THE NIGHT AFTER Freddy’s second round of chemotherapy, Nora Jane was awake all night. She was having dreams of wandering around the parking lot of the hospital trying to find the door to go in. The second time she had the dream, she slipped out of the bed and went into the bathroom and took a sleeping pill, something she hadn’t done in months.
The next morning she was groggy and scared. “You were having bad dreams?” Freddy asked. He was feeling all right. Not half as bad as he had expected to feel. “Tell me, Nora Jane. Tell me the truth.”
“I dreamed I couldn’t find a way to get into the hospital. It’s all right. Dreams are clues, I know. But this one was pretty clear. It’s because you wouldn’t let me go inside.”
“Next time you aren’t going at all. I’ll take a taxi or have Nieman drive me or Big Judy. I am not going to have you get sick too. I need you to be healthy while I’m doing this.” He got up from the bed and went to stand by the dresser where she was combing her hair. “It’s my leukemia, N.J. Just let me run it.”
“All right.” She turned around and looked at him. He was wearing a pair of striped Brooks Brothers pajamas and his hair was curled all over his head like a child’s. “You can run your leukemia, but if you don’t let Mitzi cut your hair you can’t sleep with me. How do you feel?”
“I feel all right. I could eat some eggs and toast. I’m going to go to the kitchen and see if the girls are up.”
“I’ll fix your breakfast. I love you, do you know that?”
“Then cook the eggs, woman.”
“I’m going to. When do you have to go back and do it again?”
“On Monday. Until then we are going to ignore and forget this damned leukemia. I am sick of leukemia. I don’t want to hear a word about it. I ignore leukemia, by Jove. Leukemia is dead for me.” He strode out of the bedroom trying to look like Paul Newman, an actor his mother had always thought he resembled.
“Paul Newman,” Nora Jane said out loud. She stuck two thick brown barrettes into her hair above her ears and gave up trying to do anything about the way she looked. Not that it was possible for Nora Jane Whittington Harwood to look bad. She looked beautiful on the worst day of her life. “And the sleeping pill will wear off and that’s the last one I’ll ever take,” she added. “Leukemia will not drive me to sleeping pills. Leukemia can suck hind teat.” She liked having said that, since she never cursed in any way. “Hind teat,” she repeated and stalked out after Freddy to get breakfast ready for her family.
“The dread, that’s the worst thing about any medical procedure,” Freddy was saying. “So just watch where you’re going and remind me of something nice.” Nieman was driving Freddy to his third round of chemotherapy.
“It was nice while you were starting the bookstore. Nineteen seventy-five it was. And you had all the catalogs of books and we were making lists and the boxes started coming while the shelves were still being built. I had to wear a dust mask to come watch. Remember that carpenter from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who was making the trim on the shelves? He was a good man. I wonder what became of him.”
“He went home. He writes to me occasionally. He married a woman he met out here and took her home with him. Jake Farley is his name. Turn over there, let me go in the emergency-room exit. It’s a shortcut 1 found. You just come pick me up at eleven fifteen. I’ll call if it will be sooner.”
“I’ll go to the medical-school library and hang out or maybe go walk on the labyrinth. I haven’t been in this part of town in a while.”
“Okay. Stop here. It doesn’t hurt, Nieman. It’s just a drip and I have some friends that come here when I do. A nice girl who’s going to law school.”
“Are you all right?” Nieman stopped the car and turned off the motor. He turned around. “I can go in with you. It won’t bother me.”
“Yes it will. You’ll have nightmares.” Freddy closed the car door and walked off. He was trying to walk forcibly and keep his shoulders back. Dread, he kept repeating. Dread is the normal emotion under these circumstances. I will experience it but not let it take me. I will make a mental list of all the books I ordered for the store in the months before it opened. Eight hundred dollars for the Karsh book. Another six hundred for the Hemingway with the Karsh print. The Faber and Faber books I got from that guy in Canada. That was probably against the law, but he said they were secondhand and some of them weren’t available in the United States. Freddy stopped at the desk. “Hello, Lucy. Hello, Maria. How’s it going today? Is everyone showing up? Who’s calling in with lame excuses?”
“We very busy today, Mr. Harwood, but we’ll be on time. You wait in waiting room, okay?”
“Okay. Can’t wait until my turn. Get it over with and stop thinking about it, right?”
“Right.”
