Rough Magic Page 5
Throughout 1938 and 1939, Otto’s health continued to fail. During those years, Warren suffered two separate attacks of bronchial pneumonia, and also developed an asthmatic condition complicated by allergies. With Warren and Otto occasionally sick at the same time, 92 Johnson Avenue resembled a hospital more than a home, Aurelia a nurse more than a homemaker. To ease her workload, Aurelia periodically arranged for Sylvia, who had bouts of sinusitis but was healthy compared with her brother and father, to live with the Schobers. From Point Shirley, Sylvia communicated with her mother daily, not only by telephone but also, because Aurelia could not emphasize enough the importance of the written word, by mail. This practice established a habit of letter-writing in which the two would engage for years to come. With Sylvia gone, Aurelia could devote her undivided attention to caring for Otto and Warren, a job that took its toll. Aurelia was rarely able to sleep through the night.
The year 1940 brought no reprieves. Month after month, Otto became afflicted by new symptoms: insomnia, a persistent thirst, and leg cramps so harsh that when they struck he bent double, grabbed his calves, and cried out in pain. Sylvia and Warren were horrified by these episodes, the sight of which etched lasting impressions on their imaginations. Then, one morning in August, while he dressed for school, Otto stubbed his left foot’s little toe on the base of a bureau in his bedroom. No catastrophe—a common enough mishap. Even though his toe throbbed, he proceeded to school to teach his classes. But during the day, Otto noticed something odd. Instead of improving, his foot hurt more. On returning home late that afternoon, he took off his sock and shoe only to discover—to his bewilderment—that his toes had turned a purplish black while red streaks of infection climbed up his shin. Otto was perplexed: a minor accident should not have created such a serious injury, and, what was more, a grossly infected foot was not a sign of lung cancer. Dumfounded, Otto acquiesced and allowed Aurelia to call a doctor. Their family physician, Dr. Abrams, conducted a physical examination, took blood and urine samples, and left, promising to telephone his results right away. When he did, his diagnosis shocked Aurelia. According to Abrams, Otto suffered not from cancer but from a debilitating—though quite treatable—form of diabetes mel-litus. How many years had he had it? Aurelia asked. As many as ten, Abrams guessed. And that was the problem. Otto had avoided medical help for so long that the disease might now be fatal. Finally, Abrams’s diagnosis explained so much. An insatiable sweet tooth (Otto’s had first surfaced during his German boyhood), flushed cheeks, an unquenchable thirst—all were textbook warning signs of diabetes. In addition, Aurelia remembered Otto’s descriptions of his mother’s poor health. Because the open wound on her leg and her spells of melancholia could be indications of diabetes, Aurelia decided that Otto might easily have inherited the disease from her. Had Otto sought treatment—as late as 1938 or 1939, Abrams said—he could have maintained a relatively normal life by modifying his diet and taking insulin injections. Since Otto’s condition had now become life-threatening, Abrams saw few available options.
As Otto undertook a crash program to save his life, which included a radically altered diet and massive doses of insulin, he contracted pneumonia. After a two-week stay in Winthrop Hospital, he was released, but at home he remained under the supervision of a practical nurse who, because Otto’s condition was so grim, worked every day except Wednesday. Of course, the nurse proved a huge expense, the more so since Otto had refused through the years to take out health insurance. But Aurelia had no choice in the matter; Otto was now too sick for her to care for him by herself. In early October, on one of the nurse’s Wednesdays off, Otto felt well enough for Aurelia—at his suggestion—to take the children to the beach for some fresh air. Aurelia did not like the idea of Otto being in the house alone. Giving in to his protests, she finally placed medicine and a glass of water by his bedside, gathered the children, and left the house. On the beach, Aurelia could not relax; she kept worrying about Otto. Eventually, her anxiety turned to panic, so she had a friend watch Sylvia and Warren while she went to check on him. Walking to the house, she was visited by a strange feeling of impending doom. The instant she opened the front door, her fears became justified. There before her, sprawled on the stairs, lay Otto, immobile and unconscious, seemingly dead. Terrified, Aurelia rushed to his side and violently shook his shoulders and slapped his cheeks, trying to revive him. Slowly he regained consciousness, although his eyes remained unfocused and his speech was an incoherent mumble. Somehow Aurelia managed, with Otto’s meager help, to hoist him to his feet. Then, as she guided him, they stumbled up the rest of the stairs and down the hallway into his bedroom. Lying in bed, Otto frequently became incoherent as he tried to talk. When he was lucid, he reconstructed the events that had led to his collapse. Feeling a momentary burst of energy and a powerful urge to see his flower garden, Otto had gotten out of bed and gone down the stairs, through the house, and out into the backyard. In the crisp afternoon air, he pored over his flowers until he became weary. Returning inside, he was climbing the stairs to go to his bedroom when he suddenly became light-headed and passed out. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Aurelia stared blankly at Otto. His face was crimson, his mouth bone-diy; his eyes darted from side to side. Aurelia resolved to bear up and be strong for Otto and for the children.
