by Helen Wells
“Well? Did you find her?”
“Yes—ill, but not in any danger. Needs a doctor. Can you get one?”
“Sure, right away. I’ll radio from my patrol car. Say, tell me—What’s she like, hey?”
Cherry hesitated, then helplessly held out her hands. “Pathetic. Scared. And—a nice person.”
“Beats me.” The policeman strode off to the kitchen. “What’s she scared of?”
“Life itself,” Cherry murmured as he went out the back door.
Returning upstairs to the sick woman, Cherry made her comfortable, then prepared for the doctor’s visit. She thought of preparing food for Mary Gregory, but did not want to feed her until after the doctor’s examination.
The doctor arrived within a few minutes. It was Dr. Gray, from the near-by hospital. Cherry knew him slightly and said reassuringly to the sick woman, “This is Dr. Gray.” He was middle-aged, quiet, a soothing presence, and an excellent practitioner. From the look on his face, Cherry guessed O’Brien had cautioned Dr. Gray as to the special psychological situation here.
“Hot water and towels, nurse.”
“Here you are, doctor.”
Like Cherry, Dr. Gray apparently had decided to talk as little as possible. It was enough of a shock to this woman to have people confront her, after her eighteen years of solitude and silence, without being subjected to a great deal of talk besides. Only the smallest and most tactful contact with her could be made at first.
“Yes, it’s influenza. A mild case, fortunately. When did you last have anything to eat, Miss Gregory?”
She had to stop and think. “Yesterday.”
“Nurse Ames will fix you something.”
“Yes, doctor,” said Cherry. She smiled to herself, thinking Mr. Jonas would be relieved to hear of this. She figured that even though Mary Gregory had gone downstairs to the kitchen yesterday, probably the rain plus her own weak condition had kept her from putting out the food basket with her check and the order.
The doctor sat thinking. “Miss Gregory, although you’re not very ill, you would be more comfortable with a private nurse. Someone to take constant care of you, and cook for you. Can you—afford that? If not—”
The woman lifted a thin hand. “I—don’t want that. Someone here all the time. No.”
“Very well,” said Dr. Gray peaceably. “The visiting nurse will be enough. Please come every day, Miss Ames, and report to me daily.”
“Yes, Dr. Gray.”
She glanced at Mary Gregory to see if she objected. Evidently not. Cherry rapidly figured: Must explain to Supervisor Davis so she will assign Gwen or Nurse Cornish some of my other calls, and leave me enough time for here. Will have to cook three meals for Miss Gregory on each visit. Has she a little electric stove to warm the food again? Better leave a pitcher of fruit juice beside her bed, too. Get a thermos for water. What else?
The doctor was taking his leave now. Leading Cherry into the sitting room, he gave her instructions for the patient’s care. He wrote out a prescription to be filled; Cherry promised to take care of it.
Dr. Gray gazed curiously around this upstairs sitting room. “Strange, strange … I don’t envy you, Nurse Ames, trying to learn the case history of this patient.”
Cherry jumped slightly. She had not thought of this half-tragic woman as anything so impersonal as a case history. Yet, of course, Dr. Gray was right. Cherry would have to get the facts about this patient, just as with all others whom the Visiting Nurse Service served, as a matter of official procedure.
The doctor picked up his hat and bag, still thinking. “It may not do her any harm to talk—if you can ever get her started talking. In fact, it should do her good to pour out her story. And you’ll have to be the one to listen,” he said quietly. “Well! Have I forgotten anything?”
“I think not, doctor.”
“Call me up tomorrow morning at the hospital. Oh, yes, and the policeman wants you to get in touch with him, too, for a report. Good-bye, Miss Ames. And—don’t let this house unnerve you.”
He left. Then Cherry heard the patrol car drive off. She was all alone now in this mansion with this strange woman.
“Nurse—” It was only a whisper.
Cherry bent over the bed. The woman extended her clenched hand, then opened it. It was a door key. To the back door, it seemed. Cherry took the key and put it into her purse. The key was still warm; it must have been under Miss Gregory’s pillow.
