted. “What can you do, Daddy? They have this attitude.”
“What attitude?” I whispered.
She lowered her voice further and indicated with her eyes the Bluejay whose efforts I was unraveling. “Watch her a while.”
The volunteer was a slender brunette of thirty or so whose own grooming, triumphant over uniforms, and rippling assurance testified to a lifetime of security, of swimming pools and tennis matches in expensive club sunlight and charity balls under great chandeliers. She was clapping her hands over a colored boy who lay on a wheel table narrating his surgery in tones of frightened bravado. He too wore a turban, through whose cerements the deleted lump could be seen slowly rising again, like a brioche in a pan. “Oh, that’s wonderful, Tommy. What all you’ll have to tell the kids when you go home!”
The Bluejay moved from child to child, spooning food into the mouths of laggard breakfasters, adjusting a television set before which sat a small group in a vinework of transfusion and intravenous tubes, getting out games and puzzles for those at tables. By the time she circled back to us I had thoroughly dismantled her handiwork. She paused over us to take it in.
The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel Page 15
