The amount of hope (2018)

We lived in a large house in New Haven, on a tree-lined street with many other large houses.

This was Everit Street. A lawyer who later became a judge lived next door. A professor of English literature lived in the house near the mailbox. A former president of Yale lived on the other side of our backyard fence. There was a biologist, a geologist, other lawyers, and other doctors. It amused my father that he, Clint Smith, a poor boy from the South, would own a house on a street like this.

One day, in our large house in New Haven, on our street full of other large houses, I asked my father a question. Just home from work, he still wore a dark suit, a white shirt, and a tie. I was probably six or seven.

“Dad,” I asked, “what are we?”

He had been talking to my mother at the stove.

“What are we?” I repeated. “I mean, are we Jewish? Italian? Irish? English?”

He looked down at me with this teasing expression on his face—thinking about his own journey from a childhood where he went barefoot half the year and then wore hand-me-down shoes with the soles taped together during the winter. “No,” he said. “We’re white trash.”

My mother laughed with surprise and delight.

“What?” That phrase stunned me.

Smiling, he put his hand on my head. This was his sense of dislocation, his ironic dissonance. “We’re white trash.”

And I burst into tears.

On the same block of Everit Street, just past the church parking lot, lived his friend Marc Schwartz. Marc and my father were both psychiatrists. Friends since residency, they lived ten houses apart and met for lunch once a week. They also owned the farm together. Marc and his wife Anne shared many weekends and many projects with my parents. Here they are all working together. You see my mother first and then Anne and then my father. Marc is filming. When the kids ride past on the hay, I am the one with an attitude.

In hot weather at the farm, my father often worked with his shirt off. One summer, both Marc and Anne noticed a large, irregular growth on his chest. Over the course of various projects on various weekends across that summer, the mole was clearly changing.

There was one effective treatment then for melanoma. Cutting it out. If that didn’t work, little else did. When a biopsy confirmed that the mole was malignant, his doctors could only cut it out and hope it hadn’t started to spread. Five years is what they said. If the cancer hasn’t spread in five years, he should be fine. I don’t think either my mother or my father were thinking about that mole, five years later, when he coughed up blood and the doctors discovered that the melanoma had metastasized to one lobe of his lungs. Again they cut it out. Again, they hoped. Then he started having seizures.

As he went through lung surgery and chemotherapy, my parents actually did have one small project left. They had bought an antique bed for my youngest sister. It was simple, solid construction, made of cherry. I remember the pieces stacked against the side of an auction barn—the head and the foot of the bed but only one of the two side rails. The project was to replace the missing rail with wood that matched the rest of the bed. They eventually found the right piece, a rough-hewn, eight foot long beam of heavy cherry, which ended up at our house in New Haven. The beam, which was quite substantial, lay outside our front door, beneath a window that had no curtains.

It is a Saturday afternoon in November. They are bringing the beam to a carpenter. Through the window, I watch them bend down together and pick it up. I am standing in our front hall. They carry it toward the car, along the porch that spans the width of our house.

They pass out of the window, my father going last. Then they pass outside the three living room windows, becoming shadows through the curtains behind the couch.

I go on with whatever I am doing, upstairs or in the basement. I come back through the front hall perhaps a half an hour later. Shadows no longer, I find them sitting on the couch. He sits hunched over, head down and hands clasped between his knees. She has her arm around his shoulders and her cheek against his temple. Later, I look outside. The car is still open, and the beam lies on the ground behind it.

A few weeks later, I am reading on my bed when he calls me from downstairs. My mother is out. He stands in the front hall, close to the first step on the stairway. I come down and stand looking up at him, two steps from the bottom.

“I had another seizure.” He braces his arm against the bottom of the bannister. “Can you help me upstairs?”

I shrug my small, thin shoulders.

“Do you think you can do it?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say and hope it is true.

We start up the stairs together, side by side. He puts his arm across my shoulders, which aren’t much higher than his belt. There is nothing I can really do to prevent him from falling. Maybe I give him courage. Or maybe I help him focus. We walk together into their room. I stand beside their bed while he lies down.

“I am going to close my eyes for a few minutes. I need to talk to Marc. He’s home. Can you call him? You know where their number is? In the rolodex?”

“Yes.”

Marc comes running down the street. Waiting for him on the porch, I bring him upstairs. When I leave them alone together, Marc closes the door, and I think I hear my father crying. Then I go downstairs again and sat stiffly in the center of the couch. They talk to each other for a long time.

After Marc leaves, my father calls me back upstairs. He is lying on his back in the bed, hands clasped across his stomach. I stand near his head, still stiff and solemn.

“How you doing, Doug?” He is staring at the ceiling. “Are you okay?”

I shrug.

“How did you feel when I asked for your help?”

“I don’t know.” There is a long pause. “It just happened so suddenly.”

“And that scared you?” he asks.

“Yeah. I guess. Kind of.”

“I was scared too.” He looks over at me now, rolling his head on the pillow. “Could you tell?”

“No. I mean, yes. Yes. You were pale. And kind of shaky.”

“It was a lot to ask of you. I only asked it because your mother wasn’t here.” He watches me.

“Okay,” I say finally.

“You handled it well. I’m proud of you.”

Thinking back, I don’t understand why he wanted to go up a set of stairs that day, instead of lying on the couch. And I don’t understand why there wasn’t an ambulance involved. But there wasn’t. Appointments with his surgeon and with a neurologist followed. And he did return to the hospital soon after this. They measured him for a wig and hoped radiation or chemotherapy would help, although there wasn’t much evidence either would.

I recently met an oncologist who was practicing then in New Haven. What would you see, I asked him, in a hospital room where a cancer patient was being treated in 1973? “You would see a family weeping and wringing their hands,” he said. “What is different today is the amount of hope.”