Denial (10 page)

Despite these painful memories, or perhaps fantasies, I found my grandfather's office irresistibly intriguing. Throughout my childhood and teenage years I would regularly retreat to his offices when my grandfather wasn't working, with a novel or homework in my hand. It was peaceful and quiet in there, beyond the double doors that separated the office from the rest of the house.

My grandfather's office consisted of four separate spaces—the waiting room, the examining room, the X-ray room, and the consulting room. There were doors everywhere. It was a world apart, but connected to the house through two sets of double doors.

The waiting room had wall-to-wall carpeting in a cheerful royal blue, and an airy, uncluttered feeling. It felt luxurious to me, but also alien. There was a white display case with issues of
Life
and
Good Housekeeping
, and a big white book filled with pictures of birds. I didn't stop to spend a lot of time in there.

I usually went directly from the house into the consulting room. I liked to spend time in that room because you could sit
at my grandfather's desk, and there was interesting information in there. The room smelled of leather, wood, and ink. There was very little natural light, but there was a glow from the oriental lamps. It had the feel of an internal room, with doors leading in three directions—to the waiting room, the examining room, and the rest of the house. There was mocha-colored rice paper on some of the walls, and paneling on the others, giving the room a cozy feeling. There was a fireplace on the wall to the right of the desk. My grandfather's massive, carved oak desk stood in the center of the room, with shiny, pounded nickel pulls.

I knew where everything was in my grandfather's drawers—the checkbooks in the top right drawer, the envelopes and stamps in the second, paper clips and tape in the third, and the bank statements in the bottom. The drawers on the left contained financial records—taxes and statements from Smith and Barney. I'm surprised how many details I remember because I am generally not visual. I remember far more about what was contained in my grandfather's desk than I know about the contents of my own desk now.

On top of the desk—which was always pristine—was a leather blotting pad. My grandfather's two fountain pens stood primly in a green marble stand. Grandpa's chair was covered in brown leather that squeaked when you moved your body, and emitted a comforting, horselike smell.

Grandpa kept six-by-eight-inch file cards in ornate wooden boxes on the bookshelf built into the wall behind his desk. That was where he kept his private notes on his patients. I liked to sit at my grandfather's desk, remove the boxes from the shelf, and place them on the blotting pad. I understood, as a spy in training, that I had to put everything back exactly as it was, so I pulled the cards out carefully. His penmanship was flowing, romantic, almost artistic, quite out of keeping with his character, or at least the character I knew. I would study his notes,
curious about the diseases his patients suffered from. Often I looked up the patients' illnesses and their medications in the reference manuals, which were also kept on the bookshelf behind the desk. The books were filled with glossy pictures of diseased organs, swollen limbs, and colorful pills. One of my favorite pastimes was to compare the side effects of medicines listed in the
Physicians' Desk Reference
with those listed in the
Merck Manual
.

The full files for my grandfather's patients were kept in the front office, where his long-suffering nurse, Anita, greeted patients, but I was less interested in those—I wanted to see my grandfather's personal notes. I have no idea whether my grandparents knew what I was actually doing when I retreated to the quiet of my grandfather's office to read. Grandpa must have suspected that I wasn't only reading Jane Austen. After all, I knew where to find stamps and tape and even his checkbook if he needed these things on weekends. Did he know that I was actually spying on him?

Fortunately, from the standpoint of patients' privacy, there was only one patient, Miss Celia, whom I knew by sight. Miss Celia was extremely old. She and her sister owned the candy shop down the street, and lived together in rooms above the store. Once I heard my grandfather telling my grandmother about her high, firm breasts, which he insisted had remained youthful into her old age because she was a virgin. There were no Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) rules back then, and Grandpa often spoke about his patients at mealtime.

The consulting room opened into the examining room. This room was filled with a cold, clean light. The floor was covered in pale gray linoleum, which Jean, the housekeeper, kept so polished you could see your reflection. When you entered the room through the patients' door, you faced a wall of glass cabinets. I
knew precisely what lay in those cabinets, though I suppose the patients, fortunately for them, did not.

