Warm Springs

by Susan Richards Shreve

  So I would make a list of the things that frightened me, and after my light was out, my father, always my father, who was the go in and out the window worldly force, would come to the door of my room to hear my litany of fears.

  Promise not poison, I’d say.

  Promise no snakes under my bed.

  Promise no rats in the wall.

  Promise no thunder.

  Promise no bedbugs.

  Promise I won’t die.

  He would promise me each of these impossibles one by one, never impatient, never complaining.

  Even my logical, fair-minded mother would make these promises she knew she could not keep, when my father was traveling or stuck in Washington, not enough gas to get home to Vienna because of wartime rationing. I’d ask her for promises and she would repeat after me: “Promise not poison. Promise no snakes. Promise no rats in the wall.”

  A couple of years later, when we moved to the house in Cleveland Park, I told my father that I’d stop the Promise Problem, one promise at a time. But I couldn’t, and the ritual went on and on, until one night when I was about seven, my father said, “This is the last night for promises.”

  And it was over.

  I must have been relieved to end this desperate charade. And the raw fear at the source of these promises dropped somewhere out of sight, to a place I didn’t know was there, but could at any moment expand and rise like an air balloon.

  Fading from the effects of my psychedelic enema, the iron lung within easy reach, I kept my eyes wide open so I wouldn’t fall asleep.

  “It’s not taking, Dr. Iler,” I heard a nurse say just outside my room. “She’s still awake.”

  “Give her another enema,” he said. “She’ll go out like a light.”

  The nurse came in and slid between my stretcher and the iron lung.

  “You didn’t do what I asked you to do,” she said crossly. “Now I have to give you another enema.”

  And between the start and the end of it, I was out.

  By the time I arrived at Warm Springs, the hospital had a staff of orthopedic surgeons who routinely performed stabilizations to solidify a bone at a joint, like the ankle, since the muscles were insufficient to support the skeleton. They were doing transplants of muscles from one part of the body to another, and very delicate back surgery such as Caroline Slover had had, and leg surgery and hand surgery. A stabilized bone is more dependable than one with joints if the muscles are weak. The surgeons performed many ankle stabilizations like the one I had, in which the ankle is broken and fused, and bone tissue from another part of the body, such as the hip, is grafted onto the ankle bone to strengthen the fused joint. In the case of transplants, some muscles are more essential to walking than others. In my case, I had traces of muscle at the ankle in the front of my leg but no muscle traces remaining in the calf. The muscle from the front was transplanted to the calf, which allowed me to learn to walk from heel to toe. I have no side-to-side movement in the ankle and limited but sufficient movement up and down. These operations were performed with varying degrees of success, but many patients left the hospital with much greater mobility than when they came.

  I was a Warm Springs success story, in part because I wasn’t severely handicapped and in part, I believe, because my mother had insisted on hours of physical therapy that she did herself. What muscles could be saved from atrophy were saved. The bones in my foot—which looked like a claw bent nearly in half from walking on the beach in Florida after polio, without the muscle strength to protect the bones—were broken and fused. I walked by swinging my hips and using my leg as a peg, and I fell frequently, tripping myself up even with crutches.

  In this particular surgery, the doctors broke the bones in my foot to re-form it as a straight, flat foot. It is still crippled, but flat enough to serve as a base for walking. The stabilization was a common operation. The re-forming of the foot was not, since most polios have dropped foot, so the foot hangs down but is not crippled.

  On the third day after my surgery, my mother moved into the cottage with Caroline’s mother, Mrs. Slover, and by the time my father and Jeffrey left for the drive back to Washington, I was sitting up in bed.

  I kissed my father goodbye and watched him walk out holding my somber little brother’s hand, my mother’s arm around Jeffrey’s shoulder. And I think now what a sad sight that was. My poor brother must have felt he was walking off the earth. He didn’t know my father well then and was uncomfortable around him and a little afraid. He didn’t want to go to first grade without my mother there. He didn’t want to leave my mother at all.

  None of those thoughts were on my mind that afternoon, and I came to understand only much later what the cost of that separation must have been for Jeffrey, how fractured he felt. But that’s retrospective and had nothing to do with the thrill I felt at having my mother to myself.

  II

  WHAT BECOMES AN ORDINARY LIFE

  Negotiating Safety

  I WAS ALONE.

  At night before lights out I’d write a list in my Survival Notebook of my plans for the following day, and then I’d read the book of catechism Father James had given me to prepare for my conversion to Roman Catholicism, which I kept inside my latest Nancy Drew mystery. I associated Catholicism with sin and hid the catechism inside Nancy Drew so no one could see what I was reading. I understand now that the association with Catholicism was really sex, not sin, but it’s no wonder that at eleven I was confused.

