by Helen Wells
“We might as well see the scaffold,” Cherry said grimly.
With Gwen humming a mournful tune, the three of them marched in double-slow time to Spencer basement where the classroom was. Their first discovery was a sink.
“Nothing so terrifying about a sink,” Cherry said.
They poked their heads inquisitively into the two doors alongside. Here they found a small laboratory and a tiny linen closet.
“They don’t terrify me either,” Cherry declared.
The rest of the basement, as far as they could see, was a bewildering labyrinth of corridors, pipes, and service rooms.
“You could get lost down here,” Ann said.
They marched quite boldly into the classroom. It looked like any classroom, with its chairs each with one wide arm, and its low platfrom for the teacher’s table and chair. But all along one side of the room were beds, perhaps a dozen of them. And on the platform was another bed. Cherry jumped slightly. Someone was in it.
A few other girls, including the Chinese girl and Vivian Warren, her face now discreetly free of excess make-up, were already waiting in their chairs. All eyes were upon the figure in the bed. Whoever it was, it was a mystery how he or she breathed, for the covers were drawn up over its head. Some of the girls looked at it curiously and some smiled knowingly.
Cherry and Ann sat down near the front of the room. Gwen started for the beds. “I could use one of those,” she whispered. Laughing, they pulled her into a chair beside them. Gradually the rest of the class trooped in, all solemn and apprehensive. There was an awful five minutes of waiting for an unknown teacher. The probies joked nervously among themselves.
“Maybe that thing in the bed is a corpse,” someone whispered in back of Cherry.
Someone else gasped. “Do you really think it is?” Cherry turned around and recognized Josie Franklin, the timid girl with glasses.
A door creaked and light footsteps ran down the stairs. The probationers assumed the look they would wear on Judgment Day and temporarily stopped breathing. When they saw the lively young person who came in, there was a rustle and a sigh as they all relaxed.
Miss McIntyre, the instructor in Nursing Arts, was a brisk, dashing young woman who made you feel that she was tops in efficiency. At the same time she made you think of whirlwind tennis, a sports roadster with a wire-haired terrier hanging out the front seat, and plenty of beaux. In fact, Cherry learned later, until the war Miss McIntyre had had her roadster, as well as her own apartment, when she wasn’t driving from one end of the United States to the other on private cases. As she swung up onto the platform, the probationers noticed she wore her white uniform like a stunning sports dress, and that her nurse’s cap, with the wide black velvet band of the graduate, sat astride a rakish brown bob. She was just the sort of person the girls would refer to affectionately as “Miss Mac”—and Cherry soon learned she was called just that.
She called the roll at furious speed, looking for each girl’s face, and though she grinned at them, there was no nonsense about her. “I’ll bet that with her, you’ve got to get it right the first time, and quick,” Cherry whispered to Ann.
Ann scribbled back on the margin of her notebook, “T.S.O. takes her word for whether you win your cap or not.” Cherry blinked and passed the note on to Gwen.
Miss McIntyre perched herself on the edge of her table and shot at them, “This isn’t conventional, but I want to know. Why do you want to be nurses?”
The girls sat up startled. Miss Mac held the roll in her hand. “Miss Franklin. Come on now, speak up,” she said crisply.
Josie Franklin stood up. She opened her mouth but no sound came out. “Let’s hear the worst,” Miss Mac’s voice was encouraging. The girls all laughed—even Josie, who began bravely,
“I guess I always wanted to be a nurse. When I played with dolls, they were always patients. And I was always fixing up dogs or birds or cats in our neighborhood that got hurt, or binding up my kid sister’s bumps. I guess I just—well, I can’t help it! I just want to take care of people.”
“That’s an excellent attitude,” Miss McIntyre said. “Some of us are born nurses.”
Cherry did a little hasty soul-searching. She didn’t think she had been born anything in particular. Good grief, what was she going to say for herself? Would Miss McIntyre understand about Dr. Joe? But she forgot to worry as Miss McIntyre called out, “Miss Jones!” and poor Gwen stood up. She was right beside Cherry and Cherry could feel her shaking.
