To Play Again

by Carol Rosenberger

  “Don’t worry about that,” I told her, a little impatiently. “The problem is the pain.”

  “Would it help if I massaged your back?” she asked. I was sure that it would. But she stopped almost as soon as she had started.

  “Carol, there’s something very strange!” she said, sounding worried. “Your muscles are jumping and jerking!” So she could feel it, too.

  Martha gently replaced the hot-water bottle and said she would be back in a few minutes. She returned with a thermometer and two other friends, Marge Marçallino and Carol Stein. I lay there with the thermometer in my mouth and listened to my three friends talking in low tones. It was good having them all there; they could talk with each other and I didn’t have to reply.

  Marge, a tiny, olive-skinned girl with huge dark eyes, was spending the year in France on a scholarship from the Rotary Club in her native Hilo, Hawaii. She had a delightful combination of practicality and Hawaiian ease in enjoying life, and had rapidly become a good friend. Carol, one of the twin daughters of violist Lillian Fuchs, was a gifted violinist. Everything about her was intense: her eyes, her voice, her way of playing. She and her sister Barbara, a cellist, and I were planning to enter the Fontainebleau Chamber Music Competition as a trio.

  Carol swung her long, brown hair and put her hand on my shoulder. “My mother gave me the name of a doctor in Paris to call in case of emergency,” she told me, her voice rising in pitch with eagerness and concern. “I’m going to call him now.”

  I started to protest, but didn’t. Whatever had taken hold of me so violently had crowded out all normal thought processes, so I might as well let someone else think for me.

  Things were beginning to blur. Someone was notifying Mademoiselle, and someone else brought me some food, which I didn’t even want to look at. Carol returned from her telephone call to a Dr. Lipsitch in Paris.

  “He told me you should be brought to the hospital right away!” she told me, impressed with the order. The hospital! That seemed a long way. I thought vaguely that I really didn’t want to leave this bed. But I was in someone else’s hands now.

  “Larry is going to drive you,” Carol went on. Larry Isaacs, a tall, lanky Southerner, was one of our few friends who had a car. It looked as if I had no choice.

  Marge and Martha helped me into two sweaters and a pair of slacks over my pajamas. I wanted another pair of socks, too, as well as my coat. It seemed inconceivable to me that everyone else could be comfortable in their light summer clothing.

  I noticed as I got up that I seemed to have lost control of my body. The pain and the muscle jumping had taken over, shaking me continuously and playing their cacophonous tutti inside me.

  Four people were trying to help me down the steps—practically carrying me. Everyone seemed to have forgotten how to smile; they all looked grim. Oh God, I thought, they’re scaring themselves. They’re overdramatizing the whole scene. I wondered why I couldn’t stop them, until I realized that I was leaning heavily on them.

  I was bundled into the front seat of Larry’s little Fiat. Carol and Martha got in back; they looked cramped, I thought, leaning forward as if they could somehow be of more help from that position. Larry tried valiantly to amuse us with his imitation of a broad American accent in French, using his drawl to perfection. Ordinarily we all loved this act, and I tried to smile, but Carol and Martha stared grimly ahead.

  They took me to a small private room in the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine on the outskirts of Paris. The room looked out on a garden surrounded by trees, and there were neat borders of yellow flowers under the trees. It was sunny and green and too bright. I felt drab and even more miserable in contrast. Inside the room, everything was crisp and white, and I was suddenly aware that I hadn’t combed my hair or had a bath for what seemed like a very long time. I didn’t belong in this pristine atmosphere. Why had I let them bring me here?

  A nurse who looked scrubbed and energetic and spoke with a British accent came in to welcome me. “What are your symptoms?” she asked. My mind was working too slowly.

  “My symptoms? Well, uh . . . I seem to be twitching . . .”

  “Twitching?” She laughed and I could almost feel myself squirm. I must have used the wrong word. Maybe she thought I shouldn’t be here, if all I was doing was twitching. But she was already helping me out of my slacks.

  “May I leave my sweaters on?” I asked. “I’ve got chills.” That was probably a symptom, too, I thought, after I’d said it.

