Soap and candles were somewhat less recession-proof than firearms. Resolve, drowning in overproduction, hoped to pull the company through hard times by laying off much of the workforce. They could weather the stagnation, drain inventory, hope for an improvement in national well-being, and rehire later, after wages collapsed.
But hard times brought a harder recovery. In the midst of depression, a certain Richard Tilghman, chemist from Philadelphia, notified Clare’s Sons of Roxbury, Massachusetts, of his intention to sue them for patent infringement. The notification referred to papers filed with the U.S. government, blueprints of a process not identical to Ben’s and Jewitt’s autoclave but so close a progenitor as to produce an ironclad case.
Pleading ignorance would not protect the Clares. The law was the law, built to settle the frontier, protect cleverness’s property, provide incentive for gain, and compound the power of capital. And toward that end, the law would gladly shut down all manner of soap manufacturers, whatever their size.
The Clares settled with Tilghman before the suit reached a court. But settlement cost them dearly, both in license fees and in retroactive penalties.
Benjamin had thought himself on the verge of paying off his debt to family and business. He dreamed only of escaping the chemistry of fats and returning, at long last, to his beloved botany. He had imagined his indenture to be almost over. And now it was set back decades.
For a time, he considered killing himself. But he soon realized how little fiscal recompense his brothers could extract from such an act. Instead, he resorted to a move that was, for him, far harder. Far more a sacrifice.
He approached his brother Samuel one day, in the wooden supervisor’s office above the cooking-vat floor. Samuel, the one who would force their brother Resolve to return an overcharged dollar on a billing of one hundred. Samuel, the one who refused to follow the common practice of underweighing, however widespread. Samuel the good, who still thought of earthly business as preparation for the business of eternity.
And Benjamin laid down upon his brother’s desk a packet of thick, succulent leaves. Each oozed a viscous milkiness from the slit where it had been severed from its roots. And he signed over the first, native-born North American crop of Utilis clarea.
The Red Man never worried about his skin, Benjamin announced. Why should you?
“Your husband seems to be threatening to sue me,” Dr. Jenkins says, when Laura checks back into Mercy for her first round of chemotherapy. Two parts embarrassed and one amused. Or maybe the other way around. It’s hard to say, with so professional a caregiver.
“Not my husband,” Laura apologizes. Just some creep I used to be married to.
The surgeon has dropped in just to well-wish. Laura’s not really her beat anymore. The ball, Laura’s cancer, is in Dr. Archer’s court now. Mercy’s oncologist has come back from retirement after his young replacement suffered a nervous breakdown and put himself indefinitely out to pasture.
Everything about the returned retiree gives Laura the heebiejeebies. Dr. Jenkins, at least, provides a little color. The changing plumage. One day surgical scrubs; the next, thigh-length mauve.
Laura’s own fashion statement today consists of her shortest hair since the home Toni days. Ease the transition, make the change seem semi-deliberate. It was time to lose her locks anyway. She wore them five years longer than she should have. She always disliked the rule that says older women can’t wear long hair. But they shouldn’t.
Don hates her new look. That, at least, is some small compensation. “It’s not you, Laura. It makes you look . . . severe.” By severe, he meant lesbian. Feminist. Just you wait, babe.
“I didn’t see a reason to take the lymph nodes,” Dr. Jenkins says. “You’d lost a good deal of blood already.”
“The man is a little excitable. Don’t pay him any attention.”
“People don’t always know how to help,” the doctor suggests.
“People don’t know anything.”
He’ll never sue you, she wants to assure the doctor. Ask you out, maybe. But he’ll never sue you. It’s the woman’s perfume, Laura figures. That faint bouquet of carbolic acid. The Spanish fly of the industrialized nations.
Hospitals everywhere: that same aroma. More distinctive than a Crabtree & Evelyn’s. Does everything medicinal have only one available whiff? Vitamins, Band-Aids, antibiotics, prosthetic limbs. Obstetrician-gynecologists. Heady, solvent smell of the safely disinfected. Death Beater Number 5.Kinda new, kinda now.
