The Cure by Varley O'Connor

A Non-review by J. Stefan-Cole

THE CURE, Varley O’Connor’s third novel, Bellevue Literary Press, is an ambitious look into the life of a family touched by polio. Beginning with three year old Scott waking up one sticky August morning in 1931 laid low by disease—‚”listless and cranky” the night before, no other warning of devastation—the story continues through the last throes of World War II.
A child suddenly can’t walk: Poliomyelitis was the AIDS of its era. Rather than gays and the sexually diverse, this virus preyed on kids, paralyzing muscular apparatus, like the diaphragm for lung function, forcing its victims into tortuous-looking iron lungs. FDR comes to mind, or Jerry Lewis: weepy telethons on brand X TV, bad jokes about kids in leg braces, and ubiquitous March of Dimes collection cups by store cash registers. Polio was the scourge until the Salk vaccine was developed in the 1950′s. They made mistakes in the early days of treatment, smothering growing young limbs in plaster casts that did more harm than good. Children were warned not to put pennies in their mouth, to avoid public drinking fountains and pools (summer was the ripe time for contagion), and crowded places—like movie theatres, lest they catch it. Those who did were isolated in hospital wards. Families visited patients through glass windows, contact not allowed, no comforting touch. And then came long years of rehab, often away from home.
This it the story of a clan: mother Maeve, father Vern, Howard, Scott and Patsy Hatherford, along with an assortment of relations and servants. Scott is more or less cured after years of surgeries and muscle transplants, his limbs less withered, his life closer to normal, but the family is not. The story also belongs to its time: America during the war, seen from the perspective of a family that had weathered the Depression and prospered. They live in a New Jersey that is still countrified, the rolling hills of Bergen County situated close to the alluring city: Broadway glitter, Fifth Avenue, jazz and wartime glamour. Vern owns a Ford dealership in Hoboken in the time of Frank Sinatra, the waterfront is industrial working class and a little seedy (the antithesis of hip Hoboken today). Patsy lets her mother know she heard the name Dutch Shultz whispered one night after some shady types showed up to collect one of Daddy’s cars. The sprawling Hatherford acreage in Ridgewood includes an arriviste manse that Vern’s long-suffering beauty of a wife ultimately calls ‚”no place for children”. Scott’s polio becomes the family’s make or break challenge. Life is materially good, but boozy Christmas parties (through to New Years), extravagant shopping sprees, loyal black servants that are like family (seeing to it the real Hatherfords never have to lift a finger for themselves), money enough to buy Scott the best treatment available don’t add up to home.

The stressful undercurrent of war doesn’t help. Twelve year old Patsy is obsessed with war bulletins announced on the radio, and Vern’s wealth can’t get around food and fuel rationing. There are rumors of polio victims like Scott, who can walk, being beaten up for not serving. O’Connor has captured the sound of the times in solidly written dialogue. Words like swell and aw gee, peachy, dandy, and ‚”Dag nab it, Dad, I reckon I am,” from Patsy—the character I was most drawn to—caught drunk one afternoon. She’s been stealing from Vern’s basement office too. To the tune of a thousand dollars, we learn when she offers the loot to her mother after one especially ugly marital row.
Patsy’s been sidelined by Scott’s polio. Left to figure things out pretty much on her own, she hectors her mother for attention and taunts the maid, Vi, to get a rise out of her—code for badly needed emotional focus. Patsy isn’t the only one neglected. Vern’s been involved for years with his brother, Jack Raymond’s wife, Cyd. Jack Raymond is a nice guy, a bit of an innocent, damaged in World War I. Vern is typically selfish nouveau riche; coming up from a hard life in Brooklyn with no advantages, success has made him confident and unquestioning. As Maeve’s bawdy mother Abigail tells her: ‚”‘Pride, power, and sex,’ she preached to Maeve, ‘drive the male of the species.’ ‘You make them sound like we still live in caves,’ said Maeve. ‘Well…’ said Abby, ‘not quite.’” Vern’s a man of appetites, generous, but a block of wood when it comes to sensitivity. Even if Maeve hadn’t been proper and proud, worn out by a son’s ailment, Vern would still have likely had a bit on the side. That the bit is his sister-in-law, that he actually loves his brother and wife (whatever his definition of love is) only serves to complicate the family’s inability to connect.
The children suffer in the souring air surrounding their parents: Dad out late most nights, tipping back gin to get through a night at home, Meave stuck, unable to express herself. She made her son well but can’t seem to win his heart. Usher in Matt Wayne, the family doctor, a character based on the doctor poet William Carlos Williams. It is through him we get the feel of a bygone New Jersey. It is to him Maeve turns, first for Scott, then for Patsy—to see if he can read the girl she has failed and cannot manage, ultimately turning to him for herself. He’s not an obvious choice, bad as his interpersonal skills are beyond the patients he earnestly means to heal. Still, he has insights the Hatherfords are blind to. The breaking point boils when Howard, scheduled for war, goes down in flames, killed in a pilot training accident.
An ensemble of characters moves through these pages, it is hard to settle on one. There is something cinematic in that, a large cast, a sprawling landscape, illness, death, infidelity, a twelve year old drinking to quiet a tender, bruised heart. And I haven’t yet mentioned Vi’s illegitimate son, Julian. A little older than Scott, he became the sick boy’s companion. Julian is gentle and wise for is age. Patsy spies on her brother and Julian—jealously in her aloneness—as they do their homework in Scott’s downstairs bedroom. She sees more than she bargained for when the boys kiss. The taint of homosexually in those days would compete with interracial mixing for poisoned reactions in a white dominated society. (Not much has changed.)
Julian’s affection for Scott, who turns petulant as his body heals and ordinary life comes within reach, is impossible. Rebuffed, Julian ‚”… had expected to smoothly return to the Julian he used to be. But he wasn’t as good as he’d thought, or as staunch. And whoever got a reward for that? Where were the medals for those who never made waves? What did you get for handing your masked self over to people who wrote all the rules and did not even know that you saw?”
If Julian is the wisdom of Varley O’Connor’s insightful novel, Patsy is the conscience. The writer has taken on a lot. Much to be cured: the body and the person. In a way, THE CURE deals with the sickness of America: all the opportunity in the world, even during a war that, once won, would usher in layers of Vern Hatherfords, rolling in success, ‘writing the rules’ without a clue to their own selves. Missing the lesson their son’s disease might have taught, the Hatherfords mixed-up emotions come out as dumb determination and sad obliviousness. I think the truth of O’Connor’s book is that learning to live is the ultimate cure. Selling overpriced cars, shopping, and swilling cocktails at the country club might not be the best route to getting there.
© May 2007 J. Stefan-Cole

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