Fleabrain Loves Franny (25 page)

“And her plan is … ?”

“You'll see, you'll see,” said Fleabrain.

The ballerina danced away the minutes of the afternoon. With each minute, Fleabrain's happiness grew, as he marveled at the miracle of a spider and a flea, perched side by side on one beam of light. Another Truth of the Universe, he realized. Kindred Spirits were everywhere!

“Say, Charles, have you read Howell's
Paramoigraphy
?” Fleabrain asked.

“Can't say that I have.”

“Charles, I think you'll love it.”

A Statement

N
icholson Street was steep, but Franny said she preferred that route, and Min and Milt helped her from behind. The birds of dawn were twittering, her heart was beating, and Alf was panting as he trudged beside her wheelchair. Somewhere on Alf's tail, Fleabrain was cheering. From Franny's perspective, things were quite noisy. From Min and Milt's perspective, Franny guessed, it was a quiet morning, with a silvery sky and a splash of sunrise. Very romantic.

“Are you OK, kiddo?” Milt asked.

“I'm perfect,
langer loksh
,” Franny said.

Milt had arrived at the Katzenback home at 6:00
A.M.
Franny was ready, dressed, and waiting in her chair. She was wearing her braces and her clodhopper shoes. Milt picked her up and carried her, and Min pushed the wheelchair, quietly and swiftly, out the front door.

Soon they were quickly crossing the boulevard, then moving more slowly along the wooded path, the morning sun slanting through the trees.

“Mom and Dad will be reading my note soon,” Min said. “I taped it on Dad's shaving mirror.”

“They'll be angry,” said Franny. “Worried, too.” That was the only flaw in her plan.

“Oh, phooey!” said Min. “This is important. I told them everything would be fine, and to meet us there at eight. They'll be there.”

Oh, phooey?

Who was this spunky, angry Min, flyaway hair in her eyes, her cheeks as pink as cotton candy? Where had Saint Min gone? Franny wondered at the change in her sister, ever since that awful letter from the school had arrived. Or did it have something to do with falling in love? Or maybe this more spirited Min had been secretly hiding all along, waiting for an important reason to show up.

And here was one reason. As they entered Lightning's stall, he bent his head way down to nuzzle Franny's neck, as always. She kissed his velvet nose, then put both arms around his neck to whisper the secret of their next adventure into his ear.

“I'll be right back,” said Milt. He ran into the stables' office and emerged with a picnic hamper. “Before we go, breakfast for all of us.”

Milt spread a blue-checked tablecloth on a picnic table in front of the stables.

Bagels, cream cheese, melon, and apples. Blueberry pie and eleven dog biscuits. It was probably the best breakfast of all of their lives.

After breakfast, Franny fed Lightning an apple, then watched Milt brush him until his rich brown hide gleamed like a buckeye. He checked Lightning's tail for stickers and hay and cleaned his feet with a pick.

“Next time you'll help me,” Milt said to Franny.

“Are you going to get into trouble for all of this?” Franny asked.

“Maybe,” Milt said. “Maybe not. Lightning's my aunt's horse.” Milt's dark eyes crinkled when he smiled. Franny understood why Min loved him.

Milt tacked up Lightning and walked him around the stables a few times to warm his muscles.

“Hey, Milt, it's getting late,” said Min. “It's time.”

“Ready, Franny?” asked Milt.

“Ready,” said Franny.

Ready
.

Milt picked her up, and he and Min carefully helped Franny straddle the horse's saddle and put her feet into the stirrups. Franny held the reins while her sister stood beside her, Min's hand on Franny's leg.

“Walk on, old fellow. You won't be traveling very far,” said Milt. He held a rope attached to Lightning's halter.

Lightning started forward slowly, guided by Milt, Alf following the horse.

“You're a natural, kiddo!” said Milt.

Franny sat tall. She'd done this before. “Thank you,” she said.

The procession turned down English Lane, then onto the sidewalk of Beechwood Boulevard, which was now alive with cars and people. Horns honked, and people gawked at the girl on her horse on the sidewalks of Squirrel Hill. Milt held up his hand to stop the traffic as they crossed the boulevard at the corner. Only one more block to go.

There were so many things in the world to repair, Franny knew. But there were so many things that didn't need repairing at all.

The sun on her back, like a warm cloak.

Min's smile that morning.

Alf.

Lightning, her noble champion, his true speed and aerial power known only to a few.

Her love for her family and her friends.

Charlotte's Web
.

Her love for Fleabrain, always and forever.

They had reached the school. Walter Walter and Katy had told the rest of the Pack who told everyone else, and now there was a respectful silence as Franny and Lightning trotted into the school yard. Every kid had imagined themselves sitting upon that beautiful old racehorse. No one would ever forget Franny's ride.

Franny saw her parents, with tenuous smiles and concerned frowns, just as Min had predicted. But she hadn't expected to see the young man with a camera.

“Jimmy Regis, here,” he said, wearing a press badge and a smile. “Special Correspondent to the
Pittsburgh Rag
. Do you have a statement to make, miss?”

