“Did you do anything?”
“No. Did you?”
“No.”
“Well …”
Shearwood swung his legs over the side of the bed. “We’ve got the rest of our lives for that, Yvonne. Right now we’ve got to catch a plane to Hawaii.”
The honeymoon was Shearwood’s responsibility. I’d told him, “I’ll take care of the wedding. You take care of Hawaii,” and I’d proceeded to spend every penny of my thirteen-thousand-dollar savings, even in the end having to borrow from Daddy to pay for the flowers. “We shouldn’t take a honeymoon,” Shearwood had said. “We should spend the money on furniture.” But then he saw my face and hastily added, “Okay, I’ve told you the practical thing to do. Now what do you want to do?”
“Furniture we can always buy, but a honeymoon is a one-time affair.”
“Hawaii it is.”
It is easy to sum up what we did on our honeymoon; we ate. We didn’t go near the beach because neither of us knew how to swim and I wouldn’t be caught dead in a bathing suit. In two and a half weeks we gained twenty pounds—each of us. To gain that much weight in that short a time takes really dedicated eating, and we were up to it. We quickly knew where every restaurant, coffee shop, service bar, and snack place was in the hotel and for blocks around. I no longer had to worry about fitting into my wedding dress, we both love to eat, and I suppose we were nervous. After all, neither of us had been married before and it does take a bit of getting used to. So we ate. And went back home convinced that after the most perfect wedding in the world, we’d had the most perfect honeymoon.
We were flat broke, of course, but it didn’t matter because Shearwood was starting the first of his two years of residency at St. Luke’s Hospital and I my second year of a four-year residency at Roosevelt, and we had a tiny apartment supplied by Roosevelt. And the band was still going on, so there was a little bit from that. Linda needed tuition money for her last year of dental school, and Rita for the University or Pennsylvania, where she had transferred. She had grown restless and discontent at NYU and thought she might like life better in Philadelphia, which was close enough for her to remain with the band. As musicians, we were so attuned to each other and by now so experienced that, even though we had no time to practice and had to accept fewer and fewer engagements because of our schedules, we still sounded great. There was no falling off in the beat and drive of the music, but the taste of college kids was changing. Drugs were becoming ever more prevalent, and what suited the drug scene were not bands and dancing but psychedelic music and strobe lights. By the end of the year, Daddy was saying, “What do you think, Cookie?”
“I’ll be chief resident soon, Daddy, and time is really going to be a problem for me, plus Mommy isn’t looking too well,”
“And things are winding down at the colleges. I guess we should think about packin’ it in.”
“We’ve had a good run for our money.”
“Yeah, and as fickle as people are, I never thought it would last this long.”
“Look what the band’s done for us: Linda’s a dentist, Rita’s in dental school, Jeanette has a doctorate in counseling psychology, Donna’s studying to be a court stenographer, Betty’s a nurse.…”
“But I only got one doctor,” he grumbled. “I set out to make five.”
“They say the best way to reach a goal is to be aiming at something far beyond it. You wanted us all to be somebody, to be able to take care of ourselves, so you aimed at our being doctors.
We’re not all doctors, but you ended up with six educated independent women, so you really did reach your goal.”
He thought this over for a few moments, then shot me one of his quick smiles. “Not bad, eh, Cookie? Not bad for an uneducated ditchdigger.”
Linda graduated from New York University School of Dentistry in 1975. Because it takes money to set up a dental practice and because, being black and a woman, the chances of her being taken on as a junior partner in an existing practice were remote, she decided to join the Army.
“The army!’ I exploded. “Linda, their uniforms are ugly.”
“I’m not joining for the uniform,” she countered haughtily. “All the army dependents, their mouths are terrible, so I’ll get lots of good experience. And the Armed Forces Dental Pathology Lab is better even than Harvard’s.”
