Gain

  She took undisguised delight in Santa Anna’s words at the fall of Chapultepec. She wrote how the marionette general had learned the error of crossing those who had returned him to power. The Yankees, Santa Anna declared, would storm by force the very batteries of hell. But in J. H. Clare’s editorials, the Yankee didn’t need to storm hell in order to rout it. He had a skeleton key to the back door. “God,” as Santa Anna’s chief of staff declared and Julia concurred, “is a Yankee.”

  American enterprise, according to Julia, already doomed the Mexicans, long before any shot had been fired. Reaper, power loom, hydraulic crane, and steam hammer beat the Catholics, not to mention the mass-produced Colt. She linked destiny and device, for to Julia, ingenuity and democratic expansion were the twinned poles of a single sphere. From this spinning globe would flow beneficence such as only lunatics and prophets had heretofore imagined.

  On slavery, she held enlightened views. A mispricing in the labor auction could only hurt business, in the long run. Bondage’s hidden costs sent false signals to the market that were better corrected than masked. Besides, the chained Negro was simply not necessary. Advances in agricultural machinery would render labor-intensive field work obsolete. At the same time, paying laborers a reasonable wage—made possible by the greater profitability of larger-scale farming—would create a new class of consumer ready to absorb the goods that production unleashed.

  The country needed to think beyond the life of the plantation. And if the South failed to accept the inevitable change, Julia publicly promised that industry would vanquish the wayward agrarian with half the North’s machinery tied behind its back. She predicted, too, that Armageddon’s real beneficiary would be large-scale manufacture. And on this account, she was dead right. After the war, she forced the government to concede her authorship of the plan to lay siege to Vicksburg. J. H. Clare: Savior of the Union.

  At first her columns warned against the rush for gold. Even where that pretty metal leached up to the surface, it offered no real prosperity. But soon Julia realized that the flaxen will-o’-the-wisp, if worthless in itself, sang a siren song that would lure the industrious race deeper into its greater habitation. Those who followed in gold’s wake would then tap the true resources required by destiny.

  Her theory of that destiny took her far afield. With access to brother-in-law Ben’s notes, she wrote the first popular history of the Wilkes expedition. Her book credited the American scientists of that expedition with inventing the theory of evolution. She further accused foreign countries of stealing the charts so carefully assembled during that voyage, and disparaged the U.S. government for letting them do so. She lamented the unfair competition our South Sea whalers faced from the British and Dutch fleets, so handsomely subsidized. She claimed that the voyage unwittingly proved that the Indians were not the original inhabitants of America after all but stray Pacific islanders arriving in a chance gust that they never fully capitalized upon.

  Of national expeditions in general, she declared:

  Our ancestors, pressed by the adversities of their harsh homeland, set their keels upon hostile seas and in the solemn spirit of enterprise chased the westward passage of growth’s glorious orb toward a garden that awaited any who gave themselves to its cultivation . . .

  In like manner, so long as a single plot of soil on the knowable map remains unexplored, no children of commerce and liberty can refrain from contributing to its revelation.

  In short, her nation was a yearning schoolchild, memorizing verse.

  Those children over whose recitations she personally held sway learned early on to keep their iambs piping to her unforgiving tetrameter. None of her four children was allowed to stuff bun in mouth without first committing to heart and spouting couplets to life’s grand gravity.

  Her first surviving boy, Peter, received her endless favor simply for living. His birth ought to have been her death, and she loved him all the more for their mutual reprieve. Ever sickly, Peter Clare hadn’t a prayer of living up to the expectations inflicted on him by maternal love. No better outlet for his accumulated sense of inadequacy existed than business. Even in the solitary nursery, the child’s life was an elaborate game of farmers, grain, hens, and foxes, each needing to be shuttled back and forth across adversity’s stream in the exact order that survival demanded.

  Her other children detested her, each for private reasons. She drove her daughter Emma from the house for marrying a labor reformer. Electa, the unwed poetess, fought a violent, running, but finally unsuccessful battle to escape that same abode. William, the baby, Julia barely acknowledged. He saved up his revenge for over half a century, springing it upon the busy object of his needs only after she died.

