The Sunday Gentleman Page 10

  In New York, I had heard much criticism of these prostheses, but the only time at Lawson that their inadequacy was referred to in my presence, I brought it up. I mentioned to the colonel, as we were leaving the hospital one afternoon, that I had read a magazine article by that young Bolte who had lost a leg at El Alamein, in which he insisted that injured veterans were not getting the artificial limbs they deserved. I told the colonel that Bolte had charged that army prostheses were too heavy, too fragile, too noisy, too crude. “It was quite an article,” I said.

  The colonel said nothing. He strode along beside me for about a half minute as if he hadn’t heard, then he spoke. “Was it terrifying?”

  I said, “No. Intelligent.”

  He lapsed into silence, and the subject was never introduced again, nor did I attempt to bring it up, nor did I hear anything more about it from anyone else at Lawson.

  The second part of our motion picture, on the construction and use of upper extremity prostheses, was comparatively simple. The patient who had lost his arm just below the elbow, for example, knelt down before a table, placed both his stump and his good arm on brown paper, and tracings were made. From these tracings an arm cuff, leather bucket for the stump, a steel frame and joints, and a hook, were assembled and fitted. The final limb usually weighed about two and a half pounds.

  My mentor, in the upper extremity department, was a thin, factual sergeant named Lukasch. He had been in the shop for thirty-seven months and he was tired. “Before comin’ here,” he told me, “I never saw a prosthesis. I was a metal patternmaker. Lookit me now.” He meant that I should look at the long, gray ledger he pulled off the shelf and opened. He had supervised the first artificial arm made at Lawson, and the birth was in the ledger. The patient’s name. The date, June, 1943. Lukasch flipped the pages. Each was filled, top to bottom, both sides, with names and dates. Lukasch slapped the ledger shut. “Seven hundred arms since I been here,” he said. “That’s a helluva lot of arms.”

  When a patient acquired an arm from Lukasch, he took it through the maze of drafty corridors to a department called “Occupational Therapy.” This was three large rooms, rigged up for the most like an advanced kindergarten, and inhabited by a number of intense she-therapists dressed like nurses and some plump Gray Ladies who hovered in the background. In this department, for fourteen consecutive days, the amputee learned to live with his arm and master it.

  A small, pert, brunette therapist, a good-looker from Minnesota named Miss Beardsley, eagerly guided me about and supplied the commentary. “Our job is to train the arm amp to use his prosthesis adequately,” she said with a professional air. She had a wonderfully indignant quality about her. She would show small patience for an amp who pitied himself. And she would tear you apart if you did not appreciate what those boys had been through. I liked her very much.

  When I looked, I could see that she was wearing an engagement ring. I thought about the type of fellow she might marry. I thought not a soldier. Then I thought yes, a soldier. An intelligent soldier who is also an amp. But I did not ask her.

  She marched me over to a table. On it lay a checkerboard, with checkers that appeared to have been designed by a drunk. The checkers were as impossible as a chess set with elephantiasis. Miss Beardsley said that this was called graded checkers, and that all arm patients had to play it because the game taught them to open and close their hooks. Miss Beardsley led me from item to item, explaining that arm patients had to learn to do everything with their hooks—to drive a car and change a tire, to dress and garden and handle a can opener, to manipulate safety pins and scissors and machinery.

  I inquired if there was some activity the men participated in as a group, something we might film that would show the awkwardness of the amps without their prostheses and then their skill using their prostheses. She said yes, there was one activity—poker. “That’ll make your point on the screen. They shuffle cards quite well with their hooks. Without the hooks—well, it takes two of them working together to shuffle the deck each time.”

