IT WAS A RELIEF TODAY TO COME OFF THE RAINY DISTRICT streets, and into the Jonas delicatessen. It was warm and spicy-smelling in here, and Cherry was scolded, fussed over, and bountifully fed. She thawed out and relaxed.
She was busy discovering that her frost-nipped ears still were attached to her head, when she noticed Mr. Jonas’s expression. The old man was fidgeting with a calendar, and frowning and shaking his head.
“Anything wrong, Mr. Jonas?”
He glanced up, and his absent-minded blue eyes were cloudy. “Maybe so, maybe not. It is only a little thing. But I do not like it.”
“Something wrong in the neighborhood?” Cherry asked with quick concern. This district was hers, intimately hers by now.
“Papa!” Mrs. Jonas called. “You forgot to order tomorrow’s milk and cream! You think the cows should remember?”
He called back wearily to his wife, “How should I think of milk and cream when that poor, lonely woman is maybe in trouble?”
“What poor, lonely woman?” Cherry pricked up her ears. “Mary Gregory?”
“Yes, yes, Mary Gregory. Only a little thing but”—Mr. Jonas riffled again through the leaves of the calendar—“never before has it happened. Never once in eighteen years!”
Cherry stopped eating and stared. “Tell me!”
Mr. Jonas shrugged. “All right, you are the nurse, you are a good girl, I can tell you. But do not tell the neighborhood or they will come in crowds around her house. She would be terrified. Well—” He paused and stared into space.
“Well, darling. This morning I sent my delivery boy over to Miss Gregory’s house to get her basket and the order for her week’s supply of food. For the first time in eighteen years, ever, there is no basket, no check, no note. No nothing. This is not like her, she is clockwork. So I am worried. I send the boy back three hours later to see if she has only been a little delayed with the order. He comes back, just before you come in here for your lunch, and he tells me he found nothing.”
“Papa! What does the little nurse think?”
“The little nurse thinks,” Cherry said, struggling into her overshoes and coat, “that she had better find Officer O’Brien and talk to him.”
“Good, good.” Mr. Jonas nodded his head. He consulted his old-fashioned pocket watch. “At this hour he should be reporting back at the station house. But hurry, he goes out in his patrol car again.”
Out in the icy rain Cherry walked as fast as she could the several blocks to the police station. She was just in time to catch Officer O’Brien.
The policeman was a powerful, rosy-faced man, solid as an oak tree in his blue uniform. He and Cherry had met earlier, when the children of the neighborhood brought him word of a great event—a new nurse had come! He smiled at her broadly and held out a tremendous hand.
“Well, now, Miss Ames!” he boomed. “What brings you here on this wet day?”
Cherry grinned back at him, wondering if she would ever learn one-tenth of the shrewd and kindly insight into human nature which showed in Officer O’Brien’s bright glance. She had heard about him—as quick and fearless with a thug as he was patient and merry with a lost child.
“Officer O’Brien, Mr. Jonas told me that Mary Gregory—”
“Ah, so you’re troubled about her, too?”
“If she’s sick—or had an accident in there—” Cherry repeated what Mr. Jonas had told her. “I don’t want to break in on her privacy, but still—”
“Nurse, I’ll tell you a bit of a secret. I make it my business to pass her house daily. Often’s the time I step to the door and shout: ’Are you all right? Do you want for anything?’ I never see Mary Gregory but she calls back: ‘Thank you, I’m all right.’ Once I let a doctor in, years ago.”
Cherry felt better. “Do you plan to go in now?”
The big policeman nodded. “After what you’ve just told me, yes, ma’am! This very minute, in fact. This may be an emergency, we don’t know. I want you to go in with me, nurse.”
They left the station house together and got into the patrol car. It was a brief drive to the mansion.
Cherry tingled all the way over. Now, suddenly, she was actually to see this mysterious woman! The urge to talk to the woman who had unhealthily hidden herself away pricked Cherry’s nursing instinct. Not medicine but psychology … Officer O’Brien, driving, was silent, thinking hard.
At the Gregory house they parked and Cherry followed Officer O’Brien out of the police car. To her surprise, she walked laggingly, along the fence toward the back gate. She felt almost numb. Curious and concerned as she was about the recluse, still Cherry felt reluctant at what she had to do. As if she were prying into a secret not meant for her to know. Or as if she might have to gaze upon some unutterable tragedy she would rather not witness.
“This isn’t like me, or like any good nurse,” Cherry remonstrated with herself. “It’s odd. I guess I’m afraid. Yes, actually afraid of what I may find in there.”
