Bex O’Brian

Word Count 920

“No, love, it was polio. Your mother had polio. That’s why one leg was so much smaller than the other.”

I didn’t like to contradict my father’s cousin, Anne, but I had never heard this story. It’s not something you can keep secret, especially someone like my mother, who told us plenty of other horrors from her childhood: her sister dying, her brother drowning, her father ending up in an insane asylum before he too died.

If she bothered to give her children the details of how she had to sleep with her dead sister’s corpse for one night, it seemed strange that she would fail to mention that she had polio which, from what I understand, would have required a substantial hospital stay, along with a lengthy rehabilitation.

Anne and I were having this chat because, after my mother’s death, I felt a need to pin down why she was so strange physically. As kids, we could never figure out if her skinny leg was her true form or if her tough, muscled leg, with a splayed foot, was her unsullied self. My father, never one to tolerate imperfections, used to say that foot belonged on a jungle floor. Neither leg matched the rest of her.

I finally blurted out that Mother always told us that she had had a stroke in the womb.

“A stroke?” Anne replied. “Perhaps. But why would it only affect one leg?”

I had never thought to question my mother’s story, but Anne was right. It did seem odd.

I began to despair that I would ever know what happened to my mother. Even when she was alive, she was strangely cagey about certain aspects of her life. Why, for instance, had her father, who never showed any signs of eccentricity, suddenly gone stark raving mad one day? Why was her gallbladder removed when she was eight? Why did she take great pains to see as little of her family as possible?

If I can’t get to the bottom of her physical anomalies, how the hell am I supposed to parse her brain? Three daughters, one stepdaughter, and none of us are anywhere near understanding the logic of the woman. Putting aside her obvious talent as a writer and humourist, which does require some mystical brain power, what tripped us up was the lack of any filter. She once asked me to cut her underarm hair. As I flew around in a state of utter revulsion, I managed to ask why she didn’t just shave. She looked at me with utter wonderment. It hadn’t even occurred to her. I could cite thousands of examples where the most obvious logic was far beyond her reach. One winter, she entered my bedroom after the first snowstorm and wanted me to help her roll each snow tire one by one to the garage down the street. When I suggested we put them all in the car, she seemed dubious. Was such a thing even possible?

I have often heard of people being at war with themselves. But with Mother, her war went deeper. And now I suspected it went deep into a secret that was the key to her off-kilter existence. Her need for attention was at odds with an acute discomfort when anyone pried past her well-scripted narrative.

Months after my call with Anne, I was still judging the disparate rendering of her physical state when I decided to delve into her past, starting with her father. Who are we if we can’t blame our parents?

Barely knowing her side of the family, I contacted the granddaughter of my mother’s much older sister, who I had sometimes wondered if she was not my mother’s mother. But no. The disparity in age was due to that horrific shindig The Great War.

Chatting away, catching up on lives we had never shared, I finally asked, “Why did my grandfather suddenly go mad? Mother always claimed it was because he was gassed in the First World War. But that never really made sense to me. Gas is immediate, and he went mad nearly twenty years later.”

“He wasn’t gassed. He died of syphilitic madness.”

Turns out, thirty-five million men came back from the French trenches infected. I kept thinking about that scene in ‘Out of Africa,’ where Karen Blixen finds out she’s infected and the doctor tells her she’s very sick while her husband might only have a touch.

How does that work? Did my grandfather only have a touch so that he could live a relatively normal life until…Bam..one day he goes off his rocker?

The wives of these poor men were told not to worry about weeping sores on penises and get on with the business of repopulating the severely thinned ranks of humanity.

My Gran promptly had four more children. Penicillin came into being the very year my mother was born. 1928. Great. Except, if you are a poor kid living in the East End of London, there was no chance in hell you were getting a jab anytime soon.

Was my mother born with syphilis? Seems likely. One of the first organs it attacks is the gall bladder.

To me, the bigger mystery was whether she knew. Once given penicillin, one is cured. She might have been only ten or eleven at that point and had no understanding of what she was being given or why. Or did she know and live her whole life with a shame that was close to crippling?

Bex lives mostly in France with her husband and their dog. She’s been scribbling around on various projects for the better part of thirty years and made very little money as a result. Thus conditioned, she is thrilled with the advent of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. She is the author of the novels (Under Bex Brian) Promiscuous Unbound and Radius.