Cate Campbell (13 page)

He couldn’t answer. He wished it were dark, so he could stop controlling his features, stop hiding behind the mask his face had become. He put his head back and closed his eyes.

“I’ll check on you later, Major,” Nurse Gregorio said. Her voice had grown gentle, its usual sharpness smoothed and softened. He had never heard her speak like that, and it occurred to him that she was angry, too. Angry on his behalf. She touched his wrist, and murmured, “You have a bit of a rest now, Frank. This was a tough day.”

He couldn’t speak past the fierce ache in his throat. He kept his eyes closed, and listened to the whisper of Rosa’s shoes on the linoleum floor as she carried his empty glass away.

Frank shook the
Times,
hard, as if the rattle of its pages could force him back to the present. He folded the paper and set it aside, to finish reading at the breakfast table.

It was not yet dark, the days lengthening as the season wore on. On such an evening in Montana, he would often saddle one of the quarter horses and ride out on some pretext or other—fences or cattle or irrigation—just to enjoy the smell of tamaracks greening, the twitter of birds flitting through the huckleberry bushes. He closed his eyes, picturing the blue outlines of the mountains against the darkening sky, the musical rush of the Bitterroot River tumbling over stones and deadfall.

He opened his eyes, and put his right arm back into the sleeve of his shirt, then tugged the left sleeve up over his stump. Suddenly, he couldn’t bear to be within doors. He wanted to stretch his legs, to climb a hill, to breathe spring air, to see the peaks of mountains rise against the evening sky.

He left the house without meeting anyone, and walked swiftly down Cherry. His long legs covered the distance to the waterfront in twenty minutes. In the big buildings to his right, offices had closed for the evening. On his left, the bawdy houses and taverns were doing a lively business, light and laughter and fragrant cigar smoke spilling from their open doorways. A pale sliver of moon ghosted over the city as the sun set beyond the crystalline peaks of the Olympics. Other walkers nodded to Frank as he passed them. A horse-drawn cart clattered across First, and Frank followed it, meaning to cut through the Public Market and stroll onto the pier beyond.

Idly, he glanced to his right as he was crossing Post Street, and saw her just leaving her office. Margot Benedict. She was locking the door, adjusting her hat, pulling on her gloves as she turned away from the little clapboard building.

She looked much more herself than she had in the unflattering newspaper picture. She was slim, well dressed, confident. She turned toward him, striding along the narrow street, her medical bag in one gloved hand, a modest handbag in the other. He saw her tip her head up to glance at the moon from beneath the brim of her hat, and a faint smile lifted the corners of her lips.

Frank paused, thinking he would say hello, but just as he lifted his hand in greeting, the horrible thought crossed his mind that he might smell of whisky. Hastily, he dropped his hand, but it was too late. She had caught sight of him.

She quickened her step, her long legs flashing beneath her skirt. Her ankles looked slender and strong above her heeled pumps, and her bobbed hair swung energetically around her chin. He wondered why the photo in the
Times
had looked so awful. She was not a pretty girl, he supposed. She didn’t have Elizabeth’s soft features and full bosom. But Margot Benedict was a striking woman.

He sighed, resigning himself. If he smelled of whisky, he couldn’t help it now. And it was damned nice to meet a friend on the street, even one he had met only once.

She reached him, and thrust out her hand to shake his. “Major Parrish,” she said. “Good to see you.”

He had forgotten how deep her voice was. He took her hand and shook it. Her fingers, through the smooth leather of her glove, were strong, and her handshake was firm. “Dr. Benedict,” he said. “It’s late. Long day for you.”

She nodded, and her direct gaze gleamed at him through the gathering dusk. “I had actual patients today,” she said, smiling. “Some of them have to come after work.”

He couldn’t think of a response. He released her hand, and put his own into his pocket.

She was, he thought, one of the most unselfconscious people he had ever met. She held his gaze directly, without embarrassment, as if they had been friends for years. “How’s the job going, Major? Father tells me Bill Boeing was awfully glad to have you.”

“It’s good,” he said.

“It’s a fine company, Father says.”

“Yes.”

