I was their life, that was how I imagined it, and for those few hours every day when I was allowed to take the babies, one at a time, out of their cribs, take them anywhere around the hospital except the wing for the sick patients, I was a heroine.
It was the early fifties and heroes were at the center of our lives. They were what we longed to be, believed we could be, the personas we assumed to negotiate the complicated process of growing up in the outwardly cheerful, optimistic environment of the Silent Generation. Heroes occupied our dreams.
When I was three or four, attentive to conversations, lying between my parents in their bed at night pretending to sleep, they would talk about the war.
In my mind, I traveled across the Atlantic Ocean for a conversation I had arranged by telephone with Adolf Hitler. A little girl traveling alone with her small dog, Trixie, would be able to persuade this villain to stop the war. I remember that in these waking dreams I’d be crossing the Atlantic on foot. I wasn’t familiar with boats, and I thought of distance as the time it took to walk from our front porch to the mailbox or out back to Guy and Aida’s house. Hitler lurked somewhere just beyond an ocean the size of our vegetable garden, in back of Guy and Aida’s peeling white clapboard house, in a house very much like ours.
The Babies’ Ward was as close as I came in my stay at Warm Springs to assembling an imaginary life within the real one.
Tommy Boy was in the first crib. I saw myself not as his mother, who lived in Atlanta and visited on weekends, but as his doctor. I was going to teach him to walk. His residual paralysis was similar to mine, his left side weakened by the disease, especially his leg; his right side was almost normal. On warm days I’d take Tommy Boy in my lap out of the Babies’ Ward, out the side doors of Second Medical and across the quad where there was a basketball court, where kids played in wheelchairs most mornings before lunch if the weather was good. We’d sit on the edge of the court and I’d lift him onto the grass, leaning over my wheelchair so my grip around his upper body was secure, and then I’d teach him to take one step and then another.
“Walk, Tommy Boy,” I’d say to him, and he’d give a huge, toothy smile and say the only word he could say besides “da,” which was “walk.” I had taught him that. My idea was that if he learned the word—if “walk” was imprinted on his brain—then he would be able in some mysterious way to correlate his muscles with the word and learn to walk in fact.
I told my mother this theory during one of our Sunday telephone calls, and she said she’d ask Dr. Nicholson whether a scientific correlation existed between language and action. But I could tell it didn’t make a great deal of sense to her logical mind.
It did to Tommy Boy and me.
Before he left Warm Springs for the last time, in the early winter of my first year, he walked on his little fat legs from the crib where he’d been sleeping for almost a year into his mother’s arms.
“Eleven steps,” his mother said happily to his father. “Eleven big steps.” And she swung him around in a circle.
I was in the Babies’ Ward reading a story to Rosie when that happened.
“How did he learn to walk?” Tommy Boy’s father asked Paisley Jean.
“I taught him,” Paisley Jean said. “If there are traces of muscles, I can teach them to walk.”
But Tommy Boy knew better and so did I, and that was what mattered. Only our time sitting next to the basketball court counted, my arms around his belly. Walk, I’d say, one foot in front of the other. And he did.
When I first saw Rosie, she was sitting in the corner of her crib chewing on a book, and Paisley Jean told me her name was Cynthia Ann and her mother was dead.
“Of polio,” she said. “It hardly ever happens, but it happened to her mother, in Philadelphia, in an epidemic last March.”
Usually I didn’t find out personal information about the babies except from Paisley Jean, and then only if none of the other nurses was around. She liked to gossip about the private stories of children’s lives. She particularly liked the tragedies and perhaps increased their troubles for my benefit if the ones they had didn’t seem sufficient.
I was a willing listener, with a preference for dramatic stories, a tendency to exaggeration. But in the case of Rosie’s mother, I believed Paisley Jean. The baby girl had the hollow look of a child with something missing, and I claimed her for my own.
