Abscess Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

Home! Of course, I hadn't been here long before the garbage disposal jammed and the sink backed up. I took it on myself, in a bit of hubris, to repair things and only made them worse -- I tightened an O-coupling too much and wrecked it. So I had to call the plumber and pay for my hubris.

After three months away, things have changed around the house. That is, nothing is where I left it. Which for a mild (?) obsessive-compulsive like me is disturbing. Nevertheless, after my first outpatient IV session today, I vow to come home and rest.

Second Childhood

Hospitals and nursing facilities are grown-up places, where things like prudishness and modesty have to be left behind. I overheard two nurses laughing about the persnickety patient who requested that no men, not even aides or orderlies, be allowed to enter her room. Of course, nurses have seen and handled things that would have most of us fleeing or throwing up. There aren't many professions that get more respect from me than nursing does.

Still, it bothers me to hear a 90-year-old man say things like "I need to go potty" or "I have to wee-wee." And the nursing staff encourages it. Instead of "urinate" and "defecate," they say "pee-pee" and "poop" or even something I hadn't heard since third grade: "No. 1" and "No. 2." (No one uses the most familiar four-letter Anglo-Saxonisms.)

At first I thought this was an example of the infantilization that some critics decry in our culture. But then I lightened up. These twee euphemisms are the ones that almost every parent uses so often during the toilet-training years that it shouldn't be surprising when they become second-nature to us.

But something in me still thinks that being sick -- or just very, very old, as most of my roommates have been -- should be treated with frankness, not cutesiness.

More on TB

Nicholas Kristof has a scary-informative column about tuberculosis today.

And I may have to modify my previous assertion that I don't have TB. When I said that to Dr. B. yesterday, he said not to be so sure. My history of respiratory problems could have its source in the bacillus. Well, damn. And as Kristof's column says, there's not a lot of new research on TB, partly because it's a disease of the poor, who don't tend to fund research. So I am scrupulously gulping my antibiotics -- literally bitter pills.

Where the Heart Is

The following review was written for the Houston Chronicle and e-mailed to them shortly before I got sick. Somehow the e-mail went astray, and the review never ran because I was incommunicado when the editor tried to get in touch with me about it. Sad, because it was one of my favorite books of the year.

HOME

By Marilynne Robinson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pp., $25


Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.

--Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man”

Everything that Frost packed into that wry aphorism – need, obligation, exploitation, resistance, resentment – Marilynne Robinson unpacks in her magisterial, breath-stealing new novel, “Home.” Everything and more, for Robinson also ventures into such difficult topics as love and faith.


These are difficult topics for fiction not only because they can betray writers into sentimentality, but also because so much of the drama of fiction depends on hatred and doubt. As Milton discovered, Satan inevitably gets all the best lines. Yet the drama in Robinson’s novel consists of the struggle of good people to love and believe in one another and at least to make the attempt to believe in God.


Glory Boughton has come home to Gilead, Iowa, to look after her father, Robert, an elderly Presbyterian minister in his last days. Before long, word comes that her brother Jack will be joining them. Neither Glory nor her father has seen Jack for 20 years, since he left Gilead in disrepute; he even failed to return for his mother’s funeral.


Glory is the novel’s central consciousness – the third-person narration sticks to her point of view – and she has secrets of her own that she’s hesitant to share with her father and her brother. But during the weeks of his visit in the summer of 1956, she will share her secrets with Jack in order to learn some of his own. The novel is a delicate dance of guilt and forgiveness, involving not only the three Boughtons but also Robert’s old friend and fellow minister, John Ames, for whom Jack was named.


Readers of Robinson’s 2004 novel “Gilead,” which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award, will know these characters already. But they won’t know them the way they’re presented in “Home,” which tells essentially the same story about the homecoming of Jack Boughton, but tells it in a new and surprising way. “Gilead” was John Ames’ journal, a testament written for his small son, a profoundly meditative novel. “Home” is meditative, but it’s also a more theatrical novel.


Not “theatrical” in the pejorative sense (that is, florid and overstated) but in the sense that, as in a play, much of the tension and substance of the novel lies in the things the characters say to one another. It’s a novel that takes place on a stage of sorts: the Boughton home, its rooms cluttered with “unreadable books” and furniture in “sour, fierce, dreary black walnut” with “leonine legs and belligerently clawed feet.” The porch is “overgrown by an immense bramble of trumpet vines,” and there is an “empty barn,” “useless woodshed,” “unpruned orchard and horseless pasture.” This is the place that has taken Glory in, a 38-year-old unmarried woman who must by the end of the novel decide whether to let the past – home -- define her for the rest of her life.


