For once, she didn’t understand. My tears were for sorrow, for the loss of my father, but for happiness, too, to be the one Mumma chose.
“When I was just a newlywed,” Mumma reminded us, “and didn’t know as much as I do now about how to be married.”
7.
Mumma Has a Friend
It was at the April garden club meeting of 1981 that Mumma first heard the news. They had asked her to be treasurer, again, so she didn’t have the option of missing the monthly meetings. Jonquil Cartenbury, who alternated between being the elected president and the elected vice president, was not present, and this was entirely unexpected, since, as Mumma often reported to us, “That Jonquil Cartenbury just loves queening it over those women. They think she’s an intellectual. They think she’s goodness itself. They think they know her but they don’t have the slightest idea the kind of Machiavelli that woman is. They don’t even know how lucky they are to have me there to keep an eye on her and keep her in check.”
The Cartenburys had moved out to Wampanoag as year-round residents not long after Mumma and Pops did. “The woman is my doppelgänger,” Mumma complained, when she heard of the move. Pops was of a different opinion. “Francis Cartenbury wants to go into politics and Wampanoag will give him a good voter base. People around here—and I don’t mean summer people, Rida, I mean everyone else—they know the Cartenbury name.”
“Or nemesis,” Mumma continued. “She wishes.”
“He might make a good DA,” Pops allowed. “He’s smart, and pretty honest, and having been born to money gives him a better chance than most not to be corruptible. I’ll vote for him.”
“I’ll vote for him to go back to Boston,” Mumma offered, “if he takes her with him.”
“Aren’t you being a little narrow-minded?” Pops asked, and Mumma, who had a lot of respect for some of Pops’ opinions, asked, “Do you think I am? Narrow-minded? Because I don’t want to be that kind of woman, you know that, Spencer, or that kind of person either.”
In Wampanoag, the Cartenburys winterized his family’s summer cottage out on Beach Road, a low, gray-shingled house with a broad porch looking down to the water. Jonquil constructed elaborate gardens, in beds that spread back from the curved entryway to surround the house. During the summers we would sometimes be at the same events as the Cartenburys and their boys, but during the off-season we almost never saw them, since the boys went first to a private school in Hyannis, and then, as soon as it was possible, to boarding school. Only Mumma and Mrs. Cartenbury ran into one another. “We pretended to talk about the price of lettuce,” Mumma might report, “and she asked after Grandmother’s health, as if she knew something I didn’t, some big piece of bad news that your grandmother asked her not to tell me.” Even when Meg ran off to Mexico to marry Jack Cartenbury and soon after, when she ran off to Mexico again to divorce him, the relationship between the two mothers did not change.
They lived parallel lives, Mumma and Jonquil Cartenbury, running against each other for a garden club office, or a position on the hospital auxiliary, where Jonquil Cartenbury was regularly elected and Mumma never. “She’s no more than a blip on my radar,” Mumma reported, and she did vote for Francis Cartenbury, who was, as Pops had predicted, a good public servant. “Or maybe a mote in my eye. No, really, she’s a gnat; most of the time I can barely see her.”
But at that garden club meeting, when they were women in their fifties, Mumma noticed that Jonquil Cartenbury had absented herself, and she asked someone about that. “What is so important that she can’t be here?” Mumma asked.
“You haven’t heard,” the woman answered.
Mumma didn’t bother to affirm it. If she’d heard, she wouldn’t have asked. She waited.
“Rida hasn’t heard,” the woman said to someone nearby.
“That’s odd,” the someone remarked. “Don’t you think that’s odd?”
Mumma continued to wait. They were talking in the kind of low voices used for serious gossip, for marital infidelity gone public, the birth of brain-damaged children, bankruptcy, drug addiction.
Looking carefully around as if to be sure they spoke privately, although everybody except Mumma apparently already knew, the first woman told Mumma, “She had a Bad Diagnosis.”
Mumma said nothing.
“Her Breast,” the woman said, confidentially. “The right one.”
“When?” Mumma asked.
