As they moved around the grounds the songs came to us now loud, now faint like songs from a campfire or over still water on a summer evening. When they sang under the windows of our ward, the melody was interwoven with sounds of deep sorrow, weeping and long broken sighs, for some of the patients were spending the second, third, even sixth Christmas away from home and a few knew they would never be home for Christmas.
But in spite of wet snow and thick dark the carolers sang with spirit and vigor, and “Joy to the World” came streaming joyously in every open window and soon drowned out the sighs and strangled sobbing. When the carolers left, the ward was perfectly still, frosted with peace and good will.
XII
Occupational Therapy
THREE MONTHS WAS the gestation period at The Pines. We were conceived at the Administration Building, confirmed by a staff doctor, approved by a Charge Nurse and for the next three months existed as embryos carefully fed and cared for by the Mother Hospital, alive but not living. At the end of three months we emerged and were individuals to engage in occupational therapy, attend the movies, read books and, if strong enough, have time up.
My gestation period ended December twenty-eighth and this date was more important to me than Christmas. I made a large red mark in my journal and worried constantly for fear the staff would not remember that this was The Day, would not arrange for me to have a chest examination, the preliminary for all activity.
On the morning of the twenty-eighth, when the Charge Nurse made rounds after breakfast, I looked at her expectantly. She said nothing. When the nurse came to take pulses, I asked her if I was scheduled for a chest examination. She said nothing. Finally in desperation I asked Eleanor if she thought I would have a chest exam. She said, “The rule is that you can have occupational therapy time and time up after three months. That means a chest examination any time after three months. It could be today—could be six months from now.”
I knew that she was probably right but I wanted to hit her hard with something big. Just because she was always so right, so above my childish enthusiasms and pettiness. When I said anything disagreeable about any of the nurses, which I did often, Eleanor always looked directly at me and said, “Oh?” with a rising inflection. This invariably made me want to do some asinine thing like shouting that the nurses were all prostitutes and I could prove it. Eleanor’s complete and perfect adjustment to The Pines’ routine made my maladjustment eight million times more noticeable and reduced me to a mental level of “my dad’s a policeman and he’ll get you.”
In addition to irritating me, Eleanor had a deft way of deflating me, of skimming the joy from me. One visiting day, as I put on makeup she said, “I think that after a woman has reached a certain age she shouldn’t try to improve on nature.” I should have looked at her pale yellow face, pale yellow eyes, pale yellow hair and pale yellow teeth, and considered the source. Instead, I blushed, felt seventy years old and like an old toss-her-head-try-to-be-young, and told her a big lie about how I really just hated to wear makeup but I did it to cheer up Mother, who used to be on the stage.
In spite of Eleanor’s intimation that I might have to wait anywhere from a week to several years for a chest examination, all morning long I jumped each time a wheelchair went by and was rigidly hopeful up until rest hours. After rest hours I knew there was no hope and so I tried to be like Eleanor and adjust myself to the fact that I might be at The Pines for the rest of my life. “At least I will go through the menopause under medical supervision,” I was just telling myself with a gallant smile, when a nurse came for me with a wheelchair and I was given a chest examination. A thorough chest examination by one of the staff doctors who, when he finished, told me that I could have one hour of occupational therapy time and three hours’ time up.
I was almost hysterical with joy and wanted to hurry back and say, “Yah, yah, yah!” to Eleanor. Instead I told her of my good luck quietly, taking into consideration the fact that she had been on complete bedrest for two years. She didn’t even look up from her knitting. She finished up a row, carefully changed her needles and said, “Sounds to me like they were strengthening you for surgery.”
The next morning I took my first time up—fifteen minutes sitting up in bed—and was visited by the occupational therapy teacher, an ambulant patient named Coranell Planter. Coranell gave me a white card on which I was to mark down my occupational therapy time. She said, “You got an hour, see? So if you crochet from nine-fifteen to nine-thirty, put it down. If you embroidry from two to two-thirty, put that down.” I said, “If I embroider from two to two-thirty I’d better pack my bags because those are rest hours.” She said, “God, Betty, you’re a boot! Now what do you wanta do, knit, crochet, tat, embroidry? Name your own poison, kiddo!”
