My first job was to clean the needles and syringes that had been used during the day. Our limited supply of autoclaves was strained past capacity by the influx of new cases. We had to fall back on the old-fashioned procedure of washing instruments in ether, then plunging them into boiling water. But, as I discovered the next morning, making rounds under the careful eye of a doctor, the ends could become plugged. When I jabbed the needle into a patient’s arm sometimes nothing came out. This was unpleasant for the patient and for me. I guessed that the problem was the hard water I’d washed them in. So I did what Mama Kathy would have done—after dinner I went outside and collected snow. Melting it took a long time with very little water to show for it. And I didn’t get to bed until after the bell.
However, I had soft water in which to sterilize my needles, and next day when the resident had me start an IV, my needle glided in smoothly without sticking. Afterward, the girls wanted to know my secret. When I told them I had gone out and collected snow, they said I was crazy.
I had collected snow before. When I was little I made ice cream by taking Mama Kathy’s vanilla and shaking it into newly fallen snow. Thinking this, I realized a week had gone by with no word from anybody. Just as I began to worry, a whole packet of mail arrived, two letters from Vancouver and one without stamps, meaning armed forces. I was most surprised hearing from Georges. Georges dear—I remembered him in his magician’s cape (which was Mama’s apron worn inside out but with a Georges flair), waving one of Papa’s good dress handkerchiefs and, over his protests, making it disappear. Georges, Georges, can’t you make the war go away? Georges dear, where are you? North Ireland with the 80th? Libya? Egypt?
Mama Kathy and Connie were embarked on their own adventure. Mama had consented to pull up stakes after all. They were in Vancouver machining spare parts for planes at thirty-six dollars a week. With wages like that they could put by for the rainy day Mama was always expecting.
But there was sad news as well, the kind that was in almost every letter these days. The Clacks’ youngest son had volunteered and was missing in action. I paused a moment to remember his pleasant, freckled face and readiness to laugh.
Then turned to the lively descriptions of life in Vancouver. They had found a comfortable apartment, but with no growing thing about. Mama had lugged in a flower box, in which they planned to raise a tomato vine. Down the street in the schoolyard a section had been set aside for a communal victory garden where they donated what free time they could.
I felt the love behind the ordinary sentences and drank in every word. Both Georges and Connie asked if I’d heard from the other. I knew how hard it was for them to be apart.
My own free time was Sundays and a half day on Saturday. Mandy and I went to the library at the first opportunity to find out about Indians. We carried several volumes to the table; Mandy sat on one side, I on the other. My tome started back in 1763 when the Crown laid claim to all unoccupied land.
I leaned across to Mandy and read the paragraph in an undertone, adding, “The Indians, being nomadic, didn’t occupy any land at all.”
“So the Crown took it all. Pretty neat if you can get away with it.”
“Oh, they were fair—according to their lights. Indians were allowed the use of selected lands. ‘Selected lands’ is code for reserves. And here’s something they don’t teach you in mission school: even today the Indians don’t hold legal title to their reserves.”
“I tell you what,” Mandy said. “When we’ve finished off the Germans, we’ll go to Ottawa and march on the Canadian government, make them give it back.”
“Here it tells about the welfare system instituted for the aboriginals. Instead of justice—handouts.”
“That fits with what I’m reading. Two and a half times more poverty among Indians, three times the prenatal death rate.”
“But they’re starting to fight back. Listen to this. It was proposed in one of the tribal councils that they stop thinking of the money as charity and call it rent, rent owed them on the land.”
We’d done enough digging for one day and absorbed all we could of Indian rights. Mandy was hungry, and when she mentioned it, so was I. We splurged on sandwiches and a soda.
“In school,” Mandy said thoughtfully, “I remember reading how the tribes escaped extermination in the States by fleeing to Canada, where they were discriminated against but not slaughtered in those terrible Indian wars.”
“You don’t have to fight a war,” I responded, “if you can get it all with a forked-tongue paper.”