  But to Resolve Clare, God could have given no greater gift than this woman. They married in fortune and clung to each other all life long, like flood victims clutching their waterlogged policies. By stroke of incalculable luck, the manufacturer latched on to the one woman of his era who saw that history called out, above all else, for a better cake of soap. In fact, Julia led him to the gradual realization that what was good for soap was good for America. And better still: the other way around.

  A woman stares frozen into the lens. Inert, motionless: a ravishing oval, hair a consummate cowl. The face is an artist's adamantine composite that would perish in unfiltered air. She sweeps one hand to her eyes in a perfect arc, devout and robotic.

  The hand launches into a cosmetic ritual, touching up some eyelash flaw so small it escapes the lens’s notice until her ethereal applicator brush addresses it. The hand disappears, returning to fix the hue, to balance the saturation in her cheeks’ alabaster. Her skin responds, the color of a bloodroot hiding under forest cover.

  The camera peels slowly from the plane of her gaze, revealing that this creature has been gazing into a mirror. Tangent to her own image, her profile solidifies into a pout, a glacial smile. She inclines toward the mirror in a crook almost intimate, almost confiding, flirting with her shadow. Her white sheath falls in a shower of crepe. Her hand snakes back up to appraise a lip, mystify it.

  A disembodied voice—male—speaks from another dimension. The voice is pastoral, reflective, sagacious. “Some things you can only say with the one look that will say them.”

  The hand subsides. She leans in to the mirror a last time, tilting her head a little wryly at the effect: she could now kill anything that breathes. She nods once, a brief “Let’s go” to her reflection. Then she rises and floats out the door of the powder room, a walk as composed as the grace she has worked upon her countenance.

  The camera follows her into an elegant dining room. She slides into a plush booth across from a suited man doing his best not to whimper. They resume the meal that neither has touched, fingering no more than the stemware, tangling their slant glances, interrogating each other with suppressed peeks, a question hanging between them.

  They rise to go. He swings an ankle-length vicuña coat to his shoulders and helps her on with her slight wrap. On the street, after an awkward pause, they pull apart to their separate cars. He succumbs to desperation, a little flick of the forearm, inquiring. She tilts her head and lifts those perfectly penciled eyebrows: who knows? Life is over long before it comes clear.

  The camera catches her in her car, making up again in the rearview mirror. Two stoplights, and she is overhauled. The conversion is complete. Her features soften and flaw; her hair relaxes. Alabaster shifts into Harvest Peach. Somehow she changes clothes from courtesan-spy white to hunter-green flannel.

  She pulls up to a house the epitome of management. Garage opens at the first entreaty of infrared. A girl of eight waits for her in the kitchen, leaps into her arms, nuzzles the face that gives up none of its layered evidence. She hugs back, pure love.

  Brushing back the child’s hair, she scoots on, into the den, leaping onto the denimed armchair quarterback there. Her laughing husband returns her embrace.

  The whole story unfolds in just under thirty seconds. In th
eir rough house clinch, the flannel woman’s purse falls open at her feet. With one hand, the same expert snaking limb, she reaches down and closes the clasp on a cake of blush hiding there.

  The voice-over returns, arch now, everything understood. “Some things you need never say at all.

  “Face by Clarity. For as many looks as you have lives.”

  The specialist in Indy is a joke. His acne-faced intern comes into the room where Laura sits on the examining table in her flimsy hospital gown. He asks all the same questions she’s already answered for the recording nurse. Twenty minutes later, the nervous boy comes back in and starts all over.

  “I’m sorry,” Laura tells him. “You’ve done me already.”

  “Yes,” the boy intern stammers. “The doctor will be right in to see you.”

