The Road Taken (19 page)

All their little lives she had worried about polio—the plague—watching them, feeling their foreheads for temperature, keeping them away from public places and even other children when the summer epidemics struck. At night she prayed for their safety, and in the morning she always thanked God when she saw they were still well. And now here was her sister Ginger, a polio victim. It was ironic, strange, and frightening.

Every time Peggy saw Ginger now she felt a little ill, and she didn’t know why. It was more than sympathy or anger, she was sure. She was constantly reminded that it could have happened to one of her own children. In a way, Ginger’s fate was a reproach. It was almost as if Ginger was a sacrifice. There was a limit on the bad things that could happen in one family, or in one life, Peggy believed, and the disaster had happened to Ginger instead of her own Peter or Marianne. She had no idea why, and she was too superstitious to mention this to anyone, even Ed. Sometimes, when she looked at Ginger imprisoned in her wheelchair or struggling to walk on her crutches, Peggy felt guilt and fear. The fact that Ginger was so cheerful, happy, and normal, made it worse.

Aside from pretending things were as they had always been, which was, of course, ridiculous, Peggy knew there was nothing,
nothing
she could do. Did the sleepwalker walk in her dreams? Peggy brought Ginger magazines and home-baked cookies, as if she were still in the hospital. Then Ginger surprised her by prattling on about her boyfriend in Boston, and things that she was doing at school, and Peggy knew she herself would never understand what it was like. If it had happened to one of her children she knew she would never have been able to deal with it. She didn’t know how Rose handled it.

***

Joan was staying at home more these days. Her affair with Henry Collins was long over, and so were her affairs with Frank Abruzzi and Steven Cohen, neither of whom she had ever mentioned or brought home to meet her family. Her parents wouldn’t have liked them anyway—scruffy beatniks, no money, into the arts. She needed to keep her two worlds separate, for everyone’s sake.

Her heart had been dented but it had never been broken. She was twenty-four, and people wondered why she wasn’t married yet. She wasn’t sure herself. She thought it was because she wanted to be free. This was a concept that had rarely occurred to a girl her age in her time, since all of them believed that marriage was the happy ending. So happy, in fact, and such an ending, that there was very little thought about what would happen afterward. Joan had thought about her aversion to legal commitment, and her conclusion was that she would be obliterated as an individual.

These were things men called their wives: the little woman, my ball and chain, my better half. She thought the latter was condescending, that no man would actually believe it. It was bad enough that her parents still had to support her, or at least keep such a nice roof over her head, but what would be insupportable would be having to ask a man for money. Peggy, she knew, had an allowance from Ed. An allowance! Like a child! Peggy felt their marriage was a partnership and was proud of it; she took care of the home front and Ed went out to the wars. The war had changed, it was advertising now, not guns and bombs, but their position was essentially the same.

Everyone in the family had been affected by what had happened to Ginger, and Joan had too. She was beginning to realize for the first time how much they all really cared about and needed one another. Her parents had never been strict, they had been tactful and accepting. The three sisters were very different, but still, they had a bond. It was a shame, Joan began to think, that she and Peggy had grown so far apart.

She should go to visit Peggy in the suburbs, invite herself for a weekend. How dreary could it be? She wanted to get to know her little nephew, and her baby niece. How could you object to nature, to fragrant grass and trees, or to clean, white, fluffy snow? She and Peggy could have the kind of heart-to-heart talks they had never had but that Joan saw female friends doing on television. They would sit in the kitchen and have coffee. The idea became so appealing she called Peggy on the phone.

“Peggy, I’ve been thinking. I’d love to come to visit you for a weekend sometime soon. Or during the week, and stay over.”

“You would?” Of course what Peggy was really saying was
why?

“Mending fences,” Joan said.

“Mending what?”

“You know. Doing sister stuff.”

“Great,” Peggy said. She actually seemed to mean it. “This weekend we have to go to a dinner party, but you could come the one after that. Bring warm clothes and waterproof shoes. We’ll take a long walk. Gee, I can’t think of a lot of things to amuse you. I hope you aren’t bored.”

“I won’t be bored,” Joan said.

She went up to Larchmont on the train, and Peggy met her at the station. They hadn’t been alone together for a very long time, and the two of them were self-conscious for the first few hours, but then they both warmed up. Peggy stopped being such a good hostess and Joan stopped being the polite guest. They started to laugh together. The kids seemed glad to be able to spend a weekend with their Aunt Joan, because for the first time Peggy had prepared them with a glowing report that made Joan seem worldly and interesting.

“Could you show me how to write a poem?” Peter asked.

