I remember clearly how anxiously Terence and I awaited the report, and how we pored over it for clues. Yet now, in retrospect, I wonder why we bothered. In fact, I wonder why we spent so much time and money—not to mention the brainpower of two such extraordinary men—on plumbing the internal workings of the cell. The tests showed us all what the disease might be. Not what we should do about it.
Back then, very little besides surgery was available to treat kidney cancer. What there was didn’t seem to be particularly effective. Chemotherapy didn’t work at all. For Dr. Howard, that is one of the frustrations of the job—and was even more so then.
“A lot of what we do is gilding the lily,” he says. “It’s interesting and very academic, but it’s not like I learn something that says I’ll reach for this drug or that drug and this will make the difference.”
Now I ask Dr. Gown the same question. His answer is similarly cheerfully direct, as I know Terence’s would have been if he had been the doctor: We do it for the knowledge. “This may not be important now,” he says. But it may be important in a year. “There’s always the possibility of things happening down the pike. There’s always a hope that we’ll find a therapy.”
• • •
It’s that hope that kept me obsessively prowling the Internet a decade before my conversations with Drs. Gown and Howard. There were tantalizing signs that something was changing in cancer treatment. It was just hard for me to figure out how and where and how it applied to us. Right in our own back yard, Brian Druker, an oncologist up the hill at Oregon Health and Science University, had found a new way of attacking cancers. His discovery—that by blocking certain enzymes you can keep the cancer from dividing—changed everything, but only for a tiny number of people with very specific cancers. His drug—which would be named Gleevec—was still several months from Food and Drug Administration approval. But the Internet back then was already alive with stories of patients whose chronic myeloid leukemia was halted in its tracks by the drug. Dr. Druker’s face appeared on the cover of Time magazine for turning what was once a death sentence into a chronic illness. Surely there must be something like that on the horizon for kidney cancer.
That was what I was looking for.
“Something is happening out there,” I tell Terence at the time. “They are discovering new things all the time.” I don’t know what that something is, but I believe we will find it. “We will just have to keep you alive until they discover the cure for this. All we need is a few years.”
I am blindly optimistic.
I even believe myself.
Just after the operation, Terence and I consider a few extreme possibilities. One article mentions interesting work by a doctor in Paris. We’re not even quite sure what he’s doing, but we consider—for an instant—relocating. I prowl the biggest cancer centers—MD Anderson in Texas, Sloan-Kettering in New York, Fred Hutchinson in Seattle. No one seems to know much more than I do about collecting duct cancer.
On February 9, 2001, Dr. Turner takes Terence’s file before the tumor board at Providence Portland, where all the hospital’s specialists review cases. Because there is no sign of metastases—the spread of the cancer from the kidney to other organs—Dr. Turner’s recommendation to the board, and to us, is that we do a chest X-ray to make sure his lungs are clear and then follow up with scans every six months.
Watchful waiting, it’s called.
Waiting for him to die is what we feared.
Yet he doesn’t die.
He gets better.
We don’t know why. We try not to think about it.
It’s like the pictures I remember from 1975, the year I graduated from college and the year that the war in Lebanon tore that country apart. I remember photos of women, baskets over their arms, stepping gingerly over the rubble during a lull in the fighting, heading for market.
I think: How much people want life to return to normal!
On February 15, 2001, Terence’s chest X-ray comes back clear. He begins to feel better. We gradually put the trauma out of our minds and our routines start to take over once again. Jazz band for Terry. Ice skating for Georgia. Mornings at Starbucks with coffee for me and Terence, hot chocolate and lemon pound cake for the kids. Terence goes back to cooking chili and lasagna, and we resume going to church at the cathedral downtown.
On April Fools’ Day, the children and I pull off one of our best pranks ever. Even at his healthiest, Daddy is never at his best in the morning. So we carefully plan to tease him about that fact. After Terence goes to bed, Terry and Georgia and I get up and race around the house, moving all the clocks forward one hour. We change the kitchen clock. We change the alarm clock. We change the clocks on the microwave and the stove. I sneak in and get his watch and move the hands forward. Terry even remembers to go out to the car and change the clock on the dash. The next morning, I shake Terence awake.
