The Road Taken (16 page)

They reached the street.

“Well,” Hugh said briskly, before Teddy could escape, “you look like you need a drink. I certainly do. There’s a lovely bar on the corner. I noticed it when I came in. Come along.”

The teddy bear allowed himself to be led by this handsome, effeminate man with the long hair and well-cut clothes. “I can’t go home just yet,” he murmured to himself and his conscience.

“Of course you can’t.”

The bar on the corner was dark and seedy, but the red leatherette booth was comfortable and their martinis were icy cold. “I went to aversion therapy because I let myself be talked into feeling guilty,” Hugh told him. “But I realized instantly that hating myself is not the answer to anything. This is a cruel world. If I’m not on my side, who will be?”

“I just feel sorry for my wife.”

“You should. You should divorce her and set her free.”

Teddy sipped his martini gratefully and his big shoulders began to relax. “I’m beginning to feel this therapy isn’t working for me.”

“Then you should quit. Spend your money on something worthwhile. Buy her a fur. Be
friends
with her.”

“You
like
women, don’t you,” he said. He sounded surprised.

“Of course. I have wonderful sisters.”

“Cheers.” They lifted their glasses, and their eyes met.

After the bar they went to an equally seedy hotel for an hour, since both of them lived with other people. The sex was hot, and they took each other’s phone numbers at work. It turned out Teddy was an engineer. Hugh didn’t have the faintest idea what that was, but he intended to find out. I’m in love, he thought. He walked all the way home, miles, through the gathering twilight and then the exciting, light-sparkled dark. Take hold of yourself, he thought. You don’t know if the man will call. After all, he’s terribly conflicted. But who wasn’t? If he doesn’t call me, then I’ll call him, Hugh thought. I’m a modern woman.

Chapter Eighteen

Rose felt that time had a surreptitious life of its own, sliding away just when you thought everything was fine, so that the past seemed so far in the distance it was almost unimaginable—and then slow like a heavy, organic thing in the course of one day, so every hour seemed endless. They did not reminisce in her family, so if it hadn’t been for Ginger’s fascination with their family history Rose often felt it would have melted and disappeared. What did they do then? What did they think about that, Ginger wanted to know. How could they do that? How could they let that happen? And then? And then?

What could she say about Ginger? That Ginger, her youngest, the baby born to her late in life, was unexpectedly her greatest joy. Not that she didn’t love all three of her daughters, but Peggy had always known what she wanted, and had left her so early to be a grown-up herself that Rose wondered if she had even touched her; while Joan, untouched too, had never seemed happy and refused to discuss it. Ginger, the most complicated of her children, was in a way the simplest. There did not seem to be any guile or selfishness in her, and she was full of curiosity.

With Peggy, Rose had to be careful. Grandma must not try to take over the rearing of the grandchildren, even with a suggestion. Peggy had her Dr. Spock book. She also had a kind of rivalry with her mother, perhaps because she was still so young that she felt threatened by any show of authority in Rose, and she wanted to do everything herself. The few times Rose went to visit Peggy and Ed in the suburbs she felt like a guest, and what was worse, she knew that Peggy would be glad when she left. It was as if her presence stopped the flow of their lives.

Joan was no better. Her life was downtown and secret. Rose couldn’t criticize too much, she couldn’t pry too aggressively, she couldn’t try to change her. She was afraid to antagonize Joan for fear she would move out. She didn’t want Joan to live on her own . . .
alone
was not the right word, because Rose was sure Joan wasn’t alone. Years ago Rose had asked Peggy if she was a virgin, expecting her to say yes and believing her when she did. It had not been a question so much as a warning. But she never asked Joan if she was saving herself for the right man, the one who would marry her, because not only would the answer probably be no, but Joan would be glad to tell her the truth. Rose could only hope that Joan’s wild ways, which she could merely guess at, were a phase.

But Ginger . . . Rose imagined being friends with Ginger forever. Peggy would continue to be distant and content in her own world, much as Maude had been when Rose was young; and the future of restless Joan was still a mystery. But Rose could see herself with Ginger as an equal someday: two women, two soul mates, each of them sharing information. The thought consoled her more than she wanted to admit.

One summer Rose and Ben had sent Ginger to camp, just so she could have the experience before it was too late to interest her, and Rose had missed her dreadfully. The camp, in Massachusetts, on a lake, was quarantined that summer because of the annual polio epidemic, and there were no visitor’s weekends. Ginger didn’t mind, but Rose did.