Officer O’Brien, ahead of her, was moving slowly too. He, too, admitted that he had no liking for this delicate, unpredictable task. They stood talking outside the silent mansion, the nurse and the big policeman.
“I’ll escort you in, nurse. Legal right of entry, and so forth. Besides, you never know what these queer birds may do. I sort of remember her father had an old gun collection in the house. She might get panicky.”
Cherry said stoutly, “From the orderly way she lives, I’m pretty certain she’s sane. I don’t think we have to be afraid of any violence. If anyone’s going to be frightened and at bay, it will be Mary Gregory.”
She tried to imagine how this strange woman would feel to have her long seclusion invaded by strangers. Officer O’Brien seemed to be pondering and worrying over the same thing. He and Cherry looked unhappily at each other. This was like hunting down a helpless creature. At length she said:
“You know, I think it might be better if you stayed downstairs and let me go up to see her alone. Then if I need you, I can call you.”
“I expect so, ma’am. Guess a woman could handle this more tactful than a cop.” He seemed rather relieved to have it settled that way.
He unlatched the back gate. The front door had not been opened in years, he explained. With a skeleton key fitted into its lock, the back door swung open easily. Cherry followed the broad, blue-coated figure in.
They were standing in a kitchen, immaculate, up-to-date, except that beside its fairly modern stove stood a very old, iron one. The house was so silent that the stillness seemed to ring.
Officer O’Brien slowly walked into the adjoining hallway and stood at the foot of the stairs. Cherry could see him glance sharply into rooms giving off the hallway, turn, open a door—apparently a cellar door—glance in. Once he stepped out of her line of vision. Instinctively she rushed a few paces forward so that she could see the policeman again, then stood rooted to the spot.
She jumped. Officer O’Brien was calling. His big voice, rather strained, echoed and re-echoed in the motionless rooms.
“Miss Gregory! Are you all right? It’s the police! Are you all right?”
No answer. Not a sound. Cherry felt gooseflesh shiver down her spine.
“Are you all right? Answer me if you can!”
Only echoes replied, dying away. Officer O’Brien clumped back into the kitchen, to where Cherry stood. He wet his lips.
“Do you think she’s dead?” Cherry breathed.
The policeman shook his head. “I doubt it. Doesn’t add up that way.” He smiled a little, grimly. “When you’ve pounded a beat as long as I have, you’re bound to get hunches about these queer situations.”
Cherry felt only dimly reassured. She was beginning to dread venturing alone through these rooms, and upstairs. It was more than ordinary dread—it was a kind of outrage to any delicacy of feeling.
“If you’re ready,” Officer O’Brien said, kind and gruff, reading her thoughts. “I’ll wait for you at the foot of the stairs.”
Cherry’s gaze flew to his. He said again:
“You were right. It would be easier for her, to see just a young woman—a nurse—”
Cherry drew a deep breath. “All right.”
“Good girl. Now suppose you take a look at the downstairs rooms first—I’m not going to barge in—”
Cherry nodded and holding tightly to the strap of her black bag, started off. Unconsciously she walked on tiptoe out into the hall. The grandfather clock out there had stopped. Its hands stood still at quarter to three.
She looked over her shoulder at Officer O’Brien. He had taken up his post at the bottom of the long, wide stairs. He waved her forward.
She entered the first of the three open doors and found herself in a high-ceilinged living room which belonged to another day. It was beautiful and faded, with satiny wallpaper, old-fashioned furniture, and thick, flowered carpet into which her steps sank without a sound. Cherry ran a finger over the surface of a gleaming table. There rose up a tiny shower of dust, the accumulation of only a day or two. Otherwise, all these inanimate things were polished, washed, waxed to the most fastidious degree.
“But the room looks dead—not lived in—” she thought, troubled. “Like a museum—no, a tomb.”
In the next room, two steps down, the past had been perfectly preserved. Cherry stared at the dark oak walls, the bull’s-eye windows, the black marble fireplace with roses carved into it. Here the furniture was plumply cushioned with dark-red silk, but no imprint of a living being was left. The windows were tightly closed, the heavy draperies did not stir. It was perfect, immaculate, and dead.
Cherry felt as if she were being suffocated. “It’s a room for ghosts.” Suddenly she saw someone staring across the room at her. She started, opened her mouth to call Officer O’Brien—It was only herself, wide-eyed. It was only her own reflection in a shadowy mirror.
