By the time Terence was diagnosed in 2001, Dr. Bukowski now says, the information was just beginning to filter out revealing that with Terence’s odd cancer—whether papillary or collecting duct—there most likely was zero chance that the painful and awful experience of taking IL-2 would have done him any good at all.
So what about our decision to do nothing, I ask now. Do you still think that was a good choice?
Yes, says Dr. Bukowski. I hear in his voice the same clarity Terence and I together heard back then. And yet as he reviews the confusing state of knowledge back in late 2002 I can see some of the ambivalence that must lie behind the adamantine certainty.
Collecting duct cancer is so different that some doctors even believe it isn’t kidney cancer at all—even though it’s located in the kidney, he explains. Even papillary cancer—the one Dr. Bukowski still believes Terence had—is so different that few people understand how it behaves. The confusing mass of trial-and-error discovery that I sensed from my forays into the Internet and into the kidney cancer forums was just as real for Dr. Bukowski as it was for us. There was an explosion of research taking place behind the scenes, but nearly all of the new drugs were only known to target the garden-variety clear cell type of cancer that makes up more than 80 percent of the cases.
“You are left with a conundrum,” he says. “Do you delay and hope that something will come on the scene? In a patient with a slow-growing cancer, no treatment may be the best treatment.”
So did Terence have collecting duct cancer?
No, says Dr. Bukowski.
The cancer didn’t act like collecting duct, he says. It didn’t look like collecting duct. So why did so many expert pathologists think it was?
His answer would sound condescending if the opinion wasn’t shared by the pathologists themselves: “A group of leading experts in kidney cancer pathology will not infrequently disagree,” he says. He even pulls a card from his sleeve: Back then, he had consulted yet another pathologist at Sloan-Kettering in New York, a leading cancer center, who agreed with Dr. Bukowski that Terence did not have collecting duct.
Dr. Gown in his Seattle pathology lab is unmoved. He looks over his work from 2001 and still concludes he was right. So, I ask Dr. Gown, why didn’t Terence’s tumor behave like collecting duct? Why did it grow so slowly, when most collecting duct is ferocious in its speed and proliferation?
Dr. Gown shrugs. “Some tumors don’t read the book,” he says.
So what’s the box score on the tumor?
Six pathologists. At least four hospitals. MD Anderson. The Cleveland Clinic. Sloan-Kettering. PhenoPath. Three oncologists. The outcome? Nearly four years after his death, I still don’t know what kind of cancer Terence had. Everyone is convinced he is right. Yet, for all our education and experience and the $2.7 billion health care industry that cradles us, we are collectively brought to our knees by Terence’s wayward cells.
So why—with all the research I did and the options I found and the insurance payments for drugs I got approved—did Terence and I agree to do nothing?
I’m not sure I know, even today.
I think we trusted Dr. Bukowski. I think that’s the reason we did a lot of things we did. For all our research, it wasn’t really the science we were following. It was the people. We took the measure of people we trusted and then followed the path they led us on.
14
In the spring of 2003 we are awash in family and friends. My mother and father visit from New Jersey. Georgia’s godparents drive up from Atlanta. Terence’s old army buddy Woody Boyd comes in from D.C.
And Terence’s younger brother roars in from Detroit on his motorcycle.
Younger brother?
A brother for Terence, who grew up in Cincinnati as an only child? Yes, at age sixty-two, Terence is now, much to our surprise, part of a large, far-flung, yet close-knit family. One he didn’t even know existed till he was over fifty.
In between our visits to Dr. Bukowski, our life has taken on a pleasingly normal rhythm. Christmas of 2002 comes and goes in our Lexington home. A ceiling-scraping tree sits properly in the front window, its hundreds of lights shining right there for passersby to admire. Most of the 150 people from our newsroom crowd into our house with their families, bearing sugar cookies decorated with Red Hots and tooth-destroying silver pellets, gingerbread men, and rum balls. The copy-desk chief sits at the piano. People sing. Everyone pushes into the living room for his specialty, a hilarious three-minute pastiche of every Christmas carol ever written. On Christmas morning, fourteen-year-old Terry gets a new snare drum and cymbals, Zildjian—the best there is. Georgia, now eight, gets a bike with pink streamers. The world keeps on turning.
