by Helen Wells
“Look what she did to others,” Grey said.
“And I thought she took such a pride in her work,” Cherry said wryly. She realized now that Mrs. Wick’s touchy, jealous attitudes did not stem from pride—not even from fear of losing her job. No, Irene Wick was bossy and monopolistic because she was guarding, covering up, her stealing from the doctors and virtually stealing from Bally.
“Poor Bally!” Cherry thought about the salesman. “I suppose he needed to make big sales in order to hang on to his job. But imagine paying Mrs. Wick a bribe, a rake-off, an extortion really—in order to get Dr. Fairall’s, Dr. Russell’s, and Dr. Lamb’s supply and medication orders!”
Bally had paid Mrs. Wick part of his sales commission, out of his own pocket.
“It’s ugly. Well, at least Bally won’t be arrested,” Grey answered. “Bally was as much Irene Wick’s victim as we three doctors were. He must have needed her large orders very much.”
Bally was not the only victim of Mrs. Wick in her role of purchasing agent. The lawyer’s investigators had discovered that a pharmacy and a prosthetics manufacturer were paying her cash rake-offs, in return for referring her three doctors’ patients to them. It was the pharmacy that had sent the messenger with the blank envelope—filled with cash.
Cherry and Grey both felt badly at how Mrs. Wick had frightened and dominated young Dottie Nash. She had threatened to tell that the young lab technician was a thief. Coming from Mrs. Wick, it was a bad joke! Because she’d caught Dottie borrowing overnight the price of a party dress! The lawyer said that Dottie should be reported to the police. Small sum or not, she had stolen. But Dr. Fairall would not hear of it.
Grey reported that Dr. Fairall was feeling much stronger. He still had to rest at home. Grey and an older doctor who were treating him foresaw a reduced work schedule for Bill Fairall. Fortunately, his book was finished.
“He’ll need someone to take Mrs. Wick’s place,” Cherry said. “Do you think Dr. Fairall would rehire Zelda Colt? I mean if Miss Colt does secretarial work, too? A few nurses do.”
Grey smiled at her eagerness. “I thought you’d say that, so I asked Bill Fairall. Told him you believe Irene Wick lied to him about Zelda. I told Dr. Fairall that you had called Zelda in to take your place at the last minute Monday morning. She did beautifully, according to Dr. Lamb.”
“Of course, because she cares about doing a good job,” Cherry said.
“That’s just what Dr. Fairall said. Bill Fairall is going to ask her to come back in case you ever leave, Cherry.”
Cherry looked through her eyelashes at Grey. “That may be any minute now, Doctor.”
“Stop coquetting and joking with me,” Grey said, laughing.
“I’m not entirely joking,” Cherry said. “Honestly, Grey. I received a letter from home, with a job offer that’s a real surprise to me—”
“You can’t leave, just when I’ve gotten used to working with you,” Grey said. “Besides, we haven’t had that eating contest I once challenged you to.”
“Well, if anything could keep me from a fabulous new job, it would be you, Grey dear, and a Kitchen Sink sundae,” Cherry said tenderly. She ducked as Grey threw a towel at her.
It was almost time for the party to begin. The Spencer Club nurses felt they owed a party to their friends who had helped with the summer house. Cherry had invited her employers, too. The doctors could use some cheering up after the difficult past week. She hoped Dr. Fairall would be well enough to come, even for a little while. For his convenience mainly, the party was being held in town—a picnic lunch on Saturday noon in Central Park.
Bertha had packed two immense baskets of fried chicken, deviled eggs, bread and butter and tomatoes, fruit and chocolate cake. Josie and Gwen were carrying four lightweight folding chairs that were Grey’s contribution—for Dr. Fairall or anyone else needing special consideration. Josie and Gwen earlier had found this peaceful meadow, its boundaries shaded by oak trees. From here, they could hear the tinny music of the children’s merry-go-round. The merry-go-round was the guests’ meeting place. Cherry stationed herself there, to direct them on to the meadow.
