Warm Springs

by Susan Richards Shreve

  Coming up the street in my direction, toward Wisconsin Avenue, was a young beautiful woman with a Rita Hayworth look, tall, raven-haired, elegant but blowzy—I’d seen that look in movies at Warm Springs. She was wearing a boxy camelhair coat, too big for her and heavy for the climate, and she was smoking a cigarette.

  That much I believe was true.

  In the time it took us to intersect, at the corner of 36th Street and Macomb, she was pregnant with the child of someone well known in the government, but she was married to another man, so the pregnancy was a secret. She lived downtown near the well-known man but was in our neighborhood to see a doctor, an obstetrician called Dr. Incas, who lived on the next street over. He would perform an abortion in the privacy of his basement office. This was years before Roe v. Wade. She could die.

  All of this occurred to me as I passed her, headed toward 35th Street and my house. I turned back once and saw that she had stopped, dropped the cigarette on the bricks, and was grinding it out with the toe of her high-heeled shoe.

  At dinner that night—dinners were special occasions, evenings I prepared for if my father was going to be at home—I arranged my story. In my small family there was high currency for stories, and on that autumn afternoon I became aware of the process I had followed from the fact of a pretty woman whose coat didn’t fit to the fiction of a pregnant beauty on her way to an abortionist.

  When I was very young, particularly when I was sick in bed, I’d play with paper dolls with my mother when the soap operas came on. We’d choose our characters before a program began, dress them in their paper clothes for the day, and as the music for, say, Stella Dallas rolled out of the console radio, we’d take our places on the bed. In between those hours with my mother when I was four, and seventh grade when I was thirteen and in the real world of junior high, fixed on my chances for election to the cheerleading squad, I was becoming a storyteller.

  Reality hovered around my daily life like a fog, and when the air became impossibly thick and close and I couldn’t see how to escape it, I discovered a way out.

  Warm Springs became for me a festering swamp of hidden possibilities. Hours of time to linger in my own mind and a kind of noisy silence around me, in which I was like a girl on a subway train traveling with strangers. There was no one for whom I was the object of affection and so I had no emotional responsibilities. I became someone I could count on. A variety of someones. I filled the time. I don’t remember boredom. I could play many parts.

  It is true that the story I have told so far in this book doesn’t reflect the character of a solitary child lost in her own meanderings. Rather, one who might, in the language of contemporary psychology, act out.

  I was both. Given a choice, I probably would have wanted to be someone in the real world, but under the circumstances it wasn’t always possible. And so I discovered a way to create a place real enough to me to believe in as fact.

  The week after Thanksgiving, I took my Survival Notebook to catechism class.

  Some afternoons—and afternoons at Warm Springs could be very long—I’d write a story in my notebook. It would often start with a real story, such as the one my mother loved to tell about the night my father came home late and I was crying and he told my mother he was going to throw me out of the window because I cried too much and replace me the following morning with a teenage boy.

  I was never very fond of that story, told off and on throughout my childhood, usually at dinner. In my notebook, I had jotted down the notes for a rewrite:

  Story Outline: Father comes home from the bar a little drunk. Baby is screaming in her crib. He picks her up and throws her out the window. Mid-fall, she turns into a beautiful young girl with wings, and taking flight, she disappears, only to return months later with a wagon full of gifts for the distraught father, beside himself with sadness and remorse. They all lived happily ever after.

  “I’m always in trouble,” I said, handing Father James the notebook. He glanced at it, skipping over the self-improvement lists, stopping at the stories.

  “What is this about?” he asked.

  “I rewrite real stories so they come out better.”

  “I see,” he said, closing the notebook. “And what do you want from me?”

  I wanted to be excused or absolved of whatever weighed on my mind under the general heading of trouble.

  “Never mind,” I wanted for him to say after I confessed the problems I had caused. “Do better next time.”

  That was my understanding of confession. I loved the idea of it, the vision I had of confessing.

  I’d slip inside a little box, pull the curtain so I couldn’t be seen as a sinner by the public, fall to my knees, press my palms flat against each other in an attitude of prayer. A tiny door would open and I would be able to see the mouth, maybe the nose and eyes—I wasn’t sure how much of the face of the priest would show.

  But as compelling as confession was to me, I had a problem with forgiveness as I understood it in the Catholic Church. It was too simple that a litany of prayers could liberate a burdened soul like mine from guilt.

  I think about guilt now, at an age when it’s useful to get rid of things so as not to lug around more than I can carry.

  That December afternoon at Warm Springs, I wanted something from Father James. Perhaps relief from my responsibility for bringing unhappiness to the people I loved.

  For as long as I could remember, I had been told that my father had hoped to take the job that Edward R. Murrow had been given, broadcasting from Europe during the Second World War.

