Warm Springs

by Susan Richards Shreve

  Father James told me anyway, in spite of my reservations. He said that Joey’s grandma had died in May and that his father had a drinking problem and that Joey had returned to Warm Springs for a series of surgeries that might make the difference between walking and not walking for the rest of his life.

  “He thinks he will walk again,” Father James said. “That is the problem.”

  “He might walk, right? Isn’t that why he’s having all this surgery?”

  “It’s possible, but not likely, not likely at all, but the doctors think it’s worth a try. And Miss Riley tells me you’re such a cheerleader with him.”

  “I am,” I said. “That’s what I am. A cheerleader with everyone.”

  “Well, the nursing staff is trying to be realistic with him so he won’t be too disappointed.”

  “What do you want me to say to him?”

  I had been optimistic. Of course I’d been optimistic. What else did Joey have to get by on day after day except the hope that maybe there was a small chance he’d get to play football for Alabama? There was, I thought, at least a chance.

  “Just don’t make a big deal of it,” Father James said.

  I hadn’t made a big deal. I’d listened to Joey talk. I knew what he was hoping for when he left Warm Springs, and I hadn’t wanted to disappoint him. And why would I, the daughter of a mother who believed everything was possible under certain conditions, only the conditions were up to you to create.

  Besides, what did I know about Joey’s future? He could recite every single play in an Alabama victory as reported in the local newspaper, and just his obsession with football won me over.

  “Let’s say he thinks he will be a football player,” Father James said, “and is so sure of it that when the cast comes off and he finds out otherwise, he’ll be disappointed. Too disappointed.” He got up to open the window over the back lawn, and a breeze crossed the desk, taking his papers with it.

  “Do you want me to say he won’t be playing football?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want me to say I can’t talk with him about football anymore?”

  “I don’t want you to say that either,” Father James said. “But I don’t want Joey to believe too much. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “I understand,” I said, “but I think you’re wrong.”

  Father James had turned his chair to the side, his feet resting on an upturned wastebasket draped with his cassock.

  I expected that he might ask me to leave but he did not, and I sat across from him, abstracted, a thought forming in my mind. Before I had a chance to think what it was I was really saying, I blurted out what had been simmering in my mind about Father James for almost a year.

  “What really happened to your wife?”

  He could have ignored me. I was a twelve-year-old girl with very little understanding of the adult world. I had a sense of grief but no genuine experience with the arc of it in a person’s life. I wasn’t the right audience for a confession.

  Father James leaned back in his chair, his palms together under his chin, his eyes fixed on the expanse of lawn behind the office.

  “She died,” he said. “Her name was Aleilia, and she died of meningitis the year we married. She was nineteen.”

  “That’s awful,” I said, at a loss for what else to say, embarrassed by my invasion of his privacy. “I had meningitis too.”

  “I’ve read your records,” he said.

  “What do they say?” I asked with a sudden sinking feeling that my overall behavior had been marked down permanently.

  “I read your medical record. It’s the only record on file, if that’s what you’re asking. Only your diseases. Nothing about your character.”

  He looked young and surprisingly anxious or uncomfortable, as if he didn’t know what to do with his hands, so he laced the fingers in and out, pushed back and forth on his chair, his lips tight, his eyes unfocused.

  Something familiar, like an agreeable smell I couldn’t identify, had surfaced between us, and it was comforting to be with him in this room, as if we had known each other always.

  When I leaf through the events of my childhood, certain moments stop me on the page. That afternoon with Father James was the first time someone had trusted me with a confidence. Astonished and humbled by his trust is what I felt.

  “Later,” he began, changing the subject. “Maybe even this month, we’ll get back to catechism. Doesn’t that seem right?” he asked.

  “It does seem right,” I said, and wheeled out of the room before I said too much or asked him another inappropriate question and ruined our friendship.

  I don’t know why Father James left to go back to Ireland, only that he did. It was in the late spring after I had left, that much I know. One day he was there and the next he was gone, Caroline Slover wrote me. I didn’t have an address for him, and though he might have gotten mine from the medical files and written me, he never did.

  Joey was getting ready for reconstructive surgery, scheduled for late March, and I was helping him. Or so I thought. I don’t know what he thought, since he never complained and wasn’t a great talker.

  He was supposed to gain weight, so I brought him Clark bars from the candy store and extra ice cream on the days I passed out trays. I read him stories from the books my mother sent me, and although I don’t think he was much interested in literature, he loved to lie on the grass, his legs propped up on the seat of his wheelchair, and listen. I told him about my trick with pain, moving it from one place to another, and we’d lie side by side on the grass, practicing.

  We went everywhere we were allowed to go together, as far away—about a mile—as the Little White House, where Roosevelt had lived and died.

  “Do you think about President Roosevelt?” I asked him once.

  “I never knew him,” he said. “My father didn’t like him, and he doesn’t have a good reputation in our house, so I don’t ever think about him.”

  “I think about him because he was the president of the United States, and he was a polio and wheeled around this place just like us.”

