The Plague and I
In the occupational therapy shop, Miss Gillespie took me to task over my useless tatting. She said that there were hundreds, yes hundreds of useful articles made by former patients and displayed on her shelves and that I was to look them over and start to work making one of them immediately. I said again that I would like to study shorthand. She said, “You’re no better than the rest of us, Mrs. Bard.” As I had always considered the writing of shorthand a very humble accomplishment, I was certain that Miss Gillespie still labored under the impression that shorthand was some fashionable game like badminton. I told her that I thought I would crochet a cover for my dictionary. She seemed well satisfied with this useful project.
Dinner was a frugal meal with one small chop apiece. “Chip, more appropriate name,” Kimi said, dismally inspecting hers. “Until August and September,” we said mournfully to each other as we parted for the rest hours.
At two-thirty we heard the slap, slap, slap of the Charge Nurse and it meant nothing to us. She turned in to Kimi and Sheila’s room, then came to me and told me to report to the dining room. I was in my robe and was on the rustic walk before I noticed that I was barefooted. I ran back up the ramp to my room, grabbed my slippers but didn’t stop to put them on. When I got to the deserted dining room Sheila was sitting at a table clasping and unclasping her hands. Kimi was with the Medical Director. I was the last to be called.
The Medical Director was sitting at the Charge Nurse’s desk. He told me to sit down and I fell weakly into a chair. He said, “How would you like to go home this afternoon?” I couldn’t answer. I just looked at him. He then told me that my sputum had been negative since October, that I was in fine condition, that I would have to take pneumothorax for from three to five years, that he had had a most difficult time teaching me that I had tuberculosis and that he still wasn’t sure that I realized how serious my illness had been. I said, “If my sputum has been negative since October I must have started getting well almost as soon as I got here.” The Medical Director said, “You have made a very rapid and splendid recovery and you are fortunate in having great recuperative powers. All are not similarly blessed. The important thing for you to remember is not that your sputum has been negative since October but that you had a cavity in your left lung and a shadow on your right lung. You have had serious tuberculosis, do not forget it.” I asked him if I could be with the children and he said, “Certainly, you’re not contagious.” I tried to thank him for all he had done for me but he brushed it aside. “Take care of yourself,” he said. “Show me that you have learned something about tuberculosis, that’s all the thanks I want.” We shook hands and I returned to the hospital where I found Sheila and Kimi sitting on their beds and looking dumbly at each other.
Miss West came in, hugged us all and offered to run over to the office and call our homes. Patients came from all sides to congratulate us and we told them all we would be packed and gone in a maximum of twenty minutes. The Charge Nurse had told me that I didn’t have to send my things through fumigation so I tossed everything helter-skelter into cartons and was fully dressed and ready to leave in twelve minutes.
Sheila’s family came about thirty minutes after Miss West called them. Kimi and I put on our coats and walked to the car with her. We expected our families within the next few minutes so we thought we’d just stay on the walk by the dining room. It was three-ten. At four-thirty they still hadn’t come but we disdained offers of supper and returned to the promenade. I ran the gamut of things that might have caused the delay and at last came to the bitter conclusion that they didn’t want me. I saw my future as a long series of trips from one sanatorium to another, a trail of enemies behind me.
The deep twilight settled down and Kimi and I could hardly see the road. A single car wound slowly around the bend. Kimi and I jumped up and began assembling our bundles. The car passed our building and went on up the drive. We sat down again. We could hear nurses calling to each other as they went off duty; the doleful splash of the fountain, the soft pad of slippered feet in the hallway. Why didn’t they come? Would we have to face the humiliation of begging the Charge Nurse for just one more night under her roof? We decided to walk to the office and call again.
Kimi’s mother answered the phone at her house and was so excited at hearing Kimi’s voice and so bitterly disappointed not to have been home when the first call was made, that she began to sob. Kimi spoke crisply in Japanese for a few minutes then hung up the phone and translated for me. “Mama is so emotional, she is a poet you know and so of course slightly unbalanced, she began to cry when she heard my voice so I said, ‘Please don’t waste time crying, Mama, just get hold of Papa and drive out here as fast as you can.’”
