The midnight moon was bright, and a mile or so beyond the Bahama Queen, one of the bergs, a silver tower in the moon glow, split, its cracking sending hundreds of birds rising above it in panic like falling confetti, the wave running toward the hospital ship as the main berg and its calf righted themselves. For a moment, broadside to the moon, they looked dazzling white on the gunmetal sea.
“When will I know?” William Spence had asked her, and she had to wait until he had finished coughing before she replied, asking, “Know about what?” She knew what he meant but didn’t want him to worry unnecessarily.
“The X rays.”
“Oh — tomorrow morning, I guess.”
“I’m coming apart,” he said, the violent coughing starting up again, so that she got up and slipped the elastic about his head, placing the plastic mask over his nose and mouth, altering the rate of oxygen flow until the small, black plastic marble was unseated, jumping up and down inside the flow indicator.
Spence was perspiring so much, the sheet was clammy about his chest, and Lana could tell the other pain, from the amputations, was also tormenting him, the medication wearing off again, the pain boring into him again. But she knew she couldn’t give him any more morphine for half an hour. If it were up to her, she would have given it to him now — it wasn’t going to make much difference. The lungs in the X rays had been a diaphanous white. He was so weak that his so-called “walk” to the washroom had degenerated during the last twelve hours to nothing more than a shuffle. They had performed a miracle of modern surgery in keeping him alive after the trauma of the evacuation from the Peregrine, but now the killer of more shipwrecked sailors than torpedoes or shells, oil, had lain in wait in the lungs, threatening to drown him slowly. With only a cough to announce it, the lipid pneumonia had come upon him swiftly, the final quietude of pneumonic death in any hospital called “the old person’s friend.”
While holding his cough-wracked body, Lana recalled the X-ray technician as he had stood looking gloomily at the film, watching it rock to and fro with the action of the ship, the very motion somehow an obscene mockery of real life.
“There will,” Matron had told her matter-of-factly, “be moments of serenity, even reverie. In the end they’re quite content.”
“With a double amputation?” Lana had asked tartly.
“You’d be surprised, my dear,” Matron had replied.
No, thought Lana, you’ll be surprised. This boy is going to fight with everything he’s got.
“The X ray doesn’t tell us the whole story, nurse,” the MO had advised her in a more understanding tone. “Even so, I’m surprised the prednisone didn’t help — I’d thought there was definitely an allergic component that the prednisone would deal with. Well, all we can do now is watch him. Could be a turnaround before we reach Halifax.”
She had been with him eight hours straight, and now in the calm following the wracking coughs, every one of which she had felt like a blow to her own body, Lana leaned over him and with a cool, white facecloth, as white as the ice, he thought, she dabbed his body cool, gently patting him dry. She saw him smile, or rather his eyes moving suddenly, full of life, the rest of his face covered by the semitransparent green mask. “What are you grinning about, Mr. Spence?” she asked with playful severity.
“I can’t help it,” he said, his voice sounding nasal from behind the mask. “I don’t need this mask anymore.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.” Closing his eyes, he lifted his left arm and lowered it gently onto her hand. She did not take it away but reached up with her left hand to turn off the oxygen flow, its soft hiss fading, the sound of the waves from the calved berg still slapping the ship’s flanks. She was standing by him, her right hand still beneath his bandaged arm. He looked up at her and wordlessly she sat down by him, her hand still beneath his arm, her other hand gently stroking him and seeing the miracle of the pain not gone but momentarily defeated by her gift of touch. She raised her left hand higher, kissed her finger, and gently stroked him again. He groaned in ecstasy, his head beginning to move slowly, joyously, from side to side, and in that moment, out of all the pain and the evil of Jay La Roche, Lana emerged as gentle as a virgin, but knowing much more, lowering her head, her long, soft hair falling on him, then she kissed him there, the firm but pliant wetness of her lips encasing him, drawing him into her, her tongue sliding hard and fast and then slowly, lovingly, as he groaned, his whole body beginning to arch and rock, arching again, then arched as if frozen in time, shuddering before he collapsed against the bed, bathed in sweat, his eyes glistening with life, looking at her, then slowly filling with such calm that they said nothing until the pain, like a vindictive husband wanting to kill, attacked again.
