Nora Jane (43 page)

“He’s not a surgeon only, Freddy. He’s a very important and hardworking man. I don’t understand why you don’t love your only
brother.”

“He is not my brother. He’s your adopted child. I can’t believe you want me to get Stuart in on this. I’ve got this taken
care of, Mother. I’m being treated by the best doctors in the United States. For God’s sake, this is why I didn’t tell you
sooner.”

Mrs. Harwood closed her lips into a thin, hard line. Her eyes didn’t leave his.

Blessedly Nora Jane and Little Freddy came in through the door from the kitchen, and Little Freddy went to his grandmother
and began to do his magic on her.

* * *

Fifteen blocks away, Nieman was getting into his small, energy-efficient automobile and setting out for his laboratory. Stella
had already left to take Scarlett to the university day-care center. Stella was on the board of the center. She had hired
the woman who ran it and was on the hiring committees for most of the other employees. She never minded leaving Scarlett there
and Scarlett never minded going. Scarlett thought she helped run the place because that is what Stella and Nieman always told
her. They told her it was her duty to help with the other children, and she believed it.

Nieman turned on his meditation tape as soon as he moved out into the morning traffic and tried to concentrate on driving.
Mindfulness, the tape was saying. Paying attention, in the moment, right now, the only time there is.

“Drive the car,” Nieman said out loud. “Pay attention to what you’re doing.”

On the ramp at Geary Boulevard, there was a wreck with three ambulances and at least three wrecked cars. Nieman tried not
to look for injured people. It was no way to start a day that was already shadowed by Freddy’s problem.

It was the seventeenth of October and already some radio station was playing a Christmas song. Perhaps that is why Nieman’s
mind wandered away from Zen meditation and he began to make up new words to the song. Five golden rings, four nuns praying,
three Buddhist monks, two Jewish physicians. One Hindu oncologist, six worried friends, the synnnagooogue. Ten movie stars,
ninety hungry writers, everyone we know. My secretary, his secretary, our certified public accountant. Our Merrill Lynch broker,
his old mother… and so on, he decided. We are down to praying, that’s for sure. He turned onto a side street and decided to
weave his way around to the Berkeley campus. Okay, then. The double-blind study at Caltech proved to the satisfaction of everyone
who read it that the patients who were prayed for got well four times faster than the ones who were not prayed for. They only
stopped the study because people at the churches they were using insisted on adding the other people to the prayer list. It
is of no importance that we don’t understand why prayer works. It’s all electricity and chemical transfer, and you don’t have
to believe in magic to know that thought has an effect on matter. Duh.

The traffic began to move and Nieman continued the song he was making up. “Everyone we know, everyone we love, one glorious
nun …give us this day a bone marrow donor,” he prayed. “We really need one, Sir or Madam. It’s not that I don’t believe in
you, it’s just always been hard for me to put a human face on something so huge and amazing. I do believe in you. Now I do.”

He pulled off the highway onto the campus and began to search for a parking place nearer than the parking garage, but of course
he couldn’t find one because it was nine o’clock and he was late.

Sister Anne Aurora had gone out at dawn in the crisp, clear, bitingly cold air to climb the hill and put in another thirty
minutes on Frederick Harwood of Berkeley, California. Stella had wired five thousand dollars to the school and sent a list
of the probable drugs that would be used and everything she could find about the sources for the ingredients in the drugs
and their places of manufacture. Plus some diagrams of the molecular structure of anything relevant.

Sister Anne Aurora had the papers in her inside coat pocket. She knelt by the grave of Sister Margaret Hoy Biggs, who had
been one of the founders of the order, and began to pray. We ask your mercy and goodness to descend on Freddy Harwood as his
ordeal continues, she prayed, and on all who suffer anywhere in the world. Let energy and power and goodness cover the world.
Keep illness and evil at bay this morning for the whole world and especially for this good man and for his friend, Stella
Light-Gluuk, and let your light so shine upon them that no harm can come to them this day…

* * *

Stella’s monthly egg was taking on a sperm as Sister Anne Aurora prayed. As an unintended side effect of Sister Anne Aurora’s
prayers, little Scarlett’s deep desire for a baby brother was beginning to come true. “We could have a baby here,” she had
been telling her parents for several months. “They have a bunch of them at my day care. We could take one home with us and
I would talk to him if he was crying.”

