They separated less than a year later and Margaret moved for a while to Nairobi, where she exercised the race horses of Beryl Markham, famed aviatrix, author of the beloved aviation classic West with the Night, perhaps the last survivor of the wild and wicked days of “White Mischief,” the colorful set of hard-drinking, hard-living colonial whites described in Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. (For those who remember the 1985 film based on it, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Beryl Markham was the horsey English adolescent who befriends Baroness von Blixen, played by Meryl Streep.)
Margaret only occasionally alluded to her life in Nairobi at the age of twenty, and on the rare occasions when she mentioned her first husband Don she never spoke badly of him, but it was noticeable that while every flat surface in the house was crowded with framed photographs of all the people and animals that had played an important role in her life, including her second husband, Magnum photographer Burt Glinn, Don’s photograph was conspicuously missing.
It was in Nyeri that Margaret began a lifelong habit of sunbathing whenever she had the time and the opportunity. The fact that Nyeri is less than ninety miles from the equator and almost six thousand feet high did not seem to her dangerous regarding sun exposure, nor to anyone else at the time. A tan was her definition of glowing health, beauty, and above all glamor, as it was for many women, particularly those coming from a country with a climate like England’s. A year-round tan was sexy, it suggested skiing holidays in Switzerland, summers on the Riviera, winter cruises in the Caribbean; it wasn’t something you could get at home in the Cotswolds, so for a young woman with a pale English skin it was a kind of transformation. Where other people were careful to wear a hat and a long-sleeved shirt in the tropics, Margaret stripped to the skimpiest two-piece bathing suit she could find or get away with (the bikini had been around since 1946 in France, but it must still have required a certain amount of daring to wear one in colonial Kenya in 1957) and exposed herself to the East African noonday sun blazing down on her fiercely from a cloudless sky, rubbing in a little Johnson’s baby oil from time to time to keep her skin from drying out. The sun was her friend, and remarkably she never suffered from sunburn, as I did—her skin turned almost instantly to the exact shade of tan that surfers in Southern California sought. It would not occur to Margaret until it was too late that pursuing the sun might be a fatal addiction.
“I’ve been having a hard time sending emails from my phone,” she said. “My fingers seem worse.” She held up her right hand, and showed me that she could no longer touch her fingertips to her palm. “I tried to answer Megan’s email, but I couldn’t.” Megan had worked in Margaret’s barn and helped to exercise her horses for nearly twelve years; smart, pretty, and blond, she was something like a surrogate daughter—Margaret had never wanted children of her own but was not without motherly feelings—if she had had a daughter she would have wanted her to be like Megan. Married now, with a daughter of her own, Megan would of course be the first person to whose message Margaret wanted to reply. “So I’m tidying up instead,” she went on, sounding, unlike her normal self, ever so slightly helpless.
I did not think it would help matters to ask why one of the things Margaret wanted to tidy up was her first marriage. Besides, a glance at her wastepaper basket showed that it was already full of horsey bits and pieces off her desk, engraved paperweights, framed dressage results, photographs of Margaret jumping big walls and fences on horses long since departed—Margaret never sold a horse, once they were in her barn they stayed for life, looked after just as carefully as they were in their prime even when their days of being ridden were long since gone.
I understood perfectly. Before every big move in her life Margaret liked to make a “clean sweep” of the past with ruthless efficiency, although this time she must have realized the hopelessness of the task as she looked around her at the walls hung with ribbons, hundreds of them, and the glass cabinets full of silver trophies of every shape and form. Even if she devoted the next twelve days to the job she was unlikely to produce a clean slate here.
The thought must have occurred to her too. She picked up her cell phone and made another stab at emailing Megan. Her fingers moved slowly and clumsily, but she finally completed a brief message, sent it off with a swoosh, then burst into tears. “It’s never going to get better, is it?” she asked.
Margaret was not a woman who cried easily or for no good reason, but once she started, it took her some time to stop—then, when the tears were over, she set her jaw and got down to facing what had to be faced. She would not cry again for the next twelve days.