  It was just the kind of assignment my father would have loved. He was twenty-seven years old, longing to be part of the war, rejected as a soldier for having flat feet. The story my parents told was that he had turned down the offer because I was too ill for him to go to London, and so Murrow got the job. It was evident by the way my mother spent her time that she had given up her life for me. And my brother had given up his mother to me.

  Those were the repeated chords of my childhood. Or so I imagined. I don’t know whether they were actually repeated by my parents or told to me only once and so deeply affected me, or even whether nothing was said directly to me at all, but were instead stories I overheard, always listening to overhear.

  Suffice to say I defined myself as being too much trouble. Somehow in those early years that perception got woven into the fabric of who I was, how I was seen by others, how I perceived myself. Caught up in the dilemma of the sick child, the center of attention, I was an inadvertent troublemaker, an albatross around the family’s neck.

  My situation was like a recurring attack of hives. Something must be terribly wrong if every time I arrived at a new place—and I loved the opportunity promised by arrivals—something went haywire. I was emotionally klutzy, like a person who walks into a room and knocks the crystal off the tables, but the stakes in my “accidents” were higher than the loss of cut glass.

  I had a sense of failure and importance scrambled in a single bowl.

  This sounds far weightier than it was, and I look back on my childhood as being more happy than unhappy. But like most storytellers, I write to make sense of the disorder in our lives.

  Happiness is a mirage, a phantom hope that seeps into the spirit, taking us by surprise. What counts over the long haul is the pursuit of happiness.

  What I must have been hoping to find with Father James was my own self.

  I wanted to get rid of my habit of bursting out of the starting gate before the gun, my tendency to live life by accident, as if there were not always some intention beyond carelessness. I wanted to compensate for the problems I caused to the people I loved, or start over from the beginning, or make up a new beginning with a different set of inevitabilities.

  Father James was reading when I came into the room, and he looked up over his glasses.

  He had the kind of pale, elegant face that registered expression only in the eyes and otherwise maintained a preternatural calm. That day I
was expecting nothing from him but the usual lesson and, after I showed him my notebook, a gentle conversation and an interest in what I had to say.

  But he had a different subject in mind.

  “What happened with Magnolia?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I understand something happened with Magnolia.”

  “She’s the little girl who stays in the supply room while her mother mops the floors,” I said. “She’s my friend.”

  “She bit a child in the Children’s Ward.”

  I took the notebook I had brought to show him and slid it between an arm of my wheelchair and my hip.

  “Why did you take her into the Children’s Ward?” he asked.

  “I took her in to see the babies. She has nothing to do all day,” I said. “No one told me I shouldn’t.”

  “Well, they should have told you. They should have told you that Magnolia was to be left alone at her mother’s request and that you are allowed in the Children’s Ward only as a special privilege.”

  “She bit Violet Blue by accident, not on purpose. She’s deaf. You can’t tell her things she can or cannot do.”

  His chin rested on his fist, and he was looking not at me but just beyond, at the closed door behind us, and probably thinking he wished he didn’t have to have this conversation.

  I wonder now how Father James got to Warm Springs in the first place, and what he was doing spending so much time with me. Did he actually believe he had a new soul to deliver into the hands of God? Was I really interesting to him, or was he just lonely, like me, without his countrymen or his own church or his wife, whom he had left or who had died?

  Race in the United States must have been perplexing to him, and I myself didn’t understand at the time what it was that separated Magnolia and me. Only that something did.

  “You ask for trouble,” Father James said, opening the catechism book to the day’s lesson, reading it to himself as if he didn’t know it already by heart. “Why ask for trouble? is my question to you. Why do you need problems when you have enough? Everyone here has enough problems not to go looking for new ones.”

  I started to answer, but he shook his head.

  “Don’t talk,” he said. “I asked you a question that you should think about for a long time. Maybe even years.”

  Paisley Jean had been the one to tell, the only one who knew to tell, since Magnolia couldn’t have told even her mother. She told me she was sorry to have gotten me into trouble, that Violet Blue’s finger did get infected and then she couldn’t “lie” about it, and she did say that I had come with Magnolia to the Children’s Ward but the biting was not my fault, or Magnolia’s, but her own.

  I was impressed by Paisley Jean’s honesty. Grown-ups, in my brief experience, did not often take the blame for things.

  “So that’s over, and not to worry, but I’ve got bad news,” Paisley Jean said, pulling me down on the chair so I was sitting next to her. “Rosie has polio.”

  “But she’s had polio already,” I said.

  “Well, she’s got it again.”

  “Is this a secret?” I asked.

  “It won’t be a secret for long,” Paisley Jean replied.

  I left the Children’s Ward, pushed the up button, and went back to my room, where Caroline was just finishing her lesson with Miss Forkman.

  “Guess what?” I said after Miss Forkman left. “One of the babies in the Children’s Ward has polio again.”

  “That’s not possible,” Caroline said with her usual confidence. “You can only get it once.”

