by Helen Wells
She fumbled in her change purse and produced a quarter. He accepted it expressionlessly and left her outside the doctor’s suite without a word.
Cherry hurried back down the corridor to her cabin. Hastily, she changed into uniform, white stockings, and rubber-soled white shoes.
“Oh, dear,” she thought, locking the door behind her, “I hope the other employees aren’t going to be as uncooperative as Waidler.”
Then, remembering her first pleasant impression of the young ship’s surgeon, she cheered up. The important thing was that she and Dr. Monroe should make a good team. According to what Miss Henry had told her in the medical offices on the pier, she would have very little to do with the rest of the crew. And none of the passengers would even know of her existence unless one of them became ill.
And then, hurrying along the corridor, she banged right into one of the passengers. A stateroom door was suddenly thrust open and out popped a slim young girl, right in Cherry’s path. They collided for one breathless moment, and then both of them laughed, apologizing:
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
“It was my fault,” Cherry insisted tactfully. “I’m in a frightful hurry to help with an operation.”
The girl, who looked about sixteen or seventeen, had thick golden-blond braids wound around her head. Cherry noted briefly that her huge hazel eyes showed signs of recent weeping. The reddened eyes grew even wider with respect and awe as she stared at Cherry’s crisply starched uniform.
“Oh, you’re the ship’s nurse,” she breathed. “How wonderful! It must be marvelous to have a career.”
“It is wonderful.” Cherry smiled. “I love my profession.”
“My name’s Jan,” the tall, slim girl blurted out. “Jan Paulding. I want to be an artist, but my mother—”
A querulous voice from inside the stateroom interrupted: “Jan. Jan! Please close that door. I feel a draft.”
Cherry gave Jan a friendly wave and hurried down the linoleum-covered stairs to C deck. She found sick bay without any trouble at all. It contained two wards, one for men and one for women, with upper and lower bunks in each ward.
“Why, it’s a miniature hospital,” Cherry thought with an approving glance at the white-tiled walls, the spotless sink, the gleaming instruments that lined the walls of the tiny instrument room. In the center of the operating room, lying on a long table under a powerful lamp, was the patient, his face white under a spattering of freckles. He looked like a drowsy-eyed boy and he smiled cheerfully up at Cherry as she checked his temperature, pulse, and respiration. The purser, who Cherry guessed would act as “scrub nurse” during the emergency operation, was already in coveralls, cap, mask, and gloves.
With a friendly nod he introduced himself as “Ziggy.” Before she began to scrub, Ziegler handed her a cap and mask. Cherry carefully adjusted the strings on the cap so that the flap completely covered her dark curls. Then she turned to the sink as she pulled the mask up over her mouth and nose. She waited while Ziggy adjusted the little hourglass above the sink. “When all the sand shifts from the top to the bottom,” he told her, “you’ll know you’ve scrubbed for at least twelve minutes.”
Halfway through, the ship rolled, and Cherry, who had not yet got her sea legs, lost her balance for a second. One of her fingers brushed against the side of the sink.
With a shrug, Ziegler adjusted the hourglass again. “Don’t mind that, Miss Cherry,” he said kindly. “We all make slips.”
Cherry, as she started to scrub all over again, decided that there was a difference between operating on a deck and operating on a nice, steady floor! And it was very generous of a seasoned sailor like the purser not to have lost patience with a landlubber nurse.
Once scrubbed, Ziggy helped her into a sterile gown and gloves, being careful not to contaminate them. Ziegler then unpinned the big surgical bundle. Deftly avoiding contact with the inside of the bundle, he turned it upside down and dumped the sterile contents on the sterile O.R. tray.
Using the big forceps that always reminded Cherry of ice tongs, she set up the O.R. equipment: Sheets, towels, swabs, gauze bandages, vaseline, solutions—she did not yet even touch her gloved hands to the can of sterile powder with which she would later dust the interior of the surgeon’s gloves.
As she worked, Ziegler said, “Bill, that’s the patient, has already had his Ether. He’ll be asleep in a minute.”
