Promise Me (22 page)

“Fire away.”

“I have to cure breast cancer.”

He smiled a pained, knowing smile. “Me too.”

“No, I mean it. This has to be done. How do we do this?”

“Well, you start with … with this,” he said, indicating the packed ballroom. “Keep doing what you’re already doing. We need funding for research.”

“Funding can be had,” I said. “There’s tons of oil money in Texas right now. We need to push breast cancer to the top of the list and get some of that money flowing our way.”

“People tend to fund a general focus on cancer. Breast cancer specifically … that’s a little difficult.”

“Yes, so I’ve heard. People keep telling me it’s not a major deal, which you and I both know is untrue. Or they tell me it’s unseemly and makes people uncomfortable. But why should that be? How can people in the civilized world circa 1980 glorify Raquel Welch, eat up
Charlie’s Angels
with a spoon, then turn around and tell me there’s something unseemly about
breast cancer?
What is this antediluvian …”

“You’re preaching to the choir, Nancy.” Blumenschein held up his hand like a crossing guard. “I’m not disagreeing. Just saying … let’s not get ahead of ourselves. That’s how it is. We’ve learned to be realistic about it.”

I studied the well-dressed assembly. There was a lot of décolletage in the room. If we couldn’t champion the cause here, where on earth could we? When Dallas society came out to play, they did it in a great big, star-spangled, bouffant-and-bow-ties way. Bras and beehives were piled high, egos and checkbooks fully loaded. Generosity was a competitive obsession, second only to Friday night football. Texas was teeming with fabulously philanthropic movers and shakers like Joanne Herring, powerful políticos like the Bush and Connally families, brilliant business moguls like … like Norman Brinker.

He smiled at me from across the ballroom. I smiled back with an absent nod and returned to Blumenschein.

“It’s a marketing issue, that’s what it is,” I said. “We need to work on education. That’s imperative. To get the money ball rolling in a big way, we need awareness. We need
outrage
. We need people to care enough to get into the conversation. Rose Kushner, Betty Ford, Happy Rockefeller—they got things started, and the Betty Rollin book was a huge step forward. But it came out four years ago, and in terms of awareness, have we made any real progress since then? As far as the fundraising piece—okay, we’re here. This is a wonderful event, and I appreciate everyone’s generosity, but it’s too little, too late.”

“Too late for Suzy, yes,” said Blumenschein. “And for a lot of others. Believe me, I never forget a face. But what keeps me up at night are the ones walking in the door tomorrow. The ones we might be able to save.”

“You’re a great man, George Blumenschein.” I gave him another quick hug, then clinked my champagne flute on his. “L’chaim.”

He nodded firmly and raised his glass. “To life.”

I saw Norman Brinker again the following Sunday.

My friends, Joyce and Selwin Belofsky—regulars at Dallas charity functions and in the
Dallas Morning News
society pages—had been very sweetly concerned about me over the previous year and had invited me to brunch at their country club. Norman did the standard table flyby.

“Joyce, so good to see you. Selly, how’s it going?” He gave my tailored red suit an unabashed once-over. “And the lady in red. How are you, Nancy?”

We exchanged stock pleasantries, and Norman went on his way, working the room like a summer wind gust, stirring up a little flurry of conversation here and a little dust devil of laughter there. Joyce and Selly and I sat chatting in the sunshine until Norman made his way back to us again.

“Selly, what are these ladies buzzing about so intently?”

“Nancy’s doing the most interesting work with M. D. Anderson,” said Joyce. “She’s studying all the medical journals and really making quite a project of it.”

Norman raised one eyebrow. “Really.”

“I met some Baylor research scientists at the Cattle Baron’s Ball,” I said. “They were very appreciative of everything you’ve done.”

“I’m glad to help,” said Norman. “Can’t say I know much about the science, but I do know a good team when I see it, and they’ve got one.”

A few more pleasantries and off he went. And back he came.

“Selly, I just want to know how you rate,” he said. “Not one beautiful woman on your arm, but two? Don’t you think that’s a little greedy?”

Polite chuckles. Parting pleasantries. Off he went again, and we got up to leave.

