Cherry Ames Boxed Set 5-8

by Helen Wells

  For any mail delivery, any day now, would tell her whether or not she was to go to New York this fall, and become a visiting nurse. Cherry had already sent in her application for the job—including transcripts of her R.N. degree from Spencer Nursing School, her record as an Army nurse, as a private duty nurse, and a glowing personal reference from Dr. Joseph Fortune.

  She supposed that the other nurses from her own Spencer School crowd were awaiting the mailman just as eagerly as she was. If their applications to become visiting nurses were accepted, several of the girls were to take an apartment together in New York.

  The screen door opened and Mrs. Ames came out on the flower-vined porch. She was a pretty, dark-eyed woman, slim and youthful looking. She hesitated on the top step.

  “Still waiting for the mail, Cherry?”

  Cherry stood up. “Still waiting. I feel like Poor Butterfly, or a mislaid umbrella. You look so warm, Mother—almost as warm as I feel. Shall I make some lemonade?”

  Edith Ames walked over to the swing and sat down. “No, thanks, dear. Unless you want some yourself. At least, this heat is good for the late crops. And for my dahlias.”

  Cherry grinned. “Your pet dahlias!” Her mother struggled with them every late summer and fall.

  Mrs. Ames stiffened slightly. “You know my dahlias always win Hilton’s Garden Club ribbon.” Suddenly she grinned too, and her face was as merry as Cherry’s. “Nurse, my dahlias are to me what your patients are to you!”

  Cherry and her mother nodded at each other in perfect understanding.

  A voice boomed from somewhere in the house:

  “Did I hear someone mention refreshments?”

  It was Cherry’s twin brother, Charlie, who had recently been released from the Army Air Forces. Mrs. Ames reported to Cherry that Charlie had just taken his fourth shower of the day, had raided the icebox so continuously that she was kept busy refilling it, and that Charlie, too, was waiting for the mailman.

  Cherry nodded. “For his notice from State Engineering College.”

  “Yes. Dad and I do want Charles to go back and finish his schooling.” Mrs. Ames fell to musing. “The war interrupted all our lives, didn’t it?”

  “Well, here’s one candidate for a fresh start,” Cherry said cheerfully. “Gosh, how I hope the Visiting Nurse Service writes back yes. Yes to all us Spencer hopefuls.” She thought how awful it would be if any one of the girls was turned down, left out.

  The screen door flew open and Charlie strode out on the porch. He was a tall, athletic young man, fair-haired and light-eyed. The Ames twins looked like a negative and a print of the same picture: identical, lively faces, but Charlie blond and Cherry vividly dark.

  He grinned at their mother and sat down beside Cherrry on the porch steps.

  “I’m the cleanest,” he announced. “Undoubtedly the coolest.”

  Cherry sniffed. “You’ve been using my sandalwood soap.”

  “Horrors, did I? I’ll have to take another shower, then. How’s the mailman situation?” Charlie put his arm across Cherry’s shoulders and started to sing, in a passable baritone, “Waitin’—yes, just waitin’—awaitin’ for the evenin’ mail!”

  Cherry chimed in. They sang three choruses, if not well, at least enthusiastically. Mrs. Ames shook her head.

  “Don’t you care for our singing, madam?”

  “It is so harmonious I can hardly tear myself away. But I will.” Mrs. Ames smiled at them and vanished into the house.

  “Look! Gaze yonder!” Charlie flung out a sunburned arm and pointed. “Blue-coated figure doth approach!”

  “Gadzooks!” Cherry responded, shading her eyes. “It is ye mailman or I’ll be a two-headed, brindle cow.”

  “Please don’t be a cow,” Charlie requested earnestly. “I think you’re prettier the way you are. C’mon, Sis, let’s go meet him.”

  Her brother yanked her to her feet and they went loping together across the grass. Charlie soon outdistanced her. “Slowpoke,” he called over his shoulder.

  “Only because you’re taller than I am,” Cherry puffed indignantly.

  “Excuses, nothing but excuses.”

  Charlie reached the mailman first. He came strolling back to Cherry with a fistful of letters.

  “No, yours didn’t come yet, honey. But here’s a letter from State Engineering College for me!”

  “Here’s hoping,”Cherry said loyally.