“Very good.” She smiled at him. “Well. I’m afraid I have to be off. I have to go to the hospital and see a couple of patients. Awfully nice to run into you, though.”

“Yes,” he said. He wished he could think of something interesting to say. “Good night.”

She gave him another nod, and turned to her left. He watched her moving purposefully up the hill toward Fifth. Too late, it occurred to him he should have offered to walk with her to the hospital. Escort her. It would have been the gentlemanly thing to do.

“Hell,” he muttered, as he continued his lonely stroll toward the pier. “Parrish, you’re a lost cause.”

 

He was at his drafting table the next morning, analyzing stress points on airplane wings, when one of the stenographers came up from the workroom to lay a message on his desk. He murmured his thanks without looking up, and for long minutes, absorbed as he was in his problem, he didn’t glance at it. When he finally picked it up, he caught his lower lip between his teeth and leaned back in his chair, holding the slip of paper between two fingers.

One of the other engineers looked across at him and laughed. “What’s up there, Parrish? You’re holding that thing as if it’s about to catch fire!”

Frank hastily laid the paper on his desk, facedown. It was a silly gesture. Harry wouldn’t know who she was, anyway.

Harry was watching him. “Must be a lady!” Frank felt his ears redden. Harry chortled again. “I was wondering when you were going to start meeting some of these Seattle girls, Parrish. Handsome devil like you!”

The rest of the room erupted in laughter. Frank felt like a schoolboy caught passing notes in class. He wished the stenographer had let him pick up the damned message on his way to lunch, but he forced himself to meet the curious gazes of his colleagues. “Just a friend,” he said.

It wasn’t enough for the ebullient Harry. He leaped from his chair and crossed the room to Frank’s desk. “Come on, Parrish. Girl friend or man friend? You hiding something?”

Frank pushed the message beneath the blueprint he had been working on. He liked Harry. He liked them all, really. But he didn’t know how to respond to her message, nor how to explain such a thing to these men. They all seemed so easy in their friendships. They often spoke of their wives or their young ladies in comfortable terms. Harry’s wife had given up her teaching post when they were married, and now sent him off to work each day with elaborate lunches. Paul was walking out with a switchboard operator from the telephone company. One or two declared they would never settle down, but it was clear to Frank no one believed them. Frank’s bachelor state had been remarked upon more than once.

The thing no one ever mentioned, of course, was his missing arm. No one asked about his war experience, a circumstance for which he was grateful. They knew he had grown up in Montana, but no one called him Cowboy, and he was grateful for that, too.

Harry grinned down at him. “The wife’s still after me to have you to dinner, Frank. She wants to introduce you to one of her friends.”

“I’m not much good at parties. Nice of her, though.”

Someone called, “You should go, Parrish. Harry’s wife is a wizard in the kitchen.”

Someone else said, “He’s had to let his belt out three times since he got married.” Everyone laughed, and Harry made some jocular response.

Frank breathed a little easier with their attention diverted. He picked up his pencil and slide rule, and with a nod to Harry, bent over the blueprint again. He had lost his train of thought, though, and the corner of the pink message slip distracted him, glaring up from beneath the blueprint. He kept his head down, his chin on his fist, and thought about it.

He wondered if other young women did this now, if this was the new social order. If he accepted Margot Benedict’s invitation, what would that mean? In Missoula, a girl’s family expected certain things of a young man. He and Elizabeth were hardly allowed to be alone until she was eighteen. When he came home from college at Christmas and Easter, her family and his assumed their inevitable engagement. He didn’t have to say anything, or ask anyone. It had all been easy. Everyone knew the rules.

This bold query unsettled him.

He slid the slip out, folded it into a square, and dropped it into his pocket. It was much easier to concentrate on the orderly succession of numbers on his slipstick, to lose himself in comparisons and projections. The implications of a dinner invitation from Margot Benedict were too complex to contemplate.

Blake came in from the garage, pulling off his driving gloves as he scraped his boots on the mat. He had dropped Mr. Dickson and Dick at the office, then driven by the hospital to pick up Dr. Margot and take her to Post Street. It had been a busy morning. Loena was ill again. Leona and Hattie had scurried about, serving the family’s breakfast, rushing up the stairs to collect sheets and towels and carry them down to the cellar, where the electric Eden washing machine and mangle stood in their solitary magnificence. The first loads of laundry were already snapping in the spring breeze on the clothesline behind the kitchen.