“A Biopsy,” the woman continued.
Mumma repeated herself. “When?”
“And if it’s Malignant…a Mastectomy,” the woman said, with a significant nodding of her head. Then she relented and told Mumma, “The doctor just told her two days ago. She’s barely had time to think, poor woman. To decide if she—to think about what she should do—if it’s as bad as—if they tell her it’s Bad News. Because sometimes they’re wrong, you know. And then where would she be if she’d run off and had…a Mastectomy?”
“What does she say?” Mumma asked. She didn’t much care for Jonquil Cartenbury, as everybody knew, but she wouldn’t wish cancer on anybody. Life was hard enough without cancer.
“We wouldn’t ask her!” They were shocked. “We don’t want to intrude.”
“We’re not that insensitive!” they said. “We sent her notes.”
“To assure her that Louise has agreed to take over the vice-presidency.”
“Only temporarily, of course. Unless—”
“And we sent flowers. Not houseplants, they take too much attention and who can say how much time she’ll have? For houseplants, you know, so we sent cut flowers.”
The Garden Club of Wampanoag held its meetings at the Falmouth public library, in a paneled room with chairs set in rows facing a long table at the front. At the conclusion of the meetings, the women would leave their seats to gather around card tables at the rear, where whichever volunteers had come to the top of the roster set out their sliced cakes and crustless sandwiches, urns of tea and coffee, pastries from the one French pastry shop in business on the lower Cape at that time.
Mumma didn’t stay for tea that day, or for her monthly efforts to improve the thinking and maybe even the voting habits of her fellow members. She went directly to her car and drove back into Wampanoag, where she turned on to Beach Road and drew the Cadillac up in front of Jonquil Cartenbury’s low gray house. It was too early in April to expect to find the mistress at work in the garden, and she didn’t. But it was midafternoon, so she didn’t expect to find her in her peignoir, which she did.
It was a real peignoir Jonquil Cartenbury wore, a honeymoon peignoir of white lacy stuff that flowed all around the slender blonde woman. “Faded blonde, but still,” Mumma admitted. “She always was a pretty woman, and she’s kept herself up. She’s kept her looks, Jonquil has, and it can’t have been easy.”
When Mumma was shown by the housekeeper into the conservatory, where Jonquil Cartenbury had stretched herself out on a wicker chaise with a pile of magazines on the table beside her, her hostess sat up straighter, arranging the filmy skirts of the peignoir around her legs, but seemed to address her own ankles, “How very good you shouldn’t have—” Then she looked up. “Is that Rida?”
“Who did you expect?” Mumma asked. “Not one of those garden club friends of yours I don’t think. They’re all very well and good, but they’re at a loss when it comes to real life.”
“What a surprise!” Jonquil said, sitting up still straighter, setting her feet on the floor. “May I offer you some tea? I think I will have a cup after all, Teresa, and—some sandwiches? You just love my little cucumber sandwiches, Rida. Don’t try to deny it. I’ve seen you gobble them up. Tell me everything that happened at the meeting,” Jonquil Cartenbury said, rising to change seats and sit upright, hands folded in her lap and a bright smile on her face.
Mumma knew she was going to have to wait until the tea table had been wheeled in and she had been given a full teacup and passed a small plate of sandwiches, so she recapped the meeting even t
hough it was clear that despite her bright-eyed expression, Jonquil was not paying attention. “Well, imagine,” Jonquil said, whenever Mumma left space for a response. “Imagine that.”
Finally they were alone and Jonquil Cartenbury was making no effort to drink her tea or even nibble at the one tiny triangle of sandwich she had taken, so Mumma could ask, “Who is your doctor and what did he say to you? What exactly, I mean.”
“I don’t think—”
Mumma brushed any protests aside. “I’m here to help.”
“I don’t think I want—”
“I didn’t say you did. I don’t think you do, but I’m here anyway. What are the facts, Jonquil? Spit it out.”
