I still do, although not on a regular basis. I still write stories and some of them are pithy explorations of unspeakable pain. I did a magazine piece not long ago about breast cancer and I sat one night in a conference room listening to eight women talk about the feeling of taking off their blouses and seeing the zipper of the scar, and I sat there, my two perfectly good breasts slowly swelling with milk for the baby at home, and felt like the worst sort of voyeur, a Peeping Tom of the emotions. Afterward some of them came to me and said how glad they were that I was writing about them, so that others would understand, and I tried to take solace from that. But all I felt was disgust at myself.
I know there are good reasons to do what I do. The more we understand worlds outside our own orbit, the better off we will be. I know there are people who do not believe reporters feel any of these things, that we file our feelings with the clippings, that both are soon dried out beyond saving. That’s not true. The problem is that some time ago we invented a kind of new journalism and then tried to play it with old journalism rules. We approached a rape victim with the same feelings about objectivity and distance that we had brought to a press conference, and that was not fair—not so much to the rape victim, but to ourselves.
Some years ago I did a story about Stan and Julie Patz. Their names are probably familiar; their son, Etan, age six, disappeared in 1979, and they have opened their door to reporter after reporter because anything might bring him home. I interviewed Julie several years after he had gone, and at some point during our conversation my eyes filled and tears began. I thought I felt her pain—now that I have children of my own, I realize I hadn’t a clue to what her pain was—but I was also angry at myself for being, after years of practice and journalism review articles, so unprofessional. I thought that what was the right response for a human being was the wrong response for a reporter.
Years have passed, and Julie’s son is still missing. In the meantime, I have had two sons of my own. For a while I looked for Etan’s face in every playground and schoolyard, but then I stopped. I am ashamed of that. I am proud of the story I wrote. I had the story, and Julie had the life. I still think of her sometimes, and of her pain. Now that I work as a reporter less, I am capable of bringing my emotions to it more.
Perhaps there are no unwritten rules that say you are not to feel these things. Perhaps I made them up out of my own insecurities and stereotypes, the way I insisted on drinking Scotch shots when I first got into the newspaper business, so that everyone would know I was serious stuff, not just a kid. Some of this is changing for the better, I think. The day the space shuttle exploded, at the end of the evening news, it looked to me as if Dan Rather was trembling on the verge of tears when he signed off. For a moment I was able to forget the cameras hovering over the faces of Christa McAuliffe’s parents as they looked up to see their eldest child blown to bits, and to forget that if I were still in the newspaper business I might have been there too, scribbling, “Mother lays head on father’s shoulder.” It appeared that his emotions and his profession were merging, and it made me feel a little better about myself. But the part of me that still looks at every disaster as a story wondered for just a moment if his contact lenses were bothering him, or if the light was in his eyes.
FACING
THE
WORST
HEREDITY
In 1971, The New England Journal of Medicine reported the discovery of a connection between a rare form of cancer in young women and a synthetic estrogen called diethylstilbestrol. The drug, which became known familiarly as DES, had been given to pregnant women thought to be in danger of miscarrying, and the cancer was occurring in some of their daughters. It was not until two years after the reports that I found out I was one of the young women at risk. It would be natural to think that discovering I was a DES daughter radically changed my life, but it had already been so altered the year before by my mother’s death from cancer that this further fillip was only one small piece in the puzzle of why I was still alive.
At the time of my mother’s illness, there was not the kind of openness about cancer that there is today, and certainly not the kind of acceptance. I knew well that there were a handful of people who did not come to visit her because they thought what she had was catching. If that had been true, of course, my father and I would have been goners. But deep inside, I, too, believed cancer was contagious—that is, you caught it from your parents.
“Interesting but not clinically confirmed,” said the emotionally dense oncologist whom I asked about hereditary links. By the time I found myself repeatedly tested for the effects of my in utero DES exposure, I felt like one of those teenagers in a horror movie: You don’t know which closet he’s in, but you do know that before the night is over he’s going to jump out of there and finish you off.
For a long time this made me feel different from everyone else I knew, but slowly over the years my circle has been filled by people who carry the same feelings within them. We’re not the first generation of people to feel this way; we’re just the first to be afflicted with such a profound dichotomy between how we tend our bodies and how they may turn on us, about our expectations of transcending our backgrounds and the seeming tenacity of their hold.
One day not long ago I had lunch with two friends and all three of us admitted we were people who believed that the disease of our mothers would be visited on the kids. “If I can make it past forty-seven,” said the one whose mother had died at that age, “then I’ll be home free.” And when I asked the other, whose mother had died of breast cancer, whether she did breast self-examinations, she said, in all seriousness, “No more than once a day.”
There are all sorts of other diseases that have this same effect, although cancer happens to be the most prevalent and the one we hear most about. A friend of mine had a mother who died of Alzheimer’s disease, and every time he misplaces his car keys he is in a sweat for a week, wondering if this is the beginning of degenerative memory loss. Another friend, whose family has a history of heart disease, lay in bed one night thinking he was having a coronary when he had really strained a shoulder muscle playing tennis.