  “Oh, yes,” I remembered, “and pain . . .” but she was nodding, as if she already knew that.

  The bed was smooth and white and cool, while I was nothing but pain and muscles jumping, sweat and chills. My rumpled bed at the Hôtel d’Albe had felt more appropriate.

  I faded in and out of my feverish fog. At one point a young intern came in with a chart and a pen in his hand. “Take this off, please,” he smiled pleasantly, pointing with his pen to my outer sweater. I struggled to remove it.

  But that wasn’t enough. Now I was to remove the other sweater, the socks, the pajamas, everything. My hands were trembling so much that the smiling young man had to put his pen and paper down on the chair and help me. With every layer we removed, he seemed to find it more amusing. I must look ridiculous with all this, I thought. He probably can’t believe how cold I feel. It occurred to me that I had put the thicker socks on over the thinner ones, just as I used to do when I went ice-skating. He handed me a hospital gown—only a hospital gown, to replace all of this?

  “I’ve been having chills,” I explained again.

  “Oh, you’ll be warm here,” he assured me, still laughing. I thought to myself that he wouldn’t find it so funny if he felt this cold.

  He started to ask me a long list of questions. After the effort of getting my clothes off, my mind was wandering wearily, and his questions filtered unevenly through my fog.

  Then a short, stocky nurse came in and told me I would have to be weighed. As she was helping me out of bed, my left leg seemed to give way and I lurched to the left. I probably would have fallen if she hadn’t grabbed me, her strong grip digging into my right arm. As I looked over at her to apologize, I noticed that her expression was severe and her eyes frightened—the same look my friends had had when they were helping me out of the d’Albe. She steadied me, helped me over to the chair, and said she would be right back with a wheelchair.

  “No!” I tried to shout at her. “I can walk! I’m just a little weak!” But she was resolute, and into the wheelchair I went. Evidently I had failed in the one chance she was going to give me to hold myself up on my own two feet. As she wheeled me down the hall, I hunched down in the chair and hoped no one would see me. Surely this was all some kind of fearful comedy.

  I had not really recovered from the humiliation of being wheeled to the scales when Dr. Lester Lipsitch swept cheerfully into my room. He had a pleasant face and a resonant voice that made him sound very confident. I could tell from his speech that he was a New Yorker. He had his own list of questions, but it seemed to me that the intern had asked many of the same things. I wondered vaguely why they couldn’t have gotten together over this. But now he wanted more than answers to questions. He wanted me to move my foot.

  “Push up,” he said, and resisted my foot so that it was almost impossible. “Hold. Good. Push away from me . . . hold . . . good. Push toward me . . . hold . . . good.” I pushed and pulled in every direction and position, with legs, arms, head, and torso. My legs trembled; my arms trembled more; but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “Pull your abdominal muscles in,” he ordered, his hands on my belly. I pulled. The muscles shook. “Pull them in,” he repeated. I pulled again. He glanced at me and his look wasn’t cheerful. Did he think I wasn’t cooperating? Something was wrong. But then he smiled quickly. “Good,” he said.

  How could it be “good” so suddenly when his expression had told me clearly that it had not been good the instant before? But my private fog rolled in aga
in, and I let his smile take over. He had obviously been giving me muscle tests, and the “good” must mean that I had passed them.

  “We are going to keep you here for a few days,” Dr. Lipsitch said cheerfully. “We don’t know what you have, but we’ll get you well as soon as we can.”

  A few days? “I’m entering a piano competition in three weeks,” I told him anxiously. “Do you think I’ll be all right by then?”

  He was still cheerful. “We can’t be sure of that right now. I just want you to rest. I don’t want you to get out of bed at all for the next few days.”

  “Not at all? I can at least get up to go to the bathroom, can’t I?” I pleaded, pointing to the toilet and washbowl in the corner of my room. They couldn’t have been more than three steps from the bed.

  “No,” he said easily. “I want you to stay right in bed until we figure out what you have.” He said it so casually that I wondered if this was standard procedure in France, or his usual way of treating a patient. He must not have an aversion to bedpans. Or maybe he thought I had something besides the flu. Why else would he tell me I couldn’t get out of bed at all?