First came those ever-hungry helpers, Spud and Tottie, with the two boys who had helped, too. Cherry welcomed several former patients of the Spencer Club’s. So many more friends came that she was pleasantly surprised. Here came their Long Island neighbors, the Peterses, with their small son—they’d come into the city to visit Grandma today, as well. Cherry was delighted to see the Young entourage—led by Henry J., dazzlingly handsome and blond, and carrying the baby. Little H.J. was brown from the sun, and had grown greatly in the country; he gabbled at Cherry.
Leslie smiled at Cherry. “You did invite babies to the picnic, too? If not, please tell us.” Of course little H.J. was invited, Cherry assured them. Leslie, looking like a ballerina today in a full-skirted pink cotton dress, said Mrs. Faunce and her escort Elijah would be along soon.
Where was Grey? Cherry was beginning to wonder. Almost everyone else was here. Even elderly Dr. Lamb, rakish in a sun hat, had arrived with one of his cronies. Then Cherry saw Grey and Dr. Fairall walking across the grass toward her. Bill Fairall was thin and he did not tear along as usual. But he looked recovered and was smiling. Cherry ran to welcome him.
“Hi, Cherry,” he greeted her. “How are you? Grey called for me in a taxi. Glad he did. I wouldn’t miss you young ladies’ picnic for anything.”
“Thank you. And how are you?” Cherry asked.
“Much better,” Dr. Fairall said. “Well, some better.” Grey smiled and kept silent. Dr. Fairall said, “Grey told me you and he have something more to tell me—and Arnold Goldsmith has, too—about what Irene’s been up to.”
“Picnic lunch first,” said Cherry.
Later, gradually, they told Dr. Fairall the whole story about his trusted employee. They told Dr. Lamb, too, who joined them. Dr. Fairall seemed stunned.
“Well, it’s always essential to learn the truth,” he said. “I’m indebted to you two.”
The Youngs hesitantly came up to them.
“Are we intruding?” Leslie asked for herself and her young husband. “Dr. Fairall, we’re so happy to see you here. And we have some good news of our own to tell you. A real triumph for Henry.”
With a wife’s pride and a showman’s flair, Leslie was addressing Dr. Lamb, Grey, and Cherry, too. Henry J. looked embarrassed. He jammed his hands in his pockets, not at all the poised actor. Not in front of Dr. Fairall.
“I think you know, sir, how profoundly grateful I am to you,” Henry J. said. “Leslie is, too. Well, Dr. Fairall, I’ve been lucky enough to win a good role in a play that’s opening this fall. The second lead, in fact.”
“It’s not simply luck,” Dr. Fairall said. “I won’t embarrass you by saying it’s talent, and hard work, and”—Henry J. was perishing of embarrassment—“a lot of other good traits.”
Leslie said, “To be practical, and this was my idea—” Here Dr. Fairall grinned. “Besides the play, which may not earn a living for us, Henry has landed a bread-and-butter job in television. It pays quite well, it’s steady, and it starts right away.” Leslie gave her husband her I’ll-call-you-Julius warning look, and said, “Henry doesn’t like the television job very well. I don’t blame him. But as long as it doesn’t conflict with the play—”
“What we both do like, Dr. Fairall,” Henry J. said, not ashamed that others were listening, “is that now we don’t have to lean on your generosity. We can pay the rent now at your apartment. And I plan to pay you the rent for the time we lived there—in installments as I earn it, if you’ll be patient with me, sir.”
Dr. Fairall did not want to accept, but the Youngs insisted, as a matter of self-respect. Otherwise, they said, they would leave the brownstone soon. Irene Wick had already left, in another sense. Possibly Cherry would leave soon, too.
“What a lot of changes!” Cherry said to Grey. “What a lot has happened in that brownstone house!”
“That’s partly because,” Grey said, “you’re the kind of girl things happen to. Or should I say, you’re the kind of girl who makes things happen? Or both?”
Cherry started to laugh. “If you’ll bring me a peach or some cherries, I might tell you what I plan to do next.”
In case you missed Cherry Ames at Hilton Hospital …
CHAPTER II
Dr. Hope
CHERRY ARRIVED ON THE WARD AHEAD OF TIME THE next morning. Looking into Bob’s room, she saw a big, blond man sitting with him. He was Dr. Hope, the head nurse said.
“He’s been here for half an hour. Your Bob Smith seems to be talking to him.”
