The Road Taken (41 page)

“No?”

“No.”

“All right.”

This time it’s all or nothing, she thought. Let’s see who wins.

Chapter Fifty-One

Hugh knew more than the others did about when he was going to return to his own house. The answer was never. His life had come full circle; he had spent his youth with Rose and he would die with her, unless, of course, she died first, which was likely since she was older. He liked being in her home with the two babies, which reminded him of when his nieces were young. During those sad mornings or afternoons in the beloved mews house he had shared with Teddy he had thought a great deal about the past. Sometimes he spoke to Teddy in heaven, or wherever he was if there wasn’t a real heaven, and asked him what he should do. If Hugh concentrated hard enough he could hear Teddy’s voice, if only in his mind, and it always made him feel better.

The aged should not be alone, Teddy told him. Stay with Rose. I’m with you wherever you are. As for the house, if you don’t want to live in it, do something useful with it.

But what? Hugh asked.

Leave good works as a testament to your life, Teddy said. Be of help to the less fortunate. It was odd how he sometimes sounded like someone in a Biblical movie.

I was going to leave it to my family, Hugh said.

To the young ones? How are they going to pay the inheritance taxes?

Have you been talking to Ben? Is Ben there? Hugh asked. He imagined he could see Teddy smiling.

The world is your family too, Teddy said. And, Hugh, please, that pink negligee with the feathers—throw it away. It doesn’t become you. It’s dreadful.

Did the spirits of the dead sit on your shoulder to advise and comfort you? Hugh had read such a thing, since occasionally he read spiritual books. He was sure that Teddy, like the other departed, was waiting around to be of help to him until he wasn’t needed anymore. Meanwhile, Hugh was packing, but he didn’t sell the furniture because he felt he might still use it in some way. And one evening, after dinner, at home in his comfortable room at Rose’s, Hugh suddenly knew what he was going to do with his mews house.

His gay activist activities had given him many contacts. Through the Gay Men’s Health Crisis he was able to get the advice he needed, and then he gave the house to them as a charitable contribution, to be made into a hospice for people dying of AIDS. He told them he wanted it to look nice, and therefore the furniture would stay. Meanwhile they arranged for construction, for the changeover into a small medical facility that would also look like a comforting residence, and were building an elevator to accommodate stretchers and wheelchairs.

His family was surprised at the news of Hugh’s project, but not as stunned as he had thought they might be. If anyone complained about their vanished inheritance, it was not to him—except, of course, for Peggy, who, Hugh decided, had in her later years turned into Celia. Funny, Celia had always been Peggy’s favorite, and vice versa. Maybe the spirits of the dead stayed around longer than one thought.

Looking at him resentfully, as if he were an old fool, Peggy informed him that Markie was living with David Laurent again, in Markie’s apartment, but this time they were talking about getting married. It was only a matter of setting the date and deciding where they might live. They wanted children right away, before Markie was too old, so they would need a larger apartment. “You might have let them buy your house,” Peggy said. “There’s a housing shortage, you know. You wouldn’t have had to worry about financing; they would have gotten a mortgage easily, being well-paid lawyers, but you didn’t even think.”

Hugh was so annoyed he didn’t speak to Peggy for a month, not that she noticed since he hardly ever saw her anyway.

When the Hugh Smith-Teddy Benedict Hospice opened in the spring of 1992 there was a little celebration, and photos were taken for the newspapers, since Hugh was always interesting news. “I only hope this is temporary and that there will be a cure soon,” Hugh said. The next day patients began to be moved in. They were mainly young men, many of whose families were not willing to let them come home to die, or who wanted to spend their last days where they were, among their remaining friends in this city that had been their home for so long. There was a waiting list right away. It was devastatingly sad, and yet it was uplifting. If people had to die this horrible death, at least let them be surrounded by love, Hugh thought.