“Well,” Joyce said, “Norman Brinker is a good friend of ours. But not
that
good. He was hovering around our table like a honeybee.”

“Had to be the red dress,” said Selly.

T
he milestone moment. A crisp October morning at ten o’clock, my phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Is it true you walk on water?”

“Who is this?”

“Norman Brinker.”

I’m not going to sit here and pretend I didn’t know why he was calling. Through the grapevine, I knew he and his second wife had divorced after five years. They’d had two children, but for whatever reason, they didn’t appear to occupy the same sort of place in his life as Brenda and Cindy, his daughters with Little Mo. He was currently seeing a nice woman and wasn’t one of those men who swaggers around playing the field or flying personal laundry out in the breeze. He was a father, the head of a huge corporation, an extremely wealthy and influential community leader; a man in his position has good reason to be guarded about the relationships he gets into. If I was interested in getting to know Norman—and I was—I could expect to be properly vetted. Which was fine with me. I had my son to consider; I wasn’t about to get involved without knowing a man’s true colors.

He asked me to meet him at Chateaubriand, a Dallas steak house that was upscale but not too self-important.

“Can you be there in ninety minutes?”

“Sure,” I said. I was there in eighty.

Norman was still there ahead of me, glad-handing the waiter like the
guy was his long-lost cousin. Something I quickly learned about Norman: No matter how many friends he had there when he walked in the door, you could multiply that times ten by the time he walked out. It was the secret of his success. He was the quintessential people person. He didn’t lord it over a waiter or a line cook; he was in league with him, a comrade-in-arms. He made everyone on the totem pole feel like a partner in this great endeavor of dining, this noble enterprise of living a good life, eating good food, and making great, caring conversation with everyone in earshot.

I quickly learned a few other things as well. He didn’t drink. (His mother was a staunch member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.) He didn’t smoke. (His father had once made him eat a fistful of chewing tobacco.) He rarely ate lunch sitting down, but he accepted the table we were offered, held my chair, and sat down across from me. There was a bright light directly over my head. I felt a foursome of suits at a nearby table giving me the eye. A trio of ladies came in and exchanged pleasantries with Norman, then sat in the corner staring holes in the back of my neck.

“Tell me about yourself,” he said.

“What do you want to know?”

“The usual. Where are you from?”

“Peoria, Illinois. Land of milk and honey.”

“Are you a person of faith?”

“More like a person of doubt right now. It’s been a trying year. But I was raised Jewish, and those teachings mean a lot to me. I hope God and I will eventually be on speaking terms again.”

“What do you like to do when you’re not at work?”

“My little boy keeps me busy. I’m involved in a lot of cancer-related charities. Working on fundraisers, trying to learn everything I can.”

We riffed the way acquaintances do, starting with banter-weight small talk, then embarking on what felt like one of those long, casual job interviews, where you’re not really sure you want the job, so you’re not nervous, and the person conducting the interview isn’t really sure he wants to hire you, but he’s definitely reluctant to let you leave. Talking back and forth across the table, we both recognized a kindred spirit under the skin, but to the naked eye, we didn’t have much in common.

Norman was sixteen years older than me, a Christian, with two grown daughters. Five years earlier, he’d founded the Willow Bend Polo and Hunt Club just outside Dallas, and while Norman himself was an egalitarian sort of guy, there were plenty of godly people in the country club set who chose not to mingle with God’s Chosen People. I wasn’t sure I’d be welcome there, even if I was associating with someone swanky enough to invite me.

We talked about our families—children and parents—and here again, our backgrounds were light-years apart. My childhood was far more privileged, idyllic compared with Norman’s, but I could see that he cherished his upbringing the same way I cherished mine. His mother had died just a few months earlier, and he was still feeling raw about that loss, a feeling with which I could certainly identify. We traded our best stories about growing up and going out into the world. I shared a few amusing anecdotes from my travels with Suzy, and he regaled me with the tale of his great Hungarian horse-jumping mishap at the Modern Pentathlon in Budapest in 1954.

The first event was on horseback: a three-mile course with twenty-eight jumps. After that came fencing, pistol shooting, a four-hundred-meter swim, and a three-mile cross-country run. (Yes, I know. No shortage of testosterone there.) Toward the end of that first event, the horses had to jump over a fence onto a bridge, then go around a big tree.

