7
Tuesday through Friday, I dropped the children at school and then spent five hours at the hospital, which was a relatively new arrangement.
I had started as a volunteer when Bobby went off to kindergarten and I was left alone with my mother and my thoughts, either of which was enough to drive a person mad.
I needed to find a way to occupy my time.
My mother suggested charity work, and after a trip to the emergency room to get stitches for Bobby’s right ear left me practically hyperventilating, I decided I had to get past my memories of the night Harry died.
So I marched up to the door one day, took a deep breath, and walked inside, breathing in the faint scents of bleach, antiseptic, and sadness, and went straight to the nurses’ station, where I asked how I could be of any help.
Dressed as a candy striper, I patted the arms of the elderly, fed Jell-O to those with shaking hands, and comforted new mothers. The latter of which was the best balm for my battered soul. It was good to remind myself that hospitals weren’t just where life ended, but where it began as well.
But there wasn’t much organization to how and when volunteers came and went, and there were days when the head nurse would call, begging me to come in again.
So I started a chart, making sure that we would have candy stripers there every day of the week, including weekends, and that they were assigned to the areas of highest need.
Before long, we were running a tight ship.
By the end of my second month there, Dr. Harper, the hospital’s administrator, offered me a job.
I shook my head at first, thinking he was going to pay me for candy striping.
“Mrs. Feldman,” he said, leaning toward me over his hands, which were folded on his desk.
“You don’t understand. While you’re useful with patients, you’re invaluable in keeping this hospital running.
Nurse Frank told me that she was on the verge of quitting when you came in. ”
Suddenly I was employed. It didn’t pay much—the hefty life insurance policy that Harry had taken out (and entrusted to Janet’s husband to avoid worrying me) amply provided for us—but I deposited my checks dutifully, watching proudly as the little nest egg of my own earnings grew.
And with Mondays off for errands and housekeeping, and the kids in school, it was an arrangement that suited everyone.
I asked Ruth what she was going to do with herself while I was at work. Remembering how she used to let herself in and rearrange things, I didn’t love the idea of leaving her home alone, but she told me she was perfectly capable of entertaining herself.
The hospital had rapidly become a comfort zone for me.
For five hours a day, four days a week, I could shed my mom skin and be an unencumbered human.
There was something so satisfying in knowing that I was helping people beyond my own family and making a contribution to the world beyond the children I had brought into it.
Work at the hospital wasn’t easy. There were days when I left only to sit in my car and sob over the news I had seen families experience while I held their hands, feeling their pain on a level that they would never know how well I understood.
But there were beautiful moments as well.
Miracle births, coma patients waking up coherent, life-saving procedures on people who, moments earlier, had seemed beyond saving.
It was a whole world of life, death, and everything in between, and I was proud to be a part of keeping that running.
“Good morning,” I said brightly, dropping off a box of Montgomery Donuts for the front desk staff. I had another for the nurses upstairs.
“You’re an angel,” Delores said, opening the box and letting the heavenly aroma of sugared fried dough overpower the antiseptic hospital smell.
“How busy is it today?” I asked with a wink.
“Not too terrible, but Dr. Howe is in rare form today according to Donna.”
I grimaced. Dr. Howe was an absolute menace to every woman on staff.
Dr. Harper knew, because I complained about him regularly, but was avoiding the issue as long as he could because there was no denying that Dr. Howe was a fantastic doctor.
He was just a terrible human being. And quite often, dealing with him fell to me—not because I cowed him in any way, but because I had nothing to lose by standing up to him.
He still pinched my bottom anytime he thought he could get away with it, but I fought back when I could, “accidentally” stomping on his foot or slamming a door in his face.
And I had no problem warning him to leave the nursing staff alone or reporting him to Dr. Harper, useless as that was.
The rest of the hospital staff relied on the income and therefore couldn’t be quite as forceful in their rebukes as I could.
Which meant I had frequently taken on the role of protector—which Dr. Howe incorrectly interpreted as flirting.
“I’ll keep an eye out,” I said as a team of paramedics brought a stretcher in from an ambulance outside.
“Hope it’s an easy day.” I moved past them toward the elevators and went to the third floor, where a supply closet had been turned into a small office for me.
