“When?”
She shrugs. “All the time. My chest feels heavy. I run out of breath.”
“Does the pain wake you up?”
“How did you know? Sometimes the pain, and sometimes the ringing in my ears. The tips of my fingers are going dead, too. It’s like I’m wearing mittens. I can’t hold a pen anymore. I’m always dropping things.”
“Anything else?”
Where should she stop? “Well, I’ve been vomiting again.”
“We don’t want you walking around doubled over for another two months,” he jokes.
“No,” she agrees.
They go ahead and work up her blood in preparation for the fifth treatment. A practiced veteran, she lets them hitch up to her catheter tap. The blood work shows her white cell count plummeting deep below the margin of safety.
“We’re going to try you with Neupogen,” Dr. Archer says. “Great stuff. This will do good things for you.”
“What is it?”
“What is it? It’s filgrastim.”
“It has two names?”
“Neupogen’s the registered trademark.”
“I mean, what does it do?”
“Oh! I didn’t get you. It’s a granulocyte-colony-stimulating factor. We generally have good luck with it. A neat drug. Produced by recombinant DNA.”
“My colonies need stimulating?”
Dr. Archer laughs. “The taxol and cisplatin have knocked down your neutrophil counts. The Neupogen will accelerate their recovery.”
Learning that she has neutrophils plunges Laura into depression. Not only does she have the horrid-sounding things, she doesn’t have as many as she should. Something is loose in her system, a runaway growth. They can try to gun down the criminal, but not without firing into the innocent crowd.
They pump her with one drug to destroy and another to rebuild. Next she’ll need to take something to correct the Neupogen, and another to correct the correction. It’s just like life, this chemotherapy. The cure is even worse than the disease.
She must come in for five days in a row. Five consecutive booster shots, with blood tests before, during, and after. She feels like crocheting a little doily flower to ring the mouth of her IV tap.
“Can I stay in the hospital for the four nights? It’s tough for me to get back and forth.”
“The point of the shots is to keep you out of the hospital.” Dr. Archer grins. But he looks into it. The stay would not be covered. It would cost as much as half a year in Fort Lauderdale.
She thinks about asking Ken to chauffeur her. But Ken has already faded to an unpleasant memory. He is a dim stranger to her now, surely happy to be free of that bald, anemic, desexed woman with the gash across her midriff and no ass left at all. A woman whose edgy nausea and mood swings sealed him in a tomb as lonely as hers, without even the disease to comfort him. A woman who from the far edge of the bed gladly drove him, innocent, away.
Don would jump at the chance to play driver, of course. Exactly why she can’t let him. Lately Laura has felt an odd concern for that twenty-something twit Don’s been dating. Like the kid’s got a bum deal the way it is, and doesn’t need a cancerous ex-wife thrown into the kitty.
She gets Ellen to take her. Nothing makes her daughter happier than the prospect of substituting a little afternoon driver’s ed. refresher for history, humanities, and algebra II. The only problem, despite what the Illinois Department of Motor Vehicles says, is that her daughter can’t drive.
Her five-year survival rates are better with any cancer in the book than in this car. “Turn the radio off,” Laura croaks. “Don’t talk, just concentrate. Look out!”
“I see him, Mother.”
“Then stop for him, for God’s sake.” They come an inch from slamming into a bumper sticker that reads: My Dolt Trashed Your Honor Student’s Ass.
“Mother, you’re making me really nervous. Just turn around. Look out the back window or something.”
The back window is even more terrifying.
“I’m better off without neutrophils.”
Five boosters fail to raise her count to safety. More blood work shows additional problems, problems that Laura can’t quite catch and does not try to. Dr. Archer and Dr. Jenkins confer. Together, they conclude what neither wants to.
“You’re not tolerating the treatments,” Dr. Archer tells her. “High-dose chemotherapy has compromised your immune system. The smallest infection could finish what the cancer has started.”
“I can settle for four,” Laura suggests politely.
