Anne and Joan, in their dark blue coats, spent the entire five and a half hours asking me if they could have wooden shoes, and I had a strong feeling, that if I died, their chief sorrow would be not getting the wooden shoes. Just before dinner I dressed and took the children around the promenades and introduced them to my friends and after the first four or five introductions I didn’t have to push so hard on the tops of their heads to make them curtsy.
Kimi had the first town leave. On May thirteenth at noon her family came to get her and Sheila and I stood on the dining-room terrace and waved and waved, the tears running down our foolish faces. Just as she climbed into the car, Kimi looked threateningly over her shoulder at us and said, “Tell the Charge Nurse not to be surprised nevair to see me again.” She came back, though, promptly on the stroke of eight, reported to the office, had her pulse and temperature taken, and then staggered up the ramp her arms full of food and presents for us all.
Eleven of us gathered in her bathroom to drink tea made from hot water out of the tap, to eat hamburgers, soggy and slightly cold but delicious, and Japanese Sembi. Kimi said that her town leave was wonderful but it raised a doubt in her mind about the future of “a large Japanese creature, riddled with germ but longing for a normal life.” Delores said, “Don’t you worry, honey, with your looks and brains you could go on the stage.” Kimi said grimly, “But only to demonstrate to the world how large the Japanese can get.” Pixie said, “Look at me, I bet not one of my costumes will fit me. This morning I weighed one hundred and two pounds.” Kimi said, “Let us change the subject at once. When is your town leave, Betty?”
My town leave was to be on Saturday, June third, if granted. I turned in my application or request, on May twenty-first. A few minutes later the Charge Nurse sent for me and in her most ingratiating manner told me that before approving my town leave the Medical Director would have to know what my attitude was toward—and she read off a list beginning with “Controlling impulses of the bladder”—result of a report from Miss Toecover—and ending with “Speaking French to roommate.” I could not imagine what this last was all about and told the Charge Nurse so. She said, “It has been reported to me, Mrs. Bard, that you speak French to your roommate in the evenings.” I wondered why, if this were true, it would not be considered a virtue but refrained from comment.
The mystery was cleared up when I returned to my room quivering with rage and noticed a cook book lying on my roommate’s table on top of several weeks’ accumulation of funny papers. I remembered how, several evenings before, roommate was studying the cook book and asking me the meaning of the terms, sauté (she pronounced it sooty), au gratin, fricasee, en brochette, mousse (pronounced of course mouse), etc. I told her of the incident with the Charge Nurse and warned her that if I lost my town leave I would not answer for the consequences. She said only, “Speaking French. Gee, kid, what a laugh!”
Three days later the Charge Nurse sent for me, kept me waiting as she always did for about half an hour, then summoned me to her office. She preceded her lecture by telling me how many times a week the Medical Director called her a damned fool. This was supposed to establish a fellow feeling between us. All it did for me was to give the Medical Director credit for being more discerning than I had thought. The crux of the visit was that my request for a town leave had been approved but with the addendum: “Tell this patient that her attitude does not warrant a town leave but I will grant this one. However, unless she changes materially she will get no further town leaves unless it be a permanent one.” After reading this message from the Medical Director, the Charge Nurse gave me a short lecture on “Thrice blessed are those who forgive and forget” and “Let us admit our faults and try to do better.”
I awakened on the day of my town leave to leaden skies and driving rain which I didn’t mind in the least as it meant a fire in the fireplace at home. On the stroke of twelve Mary drove up and out spilled Anne and Joan followed by Mother carrying my tweed coat. I ran down the ramp and was engulfed in embraces and my old tweed, then to the car and away. The thrill of going through the gates, rounding the bend and losing sight of the sanatorium was never to be forgotten.
When we drove up in front of the house, sisters Dede, Alison and Madge, the dogs and the cats were on the steps to greet me. We all went in, Anne and Joan glued to each side, and then I had cups and cups of delicious, strong, hot coffee. I felt peaceful and content and so happy. Then Madge began to play the piano. She played “Tea for Two,” “Night and Day,” “Body and Soul,” “Judy,” all my favorites, and I was overwhelmed. It was all too wonderful. I wept and the children cried too, and the dogs barked and everyone else tried in loud voices to be cheerful. Mother hurriedly served lunch.
