The Nurse Novel

by Alice Brennan

  She had read everything she could find about the School of Nursing—how it was founded in the 1880’s, how it opened with eight probationers, four graduate nurses, and a school superintendent. Oh, if those pioneers could see the gleaming fifteen-story building that was their heritage today! And oh, if she, too, could join that noble profession and become a pioneer, too, to be so considered by unborn generations which, each in turn, would build upon past knowledge and increase it. Alice’s constrained life in Alexanderville had led her to introspection: she was given to daydreaming. She was idealistic but she was realistic, too. These are good qualities in a nurse.

  Clearly she remembered that spring day. She had looked down at her slim patent leather pumps, so shiny black against the chewing-gum gray of the park pavement, so expensive at one of New York’s best stores (for her father, difficult though he could be, was generous with her allowance). She even remembered the small pun that had crossed her mind: I may be a farmer’s daughter but I am well heeled. And also the thought, no, the hope, the hope that soon she could exchange them for those ugly, comfortable, sensible, low-heeled, white shoes of a nurse.

  She had risen then and a small child in a bouffant dress that made her look like a lampshade had staggered toward her. The youngster had been clutching the strings of two blue balloons in her right fist and concentrating on nothing to the point of oblivion. Blue is the color of luck, Alice had thought, and she had patted the child’s tawny head. The child had paid not the slightest heed, but had determinedly kept going wherever she was aiming. And Alice, now with luck on her side, had approached the glistening and formidable buildings with calm and confidence.

  * * * *

  “There are some personal things I must ask you,” said Miss De Gersdorf, who interviewed her.

  “Yes?”

  “Everything you have sent us is in good order—your educational credits, your certificates of health, the letters of recommendation, and so on. But I like to ask a few other questions. We need nurses, you know, but the need can never be so great that we can accept any nurse. And we are a proud institution. Why did you decide to become a nurse rather than choosing another and less exacting profession?”

  “I’m used to taking care of things. I mean mostly animals—I’m a farmer’s daughter.”

  “That’s hardly an answer, my dear. Would you rather be a veterinarian? Would you, by the way, oppose vivisection—some people do, and yet millions of people are alive today who would not be if vivisection were not practiced.”

  “I am not against vivisection.”

  “And…”

  “I’ve been lonely and afraid, Miss De Gersdorf. I wanted someone to take care of me. I know other people must feel the same way. I’d like to take care of them. I’ve also taken care of my mother, who is an invalid.”

  “You’re an attractive girl, Miss Smith. Do you think a nurse’s uniform will enhance that attractiveness? Do you think there’s glamour in a nurse’s uniform?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “A good answer. You’re right. There’s nothing in the world more glamorous than a nurse’s uniform. And nothing in the world that demands more of the person who wears it. Nurses, you know, don’t spend their time flirting with handsome young interns or doctors, nor do they marry rich patients whom they’ve tended. If you had a million dollars would you still want to be a nurse?”

  “I’ve never thought of having a million dollars. I suppose if I had I’d—I don’t know—perhaps start a hospital or found a research lab. Something. I don’t know. Why do you ask that kind of question? I do want to be a nurse, Miss De Gersdorf.”

  She was close to tears and Miss De Gersdorf saw it.

  “Alice,” she said, “you’re going to be a good nurse. You must forgive me for goading you, but I like to know what our girls think—when they think, for some of them get by me and don’t. You, Alice, are going to be a good student at the hospital and I shall keep an eye on you. And…when you come to us, you are never going to be lonely and afraid again. All right, my dear, go on home. We’ll be writing you in a few weeks.”

  Alice went down to Grand Central Station and when she walked those high-heeled patent leather shoes never touched the pavement. And the train that took her home to Alexanderville had rubber tires on its wheels. She had been accepted! She was a student nurse!

