MICHAEL KORDA
Passing
A Memoir of Love and Death
For Margaret, always
We rarely go gentle into that good night.
—SHERWIN B. NULAND, How We Die
PART I
“I’ve known that something was wrong for a long time.”
1.
“YOU DON’T KNOW what you’ve got until it’s gone,” my wife Margaret was fond of saying, meaning that you shouldn’t take the good things of your life for granted.
“When you see something you want, go for it,” was also one of her maxims—she was never one for dithering or “shilly-shallying,” as she put it. Hesitation was not part of her makeup, big life decisions or small ones alike she made quickly, without looking back, or regret afterward.
I was the more cautious one, inclined to think things out, or through. “Look before you leap,” might have been my motto, a note of caution that was washed away by the fact that from the first moment I set eyes on Margaret I knew she was the woman I had always wanted. It was love at first sight—surely the most dangerous of emotions—and as I was shortly to discover it was mutual.
We met in 1972, of all improbably romantic ways while riding in New York’s Central Park. I used to board a horse then at the one remaining stable near the park on West Eighty-Ninth Street and rode early every morning before taking the subway downtown to work. Margaret, a much more gifted and experienced rider, had started to rent a school horse in the mornings. Our rides were not synchronized, so for some days we went around the reservoir on the bridle path in different directions, merely saying good morning politely as we passed each other.
It was midwinter, so we had the bridle path pretty much to ourselves. The few riders who braved the weather went out in bulky down parkas suitable for a polar expedition; Margaret wore a sealskin coat with a silver fox collar, her long blond hair tucked up under a towering white fur cap, looking like Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago. I soon learned she was married to Magnum photographer Burt Glinn, and not surprisingly that she was a model. I was married too. I could tell that this was going to be complicated, the mutual attraction was too strong for it to be otherwise, and soon we were riding around the reservoir side by side in the same direction, and stopping for a cup of coffee on the way to the B train.
By the spring we knew, or thought we knew, everything there was to know about each other, until one day when instead of stopping for a cup of coffee on Eighty-Sixth Street and Broadway, Margaret asked if I would like a cup of coffee in her apartment on Central Park West and I said yes, both of us knowing that the relationship was about to get even more complicated. Burt—by then my wife and I had become friends with the Glinns and we often went out to dinner together—was away photographing in Indonesia or somewhere, we had the apartment to ourselves. We forgot about the coffee, Margaret put Carly Simon’s album No Secrets on, “You’re So Vain” was the big hit of 1972, and we went into the bedroom and embraced passionately, just as I had been imagining for so long, at which point it became apparent that Margaret had left the Vuitton bag that accompanied her around the world in her locker at the stable, and with it her bootjack. We fell on the bed, and Margaret said, “We’ve got to get our boots off.”
In those days I still had a pair of riding boots made for me in London by Henry Maxwell on Jermyn Street, tight enough that I needed to sprinkle talcum powder on the calves of my breeches before using boot pulls to haul them on, and Margaret’s were, if anything, tighter. (English riding boots are supposed to fit like a second skin.) I told her to hold on hard to the headboard of the bed, got down on both knees, removed her spurs, and began to pull as hard as I could, to no effect. Without a bootjack there seemed no hope of getting them off. I stood up, she raised one leg, and I pulled harder. “I could cut them off,” I suggested, but Margaret shook her head; she did not want to ruin a good pair of riding boots. From time to time Margaret lost her grip on the headboard and slipped to the floor, but after what seemed like hours I managed to get one of her boots off, then the second one popped off unexpectedly and I landed on the floor with a thump.
We both broke into laughter at the sight of ourselves in the mirror. I looked at my own boots. “To hell with the bedspread,” Margaret said, and so we made love for the first time, Margaret in her riding breeches and me in my boots, and never looked back. For the next forty-five years we were each other’s lover, companion, and best friend.
