“What didn’t he pay attention to?” I said.
She thought about this for a moment. “Well,” she said, “I’ve had a bit of a problem and he didn’t catch it. I don’t want him doing the same thing with you.”
She didn’t mention the word “cancer,” and she didn’t explain what Dr. Jaron had done and not done about her “bit of a problem.” I suspect—now, not then—that he’d been slow to act when she found the lump, and then had been too laconic when the biopsy proved the lump malignant, treating it as if it was her problem and not his. Many years later she told me, out of the blue, that he hadn’t caught it because he didn’t like to touch women’s breasts.
No doubt his casualness after the fact had something to do with covering his ass, as doctors do, then and now, by acting as if everything is routine, what’s the hurry? Yet it might have been more simple. My mother may have decided that Dr. Jaron either lacked sufficient expertise, or interest—who could trust breast examinations to a doctor who didn’t like to touch breasts? So, she took matters into her own hands. When she did that, how could she continue to send her children to him?
Or maybe I just didn’t ask any questions. A new doctor? One without skin rashes? Why not?
The other datum I have is more flimsy still. When she announced that “Larry” Maxwell was her new doctor, she made a point of saying that he was a man that she trusted. I may have thought about asking why—simple curiosity. But more likely, I deduced that she’d gone to Larry Maxwell because he was a family friend with whom she and my father often socialized. I didn’t think to ask why I was now going to a third doctor, which would have forced her to explain what was really going on. When she announced that she was going to Vancouver for a trip, I didn’t ask why, either.
I was, in other words, oblivious to the most catastrophic event in my mother’s entire life while it was happening. My obliviousness didn’t end there, either. I remained woefully ignorant about dates, times, effects of the mastectomy and the several courses of radiation treatments she suffered through over the next several years. Worse, I was utterly without empathy about the pain and suffering she experienced. For instance, I believed that the diagnosis had come in 1958, when I was 14—thus partly excusing my indifference on the grounds of my youth. But it turns out I was 16, and the 3-year crisis from diagnosis through surgery to radiation treatment took me past the age of 18—making me a self-involved near-adult instead of an oblivious adolescent.
I have just three other memories of it to work with, and all three of them are brief and mainly about me.
The first is a vague recollection of my mother coming off the plane from Vancouver with her left arm in a sling. I’d gone out to the small airport in Prince George along with my father and sister Nina—my sister Serena was already married and living in Kamloops, 500 kilometres south, and god only knows where my brother was that day—did my father have him stay behind to deal with some delivery that needed to be made? I remember this event more because of the novelty of going to the airport than any sense of dire occasion. As she descended, very uncertainly, the steel staircase from the plane onto the tarmac, she had, I recall, her light-coloured coat half on, her right arm in the coat sleeve, the left sleeve draped over the sling that immobilized her left arm, obscuring it. I remember being surprised at the sling, and I have to imagine, now, that she was pale. Did she smile when she saw us?
What happened after we picked her up is a total blank. It is blank about the remainder of that day, and blank for months and even years after that. Now that I think of it, I have very few tactile memories of any kind from this period of my life, except for sideswiping a telephone pole with the new-from-the-Europe-trip Volkswagen when my father forced a driving lesson on me as a sixteenth-birthday present.
The driving lesson hadn’t felt like much of a birthday present even before I sideswiped the pole and had to sit through what seemed like the 650th lecture about what a boob I was. I knew my father only wanted me to get my licence so I could drive delivery vans and trucks for him. I had no objection to that, but no burning interest, either. The important thing, in my mind, was that I had no choice. I was correct about not having a choice. Three days later I took my driving test on a 1956 3-ton Chevrolet flat-deck painted Orange Crush colours. The truck, mercifully for me and for the safety of others, had been unloaded for the test. I passed, but I was a lousy driver. I had four small accidents over the next two months before I smartened up and recognized that I had to actually drive the car all the time while I was behind the wheel. In one of the accidents, I drove the Volkswagen through a supermarket window after my foot slipped off the brake pedal and hit the gas as I zipped through the supermarket’s parking lot. Bwam! The others were lapses of attention: I’d decided it was more interesting to do or think about other things. Bwam!
The second memory is wholly fabricated, because I was only told it happened, years later, and it subsequently burned into my brain as an event I’d witnessed. The night before she flew to Vancouver for the mastectomy (Did I go the airport to see her off? Did I try to reassure her before she left?) my father sat her down at the kitchen table and had her sign a dozen blank cheques.
I understood what this was about the instant I was told about it. I was in my twenties at the time, and when I asked, rhetorically, why my father would do such a thing, my mother rolled her eyes and said, “Guess.”
Nah, there was no guessing needed. He’d wanted to be able to clean out her private bank account and the several joint accounts in case . . . Well, I’m sure you get it. It was a horrible thing to do, and it was wholly in character. A sensible woman today would leave a marriage over such a stunt. My mother, a deeply sensible woman, didn’t, and not just, I think, because it was a different era.
The third memory is tactile, and not quite so spare. Several months after she returned home from the operation, she called me into her bedroom.
“It’s time you had a look at this,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact. I was standing just inside the bedroom door as she slipped her nightgown from her left shoulder to expose the vast plate of scar tissue for me to view. I was horrified, by its extent and by the incontrovertible injury of it. Not only was the breast gone, but there was a cavity in her upper chest where the doctors had removed the lymph glands from her left armpit, taking with it elements of her shoulder musculature. The scars were still red and raw-looking, the remaining muscle tissue twisted and cobbled with keloid. (Twenty years later—the next time I had a close look—the scars had changed little.)
“Come here so you can touch it,” she ordered.
I sat on the bed beside her, and I remember caressing her cheek—good for me!—before I ran my hand over the scars. The muscles in my groin contracted as I did, as they do to this day when I recall that moment. Probably, I asked her shyly if it still hurt, and probably, she said “no,” or, “not anymore,” or, “only sometimes.” But maybe I didn’t ask.
What I should have recognized, and didn’t, was how unnecessarily searing an experience it had been for her, both physically and emotionally, and how tough and decisive she’d been through it. My father, never much help when anyone was in physical pain or discomfort, withdrew from her with cruel swiftness the moment he found out about it.
At the end of that conversation with my sister Nina I had to have so I could pinpoint the dates, Nina recalled two extra details. She had a vivid memory of my mother looking frightened as she boarded the plane to Vancouver. The other was much darker. Dr. Jaron, when he got the results of the biopsy, had phoned my father, not my mother. He phoned on Saturday morning, but it was late Sunday afternoon before my father could work up the nerve to reveal what he’d been told. Fifteen minutes later, he left and went down to the plant. He didn’t return home until after ten in the evening. The phone conversation I recorded at the beginning of this took place the next day, and Dr. Jaron had left it to the end of the day to return the call my mother would have made that morning.
My father stayed clear of her for the duration. After the cruelty of the cheques-signings, he delivered her to the plane when she flew to Vancouver for the operation, bringing my sister to the airport to