Freddy settled into one of the pink leather chairs by the magazine stand. He pulled a paperback edition of Rilke out of his suit pocket and started to read “The Panther.”
“I’m staying,” Nieman said, coming up beside him. “I’m not going roaming around uptown San Francisco while you’re sitting here. What are you reading?”
Freddy held out the book.
“Okay. That’s good and depressing.”
“It is not depressing. If you didn’t know Rilke’s biography you wouldn’t think it was depressing. You have a bad habit of getting the author confused with the book, Nieman. There are moments of great joy and happiness in this book and that is what I’m reading it for.”
“‘The Panther’?”
“It’s a beautiful poem.”
“Mr. Harwood.” Maria had come to get him.
“That’s me. Don’t wait here, Nieman. Go find something to do.”
“I’m doing something. I’m waiting here for you.” Freddy stood up and Nieman stood up beside him and took his arms with both his hands and held them tight. Then he sat back down and Freddy followed the nurse back to the room with the poison.
At eleven fifteen he came back out into the waiting room looking sick. “I guess it’s working,” he said. “Take me home.”
Nieman took his arm and they walked out of the hospital and found the car and Nieman drove without talking.
“Say something,” Freddy finally said. “Say I hope you don’t throw up. Say leukemia sucks a big one and I hate leukemia’s guts. Feel free to talk.”
“I kept thinking about all the books we had when you first opened the store. I never would have read Freeman Dyson or those Einstein essays. Remember that book by the French anthropologist who got into the South African veld after the Boer War and made those first studies of primates in the wild? The same guy wrote The Soul of the White Ant. I ought to go around my house and make a shelf of the books we read because of the store. That was a real contribution to the world, starting Clara Books. Are you okay?”
“No. Just drive. You don’t need to talk anymore. Yeah. Eugene Marais, The Soul of the White Ant. And The Soul of Something Else. What was it?”
“The Soul of the Ape. Eugene Marais. The soul of the cancer cell. We could write that now, I guess.”
“Oh no, we won’t. If this stuff makes me sick it’s working. I have to remember that.”
“You surely do.”
“God knows what else it’s killing except cancer cells. I should have put some sperm in a bank before I did this. I think it’s killing the lining of my stomach at the moment.”
“That’s sixty percent of your immune system. It’s just reacting. It’s supposed to react.”
“Tell your buddies in the labs to hurry up and find something better than this crap, okay? Will you tell them that? But not Stella. She might think I don’t appreciate this crap, which is better than nothing, which we used to have.” Freddy was rolling down into the seat. He was rolling down into a ball. “Hurry up and get me home.”
“I am hurrying. And so is medical science, Freddy. Thousands of people work every day all day for every miracle. You know that. Try to stop thinking. This is not thinking time.”
Nieman leaned down on the wheel of the car and started taking chances.
Three weeks into the chemotherapy, Freddy’s doctors had a meeting and decided to put him in the hospital for a while. They didn’t like the results they were getting from the tests. The chemotherapy wasn’t doing what they had hoped it would.
“We need to get him ready for a transplant,” his oncologist said. “If we can’t find a match, then we’ll have to use stem cells. We have to make a move here. I don’t think we can wait much longer.”
“How close a match will work?”
“Whatever we can get at this point. I’m going to tell him this afternoon. If any of you have objections, state them now.”
“Go on,” Freddy’s internist, Danen Marcus, said. “Do what you have to do. What have you already tried?”
“Everything I have. We need to give him blood. I can’t wait any longer on that.”
“Go on.”
“Good.”
Nora Jane had always liked to be alone. Ever since she was a child she had needed long spaces of time when she sat and daydreamed or did ordinary things without talking to anyone while she did them. She liked to be alone cleaning up the house or grocery shopping or moving the cleaning equipment in the swimming pool. She liked to lie in bed and read in the afternoons while she waited for the children to come home from school.
Now, with Freddy’s illness, she found she needed company constantly. Even with the children all around her, she wanted other people in the house. She stayed at the hospital as much as Freddy would let her stay there, but it bothered him if she stayed all the time. “This isn’t Schweitzer’s hospital in Africa,” he kept telling her. “We don’t need the family moving into the tent. Go on home and call me every hour. There’s nothing to do here but worry about catching something. I’m more worried about staph infections than I am leukemia. They’re fixing it, N.J. It just takes time.”
