* * * *
David spent the rest of the week looking for a place to live, getting his bearings around the clinic, and preparing to start his own practice on Monday. He usually joined Graham for lunch and met various persons he would be working with: the Drs. Sam and Ida Brainerd, man and wife, who handled gynecology and maternity, Dr. Wilcox, the urologist, Dr. Deane, the pediatrician. He was introduced at a hospital staff meeting, and at a board meeting. He met the clinic technicians and office personnel, and supervised the refurbishing of the offices he would occupy. And he negotiated for a car.
Aside from that, his time was spent mostly with Coralee. Each morning after Graham had left to make hospital rounds, they set out in the yellow Ford convertible, answering ads, consulting real estate agents, and wandering through one house or apartment after another.
They confined their house-hunting to morning hours, leaving the afternoons for recreation. One was spent on the golf course of a beautiful country club where the fairways were green hills fanning out to the ocean. Another was spent at the Tennis Club where rows of courts were lively with players. One afternoon they rented horses from a swank academy and followed woodsy trails into the hills. On warm afternoons they usually ended with a swim in the Burns’ heated pool.
Coralee was fine company, and Graham didn’t seem to mind that she was spending most of her time with David.
In fact, he encouraged it so cordially it would have been embarrassing to protest.
“Have a good time while you can,” he told David heartily. “Monday you’ll have to buckle down to work. Your license will be in order, and Claibourne has you set up for hospital rounds. So, whether your car’s delivered and you’ve found an apartment or not, your drudgery begins. Meanwhile you couldn’t find a better guide than Coralee to help you get acquainted with Las Lomas. And take your time deciding on a house. You’re welcome here.”
He settled on a place Saturday, not because it was superior to all others, but because he knew further search with Coralee would be dangerous.
Their Lomacita agent was too busy with a buyer that day to bother with rentals, so he loaned David and Coralee the key to a small, studio-type house that had just been vacated in a wooded setting, and they drove there by themselves.
David liked the place right away. It was furnished in severe, masculine style, but with an eye to comfort. The huge, beam-ceilinged living room occupied the whole first floor, except for a small bath and a bachelor-size kitchenette and bar. An ornamental wrought-iron-railed stairway led to a bedroom and bath upstairs. As he followed her up, David was too sharply conscious of the slim thighs and delicately rounded buttocks undulating in tight red slacks just ahead of him.
“If you like seclusion,” she said as they came back down the stairs, “this should suit you fine. And there’s plenty of room for entertaining, too.”
She opened the french doors onto a flagstone terrace, beyond which a small yard was enclosed by a tall laurel hedge. He was standing directly behind her, breathing fragrance from the dark cloud of her hair. She turned suddenly, apparently not realizing he was so close, for as she swung about she bumped into him. He caught her shoulders to steady her against the jolt—and found himself too shaken to let go.
“David…” she whispered, then caught a sharp breath that ended on a whimper as she leaned against him, lifting her mouth so tantalizingly close he was kissing her before he could regain his control.
The next moment he had thrust her away and they were staring at each other wildly.
“I didn’t mean to do that!” he choked. “Graham’s the best friend I’ve got!”
“I know!” Her voice was harsh. “He’s mine, too—but some things just can’t be helped. Oh, David…” she stepped close again, her eyes imploring. “What are we going to do?”
He backed away stiffly. “Were going to rent this place, so we won’t need to look any further. And we won’t be alone together again. It’s nothing but propinquity. Graham is just too damned trusting. But after what he’s done for me, I’m not going to thank him by making love to his wife! Come on, let’s lock up and go make a deal with the agent!”
Chapter 3
The Las Lomas Student Nurses’ Home was on the opposite side of the hospital from the Claibourne Clinic. It had been remodeled from an old church, and still boasted a belfry, though no bell had hung there for many years. Scarlet bougainvillea climbed the sunny wall, and English ivy thrived on the shady side, the two meeting in the belfry where the ivy tendrils wound into a tangle with thorny runners of bougainvillea.
