by Marge Piercy
The doctors threw drugs into him and she threw random food in front of him. Finding food he could endure eating was a constant experiment of another sort. His sense of taste was off. Foods he had always loved tasted burnt or spoiled. Some smells disgusted him. She had to stop wearing perfume. Even her hand lotion irritated him. He was always thinking the milk had turned. He developed a taste for something called junket, an old-fashioned pudding made of rennet and flavored with raspberry. She could only find one mail-order source for the stuff. He also liked vanilla tapioca pudding and chicken soup. Childhood foods, perhaps. She would do anything to make him less miserable. Discomfort, the doctors called it, you’ll be experiencing some discomfort. They never said pain. Agony. Terror. He was on the chemotherapy for a week and then off for three weeks. Then just as his weakness was lessening, another cycle began.
She slept badly. Insomnia had never been a problem of hers. In law school she had been constantly exhausted, but that was because she only had three hours to waste in bed every night. Now she lay down beside him but rarely slept. She was secretly relieved when he suggested they have separate bedrooms. He found it painful when she bumped against him or curled into his side during the night. Still, it seemed an ominous change, to move out of the bedroom they had shared. It was a long winter and a slow spring. Fern arrived for a week and tried to teach Gordon visualization. At first he was forbearing and went along with her exercises. It made sense to Judith that the mind should be able to infiltrate the immune systems, but it was too New Age for Gordon. Why had he ever married Fern? Fern was not a difficult guest. She was used to living in group situations, and did not spread out through the house and always cleaned up after herself. Actually, Judith rather liked being able to share some of the nursing chores. She could imagine, briefly, the advantages of polygamy. But Fern and Gordon always ended up arguing, as she was sure they had when they were married to each other. That is, Gordon argued and Fern sighed and looked pained and quoted her experts.
“My good body has betrayed me,” he told Judith. “Always I’ve been vigorous, able to stay up all night and dance and fuck and drink, and still work the next day. It’s like a great battle horse that suddenly stumbles, and you wonder if you’ll have to shoot it. My body is all I think about now. It’s a new kind of narcissism.”
“It’s not narcissism, Gordon. You’re trying to recover from a dangerous illness. It takes all your time and all your energy.”
Gordon was sitting in his favorite chair in the living room with Portnoy on his lap, the big gray cat who had become his constant companion. Seven years before, Natasha had found him beside Route 6, a discarded, starving kitten with a broken leg. Now Portnoy had decided to take care of Gordon, according to his lights, washing his hands, cuddling against him, keeping the other cats and dogs away. “It is narcissism, Judith. I’m obsessed with how I feel day and night. I keep a journal about my symptoms and my responses. I go through litanies of my aches and pains. I am obsessed with the chemicals, the poisons they put into me. The idea of taking platinum as a drug is fascinating. My body is becoming this expensive and useless artifact.”
“With the end in sight of getting better, of being well again.”
“The stupidest thing is, I felt much better before they started on me. I keep thinking—and don’t yell at me, I’m not acting on it—that all that was wrong with me was a cough and a little fever and a pain in my shoulder. Now my whole body is screwed up. I can’t eat, I can’t drink, I can’t fuck, I can’t climb a flight of steps unassisted. I’m wondering if the cure isn’t worse than the disease.”
“Gordon, lung cancer kills.”
“But Judith, it may do that anyhow. And is this living?”
Finally Dr. Ripkin pronounced the tumor shrunk enough for Dr. Barrows to operate, to remove the tumor, affected lymph nodes and, of course, a good portion of Gordon’s left lung. Many new tests irritated Gordon. But he was pleased to hear he had a good heart. They always tested for cardiovascular problems before surgery. It seemed as if there was scarcely an inch of his body they did not test in some way, not a system they left alone. Judith had enough warning so that she put everything on hold, found another lawyer to cover for her and went into Boston with him. The surgery would take place at Dana Farber, where they had done the biopsies on his lungs and lymph nodes. They had friends she could have stayed with, but she preferred a hotel. She did not want to have to chat with anyone. It was easier to be alone. She spoke to Natasha twice a day, to Hannah every night and usually also to her best friend on the Cape, her frequent antagonist in court, the assistant district attorney, Barbara Ashbaum. That was as much contact and conversation as she could endure. Most of the other children called the hospital or the doctor. Ben, the oldest, called her the night of the surgery.
