About Alice by Calvin Trillin Read Free Book Online Page A

I intended to keep my composure. I couldn’t talk about it, and I tried not to think about it. But it was the shock of it that I was trying to avoid, I think, not the content: for reasons I can’t completely explain, I truly never believed that Alice would, like an overwhelming percentage of the people in her situation, die within a year or two of being diagnosed. Although she warned in the
New England Journal of Medicine
article that every talisman has its limitations, I suppose I fell for the talisman of will. I thought I could protect her. I somehow thought I could keep her alive because I wouldn’t accept the possibility that she was going to die. I don’t think Alice accepted that possibility, either. She later wrote, “I am known among my friends and family as an incorrigible, even ridiculous optimist,” although she also wrote, “I was afraid that all the brave things I said might no longer hold if I got sick again.” A couple of days after she’d learned the prognosis, I came into her room to find her on the phone, making notes. It had become obvious that the course of radiation would mean that we couldn’t go to Nova Scotia, and she was trying to find a day camp where the girls could go while we made our trips to the radiologist.
    A few weeks after Alice’s operation, a neighbor of mine pulled me aside and said, portentously, “What she’s got to do is to change her whole lifestyle.”
    â€œThere’s nothing wrong with her lifestyle,” I said. I refrained from adding that there were some things about his own lifestyle that could use tidying up. He wouldn’t have heard me anyway. He was off on a lecture about macrobiotic food or ingestion of great quantities of vitamin C or some other magic cure. What such people were saying was that we were suckers if we thought Alice was going to be cured of lung cancer by what they called, with some disdain, conventional medicine. Alice was more patient with such people than I was. At some point she’d tell them that her husband always said that his idea of alternative medicine was a doctor who hadn’t gone to Johns Hopkins. But she didn’t disagree about what they were really saying. “We got a lot of phone calls from people recommending apricot pits, or some such thing,” she said at a medical conference many years later. “To us, and particularly to my husband, that was an indication that they thought I was going to die.”
    A couple of years after Alice’s diagnosis, I realized that I wasn’t thinking about it all the time. Gradually, we had found ourselves back in our regular lives. We attended our first family graduation ceremonies, at P.S. 3. Alice had become more involved in educational television. A company she and a partner founded eventually produced a PBS series that described various aspects of the visual and performing arts to children by building each program around an artist at work—David Hockney painting a picture for a program on perspective, for instance, and Max Roach working out drum riffs for a program on rhythm. I was again going on the road every three weeks for a series of articles I was doing for
The New Yorker
. After finishing the reporting for one of those pieces, I was walking through an airport to catch a plane back to New York when, apropos of nothing, the possibility that things could have gone the other way in 1976 burst into my mind. I could see myself trying to tell my girls that their mother was dead. I think I literally staggered. I sat down in the nearest chair. I wasn’t in tears. I was in a condition my father would have called poleaxed. A couple of people stopped to ask if I was all right. I must have said yes. After a while, the pictures faded from my mind. I walked to the gate and caught my flight to New York. Alice was there. The girls were there. Everything was all right.
    In the letter Alice sent in 1979 to Bruno