Warm Springs

by Susan Richards Shreve

  “I could get you out.”

  “How could you do it with me in this cast?”

  “I just could,” I said.

  We stayed up all night, watching the sun rise deep yellow over the trees, and I told Caroline things I had never told anyone, things I scarcely thought about or remembered until I started to talk about myself. I was unaccustomed to personal narrative except with my mother.

  I used to think concealment was a virtue, and since I believed myself to be short on virtues, I was glad to count on that one. People told me their lives—girls my age, older girls, boys, grown-ups, people of all ages whom I knew or ran into on streetcars or in bookstores or libraries—and I listened. I was glad to have their lives—it gave me a sense of accumulating friendships. But I kept my own life under wraps. I imagine that Caroline was similar, and spoke to me that night only because it was night and we were vaguely afraid of what might be happening at Warm Springs with Rosie’s polio and whether it could happen to us.

  At one point in the middle of the night, as I faded in and out of sleep, Caroline raised her voice.

  “Please don’t fall asleep,” she said.

  I said I wouldn’t, but I did fall asleep, and she woke me again, this time in a voice near panic.

  “I need you not to sleep!” she said.

  Then, to my own surprise, because it was both personal and revealing, I told her about the promises I used to exact from my parents every night—promise not this and promise not that until my stiff, worried body finally relaxed into the mattress and I fell asleep.

  Caroline was quiet for a long time, so I was primed for one of her acerbic remarks, expecting it. But instead she spoke in a voice more pensive and tentative than I was familiar with from her.

  “We need to keep ourselves a secret.”

  I read a lot of fiction, but only occasionally do I read something that hits home so powerfully that I’m left with the full memory of that first reading. “Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor was one of those stories. I was in my first year of graduate school, sitting up in bed, alternately reading and listening for the waking calls of my first son, and I remember the emotional shock as I reached the end of the story.

  In the story, a young woman with a wooden leg is visited by a traveling Bible salesman, who persuades her to let him come up to her secret hideaway and then prevails on her to take off her wooden leg. He leaves with the leg, and she is trapped in her hideaway and humiliated. I was physically sickened by the story and so disturbed when I finished it that I took a shower and stood under the spray weeping, the water running so my little boy wouldn’t hear me crying.

  When my children, especially my daughters, were young, I warned them against trusting easily. It saddens me that I had children before I knew enough about myself to shield them from my own suspicions. They didn’t need my childhood in addition to their own.

  “Don’t show too much,” I’d say to them. “Don’t let anyone know that you feel helpless.”

  Recently, my younger son was working in Japan with the Special Olympics. He told me that some Japanese, although pleased from a political and economic point of view to host the event, wanted the crippled athletes to be invisible. They would bring bad press if allowed to move freely and mingle with the public.

  And not many years ago, I was standing at a window with one of my colleagues at George Mason University as a work crew was putting in ramps and bars and automatic doors for the handicapped.

  “Why do we need this stuff?” the colleague asked. “These people should stay at home.”

  I don’t think it even crossed his mind that I was one of these people.

  Dr. Stern, who was the head of surgery, arrived at our room early the next morning, just at dawn, in scrubs.

  He took a seat between Caroline’s bed and mine.

  “What’s this I hear about a child with polio at Warm Springs?”

  “That’s what I was told,” I said. “I was told that a baby called Cynthia—I call her Rosie—is in isolation with polio again.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “She has been diagnosed with nonparalytic polio. But it’s unlikely—not impossible but very unlikely—that anyone here will get it.”

  And then he told us about polio, what it is and how it is spread. I had never asked my parents or any doctor about the disease itself, never wanted to know, but Dr. Stern’s scientific explanation gave a specific identity to our lives. The doctor was in our room for half an hour, maybe less, but it was the first time I had been taken so seriously, the first time I had been spoken to by anyone besides my parents who assumed I was capable of understanding the complexities.

  “So we’re polios,” I said to Caroline after Dr. Stern had left. “That’s just who we are.”

  “Like a club, and no one else but us can belong.”

  We laughed, laughed and giggled for a long time, near tears with relief. We were conspirators, finally recognizing each other as residents of the same hometown, where we’d been living as if separated by miles instead of by an air space of three feet.

  When I first arrived in the room I was going to share with Caroline Slover, I noticed that she took exception. I thought she was contemptuous of my stronger body, and perhaps she was. I hadn’t earned my place at Warm Springs.

  Implicit in our relationship was her fear of dependency and what my arrival as her roommate might mean to her, so we skirted each other’s tiny territory. I misunderstood her reserve as a judgment and we never spoke of it. She was independent of help or sympathy. I should have realized that however long it took her to move from one place to another, she would do it alone. The same instinct was deep in the fabric of my own character.

  I was a kind of steward, custodial in my friendships. There is a photograph of me walking before I contracted polio, so I had only just learned to walk, and my head is turned back toward a little girl behind me who is dragging a wagon. My hand reaches out to her. My mother used to show me that picture as an example of my sweet and generous nature. But then again, she was my mother.

