I made arrangements with Miss Riley to distribute and empty bedpans everywhere but the Boys’ Ward. That was my morning job. I’d take the hot bedpans out of the sterilizer and go from room to room, to all the private rooms where children with more severe cases of polio were in residence, and then to the Girls’ Ward and to some of the rooms at the other end of the corridor, beyond the Boys’ Ward, where adults were in private or semiprivate rooms. Then I’d pick up the bedpans, a slow process, one at a time, the bedpan balanced in my lap, driving the wheelchair carefully so the sloshing urine stayed mostly in the pan. I’d dump the contents and put the soiled pan back in the sterilizer.
I can’t say why—and that I was permitted by Miss Riley to do this job and wanted to do it is curious to me now—but it was entirely satisfactory work.
Every afternoon, I delivered the mail, so my life was carefully ordered: bedpans and then babies, followed by catechism and lunch and mail.
“I don’t have any time for school,” I told Father James when he recommended a tutor so I’d have a goal during my stay. “Miss Riley knows that I’m busy.”
“What do your parents say?” he asked, concerned because most of the children in Second Medical who were not actually sick were being tutored.
“I haven’t talked to them about it,” I said.
I had no intention of bringing it up.
I’d seen the tutor. She worked with Caroline three times a week in math and reading, and even Caroline, who never criticized people, had nothing good to say about her.
But one afternoon between the end of my Thanksgiving plans and the actual celebration of Thanksgiving, Miss Forkman, the tutor, arrived in my room with a pile of books to say that arrangements had been made for me to be tutored three times a week.
“By whom?” I asked.
“I was called,” Miss Forkman said, taking a seat beside my bed, where I was eating lunch. “So I suppose your parents made the arrangements.”
I sensed we were off to a bad start already.
“When I finish lunch, I do the mail,” I said.
“I spoke to Miss Riley and she said you could do the mail later.”
She had brought a sixth-grade social studies textbook, an English grammar book, and a mathematics text.
“These are the books we’ll be working on,” she said and, handing me the social studies text, asked me to read to her so she could check my reading ability.
Miss Forkman was probably forty and maybe even attractive, although I remember her as very old, with a tank build, a wiry bun on top of her head, red lipstick, and short legs.
After the first class, I called my mother. I never called my mother during the week. It was difficult to make long distance calls, because I had to go to the first-floor offices and get help placing the calls, and the secretary didn’t like to do it during the week. But this, I told her, was an emergency.
My mother said she hadn’t been the one to make the arrangements. In fact, she didn’t particularly care whether or not I had tutoring. She cared only that I get better and come home, which was just what I wanted to hear.
My mother had mixed feelings about school. Even when I finally returned to Washington and entered seventh grade at Alice Deal Junior High, where I received too many failing grades, I never felt pressure from her to do well. She had been home-schooled by her father, an academic before he bought the Urbana Mill, who distrusted the school system and objected to its insistence that she write with her right hand. My father, on the other hand, believed that school was a job and I should do it well, and when I didn’t, his response was silence.
I chose to go with my mother and dismissed Miss Forkman after the first day.
On my mail route, I made friends. I’d arrive in a room with a lapful of mail and, especially in the Girls’ Ward, I’d go from bed to bed and listen. I wasn’t the only patient in a wheelchair. There were a number of us who were able to go to the candy store or wander around the foundation grounds or visit rooms. But I had a need to fill my day so there were no empty hours, a fear of loneliness—a kind of desperation is what I think in retrospect. If a white space loomed in the distance of a day, I’d have no barricade against homesickness.
“I understand you got rid of the tutor,” Father James said.
“My mother didn’t make arrangements for me to have tutoring,” I replied. “So I don’t know how the tutor got there in the first place.”
“I sent her,” Father James said.
I should not have been surprised but I was, and humiliated and hurt. Father James was my confidant, my spiritual instructor, my friend. And in my daydreams, he was also what I could conceive of as a lover—his hand on my wrist, on my hair, on the top of my head, his blue, blue eyes focused on me, sufficient to my capacity at eleven to imagine love.
I flew out of his office as fast as an antique wooden and wicker wheelchair could move, down the corridor, down the elevator, out the front door, across the courtyard, past Georgia Hall, and down the hill to the candy store, where I bought a Clark bar, a Grapette soda, and cheese puffs and ate them, one after the other, while parked in a corner next to the building, tears pouring down my cheeks.
Father James found me with Rosie. I had gone to the Babies’ Ward for solace, which is what I found there—those needy babies, their arms outstretched, their eyes darting after me wherever I went. Paisley Jean allowed me to bundle Rosie into a soft yellow snowsuit and cap and, since it was a sunny day, take her out to the courtyard. She sat on my lap, her head against my shoulder, her soft cheek next to mine, and I rode her up and down the paths. She was able to sit, but she couldn’t move her rag-doll legs, so Paisley Jean had tied a towel around her waist and mine to keep her from falling off my lap while I wheeled her.
Father James kneeled beside my wheelchair, his hand on the wheel so I wouldn’t try to get away.
“I can’t talk now,” I said quietly.
