Eve's Daughters (38 page)

Mother was forty-two and often exhausted after a long shift at the factory. “Think about your future, Gracie,” she told me one night as we sat in our gloomy kitchen. “Get a good education so you don’t have to work in a factory all day like I do.”

“I don’t know what I want to do after high school,” I said. “I don’t suppose we have any money for a college education.”

Mother smiled sadly. “I’m sorry, baby.”

Then, just as Mother predicted, the war changed my life. Because of the need for nurses, full scholarships were available if I trained to become a registered nurse.

“It’s your salvation, Gracie,” Mother said. That was the closest she ever came to mentioning religion.

TWENTY-TWO

I graduated from high school in 1943 and started nursing school in Philadelphia the following fall. I would be away from home for the first time since staying with Mam when I was four years old.

“I promise I won‘t cry buckets when the time comes to say good-bye,” Mother said, but she did anyway. So did I.

I dreaded the idea of traveling to Philadelphia alone on the train, but as it turned out, Father O’Duggan had a meeting there with the bishop that same weekend, so we rode down on the train together. We sat side by side in the crowded coach section, watching the grimy view of warehouses and rail yards give way to city neighborhoods, then suburbs, then open countryside. We talked like the old friends that we were, comfortable with each other.

“I imagine you must be very excited about all the changes that are ahead for you,” Father O’Duggan said.

“Yes . . . and a little scared too. I’ve never been away from home before.”

“May I ask you, Gracie . . . do you know much about . . . about dating . . . and about men?”

“I’ve never had a boyfriend or even been on a date. I think it’s because I’m not very pretty.”

“Nay, you’re a lovely girl. I may be a priest, but I’m also a man, and I can still spot a pretty girl when I see one. May I tell you what I see?” He turned in his seat to face me, his blue eyes warm with candor. “You have the dainty quality of a fine porcelain doll with your fair hair and skin, your tiny delicate bones. You have your mother’s beauty, Gracie, and I think you’ve seen the way she has always attracted men’s notice.”

“You’re very kind, Father O’Duggan, but believe me, the boys don’t notice me at all.”

“Your looks are not the reason you haven’t had any dates. The majority of boys in our neighborhood are Irish-Catholic, you see, and their mams drill it into their thick skulls that they may not date a Protestant girl.”

“Much less one whose mother is divorced.”

“Aye,” he said with a weary sigh. “There is that problem, too, I’m afraid. But you see, the boys in Philadelphia aren’t going to know your mother is divorced, and a good many of the soldiers roaming around the city aren’t going to care if you’re a Protestant or a pagan. They’ll simply see a lovely, available young woman, and they’ll want to ask you out.”

I found that difficult to believe, even though I trusted Father O’Duggan not to lie to me. I must have appeared skeptical because he continued to assure me that it was true.

“I’m worried about you, lass,” he said, frowning slightly. “You’re not only pretty, you’re naive. There are many unscrupulous men out there who will try to take advantage of you. Unless they’ve taken a vow of celibacy as I have, most young men have only one thing on their minds . . . and I think you know what that is.”

“Yes,” I said quickly. We had both begun to blush.

“Gracie, they’ll tell you all kinds of things . . . they love you, they have ‘needs,’they want to marry you someday, ‘it isn’t wrong if we love each other’ . . . but you mustn’t give in to them. A respectable man, an honorable man, will know that God considers any physical relationships outside of marriage a sin. Wait for a man who respects you enough to wait for marriage. You deserve it.”

“Mother already warned me to choose my husband carefully. She doesn’t want me to make a mistake and marry the wrong man like she did.” Since he had raised the subject, I hoped I could pump some information from Father O’Duggan about Karl Bauer. “Do you know what kind of a man her husband was?” I asked.

“I’ve never met Karl Bauer,” he said, looking away.

“Oh. For some reason I thought that you had.”

He shook his head. “No, like you, I never have.”

By the time we reached the train station in Philadelphia, we both felt travel-weary. Father O’Duggan hired a cab, and since we were going in the same direction, we shared it all the way to the nurses’ home across the street from the hospital. He helped the driver carry my belongings up the stairs.

