The next day, Una hurried across Twenty-Sixth Street, shoving her arms into her coat sleeves and pinning on her ridiculous white cap as she ran. Drusilla scampered at her side. Una had told her she needn’t wait, but Drusilla insisted and lingered by Una’s side as she threw on her uniform like a stray dog after you’ve made the mistake of giving it a bone.
Una had woken on time that morning. With Drusilla’s loud footfalls and incessant chatter, it was impossible not to. But she’d fallen back to sleep as soon as Drusilla went down to breakfast. Early mornings had never been her cup of tea. Those poor souls bustling to work with the dawn had lean pockets anyway. Better to wait for the fat pickings that strolled out later in the day.
When Drusilla came to fetch her coat, Una had woken again. Now, they trailed behind their fellow trainees in peril of being late their very first day. To make matters worse, Drusilla stopped and stepped aside every few paces to accommodate even the slowest of wagons. By the time they reached the far sidewalk, Una had grown so exacerbated by their halting pace and Drusilla’s endless streams of “excuse me,” “pardon me,” “after you, please” that she grabbed her roommate’s hand and yanked her through the crowd.
Bellevue was a hulking gray fortress that took up two whole blocks along the East River. It rose five stories at its center and branched out like an ill- shaped letter T with the top end fronting Twenty-Eighth Street. A high brick wall surrounded it on all sides, save the back where it was bounded by the river dock and the Twenty-Sixth Street side, where a temporary wooden fence had been erected during construction of a new gatehouse.
“What a lovely building,” Drusilla said, stopping on the snow-covered lawn just beyond the partially built gatehouse.
More like a blockhouse, Una thought, remembering a similar gray-stone building on Blackwell’s Island. She shuddered and tugged Drusilla onward. They took the curving, iron-railed steps that led to the double-wide entrance
two at a time, arriving in the main hall just as Superintendent Perkins called the corralled trainees to order.
“Welcome to Bellevue Hospital, ladies,” she began. “Today you embark on a momentous journey. One that will require discipline, obedience, and the utmost fortitude. Not everyone will weather the journey. Those who do, however, will be rewarded with a livelihood of great usefulness and divine purpose.”
Una worked a finger beneath the scratchy collar of her uniform. Divine purpose? One would think they were about to enter a nunnery. She glanced from Superintendent Perkins to the other trainees. Some, like Drusilla, listened enraptured. Others looked afraid, as if the lot of them were about to be thrown in the middle of a cockfight. Still others wore thinly veiled smirks of conceit. These were the women who, like Miss Hatfield, had illustrious pedigrees and egos to match.
Una already had a useful livelihood. Perhaps not useful to others, but certainly useful to herself. As for divine purpose, staying alive and out of prison was purpose enough. Besides, her mother had subscribed to such absurd notions as usefulness to others and divine calling, and look where it got her. Let these other women embark on a journey. Una’s only goal was to keep her head down and not get expelled so she could stay out of the coppers’ clutches. If she learned a few skills to use on the streets, a new ruse to get not only into people’s pockets but into their homes, so much the better.
When Superintendent Perkins finished her address, she introduced the head nurses standing at her side. Three of them oversaw the medical wards; the other three, the surgical wards. Miss Hatfield was among the latter.
“These esteemed women will be in charge of your day-to-day training and oversee your work on the wards. They began like you, probationers in the program, and have risen to this position through hard work and rigorous study. Listen faithfully to what they say and obey their every direction. In a year’s time, the best among you might also earn the title of head nurse.”
Una glanced at Drusilla, who stood nodding eagerly beside her, and couldn’t help but roll her eyes.
Superintendent Perkins took her leave, as did five of the head nurses, whose supervision was needed on the wards. That left Una and the other trainees in Miss Hatfield’s “capable” care.
She waited until Superintendent Perkins ascended the stairs to her office before addressing them. “Look around you,” she began in the same smug voice Una remembered from her interview. The trainees’ heads turned this way and that. Una didn’t know if they were meant to be looking at one another or the hall in which they stood. None of it, not the other women dressed alike in their blue and white seersucker uniforms, nor the room with its whitewashed walls and marble-tiled floor seemed of note. Three portraits hung on the wall to her right—all stodgy-looking men, physicians according to their gold-plated placards. On the wall to the left was a roster of the current medical and surgical staff. Una hoped she wouldn’t have to memorize these men’s names and their positions. Hey you, generally worked in the slums. A nickname if you cared to be polite. But if the self- important expressions of the men in the portraits were any indication, Hey, you or Lazy-eyed Joe wouldn’t do.
