“They needed me, especially right after the attack. They offered me a commission immediately, and I took it and moved on base. Our apartment downtown got requisitioned, so, if nothing else, I needed a home, I guess.”
“Makes perfect sense.”
“Then 1942 wasn’t such a great year, either. So here I still am.”
“Inertia has its way, doesn’t it,” he said. “I know how that works. I lost my wife and two children early last year. A truck hit them head-on. The Merritt Parkway, of all places. Not supposed to be trucks on that road. Turned out the driver was drunk.”
It was her turn to say wow.
“I was working in New York City at the time. I took a month off, found myself going crazy, so I went back to the grind. It just seemed like the thing to do.”
“Yes, exactly,” she said. A breeze came up and stirred the fabric of her muumuu, pressing it against her breasts. She sensed that he was looking.
“Now I smell lilacs,” he said. “Let me guess: This is the end of a long day, you’ve just had a bath, and then put on some lilac water.”
She felt her cheeks redden. That was precisely what she had done. Her rearrangement of the fabric hadn’t worked at all. She suddenly felt exposed.
“Sorry,” he said, putting up a hand. “My wife used to do that, too. In fact, the lilac water was our secret signal.”
“Secret signal?”
“You know. You were married. I’d be working late, reviewing records in my study, and she’d show up wearing not much at all. I’d smell the lilacs and then she’d be right there.” He laughed softly. “As in, time for bed, and now would be nice.”
She felt her breath catch. She and Tommy had done something very similar. She looked straight ahead, really feeling the red in her cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve embarrassed you again, haven’t I. I’ll go now. It’s been a pleasure to meet you and talk a little. Tomorrow it will be much more formal, I assure you.”
“Good night, Doctor,” she managed.
He nodded, doing that formal little bow in the process of starting down the steps.
“You didn’t embarrass me, by the way,” she called after him. “You just caught me unawares.”
He turned around. “That happens to me all the time,” he said. “I keep telling myself I’ll get used to it, but then I wonder. Good night.”
The next time Glory saw Surgeon Stembridge was in OR Two. The patient was a Marine with a through-and-through gunshot wound to the chest. One lung had been partially compromised, and a rib had been shattered near the exit wound. The patient had been prepped and anesthetized by the time Stembridge entered the OR from the scrub room. He came to the side of the operating table and introduced himself to the nurses.
“Good morning, ladies,” he said. “I’m Dr. Allan Forrest Stembridge, thoracic surgeon. Please tell me your names, and a little bit about your training.”
Glory, being the senior nurse, went first, describing her nurse’s training and her work experience. She was followed by the other four nurses. Ordinarily there would have been another surgeon present, but the naval hospital was running five operating rooms, and with a heavy flow of casualties coming in from the climax of the Solomons campaign, there were no spare surgeons. Stembridge took it all on board, listening carefully and with such fierce eye-to-eye concentration that a few of the nurses stumbled with their résumés.
“Thank you,” he said. “My turn. I’m forty-six, graduated from Brown and then Harvard Medical College. I’ve been doing thoracic surgery for fourteen years, lately specializing in traumatic injury. This will be our first operation together. I will debrief Nurse Lewis when we’re finished, and she will in turn debrief you.”
He then asked the anesthesiologist if the patient was stable and ready for surgery. The doctor tending the mask said that the patient was stable but somewhat precarious, having only one functioning lung. Stembridge glanced up at the X-rays hanging from light boxes above the table.
“Super,” he said. “Then we’ll need to go fast. Ladies, step up, please.”
Ninety minutes later he was done, and Glory was exhausted. Stembridge had become like some kind of a machine, cutting swiftly and seemingly without a pause to see what he’d done or where he was going. Neither of those things appeared to have been in question, ever. The quiet scramble to keep up with him had had some of the younger nurses tripping over each other to get instruments into those ever-demanding hands. Prior to closing he had announced the sponge count, in and out. Glory, as supervisor, always kept a running count, and he was right on. Usually the surgeons roughly kept track but really depended on one of the nurses to make damned sure.
