The Sisterhood - Michael Palmer [15]
“Don’t know for certain. Annie Grissom next door helps out some when she can.”
“I can send a nurse to your house, Mr. Weller. If she thinks your wife needs one, she’ll arrange for her to have a homemaker.”
“A what?”
She started to repeat herself, but stopped in midsentence and threw her arms around him. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything,” she said in a voice that was half shout and half laugh.
Suddenly, Christine shuddered, then slowly loosened her embrace. She felt the eerie sensation of eyes watching her from behind. She spun around. Standing there, filling the doorway, was Dorothy Dalrymple, director of nursing for the hospital. She was in her mid-fifties, with close-cropped hair and a cherubic face. Her uniform stretched like a snowy tundra, enclosing a bulk of nearly two hundred pounds. Puffy ankles hung over the tops of her low white clinic shoes. The fleshy folds around her eyes deepened as she appraised the scene.
Christine hopped off the bed, tugging her uniform straight. Although she had come to know Dalrymple professionally over the years, she had never felt completely at ease around the woman. Perhaps it was her imposing size, perhaps her lofty position. She had certainly been kind and open enough.
The director moved toward her, stopping a few feet away, hands on hips. “Well, Miss Beall,” she said reprovingly, but unable to completely conceal a wry smile, “is this some new nursing technique, or have I walked in on a budding May-December romance?”
Christine smiled sheepishly and turned back to Weller. “Harrison,” she said softly, “I told you we’d be discovered. We simply cannot go on meeting like this.” Christine squeezed his hands reassuringly, then followed Dalrymple out of the room.
Over the decade and a half she had headed the service at Boston Doctors Dotty Dalrymple had become something of a legend for her fierce protection of “her nurses.” Never considered a brilliant thinker, she was nevertheless well known throughout the medical community not only because of her bearlike charisma, but also because her identical twin, Dora, was the nursing director at Suburban Hospital, located some fifteen miles west of the city.
The two were called Tweedledum and Tweedledee—though never to their faces. They were, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, the only nursing directors in the area who still faithfully wore their uniforms to work. It was a gesture, however unaesthetic, that contributed to their popularity.
Dalrymple put a motherly paw on Christine’s shoulder. “So, Christine, what was that all about?” she asked.
Briefly, Christine recounted her discovery of the likely causes of Harrison Weller’s “senility.” The nursing director shared her excitement.
“You know,” she said, “I spend so much of my time buried in paperwork, labor negotiations, and hospital politics tht sometimes I actually forget what nursing is all about.” Christine nodded modestly. “The flair you show for your work reminds me that no matter how little respect physicians show us, no matter how much they demean our intelligence or our judgment, we are still the ones who care for the patients. The ones who really know them as people. I honestly believe that most patients who recover from their illnesses are nursing saves, not doctor saves.”
What about those who don’t recover? Christine wanted to ask.
They walked down the hall in silence for a bit, then Dalrymple stopped and turned to her. “Christine, you are a very special nurse. This hospital needs you and more like you. Always feel free to talk with me about anything that troubles you. Anything.”
Her words should have been reassuring, but something about her expression did not seem to fit with them. Christine felt suddenly cold and uncomfortable. She was searching for a response when the pay phone at the end of the hallway began ringing. She whirled to the sound as if it had been a gunshot.
“Well, it doesn’t look like that telephone is going to answer itself, Christine,” Dalrymple said, starting toward it.
“I’ll get it,” she blurted out, racing past the bewildered