That night, thrashing in bed, Otto sweated profusely. Aurelia kept having to change his wringing-wet pajamas and bed linen. By morning, because Ottos condition had not improved, Aurelia rushed him to Winthrop Hospital, where staff doctors called in Dr. Harvey Loder, one of Boston’s foremost diabetes specialists. Examining Otto, Loder determined that the restricted blood flow characteristic of diabetes had made Otto’s left leg gangrenous. His recommendation: amputate the leg. Since Otto’s condition warranted emergency treatment, Loder checked him into New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston, and there, on October 12,1940, performed an above-the-knee amputation. Afterwards, Loder, encouraged by Otto’s response, told Aurelia that her husband could have a normal future once he learned to walk with a prosthesis. In the days following the operation, Loder’s optimism waned as Otto underwent a series of reversals. In agony, Otto himself soon suspected that he might never recover.
Before long, Otto’s health was declining at such a rapid pace that Aurelia could chart his demise by simply watching him: the nurses did not need to report his vital signs. On the night of November 5, as Aurelia sat beside his bed, Otto seemed to resign himself to his fate. “I don’t mind the thought of death at all,” he whispered in a strained voice, pausing as he looked up at her from his bed, “but I would like to see how the children grow up.”
Shaken, Aurelia could barely keep herself from breaking down. Surely Otto was not going to die. At fifty-five, he was too young. Aurelia decided to go home and compose herself so that she could be of comfort to him the next morning. She had reached Winthrop and was unlocking the door when the telephone began to ring. Dashing to the telephone, Aurelia clutched the receiver in her hand and then listened to the doctor’s voice on the other end of the line. An embolus, dislodged from somewhere in his bloodstream, had struck Otto’s lung, killing him instantly. He had probably not even been conscious of his own dying. The next day, a hospital doctor, a Dr. Holmes, would sign a statement that read: “I hereby certify that I attended deceased from 10/7/40 to 11/5/40.1 last saw him alive on 11/5/40, death is said to have occurred on the date stated above, at 9:35 PM. Immediate cause of death [is] diabetes mellitus [and] broncho pneaumonia [sic] due to gangrene left foot.”
Since the children were already upstairs asleep, Aurelia decided to wait until morning to break the news to them. When she told Sylvia, who had been sitting up in bed reading a book, Sylvia blurted out, “I’ll never speak to God again,” and pulled her blanket over her head.
Because she believed the children were not old enough to witness an event as traumatic as the funeral of their father, Aurelia arranged for Marion Freeman to baby-sit. At three o’clock on the afternoon of November 9, Aurelia, supp
orted by her parents, attended her husband’s funeral, which was held at First Methodist Church in Winthrop under the direction of Reverend Hariy Belmont Hill. After the services, interment took place in the newest—and third—section of Winthrop’s nondenominational Town Cemetery. With Hill reciting final prayers and Howard S. Reynolds serving as undertaker, Otto was buried in Grave Number 1123 on the cemetery’s Azalea Path.
