Cherry Ames Boxed Set 17-20

by Helen Wells

  When one man telephoned that he had nausea and pain in the abdomen, Cherry could hear from his breathing that he was not exaggerating. Cherry wrote down his name, address, telephone number, and symptoms. She cautioned him to take no foods, no water, no laxatives. “If you have an icebag—that will relieve your pain. Dr. Russell will call you back shortly.” The symptoms indicated appendicitis.

  She gave the message to Irene, who was pulling the charts for patients coming in that day. Then Cherry ran upstairs to change into her uniform.

  As she pinned on her nurse’s cap, Cherry thought of the young family on the top floor. How were they this morning? She would try to go up to see them some time today and help out a little, and extend Gwen’s offer.

  The early patients began coming in. Cherry and Irene Wick took turns in greeting them—“I see you’re right on time! We’ll call you in just a few minutes. There are some new magazines on the table. …” Cherry did the bloodwork since the lab technician had not arrived yet, gave the injection, wrote a memo to Dottie Nash asking for the findings on the Gatti hemoglobin (iron) count. Where was the lab technician? Dottie was late this morning. Cherry thought perhaps she had better do the Gatti blood count herself. She heard Mrs. Wick on the phone ordering so many c.c.’s of various drugs, smallpox vaccine, B12, adrenalin, typhoid shots, tetanus vaccine, novocaine, and penicillin. At the end, the medical secretary said, “You’re welcome, Mr. Bally.”

  Dottie Nash hurried in, mumbling apologies for being late. Mrs. Wick asked her, “Did you have a good time at the dance?”

  “Oh, I had a marvelous time! I did buy that dress—remember the one I told you about, Mrs. Wick—the blue? It took some managing. I’ll tell you about it later.” Dottie Nash giggled, a silly, tiny sound to issue from such a big girl. “Oh, hello, Miss Ames,” she said, and clattered off to her laboratory.

  Cherry gave the lab technician a few minutes to get her work set up. Meanwhile, she checked with the roentgenologist to whom the doctors sent patients for X-ray therapy. Dr. Fairall was having one man’s lesions treated by X ray.

  Then Cherry started for the lab carrying Mr. Gatti’s blood sample. Down the long hall, she heard Mrs. Wick’s voice. Cherry could not make out the words. But the rage—not annoyance, but rage—made Cherry wonder. What had caused Irene to change so suddenly toward Dottie? It must be something serious to arouse such fury. Had Dottie made some mistake in her work? If a medical mistake was involved here, she’d better find out, Cherry decided.

  Irene Wick burst out of the lab, rigid and pale. She stamped along the hall into an empty examining room and slammed the door shut.

  Cherry waited, then rapped at the open lab door. Receiving no reply, she went in. Dottie Nash, perched on a high lab stool, was crying like a clumsy, overgrown child.

  “Why, Dottie, things can’t be that bad,” Cherry said humorously.

  “Oh, can’t they! I’m going to be in trouble—all because of that Mrs. Wick. I thought she was my friend! I haven’t done anything bad, honestly, Miss Ames. Just a little indiscreet—foolish—”

  “Has it anything to do with your work here?” Cherry asked. “Perhaps I can help you straighten it out. You know, Dottie, everyone makes mistakes.”

  Dottie looked down at her hands, then out the lab window. “Thanks, Miss Ames, but it has nothing to do with my work.” She sniffled and gulped. “I don’t make mistakes in the lab. Only outside. You can check my work if you want. This is a personal thing. Between Mrs. Wick and me.”

  “Would you like me to put in a good word for you with Mrs. Wick?”

  “No.” Dottie stood up, blew her nose, and said shakily, “Want me to analyze that blood sample?”

  “Yes, please, as soon as you have time,” Cherry said. “I’m sorry you are so upset. You don’t really believe Mrs. Wick would do anything to injure you?”

  “No, I suppose not.” Dottie Nash wiped her eyes. “You can’t tell about Irene Wick, though. She drove Zelda away—Zelda Colt. She was so nasty and uncooperative that Zelda just couldn’t stand working here any more!”

  Cherry silently discounted Dottie’s overexcited statement. She asked who Zelda Colt was.

  “The full-time registered nurse who was here before you,” the technician said.

  “Did she resign?” Cherry asked.

  “No, Dr. Fairall fired her. Zelda left here under a cloud. Sort of mysterious. I never found out exactly.”

