Authors: Deborah Schwartz
For months, I’d wondered about Jennifer, Dale and Peter. Pictures of them lined the bookshelves of Len’s office. Judy supposedly had a gentle spirit to balance the warrior in Len. It seemed a good omen that he even wanted me to meet them.
As soon as we walked into the large wedding hall, Jennifer rushed over and quickly kissed and embraced Len. She held out her hand to shake mine.
“Dale and Peter are inside,” she said.
Jennifer appeared to have tried her best to transform Len’s looks into a New York stylish, attractive woman. Her blondish hair streaked with highlights, her makeup attempting to accentuate her eyes, diamond stud earrings, her short trim body in a Dolce and Gabbana print silk dress.
Two hundred people were gathering for the wedding. Judy’s brother, the father of the bride, stood at the door to the room set up for the ceremony. He graciously introduced himself to me as he held my hand.
“Congratulations on your daughter’s wedding,” I said as we exchanged pecks on the cheek.
“Thank you. It’s such an emotional day for the father. But I’m so pleased to meet you,” he said as he continued to hold onto my hand.
I couldn’t ask for more from John, Judy’s brother. Len had allowed me to enter Judy’s world and I knew the eyes of her family and especially his kids would be carefully watching me, comparing me to Judy. Everything about me would be up for comment.
As we walked to the first row, Dale and Peter stood up and both shook my hand. Except Dale leaned in to exchange a kiss.
‘You’d be surprised how often my dad speaks about you,” he said.
“That’s so sweet of you to say.”
Dale, the medical student, seemed to exude a warmth that doctors could certainly use. And like so many of those male Hollywood stars, very short but very handsome, Dale’s looks more than compensated for his stature. Len’s genes must have simply skipped right by Dale, his middle child.
Peter, still at Cornell, appeared more reticent. He stood still, simply observing me. He had a melting pot appearance of Len and Judy. Some compelling Judy features interspersed with Len’s.
Jennifer, maybe defending her mother’s honor, stared at me with cold, angry eyes. That anger probably cloaked a great sadness lingering over her mother’s death but I felt disappointed in the twenty-six year old teacher of young children. After all, I’d recently been down that road with death myself.
The evening was a blur of the routines of a wedding with any number of guests whom I assumed were invited for peripheral reasons, just like me. Some weddings are emotional highs for everyone there because the bride and groom pull off a kind of theatre and the whole event is pure entertainment. The story of the love affair, the journey together is told so beautifully, so differently, through toasts, dancing, body language, that the wedding could be staged on Broadway.
There had to be people who felt the stirring emotions of this day. Just not me, since I didn’t know the bride and groom and the stagecraft was missing in action.
The room was decorated rather simply. I’d heard John didn’t make much money at the men’s shoe store he owned in a small Long Island town.
“I gave John $25,000 to help pay for the wedding,” Len said as we drove to the ceremony.
“Judy would be so happy you did that.”
“It’s really nothing. When Jennifer gets married, I’m sure she’ll spend at least several hundred thousand on the wedding.”
Len strolled around talking to various relatives of Judy’s. Each time, I’d see a head turn and someone staring at me. I knew how hard it was for her relatives to see Len show up with a new woman, Judy’s possible replacement.
The whole evening, Len appeared so out of his usual element. These were some of the people he had grown up with in Jersey City but had left behind long ago. There didn’t appear to be a person in the room, other than Len, whose net worth was worth talking about. No eye-popping jewelry, designer handbags or shoes from Bergdorfs that cost $600.
Although my attendance at the wedding might have been compelling for gossip or curiosity purposes for others, I tried to remain as invisibly present as possible. As the evening passed enormous relief began to set in, especially after those awful looks Jennifer had thrown at me when we met. We might escape the night with no great drama.
As we were preparing to leave, I walked over to Jennifer.
“It was so nice to meet you since I’d heard such wonderful things about you from your dad.”
“Don’t get so comfortable with my father. My mother hasn’t been dead even a year.”
“You know that my husband died of cancer. And I lost my father when I was twenty-one. I know how much it hurts.”
“Then why don’t you give us some space?”
Jennifer obviously didn’t have a clue what her father had been up to within a month of Judy’s death. And it wasn’t like I was some thirty-year old showing up on Len’s arm.
“I’m sorry you feel that way. Your dad is interested in moving on in his life and I hope you will be too at some point.”
“You expect to replace my dead mother?”
“Jennifer, no one can replace Judy. I’ve heard about what a loving mother and wife she was. And no one can replace my husband, the father of my children. We are simply living our lives.”
Tears began to fall from her eyes.
“Can’t you let my mother rest in peace for one year at least?” she said as she stormed out the door.
Len sauntered over a few minutes later. I hadn’t moved an inch. When I relayed the conversation his smile faded and the tension that pervaded his body returned.
“I’ll deal with this.”
Good luck with that, I thought. Since Jennifer seemed to think I was some kind of seductress to her poor innocent father, he’d have quite a task ahead of him. How was he going to explain this one? Yet, I’d never underestimate Len’s ability to get his way.
FALL 1988
CHAPTER 10
September
I
t was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Jake had been off chemotherapy for two and a half months. He looked like Jake again. His hair was growing back. He had filled out, weighing in at two hundred twenty pounds; he had color in his cheeks. Nausea, mouth sores, fevers and exhaustion disappeared into just bad memories.
We went to Temple to thank God for our special blessings, then to our friends Susan and James’s house for a holiday dinner. Jake was full of talk and laughter, and I was full of gratitude.
