Epilogue #2
Teo and I named our son Leonardo O’Malley Manca but called him Dino for short.
The Leonardo was for Leonard, who had never been far from my thoughts, but whom I thought of with increased frequency as I watched Dino grow up.
He had Lenny’s round nose and sharp chin and even some of his mannerisms, and in that way, my brother lived on.
For my parents, Dino was a gift, and on my mother’s subsequent visits, I could usually count on her bringing him at least one item that had belonged to Lenny.
His baseball glove or his Mickey Mantle 1963 rookie card or the Atlanta Braves pennant that had hung above his bed.
Dino didn’t know the first thing about baseball—it was soccer, or calcio, all the time—but he knew that these keepsakes were important to the people who loved him because they had been loved by someone else, and that was enough for him.
When my mother retired, she kept the house in Charleston but spent more and more time in Italy, where she worked on her Italian and took her role as nonna very seriously.
Thanks to the help I got from her and my mother-in-law, I was able to take increasingly demanding jobs without being plagued by the guilt that so many working women of my generation learned to live with as a matter of course.
For a while, Bev sent me updates on Paul.
I knew that, after he got out of the navy, he moved back to Richmond, where he got a job working in public affairs for Dominion Energy.
He married a woman who was a good decade younger than he was, and they had two children.
Sometime in the nineties, I lost touch with Bev, so that was the last I heard of my first husband until 2003, when I thought to google him and discovered, of all things, his obituary.
He’d died three years earlier, at the age of fifty-two, “after a long illness.” It was leukemia, I assume, since the family directed mourners to donate to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in lieu of sending flowers.
I did send a donation, along with that photo I’d taken of Paul in front of the Colosseum in Rome.
On a Post-it, I asked if someone wouldn’t mind forwarding the photograph to the family, and on the back of the photograph I wrote only: Paul Archer, Rome, 1974.
Paul’s leukemia diagnosis and his subsequent death certainly could have been attributed to the accident on the Seneca, which brings me back around to you and the book you’re writing about your father.
But first I just have to say how sorry I was to hear about your mother’s diagnosis.
Dementia is such a beast, and I hate that it robs us of not only the people we love but also their stories.
Your mother deserved to be able to tell you this one in her own words, and while it sounds like she doesn’t remember much, I am impressed that she recalled the two of us stealing Hollingsworth’s car. For what it’s worth, I did return it.
You are right that your parents always suspected the incident on the Seneca contributed to your father’s cancer.
They couldn’t prove it, but over time, the research studies have mounted up.
I’m sure you’ve read all the same stuff I have, so I won’t offer you a bunch of citations you’ve already got bookmarked on your own web browser.
What I will give you are a few thoughts.
The first is that you have to take everything the U.S.
Navy says about its Nuclear Propulsion Program with a grain of salt.
They spent years claiming that the program was “accident-free,” even while two nuclear subs—the Thresher and the Scorpion—sat at the bottom of the ocean.
In the eighties, they amended the statement, claiming instead that the program had had “no radiological incidents,” but this revision still ignored accidents like the one that happened on board the Seneca.
In 1986, in the aftermath of some pretty damning congressional testimony, a navy spokesperson admitted to the Los Angeles Times that there actually had been six hundred and thirty nuclear-related “safety incidents” since the program’s inception, although he was quick to point out that not a single one had resulted in the release of radiation.
The second point I’ll make is that the old methods, which Paul would have employed, to track the repair crew’s radiation exposure were always going to tell only half the story.
Your dad’s film badge, if it was ever even collected and processed after the incident on the Seneca, could detect penetrating radiation—gamma rays and some beta particles—but it was useless when it came to detecting low-energy beta emitters, not to mention anything your dad swallowed or inhaled.
To assess internal radiation exposure, your dad’s medical team would have needed to look at bioassays, and while it’s likely that they did do blood draws and urine analysis to try to detect and quantify the radioactive material in your dad’s body, my bet is you’ll never get your hands on those results, no matter how many FOIAs you file.
The last thing I’ll point out, and I find this particularly interesting, is that in studies of the effects of radiation exposure on nuclear workers, the results are skewed by what researchers call the “healthy worker effect.” Nuclear workers, and certainly nuclear engineers like your dad, are some of the smartest human beings on the planet.
They have to be, to do the work, but the result is that they’re a fairly homogenous group of people.
On average, they come from higher socioeconomic classes, are more educated, and generally make healthier lifestyle choices than their peers.
Why does this matter? Because if the navy trumpets a study that claims nuclear workers have an average life expectancy that’s equal to the general population, you should ask yourself one question: Why isn’t their life expectancy actually higher?
I saw your mother a few times after you were born and your father got out of the service.
Once, on a trip to Charleston, I borrowed my mother’s car and drove up to Norfolk, where your family was living at the time.
You were maybe three or four, and your father wasn’t sick then, but he wasn’t well, either.
His symptoms, as I remember, would come and go.
Headaches. Muscle weakness. Nosebleeds. Nothing they could pin on radiation syndrome, precisely, but not the type of health problems that most thirty-two-year-old men dealt with.
I remember your mother and I took you to Virginia Beach for the day.
The beach was nothing compared to Bassa Trinità or even Spiaggia di Punta Tegge, but it was a nice outing, and without your dad around, Laura and I could talk a little more freely.
While we watched you play in the sand, she admitted that she’d given up on having a second child.
I asked if she’d had more miscarriages, but she shook her head, said that the problem was she couldn’t even get pregnant.
She was convinced that your father’s radiation exposure hadn’t been good for his sperm count, but this was 1980.
Regular people weren’t going to see reproductive endocrinologists; your parents took their lumps and comforted themselves with the knowledge that they had you.
I didn’t see your mother again until 1989, when Teo and I traveled to D.C.
for a conference. We brought Dino, and I wanted to take him to see the Vietnam War Memorial.
You had to have been twelve or thirteen.
Do you remember that visit? You came with us to the memorial, and I had brought along paper and charcoal to make a rubbing of Lenny’s name.
We let Dino try, but he was only four, and then you made one.
Actually, you made several, because you were a perfectionist and wanted to get his name, LEONARD J O’MALLEY, just right.
I thought the memorial was the most beautiful piece of architecture I’d ever encountered, more stunning than the Pantheon or any of the other wonders I’ve encountered in my life abroad.
It was there, at the Vietnam War Memorial—watching you and my son touch Lenny’s name—that I came the closest I’ve ever come to believing that maybe there is a God.
By then your parents were living in Gaithersburg, and your dad was being treated for prostate cancer at Walter Reed Medical Center.
The treatment options weren’t great in that era, and your dad, who was barely forty, was young to lose his prostate.
Your mother put a good spin on it, but when we went down to the basement to make up the sofa bed that first night, she told me that the cancer had proved to be resistant to radiation, which was why they’d had to go with the more aggressive surgery.
At that point, she’d read everything she could on the correlation between early radiation exposure and its impact on subsequent radiation treatment, and she was convinced that what had happened on the Seneca had not only caused your father’s cancer but made it more difficult to treat.
I don’t remember when they got the bladder cancer diagnosis.
It must have been your junior or senior year of high school?
It had been several years since Laura and I had spoken, and the news we shared with each other arrived by letter and was the same stuff we’d have put in an annual Christmas letter, if either of us had been inclined to write them.
I knew that your dad’s doctors had hoped to remove the tumors without taking the whole bladder, but once they got in there, they realized there was no saving it.
He did a round or two of chemo after that, hoping to reduce the likelihood that the cancer would spread.