To Play Again

by Carol Rosenberger

  A View from the Broom Closet

  Marge was waiting for us when we arrived, looking as excited as I felt. As we walked slowly into the Hôtel d’Albe, she on one side and Martha on the other, I felt as if I were entering the normal world once again. I was leaning heavily on them both, and was surprised that Marge’s slight frame seemed so strong.

  They took me to Marge’s room on the first floor. No more stair-climbing for me! One of the beds had been moved over by the window so that I could look out onto the street. I hadn’t been up more than an hour or so, but already the bed was very inviting. My back and neck were aching from the hour of sitting in the car.

  Once I was lying down, I looked around at the other thoughtful touches I was sure that Marge, with her Hawaiian background, had been responsible for: the bowl of fresh fruit she had arranged on the table, the cans of fruit juice sitting on the windowsill, the flowers on another table that had been placed at a considerable distance from my bed.

  I smiled to myself. Martha must have told her about my flower allergy. Anyone around me at concert time knew that I asked the ushers to hold the flowers until after the performance. I had learned to do this when I had played my first solo recital at the age of eight. Someone had placed flowers close to the piano, and I had to turn my head away from the audience at crucial moments, wrinkling my nose and trying not to sneeze.

  I was touched by Marge’s welcome and by my friends’ eagerness to make me comfortable.

  “I hope it’s not going . . . to be too hard on you . . . to have me here,” I said, realizing as I said it that I was a little late to be expressing such thoughts.

  “Oh, Carol,” they both started to say at once. Marge finished. “Think of all the time we’ll save now that we don’t have to travel on the train every day!”

  “Haaaaaaaaaaaaaa,” I laugh-wailed.

  “Besides,” Martha added, “you don’t know how many volunteers we have to help bring meals to you.”

  As if on cue, Carol Stein breezed in with my lunch tray. She had also brought me some fruit and patisserie for later. She threw herself into a chair and launched excitedly into the latest Fontainebleau gossip, which I was eager to hear. I was only vaguely aware of Martha tucking the towel around me as Carol described the competition I might have won. All through lunch I listened, fascinated.

  The first couple of times I spilled something, Carol jumped to my side. “It’s OK,” I reassured her, “I do this . . . all the time.”

  I had a few twinges of distress while she talked about the competition, but after I had finished lunch, while Carol was detailing who would be doing what at the end-of-summer performances at Fontainebleau, I felt the tears welling up.

  What was the matter with me? After all, this was what I had looked forward to in my days in the hospital: friends dropping by and keeping me in the mainstream—vicariously, at least. But the contrast between this normal world I had been a part of such a short time before and the world that was now mine—the pain, the weakness, the trembling—was striking me more violently now.

  Here I was, back in the place where I had been functioning at the height of my powers. The other musicians Carol was talking about were going on with their lives, but mine had come to a screeching halt. I didn’t think I could stand to hear any more about them.

  “I have to make a trip . . . to the bathroom,” I interrupted hastily. Carol helped me out of bed and supported me while we walked the few steps to the bathroom door.

  “I’ll be OK,” I said, hearing my voice shake as I turned away from Carol. I didn’t want to cry in front of her.

  “I’ll wait here in the hall for you,” she assured me.

  I sat down and bunched up what I could of my pajama top around my mouth. The tears and sobs were coming, and I didn’t want Carol to hear them. Hearing about other performers was too painful a contrast—while I had been reduced to an improperly functioning neural tube, with an alimentary canal that had become a primary concern, and a frequently fogged cerebrum. “I must stop this,” I kept telling myself.

  I looked around the “private bathroom,” at the collection of mops, brooms, and cleaning rags. It was actually the maids’ combined bathroom and storage room. The washbowl was a large laundry tub. I sat there looking through my tears at a spider crawling among the array of cleaning implements. Since nothing about me was functioning properly, didn’t this catch-all room suit my damaged body better than the sparkling cleanliness and smooth whiteness of the hospital? Years later, when I read Kafka’s Die Metamorphose for the first time, I pictured Gregor’s room as the broom closet-bathroom at the Hôtel d’Albe.