When she turned back to the bed, the haunted eyes were closed. Asleep? Or afraid and feigning sleep? The recluse’s face was wan, her expression vaporous. It was like a face half forgotten, vaguely recalled, not seen in focus, not a real and present face at all.
Cherry waited a while, until the woman’s breathing grew slow and deep. Then she crept downstairs, prepared sufficient food, and brought back the laden tray. Mary Gregory was still asleep, and that was good. Cherry set the food within easy reach, adjusted windows, shades, blankets. Then, having done all she could do, she went away until the next day.
But Mary Gregory had given her the key to her house. Of her own free will. Cherry had won her trust.
CHAPTER XI
The Secret
FOR A WEEK CHERRY WENT FAITHFULLY TO THE Victorian mansion. Every day, as she nursed and cleaned and cooked for Mary Gregory, Cherry hoped that the woman would talk. She did not talk, except to murmur words of thanks. Her wistful gaze followed Cherry at her tasks, and her first fright died away. But a trace of hostility remained.
Cherry did not press. After eighteen years alone, one did not return to the world overnight. Cherry would make occasional remarks. “It’s colder out today. The children are wearing their leggings now. I met them on their way to school.” Or, “Mr. Jonas says the winter squash and potatoes are coming in, if you’d like some.” Or Cherry simply brought Miss Gregory the daily newspaper she found on the back step. “Did you see this article about care for the war orphans?”
Children were an appeal Miss Gregory always responded to. Once she told Cherry sadly that the neighborhood children never played in her yard any more, as they used to do.
“Oh, they talk about you often,” Cherry said carefully, and smiled. “There’s a fine crop of youngsters around here, isn’t there?”
Mary Gregory smiled back. She closed her eyes and was silent.
This far Cherry went but no further.
She was troubled about this odd woman. What was to happen after she reached convalescence, and needed the nurse no longer? Would she slip back into her life of dreams? Cherry felt a horror at permitting that to happen again. If only she could rouse Mary Gregory—shake her into seeing that she was being afraid of mere ghosts, needlessly wasting herself.
“I won’t be able to help her,” Cherry realized, tramping her district these cold, December days, “until I know what those ghosts in her mind are. Until she talks to me about her past. Those three portraits—Why did she lock herself away in the first place? Why? Why?”
Knocking on doors, nursing and teaching, writing up her case records at the center, occupied only the periphery of Cherry’s attention. The core of her thoughts was Mary Gregory.
The woman’s affection for children—there was a clue. Children were the only people she had felt able to talk to, during any of these years. “And she regards me as a child,” Cherry thought in some amusement. “As a matter of fact, she is the one who’s not grown up—running away and refusing to face her problems.” Something really crushing must have befallen her.
“She was so young, so pretty!” echoed Mr. Jonas’s voice in Cherry’s mind. “I was sorry for her even then.”
At home at the apartment these days, Cherry was preoccupied. She scarcely heard the girls’ chatter.
“The head worker at Laurel House has approved having a great, big Christmas party!”
“We’ll all have to pitch in. If we could get dolls, lots of ’em, and make doll clothes, for the neighborhood children—What do you think?”
&
nbsp; “Cherry, aren’t you interested any more?”
“That’s fine,” Cherry said absently. “Of course I’m interested but—”
But at this moment she was concentrating on Mary Gregory. A great deal depended on Cherry’s proper handling of this case. Err, and the woman would creep forever back into her shell. But with tact, insight, skill, a woman’s life might be salvaged.
Cherry’s supervisor at the center, Dorothy Davis, had a brisk suggestion. “Get her to move. Get her out of that mausoleum of a house, where she sees the past every day. Then she’ll have to live in the present!”
“How can I get her to move?”
Supervisor and nurse held a conference, and talked the case over from every angle. Miss Davis finally admitted that, short of a fire or a Health Department order to move, Mary Gregory would probably never live elsewhere.
