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  “Are you kidding?” Alan responded. “If you promise not to use protection, Debbie will come over and light the candles!”

  The truth is, we had made a schedule. Linda and I had met six years earlier on a blind date outside a gourmet food market on Twenty-third Street in Manhattan. She was wearing long flowing black silk pants and black patent leather high-heeled clogs, and her hair cascaded around her olive-skinned face like Sophia Loren’s. With wide, chocolate brown eyes and a beaming white smile she could have passed for Latin, Italian, or Tahitian. She was my passport come to life.

  But she had grown up in suburban Boston in a tight-knit family with a station wagon, a favorite pot roast recipe, and a nightly habit of eating ice cream out of coffee mugs standing alongside an open freezer. In other words, she was just like me. She loved to travel. She had recently started an international nonprofit called Endeavor that supported young entrepreneurs in the developing world. But she also loved to be home—to play Scrabble, do the Sunday crossword, and lament the scourge of green food coloring in mint chocolate chip ice cream.

  We were engaged four years later on a balcony overlooking the Atlantic, and the next day Linda stunned me by announcing she wanted to get married in Savannah. “You come from a place of such long history and connection,” she said. “I want my family to see that.” But she also wanted to be a Moroccan princess on her wedding day, she said, so the following June we had what must have been the first Bedouin-themed wedding with a carpet for an invitation and an orange-and-purple wedding cake in the 250-year history of Mickve Israel synagogue. When Linda told the caterer her fantasy menu, his reaction was, “What’s a falafel?”

  The next year we set about trying to find time in our busy lives to have children. “You can’t time the market,” I said, echoing my grandmother’s stock market advice, “but you can try!” So we tried, and within weeks we were fortunate to have early positive signs. Linda went to the store to buy a home pregnancy test. The instructions said to pee on the paper, and if one pink strip appears, you are not pregnant; if two pink strips appear, you are.

  The first time, Linda got one pink strip and one faint, half-pink strip. We didn’t know what that meant. She tried again, then the following day, then once more. Every time the same thing. We did a Google search for “pregnancy test” and “half-pink strip.” Five hundred and fifty-seven thousand entries appeared. It would seem we had a common problem.

  Finally Linda went to three separate drugstores and came back with an armful of pregnancy tests. I joked that being married to a woman who went to Harvard and Yale meant I had a wife who had to pass every pregnancy test ever made. She wasn’t satisfied until she found one that said, simply: pregnant. Then, we knew.

  Then she started throwing up. Not once a day, but twice a day. Sometimes three. Unlike me, who gets food poisoning at the drop of a kebab, Linda hadn’t vomited since childhood, so the experience unnerved her. I sat on the tub and tried to comfort her. We bought saltines by the case. Over time, she began to accept, even laugh at, the relentlessness. For a high-flying executive, it was an adjustment for her to be patient and let her baby be in control. This was her first lesson in motherhood.

  At about eight and a half weeks, we went to see an OB. A young woman walked in, gave us a thick folder, and patiently answered our questions. Then it was time for the sonogram. Linda mounted the spread-eagled chair, and soon an indecipherable gray image appeared on the screen. The doctor was silent for the longest time before she said with a slight hiccup in her voice, “Well, my dear, you’re having, um, twins.” Then she added, “Disregard everything I’ve told you up to now.”

  It would be safe to say that Linda and I are both talkers. But we were silent at this news. We had never contemplated having twins. Never discussed it. Never even considered discussing it. The popular notion is that twins run in the family; neither of us has twins in our immediate families. The other common cause of twins is fertility drugs; we weren’t using fertility drugs.

  But we were having twins.

  Or maybe not. The doctor explained that our twins appeared to be in the same sac, a potentially dangerous condition in which one fetus is likely to deprive the other of nutrition. Within seconds we heard a chilling expression: “selective reduction.” Minutes later we were in a taxi on our way to the highest floor of the city’s largest hospital to be screened by New York’s most powerful sonogram. “The joke’s on us,” Linda said. “We never do things normally!”