“I will be your mommy,” I’d whisper in her ear, my breath tickling her cheek so that she’d giggle.
I could not imagine my own life without a mother.
In second grade at Sidwell Friends, my classmate Elaine’s mother had died of breast cancer over Christmas vacation, and Elaine had come back to school after New Year’s with her black curly hair cut very short, close to the skull. Was that shearing her own doing in grief, I wondered, or had someone thought to cut her hair to call attention to her loss? I’d sit in reading class watching Elaine two seats away, slipping down in my own seat so I could stare without her knowing. To my amazement, she could read aloud without a quaver in her voice. Maybe she didn’t love her mother the way I did mine. Or maybe she was covering up her sadness and one day might die of sadness in her sleep.
If my mother were not there to see me, I would not exist.
When I left the Babies’ Ward every day at noon, in time to put Rosie back in her crib and get the lunch trays, I ached at having to let her go. She was always the last baby I held on my visits, the sweet dessert, my darling girl. I thought of myself as her mother.
I could recall afterward that Magnolia had her eyes on Violet Blue, that her jaw was clenched and her fingers were tight around the railing and her black eyes in the glance I got of them were flashing. She leaned her head down, grabbed Violet Blue’s little fist, clamped her teeth on the fleshy fingers, and bit through the skin.
Paisley Jean shouted at me, the veins popping in her neck, her voice trembling, and the sound of baby voices in the room went silent except for the long wail coming from Violet Blue.
“Leave,” Paisley Jean said. “Leave the ward now.”
I didn’t move. I saw blood coming from Violet Blue’s finger, the look of surprise on Magnolia’s face, felt Paisley Jean rush by me and pick up the bleeding baby.
“She make blood,” Violet Blue said, holding her hand out for the nurse to see.
“You broke the skin,” Paisley Jean said to Magnolia. “Do you see the blood?”
Magnolia looked up at her, shook her head, buried her face in her arm.
“She can’t hear,” I reminded Paisley Jean. “She doesn’t know what you’re saying.”
“I’ve heard about her. Her mother’s on the maid staff, right?” Paisley Jean asked, washing Violet Blue’s bloody finger under the faucet in the corner of the room.
“Her name is Magnolia,” I said.
“Magnolia.” Paisley Jean put antiseptic on the bloody hand and wrapped it in gauze and tape. “What’s her last name?”
“I don’t know her last name,” I said as Paisley Jean moved the rocking chair over next to Violet Blue’s crib and rocked her. “Her mother works on my floor. I think she cleans.”
“What are you doing being friends with a child like this anyway, Susan?” Paisley Jean asked.
I had lifted Magnolia back on my lap and she sat there quietly, her head hanging down as if she were expecting something more to happen.
I didn’t know how to answer Paisley Jean. Magnolia was my friend. She needed to be my friend.
“Causing trouble is what you’re doing,” Paisley Jean answered for herself. “You ought to take this Magnolia back where you found her. You oughtn’t be playing with her—you know that.”
“I don’t,” I said, and I suppose my heart was beating hard because I did know. At least I was beginning to understand what was more alarming than the kind of trouble I was accustomed to getting into at school.
“Time you did know,” Paisley Jean said. “She could have rabies, you know, and now she’s bit Violet Blue.”
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“Dogs have rabies,” I said.
“Dogs have rabies and they bite children and then the children die.”
“She’s not a dog,” I said.
“No,” Paisley Jean said quietly. “She’s not a dog.”
I didn’t leave, and Paisley Jean didn’t ask me to again. We sat there quietly while all around us those babies peered out of their cribs, waiting to see what would happen next, and Violet Blue nestled into Paisley Jean’s arms.
After a while, Paisley Jean took off the bandage and checked to see if the bleeding had stopped, and then she wrapped Violet Blue’s hand up again.
“What’s going to happen?” I asked finally.
“Children have germs,” she said. “The mouth is a dirty place, and I can’t tell you what’s going to happen until it happens.”
