Steve had learned that it was often difficult to have a discussion with Uncle Homer without having Ann in earshot as it was pretty clear that he didn’t want her around when he asked about Mrs. Cooper. But sometimes it was possible, and the next morning was one of those times, since Ann had to make a run to the grocery store in the minivan. It meant her dressing from neck to toe, with a big wide-brimmed hat and her wrap-around mirror sunglasses, of course.

Uncle Homer was up and for once not playing Windows Solitaire. “So what are you doing this morning?” Steve asked as he casually walked into the room.

“Just trolling the Wall Street Journal website,” the old man replied. “I never know what might catch my eye. Once in a while it’s something useful. Most of the time it’s a bunch of garbage, but occasionally I turn up a jewel or two.”

“I’ll bet things were different for you before you had the Internet.”

“Oh, no fooling, Steve. I’d have been lost without it the last fifteen years or so. It would have made my life a heck of a lot different if I’d had it available fifty years ago. I was tailing down my business interests about the time Ann arrived, but the Internet gave me a whole new lease on life and changed a lot of things around here.”

“Ann has been with you quite a while now, hasn’t she?” Steve offered as a way to nudge the discussion closer to what he wanted to talk about.

“Yeah, fifteen years. Actually, it’s a little more than that. She was still pretty young when I brought her here, and I had my hands full with her for a while.”

“The other day, she mentioned something about a Mrs. Cooper being her teacher, but she didn’t get into that very much.”

“Not surprising,” Uncle Homer shrugged. “Ann is not one to be very open about her past, but I would have had a heck of a time with her without Agnes. She was a teacher long, long ago, but she ran Ann through several years’ worth of school in months, and Ann just soaked it up like a sponge. I couldn’t have managed those years without Agnes’ help, and we all sort of helped each other along.”

“How was that?” Steve asked, realizing that he was getting Uncle Homer into one of his story-telling moods where he might learn a little more about the mystery of Ann.

“There’s another one of those stories from around this place,” Uncle Homer said. “In a way, I’m a little surprised that Ann hasn’t mentioned her before, but then, Ann is Ann after all. She looks at the world a little differently than the rest of us.”

“If there’s anything I know about Ann for sure, that’s it.”

“No fooling,” Uncle Homer grinned. “Let’s face it, she has special needs, and I’m sure you know that as well as I do. When I brought her here, she had even more special needs. Steve, I never married and I have no children, or at least not any that I know of, so I was at a total dead loss about how to raise her. I mean, I might have been able to get by if she had been a boy, but girls are not boys, and well, they’re different, so I realized I needed a woman’s help with her.”

“Makes sense,” Steve agreed. “I’d be totally stuck if I were to get in that situation, too.”

“Well, fortunately we got a little lucky, or at least I had the good luck to turn two pieces of bad luck into an opportunity.” Uncle Homer was silent for a long moment, obviously gathering his thoughts, but his next words were nothing like what Steve expected: “Steve, what do you know about polio?”

“Not much,” he replied, wondering where that question came from. “I know Franklin Delano Roosevelt had it, and pretty much spent his life in a wheelchair, and that the general public didn’t know that fact until after his death.”

“It’s amazing that people know that much these days,” Uncle Homer replied. “It’s all been pretty well forgotten, and in a way I’m glad it has. Steve, you’re probably forty years too young to know just how much it scared the hell out of people, especially in the early fifties, when there was a major polio epidemic. Fortunately a man by the name of Jonas Salk came along and just stopped the epidemic in its tracks by inventing a vaccine to prevent it. Within only a year or two new cases of polio were all but unknown. At the time people pretty much considered him to be a living saint. Most people have forgotten him these days, just like they’ve forgotten the fear people had of polio. That’s a shame, because he proved that one man can make a difference, but that’s neither here nor there to us, at least as far as Agnes goes. The sad part about that is that while Salk managed to prevent people from getting the disease, there was nothing that could be done to cure it, and there still isn’t.

“To simplify things a little bit, polio caused paralysis in various parts of the body. Roosevelt was paralyzed from the waist down after he caught it, not long before I was born. The disease was also called infantile paralysis, but that wasn’t quite true since people could get it at any age. If I recall correctly, Roosevelt was in his late thirties when he came down with it, for example. Agnes Cooper was twenty-eight when she caught it, in the big polio epidemic of 1952.