Ginger was too young and carefree to really understand about polio, but polio had been one of Rose’s fears for years. In the worst year of the recent epidemics there were almost fifty-eight thousand cases. It seemed to strike young people particularly, and children. Little children screaming in splints, crying in casts, filled the hospitals. Doctors tried to force paralyzed limbs that were in spasms back to straightness, immobilizing them, operating. Of course, those limbs were still useless afterward, the muscles dead, although there were metal braces, and crutches, for the victims who weren’t in wheelchairs or on stretchers for the rest of their lives.

The iron lung, a huge, barrel-shaped piece of equipment into which the patient disappeared except for her head, with a mirror like a car’s rearview mirror for communication—a behemoth that breathed for a paralyzed respiratory system—was a frightening sight. Most people got out after the first phase of the disease, but some never did, and those were the ones with their pictures in the newspapers.

It was thought polio was caused by a virus, and people were advised to avoid crowds, swimming pools, and public events, all summer. There were always quarantines. There was no prevention and no cure.

Their late President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been a polio victim as a young man, and people knew more about it now. But in photos he had never been seen struggling on his crutches, and seldom in his wheelchair; he was usually shown sitting in a dignified manner behind his desk. People had been afraid of giving handicapped people positions of authority. They donated to the March of Dimes, for the cute little poster child. Somehow it wasn’t quite the same as a world leader with a disability, even though he had started the March of Dimes himself.

Sister Kenny, the aggressive, abrasive Australian bush nurse, working in Minneapolis, was campaigning tirelessly to take polio patients out of casts and relax their muscles with hot packs instead. She said she could make a paralyzed person walk again, and sometimes she proved it. But it was essential to begin her treatment immediately after the onset of the disease, and a lot of doctors didn’t believe in it. Some of the doctors hated her and said she was a fake. But there
were
results, and Rose had heard about them. She hoped she would never have to deal with any of this in her own family firsthand.

When Ginger came back from camp after that one summer, laden with trophies and medals for everything from best athlete to best camper, she said she never wanted to go back again. “Why not?” Rose asked.

“Because people haze each other. In my bunk everyone picked on one girl, all summer. You had to, or you would be the one who got picked on. They did that in every bunk. I can’t go to a place where you can only have friends if you’re mean to someone.”

“Then you never have go again,” Ben said, before Rose even had a chance to answer, although of course she would have said the same thing.

With no camp, and crowds forbidden, Ginger spent her subsequent summers reading books she took out of the library, and seeing her friends; until now, at fifteen, with working papers, she got a volunteer job helping in the foundling hospital uptown. Rose went by one day, hoping to get a glimpse of her, pretending she had an errand in the area, and there was Ginger in her pink uniform outside in the sun with another nurse and a row of patients in wheelchairs. But what patients! Rose was aghast. Ten-year-old twin girls with tiny heads, hardly able to hold them up, something Rose had only seen as a child in ads for sideshow freaks. She remembered now they had called them Pinheads. The past seemed very cruel. Ginger appeared matter-of-fact, not upset. Rose waved, and Ginger waved back.

“I didn’t know you had patients like that,” Rose said when Ginger came home for dinner.

“They’re foundlings,” Ginger said. “People give them away. The cute ones get adopted. I take care of the ones who don’t.”

“In my day you never saw people like that,” Rose said mildly. She did not add unless it was in the circus.

“Because their families hid them. It was disgusting. I read about it. In your day they hid everything that was different. Did you know that crippled people were locked up? And people with cerebral palsy? If their families didn’t want to take care of them, or couldn’t, they were sent to institutions. They were like prisons. Nobody was taught anything. They didn’t have love.”

Rose felt a rush of pride for her fierce daughter. “That’s so sad,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about it. I remember people with TB being sent away to get fresh air, but . . .”

“They locked up retarded people too,” Ginger said. “I bet you knew only one person in your entire town who was slow, and he wasn’t all that slow either, just enough to be the local character.”

“Well, yes, I do remember that,” Rose said.

“They still put people away because they aren’t like everybody else,” Ginger said. “Kids with Down’s syndrome—do you know what that is? It’s what everybody calls a mongoloid. Or a mongolian idiot! Don’t you think that’s cruel? There are a lot of them, but you don’t see them walking around with their families. They sit in institutions and get worse. Nobody tries to make them function; all people care about even today is that everybody has to be perfect and fit in.”

“How do you know all these things at your age?”

“I read. I ask questions. I listen. When I grow up I’m going to be a doctor.”

