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By Root 1730 0

mentioned the incident to her husband, Allan, and Allan mentioned it to Peikoff, who was staying in Rand’s apartment, caring for Frank. Peikoff dutifully reported the Blumenthals’ concerns to Rand, who remained furious for months. Home again, she would phone Joan and scold the younger woman for having tried to undermine her rationality. Meanwhile, the thinker who insisted that a heroic sense of life grants no importance to mental suffering proved to have little tolerance for physical pain. Finding movement difficult, she would not sit or walk. Her medical attendants, like her mother long ago, exhorted her to move—even to wiggle her toes—to prevent blood clots, but she would not cooperate. She changed position without protest only when she was arguing with someone, Blumenthal recalled wryly; then, she waved her arms.

She often reverted to childlike demeanor during the period of her recovery. Peikoff remembered bringing her home from the hospital, an event he later described as the most cheerful moment in his life with her. “She was finding it difficult to walk,” he recalled, “and she sort of stumbled into the apartment.” At her request, he put on her “tiddly-wink” music. Buoyed by the gay spirit of the melodies of her youth, “she got [her] little baton and started to march around the room, tossing her head, grinning at us, conducting the music. That was very happy.” Yet she refused to take walks around the neighborhood or exercise—that is, until doctors also ordered Frank to walk. Then they would go out together. Mostly, she preferred to stay in bed, watching TV game shows during the daytime and prime-time dramas in the evening and reading mysteries. She worked with her secretary to answer accumulated fan mail and sometimes played solitaire.

She gave up smoking but refused the Blumenthals’ requests to make her decision public, even though, as they reminded her, she had indirectly or directly encouraged her fans to smoke. She still denied that there was any conclusive, nonstatistical evidence to prove that smoking caused cancer. The Blumenthals understood that she was all but unable to admit to imperfections or mistakes. And they knew that she was trying to absorb a number of profound and painful psychic blows, including the loss of her protégé and a mutiny by her body. But she was testing their patience and, to some degree, their admiration.

Perhaps the most stunning blow had come a year before her cancer diagnosis. In 1972, half a world away in Leningrad, her youngest sister, Nora, now also in her sixties, stumbled on a copy of a Russian-language magazine published and distributed by the U.S. Information Agency in Washington, D.C. The magazine contained an article about the range of political opinion in America and included a thumbnail sketch of Rand. Nora was familiar with her older sister’s pen name but had heard nothing about her since 1937, when the first-time novelist had, perforce, stopped writing to her family. The decades-long Soviet barricade against Western influences had insulated Nora and her husband, a retired factory engineer named Fedor Andreyevich Drobyshev, from all knowledge of Rand’s best-selling novels and her fame as a polemicist. In March 1973, Nora contacted the U.S. embassy in Moscow and, with its help, sent a letter of inquiry about Rand to the USIA magazine. A translation of the letter crossed the desk of an assistant editor named Lilyan Courtois, who phoned Rand. “Do you have a sister in Russia?” Courtois asked. “I don’t think I do anymore,” Rand answered. Told that her beloved sister Nora had been trying to contact her, she burst into tears. “She’s alive!” she exclaimed, again and again. “She’s alive! All these years, I thought she was dead!” Courtois wept, too. “It was unbearably moving,” Courtois later said.

In 1973, Rand was already experiencing early symptoms of lung disease. Energized by relief and affection, however, she began a campaign to bring Nora to the United States. This was an old and treasured dream; at least until Nora’s marriage in 1931, she had wanted to show this most compatible