Bullied, Jonquil Cartenbury admitted it. There was a lump. She had waited and waited, but it hadn’t gone away and now the doctor…In her right breast. There, if Rida insisted on knowing the precise and exact location. She was going in for a biopsy. The day after tomorrow. To see what it was.
“Is it growing?” Mumma asked.
“Rida! How would I know that!”
“If it were me, I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off it,” Mumma said, taking another sandwich. She didn’t like to admit it, but Jonquil was right: She did love those little cucumber triangles, the cucumbers sliced paper-thin, the wheat bread crustless and brushed with sweet butter, just the lightest salting and even less white pepper. “You must be terrified,” she observed.
“It’s only a biopsy,” Jonquil protested.
“I would be,” Mumma said. “Cancer’s a horrible disease, even if nobody wants to admit that it exists.”
“Well, why anybody would want to talk about it…I can understand why nobody wants to talk about it,” Jonquil said. “I am certainly hoping I don’t have it, I promise you that.”
“How is Francis taking this? I’m not sure how Spencer would react.”
“Oh, I haven’t told Francis. I don’t want to worry him unnecessarily.”
Mumma froze, the sandwich held suspended between her upper and lower teeth. She didn’t move for a full five seconds, then she bit down thoughtfully and set the uneaten portion gently back on her plate.
Jonquil told her, “Francis is a man, and that means he’s not one bit happy to hear about women’s problems. I won’t bother him unless…” And then, as if she were an inflated balloon let loose to rocket across the room, the air went out of Jonquil Cartenbury. She hunched over her knees, arms wrapped around her stomach. “What am I going to do?” she whispered. “If—if I really—”
“Probably you’ll cry a lot,” Mumma predicted. “But you have to do what the doctor tells you. You can’t pretend it’s not happening, not if you want to survive. You’ll have to—” But she stopped talking because Jonquil was waving her hands in the air, either dismissing Mumma’s words, or pleading with her not to utter them.
“I’m too young,” Jonquil whispered. “I’m only fifty-five, that’s too young. Isn’t it?”
“I always thought you were older than me,” Mumma objected.
“Really? How old are you?” Jonquil asked, perking up a little.
“Fifty-six,” Mumma admitted. Then she said, “I’ll go with you.”
“Where?”
“To the hospital.”
“It’s in Hyannis,” Jonquil protested. “It’s overnight,” but Mumma had made up her mind. “You won’t want to be alone. I’ll be there in the morning too, while they’re operating.”
Jonquil tried to decline the offer. “That’s too much trouble for you, Rida, with your busy life and all.”
“You’ll feel better, knowing I’m there,” Mumma assured her, contrary to any evidence.
So Mumma drove Jonquil Cartenbury over to Hyannis the next afternoon, and stayed with her while she filled out forms, and went with her up to her single room, and sat with her while she swallowed the pills that constituted all she was supposed to ingest before her early morning procedure. She did not visit Jonquil the next morning, but she sat in the waiting room—she had brought paperwork and a book to read, from six until ten, at which time the doctor emerged from behind a door, looking for Jonquil’s family, to tell them the bad news.
“You’re supposed to tell me,” Mumma said. “I’m with her.”
He recognized authority when he saw it, so he reported that it was in fact malignant and he himself would recommend a double radical mastectomy. If it were his wife, he assured Mumma, that is what he would advise her to do. The cancer, while not in evidence in the left breast, was of a type that spread rapidly and was in its later stages peculiarly resistant to both radiation and chemotherapy. He didn’t trust it not to have already spread. Two lymph nodes on the right side were already impacted.
Mumma listened, with her arms folded protectively over her own breasts, as he made his diagnosis and recommendation. (“Not that I didn’t trust the man. He had a good reputation and he was sympathetic. He said that if he thought there were decent odds in its favor, he would be recommending a less drastic response, but…I knew what that but meant.”)
“Where is Mr. Cartenbury?” the doctor asked Mumma then.
“He’s a district attorney so he’s probably in court.”
“The children?”
“Boys, both of them.”
He nodded. “Family?”
