The Light of Luna Park Read online

  I turn back to Hattie. “You’re going to be just fine,” I soothe. And she will. She’ll be all right soon enough, when I bring her daughter back to her. Once Margaret is five pounds, six. Once Margaret can suckle and breathe unassisted. Poor Hattie and her husband need only endure their grief a month, maybe two, before I can tell them what I’ve done.

  “When can we go?” Michael too is looking toward the future.

  I affix a patient smile as I swivel to face him. “We’ll need to keep your wife in for at least three days.”

  “Why?”

  “Monitoring.” I glance behind me and lower my voice so as not to frighten poor Hattie. She’s been through enough. “There’s always a risk of blood clots, hemorrhaging, or infection.” A hemorrhage killed my own mother, but infection is more likely here in the hospital.

  “You couldn’t save the baby.” Michael raises his eyebrows. “Why should I trust you with my wife?”

  We could save the baby, I want to tell him. In fact, I did. You’re the one who refused. Instead, I keep my smile plastered on my face. “I assure you, it’s for the best that she remain here.”

  “Yes. I want to stay,” Hattie confirms. Her voice is high and girlish like a child’s. I wonder if it’s how Margaret’s voice will sound too—if the baby girl lives long enough to speak. The uncertainty as to whether she will, the doubt, is all that keeps me from pouring the truth out to Hattie right now. Sparkle in her eyes or not, Margaret is helpless. She could succumb to anything: apnea, bradycardia, sepsis, jaundice, hemorrhaging in the brain. I can’t feed Hattie hope and then take it away again. She looks younger than me—twenty, twenty-one? I don’t know how much pain she can take.

  “You’ll stay,” I assure her. “It’s standard procedure.”

  She nods, and I wonder if she’s even younger than I’ve guessed. Her open face is so desperate; she needs taking care of. I’m happy to have a task. Something to distract me from the crime I’ve just committed, and the possible loss of my job on top of it.

  “Am I going to die?” Hattie’s voice wavers.

  “Of course not.” I can’t really make this promise, but I’ve already broken so many rules that the kindness feels worth it.

  “Then why can’t we go home?” Michael snaps.

  I purse my lips. “You are welcome to go home. It’s your wife who needs to stay.”

  “I’m not leaving her here with you,” he grumbles.

  I’d like to think he wants to stay because he cares about his wife, but I’m afraid he’s acting more from a territorial instinct than a protective one.

  “You will have a new nurse after tonight,” I tell the man. “Perhaps you’ll find her more competent.”

  Michael merely grunts, but Hattie wraps her bloated fingers around my bony wrist. “Do you have to go?”

  “Not yet,” I promise her. “What do you need?”

  “I just have questions.” Her whole body shudders, pale skin against pale sheets like a ghost. “I . . . Did she suffer?”

  I bite my lip. “No.”

  “What was it that . . .” Hattie flounders. “. . . did it?”

  “Hattie!” Michael’s voice slams into us like the shutting of a door. “It’s over. Let it go.”

  I want to ignore Michael’s command, but I don’t have an answer for Hattie. Instead, I provide the only human comfort I can, keeping my hands on her so she feels less alone. I smooth her hair and plump her curls. I rub my thumb over her unblemished white shoulder.

  She drifts to sleep before my shift ends at seven o’clock, and I don’t wake her to say good-bye. I’ll see her again, and I’ll have her daughter with me when I do.

  Though my whole body aches, I can’t go back to the Nurses’ Residence yet. Instead, I knock on the door of Miss Rottman’s office. The plaque outside, Director of Nursing Service, usually thrills me. Today, it terrifies me.

  “Come in.” The principal’s stern voice penetrates the door.

  I enter.

  “Nurse Anderson.”

  “Good evening.”

  “How can I help you?”

  I inhale. “I’ve had a slight difference of opinion with Dr. Bricknell, and he’s asked for a new nurse in obstetrics.”