The perfume of this building, of the nurses’ carts, the packed supply rooms, takes her back to her last serious hospital stay. Tim’s birth. The hospital in Peoria. Same as this one. Same as any of them. Tim, so early, so tiny, so purple. Dead on arrival, save for those machines.
And for five months she and Don didn’t know what their baby’s face looked like without a nosegay of tubes strapped to it. But they knew how the little thing smelled. They could smell him at night, back at home, the two of them spent and exhausted, the smell still on their helpless hands, staining the sheets of their own ignorant bed.
He smelled like a hospital. Like they might lose him at any minute to this health scent. This chemical antiseptic: the stink of medicine and meters. The little guy smelled like he’d been swabbed in some formaldehyde, a bath to put him beyond all earthly corruption. In her mind, that smell bumps up against the aroma of boeuf bourguignonne. She and Don at that ruinously fancy French restaurant, one meal like a month’s worth of groceries, swearing to each other the most serious vow that life allowed. How they would see that tiny purple thing through graduation from college. How they would love each other and support each other as long as it took, and bail each other out for as long as there was bailing.
Dr. Jenkins moves on to her real rounds. Laura lies back in her chair-bed, in a room with half a dozen others in her same boat. A ring of people lie attached to drips, a wayside filling station. The room is large and bright and flowery, freshly stamped, like one of those recently airdropped tract homes.
The chair-beds don’t exactly face each other. Two have already changed occupants—booths in a short-order restaurant—during the time she waits to get hooked up. A room full of other poor cancerous souls. Tomorrow, another group just like them.
Laura checks in to the circle for a longer stay. The same amount of chemicals, only dribbled through her system at a quarter of the usual rate. They give her this much choice. Some patients seem to experience less nausea if the poisons are spread out a little. The trade-off sounds fair. It’s not as if she’s losing any quality work time, after all. And this way, with luck, she’ll get the retching over with before the kids have to see her.
She lies back, sloshing inside. Cisplatin tends to hammer the kidneys, so for the last twelve hours she’s been gulping water until she feels like a fifty-gallon fish tank.
Dr. Archer breezes through while the onco nurses are prepping Laura. He greets the other patients—veterans and rookies—with the cheer of someone who in his heart’s heart is still retired. Invulne -rable. Only a matter of time before the hospital makes the replacement hire.
“Mrs. Bodey.” The oncologist beams. He scans her chart and reviews all the indicated dosages. “You have someone to pick you up and take you home when you’re done?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Can you believe those clowns in Congress?” Dr. Archer looks up quickly, to see if she can. If she can believe the clowns.
Maybe it’s a trick question. She can’t wrap her head around it. She can’t quite say anything.
“They think they’re protecting us.” He returns to studying her chart.
Health care, she wonders? But no. He’s just relaxing her. Making polite conversation. Chatting over the eternal budget impasse. Partisan politics. What kind of world do we want? Who do we want to win the big game?
“I suppose they want what’s best.” Dr. Archer sighs. “That’s the heartbreaking thing. If they’d just get the hell out of everybody’s
way and let people get ahead with their lives. Let us all do what we do best.”
She smiles as warmly as she can. She shrugs at him. Those nutty legislators. What are you going to do with them?
“You think our noble government protectors would have let electricity on the market if they’d been around to take care of us? Cars?”
“No?” Laura ventures.
“Damn straight, no. Too dangerous! We’d still be living in fail-safe lean-tos. Good old safe holes in the rock, if our lawmakers had their way.”
Dr. Archer signs off on her clipboard and hangs it back on the foot of her bed. He inspects her PICC line. A narrow plastic straw now runs inside her, a phloem tube into her wrist and up her arm, coming to rest somewhere south of her collarbone. Snaking toward her heart.
“Sweetheart, we’re going to start you off with dexamethasone, 20 mg. It’s a steroid. Anti-inflammatory. Good stuff. Throws a damper on the worst effects.”
