Huck: The Remarkable True Story of How One Lost Puppy Taught a Family--and a Whole Town--about Hope and Happy Endings (4 page)

There was not much to do at this point but pray. We walked home, hand in hand. I explained to Rich about the morose doctor and the sonogram and the needle that made a popping sound. I told him I really had no information beyond the doctor saying that she thinks the mass she saw is likely to be cancerous. He reacted the way I did—he pushed his emotions to some far corner of his heart. “Let’s wait and see,” he said. “Let’s wait until we know what if anything we are dealing with and then we’ll figure out how to proceed.”

We stopped by my local church, St. Ignatius Loyola. We slipped in through a side door of the Roman basilicalike church and walked down a long aisle, past the baptismal font and depictions of the first seven Stations of the Cross, to a small altar. I lit a candle and prayed for strength. I don’t know if I felt the closeness of God or the closeness of childhood, but I felt calmed.

I sat down in a pew with Rich beside me and I thought about my childhood, the happiest days of which were spent in Fairfield, Connecticut, where I lived with my parents, two sisters, a brother, and a dog in a white colonial house on a dead-end street with a brook at one end and a hill at the other. At the top of the hill, a stone fence and two white boulders marked the divide between our street and the property of an adjacent country club. When I asked my father why we didn’t belong to the country club, he told me it was because “Clubs are designed to keep people out, and I don’t think that’s something we’d want to be a part of.”

It was a close-knit neighborhood. On hot summer nights, the kids on the block stayed outside playing kick-ball in the middle of the street until it was so dark we could no longer see the ball. We went sled riding and ice-skating in the winter. In spring, we rode our bicycles down the hill, daring each other to do it without holding on to the handlebars and without falling off at a spot where tree roots pushed through the concrete.

My sister Barbara and I used to play “train” on the winding steps leading to the attic bedrooms. Barbara had been given some toy suitcases one Christmas. We’d pack them full of our dolls’ clothes, take the luggage and the dolls, and board the train. Our imaginations took us all over the world to places we had only heard of but never been—Paris, Rome, and New Haven.

Another of our favorite games was “school,” with each of us having a classroom full of imaginary students. Our older sister, Louise, had beautifully illustrated fairy-tale books. We’d pile into her bed, and she’d read to us. Our brother, Bill, collected baseball cards and taught us how to play a game where you would stand the cards against the floor molding and flick others to knock them down.

During my grade-school years, my two best friends were Betsy Weldon, who lived next door, and Mary Beth Quinn, who lived at the end of the block. We’d sleep over at one another’s house. Often, when it was my turn to sleep at Betsy’s or Mary Beth’s, darkness would fall and I’d decide that life was really better back at my own house. The unfamiliar, creaking floors, the shadows on the walls, the intimidating parents in the next room, all made me long for the comfort of my own room and my own bed.

I’d sneak out of bed and dial 336-5148, hoping the
click, click, click
of the spinning dial would not be overheard. The voice on the other end always said the same thing: “I’ll be right there.” My father would come and take me and my Raggedy Ann doll and my pillow home without making me feel embarrassed about being too homesick to stay the night at someone else’s house.

Mary Beth’s family was the first on the block to get a color TV. She had Barbie dolls. Betsy’s family had the cast album to
The Sound of Music
, and a little room in the basement stocked with cans of food in case war broke out. They ate white toast with butter and cinnamon and sugar on it. I envied them all those things.

But neither Betsy nor Mary Beth had a younger sister to boss around, or a brother who was a ham radio operator and could talk to people from all over. Through my eight-year-old eyes, they were not taken into New York City as often as we to see plays, or to have fancy dinners in restaurants where the waiter came over with a giant pepper mill. Their mothers did not play “Clair de Lune” on the piano, and I don’t know if their fathers packed all the neighborhood kids into the family station wagon to take them for ice cream as often as mine did.