  Miss Rottman’s eyes narrow behind her thin, perfectly round glasses. “I’ve never known you to be oblique, Nurse Anderson. What was this ‘difference in opinion’?”

  “Dr. Bricknell informed the parents of a premature infant that their daughter would not survive here at the hospital. I agreed with him, but felt it was my duty to tell the parents about the incubator wards on Coney Island.” Just mentioning the island sets my armpits sweating. I have the absurd fear that Miss Rottman can smell the salt on my skin. “Dr. Bricknell was . . . displeased. He felt that I was usurping his authority.”

  “You were.” Miss Rottman’s voice is curt, and my heart plummets. If I didn’t smell like salty ocean air before, surely I do now: not from the beachy breezes but from the sweat that clings to my body like panic. “But”—Miss Rottman almost smiles—“occasionally, we must do that.”

  “We must . . .” I pause. “Excuse me?”

  “We must occasionally usurp the man’s authority. I wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t, would I?” This time, she does smile. Despite the stiff collar and the buttons that march from Miss Rottman’s waist to her chin, I can imagine how she might have looked as a student here nearly two decades ago. She’s stern now, but she would have been a spitfire.

  “I suppose you’re right.” My own smile echoes hers.

  “However.” Miss Rottman raises her eyebrows. “There are no other positions available in obstetrics.”

  I bow my head.

  “Where are you in your rotations?”

  “I’ve done psychopathy, Pavilions A and B, the tuberculosis ward, and surgery.”

  The woman nods. “I avoid saying this as a matter of principle, but you have been one of our best nurses. In fact, though I’ve got decades left in me, I can almost imagine you taking over my position one day. I certainly don’t want to keep you from graduating. How many mothers have you delivered?”

  I can barely keep my voice level. My head swims from her compliment. “Over fifty, ma’am. I’ve done two of the three months in obstetrics.”

  Miss Rottman closes her eyes. “Don’t make me regret this, Nurse Anderson. We don’t take exceptions lightly.”

  I tip forward on my toes, desperate for good news.

  “But I can move you to the emergency ward in Pavilion G. We’ve been over capacity every day for months, and we need a night nurse. Seven p.m. to seven a.m.”

  “I’ll take anything, ma’am.”

  “You’ll be on probation. Another complaint and you’re out.”

  “Of course. I understand. Thank you.” I would hug the woman if I didn’t suspect she is as standoffish as I am. “You don’t know how much this means to me.”

  Miss Rottman fingers her pin. It is the same one I will receive at commencement next year: a crane on a round backdrop of gold. “I do know, Nurse Anderson. That is exactly why I’ve allowed it.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Stella Wright, December 1950

  Jack arrives home from work at the bank just after five thirty p.m., and—miraculously, though I’ve just barely made it home myself—I’ve managed to get dinner on the table. I could have just picked something up on the way home, but I knew I’d fall apart without a task to do. I knew that as soon as I let myself stop and think, I’d break.

  “How was your day?” I ask my husband at the door. Today, it’s more reflex than genuine question.

  “Better now that I’m here.” He plants a kiss on my forehead and shrugs off his rain-splattered jacket. “How was yours? Did you get the supplies?”

  Jack’s coat slips off the coat rack and slumps to the floor, but I make no move to p
ick it up.

  “I quit,” I say. The words taste like poison in my mouth.

  “Quit?” Jack’s shock would look comical in any other situation, rain dripping from his hair onto the polished floor. “What happened?”

  “Straitjackets. The supplies were straitjackets. He wants to make the kids wear them in class, and I just can’t do it.” My voice breaks, and I repeat myself in an effort to sound more sure. “I can’t do it.”

  “Then don’t,” Jack says. “There has to be another option, something other than quitting. You love those kids.”

  “I do, but Principal Gardner doesn’t. And I can’t do anything for them when he’s against me. I only make it worse.”

  Jack’s eyebrows draw together like the kids have swiped a marker across his forehead. I recognize this look. He’s about to give me a pep talk.

