Warm Springs

by Susan Richards Shreve

“I think you’re becoming too good friends,” Miss Riley said, and pulled the door almost closed so the light in the hall didn’t keep us awake.

  But we stayed awake. We were always getting ready for March of Dimes Day.

  The morning of July 15 was hot even before the sun rose. A new girl had been admitted the night before, in the last bed against the far wall. Her name was Angela, and that night while we giggled in our beds, she was crying softly, her back to us. We knew from one of the orderlies that she would be having surgery in two days, which meant that on March of Dimes Day she wouldn’t be in the ward but downstairs having a physical and other tests. We were relieved to have her gone, and it was lucky, we all said, that Angela had not been admitted the day before, or else on March of Dimes Day she would have been in the first bed, post-operative and probably screaming out in pain, as happened to all of us when we came out of anesthesia.

  But Avie was back and so was Julie, so the beds were almost full.

  “I suppose you know that one of us is going to be the poster child this year,” Polly said to Miss Anna when she came in with the breakfast trays. Miss Anna was new that summer, just out of nursing school, and what I remember about her is her crackling laughter and big freckled hands.

  “One of you girls is going to be the poster child?” she asked.

  We nodded.

  “One of us,” I said. “We’re all under consideration.”

  “How come I didn’t know about this?” Miss Anna asked.

  “No reason you should know. We find out today.”

  “I suppose you know what the poster child is, don’t you?” Janet asked.

  “Who doesn’t?” Miss Anna said. “The posters are hanging all over hell and gone. Some little blond angel is the poster child this year.”

  She stood at the door and looked around the room. “Something crazy’s going on here,” she said.

  We all had big smiles on our faces as if we’d been practicing happiness, which we had been, sitting up straight in bed if we could sit up, or our heads raised out of body casts like turtles.

  “Well, they were looking for a girl again this year,” I said, “and they decided to look in the Girls’ Ward at Warm Springs.”

  “Well I’ll be darned,” Miss Anna said.

  One of the orderlies, called Jimbo, came to take Angela downstairs to have her physical, and Miss Anna stopped him.

  “Do you know those polio poster kids, Jimbo?” she asked. “All smiles and skinny with braces heavy as dump trucks on their legs and big corsets so they can sit up happy as clams?”

  “I know those pictures,” Jimbo said. “We’ve got one next door to my place at the drugstore.”

  “Well, one of these girls might be the poster child next year.”

  “No kidding?” Jimbo said, lifting Angela into a wheelchair. “How do you get to be a poster child?”

  “You have to have a terrible story,” I said. “And smile a lot.”

  “So give me a terrible story,” he said, directing his remark to Bootsie, who was sitting in bed, her legs dangling over the side, her eyes dancing.

  “I got polio in the swimming pool at the playground down the street when I was seven, and some kids got it and died, and I almost died but I didn’t. And then my parents were so fed up because they had to carry me everyplace that they gave me to my grandmother, and now I’m here because there were enough dimes collected to get me here and get me better and now I’m almost well.”

  “I guess you are,” Miss Anna said.

  “Is that a true story?” Jimbo asked.

  “Every bit of it is true,” Bootsie said.

  “I thought I met your mother.”

  “Bootsie’s mother came but she didn’t stay like my mother didn’t stay, so it’s been Bootsie here for almost a year,” Janet said. “And not even one person has come to visit her, so she’s getting well all by herself.”

  “I see that,” Jimbo said.

  Janet had the worst story, and part of it was actually true, like the story of Rosie in the Babies’ Ward.

  “I got polio when I was five in Oregon and my little sister died of it and my big brother almost died and is still in an iron lung and I was in an iron lung for six months and now look at me.”

  “You don’t look all that good to me,” Jimbo said. “Not ‘til you cut loose of that plaster.”

  “I’m going to be fine,” Janet said. “I’m going to walk out of here without braces or crutches and I’m giving away my wheelchair to Bootsie.”

  “What about you, Polly?”

  “I got polio when I was three, and we were on the only vacation my parents had ever taken. I was the youngest child of five children, and now they’ll never be able to take another vacation because I can’t walk and it’s a lot of trouble for my parents. And that’s all.”

  “You’re less trouble than anyone I know, Polly,” Jimbo said.

  “Except to my mother. She takes care of me all the time.”

  “You didn’t make anything up,” I whispered to Polly.

  “I can’t make things up,” Polly said. “I would’ve done it but I just don’t know how.”

  Jimbo pushed Angela out the door, passing Miss Riley, who came in with laxatives and other meds.

  “What’s this I hear about a poster child in this ward?” Miss Riley asked. “This is not exactly a poster child ward.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It means what it says,” Miss Riley went on. “And how come I never heard about this before?”

  “We didn’t have a chance to tell you.”

  “Well, who told you?” she asked.

  I was the best liar in the group, the most practiced liar.

  “My father knows Basil O’Connor,” I said, “and he recommended to Mr. O’Connor that he look for the poster child in our ward.”

  “I think Mr. O’Connor should be thinking about raising the salaries of the nursing staff instead of looking for poster children,” Miss Riley said.

