The Nurse Novel

by Alice Brennan

Merry felt uncomfortable. She said sharply, “You’re trying to embarrass me.” She lifted her chin higher and said carefully, “I have my own reasons, and I’m sorry, but they’re not for publication.”

  He said softly, “They wouldn’t concern the proverbial vine-covered cottage and the patter of little feet, would they?”

  Blushing, she retorted angrily, “You have no right to laugh at me!”

  “I’m not laughing,” he said gently, and looked down at her until she turned her face away. He sighed, “I wish there had never been this Tom person.”

  “Me too,” she thought.

  He left her a few minutes later. A woman was frantically signaling from the other side of the room. She was a fairly well-known actress and swayed when she moved as if her stilt-like heels were too slender to support her weight. Her bright scarlet mouth was twisted into lines of impatience and anger.

  Jeff said hastily, “She’s a client of mine, and I’d better get over there before she comes over here. I assure you she isn’t the type of woman you’d want to listen to.” He hesitated. “Shall I bring you a drink first?”

  Merry shook her head. “Nothing.”

  “You’re sure you don’t mind? I won’t be any longer than it takes to pacify her.”

  “I don’t mind at all.”

  “That’s a sea of wolves out there,” he said, waving his hand to include the garden and the patio.

  “I’m not Little Red Riding Hood, you know.”

  She stayed where she was for a few minutes, but when she saw Mai Hinge turning in her direction, moved hastily to merge with the crowd milling close to the pool, escaping through them to a spot out of the garish brilliance of the lights.

  Standing with her back to the darkness she wondered where Tammy was, and if she’d succeeded in talking to Pierson Webb, and if she had succeeded…what? Cigar smoke blew into her face, and a voice, thick and sleepy, said, “You don’t look too bad from the back. Turn around so I can see what you look like from the front.”

  When she turned around, she was startled to see the balding, cigar-smoking reporter whom she’d tried to avoid so many times while Pierson Webb was in the hospital.

  He puffed on the cigar, his eyes trying to focus on her face. “S’funny,” he said, “I think I’ve seen you someplace before. How about it, sister, I seen you before?”

  Merry shook her head and said quickly, “No, no, I don’t believe we’ve met.” She was indeed telling the truth…they had never met. And she was anxious to keep it that way.

  She couldn’t help wondering what a reporter was doing at Pierson Webb’s cocktail party. And then she thought that of course Pierson would want to keep good relations with the press. He’d want to quash any idea they’d had that he was on the way out.

  Pity for him again overcame her, and she made a sound low in her throat which she quickly tried to cover by pretending to cough.

  He blew smoke at her again. “You a reporter, sister?”

  “No.”

  He sighed. “Well, I am, and I’m here to tell you that one thing they don’t provide at these shindigs is a place to rest your feet. I got corns.”

  Merry watched him limp away. And then another voice needled at her out of the darkness, a voice as thick as the reporter’s, lined with weariness, and laced with pain. It said, “So you came.”

  Merry turned to face Pierson Webb. She saw that the lines in his face were deeper and the pouches under his eyes more pronounced. She said, “I remembered that I’d made you a half-promise before you left the hospital that if you asked me to a party, I’d come.”

  The old man said coldly, “You didn’t have to do me any favors, doll.”

  “I came because I wanted to, Mr. Webb.”

  He glared at her. “Don’t feed me that line of jazz,” he said. “I suppose you didn’t know anything at all about that friend of yours coming here with Arch Heller to try and persuade me to make her into another Natalie Pries.” He laughed harshly. “Don’t these babes understand there’s only one Natalie Pries developed in a generation?”

  “I know Tammy came here to try and talk to you.” Her eyes searched his face. “Tammy’s ambitious, not greedy. She’s fighting for what she wants out of life.”

  He snorted. “She’s willing to pay any price that’s asked,” he said. “Any price, Miss High-and-Mighty.”

  “That is not true!”

  His scorn deepened. “Don’t think you’re fooling me by that jazz, you or that friend of yours. I know women. I know them all.”

