Nonfiction by David Blumenfeld
August 1, 1944
I’m almost seven. Mother tells me she’s going to have a baby. I think: That’s why her belly has gotten so big. Smiling, she says how nice it will be to have a little brother or sister. I’ll be the big brother. I feel grown up and hope for a boy.
October 3, 1944
Mother returns from the hospital with baby Barry, a fair-skinned, blond, blue-eyed boy with a tiny, button nose. In our family, only Bubby Rebecca, my paternal grandmother, has blue eyes and everyone says that’s where baby Barry’s eyes came from. I wonder: Do eye colors come from relatives? How? But there isn’t a single blond in our family and Barry is a tow head, whose yellow-white hair is like a gold and silver crown. A flaxen-haired babe has miraculously been born to a dark-skinned, eastern-European Jewish family! Friends needle Dad that someone else got into the act. I ask myself: What does that mean? But Dad adores his blue-eyed baby. Does he adore him more than he adores me? Me, who was here first? Aunt Gert and Uncle Murph, who have no children, treat Barry like their own child, the one they want but, for some reason, cannot have. As the years pass, Barry becomes even more beautiful: the bright-eyed, good-natured, golden-haired child loved by all.
Summer, 1951
Every parent and every child old enough to read the daily paper or see newsreels in movie theaters lives in fear of polio, the crippling disease that typically strikes the young, especially in the summer. It has even struck President Roosevelt, though the press keeps it hidden. Newsreels show physically stunted young polio victims with crutches and leg braces trying awkwardly to relearn to walk. Worse yet are those who lay prone, encased in an “iron lung,” or early respirator, a huge box that covers them from neck to foot, leaving them immobile, imprisoned alive in a metal tomb. I shudder and pray to God neither I nor anyone I care about will suffer such a horrific fate.
September 14 – 16, 1951
Barry goes to a summer camp and after a few days, returns home with a violent illness. I try to read to him but he is too sick to listen. Mom and Dad rush him to the hospital, where they learn that he has bulbar polio, the most devastating form of the disease. The next day the family gathers at Grandpa Ben’s and Bubby Rebecca’s apartment waiting for news from Mother who is at the hospital by Barry’s side. After what seems like endless hours, Mother staggers into the apartment, her face bloodless and ghost-like, and collapses into a chair. “He’s dead,” she says, grimacing and clearly in shock. After a second’s pause, there bursts from the rest of us a wail the likes of which I have never heard before and, God willing, I shall never hear again. It says: Everything worthwhile, everything good and bright in the world, has vanished and can never be restored.
September 17, 1951
In the following days, Dad cries only briefly but looks as though someone has kicked him brutally in the stomach. Then he sucks it up and soldiers on, hiding his grief as best he can. Everyone fears that Mother, who has a history of mental illness, will collapse. But she does no such thing. She collects herself and, as if on autopilot, mechanically and with blank eyes, arranges for the funeral and for sitting shiva, the week-long Jewish mourning period when friends gather at the home of the bereaved family to support them. In the next few days, with a stolid and impassive visage, she does much else and makes many wise decisions. For more than a decade she speaks of Barry almost daily, visiting his grave at least once a week.
Years later, while rummaging through a drawer of old clothing in a room Barry and I shared, I find a little, neatly-ironed suit of his that she has preserved as a keepsake. I suspect that it is not the only such memento mori buried in the house to remind her of him. Polio casts a pall over my mother for the rest of her life.
1952
1952 sees the worst polio outbreak in U.S. history: 57,000 cases, primarily among children. In 1953, Jonas Salk successfully tests a polio vaccine and, despite some early setbacks, hope arises that someday polio will be eradicated. By 2020, the three most common forms of the disease are declared eradicated everywhere but in Asia and are endemic only in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yet new strains of the disease are beginning to emerge and as we have learned, viruses that threaten one country, threaten us all. Caveat mundus: Let the world beware! May there never again be polio deaths like my brother Barry’s.
(Editor’s Note: On 22 July 2022, the New York Times publishes the story Rare Case of Polio Prompts Alarm and an Urgent Investigation in New York. “Health officials in Rockland County…urged the public to get shots as they investigated whether the disease had spread to others.”)
David Blumenfeld (aka Dean Flowerfield) is an 84-year-old retired philosophy professor and associate dean who only recently returned to writing stories, poetry, and children’s literature, which he abandoned in his thirties to devote full-time to philosophy. He is happy to have returned to a road only briefly taken.
