The Plague and I Read online

  Dedication

  For Dr. Robert M. Stith, Dr. Clyde R. Jensen

  and Dr. Bernard P. Mullen without whose generous

  hearts and helping hands I would probably

  be just another name on a tombstone.

  Contents

  Dedication

  I “O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN!”

  II I HAVE A LITTLE SHADOW—WHO DON’T?

  III “GOOD-BYE, GOOD-BYE TO EVERYTHING!”

  IV ALL NEW PATIENTS MUST FIRST BE BOILED

  V OH, SALVADORA! DON’T SPIT ON THE FLOORA

  VI ANYBODY CAN HAVE TUBERCULOSIS

  VII HEAVY, HEAVY HANGS ON OUR HANDS

  VIII I’M COLD AND SO IS THE ATTITUDE THE STAFF

  IX KIMI

  X A SMILE OR A SCAR

  XI DECK THE HALLS WITH OLD CREPE PAPER! TRA, LA, LA, LA, LA, LALA, LA, LA!

  XII OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY

  XIII MY OPERATION

  XIV AMBULANT HOSPITAL

  XV EIGHT HOURS UP

  XVI A TOECOVER AND HOW IT BREEDS

  XVII PRIVILEGES

  XVIII “LET ME OUT! LET ME OUT!”

  XIX “WHOM’S WITH WHO!”

  Also by Betty MacDonald

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I

  “O Captain! My Captain!”

  The Captain of all these men of death that came against him to take him away, was the Consumption, for it was that that brought him down to the grave.

  —Bunyan, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman

  GETTING TUBERCULOSIS IN the middle of your life is like starting downtown to do a lot of urgent errands and being hit by a bus. When you regain consciousness you remember nothing about the urgent errands. You can’t even remember where you were going. The important things now are the pain in your leg; the soreness in your back; what you will have for dinner; who is in the next bed.

  By background and disposition some people are better suited to being hit by a bus than others. For instance Doris, who had worked in a Government office with me. Her mother had a little tumor, her father had a “bad leg,” Doris had a great deal of “female trouble,” and they all were hoping that Granny had cancer. Doris, her brothers and sisters, her aunts and uncles, her mother and father, her grandmother and grandfather, all of them, had begun life as barely formed, tiny little premature babies carried around on pillows and fed with eyedroppers. If they did manage to pull through the first year, and they often did, life from then on was one continuous ache, pain, sniffle and cough. When Doris or any member of her large ailing family asked each other how they felt, it wasn’t just a pleasantry, they really wanted to know.

  They were so anxious to be sick that they prepared for colds days in advance of the actual germs, like training for the big game. Doris would say Monday morning at breakfast that she thought she felt as if she might be getting a cold. Instantly the whole household was en garde, and for the next week Doris was given hot tea, whiskey and lemon; a little sweater to wear under her blouse; many pills to take at the office, including nose drops which she administered by lying across her desk with her head hanging over the edge; a small screen to put around her desk to ward off draughts; sun lamp treatments on her back; mustard foot baths and plenty of encouragement.

  By Saturday she usually had “the sniffles” as they called it, and during the next week she worked it into something big. To Doris and her family tuberculosis would have been anti-climactic but a definite asset. So of course it was not Doris but I who got tuberculosis, and the contrast between our families was noticeable.

  In the first place our family motto was “People are healthy and anybody who isn’t is a big stinker.” In the second place there were five children in the family but not one little premature baby. We began life as large, plump, full time babies, filled with vigor and strength and all but one had bright red hair. My father, a mining engineer and a great admirer of health, spent much of his spare time and energy maintaining our good health. As soon as we were able, he made us run around the block every morning before breakfast in winter; hike for miles and miles in the mountains with mother and him in summer; go to bed every night at eight o’clock; drink ten glasses of water a day; and play out of doors (much against our wills) during all daylight hours.

  For my sister Mary and my brother Cleve (sisters Dede and Alison were yet to come), this routine brought the desired results but as I grew out of infancy I turned thin and olive green and remained so no matter how many times I ran around the block, which was undoubtedly why I was Gammy’s favorite child.

