by Helen Wells
They were packed in a wheeled truck, all ten of them lying in a row. Long before the truck arrived, when the babies’ combined squallings, gruntings, bubblings and puffings were just a faint sound down the corridor, a thrill went through the ward. The patients, who had been until now matter-of-fact women, reading or chatting or dozing, suddenly sat up and appeared radiant. The nurses, too, looked eager and amused. Cherry forgot everything else and thoroughly enjoyed herself. When the two nursery nurses wheeled in the truck, with its tiny lively occupants, the ward came thoroughly to life. Only the babies themselves, the reason for this excitement and happiness, remained nonchalant.
“They get cuter and funnier each time,” Cherry said to Miss O’Malley, her fellow nurse, as they each dug squirming tiny babies out of their compartments.
“This one is a little damp,” Miss O’Malley said hastily.
Cherry laughed. She did not mind. She had taken to this branch of nursing as easily and blithely and efficiently as if she were a veteran, instead of a student nurse.
Cherry slipped her hand under Baby Norris’s warm downy head, rested his spine along her arm, and lifted him up firmly and horizontally, between her hip and arm. He made a compact bundle. He blinked gravely at her, opened his tiny pink mouth in a yawn, then stared up at her again. Each day Cherry made fresh discoveries about these miniature human beings. “Baby Norris is decidedly dignified,” she observed.
“Even his mother is awed by him,” Miss O’Malley answered. She efficiently scooped up a baby and, with a wriggling blanket on her arm, started toward its mother.
Cherry found one small baby quite an armful, particularly with Baby Norris waving his miniature pink plump fist in her face. Around his wrist, sealed on, was a bead bracelet which spelled out his last name. Even so, as Cherry approached the bed, she glanced at the name on the bed and said aloud, “Baby Norris.”
“Are you sure it’s my baby?” said the nervous little woman in the bed. “Are you sure you aren’t making a mistake?”
“Absolutely sure,” Cherry soothed her. “See how fine he looks today.” She laid the baby in the curve of his mother’s arm, thinking that sometimes a nurse has to be chiefly a psychologist.
“Why does he kick so?” Mrs. Norris asked, touching him gingerly. “Oh, dear, I’ll never be able to take care of him at home. I don’t know the first thing about babies!” she wailed.
“You’ll learn,” said Mrs. Sorley from the next bed. She was a big, good-natured, middle-aged woman. “By the time you have your fifth, like me, a baby’s no trouble at all.” She patted her chunky infant comfortably on the seat of his diaper.
Cherry suppressed her smile at Mrs. Norris’s terrified expression and went back to the cart. She took Baby Saunders on her arm and held her a moment. “Hello, my lovely,” Cherry murmured. The baby girl’s gray eyes were like a china doll’s, fringed with black lashes, a golden halo covered her little head, her skin was pink and delicate as a flower. She rested, quiet and good, on Cherry’s arm, breathing lightly. “I wish she were mine,” Cherry thought as she trotted over to the mother’s bed.
Mrs. Saunders reached out her arms. She was only eighteen. Her young husband was fighting somewhere in Europe. Cherry knew that Mrs. Saunders had not heard from him or about him for three months. Yet she had never heard the young mother say anything about her own worry, except what she said now:
“Dick’s going to be pretty proud when he sees his daughter.”
“I should think so!” Cherry said a hasty little prayer that he might come home safely, that he might some day really see his beautiful little daughter.
The cart was empty now except for Baby Lane. Cherry scooped him up and could not help laughing. He was wrinkled, red, and wiry, more like an animated dried prune, Cherry thought, than a human being. Baby Lane tossed his arms and legs, looked her square in the eye, and grunted for nourishment.
“He’s so homely,” Mrs. Lane mourned half-humorously as Cherry handed him over and helped her to a more comfortable position in the bed. “My husband is disappointed in such an ugly duckling.”
“He’s a fine husky boy, and just what most brand-new babies look like,” Cherry retorted. “Just wait until his skin grows a little less sensitive and less red, and he gains some fat to go over those muscles.”
“I hope he grows better-looking,” Mrs. Lane sighed. But from the way she stroked the fuzzy crimson little head, Cherry saw that her remarks had comforted and satisfied her patient.