Everyone in the neighborhood did have a dog and we did, too. He was one of the largest on the block, a golden retriever, a birthday present for my brother, Bill, who named him “Scout.”

On occasion, Scout would sneak out the back door, sending the entire neighborhood into a panic. “Scout’s loose! Scout’s loose!” The screams could be heard from front porches up and down the block. Sooner or later, Scout wandered home, having taken a swim in the brook or a run through the country club. Sometimes my father would take the family station wagon out, park it by the brook, and call to Scout, who sooner or later would come running. Even though the scenario was oft repeated, I was always scared when it happened. Surely the day would come when Scout would run away and not find his way home.

As adults, my siblings and I all look back on those Connecticut days as the happiest, most stable time of our childhood. Eventually my father had some shattering financial setbacks, and his heart disease went from a disease he could live with to a disease likely to kill him. He often could not work.

When he’d fall asleep in front of the television, or reading a book, or close his eyes while listening to music, I’d stare at him to see if he was still breathing. When I left for school each morning, I wondered if he’d be alive when I got home.

For all of us, life became unmoored and stayed that way for many, many years. My mother struggled single-handedly to support four kids and a sick husband. She was a nurse, though she had started her career as a research physicist. In her early twenties, she turned down the government’s invitation to work on the Manhattan Project, standing firm in her belief that nuclear weapons would only lead to more war. It was a brave thing to do. She thought about becoming a doctor, but loved the world of books and characters drawn from the imagination more than she did science. She set out to teach English literature. But life circumstances and World War II led her to nursing. She helped the wounded heal body and soul. It became her life’s work.

My parents’ changing financial fortunes in general, and my father’s search for an employer interested in hiring a man with a razor-sharp mind but declining health, caused us to move around a lot.

One of the darkest periods came during a brief move we made to New Orleans, where my father took a job expanding a wholesale drug company based in St. Louis. It was an odd fit. The boss didn’t know my father was the kind who would not join clubs. He was dismayed when my father put a television in the warehouse so the workers could watch the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. The relationship deteriorated quickly, and so did my father’s health. Now, forty years later, I can still vividly recall his gasping for air on the front porch on a thickly humid night. My father survived that episode and we moved back north, but life always seemed to teeter on the brink of catastrophe.

We moved back north in the middle of winter. I didn’t understand why we could not just return to our old house in Connecticut, where life had been so safe and happy. We were headed instead for New Jersey (which, in my mind, was at least close to Connecticut), but it wasn’t home. Still, I couldn’t wait to get back to the part of the country that was familiar to me. I missed the landscape of my childhood, the solid maple trees with their large leaves, the slender white birch trees, rolling hills, peonies, forsythia, and the beach. My sister Barbara and I prayed for snow, though we no longer owned sleds or ice skates.

Shortly before we moved, with our house in New Orleans full of boxes and commotion, someone went out the back gate followed by Scout. He took off. We all panicked. None of the neighbors knew us; there were no friends standing on their front porches screaming, “Scout’s loose!”

My father realized Scout would not know how to get back to our house on his own, since we had lived there for such a short time and the terrain was still unfamiliar. My father combed the neighborhood for days looking for him. But his effort was for naught. He was unable to find our beloved dog. We had to move, leaving Scout behind. The pain was searing.

On the day we moved, one of the last items to be loaded onto the truck was a mirror that had hung in the entrance hall in our house in Connecticut. “I’ll get it,” I volunteered. “You better wait for me,” my father said. “It’s too heavy for you.” I was then about twelve or thirteen years old; I thought he was wrong.

I wanted to surprise him and show him I could do it. I also wanted to spare him any unnecessary labor because of his heart. When the mirror slipped through my hands and shattered into hundreds of pieces on the floor, I was devastated. I was disappointed in myself, upset that I’d done something my father asked me not to. I thought I was surely in for seven years of bad luck.

