by Anya Seton
‘Do sit down,’ said Rachel, again laughing, for like all wise people she was often amused, and the wholesouled admiration she saw in the unknown girl’s face touched her.
‘My dear, I’m a very ordinary doctor; don’t stare at me like that, but tell me all about yourself.’
‘Yes, I think to you I could,’ said Fey, earnestly leaning forward. ‘Would you listen?’
Rachel saw that there was appeal in this, a call that went deeper than the need for physical advice. She saw now, too, that this was not one of the little immigrant girls from over by the river as she had first thought. There was something unusual about this young woman, something compelling. Surely hers would not be just the ordinary story of seduction. And yet, thought Rachel sadly, is it ever ordinary? Is it not always for a little while a glory and a brightness, no matter how tawdry it seems to us who try to mend the broken pieces.
‘Wait until the dispensary hour is over then,’ she said to Fey. ‘ I’ll make you some tea, and we can talk.’
Rachel Moreton’s little sitting-room next to the six-bedded ward was more plainly furnished and cleaner than any room Fey had seen since leaving Santa Fe. It was not austere, for there were blue chintz curtains at the windows and two good landscapes on the walls. But it was a simple and serene room like its owner. She made the tea on a gas-ring and poured it into two thin white porcelain cups.
‘They’re plain,’ she said, seeing Fey look at the cups, ‘but good china. You see I’m a Quaker and the Friends like good things, but we don’t believe in much ornament.’ She spoke entirely from tact to allow the girl to orient herself, but to her surprise Fey considered this carefully.
‘Yes, plain usually, but good is the way it was in the fine homes—back where I come from,’ said Fey. She looked at Rachel’s neat brown bombazine edged at neck and wrist by immaculate white niching. ‘You do not, I think, like my dress,’ added Fey ruefully. ‘It is neither plain nor good,’ and suddenly she smiled, making a little gesture of disgust at the red plaid dress with the cherry trim.
Rachel smiled too. ‘Then why do you wear it?’
‘Because,’ said Fey, ‘I must save every penny for the baby. But it fits no more. See I have had to let out and patch.’
‘Ah,’ said Rachel soberly. ‘Forgive me—but are you married, my dear? ’
Fey turned her head a little. Her mobile face became older and harder, the animation and the touch of humor left it. Rachel watching felt pity. She was drawn to the girl, and she had seen this reaction many times before to that question. But the answer surprised her as Fey was often to surprise her.
‘My baby is not a bastard,’ Fey said.
Rachel, accustomed as she was to the East Side slums, flushed at the word so calmly spoken, so incongruous in that low voice.
‘You mean that you are married?’
‘I mean that I was married to him, but not he to me, it seems,' said Fey.
Rachel’s thick eyebrows contracted. She leaned forward and put her large capable hand on the girl’s arm. ‘You’re too young to be so wise and so bitter. Tell me about it——’
Fey stayed with her new friend throughout that soft May afternoon. There were interruptions; several times the doctor went downstairs to see patients, twice she visited an old German woman who was recovering from pneumonia in the near-by ward.
These absences did not disconcert Fey, nor break the mood of peace and security. She could and did talk to Rachel as she had never talked to anyone, for the doctor had the gift of listening calmly, sympathetically, and without astonishment.
Rachel Moreton had had an unusually broad expérience. She had been born in Philadelphia to cultured, wealthy Quakers who had given her a far more advanced education than was customary. She had traveled in Europe, and been happily married for ten years until her husband died. After the first shock of this loss she had faced life with courage and altruism, and, making use of a natural talent for healing and superior intelligence, had at the age of thirty-five entered the Philadelphia Medical College for Women. After graduation she had been attracted by the opportunities for service offered by the struggling little New York Infirmary founded by Quaker women like herself. Now at forty-three she was a great physician, for she combined technical skill and intuition ; had she been a man, her name would have been known from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, but she had no personal ambition. She was content to do her best in the only field so far opened to her sex—the treatment of women and small children from districts so destitute that they never dared aspire to the services of a ‘ real ’ male doctor. To this work she brought spiritual insight. The stilling of her mind to Silence, and then the effortless waiting for communion with the Light and the message of the Inner Voice were observances of her faith as natural to her as eating. The Friends taught a religion which must justify itself in results; they believed in Guidance, and they accepted Vision. Fey’s few wavering references to her lost clairvoyant faculty did not astonish Rachel. She accepted them at once. Everyone had, at times, more or less perception of events usually veiled. Everyone in dreams or waking flashes occasionally transcended time. And that the gift of intuition shared by all might extend through the physical world and bring back an accurate register of impression without using the physical eye seemed to her in no way surprising.