“A statement? Well, yes, I do,” said Franny. “My name is Francine Babette Katzenback. I'm in fifth grade, and I want to go to school with my friends. I'm not allowed to come in my wheelchair, so I came on a horse. They may not let me stay at Creswell, but here I am today.”

“May I?” Jimmy asked, holding up his camera. Franny nodded, and a bulb flashed.

Min and Milt helped her down, and Franny walked across the yard, holding on to Min's arm. Lean on left foot. Swing right hip out. Step with right foot. Lean on right foot. Swing left hip out. Step with left foot.

She could see Mrs. Nelson, waving from a second-floor window. Franny could tell she was singing. At the Girls' Entrance, Katy and Teresa made a friendship seat, hands over wrists, stronger than rope. Franny put her arms around the girls' shoulders and pulled herself up, and they climbed the stairs to their classroom.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Charlotte's Web
, written by E. B. White and illustrated by Garth Williams, was published in October 1952, after the summer of the worst polio outbreak in U.S. history, in which 58,000 cases were recorded.

White's novel is a celebration of life and of a life-saving friendship. Any reader who has ever felt helpless and lonely can identify with the plight of Wilbur, the runt piglet of the litter, doomed to death because of his size. Young polio victims, especially, felt small in the face of their illness, suddenly overwhelmed by a situation in which everyone seemed to know what was best for them, but no one could really help. Perhaps some longed for their own tiny, but mighty, Charlotte. And so I imagined Franny and Fleabrain, the three of us connected by E. B. White's inspiring book.

In the mid-1950s, surveys showed that people in the United States feared polio—also called poliomyelitis or infantile paralysis—more than they feared the atom bomb. The terror they felt was largely the result of their sense of hopelessness in preventing an outbreak, the mysteries of the disease, and the fact that so many children were tragically affected.

Polio has been around since ancient times. The disease is caused by the poliovirus, which enters the intestinal tract through the mouth and may find its way into the bloodstream. It is thought to spread by hand-to-hand contact.

Polio's virulence and incidence increased during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ironically, it was the improvement of sanitation systems that most likely led to polio epidemics. In earlier
times, when there were open sewage systems and outdoor latrines, people were exposed to the virus as babies—that is, while they were still partially protected by the maternal antibodies (disease-fighting agents produced by the immune system) in their bloodstream. While they might come down with a mild case of polio, this very early exposure to the poliovirus protected them, because it enabled them to develop their own protective antibodies against future exposure to the disease. Such protection was far less likely to occur in more sanitary times, and older children became vulnerable, since they had not been exposed to the poliovirus as babies.

In the majority of cases during the polio epidemics of the twentieth century, the infected individuals experienced only mild gastrointestinal or respiratory problems. Many did not even realize they were infected (although they could still spread the virus to others). However, for a minority, the virus left the intestinal tract and entered the central nervous system, where it damaged or destroyed motor neurons, resulting in severe muscle weakness or permanent paralysis.

When the virus affected muscles necessary for breathing, patients were in danger of dying; the only way to keep them alive was to place them in an “iron lung,” a large, elaborate machine in which they lay immobile, often for days at a time. Many polio patients eventually regained the ability to breathe on their own, to walk, and to function without the aid of an iron lung, braces, crutches, and wheelchairs; others, tragically, did not.

One of those stricken was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who contracted polio as a young man. After serving as governor of New York,
Roosevelt became president of the United States in 1933. Even though he needed leg braces and a cane in order to stand, he wanted to appear confident and able-bodied to the American public, so his staff discouraged any photographs or films of him in a wheelchair. However, during his presidency, Roosevelt established the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to raise money for polio research and financial aid for patients. Because of the huge success of its fund-raising campaigns, in which millions of coins from people of all walks of life, including children, poured into its headquarters from across the nation, the foundation's name was later changed to the March of Dimes.

The desperate race to create a safe and effective vaccine to prevent polio was centered in the United States, funded by the March of Dimes and other foundations. The young Dr. Jonas Salk and his team of dedicated scientists at the University of Pittsburgh, working sixteen-hour days six days a week in the basement and lower floors of the Municipal Hospital for Contagious Diseases, were the first to meet with success. Pittsburgh was, and remains, proud of its association with this team, and Salk did indeed live “somewhere” in Squirrel Hill—although Professor Doctor George Gutman is fictional.

Salk's theory was that a vaccine containing a small amount of the dead poliovirus would “fool” the body into creating antibodies against it without causing the disease itself—a method he had used in his previous research with influenza vaccines. Many others—for example, Dr. Albert Sabin—preferred a vaccine using a live but weakened (or “attenuated”) virus, but Salk's vaccine was the first to be tested on groups of humans.

Salk and his team laboriously identified three distinct types of the poliovirus. They realized they would have to create a vaccine that successfully protected against them all. Large quantities of the polio-virus were grown “in vitro” (that is, in cells removed from the living organism from which they came), using cultures of monkey kidney tissue. The goal of Salk's team was to inactivate the virus with just the right amount of formaldehyde to make the virus noninfectious but still able to stimulate the production of protective antibodies. Eventually they created a vaccine (made up of the three strains of the inactivated poliovirus) that did just that.