Wellesley
1
Following Otto’s death, Aurelia and the Schobers were forced to make sweeping changes in their lives. Within a week of their father’s funeral, both Sylvia and Warren became ill. Each contracted measles; Sylvia also came down with sinusitis, Warren with pneumonia. Nursing her children, Aurelia realized that she would somehow have to overcome her own sorrow so that she could provide her children with the parental love—and financial support—they needed. The former did not worry her—in many ways, Otto had been a phantom parent—but the latter did. Otto had left Aurelia strapped for money. Throughout their nearly decade-long marriage, the Plaths had amassed little savings besides Otto’s modest university retirement account, for they had used the majority of Otto’s salary to meet monthly bills. Also, Otto’s life-insurance coverage amounted to a mere five thousand dollars, from which doctor, hospital, and funeral expenses had to be paid. Settling the bills, Aurelia realized a cash sum, counting insurance, savings, and Otto’s retirement, of about two thousand dollars. To make matters worse, Otto’s salary (naturally) stopped at the end of the fall term. During his illness, a colleague, Irving Johnson, and a graduate student, Carl Ludwig, had conducted Otto’s classes without remuneration; but now that source of income had stopped. Luckily, Braintree High School offered Aurelia a job for the spring term. To teach three German and two Spanish units on a full-time temporary basis, she would be paid twenty-five dollars per week.
Not long after Otto’s death, the Dorothy Muriel Company laid off Frank Schober because of management restructuring. At Christmastime that year, Aurelia and her parents tried to make the holidays as festive as possible for Sylvia and Warren, but Otto’s death cast a shadow over the season. Two recurrent topics—Aurelia’s Braintree job and Frank’s premature retirement—led them to discuss the practicality of alternative living arrangements. With Frank unemployed and Aurelia in need of help around the house, the Plaths and the Schobers decided to merge their households. The Schobers rented out their Point Shirley home and moved into 92 Johnson Avenue. Grammy—the children’s name for their grandmother—assumed the lion’s share of domestic duties. She bought groceries, cooked meals, cleaned house, minded Sylvia and Warren, even chauffeured the family in the Schobers’ secondhand Plymouth. (Otto and Aurelia had never owned a car.) Because she had no household responsibilities, Aurelia could devote all of her energies at home to class preparation and, more important, to her children.
Since Braintree’s position was temporary and involved a commute, Aurelia accepted a permanent job for the coming fall at Winthrop Junior High School, a position that involved teaching ninth grade and overseeing a substantial part of the school’s accounting services. She carefully weighed the job’s pros and cons before accepting it, for Otto’s protracted illness had taken its toll and had left Aurelia with a duodenal stomach ulcer. The year at Winthrop, if her accounting duties proved as stressful as she thought they might, could make things worse. But Aurelia had to provide for her children, so she took the job.
At the end of the spring term, the high point of which was Aurelia’s sister Dorothy’s wedding to Joseph Benotti on April 19—the reception was at 92 Johnson Avenue—Sylvia eagerly awaited summer. After she had a tonsillectomy (Warren had one too), she sunbathed on Winthrop’s sandy white beaches, combed “the flats” at low tide in search of sea-shells, sailed with her Uncle Frank in a boat he had built himself, and, once recovered from her operation, swam in the harbor with her grandfather. One other activity engaged her imagination as well. For more hours than usual, Sylvia would sit in her room and study the airplanes landing and taking off at Logan, Boston’s municipal airport, located across the harbor from Winthrop and in full view from Sylvia’s bedroom window. “I marveled at the moving beacons on the runway and watched, until it grew completely dark, the flashing red and green lights that rose and set in the sky like shooting stars,” comments a narrator of a short story Plath would one day write. “The airport was my Mecca, my Jerusalem. All night I dreamed of flying.”
But mostly Sylvia worked at something that was slowly becoming a compulsion—writing. To Sylvia, the single most important day of the summer of 1941, August 11, was the date on which the Boston Herald published one of her poems in its children’s section, “The Good Sport Page”—the first time the byline “Sylvia Plath” appeared in print. Introduced by a brief explanatory note—“I have written a short poem about what I see and hear on hot summer nights”—the poem, entitled simply “Poem,” was a childlike effort about crickets and fireflies. Submitting creative material to periodicals is not a regular activity of most eight-year-olds; it is telling, then, that, even at such a young age, Sylvia wanted to see her work in print badly enough to submit it for publication.
