A Civil Action (4 page)

The cycle seemed unending. Anne Anderson called the city board of health and the public works department to complain. Carol Gray and Kay Bolster and other friends also complained. “Did you call today?” they would ask each other. “What did they say?”

“It was the same story all the time,” recalled Anne. “There wasn’t any problem with the water; the water had been tested and it was fine. I think toward the end, I felt like the answer was never going to be any different. Neighbors would talk, people would call, and everybody would give their own report of what they had heard.”

During the summer of 1972, six months after Jimmy Anderson’s diagnosis, the reservoir in central Woburn fell ominously low and the superintendent of public works told the citizens of Woburn that they had to conserve water. If they failed to observe a voluntary ban on certain activities—washing cars and watering lawns—the superintendent announced he would reopen Wells G and H, which had remained closed throughout the winter. The superintendent’s threat worked. The wells were not used that summer. Anne was preoccupied with caring for Jimmy. Since the water flowing from her taps seemed relatively pure, she gave no thought to it. The following spring, in 1973, the superintendent once again warned Woburn residents to conserve, but a severe drought compelled him to open Well G in August.

Charles Anderson was doing well in his job as a computer analyst at GTE. His work required that he travel a great deal, but in some respects that was a relief. Everything in the Anderson household seemed oriented toward illness and caring for Jimmy. The boy was thin and undersized for his age and he clung to his mother. To Anne, he appeared pitifully vulnerable, and she felt compelled to protect him. Nearly two years after his diagnosis, he began school. Anne bought him a wig to hide his wispy hair and bald patches caused by maintenance doses of chemotherapy, but she still feared that the other children would ridicule him. He missed days at school because of visits to the clinic or because he didn’t feel well. He missed more days because he
disliked school and begged his mother to let him stay home. Usually she acceded. Charles argued against such special treatment. He wanted the boy to lead as normal a life as possible. As it was, Jimmy had no friends; Anne was his constant companion. She and Jimmy had developed a special, intimate way of relating to each other. He would kiss and hug his mother and constantly require her touch, even as he grew older. Every night he slept with Anne and Charles in their bed. That practice had begun with his diagnosis, but it did not end as he grew older.

Reverend Bruce Young often drove Anne and Jimmy in to Massachusetts General. He didn’t mind the drive. He considered the task a part of his ministerial duties, and he enjoyed his chats with John Truman and the nurses at the hospital. He watched with curiosity the relationship between Anne and her son. “They seemed to draw from each other to the exclusion of others around them,” Young recalled some years later. “Anne cut everybody else off. She did it in the name of Jimmy and the fact that he was so sick and dependent on her. It became absolutely necessary for her to find some reason for why the kid was so sick. She had to find an enemy, a reason, something to focus her rage on for afflicting her son.”

Charles listened to his wife’s speculation about the connection between leukemia and the water. At first he was dubious. And as Anne became more adamant, he became increasingly skeptical. The problem with the water was no secret, he’d say. Everyone knew about it—the public health department, the city council, the mayor. It wasn’t as if people weren’t alerted to the fact that the water didn’t taste good and was discolored. When Anne talked about the water causing leukemia, he told her it was wild speculation. “If it’s something as obvious as the water, don’t you think somebody else would know about it?” Charles asked.

Long before Charles lost his patience, long before he stopped listening, Anne could see from the expression on his face how angry the subject made him. She couldn’t help bringing it up anyhow.

“What else could it be?” she asked once as they set out in the car to Lowell, to visit friends.

“What makes you think you know something the public health people don’t know?” he said. “If there’s a reason, I’m sure Dr. Truman would know. He’s treated dozens of cases.”

They argued all the way to Lowell. When they arrived, they were terse and white-lipped and said barely a word to each other all evening.

Charles believed that Anne’s phantom notion about the water causing leukemia had become a destructive obsession. It was, he told Bruce Young, contributing to the deterioration of their marriage. He asked the minister if he could use his influence with Anne. “Can you make her see reason?” he asked.