  Miss De Gersdorf actually had no authority to accept Alice on the basis of that interview, nor was she really supposed to question Alice as she had. But the real authorities deferred to Miss De Gersdorf—she had been with the hospital longer than any of them and if she said a girl was a good girl she was a good girl.

  Miss De Gersdorf, by the rules of the hospital, was supposed to have retired six years ago. Miss De Gersdorf had not wished to retire and the rules were not changed, but simply ignored. At the hospital, Miss De Gersdorf had her way within her bailiwick and nobody was fool enough to question it. You didn’t tangle with Miss De Gersdorf and when Miss De Gersdorf said Alice was approved, Alice was approved. The letter confirming this had arrived in Alexanderville three weeks after the interview.

  * * * *

  “Miss,” the young man said, “may I return these?” In his right hand he held Alice’s white gloves.

  She saw a tall, lithe man in his twenties, features as regular as those of a model for men’s sportswear, rather grave eyes the color of which escaped and puzzled her, a shy smile that was assuring, and cropped curly brown hair that hugged his head like a cap. All this she noticed as she shook herself free of her trance and accepted the gloves with her own smile of thanks in return.

  She liked him immediately. He was dressed in civilian clothes, but he stood so straight she hoped he was Navy. Alice was a romantic: when, not if, she found a beau in New York City, she wanted him to be Navy. That went without saying; the Navy sticks together. Civilians were P.F.C.—poor foolish civilians—the ungracious phrase sometimes used by the boys at St. Albans to describe some particularly inept though well-meaning civilians who didn’t know the score. Navy unto Navy—like unto like—that was her credo.

  All this, too, she thought with the lightning revolutions, convolutions, and speculations of which the human mind and imagination are capable. Even to the quick amused corollary: why I don’t even know his name (all girls have thought this at some moments in their lives).

  “Thank you. I have a bad habit of daydreaming. That’s a bad thing for a nurse. But I don’t do it on duty.”

  “We all do it and many of us do it on duty…”

  Did this mean he, too, was in the Navy? Or at least in some branch of the Armed Services? She thought she liked this man.

  “Look,” he said, “it’s customary to give a man a reward for picking up a lady’s glove. Would you care to have a drink with me? I’ve been observing you for at least a half hour and I don’t think you’re expecting anyone. My guess is you’ve been stood up and you’re just passing the time here.”

  “And how do you know that, or think you do?” A touch coldly. Not only was he somewhat too confident, he was accurate.

  “You would, if you’d been waiting for someone, occasionally have glanced at the door. You never did. You were completely at ease and absorbed—in your daydreams…”

  “You’re quite the detective, aren’t you? So I was stood up and I deliberately dropped my gloves so that somebody would pick me up?”

  “Pickup is an ugly word. Anybody with, if you will excuse me, any manners would have picked up your gloves and returned them to you. That wouldn’t mean he was trying to pick you up as well. I was alone and you were alone. We’re both members or guests of the same club. I saw nothing amiss in my invitation which, of course, I withdraw.”

  She flushed and rose quickly. “Please don’t. And forgive me. I was hasty and rude. I’d love to have a drink with you. My name is Alice Smith.”

  “Good. I’m Morgan O’Neill.”
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  He led her to a small square table in the cocktail room. It was near a southern-exposure window and the westering sun splashed a thin wedge of light on it. A steward with a white monkey jacket with red piping on the cuffs and lapels came quickly to their side.

  “I’d like a frozen daiquiri, please. I drink very little and they taste sort of like a lemonade and they last a long time. It’s what I suppose you would call a typical woman’s drink.”

  “Not at all. I like them in their place, but for me today it’s a very dry martini.” The steward ran off with the order and Morgan continued, “Unlike you, I like very much to drink—not to excess, I assure you—and, like you and your daydreaming, never on duty.”

  “Are you in the Navy?”

  “Yes. ONI.”

  “The Office of Naval Intelligence! That’s exciting. Imagine knowing a real honest-to-goodness spy! That’s how you knew about my being stood up. And I was, you know—by my roommate.”

