the door jingled behind her.
Her breath fogged out around her as she hurried up the street. A man in an ancient ragged Army greatcoat stepped out of a doorway and whined, 'Got any spare change, lady?' Nellie walked past him as if he didn't exist. He didn't bother cursing her; he must have been ignored a thousand times before. He just shrank back into the doorway and waited for someone else to come along.
Three men and a woman were waiting for the trolley when Nellie got to the stop. 'Any minute now,' one of the men said. He carried a dinner pail, which probably meant he had a job.
'Thank you,' Nellie said-not, Good, or anything of the sort. She would have given anything she had not to be making this trip, the one she'd made every day she could while Hal lay dying in the hospital. How much it tormented her measured how much she'd come to love him.
Sure enough, the trolley clanged up to the corner a couple of minutes later. Nellie threw her nickel in the fare box. The car was already crowded. A middle-aged man with a scar on his cheek stood up to offer her his seat. 'Here you go, ma'am,' he said.
'Thank you,' Nellie said again, this time in real astonishment. She couldn't remember the last time that had happened. Who would have thought any gentlemen were left in the world? she thought, and then, Who would have thought there were ever any gentlemen in the world? Except for her husband, her son-in-law, and her grandson, she still had no use for the male half of the race-and she knew her grandson was an unruly brat, even if he was blood kin. Well, Merle can always take Armstrong to the woodshed a little more often, that's all.
Her stop was only a few minutes away from the coffeehouse. 'President-elect Coolidge in Washington to meet with Cabinet picks!' a newsboy shouted, waving a paper at Nellie. She shook her head and hurried on to Remembrance Hospital.
Built after the end of the war, the hospital was an immense, brutally modern building that resembled nothing so much as a great block of granite with windows. The stairs leading up to the front entrance were too wide for Nellie to take them in one step, too narrow for her to take them in two. The hitching strides she had to make annoyed her every morning. By the expressions some of the other people going up and down those steps wore, they didn't like them, either-or maybe they had other worries of their own, as Nellie did.
The only happy people she saw coming out of the place were a young couple, the man carrying a crying baby. Maternity wards are different, Nellie thought as she went past them. I bet they're the only place in a hospital where people win instead of losing.
She knew the way to the veterans' ward. By now, she'd come often enough to be a regular. A nurse in the corridor nodded to her as she walked past. A couple of the nurses had even dropped in at the coffeehouse when they came off their shifts.
Two long rows of metal-framed beds, facing each other, stretched the length of the ward. Hal lay in the sixth bed on the left-hand side as Nellie came in. Just beyond him lay a younger man, a fellow about forty, whose lungs were killing him faster than Hal's. He'd been gassed in Tennessee in 1917, and had been dying by inches ever since. Nellie had never seen anyone come to visit him. He nodded to her, his lips a little bluer than they had been the day before. Like Hal, he had a rubber attachment that fit over his nose to feed him oxygen.
'Hello, darling,' Hal said, his voice rasping and weak. His lungs weren't all that was troubling him, not any more. The flesh had melted from his bones over the past few months. His skull seemed to push out through the skin of his face, as if to announce the death that lay not far ahead.
'How are you feeling?' As Nellie always did, she fought to hold worry and pain from her voice. Hal didn't need her reminders to know what was happening to him.
'How am I?' He wheezed laughter. 'One day closer, that's all.' He paused to fight a little more air into the lungs that didn't want to hold it any more. 'We're always one day closer, but usually… usually we don't think about it. How's Clara?'
'She's fine,' Nellie said. 'I'll bring her Saturday. She wants to see you, but what with school and all now that New Year's is gone….'
'School is important,' Hal said. 'What could be more important than school?' He stopped to gather breath again. 'Maybe it's better.. she doesn't see me… like this. Let her… remember me.. like I was when I was stronger.'
'Oh, Hal.' Nellie had to turn away. She didn't want her husband to see the tears stinging her eyes. All she cared about was making sure he stayed as happy and comfortable as he could till the end finally came.