Margaret seemed invulnerable, her beauty and her athleticism untouched by age, her presence at once commanding, reserved, and slyly appealing, seemingly invulnerable. Even into her sixties she could still wear a bikini and look good in it, walk an hour a day in any weather, ride competitively and win—as a horsewoman she won the last of her five national championships at the age of sixty-six. She had never experienced a serious illness or any kind of surgery, not even the removal of her tonsils or her appendix, until 2011, when she had a melanoma removed from her right cheek, a scary moment, but one she managed to change into a kind of party, with friends coming from all over to sit and wait for her at New York–Presbyterian Hospital as the procedure was done under local anesthesia in the doctor’s office while she was fully dressed, including her favorite pair of cowboy boots.
Unlike most people born in England, Margaret had perfect teeth despite a lifetime of drinking tea and eating too many “sweets,” especially her favorites, Cadbury Fruit & Nut chocolate and Kit Kat bars. Age had weathered but not diminished Margaret’s looks and sharpened the dramatic curve of the cheekbones; by 2016, she retained the agility of a young person and the perfect posture of the fashion model she once had been, she could still command attention when she entered a room. A lifetime spent outdoors—she could not bear being “cooped up” indoors during the daylight hours—had given her a kind of permanent tan. I was the one who had the big medical dramas over the years, two cancer surgeries and a cardiac arrest, while she remained virtually unscathed at the age of seventy-nine.
Nothing had therefore prepared us for the fact that we were standing outside a nondescript medical building in Poughkeepsie on April 1, 2016, of all dates, having just been told that Margaret had a large malignant brain tumor that might kill her in a matter of weeks if it wasn’t taken care of at once.
The first step, the doctor told us, was to perform a biopsy of the tumor to find out what he was dealing with, and he could do the procedure the day after next—there was no time to waste. It was no big deal, he assured us, he would merely drill a small hole in the skull and take a tissue sample, then we would know exactly what we were facing.
I said that drilling a hole in the skull sounded like a pretty big deal to me, but that fell upon deaf ears. He was determined that we should realize the urgency of the matter, he told his secretary to give us an appointment card and a thick sheaf of forms to fill out, and dismissed us. We should read and sign everything before he saw us again on Friday.
Margaret’s expression was that of a condemned prisoner looking at the firing squad with something between stoicism and hostility on her face as the neurosurgeon showed us the brain scan on his computer and pointed out the tumor, a glaring white blob on the left side of her brain, surrounded by an aureole of darker tissue. You couldn’t really miss it. It looked like something glaringly out of place, which of course it was.
Once we were outside, she stared stonily at the Hudson River for a moment while we waited for the car, then she put her sunglasses on briskly, a signal that she was ready to move on. There were no tears on her cheeks, Margaret was not someone who cried easily. Until now I had always been the one who had needed nursing through one medical crisis or another, and it occurred to me that our roles had been suddenly reversed. “I knew it was going to be bad news,” she said. Her accent was sti
ll English, hardly changed at all by more than five decades of living in the United States.
“Not this bad, surely?” I asked, but Margaret didn’t answer. She was the one who faced bad news of whatever kind squarely, I was the one who tried to deliver it in small doses, trying to play it down, sugarcoat it. There was no way to sugarcoat this.
“Not this bad, no, but bad,” she said as we stepped into the car. We held hands briefly. Hers was ice-cold, although it was a sunny spring afternoon.
I babbled on as we drove home. “He isn’t the only neurosurgeon in the world, you know . . . The first thing we need is a second opinion. I’ll call Adam. And Maurice. And Vinnie, of course . . .”
Adam Rosenblüth was Margaret’s internist, Maurice Carter was her orthopedist, who over the years had always managed to get her back on a horse despite the inevitable aches and sprains of competition, both of them “in the city,” as people said up here in Dutchess County as if New York City were Shangri-la, although it was only ninety miles away. Vincent Beltrani Jr. was our dermatologist, a friend and neighbor who collected and rebuilt old sports cars in his fully equipped garage, shared my passion for motorcycles, never failed to charm Margaret, and whom we had known since he was a teenager.