  Soon the pain and haziness took over again. At one point a nurse brought dinner, but it seemed too much effort to eat. She also brought a sleeping pill. Maybe that would shut out the pain for a while. Maybe I would feel better in the morning.

  But when the nurse woke me up at dawn to take my temperature, the pain and muscle jumping were still there. I thought irritably that if she had only let me sleep a little longer, maybe some of the pain would have gone away. Then another nurse came in with a basin and towel. She handed me a warm cloth. I started to wipe my face but my hands were trembling, and it seemed hard to get the cloth in the right place. The nurse took the cloth out of my hands and finished giving me my “bath.” How I hated having someone else bathe me. I began to suspect that I might be even weaker than I was yesterday.

  Dr. Lipsitch came in surrounded by a group of interns, repeated his “push-pull-good” tests, and declared: “You’re doing very well!” Since I felt that I was weaker than yesterday, and the pain and jerking were no better, I wondered in what way I was doing well. But I felt I shouldn’t ask him; he seemed to have his own rhythm for the visit and was already on his way out the door. Besides, my mind was working slowly, and the whole group of interns would hear anything I said. Maybe they would find me as funny as the first intern had yesterday.

  Nurses came and went. Around noon my door opened to another figure in white. I glanced up and then looked again in amazement. It was Martha, gowned in a long white hospital coat. She laughed at my surprise and said she had come in on the train. I knew it was a long ride, and was so grateful to her for coming that I was close to tears.

  “Where did you get that?” I asked, indicating the hospital coat.

  “It was hanging outside your door. The nurse wouldn’t let me come in without it. There’s also a bowl of disinfectant sitting there. I’m supposed to rinse my hands in it when I leave.”

  “French hospital procedure?” I wondered aloud. She shrugged. “Quaint, isn’t it?”

  A nurse came in with my lunch tray. “Help yourself before I contaminate it,” I suggested, as soon as the nurse had left. “I haven’t been hungry.”

  But Martha shook her head. “No, I think the hospital staff should be aware of your lack of appetite.”

  “Oh,” I had to laugh, “I doubt if anyone here has heard of my legendary appetite.” In my only other hospital experience, a tonsillectomy at age two, I had supposedly amazed the nurses by eating a full breakfast the morning after surgery. I could remember very few occasions in my life when I hadn’t felt like eating.

  I looked down at my lunch tray and grasped the fork. I tried to lift a bite of salad as far as my mouth, but it was too much effort. I put the fork down to rest my arm for a minute. It was odd how heavy the fork seemed. The food looked less inviting.

  “I just don’t seem to be hungry,” I told Martha.

  “You seem to be having trouble lifting the fork,” she observed, with her serious look. “Why don’t I try feeding you?”

  That was a startling idea. Yesterday I would probably have refused, but today it seemed logical to let someone else lift that heavy fork. Strangely enough, with Martha doing the work, I was able to eat the entire lunch.

  When Dr. Lipsitch came back that afternoon, Martha confronted him. Her penetrating gaze and clear diction could be a commanding combination.

  “Carol is able to eat if someone feeds her!” she declared.

  Dr. Lipsitch looked surprised. “But I want her to be fed, of course!” he answered, as if stunned that no one was doing so.

  “Well, the nurses don’t seem to be aware of that,” Martha shot back. He said he would take care of it immediately.

  It was strange how good it felt to have someone speak for me. How often I had found myself speaking for someone: defending my younger brother, Gary, if other little boys ganged up on him; being spokesperson for a group at school if they wanted to approach the faculty about a problem. It was a role in which I had always felt comfortable. But now, with the pain and weakness and fogginess, I wasn’t in a strong position anymore. I was glad to let Martha take over.

  From then on the nurses fed me every meal. Those next days blur in my memory. I remember Martha and Marge coming in from time to time, bringing books from friends at Fontainebleau. I wasn’t able to hold a book up to read, but didn’t mind because even when Marge or Martha read to me, I couldn’t concentrate very well. One day Martha brought me a special gift from Mademoiselle: wild strawberries from the Forest of Fontainebleau. She said that Mademoiselle, who was a devout Catholic, was having prayers said for me. That struck me as sweet and a little melodramatic.