  “If you do,” Merry said, “then I’m sorry for you, because you’ve been meeting the wrong ones all of your life.”

  She started to walk away, and he called after her, “Just where do you think you’re going?”

  “I’m going home,” Merry said. “I don’t like your party, Mr. Webb. And I don’t like you.”

  “Hell with you,” he shouted after her. “Hell with you. Hear?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The night of the party Agnes went to bed early, but did not sleep. She rolled and turned, waking herself up from a bad dream in which Ellen was tossed back and forth between her and Harvey, like a ball.

  She’d drift back to sleep only to be awakened again by an equally horrible dream.

  When Merry came in she was lying tense and wide awake. She yawned luxuriously as if she’d only just come awake and asked about the party.

  Merry shrugged. “I guess it was all right, if you like that sort of thing.”

  She undressed and climbed into bed. “It was exciting at first,” she said, “and then people began to get nasty.” Her tone was reflective. “I wonder why people drink too much,” she mused. “They usually end up saying or doing things they wouldn’t do or say if they hadn’t been drinking.”

  Agnes said, “I suppose they do it for the kicks liquor is supposed to give them.” She thought, “I wonder who it is Merry’s talking about… Jeff? It doesn’t seem possible, but still…”

  Merry turned over on her side. “Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight,” Agnes said.

  Merry was no more sleepy than Agnes was. She lay wide awake staring out into the darkness of the bedroom, the anger against Pierson Webb still glowing inside her.

  She wondered if Jeff was still annoyed with her for insisting they leave so soon.

  “So Pierson said something you didn’t like,” he said, “and you’re going to get revenge on him by walking out on his party. That’s rather childish, isn’t it?”

  “Perhaps,” Merry shrugged. “But I still want to go home.” She’d faced him squarely. “And I’m not going to say you don’t have to take me home, because you do. I don’t intend to go home alone. You can come back later but first…”

  He’d laughed, delighted by her anger, “But first I have to take you home,” he finished for her. “It is a horrible party,” he said. “I don’t like it either. And I’m sorry if Pierson hurt your feelings. You mustn’t mind; he makes a practice of that sort of thing.”

  Merry didn’t answer. She sat in the car and gulped in breaths of the night air. It wasn’t what Pierson had said to her; it was what he had implied about Tammy. Loyalty to her friend engulfed her.

  Jeff’s arm slid along the seat and gripped her shoulder gently. “You look as if you needed to be cuddled a bit.”

  He kissed her when he let her out of the car, a gentle, warm kiss that brought tears to her eyes. She pushed at him, frightened by her sudden desire to stay in his arms. “Please,” she begged, half tearfully, “don’t…don’t…”

  He’d let go of her and warned her cheerfully, “One of these days you’ll want to stay.”

  “No,” she moaned now, peering into the darkness. “No. No. No.”

  She turned her head when she heard Tammy come in. By the sound of Tammy’s steps, she was happy—she’d had a fin
e time at the party.

  She hummed to herself as she began getting undressed. “Hey, everybody asleep?”

  Agnes asked, “How was the party?”

  “It was a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful party,” Tammy told her joyously, sitting on the edge of her bed. “I met Natalie Pries and she told me that she hated me because I was much too beautiful and she always made it a practice to hate every beautiful girl except herself. And guess what? Pierson Webb promised me he’d talk to me next week, and maybe, just maybe, he’ll give me a screen test.” She flung herself wildly around the room. “It’s been the most wonderful evening of my whole life!”

  She flopped down on Merry’s bed. “I owe it all to you,” she fairly sang. “If you hadn’t let Arch bring you home that night you’d probably never have met him, and we’d never have gone to the Alibi Club and tonight wouldn’t have happened and…”

  Merry said, “It was to escape reporters that I let a strange man pick me up. So maybe you should thank them instead. Or maybe Pierson Webb, for getting ill and coming to the hospital in the first place.”