“Sure.”

“Here’s
Aunt Joan,”
Peggy said to baby Marianne, in that enthusiastic voice people put on for small children to make them think it’s a good thing.

When Ed came home for dinner he made martinis. Joan got high and began to think that her sister and brother-in-law were absolutely lovely people, that they were lucky to be so attracted to each other after all these years, and that the kids were as cute as could be.

After that she came to visit them again from time to time, bringing house gifts even though it wasn’t necessary. “Take Aunt Joan to her room, Peter,” Peggy would say, as if it were really hers.

Who would have thought that prickly Joan could have changed? Part of the time she felt as if she were watching her step, not to fall, wondering who this cordial person was she had become, or at least was pretending she had become. There was still something unreal about the bond she was forging with Peggy, but Joan wanted to try. Maybe Peggy wasn’t all that interesting, maybe they were too different, with different values and goals, maybe she herself in many ways wasn’t even worthy enough to be a part of their world, but Joan wanted herself and Peggy to be again the way they had been when they were very young, before people became judgmental, when they had simply accepted each other, when love had been a given and not something that had to be earned.

It was April, 1955. And then the bombshell struck, the news that changed everything. “The vaccine works,” a little-known doctor named Jonas Salk announced, and became famous overnight. There had been a year of clinical trials on humans, and now the polio vaccine he had discovered would be given to people. In the beginning, while they were making more, the inoculations would be restricted to children and pregnant women, because the research had shown those were the ones most likely to contract polio. Later on, everyone would be able to have them. Of course, until the vaccination program was up and running on a massive national scale there would still be cases, but everything had changed now, it would be a new world. The most terrifying plague of the first half of the twentieth century had been conquered.

But for Ginger, and Christopher, and their friends, who had once been statistics and now had become a part of history, it was too late.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Her junior year in high school hadn’t been hard, but when the summer came Ginger was glad to be alone again. Not that she hadn’t been alone at school. But this way she could go to the public library and take out books, she could read, she could hide. She read a book every day, novels and nonfiction, but more often she devoured anything about medicine. No reason, she thought, why she shouldn’t get a head start on her life.

She had tried the motorized wheelchair, but found it too clunky and unwieldy with its big battery; it could hardly fit into a crowded elevator, she couldn’t gauge the speed, it didn’t fold into a car. Her parents said they would wait until there were better ones, and replaced it with a conventional wheelchair so she could be in control. But she still had to fight her feeling of not being able to take charge of her existence. Curbs still made her stomach lurch because she kept thinking she would tip over and fall out, break her skull, or lie helplessly on the ground until the cops came. This was not a silly fear, it was a distinct possibility. Usually her mother or father, or Uncle Hugh, insisted on going with her to the library, to help with the curbs, to push her when she got tired, to protect her. Her father had driven her to high school every day too, and it emphasized her differentness. The other kids went to school by themselves, walking or taking public transportation. Everyone her age wanted to look alike, dress alike, do the same things. Every little difference counted, and it was cruel.

Christopher had a summer job, working in his father’s office, sitting down behind a desk in his wheelchair, fitting in, liking it, pleased with himself. They still talked on the phone several times a week. Well, twice a week, tops. It hurt her not to speak to him more often because she had so many things to say to him, and because she was keeping a kind of record. She would wait until Thursday, and if he hadn’t called, she would call him. Once, suffering, sweating, and sleepless, Ginger didn’t call him for an entire week, but then, finally, on Monday he called her.

“Where have you been?” he asked, as if she had neglected him, as if her life were interesting and she had better things to do than keep in touch with him. She had felt relieved, but also disappointed. She had hoped their relationship was better than that; that they didn’t have to play games.

But of course she was the one playing games; he had no idea. He was living his life, he didn’t count days the way she did. He called her when he thought of her. She thought about him all the time.

She remembered their months at Warm Springs, and their kisses, and the sex; she relived the night he had asked her if she would be his girlfriend, and she missed him terribly. “Do your parents mind that you make long-distance calls?” she asked him.

“No. Why?”

“I just thought they might. Mine don’t.”

“Mine don’t either,” Chris said. “But you’re the only person I call who lives out of town.”

Oh, how she glowed when he said that. She was still special to him. But then Ginger wondered, as she had to, whether Chris had so many friends, and even girlfriends now, that he didn’t need the past. She was afraid to ask him.

