Bridie perched on the other side of the bed and took the young woman’s hands in hers.
I told her, I’m making you ready now…
I disinfected her vulva with Lysol solution, scrubbed it with soap, and then douched her vagina with a syringe to make sure the doctor wouldn’t pass any germs from outside to inside.
Dr. Lynn murmured, Relax your muscles, dear, I won’t be long.
Mary O’Rahilly made no protest, but I could hear her breathing quicken. She coughed convulsively.
I knew the doctor was feeling with one finger for the edge of the cervix, hoping not to find it; only when the tissue thinned so much it was undetectable would the woman be ready to start pushing.
Dr. Lynn pulled out her gloved hand. I believe I’ll break your waters now to move things along.
She turned her head to me and murmured, Given the circumstances.
Clearly Mary O’Rahilly wasn’t much further on than when she’d come in this morning. A few months ago, we’d have let her take as much time as she needed, but the doctor wanted to spare the young woman the double burden of the grippe and days of exhausting labour in this makeshift ward.
So I went and got the tray with the long sterilised hook.
She burst into tears at the sight.
Oh, the doctor won’t be poking you with that, Mrs. O’Rahilly. It’s just to make a little opening in the bag of fluid the baby’s swimming in.
She’d probably never heard of the amniotic sac either.
Two towels, please, Bridie?
I folded them under Mary O’Rahilly, who let out a rat-a-tat-tat of nervous coughs. I douched her again. This wretched brownout; I took out my small battery-powered torch and aimed it so Dr. Lynn could see what she was doing. (German manufacture, of course. A miracle it had lasted four years; I never let it out of my sight.)
The doctor deftly opened Mary O’Rahilly with her left hand and slid the hook in, guarded by the fingers of her right, then stared into the distance as if navigating a mountain pass by night.
Amniotic fluid leaked out. It was clear, in the sharp beam of my torch; no greenish, yellowish, or brownish traces of meconium, which would be a strong hint that we should get the baby out fast.
Excellent, said the doctor.
I pulled down Mary O’Rahilly’s nightdress and helped her to sit up.
She shivered and sucked on her cooling whiskey. Will it stop hurting now, Nurse?
Her innocence bruised my heart. Ought I to break it to her that we were trying to make her pangs come faster and harder, powerful enough to squeeze out her baby?
Instead I said, That should have made some room in there and hurried things along a bit.
Bridie took away the wet towels and I straightened up the bed.
I went over to the doctor, who was stripping off her gloves. I said quietly, There’ll be no midwife here once I go home tonight, only a general nurse.
Dr. Lynn nodded tiredly. Then I’ll be sure to check up on Mrs. O’Rahilly before I go off duty, and I’ll ask—who is it, Prendergast?—to look in on her in the small hours.
After she’d gone, Honor White coughed up more sputum. I gave the cup to Bridie to empty and rinse out with carbolic.
The lamps turned back up just then, which was a relief.
I took a fuller look at the newcomer’s chart and noticed that all it said after Husband’s name was White, with no Christian name, and below Husband’s occupation, only a blank. So there wasn’t actually a husband; Mrs. must be a courtesy title. One of those things that had been very shocking before the war but were rather less so now; were there more illegitimate births or did it just seem to matter less when so many men weren’t making it home? A fervent Catholic, though, in a temperance league, and pregnant out of wedlock, perhaps for the second time; that combination did intrigue me. At any rate, I never gave an unmarried patient any grief for her situation—though the same couldn’t be said for some prigs of the old school such as Sister Luke.
At the side, under Transferred from, I recognised the name of an institution just a few streets away, a large mother-and-baby home where women went to bear unwanted children. Or were sent, perhaps; I was hazy on the details. The whole phenomenon was so shrouded in shame. It was known that if a woman got into trouble she’d be taken in by the nuns; these institutions dotted the country, but nobody ever said much about what they were like inside. What had happened to that first child of Honor White’s, I wondered—had it lived?
