About Alice (4 page)

VII

By now, my wife's policy on attending school plays (a policy that also covers pageants, talent shows, revues, recitals, and spring assemblies) is pretty well known: she believes that if your child is in a school play and you don't go to every performance, including the special Thursday matinée for the fourth grade, the county will come and take the child.

—
Shouts & Murmurs,
The New Yorker

That description of the way Alice felt about school plays was pretty close to the literal truth. Not only that: toward the end of the article, I admitted that I endorsed her policy, on the ground that school plays were invented partly to give parents an easy opportunity to demonstrate their priorities. There was no doubt about her priorities. While our girls were growing up, she hated being separated from them; after a two-week trip to Asia, when they were about ten and thirteen, she decided that one week was her limit. Concerning children's constitutional right to sit down to dinner with their parents every night, Alice tended toward strict constructionism. When it came to trying to decide which theories of child-rearing were highly beneficial and which were absolutely ruinous to the future of your child—a subject of considerable discussion among some parents we knew—we agreed on a simple notion: your children are either the center of your life or they're not, and the rest is commentary.

After both girls were out of college, there was a period when Abigail was living in San Francisco while Sarah was in Los Angeles. When this came up in conversations with friends, Alice would say that if the girls remained where they were, we would simply have to live in California for part of the year. “If we want to be convenient to both of them,” I'd say, “we could find a nice little place in between—Bakersfield, or maybe Fresno.” Alice would shoot me the look I associated with a catch-phrase from a radio sitcom I used to listen to as a boy: “'Tain't funny, McGee.” By then, though, her desire to be near them was no longer based partly on her need to influence what kind of people they would become. In her
New Yorker
article about the recurrence scare in 1990, at a time when Sarah was a sophomore at Yale and Abigail was in Teach for America in Los Angeles, Alice wrote:

In the days after that bone scan, I couldn't find a hopeful way out…. I did manage to imagine uplifting conversations I might have with my daughters about how it was O.K. for me to die this time, as it absolutely had not been when they were four and seven, and I had foreseen their adoring but occasionally absent-minded father getting them the wrong kind of sneakers or losing track of their dental appointments after I was gone. Now I was sure that I had told them everything of importance I knew; they had understood it all and figured out a lot on their own, and were as close to perfect as they could possibly be. Then it occurred to me that neither of them was married yet, and I would hate to miss the weddings and the grandchildren. I speculated about which of my friends I would assign to help them pick out their wedding dresses. Then I cried and decided that I really wanted to stay around.

My problem in 1976 would have been much more serious than sneakers and dental appointments, I realized, when I finally allowed myself to dwell on what would have happened if Alice hadn't survived. The real problem would have been that I couldn't imagine trusting anyone else to be involved in raising our girls. I not only thought they needed to know everything of importance that Alice knew; I also thought, I suppose, that she was the only person who knew it. When I'm asked how both of our daughters came to be involved in the sort of work they do—Abigail is a legal-services attorney for children, Sarah is a clinical social worker—I, naturally, deny having anything to do with it. “I want to assure you that I tried to instill in them the value of selfishness and even rapaciousness,” I say. “When Abigail came down to breakfast during her years in high school, I would tell her the temperature and the starting salary for an associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore.” But they had Alice there as a model. Because she survived, they were exposed every day to someone who (as a friend wrote after Alice died) managed to “navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.” Sneakers and dental appointments are the kind of things you can figure out, or find someone to figure out. Exemplars are hard to come by.

I don't mean that Alice and the girls were always in perfect harmony. Sarah, in describing the complicated relationship that she, in particular, had with her mother, said at Alice's memorial service that at the center of it was the fact that “we both wanted desperately love, approval, and admiration from each other.” That meant that it was easy for them to wound each other even with an offhand comment. At times, Sarah said in that speech, Alice had told her that their conversations had made her feel like “a nerd around the too-cool cheerleader.” At times, Sarah would feel that Alice expected her and Abigail to sail through perfect lives. Addressing that in one of her letters to the girls, Alice said that, perhaps because of a too-flippant family motto—“Pull Up Your Socks,” which was sometimes expressed as “No Kvetching”—we hadn't made clear how difficult we knew it could be to get through the imperfect patches that occur in everyone's life. “As you get older,” she wrote, “you will begin to understand that we love you not because you are perfect, but because you are decent and loving and honest and will always deal with what life brings you with courage.”