At the end of that summer, when Ginger was about to go back to school and was busy with the purchase of school clothes, Aunt Harriette surprised everyone in the family by getting married. Celia told them, delighted that she could stop worrying about her renegade daughter at last. Imagine that, Ginger thought; Aunt Harriette is ancient, why, she must be over forty. Who would think she would fall in love and get married at her age? Not to mention her reputation. Her new husband, Julius Wanderer, was a well-to-do shoe manufacturer, quite a bit older than she was, with two grown children, and he was divorced. Had Harriette broken up this marriage? Who would ever know; she wasn’t telling.

What she did reveal to them was that Julius was Jewish, and that although he didn’t mind that she didn’t convert to his religion, out of respect she was learning to make gefilte fish and other specialties so that she could do his holidays for him. Their family found the situation exotic.

“Harriette, you cooking anything, imagine!” Rose laughed on the phone. “And gefilte fish!”

“It’s quenelle of pike,” Harriette told her. “You made that once, remember?”

The happy couple had gotten married privately in Washington, the ceremony conducted by a judge Harriette knew. She had registered her dishes and silver pattern, just like a young bride, and they would live in Boston because that was where Julius was from. She said she hoped everyone would come to visit her. Ginger knew who would.

“Mom, we all have to go to Boston,” Ginger insisted. “Just for a weekend. She has a house, she told us. I can stay on the ground floor.”

“And see Christopher Riley,” Rose said, smiling.

“Well, of course.”

When her mother agreed, Ginger was overjoyed. She called Chris and told him. They hadn’t seen each other for almost seven months. Seven, she thought, was her number. Seven months in Warm Springs, seven months parted from the boy she loved. . . .

“Great,” he said. “You can come over for dinner and meet my family.”

Family, that was good, they were friends. But Ginger couldn’t help wondering where and if she and Chris would be able to hold each other and touch and kiss with all this family around. “I miss Warm Springs,” she said. “Don’t you?” She hoped he would get it.

“Some things,” he said, in the mischievous tone she remembered with love and lust, and she knew he did.

The four of them, Rose and Ben and Ginger and Hugh, went to Boston together on the train. Peggy and Ed, with their children, had decided to defer their visit until a time when there wouldn’t be so many people for Harriette to deal with. Joan didn’t go to Boston either, because she had to work at the coffeehouse on weekends. That was when it was crowded, and she was allowed to read her poetry.

“How pretty!” Rose exclaimed when they got there. “In some ways it reminds me of Bristol.”

Aunt Harriette and her new husband lived in a suburb called Brookline, in a two-story house with white columns in front of it and a gray roof. They had large trees, and a flower garden. There was a little brass ornament attached to the door frame, which Harriette told them was called a mezuzah, and that it was a part of her husband’s religion, something a good Jew put on his door frame for luck.

“How charming,” Rose said.

Like the religious Catholics hang crosses on the walls of their houses, Ginger thought, and wondered if Chris’s family had crucifixes around. He had never acted as if his parents were particularly pious. She realized that she knew so much about him and yet she didn’t know anything about where he came from. The two of them had not discussed their families except in passing; they had talked about themselves, the most interesting subjects in the world.

Julius was an almost elderly, massive, handsome man with a large head and thick gray hair. Aunt Harriette seemed to have become more Jewish than he was. It was Friday night, and he took the family to a seafood restaurant that was a favorite of his, and on the way she told them that she would have been perfectly happy to make a traditional Sabbath meal but that he didn’t want her to. “I had that with my first wife,” he said. “I don’t need that. She was the one who cared.”

She’d better not turn into his first wife, Ginger thought. As exotic and strange as the family found Julius Wanderer, so did he find Harriette Smith. It was their difference that seemed to have attracted them to each other. Although Ginger had not had much life experience, she had never met two people so unlike, and she could see they flourished on it. She hoped Aunt Harriette would stay her crazy, nervous self and let Julius keep rescuing her.

Ginger had telephoned Chris the moment she had arrived, and they had made plans to have dinner at his house on Saturday. He had extended the invitation to her parents too, but they had promised to let Julius and Harriette take them to their country club, so Uncle Hugh volunteered to drop her off at the Rileys’, in one of the Wanderers’ two cars, and join the others later. Ginger put him on the phone with Chris to get the directions.

She hated that people always had to take her places, as if she were still a child. But she could hardly sleep the night before for excitement that she was going to see him at last. How would they have to behave in front of his parents? Would they kiss hello? Shake hands? She supposed formality was the best course to take until his parents decided they liked her. She had no idea how much Chris had told them about her, if anything.