Susan and I left James and Jake to their work stories and went into the kitchen.
“How’re you doing?” Susan asked.
“I’m scared. Since you asked.”
“Come on, Jake looks great.”
“I know. But I’m scared it will come back again. After all we’ve been through, I couldn’t take any more of this.”
“Maybe you need to see someone. You’re being awfully hard on yourself.”
“I saw a therapist after Jake’s first tumor nine years ago. He told me there was no reason I should fear a recurrence, the likelihood of Jake’s developing a second tumor was about the same as being hit by lightning. Now nine years later we know he was obviously wrong - dead wrong.”
Several evenings later I was lying on our bed talking with a friend on the phone. Just past nine o’clock, and the kids had been asleep for the past hour. Jake closed the door downstairs and headed right up to our bedroom, which was unusual. Normally he would go through the mail and the refrigerator.
He walked into our room and said, “Hang up the phone.” Jake never talked to me like that. I hung up. He sat down on the soft round chair in the corner of our bedroom.
“I found another lump on my shoulder. The lump is on the other side this time, the left shoulder. It’s the exact same size.”
This must be what it’s like when you’re sitting in the electric chair and they turn on the juice, I thought.
I went over and looked at it. It appeared as innocent looking as the last one. I felt it.
“I think it feels different this time,” I said.
“Why?”
“It’s not as soft.”
We both touched the lump. Jake’s hands were experienced at examining the human body, mine were just instruments of hope.
“If there are little changes from the last one, do you think that’s a good sign?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Anything. What do I do now?”
“Call Henry.”
I felt sure that if I had looked out the window at that moment a dark cloud would be arriving to cover our house again.
Henry could not reassure Jake, only arrange another biopsy. Trying to comfort Jake, I didn’t believe a word, and Jake probably didn’t either.
CHAPTER 11
October
J
ake, this is Henry. I’m in the pathology department. I looked at the slides myself. The biopsy shows Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The same as last time.”
Silence.
“I’m afraid you’ll need a bone marrow transplant. Your next step is to see Dr. Davis again.”
I sobbed. Jake started to cry but then he looked at me and stopped. Jake called the hospital and was told that Dr. Davis was not available. His call was directed to a Dr. Martin Lee, responsible for transplants for lymphoma patients.
We would be seeing Martin on the day before Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. It is between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur that God supposedly decides whether He will write your name in the Book of Life for the next year. On Yom Kippur God closes the book for another year.
On Tuesday we drove to the cancer center to meet Martin. Jake was also scheduled for tests to determine the extent of the recurrence. It helped when every now and then one of the technicians talked to us. Some of them did; some of them couldn’t.
Time passed before a short, middle-aged man flew into the room, put his foot up on a chair, leaned his elbow to rest on his knee, and began to talk to Jake, who was still laying on a stretcher.
“I’m Martin. I know you’re scared, Jake,” Martin said as his eyes kept darting left and right. It was as if his mind was racing while his words slowed him down.
“We’ll talk later. Don’t worry about a thing.”
And then he was gone. Jake and I looked at each other and smiled. Martin seemed confident, quick and smart. He had dropped into our lives just when we needed him.
Then we got good news. The scans showed no other signs of cancer in Jake’s body. Once again, the only evidence of cancer was the pea-sized lump on his shoulder. He had endured four and a half months of chemotherapy to get rid of that tiny lump. Now the doctors were bringing on the really big guns, to get rid of that same enemy.
We found an empty room in a clinic and sat down to what turned out to be nearly three hours of getting to know Martin.
“I’m a very dedicated physician,” he said. “I care about my patients and I do the best I can for them. I’ve had some famous people as patients, I’ve cared for the best of them. The fact that you’re a doctor Jake won’t make any difference at all. I’ve had many physicians with cancer as patients, even one who looked bound to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine, until he passed away.”
Jake and I could only watch him. This was Martin’s stage.
“Jake, you clearly should have had a bone marrow transplant to begin with instead of the chemotherapy Dr. Davis recommended.”
Not sure how Jake was receiving this information, I felt blindsided. This was Davis’ colleague saying this. Was this maverick saying that the great Dr. Davis had been wrong and Jake had not only received the wrong treatment but had gone through four months of hell for nothing?
“You just didn’t receive a high enough dose of the drugs when you were on them,” Martin said. “Only with a transplant can you get enough of a dose in to achieve the results we want. You could be cured with a transplant.”
“Jake’s tumor is fast growing. Is there any advantage to having a fast growing or slow growing tumor?” I asked.
“I’m always worried about patients with slow-growing tumors,” he said. “They can appear to be in remission for a long period of time and then it’s back, the tumor is just insidious. A fast-growing tumor isn’t like that. It doesn’t come back. You’re either cured or dead in a year.”
“Jake will be cured,” I said.
Jake turned pale and froze in his chair. He looked ghastly. I sat upright and firm. He heard the other possibility while I refused to believe it.
We loved Martin. We loved his intense desire to cure his patients. His energy, his intelligence, his hope were our lifelines now.
FALL 1995
CHAPTER 12
September
O
n a hot, muggy Friday evening over Labor Day weekend Len and I headed for the first time together to his summer home a few blocks from the ocean in pristine Spring Lake, New Jersey. The house, with whitewashed board and batten siding, boasted a great room with huge windows facing the water and an enormous fireplace. It looked understated compared to the formality and abundance of art and antiques filling Len’s house in Alpine.