  “He’s maybe doing that too,” I added for good luck.

  Father James, who had been alerted to the contest, arrived at lunchtime and listened to Sandy Newcombe’s story about catching polio in Georgia at her aunt’s house and not being able to get out of bed when she woke up in the morning.

  “You were all invited to try out for poster child?” Father James asked.

  “We were,” Bootsie said. “They thought it would be a good idea to find a girl at Warm Springs to put on a happy, get-better-and-better-every-day face, and that’s who we are, all of us.”

  “Not every day,” Father James said, sitting down beside Polly, running his fingers through her hair. “And Polly, it’s very nice to see you so cheerful.”

  “I would like to win,” Polly said quietly.

  “Wouldn’t everybody like to win?” he asked.

  “I’d like to win the most,” Polly said. “It would make my mother very happy.”

  I remember that in particular—remember how many times I wanted to do something to balance the sadness I had brought my own mother. But I never would have said it out loud, never would have wanted anyone to know how much I counted on my mother’s happiness for my own. Had it taken courage, I wondered, for Polly to tell the real truth about herself, or was she by nature incapable of invention?

  “What about you?” Father James asked, leaning over my bed.

  I shrugged.

  “I won’t win,” I said. I didn’t add, “I’m not sick enough,” but that is what I was thinking.

  “I heard you were sent to an orphanage when you were small, yes?” He was smiling.

  “That’s right,” I said, “but not for long.”

  We voted after dinner, and I was chosen to count the votes. I tore off pieces of notebook paper and passed them around the room, then collected the votes while everybody waited, watching.

  “I bet it’s Janet,” Sandy Newcombe said.

  “It won’t be me,” Janet said. “I didn’t vote
for myself.”

  “Me neither,” Sandy said.

  “Me neither,” Bootsie said.

  I opened the votes one by one, putting them face-up on my bed.

  Polly. Polly. Polly. Polly. Polly . . .

  Everyone had voted for Polly.

  That night I couldn’t go to sleep. The breathing of the girls, no different from any other night, was thunder in my ears.

  “It was fun, Suzie,” Bootsie called across the room.

  “It really was fun,” Janet said.

  “I liked best that we all did this together,” Avie said.

  “That it was our own private secret,” Polly said.

  And everybody clapped. They clapped so loudly that Miss Riley came in and told us to hush or we’d wake the babies on the floor below. Then she walked over to my bed.

  “I’m leaving a note from Joey Buckley on your bedside table,” she said.

  “Can I turn on the light and read it?” I asked, my heart leaping.

  “I’ve read it already. All it says is he wants to meet you tomorrow morning and go to the candy store. He has a new wheelchair.”

  “Tell him yes,” I said. “Tell him I’ll meet him first thing in the morning after breakfast.”

  I listened to the steady tread of her oxfords across the linoleum floor.

  “Silence from now on, girls,” she said, closing our door. “Did you hear me?”

  “Yes,” we said in unison.

  I heard her voice in the distance, speaking to one of the night nurses, and then the hall was silent.

  “Thank you for clapping, everybody,” I said after Miss Riley had gone.

  A Changing Friendship

  FATHER JAMES CALLED me into the office on the ground floor of Second Medical and said he had something he wanted to talk to me about.

  I wheeled in and pulled up next to his desk.

  Except for March of Dimes Day in Ward 8, I hadn’t seen much of him since June. He’d been especially busy, having taken on a parish in the next village, and he was spending only two days a week at Warm Springs. We had dropped catechism classes until early spring, which worked for me since I was busy myself, with my self-betterment program and other things. Including Joey Buckley.

  “How is everything going?” he asked.

  “Really good,” I said. “I’m very happy here.”

  I think I was happy that fall. The nurses, especially Miss Riley, seemed glad to have me back. Dr. Iler said he had heard good things about me. I had been well known during my first stay, but the staff were wary of me, expecting a disturbance when I was around. I was beginning to find a new place for myself. I still didn’t understand what had gone wrong with Magnolia, why I had been in so much trouble for that friendship. I continued to play with her the two days she was at Warm Springs, but we played under the table, where she’d been told to stay, and I didn’t take her on wheelchair rides.

  I felt subdued, as if some of my former self had dropped out and I was left with the shell of the girl I’d been. But it wasn’t bad. The rise in my approval rating filled me with a kind of mirth. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to be good.

  That was the first thing Father James said.

  “I’ve heard good things,” he said. “Great things. When you were here last year, you were always in trouble here and there, dragging Magnolia into the Children’s Ward, invading the Boys’ Ward. You seem to have settled down.”

  He looked different, maybe older. He did have more gray in the semicircle of hair around the crown of his head and wrinkles on the sides of his eyes. But something else had changed. I wasn’t sure what was unfamiliar, only that I could see it.

  I didn’t want to appear settled down, exactly. Not with Father James. I’d seen enough movies to prefer a walk-on-the-wild-side girl. I took the films that we saw every Saturday to heart. Especially the love scenes.

  “Do you know about sex?” I asked Joey Buckley once.