As the winter of 2002–2003 edges toward spring, the inexorable post–9/11 march toward Baghdad is picking up steam. No one has found the weapons of mass destruction that they are expecting; everyone keeps asserting they are there. I don’t believe it. Terence doesn’t believe it. The invasion seems more and more inevitable. Terence is Terence. He flies a flag from our front porch. He reaches out to veterans’ groups. He supports my decision to oppose the war. Our paper’s editorial board concludes that the evidence does not support an invasion. Don’t do it, Mr. President. You have not made your case, we say. We are one of the few papers in the country to write that. My voice mail and email box fill with hateful calls and notes. Other people stop by the building to urge us to do more.
For two weeks in March I sleep in front of the television set. We await the bombing. It will come any day now; if it happens before a certain time, we will stop the presses. When the invasion finally happens, two young men from our staff are there with the troops. One of them, a reporter, is burned by a mysterious chemical. Are these the chemical weapons we are seeking? Another, a photographer, rides into Baghdad in a tank full of soldiers. Every night when I hear from them, I call their moms.
The war wends on. Saddam Hussein’s statue is dragged to the ground. There are suicide bombers in Chechnya. Terry learns new Green Day and Blink-182 music. Georgia and her best friend, Bailey, spend most of their waking hours together at Bailey’s house, and many nights too. Bailey has a French provincial bedroom, her own bathroom with a large claw-foot tub, and a swimming pool in her backyard. Is it any wonder her home is the playroom of choice? The human genome project is completed. SARS breaks out. Scientists clone a horse, a deer. A gynecologist in a strip mall on the edge of Lexington claims to be cloning a human in an undisclosed European location. We write to debunk his claims. He sues the newspaper.
Terence is teaching and beginning a new project. He wants to start a schoolhouse museum. He prowls the region looking for old schoolhouse items. Our garage swells with initial-carved desks, both tan and dark brown, with hinged lids covering book wells and with cubbies under the seats. He finds fifty-year-old chalkboards, seventy-five-year-old globes. He collects pointers and easels and coal scuttles from one-room schoolhouses. Our cars, once again, are exiled to the driveway. I grouse. When he spots a garage sale Terry and I groan and shout. Only Georgia is enthusiastic. She knows there is costume jewelry in it for her.
It has been nearly fourteen years since Terence and I discovered his lost family. When Terence became a father for the first time at age forty-eight, he began thinking about his own dad, whom he had never met. Increasingly, Terence got an itch to try to find him. In those pre-Internet, pre-Google days, it wasn’t all that easy. His mother was dead. The cousins he grew up with are all from her side of the family. They are younger than Terence and they know very little. That left phone books.
Just after Terry’s birth in 1988, while we were still living in New York, we spent weekends at the New York Public Library, systematically working through a book at a time, taking the numbers with us to telephone from home.
Whenever we traveled in those days, our first task was to find the phone book and flip to the L’s. Nearly a year passed without any luck. Finally my mother, a skilled genealogist, called with a tip, picked up
from one of her mysterious sources.
“Try California,” she said.
Luckily Terence’s dad’s name—Laudeman—isn’t all that common. There were dozens, not hundreds, to search. Terence began at the north and worked his way down, a couple of names a night, leaving messages or talking to strangers.
Finally, late one night, the phone rang. A wary voice on the other end said he was responding to a message left days earlier. Terence took the phone in the bedroom. He emerged a few minutes later.
“I found him,” he said.
As it happened, I was already booked to leave for a business trip to California. We hurriedly bought two more tickets, one for him and one for the year-old Terry. We set off. While I spent days at a conference listening to the drone of economists impressing one another with erudition, Terence took little Terry riding on the cable cars where he once worked. Perhaps they rode the very same cable car! We marveled at the possibility.