Somewhere in the many notebooks all over the house in which Margaret recorded in a firm bold hand things she had read that captured her attention and that applied to her, she wrote down a sentence by Isak Dinesen: “The cure for anything is salt water—sweat, tears or the sea.” It must have made an impact on her, she had carefully underlined it twice.
“You’re tired,” I said, “it’s been a long, hard day. You’ll see, things will look better tomorrow.”
Margaret dabbed at her face with a Kleenex. “I don’t think so,” she said.
She was right. The next day was awful. Whether this was or was not a psychosomatic reaction to facing the fact that she was going to have brain surgery, Margaret’s symptoms worsened overnight. The fingers of her right hand became even more difficult to use, so much so that it was hard for her to deal with the buttons of her jeans and shirts, or to tie her own shoelaces. At the same time, her lips began to droop ever so slightly on the right side of her face, and chewing became more difficult, as if she were losing control of those muscles. The fact that she could see this for herself every time she looked in a mirror made it seem even more serious to Margaret than the problem with her fingers, but worst of all was the sudden onset of diarrhea, which seemed unconnected to the brain tumor, although it may have been a side effect of her anxiety.
Margaret’s bag of pills in the dressing room of her horse trailer always contained Lomotil and Immodium—no serious competitive rider wants to risk having to withdraw from an event because of something he or she might have eaten the night before—but neither of these slowed the diarrhea down a bit. A call to our friend Dr. Tom got Margaret an appointment with Dr. Salvatore Buffa, a genial gastroenterologist in Poughkeepsie, who saw Margaret the next day. He told her this was a fairly common reaction to the contrast fluid she had to drink before the full-body scans the day before. It would take a while for the liquid to work its way out of her system.
Dr. Buffa, a large, bluff, friendly man captured Margaret’s confidence immediately—he prescribed something a lot stronger than what she was taking. While Margaret had a fear of doctors, she also had a touching trust in prescriptions. The quickest way to her heart was with a prescription pad; she had the same unquestioning faith in a prescription that Catholics have in the wafer at Holy Communion. Her favorite doctor had been her old friend and internist Mort Shapiro, dead now, alas, who always carried a prescription pad in his pocket—even at black-tie dinners Mort would whip it out if anyone mentioned a symptom, however slight, and scrawl a prescription, saying, “Take these, bubbi, you’ll feel better in no time.” Mort never hesitated to prescribe opium drops for an upset stomach, major-league painkillers for the slightest headache, or huge quantities of Naproxen for an aching back. What Mort offered, and what Margaret wanted from a doctor, was instant relief, but that was not on offer from Dr. Buffa, who recommended “BRAT,” a diet of bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast over the next few days instead.
This was not in itself a problem, Margaret had very little appetite but she quite liked rice and toast. What was more alarming was the rapidly increasing paralysis of her lips and facial muscles, which made everything difficult to eat. It was not just that it became hard for her to chew; the lack of feeling in her lips made her fearful that she was drooling without realizing it. Quite suddenly, even the ordinary, everyday moments of her life made her self-conscious—she need
ed to use a straw to have morning coffee in the tack room with Megan and Miguel; it was difficult for her to articulate, which made it hard to talk to anyone on the telephone, even close friends; the difficulty of using the fingers of her right hand made answering emails almost impossible. It was as if she had been cut off overnight from the world, at just the point when she most needed support.
The list of things that suddenly became difficult for Margaret grew frighteningly long: doing up her bra, flossing her teeth, using a spoon, making tea, putting on her makeup, fastening a necklace, writing out a shopping list, taking her watch off. It seemed as if every hour brought her face-to-face with something ordinary she could no longer do. I did my best to help, but my fingers were often clumsy, which made her ever more irritated not to be able to do these simple, everyday things.
