The Eleventh Virgin · Part III · Chapter 3 1 (1/3)

I

Mother Grace thought that it would be tactless to show her enthusiasm for what June was about to do. If she showed the happiness she felt, she thought it would reveal to June her disapproval of what her daughter had done before.

“As for those three boys, Hugh and Daniel and Kenneth⁠—they’re perfect dears. And the apartment is a lovely one. I don’t blame you for preferring it to a furnished room,” she had said. “Of course your friends think nothing of it and neither do their friends. But think of the world. Not your world, I suppose, but my world. If any of my friends ask ‘where’s June living now’ and I say, nonchalantly, ‘with three men over on Waverly Place’⁠—what do you suppose they’ll think? Not that I’m likely to answer them in any such way.”

She wrinkled her eyebrows considerably over the jail episode and June noticed the little pucker of worry with remorse. “I am a brute,” she thought, “to make her worry so.” And she continued to fret over the inconsequentiality of her life. “Am I going to continue frittering my time away?”

As for the youngest member of the family, he gloated over his sister’s recent confinement. He sat on the front steps and informed all the children in the neighborhood of it. “My sister’s been to jail,” he boasted.

“We mustn’t talk of June in front of Glubb,” Mother Grace told Adele in despair. “He only goes out and repeats it to the children and they take the news home to their families. They think I’m the most unnatural mother, not to take better care of my children.”

And then June came with a letter to show her mother, applying for admittance to the city hospital. Her mother hid her approval as carefully as she hid her disapproval and asked her if she was about to become patriotic.

“Not a bit of it,” said June indignantly. “I don’t believe in war and I really think that if women united and refused to bear children to fight wars or to take care of the wounded as long as there are wars we’d never have any more fighting. But I hate being Utopian and trying to escape from reality. And now that there is war and so much work to be done, I might as well try to do some of it instead of sitting around playing at writing book reviews and helping edit magazines that are on the verge of suppression. That’s the only kind of a job that I’m fit for.⁠ ⁠… And I’ve had enough of newspaper work. I’d be sacrificing principles to work on the capitalist press even if I could get a job on one of the New York papers which I can’t. And if I’m going to sacrifice the foolish little principles that I have in looking forward to an ideal state, I might as well sacrifice them by doing work that has to be done in a hospital.”

“I don’t know what in the world you are talking about when you say you are sacrificing principle to enter a hospital,” said Mother Grace. “But you always have to have some high-flown reason for what you do, I suppose.”

“I expect I don’t know what I mean, either,” June agreed amiably. “I just know that I don’t believe in war and that by entering a hospital I am doing my share in the war.

“At any rate, the prospectus of the training school calls for six pink uniforms (that’s what probationers wear and I look like hell in pink) and a dozen aprons. Will you stake me to the money to buy them? I’m broke.”

“By the way, Mother Grace,” said Adele, not long afterward. “Do you realize that I’m eighteen?”

“Goodness gracious, so you are. I guess it’s about time that you began to talk of living your own life and getting out in the world.” And they smiled to each other as they often did when they were making pleasant fun of June.

“I know what you’re thinking of,” said June. “You want to enter the hospital with me.”

“You’ve still got Glubb,” and Adele looked at her mother appealingly. “I’ve got to do something, some time. And they need nurses so badly now. Not to go abroad, but to stay at home and serve in the hospitals here. The Red Cross is full and they haven’t sent abroad anywhere near all the nurses they have in reserve. They just sit around doing nothing or parade Fifth Avenue while they wait to get across. And meantime the hospitals are terribly hard up for help.”

Mother Grace had long expected her youngest daughter to realize her eighteen years. Since the hospital the two girls wished to enter was within twenty minutes’ ride of home, it was easier to give up the last of her grown ups than she had thought possible.

It was decided that the two should begin training after Christmas and many afternoons were spent in making pink dresses and voluminous white aprons.

“I did not dream bed-making could be so hard,” Adele sighed at the end of the first day and stretched her lame body luxuriously. “If it weren’t for you being here, I’d want to cry and go straight home. How many times did you have to put the bottom sheet on your bed? I didn’t get mine right until the tenth time.”

“I did mine satisfactorily the seventh,” June laughed. “But then I’m two years older than you are, so I can’t help being smarter.”