One of the best parts of this new endeavor was that he had been able to persuade Ginger to work there twice a week, as a doctor and also as a consoler whose heart was filled with kindness. He had even managed to see that she was paid. Of everyone in the family, it was Ginger who had been the most affected by Teddy’s death. The three of them had been companions for so long, since she was a teenager, and he and Ginger were still taking care of each other, even now. Hugh knew his project wouldn’t have been the same without Ginger’s being somehow connected with it.

***

Ginger had gone to work at Uncle Hugh’s hospice with mixed feelings. Wasn’t life bad enough; didn’t she already see enough tragedy? At least at the hospital sick people often left well. But she knew how much the hospice meant to Hugh, and so she let him talk her into helping. She felt there was a certain kind of person who could regularly tend to the terminally ill, a Mother Teresa kind of person, and she was sure she wasn’t that. Her knowledge of oncology did her little good here, since the purpose was not to cure, only to comfort. If she needed yet another lesson that her life wasn’t so lonely, that her blessings were to be counted, then here it was. But how many lessons did she need?

The body was only a package for the mind and for the soul—such an imperfect package that people were constantly trying to patch it up, mend it, make it operate, make it last. Understanding the way genes worked made her more aware that this fragile and often defective organism was in many ways an unbelievable miracle. It created, it fought to survive, it evolved with a mindless tenacity. It made mistakes, it turned on itself. And through all this, the part that was cognitive just kept blundering along because the package it was in was the only one it was going to get, no matter what you did to make it look better, to keep it healthy, to make it feel good.

Organs could be transplanted, arteries and joints replaced, viruses killed until a resistant strain appeared—medical miracles that had happened in her lifetime—until now it was said that the largest growing part of the population was the people who were going to live to a hundred. Perhaps her own mother would. And yet, despite all the new knowledge and the frantic searching for more, people died too young all the time. The hospital had made her aware of this years ago, and now the hospice reminded her.

That summer Markie and David got married at Markie’s parents’ house in Larchmont. The couple had found a larger apartment without Hugh’s help, on the upper West Side of Manhattan, not their first choice, but what they could afford. David seemed more mature now, in his attitude and somehow also his looks—a handsome young man, not a boy anymore—and they were both looking forward to having a family of their own.

It was a lovely wedding on a fine sunny day. Markie looked radiant, even triumphant. Angel, with a blue streak in her hair that matched her dress and annoyed her parents, was the maid of honor. Ed gave Markie away and Peggy wept, and Joan, when Ginger looked at her, seemed both proud and wistful. Well, of course she would, Ginger told herself. Ginger hadn’t thought about Markie’s origins for years, but Markie’s wedding made her wonder if anyone was ever going to tell her who her real mother was. And who her father was, since only Joan knew that.

It’s none of my business, Ginger told herself, and I was sworn to secrecy; and yet, Rose was getting older and so was Hugh, and when they died only four people would hold the answer to the mystery. It didn’t seem fair. Ginger thought of a dangerous scenario: that Markie’s children might fall in love with and marry their own first cousins without ever knowing. It won’t happen, Ginger reassured herself, it’s much too unlikely. Yet, in the fertility field, anonymous sperm donations were kept to four times so people wouldn’t have to deal with the possibility of accidental incest—so doctors did worry about it.

Family secrets, no matter how interesting, die eventually and disappear if people won’t tell, Ginger thought. She would have liked to discuss all this with Rose, but she had kept silent for so long that by now she was almost afraid to talk about it. Peggy and Joan had made their pact long ago, a pact of which she had never been a part. If Uncle Hugh hadn’t told her the story she would never have known. She felt rather like an outsider, and she supposed she was. It had been decided by the two principles that no one could tell Markie but Peggy, and by now Ginger could not imagine what would make Peggy tell her.

Maybe no one should, Ginger thought.