Alice always said that parents had a huge influence on children when it came to what she called “the big things.” Essentially, she meant values. In a letter to the girls, she once included among the messages we'd been trying to send them “to worry about being kind and generous to other people, to be honest with yourself and with others, to find meaning in the work you do, not to over-value financial success.” Although we never discussed it in these terms, I think she believed in the transformative power of pure, undiluted love. Once, for the program at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp gala, some volunteer counselors contributed short passages about their experiences at camp, and Alice wrote about one of the campers, a sunny little girl she called L. At camp, Alice had a tendency to gravitate toward the child who needed the most help, and L. was one of those. “Last summer, the camper I got closest to, L., was a magical child who was severely disabled,” Alice wrote. “She had two genetic diseases, one which kept her from growing and one which kept her from digesting any food. She had to be fed through a tube at night and she had so much difficulty walking that I drove her around in a golf cart a lot. We both liked that. One day, when we were playing duck-duck-goose, I was sitting behind her and she asked me to hold her mail for her while she took her turn to be chased around the circle. It took her a while to make the circuit, and I had time to see that on top of the pile was a note from her mom. Then I did something truly awful, which I'm reluctant now to reveal. I decided to read the note. I simply had to know what this child's parents could have done to make her so spectacular, to make her the most optimistic, most enthusiastic, most hopeful human being I had ever encountered. I snuck a quick look at the note, and my eyes fell on this sentence: ‘If God had given us all of the children in the world to choose from, L., we would only have chosen you.' Before L. got back to her place in the circle, I showed the note to Bud, who was sitting next to me. ‘Quick. Read this,' I whispered. ‘It's the secret of life.'”

VIII

The summer after her operation, I was finishing the second of what turned out to be three books about eating. The work I did on the final drafts of the book was dominated by additional references to Alice. The title I eventually settled on for the book was
Alice, Let's Eat.
Spreading Alice from beginning to end in her usual George Burns role was a way of declaring, mainly to myself, that we were not accepting the prognosis that would have made her a tragic character.

—Family Man

I was never able to remember more than smatterings of what the surgeon said just after Alice's operation in June of 1976. He told me the tumor had been malignant but that he'd taken it out, along with a lobe of Alice's lung. I don't remember whether he mentioned then that there'd been some lymph-node involvement; I'm not sure I would have known what that meant anyway. After he had summed up the operation in a couple of sentences, I asked him about Alice's prognosis, and he said something about “ten-percent chance.” I didn't quite understand what he was talking about. I thought I'd missed something. I asked, “Ten-percent chance of what?” And he said, “Ten-percent chance that she'll survive.”

For some years, that conversation with the surgeon was unsafe territory for me if I intended to keep my composure. I couldn't talk about it, and I tried not to think about it. But it was the shock of it that I was trying to avoid, I think, not the content: for reasons I can't completely explain, I truly never believed that Alice would, like an overwhelming percentage of the people in her situation, die within a year or two of being diagnosed. Although she warned in the
New England Journal of Medicine
article that every talisman has its limitations, I suppose I fell for the talisman of will. I thought I could protect her. I somehow thought I could keep her alive because I wouldn't accept the possibility that she was going to die. I don't think Alice accepted that possibility, either. She later wrote, “I am known among my friends and family as an incorrigible, even ridiculous optimist,” although she also wrote, “I was afraid that all the brave things I said might no longer hold if I got sick again.” A couple of days after she'd learned the prognosis, I came into her room to find her on the phone, making notes. It had become obvious that the course of radiation would mean that we couldn't go to Nova Scotia, and she was trying to find a day camp where the girls could go while we made our trips to the radiologist.