“Steve, one of the scariest things that could happen with polio was when it settled into the muscles in the torso. You know that people breathe by expanding and contracting their chests or bellies?”

“I remember something about it from biology class,” Steve replied. “It would be hard to breathe without it.”

“That’s what happened to Agnes,” Uncle Homer shook his head. “Steve, do you know what an ‘iron lung’ was?”

“I think I remember seeing a picture once or twice,” he replied. “A big tube, maybe three feet across, six or seven feet long. People would have to lie in it with their head sticking out of it. In fact, now that I think about it, I remember seeing a picture of a room about the size of a gymnasium floor, with people in those things parked next to each other filling the room. No wonder it scared the hell out of people.”

“That’s not a bad description,” Uncle Homer shook his head. “‘Iron lung’ wasn’t a very good name for them. ‘Iron diaphragm’ is actually a better term. What they did was pump air in and out of the tube to simulate the action of a diaphragm on the whole body, not just the chest. Basically, it was mechanical artificial respiration. Agnes almost died back there in 1952, except that they managed to get her into an iron lung in time. She was dying, but they turned on the switch, and within a minute she felt like normal. She could breathe again, at least the machine could do the work for her.”

“I can’t imagine what it would have been like,” Steve shook his head. “I would think it would be pretty scary to contemplate being trapped in one of those things in order to live.”

“To be honest, Steve, I agreed with you for many years. But Agnes, well, it was the breath of life to her. She was comfortable when she was in her iron lung, and it was always a struggle to breathe when she was outside. She spent, hell, I don’t know how long, years in hers, continually or nearly so. To make a long story short, she was eventually able to be outside of it for a while, but hardly ever comfortably. Better respirators were invented, but they still caused her distress in various ways, and she had continual problems with asthma, partly as a result of the polio. She was able to learn to breathe on her own, using her chest muscles, but she never was able to breathe well, and usually had to be on oxygen on the rare occasions when she wasn’t using some kind of respirator. She couldn’t sleep outside her iron lung or some kind of an artificial respirator since it took a conscious effort for her to breathe.”

“That’s still a pretty hard life,” Steve replied soberly. “It’s not the way I’d want to live.”

“Me either, Steve, me either. But Agnes had no choice, and once she became used to it she was reasonably comfortable with it. Sometimes you have to accept what happens to you and get on with your life. I don’t like being old and feeble, but I have Agnes’ example to live with, and there are times it keeps me going.

“Now, I knew Agnes from way back when we were little kids. We were friends, we went to school together, and we even dated a little bit back in, oh, the early forties before I joined the Air Corps. She went to Michigan Normal School in Ypsilanti to be a schoolteacher. She got married to a college classmate after the war and had a couple of kids. Life was pretty hard for her after she got polio, and I helped her family where I could, mostly financially. I wasn’t anywhere near as wealthy then as I am now, but I tried to do what I could for her, since we had been classmates and we were still friends.

“Without going into all the details, Agnes had lousy luck with her family in later years. Her husband died young, and the boy died in Vietnam. Her daughter was the next damn thing to useless, mostly a combination of drugs and stupidity, and didn’t want anything more to do with her mother than she had to. Just before I brought Ann here, I found out that Agnes was in a nursing home and not being very well cared for. I mean, she was in reasonably good shape, but the idiot staff of the nursing home didn’t want to be bothered with a resident on a respirator and who needed more support than they were willing to give her. Frankly, it was pretty damn clear to me that if she weren’t back in an iron lung, at least to sleep, she didn’t have long to live.”

“That’s sad, but I guess things like that happen more often than we want to think about.”

“No fooling, Steve. At least I have the money to be sure of getting decent care if I get to be that bad, so long as someone is willing to be sure I get the care I need. But to get on with the story, when Ann came into my life I knew I needed some female assistance, at least female input. Chiseling Agnes away from the nursing home and bringing her here really killed two birds with one stone, and it proved to be the right thing to do. It took lawyers and money to get Agnes out of the clutches of those weasels, but I was lucky enough to have both.”

“And you don’t take ‘no’ for an answer if you don’t have a pretty good reason to,” Steve grinned.