We all sat down at the table and everything was very gay for a few minutes. Then Joanie put down her soup spoon and began to bawl. With sympathetic tears streaming from my own eyes, I asked her what the trouble was. She gulped and said, “I was just thinking about showing you my new shoes and I remembered they have dye spilled on them.” I finally persuaded her to get them anyway and she came down with a very large pair of Mexican huaraches with a pinpoint of black dye on one side. I exclaimed over the beauty and wondrous size of the shoes and everything was peaceful until lunch was over.
Then brother Cleve, his wife Margaret and son Allen, dear neighbors and their children, the “old baby” now a little boy who shook hands and talked plainly and solemnly, and neighborhood children came to see the returned invalid. The very foreign atmosphere of loving kindness proved too much and again I wept and the children chimed in. When the visitors had gone we piled logs on the fire, made more coffee and prepared to make the most of the fleeting eight hours.
Unhappily I raised the question of where I would sleep when I returned, which brought to light the fact that the-always-ice-cold but with-its-own-bath-downstairs bedroom, instead of being filled with flowers in crystal vases awaiting my return, had not been touched since I left. In fact was being used as a storeroom. “Just as though you didn’t expect me to come home ever,” I said brokenly. “Oh, we knew our good luck couldn’t last forever,” Dede said putting her arm around me. The issue of who was to clean the back bedroom before I came home ended in a tremendous and very vigorous family fight involving every injustice done to any of us as far back as we could remember. In the midst of this emotional upheaval I was horrified to find that I was weeping and TATTING!
I was in the office on the stroke of eight o’clock and rather disappointed to find that my pulse and temperature were perfectly normal. As I had returned laden with hot ham sandwiches and a chocolate cake, I was greeted by my tubercular friends with great enthusiasm.
After lights out I lay in the dark and thought about the day. I was certain that my family hadn’t the least idea of the meaning of the words rest and quiet; that they thought because I looked much healthier than any of them that I must be equally strong or stronger; that it would be impossible to observe rest hours or to adhere to only eight hours’ time up at home. I was very tired, quite unhappy and bewildered and didn’t care that I had lost my next town leave.
The next morning Kimi and Sheila were informed that their next town leaves had also been cancelled on the grounds that the Charge Nurse thought that they thought they were superior to her. They said that they didn’t care.
As there was a perfect cloudburst during rest hours and immediately before visiting hours, Mother arrived very wet and very cross. She denounced me soundly for weeping on my day at home, said that everyone had planned a happy day for me and that I was a most unsatisfactory guest. I explained that tears were brought on by joy but she merely sniffed and intimated that I was a big “saddo” and very spoiled. She said, “You have been concentrating on yourself for eight months, now it is time you began to think of someone else.”
I wish that I could say that I immediately began thinking of other people and was consequently much happier. I didn’t. As soon as visiting hours were over I told Kimi and She
ila how very un-understanding my family were. They retaliated with similar tales of hard-heartedness on the part of their loved ones. After supper we sat in the bathroom, drinking tea, eating cake and talking about how difficult it was going to be for delicate, emotionally frail us to get the proper care in the big cruel outside world.
XVIII
“Let Me Out! Let Me Out!”
THE MEDICAL DIRECTOR of The Pines made himself personally responsible for all admissions to and discharges from the sanatorium. He never admitted as a patient anyone who could afford to go to a private sanatorium and he never gave an honorable discharge to a patient until he was sure that patient was well enough to resume normal living.
Patients at The Pines paid nothing or what they could and only the Medical Director knew who paid what. People who can reach out anytime and touch death have little false pride and the nothing-payers, by their own admission, were in the great majority. The Medical Director ruled his sanatorium and the patients with a rod of iron, said constantly that people with tuberculosis were ungrateful, stupid, uncooperative and unworthy. Then, carefully screening himself from his own kindness the way he screened his patients from their operations, he loaned those same ungrateful, stupid, uncooperative and unworthy patients money, bought them bathrobes and pajamas, took care of their families and children, listened to their problems, helped them get work and fretted twenty-four hours a day over their welfare.