Hattie labored up the stairs with a basket of wet towels just as Blake was changing his jacket. “Here, here,” he said. “Why are you doing that, Hattie? Where’s Leona?”

“She’s putting sheets through the mangle,” Hattie puffed. Her round face glistened with sweat, and she relinquished the heavy basket with a grunt of relief.

Blake shouldered the screen door open, and held it for Hattie to go through. He came after her with the basket, and set it on the grass beneath the clothesline. “We’d better have Dr. Margot take a look at Loena,” he said.

Hattie bent to pick up a towel. She spread it on the clothesline, and affixed it with a wooden clothespin. “Dr. Margot has taken a look,” she said sourly.

“Well, what’s the matter, then?”

Hattie paused, another wet towel in her plump hands, and she fixed Blake with a dark look. “She’s gone and gotten herself in trouble.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Trouble? What trouble?”

Hattie clucked her tongue. “What do you think? She’s nineteen and pretty and has a head full of clouds instead of brains!” At Blake’s blank look, she sighed. “She’s in the family way. And Mrs. Edith is going to put her right out of the house when she finds out!”

“Drat,” Blake said, inadequately, helplessly.

Hattie gave a mirthless laugh, and smoothed her hair with damp fingers so it frizzed even more. “Drat indeed. What’s to become of her? Little fool!”

“Who’s the—who’s responsible, then?” Blake felt like a fish out of water. His knowledge of women was limited to Mrs. Edith and Mrs. Ramona—and Miss Margot. His brief encounters with the whores of Chatham County had taught him nothing about how to deal with women and their problems. When he came to work for Mr. Dickson, he gave up that sort of thing. He’d hardly missed it. Even the memories seemed sordid now, and made him squirm if he thought about them.

“I tried to ask her,” Hattie said. “She wouldn’t tell me. How long have I known that girl, Blake? Since she was fifteen! But she won’t say a thing! Protecting someone, I s’pose. Because she knows—” She shook out a wet towel with a crack, spattering water droplets on Blake’s pant legs. “She knows Mr. Dickson would have his hide.”

Blake turned toward the house. “I’ll go talk to her,” he said.

“Good luck with that! I don’t know how you’ll get anything—”

The screen door opened, and Leona stood staring out at them. Her eyes were round, and she was chewing her lower lip. “Hattie—” she said, then stopped.

Hattie made an impatient noise. “What is it? I thought you were getting Mr. Preston’s laundry out of his room.”

For answer, Leona held something out, some bundle of white linen, stained dark. Blake scowled at it, not able to understand at first what it was.

Hattie stomped across the grass, and took the thing from Leona’s hands. She shook it out. It was a shirt, one of the new ones with an attached collar and mother-of-pearl buttons. And it was stained down the front with great brown splotches.

Hattie said, “Where did you find this?”

“There wasn’t nothin’ in his laundry basket, Hattie. But I knew there had to be dirty clothes somewhere, so I—I looked under his bed, ’cause I remember my brother always shoved his dirty laundry under his bed, and—it was stuck behind an old box.” She gave Hattie a fearful look. “It won’t never come clean, Hattie. I run it through the washer twice.”

Hattie turned the shirt in her hands, inside out and back again. She tutted, and muttered under her breath. “You bleach it, girl?”

Leona nodded. Blake could smell the bleach from the wet shirt, and he could have told both of them to let it go. The stain was never going to come out.

“What do you think it is?” Leona whispered.

Hattie pressed her full lips together, fixing Leona with a fierce stare. The girl dropped her eyes. “I forgot,” she said, her voice fading to nothing.

“Dang right, you forgot, Leona Kinstry,” Hattie said with asperity. “We don’t ask the family about things like that. Now you just get back in there and tend to the rest of the laundry. I’ll deal with Mr. Preston’s shirt.”

When the girl had disappeared again through the screen door, Hattie folded the shirt over her arm, and turned back to her basket of towels.

