What It Takes (28 page)

But what about him? Where was his cheer? It got to be frighteningly clear to Dole, the Army had no miracle for him—not at Percy Jones. After months there, he could barely walk, there was still no movement in his right arm, almost no feeling in his left hand. And there was no plan to do much about it—not that he could divine. So he got leave to go home to Russell. If he had to make his miracle himself, he’d do it. If the doctors in Michigan couldn’t straighten out his arm, he’d do it alone. So Kenny came back to Michigan and brought Bob home on the train. Bina and Doran moved once again to the children’s bedroom, in the back of the house. Once again, they rented a hospital bed and a rolling tray for the front room. Doran, Kenny, and some neighborhood fellows hooked up ropes and pulley-weights from old sash windows on the wall of the garage, behind the house, so Bob could work on his strength, every day.

And Bob worked, alone, day and night, on his problem. That’s what he called it, his problem: there were no good words for this enemy, his body. What words could anybody use that would not burrow into him and eat at the will that was keeping him alive? It wasn’t that he chose to wall himself away, but what else could he do, when he heard those words that would never leave him? One day, when he was with Doran at the grain elevator, a farmer came in and, by way of chat, asked: “This your crippled son?” There wasn’t a thing for Bob to say, but for days after, he was clouded over with gloom and rage. One afternoon, when he’d been home awhile, he screwed up his courage and walked to Dawson Drug. Main Street seemed a hundred miles long. He was sure everybody was looking at him—120 pounds: he was a spectacle!—the way his feet shuffled, his right arm cocked up in a lead brace that a high school pal, Adolph Reisig, made for him at his auto body shop. Bob got into the drugstore and hauled himself, without help, onto a seat at the counter. But even then his bones wouldn’t sit right on the stool. Bub and Chet had to adjust him for balance, like a rickety piece of furniture. One of the geezers at the wooden-top tables said: “Gee, that’s too bad. ... You prob’ly wished they woulda finished you off ...” Bob turned and glared, felt his face flush hot. “If I thought like that, I’da been dead a long time ago.” But for months, he didn’t go back to Dawson’s.

He worked alone. He pulled down the dark curtain of reserve that he could not lift again, even when he chose. He’d spend all day behind the house, working himself to exhaustion with the ropes on the garage wall. Bina would stand at the back door and call: “Bob, don’t you want to rest? Bob! Come in and rest awhile ...” He’d just say: “No.” He’d growl it. Or he wouldn’t answer. He’d pull harder. He was trying to pull with the bad right arm. If he could straighten that out, he’d play again. Even when he was in the house, he’d be squeezing a rubber ball, or a nutcracker, with the left hand. Even when he sat in a chair, his legs were moving. Time was weighing on him: months were flying by, and he felt he was standing still. He could walk around the block, but that wasn’t good enough. He pushed it, faster, harder, until he was dragging his bony form along in a shuffling run. He brought the lead arm brace back to Adolph in the body shop: he wanted more lead in it, more, and more, a constant weight, so it ached, so he knew he was working it every minute.

There was no schedule in the house anymore, except for Bob’s racing internal clock. Chet and Ruth Dawson would show up to play bridge at midnight, and Bina’d do a load of wash while the card game went on around her. Food was whatever he wanted, when he wanted, and where: if Bob said he’d like to be outside, Bina would move the whole show outdoors: tablecloth, silver, the dishes with the pattern of pink blossoms and green leaves. ... Or Bina’d ask Bob in the middle of the morning: “You want a Coke?” And everyone would pile into the car, and ride out to the highway. Norma Jean would come in the afternoons, and Bob would ask: “You doin’ anything tonight? ... No?” And then she’d stay with him in the front room and rub that arm for hours. Gloria was married by then, living out of town, but she’d come back to visit, too, mostly to talk to Bob. She’d ask about the war sometimes, in case he wanted to get it off his chest. But Bob would only say, “Agh, the heroes are still over there.” He meant the dead ones. That put an end to the questions. Now Kenny was married, too, living with his beautiful Dottie in a little brick house, right next door. Of course, Kenny was still on call. If Bob had to go anywhere, Kenny took him. (He was driving Bob back to Michigan on Dottie’s twenty-first birthday.) But mostly, it was Bina who did for Bob. Kenny would do for Bina. And she wasn’t shy about asking. More and more, as Bob’s problem wore her down, she didn’t have patience for anyone else. When Dottie was in labor with Kenny’s first child, Bina visited her in the delivery room and rasped: “Are you all right?”