“I figured I could save about three seconds if I took the fence at an angle and went under the tree,” said Norman. “Unfortunately, the tree had other plans.”

When Norman was snagged by a low branch, the horse’s gait was thrown off. Going into the next jump immediately in their path, the horse fell and Norman flew from the saddle in one of those spectacularly terrifying, Superman-destroying moments that define this dangerous sport.

“I heard something when I hit the ground,” he told me. “I knew something was broken, but I managed to grab hold of the reins and get back on. Finished eighth out of sixty, but I was out for the rest of the competition, which was unfortunate.”

“What broke?” I asked.

“Collarbone. Right here.” He indicated his left shoulder. “They hitched
me up with a metal sling and knocked me out with painkillers for a few days.”

“You were lucky,” I said. “That could have ended badly.”

“Don’t I know it. But you can’t think about that when you’re in the saddle,” he said.

“In 1954—the height of the Cold War—it’s remarkable that they had Americans competing at all.”

“Oh, the people were great. They’re just grand, proud, strong people over there. But there were only about two dozen Americans in the whole Eastern Bloc. The next day, I came to in the hospital and found a crowd of Hungarians packed into the room, reading my American magazines, asking me about Jesse Owens and Bogey and Bacall, looking for news of the outside world. It was the darnedest thing—they were so isolated, so misinformed. These people didn’t stand a chance under the Communist regime. No way to get out into the world or even know what was going on. No way to make anything of their lives other than what the government told them they could. Even at that age, I appreciated what it means to live in a free country.”

I smiled, remembering Suzy.
Nothing compares with good old America
.

“I like your adventure stories,” I said. “They’re all about horses.”

“I’m playing in a polo tournament down in Argentina later this month,” said Norman. “We should go riding when I get back.”

“I’d love to.”

“Do you ride Western style? Or are you one of those DAR types who has to have an English saddle?”

“I can handle anything you put under me.”

Norman raised one eyebrow.

“But I am a proud Daughter of the American Revolution,” I added. “And a Daughter of the Confederacy.”

“You don’t say.”

“My mother’s grandfather came from Germany and settled in Kentucky.”

“How’d he end up there?”

“No idea. We didn’t spend much time with that side of the family, but I’ve seen pictures of my great-grandmother sitting on the front porch in
Hopkinsville, smoking a corncob pipe. They raised hogs. My Grandpa Leo was a butcher.”

“Jewish hog farmers of the Confederacy. That’s good stock.” Norman laughed, crowing straight from the thorax, wide open, highly contagious.

“You have a terrific laugh,” I told him. “I hate a pinched laugher. You’re the polar opposite of that.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“So. Mr. Brinker. Is there anything else I should know about you?”

“I’m not easily smitten.”

“Lucky you.”

The suits were loitering over coffee and whiskeys now.

“Those gentlemen over there keep looking at us,” I said.

“You’re very easy to look at.”

“Are you allowed to flirt with me?”

“That would be up to you,” he said. “Do you play polo?”

“No, but I think I’d be good at it. Is it as dangerous as it looks?”

“People say it is.” Norman shrugged. “If you took the danger out of it, I think I’d just as soon go do something else. It’s like a business deal. If there’s no risk, where’s the fun in that?”

“I’d love to take some lessons. I really need to get … just get out of myself. Learn something new. Do something hard. I want to leave the last year behind and start the decade all over again.”

“Why’s that?”

“My sister … Suzy. She had breast cancer.” I made a point of saying it now. Saying it the way it should have been said before. “She died.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you. That’s very kind,” I said automatically.

“Cancer’s a hard way to go. A hard thing on the family.”

I nodded because saying anything risked my bawling like a calf. If he’d said another word, I would have had to leave the table, and what made me fall a little bit in love with this man right then was his respect for that. There was no searching for the right thing to say because he knew there were no words—or there was something beyond words—I don’t know. I felt safe with him, that’s all. Here was another small refuge from the wreckage: a quiet conversation with someone who had no expectation that we should rise above these losses we both knew would
tower over us for the rest of our lives. There was, however, an expectation of redemption and the return of joy.