The minister had often heard Anne talk about her water theory during their trips into Boston. Usually he just let her talk. But now he felt obliged to try to intervene. When Anne brought up the water again, he told her about the experience he’d had after buying his car, a Volvo, that they were riding in. He had suddenly noticed Volvos everywhere he looked. But that had been an illusion, he said, a trick of the mind. There really weren’t a lot of new Volvos around; he’d simply become more aware of them. He suggested to Anne that she was experiencing the same sort of phenomenon with leukemia.

“I tried not to talk about it all the time,” Anne said in a deposition some years later. “I knew how I was being received by my husband. I stood for emotionalism; I was the hysterical mother. With Dr. Truman, I’d try to pick my moments. He was always very patient. I’d tell him: ‘If I stand on my front porch, I can see all these houses where children with leukemia live.’ His theory was that because more children were surviving, that’s the reason I was seeing more leukemia.”

Truman didn’t discourage Anne’s questions, but neither did he encourage her. He listened impassively. “From the outset, she, as indeed most mothers, asked what is known as to the cause of leukemia,” Truman observed. “It’s very tempting to look at the immediate environment, I suppose.”

When Anne pressed Truman for a response, he’d tell her there was no scientific evidence linking childhood leukemia to external factors. “We had, I’m sure, over a dozen conversations about it. She commented on the taste of the water and the aroma of the air in Woburn on several occasions and asked if they could be related to the leukemia.”

Anne realized that her search for an explanation had become an obsession. “I really wanted to believe that the water wasn’t a problem. But it just nagged at me and it wouldn’t go away. It
was
a fact—there really
was
this number of children with leukemia.”

•     •     •

For three years, until February 1975, James Anderson received a program of maintenance chemotherapy as prescribed by the St. Jude protocol. On February 21, a bone marrow aspiration confirmed that he was free of blasts and the maintenance was discontinued. Everything had progressed according to schedule. The Andersons were optimistic. The boy was still small, underweight and pale, as fragile as a porcelain figurine. But he appeared headed for a cure, one of the 50 percent that make it.

On September 15, seven months after the maintenance chemotherapy had ended, during a routine visit to the outpatient hematology unit at Massachusetts General, Truman noticed a troubling decrease in platelets in Jimmy’s blood. He ordered a bone marrow aspiration, but the results of that test were inconclusive. The boy continued to bruise easily and Truman suspected an early relapse. He ordered a second, and then a third bone marrow aspiration. By November, Jimmy began developing petechiae and suffering nosebleeds. A fourth bone marrow revealed 44 percent blasts. He had definitely relapsed. Truman was greatly discouraged. He believed he could induce another remission in Jimmy’s leukemia. But even if he succeeded, he knew the remission would probably be only temporary. The prospect for an ultimate cure was remote indeed.

Jimmy Anderson commenced a different protocol. Anne felt certain her son was dying. She had difficulty containing her anger. Her tone in dealing with the nurses and doctors became sharp. On occasion, Truman was the target of her anger.

That November, Anne remained with Jimmy in the hospital each day and throughout most nights. Often she slept with her son in his hospital bed. On an unseasonably warm day, she stood alone at the end of the hospital corridor, by an open window, looking out over the rooftops of Boston. Another woman—she was older than Anne, her hair gray, her face lined with sadness—came into the corridor from a nearby room. She walked up to Anne and said, without preamble: “A child just died of leukemia.” Anne felt exhausted. Her own child was dying and she had no energy for sympathy or even perfunctory condolence. She wished the woman would tell her story to someone whose child was in for a hernia operation, or a broken arm, something simple
and curable. But the woman (a grandmother? wondered Anne later) was distraught, with such an urgent need to talk that she failed to notice Anne’s coldness. She rambled on: the child had been a boy, just a baby still; he’d gotten sick so suddenly; the family lived in Woburn; their name was Lilley.

4

Back in the summer of 1966, when Bruce Young first arrived at Trinity Episcopal, Donna Carner was sixteen years old. She was the prettiest of the four Carner sisters, with a smile that dimpled her cheeks, and thick, dark hair. With boys, she adopted a languid and skeptical manner that implied she wouldn’t be surprised by anything. That manner served, she thought, to hide her shyness.

