Strange Women, The

THE STRANGE WOMEN

By

Miriam Gardner

The Strange Women

By Miriam Gardner

First published in 1962.

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ISBN:  978-1-936456-31-4

Cover painting by Tom Miller.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Nora Caine had seen only three patients this afternoon. Now again the waiting room was empty; there would still be time to drive to Albany and see Kit, before the night and the gathering snowstorm closed down over the twenty miles of country roads that lay between.

Kit, her husband, had been six months in the Veteran's hospital there, and would be there for six months more.

Kit would never have re-entered the hospital if she had not urged him—if she had not married him first, and spent a wild and insanely happy and heartbreaking honeymoon week with him. Kit was tired of hospitals; he resented every minute in the prison of bed and wheelchair. After the plane crash from which he had been dragged with crushed legs, he had fiercely refused to admit that he was disabled.

It made Nora dizzy and a little light-headed to think of Kit—the tanned face, the lean body so firm and healthy-looking that you expected him, any minute, to pull himself out of the wheelchair and clasp you in those muscular arms that seemed made for holding a woman close. He had blue eyes, narrowed from looking into the lights and far horizons of a jet flyer, but he was dark, with the fierce keen look of some caged falcon, restless and quick.

"What the hell—I should spend a year of my life in casts again? I'm doing fine!" he had flared in savage rebellion.

But in the end he had gone; he had done it for her. "I won't have people saying you've tied yourself down to a—a damn cripple," he said, his fists clenched and his voice shaking, and he had gone.

Nora shook her head hard. The longing for Kit was a continuous hunger, but dreaming about his arms was a luxury she couldn't afford during working hours. If there weren't any patients, there was the problem that had come with the morning mail.

The letter had been forwarded from her last hospital. Nora glanced through it, though she already knew it by heart.

Dear Nora;

Dad's old lawyers finally tracked you down. Why did we lose touch, anyhow? A stepbrother may not be much of a relative, but that's no reason for dropping right out of sight...

But I didn't,
Nora thought, with the old touchy defensiveness
. You did.
My
letters kept coming back from all those funny parts
of
the world. The Sorbonne. Cambodia. Tehuatlapan. Yucatan.

…
I've been staying in the old house at Mayfield; I didn't think you'd mind...

So that's why there were lights there. And I only thought the agent had finally managed to rent it.

…and I'm wondering now, Nora, if you'd sell me your equity in the place. Since you've married again, I don't suppose you want it. I hate doing business by letter; please let me know where I can get in touch with you personally.

* * *

And the blunt, firm-stroked signature;
Mack.
He had penciled a telephone number after it; Nora went out into the hall, picked up the phone, and dialed. She listened, frowning.

"Oh, I see," she said at last. "Ask Mr. MacLellan to call me when he gets in." She hung up and was immediately furious with herself.

Damn, now I'll have to wait for the call, and I could have gotten away. And Kit's waiting.

An ancient framed pier-glass hung in the hall; Nora saw herself there, a tall woman, big-boned but slender, who would have been pretty if she had taken the trouble. At the moment she wore no makeup, not even lipstick, and her thick braids, wrapped close to her head, looked at least two shades darker than the bright copper they really were.

Because of the drafty old farmhouse, she had worn wool slacks under her white coat; she looked severe and rather forbidding. She scowled at her reflection, thinking of the years since she had seen Mack and what they had done to her; then, pushing the thought away, she opened the door to the waiting room.

The old parlor, gray in the December twilight, looked empty; then something moved in the dusk, and Nora, snapping on the light, saw a woman there.

A girl, really, so slender and young she might have been still in her teens. She jumped up, with a nervous smile, as the light flooded the room.

Nora said, "You can come in now, please," and held the heavy door for the girl to precede her into the office.

She was wearing a dark red coat like a schoolgirl's, and
a
childish knitted cap; but her legs, in fine stockings and high-heeled pumps, were too trim for a schoolgirl's. She unbuttoned her coat and laid it across the back of an old oak chair. She was small, with curly dark hair and widely spaced dark eyes, and she was wearing a red cashmere sweater, brightened up with a modest little jeweled pin that had cost about as much as Nora's entire winter wardrobe.

"Where's the doctor?" she asked, and Nora smiled.

"I'm
the doctor."

"But—I mean—where is Dr. Byrd? The
old
doctor?"

"Flat on his back, and in an oxygen tent, I believe," said Nora serenely. "I'm Dr. Caine. Please sit down." She sat down herself and waited. After a minute the girl did, too; suspiciously, as if she still expected Dr. Byrd to pop out of a cabinet somewhere. Nora uncapped her pen.

"Your name, please?"

"Jill Bristol."

There was something oddly familiar about the name. About the girl, too, now that Nora came to think of it.

Well
after
all, I lived here once.
If
I put my mind to it, I'd probably recognize half the population.

"Are you a regular patient of Dr. Byrd's?"

"Not—since I was a little girl. I moved away years ago." Jill Bristol looked down at her shoes. Their polished pointed tips were still wet with snow. Then she said very quickly and all at once, "I want to know whether I'm pregnant."

Nora made a question mark on the desk pad. "Have you had other children?"

"Oh, no. I'm not—" she broke off. "No."

Something in the tone made Nora raise a mental eyebrow, but she asked neutrally, "When was your last period?"

