N and I became inseparable. He admired my athleticism and my determination to pay for my own education and thought it was wonderful that I was working so hard to find a way to pursue my real dream of becoming a theater director. He, too, had a similar “secret” passion: though he was expected to complete his studies and go into business with his father, in his heart he wanted to become an architect. Just before I graduated, we became secretly engaged.
I graduated with a degree in physical therapy in 1953, the year Jonas Salk began the preliminary testing of his polio vaccine. It also happened to be the time when the worst polio epidemic in decades was at its peak. I was terribly naive at that point, almost completely unaware of what I was getting into. Polio is a virus that attacks the motor nerves in the brain and spinal cord, often leaving the victim’s legs, arms—or their entire body from the neck down—paralyzed. In the most severe cases, the muscles of the respiratory system and throat are also paralyzed, which makes speaking, swallowing, and breathing difficult or impossible. From the time of the ancient Egyptians five thousand years ago until 1955, when Salk’s vaccine was delivered to the masses, polio epidemics would flair up the world over. Most of the victims were children. If a patient was lucky enough to survive the virus, he or she would need physical rehabilitation in order to retrain the muscles that had been paralyzed by the virus. Helping people regain their mobility through intensive rehabilitation would be my job for the next two years.
Leaving Boston and my family home was something I had been looking forward to. In fact, I was itching to get out on my own and become independent. The prospect of leaving N, though, was another matter entirely. We agreed that we would write each other constantly, so with this promise in hand, I left Boston for rural West Virginia. I was on my own for the first time in my life.
Just getting to Marmet, the tiny hamlet in the Kanawa Valley where I was to work, was an adventure. I first took the train from Boston to New York City in order to register with the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. I spent my first night ever in a hotel, and the next morning, I boarded an airplane from New York to West Virginia. I was twenty-three years old and I was taking my first airplane flight. The stewardess got such a kick out of how excited I was, they got the pilots to invite me to sit in the cockpit for a few minutes. After landing, I was brought to a tiny frame house that would serve as my lodgings for the next several months. Up a path from the house was the clinic, a renovated schoolhouse.
Despite how remote Marmet was, the population had been hard hit by the epidemic. There was no full-time doctor tending to the children who were being treated. Twice a week, a doctor from nearby Charleston, West Virginia, would come through on his rounds and check the status of each patient. Other than that brief encounter, we were all on our own. The therapy department was desperately shorthanded, and the staff—all two of us—worked ten-hour shifts, treating twenty-five to thirty patients a day. We had both been trained to handle a caseload of only twelve patients a day. It was grueling and humbling. Each time we’d begin to make progress with one child and he or she would be taken out of the iron lung and moved to a bed, it seemed as though two more very critically ill children would arrive.
One of my first patients in Marmet was an eight-year-old boy named Daniel Cade. He was blond, blue-eyed—and encased in a respirator because he was unable to breathe on his own. Every day, I would work with Daniel by reaching into the side openings of the iron lung and stretching his tightened limbs. He would tell me, in no uncertain terms, to ease up. (“Don’t take it up so fer!” he’d say in this mountain dialect everyone there spoke.) But every day his condition worsened. Miraculously, one day he seemed to turn a corner and begin to improve. When he was finally removed from the respirator, Daniel was still very weak and I had to work hard with him to begin the painful and long process of reawakening the muscles in his body.
One rare day off, a Sunday, I had gone to see the feature at the local movie house. While I was sitting there I had a premonition, and I stopped at the hospital on my way home, just to check in on Daniel. He wasn’t in his room. He had had a relapse and was once again placed on a respirator. Next to him, kneeling on the floor and sobbing, was a giant of a man who I recognized must have been his father. Standing next to him was a woman who was obviously Daniel’s mother—she had his clear blue eyes and blonde hair. She was staring out the window, praying. I stood there, taking in these people, so overcome by grief and a sense of helplessness. Soon after I left the room, Daniel Cade died. I had never been so close to death, had never witnessed people who were forced to sustain such heartbreaking loss.
Within a week of losing my first patient, I, too, contracted polio—luckily, not the paralytic kind. I had all the classic symptoms: a stiff neck and tightness in my hamstring muscles. I spent a week in my tiny house, alone most of the time except for the occasional visit from one of the nurses from the clinic. Though I recovered quickly from the virus, I’ve never forgotten that experience. Three months later, I was sent to the next viral “hot spot” in Duluth, Minnesota.
“It’s freezing here” is how I started every letter I posted to N from Duluth. I found myself living in the middle of the northern prairie just as winter hit—in a dramatic change from the stultifying heat of the Appalachians. This was about as far as I could have gotten from my experience in Marmet. The hospital in Duluth had every piece of equipment money could buy, much of it state-of-the-art, and a full staff of doctors and nurses. My job was focused on recovery rehab, which meant that I spent most of my time with patients who had already survived the virus. They were now retraining their muscles in order to regain mobility. During my three-month stint there, not one victim of the epidemic died—not one. But I had another experience with a patient that I will never forget. A young woman came into the hospital extremely sick with the virus—and eight months pregnant. Her condition was bad enough that she had to be placed in an iron lung. Miraculously, though she was paralyzed from the neck down, she managed to deliver a healthy baby—even while on a respirator. But it soon became heartbreakingly clear to us that this woman would never be able to actually hold her baby. I have thought about that woman over and over again throughout my life.