  She sits on the table forever, shivering in her sheet. Near-naked, in this sterile room, thinking of math. Is math a boy thing? Tim can do it. Maybe even better than his father, and Don has numbers coming out of all orifices. The two of them: batting averages, yards per carry, cruising velocity, kill ratios, angles of fire, square footage of recently conquered territory.

  Girls just don’t learn to think in numbers. Everything about math makes Ellen crazy. She hates the entire concept, more than Laura ever did. Playing right into the whole damn stereotype. Probably thinks some good-looking doc will balance her checkbook for her. Handle all her five-year survival rates.

  The omentum and washings have come back negative. The second time in as many guesses that her hometown woman gyny has rolled wrong. Surely doctors have to do lots of math? Dr. Jenkins had three semesters of calculus just to get through pre-med. Probability and statistics must be Gerber for her. She knows the odds against two ninety-something percents going wrong.

  At least the bank error is in Laura’s favor this time. A massive break. She’s one for two in long shots. But the reversals give her whiplash. Now she doesn’t know what to do with any of her numbers.

  Don’s fed her a small library of books and pamphlets. Quizzes her over the phone, as if knowing the right answers is her only reliable safeguard. What kind of cancer do you have? Serous cystadenocarcinoma. What stage is the cancer? Stage One C. It’s worse than the bloody Baltimore Catechism.

  “How do you know you are a One C?” Don asks.

  “Cancer limited to the ovaries. No ascites. Negative peritoneal washings.”

  “No, no, no.” It makes him nuts. He’d slap her knuckles with a ruler if he had one. “Positive washings would guarantee that you are a One C, minimum. But you’re a One C because the tumor was topical.”

  “Topical?”

  “On the surface. Have they told you your five-year prognosis?”

  But that’s where things get a little tricky. That’s what she hopes the specialist in Indy will clear up. Her five-year chance of survival requires what they call multivariate analysis. Age of patient, cell type, stage, presence of ascites, tumor differentiation and grade, disease volume prior to surgical debulking, amount of subsequent therapy . . .

  She was always too timid to march for Liberation back in the seventies. Back when Liberation was still something you marched for. But she would march for segregated girls’ math classes now, the last decade before the naughts, if separate classes could make girls better with the odds.

  If only numbers were like perfumes. If every probability had its distinct color. That, she could have gotten. Some equation to map cancer recurrence rates onto different scents or shades. She tries on a 90 percent five-year survival. An 80, a 70. Down such a function’s slope, the room browns out from teal to tobacco to tar. The air goes from rose water to chrome to exhaust.

  When the specialist does turn up, he clearly hasn’t seen her chart. The pimpled intern, in tow, shoots her embarrassed looks: I gave it to him. Not my fault. The specialist has written the definitive textbook on ovarian cancer. Definitive today, anyway. The text is called Ovarian Cancer. But the specialist can’t even find Laura’s tissue samples.

  He looks at the intern. He looks at Laura. “Your tissue samples must still be on the way to our lab.”

  Laura says, “Mercy sent them in. Days ago.”

  Some part of the doctor’s brain seems to hear her words. He smiles, without looking at her. He finds the lab work. He explains to her that she has ovarian cancer. That the surgery removed all visible tumor. “The slides show your tumor to be Grade Three.”

  “Dr. Jenkins at Mercy told me I was a One C.”

  He smiles again, patiently. “That was Stage. This is Grade.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, it means the tumor has about a 40 percent chance of recurrence.”

  “No. I mean, how can you tell it’s a Grade Three?”

  “Well, I’ll grant you that the measurement is somewhat subjective. If you give the tissue samples to any three pathologists, they might not all give it the same classification.”

  She has no idea what he thinks she asked. “I mean, what is Grade Three? What does it mean?”

  “Oh.” Now her question is just a nuisance. Barely worth answering. “Grade is an indication of how clean the edge of the tumor is. How well defined. How aggressive.”

  In other words, how long before it takes over.

  The specialist continues, while writing into her file. “You’ll need to do half a year of dual-agent therapy. Taxol plus cisplatin. And by the way, we don’t know for certain whether you are Stage One C. Even though your washings are negative, there is still some chance that you may be Stage Three.”