  I hold up a finger. “Don’t, Jack. Please.”

  But Jack surprises me, pulling me in to his chest so I smell his woodsy scent. “Stella, sweetheart. I know you’re upset. What Principal Gardner did was wrong—God, he sounds like a monster. But . . .” Jack takes a breath. “I can’t help but wonder whether your going through with quitting has more to do with your mom than with what happened. Because this—giving up—it isn’t like you.”

  My mother’s death was my final unraveling, I know. But the edges of my life have been fraying for longer than the past three months, the threads of overwork and undervalue splitting my days to the point of disintegration. How to make Jack understand the slow, steady crush of opposition? The slow, steady dissolution of the idealism that carried me through school despite the odds? I’d thought being a teacher would mean I could change things, teach girls to be fearless and confident the way boys were taught to be. When I’d accepted the job under Principal Gardner, I thought I could do the same—if not for young women, then for a group even more neglected.

  But being a teacher is a woman’s work, and that means it carries little power. I’m no agent of change; I’m part of the system. A system that wants to put kids in straitjackets just because they’re different.

  I shake my head. “Mom’s dying might have pushed me over the precipice.” After all, my mother always told me to speak up, and it was partly her voice ringing in my ears the day I gave Principal Gardner the ultimatum. “But does it matter?” I throw up my hands. “I’m hurting the kids, whatever the reason.”

  Jack squints at me as if trying to see me more clearly. “You’re going to just walk out, then? Leave those kids worse off than they are now?”

  I close my eyes, unable to bear the sight of Jack’s disappointment. I’ve never been a quitter. Not as a first grader, when I campaigned for my classmates to bring in stuffed animals to donate to the Salvation Army during the Depression; not as a teenager, when I refused to drop out of physics and raised my grade from a D to a B.

  But Jack is wrong. Another teacher might be able to get through to Principal Gardner, might know how to better reach the kids. I’ve never failed before; I never imagined that Principal Gardner would force my hand.

  But I see no way around quitting now, not after what he’s done. What I drove him to do.

  I press my lips together. “Gardner hates me. If he uses my attempts to help my kids to hurt them, the kids are better off without me.” The words burn my tongue.

  “Stella, I think you’re being dramatic—”

  “Stop,” I snap. I’m tired of being called rash or dramatic. I’m no more dramatic than when he mistakes a thunderbolt for a gunshot, am I?

  Jack pulls back, and I realize for the first time that today’s storm must have been hard for him, too.

  My level-headed mom would have thought of that. She never would have had this conversation with my dad in the first place. Mom probably would have smiled, told Dad she had to talk to him after supper, and let him enjoy his meal in peace. Meanwhile, our pork chops grow cold, and Jack’s stomach rumbles.

  But I’m not like my mom. I don’t want to just lie down and swallow what I feel, or put the needs of the man of the house before my own. That’s what women in my mom’s generation did. And some part of Mom must have regretted it, because she always told me to speak up despite the fact that she seemed content to do the opposite.

  Speak up. I tried that. I tried to speak up for my kids, and look what happened.

  “I’m just bad for them,” I finally say. I hardly recognize my own voice, it comes out so hoarse and quiet. “They’re better off with someone else.”

  “No, Stella.” Jack places a hand on my shoulder. “That’s impossible. You love those kids more than anyone. You talk about them all the time, love them like they’re your own.”

  Am I imagining the meaning behind his words? That if I had loved these children less, maybe we would already have one of our own? I shrug away the unfair thoughts. “It doesn’t matter. I told him already. I quit.”

  Jack hesitates. “Maybe you could learn to see this as a good thing.”

  “What?”

  “I just hate seeing you like this. I want you to see the positive—like how you can focus on our future now. You can start thinking about your own children, kids no one will begrudge you for loving.”

  I narrow my eyes. “It’s not the time to talk about our own children, Jack.” Not so soon after Mom died. Not when I’ve just thrown my career away. Not when he still shuts me out of his own thoughts and fears.

