The Stolen Marriage

by Diane Chamberlain

  I was amazed by the generosity of my Hickory neighbors as I drove from house to house. People scoured their homes for items they could share. They helped me load things into the car and thanked me for volunteering. Even people who were obviously struggling to make ends meet gave what they could, as well as those households with blue stars—and in one case, a gold star—hanging in their windows. Surely their minds were on their own families and not Catawba County’s sick children, but still they gave. Nearly everyone shared a story of a friend or acquaintance from another part of the country who had been touched in some way by polio. In one afternoon, I discovered something I hadn’t learned in my five difficult months in Hickory: the town was full of generous, compassionate people. My experience of Hickory had been limited to the Kraft family’s small circle of judgmental friends who’d seen me as a manipulative interloper. The majority of the townspeople were nothing like that at all.

  * * *

  It was possible, I discovered, to perspire even in the rain, and I was both sweaty, rain-soaked, and exhausted by four o’clock when I pulled the Cadillac up to one of the new wards and began unloading a batch of donations. I carried an armful of linens into the building and headed for the cupboards, where I found Ruth’s friend Mrs. Wilding, the woman whose niece was a nurse. I almost didn’t recognize her in capris and a sleeveless yellow blouse. She was checking the plug on one of the donated hot plates.

  “Hello, Tess.” She smiled at me. “I heard you were collecting donations today too.”

  “Yes.” I returned her smile as I set the linens on one of the cupboard shelves and brushed the sweat from my eyes. “Who knew it would be such hot, wet work?”

  “That’s why I’m dressed this way,” she said. “I don’t ordinarily go out of the house like this, but really! You must be stifling in those nylons.”

  “I am,” I admitted. A dozen times that afternoon, I’d thought about stopping home to change into something more comfortable, but I hadn’t wanted to take the time.

  “But you’re Ruth Kraft’s daughter-in-law, aren’t you.” She gave me a knowing smile, then chuckled. “You have an image to uphold.”

  I tried to determine what was behind her teasing tone. Sympathy? Understanding? Whatever it was, at that moment I felt she was on my side.

  “I try.” I smiled back. Wanting to get the conversation off myself, I motioned behind us toward the two long rows of beds and cribs. “This is amazing, isn’t it?”

  She nodded. “This is Hickory,” she said. “The real Hickory. I’m glad you’re finally getting a chance to see it.”

  * * *

  I was heading back to the Cadillac for yet another load of linens when a truck pulled—way too fast—into the clearing. Everyone looked up from his or her work, including Henry, who was hammering molding around one of the windows. I gasped, afraid the truck was going to plow straight through Henry and the window, but it stopped short of the building with a squeal of brakes.

  A man and woman jumped from the cab, wild-eyed, wild-haired. Both of them were dressed in dungarees, and the man grabbed Henry’s arm.

  “We need a doctor!” he shouted.

  “Our boy!” the woman said, lowering the tailgate and climbing into the truck bed. “He woke up with the polio!”

  “The hospital’s not up and running yet,” Henry said to them, gently extricating himself from the man’s grasp. He looked toward the rear of the truck, and I walked toward the truck myself, trying to see inside the bed. A crowd of workers was beginning to gather around it. “You’ll have to take him to Charlotte,” Henry said. “There’s no medical staff here yet.”

  “Charlotte!” the woman said, kneeling down in the truck bed. “That’s too far. He could die!”

  I moved close enough to see the boy she knelt over. He lay motionless on a folded blanket in the truck’s bed and his mother clung to his hand.

  “I’m a nurse,” I said, walking even closer to the truck. I didn’t dare look at Henry. “May I see your son?”

  “Tess, no,” Henry said, but there wasn’t much heart behind the words and they were drowned out by the man’s response.

  “Yes!” he shouted. “Please!” He helped me climb into the truck bed and I felt one of my nylons run in the process. This was foolish of me, I thought. I had no mask or gloves or anything to protect me from this boy’s illness, whatever it was.

  I knelt next to the boy, across from his mother. The little guy was seven or eight with hair the color and texture of hay. His blue eyes were open. He was pale for a farm boy, but he smiled up at me and I returned the smile.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” I said. “Can you tell me your name?”

  His father started to answer from where he stood outside the truck, but I held up my hand to stop him. I wanted to see how alert and aware this child was.

  The boy licked his paper-dry lips. “Frankie,” he said.

  “He had a bellyache and was sick on his stomach all night,” his mother said. “That’s the infantile polio, ain’t it?”

  “It could be one of many things,” I said. “Did he also have diarrhea?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Frankie answered for himself. “My belly near exploded.”

  “Has he been around anyone who was diagnosed with polio?” I asked his mother, pressing my palm to his forehead. He was no warmer than I was on this clammy day.

  “No, ma’am,” his mother said.

  “He’s been keepin’ to hisself, helpin’ us with the crops,” his father said. When I raised my head to look at the man, I saw that a crowd of curious volunteers had gathered around the truck. I returned my attention to Frankie.

