Warm Springs

by Susan Richards Shreve

  “You’ll be fine” she said. “Not to worry”

  My father was wearing a suit, the Washington morning paper folded under his arm, an empty suitcase in his other hand. Miss Riley was with him, leading the way. The girls looked up, then down to their business, as Miss Riley pulled the curtain around my bed.

  “I don’t believe she has very much to pack,” she said, and left us there alone.

  He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t anything at all, simply a father who had come to pick up his daughter, dismissed in disgrace. He packed my clothes, something I’d never seen him do, folding them hastily.

  “Is that all?” he asked.

  I put in the books my mother had sent, my Survival Notebook, my packet of letters, and he closed the suitcase.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “I can’t walk” I said. “You heard that”

  I put on my brace and my orthopedic shoe with the high lift and picked up the crutches that were leaning against the night table.

  An orderly came in with a wheelchair and I sat in it.

  “Someone from Warm Springs is driving us to the Atlanta airport,” my father said.

  I put the crutches across the arms of the wheelchair and headed out in front of my father.

  I hadn’t considered how to leave after the circumstances of my departure changed.

  I stopped at the door, my father beside me.

  “Goodbye,” I called, hoping that my voice sounded strong. “It’s been really fun.”

  “Goodbye.” “Goodbye.” “Goodbye.” “Goodbye.”

  “It’s been really, really fun,” Sandy Newcombe called after me, and her voice was breaking. I think I heard that her voice was breaking.

  As I turned to go through the door of the Girls Ward for the last time, Sandy—I should have expected this, I should have known it would happen, that Sandy would be the one—started singing, and then they all joined in:

  Put another muscle in

  Where the quadriceps have been

  ’Cause we know we’ll never win

  With traces, traces, traces.

  What’s the use of stretch and strain

  What’s the good of pull and pain

  When our muscle tests remain

  Just traces, traces, traces.

  They push our torso

  And make it more so

  When we try to make a muscle go

  It’s substitution, no, no, no.

  So even though our hopes have soared

  Higher than our muscles scored

  Just the same we thank the Lord

  For traces, traces, traces.

  I could hear the words all the way down the corridor, past the nurses station where Miss Riley was standing, and to my astonishment she leaned over, put a bony hand on my shoulder, and kissed my cheek.

  My father pressed the down button and pushed me into the elevator.

  Paisley Jean was standing at the door of the Children’s Ward as I wheeled past, and I couldn’t look, not at her, not through the door at the babies. I was afraid I would cry and never stop crying.

  Dr. Iler walked to the car with us and shook my father’s hand and handed him an envelope with the instructions for physical therapy.

  “If she continues to work hard, there is no reason why she shouldn’t be much better than when she arrived, but it will take time, years even.”

  I settled myself in the back seat, probably sitting with my arms folded defensively across my chest.

  Dr. Iler leaned in the open window.

  “You’ll be fine, Susan Richards,” he said, meeting my gaze.

  My father eased into the seat next to me. He seemed more perplexed than upset. That, at least, is what I felt in the close confines of the back seat.

  I hadn’t asked about my mother, but he brought her up.

  “Your mother doesn’t fly, as you know,” he said, to explain why he had been the one to come. “And they wanted you home pronto.”

  I hadn’t spoken with my mother since the accident, but I was sure she would be more glad to have me home than upset by the reason I was coming early. I wasn’t sure about anything with my father.

  “I guess I sort of flunked out of Warm Springs,” I said.

  “That would be a fair description,” he said.

  “Did anyone tell you about Joey Buckley?” I asked.

  “He broke his legs.”

  “Both legs?”

  “Both.”

  I bit my lip until it bled salty in my mouth, but there was nothing to say, nothing to add to what was already known. Most of the trip to Atlanta we didn’t talk, but sometime along the way, my father asked me what had happened.

  “A lot happened,” I said, but I couldn’t have known the answers to his question then.

  Something fundamental had taken place in those two years, some imperceptible change that had a life of its own. Character is surprising, the way it surfaces and resolves itself over and over in any life.

  Once inside the plane, I asked my father why my mother was afraid to fly. It was my first time in an airplane.

  “She’s afraid to lose control. If something should happen, she won’t know how to fly the plane.”

  “Do you?”

