by Lois Ruskai Melina
My father’s spine had fused into one solid mass of bone before I was born. Bowed forward, it might have been the tusk of an ancient beast stood on one end. With his back forming a C and the C-vertebrae of his neck permanently twisted slightly to the left, he invariably gazed down and a little off-center. He had no mobility in his backbone to counter-balance his hip movement, which put an awkward bounce in his walk. To see what was in front of him, he would pause every dozen steps or so, bend his knees to thrust his hips down, and in doing so, bring his eyes to a horizontal plane. He looked then like an unfinished question mark.
I see men who would be my father’s age, had he lived, with that characteristic walk and stoop, and know immediately they, too, have ankylosing spondylitis, a trochaic-sounding disease whose name literally means the vertebrae have become inflamed and fixated. The disease mainly attacks young men. No one knows what causes it or why it targets males, although an autoimmune response is suspected and there are markers that indicate genetic factors make some people more susceptible.
When I was about nine years old, I asked my father why his back was curved. I knew the bones were fused, but I didn’t understand why they hadn’t fused straight. In my mind, it had happened in a flash--my father had gone to bed one night flexible and woken up rigid and arced. He explained that the disease began with swelling in his joints, causing pain. By bending his back, he took the pressure off the joints and initially experienced some respite from the pain. We know now that the backbone fuses as bony spurs extend from inflamed vertebrae and attach to adjacent vertebrae. I imagine the bones sending out fingers to the vertebrae next to them, clutching them for support in a kind of skeletal codependency, the temporary relief from pain masking the long-term price until it is too late.
Some people believe that physical ailments are metaphors for unresolved emotional issues. People with indigestion really are saying I can’t stomach this. Those with sore throats communicate I can’t swallow that. If that is true, then my father said, I do not bend.
•
When I was growing up, our grass was the most verdant in our neighborhood-- dark and lush, nourished with regular fertilizer and attention to the watering schedule allowed in our Denver suburb, even-numbered houses allowed to water on the even days of the month. My father sometimes mowed the lawn, but it must have been uncomfortable for him because he usually had my oldest sister do it, and later hired a boy. The grass had to be mown on the hypotenuse formed opposite the 90-degree angle where the sidewalk met the driveway; then mown a second time, at 90-degree angles to the initial swath. That was Mike Ruskai’s way.
My own lawn is nothing like my father’s. It is rough and patchy, and goes dormant quickly in the dry western July. I am happy if anyone mows it, and pleased with myself that I do not require the precise cutting pattern of my father. Sometimes I can deceive myself into thinking that because I can be loose about the lawn, I am not as rigid as my father. The truth is that each time someone mows my lawn I think of how my father would do it--what the right way is to mow a lawn. I resist doing it his way not because I am more laid back, but because it is directly opposed to his way.
The summer I was 12, a fungus--Miramius oreades--invaded my father’s turf. It broke down the organic matter in the soil, releasing nitrogen that made circles of grass even taller and darker than what my father urged from the plants. My father took an electric drill with a one-half-inch bit and aerated the characteristic fairy rings, drilling every few inches while I followed behind him on my hands and knees, pouring a home-brewed fungicide through a funnel into each hole. The late August day was hot, and I wanted only to be inside listening to the radio account of the arrival of Beatles, whose first United States tour had them performing that evening at the Red Rocks Amphitheater outside Denver. It seemed to me fairy ring was spreading even as I crawled around, with no end to the circles that must be drilled and filled in the manner my father had dictated.