There was no answer to many long, long rings at my house. In desperation I called a neighbor who told me that the entire family were across the lake on a picnic and she had no idea when, if ever, they would return. I left word that I would be waiting all night if necessary but they must come.
At nine o’clock the family came for me and after reaching home, we stayed up until three o’clock drinking coffee and eating left-over sandwiches. When I climbed into bed in the uncleaned back room my stomach felt like a just-hooked marlin, but I was happier than I had ever been in my life.
XIX
“Whom’s with Who”
IT TOOK ME the whole summer to learn that you do not dispose of eight and a half months in a sanatorium just by leaving the grounds. I had had to struggle and bleed to adjust to sanatorium routine and I had to struggle and bleed to adjust back again to normal living. Certain marks of sanatorium life, like the prison pallor, disappeared with time; some, only concentrated effort erased; a few, like the scars from surgery, remained forever.
When I first came home, I dreamt about the sanatorium every night and awoke every morning when the five o’clock streetcar clanged past, expecting the washwater girls. At first I used to get up, stealthily retrieve the paper from the front porch, make a large pot of deliciously strong coffee and luxuriate in the breakfast nook until around seven when the family began seeping downstairs. After a month or so I would wake up, realize that I was at home and go back to sleep.
On my third day at home I received a letter from The Pines giving explicit instructions for care at home. It was a routine letter sent to all discharged patients but, as it was signed by the Medical Director, I thought it was a warning directed solely at me. The letter said:
1. Go back to your doctor every month for the first six months and have x-rays made as the doctor advises.
2. Do only the work the doctor approves. Ask his advice about hours and place of work.
3. Sleep at least nine hours every night, and a rest period of two hours in the afternoon is desirable.
4. Sleep alone in bed, preferably in a room alone. [Was this advice for morals or health?]
5. If attacked by slight cold, rest in bed until the cold is entirely gone. A doctor should be called if any symptoms appear.
6. Eat well-balanced meals at regular intervals.
7. If there is sputum, even though it is “negative,” it should be disposed of as it was in the sanatorium. [Oh, please let me spit on the floor, just once!]
8. A woman who has had tuberculosis should avoid becoming pregnant except on the advice of her doctor. [And preferably after the marriage ceremony.]
9. Recreation and entertainment should be engaged in only in moderation.
The letter ended with a quotation on relapse, warning me that if I didn’t play the game according to the rules and if I was restless, heedless or willful I would soon go to my eternal rest. I was only slightly reassured when I learned that Sheila and Kimi had had similar letters.
At first I had no inclination to resume old friendships, and I kept up an enormous correspondence with my sanatorium friends. I clung to Sheila and Kimi as though we were all lepers trying to live in a non-leper colony. Sheila disengaged herself from us after the first few weeks and became very normally interested in her comin
g marriage. Kimi and I clung together. She came to the house frequently and we walked in the park and talked about The Pines, Miss Toecover and the patients.
Kimi said that she was very lonely and unhappy, that her former friends treated her as though she were violently contagious, and boys, who before had been merely too short for her, were now like “mites” in comparison. I tried to cheer her with stories of my lonely, unhappy girlhood. Of how even without tuberculosis I had always been shunned. After the third chapter of “The Lone Wolf” in grammar school, high school and at college, Kimi said, “Enough of this lying. Let us face facts. I used to be full of fun and have many friends. Now I am over-sensitive. I get hurt by everything and I do not find enjoyment in anything. I am hateful to my poor mother and father and I quarrel incessantly with my brother and sister. I am only happy when I am with you discussing the old days at the sanatorium.” I told her that I was sure that this was all part of the adjustment from one life to another, but I felt much less sure than I sounded for I knew that I had become big and fat and whiny and the epitome of everything the sanatorium had warned us against.
