Ben tested his brother’s gaze. There he saw all the words of any possible challenge, already heard, discounted, and dismissed. Merely giving suit to his case would lose it. His brother waited for him to choose: defeat by silence or the humiliation of speech.
Would not, Benjamin risked insisting, would not an investment in his education be worth something? Wasn’t knowledge the principal from which all other interest flowed?
He appealed to Samuel, the weaker businessman. Wasn’t knowledge of God’s creation the reason why we store up riches here at all? As merchant had fathered manufacturer, so should manufacture father scholarship. Wasn’t that God’s hope for us here on this earth, His laboratory?
Samuel demurred.
Resolve shut the tome and restored it to its shelf. Knowledge. Your pearl of great price. We only sent you to university in the first place in the mistaken belief that the cost of your edification would someday cease to be a drain and begin to return something to the family’s current account.
Ben set his bloodless face into a mask. What, then, do you propose I do with myself?
The question was academic, the answer available long before education. What does life ever propose that one do, but come work?
S, R, & B CLARE
SOAPS, CANDLES, & ALL THINGS THERETO BELONGING
JUSTICE & SPRING STREETS, ROXBURY
HE THAT HATH CLEAN HANDS SHALL GROW STRONGER AND STRONGER
She’s still asking that first question, years later, when she wakes with tubes all over her. Which side is the cancer on? As if it mattered. As if Don or the doctor or anyone else cares. As if her ovaries know her right side from her left.
But her right side knows why her left asks. She woke in a panic, not for the disaster already handed to her, but for the one still hidden. Cancer: okay. She half expected it, going in. Too clean; too reassuring. A 2 percent chance of catastrophe.
She remembers bobbing up from the truth serum milkshake—thiopental sodium, fentanyl, tubocurarine, halothane—in a state perilously close to knowledge. The concoction left her with a continuous sense of micro-déjà vu. She heard the word “cancer” a good two seconds before the surgeon pronounced it. Maybe it was still the drugs, but she found herself thinking, “All right. I can deal with this. I’m an adult.” And for a second or two, she thought it might even be true.
She digested the horror with all the ease of downing nouvelle cuisine. It’s the aperitif she gags on. She woke from her long nausea sure she’d fallen into one of those amputation stories where they misread the X-ray and take the wrong leg. Laura Somebody-else, a stranger’s chart accidentally switched with her own. While she let her attention slip, ignorant medical personnel were busy committing colossal mistakes on her.
All the magazines agree: health care is now the patient’s business. Responsibility falls squarely on the care receiver. And there she was, sleeping on the job.
Her nose now sprouts a tube, like one of Tim’s Star Wars creatures. It itches; she picks feebly at it like some declawed cat. She vomits up the last of the anesthesia, convinced that they’ve taken the good cyst and left the bad one inside her. She badgers the nurses until one of them checks the chart. “Mrs. Bodey, everything was bad. They’ve taken everything.”
Someone sponges her off. Another gets her into a clean gown. Still a third—or maybe it’s always the same nurse, recycled—hooks her up to sugar water and electrolytes, with a little anti-nausea chaser. Order of narcotic on the side. Self-administering, they call it. Hit this button every time you think you need some morphine.
She pretty much keeps her thumb locked on the joystick. Like Tim strafing Warsaw. But some sadist has disabled the flow, rigged it to deliver a new trickle only at ten-minute intervals. Patient-administered, but machine-approved.
Whenever the machine thinks she’s ready for another thimbleful, it beeps. After an hour, the beep itself is enough to give her a little imitation rush. But the rushes don’t last. She asks a nurse to check if there’s been some mix-up. “Are you sure there’s really morphine in the bag? I don’t know. Maybe it’s 7022’s supper.”
The smallest movement makes her wish for death. She never imagined that pain on this scale existed.
She keeps asking anyone in white what she’s supposed to do now. But apparently she’s just supposed to wait. “Just rest up,” someone tells her. “The doctor will come explain everything tomorrow.”