  Whether I would have been that same child without polio, who’s to say? But caretaking became a safety net for me as I negotiated the life of a normal, healthy child, gravitating to those who were frail or needy or lonely or simply, like me, outsiders.

  If I made myself indispensable, then I would never be left alone.

  To be left alone was my great fear, but at that time I would not have believed it. I thought of myself as invincible of spirit, which is how my mother saw me. And it is possible that her belief was a bridge to my own eventual hard-won belief that I might, just might, survive without her.

  In character studies of Franklin Roosevelt, much is made of his isolation and reserve, his refusal to become preoccupied with problems, his insistence on optimism, his loneliness. In everything I’ve read, Roosevelt was warm and engaging before the public and restrained in his intimate relationships.

  He was, especially after he had polio, always surrounded by people, both by necessity and by choice. Yet his various biographers would argue that in spirit he was always alone.

  Although such a description of character speaks to his aristocratic upbringing and his position as an only child, to the climate of the times and his particular construct of a warm and gregarious personality, it also reflects the problems of dependency and how they arrange themselves to protect a person’s vulnerability.

  When my youngest child, Kate, was nine or ten, her choral group planned to sing a Japanese children’s song at an event at the Kennedy Center, sponsored by the Japanese embassy.

  “I can’t do it,” she said the night before the event was to take place. “People will see my mistakes.”

  “How many children in your chorus?” I asked.

  “Maybe a hundred.”

  “You won’t make a mistake,” I said, “but even if you were to do so, how would anyone know with so many people onstage?”

  “I would know,” she said.

 
; Kate was born when I was five and a half months pregnant. She was tiny, fragile, sickly, and we hovered over her, rushed her to emergency rooms, stayed up all night, ever watchful, my eyes glued to her every breath. I was a nervous, smothering, ensnaring terrier of a mother with her, and it was no wonder that she was afraid she’d be visible in a chorus of a hundred children.

  I too would have imagined that I was being watched, not for my failures, as worried Kate, but for my imagined and various successes.

  When I retrieved my first novel, the one I had written five years after I left Warm Springs, I had forgotten the story. It had been more than forty years since I had written it, and I’d never looked at it again after I graduated from college. I wanted to read it this time for the context, certain that there would be many particulars in that story on which I could count for this one, places and people and the look and feel of things, including myself, things I certainly had forgotten. And I was right.

  I recognized a memory of myself and my parents and Caroline and others, what I did every day, how I assembled a life with other people—much made of little, in that story as in this one.

  I have never forgotten the end of my time at Warm Springs. As I was reading along in Wooden and Wicker, prepared for the inevitability of the last chapter, I was stunned to discover that in the novel I had changed the single significant event of my years at Warm Springs to suit my desire for a different conclusion.

  When I was eight, I was given a set of opera librettos by my aunt Elsie. I loved the high drama of the stories and decided to put them on in our living room for my parents and some of the neighbors—without the music, of course. I did no rewriting of the librettos except for the final acts, which usually concluded in disaster, with the characters dying or disappearing or left in some state of despair.

  I crossed out the last page of each set of librettos, and in its place I wrote: “And they all lived happily ever after.”

  III

  DRESS REHEARSAL

  The Art of the Positive

  IN LATE JUNE OF 1951, after spending six months at home, I was to return to Warm Springs for a final year, during which I would have muscle transplants. The stabilization that was the first stage of surgery was successful and I had gone home for Christmas. So had Joey Buckley.

  “I won’t be back until summer,” he said. “The stabilizations are going to have to heal before they can do any more surgery.”

  I was stunned with sadness. For days after he left, I sat in my wheelchair outside the candy store eating Clark bars.

  That Christmas, my parents had photographs taken of Jeffrey and me in our ordinary lives, as if our lives were ordinary. I had returned from Warm Springs in worse shape than I’d been in when I arrived. I was in braces, on crutches, in orthopedic shoes with a three-and-a-half-inch lift, and the Clark bars had taken effect.

  There are pictures of us in front of John Eaton Elementary School and the Congregational church, which was the closest church to our house, although we had almost never attended it; in front of Alice Deal Junior High, where I would go when I finally returned from Warm Springs; on our front steps; on the swings at the Macomb Street playground across the street; with General Beauregard in the back yard—posed photographs of a life we didn’t lead, Jeffie and I dressed in appropriate outfits for the recorded occasions.

  It was so unlike my parents to send out photographs of their children to relatives in Ohio and Michigan, to the friends with whom they’d grown up, as if we were a normal American family. It was as though they were somehow ashamed and wanted to prove to others that we were normal now, finally, at Christmas 1950, and that we were all well and happy at school, in church, cavorting with our dog in the back yard.

  We were odd. We would have been odd if I hadn’t had polio, if Jeffie hadn’t been dead terrified of school, if Grandma Richards had been a regular grandma and let her boobs go the way of all flesh instead of buying new ones at the five-and-ten, if my father had asked the drunks to sleep in their own houses, if he’d left the stray cats and dogs on the streets and given up civil rights as a personal war in a segregated city.