“I am sorry,” he said, his delicate hand gripping the arm of my chair. “I misunderstood.”
What was it that he misunderstood? About the arrangement for a tutor and my embarrassment that he thought of me as such a child? About my love for him? About the girl I was, different from the one I seemed to be?
I turned my head away so he wouldn’t see that I’d been crying and take pleasure in the possibility that it might have had to do with him.
On Thanksgiving Day it rained.
In Washington, my parents and Jeffie and Grandma Richards were having dinner at our house. They had invited the Bowmans from next door, whose son had been in Korea. My aunt Janet and uncle Joe and their children would come, and there would probably be a couple of inebriated journalists and some lost soul my father had happened to meet who didn’t have a place to go for dinner. Such occasions at our house were probably replicated in nuclear families all over the transient city, people pulling together a facsimile of the Thanksgiving they remembered from their hometowns, where everyone was family.
Caroline’s parents asked me to have Thanksgiving dinner with them at the cottage where Mrs. Slover stayed on the foundation grounds, but my plan was to go to Thanksgiving with the rest of the hospital in the hope of finding Joey Buckley among the children who had not gone home for the holiday.
In my mind, Joey had a full life. He wasn’t exactly a romantic figure—although I reserved that possibility—but he was a constant companion, and I transmitted my thoughts and fears and worries to him in a kind of one-sided telepathic communication.
After picking up the bedpans—which had to be done on Thanksgiving the same as any other day, though there were fewer patients—I spent the morning in the Children’s Ward.
Rosie was ill. The doctor on call, who came from town—probably a general practitioner, not an orthopedic doctor—was examining her when I went into the ward. Paisley Jean made me wait outside until he finished.
“She’s sickly,” Paisley Jean said after the doctor left and I started my rounds of the ward. “She’s been this way since s
he came here, and her father tells us that it’s because her mother’s dead, but I think it’s because she’s sickly.”
She had a virus, Paisley Jean said, and they were moving her to isolation so the other babies wouldn’t catch it, and as the orderly pushed her crib through the ward and passed me, Rosie reached her arms in the air in my direction.
“Can I follow?” I asked.
“Absolutely not,” Paisley Jean said. “You have to tend to some rules.”
After I finished with Sue Sue, I wheeled over to her desk.
“Where are you going for Thanksgiving dinner?” I asked.
“Here,” Paisley Jean said. “I’m on duty.”
“Maybe I can stay and help you.”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
Paisley Jean went on filling in the charts, her head down, her fingers running through her hair, her pen in and out of her mouth. I think now that she may have liked my company, that she enjoyed satisfying my curiosity with information, and that the other nurses were dutiful and dull. Dull was her word for them, and I took it as a compliment that I was not.
What I wanted to know from her was everything about Rosie.
“She’s ten months old and her mama died in June and she’s got older siblings and her dad takes care of them someplace in Pennsylvania.”
“How do you know she’s sickly?” I asked.
“Because she is. You can tell it to look at her, those droopy eyelids and pale skin and pale blue eyes and thin, thin, thin for a baby. She’s just not healthy.”
“She looks like me when I was a baby. Thin and stuff.”
“Not a chance. You have black hair and black eyes and yellow-brown skin. You couldn’t have looked any more like her than a cocker spaniel.” She shook her head. “You’re a little crazy about babies,” she said. “All they are is puppies waiting to be grown up and no better as grown-ups than a dog. At least that’s the way I see it.”
I don’t know what I was after with Rosie, but I do know how it felt: a deep hollow in my stomach, an urgency to hold her in my arms so tight she’d melt into me and, in some strange process of osmosis, I’d absorb her.
I thought to tell Paisley Jean about this feeling because it was troubling to me, but I said nothing. I told her goodbye and said I was going to get dressed for Thanksgiving in Georgia Hall, but instead I went down the corridor to the isolation rooms, where I assumed Rosie had been taken.
The doctor on call was coming out of one of the rooms and I wheeled toward him and he put his hand on my wheelchair and turned me around.
“Off-limits,” he said.
“I wanted to know about the baby,” I said.
“She’s sick, but she’ll get well, and when she does, you can go back to the ward to visit her.”
“It’s kind of sad, her being sick on Thanksgiving,” I said, with more emotion than I thought I had about it.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “She doesn’t know the difference.”
I started to push the elevator’s up button, and when the doors opened, he got in with me.
“So you like the babies,” he said.
I nodded.
“The nurses have told me about you.”
“Maybe because of the babies,” I said, pleased to have been noticed.
“You seem to get around more than most of the patients here, and you’ve developed something of a reputation. Joey Buckley, in the Boys’ Ward, had a post-op infection that I took care of, and he asked me did I know you. And now I do.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He said that you two are friends.”
“We are,” I said, and I was probably blushing.
When we got out of the elevator, he smiled and tousled my hair and headed toward the Boys’ Ward.
Caroline was gone when I got to the room to dress. Miss Riley stuck her head in the door to say that we’d be leaving in fifteen minutes for Georgia Hall in a caravan of stretchers and wheelchairs, the way we went to the Saturday movies, and I should be dressed soon and ready to line up.
