“From whom did you hear that?”
“One of the nurses,” I said.
“Well, he’s fine now,” Miss Riley said. “Perfectly fine and in the Boys’ Ward, where you can’t go.”
I knew that, of course, but had no intention of obeying her prohibition.
“You could write him a letter, and I’ll see that he gets it.”
“Thank you,” I said, turning my wheelchair around in the direction of my room.
It was almost three, I noted from the clock overhead. Miss Riley left at four.
When I got back, Caroline was gone, so she must have been taken to x-ray or physical therapy, since she hardly ever left the room except for a special occasion, like the Saturday movies.
I got the Alabama cap out of the top drawer of my dresser and put it on low on my forehead, sticking my bangs under the band. In the mirror on our closet door I noted that in spite of my body’s expanding, I still looked like myself in a baseball cap. I sucked in my cheeks, assuming the pouty, lippy look I’d seen in the movies.
And then I must have had a sudden inspiration and took hold of it, ignoring the inevitable consequences until later.
In the drawer of my bedside table, among other assorted things, I’d stuffed the elastic belt that secured a sanitary napkin. I took the pink elastic with hooks at the front and back and slipped it over my head, where it hung like a necklace to my breastbone on the outside of my shirt. In the mirror, which I checked again before I left for the Boys’ Ward, I was pleased with my reflection, with the addition of this elastic jewelry around my neck, the baseball cap framing my face. I headed out the door in the direction of the Boys’ Ward, feeling almost pretty.
Miss Riley, who should have gone off duty, was talking to Dr. Iler as I wheeled by, and I thought she might have caught sight of me out of the corner of her eye. I pushed the down button on the elevator so she’d think I was going downstairs, and when the elevator doors opened, I went down the hall in the direction of the Boys’ Ward.
In spite of everything Father James had told me about the Virgin Mary, I couldn’t get excited about her. She seemed to me a sweet, gentle, pleasant mother who had lost her son, although He wasn’t exactly dead—not dead is dead, as I had thought about death before the process of my conversion. But on the whole she was kindly, dutiful, sort of beautiful in her pictures, but of no particular interest to me.
Jesus was the one who captured my imagination. Not the red-haired version of Jesus either, who seemed pale and sickly, but the darker one I imagined hanging by nails hammered through his skin and bone, not making a fuss about the pain.
Nevertheless, I had taken seriously the importance of the Virgin to Father James and wanted to please him. So I told him that my name was Mary, that I was called by my middle name, Mary, because of my admiration for the Blessed Virgin or the Blessed Mother.
I doubt now that Father James believed me, but either he liked me, and I think he did, or I was of interest to him, in part because he was of interest to himself and I was an excellent listener.
At eleven, I looked older than I was, angular features with high cheekbones, full lips, dark eyes, which in pictures from that time give off a sense of age. In photographs, even when I was a baby, my brow is always furrowed. As a result of that, or of my great interest in him, Father James got in the habit of telling me personal things, which I doubt he told anybody else.
I knew he had been married before he became a priest, that he had grown up in northern Ireland—“Belfast,” he told me—and left because of the failure of his marriage, which led him to the priesthood. Eventually he changed the story, or else I had misunderstood it in the first place. He later said he had become a priest when his young wife had died.
For almost a year I didn’t know which story was true, although I was surprised by the discrepancy and preferred to think his wife had died. Somehow her dying reflected better on Father.
What interested me was that he had been married at all and that he had told two stories about the end of it. It made him someone more than a priest, and the mystery of who that was obsessed me.
As I’ve said, I thought a lot about death—more, according to Father James, than usual for an eleven-year-old who had had polio. I didn’t talk about it, certainly not to my parents, especially my mother, who would have been distressed to know that my sunny exterior could not be counted on as fact.
Or perhaps my mother did know and that was part of the secret dance we did together.
One morning during a lull in our catechism class, when Father James, distracted, was looking out the window, I told him that I thought death was his business.
The thought had come to me on a day when we had been discussing the Holy Ghost. I understood the Holy Ghost to be the Spirit of God, and as such He could not materialize in the flesh. But a ghost was an apparition that had once been alive and now was dead, and God as a ghost didn’t make sense. Or, rather, if it did, my fear about existence would be confirmed.
Invisibility was what troubled me. It was possible that I could be conscious of my own presence and not be seen by others, and that would indicate that I didn’t exist.
Or was my own consciousness sufficient proof of life?
That was the kind of thinking that came about with too much solitude.
“I was wondering whether we would have God if we never died,” I said, bringing Father James’s attention back to the room.
“But we do die,” Father James said.
“That’s what I mean.”
“I don’t understand what you’re asking me,” he said, leaning over the desk, brushing the hair out of my eyes.
“I’m asking you to explain God to me,” I said.
“That’s what we’re doing together in catechism classes, but God is not an explanation.”
“But I want to believe in Him.”
Since my childhood need for promises of safety from my father, I had been an uneasy sleeper. Some nights at Warm Springs I didn’t sleep at all, lying on my back, my eyes on the ceiling, or on my side looking out the window beside the bed, or with the pillow covering my face to cancel out the light.