A few weeks after Alice's operation, a neighbor of mine pulled me aside and said, portentously, “What she's got to do is to change her whole lifestyle.”

“There's nothing wrong with her lifestyle,” I said. I refrained from adding that there were some things about his own lifestyle that could use tidying up. He wouldn't have heard me anyway. He was off on a lecture about macrobiotic food or ingestion of great quantities of vitamin C or some other magic cure. What such people were saying was that we were suckers if we thought Alice was going to be cured of lung cancer by what they called, with some disdain, conventional medicine. Alice was more patient with such people than I was. At some point she'd tell them that her husband always said that his idea of alternative medicine was a doctor who hadn't gone to Johns Hopkins. But she didn't disagree about what they were really saying. “We got a lot of phone calls from people recommending apricot pits, or some such thing,” she said at a medical conference many years later. “To us, and particularly to my husband, that was an indication that they thought I was going to die.”

A couple of years after Alice's diagnosis, I realized that I wasn't thinking about it all the time. Gradually, we had found ourselves back in our regular lives. We attended our first family graduation ceremonies, at P.S. 3. Alice had become more involved in educational television. A company she and a partner founded eventually produced a PBS series that described various aspects of the visual and performing arts to children by building each program around an artist at work—David Hockney painting a picture for a program on perspective, for instance, and Max Roach working out drum riffs for a program on rhythm. I was again going on the road every three weeks for a series of articles I was doing for
The New Yorker
. After finishing the reporting for one of those pieces, I was walking through an airport to catch a plane back to New York when, apropos of nothing, the possibility that things could have gone the other way in 1976 burst into my mind. I could see myself trying to tell my girls that their mother was dead. I think I literally staggered. I sat down in the nearest chair. I wasn't in tears. I was in a condition my father would have called poleaxed. A couple of people stopped to ask if I was all right. I must have said yes. After a while, the pictures faded from my mind. I walked to the gate and caught my flight to New York. Alice was there. The girls were there. Everything was all right.

In the letter Alice sent in 1979 to Bruno Navasky—the book,
Dear Bruno,
was published many years later, in 1995—she said that at times she'd been angry at the unfairness of having become sick in such an unlikely way despite being what she described as a reasonably nice person who had always tried to behave herself. “My doctor said that getting sick like that—getting a lung tumor when you haven't smoked and when you are way too young to get one—is like having a flower pot drop on your head while you are walking down the street,” she wrote. “It really isn't your fault, and there isn't much you can do about it except try to get the flower pot off your head and go on walking.” That's more or less what Bruno did.
Dear Bruno
included a reply from him to the letter Alice had sent sixteen years before. It began, “Thanks for your letter. I really should have answered sooner, but I've been so busy. After you wrote to me, I made a list of everything I wanted to do when I left the hospital, and then suddenly I was doing it. There was high school to finish, then college. For a few years, I was living in Japan.”

Alice loved Bruno's letter. For her, of course, the measure of how you held up in the face of a life-threatening illness was not how much you changed but how much you stayed the same, in control of your own identity. At least until the 1990 recurrence scare, we had gradually unclenched our fists and tried to think of Alice's illness as something in the past. Of course, we never completely lost sight of the dragons mentioned in her
New England Journal of Medicine
piece. In the blood-count line at Memorial, she wrote, cancer survivors sometimes feel like knights who have slain their dragons, but “we all know that the dragons are never quite dead and might at any time be aroused, ready for another fight.” She thought the situation had been captured perfectly by Ed Koren's drawing on the cover of
Dear Bruno:
a knight, holding a syringe instead of a sword, is shown standing on top of the dragon he has vanquished, but a close look reveals that one eye of the dragon is half open.