T
HE NIGHT AFTER
Freddy’s second round of chemotherapy, Nora Jane was awake all night. She was having dreams of wandering around the parking
lot of the hospital trying to find the door to go in. The second time she had the dream, she slipped out of the bed and went
into the bathroom and took a sleeping pill, something she hadn’t done in months.

The next morning she was groggy and scared. “You were having bad dreams?” Freddy asked. He was feeling all right. Not half
as bad as he had expected to feel. “Tell me, Nora Jane. Tell me the truth.”

“I dreamed I couldn’t find a way to get into the hospital. It’s all right. Dreams are clues, I know. But this one was pretty
clear. It’s because you wouldn’t let me go inside.”

“Next time you aren’t going at all. I’ll take a taxi or have Nieman drive me or Big Judy. I am not going to have you get sick
too. I need you to be healthy while I’m doing this.” He got up from the bed and went to stand by the dresser where she was
combing her hair. “It’s my leukemia, N.J. Just let me run it.”

“All right.” She turned around and looked at him. He was wearing a pair of striped Brooks Brothers pajamas and his hair was
curled all over his head like a child’s. “You can run your leukemia, but if you don’t let Mitzi cut your hair you can’t sleep
with me. How do you feel?”

“I feel all right. I could eat some eggs and toast. I’m going to go to the kitchen and see if the girls are up.”

“I’ll fix your breakfast. I love you, do you know that?”

“Then cook the eggs, woman.”

“I’m going to. When do you have to go back and do it again?”

“On Monday. Until then we are going to ignore and forget this damned leukemia. I am sick of leukemia. I don’t want to hear
a word about it. I ignore leukemia, by Jove. Leukemia is dead for me.” He strode out of the bedroom trying to look like Paul
Newman, an actor his mother had always thought he resembled.

“Paul Newman,” Nora Jane said out loud. She stuck two thick brown barrettes into her hair above her ears and gave up trying
to do anything about the way she looked. Not that it was possible for Nora Jane Whittington Harwood to look bad. She looked
beautiful on the worst day of her life. “And the sleeping pill will wear off and that’s the last one I’ll ever take,” she
added. “Leukemia will not drive me to sleeping pills. Leukemia can suck hind teat.” She liked having said that, since she
never cursed in any way. “Hind teat,” she repeated and stalked out after Freddy to get breakfast ready for her family.

“The dread, that’s the worst thing about any medical procedure,” Freddy was saying. “So just watch where you’re going and
remind me of something nice.” Nieman was driving Freddy to his third round of chemotherapy.

“It was nice while you were starting the bookstore. Nineteen seventy-five it was. And you had all the catalogs of books and
we were making lists and the boxes started coming while the shelves were still being built. I had to wear a dust mask to come
watch. Remember that carpenter from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who was making the trim on the shelves? He was a good man. I wonder
what became of him.”

“He went home. He writes to me occasionally. He married a woman he met out here and took her home with him. Jake Farley is
his name. Turn over there, let me go in the emergency-room exit. It’s a shortcut 1 found. You just come pick me up at eleven
fifteen. I’ll call if it will be sooner.”

“I’ll go to the medical-school library and hang out or maybe go walk on the labyrinth. I haven’t been in this part of town
in a while.”

“Okay. Stop here. It doesn’t hurt, Nieman. It’s just a drip and I have some friends that come here when I do. A nice girl
who’s going to law school.”

“Are you all right?” Nieman stopped the car and turned off the motor. He turned around. “I can go in with you. It won’t bother
me.”

“Yes it will. You’ll have nightmares.” Freddy closed the car door and walked off. He was trying to walk forcibly and keep
his shoulders back. Dread, he kept repeating. Dread is the normal emotion under these circumstances. I will experience it
but not let it take me. I will make a mental list of all the books I ordered for the store in the months before it opened.
Eight hundred dollars for the Karsh book. Another six hundred for the Hemingway with the Karsh print. The Faber and Faber
books I got from that guy in Canada. That was probably against the law, but he said they were secondhand and some of them
weren’t available in the United States. Freddy stopped at the desk. “Hello, Lucy. Hello, Maria. How’s it going today? Is everyone
showing up? Who’s calling in with lame excuses?”

