An Excerpt from Elegy for a Disease
The Thing Itself
In high school, I turned the page in my chemistry book and there before me was a photograph of the molecules of the polio virus. Taken through an electron microscope, the picture could have been faked by setting fifteen or twenty ping-pong balls next to each other and snapping a picture of them in a dim room with black and white film well past its expiration date.
The photograph evoked a vertiginous feeling in me: how could the thing that had so radically altered my life be so simple?
The Kid In The Parking Lot of Warehouse Club
I'm exhausted when I limp out of Warehouse Club, a discount supermarket on the outskirts of Detroit, where cartons have been razor-bladed open to reveal their contents: ten pound sacks of rice or half-a-dozen boxes of tissues shrink-wrapped together. My cart is loaded down with industrial-sized quantities of toilet paper and breakfast cereal and cans of tuna.
One of the neighborhood kids who hang around the doors asks me if I want help. Instead of my usual, "No thanks, I'm okay," I let him help me. It's partly that I'm beat, but also that I'm doing him a good turn as much as he's doing me one.
"What happened to your leg?" he asks me as he's loading the groceries into the trunk of my Volvo.
"I had polio."
"What's that?"
I feel like an aging movie star whose been asked her name by a restaurant maitre d'. Polio was as famous as AIDS. Those of us who had it were figures .We limped around under its metaphoric weight. Polio had such cachet that occasionally people lied and said they had it when they hadn't. Having "overcome" polio was something you could put on life's resume.
"It's a disease. People don't get it anymore. There's a vaccine now," I say, and hand him two dollars.
"Thanks, lady," he says.
"She'll Be Three At The End of October..."
Prehistory refers to times preceding the beginning of the written record, prior to Herodotus writing of Xerxes' Persian army marching into Greece, of Thucydides' accounts of the Athenian armies battling the Spartan, or of Ssu-ma Ch'ien's writings on the Chinese courts. History begins when accounts are written, facts are set down.
We know the prehistoric past by supposition and inference, what we extrapolate from myths, what we learn from the archeological fragments extracted from the earth.
All of us have our own prehistories: our early childhoods.
In the late summer and very early fall of 1954, in the college town of Hamilton in the dairy country of upstate New York, my mother must have answered questions about my age by saying, "She'll be three at the end of October."
To the question, asked perhaps with a gesture towards her belly, "And when will this one arrive?" she would have said, "Beginning of October."
"Well, I guess you're keeping busy."
She must have laughed and said, "Yes, and there are three others. The oldest will be six at the end of November." Four children, five and under; one more on the way. My sisters and brother and I arrived, if not quite like clockwork, close to it. A gap of seventeen-eighteen-nineteen months separates each of us. My mother planned on having seven children.
Everything had happened so fast. In 1944, just ten years before, the war was still going on. My mother was a junior at Radcliffe, walking across the yard with a green book bag containing her copies of Canterbury Tales and Pound's Cantos slung over her shoulder, "Mary Donovan, Bertram Hall" written on the flyleaves in the blue-black ink of a fountain pen. Nearly every morning, through the open window of her dorm room, the words, "The uniform of the day will be the regular uniform of the day," drifted in from the p.a. system set up in the Yard, telling the students in ROTC what to wear. It was a phrase she would sometimes repeat to us when it was time for us to get out of our pajamas and into our clothes or out of our clothes and into our pajamas.
Later, on the radio, somber music played. "This morning, at 5:37 a.m., President Roosevelt died suddenly at Warm Springs..." Truman was inaugurated with all the pomp of a shotgun wedding. A few months later, the music was rousing. And then the atom bombs were dropped on Japan. All through the fifties, on every calendar, May 8 had "V-E Day" printed on it in red letters and August 14, "V-J Day": victory in Europe, victory in Japan.
My father came home from the Pacific, met my mother but then could not find her again, because Bertram Hall had been shut down when the roof fell in. They ran into each other on the street in Cambridge. My mother graduated from Radcliffe, got a job at Harvard Press, shared a flat on Beacon Hill with two other girls. Meat was still hard to get, she would tell us later. "What did you eat for dinner?"--dinner without meat being an unimaginable concept. Sometimes we had peanut butter, she'd say, and I imagined peanut butter, formed into the shape of a roast and set on the pale blue glass platter on which our Sunday roasts were served, being carved into slices, a slice set on each plate. The three Boston career girls would have cut their slices of peanut butter with dinner knives, and then lifted them to their lips with forks, interspersing bites of peanut butter with the boiled potatoes and boiled peas that surely must have accompanied the peanut butter roast.
