Broken Vessels

by Andre Dubus

In June of 1987 I graduated from physical therapy at home with Mary Winchell: she taught me to transfer from my wheel chair to the passenger seat of a car, meaning the Visiting Nurses Association and Blue Cross and Blue Shield would no longer pay her to come work with me. But it was time: for the physical therapy clinic at Hale Hospital in Haverhill; for Judith Tranberg, called Mrs. T by herself and almost everyone who knows her: a lady who worked at Walter Reed with amputees from the Korean War, a lady whose lined, brown, merry and profound face and hazel eyes and deep tobacco voice I loved at once. On the twenty-second of July I wheeled into her clinic and said to her: They’ve always told me my left leg is my best one, and she said: Why did they tell you your left leg is your best one? I said: I like you. I had my spirit till June, then the surgeon took off the cast and I saw my right leg and I started listening to my body. But now my spirit is back. Mrs. T said: I never listen to the body; only the spirit.

  My right leg looked like one found on a battlefield, perhaps a day after its severance from the body it had grown with. Except it was not bloated. It was very thin and the flesh had red and yellow hues and the foot was often purple and nearly always the big toe was painful. I do not know why. On the end of my stump was what people thought then was a blister, though it was a stitch which would become infected and, a year later, require surgery, a debridement. So Mrs. T told me not to use the artificial leg. She started me on parallel bars with the atrophied right leg, whose knee probably bent thirty-two degrees, and was never supposed to bend over forty-five, because of the shattered femur and the scar tissue in my thigh muscles, and the hole under my knee where a bone is now grafted. The tibia was also shattered, and part of my calf muscle is grafted to the top of my shin. Because of muscle and nerve damage, my surgeon, Fulton Kornack, and Mary Winchell told me my leg would never hold my foot in a neutral position, and it still does not: without a brace, from the sole and heel up my calf, my foot droops, and curls. But Mary never gave up on the knee, nor has Mrs. T, nor have I, and it can now bend sixty-three degrees.

  The best person for a crippled man to cry with is a good female physical therapist, and the best place to do that crying is in the area where she works. One morning in August of 1987, shuffling with my right leg and the walker, with Mrs. T in front of me and her kind younger assistants, Kathy and Betty, beside me, I began to cry. Moving across the long therapy room with beds, machines, parallel bars, and exercise bicycles, I said through my weeping: I’m not a man among men anymore and I’m not a man among women either. Kathy and Betty gently told me I was fine. Mrs. T said nothing, backing ahead of me, watching my leg, my face, my body. We kept working. I cried and talked all the way into the small room with two beds that are actually leather-cushioned tables with a sheet and pillow on each, and the women helped me onto my table, and Mrs. T went to the end of it, to my foot, and began working on my ankle and toes and calf with her gentle strong hands. Then she looked up at me. Her voice has much peace whose resonance is her own pain she has moved through and beyond. It’s in Jeremiah, she said. The potter is making a pot and it cracks. So he smashes it, and makes a new vessel. You can’t make a new vessel out of a broken one. It’s time to find the real you.

  Her words and their images rose through my chest like a warm vapor, and in it was the man shattering clay, and me at Platoon Leaders’ Class at Quantico, a boy who had never made love, not when I turned nineteen there, not when I went back for the second six weeks just before becoming twenty-one; and memories of myself after my training at Quantico, those times in my life when I had instinctively moved toward action, to stop fights, to help the injured or stricken, and I saw myself on the highway that night, and I said: Yes. It makes sense. It started as a Marine, when I was eighteen; and it ended on a highway when I was almost fifty years old.

