THE SURPRISING
PATIENT

Ida would not soon forget the hospitals of the city of Washington—the shattered men sunning themselves at Campbell Hospital, the four-horse wagons rumbling up from the Sixth Street wharves with their loads of wounded men, the one-legged boy bouncing along the Avenue on crutches, the woman praying beside her dying husband at Armory Square, the devotion of the army surgeons, the kindly care of the men and women of the Sanitary and Christian Commissions and the quiet courage of the wounded wherever they lay.

Surely it would be the same in the Patent Office. Too much the same, Ida thought unhappily, fearing that once again she would not find Seth. Perhaps she had been on the wrong track from the beginning. It was not only her false friend Lily LeBeau who had led her astray. Her own foolish hopes had deceived her.

Therefore she had now made up her mind. Her confinement was near. As her hope of finding her husband faded, the concern for his child grew stronger. If she failed to find Seth today, she would go straight to the depot and take the cars for Baltimore, transfer to the other station and continue her journey home.

She had paid her weekly rent to Mrs. Broad and packed up her belongings. Her store of banknotes was almost gone.

At this early hour in the morning Seventh Street was nearly empty, except for a man in a bowler hat, fussing with a boxlike contraption on the sidewalk. On the other side of the street a woman at a newspaper stall stared at her, but Ida paid her no mind. Undaunted, she strode along the sidewalk toward the monumental staircase of the United States Patent Office.

Her healthy frame could still carry her swollen body any number of miles on flat ground, but the staircase was a challenge. Pausing to rest halfway up, she gazed at the massive columns soaring above her, amused by the hit-or-miss dignity of the city of Washington, its marble edifices alternating with acres of squalid debris. The portico of the Patent Office looked like the Parthenon.

Recovering her breath, she climbed the rest of the way and pulled open a massive door. At once she was confronted by another grandiose set of stairs. Slowly Ida made her way to the second floor, hauling herself up by the banister.

Here the door to the hospital ward stood wide open. But she waited, breathing hard, recovering her strength. At last she crossed the marble floor and paused on the threshold to take in the enormous room.

It was a magnificent chamber with a high vaulted ceiling. Glass cases rose from the floor, filled, Ida knew, with models of inventions. There was a gallery, and it too was lined with glass cases. The Patent Office was proof of what people always said, that American boys liked to tinker. Even the president, they said, had invented something.

The ranks of glass cases were arranged in alcoves like chapels in a church, but instead of altars, they held hospital beds. More beds ran down the length of the central corridor, the head of one butting up against the foot of another.

Like most of the other hospitals in and around the city of Washington, this one seemed in good order. The marble floor shone, the bedding was clean and white. A surgeon was moving among the beds and a number of nurses hurried in and out of the alcoves. Some were middle-aged women, others were young men, convalescents themselves or medical cadets.

Ida walked into the room, but she was stopped at once by a bustling matron carrying a tray. The matron stared at the bulge in Ida’s figure and paused long enough to say curtly, “What are you doing here, missus?”

“My husband,” said Ida patiently. “I’d like to see if he’s here.”

“His name,” snapped the matron, hurrying away. “Give his name to Mr. Bannery.”

Ida stopped at the second alcove on the south side, where a man with a notebook stood over one of the beds. The patient in the bed wore a bandage around his head, covering one eye.

Ida waited for Mr. Bannery to notice her. Behind the shining glass of the tall case beside him, there were shelves of mechanical devices with cutting edges and wheels and gears. Ida glanced at them with interest, but the patients in the beds had more serious concerns and showed no curiosity.

“Your name?” said Mr. Bannery to the man with the bandaged eye.

“Irwin J. Skedaddle,” said the man craftily. He looked at Ida with his one mad eye and grinned. “That’s S-K-E sump’n else.”

The man with the notebook grimaced and turned away.

Ida spoke up quickly. “Mr. Bannery?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“I’m looking for my husband, First Lieutenant Seth Morgan.”

“Morgan.” Mr. Bannery flipped the pages of his notebook. “No Morgan here now. A month ago”—he turned another page—“there was a Lysander Morgan, but he was in Twenty-ninth Pennsylvania, and anyhow he passed away.”

Ida plucked up her courage and said, “My husband might be using another name. Please, may I look around for him?”

Mr. Bannery looked at her sharply, and she knew he understood what “another name” meant. So did the man in the bed. He gave a loud laugh and began jabbering. His wound seemed to have excited his brain. “Oh, dearie me, another skulker. Skedaddle W. Skulker. That’s S-K-U, right, ma’am? Listen, missus, I hope your blessed event turns out female. You don’t want no poor little boy got to go in the army.”

Mr. Bannery shook his head and moved into the aisle. His bureaucratic manner softened, and he said, “Some men come in without identification. Kinfolk, they’re welcome to look. Just try to keep out of the way.”

“Oh, I will,” promised Ida. “Thank you.” Quickly she began moving along the beds in the center aisle, following a woman who was distributing pamphlets, thrusting them into the hands of men who were sitting up, placing them tenderly on the pillows of those who lay still. Ida saw her set down a leaflet on The Sin of Swearing beside the staring face of a man who had surely breathed his last.

There were eight beds in each alcove. Ida went in and out, inspecting every face. Some of the men looked back at her, some ignored her. She felt intrusive, but she had to look, she had to see.

Up and down both sides of the enormous room she went, pausing and moving on, then pausing again. At one of the beds in the center aisle two clerks were examining a patient whose left arm was in a sling. One of them said as she walked past, “Disability rated one-fourth,” and the other wrote it down.

Many were sadder cases. Ida ached with pity for a rag of a young man whose body under the sheet went only halfway down. An older man spat blood into a cup. In the next bed a gray-faced boy lay still, a tube from his side draining into a bucket.

Some of the patients were young and clean-shaven, some older and gray-bearded. A few were little more than children. One of them resembled her little brother Eben.

Ida moved on, then stopped and went back. The young boy in the last bed, lying beside a model of a patent reaping machine, not only looked like Eben, he was Eben.