A Civil Action (3 page)

They lived in a small apartment in the Boston area until, in 1965, they began looking for a house. They had often visited Woburn, where Anne’s best friend from childhood, Carol Gray, had moved with her family several years earlier. Carol and her husband had told a real estate agent that they wanted a house in the country, something close to Boston but with plenty of trees and some open spaces, and the agent had taken them to eastern Woburn.

In the mid-1960s, east Woburn had a pleasing rural aspect. The Aberjona River, a narrow, placid stream, only a few feet wide and waist-deep, ran through a marshland of reeds, cattails, and grassy tussocks. Much of the land on either side of the river valley had been farmed, and several small farms, an orchard or two, and open fields still remained. Along the river itself, at the edge of the marshes, grew copses of maple, oak, and hickory.

To Anne and Charles, east Woburn seemed like a fine place to settle down. Anne particularly liked the Pine Street neighborhood, not far from where Carol lived. It was a small enclave of about a dozen streets, a mile and a half from the center of town. It occupied the ridge of a low bluff that sloped gently to the east, to the marshlands of the Aberjona. The streets were quiet and shaded by trees, the homes modest, many of them constructed before World War II. No one with money to burn would look for a house in the Pine Street neighborhood, yet once people settled there they seemed to stay for a long while. Charles found the house, a ranch-style built in the early 1950s. It had three small bedrooms and a large picture window in the living room. The shingle siding needed paint, the kitchen floor needed new linoleum, but the price was only $17,900.

Once the Andersons settled in, they began attending Trinity Episcopal Church. Reverend Young was delighted to have new members join his flock, youthful ones at that. Charles and the minister were about the same age and they quickly became friends. In a short while, Charles began serving on the church’s board, and then, at Young’s request, as treasurer of the church.

Jimmy Anderson returned home from the hospital in mid-February. Some of the Andersons’ Pine Street neighbors came to visit, bearing casseroles and baked goods. One woman, Kay Bolster, who lived a block away on Gregg Street, mentioned to Anne that two families on either side of her each had a young boy with leukemia. Kay thought Anne might find some solace in talking to other parents who were going through the same experience. One of the mothers, Joan Zona, was a regular customer at the beauty parlor where Kay worked. Joan was a warm, outgoing woman, said Kay, although she had the impression that Joan was having a difficult time coping with her son’s illness. The boy, whose name was Michael, was not doing well in treatment. The other family, the Nagles, Kay knew only in passing, although from what she had heard it appeared the Nagle boy was doing well.

Shortly after Kay’s visit, Anne phoned Joan Zona. Joan seemed eager for company and invited Anne over for coffee. They spent two hours together that first day. When Anne left, she and Joan hugged each
other. The visits and phone conversations with Joan soon became part of Anne’s daily life. “Joan and I sort of hung on to each other,” recalled Anne some years later.

Michael Zona, the youngest of Joan’s four children, was being treated at the Children’s Hospital in Boston on a protocol similar to Jimmy’s. He had been diagnosed ten months before Jimmy, and Joan knew all about the hospital routines, the drugs and radiation, the side effects, knowledge that she readily shared with Anne.

One thing after another befell young Michael Zona, like toppling dominoes, and it seemed that nothing could intervene to save him. His problems had started with a mild cough that had gotten progressively worse. The family doctor had treated him with cough syrup and antibiotics, but he had failed to improve. One night when Michael complained that he couldn’t breathe, Joan took him to the emergency room. At first, the doctors thought he was suffering from bronchial asthma. Then they discovered a tumor the size of an olive in the mediastinum, a lymphosarcoma, between his right and left lungs. He underwent radiation treatments. A bone marrow biopsy later revealed that he had acute lymphocytic leukemia, the same disease Jimmy Anderson had.

Anne thought it strange that three cases of leukemia should occur in the same neighborhood, within a few blocks of each other. She wondered if it was coincidence, or if a virus of some sort was circulating. Dr. Truman, she remembered, had mentioned that some cancer researchers suspected a virus might cause childhood leukemia. Although she knew that was an unproven hypothesis, she and Carol Gray spent hours speculating about it.