And tumbling over and over in my mind, keeping me wide awake even as I tried with growing desperation to fall asleep, was the prayer that Grandma Richards used to insist I repeat after her when I was very young: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. I repeated only that much of the prayer, refusing to continue: If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.
I didn’t want to die or to think there was a chance of it. I didn’t want my soul taken. It wasn’t God’s to have.
“Sometimes you’re better at imagining than thinking,” Father James said when I told him that story. “But as to death, I think of myself in the business of living, not dying.”
I cannot for the life of me understand now how I had the nerve or stupidity or exhibitionism to wear a sanitary belt around my neck, in full view of nurses and doctors and eighteen adolescents in the Boys’ Ward. It occurs to me now, considerably more embarrassed for myself in reflection than I was then, that the gesture was an announcement of desire.
I went into the Boys’ Ward as if they expected me. In the far corner of the room, Miss Barnes was fixing the IV of one of the boys, and Joey was propped up on pillows in the first bed, and a boy I’d never met was leaning on his crutches, looking out the window.
I pushed my wheelchair across the room to Miss Barnes, so I could announce myself before she had a chance to ask me to leave.
“I need to see my friend Joey Buckley,” I said.
“Ask Miss Riley.” She was concentrating on slipping the needle into the boy’s vein. “She’s in charge.”
“You’re going to get in trouble,” the boy in the bed next to Joey’s said. “Girls aren’t allowed.”
“I’m allowed,” I said.
“Who says?” the boy asked.
I pulled my wheelchair up beside Joey’s bed.
“Miss Barnes,” I said.
“The baseball cap looks good on you,” Joey said. He was pale and thin and fragile against the white pillow.
“I wear it every day,” I said. “It’s my favorite.”
“I guess you know I’ve been sick,” he said.
“I was here when they took you away.”
“I had blood poisoning from the incision they did when I had my stabilization, and they don’t know why because it’s never happened before, but it happened to me, and so I was really sick.”
“And you’re okay now?”
“I won’t be allowed up in my wheelchair for a while,” he said. “But I’m not sick any longer, and the year after next I’ll be playing football, I think.”
I wheeled my chair between Joey’s bed and the one beside it.
“Hey, girl.” The boy in the next bed swung his legs over the side. “What’s that thing around your neck?” He called to another boy to look. “Ask the girl what’s that thing she’s wearing, Joey.”
“It’s a necklace,” I replied.
“An elastic necklace?” the boy next to Joey asked.
Joey was looking at me and I didn’t know exactly what to say, already sorry I had the sanitary belt around my neck, but not sure what to do with it or what I could possibly say about it.
“I’ve seen that kind of thing before in my house,” the boy next to Joey said, “and it’s not a necklace.”
“Shut up,” Joey said.
“Don’t tell me to shut up”
“Then leave her alone.”
The boys were yelling at each other. Miss Barnes had finished inserting the IV needle and was headed in my direction.
“No shouting,” she said, coming up behind my wheelchair. “What’s going on?”
“We’re fighting about this girl and the necklace she’s got hanging on her,” the boy said.
Before I had a chance to speak, to turn my chair around and explain myself or leave, the nurse had caught hold of the sanitary belt and pulled it off.
“What is your name?” she asked, dropping the belt in her pocket.
“Susan,” the boy said. “Isn’t that her name, Joey?”
“You’ll be coming with me, Susan.”
Father James took me to the office where we had catechism class and shut the door. The office belonged to Dr. Iler, and photographs of children lined the walls, but I hadn’t noticed the pictures before this afternoon, when I couldn’t look at Father James and had to concentrate my attention on the walls.
The children, four of them, all girls, were blond with wavy hair in pageboys. They sat on a cement garden bench in one of the pictures, their hands folded in their laps, their eyes on the camera. In another picture they leaned against a tree holding hands. In another they were climbing the same tree, one on a low branch, two standing on a higher branch, the fourth at the bottom of the tree.
Next to the girls was a picture of President Franklin Roosevelt sitting on the edge of a dock, his legs hanging like the legs of all the children I had seen at Warm Springs: thin, lifeless, the feet dropping, curling in a half-moon, pointing toward each other.
“Are those President Roosevelt’s children?” I asked as a way of putting off the talk I was there to have with Father James.
He was writing in a notebook on the desk, and it occurred to me that he was no more interested in talking to me about what had happened in the Boys’ Ward than I was interested in talking to him.
“Those are Dr. Iler’s children,” he said.
“I guess from the picture that President Roosevelt had the same kind of polio as Joey Buckley, didn’t he?”
Father James looked over at the photograph.
“He couldn’t walk, if that’s what you mean by the same.”
“Joey is expecting to walk,” I said, falling silent.
There were many photographs of Roosevelt in the halls of the Warm Springs Foundation, and most of them were formal and taken above the waist. There were a few of him standing with someone supporting him, like a human crutch. There was one showing him in a wheelchair, and the one in Dr. Iler’s office, Roosevelt without his leg braces, his long legs exposed, swinging free as skinned chickens hanging in a butcher shop.