  As Carol helped me back to bed, I felt ashamed for losing control. She must have realized that something was wrong, and tried to keep the conversation light. I responded with a “That’s great!” or with a head jerk, my present version of a nod. But I no longer wanted to hear about the world of performance that did not include me. Years later, I was to remember that moment as the beginning of what would be a gradual distancing from other serious musicians.

  The next day Mademoiselle came to see me, bringing along her own doctor. She had just received a cable from my parents asking her to prevent, if possible, my release from the hospital. They had read with dismay my enthusiastically dictated letter telling them I was leaving its prisonlike confines. They cabled Mademoiselle that they would feel safer with me in the hospital until one of them could get there.

  My parents had communicated all of this to Mademoiselle rather than to me because they hadn’t wanted to tell me the reason for their delay in rushing to my side. My maternal grandmother, my beloved Nana, who had lived with our family since before I was born and was my lifelong pal, had suffered a heart attack. Nana was recovering but needed care. My mother, who had been preparing to come to France, was now urgently needed at home, so they decided that my father would come instead.

  The news about Nana was a shock. I tried to say that there was no reason for either Mom or Dad to come to France; that they should stay home and take care of Nana. But they were too concerned about me to accept anyone’s reassurances, including mine.

  Mademoiselle clearly had her own doubts about my returning to Fontainebleau so quickly—another reason she brought her doctor to take a look at me. He was a kindly Frenchman who gave me a cursory version of Dr. Lipsitch’s daily muscle tests. Then he asked me to sit up. He watched while I turned laboriously onto one side, pushed with my legs against the bed, braced my trembling arms and half-slid myself into a sitting position. It took me at least a minute to achieve this feat, and I was perspiring when I finished. He turned to Mademoiselle and told her that I must rest, take a holiday—perhaps in southern France—and try to get my strength back gradually.

  “I’m surprised he didn’t tell you to take a sip of cognac every hour on the hour,” Martha said wryly, after he and Mademoiselle had left. It was a joke among the young American musicians at Fontainebleau that the typical French remedy for anything was cognac and/or a holiday.

  “He didn’t even ask to see you walk,” Marge noted.

  “I guess there is . . . no way . . . anyone can help,” I mused. Two doctors had now said that I simply needed time to recover.

  Walking, even leaning on someone, was still a strange sensation. I knew that my legs were now the strongest part of me. But there was nothing to guide my feet. I couldn’t really tell where to lean my weight; and the rest of me wasn’t able to give any support at all.

  Of course! I thought one day, as I headed for the broom closet. There was no support from my back or abdominal muscles. The entire “core” was so weak that I seemed to wobble the way babies do when first learning to walk.

  It was a strange reversal of my preconception of polio as something that paralyzed the legs, after which patients learned to support themselves with still-powerful arms and upper bodies. I was in the opposite condition.

  A more optimistic part of me wanted to believe that since I could walk I would soon be doing eve
rything else. I noted each tiny improvement. But since I had begun to lose perspective on muscle strength and coordination, I hadn’t the remotest idea of how far I still had to go.

  Perhaps this is a natural protection within an ill person’s psyche. One adapts very fast to a total change in outlook. When you have been unable to feed yourself, lifting a fork is a very big achievement. When you haven’t been able to get out of bed at all, walking a few steps to the bathroom is an adventure.

  A cable from my father announced that he would arrive the next day. I slept more fitfully than usual that night, knowing that he was flying over the ocean. I had never been concerned about plane flights, but worrying about new things was another characteristic of my post-polio state.

  Though I knew when to expect him, I still had the feeling of a deus ex machina when he walked into the room. He smiled his open, wide smile that made people like and trust him instantly.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” he said, his eyes and voice full of emotion. He looked at me as if he wanted to see into my muscles, see into my insides, to know how I felt. He came over to the bed and hugged me as if I were still the person he and Mom had waved goodbye to a few weeks before. They had driven me from Detroit to New York Harbor so I could sail to Europe on the SS Liberté. I looked up at him, meeting his blue-eyed gaze that always said he feared nothing and no one.