But the outward events of Fey’s brief life she did find amazing and she felt increasing admiration and pity.
‘You must not go back to that dreadful rooming house, Fey,’ she said at the end of the afternoon. ‘Come here to us; there’s a little room on the top floor near the nursery that you may have. You can help us a bit in the wards, and when your time comes I will deliver you.’
Fey got up heavily and walked over to the older woman. She threw her arms around Rachel’s neck and kissed her with a passionate gratitude.
‘My mother and my friend,’ she said. ‘I have never had either before. I will help you and thank you as long as I live.’
Rachel, though embarrassed by demonstration and physical caresses, was deeply touched. She felt the girl’s sincerity, and an empty place in her heart, too, was filled. But she was too wise not to realize that she did not completely understand Fey. How should I? she thought reasonably, when every experience of her life so far has been so utterly different from mine. She tried to imagine the life of the little orphan in a mud hovel in Santa Fe, to imagine the Indians of whom Fey spoke with affection and respect. The Friends, too, had respected the Indians, but that was long ago in Penn’s time, and Indians were to Rachel only exotic words. She tried to reconstruct from Fey’s few sentences that extraordinary meeting with the red-haired scamp of a quack doctor, and to understand the instantaneous, unthinking passion which had bound Fey to him, or that pathetic mockery of a marriage six days later.
She thought, too, about Fey’s abandonment in New York. But there was nothing strange in that old story, given the type of man which Dillon apparently was; the sequel was stranger. That Fey had considered going to the infamous Madame Restell—and yet that a visit to the unfinished cathedral had somehow saved her. And then these last months in a Bowery concert saloon, a degrading experience from which she had apparently emerged quite untouched. A baffling mixture she is, thought Rachel, for even in that first afternoon she had divined that Fey had a large share of contradictory‘qualities. There was a soft dependence and gentleness, but there had been glimpses of a steely obstinacy, too, and the strength of shrewd purpose. And combined with spiritual enlightenment and acutely sensitive perception there was also bitterness and egotism. But I believe that she can develop into a remarkable woman, said Rachel to herself. Two other people had felt in Fey that intangible aura of potential greatness, the Mexican harlot, La Gertrudis, and the Navajo shaman, Natanay. The Quaker doctor, Rachel Moreton—halfway across the country from them—shared the feeling and another element in their response to Fey—a foreboding. If she will not be guided by the Spirit, she may have the strength to do great harm, thought Rachel.
>
Perhaps, she thought humbly, God will use me to help her find her highest realization.
The next day Fey thankfully left Mrs. Flynn’s and moved to a tiny bare attic room in the Infirmary. For that last month of her pregnancy she was placidly contented. Her body, for all its burden, gave her no trouble, and except for one emotion—loving gratitude toward Rachel Moreton—she thought and felt very little. She ceased to read, or to look either backward or forward; all life was in abeyance until she should be delivered and alone again.
She did, however, make herself extremely useful around the hospital. She displayed from the beginning a swift competence in caring for the sick, and she seemed able to follow Rachel’s directions intuitively and almost before they were formulated.
‘Now will you admit my experiment is a success?’ said Rachel one day to her colleague, Doctor Annie Daniel, who was in charge of the Out-Patient Department. ‘Why, that girl, despite her handicap, is already as good as any of our trained nurses after three months' training. She has a talent for it, a vocation.’ She spoke with a natural triumph, since she had been criticized for her impulsiveness in taking in an unknown derelict.