  Gammy was my father’s mother who lived with us and consistently undermined his health program. Gammy was a wonderful grandmother. She was a tireless reader-alouder, doll-clothes sewer, storyteller and walk-taker, but she was a pessimist, the kind of pessimist who gives every cloud a pitch black lining. With Gammy the state of being pessimistic was not a spasmodic thing induced by nerves or ill health, it was a twenty-four-hour proposition and she enjoyed it. She began her black premonitory remarks each morning as Daddy forced Mary and Cleve and me out the front door to run around the block.

  We were living in Butte, Montana, the mornings were often bitterly cold, and we children, who were not exactly eager good sports about this morning exercise, would rush in from our rooms and sit down to breakfast, hoping that Daddy had forgotten about the morning run. But he never did. “Let’s see some color in those cheeks,” he would say heartily, unclamping our fingers from spoons and forks, stuffing us into our coats and rubbers and driving us out into the crisp morning air. Gammy would stand by the door waving her “apern” and wailing, “Darsie Bard, how can you drive those poor little cheeldrun out into this bitter cold?”

  We’d hang around the steps blowing our hot breaths into the freezing air and watching them smoke and hoping that Gammy would soften Daddy, but he only laughed at Gammy and shut the door firmly and finally. We’d start out then moodily shuffling our feet and pushing each other off the sidewalk into the deep snow but about halfway down the block the natural childish spirit of competition would come bubbling up and we’d race each other the rest of the way and arrive back at the house with full circulating blood and, in the case of Mary and Cleve, rosy cheeks. The first one in the back door would always hear Gammy say, “Here come the poor little things now, I’ll fix them some hot Potsum.” (She always called Postum “Potsum.”)

  After she had fixed us some hot Potsum and had given us each a much too big helping of her gray, gluey, lumpy oatmeal, Gammy would pick up the morning paper and read aloud bad news. “I see that the Huns are cutting off all the Belgian women’s breasts,” she would remark pleasantly as she took a sip of Potsum. Or, “Well, here’s a poor careless little child who played on the railroad tracks and the train came along and cut off both his legs at the hip. Poor little legless creature.” Or, “Here’s a little mountain girl who had a baby at thirteen. Well, I suppose we can’t start too young to learn what life has in store for us.” When she had exhausted all the sad news about people, she would read bad weather reports from all over the world. Blizzards, cyclones, droughts, floods, hurricanes and tidal waves were her pleasure. Mother pleaded with Daddy to stop taking the morning paper, but we children enjoyed it.

  Like all children, we were bloodthirsty little monsters and relished Gammy’s tales of brutality, death and violence. Our favorite stories, made up by Gammy, were about a little boy who put beans up his nose and grew a beanstalk through the top of his head with little pieces of his brain stuck to the branches; and a little girl who swallowed a peach stone and a peach tree grew inside her, the main branch finally forcing its way up into her throat and choking her to death. Our favorite books were Slovenly Peter and a cheery little thing left in one of our house
s by a former tenant that told about some men who were trapped in a cave in the Yellowstone and ate each other up. The book described in detail the smell of the soup made out of Tom’s leg and the sweet, porky taste of Ernest’s roasted arms. We almost wore it out making Gammy read it to us, which she did willingly.

  Gammy thought all of Daddy’s efforts to keep us healthy were a ridiculous waste of time and no wonder, because according to Gammy childhood was a very hazardous time of life and if we children weren’t bitten by rattlesnakes, eaten by wild animals, killed by robbers or struck by lightning, catarrh, consumption and leprosy were just around the corner. Gammy said that catarrh, consumption and leprosy were diseases very common to little children and were brought on by coasting too late; not making your bed; quarreling; not feeding the chickens; keeping bad company; not washing your hands; cheating at croquet; being impudent and eating too many eggs.