We didn’t go back to the library. Mandy had other things to do, and I didn’t like the feelings of anger and resentment that had been stirred up in me. That was no way to be joyful.
The next fortnight I was assigned to blood draws, which entailed going up and down the rows of beds taking blood, smearing the plasma onto glass slides, and labeling and keeping them straight. The second-year nurses complained at this acceleration of our training. We had been promoted from bedpan duty much too fast, in their opinion.
The number of patients on crutches distressed me. They were so young, these boy-men without feet or legs, the lucky ones in casts. I watched my chance and slipped into the stock room to try crutches myself. I spent half an hour swinging about on them. At the end of that time I was exhausted and my armpits were sore. As a result I sewed additional padding onto those waiting to be used, and sprinkled them liberally with baby powder.
Mandy kept a diary in her underwear drawer. It had a vellum cover and tiny gold chain and key. I wondered what she said about me. I think she was disappointed that I wasn’t more fun, that I had my nose in a book all the time.
At night, instead of chatting, I sat late, memorizing bone and muscle structure for hands and feet, and I was working on the neck. There were no plots or stories in these books, but after a while I managed to weave the charts and graphs into tales of saving lives.
Besides Saturday half days we students had all of Sunday to allow for church attendance. This, I often thought as I turned the pages of my hymnal, is the sin city Mama Kathy worried about.
Mandy was asked out a lot. Several times we double-dated. But I had the feeling that it took a good deal of manuevering on Mandy’s part. I was invariably self-conscious and uncomfortable and finally persuaded Mandy that I preferred a good book, or listening to Frank Sinatra and the Andrews Sisters, or studying French by puzzling my way through Le Devoir. Also I was familiarizing myself with the big bands, Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. They set your feet tapping—that is, until they broke off the music for news flashes.
General MacArthur withdrew to Bataan. They used the word withdrew but it didn’t fool anyone. It was a retreat, a rout, and the rich oil fields of the Dutch East Indies fell to the Japanese. They took Singapore and the struggle was now for Java. In the Java Sea on February 27 we lost five warships in a seven-hour battle. The Japanese sustained slight damage to one destroyer. By March 9 the last Allied troops in Java surrendered.
I gave up reading the papers. It didn’t do to think of all those young men dying horribly out there on unknown beaches or winding up in ward B without faces, without limbs. They put their lives on the line and it wasn’t enough. We were losing, losing badly—over six million tons of shipping in the Atlantic and endless square miles of territory in the South Pacific.
A new load of wounded were brought in from ships sunk in the North Atlantic, some off our coast. The protective attitude the Sisters had endeavored to maintain for us new girls was a thing of the past. We were, you might say, posted to frontline trenches and found ourselves in the thick of things.
The first time I was called on to hold down the head and shoulders of a patient in the throes of a gastric bleed, whose body contorted and whose blood splattered my uniform and my shoes, I almost passed out myself. Instantly I was in the little back bedroom, and it was Papa. Somehow I managed to stay on my feet and, afterward, in the bathroom, splash water over my face. I dabbed at my uniform and shoes, mak
ing a solemn resolution as I did. A resolution I broke the very next day.
I was present at an amputation. It was all right when the form was swathed by a sheet, but then a mangled leg was sterilized and a surgical saw—which was nevertheless a saw—bit into flesh and began to cut. I swayed on my feet . . . that wasn’t a human being under the drapes . . . this wasn’t happening to a human being. The room swirled. I passed the bandage roll I was holding to the person next to me and raced for the bathroom.
I slammed the door shut and leaned against it. The gastric bleed, now this. At the first sight of ligaments and tendons, I’d given way. I hadn’t the stuff to make a nurse. I couldn’t look at dismemberment in a cold, professional way. I’d blown it.
“Don’t feel too bad, Kathy.”
I hadn’t noticed Sister Eglantine washing her hands in the corner.
“Compassion is very important in a nurse. The very best nurses have it in good measure. If you can look for the first time on an amputation unmoved, you’re not much of a human being. And you have to be a human being first.”
