The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (34 page)

Early one morning I awoke to find my parents at my bedside. Standing near them was a stooped elderly man, a hunchback, who looked so ancient he could have been in his eighties or nineties. It was Rabbi Halfon, they said, a reverential tone in their voice, and he had come to heal me. The rabbi of the Congregation of Love and Friendship was said to possess mysterious powers. If anyone could intervene with God on my behalf, my parents whispered, he could.

The rabbi, who couldn't have been more than five feet tall, put a gnarled hand on my head and bent over me as I lay in my pajamas. He began to chant out loud and mumble a series of blessings. I had no idea what he was saying, but I noticed that my parents didn't dare sit down; they stood apprehensively in the background and didn't utter a word.

At last, the holy man was done. He handed me an amulet with Hebrew scriptures, and said I was to sleep with it every night of my illness. Then he grabbed his cane and hobbled out into the chilly spring morning.

My parents seemed much calmer after he'd left. My father eased himself back in the armchair and began to pray.

T
here was an invisible barrier separating the reception lounge out front where my parents could sit comfortably and wait for me on padded armchairs, and the inner sanctum in the back where I would meet privately with Dr. Lee, and allow him to examine me, determine my treatment, chart my progress, and see how I was faring.

I was now in full survival mode. I'd instinctively realized that my new American doctor didn't much care for my old immigrant parents, especially Dad, looking over his shoulders. I didn't exactly understand why, only that—for now, at least—I needed Dr. Lee more.

This imperious and formidable WASP doctor who seemed immune to my father's tears, yet was increasingly receptive to me, had to be wooed and courted at all costs, and I agonized that the slightest misstep on my part—too great a show of emotion, too much melodrama or maudlin self-pity—would prompt him to drop me as his patient. I would still be treated at Memorial, but most likely pawned off to the legions of young oncology residents and fellows who were assigned to work on the poor.

I wanted none of them. I only wanted Dr. Lee.

That meant I had to immediately shed my Egyptian sensibility and reinvent myself as an American. I had to be as cold and confident, as sober and unsentimental, as Dr. Burton J. Lee III, or as I imagined him to be.

I began to cultivate him, gauging exactly how to talk and behave with him. I prepared intently for my appointments—no baggy pants and inelegant T-shirts anymore. I forced myself to dress up, to act poised and upbeat, though I wasn't feeling much of either. And I didn't cry, no matter how sad I felt, no matter what news he delivered.

Even early on, examinations rarely took more than a minute or two. He would peer at me intently the moment he saw me. I would notice him taking in my eyes, my hair, even my clothes and my shoes. How odd, I thought. I still hadn't gotten over the fact that he didn't wear a white coat like all the other doctors I knew, and now I had to get used to his decidedly unorthodox approach.

When we talked, it was rarely about medical matters. Mostly, we chatted about books, his favorites and mine, and hobbies, and I quickly learned of his pet peeves—and he had many, from Frank Sinatra to the emerging feminist movement.

How could he possibly know how I was doing without conducting a thorough exam? I asked him one day.

“By looking into your eyes,” he replied.

The test results came back. My illness, I learned—though not from Dr. Lee—was advanced, spread far beyond the site of Cat Scratch Fever. I had secretly glanced at my chart, which said that out of four possible stages of Hodgkin's—the fourth being the worst and hardest to treat—I was in stage three.

Dr. Lee never discussed my prognosis; he never even used the word. He didn't cite odds of survival or years to live. He simply spoke of the need to begin treatment, which he minimized by saying it would consist of a couple of weeks of radiation. He made it sound as simple and innocuous as taking a course of antibiotics. He warned of only one major consequence—I would never be able to have children.

There was a way to avert that, a simple one-hour operation that could potentially work. My family seemed too dazed by the avalanche
of bad news to help me decide. My mother, having raised me to avoid the drudgery of kids and housework, couldn't suddenly turn around and sing a different tune. Dad, of course, had a lingering terror of surgeries; he had never forgotten his own ill-fated operation, the pounding of the hammer. Neither seemed capable of having a rational conversation with me, of expressing concern or sorrow, let alone advising me clearly as to what to do.

Out in California, Suzette couldn't have been more distraught, though not about the latest revelation. I most certainly did not have Hodgkin's, she continued to say over and over, even when there wasn't the slightest doubt anymore. The entire medical establishment was mistaken, she said. I had to ignore them all. And I certainly shouldn't subject myself to any operations that could be dangerous and, besides, wouldn't work. Short of objecting to whatever I was being told, she never offered any alternatives, beyond urging me to get on a plane and fly to Stanford.