“I don’t know a thing about brain tumors,” I went on, “but I’ll hunt up a few sites on the internet the moment we get home and read up on them, and try to find out which is the best hospital for this kind of thing . . .”
Margaret waited for me to run out of breath. She knew my way of processing bad news was to read up on whatever it was, then get on the telephone and start organizing things and people, the natural response of a retired book publisher. When faced with a crisis, my first instinct was to reach for my Rolodex and a telephone. “I’ve known that something was wrong for a long time,” she said calmly.
The truth was that I had half suspected so myself, although I had been reluctant to admit it and never imagined it could be anything this bad.
It had begun about a month ago, with Margaret dropping her whip while she was riding. She was a strong, gifted, fearless horsewoman, who rode two horses a day rain or shine, someone who had started riding in England at the age of three. In ordinary circumstances, even in extraordinary ones, she would never have dropped her whip, yet now day after day she did. When I could, I dismounted and handed it back to her, otherwise we came back later to look for it. I did not give it much thought, but I should have. It did not occur to me that she wasn’t dropping the whip, it was slipping out of her fingers—she couldn’t feel it.
She was a good driver too, her father’s daughter in that respect, as in many others, but she had been driving faster than usual lately, and with a certain recklessness that sometimes made me nervous as a passenger, as if she weren’t entirely sure where the right edge of the road was, or how close she was to other vehicles as she passed them.
A couple of weeks after she first began dropping her whip I began to notice that Margaret was slurring her words, so that I didn’t always understand what she was saying. This was entering more difficult territory. I had been getting deafer as I aged, perhaps a legacy of two years in the Royal Air Force and two weeks in Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, my hearing dulled by the noise of jet engines warming up in the age before hearing protectors were issued, and of artillery shells exploding close by, and I now depended on hearing aids, imperfect instruments at best. Margaret sometimes became impatient when I missed what she was saying, she urged me to get the hearing aids adjusted again, or get new ones, or “raise hell” with the audiologist. Then too, perhaps like most wives, she assumed that I simply wasn’t listening to her, or perhaps still worse didn’t want to hear what she had to say. In either case, the assumption was that it was my fault. My audiologist took all this calmly: “All wives complain about their husband’s hearing aids,” she said.
I felt guilty about this—and mildly resentful—but no matter how many times I went back to the long-suffering audiologist, the problem persisted and grew worse. It didn’t occur to either of us that the problem might in part be hers—that she was groping for the right word and slurring it when she found it.
Other small changes came and went, some of them imperceptible to anyone but myself. Every afternoon around four we had tea, a familiar English institution, hers with sugar, mine without. One afternoon she tasted hers, put her mug down, made a face, and said, “This must be yours, there’s sugar in it.” I was about to tell her that she’d got it all wrong, in all the years I’d known her she had always put two spoonfuls of sugar in her tea, but something in her expression warned me not to. After all, what difference did it make? People’s tastes change as they grow older, they suddenly “go off” things; still, it seemed strange that something as basic as this had changed. Margaret had always liked a lot of salt, but now she poured salt on her food with a lavish hand, so the saltcellar had to be filled up much more often than before. I did not imagine that changes might be going on in her brain that she did not even notice.
Margaret loved doing crossword puzzles, and excelled at it. Every afternoon after lunch she settled down with the New York Times crossword puzzle, a skill I do not have—she knew it was useless to ask for my help—and zipped through it with a ballpoint pen in time for tea. At some point, she switched to the much easier puzzles in the Poughkeepsie Journal, then gradually she stopped doing those too, the daily papers were left untouched.
She had been an avid reader of fiction too, marking off for me in the New York Times Book Review novels she wanted to read so I could get them for her, but now they piled up on the chest at the foot of the bed as if it were a secondhand bookshop. She could not concentrate, she thought she might need new reading glasses, but made no effort to have her eyes tested, and didn’t respond well to my nagging her about it. She loved to read and reply to emails from her friends on her cell phone, but she found the phone harder and harder to work, and complained that the buttons on it were too small. She found it increasingly difficult to “do” her hair, or to fasten the clasp on jewelry, leaving me to come to her aid with clumsy fingers, to our mutual irritation.