She unpacked her O.T. bag and covered my spread with samples. A round pillow made of variegated green yarn tied in knots and clipped so that it looked like a sea of old parsley stems; a crocheted woolen afghan done in wavy stripes of eye-putting-out turquoise and throat-gripping magenta; a gray hand-knit man’s slipover sleeveless sweater with enormous armholes, big pouch pockets and a v-neck so small that a tennis ball couldn’t have been wrenched through it; crocheted doilies, tablecloths, tidies, and runners all in deep ecru cotton; a lovely lacy white, very large tatted collar; many crocheted purses; two crocheted neckties, one maroon cotton, one black silk; crocheted pot holders in the shape of pots, kettles, cups and pigs; a white string knitted lettuce bag; natural string-colored woven belts; a khaki-colored crocheted shopping bag with Kelly green braided handles; and a bunch of straggly ill-formed entrail-colored yarn flowers, “to wear on your coat,” Coranell explained, holding them experimentally against her maroon tweed coat where they drooped palely.
It looked like a collection rooted from some lonely spinster’s bureau drawers and made me want to cry, for I had thought that occupational therapy meant useful work. Something I could learn to do well while in bed that would support Anne and Joan and me after I left The Pines and while I was not strong enough for my regular job. If I learned to make every single thing displayed on my bed, the only thing it could possibly do for me would be to turn me into a watery-eyed old lady running my own Gifte Shoppe in the front room of my small cabbage-smelling house in a poor part of town.
I asked Coranell what the men did for occupational therapy, hoping that they were offered something that I could do too, that was just a little more useful and slightly more up-to-date than yarn pillows or tatted Bertha collars. Coranell said, “Oh, the fellas do the same kinda work as the girls except that most of the fellas don’t do none. They think that knitting is sissified, they won’t learn to crochet, they say that those braided belts are useless and of course they won’t embroidry. Some of them do a little leatherwork, one or two knit but most of them just lay.”
It was a most depressing picture and I made a silent vow that when I got out of The Pines I would start a world-wide movement to improve occupational therapy among the bedridden. I didn’t keep the vow, unfortunately, and apparently no one else has felt the urge, for the other day I asked a woman, whose young unhappy husband is in a tuberculosis sanatorium, about occupational therapy and I got the same old story. She said that in her husband’s ward, a few knit, one crochets, one or two do leatherwork, two or three make little lapel pins out of x-ray film. The rest just “lay.”
Coranell told me not to be in a hurry choosing what I wanted to do, that I had all the time in the world, haha, and that she would be back the next day. So saying, she gathered up all the ugly examples of therapeutic occupation, stuffed them in her voluminous canvas O.T. bag and left. I lay in bed and fumed. I wouldn’t make any of those useless things. A white string knitted lettuce bag, indeed! I had never liked fancywork. I saw no earthly use for it and I wasn’t going to change. I would do something useful with my occupational therapy time. I would make brilliant satirical line drawings of the patients and nurses and I would make brilliant satirical notes for a book. I’d show th
em!
After supper the Charge Nurse congratulated me on my time up and asked me what I was going to do for occupational therapy. I said that I thought I’d sketch and write a book. I tried to sound very well trained and bursting with talent. The Charge Nurse, not in the least impressed, said, “Drawing [she spoke of it as though it were coloring in a book with crayons] and writing notes are all right for fun but you must do something useful with your hands. Something to release your nervous tension, like knitting or crocheting.” I said, “I thought occupational therapy was training for some kind of work.” She said, “Not while on bedrest. Bedrest is supposed to be bedrest and occupational therapy is only to relieve tension.”
The next morning I told Coranell rather resentfully that I guessed that I’d learn to tat. Cheerfully ignoring my unenthusiastic attitude, she said, “Well, that’s fine. I’ll lend you a shuttle and some thread until you can have some brought from home. Now this here’s the way to hold the thread, see? And this here’s the way to hold the shuttle, see?”
