Macedonia that he’d been made second lieutenant, and I should expect him home on leave. But he never turned up, and it took me three days to discover that he was in hospital with trench fever. No sooner did he get over that than they told him it had counted as his leave, and he was being posted back.
Bridie groaned.
Well, I said, one has to laugh.
(What I didn’t mention was that when Tim had finally been shipped back to me from Egypt fourteen months after that, he wasn’t speaking.)
Good night, then, Julia.
I was still oddly unwilling to let the conversation end. Have you far to go?
Bridie jerked her thumb left. Only down the street.
Her eyes dropped briefly.
She added, To the motherhouse.
Oh, now I understood why Sister Luke took such a proprietorial tone. Bridie’s shabby clothes, too, the lack of free evenings and spending money…
The moment was awkward. I tried to make a joke: Rather funny that motherhouse is the word for an order’s main premises when there’s not a mother in the place.
She chuckled.
So you’re a—a novice, Bridie? Or is postulant the term?
A dark laugh now. I wouldn’t be a nun for a hundred pounds.
Oh, my mistake, I thought—
I just board there.
Her voice went very low.
I come from one of their homes, she added, down the country.
I registered that. It suddenly struck me as perverse that someone was said to have grown up in a home only if she had no real home.
Awfully sorry, Bridie, I didn’t mean to pry.
That’s all right.
A stiff kind of silence.
She muttered, I’d rather you knew why I’m so stupid.
Stupid?
They only sent me up to Dublin at nineteen, see, and it’s all still new to me.
Bridie, you’re the opposite of stupid!
Ah, you wouldn’t believe the mistakes I still make, she said bitterly. Handling change, reading signs, getting around on the trams, losing my way or losing my hat—
You’re a traveller in a strange land, I told her. Clever and brave.
That made Bridie beam.
Nurse Power?
Dr. Lynn, coming up from the basement, almost barged into us. I know it’s a lot to ask, but could you possibly help me with Mrs. Noonan?
I blinked, wondering what could be done for Ita Noonan now.
With the p.m.
A discreet abbreviation for postmortem.
Oh, of course, Doctor.
Frankly I’d have preferred to go home, but how could I say no to her?
The flare of Bridie’s head had already disappeared in the throng. I felt nettled that the doctor had broken up our chat.
I followed her down the stairs.
She told me, It has to be tonight, since the body will be released to the husband first thing in the morning.
Families were rarely told in so many words about autopsies; it was hard for them to understand the benefit to medicine of our hacking their loved ones about.
Then it occurred to me that I might be in real trouble. I asked, You’re not thinking Mrs. Noonan’s cause of death is in doubt?
Not at all, the doctor assured me. Since the outbreak began, I’ve been seizing any chance to do a p.m. on a flu case, especially a pregnant one.
Just my luck to run into a true scientist; I could have been on my way to bed by now. Still, Dr. Lynn’s zeal impressed me, especially considering she was living under the shadow of arrest, if the gossip was true; how did she manage to rise above her own sea of troubles and concentrate on the common good?
The mortuary was deserted. I’d been down to its white chill before, but I’d never seen it so eerily full of coffins. Six high against all four walls, like firewood stacked ready for the furnace. I wondered how the attendants remembered who was who—did they pencil the names on the sides?
So many!
Dr. Lynn murmured, This is nothing. Out at the cemetery there are hundreds of caskets piled up, waiting their turn. Hazardous to the living, I call it. The Germans—an eminently practical race— cremate their dead.
Really?
A shocking notion, but fas est ab hoste doceri, you know.
My face was blank, so she glossed that: Learn even from enemies. It wouldn’t surprise me if this flu turned out to be caused by a miasma of rot blowing over from the battlefields…
I followed her into the autopsy room, where the table was a gleaming altar: white porcelain with a central drain and deep grooves like the veins in a leaf. I put down my things as Dr. Lynn slid out one of the laden shelves and lifted off the sheet.
Ita Noonan, paled to