“Well, my Dad’s a doctor, an industrial doctor in a coal mining town. I’ve seen accidents and sickness and children born, and I know the great need for doctors and nurses.” Cherry looked up at her in surprise. Suddenly Gwen tossed her red head and her usual gaiety returned. “And living in a medical household means never a dull moment. I like people and it’s fun to be dealing with them all the time.”
“Miss Jones obviously knows whereof she speaks,” Miss McIntyre said. “Next! Miss—Let’s see. Miss Swift.” The little blonde who until today had breakfasted in bed stood up.
“I want to do something useful. I’ve found out that if you don’t, you’re bored and discontented and even lonesome. And I can’t think of anything more useful than nursing.”
Miss McIntyre nodded. “Miss Evans!”
Ann rose. She was calm but Cherry saw that her face was curiously strained. “My father was maimed in the last war. He would not be lame today if there had been enough nurses to send even one into the area where he was. And now—” Ann swallowed but went on quietly, “my two older brothers and my fiancé have enlisted. I’m going to be an Army nurse.” She sat down abruptly.
Everybody tactfully avoided staring at her.
Suddenly the Chinese girl was on her feet, speaking—and speaking directly to Ann. “I am going to be an Army nurse, too. My family, my town—I beg your pardon, Miss McIntyre,” she apologized, looking at the instructor with pleading almond eyes, “but may I please speak next? My name is Mai Lee. I was born in this country but my family is in China. Two years ago I went back to see them and see the village where my ancestors have always lived in peace.” Her ivory face was impassive but her voice shook. “When I had been there five days, Japanese planes bombed our little village.” Her small hands gripped the back of the chair before her. “My family was killed, the village isn’t there any more. But I’m going to learn to be a nurse and I’m going back.” She seated herself with fierce, quiet dignity.
There was a moment’s stunned silence. Suddenly the room burst into applause. Cherry felt hot tears sting her eyes.
“I congratulate you on your courage,” Miss McIntyre said to Mai Lee, and she glanced understandingly at Ann, too. “I expect that many of you will answer the Army’s call for nurses.”
She stood up and put the roll away. “You are too large a class for all of you to introduce yourselves today,” Miss McIntyre explained. “More next time. And now let’s get down to business.”
The class, feeling better acquainted, lined up at the back of the room for a rapid inspection of uniforms. Miss Mac raced down the line, tossing out orders: “Your collar’s untidy. Get rid of that fancy hair-do. Buy flat-heeled shoes this afternoon. Shorten your apron. Sewing room on the second floor of Spencer. A nurse must be neat as a pin! Over to the supply closet now!” The class hustled after her brisk steps. Keeping up with her left them a little breathless.
Miss Mac opened the door of the closet, which contained bandages, tape, scissors, twine, rubber sheets, and a collection of other things. “Same as on the wards. Memorize it. Everything must always be in the same place.” The class stared but already she was whisking them along to the laboratory.
“I heard that if you even put the bandages back in the wrong place, you get expelled,” Josie Franklin whispered to Cherry as they hurried after Miss McIntyre.
“That must be what happened to the poor soul in bed on the platform,” Cherry whispered back. Miss Franklin looked decidedly uncomfortable.
Miss Mac had flung open the door of the laboratory closet. Its huge five-pint bottles of antiseptics gleaming blue, green, yellow, and red reminded Cherry of the jars in apothecary’s windows. Above them on a shelf were rubber gloves and rubber tubing. Surgical instruments, if the class needed them, would be borrowed from the wards. Poultice pans stood in copper racks. “You’ll memorize this,” Miss Mac said casually. “And memorize the linen closet,” she added, opening that door too. The class felt stunned.
“She’s so good herself, she thinks we’re wonders too,” Cherry thought. But she realized that practice in class would thoroughly familiarize her with the contents of those closets.
When they were back in their seats, Miss McIntyre distributed notebooks and instructed them in rapid succession on how to clean a room and how to keep an icebox sanitary. While they were still digesting this, she proceeded to bedmaking. “I’ll need an assistant,” Miss Mac said. She consulted the roll. “Miss Ames.”
“Go on up,” Gwen whispered. “The corpse needs you.”
