“She’s very famous, you see.”
My idea of famous was a movie star, but she didn’t appear like one to me. Sister Kenny looked large and old and fierce, but I was unworried. I was wearing my new clothes, my hair curled for the occasion, and my mother’s voice as she explained what would happen at the hospital was contagious with excitement for my leading role.
Perhaps my mother was susceptible to Dr. Nicholson’s insistence that Sister Kenny would want to know her method. My guess in retrospect, however, is that Dr. Nicholson, whom I thought of as a kind of Mary Poppins as she pedaled around Washington, her white dress flying behind her, pockets full of lollipops, a baby bouncing in her wire basket, was competitive with Sister Kenny. She didn’t want a nonmedical professional riding high on slim evidence, and so she was challenging the Australian saint in a serious public forum.
That morning, riding in the back of a taxicab downtown to the hospital, my mother and I were gleeful stage-struck innocents, holding hands, swinging with the cab around the curves of Rock Creek Parkway on our way to victory.
Dr. Nicholson met us in front of the hospital with her bicycle, slipped a lollipop into my jacket pocket, told me to repeat the usual ten Hail Marys and the Our Father, which she had taught me to say, made me stick out my tongue so she could see if it was coated, checked my fingernails for white spots, and asked me how much I had in my piggy bank for the poor children in Guatemala. As far as I knew, my mother never took exception to anything Dr. Nicholson asked of me, including reciting Catholic prayers.
We followed Dr. Nicholson down a long corridor and into a room where another child with polio was lying on a stretcher, covered with a sheet.
My mother lifted me up, took off my clothes, and folded them on a chair. A nurse put me in a hospital gown and covered me with a sheet.
“You’ll be wheeled into the theater by a nurse,” Dr. Nicholson said. “Your mother and I will be in front-row seats—if you turn your head, you’ll be able to see us. Sister Kenny will look at your bad leg and your neck and the right side of your body, and you will lie still and let her look.”
There was no gentle hand of Dr. Nicholson on my arm, no soft words or kisses, just her steady presence and high expectations.
That morning, my mother was wearing a broad-brimmed black cloth hat with a thin, red-striped silk ribbon around the crown. When I looked over to check whether she was in the amphitheater, as the nurse pushed my stretcher onto the stage under the bright lights, she was sitting in the first row next to Dr. Nicholson. She looked very beautiful. She always did.
I didn’t see Sister Kenny until I was directly beside her. She was looking at the audience, and from the stretcher, with my angle of perspective slightly skewed, what I saw was an enormous woman who looked like a man, with a boxy jaw and a booming voice and hands the size of a trucker’s. I recently looked at a photograph of Sister Kenny on the Internet: she had wide-set eyes, a pretty mouth, an undistinguished jaw, and a pleasant expression. She was probably eighteen in the photograph, and that morning she was sixty-five.
“My name is Susan Richards,” I said, as Dr. Nicholson had instructed me.
Sister Kenny looked down and lifted the sheet—or, rather, in a grand gesture tore it off my body, in its oversized hospital gown.
“This is patient Susan Richards, age five, infantile paralysis, November 1941, paralytic polio with residual paralysis on the right side, atrophy of the leg, seriously deformed right foot.”
She looked at my legs, my hips, checked my arms, wiggled my ankles and toes, all the time shaking her head back and forth with an expression of despair.
“The patient has been treated by methods devised by her mother. These methods have never included the application of hot cloths or muscle stretching or reeducation of the damaged muscles. And so . . .” She lifted me off the stretcher in a swoop, set me on the ground where I wavered unsteadily, and said, “Walk.”
I did walk. I didn’t fall, and it seemed to me I walked in a straight enough line, but I must not have taken more than five or six steps before she lifted me back onto the stretcher and raised her hands in a gesture of defeat.
“By the time she is twelve years old, this child will not be able to walk any longer.”
There was a commotion in the audience, and out of nowhere Dr. Nicholson flew up, gathered me in her arms, rushed across the stage, took off my hospital gown, dressed me in my tights and dress, buttoned up my overcoat, tied my hat on, and delivered me to my mother.
“Ten Hail Marys, Susan. Quickly.”
In a matter of seconds we were rushing down the corridor, my hand in my mother’s, out the front door, hailing a cab, and seated side by side in the back, looping through Rock Creek Park.
I had let my mother down.
She took off her broad-brimmed hat, put it in her lap, and gripped my hand tightly as we swung through the park.
“I am so sorry,” she said, turning to face me.
“For what?” I asked, confused that she should be the one who was sorry.
“For what Sister Kenny said to you.”
“I didn’t believe Sister Kenny,” I said, and in the dark safety of the back seat of the taxi, under a canopy of budding trees, I leaned hard against her. “You told me I could walk, and I can.”
The Ticket of Admission
THE MORNING I WAS admitted to Warm Springs was cool enough for my mother to wear the yellow linen suit she had made for this occasion, copying the design, as she did with her clothes, from the French edition of Vogue. She had hoped to be a dress designer, but the years she would have started a career were those between the end of the Depression and World War II, so dress designing gave way to teaching school, and then to me.