  In the hospital one night when I was in very bad shape, I woke from a dream. In the dream I was in the hospital at Camp Pendleton, California, and I was waiting for Major Forrest Joe Hunt, one of the best commanding officers I ever served with, to come and tell me where I must go now, and what I must do. But when I woke I was still at Camp Pendleton and the twenty-nine years since I left there to go on sea duty did not exist at all and I was a lieutenant waiting for Major Hunt. I asked the nurse if we were at Camp Pendleton and it took her a long time to bring me back to where and who I was. Some time later my old friend, Mark Costello, phoned me at the hospital; Mark and I met on the rifle range in Officers’ Basic School at Quantico in 1958. I told him about the dream, and he said: Marine Corps training is why you were on the highway that night. I said I knew that, and he told me he had pulled a drowning man from the surf one summer at Mazatlan and that a Mexican man on the beach would not help him, would not go out in the water with him, and he said: Civilian training is more conservative. I had known that too, and had believed for a long time that we too easily accuse people of apathy or callousness when they do not help victims of assault or accidents or other disasters. I believe most people want to help, but are unable to because they have not been trained to act. Then, afterward, they think of what they could have done and they feel like physical or moral cowards or both. They should not. When I came home from the hospital a state trooper came to visit me; he told me that doctors, nurses, and paramedics were usually the only people who stopped at accidents. Sadly, he told me that people do stop when the state troopers are there; they want to look at the bodies. I am sure that the trooper’s long experience has shown him a terrible truth about our species; and I am also sure that the doctors and nurses and paramedics who stop are not the only compassionate people who see an accident, but the only trained ones. Don’t just stand there, Lieutenant they told us again and again at Officers’ Basic School; Do something, even if it’s wrong.

  Until the summer and fall of 1987 I still believed that Marine training taught us to control our natural instincts to survive. But then, writing a long letter to a friend, night after night, I began to see the truth: the Marine Corps develops our natural instincts to risk ourselves for those we truly love, usually our families, for whom many human beings would risk or knowingly sacrifice their lives, and indeed many have. In a world whose inhabitants from their very beginning turned away from rather than toward each other, chose self over agape, war was a certainty; and soldiers learned that they could not endure war unless they loved each other. So I now believe that, among a species which has evolved more selfishly than lovingly, thus making soldiers an essential body of a society, there is this paradox: in order to fight wars, the Marine Corps develops in a recruit at Boot Camp, an officer candidate at Quantico, the instinct to surrender oneself for another; expands that instinct beyond families or mates or other beloveds to include all Marines. It is a Marine Corps tradition not to leave dead Marines on the battlefield, and Marines have died trying to retrieve those dead. This means that after his training a young Marine has, without words, taken a vow to offer his life for another Marine. Which means, sadly, that the Marine Corps, in a way limited to military action, has in general instilled more love in its members than Christian churches have in theirs. The Marine Corps does this, as all good teachers do, by drawing from a person instincts that are already present, and developing them by giving each person the confidence to believe in those instincts, to follow where they lead. A Marine crawling under fire to reach a a wounded Marine is performing a sacrament, an action whose essence is love, and the giving and receiving of grace.

  The night before the day I cried with Mrs. T for the first time (I would cry many times during physical therapy that fall and winter and spring of 1987 and 1988, and she teases me about it still, her eyes bright and her grin crinkling her face), my wife took me to a movie. She sat in an aisle seat and I sat in my wheelchair beside her, with my plastic urinal on the floor beneath my chair leg that held my right foot elevated for better circulation of blood. Two young couples in their late teens sat directly in front of us. One of the boys was talking before the movie, then when it began he was still talking and he did n
ot stop; the other three were not silent either, but he was the leader, the loud one. In my biped days, I was the one who asked or told people to be quiet. But in my chair I felt helpless, and said nothing. There was no rational cause for feeling that way. When you ask or tell people to be quiet in movies, they do not come rushing out of their seats, swinging at you. But a wheelchair is a spiritually pervasive seat. My wife asked the boy to please stop talking. He turned to her, looking over his left shoulder, and patronizingly harassed her, though without profanity. I said, Cool it. He looked at me as though he had not seen me till then; and maybe, indeed, he had not. Then he turned to the screen, and for the rest of the movie he and his friends were quiet.