  “That’s why you and me are different,” Joey said.

  Once his father came from Alabama and took us to the local inn for Sunday lunch, and Joey told his father I was his girlfriend.

  “You’re too young for a girlfriend, Joey,” Mr. Buckley said.

  “You’re right, I am, Dad,” Joey agreed, and we all laughed. I didn’t understand the laughter, whether it was a joke or whether in fact they thought I wasn’t anything to Joey but a helper.

  I sometimes took off his high-top oxfords and rubbed his flimsy chicken feet, which ached from hours trapped in the stiff leather shoes.

  We were inseparable. Somehow the nurses had given up worrying over my trips to the Boys’ Ward, and I assumed it was because I’d turned into this model child.

  I told Joey everything about myself, more than I had told anyone except my mother, and he talked about football and the farm where he lived and the John Deere tractor his father bought secondhand and let him ride on the hood.

  Once he started to talk about his mother and then he stopped, saying he didn’t want to talk about her dead.

  “Talk about her alive, then,” I said.

  But he couldn’t.

  One Saturday, Joey and I were heading to the movies together in the middle of the line with other wheelchairs—I was in the front of the line of the Girls’ Ward and he was in the back of the line of the Boys’ Ward—and we followed the others stringing through the narrow paved paths. There was a long, steep dip of cement walk from the level ground of the first floor of the hospital to the movie theater room on the basement level. We had to drive our wheelchairs very slowly down the hill.

  “It’d be fun to race down here, don’t you think?” I asked him.

  “Pretty fun,” he said.

  “We’d have to keep control of the wheels, and I’d probably be scared.”

  “I wouldn’t be scared,
” he said.

  “Then maybe when you get out of surgery we’ll try the hill,” I said. “If you want.”

  In late March my cast was taken off. The doctors were waiting to see whether I’d need to have another transplant, moving a muscle to my right calf. In the meantime I was in physical therapy, exercising my new calf muscle, walking between the parallel bars. “Face forward and walk in a straight line,” the therapists would say as I dragged myself from one end of the bars to the other. I’d reduce the considerable swelling and loosen the muscles by soaking my leg in hot paraffin or lying on an exercise table in the spring pool. Physical therapy was slow and made me restless and bad-tempered. More times than not, I was in worse shape after therapy than I had been before it.

  I stopped my daily letters home, the way I had written every night before lights out, and my mother began to call several times a week instead of only on Sunday afternoons.

  “What is going on?” she asked. “You’re not yourself.”

  “I’m exactly myself,” I said.

  My father asked if I would like for them to pay a visit—I had seen them only twice since the fall—and I told him no, I would not like for them to pay a visit at all. Before long, I said, I’d be home for good.

  Miss Riley came to the ward one night, pulled up a chair, leaned her starchy white uniform on the bed, and asked me whether something was the matter.

  “My mother called you, didn’t she,” I said. “That’s why you’re here, I’m sure. You can tell her nothing is the matter with me.”

  And then one afternoon, lying on the grass with Joey two days before his surgery, reading comic books behind the candy store, I a changing friendship felt a stirring of something I’d felt before but never with such insistence. I rolled over on my back. The air was cool, even for late March in Georgia. Overhead, a small plane not far up in the sky, close enough for us to see the fuzzy line of the propellers, crossed just above where we were lying.

  “Joey?” I felt an inexplicable intensity, as if nothing that I knew in life so far was sufficient to describe it, as if I were in some kind of immediate danger or wanted danger to step forward and announce itself.

  He looked up from his Superman comic.

  “I hope we get to grow up before we die,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Me too. But that’s not what I’m thinking about.”

  For two weeks after Joey’s surgery, I went about my usual workday but wasn’t allowed to see him until he was well enough to get into his wheelchair and go outside. We had made a plan for then, and I was patient, at least as patient as a girl of my temperament had a right to expect.

  His surgery had gone well, according to Miss Riley when I asked her how he was. He’d be up in a couple of weeks, as expected. His father had come and was staying on for another few days.

  I got to see him the day before he was allowed to get out of bed.

  I was delivering the mail. When I went through the door of the Boys’ Ward, Joey, in an Alabama cap, was sitting up in the first bed, the bottom raised, both legs in long casts. He was eating lunch.

  “I get out tomorrow,” he said.

  “Miss Riley told me.”

  “It looks good, Dr. Iler said. It looks like maybe not football, because it’s a contact sport, but it could be baseball.”

  “That’s really great,” I said. “Kind of amazing.”

  “Yup,” he agreed. “Really great.”

  “We should do something special tomorrow to celebrate.”

  “Something fun. Something different than lying here in bed all day.”

  “What do you think about racing the hill?”

  “Down the big hill?”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “Maybe,” Joey said, stretching his arms over his head “Maybe that’s exactly what we should do.”