Quickly, alarmed, she looked at the clock, rearranging her clothes and hair. It was still ten minutes to go before the next injection. Now the flush of love in his face left him, like a red curtain torn aside, his face stunned with ferocious pain, white, as pale as moonlight. She took the hypodermic, injected him, and knelt by him, ready with the mask should the coughing return. It never did, and as she told him she loved him, he went into a deep sleep, a tiny spot of blood seeping through on the stump of his right hand, as scarlet against the bandages, she thought, as a rose against hard snow.
She pressed the buzzer and the cardiac arrest team arrived. He revived on the second “jump,” but later that night the oscilloscope’s hiccuping green sine wave went flat, and in place of the lively “bips,” there was a long, steady tone.
“In all my career,” Matron fumed before the chief surgeon and the ship’s chief medical officer, “I have never seen such a flagrant violation of procedure.”
The MO, the young captain who had referred to Spence as Lana’s “boyfriend” a couple of days ago, could see the pain in Lana’s face, and for his part, the morphine shot she’d given the patient too early would hardly have made any difference. He told the chief surgeon so. And in his view it certainly didn’t warrant a court-martial, as Matron was pressing for.
The matron’s head shot up, looking over at the surgeon.
“It’s hardly the morphine I ‘m concerned about, Mr. Reilly.” Even now she insisted on the British convention of referring to chief surgeons as “Mister,” its usage conveying a higher status than “Doctor.”’ “Though giving the patient the injection earlier is, in my professional opinion, also thoroughly reprehensible.”
“Then what is this all about?” asked the surgeon, nonplussed.
“Ah — perhaps,” the MO interjected, “Ms. La Roche would care to step out for—”
“No,” said Lana.
“All right, then, Matron, I think you’d better go ahead,” said the MO.
“The sheet, sir… it’s… it’s filthy.”
“Filthy sheets?” said the surgeon, pushing the question back at her and looking at the MO for clarification.
“She …” began Matron archly, “did things to him.”
“Oh—” said the surgeon. “Oh—” He paused. They could hear the ship’s foghorn as it entered the area off Cape Race. “This is a very severe charge, Matron. I would advise you—”
“I don’t deny it,” said Lana.
Matron glanced quickly at the surgeon, making it quite plain she expected the maximum punishment for such unprofessional conduct and would not rest until she got it.
“Ms. La Roche,” the chief surgeon began, “you must realize how serious this is.”
“Yes, sir.”
Now there was a silence in which the captain noticed for the first time that he could hear the clock in the cabin ticking very distinctly. He shifted a few pens on his desk pad. “I’m afraid I’ll have to refer this to HQ. Are there any — mitigating circumstances you’d like to add—”
“The boy was dying,” said Lana.
There was silence again, Matron staring at her. Finally the surgeon, doodling uncomfortably on the blotter, said, “That doesn’t excuse it.”
“Exactly!” said the matron.
“All right,” said the surgeon. “That’s all.”
Out on the deck, where the chilly fog now came tumbling through in gusts, Matron paused before taking the steps down to her cabin deck. “If you think I’ve done it because I don’t like you, that’s not true.”
“Oh really?” said Lana.
“The point is, my girl, that we have to set an example for the others who come after us.”
“Yes,” said Lana. “Imagine if every nurse did it, and,” she added sarcastically, “right in the middle of a war.”
“Don’t be insolent! You don’t seem to have realized something, young lady.”
“And what’s that?”
The matron stood very close to her, and Lana could smell her bad breath as she began to speak. “You might have killed him. A shock to the heart like that.”
“He was dying.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Didn’t you see the X rays, Matron?”
“I’ve seen more X rays and more deaths than you, young lady. He might well have recovered—If he had been left alone.”
“I don’t think so,” replied Lana, but Matron thought she saw a glimpse of fear in the young woman’s eyes and she pressed home her advantage.
“You’ll never know, will you?”
The temptation of guilt, of a hundred letters to Ann Landers about unprofessional conduct of nurses, flashed through Lana’s mind, doubt flickering in her eyes for a moment, and then it was all gone, rejected utterly, as if her whole being had irrevocably changed at that precise moment in her life. “I gave the boy love.”
