The Side of the Angels

by Christina Bartolomeo

  “You’ll never make it through the winter in those shoes,” I called after him.

  He slammed the office door, the effect somewhat marred by the tinkling chimes Margaret had tied to it. I watched him climb into his rusty 1984 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme and take off, skidding a little on a patch of ice that had congealed in one of the ruts in the parking lot. Our relationship just kept getting better and better. At this rate, we’d be taking contracts out on each other long before these nurses ever won one.

  “At least you’re talking,” Louise would have said.

  13

  THE ODOR OF JEREMY’S lilies seemed to fill the whole office. They’d arrived on day six of the strike and now, by day ten, it seemed they’d never die off.

  It was like Jeremy to have them delivered to the office, a show-offy thing to do when I was sure that my mother must have supplied him with the name of my inn. The flowers came tied with a fat white bow that looked strangely bridal. The card had only his name. Perhaps my mother had advised him to lighten up on the sentimental pleas.

  “Those stink,” Eric had commented, and an hour later he’d knocked the pot over “by accident on purpose,” as we used to say when we were kids, only to have it rescued by Margaret. Tony said nothing aloud, though I’d heard him mumble something under his breath about the place smelling like a perfume factory. Tony was not the flower-giving type, though once he’d brought me home a sheaf of gladioli he’d lifted from a funeral parlor at the end of a wake.

  I was grateful to Jeremy for making me look popular and admired, and for irritating Tony. But I did not call him. There was nothing new to say.

  That second week of the strike was a low one for all of us. Cold and damp set in, a damp that struck to the bone. Two days of driving rain that turned picketing into a miserable chore. I began to see that Kate hadn’t been joking when she suggested I stock more winter clothes. Washington’s sunny Novembers and mild, fair winters with their sunny cold snaps bore no comparison to these penetrating fogs, these ungentle rains.

  Kate was far too petite for any borrowed clothes of hers to fit me, but she came to the strike office on Sunday with a hefty cardboard box full of sweaters, tights, and leggings. The tights and leggings still had the tags on them.

  “My sister Caroline is just your size, and she’s surprise-pregnant with her third,” Kate explained. “The sweaters are old ones but the rest of this stuff we just got at the outlets in September.”

  The sweaters were serious sweaters, in a different league than the thin cashmere cardigans and lamb’s-wool vests that saw me through winters at home. There were two fisherman’s-style pullovers, one cream colored and one slate-blue; a brown-and-cream Peruvian V-neck that shut the cold out as effectively as flannel underwear; and a luscious, coral-pink angora with tight sleeves that made me feel as if I were being hugged by a giant rabbit. Kate’s donations layered over my own clothes kept me comfortable, despite the faulty heating of the strike office, which rattled through the office walls as if the whole building had a rumbling cough, yet generated a surprisingly paltry amount of warmth. The former-drugstore side of the office was especially cold, with its high ceilings and knocking, sputtering radiators.

  On Monday, the hospital announced that, effective immediately, it was canceling health insurance coverage for every striking nurse. The Toilers’ lawyer (I hoped for his sake that he was on a fat retainer) filed the appropriate court challenges, but the effect was chilling, as the hospital meant it to be. A nurse who had a young daughter with severe juvenile diabetes and one who had a husband dying of lung cancer crossed the line and went back in. Nobody blamed them.

  The same morning, the Newport Herald ran an open letter from the archdiocesan bishop, calling for nurses “to promote harmony instead of strife, and remember that nursing is a profession of sacrifice by returning to their patients as swiftly as possible.” Archbishop Kroehling, Clare explained to us, belonged to the same country club as Winslow, and was known for his often-voiced nostalgia for the dear dead days before Vatican II. But this same bishop had confirmed most of our members, and his rebuke was bound to sting.

  Our only comfort was that the local parish priest, angered at Kroehling’s betrayal of his flock, stopped by to suggest that the Church of Sts. Jude and Rita host a Thanksgiving Mass and supper for the strikers and their families. Father Peter also offered to have St. Jude’s “adopt” the St. Francis nurses as their Christmas effort.