Gordon hated the hospital. He was depressed by patients lined up in corridors waiting for X rays, waiting for scans, waiting for doctors. He found the standard ways that nurses and orderlies addressed him demeaning. He was used to admiration, deference, used to people knowing who he was. Here he was just bald Gordon the patient to whom things were administered and done. “They speak to me as if I had lost my mind with my tumor and had the mental level of a five-year-old. It drives me up the wall. Do you know what you mainly do in the hospital? You wait. You’re called a patient because you’re required to be endlessly, endlessly patient.”
She could not stay in Boston the next two weeks, but commuted when she was able. She could not drop her practice, or they would not survive economically. The nights she spent in the house alone were dreadful. When she was in Boston, Stumpy cared for the cats and dogs and the birds and random other animals Natasha brought home. The six cats and two dogs were some kind of comfort. They were worried. They came to her to give and take reassurance. She could not say that she slept alone, for there were up to five other mammals in her bed on any given night.
She was tremendously glad to bring Gordon back to the Cape. He was not to remain in bed, but to get up every day and walk as far as he could endure. He was to eat as much as he could, to regain lost weight. Gradually he began to regain his strength. They walked, slowly, but they walked together along the sand roads, over the hills, along the beaches on both sides of the island. They walked and sometimes they talked. He was short of breath and had to rest frequently, but he was no longer an invalid. His hair was growing back, all white and finer than it had been, like down. He had an appetite. Sometimes they were even able to make love. They tried new ways of pleasing each other, gentler ways of putting their bodies together.
She studied nutrition. Hidden in her office, she had six different tomes on cancer and cancer therapies. Now Gordon was freed from the doctors for a while. He saw Dr. Barrows once a month. Perhaps he was cured; perhaps their life would really resume. His strength seemed to be seeping back. He was at work on his long overdue manuscript. The family came in bunches, and Gordon began to hold forth, as he always had, the hub of everything. She began cautiously, secretly, to hope. To hope that she would retain this man who was the center of her life, the only man she had ever really loved.
JOHNNY
Johnny Lynch had put back a few drinks after dinner and fallen asleep on the couch when the phone woke him. Twenty past midnight, said the ship’s clock in his den. Chief of police Smalley filled him in at once. “It’s a tragedy,” Johnny said. “Did the boy damage the dike?”
“Only himself.”
“Did the parents take it hard?”
Abel said he was about to call them. He was sitting at the accident site, talking to Johnny on his car phone. His men were securing the area, and the rescue squad was taking the kid to the hospital twenty miles away.
“And you think he’ll lose the arm?”
“What’s left of it,” Abel said.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph.” He stood, clutching the phone, and dizziness hit him. He ended the conversation sitting on the floor. “The parents will want to be off to the hospital immediately. I’ll ca
ll the mother in the morning.”
He struggled to his feet and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. Once he’d been able to handle a scotch before supper, a bottle of wine with his meal and a few brandies as he sat down afterwards with the newspaper. But he wasn’t drinking alone back then and that made all the difference. There were selectmen’s meetings and poker games, cocktails with clients and dinners with the family. He’d lost half the old crowd to illness, and the other half to politics.