A man in the row of beds facing Hal's lit a cigarette. Hal said, 'Do you know what I wish?' Nellie shook her head. He lifted a bony hand and pointed with a forefinger that still showed a yellowish stain. 'I wish I had one of those, that's what. They won't let me smoke… on account of this oxygen gear… Fire, you know.'
'That's terrible.' Nellie rose. 'I'm going to see if I can't get 'em to change their minds.' As far as she was concerned, cigarettes were more important for Hal than oxygen right now. The oxygen helped keep him alive, yes, but so what? Cigarettes would make him happy as he went, for he was going to go.
Out at the nursing station, a starched woman of about Edna's age, shook her head at Nellie. 'I'm sorry, Mrs. Jacobs,' she said, not sounding sorry in the least, 'but I can't deviate from the attending physician's instructions.' Nellie might have asked her to commit an unnatural act.
'Well, who is the attending physician, and where the devil do I find him?' Nellie asked.
'His name is Dr. Baumgartner, and his office is in room 127, near the front entrance,' the nurse answered reluctantly. 'I don't know if he's in. Even if he is, I don't think you can get him to change his mind.'
'We'll see about that,' Nellie snapped. She hurried off to room 127 with determined strides. Dr. Baumgartner was in, writing notes on one of his patients. He was in his late thirties, and wore the ribbon for a Purple Heart. Above his collar, the side of his neck was scarred. Nellie wondered how far down the scar ran and how bad it was. Shoving that aside, she told him what she wanted.
He heard her out, then shook his head. 'I'm sorry, Mrs. Jacobs, but I don't see how I can do that. They don't call cigarettes coffin nails for nothing.'
'What difference does that make?' Nellie asked bluntly. 'He's dying anyhow.'
'I know he is, ma'am,' Baumgartner answered. 'But my job is to keep him alive as long as I can and to keep him as comfortable as I can. That's what the oxygen is for.'
'That's what the cigarettes are for,' Nellie said: 'the comfortable part, I mean.'
Before Dr. Baumgartner could answer, an ambulance came clanging up to the front door of the hospital. The physician jumped to his feet and grabbed a black bag that sat on a corner of his desk. 'You have to excuse me, ma'am,' he said. 'There might be something I can do to help there.'
'We aren't done with this argument-not by a long shot we're not,' Nellie said, and followed him as he hurried out of the office.
To her surprise, policemen rushed in through the entrance ahead of the men getting a stretcher out of the back of the ambulance. Some of them had drawn their pistols. Most people shrank away from them in alarm. Dr. Baumgartner eyed the pistols with the air of a man who'd known worse. 'What the hell's going on?' he demanded.
'Come quick, Doc,' one of the policemen told him. 'Do what ever you can. He'd gotten out of the bathtub, they tell me, and he was shaving when he keeled over.'
'Who's he?' Baumgartner asked. 'And since when does an ambulance need a squad of motorcycle cops for escort?'
'Since it's got Calvin Coolidge in it, is since when,' the policeman answered. 'He keeled over, like I say, and nobody's been able to get a rise out of him since.'
'Oh, dear God,' Nellie said. Nobody paid any attention to her. The stretcher-bearers brought their burden into the hospital. Sure enough, the president-elect lay on the stretcher, his face pale and still.
Dr. Baumgartner knelt beside him. The doctor's hand found Coolidge's wrist. 'He has no pulse,' Baumgartner said. He peeled back an eyelid. 'His pupil doesn't respond to light.' He took his hand away from Coolidge's face. The president-elect stared up with one eye open, the other closed. Nellie could see what Dr. Baumgartner was going to say before he said it: 'He's dead.' Baumgartner's expression and voice were stunned.
'Can't you do anything for him, Doc?' a cop asked. 'That's why we brung him here.'
'You'd need the Lord. He can raise the dead. I can't,' Dr. Baumgartner answered, still in that dazed voice. 'If I'd been standing next to him the minute it happened, I don't think I could have done anything. Coronary thrombosis or a stroke, I'd say, although I can't begin to know which without an autopsy.'