On the one hand, she was anxious about the surgery; on the other, she wanted to hurry up and get it over with in the hope that she would be able to resume a normal life afterward. References to “quality of life” from a doctor, even the sympathetic Dr. Alain, only increased her anxiety. For to her that phrase meant riding her horses, driving her car, going out to dinner with friends, and now it seemed to be narrowing down to closing the zipper of her jeans or fastening the hooks of her bra.
Every day seemed to present some new health problem, as if Margaret were being made to pay day by day for all those years of robust health and physical activity. The day after seeing Dr. Buffa, Margaret had an attack of cystitis, one of those things that happened to her from time to time for no apparent reason and for which she kept a supply of Bactrim in the bag of pills in the dressing room of her trailer, just in case that should occur when she was competing. Cystitis was no big deal for her—it’s one of those complaints that men don’t suffer from and therefore tend to dismiss as a “woman’s problem”—but this time the cystitis grew more and more severe with frightening speed, and combined with the diarrhea and her anxiety it turned Margaret into what she most feared to be, sickly, an invalid, a patient, in constant need of cleaning and care. Her gynecologist was in Manhattan, a two-hour drive away, as was her internist, but I could see during the night that she was getting sicker by the hour: her face was alarmingly pale, she had a fever, her hands were trembling badly. I bundled her up into the car in the morning over her increasingly faint objections and took her to the ER at the Vassar Brothers Medical Center in Poughkeepsie, fortunately at a moment when there were no victims of gunshot wounds, a heart attack, or a car crash waiting; in fact, we had the waiting room pretty much to ourselves.
“I don’t want to stay here,” she whispered to me, but the ER doctor’s instant diagnosis that Margaret was suffering from an acute urinary tract infection and severe dehydration, combined with his firm but gentle manner—he seemed to me absurdly young, but already endowed with a great bedside manner—calmed her at once. She needed to have sodium chloride and an antibiotic administered intravenously, he explained. Margaret handed me her handbag and sweater and lay down obediently. She was better at dealing with a medical problem after it had been named and a solution proposed to her. Once she knew what was going to be done and why, she could be a model patient. An authoritative diagnosis lifted her spirits almost as much as a prescription. It was the unknown she disliked.
As a child, Margaret had been sent to a boarding school run by nuns—her parents were not Catholic, but, like many middle-class English people at the time, they believed that the nuns were better at teaching and disciplining girls, that a convent school was a step up socially and academically. Margaret had hated being sent away to school; her experience at the hands of the nuns who enforced discipline with a briskly wielded ruler or cane gave her a lifelong hostility toward the Catholic Church and its teachings—to the end of her life she still wondered from time to time how her father and mother could have been so cruel as to send her away when everything she loved, pony, dog, and cats, was at home. That her father simply thought it was the best thing he could do for her she never accepted.
Much as Margaret had hated the nuns at the convent, she regarded the priest paradoxically as an authority figure, with even more power than the Mother Superior. The priest could be appealed to, he could overrule Mother Superior and allow Margaret to go home for the weekend if she had misbehaved. As an adult she projected these feelings onto doctors: they too were authority figures, they had the wherewithal to ease pain, tell her what the problem was, and deal with it. She did not exactly trust them, but she acknowledged with whatever reluctance their power.
Over the next year we would become reluctant connoisseurs of emergency rooms, and while the one at Vassar Brothers was not at the top of our list, lying there in the examination room with the intravenous needles in her arm and the lights turned down seemed to bring Margaret to a kind of peace that she had not felt since her diagnosis. The small room was decorated in various shades of green, the kind of colors you only see in a hospital, but it was quiet, and as the transparent plastic pouches slowly drained into her arm, Margaret began to look more like herself, not quite asleep but restful and composed, with some color returning to her face. Being in the ER removed her for a time from the decisions we had to make, it was a moment of escape; ironically, she would look back on this as one of her best moments in the days to come.