  Since the prostheses were so valuable, I asked how the men themselves felt about them. Miss Beardsley wrinkled her nose. “They hate to strap on those arms,” she said. “They say it’s like a saddle on a filly, like a girdle on a girl. Lots of them throw their limbs away when they leave here, but they’re foolish, because the limbs are helpful.” I ventured that perhaps the men hated the hooks just as sailors hated those monkey suits. She said that was so, that lots of the boys discarded their hooks when they left Lawson and replaced them with cosmetic hands, which were prettier, but valueless. “The hook is functional,” she said. “The boys must learn to accept it themselves, and then, even though it’s ugly, they can make others accept it.” I asked if there were many married men worrying about the hooks and their wives’ reactions. Miss Beardsley became indignant. “Of course, there are married men and of course their wives don’t mind!” She pulled back the arrow and let fly. “Why, I’m marrying one of our amps in the spring!” Her amp had been a sergeant and now he was with his parents in Chicago and would be back to take her away from all this. I was happy for her. For him, too.

  Miss Beardsley told me how the arm amps graduated. “On the fourteenth day, the patient is given a proficiency test. Sort of an obstacle course. The patient goes into that little room over there, by himself, and in thirty minutes, he must finish each of these fourteen tasks. One of us watches him, from time to time, through a peephole. If he makes it, he graduates. He is a civilian.”

  She showed me the test. It was at once pathetic and Herculean. It read:

  “Proficiency Test Requirements. Check each item as you complete it. The test must be completed in thirty minutes…Close and lock door. Sharpen pencil. Cut meat. Butter bread. Turn on faucet. Fill glass with water. Tie tie. Wrap package. Answer phone. Put watch on wrist…”

  When I was leaving, I saw on the bulletin board clippings of famous one-armed athletes who had lectured at Lawson. I asked if they helped morale. Miss Beardsley said no, not if they were injured in World War I. The patients were bored with accomplishments of World War I amputees. The patients said to each other, “Hell, he’s had more than twenty years to learn. Wait’ll you see me after twenty years.” But the amps of this war, who were already proficient, were real morale builders. One officer, who had lost both arms but now used prostheses successfully, had been brought back three times to lecture.

  As much as I wanted to, in my period at Lawson, I could not avoid the amps themselves. Particularly, the legless. Wherever I went, there they were. They swarmed through the corridors, every afternoon—men in wheelchairs, bandaged stumps protruding, wheeled by members of Law-son’s permanent enlisted company; or men in wheelchairs piloting themselves with amazing speed. You would go into an office, and an amp would be stretched on a table, waiting. You would walk outdoors, and an amp, already fitted, would come hobbling toward you. You would go to the PX.

  The PX was the hardest to take. Every early afternoon, I went down the corridor, off Ward 10A, and into the Exchange. There they would be, jammed wheelchair to wheelchair, and crutch to crutch, gathered mostly about the women’s jewelry case or the smoking counters. Together, in groups, they were raucous, cheerful, profane. Together, they would scream at each other and shout wisecracks. I remember one enlisted man floundering into the PX, afraid to step on his new prosthesis, and a fat patient beside me screaming at him, “Come on, Tom, tell that leg who’s boss!”

  When the men were alone, I heard, it was different. Many became depressives, even serious paranoids, suffering from self-pity. Not only the endless hospitalization, a calvary, not only the maddening monotony of hours and days and bandages, punctuated with pain, but the knowledge that the limb is gone, plain goddamit gone, and no power in heaven or on earth can ever, ever in a whole lifetime, put the flesh and the bone back in that empty space.

  The colonel himself was aware of the amps’ psychological problems. In preparing research for our script, one day he dic
tated the following to me: “In the early functional use of a prosthesis, the fabric is the least important factor. More important are proper alignment and fitting…and even above the limb itself, in importance, stands the patient, the individual user. Upon the patient’s stamina, perseverance, upon his high integrity and his will, depends his early use of the well-fitted prosthesis and his return to normal and gainful living.” The colonel asked me to read it back to him. I read it back. He said, “Uh, that last phrase, change that last phrase to read ‘and his return to relative normal and gainful living.’”

  My very lowest moment with the amps occurred at the PX the afternoon I wandered in to buy a pair of short socks. I wanted a heavy pair, size twelve, light brown. The girl behind the counter said they had lots of everything except socks. I griped. But she was busy, so she said simply and as a fact, “Sarge, we just don’t have as much call for socks in this PX as for other things.”