Father Donovan and Mitzi were frequent guests at Nora Jane’s, and Stella came by with Scarlett when she had a few minutes. It consoled Nora Jane to talk to Stella, since Stella used the Latinate names of the drugs and acted like she understood what was going on. Father Donovan and Mitzi were helping Nora Jane as an antidote to the thing that was going on between them that neither of them had any intention of stopping. Also, it gave them a place to be together.
“I have ended up alone all my life,” Nora Jane told them one night. “I do not think I could take care of the children without him. I can’t live without him now that I have had him here so long. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to wait and see what happens.”
“He isn’t going to die,” Mitzi said. “He isn’t the type to die. They’ll find a bone marrow donor and he’ll get better.”
“They might not find one.”
“Then they’ll do the stem cell thing.” Father Donovan went near to her and took her arm. “You must be strong, Nora Jane. You have no choice because of the children.”
“I’m trying,” she answered. “I am trying as hard as I can.”
Three weeks went by and it was the twelfth day of December in the year of our Lord two thousand and three. Because it was Friday, Tammili and Lydia had rode their bicycles to school. Little Freddy was mad because he was too young to ride his, so he sulked in the back of his grandmother’s limousine and only stopped sulking when Big Judy’s girlfriend, Lenora, started talking about her psychic.
“It doesn’t hurt to let her try,” Lenora said. “She told me the spirits are with her so much now they talk to her all the time, trying to get out their messages to the right people.”
“Witch talk,” Big Judy replied. “The last thing we need now is some dead people in on this. Freddy’s not going to die, Leeno. Don’t go telling a psychic our names. I don’t want her knowing anything about me and I can tell you right now if Mrs. Harwood found out you were telling her business to some fortune-teller she’d never hire you to work at another party.”
“It doesn’t hurt to let spiritual people see what they can do. I didn’t tell her anyone’s names yet. I just asked her if there was any way she could make some gris-gris to help us out.”
“You ought to quit going out every night and seeing all those good-for-nothing people that hang out in the bars. It’s starting to make you look old, you know that.”
Little Freddy had loosened his seat belt and was almost in the front seat now. He was fascinated by Big Judy’s friend Lenora and always loved it when she came along to take him to school. In the first place she had beads braided into her hair and in the second place Big Judy argued with her and that was fun to hear. It took thirty minutes to get from the Harwoods’ house to Little Freddy’s school and it was usually pretty boring, but when Lenora came along something always started up.
“You just promise me right now that you won’t talk anymore to this psychic about any of my business or the Harwoods’ business,” Big Judy was saying. “You just give me your promise, Leeno, or we’re finished.”
“I was only trying to help. I want to do something to help. I can’t help wanting to help.” She sat up and looked straight ahead.
“Yeah,” Little Freddy put in. “She just wants to help Daddy get well so he won’t have to stay in the hospital. We’re tired of him being there. It’s no fun when he’s gone.”
“Look at what you did now,” Big Judy said. “I’ll be damned, Leeno. He’s going to tell them.”
“No, I won’t. I won’t tell them anything you said.”
“All I did was tell this very nice lady who is able to talk to spirits that I wanted her to be praying for your daddy to get out of that hospital soon,” Lenora said. “There is more to life than a lot of people think there is. There are certain people that can find out things the rest of us can’t, and all I was trying to do was to help.”
“What is ‘gris-gris’?” Little Freddy asked. “Like you said maybe she could get some gris-gris.”
Big Judy stopped the car in the parking lot behind the school and turned around in the seat to talk to Little Freddy.
“Don’t go telling this to your momma, honey. We got to be careful what we say to all of them while your daddy’s sick. Leeno is not going to have any more truck with that lady she was talking about, and gris-gris is what some dumb people call luck. It’s like when people tell you a fairy is going to come get your old teeth out from underneath your pillow and put some money there. It’s just a bunch of superstition from a long time ago when people didn’t know anything and had to make stuff up.”
“Yeah,” Little Freddy said. “I know all about that. Nieman got me a book about superstitions and how magic used to be science before they had the labs at Berkeley. And the scanning electron microscopes or the telescopes at Mount Palomar.”
“That was the easy part and now we’re going to start the hard part.” Freddy was lying in the hospital bed with Nora Jane beside him. She had on a cap and gown and mask and gloves but she was still able to touch him. In another day she would not be able to come into the room.
“I’m not going to come in after they start the new drug. I talked to Stella about it. She said isolation means isolation and that Nieman was fixing a phone you can use by remote control.”
