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Wilbur Larch had had a big day, and Mrs. Grogan and his nurses knew it. He made them all meet in Nurse Angela's office, as if he took comfort from the litter of paper and the gloomy, surrounding presence of his massive A Brief History of St. Cloud's, which was gathered around him. He leaned on his overworked typewriter as if the machine were a podium.
"Now!" he said, because the women were chatting. "Now!" he repeated, using the word like a gavel to call the meeting to order. "Now we're going to head them off at the pass."
Nurse Edna wondered if he'd been sneaking down to the train station to watch the Westerns on the TV with the stationmaster; Nurse Edna did this quite often. She liked Roy Rogers better than Hopalong Cassidy; she wished Roy wouldn't sing; she preferred Tom Mix to them all. Although she loathed the Lone Ranger, she had a soft spot in her heart for Tonto--for all the world's sidekicks.
"Whom are we heading off?" Nurse Caroline asked aggressively.
"And you!" Dr. Larch said to Nurse Caroline, pointing his finger at her. "You're my top gun. You're the one who's going to pull the trigger. You get to fire the first shot."
Mrs. Grogan, who feared for her own sanity, feared that Dr. Larch had finally lost his. Nurse Angela suspected Larch had been slipping for a long time. Nurse Edna loved him so much that she couldn't judge him. Nurse Caroline just wanted the facts.
"Okay," Nurse Caroline said. "Let's begin at the beginning. Whom do I shoot?"
"You're going to turn me in," Larch told her. "You're going to blow the whistle on me--on all of us here."
"I'll do no such thing!" Nurse Caroline said.
Very patiently, he explained it to them. It was so simple--to him it was simple because he'd been thinking of it for years. It was not simple to the rest of them, and he had to take them very slowly through the steps toward their salvation.
They must assume that Melony would respond to the questionnaire. They must believe that her response would be negative--not because Melony was necessarily negative, as Larch pointed out to Mrs. Grogan (who was ready to defend her), but because Melony was angry. "She was born angry, she will always be angry, and even if she means us no harm, one day she will be angry enough--about something, about anything--so that she will respond to the questionnaire. And she'll say what she knows," Larch added, "because, whatever else Melony is, she's no liar."
Therefore, he argued, he wanted the board to hear that he was an abortionist from someone else first. It was the only way they might be saved. Nurse Caroline was the logical betrayer; she was young, she was relatively new, she had struggled with her conscience for an acceptably short period of time, and she had decided that she could remain silent no longer. Mrs. Grogan and the older nurses had been bullied into accepting a doctor's authority as absolute; Nurse Caroline would maintain that they were not to blame. Nurse Caroline, however, had a challenging attitude toward the authority figures of this (or of any) society. She would present her protest as a matter of women's rights--that even nurses should never allow doctors to tyrannize them; that when a doctor was breaking the law, even if it was not a nurse's role to challenge him, it was her right and her moral obligation to expose him. Larch was sure that Mrs. Goodhall would like that bit about "moral obligation"--Mrs. Goodhall doubtlessly labored under the illusion that her own moral obligations were the guiding lights of her life, and Dr. Larch felt that it was the overwhelming burden of these obligations that had made her a sour, joyless woman.
Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela listened to Larch as if they were baby birds awaiting a parent's return to the nest; their heads were sunk into their shoulders, their faces were tilted up, their mouths silently forming the words they heard Larch speak--in anticipation of swallowing worms.
Mrs. Grogan wished that she'd brought her knitting; if this was what a meeting was, she never wanted to attend another. But Nurse Caroline began to see; she had a basically brave and a fundamentally political conscience; and once she grasped the portrait of the board as her enemy, she was most attentive to her commander who had so arduously plotted the board's defeat. It was a kind of revolt, and Nurse Caroline was all for revolution.
"Also," Larch pointed out to her, "you need to win a few points with the right-wingers on the board; they've colored you pink. Now you color yourself Christian. They're not only going to end up forgiving you, they're also going to want to promote you. They're going to want you in charge.
"And you," Larch said, pointing to Nurse Angela.
"Me?" said Nurse Angela; she looked frightened, but Larch knew that she would be the perfect one to recommend Fuzzy Stone. Hadn't she named him? And hadn't she almost dared, all those times, to join Fuzzy in his righteous debate with Dr. Larch? Because Fuzzy knew them all, and loved them all; he knew what they needed, and his beliefs (regarding the abortions) were so much more in sympathy with Nurse Angela's own beliefs.
"They are?" Nurse Angela said. "But I believe in abortion!"
"Of course you do!" Larch said. "And if you want Saint Cloud's to continue to offer abortions, you better pretend that you're on the other side. You'd better all pretend."
"What do I pretend, Wilbur?" Nurse Edna asked.
"That it's a great load off your conscience--that I have been caught," Larch told her. Perhaps, if Fuzzy Stone came back, Nurse Edna's conscience would let her sleep. And Mrs. Grogan could lighten up on the praying; perhaps she would not be so driven to pray, if they had that wonderfully decent Dr. Stone around.
Not that we don't all adore Dr. Larch! Nurse Angela would tell the board. And not that the poor old man didn't believe in himself, and in what he was doing--and for whom he was doing it. He was always devoted to the orphans. It was just that this social problem got the best of him and of his judgment. And how this issue has upset us all! How it has taken its toll!
How, indeed, Nurse Edna thought, her mouth still open, her head lolling between her shoulders--she was more in love with him than ever. He really was devoted to his orphans; he really would do anything for them.
"But what will happen to you, Wilbur--if we expose you?" Nurse Edna asked, a slim tear making its difficult way down her wrinkled cheek.
"I'm almost a hundred years old, Edna," he said softly. "I suppose, I'll retire."
"You won't go away, will you?" Mrs. Grogan asked him.
"I wouldn't get very far, if I tried," he said.
He had been so convincing about Fuzzy Stone--he had presented them with su
ch marvelous details--that Nurse Caroline was the only one to spot the problem.
"What if Homer Wells won't come here and pretend to be Fuzzy Stone?" she asked Dr. Larch.