  “Our Lenten effort, too, if it comes to that,” he said. “The bishop’s seminary training must have left out Pope Leo’s encyclical outlining the Church’s unqualified support for workers’ rights to organize. I’ll have to send him a copy.”

  “The bishop won’t exile you to Siberia?” Kate said.

  “The old fossil can yammer on in the Herald, but he’s not going to risk St. Jude’s chunk of the annual funding appeal. Not on your life.”

  This cheered us all. Until the next morning, when Clare found taped to her front door a photo of herself on the picket line, cut from an article in the Winsack Eagle-Gazette. A thick black X was slashed with a marking pen over her face, along with a printed message, “Get back to work, bitch.”

  She showed it to Kate, Tony, Doug, and me in the privacy of her office.

  “It’s juvenile stuff,” she said. “It could even be one of our own people. There are some in our own unit who definitely don’t love me.”

  The hand that held the photo was shaking a little.

  “No, this is the hospital’s taking it to the next level,” said Doug. “I expected this.”

  “Do you really think the hospital’s behind it?” said Kate. “This doesn’t seem like Winslow’s style. He likes Clare.”

  “Hey, in one strike in California, management hired someone to toss the local president’s bedroom, just to scare her,” said Doug. “They broke the frames on her photos of her kids and threw her underwear all over the room.”

  “Those bastards,” Tony said. “I’m spending the night tonight. Make up the couch for me.”

  “How is that going to look?” said Clare, ever the prude.

  Margaret, who’d eased through the door as soon as she got a whiff of drama, suggested that Clare put up at a hotel for a while.

  “That’s even worse. As if I’m running away.”

  “Clare, nothing is worth your well-being,” said Doug solicitously. He made a movement as if to put a protective arm around her shoulders, then seemed to think better of it.

  “Don’t you know that when you’re being bothered like that you’re supposed to report it to the police?” Margaret asked.

  Margaret always followed procedure. She’d be a good person to have around during an air raid: calm and conscientious, with an iron nerve sustained by rules and regulations.

  “If I show up at a police station with this scribble, I’m going to look absolutely neurotic,” said Clare.

  “Not with modern stalker laws,” said Margaret.

  “Clare is right,” said Doug. “The police won’t take this seriously. I’m going to keep an eye on you. We’ll see if they try anything now.”

  The virility of this speech was marred by Doug’s immediately choking on an overlarge bite of lemon Danish. Tony pounded him on the back, harder than strictly necessary.

  “Mighty Mouse will save the day,” I muttered to Kate.

  “Clare can stay with Mike and me for a few days until we see what’s what,” said Kate firmly.

  Doug seemed disappointed, but Clare did not, to my relief. Clare might have been vulnerable to the soothing blandishments about her leadership abilities that Doug constantly provided, but she clearly did not want to curl up on her sofa with him to sip sherry and watch Norma Rae on video.

  Someone at the hospital must have put the lowlifes on a leash. After three days there was no more trouble, and Clare returned home. Tensions were running high, though. When word got out about what had happened, a few of our people took things into their own hands. Forty-eight hou
rs after Clare found the threatening photo, every vehicle left in the hospital’s executive parking lot after sundown had a tire flattened, including Winslow’s Porsche.

  Winslow remarked to a news crew in wounded outrage, “I don’t even know our nurses anymore. They’re acting like hooligans instead of healing professionals.” Several of the nurses then showed up for picket duty in sweatshirts on which were painted the motto, “Proud to be hooligans.”

  “We need to set a more positive tone,” Clare said in our morning meeting on Thursday. She was her calm self again. Once the first fear was past she had been eager to get back to her home and to her dogs. Clare might be a risk-taking politician, but she needed her lovingly arranged retreats to survive: her office with its willow ware and Saint Anthony statue, and the small Cape Cod with its fenced backyard and front garden.

  Kate said, “Father Peter’s going to hold a toy and clothing drive and start a Christmas fund for the strikers. Let’s have him talk to the papers, give us a little cover.”