My father was not given to exuberant displays of praise. "Why should I reward you for doing what you’re capable of," he told me when I complained of not receiving dollars for A’s, as many of my friends did. So my hours of labor in the sun did not send my father into effusive accolades. When we finally finished attacking the fungus, my father simply said, "Why don’t you call one of your friends and see if she wants to go to the airport with you," he said. I had known there was no chance that I’d be allowed to go to a Beatles concert, but I had begged to be allowed to go to Stapleton Airport to meet the Beatles’ plane, a request that was almost as ridiculous. I was in shock as my father drove my friend and me to the outskirts of the airport where throngs of adolescents lined the barbed-wire-topped chain-link fence that enclosed the runways. He sat in our white Dodge Dart, smoking cigarettes, while we claimed our own spot on the fence. Listening to a transistor radio, we knew which jet carried Paul, John, George, and Ringo, heard that they had descended the stairs from the plane to a waiting limousine which would be driven across the tarmac and around the inside of the fence, like a victory lap at the Indy 500. And when we could see the limo edging toward our section of the fence, each one of us screamed the name of our favorite Beatle and pushed our bodies even closer to the fence, some climbing up the wire barrier for a better view. Then the black car was opposite us, separated only by a few millimeters of metal and forever, and I could see into the open window where George sat, a cigarette in his hand.
I don’t remember if I thanked my father, although as a parent myself, I’m sure my delight was obvious. I know that no matter how enthusiastic I might have been, I did not throw my arms around him. I knew that to do so would cause him physical pain that had nothing to do with how he felt emotionally. Growing up, I could not sit on his lap. He could not carry me on his shoulders. He could not get down on the floor and wrestle with me. When he tucked me in bed at night, he laboriously sank to his knees, then leaned back so that he was sitting on his heels, and told me a story about Ike and Mike and their little sister Evelyn Marie, whose antics during the day closely resembled those of me and my two older sisters. Then he would slowly push his body off the floor, curve over my bed, and kiss me good night.
•
On Christmas Eve, 1943, my father was in an army hospital in Massachusetts being wrapped in plaster from his hips to his armpits. His back was bowing at an alarming rate. Once he was enclosed in the cast, technicians placed my father’s upper body on one hospital table, his hips on another, suspending his weighted spine in between, hoping gravity would pull it back into alignment.
Today, rather than immobilizing the spine, medical experts advise stretching, regular exercise, and attention to posture to prevent the stoop; anti-inflammatories for the pain. But they knew little about the disease when my father contracted it during World War II.
Like so many, my father had enlisted in the army after Pearl Harbor. He married my mother the following year. In the photos of my parents’ wedding, my father is dashing in his army uniform, and the smiles on the faces of the bride and groom are a testament to the power love has to generate hope even in times of war. The army separated them for most of the first year of their marriage, but in August of 1943, my mother moved to Buzzard’s Bay, Massachusetts, living in a rented room near the army base to be near my father. She was pregnant. It was my father who went to the hospital first, though, with excruciating back pain. After a month of tests and medical head-scratching, he was diagnosed with what was then called Bechterew Disease or Marie-Strumpell Disease, after the doctors who first described it in the late nineteenth century. With my father in and out of military hospitals, the future uncertain, and army wages spare, my gravid mother returned to her parents’ home in Cleveland. That is where she waited for my father’s call on Christmas Day.
I imagine her struggling to be cheerful, not allowing herself to think about the future--a baby due in two months, a crippled husband, the world warring around them. I imagine my grandfather, who looked as stern and handsome as Clifton Webb in Cheaper by the Dozen, not knowing how to comfort his oldest daughter except by welcoming her back into his home and eventually walking the floors in the middle of the night with a colicky granddaughter--my oldest sister. I imagine my mother hearing the telephone ring, longing to talk to her husband on Christmas Day but not wanting to hear that his new cast is painful, not wanting to hear that he needs her when she is so far away, and then my father telling her he’s coming home, will be there in two days, and the rest of Christmas Day being a celebration of family and faith.
His train pulls into the station at the Terminal Tower in downtown Cleveland at 3 a.m. He’s told my mother not to meet the train at that hour, but an army chaplain phones ahead to tell my mother he will need assistance. She and my grandfather join the wartime crowd meeting the holiday train, and wait on the platform with a wheelchair. But when the train pulls in and they tell the conductor which soldier they are waiting for, he looks at them with confusion. "That guy?" he is reported to have said, "That guy don’t need help. He’s been all over this train." And then my father disembarks unassisted, somehow having fit the olive-colored uniform of an army warrant officer over his body cast, and despite the barriers of plaster and pregnancy, embraces his wife and her pregnancy in an image that could have graced the cover of Life magazine, the forgotten wheelchair off to the side.
