Learning the Code

COMMIT ACTS OF KINDNESS!

—a bumper sticker

IN late July 1944 life for me was suddenly framed by a sense of ending. I had just turned eleven that May, an age at which most boys are old enough to realize that death is inevitable. Yet all eleven-year-olds measure life through the mysteries of impending adolescence—which meant that it wasn’t the death of my legs or the fear that the sudden onset of illness was yet another punishment inflicted by the mysterious metaphysics of the body that I found difficult to accept. Eleven-year-olds willingly grant death its prerogatives, if only because the only indisputable fact of life at eleven is how painfully quixotic it can be. As terrified as I was of this sudden inability to move my legs it somehow seemed curiously natural to wake and find one’s body suddenly reduced to a burning slab of pain.

I don’t remember having heard the word polio before the virus took me down. Yet it struck me from the onset as appropriately onomatopoeic. Simply to sound the word out gloved fear from the beginning. That illness had established its kingship over my body was one more unexplainable aspect of a world at war. Sixty-three years later that war remains the counterimage of my embattled body. Long before I read Heraclitus’s line “Death is everywhere, in the voices of all men,” I was acquainted with its accuracy. Because of the war death’s inevitability seemed almost reassuring—not that I had any desire to die at the onset of illness. I passionately wanted to live. Only, as I wondered whether I would soon embrace that farthest shore, I didn’t feel any greater fear of death than I do today as a man in his seventies. In 1944 eleven-year-olds were on curiously intimate terms with the idea of death. American life was rooted to those sudden endings that had become a staple of the radio and newspapers. Calamity invariably seemed just around the corner in a nation barraged by daily renditions of the barbarism of the Nazis and Japs (who didn’t become Japanese until the war’s end). Death hovered in the air, and one didn’t need Professor McLuhan to understand that brutal naked catastrophe could seek one out at any moment.

And when catastrophe came it would inevitably be personal. I myself was somehow responsible for lying flat on my back and board-stiff in a small country hospital in Cold Spring, New York, just as I was somehow responsible for the fact that in that same room Jerry, one of the four boys with whom I shared a bunk, lay choking to death in an oxygen tent that loomed over us like a giant yellow balloon. Had I not begged my parents to send me to camp until I finally succeeded in wearing down their immigrant fear? Eastern European Jews who had never mastered America, they desperately wanted their sons to be part of a nation where even a workingman’s children could escape the city’s summer heat. Two weeks in “the country” would be “healthy.” How could fresh air and green grass and chirping crickets possibly harm an eleven-year-old?

I breathed that air and I ran through that grass and I swam in a dark lake far beyond their fearful immigrant eyes—until I awoke one morning to discover I could run no more. Long before Milton Friedman made it a conservative mantra, any New York child could have testified to his statement, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” It was cataclysmic but not altogether surprising to wake in the middle of the night two days before I was to return home and find that my legs no longer held me up. I reacted to that discovery in typical eleven-year-old fashion—by crawling back to bed and going back to sleep. Morning would prove it all a bad dream. But morning brought only the ambulance that would take me to the Julia Butterfield Memorial Hospital in Cold Spring.

Jerry...