“We’ve overslept!”
He has a meeting to see a man about a trumpet at nine o’clock in Oregon City, across the bridge.
“It’s already eight thirty!” I cry, and the kids play along, pretending to be upset about being late for school. Terence throws on his clothes and stumbles out the door.
Several hours later, I get a call at work.
“Very funny.”
It takes him a full hour of waiting outside a locked store to realize he’s been had. The kids are delighted.
While Terence is sick and recovering, I am coddling, conciliatory. I tiptoe around his moods and try to arrange things the way he likes. As he recovers, the old ways reemerge.
I leave on a trip for several days. His friend Patrick comes to stay. When I return on a Saturday morning, I can hardly push the back door open against all the recycling piled up in the laundry room. Cheerios boxes. Paper towel rolls. Empty cans of tomato paste and red beans. Empty two-liter bottles of Diet Coke. I walk through the kitchen, where dishes—cooking and eating—are piled on the countertops. On the table. In the sink. I spot evidence of spaghetti. Several empty pizza boxes. The garbage cans are overflowing. They clearly haven’t been emptied in days. On past into the living room, where unsorted, unfolded laundry covers every surface. Evidently some clothes had not completely dried, because underwear, socks, pajamas, and jeans are draped over the backs of chairs and the sofa and even over the tops of lampshades. As I walk down the stairs to the family room below, I smell the untouched cat litter box.
I find Georgia and Terry in pajamas and Patrick and Terence in their underwear in front of the television set. More dishes and food, bowls and glasses. Several days’ worth of newspapers are layered on the carpet. All four of them have colds. There are boxes of Kleenex everywhere, and the floor is covered with crumpled, used tissues, tossed every which way.
I am screaming before I make it halfway across the room.
“You are pigs! Pigs! All of you! You too, Patrick.”
They all freeze in place.
“How can you even think of sitting here like this? This is disgusting!”
No one moves.
“Get up. Now. All of you. Get this mess cleaned up. You too, Patrick.”
I’m raging.
“Terence, how could you? How could you let them? How can you even sit here in this pigpen?”
Finally Terence reacts.
He becomes furious.
With me.
His face reddens. He outshouts me. The old Terence is back.
“You told me you were coming home Saturday night!”
7
In the last week of May 2001, Terence, at age sixty-one, finally gets his Ph.D., completing the degree he began in 1957.
I see in the history of that degree a zigzag, ebullient path of almost dizzying choices. Books. Music. Friends. Adventure. Mystery. Travel. Language. Study. I peer back with amazement into the kaleidoscope that was his life before me.
He spent only one semester in college when he was seventeen, a tuba player in the famous Ohio State University marching band. Even tod
ay mail from TBDBITL—The Best Damn Band in the Land—comes to the house addressed to him. It has followed him for fifty years, past his death, through at least twenty-three address changes in three countries and nine states that I can count.
After that came the navy, and his stint in the Philippines translating Chinese radio transmissions of ship movements. He mystified his friends with hints of all the things his security clearance prevented him from saying. When he left the navy, he reinvented himself again—this time as a radio announcer in Xenia, Ohio.
Sometime in 1966 something pulled him west, and soon the cable car conductors and brakemen of the San Francisco Municipal Railway Company began to hear rumors of the new guy working the cars who spoke Chinese better than the Chinese.
Today as I stare at the picture of him grinning out the back window of cable car number 509 in his conductor’s uniform, I think I know what drew him there. In the photo, the car is suspended at a gravity-defying angle. Over Terence’s shoulder Hyde Street drops down to the San Francisco Bay. The view from the Powell-Hyde line stretches out across the bay. Alcatraz is below. Off in the distance, Angel Island.
Even now I can see him clearly as he was back then, twenty-six years old, in the uniform vest, jacket, and tie, a six-slot steel change belt strapped to his waist, flirting with the young women on their way to work as they jump onto the wooden steps. In my imagination, I can see him leaning into the wind and reciting Tu Fu’s eighth-century laments of loneliness that I know he has already come to love.
