Warm Springs

by Susan Richards Shreve

  My mother had outfits for all occasions. Dresses she wore to travel, suits for the afternoon, long skirts and fitted blouses for the evening. I believe that having been stalked by emergencies, she gained a sense of control by dressing in clothes she made herself, familiar to her skin, by dressing elegantly so people stopped on the street to look at her, wondering whether she was a fashion model. When I was young, I loved to see what she would be wearing, what new original she had cut and stitched overnight. But by the time I was an adolescent, I wanted her to dress like everybody else’s mother, in sensible clothes, skirts and sweaters, penny loafers and knee socks, and not as if she had fallen out of the pages of the French Vogue pattern book she kept on her bedside table. I wanted her to buy my clothes off the rack too.

  But not that summer in Warm Springs. Just to see her coming toward me took my breath away.

  She sat down and pulled up the chair next to my bed.

  “Dr. Iler says you are doing wonderfully,” she said. “You look much better this morning.”

  “How can you tell?” I asked.

  “The color in your cheeks,” she said.

  My mother determined everything by the color in my cheeks, which were inclined to yellow.

  “I hear Lindsey is sick.”

  “She is sick.” Her voice was tentative.

  “How sick?” I asked, determined not to let on that it made a difference whether Lindsey was ill or just feigning illness, as I believed she was doing so she could go home.

  “I think the heat has gotten the best of her.”

  “Then maybe she should leave,” I said.

  There was a long pause, and then my mother talked about the operation and its success and what Dr. Iler had to say about the future—two months in a cast, then a peek at how the surgery had worked, and if it had been as successful as the doctor thought, I’d begin physical therapy, walking between the bars, soaking in hot paraffin, swimming in the baths. And then a second transplant, once they saw how the therapy had worked. And maybe—just a possibility—the transplant would have worked so well, a second operation would not be necessary. This I remember.

  My mother was direct, and it wasn’t like her to suggest the possibility that I might leave Warm Springs early if she had not been under pressure to compensate for something I didn’t know.

  “Maybe Lindsey could take a train back to Columbus and a taxi to Urbana,” I said.

  “I don’t think she’ll be willing to do that.”

  I was twelve that summer, my mother thirty-nine, and Lindsey fifty-four. I know fifty-four. It isn’t old and wasn’t then. Her heart was fine, although she always talked about it. Jeffie and I used to say that Lindsey Greene didn’t have one, that there was just a hole in her chest for a heart. She would live to be one hundred and three, outliving my mother by more than twenty years.

  “I’m taking Lindsey home,” my mother said, her voice neither exploratory nor apologetic. “It’s very hot, hot for her at least, and she has a heart condition, or perhaps she has something with her heart, but under the circumstances and because you’re such a grown-up . . .” She could go on and on, especially when she was nervous. “I think we’re leaving this afternoon for Ohio.” And then she added, to be sure I understood, “We are leaving this afternoon.”

  “That’s fine,” I said, without a missed beat, quick to rebound, to construct a mechanism concealing disappointment even from myself. “Soon I’ll be back in my wheelchair and can go anyplace I wish.”

  “Of course you will,” she said, relieved.

  Apparently Dr. Iler had reassured her that I was well enough for her to leave, that Miss Riley would pay special attention to me.

  “If you’re even the least bit sick or upset or unhappy,” she told me, “I’ll be back in a flash”

  “On an airplane?” I asked, and she laughed and so did I, since we both knew that my mother didn’t fly in airplanes.

  My mother stayed most of that second day with me, a day of practical advice for getting through the next couple of months, when she’d be back to visit. She brought me sanitary napkins and some candy and a new nightgown and said she would send books from Washington to read.

  “Since you don’t want to have tutoring,” she said. “What books would you like me to send?”

  “Big-family books, like Five Little Peppers and How They Grew and Little Women and Cheaper by the Dozen—books about a child in a huge family with a lot happening all the time.”

  “I’ll send you my collection of Little Colonel stories about Virginia Lloyd,” she said. These were my mother’s favorite childhood books, a Victorian series about a young girl, like Nancy Drew but domestic and without the element of mystery.

  “Don’t worry about sending the Little Colonel,” I said. “Nothing happens, and her family is too small.”

  I didn’t watch her leave.

  “Is your mom going for good?” Sandy Newcombe asked.

  “We have a family emergency,” I said. “And I’m fine by myself.”

  For years, I didn’t remember that she had left precipitously the second day after my surgery. I recalled only having vague misgivings about my second stay in Warm Springs and why it had ended the way it did.

  Years later, when I was in my thirties, my mother, in her sixties, was dying, although we didn’t know it at the time. It was June of the summer that she died, in August, and she brought up the summer of 1951.

  It was evening, and we were sitting on the screened porch of her house, my children were sleeping, and we were talking with the same ease we had had all my life.

  She had something to tell me.

  Now I think that she sensed she might be dying and wanted to put things in some kind of order, although I had no particular sense of disorder. She had taught me never to go to bed angry. I believe she lived by that as well as a person could. She was a child in her need for emotional immediacy.