  “Do you have a sore throat, Frankie?” I asked.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Any other illnesses in the last few weeks?”

  “Nothin’,” said his mother. “He’s the healthiest boy there is.”

  I examined him as best I could without any instruments. I checked his reflexes—all normal. I lifted his shoulders from the truck bed to see if he could support his head. He could. I bent his legs and asked him to push them against my hands. He quickly knocked me off balance and I fell from my kneeling position to my bottom, laughing. I was not a doctor, but I didn’t need to be one to feel quite certain this boy didn’t have polio. I knew the definitive test was a spinal tap, but I doubted Frankie was going to have to endure that painful procedure.

  “What did you eat yesterday?” I asked him. “Starting with breakfast.”

  “He had the same thing for breakfast he always has,” his mother said, and again I stopped her.

  “Please let Frankie tell me,” I said.

  He told me about his breakfast of eggs and ham, the three ham sandwiches he ate for lunch, and the fried chicken and okra he had for dinner.

  “Did everyone else”—I looked at his mother—“did you and your husband eat the same things?”

  “We did, exceptin’ for I only had one sandwich,” she said.

  “I had the three too,” Frankie’s father said.

  “How about snacks?” I asked Frankie.

  “Nothin’,” he said. “Ain’t no time for a snack on account of they got me workin’ in the field every darn minute.”

  “Frankie!” his mother said. “Watch your tongue!” She looked at me. “We’ve got to get the crops in,” she said.

  “What were you harvesting yesterday?” I asked.

  “Pole beans,” Frankie and his mother said at the same time.

  “Ah,” I said. “Did you snack on any of them?”

  His mother laughed. “They’re his favorite,” she said. “He can’t get enough of them.”

  “How many would you say you ate while you were working yesterday, Frankie?” I asked.

  He shrugged, and I had the feeling he was afraid of getting in trouble.

  “A lot?” I asked, and he gave a guilty nod.

  “A whole lot?” I smiled at him with a wink.

  “Maybe,” he said, not making eye contact with any of
us. “I don’t rightly recall.”

  I was quite certain I knew what was wrong with this boy, and it was nothing that a day away from raw green beans wouldn’t fix. But if I was wrong?

  I peered over the side of the truck bed and saw that Mrs. Wilding was one of the onlookers. “Could you call Dr. Poole and see if he’d be able to take a look at this boy if his parents bring him over?” I asked her.

  Mrs. Wilding nodded, then left to give the hospital’s new switchboard its first call.

  I told his parents why I didn’t think he had polio and that it was possible he’d simply eaten far too many raw beans the day before.

  “You’re sure?” the man asked.

  I shook my head. “I can’t be one hundred percent sure,” I said, “which is why I want you to see Dr. Poole. But his symptoms really don’t seem to fit polio.”

  A few minutes passed and Mrs. Wilding ran—yes, she ran, and I felt proud of her—back to the truck. “He says to bring him right over,” she said.

  I gave the husband directions to Dr. Poole’s office. His wife hugged me and thanked me, and Henry helped me climb from the truck bed. We watched as the truck pulled out of the clearing, and the workers who’d observed the whole exchange gave a little round of applause. I blushed, feeling like the sole performer in a drama. I turned to Mrs. Wilding, ready to escape the attention.

  “Can you help me get another armload of donations from the car?” I asked her, and together we headed across the muddy clearing toward the Cadillac.

  Henry walked into the building as I was placing a stack of folded blankets in the cupboard.

  “Tess?” he said.

  I looked up from my work. “Yes?” I stiffened, expecting him to be angry. He would tell me I’d overstepped my bounds by having anything to do with that young boy.

  “You were different out there.” He stood in front of me, hands in his pockets. “It was a side to you I haven’t seen before. Self-confident and … I don’t know. Capable, I guess is the word.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I was proud of you.”

  I felt myself blush yet again. “Thank you,” I repeated.

  He drew in a long breath and let it out in a sigh. “The hospital is going to need you,” he said, “and you need it. I can see that. You can work here if you want.”

  “As a nurse.” I made it a statement rather than a question.

  “As a nurse,” he agreed.

  “What about your mother?”

  “I’ll deal with my mother,” he said. “Just let me be the one to tell her.”

  “Thank you, Henry,” I said again, and as he walked away and I folded another blanket and put it on the shelf, I grinned to myself. “Well, Walter,” I whispered to the air, “what do you think of that?”

  62

  I was one of twelve nurses who arrived at the hospital the following morning. Ten of us were volunteers, most of us local. Two were from the State Board of Health. We were young and old, married and single. I was the only one whose uniform was at least a size too large. I hadn’t realized how much weight I’d lost over the last few months. I didn’t care. I’d put on my cap, my white shoes, my white nylons, then buttoned my uniform and smiled at myself in the mirror. “You’re an RN,” I whispered to my reflection. I hoped I would remember all my training.

  At least twenty more nurses were on their way from other parts of the country, due to arrive in a few days by train or bus. It felt strange that morning to have a hospital filled with nurses and no patients, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the ratio would soon change. And there was so much preparatory work to be done.