“That’s true, and it was even more true that time. Now, I knew that Agnes had been in and out of an iron lung for, hell, over forty years, but when she went into the nursing home her useless idiot of a daughter got rid of it. Didn’t want it sitting around, I guess. Well, I knew Agnes wanted to be back in one and did better when she was, so I hunted one up for her. They weren’t being made anymore by that time and even spare parts were hard to find. To make a long story short, I found one sitting in the storeroom of a hospital in Louisville. It was built back in the forties and needed refurbishing, but I got that done while the lawyers and I were wrestling with the nursing home, which was trying to drain Medicaid dry before Agnes died. But we got it all fixed up, along with a new battery backup, and it was sitting in the atrium room off the living room when we brought Agnes here.

“Steve, I know the thought of having to live in an iron lung scares you since it scared the hell out of me, but you should have seen Agnes’ eyes light up when she saw it! She was very pale and weak when we got her here in an ambulance, and honestly, she was pretty close to dying. But we got her in the machine, and turned it on.” He paused for a moment, and Steve thought he saw a tear in the old man’s eye. “Within two minutes she looked at least ten years younger,” he finally went on. “She got the color back in her face almost instantly, and she had a big smile because she was breathing comfortably again, literally for the first time in months. Steve, I never saw anyone happier in my life.”

Steve shook his head. “In those circumstances, I guess it’s understandable.”

“Yeah, really. Like I said, they make better respirators now, but they can cause problems, too, like an increased possibility of infections and throat irritation. They aggravated Agnes’ asthma to the point where she could hardly breathe until we put her in her new iron lung. Within a couple weeks she’d perked up a lot. She’d gained a lot of strength back, put on some weight, and she could be out of the machine for a bit each day. After that, Ann and I got her out of it for, oh, anywhere from two to six hours a day. She really became a part of the family in many ways, but she was always happiest when we could get her back in her iron lung and so she wouldn’t have to worry about struggling to breathe.

“We left her iron lung in the atrium room so she could be a part of the household, rather than stuck away in a back room somewhere,” Uncle Homer went on. “We rigged up a computer screen above her head so she could see it, and she could run a keyboard and a mouse with her hands from inside the machine. It was the first she’d been exposed to computers or the Internet. Talk about a whole new world, Steve! I like to think the Internet has made life easier for me in my old age, but it’s nothing like what computers did for her.”

Uncle Homer stopped for a moment and his mind seemed far away. Finally he continued, “God, I can close my eyes and remember one time when Agnes was laying on her back in her iron lung, with a computer screen going in front of her and another one hooked up so Ann could look at it. Agnes had a paint program up and used the cursor like a piece of chalk on a blackboard, explaining the Pythagorean theorem to Ann. It was two people who both needed help, helping each other.”

“I can almost imagine it myself. I mean, it sounds pretty unique.”

“It gave a new life to Agnes, that’s for sure. Steve, when she was in the nursing home she was literally bored to death. I mean, an active mind in a useless body with little to stimulate her but a TV being left on all day, and she really grew to hate that. When she came here, she had a purpose to her life again, and that turned her life around.

“While Agnes loved to teach Ann, or just talk with her and help her develop her mind, and liked exploring things through the Internet, she also liked to just lie there and look out the window at the birds using the bird feeders. That’s part of the reason Ann and I have kept filling them in spite of all the hassles that damn raccoon has caused us. It’s almost like Agnes is still lying there in her iron lung looking at them. In spite of everything, Steve, it was a very happy time around here, probably the happiest I’ve been in all the years I’ve been living here.”

“Ann told me a little about that part of it, but she never mentioned Agnes being in an iron lung.”

“Well, you know Ann,” Uncle Homer shrugged. “She sometimes leaves out little details like that. She’ll give you chapter and verse on a business deal, but she’s often very reticent about any personal feelings she has. In a way I’m surprised she told you that much.”

“She sure never even gave me a hint of all of this. Uncle Homer, that seems like a hell of a nice thing for you to do all around.”