I suspect Daddy had planted the idea of the Army because Linda was unsuited to the hurly-burly of the world. She could bang the drums but she couldn’t bang on doors; she could crash the cymbals but she couldn’t crash gates. The Army would give her security and a fine chance to grow in her profession. It was the right move for her to make, she and Daddy agreed, and one day in the summer he took her to Fort Monmouth to sign up.
“Sorry,” the recruiter said. “We can’t take you.”
Linda, expecting a glad hand, was rocked by the cold shoulder. “But I was at the top of my class at NYU and the Army needs dentists, they told me that in New York.”
“It’s not your qualifications,” the recruiter explained. “It’s your weight. We don’t have a uniform that would fit you.”
Linda was devastated. Mommy and Daddy had always said it was our brains that mattered, not our bodies, and nobody had ever made anything before out of our being overweight. Linda plummeted head first into a black depression, then surfaced grim with determination: if she was going to be denied what she wanted because she weighed 298 pounds, she would cease weighing 298 pounds by the simple but excruciating expedient of ceasing to eat. She did not intend to spend two years of her life getting the weight off at the approved rate of two pounds a week; she took the fast track and she had the willpower to stick to it, even when she was hospitalized with gastritis.
“What have you been eating?” the doctor said.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I’ve been fasting for two months.”
“Good heavens! You’ve got to start eating.”
But she did not. “I didn’t care what that doctor said. I had a little diluted orange juice and went right back to not eating.”
She began fasting in August and I didn’t see her until November when we had a family gathering at our apartment in New York for Thanksgiving. When I opened the door, I saw this woman wearing a bright scarf around her neck. Her eyes looked familiar but I didn’t recognize anything else about her. “Yvonne, it’s me. It’s Linda!” She had lost 120 pounds.
When she ended her fast, despite having exercised hard on a rowing machine, she had to have a tummy tuck and reduction mammoplasty to make her skin fit her new shape. With these procedures out of the way, she took two large steps: she married the man she’d been dating at NYU, Roger Braithwaite, a law school graduate, and she applied again to the Army. This time the recruiter welcomed her. As for her wedding, she said, “Your wedding was gorgeous, Yvonne, but I’m not going through all that.” Always a quiet person, she and Roger were quietly married by a justice of the peace.
That year of 1976-77, I was chief resident on the OB/GYN service at Roosevelt Hospital, loving it the way you love work that uses you fully and is triumphantly worth doing. Shearwood and I had been married for two years and had eased into the deepest kind of enriching contentment. Our time together was limited because he was as immersed in work at St. Luke’s as I was at Roosevelt, absorbed in the curiously contradictory calling of orthopedic surgery, which can require both a delicate touch and brute strength as you wrest bones back into place or yank out a diseased hip socket that is to be replaced. But what time we did have together was filled with a kind of delighted tenderness, Sometimes I thought: Now. Now I’m beginning to understand what Mommy and Daddy meant by love. It isn’t a pounding heart and sighs and fervent embraces. It is this good, deep sense of being here together come what may.
On a winter’s day in December, I was in the operating room at Roosevelt doing a vaginal hysterectomy when a message came that the medical center needed to get in touch with me and asked that I cal
l as soon as I could. With the years of my residency at Roosevelt ending the following June, the chairman of the department had suggested that I consider continuing my studies to become a perinatologist, a specialist in maternal-fetal medicine and the problems surrounding complicated births.
“Because it’s a new specialty, there are only a hundred or so perinatologists in the country,” he said, “and I think you’d be gifted at it.”
I had asked Mommy what she thought, and she said, “I don’t have the slightest idea what it is, Cookie, but if it means more education, do it.” So I had applied to Columbia for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in maternal-fetal medicine, and I presumed it was the medical center calling me now about some problem with the papers I had filled out. When I left the operating room, I asked the department secretary to get P & S on the line for me.
“No, it’s Monmouth Medical Center in New Jersey that wants you. A Dr. Demaree.”
Dr. Demaree was Mommy’s doctor from the time of the kidney operation. When he came on the wire, he said, “Yvonne, your mother’s in the hospital. Can you come?”