Thankfully, when Miss Hatfield continued, she didn’t mention the list of physicians. “You are not nurses. You’re not even nurse trainees. You’re probationers. Barely above the coarse and ignorant women who scrub the floors. And at least ten of you,” she said, “maybe as many as fifteen, won’t be here in a month’s time.” She strode back and forth in front of them, the click of her boot heels on the marble, echoing as she spoke. “Passing your probation is not an easy feat. Nervousness, forgetfulness, disorderliness”— her eyes stopped on Una—“tardiness will not be tolerated or excused. Do you understand?”
The women nodded.
“If there’s anyone who would like to leave, you may do so now without judgment. Anyone who perhaps feels outmatched by the women beside her or unequal to the challenge ahead.” Miss Hatfield’s mean blue eyes again came to rest on Una.
Una returned her cold stare. Miss Hatfield was nothing compared to the gangsters and swindlers and coppers she’d dealt with in the slums. But that didn’t stop Una’s hands from turning clammy or her heart from thudding against her breastbone. So much for keeping her head down and going unnoticed.
“No one?” Miss Hatfield said after a ponderous silence. “Very well. Let’s begin.”
* * *
Miss Hatfield’s words proved prophetic not two hours later, before they’d even finished their tour of the hospital. On the twenty-fifth ward, they passed the bedside of a man newly arrived after an accident in the ironworks factory. Three doctors and a nurse crowded around him. When the nurse scurried away at the doctor’s command for morphine, Una and the other probationers were able to see the man’s injuries. His right leg stuck out at an unnatural angle beneath the knee. Bruised and swollen, his face resembled an eggplant. But it was his arm that was most gruesome: gnarled and bloody with only a splintered stump of bone where his hand and forearm ought to be.
Several of the women around Una gasped. One retched into a nearby bucket. Another swooned, smacking her head on the floor as she collapsed. Drusilla clutched Una’s arm and looked away, her rosy cheeks draining of color. Once Una was sure Drusilla wasn’t going to swoon as well, she peeled her clammy fingers from her arm and stepped closer to the bedside, curious what the physicians were doing to save this man’s life. A tourniquet had been wrapped around the man’s mangled arm to stanch the bleeding while two of the doctors discussed whether it was wise to operate immediately or wait for the man’s vital signs to stabilize. The other doctor probed the man’s head as if checking for cracks in his skull, unhindered by his screams.
The blood-soaked sheets did not trouble Una. Nor the mauled flesh. She’d seen worse in the slums. But his screams reverberated beneath her skin, settling uncomfortably inside her, and she found it a great relief when the nurse returned with morphine.
When the doctor—a young man dressed in a well-tailored suit with still, serious eyes—went to plunge the syringe into the patient’s arm, the patient, in his pain-induced delirium, knocked the syringe out of the doctor’s hand. It landed on the floor with a clatter, rolling to a stop at Una’s feet.
“Miss Kelly,” she heard someone say behind her.
She turned around and saw Miss Hatfield scowling at her. “Step back.
You mustn’t get in the doctors’ way.”
Una hadn’t been within three paces of the doctors and would have liked to hear their verdict on when to operate, but she obliged Miss Hatfield and fell in with the other trainees. The woman who had passed out was awake now and sitting up, her face the color of withered cabbage and a goose egg growing on her temple.
Miss Hatfield dispatched one of the helpers who cleaned the wards to see the woman back to the nurses’ home, then ushered the rest of them on to the next ward. Undoubtedly, the woman would be packed and gone by the time they returned for supper.
“No dawdling, now,” Miss Hatfield said, eyeing first a sallow-cheeked woman who tottered at the rear, and then Una as if hoping to catch her straggling too. “We’re already behind schedule.”
“I don’t think she likes you,” Drusilla whispered to Una as they walked. “Though I can’t imagine why.”
Una only snorted. Her Irish name was one reason. Her unremarkable school record was another. But Una suspected there was something more, something Miss Hatfield had disliked about her from the first moment they met. Whatever it was, Una had to figure it out, and quick, otherwise Miss Hatfield would be on her like mud for the rest of her time here. And if Miss Hatfield had her way, that wouldn’t be very long.