  My mother had left Warm Springs the day after Halloween. She might have stayed longer if Jeffrey were not refusing to attend first grade at John Eaton Elementary and if Grandma Richards, under pressure from a six-year-old who threw up every day in the classroom, had not been driven to drink a couple of extra bourbons before dinner. My father was then vice president of the National Association of Broadcasters and spent about eight months of the year traveling. The principal at John Eaton told Grandma Richards that Jeffrey had to be kept at home until either he stopped getting sick or his mother returned. So my mother had no choice but to go home. I don’t think it occurred to her to bring Jeffrey to Warm Springs and send him to the public grammar school nearby, although later she wished she had done just that. It’s what the parents of my sixties rule-breaking generation might have done, but the mothers of the fifties tended to live by the book—as if school could in any way replace her absence. For all my mother’s extraordinary maternal instincts, she was bewildered by boys, tougher with me than she was with Jeffrey, more uncertain with him, more tentative, and less present.

  It may have had something to do with the fraught relationship of mothers and daughters. My daughters tell me that I was much easier on my sons. It may have had to do with guilt, but I also know now that the doctors at Warm Springs encouraged parents to leave their children in the hospital’s care in order to avoid parental interference with painful treatments. In the end, however, my mother realized that Jeffrey would have been happier living with her in Warm Springs, in or out of school, than at home with General Beauregard and Grandma Richards and, occasionally, my father.

  “I’m fine,” I told her when she said she had to go home. “I love it here. Don’t worry.”

  Perhaps she believed me. I’m sure she wanted to believe me.

  Perhaps I felt the hollow crush of homesickness, the rise of tears, but I don’t remember it, and if I did feel homesick, I would not have been inclined to show it.

  Halloween had been a failure. Even without the benefit of rereading my unpublished autobiographical novel, in which the insipid heroine hates her roommate for usurping all the prizes, I would remember my first Halloween at Warm Springs.

  One of Franklin Roosevelt’s goals when he transformed Warm Springs from a decaying spa hotel to a rehabilitation hospital was to create the sense of a normal life so the polio could develop confidence in himself as an ordinary citizen in a place where he felt the safety of home. Physical improvement came second to social adjustment, a concept revolutionary for medi
cine in the late 1920s, when Roosevelt was the architect, in fact and in spirit, of Warm Springs.

  And it worked. There was a generous democratic spirit of fun and even joy when holidays approached, with weeks of planning and anticipation and fanfare. Halloween was the first of many of these during the time I was at Warm Springs. The hospital was electric with excitement as patients put together their costumes. You could feel it in the corridors. Everyone dressed up for the parade around the grounds on a fall day that in Georgia was usually warm and sunny. There were bags of sweets and cotton candy and popcorn and soda and balloons, but the highlight of the occasion was the awarding of prizes.

  I was Sunbonnet Sue. My mother’s childlike imagination had led to the design of a wheelchair-turned-surrey with Sunbonnet Sue sitting in it, dressed in a calico puff-sleeved dress that covered my legs and a straw bonnet decorated in ribbons, attached to which were construction-paper black-eyed Susans.

  It took her weeks to make it all. She’d sit sewing in my room, on the lawn while I sat beside her, in the cottage she shared with Caroline’s mother. It was a delicious time together. We’d have milk and cookies or chocolate pie, and she’d tell me stories and I’d tell her stories. We talked and talked and I can’t even remember what we talked about, but I know our conversation made the world a place of endless possibilities. I was never bored. She delighted in everything I said, and I loved to watch her pretty hands, such small hands, the way they flew over the material.

  Sunbonnet Sue was not my choice of identity. I would have preferred a male figure, someone in jeans and a cowboy hat or bandanna or baseball cap, a boyish character who happened to be in a wheelchair for a reason. He’d been in the war or shot accidentally or attacked in the woods by a wild animal. A character with a dangerous story.

  But that character wouldn’t have suited my mother at all, would have left her with nothing to do, no role to play in my future success. I was not an ideal dress-up doll for my mother, with my straight dark hair and bony limbs and angular face and damaged leg, so I was happy to sacrifice my vision of myself that Halloween and the chance we had together to win the gold.

  Caroline Slover was dressed as a ghost in a ghost car. She had a sheet over her head with holes cut out for the eyes and mouth, and a steering wheel on the front of her stretcher, which her mother had rigged with the help of one of the orderlies. A white blanket was draped over her body and the stretcher, and big cardboard wheels were attached to the blanket to serve as the wheels of the ghost car.

  “No one can see who I am,” she said, and that pleased her.

  I hoped that Caroline would come in second or third in one of the categories, maybe for Best Costume, because she deserved it—not for her costume but for her struggle.

  I was sure I would come in first in at least one category. Certainly Originality. Maybe Best in Show.

  By inclination I was unsurprised by failure, and good at it, and even felt a kind of satisfaction in the resilience required to bounce back, as if the failure itself were lengthening my chances of survival. But I also always expected to win, and the two were strangely complementary in my mind.

  I’m a backstage girl, comfortable there. It’s a family trait that each generation tries and fails to overcome. But I’m always imagining that one night the curtains will open and I will be the one onstage.

  That Halloween, my confidence in winning had to do with my mother, who was a perfectionist. If she tried something, she succeeded at it.

  Caroline Slover won first prize for Originality and came in third for Best in Show.

  Everyone got a prize. I came in fourth for Originality.