  I was not. I made no sounds, but I felt them inside of me. As the movie was ending, I breathed deeply and slowly with adrenaline, and relaxed as much as I could the muscles I meant to use. I would simply look at his eyes as he left his seat and turned toward me to walk around my chair and up the aisle. If he insulted me I would pull him down to me and punch him. During the closing credits he and his date and the other couple stood and left their row of seats. I watched him; he did not turn his eyes to mine. He stepped into the aisle and turned to me but did not face me; he looked instead at the carpet as he walked past me, then was gone. The adrenaline, the edge, went out of me, and seven demons worse than the first came in: sorrow and shame.

  So next day, weeping, lying on my back on the table while Mrs. T worked on my body, I told her the story and said: If you confront a man from a wheelchair you’re bullying him. Only a coward would hit a man in a chair.

  That is part of what I told her; I told her, too, about making love: always on my back, unable to kneel, and if I lay on my stomach I could barely move my lower body and had to keep my upper body raised with a suspended pushup. I did not tell her the true sorrow of lovemaking but I am certain that she knew: it made me remember my legs as they once were, and to feel too deeply how crippled I had become.

  You can’t make a new vessel out of a broken one. I can see her now as she said it, hear her voice, soft but impassioned with certainty, as her face and eyes were. It’s time to find the real you.

  I was working on a novella in August, but then in September, a beautiful blue September with red and orange and yellow leaves, I could not work on it any longer, for I knew that soon my wife would leave. So did Cadence. We played now on my bed with two small bears, Papa Bear and Sister Bear. She brought them to the bed, and their house was my lap; Cadence had just started kindergarten, and Sister Bear went to school, at a spot across the bed, and came home, where she and Papa Bear cooked dinners. They fished from my right leg, the bank of a river, and walked in the forest of my green camouflage Marine poncho liner, and climbed the pillows and the headboard that were mountains. I knew the mother bear was alive, but I did not ask where she was, and Cadence never told me.

  But what did she see, in her heart that had already borne so much? Her fourth birthday was on the eleventh of June 1986, then on the twenty-third of July the car hit me and I was in the hospital for nearly two months, her mother coming to see me from one in the afternoon till eight at night every day save one when I told her to stay home and rest, and Cadence was at play school and with a sitter or friends until her mother came home tired at nine o’clock or later at night.

  Her mother had waked her around one-thirty in the morning of the twenty-third, to tell her Daddy had been in an accident and her brother Jeb, my younger grown son, was taking Mommy to the hospital and Jeb’s friend Nickie would spend the night with her, and she had cried with fear, or terror: that sudden and absolute change in a child’s life, this one coming at night too, the worst of times, its absence of light in the sky and on trees and earth and manmade objects rendering her a prisoner of only what she could see: the lighted bedroom, the faces of her mother and brother and the young woman, and so a prisoner of her imagination that showed her too much of danger and death and night. Her four years of life forced her physically to be passive, unable to phone the hospital or friends, unable even to conceive of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, of life and healing and peace. Over a year later, on a September afternoon in the sun, she told me of the first time her mother brought her to see me, in intensive care: The little room, she said, with all the machines. I kept that in mind, she said. You had that thing in your mouth and it was hard for me to kiss you. What was it for? I told her it was probably to let me breathe. Then she said: I thought you were dead till then. And I said that surely Mommy told her I was alive; she said: Yes. But I thought you were dead till I saw you.

  She came to the hospital for short visits with her mother, then friends took her home; I talked to her on the phone from the hospital bed, and she was only with her mother in the morning and late at night. She did not mind that my leg would be cut off; he’ll be asleep and he won’t feel it, she told a friend who was with her for an afternoon in Boston while her mother sat with me. When Daddy comes home, she told her mother, I’m going to help him learn to walk. At the hospital her mother sat with me, and watched the clock with me, for the morphine that, twenty minutes after the injection, would ease the pain. Then I was home in a rented hospital bed in the library adjacent to our bedroom, and through its wide door I looked at the double bed, a mattress and boxsprings on the floor, where Cadence and her mother slept. In the mornings Cadence woke first and I woke to her voice and face, sitting up in the bed, on the side where I used to sleep, and looking out the glass door to the sundeck, looking out at the sky, the morning; and talking. That fall and winter she often talked about the baby growing in her mother’s body; and one night, when she and I were on the couch in the living room, she said: Once upon a time there was a father and mother and a little girl and then they had a baby and everything went crazy.