  Charlie ripped the envelope open and held the letter so they could read it together. The college notified Charles Ames that he had been accepted for continuation of his course of study, broken off when he enlisted, and that he might matriculate the week after Labor Day.

  “Charlie, that’s wonderful!” Cherry exclaimed.

  “Only two weeks off,” Charlie said thoughtfully. He looked worriedly at his sister. “Wish your plans were settled, too.”

  “I’ll come out all right,” she said, and meant it. “Meanwhile, congratulations! And good luck toward winning your degree!” She grinned at her twin. “You’re bursting to go show Mother that letter, and call up Dad, aren’t you? Well, go ahead.”

  “Want to write Bucky Hall about it, too! Excuse me!” And Charlie raced off.

  Cherry followed him, twisting off a marigold and chewing its stem. She was glad for her brother. She half wished the Ames twins might be going to school together again. But Charlie’s career lay in aerial engineering, and hers in nursing. Cherry tossed back her black curls. Well, she would just have to see her adored brother on vacations and holidays.

  Nevertheless, she could not help feeling a bit forlorn. Maybe it was this waiting. Cherry was too restless and active a person to wait comfortably. She told herself to stop fretting and enjoy her leisure, enforced though it was.

  Back in the house, she wandered around the mahogany-and-blue living room. Cherry was fond of this hospitable room which had held so many parties. In the dining room beyond stood the big family table and the sunny bay window filled with fresh, green plants. She found the big, white kitchen deserted, an apple pie cooling on the table. A piece had already been cut out of it—Charlie! She could hear him and their mother talking in the garden. Cherry smiled, fished a chunk of apple out of the pie, popped it in her mouth, and went along upstairs, up the wide, Victorian staircase.

  At the top of the stairs, before the open door of her own room, she stood thinking. She could redecorate her room. That would be fun. But it was a big job and she might be called away to New York with only two walls repainted and the draperies down.

  “I hope! Besides, I like my little red-and-white room the way it is.” She looked affectionately at the dressing table with its saucy, starched skirts, tied back with broad, red ribbons. “Might go give little Midge a hand, if she wants it.”

  Midge Fortune needed all the assistance Cherry could give her, just now when she had to start back to high school in two weeks. Motherless Midge lived with her doctor-scientist father, the absent-minded Dr. Joe, and kept house for him, after a fashion. Attending high school and running the cottage was a double job for a young girl. It did not faze Midge, however, who could blithely serve up peanut butter sandwiches and call it dinner, and just as blithely forget to do her algebra homework.

  Cherry would have chuckled at Midge’s happy-go-lucky methods except for one thing. Elderly Dr. Joe had not been well ever since the Army Medical Corps discharged him from medical research. He protested that he was quite all right, and went ahead with his work at Hilton clinic, and puttered until all hours in his homemade laboratory. But it seemed to Cherry that Dr. Fortune was crawling about his tasks, on will power rather than energy. She was concerned, for Dr. Joe was both her charge and her mentor. Through his teachings and his inspiring example, Cherry had come to her beloved profession of nursing. The least she could do for him, now, was to see that Midge kept him nourished.

  “If I’m off to New York, I’ll have to keep after Midge by letter,” Cherry thought as she went down the stairs and left the house. Turni
ng off her block, she crossed to Pine Street and walked down another quiet, leafy street.

  She waved to Kitty Loomis, who was sitting on the porch of her red-brick house, sewing. Kitty ran down to tell Cherry she had just been graduated from nursing school, and was going to Chicago to take her first nursing job.

  “That’s wonderful, Kitty! I know you’ll do well.”

  “And what are you going to do, Cherry?”

  “Why—uh—” Cherry gulped. “My nursing plans are still unsettled. I’ll have to let you know.”

  “Please do,” Kitty said. “Write me at Heath Hospital in Chicago—because I’m leaving Hilton September first.”

  September first! Cherry shook her head as she waved to Kitty and went along toward the Fortunes’ street. Suppose—just suppose—the Visiting Nurse Service rejected her? What would she do next? Then she caught herself sharply. “Stop enjoying your misery,” she counseled herself. “In the first place, nothing has gone wrong—yet. In the second place, a registered nurse is always needed and can always find interesting work to do. Hmm, not very cheering, is it?”