Cherry trotted up to the platform uncertainly.
“Hello, Miss Ames,” said Miss Mac with a nice smile. “Will you lift up the patient?”
The class watched with a suspicion of a grin.
Cherry reached for the still figure. It was cold and clammy and surprisingly light. Then she pulled back the sheet from its face and almost laughed. It was a doll, a rubber doll with a giddy painted smile and eyes that went off in independent directions. It had a humorously resigned look—from long suffering, Cherry supposed. Cherry held it up wickedly before the class.
“This is Sally Chase, the demonstration doll,” Miss Mac said. The class nodded very wisely and professionally. Miss McIntyre started to make the bed. “You pull the sheet taut so that it cannot wrinkle, and fold square corners, at right angles, and press in tight, so the covers cannot slip. You make first one side of the bed, then the other, without disturbing your patient.” She showed them the rubber sheet, which was about two feet wide and went across the middle of the bed, over the bottom sheet. Then came the draw sheet. “This is the way you’ll do it on the wards. First, you will practice making empty beds, then with the doll in it, then with a student patient it it.”
Cherry assisted a little. When Miss McIntyre was finished she thanked Cherry and said, “You have a light hand and you didn’t bump against the bed. That’s important, class. Sick people don’t enjoy an elephant thumping around.” Sally Chase, too, seemed to smile her foolish satisfaction.
Then Miss McIntyre announced, with a straight face but with laughter in her eyes, that for the first month they would practice what they learned here in Nursing Arts class—feeding and bathing patients, giving hypodermics—on one another. A subdued giggle ran around the room as the girls, all too vividly, visualized feeding and being fed by their fellow probies. Miss Mac tried to look stern as she added, “You will practice on your ‘patients’ in this classroom and I will also give you assignments, such as bed baths, to be done in your own rooms.”
At that, Cherry dared not glance at Gwen, whose shoulders were shaking.
After a quick demonstration of taking temperatures, and a few more instructions on the rest of the day’s routine, Miss McIntyre dismissed them. They surged on to their other classes, chattering on the way.
“The nicer they are, the tougher they are,” someone predicted gloomily.
Josie Franklin was exclaiming to anyone who would listen to her, “Only a doll! Why, I thought I’d collapse.”
Bertha Larsen wailed, “Memorize three closets with a million things in them, just like it was nothing!”
Cherry and Ann and Gwen listened to the talk around them, and grinned their amusement at one another. Ann said thoughtfully, “Wonder if we’ll be on ward duty together by any chance? I don’t suppose T.S.O. would arrange it for us. But we can take our time off duty together.”
Gwen said heartily, “I’m looking forward to ward duty with Mai Lee. Imagine that spunky little thing!”
Cherry had her mouth open to reply when she heard Vivian Warren’s voice in an undertone. “She likes that Ames,” Vivian was saying. “You can just see it.” That was all Cherry could hear, for by then they had reached the classroom.
The rest of their classes turned out to be an anatomy and physiology class, plus a class in therapeutics or the study of the effects of different medicines. Hard on the heels of these classes came mental tests, which reminded Cherry irreverently of playing games. Then thorough physical examinations—tonsils, teeth, chest X-rays, everything. Cherry did not mind, for she knew that if a nurse was to heal the sick, she herself had to have good stout health. The probationers were given immunization against certain contagious diseases and a lecture on scientific precautions they must take in the sickroom. “You young ladies are going to grow taller and rounder and stronger here,” the doctor told them, “because you will have a regular routine and a well-balanced diet and exercise in the gymnasium. And early to bed,” he added with a smile. He told them that they would receive frequent physical check-ups and, should they ever need it, immediate care.
Then they went back to the dining room, ravenous.
“I’m so stuffed with knowledge I feel like an over-cooked sausage who’s going to burst out of its skin!” Cherry confided to Ann at lunch.
“Sausages aren’t stuffed with knowledge,” Ann said with a straight face. “I’ll ask T.S.O. to arrange a sausage class for you, too.”
“Not so different from high school, is it?” Gwen said over the rim of her glass of milk. “Except that teacher wears a nurse’s uniform and we’re all expected to be mental marvels. I’m going to give up sleeping and just memorize!”