Nobody I knew in Washington, D.C., had a mother who looked like mine did. It thrilled me to walk beside her, knowing that people were staring at us.
“What a beautiful woman,” they would be thinking. “And the child holding her hand must be her daughter.”
I felt almost pretty by association.
But this morning in Warm Springs, Georgia, arriving for the first time at the hospital that would be my home, I wanted anonymity.
When I got out of the car in the parking lawn and looked across the lawn to the hospital, I could suddenly imagine myself living here, careening up and down the walkways, in and out of the buildings, here and there with my new friends, nothing to do except hang around together, stretched on our backs in the sun, drinking Coca-Colas and whispering secrets back and forth. There would be no school; my mother had assured me of that.
The hospital—and we called it Warm Springs, not the hospital—was very grand. Not the institution I had expected, more like a hotel than a hospital, like the spa it had once been at the turn of the century. White-painted brick buildings surrounding a wide expanse of lawn, with trees and flowers, winding cement walkways, the southern calm of a balmy afternoon.
In the distance, as we made our way down the path to the admissions building, patients were crossing the courtyard in wheelchairs, coming out of the buildings, moving along with purpose, stopping on the lawn to talk.
I’d have a wheelchair myself, I thought. I’d never had my own wheelchair. I’d never needed one.
I constructed a particular self at a very early age. I can only imagine the process now. As a child often sick, often in bed, I spent a lot of time watching from the window as other children played. If I wanted to command the attention of visitors to my room so they’d want to stay with me, I would have to be engaging and uncomplaining and cheerful, full of stories to detain them. With little going on in my own life except games with my mother, I made up the stories, a mix of what I listened to on daytime soaps and what swam as fantasy through my mind. My mother would sit at the end of my bed, her chin in her hand, listening to everything I had to tell her with rapt attention and delight, as the lines between invention and fact bled into one another like watercolors and became something entirely new.
For my som
etimes melancholic mother, for whom I felt myself to be a source of so much trouble, I needed to be sunshine, equal to her sacrifice for me.
When I think now of how attached I was to my mother, it is notable that I told her so little bad news. I could be an edgy child, hot-tempered, but my outbursts were swift to come and go. I didn’t complain. In general I was happy, as she reported to me later and as I remember. And who wouldn’t be happy as a little girl with her mother’s full attention? To her mind, I had the genetic good fortune of a sunny disposition. Things didn’t bother me, she’d tell her friends; my illnesses caused me little of the psychic or physical pain that they might have done in another, more sensitive child, one less able to roll with the punches, as my father said of me.
I didn’t realize until I was in my twenties, and a mother myself, that the happy-go-lucky, fearless girl she and I had needed to believe in had been an invention for both of us.
Georgia Hall was the main administration building at Warm Springs. On that first morning, I walked through its doors some distance in front of my parents, less wary than determined. Perhaps I smiled at people in the waiting room, a habit I had developed for these situations.
“Speak first,” my mother had always told me, knowing that a bony child on crutches with the dark demeanor of a war survivor might not be well received. “Say ‘I’m Susan Richards’ and smile and reach out your hand.” I was probably three or four when these lessons in survival began. I never questioned my mother’s insistence on them, a result of her own shyness and the disapproving looks she received from people on the street who saw me as a damaged child, some unspoken comment on her failure as a mother.
The waiting room was crowded with new patients like me checking into the hospital early on a Monday morning. I wondered whether they would all be staying as long as I would. And whether we’d soon, in a matter of days or weeks, be friends.
The subject of the length of my stay was fuzzy. It was August, and I knew I’d be able to go home for Thanksgiving, that I’d have one surgery initially and be in a cast for a while and then have physical therapy. All that before Thanksgiving and then I’d go home. Perhaps I’d get to stay at home through Christmas and return for other surgeries. Or maybe not. “Depending on how things go” was the way the doctors had spoken to my mother and father about it. It was my plan to leave the hospital at Thanksgiving and not return. I figured I could rehabilitate myself by then, but I didn’t tell my parents about it.
I walked into the waiting room with the kind of confidence that comes of an overdeveloped imagination short on critical review. I was the girl of the hour, that’s how I remember it, and that’s the way I had intended to present myself in this room of crippled children.
I had daydreamed this scene for years.
I’d known about Warm Springs since I was seven and had gone to the Cleveland Clinic to see a famous orthopedic doctor, who recommended the hospital to my parents. He thought I should go immediately for surgery.
“Don’t wait,” he said.
My mother waited. It was her intuition that if I had surgery before I was more fully developed, it might interrupt the growing bone. Doctors did not agree with her. No precedent, they said, for bone surgery stopping the growth of a child’s bones. But my mother had more confidence in intuition than in facts, and she was stubborn. Every year I had my hand x-rayed to determine how close I was to my full growth. The x-ray taken before my eleventh birthday was promising, and so it was arranged that I would go to Warm Springs at that soft moment between childhood and adolescence. It would be an easy time to be out of school; I wouldn’t miss all that much.
As it turned out, my mother was correct about bones. I was two and a half inches short of my full growth when I was eleven, and the initial surgery did in fact stop the growth of my right leg: I am five feet four inches standing on one foot and five feet one and a half inches on the other. The difference in the length of my legs at seven years of age would have been more than a foot.
