For over a year, he had been looking for a nurse who could double as a receptionist, and he had interviewed and rejected every local person even remotely qualified for the job and then had advertised in Concord, twenty-five miles away, and after interviewing and rejecting the few applicants who had come out from Concord, he had nearly given up the search. Very few people who have qualifications for such specialized work as nursing are willing to live in a small mill town like Catamount, a town that has been dying for a half-century, a town where the poor are not only always with you but where annually they seem to increase in geometric proportion to the rich. The old buildings, designed and constructed when labor was cheap and materials plentiful, grow older and shabbier and eventually fall, to be replaced by asphalt lots or else by corrugated iron, sheet metal and plastic structures whose function, regardless of the name of the building or the owner, seems to be strictly that of temporary storage. It occurred to Doctor Wickshaw, however, that if somehow a nurse could be lured to this town and could be made to stay for several seasons, she would discover, as he himself had discovered years ago, that it offered numerous advantages and pleasures not obtainable in the cities and attractive suburbs to the south. There was the beauty of the landscape, the lakes and forests, the rivers and mountains, the flowers and wildlife; there was the comfort of living among people whose names and family histories you knew, people who would come to your aid when you needed it and who would leave you alone when you desired it; there was the security of living in a community that still honored the old-fashioned virtues of thrift, honesty, independence and respect for the independence of one’s neighbors, love of God, love of country, and love of family.
“There has got to be someone left in the world who has a decent education and still cares for this kind of life,” the doctor told his wife.
She agreed, but all she’d seen lately of people with educations and options who happened to opt for living “up here among the savages,” as she put it, were hippies and real estate developers. Everyone else, she reminded him, if it’s possible, leaves.
“We haven’t left,” Doctor Wickshaw proudly announced.
“No,” she said. “We haven’t.”
Along about the time the doctor no longer felt able to hold this type of conversation with his wife — due to his failure to find a nurse willing to come out here to Catamount and work for little more than half of what she could make in Concord or down in Manchester, New Hampshire — the son and daughter-in-law of Harold Dame, the real estate man, had come to him and asked him to locate and hire for them a private nurse for the old man’s final one to six months. They were willing to pay whatever it cost — for they already knew how much it would cost to keep the old man in the hospital or in a nursing home, and there wasn’t a private nurse in the world who would charge them that much.
The doctor pondered a moment and informed them that he probably could get someone to come out of Boston, thanks to certain collegial connections he maintained there, and if they wished, he would do all the interviewing and hiring himself, for after all, who knew the medical and personal needs of Harold Dame better than he, Sam Wickshaw, his personal physician and his old friend and hunting companion of days gone by?
The son and daughter-in-law were relieved and went quickly on to their scheduled meeting with a surveyor out at Suncook Pond. The doctor picked up his phone and dialed Doctor Furman Bisher in Brookline, Massachusetts, a heart specialist with a summer home on Lake Winnepesaukee, and that is how Harold Dame, the real estate man, came to be cared for in his dying months by Carol Constant, a twenty-eight-year-old, recently divorced black woman from West Roxbury, Massachusetts, an unemployed nurse trying to return to the profession she had left three years ago to marry a man and care for his sick and aged mother. The mother had died, the man had gone to New York with a girl who wrote for TV, and Carol, after filing for divorce, had started looking for work. One of the physicians who had interviewed her, since many of his patients were black professional people and he was therefore in the market for a black nurse, was Doctor Furman Bisher. He had declined to hire her because Carol was not, to his eyes, an especially pretty woman. She was extremely dark, with a broad flat nose and liquid brown eyes. Her hair she kept cropped close to her head, almost like a skullcap. Also, she was a large woman, well muscled and tall, almost masculine, a little frightening to a man like Doctor Furman Bisher. But he had admired her obvious intelligence, and her credentials were impeccable, and she seemed to be an extremely pleasant woman, good-natured and kind, so he had not hesitated to recommend her to his New Hampshire colleague. “She’s a black woman,” he warned Doctor Wickshaw, “but she’s sensible. She needs a long-term private job like this to build up her file, which frankly was a little thin for me to take her on here. But she ought to be perfect for your needs up there in the boondocks,” he joked.
When Carol was first led into Harold Dame’s room on the fourth floor of the Concord Hospital, she knew immediately that he could not see her, and she was relieved. Doctor Wickshaw had met her at the bus station downtown, and he had stared at her whenever he thought she wasn’t looking, and at the hospital the receptionists, nurses and orderlies, even the elevator operator, had noticeably marked her presence as a foreign presence, and she had started to worry about her clothing, her shoes, her handbag — they were wrong, loud, shabby, large. Of course, she knew what the real problem was, and she knew too that it was not a problem as such, the way loud or shabby clothing was a problem, that is, as something that could be solved. No, this was a fact, a condition. She had not seen a human face that was not gray or pink or peach-colored since the moment she had boarded the bus in Park Square in Boston. All right, then. It was a condition, a working condition, and she would endure it. She had known it would be this way. She was no fool, and she knew her geography; she also knew herself and knew that to live and work wholly among white people would continually embarrass her, which in turn would anger her. Beyond that, she knew her anger would end up defeating her true purposes here, and, therefore, to avoid being angry, she would have to accept being embarrassed.
The nearly dead man in the hospital bed relieved her of her embarrassment, however, and for a moment she forgot the portly, red-faced doctor with the ostentatiously pointed beard, and the blond, square-faced head nurse who had imperiously demanded to know her business with the patient, requiring the doctor to explain elaborately that she was being considered for a position as Mr. Dame’s private nurse. The shrunken, ash-gray man lay inertly beneath the sheet, a short, narrow mound encircled by tubes and chrome-plated armatures. His wrinkled lids closed over bulbous eyes like onion skins, and his small, open, toothless mouth was sharp-edged and dark, like a hole punched in dry ground.
“He’s sleeping,” Doctor Wickshaw mumbled, as he flipped open Harold Dame’s file, perused it momentarily, and then passed it on to Carol. “His heart and lungs are strong,” he said smiling. “So unless he catches pneumonia, he could last six or seven months. Of course, he may go tomorrow, too. The surgeon’s report is right there,” he said, pointing over her shoulder to a faded, photocopied sheet with scribbling across it.