“What’s Dr. Hope like?” Cherry asked. She had never worked with a psychiatrist, and might not have a chance to do so now. She remembered that psychiatrist, literally, meant a doctor of the soul. “I should think he’d have to have a great deal of sympathy and imagination.”
“Well, my friends the Websters live next door to the Hopes,” the head nurse said in her practical way, “and they report that Dr. Hope and his two small sons are crackerjack tennis players and that the doctor groans like anyone else when it’s his turn to mow the lawn.”
Dr. Ray Watson came into the ward, said good morning to the nurses, and waited as anxiously as Cherry. It seemed like a long time until Dr. Hope came out of Bob’s room. He looked very thoughtful, but he smiled when he saw Dr. Watson.
“It’s not so bad, Ray. The boy is depressed, but he isn’t so ill that he can’t stay here. I’ll recommend that. Of course I’ll have our team of psychiatrists come over and examine him—today if they can make it. Personally, I feel hopeful for him.”
“That’s good, Harry. Glad to hear it.”
“Not that we’ll have an easy time. There’s no guarantee we can help him recover his memory,” Dr. Hope said. “But there’s a good chance. Now, which is the nurse he talked to?”
Dr. Watson introduced the head nurse and Cherry, and Ruth Dale who was just coming in. Dr. Harry Hope shook hands with all of them and said to Mrs. Peters:
“Can you arrange for Miss Ames to spend extra time with this patient?”
“I’ll get an extra nurse’s aide, so that she can, Doctor.”
Cherry was encouraged to have Dr. Hope accept her, even temporarily, as Bob’s nurse. Dr. Ray Watson went with them to a staff office on this floor. There Dr. Hope began a briefing on how they all might best take care of the doubly ill patient.
“First, I think it will be easier for Bob Smith, or whatever his true name is, to have the same nurse—a nurse he already trusts—working along with both his medical doctor and with me. … Yes, here, Ray. … You can count on me to come to Hilton Hospital daily to treat him. He’ll make better progress, I think, in your normal hospital surroundings than among our patients who are more seriously disturbed than he is.”
Dr. Hope looked with penetration at Cherry. “What did you do to get him to talk?”
“Nothing, Doctor. I spoke softly to him—bathed his feet—that’s all.”
“Well, you did the right things. He wasn’t very willing to talk to me.”
“Could it be,” Cherry suggested respectfully, “that he finds it harder to talk to a man than a woman—for some key reason?”
Dr. Hope grinned in pleasure and Dr. Watson said, “See, I told you she catches on fast.”
Cherry felt pleased and embarrassed, and later fascinated by what Dr. Hope went on to say.
An amnesic like Bob Smith had thousands of fellow wanderers. Mental health authorities in all states were doing everything possible to help them and send them home. In past centuries they, and those with more serious mental illness, had been ignorantly regarded as willfully dangerous or evil, and thrown into dungeons and chained as criminals. This practice dated back to the Middle Ages when people believed that “demons” had “taken possession” of these unhappy persons. Now, Dr. Hope said, although the medical profession and the law recognized that a few psychotics might do dangerous or criminal acts, and must be restrained, the mentally ill were treated as any other sick persons and given medical care. He added that their suffering was bewildering and intense, perhaps harder to bear than the pain of physical illness. Nowadays, though, with good care, very many became well and happy and sound citizens again.
“About Bob Smith—”
Dr. Hope said that he was—unconsciously—forgetting certain carefully selected things in his past, things that he found impossible to face. These were the very things that he must be helped to remember, and to face and deal with. Dr. Hope’s job would be a sort of detective work, to find these forgotten facts in Bob’s clouded memory. To do this, he would use various uncovering techniques.
Dr. Ray Watson asked loudly the same thing Cherry was thinking. “Talking about detective work, why don’t we call on the Hilton police force and see if they can help us? Of course they already know about the motorist’s report, and they know we have an unidentified man here as a fracture case. But we haven’t yet told the police this is an amnesia victim.”
Dr. Hope hesitated. “Asking police help doesn’t always work out. These amnesia cases can be surprisingly difficult. The clues and secrets are locked away inside the person. Making them ill, you see. However, we’ll give the police a try, Ray.”