She immediately developed a crush on the new minister. All the girls in the small congregation seemed to have a crush on him. Despite his white clerical collar, his black shirt and his worn, shiny black suit coat, Donna found nothing stiff or pretentious about him. She thought he had a worldly manner. He smoked cigarettes, and in private conversation he might swear occasionally, as if to demonstrate that although he was a man of the cloth, he was not sanctimonious.

The Carner family of north Woburn did not dwell much on the more philosophical questions of faith. But they did attend the Sunday service at Trinity Episcopal without fail. Donna Carner quelled her adolescent love for Reverend Young after the minister’s wife gave birth to their first son. Donna found her first real romance one Saturday when she was a senior in high school. On a trip to Boston, she and her sister got involved in a bantering exchange with a good-looking boy who was in the Navy and stationed in Boston. His name was Carl Robbins and he was from Alabama. He fell in love with Donna the moment he saw her (or so he would tell her later). He came out to Woburn to meet her parents, and soon he became a regular weekend guest. By the time Donna was nineteen and two years out of high school, she and Carl had decided to marry. She worked as a bookkeeper at the General Aluminum Corporation in Woburn and had saved some money. Carl completed his military service and found a job as a welder. Reverend Young performed the wedding ceremony at
Trinity Episcopal, and he attended the festive reception at the Carner home afterward.

Donna and Carl found a three-room apartment on the ground floor of an aging, slightly shabby tenement on Main Street, a mile northeast of downtown Woburn. Donna kept her job as a bookkeeper. The couple could afford to go out on occasion and they bought a few pieces of new furniture for the house they hoped they would own someday. Two years after the wedding, in March 1972, Bruce Young baptized Donna’s first child. She named the boy Carl Robbins III, although from the first day everybody called him Robbie.

He was a big, fine-looking baby, chubby and good-natured. But from the beginning, he had a difficult time in life. Before he was a year old, Donna had taken him on seven different occasions to the doctor for earaches. The infections resulted in a perforated eardrum. The pain kept the child awake and crying on many nights. Along with the ear problems, Robbie suffered repeatedly from skin rashes—eczema and dermatitis of unknown origin. Donna applied creams, ointments, and salves prescribed by the doctor, but the skin problems kept recurring. The child’s constant illness strained the marriage. Carl would help to care for Robbie, but he had to rise early for work and the boy’s crying kept him up at night. Donna had quit her job when she had Robbie, and the many small costs associated with the child’s illnesses grew into a dismaying debt. Their tempers grew short and the three-room apartment began to feel cramped.

In the midst of this, Donna got pregnant again. She talked to her gynecologist about her marital problems, and he recommended that she and Carl see a family counselor. Carl seemed to approach counseling with a good attitude. Donna came away from the first session feeling as if they could handle their problems after all. Their second son, Kevin, was born in 1975, the sixth year of their marriage. Carl still made an effort to help care for the boys, but the apartment felt smaller than ever now, and their debts mounted. “Things kept going downhill,” recalled Donna at a deposition many years later. “It was always kind of shaky, but what really finished it off was the summer when Robbie got very sick. It happened in July 1976, when he was four years old. He complained of a pain in his groin, and then suddenly he just stopped walking. It happened overnight. He also had a fever of a hundred and one. I took him to the pediatrician, and he sent him to the hospital for X rays.”

Robbie was tested for juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, but that test proved negative. An orthopedic surgeon at Choate Memorial Hospital in Woburn thought that Robbie’s left hip joint might be septic and proposed aspirating some fluid to see if that was the case. That procedure yielded no signs of infection. Nonetheless, the surgeon recommended draining the boy’s hip. Donna gave her consent, and Robbie was operated on that summer.

He recovered slowly. When he began to walk again, he had a peculiar lurching gait and dragged the toes of his left foot. He had to lift his knee high in order to bring forward the dangling foot. And he still complained of pain, now in the other hip. The pain became so severe that he could not turn over in bed. Doctors performed more tests. Robbie began complaining of pain in his knees, shoulders and neck. He could no longer walk, and in a short time he could barely move. In September he was referred to the New England Medical Center in Boston with a tentative diagnosis of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. His lameness and the condition of his left leg and hip were a subject of inquiry and consternation, although the doctors agreed that this was clearly not his underlying problem. Many doctors examined him, but none could figure out what ailed him.