Over at the sink, where Bridie was washing up, I said in her ear: I know you have a way of chatting to the patients—
Sorry, I’m an awful blabbermouth.
No, no, it sets them at ease. But Mrs. White…please don’t ask anything about her circumstances.
Bridie’s eyebrows contracted.
She, ah, went to school before the bell rang.
The young woman showed no sign of knowing that phrase.
Unwed. (I barely whispered the word.) From one of those mother-and-baby homes.
Oh.
I wonder what’ll happen after the birth, I murmured. It’ll be adopted, I suppose.
Bridie’s face closed up. Go into the pipe, more likely.
I stared; what could she mean?
Nurse Julia, I need the lavatory.
I lifted down a bedpan and brought it over to Delia Garrett.
Not that. Let me go—
Sorry, you’re still on bed rest for at least a few days.
(It was actually supposed to be the full week after a birth, but I couldn’t spare the cot for that long.)
I tell you, I can walk!
I was glad to hear Delia Garrett sounding more like her snappish self. Come on, let me slip this pan under you and you’ll be all set.
With a huff of breath, she heaved up one hip to make room for the cold steel.
I took her pulse. No fever, I could tell from her skin, but I leaned in to take a covert inhalation. I prided myself on having a nose for the first hint of childbed fever, and all I was getting was sweat, blood, and whiskey—but I’d stay vigilant.
I heard the urine let down at last, and Delia Garrett gasped.
Two beds over, the new patient let out a ravaging cough as if her lungs were being torn to pieces. I went around Mary O’Rahilly’s cot and got Honor White propped up against a wedge-shaped bedrest.
Her pulse and respirations were still scudding along. She crossed herself and murmured, It’s just deserts.
Your flu? Don’t be thinking that way, I said soothingly. There’s no rhyme or reason to who’s getting struck down.
Honor White shook her head. I don’t mean just me.
I felt foolish for having jumped to conclusions.
All of us. (She heaved a crackling breath.) Serves us right.
All of us sinners? I wondered. This might be religious mania.
She gasped: For the war.
Ah, now I caught her drift. Human beings had killed so many at this point, some said nature was rebelling against us.
Honor White breathed, God save us.
It was a prayer of hope, but I all I could hear in this woman’s husky voice was mortification and loneliness.
Delia Garrett demanded, Do you mean to leave me on this thing all evening?
I lifted the bedpan out from under her, wiped her clean, then fetched antiseptic gauze and dabbed her stitches ever so gently.
Bridie, could you empty and rinse this in the lavatory? And get me another chilled pad for Mrs. Garrett.
Good evening, Nurse Power.
I turned to see Sister Luke addressing me through her mask, looking as starched as ever.
Where had the hours gone? I glanced at the clock and saw it was nine o’clock on the dot. I supposed I’d feel bone-weary if I let myself think about it. But I didn’t want to leave.
I noticed that both Mary O’Rahilly and Honor White were rigid, laying eyes on the night nurse for the first time—she was an Egyptian mummy come to life.
Sister Luke sna
pped the string of her eye patch as she tightened it. How did you get on today?
I couldn’t think how to sum up all that had been packed into these fourteen hours. I pictured their faces: Ita Noonan taken off in convulsions, despite all I did; the unnamed Garrett girl born dead before I could do anything for her at all. Her mother might have bled out, though, but hadn’t. Such an arbitrariness to all their fates.
In a low voice, I brought Sister Luke up to date. Mrs. White’s pneumonia needs watching, I told her, and so does Mrs. Garrett’s wound. The only one in labour is Mrs. O’Rahilly, who hasn’t been making much headway, so Dr. Lynn’s just broken her waters.
Sister Luke nodded as she hung up her apron. Having a long old time of it, are you, Mrs. O’Rahilly?
The girl managed a nod and a wet cough.
The nun quoted philosophically, Well, Woe unto them that are with child.
Irritation stiffened my spine. Some older nurses seemed to think every woman who’d had relations with a man—even her husband—should expect the punishment that followed. I hardly liked to leave this weary and frightened girl in the nun’s hands.
