Stone 588

by Gerald A. Browne

  Something gave Springer a sharp mental poke.

  What a fucking pessimist he was getting to be, he thought. A mope, a brooder, a wallower, and after just this first big setback. Shit, he knew guys who had suffered worse three or four times in their lives and were still out-looking with spirit. Drumgold, for example. Springer almost laughed aloud at himself.

  He turned, unaware that Audrey was standing close behind him. She didn't give ground, she closed it.

  "I have a kiss for your stiff upper lip," she said and gave it to him.

  His body would insist that she take small steps backward. Her legs would come to the edge of the bed and she would allow herself to fall onto it. He would drop upon her, but lightly, supporting most of his weight with his elbows. She would spread her legs. The loosely leg-holed teddy would accommodate. And, as they often jested about how his cock without assistance was able to find where it was wanted and wanted to be, it would.

  The telephone rang.

  They let it ring itself out.

  Within the time it took for someone to redial it began ringing again.

  Audrey answered it, told the caller to hold on. She placed the receiver down and walked away from it, saying, 'it's your ex-wife."

  Bad enough he was so often subjected to Gayle and her bitchiness at the office. This was new and worse behavior on her part. When he got on the phone he felt justified to come down hard on her. "How the hell did you get this number?"

  Audrey's number was not even supposed to be listed among the unlisted.

  Gayle told him. "The doctor had the police get it from the operator."

  Chapter 22

  Between 67th and 68th streets on York Avenue.

  Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the largest, most comprehensive facility of its kind in the world.

  Springer and Audrey went in and up a flight on the escalator to the spacious main waiting room. Regular visiting hours were over; only a few people were there, seated, it seemed, as far apart as possible. Gayle was in one of the plastic upholstered chairs by the window overlooking York. The way she was facing. Springer and Audrey were in her line of view as they approached, but she wasn't noticing them or anything at that moment. They didn't register until they were no more than a dozen feet from her. Then she stood, as abruptly as if she'd been jerked up by a magnet.

  Springer realized immediately that this was a different Gayle from the one he'd been disliking. Crisis and grief had subdued her; she appeared physically smaller, easily breakable. Her face was drawn pale, the color of fright, and the lids of her eyes were inflamed from crying. She tried to smile but only managed a twitch of the corners of her mouth. Her upper arms were tensed against her sides. Her hands were palms up, cupped, as though asking for someone to put any crumb of meaningful comfort in them.

  Springer didn't hesitate, overcame any unsureness of the moment by putting his arms around Gayle. They hadn't touched in more than two years.

  Gayle gave in to it, let herself be entirely held. Over Springer's shoulder her eyes connected with Audrey's. The two women had never met, only knew of one another.

  Audrey reached out and stroked Gayle's hair back from her forehead, a sympathetic caress.

  "They told me I might as well go home," Gayle said. "Twice I got as far as First Avenue." She sounded out of breath. Her voice had little hoarse cracks in it. She clung to Springer, drawing from him, and after a short while she was fortified enough to pull away. She raised her chin, sniffled twice, blinked, and widened her eyes to untighten them.

  Observing her, Springer thought at least now she was farther from crying.

  Gayle glanced around to make sure the chair was still there before she sat down on it. Springer and Audrey moved identical chairs into position so they'd be facing her.

  "I called Norman," Gayle said.

  "When?"

  "While I was trying to reach you. He's flying up tomorrow morning."

  That was good, Springer thought, Norman to back him up. A doctor to get more from the doctors and, out of close personal concern, make certain whatever course decided upon was best.

  "He's taking an early shuttle," Gayle said. "I wrote it all down." She dug into three pockets of her jeans before she found the slip of paper. She gave it to Springer.

  "What else did Norman say?"

