Читать книгу Visting Nurse - Alice Brennan - Страница 4

WALKING BRISKLY down the cement path that led from the health department building where the Visiting Nurses Association was housed to the curb where her secondhand coupé was parked, Arleen Anderson grinned to herself. She pretended not to see the passing youth who had given out a piercing wolf whistle at the sight of her.

Once inside the little car, she turned the key in the switch. The motor started smoothly and purred like a kitten.

Arleen had picked up the car at a bargain price at a local secondhand automobile lot two months previously, just after she had come to Saltboro, a large industrial city, to work. The salesman, a balding sentimental man, had been moved by the sight of Arleen in the blue uniform and cape of the Visiting Nurses Association.

In the earlier days of the salesman’s marriage, when money had been scarce and jobs few and far between, one of the visiting nurses had come every day for ten days to take care of his wife, who was bedridden with an infected leg. The nurse had even showed him how to care for his baby, who was only nine weeks old at the time.

So, to him, visiting nurses were only one notch below angels. He couldn’t bring himself to let Arleen buy the car she had picked out.

“Listen, miss,” he’d told her, keeping a wary eye toward the office and his boss, who certainly would not approve of his actions, “you don’t want that car.” He added quickly, at Arleen’s puzzled look. “It’s what we call a ‘looker’—that means it looks fine outside, but it’s a lemon. Now, if you want a really dependable car. . . .”

Arleen felt a tug of gratitude toward the salesman. After all the warnings she’d been given about how everyone was out to gyp you in the big city, she certainly had not found it like that at all.

The wolf whistle sounded again. Arleen did not turn her head as she steered the car out from the curb, but she was, womanlike, very much aware of the compliment the whistle implied. And, womanlike, she was pleased to be considered attractive enough to evince such a whistle.

Blue-eyed, with soft brown hair curling in pixie fashion around her slender face, she rarely failed to attract a second glance.

Her work this April morning took her into the Leland Street neighborhood. It was an area of narrow, ugly streets and cracked sidewalks, of curbside trash cans that served as places for small boys to sit, and as places to hide in some of their games. It was an area of crumbling brick apartment houses laced together by fire escapes; an almost windowless, dark jungle.

Arleen shuddered as she parked the car at the curb, picked up her nursing satchel and walked up to one of the buildings.

As soon as she had left the car, as if it was a cue for their appearance, a group of small children surrounded it, peeking and peering.

Arleen thought, “I should go back and lock the car.” She’d been warned about Leland Street. “It’s an area of vice and crime,” she had been told. “We’ve never had any difficulty so far concerning our nurses, but We don’t want to take chances. Be extremely careful not only of your possessions, Miss Anderson, but also of yourself.”

Arleen hesitated. Perhaps she should lock the car. She half turned, and the children, again as if on cue, disappeared.

Arleen didn’t return to the car. Instead, she walked up the cracked steps and inside the small, dark hall. There was no ventilation, and the hall smelled of damp and dust, stale food, cheap whiskey.

Arleen was appalled. Nothing in her conservative, middle-class life had prepared her for the ugliness and poverty of Leland Street.

After being graduated from nursing college, she had taken a course in public health nursing, and after that she had held down a job as a private nurse. But her patients had all belonged to the middle- or high-income group. Her work as visiting nurse was, for the first time, bringing to her the reality of how people outside her own social class lived.

She consulted her book. “Mrs. Alfred Ryan. Arthritic. Bedridden.”

The Ryan apartment was on the fourth floor. Arleen plodded up the four flights of stairs. Her legs ached by the time she reached the upper hall.

She knocked at the door of the Ryan apartment and was admitted at once by a short, unshaven man in a slightly soiled undershirt and blue slacks, baggy at the knees.

He scowled at her, his blue eyes antagonistic under thick, overhanging brows. “Whata you want?”

Arleen kept her voice soft and pleasant. “I’m the visiting nurse, Mr. Ryan.”

A woman’s voice called cheerfully from inside the room, “Let her in, Al. Mind your manners, now.”

With no great show of graciousness, the man opened the door wide enough for Arleen to step inside the apartment, then slammed it shut behind her.

The “apartment” turned out to be one middle-sized room, serving as kitchen, bedroom, living room. It had one window facing the street. On the sill was a wooden box holding green plants. Violets and geraniums bloomed gaily, as if unaware of the sorry surroundings.

“Pretty, ain’t they?”

Arleen turned her attention to the center of the room and the big brass bed. A tiny, birdlike woman, with bright blue eyes belying her age, and curly gray hair softening her face, was propped up in the middle of the bed, covered by a patchwork quilt.

“Very pretty,” Arleen said softly. “You must have a green thumb.”