  “I’m willing to leave it to the pilot,” he said.

  I sat in the window seat in the eighth row from the front, just over the propellers, watching the blades spin round and round and become a single blurred blade, looking out at the other planes lining up to take off.

  My father reached over and fastened my seat belt.

  “Now we head for the runway,” he told me as I clutched the arm of the seat.

  “And take off?”

  “We taxi down the runway, and once we’re going fast enough, we lift off the ground.”

  The plane was rushing forward, the roar of the propellers a high whistle in my ear.

  “Is it dangerous?” I asked.

  My mother had always been my barometer for danger.

  “Takeoff is always riskier than landing,” he said.

  “Are we okay?”

  “We’re fine,” he said. “This is normal.”

  I watched as the ground slipped under us, and then we were weightless, clearing the trees, angling sharply up. I caught my breath.

  “Have we taken off?”

  “We are in the air,” he said.

  Below us, the city of Atlanta spread across the landscape like a toy town glittering in the sunlight. As I settled back against the seat, the plane lurched, dipping sideways, and I felt myself tilting, off balance, my cheek against the glass as if at any moment the window would fly off and I’d be thrown into the open air, left on my own to discover the way home.

  Afterword

  AFTER 1954, when the Salk vaccine was introduced to the public, the polio patient population at Warm Springs began to diminish. In 1974, the state of Georgia took over the facility and created a center for stroke victims, patients with brain and spinal cord injuries and severe arthritis. Roosevelt Warm Springs is now in the process of becoming two hospitals, one medical and one vocational.

  The head of surgery, Dr. Irwin, who was responsible for changing the lives of so many patients during my time there, eventually moved to Atlanta. Shortly thereafter, he suffered severe injuries in an automobile accident. Confined to a wheelchair, he failed to escape a fire in his house.

  The March of Dimes has, since the success of the polio vaccine, changed its mission and now raises funds for the care of premature babies.

  The hospital records from the early 1950s are now in the medical archives of the state of Georgia, where I have access only to my own file.

  I do not know what happened to Joey Buckley.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A NUMBER OF BOOKS about polio, the development of a rehabilitation hospital at Warm Springs, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis informed this book. In particular, the excellent Polio: An American Story by David Oshinsky was not only
a wonderful read but also taught me a great deal I did not know. I valued Jeffrey Kluger’s Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio, about the race to develop the vaccine. I discovered in FDR’s Splendid Deception by Hugh Gregory Gallagher (himself a victim of polio, contracted in 1952) a sensitive and intuitive account of this most popular of presidents, at once outgoing and deeply private. My reading especially of Oshinsky’s book shaped my understanding of the history of polio and Roosevelt’s contribution to the extraordinary public health initiative that culminated in the vaccine.

  I visited Warm Springs, now called Roosevelt Warm Springs, in May 2006—the first time I returned since 1952—and am very grateful for the history provided by Linda Creekbaum, the tour guide and Web site manager for Roosevelt Warm Springs, and to Mike Shadix, the dedicated librarian there. I spent many hours at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park reading Roosevelt’s letters during his early years at Warm Springs, particularly letters to his mother and Eleanor Roosevelt, and wish to thank Alycia Vivona at the library for her considerable help.

  I want to thank my editor, Deanne Urmy, on whose sensibilities and eye for detail I depend, the team at Houghton Mifflin, and my agent, Gail Hochman.

  I owe much to my dear pals in life and work for all these many years: Beverly Lowry, Steve Goodwin, Alan Cheuse, and Richard Bausch. To Porter Shreve, an excellent editor. To Harold Ickes for the boy he was, loyal and true. To Alan Friedman for paying attention. To Carol Shreve for her generosity and wit. And especially to Dolores and Frank DeAngelis for their enduring friendship—always steady in the stern of any old boat our family takes out to sea.

  Finally, and always, I’m grateful to my family: Timothy, Po, Bich, E. Q., Rusty, Theo, Noah, Caleb, Jess, and Kate.

  About the Author

  SUSAN RICHARDS SHREVE has published thirteen novels, most recently A Student of Living Things. She is a professor of English at George Mason University and formerly cochair and president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. She has received several grants for fiction writing, including a Guggenheim fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts award. Shreve lives in Washington, D.C.