We patients at The Pines differed in color, nationality, political beliefs, I.Q., age, religion background and ambition. According to the standards of normal living, the only things that most of us had in common were being alive and speaking English, but as patients in the sanatorium we had everything in common and were firmly cemented together by our ungratefulness, stupidity, uncooperativeness, unworthiness, poverty, tuberculosis and longing for a discharge.
Discharges, announced on Mondays directly after rest hours, were (except in the very rare instance of someone like Sigrid who was so well adjusted she could have cured her tuberculosis riding on the subway, or someone being sent home to die) given only to patients with eight, ten or twelve hours’ time up.
As a patient was never told anything about the progress of his tuberculosis cure and was never warned of impending dismissal, a discharge was supposed to be a complete and wonderful surprise. Actually, every Monday from five-thirty a.m. until three o’clock, all eight-hour patients were jumpy with anticipation and lay in their beds during rest hours, stiff and prickly with hope, listening for the slap, slap of the Charge Nurse’s feet. When weeks, even months had gone by without a single discharge, we’d relax or rather droop and make morbid plans for our third Christmas, our fourth summer at The Pines.
During one of these depressing no-discharge intervals, I made plans to learn to read and write Japanese so fluently that I could even take Japanese dictation. Kimi said that she would be glad to teach me, but if I was planning on a career as a spy she thought it only fair to warn me that I would be wasting my time as spies were always willowy creatures able to slip through small apertures.
Sheila decided to write a book and Kimi decided on the study of psychiatry. She said, “With such rare laboratory specimens as we have right here at hand I may become famous almost immediately.”
Then one Monday at two-thirty the Charge Nurse’s slapping feet stopped at my door but at the bed of my roommate, who was told to report immediately to the dining room. She came back in a little while and said that the Medical Director had told her that she could go home that afternoon if she wanted to, but she didn’t want to, she liked it at The Pines and thought she’d stay on for another month or two. Resisting a strong desire to slap her for this further demonstration of stupidity, I asked who else had been given discharges.
There were six of them. A very sweet woman with four small children; Big Daddy and her faded corsages; a fat little woman who wore pink-flowered sleepers and looked like a piggy bank; a woman who had had t.b. of the spine, had had the diseased piece of her spine removed and replaced by a piece of her thigh, had lain uncomplainingly flat on her back for over a year but was distinguished not for her brilliant recovery but for not having had her hair washed for fifteen months; a young newspaper reporter, and the handsome man who had escorted Eleanor to the movies. In the dining room, as each one who had been given a discharge brought his tray to his table, there was a deafening thunder of clapping.
After supper when the Charge Nurse made her rounds my roommate said, “I don’t wanna go home yet. I think I’ll stay on for a few months.” The Charge Nurse said, “The Medical Director wouldn’t have given you your discharge if you weren’t ready to go home. We are very crowded. Please leave immediately.” I wanted to kiss her.
After temperatures and pulse we all lined up on the promenades and watched the cars drive up and take away the lucky seven. When the young husband came for the sweet woman with the four little children, everyone cried. The husband, a rather thin, stooped young man, climbed carefully out of the car carrying the baby, then with the other children tumbling around his feet, he stood in the twilight by the dining room looking anxiously toward the Ambulant Hospital. When his healthy wife came out in her too-small shabby suit, he handed her the baby, lifted up each child for a kiss, then put his thin arm protectively around her plump shoulders and guided her to the old car.
When our tear-blurred eyes had followed the lights of the last car bearing the last free patient down the drive, out the gates and around the bend, Kimi, Sheila, Evalee and I retired to my bathroom to drink tea and to talk moodily about the long, long week that lay between us and next Monday. Evalee said, “I don’t know what I’d do if the Medical Director sent me home on eight hours. With my husband away and Mama working I’d sure have to be up more than eight hours to take care of two little children.” Kimi said, “You’ll just have to give the little one sedative so that you can all sleep sixteen hour a day.”