I took my hands from my face. Sister Egg, the girls called her, because she was a good egg. Short, dumpy—everything about her could be drawn with circles, even to her rimless spectacles.
“It comes in time,” Egg continued, “standing up to it, seeing it for what it is, a lifesaving procedure.”
“You think, in time—?”
“My dear, if I were a betting woman, I’d go right down to the East Side and I wouldn’t stop till I got to the funeral parlor on St. George. But I wouldn’t go in there. I’d go next door to the basement and take a seat at barbotte and roll my dice, and I’d wager everything on you—your guts, your gumption, and the fact that you’ll make a fine nurse someday.” She folded her hands over her stomach and grinned broadly. “How’s that for confidence?”
Sister Egg swept away self-doubts. She had seen girls come and go. She knew. She knew the ones who would make it. “Besides,” she said, “it’s really the fault of the accelerated program. Ordinarily, a first-year student would not be exposed to such a drastic procedure. But there’s no help for it. It’s the war.”
This seemed reasonable to me. With renewed confidence I went back to the surgical area and stood up to the lecture on professional conduct I received from the surgeon, Dr. Bennett.
To prove to Sister Egg she had not been wrong about me, I took to reading to my amputee patient. It turned out he was British. He told me he didn’t want to go home. He couldn’t face the pity and especially the way they would try to hide it. “They’d be so damned understanding,” he said.
I discovered he was fond of poetry—“To hold infinity in the palm of your hand, eternity in an hour.” That evening he had a hemorrhagic discharge under the skin. Dark purplish areas became less as I applied compresses, but I still shuddered at the twenty-three stitches with which the leg came to an end. “. . . Eternity in an hour,” I repeated to myself.
Mandy was busy weekends, so I took to going to the movies with Sister Egg. We went to the old Roxy Theater, the Palace, and Loew’s. Like me, Egg could never get enough. We sat through double features, short subjects, Fox Movietone, and Pathe newsreels.
The newsreels were hard to watch. Wounded stacked like cordwood waited to be moved to aid centers. Suffering looked artificial on young faces. They were my own age and younger.
Another clip showed the result of the blitz in one London back street, a dazed grandmother emerging from an air raid shelter. She walked a block to her home. It wasn’t there. Nothing was there. Then she spotted something, a pan, a little bent but still serviceable. She began to sift through the rubble, saving a torn quilt, a cracked mirror from her life. I chose this time to get popcorn. Egg didn’t comment on these absences, but nothing got by her.
We only had a single movie theater in my out-of-the-way home in Alberta, and I didn’t go on a regular basis as I did here. Weekly I blew my nose through hopeless romances and parted lovers.
Egg leaned toward me in the dark. “Go ahead, you’re entitled to a good cry. After all, we don’t permit you girls to show emotion no matter what lies under the bandages you unwrap. This is one way of crying for the boys on the ward.”
Bull’s-eye! I hadn’t known it myself. How had Egg? She had lived three times longer than I, and behind her childlike face was a world of knowledge.
Then I caught her before the lights came up, dabbing at her eyes. “We’re two of a kind,” she admitted. “But don’t blackmail me with the girls.”
We enjoyed a good cry, but we laughed too, at the Schnozz and the antics of Jerry Colonna. I stored up prat falls and slap-stick situations for the moments I dressed a septic arm or wrote lies for the British boy who had lost a leg. Although there were others in the same condition, I suppose I empathized particularly with him because he was so far from home. And then of course I’d been there when it happened.
Our long winter was almost gone, and one Sunday in early March Mandy suggested ice skating at Berry Pond. I was glad to fall in with the idea, especially as the first thaw would bring an end to a sport I loved. This was a typical Montreal day—cold. I double-dressed, hoping to keep warm that way. Mandy put on two sweaters under her skating outfit but, twisting and turning before the mirror, decided the extra padding made her look fat.
But Mandy was more complicated than anyone gave her credit for. Before we left the room I was wearing her best and warmest sweater.
