The Eleventh Virgin · Part III · Chapter 3 1 (2/3)

“I’m scaldin’, Nellie, and achin’. Bring me some water in the tin cup, in the little tin cup by the pump!” Glasses did not satisfy her thirst, so June bought a tin cup for her. “It tastes so good and cold,” said Oh-a, Oh-a.

June’s special pet was Sarah Lauthier, a tiny little lady of ninety-six. June was Margaret to her and anyone who made a noise was Willie. On one occasion, five nurses and a doctor were strapping a delirious, screaming patient into the bed next to her and consciousness of the tumult gradually sifted into her mind. “Willie!” she piped up. “Don’t make so much noise. The neighbors will think we keep a disorderly house.”

June loved Willie, her cubby great-grand-child of ten. He came twice a week with bottles of orange juice and sat by her bedside. When he had been at her side for an hour, she realized that he was there, and chirped at him happily. He always stayed for two hours, holding her hand, and never seemed oppressed by the sickness around him.

For a time June almost succumbed to the temptation to break one of the most stringent of the hospital rules. Sarah was continually beckoning to her and whispering slyly in her ear, “You know what I want,” or “Wouldn’t a wee drop of gin taste good.” And then June discovered that little Willie was bringing her something that strongly resembled a Bronx cocktail, judging by the smell of it. After that she was careful that Granny’s orange juice was not confused with the orange juice of other patients and that she got every drop of it.

Every morning when June arrived on the ward, she found the little old woman, lying naked. It was evident that she could not endure being wet and tore off her sheets and nightgown so that the warm air could dry her. Her withered, crooked body was like that of Rodin’s ancient courtesan.

At times her years dropped from her and she coquetted with June adorably. She had the sweetest grin and the wickedest wink. And there was a tiny dimple still left in one cheek when she laughed her silent laugh.

One evening June found her trying to sew with her large brass cross at the end of a rosary. “What are you trying to do, Granny?” She was swearing softly to herself now and then.

“Can’t you see I’m trying to make a buttonhole, you damn fool? The needle won’t go through. How can I keep warm without a buttonhole in my gowns?”

And then Lora McAlister was carried into the ward and all its sordid ugliness was lightened and relieved. Lora was twenty-eight, a widow, with auburn hair and brown eyes. The floor man, an ex-patient, found much to do in the neighborhood and wandered around singing under his breath. June caught a few lines of a tuneless ballad once⁠—“He placed his hand upon her knee. She said, ‘my man, you’re mighty free’⁠—” and then he caught sight of her and the song died away in his throat. The doctors haunted the ward and other patients were deluged with attentions. The three men who were with Lora when the automobile accident occurred which resulted in her broken hip obtained special permission to call at the hospital to see her every afternoon, and the ward was beautiful with flowers and plants.

In spite of her injuries which were severe, she threw off her lethargy and powdered and primped and sewed ribbons on her night dress and sang until the ward was aglow and the up-patients in the corridor stopped their chattering to listen. The sixty and seventy year old women became conscious of their sex and were more willing to have their faces washed. They gave June quarters to buy them sweet-smelling talcums and relatives appeared with dainty night dresses for them.

June had been in the hospital six months when she was transferred to the male medical ward. She was glad to leave her old ladies for Sarah Lauthier was about to die. She did not want to see her dead. So she got permission to perform Granny’s morning toilet for the last time and after gathering up her flung-out wet clothes around the bed, fastening the old lady securely in a dry unbleached muslin night gown, tucking her in tightly, and leaving a little kiss on the tiny dimple in her cheek, she rushed breathlessly to the male building at the other end of the grounds.

Ward fifty-four was a strange, wild place. June and Miss Andrews, a capable young Irish girl who was two months June’s senior in training, were alone in the ward from seven o’clock in the morning until seven in the evening, save for the visits of the doctors and interns and the much to be dreaded superintendent of nurses. The head nurse of the ward was busy most of the day in the ward above and when she came, she came to help not to criticize. It was the superintendent who stood sternly at the end of the room and let her eye travel down the long ward for some disorder or carelessness. It was hard not to be careless at this time too, for an influenza epidemic had broken out over the city and every day eight to ten victims were carried in or walked in staggeringly, only to fall unconscious as soon as their clothes were taken from them.