“Hattie, shall I take that?” Blake asked. His heart felt heavy in his chest, an old ache he had begun to hope he might not have to feel again. “It’s not coming clean. Leona was right.”

“You don’t know that,” Hattie said stoutly. “It’s probably chocolate, or somethin’ like that. I’ll get it clean for Mr. Preston.”

Blake didn’t answer. There was no point. But his feet dragged as he went indoors to see to the big parlor. No one ever went in there, but it had to be dusted in case it was needed. He opened the windows wide before he started working with his dust rag and furniture polish. It was a lovely spring day outside, full of sunshine and promise. He wished he could enjoy it.

 

Margot stripped off her rubber surgical gloves, taking her time, dropping them into a steel basket of things Thea would sterilize later. She washed her hands, then smoothed her white coat. When she turned back to her patient, she had composed her face. Pity wouldn’t help the girl.

“Miss O’Reilly,” she said. “You’re about four months pregnant.”

Colleen O’Reilly’s round cheeks blanched. Her dark skirt was still rucked up around her hips, and her legs, thin as pipe stems, dangled pitifully over the edge of the table, the stockings rolled down to the knees. The white middy blouse and dark vest of her school uniform made her look younger than her sixteen years. “Oh, no.” The girl’s pupils expanded, and she began to breathe in shallow gasps. “Oh, no. I can’t be.”

Margot crossed to her, and pulled a blanket from a shelf beneath the table. “Here,” she said. “It’s all right. Take a good breath.” She wrapped the blanket around the girl, tucking it around her bare legs, folding it around her shoulders. “No, no, not like that. Take a slow breath. A deep one.”

Tremulously, the girl did. She clung to Margot’s hand like a drowning person. “Doctor, please. Couldn’t you have made a mistake?”

“I don’t think so.” Margot spoke gently, but firmly. “It’s not the end of the world, you know. It’s a baby.”

“But I’m not—”

“I know. You’re not married. But you’re a healthy young woman. You just have to decide what to do.”

“My father will throw me out.” Colleen O’Reilly’s voice flattened. The tears, clear and shining, spilled over her pale cheeks. “He always said he would.”

“And your mother?”

The girl had found her way to Margot on her own, slipping away from Holy Names Academy and spending pennies she probably couldn’t afford to ride the trolley down Madison.

In a lifeless tone, she said, “Mum has a new baby. And there are already seven of us.”

Margot loosened the girl’s hand on her arm. “I’ll send Thea in with some information. There are places you can go, places you’ll be cared for until you come to term.”

She had just put her hand on the doorknob when Colleen said, “Dr. Benedict, wait!”

Margot turned. “Yes?”

“Can’t you—can’t you just—just take care of it? Please?”

Margot sighed, and came back to the examining table. “I understand what you’re asking me, Colleen. I’m sure you know I’m forbidden by law.”

“No!” the girl cried. Her voice thinned and rose in her desperation. “I thought—if the baby hadn’t moved yet—”

“Quickened,” Margot said automatically. “It used to be legal if the baby hadn’t quickened. That changed about ten years ago.” She met Colleen’s tearful gaze as steadily as she could. “You must have suspected you were pregnant.”

The girl’s lip quivered. “I was afraid of it. I tried castor oil to bring on my monthlies.”

Margot wrinkled her nose. “That must have been nasty.”

“And it didn’t work.” Colleen looked down at her school shoes, little scuffed Mary Janes waiting beside the examination table. “Please,” she whispered. “My pa will be so mad.”

“Bring him to see me,” Margot suggested. “I’ll talk to him.”

With a little sob, she said, “He’d never talk to a lady doctor.”

“No.” Margot gave her head a resigned shake. “No, I suppose not.”

“You can give me something, can’t you?” the girl pleaded. “My friend Alice said—”

Margot put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Colleen, listen to me. All girls think they know something that will work, or someone who will do it. It’s dangerous. Girls die.”

“I know.”

“Do you, Colleen? Will you promise me not to do anything foolish?”

The girl’s trembling lips firmed a little, stubbornly. “I thought,” she said, “that because you’re a woman, you would understand.”