Markie’s wedding made her think of something else too, of course: the joyful marriage of the next generation while she herself had no one and probably never would have. At the party after the wedding, even though she knew nearly everyone and they went out of their way to be nice to her, she had been so clearly alone. She sat with Hugh and Rose, who had each enjoyed a long lifetime with the one they loved, and now had lost those people, and Ginger briefly wondered who was worse off, herself or them.

The next day she returned to work at the hospice and forgot about her problems. There was a young man, Brian, dying on the second floor, and his family had come from Kansas to be with him. Apparently, Ginger was told by one of the nurses, the father and son had been estranged but now were reunited. There was a mother, she saw, a fair-haired, good-looking woman of about her own age, and occasionally another brother and sister came by. What was interesting about the mother was that she, too, was in a wheelchair.

The woman and Ginger met in the hall when the mother was coming back, nibbling at a sandwich she had bought for herself. They were on each other’s eye level, which Ginger found refreshing. The woman peered at Ginger, and then her somber look was replaced by one of warmth. “You
are
Ginger Carson, you’re the same one, I thought so!” she exclaimed.

“The same one?”

“From Warm Springs! You wouldn’t remember me, I was Althea Crane.”

“Althea . . .” Ginger looked at her more carefully. It had been years. But there was a resemblance, and now that she thought back she could see this was her old friend. “I can’t believe it,” Ginger said. “I’m so sorry about your son.”

“Yes, it’s tragic. Actually, he’s my husband’s son from his previous marriage. I’m only glad they got to reconcile. The young man and young woman you might have seen with me are my children from my first husband.”

“You had two marriages?” Ginger asked stupidly.

“Oh, yes. Another casualty of our generation. My first husband left me for a younger woman, which happened to quite a few of my friends, and I suppose to yours. But Greg, my present husband, is a wonderful man. We’ve been married for ten years. His first wife died. And you, Ginger, you know I never forgot you and that cute boy you were in love with at Warm Springs. . . . What was his name?”

“Christopher,” Ginger said.

“The two of you used to go off into the bushes and neck. Do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“So what happened to him? Did you see him again?”

“I believe he became a doctor,” Ginger said. “We lost touch.”

“We had so much fun at Warm Springs, didn’t we?” Althea said.

“I guess we did,” Ginger said. You had
two
husbands? she thought again. Paralyzed legs and all? And I couldn’t even find
one.

“I admire you for doing this,” Althea said. “And the nurse told me you’re quite a respected oncologist and researcher. You’re amazing. So intelligent and accomplished and doing so much good. I had dreams of being a doctor when I was at Warm Springs. I suppose many of us did, they were our heroes. But I was never that bright, or that academic, to tell you the truth. I became a housewife. I guess that term is out now, but that’s what I was.”

“Homemaker,” Ginger said lightly. “Domestic engineer.”

“And a mom.”

“I envy you,” Ginger said.

“Yes, it’s been wonderful, but it wasn’t easy. The divorce, feeling so badly about myself, and the years after, trying to feed my kids.Then Brian, my stepson, hiding his life from us, the estrangement from his father, a terrible thing.And the disease. You’d never want anyone in your life to have to go through something like that. When you love people you’re open to tragedy.”

Ginger didn’t answer.

“And you, did you marry?”

“No,” Ginger said.

“Well, you have other things. You and I were of that generation that still had to choose.”

Did I choose this? Ginger wondered.

“Sometimes we’re hardly responsible for the road taken,” Althea said. “And sometimes we are. But for every one of us, every minute, it’s choices and fate, whether we know it or not at the time. What a winding road it is, and so full of surprises. Whatever brought you here, Ginger Carson, thank you from the bottom of my heart for everything you’re doing for Brian.”

“You’re welcome,” Ginger said. She watched the woman wheel away. Sitting there looking after her, she remembered again who she was, and what she wanted. Her lonely inner world was, in some important ways, a mystery to others, and there was a world of struggle out there that she didn’t even know about. Too often she forgot.