“Whew! If I can scare myself, that’s a new low! Go on now, Ames. Go—on!”
She peeked out at Officer O’Brien standing there, and smiled weakly at him, before moving on to the third room. This was a dining room, where the long-dead had dined, looking like a stage set now. A golden clock, under a Victorian glass dome, had stopped at quarter to three.
She went back into the hall.
“Find anything?”
“Nothing. I’ll—I’ll go upstairs.”
On the broad landing she did find something.
“Hello!” she called down softly. “There are three portraits on the wall up here. A man. A woman. And a young man.”
Cherry gained the second floor. Here, despite her trepidation, she sensed a different atmosphere. This upper part of the house was lived in. This wide upstairs hallway, with several windows, was virtually a living room. An open sewing basket lay on one of the window seats. Ivy filled a quaint plant stand. It was a relief to see and hear a small desk clock ticking away. Framing all these upstairs windows were yards and yards of meticulous hand embroidery.
“Where is she?” Cherry wondered. “Maybe she’s not here at all!”
The doors to various rooms stood open. These were bedrooms: a master chamber with a faded, canopied bed, a child’s room of many years ago, guest rooms furnished as Cherry vaguely remembered her grandmother’s house. The beds were made, everything stood in readiness, as if for people who would never arrive.
But up at the front of the house, looking out on the street, Cherry found a sitting room. A highly personal and feminine room. Unlike the rest of the house, this apartment had quite new, informal furnishings. Besides, there was a radio, a stack of current magazines, a tray with used breakfast china on it, and a newspaper. Cherry tiptoed in and looked at the date on the newspaper. Day before yesterday.
She noticed other things. There were several letters on the desk, some opened and in various handwritings or typed, some written and ready for the mailman. One entire wall was lined with books, many of them recent. On a chair a medical book lay open at the section marked: Respiratory Disorders.
“She’s been trying to treat herself,” Cherry recognized. “And though part of her lives in the past, if she’s in touch with the outside world, maybe there still is some hope for her.”
Cherry opened the door into the other front room which gave on the street.
She caught her breath, for here Cherry found what she had been dreading.
In a vast bed rested a woman with the air of someone living in a dream. It was a haunted face, with great eyes that looked out pleadingly at Cherry.
“I—I am the neighborhood nurse,” Cherry said softly.
She took a few hesitant steps toward the bed. The woman’s eyes followed her. She looked frightened, as if she might cry. Cherry stopped and did not approach any nearer. The woman’s hands, bare of rings, gripped the bedclothes convulsively. Around the wrists and throat of her white nightdress, and edging the sheets, was more of that hand embroidery. Her tumbled hair, against the pillow, was dark, shot with silver. The face was not young and was marked with suffering, but strangely girlish still. She reminded Cherry of some woodland animal, like a doe, injured and bewildered.
Very gently Cherry said: “If you are ill, I can treat you. But if you wish, I will go away.”
The colorless lips parted. “No. Stay.” Then: “Help me.”
Cherry knew better than to try to make this woman talk. She was careful to talk very little herself. With the utmost gentleness, she put a thermometer between the sick woman’s lips, picked up the thin wrist, counting her pulse and breathing.
“I think you have influenza, Miss Gregory. This changeable weather.”
The heavy eyes lifted and asked Cherry a question.
“Yes, you should have a doctor. A nurse cannot diagnose, or prescribe treatment. Would you let me call a doctor?”
The woman turned her head on the pillow and looked away. Her great eyes searched vistas Cherry could not see: past, unhappy years, or empty years to come. Perhaps this lonely creature did not want to be cured, did not want to go on living. Sick people were often unreasoningly low in spirits.
Cherry said quickly: “You are not very ill. You will probably get well with only my help.” This was true enough, but Cherry said it to drive any morbid thoughts out of the sick woman’s mind. “You are going to recover, Miss Gregory. But a doctor can shorten your pain. And then, too.” Cherry appealed, gambling on a motive, “it isn’t quite fair to put a doctor’s responsibility on a nurse’s shoulders.”
A sensitive glance shot from the heavy eyes. The woman faintly smiled.
“A nurse—a child, almost. Very well. A doctor.”
“Thank you, Miss Gregory.”
Cherry rose, excused herself and promised to be right back, then sped downstairs. Officer O’Brien was still where she had left him. He ran halfway up the stairs to meet her.
“Well? Did you find her?”
“Yes—ill, but not in any danger. Needs a doctor. Can you get one?”
“Sure, right away. I’ll radio from my patrol car. Say, tell me—What’s she like, hey?”
