by Helen Wells
“He said no.”
An expression of sadness permeated both their faces—such sadness that Cherry was distressed herself. For in that sadness was hopelessness.
“How—how is Toby?” Mrs. Demarest faltered. “I haven’t been upstairs this past hour.”
“Just as well, Grace. Toby is resting. And all these young people take our minds off our trouble.”
Cherry glanced questioningly at Sal. Sal’s face was stony. Mrs. Demarest noticed the glance and explained quite simply:
“We have a little boy, four years old, who has an incurable illness. At least, the doctors know of no cure. Toby has been sick quite a long time… You see, Lieutenant Cherry, Toby’s system cannot absorb food. He gets no nourishment at all out of the good food we feed him. So he’s—he’s starving.” She bit her lip. Her eyes were suspiciously bright. “He’s wasting away.”
“Starving in the midst of plenty,” young Mr. Demarest said quietly. “And there’s nothing anyone can do.”
Cherry was horrified. “Aren’t there intravenous foods, or vitamins, or medicines, that can nourish him?” she asked. “Or a corrective medicine?”
“Nothing,” Mr. Demarest said. “Toby cannot absorb anything at all. Or if there is something, we haven’t found it so far. We have a dozen eminent doctors on the case but—” He shook his head.
Cherry felt their helplessness as if a pile of bricks had dropped on her heart. No words could express her concern: she simply looked at these two stricken people.
Mrs. Demarest smiled wanly at Cherry. “He’s grown too weak and thin even to play any more. He has to stay in bed all the time.”
Sal blew her nose and looked away.
“I wish I could see him,” Cherry breathed. “He must be a lonely little boy. And I—love children.”
“It might do him good,” Toby’s father agreed. “We haven’t given up hope by any means.” He said it with bravado.
As Cherry and Sal followed Mr. Demarest upstairs, Sal whispered to Cherry:
“They must like you. They let very few people see the child.”
When a trained nurse opened the door into a nursery, Cherry understood why. The tiny boy propped up in the bed was more like a ghost, a dying doll, than a real flesh-and-blood child.
He opened exhausted blue eyes, blue as his father’s, and looked up at the three adults standing around his bed. Cherry saw the four-year-old’s tiny bony wrists, the scrawny little neck, the hollows in his temples. Beside his hand lay a toy duck but the little fellow was too tired to play with it.
“Hello, son,” his father said softly. “Here are two nurses who take care of sick soldiers. Even soldiers get sick, too, you know.”
Cherry and Sal said hello in unison. Little Toby stared soberly at them.
“Where are the soldiers?”
“In bed like you,” Sal said.
“But the soldiers are getting well and so will you,” Cherry said.
He sighed, a breath of a sigh, and smiled. It was an oddly grave smile for such a little face.
“Would you like to hear a story?” Cherry asked gently, looking at the unused toys around the beautifully appointed nursery. She glanced at Mr. Demarest for permission. “I’ll take less than five minutes.”
“A story?” Toby whispered. “Which story?”
“One you probably never heard before.” Cherry sat down beside his bed and took Toby’s hand. It was a pathetic scrap of a hand. “Once upon a time there was a man named Rip Van Winkle. He had a nice dog, named Wolf, and a very mean wife.” She looked into the boy’s blue eyes as she retold the tale. Those eyes grew full of wonder.
“And would you believe it, poor Rip had slept twenty years!” Cherry finished. “But his old dog Wolf, and all the townspeople, finally remembered Rip. Now when you hear thunder, Toby, you’ll know it’s the old Dutch men throwing balls along the mountains.”
His face was bright with interest.
“When’s it going to be thunder?”
“Next time it rains. You listen for the thunder.”
“And Rip was happy ever after?”
“Yes, Rip lived to a ripe old age.”
“Now tell me a nuther story.”
“Next time,” Cherry promised. His gaze followed her longingly as she rose.
“I hope there will be a next time,” Mr. Demarest said, as he softly closed Toby’s door behind them. “I really think Toby will be waiting for you and your next story.”
Downstairs, he told his wife about their visit to Toby. “He’s always so listless but, Grace, you should have seen how interested he was!”