  “By the way, which is worse?” I added. “Two of you, or two of me?”

  We laughed.

  And then we knew: We would survive only by laughing.

  Within hours the sonogram had provided the good news that the girls were in different sacs, and we had moved on to a more specialized doctor. We also began sharing the news with our families. “Linda is pregnant with monochorionic, di-amniotic, naturally conceived identical twins.” No one understood what this meant, and, in truth, neither did we. I went to the bookstore and bought a shelfful of volumes, then stayed up half the night devouring them. Most of the news was alarming: A higher risk of miscarriage, a greater chance for birth defects, a significant probability that one fetus sabotages the other. I threw the library into the trash so Linda wouldn’t read it.

  We began making adjustments and soon were ticking off weeks. Full term for singletons is considered forty weeks; for twins it’s thirty-six. A friend who went into premature labor with twins at twenty-six weeks was hospitalized, with her legs elevated, to keep the babies in as long as possible. Our doctor, Mark Gold, was taking no chances. At twenty-five weeks he issued a stark prescription: bed rest. Linda was confined to our sofa or bed for all but the most extraordinary circumstances. Another way of describing this is house arrest.

  Linda’s organization by now was operating in seven countries, on three continents, and soon enough she was running it from our couch. Tycoons and philanthropists came to our living room for meetings while I came plodding in in my underwear, bearing food and my cheery reprimand: “Tushy on the cushy!”

  At thirty-six weeks I bought Linda a chocolate-and-peanut-butter cake and graffitied her stomach exactly the same way I had forbidden my mother to do to my cast years earlier. We hastened our search for names. My mother always joked that she had named my siblings and me like hurricanes—Andrew, Bruce, and Cari. But we were actually named after relatives, as was customary among American Jews at the time. Bruce Stephen honored my maternal grandfather, Benjamin “Bucky” Samuel Abeshouse, who had died three years before my birth.

  I didn’t much like my name growing up. I found it too white bread and too assimilationist. So Linda and I went in the opposite direction. We turned to the Hebrew Bible, but the selection of biblical girls’ names is thin. I was in Turkey, wading in the Euphrates, while taping a television show about the Garden of Eden, when Linda proposed that one of our girls be named Eden. It sounded familiar and exotic, feminine yet strong.

  We spent the next six months trying to find a match for it. As travelers, we particularly liked that Eden was a place, a paradise. One day, Linda blurted out, “What about Tybee?” A barrier island off the coast of Georgia, Tybee is a place where the Feilers have spent summers for four generations. It’s also something of an anti-paradise. “Seedy Savannah Beach” we called it growing up. But all of us, especially Linda, have come to treasure it.

  Still the name posed problems. Adding one name that is easily mispronounced—Tybee, which rhymes with “my bee”—to another—Feiler, which rhymes with “Tyler”—seemed foolhardy. Also, Tybee is the Creek Indian word meaning “salt.” Not exactly the stuff of love songs. Finally, Linda prevailed. “She’ll be interesting,” she said of our daughter. “She’ll be able to handle it.”

  AT THIRTY-EIGHT WEEKS, WE visited Lenox Hill hospital for our latest sonogram. Linda had gained fifty pounds, almost entirely around her midsection. She looked as if she were carrying a planet under her orange shirt. The radiologist explained that there was a g
reat debate about how long to carry twins: let them stay in as long as possible, or bring them out when they’re cooked. “I’m in the latter camp,” he said. He glanced at the screen, then announced in a voice that made it clear he was looking for any excuse to support his cause, “Oooh, I see something…. You don’t have enough fluid! You’re having your babies tomorrow.”

  Our hearts raced. We went for a stroll down Park Avenue, where daffodils bobbed like chicks and tulips sprouted like fistfuls of crayons.

  At 8:30 A.M. on April 15, Linda was induced. By noon her water had broken. By late afternoon she had gone into labor. Just after 5:00 P.M., we proceeded into the operating room. “Push! Push! Push!” the nurses shouted as they rolled the gurney down the hall. And as they struggled with the bed, we shouted back, “Push, push, push!” We all laughed.