  Dr. Lipsitch continued to wear his cheery smile when he came in every day to give me the muscle tests, but I was more and more puzzled at his “good” that punctuated every test. Even I could tell that I was getting weaker all the time. It was increasingly hard to make any movement, and I even needed nurses to help me turn over.

  One evening when the night nurse was changing my damp hospital gown, she relaxed her grip on my shoulders for a moment. I tried to maintain my sitting position but seemed to have no control. I fell backwards on the bed. She looked startled.

  “I seem to be . . . paralyzed . . . or something . . .” I said, by way of apology. I was also expressing for the first time a fear that had been pushing its way through the brain fog. It seemed as if my condition was expanding beyond the category of mere weakness. I wanted to discuss it with her, but her angry glare stopped any further conversation.

  Suddenly I realized that for the first time in my conscious life I was as dependent on someone else as a small child would be. She and the other nurses, all of them strangers, had the power to enable me to sit up, turn over, take nourishment; without them I couldn’t move. And yet from childhood on, I had always been referred to as “so independent.” I had always felt that I could handle difficult situations. “Here! Let me! I can do it!” had been my most characteristic response. How bewildering that now all I could do was cry.

  I seemed to have lost control, not only of my muscles, but also of my emotions. I cried if the nurse was abrupt with me. I cried if I tried to turn over and couldn’t; I cried because I couldn’t lift a teacup. It was as if my emotions had been scraped raw; there was no longer that protective insulation that one never notices until it has vanished. What should have been a minor irritant felt like a major emotional upset. It was further upsetting that I couldn’t discuss my fears with anyone. I didn’t want to worry Martha or Marge; the doctor insisted I was doing well; and the night nurse was angry with me for using the word “paralyzed.” I felt more lonely and isolated than ever.

  One evening I decided to call Martha at Fontainebleau. There was a phone by my bed, and by using both hands I could get the receiver to my ear, but the switchboard refused to put the call through. Though I really didn’t want anot
her encounter with the night nurse, I rang for her to straighten this out.

  “I need . . . to call . . .” I began, when she came into the room. But she interrupted me.

  “No calls after 9:00 p.m.,” she said, looking less angry than the other night, but still severe. Then her voice softened a shade. “I’m sorry but it’s the rule.”

  I cried a long time that night from sheer panic and rage. I had never felt so alone. I was alone in a foreign hospital, alone in a foreign country. I felt out of touch with everyone close to me. And now they wouldn’t even let me touch base with a phone call.

  When Dr. Lipsitch came in the next morning I tried to tell him in my increasingly shaky voice about the phone call incident. The weakness in my abdominal muscles was making it hard for me to get out more than a word or two in one breath. I had noticed that my breathing was becoming shallow. Stranger still, my voice was sounding increasingly high-pitched and thin. I knew enough about singing to be aware that I was instinctively placing my voice higher in the facial “mask” in order to be heard at all. But it made me sound somewhat childish.

  “Am I . . . in some kind . . . of prison?” I heard myself say in this strange child’s voice and, to my horror, started crying again. I couldn’t seem to stop.

  Dr. Lipsitch turned to the nurse. “She may call outside anytime she wants,” he ordered. I was so grateful to him for that kindness that I kept on crying. I didn’t know how to explain to him that any emotion at all seemed to end up in the same place.

  It was worrying me that Dr. Lipsitch hadn’t come up with a diagnosis of this strange illness. As I faded in and out of consciousness, I tried to figure out what could have happened to make my muscles so weak. One morning I ventured to express to him an idea that had come during my hours of feverish fantasies.

  “Could it be . . . some strange . . . kind of . . . cold . . . in my muscles . . . that makes it . . . seem like paralysis?” I had uttered a dangerous word, but didn’t know how else to put it.

  Surely no one could get angry with me for saying that it just seemed like paralysis. The doctor’s brown eyes looked gentle behind the glasses that magnified them. He smiled as if I had said something charming. But I hadn’t been trying to charm him; I had been trying to get at what was wrong with me. Couldn’t he at least consider the possibility?