The Love of a Good Woman

an excellent dancer, an avuncular friend to girls unlikely to find partners. No woman ever took him seriously.
    “Maybe you should take a business course,” her mother said. “Or why shouldn’t you go to college?”
    Where the men might be more appreciative, she was surely thinking.
    “I’m too old,” said Enid.
    Her mother laughed. “That only shows how young you are,” she said. She seemed relieved to discover that her daughter had a touch of folly natural to her age—that she could think twenty-one was at a vast distance from eighteen.
    “I’m not going to troop in with kids out of high school,” Enid said. “I mean it. What do you want to get rid of me for anyway? I’m fine here.” This sulkiness or sharpness also seemed to please and reassure her mother. But after a moment she sighed, and said, “You’ll be surprised how fast the years go by.”
    That August there were a lot of cases of measles and a few of polio at the same time. The doctor who had looked after Enid’s father, and had observed her competence around the hospital, asked her if she would be willing to help out for a while, nursing people at home. She said that she would think about it.
    “You mean pray?” her mother said, and Enid’s face took on a stubborn, secretive expression that in another girl’s case might have had to do with meeting her boyfriend.
    “That promise,” she said to her mother the next day. “That was about working in a hospital, wasn’t it?”
    Her mother said that she had understood it that way, yes.
    “And with graduating and being a registered nurse?”
    Yes, yes.
    So if there were people who needed nursing at home, who couldn’t afford to go to the hospital or did not want to go, and if Enid went into their houses to nurse them, not as a registered nurse but as what they called a practical nurse, she would hardly be breaking her promise, would she? And since most of those needing her care would be children or women having babies, or old people dying, there would not be much danger of the coarsening effect, would there?
    “If the only men you get to see are men who are never going to get out of bed again, you have a point,” said her mother.
    But she could not keep from adding that what all this meant was that Enid had decided to give up the possibility of a decent job in a hospital in order to do miserable backbreaking work in miserable primitive houses for next to no money. Enid would find herself pumping water from contaminated wells and breaking ice in winter washbasins and batding flies in summer and using an outdoor toilet. Scrub boards and coal-oil lamps instead of washing machines and electricity. Trying to look after sick people in those conditions and cope with housework and poor weaselly children as well.
    “But if that is your object in life,” she said, “I can see that the worse I make it sound the more determined you get to do it. The only thing is, I’m going to ask for a couple of promises myself. Promise me you’ll boil the water you drink. And you won’t marry a farmer.”
    Enid said, “Of all the crazy ideas.”
    That was sixteen years ago. During the first of those years people got poorer and poorer. There were more and more of them who could not afford to go to the hospital, and the houses whereEnid worked had often deteriorated almost to the state that her mother had described. Sheets and diapers had to be washed by hand in houses where the washing machine had broken down and could not be repaired, or the electricity had been turned off, or where there had never been any electricity in the first place. Enid did not work without pay, because that would not have been fair to the other women who did the same kind of nursing, and who did not have the same options as she did. But she gave most of the money back, in the form of children’s shoes and winter coats and trips to the dentist and Christmas toys.
    Her mother went around canvassing her friends for old baby cots, and high chairs and blankets, and worn-out sheets, which she herself ripped up and hemmed to make diapers. Everybody said how proud she must be of Enid, and she said yes, she surely was.
    “But sometimes it’s a devil of a lot of work,” she said. “This being the mother of a saint.”
    T HEN came the war, and the great shortage of doctors and nurses, and Enid was more welcome than ever. As she was for a while after the war, with so many babies being born. It was only now, with the hospitals being