Bed-making was a difficult job. First you whisked the mattress⁠—away from you lest you get a germ on your clean white apron⁠—and turned it and whisked some more. Then you whisked a carbolic solution over each side of the mattress and washed the remainder of the bed till there wasn’t a speck of dust on it. You did this to six beds before you returned to the beginning of the line to make the first one.

The sheets were folded in a certain way so that they could be unfolded and spread out on the bed in a certain way. There was no flapping open as you did at home with a sheet or tablecloth to spread it smoothly. That might disturb germs that were in the air and set them in circulation.

After the sheet was smoothed out on the bed, you tucked in one side, tucking with broad sweeps from the middle. Then you went around to the other side and the sheet was so wide that when you tucked it there, you tucked that side so that it fitted into the other, as an envelop flap fits inside of an envelope. At either end what was left over of the sheet on the underside of the mattress was inserted under the sheet on the upper side of the mattress, was folded to form a flap and pinned carefully and neatly with two straight pins to the mattress. There was a certain way of putting in the pins too. You see what a difficult job it was.

And you see also what June and Adele meant when they said they had to make the bed seven and ten times before the head nurse was satisfied. It was very discouraging to put the sheet on to the best of your ability and then have the head nurse come along and point out several wrinkles. Wrinkles, it would seem, were very irritating to sick people.

When you had been told to try again, off the sheet had to come. Not quickly. You didn’t just take out the pins and pull the sheet off and begin laboriously to put it on again. No, it had to be folded as it was taken off, and unfolded again to put it on. So many times that you could never forget how hospital linen was folded.

Making a bed, June decided, was much more difficult than writing a book review, and her satisfaction when her bed had been made for the seventh time and approved was much greater than she had enjoyed when seeing a book review in print with her name signed to it.

June and Adele worked in an empty ward. A wide door opened into another ward from which every now and then came the hot, sharp cry of a patient. It was good to be working there. There was even a strange satisfaction in hearing a patient cry because when the cries were stilled you knew that something useful had been done.

Miss Kelley was the probationers’ instructor. She was a little white-faced nurse with prim firm ways. Her eyes were large and intensely serious, the color of an ocean on a dull winter day. Her hair was mouse colored. She was sweetly firm and could be very forceful. June heard her voice from behind a screen, calming an hysterical patient. “Turn right over on your side now and let the nurse attend to you! The idea of your making all this trouble!” There was quiet immediately.

There was the same insistence in the touch of her hands. She was not strong but she could move the helpless bulk of a woman who weighed three times as much as she did. Strength seemed to pour from her fingertips into a patient.

When, after several days of bed-making, June gave her first morning toilet, she felt that it was an event and an accomplishment. Before you could give a morning toilet, you had to be given a tray with many bottles and sponges and toilet articles on it. Trays were fascinating with the little jars of salve and swabs and bandages and liquid green soap and mouthwash⁠—many more things. You had to go over your tray every morning to see that the other nurses did not steal things from it.

June’s first patient was an old Canadian woman, ninety-four years old. Granny objected to being washed saying that she had been bathed the day before and that at her time of life she did not see why she had to be pestered with soap and water the way she was. Argument was useless so she began to kick and fight, clawing at June with birdlike hands.

Another nurse said, “Can’t you see, Granny, that Miss Henreddy only wants to make you comfortable? She does it because she loves you.”

“Love be damned,” said Granny, loudly, stridently. Her defiance was glorious, June thought, and she laughed joyfully as she put her hands under the armpits of the old lady and tried to persuade her to lie down. In the scuffle the bedclothes had been heaped in the middle of the bed. Granny perched there, sitting on the end of her spine, her arms clasped about her bare and scrawny knees and blazed at June with eyes as dark as those of a baby. Her cap hung over one ear, displaying a large bald spot surrounded by a queer fringe of grey hair which was matted and awry, standing up like a field of ferns. She gave way to June at last and allowed herself to be bathed, crying to herself all the while like a whimpering monkey. The ghastly youthfulness of her false teeth in her yellow shrivelled face haunted June for the rest of the day.

“She has been crying for months,” another nurse told June, “to be allowed to wear a wig which was taken away from her when she entered the hospital. She says she wouldn’t feel half so badly with it. I wish they would let her have it.”