  “I don’t talk about it, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” I said. “I mean do you know stuff.”

  But Joey was finished with the conversation before it even got started. He reached into his pocket, took out a cigarette, and stuck it behind my ear.

  “Don’t smoke it,” he said. “We’re not allowed.”

  Father James got up from the desk, walked over, and pulled a chair up next to mine, crossing his legs at the knee.

  “Miss Riley said you’re winning the good citizenship award.”

  “Is there a good citizenship award?”

  “If there were one, you’d win it, is what she said.”

  It was, I thought later, what I had wanted. An award for citizenship. To be admired if not loved. Loved was something else, only possible with the very few people who knew me inside out and who, knowing the inside, forgave the outside. That would be my mother and my father and maybe Jeffrey. Not a large group. But I was hoping, before I left Warm Springs, to include in it Father James and Joey Buckley.

  “What I want to talk to you about is Joey Buckley,” he said.

  There was a mark on his face I hadn’t noticed before, a darkness on one cheek that ran the length of it, as if he had been accidentally burned, and then I wondered whether I had seen it before and thought it was dirt.

  “We’re getting to be good friends.”

  I could feel a cautionary tale in progress.

  “Good friends, I know. And that’s great. But I was thinking . . . actually Miss Riley brought it up. I was thinking you ought to know something about the relationship between girls and boys at your age.”

  “I don’t want to know anything like that from you,” I said.

  I started for the door, and he grabbed the arm of my wheelchair.

  “I have one more thing to talk to you about.”

  I don’t know whether I was embarrassed or caught in my secret fantasies or simply too young, too immature, to deal with an unedited conversation about sex.

  “Do you still want to become a Catholic?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I would have said yes if I’d been given a second chance. I did want to be a Catholic, but maybe less than I had before. I still loved the mystery and excitement of the rituals, but I no longer needed Catholicism in the way I had when religion had to do with a need for safety and an erotic attraction to Father James, and the two seemed one when I wanted the body and the blood.

  Now I had a private life. Sometime that fall, when I was wheeling from one place to the next with a purpose, always with a purpose, bedpans or mail or gestures of friendship, I recognized in the empty vat of my chest something like substance, as if I were in the process of becoming someone familiar, my own best friend traveling always at my side.

  “For the moment, I’m putting catechism on the back burner while I get used to this new schedule of having a parish,” Father James said. “There are real things we need to talk about. I was thinking about that yesterday.”

  “What do you mean, real?”

  “Day-to-day things to address. For instance, Joey Buckley.”

  Joey and I had been spending a lot of time together when I wasn’t working and he wasn’t in physical therapy. Sometimes he came with me to the rooms in Second Medical, sometimes we went to the candy store or wandered along the paths, in and out of buildings, exploring and reexploring the same territory. When I left the Girls’ Ward in the morning, I’d bring along things to read to Joey: a letter from my mother or Harold Ickes, something I’d torn out of a movie magazine, a note from my father, which might end with “Senator McCarthy’s still at it—and his drinking’s worse.”

  My father took me seriously. We used to joke that he would have preferred that babies be incubated until they were eighteen and fully conversational, but he also talked to me as if I were eighteen. I grew up believing I would never marry, and so I had to have a profession. My father told me maybe once, maybe only by implication, that I must have a profession. It made an impression. In my head, what he
said to me concluded “. . . because you’ll never marry and you’ll have to take care of yourself.”

  He may have said that, but then again, I was always inclined to fill in the blanks. And to be overly sensitive to innuendo. He was a leg man, like many of the Betty Grable generation, and although he was respectful of women, particularly my mother, he did communicate to me a concern that my legs were not up to the competition for men looking to marry.

  “Watch your back” was my father’s message to me. It was meant to be protective. He was, in general, suspicious of people.

  I grew up believing, however, that I might marry, and of course I’d have a profession. Nevertheless, the label of “old maid” was always lurking in the shadows.

  My mother was unwavering in her certainty about my future.

  These perceptions left an imprint; I began to scan the territory for possible husbands at a young age, predicting it might take a long time to find one. Joey was an early candidate.

  Father James leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest.

  “Miss Riley tells me you and Joey are often together, and because I know you very well and because we’re friends, I’m going to tell you something confidential about Joey. Can you keep a secret?”

  I loved secrets. Growing up in a family with secrets hidden behind every piece of standing furniture, under every rug, I was obsessed with secrets, and so my response came as something of a surprise to me:

  “What if I don’t want to know?”

  Joey was mine.

  He had become someone particular to me since the first year we had lived at Warm Springs. Not just a boy, a cute boy with floppy black hair and a boyishness about him that was exciting. But more particular.

  He was Joey Buckley. Sometimes when we had pulled ourselves out of our wheelchairs and were sitting on the grass behind the candy store like regular kids, when he was telling me about his house in Alabama and his grandma and the way his father, gruff as he was, got broken up over Joey’s illness, I turned liquid. It was as if the substantial insides to which I was accustomed had melted, running warm like blood in my veins, and I simply loved Joey Buckley with all my heart.