Mrs. Demarest turned to Cherry. “Will you be Toby’s Scheherazade? We tell him stories too but perhaps he is too used to us. And if he has something to look forward to—something to I—” She checked herself. “Something to keep him going, I mean.”
Cherry knew Mrs. Demarest had started to say, “Something to live for.” Something to feed his spirit, or call it his interest and his will, which might keep alive his starving little body. Even a four-year-old, Cherry knew, might be sustained through imagination and love.
“I’ll come back as often as I have free time,” she promised soberly.
The gratitude in their two faces made her feel very humble indeed.
It was easier said than done, to go back to the Demarests’ often. Cherry’s work was heavy, and her first duty was to her soldier patients. But she had an obligation to that pathetic child, too. It weighed on her when three, four, and then five days slipped by, and she did not get over there. The picture of Toby slowly wasting away, while parents, doctors, nurses stood by helpless, haunted Cherry. Never in all her nursing experience had she run across a patient so appealing and so doomed.
“And anyhow,” Cherry said to Sal, in Cherry’s room one night, “suppose my storytelling doesn’t work? Doesn’t continue to hold his interest?”
“You’re a great worrier,” Sal said laconically. “Ten to one it at least helps.” She scowled. “What’s on my mind is the doctors on that case. Why don’t they do something?”
“A very nice, unreasonable speech, Miss Steen.”
“All right, now we’ve both bawled each other out.” Sal and Cherry grinned at each other in mutual understanding. “Ames, you show up at the Demarests’ tomorrow with a story, or else.”
“But I have late duty tomorrow.”
“I’ll go on duty for you. Fix it with my supervisor.”
So Cherry was ushered once again into the quiet nursery, this time by Grace Demarest. The little boy’s pinched face lighted, and he struggled to sit up.
“Toby’s really glad to see you,” his mother said to Cherry happily.
“I like you, Cherry,” Toby announced.
Cherry sat down by his bedside and started to tell him the Victorian fairy tale of the golden statue which had eyes of ruby and a living heart, and the sparrow which flew to do the statue’s bidding. But she had forgotten one thing. Toby was fumbling for her hand, as part of their already regular ceremony.
“—so finally the stupid mayor had the statue taken down, and melted, and the little sparrow flew away,” Cherry finished. “But many, many people remembered them both, to this very day.”
Toby heaved a big sigh. “Poor statue. Poor sparrow. If I was there, I’d ’uv brung them home with me.” His cheeks were faintly flushed with satisfaction. “Now tell me a nuther story.”
But the precious five minutes were up. As Cherry stood up to leave, the little boy still clung to her hand.
“I’ll tell you a story,” he pleaded. “’Bout a statue.”
“Next time, dear,” Cherry said. “Don’t forget the sparrow. He was quite a brave bird, wasn’t he?”
“I won’t forget,” he promised. “When you comin’ again, Cherry?”
That was the little cry which followed her through busy days: “When are you comin’ back to me?” She did her very best to get there often. And as she continued to go and spin tales, the dying little
boy grew more and more attached to Cherry.
She came to know and care for the child, and for his parents too. She appreciated fully now the generosity and the pathos of this beautiful house. She marveled at the way young Mr. and Mrs. Demarest steeled themselves, showing only a happy face to the soldier visitors. It was as if, unable to help their own son, they were determined to help other people’s sons out of the despondency of illness.
Mrs. Demarest said to Cherry late one afternoon when she insisted Cherry remain after the storytelling for tea in her own room:
“I read of a woman who years ago lost her only child. She must be a sensible woman. Instead of grieving over one baby, she went out and collected all the orphan babies she could find, all over the country, and then she found good homes for them. She’s been doing that for thirty years, and she says she’s had thousands of babies instead of just one. Maybe—maybe I’ll do something like that.”
Cherry put aside her cup and saucer to say earnestly, “But you mustn’t give up hope, Mrs. Demarest. You never can tell about these things. There always is a chance.”
“The doctors don’t seem to think so. In fact, some of them talk of withdrawing from the case, because they feel there is nothing they can do for us.”