  Cherry was startled. She doubted that any R.N. would permit a medical secretary to drive her off a job. Besides, Mrs. Wick, though touchy and bossy, did not seem to be malicious. Yet—why had Nurse Colt been dismissed?

  Cherry would not stoop to gossiping with the staff. She asked Grey Russell, but the young doctor said, “Office politics. I don’t know the details.” She would not bother elderly Dr. Lamb with questions.

  The next day Cherry found an opportune moment to ask Dr. Fairall privately how her work compared with her predecessor’s.

  “If I can improve my performance, Doctor, or if I’m omitting to do something Miss Colt did—?”

  “You’re a better nurse than Colt!” His rather heavy, handsome face tightened. “I’d just as soon not discuss Colt. A painful subject. Nothing you can learn from it, Cherry.”

  The other nurse certainly had left under a cloud! Dr. Fairall saw Cherry’s embarrassment and said:

  “All right, I’ll tell you. In confidence. You’d better know, in case some of our patients prove difficult to get along with. Maybe it’s because Colt was unkind to them.”

  “Unkind! A nurse?” Cherry exclaimed.

  Bill Fairall impatiently rose from his desk and paced the room. “Oh, don’t talk like an idiot! Do you think every nurse, every doctor, is perfection?” He was so angry—with what Zelda Colt had done to his patients—that he glared and sputtered.

  “You know what, Cherry? With a disabled patient, Colt refused to tie his shoes when he couldn’t get down to ’em. Refused other times to help Lamb’s very old ladies zip or unzip a dress. Brusque. Unkind. Snapped at a sick person. Made a person feel he is a nuisance—no right to be here.”

  Cherry murmured, “That’s hard to believe. I suppose some patients complained to you?”

  Dr. Fairall stopped pacing and ran his hands over his face. “Actually no patient complained to me. I don’t encourage whining, you know, or self-pity! No, Colt’s poor behavior was brought to my attention by—by another source.”

  By Mrs. Wick? Cherry wondered. Were the charges true?

  “Dr. Fairall, had Nurse Colt actually done these things?”

  “Of course she did!” Then, he stopped and amended that. “I have every reason to believe she did, Cherry, because I can trust my informant. But I myself never saw Colt behave badly to a patient. Naturally, she wouldn’t in front of me—her employer!”

  “And you couldn’t very well go to the patients and ask,” Cherry said. “That would be unprofessional, wouldn’t it?”

  Dr. Fairall snorted. “A doctor is supposed to know what his staff is doing. He can’t go ask a question like that, anyway.” He hesitated, then rushed on, “And if it was true, a hypersensitive patient might get upset by my question.”

  “I see,” said Cherry. She did see, but she recalled Dottie’s statement that Mrs. Wick had driven the nurse away.

  Why? Why had Irene Wick wanted Nurse Colt out of here? Could it be because Zelda Colt had ignored—or even trampled on—Mrs. Wick’s great desire to be important around here, to take charge, to be greatly needed and valuable?

  “Dr. Fairall, it you don’t mind my asking,” Cherry said, “what was Miss Colt like? Was she really harsh?”

  “I never found her so. She may have appeared harsh to others. A little tactless, too outspoken. A little humorless. Very conscientious and reliable, one of those brisk, hard-working, efficient, middle-aged women—hard-driving—like Irene Wick.”

  The comparison startled Cherry. Had the nurse and the medical secretary been competitors to be Number On
e in running the office?

  Dr. Fairall’s telephone rang. A friend was inviting him to play tennis late that afternoon. He smiled and said, “I’ll be there, Ed, and I’ll beat you this time.”

  The doctor hung up. He said to Mrs. Wick, who was just coming in, bringing her stenographer’s notebook, “Please call my wife. Tell her I’ll be home half an hour later than we planned. Where are we going this evening?”

  “I bought tickets for you and your guests to the visiting ballet company from London,” she replied.

  So she was a social secretary sometimes, too, Cherry thought. Mrs. Wick was very close to Dr. Fairall, both in his professional and private life. Well, it was part of her job to know his whereabouts at all times.

  “Fine! Thanks, Irene. And thank you, Cherry,” Dr. Fairall said, to let her know she could go now. Irene’s notebook meant Dr. Fairall was now going to dictate either letters or more of his book. “Speaking of ballet,” he said, “have either of you had a chance to visit Leslie?”

