by Helen Wells
Miss Davis explained to the newcomers with a grin.
“We joke a lot in the office—to offset the grim things we see every day. If we didn’t laugh, we’d cry. And we’d rather laugh.”
She introduced each new nurse to the experienced nurse who was to take her in tow. Cherry was assigned to a nurse named Mary Cornish who seemed to be shy and tongue-tied. She was slight and quiet, and Cherry felt Mary Cornish should be under her wing, not the other way around. She watched Gwen, Josie, and Bertha each go off meekly with her nurse guide.
Cherry sat down beside Mary Cornish at one of the long tables, in the midst of the blue-clad nurses. A puddle of sunshine danced on the case folders. The nurses’ chatter and laughter rippled up and down the table. Cherry felt as if she had strayed into a lively sorority, rather than an office.
“Now, Miss Ames, don’t you want to look over the case records of the families we’re going to visit this morning?” Mary Cornish suggested in her shy, pleasant voice. “I’ll be finished here in a few minutes and then we’ll leave.”
One of the folders was nearly empty. Miss Cornish explained that this was a new case, and they would have to gather information about the family’s members on their first visit, today. She handed Cherry family forms to put in her black bag. “You’ll take the family history.”
“But—but—” Cherry scowled. “Will they be willing to tell a stranger about their private lives?”
“A visiting nurse isn’t a stranger. Never, never,” said Mary Cornish with her gentle smile. Cherry resolved to watch closely how this quiet nurse worked with her families. Perhaps the right method would end her feeling of being an intruder.
They set out in the sunshine, swinging along with their bags. The city street teemed with life. Nurse Cornish said they could take a streetcar, but would have to walk so far at the other end that it was simpler to walk the whole way. She settled into a long, easy stride, and Cherry tried to imitate her.
“This is pretty hard work, isn’t it, Miss Cornish?”
“Interesting work,” Mary Cornish quietly corrected her. “It’s—fascinating when you do it. It’s hard to explain. When you go into somebody’s house, for instance, and they rush to the door and say, ‘Oh, thank goodness, here’s the nurse’—well, that’s sort of wonderful,” the little nurse finished shyly. “Everybody knows our uniform.”
After walking fifteen minutes and what seemed to Cherry like many miles, they came to blocks of tenements under an elevated line. Elevated trains at intervals roared past tenement windows. Poorly clad people haggled and joked at pushcarts at the curb, bearing vegetables, aprons, and shoelaces. The small shops were another meeting place. Women visited on stoops and “minded” one another’s babies in peeling carriages. A singing organ-grinder and an old man shouting “I buy old clothes!” joined the cries of playing children. Dozens of people turned to say “Hello, nurse!” as Mary Cornish and Cherry threaded their way up the lively street.
“This is my district,” Mary Cornish said. “I’ve been on it five years. I helped bring that little boy”—she nodded toward a handsome youngster bouncing a ball—“into the world. And see that pretty woman? Morning, Mrs. Castroviejo! She’d almost surely be blind if all the health services hadn’t helped. It does me good to see her sitting there in the sun embroidering blouses. That’s how she makes her living, you know. Why, Mr. Levy!” Nurse Cornish paused to wave at an old man sitting in an open window, wrapped in overcoat and blankets. “Good for you, to be up! Don’t stay up too long! Pneumonia case,” she explained to Cherry.
The district nurse stopped to inquire after an absent son and to pat a child on the head, then led Cherry into a narrow, shabby building.
Cherry stared around the murky hallway out of which rose steep, rickety, wooden stairs.
“Fifth floor,” said Mary Cornish cheerfully. “Our patients usually live on the top floor, where it costs less.” She started up.
Cherry collided in the near-dark with a baby carriage left in the hall, tripped on a cracked step, and climbed up after Miss Cornish’s small figure. On the second floor, with its four apartment doors, radio music and the smell of cabbage soup greeted them. A yapping poodle met them on the third floor. On the fourth floor, Cherry had to rest, panting for breath. Mary Cornish smiled and waited, not winded a bit. On the fifth floor, a door stood ajar for them.
