Story of Lola Gregg Read online

  I have tried to put down some description of a general nature, because the interesting event has to do with Dr. Fremont and the canning factory and Hagertown. I think this is not strange because I am a doctor’s daughter, and last week, when Mrs. Bently, my father’s nurse, had to go to Patterson to nurse her sick mother, my father asked me how would I like to come in afternoons when school was over and be his nurse. Of course, he didn’t want me to be a real nurse, but just to answer the telephone when he was inside with a patient and to tell the people in the waiting-room who was next.

  I guess that I have wanted to be a real nurse since I thought about what I want to be and sometimes Mrs. Bently lets me help her, so I knew what to do and my father teaches me first aid too, because he says I am the only one in the house with enough stomach to see blood without going faint.

  The interesting event which I have chosen as the subject of my composition happened at four o’clock in the afternoon, the third day after Mrs. Bently had left to nurse her mother in Patterson. I was sitting at Mrs. Bently’s desk wearing a white middyblouse, because that is the only thing I have that looks a little like a nurse’s uniform and there were two patients left in the waiting-room, one of them old Mrs. Garrison who has arthritis very severely and the other Sam Franklin on the highschool football team, who sprained his wrist. I was reading my geography and doing my homework.

  Then three men from the cannery burst into the waiting-room in a great hurry. I guess it is not right to say that they burst in, because one of them was sick and the other two were helping him to walk, but they did seem to burst in, even the man who was hurt so badly. That man had a face as white as flour. His face was so white that the whiskers stood out in a funny way against it. His hand was wrapped in a lot of rags and all the rags were soaked in blood but could not hold the blood which began to drip through the rags on to the oilcloth floor of the waiting-room.

  I guess I will never think of Sam Franklin or any of the boys on the football team as heroes any more, because as soon as he saw all the blood and the pain expression on the poor man’s face, Sam turned green and ran right but of the waiting-room. I don’t mean that he really turned green, but that was the way it seemed. Old Mrs. Garrison just sat there as if she was frozen.

  One of the men from the cannery said, “Where is the doctor? Is he in, little girl?” I ran into my father’s office, where he was working on a urine test for Mrs. Garrison. I wouldn’t use that word, but I asked my father today, and he said it was all right to use it in a medical sense, otherwise the people who read my composition would think that he was sitting in his office and contemplating his navel, something he never has a chance to do, although he says he would like to do it once in a while just for a change.

  He told me not to get excited and what had happened, and I told him about the man in the waiting-room. Well, he didn’t waste any time but opened the door and had them bring the man right in to his operating-room. It isn’t a real operating-room, but because the nearest hospital is forty-five miles away, he sometimes has to use it. By now the man who was hurt was sobbing with pain and tears were running down his cheeks and the other two men did not look very good, but one of them said to me that I was a little girl and should go out. My father said never mind about me being a little girl, and he said to me to go and wash my hands like he had showed me how to do. It is not just washing your hands like you do every day before supper, but a special way a doctor washes them with special soap a doctor has.

  While I was washing my hands, my father had the man lie down on the operating-table and he cut off his shirtsleeve and took away the bandages, and then the man began to cry and it was the first time I ever heard a grown-up man cry like that and I was really frightened and then the man began to say, while he was crying, just like a little boy, “Am I going to lose my hand, Doc? Are you going to cut it off, Doc?” My father said that he wouldn’t lose anything except blood and that had been lost already because no one had brains to put a tourniquet on his arm. My father has a wonderful way of talking to people so they think everything is all right even when it isn’t all right, and all the time he talked he worked and he works so fast you don’t even know that what he’s doing is being done.

  He put a tourniquet of rubber tubing above the man’s wrist and another on his hand and he said to me at the same time, what on earth was keeping me and how long did it take me to wash my hands. I told him I was all washed, and he said to me, “Sterile syringe. Tablet quarter grain morphine, atropine sulphate, dissolve in I C.C. of sterile water.”