“If Danen lets me have it. They took my cell away because they can’t sterilize it. Can we talk about something else? Tell me what’s going on at the store.”
“Christmas sales. Francis said they were doing better than they did last year.”
“What else is happening?” He pulled her closer to him but not so close that she would know how scared he was. He was trying very hard not to let her know that he was scared.
“Big Judy’s girlfriend went to a psychic to see if she could get some gris-gris for you. What else? Mitzi has a crush on Father Donovan. He brought her over one night because he was leaving St. Anthony’s the same time she was starting over to cut the girls’ hair. She’s praying for you every morning now.” She started giggling. “Oh yeah, Nieman’s writing a song to the tune of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas,’ about everything everyone’s doing to help you get well. ‘Five golden rings,’” she sang. “One nun praying, three rabbis too.”
“How about a bone marrow donor. A perfect one.”
“We’ll find one,” Nora Jane said. “I know they’ll find one.”
Then Nora Jane was gone and Freddy was left alone to examine the room, wish he had his cell phone back, and generally begin to slump into a decidedly pessimistic mood. In another day the room would become a real isolation ward, a prison. I will become Rilke’s panther, Freddy decided. No phone, no books, thank God for the poetry I memorized with my fantastic memory, which these drugs, God knows, may be scouring clean for all I know. How does it begin?
THE PANTHER
IN THE JARDIN DES PLANTES, PARIS
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
Freddy remembered the whole poem and that made him feel better. He lifted his eyes and looked toward the large window to the hall. Outside it stood his brother.
Stuart waved and opened his hands as if to ask a question.
“Come in!” Freddy yelled. “My God,” he said, when Stuart was in the door. “You didn’t fly all the way here for this, did you? Tell me she didn’t make you do that.”
“She doesn’t even know I’m coming. I wanted to be here. I talked to Danen a few days ago. It sounds pretty good, Freddy. They seem to know what they’re doing. How are you feeling? How are you holding up?” He came nearer to the bed. He looked good. Older, thinner, but still outrageously healthy and strong. “May I sit down?”
“Sure. I’m glad to see you. You better call her and tell her you’re here. She’ll go crazy if she finds out from someone else. I tried that with this mess but her canasta network found out and told her.”
“I didn’t come to see Mother, Freddy. I came to see you. I want to tell you something you have a right to know. I haven’t told you sooner because Father didn’t want me to, but now I think it’s time. You need to know and I need for you to know. It may mean something to you, especially now.”
“Tell me then.” Freddy sat up in the bed. He wanted to reach out and touch Stuart’s hand but kept himself from doing it. “Go on. Say it. What is it?”
“I’m not exactly an adopted child, Freddy. I am Father’s child. My mother was a Polish actress. He met her on a business trip. It went on for several years. When I was two years old she gave me to him and went back to Poland to marry a man she knew there. I have always thought I can remember that, but, of course, I can’t. Father told me the day I graduated from medical school. He was crying. Mother doesn’t know. She thinks my parents died. No one knows. Now you know. Please don’t ever tell Mother or anyone until she dies. That’s all I ask. Anyway, for one thing I came to be tested as a donor.”
“I should have given you part of Grandmother’s money. That was selfish of me. I’m sorry I didn’t do it. I was just always so jealous of you, Stuart. You’re taller than I am, better looking, you went to Harvard. It just kept piling up. I’ll give you the money now. I’ll have to figure out how to divide it. It was three million dollars when she died fifteen years ago.”
“I don’t need any money, Freddy. Father left me plenty. I just want you to know that I’m your brother. That’s what I came here for.”
“What is your blood type, Stuart?”
“AB positive, same as you, so there’s a chance I’ll match. I hope I do.”
“You being my blood brother, that’s too sweet to believe. Come here, give me a hug if you can find a place around the paraphernalia. I’m being a great patient, Stuart. You wouldn’t believe my patience and my real thankfulness to the medical profession and all these wild protocols they pursue like the philosopher’s stone. Well, I think it’s going to work. So does Nora Jane. Come over here.” He held out both his hands.
Stuart leaned down and put his hands in Freddy’s. “I have always loved you,” he said. “Since the day you were born. You fascinate me, Freddy. You’re a very special man. An unusual man.”