“At least it’s sunny again, away up here,” Cherry muttered.
Mary Cornish rang the doorbell and sang out, “Good morning, Mrs. Crump! It’s the nurse!”
Mrs. Crump was a large, woebegone woman propped in bed, unable to stir from there. Her leg, from hip to foot, was in a plaster cast. At the sight of the nurses, she brightened.
“Thank goodness, you’re here! I told Mr. Crump not to worry but to go off to his job. I told him you’d not fail me. Why, howje-do, Miss Ames, I’m glad to meet you. Glad to have visitors.”
Chatting with the lonesome woman, Cherry followed Nurse Cornish’s example, took off her hat, tied on her apron, and washed her hands. Newspapers were already spread on a table beside the bed. The small room was as clean and orderly as Mr. Crump, presumably, could manage.
“I broke my leg, yessiree, Miss Ames, fell down a whole flight of stairs and broke my leg,” Mrs. Crump announced with evident pride. “Mrs. Remus, downstairs, she broke only her ankle. But I broke my hip too!”
Cherry smiled and helped Mary Cornish get the woman ready for a bed bath. After bathing her, the nurse checked her temperature and pulse, and made sure she had no new symptoms. They remade her bed with clean linens, then cleaned and straightened the room, and the kitchen and living room beyond. A photograph of a man with ferocious mustaches glared down at them from the wall.
“That’s Mr. Crump,” Mary Cornish whispered to Cherry as they dusted. “Actually he’s as gentle as a lamb. Did you see the sandwiches on the bedside table? Mr. Crump fixes them every morning and cleans house a little, before he goes to his motorman’s job.”
“How does Mrs. Crump manage on the days you can’t come?” Cherry whispered back.
“Oh, the neighbors look out for her. The woman next door brings her hot soup, and the children downstairs come up every afternoon and read aloud to her.”
Back in the bedroom, Mrs. Crump seemed refreshed from her bath and begged the nurses to stay and chat. But the house cleaning—rarely done, but an emergency to be met here—had taken half an hour and other people were waiting for them. Mary Cornish tactfully explained, and added:
“But I brought you the sewing kit you’ve been asking for. Now you can turn the collars on your husband’s shirts.”
Mrs. Crump held out her large arms eagerly. “I can’t tell you how it irks me to sit here doing nothing. I’m going to sew like a house afire! Thanks, nurse!”
After this case of general care, they proceeded to a building around the corner. This one was really dilapidated. As they labored up six crazy flights of steps, this time, Cherry marveled that the old staircase did not come crashing down with them.
At the top, a brood of children swirled around Nurse Cornish, whispering excitedly.
Cherry followed them into an apartment that was in pleasant contrast to the building itself. Although the rooms were tiny and crowded, the furniture drab and worn, still this was home. Everything was immaculate and in order. Homemade toys were stacked in a corner, a stew bubbled fragrantly on the stove, and starched if threadbare curtains hung at all the shining-clean windows.
The children, too, were threadbare but scrubbed. They ranged in age from Tommy, who was seven (he was not in school this morning because of his cold), through Jenny, four, the twins Molly and Mark, who were two and a half, down to the baby asleep in its crib. They reported wide-eyed that their father and two sisters—“big girls, ten ’n’ ’leven”—had risen at five in this emergency to do the day’s chores, then left the sick mother “in our care!”
They were well-behaved, self-reliant children. Tommy pretended valiantly, “fo
r the little kids,” not to be frightened at seeing their mother lying helpless. Cherry felt sorry for these bewildered little folk.
She felt even sorrier when she saw the wan, hollow-eyed woman who lay exhausted and very ill in the stuffy bedroom. Nurse Cornish sent the children into another room on invented errands, while she quickly examined the woman. Cherry handed her the doctor’s instructions for this pneumonia patient, and hastily went through the usual routine until her bag’s contents were spread on a newspaper-covered table. Then she hurried into the kitchen to boil some water.
The children tagged at Cherry’s heels. “Will our mama get well?”
“Of course she will!” Cherry manufactured a happy smile for them.
“We’re being awful quiet, like papa said,” Tommy reported.
