CHAPTER 40

We were delusional, out of our minds with excitement because of a biopsy. Hooray. Diagnostic surgery. You would have thought we were going to Disneyland. It was action, though. Something, finally. We were all dying for something. Brenda was encouraged by how well the operation went, and Dr. Geest peered into my father’s mouth and admired his stitches, such delicate handiwork. “He’ll have a nosebleed, that’ll be the worst of it,” the doctor said. I asked, absurdly in retrospect, if it looked like tuberculosis.

Even in his compromised state my father dictated the mood, propped on an elbow on the gurney ride from recovery back to his room singing loud enough to draw attention: “Que sera, sera! Whatever will be will be!”

“Is it TB?”

“We can’t tell anything so far,” Dr. Geest said. “The cells we got in the frozen section are undifferentiated.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning we can’t tell what they are.”

The final pathology report from the lab would take a few days, or even a week. They had to fix the tissue in paraffin, slice it up and put the paraffin slices on slides, stain the tissue molecules with dye, search for tumor markers and so on.

“You’ll help me, won’t you Dr. Geest?” my father said.

He said yes, nothing more, but he didn’t leave. Dr. Geest stayed in the room in his green scrubs that were too big for him. He floated inside them like a boy dressed in his father’s clothes. He looked lost. He looked like Johnny Dolan come back in a dream.

The next morning when I got to the Meyer building, my father’s room was empty. His bed was made so taut you could bounce a nickel on it. The ninth floor was deserted. I searched the halls, glancing into doorways at horizontal legs and feet, until I found two nurses behind a desk, a young one eating a bagel, and an older one with a koala bear clamped onto her stethoscope.

“Do you know where Mr. Aronson is? Room 949?”

“He’s down in Oncology,” the young one said, peering at me over the top of her bagel.

“Oncology?” I said. “You mean the tumor was malignant? You mean he has cancer?”

The nurse shrugged. Her mouth was full.

I was trembling. The older nurse gave me an odd look. How could they be so insensitive? He was alone—he was hearing the news alone. I sped to the elevator, jabbed at the down button, stamped my feet in the plunging car, sprang out when the doors opened on the ground floor. I rushed through the carpeted corridors into the glass breezeway, past the cafeteria and the odor of burnt pizza, into the main hall, past the busy glass doors, the mauve blur of Admissions and the burst of color at the flower shop to another bank of elevators and down again, below deck.

No one in Radiation Oncology knew where he was. I drummed my fingers on the information counter and waited, idly flipping open one of the blue vinyl binders laying there, surprised to see a brightly colored Polaroid fastened to the first page. It was a photograph of a starvation victim with a chicken neck, the head too wide for the skeletal body. The patient had one bloody nostril and just below it, the thick hairs of his mustache were sticky with bright red blood. He’ll have a nosebleed, that’ll be the worst of it. I held the photograph up to the light and stared in horror and disbelief at the starving man who appeared to have lost a fistfight. I was confused. It didn’t make sense. Who took this picture? When? What were the circumstances? I shut the binder and continued my search down a narrow hall and around a corner where my path was blocked by an abandoned wheelchair. It turned out the wheelchair wasn’t empty and I knew immediately—by the way the man was slumped in it, and his hat was perched and his bathrobe tied—the Polaroid had been taken only minutes ago. The hallway had banisters like a ship’s corridor and I grabbed onto one and clung to it. The nurses upstairs weren’t being cruel. They had no idea someone could be so delusional they could look at my father and not know he had cancer.

He was assigned an oncologist, Anton Jelinek, who didn’t know for sure without the final pathology report, but said that Mr. Aronson most likely had a primary head-and-neck tumor—a nasopharyngeal carcinoma that was probably squamous cell cancer, and the result of smoking. Jelinek was not absolutely certain, however, because the cells were undifferentiated, which he explained when I asked, simply meant that the cells were difficult to tell apart and identify. My father was having so much pain and had lost his appetite because the head-and-neck tumor was pressing on his cranial nerves. The third cranial nerve caused the headache, the sixth cranial nerve affected his eye, and the ninth cranial nerve would give him gum and jaw pain as the tumor grew. This kind of cancer was treated with surgery and radiation, but Jelinek warned that the surgery was often disfiguring. I’d seen a woman in the Meyer day room. Half her face was scooped out and she had a Frankenstein scar, but she was alive. I said if the tumor was growing wouldn’t it be a good idea to zap it with radiation while we waited for a surgery date, and Jelinek said the tissue couldn’t be radiated until after surgery and Geest would not go ahead with surgery until the final pathology report. In other words, still no treatment. My father was discharged. I took him home with his pajamas in a paper bag.

