The Designated Listener

 2007-2011

Prologue

Three days are missing from my life. The gap began as I was returning from school one early March afternoon in 1955, sixty-one years ago. At the corner of the road that led to our house, I dawdled as I chatted with my friend Stephen. We were swinging our book satchels in gigantic arcs and laughing, seeing how close we could bring them without colliding. It was not until his mother opened the door to their house and called him in that I continued on my way. The days were beginning to lengthen, and for the previous week or so, the pale sun had been far enough up in the sky that it remained light until I made it all the way home. The days were warm enough that the banks of once pristine white snow on either side of the walk had begun to shrink and become spongy. Graying mounds of snow sagged and hovered on the brink of collapse, held in place only by the habit of being one substance even as they turned into another.

Water dripped from long icicles hanging from the capstones of the stone retaining wall at the front of the Patterson place and drilled holes into the snow bank below, staining it a rusty color. Here and there tufts of yellowed grass turning green at the base showed through the thinning snow cover. I was looking forward to the day in a few weeks when I would be able to run along the top of the wall and leap over the break where steps led down to the street from the walkway to the front steps of the house. The Pattersons had long since given up trying to prevent boys in the neighborhood from walking on their wall and jumping over the stairs. It was a test of athletic prowess for us to spring into the air with studied nonchalance and land safely and securely on the other side. Especially surefooted landings that did not break one’s stride earned extra points. There still remained too much snow and ice on the wall to attempt the jump, however. That would have to wait. I tried to hurry that day along by breaking off several of the icicles and tossing them into the gutter.

The snow was wet enough to make good snowballs. I scooped up the biggest mound of snow I could hold in my hands and packed it into a tight ball. Icy bits clung to my woolen mittens as I molded it into a rough sphere. I took aim at the trunk of a large maple about twenty feet away. Whitey Ford is pitching for the Yankees today at Fenway Park. It’s the bottom of the ninth, with two men out. Ted Williams is up for the Red Sox, and the count is three and two. The tying run is on third after a sacrifice fly to right field. For a minute a pennant rippling in the breeze catches Ford’s calm eyes. The stadium is hushed. Then, with no visible effort, Ford gracefully winds up and throws. It’s a fast inside slider that breaks just over the plate. Williams swings and misses. He’s out. Ford retires the side. The Yankees win the game. The crowd goes wild. Even the Red Sox fans are cheering Whitey. Hats are flung into the air, jubilantly rising impossibly high above the park. The shouts of the fans can be heard in Connecticut. As a slugger, Williams is OK, but Ford’s just too good for him. Williams lifts his cap to Ford in recognition that he has met his match. Ford, the perfect gentleman, walks over and shakes Ted’s hand and pats him on the shoulder. Better luck next time, kid. We’ll meet again. The crowd is still cheering. You don’t see pitching like that every day. Another win for the incredible Mr. Whitey Ford.

The snow underfoot had a gratifying way of compressing into ice when I stepped on it, leaving prints pressed into the slush that quickly filled with cloudy water. I concentrated on laying down an even line of perfectly formed outlines of my black rubber boots, with the ribbing on the soles and the maker’s logo neatly imprinted in reverse in the ice. The mounds of piled up snow along the walk confined the thick, icy water between them and turned it into a river cresting around the ankles of my boots. The brave Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton is leading his men to safety as the relentless ice crushes the Endurance. Timbers groan and snap in the unforgiving grip of the implacable foe. Masts tumble and splinter on the hard ice. The tattered remnants of sails are torn from the spars by the cold Antarctic gale. But for Shackleton it’s just a walk in a spring breeze. As he nimbly leaps from ice flow to ice flow, he urges the fainthearted on. Chin up, Evans, just another mile. You can make it, lad. You’ll be back in Cardiff in no time.

The weak light reflecting off the snow and ice made my eyes water. My vision blurred and then my head begin to throb. Within another twenty steps, my leg joints felt stiff and sore, and the effort of taking a breath rubbed my throat raw and made my chest hurt. A whisper of pain along the back of my neck suddenly flashed upward into my skull and exploded. Midges began to swarm through the snow and then became pulsating circles of black that grew ever larger and larger. The familiar path up the hill became an endless tunnel. I knew only that I had to struggle up that cliff and find the safety that lay at the end. But with every step my legs became heavier. My feet and legs were trapped in a vat of tar. And the pain had become an animal thrashing about in my brain and down my spine. I had never felt the inside of my spine before. That was the final moment I remember of my walk home—an angry beast clawing my spine and my skull apart in its struggle to get out of my head.

The pain returned along with consciousness. That was my next memory. The pain. It was faint at first, but as I awakened, the pain grew. It was as if I didn’t exist except for the pain. I didn’t have a body anymore. Just a consciousness in pain. The visions began—gradually at first, stray bits and pieces of color and light without shape. Shooting stars flashing at the edges of eyesight. But when I looked toward them, they were no longer there, and another comet would trace a line of light in the distance. Gradually I became aware of floating in a dim light that coalesced here and there into odd, distorted globules of yellow. It came to me that I had died and was in Purgatory. I tried to apply the catechism to my situation. Had I died in a state of grace? Was I forever to be denied the beatific vision of God? Did all the pain I was feeling mean that I was being tortured in hell for my sins? I’m sure that time has imposed an order and a coherence on my thoughts they did not have, but the fears of a Catholic childhood were behind the images that succeeded one another in my mind. I think I screamed, but that may be a false memory. I know I was in terror. That much I remember clearly. Even after all these years, I can still call into the palpable present the waves of terror that overwhelmed me at that moment.

And then I saw the angel. It was hovering behind the light and flying toward me. It was enormous. There was a ripping sound as if the sky were being torn asunder so that the angel could get at me and tear me apart too. And in that moment I knew that I would never see my parents and my brother and sister again. I was one of the lost souls, and I was being devoured by the angel of vengeance. The victorious angels with their lances were pushing the hordes of rebel demons off the cloudlike edges of heaven into the abyss waiting for them below, and I was one of the damned, falling forever through the burning night.

******

In 1954, when I was eight years old, I helped test the Salk polio vaccine. I don’t remember volunteering to do that. I was in the third grade at the time, and I believe that everyone in the class participated in the trial. Perhaps we had to take permission slips home for our parents to sign. I don’t recall. But on the appointed day, we dutifully lined up, several of the more wary students jostling for a position near the end of the line in hopes that someone had miscounted and the rows of small bottles filled with a colorless fluid and neatly lined up on our teacher’s desk would be exhausted before they made it to the head of the queue. Sister Margaret’s repeated assurances that the shot would not hurt served only to convince several of my classmates that that was precisely what it would do. For them, even the anticipation proved painful. There were some tears and several anxious faces. Billy Gephardt was the largest kid in our class, easily a foot taller than anyone else and already developing the build that would make him a starting tackle at Michigan State many years later. He was also comically terrified of shots. As he neared the front of the line, he panicked and ran out howling and bawling onto the playground. His cowardice emboldened most of the rest of us boys. We took deep breaths and swelled out our chests, tucked in our stomachs, and pulled our chins back in a parody of the military posture we had learned at the movies. Not for us the puling of Private Billy Gephardt. We were made of sterner stuff than the craven giant.

As we neared the front of the line, each of us rolled up our left sleeve to expose the upper arm. One nurse swabbed the target area with alcohol, while the other picked a bottle off the desk, turned it upside down, punctured the top with the needle, and drew out the fluid within. As she did so, she read out the number on the bottle, and Sister Margaret noted it down next to our name on a list. I received sample 252. The second nurse then swiftly injected the fluid, and her colleague secured a piece of sterile gauze over the area with tape. I doubt that it took half an hour to inoculate the entire class.

As soon as we were out of sight of the nurses and Sister Margaret, we removed the gauze so that we could check the puncture hole. Other than a small reddish circle, nothing remained to show that we were participating in a historic event. And even as young as we were, we knew that we were helping to make history. Polio touched everyone in many ways that are hard to fathom today. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been such a major presence in all our parents’ lives that we were well acquainted with his triumph over the disease. Most of us personally knew a “victim.” Every class in school had at least one member who wore braces or walked on crutches or, as in the case of my year, a student who “attended” school by phone while lying at home in bed. We had a neighbor who had contracted the disease as an adult. He was confined to a special bed in the living room. Or at least that was the rumor. No one ever saw him. Just his tired-looking wife assuring everyone that “Jim is doing as well as can be expected, thank you for asking. He should be up and around any day now. But for now, he’s resting up and not seeing anyone.”

Polio also affected us in many small ways. By the age of eight, I still had not learned to swim. Every summer after I reached five, my parents had enrolled me in the beginning level of swimming lessons at our local country club. And every summer, within two or three weeks the lessons were called off because some child in the community had contracted polio and the fear arose that it would be transmitted quickly from child to child if they gathered in groups. At an age when children would have been allowed to grow beyond the stage of being sent to bed for an afternoon nap, we were suddenly forced once again to endure this affront to our maturity during the heat of summer, just “to keep your strength up.” Our assertions that we were old enough now not to need a nap were met with the unanswerable “You don’t want to get polio, do you?”

The campaigns of the March of Dimes were a familiar event in our lives. As children we were given cardboard coin holders with circular slots into which dimes could be pressed. I can’t remember how many slots there were in each holder—fifty, perhaps a hundred. Of course, it seems a trivial amount now, but at the time for many of us a dime was a week’s allowance, and it took months and what we regarded as substantial sacrifices to fill all those slots.

Each dime we pressed into a slot served as a reminder of the horror that might afflict us. For behind all those concerns was a grim reality. The initial symptoms of polio—the high fever, the headache, the blurred vision, the stiffness—are common to many diseases. The onset of a cold, the flu, any of many childhood diseases, immediately brought looks of worry to our parents’ faces. Polio was a sudden disease and totally arbitrary. One person could get it and no one else be touched for miles around, or a dozen people in the same neighborhood could be infected within a matter of days. For most, the disease resembled a bad case of the flu and had no lasting impact. For a few, it brought a quick death; for still others it meant years of recuperation and therapy to regain control over wayward muscles. It is hard to know which of the last two was thought the worse fate.

Anyone who can recall those days would have to be nearing seventy now. Perhaps only those of us who can remember them can appreciate the jubilation that greeted the announcement that the Salk vaccine worked. It was an age with a great faith in science, and in this case, science had delivered the goods. Salk could readily have been elected president if he had wanted the job.

Those of you who lived through those days may remember that the children who participated in the trials of the vaccine were urged to get polio shots in case they had been among those who had received the placebo. In my case, there was no uncertainty. I know that vial number 252 contained only water. On March 10, 1955, nearly a year after receiving the shot, I collapsed walking home from school. A neighbor driving past saw me fall and took me home in her car. I was put in bed, and our doctor was called to the house (doctors did make house calls then). By the time he arrived, I was delirious. I have no memory of his arrival or of my immediate removal to a hospital.

Three days later, I recovered consciousness and saw an angel. I had been taken to our local hospital, which was run by a Catholic order, and placed inside a plastic oxygen tent. The plastic distorted my vision, and in my confusion, I mistook the elaborate headdress worn by a nursing sister for an angel’s wings. My first thought was that I was dead, and my fears that I would never see my parents again made me shriek. Family history has it that I started screaming, begging the angel not to punish me and promising never to sin again. I do remember that my one thought was to get out of that bed and flee. I became extremely angry and frustrated when I found I could not do so. I thought my legs and arms had been tied down, but in truth the bonds securing them existed within my body. I no longer had control over them.

I was one of the lucky ones. The nerves in my legs and forearms were damaged but not destroyed by the virus. The nerves controlling breathing were not affected. Over the next few years, I would undergo therapy and physical training to relearn to use my arms and legs. With the help of braces and crutches, I would achieve some mobility. An operation on my calf muscles allowed me once again to place my feet flat on the ground. By the time I reached college, I was able to move about wearing only leg braces and using a cane to steady myself. I was one of a few in my class who had had polio. Still, there were enough of us that we were not an unfamiliar sight. Another ten years, and the freshman class would have no visible reminders of the plague. Now, half a century later, when my students speculate on the reasons for my tortuous gait, polio has receded so far from their minds that it seldom occurs to them as an explanation.

The active phase of polio is over within ten days or so. When that stage ended for me, I was transferred to a hospital about forty miles from my home especially for children recovering from polio. I was there for over a year and a half before my parents gave in to my entreaties and brought me home against the advice of the doctors.

There is a picture of my return. My entire family is in it. We must have just arrived—we are on the sidewalk leading to our house, and the car is parked on the street about ten feet behind us. My father is dressed in a suit. A necktie is visible in the V of his topcoat, as is the neck of his suit jacket. He is wearing his usual homburg hat and standing behind me. Men dressed much more formally in those days. His hands grasp the push handles of my wheelchair. He regards the camera with impatience. He was never much for ceremonies and commemorations. My mother is beside him, in a drab, shapeless winter coat, a scarf hiding her forehead and most of her hair, looking weary and anxious. She is looking downward at me, and her right hand covers her mouth in a gesture that would become familiar. Her fingers are curled tightly inward toward her palm, and she is pressing the first knuckle of her index finger against her lips. She looks as if she is fighting to remain in control of her emotions and not cry.

My sister, Alice, stands to my right, in front of my mother and slightly apart from the rest of us. She is smiling directly at the camera. Alice always smiles pleasantly for the camera. She learned early on how to take a good picture. She appears to have taken pains to look nice for the occasion. She has on a high-waisted wool coat with large buttons that flares out over her full skirt. She is wearing dark gloves. Her right arm is bent at the elbow and held in front of her stomach. A small, shiny black purse hangs from the wrist of her right hand. A round hat with a piece of gauze at the front perches atop her head, and her well-brushed, symmetrical hair neatly touches the shoulders of her coat and frames her face. The strand of pearls isn’t visible, but it must have been there.

To my left is my brother David. He is the only one touching me. He has a hand on my shoulder and is turned toward me, looking down into my face. He must have just said something to me. He is dressed far more casually than the others. He is wearing a pea jacket, and stray locks of his hair escape from beneath his stocking cap. I am in the center, surrounded by my family. My calves and lower thighs are encased in metal braces on the outside of my trousers. The bars that went under the shoes are not evident in the picture, but the tips of the heavy orthopedic shoes I had to wear are visible on the footrests. My torso is twisted to the left, and my neck is bent as I look upward toward David. I wear the careful mask of stoic indifference we learned to assume in the hospital lest we irritate the nurses with our miseries and our need for their help.

I suppose a neighbor took the picture. I don’t know why. It wasn’t a happy occasion. Perhaps he or she felt it was something to celebrate, something we would want to remember. But it was a difficult time for my family. It would take months of practice and exercise before my legs were strong enough to allow me to venture outside by myself. I would not return to school until the eleventh grade except to take one of the occasional tests the state required. My mother tutored me, and I was able to keep up with my schoolwork and even to advance beyond my former classmates.

The library on the first floor, which had doubled as my father’s study, was made over into a bedroom for me. My mother soon fell into the habit of taking visitors in to talk to me. When my older brother and sister returned from school, she would shoo them into the room to entertain me for a while. Since my days gave me little to talk about, my visitors usually ended up discussing their lives. And that is how I became the designated listener, the quiet, reserved person who eavesdrops on life, interposing a question here and there when the speaker pauses. I quickly learned that I could keep people talking if I showed an interest in them and gave them an opportunity to speak about themselves. I also learned that judgments about what they said were best kept to myself if I wanted them to return. Especially for my brother and sister, the charitable aspect of visiting a crippled brother and amusing him combined with the opportunity to talk about themselves proved irresistible. It remains so to this day. We fell into the pattern that has since governed our lives. They talk, I listen.

I was eleven when I came back from the hospital. My father would have been forty-four, and my mother forty-two. My father was a professor of biology at the University of Michigan, about twenty-five miles from our home in Walled Lake, Michigan. Like most women of her generation, my mother was a “homemaker.” My parents had married the summer after graduating from college. My mother had worked for three years as an accountant while my father attended graduate school. When she became pregnant with my brother, she quit her job and thereafter remained at home. At the time I returned home, my brother, David, was seventeen and a junior at a Jesuit high school in a nearby town. My sister, Alice, was fifteen, and a sophomore at the girls’ academy in Walled Lake.

I suppose we were normal, middle-class children, perhaps more bookish than most, but then our parents emphasized education. I don’t think we were that much different from other children our age in our town, except that we didn’t as yet have a television set. I felt the injustice of that strongly. We would not get one until the early 1960s, when my father finally accepted the fact that television was not just a passing fad.

But enough background. The whole point of this act of recollection is for you to come to know my family as I did—by listening to them.

1

“Please, Mom, let me do it myself.”

