One slushy day of February thaw she’d gone back to the room to change her wet overshoes between classes when she found a yellow telegram under the door: BETTER COME HOME FOR A WHILE YOUR MOTHER NOT VERY WELL. It was signed DADDY. She was terribly worried but it was a relief to have an excuse to get away from college. She took a lot of books with her but she couldn’t read on the train. She sat there too hot in the greenplush pullman with a book on her knees, staring out at the flat snowcovered fields edged with tangles of bare violet trees and the billboards and the shanties and redbrick falsefront stores along new concrete highways and towns of ramshackle frame houses sooty with factorysmoke and the shanties and the barns and the outhouses slowly turning as the train bored through the midwest, and thought of nothing.
Daddy met her at the station. His clothes looked even more rumpled than usual and he had a button off his overcoat. His face was full of new small fine wrinkles when he smiled. His eyes were redrimmed as if he hadn’t slept for nights.
“It’s all right, Mary,” he said. “I oughtn’t to have wired you to come… just selfindulgence… gettin’ lonely in my old age.” He grabbed her bag from the porter and went on talking as they walked out of the station. “Your mother’s goin’ along fine… I pulled her through… Lucky I got wind that she was sick. That damn housephysician at the hotel would have killed her in another day. This Spanish influenza is tricky stuff.”
“Is it bad here, Daddy?”
“Very… I want you to be very careful to avoid infection… Hop in, I’ll drive you out there.” He cranked the rusty touringcar and motioned her into the front seat. “You know how your poor mother feels about liquor?… Well, I kept her drunk for four days.”
He got in beside her and started, talking as he drove. The iron cold made her feel better after the dusty choking plush-smell of the sleeper. “She was nicer than I’ve ever known her. By God, I almost fell in love with her all over again… You must be very careful not to let her do too much when she gets up… you know how she is… It’s the relapses that kill in this business.”
Mary felt suddenly happy. The bare twigs of the trees rosy and yellow and purple spread against the blue over the broad quiet streets. There were patches of frozen snow on the lawns. The sky was tremendously tall and full of yellow sunlight. The cold made the little hairs in her nose crisp.
Out at the Broadmoor Mother was lying in her bed in her neat sunny room with a pink bedjacket on over her nightgown and a lace boudoircap on her neatlycombed black hair. She looked pale but so young and pretty and sort of foolish that for a second Mary felt that she and Daddy were the grownup people and Mother was their daughter. Right away Mother started talking happily about the war and the Huns and the submarine campaign and what could Mr. Wilson be thinking of not teaching those Mexicans a lesson. She was sure it wouldn’t have been like that if Mr. Hughes had been elected; in fact she was sure that he had been elected legally and that the Democrats had stolen the election by some skulduggery or other. And that dreadful Bryan was making the country a laughingstock. “My dear, Bryan is a traitor and ought to be shot.” Daddy grinned at Mary, shrugged his shoulders and went off saying, “Now, Hilda, just stay in bed, and please, no alcoholic excess.”
When Daddy had gone Mother suddenly started to cry. When Mary asked her what was the matter she wouldn’t say. “I guess it’s the influenza makes me weak in the head,” she said. “My dear, it’s only by the mercy of God that I was spared.”
Mary couldn’t sit all day listening to her mother go on about preparedness, it made her feel too miserable; so she went down to Daddy’s office next morning to see if she could catch a glimpse of him. The waitingroom was crowded. When she peeped into his consultingroom she could see at a glance that he hadn’t been to bed all night. It turned out that Miss Hylan had gone home sick the day before. Mary said she’d take her place but Daddy didn’t want to let her. “Nonsense,” said Mary, “I can say doctor’s office over the phone as well as that awful Miss Hylan can.” He finally gave her a gauze mask and let her stay.
When they’d finished up the last patient they went over to the lunchroom for something to eat. It was three o’clock. “You’d better go out and see your mother,” he said. “I’ve got to start on my rounds. They die awful easy from this thing. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I’ll go back and tidy up the desk first,” said Mary firmly.
“If anybody calls up tell them that if they think it’s the flu, the patient must be put right to bed, keep their feet warm with a hotwater bottle and plenty of stimulants. No use trying to go to the hospital because there’s not a bed in a radius of a hundred miles.”
Mary went back to the office and sat down at the desk. There seemed to be an awful lot of new patients; on the last day Miss Hylan had run out of indexcards and had written their names on a scratchpad. They were all flu cases. While she sat there the phone rang constantly. Mary’s fingers were cold and she felt trembly all over when she heard the anxious voices, men’s, women’s, asking for Doc French. It was five before she got away from the office. She took the streetcar out to the Broadmoor.
It gave her quite a turn to hear the band playing in the casino for the teadance and to see the colored lights and feel the quiet warmth of the hotel halls and the air of neat luxury in her mother’s room. Mother was pretty peevish and said what was the use of her daughter’s coming home if she neglected her like this. “I had to do some things for Daddy,” was all Mary said. Mother started talking a blue streak about her campaign to put German women out of the Woman’s Tuesday Lunch Club. It went on all through supper. After supper they played cribbage until Mother began to feel sleepy.
The next day Mother said she felt fine and would sit up in a chair. Mary tried to get Daddy on the phone to see if she ought to but there was no answer from the office. Then she remembered that she’d said she’d be there at nine and rushed downtown. It was eleven o’clock and the waitingroom was full before Daddy came in. He’d evidently just been to a barbershop to get shaved but he looked deadtired. “Oh, Daddy, I bet you haven’t been to bed.” “Sure, I got a couple of hours in one of the interne’s rooms at the hospital. We lost a couple of cases last night.”
All that week Mary sat at the desk in the waitingroom of Daddy’s office, answering the phone through the gauze mask, telling frightened flushed men and women who sat there feeling the aches beginning in their backs, feeling the rising fever flush their cheeks, not to worry, that Doc French would be right back. At five she’d knock off and go to the hotel to eat supper and listen to her mother talk, but Daddy’s work would be just beginning. She tried hard to get him to take a night off for sleep every other night. “But how can I? McGuthrie’s laid up and I’ve got all his practice to handle as well as my own… This damn epidemic can’t last indefinitely… When it lets up a little we’ll go out to the Coast for a couple of weeks. How about it?” He had a hacking cough and looked grey under the eyes but he insisted he was tough and felt fine.
Sunday morning she got downtown late because she’d had to go to church with Mother and found Daddy dozing hunched up in a chair. When she came into the office he jumped up with a guilty look and she noticed that his face was very flushed. “Been to church, eh, you and your mother?” he said in a curious rasping voice. “Well, I’ve got to be gettin’ about my business.” As he went out the door with his soft felt hat pushed far down over his eyes it crossed Mary’s mind that perhaps he’d been drinking.