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VISITING
NURSE
Alice Brennan
Visiting Nurse
Copyright © 1962 by Alice Brennan.
All rights reserved.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
CHAPTER 1
WALKING BRISKLY down the cement path that led from the health department building where the Visiting Nurses Association was housed to the curb where her secondhand coupé was parked, Arleen Anderson grinned to herself. She pretended not to see the passing youth who had given out a piercing wolf whistle at the sight of her.
Once inside the little car, she turned the key in the switch. The motor started smoothly and purred like a kitten.
Arleen had picked up the car at a bargain price at a local secondhand automobile lot two months previously, just after she had come to Saltboro, a large industrial city, to work. The salesman, a balding sentimental man, had been moved by the sight of Arleen in the blue uniform and cape of the Visiting Nurses Association.
In the earlier days of the salesman’s marriage, when money had been scarce and jobs few and far between, one of the visiting nurses had come every day for ten days to take care of his wife, who was bedridden with an infected leg. The nurse had even showed him how to care for his baby, who was only nine weeks old at the time.
So, to him, visiting nurses were only one notch below angels. He couldn’t bring himself to let Arleen buy the car she had picked out.
“Listen, miss,” he’d told her, keeping a wary eye toward the office and his boss, who certainly would not approve of his actions, “you don’t want that car.” He added quickly, at Arleen’s puzzled look. “It’s what we call a ‘looker’—that means it looks fine outside, but it’s a lemon. Now, if you want a really dependable car. . . .”
Arleen felt a tug of gratitude toward the salesman. After all the warnings she’d been given about how everyone was out to gyp you in the big city, she certainly had not found it like that at all.
The wolf whistle sounded again. Arleen did not turn her head as she steered the car out from the curb, but she was, womanlike, very much aware of the compliment the whistle implied. And, womanlike, she was pleased to be considered attractive enough to evince such a whistle.
Blue-eyed, with soft brown hair curling in pixie fashion around her slender face, she rarely failed to attract a second glance.
Her work this April morning took her into the Leland Street neighborhood. It was an area of narrow, ugly streets and cracked sidewalks, of curbside trash cans that served as places for small boys to sit, and as places to hide in some of their games. It was an area of crumbling brick apartment houses laced together by fire escapes; an almost windowless, dark jungle.
Arleen shuddered as she parked the car at the curb, picked up her nursing satchel and walked up to one of the buildings.
As soon as she had left the car, as if it was a cue for their appearance, a group of small children surrounded it, peeking and peering.
Arleen thought, “I should go back and lock the car.” She’d been warned about Leland Street. “It’s an area of vice and crime,” she had been told. “We’ve never had any difficulty so far concerning our nurses, but We don’t want to take chances. Be extremely careful not only of your possessions, Miss Anderson, but also of yourself.”
Arleen hesitated. Perhaps she should lock the car. She half turned, and the children, again as if on cue, disappeared.
Arleen didn’t return to the car. Instead, she walked up the cracked steps and inside the small, dark hall. There was no ventilation, and the hall smelled of damp and dust, stale food, cheap whiskey.
Arleen was appalled. Nothing in her conservative, middle-class life had prepared her for the ugliness and poverty of Leland Street.
After being graduated from nursing college, she had taken a course in public health nursing, and after that she had held down a job as a private nurse. But her patients had all belonged to the middle- or high-income group. Her work as visiting nurse was, for the first time, bringing to her the reality of how people outside her own social class lived.
She consulted her book. “Mrs. Alfred Ryan. Arthritic. Bedridden.”
The Ryan apartment was on the fourth floor. Arleen plodded up the four flights of stairs. Her legs ached by the time she reached the upper hall.
She knocked at the door of the Ryan apartment and was admitted at once by a short, unshaven man in a slightly soiled undershirt and blue slacks, baggy at the knees.
He scowled at her, his blue eyes antagonistic under thick, overhanging brows. “Whata you want?”
Arleen kept her voice soft and pleasant. “I’m the visiting nurse, Mr. Ryan.”
A woman’s voice called cheerfully from inside the room, “Let her in, Al. Mind your manners, now.”
With no great show of graciousness, the man opened the door wide enough for Arleen to step inside the apartment, then slammed it shut behind her.
The “apartment” turned out to be one middle-sized room, serving as kitchen, bedroom, living room. It had one window facing the street. On the sill was a wooden box holding green plants. Violets and geraniums bloomed gaily, as if unaware of the sorry surroundings.
“Pretty, ain’t they?”
Arleen turned her attention to the center of the room and the big brass bed. A tiny, birdlike woman, with bright blue eyes belying her age, and curly gray hair softening her face, was propped up in the middle of the bed, covered by a patchwork quilt.
“Very pretty,” Arleen said softly. “You must have a green thumb.”
The woman shook her head, and twisted around to look at the man in the soiled undershirt. “Not me, miss. It’s my husband, Al, who has the green thumb. My, but you should have seen the flowers he grew when we had a downstairs place over on Kirby Street. There was windows all around the kitchen,” she said, a wistful note coming into her voice. “Boxes and boxes of flowers Al planted all around them windows. Folks used to stop just to look at them, they looked that pretty.
“We’re kind of down on our luck right now—” with an apologetic glance around the room—“but one of these days we’re gonna have a nice place again, and maybe even a yard where Al can grow all kinds of flowers.” She gave her husband an affectionate smile.
Arleen watched Al Ryan’s lips tighten. He said harshly, “Don’t go giving the new nurse a pack of lies, Neeliel You know we’re not going to get out of this place, unless it’s to move to someplace worse!” He glared at Arleen. “In thirty years of marriage I never did provide Neelie with a really decent living, and I’m providing her with less than that now. The welfare’s taking care of her, not me!”
“Now,