Red clouds tower in the west
The sun is sinking on the plain
A sparrow chirps on the wicker gate
I return from a thousand li away.
I can see him, lurking unseen one afternoon behind a Chinese family frantically arguing over the itinerary.
“Xiage zhan, zai xia che,” I can hear him say, as if it is the most natural thing in the world: Wait till the next stop, then get off, he is telling them. I can see his glee as the Chinese family starts as if a dog has spoken.
Even back then Terence was already painting fanciful pictures of his dark past, hinting at secrets he could tell if he chose, wives and children left behind and mysterious trips to places no one else had visited. His friend Dick Epstein, himself a brilliant oddball wanderer, worked as a gripman on the same cable cars. He remembers even then the whispers that Foley was a spy.
Dick and Terence shouted and argued about the things young people shouted and argued about in the 1960s. The war. The economy. Marxism. Communism. Capitalism. The military-industrial complex.
On and on they argued until one day they stuffed their savings into their pockets, jumped off the cable cars, and headed to Europe, and then on to crisscrossing the Soviet Union. Moscow. Novgorod. St. Petersburg. Vyborg.
It wasn’t until after that trip that Terence in 1969—by then twenty-nine years old and married—developed a hunger for school again. He threw himself into his studies as if some vacuum at his core needed to be filled up with all the learning in the world. Years later, boxes in our basement were filled with all his college notes in his round, easily legible handwriting, clipped in old-fashioned red, buff, green, and blue cardboard binder covers.
Modern Korean history. Japanese philosophy. Chinese politics. Modern Japanese literature. Medieval Chinese history. Japanese foreign policy. Even after nearly forty years his notes would remain clear and coherent. They include details about the third-century scholars who formed literary clubs—the most famous of whom were named “The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove.” They drank and discussed metaphysical problems long into the night.
No wonder the China we both knew disappointed him so!
His notes reveal the world he built for himself from his studies, a world as romantic and crazy and eccentric as he, a world that he could live in happily.
Still, he was restless. Partway through his master’s degree, he threw it over and moved to Vermont. For a time, he and his wife lived in a converted Vermont schoolhouse with the anthropologist Margaret Mead, whom he befriended at Columbia. He worked in a prison. He got a job with state government promoting Vermont agricultural products around the world. He moved to Missouri. He learned soybeans. He traveled to China and met me.
Twenty years later, impatient and brisk, I badger him into diving back into his studies to finish his Ph.D. We are living in New York again, just blocks from Columbia. I am working and writing books. He wants to go to law school. He wants to start an import-export company. He wants to write a novel. He wants to go to medical school.
“Why don’t you finish your Ph.D. first?” I ask, part supportively, part as a challenge, part irritated at his mercurial mind.
And so he does.
His studies go with us wherever we go. They follow us as we push the stroller down to the dinosaur playground in Riverside Park; as we move to Atlanta and throw the kids and the dog into our pool; when we move to Oregon and pitch our tent on the rainy and foggy side of Mount Rainier and build fires from damp wood. All the while he is chipping away at his degree.
Little by little the thesis takes shape, and as it does, he weaves his own years in China into a case study about the cultural barriers to foreign cooperation.
Finally, at the end of May 2001, it is finished. We are living in Portland, but Terence and I and the children fly to New York for the ceremony. We stay in the Plaza Hotel. We walk through Central Park up to Columbia University on the far Upper West Side. At noon at Columbia University he will defend his thesis and have his Ph.D. at last. At noon on the same day, about three blocks away, I am also at Columbia University, with my newsroom team as we receive a Pulitzer Prize for the work we did on the Immigration and Naturalization Service in those hectic final months of 2000. I am sitting at the table amid a happy group of journalists as Terence walks in.
I jump up.
“Meet Dr. Foley!” I cry out to the assembled group.
He pulls at the hem of his suit jacket, and curtsies.
