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she looked so shaky, I wanted to pour her a stiff Scotch, her usual drink. Instead, she swallowed some tea, made a face, and said, “Might as well get used to this swill. I can’t drink booze for eight months. I’ve got the Big C, Francesca.”
    “Cancer?” I was almost too frightened to say the word.
    “Yes, I have cancer. I need surgery, chemo, and radiation.”
    “How do you feel?” I said, sounding like a talk-show shrink.
    “Like shit,” she said, and the two women in Laura Ashley at the next table looked up like startled deer.
    I’ve always regretted I didn’t check their table again before I asked my next question: “What kind of cancer?”
    “Breast cancer,” she said, in a voice loud enough to be heard over the roaring web presses, except it was perfectly, pinkly quiet in Miss Lucy’s, so quiet I could hear one of the ladies at the next table pouring, and I knew both were eavesdropping. “Can you believe it? Tit cancer. Isn’t that a joke? I finally get a lump on this flat chest of mine and they want to whack it off!”
    I heard a teacup hit the floor and knew the ladies had been shocked to their Pappagallos. I called for the check, and drove Georgia home to her penthouse, stopping first for a bottle of Dewar’s for medicinal purposes. Then I spent the rest of the evening listening to her talk, while the lights of St. Louis came on around us, and the city shone like a movie set against the black sky. Two million people were below us, but we were absolutely alone.
        As the weeks wore on, Georgia’s anger and defiance gave way occasionally to an emotion I’d never seen before: terror. She kept up a brave front at the
Gazette
. Even I couldn’t tell she was fighting for her life. But sometimes, when she was with me, I saw the fear in her eyes. “I’m not afraid to die,” she said once. “But I hate dying. The
Gazette
makes it so undignified. I can’t stand to have Charlie slowly take away everything I’ve worked for.”
    I tried to tell her this was a curable cancer and she wouldn’t die, but we’d both seen too much death atthe
Gazette
. The paper had an inordinately high number of staffers with cancer. There were nine brain tumors and four breast cancers out of a newsroom with less than one hundred people. Eight of those cancers were fatal. The staff blamed it on the old, radiation-leaking computer terminals and tried to interest OSHA in a study of the situation, but OSHA brushed us off, saying the sampling was too small and newspaper people had an unhealthy lifestyle with lots of stress and alcohol. That was true for some, but not all. Milt, for instance, used to run four miles a day, played tennis twice a week, and rarely drank.
    What we noticed was that the people who got cancer usually worked at their computers all day. Reporters who got out of the office frequently, and goof-offs like Charlie, our managing editor, who hardly touched a computer, remained free of symptoms. Georgia was a worker, and now she had it, too.
    Physically, Georgia was well enough to drive to her chemo and radiation appointments, but her fear made her so absentminded, she was an accident risk. So I drove her. As a columnist, I had enough freedom that I could sneak out to drive her, as long as I turned in my column. I bought a laptop so I could write while Georgia was in treatment, and if I had to, I finished my column at home that night. Georgia may have been sick, but she still cared what happened at the paper, and soon turned her conversation back to work. “Oh, hell,” she said. “You’re right. I’m not dead yet. I’m certainly alive enough to notice that Charlie screwed with your column when I took an hour off Monday afternoon.”
    “He wanted to test reader reaction,” I said.
    “I think you passed the test,” she said. “Atthree-thirty today, we had five hundred eighty phone calls. Nice work, Francesca.”
    “Don’t thank me,” I said. “Thank the readers.”
    The Wendell C. Moorton