Cherry inquired exactly who was treating Toby. Mrs. Demarest named several eminent physicians and specialists.
“And Dr. Orchard, our local doctor,” she added. “I’d like you to meet him. You’ve never been here when he has called, but I believe he’s downstairs now. Let’s go down and see, shall we?”
In the big sitting room, Mr. Demarest was entertaining convalescing soldiers. A few civilians were here today too, including a young man whom Mrs. Demarest beckoned over.
“Dr. Orchard, Lieutenant Ames.”
Dr. Orchard was short and plump and very sure of himself for such a young man. His round fair face was shrewd, almost cold. However, his manner seemed pleasant enough as he talked with Cherry about her work at the Army hospital and his private practice here in the village.
“Dr. Orchard takes care of my son Toby,” Mrs. Demarest told Cherry.
“Oh, I’m only one of several consulting doctors for Toby,” Dr. Orchard said, but there was no modesty in the way he said it.
“You’re the baby among all those famous specialists,” Mrs. Demarest smiled. “Even if they leave us in the lurch, I know you won’t.”
“My dear Mrs. Demarest,” Dr. Orchard smiled unctuously at her. “Never fear! I could never leave so charming a woman in the lurch.”
Cherry winced at his ingratiating tones. She wondered how the Demarests, who could afford the best doctors, had happened to choose this young local doctor. No doubt Dr. Orchard was competent. It certainly was quite a feather in his cap—quite a boost to his beginning career—to be called in along with famous practitioners. How had he managed it? Perhaps simply because the Demarests knew him? Or with that ingratiating manner of his?
“I don’t like him,” Cherry thought later. “There’s something about him that’s not quite sincere—Oh, but I shouldn’t be making snap judgments about Dr. Orchard on the basis of one little meeting,” she reprimanded herself.
And Cherry continued faithfully to go to the Demarests’ and sit holding Toby’s hand, recounting fabulous legends about the elves who lived in tree trunks and fashioned a magic mirror, the winged steed that raced with the sun, the mermaid who loved a human prince and suffered for it.
And Toby listened blissfully, begging for more, while daily he became thinner, weaker, a shadow of a child, receding into a world of shadows.
If only they could snatch him back!
CHAPTER VI
Midge’s Big Romance
IT WAS SUNDAY MORNING. CHERRY WOKE UP AND BLINKED at her own red-and-white room in Hilton. For a moment she thought, “This is too good to be true.” Then she remembered riding the interurban trolley over from the hospital, Saturday evening. Cherry sniffed and listened. From downstairs came her parents’ voices and the aroma of buttermilk pancakes for a Sunday morning treat. Church bells were ringing two blocks away.
Cherry staggered to her side window and leaned out over the top of the high lilac bush. It was a heavenly day—a fine blue sky—millions of cloud-islands scudding before the wind—earth and air smelling fragrant. “It’s spring,” she promised herself. “And I’m home!”
Being home was still an unaccustomed luxury. Cherry soaked herself leisurely in the bathtub, then donned her most frivolous underthings though she still had to wear her khaki uniform. She dawdled over breakfast, cooked by her mother. Velva had gone home for Sunday. She even demanded black olives along with the pancakes—and got them.
“It’s still such a novelty to you,” she teased her parents, “having me home, that I could ask you for an ermine coat and probably get it.”
“You could not,” said her father. “But as a mark of my esteem, I’ll let you have the funnies.” He handed her the bright-hued pages across the table and poured himself another cup of coffee.
“Will,” said Mrs. Ames ruefully, “that’s your fifth cup. You know you always feel dreadful on Mondays—after all that coffee.”
“I feel like an old inner tube on Mondays,” Mr. Ames admitted cheerfully. He passed Cherry the pancakes again. “You have to eat your brother’s share for him, since he’s not here.”
“I expect Charlie would do as much for me,” Cherry agreed, and started in on another stack. “Mother, what are you looking so preoccupied about? Charlie can take care of himself.”
