The Love of a Good Woman

husbands, wives, and children had always hated them, how much of a disappointment they had been to others and others had been to them, and how glad they knew everybody would be to see them gone. They might say this at the end of peaceful, useful lives in the midst of loving families, where there was no explanation at all for such fits. And usually the fits passed. But often, too, in the last weeks or even days of life there was mulling over of old feuds and slights or whimpering about some unjust punishment suffered seventy years earlier. Once a woman had asked Enid to bring her a willow platter from the cupboard and Enid had thought that she wanted the comfort of looking at this one pretty possession for the last time. But it turned out that she wanted to use her last, surprising strength to smash it against the bedpost.
    “Now I know my sister’s never going to get her hands on that,” she said.
    And often people remarked that their visitors were only coming to gloat and that the doctor was responsible for their sufferings. They detested the sight of Enid herself, for her sleepless strength and patient hands and the way the juices of life were so admirably balanced and flowing in her. Enid was used to that, and she was able to understand the trouble they were in, the trouble of dyingand also the trouble of their lives that sometimes overshadowed that.
    But with Mrs. Quinn she was at a loss.
    It was not just that she couldn’t supply comfort here. It was that she couldn’t want to. She could not conquer her dislike of this doomed, miserable young woman. She disliked this body that she had to wash and powder and placate with ice and alcohol rubs. She understood now what people meant when they said that they hated sickness and sick bodies; she understood the women who had said to her, I don’t know how you do it, I could never be a nurse, that’s the one thing I could never be. She disliked this particular body, all the particular signs of its disease. The smell of it and the discoloration, the malignant-looking little nipples and the pathetic ferretlike teeth. She saw all this as the sign of a willed corruption. She was as bad as Mrs. Green, sniffing out rampant impurity. In spite of being a nurse who knew better, and in spite of its being her job—and surely her nature—to be compassionate. She didn’t know why this was happening. Mrs. Quinn reminded her somewhat of girls she had known in high school—cheaply dressed, sickly looking girls with dreary futures, who still displayed a hardfaced satisfaction with themselves. They lasted only a year or two—they got pregnant, most of them got married. Enid had nursed some of them in later years, in home childbirth, and found their confidence exhausted and their bold streak turned into meekness, or even piety. She was sorry for them, even when she remembered how determined they had been to get what they had got.
    Mrs. Quinn was a harder case. Mrs. Quinn might crack and crack, but there would be nothing but sullen mischief, nothing but rot inside her.
    Worse even than the fact that Enid should feel this revulsion was the fact that Mrs. Quinn knew it. No patience or gentleness orcheerfulness that Enid could summon would keep Mrs. Quinn from knowing. And Mrs. Quinn made knowing it her triumph.
    Good riddance to bad rubbish.
    W HEN Enid was twenty years old, and had almost finished her nurse’s training, her father was dying in the Walley hospital. That was when he said to her, “I don’t know as I care for this career of yours. I don’t want you working in a place like this.”
    Enid bent over him and asked what sort of place he thought he was in. “It’s only the Walley hospital,” she said.
    “I know that,” said her father, sounding as calm and reasonable as he had always done (he was an insurance and real-estate agent). “I know what I’m talking about. Promise me you won’t.”
    “Promise you what?” said Enid.
    “You won’t do this kind of work,” her father said. She could not get any further explanation out of him. He tightened up his mouth as if her questioning disgusted him. All he would say was “Promise.”
    “What is all this about?” Enid asked her mother, and her mother said, “Oh, go ahead. Go ahead and promise him. What difference is it going to make?”
    Enid thought this a shocking thing to say, but made no comment. It was consistent with her mother’s way of looking at a lot of things.
    “I’m not going to promise