“Is that what you call it?” sneered Matron.
“Yes,” said Lana, “and I’m sorry for you.”
“You! Sorry for me!”
“Yes,” Lana said softly, pulling her cape tightly about her, the fog from the Grand Banks colder by the moment, enveloping them both and hiding the bergs. “I’m sorry for anyone,” said Lana, “who hasn’t had love. It shrivels your heart to nothing.” Lana turned and walked slowly away along the deck, past the dim outlines of the lifeboats.
The young medical officer managed to get Matron to strike out some of the more hostile adjectives in her report about Lana La Roche, and while, informally, he convinced the surgeon not to recommend a court-martial, he could not prevent transfer, to the Matron’s delight, to a forward hospital — in what the nurses called “America’s Siberia”: the Aleutians.
“As godforsaken a place on this earth as you could imagine,” the medical officer informed Matron in return for her retraction of the prejudicial adjectives. “And,” he added hastily, “under strict supervision.”
“She should be drummed out of the service,” Matron retorted. “She has no place — absolutely no place — in—”
“Well, Matron, you won’t be bothered by her anymore.”
The matron, however, was barely appeased. “She’s a bad penny, that one. Mark my words, Captain. She’ll turn up again.”
The MO made no comment on her prediction but did tell Matron it was the best he could do.
Before she packed, the Bahama Queen passing by McNab’s Island, through the narrows, past the Imperial Oil refinery into Canadian Forces Base Halifax, Lana sat down and wrote a letter to Mr. and Mrs. Richard Spence in Oxshott, England. Trusting the highly reliable fleet mail service — much of it sent electronically from base to base — more than she trusted the civilian post, Lana addressed the letter care of her brother at Holy Loch, with a covering note to him just as she had done with the tape that William Spence had made a few days before.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Spence:
My name is Lana La Roche and I was a nurse on your son’s ward aboard the hospital ship Bahama Queen. Although we’ve never met, I feel I know something about you, as William talked quite a lot about his family. I know he sent a tape, and though, of course, I don’t know what he said about his wounds and the major surgery he had — I’m guessing he didn’t say much at all about this and so I thought it might be of some help if I could tell you a little about the circumstances as I know that by now you will have received official notification from the DOD of his death and that after what appeared to be the chance of a good recovery, his passing must be a terrible shock. It was a combination of things, mostly the fact that he had contracted pneumonia from oil he had inhaled while trying to rescue shipmates trapped in the engine room of his ship, and while we were concentrating so much on the severe wounds to both arms, the wretched pneumonia, as it so often does, was already forming in his lungs. By the time it was detected, I’m afraid that plus the amputation proved too much. He was a wonderful young man and, though weakened by his ordeal, quietly brave — not only on the Peregrine but on the Bahama Queen as well, where I think he knew the end was near.
All I can say is that he clearly loved you all very much and told me so, and that helped him a great deal. We buried him at sea yesterday, as regulations call for. It was a very simple but moving ceremony. I asked the ship’s first mate to mark the spot as near as he could on a chart of the area, a copy of which I’ve enclosed. I will keep the original for another time to send as I’m forwarding this by Fleet SAT Post — electronic mail. I don’t know if this will help any, but the first officer told me the location of the burial is remarkably exact as they take bearings from Loran and satellite.
I’ve addressed this letter care of my brother Robert, as I did the tape I sent on for William, asking Robert to pass it on also. I hope we can meet someday. Please don’t bother to reply, but if you wish to write sometime, and I can tell you any more about William’s time on the ship, please write me care of the address in Virginia on the envelope and they’ll relay the letter to me. Sincerely yours,
Lana La Roche
In the covering note to Robert she told him he could read the letter, as it would fill him in on the news, “if that’s what you can call it,” and also reminded him that, as she’d mentioned in her earlier note, whenever he got back to base and received the tape and the letter she sent him, he should advance the tape for a minute or two until William started talking—”otherwise the boy’s parents might think there was something wrong with it.”
The censor patched out “Bahama Queen” and went over it again, making sure there was no mention of the USS Roosevelt, on which her brother Robert Brentwood served, and whited out the time and place of the burial, giving another point hundreds of miles away so as not to give away any more information about the hospital ship’s location.