Ask Me Again Tomorrow (9 page)

I continued to work with Vitale throughout college, and I continued to compete—until I became interested in something far more compelling my junior year: I fell in love. Then something equally exciting happened—Vitale got a call from the United States Olympic Fencing Team. They had heard about me and wanted to come see me work out. One afternoon these officials showed up at the Boston Fencing Club and watched as Vitale took me through a rigorous and grueling workout. We sparred for well over an hour, and when we were finished, every muscle in my body was shaking. I stumbled over to the water fountain. “Don’t drink,” Vitale demanded, “and don’t sit down.” I stood panting, leaning against the wall. “If you drink something, you’ll throw up. And if they’re interested in you, we’ll be working like this every day so you better get used to it.”

I knew, at that instant, that despite how competitive I had been and still was in many ways, I just didn’t have that kind of desire anymore. At least not for fencing, and besides, I was in love and wanted to take walks by the Charles River, have hot chocolates at Schrafft’s, and make out in doorways.

Though I had dated some (always tentatively and uncomfortably), meeting N changed my life. He was the son of friends of our family, but they had moved out West when we were both young, so we really didn’t know each other until we were reintroduced while we were finishing our undergraduate degrees in the Boston area. One Thanksgiving we found ourselves sitting next to each other at dinner. N was very charming—and very handsome. He was also a wonderful listener and looked at me as though I were the most enthralling person on the planet. And he had the bluest, clearest eyes I had ever seen. We began to date and from very early on I was sure N was someone special. Something was opening up inside of me and it was thrilling.

N and I became inseparable. He admired my athleticism and my determination to pay for my own education and thought it was wonderful that I was working so hard to find a way to pursue my real dream of becoming a theater director. He, too, had a similar “secret” passion: though he was expected to complete his studies and go into business with his father, in his heart he wanted to become an architect. Just before I graduated, we became secretly engaged.

I graduated with a degree in physical therapy in 1953, the year Jonas Salk began the preliminary testing of his polio vaccine. It also happened to be the time when the worst polio epidemic in decades was at its peak. I was terribly naive at that point, almost completely unaware of what I was getting into. Polio is a virus that attacks the motor nerves in the brain and spinal cord, often leaving the victim’s legs, arms—or their entire body from the neck down—paralyzed. In the most severe cases, the muscles of the respiratory system and throat are also paralyzed, which makes speaking, swallowing, and breathing difficult or impossible. From the time of the ancient Egyptians five thousand years ago until 1955, when Salk’s vaccine was delivered to the masses, polio epidemics would flair up the world over. Most of the victims were children. If a patient was lucky enough to survive the virus, he or she would need physical rehabilitation in order to retrain the muscles that had been paralyzed by the virus. Helping people regain their mobility through intensive rehabilitation would be my job for the next two years.

Leaving Boston and my family home was something I had been looking forward to. In fact, I was itching to get out on my own and become independent. The prospect of leaving N, though, was another matter entirely. We agreed that we would write each other constantly, so with this promise in hand, I left Boston for rural West Virginia. I was on my own for the first time in my life.

Just getting to Marmet, the tiny hamlet in the Kanawa Valley where I was to work, was an adventure. I first took the train from Boston to New York City in order to register with the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. I spent my first night ever in a hotel, and the next morning, I boarded an airplane from New York to West Virginia. I was twenty-three years old and I was taking my first airplane flight. The stewardess got such a kick out of how excited I was, they got the pilots to invite me to sit in the cockpit for a few minutes. After landing, I was brought to a tiny frame house that would serve as my lodgings for the next several months. Up a path from the house was the clinic, a renovated schoolhouse.

Despite how remote Marmet was, the population had been hard hit by the epidemic. There was no full-time doctor tending to the children who were being treated. Twice a week, a doctor from nearby Charleston, West Virginia, would come through on his rounds and check the status of each patient. Other than that brief encounter, we were all on our own. The therapy department was desperately shorthanded, and the staff—all two of us—worked ten-hour shifts, treating twenty-five to thirty patients a day. We had both been trained to handle a caseload of only twelve patients a day. It was grueling and humbling. Each time we’d begin to make progress with one child and he or she would be taken out of the iron lung and moved to a bed, it seemed as though two more very critically ill children would arrive.

