Ozark Nurse (6 page)

For one thing, her father was going to start a doctor's column in his string of newspapers. "Guess who the doc will be who gives them all sorts of lovely advice for free?" None other than Doctor Paul Anderson. Natch.

So right there would be a nice chunk of income he could count on from the outset. Even better, her dad was planning the same kind of thing on a TV program. "Lining up some sponsors will be easy. Have you an idea how Paul can cash in on a deal like that?"

"No."

"Well, think it over, dear. Maybe it will come to you. Any more objections?"

Nora stood up. "What have my objections got to do with it? I should think Paul would be the one to decide what he wants to do. I'm not his keeper."

"But you do have some influence with him, Nora." Now the cajoling note was back in her tone, the touch of flattery. "He has told me how smart you are, how he values your opinion. In fact, that is the reason I wanted us to have this little talk. I want you to advise him to accept dad's offer, persuade him to get out of this hospital fast. He'll listen to you, if you make it good and strong. Will you do that?"

"No."

"Please don't be difficult, Nora. You must see that this is a wonderful opportunity for Paul. If you're the good friend you pretend to be, if you truly have his best interests at heart, you'll tell him to jump at this chance."

"I don't happen to agree that it would be in his best interests. Paul isn't money-mad. He does love his work: exactly the kind of work he trained for and is doing, with children."

Nora went on, her voice steady, cold. "If he threw all that aside to make some fast bucks the easy way, he'd be a frustrated and miserable man. That's what
I
think. But as I said, it's for him to decide."

Rita got up and came slowly around the desk, following Nora to the door. Suddenly she was furious and made no effort to hide it.

"You little fool! You
jealous
little fool! That's what's eating you—jealousy."

Nora watched the girl's face as she lost control of herself in an angry tirade. It was fascinating to see that beautiful face turn hard and ugly.

"You aren't fooling me for one minute. You're crazy about Paul. You can't get him the way you want him. but you keep running after him, keep trying. Naturally you don't want him to accept dad's help. If he did, he'd be seeing a lot of me. That idea kills you, doesn't it? You were always envious of me, even back in school days. Look who I was, look at all I had! And who were you? Just a piece of trash from the hills who had the luck to be taken in by the Hiltons. I was somebody, and you were nobody. You couldn't stand that, could you? You still can't. It drives you crazy to realize how you'll stack up against me in Paul Anderson's estimation. Doesn't it?"

Having run out of breath, Rita paused and breathed, then snapped: "Well, why don't you say something?"

Nora's voice was perfectly calm.

"You disgust me," she said. Then she opened the door, hurried along the corridor, and went looking for Margaret Thorpe.

"Is something on fire?"

"Yes. Me," said Nora, all but running Margaret down as she emerged from the nurses' lounge. "Maggie, have you ever had an almost irresistible desire to strangle another person?"

"Frequently. Whom would you like to strangle, dear? Can I help?"

Nora laughed, immediately feeling calmer, more like herself. Invariably Margaret had that soothing effect on her. The woman never allowed the pressure of problems and small crises to get under her skin. Take right now. She had just returned from issuing orders to the team who were struggling to keep life in the meningitis case. It was a touch-and-go crisis. The baby should have been brought in sooner. There were a large number of white blood cells in the spinal fluid, which was very bad. Margaret had ordered one nurse to keep rubbing the baby. Another nurse stood by with an intravenous feeding stand and bottles of antibiotics. Still a third held the child's head while two interns manipulated a "breathing bag" to breathe for him.

Margaret took a moment to give this run-down, and before she had finished, Nora wished she had a good thick pillow where she could bury her head in shame.

"I deserve a good stiff kick in the posterior, Maggie!" She said it fervently. What right had she to pride herself on being a good nurse, a conscientious nurse, yet take time out to worry over her own trivial personal problems, with struggles between life and death going on all around her?

And yet nothing was exactly trivial if it undermined her efficiency, was it? How could she keep her mind on her work as long as she was a walking bundle of nerves and anxiety, with any number of unanswered questions hammering at her brain?