Cherry hesitated, then helplessly held out her hands. “Pathetic. Scared. And—a nice person.”
“Beats me.” The policeman strode off to the kitchen. “What’s she scared of?”
“Life itself,” Cherry murmured as he went out the back door.
Returning upstairs to the sick woman, Cherry made her comfortable, then prepared for the doctor’s visit. She thought of preparing food for Mary Gregory, but did not want to feed her until after the doctor’s examination.
The doctor arrived within a few minutes. It was Dr. Gray, from the near-by hospital. Cherry knew him slightly and said reassuringly to the sick woman, “This is Dr. Gray.” He was middle-aged, quiet, a soothing presence, and an excellent practitioner. From the look on his face, Cherry guessed O’Brien had cautioned Dr. Gray as to the special psychological situation here.
“Hot water and towels, nurse.”
“Here you are, doctor.”
Like Cherry, Dr. Gray apparently had decided to talk as little as possible. It was enough of a shock to this woman to have people confront her, after her eighteen years of solitude and silence, without being subjected to a great deal of talk besides. Only the smallest and most tactful contact with her could be made at first.
“Yes, it’s influenza. A mild case, fortunately. When did you last have anything to eat, Miss Gregory?”
She had to stop and think. “Yesterday.”
“Nurse Ames will fix you something.”
“Yes, doctor,” said Cherry. She smiled to herself, thinking Mr. Jonas would be relieved to hear of this. She figured that even though Mary Gregory had gone downstairs to the kitchen yesterday, probably the rain plus her own weak condition had kept her from putting out the food basket with her check and the order.
The doctor sat thinking. “Miss Gregory, although you’re not very ill, you would be more comfortable with a private nurse. Someone to take constant care of you, and cook for you. Can you—afford that? If not—”
The woman lifted a thin hand. “I—don’t want that. Someone here all the time. No.”
“Very well,” said Dr. Gray peaceably. “The visiting nurse will be enough. Please come every day, Miss Ames, and report to me daily.”
“Yes, Dr. Gray.”
She glanced at Mary Gregory to see if she objected. Evidently not. Cherry rapidly figured: Must explain to Supervisor Davis so she will assign Gwen or Nurse Cornish some of my other calls, and leave me enough time for here. Will have to cook three meals for Miss Gregory on each visit. Has she a little electric stove to warm the food again? Better leave a pitcher of fruit juice beside her bed, too. Get a thermos for water. What else?
The doctor was taking his leave now. Leading Cherry into the sitting room, he gave her instructions for the patient’s care. He wrote out a prescription to be filled; Cherry promised to take care of it.
Dr. Gray gazed curiously around this upstairs sitting room. “Strange, strange … I don’t envy you, Nurse Ames, trying to learn the case history of this patient.”
Cherry jumped slightly. She had not thought of this half-tragic woman as anything so impersonal as a case history. Yet, of course, Dr. Gray was right. Cherry would have to get the facts about this patient, just as with all others whom the Visiting Nurse Service served, as a matter of official procedure.
The doctor picked up his hat and bag, still thinking. “It may not do her any harm to talk—if you can ever get her started talking. In fact, it should do her good to pour out her story. And you’ll have to be the one to listen,” he said quietly. “Well! Have I forgotten anything?”
“I think not, doctor.”
“Call me up tomorrow morning at the hospital. Oh, yes, and the policeman wants you to get in touch with him, too, for a report. Good-bye, Miss Ames. And—don’t let this house unnerve you.”
He left. Then Cherry heard the patrol car drive off. She was all alone now in this mansion with this strange woman.
“Nurse—” It was only a whisper.
Cherry bent over the bed. The woman extended her clenched hand, then opened it. It was a door key. To the back door, it seemed. Cherry took the key and put it into her purse. The key was still warm; it must have been under Miss Gregory’s pillow.
When she turned back to the bed, the haunted eyes were closed. Asleep? Or afraid and feigning sleep? The recluse’s face was wan, her expression vaporous. It was like a face half forgotten, vaguely recalled, not seen in focus, not a real and present face at all.
Cherry waited a while, until the woman’s breathing grew slow and deep. Then she crept downstairs, prepared sufficient food, and brought back the laden tray. Mary Gregory was still asleep, and that was good. Cherry set the food within easy reach, adjusted windows, shades, blankets. Then, having done all she could do, she went away until the next day.
But Mary Gregory had given her the key to her house. Of her own free will. Cherry had won her trust.