My mother looked at the spoon full of soup she was holding. I was sitting in bed, propped up on pillows. A few minutes before, my mother had straddled a wooden bed tray across my thighs. It was one of the new pieces of furniture and equipment that had been bought for my return. She had laid a napkin and a spoon on the tray and then brought in a bowl of tomato soup, and a plate with half a sandwich and some apple slices on it. It was my first meal after returning home. From the dining room next door came a carefully modulated conversation. My father was quizzing Alice and David about their progress in school. None of them sounded interested in the subject. They were trying to talk quietly and pretend that nothing out of the ordinary was happening, that it was perfectly normal for my mother’s spot at the table to be vacant and for her to be helping me eat. From my bed, I could see the back of Alice’s head.

“Really, Mommy, it’s OK. We had to feed ourselves in the hospital. The nurses made us do it. They didn’t have time to feed all of us and they made us those of us who could do it feed ourselves. I won’t make a mess. I promise.”

My mother looked at the red soup and then at her white sheets and the multicolored quilt that my grandmother had made. And finally she looked at me. The bottom edges of her eyes were watery. “I just wanted to spoil you a bit on your first day back. I wanted to spoil myself a bit too.” She tilted the spoon and let the soup drain back into the bowl and then handed me the spoon. “Sister Margaret said she might drop by this afternoon to see you. I think she’s got something for you. But if you get tired, you let me know and I’ll ask her to leave.”

“I won’t get tired, Mommy. I’ll be a good boy. I’m not going to be any trouble to anyone. I can do most everything now. You’ll see. I won’t be any trouble at all. And I’m going to practice my walking and I’ll be able to get about by myself soon and I won’t need the wheelchair or the braces and it will be like I wasn’t sick at all.” The conversation in the dining room had stopped and been replaced by the silence of people waiting for a disaster to happen.

I carefully maneuvered the spoon into the bowl and dipped up a scant half-spoonful of soup. I slid the bottom of the spoon against the edge of the bowl to get rid of the drop that always clings to the bottom. It ran down the outside the bowl onto the plate beneath it, but I didn’t think that counted as making a mess. I concentrated on lifting the spoon slowly to my mouth. When I made it without spilling a drop, I smiled at my mother. She nodded at me and patted my head. That reminded me of something else I had been planning.

“Mom, can I let my hair grow long again? The nurses cut it off so that they didn’t have to comb it. But I comb my hair now. Really, I can.”

“Oh, I think we can do that. You look better with longer hair. I’ve never liked this style of short hair on boys. It makes you look like you had to shave your head to get rid of lice.”

“And I won’t look like one of those boys in the hospital anymore. Mom, you don’t have to sit here with me. I can eat by myself. You should go eat your soup before it gets cold.”

“If you’re sure.” I nodded. My mother sighed and stood up. “I’m supposed to worry about you, not the other way around.”

“I’ll be all right.”

It took me almost an hour to finish that meal, but I did it without staining the sheets or the quilt. It was far more food than I wanted, and the effort left me exhausted. But I was determined not to be a burden on anyone.

******

“Look at the mess you’ve made. Food all over the bed. And you think you’re going home next week. Your parents will bring you right back if you make a mess like that. But I don’t know if we’ll have a place for you. A bad little boy like you. You’ve always been a troublemaker. Always causing us more work.”

Nurse Kellner regarded me with much satisfaction. She pushed the tray table out of the away and began scrubbing my face with a rough washcloth. Even my ears, which couldn’t have been dirty from eating, were subjected to a stiff cleaning. She ignored the crumbs on the sheets and blanket that had been the occasion for her harangue. I could lie in the mess I had made. It would teach me a lesson. She always liked it when we gave her a reason to indulge in lecturing us. She was the head nurse on the noon to 8:00 o’clock shift, and she insisted that all the nurses under her management resist any temptation to coddle us or allow us to take advantage of their good nature.

“If you stayed here, you would have to learn to conquer your handicaps. That’s the only way you will ever lead a normal life. But I know what will happen. As soon as you walk in the door of your house, you’ll start working on your mother’s sympathies, and she’ll take pity on you. Pretty soon, she’ll be waiting on your hand and foot because she feels sorry for you, and you’ll never learn to walk. You’ll spend the rest of your life lying in bed, taking advantage of other people, until one day they get tired of you and ship you off to the state home in Coldwater. Your family will be so happy to see the last of you that they’ll lock you away and never think about you again.

“I’ve seen it all many times before. I’ve had thirty years’ experience on the polio wards. The worst thing you can do for them, I always tell the new girls, is to feel sorry for them. You have to harden yourself and push them. It’s the best thing you can do for them. Don’t let them fall into bad habits and expect to be waited on hand and foot.”

No one would have accused Nurse Kellner or the nurses and porters under her of waiting on anyone hand and foot, but all the patients on her ward knew better than to complain. Most of the doctors knew better than to complain as well. Disobedience of her rules, and there were many of those, never went unpunished. Somehow you would be passed over when the porters from the kitchen delivered the meals. “Johnny’s not hungry tonight.” Or your bed would be empty during visiting hours, and your parents would be told that you were undergoing special treatment that couldn’t be interrupted. Hadn’t the administration called them to tell them that? It was such a pity they had had that long drive for nothing. Well, Nurse Kellner would look into it and those responsible would have to bear the brunt of her anger.

She was always on her best behavior during visiting hours. No parent would ever have reason to think that our complaints were justified. “Can I get you a cup of tea, Mrs. Hawkes? Suzie is making such good progress. We’re all so proud of her.” We paid for the cups of tea and the compliments later. “Such a pretty coat your mother was wearing, Suzie. It must be nice not to have to work for a living. To sit around every afternoon and play bridge with your lady friends. To have someone clean your house for you. But, of course, you’ll never have that. Not with those shrunken legs and those ugly metal braces. No one is going to marry you and let you live in luxury. No, I’m afraid you’ll have to learn typing and shorthand and prepare for a life as the office drudge. A working girl, that’s what you’ll be. Now let’s get you up, and you can practice using your crutches. Of course, when you fall again, you’re just going to have to work your way to your feet by yourself. None of us is going to help you. You have to learn to fend for yourself. I’ve had thirty years of experience with your kind. As I always tell my girls, you have to harden yourself and push them. Don’t feel sorry for them. You’re not doing them any favor by coddling them.”

Few of the nurses were that bad. Nurse Kellner had made a class for herself. There were some kind ones. But most of them were indifferent to us. They did their job, but they didn’t like us for making them do it. The prevailing lesson, repeated over and over, was that we had to “conquer our handicaps,” that if we tried hard enough, we could lead normal lives, that we just had to want it enough and have enough willpower and courage to work through the pain and regain control of our muscles. “Look at what Franklin Delano Roosevelt accomplished. He conquered his handicaps and went on to become president. That’s the model for you. Just keep trying, and you can be Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” There was a picture of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in every ward in the hospital. We couldn’t escape his inspiring example and that cigarette clenched between his lips in that silly holder tilted up at that jaunty angle. I hated Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

But that was the bargain I made with myself, with God, with the devil, with anyone who might have listened to my prayers. If my parents removed me from the hospital and Nurse Kellner, I would be the good boy that conquered his handicaps and learned to walk again and was never a burden on his family.

2

“Miss Lewis says that I’m the only student in sophomore English who is ready to read this book.”

My sister held the book against her chest. Both of her arms were wrapped tightly around the volume, and one hand stroked the back cover. Perhaps my memory is faulty, but I see Alice wearing what I recall as her customary school outfit. A full skirt, descending to mid-calf, made of a solid-colored wool, usually in some shade of gray, a white blouse, a sweater in a pastel shade, most often pink or light blue, buttoned up almost to her neck, and white knee socks. It was the standard uniform of the “nice” girls at her school. And Alice was a “nice” girl. She never wore jeans or trousers, and she shuddered at the thought of pedal pushers. She agreed with my mother that they looked “vulgar.” Alice detested vulgarity—frequently. It was a favorite comment about those outside her carefully chosen circle of friends.

“What is it called?”

“You won’t know it. Here, listen to this—” She reverently opened the book to the first page. “ ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ Isn’t that the most perfect sentence you’ve ever heard? And the whole book is like that. At least the first few chapters. That’s all I had time to get through in study hall. Mrs. Thompson gave us twenty algebra equations to solve. I hate algebra. I know I’m never going to need it.”

“I like algebra. It’s so beautiful. The way everything balances and the way it makes the relationships so clear.”

“What would you know about it? You haven’t had algebra yet.”

“I read David’s algebra book two years ago.”

“Well, you couldn’t have understood it. You’re too young.”

“No, he understood it, Sis. If you’re nice to him, I’m sure he’ll do your algebra homework for you. How you doing, champ?” David walked into my room and pretended to slug me on the upper arm. He was eating a piece of bread thickly spread with peanut butter and held out one corner for me to take a bite.

“Ugh. You shouldn’t do that. You’ll get germs.”

“I’m not worried. Champ here doesn’t have any germs.”

“I wasn’t talking to you. I was warning Michael that he’ll get your germs. And you shouldn’t talk with food in your mouth. That’s rude and impolite and vulgar. And even if Michael could do my algebra homework, I couldn’t let him do it. That would be against the rules. And I’ve asked you time and time again not to call me ‘sis.’ My name is Alice.”

“Against the rules, the rules.” David drew the words out and savored them in a parody of Boris Karloff. “And Sister never breaks the rules. Noooooooooo, Sis izz a goooooddgarul.” This was followed by a maniacal cackle.

“Alice’s English teacher gave her a special book to read.”

David regarded me with amusement. “Little brother is playing the peacemaker again. He’s telling us to be kind to each other.” David sat down in the other chair beside my bed, crossed his legs, and simpered at Alice in a saccharine voice. “Tell us, Dear Sister, what book are we reading? What is this special book we’ve been given to read?”

“You wouldn’t have heard of it.”

“I bet I have.”

“Un-hunh. You don’t read good literature, just those stupid …” For a second, Alice couldn’t think of what stupid things David might read. “… books you’re always reading.”

“It starts out, ‘It is universal knowledge that a man who finds a good wife is rich.’ ” I quoted as much of the line as I could remember. “Alice says it’s the best sentence she’s ever read.”

“Oh, Michael, you got it all wrong.”

“Oh, Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice. I read that last year.”

“You never did. You’re lying.”

“No, it was for English literature. We were supposed to read an important English novel and then trace its influence. I asked Mom what would be a good choice, and she told me to read Pride and Prejudice.”

“Mother? Mother hasn’t ever read Jane Austen.” Alice was shocked.

“Yes, she has. Her copy is on the top shelf behind you with all the other A authors. She made notes all over the margins. I bet her name’s on the inside front cover.” Alice jumped up and stretched up on her toes to scan the titles on the top shelf. She reached up and pulled a battered book from the shelf. She opened the front cover, grimaced at it, and then dropped the book on my bed. “See, I told you she had read it. If you have to write a paper on Pride and Prejudice, I’ll let you see the one I wrote. Father Serruys gave me an A on it. Said it was the best paper in class. I wrote on Jane Austen’s impact on Katherine Hepburn’s movies. How the screenwriters took Jane Austen’s insight that couples use arguments and insults to hide their attraction to each other. How you can always tell that two people will fall in love and get married when they bicker with each other.”

“So you and Alice will get married someday. You two are always arguing.” Both Alice and David looked aghast. David was the first to recover.

“Fortunately the laws of God and of men are against that. No matter how much Sis wants me, we won’t be able to get married.”

“Boys. You’re both such boys. I don’t know why I talk to you.”

“We don’t know why either, Sis, do we, Champ?”

“Are you two entertaining your brother?” My mother stopped outside the door and looked in.

“Yes, Mom.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“They’re entertaining me.”

All three of us mustered innocent-looking smiles for our mother.

“Oh, Pride and Prejudice. I think you’re still a bit young for that, Michael. I hope you two aren’t giving him books like this to read.” My mother picked up the volume Alice had thrown on the bed and opened it in the middle. She read for a few seconds and then smiled at the book. “I should reread this. I enjoyed it so much years ago. Professor Butler’s course on the nineteenth-century English novel was one of my favorite classes in college.”

“Alice’s teacher gave her a copy. She read me the first sentence. ‘It is a truth that men should get married.’ ”

“Indeed.’ My mother chuckled. ‘You and David are to remember that bit of wisdom when you get older. Now, Alice, I need you to set the table for dinner. And David, your father told you to scrape that patch of ice off the front sidewalk. The postman nearly fell on it this morning. Michael, do you think you can sit at the table to eat tonight? David will help you into your wheelchair after he finishes the walk. I think I found a cushion that will raise you up high enough so that you can be comfortable.”

3

“David measured them for me. The bars are ten feet long, and if I do two laps, that’s twenty feet. I’m starting today by doing two laps, three times a day. Then tomorrow I’ll add one lap to each set, and keep on adding one lap each day until I can do fifty laps. That will be 500 feet, three times a day. That’s almost a third of a mile a day. It will take me forty-eight days to reach fifty laps. Then I’ll be strong enough to make it to the stairs and start learning how to climb them again. I think it will take me a couple of weeks to learn to do that, and then I can move back into my own bedroom and you can have your office back.”

I showed my father the charts I had made, with each day’s projected exercise routine for the next two months marked in, with a square beside each unit of exercise to fill in when I had finished. The bars in questions were a set of parallel bars adjustable to hand height and set about a foot apart. They took up most of the space remaining in the library between the bed and the small desk that had been brought in there for me to do my schoolwork. My father’s desk had been moved into the small front parlor. There was only just enough space for it beside the piano, and the small sofa that had once set in that room had been moved into the front hallway.

My father examined the charts carefully. “You don’t want to push yourself too hard. You have to make sure you’re strong enough before you move on to the next step. And when are you going to have time for your schoolwork?”

“That’s on these charts.” I handed him another set of pages, with my lessons marked in for the next two months.

“Arithmetic (6th grade), Spelling (6th grade), Reading (6th grade), World History (6th grade), Science (6th grade), Geometry. What are all these sixth-grade classes? Aren’t you in the fifth grade?”

“I’ve already done all that work. I’m doing the sixth-grade lessons now.”

“Are they teaching geometry in the sixth grade now?”

This was the sensitive matter. I had counted on concealing my geometry studies from my parents until they were so far advanced that they couldn’t put a stop to them. “David said he would let me have his geometry book from last year, and I thought I could do that. I’ve already finished his algebra book. And David said he would help me if there was something I didn’t understand. But I’ve already looked at it, and it’s not hard. It all starts with just these four axions, and everything follows from those. And David says that this summer after he’s through with his advanced algebra and solid geometry books, then I can have those. I plan to finish those over the summer, so David and I can do trigonometry and calculus together next year.”

“Axioms, not axions.”

“Axioms.”

“And David is going to teach you this?”

“I’m going to study them by myself. I don’t want to be a burden on David. He’s got his own work to do. Besides he sometimes makes mistakes. He forgets that everything has to balance out. He doesn’t think about the implications of the operations. The equals sign confuses him.”

“ ‘The implications of the operations’? ‘The equals sign confuses him’?” My father regarded me with amusement.

I nodded. I was on more solid ground now. At least I thought I was. Math I could handle. I was less sure about my parents. “He forgets to change the sign of the number when he transfers it to the other side of the equation, because he doesn’t understand that the equals sign means that the two sides have to balance.”

“Where did you learn all this?”

“It’s just obvious. It couldn’t be otherwise.”

“ ‘Just obvious.’ I have graduate students who don’t grasp the functions of operators, and you think they’re obvious.”

“It’s OK isn’t it, Daddy? I mean, I could wait until I’m older if it’s wrong for me to know such things. And what are operators?”

“No, it’s not wrong, Michael. But you’ve got to give yourself time to be young too. There’s plenty of time to grow up. You’ll have lots of time for geometry and calculus and operators later. And what are you going to study in high school if you study all those courses now? You should be out playing baseball.” As soon as he said that, my father’s face betrayed that he felt he had misspoke. Both of us knew that baseball wasn’t part of my immediate future.

“Well, I’m not going to play baseball anymore. I’ve decided to give that up. I don’t have time for that anymore. So in the time I’m saving by not playing baseball, I can do other things.” I offered my father the excuse I sensed he needed. “I’d better start my exercises. I did two laps this morning after breakfast, and I need to do my two afternoon laps now.”

I wheeled myself over to the bars and pulled myself up to a standing position between the two poles. “You have to be careful to make sure that your legs are doing the work and that you’re not using your arms to lift your body up and swing it forward. That’s cheating. The therapist said that if we cheated, we would never force our legs to be strong enough to support us. You’re just supposed to use the bars to steady yourself until your legs are strong enough.” I repeated the lessons that had been drummed into us in the hospital by the physical therapists.