Cherry knew about Ether, the wonderful anesthetic. But she wondered about the purser who seemed to know almost as much as an intern. She asked him point-blank:
“What are you anyway, Mr. Ziegler? A combination purser and pharmacist’s mate?”
He grinned. “Call me Ziggy, Miss Cherry. Everybody does. I’ve been with this line since I was a kid like Bill. And I’m ex-Merchant Marine. Went to the pharmacist’s mate school during the war. Had eighteen months of what you R.N.’s would probably call nothing but elementary first aid training. I’ve had lots of practice since school, though. Assisted at all sorts of emergency operations at sea.” He chuckled reminiscently. “Most of the time there wasn’t anybody else but me to help the surgeon. You pick up a lot of know-how when you have to.”
“You certainly do,” Cherry agreed, remembering her own experiences as an Army nurse. She liked this ex-merchant seaman. He was small and compactly built, with an ageless but battered face which made her guess that he might well have been a boxer at one time or another.
Now to prepare the wound.
Bill was completely anesthetized and Cherry had just finished the eighth washing when Dr. Monroe came into the operating room. He slipped on his cap and mask, and as he scrubbed up said succinctly:
“X ray showed a compound fracture of the humerus, noncomminuted, not impacted.” Dr. Monroe added: “If it had happened a few minutes earlier we would have put the boy ashore.”
Cherry knew that the complicated-sounding medical phrases simply meant that the operation would be un-complicated. The surgeon would not have to probe for fragments of broken bone in the upper part of Bill’s arm. The bone would be set and the wound sutured with very little risk of infection.
Cherry was glad of that. Bill would, of course, wear a cast for many weeks, but he looked like the kind of a boy who would manage very well with his right arm in a sling.
She draped the patient in sterile sheets and arranged sterile towels around the wound. Dr. Monroe held out his arms. Cherry helped him into his gown and slipped rubber gloves on his hands. Ziggy, standing behind the surgeon, tied the strings that held his gown in place.
It was routine after that: the debridement—cutting away dead tissue, reducing the fracture, and suturing the wound. Cherry’s hands were steady and she anticipated every one of Dr. Monroe’s quiet, staccato orders:
“Scalpel … forceps … sponge … suture … penicillin and sulfa solution … vaseline gauze …”
At last it was over and Bill’s arm was in a cast.
Cherry took a deep breath of the warm, soapy, sweet air in the tiny room. Had she made good? Did Dr. M onroe now feel as she did that they were a good team?
His gray eyes smiled at her above the mask. “Thanks, Miss Ames. It’s a pleasure to work with someone who really is efficient.”
Then he was gone. A minute or so later a redheaded young man in a short, white coat came into sick bay. “Rick, the emergency orderly, reporting, ma’am.” He grinned at Cherry. “Doc says I’m to sit with Bill for the rest of the day.”
Cherry hastily rubbed away the frown that creased her forehead and forced her lips into a smile of greeting. But she didn’t like it at all. Was she to leave the patient, stiil under anesthesia, to the care of a mere boy?
“Take over, Rick, from here on in,” Ziggy said. “Miss Cherry and I have work to do. But first help me get the patient into bed.”
Cherry watched them worriedly, but relaxed as she saw that they lifted Bill from the operating table with efficient gentleness, and. settled him comfortably i
n a lower bunk. Cherry took the patient’s pulse and saw that he was breathing normally. Rick drew up a chair to the side of the bunk and sat down. Unconcernedly, he produced a comic book from an inside pocket of his jacket.
“Don’t worry about me and Bill, Miss Cherry,” he said. “We’re buddies. If he gets to thrashing around I’ll read to him. Or conk him over the head,” he finished with a mischievous grin.
So Cherry left them together, reluctantly, because they both seemed so very young. Together she and Ziggy cleaned up O.R., the purser chatting conversationally all the while.
“Nice guy, Doc. Never loses his temper when a guy makes a mistake. Dropped a thermometer last trip and he didn’t say a word. Guess he was almost as nervous as I was. We all knew we were going to lose that pulmonary thrombosis case. What can you do when a guy gets a blood clot in his lungs? And we had to think of the other passengers. A death on a pleasure cruise isn’t what they paid out their money for. Doc and I didn’t think the old fellow would last until we docked at Willemstad. But he did. Had an iron constitution, I guess, for all that he must have been way past seventy.”