  I wanted to go back to Warm Springs. I had planned a triumphant return to Washington and this first visit was a fiasco, a complete failure, but I kept it to myself.

  When my mother asked why I didn’t want to see my friends at home, I told her that I wanted to stay around the house with the family. And that was true. Even when Harold Ickes called to invite me to the farm, I told him I wasn’t allowed.

  The plan was that I’d return to Warm Springs for muscle transplant surgery and then physical therapy through the winter and return home again in late spring, to spend a month at the end of sixth grade at John Eaton Elementary. I’d then travel back again in June with my mother for a last series of surgeries.

  My mother would not travel by herself. She was able to drive with a child in the car, so it wasn’t the actual driving that frightened her. It was driving alone. I wasn’t aware of this phobia until that June, when I was disappointed to learn that my grandmother Lindsey Greene, my mother’s stepmother, whom I disliked more intensely than I have ever disliked anyone in my life, would be coming with us.

  I should have sensed something fragile about my mother, but we lived in a kind of maze, a finely spun fairy tale created by my parents in which some things were clear and some were fuzzy, but the general tone of our lives together as a family gave the impression of honesty and closeness, and so I assumed that what I saw was true. I didn’t realize until I was older that seeing is a matter of choice.

  Sometime after I was eight and had been healthy for maybe as long as a year, my mother retreated to her room. She did it gracefully, as if it were a plan she’d had in order to accomplish something I was too young to understand, as if it wouldn’t have interested me in any case. For almost a year, until I was preparing to go to Warm Springs, she lived in her room. We lived there, off and on, with her—General Beauregard and Jeffie and I and Grandma Richards. Often my aunt Janet, who was my mother’s cousin by her father’s second marriage, was there, and my father too, when he got home from work. He had their bedroom door replaced with a Dutch door, the top half of which was kept open onto the hall so my mother could hear what was going on in the house without having to leave her room. We ate dinner in my parents’ bedroom, and after dinner we played games. It was cheerful and I loved coming home from school knowing exactly where to find her.

  Nothing ever got said about the obvious, that it was unusual for a mother to spend all of her time in her bedroom. And so, it became the way we lived.

  I didn’t mention it to my friends. And I wasn’t much interested in inviting them over to play.

  Once a week, I’d go with her in the afternoon to Dr. April, who was an asthma doctor. A taxi would pick us up, since my mother was no longer driving. I’d go up in the elevator and sit in the waiting room while she got shots from Dr. April and they talked. Usually it took an hour, and then we’d go home by taxi and I’d follow her up to her bedroom, where she’d go to bed.

  The shots, she said, exhausted her.

  “Do you have asthma?” I once asked her.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

  One day, she came out of her room, went downstairs, put a leash on General Beauregard, and took him for a walk. And that night we had dinner in the dining room.

  We did not discuss the year we lived in my parents’ bedroom until years later, when I was in my early twenties and married. My father was dead by then, and I had started to have debilitating panic attacks.

  “I think I’m losing my mind,” I told my mother.

  “I promise you’re not losing your mind,” she said, echoing the language that hushed my childhood fears. “They used to call this condition a nervous breakdown.”

  And that was that.

  Lindsey Greene caused my mother great unhappiness. According to family legend, easy to believe, my grandfather married Lindsey, a maiden lady fifteen years older than my
mother whose fiancé had been killed in the First World War, under duress. Urbana was a small, incestuous town, and he had a young daughter with whom, by Urbana standards, he should not have been living in a rooming house alone. When he died in an accident at his mill, not long after they were married, my mother was left alone with Lindsey’s rage and mercurial temper.

  One night when I was six and Jeffie a baby and we were living in Georgetown, I got up the courage to tell my mother that I didn’t like her mother very much.

  My mother was leaning on the door of my bedroom, lovely and mysterious in the diffused light from the hall.

  “You don’t have to like her, darling,” she said, and then, in a voice wistful and sweet and so very quiet I could barely hear her: “I had a real mother once.”

  We drove to Urbana: eight hours across Maryland, to the Pennsylvania Turnpike, into West Virginia and then Ohio. I loved being in a car alone with my mother, or a train or a boat, and we went places together, just the two of us, even after I was married. I don’t know what we talked about, but we always talked and talked. About her past, about my future. She listened on these trips as if there were no one in her life who held so much fascination for her.

  The house in Urbana where my mother had lived with Lindsey Greene—where her father had died and where she had married my father—was Lindsey’s house, but it had been left by my grandfather to my mother. This particular point was made clear to me when I was very young, and what it meant, as far as I was concerned, was that the house where Lindsey lived belonged to our family with Grandma Richards and General Beauregard. It wouldn’t have been an issue for a girl except for the fact that my father wasn’t allowed to spend the night at what we called 222 College Street, in order to avoid calling it Lindsey Greene’s.