Chapter Fifty-Two

Markie and David had been married for a year, and marriage was almost everything she had hoped it would be. The missing part was that she had not yet gotten pregnant. A year of frequent unprotected sex—sex that was at first wonderful, and then sentimentally hopeful, and lately distractingly desperate—had produced nothing. If you tried, it was supposed to work in the first year. She knew couples who had hit the jackpot the very first month. She didn’t understand why she had been so fertile when she and David first met and hardly knew each other, but now that they were encouraged by society and their families to procreate it wasn’t happening.

She was thirty-four, not that this was old, but she was concerned. David was thirty. A husband, she liked to tell her friends, should be your own age or younger. But sometimes she worried that if she didn’t cement her marriage by starting a family he might get bored and start to stray. Part of the deal when they decided to marry had been that they would have it all: the home, the job, the kid, no matter how difficult people said it was. Both of them wanted a baby, preferably two, to bring up, to be concerned about, to love; a child or children to make noise, to throw toys around, to take on vacations with them. The large apartment they had rented with such eager confidence in their future now seemed to be an omen of bad luck, an empty and too quiet symbol of hubris punished.

From time to time Markie couldn’t help thinking about the abortion she’d had long ago—her baby with David—and she felt guilty. She wondered if he thought about it too. Neither of them was willing to mention it. Was she going to be punished for her abortion by not being able to conceive a child now that she was able to take care of it? Did something go wrong in the surgery? Was her body rebelling against her refusal to let it do what it wanted—telling her something?

Her gynecologist said that all of these were only her guilty fears, and that hers was a common feeling with no validity, but she would send Markie and David to a fertility specialist. It seemed so ironic Markie didn’t even want to think about it right now. She and David went to Tahiti for their vacation, the quietest, most romantic place they could think of, timing the trip to the week she ovulated, but there were no results.

Back home again, they were involved in their daily lives. Getting involved with a fertility specialist would be a huge commitment of time, effort, and emotion, and then it could end in disappointment. So months went by, and then it was another year, and she was thirty-five.

In the
New York Times
there was news that the first test of a newer, more effective drug for people with advanced AIDS, called a protease inhibitor, had been successfully tested in a first trial, and that there would be a more intensive trial now, using this drug in addition to the drugs such as AZT that were already in use. Hugh often said he hoped to live long enough to see his hospice turned into something more pleasant, even a dispensary, since he would be happy with any kind of progress. Swords into plowshares, he said, but that day was still far away, and Markie doubted he would be here to celebrate it. It was strange how some very old people seemed to shrivel up overnight, she thought. Hugh was getting frail, as if a ghostlike hand had let all the air out of his face. He was nearly ninety, a good long run, and she was surprised he was here at all.

She wished he and Grandma were her real family so she could look forward to such longevity. Next year Grandma would be ninety-five. Her children and grandchildren were planning a party, a little nervously in case that was their own tempting of the fates, since you never knew what would happen to someone that age. But Grandma was an amazement; she ran up and down the stairs of her house and refused to use the staircase elevator. She had all sorts of outside activities, she remembered almost everything, and most annoying to Peggy and Joan, who’d both had plastic surgery, Grandma’s soft, thin skin was still as smooth as cream.

This summer, there would be a wedding to go to, Angel’s. Angel had recently become engaged to a performance artist named Juan, whom she had known for years and hardly even mentioned. After having been good friends they had decided they couldn’t live without each other. Peggy and Ed, who had liked her rich boyfriend, and the banker she had dated before him, and the broker she had been seeing before that, were displeased. Juan’s being Hispanic was the worst of it. Now it was Peter they liked, and Angel they deplored.

Peter, who had for so long resisted fatherhood, was thrilled with his two little kids, Hannah and Henry, and he and Jamie talked about them all the time, to the point where it was boring, at least to Markie. She and Angel made a pact that if and when they had children of their own they would never go on about them that way. But Peggy said Peter’s lively family was a great comfort to Grandma, and, of course, to herself and Ed. Right on, Mom, Markie thought; rub it in.