  Tammy giggled. “Stop trying to get out of it. I’m pinning the medal on you and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  Merry thought, “I ought to tell her, warn her about Pierson Webb.” But she couldn’t get the words out, so she mumbled, helplessly, “All that glitters is not gold, Tammy. Remember the old saying?”

  Tammy laughed. “This is,” she said. “This is pure gold!”

  * * * *

  Agnes awakened very early in the morning after an almost sleepless night. She lay for a moment trying to will herself out of bed. The second she had come awake, she’d begun thinking of Ellen. She couldn’t push the thoughts away. Ellen, little and fat and laughing, because she had been fat and laughing when she was a baby. She’d been a perfectly healthy, normal baby.

  Her teeth gripped her underlip. Why did she say it so vehemently, because she was beginning to think like her mother? Was she trying to convince herself that Ellen was really going to die?

  She hopped quickly out of bed, unable to lie there with the words torturing her.

  She phoned the hospital, pleading illness, then the airport.

  After a cold shower she dressed quickly. She’d go to San Francisco…to see Ellen, to talk to the doctor this time…to find out for herself. It was something she had to do.

  She was ready to leave when the other two girls rolled sleepily from the beds. Merry’s eyes widened with shock. “Hey,” she said, “we overslept?” She flashed a startled glance at the clock.

  Agnes shook her head. “You didn’t oversleep.” She ran her tongue around her suddenly dry lips. “I’m going to San Francisco. I phoned the hospital I was ill.”

  Tammy said, “Oh, Agnes, is your friend ill again?”

  Agnes gave a little forced laugh. “Well, I can’t believe most of what my mother writes…she exaggerates things. So I want to see for myself.”

  “I’d want that too,” Merry said.

  Tammy said nothing, but when the door closed behind Agnes, she turned to Merry frowning. “All this for just a friend?” she asked, her voice tinged with skepticism. “If you ask me, there’s something Agnes isn’t telling.”

  Merry was heading for the shower. “Maybe there is; but if there is, that’s Agnes’ business, and we don’t have the right to pry.”

  “Well spoken.” Tammy shrugged. “There’s no law against curiosity, is there?”

  * * * *

  The street on which Agnes’ mother lived was one of those San Francisco streets that seemed to march straight upwards, and her mother’s house was at the top. It was an old-fashioned house with high ceilings and fireplaces in all of the bedrooms and in the big, ugly parlor downstairs.

  It was also a gloomy house, Agnes decided as she stood in the dark-papered hall to greet her mother.

  She said abruptly, “This house is much too big for just you and Ellen. You should sell it and move into one of those light, airy apartments.”

  Her mother shook her head. “I like old-fashioned things, Agnes.” And then she hugged her daughter. “Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”

  Agnes hugged her back. “I just decided this morning,” she said. “Where’s Ellen?”

  She watched the subtle change come over her mother’s plump, rosy face. “She’s in bed,” she said. “I’ve turned that little room just off the bathroom into a bedroom for her. She can’t go up and down stairs any longer. It tires her too much.”

  Agnes shook her head. “What are you trying to do to Ellen?” she asked sharply. “Make an invalid out of her?”

  “Oh, Agnes, Agnes, when are you going to open your eyes and see that Ellen is a very sick little girl?”

  Agnes put her hands over her ears. “I refuse to listen to that kind of talk,” she said. “I came to see Ellen. Now where is she?”

  * * * *

  She walked into the bedroom and looked at the little girl lying listlessly propped up on the pillow. “Hi, darling,” she said. “Surprise.”

  She sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled the child to her. “Hey,” she said, “we’ll have to do something about this. You’re getting lazy and you don’t eat enough, Grandmother tells me. And lying in bed until this hour of the morning. Come on now and get up for your mother.”

  Ellen smiled at her and seemed to make an effort to hug her mother tightly, but Agnes’ heart froze as she felt the listless thinness of the small arms that did not have the strength to grip even in love.

  “Up you go,” she said, lifting her gently and carrying her from the room.

  She sat down on the sofa and straightened up, grinning down at her small daughter. She shook her head. “You don’t get near enough sun, sweetheart. Especially not in this dark old house. I’ve been telling Grandmother that she needs to move to a nice, sunny apartment. But do you know what?”

