The Sunday Gentleman (12 page)

But the incident that affected me most was the least important. I met a lieutenant at the hospital who lived with his wife in my hotel. We became friends right off because he came from a small town near Madison, Wisconsin, and had gone to the University, and had known a football player I had attended high school with in Kenosha. He suggested that I drive back to town with him, and save myself the tedious bus and trolley ride, and I grabbed at the chance.

The first time I left with him, he was also taking his civilian secretary, a middle-aged, graying woman. As we walked to the parking lot, the lieutenant broke off his chatter to me, and turned to his secretary. “By the way. Miss Smith, I forgot to look. Do I have any surgery in the morning?” Miss Smith shook her head. “None. You’re not posted.” He turned back to me and kept right on talking, and as I half listened, I thought: God, in one of those shacks someone is waiting for surgery, a portion of a leg to be taken off and carted away (what do they do with the legs?); someone is waiting and his ma and pa are somewhere, away, sitting and waiting and worrying, and his girl or wife, and a couple of friends waiting, and himself before falling asleep tonight, thinking about it, his whole life standing still on this one surgery, and here I am walking with a young doctor who is asking if there is any surgery for him in the morning, he forgot to look.

When we got into the coupe, I stared at the lieutenant, a nice young guy with a handsome, beefy, red face, probably exhausted from overwork and wanting out every minute, and with his wife waiting back in the hotel and bright people coming over for dinner, a nice guy—but in one of those beds, another guy waiting for when surgery is posted. I felt lousy all the way back to the hotel.

Our picture project, which occupied most of my waking hours and a good portion of my insomnia, was divided into two parts. The first part concerned the lower extremity, and the second part the upper extremity. The first part was the more vital, since men with leg losses were twice as numerous as men with arm losses. Also, fitting the leg prosthesis was more complicated.

The earlier promise, that I would not have to witness surgery, was kept. Our picture, both parts, dealt solely with the manufacture and the use of prostheses—but always, fearfully, the surgery and the agony were just offstage.

I spent most of my time in the Orthopedic Limb Shop. This consisted, first, of a vast reception room presided over by a cheerful Irish WAC who limped. Next to it, separated by a white curtain, was the tiny measuring room, and this opened into three rooms where the construction of the artificial limbs took place.

The process was efficient and undramatic. A patient who returned from overseas with his leg missing below the knee was treated and further operated upon at Lawson. In the old days, he would have waited a year or more for a limb fitting. Now, about ten weeks after final surgery, he was wheeled into the shop. Sometimes he swung in on crutches. If the shrinkage of his stump had been uniform, and the nerves had lost their irritability, and the wound was soundly healed, he was ready. He was escorted into the tiny measuring room, and his stump placed on plain brown paper and carefully traced. Too, his good leg was traced and measured. Then he was brought into the plaster room and told to sit on a bench. His naked stump was exposed. A woolen stockinette was slipped tightly over it, plaster smeared around the stockinette, and when the cast had hardened, it was removed. The patient was also removed. From here on in, the process was out of his control.

In the shop, I met the enlisted men and civilians who manufactured the prostheses. They were a strange assortment. The boss of the plaster room, a sturdy ex-sergeant who introduced himself as
Mister
Chandler, looked like an impressive welterweight who might excel at infighting. He, for one, had been a commercial limb maker before the war. His aides were all converts. One had been a radio repairman. Another had been a garage mechanic. A bemustached corporal from Long Island had been a subway dispatcher.

In brief days, the prosthesis grew. Out of the original plaster cast came a plaster facsimile of the patient’s stump. Around this plaster stump, layers of wet hide were glued. This, eventually, would be attached to the artificial leg. Elsewhere, in the shop, other items were being assembled A willow wood foot, shaped to fit the patient’s shoe size, and built so that it would bend on a rubber hinge at the ball. The willow foot was then attached to the bottom of a fiber artificial leg, usually prefabricated, and the socket to the top of that leg. A leather lacer, to hold the prosthesis to the patient’s stump, and a special pelvic belt, to hold the whole mechanism to his body, were added.

The final product was always carefully aligned and fitted on the patient. The slightest irritation would send the prosthesis back through the assembly line.

When I saw my first prosthesis up close (it was a complex one built for an AK, above-knee amp), I asked, perhaps naively, if the men, well, went to bed wearing these limbs. The limb mechanic appeared startled, then said no, they took them off first, then understood why I inquired and added that they really weren’t much trouble to take off and put on because you simply unbuckled the pelvic belt and slid out and into bed.

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 dictated 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.”