“God be with you Gracie,” he said as we hugged good-bye. “You’ll be in my prayers-as you always are.” I couldn’t help crying. I looked at his beloved face and saw that he was still a handsome man in middle age, even if his forehead was a little higher now, his golden hair a little thinner. His blushing attempts to warn me about the wiles of men had touched me, but I didn’t
know how to thank him properly. I thought I saw tears in his eyes, too, as he hurried away. I climbed the steps to the dormitory alone. It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done.

I was painfully shy, probably because I hadn’t had many friends growing up and I didn’t know how to act around other girls. But I soon discovered that Father O’Duggan had been right—my roommate Lois didn’t know or care that my mother was divorced and never asked nosy questions about my father. We were both away from our parents for the first time, and the less we thought about them the better.

My homemade clothes didn’t matter anymore either, since all of us cadet nurses wore uniforms, a crisp, white dress with a gray collar, and thin gray stripes. We were issued dress uniforms to wear in public, too, designating us as nurses-in-training, so we could get into movies and dances for free like members of the armed forces. I got on well with my roommate, a popular, outgoing brunette. She helped me experiment with styling my wild hair and using makeup.

“Your hair is such a gorgeous color!” Lois raved. “Are you sure it doesn’t come from a bottle? Most girls would pay a lot of money to be a strawberry blonde like you. And it’s naturally curly too . . . you don’t need a permanent wave.”

A few weeks after school started, I went to my first USO dance. The club was very crowded and pulsing with energy. I had never seen so many men together in one place before, and almost all of them in uniform. I would have run back to the nurses’ home in a panic if my roommate hadn’t forced me to stay.

Ten minutes after we arrived, a dark-haired sailor strode over to our table and asked me to dance. “Me?” I squeaked in surprise.

“Yeah,” he said, pulling me onto the dance floor. “I always go for the prettiest girl in the room first.” He danced with me the entire night.

We went out quite a few times before he was shipped overseas. He was the first boy who ever kissed me. I had nothing to compare it with, but I thought the sensation was heavenly. I floated all the way up the stairs to my room.

I thought of Father O’Duggan’s words often, and I couldn’t escape the feeling that he was sitting in the backseat, watching over me every time I went out on a date. I quickly learned that he had been right—the boys did find me attractive. I had no shortage of dates on Friday and Saturday nights. But every
Sunday I walked to church a few blocks from the hospital to talk to my heavenly Father.

During the week I took classes in biology and chemistry and gradually spent more and more time on the hospital wards, taking care of patients. As a first-year cadet nurse, I didn’t do much besides take temperatures and plump pillows, but I knew I had found my calling. I loved nursing. Best of all, I lived an entirely new life—far from the poverty and disgrace of my mother’s divorce, far from girls who weren’t allowed to befriend me and boys who weren’t allowed to date me, far from the endless, nagging questions about my father. Every time I looked at the woman in the mirror I barely recognized her. I was a new Grace Bauer, a cadet nurse with pretty hair and a snappy uniform. I had been reborn.

“I’ve felt sick all day,” I told my roommate in January of my second year of nursing school. I had arrived home from classes that afternoon with a sore throat and an upset stomach. I flopped onto my bed, too sick to eat. “Go to supper without me.”

“Shall I bring something back for you to eat?” Lois asked.

“No thanks.”

By the time she returned from dinner, I was burning with fever and talking nonsense. She ran down the hall yelling for Mrs. McClure, the nursing director.

I was delirious throughout the great flurry of activity that followed, but when my fever finally broke a few days later, I lay all alone in the hospital’s communicable diseases ward, recovering from a case of scarlet fever. Since I was allowed no visitors, my recovery seemed long and tedious.

“Can you please have Lois send my Bible over?” I asked one of the nurses. I began with Genesis and read it straight through to Revelation.

Aside from my doctor and the occasional nurse bringing me my daily ration of applesauce or rice pudding, the only people I saw were medical students and interns. They paraded through in their gauze masks to peer cautiously at my sandpapery rash—a classic case, Dr. Reynolds informed them—then hurried out again. Most didn’t dare return or hang around too long for fear they would catch scarlet fever too, but one intern showed up every morning for five days straight. I recognized his inquisitive hazel eyes above the mask. He wore his light brown hair in a crew cut, and his sharp widow’s peak made his face look heart-shaped.