One of my first patients in Marmet was an eight-year-old boy named Daniel Cade. He was blond, blue-eyed—and encased in a respirator because he was unable to breathe on his own. Every day, I would work with Daniel by reaching into the side openings of the iron lung and stretching his tightened limbs. He would tell me, in no uncertain terms, to ease up. (“Don’t take it up so fer!” he’d say in this mountain dialect everyone there spoke.) But every day his condition worsened. Miraculously, one day he seemed to turn a corner and begin to improve. When he was finally removed from the respirator, Daniel was still very weak and I had to work hard with him to begin the painful and long process of reawakening the muscles in his body.

One rare day off, a Sunday, I had gone to see the feature at the local movie house. While I was sitting there I had a premonition, and I stopped at the hospital on my way home, just to check in on Daniel. He wasn’t in his room. He had had a relapse and was once again placed on a respirator. Next to him, kneeling on the floor and sobbing, was a giant of a man who I recognized must have been his father. Standing next to him was a woman who was obviously Daniel’s mother—she had his clear blue eyes and blonde hair. She was staring out the window, praying. I stood there, taking in these people, so overcome by grief and a sense of helplessness. Soon after I left the room, Daniel Cade died. I had never been so close to death, had never witnessed people who were forced to sustain such heartbreaking loss.

Within a week of losing my first patient, I, too, contracted polio—luckily, not the paralytic kind. I had all the classic symptoms: a stiff neck and tightness in my hamstring muscles. I spent a week in my tiny house, alone most of the time except for the occasional visit from one of the nurses from the clinic. Though I recovered quickly from the virus, I’ve never forgotten that experience. Three months later, I was sent to the next viral “hot spot” in Duluth, Minnesota.

“It’s freezing here” is how I started every letter I posted to N from Duluth. I found myself living in the middle of the northern prairie just as winter hit—in a dramatic change from the stultifying heat of the Appalachians. This was about as far as I could have gotten from my experience in Marmet. The hospital in Duluth had every piece of equipment money could buy, much of it state-of-the-art, and a full staff of doctors and nurses. My job was focused on recovery rehab, which meant that I spent most of my time with patients who had already survived the virus. They were now retraining their muscles in order to regain mobility. During my three-month stint there, not one victim of the epidemic died—not one. But I had another experience with a patient that I will never forget. A young woman came into the hospital extremely sick with the virus—and eight months pregnant. Her condition was bad enough that she had to be placed in an iron lung. Miraculously, though she was paralyzed from the neck down, she managed to deliver a healthy baby—even while on a respirator. But it soon became heartbreakingly clear to us that this woman would never be able to actually hold her baby. I have thought about that woman over and over again throughout my life.

The Minnesota winter was long, hard, and dark and I missed N. His letters to me were becoming more passionate and urgent, and they made our being separated all the more difficult. I started to rethink my plans: until I was called up for my next “tour,” why not move to New York City and enroll in a theater program there? I had saved enough money—maybe I could even start a term at Columbia. With that thought in mind, I finished my work in Duluth and made my way back to New York.

On my very first day in New York, N and I met at the Empire State Building and then found a hotel to check into. He was able to leave Boston and come to New York City every other weekend. He was very close to graduating, which meant we’d be together all the time. I had found a furnished room (with kitchen privileges) and had begun taking classes as planned. One night, around two
A.M
., I heard a pounding on the door of my room. It was N. I unbolted the door and took a step back to look at him and saw that he was in awful shape; he had a black eye and his face was all scratched and bleeding.

“What happened? What are you doing here?” I asked as I pulled him into my room. “I had to come. I couldn’t wait. So I hitchhiked down from Boston. I stopped in to a bar and got into a fight…” Before he could finish, we were falling into the tiny bed that dominated my furnished room.

