The patients shifted their feet and tried to look intelligent. The tuberculous males said, “Sure, Doc. I see, Doc.” The tuberculous females swelled their nostrils to show understanding. One doctor showed the mother of a fourteen-year-old girl the infected areas and cavities in her daughter’s lungs. He said, “Your daughter is a very sick girl. If you want her to get well you must send her to the sanatorium.” The mother said, “I prefer to keep Arlene at home. She don’t like hospital food.” Arlene had pale tan hair, a pale tan face and a pale tan polo coat. She gazed disinterestedly out the window. The mother said, “They sent her home from school. They act like she’s got smallpox.” The doctor said, “Your daughter is very sick. She is contagious.” He went over the x-rays again. He looked worried and grave but he would have been more forceful with something a little easier than “right bronchopulmonary lymph nodes.” The pale tan girl turned to the window and said in a hoarse whisper, “I won’t go to no hospital!” The mother said, “See, she don’t like the food.” They left soon after that and from the window Dede and I watched them walk down the street laughing and talking.
At last it was my turn for the Medical Director. I peeled myself off the bench and went into his office. He was sitting at a desk reading the letter from Mary’s husband. He glanced up at me briefly and went on with the letter. On the wall back of him was a very large picture of a human eye. Reflected in the pupil of the eye was a pretty young woman with a pompadour and a very small waist. She was seated at her dressing table looking at herself in the mirror. Reflected in the mirror was her face with death peering over her shoulder. Underneath the picture was printed in large type, “Provided a man is not mad, he can be cured of every folly but vanity.” I thought it could just as well have read, “She don’t like hospital food.”
The doctor finished the letter and looked up at me. He was bald and wore two pairs of glasses. His face was lined and severe—his eyes warm and kind. He said, “How old are your children?” I said, “Nine and ten years old.” “Girls or boys?” “Girls,” I said. “Who’ll take care of them while you’re at The Pines?” “My mother and sisters.” He said, “We have a children’s hospital at the sanatorium—you can have them there if you want to.” I said, “Mother has taken care of them since they were small. I think they’d be happier with her.”
He said, “Have your mother bring them down here to the clinic for a physical.” Then he said, “You know we have a long waiting list for The Pines, more than two hundred people, all sick, all needing care but I’m going to put you ahead of them because you have children. When would you like to enter?” I said, “Immediately!” which seemed to surprise him. He said, “All right, you can go out Friday.” This was Wednesday. I asked fearfully about payment. He said, “You’ll have to give up your job won’t you?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Someday when you make a lot of money, you can pay for someone else to get well.” Then seeing that his kindness had brought tears, he changed and became very severe.
He said, “Taking the cure is going to be difficult for you. You have red hair—lots of energy, you’re quick, active, impatient. All bad for tuberculosis. Discipline will be hard for you. The cure of tuberculosis is all discipline.” I said that I would do anything. Anything at all to get well. He stood up and put his arm around me and said, “That is the spirit,” which was very kind of him considering the fact that he had just written on my card, “Prognosis—doubtful.”
When we got home Mother had her bed turned down for me and it was very comforting to lean back against the pillows and to know that the terrible lassitude and pointless fatigue were part of the disease and therefore excusable. For lunch I had chicken soup, fresh gingerbread and hot tea. Impaired appetite was never one of my symptoms. All afternoon Mother called people to say, “Have you heard about Betty?” and all evening long people called to say, “We have just heard about Betty.” The children, not allowed to cross the threshold of my room, hurried home from school to stand in the doorway, look forlorn and reach for loose ends of the conversation.
Mary’s husband called to say that everyone in the family must be x-rayed and have a Mantoux test. I explained importantly to the assembled family that the Mantoux test is an injection of tuberculin in the forearm. If it swells and turns red in the course of a few days, it is positive; if not, negative. That approximately eighty per cent of all Mantoux tests given to adults are positive but a positive Mantoux does not mean that the person has active t.b. It merely shows that at some time or another he has had tuberculosis in some form and that x-rays should be taken. Everyone was very happy over the prospect of staying away from school or work for the tests.