  As a child, I had a favorite comic strip in the Sunday paper called “The Spirit.” The Spirit was a sort of god in human guise who could be wherever he chose, and who unraveled seemingly impossible tangles in human events. He had something in common with Superman, but didn’t have to change costume. The Spirit wore a dark suit and sunglasses shaped very much like my father’s, and I thought that he and Dad looked somewhat alike.

  I had seen other similarities between Dad and The Spirit. Dad could see into the mysteries of any machine and make it work—or build it himself. He could handle a car as skillfully as a test driver. He moved quickly and was impatient with foot draggers, but he had always found time to reason with me.

  As a toddler I had been sure I would not like tomato juice. This was unfortunate in our household, as my mother and grandmother prepared quantities of home-canned, thick, pulpy tomato juice to be stored in our cellar over the winter. Dad persisted in making me admit that I had never tried it. The next step was to lead me inexorably to the conclusion that since I had never tried it, I had no way of knowing whether or not I would like it. I was all the more impressed with his reasoning when I had grudgingly taken a tiny sip of the tomato juice. I loved it!

  As I looked up at my dad now, I wished he didn’t have to see me in this state. Everyone had always said I was the feminine version of my father—that I looked “like a Rosenberger,” that I had the energy, drive, independence. I had come to Europe to accomplish things, just as he had gone from the Iowa farm where he had grown up to Detroit to become a highly respected executive engineer at General Motors. He respected my ambition as much as I respected his.

  And now, on Dad’s first trip to Europe, he had the pain of seeing me reduced to a helpless invalid. I wished I could have kept the whole episode from both of my parents until I had regained my strength. On the other hand, it was a relief to have him here. I thought suddenly that I had great faith in his strength, and felt more reliance on it, now that I was without my own.

  A conference that included Marge and Martha was soon convened. Since the summer term at Fontainebleau was coming to an end, Dad suggested that he move us all to a comfortable hotel in Paris. Marge was to spend the year in Paris; Martha had intended to go on to Vienna. But neither of my friends wanted to settle anywhere until it had been decided what to do with me. We knew Dad had come to take me home, and were just as determined to persuade him to let me stay in Europe.

  The Hôtel Rond-Point in Paris was a great improvement over the d’Albe. We had rooms on an upper floor and Dad pushed my bed over to the window so that I could look out on the courtyard and breathe fresh air through the open window. Part of the day the sun streamed in and felt very healing as it warmed my back and shoulders and neck, where I still had constant pain. And this “private bath” really was a private bath and not a broom closet. I could walk the few steps to the bathroom by myself now, since I could lean against the foot of the bed, and then on the door frame into the bathroom. Once a day, usually in the evening, we went out for a meal. I could now walk a block, leaning on someone’s arm.

  When we went to the hospital to see Dr. Lipsitch, he asked me to walk a few steps by myself. I was still more than a little wobbly, but managed a few steps down the hall by myself. When I turned around and started back, he was smiling.

  “Good!” he said heartily. “That’s a great improvement!” Turning to my father, he declared confidently, “She’ll be able to live a normal life.”

  My father nodded, looking at the doctor intently. “Her mother and I feel that she should come home with me. But Carol wants to remain in Europe.”

  To my joy, Dr. Lipsitch replied: “I don’t see any reason why she couldn’t stay in Europe as long as she has her two friends with her. Right now she should go somewhere like the south of France to recuperate for a couple of months.”

  My father nodded again, slowly, still fixing the doctor with his gaze. He wanted so much to do the right thing. And I wanted so much to stay.

  My determination was based on the conviction that I would soon be playing again. Somewhere in the depths of my psyche I must have felt that to go home would be to admit defeat. I had come to Europe hoping for a glorious success. At the very least I could still find that cultural substance I sought. If I went home now, I would be doing what any invalid would do. If I stayed, I would be taking a step toward resuming my life as I wanted it to be.

