by Helen Wells
The whole ward was convulsed with laughter, but Miss Baker stood in the middle of the aisle with her finger pressed warningly against her lips. Blankets heaved under silently shaking shoulders. Dr. Jim Clayton was so amused that he had to leave in haste. In the general though smothered mirth, Miss Antonio hustled Mrs. Thompson out before the rest of the ward had time to fret about not being discharged too.
The moment her angry, anxious footsteps had died away down the corridor, the ward rang with laughter.
“Oh, Miss Ames,” Miss Baker gulped when she could get her breath, “you were wonderful. Inspired.”
“I just hope—” Cherry said, and broke off. What she hoped was that she would be as successful with Vivian Warren as with Mrs. Thompson. Vivian was younger and tougher and might turn out to be more than Cherry could cope with.
By the time Cherry had given her share of the patients their evening care, and settled them for supper and the night, it was four-thirty. She reported off duty to Miss Baker and looked around for Josie. She found her changing water for the flowers.
“Don’t wait for me,” Josie said. “I’ll be another ten minutes in this hothouse.”
Cherry went off alone. It was just as well she was alone, she thought, with what she planned to do.
Not that she liked what she had to do. But she was going to have trouble with Vivian Warren sooner or later. Better to nip it in the bud right now. Cherry also remembered something out of her brother’s military manual about the value of a “surprise attack.” She did not mean to attack unless Vivian made that necessary. She intended something quite different. But in any event, Vivian was going to be surprised.
Cherry slipped across the lobby of Spencer, avoiding the library and the lounge. She walked across the lawn to the Nurses’ Residence, entered the creaky elevator, and got off on the floor below her own. Two girls from her section passed her in the corridor, but Cherry only smiled and did not stop to talk. The ideas she had been considering in topsy-turvy order all this busy day arranged themselves in a plan now. Afraid—perhaps Vivian would be more afraid of this interview than Cherry. And those bullying tactics of Vivian’s—the sure sign of a coward, of someone afraid. If only she could put her finger on the cause of that fear. Cherry stopped before Vivian Warren’s room and knocked.
There was a faint rustle within, then silence. Cherry rapped again. The door opened and Vivian Warren stood there, looking astonished.
“May I come in?” Cherry’s voice was pleasant, but there was a ring of challenge in it.
“If you like,” Vivian said coldly, and Cherry entered. The room was like all the others, except that Vivian had none of the little personal knickknacks the other girls treasured. Cherry sat down on a chair. Vivian seated herself stiffly on the bed and waited.
“You probably know without my telling you,” Cherry started, “that I think your tactics against me in class are pretty unfair. I want to tell you very plainly that I don’t like them.”
She watched the other girl closely, measuring the effect of her words. Not a muscle in that guarded face moved. If Cherry had expected a bold reply, none was forthcoming. Vivian’s eyes glinted, but she said nothing. Cherry went on quietly but firmly:
“I also want to tell you that I won’t stand for that sort of thing. You’ll have to stop it or—” she gambled on Vivian’s basic cowardice “—you are going to find yourself in trouble.”
Vivian Warren dropped her eyes. Cherry waited. But Vivian did not have the courage to fight in the open. Cherry felt relieved. She had already half won. She much preferred to have no fight at all.
“But that isn’t what I came to say,” Cherry went on.
Vivian looked up curiously. “It isn’t? What else is there?”
“You, I don’t know you. Nobody knows you. I can’t help wondering why you feel you have to resort to such tactics, when you’re every bit as capable as the next student, and why you’re always alone.”
Vivian twisted her hands together and was silent for a moment. “Do you know,” she said, “you’re the first person who’s ever come to my room to see me? There hasn’t been another soul.”
She glanced up furtively again and for the first time Cherry could see into the other girl’s eyes. What she saw was loneliness and fear.