  This meant that he wanted me to take a pill, I guess it’s better to call it a tablet, of morphine and atropine and dissolve it in a cubic centimetre of boiled water and load a hypodermic needle with it, and I was able to do this exactly as he told me to because he had showed me how and I had done it before. Then I had to look at the cut when I handed him the hypodermic and for a moment I thought the same thing would happen to me as happened to Sam Franklin, but my father spoke to me right away, very sharp the way he speaks when he wants something done and when he speaks that way everyone in town listens to him, even SellyGuhrman, the Mayor, who my father said is something we endure the same way as we do measles. My father said, “Lola, bandages and peroxide right away. Don’t ogle.” Then I held the pan while he washed out the wound. I guess maybe he would have wanted one of the men to hold it, but their hands were shaking and mine weren’t, at least not as much. Then I watched him bandage, because he always said that dressing is an art within an art and some doctors not only can’t dress but wouldn’t recognize art if they saw it in a glass of water when they were dying of thirst.

  Then the hurt man who all the time was moaning and crying fainted, and my father said to the others that he had gone into shock and that they would have to take him right to the hospital because as much of a rotten shame as it was, the hand would have to come off. He told me to get blankets and I took them from where he keeps them in his office closet, and then they wrapped the man in blankets and carried him out to my father’s car. My father said to me, “Lola, hold the fort until I come back. No more patients today unless they’re bleeding to death, and if they are I guess you can take care of it as well as I can.”

  So I went back to the office and told Mrs. Garrison that she would have to go home and come back tomorrow. She kept trying to talk to me about the man from the cannery, but I told her that Dr. Fremont does not allow me to talk about his patients. This is a sort of fib, or I would have no right to write this composition, but I just couldn’t stand the thought that Mrs. Garrison would want to talk to me and ask all the things that went on in the office. Finally, she went home but she was very provoked at me and said that she would have to tell Dr. Fremont that I was insolent.

  I sat at the desk and did the rest of my homework and then read some of The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, but my father did not come back until eight o’clock. At six o’clock, my mother came in and said I had to eat supper, but I told her that the doctor told me I must remain here until he came back and at last she said, all right if I was going to be as stubborn and foolish as my father, she would bring me a sandwich and a glass of hot milk to drink in the office. Then my brother Robert came in and said why didn’t I stop trying to show off and be grown-up when I was just a kid and everybody knew I wasn’t a nurse and couldn’t be a nurse for anyone. I told him to go away and stop bothering me, and then when he did go away, I began to cry and cried for almost half an hour.

  When my father came in, he grinned at me and said, “Well, my own Florence Nightingale, has the citizenry been well or ill since I left?”

  I told him that no one called except Mrs. Schwartz, who said that her little boy was croupy and she was very upset, so I told her to give him ipecac and steam him and that Dr. Fremont would call her when he got back, and she thanked me and that she must have thought that I was the nurse.

  “So you were,” my father said, “and why no smiles, no glad hellos?” I said that I didn’t know, but
it was just the way I felt, and my father said yes, he understood the way I felt. Then he took off his hat and coat, and when I asked him did he want me to tell Mother he was home for supper, he said that he would be in good time, but first he wanted to talk to me and first he wanted to kiss me. He took me in his arms so hard it hurt, and then he wiped his eyes and told me sternly to sit down and we would get a few things plain.

  Then he said what a rotten thing had happened to that poor man and how they had to amputate his hand at the hospital, and how if he came out of it all right, which was touch and go because of all the blood he had lost, he would never be able to work in the plant again. He told me that even if he sued the company, they would get big lawyers and the poor man would be lucky to get a hundred dollars out of it. “So you see, Lola,” he said to me, “a doctor can only bandage and stop the bleeding. He can’t cure the disease.” Then I asked him what the disease was, and he said God knows but doesn’t even tell preachers, and maybe it was the selfishness of the canning company that would not shell out a few dollars for safety measures or maybe it was the way things always were and always would be.