She wanted, she told Margaret, to take an hour off from duty. She was perfectly willing to take on an evening shift to make up for it. So if Maggie would have one of the floor nurses look in on Andrew Fine—

"I'll drift in to check on him myself," said Margaret. "I'll pat his fevered brow, take his pulse, and suggest very subtly that I'd be a real comfort in his old age."

Nora grinned. "Lots of luck, pal." Then, very seriously: "I know I'm behaving like a mixed up school kid, Maggie. I'm ashamed I haven't more control over myself. But I've had a series of small shocks, as you know. Then came the last straw. I just tangled with Rita Lansing."

"Oh? Who won, honey?"

"Who knows? I certainly don't. I won't know until I've had things out with Paul. I won't be any good around here either, until I gel things settled between us, one way or the other. Then I'll snap out of it."

Margaret Thorpe nodded and told her to run along. Paul was over in the annex, she said, looking a little like a sick kid himself. "If gorgeous Rita is really loaded for bear—and from what you say, she obviously is—how about hustling Paul into the isolation section along with our meningitis case?"

An inspired idea, Nora thought. She added dryly: "He'd be a lot safer there."

Architecturally, the children's annex was not on speaking terms with the elegant exterior of the main hospital building. It had been started three years before, its main purpose to provide treatment for youngsters from poverty-stricken families in the hills and back country. There had been no money to waste on an impressive, modern structure. Surgery cases were taken to the surgery section in the hospital proper. Lab tests were made there, pictures taken. For uncomplicated hospitalization and medical treatment, the long one-story building sufficed. It resembled an Army barracks.

The small consulting offices used by the doctors were at the back end. Nora went around a side path to avoid going through the huge main ward. When she caught sight of the big, unkempt figure roaming about through the wooded area which bordered the grounds, she shuddered.

Crazy Ben Sackett was forever hanging around the hospital. The sight of him gave her the creeps.

She went up half a dozen wooden steps and into a narrow hallway. Paul's voice came to her from inside the first of the small offices. He was talking to a patient. Her heart sank as she heard his words: "Your son has a serious heart malformation. Immediate surgery is imperative. But I repeat, I can only diagnose and advise. One of the other doctors will perform the operation."

"But I want
you
to do it, Doctor Anderson." The woman seemed to be sobbing. "Oh, I'm so worried about my baby. I love him so. He's all I've got to live for, and I know you're the one who could save his life. Somehow I just can't trust my baby to nobody else. Please."

"I'm sorry. For the time being I am not undertaking any surgery."

The door opened. The woman came out, walking slowly, a forlorn little person with straggly hair and hopeless eyes.

Nora went in.

Paul's expression told her clearly that he was something less than delighted to see her. His eyes seemed to close against her completely as she walked to his desk and asked flatly: "Are you proud of yourself, turning down that poor woman when she begs for your help?"

He looked at her for a moment. "Let's not go through all that again, Nora. Frankly, I can't take it."

She drew up a chair and studied him for a moment. A feeling of deepest compassion washed away her momentary anger. She saw the lines of weariness carved deep around his wide mouth. His eyes looked tortured. Paul was thirty-four years old. Until recently he had looked closer to twenty-five. Right now he could have been taken for forty. So much for what worry and mental unrest could do to a man in a few short weeks.

"Paul, whether you like it or not, we've got to talk about this. I see you destroying yourself for no sensible reason. The other doctors see it. Everyone wants to help you pull out of this black mood. It's as if you were caught in some kind of emotional trap. We all want to help you out of it. But you refuse to be helped. You won't take advice from anybody."

He smiled thinly. "That's putting it fairly accurately. I am in a trap of sorts. How would you suggest that I get out of it?"

Nora was ready with the logical answer to that question. "I'd suggest that you do the thing you are afraid of doing: operate on that child whose mother just begged you to. Forget this obsessive fear that has taken hold of you. Once you've done a good job and brought a patient through, you'll be sure of yourself again."