Such scraps we ended up accepting with gratitude. They gave us a name. It was something. With a name, we were a little less helpless. Now instead of “goddamn Aronsons,” Brenda went around the house muttering “nasopharyngeal carcinoma,” and I muttered along with her. We listed the cranial nerves together and recited which parts of the face were affected—like a catechism for her, an incantation for me. Brenda and I got along fairly well during that time, and my father no longer bullied me as he had back in December. Now I knew how to make his tea. He did snap sometimes. I asked if he remembered those Christmases before Uncle Seymour died when we drove up to Scarsdale and he growled: “Whaddaya think I do all day?” But he only meant—yes, of course I do, what else is there, the past is all there is—and he softened, and we talked about how great it was that Aunt Adele was gentile and provided us with a Christmas tree and presents for a few years when I was little, the whole schmear, except we had pastrami around the poker table instead of ham.

“They’re rich,” my father would say.

“Do they live in a mansion?” Susan would say.

“Yes,” my father said.

We came out of the Lincoln Tunnel to horns honking. My father rolled down his window. “This is my town!” he called to passersby, absurdly considering we were hicks with Maryland license plates. We laughed merrily at his antics. To us, New York and my father were synonymous. We could have gotten off the turnpike at the George Washington Bridge, but he had to drive through the city. “MY town!” he said. By the time we got to Westchester, night would have fallen, and windows blazed like fire through the winter trees.

“There,” my father said. “Up ahead. If you go down that road, you get to the orphanage.”

“Where? Where?”

“There.” A dark and winding road, a vanishing point. Deep in the woods, Christmas lights glowed.

“Can we go there?” I said.

“Torn down,” my father said. It wasn’t long before we pulled into Uncle Seymour’s driveway.

“If this is a mansion, why aren’t there pillars?” Susan said.

“They’re rich, I tell you, rich,” my father said.

My mother dealt the cards around the table. “Seven card stud. Deuces wild.”

“How much you get paid at that grammar school in Baldymore?” said Uncle Seymour.

“Never mind,” my father said. “You see me asking for handouts?”

“Ooh,” said Uncle Alvin. “The professor has a conscience.”

“Pair of eights bets,” said my father’s cousin, Fat Ellis.

“What’re you crazy?” said Aunt Sadie. “Pair of kings! Mitzi’s got a deuce showing.”

“I see you don’t mind eating my pastrami,” said Uncle Seymour.

“My brother Harry never comes, never brings his kids here,” Aunt Vivian whispered to my mother, “because he’s still mad at Seymour and Adele for not taking in the two little boys.”

“What little boys?” my mother said.

“Harry and Clyde! My brothers! Who do you think?” said Aunt Vivian.

“Harry’s at sleep-away, that’s why he’s not here,” my mother said. She took a bite of her corned beef sandwich.

“Yeah, Harry took money from his partner,” said Aunt Vivian. “But even when he’s not in jail, he never comes. Did you know the Home wouldn’t let them out for Gertie’s funeral? But Alvin and I went to the cemetery with Mama, the three of us in a taxi, Mama with the coffin on her lap.”

“What’s past is past,” said Uncle Alvin. “You talking or you playing?”

For a whole week the adults played and the children played until one night we drove home, our presents locked in the trunk, my mother asleep in the front seat, Susan curled next to me. My father kept his eyes on the road and I looked out at passing towns and lights in distant houses. I was glad he and I were the only ones awake, although he seemed unaware of me behind him in the dark quiet of the moving car.

We were realists who knew in order to survive we had to be fabulists, so we lived on hope and imagination. Days passed. It was frustrating to wait so long for the final pathology report, but we were confident when the report came in, the thing squatting between his cheekbone and maxillary sinus would be removed at last, and with it his pain and misery. I decided this was a good time to take a break, before the big surgery. I would be needed more during what was bound to be a grueling recovery. So I flew back to LA to rest up. How could I have left him? I did, though.

While I was away, Brenda was asked if she wanted the oncologist, Dr. Jelinek, to manage my father’s case, or would she prefer their family doctor? Brenda chose the latter. That was Cromwell, the sarcastic hand-holder who was incurious about my father’s symptoms and unmoved by his suffering. I was angry. My mother appealed to me to be more sympathetic to Brenda. Brenda had a relationship with Dr. Cromwell. She could reach him on the phone easily and he knew my father’s history. I wished I could have supported Brenda’s decision, I really did. But on top of everything I loathed about Cromwell, he didn’t have privileges at Johns Hopkins.

“What’s so great about Hopkins?” Brenda said. “A lot of good they’ve done.”