When they were finished, Stembridge left the table to go sit down in a far corner of the OR for a few minutes before the next surgery began. The anesthesiologist, an older doctor, nearing sixty, gave out a low whistle as they began their preps to remove the Marine to recovery.
“Superman,” he murmured. “He’s here.”
Glory took off her mask, hairnet, and gloves. “That was pretty amazing,” she whispered.
“Let’s see how he does after six of ’em,” the gas-passer said.
“That kid going to live?” Glory asked.
“Maybe,” the doctor said, “but probably not. Long time getting here. You know—operation was successful, comma…”
By the end of the day, which came at around seven in the evening, Glory was ready to concede Stembridge the title of Superman. Each operation had been like the first, with the same fiery concentration, a sense that time was being altered when he was working, the frantic silence as hands came from everywhere across the table to hand him the next instrument, preferably before he called for it. When their last patient had been rolled into recovery, the OR crew was ready to drop. Stembridge reappeared in the doorway and called for Glory to meet him in the hospital cafeteria in fifteen minutes.
Her feet hurt, and her brain was awhirl. She’d never seen anything like this guy, and only then realized that she already was dreading the post-op conference.
“Glad it’s you and not me, honey,” one of the girls said. “That guy’s not real.”
“Scrub it good, Doris,” Glory said. “He’ll be back tomorrow morning, and so will we.”
Glory went to the nurses’ locker room and changed out of her scrubs and back into her day uniform. Then she went to the cafeteria to find Superman. He was already there, having a coffee and a cigarette. He waved when he saw her come into the room and stubbed out his cigarette when she sat down.
“Don’t do that on my account,” she said. “I have two a day, but the rest of the time I feed my cravings from other people’s cigarettes.”
He smiled, and when she saw the lines in his face, she realized that perhaps even Superman was tired.
“It went well today,” he said. “We need to work on your people’s anticipatory readiness.”
Glory raised her eyebrows.
“By that I mean they’re slowing me down somewhat. If a bleeder pops, I expect suction and then clamps. I shouldn’t have to ask for either one.”
She nodded. “I recommend you ask anyway,” she said. “Normally you’d have an assistant surgeon in there. The girls have to get used to you. Some surgeons get angry if the nurses presume to anticipate them.”
“That will soon not be a problem,” he said.
“Really,” she said. She knew two surgeons who could be real jerks about that, and they were both older than this guy.
“I guess I should tell you,” he said. “I’ve been brought in here as chief of surgery.”
She blinked. She’d thought he was just another surgeon, drafted or cajoled out of civilian life to aid in the monumental task of salvaging the thousands of young men being harvested by this war. Then she saw the silver oak leaves insignia on his shirt collars. He was a commander?
“That’s right. I chose OR Two as my theater because the hospital CO said you were the best OR supervisor w
e had.”
“That’s an exaggeration,” she said. “I’ve had more experience in more hospitals, but there are plenty—”
He waved his hand to shut her off. “Me, too,” he said. “So here’s what I’m going to want from you. I watched you today. You didn’t know it because you were watching everyone else like a hawk. When one of your girls was about to screw up, you intervened, quietly, inconspicuously, before she gave me reason to squawk.”
She shrugged. “That’s just my job,” she said.
“I’m going to float through all the ORs. It’ll be at random. Once I have a complete picture, I’ll corral the surgeons and get them calibrated to my standards. I want you to rotate with me, and then I want you to calibrate the OR teams to your standards.”
“That’s going to hurt some feelings,” she said. “Besides, I think some of the other OR supes are as good as I am, if not better.”
“We’ll see,” he said. “If that’s really the case, we’ll move on to the next one. Five ORs in one facility is a pretty big surgical suite, especially for a small hospital like this. Can you imagine twenty?”