  In the bathroom, where I went as soon as the judging was over, I wept for my mother.

  That night, after she had told me goodbye, since she was leaving for Washington early in the morning, I thought about why I had lost—how could I possibly have let her down? And I decided it must have been because I didn’t need to win. I wasn’t sick enough to be awarded first prize, and so I didn’t earn it.

  At dinner with my mother at the cottage she shared with Caroline’s mother, we didn’t talk about the prizes.

  “It was such fun,” she said cheerily. “I loved making your costume and all the time we got to spend together.”

  “Me too,” I said. “The costume was perfect.”

  We smiled and laughed and she gave me a sip of her wine, and I didn’t tell her what I really felt and she didn’t tell me what she really felt, and yet we had talked and talked for days, and would again and again in the years ahead, until she died.

  Sometime between my arrival at Warm Springs when I was eleven and my departure for the last time when I was almost thirteen, I learned to deal with a small brushfire by starting larger ones all around it, so the troubling small fire would disappear in the conflagration.

  On the day my mother left, I met Magnolia. She was sitting under a table in the supply closet where the cleaning supplies, brooms, brushes, mops, and dustpans were kept, stretching a piece of bubblegum so it made a loop from her mouth to her outstretched arm.

  I caught her eye and she gave me a big smile. The bubblegum fell out of her mouth, and she made a noise I’d never heard before. It seemed to come out of a hollow in her stomach and reverberate.

  I stopped my wheelchair at the closet door and told her hi, but even before I got the word out of my mouth, I felt a great force behind me, and one of the cleaning staff pushed me aside and swooped Magnolia up, knocking her head on the underside of the table, bubblegum all over her fingers and shirt and face.

  “I told you not to make a sound,” the woman said, setting her down on the table. “You come to work with me and you stay under that table ‘til I come get you. Understand me?”

  She took Magnolia’s face in her hands, put her own face right on the little girl’s, and mouthed no without making a sound.

  I hadn’t moved, so when the woman turned her head to find me still sitting where I’d been watching her, her eyes grew dark and fierce.

  “Where are you supposed to be living, out and about like you are?” she asked.

  “I was going to see if the little girl wanted to play,” I said.

  “Well, she doesn’t want to play,” the woman said, but the little girl was smiling a bubblegum smile at me and I smiled back.

  “So you get on your way,” the woman said.

  I turned my wheelchair around and headed down the corridor toward the Boys’ Ward, where I wasn’t allowed to go. I had seen Joey Buckley only twice since we’d been admitted, once at the movie theater and again when he was leaving the brace shop. I had stopped the second time to talk to him, but an orderly had said they were in a hurry.

  “I’m having surgery next week,” Joey had called as the orderly pushed his chair toward the Boys’ Ward. “Then I’ll get to ride in my wheelchair and we can do stuff together.”

  So he had probably had the surgery and was recovering, I thought. I went all the way down to the end of the corridor, slowing down as I came to the Boys’ Ward. I had never been this close before. As long as my mother had been at Warm Springs, I hadn’t broken the rules.

  A young nurse came clicking out of the ward with a tray of medicines and gave me a look but went on her way. After she was out of sight, I wheeled closer, right up to the door. I could see two beds facing the courtyard and one right next to the door. I didn’t have a view of the others.

  A boy about my age with carrot-red hair approached from deep inside the ward, walking slowly on crutches with two long leg braces.

  “Hi,” I said when he came into view.

  “Want to come in?” he asked.

  “Sure.” I wheeled in closer.

  “You’re not allowed, you know. Some of the guys are on the bedpan now, so they might not be overjoyed to see you.”

  I pulled back into the corridor, but I didn’t leave.

  The first bed overlooking the courtyard was empty and unmade. In the second, a boy was lying on his back, an IV in his
arm, the foot of the bed elevated and both his legs in casts. I couldn’t see his face, but from that distance I could see his head and black hair, and I thought with hair that black, it might be Joey Buckley.

  The boy on crutches was talking to the boy in the bed next to the door, and I tried to get his attention.

  “Is that Joey Buckley?” I asked, pointing to the boy with the IV.

  “It used to be,” he replied. “Now it’s a sickie with a fever and his operation may have failed. Why do you want to know?”

  “He’s a friend of mine,” I said.

  “Yeah? Well, he’s a friend of mine too, and he never mentioned your name.”

  “My name is Susan Richards,” I said.

  “That’s what I mean. I never heard of Susan Richards.”

  “So what’s the matter with him?” I asked.

  “You didn’t ask my name, so why should I bother to tell you?” the boy said, initiating what would pass for flirting at Warm Springs.

  “What is your name?” I asked.

  “I’m Bruce, but guys call me Leadfoot, for obvious reasons.”

  He came closer to the door, put his crutches against the bed, and stood with his arms folded across his chest. “Neat, don’t you think? I never could stand like this when I came to this hole, and now—bonanza. I’m practically ready for the track team.”

  I found out that Joey had had surgery the day before, but for some reason the stabilization on one foot had developed an infection, and the doctors were worried.