There was a new coffeehouse that had just opened near Markie’s apartment on the upper West Side, called Starbucks, and now and then Markie went there alone and thought about her married life, and sometimes cried into her latte. Everyone was drinking coffee now, more than alcohol; it was the new addiction. On weekends everyone wore gym clothes in the street, even the women pushing baby strollers. What Markie saw, when she looked at these strollers, were how many of them were doubles, for twins, and how some even carried triplets. Fertility drug babies, she told herself. The mothers were usually her age or older. The twins were usually fraternal. These multiple births were exploding in every residential area, due to the new medical technology.

It had been years since people were able to adopt the kind of baby she had been—white, blond, blue-eyed; many people had so badly wanted babies who looked like her that they didn’t even care if the child didn’t look at all like the family it was going to enter. A family resemblance, of course, was a bonus to many others, and often adoption agencies tried to match. And then it didn’t matter anymore. Markie felt like she came from the time tunnel. Today unmarried women were keeping their babies, even having them on purpose. Unmarried women were being artificially inseminated, lesbians too. Now the childless were adopting kids from Eastern Europe, from Latin America, from Asia—all those adorable little girls from China—and mixed-race babies from America, making her view from the sidewalk café that of a real melting pot.

Joan and Trevor had never had a child. Markie now wondered why not. And Daisy, back in Bristol, had had only one. Perhaps that had been choice, perhaps biology. Tampering with such a process as pregnancy, and actually succeeding, had seemed like science fiction. Medicine had advanced a lot since. I really
could
do something about this, Markie thought for the first time.

So now, finally, she and David were at the assisted reproduction center of Mt. Sinai Hospital, in a waiting room filled with women of a range of ages, some with their husbands, some alone. It was early in the morning, and some of these people had taken long drives to get here, and next they would go to work. There were photographs of babies tacked up all over the walls, sent by grateful parents: fraternal twins, a few sets of triplets, and a number of single babies, some of them with older siblings. The program here was supposed to be one of those with the best results.

She wasn’t sure what she was expecting to see, but when they met their doctor, Dr. Leon Kuyper, Markie was pleasantly surprised. He was almost as young as she was, on the cutting edge of a new technology, an enthusiastic, cute young guy with photos of his own babies on his desk. He has a good job, Markie thought; he only has to make people happy. But then he described the many tests she and David would probably have to take and she started to get nervous. Dr. Kuyper took a detailed personal and medical history and, like a detective, asked a lot of questions about the things that might be causing their problem.

“Did you ever use an IUD?”

“No.”

“Did either of you ever have a sexually transmitted disease? Chlamydia, for example? Or anything else?”

Markie and David looked at each other. “No,” David said.

“No,” Markie lied. “What would that have done?”

“An infection years ago might have given you blocked fallopian tubes,” he said calmly.

“Oh,” she said innocently. I have to get him alone, she thought.

She answered the rest of the questions as accurately as she could, hoping there was some other reason and that he would find it. It was not that David wouldn’t love her anymore if he knew she’d caught something once, she told herself, but it just wasn’t something you told your husband, even if it was his fault for abandoning you and making you see other men. She was angry at him for his indecisive youth and at herself for her carelessness. It was all so unfair.

As soon as she got to her office where she could be alone, Markie called Dr. Kuyper.

“I had chlamydia a long time ago,” she said. “I don’t want my husband to know.”

“A lot of women don’t,” he said calmly. “We’ll take the other standard tests first, to rule everything else out, and I’ll also give you a hysterosalpingogram, which is a sophisticated x-ray study to look for a blockage. If you have one we can do in vitro fertilization.”

The thought plunged her into despair. She remembered when she was young, hearing of the first baby who had been started in a petri dish in England, Baby Louise Brown, who had been considered a miracle. Babies like that had been called test tube babies, and they were very rare. In vitro fertilization was known to be complicated. She’d heard of people even today who had tried for years, taken fertility drugs, spent a fortune, and it had ended in failure.