It was good to be outside, good to leave the hospital behind. We ran down the stairs, our skates over our shoulders, and walked briskly, swinging a free arm, making footprints in the crusty snow that was starting to soften under the sun. We blew our breath before us in frosty puffs.
There were already quite a few skaters on the pond. “It looks like a postcard come to life,” Mandy enthused.
We dusted off one of the logs that had been pulled up as improvised bleachers, and sat down. Then began the job of fastening on the skates. Mandy was finished first. Her skates belonged to her, while mine were borrowed. As she waited for me, Mandy studied the skaters. “Look,” she exclaimed, “there’s that cute intern that transferred in last week. Robert. Robert Whitaker II.”
“How do you know? Have you met him?”
“I looked at his application—a picture is enclosed, you know. I’m not so nearsighted that I can’t spot a good thing. You have to admit he’s attractive. Six feet tall, from Nainaimo on Vancouver Island, son of Dr. and Mrs. Robert Whitaker. He’s twenty-six years old—”
“And he’s had mumps and measles and his tonsils out,” I snapped. Now I understood the reason for this excursion. “How’d you know he’d be here?”
“You’re not angry, are you? I overheard Dr. Finch giving him directions.”
I finished tying my laces and stood with a bit of a wobble. I’d been on ice since I was three, but this was the first time this year. I followed Mandy and cut myself a nice line to the middle of the pond, tried a turn, then several. It was exhilarating—only, my teeth were cold. Other people get cold ears and noses. With me it’s teeth, and as far as I know they don’t have tooth-muffs.
I realized I was here simply as window dressing, and I watched Mandy’s manuever with interest. Her plan was simple. She skated backward and plowed into him. They both wound up sitting on the ice. She begged his pardon and introduced herself. Robert Whitaker II or III or whatever hadn’t a chance.
Skating straight for me, they came to a T-stop, and I was introduced.
I liked him. And I certainly saw why Mandy did. He was nice looking and had a great build.
“Imagine,” she said, “Robert’s joined the hospital staff!”
“Really?” I tried to sound as though I were processing new information.
They glided away to “The Skater’s Waltz.” Mandy looked marvelous. Her cheeks were pink with the cold, and her smile dazzling. I fought down a twinge of jealousy. Sometimes it’s hard being the roommate of the prettiest girl in the program.
/> I lowered my head into the wind and, with my hands clasped behind my back, took a racing stance and zoomed twice around the pond to their once. It was invigorating to be on ice, with your toes and your teeth freezing.
They came alongside. “Robert’s invited us for hot chocolate.”
Steamy hot, it opened a path of warmth inside. Robert told us he came from a large family, two brothers and a sister. “My dad’s just a small-town doctor. What there is has to stretch. So I mostly worked my way through school, did KP at the frat house, drove an ambulance, got by on a scholarship. You know, scrounged. Managed one way or another.”
He got by with Mandy too. She had met her intern, and from then on they were very thick. She kept saying it wasn’t serious, but it looked to me that it was. She spent every available minute with him.
The nursing staff was constantly being rotated and I was transferred to what I was told was a responsible job, but one I didn’t like as much as it had nothing to do with nursing. While I preferred being on the wards and felt I did more good there, I realized of course that someone had to receive medicines and store and dispense drugs. I discovered the job was largely a matter of keeping records. We were short on supplies and once, when we ran low on disinfectants, were told to add salt to water and use it. Before my time there’d been some kind of scandal regarding drugs and they were very security conscious, doing everything by the book.
Shortly after I’d logged on, the driver of a lorry came in with boxes and crates which he began piling in front of my desk.
“You have to sign for it, miss.”
The voice had an odd lilt, almost an accent. I looked up into eyes that could have been my own, except they were crinkled in laughter, and were in fact joyous.
I smiled back into a face as dark as my own. The driver, in spite of army fatigues, was Indian.
He had apparently craned over and spotted my signature on the papers before me, because he said, “Right here, Kathy.”
I tried to remain businesslike. “Yes,” I said, taking up a pen.