  “But I could study theory . . . with Mademoiselle . . . until I . . . can play again!” I had insisted at least a half-dozen times to Dad. “I can be learning a lot . . . while I’m getting stronger.”

  My father invited Mademoiselle to lunch, and the three of us discussed the possibilities. She was eager to help in any way, and assured him that, as soon as I felt up to it, she would devise some musically constructive things for me to do. She, too, was in favor of the recuperation period in southern France and suggested a pension in the little town of Menton that would be comfortable and reasonably priced.

  Dad’s flexibility came to the fore. Staying in Europe had begun to look like something that would keep my morale high, and the doctor had said there was no medical reason to oppose it. Dad agreed to let me stay.

  He and Marge and Martha went hunting for an apartment to rent. Sometimes they would let me come along in the back seat of the car, where I could lie down when my back tired. I saw the tops and roofs of much of Paris through the rear window. During these rides I discovered something else I couldn’t do. I was already aware that I couldn’t turn my head to the right or left. While sitting up, if I wanted to see someone or something just out of my range of vision, I had to push my whole torso around. But once or twice I tried to twist around quickly to see something we were passing. Both times the muscles in my rib cage cramped so severely that the cramp lasted for the rest of the trip. I soon learned not to turn quickly, and not to turn very far.

  One day I stayed behind in the hotel room and decided to order some tea. The waiter poured me one cup, and I managed to drink about half of it, spilling the other half in the process. This was a good average at the time. I always tucked thicknesses of towel around me before attempting to pick up a teacup. Then, bracing my elbow so my arm would tremble less, I could get the cup to a certain point where I had to hurry the movement so that the cup wouldn’t fall again. It was at this point that I usually spilled some tea. I had gotten used to the warm, wet feeling as the liquid seeped through the towel.

  But this afternoon I had done fairly well, so I decided that there must be a way to get some more tea into the cup. The tray was on the dresser, and I braced both elbows and got hold of the handle of the tea
pot with both hands. I was sure I could tip the teapot and slosh some of the tea into the cup. It sloshed everywhere but into the cup—all over the tray, the patisserie, the napkin.

  That moment when I stared at the teapot in dismay is one of the most vivid memories of those first months after the acute attack of polio. There was no one to help me; there was no way I could accomplish such a simple act as pouring a little tea. I had a terrifying insight into my true position, one shockingly clear opening in the fog of protection and denial that enveloped me. I was to have many variations on this experience in the years to come.

  Dad and my two friends came back with good news that helped to push this recognition back into a corner of my mind. They had located an apartment on the rue Donizetti that seemed right for the three of us. I was sure that an apartment on a street with a musical name must be a sign that I was meant to stay in Europe.

  Now that he was satisfied that I had a place to live in Paris, Dad was ready to make arrangements for the recuperation period. Marge and Martha would go along, and stay until my mother could come.

  Dad left the day before the three of us were to take the train to Menton. I was excited at the prospect of the Riviera, and waved goodbye to my father with a smile, but he had scarcely left the room when I began to cry uncontrollably. I wasn’t quite sure what was wrong, but I couldn’t seem to stop. My abdominal muscles were still very weak, and the kind of sobbing I was doing made it almost impossible for me to breathe, but still I couldn’t stop.

  Marge and Martha tried to calm me, and at various intervals I heard one or the other say, “Carol-ie! Carol-ie!” They had never called me that; but somehow it must have seemed to them that the diminutive might be soothing. I couldn’t say anything in return; I just continued to sob.

  I was overwhelmed by my father’s generosity, by his concern for me. I now felt empty, as if a vital part of my vicarious strength had been cut off. I wanted to go home with him, to be safe and protected somewhere. I was afraid for my future—even afraid for the next few months. I was terrified at the prospect of coping with the world from a dependent and weak position. I was frightened because I hadn’t been able to pour the tea. I was gasping with fear because my hands and arms and shoulders and back weren’t mine anymore.