“Are you planning to specialize in communicable diseases by catching all of them?” I asked when he reappeared on the sixth day. Grateful for the company, I didn’t want him to leave. He thought my question hilariously funny.

“I’m going to be a pediatrician,” he said when he could stop laughing. “I’ll probably see scarlet fever in my practice and I wanted to watch how it progressed.”

“In that case, I’m happy to have obliged you,” I said. “Are there any other diseases you’d like me to catch?” I couldn’t see his mouth, but I could tell by his eyes that he was smiling.

“Not this semester. I’ll let you know when my rotation changes. Thanks for the offer, though.”

I didn’t see him again until the day before I was to be released. He came with the others to observe my peeling skin. “I hear you’re graduating from solitary confinement tomorrow,” he said. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks. But I’m not going very far. Dr. Reynolds wants to take out my tonsils so I don’t have a relapse.”

He winced. “Get all your talking done now, while you have a chance. Your throat’s going to be pretty sore for a couple of days. I know. I had my tonsils out when I was four. My mother said it was the only time in my entire life that I ever stopped talking.”

I was eating my first dish of ice cream after my tonsillectomy when the hazel-eyed intern strode into my room. It took me a moment to recognize him without the mask. The lower half of his face was as handsome as his eyes, with a magnificent smile and a deep cleft in his chin.

“I was right about the sore throat, wasn’t I?” he said.

I nodded and quickly wiped dripping ice cream off my chin. I shuddered to think how I must look after two weeks in the hospital.

“I thought I’d stop by . . . I might see a few tonsillectomies in my practice too.” He had an easy, confident manner, seemingly at home in any hospital room, but I got the impression he could quickly take charge in a crisis. If I lived to be a hundred, I could never be as bold and self-assured as he was. He took my chart from the bottom of my bed and studied it for a moment before replacing it.

“Actually, that’s a lie. I came to see you.” He pulled up a chair beside my bed and sat down. “My name’s Stephen Bradford . . . no, don’t try to talk. I already know your name is Grace Bauer. And I know you’re a second-year nursing student, right?”

I nodded again, then gestured to remind him that I could write if he would hand me paper and a pen.

“No, no, no,” he said, laughing. “I’m going to enjoy this one-sided conversation. I’ve been out on dates with some girls and couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”

I would have asked if he considered this a date if I could have talked. He leaned toward me, propping one elbow on his knee, resting his chin on his hand.

“I saw you reading the Bible when you were in the other ward. That impressed me. It’s usually not the favored reading material of women your age. At first I was afraid that you might be planning to become a nun or something—which would be a tragic waste of a beautiful woman—but then I remembered seeing you at Christ Church. You go there sometimes, right?”

I nodded, feeling more and more like a trained horse.

“See, that intrigues me. Attending church is obviously your choice, since your parents aren’t around to drag you there by the hand. I’m a physician not a detective, but unless I’m reading this all wrong, I suspect that there is some spiritual depth to you, Grace Bauer—along with beauty and intelligence. Sorry—I confess that I peeked at your grades too.”

By now I was blushing fiercely. I longed to duck beneath the covers to escape his probing eyes, but I knew I would look foolish. I was glad I couldn’t talk because I had no idea what to say. Nor could I imagine ever conversing with someone as poised and articulate as Stephen Bradford.

“Am I right? Have you had some sort of . . . spiritual experience?” he asked.

“My faith is very important to me,” I whispered. The effort hurt my throat, bringing tears to my eyes. He sprang to his feet and poured a glass of water, then lifted my head so I could drink.

“Hey, you’re not supposed to talk. You’ll start hemorrhaging. Do you taste blood?”

I shook my head.

“Good. Dr. Reynolds will murder me if he has to pack your throat. Let me do the talking, okay?” He settled back in the chair again. “My parents dragged me by the hand to church when I was small, and I thought it was okay—pretty music, nice people. But nothing much happened inside me, you know? It didn’t mean anything. Then I came down with appendicitis when I was twelve. My appendix ruptured and I nearly died of peritonitis.”