The next afternoon at three o’clock the entire family returned from the doctor’s exultant over their fine health and flawless lungs. They were all on my bed drinking coffee and drawing smoke into their perfect lungs when the doorbell rang. “Come in, come in,” they shouted, thinking it was some of Alison’s high school friends. The doorbell continued to ring so they screamed, “Come in, fat head. We’re upstairs in Betty’s room.” The front door opened carefully and a heavy contralto called, “Does Elizabeth Bard live here?”
We sent Anne down to see who it was. She came back immediately, glazed with excitement. “It’s a nurse!” she said. “She’s coming up.” Madge, Alison and Dede were sitting on the bed. Mother was in a small rocking chair beside the bed. Joanie leaned in the doorway. The bedside tables, the bureau, the chest of drawers and the sewing machine were littered with coffee cups, ash trays, books, magazines, coats, hats and purses. The air was opaque with smoke.
At Anne’s announcement everyone jumped up self-consciously and began picking things up and putting them in other places. A cup of cold coffee with a swollen cigarette floating in it and an ash tray with many cigarette stubs and two apple cores in it were overlooked on my bedside table. The nurse came in. She was a sturdy little woman with steel-rimmed spectacles, a flowing dark blue cape and a brown leather satchel. She strode over and threw up the windows, choking and clearing her throat. The family melted into the hallway. The nurse fanned the air around me and asked a lot of questions about my condition.
Then she unlatched her little satchel and took out: a brown paper bag, which she shook open and pinned with two safety pins to the mattress by the pillow; a stack of small square paper handkerchiefs; a little book called, “You Have Tuberculosis”; and a list of things I would need at the sanatorium. On the list were three pairs outing flannel pajamas; one wool robe; one pair bedroom slippers; sweaters; three washcloths; soap; toothpaste; toothbrush; metal hot-water bottle; cosmetics as desired.
She bent over and shuffled around in her satchel some more and came up with the following information: I had pulmonary tuberculosis; I had positive sputum; I must not even clear my throat without first putting a paper handkerchief to my mouth; all handkerchiefs must be deposited in the brown paper bag; the children must not come near me; and drinking very hot water would help my cough.
As she talked, she eyed the overflowing ash tray and the coffee cup with the floating yellow cigarette in it. Finally she said, “You don’t smoke, do you?” Her eyes were brimming with disappointment. I said, “I did smoke constantly until a few days ago but the doctor said I should stop so I did.” I sounded like a coiled spring of will power. Actually it hadn’t been too difficult because of the coughing.
As she gathered up her things and put them in her satchel, I asked her why the nurses at the clinic were so disagreeable, why nobody ever smiled. “Do they despise all people with t.b. or is it just me?” I asked. The nice little nurse hardened her eyes, compressed her lips and recited: “Complete impersonality between patients and nurses is the most strictly enforced rule of The Pines and The Pines Clinic.”
Then she softened up again and went on to explain that at The Pines discipline was the most important factor in the cure of tuberculosis and as the nurses were the ones who had to enforce this discipline there had to be impersonality between patients and nur
ses. This certainly sounded reasonable and knowing it made my initiation into The Pines routine a little easier.
The little nurse was efficient and kind and as she talked she plumped the pillows, smoothed the sheets and left the room clean, well-aired and chilly.
After she had gone the family came surging back with the kittens, the coffee, now hot and fresh, presents, flowers and new books. Soon the bed, the chairs, the bureaus, everything spilled over with people, coffee cups and ash trays and into the sterile brown paper bag on the side of the bed, went apple cores, candy wrappers, and still-smoldering cigarettes. The room was again as littered and cozy as an old saloon.
Outside the windows the evening sky gleamed palely through the cutleaf maple. Inside, the conversation flowed around me as warm and comforting as an old sweater. The dogs came upstairs, their toenails clicking on the bare steps, to find out what was the matter. Why there was no fire in the fireplace. No smells of dinner. Why we were all upstairs.