  Irene Wick smiled deferentially at him. “I run upstairs frequently. I heard about Cherry bathing the baby on Monday.”

  “I heard about your preparing their lunch on Monday and Tuesday,” Cherry replied. The doctor beamed impartially.

  “It’s nothing. I love to cook,” Mrs. Wick said. “I ought to do lunch for you, Dr. Fairall.”

  Cherry felt puzzled. Irene Wick was contradictory. Having prepared lunch for the Youngs upstairs, Mrs. Wick almost had to offer to prepare lunch for Dr. Fairall. Yet she was doing far more acts of kindness for the Youngs than Dr. Fairall had requested.

  But how did such generosity and conscientiousness compare with her accepting that lavish dinner from the salesman, Bally?

  What about Dottie Nash’s describing the gracious Mrs. Wick as “nasty and uncooperative” with the other nurse?

  What about Mrs. Wick’s repeated urging of Cherry not to come to work so early, nor to stay so late? Was there something going on that she would rather Cherry did not observe?

  Why had Dottie been so bitterly afraid of Mrs. Wick the other day?

  Their relations had improved by now. On Thursday Cherry went into the lab to get some information. She found Mrs. Wick there with Dottie, like a sleek, poised mother cat with a clumsy, eager kitten.

  Dottie seemed happy to be back in Mrs. Wick’s good graces. She tried awkwardly with Cherry to take back what she had revealed about the medical secretary—what she had blurted out in anger and fright. Why fright?

  Another thing Cherry did not understand occurred toward the end of that second week in June. A young salesman named Ted Bernstein complained to Cherry, half-humorously, that “I can’t even sell Mrs. Wick a single, solitary, blessed item! My prices are attractive—no one undersells my firm. We have a wonderful, complete line of supplies, first-rate in everything. Now, why won’t your Mrs. Wick give me even a little, tiny order?”

  And an older, quiet salesman for still another medical supply house, a gray-haired man named Joseph La Cava, said to Cherry, “Mrs. Wick won’t let me talk to any of the doctors—too busy doctoring to see a salesman, I understand. So may I talk to you, Miss Ames? I’d like to know whether there’s any point in my calling at this office any longer. In a year Mrs. Wick hasn’t yet placed an order with my firm. It doesn’t seem fair that Mr. Bally has a monopoly, does it? Ah—excuse me, Miss Ames—but does Dr. Fairall know about this monopoly?”

  Cherry brought Mrs. Wick’s purchasing practices to Dr. Fairall’s attention, privately, impersonally. He was busy as usual—rushing between hospital and operating room and a colleague’s office.

  “I’ll take it up with Irene,” Dr. Fairall said absently. He made a note to himself to do so.

  Dr. Fairall never said another word to Cherry on this subject. He was too preoccupied by his work and many other interests to pay much attention to the management of the office. It did run smoothly, with never an annoyance or intrusion for the three doctors, Cherry acknowledged.

  She still thought the cash-into-uniform-pocket a sloppy method of accepting patients’ payments. Some days she carried around a hundred dollars in her uniform pocket; there must be much more cash in Mrs. Wick’s pocket. Yet when she checked with her Spencer Club nurse friends they said that was the way it was done in every doctor’s office they knew of. At Dr. Fairall’s they could have a little safe, but were much too busy to fuss with it. Cherry noticed that each staff person in her office carefully marked each patient’s charge card Paid. However, it still seemed to her this system of handling the doctors’ money was awfully casual.

  Cherry found it was useless to suggest any change in methods to Irene Wick. Irene was set in her ways. On Friday morning Cherry suggested that Dr. Fairall might dictate his book into a tape recorder rather than squander Irene’s time by having her take it down in shorthand. Irene nearly bit Cherry’s head off.

  “I’m sorry,” Cherry said. “I only meant that you already work so hard—”

  “Didn’t you know,” said Mrs. Wick, “that the doctor discusses his book with me, as we go along? He can’t do that with a machine!”

  Perfectly true. Cherry was appalled at how tactless she had been. To make up for it, she offered during a lull late that afternoon to help Irene with the bookkeeping.

  Irene was snowed under with a big pile of charge cards, showing doctors’ charges and patients’ payments. These figures had to be transferred, sooner or later, to the ledger—a tedious job. The account books also were needed, Cherry knew, to estimate the doctors’ income taxes and so were open to government inspection for honesty.