  And then she looked at him closely and laughed.

  “But you could never be a spy,” she said. “You must do desk work. How is that for detecting of my own?”

  “You’re right, of course. Most of us do desk work. But why,” and he sounded almost boyishly plaintive, “couldn’t I be a spy? I think I’d make a good one.”

  “It’s your eyes. They puzzled me at first and now I know why. One’s brown and the other’s blue. Everyone would know about you and your eyes, so you’d be no good at all.”

  “I’m not sure you’re right. I could change their color with contact lenses and then everybody’d be fooled. You are observant, though, because I don’t think they’re at all that noticeable. Did you ever know anybody else with brown and blue eyes?”

  “No.”

  “There are quite a few of us, it turns out. We ought to form a society. But that’s enough about me. How about you? Your eyes are so brown they’re almost black; but aside from that, what? When did you become a Navy nurse?”

  And so, in a quick and easy intimacy, she told him, and he told about himself: Morgan O’Neill, thirty (she had thought him in his twenties, but what was the difference?), on a ship during Korea; father in steel and from Pittsburgh.

  “They go together, don’t they? People never think you can be from Pittsburgh and be in vegetables like Heinz or a department store like Kaufmann or even a trolley-car conductor. It’s always steel and they always think people in steel are immensely wealthy like Carnegie. Or underpaid like the workers. Father was never rich, but he was never poor and he wasn’t—isn’t—important. He’s a minor executive and outside of visiting plants now and then he has nothing fundamentally to do with steel. He could be in any business because he is really an accountant—figures are poetry to him, he can make a balance sheet sing. He was unhappy in Pittsburgh because he was trying to keep up with the Joneses—I could say Jones and Laughlin, but that’s a local pun. So we lived in Sewickley because that’s the place to live, and we lived beyond our means and everybody knew it. It didn’t prove a thing because the family never did get invited to the parties they really wanted to attend. It was a great break when the old man was transferred here. Nobody cares how or where you live and your friends like you just because they like you. It was Mother who went in for that social bit and when she died it was a good thing for him, though he loved her and misses her.

  “And when I said I thought I’d like to stay in the Navy he was pleased. ‘The Navy’s the best kind of steel,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I’d want you in my business anyhow. It’s too tough.’ As if the Navy isn’t business and tough, too. But he’s happy puttering around in an apartment on Riverside Drive, where he sees the ships on the Hudson, and going to his office every day promptly at nine. He’s as precise as one of his accounting sheets. I’m stationed here now and living with him…”

  He drifted into silence, thinking of the past and his family, and how easy it was to talk to this girl whose frozen daiquiri was melting into “lemonade” while he was sipping his second martini. He knew he was going to see more of her. She was quiet and nice and scrubbed and—wholesome. But he knew better than to tell her so. He was pretty sure if she gave him half a chance he would fall in love with her.

  As for Alice, she was lulled and somehow comforted by his recitation: she felt warmly drawn to him, she relished the idea that they each lived in apartments overlooking rivers, she the East and the Harlem, he the Hudson, which was greater than her two put together. She, too, felt she would see more of Morgan O’Neill, that he would probably ask her to dinner that very night and that she would accept. But he was not the beau she would someday have—he would be a close friend, something like the brother she had never had. But she, too, knew better than to say it.

  * * * *

  The Pantheon was a good club. It was middle class—not upper, not lower—straight down the middle. It managed to stay solvent since it had a lot of members who found it pleasant because it was divided into a number of rooms and therefore never gave a feeling of being crowded. There were also a couple of dozen bedrooms for the use of male members only.

  The décor was what somebody christened “Early New York Club”—heavy overstuffed or leather armchairs, a lot of gloomy oak, paintings either by major members of the club or minor members of the Hudson River School. The only note of modernity was the bar and cocktail room, which was chrome, black, and red, and had a nonobjective mural painted on the long mirror behind the bar.

