I rushed to the bed of the man who needed my first attention. He had been operated on for a cataract only a few hours previously and my orders had been not to let him move too soon lest the fluid in his eye run out and damage his sight permanently. But he with the other terrified patients was already on his feet.
Rounding up all those under my care and checking their names took several minutes, and while I was still trying to quiet them, ambulances from other hospitals came clanging up. By the time I had ushered my charges down to the ground floor, a way had been cleared through the debris of fallen brick and wood. Since mine were not stretcher cases I was able to crowd ten of them into one ambulance, and we were taken to the New York Hospital. Not until I had them all safely installed did I learn what had happened to our building. A tremendous explosion in the new Park Avenue subway had practically demolished it, and it had to be evacuated.
I returned to White Plains, where Bill came up frequently to see me. On one of our rambles he idly pulled at some vines on a stone wall, and then, with his hands, tilted my face for a kiss. The next morning, to my mortification, four telltale finger marks were outlined on my cheek by poison ivy blisters. The day after that, my face was swollen so that my eyes were tight shut, and I was sick for two months; since my training was finished, I was sent home to convalesce.
Chapter Five
CORALS TO CUT LIFE UPON
For a while I stayed at Corning, and then went back to New York to start nursing in earnest. On one of my free afternoons in August, Bill and I went for a drive, and he suggested we stop in at the house of a friend of his who was a minister. All had been prepared. License and rice were waiting. And so we were married.
The first year is half taken up with love and half with planning a future together which is to endure forever. These dreams feed youthful ambitions, but they seldom can come true in their entirety. In our case the obstacles arose with undue speed.
I was not well. I was paying the cost of long hours in mother’s closely confined room and of continuous overwork in the hospital. Medical advice was to go West to live, but I would not go without Bill, and he had a commission which kept him in New York. Accordingly, I was packed off to a small semi-sanitarium near Saranac where the great Dr. Trudeau, specialist in pulmonary tuberculosis, was consulted.
Existence there was depressing. A man might be talking to me one day, full of life and spirit and hope, and the next morning not appear. The dead were ordinarily removed in the quiet of the night, and the doctors made no comment. In this gloomy environment I rested, preparing myself for motherhood. The flood of treatises on child psychology had not yet started, and even the books on the care and feeding of infants were few. But I read whatever I could.
Just before it was time for the baby to be born I returned to the little apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue at 149th Street, then practically suburban. Taking every precaution, we had engaged four doctors in a row. Dr. Schmid had said he would perform the ceremony unless it came at night, in which case his assistant would have to take charge. The assistant had provided that, if he were not available, his assistant would be on call, and this assistant had another assistant to assist him.
When towards three o’clock one morning I felt the first thin, fine pains of warning, Bill tried one after the other of our obstetricians—not one could be located. He had to run around the corner to the nearest general practitioner. Due almost as much to this young doctor’s inexperience as to my physical state, the ordeal was unusually hard, but the baby Stuart, given Amelia’s family name, was perfectly healthy, strong, and sturdy. I looked upon this as a victory, although it was only partial, because I had to go right back to the mountains. It was a wrench to leave again so soon and at such a time, but I could not believe it would be for long.