  We learned first about catarrh and consumption. Leprosy came a little later. Gammy diagnosed anything wrong above the neck as “catarrh” and anything below as “consumption.” We weren’t afraid of catarrh. It was just an old thing that made our noses run and often presaged one of the less interesting children’s diseases such as measles, scarlet fever or chickenpox. But consumption was different. It was vague in cause and effect but seemed very fatal and so easy to get. Look at “poor little Beth,” Robert Louis Stevenson, Chopin, Keats, O. Henry, Elizabeth Browning, Thoreau and Paganini.

  We knew about consumption because Gammy took great pleasure in reading aloud to us in a sepulchral voice about “the Captain of all these men of death that came against him to take him away, was the Consumption. . . .” Mary had a very bad cold when Gammy first read that part in Mr. Badman and I remember that Gammy used to look over at her a lot and say “poor little thing.” We were so sure that Mary would get consumption that Cleve and I had a fight over who was to inherit her ice skates. When Gammy read us Little Women she explained to us mournfully that “poor little Beth” really died of consumption. She read us all of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poems but dwelt morbidly on “When I was sick and lay a-bed . . .” and told us that “poor little Robert Louis Stevenson” always had consumption and finally died of it.

  Mary, Cleve and I had perilously achieved the ripe old ages of eight, six and five when leprosy entered our lives. One winter afternoon just after lunch, Gammy announced that she was taking us to see Charlie Chaplin. As this was to be our first moving picture show, we were immediately thrown into a frenzy of anticipation and paid little heed as Gammy hurriedly stuffed us into each other’s clothes. To Gammy, clothes were mere coverings for the body as opposed to the sin of nakedness and she was completely indifferent to backs and fronts, rights and lefts and sizes. She matched garments and children by the simple expedient of grabbing the nearest at hand of each and forcing them to mesh.

  That winter we were all wearing dark blue woolen leggings buttoned from the ankle to well above the knee with little slippery black buttons like licorice drops; dark blue chinchilla reefer coats; woolen mittens securely attached to each other by a long crocheted cord that was supposed to be threaded up one sleeve, around the neck and down the other sleeve but was more apt to be threaded through a legging leg and into somebody else’s coat sleeve or up through one sleeve and down into the impenetrable depths of the lining; and shiny black rubbers that were impossible to tell apart or to get on or off but squeaked deliciously on the hard dry snow.

  Mary and I were distinguished from Cleve by broad-brimmed dark blue beaver hats which Gammy clamped on our heads just as she finished forcing my hand into Mary’s mitten and herding us out the front door and into the biting winter air. In the excitement, we creaked along in the snow for half a block before we became aware that Mary had on Cleve’s leggings which were so tight in the crotch that she had to walk on tiptoe, that Cleve’s coat was buttoned up the back leaving him red-faced and choking in the front and that he was further hampered by Mary’s leggings which were so long for him that they dragged behind him in the snow like dark blue evening shadows; and that all of our rubbers seemed to be for the same foot.

  We stopped short and demanded to be sorted out and reassembled, but Gammy said there was no time and that anyway it could be done much more comfortably in the warm theatre. She grabbed me by the hand and started up the street again but Cleve and Mary didn’t follow. They sat stubbornly down in the snow and began laboriously unbuttoning the slippery little black legging buttons with clumsy mittened fingers. Gammy finally had to go back and help them change clothes and though they were much more comfortable we missed most of the Charlie Chaplin picture.

  Gammy said not to mind because they would show it right over again, which was where she was wrong and how leprosy entered our lives. Because when the movie started again instead of Charlie Chaplin there was a long depressing picture about leprosy. My memory of the story is vague but I do remember something about a man, obviously a fine scientist, working in his laboratory and suddenly looking up from his microscope right at the audience and with big scared eyes saying something. The word came on the screen next. All by itself and in black letters. LEPROSY! Gammy read it to us and explained comfortingly, “Leprosy is a dreadful disease. There is no cure for it. They always die!”