“We very busy today, Mr. Harwood, but we’ll be on time. You wait in waiting room, okay?”

“Okay. Can’t wait until my turn. Get it over with and stop thinking about it, right?”

“Right.”

Freddy settled into one of the pink leather chairs by the magazine stand. He pulled a paperback edition of Rilke out of his
suit pocket and started to read “The Panther.”

“I’m staying,” Nieman said, coming up beside him. “I’m not going roaming around uptown San Francisco while you’re sitting
here. What are you reading?”

Freddy held out the book.

“Okay. That’s good and depressing.”

“It is not depressing. If you didn’t know Rilke’s biography you wouldn’t think it was depressing. You have a bad habit of
getting the author confused with the book, Nieman. There are moments of great joy and happiness in this book and that is what
I’m reading it for.”

“‘The Panther’?”

“It’s a beautiful poem.”

“Mr. Harwood.” Maria had come to get him.

“That’s me. Don’t wait here, Nieman. Go find something to do.”

“I’m doing something. I’m waiting here for you.” Freddy stood up and Nieman stood up beside him and took his arms with both
his hands and held them tight. Then he sat back down and Freddy followed the nurse back to the room with the poison.

At eleven fifteen he came back out into the waiting room looking sick. “I guess it’s working,” he said. “Take me home.”

Nieman took his arm and they walked out of the hospital and found the car and Nieman drove without talking.

“Say something,” Freddy finally said. “Say I hope you don’t throw up. Say leukemia sucks a big one and I hate leukemia’s guts.
Feel free to talk.”

“I kept thinking about all the books we had when you first opened the store. I never would have read Freeman Dyson or those
Einstein essays. Remember that book by the French anthropologist who got into the South African veld after the Boer War and
made those first studies of primates in the wild? The same guy wrote
The Soul of the White Ant.
I ought to go around my house and make a shelf of the books we read because of the store. That was a real contribution to
the world, starting Clara Books. Are you okay?”

“No. Just drive. You don’t need to talk anymore. Yeah. Eugene Marais,
The Soul of the White Ant.
And
The Soul of Something Else
. What was it?”

“
The Soul of the Ape
. Eugene Marais. The soul of the cancer cell. We could write that now, I guess.”

“Oh no, we won’t. If this stuff makes me sick it’s working. I have to remember that.”

“You surely do.”

“God knows what else it’s killing except cancer cells. I should have put some sperm in a bank before I did this. I think it’s
killing the lining of my stomach at the moment.”

“That’s sixty percent of your immune system. It’s just reacting. It’s supposed to react.”

“Tell your buddies in the labs to hurry up and find something better than this crap, okay? Will you tell them that? But not
Stella. She might think I don’t appreciate this crap, which is better than nothing, which we used to have.” Freddy was rolling
down into the seat. He was rolling down into a ball. “Hurry up and get me home.”

“I am hurrying. And so is medical science, Freddy. Thousands of people work every day all day for every miracle. You know
that. Try to stop thinking. This is not thinking time.”

Nieman leaned down on the wheel of the car and started taking chances.

Three weeks into the chemotherapy, Freddy’s doctors had a meeting and decided to put him in the hospital for a while. They
didn’t like the results they were getting from the tests. The chemotherapy wasn’t doing what they had hoped it would.

“We need to get him ready for a transplant,” his oncologist said. “If we can’t find a match, then we’ll have to use stem cells.
We have to make a move here. I don’t think we can wait much longer.”

“How close a match will work?”

“Whatever we can get at this point. I’m going to tell him this afternoon. If any of you have objections, state them now.”

“Go on,” Freddy’s internist, Danen Marcus, said. “Do what you have to do. What have you already tried?”

“Everything I have. We need to give him blood. I can’t wait any longer on that.”

“Go on.”

“Good.”

Nora Jane had always liked to be alone. Ever since she was a child she had needed long spaces of time when she sat and daydreamed
or did ordinary things without talking to anyone while she did them. She liked to be alone cleaning up the house or grocery
shopping or moving the cleaning equipment in the swimming pool. She liked to lie in bed and read in the afternoons while she
waited for the children to come home from school.