I paused just long enough to tell the department chairman where I was going, then raced to Long Branch. Daddy and Betty, who was an LPN at the hospital, were with Mommy, and Daddy told me what had happened. In the middle of the night, Mommy pounded Daddy awake. “Donald, take me to the hospital,” she said frantically.
“She didn’t say she was sick or anything?” I questioned Daddy.
“Just ‘take me to the hospital.’ Out of the blue. The middle of the night.” His hands were shaking and he looked ill himself. “So I brought her here to the Emergency Room.”
Betty had gotten a look at Mommy’s chart. “Her pulse rate was up in the 120-130 range, her blood pressure was 240 over 120, her heart was wildly irregular. They’ve diagnosed it as a thyroid storm.”
I was startled. “Mommy’s never had any problem with her thyroid. She doesn’t have a goiter.”
“No, but that’s what they’re saying—Graves’ disease of unknown origin.”
Dr. Demaree confirmed this diagnosis when I saw him, adding that the storm had been quieted and Mommy’s pulse rate brought down with medication, but the cardiac arrhythmia was continuing. “If her heart is still fibrillating by tomorrow, we’ll have to cardiovert her.”
I explained to Daddy that this meant they would administer a brief electric shock to the heart to restore a normal beat. “The body needs a strong heart,” I told him, “and right now Mommy’s heart is like a bowl of jelly.”
Dr. Demaree had to obtain Mommy’s consent to the procedure, and he warned her that, although complications were very, very rare, fibrillation could lead to blood clots, which, if jolted loose by the electric shock, could then travel to the lungs or brain. “But it’s uncommon for anything to go wrong,” he repeated.
I talked to Mommy and she was cheerful and feeling better. Linda was there, and Donna and Rita; Jeanette was on her way. Daddy seemed reassured, and after we persuaded him to join us for a quick sandwich in the coffee shop, the trembling in his hands disappeared and he told me to get on back to New York.
“Daddy, I gave Dr. Demaree my number and he’ll beep me if you need me,” I said as I kissed him goodbye.
The next day the call came. They had cardioverted Mommy. There was a clot, an embolism. It had gone to her brain. She had had a stroke.
I rushed back to the hospital. Mommy was paralyzed on her right side. She could not talk. She drooled out of the side of her mouth. The rare complication had struck, with devastating consequences. I was too much of a doctor now to rail against fate, not to know that the unexpected can happen and it is no one’s fault, but the human being inside me silently screamed. When the parents who have always been strong for you are suddenly incapacitated, one helpless with illness and the other helpless with worry and fright, it is as though someone has played cat’s cradle with the world, turning it inside out, taking it from their hands and putting it into yours.
After several days Mommy began coming back. She could speak, although not clearly and only out of one side of her mouth. Physical therapy was started, and she could drag along for a yard or two with the support of a walker. All of us were at the hospital as often as we could be.
There was no one else there one afternoon when I arrived for a visit. “How’re you doin’, Mommy?”
“Oh, some better,” she said, and gave me her hand to hold while we talked quietly. Her mind ranged back and she spoke of the Savoy Ballroom and this young boy asking her to dance and saying goodbye to Daddy on the subway steps when he went off to war and his mother ripping up her marriage certificate. I reminded her how she had been Daddy’s hod carrier building the house and about our winning six times at the Apollo and the nights she’d be sewing our band dresses with the sewing machine needles breaking and popping sequins in her face and the times we had driven all night to make a date in Georgia or Kentucky and the cocoa she made when she woke me at three in the morning to study.
‘“You kids have been wonderful,” she whispered.
All I could think of was a line from a movie. “Your children may be the miracle,” I said, changing it to fit the truth of our family. “But you and Daddy are the miracle workers.” She was lying with her head turned to one side and a tear came out from the corner of her eye and started down her cheek. I blotted it away. “I have to go back now, Mommy,” I said gently. “I’m on-call tonight. But I can phone and get someone to take my place if you want me to, if you need me here.”
