In January of third grade, I had another examination with Dr. Estes who found nothing wrong with me and again recommended full activity. That same month, the school nurse, Mrs. McNulty, noted that she had spoken to my mother, who explained that I was just not well enough to attend school because of “an occasional low-grade fever.”
By February, the notes report that I was in the care of “another Dr.” who was “trying to prove my anemia.” That month, we went to visit Dr. Farley, the doctor recommended by Marlene. He gave my mother a handwritten note informing the school that I was now under his care. In his note, Dr. Farley stipulated that I have home teaching as I currently wasn’t fit to attend school. A few days later, I had my first session with my teacher, Mrs. Johnston, at my home. The sessions didn’t last long. By March 4, my mother was canceling them, claiming I wasn’t strong enough.
I remember Dr. Farley very well. His offices were on 178th Street near the George Washington Bridge, at the top of a long, narrow staircase. In the waiting room, the chairs and couches were tattered, with splitting seams, as if all the patients sitting here waiting over all the years had worn them all to pieces. Dr. Farley was from Ireland and had an accent that I couldn’t always understand, but even so, I felt safe with him. His belly was large and round, he wore wire glasses on his nose, and his balding head was rimmed with white hair. He was always kindly and smiling when we saw him. My mother felt comfortable with him, too. She said he reminded her of her doctor in Ohio. While the other doctors we visited looked at us skeptically, Dr. Farley was different. He didn’t judge us. He believed my mother when she told him something was wrong with me. He listened to us. When we left his offices, my mother always seemed so relieved.
Lying on Dr. Farley’s dark green examining table, I could see across the room to his desk area. On the far wall, behind the desk, there was a Norman Rockwell painting of a doctor and a little girl wearing a red hat. The doctor had a stethoscope, and the little girl was holding up a doll so that the doctor could listen to the doll’s heart. The girl looked shy, maybe even a little worried. The doctor was an older man, red-cheeked and kindly, with white hair. As he pressed his stethoscope to the doll’s chest, he stared up into one corner of the room, just like Dr. Farley as he examines me. I liked the painting very much.
When my school requested another examination by a Board of Education medical officer, Dr. Farley wrote again, this time asking them to kindly hold up the procedure until I had seen another doctor.
“We will have to assume that Nina is being ‘illegally detained’ unless we receive the proper documentation,” the school principal, Mr. Bedford, wrote in April 1969. The school needed official authorization for the home teaching. That same month, Mrs. Johnston wrote in my progress report that since I had missed every single day of the marking period, it was impossible to give a progress report at all. In fact, I had been absent for 138 days and present for only 55 days. “I am forced to consider that Nina does not have the skills necessary to progress to Fourth Grade,” Mrs. Johnston explained.
At this point, the school insisted I see a physician approved by the Board of Education. Reluctantly, my mother drove me into Manhattan to visit Dr. Edmund Joyner, the chairman of the Pediatrics Department at Roosevelt Hospital. Dr. Joyner gave me a full physical exam. After that, he sent a note to the school explaining that I was in good health and “capable of taking part in school activities suitable for her age.”
My mother conceded defeat and sent me back to school. However, my return didn’t last long. One day, I was walking to my desk after collecting an assignment from Mrs. Johnston when my knees buckled under me and I fell. I was sent to the school nurse. As instructed, the nurse did not send me home but returned me to class. Later that day, when I told my mother what had happened, she immediately booked an appointment with an orthopedist. The doctor looked at my X-rays and told my mother it was possible my legs had stopped growing. Starting the next day, my mother kept me home again.
On April 24, Dr. Farley sent a letter to my school principal to explain that I was seeing a Dr. Michael Lepore at St. Vincent’s Hospital and that the school should arrange for home studies until I was ready to return. My principal had finally reached his breaking point. That May, my mother was summoned to appear in family court charged with unlawfully keeping Robin and me home without cause. Dr. Farley sent a note to the Family Intake Unit of Suffolk County to say that my mother would be unable to attend because “she must take the child Nina, age 9, for treatment of a serious illness to Dr. C. Flood.”
A day later, Dr. Farley followed up with a letter to the Suffolk County Department of Correction to explain that “Nina will be out of school for an indefinite period of time.”
For now, at least, Dr. Farley and my mother had won the tug-of-war with my school.
Although it’s not in the school records, I am almost certain it was Dr. Farley who suggested I have colonic irrigation. Throughout my childhood, my mother was convinced I was constipated—not a day went by without her asking me repeatedly if I’d gone. If I said no, she’d give me a glass of orange juice, and then I would sit on the toilet in the powder room by the kitchen and wait. When my mother