“Bob probably will be able to remember unimportant things,” Dr. Hope said. “It will be a start, at least. Miss Ames, I wish you’d carefully examine his clothes or belongings for any—what would the police call it, Ray?”
“Any identifying feature, I guess.”
“Yes, I will, Dr. Hope,” said Cherry.
She returned to Orthopedics, tiptoed into Bob Smith’s room, and softly closed the door behind her. Her patient was dozing. Bob must have slept off his first exhaustion, for his thin face was a more normal color than it had been yesterday. But his breathing was rapid and shallow, and his hands twitched in his sleep, and he frowned.
“Nervous and upset even in his sleep,” Cherry thought. She glanced at the chart and the night nurse’s report: temperature normal, pulse 90 per minute, complained of headache; his movements were abnormally slow, a symptom of depressed feelings. Well, on his breakfast tray the teacup and plate were emptied; that was one good thing.
In the closet Cherry found Bob Smith’s shabby garments and systematically searched them. No labels, no dry cleaner’s tags, nothing in the trousers pockets. No leads, in short. In a jacket pocket, she found a small calendar for this year. Its pages were torn off up to April.
“April! This is September. Did time stop for Bob in April? Was it April when his memory blacked out? If so, where had he been in the six months since that date?”
Cherry tried the jacket’s other pockets. … Empty … another empty … wait, there was something in the inside pocket. She pulled out a piece of thin white paper. A letter. There was no envelope, hence no postmark, and the letter bore no date. It was in a feminine handwriting, without a salutation, and was signed “S.” It read:
“It was good of you to tell me what you did last evening. At the moment I didn’t understand you. I hadn’t realized that he’s under such a handicap. Now I do and I will make allowances. So don’t worry. S.”
Cherry read the note again. It hinted at more than it said. Who was “S” and who was “he”? She suddenly felt Bob Smith looking at her. She was startled but maintained her calm.
“Hello. How do you feel this morning?”
Didn’t he recognize her? He seemed to be in a hazy, dreamy state.
“Bob, I’m looking in your pockets for something to identify you. We’re trying here at the hospital to help you.”
He said weakly, “I know.”
Good! He did recognize her! He did understand. Cherry thought of things to say to him—about bringing him back to the present, about sending him home. Better not. Maybe Bob Smith did not want to go home—or maybe he had no home. She could stir up a storm of emotions in him with a few wrong words. Talking, or forcing Bob to talk, co
uld be as disastrous as giving a patient the wrong medicine. Better wait for Dr. Hope to lead the way.
“Bob, may I keep this note and the calendar?”
No answer. She took his silence for assent.
During the morning, Cherry made Bob comfortable, and applied cold compresses for his headache. Presently Miss Bond, a new employee in the Admitting Office, came in. She carried a ledger. She had been advised, evidently, to conduct the interview with Bob Smith through the nurse. He listened but would not speak.
“Can you give me the usual information?” Miss Bond asked crisply. “Name, age, address, occupation, names of any relatives?”
“I—I don’t think that’s available at the moment. Bob?” Cherry glanced at him. He looked away, dazed. Cherry shook her head at Miss Bond.
“Can you tell me,” Miss Bond continued, “how and where the patient got hurt? Any previous illnesses? Shall we list him temporarily as John Doe?”
Cherry saw tears well up in her patient’s eyes. He pulled the covers around him as if trying to hide. Cherry went to sit beside him and said:
“Miss Bond, will you excuse us now? We’ll send the information to the Admitting Office as soon as we can.”
“Well, it’s most unusual—Oh, I see. Yes, surely, Nurse.” Miss Bond left, red in the face with embarrassment.
For a few minutes Cherry held Bob Smith’s hand in silence. Then he turned his head so that he could look at her.
“I’m sorry. All mixed up. I’m so ashamed.”
“Don’t be. It’s all right.”
“I can’t even remember my own name. It’s terrifying.”
“S-sh, now. You’ll remember.”
Cherry waited. His breathing grew less agitated, more regular.
“Nurse? Miss—Miss Cherry?”
“That’s right.”
“I think I’ve been using the name of Bob Smith. I made it up. It sounded like a real name to me.”
Cherry nodded and kept silent. His hand in hers relaxed, and then he fell asleep. She felt immensely sorry for this young man. Never had she seen anyone so lost and alone.