I gingerly took the fifteen or so steps it took me to travel ten feet. I was concentrating on putting my feet down squarely and not letting them pull up so that I was walking on my toes. My left leg was in better shape. The nerves in my right leg had sustained more damage, and I still could not lift that leg and bend it at the knee. I had to raise myself up a bit on my left foot and then swing the right leg out in a half circle to move it to the front. Because it took longer to move that leg, the rhythm of my walk was very irregular, and my body had to sway to accommodate the movements of my right leg. When I reached the far end of the bars and turned around to face my father, he had a horrified look on his face. For me that ten feet had been a victory lap. I was showing off for my father, trying to demonstrate to him that I would walk again, that I would be normal again. What he saw was a shambling twisting gait that barely kept me upright, with my knees splaying out at unnatural angles.

My father was a tall man. Everyone in his family was. At that period in his life, he was still at his full height of six feet two. I have never been as conscious of how short I was until that moment, when I looked up into my father’s face and saw how much my condition appalled and saddened him. “I’m sorry, Daddy. I’ll improve. I’ll be walking fine in just a few weeks. You’ll see.” I started on the second lap, trying to keep my legs from wobbling and bending to the side, not daring to look up to meet the stark, shattered gaze of a father who has seen his son’s future.

My father dropped the sheets of paper with the schedules I had laboriously worked out on the bed and walked out without speaking. A few seconds later, I heard the back door open and close.

I paused in my exercises for only a few seconds before resuming. I still had to finish that lap and reach my wheelchair. It seemed very far away.

4

“So what happens after Elizabeth and Darcy get married?”

“Well, what would you expect from someone as intelligent as Elizabeth? She impresses all of Darcy’s friends and relatives by being so clever, and Darcy respects her more and more each day. And they just grow closer and closer. There’s never anything vulgar between the two of them. It’s the perfect marriage.”

“How many children do they have?”

“None. They don’t need children to be happy. Elizabeth isn’t a mother. She’s a lady.”

“But mom’s a lady, and she had children.”

“Not that kind of lady. Elizabeth’s a lady like Miss Lewis, who devotes her entire life to reading and appreciating the better things in life and helping others and educating them.”

Alice was still clutching Jane Austen tightly to her chest. She had finished Pride and Prejudice and had found a two-volume set of Jane Austen’s complete works in the library. She was now midway through the second volume.

“Miss Lewis says that when I finish Jane Austen, I should read the Brontë sisters. I had a long talk with her after school yesterday. She’s so interesting. She’s read so many books. And she’s been to Europe. She goes to Paris every summer. She stays in a little hotel she knows. She’s the only American there. So she doesn’t have to associate with tourists. She says it’s cheap but quite serviceable, and small discomforts are worth being able to live in Paris. She says Paris is the only place she can really breathe. It’s not like Walled Lake, so bourgeois and stifling.”

“What’s birdjwa?”

Alice gave me a disdainful look. “Really, Michael. I am going to have to supervise your reading. You should know words like ‘bourgeois’ at your age. Algebra and geometry are bourgeois. And baseball is so bourgeois.”

“Then I like bourgeois things. Algebra and geometry are my favorites. But I’ve given up on baseball. I don’t have time for that anymore.”

“You don’t know anything. You’re still so young.” Alice gave me a satisfied look. I tried to look younger to win her approval. It was clearly something she found praiseworthy in a younger brother. “Miss Lewis is going to give me a list of books to read over the summer. These books are so much better than that stupid Tale of Two Cities we’re reading in class now. Really, it’s so childish.” She looked at me speculatively. “But we should start you reading Oliver Twist or David Copperfield. Those would be good books for you.”

Alice stood up and began searching the library shelves. My mother’s prized set of the complete works of Charles Dickens occupied one entire shelf and part of another. She had inherited the set from her grandmother. It was something we had been trained not to touch. Alice looked over her shoulder to see if my mother was watching and then carefully eased a volume off the shelf and brought it over to me.

She whispered, “This is Oliver Twist. I’ll get you a copy from the library the next time I go.” She carefully opened the book to the title page and the facing frontispiece. Looming over a small boy was a large, evil-looking man. “That’s Oliver Twist. He’s an orphan. And that man standing behind him is Fagin. He is not a nice man.”

“Is it a horror story? I like horror stories. There are some horror stories in the Hardy Boys.”

“Michael, this is not the Hardy Boys. That’s for children. This is real literature, even if it is by Dickens. I found it quite … enlightening when I read it. Of course, I was only in the fifth grade then. I don’t read such sentimental books now.”

“But there are ghosts in A Christmas Carol. The Ghost of Christmas Past rattles his chains on the record.” I was referring to a recording by Basil Rathbone of Dickens’s Christmas Carol that we owned. It was one of my favorites, or at least it had been until Tiny Tim became too relevant to my life.

“Well it is sort of horror story, but not with ghosts.”

“How can it be a horror story if there aren’t any ghosts?”

“It’s about the horrors of society. I’ll bring you a copy from the library, and you can read it yourself.” Alice put the book back in place on the shelf and lined it up so that its spine stood at the same distance from the edge of the shelf as the other volumes in the set.

“I could read Mom’s copy until you brought the book from the library. I wouldn’t get it dirty.”

“You know that’s against the rules. Mother would not like it if she found you reading one of her Dickenses.”

“But you took one off the shelf.”

“That’s different. I’m older, and I’m just more careful about books than you and David. I’m going to the library after school tomorrow. So you’ll only have to wait a day. I’m going to ask Miss Lewis for a list of books for you to read. Books suitable for children. If we guide you in the right direction, at least you won’t end up like David and just read the sports pages.”

“David reads lots of books.”

“Only because he has to for school. The only books he ever takes out of the library are for his homework. He doesn’t read to improve his mind. Miss Lewis says that we have to work on improving our minds our entire life. Miss Lewis is the most educated person I know. I’m going to be just like her. And when I’m older, I’m going to go with her and spend my summers in Paris.” Alice walzed around the room. She lifted her arms above her head slowly twirled around, her torso bent backwards at the waist. “We’ll go to museums and look at the pictures and statues and sit at a table in a sidewalk café and discuss books and life. I’m so glad I decided to take French. It’s really the only foreign language one needs. The others are just so … pedestrian. Everyone who is really educated knows French.” Alice sunk to the floor in a graceful bow and modestly acknowledged the tastefully subdued applause of the audience. We had been taken to see a local production of a ballet several years earlier, and Alice had been enchanted by it. Since the only recording we had of ballet music was The Nutcracker suite, she had begun dancing to that. Although not as frequently as had once been the case, Clara still visited us on occasion.

“I’m the Mouse King.” I stabbed at the air with a pencil.

“Really, Michael, that is so jejune.”

“No, The Nutcracker takes place at Christmas time. That’s December, not June.”

“Je-june, je-june. It means childish.”

“Well, it’s April now, not je-june, so I can’t be childish for another two months.”

Alice shook her head and sighed theatrically. The word “jejune” was whispered toward the ceiling. “I have to go now. I promised Margie I would go to her house and help her with her homework.”

“I thought you didn’t like to go to Margie’s house. You always say Mrs. Roberts doesn’t keep a clean house.”

“Well, she doesn’t.” Alice became very interested in the arrangement of the books on the shelves. She pulled one out and reshelved it before the book to its left. “These books are getting out of order. Mother doesn’t have time to arrange them.” She kept her back turned to me as she walked out the door. “Mrs. Roberts doesn’t want Margie coming over here. She thinks, well she thinks it would disturb you and cause more work for mother. She says mother has enough to do without having more people in the house. So I’ll be going over there from now on. I’ll see you at dinner.”

5

“Hey, Champ, how are you doing?” David was wearing his varsity jacket with his letter for baseball on the back. He was carrying his baseball uniform, mitt, and bat. The uniform was covered with dirt and grass stains. His cleated running shoes were tied together by their laces and draped over a shoulder. “I gotta take these to the basement and throw them in the laundry basket. I’ll be back in a minute.” He started off and then turned back. “We won. 5 to 1. I’ll tell you all about it.”

My mother and Alice began talking almost simultaneously. My mother called out from the kitchen. “David, do not put those dirty things in with the other clothes. Dump them in the sink and soak them in hot water. Add a half cup of the soap powder. And put those shoes on the back porch. I do not want you dropping mud all over the house. I swear that elementary hygiene is beyond you. It’s a constant fight to keep dirt out of this house with you around.”

“David, those clothes stink. Don’t bring them in here.” Alice was sitting in my room doing her homework. She ran to a window and opened it and fanned the air vigorously. “If you two are going to discuss baseball, I’m going to go upstairs to my room and read.”

I buried my nose in the book I was reading. I hoped both of them would go away. Alice hadn’t ever understood baseball, and I didn’t want to talk about it with David. “Thank you for bringing me the book, Alice. That was most kind of you.” I didn’t look up from the book as I turned a page.

“Why are you talking like Grandmother Scotthorn?”

“It’s what Mom says too.”

“Only when she wants to demonstrate good manners for us. It sounds stupid when you say it.”

“I just want to show everyone that I preciate what you’re doing for me.”

“Ap-preciate, not preciate.”

“Appreciate. Thank you, Alice, for correcting me.”

“Michael, you’re being silly. Stop it.”

“Yes, Alice. I am sorry if I am giving offense. I can assure you that none was intended.”

“Now you sound like Aunt Emily.”

“Who sounds like Aunt Emily?” David bounded into the room.

“Michael. He’s talking like Grandmother Scotthorn and Aunt Emily. Except he doesn’t have that hurt tone that Aunt Emily uses when she apologizes.”

“What hurt tone?”

“Oh, that ‘you’re being rude for making me apologize’ tone.”

“Ah, that tone.”

“David, did you leave the water on in the basement sink? I hear it running.” My mother appeared in the doorway.

“I’m letting it run for a minute, Mother, to let it get hot.”

“David, go downstairs and soak your uniform. I do not want to see you again until you’ve finished that chore. And Alice, if you’ve nothing better to do than make unkind remarks about your Aunt Emily, you can sweep the porch and front sidewalk. And put a coat on. It’s too cold for you to be wandering about outside without a coat. And have you practiced your piano lessons yet today? I’ve told you, you need to do that when you get back from school before your father comes home, so you won’t disturb him when he’s working at his desk after dinner.”

My mother watched both of them to make sure they were doing as told and then turned to me. “Do you need anything, Michael? Some more water?”

“No, Mother, I have sufficient. Thank you.” My mother examined that remark closely for sarcasm. Then she smiled at me. “Alice was right. You do sound like your Aunt Emily in one of her more aggrieved moods. It’s enough just to say ‘thanks,’ Michael. You don’t have to copy Aunt Emily. She’s not a proper model for a young boy. Not for anyone, come to think of it.”

“OK, mommy. I just don’t want to be a burden to anyone. And everybody leaves Aunt Emily alone when she talks like that. Even Uncle Ralph.”

My mother came and set on my bed. “Is that why you’re talking like that? Do you want to be left alone? Are we too much company for you, Michael?”

“I’m taking too much of everybody’s time. Everyone feels they have to sit with me and talk with me and entertain me. Alice never sat in my room to do her homework, and David didn’t spend all his time talking to me. It should be like it was before, when nobody said anything to me.”

“We talked to you before, Michael.”

“But not so much. You didn’t go out of your way to talk to me. You don’t talk to David and Alice like that. I shouldn’t be any different. It shouldn’t be any different now. It should be like it was before. Everybody is too … too careful around me.”

“We missed you. We’re making up for all the conversations we missed while you were in the hospital.”

“I don’t want to be sick any more, Mommy. People shouldn’t treat me like I was sick.”

“You’re not sick, Michael. You’ve just got to be patient and give yourself time to recover and get well. It’s hasn’t even been two weeks since you came home. We’ll get used to you again, and then things will be back to normal. Just give us time. We’ll soon be ignoring you again. I have to go make dinner now. You just read by yourself for a while. We’ll come get you when dinner’s ready.”

“Ok, Mommy. I’m sorry. I’m not complaining.” My mother gave me a half smile and patted my hand. When she stood up to leave, we both realized that David was standing in the door to the room. For once, he looked unsure of what to do.

“Perhaps we should let Michael rest, David.”

“No, it’s all right, Mommy. I want to hear about David’s game. He won 5 to 1.”

“You’re sure?”

I nodded. I didn’t want to hear about it, but I had to be a good boy and show both of them that I was interested in them. “Yes, Mommy. Besides if David tells me now, then he won’t have to tell me at the dinner table and make Alice feel bored.”

“Oh great, then we’ll get to hear Alice talking about Jane Austen and Miss Lewis.”

“David, I do not want you saying things like that in front of your brother.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Now don’t tire your brother.”

“Yes, Mother.”

David waited until mother was out of earshot before mouthing “Alice is boring.”

“Jane Austen is Alice’s baseball.”

“Alice can’t catch a ball. Here, I’ve got something for you.” David reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a hard rubber ball. “Coach gave me this. You squeeze it and it helps build up your grip. I figure if you use that every day you can start pitching to me in a few weeks. Plus coach showed me how you can use your parallel bars to build up your shoulder muscles. Here watch this.”

David walked over to my exercise bars and gripped them in his hands. With his arms locked stiff, he bent his legs backward at the knees until he was supporting his weight on his arms. Then he slowly lowered and raised his body between the bars. “See, this forces your shoulder muscles to do all the work. Why don’t you try one?”

“It’s all right, David. I’ll try it later.”

“Where’s your exercise schedule? We can add these to your lists.”

“I’ll do it later.”

“Michael, where are your schedules?”

I shook my head no and picked up my book and started reading.

“Champ, what’s the matter?”

“I’m not a champ.”

“What happened? Why are you so upset?”

“I’m not upset. And don’t talk so loud or Mommy will come back.”

David sat down at my desk and started pulling open the drawers until he found the red file folder my mother had given me to put my schedules in. He shuffled through them until he found the exercise sheet for that week. “You haven’t been coloring in the boxes to show that you’ve done your exercises.”

“I’ll do it later.”

“Michael, you have been doing your exercises, haven’t you?” David crossed to the bed and sat down on it. He poked at my shoulder.

“Yes.” I didn’t look up from the book I was reading. I tried to sound unconcerned.

“Then why haven’t you been marking your charts?”

“Dunno. Too busy.”

“Michael?”

“What? I’m trying to read, David.”

“What’s wrong?” David picked up my hand and held it between his.

Suddenly the burden was too much for me to carry alone. “I can’t. I can’t finish them. The most I can manage is six laps and then I get too tired to go on.”

“Six isn’t bad.”

“It isn’t twelve. I’m supposed to do twelve today. I’m never going to be normal. I’m never going to play baseball again, David. I’m never going to …” I pushed the rubber ball away from me. It rolled off the bed and bounced on the floor. David scooped it up and brought it back.

“What are you telling me? You want to play basketball instead? Maybe football. We could do that. Golf? Tennis?” He mimed each of the sports in turn while smiling at me uncertainly, like a comedian who fears that he’s failing to amuse.

“No, I’m never going to be able to do those things.” David turned my hand palm up and put the ball into it. He wrapped his hand around mine so that my fingers held the ball. Then he squeezed.

“We’ll figure out something for you to do, Champ. Coach said you should do twenty squeezes at a time to start. Work up to a hundred. After dinner, we’ll do your laps.”

“You have other stuff to do. Homework.”

“I can do it later. Besides you can explain conic sections to me again while you’re doing your laps. I still don’t see how you derived the equations for them. Now, I’d better tell you about the baseball game so we men don’t bore Alice with sports talk at the dinner table. I pitched a no hitter for the first three innings. I struck out eight runners and the other guy hit a pop fly to center field. I walked Paulson, you know that big catcher who plays for Stella Maris, in the fourth. …”

My brother sat and talked to me until Mother called us to dinner. I listened to him and tried to appear interested. I nodded at the right moments and asked the right questions. But I was afraid to let myself become interested in a sport that I knew I would never play again. The conversation was just a game I was playing to make my brother feel good.

“So I’m thinking maybe we can start by just throwing the ball back and forth and then moving slowly further and further apart as your arms get stronger. You’ll soon remember everything I taught you before. And I’ve been rubbing oil into your glove so that the leather’s still soft. Of course, you’ve grown so much that it might not be large enough anymore, but then you can use one of my old gloves. I’ll bring them down after dinner, and you can try them on till we find one that fits you. Does that sound all right, Champ?” David was becoming elated at the prospect of helping me recover.

I nodded. “I probably won’t be able to throw the ball far, David. Or for very long.”

“Not at first, but you’ll improve. You’ll soon be playing again.”

David has always felt that he can make the world what he wants it to be just by talking about it.

6

“Mother, can we go shopping after school on Friday? I need to get a new bathing suit for the summer and some other things.” Alice had finished practicing the piano and was setting the table for dinner. My mother was in the kitchen. I was sitting at my desk working on my lessons.

“Your father needs the car on Friday afternoon to take Michael to get his braces adjusted.”