In the fantasy, they played the roles of women in nineteen-forties movies. There would be the sharp-tongued older girl, all of twenty-six or twenty-seven, wise to the ways of the world; she'd of course be dark-haired, blowing a jet of cigarette smoke out her nose. Another roommate played the ingenue, curly-haired, dimpled, blonde. Of course, my mother must have been the lead, the woman torn between love and career. I will be able to imagine my mother's life so well because after I've had surgery I will lie in bed and watch old movies on TV: His Girl Friday, Stage Door, I Was a Male War Bride, Adam's Rib.
In December of 1947, my mother and father were married at the Episcopal Church in Peterborough, New Hampshire, my mother in a long ivory gown, my father in a cutaway tux. For wedding presents they got Blue Willow china and silent butlers--flat bottomed bowls in pewter and silver with lids, into which one could empty ashtrays. Everyone smoked then. Sandra was born in November of 1948, Susan in May of 1950; I was born in October of 1951; Jane in March of 1953. The years passed in a blur of diapers and nursing and pabulum and laughter and fatigue.
They moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Alton, New Hampshire where I was born, to upstate New York; my father went from being a graduate student to a school principal to an assistant professor; another war began, this time in Korea.
A few months before those late August, early September days of 1954, we had moved out of "the units," former Army barracks that had been moved to an open field on the north side of Hamilton. The postwar housing shortage was still going on, and Colgate's young faculty families took up residence in these square white clapboard buildings with their thin high windows and thin walls. We children played in the scrub yards where our mothers hung wash--sheets and cloth diapers and dish cloths along with our play clothes and occasional stiff-skirted party dresses--to dry on lines strung between teetering rough wooden poles. My mother quoted Shakespeare around the house: about to clean the bathroom, she'd say, "Once more into the breach, Horatio..." Gathering us together for a trip to the Grand Union--we waited in the car while she shopped--she'd say, "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers..."
To this day, I need only say, "the units," and my mother will sigh deeply and say, because she is so determinedly upbeat, "I was so happy to leave there."
By the late summer of 1954, we had moved into that farmhouse with slate grey-green shingles outside of Hamilton. Winter days so cold the station wagon wouldn't start, my father would walk to the college on the other side of town with our dog, Poly, trotting after him. No, we'd later have to explain to people. He wasn't named Poly because I'd had polio. He was named after the title character in the Rolly-Poly Puppy.
Six maple trees demarcated the front lawn of our new home. Behind the house was a long ridge, with a rutted dirt path leading out to an elm that stood alone just below its crest, looking like a ballerina with her arms raised in a circle above her head. Off the dirt path was a rusted piece of farm equipment, made to be pulled by horses, with a seat for the farmer and iron hooks behind for furrowing the soil. My mother would look at that piece of farm equipment and say, "Oh, if only we had found that during the war, when we were collecting scrap metal. We would have been so happy."
Those cycles of my childhood: a round of fall birthdays and a round of spring birthdays, my mother saying, "The uniform of the day will be the regular uniform of the day..." and "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers..." and, "If only we'd found that when we were collecting scrap metal during the war..."
The New York Times arrived at our house via mail a day late. In late August and early September of 1954, the Times spoke of the Red regime in Peiping, as Beijing was then called, while the ads showed line drawings of women in impossibly steep heels and with equally impossible thin waists, petticoats with tiers of ruffles, a "ribbon" girdle in six delectable colors, lemon, lime, pink raspberry, pale blueberry, vanilla white and licorice black. Children's summer camps would not be listed in the New York Commerce Department's directory unless a sworn affidavit was submitted as to their "non-subversive" nature. A Times Square raid had netted "rowdies, hoodlums, and undesirables." Noting that the price of coffee has risen sharply, a pound then cost between $1.18 and $1.42, an article entitled "A Thriftier Cup of Coffee" recommended mixing coffee with concoctions such as chicory or Buisman's Famous Dutch Flavoring. A novel called Chantal was reviewed, translated from the French, the story of the title character, "originally a vain, unscrupulous ignorant young woman...reformed by her experience of illness and suffering." Senator McCarthy was facing Senate censure for his conduct at the hearings investigating the Army. President Eisenhower, in an obviously posed photograph, gazed at the bill he'd just signed, outlawing the Communist Party. An Alabama school had barred twenty-three Negroes, paving the way for a court challenge to legal segregation.