“Good God, no,” she said.
“Well, start thinking about it,” he said. “We’re beginning, just beginning, to advance on Japan. They’ve demonstrated that surrender is not an option. When we have to invade the Home Islands, the casualties are going to be in the hundreds of thousands. Before that happens, the teams here are going to be staged forward as seed corn for over a dozen forward-based hospitals. My job is to ensure they’re ready for that.”
“And why me, again?”
“I move fast, Nurse Lewis. You saw that today. I make a judgment, and I act on it. Doesn’t always pan out, but usually it does. I need someone closer to my own age to be my assistant, and the fact that we’ve both been through a similar personal loss, well, that actually makes things easier.”
“What?” she asked, surprised that he had interjected a personal note.
“I assume you’re still not over the loss of your husband, certainly not with that wreck still sitting out there in the harbor. And I miss my wife terribly. You and I are going to work closely. I’m saying that I want our relationship to be strictly professional.”
Glory was taken aback by that. “What other kind of relationship would we have, Doctor?”
“Don’t get mad,” he said. “Young nurses are impressionable. They tend to fixate on older doctors. You’ve seen that.”
“And us old battleaxes don’t fall for that?”
He grinned at her. “Correct,” he said.
“Even when the doctors are tall, dark, and handsome?”
“Even if the nurses are stunners in their own right,” he said. “C’mon, Glory, don’t be a pill. You know I’m right.”
“Oh, it’s Glory now?”
“Right. And please—feel free to call me Doctor.”
She tried to maintain her expression of indignation, but the twinkle in his eye was unmistakable. He was most definitely having her on. Finally she smiled. “Very well,” she said. “This should be interesting.”
“Then you’ll do it?
“There’s a war on, Doctor. I’ll do whatever I can to help.”
He leaned back in his chair and beamed at her. “Super,” he said.
* * *
Glory met with the other four OR nurse supervisors in the nurses’ lounge. The operating rooms were all shut down for sanitizing. The first one finished was then designated as a ready room in case a plane came in overnight from the western Pacific with urgent surgical patients. Three of the four nurses had been here since December 7. The fourth was brand-new.
“Okay, ladies, you’re wondering why I asked everyone to come down for a meeting,” she said.
“This has got to have something to do with that new surgeon,” Etta Mae Beveridge said. She was the closest in age to Glory, and they were friends.
“Is it true he’s a full commander?” Janet Wright asked.
“Yes, he is, and that’s kind of why we’re meeting,” Glory said. “He’s not just another surgeon. Apparently he’s been sent here as the chief of surgery, and to get us all ready for a big expansion.”
“Here?” asked Etta Mae. “There’s hardly room for what we’re doing right now.”
“Not here,” Glory said. “Somewhere out west. He didn’t exactly say where, or even when, but this has something to do with when we invade Japan.”
There was an immediate outburst of excited gabbling at this news, but Glory quickly brought them back to the business at hand. She told them what Stembridge wanted and then waited for their reactions. She didn’t expect what happened next.
Etta Mae started giggling, and the other nurses soon joined in.
“What?” she asked.
“Oh, honey, you’re such a peach. You think he chose you to be his assistant because you’re the oldest?”
“Well, I am the oldest, and I’ve been a surgical nurse longer than anyone else here,” Glory said. “I feel like I ought to apologize in advance to the rest of you, though.”
“Glory,” Etta Mae said, “a man who looks like that did not pick you out because you’re the oldest woman in this motley crew.”
Glory felt herself reddening. “There was absolutely nothing—”
“Oh, we know, we know—and you don’t have to apologize. We’ll help out any way we can. Just watch yourself, dear heart. He will be looking for a close working relationship, unless I miss my guess.”
“Hell, I’m ready for a close relationship with him,” said Janet. This provoked more hoots of laughter, and Glory realized that her first official meeting as Stembridge’s new assistant was totally out of control, even if they were entirely wrong about him. And her.