A week later, on a bitter, dark January afternoon, the truck with all our possessions pulled up in front of our new house. It wasn’t Fairfield, Connecticut, but it would do. Nightfall came early; the truck was barely unloaded when the snow Barbara and I had been praying for started to softly fall. It did not stop for three days. The awkwardness of starting at yet another new school was put off. Barbara and I braved the frigid cold for hours on end, hurling ourselves into drifts, diving to the ground to make snow angels, packing tight snowballs with wet mitten-clad hands.

In time, we settled into our uncertain family life.

Before we left New Orleans, my father had put an ad in the newspaper offering a reward for anyone who could help us find Scout. Days after we arrived in New Jersey, someone called and said the man who lived next door to her had found Scout and was keeping him. My father hired a lawyer to get Scout back. Eventually, Scout made it to our new home. He arrived months after we did. Finally having him home, we all loved him more than ever, but he was no longer in good health, and he died soon after.

Despite the turbulence of those years, or maybe because of it, my sisters, my brother, and I learned to stick together. In a crisis, there would be no question about whether we would all show up. The only question would be who would get there first.

But sitting in that church pew with Rich, I didn’t want to tell them or my eighty-three-year-old mother that I might have breast cancer. I also did not want to tell any of our friends that Rich and I were waiting for potentially life-altering news. They were all waiting to hear about our fabulous holiday in Italy.

I thought about the struggles and sadness of my own childhood, how chaos and my father’s failing health hung over so much of it, and how badly I wanted something else for Michael.

As we walked home from the church, Rich said: “You know, it is still possible that the doctor is wrong.”

But I knew in my gut that the doctor was right. I think Rich knew it, too.

Rich is usually certain of his positions. He was certain Bill Clinton would defeat George H. W. Bush, even as the White House correspondent for
The Times
, our good friend Andy Rosenthal, told him how wrong-headed his thinking was. Rich was certain we’d return to Nantucket every summer, even though our finances suggested otherwise. He was certain I’d love Venice.

Rich also was certain that if the test results confirmed the cancer diagnosis, the disease would not take my life; we’d get through it intact and would only love each other more. I felt vulnerable enough that I put him in the awful position of having to tell me that several times over the next few days.

“You should try to stay home from work today,” Rich said when we were finally home from the doctor’s office and from our stop at the church. I considered the idea for a minute, but I knew the best thing for me was to go to work. Even if I had not been in Italy away from the paper for a couple of weeks, I knew it was better for me to sit at my desk, answer e-mails, return phone calls, gossip with my colleagues, and start putting my mind back into the vagaries of American politics than for me to sit home and tempt depression. I never appreciated the rituals of daily life more than I did at that moment.

I had to find a way to make the hours from Monday afternoon until Thursday afternoon feel like something less than eternity. I was too edgy even to sit and have a cup of coffee with Rich before leaving.

“Call me when you get to work,” Rich said, as he walked me to the front door. I walked out of our apartment and toward the subway. I felt invisible. I engaged the man at the newspaper stand in a longer conversation than my usual “thank you,” now asking about his family and how his children were doing in school.

I descended the concrete steps into the subway, this time in a way I don’t recall ever doing before, by holding on to the cold, metal handrail for support. My train came right away. Rush hour had long passed, and there were plenty of seats, but I didn’t take one. I stood, grasping one of the poles, studying the faces of my fellow passengers, particularly women, wondering if any of them had cancer.

Once I was safely inside
The Times
, I sat down at my desk and did what any journalist would: I started researching breast cancer. I put off returning e-mails and phone calls. I typed “breast cancer survival rates” into Google. One million, one hundred thirty thousand citations appeared.

Newsrooms are full of people protecting secrets. Usually the secrets have to do with who was willing or not willing to go on the record about a public official’s wrongdoing or about some corporation that’s been making gazillions in some questionable way or about an athlete who isn’t quite as superhuman as his fans have come to think. The burden of carrying the secret is shared between reporter and editor, and sometimes a wider circle than that. But my secret was about me, and I wasn’t ready to share it with anyone. The burden of carrying it for now was mine alone.