But you’re a girl, Rose thought. “What kind?” she asked brightly, as if such a thing was not out of reach.

“I don’t know yet. But I want to find out why some people are born the way they are, and maybe fix it.”

“Research?”

“Maybe. Do you know about the two medical researchers who just deciphered the structure of DNA? That’s the molecule that carries the genetic code, which tells you what you’re going to be. Who knows what wonderful discoveries that will lead to!”

“I can’t imagine,” Rose said.

“Well, Mom, this is the thing: Will you and Dad send me to medical school?”

“Yes, if you want,” Rose said. “If you still feel that way when the time comes.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You might fall in love and get married.”

“I might do both,” Ginger said.

What had she done to have a daughter like this, Rose wondered. There were no doctors in their family, no one for Ginger to emulate, and except for her Aunt Harriette, who was hardly what you would call successful, no career women either. Where had she come from?

Where had any of them come from, really, so different from each other, each so totally her own person almost from the day she was born? It must be that genetic thing Ginger was talking about. “Whatever you want to do with your life, I’ll be there to help you,” Rose said.

“Thanks, Mom.”

And thank you for letting me, Rose thought. My baby, my favorite, the only one of my children who still needs me. But of course she couldn’t say that.

Chapter Nineteen

It was hot that summer of 1954, as it was every summer in New York, and Ben and Rose discussed, as they did ever summer, whether or not they should rent a house in the country or at the beach, where it would be cool. As always, there were reasons why they couldn’t budge. Inertia was one. Their little garden in back of their town house, with the awning and Rose’s lovingly tended flowers, was pleasant. Ben had finally even gone so far as to have air conditioners installed in the bedroom windows. They rattled and made noise, but they made the nights cool enough for sleep. In the summer you could get theater tickets, and you could get into the best restaurants. Tourists flocked to New York in the summer, Ben said, so there must be something good about it. And of course, there was still the matter of the children.

Joan had a job now, as a waitress in a coffeehouse, where she also was an occasional part of the entertainment. Rose and Ben, although they felt it keenly, did not berate her that her so-called career was a waste of an education. After all, there was not much in the way of employment for a girl, no matter how well educated, since offices expected girls to get married and quit, and the good jobs were for the young men. Joan had made it clear that if her parents went away for the summer, or even the small part of it that encompassed Ben’s vacation, that she would not accompany them. “I’ll stay here with friends,” she said stonily. What friends? Rose wondered. The ones you won’t bring home?

Despite Joan’s occasional antagonism toward her parents, Rose knew she was ambivalent about her life and still dependent on her and Ben. Girls Joan’s age, twenty-three, either got married or stayed with their parents until they did, because it wouldn’t be for long. Girls who came from places outside of New York were the ones with their own apartments, with roommates—and if alone, then with cockroaches and five flights of stairs to climb. A girl with a nice town house to live in and all her bills paid would have no reason to leave and seek independence unless her parents made her life miserable. Families stayed together.

And then there was the matter of Ginger’s beloved summer job. “Next year,” Rose said to Ben, “we can decide earlier to rent a house, and then Ginger can do some volunteer work there, wherever it is. It’ll be near a town, and towns have hospitals.”

“Perhaps near Bristol,” Ben suggested. “It would be nice for you to spend more time with Maude and Daisy.”

At least they didn’t have to worry about Peggy. She lived in the suburbs; she and her family didn’t have to go anywhere because they were already there. And on the long July Fourth weekend they all went to visit her, the city relatives, so glad to be where there was grass and trees, so glad to see the sweet grandchildren, so glad to leave when it was over. They were adults going back to their own caves.

That summer Celia went on a cruise with some people she had met. It was amazing how Celia always seemed to be meeting people; she started up conversations wherever she went. She brought the brochure of her cruise when she came for dinner, color photographs depicting healthy-looking gray-haired couples toasting each other with champagne or playing shuffleboard. Celia didn’t look anything like the people in the pictures; for one thing she was still a blonde. “Marilyn Monroe,” Hugh called her, jokingly, and Celia laughed and accepted the compliment even though she was about forty pounds thinner and forty years older than the cinema sex symbol. Ginger affectionately called her “tiny little Grandma,” and Rose remembered when she had thought Celia was tall.

Nobody ever mentioned the fact that Hugh’s experiment with aversion therapy had been such a failure. Even Celia had the good grace to let it drop. He was looking happier these days anyway. When he went out in the evenings, jauntily dressed, freshly shaved and fragrant with cologne, he seemed like a man in love. Nobody ever mentioned that either, although they all noticed.

