The Search for Joyful (7 page)

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.

“What's your Indian name?” he asked.

“Oh-Be-Joyful's Daughter.” It came out spontaneously, as though that's who I'd been all along.

He nodded. “That's a beautiful name. What band are you?”

“Cree.”

“Cree? You're a long way from home. I suppose it's the war?”

“Yes,” I said, “it's the war,” and returned his receipt.

He shoved it into his pocket but didn't go. “Are you always here at this hour?”

“For a couple of weeks.”

“Then I'll see you again.” This time he got as far as the door and came back. “I forgot to tell you my name. It's Crazy Dancer.”

“Crazy Dancer? Is that really a name?”

“I'm a delight maker, you know, a clown.”

I must have looked puzzled.

“I see you went to mission school and had a white man's education. You don't know about our people, do you?”

“Well,” I hesitated, “I did go to mission school, but . . .”

“That explains your not knowing. But don't worry, I'll teach you.”

“Teach me? Teach me what?”

“To be an Indian.” He gave a quirky smile and left.

I looked out the window and watched him below in the parking lot. He moved to an inner rhythm as though he scouted along rushing streams and wild forest places instead of back alleys. He swung lightly into the driver's seat. I could see he was a dancer, a crazy dancer.

I suppose it was what he said about being Indian, but I couldn't get him out of my mind. My impression was that he possessed a kind of kinetic energy. Was he handsome? I wasn't sure. Would Mandy think his nose too high-bridged? It was an aquiline nose compared to the flatter noses of whites. But in any culture his face was arresting. In those few seconds a dozen moods had sat on it. He said he was a clown; I believed it. His mouth was ready to smile, his eyes to squeeze together in laughter. Yet there was dignity, almost a haughtiness in the way he carried himself.

Had I imagined more than was there? My Indianness was a part of me I had never explored. And Crazy Dancer wanted to teach me Indian things. I found I was looking forward to the next delivery of medicines.

I'd had an unusual relationship with young men—that is, none. Or practically none. Mostly it was fending off patients in the ward. If they weren't too ill or distressed, they were full of banter and a kind of flirting talk. After all, they were young, they were young men. They were fond of telling me all the things we would do when they got out of here. Once they were up and around, it would be dinner out and then we'd take in a movie, and then . . . And we would both laugh at the innuendo, confident it would never happen.

These fantasy romances were accompanied by an attempt at hand-holding, and frequently my patients essayed more. All this phantom attention was bittersweet. Some of the boys were nice looking, and some persuasive. Others were pathetic and I was careful not to draw away. But at night when I closed my eyes many times there were tears on my lashes because I was playing my old game
What if.
. . .

 
MONTREAL, MAMA KATHY'S sin city, was a wartime city, filled with soldiers and sailors, some on leave, some waiting to be shipped out. Guys were always trying to pick me up. But they'd try that with anything in skirts. Once by a drinking fountain I was tempted. The sailor was cute and had a nice smile. “Here, let me hold your hair back.” I walked away.

But I was disturbed by my reaction. When I analyzed my life, I had to admit it was lonely.

Two days later Crazy Dancer piled more boxes in front of my work station. “Hi!” His smile possessed his face.

“Hi,” I said.

“Oh-Be-Joyful's Daughter,” he continued formally as though he were proposing, “I have borrowed a car for Sunday. Will you go with me to a drive-in movie?”

“Yes,” I said, without hesitation.

“One o'clock white man's time. In the parking lot.”

“All right.”

“Kathy!” The sisters moved about so quietly you never knew they were there. Sister Magdalena had come around the bend of the hall. “We're waiting for these items. Haven't you checked them yet?”

Crazy Dancer, not at all abashed, stared at her curiously. “Well, young man, haven't you wasted enough time?”

“Perhaps, if you mean clock time. But there are other kinds.”

He would have left then but Sister detained him. “What kind of time are you referring to?”

“Personal time.”

“What a strange young man,” she said when he was gone.

“Oh, I don't know, he's Indian,” I said airily.