I said, Mrs. O’Rahilly may have more chloral to help her sleep through her pangs, if need be.
But what would the night nurse consider need?
I warned her, If the pangs get much stronger or start speeding up, step into Women’s Fever and have them call a midwife down from Maternity, right?
Sister Luke nodded.
And as there are so few physicians on duty, Dr. Lynn’s given permission for any of these patients to have whiskey, chloroform, or morphine.
Above the mask, the nun’s eyebrows arched at this breach of protocol.
Bridie dashed in with the chilled moss pad.
Sweeney, have you been making yourself useful?
It seemed a curt form of address, but Bridie only shrugged.
I took the pad from her hand and said, Indispensable, in fact.
That made the corners of Bridie’s mouth turn up.
The nun was unpacking an apron. The queue I passed outside the picture house! Grown men, women, and children, all gasping to get into the great germ box.
Well, the small pleasures of the poor, I murmured as I got my coat on. Can you blame them?
Sister Luke jerked a fresh pair of mackintosh sleeves up past her elbows. Courting death, so they are. Off you go now, Sweeney.
Her rudeness took me aback.
But Bridie grabbed her coat and left the room.
I said a quick good night to my three patients and put my cape and bag over my arm.
I thought I might have lost her, but I spotted her below me. Bridie!
I caught up to her and we headed down the noisy staircase together. You shouldn’t let Sister Luke boss you about that way.
Bridie only smiled.
And she’s very harsh on cinemagoers, I added. In depressing times, doesn’t one need a cheap escape?
I saw a picture once.
Oh, yes? Which one?
I don’t know what it was called, she admitted. By the time I managed to slip off and sneak into the cinema by the side door, the story was half told.
Slip off from where? I wondered. And why sneak in by the side door—hadn’t she the price of a ticket?
Bridie said, But I do remember the heroine was only gorgeous, a wee slip of a thing. She was marooned, and this fellow showed up, and next thing, they had a baby!
She laughed a little bashfully.
Then wouldn’t you know, another ship turned up with his wife on it…
I asked, This was a couple of years ago?
The title came back to me. Hearts Adrift, I told her. Mary Pickford and…I forget.
Mary Pickford? echoed Bridie. I didn’t think she’d have an ordinary name like Mary.
She’s quite something, isn’t she? Nothing ordinary about her.
Hearts Adrift; Bridie brought out the phrase with a slow savor. Oh, I’m getting it now, adrift because they’re shipwrecked.
Didn’t you love her in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm?
I’ve only seen the one picture.
Sympathy stopped me in my tracks. Once, in her roughly twenty-two years? I’d been going to the cinema ever since I’d come up from the country, and Tim came along with me after he moved to Dublin. Did Bridie’s parents not let her out in the evenings or hadn’t they two pennies to rub together? But I couldn’t shame her by asking.
I continued down the steps. Then it’s as well it was a good one, I suppose.
Bridie nodded with one of her gleaming grins.
The plot of Hearts Adrift was coming back to me. At the end, when Mary Pickford leaps into the volcano…
I thought I’d die with her!
(Bridie’s eyes as wet as shore pebbles.)
I said, I can’t remember what happens to the baby, though. Do the married couple take it away with them?
No, no, she has it in her arms when she jumps.
Bridie mimed that, protective arms caging the invisible infant on her chest, her face lit up with ecstasy.
It was such a pleasure to be able to chat for a minute without worrying about patients. But at the base of the stairs, staff pushed past us in the hullabaloo of shift changeover.
Are you all right walking home in the dark, Bridie?
I’m grand. Where do nurses sleep?
Well, big lodging houses, most of them, but I rent with my little brother. I take a tram and then cycle the rest of the way. Tim’s twenty-six.
I added that belatedly, in case I’d made him sound like a boy.
Bridie nodded.
He enlisted in ’14, I surprised myself by telling her.
Did he? How long was he gone?