Very sound advice, Paul agreed wryly; the advice one gave to someone who had been thrown from a horse, or survived a plane crash.

"It also applies to your problem, Paul. Why doesn't it? You've lost your self-confidence because of those cases you lost. So you're scared to operate again, afraid you've lost your skill. I say operate again, and fast. You'll do a successful job. Then you won't be scared any more."

"Very simple." He nodded. "But you overlook two small details. One, I might not do a successful job. And two, I'd be gambling with another life; not my own."

"Oh, Paul!" She shook her head sorrowfully, then got up and went to him, putting her hand on his shoulder. "What is it that's eating you, honey? Is it something you haven't told me?"

Suddenly she laughed, as if at the absurdity of the suggestion. "Surely you haven't let that old crackpot, Ben Sackett, get under your skin? He goes around bellowing that you aren't fit to be a doctor, but nobody pays any attention to him. Surely you don't, do you?"

He took a long time to answer. When he did, it was as if a great light had been turned on, and in its reflection Nora saw the deeply buried doubt which must have been haunting the man through all of his grownup years.

"The trouble is, Nora, a long time ago my father told me the same thing. He warned me that I'd never make a good doctor. He said I belonged on the land, not in the operating room. Maybe he was right."

So there it was, out in the open. And what could she say and do? She wasn't a psychiatrist.

As he talked, she recalled many things he had told her from time to time about his father: a domineering man whose word was law; a man who made all the decisions, who always knew best.

Paul's mother used to tell him that. "Your father knows best, dear. You must obey him without question. You'll never go wrong if you listen to your father. Look how smart he has always been. He came to this strange country with nothing. Now he owns all this rich corn land, stretching farther than the eye can reach. And such a good man. He reads his Bible and goes by the Word of God. You always listen to your father, son. He knows best."

And Paul had listened, and obeyed. "The only time I ever defied him," he had said once, "was when I went in for medicine."

What could Nora say? She still believed, would continue to believe, that he could lick this defeatist attitude, if he would just get back to surgery and do one successful job. But there was no way she could force him to do that, and if this whole thing stemmed from a childhood conviction that his father was all-wise—

I'm not clever enough to cope with a big fat neurosis like that, she thought, and walked over to the window just in time to see crazy Ben moving from behind a scrub oak a few hundred feet away. He looked like a big animal scurrying about.

When she turned back, Paul was still at his desk, staring at his hands like a man in a trance.

"Oh, let's have a cup of coffee," she said, and went over to the electric grill. Maybe she'd better change the subject. Heaven knew she had plenty else to say.

"Well, you can't go on like this, Paul. That's for sure." She set the coffee in a paper cup on his desk and sat down to sip her own. "So what are your plans? Rita Lansing tells me her father has a really big deal in mind for you. Are you going to take him up on it?"

He jerked upright, looking extremely surprised. "When did Rita tell you that?"

"About an hour ago." And she told him how the conversation had come about. Then, out of the blue, she asked the question which had been nagging at her mind.

"Paul, are you in love with that girl?"

He jumped up then, coming really alive for the first time since she had come into the office. "Are you out of your mind?" he asked, grabbing her shoulders.

"A little bit, yes." She bit her lip hard. "Did you tell Rita that we were simply good friends; that there was no thought of marriage between us?"

"Of course not!" The question seemed both to astonish and anger him. "Why would I say such a thing?"

"I don't know. That's what I want to find out."

He glared at her; then very abruptly he began to qualify his words—just a little.

"Well, look," he said. "I may have said something which gave her that impression. Not that I meant it that way."

"I see."

"It was like this." He began pacing the floor, lit a cigarette. "She asked me a lot of personal questions, see? And—well, I'm sure I can count on you to understand that no matter what I said, I didn't mean—"

"You'd better not count on me to understand anything," she said coldly. "I don't even understand how you got to know Rita Lansing well enough to discuss me with her."

She stood very still, as Paul continued to prowl the small room while he explained how he had become acquainted with Rita.