  Living among the amps became a horrible embarrassment to me, and with each day and each contact my misery gnawed deeper. Always before, when people wanted to know what I did in the army, I was proud to say that I was a writer, writing propaganda and orientation and training films. I felt that this being a writer, proclaiming it, made me retain my civilian standing, my special high-level individuality. It was defensive evidence that I was not of the stupid herd, I was no part of the blurred GI image. It was my reaction to being pushed around and downgraded for three years and three months.

  Now, suddenly, among the amps, I was thoroughly ashamed and miserable. I was ashamed of everything, of how far I’d been from combat, of the amount of secondhand reporting converted into celluloid I’d contributed. Most of all, I was ashamed of my legs.

  My legs felt fat and luxurious when I walked on them, and I kept knowing the amps were looking at them and resenting them.

  I was glad when it was over.

  The train was fast going back. When I arrived at Pennsylvania Station, it was late in the evening, but still there were people clustered, waiting. I rode up on the escalator, and strode through the row of shops, and outside. It was snowing, light flakes swirling around and down, and I could see the pavement was glassy. I stood a while, watching people going and coming. People hurrying home for warmth and dryness and dinner and talk.

  I decided to walk up to Sixth Avenue and then to my hotel. Suddenly, in the snow and cold, the two weeks past seemed impossible, isolated like a half-forgotten event among creatures of a night’s dream in a hidden valley. Here there was life, and whole people were moving, talking, rustling newspapers, laughing loudly in groups. I began moving, too, and I shivered a little in the cold. I walked faster and faster, and did not slip, even though it was slippery. Nobody was looking at my legs.

  WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

  “The Amps” was a record I wrote primarily for myself, begun in Atlanta and finished in New York City, of my last assignment as an enlisted man in the United States Army.

  Of my three years and four months in the service, I spent one year in the Army Air Force writing training films, and after a transfer, the remaining period was spent in the Army Signal Corps writing orientation and propaganda films for our troops. Despite my efforts to become an overseas correspondent for Yank, the weekly periodical for all the services, I was never near the smoke of battle. The closest I came to combat was a credit dispute over an orientation film, waged with my superior officer, the renowned but exasperating Colonel Frank Capra.

  While stationed in Los Angeles, I had done the major writing job on Know Your Enemy Japan, and Colonel Capra, in submitting the list of credits to Washington, D.C., omitted my name completely, giving full credit instead to several well-known civilian writers who had played only a small role in the backbreaking policy effort. There was no appeal—nor should there have been, considering what other young men had done for their country without credit. But it was irritatingly amusing to know how Hollywood standards carried over into the army, where most of my group—including such co-workers as Captain John Huston and Colonel Theodore Geisel—lived a schizoid existence, half the time playing soldier, and half the time playing Hollywood producer or director or screenplay writer. For many of us, too, it was a schizoid existence in another way. Every day, we reported for roll call, in uniform, at a motion picture studio leased by the Army Signal Corps. There, we wrote narration for propaganda films telling our men why they were fighting and how to survive—or for what cause they might die—and then we went back to our cozy but uneasy homes at night (since there were no barracks on the post) to live as Hollywood civilians in uniform, deeply resentful of the real civilians all around us who were going merrily ahead making civilian money and who were free of the restrictions of army life. And yet all of us felt guilty about the real soldiers far away, who were suffering and dying on Iwo Jima or at Anzio, and who were unlikely to be helped one damn bit by our films.

  Finally, our post in Hollywood closed down, and with intense relief I learned that I was being transferred elsewhere. On November 8, 1945, I was transferred to the Signal Corps Photographic Center on Long Island, New York, but this was little better—for on this post, which was another reconverted motion picture studio, there had been or were still such officers and fellow enlisted men as William Saroyan, Irwin Shaw, John Cheever, Stanley Kramer, Gottfried Reinhardt, Carl Laemmle, Jr., to name but a few.