The cumulative effect is a feeling of loss of control and a heightened sense of mortality. The second can be useful. I’ve had a real good time for most of the last decade because I figured that I had better get going while the going was good. But I despise the sense of helplessness. I don’t know what caused my mother’s cancer. I gather no one really does. Was it the air, the water, a simple predisposition, a surfeit of some food or, as one doctor suggested to me with not the slightest thought that I might be scarred by the idea, too much child-bearing? Choose any or all of those things. I am still in deep trouble. My husband, whose father died of lung cancer after years of cigarette smoking and a sedentary life, does not have this sense of helplessness. He is appalled by cigarette smoking and runs four miles each morning. I wish I had such talismans.
I once talked to my grandmother about these fears, and she said the primary differences between now and then were that in her youth people didn’t talk about what other people died of, they didn’t think too much about what went on inside themselves, and they didn’t expect to live so long. There were no warnings on cigarette packages and no oral contraceptives then, no chemotherapy and no television commercials about eating fiber to beat the Grim Reaper. When her parents died, my grandmother was grieved but not incredulous, for death was the natural corollary of life and doctors could do just so much.
Doctors now can make babies in petri dishes, and the natural corollary of life is retirement in Florida. I suppose that is what is so incongruous about what we are going through. Fresh from the gym and the sauna, I stand in the supermarket checking food labels for preservatives and wonder if there is a secret inside me, a little bit of something waiting to spring into action.
MOTHERS
The two women are sitting at a corner table in the restaurant, their shopping bags wedged between their chairs and the wall: Lor
d & Taylor, Bloomingdale’s, something from Ann Taylor for the younger one. She is wearing a bright silk shirt, some good gold jewelry; her hair is on the long side, her makeup faint. The older woman is wearing a suit, a string of pearls, a diamond solitaire, and a narrow band. They lean across the table. I imagine the conversation: Will the new blazer go with the old skirt? Is the dress really right for an afternoon wedding? How is Daddy? How is his ulcer? Won’t he slow down just a little bit?
It seems that I see mothers and daughters everywhere, gliding through what I think of as the adult rituals of parent and child. My mother died when I was nineteen. For a long time, it was all you needed to know about me, a kind of vest-pocket description of my emotional complexion: “Meet you in the lobby in ten minutes—I have long brown hair, am on the short side, have on a red coat, and my mother died when I was nineteen.”
That’s not true anymore. When I see a mother and a daughter having lunch in a restaurant, shopping at Saks, talking together on the crosstown bus, I no longer want to murder them. I just stare a little more than is polite, hoping that I can combine my observations with a half-remembered conversation, some anecdotes, a few old dresses, a photograph or two, and re-create, like an archaeologist of the soul, a relationship that will never exist. Of course, the question is whether it would have ever existed at all. One day at lunch I told two of my closest friends that what I minded most about not having a mother was the absence of that grown-up woman-to-woman relationship that was impossible as a child or adolescent, and that my friends were having with their mothers now. They both looked at me as though my teeth had turned purple. I didn’t need to ask why; I’ve heard so many times about the futility of such relationships, about women with business suits and briefcases reduced to whining children by their mothers’ offhand comment about a man, or a dress, or a homemade dinner.
I accept the fact that mothers and daughters probably always see each other across a chasm of rivalries. But I forget all those things when one of my friends is down with the flu and her mother arrives with an overnight bag to manage her household and feed her soup.
So now, at the center of my heart there is a fantasy, and a mystery. The fantasy is small, and silly: a shopping trip, perhaps a pair of shoes, a walk, a talk, lunch in a good restaurant, which my mother assumes is the kind of place I eat at all the time. I pick up the check. We take a cab to the train. She reminds me of somebody’s birthday. I invite her and my father to dinner. The mystery is whether the fantasy has within it a nugget of fact. Would I really have wanted her to take care of the wedding arrangements, or come and stay for a week after the children were born? Would we have talked on the telephone about this and that? Would she have saved my clippings in a scrapbook? Or would she have meddled in my affairs, volunteering opinions I didn’t want to hear about things that were none of her business, criticizing my clothes and my children? Worse still, would we have been strangers with nothing to say to each other? Is all the good I remember about us simply wishful thinking? Is all the bad self-protection? Perhaps it is at best difficult, at worst impossible for children and parents to be adults together. But I would love to be able to know that.
Sometimes I feel like one of those people searching, searching for the mother who gave them up for adoption. I have some small questions for her and I want the answers: How did she get her children to sleep through the night? What was her first labor like? Was there olive oil in her tomato sauce? Was she happy? If she had it to do over again, would she? When we pulled her wedding dress out of the box the other day to see if my sister might wear it, we were shocked to find how tiny it was. “My God,” I said, “did you starve yourself to get into this thing?” But there was no one there. And if she had been there, perhaps I would not have asked in the first place. I suspect that we would have been friends, but I don’t really know. I was simply a little too young at nineteen to understand the woman inside the mother.