The next day they moved Freddy out into the hall while the cleaning crew came in and coated the room with antibacterial and antiviral bleaches and cleaners. Then a new bed and new machinery were brought in and a remote telephone and plastic curtains. Then his body was scrubbed with an iodine solution and they settled him back in the bed and no one, not a soul except the doctors, was allowed to enter the room as they systematically began to destroy the marrow in his bones. If no donor showed up they were going to use marrow that had been grown from stem cells.
Stuart’s marrow didn’t match, but on December 18 a donor was found. His name was Larry Binghamton and he had gone to school with Freddy and Nieman from first grade until junior high, when his parents put him in a private academy in San Rafael. The family still belonged to Freddy’s synagogue and that is how Larry happened to be one of the volunteers who signed up to have his marrow tested. Larry ran a computer firm. He was still the quiet, solemn man he had been as a boy. Now he had volunteered to undergo the painful process of donating marrow out of his left hip to save the life of a man who had not even been very nice to him as a boy.
“I feel guilty,” Freddy said when his physician, Danen Marcus, told him the next day about the lucky match. “Should I call him, write him, send him presents? I don’t know what to think, Danen.”
“I’ll tell him. He’s glad to be able to help. I think he’s proud that he can do it.” Danen was standing by the bed with his big, fine hands clasped at his waist. He was a tall man, lanky and serious. “We’re lucky, Freddy. I can’t tell you how lucky it is to find someone this soon. And right here, in town. It’s going to be good. I feel good about it. It’s as close a match as I’ve seen. Better than some siblings.”
“Call Nora Jane, will you, Danen? Oh, and call Nieman. Never mind, she’ll call him.”
“I’ll call them. As soon as I leave here. Do you want anything? Are they taking care of you all right?”
“What else could I want? Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank him for me.”
“Okay. I will. I’ll be back this evening, after rounds. Try to get some rest.”
Danen left the room and Freddy lay back in the hard white comfort of the sheets and pillows and looked at the light pouring in the windows onto the pale walls and the hospital bed with all its strange wires and machines—the light pouring into the room from all over a world full of nuns and priests and hairdressers and polluted air and oceans and microorganisms and genius. So much genius, and so much left to find out and sing and buy books about. And children everywhere and joy and sorrow and work to do and causes to espouse and time to do it after all—he was going to have some time, except, of course, time is only energy caught in fields, if you believe that theory.
I think I do, Freddy decided. As a hypothesis it’s working for me. Manifestations, fantasy, whatever it is I’ll take all of it that I can get or that darling old Larry Binghamton will give me, but even if it was the nun, how did that make Little Larry’s marrow match mine? The match was made when our parents were screwing, long before we started this. Wait a minute, wasn’t Larry’s birthday always in the summer, like mine? I remember going to a pool party at their house when they got the first aboveground pool any of us had ever seen and Mary Anne Axelrod fell off the stairs and had to go to the emergency room. We’re almost astral twins. Isn’t that what the astrological people used to call people born on the same day, same year?
But, even if the match was made when our parents screwed, it doesn’t matter, because, if the physicists are right, time isn’t going in one direction. There isn’t any time — it’s only matter and energy, as if anyone is prepared to believe that, which we’re not, thank goodness. We’re all crazy enough without that kind of knowledge.
I love Little Larry with all my heart. I love the bloody angel.
Freddy was frantically trying to find the button he pushed so that the nurse would dial the phone for him, but it had slipped down in the sheets. Finally he found it and he gave her Nieman’s number.
It was several minutes before the connection was made because of the high volume of calls on this Friday morning in the Bay Area.
“It’s Larry Binghamton’s marrow,” he said, when Nieman answered. “Little Larry, Nieman. There is a God, old buddy, and he’s right here, in this town, today. What should I do? I want to call and thank him. I don’t know what to do.”
“Be grateful,” Nieman answered. “You want me to come up there while you call him? I can get there in ten minutes.”
“Find the number. Call me back.”
Nieman grabbed his laptop computer and headed out the door. He called the rabbi while he was pulling out of the parking lot. By the time he got to the hospital he had Larry’s number. He parked in the visitor’s lot and ran into the hospital and only slowed down when he got to the elevator. On Freddy’s floor the nurse recognized Nieman and ushered him down to the window looking into Freddy’s room. He scribbled the phone number on the signboard, although Freddy could hear him as soon as the nurse turned on the speaker. “I’m here,” Nieman said. “Make the call.”
Freddy held the phone while the nurse made the call. Larry’s secretary put him through. “It’s Freddy Harwood,” Freddy said, when Larry answered. “What can I say, Larry? How can I thank you for doing this?”
