Excerpt of Warm Springs by Susan Richards Shreve
(Page 3 of 5)
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“What are you doing up so early?” Father James gave my
wheelchair a gentle push.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “What about you?”
He hesitated, and I could tell even before he spoke that he was
inventing some excuse for being in the hospital when he normally would be
getting ready to serve at the 6 a.m. Mass, generally attended by the staff at
Warm Springs either on their way to work or on their way home.
“Did something happen to one of the babies?” I asked. “I saw Dr.
Iler.”
“Dr. Iler was in the Babies’ Ward,” he said.
“Were you there for a sick baby?” I asked.
And I suddenly remembered our recent conversation in catechism
class about last rites. I had been fascinated and repelled by the idea of a
priest, a man in a stiff white collar and black robe but still a man, ridding the
dying of leftover sins so that, fresh as a daisy, as my mother would say, the
dead could pass into heaven. I loved the Roman Catholic Church, with the
body and blood of Jesus popped into our mouths and incense burning and
bells and chanting in Latin. But passing into heaven held no appeal at all.
“Were you in the Babies’ Ward doing last rites?” I asked, my mind
running through the cribs of babies, Eliza Jane, little Maria, Tommy Boy,
Rosie, Sue Sue, Violet Blue, Johnny Go-Go, all those babies of mine with
the nicknames I had given them.
“Don’t go into the Babies’ Ward today, Mary.”
“Can you tell me which baby?” I asked.
He tousled my hair.
“Not just now,” he said, and I watched him walk away in his black
cassock, his muddy shoes showing below the skirt, his long thinning hair
flying above his head in threads.
Halfway across the courtyard, he turned and, with his cassock
blowing behind him, walked back toward me.
“Mary,” he said, kneeling so we were face to face. “I know you’re
thinking you’ll go to the Babies ’Ward as soon as I’m out of sight, but you
can’t. This was not a patient you knew.”
Instinctively I didn’t believe him.
I watched until he was out of sight and then I crossed the courtyard on a
diagonal toward the movie theater — not an actual movie theater but a large
room where current Hollywood films were shown to the patients, mostly
children, either sitting in wheelchairs or lying on stretchers in body casts,
everyone in the hospital who could breathe without an iron lung, in rows of
white sheets.
The next afternoon, a Saturday, I would be going with Joey
Buckley to see High Noon — that was the description of my Saturday I would
tell my parents during our Sunday telephone call, always just after noon, a
ritual of longing and dread.
“I went to see High Noon with Joey Buckley,” I’d say. “We do
everything together lately.”
I knew it would please them to hear that I had a best and steady
friend, a Joey Buckley whom they’d met but didn’t know, filling the gap their
absence had left. It would please them to think of me doing the things that
normal children in the sixth grade did, like going to movies.
It wasn’t necessarily true about Joey Buckley. I’d usually be in
line with all the girls from the Girls’ Ward in wheelchairs, and we’d follow the
stretchers moved by push boys, and behind would be the line of wheelchairs
from the Boys’ Ward, and then the grown-ups who had the freedom to move,
if they could move, out of the lineup. When I saw Joey, he would be in a line
of wheelchairs behind me, several boys away.
I saved stories for my parents to make them happy, to soften their
sadness over not being with me, which I knew they wished they could be,
which I wanted to believe they wished they could be. And the stories had
some truth, along with the addition of a happy ending. I added the happy
ending perhaps by nature, perhaps in my own defense. A child can cover a
multitude of sadness simply by inventing happiness, can escape the kind of
sympathy that smothers her spirit, and save her fledgling self in its slow and
lonely process of definition.
Copyright © 2007 by Susan Richards Shreve. Reprinted by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Company.