“You’re good children! Is there anything here for your lunch?”
“Papa left us apples.”
“An’ bread.” Jenny pointed a tiny finger.
“Oh, yes, and milk.”
That was something but it would not do for every day—and Mrs. George might be sick a long time. The neighbors could not be asked to take over five children; they had heavy responsibilities of their own. Nor should the two older sisters be kept away from school. What could Miss Davis do for these five children?
Cherry whispered her question to Nurse Cornish as they finished taking the sick woman’s temperature, pulse, and respiration, and marked these on the record.
Mary Cornish looked troubled. “Maybe there are relatives who could help out, or take the children into their own homes. Mrs. George,” she gently caught the woman’s wandering attention. “Mrs. George. Have you or your husband any relatives in the city?”
The woman weakly shook her head. “Canada,” she whispered. “My children—will you—?”
“Don’t worry,” the nurse reassured her. “We’ll send in a housekeeper to look after your children, and you, too. Now lie back, my dear, I’m going to give you an injection—”
“Can’t pay—”
“The city will pay the housekeeper. Ssh, now.” While Cherry swabbed the woman’s thin arm for the needle Mary Cornish held ready, she thought with relief of that housekeeper service. Without it, these five little tykes might have to go temporarily to orphanages, hardly a happy experience. “This isn’t charity,” Cherry realized silently. “This is keeping a family together. Mrs. George will certainly recover faster, knowing her children are looked out for!”
Mrs. George required a good deal of care. Then Nurse Cornish and Cherry examined the five youngsters. They warned them to stay out of their mother’s room, explaining that their mother had an infectious disease and what that meant. But they might stand in the doorway and talk with her. The children nodded solemnly. Miss Cornish left a tonic prescription for Tommy’s cold, to be filled free of charge at the clinic, and a note for Mr. George to be at home at nine tomorrow morning. She would return then to give him instructions.
“Mr. George will have to give me the facts about the family tomorrow,” Mary Cornish said with a sigh. “His wife is too sick to talk. And I had planned to teach the family today how to take care of their patient, too. Oh, dear! Well, I guess we’ve done everything we can on this visit, haven’t we? I’ll have to do more on the next calls.”
Cherry sterilized all the nursing instruments, repacked her bag, then she and Mary Cornish scrubbed their hands. They spent several more minutes cheering up the children and chocolate bars came out of Nurse Cornish’s pockets for them. When they again were out on the dark, rickety stairs, Cherry was sober and silent.
“Don’t feel badly,” Nurse Cornish said over her shoulder.
“I’m not,” Cherry replied. “I was just thinking how awful it would be for the Georges if we and the clinic and the housekeeper service weren’t here!”
The next case, a treatment, proved to be a welcome contrast.
Mr. Xenos, an elderly tailor, had cut his hand on his sewing machine, and it had become infected. He fumed because, with his hand bandaged, he could not work, and he called on all the gods to persuade Miss Cornish not to change the dressing.
She explained patiently that the hand might never heal unless it was kept medicated and scrupulously clean.
“Is no good, no good!” he insisted furiously.
“What’s no good?” Miss Cornish smiled, struggling to dress the hand anyway.
“This white rag what goes round and round on my hand! Can’t sew, can’t earn! I tear it off when you go!”
Cherry and Mary Cornish stared at the indignant old man. Then the nurse gave Cherry a glance and said to Mr. Xenos:
“If you’ll leave the bandage on, I’ll bring you my other uniforms to be fixed.”
“Aha!”
“And if you let me bandage it next time, I’ll—I’ll bring you my coat to be lengthened.”
“Aha!”
“And if you let me bandage it next week, I’ll—”
“Wait!” thundered the old man. His face had altered. “Is very kind. Is very nice. You wish to show I need the bandage. You wish for me to make the money. But do you think I charge you? No.” He bristled, then resignedly held out his hand. “I am convinced. I will leave it on, your bandage, by golly!”
A few minutes later two amused nurses entered a musty drug store and perched at a soda fountain for lunch. Mary Cornish smiled at Cherry.