 

When Alice's dragon came, it approached from a direction we hadn't even been guarding. In the spring of 2001, ten months after Sarah's wedding and a month or so before Abigail was to be married in New York, a routine X-ray prompted a doctor to recommend that Alice have an angiogram. The angiogram made it obvious that she had to have a bypass operation immediately—that day. As they wheeled her away, she was smiling. She said they were going to fix her heart. I had never before seen anybody enthusiastic about emergency open-heart surgery.

Part of that, I told friends at the time, was Alice's singular worldview. Part of it, I suspect, was the assumption that what we were in for would be similar to what we'd experienced four years before, when I'd had a bypass operation done by the same surgeon. Although the recovery had sometimes made me recall one of my father's favorite Midwestern sayings—“I haven't had so much fun since the hogs ate little sister”—it was, in fact, a pretty straightforward process. There was a steady, if slow, recuperation, and then one day I realized that I was fully recovered, grateful for the intervention.

But Alice's operation took much longer than expected. The surgeon said the radiation had made her arteries difficult to work with, and had caused some damage to her heart. I later learned that one of the young surgical residents was so concerned that he dozed in a chair next to her bed throughout that first night—the equivalent, I surmised with gratitude, of those traffic policemen who had given her warnings instead of a summons. After a week or ten days, she came home, but several days later she was readmitted to the hospital. By then, it was only about a week until Abigail's wedding. One morning, she said that we had to talk about that. She said that the wedding had to go on no matter what and that it couldn't be about her. She said it had to be the same wedding we had planned—the ceremony in the marble lobby of the Surrogate's Court building, the dim-sum-parlor reception in Chinatown which Abigail had always wanted, the same speeches and dancing. “No matter what,” she repeated.

“We don't have to talk about this,” I said. “We're going to have the wedding and you're going to march down the aisle with Abigail and me.”

“You have to promise now,” she said.

I managed to nod.

She got out of the hospital about six hours before the wedding. She did march down the aisle, and she was able to stay late enough at the reception to witness a twenty-minute or so rendition of the hora that left the Chinese waiters staring in amazement. The next day, she sent an e-mail to the group of people I'd been keeping informed of her condition. Most of the first paragraph was in caps:
ABIGAIL GOT MARRIED YESTERDAY AND I WAS THERE. I WAS THERE FOR THE WHOLE THING, GOT TO SAY MY TOAST
(
QUITE MOVING
)
AND EAT CHOCOLATE CAKE AND WATCH BUD
'
S
87
-YEAR-OLD UNCLE JERRY
(
WHO MARRIED SARAH AND ALEX IN MALIBU LAST JUNE
)
DANCE HIS ASS OFF WITH ALICE WATERS, WHO HAD BROUGHT ME ROSES FROM HER GARDEN IN BERKELEY.
Toward the end of the e-mail, she said she was safe at home, in the Village, eating comfort food and about to watch
The Sopranos
and an A. R. Gurney play on television. She closed by saying, “Life doesn't get much better than this.”

Four months later, speaking at Alice's memorial service, Sarah said she thought that Alice had toughed it out until she was sure her girls had married the sort of husbands she considered good for the long haul. “I know my mom's main goal in life was to protect my sister, my father, and me,” Sarah said. “She wanted to protect us from worry, from sadness, from loneliness—things her parents had not been able to protect her from.” She ended by saying, “Mom, I know you're listening somewhere, waiting patiently to hear me say these words: You were the coolest girl I ever knew.”

A week and a half before, Alice had died of cardiac arrest. For a while, she had seemed to be recuperating—we were able to spend the summer in Nova Scotia this time—but in late August she began to feel weaker. She died while waiting in the heart-failure unit of Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital to see if she would be eligible for a heart transplant. The doctors said that her heart had been destroyed by radiation. In other words, you could say that she died of the treatment rather than the disease. Presumably, though, it was also the treatment that, against horrifying odds, gave her twenty-five years of life. I know what Alice, the incorrigible and ridiculous optimist, would have said about a deal that allowed her to see her girls grow up: “Twenty-five years! I'm so lucky!” I try to think of it in those terms, too. Some days I can and some days I can't.