“Maybe there’s a medicine you can use on her hand,” I said.
“Maybe,” Paisley Jean said, looking at Magnolia, whose head was still hanging. “She’s completely deaf?”
I nodded.
“What do you think would happen if I told Dr. Iler that a colored girl had bitten this precious one and broken the skin?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Yes, you do. You’re from Washington, D.C., and you know what I’m talking about.”
I couldn’t bear it. I wrapped my arms around the skinny-boned girl, put her head in the crook of my neck.
“So what are you going to say to Dr. Iler?”
Paisley Jean sat for a long time, what felt like a long time anyway, before she answered. When she spoke, she wasn’t looking at me. She was staring across the room at something, and when I followed her eyes, I saw they had rested on Tommy Boy sleeping in his crib.
“I’m going to ask Dr. Iler what to do with a child bite and show him Violet Blue’s hand.”
“And tell him it was Magnolia?” I asked. “You can tell him it was me. Tell him I just got mad at Violet’s temper and bit her.”
“I’m not going to tell him that, because it isn’t true,” she said, taking a deep breath. “I’m going to say one of the babies bit her because he was teething, and the fault was mine.”
“But that’s not true either,” I said.
“I get to choose what I say, don’t I?” Paisley Jean said. “And that’s what I’ve chosen.”
I left then. I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know whether I was relieved or felt worse than I would have if I’d taken the blame for what happened, since it was mine to take.
Upstairs, Magnolia’s mother was at the other end of the hall with a pail and mop, cleaning the floor outside the Boys’ Ward. Maybe she saw us come up, maybe she didn’t. Maybe she didn’t even know that Magnolia was gone from under the table. We’d been in the Babies’ Ward for only a short time. I kissed Magnolia’s cheek and she hopped off my lap and scrambled under the table, where she stayed, lying on her belly, burrowing her face in her arms.
When I came back after lunch, after my catechism lesson with Father James, Magnolia was gone, earlier than she usually left. Maybe she had asked to go home, or maybe her mother was finished work for the day. I didn’t want to know.
Violet Blue was lying on the changing table when I went back to the Babies’ Ward just before the dinner trays were delivered, and Paisley Jean was redressing her hand.
I had wanted to confess my sin to Father James that afternoon. But I didn’t want to say “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned” and for him to tell me to repeat a bunch of “Hail Mary full of grace”s so the sin would dissolve. I didn’t really believe anything I said would make a difference.
I knew I had sinned. But I wasn’t at all sure what, of the many things I might have done or did do that morning in the Babies’ Ward with Magnolia, had been the sin.
I wheeled over to Paisley Jean.
“Thank you for what you did,” I said.
“I did nothing but take care of my babies as I usually do.”
“You didn’t tell Dr. Iler it was my fault”
“Oh, that,” she said. “I didn’t think it was your fault”
But someplace in my thinking, I must have known that trouble didn’t follow me around, pick me out of the crowd as a likely candidate, try my patience.
I pushed the limits.
The Body and the Blood
THE NIGHT BEFORE she left, my mother told me that chances were I’d have my first period at Warm Springs, although she hoped it wouldn’t come until I was home again. But she had been early, maybe as young as ten, so I should expect it.
I didn’t expect it, had no reason to think about it again, since it sounded such a strange phenomenon, difficult to imagine just by my mother’s description. So when I started, in early November, I was stunned and fascinated and probably, by the account of others’ experiences, also sad. But sadness was not a feeling I allowed myself until I was almost forty. In my mind, sadness had the weight of death, so I exterminated it whenever I felt its undertow slipping in under my skin.
However enigmatic by nature my mother was, she was direct about specifics, particularly about sex and the body, which had a different context in her mind than they seemed to have for the more fastidious mothers of my friends. Growing up, I thought her ease in talking about sex came from an open-minded Danish background untainted by American puritanism, but I now believe it simply had to do with her.