“On Saturday then? Can we drive to the Hudson’s in Southfield? Patricia said she was there last week, and they had a lot of nice bathing suits. I need two or three summer dresses too. You should get some new ones too. You’ve been wearing that same three dresses to church and the country club for two summers now. And the seams on your white gloves are coming loose. I should get a new hat too.”

“Hudson’s is so expensive, Alice. The Emporium here in town has some good things. We can find something for you there.”

“But, Mother, the Emporium is so cheap. Nobody in school wears clothes from there. I can’t wear my clothes from last summer. I’ve grown so much that nothing fits any more. Please, can we go to Hudson’s? They always have sales on weekends, and I can find something nice on sale. You can too. Just a new bathing suit and one new dress. I don’t need a new hat. But I need at least one new dress for the country club this summer.”

“Well, you won’t need a dress for the country club this summer, Alice. We’ve quit at the beginning of the year, Alice. Your father decided that we can’t afford it any more.”

“But where will I swim, Mother? All my friends swim at the country club.”

“Then one of them can take you as a guest. Members are permitted to bring guests.”

“Mother, I couldn’t ask them to do that. That would be like admitting we’re poor and can’t afford things.”

“Alice, there are three lakes within walking distance of this house. Surely you can find a beach to swim at at one of them.”

“But, Mother, none of the girls from school would be caught dead at a public beach. It’s so common, and the boys there are so vulgar.”

“Alice, that’s enough. We can shop for patterns and fabric this weekend, and I’ll sew you some dresses for the summer.”

“Mother, nobody wears homemade dresses.”

“Well, I’m afraid that both of us are going to.”

“It’s because of him, isn’t it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s Michael, isn’t it? All the money has to be spent on him. There’s none left for me or the rest of us.”

“Alice, be quiet. Your brother will hear.”

“I don’t care. He should know how much the rest of us are suffering because of him. Fine. I just won’t leave the house this summer. I don’t have any friends left because they’re afraid they’ll catch some awful disease from him. So it doesn’t matter that I’ll be wearing rags and won’t be fit to be seen. I’ll ask Grandmother Scotthorn for the money for new clothes. At least she won’t let me run around in old clothes.”

“Alice Feneron, you will do nothing of the sort. Go to your room. The only place you’ll be going on Saturday is to Confession to tell Father Kennedy how disrespectful you are to your parents and how cruel you are to your poor brother.”

There was the sound of silverware being thrown on the table, followed by Alice’s deliberately heavy-footed dash up the back stairs. A door slammed upstairs. Then there was a loud wail. In the kitchen, the refrigerator opened and closed. There was a snap of a switch as a burner on the stove was turned on or off. A few seconds later, a chair was pulled back from the dinner room table, and I heard creaking noises and a long sigh as my mother sat down.

As quietly as I could, I maneuvered my wheelchair to the door to the library and peeked around the corner. My mother was leaning on her elbows and massaging her forehead with one hand. With her other hand she pressed a handkerchief to her mouth. Her eyes were closed.

“Mommy?”

My mother looked up. When she saw me, she straightened up. She dabbed at her nose and then tucked the handkerchief back under the cuff of her sweater. “Michael, I suppose it’s too much to hope that you didn’t hear that.” She stood up. Like someone decades older, she walked around the table holding on to the backs of the chairs for support until she stood opposite me.

“Alice didn’t mean that, Michael. She’s just very young, and it’s hard for her to adjust.”

“It’s true, though, what she said, isn’t it? Are we going broke?”

“No, Michael. We’re not going broke. We’re in the same situation we’ve always been in. We don’t have as much money as the parents of Alice’s friends at school. We just have to watch our money and save it for the important things. Like David’s and Alice’s school fees. And we have to save for college for the three of you.”

“But there would be more money if I hadn’t gotten sick.”

“There might be, Michael, I won’t lie to you. But you’re not to worry about that. I want you to put that out of your mind. In any case, there will never be enough money to buy Alice all the things she thinks she needs. You’ve heard me and your father say no to her before, and you’ve heard her getting angry because that meant she wouldn’t have something the other girls in her school consider necessary. It’s good for her to do without occasionally.”

“I suppose.”

“Michael, Alice and her problems are not your fault. Not everything that happens happens because you got sick.”

“But that means that some things happen because I got sick. If I hadn’t been a bad boy and God hadn’t had to punish me, then I wouldn’t have gotten sick, and I wouldn’t be a burden on everyone.”

“Who told you that? God doesn’t do things like that.”

“That’s what the man at the hospital said. Reverend Skeffington. He used to visit us and talk to us about our sins and what we had done wrong so that God had to punish us. To make an example of us so that other kids would know what happened to bad children.”

“Oh, Michael, that’s just not true. I can’t believe anyone would say such a cruel thing to a child. He’s an evil, evil man.” My mother’s face was contorted with anger.

“I’m sorry, Mommy.”

“Why are you sorry?”

“For saying the wrong thing. For upsetting you.”

“Oh, Michael. It isn’t you. It’s never you.” My mother reached over to hug me. I involuntarily shied away. I knew instantly that my flinching had hurt my mother more than what I had just said. Her hand fled back to her mouth, and her eyes watered.

“I’m sorry, Mommy. You can hug me. Please. It’s just that sometimes it hurts to be touched. I’m ok, now.” I took a step forward to bring myself closer. My mother reached out and hesitantly stroked my head.

“You’d better sit down before you tire yourself out. Why don’t you show me your homework? What have you been working on?” Even I understood that my mother was changing the subject to something safer and less emotional.

“The questions at the end of the history lesson. I made a neat copy for school. My handwriting is getting better again.” I showed my mother the piece of paper with the answers.

“This is very good, Michael.”

“Mommy, is it true what Alice said—that her friends don’t come around any more because of me? Is that why none of my friends comes to visit me?”

“There are lots of silly people in the world, Michael. They’re not worth thinking about. I want you to put that out of your mind right now. We don’t think about things like that.”

“Yes, Mommy.”

“And now, I had better go talk to Alice. I don’t want your father to hear about this, and if she isn’t at the table and chattering away, he’ll start to wonder why. One thing she’s going to do is apologize to you.”

“Oh, don’t make her do that, Mommy.”

“It will be good for her.”

“But then she’ll hate me. She won’t mean it, and she’ll be mad at me because you made her apologize to me. Just let her come back and not say anything. She’ll find a way of saying she’s sorry by herself.”

“Michael, you are growing up too fast.” My mother pushed a lock of hair off my forehead. “It will always be hard for Alice to be Alice. You two are a lot alike. You’re my fighters.”

“David’s a fighter too.”

“No, David will always have it too easy. He’ll never have to fight to get what he wants. People will always be happy to help him get what he wants. But you mustn’t repeat what I’ve said to David or Alice. That’s just between the two of us. And now I have to talk to Alice. You’ve done enough homework for today. You can do the rest tomorrow. Why don’t you read your book? Or do your geometry.”

7

“Michael, I’m going to put your wheelchair in the car just in case you need it.”

“I won’t need it. I walked for ten minutes yesterday with just my crutches and braces.”

“I will feel better if we have it along. It will make me feel safer. Just in case we can’t find a parking spot near that shop.” My father wedged my crutches into the well behind the front seat of the car and returned to the house. I rolled down the window and watched two squirrels chase each other around a tree trunk. There was the smell of wet soil and new leaves in the air. The grass was beginning to turn green again. Only a bit of crusty dirty snow remained of the pile north of the garage where David and my father had shoveled it over winter. The sun never shone directly on that area, and it was always the last spot with snow.

My father emerged from the house pushing my wheelchair. He had to bend over to reach the handles. My mother opened the screen door and said something to him. He turned backed to her and listened for a second and then nodded. He folded the chair and then stowed it in the trunk. “Your mother said to remind you to ask the technician how to clean the pads on your braces. Can you remember to do that?

I nodded and mm-hmmed to show that I would remember.

“Is your door locked?” My father reached across me and checked that the lock button was down. Our house set up on a knoll and the street fell away sharply for the first thirty feet or so. Seatbelts would not be standard equipment on cars for another ten years or so, and as we started down the hill, I slid forward in the seat. Without thinking, I braced my leg against the dashboard and began struggling to push myself back up. The part of the brace that went under the shoe scraped against the glove compartment.

“Stop that. You’ll scratch the finish.” My father spoke automatically.

“I’m sorry, Daddy.”

My father stopped the car and reached over and lifted me back into place. He regarded me with great weariness and sadness. “Michael, I didn’t intend to speak so sharply. I know you didn’t mean to do that.” He sighed and looked straight ahead out the windshield. “David used to kick the dashboard when he was young, and I was always telling him to stop it. You took me back to that for a second.” He shifted into gear again and we started forward.

“We’ll have to figure out a way to keep you from sliding down in the seat. Maybe Mr. Perkins will have an idea.”

We rode in silence for the next ten minutes or so. Then my father cleared his throat and began speaking carefully. “You know, Michael, we’re all glad to have you home again. But you’ll have to be patient with us. We learning to make adjustments to living with your condition. It’s going to take us time to work everything out.” My father glanced over at me, and I nodded.

“I’m especially worried about your mother. Most of the work around the house falls on her. Your brother and sister help out, but she’s the one who has to take care of you during the day.”

“I know, Daddy. I try to do as much for myself as I can and not be a burden. I’m walking much better now, and she doesn’t have to do so much for me.”

“That’s my boy. How are you doing in your schoolwork?”

For the rest of the trip into Pontiac, my father and I discussed my lessons. Mr. Perkins’s shop was located near the hospital. A group of nurses walked past as my father was handing me my crutches and helping me out of the car. One glanced at me and then nodded. We didn’t know each other, but we knew what our roles were. “How’s it going, kid? You doing your PT?”

“Every day.”

“That’s a good boy. Keep up the good work.” She gave me the “thumbs-up” gesture of support.

The door to Mr. Perkins’s shop was wider than normal and a short ramp abutted the doorsill so that wheelchairs could maneuver in and out easily. When my father opened the door, a buzzer sounded in the back of the shop. A few seconds later a woman called out, “Just a minute. I’ll be right out.”

The shop had a large open space in the center. Crutches, braces, and canes hung from hooks on one wall. Another wall was used to display artificial arms and legs. A row of wheelchairs lined the front. An older man sat in one of them. He looked up from the magazine he was reading and nodded hello to my father. He smiled at me. “Take a number, kid. Ted will be with you as soon as he’s finished working on my leg.” He gestured toward his left side. The left leg of his trousers was folded and lay flat on the seat of the chair. Only about six inches or so of his left thigh remained.

My father glanced at the man’s trouser leg and then looked away. The prosthetic devices lining the walls didn’t provide a comfortable place for his eyes to linger either. The curtains over the door to the back room were pushed aside, and a middle-aged woman rolled her wheelchair into the room. “Hello, you must be Mr. Feneron. I’m Judy Perkins. My husband will be out in a few minutes, as soon as he finished working on Bill’s leg. Hi, Mike, how are you doing? It’s going to take him another fifteen minutes or so before he’s ready for you. If you folks want to go out and get a coke or something, there’s a soda fountain in the Woolworth’s in the next block.”

My father greeted that suggestion with relief. “Michael?”

“I’m fine, Dad. Why don’t you go get a cup of coffee? It takes about half an hour to adjust the braces. You don’t have to wait with me. Mother always has a cup of coffee and does some shopping while Mr. Perkins is working on my legs.”

“I do have a couple of errands to run.” He turned back toward Mrs. Perkins. “Another hour or so?”

“About that. We’ll watch Mike. If he runs out into the street, I’ll chase him down.”

I giggled. “Un-hunh. I’ve been practicing. I can run now. You won’t be able to catch me.”

“Yeah? Well, there’s something you don’t know, bud. Since the last time you were in here, Ted installed a jet motor on my chair. Plus Bill here hops real good. You won’t get away, Tiger.”

“Well, if you’re sure it will be all right?” My father gestured toward the door.

Mrs. Perkins smiled at my father. “We’ll be fine. Mike’s a good kid. He helps me do the accounts.”

“Well, if you don’t mind.” My father pulled back his cuffs and looked at his watch. “I’ll be back around 2:30. You behave yourself, Michael.” He hurriedly stepped outside and looked up and down the street for somewhere to go. I watched him out the window. My father’s shoulders were hunched forward. He looked tired as he walked away.

When I turned around, I found that the man reading the magazine was watching me. He closed his magazine and tossed it onto the seat of the chair next to him. His mouth twisted in a half smile. “Feneron. There’s a pitcher for St. Ignatius named David Feneron. Throws a mean fast ball. He some relation of yours?”

“That’s my brother.”

“My older boy plays first base for Little Flower in Royal Oak. We’re expecting to play St. Igs in the CL playoffs this year. We went out to scout your team two weeks ago when they beat St. Mary’s. You see that game?”

“No.”

“That’s too bad. You missed a good game.”

“David told me about it.”

“So you play ball?”

“I used to. I don’t anymore.”

“You’re like my younger son, then. We can’t get him interested. He’s always got his nose in a book. You can hardly get him to stop reading long enough to eat. But he does real well in school. His mom and I are proud of him. We’re proud of both our boys. Is that what you’re like? The smart brother?”

“David’s smart too. He’s going to be a doctor.”

“Is that right? Did he get interested in that because of you?” Bill pointed toward my legs.

“I guess. I don’t know.”

“Hey, Bill, leave Mike alone. He’s a good kid.”

“I can see that, Judy. I’m just talking to him. Man to man. You see, Mike, parents want to be proud of their kids. It doesn’t matter what they’re good at. We’ll even take not so good and blow it up into great. Hell, we’ll even take so-so and by the time we finish talking about it, it’s an act of pure genius.”

“Hey, watch your language, Bill.”

“Judy, Mike and I are Catholics. We’ve heard of hell. You know what hell is, don’t you, Mike?”

I nodded.

“So what I’m saying here, Mike, is that sometimes when you are a parent, things happen to your kid. And you can’t do anything about it. And you know that you can’t make it better. That you can’t talk it up into something good. You can only feel the pain of it, and you can’t fix it. And it’s almost as bad for you as it is for the kid, because you’re supposed to be the one who fixes things. And you don’t know what to say to your kid. So you end up saying nothing and walking away and hoping that things will just somehow work out for the best. And then the kid wonders what he did wrong to disappoint you and starts blaming himself. And it’s just life. That’s all it is. Life just slams into you. And a shell takes off part of your leg and blows your two best buddies to bits so small that there’s not enough left for the sharks to nibble on. And after being in a hospital for months, you come home to your family, and they try to pretend that nothing happened, and you try to pretend that nothing happened so that they don’t get upset. But nobody can forget what happened. But after a while they get used to it, and they learn to live with it. So that’s what you gotta do, Mike, help your family learn to live with it. Just be patient with them. They’ll catch up to you eventually. You’ll find other ways to make them proud of you.”

“Next time, I remove your battery when I take your leg off.” Mr. Perkins had entered the room while Bill was talking and stood there holding his artificial leg. I had been paying so much attention to what Bill was saying that I hadn’t noticed him come in. “That way you won’t talk so much. Roll up your pant leg.”

“Maybe we should go in the back. Mike’s a bit young for this.”

“No, I was at the Vets. I’ve seen stuff like this before—in the hospital.”

“The Vets? Kinda young to be a soldier, aren’t you, Mike? Or did you lose both legs and get sawed off. Is that why you’re so short?”

“He was at Children’s Hospital off of Woodward down at Seven Mile. Sometimes they take the kids over to the Veterans Hospital there to get fitted for braces.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen lots of amputees. Can I watch?”

“If it’s all right with Bill.”

“Mike wants to watch, he can watch. Kids. Bloody minded little beggars all of them.” Bill smiled at me to show he was just joking. He rolled up his left pant leg and exposed his leg. The end of the stump was red. The flesh was scarred with deep white furrows. Mr. Perkins quickly fitted the pads against the stump and then fastened the artificial legs to the straps. “There. How does that feel?”

“Let’s give it a test. Judy, you up for a dance?”

“Not today. Ted would get jealous.”

“Mike, what about you?”

“I don’t know how to dance.”

“Here, I’ll show you.” He stood up and started singing. “You put your right leg out, you put your right leg in. You do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself about. That’s what it’s all about.” He matched his actions to the words. “Now you try it.”

I stood up and spread my crutches out wide for better stability. “My left leg is better.”

“Hey, we’re a matched pair. I’m a righty. You’re a lefty. Fred and Ginger had best look to their laurels. It’s the incredible dancing duo from Pontiac, Michigan, Mike and Bill.”

Bill was singing about his right leg, and I was singing about my left leg. I even did one chorus about putting my right crutch out. Bill matched that with “I put my prosthesis out.” After a couple more verses, Judy wheeled her chair over until the three of us were in a ragged line, and she joined in. “You put your right wheel out, you put your right wheel in. You do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself about. That’s what it’s all about.” Even Mr. Perkins started dancing, all of us singing as loudly as we could. We kept going for about five minutes. Bill finished with a great flourish of an imaginary hat. Some people in the crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk outside the Perkinses’ shop to watch us applauded; some of them were pointing at us and laughing; others just shook their heads and walked off. And for a few minutes, I didn’t care about any of them. Bill was my hero, and the last thing I was going to do was disappoint him.