After two hours, they come force her to walk. Something about her staples, possible peritonitis. She can make no more than token motions. Get upright, grab the rolling IV hat tree. Gag, retch, collapse, prop herself back up, take two baby steps. Mother, may I? Yes you may.
After four hours, they try her again. This time, she can get to the door of the room and take three steps down the hall before circling back around and crashing.
The kids drift in. She tries to rally herself, joke with them. “Your mother the cancer patient. You’ll never have to turn in homework on time again.”
Don’s there, too. Every ten minutes, she tells him he can go home if he wants. Every time the morphine machine beeps. Finally he does. And finally the pain goes home a little, too.
Long after nightfall, she has the impression of Ken hovering by the bed. Saying what he always says: “I can’t stay long.”
Laura tells him what she always tells him. Go before anyone sees you. A few minutes later, the visit vanishes into hallucination.
She lurches asleep. In her dream, Nan, Ellen’s dead girlfriend, comes back home to get her annual height measurement. Her mother stands her up against the inside of the kitchen doorframe and makes another pencil mark. Only this one is lower than last year’s.
They wake her up every couple of hours to get her vitals and check the catheter.
The next morning she waits some more. Waiting: the one skill you get worse at with practice. At eight, the nurses tell her, “The doctor usually makes rounds at nine.” At ten, they say, “She’s sometimes as late as six or seven.” Someone checks; Dr. Jenkins is operating again today. Somewhere, another woman is waking up surprised.
They give her a plastic respiration toy. An accordion plug that bobs up and down when she blows into it. She is supposed to blow into it as often as she can. Something about pressure on the diaphragm, keeping her insides from gunking up. It makes her think of those carnival tests of strength.
Don takes off from work to come by. “So, what’s happening?”
“I’ve got cancer,” she tells him. “That’s what’s happening.”
“That’s all? That’s all you know? I have some questions here. When is the doctor supposed to come?”
“Somewhere between three hours ago and eight hours from now.”
“I’m going to go find someone who can give us a little satisfaction.”
Laura groans. “What do you mean, Don? ‘Can I speak with your manager, please?’” The way it works in his organization. In all the organizations he is used to dealing with.
“Yeah. What’s wrong with that?”
She says nothing. She squeezes the button. The button does nothing.
“You think this place isn’t a business?” Don asks her.
“Not that kind of business.”
“Not what kind of business?”
Not the kind that cares what its customers think, she would say. If she cared enough to say it.
They throw silence back and forth at each other until the gyny surgeon comes in. She has traded her scrubs this morning for a short, canary-yellow dress. Gorgeous, shocking, in this ward. Cheery to the point of obscene. Laura has forgotten that yellow exists. She wonders if maybe it’s okay to be reminded.
She looks over at Don. He’s got this helpless, fretting look on his face. Fighting off the salivation reflex. Poor man. Life is way too complex for some souls. He’s going to die without ever knowing what hit him.
“How’s it going?” Dr. Jenkins greets Laura as if they’re old sewing circle friends. Which they are, now.
/> Laura tries to grin. She holds up the morphine button, toasting with it as if it were stemware topped off with champagne.
“Good. Let’s just have a look at that belly.” Jenkins eyes Don. “Could you step outside a moment?”
Laura snorts. Mirth rips through her, canceling all pleasure.
The wound is fine. Hurting like hell. Doing what comes naturally. The doctor fetches Don, who comes back in without a peep.
“Well, the operation went very well,” the beautiful canary says. “No visible signs of malignancy remaining in the abdomen.”
“You mean she’s clean?” Don asks.
Dr. Jenkins smiles at him. This semester’s precocious kid, trying to trip her up with the old teaser about the three travelers splitting the hotel room and losing a dollar somewhere along the way.
“There’s no visible tumor left after debulking. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t occult disease loose somewhere in the system.”