Then my sister Mary invited Anne and Joan and me to visit her at their summer camp in the San Juan Islands. We left at a little after five, one still summer morning, and drove through miles and miles of rich, well-kept farmland, deep forests and along rocky shores. The camp, a series of small silver gray cabins, was on a great curving sweep of sandy beach, sand dunes and tide flats covered with shells, sea-animals, drift wood and agates. We cooked and ate all of our meals out of doors and at night after supper we built beach fires, toasted marshmallows and watched the sun go blazing down behind the Straits of Juan de Fuca and the moon rise over the small dancing lights of the fishing fleet.
The cabins were lined with cedar and smelled of stale bacon smoke, salt air and shingles. Anne and Joan and I dressed and undressed in front of a small airtight stove that crackled and spit and turned red in the middle. The beds were hard and the mattresses were lumpy but through the windows we could hear the scrub pines complaining about the wind, the swooooooOOOOOOSH in and out of the surf. Inside the candle sputtered in its saucer and the children’s breathing was deep and quiet. After a day or so I stopped dreaming of the sanatorium.
Before breakfast, small niece Mari, Anne, Joan and I walked a quarter of a mile over the dunes to “the farm” for the milk. As we walked along in the morning sun, the short beach grass crunchy underfoot, the salt air fragrant with pine, the mournful crying of the gulls accompanied by the whirring of the grasshoppers, I held the children’s hands more firmly and quickly put aside the thought that at just that moment only a week before I was entertaining Miss Toecover’s shop.
After ten days we returned home loaded with agates and near-agates, vile-smelling shells, pretty stones and bright plans for the future.
Soon after coming home from the beach I spent my first evening among strangers and in an apartment. The evening was not unusually warm but the room seemed suffocating and the air smelled as if it had been rented with the apartment. Everyone looked very tired and seemed to me to be on edge and straining to have a good time.
After the first hour I too looked tired and was on edge and straining to have a good time for the apartment was heated to 90°, there wasn’t a shred of oxygen left in the air, I was fat and my blood was attuned to a temperature of not over 50°. I coughed tubercularly a few times but all that got me was another offer of a drink. About eleven o’clock as I actually began to lose consciousness, I staggered across the room, mumbling apologies, raised the window two inches and opened the door into the hall. My hostess shivered a few times, then giving me an accusing look, went in and got little sacks and jackets for the women. The men hunched their shoulders, looked for the draft and moved into protected corners. When I got home I sat out on the porch and breathed in great reviving breaths of fresh air and wondered how I was ever going to stand working in a hot stuffy office.
In July Mother left to spend a month on a friend’s farm and I took over the housekeeping. I found that with hard work and activity my spirits soared, but I went down for my pneumothorax overflowing with apprehension for fear I had “overdone.” The doctor collapsed my lung and told me that I was in fine condition and that I could stay up twelve hours a day.
Later in the week I went to a luncheon at a country club and was dumfounded to have everyone dumfounded to be in actual contact with a returned White Plaguer. During the luncheon there were many questions about the exact symptoms, the location of the first pain, etc., and before the afternoon had ended I was moderately certain that I had uncovered several hidden but far-gone cases of t.b.
When I got home Sheila called to tell me that two patients at The Pines had died. One the thirteen-year-old girl, the other a Japanese boy whom Kimi knew. Immediately my trip to the beach, the luncheon, my household duties became vague far-away things and I threw myself headlong into the sanatorium. I called Kimi to give her the bad news and we talked and talked about patients who would die, had died and might die. That night I dreamed of The Pines again and awakened very early with the old depression hanging over me.
I decided that since my future was short and black, I should spend every minute with Anne and Joan. I arranged a crowded and gritty picnic in the park, including, in the heat of my enthusiasm, five very young neighborhood children as well as my own two and all the dogs. Apparently somewhere during my incarceration I had lost touch with that carefree spirit of young things, for the dogs ran wild, the park gardeners threatened to put us all out, the smallest children became entirely unmanageable and lay in the paths kicking and screaming, while the larger ones disappeared into the tops of trees.