  “A bunch of church ladies isn’t going to cow Coventry,” said Doug, fingering his newly naked upper lip. He’d shaved his mustache the day after the infamous Channel 8 television interview, and when he wasn’t talking he’d developed a nervous tic of drawing his index finger furtively across his upper lip.

  “If the point is for us to shine through as the good guys, having a photo of Father Pete surrounded by donated stuffed animals and boxes of clothes is just the ticket,” said Kate. “What’s more, Christmas is only five weeks away. And the hospital’s arranged a huge holiday bash for the scab nurses with prime rib and a raffle for a big-screen TV. We need to show our people the community is behind them. You know, “ ‘Local Church Rallies Around Valiant Strikers.’”

  “This isn’t Boys Town, you know. As much as we all like Father Pete, in real life Bing Crosby doesn’t smile a twinkling smile and save the day. If something doesn’t break by the end of December, we’re going to have to rethink our options.”

  No one liked to consider this point. We knew, much as we hated to admit it, that Doug was right.

  “So, have we got them on the ropes yet?” Ron asked at the beginning of week three, phoning from his chiropractor’s office, where he faithfully shows up every Tuesday because he has a fixed belief that one of his legs is shorter than the other and needs to be stretched weekly.

  “Not even close, Ron. We’re still dancing around the ring.”

  We’d begun leaking the damning research on Jet-a-Nurse as each piece of data passed muster with the Toilers’ paranoid lawyer. The hospital census went down as patients with elective surgeries postponed their procedures and patients with the option of choosing Providence hospitals went there.

  “I heard Coventry might ask for a mediator,” said Ron.

  “That’s just posturing. They’re not ready to cave in yet. Nowhere near. Ask Tony if you don’t believe me.”

  “No, no. I believe you.” Ron didn’t enjoy dealing with Tony directly. They spoke different masculine dialects. Tony’s language was a gruff, cut-to-the-chase Morse code, and Ron’s a needlessly embellished, confidence-man patter.

  “Are you drowning back at the office, Ron? I know it’s a crazy time of year, but I don’t think I can work this one long distance. Much as I’d like to.”

  “I’m the person who sent you in there, I shouldn’t complain.”

  “Think of your final bill to Weingould. That’ll make you smile.”

  “Yeah. Hold on, this is the part that hurts.”

  I heard him moan as the chiropractor pulled on his hamstrings. For a second I wondered if that was what Ron sounded like in bed. It’s funny how, even with men you despise, you sometimes think you’d like to give it one quick try. They say women are the monogamous sex, that we have fewer lustful thoughts than men do. Men must feel safer in this belief, which is why they cling to it.

  “Fill me in now and then,” said Ron. “I don’t want to be blind-sided.”

  Ron frequently spoke as if his staff were engaged in an ongoing conspiracy to make him look foolish and ill-informed in front of clients. In reality, Ron’s staff were always trying to get him to sit still for half a minute so as to keep him posted on late-breaking developments with their accounts. Memos didn’t work; Ron refused to read them, a stance you had to admire.

  I’d barely hung up with Ron when Margaret, who liked to man the switchboard, came over to announce, “Your cousin is on the phone.”

  She was wearing a clay brooch shaped like a pilgrim’s hat. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s seasonal jewelry.

  “Lou-lou, how are you-you?” I said, an old joke we’d found funny when we were ten.

  “Wrong cousin.”

  “Johnny? What’s up? Are you okay?”

  “Of course I’m okay.”

  He rarely made phone calls from work. The place was far too loud and busy. In the background, one of the mechanics was testing an exhaust system. I could hear him revving the engine and the clearly audible roughness still left.

  Johnny yelled, “Larry, make sure you tighten the joints on that intake pipe.”

  I said, “You guys used a replacement part, didn’t you? He’s never going to get it totally quiet now. I hope Larry told the customer. It’ll save money but he won’t get as quiet a ride.”

  “God, Nicky. Don’t you think I know my business?”

  “Most customers don’t understand replacement parts. They worry they’re getting shortchanged. You have to explain it to them up front, that’s my feeling.”