The Minnesota winter was long, hard, and dark and I missed N. His letters to me were becoming more passionate and urgent, and they made our being separated all the more difficult. I started to rethink my plans: until I was called up for my next “tour,” why not move to New York City and enroll in a theater program there? I had saved enough money—maybe I could even start a term at Columbia. With that thought in mind, I finished my work in Duluth and made my way back to New York.
On my very first day in New York, N and I met at the Empire State Building and then found a hotel to check into. He was able to leave Boston and come to New York City every other weekend. He was very close to graduating, which meant we’d be together all the time. I had found a furnished room (with kitchen privileges) and had begun taking classes as planned. One night, around two A.M., I heard a pounding on the door of my room. It was N. I unbolted the door and took a step back to look at him and saw that he was in awful shape; he had a black eye and his face was all scratched and bleeding.
“What happened? What are you doing here?” I asked as I pulled him into my room. “I had to come. I couldn’t wait. So I hitchhiked down from Boston. I stopped in to a bar and got into a fight…” Before he could finish, we were falling into the tiny bed that dominated my furnished room.
Since I had been in New York, we had been able to spend lots of time with each other, but things had become complicated. N’s parents were pressuring him to marry. And they had picked him out a bride. In traditional Greek fashion, they had set their sights on a girl back in N’s hometown, someone he had known his whole life. In their eyes, this girl was far more appropriate than I as a future daughter-in-law. Here I was, a woman who had been traipsing around the country, but even worse, now I was living on my own in New York City and studying th
eater! N’s parents thought I was too independent. They insisted that he marry the girl they had chosen. N assured me that he would not give in to his parents’ pressure. With his graduation approaching, we spent hours planning how we would break this news to his parents and more hours planning on how, once we were settled back in his hometown, I would open a community theater and he would begin to study architecture, his true passion. I called home and told my mother and father to plan on a dinner in a few weeks; N and his parents would be coming and he and I were going to share some important news. We spent that weekend in New York blissfully fine-tuning our plans.
The day came when N would formally announce to my parents our plan to marry. My mother prepared a proper Greek feast and my father set the table with the best china and silver. N and his parents arrived and I immediately sensed that something was wrong. There seemed to be a forced friendliness. Even though our parents weren’t close friends, they knew each other well enough to enjoy a drink and a meal together. As dinner was winding down, I kept waiting for N to propose a toast. I kept trying to make eye contact with him, but he wouldn’t meet my gaze. The dishes were barely removed from the table when N and his parents announced they had to leave. This was supposed to be the moment when our engagement became public (we had secretly been engaged for almost a year at that point), and then our parents would raise a toast and set a wedding date for us. Instead, we found ourselves hustling to the door behind N’s family, promising to see each other the next day at his graduation. At that point my mother remarked, “There’s something we have to talk about here.” My father stood by silent and humiliated. With vague excuses as to why they had to leave, N’s mother reassured mine, saying, “Don’t worry, we’ll talk tomorrow, after the graduation.” With that, they were gone.
The next day, I stood by, barely acknowledged as an acquaintance—let alone their son’s fiancée—while N graduated. After the ceremony, I felt sick to my stomach as I watched N hand his diploma over to his father. They then turned and walked away without ever acknowledging me or my parents. I felt so disgraced and embarrassed, both for myself and my parents, who were clearly feeling the same way.
I remained hopeful—and in love. I thought that N needed more time, needed the opportunity to convince his parents that I was his one true love. Though I was still hurt by his inability to take action at that moment, I again left Boston, this time for Dallas, Texas, and my next tour of duty as a therapist. My goal was the same: to save as much money as I could so that N and I would be able to begin our life together…
Dallas was hot, humid, and hostile. I was assigned to work in the children’s ward of the county hospital. The outbreak was so bad and so widespread, we were even seeing patients from the nearby prison. Even jail cells didn’t protect people from contracting polio. I remember a black convict in his thirties who came in feverish and delirious and shackled in chains—even though he was clearly paralyzed and couldn’t rise from the stretcher he was strapped to, let alone walk.
“Take the chains off his legs,” I ordered the policeman who accompanied him. He just looked at me as though I were crazy. “I mean it. How do you expect me to treat this man if I can’t move his legs?” I turned to the prisoner, knowing full well he couldn’t walk. “Will you promise me that you won’t run off if they unlock these chains?” He nodded yes, his eyes burning with fever. The guard unlocked the leg irons—then stood over us both with a loaded gun pointed at my patient until I finished the treatment. I thought I knew about prejudice from my own experiences back in Massachusetts, but being in Dallas, in 1954, was an eye-opener.
Two weeks after I got to Dallas, I got “the letter” from N. I suppose I should have seen it coming, but I was hoping so much for a life with him that until I read his words, I believed that our plans would come true. His letter began in the way that all such letters begin: Dearest Olympia… It was over…. simply can’t fight my parents any longer…need to get on with my life and want you to get on with yours… I held the letter in my shaking hands and walked over to the mirror, took a hard look at myself, and said, out loud, “Okay, Olympia: now what are you going to do with your life?”