  "Just that we could count on him for anything . . . and ... to keep the faith. I most remember him saying to keep the faith." Gayle was on the edge of her chair. She settled back but immediately sat forward again. Fidgety, she rocked left and right, inserted her hands flat beneath her buttocks. To keep her legs still she locked her ankles. She was wearing well-scuffed blue Top-sider moccasins. The white leather lace of one was undone, dirty where it had been stepped on. "I've had too much coffee," she said, merely stating the fact.

  "When did you last eat?" Audrey asked.

  Gayle didn't reply.

  "There has to be a deli close by. I'll go out and get you a sandwich or something."

  Gayle was oblivious to the offer. She told Springer, "If you want to go up to see him it's all right. Even though it's late they said it would be all right."

  "I'll go up in a couple of minutes. First, fill me in."

  Gayle started to speak. Her mouth was forming the first word even as her mind retracted it. Her memory was like a tape being rewound. Finally, she began with: "April. It was in April—or possibly March — anyway it was around that time . . ."

  She told it recitatively in a monotone, pretending as much as possible that it was the story of someone else so she could get through it. About how she had gone to Dr. Landon, their family doctor, for no reason other than a checkup. Jamie—Jake, she changed it to Jake with a small glance at Springer —went with her, which was not unusual. He enjoyed the waiting room magazines: Sports Illustrated, Town and Country, and particularly the one called Human Sexuality. She was aware of this precocious interest but thought whatever Jake might discover in the good doctor's office couldn't possibly harm him. Anyway, that day, after her checkup, Dr. Landon saw her out to the waiting room. He made a bit over Jake, asked him how he was. To the doctor's surprise, Jake took the cordial inquiry literally and replied that his leg hurt a little.

  This was the first Jake had mentioned it, so Gayle thought he was merely trying for some extra attention. It wasn't like him, but she thought that had to be it. Dr. Landon, between patients, took him into one of the examining rooms. Jake indicated rather unsurely where he claimed his leg hurt a little. A few inches above the right knee, in there somewhere, he said. Dr. Landon pressed and poked and asked if when he did that did it hurt more? Jake said nope. Dr. Landon feigned a concerned frown, told him what he had was a bad case of . . . growing. And that he had years of growings ahead of him. To that, Jake scrunched up his nose and remarked what a pain.

  Gayle was quite sure the truth of it was that Jake had injured his leg playing volleyball, badly pulled a muscle or something. He so often came home with knees and elbows scraped bloody, and once even his chin. He was such a toughie when it came to pain, no wonder with this he hadn't complained enough.

  A few days after he got back from the trip to Washington she noticed he was favoring his right leg and asked him about it. With playful insolence he told her to stop overmothering him. It was just that he was growing, he said, growing. Oh, so that was it, she thought. He was acting out Dr. Landon's words. Well, like so many other affectations he'd picked up from watching MTV and movie heroes and whatever, this too would soon get used up and pass.

  What should have been obvious to her was that he'd stopped playing his beloved volleyball. His clothes had told her. He returned from the Park looking as tidy as when he'd gone out. Imagine how much it must have hurt him to have to stand off to the side and watch the play.

  Last week he began limping. Couldn't walk a step without limping.

  Jake had agreed with her then that he must have hurt his leg at volleyball.

  He didn't remember when exactly, so it
must have happened during some hard, fast play. Some fellow probably got him with a knee, Jake said. He knew from sports commentators on television that athletes frequently suffered what they called deep bruises, even so much as bruised their bones.

  At that point Jake's leg just above the knee was somewhat swollen, reddened and warm to the touch. Gayle had him soak it in Epsom-salted water as hot as he could stand and she put the portable Jacuzzi whirlpool in the tub with him, thinking that might help. She massaged the area and applied some Ben-Gay ointment. All this was stoking her irritation with Springer and she intended to give him some of her usual ex-wife hell for encouraging Jake at a sport that could be so rough. She was of a mind to call Springer right then and melt the lines but he was somewhere in Europe.

