Warm Springs Read online

  Unlike other of our family stories, that one did not get told over and over. I assume my father understood exactly why I took my baby brother, but it wasn’t a subject for his consideration.

  We were a family given to a certain amount of unsparing truth and to considerable secrecy. Negotiating the land mines in between required a careful step I never quite achieved.

  I was a bad child. That was my perception of myself. I remember reading once about the strange attractor, a star that unsettles the planetary balance, which was the role I seemed to play in our family life. For one, I was always getting sick. And not just a little sick, either, in those days when most of the penicillin had been sent overseas for the soldiers. I was at the center of my parents world and had every reason to trust their love, but I also knew that my life had stood in the way of theirs. I felt accountable, as if my illness were premeditated. As if I intended to make things difficult, or had too little moral strength to resist.

  Children who are ill know this about themselves. They aren’t blind to the pain and trouble their illness causes the people who love them. And I can imagine even in my own mother a silent exhaustion, a growing irritation, at what had befallen her young life, her brand-new marriage, in the first four years of mine.

  I had polio when I was a baby living in Toledo, where my father was the manager of WSPD radio. We moved to Washington, D.C., when the Office of Censorship was established, after Pearl Harbor, and my father was asked to direct its radio division. When I was four, living in a small, cold house in Silver Spring, Maryland, which my father filled with soldiers on their way through Washington to war, I had rheumatic fever. I spent that winter in bed, my mother sitting beside me playing out the stories of the daytime soaps with paper dolls. Outside my window, my naked doll Ann Shirley, named for the dimpled, curly-haired movie idol Shirley Temple, her golden hair matted with filth, her plaster skin peeling, lay on the frozen ground where I’d asked my mother to put her so she could catch pneumonia. Which she finally must have done, since one day she was gone.

  And when I was five, in the autumn of 1944, the October my brother was born, I caught spinal meningitis, in an outbreak that filled the Children’s Ward of Washington’s Providence Hospital with lines of children in metal beds, many of them dying. Sickness has a peculiar glamour. I was both trouble and the center of the universe.

  The Christmas after I had meningitis was a happy one for my parents. We had moved out of Silver Spring to a farm in Vienna, Virginia, and they had a baby boy and dogs and chickens and ducks and cows and a horse, and I was recuperating, which they never thought I’d get to do. In celebration, although it may not sound celebratory, my parents filled my stocking with coal on Christmas Eve.

  I am my parents’ child, so I understand why they did that—in the spirit of fun and relief and for a big old laugh at death. I’m sure they intended to include me in the joke and must have thought I had a more sophisticated sense of humor than I did.

  I didn’t cry. I thought that I deserved the coal.

  “Are you scared?” my brother asked, climbing up on the back seat beside me.

  “I’m not scared,” I told him, and probably meant it. “The next time you see me, I’m going to be a different girl.”

  “What kind of girl?” he asked.

  “A perfect one,” I said.

  I believed that all it would take for my transformation from bad to good was an act of will, as if will had its own independent life separate from the self and could be fashioned of whatever material you had at hand.

  What I felt on that long, hot drive to Georgia was a kind of wild exhilaration, not for the young girl arriving at Warm Springs that August of 1950, but for the one I expected to become by the time I left, a reconstructed girl unimaginable at that moment in my daily life.

  In June, I had completed fifth grade at Sidwell Friends, a Quaker school that had excellent academics, an ethic of service in keeping with Quaker philosophy, and a willingness, unlike the public schools, to accept handicapped children. Which is why I was there. I think the school had every hope that I’d be a star pupil to compensate for my handicap, but I was neither a star pupil nor a star citizen. On the Character side of my report card, I failed Cooperation, Responsibility, Obedience, Discipline, everything but Initiative.

  And Initiative can have many interpretations, not all of them good.

  A letter accompanying my final grades that year requested that I not return to Friends after my stint at Warm Springs, since I should be well enough to attend a public school like everybody else.