Cherry and Miss O’Malley patrolled the quiet ward, to see that the mothers did not nurse the babies too fast and to watch for any emergency. Cherry taught one amazed baby to bubble. Then she carried the babies, carefully horizontal, back to the truck. Most of them, now that they were full, were drowsing, tiny hands uncurled, limp and soft and warm. They were packed back into their beds, the truck was wheeled out and the ward settled down to matter-of-fact knitting again until the babies’ next visit.
Cherry was still chuckling over the distinct personalities of these tiny people when she went off duty. But the moment she was out of the ward and hurrying across the yard with her nurse’s cape billowing out behind her, time pressed at her heels again. Senior lecture classes were heavy, she had an enormous amount of reading to do, and besides she had promised Dr. Joe to help him. She half-ran through the blowing October afternoon toward Lincoln Hall where his laboratory was. Lincoln housed laboratories, a special library, and valuable medical records. Cherry, like all student nurses, and even most young staff doctors and graduate nurses, would have had no business in Lincoln, except that she was helping her old friend and mentor, Dr. Joseph Fortune.
Dr. Fortune had brought the Ames twins into the world, and had been their friend and neighbor all their lives. His selfless devotion to medical research in his little home laboratory in Hilton—in the teeth of poverty and loneliness and lack of recognition, in those days—had inspired Cherry to be a nurse. Cherry had tried to pay him back in her own way. After Mrs. Fortune had died, while Cherry was still in high school, Cherry had kept an eye on impractical Dr. Joe and on his house and on his madcap daughter, Midge. Dr. Joe’s present recognition, and his presence here at Spencer, was due to Cherry—and a nightmarish episode in her first year at the nursing school.
Cherry blew into Dr. Joe’s small cluttered laboratory, red-cheeked and out of breath. “Why aren’t there more hours in the day, Dr. Joe?” she asked in greeting.
Dr. Joe lifted his head from the microscope a full minute after her remark. He brushed the boyish shock of gray hair out of his eye. “What’s on your mind, Cherry?” When she shook her head, he said gently, “Oh, yes, there is. I’m not as absent-minded as you think I am. I noticed, for instance, that you filed my notes on quinine substitutes in the wrong drawer,” he smiled at her over a row of test tubes, “and you forgot to bring me the drugs I requisitioned for tomorrow’s experiment.”
Cherry pressed her hands against her tingling face. “I’m sorry. If you’ll give me your authorization, I’ll get the drugs right away. I’m not much help to you, am I, Dr. Joe?”
“We-ell, I really need a technical assistant. But I’m going to keep you on for company. After all, if your mother has Midge, then I ought to have her daughter in exchange. That’s only fair, isn’t it?” He pottered around the long laboratory sink. “About the assistant——”
Dr. Joe fumbled in the pocket of his crumpled laboratory coat. Cherry waited for him to finish his remark. He took some notes out of his pocket, searched for a pencil, sat down on a stool, and absorbedly started to write. Cherry was used to this.
In two or three minutes, he looked up again and grinned sheepishly. “Where were we?”
“About a technician for you,” Cherry prompted.
Dr. Fortune rose from the stool and seated himself slowly in the one comfortable chair. “He looks old,” Cherry thought, “and tired. It’s no wonder, the way he drives himself with this research.” Aloud she said, “Couldn’t you take a little vacation, Dr.
Joe? Perhaps around Thanksgiving? Midge will have vacation from high school that week end.”
“Vacation! With our hospitals desperately under-staffed? Does malaria, or the other tropical diseases, take a vacation? Do our soldiers in the Pacific get vacations from danger and infection?” Then he said less sternly, “I think I’ve found the man I want.”
“Who is it?” Cherry asked.
“He came to me voluntarily because he, too, is interested in research for developing quinine substitutes. He says he’s not a specialist in it, but he knows the field like a specialist.” Dr. Fortune tamped down the tobacco in his pipe, thinking aloud as he often did with Cherry. “This staff man can give me only a little of his crowded time. A technician could give me his full time—if there were a technician to spare in wartime!” He talked a little further about the man’s abilities and the technical aspects of the research.
