In retrospect, and as a result of the reading I have done for this book, I believe I reacted to type. Again and again, it’s reported that we polios didn’t look back, didn’t dwell on the negative, didn’t concern ourselves with impossibilities. We were proficient at denial.
I believe there is a physical, instinctive explanation for this. Those of us who had paralytic polio generally were left with traces of muscles and the confidence—another word for hope—that those muscles could be restored. It took hours and days and weeks of concentration on a very small part of the body to work on a trace of muscle. It was tedious, repetitious, and the rewards were small.
The process lends itself to that of a competitive athlete, practicing over and over again the same move, the same stroke, with the same perseverance. Or it lends itself to becoming a writer.
I saw Joey Buckley on my first day up from surgery. I was wheeling from one end of the corridor to the other, and Joey was just coming out of the Boys’ Ward.
He saw me and waited just outside his ward.
“So you’re back,” he said.
“You too,” I said.
“We ought to do some fun stuff this time, don’t you think?” he asked.
“We will,” I said, and, hardly able to contain my tears of laughter, “we will, we will, we will.”
March of Dimes Day
I WOKE UP ONE Sunday morning with the idea for March of Dimes Day already in my head, as if it were the tail end of a dream. It was early July, after a long and lonely weekend when some of the nearby parents from Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee had driven over to visit their children, as they sometimes did on weekends, and Joey Buckley had gone home for the week to get over the croup. The hospital had been too quiet, the air so hot and still, even with the fans going, that I wanted to sleep clear through until Monday.
Instead I sat up in bed and made a diagram of Ward 8, a drawing of the beds with the names of the girls, ten of them that July, since some had gone home for good at the end of June and Avie Crider was having a holiday with her parents in St. Paul and Julie Camp had come down with something catching, so she’d been moved to isolation.
By the time the breakfast trays were delivered, my plan for March of Dimes Day was beginning to take shape.
I have always been a starter of things. In retrospect, my drive for new beginnings was born of loneliness more than a desire for leadership. As a child growing up in the years of birthday parties and sleepovers and exclusive clubs of girls, I must have come to the self-protective decision that in case I wasn’t going to be invited to the party, then I would have the party myself.
I had written a newspaper that I distributed in the neighborhood, full of maxims and other earnest hints for leading a better life, what I must have assumed was helpful instruction for the families in Cleveland Park. Again, these were the postwar years of high moral purpose, of discomfort with ambiguity, a kind of cheerful smugness. I fell right into line, in spite of my questionable behavior at school, recommending such axioms of good behavior as my personal favorite at the time, from “Outwitted” by Edwin Markham, which I had lifted from a pamphlet and used as the banner of one of my newspapers, the Cleveland Park Weekly: “He drew a circle that shut me out / Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout / But love and I had the wit to win / We drew a circle that took him in.”
I had also formed a small acting company, consisting of Jeffie and me and General Beauregard, and we performed plays for profit in our living room. I wrote one called Mercy, Be Kind to the Indians, playing the part of Mercy myself, with Jeffie as the Indian boy and General Beauregard as the horse. In the summer I had put together a neighborhood circus for the younger children and made a clubhouse under one of the porches on our street, where I served magic lollipops and told stories to the little children in the semidarkness.
My need for the March of Dimes Day had come shortly after the Fourth of July, when I received a letter from Lindsey Greene, my stepgrandmother, who had returned to the cool breezes of Urbana, Ohio, to play bridge at the country club. The letter went something like this (I don’t have the letter in hand to support this memory, though her letters were more or less interchangeable):
Dear Susan,
I trust it’s cooler there than when I left. I can’t imagine anyone living in the kind of heat they have in Georgia. No wonder! [“No wonder” was a phrase dear to her heart, which stood for most anything; in this case I imagine it stood for No wonder I had to leave Warm Springs.] I was at the five-and-ten yesterday, where your other grandmother [“other grandmother” was the best she could do in identifying Grandma Richards, known with great affection in their community as Aunt Bessie] works at the costume jewelry counter, and she stopped me as I was about to purchase some nylons and said that your great-uncle Harry or Joe, I can’t remember which, but you don’t know him well, had died on Thursday and was being buried that afternoon. She didn’t mention the cause of his death, but I happen to know he had a drinking problem . . .
I’m sure that in the second paragraph she said she hoped that I was doing well and had some friends and not to eat too much greasy food like they seemed to favor in the South.
I phoned my parents right away. The staff let me call even though it was the middle of the week and usually I called on weekends, but I told the receptionist at the front desk that someone had died in my family, and she placed the call for me.
“Who died?” I asked when my mother answered the phone and my heart was beating hard.
There was a long pause.
“Uncle Joe,” my mother said finally. “Grandma Richards’s oldest brother, but I didn’t think it necessary to tell you, darling. What could you do about it but worry, and I would have told you when we saw each other next.”
