CHAPTER 6
Blake came in from the garage, pulling off his driving gloves as he scraped his boots on the mat. He had dropped Mr. Dickson and Dick at the office, then driven by the hospital to pick up Dr. Margot and take her to Post Street. It had been a busy morning. Loena was ill again. Leona and Hattie had scurried about, serving the family’s breakfast, rushing up the stairs to collect sheets and towels and carry them down to the cellar, where the electric Eden washing machine and mangle stood in their solitary magnificence. The first loads of laundry were already snapping in the spring breeze on the clothesline behind the kitchen.
Hattie labored up the stairs with a basket of wet towels just as Blake was changing his jacket. “Here, here,” he said. “Why are you doing that, Hattie? Where’s Leona?”
“She’s putting sheets through the mangle,” Hattie puffed. Her round face glistened with sweat, and she relinquished the heavy basket with a grunt of relief.
Blake shouldered the screen door open, and held it for Hattie to go through. He came after her with the basket, and set it on the grass beneath the clothesline. “We’d better have Dr. Margot take a look at Loena,” he said.
Hattie bent to pick up a towel. She spread it on the clothesline, and affixed it with a wooden clothespin. “Dr. Margot has taken a look,” she said sourly.
“Well, what’s the matter, then?”
Hattie paused, another wet towel in her plump hands, and she fixed Blake with a dark look. “She’s gone and gotten herself in trouble.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Trouble? What trouble?”
Hattie clucked her tongue. “What do you think? She’s nineteen and pretty and has a head full of clouds instead of brains!” At Blake’s blank look, she sighed. “She’s in the family way. And Mrs. Edith is going to put her right out of the house when she finds out!”
“Drat,” Blake said, inadequately, helplessly.
Hattie gave a mirthless laugh, and smoothed her hair with damp fingers so it frizzed even more. “Drat indeed. What’s to become of her? Little fool!”
“Who’s the—who’s responsible, then?” Blake felt like a fish out of water. His knowledge of women was limited to Mrs. Edith and Mrs. Ramona—and Miss Margot. His brief encounters with the whores of Chatham County had taught him nothing about how to deal with women and their problems. When he came to work for Mr. Dickson, he gave up that sort of thing. He’d hardly missed it. Even the memories seemed sordid now, and made him squirm if he thought about them.
“I tried to ask her,” Hattie said. “She wouldn’t tell me. How long have I known that girl, Blake? Since she was fifteen! But she won’t say a thing! Protecting someone, I s’pose. Because she knows—” She shook out a wet towel with a crack, spattering water droplets on Blake’s pant legs. “She knows Mr. Dickson would have his hide.”
Blake turned toward the house. “I’ll go talk to her,” he said.
“Good luck with that! I don’t know how you’ll get anything—”
The screen door opened, and Leona stood staring out at them. Her eyes were round, and she was chewing her lower lip. “Hattie—” she said, then stopped.
Hattie made an impatient noise. “What is it? I thought you were getting Mr. Preston’s laundry out of his room.”
For answer, Leona held something out, some bundle of white linen, stained dark. Blake scowled at it, not able to understand at first what it was.
Hattie stomped across the grass, and took the thing from Leona’s hands. She shook it out. It was a shirt, one of the new ones with an attached collar and mother-of-pearl buttons. And it was stained down the front with great brown splotches.
Hattie said, “Where did you find this?”
“There wasn’t nothin’ in his laundry basket, Hattie. But I knew there had to be dirty clothes somewhere, so I—I looked under his bed, ’cause I remember my brother always shoved his dirty laundry under his bed, and—it was stuck behind an old box.” She gave Hattie a fearful look. “It won’t never come clean, Hattie. I run it through the washer twice.”
Hattie turned the shirt in her hands, inside out and back again. She tutted, and muttered under her breath. “You bleach it, girl?”
Leona nodded. Blake could smell the bleach from the wet shirt, and he could have told both of them to let it go. The stain was never going to come out.
“What do you think it is?” Leona whispered.
Hattie pressed her full lips together, fixing Leona with a fierce stare. The girl dropped her eyes. “I forgot,” she said, her voice fading to nothing.