Sheila said, “Well, I’m not going to stick to eight hours’ time up when I get home, and as long as I live I’m never going to lie down in the middle of the day again.” Evalee said, “Just you wait until you have a family. You’ll be tickled to death to have an excuse to take a nap.” I said nothing. I came from a family that considered one a.m. early evening and afternoon naps only for little children and the senile. I wondered if the Medical Director knew of these problems and took them into consideration when giving discharges. It seemed he did, for the days went by and we remained disgruntled, unhappy but undischarged.
The next Monday was dark and dreary. The smoke from the store chimney sat sluggishly overhead and the steady beat of the rain was punctuated by the staccato drip from the eaves and the restless splash of the fountain. Nothing good could happen on such a day and nothing did. I had a new roommate. A very young girl who looked like a Madonna and told me that she was writing a book. She said, “It’s about robbers and stuff like that. I don’t have any trouble getting ideas, it is the putting them down that is hard.”
The next Monday was beautiful and warm and the desire to deviate from the straight and narrow path to breakfast was almost overwhelming. The perennial beds in the formal garden were gaudy with small, deep purple and blue Japanese iris, scarlet and yellow geum, large languid doronicum, pale yellow cottage tulips and blue and purple violas. Everything was drenched with dew and I wanted to bury my face in the fragrant coolness. This simple pleasure was denied me, however, for I had been advised by the authorities that wandering in the grounds before breakfest meant just one thing—S-E-X.
On the Friday before the next Monday, I was given a chest examination and spent the rest hours formulating an appropriate leave-taking of Miss Gillespie. I was torn between a well-aimed kick and a dignified and haughty exit. No word on chest examination. My longing for home was so overwhelming that in spirit I had already left the sanatorium. Only my bulky body, like an empty house with cold unfriendly rooms and dark windows, remained.
The occupational therapy shop was very crowded a
nd Miss Gillespie’s shouts for “Quiet! Must have Quiet! QUIET!” rang like a gong every minute or so. One of the innocent new patients created havoc by assuming that the WOMEN’S TOILET on the door across the hall from the O.T. shop meant just that and went in. Miss Gillespie, busy painting her own likeness on a suspender button (nice Christmas gift), was not aware of what had happened until she noticed that the light was on in the lavatory. She exploded. “Who’s there? Who went in there? What’s going on?” She hurled herself from her seat and against the door of the women’s toilet. The door was locked. “Open up! Open up!” she demanded banging on the door so loudly that all the men in the print shop next door came out into the hall to see what was going on. The poor frightened little patient opened the door and Miss Gillespie grabbed her by the arm and threw her into the O.T. shop. “Never go in there!” she yelled. “Control the bladder. Everything can be controlled. Quiet, must have quiet. Control everything!” She went back to her painting. Kimi watched her for a few minutes, then said, “She is painting her likeness on some small object. Could it be a kidney stone?”
June twelfth was a beautiful summer morning. The pergola over the dining-room walk was quilted with pink roses and purple clematis. Long ribbons of purple and blue violas bordered all the beds in the formal garden and in every corner were clumps of great, heavy-headed peonies. The air was moist and scented and a tender breeze gently flipped the leaves of the poplars, now silver, now green. The brightly robed patients moving slowly and sedately toward the dining room were so like figures in a pageant that I expected a chorus to come out from behind the privet hedge.
Over our morning coffee, Sheila, Kimi and I decided that from that day forward we would maintain stoic calm and complete indifference toward the Charge Nurse and Miss Gillespie. Kimi said that she was also toying with the idea of starting a rival sanatorium magazine to be called “Over the Sputum Cups.” We asked Miss West, a friendly little nurse, if she thought there was a chance of our getting our discharges that day, but she said that we should settle down and forget such nonsense, as patients were never discharged under a year. A year would mean August for Sheila and Kimi, September for me. She could not explain why I had received the mysterious chest examination.