Dr. Archer smiles. “It doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. You haven’t completed the whole protocol.”
“But didn’t I have a choice, back when we started? Three or six?”
“That was then. If you can’t finish all six, we have to try to move you onto another modality that you can get all the way through.”
“Start from zero?” She cannot even finish this race. And they’re asking her to begin another.
“We could try localized chemo washes. Or intraperitoneal radiation therapy. Pipe some radioactive phosphorus directly into the site. Or we might try another general drip. Maybe one of the newer multi-agent combinations. Try to find a mix that you can tolerate a little better. There’s a new drug, topotecan. SmithKline. It’s just been approved.”
“I thought taxol was new.”
“This one’s even newer.”
She goes home. The facts sit like an unbathed hitchhiker on the backseat. She does not tell Ellen, who drives back to school for a last half hour of learning things.
The middle of November, and the lilacs are budding in confusion. Greenhouse effect. Global warming probably, although that weatherman, Mr. Goddard, on the Channel 3 news says that you can’t talk about climate change in such short terms.
She turns on the television, just for the sound of human conversation in the next room. Outside, in the world of broadcast, it’s still raining down plenty and profusion. The catchy salsa sound of updates every eight minutes keeps her from thinking. Just what she needs from it. No worse threat now than concentration.
She plays house. Toys with the dishes, unloads them from the washer. She heats a heaping plate of pilaf, but the smell gags her and she leaves it in the microwave. She flips through the new issue of Bountiful Living, browsing the garden feature, the furniture-refinishing column, the entertaining hints—all the graceful pointlessness of enjoyment.
She lingers on the parting-shot article, “The Bumpy Road to the Obvious.” One of those how-stupid-can-you-get lists that people love to hold up to ridicule the human race. The elusive core, hiding inside the ordinary. How long it took us to make the most self-evident things. The first two-sided record. The shift key on typewriters.
Number seven in the list stops her:
The indispensable Post-It began life as a failure, when a chemical engineer at 3M developed an adhesive that wouldn’t stick. He set the whole batch aside for disposal. Another company scientist, looking for a way to mark his Sunday hymnal, asked to borrow some of the worthless stuff. Only after the two researchers painted a square of paper with the defective glue did the men realize what they had: a quarter-billion-dollar annual industry.
Distraction vanishes, reminding her of her reminder. She goes into the bathroom, careful not to look. She pulls the orange square off the mirror and rubs the reticent adhesive. The gum is fuzzy, grayed. She folds the gum over and sticks it to itself. She wads the scrap into a ball and pitches it in the trash.
She calls Don. She never calls Don. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. He’s deeply confused to hear her. As confused as her budding lilacs.
“What’s wrong?” he asks. That instant tone of professional competence. What she wanted. What she needed.
“Nothing. Nothing, really.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Not the best, Don.”
“Fight it. Attitude is everything, La. The mind is your best chemo. You have to picture yoursel
f well again, and then you will be. Remember, all of this is only temporary. These treatments aren’t going to last forever, you know.”
“In fact, Don, in fact, I’m done for now. I don’t have to do those last two chemos.”
“You what? Sweetheart. That’s fantastic. You’re through?”
Fantastic, no. Through, maybe.
“Through for now, anyway. The doctors are thinking about some other treatment. We’re going to have to wait and see.”
Either Don doesn’t get it, or he’s a step ahead of her. Either way, God love him, he’s off on other topics. Ellen’s college applications. Tim’s sudden interest in joining tech crew for the winter play. She could listen to him, listen to these things that need her interest, forever.
“Hey,” he says. “By the way. We haven’t figured out how we’re going to handle next week. Turkey Day.”
“Oh God. Already? I haven’t even thought about it.” At least he has never once used the kids against her. Has always made sure she got them beyond all fairness, even when they would have been better off with him. “How would you like to work things, Don?”
“I don’t know.” Wary; once-burned. “I don’t want . . . What do you say we go out? Just the four of us, somewhere.”