“Dang right, you forgot, Leona Kinstry,” Hattie said with asperity. “We don’t ask the family about things like that. Now you just get back in there and tend to the rest of the laundry. I’ll deal with Mr. Preston’s shirt.”
When the girl had disappeared again through the screen door, Hattie folded the shirt over her arm, and turned back to her basket of towels.
“Hattie, shall I take that?” Blake asked. His heart felt heavy in his chest, an old ache he had begun to hope he might not have to feel again. “It’s not coming clean. Leona was right.”
“You don’t know that,” Hattie said stoutly. “It’s probably chocolate, or somethin’ like that. I’ll get it clean for Mr. Preston.”
Blake didn’t answer. There was no point. But his feet dragged as he went indoors to see to the big parlor. No one ever went in there, but it had to be dusted in case it was needed. He opened the windows wide before he started working with his dust rag and furniture polish. It was a lovely spring day outside, full of sunshine and promise. He wished he could enjoy it.
Margot stripped off her rubber surgical gloves, taking her time, dropping them into a steel basket of things Thea would sterilize later. She washed her hands, then smoothed her white coat. When she turned back to her patient, she had composed her face. Pity wouldn’t help the girl.
“Miss O’Reilly,” she said. “You’re about four months pregnant.”
Colleen O’Reilly’s round cheeks blanched. Her dark skirt was still rucked up around her hips, and her legs, thin as pipe stems, dangled pitifully over the edge of the table, the stockings rolled down to the knees. The white middy blouse and dark vest of her school uniform made her look younger than her sixteen years. “Oh, no.” The girl’s pupils expanded, and she began to breathe in shallow gasps. “Oh, no. I can’t be.”
Margot crossed to her, and pulled a blanket from a shelf beneath the table. “Here,” she said. “It’s all right. Take a good breath.” She wrapped the blanket around the girl, tucking it around her bare legs, folding it around her shoulders. “No, no, not like that. Take a slow breath. A deep one.”
Tremulously, the girl did. She clung to Margot’s hand like a drowning person. “Doctor, please. Couldn’t you have made a mistake?”
“I don’t think so.” Margot spoke gently, but firmly. “It’s not the end of the world, you know. It’s a baby.”
“But I’m not—”
“I know. You’re not married. But you’re a healthy young woman. You just have to decide what to do.”
“My father will throw me out.” Colleen O’Reilly’s voice flattened. The tears, clear and shining, spilled over her pale cheeks. “He always said he would.”
“And your mother?”
The girl had found her way to Margot on her own, slipping away from Holy Names Academy and spending pennies she probably couldn’t afford to ride the trolley down Madison.
In a lifeless tone, she said, “Mum has a new baby. And there are already seven of us.”
Margot loosened the girl’s hand on her arm. “I’ll send Thea in with some information. There are places you can go, places you’ll be cared for until you come to term.”
She had just put her hand on the doorknob when Colleen said, “Dr. Benedict, wait!”
Margot turned. “Yes?”
“Can’t you—can’t you just—just take care of it? Please?”
Margot sighed, and came back to the examining table. “I understand
what you’re asking me, Colleen. I’m sure you know I’m forbidden by law.”
“No!” the girl cried. Her voice thinned and rose in her desperation. “I thought—if the baby hadn’t moved yet—”
“Quickened,” Margot said automatically. “It used to be legal if the baby hadn’t quickened. That changed about ten years ago.” She met Colleen’s tearful gaze as steadily as she could. “You must have suspected you were pregnant.”
The girl’s lip quivered. “I was afraid of it. I tried castor oil to bring on my monthlies.”
Margot wrinkled her nose. “That must have been nasty.”
“And it didn’t work.” Colleen looked down at her school shoes, little scuffed Mary Janes waiting beside the examination table. “Please,” she whispered. “My pa will be so mad.”
“Bring him to see me,” Margot suggested. “I’ll talk to him.”
With a little sob, she said, “He’d never talk to a lady doctor.”
“No.” Margot gave her head a resigned shake. “No, I suppose not.”