She was right about the worry. I could hardly breathe for thinking about death—not Uncle Joe’s death, which wasn’t surprising since he was quite an old man, probably in his eighties. I didn’t know him well but I did know him, and I’d had dinner at his house every time we visited Urbana. Lately, in the past year, he had been getting up from the dinner table, pulling open one of the drawers of the buffet where the napkins were kept, and peeing in it. This didn’t seem to bother anyone, certainly not his wife or even my mother and father, but Jeff and I giggled into our napkins, leaning up against our cousins, and almost choked on our food.
“He has quite a bit of beer before he sits down at the table,” my mother told me. “And he’s too old to hold his pee.”
“I’m not even going to the funeral, darling,” my mother said, as though that would make some difference in the fact of death. “He was very old and it was to be expected.”
Death was to be expected. That stuck with me, although I’m quite sure that my mother said that to ease my mind, to take the fear of death out of our conversation, but of course my mind was already on a different path, galloping toward darkness. Here I was in this outpost of crippled children, stuck with others who couldn’t get away, couldn’t get farther than the hospital candy store on their own in a wheelchair, and what could I do with such a possibility as death menacing the lives of the people I loved, the people on whom my life depended?
Death was kept behind closed doors in the middle-class families of those postwar years, parents who had grown up with their own parents dying at home, slow deaths in which the family participated. Dying was not the secret that it was for my postwar generation of children, accumulating, as death did for us, the kind of terrifying danger of the secret.
I couldn’t sleep that night for thinking of Uncle Joe. His face turned into the face of my father, and I wondered, Was he lying in a casket with his face showing, bone white with his mouth and eyes closed? Then I started thinking about my parents: if one of them had to die, which one would I choose, which one could I bear to do without? That night my breath came in short takes, and when I woke up in the morning I was thinking of the March of Dimes.
The actual March of Dimes was initiated by the Nati
onal Foundation for Infantile Paralysis in 1938 as part of its fund-raising campaign and was given its name by the beloved comedian Eddie Cantor. The foundation was a private charity started by Roosevelt and Basil O’Connor, administered by O’Connor with the goal of raising funds for the care and cure of poliomyelitis.
Eddie Cantor represented the perfect husband and father in the idealized American family of the time, publicly devoted to his wife and five daughters. Through his radio show he created a bond with families all over the country. He loved Roosevelt, and in the foundation’s courting of Hollywood, he became the celebrity to take a central role in its mission to eliminate polio. Cantor launched the March of Dimes on his show, entreating the American people to send their dimes directly to the president in the White House. He alerted the White House mailroom that the volume of mail might increase. In fact, it went from 30,000 letters on the day the campaign started to 150,000 by the third day. The letters had to be redirected from the White House in order for the initiative to function, but the campaign had begun, uniting the nation in collecting dimes for the protection of the health of its children. The campaign culminated eight years later—nine months after FDR’s death—with the minting of the Roosevelt dime, in honor of the president’s sixty-fourth birthday, January 30, 1946.
This was the same year that the March of Dimes introduced the first polio poster child.
Anyone growing up in those years knew the poster children. Their photographs were seen everywhere in the country and promised a bright future for those ravaged bodies with happy faces.
In the persuasive spirit of advertising and marketing, the chosen poster child was always well groomed, attractive, engaging, and supremely cheerful. Such an encouraging image would attract the attention of the American public and compel people to make a contribution to this child’s future, to the future of all children with polio.
In 1946 polio was not nearly as pervasive as the dread of polio. It was true, however, that by the late forties epidemics had increased at a steady and disturbing rate. Under the leadership of Basil O’Connor, the foundation was determined to find a cure.
The first poster child was Donald Anderson, a boy from a working-class family in a small town in Oregon. He had been photographed by a volunteer as a three-year-old, looking out of his crib with a “wistful look” and “enormous eyes.” His appeal as an innocent child destroyed by infantile paralysis must have captured people’s hearts. One photograph on the 1946 March of Dimes poster showed Donald in his crib, braced and bandaged. In another, taken when he was six, he seems to have recovered and is striding, full of determination and high spirits, his arms swinging, his legs moving without support. It was not a factual representation of the daily life of Donald Anderson, who did not have an easy time of polio and was certainly not recovered. But the photograph assured the American people that their accumulating dimes were making a significant difference.
“Your dimes did this for me!” reads the banner across the top of the poster.
Happy-faced crippled children were used for this campaign, and surely many of us who had had polio thought about our own chances at momentary fame.
After breakfast in the Girls’ Ward, I made a speech. In the heat of early July in Georgia, we often stayed in bed, those of us with the choice of getting into wheelchairs, until the breakfast trays were taken.
This was my plan for March of Dimes Day. We would all compete to be the poster child for 1952, the year ahead. I imagined a committee of people from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis coming to the Girls’ Ward. Basil O’Connor would be among them. We all knew his name, believing, as was more or less true, that we owed our medical care to him. This group of dignitaries would photograph each of us, and we’d tell them our personal polio story, and then one among us would be chosen as the poster child.
In this game of the March of Dimes, we would not be ourselves. We would create a persona, invent a dramatic story such as the one contrived by the foundation for Donald Anderson, recreate ourselves as an advertisement for polio recovery in order to earn us consideration as the polio poster child.