“Next time, Mike, we’ll teach you the bunny hop. Only in all honesty, Mike, I gotta tell you. You may have blue eyes, but Frank Sinatra you’re not. Better stick to dancing and let someone else do the singing.”

******

“Did you remember to ask about cleaning the pads on the braces?”

My father and I were back in the car headed toward home.

“He said to use some mild dish soap in lots of hot water and make sure to dry it thoroughly.”

“What did Mrs. Perkins mean when she said that next time you had to save a dance for her?”

“We were just fooling around. That man who was in the shop. He was teaching me how to dance.”

“I hope you weren’t bothering him, Michael.”

“No, Daddy. We were just talking.”

“About what?”

“He was telling me about his two sons. One of them plays first base for Little Flower. He’s going to play against David, and Bill said that David throws a mean fast ball.”

“Bill?”

“The man.”

“You shouldn’t call adults by their first names, Michael. It’s disrespectful.”

“But I don’t know his last name. Mr. and Mrs. Perkins just called him Bill.”

“You could have asked, Michael.”

“Yes, Daddy. I’m sorry. I’ll ask next time.” Although I was sure that if I had, Bill would have told me to call him Bill. I bet his sons’ friends called him Bill. “He was in the war, like you. That’s how he lost his leg. And his two best buddies got blown to bits. There wasn’t enough of them left for the sharks.” The hungry sharks had caught my imagination. “And his leg is all red and bumpy where it was cut off.”

“Michael! I hope you weren’t asking him questions. That’s not a subject people like to talk about. You mustn’t bring subjects like that up. Especially with strangers. And how do you know what his leg looks like? Michael, your mother and I have told you before how rude it is to be curious. There are some things one doesn’t talk about. You’re old enough to know better.” My father was becoming angry. He pulled the car over to the side of the road and turned it off. I was about to receive one of his lectures.

“I didn’t ask him. I didn’t. He told me. And I’ve seen worse injuries—in the hospital, there were people without any arms or legs. Bill was just talking to me about how hard it is for parents to deal with …”

“With what?”

“Nothing.”

“Michael, I asked you a question. What is hard for parents to deal with?”

I stared out the window at a field where a bunch of cows were grazing. My father prided himself on his ability to know where he was at all times, and he often took back roads because they were “shorter than the highway.”

“Michael, I am waiting for an answer.”

I watched the cows. “That man whose last name I don’t know said it was difficult for parents to deal with crippled children because they couldn’t help them.” I didn’t look at my father. I could feel his eyes on me, though. We sat there for a while. Finally my father looked away and started the car. He drove for ten minutes before he spoke again.

“I’m going to talk with your mother. We will have to find another place to take you to get your braces adjusted. Those people obviously do not know what is appropriate behavior around a child. There must be some place in Ann Arbor we can go to.”

8

“Michael, your father and I were talking. He’s found a place in Ann Arbor that can service your braces and wheelchair. It’s closer, and the roads to Ann Arbor are better than those to Pontiac. You won’t get jarred so much.”

“But I like Mr. and Mrs. Perkins, Mom. They’re nice.”

“I know, sweetie. But I’m sure you’ll like the people in the new shop. Your father says they’re very professional. And he can take you when he goes to work. It will be much more convenient for everyone.” My mother was dusting the bookshelves and pointedly devoting much more attention to that task than to me.

“It’s because of what happened, isn’t it? He’s punishing me.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, Michael. And I don’t like your tone of voice. And you are not to slam your books like that. Your father is just thinking about your comfort. He thought the long ride made you very tired, and he’s trying to make it easier on you. You ought to be grateful to him for thinking of your welfare.”

“He didn’t give the Perkinses a chance. He didn’t stay in the shop or talk to them. He wouldn’t even come in when I was finished. He waited in the car, and Mrs. Perkins brought me out. She had to wheel herself out because he didn’t want to be in their shop.”

“Michael, that’s enough. I don’t know what happened in Pontiac. I don’t want to know. All I know is that your father was upset, and he’s decided that you’re going to go to this place in Ann Arbor from now on. And I don’t want to hear another word on this subject.”

“It’s not fair. Why is he so mean to me? Just because I had fun at the Perkinses’? Because they understand what it’s like to be crippled, and he doesn’t?”

“Michael, you are not crippled. I refuse to let you use that word. You’re getting stronger every day, and soon you’re going to be back to normal. You just have to keep working at your exercises.” My mother had abandoned all pretense of dusting. She stood with her back to me, her right arm resting on a shelf and bent at the elbow so that her hand covered her eyes. “And your father loves you. It just causes him so much pain to see you like this.”

“He doesn’t love me. I embarrass him, and he doesn’t want to be seen with me.”

“Oh, Michael, it’s not that. It’s never been that. It’s just that …” My mother left the dust cloth on the shelf and came over and sat beside me at my desk. She put a hand over my wrist and squeezed it. “Your father had a very hard war, Michael. He saw some awful things, and he still has nightmares about them. Then after his back was injured, he had to spend months in that hospital in Toledo while they did the bone and skin grafts. It was a horrible place, Michael. So many of the soldiers were so badly injured. Much worse than your father. You’ve no idea. It took all my bravery to visit him there. Some days I got sick to my stomach on the train down to Toledo. That’s why he didn’t like to visit you when you were in the hospital, and that’s why he’s having a hard time dealing with you. It just brings back a lot of memories that he has trouble dealing with.

“Plus he feels that he should have been able to prevent you from getting sick. He thinks he should have seen the symptoms earlier and taken you to the doctor the night before when you complained about being stiff and tired. You know he read every article he could find on the transmission of polio, trying to figure out how you got infected. I think he was worried that he might have brought something home from his lab that gave you the virus. Sweetie, it’s just very painful for him to deal with you now. You’re going to have to give him some time to make his peace with it. Well, you’re going to have to give us all time.”

“You’re much braver than he is, Mommy.”

“No, Michael, that’s crazy. It’s not as simple as that. It’s never as simple as that. You just do what you have to do, and pray that you have the strength to do it. But we have to keep thinking good thoughts, positive thoughts. That’s why we can’t use words like ‘crippled.’ We have to focus on getting better. If we think of ourselves as healthy and normal, then we’re going to be healthy and normal. Promise me you’ll do that, Michael. Promise me. You’ve got to have the right attitude.”

“I promise, Mommy. I’ll have the right attitude. In fact, I should start my exercises now.”

“That’s my good boy. I’m going to go make lunch for us. When you’ve finished, let me know and we can eat.”

9.

“Nora, Michael’s finished that plate of cookies. I know he can eat more.” Grandmother Scotthorn had kept an eye on my consumption of the cookies she had brought. I had barely slipped the last one off the plate before she spoke to my mother.

“He’ll spoil his supper if he eats any more, Mother.”

“He’s a growing boy, Nora. At that age your brother could eat a dozen cookies and then sit down an hour later and eat as if he hadn’t been fed for a week. Not that my children ever lacked for food on the table. Besides I baked those just for Michael. I know he loves my sugar cookies. Isn’t that right, Michael?”

Negotiating the shoals of the relationship between my mother and her mother, especially in the matter of our consumption of their cooking, was a hazard that David, Alice, and I had long faced. It required the skills of a diplomat. “Just one more, Mommy. I’ll do my exercises before dinner, and that way I’ll be hungry.”

My grandmother beamed. “There, Nora, one more won’t spoil his appetite. Emily, make yourself useful. Nora has enough to do.” My grandmother handed my Aunt Emily the cookie plate and nodded toward the dining room table, where a large red tin filled with sugar cookies sat.

My Aunt Emily put her cup of coffee down and leaped to her feet. “No, no, sit, Nora, don’t get up. I’m happy to help. It’s no trouble. I’m on my feet all day long anyway.” My mother in fact had not made a move to stand up, but Aunt Emily seldom missed an opportunity to remind others of her ceaseless labors on their behalf. “Nora, while I’m up, I think I should cover that pie I brought. I think I heard a fly buzzing about. Is your cake cover still in the second cabinet? That will work.”

“Emily, there are no flies in this house. You’re hearing things. And I made a cake today. Please leave it covered.”

Aunt Emily opened the cabinet as if my mother hadn’t spoken. “Oh, I see you already made a dessert for your supper tonight. Did you use one of those new cake mixes? I think you’re wise to use them.” Aunt Emily put the slightest of stresses on the word “you’re.” “Even with all my experience baking cakes, every now and then, one of them just doesn’t rise as high as I like. Of course, they’re still good, but they’re just not as light as I want them to be. I’m told that these new mixes are foolproof, but I just don’t trust what comes out of a box. I hope you don’t mind that I brought a pie, Nora. I know how your family likes my pies. Luckily your cake will keep. But you should serve the pie tonight. The crust won’t be as flaky if you wait to eat it.” Aunt Emily had all but guaranteed that her pie would not appear on our table until her famously flaky crust was sodden. “Oh here, this will do. This will keep the flies away.” Aunt Emily appeared in the doorway and briefly brandished the lid to the turkey roaster. She reappeared shortly with the cookie plate, which now held a stack of a dozen or more of my grandmother’s sugar cookies.

“Just one, Michael.”

Aunt Emily spoke at the same time as my mother. “These are so good, Mother. I’ve always said that you make the best sugar cookies.” Aunt Emily put the plate on the end table beside me and helped herself to a cookie as she sat down. She patted her lips with her napkin as she held the cookie up so that we could all see that she had taken a bite out of it. She and my grandmother smiled at each other. They bickered with each other frequently, but they often presented a united front against my mother.

I nodded and took the one cookie I was allowed. I sat it on the plate my mother had provided each of us. I was quite proud of that solution. I had taken a cookie (one point to grandmother), but I wasn’t eating it and spoiling my dinner (one point to mother). In the most “grown-up” voice I could manage, I turned toward my grandmother. “Is your arthritis better now, Grandmother, now that the weather is warmer?”

All three women stared at me. My grandmother with delight, and my mother and aunt aghast that I had broached the subject. “Why, thank you for asking, Michael. It is better. Not that I would ever complain. No one knows what I suffer. I’ve never been one to complain. But there were days this winter when the cold and the damp got to me. But I never let it interfere with my work. Not like some I could mention.”

The last was a reference to my Uncle Robert’s wife, who employed a cleaning woman once a week and whose migraines often rendered her unable to cook or do housework. If there was one subject that united the three of them, it was “that woman from San Francisco your Uncle Robert married when he was in the Navy.” They all agreed on her shortcomings.

“But I shoulder on. Your mother tells me that you’re being very good and doing all your exercises. As soon as I heard that, I knew where you got that trait. Everyone in my family has always been a hard worker. I said to myself, ‘That’s the Wainwright blood coming out in him.’ You get that from your great-grandfather. He was thrown from a horse and broke his leg. It never healed right, but he never let that stop him. You’re like your Great-Grandfather Wainwright and me. We don’t let anything defeat us.” The subject occupied my grandmother for the next five minutes. My mother and Aunt Emily and myself nodded at the appropriate places.

When she finally wound down, I turned to Aunt Emily. “And how is Jordan? Does he like Dartmouth?” Jordan was my cousin and Aunt Emily and Uncle Ralph’s only child. He was then in his freshman year at college.

“My goodness, Michael, you are becoming such the young gentleman. You are too kind to ask. Jordan absolutely loves Dartmouth. He is doing so well there. We had a letter from him yesterday. I’ve got it in my handbag. I brought it so that your mother could read it. I shouldn’t boast about my child, but all his professors think so highly of him. They say he’s the brightest student they’ve seen in many years.” Aunt Emily reached into her purse and pulled out Jordan’s letter. “But since you’re interested, I’ll read it to everyone. Your Grandmother’s already read it, of course, but I’m sure she’ll forgive a mother’s pride if I read it out loud.” Aunt Emily put her glasses on and pulled the letter from the envelope. “ ‘Dear Mother and Father,’ ”

Aunt Emily read the letter in its entirety. Apparently all of Jordan’s teachers did think highly of him, except for one, but he was widely acknowledged at Dartmouth to be long past the age when he should have retired, if not senile. Unfortunately no matter how hard Jordan tried to please him, this man remained unimpressed with my cousin’s talents. Aunt Emily paused in her reading long enough to inveigh against the evils of the tenure system (“although it must be a comfort to you, Nora, to know that Connor [my father] can’t be fired, no matter what he does”).

When Aunt Emily finished reading, she folded the letter and returned it to the envelope. She briefly pressed it to her heart and then put it back in her purse.

“More coffee, Mother? Emily?” My mother held up the coffee pot.

“No thank you, Nora. Mother, I think we should be going. I have to get Ralph’s dinner ready. He’s so fond of my cooking that he wants it on the table when he gets home from work. And Nora probably has to start dinner for her family soon.”

“I was hoping to see Alice and David.” My grandmother made no more to join Aunt Emily and my mother in standing up.

“Alice has library club after school today, Mother, and David has baseball practice. His team’s in the semifinals this weekend. I know we won’t be able to persuade you to sit through a game, Emily, but it will mean a lot to David, Mother, if you would be there.”

My grandmother made a noncommittal response. My mother helped her to her feet. I was wrapped in her embrace for several seconds. I thanked her politely for the cookies. As my mother walked my grandmother to the front door, my aunt leaned over and spoke quietly. “We’re so glad that you’re back home, Michael. Your mother was so worried about you when you were in the hospital. She looks much better and happier now that you’re here. I know it must seem that the two of us argue a lot, but we are sisters and we want each other to be happy. Now I won’t hug you, because your mother says that hurts you still, but I’m hugging you mentally. You’re such a good boy. I know your grandmother can be difficult sometimes, and you’re not interested in hearing women talk, but you behaved very well today.”

“Thank you for the pie, Aunt Emily. I’m looking forward to having a piece with dinner.”

Aunt Emily exploded in a most un–Aunt Emilish hoot of laughter. “And everyone thinks that David’s the charmer in your family. The two of you are a right pair. But you mustn’t mock your grandmother. She means well. And that’s the way young ladies were taught to talk in her generation.”

10

“Was Grandmother Scotthorn here? I see the red cookie tin.” Alice stood in the doorway to the library holding a stack of books. She was looking intently past me out the window.

“Mmm. She and Aunt Emily were here earlier. Aunt Emily brought a pie. Mother put it away after they left.”

Alice looked over her shoulder toward the kitchen where my mother was preparing dinner and then turned back to me. She spoke softly. “Did Mother lose her temper again?”

“Aunt Emily said there was a fly in the house. And Mother, well she didn’t shout this time, but she wasn’t happy. They’re a lot alike, aren’t they?”

“Who? Mother and Aunt Emily?” The rest of us used the pronunciation common in the Midwest in the 1950s and said “ant” for “aunt.” Alice had recently begun saying “aahnt” instead.

“No. I meant Grandma and Aunt Emily. Aunt Emily will be just like Grandma in a few years. How was Library Club?”

“It was OK. Helen Thompson is graduating this year, and everyone seems to think I’ll make a good replacement as club secretary.”

“Of course you would, Alice.”

“Don’t say things like that, Michael. You can’t know anything about it.”

“But you would, Alice, you would make a good secretary or president.”

“If the members want me to serve, of course I will be happy to be an officer of the club. But I’m not going to seek office. That’s so common—putting yourself forward and running for office. Here, I brought you some more books. Another Dickens, a collection of Mark Twain’s stories, and I thought you should start reading poetry, so I brought an anthology of English poetry. An ‘anthology’ is a collection. You should learn that word.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. What makes you think something is the matter?”

“You’re frowning.”

“I’m not frowning. It’s just discouraging sometimes. Helen was talking about her plans after graduation. She was accepted at Marshall College and now she doesn’t know if she wants to go. She’s not the smartest person in school, but she does well enough when she applies herself, and she likes to read. She could get through college and make something of herself—be a grade school teacher or something like that. But now she’s wondering if she shouldn’t just get a job until she gets married. Her parents don’t know yet, but she secretly engaged. She’s waiting until after graduation to tell them. She’s even got a ring. She doesn’t wear it on her finger, but she keeps it on a chain around her neck. It’s not a real engagement ring. Her boyfriend can’t afford that. But it’s a sign they’re committed to each other. She won’t tell anyone the boy’s name, but we all know who it is. And really, Michael, he’s so ordinary. She could do much better. Some people just don’t try hard enough. They give up. And then Sylvia Merton asked me if I thought David would accept an invitation from her to attend the end-of-the-year tea and dance at school. We’re supposed to be discussing the library and how to raise money for the book fund, and as soon as Miss Jessop leaves the room, all they do is discuss boys and dates and marriage. And why would anyone want a date with David?”