  In those last three months of my army career, since again there were no accommodations on the post, I lived at the Royalton Hotel on 44th Street in Manhattan. Every night, when I returned by subway from my Long Island post to the Royalton Hotel, I entered into a remarkable world. George Jean Nathan had a suite on one floor. Robert Benchley had a suite on another. And just before I left for Atlanta, Thomas Wolfe’s aged mother Julia (the Eliza Gant of Look Homeward, Angel) registered at the hotel. I met her one evening in the lobby, introducing myself with great diffidence as “a writer” and “an admirer” of her son, and after that, she talked on and on about Tom, as if he were alive and about to call for her, although he had been dead seven years. She had some unproduced and unpublished plays her Tom had written, and she was in New York hoping to arrange for either production or publication of them.

  I was eager to know Julia Wolfe better—there was even stirring within me, based on her lonely visit to New York, an idea for a novel—but it was not to be. My soldier-writer existence suddenly submerged my civilian-writer existence. The Army Signal Corps ordered me to Atlanta for what was to be, although I did not know it then, my last assignment, before my discharge in February of 1946. I was ordered to proceed to Atlanta to work with a colonel from St. Louis at Lawson General Hospital on a film project to be called Construction and Use of Provisional Prostheses.

  Altogether, I was in Atlanta for fourteen days. What the Army got out of my visit was a training film, which I wrote during my last two weeks in the service. What I got out of my assignment was the experience recounted in “The Amps,” a memoir which I wrote for myself. Long after, when I came to write my novel The Prize, and I sought a locale for the story of Professor Max Stratman and his bruised niece, Emily, my memories of the patients’ traumas at Lawson General Hospital came back to me, and I placed Stratman and Emily in Atlanta and at Lawson General Hospital.

  What I lost, because of this assignment, was a chance to get to know Thomas Wolfe’s mother better, and perhaps to develop a novel that might have been based on her. For when I returned to the Royalton Hotel, I learned that shortly after I had gone to Atlanta she had moved across the street to the Algonquin Hotel, and there, a few days before my return, she had died. Julia Wolfe was gone. Only Eliza Gant survived. It would be futile to attempt to show how well she had survived after “Eugene Gant’s” death—when I could no longer really know.

  Except for one day in 1961, when I reviewed my Atlanta experiences briefly in preparing The Prize, I did not reread “The Amps” until I decided to include it in this collection. Since rereading it, I have wondered what my colonel in the Orthopedi
c Surgery Building, then late thirtyish, now late fiftyish, had done with himself in the two decades since we had worked together. Had he remained in the service? Had he gone into private practice in St. Louis? Was he still involved with amps? It is unlikely I shall ever know, for I could not remember his name. What had happened to the Thing in the glass container in his office? Or to the triple amputee who had been a Georgia University football end? Or to those of the nation’s fifteen thousand amps who were patients in Atlanta when I was there? I do not know the answers. I made no effort to learn them. I did not have the nerve.

  All that I made an effort to find out, and all that I did learn, was that the Lawson General Hospital which I had seen I would never see again. The medical director of the Veterans Administration in Atlanta replied to my recent inquiry: “The Lawson General Hospital, as Mr. Wallace may have known it in 1945, has ceased to exist as a VA medical facility since 1951. In its stead, the Atlanta VA Hospital was established as a general medical and surgical facility, currently operating approximately three hundred beds for many types of acutely ill VA patients. Although amputees are often a small part of its patient population and a few prostheses are issued, it no longer remains or specializes as an amputee center.”

  And finally, I determined to find out what happened to the film I wrote for the Signal Corps after Atlanta, the film called Construction and Use of Provisional Prostheses. I do not mean that I was interested in finding out what happened to the reels of celluloid, but rather in learning what had happened in the twenty years since, to the subject I had written about—the development of artificial limbs. Had there been any progress? Had there been any major changes? Were the amputees I had known and observed, or their sons or neighbors’ sons who had lost limbs in Korea and Viet Nam, any better off today (in terms of receiving an artificial limb for a real limb taken away) than their fathers were at the end of the Second World War?