Cherry had learned, in this week with the recluse, that Mary Gregory was a wealthy woman. She owned the house, and had a large independent income, left her by her father. The bank handled all her affairs, and paid all her bills. Cherry thought this financial good luck, in a way, had almost spelled bad luck for Mary Gregory.
“If she’d had no funds, she would have been forced out among people, like my brave Miss Culver. She would have been a much healthier, happier, and more useful person, too. Well, maybe it isn’t too late,” Cherry mused. “She isn’t really old, scarcely middle-aged. Half her life still stretches ahead of her. She mustn’t waste that, too. If only, only, only she would tell me her story!”
At the Jonas delicatessen, between sips of steaming broth and bites of tangy rye bread, Cherry reported the recluse’s progress. The old man, who had wondered for eighteen years as he packed up each weekly food basket and his own head grew slowly gray, remained as baffled as ever.
“To die of a broken heart, I can understand, yes. But to half die—to neither live nor die, it makes no sense.”
Mama Jonas called from the back of the shop: “Papa! So romantical, where is the cheese?”
The old man called back indignantly, “I suppose you weren’t romantical when you married me, hah?”
“Hokay, Papa, you still are my heart’s blood, but if you should be so kindly—where are you putting the cheese?”
Cherry grinned and asked Mr. Jonas to help her with menus for Miss Gregory. Cooking three meals daily for her took too much time from Cherry’s other patients. The grocer selected several prepared dinners to go into this week’s food basket.
“Miss Gregory will be walking around soon,” Cherry said. “She’ll be able to get down to the kitchen and do a few light tasks. No, Mr. Jonas, there isn’t anything you, or anyone, can do for her, I’m afraid.”
Officer O’Brien was another interested person. When Cherry stopped by at the station house, he plied her with questions for his report, and questions out of plain, human curiosity.
“Her with her comfortable house and means, not enjoyin’ life!” The big policeman shook his head. “Not even steppin’ out under the blue skies! Now, mind you, Nurse Ames, I’m sorry for the poor soul but—Say, how can people be like that?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out, too,” Cherry assured him.
“Well, thanks for the report. I’ll keep a weather eye on her and the house, as usual. Nobody been botherin’ her? Everything all right?”
Dr. Gray, in learned language, asked the same question about Mary Gregory. Conferring softly with the nurse in the upstairs sitting room, after each visit, the doctor speculated:
“What motivated her withdrawal from life? What crisis or loss was she unable to adjust to? And what early conditioning rendered her unable or unwilling to adjust? Try to get her history, nurse.”
“I am trying, Dr. Gray. But she won’t break her silence.”
“Keep after her. Be ingenious.”
Cherry tried everything she could think of. She recalled her courses in psychology, during nursing training. She sat up late three nights studying a book on casework, which Supervisor Davis thought might help her. She challenged Miss Gregory, she coaxed her, then ignored her, offered provocative openings in conversation, struggled to rouse her sympathy or curiosity for others, offered her own sympathy to the strange woman. None of it worked. Mary Gregory merely turned away.
On the day of one of Cherry’s final visits, Miss Gregory was sitting in a chair beside a window. Pale winter sunshine filtered in, illumining her face. She was almost pretty in her embroidered negligee, Cherry thought, and certainly less ghostly, more like a flesh-and-blood person now.
But she still should not be left all alone again. Cherry made a last, despairing effort.
“I’ll be here again tomorrow, Miss Gregory,” Cherry said, packing her black bag. “Then after that I won’t come any more, unless you send for me.”
The woman looked at her with an expression Cherry could not decipher. Was it fear? The dignity of her bearing became steeliness, tension.
“Unless”—Cherry hesitated and urged again—“you’d like me to drop in, say, once a week, to see how you are getting along. Mondays would be good. Would Mondays suit you?”
“It isn’t a question of Monday or Tuesday or Friday,” Mary Gregory brushed her aside. But she faltered under Cherry’s earnest gaze. “You say you—won’t be back at all after tomorrow?”
“Unless you change your mind. I’d like to come back.” And Cherry put into her eyes and voice all the concern she felt for this drifting woman.