My brothers, oddly, were the only ones willing to weigh in decisively: I should have the operation at once.

It was the spring of 1973,
Ms.
was the most talked-about new magazine, and Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan were holding court about what made women happy—and that wasn't the traditional route of marriage and a family. On the radio, Helen Reddy was singing the anthem to the burgeoning feminist movement, “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar.” There was a revolution under way, every bit as powerful and wrenching as the one my parents had lived through in 1952. A social movement was transforming women's lives, even as my own life was being transformed by illness.

I made the mistake of thinking the two were linked, and that I could apply the lessons of one to the other.

I didn't yet have my father's wariness toward revolutions and all they promise. I found the rhetoric comforting, an antidote to my fears, a way to escape my sorrow about the course I was choosing, or that fate had chosen for me. I ultimately passed on the surgery, and started treatment.

As I walked to my first radiation session, I was determined not to cry. I was my father's daughter: I would never let anyone see me break down.

 

AT HOME, MY FAMILY
behaved so strangely; that was the worst of it. They were overly solicitous, which only fueled my paranoia. How sick was I, anyway? Was it perhaps worse than I knew?

Once, when we came back by subway after a long day at Memorial, they insisted on calling a car service to pick us up from the train station. We were only a couple of blocks away from the apartment. I was so distraught, I refused to get in the car and began walking home without them.

The more attentive they were, the more I fretted.

It was almost as if they didn't think the treatment was going to work. As far as Mom was concerned, I was Baby Alexandra.

Only my father continued to act as he always had, and when the treatment became so intense I could no longer eat, it was my father who thought of olives.

He began to bring home cans of olives, black, with no pits—the enormous ones labeled “Colossal.” I couldn't bear to look at food, the mere thought of eating made me ill, but I was somehow able to nibble on olives. Dad insisted on feeding me himself, one olive at a time. While all around me, patients became weak from the treatments, collapsed, dropped out, never to be seen again, I continued to eat olives.

My mom, panic-stricken at my weight loss, persisted in preparing massive hot Levantine suppers night after night—stuffed artichokes, meatballs, veal stew, cooked lamb—all the dishes I had loved and now couldn't go near. She looked so hurt each time I pushed a plate of food away, unable to swallow a single spoonful of the rich stews and soups she served me and that were designed to fatten me up and make me strong.

That is when my father would step in and hand me an olive.

I became convinced that the olives—not the radiation treatments—were healing me.

I don't think Dad gave much thought to the unusual regimen he had devised for me. Olives had been a staple of life in the Levant, as essential as bread and water. While the rest of us learned to devour hot dogs and hamburgers and French fries, he preferred to dine simply on pita bread, feta cheese, and black olives. Of course, he had always lived as if
he were still in his beloved Cairo. Even Pouspous Jaune had been trained like her predecessors to disdain supermarket cat food and enjoy fresh pita and black olives. It was all part of my father's plan to ignore the New World and pretend he'd never left the old one.

He sat in his chair, praying, eating his bread and cheese and olives.

From California, my sister kept calling, asking questions. Was the radiation working? she wanted to know. Was I cured yet?

There were no answers that spring and summer.
Cured
was a mythical term, I learned, used only on TV and in magazines. There was only the chance that the relentless treatments—if I could withstand them—would interrupt the disease's relentless advance.

There were times I felt so weak that all I wanted to do was sleep. But then I would feel my father's gentle tap on the shoulders.

“Loulou, Loulou, reveilles-toi,” he'd say; Loulou, Loulou, wake up.

He came every couple of hours to feed me olives. I'd be so annoyed, preferring my comatose state. Only grudgingly would I take what he handed me. He seemed content if in the middle of the night, I agreed to have one or two olives. In the afternoon, around lunchtime, I was supposed to eat a few more, maybe five or six. They were regular feedings, delicate, as with a newborn. He attended to me as patiently and meticulously as my grandmother Zarifa ministered to my cousin Salomone in Cairo, in 1944, bringing him regular portions of bananas and raw eggs and stewed apricots—above all,
mesh-mesh
—to cure him of his pleurisy.

