Warm Springs

by Susan Richards Shreve

  Thanksgiving Afternoon

  MOST DAYS AFTER my mother went home to Washington, I got not one but two envelopes from her, one with a cozy, chatty letter and the second with newspaper clippings from the Washington newspapers, sometimes photographs from fashion magazines or recipes. My mother was not an every-day cook—we went to restaurants more than most families in our neighborhood—but when she did cook, when she did anything, she did it to perfection. She loved recipes. She would sit in bed leaning against an avalanche of pillows reading cookbooks—Fannie Farmer was her particular favorite—and historical novels and mysteries.

  Sometimes now, I imagine her childhood from the photographs I have. In a tent in northern Wisconsin, sleeping on a cot with her parents. In St. Louis when she was nine, her mother very ill, her father traveling. “Take care of your mother while I’m gone,” he’d said. “She isn’t feeling well.” Her mother died under her care. In Urbana where her grandparents lived, she shared a suite in a rooming house with her father, a widower in his mid-thirties. In the house of her stepmother after her father had died in an accident at the Urbana Mill, the wheat-processing mill that he owned.

  Of course she would love recipes, as substitutes for the meals she had missed growing up.

  Early in November, she began to send me menus for Thanksgiving that she had clipped from the newspaper, and the idea was for me to decide which dishes she would make. We always had the same thing for Thanksgiving: turkey and stuffing made with butter and bread crumbs and onions, green beans and Brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes with gravy, and apple pie with cheese and mince pie with hard sauce and pumpkin pie with whipped cream. I was not a big eater, but I liked stuffing with gravy and pumpkin pie, and I loved reading recipes in the same calming way I loved reading the words in the hymnal and leafing through the photographs of paintings in art books.

  After the recipes started to come with the newspaper stories, I’d sit up in bed while Caroline was reading and go through my mother’s suggestions. It became one of our brief but predictable dances. I knew we would have the same Thanksgiving we always had, and I wanted it that way, but I’d write back choosing creamed onions or chocolate mousse or oysters Rockefeller, and she’d write to say the creamed onions and the mousse, et cetera, et cetera, sounded delicious.

  I read the newspaper stories after the recipes.

  On one occasion, my mother sent me a story about Pope Pius XII’s announcement of a new Catholic Church dogma that included the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, with a note in her scrawly handwriting: “I don’t know how the Blessed Virgin could allow this to happen.”

  In conversation, my mother always treated me as an equal conspirator. Sometimes I understood what she was saying, sometimes not, but I’d always pretend to know.

  When I asked Father James about the bodily Assumption, hoping to impress him with my knowledge of dogma, he explained that the Blessed Virgin was now like Jesus—resurrected and in heaven is what I remember him saying—and the new doctrine was important for me to understand.

  Heaven held no interest for me. It was too perfect a place. Just the thought of being there with Jesus, and now the Blessed Virgin, as well as quite a few other good people—it all struck me as a high-security prison. But I was fascinated with the idea of bodily Assumption, of floating up into the sky, through the clouds like a balloon, fully dressed and perfectly intact.

  I had never shown an interest in politics, and was always more taken with feature stories that had to do with the trials of one person’s life rather than the general condition of mankind. But that fall I received many clips about the state of affairs in Washington and one new book, which I didn’t read until years later, called The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson.

  “Read the story ‘The Lottery,’” my mother wrote. “It’s frightening.”

  Caroline, more bookish than I, read “The Lottery” instead and told me it was about a town that decides every year to stone one person, selected by a drawing of names. Caroline agreed with my mother that the story was scary, and added that nothing like that could ever happen in the town in Illinois where she lived.

  Only in New England.

  I learned a lot from Caroline that first year.

  My parents, particularly my father, were horrified by the witch-hunting career of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Just before I left for Warm Springs, Congress passed the anti-Communist McCarran Internal Security Act, setting drastic curbs on the rights of those accused of being “subversive.” I knew from my mother that my father would have joined the Communist Party when he was at Ohio State, except that he was the editor of the college newspaper and not a joiner in any case, and just the way she spoke, either her excitement or perhaps her anger at what was going on, made me worry for my father’s safety.

  I knew that early in the winter of 1950, McCarthy had falsely charged that there were a couple of hundred card-carrying Communists in the State Department. Before I left for Warm Springs, we had frequent dinner conversations about Senator McCarthy, usually including a couple of visiting drunks my father had taken in, and the talk would go on and on past my bedtime, past my tolerance for adult conversation.

  “Do you mean these Communists could be killed?” I’d asked my father at the table one night.

  “Their careers will be over,” my father had said. “Their lives will be ruined.”

  One of the newspaper stories I received from my mother in early November that year had to do with a Puerto Rican nationalist’s attempt to assassinate President Truman at Blair House, where Truman was staying.

  “Such a lot is happening in Washington,” she wrote, “but nothing on our street except news from the Bowmans about Korea.”

  Our next-door neighbor had gone off to fight in the Korean War, and my mother sent an article from the local paper saying that he was back and at Walter Reed Hospital, recovering from his wounds.

