A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [139]
The young male host assigned to Ann’s group turned out to be an anthropology major, fluent in English, who did modeling on the side. Soon, he, Ann, and Nayar were in a taxi, heading to an archaeological dig. Ann took Nayar to the Frida Kahlo Museum at Casa Azul, the house in Coyoacán where Kahlo had grown up and later lived with Diego Rivera. At the National Museum of Anthropology, Niki Armacost recalled, Ann stopped in front of an exhibit illustrating human evolution. “There was an Africa grouping, an Asia grouping,” Armacost told me. “She was talking about the Africa grouping. The image they had up on the wall was this incredibly curvaceous African woman who had this huge, curvy bum. And we’re all so—kind of unshapely. And she said, ‘You know, it’s very interesting, because when the white explorers found these African women and took them back to Europe, that’s when the bustle started!’”
On an outing to Teotihuacán, the vast archaeological site northeast of Mexico City that was the largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas until it was suddenly and mysteriously abandoned, Ann wanted to climb the Pyramid of the Sun, one of the biggest pyramids in the world. Worried about her stamina, Nayar suggested instead the Pyramid of the Moon because it was smaller but offered dazzling views of the bigger pyramid and the majestic expanse of the Avenue of the Dead. Against the backdrop of a sacred mountain to the north, the two women, a generation apart, ascended together. “It was so hard for her to climb this thing,” Nayar remembered years later. “I really thought she was going to pass out or fall. There was no way I was letting her go up on her own. She was also a little afraid of heights. But she was going to do it. And she did it.”
Two months earlier, Ann had gone to see a physician with a private practice in obstetrics, gynecology, and infertility on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She had been given the doctor’s name by another physician, who had retired, and had made an appointment for a gynecological checkup. She told the doctor, Barbara Shortle, that she had a five-year history of heavy and irregular periods, for which previous doctors had put her on hormone-replacement therapy. Twice, she said, she had received a dilation and curettage, a procedure commonly done to diagnose the causes of abnormal bleeding. Each time, she said, the test had turned up nothing. Shortle, who had a particular affection for Hawaii, took a liking to Ann, but she also suspected Ann was seriously ill. From the extent of the bleeding, Shortle thought she might have uterine cancer, a rarity in Shortle’s practice, which could in many cases be treated successfully with surgery and radiation, depending on the grade of the tumor. Shortle jotted her hypothesis in her notes. She recommended a physical exam, a Pap smear, a pelvic ultrasound, a mammogram, and, most important for a diagnosis, another dilation and curettage, which could be used to rule out uterine cancer. The D&C would have to be done in a hospital, and would for that reason take up the better part of a day at a critical time when the staff at Women’s World Banking was especially busy. Ann went ahead and had the physical, the Pap smear, the pelvic ultrasound, and the mammogram, as well as a breast ultrasound, at the radiologist’s suggestion.
“I completed all of those tests,” Ann would write to Shortle a year