They talked for a long time, slowly and painfully at first. Then Vivian’s words came pouring out in an emotional storm as she admitted her need to tell someone. Vivian’s bravado was gone now, and Cherry gradually learned a story that amazed her. Vivian came from a desperately poor and wretched family. Her father had been a drunkard for years. Her mother had long since given up hope and ambition for her many children. Home meant nothing to Vivian but squalor and fights. At school she had been despised as a member of “that awful Warren family.” She had grown up believing that she was not as good or as bright as the other young people and that she had better distrust everyone and look out for herself by any means possible. She was embittered and hard. Nursing stood for something clean and decent and orderly to her, and it meant having a home for the first time in her life. She had worked for two years in a laundry to save up enough to enter the nursing school. Now she was counting on winning a government scholarship from the U. S. Cadet Corps to get through.
“I have to make good here, I have to!” Vivian cried to Cherry. “If I don’t, I have no place else to go—I haven’t a cent—I’m all alone—And I can’t go home, I can’t, I won’t!” She shuddered, and for a moment Cherry thought she was going to weep. She added sternly, “Not even T.S.O. knows this. I’m ashamed. I don’t want anyone to know.”
Cherry listened to all this, feeling stirred and deeply sorry. She tried to imagine herself in Vivian’s place, tried to feel as Vivian felt, but she could not. Her own life had been so happy and normal. She only knew that if Vivian’s fears could be banished, there was a nice girl waiting to be coaxed out from under that hard shell. Cherry took a deep breath.
“See here, Vivian,” she said. “All that’s behind you now. And you don’t have to go on hating and distrusting people. People will be nice to you if you only let them. You’ll make good here, and on merit alone. See how well you’ve done already! And honestly you don’t have to treat us all as enemies. We want to like you. We want you to like us.”
Vivian looked at her through narrowed eyes. Cherry thought of a hunted animal. “I don’t believe you,” Vivian Warren said coldly.
Cherry sighed. She knew that it would take a long time to overcome the fears Vivian had grown up with. So she said only, “We’re all going to the movies after dinner. Come along. We can get back safely before ten.”
Vivian rose and held the door open. “You don’t really want me. And the other girls don’t. I’m not fooled.”
Cherry rose too. “We’re meeting in the lobby at seven. Wear your hat and coat. It’s getting cold out these fall nights.” Vivian did not reply. Her face was sullen.
Cherry turned to say one more thing before she left. “I’m glad I’m getting to know you. And I hope you’ll return my visit.”
Only her footsteps broke the strained silence as she walked down the hall.
At dinner Cherry did not see Vivian Warren anywhere in the dining room, and that troubled her. She could not take part in the conversation around her.
“Very sad about Ames,” Gwen said, shaking her red head. “Did you hear? I wish she were here, the poor girl, I’d try to help her.”
Ann’s dark blue eyes crinkled in a smile. “She’s obviously not here.”
Cherry said feebly, “Present,” and relapsed into her thoughts. When the other probies were discussing, over their coffee, the movie they were to see, Cherry roused herself long enough to remark:
“I’ve asked some of the other girls to come along.”
“Fine,” Ann agreed.
“Sure, the more the merrier,” Gwen said. “Come on, let’s collect ourselves—Josie, Mai Lee, Marie, Bertha—” Four other classmates trooped along, too. Second dinner ha
d begun and still Vivian Warren had not appeared. At seven they slipped into their coats and went out to the lobby to meet the rest of the theater party. Cherry glanced around the lobby, holding her breath.
Standing alone by the elevator, clutching her coat and looking both afraid and eager, was Vivian Warren. Her eyes were red about the rims.
Cherry smiled and waved, and was rewarded by a faint smile forming with difficulty on the other girl’s lips. Vivian came toward them with uncertain steps, like a person just learning to walk.
“Our star probationer is not above movies!” Cherry announced gaily. And the other girls, taking Cherry’s cue, welcomed Vivian cordially into the group.
“I’ve won!” Cherry thought as she went down the steps with Vivian by her side. “I’ve won!” And it was a double victory—one for herself and one for Vivian Warren.