In the fall, Sylvia enrolled in the fifth grade, Warren the second, while Aurelia, who over the summer had tutored remedial English and Spanish, began her sixteen-hundred-dollar-a-year teaching position at Winthrop Junior High. But as the term progressed, world events, not school, dominated their minds. Since 1938, when Germany had annexed Austria, Americans of German heritage, like both the Plaths and the Schobers, had felt the sting of anti-German sentiment. Now, in Europe, Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich bombed London—one more step in its aspirations towards world domination. In the Pacific, Japan, a wealthy and powerful country, tested its own military muscle. On December 7, 1941, international events were further personalized for Americans when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The next day, a banner headline in the Boston Herald read, JAPS OPEN WAR ON U.S. / BOMB HAWAII, KILL 350. That afternoon, President Roosevelt requested and received from Congress a formal declaration of war against Japan. All across the country, Americans huddled around radios to hear breaking news reports. The Plaths and the Schobers were no different. Years later, Plath would write a short story inspired by events that occurred during this disturbing time. “I remember sitting by the radio with Mother and Uncle Frank feeling a queer foreboding in the air,” says the narrator. “Their voices were low and serious . . . and Mother kept saying over and over about Daddy: ‘. . . I’m only glad Otto didn’t live to see it come to this.’ “
On December 11, Congress passed and Roosevelt signed a proclamation of war against Germany and Italy, Japan’s Axis partners. Afterwards, Congress expanded the draft age to include all men between eighteen and sixty-four, making some forty-one million available for military enlistment. Eventually, during Sylvia’s fifth grade, Frank Junior would be drafted. For the Plaths, as for others, the war had become a painful reality. The December 16 Herald article JAP ATTACK UNITES ALL BOSTON BEHIND WAR TO MOP UP AXIS exemplified Americans’ growing concerns, although in the end it did not predict history. “When college students pass up their suppers to talk about it,” the article began, “when truckdrivers hang around the garage to hash it over, when the Italians blast Mussolini, the Germans run down Hitler and the Irish talk about patching things up with Britain, you somehow get the idea that a unified Boston is in there pitching for the United States to win this war and win it quick.”
As Otto’s death had last year, World War II darkened moods in the Plath-Schober household during Christmastime 1941. That spring semester, while the war raged on, Aurelia taught and the children studied. In June, both Sylvia and Warren having graduated with high marks, the Plaths anticipated a quiet summer—and, they hoped, the end of the war. On June 27, 1942, Frank, bound for military duty, married Louise Bowman in a ceremony in which Sylvia served as flower girl, Warren ring-bearer. In this discouraging season, Aurelia met with an unexpected personal triumph when the secretary departmen
t in Boston University’s College of Practical Arts and Letters, which that fall would offer a new degree program in medical-secretary procedures, invited her to develop and then oversee the program. Because the stress from handling Winthrop Junior High’s monies had aggravated her stomach ulcer, and because she wanted to enter the more comfortable field of university teaching, Aurelia accepted BU’s job offer, which brought with it an annual salary of eighteen hundred dollars. By the fall, Aurelia had assembled the new degree plan and was prepared to teach her first students.
In late summer, Aurelia had begun to consider moving out of Win-throp. The ocean exacerbated the children’s chronic respiratory and sinus infections and Aurelia’s arthritis, now in its early stages. From Winthrop, Boston University was no easy commute. Most important, Aurelia did ript want her children to grow up in Winthrop’s working-class community. Consequently, she scouted several inland Boston neighborhoods and, as she did, rediscovered Wellesley, some fifteen miles west of the city. Examining the town closely, Aurelia saw that real-estate taxes were surprisingly low; the town’s demographics, which ranged from middle to upper-middle class, would guarantee Sylvia and Warren a suitable environment; and as a resident Sylvia would be eligible for an all-expense-paid town scholarship to Wellesley College, a Seven Sisters school. When she looked at possible houses to buy, Aurelia fell in love with 26 Elmwood Road, a two-story Cape Cod built on a wooded half-acre corner lot. And so, by Sylvia’s tenth birthday, October 27,1942, Aurelia had sold 92 Johnson Avenue—at a loss, since real-estate prices had slipped—and purchased 26 Elmwood Road. In the coming months, Sylvia would miss many elements of her old life, particularly the Freemans, but none more than the one most evident to Winthrop residents—the ocean. “And this is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood,” Plath would later write. “My father died, we moved inland. Whereupon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.” It was as if the nearly four years she had lived in Jamaica Plain before moving to Winthrop had never existed.