All this talk about vaccination reminds me of convalescent homes, a fixture of my parents' generation.
***
Poupée Doll
I remember the fever. It roared in as I
played with my doll, Poupée, my woolen rabbit and my teddy bear, all arranged
around a little table. I had served them tea and we enjoyed sophisticated
little conversations.
The fever hit in one strange instant. Mid-sentence,
I lost my train of thought. The child’s table shrank and tumbled down a long
tunnel. I stood up, shakily, always on the verge of overbalancing. My family bore
haloes. The furniture hollowed out and became nebulous, transcendent. I grew lighter and found myself stepping carefully to
avoid floating into the air. I assumed I would rise up to a better place, but in a
few moments, these airy angel steps somehow landed me hard on the floor. Sandpaper
hands like vises seized me, lifted me and pressed me into a smoldering linen
bed where I shivered and burned and mumbled for water I couldn’t drink.
On the third day, I saw the devil, tall
and graphic, walking down our street throwing children into a basket on his
back. For a week someone placed cold compresses on my forehead while I coughed
a thin red membrane on to the pillows. In the few moments I could see, I
thought the crimson streaks were my lungs.
Convalescent homes did not take
children with Diphtheria. They required us to suffer at home for three weeks
until we were non-contagious before they admitted us. My father handed me over
to the blue-gowned matron on the twenty second day. I took my beloved
doll, Poupée, so named by my French Aunt Jacqueline. My previous life retreated,
like the tide, and a new life washed up against the green gloss walls of the
home.
The home was full of children with
lumps and stumps, some sightless, some deafened by measles or paralyzed by
polio. Paying children were housed in upper wards with windows. The
working-class children, like Poupée doll and I, were sequestered in iron beds a
mile from the world.
Between my ward and the main door ran a
corridor painted a shiny leaf green from waist height down. The color choice may
have symbolized spring, new vernal life, to the staff but to inmates it denoted
an institutionalized half-life, where you were warehoused until your own body
decided whether you would live or die. At night, the nurses would slap us if we
did not sleep promptly at lights out. During the day, we played with our toys,
if we had brought them, ate small portions of pie from shallow tins the size of
rail station posters, served with potatoes and, if we were very good, an hour
in the afternoon sun in the grounds next to the hospital laundry.
William, the boy with polio, had
graduated from an iron lung in the hospital to iron legs at the home. He now wore
calipers, which barely slowed him down. He climbed the crabapple tree in the
yard and threw down the tiny sour apples, which we gathered up, laughing, and
took to our little metal lockers beside our beds.
Then, the mother of a Scarlet Fever
girl lied about the three-week quarantine. One of the paying girls, she was
admitted still in the throes of fever. Lucky for her, as the starchy nurses
applied their hottest poultices and brought her temperature down in hours.
Unlucky for us, as her Streptococcus coughed its way into our green-striped
corridors and turned our skin to raw-nerved burplap. The renewed fever knocked
me back into the burning linen for three more weeks, and by the time I was able
to breathe again, my ward was emptied. William was dead and already in the
ground under a sandstone slab, and my friend with spina bifida was paraplegic,
shortly to pass away.
Poupée doll did not leave with me. She remained behind, scheduled to be destroyed, because the nurses said toys could never recover and would be infectious all their lives. I lost my beloved companion and barely kept my life.