  In the back seat of the Chevrolet on the second leg of our journey south, the day we were due to arrive at Warm Springs, I lay with my arm covering my eyes to shut out my brother’s war game, which he was playing on my legs, my stomach, and up and down the back doors of the car.

  I was thinking of rehabilitation. Not the kind for which I was going to the hospital. I expected the doctors and nurses and physical therapists to take care of my paralyzed leg, expected I’d walk out of the hospital free of crutches and braces, looking like Margaret O’Brien, my particular choice, the pigtailed darling of late-forties movies with two long, beautiful legs, thick hair that waved when she took it out of plaits, and plump bow lips. Almost a conventional beauty but not quite, which is exactly where I wanted to place myself in the lineup.

  Since the doctors were planning to transplant muscles and stabilize bones, it seemed quite possible that everything in my whole physical biography would improve.

  The rehabilitation I had in mind was of myself.

  At the end of my mother’s life—my parents lives were much too short—she kept aphorisms for self-improvement on the fridge: “Smile and the world smiles with you. Cry and you cry alone.” “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile.” “A good deed a day keeps the doctor away.”

  It was surprising in my mother, these Hallmark platitudes. She was too whimsical, I thought at the time, too eccentric for that kind of pedestrian belief. I wondered whether she hadn’t always been quietly about the business of turning her own sadness into some defined act of self-betterment. She was the most gentle and sweet person I have ever known. I cannot imagine that she believed there was a need for improvement or that she struggled with a sense of failure, but she must have. And by some form of osmosis, this need had been communicated to me by the time I reached Warm Springs.

  In the back seat with my eyes closed, I examined my transgressions, making a plan for daily improvements. It was my goal to emerge from Warm Springs reinvented as a faultless girl. I saw my future self as no longer the perpetrator of accidents but as an angel of God.

  Taking off my shoes so the hot wind blew on my toes as the car sped down the highway, I rewound the reel of fifth grade that I had completed in June.

  Mrs. Gosnell was my teacher. She was a squat, humorless woman with gray hair who had a bad temper and an uncontrollable dislike for me.

  And the perfect Toni Brewer, with her looping braids and impeccable demeanor, was the girl I planned to be at the end of my initiation at Warm Springs.

  The arrival of Harold Ickes in my fifth-grade year at Friends changed my life. He was my first genuine friend. I had had other friends, but they were either not real friends at all or sympathy friends, either mine for them or theirs for me.

  Harold was mine.

  In the late forties, children were seldom home-schooled, but fifth grade was Harold’s first year in an actual classroom. He had lived on a farm outside Washington, lived freely and without a lot of social contact with kids his age. He was the son of an older father, who was secretary of the interior under President Roosevelt, and a strong-minded mother, and he had no interest in the order of school or the requirements and limitations and fussiness of it. He came along at just the right time for me. We both were smart enough but were poor students, failures on the Character side of our report cards with plans of our own.

  At one point or another, probably late in the yea
r, after our general academic failures were widely known in the class, thanks to the loose-lipped Mrs. Gosnell, we decided it would be a good idea to break the monotony of silence in Quaker Meeting by shooting off cap guns.

  It wasn’t a careless decision. We had Quaker Meeting once a week with the whole school, and daily in our own class we had a Moment of Silence. We were well aware—it was impossible not to be—that the Quakers believed in decisions arrived at by consensus and in peace and that they refused to participate in war. Quaker Meetings were silent and long, and a cap gun seemed to provide the opportunity for a short, emphatic statement.

  I can’t remember what happened to Harold, but I know that I was sent home for a few days to consider what I’d done.

  The day I came back, Mrs. Gosnell stood in front of the room and called for the usual Moment of Silence.

  “We all know that Suzie Richards has caused a lot of trouble this year,” she began. “But we must feel sorry for her because she has a crippled leg.”