  “Well, Rosie has it and she’s already had it once.” I didn’t add about Rosie’s mother, because Caroline didn’t like what she called my blown-up stories, whether they were true or not.

  “Maybe you better shut our door,” Caroline said, and I wheeled over and shut it.

  “Should we ask Dr. Iler?” I wondered.

  Caroline nodded.

  “You ask,” I said. “He thinks you’re more serious than me.” What I really thought but could not have articulated at the time was that Caroline had the right to ask whether the polio virus was floating around Warm Springs because she was severely handicapped, and I did not have that right.

  Caroline said, “I thought you only got polio once and you were sick for about a month and when you started to get well some of your muscles were okay and some were not, depending on how sick you’d been. But at least after it was gone, you were immune to getting it again.”

  “That’s what I thought too,” I said.

  A year and a half later, in 1952, Jonas Salk announced his discovery of the vaccine against polio, during a nationwide epidemic affecting more than forty-five thousand people.

  Most of us, certainly as children, did not know very much about the disease we’d had. The main problem for polios was to persuade others that although the effects of polio remained, the disease had gone. We were not contagious. That’s all I knew. I’d said it often, from the time I was little, to anyone who questioned my health or looked at me askance.

  “I’m not catching,” I’d say, sensing others’ fear of me.

  “I think we need to keep the door closed all the time,” Caroline said, “and maybe we shouldn’t eat the food. It could carry germs.”

  “What’ll we eat?” I asked, inclined in any case to turn up the heat to the level of emergency.

  “You can get us dinner at the candy store. Crackers and stuff, and hide it in your sweater drawer.”

  “Are you going to tell your parents?” I asked. “I don’t think I will.”

  “They’ll worry too much,” Caroline agreed. “I won’t either.”

  We skipped lunch that day, without Miss Riley’s interference, but at dinner, when our trays went back untouched, the night nurse, Miss Barnes, came in to ask what was the matter.

  “I have a note you skipped lunch,” she said.

  “We’re not hungry,” Caroline said.

  “You’ll be very hungry. I’m bringing back your trays.”

  Caroline said she didn’t feel well. I said we were both sick, probably with the stomach flu.

  “I’m bringing back the trays anyway,” Miss Barnes said.

  “The food is sure to have germs, since it’s been sitting out in the hall with all the other finished trays,” Caroline said. “I’m eating nothing that isn’t in a package.”

  When Miss Barnes returned, we ate the packaged saltines and drank milk from the carton but left the rest, although I couldn’t keep myself from eating the chocolate pudding.

  I had picked up Ritz crackers and a jar of peanut butter and two Cokes at the candy store, and we ate the whole box of crackers and the peanut butter.

  I wanted to find Rosie. I’d stand at the door of her room and check if she was breathing.

  Caroline took the situation of Rosie’s polio very seriously.

  “You can’t come back into this room if you get exposed to her,” she said.

  At lights out, when Miss Barnes came in with laxatives and juice, Caroline asked her how the child with polio was doing.

  “There is no child with polio in the hospital—if what you mean by polio is active illness. You all had polio, of course.”

  We nodded.

  “I know there is a child with polio,” I said.

  “Who told you?”

  “A nurse,” I said. “I don’t know her name.”

  “Maybe you can point her out to me,” she said.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Or won’t,” Miss Barnes said coolly.

  “I won’t,” I said, glad to protect Paisley Jean as she had protected me.

  “Well . . .” Miss Barnes started to say something, but she changed her mind and left the room, so distracted she forgot her tray of laxatives.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I think they want to keep it a secret because it’ll be a mess if we get a polio epidemic at a polio hospital,” Caroline said. “Maybe I shoul
d call my parents.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  But I was not going to call mine. I didn’t want them to worry, and at the time I didn’t want them to come to Warm Springs. It was my plan to return home to them without flaw or fault. They would be giddy with happiness to see the changes I’d made.

  After lights out, I lay on my back with my eyes open, aching for Rosie. Across the room, Caroline was on her stomach, her face resting in her fists. She was wide awake. The light from the moon slid over her face, and she was lovely and vulnerable in that light, and at that moment I believed I loved her.

  I wondered what it must be like to be confined to bed while germs too small to see were spreading through the air around you and you couldn’t move without help.

  Caroline never spoke about her life with polio, had never mentioned what it had been like to walk and then not walk ever again, how it had felt when she got sick.

  But that night she told me some things. About the way her friends had been with her, curious at first, anxious to see what polio looked like on a girl they’d known, and then too busy to take the time to go to her house after school. About the loneliness of home-schooling and how someday she was going to be a lawyer for poor people who needed her, and she’d go live by herself in a first-floor apartment in case there was a fire.

  “What if we had a fire here?” she asked.

  “They’d get us out.”

  “There’re so many of us, more than they have people to get us out.” And then she added, “You could get us out.”