  “I could do a simple copying job,” Cherry offered. “I’m careful, and if you like, I can—”

  “I never let anyone touch these books but myself!” Irene Wick snapped at her. She was so tense that she quivered. Cherry stared, shocked. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Mrs. Wick said. “By the end of Friday afternoon I’m dreadfully tired. Thanks, anyway, Cherry. The job’s not as simple as it looks. I’d have to teach you. And one tiny error can take hours of rechecking.”

  They were interrupted by Cherry’s having to talk on the phone to the R.N. in a specialist’s office, where one of Dr. Fairall’s patients had been referred. Cherry carefully wrote down the specialist’s findings. Then, getting out the patient’s chart, she asked the other R.N. a few medical questions that she felt Dr. Fairall would need to know.

  Irene Wick touched her hand. “Finished phoning? I could use your help, if you’ll forgive my stupid outburst.” She seemed concerned that she might have offended Cherry, eager to erase a bad impression.

  But Cherry had been stunned by Irene’s jealousy about handling the books herself. This was the nearest she and the medical secretary had come to a quarrel. … Had Nurse Colt blundered into this domain of money? And so provoked Irene into being “nasty and uncooperative”? An idea struck Cherry. Had the other nurse found out something about Irene—something detrimental—a not too scrupulous honesty?

  “You’re so very quiet, Cherry,” Mrs. Wick said gently. “I hope I haven’t hurt your feelings.”

  “No, no. Not at all. Just tired—on Friday afternoons, end of the workweek, as you said,” Cherry answered.

  “Look, my dear,” Irene Wick said. “If you want to work on the charge cards, or if you want to total what we took in in cash and checks today—certainly, go ahead.”

  “Irene Wick remembers that Dr. Fairall put me in charge here,” Cherry thought. She felt terribly uncomfortable. She had a responsibility to her employer. On the other hand, she had to be entirely fair in supervising this woman who worked hard for her living.

  “Come on, Cherry,” Irene Wick urged her. “I’ll show you how to read these ledgers, if you wish. Because I don’t want you to doubt even for a minute that I keep the records in anything but perfect, up-to-date order.”

  Cherry muttered something reassuring. She felt ashamed of her suspicions.

  “While you do that,” the medical secretary went on, calmly but with a catc
h in her voice, “I’ll do another part of this deadly dull job—giving the cash fees to each doctor at the end of the day.”

  Mrs. Wick looked and sounded exhausted. Cherry suddenly felt tired herself. Not from her stimulating work, she knew—but from the strain of fencing with Irene Wick. And from her nerve-racking doubts.

  Still, Cherry wanted to be fair and to be friends. She reached out her hand to Irene Wick, closed one of the ledgers with the other hand, and said:

  “I apologize if I’ve said or done anything to distress you. I am really sorry. You know what, Irene? I think we’ve both done about all the work we can for today. Let’s just do the wind-up details, and then call it a day and go home.”

  Mrs. Wick sighed in relief. “Yes, let’s. You’re right. You are a dear.” She gave Cherry a sizing-up glance that chilled her. “Have a good weekend, Cherry.”

  “I hope you have a good weekend, too,” Cherry replied politely, and left the office a few minutes later feeling anything but reassured.

  CHAPTER VII

  Sausages and Roses

  A BIG EFFORT WITH MANY HELPERS—THAT WAS THE Spencer Club’s plan this weekend for getting their summer place into shape promptly. The big push, as Cherry said.

  The four nurses had invited everyone they knew, for Saturday or Sunday or both, offering swims, a picnic, and some hard work. A few were scared off by chores. Some already had made weekend plans. Two nurses at Bertha’s clinic wanted to come and bring their young men, but had no car. They couldn’t all squeeze into Gwen’s jalopy. Dr. Grey Russell offered to bring the two couples in his car. Twelve persons promised to come—“and that means probably nine will show up,” Josie figured.

  Cherry could not arrive at a clear-cut count of guests. It seemed to her that people drifted endlessly in and out of the cottage, across the overgrown grass—friends, neighbors, casual acquaintances—pushing a borrowed lawn mower or dragging mattresses out into the sun and air. Or repairing the barbecue grill, or hauling junk out of the distant barn, or resting under the elm trees, drinking lemonade from Bertha’s Thermos jug.