Occasionally I told myself—after all, we had been together for over forty years—so this is what old age will be like, a succession of mild retreats from things that had once been easy. But then, at last, she turned to me as I made her a drink before dinner, and said quietly, “I think something serious is wrong with me.”
My first instinct was to say, Don’t be silly, but at the sight of her face I put that to one side. I finished making her vodka tonic, poured myself a glass of wine, and sat down opposite her at the kitchen table. “Wrong how?”
“I can’t hold things, like a pen or an eyebrow pencil. I drop them. I don’t even know I’ve dropped them. And I can’t find the word I want. I’m embarrassed when I’m talking to people. Surely you’ve noticed?”
I nodded. I had noticed, and had chalked it up to fatigue or age—she would be seventy-nine in November, after all, four years younger than me. The closer you are to someone day by day, the harder it sometimes is to see that something is wrong. “I thought you were tired,” I said, and it was true, Margaret wasn’t sleeping well, and everything, even taking off her makeup before going to bed, seemed to take her more time and make her even more tired.
“It’s not that. I’m sick. I need help.”
This was profoundly not in character. Except for what she called “maintenance,” regular checkups and so on, Margaret tried to avoid doctors when possible, except for Maurice Carter, who had the gift of making a trip to his office seem like a social occasion. She had a typically English reluctance to seek out medical help, she was the opposite of a hypochondriac. Injuries that would have sent anyone else rushing to the nearest emergency room, Margaret ignored.
Once, when she was away trying out a horse in Massachusetts, the horse threw its head up and drove the metal frame of her Ray-Ban sunglasses deep into her nose. She washed the blood off, put several lay
ers of cotton pads from the barn’s horse first-aid kit over her nose, and drove more than two hours home alone in severe pain.
When I opened the front door and saw her that night I was appalled—once I had removed the bloodstained cotton pads I saw that the cut was deep, a ragged open gash, the flesh on either side bruised. It had not crossed her mind to call me, or to seek help. “I just need a Band-Aid,” she said. With great difficulty I persuaded her to let me drive her to the emergency room of Vassar Brothers Medical Center in Poughkeepsie instead, where she was given an antibiotic and the wound was cleaned, then a plastic surgeon gave her a local anesthetic and did a terrific job of sewing it up with more than a dozen tiny stitches—we were lucky that he happened to be on call that night, because once it healed the scar was almost invisible. He too was amazed that she had driven two hours and proposed to put a dab of Neosporin and a Band-Aid on it when she got home. I thought, but did not say so, that if one of her horses had received a wound like that she would not have hesitated for a moment to call her vet, whatever time of the night it was.
That Margaret sought my advice instead of calling a doctor did not surprise me. When she competed she carried her own personal medical kit in the horse trailer, tranquilizers, painkillers, antibiotics, drugs to stop diarrhea or snuff out a cold, and when she needed advice about her health she was apt to seek it from those around her, like Roxanne Bacon, who looked after her horses, or her favorite equine veterinarian in those days, Paul Mountan, whose own dislike of seeking any kind of medical help was so great that rather than waste time visiting a dentist he once pulled out a painful tooth himself with a pair of pliers.
Margaret had grown up in a small English village in the days before the National Health Service, when the doctor still made house calls for routine matters and a visit to his surgery was something you only did for the most serious of health problems. Whatever childhood trauma had made her fear visiting a doctor, I never learned. Some of her best friends were doctors, but she sought unprofessional medical advice for as long as possible, and often asked me to serve as her go-between and describe her symptoms over the telephone. “Just tell him I need something for my cough,” she would whisper to me, rather than asking herself. Not every doctor reacted well to this. Many of them told her to come into the city and see them, or even to take her own temperature, which she disliked doing in case it was higher than normal—she had a touching belief that a prescription containing codeine telephoned to her pharmacy would solve anything except a broken bone.
Passing Page 1