When my grandfather first started practicing in the 1920s, general physicians did nearly everything themselves. They delivered babies, set limbs, took their own X-rays, examined their own slides to check for various infections. There was an extraordinary array of sharp metal implements in those glass cabinets, which, earlier in his career, my grandfather must have used to perform minor surgery. There were hypodermic needles, medications in glass vials, an ancient microscope, glass slides in glassine envelopes. A stainless-steel scale for weighing babies stood on a shelf in the corner next to an autoclave. The examining table stood coldly in the center of the room. The stirrups looked to my child's eye like implements for torture.

The most interesting and frightening item in the room was the ornately decorated X-ray machine, which stood in the corner. I have no idea how it worked, but there was a kind of central operating system on the floor of the examining room—a large metal box with dials on it, the size of a small trunk set on its end. I imagined my grandfather standing behind it and manipulating the controls, like the Wizard of Oz. After my grandfather died, a medical museum asked us to donate it, and we did.

A side door opened to the X-ray room. That was where the patient would be instructed to lie down on a narrow wooden bed. The thin mattress was covered in a white sheet. I remember the smell of the sheet and its rough, starchy feel. Jean must have used a lot of starch on it. On the mantel was a clock or a timer.

I did not like that room. It was always dark, even with the fluorescent light on. It smelled of chemicals, and maybe of fear.

The patient would be instructed to lie on the narrow wooden bed while my grandfather operated the controls from the next room. Across from the bed was a deep sink, where my grandfather developed the prints, and a large file cabinet filled with
pictures of patients' insides. This was the one area of my grandfather's offices that I didn't study in detail. I knew there were X-rays filed, in alphabetical order, in the metal cabinet, so I must have looked inside it once. But, unlike nearly everything else my grandfather touched, I never looked through the hundreds of prints in that cabinet. I never bothered to determine whether there were X-rays of Miss Celia's chest, for example, to see whether I might discover what her supposedly firm breasts looked like on the inside. There was something dreadful in the air here, some unnamed evil that squelched my normally insatiable desire to spy on my grandfather.

It wasn't until I was in my late teens that I heard about my grandfather's love of medical technology, and especially that X-ray machine; and his conviction, in the early days, of the curative power of radiation. Grandma and I were sitting on her four-poster bed, where I often sat with her in the morning before breakfast, or before bed in the evening, up until the day she died. It was my habit to wear my grandmother's gowns when I slept at her house. She had so many of them, all pressed and folded neatly in her second drawer. You could choose among pastel yellows, pinks, or blues, with lace or without. I don't recall what Grandma was wearing, but I do recall that I was wearing one of her pale pink gowns, which felt luxuriously smooth on your skin because it had been worn into a silklike softness. I do not recall how the conversation began, but somehow we got into the topic of my grandfather's mad-scientist obsessions. If 10 milligrams of a certain medication were typically prescribed, Grandpa would want us to take twice as much—only the best for his family. Your mother had frequent colds as a child, Grandma said to me. Or so it seemed to Grandpa. He became convinced that her thymus was enlarged, and that that was the source of the problem. So he decided to do whatever he could to shrink it. He commenced a course of radiation therapy, which he administered himself.

I would later learn that the practice of irradiating children whose thymuses were suspected to be enlarged was common at that time. The problem of an enlarged thymus turned out to be a myth, but some physicians continued the practice into the 1960s, though it was most common between the years 1924 and 1946. Even croup was sometimes treated with radiation. In those days, no one really understood the dangers of radiation therapy, and typical dosages were hundreds of thousands of times higher than we would use today. It would not surprise me, given my grandfather's habitual enthusiasm for overmedicating members of his family, if he used a higher dose than was the norm.

At twenty-six, my mother contracted lymphoma. At twenty-eight, she was dead.

