About Alice by Calvin Trillin Read Free Book Online Page B

Navasky—the book,
Dear Bruno,
was published many years later, in 1995—she said that at times she’d been angry at the unfairness of having become sick in such an unlikely way despite being what she described as a reasonably nice person who had always tried to behave herself. “My doctor said that getting sick like that—getting a lung tumor when you haven’t smoked and when you are way too young to get one—is like having a flower pot drop on your head while you are walking down the street,” she wrote. “It really isn’t your fault, and there isn’t much you can do about it except try to get the flower pot off your head and go on walking.” That’s more or less what Bruno did.
Dear Bruno
included a reply from him to the letter Alice had sent sixteen years before. It began, “Thanks for your letter. I really should have answered sooner, but I’ve been so busy. After you wrote to me, I made a list of everything I wanted to do when I left the hospital, and then suddenly I was doing it. There was high school to finish, then college. For a few years, I was living in Japan.”
    Alice loved Bruno’s letter. For her, of course, the measure of how you held up in the face of a life-threatening illness was not how much you changed but how much you stayed the same, in control of your own identity. At least until the 1990 recurrence scare, we had gradually unclenched our fists and tried to think of Alice’s illness as something in the past. Of course, we never completely lost sight of the dragons mentioned in her
New England Journal of Medicine
piece. In the blood-count line at Memorial, she wrote, cancer survivors sometimes feel like knights who have slain their dragons, but “we all know that the dragons are never quite dead and might at any time be aroused, ready for another fight.” She thought the situation had been captured perfectly by Ed Koren’s drawing on the cover of
Dear Bruno:
a knight, holding a syringe instead of a sword, is shown standing on top of the dragon he has vanquished, but a close look reveals that one eye of the dragon is half open.
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    When Alice’s dragon came, it approached from a direction we hadn’t even been guarding. In the spring of 2001, ten months after Sarah’s wedding and a month or so before Abigail was to be married in New York, a routine X-ray prompted a doctor to recommend that Alice have an angiogram. The angiogram made it obvious that she had to have a bypass operation immediately—that day. As they wheeled her away, she was smiling. She said they were going to fix her heart. I had never before seen anybody enthusiastic about emergency open-heart surgery.
    Part of that, I told friends at the time, was Alice’s singular worldview. Part of it, I suspect, was the assumption that what we were in for would be similar to what we’d experienced four years before, when I’d had a bypass operation done by the same surgeon. Although the recovery had sometimes made me recall one of my father’s favorite Midwestern sayings—“I haven’t had so much fun since the hogs ate little sister”—it was, in fact, a pretty straightforward process. There was a steady, if slow, recuperation, and then one day I realized that I was fully recovered, grateful for the intervention.
    But Alice’s operation took much longer than expected. The surgeon said the radiation had made her arteries difficult to work with, and had caused some damage to her heart. I later learned that one of the young surgical residents was so concerned that he dozed in a chair next to her bed throughout that first night—the equivalent, I surmised with gratitude, of those traffic policemen who had given her warnings instead of a summons. After a week or ten days, she came home, but several days later she was readmitted to the hospital. By then, it was only about a week until Abigail’s wedding. One