They finished lunch and hurried out to the bulletin board. The class had been divided (“like Gaul, girls,” Ann said) into three sections. To their delight, the three of them were in the same section. Beside their names on the bulletin board were the numbers of wards, which might as well have been the Secret of the Ages to them. Cherry was to be assigned to Ward 4 and Josie Franklin was on Ward 4 with her. Gwen and Ann each were going to go on different wards. Ann had drawn a Miss P. Shore, a totally unknown quantity. Bertha Larsen, Cherry noted, would have Vivian Warren to work with. Cherry hoped that good-natured Bertha would find the right way to get along with her. Gwen did not know Miss S. Stevenson, the probationer who was going with her to Ward 23.
“What the dickens is Ward 4?” Cherry wondered aloud.
“Whatever Ward 17 turns out to be,” Ann declared, “I’m excited!”
Gwen was almost dancing in her hurry to do some actual nursing. “Think they’ll let me change a dressing? Too soon? Maybe they’ll let me take off a plaster cast!”
A passing student head nurse said haughtily, “They may trust you to go for clean towels, until you learn something.”
Gwen was mimicking the nurse’s self-important walk when the nurse turned around and said, “Don’t be too elated over ward duty. You won’t have it for a month yet—until, as I said before, you learn something!”
“What!” they exclaimed in a disappointed chorus.
Gwen raced back to the bulletin board and put one finger on the date. “She’s right—worse luck. A whole month to wait!”
Their faces fell.
“I suppose,” Ann said evenly, “that’s posted now so we’ll have a chance to get acquainted with the girls we’re to work with. Maybe it’s to encourage us in our class studies, too.”
“It certainly encourages me,” Cherry said. She took a deep breath. “Well, a month is only thirty days.”
CHAPTER IV
Nurse! Nurse!
BY THE TIME WARD DUTY ARRIVED, CHERRY’S EXCITEMENT had become tempered with nervousness. Climbing up the stairs to Ward 4, on the first of October, she had some extremely gloomy ideas. Just outside the ward door, she met Josie Franklin. Josie was pale, earnest, and perspiring. She whole-heartedly expected to do all the wrong things.
“You’ll never do the ri
ght things in that state of mind,” Cherry assured her. She took Josie’s hand, and with a boldness she did not feel, half pushed and half dragged Josie to the door of Ward 4.
Cherry stood on the threshold and tried to see everything in the ward in one excited glance. There was a great deal to see, and everything was in beautiful order. It was a large room, warm and sunny and quiet, with rows and rows of white beds along the walls. Some of the women patients lay very still in their beds. A few sat stiffly in chairs around an oak table and listened to the ward radio. But most of the patients, here on Women’s Medical, were walking gingerly about in bathrobes, chatting and looking out the windows. The ward had a friendly, peaceful atmosphere, although behind it Cherry sensed the whole great hospital organization firmly at work.
Near the door was a desk—the head nurse’s desk. Cherry knew, from its location, that the sickest patients were closest to the desk and whoever had the beds nearest the far windows were almost well. In fact, almost all the patients were nearly well. “Guess T.S.O. doesn’t trust probies with really sick people,” Cherry thought, and felt about one inch tall. Behind her, Josie Franklin was grabbing at her apron tails.
“Well, come on!” Cherry said and walked into the quiet ward to report to the head nurse. Josie was right behind her.
A young graduate nurse came down the row of beds to greet them. “I’m Miss Baker, the head nurse on Ward 4,” she said. She was pretty, with candid hazel eyes and a mass of soft blonde hair. Miss Baker was so young that Cherry thought the graduate’s wide black velvet ribbon on her cap must be very recent indeed. “You’re Miss Ames and Miss Franklin—but which of you is which?”
The probationers introduced themselves.
“Well, I’m very glad to have you on my ward.”
Cherry was relieved to hear that. She’d heard at lunch that head nurses, particularly young new ones, considered green probationers just a nuisance. Out of the corner of her eye, Cherry saw that Josie had lost that hunted rabbit look.