Not that I did much in there beyond writing up schedules—I still spent as much time assisting with patients as I could, even if I no longer wore the red-and-white pinafore of a volunteer.
“Barb?” Gloria Ramirez, one of my favorite nurses, poked her head in. “You busy?”
I was, but I never minded helping. “What can I do for you?”
“It’s Mrs. Kline again,” Gloria said with an eye roll.
I rose from my desk chair. “What is it this time?”
“She’s refusing to see Dr. Lefkowitz.”
I blinked three times in rapid succession. I knew exactly why she was protesting, but to refuse the best cardiologist in the state was insanity.
Mrs. Kline was always uncooperative with Gloria because she was Mexican—never mind that her parents and grandparents were born here, which wasn’t true for most of the white and Jewish doctors and nurses.
Not that she responded much better to me with the last name Feldman, but I felt we had made some progress on her last visit to the hospital. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“You’re a godsend,” Gloria said with a sigh. “I swear that woman is going to be the death of me.”
“And somehow, she’ll outlive us all,” I said, which got a laugh.
Gloria gave me her room number and I went across the hall, down a flight of stairs, and knocked on the open door. “Mrs. Kline?” I asked.
“Not you again,” she said as I came into view.
“Me again,” I said cheerfully. “We’re practically best friends with how often we see each other.”
Mrs. Kline sniffed. “I wouldn’t associate with you if I weren’t dying.”
Mrs. Kline had been “dying” for years before I started working here. As far as any of us could tell, her primary ailment was loneliness, perhaps mixed with a bit of hypochondria.
“Mrs. Kline, I hear you won’t see Dr. Lefkowitz—”
“I want a Christian doctor.”
“Well, Mrs. Kline, you happen to live in an area with one of the biggest concentrations of Jews in this country after New York. And while you’re free to select an outside cardiologist of your choice, when you come to the hospital, I’m afraid you need to see whichever doctor is on duty, regardless of religion. ” Or of your own bigotry, I thought.
“Then I’ll leave,” she said, sitting up in the bed and trying to unhook the wires connected to her.
“You can certainly do that,” I said. She stopped and looked at me suspiciously. “But it is against medical advice. So if you have a heart attack and drop dead on the street, it’s entirely your own decision. And the hospital will not be financially liable if you have a heart attack and live.”
She stared at me for a moment to see if I was bluffing—which I was, just not in the way she assumed.
I would have bet a week’s worth of groceries that Dr. Lefkowitz would find absolutely nothing wrong with her heart.
Just as the oncologists had found no cancer, the neurosurgeon had found no tumor, and the pulmonologist had found nothing wrong with her lungs.
But I raised an eyebrow and gestured toward the door.
Slowly she leaned back against the bed, pressing a hand to her chest. “Fine,” she said eventually. “I’ll see that man. But I want a good Christian nurse in here with him, so I have a witness if he kills me.”
“I won’t do, then?” I was teasing her by now.
“Certainly not,” she said. “You’d lie to protect your kind.”
“Right. How silly of me. Have a lovely day, Mrs. Kline.”
“And not that Ramirez woman either!” she called after me.
Gloria was outside the room waiting for me. “She’ll see Dr. Lefkowitz as long as a white, gentile nurse is in the room as well.”
Gloria closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I suppose that’ll work,” she said. “I wish she’d choose a different hospital already.”
“We could always refer her to Mount Sinai up in New York, but quite honestly, the Jews have suffered enough in the last twenty-five years. I wouldn’t wish Mrs. Kline on anyone else.”
Gloria chuckled. “I meant a psychiatric hospital.”
I patted her arm. “We can ask Dr. Lefkowitz to suggest that as a next step. Actually you’d better warn him what he’s going into anyway.”
“She won’t let you be in there? She always eventually does what you say.”
I shook my head. “Feldman was a dead giveaway. You’d think with a Jewish- sounding name, even if it’s not spelled that way, that she’d at least question last names, but there’s no rationalizing bigotry.”
Gloria thanked me and went to go find our esteemed cardiologist, who had survived Normandy, but whose upcoming interaction with Mrs. Kline just might do him in.
Then another nurse came to find me for the next catastrophe, and I stayed busy until it was time to leave and go pick up the kids.