Minerva had never been much interested in colored people. While her husband lived, she had dutifully inspected the Infirmary from time to time and irregularly dropped in on Wednesday afternoons, when a group of white Episcopal ladies—“meddlesome gossips and prying shrews,”
Minerva called them—came to the Infirmary to sew. One of Minerva’s countless, small sensations of relief, at the time of Emmet’s funeral, had been the realization that he would no longer “dragoon” her to those charitable Wednesdays.
In that, to her astonishment, Minerva found she had erred.
Shortly before his death, Emmet had signed a contract employing as the new head of the Infirmary one Alice Groves, an expert in hospital management, with a varied postgraduate background and a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University. Minerva had paid little attention at the time and remembered only her husband’s delighted remark that he and the hospital board had “bribed the woman away from Kansas City.” She understood the joys of successful bribery.
After Emmet was decently interred, Minerva had herself driven by Willis, in the Rolls, to what she thought of as a “last” Wednesday meeting. She was very much discountenanced to find that the new head of the Infirmary, Alice Groves, was herself a Negress. A mulatto, Minerva decided on sight. Not only that, hut Alice Groves was beautiful, gracious, young and, of course, exceedingly well educated. She spoke English with “a better Eastern accent than my son, Kit,” Minerva told certain outraged ladies.
She was warm and kind with Minerva, who made the sourest and most critical inspection in the history of the Infirmary, even though she found little enough to criticize, the facilities considered. After the tour of the hospital, to Minerva’s intense amazement, reporters from her own papers, accompanied by cameramen, took pictures of her with Alice and a dozen white-uniformed, dark-skinned nurses. These were duly printed, with captions noting how Mrs. Sloan was “carrying on the traditional family charities.” There was much editorial talk about the Infirmary being her late husband’s “favorite” charity and about her “nobility” in visiting it while her “bereavement was so recent.”
Minerva knew, of course, that it was a put-up job. Alice Groves was well aware her patronage was essential to the running of the hospital. So Alice Groves meant to keep Minerva’s interest. She was evidently publicity wise and had used publicity to gain her ends: Minerva could not repudiate a vast amount of printed praise. She came for a few Wednesdays and signed the annual check.
Just when she thought she could let the duty wither on the vine, she learned of a movement to rename the Infirmary. Mildred Tatum had been the first free slave to settle in River City. The colored population had apparently decided that, since they were no longer slaves, their hospital should have a different name. And “school children [Minerva again noted in her own newspapers] had voted by hundreds,” in a contest, to call it the “Minerva Sloan Infirmary.”
That move Minerva partly checked. She had no wish to be immortalized over the doorway—not to mention on the bedpans and diapers—of a “darkie infirmary.” But even as she graciously declined the offer and the vote of children, she found herself that much more enmeshed in Alice Groves’s toils. Her very refusal of the use of her name had wedded her person to the charity, which was what the administrator had wanted.
Their relations thenceforward were cordial but, on Minerva’s part, guarded. No white woman in River city or Green Prairie had ever managed to “take” her against her will, so thoroughly….
On a Wednesday, as usual, Willis drove across town to the Infirmary punctually at three.
Alice Groves, as usual, stood at the head of the stairs within the dingy building. She was dressed in powder blue, which, Minerva noted, became her. Behind Alice were the usual starched bevies of nurses, drawn up like a company for inspection.
Minerva made panting, reluctant rounds—baby wards and the new operating room (which was a sickening display of shiny things best not thought about, Minerva felt). She drew the line at visiting the adult wards, and there were no private rooms.
“Right after Christmas,” Alice Groves said pleasantly, as they finished the tour and started toward the bright, chintz-draped room where the ‘Wednesday ladies” sewed, “we’re going to start a drive among our own people for fifty thousand dollars.”
“Good heavens! Can you raise anything like that?”
“Perhaps not. It’s the amount we need to buy a little building in the country, for chronics.
There are so many!”
Minerva, headed for the white ladies, was beginning to think other thoughts. “That’s really very enterprising and wonderful—”
“I’m delighted you approve. I was sure you would. In fact, I’ve told the press—”
“What have you told the press?”
“That you approved. In fact, I said it was your idea.”
“No harm in that,” Minerva murmured.
“You’re always so kind, Mrs. Sloan!”
Minerva thought grimly that beyond doubt this “chronic home” drive would cost her the uncontributed balance of its quota. She had to admit Alice Groves was a good operator. It might, she thought, pay to take Alice into her camp. Then she saw the hat—the sprouted fright—that Netta Bailey was wearing, and she went through the chatting, peanut-eating, one-day seamstresses with a booming, “Afternoon, everybody! Afternoon, Netta! So glad you’re here. I wanted to have a private chat with you— church matters—before you left.”
It was recognition that both delighted and alarmed Netta. Minerva seldom did more than nod to her, at a distance.
The two women were ideally suited to the “little talk” that took place in the “visitors’ powder room,” some half hour later. They were suited in the sense that each knew what she wanted and what the other wanted and each knew what she had of value to the other. It wasn’t even a very long talk, considering that it proposed to settle the lives of a son and a daughter.
Minerva explained her position, rapidly. “You see,” she wound up, “my boy loves Lenore. Crazy about her. Charming girl. I’m crazy about her myself. So unfortunate, dear, old Beau would make a slip at such a time! I have no sympathy with crookedness, Mrs. Bailey….”
“Of course not!”
Minerva squinted, but she could not prove irony in the response. She made a thin, tight mouth, a formidable mouth, and then let it relax into a smile. “However, it was only a slip, a little slip, and his first. It must, of course, be his last. I can hardly send my son’s future father-in-law packing off to prison—”
“God forbid!” There was, at least, no irony in that.
“On the other hand,” Minerva went on, changing her tone to one of intimacy, intimacy tinged with potential regret and the potential withdrawal of intimacy, “we mothers understand things our children don’t. Kit tells me Lenore doesn’t seem to reciprocate his feelings…”
“Oh! I’m sure she does!” Netta was alarmed, but not as much as she appeared to be.
“I can understand it. Kit’s rather a—shall we say, frightening young man, from the standpoint of an innocent young thing.”
“Innocent as driven snow,” Mrs. Bailey murmured.
“Kit’s peremptory, bullheaded, reckless and foolish. I wouldn’t have it any other way,”
Mrs. Sloan said sharply. “But you know and I know how love grows in marriage—”
“Indeed, I do!”
“—so I feel, a word from you, Mrs. Bailey—I must call you Netta, and you must call me Minerva—the right word…”