I reminded her Hopkins was where my father’s tissue now sat in a lab under a microscope, and where his surgeon practiced. What I thought didn’t matter, though. The doctors wanted to deal with one family member only, whoever was next of kin. That was Brenda. I was thousands of miles away. She was in charge again.

At first I couldn’t get used to being away, not knowing what was going on minute to minute. I wasn’t sure I would last for two long weeks in LA. Then I got I got used to the freedom. I rode my bike down to Hermosa Beach to visit a friend a couple of times, and I started writing again. I was sitting at the desk in the bedroom noodling with a short story about a freaky Greyhound bus trip to nowhere, when I got a call from an old boss in New York. She had started working at GQ magazine and wanted me to do a story on the differences between dating in LA and dating in New York. Fred pointed out the obvious—that I wasn’t dating, so how would I know? Well, gee, I could interview single friends. And right away I had some ideas. Like how at parties in LA people asked, “What do you drive?” Fred said everyone had heard that before, and maybe the assignment was a lot to take on while caring for my father, so I called the editor and said I would pass. I trusted Fred so much then. “You’re better off working on your short story,” he said.

“Do you really think the Greyhound story is good?” I said. We were in the den, Fred’s office. I struggled to pull out his rolling desk chair—it was difficult with him still in it—but I moved it far enough so I had room to climb onto his lap. He put his arms around me. I was relieved. GQ was intimidating. The assignment came at the wrong time.

I finished the Greyhound story and started a new one, a story I had been thinking about writing for a long time, about Johnny. But I was struggling. I couldn’t even think of a fictional name for him. Bobby wasn’t right. Tom was close, but I didn’t want to give him my childhood friend’s name. Not finding a name for him felt like a sign. Don’t go there, everything about Johnny is too weird.

With nothing to work on, I got agitated. I called Cedar Drive every day, always with the same two questions: How is my father and have you heard from pathology? He’s fine and I haven’t heard anything, Brenda always said. After a week of this, I suggested instead of waiting, she ought to call pathology herself.

“I’m sure they’ll call when they have anything to report,” said Brenda.

Take care of yourself during the break, my mother said. Be good to yourself. Get a massage or something, Susan said. So I got a haircut, and decided to go really short. It was a reckless decision. My small face looked smaller and my nose looked bigger with no hair to hide behind, but I tried to embrace it. I did feel lighter. That was good. I felt I could levitate if I wanted. I was a warrior, ready for battle, at least on behalf of my father, if not for GQ. To further my self-care, I went to see my gynecologist for a checkup and we chatted. She said, “Undifferentiated cells? That’s bad. I’m sorry.” I was shocked. I shouldn’t have been, but I was. Why hadn’t his doctors told me undifferentiated cells meant a poor prognosis? I’d done my own research, but the books about cancer I’d taken out of the library used the same language as the doctors, in the same way, talking about the cells as if they weren’t attached to people, telling me nothing, allowing my massive denial. I cried to Fred, and he cried, too. After a while, I squirmed out of his arms and I went and watered the flowers on the patio and deadheaded the wilted blossoms and sprayed the lemon tree with biodegradable soap and that calmed me down. I saw a few movies with Fred during that week and I had lunch with friends, but I wasn’t really present. What could the holdup possibly be about? I figured if I wanted to find out I’d have to call pathology myself. I was put through without delay. No one asked what kind of kin I was, and I was told immediately they had results. I felt regret and shame for not calling sooner and fury at Brenda for not calling at all. Our détente had come to an end.

The final results were a surprise, not at all expected. He did not have nasopharyngeal carcinoma. The undifferentiated cells were adenocarcinoma, not squamous cells. Primary head-and-neck cancers were not adenocarcinomas. The name they gave us was the wrong name. The mass pressing on his cranial nerves was a metastasis. It had traveled from a distant site. But what distant site? The doctors scratched their heads. They were clueless. All they had to go on was his history of prostate cancer. Prostate cancer was an adenocarcinoma.

I expected Brenda to be angry I went over her head, but she didn’t seem to mind. She called Dr. Cromwell with the news and he spoke to Dr. Jelinek and they agreed to give him DES, the notorious drug prescribed to prevent miscarriages that was found to cause cancer in the children born to mothers who used it. DES was banned for women, but still used to curb testosterone in men with prostate cancer. I couldn’t believe we were taking this giant step backward. Hadn’t we been told months ago prostate cancer traveled to the bones first and foremost? And my father’s bones were fine. Hadn’t we been told prostate cancer was not known to travel to the sinus? Like, never. I called Jelinek’s office and shared my concern. “That’s all true,” Jelinek said. “But he had prostate cancer once, so we’re going with that.”