An intrusive thought comes into my mind as I type. I see my grandfather's revolting body, the rough black-gray hairs on his chest and arms, his skin repulsively white under the hair. He smelled foul. Even his genitals come to my mind. When I had croup as a child, he created a tent and held me inside it, held me in his repellent arms. Later, he took me in the shower with him and held me close to his fat, naked body. Why?

My grandmother imparted this information about my grandfather's irradiating my mother to me with a deep sadness. But the sadness seemed to be for my grandfather, who suffered so much, she told me, as a result of his mistake.

I took this information in, but I did not really believe it. I told myself that it was clearly a coincidence—Grandpa happened to have irradiated my mother, and she happened to have died of cancer. Even if it were true, I felt myself to be way too young to hear about it. I put the information away, to consider at a later date. It seemed imprudent to mention this story to anyone else, uncertain as I was about its veracity. So for a very long time—for more than ten years—I kept the story to myself, shunted away somewhere in a mostly inaccessible part of my mind.

It took quite a while—perhaps fifteen years—for me to ask my father about my grandmother's tale. It's not that I was afraid, exactly; it's just that it never seemed to be the right time. But then, suddenly, it was. My father and I were alone in the car, returning from an uncle's funeral. It was dark, so I didn't have to look at my father, and he wasn't able to see me. Plus, death was in the air between us, so it seemed okay to broach the topic of my mother. I told myself I would find a way to change the subject as soon as I could. All I wanted to know was just this one thing: Did Grandpa accidentally kill my mother?

“Is it true that Grandpa's irradiating Shola is what killed her?” I asked. My sister and I often referred to our mother by her name rather than as our mother. Somehow that made our mother's life and death less real to us, enabling us to skirt around the feelings of grief and loss, feelings I knew to be exceedingly disturbing to my father.

“Yes,” he said. “It is quite likely that your grandfather inadvertently killed your mother.” Before I could stop him, he repeated a story I had heard before, a story that for some reason was not “off-limits” for my father, even though it concerned my mother's death. When my mother was nearly dead, my grandfather insisted on trying every possible therapy. “She was emaciated,” my father said. “In agony. Grandpa was crazed with grief. He could not bear to see his only daughter die. So he insisted that she undergo this crazy therapy, that she serve as someone's guinea pig,” he said bitterly. “After she died, your grandfather kept seeing her ghost,” my father told me, disgustedly, not for the first time. I could tell that my father wasn't sure what to make of this phantom, or what it meant about my grandfather's sanity. I have an idea that his revulsion is a substitute for rage.

Later, I asked an uncle, a psychiatrist. “We all assumed that your grandfather's radiation treatments killed your mother,” he confirmed. An older cousin said the same thing. To this day, I
have trouble grasping the idea. It doesn't compute. I can only believe it some of the time. Until recently, I didn't discuss this matter with my sister. I didn't think she'd believe me. After all, I could hardly believe the story myself.

I have learned that many people who received radiation treatments for benign conditions, such as supposed enlarged thymuses, ultimately succumbed to cancer. But I'm still skeptical: correlation does not imply causation. The idea that a swollen thymus caused disease in childhood was a widespread misapprehension among medical professionals at the time. So it would make sense, given my grandfather's character, that he would want to do his best for his daughter by irradiating her with very high doses. Still, I cannot get it.

A number of things would make sense were I to allow myself to believe this story—my grandmother's apparent acceptance of life's blows, my grandfather's depression, my father's virtual disappearance after our mother's death, his loathing of my grandfather. Nonetheless, I want to hold the news at bay. It still feels like news to me even now, even though my grandmother told me these stories more than thirty years ago.

I have to wonder if I was still spying on my grandfather when I studied chemical weapons and terrorism. When I worked at a nuclear-weapons laboratory, surrounded by “mad scientists” of another sort. Later, when I was working on nuclear terrorism at the National Security Council, I was invited to visit a former Soviet nuclear site. To protect us from radiation, the Russian scientists offered us white medical coats, which of course would not protect us from anything. Some of the members of the team were a bit alarmed. But I marched right in, with only the white coat and hat to protect me. Perhaps I was taming isotopes.