“But that’s all everyone talks about in those books you read. Like that Withering Heights you were talking about yesterday. Catherine and Cliff. And Elizabeth and Darcy get married.”

“That’s different, Michael. That’s literature. And it’s Wuthering Heights. And it’s Heathcliff, not Cliff. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, you should keep quiet.”

“Yes, Alice. But why shouldn’t David have a date?”

“It’s my school. I don’t want David there. He has his own school. Let him stay there. Besides, he doesn’t even own a proper suit anymore. Mother told him she wasn’t buying another suit for him until he stopped growing. And he can’t tie a tie. He’s just unsuitable. I told Sylvia he had a baseball game that day.”

“How do you know that?”

“He always has a baseball game or a practice.”

“But you lied. You don’t know if he has a game or not.”

“It wasn’t a real lie, Michael. You’ll understand when you get older. And you have to promise me not to tell anyone.” Alice had dropped her voice to a whisper. “Besides, David wouldn’t go out with Sylvia. I’m just saving her the embarrassment of being turned down. Sometimes the kinder thing to do is to prevent unpleasant things from happening. And it would be embarrassing for me to have to face Sylvia after David had turned her down. Sometimes one has to manage things in everyone’s best interests. So really the best way to save everyone trouble is to say that David has a game. More likely than not, he does. And if he doesn’t have a game, he probably has something else.”

“Maybe he’ll be working that night.”

“Working? Why would David be working? He doesn’t have a job.”

“Yes, he does. He got a job as a life guard at the pool at the country club.”

“Do Mom and Dad know about this?” Alice scowled at me. It was not welcome news.

“Um-huh. They had to sign some papers for him. That’s where he is now. He’s at the country club turning them in.”

“Mother!!” Alice flew out of my room. “Michael says David has a job. At the country club!” Alice had recovered her voice. My mother murmured something from the kitchen.

“But it’s so unfair. David gets to use the swimming pool at the country club, and I can’t.”

I heard my mother mention the words “job,” “working,” “sixteen years old,” and “earning money,” “taking some responsibility.” This was followed more clearly by “Mrs. Henderson is looking for someone to watch her children during the summer and supervise their play. The Hendersons belong to the country club, and I’m sure that part of the job will involve taking the children to their swimming lessons. She asked if you might be interested, and I said I would ask.”

“Babysitting? Mother, I couldn’t babysit.”

“I don’t know why not, Alice. Millions of girls your age do. You are surely as capable as they. And Mrs. Henderson said she would pay twenty dollars a week.”

“But they’re such awful children.”

“No worse than you and your brothers were at that age. It will be good preparation for you.”

“Preparation for what?”

“Someday, Alice, you will have children of your own. Trying to boss David around and supervising Michael’s studies isn’t all there is to raising children. Taking care of the Henderson children will be good practice for you.”

“I am not going to get married and I’m not going to have children. I’m going to be a teacher. At a university. Like Daddy.”

“We don’t always get what we want, Alice. It’s fine to have grand plans, but you need to be practical as well. And twenty dollars a week for a girl your age is good money. You need to start saving money to have when you’re in college. And there will be twelve weeks of vacation during the summer. That’s almost $250.”

“But surely I can’t work in August.”

“Why not?”

“That’s when we go to Georgian Bay. To Grandfather and Grandmother Feneron’s place on the lake.”

“We won’t be going this year. Your grandparents are coming here for a visit this year.” My mother’s voice faltered. “Lion’s Head Cove is too rocky for Michael to get about. And it’s too far from a hospital if we need one. We’d have to go to Owen Sound if there were an emergency, and it takes two hours to get there. Besides, your brother will be working all summer, and you know that we couldn’t leave him alone in the house.” My mother’s appeal to Alice’s disdain of my brother didn’t work. Alice didn’t bother to answer. She turned and ran up the back stairs to her room.

11

“Michael, there’s a letter for you.” My mother stood in the doorway holding an envelope. “It’s from a Mrs. Kinross. She says that you and her son John were good friends in the hospital. I’m sorry, Michael, but I’m afraid it’s not good news.”

“Is he dead?” I looked up from my schoolwork.

My mother looked startled for an instant before assuming the expressionless mask she habitually wore in the presence of bad news. I suppose she was taken aback by the matter-of-fact way in which I spoke. She nodded and sat the envelope on the corner of my desk. “Why don’t you read it and then we can talk about it, if you want?”

“No, it’s ok. He wasn’t very well. He had trouble breathing. He was in and out of the iron lung several times. And he couldn’t walk.” I picked the envelope up and aligned it squarely on the desk. In the past few weeks, I had begun controlling my world carefully. It was ordered, square, proper. My dislike of the accidental and unexpected was growing.

“Were you good friends? I don’t recall him. Which one was he?” I recognized the start of one of my mother’s attempts to engage me in conversation.

I shrugged. “You never met him. He wasn’t in the beds near me. When he was on the ward, he was kept near the nurses’ station, because he had to be watched. Some days when he was feeling stronger, they put him a wheelchair and took him to the games room. He liked to play checkers. When he was in the iron lung, we would move his pieces for him. What does his mother say?”

“I didn’t read your letter, Michael. Mrs. Kinross put in a note to me saying that she was writing to all of her son’s friends to let them know. He died ten days ago. The funeral was last week. I’ll buy you a sympathy card that you can send. You’ll have to write a note to go with it.”

“But I don’t know what to say.”

“It isn’t so much what you say that’s important as the fact that you take the time to say something. Just say you’re sorry to hear that her son died, that you’ll pray for him, and then remember something about him, something personal like the checkers games. Oh, that poor boy’s parents.” My mother pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and pressed it against her lips. Her eyes began to water, and she swallowed convulsively several times.

“His father was dead. He was killed in the war. He was born after his father died. It was just his mother and him.”

“Then he was all she had.” My mother sat down on my bed and covered her eyes. “The poor woman.”

“It’s OK, Mommy. He was in a lot of pain, and he wasn’t ever going to be able to walk again.’

‘It’s not OK, Michael, it’s never OK to lose a child. You can’t know what it’s like to lose a child. Those first few days you were in the hospital, I—all of us—were so worried. I don’t know how I would have gone on if you had died.” My mother was crying openly now, something she rarely did. At least something she rarely allowed the rest of us to see.

“But I didn’t die. I’m still here. So there’s no reason for you to worry.”

On the wards, we learned to gauge who would make it and who would die. There were some who were mobile within a couple of weeks. If the nerves in their legs had been affected at all, they usually took delight in swinging around on their crutches. They seldom had to be fitted with permanent braces and wore supports only for a few weeks. They usually left within a month or so, never to return. There were others like myself whose arm or leg nerves had been moderately damaged during the active stage of the disease. Our recoveries took longer, but once the fever and the infection had ended, it became clear that we would not die.

And then there were those like John Kinross, for whom every breath was a struggle, whose limbs froze in awkward shapes, their heels drawn up and their feet distended like those of ballet dancers standing on the tips of their toes. Their hands and fingers curled and bent into impossible angles. Their muscles unresponsive. Lives of pain and agony. Some unable to control their bladders or bowels. Occasionally one would improve enough to be taken from the iron lungs and allowed to sit up for a while. They were always carefully watched, if not by the nurses, then by the rest of us. They were everyone’s joint responsibility. All of us soon learned to distinguish a labored but successful breath from the panicky flailing and purpling face that signaled the inability to pull air into the lungs. A dozen voices would immediately start yelling for a nurse to come, and the temporarily freed prisoner would be rushed backed into the iron lung.

The worst patients were kept on Ward 8. There was always someone ready to report that he had been awakened late at night by the sound of a gurney being slowly pushed down the central aisle of our ward, the orderlies trying to move it noiselessly so that no one saw the shrouded figure, its face covered by a sheet. Even though the aisle between the two rows of beds was an unlikely route for the “death cart,” as one of the boys on the ward christened it, our imaginations were caught by the image. Even now, after fifty years, I still half believe that I personally witnessed dead children being wheeled past our beds late at night.

We joked that no one left Ward 8 alive. That ward was our bogeyman. Any of us would have taken the announcement that he was being moved to Ward 8 as a sign of impending death. Occasionally, someone would be wheeled away to be examined privately by one of the doctors and not be brought back. Later a team of nurses would descend on the bed and strip it. One of them would open the small cabinet beside the bed that each of us had and remove the few personal belongings we were allowed to have and pack them in a box to take away. None of us asked them what had happened. Everyone studiously ignored the nurses. We forced all our attention on the book we were reading or the game we were playing. But we were never for a moment unaware that someone had been transferred to Ward 8.

My mother’s tears and anguish made me relive my worst moments in the hospital, when the fear had been strong that I would die. In my imagination, I saw myself lying on the death cart, sightless eyes open, not registering the alternation of light and shadow as the cart was wheeled down the hallway and passed under the regularly spaced lights on the ceiling. For a moment, I was close to tears myself.

But then I reminded myself that I had to be strong. I couldn’t allow myself to be weak. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t doubt that I was going to walk again, to be whole again. I had to fight. I had not just to survive but to be victorious. I had to be the good child and repay my parents for all the trouble and suffering I had caused everyone.

“If you’ll buy me a card, I’ll write a letter to Mrs. Kinross, Mommy.’

My mother wiped her eyes and quietly blew her nose, mollified by my attempt to behave properly. “I’ll get it tomorrow when I go shopping. You can write the letter on a separate sheet of paper to put inside the card. Why don’t you write it out on your tablet? I’ll check it for you and then you can copy it onto a sheet of good stationery.”

I turned the pages in my notebook to an unused sheet. As I had been trained, I wrote the day of the week in the upper right corner. On the next line, I began “Dear Mrs. —.” “How do you spell Kinross?” I knew how to spell it, but I sensed that it would please my mother to do me a service. I carefully wrote out the name as she spelled it out letter by letter. “I’ll write how much I liked him and about the checkers.”

My mother nodded and smiled at me. “That’s very good, Michael. I’m glad to see how grown up you’re becoming.” She patted me on the head and then left.

I suspect that by that point in my life, I had seen more illness and death than my mother, certainly more than David and Alice. My father had been injured in combat in Italy in World War II. He had seen more death than I. In retrospect, I know he probably saw far worse injuries and deaths than I did. However, I had long outstripped the others. I had heard silence. And I had learned the value of sound. Any sound will serve for the great white noise, even a whisper.

“Dear Mrs. Kinross,

I was so sorry to hear of your loss. John was …”

I could already bandy those clichés with ease.

12

As the weather warmed, I took to sitting outside, either on the swing on our front porch or on an old bench under the trees at the bottom of the back yard. I liked being able to leave my room and the hospital bed and my exercise bars. They were becoming increasingly burdensome reminders that I was not progressing as fast as I had hoped. The bench was my favorite place because it was partially hidden in the shrubberies. I knew that my mother could see enough of me to know that I was there but not so much that I felt under her surveillance. I quickly became aware that, even so, my mother looked out the window several times an hour to check on me. The slightest sign of overcast brought her out with a jacket or sweater for me. The possibility of rain was enough for her to wheel me back inside. Sometimes I was allowed to sit on the porch swing when the weather was bad, but not for long. I liked sitting outside on rainy days. It was as though I were isolated in my own private space, kept safe from intrusion by the rain. Sometimes it felt that the worst punishment that polio had inflicted on me was the loss of privacy. I was never allowed to be alone or unwatched.

David joined me outside after school the day after I learned that John Kinross had died. Earlier I had been doing some schoolwork, and my books and papers covered one end of the bench. David stacked them into a pile and sat down beside me. I was reading one of the novels that Alice brought me. He reached over and grasped the top of the book and tilted it up so that he could read the title. “David Copperfield. I see Alice is still trying to educate you. She’s worried that if she doesn’t guide you, you might turn into me.”

“I like it. So far.”

“School’s out in another four weeks and then you can have my solid geometry book.”

“How are you doing in math?”

“Better, thanks to you, champ. I’ll get an A in that course.” David flashed me a sardonic grin. It was a joke between us that I was helping him with his math. In reality, he was teaching it to me by pretending not to understand.

David reached out and pulled a leaf from one of the bushes. He drew it between his fingers and examined it without looking at me. “They’re worried about you, you know. I heard them last night when I was in bed. They were sitting outside on the porch and talking.”

“Mom and Dad?”

“Who else? You don’t think Alice is sitting up worrying about you, do you?”

“Why are they worried? I’m getting stronger every day. I can do a lot more now that I could before.”

“It’s not that. They’re think you’re going crazy.”

“I’m not going crazy.”

“Yeah, I could have told them that. You’re not going crazy. You’ve always been crazy.”

“Un-uhh. Not me. You’re the crazy one. Not me.”

David half-turned to punch me playfully on the upper arm, but he stopped in mid-motion, his fist just about to make contact. The laughter that had been on his face faded, and he bit his lips. He opened his fist and patted me on the shoulder with his palm. He turned away and stared into the distance. “You can’t tell them I told you this. You have to swear. They don’t know I can hear them talking when they sit on the porch and I have my bedroom window open.”

I nodded agreement. “What? What did they say?”

“They think you’re too calm. They’re worried that you’re not reacting enough. Mom said you’re so unemotional now. When she told you that that friend of yours died, you were so cold. That you didn’t even cry. You don’t laugh anymore. You don’t even really talk anymore. All you say is polite things but that you never really talk to anyone. She said you had so much to bear and that you were shutting everyone out and …”

“I can’t talk. And I won’t cry.”

“Everybody can talk. I’ve heard you talk. You talk all the time. I’ve even seen you cry.”

“No, I can’t let myself talk.” I pushed at him to make him leave. If I could have run away, I would have. “Go away. Just go away. Just leave me alone.”

“No. Not until you tell me why. Why can’t you talk?” David must have sensed my desire to run because he moved close to me, draped his near arm across my shoulders, and pressed my chest with his other hand. It was an unusual act for that time. In the American Middle West in the 1950s, men, even brothers, simply did not hug. Physical contact was limited to handshakes and the occasional playful punch.

I shook my head no. “Let go of me. You’re hurting me.”

“Then maybe you’ll talk.”

“No, I can’t talk.”

“Tell me why. Why can’t you talk?” He shook me.

Suddenly the misery of being the good patient became too much. I started shouting, “Because no one would understand. Nobody can understand what it’s like. I have to be strong. I have to make myself right again. I have to. I can’t be weak. I can’t be a burden on everyone.”

David pressed my head against his chest and then started rocking us back and forth and patting me on the shoulders and neck. “Shhh, Michael. It’s all right. It’s going to be all right. We’re going to make everything all right.”

“No. I’m never going to be all right again. I’m always going to be a cripple. I’m never going to walk again. You can’t make everything right. Nobody can.” I think I knew that that would set David to reassuring me again. I wanted him to tell me again that I would be all right and that I wasn’t alone.

“Stop talking like that. You’re going to get well again. Listen to me. You are going to get well.”

“No, I’m not. Why can’t you just face facts? I should just go back to the hospital so I won’t be a burden on everyone. I’m just making trouble for everyone here. For you and Alice and for Mom and Dad.”

“You can’t go back to the hospital. Who would I have to talk to?” David let go of me and gave me a shy smile, as if he wanted to ease the situation with humor but wasn’t sure how I would receive it. “You know I can’t talk to Alice. Nobody can talk to Alice. And all Mom and Dad do is shout at me and tell me that I’m doing everything wrong. You’re the only person who listens to me.”

“You’ve got friends. They can listen to you.” I wasn’t about to be placated and give up my grievances now that I had released them.

“Yeah, but I’ve only got one brother. And he’s my best bud.” He hugged me again. My head was buried in his chest, and I couldn’t see his face, but he sounded like he was almost crying. “You are crazy. Mom and dad are right. You are crazy. You’re not alone, you know. Just stop this talk about leaving. That’s crazy. If you need to talk with someone, talk with me. I’ll listen to you. I promise. But you gotta promise not to worry mom and dad. You gotta try to be more cheerful around them. Otherwise they’re going to worry, and they’ll start taking you to a shrink. And I like my crazy brother just the way he is. Listen to me. You’re going to get well. So maybe you won’t walk as well as before. Big deal. Just try to be happy again. That’s all. Just be happy again.”

He released me and moved away from me. That exchange had taken us into places neither of us found comfortable. By that point, both of us were embarrassed by the conversation. We came from an environment in which strong emotions were conveyed in small gestures and clipped words. We didn’t like getting that close to expressing ourselves. Neither of us could look at the other.

I changed the subject. “Why aren’t you at practice?”

“Coach had something to do after school. We practiced at lunch. You’re coming to the game on Saturday?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to pitch a no-hitter.”

“Against St. Paul’s? Not a chance.”

“Wait and see. I’ll make you a bet. If I pitch a no-hitter, you have to mow the lawn this summer.”