We have lived three years in Oregon. On Sunday afternoons once a month we drive up to the Milwaukee Elks Lodge, nestled between City Auto Wholesale and a shop advertising windshields for 50 percent off. Nothing much appears to have changed at the club since it first opened in 1956.
Terence plays here once a month with the Portland Dixieland Jazz Society. “Muskrat Rag.” “After You’ve Gone.” “Canal Street Blues.” His tuba holds down the bass line. Sometimes he sits in on string bass. Georgia and Terry eat hamburgers and chicken fingers and fries in the room with the upholstered white bar and the brown Naugahyde stools.
We hope that the bad times have passed.
Our time here is drawing to a close. Soon the whole family will be packing up and leaving again. I have been offered my own small newspaper in Lexington, Kentucky. As the Oregon summer gets older we drive out near the base of Mount Hood for the last time, to pick blueberries and raspberries and marionberries. In the car on the way home, Mount Hood looming off to our right, the four of us sing silly rounds, ending up with “Sloop John B,” weaving in and out of the melody and backup, laughing with pure pleasure when we nail the last chords.
Early in September 2001, we again prepare to move. Terence leaps at the adventure. This time it is he who will go first. He will leave two days early and get the children into school, I will stay behind to finish up my work and close up the house. He’s still not strong enough after two operations for a long walk with bags, so we arrange a wheelchair for the long trek between terminals in St. Louis. Otherwise, he is fine. He calls me, pleased, from our new home. He and the children spend the day filling the house with food. Everything is ready and they will be so glad to see me.
In the middle of the night I take a dark peek into the world that Terence must have been living in. By myself in the silent house in Oregon, my family 2,400 miles away, no one nearby to realize I am alone, I awaken feeling as if an elephant is sitting on my chest. My arms and legs are leaden. There is a band around my heart pulling tighter a
nd tighter. I cannot catch my breath. I call an ambulance.
A few days later, everyone will conclude that the chest pains are simply the stress of the past six months finally coming to rest in me. But thus it is that on September 11, 2001, at 9:03 a.m. EST—6:03 a.m. in Portland—Terence is in the principal’s office in Lexington, Kentucky, registering our children for school and I am lying on an emergency room gurney in the hospital where I spent so many days with Terence, as we each look up at a TV screen to see the second plane crash into the World Trade Center.
8
If Terence’s vision of a proper 1950s family life has a stage set, it is here in Lexington. Modest brick houses line the streets, and proper steps lead to proper front doors. The front windows look out over sidewalks and neatly trimmed shrubs and lawns. A young girl clutching a violin case passes our house every morning on her way to school. We hear children laughing over our back fence. The roots of tall oak trees push up ridges in the walks, the kind we both remember catching our roller skates on.
The house we rent until our own is ready reminds us both of the places we grew up. The kitchen has yellow appliances and a beige linoleum floor. In the living room, bookshelves flank a white-painted brick fireplace. Our bedrooms are tiny, clustered around a small center landing and a single bathroom with porcelain fixtures and white tiles. We can all hear one another breathe in the night. We play Monopoly and Life on the dining room table.
I settle in to the world of news in Kentucky. I learn about horse breeding and become obsessed with the mystery disease that makes mares miscarry and just-born foals die. Abuse of the powerful painkiller OxyContin continues its fatal sweep of eastern Kentucky. Lovely old racetracks agitate to add slot machines to compete with casinos. I try to understand the manic grip that Tubby Smith’s sixth-ranked college basketball team has on the region. There is a vague, uneasy sense of war off in the distance, heading toward us.
Lexington is only ninety miles from Cincinnati, the town of Terence’s childhood. We drive up and look at the old neighborhoods, once genteel, then rough, now bohemian, where Kentucky and Ohio come together at the Ohio River. Terence tells the children stories of his life as a musician in the bars here. Terry is turning into a musician himself. We reluctantly let him crowd-surf his first rock concert. Georgia is becoming a rider. Every Saturday Georgia and I drive out Old Richmond Road to Champagne Run, where she coaxes forty-year-old Dan over foot-high jumps.
The Cost of Hope Page 8