Effects? Like that little booklet, Chemotherapy and You. You may find yourself not wanting to eat. Your ears may ring or your fingers may feel slightly numb. Everybody bracing the patient for the worst, all the while cueing her to make the worst even worse.
The dexamethasone starts leaking into her at two-thirty in the afternoon. It dribbles for an hour and a half. She lies back with two folders, Properties and Clients, open across her lap. By 4 p.m. she’s reviewed maybe three entries. Made some checkmarks that will mean nothing to her tomorrow.
At four, Tracy, the supercompetent onco nurse, comes to change her bag.
“This is Benadryl, 50 mg. It’s an antihistamine and an anti-emetic.”
“What does that mean?” Laura likes Tracy. She’s like Ellen, only old enough to have outgrown the attitude.
Tracy grunts. “That means the second course is supposed to keep you from throwing up the third course.”
“Terrific. Wish me luck.”
“Oh, you’ll do fine, Mrs. B.”
Sixty seconds after the first drop of fluid hits her blood, she feels how right Tracy is. She’s going to be fine, and more than fine. Everything is going to turn out like magic, only better.
The potion baptizes her with a wave of well-being. The front edge of that liquid blessing flows into her, intact. Its chill rushes past each of her body’s way stations. She lets herself rise, a blissful thermometer, the silvery glow of mercury coursing through her, up into her neck and through her throat, splashing across her head and out her ears. She gives herself to the strange wash now delighting, now calming her cells.
And her cells respond like succulents after a rain. This must be what heroin is like. A perfect, wonderful, absurd feeling, beyond description. Of course people want to stay here, bathing, forever and ever. “Hooked” isn’t right, isn’t fair. Not for such peace. A drowsy syrup of sleep frees her from anxiety she didn’t even know was hers.
Alan, Tracy’s second-shift copilot, slaps on a pack of Zantac, 50 mg. Laura looks up for an ID. But it’s not a big deal. Whatever they do is right. From some distance away, across the air’s chasm, she hears Alan say that it’s an anti-ulcerative. To coat her stomach and soften the chemo’s landing.
Gladness takes her up through 4:30 p.m.: the start of the taxol, 200 mg in 1,500 cc of saline. Somebody—Tracy or Alan—tells her the thing about the tree bark again. How can tree bark hurt you? Tree bark is 100 percent natural. The Native Americans used to make all sorts of things out of tree bark. Canoes and houses. Mighty medicines. The completely natural toxin is set to drip into her for the next twenty-four hours.
She calls the kids. Everybody’s fine, but she has to get off the phone because Ellen’s expecting a call. She’d like to call Ken, but of course she can’t. Nor, apparently, can he call her.
By 7 p.m., bliss is gone.
She sleeps maybe a total of forty-five minutes that night. For one, they keep waking her up, just to see if she will. For another, the early-warning beeper on the IV pump keeps going off every time she flexes her fingers. She shifts her arm, and it’s an emergency. After the millionth beep, she starts talking to it. “Shut up. Oh, shut up.” But it won’t shut up, and the nurses can’t make it any less sensitive.
A day dripped out in microseconds outlasts the idea of time. She sits with her two folders across her lap, as the world runs its whole arc from light to dark and back to reconstituted light. Weird ideas come to her at three or four in the morning. There is no history. Everything already is. Humanity is a child locked by accident in a library, reading its way through the permanent collection, looking for a way out.
This is no time for sleeping or eating or reading. No time for plans. She gives the day over to breathing. She needs all her powers of concentration. A day of doing nothing at all, of simply keeping the tedium from killing her. Nazis are loose in her blood’s lowlands. She must break the dikes and flood out their armies.
Then four-thirty again. The next day, whatever “the next day” means. Her system gets a flushing: pure saline for five hours. Like the stuff her mother used to throw into the wash machine after several loads, to keep the works from clogging up.
Someone calls. Some man. She doesn’t take it.