  I said to him that even if things always were one way, I didn’t see why they always had to be that way, and he looked at me in a funny way and said, “Lola, if a man like me can produce something like you, then God only knows but what you may be right,” I asked him what he meant by saying that, but he said, no, it took a little time to grow up.

  So I think that this is a good place to end my composition about an interesting event that happened to me.

  The incident of the composition came back to Lola with startling clarity, giving her a sudden sense of being back there with old Doc Fremont and the increment of defeat that made his shoulders bow rounder and rounder as the years went on. Nothing changed, he had said, and men, Lola, are fools, born of fallacy, nursed on the milk of superstition and ignorance, weaned on braggadocio and hypocrisy, and made proud on all the emptiness of nothing. Consider, Lola, he said, how this mirror of God spends his time: the beasts of the field live in ignorance, but the creature of reason spends his years gathering ignorance, and passes laws, ordinances, and all sundry devices of torture and jail to punish any of his species who should dare dabble in the truth. He prays to God to be rich, and if he’s lucky as he calls it, he sweats his riches out of the poor, who also pray to be rich. Of all species, only he spends the better part of his wealth and existence organizing the slaughter of his fellow men, and in the name of his God, he kills and kills with wanton, insane ferocity. His God is always the only true God and his way of life is always the only good way of life. He brags of honesty and he is the most dishonest critter that ever walked on this earth, and I tell you, Lola, if there is a God, the only reason he permits this abomination to continue to dirty the Lord’s green fields is because there happens to be a woman of the species, and usually she’s got more real decency in her little finger than a whole nation of mankind anywhere on this earth. Not always, Lola, not by any means, for I can tell you I’ve seen some women who were real humdingers, but that’s usually the case—and if this is the species you’re thinking of changing, well, give it up. You’ll have more luck with good work dogs, I’ll tell you that.

  And the composition, oh, that was a composition, and Lola found herself smiling at the recollection of the things that had happened just because of that composition. There is a moment in the life of every young lady when innocence begins to fall away, but usually not because of a composition she has written. Lola had never worked so hard on any composition as on that one. She looked up at least a hundred words in the dictionary, and she consulted her father again and again until he wanted to know whether she was writing a home-aid manual or what? Do you want me to read it? he had asked her. She said no, she didn’t think so, because he was in it, and he told her that if he was in it, she would certainly get no A and probably not even a B. But he didn’t realize how deeply he was in it until Mrs. Belefont, Lola’s teacher, turned up at the house one evening after dinner, her face set like a rock, and informed Dr. and Mrs. Fremont that she had something of importance to discuss with them. Mrs. Fremont took Mrs. Belefont into the parlour and closed the double sliding doors behind them, but Lola, sensing the odour of something she herself had brewed, ran up to her room and lay down with her ear to the register, which was a better conductor of sound than a telephone.

  “Well, what can we do for you, Mrs. Belefont?” Mrs. Fremont asked. “I hope there’s nothing wrong at school—with Lola, I mean.”

  “Wrong! Well, wrong is hardly the word for it! Did you see this?” Mrs. Fremont wanted to know what “this” was, and was informed by Mrs. Belefont that it was Lola’s composition. “Have you or Dr. Fremont read it?”

  “Why no—should we have read it?”

  “Well, I must say I would deeply appreciate your reading it right now.”

  “Now—but really, Mrs. Belefont——” But Mrs. Belefont insisted, and then there was a long silence in the register above as they read Lola’s composition. Lola waited in more or less complete bewilderment. If it were not for the tone of Mrs. Belefont’s voice, Lola would have expected praise, although it was a little beyond reason or expectation that Mrs. Belefont should come unannounced after supper just to praise her. But the tone of voice did not suggest praise, and Lola, who had an intimate knowledge of the full range—as she had thought—of Mrs. Belefont’s vocal capabilities, was astonished to find a pitch and tremolo she had never heard before.