  After she died, my brother and I found a spiral notebook of her life. She seemed not to have kept it up for a long time. Its literal language and nonreflective tone, its careful linear chronicle of events, made it important to me only for the facts it included. Among these was a record of her leaving Warm Springs with Lindsey two days after I had surgery. “Morning of third day after Susan’s surgery. Left to take Lindsey back to Urbana.” She didn’t say why she’d left, only that she had.

  When my mother died in 1981, her will left everything to Jeffrey and me. Lindsey, then in her mid-eighties, got in her car and drove from Urbana to Washington to meet Jeff and me for lunch.

  “She left me nothing,” Lindsey said, “not even an ashtray.”

  We had no reason to speak to her again after that, and didn’t. But one winter afternoon when I had gone to Urbana with Jeffrey for the funeral of our aunt Janet—Lindsey’s niece, my mother’s cousin by marriage—Lindsey drove up to Oakdale Cemetery in her white Cadillac, rolled down the window, and looked at me with a peculiar expression, more like curiosity than anything else.

  “Betty?” she asked, calling me by my mother’s name, and I believe she thought I was my mother. “I didn’t think I’d see you here.”

  “Well, here I am,” I said.

  That night on the screened porch, my mother apologized for leaving me alone when I was barely out of surgery.

  “I was fine,” I said.

  “You were not fine,” she said.

  She wanted me to acknowledge that she had left me there. She wanted me to accept her apology, and I did, although I had only a shimmer of memory about her departure, until much later, when those June days came back of a piece.

  I was in bed for almost a week after my mother left, not unusual with surgery at that time. Though the recovery seemed to go on forever, I had a plan in mind.

  It was warm and sultry that summer, a sleepy softness to the air, with light breezes coming through the windows of the ward and across our languid bodies. I spent hours, half propped up by a pillow, lingering over the details of my plan for surviv
al over the next eleven months, more or less without my mother’s company.

  I would be an entirely different girl. An invention to suit the times, a construct in the long tradition of self-made men and women, and in this case, the goal was goodness.

  In my Survival Notebook, I made a list of good works that included visiting one new sick person every day, concentrating on the adult patients and those patients who were actually sick and whom I would be permitted to visit. I’d continue my jobs of mail and bedpans and would write letters to the people I never wrote to, like Grandma Richards and Caroline Slover’s mother, who regularly sent me get-well cards. I’d write to Lindsey for the sake of forgiveness—not a virtue I in general pursued—and my teachers at Sidwell Friends, from which I had been more or less expelled. I would get in touch with Miss Forkman and start up tutoring, and I would obey the rules of Warm Springs and respect those in authority.

  I had never been a good girl, in the conventional perception of goodness as obedience, and at some level I knew that I needed a self-corrective list, as if I were learning a new language and had to practice my verbs by constant repetition of their conjugation.

  “Good girl” was a term widely used in the fifties. An expectation, a ticket of admission, a rule of life in an atmosphere of rules. It usually referred to sexual behavior, but it had a trickle-down effect. At eleven or twelve or even younger, success for a girl was goodness and selection for the cheerleading squad, not a contradictory pairing in those years.

  Sometime in 1951, The Power of Positive Thinking, by the Protestant minister Norman Vincent Peale, was published. It struck an immediate chord among postwar Americans. We were a great country, victors at war and at home, economically successful, a forceful challenge to the Communists, God- and family-centered, reproducing like rabbits into a promising future, clean and virtuous and good. It was for so many Americans, especially in the provinces, a period in which the Puritan virtues of hard work and strong moral values triumphed, and being different was considered suspect, even un-American. There was a conviction reflected in The Power of Positive Thinking that individual will could prevail; it was only a matter of believing in it.

  The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951 as well. Holden Caulfield’s story of hypocrisy and alienation captured a generation of young Americans with its new voice of outrage. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sentenced to death for transmitting atomic secrets as spies for the Soviet Union. The Communist Party was effectively outlawed in a decision handed down by the Supreme Court, Dennis v. United States. And the first postwar nuclear test on American soil occurred at the Nevada Test Site, not far from Las Vegas; the government assured the area’s residents that there was no danger. In fact, radioactive fallout contaminated the atmosphere as far as two hundred miles away, causing radiation-connected illnesses, denied by the government for years.

  In Jonas Salk’s laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh, researchers with funding from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, supported by the March of Dimes and other extraordinary volunteer fund-raising efforts, were, in 1951, close to a field trial of a polio vaccine.

  By the time I was dismissed from bed rest after surgery, my bed had been moved three places to the right along the wall, next to Avie Crider on one side and Anna Fitz on the other. Sandy Newcombe and her endless chatter were next to the door.