  She was only four. That summer of 1986 her mother and I believed Cadence would only have to be four and worry about a baby coming into her life, perhaps believing the baby would draw her parents’ love away from her, or would simply be in the way. And her mother and I believed that, because I had a Guggenheim grant from June of 1986 to June of 1987, we would simply write and pay the bills and she would teach her fiction workshop at home on Wednesday nights and I would try to recover from burning out as a teacher, then becoming so tired visiting colleges for money from January till July of 1986 that I spent a night in intensive care at Montpelier, Vermont, on the fourth of July, with what the cardiologist thought was a heart attack but was exhaustion; and we would have a child.

  Madeleine grew inside of my wife as she visited the hospital, then as she cared for me at home, changing bandages as they taught her in the hospital, emptying urinals, bringing food to the hospital bed in the library, and juice and water, and holding my leg when I transferred from bed to chair to couch and back again; Madeleine growing inside of her as she soothed the pain in my body and soul, as she put the bed pan under me then cleaned me and it, and she watched with me as the Red Sox beat the Angels in the playoffs and lost to the Mets in the World Series, sacrifice enough for her, to watch baseball till late at night, pregnant and caring for a four-year-old energetic girl and a crippled man. But she sacrificed more: for some time, I don’t know how much time, maybe two weeks or three, because it remains suspended in memory as an ordeal that broke us, or broke part of us anyway and made laughter more difficult, I had diarrhea, but not like any I had ever had before. It not only flowed from me without warning, but it gave me no sign at all, so that I did not even know when it flowed, and did not know after it had, and for some reason we could not smell it either. So when a game ended she would stand over me on the couch and turn my body toward hers, and look, and always I was foul, so foul that it took thirty minutes to clean me and get me from the couch to the bed, after midnight then, the pregnant woman going tired and un-held to bed with Cadence, who would wake her in the morning.

  Which would begin with cleaning me, and that remained such a part of each day and night that I remember little else, and have no memory of the
Red Sox losing the seventh game I watched from the couch. They saved your life and put you back together, she said, and they can’t cure this. Gene Harbilas, my doctor and friend here, cured it, and that time was over, and so was something else: a long time of grace given us in the hospital and at home, a time of love near death and with crippling, a time when my body could do little but lie still and receive, and when her every act was of the spirit, for every act was one of love, even the resting at night for the next long day of driving to and from the hospital to sit there; or, later, waking with me at home, to give me all the sustenance she could. In the fall, after the diarrhea, she was large with Madeleine, and exhaustion had its hold on her and would not let her go again, would not release her merely to gestate and give birth, and nurse and love her baby. The victim of injuries like mine is not always the apparent one. All that year I knew that she and Cadence were the true victims.

  Cadence cried often. On a night in January, while Andre was staying with us for the month of Madeleine’s birth, having come up from New York to take care of Cadence and mostly me (yes: the bed pan: my son) Cadence began loudly crying and screaming. She was in her bedroom. I was no longer in the hospital bed but our new one in the bedroom, and they brought her there: her eyes were open but she did not act as though she were awake. She was isolate, screaming with terror, and she could not see or hear us; or, if she could, whatever we did and said was not strong enough to break what held her. Andre called Massachusetts General Hospital and spoke to a pediatrician, a woman. He told her what Cadence was doing and she asked whether Cadence had been under any stress. He said her father was hit by a car in July and was in the hospital for two months and they cut off his leg, and her mother just had a baby and Cadence had chicken pox then so she couldn’t visit her mother in the hospital, where she stayed for a week because she had a cesarean. The doctor gasped. Then she told Andre it was night terrors. I do not remember what she told us to do, because nothing we did soothed Cadence; she kept crying and screaming, and I lay helpless on my back, wanting to rise, and hold her in my arms, and walk with her, and I yelled at the ceiling, the night sky above it: You come down from that cross and give this child some peace! Then we played the cassette of Porgy and Bess by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald that she often went to sleep to, and she was quiet and she lay beside me and slept.