* * *
The next evening, Glory was sitting out behind the nurses’ quarters with the rest of the girls, nursing a beer and cooling her weary feet in the long green grass of Hospital Point. The ever-present tropical breeze was blowing through the palms and riffling the water in the harbor entrance channel, which was only a few hundred feet away. The sun had set, but there was still a beautiful tropical afterglow.
“Oh, look,” one of the nurses said. “That’s an aircraft carrier, right?”
Glory shaded her face to look into the sunset. Sure enough, the bulky silhouette of an Essex-class carrier was pointing into Pearl, followed by a long line of smaller ships.
“I think it’s Lexington,” another nurse said. “Scuttlebutt in the cafeteria was that she’s coming in for a week.”
Glory was always surprised at the speed of ships coming through the narrow reef channel. Tommy had told her that there were strong currents off the outside reef and that ships had to scoot in order to maintain good steering control. The carrier came abeam of Hospital Point and passed the nurses in their lawn chairs at a distance of only a few hundred yards. Many of the crew were topside on the flight deck, and sailors were waving at the nurses, who were waving back. They could hear the sound of the big ventilation fans under the flight deck overhang. An announcement being made down on the hangar deck echoed across the water as the ship’s wake broke over the coral flats between the channel edge and the shore. Glory sneezed when a strong whiff of sulfurous smoke from the carrier’s single massive stack wafted over the lawn.
Lexington, she thought. That will mean Beast, and possibly Beauty, if his ship was still assigned to the Lexington group. She knew they’d both be calling, probably as early as this evening. She made up her mind to put them off, and then to make sure that if she did see them, it would be with both of them together. She was pretty sure that Marsh would be satisfied with that arrangement, and Beast? He would simply have to cope. The last thing she needed was an evening spent trying to keep Beast’s big hands off various parts of her anatomy, especially once he got some booze in him.
“I’m going to turn in,” she announced. “My feet are killing me.”
“Sure you don’t want to come with us to the O-club?” one of th
e nurses asked. “With a carrier in, it’ll be jumping tonight.”
“Jumping is precisely what I don’t need right now,” Glory replied. “Anyone calls, somebody please just take a message.”
* * *
It almost worked. At eleven, one of the girls, Betty Billings, knocked quietly on Glory’s door. Glory, who’d been just about to turn off the light, put down her copy of Time. “What now?” she asked.
“There’s this really big guy down on the lanai?” the girl said. “He’s got two mai tais, and he said if you didn’t come down and have a drink with him, he’s coming up.”
“He damned well better not,” Glory said, reflexively pulling up her sheet.
“Glory—he’s huge. I think he’s a pilot. I can’t stop him if he really wants to come in. Please?”
“Betty, just tell him to go away, and if he doesn’t, call the base shore patrol. They know what to do with drunks.”
“He’s not drunk, I swear. Well, not very. He’s kinda cute, too. He says he knows you’re here because he checked with the hospital.”
“Glo-reeee!” a voice called from the downstairs hallway.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Glory said.
“Glo-reeee!”
“All right,” she said. “Go down there and tell him to shut up and I’ll come down.”
Ten minutes later she pushed open the front door of the quarters and looked around. Beast was sitting in one of the rattan armchairs at the far end of the front porch, balancing a large, fruity-looking drink in each hand. Glory had put on cotton pajamas and a long bathrobe. She went over to where he was sitting and pulled up a chair. She’d put a few curlers in her hair just to make herself frumpier.
“Beast, for cryin’ out loud—what are you doing here?”
“I’m in love. I’m also in lust. And just a bit drunkit.”
“No kidding.”
“Yeah, well, what can I say. You’re the best-looking thing west of San Diego, and I just had to see you. Like my jeep?”
“Your jeep?”
“Yeah, my jeep,” he said, draining half of one of the mai tais. “Over there. The one with the spiffy aerials.”
Pacific Glory Page 15