The lower floor of the converted building housed the senior nurses and the comfortable lounge and recreation rooms. Janet Raleigh and her roommate, Fern McCall, were relegated to one of the smaller rooms upstairs, for they had finished their probationary period scarcely two weeks ago.
It was six-thirty in the morning, but the girls had already showered and dressed, then made up their narrow cots, folding the sheets envelope style at the corners the way Miss Crenshaw, their instructress, had taught them to make hospital beds.
“There now! We ought to pass inspection,” Janet said, passing a critical glance over the neat, sparsely furnished room.
She ran her handkerchief once again along the edge of the box-like dresser, to be sure it came off clean, then picked up her starched white cap and nestled it proudly on her head of short, tight, auburn curls, where it clung as if it belonged there.
“Gosh damn it, Jan, I wish my cap would stay on like yours!” Fern complained from her own dresser across the room, where she was struggling to anchor her cap on limp blonde hair with bobby pins.
Janet laughed and took another glance at herself in the wavery mirror. She knew that she was attractive in a pleasant, wholesome way, and that generally people liked her. In fact, she had never come up against any noticeable dislike until she had started her first assignment as a student nurse.
Remembering, she found herself facing the day’s work with something less than enthusiasm.
“I wonder if Mrs. Burns would transfer me to a different ward,” she said, starting for the open door past which other students were chatting on their way to breakfast.
“I doubt it,” Fern said through the bobby pins she held in her teeth. “Old Dizzy getting your goat again?”
“Dizzy Andrews is the right name for her!” Janet declared hotly. “How anyone so uncouth ever got to be ward supervisor is more than I can see! I bet she’d enjoy sticking pins in babies just to make them howl! If I don’t do everything exactly to suit her, she tries to make me feel like something that crawled out from under a rock! Ever since that first day when…”
“Miss Raleigh!” The stern voice at the doorway brought Janet around, her cheeks flaming, as she saw the housemother standing there. Mrs. Carson was reported to be a close friend of Daisy Andrews. At the moment, with her angular face set in hard lines, she looked ready to do battle for her friend.
“I—I’m sorry,” Janet stammered, “but I can’t help the way I feel about…”
“You can refrain from airing such feelings,” Mrs. Carson told her furiously. “I’ll have you know that Daisy Andrews became head nurse by doing her work with skill and competence, and she learned that by respectfully following the advice and commands of her superiors. With your contemptuous attitude, you won’t last long here, I can tell you! Miss Andrews noticed it the very first day you…”
“I wasn’t contemptuous that day! I merely…”
“Don’t argue with me, young lady. Just learn to hold your tongue and do what you’re told, if you want to be a nurse. Hospital discipline, like army discipline, has to be strict, for safety’s sake and also to weed out the unfit. So if you don’t want to be weeded out quickly…”
She stalked off, leaving the sentence dangling like a threat.
Janet drew a shuddering breath and tried to grin. “Well, that’s telling
me. I would open my big mouth! But my opinion stands. I don’t care how good a nurse Miss Andrews is, she needn’t treat the rest of us like worms!”
Fern jabbed one more bobby pin into her hair, grimaced at her thin face in the mirror, then linked her arm in Janet’s as they left the room. “We’d better hurry. We’re late for breakfast already, and we don’t dare be late on duty. I know how you feel about Andrews, but if you got a transfer you’d still have to come back to finish your stint on Second Annex before you graduate.”
“Maybe she wouldn’t be there by then.”
“Fat chance! She’s a fixture from what I hear. She’s some relation to the chairman of the board, I think—and they say the administrator, old Bristow, is sort of sweet on her. You’ll just have to put up with her, Jan. It’s tough, all right, and Andrews is extra hard on you because of the way you spoke up to her that first day.”
At the end of her first day’s work after probation, Janet and Fern had been called to the nurses’ station, along with the two newly-capped four-to-twelve nurses, for a stiff little lecture about nursing procedure on Second Annex. Miss Andrews had stood them in a row and sat facing them, a lean, handsome woman in her forties with straight black hair in a tight bun under a net.