CHAPTER VII
Ames’s Folly
CHERRY’S OLD ENEMY TIME HAD CAUGHT UP WITH HER. She was leaving Ward 4. Cherry was sorry to say good-by to Miss Baker, who understood a probationer’s sorrows, and the familiar patients who had practically adopted her. She was sorry, too, to part from Josie Franklin who was also going to wards unknown. But say good-by she must, for it was November, the fateful third month of probation was starting, and she was being transferred to Ward 27.
“Never mind,” Miss Baker consoled her as they stood in the doorway of the old ward. “You can always come back and visit. And we’ll want to see how your cap looks on you.”
“Wish I were getting my cap on your ward,” Cherry said, “if I do get it. What is Ward 27?”
“Men’s Surgical. It’ll be extremely good experience for you.”
“Surgical!” Cherry exclaimed in horror-struck tones. “Dr. Wylie! Don’t tell me I’ll have to earn my cap on Dr. Wylie’s ward!”
At first it seemed to Cherry that everything was for the worst in the worst of all possible wards. Miss Craig, the head nurse, was an old-school disciplinarian, more of a machine than a human being. She was a short stout, elderly woman with a rigid posture, a voice and temper that crackled like her apron, and a withered smile that seemed mechanical.
As for the three graduate nurses here, they were marvels of efficiency and a little tired of nearly helpless probationers. Cherry suspected that her predecessors, whoever they were, must have made some trying blunders. Cherry found it simpler to keep out of the other nurses’ way. Perhaps on another ward, working under a pleasanter head nurse, they might be pleasanter themselves, Cherry realized.
The patients provided another problem. Most of them were very sick, and the others seemed to have caught an unusually gloomy mood. Of course the orderlies did all the necessary bathing and lifting. To be fair, Cherry admitted, the men were much less fussy than women patients, and she could not blame them for not being cheerful. There was nothing cheerful about a ruptured gall bladder or a brain concussion—and all surgeries were serious business.
There were no flowers here, no pastel bed jackets and laughter of people who were almost well—just masculine silence and a grim routine under Miss Craig’s icy eye, and under Dr. Wylie’s rigid ruling. He came faithfully every day, sweeping past Cherry, to her relief. In his terrifying way, he forced even the most desperately ill of these men toward recovery.
And it rained. It rained and rained and rained, till Cherry wondered why the ward did not float. “If anyone thinks nursing is romantic,” Cherry thought at the end of her first week here, “let him step right this way to Ward 27, please.”
But there were two bright spots. Miss Craig was a top-flight nurse and Dr. Wylie was a top-ranking surgeon, and here was Cherry working right alongside the most superb medical talent in the country. The other bright spot was Ann Evans. She had been assigned with Cherry as the ward’s other probationer.
“If it weren’t for you, you anchor,” Cherry told Ann late one afternoon in the kitchen, as they—quite against the rules—sampled bread and butter, “I’d have washed out by now from sheer fright. Why do we have to earn our caps here of all places? The toughest surgeon in the hospital!” Cherry sighed as she set to work on the supper trays. “I never was lucky. Never won dolls at the fair, never won at bingo, couldn’t even win a booby prize at a party.”
Ann said with her mouth full of prunes, “It’s not a question of luck. It’s merit that counts here. Of course Dr. Wylie is demanding and that’s to his credit—he’ll have only the best care for his patients. You must admit, Cherry, that he’s absolutely right.” Ann carefully swallowed the prunes and started out with the first tray. “T’ain’t luck, no, Ma’am.”
“If a little luck came along,” Cherry called after her, “I wouldn’t turn it down. Not with caps less than a month away.”
“Good luck or bad luck?” Ann smiled back as she disappeared into the ward. Cherry was a little startled by that remark. Ann had a way of tossing off the most penetrating insights without warning.
Bad luck was what it turned out to be. During the first two weeks that Cherry and Ann were on Men’s Surgical, Dr. Wylie had ignored the probationers. He had seen them all right; he saw everything. Sometimes he came in alone, or sometimes he brought two or three eminent visiting doctors to see some special surgery. Occasionally he entered followed by a group of nervous, respectful internes, whom he lectured as if contemptuous of their ability ever to learn.