According to the superintendent every ward in the hospital should be in order by ten o’clock; but to get the work underway, June and Miss Andrews did without their breakfasts in the nurses’ dining-room and arrived on the ward at six-thirty.

However, Red Reynolds who used to keep a saloon on Coney Island and was at present the kitchen-man, prepared an excellent breakfast of toast, soft boiled eggs and coffee. While June ate, Miss Andrews worked and kept a lookout for head nurses (it being against the rule to eat on the ward) and June did the same for her.

The up-patients were already at work when the girls arrived, sweeping, polishing brass, getting the linen in order and helping other more miserable up-patients into their wheelchairs. The latter were trundled out into the solarium where they sat all day and chewed tobacco and gossiped of wine, women and war and occasionally of God. Sometimes you could hear the cracked voice of an old sailor trying to sing a barroom song or the booming voice of the old German who was almost ossified, singing a hymn.

June’s first task was to pour out the medicine for a hundred patients, a task demanding concentration and a steady hand. When she first started pouring, she continued pouring in her dreams every night, until she was able to associate every patient with the medicine which he took. For instance, whenever she saw Sullivan, her brain immediately flashed:

• Arom. Spt. Am. Dr. 1
• Donov. Sol. M. 10
• Pot. Iod. Gr. 15
• Stokes M. Dr. 1

There were almost as many medicines for each patient, and the entire dose was handed out in one glass regardless of chemical combinations. The convalescent patients greeted June hilariously as she came bringing them what they called their cocktails and bracers.

It took two hours to pour and chart the medicines. All the while June stood at the glass medicine cabinet in the center of the ward, Philip, a handsome elderly man in the bed opposite to her, leisurely selected and picked (with apparently great discrimination) a large bouquet of flowers from the air, each one of which he sniffed with enjoyment before adding it to the bunch in his hand. This he presented to June with a courteous, grave smile, when she brought him his medicine, and she thanked him with equal gravity and ceremony and arranged them in an imaginary vase on her medicine tray. One time she noticed him pulling with a great deal of effort at what must have been a goldenrod, it was so hard to separate it from its stalk.

“If you try to break it, instead of tearing at it,” said the man in the next bed kindly, “maybe you’ll get it off.”

There was another patient, a laundryman, with a red haggard face and burning eyes, who took off his bedclothes, one by one and fed them into an ironing machine. Even his nightshirt was sacrificed in the stress of his delusion, and wearily, again and again, June clothed him, and bound him down in the bed with restraining sheets which he loosened in fifteen minutes with his restless, strong, sick fingers.

Adele sat and sniffed into a handkerchief at the open window while June, crouched on the bed in the corner where she couldn’t see how tantalizing the spring evening was, was trying vainly to memorize the symptoms of atropine poisoning.

“It seems to me that all the heart medicines have the same poisoning symptoms,” she complained. “Now, mercury is easy to remember. If your patients salivate, then you know they’ve got the first symptom. Then their gums begin to swell and turn purple and then their teeth fall out. When I first went on ward seventy-two, I had just learned those symptoms, so I went around to all the patients who were taking mercury in one form or another and looked at their mouths. And would you believe it, every one of them complained of wanting to spit all the time! Those interns had forgotten all about prescribing mercury and had left it on the medicine chart and the damn-fool nurse who was in the ward before me kept right on giving the medicine. I kicked to the head nurse⁠—or rather I reported the matter respectfully, for she’s an old devil⁠—and she told me to go right on giving the medicine till the doctor came on the ward again. ‘Doctor’s orders must be obeyed.’ And the doctor might not be on the ward again for a week!”

The ward was like a ship, she concluded, where the doctor was captain, the superintendent first mate, the head nurse, second mate and the nurses just ordinary seamen. They had to obey orders, nothing else. And if they used their brains, and deduced that a patient was about to die of strychnine poisoning unless the dose was stopped, they had to go on giving the dose until word came from higher-up to stop it. Discipline was a great thing. For any woman holding an executive position who was about to have a nervous prostration, a course of training in a hospital would surely cure her. If it didn’t kill her. June felt that she would like to scream every now and then and throw medicine bottles at the head nurses. But she felt too the relief of being told what to do and knowing that she had to do it.

Suddenly she looked up from the book she was vainly trying to concentrate her mind upon and noticed Adele with her handkerchief. “What is the matter? Have you got a cold or are you crying?”

Adele admitted that she was crying and continued sniffing. June’s sympathy made it worse.