When Sunday arrived, we set out driving, following telephoned directions. After about an hour, we pulled into a trailer park.
It is here that I learn how Terence inherited his dramatic flair, and his mania for secrecy. There is the old man, barely five feet five inches tall, standing outside a white double-wide. He is flanked by two middle-aged men wearing blankly wary looks. Just an hour earlier, it turns out, he has summoned the two sons to the house and—just minutes before we arrived—told them his fifty-year-old secret.
“Meet your brother,” he says.
If this were a made-for-TV movie, what would happen next? Perhaps a flashback to a romantic scene or two between Terence’s parents as teenage lovers. A heartrending moment of anguish with the woman who is now Dad’s wife, as she learns the secret for the first time. At the half-hour mark, the younger sons confront their dad. At forty-five minutes Terence and his dad bare their souls to each other, and Terence will confess his pain at his dad’s abandonment. By the finale enduring love will triumph over hurt and betrayal.
Nothing remotely like that happens.
We sit through an awkward and strained lunch where we pass around ancient Polaroids and find out that Terence has not two, but four younger brothers. These four—Fred, Bill, Dick, Charlie—are the children of Myrtle who, for want of a better word, might now be called Terence’s stepmother. Although she sits nearly silent through lunch, she seems friendly enough and not at all anxious or edgy. Has she always known the long-buried secret? She claims not, and we never do learn for sure.
Unlike in the made-for-TV-movie version, there are no dramatic professions of love or anger. The Germanic reserve of Terence’s Laudeman side triumphs over the untamed volubility of his Foley side. We mince politely around irrelevant subjects and leave.
Still, this is not the end of the story.
Once out of earshot of the parents, the five boys fall on one another with glee, by telephone and later in visits. Whatever the secret or anger or shame of the past, it is immediately clear that no one in this generation shares in it. The four younger boys are as eager to get to know their older brother as Terence is to know them. Cameras. Travel. Motorcycles. Languages. Military service. They compare their life histories and eerily shared memories. They discover that they summered within miles of one another, perhaps even visiting the same Cincinnati-area relatives on the same weeks, or even days, but never encountering one another.
By the end of a week, they are Uncle Fred. Uncle Charlie. Uncle Bill. Uncle Dick. We like one another. We visit one another’s homes. Get to know one another’s children. Little Terry is suddenly one of fourteen half cousins. On my bedroom wall a photo still hangs from the wedding of Fred’s oldest son. There gathered together are the lost siblings, in one place for the first—and as it turns out, last—time. There they stand in a row, sturdy, barrel-chested German stalwarts all, each of the six of them round-faced, stout, and open.
Six? Yes, six. For that is the biggest surprise of all. For in addition to the four boys, it turns out there is another child, a girl, from yet a third wife in the old man’s past.
This lost girl, now a grown woman with seven children of her own, is—for me—the missing piece in Terence’s family story that never quite added up otherwise. Why did Terence’s dad leave the scene so suddenly? Why did he leave behind a pregnant wife and never look back? Why were there no cards? No letters? No visits? Even though, as we discover fifty years later, the families are regularly crossing paths?
Terence grew up hearing his mother, Ruth, tell a whimsical story that to my ears never quite rang true. In this version, she and his father, Turner—sweethearts since high school, and married for seven years after—amicably agree to divorce but only on Ruth’s giggling condition: that she become pregnant first. That mission accomplished, she lets him go and never sees him again.
Does this make sense? Does this explain the total estrangement? The fact that the father never seeks out his son? The mother never introduces the father? The brothers who pass yearly at the farm in Ohio and share visits with the same relatives never meet?
Not to me.
Nothing explains that estrangement to my satisfaction until I meet Terence’s sister. In our excited conversations with our new relatives we compare biographical details. All at once the mathematics of the past’s secrets leap out. Terence, the eldest of the old man’s children, is born to Ruth on September 4, 1940. And when is Terence’s open-faced younger sister Artie born to Virginia, Turner’s second wife?
