Lynn in Berkley kitchen

Winter 1951. Summer melted into that autumn of paralysis. Autumn solidified into crystal winter. Switch on the projector light. Small dust diamonds begin their dance, whirling round and round in the cone of electric light as in a centrifuge. It makes a low sound. Like an anti-aircraft’s drone. Now show the frames. They shudder like gelatin, shimmy into place, then fuzz, double, blur, rip, bleed, then it all comes clear in black and white again.

What was the loneliness of late night movies on early television screens in one’s own living room high atop Manhattan to the loneliness of movies in the ward being shown fifty children, overflow polio from the big metropolitan hospitals, spinabifida children whose parents needed relief, thalidomide births, and cerebral palsy—non-spastic in our ward separated from spastic across the hall—lined in cots upstate New York where outside there was a wilderness of snow? One could look for miles and miles, but see not a soul around walking on those grounds. We had all lost weight to our disease and looked like little skeletons. "Another child with two useless limbs," the rounding physician would shake his head and move on. Our cheekbones showed. The badge of initiation, a bald spot, shone on back of our heads. Meanwhile, a Phillip Morris in her right hand, a cup of coffee in her left, our Mother Marcelle watched old Kate Hepburns flash across the screen. It was 1951.Peter Lorrie lived right around the block from us, his crooked grin on screen came from a man who was in reality timid. The TV was a Motorola. The screen flickered Mother flicked ashes with her right index finger. She wore nail polish. These finely tapered, manicured hands were the ones that had pinned diapers, bathed children’s’ heads in an enamel bowl on farms, in shacks down South, scrubbed Rachel’s dark hair with olive oil, my blond with lemon. The dark was thought to bring out the highlights in a brunette, lemon to make more lustrous the sheen of blond. Her hands had also signed the papers which had consigned me to that prison upstate New York. Mother had so musical a voice people wondered if she were singing. Was hers the velvet glove with the iron claw? Like that of the dispossessed Southern Belle? A Jewish princess, she had far more humanitarian instincts and convictions more than her well-to-do sister Cornell freshmen. She was impassioned—and art, painting and sculpture lit her fire.

Later, when things got rough, she’d say, "How can we complain? Look at the Siamese twins." When one of us wanted to move out for a boy, she’d say, "Fine, you know where Harlem is."

In those years, she wore a small silver ring on her ring finger where her wedding band had been. Delicate, it became her with its two pearls entwined.

It wasn’t her hands, which had wound the hot wool about my legs to get them to bend that summer. Some nurse’s hands did that, one trained in the method of the Australian Sister Kenny hot packs. It was mother’s hands which turned the key in the ignition to make those long drives up out of Manhattan to Haverstraw, upstate New York. These drives must have triggered memories of her own most desolate time, the war years when our father, an Army psychologist, was re-stationed constantly and she was left alone to nurse the wounds of a loveless marriage and to nurture two small children. It was impossible for her to do this, to live these years, without bitterness. I could see the red and white crisp Canadian flag snapping from my sight across Lake Champlain.

Mother’s were artist’s hands. I do not remember the touch of tenderness. What, I ask myself was her loneliness as a young divorced woman, still beautiful, one child an emerging wudnerkinde, one paralyzed from the waist down? Where did her thoughts drift those summer evenings when the blue tube was filled with jagged lines like lightning and static buzzed from the screen? Yet what was her solitude to that of a child watching Monday night movies? I had come round robin in my thinking.

We kids had no power, one way, but from another, we developed moxie, we had chutzpah and became con-artists. There was, however, absolutely no gift which could take away the pain of childhood incarceration: absolutely no bears, no comicbooks parents brought desperately as if to stanch the blood from an emotional wound could stand the blood. It was as though we were an amputee’s stump which kept weeping

Monday nights were movies, a thrilling, highly anticipated evening, offering us a release from routine of treatments, baths, conferences held upon us with the men in white doing much head-shaking. On white plinths with scratchy sheets, we were wheeled in. Some of us in wheelchairs, a very few. ambulatory, but on stretchers in the main, some cased skull to toe in body-length Reese jackets, some in permanent traction. Whatever was in the hospital library was brought out. So we were shown old Roy Rogers and Dale Evans movies which sailed us into seventh heaven. Here indigo, cobalt ruled although I failed to smooth with an iron that light: it kinked for me. Being wheeled backed to the ward, the relief of those sixty minutes plunged some of us, I am certain, into further grief. I was covered with the handprints of those who could climb and run. Like the voiceprints Ava talks of in her beloved poets.

It was all we needed of hell: Movies for us who could not move. "I’ am covered," Ava said, "with handprints, voiceprints of all the poets I have read." So I am with the children in the ward...How is it possible to communicate to one who not lived that 365 degrees of isolation with only an hour here, a half-hour there, snatched free of pain, with what words, music, gestures can I communicate the leaden light and time of those hours which mounted to half a year?

There was another type movie shown on screen: or rather, a still: our x-rays bringing up a set of white, semi-transparent bones; x-rays which would be brought up, when the little ominous light was flicked on, by the radiologist and in conference with Dr Pain (our resident’s true name) we, the children, were shown, let see the pictorial diagram of our disease, the root, the cause of being locked up against brilliant August now reddening into November, now silvering over into winter sun.

Having sold the little house in the suburbs which she bought after war, on Edna place, the small green stucco house in which our fate turned, Mother watched Greer Garson, Claudette Colbert, Kate Hepburn—most often the swish Kate dressed as a young male—Kate who called herself "that American thing," in the new brownstone in Manhattan she’d found, while I, down the hall, relived those hospital movies about which I breathed not a breath to a soul living.

II.

