Warm Springs Read online

  He gave the polios what he himself had found, a home of their own with people like themselves, like him, a kind of substitute family in a place where they were expected to work hard and laugh hard and to reach for their highest expectation of themselves. They called him “Doctor Roosevelt,” and he called himself Doctor too, saying in a speech at Warm Springs after he became president of the United States that he hoped, once his work in Washington was done, he would be welcomed back into the medical establishment at the foundation. He became a consulting architect and landscape engineer, designing a new water system, a sewage plan, a fishing pond, and a club that would have a dance hall and a tea room, indoor and outdoor sports.

  Roosevelt was a “holistic physician” before that concept became a term of art, and established his beliefs as practice at Warm Springs. Patients came and stayed because they had found a home. Fred Botts, the business manager when I was there, had been among the first patients, back in the twenties, some of whom traveled to Warm Springs by hiding out in freight cars, near death from heat and starvation by the time they arrived. (I know that they rode the cars but not how they got on them in the first place.) When I visited in 2006, new pillars in the hospital’s courtyard colonnade had replaced the original ones, modeled by Roosevelt after Thomas Jefferson’s design for the University of Virginia. The new pillars tell a story of gratitude, donated by patients who stayed at Warm Springs for many years, met their wives or husbands, made a life there.

  In the spring of 1926, against the strong advice of his wife, his mother, and his law partner Basil O’Connor, Franklin Roosevelt bought Warm Springs, committing two thirds of his personal fortune to the purchase.

  He brought in an orthopedic surgeon to be in charge of the medical program and a physical therapist who had worked with polio since the 1916 epidemic in New York, and he set about seeking the endorsement of the American Orthopedic Association. After a study of twenty-three patients in treatment, the association concluded that there was marked improvement in each of the cases, and endorsed Warm Springs as a hydrotherapeutic center.

  In 1927, Roosevelt and O’Connor established the Georgia Warm Springs Polio Foundation (the name was changed to the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis after Roosevelt was elected president) as a permanent nonprofit institution to provide funds for polio research, particularly to the laboratory of Jonas Salk, through the March of Dimes and the President’s Birthday Balls, held as fund-raising events all over the country on Roosevelt’s birthday. In these ways, the foundation became the vital source of funding for the first major public health triumph in the United States. That same year, the paying guests at the Meriwether Inn, less and less happy to be sharing their vacation with the polios, were sent away and a master plan for construction of the hospital was designed.

  At the heart of Warm Springs was Roosevelt’s deep belief that the rehabilitation of the polios was a social problem with medical considerations rather than a medical problem first. The hospital became a community of the handicapped, living and working together to repair their lives in a beautiful setting with bright rooms and good food. It was envisioned as a place where fun was central to daily life, where people could sing and dance and talk and fall in love.

  Roosevelt had gone to Warm Springs to recover. He imagined that he would leave the mineral waters walking unattended, without crutches or braces. Sometime between 1927 and his first presidential race, he realized that he would never walk again. But he must have known that what he had accomplished at Warm Springs was not just the creation of a rehabilitation center but a revolutionary concept of treatment.

  In September 1937, the first year of his second term as president, Roosevelt announced the nonpartisan National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, changing the name of the Georgia Warm Springs Polio Foundation to expand the mission and separate the foundation from his Democratic presidency. The newly named foundation had the goal of leading and unifying the fight against every phase of polio. By 1945, the year Roosevelt died, eighteen million dollars had been raised through the efforts of volunteers, and the foundation undertook the task of seeking the development of an anti-polio vaccine, which led in the 1950s to the success of the Salk vaccine and later the vaccine invented by Salk’s major competitor, Albert Sabin.

  In the years between 1924 and 1950, Warm Springs succeeded as a home to polios from all over the country, especially children, who wanted to become more than they were in both body and soul.

  It was to this Warm Springs that I arrived in 1950, the summer I was eleven, in a village where the only four-term president of the United States was known as Doctor Roosevelt, where his vision for a hospital of polios living together like ordinary people had been realized.

  These were the years before the massive public testing of the Salk vaccine in 1954, which would soon lead to the end of Warm Springs as a polio hospital. We were conscious that something like the smallpox vaccine might become available for polio, but I don’t remember it as a subject of conversation.

  I knew little of this until I started to write a book about my years at Warm Springs.

  I have recurring memories of President Roosevelt, although I never met him. One features a flowered rug in our living room when I was a little girl, which had a stripe of white smeared across a loose-petaled rose. The white marked the place where my mother had thrown a bottle of nail polish remover at my father when he told her he had voted for Franklin Roosevelt in the 1936 presidential election. In another memory, I have a clear picture of myself lying on my stomach on a rug in the living room at the farm where we lived in Vienna, Virginia, my arms wrapped around the console radio, weeping as I listened to the coverage of President Roosevelt’s funeral cortege leaving Warm Springs, where he had died at the Little White House on the afternoon of April 12, 1945. I was five, old enough to realize that I was listening to an important moment.