By the time I got my period, I had had long conversations with her about the pleasure of sex, and men and women, and the changes in the body of a girl. She had also left sanitary napkins and an elastic belt in my night table, next to the bedpan, so I got them out and put them on with curiosity and disgust.
Weird was how I felt that week. I didn’t tell anyone, not even my mother at first. An unfamiliar combination of secrecy and exhibitionism overtook me almost immediately. I didn’t know what to do with myself. In the long mirror on the door of the closet I shared with Caroline, I discovered I was getting fat. Rather, I was spreading. I’d gone to bed with my familiar bony body, all sharp edges and no flesh, and awakened in the process of expanding.
My body had been available for public scrutiny since I could remember. I was accustomed to lying on examining tables covered with nothing but a sheet, to the arrival of doctors, sometimes singly, sometimes in teams, who pulled the sheet off, poked and prodded, rarely even glancing at my face. I’d lie naked while they gathered around the table talking about me as if I were fair game. At the time, it didn’t seem like a violation of privacy. I had never had a chance to develop a sense of modesty, so I wasn’t aware of the loss of it.
Certain boundaries were perplexing and unclear. Since I was by nature a child who wanted to jump in the water whether or not I could swim, I needed help in this transition to womanhood, as it was delicately called when I was growing up, and the only person I would have been comfortable talking to wasn’t there.
Three mornings a week I had catechism with Father James. I’d lie in bed at night, unable to sleep, and think of the Passion of Christ. In my dreams, He had the beautiful face of Father James and died on the cross for our sins, and I hoped to have many sins, to make His dying worthwhile.
After lights out, Caroline had difficulty getting comfortable, and I needed her to go to sleep so I could pray. I didn’t want her to know that I was praying, something I had never done except for my regular plea to the galaxy for certainty: Star light, star bright . . .
I didn’t want her to think I was that kind of girl, because she had told me that her parents thought Roman Catholics were disgusting.
“They have children one after the other like rabbits, is what my father told me,” she said. “They don’t even think about it.”
On Sundays, Caroline was taken on her stretcher to the Methodist service, in the room where the movies were shown, and she hated it.
“Why do you go, then?” I asked.
“I go to be good,” she replied in her definite way.
“You’d be good whether you went to church or
not,” I said, and she gave me one of her icy looks.
“You don’t know that,” she said.
What I did know was that my conversion to Catholicism had nothing to do with good.
I wanted to be transported.
At night when Caroline finally went to sleep, I prayed. She might have been awake, watching me through the slits of her eyes, but she never mentioned it, never said she saw me slip out of my bed into my wheelchair, my elbows propped on the bed, my hands together, my chin resting in the V made by my thumbs. I prayed to the Blessed Virgin. The vision on the inside of my eyelids was of myself in a white dress to the ankles, bare feet, my hair long and curly and black, and I am walking up the hill to Calvary, where Jesus is dying on the cross, and the sight of Him dying is wondrous. I stand under the cross next to the crouching, veiled Mary Magdalen and the Blessed Virgin, and the blood falling from His ankles stains my white dress.
I didn’t tell Father James about my vision, only that I prayed, but I did ask him if there were any children on Calvary when Jesus died.
He said he doubted it. Children wouldn’t have attended a crucifixion, wouldn’t have been allowed to be there.
“But maybe an orphan,” I said.
“Maybe an orphan,” he said. “But I don’t think so.”
Every night I repeated the same prayer with a vision of Jesus on the cross, and just the vision of Jesus gave me a rush as if my own blood were accelerating.
Joey Buckley returned to the Boys’ Ward from the sick patients’ ward a week after I had watched him being taken away. I overheard Miss Riley talking about him to Dr. Iler, who said that Joey’s situation had been “precarious,” and so I asked Caroline the meaning of the word.
“I heard my friend Joey Buckley’s condition was dangerous,” I said later to Miss Riley.
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