But before that, she has to deal with Jack and their father, and with John Ames, who disapproves not only of Jack but also of his father’s willingness to overlook Jack’s transgressions. The novel moves through a series of crises, some of them provoked by Ames’ words and some by Jack’s tendency to adopt an ironic self-distancing that slicks over his underlying desire to be accepted and forgiven. As Glory moves among these characters, she comes to recognize and embrace her kinship with Jack, even though she is ostensibly the most dutiful of the eight Boughton children and he the most prodigal of the sons and daughters.


A moment of almost telepathic recognition of this kinship comes in mid-novel when Jack makes a remark that annoys Glory:


“That was a little flippant, she thought. She went into the kitchen to peel potatoes for a salad.


“After a while he came into the porch and the kitchen and stood by the door.


“ ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.


“ ‘What for?’


“ ‘When we were talking just now. I think I may have seemed – flippant.’


“ ‘No. Not at all.’


“ ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to. I can never be sure.’ Then he went outside again.”


That’s an utterly simple yet impeccably crafted account of the way a casual word or expression or action can ripple seismically through the consciousness of others. And it’s characteristic of Robinson, who has a sensibility attuned to “the intimacy of the ordinary,” to rip one of her own phrases out of its context. She is a writer of rare grace, whose words seem to fall into place as naturally and freshly as raindrops.


Don’t worry if you haven’t read “Gilead,” to which this novel is both companion and complement. You can begin with “Home” and then read the other. But you may be tempted when you finish “Home” just to start over and read it again. It’s that good.

Liberation Day

The groundhog saw the shadows and liked what he saw, so my winter in the nursing facility is nearing its end. As soon as the two bureaucracies -- hospital and facility -- can iron out the details, I'll be back home, probably by Tuesday. The catch is that for the duration, i.e., as long as the lesion still shows up on the MRI, I'll have to go in every day (Sundays and holidays too) for about an hour of intravenous antibiotic. But hey, I won't be stuck in wheelchair central anymore, waked up every morning for a change of IV bags.

Groundhog Day

Tomorrow is my version of Groundhog Day. Not that it's going to repeat over and over, although that pretty much describes my current institutionalized life. I mean that Dr. B. is going to come out of his office and look at the shadow of my brain lesions on the MRI and say whether I have six more months of IV therapy. (I could be here till June.)

A devout friend writes that he has me in his prayers. This old agnostic is almost willing to believe that they're working.

Proposition H8

They should have done this before the election:

TB or Not TB

If this were an episode of "House,"the cranky, pill-popping doctor would long ago have diagnosed my brain abscess as caused by an ingrown toenail. Dr. House often finds the solution to his mystery cases in the family medical histories of his patients. But in my case the family medical history only complicated things.

In the age of prosperity and antibiotics, tuberculosis is a disease of people who live in cardboard boxes under bridges. (At least in countries without, ahem, a national health insurance program.) But as anyone who knows Romantic poets, Victorian novels or grand opera is aware, it used to be more widespread.

My mother had tuberculosis when I was 3 or 4. She spent a year in a sanitarium and had part of a lung removed, yet she lived to be 75. (She might have lived longer -- her sister lived till she was 90 -- if she hadn't given in to depression and essentially starved herself to death, refusing to eat. Which is why I'm no foe of antidepressants.) Moreover, her father, who lived with us until I was 8 or 9, also had TB. So whenever I have to fill out one of those medical history questionnaires the doctor give you, I mention this exposure.

TB is not all that contagious, I think. None of my mother's six siblings contracted it, nor did my father. But I've had a history of upper-respiratory crud -- from sinusitis to pneumonia (twice) to an empyema, so doctors are quick to send me to X-ray.

Which is good, except that this time they decided that TB was a prime suspect, even though the usual pinprick skin test was negative, and they sent me to lock-up: a private room in the contagious ward, accessed by a kind of airlock and only by people wearing face masks. I spent three days there producing sputum samples -- coughing (even though I didn't have much to cough) into a little plastic cup full of weird-smelling chemicals.