  Her head throbs; a vein slaps at her temple. She hears in the words a trapdoor opening onto enormous space.

  “How can that be?” “We have no lymph node section. We’d need to test a couple of nodes in order to get a definitive staging.”

  “Can’t you get them?” She doesn’t even know what she’s asking for.

  The idea of a controlled commando raid intrigues him. He considers it, but shakes his head no.

  “We could try to snip them in a laparotomy. But with a cancer like yours, you’ve only got a one-quarter chance of positive nodes. So the risk of another surgery isn’t worth finding out what risk group you’re in.”

  Surely she will drown in numbers. She plugs these new ones into the formulas from Don’s pamphlets. She seems to have a three-quarters chance of having as high as an 80 percent five-year survival rate. But that means a one-quarter chance of having a five-year survival rate as low as one in five. And do you figure that 40 percent recurrence rate, or is that already factored in?

  “Doctor,” she says. Louder than she expected. “What am I looking at?”

  The specialist smiles and flips back over her charts. She assumes they’re her charts, anyway, and not the next patient’s. “The recommended chemotherapy for a Stage Three is six months. Stage Ones usually can get away with half that.” He shrugs. The ball is in her court. How lucky does she feel?

  She agrees to the harsher order. Half a year of hell, to be on the safe side.

  “Fine,” the doctor says. “You’d like to do the six months?” And into her chart he pens, Patient elects for . . . “Is there anything else we can help you with?” he asks.

  “Yes.” Of course not. “What causes . . . why do I have this?”

  “Now, that’s a very natural question. Almost everyone who comes into this office wants to know the answer to that one.” He grins, indulging her understandable human frailty. “I wish I knew the answer. Ovarian cancer does follow at least three distinct hereditary patterns.”

  “No one I’m related to has ever been near it.”

  The specialist shrugs again. The gesture falls on his shoulders like a favorite windbreaker. “There’s also some evidence that provoking agents, either combined with or inducing an alteration in the immune system . . .”

  She tries to pay attention. But she has a fair amount on her mind. She comes back in time to hear him wind up. “The important thing is that you come back in half a year
, after the six doses, for a second-look surgery.”

  “What will that tell?”

  “Well, you may be right. There’s some debate about whether invasive second-look surgery is reliable enough to merit the possible complications.”

  No, she wants to say. No, no, no. It’s like talking to the kids while they’re watching videos.

  She promises to come back in six months. She’d promise anything. She just wants him to leave. Go take care of someone else. She wants to dress, get warm, go home.

  Ken is cowering in the waiting room, treading in ever-tighter circles. He looks up at her as she enters, his face like a knee whacked by a little rubber tomahawk. The next instant, he is all concerned smiles.

  She was against Ken’s driving her out in the first place. But she needed him. He gave her the perfect excuse to turn down Don. Not much of a trade. Now he cringes with concern, between impatience and indifference.

  “Come on,” she says. “Let’s get out of this place.”

  She drags him down the catwalk onto the flyover. They take the glass elevator up to the coded parking lot. The specialty center suddenly strikes her as a giant, state-of-the-art, cancer-fixing factory that enjoys a regional monopoly. The medical equivalent of one of those assembly lines in one of those constantly breaking 16 mm films they used to show in tenth-grade social science.

  Why did she have to drag all the way out here? Sitting there in that sheet, and the specialist didn’t even look at her abdomen. Couldn’t they have done this by fax? By Second Day Air?

  “Can we do a little sight-seeing?” she asks Ken. “While we’re here?”

  “Honey. It’s Indianapolis.”

  The difference between Don and Ken flashes upon her. Don used to say, Get real, honey. Ken likes to say, Honey, get real. Seemed like a small improvement to her, once.

  She makes him drive around the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Past the Benjamin Harrison Home. Lockerbie Square. The fake-Gothic cathedral. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Hall of Fame Museum, which perks him up a little. He actually gets out of the car for that one.