The cystitis ebbed and by the next day it was under control, but the diarrhea continued. Other things were becoming more difficult. Even the most ordinary household tasks. Although Margaret did not exactly like doing laundry (who does?), she had exacting standards about how it should be done, and found a certain peace in carefully folding it and putting it away. Her mother Kit—she always addressed her parents as Paul and Kit, and as far as I could tell always had—was a wonderful cook and a perfectionist housekeeper, and Kit somehow managed to pass this on to her daughter, a vast multigenerational knowledge of how to cook, clean, and put away anything. Margaret would become a world traveler and a model at an early age, but in some corner of her mind she was also her mother’s daughter. Ironing pleats perfectly, preparing a crown roast of lamb, folding laundry neatly and putting it away in exact piles, these were all hardwired into Margaret, she was happy to leave the tasks to somebody else, but she was no more likely to miss a fingerprint on a glass or to serve ready-made mint sauce from a bottle instead of making it from scratch than Kit had been.
The next day was devoted to “pre-op” tests at Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, New York, where the surgery would take place. Unlike the soothing ambience and décor of the Northern Westchester Cancer Treatment and Wellness Center, WMC is a big, intimidating hospital, a sprawling, formidable presence that dominates the small and oddly named town of Valhalla, with over six hundred beds and nine hundred consulting physicians, on a campus it shares with the New York State Police and the Westchester County Jail, a pretty grim landscape viewed from one of the many parking lots. WMC serves the Hudson Valley region as well as northern New Jersey and southern Connecticut, and like a lot of major hospitals it is in a more or less constant process of rebuilding and expansion, so that it’s almost impossible to get to any part of it in a direct line; instead one passes constantly from a run-down, old-fashioned area to a stunningly modern one, guided by temporary signs that seem to lead you nowhere, after a long walk that often brings you back to the place you started from, asking for directions for the second or third time from harried doctors and nurses. The lobby was serene and sleek, like the departure lounge of a modern airport, except that here we were taking a journey of undetermined duration into the unknown. Big hospitals are impersonal, frightening places, phenomenally busy. Especially for someone who has never been a patient in one, it’s easy to feel one is on a conveyor belt. WMC was no exception.
The waiting room to the Radiology Department was all bare wood and sleek plastic furniture, rather like a Scandinavian sauna. Margaret went off to undress and put on a hospital gown, leaving me with her handbag to sit and listen to people exchanging horror stories about their ca
ncer treatment or unimaginable injuries. I had negotiated with numerous emails and telephone calls for the use of a contrast fluid that would not worsen Margaret’s diarrhea. Once radiologists listened to the problem, they said, oh, sure, of course there was an alternative. Then why not use one that didn’t cause the problem in the first place? I couldn’t help thinking.
I also had a pocketful of Margaret’s jewelry. She did not own anything in the way of valuable jewelry, always preferring a new horse or a saddle to a bracelet or a necklace, but she never took off her wedding ring, or the engagement ring I had bought because neither of her two previous husbands had bought her one. Even more important to her was the gold Cartier “Love Bracelet” I had bought her in 1976, when we were first living together. In those days Cartier had a policy that you couldn’t buy one for yourself. You had to go to Cartier with the person who was buying it for you, and sit while the bracelet was fastened around your wrist with tiny gold screws using the gold screwdriver that came with the bracelet. The whole idea was that you wore it for life; Cartier made something of a small ceremony of it. That day in 1976, we had lunch, drank a toast to our new state, then walked back to Fifth Avenue—I was going back to my office in Rockefeller Center. As we passed Cartier I told her there was something I wanted to show her, and led her upstairs to the department, where we were seated quickly and they fastened the bracelet on. “I will always wear it,” Margaret said, to gentle applause from everyone in the service department. That was the whole idea, of course, you wore it for life, at Cartier they screwed it on tightly with that in mind. Removing it for the MRI not only challenged my eyesight and dexterity, but deeply upset Margaret. She had worn it for almost forty years through thick and thin, and taking it off seemed to her a surrender to the unthinkable.
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