  Ruth was angry and not talking to either Henry or myself.

  “It will pass,” Henry said to me, though I knew he was bothered by his mother’s disapproval. She’d actually suggested that I share Hattie’s cottage with her instead of sullying the house with all the germs I’d be bringing home, but Henry silenced her with a stern “enough, Mama!” I was touched by how he was sticking up for me, as well as how hard he was working day and night as he split his time between the factory and the hospital. He had to be exhausted.

  One of the nurses was Grace Wilding, Mrs. Wilding’s niece. She wore her hair, as dark as mine, in a victory roll, as I did, and I felt an instant bond with her.

  “Isn’t this simply staggering?” she said, sweeping her arm around the ward we were preparing for patients. “I can’t believe what’s been accomplished here in two days.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s amazing.” The idea for the emergency hospital had been conceived on Thursday, and here we were on Saturday morning, standing in the middle of a hospital ward with the scent of sawn wood still strong in the air. All the bed frames had been fitted with mattresses and they lined the walls, waiting for us to make them with our donated linens. We needed to get to it quickly: the first patients were due to arrive that afternoon.

  We spent the morning getting acclimated to the hospital’s two sun-filled wards, the second of which was still under construction. With their pine walls and bare floors, they felt more like wide-open mountain cabins than a hospital. Volunteers, including Henry, hung screens in the windows as we worked, and someone delivered a raft of fly swatters to us, just in case those screens didn’t do the job. We hammered nails into the walls and hung the swatters. Women from the community—including several I recognized from Ruth’s book clubs and the Ladies of the Homefront—scrubbed fifty-five bed frames from top to bottom. I knew that other Hickory women were preparing food for the hospital in their homes, since the kitchen wouldn’t be functional for a few days yet. I doubted there was a man or woman in Hickory untouched by the goings-on at the former Fresh Air Camp.

  We made all the beds, filled jars with alcohol for the thermometers, and prepared a giant vat of disinfectant where we would empty all patient waste to prevent the spread of disease. And then we began what turned out to be the most arduous task of the morning: cutting lengths of wool from donated blankets to be used in something called the Sister Kenny Method. A volunteer physiotherapist explained the approach to us: when a patient with paralysis arrived, we would further cut the wool to precise measurements for his or her affected limbs. Then, at least a couple of times a day, we’d boil the pieces of wool, run them through a wringer, and wrap them around those paralyzed arms or legs. Once the hot packs were removed, we’d exercise the limbs to keep the muscles from atrophying. In the three polio cases I’d seen as a student nurse, we’d immobilized the affected limbs with splints and in one case a cast. Suddenly that approach was viewed with disfavor and this new, incredibly labor-intensive treatment was what we’d be using. It made sense in theory to me, but after only thirty minutes of cutting lengths of wool, my hand was cramping up. I didn’t really care. For the first time since nursing school, I felt myself a part of something important. No one treated me as an outsider here. No one treated me as Hank Kraft’s wife. I was just a nurse. I was happily one of them.

  One end of the ward now held several therapy tubs made by a Hickory metal worker, along with an iron lung that had been sent from Morganton. Fortunately, they also sent along a technician trained in the huge respirator’s use. The machine was long and green and simply overwhelming to behold with all its ports and knobs and giant pump. I knew the iron lung could be a lifesaver, but I also knew that caring for an iron-lung patient was tricky. I felt intimidated by the respirator’s presence and hoped we never had a patient that sick.

  In the clearing outside the two wards stood a small admissions tent where one of the nurses and a local physician, a Dr. Matthews, were preparing for our first patients. In another tent, an epidemiologist set up his tables and microscopes, getting ready to research the cause of the disease, and more researchers were on their way. I remembered Vincent wanting to stay longer in Chicago to help with the research and I was angry at myself now for being impatient to get him home. I’d been selfish and so shortsighted.

  * * *

  The patient
s seemed to arrive all at once that afternoon. A few came by ambulance. Two others were delivered to us by hearse, since ambulances were in short supply. It gave me a jolt to see those hearses pull up in front of the admissions tent, but I had the feeling I would need to get used to the sight. The ward was suddenly a flurry of activity and I was assigned my first patient, a little girl named Carol Ann. Five years old, she’d awakened the day before in pain from head to toe. When she tried to get out of bed, she fell, and within hours, her legs were paralyzed. One of the men carried her into the ward and I, dressed in my mask and protective gown, tried to settle her in a bed. She screamed and sobbed, asking over and over again for her mama, who was not allowed in the ward. My heart broke for her. This would be one of the hardest parts of my job, I thought: dealing with my patients’ absolute terror over being separated from their parents—from everyone they knew—when they were so sick and helpless. The quarantine would have to last ten days, and the parents who watched their children being carried or wheeled away from them were as terrified as the patients.

  By late afternoon, the ward buzzed with activity. My fellow nurses and I were exhausted from stumbling our way into some sort of routine, learning care techniques that were new to many of us, and treating a disease some of us had never seen before. We knew this was only the beginning. More patients were on their way.