  The flagstone path to the Fortunes’ small, white cottage was neatly cleared of weeds, the windows shone, and the winter draperies aired on the clothesline behind the hollyhocks. That was Cherry and Midge’s handiwork. Cherry had persuaded Midge to get the Fortune household in apple-pie order before the high school term started.

  Cherry rapped on the open front door. No one answered. She went in.

  “Midge?” she called.

  Through the small sitting room, Cherry could see into the laboratory. It was empty: Dr. Joe was still downtown at the clinic. Cherry went out to the kitchen, on the chance that Midge, newly zealous from Cherry’s prodding, might be preparing dinner. No Midge. The girl’s bedroom was deserted, too, with every garment and cold cream jar Midge owned flung around the little room in glorious confusion.

  “Midge!” she called. “Miss Margaret Fortune! You must be home, with the front door standing wide open!”

  A faint, strangled shout from the garage answered her. Cherry went back there. There, safely out of the neighbors’ view, was Midge in a bathing suit, face oily with cream, light-brown hair in pigtails, standing shakily on her hands. The teen-ager was the oddest sight Cherry had seen in a long time. Midge waved one foot in greeting.

  “Midge, in heaven’s name, what are you doing?”

  Midge’s upside down, flushed, sticky face contrived to grin at her. “Gebbing—broofoo,” Midge choked.

  “What?”

  Midge wobbled, toppled and fell. One hand landed on an opened magazine. She held it up, brightly indicating the beauty advice page. “I said, I’m getting beautiful. Standing on your head is the best thing in the world for your circulation.”

  Cherry rubbed one rosy cheek and stared. “Is anything wrong with your circulation?”

  “Oh, no. But I want that glowing look.”

  “You’re glowing, all right. You look like a boiled lobster.”

  “ ‘The anti-wrinkle cream,’ ” Midge read, unruffled, from the magazine, “ ‘is doubly effective when the circulation is stimulated. Massage the wrinkles lightly—’ ”

  “You won’t have wrinkles for another thirty or forty years!”

  “This is preventive. A girl can’t start too soon.”

  Cherry burst out laughing. Her dark eyes danced. “You remind me of the time I put a mud pack on my face and it hardened and I couldn’t get it off for six hours. Charlie threatened to use a hammer. Incidentally, Miss Fortune, why must you make a spectacle of yourself in the garage, of all places?”

  “ ‘Always exercise in the open air if possible,’ ” Midge read virtuously from the beauty advice page. She waved at the open garage door. “Oodles of fresh air. Besides, no one can see me back here, behind these hollyhocks and the clothesline.”

  That was true.

  “Also,” continued Midge, “I won’t have time for self-improvement once high school starts. It’s only two weeks away.”

  Those dates again. Cherry sighed. Everyone had definite plans for the fall and winter but herself. She asked Midge, rather warningly, what she planned to serve Dr. Joe for dinner this evening. Midge hoisted herself on hands and head once more, and replied:

  “Gloop.”

  “Soup?”

  “At’s w’at I’ed—gloop.”

  Cherry seized Midge by the ankles and turned her right side up. The teen-ager’s hazel eyes turned dark gray in annoyance.

  “Now you listen to me!” Cherry exclaimed, trying not to laugh. “Your poor dad needs better meals than gloop, young lady. Suppose both of you have dinner with us tonight.”

  Cherry knew no special permission from her mother was needed. Midge had practically grown up in the Ames household.

  That evening the Fortunes sat down with the Ameses around the big table. Cherry’s father, serving at the head of the table, was an older, graying, but still handsome version of his blond son. Dr. Joe, in his accustomed chair, seemed small and tired tonight. One lock of gray hair, as usual, stubbornly fell in his eye and, as usual, Dr. Joe abstractedly kept pushing it back.

  “Well, Cherry, did the mailman remember you today?” Mr. Ames asked.

  “Not yet, Will, and did you,” Mrs. Ames countered brightly, “ah—remember to buy me a new pair of garden shears?”

  “What garden shears?” Mr. Ames scowled. “Edith, I don’t understand you! And I don’t understand why Cherry didn’t hear—”

  “Oh, dear, I’ve dropped my fork,” Mrs. Ames exclaimed, dropping it. “Midge dear, will you get me another?”