I can imagine my father on that train, jolly and a bit rakish, telling tall tales to strangers about why he wore a cast, the way I heard him tell people who asked him the origins of our name: "Hawaiian." he’d say, "You know--Ruskai, like Molokai." Only the fact that he had to laugh at his own wit gave him away. Years later, when I was in high school, he would tease my dates to the point of cruelty just to see how much they were willing to endure to ingratiate themselves with him. "How was your tennis match?" he would repeatedly ask one, who had an unbroken string of losses in high school competition. All the time, he was judging them by the quality of their initial handshake. "Don’t go out with that one again," he said to me once, "He’s weak."
My sisters and I were never subjected to cruel criticism, nor did we grow up dependent on my father (or any man) to tell us what to think, but my father’s subtle judgments had their own power. I grew up believing that there was a right way and a wrong way, and that with sufficient data and analysis, I could discover the right way. I was eager for my father to recognize and approve of my thinking. I recall my father once commenting, "You really picked that one right." All I’d done was to choose a storage container that was precisely big enough to hold the leftovers I was pouring into it. My father had been dead for more than thirty years before I stopped looking to men for approval of my thinking.
•
My father never complained of the pain he was in, so I grew up unaware of his suffering. I confused his immobility with paralysis, believing he was numb. In the years before handicapped parking was required in public places, our family would arrive at a racetrack or baseball stadium and my father would pull up to the main entrance and ask the police officer or parking attendant if there was a place to park close by. "I have some trouble walking," he would say nonchalantly, and I would be amused at what I thought was a brazen attempt to capitalize on his unmistakable deformity, not understanding that the walk from the distant edge of a public parking lot was a strain for him. Once an avid recreational hockey player, he biked, ice skated, and swam, even though he could only swim a few slow laps or ride around the block a few times before saying he’d had enough. Though he could not be as active as he wanted, he encouraged his four daughters to play softball, and to swim well enough to join a competitive team or work as a lifeguard. When I was 12, he drove to the ski resort at Loveland Pass so that I could learn to ski, waiting for me in the lodge, smoking the Kents that were always in his shirt pocket. When I was eight years old, he stood outside with the temperature below freezing, using a garden hose to flood the dormant grass in our backyard, turning it overnight into a private ice skating rink for the two of us.
•
I have heard this story many times: My father comes into the apartment he and my mother have rented in Cleveland after his medical discharge in 1944. He has struggled for days in occupational therapy at the Veterans Hospital to make two potholders, pulling loops of rags over a square, metal frame, weaving other loops over and under the warp. He is bringing the potholders to my mother, offering them to her the way I would one day offer my own woven potholders, crayon drawings, and bouquets of dandelions, and my mother does not have time to hide the potholders she has just purchased from a man who has come to our door to sell them, a man who can make dozens in a day. The look on my father’s face when he sees that his potholders are unneeded is that of a defeated man who does not know how he will take care of his family.
Without the Americans with Disabilities Act to protect him after his medical discharge from the army, my father was refused his pre-war job as a secretary for the Erie Railroad. The occupational therapist at the VA taught him how to make belts--something he could do at home, and he made a few but he didn’t want to rely on friends to buy them out of pity. He would not allow my mother, a qualified dietitian, to work, believing it was his responsibility to support his family. He found work as a time study engineer, a job in which he studied the movements of workers in a factory and suggested ways to improve efficiency. He had no formal training, but he had learned on his own how to eliminate unnecessary motion. By telling people the right way to approach a task--even if he’d never done it himself--he was able to earn a living; he could stand tall.
When did my father begin to believe that he alone knew the right way--the only way--to approach a task? It was not just our family who knew the phrase: There is only one way: Mike Ruskai’s way. My mother-in-law served on a church board with my father. Years later my husband told me how his mother would come home from meetings muttering about how "that Mike Ruskai thinks his way is the only way to do it."
