Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [40]
They stop before an unprepossessing brick edifice, one of many in a row. Haskell helps her down, and he swings his satchel from the floorboards. She walks behind him to the front door, where he puts his hand upon the latch. He hesitates and looks about to speak.
She shakes her head quickly to forestall his words. “Do not trouble yourself about me,” she says. “It is all right what we have done.”
Although they both know — as how could they not? — that it is not all right. It is not all right at all.
• • •
It is the noise Olympia notices first. In a large room, which she takes to be a waiting room, she can hear a group of small children squealing and shouting as they chase one another through the aisles. Near to them, a woman who seems to huddle into herself is alternately crying and cursing. Men in varying states of dress and undress roughly cough up phlegm, and a mother, in a harsh voice, scolds a group of boys who are trying to crowd all together onto a scale. Olympia hears as well the irritated mutterings of patients who have been kept waiting on the holiday, and the moans of other patients who are clearly in pain: an old woman weeping, and a younger woman, in labor, grunting in a terrible manner. These people sit or lie upon a series of wooden benches that resemble church pews in their arrangement; and the entire gathering seems to her like nothing so much as a bizarre and noisy congregation waiting rudely for its minister. As Haskell strides purposefully through the room, a kind of order begins to descend, as though the patients can already perceive their relief. Haskell speaks immediately with a nurse who has on a starched white muslin cap and a blue serge dress with sleeves Olympia assumes once were white but now are dotted or smeared with blood and other substances she does not want to think about. The nurse holds a sheaf of papers in one hand and a watch chained to her belt in the other. It is an unfortunate posture, as the implication seems to be that she is scolding Haskell for being tardy.
“The holiday is worse than a Saturday night for the drunkenness and injuries resulting from inebriation,” the nurse says to Haskell in an accent of broad vowels that Olympia recognizes as native. “There are seven patients who have come in with food poisoning from a tin of tainted meat, and there are three boys who fell into the runoff from the Falls, and what they were doing trying to cross the river there, I cannot tell you, but they are, as you might say, all battered to pieces. And as we are short-staffed today — well, there is no wonder we are in such a state. Oh, and there is a child, the Verdennes boy, who came into the clinic not an hour ago with the diphtheria croup, and I am sorry to say that he has passed on, sir.”
(The half hour she detained Haskell on the beach, Olympia thinks, with the first of many small shocks of that afternoon.)
Haskell looks disturbed, but not overly so. Perhaps he knows that the child would have died even had he been there.
“This is Miss Olympia Biddeford,” he says, turning to her. “Olympia, this is Nurse Graham,” he adds by way of introduction.
Nurse Graham, who looks to be in her mid-twenties, narrows her eyes at Olympia, but her scrutiny is fleeting. She has other, more pressing matters on her mind.
“I promised my family, sir, that I would be finished at two o’clock,” she says.
“Yes, of course,” Haskell answers. “Is there anyone in the back?”
“Yvonne Paquet is here, sir. And Malcolm.”
“Enjoy yourself then,” he says, turning then to survey his flock, who now have fallen mostly silent and are watching him with great interest. Haskell takes in air and holds it, and then lets his breath out in a long, slow sigh.
“Let us begin,” he says to Olympia.
• • •
The clinic occupies the ground floor of what was recently a textile warehouse. It has several rooms, one of which Olympia has ample opportunity