  In those first weeks after my mother left, traveling first to Urbana to drop off Lindsey and then to Columbus, where my father flew to join her so she didn’t have to drive home alone, she wrote me two or three letters a day. She had taken up drawing. The pictures she sent were little squiggles at the end of a letter, of a girl in a wheelchair with very large wheels and the girl’s hair sticking straight up, giving the impression that she was moving very fast. I loved these pictures. They brought me the whimsical mother I knew, which her literal, newsy letters did not reveal.

  And I’d write back full of the happy inventions of daily life at Warm Springs.

  I never thought about her leaving with Lindsey. And if I had, I would have placed the blame on Lindsey, not my mother.

  I filled every moment of my day from breakfast to lights out with work, leaving little time to think. That was good.

  The second stay at Warm Springs had taken on a different tone. Pensive, sometimes melancholy, tentative. I was twelve, somewhere between childhood and something else. Tentative and melancholy were not adjectives I had associated with myself before. Living in my own body had come to feel precarious, as if I were on a balancing bar and had to pay attention.

  The list I made in my Survival Notebook looked something like this:

  7:00 A.M. Breakfast

  7:30 A.M. Bedpans

  8:30 A.M. Visit Adult Ward, room 12, with cookies

  I got cookies from the candy store and took them, three or four in a paper napkin, as a gift when I went to visit patients, something I had learned from Grandma Richards, who traveled everywhere with cookies in her purse, just in case she met someone she liked.

  9:00 A.M. Babies’ Ward

  10:00 A.M. Tutoring with Miss Forkman (Tuesday and Thursday)

  11:30 A.M. Lunch

  12:00-2:00 P.M. Read. Talk to one of the girls in the ward.

  I went around the room with a plan to talk to the patients confined to bed, so that by the end of two weeks, every two weeks, I would have spent time with each of them. Given a choice, I might have spent all of my time with Avie Crider, but according to my own rules, I had to spend the same amount of time with Sandy Newcombe.

  2:00 P.M. Mail delivery

  4:00 P.M. Bedpans

  5:00 P.M. Dinner

  6:00 P.M. Joey

  7:30 P.M. Bed

  Nighttime in the ward was cozy. We giggled and whispered. We sang together and told outrageous stories of what we might do when we got out. Often someone would start a story and it would go around the room from bed to bed, each of us adding to it when our turn came.

  Those nights were as close as I got to a sense of family at Warm Springs, as close as I have ever felt to belonging to a group.

  All that summer and fall of 1951, I kept to my Florence Nightingale routine of good works, waking up every morning relieved to have my day planned down to the last minute, including the visits I would make in the various rooms, unaware that the life I was leading was one of lonely desperation.

  Whatever had happened between my mother and me when she left with Lindsey, I had turned into an escape artist.

  There wasn’t an excess of sympathy from my mother. No indulgences. No special considerations. A handicap was a handicap and no more.

  When I had children, there were always special considerations. Whether I consciously chose to be different from my mother or was unconsciously making up for what I had missed or was simply a mother of my time, an offshoot of the sixties, I was looser with rules, more indulgent in the child-centered, freewheeling household I created, full of noise and cats and dogs and a certain amount of unbridled confusion.

  My children, now grown, tell me they will make their children go to school every day and on time, unless they have a high fever.

  I would have been a different person without my mother’s perseverance. I would have been different without Warm Springs.

  At the very heart of fiction—and writing fiction is what I have done all my professional life—is character and change. Does the character, in the most simplistic sense, change as a result of what happens to him in the story? We want to think one thing leads to another. We have the need to believe that life experiences matter.

  My mother was not unusual among the caretakers of polios, including Eleanor Roosevelt, who pushed their charges to live beyond their limitations.

  I look at the pictures of Franklin Roosevelt differently than I did when I started to write this memoir. Before, I saw his strong, smiling face, his powerful torso and shapely hands, the physical force of his presence. And just as he would have wished, I didn’t see the wheelchair or the cr
utches or the tight grip of a man standing next to him, holding him up.

  What I see in photographs now is the courage of his laughter, the pain of standing, the ten-pound weight of steel he carried on his legs and how it wore him down. This giant of a man sitting in the company of standing men, no taller than he was and of no more force. What it must have taken to be that man. He wanted the life he had, and he must have loved it, but it came at great cost and with powerful loneliness.

  I don’t claim this as my story; it is the story of most of the children with whom I lived at Warm Springs. The Power of Positive Thinking was in their blood. They didn’t need to read the book.

  In the past twenty years, a new condition has been discovered among polios called post-polio syndrome, which seems to have affected about 50 percent of the people who had polio decades earlier. The symptoms are general weakness, a loss of muscle control, and in some cases the return to a wheelchair, even to bed. These symptoms are similar to the original illness, including the pain associated with the onset of the virus. Physicians and scientists have concluded that the previously determined, ambitious, hard-driving polios have perhaps worn out the ancillary muscles, and the body has given up.

  I was asked several years ago whether I’d agree to be part of a research study, in a control group of patients who had not yet experienced post-polio syndrome, and I refused. At the time, my reason was simple: I was suggestible, and I felt that I’d end up with post-polio if I joined the group.