I know now what I didn’t at the time, the lengths he went to in order to conceal that he was crippled—that he was carried through the back doors of the buildings where he was giving speeches, arriving early at events so he could be seated before the crowd arrived; that he was hoisted down shafts and fire escapes, lifted into and out of boats and trains and planes. I understand the trust he needed to have in those who protected him, the pain he endured to stand or walk while holding on to the arms of others so he would not be perceived as disabled, the courage to pretend that he was fine—his head thrown back, his cigarette holder clamped in the side of his mouth, his great, long laugh, intrinsic to his character as a leader at once solitary and public.
In the spring of 1997, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial, forty years in the making, was dedicated amid considerable controversy by President Bill Clinton.
There was no wheelchair in the initial memorial.
After lobbying by the National Organization on Disability, President Clinton announced that he would send legislation to Congress to modify the memorial, to present Roosevelt not as the public knew him but as his intimates did, certainly those who had known him at Warm Springs. The new memorial, which includes a wheelchair, was dedicated in January 2001, and it recognizes that who Roosevelt was and what he achieved could not be separated from his damaged body.
I don’t know which memorial I prefer, the one depicting Roosevelt’s “splendid deception” as a strong, healthy figure of a leader, or the one with the addition of his wheelchair. By all accounts he would have preferred the first memorial to the second. Our perceptions about disability have changed since then, and that in part is because of Roosevelt. It’s also true that he was a privileged man who served as president in a time of depression and war, and was seen as a man of the people, a perception made possible in part because it was visibly clear that privilege had not freed him from the trials of ordinary men.
It was November of 1950, and I had been in Warm Springs for three months, and it was only three weeks since my mother had left.
I was beginning to assemble a life alone. In my imagination it grew beyond its reality but included Father James and Joey Buckley and Caroline and Magnolia and the babies and President Roosevelt.
At home in Washington, my family would be gathering for dinner, my mother in the kitchen with Jeffie, who would tell her about his day and the boys who beat him up on the playground and the girls he loved. Grandma Richards would be making cookies, and General Beauregard would be sleeping on the sofa, since there was no one in the living room to remove him. My father would be home late or not at all because he was traveling. There were not enough people in our house, I thought. Even if I were at home, our family was too small.
In my passport case, under my T-shirt, there was an unopened letter from my mother, which had come on the day of my humiliation. She wrote me every day, my father wrote once a week, and Harold Ickes sent a letter from time to time with news of the miseries of sixth grade. Occasionally my little brother wrote, scrawling across the page at my mother’s instruction: Dear Suzie, I am fine. Beau is fine. Mom and Dad is fine. Grandma is fine. Love, Jeffie. P.S. Granfer Swindells died yesterday in his own house while I was playing with my friends in the Swindellses’ back yard.
My mother’s letters were chatty until the end, which was always the same: P.S. Remember, I know you will, you can do anything you want to do with your life, be anyone you want to be. M.
Father James closed the notebook and leaned back in his chair, looking at me.
“Infra dignitatem.” He folded his hands on the desk. “You don’t know Latin.”
I shook my head.
“Dignity?”
“I know the word dignity,” I said.
He lea
ned across the desk.
“One of the things I’ve noticed in the years I’ve worked with polios is shame. Do you know what I mean by shame?” He answered the question himself. “Something like disgrace or humiliation. Polios feel ashamed because they had polio. As if they are to blame for it.”
I wasn’t sure I understood what he was saying, only that it seemed to be specific to me.
“Do you feel ashamed?” he asked.
The moment was weighted with a kind of importance.
“Because I had polio?”
He nodded.
“I’ve made my family unhappy. If that’s what you mean by ashamed. I feel destructive.”
“Destructive.”
He said it as a matter of fact, as if he were collecting a list of applicable vocabulary.
I was uncertain how this conversation was unfolding. Was the subject my visit to the Boys’ Ward in the pink elastic necklace, or was Father James trying to avoid a delicate issue because he was a priest?
“What have you destroyed?”
He had a habit of sitting very straight and still, his palms pressed flat together, his chin resting on the tops of his fingers, his water-blue eyes bright under weary eyelids.
“A lot of things,” I said. “I’ll bring you a list of things I’ve destroyed if you’d like to see it.”
“Miss Riley thinks you need to be in school because you’re bored.”
“I don’t want to be in school except a regular one,” I said. “School would mean me and a tutor sitting in a room together, and I don’t want that. Besides, I have catechism with you, where I learn about everything except spelling, and I already know how to spell.”
“Then,” he began, pushing a book across the desk for my second catechism lesson of the day, “we’ll start this afternoon with the Holy Ghost.”
That night, a cold and silver night, not enough covers over me to stay warm, I thought about the Holy Ghost. If I lay very still with my eyes closed, with my mind on little things like Clark bars and Grapette soda and the list in my Survival Notebook, the Holy Ghost might slip through the window glass and I wouldn’t recognize Him except as warm air moving over my body, slipping through the layers of skin into my blood.
Warm Springs Page 11