‘She has, at any rate, a talent for trying to please you, Rachel,’ said Doctor Daniel tolerantly, ‘and that’s not surprising considering what you’ve done for her. But I don’t think she has much interest in the patients for themselves.’
Rachel smiled and let the matter drop. She knew that the rest of the staff did not think Fey as remarkable as she did, nor did they guess the ambition which Rachel was beginning to cherish. On two occasions Fey had shown extraordinary powers of diagnosis. If Fey could do this without training, what wonders might she not perform as a physician, thought Rachel, and she loved the girl even more because of the hope she had for her. She began to plan for Fey as she would have for her own daughter, and every morning, when she closed herself into her room and stilled her mind into the silent receptivity whose fruits would later sustain her through the harried day, she prayed for Fey.
The baby was born in the early morning hours of June twenty-fifth. Rachel had little need of her skill in midwifery; the labor and birth were normal. For the last terrible pains, Fey refused the chloroform which Rachel wished to administer, crying, ‘No, please! I must know it all. I want to be here while my baby is born.’ And though her small body strained and writhed, she endured all in panting silence. The baby was a girl.
Rachel laid the swaddled bundle in Fey’s arms and said gently, ‘ She’s a beautiful mite, my dear, and I hope she’ll be as brave as her mother.’
The baby had a wealth of fluffy red-gold curls, and the tiny features bore no resemblance to Fey’s.
Rachel, drawing back to look down at them both, shook her head. It would be even harder for the girl to make her way alone with this little replica of the man who had deserted them both.
Fey raised herself weakly on her elbow and looked into the small crumpled face. Her head fell back on the pillow and the tears which had not come earlier began to ran down her white cheeks.
‘Don’t, dear,’ said Rachel, stroking back the damp matted hair. ‘I’ll help you. I’ve a plan for you, when you’re stronger. A wonderful plan.’
Fey’s eyes opened; they wandered to the kind face above her, but they did not rest there. They hardened a little and grew intent.
‘I shall help myself,’ she said. ‘I can manage alone for both of us.’
That was pride, the fastidious independence of spirit which she had admired from the first, thought Rachel, but she was nevertheless chilled.
‘Will you send for a priest?’ said Fey. ‘I want her baptized.’
‘Of course,’ answered Rachel, turning from the bed. She believed neither in baptism nor priests, but she was perfectly tolerant of other faiths. It was not that which dismayed her; it was the flavor of command in Fey’s voice. She saw that the girl was following some separate preoccupation and unconscious of Rachel as a person or anything except an instrument to carry out her wishes.
But later, when the Irish priest had come, Fey was again the gentle affectionate girl she had been before. She smiled up at them both, explaining that she wished the baby to be called ‘ Luz. María de la Luz.’ Both doctor and priest were uncomprehending until Fey explained that ‘Luz’ meant the Light in Spanish. Rachel thought it charming, seeing a mystical application dear to the Quakers. And the priest, too, was satisfied when he had translated the peculiar word into Lucia, a proper saint’s name. So the baby became Lucia Mary Dillon, anglicized into Lucy by Rachel. But Fey always called her child Lucita, as they would have in Santa Fe.
All during the hot summer months Fey lived at the Infirmary and tended her baby in a passionate concentration. She found both an emotional and physical pleasure in suckling her and showed this pleasure with a lack of self-consciousness which sometimes embarrassed Rachel. It was Fey’s strange upbringing amongst those New Mexican peasants, she thought, in extenuation. Always she was ready with excuses for any of Fey’s conduct which disturbed her. Those months were happy ones for the doctor. Her interest in Fey and little Lucy filled her heart, which had since her husband’s death had no stronger nourishment than the fleeting gratitude of patients.