Mrs. Ames rested her pretty face in her hands. “I’m not worried about Charles. It’s Midge and Dr. Joe I’m concerned about. Midge is having a big romance. Today is the day, I gather. And it—Well, that child’s antics are simply indescribable. Perhaps you’d better stop by at the Fortunes’ house, Cherry. Midge does listen to you.”
“Yes, see what advice you can give to the lovelorn,” her father grinned.
This was the first Cherry had heard of Midge’s romance. Surprised and rather amused, she strolled along the quiet Sunday streets. She enjoyed seeing all the familiar places again: the stately pillared Pendleton house on the corner, set far back in its long sweep of lawn—the rather grim, gabled stone house which Cherry as a child had thought must be haunted because it looked so forbidding—the brick high school where she had had both good and bad hours. Several old friends waved to her along the way to the Fortunes’ small white cottage.
One of Cherry’s long-time daydreams was to take this neglected cottage in hand, for someone could make it lovely. Looking like a dollhouse (though actually it was roomy inside), the cottage cried out for a fresh coat of white paint and latticed roses around the door. The weeds should be pulled too, and flowers planted instead, along the flagstone path Cherry trod now.
Apparently Midge had the same idea, only applied to the interior of the cottage. Midge, with her hair strained back in pin curls, opened the front door, and an overpowering fragrance of lilacs practically smote Cherry down.
“Midge! Is this a funeral parlor? Or are you planning to anesthetize somebody? I can’t breathe in here!”
The living room was crammed to overflowing with purple lilacs. On the tables, on the floor beside the sofa, at the window, in vases, jars, jugs, even in a bucket, branches of nodding lilac left almost no space to turn around in. It was lovely enough in a startling way.
“It’s a bower,” Midge said aggrievedly. “You seem to have no artistic appreciation. Anybody’d know this is good psychology, too. I’ve got a caller coming this afternoon at five, you see,” Midge explained importantly. “The lilacs are to put Tom in a romantic mood.”
“I hope Tom likes flowers.” Cherry choked a little in the sickening sweetness. She ran a finger over the dusty table top. “Shall I draw a heart?” she suggested. “What’s Tom’s last initial?”
“All right,” Midge sputtered. “I’ll dust.”
She marched off in high dudgeon, straight into an overhanging branch of lilac.
It left a wide smear of pollen on her flushed young face.
Cherry knocked on a door off the living room. “Dr. Joe! Good morning!”
He opened the door into his homemade laboratory. “Thank heavens you came over! Midge is driving me to distraction.” He sat down wearily on a high wooden stool and put his hands in the pockets of his white lab coat. “She drives me out of every room and says I mustn’t brew any chemicals today. Seems it would interfere with those blasted lilacs.”
Cherry could not help giggling. Dr. Joe looked so harassed, bewilderment all over his seamed face. “Listen!” he said disgustedly.
Cherry listened. From the living room came a phonograph record playing, slow, sad, sirupy sweet. A tenor voice bleated, “Do you love me—will you love me—”
“She’s been playing that danged record day and night. Midge!” Dr. Joe lifted his deep voice. “I can’t stand much more! Please shut that thing off!”
“—morning, noon, and night—you are my heart’s delight—” the record groaned on. Cherry ran into the deserted living room. “—when will you see the light—” Cherry stopped the tenor’s sufferings at that point. There was a sigh from Dr. Joe, and a yell from Midge in the vicinity of the kitchen.
Cherry found her anxiously stirring at the stove.
“Fudge,” she explained, wiping her perspiring forehead with the back of her hand. “For Tom.”
“Who is this Tom anyway?”
“Tell you later when you help me with my dress. You will help me, won’t you? Be a dear and beat this fudge while I ice the cake.”
“Did you dust?”
“Oh, Tom will never notice a little dust.”
Cherry stirred, Midge spread chocolate icing and then licked the icing bowl.
“Perhaps,” Cherry suggested as tactfully as she could, “perhaps Tom would like to do some of the providing himself. Perhaps he’ll be a little embarrassed or scared off by all this militant preparation. Sweetie, aren’t you overdoing things just a bit? Why don’t you—ah—give him a chance to do something for you? Say, buy you a soda on this date?”