It is an old thirty-three millimeter, with grainy color but color it has. It’s a movie which lasts about four minutes, yet captures forever, the poet running, jumping, tumbling, doing cartwheels and handstands and somersaults, all within the space of about sixty seconds on screen. I was the twinkler, the performer.. "You couldn’t be contained," said Rachel. The joy of childhood was when time moved. Hospitalised, time itself had been paralysed, its pale slim body, with virgin veins, shot up with a tranquilizer which would never wear off: this deathly body of Time was borne on a gurney too, parallel to ours, visible in the mirror where one looked into one’s heart.

Four years earlier, when the home movie was shot, it was August in Toledo, Ohio summer 1947, There was my cousin Jerry, plump, short and blond like his sister, my first cousin Irene. Although Jewish, they had joined the Country club and went to Unitarian Service on Sunday. They were pale, blue eyed blondes without the sea-bitten look and blue eyes of their parents who were first generation Ukranian. Rachel and I were the slender ones, the Caravaggio children: Rachel balances precariously, in the pool, on a shiny black inner tube which appears not to have enough air: sways with all the concentration she brought to practicing violin, catching her weight right, gaining purchase Enter a dark blond with rubberband, thin, impish smile.

In the hospital, there were no words for the bottomless well I was in. There was no one to tell I had fallen, nor was there sky visible from the bottom. Occasionally a nurse would take and flick a pocket mirror to check out her make-up accidentally flashing me a signal of sky or some kid who knew the ropes better than most of us would whip a pocket mirror out of a pad or gown, grinning connivingly.

There was another, better theatre on the roof an amphitheater of New York sky, diesel boats in all directions: a well of brick, old brick, the kind one imagined combined with thatch in English country cottages like Yorkshire. This was mid-century Manhattan. My theatre, where I watched the movie of the East River, the movie of the sky. In the darkroom where this movie was developed, the chemicals, were longsuffering, paralysis, pain. There is no horizon in sight as there is hardly one to the day at noon in July. A gasoline haze hung in the air. The screen is a gray-brown scrim, lightening at odd times to blinding white. The nurse ran the projector, or rather God ran it, because I still believed. Still believed with the fervor with which I had pressed Connie to me. "Shhhhh!" Rachel whispered from the hall. There were few taller buildings than New York Hospital, Cornell Medical Center, in 1951. The United Nations had yet to be built. Mother was at home, in the circle of lamplight in an apartment I hadn’t yet seen, divorced, chain-smoking, turning her teeth brown, turning the pages of a Daphne du Maurier mystery. Was she developing scars too deep to forgive?

Once, dramatically, I almost flew out of the frame. My leg flopped over, and despite the restrainer, the weight of the paralyzed leg could have dragged my body all 53 pounds of me. "You nearly flew away!" my nurse whose name I cannot remember scolded. She had an Irish accent. Many were from Ireland in those days. (I had my rights. Dogs were taken for their walks. I had asked to be taken up to the roof. And for a microphone to record Longfellow’s "Children’s’ Hour" because I remembered what childhood had been. I got both requests, though it felt the hollow granting of my prayers.)

I closed my eyes. What would it be like up here when snow came? A few twigs poked up from an abandoned planter. I never asked to walk again. I asked for it to be winter because I knew winter would heal things. in the boneless silence and gasoline gray air of midsummer Manhattan, I longed for a blizzard . . .I’d seen photos of TB patents, 1909, from Bellevue Hospitals archives: a weird frontier was set up on the hospital roof, with vast view of the lower part of Manhattan, an aerial view. The patients were sent up there to spend the day, bundled in blankets and with thermos of hot tea, sometimes to camp overnight, taking the cure. taking the air in wintertime on the roof of the hospital that could be their only home for years. They wore fur earmuffs, those women and men. There had been small tents set up on the hospital roof of that great city great engine as though this were the wilderness where one was camping. It was the wilderness.. I was walking the thin tightrope of terror which is childhood. There was a rust geranium dying. (We’d had one back home on Edna Place.) Although there were water towers and smokestacks on the horizon, after the final cut, when the camera panned out, it was still summer, viral, contagious. I waited for winter as one waited for God: sculptural, redemptive, healing it would come. Each day we thought it couldn’t get colder at Haverstraw, but it did. Then the first wooly flakes came. Cottony ones and that gray snow began silvering incinerators, the piles of discarded brick out our hospital window which some early hod-carrier had rejected for mortaring with his V-shaped trough. December had arrived turning blue the nightfall of New York winter, after that stark summer of 1951. The windows were frost-rimed in the radiator heat of intense, early morning. A soul was rattling thermometers on a stainless steel cart. Someone was coming . . .Despite the freeze, there was the thrill to body and spirit of five a.m. Soon it would be another day of rounds.

(July 26, 2003)

Write about the students? The voice comes to me, not from old movies, but my body-memory, being before a classroom, that body strength, projecting, teaching. I was not, like Jake, my husband, determined to stand my five foot six on long leg braces and crutches in order to command respect, supporting myself by a lectern. But then, I am not a man.

Gathered in a world war two Quonset hut, a temporary building in Oakland’s black Ghetto where Huey P. Newton had recently founded the BLACK PANTHERS, at Merritt Junior College, the first College in the United States to give a major in Black Studies, I taught, on the heels of teaching at "The Cereal college," C.W. post the year before, before Jake and I broke up.

Here they were. Their names? Martha Shcroeder—who had come off heroin and introduced me to Transcendental Meditation, Laurie MacCraie who wrote a line in my poetry workshop which I’ll never forget, "All I keep and my boldness for you." Gail Rapoza, whose eyes were bloody from a blow her husband had given her and who invited me to her small apartment where I met her vivacious two young kids, and Casey Jones, Black, lustrous, an arresting young man who was determined to pull himself up from the ghetto by the bootstraps and write.