  The soaks and Ben-Gay massages didn't help. By Friday Jake's leg was visibly worse: redder, swollen more, and hotter. She gave him double-strength Tylenol for the pain. He hobbled around the apartment using the furniture for support. When she phoned Dr. Landon she was told that he was away for the weekend. The doctor covering for him was offered. She decided against him, imagining incompetence. She requested an appointment with Dr. Landon for early Monday morning. Was it an emergency?

  Yes.

  Dr. Landon examined Jake's leg and immediately ordered x-rays. Even before the doctor had seen the x-rays Gayle sensed his gravity. She had thought what she'd be hearing at worst was that Jake had an infection of some sort and would have to take an antibiotic. However, Dr. Landon advised that Jake be put in the hospital for more comprehensive tests—a thorough workup, was the way he put it. He mentioned the possibility of osteomyelitis with a tinge of optimism in his voice, which Gayle thought was a strange way of looking at it. Osteomyelitis, as she understood from having read about it somewhere, was a serious infection of the bone. Certainly nothing to be hoped for.

  Dr. Landon's attitude became a bit less enigmatic to her when she overheard him call and arrange for Jake's immediate admittance to Memorial Sloan-Kettering.

  Other than osteomyelitis what else could it be? she wanted to know.

  Dr. Landon was careful not to unduly alarm her, said he was merely being cautious. He referred her to a Dr. Stimson.

  Dr. Stimson was a pediatric oncologist.

  From then on Gayle had the feeling that everything was happening too fast while time dragged. It had been just this morning, only about twelve hours ago, that Jake was put to bed in a private room there at Sloan-Kettering. Nurses and interns and various hospital personnel moved about in white cotton jackets and coats with the Sloan-Kettering insignia on them: a thin sky-blue cross with three transverses, resembling somewhat a papal cross but probably not with any relative intent. Dr. Stimson showed up almost immediately. A man in his early forties with a harriedness just below his considerate manner. The sort of doctor who was much more do than show. He examined Jake, made no comment, had him wheeled on a stretcher down to the second floor for x-rays. Gayle tried to get an opinion, any crumb of an opinion, from Dr. Stimson then; however, he put her off. The x-rays would tell him what he should tell her, he said.

  An hour later she was with Dr. Stimson in his hospital office, an almost cubbyhole of a place cramped all the more by stacks of accumulated information. Jake's x-rays were clipped onto the light panel on the wall. The chief radiologist and Dr. Stimson had already studied them—various views of the lower section of Jake's right thigh. Some included the knee.

  The troubled area was easily distinguishable. It was where the bone appeared to bulge out, an area about two inches in diameter that deviated from the straight line of the rest of the femur. Dr. Stimson called Gayle's attention to the outermost covering of the bone, which he told her was the periosteum, and the mass of compact bone just beneath it. He patiently pointed out the difference between the affected area and where the bone was healthily normal. As though she already knew the implications, he told her that it was often extremely difficult to differentiate osteomyelitis, a bacterial infection of the bone, from something more serious.

  Such as what more serious?

  Osteogenic sarcoma.

  Cancer of the bone.

  Gayle had a sensation like a parachute opening inside her, a plosiveness. She silently told the x-rays that Jake was only eight years old. A plea and protest.

  Dr. Stimson explained that osteogenic sarcoma was usually a young person's cancer. It occurred mainly in eleven- to thirteen-year-olds but younger cases were not uncommon. He must have sensed her reeling inside, her needing to be steadied, because he quickly added that to assume the worst in this instance would be jumping the gun. He was not, he said emphatically, on just the basis of these x-rays, ready to make a diagnosis of cancer. Osteomyelitis was still a possibility, and there were other possibilities as well. A favorable thing was that the articular capsule did not appear to be involved. He pointed out Jake's knee joint in the x-rays.

  Holding nothing back, putting kindness entirely aside, what was really the chance of its being something other than bone cancer? Gayle asked.