“You may have heard that I’m unusually strict,” she had said pompously, and Janet couldn’t repress a giggle, thinking that was putting it mildly. As a “probe” she’d heard so much about the unrelenting tyranny of “Dizzy” Andrews that her heart sank when she read her first assignment on the bulletin board.
Janet’s nervous little giggle—hardly more than a catch of her breath—had subsided quickly under the baleful glare Miss Andrews turned on her.
“This does not happen to be funny, Miss Raleigh,” she snapped. “I consider it a matter of pride to maintain Second Annex as the finest and most efficiently operated ward in the hospital—or any hospital. That means I will not tolerate careless or slovenly procedure by untaught young women who think they can come here and turn in any sort of a sloppy job…”
“Sloppy!” Janet had exploded on an indignant breath. All day she had tried especially hard to do everything exactly the way Miss Crenshaw had demonstrated each task.
“That’s what I said!” Miss Andrews retorted. She turned to Fern. “Miss McCall, what did you do with each patient’s washcloth and towels and bath blanket after his bath?”
Fern looked miserable. Avoiding Janet’s concerned gaze, she said, “I rinsed out the washcloth and hung it on the rod with the towels. I folded the blanket and put it in a drawer.”
“Good.” Miss Andrews turned a saccharine smile to Janet. “What did you do with your patients’ towels, washcloths and blankets, Miss Raleigh?”
Janet saw her mistake. She’d precisely followed the bath procedure she’d been taught, but if there’d been any instruction concerning disposal of the equipment afterward, it had been lost to her under her old habit of dumping everything in the laundry at home.
“So,” Miss Andrews said tartly after Janet admitted her mistake, “if your patients need any sort of cleaning up attention the rest of the day, fresh towels and washcloths will be necessary, and each floor is issued only so much linen every day.”
“Then why didn’t someone tell me?” Janet burst out. “Anyway it’s such an unimportant, inconsequential thing to make such a fuss over!”
“Unimportant?” Miss Andrews stood up, seeming to tower over her. “Nothing is unimportant, Miss Raleigh, that serves to maintain a well-run hospital. You’re here to learn what needs to be done, not to tell us which rules are unimportant. Any more of your impudence and I’ll recommend depriving you of your cap.”
She had switched to another subject, and Janet had prudently kept still. But ever since that day she had felt the supervisor’s watchful, critical eyes upon her, rendering her so self-conscious that she was guilty of a few awkward mistakes she would not otherwise have made. And no matter how hard she tried, she had yet to receive a word of commendation, though in her studies and practical demonstrations under Miss Crenshaw, she had made the highest grades in the class.
The first thing Janet always did on reporting for duty, was to pick up her list of bed-bath patients from the desk. Today she found she had an entirely new list—none were patients she’d bathed before. Checking closer, she saw that a couple were patients usually trusted only to Karen Carruthers, the senior nurse.
“Think you can handle it?” Miss Andrews had come up behind her. “We’re short-handed today. It’s Carruthers’ day off and her relief is sick, so we’ll have to divide up her work.”
“I’ll do my best, Miss Andrews,” Janet promised. Miss Andrews gave her a frosty smile and Janet wondered if Mrs. Carson had reported the impulsive remarks she’d overheard. When she realized who the patient in Room 242 was, she couldn’t help but figure he had been assigned to her with malicious intent. Janet had heard the other nurses talk about him as the sickest, most miserable, cantankerous, and obnoxious patient on the floor. Janet hadn’t had to answer his calls herself, and knew only that his name was Arnold Crane and he was a post-appendectomy, having been brought in for emergency surgery due to ruptured appendix about eight weeks ago.
Knowing he would require extra time, since he hadn’t recovered as expected, and his condition was still serious, Janet left him to the last. She tried to hurry through the other baths, but since they were unfamiliar cases, and more demanding than her usual patients, she was late getting to Arnold, and afraid she’d never finish before the doctors came to the ward to make rounds.