  At the small hotel in Warm Springs, where we stayed the last night before I went into the hospital, I slept on the floor. My mother and father and Jeffrey slept in the double bed, and it was intended that I sleep with them.

  “I’m too hot,” I said.

  “But it’s your last night with us,” Jeffrey said in a sentimental moment.

  I watched them with longing, all curled up together in the bed under a slow-moving fan. But I wasn’t going to test my emotional strength by giving in to the comfort of their warm bodies.

  “I’m still too hot,” I said. “I need to sleep by myself.”

  Dr. Nicholson, Sister Kenny, My Mother, and Me

  MY MOTHER PLANNED to stay at Warm Springs for a month. My father and Jeffrey would fly home after my first surgery, which was scheduled for the Thursday morning after my admission on Monday. Grandma Richards would help my father with Jeffrey, who would be going into first grade in September, and my mother would return to Washington at the end of September, at the earliest.

  “This will be an adventure,” my mother said. “I’ll stay for a while and then I’ll go back home and you’ll have a wonderful time.”

  I believed her. I believed everything she told me.

  My pediatrician in Toledo had diagnosed my poliomyelitis as paralytic strep throat. It was not uncommon to misdiagnose polio; I was among many, including Roosevelt, whose initial diagnosis had to do with inflammatory disease or a serious back problem or one of the strep-related illnesses. My mother had never heard of this particular strep condition—perhaps it existed, perhaps not—but she was told that the paralysis would be gone as soon as the streptococcus bacteria disappeared. By the time my parents discovered that I had had polio, not strep, the virus was gone and the residual damage remained, as it does with polio.

  The damage was to the right side of my body: I had been left with traces of muscles on my right side, especially in my leg, but I was unable to walk after the virus disappeared. I was, however, very young and had been walking only a short time before I got polio, so my mother figured she could do something about my condition. As soon as I was better, she devised a military regimen of exercises to coax those muscles back to life.

  The illness caused by the polio virus is similar to influenza, beginning with a high fever, aching muscles and head, and lethargy. If the particular virus—which is spread through feces, entering the system through the mouth and eventually lodging in the spinal fluid—is the one that causes paralytic polio, then the limbs become first numb, then painful, and over hours or days the body is gradually paralyzed from the neck down. If the virus is bulbar polio, then the patient’s diaphragm is paralyzed, and he must be placed in an iron lung in order to breathe. After the illness runs its course, a few or many or all of the muscles affected return to a measure of use. More children than adults were victims of polio, more boys than girls, and it was believed that a high level of physical activity at the onset of illness—as happened with Roosevelt, for example—led to greater paralysis. Whether or not that was ultimately proven true, infants generally had milder cases of paralytic polio, and I had polio as an infant.

  My mother and I spent days together, all through my childhood, on the floor, on the bed, standing against the wall, doing a long series of exercises. She made a game of this routine, so it felt pretty much like play to me. I’d spend hours standing pencil-straight against a wall—like a soldier guarding the queen of England, she’d say, or the Nutcracker Prince (with the Nutcracker Suite playing in the background), or the tin soldier from The Wizard of Oz— or like me when I grew up to be a spy, listening at the door to the enemy’s conversation. My mother would hold me against the wall so I wouldn’t fall while I prepared for the Olympic Games, balancing a book on top of my head, or while I tried out for the lead puppet in a dance of marionettes. I would sit on the end of a chair, my foot in her hand, while she massaged and exercised each tiny muscle in my toes and feet and ankles, my neck and hands and arms. By playing the role of a patient, I was preparing to be an orthopedic physician, a nurse on a battlefield of injured soldiers, a fallen Olympic runner. She had me do stretches, my foot against her hand, my leg against her arm.

  I was always in the process of inventing someone I wasn’t, someone I might become.

  Our days, which to an outside observer like my father seemed long and tedious, were full of surprises, in spite of the repeated exercises. What would my mother imagine next for us? For me?