It seemed as if everyone she knew lived in the suburbs of Boston, although there was a large central city. Christopher Riley’s family lived in a suburb called Newton. They had a nice white-painted house like Aunt Harriette’s, and grass and trees. Chris opened the front door himself, sitting in his wheelchair—the same beautiful muscular arms, the same adorable face. Ginger was so in love that her breath caught in her throat at the sight of him. Nothing had changed, not the way he looked, or the way she felt.

“I’m the uncle and I’m late to dinner,” Uncle Hugh said, and left.

“Oh, Chris,” Ginger said. “Oh, Chris . . .” She looked into his eyes and thought she was going to die right there.

“Hey,” he said. “You tied ribbons on your wheelchair.”

“The way I said I was going to do with my crutches,” she murmured, telling herself not to feel hurt. She had expected a more romantic greeting. Look at
me,
she thought, you’re not like the others, who only see the equipment. Do I look pretty, sexy? Are you glad to see me? Then his mother appeared behind him, a slender sandy-haired woman, wearing a green dress and an apron. She had Chris’s turned-up nose and sensuous lips, or rather, Ginger supposed, he had hers.

“Mom, this is my friend Ginger Carson, from Warm Springs,” Christopher said.

“Come right in, dear. How nice of you to visit us when I know you have your family. Chris has spoken about you often.”

What am I to think? Ginger thought in despair. Nice of me to visit? But at least he did talk about me, he mentioned my name. “Thank you,” she said. “It was good of you to invite me.”

His father, dark-haired, and from whom Chris got his height, rose from his seat in front of the television set to greet her. “How about a Coke?”

“Thank you.”

His father gave them Cokes and went back to his TV, while his mother went back to making the dinner, leaving Ginger and Chris alone. He immediately took her on a guided tour of the ground floor. The furniture was modern, there were watercolors on the walls, and no crucifixes. “My room,” he said finally, leading the way in there.

He shut the door, and then he leaned over and kissed her. Ginger felt it just as if it had been the first time. She kissed him back, and held on to him, but then he moved away.

“My parents,” he whispered. “We can’t get excited.”

Ginger looked around his room. He had posters of sports figures and racing cars, and on the bookcase there were some tennis trophies he had won before all this happened to him. “The emotional life goes on,” she said.

“What?”

“Your room. The things we like. Our dreams.”

“Oh, yes.”

He knew her, they were in tandem again. “Where’s your sister?” Ginger asked. He had a younger sister who was twelve.

“She’ll be thundering down any minute.”

Ginger looked at his bed, a single bed, like hers, the first time she had ever seen any bed he lay on at night. She imagined lying on it with him. There was a night table next to the bed, and on the table a black telephone. That was where he took her calls. She found it all overwhelmingly intimate.

“I missed you so much,” she said.

“I’m glad you could come tonight.”

“Me too.”

There was a framed photograph on the night table, of four people, two boys and two girls. They were all smiling. One of them was Chris. He was sitting down and the other three were standing up, leaning over him to get into the shot. The picture had apparently been taken at a party. Their eyes were orange from the flashbulb. Next to it was a more formal framed photo of a girl alone, the same girl as one of those in the group picture. She was pretty, with short brown hair, and now you could see her eyes were dark.

“Who is that?” Ginger asked.

“Oh, my friend Laura.”

“You have her picture?”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.” You don’t have mine, Ginger thought. She felt something cold crawling up her arms and waited for it to overtake her heart. “Is she an old friend?”

“We go to school together.”

Then why do you need her picture by your bed when you see her every day, Ginger wanted to say. But she didn’t.

“I guess I’m jealous,” she said lightly, and smiled.

He didn’t smile back. “You shouldn’t be jealous,” he said. “I live here, you live in New York. I have people here, and a life. You have one too, don’t you?”

“I tell you everything I do.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

He shrugged. “You’re the best friend I ever had, Ginger,” he said. “Nothing will change our friendship.”

The cold creature had touched her heart now. She didn’t know what had happened to love, but all she knew was that she had become his friend. His best friend, but only that. “Is Laura your girlfriend now?” she asked, and immediately wished she hadn’t.

“For now.” He sounded embarrassed.

“Are you going to go to college with her?”

“No. I don’t know. Why are you asking me these things?”

“Because I guess you’re not going to college with me.”

“My parents want me to go to B.U. I probably will. I told you I was thinking about it.” He looked distressed, as if he had been unjustly accused of some sin he knew nothing about.

“She can walk, can’t she,” Ginger said bitterly. Her words sat there for a moment, a hated presence, showing who she was and who he was, and how the world was. He looked even more distressed, as if he would like to depart, but of course he couldn’t; it was his house, and where would he go?

“Do you think that’s why I
like
her?” Chris said.