Coranell was patient and kind and apparently used to people like me. She was enthusiastic over even the slightest progress on my part and never cross with my clumsiness. When she left she said, “You know, Betty, it don’t really matter whether you crochet, knit or tat, or whether you make a tablecloth or just a simple chain, the important thing is that you’re doing something besides layin’ in bed.”
So I tatted and like Kimi learned that sweat is easier to release than tension and that it made no difference what I did, I was doing something besides “layin’” in bed. Tatting, no matter how proficient I became, would never give the children piano lessons, but it made listening to the radio, time up, in fact, life in general more pleasant, and proved to me again that the staff at The Pines always knew what they were doing.
When my time up, which was increased five minutes a day, had reached one hour, I was wheeled to the porch morning and evening to join the other time-uppers. Bundled in everything we owned and wrapped in our night blankets, we sat in reclining chairs and during the morning light, manipulated our crochet hooks, tatting shuttles or knitting needles with our frozen fingers. The evenings were dark so we just sat and shivered.
There were five of us. Kimi, me, the Friendly Organs woman, a former nurse and a small, dauntless woman who was trying time up for the fifth time that year. Each morning, after our time up, a nurse recorded our temperature and pulse and if there was any increase in either, the time up privilege was taken away and we were put back on bedrest. Mrs. Harmon, the small, dauntless woman, said that she could not get past two hours without running a temperature but at least they didn’t take her O.T. time away from her. She was crocheting a lace tablecloth and her bet was that it would be big enough for forty people by the time she got to three hours.
The former nurse, Helen Smith, was making one of the yarn pillows but had chosen shades of tan yarn so that she was creating a sea of dead grass instead of the parsley stems. Friendly Organs knitted socks. She knitted rapidly and perfectly and never looked at her work except when turning the heel. As she knitted she told us about the operation removing her ovarian tumor; about the operation removing a cyst from her wrist; about the operation removing a bunion from her big toe; about the operation to drain her sinus; about the exploratory operation she hoped to have as soon as her t.b. was a little better. The combination of her low, motherly voice and her memory for detail made each of her trips to surgery sound like a “Through the Andes with My Own Llama” travelogue.
On stormy mornings when the wind swooped rudely through the porch, slammed rain against the screens, dashed noisily through the trees and pounded rain on the roof, we experienced difficulty in keeping up with Friendly Organs. One morning we lost her just as she was being given a shot of morphine, heard nothing of the trip to surgery, the six cans of ether, the specialists called in, or the two blood transfusions. In fact, we didn’t pick up the thread of the story until she was back in her hospital bed being fed through the veins. Listening to her long dull stories and gently soothing voice was as lulling as hearing the Congressional Record read aloud, as therapeutic as our handiwork.
Mother was, of course, delighted over my time up and occupational therapy. She brought me a tatting shuttle, several large balls of white thread and a thick book of instructions. According to this book, you could tat anything and there were alluring pictures of filmy collars and cuffs, lacy edgings, place mats like snowflakes, children’s clothes, even bedspreads and tablecloths. I read the fine print and worked hard but for a long time I was able to produce only many small therapeutic pustules of grayish white thread.
I showed this work to Kimi. She said, “It’s hahrrible, what is it?” I said, “It’s tatting. I’m going to make a collar.” She said, mournfully pulling yards and yards of dirty crocheted chain from her bathrobe pocket, “Is this all that lies ahead of us, Betty?” Because her family had always bemoaned the fact that Kimi was interested only in intellectual pursuits, that she cared nothing for domesticity, she insisted that I make a sketch of her crocheting. “Don’t waste time on the face,” she warned me. “Concentrate on the crocheting.”
Having never seen Kimi engaged in any form of occupational therapy other than the simple crocheted chain, I was suspicious when she produced, from time to time, exquisite, finished products of embroidery, cross-stitching, knitting and crocheting. I asked her about this one evening as we sat coldly in our chairs watching the great red double-barred cross on the top of the Administration Building flash on and off and turn our faces, our swaddled forms and the misty spray of rain forced through the screens by the wind, now red, now white like reflections from a fire.