Cherry worked swiftly and deftly, listening with only half of her mind. She hoped they wouldn’t have another tragic case this trip. But lightning didn’t strike twice at the same place. Or did it?
“Like all physicians, Dr. Monroe hates to lose a case,” she said to Ziggy. “What was the old gentleman like?”
“My guess,” the purser said as he wheeled away the instrument table and tray, “is that he had spent a lot of time at sea, during his youth, and not too long ago either. Had that weather-beaten, seafaring look. A rough diamond but a nice character, although peculiar. Doc and I liked him, but Waidler, the steward assigned to his cabin, couldn’t get on with him at all.”
Laughter bubbled up to Cherry’s red lips. “You’d have to be a saint to get along with Waidler, I imagine.”
“That you would,” the purser agreed emphatically. “Personally, it’s all I can do to keep a civil tongue in my head when he’s in one of his moods. But for all his fits of bad temper, he’s a good employee and has been with the line as long as I have. Knows the ropes better than any other member of the crew. Efficient as all get out. But even he slips up every now and then. Like at Willemstad last trip—” Ziggy suddenly clamped his mouth shut.
Cherry wondered what the rest of the sentence might have been. In what way had the efficient Waidler slipped up? Mildly curious, she would have enjoyed hearing how the disagreeable steward had got himself into some sort of scrape. But Ziggy adroitly changed the subject.
“Oh, jimminy, I forgot.” He handed her two sheets of typewritten pages. “Doc told me to give you this first thing.”
The pages were headed: “Duties of a Ship Nurse.”
Cherry scanned them hurriedly, then decided to read the instructions carefully back in her own cabin.
“It’s a lot of hokum,” Ziggy said gruffly. “No swimming-pool privileges for either you or Doc. What’s the matter with the powers that be? One would think you two, the cleanest people aboard ship, might contaminate the water. Naturally the crew doesn’t expect, or want, to mingle with the passengers any more than they have to. But you and Doc are professional people. Passengers ought to consider themselves lucky if you gave ‘em a little of your spare time.”
Cherry gulped, thinking of Charlie’s Christmas present. But she wasn’t going to be able to wear that lovely American-beauty suit in the glamorous outdoor, tiled pool after all.
Then she laughed and said, “There’ll be plenty of time for swimming when we’re in port.”
“Not so much,” Ziggy told her. “Look at Rule Four.” He pointed a stubby finger at the first page of her instructions, quoting by heart:
“When in port the ship’s nurse is never to go ashore without first obtaining permission from the ship’s surgeon. The nurse and ship’s surgeon may not have shore leave at the same time.”
Cherry couldn’t help giggling. It sounded like old times.
“Well,” Ziggy said with relief, “I’m glad you don’t seem to mind the red tape too much. But maybe you won’t feel like laughing when you read Rule Five.”
Cherry read it swiftly. “In foreign ports the nurse is to report aboard ship and in uniform to the surgeon at least one full hour before the scheduled sailing time.”
She refused to allow these restrictions to depress her. “Dr. Monroe’s just naturally nice,” she told Ziggy. “And I know he’ll he more than fair. He’ll give me plenty of shore leave. After all, you can only do just so much sightseeing. And I can’t do a lot of shopping. I’ve already spent most of my money on Christmas presents.”
“You’re a good sport,” Ziggy said approvingly. “Come on. I’ll show you the dispensary on B deck. Then we’ll go up to my office on A deck. We keep the medical refrigerator in there. You’ll want to be able to locate quickly, the penicillin and other drugs that deteriorate unless kept on ice. You’ll also need ice cubes for ice bags once in a while.”
After a quick inventory of the dispensary, Cherry was satisfied that the ship was adequately supplied with medication, gauze, bandages, etc. Then Ziggy escorted her to the purser’s office.
He unlocked the door and then sucked in his breath sharply as he moved inside. “The safe!” Cherry heard him say. “It’s been broken into.”
Cherry peered around his broad back. The door of the little safe gaped open, and the floor around it was littered with papers and legal-looking envelopes!
