It happened on one of our morning walks. Hands clutching his stomach, abdominal pain etched on his face, in midstride my father doubled over. When he straightened back out he said he was fine, but later that week the burn in his stomach returned and my father consulted a doctor. A biopsy was taken. The doctors said there were no signs of cancer.
When my dad resumed his walks, the razor-sharp pain froze him in place again, again while I was with him. Later, back at the house, he told me it felt like jagged glass had been raked against the inside of his stomach.
“Aissa,” he said softly. “I know I have the Big C again.”
“It can’t be. They did biopsies. You don’t have the Big C. I know you don’t.”
“I have it, Aissa. I feel it inside my body.”
I was not telling my dad what I thought he wanted to hear. Since the doctors spotted no cancer, I thought his discomfort was coming from something else. Later, I learned that certain types of cancer cells can hide out, and my father’s had hidden deep inside the lining of his stomach. When at last they discovered it, the doctors said my father’s cancer was very slow and might have been inside him for months or even years. When first I heard this notion it made me physically ill. As it sank in—cancer might have been killing him, gradually, and nobody knew it—my squeamishness turned to a kind of hatred. Not at the doctors, but hatred at cancer itself, a fickle, cunning disease with phony retreats that foster hope, followed by brutal frontal advances. With cancer, I learned, no one ever really feels certain. Not patients, not family, not even superstar doctors.
By December my father could not stand the smell of most food and mostly ate fruit. He began dropping weight and the doctors urged further exploratory surgery. But Christmas was near, the holiday he so loved, and my dad insisted on being at home with family and friends. As he did every Christmas Eve, he invited a pair of Newport Beach couples, the DeFrancos and the Reafsnyders, to the Bayshores house for dinner. Most Christmas Eves the women cooked and sipped champagne while the men drank liquor and gabbed about sports and politics. This night, my father could not make it through our meal. Excusing himself, he fled the scent of liquor and food and went to lie down. By then, around me, he’d stopped concealing his weakness, but was still professing decent health around his friends. At this revealing moment, it hit me hard just how sick my father felt—too sick to pretend. As the Reafsnyders and DeFrancos left early, I wondered if he’d make it until the following Christmas.
Two weeks later, Barbara Walters arrived at the Bayshores house to interview my dad for one of her prime-time ABC specials. I was struck by how pretty she looked off-camera, and how genuine she seemed. Though weakening day by day, my father had made the deal with Miss Walters’s office several months earlier, and he was determined to honor it. Miss Walters didn’t know, since no one told her, he would start taking tests for cancer the very next morning.
At one point in their talk my father did say he’d be hospitalized the following day, but he owed it to gall bladder trouble. In truth, gallstones had once been discussed as the possible problem, but the theory had been discarded. By then we all feared he had cancer. My father himself told his doctors, “Get rid of anything you find. I don’t care what you have to do. Get it out.” The gall bladder story, one we’d all been instructed to stick to, was contrived for the press. I could see my father started liking Barbara Walters the moment he met her; I could also see how uneasy he felt at leading her on.
If he did have cancer again, the doctors had two prevailing theories. It might have been triggered by his heart surgery, since such a radical jolt to the system can sometimes enliven previously dormant cells. Or it might have been all that hot smoke, passing through my father’s lungs and into his stomach. When I heard that, I felt a pang in my own insides. It makes no difference, remember, how long or how much a person has smoked: the moment they stop they reduce their chances for cancer. But my dad, even after losing one lung to cancer in 1964, had not quit smoking. Oh, he stopped smoking Camels, but first he started chewing tobacco, then he infrequently smoked cigars, then he was smoking cigars all the time.
“I’m not inhaling,” he always said, but he was and all of us knew it. I, for one, never made any real effort to stop him. I dropped a few benign hints but I never said, “I don’t want to lose you—why can’t you stop?” My reluctance came partly from fear and deference, partly because I was smoking myself by the time I entered high school. I smoked behind my parents’ backs, with my girlfriends, struggling to look cool and adult, coughing my brains out, then drowning the scent of Virginia Slims with gum and Binaca. Who knows? Perhaps I was also emulating my father, self-ruinous habits and all.
It’s one more reason I’ll always feel some sorrow that I was afraid of him for so many years. Had I been less hesitant, we might have been free all that time to discuss meaningful things. I’ll never know, but maybe I could have pushed him to give up his cigars. My mother tried to when she quit smoking and drinking herself when we moved to Newport. My father said no, but at least she gave it an honest shot. I just sat there watching him smoke.