The boy on the bed, with head-rest and knee-rest both raised to prop him into the Fowler position, couldn’t be much older than she. Probably about nineteen or twenty, she surmised. His rope-brown hair, badly in need of barbering, hung in clumps over his forehead, and stood up in untidy sheaves at the back of his head. His face was drawn and so thin the high cheekbones showed through the skin. His bony hands were clawing at the covers.
“What took you so long?” he whined in a voice that rasped along her already taut nerves. “I’ve kept calling and calling and they kept saying you’d be here soon, but it’s almost eleven o’clock!”
“I’m sorry. I came as soon as I could. I have other patients too, you know.”
“They aren’t as sick as I am. Miss Carruthers always does me first.”
She folded the spread and blankets to the foot of his bed, shook the bath blanket out over him, then slid the top sheet out from under it. “I’ll do you first next time,” she said, “if that’s what you want. I thought if I got the others out of the way I’d have more time to spend on you.”
“Am I gonna get well?” he asked her querulously.
“Of course you are! That’s why we’re here—to help you get well. Shall I put your bed down flat now?”
“No! I can’t be flat! I had peritonitis!” The urgency went out of his voice and he stated flatly, “I don’t think I’m gonna get well. Every day I feel sicker. It hurts—right here.” He laid his hand on his side and implored her, “What makes it hurt so bad?”
“You’ll have to ask your doctor,” she said. She untied his bed jacket at the back of his neck and gently pulled it off of him, then tucked the bath blanket up around his shoulders. “I’m just here to give you a bath and clean linen.”
She filled the basin with steaming water, laid the bath towel on the bed beside him and drew his long, painfully thin arm from under the bath blanket to wash it thoroughly. Speaking only when she had to answer his fretful questions, she progressed through the rest of the bath.
Then she tackled the N-shaped bed, wondering how she could possibly get the under-sheets on smooth with the mattress humped up. She loosened the soiled drawsheet, the rubber sheet under that, and the full-size sheet that covered the mattress and pad, rolling them lengthwise toward the middle of the bed to make as neat a roll as possible against the length of his body. T
hen she made up her side of the bed with clean linen, folding the other half along the roll of soiled linen.
“Now you’ll have to roll over onto the clean sheets so I can make that side of the bed,” she told him.
“I can’t roll over,” he whined. “It hurts to move.”
“Come on. I’ll help you.”
She sat on the bed to reach under his arms, and placed her hands firmly at the back of his shoulders, hoping she could hoist him further up on the raised head of the bed as she pulled him toward her.
Instantly his feverish arms went about her neck, clinging tight. She was almost overcome by the stench of his illness.
“Brace your feet and push yourself up as I lift,” she panted, tightening her hold to heave his thin torso upward.
“Oh, nurse, I’m so sick…” he moaned, making no effort to help himself, so her own struggle moved little but his shoulders, and left him slumped further down in bed.
“You didn’t try!” she scolded.
“I can’t—I hurt so! Kiss me and make it well!”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” She tried to draw away, but his arms clung like burning thongs.
“Please, nurse… I’m going to die! Give me just one kiss to take with me—then I’ll push with my feet. I promise!”
Exasperation was clawing at her. She was already late. She’d heard doctors’ voices in the hall and knew they’d be in here soon. She couldn’t be caught like this, or with the bed in a mess. Andrews would have a fit!
“Look here, Arnold, I haven’t time to…”
“It won’t take long—then I’ll feel so much better I can help you. Please…?”
She felt like shaking him—yet at the same time, pity was gnawing at her. There was no doubt in her mind that he was desperately ill and might not live much longer. His breath and body odor were redolent of death.
She tried again to pull away, but his arms clung feverishly. With a sob of desperation she touched her lips briefly to his burning cheek. But that wasn’t enough. Planting his claw-like hands at the back of her head, he brought her mouth down to his parched lips for a long, nauseating moment before he let her go.
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