This was an occasion.
I had several dresses in my closet. I actually wore dresses a lot, because they were easier to put on with a cast and more comfortable for sitting in a wheelchair.
My favorite was a red-checked one with long sleeves and white starchy cuffs and a high white collar, a little like a Sister of Mercy, which appealed to me. My mother had made this dress especially for Warm Springs: the skirt was long and full and came to my ankles and covered my cast.
I put the dress on and took out the Alabama baseball cap Joey had given me and went toward the nurses’ station, hoping that those of us in wheelchairs would be at the front of the line and, more important, that I might meet Joey coming out of the Boys’ Ward.
Miss Riley suggested I take off my baseball cap for Thanksgiving dinner, but I said I couldn’t. It was a gift from a friend, another polio, and I might see that person at the dinner.
“But you’re going to be at the president’s party, remember?” Miss Riley said. “You might want to look your fanciest.”
I took off the Alabama cap and put it in my lap.
Dinner was in the late afternoon, probably around five, and it was dark at that hour in November as the wheelchairs and stretchers wound their way to Georgia Hall and the large dining room where we would be celebrating at President Roosevelt’s party. There was a sense of family among us, a colony of outsiders whose lives were dignified by kinship to a man like us who had been president of the United States. Everybody, maybe everybody in the world, knew who he was.
It was my first consciousness of value by association, and I was aware that evening of a kind of glamour, as if I were illuminated in the darkness, seen by my friends and enemies at Sidwell Friends and in my neighborhood as I made my way in the long, long line of us to Georgia Hall.
My mother, who I knew was beautiful, told me that I would be beautiful as well when I grew up, and although I was certain that wasn’t true, I could believe it was a possibility that Thanksgiving night.
There’s a common personality recognized, written about, even filmed, among polio patients—I see it in myself, in others I’ve known, and in my reading about Roosevelt. It’s difficult to know, of course, where nature stops and circumstance takes over. What everyone I knew at Warm Springs certainly shared was a drive to excel, a refusal to quit in the face of extraordinary odds, a determination to go forward and never look back, and a lack of evident self-pity.
Which is not to say that many of us didn’t struggle with depression or anger at our dependency—and so, on record, did the president. Roosevelt’s experience reflected that of so many polios. He was determined to live as if he were not a cripple, for political reasons—if the electorate saw him as physically disabled, it was thought, they would not believe in his strength to run the country—and for personal reasons as well. Politically, it took enormous effort to present himself as strong and able-bodied: to walk with a cane and locked braces, gripping the arm of whichever strong man stood beside him, usually his son James; to be lifted out of the wheelchair, away from public view; to live a life of “splendid deception.”
There is another similarity among polios that struck me in reading about Roosevelt. He was a loner but couldn’t bear to be alone, was warm, outgoing, engaging but friendless, sharing little of himself with others, not grief and not frustration, simply putting forth the illusion of cheeriness and ease and fearlessness.
It was a fine cover for a man whose body no longer belonged to him, and I venture that for polios in general, the desire for control stretches far beyond the definition of normal.
I was at the end of the line of girls who lived in the Girls’ Ward, and I couldn’t find Joey Buckley until we were inside Georgia Hall, and there he was in his wheelchair, separate from the others from the Boys’ Ward.
I put on my Alabama cap.
“I think we can sit anyplace we like,” I said, wheeling over to him.
“
Then you can sit with me and some of the guys,” he said. “I was supposed to go home for Thanksgiving.”
“Me too,” I said.
“My dad got sick and didn’t feel well enough to come get me, and my grandma who lives with us doesn’t drive on highways.”
“I couldn’t leave because my stabilization hasn’t healed.”
We followed the crowd into the large room, candlelit tables with white tablecloths set in a U. On one side of the U were the patients on stretchers, pushed up to the table on their stomachs so they could eat. And on the other side of the U were the wheelchairs. There were no regular chairs at all, no need for a chair except at the far end of the table, the half-circle of the U, an empty chair where Roosevelt would have sat had he been there.
“It’s better than Thanksgiving at my grandma’s,” Joey said to me after grace was spoken, as the plates were served to us. “Like a festival, all us guys together.”
“I’m glad I’m here too,” I said.
In a far corner of the room, a man stood up, tapped his glass, then every one of us tapped our glasses, and the man called out in a booming voice for us to lift our glasses, and we did, our milk or water or coffee—maybe there was wine, I wouldn’t have remembered—in a toast to the head of the table, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
“Thank you, Mr. President,” we cheered in unison, and then there was the clicking of forks and the chatter of voices and happy laughter.
We could have been anywhere on earth where there was a party.
I See the Moon and the Moon Sees Me
I WAS WALKING DOWN Macomb Street toward home in September of 1952, after I had left Warm Springs for good and was attending seventh grade at Alice Deal Junior High School. The brick sidewalks on Macomb Street were uneven and mossy, so walking was difficult for me. I did it slowly and in the company of a changing series of characters with whom I’d be engaged in conversation—sometimes the characters were real although not present, sometimes imagined. On that day I was conscious of being both an observer and a participant. I was being watched.
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