“Oh, I like hospital work and I wouldn’t stop it for anything,” she wept, “but every now and then you see something that actually breaks your heart and you don’t see how you can stand it any longer. You know Mary⁠—the one I told you about with consumption and who had just had a baby a month ago? Well, she’s dead.”

June knew that it wasn’t at the death itself that her sister was crying, for they had talked of it and expected it every day for the past week. It sounded callous but there was a sort of excitement in seeing how long you could keep a person who was lingering with a fatal disease alive.

“She died at quarter to seven,” Adele went on. “And you know when a patient dies at ten minutes of seven the day nurses leave the work to the night nurses. Doctor Gleason was passing through the ward and signed the death certificate then and there, the time of death marked at the top of it and the day nurses had to ‘do up’ the dead body. Miss Smith⁠—she’s a month ahead of me⁠—had to attend to it seeing as the head nurse was off duty, and she and another girl went behind the screen and you could hear everything they said through the ward and out in the corridor. They swore⁠—they said, ‘damn it, why couldn’t she have waited till after seven. I’ve got a date tonight.’ And the other girl said, ‘Oh, hell, of course she had to wet the bed again before she died.’ And you could hear them slap her as they turned her over to get the sheet out from under her. The worst of it all was, the husband of the girl was standing out in the hall all the time and he was just a young boy. He was crying terribly. And I have been, too, ever since.”

Nursing was like newspaper work in that it was impossible to suffer long over the tragedies which took place every day. You were too close to them to have perspective. They happened too continuously. They weighed on you⁠—gave you a still and subdued feeling but the very fact that you were continually busy left you no time to brood.

There was brightness on the ward, the brightness of the spring sunlight, the cleanliness and the convalescent patients. Some patients could not help shedding a jovial atmosphere about them. There was the old sailor who called himself Captain Kidd, for instance. He had toppled into the river and when rescued had emptied no one knew how many bottles of whiskey to avoid bad effects, he told the doctor. But nevertheless he had been brought into the hospital with influenza. Now he was convalescing and his red bandana handkerchief which he twined around his head made the one spot of color in the white ward. Every time the head nurse entered the ward she made him take it off. But it was on again as soon as her back was turned and June received grateful little nods and winks every time she was reprimanded for not having discipline among her patients. Red handkerchiefs were untidy, it seemed.

Even the superintendent of the nurses, who had trained in that same hospital long ago and had been there ever since, felt the influence of spring. Her yellowish-grey hair usually was pulled straight back behind her ears, but now it fluffed out a little like the wings of birds. Instead of the high stiff collar which she wore all winter, there was a low stiff one, but it was softened by a white and slightly withered throat. Every other afternoon she lectured the first year girls on anatomy and June noticed that the bones which she handled delicately, as though they were flowers, were the same color as her hair.

There was an insistent somnolence in her voice which must have come from years of association with the sick. It murmured on, those spring afternoons like the bees in the park outside. On Thursdays there were band concerts for the old peoples’ home next door and then the lecture had to be cut short. It wasn’t only that Miss Daly couldn’t compete with the noise. But the band was made up of twelve year old boys from the Catholic school nearby and every now and then came a series of bars that rasped on her nerves like the tearing of silk. She could not concentrate on what was before her. And since the lecture had been cut short there was a half hour of freedom for June and Adele to sit in the park and watch the old people smoke and mumble to themselves.

“Every one of those old ladies smokes her pipe and the county allows her tobacco,” June grumbled. “Gee, how I’d like to have a cigarette now.⁠ ⁠… What is it that you miss at these Thursday afternoon band concerts, Adele?”

“Lots of things.”

“No, I mean one thing specially. It’s the smell of cigarettes. I can’t think of those park concerts and Mr. Armand without remembering that odor of damp grass and people’s clothes and cigarettes.”

It was very restful there under the trees. The sparrows hopped up to the little old women who had saved crusts for them in their apron pockets. An occasional pigeon strutted up and down and a large black cat slunk under the benches with her yellow eyes on the birds. The trees were flecked with the pale green of new leaves.

June noticed one shrivelled little woman standing apart from the others talking to a man who was also in the uniform of the county. “Sex instinct at this late stage of the game,” she was about to say jeeringly, for the little woman was laughing coquettishly. But the smile was wiped off her lips as she recognized the bent figure as an ex-patient of hers.