  That first winter, when I was too young to remember, we went to Florida and stayed in a guesthouse. My mother made a party of it, bringing my aunt and cousin along so we could all escape the gloomy Ohio weather. I have pictures of myself at the beach with her. She is holding me around my stomach, swishing me through the water. I’m riding on her back in the shallows near shore. She had hoped the sand would serve as a brace and I could learn to walk in Florida, that the sun would restore my health.

  By the time we moved to Washington, D.C., when I was almost three, I could walk in braces, holding my mother’s hand or swinging back and forth in a kind of jump step, moving forward by throwing my hips ahead of me.

  Washington was a damp, disease-ridden swamp city toward the end of the Second World War. Poverty and illness were widespread; the city and its suburbs were teeming with soldiers, stuffed into apartments and rooming houses and spare bedrooms in people’s homes, like ours in Silver Spring. Rats and rabid dogs ran in the streets, and hospitals were overcrowded. There was a shortage of doctors and nurses, and in the absence of penicillin disease was rampant: scarlet fever, spinal meningitis, polio. Polio was the plague for the parents of that generation, lurking in the shadows, sweeping in with symptoms of influenza that could, in a matter of hours, paralyze or kill a child.

  Signs warning of scarlet fever were plastered on the doors and windows of houses where we lived. I got rheumatic fever before my mother had even found a doctor in our new city. Dr. Margaret Mary Nicholson was the only pediatrician willing to make house calls at night during the war. She came from downtown, what is now called the Old City, on her bicycle in a white dress, with hair pinned to the top of her head in a loopy bun that sometimes gave way and fell to her waist, with a stethoscope around her neck, a crucifix in her pocket. The treatment was ten Hail Marys, kale sandwiches on brown bread, and cod liver oil. She came everyday for weeks and weeks until I got well.

  She was famous in Washington for taking care of the city’s poor. At a time when blacks couldn’t go to the hospitals in segregated Washington, she’d pick up the sickest babies in her bicycle basket, haul them to the hospital, treat them herself in the emergency room, and take them home. She ran her office like a clinic, with mothers and children lining the halls, sitting on the floor, waiting sometimes for hours and hours. I didn’t leave Dr. Nicholson until I was twenty-one years old, got married, and moved to England. She’d stay in her office, often into the night, until everyone in the line had been seen, charging what a family could pay, or nothing. And she always
had plans in the works, for orphans in Mexico, for leukemia patients in the Deep South, for burn victims. She liked my mother, and somehow—I never asked and don’t know how it happened—they were in cahoots. Whatever wild scheme Dr. Nicholson had in mind in the years when I was very young, my mother was part of its execution.

  Dr. Nicholson’s plan for me was that I should be the subject of a lecture by the renowned Sister Kenny, in the amphitheater of Washington’s Doctors Hospital, in front of hundreds of physicians and residents and interns and nurses.

  Sister Elizabeth Kenny, a physical therapist without formal medical training, was controversial in the medical establishment and enormously popular elsewhere for her method of treating infantile paralysis. When she had been a bush nurse in the Australian outback, she came across a young girl who was paralyzed, her body stiff and contorted. Sister Kenny decided instinctively that the paralysis and stiffness were due to muscle spasms and devised a treatment of hot packs—strips of wool soaked in boiling water—which she used to help the muscles to relax. She then “reeducated” the muscles by manipulation to function correctly. She dismissed the notion that polio was a disease of the nerves and the belief held by scientists that its residual paralysis was a result of nerve damage. Nevertheless, her method of therapy was often very successful.

  In the forties, she traveled around the United States, treating patients, making speeches, arguing the case for her hot-pack treatment, and seeking funding and support from the medical community, which generally shunned her.

  By 1945 she was a celebrity, and Dr. Nicholson wanted her to examine me. She especially wanted Sister Kenny to see the method my mother had used in restoring to use some of the paralyzed muscles on my right side.

  The morning of my first stage appearance, my mother showed me a picture of Sister Kenny on the front page of that day’s newspaper.