The Eleventh Virgin, Dorothy Day [best e book reader for android TXT] 📗

own, some of the nurses are stingy about it and use the same ones over and over.”

But even the morphine when it was finally administered failed to soothe the delirious man. In the middle of the afternoon he wrenched loose the sheet from around his shoulders and sat up in bed suddenly.

“Line up, everybody,” he called out. “My treat.” And one feeble longshoreman from the other side wandered vaguely into the middle of the ward with his nightshirt flapping around him and died upon being put back into bed.

It was only when an intern ordered whiskey three times a day for Liscinderella that he subsided and the ward again became quiet.

There was a sort of ghastly excitement and joy in the ward among the convalescing patients when the sicker ones were obstreperous.

“Gee, ain’t this a hell house,” June heard one of them remark complacently. “You’d think the old black bottle was being passed around.” For the legend that hospitals did away with superfluous patients by draughts from the black bottle was still current among the lowest of the lower classes.

They rather enjoyed believing it.

It was an exciting play that they were all taking part in. It was a battle in which one grim spirit passed by, casting a spell over some and shrieking through their mouths obscenities on life.

June and Dick were the only healthy young things in the entire ward. As long as some of the patients could help the nurse by washing their own faces and keeping their beds smoothed and the tables cleared by their sides, they felt that they partook of a little of her energetic health. They could watch the struggle going on in the long room with a grim humor.

On one occasion when the ward slept and June was off duty, a delirious patient who had been so quiet that it had not seemed necessary to fasten him in bed with restraining sheets, quietly got up, tied his blanket around his waist to hide his bare legs and sneaked down the stairs and away.

June came on the ward at seven to find the night nurse weeping hysterically. “You can’t turn your back to feed one patient his medicine without another getting into some devilment. Now I’ll be kicked out.”

Dick took part in the search. Patients had been known to have escaped to the roof, to the benches in the park around the hospital buildings. This one was not to be found on the grounds. It wasn’t until noon that he was discovered, minus the blanket, sitting on the curbing of a street that ran through two deserted lots, holding an imaginary fishing pole and pointing to what he thought was a trout in a large puddle before him. The short nightshirt was open down the back and disclosed a long curved spinal column and shoulder blades which, Dick said, seemed to flap as he flung his line. His toes were meditatively wriggling in the dirt of the gutter.

Dick was triumphant as he brought him in and June was triumphant that she kept him alive all that day. He continued to live too, and was the admiration of the other patients in the ward when they heard of his nocturnal wanderings.

It was these things which drew Dick and June closer together. They looked on the work with the same eyes and the same clearheaded enthusiasm. Other long winter afternoons when the ward was quiet and no patients were ill enough to demand continual attention, they shared a feeling of languorous tiredness. They seemed to have wandered through a nightmare hand in hand, to have passed through it into a half stupor. June felt the sensuousness of her mood even before Dick voiced it.

“Two lines of a poem have been running through my head these last few days,” he told her while they were making eggnogs in the kitchen:

“ ‘Here, where the world is quiet,
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds’ and spent waves’ riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams.’

“After the strain we’ve been through this last month everything seems the shadow of a dream.”

And because they both were so tired, and it was the quietest time of the afternoon when no one was stirring in the ward, she leaned against him with her head on his shoulder and they rested that way a few moments.

“You tempt me,” he told her one time. (It was a month later.) “You are a most intoxicating temptation. And who was it that said that temptations were made to be succumbed to?”

Neither of them could remember, but they were sure that it was a poet. (A year later he thought he remembered and woke her up in the night to tell her that it was Oscar Wilde.)

But they weren’t thinking much in terms of poetry those early days. June was too desperately determined that he shouldn’t go away from her as he kept saying he would. He gave himself three months to stay in the hospital. June gave him three months in which to seduce her.

“I’ve got to have you,” she told him. “I love you. I do love you. It’s a fatal passion.” She smiled, but her lips were trembling.

“You should wait for some nice young man who will marry you and buy you a rubber plant and give you babies.”

“I don’t give a damn about marriage. And you only talk about nice young men and rubber plants because you really want me, even though you don’t want to marry me.”

“Better look out! You’ll persuade me yet,” he laughed at her. And then, “But you know you love babies. And if you had one I’d leave you.”

“I don’t want anyone but you,” June protested stubbornly. “When women are really in love they don’t want babies. They only want them when they aren’t satisfied with the man they have and feel the need of something else. Or if they are jealous. Then they could feel, I suppose, that they were bringing another edition of their lovers into the world⁠—an edition that wouldn’t