Then, too, as soon as she was strong enough, Fey had insisted on resuming her duties in the wards. She became expert at making poultices, at dressing wounds, and at keeping Rachel’s instruments cleaned and in order. She made beds, washed sick bodies, and emptied bedpans, all with the same quiet efficiency. The other two nurses were jealous of her, partly because some of the patients frankly expressed a preference for ‘little Mrs. Dillon’s ’ care, and partly because of her privileged position as friend and protégée of the resident doctor. Rachel, indeed, careful as she was of other people’s feelings, did show preference. It was only natural that she should try to spare the girl the heaviest tasks, since much of her strength must go to the baby, and she taught Fey techniques and procedures not permitted to the other nurses, 'who were clumsy ignorant Irish girls. Besides, she had no intention of allowing Fey to remain a simple nurse; that new profession required as yet no more general knowledge than did domestic service.
So for those summer months Rachel had a companion and disciple, and she dreamed sometimes of the great work she and Fey might do together in alleviating the misery of the slums. For, she thought, the girl is a born physician, she has stamina and intelligence, and she has the most precious of all talents for a doctor, a brilliant intuition.
This was true, but Rachel would not recognize the further factor referred to by Doctor Annie Daniel. Fey tended the sick at the Infirmary and applied her innate skill to learning what Rachel wished her to learn, not from sympathy for human misery nor any ideal of service. She worked entirely for Rachel Moreton because she loved her and because a debt of gratitude must be repaid. This trait was bequeathed twofold through the Spanish and the Highland blood; and just as no personal insult, might stand unavenged, so no personal kindness might go unrequited.
Fey loathed the smell of poverty in the wards, she despised the filth and the lice which dropped from the patients’ emaciated bodies. When, before they were bedded in the coarse hospital shifts, she had to handle their own clothes—patched and sleazy, reeking with body odors—she felt no pity, but only a fierce disgust. It did not occur to her that most of this was the result of the abominable tenement system where two hundred souls existed without air or light in one rickety frame building. She thought neither of causes nor the possibility of improvement. She thought only of escape.
After her hours in the wards she would rush upstairs to her baby. And while she rocked and gave her breast to the avid little lips, she talked. ‘Never fear, chiquita, we’ll get out of this. You shall wear white clothes embroidered in silk, you shall have a gold dish and spoon to eat with. You shall never know ugliness and sickness and want. For I won’t let you. We’re going to the top together, you and I.’
She sat this way many times with her baby. And sh
e thought with lucidity and purpose of Simeon Tower.
One noontime in October, Rachel tapped at the door, opened it and found them like that. Bright sunlight slanted through the attic window and illumined the two. Fey had taken off her striped nurse’s uniform as she always did before touching the baby. She sat in white petticoat and bodice. This was unbuttoned and her breasts, blue-veined and nearly as white as the bodice, jutted out proudly in a pagan abandon. Above them on its golden thread hung the turquoise pendant. The girl’s head was bent; the great coil of black hair had slipped down one naked shoulder. Her profile against the black wave had the pure esthetic line of a Leonardo da Vinci madonna. She was smiling down at the baby, who gurgled and struck at her mother’s breast with a rosy wandering hand.
Fey’s eyes half-closed in purely sensuous enjoyment. ‘Little bad one,’ she said, kissing the baby’s red-gold curls. ‘She is so greedy.’ She smiled lazy greeting at Rachel, but the doctor did not respond.
She stood looking, and for the first time she doubted the possibility of the ambition she had formed for Fey. The girl was beautiful; she had never realized it before. Or if not exactly beautiful, something far more disturbing. She was alluring, every line of her body, partly unclothed as it now was, pointed to seductive allure. She had never seen this before. Fey’s body had been previously handicapped by pregnancy and the recovery.
Rachel turned her eyes away at last. There was a pain in her heart. ‘Put the baby down, and fasten up your bodice, do,’ she said sharply. ‘I want to talk to you.’
Fey nodded with the instant docility she always showed to Rachel, she laid the baby in the cradle, reached for her blue-and-white coverall. ‘I’d better put some more ice on Mrs. Petroni’s belly, before she starts bleeding again? ’ she suggested.