As for Hugh, he was indeed in love, with Teddy, the man he had met in the therapist’s office. And on one of those lovely summer evenings when he went out all dressed up, he sat with Teddy in an outdoor café they had grown fond of and they toasted Teddy’s recent decision to give up aversion therapy himself, to give up thought of any kind of therapy, to be what he was. After this landmark in his life Teddy had discussed it with his wife, and she agreed that the best thing for her to do would be to get a divorce while she was still young, so she could marry someone else and have children. Not that she didn’t love him, she told Teddy, but more like a brother. So the next time that he and Hugh made a toast at their favorite outdoor café they were celebrating his entire new life.

“I am not a woman who wants what she can’t have,” his wife had told him.

“Ah, how much she could teach me,” Hugh sighed.

“But you can have me,” Teddy said to Hugh, leaning forward over the small café table, earnest and shy.

“Could I?”

“Yes.”

They would continue to have separate living arrangements, of course. Both of them were wary of scandal. Hugh knew male couples who had been together for years and kept their own apartments. He also knew some who lived together. He didn’t disagree openly with what Teddy wanted, but in the back of his mind was the hope that someday it would be different for them. Who would know? People from work didn’t go to Teddy’s apartment for dinner, to see whom he lived with, to peer into his closets. If he had to entertain for business he could do it at a restaurant, with a woman friend posing as his date. Gay men did that all the time. The worst thing that could happen would be that people would try to fix Teddy up when he became an eligible bachelor, and Hugh knew he himself would be irritated and jealous, even though there was no reason to be.

I should count my blessings, Hugh thought. I should even thank Celia. Everything in life is a chain of events, some so bizarre it is hard to believe, but all fated. Hugh believed in fate. In the old days he had postulated that fate was arbitrary and cruel, but now he felt it was more benevolent. Or perhaps it was a balance. He had been content, but now he deserved, at last, to be happy. He wished he could share the good news with his family. Maybe one day he would. He would invite Teddy home for dinner, the first time he had ever brought home a guest. Would that be possible? How would he introduce him? A friend, my life’s companion, the man I love? Or just invite him. Hugh suspected that Teddy would have more difficulty with the concept than he did, although that, too, would change. He was buoyant with optimism.

This was turning out to be a good summer for Ginger, too. She was sixteen and she felt on the cusp of womanhood. Inspecting herself in the mirror, she liked what she saw for the first time in years. As her mother had promised when she had complained about inheriting her grandfather William’s long, aquiline nose, she had grown into it. Ballet lessons had given her curvaceous, pretty legs. She had a good smile. She had a nice body, not voluptuous like her sister Peggy’s, but slim and shapely nonetheless. Her blond sisters were the all-American ideal if you believed what you saw in the magazines and the movies, but Ginger thought she herself was rather more interesting.

She and her girlfriends talked about boys and sex, and giggled and wondered and yearned. On some Saturday nights she had dates, although they were only boys she knew from school and she thought of them more as friends. They were too shy to be forward with her, mainly because she was intelligent and independent and that put them off. She preferred it that way. The man she would fall in love with was a fantasy so far, but she was excited at the thought that there was a whole world of young men out there, that she would eventually know a lot of them, probably in college, and go out with them, have fun with them, and then, at last, fall in love forever.

People talked about love all the time, and although Ginger had never let go of her ambition to do some good in the world, she also was sure that she could combine it with love. What she really wanted to do, she thought, was marry a doctor. Then they could practice together, perhaps do research together, and discover something that would make them famous. Why not?

One August night when her escort for the evening brought her to her door in time for her curfew and kissed her chastely on her closed lips, Ginger looked up at the moon and felt chilled. She said good night and ran into the house. The house seemed cold too, and when she went into her bedroom she made sure her air conditioner was off. She pulled her quilt up to her chin and wondered if she was getting sick. Usually so full of energy, she had been feeling tired and draggy the last few days. Sleep cures most things, she thought, and I could certainly use some. She slept.

But the next day she had a sore throat, and a violent headache that aspirin didn’t seem to help, and she felt feverish. She called work and said she wouldn’t be coming in, and hung around the house.

“Are you all right?” her mother asked when Ginger went upstairs to her room right after dinner. “I’ll call the doctor.”

“It’s just a summer cold. I’ll be fine.”

“Take some aspirin before you go to bed.”

“I just did.”