"About—let me think—about five weeks ago."

Nora raised her real eyebrows this time. "You know, of course, Mrs. Bristol, that's a little too soon to be sure? I wouldn't like to give you a definite opinion until after the second missed period."

"But—but I've always been so perfectly regular before, and when it was late—this time especially,—I started to worry—"

Oh-oh,
said Nora to herself.
One
of
those.

Then, firmly, she told herself not to jump to conclusions. The girl might simply be a jittery new bride. In her own city practice, her next question would have been "How long have you been married"—if not a point-blank, "Are you married?" but two weeks of dealing with Byrd's small-town patients had made her less blunt and more careful.

"Even so, it's too soon to know. Why don't you go home and wait—oh, two or three weeks. Then, if your menstruation hasn't returned, Dr. Byrd should be back, and a diagnosis would be much more reliable."

And the old boy is welcome to give you the good news —or the bad!

Jill Bristol was regarding her with wide unhappy eyes—not dark as Nora had thought, but gray, rimmed in long, smoky lashes. "But I—I really do have to know, right away. Aren't there—tests?"

Nora's grim conviction grew. Young wives, happy or unhappy about the prospect of a baby, didn't look that desperate.

Ordinarily Nora would have said, "I haven't the facilities to make them here," referred her to a specialist, and let her walk out. Desperate pregnant girls were no novelty to any doctor. Sooner or later, though it hurt, you grew hardened to knowing you couldn't help more than one in a hundred; that however you advised, pleaded, admonished, they would go their own way. But something in this particular girl had touched her. She didn't quite know why; but she couldn't bear to think of
this
girl making the dreary rounds, trying old-wives remedies, ending in the shabby horror of some abortionist's butcher shop.

"Yes, of course, a rabbit test will diagnose pregnancy within a week after conception. You can leave a specimen for me, and I'll take it to the laboratory in Albany tonight. It will take a few days for it to be processed. Meanwhile, I can look you over and give you an opinion—if you'll bear in mind I might still be wrong."

"Please."

Nora got out a form and went through the routine questions; then took Jill into the examination room, and the girl sat on the edge of the cracked-leather table, unbuttoning her sweater.

"If you'll just unfasten your brassiere, please?"

The girl smiled for the first time, a small pixie grin. "I can't. I'm not wearing one."

Under the sweater was only a lacy slip, set with deep bands of embroidery. She slipped it down, exposing small breasts, very firm and taut, tipped with brown nipples like raisins. Nora touched the wide pink areolas and the girl winced.

"Tender? Is that something new? Say in the last week?" Sensitivity around the breasts was often the earliest sign of pregnancy.

"No, they've always been—ticklish." Jill giggled nervously. Nora said brusquely, "All right, you can button your sweater," and turned her back. The soft, secretive giggle, the suggestive intimacy of that word
ticklish,
flicked Nora on a raw nerve, and it was a moment before she could recapture the impersonal professional look.

She turned back to the laughing girl, still struggling with her slip straps, and Jill looked up suddenly and caught her eyes.

"Are you married, Dr. Caine?"

Nora looked at Kit's picture, smiling from the frame on her desk; then returned the girl's look steadily. "Yes, my dear, I am. Are you?"

"I—I will be. Oh, please," Jill's words tumbled over one another, "it isn't what you think, really it isn't. It's different—"

"They're all different," Nora said wearily, gesturing the girl to lie back on the table and guiding her heels into the stirrups. As her trained hands probed, Jill flinched, and Nora, mechanically reassuring her, broke off; "Hurt much?"

"Y—yes."

"All over. You can get dressed again." Nora discarded her rubber gloves. Jill had a narrow-hipped, slim body— a girl's body, hardly a woman's. Nora wrote
pelvis slightly contracted
with the surface of her mind. From her wince, Nora would offhand have written the girl down as a virgin
—which she obviously isn't,
Nora told herself wryly,
but I'll bet she doesn't have much
fun
in bed.
She pulled the thought up short—what was the matter with her this afternoon? Not since her intern year had she indulged herself in this sort of personal curiosity about a patient, even in her own thoughts.

"Well, my dear, it's quite possible you may be pregnant, but it's equally possible you may not." She explained the presumptive signs briefly, and why they might mean something else. "So we'll see what the bunny says. You—"

The telephone shrilled from the hall, making Jill jump. Nora said, "Excuse me a moment," mentally damning old Byrd's refusal to have an extension in the office.

"Doctor Leonora Caine speaking!" she rapped.

"Ouch!" said a resonant baritone, "you say that as if you were using a needle. Nora, this is Mack."

The unexpected depth and authority of the voice startled her. "Mack! I'm sorry, I'm nearly through for the day, and I thought it was another patient."

"I can't get over it, that you're here in Mayfield! How long have you been here? Why on earth haven't I run into you?"

"I've been here two weeks, but I don't go out much. Unless you needed a doctor, I don't suppose we would have run across each other at all, before I left."

"You're not living here, then?"

"Heaven forbid. Mack, I have a patient in the office. I'm sorry, but could you call back?"

"Why bother? If you're nearly through for the day anyhow, why not—wait, let me check with—" he broke off, adding after a minute, "Oh, well, it wouldn't make any difference to her. Could you have dinner with us at the hotel tonight?"