There were two women dying in the ward, a woman of fifty and a girl of twenty-two. Mary Adams was slowly fading from the whiteness of the ward around her into a grey shadow on the long slim bed. She had a grown son who came to visit her every evening when the wards were twilit and the evening toilets were completed. He brought huge bunches of flowers which the head nurse vaguely disapproved of. “They are too flary.” But the orchids suited her somber eyes and the mint and old-fashioned flowers made a strange rich scent around the bed, Every time June passed her, a little thrill ran up and down her spine. Mrs. Adams never spoke but lay there motionless, looking out of wide open grey eyes, looking at the death she saw so plainly with dull wonder.

Irene was the girl and she was pathetically young. Her finely shaped mouth was always contorted with pain and there was a fierce protesting light in her eyes. The lines that agony had drawn in the ivory of her skin were like those of passion. She might have been clutching a lover in a last embrace knowing that when he arose from the bed he would go out and close the door forever.

“There is the smell of death around her,” June thought, “and no one brings her flowers to deaden it.”

When Adele was working in a ward where there were six girls who were about to have their tonsils taken out, June was passed on to the fracture ward, number twenty-five. There were eleven old ladies there with fractures of the femur and hip bones. The most youthful of them were sixty and close on to seventy years. They approached the elderly stage when they were eighty and when they passed ninety-five, it was admitted that they were indeed old.

It seemed strange at first to call them by their Christian names but it was the custom of the hospital and June soon became used to it.

Ida, a young Jewish woman of sixty, was a trial to June. It seemed she had never known the meaning of the word bath and when she was washed on her arrival she howled so that a young intern rushed in thinking that she had been taken with labor pains. Her features were colossal, well carved and wrinkled like a crumpled linen handkerchief. She had become so used to contorting every feature to give vent to her emotions that now her face was as uncontrolled as that of a six year old child.

Every morning June had to bathe her from head to foot, rub her back with alcohol, powder her and comb her hair. And soon Ida was so accustomed to being waited on that although she was no longer helpless, she wailed loudly if any detail of her morning toilet was omitted.

“Schmeer! Mit alcohol!” she demanded, arching her back from the bed. She could not turn, owing to the splint which bound her on one side from her shoulder to her ankle.

Her sensuous joy was so great that all the while she was being groomed and curried, she grunted like an enormous pig. Before she had been in the ward a week, she demanded that each leg, each arm, be also rubbed with alcohol.

Occasionally, the ward maid, Catherine, “did” her morning toilet, and to avoid the boisterous argument which Ida always indulged in and to save the alcohol, she took to rubbing her arms and legs with a weak solution of thymol and water. Ida soon discovered the deception and seizing the bottle, she dashed it on the floor. After that she could no longer be deceived. Before she allowed herself to be rubbed, she smelled the contents of the bottle.

Although she was physically clean, thanks to June’s efforts, her habits remained filthy. On visiting days, she furtively accepted the food which her relatives brought her, and which was not supposed to be left at the bedside of the patient, and hid it under her mattress, her pillow, under her arms, and even between her splint and her body under the bandages. Then knowing that she had only a few hours before she would again be bathed, she applied herself assiduously to the food which was brought to her until every crumb was devoured. “Ei, ei, gevault, gevault, gevault,” she complained if anyone tried to take her food away from her.

Usually her relatives, who came in tribes and draped themselves around the bed to ei-gevault with her over the miseries of the world, brought her prunes. They came in quart jars, twice a week, and after drinking all the juice out of the bottle, Ida munched the prunes all night, eating them as continually and with as unalloyed delight as a debutante would salted almonds.

There were times in the sweet dusk of evening when she had been “schmeered” with alcohol to her heart’s content that she showed a gentler side. Her ei-gevaults gave way to a melancholy chanting, a chanting that was also joyous. One time when she was softly and exultantly wailing, June asked another Jewish woman in the ward what she was singing about. The reply was that she was “talking to God.”

There was another in the ward who was almost as much trouble as “Ei-gevault.” The nurse called her “Oh-a, Oh-a” because she cried continually. She was the one Irishwoman there who did not bear her pains stoically. Approaching death had loosened the bolts she had placed on her consciousness. Although she was seventy, she had a beautiful body, as white and firm as that of a young girl. She paid for her delicacy however, for every inch of her was alive to sensation and responded to the pain in her broken hip. She seemed burned by an inward fever and was always calling for water.