At nine-thirty that night—which night?—they hook her up with Zofran plus a dexamethasone chaser. She’s not catching dosages anymore. Zofran to keep the nausea at bay. What took you so long? Medical research, working on cutting-edge solutions to the horse/barn door problem. All these meds—discovered, researched, tested, refined, combined, advancing in perfect parade formation, from hospitals everywhere. Some woman in Flagstaff, Arizona, roughly her age and weight, her same ambiguous staging, gets this exact cocktail tonight, administered with like expertise by her very own teamlet of onco nurses.
The ingredients multiply without limit, most of them less than a month and a half old. How we live, now: a new set of doses every day. From experiment to established practice, even before the first round of guinea pigs can sicken or get better. This huge practice, this sacrament, millions of interlocking decisions implemented by tens of thousands of orderlies, each doing his expected turns. An anthill beyond anyone’s ability to manage.
“What’s next?” she asks at 10 p.m. Square-jawed, but still game.
“Cisplatin, 120 mg, plus mannitol, 37.5 mg, for about six hours.” Alan is on shift again. Somehow, she’s missed Tracy’s shift all together.
“For?”
But who can say what for? Thiamine for metabolism. Rosemary for remembrance. Doan’s little liver pills, for whatever ails you. Just so long as the number of cures, however narrowly, stays ahead of the number of ailments. And always water, more water, keeping the metals off her kidneys until she floats queasily on her own insides.
Cisplatin, she remembers. The killer heavy metal. Platinum, like her spent wedding ring. The kind of stuff they’d sue you for letting within ten miles of the village water supply. But here they’ve worked her up a private hip flask. She cannot even think about how much the drink costs per sip. Thank God for insurance. Anyone who denies modern progress has never watched a parent die from inability to pay for treatment.
Karen, the graveyard nurse, gets her up at 3:30 a.m. Rather, the tube alarm gets Laura up, and Laura alerts Karen. Time for another saline, this one rich with assorted nutrients and electrolytes. Set to last eight hours, roughly what sleep used to run, back when Laura used to sleep.
On the third day, she wakes to another Zofran-dexamethasone combo. Tracy’s back. “Haven’t we done this one already?” Laura asks her.
Tracy rolls her eyes in sympathy. “Yup.”
“Buy two, get one free?”
Tracy laughs. “Almost done, Mrs. B. You’re in the homestretch now.”
By noon the third day, she can almost imagine the alien idea:home. As unceremonious as any finish line she’s ever crossed. ’Bye. On your way with you. One down, five to go.
They try to make her eat before she leaves. But the smell of food fills her with a nausea so severe that her body overrules eve
ryone’s best intentions. Her body screams one thing while Tracy insists another. Laura gets through lunch only by wadding up half the entree and stashing it in her purse for later disposal. As if she’s a little child again, only now blessed with a handbag.
No one really knows their real body. Hers has turned electric, buzzed, frizzy. Her internal organs go some horrid shade of Nauga-hyde. No one knows what food really smells like. Well-being is nothing but an impostor, a beautiful girl who turns into a hag at neap tide when the spell breaks and reason at last sees through her.
Don picks her up out front. Avoiding Dr. Jenkins, most likely. “How did things go?” he manages to ask. But he looks away when she answers. As if he’d prefer the short version. “Do you need to hydrate? Should I stop for some water?”
“You do and I’ll scream. I feel like a bloody Perrier factory.”
“Ellen’s been suspended,” he announces.
“Ellen what?”
“Your daughter’s won a three-day vacation from school.”
“I know what the word means, Don.” Now that she remembers it.
“When did this happen?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“Nobody told me?”
“You had other things to worry about.”
“What did she do?”
“Brawling. She and a pretty classmate of hers. Fists. Teacher dragged the two of them down to the principal. Neither would say what was going on. Some kind of silent honor pact. The principal threatened to throw them both out. Finally Ellen admitted to starting things. She says . . . she says that she asked the girl how many viscoses died to make her blouse.”
“Don! How can you laugh? It’s horrible.”
“I’m not laughing.”
“How can you even grin?”
“I’m not grinning.”
“Suspension?”
“Seems this was her third offense this week.”
They coordinate parental responses. Each house hold agrees not to undercut the discipline of the other.
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