“I understand better than you think. And I know that these things work out in the end.” Margot patted her, as decisively as she could. “Now, Thea will have a list for you, and she’ll tell you what you should eat and what you shouldn’t. I want to see you again next week. Otherwise, you can go on about your normal activities, at least for a time.”

The girl gave a bitter sob. “My pa’s gonna kill me.”

Margot wanted to believe that wasn’t likely, but she had heard the stories. Not in medical school, where family considerations were secondary to medical ones, but in the streets, and in the living rooms where she and other suffragettes had gathered. Abortions killed young women, but so did outraged fathers, even in this modern age.

Margot was about to leave the room, but the misery and fear in the girl’s face wrenched her heart. Her attempt at detachment failed her, and she put out her arms. Colleen O’Reilly, old enough to conceive but too young to cope, leaned into her and wept against her shoulder.

Thea knocked on the examining room door, and Margot called, “Come in, Thea.”

Her nurse took in the situation at a glance. “Dr. Benedict,” she said calmly. “I’ll take over here, shall I? The mail came. It’s on my desk.”

Margot murmured, “Try not to cry, Colleen. Thea has some help for you.” Above the girl’s head, she appealed to Thea with a lift of her eyebrows, and Thea nodded. “Tell her about the Good Shepherd Home,” Margot said as she gently released herself from Colleen’s grasp. “Colleen is Catholic.” She wiped the girl’s streaming eyes with her own handkerchief. “But first, Colleen, let’s talk to your family. You may be wrong about them.” She pressed the hankie into the girl’s hand, then left her to Thea while she went out into the office, closing the door of the examining room behind her.

She took the mail back to her office. When she heard Colleen’s small footsteps in the hall, then the closing of the office door, she came out into the waiting room.

Thea was at her desk. Margot handed her the invoices she had sorted from the other oddments in the mail. “You’ll never see a penny from that girl,” Thea said.

“If we can get her into the Good Shepherd, I’ll count us lucky.”

“They usually find the funds somewhere.”

“Yes. They do a good job, although I think the nuns are hard on the girls.”

“Do you want me to pay the bills?”

“Please. If the clinic account is short, let me know. There’s still a bit left in my own.”

“I hope this is the way your grandmother would want you to use her legacy,” Thea said. She smiled up at Margot.

Margot gave a short laugh. “You should have heard her go on about rising hemlines! I can’t think she would have wanted me even to cut my hair, let alone take on a profession.”

“That’s too bad,” Thea said. She pulled the little pile of bills toward her. “I was lucky, I guess. My mother was also a nurse.”

“I remember that,” Margot said. “You come from a line of working women.”

“A mixed blessing,” Thea said.

“I expect so.” Margot, on her way back to her tiny office, paused. “How’s Norman?”

“He’s pretty well this morning, I think. He coughed a lot last night.”

“Do you need more potassium iodide? I can call Herbert’s.”

“No. I stopped on my way home yesterday.”

“Do you want me to come to see him?”

“Thanks. When you have time.”

“Of course. I’ll come soon.”

Margot went back into her office, and closed the door. There wasn’t much she could do for Norman, in truth. He had gone over in the first wave of American soldiers, and succumbed to a chlorine gas attack before he had been in Europe a month. He had been, theoretically, one of the lucky ones. A treacherous wind had blown the worst of the gas into the trenches behind him, then back again, to wash over the Germans who had released it in the first place. But he suffered from chronic bronchial spasms, and nothing—not atropine or even morphine—seemed to quiet them. Margot didn’t think much of the potassium iodide solution, but it was all the military doctors had come up with.

Margot sat down at the rolltop desk in her small, spare office. There was just one window, with her medical diploma hanging on the opposite wall. A book lay open, a surgical text with beautiful illustrations of a new procedure for doing skin grafts. She spent most of her free time studying it, though her chances of doing surgery seemed remote. In her internship at Seattle General—which had been hard enough to get—she had had to fight for her turn in the operating theater. Even now she was relegated to assisting at operations, but the intricacy of what lay beneath skin and bone and muscle fascinated her. She turned the pages, losing herself in the wonders of modern medical techniques.