  “You’re right.” He holds up his hands. “Sorry.”

  When I don’t answer right away, he bites his lip and then winces. “That’s the second time today, isn’t it?”

  I nod, and he breathes in deeply. “I’m sorry. You have too much going on right now. I know that.”

  “Thanks,” I whisper.

  “Do you want to keep talking about it all?”

  I shake my head. “Distract me.”

  We move to the table, and Jack lifts the pork chops and carries them back into the kitchen to reheat. He tells me to sit as he finishes, and then he joins me at the table.

  “I have a good story,” he says. “Very random. Very distracting.”

  “Okay.” I smile. “Go ahead.”

  He launches into his telling of what might be the most ridiculous story I’ve heard. It’s about Bill, a coworker of Jack’s who has apparently decided he is allergic to facial hair. Jack explains how he and the others ended up having to do all of Bill’s work today, because the ridiculous man couldn’t bear to have a conversation or even sit in a meeting with a man who had a beard or a mustache. “And the worst part,” Jack concludes finally, “is that, I swear to God, I sat down in front of this bearded guy that Bill forced me to meet with . . . and I sneezed! Six times in a row!”

  Jack’s story is so silly, so patently Jack, that I can’t help but laugh. My husband is a goofball, and that’s exactly why I fell in love with him.

  I give his hand a squeeze as I get up from the table to clean the dishes. Only once I’m in the kitchen do my emotions hit me in full force again, and I breathe deeply over the sink.

  Thank you. I look back at my husband in the other room. Thank you for that half hour. Thank you for helping me forget.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Althea Anderson, July 1926

  Margaret has been at Coney Island but a day before I return to visit her. I am the only one who knows she is there, after all; she is my responsibility. I can’t tell Hattie what I have done until I can assure her with certainty Margaret will pull through. The poor mother need not lose her daughter twice. I know grief leaves its scars. Absently, I reach into my purse for the one photograph I have of my mother. Dripping in ephemeral white lace, she grips my father’s arm as if to root herself to the earth. Otherwise, I always thought as a child, she would float away like a cloud.

  Now, the baby is asleep when I arrive. I gaze at her through the small glass doors of her incubator as her ti
ny, bony chest rises and falls. With her eyes closed, she is indistinguishable from the other babies; I recognize her only because her name is printed neatly on a card affixed to her unit. Margaret.

  Funny, for she doesn’t look like a Margaret to me. Margaret is a name for an older generation of women, ones who didn’t go into nursing or work in Coney Island or survive when they weren’t supposed to. This little girl is a fighter. Her body is weak, but her eyes spark with power. She’s as determined to live as Dr. Couney is to save her.

  Behind me, a group of fairgoers enters the building. Their reflections move ghostlike and dim across the glass panes of Margaret’s incubator until something catches the light. I turn quickly to see what is sparkling so and watch head nurse Louise Recht slip a ring off her finger and then slide it, glittering, up the leg of one of the infants. The crowd gasps, whether in horror or awe, and Louise deftly drops the ring back on her finger before tucking the baby safely away. “And even that small,” she concludes with pride, “the baby will survive.”

  I turn again to Margaret. Her limbs, too, could be encircled by a ring meant for a woman’s finger. Her veins, purple-red like a bruise, circumnavigate the entirety of her tiny torso like the lifeline of a palm.

  I place my own palm on the glass that separates us. Those spidery veins, the thin lines of her ribs—they are begging to be filled with life. I want so desperately to pour it into them, to breathe into Margaret’s knobby body and fill it with love.

  I am a trained nurse, I remind myself. Nearly registered. When it comes to life, I must deal in numbers and facts. The love of a near stranger will never do what milk or oxygen does for an infant. I am a nurse, and I cannot afford the distracting comfort of superstition.

  Beside my palm on the glass, Louise’s reflection grows larger. I cringe, hoping she isn’t going to make a spectacle of Margaret with the ring.