The telephone rang—it was a date for Alison. The doorbell rang—a neighbor wanted to borrow a cup of sugar. The telephone rang—it was a date for Dede. The children’s radio changed to Hop Harrigan. The telephone rang—it was for Mother.
Mother stayed downstairs and soon there floated through the house the tingling smells of woodsmoke, garlic, and baking potatoes. Dinner and the fire were started. The dogs went downstairs. The children’s radio changed to Jack Armstrong. The telephone rang—it was my last night at home.
IV
All New Patients Must First Be Boiled
BEING SENT TO an institution, be it penal, mental or tuberculous, is no game of Parchesi, and not knowing when, or if, you’ll get out doesn’t make it any easier. At least a criminal knows what his sentence is. I had been confidently counting on the chest specialist’s guess of one year, when I remembered the rider he had tacked on of “or longer.” “Or longer” could mean anything from one month to ten years. It was not comforting.
Instructions from the clinic were that new patients must arrive at The Pines between the hours of three and four-thirty in the afternoon, “after rest hours and before supper.” Mary was to drive me out and Madge and Mother were going along. We had planned to leave about two o’clock. We had also planned to send the children to school and to keep everything very normal. People who “packed up their troubles in their old kit bag and smiled, smiled, smiled!” made us want to throw up and yet we were not of the “Let’s Close Down the Lid of the Old Cof-fin and Bawl! Bawl! Bawl!” school of thought. Mother’s philosophy embraced a middle track somewhere between the two and that middletrack attitude was what we intended to maintain on the day of my departure.
I awoke early to milky windows and foghorns. The hollow echoing footsteps of the paper boy followed by the thump of the paper on the porch. A streetcar clanging past, high-spirited and empty on its first trip. A window slamming shut across the street. The thud of the front door and several sharp joyful barks as Mother let the dogs out. The complaining groans of the starter on a car somewhere down the alley. The rumbling thunder of another streetcar crossing the bridge over the park ravine two blocks away.
Finally Anne asked bluntly, “Are you going to die, Betty?” I said of course not. How ridiculous. Joan said, “Bessie had tuberculosis and she died.” Bessie was a school friend of Alison’s, and until this moment her illness and death had been tactfully kept from me. I said, “She must have been a great deal sicker than I am.” Anne said, “Will you be home for Christmas?” I said that I didn’t know and then Joan said, “Mr. Bartlett takes out his teeth and washes them in the hose.” The good-byes were over. It was time to get up.
In spite of our good intentions, the children did stay home from school and everything was very abnormal but I managed somehow to tie up most of the odds and ends of my life, and to have a permanent wave and a very short haircut before two o’clock. Then the thin autumn sunshine and the rollicking dogs gave a picnicking air to the good-byes, but even so as I walked down the steps of the old brown shingled house I remarked morbidly to Dede that I felt like a barnacle that had been pried off its rock. Glancing briefly at my short, too-curly hair she remarked drily that I looked quite a lot like one too.
As we drove off I turned and waved and waved to the children. They stood on the sidewalk, squinting against the sun. Young, long-legged and defenseless. I loved them so that I felt my heart draining and wondered if I was leaving a trail behind me like the shiny mark of a snail.
The Pines was several miles out of the city and it was a lovely day for a drive but horrible little phrases such as “The Last Mile” and “The Last Roundup” kept creeping drearily into my thoughts as I looked at gardens blazing with dahlias, zinnias, Michaelmas daisies and chrysanthemums. At lawns blatantly green from damp fall weather, lapping the edges of the sidewalks. At full-leaved Western trees hesitantly turning a little yellow on the edges, while imported Eastern trees blushed delicately as they dropped their leaves in the soft, warm autumn air. Mother in the front seat with Mary said tactfully, “Have you ever noticed that the ugliest flowers, like the ugliest people, are always the strongest. Look at those hideous dahlias over there.” She pointed with her cigarette to some virulently purple dahlias exuding their uncompromising color against a red brick house.