“No, Don. Let’s not.”
Silence explodes between them like a shrapnel shell. How quickly they find their way to the old hostility. She smiles a little on her end, invisible, noiseless, at the idea of two people fighting for control of a scrap of land that their battle has left cratered, wasted, worse than worthless.
But she cannot get angry now. All stakes seem inconceivable, strange. Who can fight over something so trivial? How could anything in life be worth fighting over, when life itself is the only available win? So inexhaustibly much, so much more than anyone could spend. It must somehow drive us mad, this enraging abundance.
“No, Bodey. Let’s eat here. We four. You come over.”
He stops short again, flushed into the trap of kindness.
“But you can’t cook. I refuse to let you.”
“Refuse, Don? Let me?” she taunts, letting the smirk seep into her voice.
“Laura. Be realistic. You can’t even stand at the counter without getting winded.”
“Oh, I’m not cooking,” she says. “I have a staff. Didn’t you know about that? I’ve got a private chef. I’ve got a purveyor. I even have a maître d’. I don’t have to lift a finger.”
He hangs on the line, wordless.
“Come on, man. Why do you think they call it Thanksgiving?”
There came a year of nationwide upheaval. Everywhere, the cauldron of workers boiled over. Labor, squeezed too long, lashed back at the stamping machine. Turning the wage back on itself, line men struck for pay, safety, and survivable hours. The Knights of Labor took to the streets in every city where Clare had a plant. In two of those cities, running battles broke out and blood flowed on both sides.
But for whatever reason, agitation at Clare’s plants fell below the national levels. Trade union membership at the soap works remained marginal. Even organizations more moderate than the Knights made little headway among the Clare laborers. The company headed off the unions with a two-pronged strategy. A Golden Jubilee wage hike, raising the lowest-paid workers to over four dollars a week, served as Clare’s carrot. Government-subsidized strikebreakers carried the stick.
But in the summer of ’85, an armed cadre of agitators from the Knights occupied the Walpole works. On behalf of all Clare employees, they demanded negotiations with the plant bosses. The loosely organized rabble quickly became a de facto democratic movement. The agitators shut down the factory and vowed to halt all soap production until such talks occurred.
To the astonishment of the manufacturing world, their demand was answered not by the plant bosses but by the éminence grise, Peter Clare himself. Feeble and blinking, the invalid figure appeared on the factory floor. The abashed workers’ committee made the fatal mistake of letting the apparition speak first.
These are not my workers, Clare told the intruders. Where are my workers? No man speaks for my men but them.
Their recluse boss knew his own, by sight. He knew his labor force, even though they had never laid eyes on him. Peter’s words so shamed his men that they voted against representation by the Knights and sent the outsiders packing.
Shortly after the incident, Peter instituted a measure giving all company employees Saturday afternoons off with pay. The move stunned labor and management alike. A paid half-holiday ran counter to the very thrift that had founded the firm. It defied all sense. No business could survive by giving away something for nothing.
Yet the move made Peter, for the moment, his workers’ man. Management’s popularity surged so roundly that Strasser and Gompers’s new American Federation of Labor made only negligent inroads into the company workforce. The second half of the decade saw only eight production shutdowns, the longest of them lasting just ten working days.
In the year 1886, the Personal Goods plants in Boston, Ohio, and Chicago claimed to wrap, crate, ship, and sell more than thirty million units of tonic, salve, shortening, lard, candles, whiskey, and soap. The Industrial Goods facilities, by their nature, had to play their sales closer to the chest. Yet in that bumper year, the less visible branch of the operation sold enough anesthetic, disinfectant, alkali, bleach, and fertilizer to account for more than a quarter of company revenues. Industrial Goods also supplied considerable chemicals to its more visible partner, a transfer much more difficult to price.
The firm’s parts now meshed with one another, cog driving sprocket, sprocket turning pinion with the precision of fine castings. Yet one could not stop oiling the points of contact even to step back for a minute and enjoy the fantastic whole. To do so would be to invite wear, breakdown, and disaster.
