Читать книгу Bellagrand - Paullina Simons - Страница 28

“THINGS ARE STILL QUITE SPARTAN,” Rose said to Gina as she took her around the ward, a long annex attached to the Wayside, and showed her where they kept the salves, the bandages, the sponges, the bedpans. “Please stay away if you become with child again. Just in case. Sometimes we have lepers staying with us. They are highly infectious. There is bacteria in the air from all sorts of sickness. If you’re blessed enough to fall pregnant, don’t breathe in the air of the dying. Promise me?”

“The danger of that while the strike continues,” said Gina, “is slim. But how do you not get sick?”

Smiling, Rose raised her eyes and palms to the ceiling. “The God of all comfort comforts us in our tribulation so that we may give comfort to those who are in any trouble.” Rose put her arm through Gina’s. “You are a good girl, and you’re going to be just fine.” She leaned in for a confidence. “You know, I had no nursing experience before I started caring for the incurably sick. Oh, yes. Don’t be so surprised. But like my dear father, I have always been fascinated by medicine. He wanted to be a doctor before he became a writer, did you know that? Not a lot of people do. What do you think? Did he make the right choice in his life’s path?”

“Hard to say no to that, isn’t it, Rose? His books bless the future generations.”

“I suppose they do. But look, please don’t tell anyone else that I have no nursing training. They’ll close me down for sure. Come with me—I hear Alice.”

Gina blanched.

“Not that Alice,” Rose said gently. “My Alice. She must be back from her walkabout. She goes around Concord twice a week, in the afternoons. Visits the sick in their homes.” The nun paused. “Though I must say, I’m surprised the other Alice is still so top of mind for you.”

“What can I say?” Gina nodded. “She left me with a few parting words I haven’t been able to shake from my heart. Her valedictory salvo, so to speak. When things aren’t going well, her words are all I can think about.”

“Clearly what catches seed is the grain of truth, no matter how small.”

“Not even that small.” Gina pointed to the door. “Let’s go say hello.”

In the front hall they were greeted by a plump serious woman. “Gina,” Rose said, “you remember my friend and colleague Alice Huber, don’t you?”

Nodding, Gina shook Alice’s hand.

“Alice used to be a portrait painter,” Rose told Gina with a proud smile.

“I’ll tell my own story, Rose, dearest.” Alice took Gina’s other arm. Flanked by the petite sisters, the towering Gina walked through the ward between the beds of the dying. “It’s true I used to be a portrait painter,” Alice concurred. “But my heart wasn’t in it. I was looking for something else. I said that when I found a work of perfect charity, I would join it. And so I did.”

“It’s not for everyone, Alice,” Rose said. “Don’t judge people.” She looked up at Gina. “My friend can be too critical sometimes, God love her. I tell her all the time—people are the keepers of their own souls, not you.”

“And do I listen, Rose?”

“Hardly ever.”

“Exactly. Do you know, Gina,” Alice continued, “that before we built this small annex, we housed the sick right in Rose’s Wayside?”

“And it wasn’t even my Wayside anymore.” Rose laughed. “Imagine how my dear Harriet felt about it.” The Wayside was the only home Nathaniel Hawthorne had ever owned. In 1879, many years after his death, Rose and George bought the beloved house to keep it in the family. Financial hardship forced them to sell it just four years later to George’s publisher and his wife, Harriet Stone, also known as Margaret Sidney, the writer of children’s books.

“We bathed them and changed their dressings right in the parlor room.”

Rose nodded. “In the summers we used the front porch for their beds. My father used to sit and have his morning tea on that porch.”

“And in New York we collected the sick into three cold-water flats on the Lower East Side,” said Alice. “We managed. They managed.”

“Well, yes,” Rose said. “Because our goal wasn’t convenience. It was to do something to comfort other hearts than ours. To take the lowest rank of human beings—both in poverty and in suffering—and put them in such a condition that if our Lord knocked on our door, we would not be ashamed to let Him in.”

“Let’s go then and comfort other hearts than ours,” said Gina, rolling up her sleeves. “Perhaps we can make our Lord proud.”

Eighteen months went by.