“But that’s so hard, isn’t it?” Markie said.

“You’re lucky to be in New York,” he said reassuringly. “Mt. Sinai and two other hospitals here in the area have the highest success rate in the nation, with a fifty percent success rate on the first try for a woman your age, and seventy-five percent by the second try. The rest of the country only has a twenty-five percent success rate.”

It turned out that it was indeed her fallopian tubes that were the problem. David never asked why they were blocked and Markie didn’t tell him. Now the two of them became involved in a proceeding so complex that they had to enroll in a three-hour class at the doctor’s office, and went home with charts and literature and directions and vials of medications that had to be mixed and injected into her at specific times. There was a drug called Lupron to suppress her ovaries from producing eggs, because the procedure demanded more than she could make on her own, and later there was a drug called Pergonal to stimulate those same ovaries to produce as many eggs as possible for fertilization.

There were papers to be signed: Did Markie and David want to keep some of the extra fertilized eggs frozen for the next try if the first didn’t work, or, if it did, so their baby or babies could have a sibling later? Or did they want to give them away? Would they prefer to have them destroyed? What if one of the parents died? What if Markie and David got divorced; who would own the embryos? Death seemed very far away, but the thought of breaking up some day and fighting over an unborn baby who would still be just a couple of cells in a freezer was very depressing.

David had to give her a shot every night, in the butt, after practicing on an orange, and he was so nervous and squeamish that Markie seriously thought of calling Aunt Ginger to come over and do it for him. The Lupron made Markie bloated and hysterical, like the worst PMS she’d ever had, and she gained five pounds of bloat in a week. Sex had to be kept going on a normal basis to keep the sperm count high, and then there was no sex allowed, and then there was mandatory sex, until Markie was surprised that, between her bad disposition and the medical necessity for him to perform, she and David could manage to have sex at all.

Every morning Markie had to be at the doctor’s office at eight
A.M.
, first-come first-served, waiting in a room with thirty other anxious women to have an ultrasound test to see how her eggs were growing. Day Thirteen of the medication cycle was egg retrieval day. Markie had an anesthetic, and David had a copy of
Playboy
so he could masturbate in the doctor’s office bathroom to provide the sperm. Why did they think
Playboy
always did the trick? If it did, then there was something about men that she would never understand.

After the procedure Dr. Kuyper told them he had retrieved ten eggs. They were injected with the sperm and then cultured in a dish with her own blood serum, and two days later he told her there were six that were successfully fertilized—embryos now—just tiny round dots with cells in them. Under a microscope you could see that some were more perfect than others. Two days later the three healthiest ones (three at the most so they could thrive in case all of them managed to “stick”) were transferred into Markie’s uterus. After the anxiety and the counting and the rushing to the doctor and the rules to follow it was hard to believe that this entire process had taken only one month.

But she didn’t know yet how many would turn into her children, if any at all. Success rate to a childless person meant taking home a baby to play with, not what happened along the way. There could be a problem with the egg, with the uterus, or in the lab. Older women, Dr. Kuyper told her, often miscarried. He reminded her again, proudly, that for a younger woman her age the success rate was fifty percent, which Markie thought was a large number if you were looking at progress in the fertility field but a small one if you were the nervous patient. If a doctor told you that you had only a fifty percent chance of surviving you would be very upset. What should she say then for her child?

She had told her mother and Aunt Joan that she and David were trying to have a baby, but had omitted all the details. It seemed too clinic and private to describe everything she was going through, and beside the others would either be too concerned or not concerned enough. She didn’t want them asking questions, or being disappointed, and she felt so fragile right now that she was sure their concern would bring her to tears. The only one to whom Markie told everything that was happening was her sister, and she only told Angel because she had to share this with someone near her own age. Even so, she had the feeling that Angel really didn’t want to know.