“Get well,” Larry said. “My cousin, Allie, died of this four years ago because they couldn’t find a match. I’m proud I match, Freddy. I have admired you all my life. I can’t imagine not being happy I can do this. I’m happy about it. I really am.”
“It’s painful, Larry. They’re going to take the marrow out of your hip.”
“I’ve been in pain. I can stand some pain. Nell and I are divorcing. Did you hear about that? She’s trying to take my boys to live in France, but Jay David and Harold Levi are representing me. I don’t think she’s going to get to do it. Right now she can’t even take them out of the county. So this is good for me. I know Danen. He won’t let me have any problem. I talked to him yesterday. Did he tell you that?”
“All he told me was that you are going to save my life. I don’t know what to say, Larry. Nieman’s here. He’s standing outside this room. I’m in an isolation room. You want to talk to Nieman?”
“Sure I do.”
Freddy flipped the switch and said in a loud voice, “He wants to talk to you too. Say something.”
“Hello!” Nieman yelled into the speaker. “Hey, Larry, let’s have lunch tomorrow. Could you do that?”
“Sure,” Larry said on the phone to Freddy. “Tell him I would like that.”
Two nurses were standing by the window watching and listening. One of them was almost in tears. She was young and had not been on the oncology ward long enough to get tough.
“Tell him Maggie Bee’s at twelve. I’ll come get him,” Nieman said into the speaker.
“He said can you make Maggie Bee’s at twelve. He’ll come get you at your office.”
“It’s Friday,” Larry said. “I’ll call him after I talk to you and make plans.”
“He’ll call you,” Freddy said into the speaker. “Tomorrow’s Saturday.”
“Larry.” He had turned back to the phone. “Look, I don’t want to take up your whole morning. I just want you to know that I can’t think of anything to say to thank you except, I don’t know, thank you. Look, is there anything you need? Is there any way I can help you with the divorce?”
“Just pray she doesn’t find a way to get them to France. I’d never get them back. Her mother has dinner with Jacques Chirac.”
“I can get the prayers,” Freddy said. “I learned how to do that this year. Okay. Hey, what is your birthday?”
“July tenth, nineteen fifty.”
“Mine’s July the fifteenth. I guess our mothers were in the hospital together. I’ll ask mine.”
“I’ll ask mine too. Maybe that’s how the match got made.”
“Ask Nieman. He’ll do research.” They both started laughing at that and then they hung up and suddenly Freddy was so tired he almost fell asleep with the phone in his hand. The two nurses looked at each other. The younger one was really crying now.
“You have to learn to control that,” the older woman said. “I applaud your humanity and so forth, but don’t let patients see you cry.”
“I know, but no one is looking at me, are they?”
Danen Marcus called Nora Jane and then Nieman called her. “I was getting dressed to go down there,” she answered. “I don’t know what to think, Nieman. What if it doesn’t work?”
“It will work. It has to work.”
“Okay. Maybe. The Binghamtons are in the middle of a terrible divorce. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“His French wife is making a lot of trouble. She’s saying bad things about him all over town.”
“That will stop,” Nieman said. “I’ll put a stop to that.”
“Danen said they might do it as soon as next week.”
“Okay.”
“Well, I’d better finish getting dressed. I like to be there by noon.”
“Hold on, N.J. We have a chance now. A real chance. Be grateful if you can.”
“I know. I will.” She put down the phone and went over to her bedside table and turned on the CD player with the meditation tape by Jon Kabat-Zinn and listened to it as she dressed. She pulled on a pair of Gap jeans, then took them off and put on panty hose and a silk dress. I have to get dressed as though every day were the main one we’ll ever have. I will not start looking like someone who needs sympathy. Every thought counts. So does every minute. She put on a pair of two-inch heels that matched the brown in the print dress and then she put on a string of pearls and went into the bathroom and pulled her mass of curly black hair back into a ponytail and clasped it with a silver clasp she and Freddy had bought the first time he took her to New York City. She pushed it firmly into place and went into the bathroom and put on foundation and powder and eye shadow and mascara and rouge and lipstick, then took a towel and wiped part of it off. She went back into the bedroom and removed the CD from the CD player and went out the side door to the garage and opened the trunk of the car and put the CD in the player and got in and listened to it all the way to the hospital. “No matter what is wrong with you,” Dr. Zinn was saying, “even if you have the worst kind of cancer, there is still more right with you than wrong with you.” There is still more right with him than wrong with him, there is still more right with him than wrong with him, Nora Jane kept repeating. Such a world to give us doctors and medicines and Larry Binghamton. I’ll go see his wife in a few days and tell her what he’s doing and that she ought to quit running him down at cocktail parties because all it does is make people think she’s mean.