  “I didn’t call to hear your views on replacement parts.”

  “Why did you call?”

  “To hear your lovely voice.”

  “Johnny. Spill.”

  “It’s Louise. She’s really hurt Betsey’s feelings, and for no reason. I don’t know what’s going on with her these days.”

  “What did she do?” I hoped that Louise had thwarted Betsey in another tasteless wedding idea. I wouldn’t put it past Betsey to try to incorporate her cat in the wedding party, perhaps as flower girl.

  “She told Betsey she wouldn’t be a bridesmaid, and she gave her no good excuse at all.”

  “A bridesmaid? Betsey already has all her bridesmaids, doesn’t she?”

  “One dropped out. She was waiting for her Foreign Service assignment, and she got it. So she’ll be in New Delhi in June, and that’s too far to fly back even if they’d let her.”

  “So Betsey thought of Louise, of all people? They aren’t even close. They don’t even go shopping together.”

  “She thought it would be nice to have someone from my family.”

  “And she didn’t think of me?”

  I made sniffly weeping sounds.

  “She said that you once told her that you thought most weddings were hokey bourgeois displays and that you wanted to be married on Burnside Bridge at Antietam, at dawn, with only a battlefield guide or two as a witness. She said that you said the slaughter of the Civil War was a fitting metaphor for the future of most marriages.”

  “I was joking around. Although the Burnside Bridge is very erotic, Johnny. You should go there sometime with someone fun.”

  “Betsey said that you also said that you’d once deliberately exposed yourself to the Hong Kong flu to get out of a bridal shower.”

  “So I’m not on the short list?”

  “Not even if she has to get Boy George to stand in, in full drag.”

  “Damn. And I was looking forward to wearing the dress.”

  Like most brides, Betsey did not want to be upstaged by her bridesmaids. Unfortunately, the linen potato sack that Betsey had chosen for the wedding dress left very few less appealing options for the bridesmaids’ attire. Betsey had finally decided on a hideous button-down blouse and skirt combination, chosen ostensibly for its post-wedding usefulness. The fabric was a pale blue sailcloth, and the blouse had elbow-length sleeves and a wide pleated collar. You could upholster a sofa with all the excess material in the skirt. Not
an outfit for Louise, whose pink-and-white complexion was washed out in anything but simple lines and subtle, warm colors.

  “Betsey asked Louise very tactfully, she said, and Louise turned her down flat.”

  “Louise didn’t even want to do a reading at the wedding, Johnny, remember? Why would she want to be a bridesmaid? Especially a substitute bridesmaid. Can’t Betsey ask anyone else?”

  “She decided that since her half of the wedding party is blond so far, she needs another blond.”

  “Well, how could Louise ever resist a compliment like that? What’s gotten into the girl?”

  “It’s not that much trouble, Nicky. It’s one day of her life.”

  “It is that much trouble, Johnny. That just shows how much you know. It’s going to the damn shower, and buying the dress, and getting shoes dyed to match it, and getting measured for fittings once the dress comes in. And getting thingies to go in your hair.”

  “Thingies?”

  “You know, silk rosebuds or a little tiara or whatever the bride inflicts on you. Betsey’s so damn nature-loving she’ll want them to stick hay in their hair, for all I know. Anyway, it’s a pain in the ass of monumental proportions, being a bridesmaid.”

  “I think you’re exaggerating.”

  “How many times have you been a bridesmaid? By the way, if she agrees to do this, who would you pair Louise up with?”

  “Bob Sanders.”

  “Bob Sanders? Oh, yeah, she’ll have a great time with him. His idea of conversation is reviewing the transmission problems of the 1972 S-Class Mercedes. Why not Dennis Flannery?”

  “She’s too short for him.”

  “Or he’s too good-looking for her.”

  “Dennis goes through women like Kleenex, Nicky. I’m not putting Louise with him.”

  “Yeah, it would be awful if Louise got to spend your wedding with someone charming and self-assured and sexy. Could it be you’re jealous?”

  “I should have known better than to call you,” Johnny said. I could hear Joey shouting for him in the background.