During my senior year of high school, I took an art class from Sister Rose who assigned us to make a metal sculpture. While others bent wires into stick men, I fashioned clay into an abstract design that looked a little phallic, a little like an angel. My boyfriend offered to cast the sculpture in lead and went to my father for direction. Although my father had never sculpted, he had definite ideas of how to proceed. Perhaps he drew on his own experience as the torso being cast.
I remember the three of us sitting in our kitchen at the table with the black and white linoleum top. My father is meticulously describing how to mix plaster into a slurry. I interpret his detailed directions as a sign that he thinks I’m incapable of using my brain. I fume silently and tune out my father. If my father can read my frustration, he pays no attention. My boyfriend listens attentively. He does not understand my attitude; does not have my need to believe my father thinks I am keen.
•
My father had not worked long at his post-war job before he was back in the hospital, that time for six months, and when he came home he was so bent that when he sat up to eat his head was bent too far forward for him to swallow. My mother told me how, in the second floor apartment of a house converted to a duplex, she would feed my older sisters, one a two-year-old toddler, the other a six-month-old infant, while my father sat at the kitchen table sipping a drink through a straw. Then he would lie down on the twin bed in the room he shared with his oldest daughter--my mother shared a room with the baby--and my mother would feed him. After lunch, he and my sister would nap, and each day when my sister woke up she would vomit--a kind of solidarity with my father who was wasting away, weighing less than 100 pounds. My mother spent her weekends baking apple kuchen and frying donuts in an effort to put weight on him.
Another cast. This one started at his thighs and extended up the back of his neck and over the top of his head. He must have resembled the 5000-year-old Egyptian mummy who was found to have evidence of ankylosing spondylitis. I wonder what my plaster-covered father might have looked like to his two young children and how my mother managed to care for all of them. We were fortunate that the Veterans Administration provided him with medical care.
When the cast was removed, my father was fitted with a metal brace that extended up his back and neck. He suggested a leather strap around his forehead be attached to the brace to pull his head up. My father wore this brace for years; the leather strap across his brow shows up in the photos of him with me as a little girl, although I’m not sure I have a memory of it.
With the cast and brace stemming the curvature of his back, my father gradually built up enough strength to attend college classes on the G.I. Bill, starting with one-half day each week and graduating with degrees in both industrial and mechanical engineering. It was a profession well suited to someone so single-minded; someone who could take a vision of how something ought to be and construct a reality from it, not allowing initial failures to discourage him, not doubting his own sense of order.
Eventually, I found my own profession for people who see things in black-and-white terms. I became a journalist, collecting and synthesizing information. I specialized, and eventually became an authority in my field. People asked me questions. I told them the answers as I believed them to be true.
While valuable in my profession, my nearly unshakable belief that I knew the right way to do things annoyed the people in my life. I sat stunned one night at a board meeting for a parent-run sport club while another parent told me how I bulldozed my ideas through meetings. From my perspective, my notions were well reasoned and produced the intended results, so I had assumed the lack of discussion over them meant that everyone else agreed. That wasn’t the case, I was told. "There’s just no point arguing with you," the parent said.
I began to see that others did not see things as I did, and that didn’t make them wrong.
•
I was 13 when my father deliberately had his back broken. It was a surgical procedure called an osteotomy that he had considered for many years. It was not truly experimental, having been done since the 1940s, but it was risky, and few surgeons performed the procedure. The surgeon would make two V-shaped cuts at different points in my father’s spine--one in the back of it and one in the front--and push the spine into alignment, filling in the opening in front with harvested bone. The incisions would be made in the spine at the lumbar level to minimize paralysis should the surgery not go well.
My father’s motivation for a procedure that involved cuts a breath away from the spinal cord was not simple vanity. However, I wonder if the promise of relief from pain and the fatigue of walking with his center of gravity off-center would have even been enough. My father thought his career opportunities were limited by his physical deformity. He had advanced from being a project engineer to management, and his goal was to be the plant manager of a manufacturing firm. But he kept hitting what he believed to be a glass ceiling. It certainly was true that at the time, disabled executives were considered more liability than asset. Handicapped managers couldn’t make deals on the golf course or navigate in the executive restroom. Today a company might believe a physically impaired executive communicates We employ the best minds, no matter what the body. Back then it was thought the physical condition of the executive was a metaphor for the company; the executive’s limitations a sign of the company’s limitations. My father believed the only way to get past the glass ceiling was to move in on a higher floor, and so he moved our family--four times in eight years, to gain advancement in his career. And he hoped that if his deformity was less apparent, it wouldn’t hold back his advancement.