The woman shook her head, and twisted around to look at the man in the soiled undershirt. “Not me, miss. It’s my husband, Al, who has the green thumb. My, but you should have seen the flowers he grew when we had a downstairs place over on Kirby Street. There was windows all around the kitchen,” she said, a wistful note coming into her voice. “Boxes and boxes of flowers Al planted all around them windows. Folks used to stop just to look at them, they looked that pretty.

“We’re kind of down on our luck right now—” with an apologetic glance around the room—“but one of these days we’re gonna have a nice place again, and maybe even a yard where Al can grow all kinds of flowers.” She gave her husband an affectionate smile.

Arleen watched Al Ryan’s lips tighten. He said harshly, “Don’t go giving the new nurse a pack of lies, Neeliel You know we’re not going to get out of this place, unless it’s to move to someplace worse!” He glared at Arleen. “In thirty years of marriage I never did provide Neelie with a really decent living, and I’m providing her with less than that now. The welfare’s taking care of her, not me!”

“Now, Al, honey,” the woman chided him. “You don’t want to talk like that. Why, it’s been a real good life we’ve had, Al, and I wouldn’t have missed having it with you for anything. Things’ll get better. You just wait and see if they won’t. And I’m not going to be always laying in bed like this, either. You just mind that’s the truth!”

Al Ryan shot his wife a baffled, angry glance. He shook his head, and his hair, white and thick, stood cloudlike on top of his head.

“Listen to her!” he appealed helplessly to Arleen. “I’m sixty years old. Nobody’s going to hire me. I’m too old to get a job, and too young for social security. I keep telling her, but she won’t listen! Sometimes I honestly think she even believes that stuff she says, about how everything’s going to get real good for us one of these days!” His Adam’s apple worked vigorously as he talked. “You make her see,” he told Arleen, “that she’s got to face up to what’s real. If she don’t, she’s going to end up in one of them psycho wards. You make her see that!”

Neelie Ryan smiled sweetly up at Arleen. “Now, ain’t that just like a man? Always getting depressed, like they don’t know the bright side’s there, if you just look hard enough for it?”

She squinted up at Arleen. “My, but you don’t hardly look old enough to be a nurse.”

Arleen laughed and took off her cape, putting it carefully on the foot of the bed. “Thanks,” she said, “but I’m twenty-three.”

“My,” Neelie Ryan said, “twenty-three. Imagine that.” Her faded blue eyes held a faraway, dreamy look. “I can remember when I was twenty-three. I was doing housework and taking care of three kids for a widower upstate. I always liked doing that kind of work. It’s a whole lot better than working in some dime store. I felt that, in a way, I was helping people who needed help.” She smiled, a sudden, secret smile. “But then Al come along and I forgot all about wanting to help people. I couldn’t see no one but Al.”

The door slammed, and she sighed and said softly, “Poor Al, he feels terrible about not having a job. But it’s not as if he don’t try. He’s the tryingest man. Even that Mrs. Gibbons from welfare has to admit that, even if she don’t like Al.” She sighed again. “Al’s so proud.” As if that were an explanation.

Arleen asked for hot water, and Neelie Ryan shook her head regretfully. “These are cold-water flats. We have to heat water. There’s a pan under the stove. I’m sorry Al went off like he did, he could have heated the water for you. Watch out for that gas burner. It’s a kind of temperamental.”

“I’ll make out fine,” Arleen told her. “I’m used to temperamental gas burners. We have one in the apartment where I live.”

Neelie Ryan laughed. “You’re real pretty, too,” she said, admiringly. “What happened to the other nurse, Mrs. Kitchener? She was a very nice lady.”

Arleen set out alcohol and cotton, soap, washcloth and a large, absorbent towel. She had been told to include towels, washcloths and soap in her supply bag, because most of the people with whom she would deal would deal would not consider such articles as real necessities.

“She decided to have a baby,” Arleen said, in answer to the woman’s question.

“My, that’s nice,” Neelie said. “I’m real glad for her.”

Arleen used a gentle touch in sponging the thin, small body, “Now, I’m going to give you an alcohol rub, Mrs. Ryan,” she said cheerfully.

“My but that feels good,” she said, as Arleen skillfully massaged her shoulders and back. “Sometimes the other nurse wouldn’t have time to give me a massage, but when she did have the time, oh, but it sure felt so good. You don’t want to call me Mrs. Ryan, miss. I’m Neelie. Everybody calls me Neelie. Even kids.”

Finished with the rub, Arleen got out a big box of dusting powder and patted Neelie’s neck, back and shoulders generously with it. She got a comb and combed her soft gray hair into becoming order.

“There now,” she said cheerfully, putting the things back into her satchel, “you look all pert and pretty.”

Neelie nodded happily. “I smell like a flower garden, too.” she said. Wistfully she added, “I like pretty things, pretty smells, pretty flowers, pretty dresses.”