“Like I said, Agnes was an old friend and needed a hand, and it was especially true due to her needing to be in an iron lung. I knew that she could help me with Ann. The other way around was true, too. Ann could be a lot of help with Agnes, and she helped herself a lot in the process. Steve, have you ever seen how a troubled kid can sometimes be helped by learning to deal with and care for a pet? A dog, a cat, maybe even a horse?”

“I’ve never been directly involved with something like that, but I’ve heard of it happening.”

“I’ve seen it happen and it happened right here. Ann and Agnes were so good for each other it was incredible. Agnes taught Ann woman things I would never have even thought about. Like I said, Ann soaked up schoolwork from Agnes like a great big sponge. In only two or three years Ann went from early elementary school level to being a high school graduate well ahead of her age group, and they pushed on into college-level work. Ann may have her problems, but a learning disability is not one of them. Although she doesn’t have the class work, she has the knowledge of an MBA. She learned that from Agnes, and a lesser extent from me, but mostly by herself using the principles Agnes taught her.”

“That’s impressive. I hadn’t realized that.”

“That isn’t all Ann learned from Agnes. For instance, Ann is a good cook, mostly because Agnes taught her how to be – or at least the principles, same difference. But the list hardly ends there. Do you know how Ann tends to be a little formal, a little prissy?”

“That’s an understatement if I ever heard one.”

“I’m afraid that’s part of Agnes’ doing, and yes, it sometimes irritates me, too. Agnes taught her how to be a very proper young lady, but unfortunately Agnes’ idea of being proper dated from the thirties and forties, maybe even earlier than that, and she was rather prissy and proper for those days, too. But believe me, I see an awful lot of Agnes in Ann, and under the circumstances I could not have come up with a better role model, so I’m perfectly willing to put up with the irritations. Believe me, Ann came out much better than I could have dreamed, thanks to Agnes.”

“It sounds like it worked out very well all the way around.”

“Better than I could possibly have believed, Steve. Like I said, it was a case of turning two problems into one opportunity.”

“So what happened to Agnes?”

“She died, Steve. She’d lived a physically hard life, and was always frail after the polio hit her. One evening we got up and she was just dead, died in her sleep. The machine was still breathing for her but her heart had quit working. There’s a private cemetery plot on the hill overlooking the pond, and she’s buried there. When my time comes, I’ll be buried next to her. She was never my wife or anything, but I think that in her last few years I loved her like I never could manage with anyone else.

“Her iron lung is still here in the house, in one of those rooms on the third floor. Bob and Ray had a hell of a time getting it up there – it weighs something like eight hundred pounds – but I just couldn’t bring myself to scrap it. I always thought someone might come along who would still need it, but it’s never happened and the last I heard there are only about a half a dozen Americans left living in them. And thank God, when you stop to think about it. At least thank Jonas Salk for literally stopping polio in its tracks. The last time I was upstairs, it was to just look at that machine to remember Agnes a little. I think Ann goes up there from time to time to do the same thing.”

“Ann said she thought the two of you had been lovers, way back when.”

“I’m afraid Ann got that wrong. Agnes and I were never lovers in that sense. She wasn’t that kind of girl, especially before I went into the Air Corps. She would never have dreamed of it back in those days, and I knew better than to ask. The last few years I’ve often wondered how things would have been different for me if . . . well, just if, Steve. Although we were never lovers, at least I had a few years to love her.”

As always, when Steve learned something new about Ann, he was left with more questions than he’d had when he started. He’d figured out already that Ann had been young when she’d come to live with Uncle Homer, but he hadn’t quite realized how young – and didn’t really know, even now, since he didn’t know how old Ann was. There had been hints that she’d had some problems when she had been young – and now he was sure of it, even though Uncle Homer hadn’t gone into detail.

What was even more of a mystery was that neither Ann nor Uncle Homer had ever given a hint of why she’d come to live with him – and Agnes – in the first place. The only thing Steve could figure out was that it must have been something of a rescue, much like Uncle Homer had rescued Agnes from the nursing home, but both what and why were still unaccounted for. When Steve tried to nudge Uncle Homer into getting into that question, the subject somehow seemed to change very quickly to something else with no reason for the change given.

But Uncle Homer had made it pretty clear that while she lay on her back in an iron lung, Agnes had worked a miracle with the young Ann – and though how the miracle had been accomplished was pretty clear, what it had fixed was still pretty vague to him.

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