  The little girl, whose blue eyes looked much too large for the small face, smiled up at Agnes weakly. “No. What?”

  Agnes sat down beside her. “Well,” she said, busily cheerful, “after you and I have our two-week vacation I’m going to look around for a house for you and Grandmother and me in Hollywood. How would you like that?”

  Ellen nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes.”

  Agnes hugged her. “Well, that’s just what we’ll do,” she said. “We’ll all live together, and when I come home from the hospital at night you and I will do things together…lovely things. Anything you want to do. Go to the zoo or the library, or the beach. Or just walk. And walk and walk.”

  Ellen began to cry suddenly, weakly, frettishly.

  Agnes gathered her quickly in her arms. “Honey; Ellen, sweetheart, what is it? What did I say to make you cry?”

  The little girl said still sobbing, “I can’t walk and walk and…walk. I get tired!”

  Agnes laughed softly. She said, “Oh, but you’ll get over being tired, Ellen. You’ll get so you’ll walk so far you’ll tire me out. I’ll be the one who’ll get tired. You just wait and see.”

  Ellen stopped crying. Her big eyes searched Agnes’ face. She asked, “After I go to the hospital and the doctor makes my heart well again?”

  Agnes threw her mother a furious glance. She said, under her breath, “What have you been saying to her?”

  Her mother shook her head warningly, with a little nod at Ellen. She said slowly, “Oh, mother doesn’t know about the operation yet, sweetheart. Grandmother hasn’t told her so we won’t talk about it yet, will we?”

  Drawing her breath in a slow, rasping movement, Ellen asked, “Will it hurt? I don’t want it to hurt.” Her mouth quivered and she looked ready to cry again.

  Agnes said with a hard glare at her mother, “It isn’t going to hurt, sweetheart. You aren’t going to have any operation. You don’t need one. Now stop worryi
ng about it.”

  Ellen sighed suddenly and her eyes began to close, her small, thin face drawn and old with weariness. “I’m tired,” she said. “I want to go back to bed.” She lifted her arms for Agnes to pick her up.

  Agnes stooped and lifted her. “You’re a real lazy, lazy puss,” she chided gently.

  There was terror in her heart. Ellen felt like nothing in her arms. She laid her down on the bed, pulled the blanket up over her, tucking it in around her shoulders.

  Sitting beside her on the bed, she watched the unsteady, labored rise and fall of her daughter’s breathing, noticing, without wanting to, the bluish cast of her skin and lips.

  When Ellen was asleep at last, she left the room, and turned furiously on her mother. “You’ve been frightening her with talk of an operation. Why have you been doing that? I thought I told you…”

  Her mother, usually soft-spoken, spat the words at her. “Your stubborn refusal to face facts is killing that child! And I’ll have no part of it. I love Ellen.”

  Agnes asked bitterly, “And you think I don’t?”

  Instead of answering, her mother walked over to the telephone and began to dial. Agnes stared at her. “Whom are you calling?”

  Her mother said calmly, “Dr. Bronley. This time you’re going to talk to him, Agnes. He’s going to tell you about Ellen.”

  “I won’t talk to him. I’m not a little girl any more, Mother. You can’t order me around.”

  Her mother ignored her. She was talking softly into the telephone. She turned suddenly, handing the phone to Agnes. “You talk to him,” she told her daughter coldly. “And don’t tell me ‘no’ again.”

  Agnes found herself automatically responding to her mother’s command as she’d done as a little girl. The doctor sounded brusque and busy. He wasted no time on the amenities. “Your daughter,” he said, “has a congenital heart condition. It would be useless to go into it over the phone. The explanation would be hurried and you wouldn’t understand.”

  “I’m a nurse,” she said coldly. “Did my mother tell you?”

  He ignored her. “What I’ve told your mother and what I’m telling you is that your daughter needs that operation in order to live. I suggest you make an appointment with my nurse and come in and have a talk with me. Your daughter deserves this much.”