  And once on a June day before I arrived at Warm Springs, while walking with my mother in Georgetown, we passed a row house near 34th Street with a policeman leaning against the wall.

  “That house belongs to Alger Hiss,” my mother said, peering in to see if anyone was at home. “He’s in trouble for being a Russian spy.”

  “Spy” was part of my vocabulary. It was in common use in the early fifties.

  As I sat in a hospital bed with a light focused on my reading, especially the mail from my mother, Washington seemed a very long way from a village in Georgia. Caroline was across from me, lost in her Nancy Drew or Charles Dickens, the lights in the corridors had been dimmed, and the night sounds of clicking footsteps on linoleum as the nurses gave out meds and bedpans and juice were background music. In the stories from home, Washington had become a dangerous city, and I lost sight of my memory of streets lined with shade trees, of rolling green lawns and children and bicycles and dogs, even the occasional horse trotting up and down the streets where I had been growing up—a small, provincial, segregated southern town where the central offices of the United States government happened to be located.

  The hospital had notified my mother about the episode with the sanitary belt, and she had talked to me about it during one of our Sunday afternoon phone calls. It was important to me that my father not find out, and she told me that on this occasion she wouldn’t tell him.

  I was never nervous with my mother, never felt as if there were anything I could do to upset her, nothing specific that would cause her to raise her voice or take on a tone of disapproval.

  And so it was with the story of the sanitary belt.

  Miss Riley had been the one to call her.

  “I wasn’t surprised,” my mother said to me in her quiet, confident voice. “What does a girl do at eleven years old without help from an adult?” She said it wasn’t my fault. “I told Miss Riley that she might have been of some help to you with your first period.”

  It made me smile.

  But I didn’t try to go to the Boys’ Ward for the rest of the month and didn’t see
Joey Buckley at all.

  I had planned to leave on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, on a train to Atlanta where I would meet my father, who was flying there to pick me up. I made a list of the clothes I was going to take. I expected my cast to be removed, although I knew I would be able to walk on only one leg and with crutches. But the hospital was going to send me home with a folding wheelchair.

  I had written Harold Ickes that I’d be coming home, and he wrote back to say he hated sixth grade, in case I was interested, and would I be able to go horseback riding on his farm when I got there?

  The plan was, I’d be home for a week and then my mother would bring me back to Warm Springs by train and I’d stay until Christmas. Maybe, I allowed myself to think, she would stay with me.

  My cast was due to come off the Friday before I left to go home. When the nurse came to take me to the plaster room, I was in the supply closet playing a game of old maid with Magnolia.

  I had been in a cast for three months, and that seemed a very long time, long enough for my leg to restore itself to a leg entirely changed from the one I remembered.

  I daydreamed of riding a horse with my new leg, of galloping across the fields of the Ickes farm. Galloping was something I’d never done but could imagine.

  I knew how to ride. When I was nine, my mother sent me for two months to the same sleep-away camp in Wells River, Vermont, where she had gone as a young girl. It was an old-fashioned camp with swimming and riding and tennis and canoeing—no motorboats or water skis, but arts and crafts, music, and a daily life of disciplined togetherness. I loved it there.

  My mother was from a camping family. Her Danish father had owned two camps in northern Wisconsin. To reach the camps, it was necessary to portage canoes, and my mother lived there for the long summer, June to September, from the time she was born until her mother died, when her father sold the camps and moved back to Urbana.

  When I look back, with the perspective of the mother I’ve been, and think about the courage it must have taken for my mother to let me go at nine, with her history of loss—her mother, her father, and almost, on a couple of occasions, her only daughter—I’m amazed that she sent me away from her watchful eye.

  But she had made up her mind that I be treated as an ordinary girl, with no fewer expectations.

  I went away outfitted for every sport, my name sewn in my uniforms. I had extra sweaters to stay warm at night, since I was so skinny; child’s rubbers over my orthopedic shoes so I could stand on the tennis court and learn to return balls; jodhpurs my mother had made to fit over my brace for riding. My father, who had lived in a cottage next to a trotters’ barn in New Philadelphia, Ohio, knew about horses and thought it was risky for me to ride. I could be thrown and then what? I probably would be thrown. A horse would know I was an easy toss.

  My mother disagreed.

  “She’ll be sitting on the horse,” she insisted. “She doesn’t need to walk to ride a horse.”

  In fact, although my mother was not a rider and didn’t realize that legs actually counted in horseback riding, it turned out she was right. I was a good rider and discovered enough muscle in my upper thighs to hold on. And the horses weren’t fond of my brace, so I learned to use that to advantage. I did fall off, since I was something of a one-sided rider, but I was young and learned to fall.

  You entered the plaster room and were hit with the smell of wet plaster and rancid flesh and a cloud of plaster dust. Casts were always being taken off and replaced, but this visit was my first and I was thrilled. There was an air of excitement in the room; this was the first step toward going home.

  I sat up on the stretcher and the medical technician turned on the handsaw and sliced the cast open on either side.

  “I cut this off,” the technician explained, “and the doctor comes and we take a look and another x-ray and then the doc will tell you what next.”