Dottie said: “Feel like I’m gonna die.”

“Aw, you’ll live,” Bina snapped, and went back home to Bob.

On his darker days, Kenny’s marriage and his new baby girl were hard for Bob, too. It wasn’t that he grudged it to his younger brother—not at all. But Bob was the elder ... always a mile out in front of that kid. And now Kenny was a husband, a father ... and Bob? Treading water, trying to get back to where he was. Who would
he
live his life with? Who’d take him now ... like this? Did he even have the right to impose his ... problem? No, he’d probably be alone. Hell, he was alone. No matter how everybody did for him, how long they sat and talked with him, how late they stayed up to see if they could get him to sleep ... when it got down to it, it was Bob, alone. Sometimes, Dottie would wake, next door, to give the baby a bottle or quiet her in her crib. And through the darkness outside, she’d hear the music from Bina’s house. It was Bob, with the record player he got when he went off to KU. And he’d play that song, over and over, Jane Froman’s song from
Carousel ...

When you walk through a storm,

hold your head up high

Sometimes, after he played that song, you could see he felt better, and he’d say, “How ’bout s’more music?” And he’d play it again, and whistle along.

Walk on, walk on

with hope in your heart.

And you’ll never walk alone.

You’ll never walk alone!

And then, everyone was lighter. Even Bina was happy. But just as suddenly, the dark curtain could descend. One day, back by the garage, Bob fell and couldn’t get up. “Never gonna work ...” he was muttering afterward. “Terrible ... crawling around like an
animal
.” Then there was
nothing
they could do for him. That was the awful fact at the bottom of their every day. It didn’t matter what they did for him. It didn’t
count
unless he could do it himself. He
had
to do it alone. Now he wouldn’t let anyone light a cigarette for him. Sometimes, with a match, he’d char his numb left hand black ... but don’t try to get in his way. Or, he’d be sitting at the table, getting along okay with a fork in that balky left hand. But then a piece of food would tumble to his lap. And his face would go dark with helpless rage. And he wouldn’t say a word. He’d just get up and walk out. No one dared follow him, or say anything.

One afternoon, the family came home, and there was no Bob—not in the bedroom, the living room, he wasn’t out back, pulling on the ropes. Bina called Dawson’s, then Doran: no Bob, not a sign of him. Finally, they looked inside the garage, and there he was, hanging from the rafters by the bad right arm. Hanging with his feet swinging off the floor. Soaked and trembling with sweat and pain. Bina burst into tears right there. Thought he was dead. But his will was alive: Bob wouldn’t come down. If he could straighten out that arm, he was going to play ball again.

He was still hunting the miracle, when an uncle who’d served in the Medical Corps told him about Dr. K. This was Hampar Kelikian, who’d escaped to America as a boy, with twenty dollars and a carpet from his family home in Armenia, and had worked his way to eminence as a neurosurgeon in Chicago. Dr. K. knew about wars: his three sisters were killed in the massacres that posed as war in his native land; his brother, a soldier in World War II, was killed in the Italian campaign. Dr. K. also enlisted, in the Army Medical Corps: he became a pioneer in the restoration of damaged limbs. President Truman awarded him a medal for special contributions to military medicine. In 1947, Dole made his pilgrimage to Chicago.

Kelikian was a small man, with curly hair, prematurely gray. He was friendly, brisk, optimistic. He spoke with an accent, but no hesitation. He knew what could be done for Dole, and he knew he could do it. But he wanted Dole to know something, too: there wasn’t going to be a miracle. He could give Dole partial use of the arm, maybe forty percent: the rest was up to Bob. He could jerry-rig a shoulder of sorts, but there was no way it would rotate: the arm would not lift; Dole would not play ball. What Dr. K. could do was corporeal carpentry, not magic. ... That was the most important work he did for Dole, and he did it with words. There was something about Kelikian, his certainty, his self-possession, the big office in Chicago, or the way he’d pulled himself up by his own will ... or maybe Dole was just ready. But he listened. Kelikian told him: “Don’t think anymore about what you’ve lost. You have to think about what you have ... and what you can do with it.”

Kelikian would not take a fee for his work, not from Bob, not a dime. He’d do it out of gratitude to his adopted land. To Dr. K., Bob Dole represented something fundamental about the country: “This young man ...” the doctor said later. “He had the faith to endure.”