I finally emerged from the park yanking in one hand, by the leashes, the three dogs who slid along on their haunches, and in the other hand, three little, red-eyed, snuffling boys tied together by their belts and led by my scarf. The four older children I had abandoned while they were still risking their necks in the trees. As I grimly headed toward home, I wondered if this was why the sanatorium was constantly warning its patients about being around young children when they got home.
As it became known that I was home, people were very kind and entertained for me, but I grew increasingly resentful of the tendency of my friends first to scream when they saw me as if I were a ghost, and then shout that I looked TEN YEARS YOUNGER BUT SO MUCH FATTER! As time passed I declined all invitations and asked Sheila, Kimi and the sweet sanatorium nurse, Molly, to dinner and to spend the evenings talking about The Pines and the inmates. I learned that Eileen still had no time up, Minna had had the operation removing her kidney and was doing very well; and that Kate, Delores, Pixie and several others were due for discharges. Kimi brought me copies of the sanatorium magazine and I was ashamed to find myself reading them avidly.
I had long letters from Kate who told me that Miss Gillespie talked about me constantly as a powerful threat of mob rule in the occupational therapy shop; that Kate was considered such a trusted patient that she was given library duty and was allowed to push the book-cart into the men’s ward, which privilege had been much over-rated; that almost everyone was being strengthened for some kind of surgery; that Delores and Pixie had come to open warfare and the entire Ambulant Hospital, especially the men, had all taken sides. She said that the Charge Nurse was threatening to throw everybody out and close up the institution.
Kimi came to lunch almost every day and brought charming gifts for us all. Sembi for the children, a lovely set of bowls, little Japanese figurines, silk scarves and handkerchiefs. She was very blue and said that there was no place for her any more. She was a misfit even at home. I told her of my fragile feelings, spells of black depression and secret dread of looking for a job, of becoming so obsessed with housework that I even polished the mailbox and waxed the front porch. Of trying to get close to the children again by boring them with too much attention, too much unskilled participation in their games.
At that time Anne and Joan and
Anne’s best friend Ermengarde spent the lovely summer days in their room with the doors and windows shut, playing Sonja Heine. Anne and Ermengarde took turns in an old green chiffon party dress and Alison’s black hockey skates, stumping around on the linoleum floor, being Sonja Heine. But Joan was always Tyrone Power. Dressed in her Buck Rogers helmet, an old pumpkin suit with bloomer legs, long brown stockings and her red rubber raincoat she pursued Sonja on a pretend roller coaster, on a pretend Ferris Wheel, on pretend horseback, then finally caught her on the ice (or linoleum rug), always posing in a poorly executed very unsteady arabesque performed to the squeaky accompaniment of the Skaters Waltz played on their little phonograph. I watched the performance one day much against their wills and made some suggestions about the costumes. The suggestions were not well received. Joan said that I had been in the hospital so long that I apparently didn’t recognize the fact that she was dressed exactly like Tyrone Power. Anne said that she and Ermengarde dressed and skated exactly like Sonja Heine and they could prove it by pictures.
When Joan had other plans, Anne and Ermengarde spent the lovely, sunny, summer daytime in their room with the windows and doors shut, playing opera singer. Crouched by the little phonograph they would listen attentively while Alma Gluck sang “Lo Hear the Gentle Lark” over and over and over again. Then Ermengarde would stand up and sing the song with Anne prompting from her crouched position on the floor, then Anne would sing and Ermengarde would prompt. This was a harmless enough activity except that Ermengarde was the type of singer who had a gesture for every single word. “Lo” she sang with her index finger pointed menacingly toward the audience; “hear” (her head was bent slightly to one side, her right hand cupped her right ear) “the gentle” (stroking motions) “lark” (bouncing and fluttering of wings) and Anne copied her exactly.