  He cut the gauze inside the plaster, lifted off the top of the cast, dropped it in the trash, and left me sitting on the stretcher while he moved on to the next cast, on a boy I’d seen in the Boys’ Ward in a body cast.

  I don’t know exactly what I expected to see when my bad leg was lifted out of the cast and I saw my reconstructed foot for the first time. Probably a matching leg.

  When I tried to lift my leg out of the half-shell of cast, it didn’t move. That was the first sign.

  I leaned over to examine my foot, which was double the size of the foot that had gone into the cast in the first place, and I could tell that any trace of flesh on my right leg had disappeared.

  Dr. Iler arrived late and in a hurry. He looked at me, took my chin in his hand, turned my face one way and then the other.

  “You must be eating your grits,” he said.

  “You mean I’m fat?”

  “You look healthy,” he said. “You were too skinny when you got here.”

  He lifted my leg out of the cast.

  “I’m going home for Thanksgiving,” I said, taking the offensive, as I was in the habit of doing, stating what I hoped would happen as fact.

  My ankle was bloody and swollen. My foot, puffed up as it was, looked like a more extreme deformity than I had before.

  “I’m sending you to x-ray,” Dr. Iler said, “and then we’ll talk.”

  In hospitals, you wait and wait. I was accustomed to that. At Warm Springs, because the days went on so long, waiting for x-rays or cast removal or a doctor’s appointment actually had a sense of adventure. At least something was going to happen. Some change from the sameness of the days.

  Late in the afternoon, still on the stretcher, my newborn leg lying in a half-cast, I was taken to another room, next to x-ray. The picture of my new leg was on the wall, lit from behind.

  “There it is,” Dr. Iler said, coming in the door. “You’re in good shape, a great success. One of the best.” He pointed to the stabilized ankle on the back-lit picture, the pin, the re-formed foot. “Perfect.”

  “But pretty swollen, isn’t it?”

  “That’s to be expected,” he said, lifting the foot very gently in his hand, and the way he touched me was a hint. I understood that everything was not exactly as he had hoped.

  “So I’ll be ready to start physical therapy when I get back from Thanksgiving?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “You’re not quite cooked. We’re putting you back in a cast.”

  He patted my leg.

  “So what happens now?” I asked, although I already knew that nothing was about to happen—no change, a new cast, more weeks to go, the same day-after-day inventing my own excitement.

  I allowed the disappointment to slip quickly through my mind, in and out, so I was ready for what Dr. Iler said next, defended against it, already planning the rest of the month.

  “I guess the plan has changed,” I said.

  “You won’t be going home for Thanksgiving, if that’s what you mean by changed,” he said.

  On the telephone with my mother, I was full of high cheer.

  “Everyone tells me Thanksgiving at Warm Springs is so great, that I’ll love it,” I said.

  I don’t remember whether she offered to come down or not, because my decision was made, and if she had offered, I would have told her: “Don’t come. I’m happy to be here for Thanksgiving, I mean it, and lots of other kids are here without their parents, and probably I’ll be home for Christmas.”

  That’s what I would have said, primed for optimism. I’m sure I never let my voice break. Never even thought it might.

  I wonder now whether my high spirits hurt her feelings, whether she wanted to be needed as I certainly needed her, whether we were simply locked in that old two-step in which we didn’t tell the real truth because we were afraid to hurt each other.

  In writing this book, I have thought that I might have cheated her out of being a part of this lonely life I had without her by seeming as if I were enjoying it, reveling in the absence of her company. That if I’d shown a flicker of hesitation, she would have
come to Warm Springs to spend Thanksgiving with me, grateful to be wanted.

  But I didn’t retread these years when she was alive, and perhaps she would not have remembered how she felt, so I can only imagine, as happens with memory and what we make of it.

  After my conversation with my parents about Thanksgiving, I made a plan. I would put down roots. This was my home now, and the kind of spinning around the hospital that I’d been doing to fill the days—moving through the Babies’ Ward, sneaking into the Boys’ Ward, doing catechism with Father James—was not sufficient to a permanent life.

  I didn’t have the problems of the other children in Second Medical. Most of them, almost all of them, needed every bit of reserve to get better. I had free time. Many had come to Warm Springs in desperation, with small goals, and I had come with the expectation of returning to real life as an ordinary girl.

  I was ashamed among these brave and damaged children. I needed to earn my keep.

  It surprises me now, in these very different times, to think that we believed our lives to be morally balanced, that the good was rewarded and the failures punished. I was a true believer in this. In part it was my age, in part the age in which we were living, the forties and fifties.

  Reading recently about Roosevelt, I was struck to discover that he regarded infantile paralysis and the possible end of his political career as punishment for his infidelity with Lucy Mercer. So that kind of feeling about morality and consequences was not uncommon even among sophisticated, intelligent people.

  A confidence in checks and balances is an easy way to live, and I set out, that day after my cast was removed, to even the score. If I was lucky, as I certainly had been, then I had a duty to compensate for unearned good fortune. Or worse trouble lay ahead.