Pity tugged at Arleen’s heart. Impulsively she leaned over and patted the older woman’s hand. “See you day after tomorrow,” she told her.

She frowned. She didn’t like leaving Neelie alone, and her husband had not yet returned. “Is there anyone in the building I could get to stay with you until your husband comes back?”

Neelie smiled confidently. “Don’t you worry none about me. I won’t be alone very long—my Al never stays away long. He worries about me.” She said it proudly, with the air of a woman who knows she’s cared about.

“Don’t you get the wrong impression about Al,” she told Arleen anxiously. “He’s a good man. It’s just. . . .” the thin, small hands moved on the patchwork quilt, folding and creasing it along the edge. “Well, Al’s one of those people who just don’t have good luck, no matter how much they work.” Earnestly, “But you know what I believe? I believe that everybody’s got one big chunk of luck that belongs just to them. And me and Al’s going to get our chunk before we die.”

That stab of pity liit Arleen again. She thought fiercely, “I must not allow myself to identify with my patients! Have I forgotten already what Mrs. Hitzer drummed into my head in third-year training?”

A nurse must not identify with her patients, because if she allows this, the personal element enters in and some of her efficiency is destroyed.

Arleen bent to smooth the quilt across Neelie’s chest. “That’s a beautiful quilt,” she said. “I’ve been admiring it.”

Neelie said proudly, “I made it myself, and by hand. Every last stitch of it.”

In the hall, Arleen nearly collided with a tall, thin young man hurrying toward the stairs that led to the last floor of the building.

She was aware of gray eyes sweeping over her face as if she were not there; dark hair badly in need of a trim. He hurried by her with not so much as a “sorry.”

Arleen stared after him. She was not used to rudeness in men where she was concerned, nor was she used to being ignored as if she did not exist.

She became aware of Al Ryan plodding up the stairs, a paper-wrapped parcel under one arm. He looked at her, then followed her eyes as she looked toward the upper stairs.

“Who was that?” She couldn’t resist the question.

“Him?” Al shifted the parcel from under his arm to his hands. “That’s Dr. Wynter. Imagine a doctor living in this neighborhood, taking care of people who can’t afford to feed themselves, let alone pay a doctor.” He shook his head. “He’s as crazy as Neelie, always figuring some miracle’s going to come along. Well, before he starves to death, somebody ought to tell him that miracles don’t happen to people like us!”

With what Arleen knew was a gesture of defiance, he pulled open the paper bag and revealed its contents. “Know what a wino is, miss? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s a guy who gets drunk on wine because it’s the best he can afford.”

Arleen said nothing. Al fingered the cap of the bottle. He said bitterly, “A man’s got to have something to get him through the days. You wouldn’t know what it’s like to ache inside of you like you have a toothache.”

Arleen, thinking of Dr. Johnny Thorne, the young intern she had fallen in love with during the last year of nurses’ training, thought, “Oh, don’t I?”

Johnny had been handsome and cocky, terribly smart, terribly ambitious. When he had asked her to marry him, she had been quite sure that heaven could offer no more.

Five months afterward, almost to the day, he had asked her to return his ring. “I thought it could work,” he’d told her. “I know now it couldn’t.”

Arleen had been unbelieving. “Why wouldn’t it work, Johnny? I wasn’t going to be only your wife. I was going to be your nurse and your receptionist. I was even going to . . . to keep your books.” Her voice had broken.

He’d shaken his head impatiently. “You’ll make a fine wife for the right man, Arleen. I’m not the right man. I want to climb to the top of my profession, but not by taking one rung of the ladder at a time! I want to leap to the top!”

Arleen had wanted to tell him that she didn’t think it was that way in medicine; that you worked your way to the top. But he hadn’t given her the chance.

“I’ve found a gal who can help me make that leap,” he’d told her.

“You love her?” Arleen had asked him.

“I want to marry her, if that’s what you mean,” he’d answered. “She has the money and the influence to help me.” At Arleen’s shocked look he’d added, “Now, honey, don’t look that way. I’ve never pretended to be a knight in shining armor, have I?”

She’d had to admit that he hadn’t; that he’d never pretended to be anything except what he was. The dreams had been on her side alone. And the love.

Johnny’s love was the surface kind, never going deep enough to bruise. She had made her mind up, after Johnny, that never again would she let herself be hurt.

She liked men; she enjoyed their company. But she determined that never again would she allow herself to fall in love.

It was over a year since she had made that promise, and her heart was still safe inside the invincible, love-resistant shield she had built to protect it.

Sighing, Arleen glanced down at her notebook. One more call to make in the building. “Mrs. Mario Luigui. Eight months pregnant. Missed last two check-ups at clinic.”

The Luigui apartment was on the floor below. Thinking that it was easier walking downstairs than up, Arleen headed for the stairs.