That was the game. Only we, the girls of Ward 8, would know what was going on. Not the nurses, not the patients, not doctors or orderlies. One morning, maybe in mid-July, we’d begin as someone other than who we were, with a story to tell worthy of engaging the sympathies of the American people.
If you entered the Girls’ Ward that early July and turned right, you’d see that the beds lined up along the near wall were assigned to me, Polly, Jennifer, Marianna, and Sandy Newcombe, with an empty bed left for Avie. On the other side of the room were Amy’s bed, Elaine’s, Julie’s bed, empty while she was in isolation, Bootsie’s, Janet’s, and Francy’s.
“I don’t understand this game.” Polly was a small blond girl, crippled below the waist, pretty, stoic, and cheerless. “I don’t want to play.”
“It’s not exactly a game,” Marianna said. “You don’t play it.”
I didn’t know Marianna well. I had been back at Warm Springs for only three weeks, two of them following surgery, after Lindsey Greene took my mother away, but so far I liked Marianna and Avie the best.
It is curious to me now, as a person who holds tight to friendship, that all of these associations except for mine with Caroline have slipped away except in memory. And even Caroline has not been in my life for years. I don’t know what to make of that except to conclude we were all young, homesick, self-centered, probably afraid and too proud to show it, determined to get better, biding time until we could return to our lives. Perhaps we didn’t even want to hold on to those years. Were it not for the novel I wrote in the wake of leaving, those two years in Warm Springs might have been simply among the inadvertent losses I have had in my life. But I remember the ward and the feeling of friendship in it, the smell and sound of it, and the faces of those girls. It was, I think, a place to be in the moment. And after the moment it was time to be someplace else.
“So show us how it will go,” Janet said from her bed, to which she had been confined for months in a body cast with slow-healing back surgery.
“Like this,” I began. “The judges, whoever they’re going to be, come in the room and I say, I am Susan Richards, and I got polio when I was a baby in Toledo, Ohio, and was paralyzed from the neck down.” I exaggerated an enormous smile. I was not a smiley girl, but I arranged one for the occasion. “And then my parents got a divorce and I went to live in an orphanage, where the nuns were extremely cruel to girls who weren’t blond and weren’t perfect,” I went on cheerfully. “And finally I was adopted by a very kind man who was a clown in the Ringling Brothers circus, and he started teaching me to walk in braces even though I was in terrible pain, and then he heard about Warm Springs. So here I am, and when I leave I’m going to be fine.”
“Did your parents really get a divorce?” Bootsie asked.
“They didn’t,” I said. “My parents will never get a divorce.”
“Is any of that story true?” Bootsie asked.
“I was born in Toledo and was paralyzed. That part is true.”
“So you’re not an orphan,” Polly said.
“I’m not,” I said. “Pretty much the rest I made up.”
“We’re all going to make up who we are then, right?” Polly asked. “That’s kind of like lying.”
“No it’s not,” Marianna said. “It’s like telling a story, which is different from lying.”
“So that’s all we do,” Polly said. “Make up a story?”
“We have to smile,” I said. “We have to act like we’re getting better and better and polio is nothing to us, hardly a bother at all.”
And so our plans were made that morning, and we wrote down the rules:
We would tell no one who we were until March of Dimes Day.
March of Dimes Day would start the morning of July 15.
Father James would be told of our plan. He’d be the only one told, and he’d bring the nurses and or
derlies in and they would choose the 1952 poster child.
We wouldn’t say one word to the doctors and nurses and orderlies about our plan.
“Who will judge us?” Marianna asked.
“We’ll judge ourselves,” Elaine said. “We’ll do a secret ballot and vote and Miss Riley will count the votes.”
Ward 8 came alive. For days, whenever the nurses weren’t in the room, we practiced our stories back and forth. Or we shut the door and all played our pretend roles as if we were the subjects of our own invention. And when the nurses did come or the orderlies arrived to take one of us to the plaster room or the brace shop or to physical therapy, we stopped pretending and giggled, burying our faces in our pillows or picking up a book and hiding behind the pages. At night we sang our favorite songs together: “When the Saints Go Marching In” or “Put another muscle in / Where the quadriceps have been / ‘Cause we know we’ll never win / With traces, traces, traces.” Or songs we heard from our mothers when we were very small, like, “Oh little playmate / Please come and play with me / And bring your dollies three / Climb up my apple tree / Slide down my rain barrel / Look down my cellar door / And we’ll be jolly friends / Forevermore.” Or “I want to dance with the dolly with a hole in her stocking / While her knees keep a knocking and her toes keep a rocking / Want to dance with the dolly with a hole in her stocking / Want to dance by the light of the moon.” The same songs night after night until Miss Riley came in to say “Lights out,” and then we whispered into the darkness.
One night, she stood in the doorway after the lights were out.
“What is going on with you girls?”
“Nothing,” we said in unison.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing at all,” I said. “We’re just becoming good friends.”
Warm Springs Page 18