I no longer had a future. I had no idea what I would do next. I couldn’t go back to Boston and face my family and the shame I had visited on them. I couldn’t bear the idea of going home and seeing pity in their eyes.
I decided to stay in Dallas and enroll in classes at Southern Methodist University. I wanted to take more humanities courses, since I had concentrated so much on the sciences. That was the extent of my plan. I enrolled in a handful of classes, including a fiction writing class. I began writing poetry, and encouraged by the teacher, I submitted a few poems to literary magazines. They were published. I had been alone working the epidemics, but I had never felt lonely until now. I was again the outsider, but now I was separated not only by my ethnicity and because I was a northerner. I was also isolated because of my circumstances. Here I was, a young woman who could hardly pull herself out of bed in the morning, drinking Cokes and smoking cigarettes for breakfast, who wore her pajamas to class. The social world at SMU was built around the “Greek” system of sororities and fraternities, and I was considered a freak by the standards of this system. Or at least an exotic East Coast bohemian. On the “fuckability” scale that everyone talked about, I scored the highest rating—the highest for being the least likely to succumb to the charms of all the good ol’ boys around me. One of my fiction-writing classmates approached me after class one day and asked if I was a lesbian, as though this would explain why I came to class with uncombed hair and no makeup. The only thing that kept me grounded was the encouragement I got from my fiction-writing teacher.
At the end of my second semester, I got a phone call from Uncle Panos, my father’s brother and our family physician, calling from Boston. My father was gravely ill—could I come home at once? My father, then in his mid-fifties, had worked many nights standing at the printing press, and he had terrible circulation problems from his varicose veins. He had gone into the hospital to have them removed, but the routine surgery hadn’t gone well and he had developed a postsurgical pulmonary embolism. I looked at the meager amount of money I had left in my drawer and decided that I had just enough to take a train from Dallas to Boston.
Two days later I went directly from the train station to the hospital and to my father. He was going to be okay, but it was immediately apparent that something else was going on.
“I just want you to know that your father has done nothing bad.” These were the first words out of my father’s mouth when I walked into his hospital room. Then he said, “And if anything happens to me, you have to help Apollo get an education.” I had no idea what he was trying to say. That night at home, I learned what had been going on.
“Do you know Dad was gone for awhile before this?” Apollo said. My father had simply driven off one day and didn’t come back for almost two months! Before he left, my mother had found cups with pink lipstick stains, smelling of liquor, in my father’s car. And then he was gone. He would call her every three or four days, telling her that he had had to flee—that he was being pursued by Senator Joseph McCarthy. His prolonged absence sent my mother into a complete tailspin: she would rage and curse, and run weeping out of the house to pound on the doors of churches. She took on the keening and lamenting that reminded me of the women in her village back in Greece who I saw many years later. My mother lamented my father as though he were dead. I remembered when I was still in high school, my mother would stand weeping in the kitchen, in the dark, waiting for my father, who was “working late,” to get home. He was absent this way much of the time when I was growing up. And here she was again, waiting for him.
Apollo, who was only seventeen and still living at home when my father disappeared, was furious with me for leaving him to handle this alone. Now my father had come home, in order to have the operation. My parents were back to their old game of pretending nothing had happened. It was as though they
had a pact that relied on silence as a way to convince the world—even their own children—that everything was fine. My brother and I felt worn down and confounded.
My father had been somewhere in Delaware or Maryland, presumably traveling from one cheap motel to another with some woman, though we never knew for sure. Whatever he had done, the transgression was so great that he would never again have the moral ground over my mother, but some things remained the same. My mother dressed herself in the role of dutiful wife and my father once again wore the mask of his “Anatolian smile.” In this way, they went forward in their lives.
I was now almost twenty-three and Apollo was almost eighteen years old. Once again, I had to leave. I had worked one summer during college as a waitress on Martha’s Vineyard, so I decided I would spend another summer there, working and writing. I found myself just hanging around and partying, not getting much writing done. I also began to hear over the radio repeated calls for physical therapists. This time the epidemic was closer to home: it was in Boston and it was bad. I knew that I was wasting my time, so I left the Vineyard and went back to work.
At Boston’s Hospital for Contagious Diseases, many people had already died and more were dying daily. I was working around the clock, alongside an army of doctors, therapists, and nurses. One afternoon the power went out and we were forced to manually pump the respirators in order to keep our patients alive. I will never forget that sound—the rhythmic mechanical rasping of those machines—as I sat hunched over, pumping the handle of a respirator. It was exhausting, physical work. I developed blinding headaches that came every day. I realized I could no longer do this work. I went to the head therapist and told her I was leaving, that I was going to pursue the theater. “The world doesn’t need another actress,” she said. “It needs physical therapists.” She was right, but I needed to move forward. I applied to the theater program at Boston University. Without ever being interviewed or asked to audition, I was accepted into the master’s program. It was 1955. I was twenty-four years old.
Ask Me Again Tomorrow Page 9