Kimi said, “Everything at this hospital reminds me of tuberculosis. Look how the red light turns the raindrop to little drop of blood, like a small hemorrhage.” I said, “Stop hedging, Kimi.”
She said, “Well, I used to have my mother buy the material and bring them to me. Now I have her buy the material and bring me the finished product because after all, as I am well adjusted and she is not, she should be the one to engage in occupational therapy.”
XIII
My Operation
ON JANUARY SIXTH the Charge Nurse invited me to The Pines moving picture show, but she handed me the invitation so thickly encased in rules it was like being given a present of one smelt wrapped in the New York Sunday Times.
She said in part, “You are on the list to go to the movie tonight, Mrs. Bard. You may wear makeup, if you wish, but you may not talk or laugh. You are to be ready by seven o’clock, in your robe and slippers, with your pillow and night blanket. You will be called for by a male [she said male in a low throbbing voice as though it were some dangerous new sex] ambulant patient but you are not to speak to or to laugh with your escort. Your temperature and pulse will be taken as soon as you return to bed and if your temperature or your pulse has increased you will not be allowed to go to the next moving picture show.” I thanked her, promised not to speak or to pulsate and she left.
When she had gone I dug down under the thick depressing wrappings and found that my little present was still there, I was going to the movie! I was going to leave my bed and spend a perfectly delightful evening losing myself in the lives of people who had nothing to do with tuberculosis. I hoped that the picture would be either a musical extravaganza in technicolor or a gangster picture with lots of shooting and screaming tires, but I didn’t really care if it turned out to be a travelogue or something starring Rin Tin Tin, it was a movie and I was going to it and it would be my first strong step toward normal living.
After supper I was so excited my heart pounded like a jungle drum and my hands were as fluttery and unmanageable as freshly caught sole, but I smeared on lipstick, wet my hair with drinking water and thought, “This is living!”
Eleanor, who was also going to the movie, remained, of course, as unruffled as a turnip. She knitted methodically and unemotionally until one minute before seven, then she put her knitting dow
n temporarily while she made her first and only gesture toward the evening by pulling her pale hair behind her large transparent ears, anchoring it firmly with black bobby pins, and getting out and putting on rimless spectacles. When she had finished she didn’t even look in her mirror but returned immediately to the knitting, and not until we heard the first clang of the elevator doors, the creak of wheelchairs and unfamiliar deep voices reading off names from slips of paper distributed by the office, did she get slowly out of bed, slowly put on her tan bathrobe and tan leather slippers and slowly wrap her night blanket around her bed pillow.
I had been dressed, twitching on the edge of my bed, for half an hour so of course she was called for first. Her escort, large, handsome and cheerful, stopped at the door, smiled at both of us but read Eleanor’s name from his little slip of paper. I was glad that she didn’t believe in makeup and was happy to note that she fluttered coyly as she climbed into the wheelchair. When she was ready she turned and gave the handsome stranger one of her most inspirational smiles. She had intended to be alluring I was sure but the effect of her smooth pale head, the spectacles, the large myopic eyes, the waxy ears, the tan body, the gargoyle smile and the clutched woolen blanket, was so exactly like an eager brown moth about to eat lunch that the man flinched perceptibly and I almost laughed out loud. As they creaked off down the hall I could picture Eleanor flying out of the wheelchair in one of the dark tunnels, flittering along the walls and finally flinging herself drunkenly against the lighted windows of the auditorium.
When I finally heard my name being read in a high uncertain voice at the doorway of the wrong room, I knew that Eleanor had had the evening’s luck. My escort had nothing in common with Eleanor’s. He was not handsome, he was not cheerful and he wasn’t a man. He was about seventeen years old, approximately six feet six inches tall, two inches thick, greenish and so shy that I was afraid that speaking to him would have the same disastrous melting effect as putting salt on a snail.