Cherry found it difficult to understand and she in voluntarily glanced down at her watch. There was not much time to get Dr. Joe his supplies before the main laboratory in Spencer was locked for the day. She rose. Where did time go? She ought to spend some time with her probie, she wanted to have time for Lex——
“Would you stop in at the office,” Dr. Joe was saying, “and ask them to have Dr. Upham come in and see me?”
“Who?” Cherry asked, startled.
“Lex Upham, the man I was telling you about.” Dr. Joe patted her cheek. “You’ll have to meet him.”
Cherry said meekly, “That’s right, I will meet him here, won’t I?”
So he wasn’t just a fly-by-night! She had supposed he was joking about becoming Dr. Joe’s assistant. From now on, she would approach Dr. Lex Upham with the same respect and caution as a stick of dynamite. It occurred to her, with a grin, that coming to Dr. Joe’s laboratory would be even nicer when Lex started his work here next month.
It was not until several busy days later that Cherry met Lex himself. He happened to be, or he said he “just happened to be,” passing through the Obstetrics Clinic, when Cherry went off duty at three. She rushed up to him, noticing that he looked very much amused about something.
“How’d you do it?” she demanded, not bothering with preliminaries.
“I told you I would,” he replied with a grin.
“But you’re not a specialist in——”
“I became one. I spent every night last week until four A.M. reading every book I could find in this city on the subject.” His golden brown eyes twinkled. “I read it so I could qualify to work with Dr. Fortune so he’d invite me to his lab so I could see you. It’s simple.”
Cherry had never before thought of sitting up all night reading books on quinine substitutes as a romantic gesture. But that was what it was. There was something irresistibly funny about such a direct and studious approach, and something touching too. Cherry’s expression was a very puzzled one.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Lex said as he shoved open the door into the yard for her. “But, believe it or not, I have a lighter side. For instance, I’m a wonderful dancer. I could prove it if you’d have dinner with me tonight.” He strode along, smiling at her, his sand-colored hair ruffled by the tangy October wind. “Well? Well? Are you still intimidated by a few rules?”
Cherry turned a laughing face to him. “Lex, honestly you do deserve something in return for all that studying, and for all the extra work you’ll do with Dr. Joe.”
“That’s all right,” he interrupted. “The more I read, the more interested I got. I’m keen on doing that research for its own sake now.”
“So I don’t count any more!” Cherry teased.
“Certainly you count and don’t say such idiotic things,” he commanded. “If you’re going to twist my remarks——”
“If you can’t take a little teasing——”
They both broke off short, and faced each other in a flare-up of anger. Suddenly Cherry started to laugh. “We certainly are two of a kind!” She took out her white handkerchief and waved it. “Truce! Truce!”
“Truce declared.” He took her arm, smiling again. “Now about some dancing——”
“Quiet, you rebel! You know I can’t afford to break the rules.”
He jammed his hands into his pockets. “No, I suppose you can’t. Well, there’s a dance here at the hospital way off next week. That’s legal.”
“Is that an invitation?” Cherry teased, though she knew she should not provoke his lightning temper.
He bowed from the waist. “I will have it engraved, Madame.” He straightened up and looked her full in the eyes. “You adopted me and that includes the dance.”
Cherry retreated into Crowley. She remembered a line from an old popular song, “You may have been a headache, but you never were a bore. …”
“Anyway, I’ll have free time for the dance,” Cherry consoled herself, as she got out her books to study. She would like to see Ann and Gwen other than just at mealtime but they were both now on relief duty, from three P.M. to eleven P.M., when she was off. All the seniors were rushing like plagued creatures. “A dance will be a nice break for us poor seniors. I’ll count off the days against that.” And Cherry determinedly opened her book, to study for Delivery Room work which was almost upon her.
It was still six days before the dance, when Cherry had a meeting with her other adoptee, Mildred Burnham. With Mildred on her conscience, Cherry had left three notes in the girl’s room trying to make an appointment. The first two had gone unanswered. But here the two girls were, finally, on a Sunday afternoon in the deserted lounge.