The transplant was set for December 23. As the day drew near everyone drew together into a tight circle. Nieman and Stella were coming to Nora Jane’s for dinner every night. Little Freddy was teaching Scarlett some new card games based on old maid. Tammili and Lydia had started sleeping together in Lydia’s bed. Freddy’s mother was calling every morning and coming by in the afternoons. She and Big Judy would come sit in the kitchen and talk to the girls when they came home from school or give them clothes she ordered for them from her cousin’s shop in New Rochelle, New York. “Just pretend to like them,” Nora Jane said. “You can give a few things back but keep some of them.”
“Do I have to wear them?” Lydia asked.
“You don’t like that mauve sweater set? I’ll take it if you don’t want it,” Tammili said.
“I like the sweaters. I just don’t like the plaid skirts.”
“Then give her back the skirts,” Nora Jane said. “But keep some ofthe things and wear them when we go over on Friday night. Think of what pleasure it gave her to have them sent from New Rochelle.”
“Grandmother has to have something to do,” Lydia said. “Days pass slowly when you are in extreme anxiety.”
“All right,” Tammili agreed. “I’ll wear the blue sweaters and I’ll wear those mauve ones if you change your mind.”
Big Judy had convinced Lenora that plain old prayer was better than psychic intervention, and she had started going with him on Saturday to sing at his church in Marin City. She had really started liking her evenings there. She’d forgotten how nice it was to be with sober people who had jobs. Lenora was having a real makeover in the spiritual and lifestyle departments.
Mitzi had turned her prayers into confessions and promises and deals. If you will let Freddy Harwood get well, then I will not entertain sexual thoughts about your priests and servants. I will mind my own business and do a good job helping people look better so they’ll be in a better mood and I will not keep going to church if I can’t keep unclean thoughts out of my head about Father Donovan, for Christ’s sake. Hail Mary, Full of Grace, blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, amen…”
At seven o’clock in the morning on the twenty-third of December, they rolled Freddy Harwood into an operating room and put Larry Binghamton’s bone marrow into his body and waited to see if it would take.
Long, long ago in a small town in France the match had been made when their common great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother gave birth to twin boys and both of them lived, a rarity in the seventeen hundreds. Now the DNA met again and was not sur-prised, was even pleased, very pleased, in some smooth chemical version of that emotion we don’t know how to talk about in words but can imagine if we watch a tree put out its leaves, or cherries ripen, or our own hands when they are at work.
“He keeps quoting Rilke,” Nora Jane was telling Nieman. “He’s quoting it a lot.”
“It’s the hospital,” Nieman answered. “He doesn’t like to be confined and he’s a control freak. I’ve never been in a hospital to stay. I know it would drive me crazy. Some of the aids seem, well, less than competent. I’m not sure I’d trust half those people to touch me.”
They were waiting while the transplant was taking place. It was Mrs. Harwood, Big Judy, Nora Jane, Lydia, Tammili, and Nieman. Stella had Little Freddy at her house with Scarlett.
Lydia and Tammili were sitting very close together on a sofa. They were reading books from school. Tammili was reading The Return of the King for the fifth time. Lydia was reading a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt for a paper she was writing for American history. They were snuggled down very close to each other.
“I heard Stuart went back to South Africa,” Nieman said to Mrs. Harwood. “It must have meant a lot to you to have him here.”
“He is good to have around,” she answered. “What time is it, Nieman? How long have they been in there?”
“They took him in at seven. So it’s been fifty-six minutes. I think it takes a while. They have to wait and watch it. Well, I made that up. I’m sorry.”
“Are you enjoying being at the university?”
“He loves it,” Nora Jane answered. “He is a different man. Can’t you tell, Miss Ann?”
“How long do you think it will take?” she asked.
“I’ll go ask.” Nora Jane got up and left the waiting room and walked down to a nurse’s station. She wasn’t really going to bother a nurse with a question like that, but she thought it might make Mrs. Harwood feel better if she believed information was forthcoming.
