“She has been crying for months,” another nurse told June, “to be allowed to wear a wig which was taken away from her when she entered the hospital. She says she wouldn’t feel half so badly with it. I wish they would let her have it.”
There were two women dying in the ward, a woman of fifty and a girl of twenty-two. Mary Adams was slowly fading from the whiteness of the ward around her into a grey shadow on the long slim bed. She had a grown son who came to visit her every evening when the wards were twilit and the evening toilets were completed. He brought huge bunches of flowers which the head nurse vaguely disapproved of. “They are too flary.” But the orchids suited her somber eyes and the mint and old-fashioned flowers made a strange rich scent around the bed, Every time June passed her, a little thrill ran up and down her spine. Mrs. Adams never spoke but lay there motionless, looking out of wide open grey eyes, looking at the death she saw so plainly with dull wonder.
Irene was the girl and she was pathetically young. Her finely shaped mouth was always contorted with pain and there was a fierce protesting light in her eyes. The lines that agony had drawn in the ivory of her skin were like those of passion. She might have been clutching a lover in a last embrace knowing that when he arose from the bed he would go out and close the door forever.
“There is the smell of death around her,” June thought, “and no one brings her flowers to deaden it.”
When Adele was working in a ward where there were six girls who were about to have their tonsils taken out, June was passed on to the fracture ward, number twenty-five. There were eleven old ladies there with fractures of the femur and hip bones. The most youthful of them were sixty and close on to seventy years. They approached the elderly stage when they were eighty and when they passed ninety-five, it was admitted that they were indeed old.
It seemed strange at first to call them by their Christian names but it was the custom of the hospital and June soon became used to it.
Ida, a young Jewish woman of sixty, was a trial to June. It seemed she had never known the meaning of the word bath and when she was washed on her arrival she howled so that a young intern rushed in thinking that she had been taken with labor pains. Her features were colossal, well carved and wrinkled like a crumpled linen handkerchief. She had become so used to contorting every feature to give vent to her emotions that now her face was as uncontrolled as that of a six year old child.
Every morning June had to bathe her from head to foot, rub her back with alcohol, powder her and comb her hair. And soon Ida was so accustomed to being waited on that although she was no longer helpless, she wailed loudly if any detail of her morning toilet was omitted.
“Schmeer! Mit alcohol!” she demanded, arching her back from the bed. She could not turn, owing to the splint which bound her on one side from her shoulder to her ankle.
Her sensuous joy was so great that all the while she was being groomed and curried, she grunted like an enormous pig. Before she had been in the ward a week, she demanded that each leg, each arm, be also rubbed with alcohol.
Occasionally, the ward maid, Catherine, “did” her morning toilet, and to avoid the boisterous argument which Ida always indulged in and to save the alcohol, she took to rubbing her arms and legs with a weak solution of thymol and water. Ida soon discovered the deception and seizing the bottle, she dashed it on the floor. After that she could no longer be deceived. Before she allowed herself to be rubbed, she smelled the contents of the bottle.
Although she was physically clean, thanks to June’s efforts, her habits remained filthy. On visiting days, she furtively accepted the food which her relatives brought her, and which was not supposed to be left at the bedside of the patient, and hid it under her mattress, her pillow, under her arms, and even between her splint and her body under the bandages. Then knowing that she had only a few hours before she would again be bathed, she applied herself assiduously to the food which was brought to her until every crumb was devoured. “Ei, ei, gevault, gevault, gevault,” she complained if anyone tried to take her food away from her.
Usually her relatives, who came in tribes and draped themselves around the bed to ei-gevault with her over the miseries of the world, brought her prunes. They came in quart jars, twice a week, and after drinking all the juice out of the bottle, Ida munched the prunes all night, eating them as continually and with as unalloyed delight as a debutante would salted almonds.
There were times in the sweet dusk of evening when she had been “schmeered” with alcohol to her heart’s content that she showed a gentler side. Her ei-gevaults gave way to a melancholy chanting, a chanting that was also joyous. One time when she was softly and exultantly wailing, June asked another Jewish woman in the ward what she was singing about. The reply was that she was “talking to God.”
There was another in the ward who was almost as much trouble as “Ei-gevault.” The nurse called her “Oh-a, Oh-a” because she cried continually. She was the one Irishwoman there who did not bear her pains stoically. Approaching death had loosened the bolts she had placed on her consciousness. Although she was seventy, she had a beautiful body, as white and firm as that of