  Soon after arriving for the first time at Warm Springs, I went with my family to the Little White House, the place Roosevelt built for himself in 1926 next to the grounds, to which he repaired as other presidents have done to their farms or ranches or estates or Camp David. It is a small and simple house, maintained as it was on the day he died, just after lunch, signing letters and a bill into law; he expected to join the children of Warm Springs at a party later that day. What struck me even then was that the house was so small, his bedroom spare and simple, the bed too short and narrow for a president.

  But the image of Roosevelt that remains with perfect clarity is the dining room in Georgia Hall, which during my time at Warm Springs was where all the patients able to be moved from their hospital rooms gathered for special occasions. The tables were formally set and arranged in a U around a head table. I sat on the far edge of the room with the rest of the wheelchair children, but I could easily see, across the field of faces, a chair left vacant at the center of the head table.

  Memory in Process

  IT IS THE MIDDLE of the night in Toledo, Ohio, and my father is at work broadcasting his weekly radio show, Captain Reckless, from WSPD, where he is the station manager. I am standing in my crib, holding on to the bars, calling for my mother, who has gotten out of bed and is on her way across the hall to my room. Her figure is backlit by the light in her bedroom.

  I’m a year and a half old, recovering from paralytic poliomyelitis, and this is my first memory.

  My mother is walking toward me in her long nightgown and it’s winter. Behind her a man, taller than she is and very broad, is following her.

  “Who’s that man behind you, Mommy?” I ask as she comes into my room.

  That is the full measure of the image in my head. My mother supplied the words.

  “You called out to me in a low voice unlike your own,” my mother would tell me over and over when I was young, and she was a literalist with a strong memory for narrative, her story always exactly the same.

  “I was walking into your room and you weren’t looking at me. You were looking just beyond, and you sa
id, ‘Who’s that man behind you, Mommy?’ And I must have screamed, because of course I thought you saw a man, but when I turned around, no one was there.”

  My father insisted that the man was in my imagination, but I remember seeing him, and he was a stranger.

  Mid-August 1950, 96 Degrees

  I WAS LYING in the back seat of our old lavender Chevrolet as it rattled south from Washington, D.C., along a two-lane highway toward Georgia, my feet hanging out of the open window. It was the first day of our journey, an empty moment out of time between leaving and arriving, and I was traveling in what felt like the absolute safety of isolation with my family locked together in the moving car. I had one arm flung across my eyes to block the morning sun of late summer, and in preparation for our destination, I was making a mental list of the things I knew for certain. It wasn’t a list of the small things: what was in my blue and white bedroom, so I wouldn’t forget how it looked while I was away, or the names of my friends or my stash of trading cards or the movies I’d seen or the boys I loved. Those were lists I would make later in the year, in the wide-lined spiral notebook I kept in my bedside drawer and wrote in under the covers after lights out.

  No, that morning on the road to Georgia I was thinking of the serious things.

  I knew, for example, that it was easy to die.

  Even at eleven I felt a kind of urgency, as if we were all hurrying to some unknown destination. Against that finality, I had prayed every night since I could remember to the first star I saw in the black sky. Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight. That my small family of four and General Beauregard and Grandma Richards will live happily ever after.

  Our small family lived in a state of emergency that in retrospect go in and out the window was a state of mind. My father had grown up poor in New Philadelphia, Ohio. His father had died by the time he was ten, and his mother was employed until she was in her seventies, selling costume jewelry at the local five-and-ten. Local, by the late 1920s, was Urbana, another small town in Ohio, where my father met my mother. He decided on her in spite of her age, which was older; her upbringing, which gave her access to the country club; and her refusal to accept the frequent gifts he left on the front porch of her house, returning them promptly to his mother’s tiny apartment.

  When, on a night in November of 1937, my father, by then a crime reporter at the Cincinnati Post, crashed the Urbana Country Club, my mother was dancing with her new fiancé. My father cut in, dancing—and he was a smooth, graceful dancer—to the end of the song before he was escorted out of the club.

  They were married two months later, on New Year’s Day, in the living room of my mother’s house on College Street.

  The night of the wedding, my parents set out for Cincinnati, to take up residence in a hotel for retired and unemployed actors. I have a photograph of my mother in that hotel, taken in the dark, her hands around a lighted globe illuminating her face. There must have been some kind of séance going on, and she is conjuring or playing the role of conjurer. The expression in her eyes is otherworldly. I keep it in my kitchen as evidence of the lovely mystery that their marriage was to me and the stage on which our lives seemed, in my child’s mind, to be played out before an imagined audience. There was a delicate sense of drama between them.

  On the way from Urbana to Cincinnati, driving at night, my father noticed in the circle of the car’s headlights a paper bag lying on the side of the road. As the story goes—the one they chose to tell again and again to define what they wanted us to know about the nature of their marriage—my father pulled over and jumped out of the car, calling behind him that he believed there was a baby in the paper bag. Through the passenger-side window, my mother watched as he hurried over to the bag, which was barely moving in the night wind. He picked it up and looked inside.