The following morning he drove the length of High Street, as he did every day, slowly (he didn’t care who was behind him) and took in the inn with its huge porch and columns, the churches, so white and pure in the rosy light of the rising sun, redbrick Town Hall, perfectly restored after that little fire, and the street itself, washed clean every day at dawn—he’d made sure of that, wrote it into the job description of the Department of Roads, Bridges and Waterways twenty years ago after a visit to Paris. Johnny parked in the Town Hall lot, bought his three newspapers, walked to his table in the Binnacle. Conversation dropped to a murmur. Even the rattle of plates in the kitchen stopped, the dishwasher and the cook peering through the pantry window. They all wanted to know what to make of the explosion. Was it a serious crime? A seventeen-year-old boy, no stranger to the police, attempting to make some kind of statement by blowing up public property? Or just mischief? Or was this the beginning of war, neighbor versus neighbor?
Nobody approached his table. These were tough, hardworking people; not shy about demanding their due, but respectful. They were churchgoers, some of them, but they were not moralists. There was a tradition of live and let live in Saltash. This was no small midwestern town with a distrust of what was too different, but a village whose economy had depended on the sea; that had sent its men all over the world and felt damned lucky if they made it home, no matter what their quirks and changes. What these people had always sought from him was a vision of how to proceed politically; how to survive in a state whose legislature saw their home as a playland in July and August and a hinterland from September to June. They looked to Johnny for the way around and through state laws never written for their benefit.
The waitress approached his table with a pot of coffee. “How are you today, Johnny? Two eggs, toast and griddle cakes?” He was Johnny to everyone, young and old, rich and poor, except at the office. He didn’t believe in humbling people before him any more than in driving fancy cars. People resented you for it. The greatest man he’d ever known drove a Buick and had people call him Jack, until he was elected president.
“Just coffee, dear. Just coffee this morning.” He made his point, saw people beyond this girl’s fine broad hips stop their chewing, rethink things in light of the accident.
“You feeling all right, Johnny? There’s a stomach flu going around.”
“To tell the truth, it’s the Compton boy, dear. I can’t get him off my mind. Has he truly lost that arm? We’ll have to find something for him, won’t we? And we will.” He lifted his eyes, addressing the other tables. “Once we make sure he gets the best damned care available.”
Gary Zora twisted around from the table behind. “What in the hell did the kid think he was doing, Johnny? Dike’s been through two hurricanes. And did he think he wouldn’t get caught?”
Johnny shook his head sadly. “I don’t think the boy himself knows. Only thing I thought about at seventeen was baseball and pretty girls.” He winked at Doris Fisher at the table next to Gary’s. She blushed and touched her fingertips to her tight gray curls.
“I don’t know where they get their ideas,” Gary said.
“What I want to know is, where did he get the explosives?”
“It was easy enough.” Gary was in the fire department and had either responded to last night’s call or listened on the radio. The juicy gossip attached to any rescue operation was one of the perks of a dangerous nonpaying job. “He just stuffed a copper pipe full with black powder from his father’s shotgun shells and laced it all through with a candle wick.”
“I don’t believe it, Gary. Saltash kids don’t do that kind of thing,” Johnny said.
Gary lowered his voice. “You know his father. The apple don’t fall very far.”
Johnny said, loud enough to make himself heard, “No parent would put his child up to this. No parent would ever want to see his boy lose his arm. Not over a petty municipal disagreement. Am I right?” he asked Birdie Hogan, watching from a corner table.
“Not here, Johnny. Not since I been.” Birdie wore coveralls, summer and winter, stained with motor oil, and was always coated with sawdust shavings. Going on seventy-five, he still worked his gas station and, out back, a firewood business. “Not in this town.”
Johnny could feel a consensus building, a general return to normality in the clatter of plates, the rise of cigarette smoke and conversation. He had flushed the issue like a pheasant into the open. People weren’t inherently mean-spirited or stupid, but the world was complicated. He left feeling better than he had in hours, knowing that he had set things right, let everyone know where he stood.