My father spent weeks lying immobile in a hospital bed before being fitted with yet another full-body cast. The surgery to straighten his spine was a success in that afterwards, my father stood erect, but he still did not bend.
I’ve come to believe that what most limited my father’s attractiveness as a manager was not the inflexibility in his back, but the inflexibility in his thinking. He believed that the more often he was right, the more valuable he was to his employer, but it may have been that his employer would have valued him more had he been more of a team player.
My father also may have believed his value as a father, husband, and human being was directly related to his ability to solve problems. Certainly, I believed that for me to be valued as a wife and mother, I needed to be an authority on everything from the most effective ways to sell two dollar candy bars to what cognitive skills were associated with each developmental age of a child. As my children approached adolescence, I forgot how incompetent I felt when my father provided me with answers; how I chose to do the opposite rather than do it his way. I failed to notice how when I provided the "right" answer, it removed options for those who wanted to think for themselves. A crisis with my teen-age son put me in touch with people who began to help me peel away the protective layers of authority and recognize my own rigidity.
•
In the Catholic grade school I attended, graduation from eighth grade was almost as celebrated as First Communion. Up until then, we had been prohibited from dating, or even attending boy-girl social events, a rule enforced by parents and teachers but not by the attendants at the local ice skating rink or movie theater where we just happened to run into classmates of the other sex. Despite having had our own clandestine social events, we looked forward to the class dance in the school cafeteria that would follow graduation--an event that would be fully chaperoned by the parent of every graduate. It was a kind of adolescent "coming out," in the cotillion sense, and girls were required to wear white dresses. I made a white eyelet dress with an empire waist, but prone as I was to resisting direct commands, I selected a pale green lining that just barely showed through the lace. In my own quiet way, I defied the nuns to throw me out of the ceremony because my dress did not conform.
Afterward, in the cafeteria, the principal played records while we danced. I knew how to dance the pony, the Watusi, the swim. I danced almost every dance with the boy I had been going steady with despite the prohibition on dating. And I awaited the ritual father-daughter dance because I knew no other father could dance as well as mine.
My father was smooth. A graduate of Arthur Murray’s Dance Studio. He was like the cowboys I see in Idaho bars who have been thrown from their horses so many times that their legs seem as gnarled and twisted as the trunk of a hawthorn tree. I marvel they can even stand, and then the music starts and they move with the grace of a thoroughbred, almost floating across the smoky dance floor, elegantly guiding their partners through complicated maneuvers. When my father and mother went dancing, all the ladies wanted to dance with my father, even though he could not gaze into his partner’s eyes or rest her head upon his chest. It was because he was such a strong lead.
My father taught me to dance--to move to the four/four beat of a fox-trot and the three/four beat of a waltz. He would direct me around the room counter-clockwise, simultaneously spinning me counter-clockwise, while our feet moved clockwise through the step. He taught me to cha cha and introduced me to the swing sounds of Glenn Miller, Gene Krupa and the Ink Spots, as well as the easy listening piano jazz of George Shearing.
My father was still in a full-body cast at my graduation dance. My worries about the potentially paralyzing surgery had coalesced into a fear that my father would miss my graduation dance, but he had assured me he would be there, and he was, his suit fitted over his cast just as his army uniform had been.
I remember my father taking me into his arms for the father-daughter dance. The sweet smell of Brut aftershave mingling with the stale odor of cigarettes. He leads me in a fox-trot, guides me into a twinkle step where we move side-by-side as one. Then we are back in the closed position, my left hand on his right shoulder, my right hand firmly clasped in his left. I am aware that we are the best dance couple on the floor. What I care about most, however, is that he is there with me. And if only for the length of a song, I let him lead, and we see eye-to-eye.