Anne mentioned her suspicions to Joan Zona, too. Joan agreed that three cases of leukemia in the same small neighborhood did seem unusual, but she did not dwell on the subject the way Anne did. She was too preoccupied with Michael’s downward spiral to care about much else. In June 1972, while Jimmy was in remission and his prospects looked good, Michael Zona relapsed. His doctors attempted to induce a second remission with an experimental drug called Adriamycin, a highly toxic drug that causes deterioration of the heart muscles at levels near the therapeutic dose for leukemia. The therapy worked, and by July Michael was again in remission. It was short-lived,
however. In late October, with his blood counts still alarmingly low, Michael’s doctor performed a bone marrow aspiration and found that 25 percent of the cells were blasts. Michael had relapsed for a second time. The cycle began again: another protocol was attempted, and yet another remission was induced. But the chances for Michael’s long-term survival were not good.

During a visit to the clinic at Massachusetts General that spring, Anne told Dr. Truman about the Zonas and the Nagles. Wasn’t it unusual, she asked, that there were three cases in the same neighborhood?

Truman listened in his polite, attentive manner, tall frame slightly stooped, but he would admit later that he did not give Anne’s question any serious consideration. He’d learned over the years that parents of children with leukemia tended to develop a heightened awareness of the illness. Everywhere they turned it seemed they encountered a reference to it, or someone else whose child had it. To Truman, this was not an uncommon psychological phenomenon. Many years later, in a deposition, Truman recalled his reaction to Anne’s queries: “My response was that on the basis of the number of children with leukemia that I was aware of at the time, and considering the population of the city of Woburn, I did not think the incidence of leukemia appeared to be increased. In essence, I dismissed her suggestion.”

Nor did it occur to Truman a year later, in June 1973, that there was anything unusual about the illness of a two-and-a-half-year-old boy from east Woburn named Kevin Kane, Jr. The boy had been referred to Truman from Winchester Hospital, where his mother, a nurse, had taken him because of a persistent fever, pallor, and irritability. Two weeks earlier he had been treated unsuccessfully for a respiratory infection that did not respond to penicillin. His history on presentation at Winchester Hospital included several respiratory infections as well as recurrent episodes of earaches. Winchester referred Kevin Kane to Dr. Truman at Massachusetts General with a “high suspicion” of acute lymphocytic leukemia. Truman confirmed the suspicion. He began treating Kevin Kane on a chemotherapy regimen similar to the St. Jude protocol. The child responded well. At four weeks, a bone marrow aspiration revealed that he was in remission.

Kevin Kane, Sr., and his wife, Patricia, lived with their four children on Henry Avenue in east Woburn. Henry Avenue curved around the perimeter of a low bluff overlooking the Aberjona marsh. From the back door of the Kanes’ house, looking east across the expanse of marsh, you could see the houses of the Pine Street neighborhood a quarter of a mile away. If you looked closely, you could see Orange Street and, through the trees, the red-shingled ranch house of the Andersons.

Anne found out about the Kanes’ child from Carol Gray, whose fourteen-year-old son delivered the
Woburn Daily Times
every afternoon along Henry Avenue. In the summer of 1973, as Carol’s son made his rounds, he learned that one of the Kanes’ children had leukemia. He reported the news to his mother, who went immediately to the phone and called Anne. “What the hell is going on here?” Carol said to Anne.

With the discovery of yet another leukemia case, Anne began writing down some of her thoughts. She made the first of many lists of the cases she knew about, writing in a spiral notebook the names of the children, their addresses, their ages and the dates when she figured they had been diagnosed.

The notion that each case shared some common cause began to obsess her. “The water and the air were the two things we all shared,” she said in a deposition some years later. “And the water was bad. I thought there was a virus that might have been transmitted through the water, some kind of a leukemia virus. The water had never tasted right, it never looked right, and it never smelled right. There were times when it was worse than others, usually during the summer, and then it was almost impossible to drink. My mother would bring some water from Somerville to the house on weekends, probably about three quarts, which we used as drinking water. The rest of the time, when we could mask the flavor of it with Zarex or orange juice or coffee or whatever, then we used water from the tap. But you couldn’t even mask it. It ruined the dishwasher. The door corroded to such a degree that it had to be replaced. The prongs that hold the dishes just gave way and broke off. On a regular basis, the pipes under the kitchen sink would leak, and under the bathroom sink. The faucets had to be replaced. The bathroom faucet dripped constantly. It seemed like no sooner would I get everything fixed and we’d have another problem.”

