Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [80]
When I returned to New York, I was treated at the Institute for Sports Medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital. The institute had been founded by Dr. James Nicholas, one of President Kennedy’s doctors and a good friend of Mrs. Onassis. She was kind and supportive, and gave me the use of her car service for months while I was laid up. She told me stories of when she was engaged to John’s father and broke her ankle playing touch football. “That was the last time,” she said. You don’t have to keep up with him, her eyes seemed to confide. He wants you because you’re feminine. She smiled, recounting the effort it took to hobble across the room for a book or a cashmere sweater. I didn’t have a drawerful of cashmere, but I nodded as if I did.
After three weeks, the cast was taken off, and in its stead I was given a lightweight removable brace—a blue plastic miracle. I wouldn’t be able to walk without crutches for another three months, but now, with the brace, I could swim in a pool, receive ultrasound treatments, and take a bath. John would gallantly carry me up the five flights of stairs to his brownstone apartment, but he wasn’t able to look at my cadaver-like foot. Nor could he bear to hear how painful it was or of the fears I had. He wanted me to be a trooper, a sport, but for all his exploits, he was squeamish about blood and weakness of any kind.
Around Easter, he had a break from school and decided a vacation was in order. His aunt Lee invited us to join her and her husband, Herbert Ross, at a rented villa in Acapulco, and it was tempting. But we chose the less cushy alternative.
We landed in Montego Bay. Waiting for our delayed luggage at a roadside hut, John drank the manroot drink to be manlier and bought me a wooden cane carved by a Rasta with wild eyes.
On a side road to Negril, we saw a handwritten sign—HOLY CAVE—and pulled over. When the men there caught sight of my crutches, they began waving their arms and shouting, insisting I go to the healing spring deep within the cave. I smiled at John, and he smiled back; it was the beginning of adventure.
A price was settled on, torches were lit, and my crutches were laid at the entrance. With three men as our guides and one tagging along, John flung me over his shoulder he-man-style, and we entered the cave. Soon any trace of sunlight was gone, and we were enveloped by rock. Bats flew by us. I swallowed my fear and tried to breathe the dank, dead air. Against my stomach, I could feel his heart beating fast. As we went deeper, the rock walls narrowed, and when the ceiling got so low that his knees shook, one of the younger guides took over carrying me. He moved quickly in a deep squat until we heard the roar of the spring.
The passage opened suddenly into a wide cavern. Without speaking, the men began to form a half circle around the spring, as John and the young guide lowered me into the cold water—the force of it so strong, I had to grip the rocks or be swept into the deeper darkness. The gush of water and the men’s voices echoed off the rock walls. Because of the dialect, no words were discernible; it was like a chant, louder and more insistent, until finally I cried out. By the whites of eyes lit by fire and the black smoke of the kerosene, I cried and prayed. I prayed to the divinity of the dark that I would be healed and walk again.
We drove away invigorated by my baptism in the cave spring. We sang old songs as the rental car hugged the coast. Then he said he had a surprise, a temporary but genius solution for my inability to walk, at least in Jamaica. He’d secretly brought his Klepper kayak, a fancy collapsible kind. I didn’t tell him that I would have been happy to lie on the beach reading while he explored solo to his heart’s content. He wanted us to do things together and he wouldn’t have believed me anyway.