WW III

“Then what is this all about?” asked the surgeon, nonplussed.

“Ah — perhaps,” the MO interjected, “Ms. La Roche would care to step out for—”

“No,” said Lana.

“All right, then, Matron, I think you’d better go ahead,” said the MO.

“The sheet, sir… it’s… it’s filthy.”

“Filthy sheets?” said the surgeon, pushing the question back at her and looking at the MO for clarification.

“She …” began Matron archly, “did things to him.”

“Oh—” said the surgeon. “Oh—” He paused. They could hear the ship’s foghorn as it entered the area off Cape Race. “This is a very severe charge, Matron. I would advise you—”

“I don’t deny it,” said Lana.

Matron glanced quickly at the surgeon, making it quite plain she expected the maximum punishment for such unprofessional conduct and would not rest until she got it.

“Ms. La Roche,” the chief surgeon began, “you must realize how serious this is.”

“Yes, sir.”

Now there was a silence in which the captain noticed for the first time that he could hear the clock in the cabin ticking very distinctly. He shifted a few pens on his desk pad. “I’m afraid I’ll have to refer this to HQ. Are there any — mitigating circumstances you’d like to add—”

“The boy was dying,” said Lana.

There was silence again, Matron staring at her. Finally the surgeon, doodling uncomfortably on the blotter, said, “That doesn’t excuse it.”

“Exactly!” said the matron.

“All right,” said the surgeon. “That’s all.”

* * *

Out on the deck, where the chilly fog now came tumbling through in gusts, Matron paused before taking the steps down to her cabin deck. “If you think I’ve done it because I don’t like you, that’s not true.”

“Oh really?” said Lana.

“The point is, my girl, that we have to set an example for the others who come after us.”

“Yes,” said Lana. “Imagine if every nurse did it, and,” she added sarcastically, “right in the middle of a war.”

“Don’t be insolent! You don’t seem to have realized something, young lady.”

“And what’s that?”

The matron stood very close to her, and Lana could smell her bad breath as she began to speak. “You might have killed him. A shock to the heart like that.”

“He was dying.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Didn’t you see the X rays, Matron?”

“I’ve seen more X rays and more deaths than you, young lady. He might well have recovered—If he had been left alone.”

“I don’t think so,” replied Lana, but Matron thought she saw a glimpse of fear in the young woman’s eyes and she pressed home her advantage.

“You’ll never know, will you?”

The temptation of guilt, of a hundred letters to Ann Landers about unprofessional conduct of nurses, flashed through Lana’s mind, doubt flickering in her eyes for a moment, and then it was all gone, rejected utterly, as if her whole being had irrevocably changed at that precise moment in her life. “I gave the boy love.”

“Is that what you call it?” sneered Matron.

“Yes,” said Lana, “and I’m sorry for you.”

“You! Sorry for me!”

“Yes,” Lana said softly, pulling her cape tightly about her, the fog from the Grand Banks colder by the moment, enveloping them both and hiding the bergs. “I’m sorry for anyone,” said Lana, “who hasn’t had love. It shrivels your heart to nothing.” Lana turned and walked slowly away along the deck, past the dim outlines of the lifeboats.

* * *

The young medical officer managed to get Matron to strike out some of the more hostile adjectives in her report about Lana La Roche, and while, informally, he convinced the surgeon not to recommend a court-martial, he could not prevent transfer, to the Matron’s delight, to a forward hospital — in what the nurses called “America’s Siberia”: the Aleutians.

“As godforsaken a place on this earth as you could imagine,” the medical officer informed Matron in return for her retraction of the prejudicial adjectives. “And,” he added hastily, “under strict supervision.”

“She should be drummed out of the service,” Matron retorted. “She has no place — absolutely no place — in—”

“Well, Matron, you won’t be bothered by her anymore.”

The matron, however, was barely appeased. “She’s a bad penny, that one. Mark my words, Captain. She’ll turn up again.”

The MO made no comment on her prediction but did tell Matron it was the best he could do.

* * *

Before she packed, the Bahama Queen passing by McNab’s Island, through the narrows, past the Imperial Oil refinery into Canadian Forces Base Halifax, Lana sat down and wrote a letter to Mr. and Mrs. Richard Spence in Oxshott, England. Trusting the highly reliable fleet mail service — much of it sent electronically from base to base — more than she trusted the civilian post, Lana addressed the letter care of her brother at Holy Loch, with a covering note to him just as she had done with the tape that William Spence had made a few days before.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Spence:

My name is Lana La Roche and I was a nurse on your son’s ward aboard the hospital ship Bahama Queen. Although we’ve never met, I feel I know something about you, as William talked quite a lot about his family. I know he sent a tape, and though, of course, I don’t know what he said about his wounds and the major surgery he had — I’m guessing he didn’t say much at all about this and so I thought it might be of some help if I could tell you a little about the circumstances as I know that by now you will have received official notification from the DOD of his death and that after what appeared to be the chance of a good recovery, his passing must be a terrible shock. It was a combination of things, mostly the fact that he had contracted pneumonia from oil he had inhaled while trying to rescue shipmates trapped in the engine room of his ship, and while we were concentrating so much on the severe wounds to both arms, the wretched pneumonia, as it so often does, was already forming in his lungs. By the time it was detected, I’m afraid that plus the amputation proved too much. He was a wonderful young man and, though weakened by his ordeal, quietly brave — not only on the Peregrine but on the Bahama Queen as well, where I think he knew the end was near.

All I can say is that he clearly loved you all very much and told me so, and that helped him a great deal. We buried him at sea yesterday, as regulations call for. It was a very simple but moving ceremony. I asked the ship’s first mate to mark the spot as near as he could on a chart of the area, a copy of which I’ve enclosed. I will keep the original for another time to send as I’m forwarding this by Fleet SAT Post — electronic mail. I don’t know if this will help any, but the first officer told me the location of the burial is remarkably exact as they take bearings from Loran and satellite.

I’ve addressed this letter care of my brother Robert, as I did the tape I sent on for William, asking Robert to pass it on also. I hope we can meet someday. Please don’t bother to reply, but if you wish to write sometime, and I can tell you any more about William’s time on the ship, please write me care of the address in Virginia on the envelope and they’ll relay the letter to me. Sincerely yours,

Lana La Roche

In the covering note to Robert she told him he could read the letter, as it would fill him in on the news, “if that’s what you can call it,” and also reminded him that, as she’d mentioned in her earlier note, whenever he got