“You can give me something, can’t you?” the girl pleaded. “My friend Alice said—”
Margot put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Colleen, listen to me. All girls think they know something that will work, or someone who will do it. It’s dangerous. Girls die.”
“I know.”
“Do you, Colleen? Will you promise me not to do anything foolish?”
The girl’s trembling lips firmed a little, stubbornly. “I thought,” she said, “that because you’re a woman, you would understand.”
“I understand better than you think. And I know that these things work out in the end.” Margot patted her, as decisively as she could. “Now, Thea will have a list for you, and she’ll tell you what you should eat and what you shouldn’t. I want to see you again next week. Otherwise, you can go on about your normal activities, at least for a time.”
The girl gave a bitter sob. “My pa’s gonna kill me.”
Margot wanted to believe that wasn’t likely, but she had heard the stories. Not in medical school, where family considerations were secondary to medical ones, but in the streets, and in the living rooms where she and other suffragettes had gathered. Abortions killed young women, but so did outraged fathers, even in this modern age.
Margot was about to leave the room, but the misery and fear in the girl’s face wrenched her heart. Her attempt at detachment failed her, and she put out her arms. Colleen O’Reilly, old enough to conceive but too young to cope, leaned into her and wept against her shoulder.
Thea knocked on the examining room door, and Margot called, “Come in, Thea.”
Her nurse took in the situation at a glance. “Dr. Benedict,” she said calmly. “I’ll take over here, shall I? The mail came. It’s on my desk.”
Margot murmured, “Try not to cry, Colleen. Thea has some help for you.” Above the girl’s head, she appealed to Thea with a lift of her eyebrows, and Thea nodded. “Tell her about the Good Shepherd Home,” Margot said as she gently released herself from Colleen’s grasp. “Colleen is Catholic.” She wiped the girl’s streaming eyes with her own handkerchief. “But first, Colleen, let’s talk to your family. You may be wrong about them.” She pressed the hankie into the girl’s hand, then left her to Thea while she went out into the office, closing the door of the examining room behind her.
She took the mail back to her office. When she heard Colleen’s small footsteps in the hall, then the closing of the office door, she came out into the waiting room.
Thea was at her desk. Margot handed her the invoices she had sorted from the other oddments in the mail. “You’ll never see a penny from that girl,” Thea said.
“If we can get her into the Good Shepherd, I’ll count us lucky.”
“They usually find the funds somewhere.”
“Yes. They do a good job, although I think the nuns are hard on the girls.”
“Do you want me to pay the bills?”
“Please. If the clinic account is short, let me know. There’s still a bit left in my own.”
“I hope this is the way your grandmother would want you to use her legacy,” Thea said. She smiled up at Margot.
Margot gave a short laugh. “You should have heard her go on about rising hemlines! I can’t think she would have wanted me even to cut my hair, let alone take on a profession.”
“That’s too bad,” Thea said. She pulled the little pile of bills toward her. “I was lucky, I guess. My mother was also a nurse.”
“I remember that,” Margot said. “You come from a line of working women.”
“A mixed blessing,” Thea said.
“I expect so.” Margot, on her way back to her tiny office, paused. “How’s Norman?”
“He’s pretty well this morning, I think. He coughed a lot last night.”
“Do you need more potassium iodide? I can call Herbert’s.”
“No. I stopped on my way home yesterday.”
“Do you want me to come to see him?”
“Thanks. When you have time.”
“Of course. I’ll come soon.”
Margot went back into her office, and closed the door. There wasn’t much she could do for Norman, in truth. He had gone over in the first wave of American soldiers, and succumbed to a chlorine gas attack before he had been in Europe a month. He had been, theoretically, one of the lucky ones. A treacherous wind had blown the worst of the gas into the trenches behind him, then back again, to wash over the Germans who had released it in the first place. But he suffered from chronic bronchial spasms, and nothing—not atropine or even morphine—seemed to quiet them. Margot didn’t think much of the potassium iodide solution, but it was all the military doctors had come up with.