  “Keep it down!” The chief nurse scowled from her station. “There’s far too much laughter for a hospital.”

  Linda and I looked at each other. We wanted our daughters to be born into laughter!

  Inside the operating room, the atmosphere was more sober. About fifteen people were crowded into the huddle of monitors, fluorescent lights, plastic incubators, and heat lamps. Linda’s hair was netted. Dr. Gold disappeared between her legs, and the nurses gathered around her head. Two heartbeats thump-thumped a steady soundtrack. For months, one of our girls had been closer to the cervix and thus earned the moniker Twin A, meaning she was expected to come out first. But Twin B was more active, and as Linda predicted, at the last moment she pushed her sister out of the way and, at 6:14 P.M., made her way first into the world. She was the saltier of the two. She was Tybee Rose.

  I was called over to hold her. She was wrapped in a white blanket with blue stripes. Her skin was dark; her hair almost black. She reminded me of her mother. I began to whisper a poem into her ear. As I did, chaos erupted on the far side of the room.

  For years I’d heard friends say that the moment they first held their son or daughter was one of the highlights of their lives, like looking into the face of God. But in my case, God was distracted. Linda was in pain. Twin A was in trouble.

  I suddenly felt torn between the baby in my arms and my wife on the table. The choice was clear. This was the moment I learned that with twins, there is no such thing as unbifurcated emotion. You don’t get a moment with one that doesn’t have the shadow of the other.

  “The heartbeat is sinking,” Dr. Gold said. “Time to scrub.”

  As soon as he spoke, I realized why so many people were in the room. There was an entire surgical team prepared to give Linda a C-section in the event something went wrong. Linda had said for months that she didn’t care if her babies were delivered naturally or by caesarean. But she was adamant that she didn’t want one of each, thus doubling her side effects and recovery time. She was now facing this scenario.

  “No!” barked the head nurse, who was wrapped around Linda’s neck. “I think she can do it.”

  And with that Linda began to push harder. I later learned that threatening the mother of twins with a C-section is an old obstetric trick to get her to push out the second baby, but Dr. Gold insisted he wasn’t playing that game. Whatever the case, it worked. Thirty-two minutes after the birth of her sister, Twin B came sliding down after her. Eden Elenor completed our family.

  Linda held up two fingers and beamed. She had carried our daughters for thirty-eight weeks and delivered them naturally within the same hour. I leaned over and touched my forehead to hers. “You did it, baby,” I whispered. “Twenty fingers and twenty toes.”

  I went over to hold Eden. The stripes on her blanket were green. Her skin and hair seemed fairer. She looked more like me. I whispered in her ear the same poem I had recited to her sister. By the time I returned to Linda’s side, Dr. Gold was stitching her up. Suddenly, he looked down at his watch.

  “Hmmm,” he said. “Tax day. Early Feiler and Late Feiler.”

  And with that our daughters were welcomed into their lives with a roomful of laughter.

  .4.

  CHRONICLES OF THE LOST YEAR

  volume I

  July 15

  Dear Friends and Family,

  The mist lifts slowly off my in-laws’ back lawn on Cape Cod most mornings, revealing a day that is well under way and a layer of dew on the granite boulders. The sky has been gray over Snug Harbor the last few days, but at last the clouds have magically parted and the air turned sunny once more.

  I apologize for reaching out in this way, but the crush of events in recent days has forced us into a number of uncomfortable situations. I have learned that I have a seven-inch osteogenic sarcoma in my left femur.

  Put more directly: I have bone cancer. My sarcoma is considered very rare, and very aggressive. It has already eaten through the central shaft of my bone and corroded large portions of the thigh muscle around it. My knee and hip appear to be safe, and early signs that the cancer may have spread to my ribs and lungs have been downplayed. We believe it’s contained to my leg, but the situation continues to be very fluid and could change at any time.