I occasionally pass by one of those restaurant tables and I hear the bickering about nothing: You did so, I did not, don’t tell me what you did or didn’t do, oh, leave me alone. And I think that my fantasies are better than any reality could be. Then again, maybe not.
MY GRANDMOTHER
My grandmother was rather vain, and I loved her for it. Her favorite stories concerned her own charms: how she weighed ninety-six pounds until the third of her eight children was born, how some man tried to pick her up on the street even though she was pushing a baby carriage with a toddler on either side of it, how the nicest boys clamored to date her, particularly August LaForte, he of the wonderful manners and fine clothes. Once I asked her why she had chosen instead the rather dour young man, as she described him, who was my grandfather. “I don’t know,” she said with a sigh. “I don’t think I could have hardly stood him at all if he hadn’t played the piano.”
She was born Kitty O’Donnell, and she had what the nuns in school used to call a smart mouth. The older she got, the smarter it got. “How do you think your brother looks?” she asked my father several weeks ago, lying with her eyes closed in a hospital bed set up in her bedroom. “He looks fine, Mother,” my father replied. “He should,” she shot back, “he doesn’t do anything all day.”
She would have been eighty-nine years old last week, but she died on April Fools’ Day. The joke is on me. I accepted the inevitable disintegration of age without realizing how bereaved her death would leave me. She was the last of my grandparents to die. Concetta was gone before I really knew her. Caesar left me with only the enduring feeling that it was possible to not have much money or education, and yet to be a gentleman to the starched tips of one’s white shirt collar. My grandfather Eugene, the one who bested the natty Mr. LaForte, died when I was in college. He was often stern and always undemonstrative. I loved him blindly. I remember sitting at the kitchen table with him as he read my first newspaper story, a serviceable feature about someone’s hundredth birthday. I watched him run his finger over my name, his name, at the top of the story, and I felt as though I might keel over with happiness.
Perhaps no four people have meant as much to me as they have, not only because they persuaded me that I had a past and a future, but because their affection and pride were rarely tinged with the perils of ownership. They were close enough to feel the satisfaction of blood in my successes, but not so close that my failures made them doubt themselves. This is the familiar dance of the generations, the minuet in which the closer we are the more difficult relations become. We are able to accept, even love, things in our grandparents that we find impossible to accept in their children, our parents. The reverse is true, too: in us they can take the joys without the responsibilities. In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat.
I realized this when I had children of my own. When I began to think of my father as my children’s grandfather, I began to look at him differently. And he began to behave differently. During the summer he took my three-year-old fishing, a pursuit my father finds sacramental. It was a great rite of passage. But the ocean was rough, the boat dipped, plunged, rolled, and the little boy cried and turned pale. His grandfather turned back immediately to the quiet of the bay, not to embarrass the child by putting him ashore, but to find a quiet backwater where he could go crabbing and save face. It was a lovely thing done in a lovely fashion, and I am ashamed to say that I tried to cajole my son to remain out in the rough waters, for two reasons: I had more of my ego tied up in his behavior, and I could remember a small girl who didn’t want to stay at sea, either, but whose father insisted she do so. That father is cut out to be a wonderful grandfather. He is funny, irreverent, rather eccentric, and a bit childish. He is a character.
My grandmother was a character, too. Despite the rosaries and the little clicking sound she made when someone told an off-color joke, she was no saint. I loved her for that. I never tired of hearing the story of my grandmother’s career as a world-class shoppe
r, of how one of my uncles was amazed to find himself first on line outside my grandmother’s favorite department store the day of a big sale, then flabbergasted to hotfoot it up to the menswear department only to discover his mother peeking at him from the end of a rack of suits. Or the one about my parents bringing my grandmother home after a night on the town and trying to convince her that there was no place to get a nightcap at that hour. My grandmother grandly led them to the Irish War Veterans headquarters and knocked on the door. “Hello, Mrs. Quindlen,” said the son of a friend she had known would be in charge that night. He let them in.
Now I am the meat in this family sandwich. Already, my elder son has invested his grandparents with a special aura; they are people who are very close to him in some magical way, but not too close for comfort. They get all the calls on his play telephone. That was what my grandparents always were to me.
“I’m going to be in heaven for my birthday,” my grandmother told her eldest daughter, who had tended her tirelessly as she weakened. “Sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me.” She had buried her husband and two of her children. She left two daughters, four sons, thirty-two grandchildren, twenty-nine great-grandchildren, and so many anecdotes that we were still telling them three hours after we left the cemetery. She always gave me the cherry from her Manhattan. In my mind, she’ll live forever.
A SICK FRIEND
The way he told it, it really was a funny story. He was sitting at the kitchen table, his second beer in hand, talking about having minor surgery. He said the inside of the office looked like a gathering of ghosts, with the doctor and his assistants draped, masked, gowned, gloved. The trays, the floors, the chair, the countertops: everything was swathed in white. And there he was in the middle of it, feeling as though he should have a bell in his hand, so that when he could talk again he could clang the thing and cry “Unclean!”