Laura isn’t keen on having her system referred to in the third person while she’s still in the room. And occult disease doesn’t sound all that hot to her either. She’s still not crazy about the ordinary kind.
“How can you tell?” Don asks.
“Tell what? If the disease has gotten loose somewhere else? I took the omentum and peritoneal washings. They’re in the lab right now. If they come back positive, then we can figure that some cells have gotten loose.”
Laura’s eyes close. “I have an omentum?”
“Not anymore.” Dr. Jenkins laughs.
“Do you expect them to come back positive?” Don sounds like Laura’s lawyer.
“I think it’s likely.”
“How likely?”
“I’d say there’s a 90 percent chance that one or the other will come back positive.”
Laura feels the thought flash through Don’s mind. But he declines to make the kill. Probably can’t kill anything yellow. Instead, he asks, “You’re sure you got the whole tumor?”
Massively professional: “Quite sure.”
“Say the washings come back positive,” Don says. As if he knows what “washings” are. Maybe it’s just as well. Left to herself, Laura would not ask anything. This way, she learns more than she wants, and doesn’t have to take the blame for discovering.
“Let’s say some cells are loose,” Don says. “What does that mean?”
“That means the cancer is Stage Three.”
“And if not?”
“Then it’s a Stage One. Stage One C, technically.”
“What happened to Stage Two?”
The man is hopeless. Laura bleats. But she still doesn’t open her eyes.
When she does, Don is sitting across from her vacuum drain, scribbling everything down into a legal pad the color of the surgeon’s dress. Asking how to spell “serous cystadenocarcinoma.” Trying to keep his eyes off the pretty hemline. Poor soul. She’s going to have to remind him, soon, tomorrow. They’re less than friends, now. The contract’s been canceled. He owes her nothing.
Jill Jenkins leans lightly against the empty bed next to Laura’s. She seems to be telling Laura to wait some more. Longer. Wait for the lab tests. Wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow: the only lever long enough to dislodge today.
“You’ll need a few months of chemotherapy,” the doctor says. A handful of system-wide poisonings. Half a year of vomiting and hair loss. “The specialist in Indy will decide what chemicals you will get. How much, and how often. Maybe your doses will include that new drug everyone’s so excited about,” Jenkins chirps. “The one they’re making from tree bark. One hundred percent natural.”
Laura can’t keep from staring at this woman’s legs, either. They remind her of the waxed fruit in that upscale food boutique in Next Millennium’s office park. A dollar an apple, catering to young professionals who would never stoop to anything so déclassé as packing a lunch. How old can Dr. Jenkins be? How long will she stay ripe without refrigeration? How old should you be before you get really sick?
Outside, a freight runs past the new hospital parking expansion whose construction Laura fought. The train heads north, through the rotting neighborhoods Millennium never deals with. She begins to imagine herself in another life, indigent, penniless, victimized. But well.
Silence interrupts her fantasy. Jenkins has stopped explaining things. The doctor is waiting.
Laura hears herself speak, from inside a shortwave radio set. “What is the cause?” She cannot say of ovarian cancer. She cannot say of this. “Is it genetic?”
She just wants to know how much of this is her fault. Whether she should have done something. Might still do something. Whether she would have had to go through this even if she lived better. Whether Ellen.
“Sometimes.” The doctor frowns. “Nobody really knows for certain.”
Laura feels Don’s fury, even through her sedatives.
“Which is it? Sometimes, or Nobody knows?”
“There was nothing wrong with me,” Laura interrupts. “A little tenderness.”
No warning signs at all. How could that be? she wants to ask. But she doesn’t know what a warning sign looks like. Something like in the midnight reruns, when the pretty girl coughs while skipping rope, which means she’ll be history by the next commercial break.
She wants to ask, How long do I have to live? But the words seem rude. You can’t embarrass the physician that way.
“What are my numbers?” she says, instead. The phrase sounds calm. Almost sophisticated, once it’s out in the open.
“Laura. Listen. People with ovarian cancer die of ovarian cancer.”