  The tumor was discovered by accident after a routine blood test in late May produced an elevated alkaline phosphatase number, a nonspecific test indicating possible problems in the liver or bones. My liver was cleared, and a series of tests led us to where we are now. One remarkable aspect of my situation is that I am, for the most part, pain free. This type of tumor usually presents itself through pain, swelling, or fracture. In this regard, we are lucky. As one oncologist said to me recently, “Kudos to your internist for discovering your tumor early.”

  Through the generous and swift intervention of friends, Linda and I had a consultation with Dr. John Healey, the head of orthopedic surgery at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York. Dr. Healey has been variously described to us as “the man,” “the one,” or “the guru” in this field. He’s a genial man in his early fifties with an easy smile, a bow tie, and the unusual-but-arresting manner of speaking about three words every minute. If you hang on his every word—and boy do we!—you hang for a very long time. He also happens to be a fellow graduate of Ezra Stiles College at Yale University and, like me, a teenage juggler and clown.

  Dr. Healey spent several hours with us and about halfway through our conversation said of the cancer in my leg: “In the worst-case scenario, this appears to be curable.” He also said several times, “This is a war, and I intend to win it.”

  Dr. Healey thinks my cancer is probably related to the bicycle accident I had when I was five years old in which I broke the same bone in the same place. Osteosarcomas in the femur usually appear closer to the knee or hip; mine is in the central shaft. We had assumed that the broken bone did not heal properly, or left behind some inflammation that somehow cancerified four decades later. But Dr. Healey hypothesized that the arrow may point in the opposite direction. When he asked me, for example, how I had broken my femur, I gave what I assumed to be the only logical answer: “I was hit by a car.”

  “But why that bone?” he said. He was suggesting that I had been born with a genetic predisposition that weakened my left femur.

  Regardless, something happened between then and now that made my left femur different from the tens of thousands of other bones children break every year in the United States. And at some point a cell went rogue. A cancer was born. About six hundred Americans get an osteosarcoma every year, and about 85 percent are under the age of twenty-five. Fewer than one hundred adults a year get this disease. (Compare that with 200,000 cases of breast cancer a year, or 190,000 cases of prostate cancer.) As a result, very little is known about how to treat this illness, especially in adults. No one wins a Nobel Prize for curing an orphan disease.

  Had I faced this diagnosis twenty-five years ago, the doctors would have cut off my leg and hoped. Ted Kennedy’s son Teddy lost his leg to this disease when he was twelve. Only 15 percent of patients survived. In the 1980s, doctors discovered that a particular cocktail of chemotherapy was effecti
ve, quadrupling the survival rate.

  Before proceeding down that route, I must receive a proper analysis of my tumor. I am scheduled to have an open biopsy in the coming weeks, during which Dr. Healey will cut into my leg and extract a piece of the bone. That will be sent for pathology, and then we will begin designing a course of treatment. We have been led to believe that I am likely looking at two to four months of chemotherapy, followed by surgery, followed by four more months of chemotherapy. The surgery will likely involve going into my leg, cutting out the tumor and some additional bone around it, as well as a chunk of muscle. A replacement femur of either cadaver bone or metal will be inserted. The bone will heal, I am told, the muscle will not. If we are fortunate, my leg will be spared, and my knee and foot will function as normal, though my movement will be permanently affected. As Dr. Healey put it, “You will walk, not run. Flat surfaces will be better than stairs.”

  As you might imagine, this news has hit us with titanic force. After Dr. Healey finished explaining my situation, a nurse came in to have me fill out some forms. I asked her to give Linda and me a few minutes to ourselves. When she left, I broke down on the examination table. I had hoped against hope that I wouldn’t have cancer. I had yearned beyond yearning that I could avoid chemotherapy. My hopes were dashed. My yearnings crushed.

  I stand at the dawn of a lost year.

  At best.

  So how are you doing? We’re hanging in there. We’re focused. We have good spells and bad. We have had plenty of tears and late-night conversations about each other, our lives, and our dreams for our girls. It is not easy. We are not heroes. No one aspires to be the person who handles this kind of situation well. And we don’t always handle it well.