“I’d do a better job than you do. Dad won’t complain that I missed lots of spots.”

“That’s never going to happen. Even if you did a perfect job, he’d still find something to complain about. He doesn’t want to admit one of us might do something right for once.” A bitter look roiled David’s face. “Hey, don’t worry about it.” He patted me on the knee. “You’re probably right. I won’t pitch a no-hitter, and I’ll end up mowing the lawn this summer. Dad would like that better anyway. He’ll get to complain more that way. If you did it, he would have to keep quiet.”

“Nah. He doesn’t like anything I do.” Suddenly we were in competition over who suffered more from my father’s insistence on perfection. “Anyway, you’re going to pitch a no-hitter.” I looked around. “This is a big yard, isn’t it? How long do you think it will take me to mow all of it?”

“We’ll do it together. It won’t take us long.” A puff of wind lifted the lock of hair that fell over David’s forehead. He stretched his legs out and leaned back against the bench with his fingers laced together behind his neck and his elbows outspread, turning his face to the sun and closing his eyes. “It’s nice out here.”

I leaned back too and put my hands behind my neck, aping David. “Yeah, it’s nice out here.”

13

The baseball game that Saturday was for the divisional Catholic League championship. St. Ignatius, my brother’s school, belonged to the division consisting of high schools in the northern and western suburbs of Detroit. The winner of the game would play the winner of the division for Catholic schools in Detroit.

In the mid-1950s, these games attracted more attention than they might now simply because far fewer people had access to professional sports. Only a few baseball games were televised in those days. I’m not certain, but I think that for most of the baseball season the only televised broadcast was the “game of the week.” Also, at that time getting from towns like Walled Lake to Briggs Stadium, then the home field of the Tigers, was considered an undertaking, and that meant few people made the trip. Most of the Tiger games were broadcast on the radio, of course, and sports writers in the newspapers provided detailed accounts of games, but listening to an announcer’s description or reconstructing a game from a written description required imagination and enough familiarity with baseball that one could envision the play. So a major game between two good high school teams afforded a relatively rare opportunity to see live baseball. There was also a certain amount of partisanship involved. Catholics were not then part of the mainstream, and attending CL games was considered a way of supporting “our side.” All these factors meant that the divisional CL championship was held in Pontiac at the high school with the largest set of bleachers and attracted a crowd of nearly a thousand people.

Our tickets were for seats several rows up in the section reserved for supporters of St. Ignatius. The bleachers were too steep for me to climb, however. After some discussion with one of the men managing the event, my father positioned my wheelchair next to the end of the bleachers and just behind the tall chain-link-fence that served as the backstop surrounding home plate. That put me out of the way of everyone. I was off to the left side of home plate and had a clear view of the infield through the backstop. I was also seated next to a group of nuns, who volunteered to keep an eye on me when they overheard my mother fussing about leaving me by myself. That fact reassured my mother, who had been ready to have my father drive us all home when she found out that I could not sit with them.

David had given me a pennant with his team’s name on it. After my parents left, the nun closest to me asked, “You’re rooting for St. Igs then?”

I nodded and said, “My brother is their pitcher.”

“Poor boy. We will pray that God will help him to accept defeat gracefully.” She grinned at me. “I’m Sister Ursula. We’re teachers at St. Anne’s, by the way, and we hope you will behave yourself and not embarrass yourself by cheering for a lost cause.” St. Anne’s was the girls’ school affiliated with St. Paul’s, the other side in that day’s game. I had been abandoned to the mercies of the opposite team’s supporters.

“And I will pray for you, Sister Ursula.” That drew a laugh from the row of nuns. A certain amount of cheek was tolerated in relation to athletic competitions. The same remark from a student in a classroom would have merited a ruler across an open palm.

The nun seated next to Sister Ursula leaned forward. “Did you have polio?”

When I nodded yes, she said, “Oh your poor parents. It’s always such a hardship on the family. Still, God does not give us burdens we are incapable of bearing. You must pray for the gift of His grace.”

That platitude received a collective nod from the nuns and precipitated a series a questions. Where did I go to school? What parish did we live in? What did my father do? How many brothers and sisters did I have? Where was Alice going to school? Why was she not being sent to a Catholic school? What did I think of the Tigers’ chances this year? Was Al Kaline enough to lift the Tigers in the standings?

It was professional sympathy, of course, but still it was the first conversation I had had in weeks with someone outside my family. It drove home to me how isolated I was becoming. My former friends hadn’t been permitted to visit me when I was in the hospital. There had been a few visits soon after I had returned home, but all those children had been brought by their mothers, and those duty calls had gradually ceased. When, at the end of these visits, my mother had urged my friends to return, their mothers had inevitably remarked that the visits added to my mother’s work and that they didn’t want to impose.

The conversation was brought to a halt by the start of the game. By lot, St. Igs was chosen to bat at the top of the inning. My brother was positioned late in the batting order, and St. Igs was retired in the first inning before his turn came. The dugout for his team was on the same side of the field as I was, and I wouldn’t have come within his line of vision until he took the mound. Even then, I don’t think he saw me. My mother once asked him if all the noise bothered him while he was playing, and he said that he didn’t hear it. You had to focus on the game and the next pitch, and you learned to ignore the crowd when you were on the field. You just couldn’t permit yourself to be distracted by the noise.

Nor did he see me in the second inning when he walked from the on-deck circle to batter’s box. I suppose that for him I was just a part of the irrelevant background. Also, David is right-handed, which meant that he had his back to me when he batted and I was out of his line of vision. He got a single on the second pitch to him. That was his only hit of the game. He didn’t pitch a no-hitter, but he was credited with the win. It was a good game, close enough for the outcome to be in doubt until the last out, with some exciting plays on both sides.

The players probably ranged from sixteen to eighteen years old. Many of them were still growing into their bodies, and some arms and legs were too long or too short for the torso to which they were attached. Each team’s uniforms matched only in concept. Some had endured many more washings and were faded and graying. Sudden growth spurts had made many of the uniforms ill-fitting. Footwear was a matter of individual choice, but most players wore black-and-white Keds. Batting helmets were not yet a requirement, and each player wore a cloth cap. It was considered a matter of distinction to have an old, run-down cap—it proved that one had been a member of the team for a longer period of time.

The teams’ demeanor also differed from that seen now. Television hadn’t as yet exposed viewers to the habits of professional players, and there was much less posturing or copying of role models. The priests who ran those schools also demanded a certain decorum. All the players and the fans wanted their team to win, but the other side was to be treated with respect. Everyone applauded a particularly good play, although groans might interlace the applause.

Once the game started, I was left to myself for the most part. Occasionally when the teams switched sides or between innings, one of the nuns might ask how I was doing or if I needed anything. My mother came down to check on me during the seventh-inning stretch. But during the play, everyone’s attention was focused on the game. But baseball is a slow game. The slowness is part of the game, the rhythm each side tries to impose on the other. There is plenty of time for thought.

It was the first time in two years that I had seen my brother interacting with people his own age. He moved with ease among them. At the end of each inning, he was quickly surrounded by the other players on the St. Igs team as they walked off the field. David was patted on the back repeatedly—he was pitching well—and he and his teammates would be deep in conversation about the game even before they left the field. They must have been aware that they were being watched, but evidently it wasn’t “cool” to acknowledge the spectators. Their smiles and their laughter and their chaffing were only for the circle of themselves. The spectators could look but not touch. It was the players’ game, and they weren’t sharing it with others. They must remember that game as a golden moment.

That day I saw that David had a life apart from me and my problems. I suppose I knew that but I had ignored it in my egoistical focus on myself. Misery and its burdens can make your world very small. My feelings toward David were so mixed that afternoon. Every time he struck someone out, I shared his glory. I was so proud of him. But I was also jealous both of him for being able to have the life he did and of his friends for being part of a life I would never share. For me, David had been my greatest supporter, my one friend, my brother, and seeing him with others made me wonder if he had been acting, if his behavior toward me was simply his form of pity and charity. I began to question his attachment to me. How could he make others as happy as he made me, how could he share his smiles with others, if he truly loved me? Even as I thought that, I knew those thoughts were petty and that my brother’s life was larger than me.

Most of my attention was devoted to David. Pitching requires so many different motions of the body. The balance of the body shifts from the back to the forward leg. The pitching arm rotates overhead from behind the body forward and then across to the other side of the body after the ball is released. The pitcher’s hand has to release the ball at a certain angle to achieve the type of pitch desired. And the pitcher has to recover quickly enough to be poised to field a hit if necessary. It is a sequence of motions that has to be drilled into the body through training and practice and, to be successful, has to be governed by sharp reflexes, a good eye, and no little intelligence. David was good, not flawless, but good. He was never good enough to pitch for a professional team or even for a major college team, but he was a good high-school player. He had enough ability to make pitching look effortless. He held St. Paul’s to eight hits and three runs during his time on the mound.

As I watched David play, I knew that I would never achieve that particular grace. I might regain enough control over my body to walk unassisted, but I would never be able to pitch a ball again. I was very quiet during the last few innings. My eyes and part of mind still were on the game, but my thoughts were elsewhere.

Polio had imposed certain limits on me. That day I realized that I had to learn to recognize and accept those limits and to live within them. I didn’t have to like them, I didn’t have to be happy about them, but I had to be realistic about what I could achieve and concentrate on that. Everyone had limits. Mine were more physical than most people’s, but still everyone had physical limits. All those people watching the game were sitting in the stands because they, like me, weren’t capable of playing baseball as well as the players on the field.

There are many ways of excelling. David and Alice and my parents, everyone I knew, excelled in different ways. I decided that I just had to find my own way. That would be my form of grace. I wasn’t going to live my life second-hand through others, and I wouldn’t allow them to live their lives through me.

I had received special treatment that day because I was different. I was crippled, and for some I had become an object of charity. For others, I was something to be avoided and shunned lest they be infected too. Still others resented me as a reminder of what might happen to them. And, as every handicapped person knows, sometimes one just isn’t seen. Being unseen isn’t the worst treatment, however. Jokes and disdain and pity are the crueler methods of quarantining and isolating the damaged and placing them in the category of the safely other, the person we shall never be. The worse, however, are the stares from the people who don’t see a person, who regard you as an object. I decided I couldn’t do anything about how others regarded me. I couldn’t stop them from pitying me or seeing me as a victim or avoiding me. But I could stop seeing myself as a victim. I could stop avoiding myself. I could stop feeling sorry for myself. And I would stop manipulating others through my lack of emotion and engagement.

This account makes it sound as if I suddenly grew up that day. I didn’t. I was still a small boy, determined to be a good fighter according to the code of conduct others had given me. The resolutions I made that day were much more rudimentary than this account suggests. The systematic version has taken me a lifetime to articulate. My resolutions were often neglected, and my progress toward maturity often interrupted. But I like to think that was the day I started on that path.

14

“15-2, 15-4, and a run of three for 7.” My mother and I were playing cribbage. She loved to play cards. She was very good at it, and she outshone everyone. Before I got sick, she had belonged to several bridge groups. Now that I was better and no longer required constant care, she had cautiously rejoined one of them and was spending her Wednesday afternoons playing. My father had long before given up playing with her, and she had never been able to interest David or Alice. Neither of them had any feeling for the mathematical probabilities, and, when forced to play, both made ridiculous choices and relied on luck. They saw no value in the types of skills good card players need. David lacked guile, and Alice thought card playing was frivolous.

My mother had early on discovered that I shared her interest in cards and had taught me to play cribbage. Both of us delighted in the neat board with the little pegs that force one to consider the strategy necessary to manipulate the path to the final hand so that you count out first, the challenge of choosing the four cards that give you the greatest chance of benefiting from the cut and of deciding which two cards will most help you when the crib is yours and most damage your opponent when the crib is hers, the psychological battle of laying down your cards in the count to maximize your own score and minimize the other player’s, the wonderful balance between playing it safe and taking a chance, even the rhythm of the totaling of the point value of a hand. We played thousands of games together.

My mother was taking a break from her housework. The two of us were alone in the house. My father was away in Northern Michigan supervising a research project with several of his graduate students. David was at the country club working as a swimming teacher for the beginners, and Alice was babysitting. I had finished my physical exercises and had been reading David’s solid geometry textbook and working on the problems. When my mother asked if I wanted to play a round of cribbage, I inserted a page marker in the book and placed my worksheets in a neat stack to one side.

“4.”

“8 for a pair and two points.”

I looked at backs of the three cards remaining in my mother’s hand. I had another 4, but dare I risk that mother had the other one? It was early in the game, and I decided to take a chance.

“12 for three of a kind and six points.”

“16 for four of a kind and twelve points.”

“Rats.”

“Ha!” My mother beamed, happy to have enticed me into playing the third 4.

“22.”

“Go.”

So my mother’s two remaining cards were face cards. I was safe. “27 for a go and one point.”

“10.”

“15 for 2.”

“Oh, you’ve got a good hand, don’t you? It’s lucky I counted those fours. 25 and one for last card.”

“15-2, 15-4, 15-6, 15-8 and a double run for twenty-four.”

“Four for the two pairs. And in the crib, a pair and a run of three for five points. You’re going to skunk me if you keep getting cards like that.” She folded her cards and added them to the pile of undealt cards and handed me the deck to shuffle and deal. She pointed at the solid geometry book. “How are you doing with that?”

“Good. It’s not at all difficult. It’s just the mathematics of solid figures. It’s neat.”

“I remember that it was fun. We had a few weeks of it at the end of second-year algebra.”

I began dealing the cards. “Mom, have you bought David’s textbooks for next year?”

“No, not yet. It’s still three weeks until school starts. I suppose we will have to get them soon.”

“Do you think you can buy me a copy of the trig and calculus books? I’d like to get started on them.”

“So soon? I wish David were as enthusiastic about math. Let me look through your father’s books. He has a trunk full of old textbooks in the attic. He never threw any of them away. I know he took trig and calculus. If I can find them, you can use his. Trig and beginning calculus can’t have changed that much. Oh, another lousy hand. And it’s your crib too. What am I going to do with this mess?”

I discounted my mother’s comments about her hand. She was capable of bemoaning four 5’s to deceive her opponent. “If Daddy doesn’t have the trig or calculus book, do you think I could use David’s calculus book while he does trig? He says that the trig is the first semester. He won’t start calculus until January, and I’ll be finished with it before then.”

“You need trig to do the calculus. If I can’t find your father’s book, I’ll see about getting a copy from a used bookstore in Ann Arbor. If push comes to shove, we’ll borrow the library’s copy.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that my mother knew anything about the subject. “Did you take trig and calculus?”

My mother scowled at the cut when I turned over a four. “No, it wasn’t considered suitable for young ladies when I was in high school. I was the only girl in advanced algebra. When I wanted to sign up for trig, I was put in a book-keeping class. Play a jack for 10.”

“16. But that’s not fair. I bet you would have been good at trig.”

“I think I would have been too. But I didn’t get the chance. 26.”

“30.”

“31 for two.”

“10. You could study it with me.”

“20.”

“24 and one for last card.”

“I think it’s a bit too late for me. You need a young mind to learn math. We’ll get you copies of the books, but you have to promise me that you will do your regular schoolwork first. You can’t neglect your lessons. 15-2, -4, -6, a pair for 8, and nibs makes 9.”

“Three 4’s for six points. And in the crib, 15-2, 15-4. I won’t. I’ll do my other lessons first.”

“I am never going to have children.” Alice’s entry was heralded by the slamming of the screen door at the back entrance and a rush of footsteps across the kitchen and dining room. She stood in the doorway to the library. Her face was flushed and strands of her hair stuck out at odd angles. “They are evil, just plain evil.”

“Why aren’t you at the Hendersons’?” My mother dropped the cards on the table and stood up, prepared to do battle with Alice. I think she had guessed why Alice was at home in the middle of the day.

“I quit. I am never going back. You can’t make me.”

“I see. Well, that’s that then.” Alice and I looked at each other in surprise. Calm acquiesnce was unexpected behavior from my mother. “Your brother and I are playing cards. Since you have some free time, you can check the washing on the line and take down and fold the dry things. The basket is on the shelf by the back door.” My mother sat back down and began shuffling the deck.

“Mother, I couldn’t …”

“I am not interested, Alice. You are old enough to make your own decisions. The reasons may seem important to you, but you will find that they are of little concern to anyone else. And you are right. Children are sometimes difficult. But they are hardly the worst thing life will throw at you. If you cannot handle the Henderson children, you cannot handle them. As soon as Michael and I finish this game, I will call Mrs. Henderson and apologize to her for thinking that you were mature enough to help her out.” My mother pointed at the cribbage board. “You would do well to learn that we cannot control the hand dealt us. It’s what we do with that hand that matters. Now, you have work to do, and I need to concentrate on our game. Your brother is beating me.”