What does that mean? Can, might, must? She tries to remember what exactly she needed to know. Should she quit her job? Forget about building that deck? Get the gutters cleared out as quickly as possible?
Don starts asking about prognosis. About five-year survival rates if she’s a One versus if she’s a Three. How does he know to ask these things? He must have prepared. He must have expected the worst, long before she knew what the worst was.
“Is there anything we can read that might help?” The man sounds like a brownnosing student. The topic interests him way too much. Laura doesn’t want to read about it. She just wants it gone.
The doctor summons a nurse, who produces a couple of pathetic hospital pamphlets: Diet and Cancer. Chemotherapy and You. Dr. Jenkins also recommends a memoir written by a celebrity actress, one that sold well, even before the comedienne’s death.
Disgust plows Don’s forehead. A comedienne’s memoir: worse than worthless. They need facts. Medicine.
“So.” The surgeon taps Laura’s chart. “Anything else I can answer for you?”
What do you mean, else?
“Are we asking the right questions?” Don asks. “Is there anything we should ask you that we haven’t?”
Dr. Jenkins grins again. “You’re doing just fine. I would give your questions . . . an A minus.” She excuses herself. She leaves the room, a blazing flower, off to give more people the same message.
As soon as the surgeon disappears, Don starts in. He’s got everything planned. Indianapolis. Medline searches. Second opinions. Dietary supplements. Second-look surgery.
“Don.” Go home, she wants to say. I can’t deal with you and this at the same time. “Don. I appreciate what you’re trying to do. But I’m not your wife.”
He flings his hands up—fine. He holds that wronged gesture in the air, as if he’s playing a tree in the grade-school play. When he brings his paws back down, it’s to shove the scribbled-over legal pad into his attaché case and close it quietly. He rises, chilly, at a great distance.
“You’re still the mother of my children.”
When we devote our Youth to God
’Tis Pleasing in his eyes
A flour Offered in the bud
Is no vain saCrafiCe
Eliz. Clare daughter of Samuel and Do. Fox
Clare wrought this Work in the yr 1843
Soap’s summons c
ut into Benjamin like a scythe loose among the crops of high autumn. He moved into the Roxbury works shortly thereafter, attacking agricultural chemistry with an ingenuity that hoped to wipe out his personal debenture forever. To settle education’s bill and balance his ledger, Ben deeded his life to the company until such day as the lucrative virgin secret at last surrendered itself to research.
He studied the boilings, sped the splittings, and rang the changes. He calibrated his test instruments to match the sensitivity of Ennis’s eye and tongue. His botanical notebooks now swirled with chemical radicals. He sketched, in symbols, those metallic salts that formed when alkali worked upon fatty bodies. Every mark he made in his private papers became company property.
Benjamin, who still followed the New England horticultural journals, alerted his brothers that a local competitor, Haggerston, was going about claiming that a mixture of 2 lbs. of his whale-oil soap with 15 gallons of water provided a most efficacious solution for ridding the world of the sawflies that infested roses. Thaddeus W. Harris’s Treatise on the Insects of Massachusetts, Injurious to Vegetation brought the bug-killer to wide attention:
Mr. Haggerston finds that it effectually destroys many kinds of insects; and he particularly mentions plant-lice of various kinds, red spiders, canker-worms, and a little jumping insect, which has lately been found quite as hurtful to rose-bushes as the slugs or young of the saw-fly . . .
Harris urged readers to wage an all-out war on caterpillars: men in the front lines and women in supply and logistics; their weapons, brooms and pails; their ammunition, soapsuds.
[I]f every man is prompt to do his duty, I venture to predict that the enemy will be completely conquered in less time than it will take to exterminate the Indians in Florida.
A soap that could double as agricultural pesticide: Benjamin alerted his brothers, sporting the funeral pall of one who has just spied out his own obsolescence. But a few hasty tests confirmed that Haggerston’s soap in solution could do nothing that Clare’s could not.