  Subsequent scenes showed the fine scientist washing his hands thoroughly, many times. Then one morning he happened to be washing his hands and he looked at his wrist and there was a white spot the size of a fifty-cent piece. He rushed to another scientist and showed him. Then they both looked at the spot under the microscope and, sure enough, leprosy. The rest of the picture was devoted to the white spots, horrible sores, arms and legs dropping off, a beautiful girl getting leprosy and a man jumping off a building.

  I don’t remember whether or not we ever saw Charlie Chaplin again but I do remember that we stopped under a street light on our way home, rolled up our sleeves and looked for the dreaded white spots, and that for weeks afterwards we examined our arms every morning and night looking for spots. Several times Cleve became very alarmed until he realized that the white spot on his dirty little arm was just a place where some water had dropped by mistake because, although we were scared, we hadn’t yet reached that point of desperation where we washed thoroughly.

  On the other hand, we figured that Daddy, being a mining engineer, was a kind of scientist and we pleaded with him constantly to wash his hands more thoroughly and every morning we examined his wrists. He finally wanted to know what in hell was the matter with us, so we told him about the moving picture. He immediately forbade our going to any more moving pictures, then got out the Encyclopaedia Brittanica and read us a long comprehensive article on leprosy and leper colonies. We listened carefully, as Daddy read aloud very well and then we compared Daddy’s information with Gammy’s and decided that Gammy knew the most because she had already added leprosy to catarrh and consumption as being ordinary ailments for small children. Leprosy, she told us, was the immediate and natural result of keeping bad company and not washing enough.

  When we children were eleven, nine, eight and two we left Butte and moved to Seattle, Washington. Up to this time and in spite of Daddy’s ministerings in the form of exercise and Mother’s in the form of good food, we had had, to date, measles, mumps, chickenpox, pink eye, scarlet fever, whooping cough and tonsillectomies. It was after the last batch of German measles that Daddy began checking up on the health strains of both sides of the family. He found them excellent. Mother’s ancestors were Dutch and had all lived actively for eighty-five or ninety years. Mother herself was never sick. Daddy’s forebears were Scotch and terrifically healthy. Daddy himself displayed the utmost in stamina by growing up to be tall, handsome and vital in spite of Gammy’s cooking.

  Daddy decided that all his children needed was a good toning up, so he bought a set of exercise records for the Victrola and made us get up at five a.m. to take cold baths and do exercises. He enrolled us in the YWCA and YWCA gymnasium classes. He started Mary and me taking ba
llet dancing. He had the ballroom in the basement of our house made into a gymnasium. He would not let us eat salt. He stopped our drinking water with our meals. He ordered us to chew each bite one hundred times. He bought apples by the carload and made us eat brick-hard toast and raw vegetables. He read us long dull articles on natural foods and the diets of the aborigines of different countries.

  Evidently some tribe with good bone structure and sound teeth had eaten nothing but smoked fish because Daddy bought one hundred pounds of smoked herring and instructed us to gnaw on it after school. Fortunately for us he gave Mother the instructions and the herring just as he left on a mining trip, so she helped us shovel the whole hundred pounds of it into the furnace. When he came home a month or so later he had forgotten all about the herring and ordered an enormous canvas sack of hardtack for us to gnaw on after school. We ate the entire lot eventually because Gammy taught us to soften it by dipping it in hot cocoa or Taylor Tea (hot water with sugar and milk). He also bought one hundred pounds of peanuts, “a natural food high in protein,” which we thought was more like it. We loved peanuts and filled our pockets with them morning and night. For weeks Mother said that she could follow our little peanut-shell trails to and from school and around the neighborhood. She could also follow them through the house, much to her annoyance.

  When Daddy first started the cold baths he put us on our honor, so of course we cheated. We used to go into the bathroom fully dressed and run the cold water loud and forcefully. Then, when the tub was full, we’d lean over and splat our hands and scream as though we were jumping in. For one blissful week not a drop of cold water, in fact any kind of water, touched our innocent little bodies. Daddy didn’t say anthing. He merely watched speculatively as each morning we lined up for our exercises, smiling blandly, very dry and obviously warm and tousled from our beds. Then he went downtown and bought some large, brown, rough, English towels and from then on personally supervised the torture.