Clare’s choice was a simple grow or die. As with other creatures in upper food ranges, its search for more fuel was intermittent but continual. The firm now made much of its own capital. Like a dirigible, the higher it rose, the fuller it expanded. And the more the blimp swelled, the smoother it rode.
But the expansion that Peter and Douglas envisioned could not wait for the slow trickle of currency from internal mints. The cousins had no patience for time in its own season. The curve of growth that the firm now tracked was insufficient to the day. To collect an advance upon the future, they needed to throw the doors open to outside money.
To make the company as attractive an investment as possible, Clare first needed a healthy, dependable flow of revenues. Investors demanded to see a reasonable earning potential before they would add their own egg to the nest.
Above all else, they needed new products. Neeland tinkered with the versatile coal tar, recently converted into saccharin by chemists at Johns Hopkins. He produced a black milled soap that Nagel promptly christened Tar Baby.
Neeland looked into the uses of linseed and lard, pointing the firm toward foodstuffs and preservatives. His labs slapped together a passable hair pomade. But the cream sold only moderately for two years until John Gale, an engineer and amateur painter, had his packaging brainstorm. Gale took the collapsible metal tube for paints invented by one of Morse’s assistants, and softened and enlarged it. The squeezable tube distinguished Clare Hair Enhancer from its increasingly voracious imitators and kept it alive for a fifty-year run.
While washing dishes after the family Christmas dinner in 1887, Neeland flashed upon the idea for soap flakes that would dissolve rapidly in liquid yet remain strong enough to cut heavy grease. As simple as that idea was, it took Neeland’s group years to implement. But in developing the formula for their soap flakes, they lucked into their first new runaway soap success since the Brave.
The starter recipe came from a competitor whom Douglas bought out. Clare chemists modified the soap’s vegetable oil base, seeking a delicate balance of sources. Coconut lathered well but briefly, tallow poorly but long. The two would unite with soda only in the presenc
e of palm oil. Cottonseed substituted nicely for the ruinously expensive olive. In the end, they settled upon a blend of animal, vegetable, and mineral, all artfully combined under the name Snowdrop.
In many ways, Snowdrop Toilet Soap was Native Balm’s opposite. Mild, frothy, and headily white, Snowdrop mocked the herbal curative of the Brave. Native Balm bespoke a Nature pungent, arcane, and enchanted. Snowdrop delineated the new face of Nature: immaculate, measured, managed; purity incarnate.
The new soap threw Clare’s upper brass into crisis. No one contested Snowdrop’s perfection. But Native Balm still had a devoted customer base. The Brave continued to sell well, though yearly growth had slowed to nothing. Yet somehow the homemakers of New York, the Cleveland WCTU, and the Pittsburgh Girl with her bustle and five dozen buttons from the base of her blouse to her chin began to distrust its lusty unguent. The new woman seemed to call out for something more wholesome, something more elegant, more refined, whiter. Snowdrop was as white as any imagined future.
Clare had always sold a variety of generic soaps to a number of special niches. Men, women, the well-off, and the less-well-off—all called for unique types and grades. But Douglas did not see how one company could label and promote two such inimical household soaps. His company’s name was bound up in the name Native Balm, not the name Snowdrop. How could they go on preaching the gospel of brown magic, while at the same time belying it with white?
Hy Nagel—who already had whole Snowdrop Purity campaigns worked out in his head—set Douglas straight. The company’s mark could inscribe all manner of disparate brands. The nation was changing, diversifying, fattening out from desperate to luxurious. Clare meant affordable quality, and quality came in endless flavors. Native plant extract and stainless white froth were but two.
But what of sales? the fiscal-minded Douglas wanted to know. Did Clare really want to risk driving its most famous trademark out of business?
Here was the question that Peter Clare had been waiting for his whole corporate life. He laid it out for the rest of the board in the simplest possible terms.
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