“In Virginia, but I don’t know if her parents are still living. I don’t know if she has a sister, or cousins—”
“Because someone should be with her when she comes out of the anesthetic. To help her think about the decision.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” Mumma said.
“Ordinarily a friend isn’t…not being a relative, you see…”
“I’m not a friend,” Mumma assured him. “I’m just—I’m here with her. Does she know?”
“Not yet. I’ll tell her when she’s compos mentis.”
Mumma didn’t know compos mentis, never having taken Latin, but she could guess. At home, when she asked Pops what it meant and he told her, she announced to him that she’d gotten the gist of it, whether she knew Latin or not.
“I’d better go see her,” Mumma decided. “What room?”
Who knows what Mumma thought about, sitting in Jonquil Cartenbury’s hospital room waiting for her to wake up enough to recognize more than the little paper cup of water she occasionally sipped from. “I waited,” was all she ever said about it. It was a couple of hours before Jonquil really surfaced, and the confusion in her eyes was swiftly replaced by memory, and fear. Then she saw Mumma.
Jonquil Cartenbury looked terrible, that midday; that was all Mumma said about it. She didn’t look like herself, and it was more than lack of makeup. “I should call Francis,” Mumma said, as soon as she saw that Jonquil knew who she was, who they both were. And where. And why. “You’ll want him here when you see the doctor.”
“No. No, please don’t. I don’t—He doesn’t—Sit back down, Rida. You could stay. You said you’d be here,” Jonquil reminded her. “Francis is a man, and you know how they are about hospitals.”
“He should be here,” Mumma insisted.
“It’s fine,” Jonquil Cartenbury responded, and motored the bed so she was sitting up. “I’m fine. You’ll see, I’ll talk with the doctor and be home by four. You’ll let me stop off at the market, won’t you? Everything’s going to be just fine now,” she announced. “Just hand me my purse, would you, Rida? I know that you think concern for appearances makes a person shallow, but I happen to believe a woman owes it to the world to always be at her best.”
“Putting her best face forward,” said Mumma, and Jonquil Cartenbury did something she had never in their whole long enmity done before: She laughed at one of Mumma’s jokes.
Mumma knew then how perilous was the woman’s mental state. So she didn’t tell her the bad news she already knew, thinking that a last hour of hope was not to be begrudged, not to anybody. Mumma prided herself on not being so small-minded that she couldn’t lie for a good cause.
“Wo
n’t Francis be wondering where you are?” she asked. Jonquil shook her head and smiled brightly. Mumma grew suspicious. “Where did you say you were going to be last night, since you weren’t at home?”
“Oh, that’s not a problem. Francis keeps very odd hours. He works so hard, he can never keep up with the criminal classes, you know how they are. You read the papers, Rida, you have to know what people are turning into, what the forces of law and order are up against. Francis has his own rooms, of course. So he won’t disturb me coming in late, working late, leaving early. He likes to eat breakfast at Maggie’s, with people from the office; they have their own table and they start right in on the day’s work, even if it’s terribly early. I don’t think people understand how hard public servants work. Tonight, however, we’re engaged for dinner. So I have to be home by four, and I do need to do a little marketing because on weekends Francis likes to breakfast at home. Together,” she added, lest the separate bedrooms give Mumma any ideas about the Cartenbury marriage, as if she had already heard Mumma’s opinion, which began with the declaration that “Single beds are bad enough, even in the same room.”
Mumma gave Jonquil Cartenbury her privacy with the doctor, to hear the bad news. They left the hospital together and stopped by the grocery store, where Jonquil waited in the car while Mumma purchased her groceries. Then Mumma dropped Jonquil off at the low, gray-shingled house. Jonquil stepped tenuously out of the Cadillac, and Mumma took her overnight case out of the trunk, to carry it inside for her. Jonquil was carrying the bag of groceries.
“I surely do thank you,” Jonquil said, bending her mouth into a smile shape. She still looked like someone walking away from a train wreck. Or a bombed building. Or someone who had crawled out of a collapsed mine shaft.