  Cherry and Charlie exchanged grins. There was a trace of concern in her brother’s face. Cherry said:

  “Announcement. I haven’t heard about my application. Anybody who wishes to remark on it, may do so. I feel gloomy, anyway.”

  Dr. Fortune glanced up. “No cause for gloom, my dear,” he said absently. “You can always stay here in Hilton and nurse for me.”

  “That’s right!” Mr. Ames said firmly. “I was thinking it’s time Cherry stopped traipsing around and stayed at home for a change. Brush up on her cooking. Learn to sew. Be a help to her mother.”

  “Feed the cat,” said Charlie, straight-faced. “Water the plants. Never see anyone but the grocer, and go to bed at eight o’clock.”

  “No nursing? Horrors!” Cherry exclaimed.

  Next morning, Saturday, brought a letter from Gwen Jones, Cherry’s old classmate. It was postmarked from Gwen’s home town in Pennsylvania. “I’ve been accepted! Bertha writes from their farm that the Visiting Nurse Service of New York has accepted her, too. I’m going straight to New York and find us an apartment. How does Greenwich Village strike you as a location for us?”

  “ ‘Us,’ ” Cherry thought mournfully. “Oh, well. I can always visit the girls. Or something.”

  The Saturday noon delivery brought a note from Mai Lee, the Chinese-American girl Cherry had trained and worked with. “Just heard from the Visiting Nurse Service and they not only said yes! They really want me, because I can speak two or three words of Chinese. Suppose they will assign me to Chinatown for my territory. When will you arrive in New York, Cherry?”

  It was awful. Sunday was worse, for there was no mail on Sunday. Monday was Labor Day, and deadly dull.

  Tuesday morning brought an advertisement, a bill, an exultant letter from another old classmate and friend, Vivian Warren, a postcard from Josie Franklin marked simply “Hurray!” and a cool, driving rain.

  “At least, it’s a fall rain,” thought Cherry. “Guess I’d better do my room over, after all. Guess I’ll go hide out at the movies this afternoon.” Everyone else was too busy to go with her.

  Cherry sat through two features, a newsreel, and a cartoon without clearly seeing any of them. When she emerged from the movie theater, the rain had stopped and the air was fresh and tangy. On Main Street she saw purple grapes and frosty-cheeked plums in the fruiterer’s window.

  And when sh
e reached home, there was a letter awaiting her! Someone, Charlie probably, had tied it to a long, red ribbon and hung it from the living-room chandelier, so Cherry would be sure to see it. The letter swung festively and tantalizingly out of her reach—Charlie had made sure of that.

  Breathless with excitement, Cherry dragged a chair over and climbed up on it. She glanced at the envelope—yes, it was the one. Then she noticed on the envelope that the letter mistakenly had been addressed to Hilton, Indiana, had traveled all the way back to New York, and then had been readdressed to Hilton, Illinois, mailed once more, and finally reached her. So that was the cause for the delay! She tore the letter open.

  “—accepted—visiting nurse—please report in New York before September tenth, if possible—”

  “If possible!” Cherry laughed for joy. She teetered on the chair in sheer excitement.

  Charlie’s tow head carefully emerged from the hall, and her mother’s sympathetic face peered in from the dining room.

  “Is everything all right?” they breathed.

  “Everything is perfect!” Cherry crowed. “Marvelous—perfect—I’m going to New York, think of that—!”

  She tumbled off the chair and sat on the floor where she landed, laughing up at her relieved family.

  CHAPTER II

  The Spencer Club

  “THIS CAN’T BE IT!” CHERRY SAID.

  The taxi driver turned around. “Look, lady. You give me an address, did’n’ ya? I ain’t responsible for this here crazy Greenwich Village.”

  Cherry alighted. She peered around, delighted and astonished, at the narrow crooked street and the ancient, little brick houses.

  “Seventy-five cents, lady.”

  “Oh! Here you are.” She paid him, then reached into the cab for her suitcase.

  The taxi driver looked skeptically at the ten-cent tip she had given him. Then he studied Cherry, fresh-faced and trim, in her red suit and tiny black hat perched on her black curls.

  “Look, lady. You ain’t the Village type. You shoulda stood in Brooklyn. Like me.”