In July, deep into the treatment, Suzette surprised us by flying into New York and swooping into the house on Sixty-fifth Street. I was jolted out of my lethargy—the deadening routine of going every day to Memorial for the radiation sessions and coming home ill and exhausted. I was thinner than ever and more frail than ever. I stared at my sister, all beaming and resplendent in a kelly green sweater that set off her long, shiny black hair, as if she were a visitor from another planet.

I should have been used to her fact-finding missions, the trips she took once a year to check on how we were doing and insert herself into the latest family drama. She would come with an armful of gifts, and I tended to remember her visits mostly by what she had brought me on
a particular year—games, lavish clothes, expensive chocolates. This year, her self-styled role of Inspector General had taken on a grimmer cast. She still harbored doubts about my chosen treatment, and hadn't given up hope I'd come to my senses and fly off to the Mayo Clinic. Clearly, she had been alarmed by my mother's letters and had decided to come see for herself how “
pauvre
Loulou” was doing.

And maybe she simply wanted to cheer me up.

At one point, she asked me why I hadn't bothered to comb my hair. I was afraid to tell her the truth: that if I brushed it too much, some would fall out. Until now, it had been my secret. I had very long hair, and it was only falling out in the back, where I'd been heavily radiated; I figured that if I arranged it artfully, no one would notice. Suzette took out a hairbrush from her handbag and began to lightly graze my hair with it. We both pretended not to notice the thin strands that landed on my shoulder.

In the midst of the inevitable discussions about my treatment and the mentions of Stanford and the Mayo Brothers, Suzette announced that she was taking me out to lunch. Nothing my parents or I said could stop her. I insisted that I wasn't hungry, but she was adamant. We took a subway to Grand Central and walked over to the Pan Am Building. She had made reservations at a restaurant called La Trattoria, a vast, jaunty space that was supposed to make customers feel like hopping on the next Pan Am flight to Rome or Milan (far more desirable destinations, I thought, than Palo Alto or Rochester, Minnesota). Over a lunch of eggplant parmigiana, I felt oddly chatty, though I didn't eat much.

All around us were young businessmen wearing suits, and I found myself staring at them. Elegant men in dark pinstriped suits weren't a common sight in my corner of Brooklyn. I'd point them out to my sister, remarking on how wonderful they looked. They seemed rich and important and I told my sister the man I'd someday marry would have to wear a terribly expensive suit.

At that moment at La Trattoria, as I nibbled at a breadstick, “someday” seemed like a possibility.

After lunch, we wandered around the corner to a boutique and my sister encouraged me to go in. She went to a rack and pulled out a knit sweater in a shocking shade of red—the same shade as the one I'd worn
that long-ago night of the red dress. It was clingy with a plunging V neckline.

“You don't think it's too low cut?” I asked Suzette, fearful she would say yes. She didn't even blink.

“It is perfect. Why don't you wear it?”

I walked out in my new sweater, feeling resplendent and, for the first time in months, pretty.

As the summer wore on, I finally dared to ask Dr. Lee if I would be able to attend college in the fall. I was supposed to start Vassar, yet there'd been a dreamlike quality to my decision to enroll there, as if I were merely going through the motions, without any real conviction I'd be able to attend.

“You
will
go away to college,” he declared, and his voice resonated with that booming self-confidence that in my mind was distinctly American, enhanced by the kind of absolute certainty that comes from growing up privileged and attending great schools.

Dr. Lee didn't betray any doubts at all, and because he seemed so sure of himself, and his voice sounded so brisk and refreshing, it reminded me of that first sip of lemonade from the glass my mother handed me at the end of the Fast of Lamentation, bracing and tart and delicious at the same time, so that I began to feel hopeful, and considered the possibility that I would be well again.

 

WITHIN MONTHS, IT WAS
as if it had never happened.

There were no obvious traces of my illness, except that I was pale, and tired very easily. At synagogue on Saturdays, when the congregation rose, I was unable to stand and stayed in my chair, like the old people. During the High Holidays, for the first time in my life, I didn't fast. I was so thin, I concentrated on eating and trying to regain some of the weight I had lost.

One day, shortly after the treatment had ended, I developed a high fever. I returned to Memorial, but Dr. Lee was nowhere to be found; the emergency doctor on call prescribed horse pills I could barely swallow. When Dr. Lee returned, I showed him the pills and he ordered me to stop taking them. The fever disappeared as mysteriously as it had come.