  As she waited, she attempted to sort out sound and get some clue to what was happening below; but aside from her mother’s rather worried plea that Mrs. Belefont seat herself, and her father clearing his throat, there were no special sounds at all. Her father must have finished reading first, for he said, a note of wry humour in his voice.

  “Well, Mrs. Belefont, I do think it’s a forthright piece of prose, but nothing to get excited about. Or is there?”

  “Max, give me the last page, please,” Lola’s mother said.

  “Well, really, I don’t understand you, Dr. Fremont.”

  Then Lola’s mother said apologetically, “Nor do I, Mrs. Belefont, and I’ve been married to him nineteen years.”

  “I don’t think this is a laughing matter at all.”

  “No, of course not,” Dr. Fremont agreed hastily. “But on the other hand, it’s just the composition of a schoolchild——”

  “Max,” Mrs. Fremont interrupted, “I know what Mrs. Belefont means, and I assure you, Mrs. Belefont, that if we had been alert enough to read it before Lola gave it to you, we would have persuaded her to confine her pronouncements to her own judgments and not those of her father.”

  “Well—I still think, Mrs. Fremont, that parents bear a certain amount of responsibility. In thirty years of teaching, I never heard the lawfully elected mayor of our city referred to in such disgraceful terms. We attempt in our civics classes to teach the meaning of democracy——”

  “Good God,” Dr. Fremont interrupted, “everyone knows what a miserable creature Selly Guhrman is—even you must know that, Mrs. Belefont. Of course Lola shouldn’t have put it so bluntly and she shouldn’t, have quoted me, but since only the three of us and Lola have read the thing, I don’t see that much harm’s done.”

  “No harm done! And I suppose the godlessness in there, the blasphemy is just as harmless?”

  “Godlessness? Blasphemy? By all that is holy, Mrs. Belefont, I will not——”

  Lola waited breathlessly for the explosion, wondering how she would ever return to school in Hagertown again, but her mother stepped into the situation and said calmly and decisively, “Max, please——” and as he spluttered into silence, “You see, Mrs. Belefont, we feel here that matters of religion are highly personal. There is a lack of agreement even in our family circle, yet we manage to live happily and in a civilized manner. And if that can be done in a family, it can surely be done in a school or a town, don’t you think, Mrs. Belefont?”

  “Well�
�really—I don’t know what to say.”

  “Of course I understand, Mrs. Belefont, and don’t you think the wisest thing we can do is for me to keep this composition for the time being and have Lola rewrite it under my supervision?”

  “That’s hardly an accepted procedure, once a composition has been handed in.”

  “But we can make an exception this time, can’t we, Mrs. Belefont? I’m so grateful that you took the time and effort to bring it over. It was so thoughtful of you, and showed not only a public spirit, but a true pedagogical interest. At the next meeting of the Board of Education, I shall make certain to commend your attitude publicly.”

  “Well—if you think it should be rewritten?”

  “I do.”

  And in the room above, Lola listened, mouth open with wonder and amazement as she heard Mrs. Belefont tamed so gently and led to the door, so thankful for Mrs. Fremont’s understanding; and even her father, grumbling that his wife had betrayed him, did not change her awe at her mother’s tact and wisdom.

  Her mother said:

  “I did nothing of the kind, and I have to live in this town, Max Fremont, and your children have to go to school here—and I think it’s time we both had a talk with Lola.”

  They had their talk and Lola did rewrite the composition, but strangely enough, it was her mother who preserved the original and kept it, for Lola to find one day after her mother’s death, going through a box of what had been most precious to her through the years, wisps of hair and baby shoes and some faded ribbons and her marriage certificate and Robert’s first report card and a photograph of the Fremonts, newly married, at Niagara Falls and this and that and Lola’s composition.