  The room had been installed with a great deal of pride in the early fifties, but now it looked a little passé, even tawdry, and the older rooms seemed more fitting and cheerful. This amused the older members and annoyed the younger, who were responsible for the room. But nothing was going to be done about it for a while—the House Committee was always too close to a deficit.

  Such a friendly unpretentious club attracted many members. They came from the advertising agencies along Madison Avenue and from publishing houses and offices in Rockefeller Center. There were diamond merchants from Forty-seventh Street and lawyers and department-store executives from Fifth Avenue. And always a sprinkle of Servicemen and women.

  One member was presently standing at the bar sipping a chilled vodka and chatting with the bartender. Alice and Morgan, pleasantly rapt in their conversation, were unaware of him, but the bartender, who like all of his profession saw everything, noticed that his customer glanced often at the still sun-splashed table and its occupants. The customer, feeling himself observed, said, “That couple over there. I know the man, Mr. O’Neill. Do you happen to know the name of the nurse?”

  He spoke with a faint, pleasing French accent.

  “Oh, yes. A nice young lady named Alice Smith. She lives uptown with another nurse and works in St. Albans, the Navy Hospital in Long Island.”

  Bartenders must know everything from the names and habits of their customers to the latest batting averages and odds on the horses. By his ready, knowledgeable answer, this bartender had discharged his obligation to society and he was pleased with himself. He had also let his voice trail off as if he could have supplied more information had he chosen. Actually, he had told all he knew.

  He was also pleased at the prospect of witnessing a burgeoning romance. Perhaps even a triangular one. Mr. O’Neill was a fine man and he would be the bartender’s choice if a contest should develop, but there was something pretty classy about Jacques Stern, too. It would be interesting to watch. There is nothing a bartender (unless he is the crusty kind who hates women on the premises) loves more than incipient romances.

  Jacques Stern was not a typical member of the Pantheon Club. He was too elegant and he seemed too rich. The foot that rested on the bar’s shiny brass rail was shod in something that obviously must have been made to order. The clothes perfectly fitted a slim figure that indeed would have been difficult not to fit. His coal black hair was worn medium long and was clearly trimmed once a week. He had a pa
le, interesting face and the murmur of a mustache on his lip. He was the type of man a girl could swoon for; but he was lucky, for men liked him too.

  Jacques was known to be in several businesses assigned him by a French father, and he had been a boy messenger for De Gaulle when the Germans were in France. There was no one in the club who did not envy him with affection. He was gay and generous and seemingly had not a care in the world. Other members often wondered why he chose to frequent the Pantheon when clearly more exclusive and expensive retreats would gladly open their doors to him.

  His answer, had the question been put to him, would have been as simple as it was true: “At other clubs, you meet only one kind of person. At a lawyers’ club, lawyers. At one of the rich social ones, bankers, stockbrokers, and polo players. And lawyers again. At the Tag Club, people who think they are prominent because they like to pat dogs and occasionally show them. At the Badminton…

  “Here at the Pantheon, I meet all kinds of people and that is what I like. It is of a simplicity. I love De Gaulle, but he is a snob. I am not a snob. Father made his money in trade. I do, too. I like the Pantheon and c’est ça.”

  Jacques Stern finished his drink and said to the bartender, “That is the kind of American girl I like most. Some of your American women are incredibly beautiful, chic, and sophisticated. But so are women everywhere in Europe, particularly in the Latin countries. But only in America—and sometimes in Scandinavia—do you find a clean, fresh, intelligent-looking girl like Miss Smith. I believe I shall intrude a moment upon Mr. O’Neill. Wish me well.”

  What a character, the bartender thought. Smooth, but on the level. Who else would so simply declare he was going to try and move in on somebody else’s girl? In his admiration, the bartender almost switched his allegiance from O’Neill to Stern. “May the best man win,” he said with a smile and bad grammar.