Ziggy was already down on his hands and knees, checking the rifled contents of the safe’s drawers. Cherry stood uncertainly watching him. Should she quietly go away or offer to help?
“Somebody awfully smart pulled this job,” Ziggy muttered. “Somebody who knew I’d be down in sick bay for more than an hour, safely out of his way. Somebody who knows how to pick locks; somebody mighty familiar with safe combinations. Somebody smart enough to guess we always set this combination to correspond with our sailing dates. This one,” he explained in an undertone, more to himself than to Cherry, “was set for one-o-two-o-two-two: the twenty-second day of the twelfth month, you see.”
Cherry couldn’t help reflecting that Waidler might well know that the safe combination was set to correspond with the ship’s sailing date. He had also heard Dr. Monroe order Cherry to sick bay for an emergency operation. And the disagreeable steward could have counted on the purser being called on to assist as the pharmacist’s mate.
Hastily Cherry quieted her suspicions. It wasn’t fair to suspect Waidler simply because he had been rude to her. Dozens of passengers and other stewards might have overheard Dr. Monroe telling Cherry of the accident. Any member of the crew would have known the purser would be out of his office then, too. A passenger familiar with shipboard procedure would have known the purser would be called on to assist at the operation.
Ziggy suddenly straightened up. He turned around to Cherry, the expression on his face one of complete bafflement.
“Well, I’ll be tied to the mast before the skipper!” he exploded. “Not a single, solitary thing has been taken. And let me tell you, Miss Cherry, there’s enough jewelry in that drawer alone to buy and sell this ship!”
CHAPTER IV
Timmy
ZIGGY, STILL MUTTERING TO HIMSELF IN BEWILDERMENT, replaced the contents of the safe. “I don’t get it, Miss Cherry,” he kept saying. “Who would want to go to all the trouble of breaking into the safe and then go off without taking even a gold-plated pin?”
He reset the dial with a new combination and handed Cherry a duplicate key to his office. He also gave her a key to the outside door of the dispensary and another one for her own office.
“I’ve got to go and report to the master,” he said. “But you might take a look through the refrigerator while I’m gone. If you need anything like canned juices you want kept chilled, Waidler will get ‘em for you.”
He hurried away. Cherry checked the contents of the refrigerator, saw that
it was well stocked and that all the ice trays were filled.
Then carefully locking the door behind her, she went down to her cabin, wondering who had broken into the safe. And why. Before unpacking her bag, she carefully read her instructions. Cherry noticed with relief that in general the duties of a ship’s nurse were very similar to those of a nurse connected with a hospital, a clinic, or a doctor’s office.
In a hospital nurses ate at stated times. If they were late to meals, they went without. On board ship she was to eat half an hour before the passengers.
In a hospital nurses were not allowed to eat in the wards. On a ship, apparently, the nurse did not eat in the big dining room that ran amidships completely through from port to starboard. She would eat in the small, staff grill. But that was where Dr. Monroe would have his meals too.
Cherry couldn’t help hoping that one of her “duties” would be sitting at the same table with the ship’s surgeon. As though in answer to her question, someone tapped on the door. It was Dr. Kirk Monroe.
“Aren’t you starving?” he asked. “We missed lunch, but I ordered a snack sent up to the grill. It’s waiting for us now. Soup and sandwiches and cake.” He smiled at her trim, uniformed figure. “You don’t look as though you had to diet.”
Cherry grinned, pleased at the implied compliment. “It’s a good thing I don’t. I’m ravenous practically all the time.”
They strolled up two flights of stairs to the promenade deck. Cherry discovered with pleasure that the staff dining room was a cozy little grill, decorated informally but attractively with a red-and-gold color scheme.
“Sometimes passengers eat in here,” Dr. Monroe said. “Mostly children with their mothers or nurses. That’s why we have to show up half an hour ahead of time.”
Cherry had not realized how hungry she was until she tasted the delicious cream of asparagus soup. The chicken sandwiches were delicious too.
“When you finish your second piece of cake,” Dr. Monroe said, grinning, “I’ll take you on a sightseeing tour of the ship.”