I don't have TB, and I suppose I should be grateful for their thoroughness in making sure of the fact. But for a time there I wondered if instead of being Bette Davis in Dark Victory -- alerted to the onset of death from a brain tumor by losing her eyesight -- I was going to be Greta Garbo in Camille. Fortunately, I'm neither.

What's in a Name?

A nurse I hadn't seen before was hanging my IV bag the other day when I noticed her name tag.

"Is your name Arsenic?"

"Ar-say-nich," she said softly, a little wearily, as if answering the question was a burden she had borne for a long time. She was Croatian, she said, and the "c" was pronounced "ch."

Even so, it's an unsettling name for a nurse. You couldn't get away with a Nurse Arsenic in fiction. It would be like calling a surgeon Jack Ripper.

The word "arsenic," I learn from Wikipedia, is from the Greek, meaning "masculine" or "potent," which is how, I suspect, it became a Croatian surname. The Greeks got the word from the Persian, where it meant "yellow orpiment" -- a pigment. (Artists used to get arsenic poisoning from their paints.)

I suspect that Miss Arsenic, if she stays in the United States, will change her name, just as countless Vietnamese named Phuc have decided to do.

I don't mention all of this to make fun. No doubt there's a language somewhere in which "Matthews" means "foreskin" or monkey dung."

It's All in My Head

I can't imagine driving a car. That fierce and constant calculus of velocity, distance, and direction, which the ordinary brain does more deftly than any computer, is beyond me.

But on the other hand, just a few weeks ago I thought I'd never be able to read again. When I woke up that morning and the clock said 26 and Julian Barnes had become Ian Barnes, it wasn't that there was a blot or a blur in front of the 7 or the Jul-. It was as if my brain was telling me they weren't there. Later, lying on a gurney in a hallway at Stanford Hospital, I would watch people going by in a hall that crossed the one I was in. They would walk in from the right and then at a certain point simply vanish, as in some cheesy movie special effect. And other people would appear from the left out of sheer nothingness.

My brain was simply incapable of processing some of the information it was receiving. But it was doing the best it could. I think Julian became Ian because my brain knew Ian was a proper name. But Barnes didn't become Nes, because it knew that to be a nonsensical name.

Things got worse over the next few days, which I spent in a very nice private room in the ground floor isolation ward while they made sure I didn't have tuberculosis (another story for another day). It had a big window opening onto an enclosed garden. But I couldn't make sense of what was outside, couldn't distinguish trees from walls, shrubs from flowers; it was a mass of green with dots of colors that I toook to be blossoms. Later, I moved to a third-floor ward in which occasionally you could hear the hum of an engine starting up. It was the Medevac helicopter, which landed on the roof nearby. Visitors told me that from my window they could see the chopper taking off. But I never brought it into view. Maybe my brain thought it wasn't worth seeing.

As for reading, I developed a kind of dyslexia: Words refused to shape themselves into coherent syllables. Letters swapped places. The name "MERYL" was written on a dry-erase board on the wall -- presumably the name of a supervising nurse, not the actress. But my brain kept rearranging and substituting the letters. "Meryl" became "Merlyn" became "Merry." Was it simply trying out variations to see what worked?

Nor was watching TV any better. Profoundly bored, I wound up listening to a classical music station when I wasn't sleeping. But classical music on the radio is "easy listening" for office workers: classical Muzak. After several days of Baroque jangle I gave up. I don't care if I never hear Vivaldi again.


Finally, a few days after I left the hospital for the rehab facility, an occupational therapist put a book in front of me and asked me to try to read it. Maybe several weeks of ennui had persuaded my brain that this was a good thing to do, because the words took shape and stayed in place.

They say that when one part of the brain is injured, the other parts try to compensate, to work around the crippled part, to form new neural pathways or something. I believe it now. I haven't regained my sight completely. Occasionally someone will speak to me on my left and I'll have to search for the speaker. I look at cartoons on the Internet and don't get the joke -- the new pathway in my brain hasn't developed a sense of humor, perhaps.

Most embarrassing, I seem to have lost the easy automatic approach to familiar tasks: I put my shoes on the wrong feet. I have to be careful pulling a polo shirt over my head lest it go on inside-out or wrong-side front. I've been known to make several attempts at this before succeeding. Yet there are tasks -- like tying my shoelaces -- that are as automatic as they've been since I learned them many decades ago.
Some day, a long while from now, maybe I'll try driving. But I can't think about that now.