  My mother, whimsical but literal-minded, was just getting to know this man she had married that afternoon, but she had no reason to doubt there was a baby. And by temperament she was a willing believer.

  She patted down the skirt she had made for her honeymoon trousseau to be ready for the baby when my father returned with it.

  “What happened?” she must have asked my father when he dropped the empty paper bag in the back seat.

  He slid into the driver’s seat, put the car in gear, and accelerated.

  “There could have been a baby,” he said crossly as he pulled back onto the highway, headed toward Cincinnati.

  “Yes,” she agreed, “there could have been.”

  She must have been bewildered by the strangeness of my father’s imagination, and fascinated too, and thrilled to be on a car trip during which such a thing might happen.

  My father was not conventionally handsome, but he was compelling and charismatic. In his twenties, he was wiry and balding, with a half-moon of black hair at the base of his skull, a prominent nose, small bones, black eyes, and an easy way of moving. My friends had crushes on him. To us as children—and he died before we had a chance to know him as adults—he was thrilling, with an unerring instinct for narrative, a sharp wit, and a dark, delicious sense of humor. The rooms of our small house were bright with heat when he was in them.

  He had a crime reporter’s mentality, a poor boy’s sense of mortality, and I think an abiding fear, even an expectation, of losing what he loved. Especially my mother.

  He filled the house with a needy crowd: lonely, down-on-their-luck, out-of-work journalists; soldiers, when the war was on; stray cats he found on the streets of scummy wartime Washington; and the occasional lost dog. I was attracted to him and frightened too, and the fear wasn’t of what he might do or say, although we were not spared his wit. It had to do with how quickly he could ignite. How much I was ignited in his presence.

  But I was in love with my mother.

  In the front seat of the lavender Chevrolet, my parents were talking the way they did when my father was driving, his hands together at the bottom of the steering wheel, my mother leaning into him so her soft butter-brown curls brushed his cheek. On the radio, “Tennessee Waltz” was playing, and my father started to sing it: “I was waltzing with my darlin’. . .” I knew all the words.

  On the floor of the back seat, my brother was zooming his metal cars over his plastic soldiers until all the soldiers were dead and bloody. From time to time he’d lift his head from the carnage to tell us he was about to throw up, and then he’d return to war.

  My brother was five years younger than I, and that year and for a long time afterward, I liked him much better than he liked me. He may not have been sufficient to my idea of the proper size for a family, but he was all I had, and he was mine—although I wished I had more brothers and that I was the one girl in the middle of a squadron of them, instead of being one of two siblings with a lukewarm reputation as a sister.

  “Will you live in the hospital forever?” Jeffrey had asked while we were packing up the car for the trip to Georgia in front of our yellow stucco house in Cleveland Park. He was curious but not concerned.

  “Nothing is forever,” I replied, irritated that my absence was being greeted with something like enthusiasm.

  “I am forever,” Jeffrey said with confidence.

  He was almost six years old that summer. An easy baby, a perfect little boy, winsome, sweet, the right amount of shy.

  “No trouble,” my mother would say happily. “Jeffie is no trouble at all.”

  That was the word out on my little brother when we were growing up.

  I don’t remember feeling jealous, and I don’t believe I was. But I did understand that if Jeffie was no trouble, I was certainly trouble enough for two.

  When the time came for me to run away from home, I was six and Jeffrey was a year old and we lived in a row house in Georgetown on a busy street. I don’t know what occasioned my decision to bolt that particular spring day, but I do remember standing in the doorway to the living room watching my brother play quietly in his
playpen while upstairs my mother was taking a bath. I made a plan then to walk out the front door, take my Radio Flyer wagon parked in the tiny yard, and walk to the village of Georgetown, where I would get on a streetcar with the wagon and disappear into the world.

  I imagined my mother calling me when she got out of the bath and I wouldn’t be there to answer. She would wrap a towel around herself and rush downstairs, but I’d be gone and Jeffrey would be gripping the side of the playpen, looking at her with his mournful blue eyes. It was my hope that she’d be beside herself with worry, as she might say, that she’d put in an emergency call to my father, phone the police, rush upstairs to dress, run downstairs and out the front door in search of me, leaving my brother to sit in his playpen, good as gold, a perfect angel, waiting for her return.

  But it must have occurred to me that she might be relieved to find me gone. That she’d lie down on the couch in the living room in a state of quiet bliss, wrapped in her towel, her wet hair spread out on the pillow, singing the sweet old-fashioned songs she liked to sing.

  On second thought, I picked Jeffrey up, opened the front door, closed it softly behind me, put the baby in the Radio Flyer, where he sat with his small hands folded in his lap, and I took off up P Street on my way to Wisconsin Avenue and the streetcar to nowhere.

  I was picked up by the police before I reached the avenue, but I had already walked five blocks and crossed four streets. When the policeman with my mother brought us home, my father was standing outside on the street, his face white with terror.

  “Do you want to know why I took Jeffrey when I ran away from home?” I asked when my father came to my bedroom door to tell me goodnight later that evening.

  “I don’t want to know why,” he said. “You did what you did.”