Suddenly Miss Gregory turned a stricken face to Cherry and held out her hands. “Don’t go away and never come back! Don’t leave me all alone!”
Cherry could hardly believe her ears. She took a step forward. Mary Gregory burst out weeping.
“I’ve been wanting to—get back in touch—Wanting to for a long time now—But I don’t know how—with people—And then you came, you’re easy to talk to, you didn’t ask me questions. But now you’re leaving—Oh, help me, help me!”
Cherry took the woman’s hand. She said very low, “I’ll help you. I won’t leave you.”
She let the woman weep stormily, clinging to her hand. Years of dammed-up emotion overflowed at last. The tears were washing away the mental locks and bolts, so that finally Cherry could reach her. Cherry watched the racked woman with pity, until her sobs subsided.
“I’m—so ashamed, nurse.”
“You needed to cry. Here, wipe your eyes. Take a sip of water.” Cherry comforted her, smiled, sat down in a chair beside her. “Better now?”
“Yes, much better. Nurse, I wish—Would you let me talk to you? Would you listen? If you’re going to help me—come back, I’d better tell you what’s happened.”
Cherry soothed her and reassured her. She settled back to listen, marveling at the change that had come over Mary Gregory in these last few minutes. The strain had slipped from her face, leaving it naked-looking, and her bearing was no longer steely but exhausted. She began to talk in low, rapid tones, not looking at Cherry.
Mary Gregory had been the only child of wealthy, elderly parents. They lived very much to themselves, and when a daughter was born to them, late in life, they kept their treasure to themselves. Mary Gregory was not permitted to go to school but was educated by private tutors at home. She traveled much with her parents, all over the world, throughout her childhood and adolescence. Rarely did she know other children, never did she have friends of her own age. She was constantly with her parents, and when occasionally she met other people, either they were much older than herself or Mary was strictly chaperoned and soon whisked away.
“You can see”—the woman looked at Cherry apologetically—“why I grew up fantastically shy and totally unable to deal with people. Oh, I like people, I wanted so much to know them and be friends with them. But my shyness held me back. There was only one person my own age to whom I ever felt close. Louise and I didn’t see each other often, but we exchanged long letters when we were apart and we were dear friends. I liked writing to her sometimes bette
r than seeing her face to face. I always had my mother and father, whom I loved dearly, for companionship. There seemed to be no need for other people. I suppose—I suppose I was a very odd sort of girl.”
“Through no fault of your own,” Cherry put in gently.
“You would think, wouldn’t you, that the odds against my meeting a young man would be very great? Yet it happened. He was Louise’s cousin, and he called on us—a purely polite call when we happened to be in San Francisco one year. I fell in love with him and—I was so grateful!—he with me. I was—rather pretty, then.” A ghost of tenderness flickered across Mary Gregory’s face, as she sat remembering her love affair of long ago.
Reluctantly Mary Gregory’s parents acceded to the courtship and gave permission for her marriage. John Wheeler was a handsome, robust, high-spirited young man, sociable and easygoing, the opposite of the shy girl who was to be his wife. “He was exactly the right temperament to draw me out of my shell,” Miss Gregory murmured, smiling. “Everything I did in his company magically became easy, happy, thrilling—I forgot to be afraid of people when I could hear John laughing. He was so proud of me when he introduced me to his friends, and I felt free for the first time in my life. We planned to go all over the world together—he was an engineer and had to travel—”
Her face convulsed. She swiftly rose and went to a dresser. Opening the top drawer, she took out a small, white satin box and brought it over to Cherry. Shining in the box was an unworn wedding ring.
“Mrs. John Wheeler, I was to have been,” Mary Gregory whispered. Weeping, she told Cherry the rest.
A month before their marriage, John had been called away on an engineering project. He would be back soon, he cheerfully told her to go ahead with the myriad preparations for their wedding. Mary Gregory was having the final fitting of her bridal gown, standing in the seamstress’ dressing room in white satin and lace, when the telegram came. John Wheeler had been seriously injured in a construction accident. He was asking for her.