January 20, 1941, just four and a half months later. Did a hurtful infidelity cause the rift? Did Turner really know Ruth was pregnant? Did Ruth know that Virginia was? Is Artie even Turner’s child at all?
Everyone who knows the true story is dead.
15
In the slow summery days of 2003, we increasingly feel that Lexington is our home. We may live here forever, we think.
On South Ashland Avenue the bulbs we planted the previous fall bloom and die—jonquils in the front, hyacinths in the back. We go to the Kentucky Derby. I buy a huge floppy white hat with a purple peony. Terence wears blue seersucker and a boater. We win a hundred dollars. We lose a hundred dollars. We drink mint juleps and sing “My Old Kentucky Home.” Funny Cide takes the prize, the first gelding to win since 1929, which yields predictable wisecracks. I play practical jokes on my boss; he stings one back at me. His wife, a nurse, keeps tabs on us.
And then, all of a sudden, it is time to move.
In late spring, I travel with all the other Knight Ridder editors to our annual gathering in California. We trade notes, compare experiences, sit through long PowerPoint sessions on the company’s finances. At dinner the night I return, I regale the children with the pranks that even grown-ups like to play—including a caper in which all of us editors band together to steal as many household items as we can out from under the nose of our host.
The children are enchanted.
After they leave for bed, I casually continue the conversation with Terence.
“Does Tony Ridder know you?” I ask, referring to the chairman of the company I work for that bears his name.
“No, not at all,” Terence says. “Why?”
“He was very interested in what you are doing, asking lots of questions,” I say. At the cocktail party, Tony did in fact seem very interested in Terence. What does he do? How long has he done it? How does he like Lexington?
Terence’s face lights up.
“We’re moving!” he says.
“Huh?”
“We’re moving,” says Terence. “It’s obvious.”
“You’re crazy,” I say. “He was just being polite.”
“Not a chance,” he says. “They’ve got a big job for you. We’re moving.”
“We’re not moving again!” I say. “We just got here. I like it here.”
The next morning when I leave for work, Terence is already in the basement, inventorying boxes.
“You’re out of your mind,” I say. “Have fun!”
Shortly after lun
ch, my boss calls me into his office.
Philadelphia!
I am not sure what I am expecting, but certainly not the monumental view that greets me as I step out of my hotel on my first day in Philadelphia. The Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The starkly classical Free Library and Family Court buildings. The reddish brick Italian Renaissance Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul. The Franklin Institute. The Rodin Museum. The Swann Fountain with its Native American figures. And off in the distance to the left, looking like the Acropolis, the Philadelphia Museum of Art hulking over the whole scene. To the right, City Hall with its fussy detail and its statue of William Penn atop the clock tower. Soon enough the children will discover the hilarious—to a fourteen-year-old and a nine-year-old—phallic view that can be had of Old Billy if you stand and look at him from a certain angle.
Everything about Philadelphia seems monumental. Its buildings. Its history. Its art. Its poverty. Its sheer daunting size—143 square miles that stretch out far beyond any place any visitor normally ventures. Even The Philadelphia Inquirer—Knight Ridder’s flagship paper—is monumental. The paper’s square-shouldered white building topped by a clock tower and dome can be clearly seen from miles away. The top story is the former home of Walter Annenberg, the paper’s onetime publisher.
And the newsroom! The newsroom! It too is monumental, like no other newsroom in America. It is like everyone’s fantasy of a newsroom—only more so. In perhaps one of the most improbably thoughtful acts of industrial redesign, the newsroom has been carved out of the space that the paper’s presses once occupied. The news floor is as long as a football field, and its ceiling soars the equivalent of four stories up. The entire whitewashed space is punctuated by massive white columns, while a balcony that rings the room is big enough to house a quarter of the paper’s five-hundred-plus reporters and editors and photographers. The walk into the newsroom is a daunting one, past framed certificates of the paper’s Pulitzer Prizes—eighteen of them over the previous eighty-six years.
The Cost of Hope Page 12