My mother turned away from Alice and dealt the cards. Alice stood in the doorway for a few seconds staring at my mother’s back and then she crept soundlessly off. The screen door at the back of the house creaked open and then closed.

The cards in my hand made no sense to me. They refused to form patterns.

“It’s my crib, Michael,” my mother prompted.

“I … I’m sorry, Mommy.” I pulled two cards at random from my hand and threw them into the crib.

“You haven’t beaten me yet. No need to apologize.” My mother smiled at me. “Your go, I think.”

Before we finished the game, Alice came back into the house and called Mrs. Henderson. She apologized for running out and recommended a girl who lived down the street from us as a replacement. When she finished, she came and stood in the door to my room waiting for my mother to acknowledge her. My mother seemingly paid no attention. She played her cards and counted her points. The only response Alice got was “15-2, -4, -6 … .”

15

The room that functioned as my bedroom after I returned home occupied one rear corner of our house in Walled Lake. Our house was at the end of the street, on the outskirts of the town. Beyond our house, a thicket of trees separated our lot from the fields of the farm on the other side. The room was very dark at night. The streetlight at the end of the road was on the opposite corner of the house, and its rays did not reach my bedroom. Nor, in the mid-1950s, did the house contain the sorts of electronic devices that now provide small green or red dots of light in almost every room. In contrast to my current bedroom, in which every object is visible at night, I could see very little even with dark-adapted eyes.

I usually fell asleep by nine. That summer, with my father away, my mother and Alice went to bed about the same time and read for an hour or so before turning out the lights. On many nights David worked late at the country club, earning extra money by serving as a waiter for dinners and banquets or as an attendant at the swimming pool. It was often eleven or even later before he returned. I grew used to half-waking up at the sounds of his key in the front door lock and his footsteps as he crossed the small entry hall and climbed the stairs. It was usually little more than the dim, comforting thought “OK, David is home. We are all here.” And then I would return to sleep.

One night, late in August, David instead walked into the dining room and paused at the door of my room. It was very dark, and I sensed rather than saw him at the door. “David?”

“Shhh. Don’t wake Mom up.” He crept across the room toward my bed, trying both to be as quiet as possible and not to bump into any furniture. When he reached the bed, he knelt down beside it and then felt for my hand. When he found it, he wrapped both his hands around it and pulled it toward himself. Still holding onto it, he laid his forehead on it. I felt something wet on my hands and then realized that my brother was crying.

“What’s the matter, David? Are you all right?”

His shoulders shook with his stifled sobs. “Stay pure, Michael. Promise me that you’ll stay pure.”

“David, what’s the matter?” I was becoming alarmed and sat up in bed, pulling my hand away.

“Shh. Don’t say anything.” David stretched out an arm and patted me on the chest. “I didn’t mean to wake you. I just wanted to make sure that you were safe.”

“I’m all right.”

“Good. Don’t tell anyone about this. I’m sorry I woke you.” He stood up.

“Don’t go. Tell me what’s the matter.”

“I can’t. I’ve just done something very wrong. At least everybody says it’s wrong.”

“What did you do?”

“Keep quiet. Don’t talk so loud or Mom will hear. I can’t tell you. I can’t tell anybody. I can’t even confess it. I just wanted … It’s just that you’re so innocent. I just wanted to be with you for a while. After what I’ve done.”

I stretched out my hand and found David’s body. Since he was standing, I must have touched his leg. He grasped my hand again. I pulled him toward me. “Sit.” The mattress sagged with his weight as he sat on the bed beside me. “It’s OK.” I whispered. I curled my body closer to David, bringing myself as near to him as I dared. His anguish was upsetting me, but I couldn’t tell him that. I couldn’t admit to myself that my adored brother had a problem. He was supposed to be my problem-solver, and I wanted him to hold me and tell me that everything was all right, that nothing was wrong, at least nothing that he couldn’t fix for the two of us.

“No, I won’t be OK again,” he said.

“David, what have you done?”

“I can’t tell you. I just broke one of their rules.”

“What rule?”

“I can’t tell you. I don’t want you to know about such things. It’s just that they have all these rules. They have everything figured out. They’ve got your entire life planned for you. They never ask you if it’s the life you want. It’s just go to school, study hard, go to college, study hard. Get into graduate school, study hard. Get a good degree. Work hard and be a success. Get married and have children. Earn lots of money. Make your children into copies of yourself. They never think that someone might be different. That I might want something different. Ugly words. They have ugly words for what I am. It isn’t that I want to be what I am. I just am that way. I don’t have a choice. I feel like I’m going to explode.”

David was crying again. I didn’t know what to say. I understood that he was suffering, but I didn’t understand the cause. I was years away from having the maturity to deal with his problem. So I did the only thing I could. I pushed my head against his body and then hugged him. He sobbed and then hugged me back, his body curling up around my head.

“I shouldn’t be here. Go back to sleep.” David patted me on the back and then released me. “I’m sorry. Don’t tell Mom about this. Forget about this.” He stood up and left. A minute later, I heard his footsteps on the stairs.

I did not go back to sleep for several hours. The next morning David was ill at ease around me. At the breakfast table, when my mother said, “You didn’t come in until very late last night,” David apologized. He didn’t explain why, but he did glance at me, checking to see if I would say anything. When I continued buttering my toast, he said only, “Some of the guys got together and had a party for Gene. He’s leaving for college next week, and that was his last night at work.”

My mother looked at him carefully. “I hope you weren’t drinking.”

“Just sodas, Mom. Mr. Carter was there, and he just put out Cokes and 7-Up and chips. The special last night was roast beef, so he had the chef make roast beef sandwiches for us. There were some leftover desserts from dinner, but I didn’t have any. But I ate too much, and it made my stomach queasy. There was lots of horseradish and mustard on the sandwiches, and I think that upset my stomach. I sat out on the porch for a while till it calmed down.”

I knew that David wasn’t telling the whole truth. There may have been a party, but that wasn’t what had upset him. And he hadn’t been sitting on the porch with a stomach ache. He had been sitting on my bed crying because he had broken some rule.

“That happens when you eat too much too late. Your body’s not accustomed to it. Especially if you’re drinking colas. I find that all that fizziness upsets my stomach. Beer does the same thing to me.”

I looked from David to my mother and back again, all the while eating a slice of toast and trying hard to look the picture of innocence. Luckily my mother was focusing on David and not on me, or she might have realized that another source of information was close at hand. I don’t know if my mother knew that David was lying. If she did, she had decided, at least on the surface, to accept his version of events. She probably thought David had been drinking. The emphasis she put on “drinking colas” and her mention of beer suggested that she found she found that part of his story suspect.

The incident was never mentioned again. My mother monitored David’s late-night returns from work a bit more closely. For the remaining two weeks of the summer, I sometimes heard her call out to him as he climbed the stairs at night. In the ensuing decades, David and I have never spoken of the events of that night. For a time I was unsure whether it had really happened or whether it was only a dream.

With my knowledge of David’s subsequent life, I now have several guesses about what may have happened that night. At the time, it was one of the central mysteries of my childhood. From time to time, David would say or do something a bit out of the ordinary, and I would find myself wondering what rules he had broken and what made him different. As far as I could see, he didn’t break any serious rules, at least none worth worrying about, and he was no different from any other teenage boy at the time.

David’s reaching out to me had the effect of making me feel even closer to him. He had come to me when he was troubled and had sought comfort from me. That was very flattering. To my mind, he didn’t have anyone else he could really trust. Not our parents, not Alice, just me. And we now had a secret, a secret so big that we couldn’t even talk about among ourselves.

16

“Do you have everything you need, Michael?”

“Yes, Mom. I’ll be all right. Don’t worry. You’d better hurry. Aunt Emily will start honking her horn if you don’t go out soon.”

“And we don’t want that, do we?” My mother kissed me on the forehead, brushing a lock of my hair out of the way, and patted me on the head. My mother smelled gently of the face powder she wore on special occasions. It came in a shiny dark blue box with silver lettering. I can’t remember the name, just that the smell signified that my mother was dressed up and going out. She and Aunt Emily and Grandmother were attending a wedding shower for the daughter of a friend. For once, I would be left alone in the house for several hours. My father was at the university, and Alice and David were in school. I figured I had the house to myself for at least four hours. And I had a plan.

Through an open window in the dining room, I heard Aunt Emily asking my mother, “Nora, did you remember to bring a cake knife? You know that Mary won’t have one. She never has anything you need.”

Before Mother could answer, my grandmother began issuing instructions. “Nora, put that gift in the trunk with the other things, but you had better hold the cake on your lap.”

“Mother, I don’t want to open the trunk again. It would take me ten minutes to rearrange everything to make room for that box. Nora can put her gift on the back seat.”

“It’s all right, Mother. I’ll just move this sack out of the way and put the box on the floor behind the front seat. There’s room for the sack and the box. I’ll put the cake on the seat and watch it.”

“Now, Nora, …” Both Aunt Emily and Grandmother spoke at the same time, giving contradictory orders. My mother attempted to placate both of them and ended up pleasing neither of them. Finally, everything was stowed away, although not without a final warning from Grandmother. “Nora, you know how Emily drives. I will not be responsible for any damage that occurs to that cake if you leave it sitting on the back seat. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. And don’t hmpff at me, Emily. You know you never stop until the last possible moment and then you stomp on the brake and toss everyone and everything forward. One of these days you are going to wait too long, and I will bang my forehead against the windshield.”

Aunt Emily’s car made a grating noise as she shifted into reverse. I watched as she backed down the drive and out into the street and then drove off. I gave them fifteen minutes to get far enough away that a return would be thought unreasonable no matter what might have been forgotten.

It was a luxury for me to sit in such a quiet place. The hospital ward had been filled with noise at all hours. Even during the depths of the night, there had been nurses coming and going and whimpering and cries from my fellow patients. Since my return home, I had seldom been left alone in the house for more than a few minutes. Now the house felt hollow and empty. The slight breeze coming through the open windows barely stirred the curtains. The sounds of the town seemed far off. Our street dead-ended just past our house, and we seldom had traffic on weekdays except in the morning and after work.

When I was sure that I was safe from interruptions, I closed my book and pulled my crutches over. I got to my feet and walked to the door of the library. I was getting much better at maneuvering myself around. I could move almost as fast with my crutches as someone walking slowly. I peeked around the doorway to make sure that I was truly alone in the house. I stood there listening to make sure that it all hadn’t been a trick and my family was lying in ambush. I had considered both stairways and decided on the front stairs, even though my bedroom was at the back of the house. The landing at the top of back stairs was right outside my bedroom door, but that staircase rose steeply upward in one continuous flight. The front stairway had two landings, one only three steps up from the first floor and another seven steps up. The second floor was another dozen steps up. There was a sturdy banister along one side all the way up, and the final flight of stairs had a railing on the inside wall. I figured I could hang on to the railing with one hand and hold my crutches in the other. If worse came to worst and I couldn’t walk up the stairs, I had worked it out that I could sit down and ease my butt up the stairs, dragging my legs and crutches behind me.

The front parlor was tricky since it was crowded with furniture now that my father’s desk occupied one wall of the room, but I managed to hold my crutches in front of me and hop through the narrow opening between the piano and a large easy chair. That left only the front hallway. I looked out the window just to make sure that my mother wasn’t lurking outside.

The front staircase was made of oak. It was a grand edifice. My mother kept it highly polished, and the wood gleamed. The first three steps took one up to a landing inside the tower attached to one corner of our Victorian house. There were benches and windows all along the outside walls of the tower. My mother had plants growing in all the windows, and Alice’s parakeet was kept in a cage there. It chirped at me as I carefully took the first three steps. It was harder to lift my right leg than I had anticipated. I had been practicing trying to raise it directly up, but the best I could manage was to lift the left leg to the next step and then swing my right leg up while hanging on to the banister to steady myself until I was standing on both legs. My crutches got in the way of moving my right leg. I hit upon the tactic of bracing them between the railing and the second step up and then moving them up one step before I moved myself.

I was already tiring by the time I made to the second landing. I stopped and rested on the bench beside the window there. My mother’s battered Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls slumped against the wall in one corner of the bench. They must have been close to forty years old at that point. Ann’s red-checkered gingham dress had long since faded into a light pink, and, no matter how often my mother straightened Andy into a sitting position, he always ended up prone. They had always sat on either corner of the bench, at least as long as I could remember.

I measured my strength against the next flight of stairs and decided that Plan B was the wiser course of action. I sat on the first step and began backing myself up by lifting myself from stair to stair. It was difficult to do this and to hold on to my crutches. I thought about abandoning them, but decided I would really need them when I made it to the top. Crawling along the floor would be an admission of defeat. I had to play by the rules and make it to my bedroom by legitimate means. It was part of my plan to show my parents that I could leave the library and the first floor and restore at least some measure of normality to our household. I reasoned that with more practice, I would build my leg muscles up enough that I could walk all the way up the stairs and not have to resort to the butt-sliding technique. But for today, it would be enough to make it all the way up and back.

It took about ten minutes to get myself and my crutches up the final flight of stairs. I felt elated when I made it and stood up. If I had been capable of a victory dance, I would have done one. It was the first time in nearly two years that I had been upstairs. Nothing seemed to have changed. The balcony leading to the playroom in the upper story of the tower still contained the familiar wooden trunk that had accompanied my great-great-grandparents from Ireland. We had inherited it along with the oft-repeated statement, “Imagine, everything the two of them owned was in that trunk, and he ended up owning thousands of acres of forest and several paper mills.” What appeared to be the same coleus and African violet plants occupied every window in the playroom.

I paused in the doorway to each bedroom and took in their reassuring normality. David’s bedroom was at the top of the front stairs. It contained its usual muddle of books and sports equipment. Alice’s bedroom was the first door on the left. Her room was neater than David’s, the books shelved in tidy rows, the cover on her bed pulled tight over the sheets and pillows. Like my bedroom and the second-floor bathroom, my parents’ room opened on to the back landing at the other end of the upstairs hallway. My mother’s prized antique candlewick bedspread lay evenly on the bed, the row of small balls along its bottom edges a uniform distance from the floor on all sides. Before she had left, my mother had opened all the windows on the second floor. She had taken advantage of the warm autumn day to air the house out one final time before the storm windows were put on in preparation for winter. The dry powdery smell of the first of the autumn leaves came through the screens.

All the doors were open except for the one to my bedroom. I braced myself on my crutches and opened it. The room was quite dark. The shades were down, and the curtains were pulled over the windows. I felt along the wall for the light switch. The room looked unused. It had none of the clutter of a lived-in room, not even the slight mess that our mother permitted us. It was too tidy, and in comparison to the breeze circulating through the rest of the upstairs, the air smelled stale. An unfamiliar spread lay atop my bed. I lifted one corner and discovered that there were no sheets or blankets on the bed, just the pillows and the bare mattress. The top of the dresser held one of my grandmother’s crocheted doilies and a small vase, neither of which had been in the room the last time I had seen it. I eased a drawer open and discovered that instead of my clothes, the dresser now held linens. The closet held an assortment of boxes as high as the rod for the hangers.

Another new object was the easy chair in one corner beside the bookcase. A reading light stood behind it on the right side. I recognized my mother’s handiwork in that. Light was supposed to come over your right shoulder, she insisted. I sat in the chair and looked around. Instead of my toys and my few treasures, the bookcase held an assortment of books and journals. I pulled one out and saw that it was devoted to biology. My father was using the room to read in. A book lay on the small table to the left of the chair, with a small piece of paper marking the spot where he had stopped reading.

A small frame atop the bookcase held a picture of me taken several years before. I was seated outside at a picnic table. There were platters piled high with ears of corn and chicken pieces in front of me. I was laughing at the camera, my head tilted back beneath a straw hat that my grandfather had bought me on one of our trips to their summer house on Georgian Bay. It was too large for me and fit low on my head, propped up on my ears. I remembered the summer he had bought me the hat but couldn’t recall the occasion when the picture had been taken. It would have been during a summer three or four years earlier. I recognized myself but felt no kinship to the child in the picture. It was a boy someone else wanted to remember, some story line other than the one I found myself in.

But other than that picture, there was nothing of me left in the room. I understood why my discussions of my plans to return to my bedroom had been met with variations on “We’ll see. First you have to get your strength back.” I sat there for perhaps half an hour, trying not to feel overwhelmed by my discovery. Someone else had lived in that room, not me. Something had been taken from me, without my permission. There was no going back now. My family had moved on and adapted. I would have to learn to do that too. I was not going to be “normal” again. I wanted to accept that and to find reasons for it. But I couldn’t. The most I could achieve was to realize that I was different now and that I couldn’t allow what wasn’t going to happen to determine my life. I couldn’t afford emotions and regrets. I had to go on, and if that meant being hard, well, then I would be hard. I turned out the light and closed the door. I sat down at the top of the back staircase and slowly went down them step by step. It was easier going down the stairs than coming up them had been. I was back at my desk in my room long before my mother returned.