After a while we left the city and drove along the shores of the Sound. As we progressed the autumn colors grew braver and so did I. The bloodless lukewarm sunshine, too weak to lift the fog from the silky gray water, at least made the greens and yellows of the trees clear and brilliant, my outlook less doleful.
A freight train, enveloped in its own smoke, racketed and panted along the shore. Occasional late-flowering dogwoods gleamed greenish white in the dark woods, like numbers on a luminous-dialed clock at night. The madroña trees, leaning down and twisting their trunks in an endeavor to see from under the suffocating firs, dripped with berries bright as blood. Their cinnamon brown bark curled back to show patches of chartreuse skin. Occasional pines stood alone, their branches stiff, their gray green skirts held high. The whole outdoors was fragrant and beautiful and grew more so as inexorably we drew closer and closer to The Pines and my incarceration.
We entered The Pines by a long, poplar-lined drive. On either side were great vine-covered Tudor buildings, rolling lawns, greenhouses and magnificent gardens. It might have been any small endowed college except that there were no laughing groups strolling under the trees. In fact, the only sign of life anywhere at all was a single nurse who flitted between two buildings like a white paper in the wind. We parked the car, distributed the luggage among us and went up the brick steps of the main building.
The entrance hall was large and dim with tall leaded windows, a tiled floor and dark woodwork. Feebly-lit mysterious corridors radiated from this central point and we all stood uncertainly wondering which to take. There was no one in sight anywhere. No sound. Mary said, “I didn’t realize that your arrival would create such a sensation,” and a nurse bobbed up from behind a high counter and said, “Shhhh!” This startled Madge so that she dropped the four large books she was carrying. They crashed to the floor and noise rolled along the corridors like spilled marbles.
The nurse swelled her nostrils and drew in her lips. I hurried over to the desk and explained that I was the patient. She said, “We were expecting you.” Her voice held the same wild enthusiasm generally bestowed on process servers. She said, “What is your full name, Mrs. Bard?” I said, “It’s Miss Bard. Miss Betty Bard. You see I have always used my maiden name in business and . . .”
The rest of what I was about to say went dribbling back down my throat for the nurse was looking at me with eyes that could have been taken out and used to replace diamond drills. She said, “You have children, haven’t you?” “Yes,” I said almost adding, involuntarily, “Mr. District Attorney.” She said, “You’re Mrs. Bard, then.” I said, “If you want me to be Mrs. Something why not use my married name?” She gave me the look again for a full minute, then said, ??
?It says here on this card,” she tapped it with a long black pen, “Mrs. Bard. You’ll be Mrs. Elizabeth Bard out here.”
Then she took my history, probing deep, questioning all my answers and in general giving the impression that she was building up a case to prove that tuberculosis was really a venereal disease. When she had finished she gave me some papers to sign; a little book called, “Rules of the Sanatorium”; and some salient facts about visitors. She threw these facts into me like darts into a target.
They were: 1. The children could come to see me once a month for ten minutes only. 2. I could have three adult visitors on Thursdays and Sundays from two until four o’clock. 3. If my visitors came too early, stayed too late, were noisy, broke rules or exceeded the allotted three in number, my visiting privileges would be removed for an indefinite length of time.
Then Florence Nightingale leaned over the counter and directed us with her pen down one of the dark corridors to a waiting room. She undoubtedly was impersonal but she was also the most thoroughly disagreeable woman I had ever met and I didn’t see why The Pines didn’t rent her out to England to threaten India with.
The waiting room had large casement windows, a lovely view of the gardens, overstuffed furniture, a virginal fireplace with its firebricks washed and waxed clear up into the chimney, and no magazines, no ash trays. We put down the suitcases, chose places, sat down and were immediately engulfed in silence. The kind of all-embracing silence that makes the snap of a purse clasp sound like a pistol shot, the scratch of a match like the rasp of a hacksaw blade. Mary said at last, in a strained unnatural voice, “Napoleon Bonaparte had tuberculosis but I don’t suppose you care. I certainly don’t.”