  IV

  LEAVING HOME

  Face Forward and Walk in a Straight Line

  I HAD BEGUN to imagine the day of my departure from Warm Springs. It would be late May, toward the end of school in Washington, so I’d have a chance to visit my friends at Sidwell, to let them know that I’d gone to the school in the first place only because I was handicapped, and now, as they could clearly see, I no longer needed to be there.

  My parents would arrive with the car to pack up all my things and I’d walk out the front door of Second Medical—I’d be wearing jeans rolled up at the ankles, a white short-sleeved blouse, penny loafers, and white socks. I’d walk across the lawn, swinging my arms, striding without a limp, no crutches, no braces, no lift necessary on my penny loafers in spite of the three-inch difference in my legs.

  My friends would be amazed.

  I was in bed in the Girls’ Ward, dressed, sitting against a pillow, my Survival Notebook in my lap, a letter from Harold Ickes, saying he’d gotten word I would be heading home in May, lying open on the bed.

  It was a Friday morning, the first week of April, and I was waiting for my father.

  The ward was oddly quiet after breakfast, the beds full except for that of Avie Crider, who had gone home. In the next bed, Sandy Newcombe peered over her Hardy Boys to watch me, and I pretended not to notice. No one spoke, but I understood that and was just as glad to sit in silence. The girls didn’t know what to say to me, so they busied themselves with drawing or reading or writing or playing solitaire on their laps, avoiding conversation.

  I had asked Miss Riley if I could get dressed and wait for my father downstairs in the waiting room, and she said I needed to stay in the ward.

  I didn’t have the heart to read or write, and just the effort of following my thoughts to some kind of dead end was exhausting, and so I simply sat there, a lead weight, looking beyond Sandy’s bed out the window, which overlooked the woods, dappled with sunlight.

  I had rehearsed my last day at Warm Springs many times. I’d go back to the Girls’ Ward with my parents after they had arrived—it would be sunny and warm and breezy because we were in the mountains. I’d stand at the door and call goodbye and thank you. Thank you for everything, my good friends for life. Thank you for this year, I’d say. And everyone, bed to bed, all of my new friends and old ones, even Caroline Slover, still in a semiprivate room, would cry a symphony of tears at my departure. I’d walk down the corridor past Magnolia, waving at me from under the table, her big eyes red as apples, and stop at the Babies’ Ward, kiss Paisley Jean, who would be weeping, and blow kisses to all my babies, Goodbye, goodbye, my darling babies, my darling ones. Joey would be at the front door with a silver bracelet he had had engraved—To Suzie. I love you. Joey. But I had to leave, had to go home to my regular life, so I’d kiss Joey on the cheek and tell him we’d write each other every day.

  I’d walk out the front door between my proud parents, waving and waving to the windows behind me, waving to the world ahead.

  Father James had come up to the Girls Ward the night before, after lights out, and sat down on the side of my bed.

  “I have to tell you before you hear it from someone else that Cynthia died yesterday morning.”

  I didn’t cry. Not then and not for weeks after I had left Warm Springs. Not until I’d gone home, when I tried to fall asleep, with Rosie’s little face on the inside of my eyelids.

  “She had a strep infection and it just . . .” He lifted his arms in the air in a gesture of hopelessness.

  “I called her Rosie,” I said. “That was my name for her.”

  So Father James had been called to the Children’s Ward for last rites the morning of the day Joey and I had raced down the hill.

  Would it have made a difference if Father James had told me about Rosie before I had met Joey for the race? Would I have been deterred?

  Occasionally I have wanted to die, and that was one of the times. I remember it clearly.

  “Do you want to talk to me?” Father James asked.

  He knew better than to mention Joey.

  I shook my head.

  When I reread Woo
den and Wicker at the beginning of my research for this book, I was pleased to find in that quite awful manuscript so much valuable information, factual and personal, about Warm Springs. I needed it to jar my memory. When, at the end of the book, the young boy and the girl protagonist, slimly disguised as Victoria, are stopped in their wheelchairs at the top of the sharp incline between the buildings at Warm Springs, I felt a nervous anticipation, as if I were reading the story for the first time.

  The girl and boy start down the hill, going faster and faster. Speeding dangerously and nearing the bottom, their grip tight on the wheels, they spin out of control and fly out of their chairs into the air.

  And then something surprising happens in the book.

  In this imagined version of my young girl’s reality, the race ends in a terrible accident: the boy is bruised but otherwise unharmed, and the girl is nearly fatally injured.

  I was stunned. I had no idea until then that I had rewritten the real end of the story so that it came out right— that I, though the perpetrator in the book, am also the victim. All those years between the writing of that book and the reading of it, I had believed that, in my novel, I’d told the truth.

  Miss Riley had come to my room early on the morning after the accident.

  “We have called your parents,” she said. “Your father will be here by this afternoon and will take you home.”

  “But this is my home until I’m well enough to leave,” I said. “I’m not well yet.”

  “You’re well enough to go home,” Miss Riley said.

  “I was told by Dr. Iler,” I said, gathering my wits about me, “that no one left Warm Springs until she was as well as possible. And I’m not that well. I can hardly walk and I’m in very much pain.”