3

Long before Jimmy’s diagnosis, Anne’s neighbors in east Woburn would talk among themselves about the water the way most other people would talk about the weather. Like the weather, it seemed there was nothing one could do about the water, although people kept trying.

When Carol Gray moved to Woburn in 1961, there had been nothing unusual about the water. But by the time Anne and Charles moved into their house on Orange Street, in 1965, people in east Woburn had started to notice a change. “Does the water taste funny to you?” Anne had asked Carol during her first summer in Woburn. “Or is it just me?”

In retrospect, it became clear that the moment of change began in November 1964, when a new city well started pumping water into the Woburn system. The well, known as Well G (Wells A through F had been drilled in central Woburn over the previous forty years), had been sunk in the marshland on the east bank of the Aberjona River, half a mile north of the Pine Street neighborhood. The well penetrated an ancient valley that had been formed twelve thousand years ago by the last glacier to cover New England. Over the millennia, the valley had filled with gravel, sand, and silt, and the roaring ancestral river had become the tame Aberjona. Under the river, the sediment-filled valley acted as a sponge, creating a subterranean reservoir.

Even with Well G on line, Woburn needed more water. City officials did not want to pay to get it from the state Metropolitan District Commission. The Aberjona aquifer had proved so plentiful and inexpensive that the city had another well dug, Well H, three hundred feet from Well G. In 1967, three years after Well G went on line, Well H also began pumping. Although both wells were connected to the city water mains, they served only the homes in the east and, to a much lesser extent, those in the north and central sections.

Whitman & Howard, the engineering firm hired to find a suitable site and then to dig the two wells, congratulated the mayor on having so bountiful an aquifer close at hand. “We feel the city is fortunate in finding an additional groundwater supply of good quality in east Woburn,” wrote the engineer in charge, L. E. Pittendreigh, to the mayor. “The development of this supply will aid in overcoming the city’s Water Problem.”

As it turned out, Pittendreigh could not have been more wrong. The city’s real water problem began with the drilling of Wells G and H.

In the summer of 1967 the Massachusetts Department of Health contemplated shutting down both wells because of “the poor bacterial quality of the water supplied therefrom.” The city protested. The state health authorities relented, permitting the wells to remain open on the condition that the city subject the water to continuous chlorination.

Chlorination began in April 1968. That spring and summer, residents from east Woburn called the city’s public works and health departments to complain about the taste, the odor, and the murky, rust-colored appearance of the water. “The odor is almost like clear bleach,” wrote one angry resident. “Why can’t we have water like the rest of Woburn?” A woman from east Woburn wrote the “Tell It to Joe Action Line,” a daily column in the
Boston Herald Traveler
, and other residents complained to the
Daily Times
that “the water is very unpotable, very hard, and has a strong chemical taste.”

The Woburn City Council appointed a special committee to investigate the problem. The city engineer told the committee that the chlorine, which was the source of complaints about taste and odor, was added to the water to kill bacteria. The rusty color came from the water’s naturally high iron and manganese content, which the chlorine caused to precipitate out. The engineer assured the committee that the water was perfectly safe to drink.

Despite this assurance, a group of east Woburn residents formed their own committee in the spring of 1969 to force the mayor to close Wells G and H. They presented the mayor with a petition in August, and by October, after the peak demands of summer had eased, the mayor shut the wells. The following spring, the city engineer ordered the wells to start pumping again. The complaints about the odor and taste began “to pour again like so much water through a broken dam,” in the words of Gerald Mahoney, an east Woburn councilman. That summer was hot and dry. The engineer at the Woburn pumping station declared the water “absolutely safe.” The wells were closed again in January, when the risk of drought had passed. Four months later, in May 1971, the wells were reopened. Councilman Mahoney told the
Woburn Daily Times
that he had been “bombarded by calls of complaint” about the “putrid, ill-smelling, and foul water.” This was, said Mahoney, “the fourth successive
year that the residents would be compelled to use it for drinking and other household purposes.” Nine days after the wells opened, Mahoney succeeded in getting them closed. But a month later, in July, the city engineer ordered them put back on line once again.