Since I had been in New York, we had been able to spend lots of time with each other, but things had become complicated. N’s parents were pressuring him to marry. And they had picked him out a bride. In traditional Greek fashion, they had set their sights on a girl back in N’s hometown, someone he had known his whole life. In their eyes, this girl was far more appropriate than I as a future daughter-in-law. Here I was, a woman who had been traipsing around the country, but even worse, now I was living on my own in New York City and studying theater! N’s parents thought I was too independent. They insisted that he marry the girl they had chosen. N assured me that he would not give in to his parents’ pressure. With his graduation approaching, we spent hours planning how we would break this news to his parents and more hours planning on how, once we were settled back in his hometown, I would open a community theater and he would begin to study architecture, his true passion. I called home and told my mother and father to plan on a dinner in a few weeks; N and his parents would be coming and he and I were going to share some important news. We spent that weekend in New York blissfully fine-tuning our plans.

The day came when N would formally announce to my parents our plan to marry. My mother prepared a proper Greek feast and my father set the table with the best china and silver. N and his parents arrived and I immediately sensed that something was wrong. There seemed to be a forced friendliness. Even though our parents weren’t close friends, they knew each other well enough to enjoy a drink and a meal together. As dinner was winding down, I kept waiting for N to propose a toast. I kept trying to make eye contact with him, but he wouldn’t meet my gaze. The dishes were barely removed from the table when N and his parents announced they had to leave. This was supposed to be the moment when our engagement became public (we had secretly been engaged for almost a year at that point), and then our parents would raise a toast and set a wedding date for us. Instead, we found ourselves hustling to the door behind N’s family, promising to see each other the next day at his graduation. At that point my mother remarked, “There’s something we have to talk about here.” My father stood by silent and humiliated. With vague excuses as to why they had to leave, N’s mother reassured mine, saying, “Don’t worry, we’ll talk tomorrow, after the graduation.” With that, they were gone.

The next day, I stood by, barely acknowledged as an acquaintance—let alone their son’s fiancée—while N graduated. After the ceremony, I felt sick to my stomach as I watched N hand his diploma over to his father. They then turned and walked away without ever acknowledging me or my parents. I felt so disgraced and embarrassed, both for myself and my parents, who were clearly feeling the same way.

I remained hopeful—and in love. I thought that N needed more time, needed the opportunity to convince his parents that I was his one true love. Though I was still hurt by his inability to take action at that moment, I again left Boston, this time for Dallas, Texas, and my next tour of duty as a therapist. My goal was the same: to save as much money as I could so that N and I would be able to begin our life together…

Dallas was hot, humid, and hostile. I was assigned to work in the children’s ward of the county hospital. The outbreak was so bad and so widespread, we were even seeing patients from the nearby prison. Even jail cells didn’t protect people from contracting polio. I remember a black convict in his thirties who came in feverish and delirious and shackled in chains—even though he was clearly paralyzed and couldn’t rise from the stretcher he was strapped to, let alone walk.

“Take the chains off his legs,” I ordered the policeman who accompanied him. He just looked at me as though I were crazy. “I mean it. How do you expect me to treat this man if I can’t move his legs?” I turned to the prisoner, knowing full well he couldn’t walk. “Will you promise me that you won’t run off if they unlock these chains?” He nodded yes, his eyes burning with fever. The guard unlocked the leg irons—then stood over us both with a loaded gun pointed at my patient until I finished the treatment. I thought I knew about prejudice from my own experiences back in Massachusetts, but being in Dallas, in 1954, was an eye-opener.

Two weeks after I got to Dallas, I got “the letter” from N. I suppose I should have seen it coming, but I was hoping so much for a life with him that until I read his words, I believed that our plans would come true. His letter began in the way that all such letters begin:
Dearest Olympia…
It was over….
simply can’t fight my parents any longer…need to get on with my life and want you to get on with yours…
I held the letter in my shaking hands and walked over to the mirror, took a hard look at myself, and said, out loud, “Okay, Olympia: now what are you going to do with your life?”