Still, Dole would have to come back to Chicago, to check into a hospital, and this wasn’t on the Army’s ticket anymore. Back in Russell, Chet Dawson spread the news: Bob had to go to Chicago for an operation. And he put a cigar box on the drugstore counter: the Bob Dole Fund ... the Dawson boys started it off with a few bills themselves. And Chet was post commander at the time, so the VFW took up the charge. Pretty soon, Bub Shaffer at the Home State Bank was taking collections, too. Then, they started across the street at the Russell State Bank, and then Banker’s Mercantile and the rest of the shops pitched in. Everybody in town lent a hand, one way or another. One lady put thirty cents in the box—that was all she could afford. But there was some serious money, too, and by June, when Bina packed the car for the trip to Chicago, the people of Russell had collected one thousand eight hundred dollars to help Bob Dole get back on his feet.

It turned out there were three operations: the first to cut away the bone in the shattered shoulder, to hang the arm instead by a strip of muscle that Dr. Kelikian took from Dole’s thigh. But in recuperation at Percy Jones, the arm wouldn’t come down: it fused instead in front of Dole’s chest, about at the level of his chin. So Kelikian went at it again, and after the second operation, the arm healed at Dole’s side. It was as Dr. K. had told him: no miracle, nothing magic about it. The arm would hang shorter than his left arm, Dole would never be able to lift it much, or control it at full rotation. But the point was, Dole could do something with it. He could hold it a certain way—like this ... and it looked like an arm again.

In a third operation, Kelikian tried to transplant muscle and tendon back to the right hand. Most of that didn’t take, so Dole’s fingers would always splay unnaturally on that right hand; but he learned he could roll it around a pen, a folded paper, something to give it shape. It started to look like a hand again.

The point was, he could do something with it. The biggest change was how Dole looked at it. Look what he could do! In October, Norma Jean was married, and Bob went to the wedding as best man. He wore his lieutenant’s uniform—not the fussy dress stuff, but the Eisenhower jacket, with the square padded shoulders. He was thin, but his
eyes
... he looked so handsome. The minister put Norma Jean’s ring onto one of Bob’s fingers: that was the only way Bob could hold it, until the proper moment; but nobody saw that, the way Bob did it. What they saw was the way he stood up at Trinity Methodist, on Main Street, in front of all the guests, like a soldier, proud, straight as a rod.

A
DVENTURE WAS NOT
a word that would have leapt to most minds in that apartment. Nothing wrong with Hillhouse Avenue, of course: the president of Yale lived next door. But 37 Hillhouse was cut up into thirteen flats, divvied out to married veterans with children. So thirteen couples lived in the house, each with a child, save for one couple with twins: that made forty souls altogether. And they were lucky to get the place. After the war, when almost ten million men and women suddenly qualified for the GI Bill, the campuses took the brunt of the avalanche. The vets lived in trailers, Quonset huts, abandoned barracks. At the University of California, couples were living in cars.

Poppy and Bar were extra-lucky: they had their own bathroom. The two couples with whom they shared a kitchen also had to share a bathroom. That was apparently too much to take. So the two other couples feuded endlessly, and there were battles about the two refrigerators that three couples (and three children) had to share. One of the neighbors got so furious at the others that he brought in inspectors to test their germs. He claimed there were more germs in their fridge than in the sewers of New Haven. Mostly, the other couples never spoke. One family ate at five and the other at seven, so they wouldn’t have to pass. Well, Utopia this was not.

But adventure ... it surely was, to Barbara Bush. New Haven was the first place Bar had lived on her own, without her parents, or some school authority (or the U.S. Navy, which greeted her as a bride) ruling her destiny
in loco parentis.

Ever since Bar could remember, her mother and older sister had imposed their wisdom on whatever Bar had to do. Her mother, Pauline Pierce, another daughter of the good Midwest (her father, James Robinson, served on Ohio’s first Supreme Court), was a woman of great and refined beauty, an insatiable, somewhat spendthrift collector of beautiful things, and a woman of expert enthusiasms. Horticulture, fine needlepoint, management of the home and children, matters of dress, taste, and decorum—Pauline had firm, often idiosyncratic, ideas on
everything
, and her notions, however insupportable, were not subject to argument. She was a joiner and a ferocious doer, who had, as Barbara concluded at length, not much sense of humor in general, and none about herself or her children. Barbara’s older sister, Martha, got her mother’s looks, her brains, and her temperament: she had definite ideas, five years’ more experience on the planet, and no discernible shyness about instructing her ungainly younger sister. What’s more, Martha was thin. Barbara was not.