I’d thought about Warm Springs for a long time and imagined my perfect life there. My triumph, as I imagined it, was about to begin.
The hard-backed chairs circled the room, and most of them were filled. A baby boy maybe ten months old, with a big head and floppy body, was sitting on his mother’s lap. Two girls with their parents, the parents talking back and forth, sat next to the baby boy. One of the girls had a back brace, like a corset, over her yellow pinafore and two long leg braces locked at the knee, sticking straight out. The second girl, who smiled shyly at me when I sat down, was in a wheelchair with a contraption attached, and her arms rested in slings hanging by thin chains. A grown man was lying on a stretcher, his head turned away from a woman, perhaps his wife, whose hand rested on his forehead. In the corner of the room there was a boy of about twelve, maybe thirteen, whom I’d soon come to know as Joey Buckley. He had a mass of black, curly hair, with a knitted cap and a cigarette poking out from behind his ear.
I included him immediately in the vision I had for my new life.
He was sitting in a wheelchair, an older man beside him wearing a red flannel shirt in the middle of August, the sleeves pushed up, his bare elbows on his knees, his head in his hands.
I walked through the middle of the crowded room, past the chairs already taken on either side, past the admissions desk, where a long-legged red-haired woman was talking on the telephone. I moved quickly, conscious of my speed, in braces without crutches, swinging my leg forward from the hip like a wind-up toy, winning this footrace with practiced posture—straight back, level shoulders, tucked chin.
These small accomplishments would be recognized and admired by my new teammates.
“Stand like a dancer,” my mother would tell me at home as I flattened my back against the wall, a book balancing sideways on my head. “Pretend you are a dancer.”
And you will be was the suggestion in her voice, but she was careful not to promise the impossible, only to let me know what opportunities might be in store if I kept to my regime.
My parents and my reluctant brother, who had spent a lot of his early childhood waiting for me to be examined in such rooms as this one, had followed me in and taken a seat next to the older man with Joey Buckley. I stood alone at a distance, assessing my future.
I don’t particularly like to be alone now. I often prefer a coffeehouse full of strangers to my own study, or a friend in the guest bed to an empty house when my husband is working in another city.
But by the time I was eleven, I had spent long hours alone and knew the benefits—that a certain kind of courage was easier to come by alone, that I was more alert, my senses sharper, my vision in particular, and that as a solitary girl I would put myself forward in ways that wouldn’t be necessary in the company of my parents.
I lowered the blinds of my eyes so the waiting patients wouldn’t notice that I was checking them out. All of them were young, with the exception of the man on the stretcher. I began to realize that every one of the children old enough to walk was in a wheelchair.
So they couldn’t walk. I registered that fact with a sudden sinking of confidence. Seven children, and I was the only one who could walk.
In my daydreams of this adventure, I was coming home to a place where everyone would be exactly like me, a place where I’d be known for my own self and not for polio.
At Sidwell Friends School, especially as I got older, I’d answered to the name “Gimp” as if it were my own.
When I was four or five, my mother sent me in braces to Madame LaFrere’s Ballet School, expecting that Madame LaFrere would be agreeable to a dancer in orthopedic shoes gripping the barre. Handicapped was not a word in my vocabulary. I was expected to participate. And when Madame LaFrere said it was eemposseeble for me to do ballet, my mother set up a barre in my bedroom so she and I could dance together.
I played sports, always the last one chosen for the team, whether I could play the sport or not. Volleyball, soccer, and softball, all were possible for me to
play, and in fact a peg leg has a pogo-stick quality that an ordinary leg lacks, so I bounced along. I could have been a student, but I didn’t have any interest in academics, so I hitched my wagon to sports. Of course, in any real sense, I didn’t belong there. Nevertheless.
At night I’d lie in bed and think with relief about this place of crippled children and what it would be like to live there.
At Warm Springs I would be one among equals.
I sat down next to Joey Buckley and told him my name.
He shrugged.
“Did you just get here?” he asked without introducing himself.
“Last night. We drove for two days and nights.”
“We drove up this morning from Alabama.”
His voice was soft and rolling and I liked the sound of it.
“I came here because I’m going to be a football player at Alabama in a few years and I’ve got to get ready for it.”
“You’re not going to be any football player with that cigarette behind your ear, Joey.”
The man in the flannel shirt lifted his head, leaned back, and gave me a look, not unfriendly but not smiling either.
“I don’t smoke the cigarette, Papa,” Joey said. “I keep it behind my ear because I like the way it looks.”
“You’re not going to be a football player anyway,” his father said. “You can’t walk. Got that, son?”
“I came here to learn how,” Joey said without looking at his father. “What about you?” he asked me.
“I came here for some operations,” I said, adding an operation or two in my head just to keep abreast of the crowd in the waiting room.
“Me too. They’re going to lock my ankles so they don’t buckle when I stand up, and then they’ll find some muscles and put them in my legs because all the ones I have are dead, and when I get out of here, I’ll be standing and I’ll have these muscles and pretty soon when I practice a lot, I’ll be able to walk.”
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