A revelatory memoir of a polio survivor

June 27, 2007|Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR’s Polio Haven, By Susan Richards Shreve, Houghton Mifflin, 215 pp., $24

Our cultural fascination with illness derives in part from the impact that disease has on the social order -- the fears of contagion, the rush for a cure or a vaccine, the almost predictable ostracism that befalls victims (a rough moral insurance that it could never happen to us). These tenets have held in the modern world from smallpox to AIDS, though the polio epidemics of the mid-20th century may have occupied a unique place in the collective consciousness. The worst casualties of polio are often children, whose immune systems are not yet strong enough to fight back, and the virus tends to maim rather than kill. So we were left with the photographs: of kids on crutches or in iron lungs, of March of Dimes poster children with broken bodies and strong hearts. The visual metaphors were anguished but ongoing: If polio let you live, it left a permanent reminder of what it had taken.

Novelist Susan Richards Shreve contracted the disease as an infant in 1941; by the time she was 3, she was able to walk with braces on both legs -- and with the help of a mother who is one of the competing female heroines of "Warm Springs."

"We were odd," writes Shreve about the Richards family more than halfway through this affecting memoir, though by now the reader has long since figured that out. Her father was a radio broadcaster in Washington, D.C., who took in stray dogs and drunken journalists. Her mother, who dressed out of French Vogue and counseled her daughter to stand like a dancer, retired to her bedroom for a year when Shreve was 8; the family installed a Dutch door so that Mrs. Richards could hear conversations from the rest of the house. Yet she had tirelessly worked with her daughter's frail body until the girl was able to hobble forth into the world, imbuing her with a nobility of spirit that is as striking as anything in "Warm Springs."

" 'Speak first,' my mother had always told me," writes Shreve, "knowing that a bony child on crutches with the dark demeanor of a war survivor might not be well received. 'Say "I'm Susan Richards" and smile and reach out your hand.' " It was advice that the finest etiquette schools might have envied, and probably as essential as any treatment Shreve endured.