Margot sat down at the rolltop desk in her small, spare office. There was just one window, with her medical diploma hanging on the opposite wall. A book lay open, a surgical text with beautiful illustrations of a new procedure for doing skin grafts. She spent most of her free time studying it, though her chances of doing surgery seemed remote. In her internship at Seattle General—which had been hard enough to get—she had had to fight for her turn in the operating theater. Even now she was relegated to assisting at operations, but the intricacy of what lay beneath skin and bone and muscle fascinated her. She turned the pages, losing herself in the wonders of modern medical techniques.
An hour later, Margot heard the outer door of the office open. She listened to Thea’s greeting, and to the high piping voice that answered her. She stood up just as Thea put her head around the door. “Please,” Margot said. “Tell me that’s a patient.”
“Oh, it is.” Thea was shaking her head, smiling. “She came with her whole family. I don’t know where to put them.”
It wasn’t unusual for patients to arrive with a phalanx of relatives. A trip to the doctor’s office was often a communal event. But in Margot’s clinic, with its sole examining room and cramped reception room, it was a problem. She hoped, one day, to add another room, but for now, they had to make do.
Four generations of a Chinese family had crowded into the reception area. One was aged and stooped, tottering on tiny bound feet. Another was middle-aged, with a toddler clinging to either hand. Her feet were also bound, folded into silk slippers no more than four inches long. One was a very young woman, surely no more than eighteen or nineteen. Even for a Chinese, she was pale, her skin like ivory. Her feet were straight, though, narrow and small in leather slippers shiny with use. All of them, women and children alike, wore padded cotton jackets over loose trousers. Margot thought this attire eminently practical. She wished she dared wear slacks herself.
The middle-aged woman, who Margot surmised was the young woman’s mother, chattered at her daughter in Chinese.
The girl turned her dark eyes to Margot. “I fainted. My mother made me come.” Her voice was thin and high, and her hand, as she put it up to brush a strand of straight black hair away from her face, trembled.
“Come into
the examining room,” Margot said. The girl stepped forward, and her mother started to follow, the children trailing her. The examining room would never hold all of them. “Can your family wait out here?”
The girl turned to chatter at her mother. One of the children whimpered, and she bent to speak to it. When she straightened, she braced herself on her mother’s shoulder to keep from falling. The child tried to come to her, but the middle-aged woman held it back, scolding in swift Chinese.
The pieces fell into place for Margot. The children belonged to the girl. The other women were the grandmother and the great-grandmother. When the young mother followed Margot toward the examining room, the toddlers immediately began to wail. The girl turned back, but Thea, smiling and firm, shut the door on the racket.
The girl stood uncertainly beside the examining table.
“Come,” Margot said, smiling as reassuringly as she could. She patted the leather surface. “Climb up here, Mrs. . . . ?”
“Mrs. Li.” The girl spoke unaccented English, a sign that she had grown up in America. She worked her way onto the table, and Margot helped her to lie back. “How old are your children?”
“The girl is three,” Mrs. Li said. When Margot touched her, her flesh jumped. “The boy is two.”
It developed, as Margot asked questions and measured pulse and respiration, that this girl had never seen a doctor before. Her two babies had been born at home, which wasn’t at all unusual, and often safer than in disease-ridden hospitals. She worked as a hotel maid. When Margot listened to her heart and lungs, the girl stiffened at the touch of the stethoscope, as if expecting it to hurt. Her dark eyes, full of apprehension, followed Margot’s every move.
When she was done, Margot helped her to a sitting position and lifted her hands to examine the nails. They were paper-thin, and white. She was cold to the touch, and when Margot released her hands she pulled her padded jacket more tightly around her.
“Mrs. Li, do you know what anemia is?”
The girl shook her head.
“It’s called Addison’s anemia, for the doctor who discovered it. It can be serious—” A tear escaped one almond eye, and slid down the girl’s cheek. “Don’t cry.” Margot patted the girl’s shoulder. It felt like nothing but bone beneath the jacket. “There might be something to help. Just wait here for a moment.” She went to the examining room door. “Thea, will you ask Mrs. Li’s mother to come in, please? See if the children will stay with their great-grandmother.”
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