TELLING A COMPELLING STORY OF ONE UNTIMELY DEATH

Author: By Maureen Dezell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, August 17, 1997

Page: N14

Section: Books

Abby Frucht's fourth novel, about a 40-year-old woman dying of breast cancer, therefore stands as a rare achievement. Neither a tragedy nor a tale of survival, it is a compelling, evocative story of one woman's ascent to death before her time.

On the morning she discovers a lump in her breast, Isobel Albright is ensconced in a life so purposeful and serene that she briefly welcomes the life-threatening presence as an opportunity for adventure: ``When I say that until now my world was routine, I don't mean it was dull,'' she explains ever so precisely near the beginning of her first-person narration. ``Only that I knew every brilliant, breathtaking moment that was coming.''

Isobel describes herself as ``one of those ladies you see walking alone on beaches, her shoes dangling from her fingers away from the splash of the water as she crouches to examine the whorls in the sand around the tide pools.''

A curator at a historical museum, she is a keeper of treasures; a detached, deferential arranger of the artifacts of others' lives. Her own environment is composed for comfort: Her iron sits primly beside her teapot and a spare pair of socks in her office; sturdy Scottish afghans and books are stored according to the ``frugal code'' of her home. Books are among Isobel's few cherished possessions and passions, replete as they are with passages such as her favorite by the poet Elizabeth Bishop: ``her white disordered sheets like wilted roses.''

A bemused Isobel observes, ``Neither I nor a single one of my lovers has ever been able to cause my sheets to be disordered in such a way that they resemble wilted roses or any other flower. Crumpled paper, maybe, or pleated like a fan but never moist, never fragrant with bloom or loss.'' But that was before her fingers found the lump -- the abrupt obstruction that sends her crystal-clear stream of consciousness into flux.

``There was a pebble in there. Smaller than a tooth. Larger than a grain of sand yet with the same chiseled, irregular edges. The lump was actually sharp to the touch. I remember being careful not to examine it too vigorously for fear it might cut me.''

Within days of her discovery, Isobel's museum burns down. Standing outside, the only member of the staff who doesn't sob while watching flames destroy the building that has housed much of her adult sense of self, she decides to call her doctor about what suddenly seems to be a trembling, throbbing sensation in her breast.

A mammogram is scheduled quickly. A biopsy. Surgery, with devastating results.

Isobel awakes from the operation in pain, though not the searing sort she'd expected. Searing ``suggested a pain too close to the surface, not mixed with my soul the way this one was.'' She responds with fury, which gives way to a desperate wish to ``make my world into a more flexible place, a place of mirrors and doorways, access and egress.''

With the help of sooty talismans salvaged from the museum fire -- an old silver compact case; a collection of enigmatic dolls with faces the color of bisque -- Isobel's imagination soars to a fantastic world, a place that flourishes with all she has planted in her rich, well-tended soul. In this fabulously imagined future, Isobel evolves into ``Bald Queen Butterfly,'' a cancer and chemotherapy survivor, a breastless, bejeweled, and (save for false eyelashes) hairless woman who Rollerblades to work.

In Bald Queen Butterfly's world, Isobel's best friend, Martha, joins her once she is in remission, toting two Mexican baby girls. Isobel and Martha raise the children in the company of family and friends. Love endures, romances flower and wither. Bald Queen Butterfly grows to be a wise old woman ready and willing to ``jump'' her much younger husband in public as they sit in a tide pool and sip tequila on a beach.

Meanwhile, in ``real time,'' Isobel is dying. Martha and her 19-year-old son, Hercules -- named for the constellation Martha glimpsed while giving birth -- care for her, after vowing they won't let creeping cancer turn her brain to ``cabbage soup.'' Hercules -- shy, sensitive, and seemingly clairvoyant -- keeps order in Isobel's life-before-dying. Martha cradles and comforts, answering phones at the museum while Isobel forges ahead with plans for an exhibition about the fire.

Martha fashions fake breasts for Isobel, making one from a nylon stocking, rubber bands, and bath-oil beads. On the afternoon Isobel makes a televised appearance before the local city council to testify about the fire, one of the prosthetics slides from under her dress, exploding on the floor.

Isobel watches ``the bath beads skid like blue fireworks beneath the TV cameras, the dull clattering dispersing under the lectern,'' and notices ``a dewberry fragrance, warm in the glare, that made me think of summer picnics and moonlight concerts of the sort we had each June on the lawn of the museum. Rum punch, lemonade, our whole disorganized collection of hanging lanterns casting vibrating rays in time with the too-loud music.''

Most uncharacteristically, she blushes. Not because of the bath-bead spectacle, or at the new-found sense of the fantastic that Bald Queen Butterfly has brought to her dying days. Isobel's face reddens because of a most publicly revealing gesture: Her hand has rested absently over the latest place cancer has been detected -- her spleen.

As Isobel's cancer spreads, she is confined to bed, and her own cerebral splendor. Utterly dependent on Martha, Hercules, and the dedicated Dr. Klink, Isobel watches as her mind soars and her body succumbs to cancer. She reflects on ``plasma, which finds its liquid way through my damaged inner linings, putting me in the irresponsible position of dying of starvation while my belly balloons with protein, making me look pregnant.'' Death is filled with contradiction, she decides: ``The illness makes me tired, the lethargy soothes the pain, the absence of pain allows me to perform mundane tasks, the ease of which invites me to think abstract thoughts, the convolutedness of which makes me excited.'' Realizing just how alive she is while dying ``is the proudest and most wonderful contradiction of all.''

Isobel's life before death is so splendid, her charmingly eccentric friends and caretakers so supportive, and her dying so blissfully serene that Frucht at times jeopardizes the verisimilitude that frames this story. Some of the plot twists are too cutely convenient; Hercules's dewy youth and Dr. Klink's devotion sometimes seem overweening. Still, Frucht has created so sympathetic a character, of such imaginative intelligence and humor, that we accept Isobel's most extravagant beliefs and visions. Frucht never shirks her suffering, and Bald Queen Butterfly is both a splendid and a spectral presence.

Written in evocative, lapidary prose, Frucht's ``Life Before Death'' is a breathtakingly beautiful story about a heartstopping horror, movingly told.