  Dr. Stimson turned away from the x-rays, as though self-conscious that they might hear him tell her that he'd say the chance was fair. Then his beeper had sounded, saving him from being further pressed for hope—that tenuous commodity he was incessantly asked to dispense.

  That, Gayle told Springer and Audrey, was more or less how it had gone. She paragraphed the moment by pulling her hands out from beneath her. She immediately laced them in her lap, so tightly her fingertips showed bright pink. "They've scheduled a biopsy tomorrow morning," she said. "We'll know more for sure then."

  Springer stood.

  Audrey told him, "I'll stay here with Gayle."

  He gave Gayle's shoulder an encouraging pat on his way to the reception desk at the far end of the waiting room. A pleasant-mannered gray-haired woman provided him with a visitor's pass and directions. He had to show the pass to the uniformed guard in the corridor before he was allowed to take the elevator to the fifth floor. He hadn't expected the pediatrics department to be so vast. A nurse on duty there verified his pass and indicated the way to go. Springer believed he could have found the right room without directions from anyone, by merely relying on the instinct of needing, during crisis, to be with his own.

  Down the beige corridor.

  Past entrances of room after room, all the way to the last one on the left.

  Dimly, indirectly lighted. A small room but adequate.

  Springer paused to take it in. The stillness made him feel an intruder. He walked noiselessly to the bed, stood at the foot of it. Springer's own boy was lying on his side, covered up to his chin by a sheet. The head section of the adjustable bed was slanted up and he'd slid down to where it angled. In Springer's eyes he looked too small for the bed. Displaced, Springer thought. He had the notion to take him up in his arms and carry him away, to anywhere, to happy circumstances. God, if only it could be that easy.

  For twenty minutes Springer stood there silently communing. A part of him suggested he sit in one of the visitor's chairs and keep an all-night watch. Another part of him advised that he had better go rest for the demands of tomorrow. He was about to turn to leave when his son came awake, didn't stir up out of sleep gradually, was at once abruptly conscious, as though influenced by Springer's presence, feeling him there.

  "How's my Jake?"

  "Not half bad."

  "Are you hurting a lot?"

  "They gave me something. With a needle. Ouch."

  They must have also given him a sedative, because he was barely opening his lips, having to push the words out.

  "I got here as soon as I could," Springer told him, moving around to the side of the bed.

  "I figured you'd be along. Where were you?"

  "France."

  "With Audrey, huh?"

  "She sends you a kiss."

  "So give it to me."

  Springer lowered a kiss to Jake's lips. Jake's mouth had never felt so small to him. Funny, he thought, how much he'd lo
st sight of the child that Jake actually was. Jake's dependencies, lack of adequate defenses. The boy's reaching out so early and eagerly for maturity had had a lot to do with it, of course.

  "What do you think of this place?" Springer asked, to measure Jake's frame of mind.

  Jake thought a moment, evidently deciding which reply to make. "They give you room service you don't even ask for," he said and laughed a httle, lazy, back-of-the-throat laugh.

  "Like the Ritz in Paris."

  "Never been there."

  "I'll take you."

  "Double promise?"

  "We'll sit by a tall window that can be opened by a golden knob, and we'll eat all kinds of fancy cakes and pies. ..."

  "Audrey will eat most of them."

  "So we'll order more."

  "We'll have some croak monsters."

  For years they'd shared a just-between-them joke about Croque Monsieurs, those melted cheese and ham sandwiches the French sell at nearly every bistro. Their joke involved a nearsighted bartender and a frog.

  "Maybe we'll even have some croak madames," Springer said.

  "That's after we get back to the hotel from a long walk around seeing everything."

  "A long, long walk around."

  That future prospect hung in the air.

  "I see you've got a television," Springer said.

  A set with a seven-inch screen was fixed to the end of a manipulatable elbowed arm. Attached to the wall, so it could be swung out of the way or down before the eyes of the patient in bed.

  "They don't have cable. I felt like watching some MTV but I couldn't get it. Instead I just watched the bridge."