On the Thursday afternoon later known as Ames’s Folly, Dr. Wylie brought four house doctors with him, among them young Dr. Clayton. It was raining: a cold, unrelenting, late November rain that had been beating monotonously against the windows for three days without let-up. Everyone was edgy. The electric lights were on, giving their faces a yellow look. Even Dr. Wylie looked more razor-sharp than usual as he marched down the row of beds with the tall young internes behind him.
Cherry promptly headed for the linen closet. She could be just as useful among the sheets as making some terrible blunder before Dr. Wylie, she told herself, not to mention Miss Craig and the assembled internes—especially a certain engaging one. Perhaps she looked a little too eager to get away. Dr. Wylie called after her.
“You!” he said in an accusing voice. Everyone froze, even the head nurse. Cherry could feel her heart beating as the steely gray eyes fastened unmistakably upon her. “You will kindly come back here and assist me in changing a dressing.”
Cherry walked back slowly, in the manner of a doomed man. Everyone knew that doctors never wanted probationers when there were experienced nurses around. Something was up. Cherry vaguely saw Miss Craig’s disapproving face, Ann’s blue eyes opened to the size of saucers, and Jim Clayton looking at her sympathetically, as if he were trying to whisper, “Buck up, I know you’ll do all right.” She finally reached Dr. Wylie’s side and could smell the strong chemicals which clung to his long white coat. He turned his back to her while he explained the details of the abdominal surgery to the internes.
Cherry listened in fascination to Dr. Wylie. She had known a little about the case, enough to keep elderly Mr. Mills on his strict diet and to watch his bandage carefully for staining. But now here was the whole story, and it was exciting. Cherry was amused to see Mr. Mills’s proud satisfied glance when his incision was displayed, as if it were the only case of its kind in the world. Actually Dr. Wylie was selecting for his students the most common and typical example of a complex appendectomy.
Cherry was so interested that when Dr. Wylie said absently over his shoulder, “Sterile field!” Cherry had no sterile field ready. She simply stood there, appalled.
Dr. Wylie turned full around. “Sterile instruments!” he barked. “Why haven’t you got them ready?”
Cherry said, “Yes, sir!” and ran. Luckily Ann, out in the laboratory, had hastily checked the contents of the dressing carriage. Cherry hurried back pushing the carriage, placed the sterile sheet on Mr. Mills’s bed, and laid sterile instruments and bandages on the sterile field. Dr. Wylie was fuming. His eyes darted critically from one object to another—sterile gau
ze, forceps, one pair of them in phenol solution, adhesive—fortunately it was all there. Ann had seen to that, bless her!
“Well? Well?” Dr. Wylie demanded. His eyes went through her like knives. Cherry became so rattled that the could not remember what to do next, although she knew all of it by heart. The older nurses, behind Dr. Wylie’s back, were frantically going through motions of washing their hands and one of them quickly trundled a screen around Mr. Mills’s bed.
Her hands thoroughly scrubbed, Cherry picked up the sterile forceps. A dozen pairs of eyes, huddled inside the screen, watched her lift off the old bandage. At that very moment, she remembered she should have used the phenol forceps instead. The silence was so complete and horrified that the rain on the windows sounded like drums. Funeral drums.
Dr. Wylie snorted. Instantly the head nurse stepped forward. “I’ll get you another nurse, sir.”
“No!” Dr. Wylie exploded. “This girl’s going to learn!”
Cherry hesitated, holding the soiled and infectious bandage in mid-air. And then she dropped it on the bed, just missing the surgeon’s immaculate hand. It made a spreading red stain on the clean blanket.
Dr. Wylie opened his mouth in fury but checked himself. Somehow his silence, and his face mottled with anger, were worse than anything he could have said. The head nurse whirled upon her. Cherry was close to tears.
All those internes’ faces! Were they laughing at her or suffering along with her? Just as her hand reached out for the phenol forceps. Dr. Wylie grated in her ear. “You in Miss McIntyre’s class?”
Cherry jumped and gulped, “Yes, sir,” while her hands went on blindly about their business.