Nineteen months at first. Then he sent word from Macedonia that he’d been made second lieutenant, and I should expect him home on leave. But he never turned up, and it took me three days to discover that he was in hospital with trench fever. No sooner did he get over that than they told him it had counted as his leave, and he was being posted back.
Bridie groaned.
Well, I said, one has to laugh.
(What I didn’t mention was that when Tim had finally been shipped back to me from Egypt fourteen months after that, he wasn’t speaking.)
Good night, then, Julia.
I was still oddly unwilling to let the conversation end. Have you far to go?
Bridie jerked her thumb left. Only down the street.
Her eyes dropped briefly.
She added, To the motherhouse.
Oh, now I understood why Sister Luke took such a proprietorial tone. Bridie’s shabby clothes, too, the lack of free evenings and spending money…
The moment was awkward. I tried to make a joke: Rather funny that motherhouse is the word for an order’s main premises when there’s not a mother in the place.
She chuckled.
So you’re a—a novice, Bridie? Or is postulant the term?
A dark laugh now. I wouldn’t be a nun for a hundred pounds.
Oh, my mistake, I thought—
I just board there.
Her voice went very low.
I come from one of their homes, she added, down the country.
I registered that. It suddenly struck me as perverse that someone was said to have grown up in a home only if she had no real home.
Awfully sorry, Bridie, I didn’t mean to pry.
That’s all right.
A stiff kind of silence.
She muttered, I’d rather you knew why I’m so stupid.
Stupid?
They only sent me up to Dublin at nineteen, see, and it’s all still new to me.
Bridie, you’re the opposite of stupid!
Ah, you wouldn’t believe the mistakes I still make, she said bitterly. Handling change, reading signs, getting around on the trams, losing my way or losing my hat—
You’re a traveller in a strange land, I told her. Clever and brave.
That made Bridie beam.
Dr. Lynn, coming up from the basement, almost barged into us. I know it’s a lot to ask, but could you possibly help me with Mrs. Noonan?
I blinked, wondering what could be done for Ita Noonan now.
With the p.m.
A discreet abbreviation for postmortem.
Oh, of course, Doctor.
Frankly I’d have preferred to go home, but how could I say no to her?
The flare of Bridie’s head had already disappeared in the throng. I felt nettled that the doctor had broken up our chat.
I followed her down the stairs.
She told me, It has to be tonight, since the body will be released to the husband first thing in the morning.
Families were rarely told in so many words about autopsies; it was hard for them to understand the benefit to medicine of our hacking their loved ones about.
Then it occurred to me that I might be in real trouble. I asked, You’re not thinking Mrs. Noonan’s cause of death is in doubt?
Not at all, the doctor assured me. Since the outbreak began, I’ve been seizing any chance to do a p.m. on a flu case, especially a pregnant one.
Just my luck to run into a true scientist; I could have been on my way to bed by now. Still, Dr. Lynn’s zeal impressed me, especially considering she was living under the shadow of arrest, if the gossip was true; how did she manage to rise above her own sea of troubles and concentrate on the common good?
The mortuary was deserted. I’d been down to its white chill before, but I’d never seen it so eerily full of coffins. Six high against all four walls, like firewood stacked ready for the furnace. I wondered how the attendants remembered who was who—did they pencil the names on the sides?
So many!
Dr. Lynn murmured, This is nothing. Out at the cemetery there are hundreds of caskets piled up, waiting their turn. Hazardous to the living, I call it. The Germans—an eminently practical race— cremate their dead.
Really?
A shocking notion, but fas est ab hoste doceri, you know.
My face was blank, so she glossed that: Learn even from enemies. It wouldn’t surprise me if this flu turned out to be caused by a miasma of rot blowing over from the battlefields…
I followed her into the autopsy room, where the table was a gleaming altar: white porcelain with a central drain and deep grooves like the veins in a leaf. I put down my things as Dr. Lynn slid out one of the laden shelves and lifted off the sheet.
The Pull of the Stars Page 12