And, on Friday, August 27th, the Times noted that 2,207 cases of polio had been reported in the past week, a rise of 15 percent from the previous week. The National Foundation was rushing respirators and iron lungs to hard hit areas.
Summer was polio season. Air-conditioning was rare in those days. In the summer, you were hot almost all the time, and by August, nearly everyone had slipped into a state of languid torpor. Gaggles of folks sat on the porches of white clapboard houses, tenement stoops, country home verandahs. They ate summer fruit that the heat threatened to send from ripeness to decay in the space of an afternoon. Boys spit watermelon seeds at one another; flat-chested tomboys with dirty elbows snuck off to swimming holes; kids danced in the jets from opened fire hydrants. Everything was sun-drenched and freckle-faced. Only the threats of polio and Communism lurked. Every summer, the mothers told their children not to go swimming--they might get polio, not to drink from public water fountains, and if they couldn't wait until they got home, for heaven's sake, not to sit down on the seats of public toilets. The fathers told them never to sign a petition, your name might end up on some Communist list, especially not if the petition uses words like "freedom" or "justice" or "free speech." Watch out. Give to the March of Dimes, wash your hands with good, strong soap, and never sign anything except a loyalty oath.
Who is she, this girl who will be three in October, who I can only track with suppositions, I must have seen... My mother must have said... extrapolating backwards from later memories?
When I was in my forties, I received a writing fellowship and got to live in an ugly prefab 1950s cabin in one of the most beautiful places on earth, the ranch where D.H. Lawrence lived on a mountaintop outside of Taos, New Mexico. Every morning, I made a cup of strong, strong coffee and doused it with sugar and half-and-half, because I hate the taste of coffee and only drink it for its drug effect, and walked out onto the deck. I looked down at the scrubby yard in front of me, the split rail fence marking the field where Sassafras and Ebony, the caretaker's two horses, munched grass and flicked their tales lazily at flies. My friend Jeff, who later died of AIDS, talked about coming to visit me there, but ended up not making the trip. When I was anticipating his arrival, I imagined him standing there on the porch next to me, while I drank my coffee. We would have watched the horses ruminating in the field beyond the yard; seen the wild iris and heard the shrill chirps and clicks of mosquitoes and chipmunks. Later, after he'd died, I supposed that when I was eighty I'd have forgotten that he never actually made it. The fantasy would grow seamlessly into memory, and it would be no different than if he had come and stood next to me there, smelling the earth, looking out at Sassafras and Ebony and the wild irises.
Every morning on the porch, I looked up at a mountain in the distance, which appeared to be a color that occupied some equidistant space between purple and green and gray and imagined that on that opposite mountain, a woman stared at my mountain, which to her appeared as a clear, uncluttered form, a color equally distant from gray and green and purple. Maybe she stood on the deck of a 1950s prefab like me; maybe she was ecologically conscious and had built her house out of old tires or bales of hay. Were there trees on her mountain? Or maybe it was drier there with a few stubborn, scrubby pines clinging to rock?
That past is like the mountain: hazy, beautiful, almost an illusion. Who is that girl with my name, my birth date, my genes, my first (almost) three years of history; the girl with my mother and my father and my sisters, my brother tucked inside my mother? Who is that girl who in late August and early September of 1954 must have stood on the front porch of our house in Hamilton and looked past the six maples in the yard, past the line of weeping willows, at the house in the distance, which had once been red but was now-faded to gray mottled with red? Did she stick her nose in one of the Blue Willow coffee cups with a half-inch of cold black coffee in the bottom that my mother left here and there around the house? Did she take an experimental sip, then spit out the bitter liquid? Did she see the Indian paintbrushes, rust red and bright yellow, alongside the road? When, in late August, her parents took her out on a sailboat on Saranac Lake, did the feel of the wind on her face scare her, or did she laugh with a toddler's delight in the new? Did she believe her mother when she told her that everyone used to be a baby--not just her mother and father, but even her grandmother and grandfather? Did she really believe that her mother was growing a new baby inside of her?
Years later, nine month's pregnant, dreaming every night of schools of fish and stately vast houses, I will smell a rich fecund smell coming from between my legs, a smell my body has never given off before, yet familiar. Did I smell that smell when my mother stopped in at Streeter's to buy a spool of thread or a darning egg, and I pressed my face against her leg, clutching at her skirt, nose close to her crotch, while someone cooed, "What pretty blue eyes! How old is she?" and my mother answered, "She'll be three at the end of October..." "And when's the next one due?"
My brother will be born at the beginning of October; I will turn three at the end of October.
But everything is about to change.
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