“Now you’ve had a sample. Do you think you’re going to like being a visiting nurse?”
Cherry tossed back her dark curls, and her black eyes sparkled. “I not only think so—I know so! And I certainly am going to learn about people!”
And she began to think in earnest of having her own district.
CHAPTER VI
Cherry’s Own District
ALMOST ANY EVENING, FOR THE ENSUING MONTH, THE Spencer Club could be found earnestly practicing bag technique, or comparing notes on Chinatown versus the Bronx, or rubbing aching legs with alcohol.
“Thirty flights of stairs today!” Gwen groaned regularly.
“Let’s review the lecture on family budgeting,” Mai Lee, sleepy but conscientious, proposed at least twice a week.
“And the new lecture on the care of new babies. I’m rusty,” Josie confessed. “Wake up, Vivian. Poor Vivi, you can’t fall asleep yet.”
Cherry giggled. “What a mad round of riotous living.”
They were taking turns at cooking, too, not wishing to impose on good-humored Bertha Larsen. It seemed to Cherry that the six of them ran as fast as they could, all day every day, to get through their many duties. There was no time but Sunday for sight-seeing, and on Sundays they luxuriously slept. The breakneck schedule left Cherry breathless but satisfied, for this work was rewarding.
After going out several times more with Nurse Cornish, Cherry had then had the benefit of Miss Davis’s supervision on further field trips. For several weeks now, as the weather grew colder, Cherry had been going out all by herself on carefully selected cases. She made one or two blunders, being too sympathetic with an overdemanding family, and once bathing the wrong patient. But, on the whole, Cherry and her fellow nurses were developing real skill in dealing with their families.
“Wish we had time some evening to get back to that Paradiso restaurant,” Vivian said plaintively, as she and Cherry dried dishes.
“It’s quite a walk. The Ames feet wouldn’t stand for it.”
Vivian giggled. “We’re floaters—why can’t we just float down there?”
Bertha called in, “The gold curtains are ready to hang! Who wants to help?”
“Who wants to put on a final coat of paint?” Gwen’s shout came from the opposite end of the apartment.
Their apartment was beginning to shape up. The living room would have been a credit even to their mothers. More lamps, a wall full of Mai Lee’s Chinese prints, and a handsome extra clock of Ann’s on the mantel, “made the room human,” as Vivian said.
The back parlor was brightly papered now as Cherry had sugg
ested, courtesy of the Spencer Club, not the landlord, and the furniture painted blue. The girls had paste in their hair and blue-stained hands for days, but they agreed the room had turned out fresh and cheerful. Josie pleaded for a canary, then for a dog, and finally for a cat, but she was outvoted.
“Only these three poky bedrooms,” Cherry fretted, “still have that rented, cheerless look.”
“What’s the difference?” Gwen said. ’We’re in them only to sleep. Our eyes are closed so we can’t see ’em, anyway.”
The bedrooms were hopeless, they all admitted. Besides, their spare money had run out. They decided the best solution was to ignore the bedrooms.
“Oh!”
“What’s the matter, Cherry?”
“We never did return Mrs. Jenkins’s gingerbread!”
“How could we return it, when we ate it?” Josie blinked.
“Silly, Cherry means we ought to reciprocate. Let’s fill her basket—we’ve kept it a disgracefully long time!—let’s fill it with—with—what?”
“I’ll bring rice cakes and preserved ginger from Chinatown,” Mai Lee suggested. “We simply haven’t time to do any extra cooking, you know that.”
“Bring some for the janitor’s wife, too,” Bertha asked. “She’s been nice, she does so many little things to help us.”
Being career women certainly did crowd their time. One of the time-consumers was traveling around this enormous city. Every one of the girls spent an hour on the subway getting from home to her center, and another hour in the evening getting back again. Besides, from center to headquarters for more lectures, and from center out to the far-flung districts, meant crisscrossing back and forth on buses and streetcars. At first Cherry just sat (or stood) and stared curiously at these hordes of people, never seeing the same face twice. Presently she learned to utilize her traveling time by reading, finding newspapers best; thus she became well informed on current events.