She said no, that I should go ahead. But then, as I started for the door, she suddenly said, “Honey, don’t leave me.”
“Sure, Mom. I’ll call and change my schedule.”
“No. No, I’m just being silly. You go on, honey. I’ll be okay. I’ll be fine.”
In the night, another embolism lodged in her brain.
I talked on the telephone to the medical staff of the Intensive Care Unit, to the neurologist who was called in, and to Dr. Demaree, who warned me that the situation did not look good. With this new embolism, Mommy was totally incapacitated and they would have to put her on life support. “All right,” I said. “Go ahead. Let’s hope for the best.”
I went down each day for the next three days. Mommy was on a respirator and she began to improve. She was clearly fighting and I was optimistic. But on the fourth day, a call came from Dr. Demaree. “Yvonne, I don’t think your mother is going to make it.”
“What do you mean, she’s not going to make it? What does that mean?” I, as a physician saying that to a family member knew perfectly well what it meant. It meant “your mother is dying.” But when it was my mother, I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t accept, I couldn’t take in the meaning.
Understanding, Dr. Demaree said quietly, “She’s not doing well. I want you to come as soon as you can.” The same message went out to my sisters, and since they all lived in New Jersey, they were at the hospital before I got there. Linda met me coming down the corridor. Mommy’s not good, Yvonne. What do you think, should she be taken off life support?”
“I don’t know. I have to talk to the doctor.”
“He’s already been here. He talked to Jeanette.”
“Jeanette? What’s he going to talk to Jeanette about?”
She shook her head. “He came out and said, ‘I need to talk to you about your mother’s condition. Which one of you is Dr. Thornton?’ and Jeanette said that she was Dr. Thornton, so he started telling her about this count and that rate and this reflex and that sign. When he noticed a funny look on Jeanette’s face, he stopped and said, ‘What kind of a doctor are you? She told him she had a doctorate in counseling psychology. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘then I need to speak with your other sister—the real doctor.’”
Rita had gone in search of Daddy, who was off finishing up a masonry job, Linda stayed with Donna, who was looking rocky, and Jeanette and I went into the Intensive Care Unit. We threaded our way past the IV poles and tubes and wires runni
ng to monitors, past the beeping machines and the busy screens, until we came to the foot of Mommy’s bed. We hesitated there to see if she would open her eyes. In that moment we heard a high-pitched “Hmmmmm,” and then “Code.” Mommy’s heart had stopped.
From her body came…it wasn’t a mist; it was like looking through the trembling air that rises above a hot stove; a shimmer floated up and disappeared. I whispered, “Did you see what I just saw?” I knew from the whiteness of Jeanette’s knuckles gripping the bed railing that she had indeed.
A split second later, doctors and nurses racing with the “crash cart” and shock paddles in hand converged on the bed. “No,” we said, “it’s too late. Leave her alone. It’s over.”
We went out to Donna and Linda. “Mommy’s gone.” It was all there was to say. It was Saturday, January 8, 1977. Our lives would never be the same.
The doctor asked for permission for an autopsy. “Not my Tass,” Daddy cried over and over. “You’re not going to cut my wife!”
The doctor appealed to me. “An autopsy would help us to know what happened, what caused your mother’s death.”
It had all happened so unexpectedly, the onset of the Graves’ disease had been so sudden, that I understood his wish to discover if there had been other, unidentified factors involved. I put my arm around Daddy’s shoulder and kneaded a knotted mass of muscle in his back. “Don’t think of it as cutting Mommy,” I said. “Think of it as the doctors trying to understand what happened.”
“I don’t want them to cut her. I can’t see her being cut.”
“All right, Daddy, I’ll tell them no.” I squeezed his arm and began to turn away.
“Do you think it’s best, Cookie?”
“Not if you don’t want it.”
He thought a minute. “If it was something female, maybe they’d find something that could help you girls. All right, tell them it’s okay.”
The autopsy turned up nothing mysterious; the only finding was an enlarged thyroid.
The Ditchdigger's Daughters Page 22