That night she couldn’t sleep, even though she was exhausted, and the next day when her mother made her stay in bed and brought her tea she acquiesced gratefully to being a patient. Rose also called the family doctor, who prescribed an antibiotic over the phone, one of the new wonder drugs that were given for everything these days and were guaranteed to cut a cold in half. But Ginger stayed the same for two more days, and by the third night, antibiotics or not, she knew she was really sick. She was throwing up, her headache was the worst she’d ever had in her life, her sore throat was worse, her back and neck felt stiff, and she had sharp, agonizing cramping pains in her legs. No matter what position she tried to put herself into, they wouldn’t get any better. Sometimes the cramping was so bad she couldn’t breathe. It was stupid to be so stubborn—tomorrow morning she would have her mother call the doctor to come over and save her.

But at midnight, watching the hands of the clock creep slowly, knowing everyone else was asleep, Ginger suddenly knew what was wrong with her. This was not a bad cold, or even a virus or the flu. She hadn’t had the thought before because she wasn’t a child anymore, and this was supposed to be a children’s disease. Even her mother, who had hovered over her every summer of her childhood, kissing her on the forehead but actually testing her for fever, had not thought of the dreaded word this time.

She had polio.

Her first reaction was an instant of numbed disbelief; then the horror washed over her. There was an epidemic this summer, of course, as there was every summer, and the number of the newly afflicted was announced on the radio every day. Polio was the most terrifying thing in the world, but when you were young you lived your life and didn’t think you’d get anything like that. She didn’t know anyone personally who had polio. Strangers, of course, she’d seen them going by in their wheelchairs and braces, but luckily none of her friends. Now she wondered how she had been singled out. Had she given it to the children at the foundling hospital—one more stroke of bad luck for patients who’d had so much already—or had one of them infected her? What about that boy who had kissed her? No one even knew how you got infected. It was in the air.

The pain was so excruciating she thought of calling her parents to take her to the hospital, and then she dimly remembered the movie she’d seen as a kid about Sister Kenny. Immobilization was bad. People with polio held themselves tightly because of the pain, afraid to move and exacerbate it, and then the muscles went into spasm. If I just keep walking, Ginger thought, I won’t get paralyzed. She got out of bed.

She walked all night, holding on to the walls, to furniture, fighting the pain that was like knives being driven into her leg muscles. As long as I’m upright, as long as I’m putting weight on them and moving, she told herself, then I can still walk, and as long as I can still walk I’m okay. But it was more than her own medical theory that propelled her. It was the fear of giving up, of letting the paralysis win. Maybe this is idiotic, she told herself once, at about three in the morning. They tell you to rest. You’re not supposed to do anything. But if I stop, then I can’t control my life anymore.

At six in the morning her legs gave way and she fell on the bed, and screamed for her mother.

Attendants took Ginger to the hospital in an ambulance, on a litter, to a scene of bedlam. It was a special isolation hospital for polio patients, not near where she lived. Behind a sign saying “Contagion, No Admittance,” there were so many beds and cribs filled with sick children that there were even beds in the hall. The little kids were crying and wailing from pain and fright. The nurse at the desk let her parents stay to give information.

A doctor gave her a spinal tap under a local anesthetic, and then he came back and said she did indeed have polio. Rose’s face was white and drained, and Ben looked grim, almost angry, although Ginger knew that look was fear.

“I walked all night,” Ginger said to a nurse hurrying by. “Did I make it worse?”

“What is she saying?” Ben asked.

“You shouldn’t have,” the nurse said. “Lie still,” and she was gone.

“Why did you do that?” Rose murmured. “Why?”

“What did she do?” Ben asked.

What kind of a doctor will I ever be? Ginger thought. I’m so stupid.

She was lying on her back, and now from the pull of her twisted muscles her legs were doubled up above her like a trussed chicken. She rolled onto her side because the sheet hurt them and because they looked so ridiculous. Everything hurt; she could tell she had a fever even before a nurse affirmed it. A medical assistant came by to see if she could breathe, holding a scalpel, and Ginger knew if she hadn’t been able to he would have cut her throat open in an emergency tracheotomy. “Not bulbar,” he said reassuringly to her parents, and then he, too, was gone.

There were three kinds of polio, she knew. Bulbar, which affected the respiratory system and could kill you; paralytic, which would ruin the rest of your life; and nonparalytic, from which you would recover. She prayed for the nonparalytic kind, but she was so sick she had her doubts that her prayers would be answered.