Outside, the wind rustled the red and gold leaves, and the sky was very blue. Cherry longed to be outdoors, but Mildred did not want to go for a walk. She sat slouched in a chair, her lumpy face wearing its habitual sullen expression. Cherry settled herself resignedly in her own chair and sighed. She felt as if she were pulling, all alone, on a heavy weight. After some preliminary small talk, she made a start.
“It’s only a little over a month until probationers are capped, Mildred——”
“—or expelled,” the girl interrupted. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
“I’m not worried, because I’m sure you’re doing very nice work.” Cherry tried to smooth the girl’s prickly feelings. “But every one of us has her weak points and I wondered if you might want some special coaching.”
“No, thanks.”
Cherry felt as if she were pushing against a wall. Wasn’t there a door anywhere in this closed wall? She talked for a while about what the probationers’ written and oral and practical examinations would be like. Mildred listened but made no response. Recalling her own probie experience, Cherry warned Mildred what an ordeal capping could be and suggested how she might best face it. There was no response to this, either. At last Cherry said:
“I wish we could be friends, Mildred. I’d like to be. Wouldn’t you?”
Mildred Burnham gave her a sharp look. “You don’t feel friendly toward me.”
Cherry felt caught up short. It was true she did not like Mildred. So the girl sensed it! “You’re rather difficult to be friends with,” Cherry reminded her gently.
“Then why don’t you let it go?” Mildred said, getting to her feet. And Cherry was too discouraged, after this awful half-hour, to push the interview further. She wondered how in the world she was going to deal with Mildred Burnham for a whole year.
A few days later, a talk she had with Bertha Larsen did not help matters. Cherry had learned that Mildred was on the same ward with Bertha, and she asked the good-humored farm girl how Mildred’s ward work was going.
“Well,” said Bertha and stopped, troubled. “Mildred’s work is all right, but she does not understand that we all must work together. She is a little selfish—” Bertha stopped again. “Maybe she just tries too hard,” she said apologetically.
“You mean she grabs the best of everything for her own patients and leaves the rest of you to get along as you can?” Cherry asked sharply.
“Sometimes,” Bertha admitted. “She hurries and takes hers, as if she did not trust the rest of us. Oh, it’s nothing! She’s just a foolish little probie, she will get over it.”
Cherry made a point of seeing Mildred Burnham that same afternoon. She came straight to the subject of the way Mildred was behaving on the ward. Cherry was angry that Bertha Larsen, who was so kind-hearted and generous, should be imposed upon. She felt it was hopeless to try to be friendly or kind or understanding with Mildred. So she spoke sharply to her probationer, to drive her point home.
Mildred looked unhappy. It was the first time Cherry had seen any expression except sullenness on the girl’s face.
“I’m sorry to scold you,” Cherry said, picking up her cape to leave. “But it’s better to hear this from your adopting senior than from your head nurse—or from Training School Office.”
“You don’t like me,” said Mildred Burnham accusingly.
There it was again! Cherry flung her nurse’s cape about her shoulders and hurried out into the rotunda, feeling almost guilty. She was troubled for several days, and even more troubled when Miss Reamer routinely called her to her office.
“How are you and Miss Burnham getting on?” the Superintendent of Nurses asked.
Cherry looked at the floor. “We’re not. Perhaps it’s my fault.”
“You are a little impatient, you know, Miss Ames. I want a more cheerful report next time—if you are to go on being a guiding senior.” Miss Reamer smiled and the talk turned to Cherry’s studies. But the worry about Mildred Burnham stuck in Cherry’s mind.
The day of the dance, when it finally came, was one long disappointment for Cherry. She worked an extremely hard eight hours on the mothers’ ward, until her head felt like a balloon and her feet seemed to weigh ten pounds each. After that Dr. Joe, in all innocence, asked her to run errands. Cherry barely made second supper and choked down her food. Then she headed frantically for lecture class. On the way, a phone call came from Obstetrical. The relief nurse was sick this evening: the hospital was short of nurses since so many had gone off to the battlefronts: would Miss Ames take over the ward in this emergency until eleven P.M.? She would, of course. Cherry went back to the ward and resumed her duties. Her whole body ached with fatigue. But hearing music drift faint and tantalizing across the yard was the worst of it. The dance had started. And Cherry had missed it—after all that waiting.