Nora Jane spoke to the nurses at the station, thanking them for working so hard to help people. Then she went back to the visitor’s waiting room and told Mrs. Harwood it would not be too much longer.
Twenty minutes later a doctor came to the room and spoke with them. “It went well,” he said. “He’ll be in a recovery room for the rest of the day. You might as well go home and rest. Tonight or tomorrow morning we’ll move him back to an isolation room. You can see him then. If you’ll give me a telephone number, someone will call when he’s back in a room.”
Mrs. Harwood stood up. Nora Jane stood up beside her. They gave him both their numbers. Then everyone began to gather his or her things and move out into the hall and down the hall to an elevator and down the elevator to the lobby and out the doors to the steps and the parking lot. Nora Jane was crying. Tammili and Lydia were beside her. Bigjudy had Mrs. Harwood’s arm.
“I’d better get back to the lab,” Nieman said. “Call me there if you hear anything.”
They went their separate ways. “But this,” Nieman was quoting from Rilke as he drove, “that one can contain death, the whole of death, even before life has begun, can hold it to one’s heart gently, and not refuse to go on living, is inexpressible.”
Nora Jane was also thinking of Rilke, but she was thinking of something Freddy had written down for her that was nicer to think about.
Earth, my dearest, I will. O believe me, you no longer Need your springtimes to win me over—one of them, Ah, even one, is already too much for my blood….
Lydia was driving the car. “I don’t know what this means,” she said, after they had gone twenty blocks and were stopped at a stop sign. “Is Daddy going to live?”
“It means the transplant was successful and the leukemia won’t have a place to be. Yes, it does mean he is going to live.” Nora Jane realized as she was talking that she didn’t understand what was going on any better than Lydia did.
“Forever? He’s going to live forever?”
“No one does,” Tammili answered. “He’ll live as long as normal, I guess.”
“The next few weeks will be scary,” Nora Jane said. “But we have to have faith in the doctors and what they are doing. These are miracles that are occurring. We are the beneficiaries of the work of thousands of people over hundreds of years.”
“Yeah, science,” Tammili added. “We live in a world made out of other people’s dreams. That’s what Mrs. Harley told us in chemistry lab. That’s why we have to study it even if it’s hard to do.”
“Yeah,” Lydia added, choosing to ignore her abysmal grades in science. “I may take some science courses in summer school this summer.”
“That would be wonderful, Lydia,” Nora Jane said. “That is a very mature decision.”
“I didn’t say I’d do it. I said I might do it.”
“Oh, right,” Tammili couldn’t keep herself from adding. “I’m waiting for that day to come.”
Lydia reached across the seat and pinched her sister on the leg. Not much of a pinch. Such a small pinch it would have been difficult to prove it wasn’t a pat or touch.
“I saw that,” Nora Jane said. “Go over to Stella’s and get Little Freddy. And please don’t fight today. Please. Just for me and just for the sake of goodness, mercy, and love.”
“Don’t start crying again, Mother. Please don’t cry when we should be happy.”
“We won’t fight,” they both said, and Nora Jane decided to believe it.
* * *
It was two days later when Nora Jane was allowed to enter Freddy’s room. Gowned and masked, she was allowed to talk to him for five minutes. “That’s over,” he said, when she took his hand. “Would you tell Danen I’m ready to go home? And what happened to the twins’ birthday? We didn’t even have a party? Have you registered Lydia for the Kaplan course?”
“I thought you wanted her to do Princeton Review?”
“She might need both. Tammili still doesn’t want to do it?”
“She doesn’t need to do it. Are you all right? Do you feel all right?”
“I feel like a different man. I think I have taken on some of Larry’s characteristics. I’m serious, N.J. Yesterday I found myself being profoundly, even mysteriously, patient.” “That would be interesting.”
“Is Mother out there?”
“No, she’s coming this afternoon at five. It’s Christmas, Freddy. Do you know that?”
“Of course I know it. Good that Mother’s coming.”
“All right. I have to leave.” She stood up beside the bed. “Did I tell you Little Freddy was picked to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ when school starts in January? So we have to practice. If you can’t make it I’ll videotape it for you.”
“I’ll be there. Are you kidding? This is over now, N.J…. I am done with this mess.”
She stopped at the door. “I think you are. You know what, Freddy? We’re lucky. I have this huge feeling of being grateful and feeling lucky.”
“You bet we are,” he said. “You bet I know that.”