Although Abel Smalley assured him the kid had done more damage to himself than to the dike, Johnny asked Petersen, a retired engineer and chairman of the Board of Selectmen, to go down and take a look. He’d go by himself after dark when there wouldn’t be too many people around, or he could hear it now: Johnny Lynch was out there checking on his dike; Lynch’s dike, some called it.
He used to know all the kids in town when his own were in school, and even after, when he used to read his favorites out loud, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. This Compton boy was a blank. The girls in his office said there was something funny about the kid, always on his bicycle, always by himself, riding up and down High Street as if he never had a friend or a home. The girls said the kid’s father was at fault. Palmer Compton was as loud as he was nasty, thought the best way from point A to point B was to run everyone down in between. He had one issue, never gave a lick about anything else in town, and he beat it like a deaf mule, so long and hard that even people prone to agree got mad sometimes and voted the opposite way. Palmer Compton had always been against the dike. He thought the whole town was out to keep him from making a living, when everyone knew the old days of shellfishing were over. Sure there would always be a living for those who were scientific about it and had their own shellfish grant. But scratching clams from the wild? Trying to feed his family with a pail and rake? That was good for the tourists and picturesque, but the money lay in developing the land, in building. If the dike was gone tomorrow and the whole valley flooded over, there still wouldn’t be enough shellfish to support more than a few families. Johnny had done everything he could to bring this town into the future, to open it up to real prosperity, to get it in the Sunday travel sections and the guidebooks. But here was this fool Palmer Compton railing about a dike drying up the shellfish, when the dike kept flood tides out of land that could profit the entire town.
Next, Johnny called Sams, the medical examiner, and asked him to find out about the kid. If God forbid the boy died, there’d be a martyr; as if a one-armed half-wit bicycling back and forth on High Street wasn’t symbol enough. He’d have to come up with a job for the kid—quietly. Roads and Bridges was out, obviously. Then an idea struck him: with one arm, the kid might qualify for handicapped. There was a lot of money floating around for the handicapped; state and federal. Johnny was sure he could find a job, maybe for the county: get the kid out of Saltash.
The new secretary rapped on his office door. He liked to keep it open if he wasn’t seeing a client, to make everybody feel like family. He’d been watching Crystal and he liked what he saw. The old girls cooed over her, and lately he’d heard giggling in the office, the way it used to be.
“Mr. Lynch? Selectman Petersen’s on the line.” She was only thirty-odd, but she’d been around the block a few times. She had a fine body, thickening around the waist, although that had never bothered him about a wom
an. Her skills were rusty; he doubted she had done legal work for years. He didn’t hire her for her skills, and certainly not because of her father; he hardly owed any favors to Doc Sinclair. He’d kept the dentist out of jail and got the case of the woman whose tongue he had cut up settled out of court.
Then he’d urged Doc Sinclair, with his shaky hands and his drug habit and his history of trouble, to move on. The man had blown it. Sure it was paradise out here, but you had to know your limits. He’d hired Crystal for the same reason he’d sometimes go fishing instead of the office on the first hot days of June; the same reason he’d once come back from a hunting trip with a pony for his daughter. It was a willful submission to temptation, a vague infrequent admission that there was more to his life than politics and the law. He hired her because it amused and titillated him to have her around. And of course because Maria wanted her. At least she did know something about computers.
He made a point to act businesslike in her presence. He couldn’t afford to embarrass himself. But the simple truth was that it had been years since he’d found himself smiling for no reason. “Put him on, please, Miss Sinclair … Ralph? What’s it look like over there? Give it to me straight.”
“Nothing to give,” Ralph Petersen said.
Prying information out of Petersen took persistence, but his silence worked both ways. The man was unshakable. Never made promises he couldn’t keep or shot his mouth off to the newspapers; never lashed out no matter who attacked him at a meeting. He was bald as an egg, with a straight white mustache that looked glued on. Petersen liked to make you feel as if you could answer your own question if you just thought hard enough. His only gesture was to touch the ends of his mustache, as if to make sure they were still there.
