By what back streets and alleyways Nora had come, climbing over what masses of brick, past what unspeakable sights, Alice would never know, didn’t ask, didn’t want to know.
“There’s a child in here,” one of the nurses had said, as Alice moved out of one blood-washed operating room and started toward the other. “She wants to speak to you.”
“Good heavens!” The superintendent’s annoyance was plain.
“She says you bought her lunch. She says she wants help for Mrs. Sloan. And she has the old dame’s pocketbook, with eleven hundred dollars in it.”
Alice Groves looked at a curved needle, threaded with a suture, which she held in her hand. She listened to the soughing of the fire wind and watched the jitterbug reflection on the painted wall, felt tremor in the floors and listened intently to the groan that came up from the hot streets. Somehow she ran her mind backward to the cities that were gone, the streets, the skyscrapers, the White Elephant Restaurant. “Oh,” she said slowly. ‘Where is she?”
Nora was brought. Her hair was burned ragged, her eyebrows were gone, her face, on one side, was red and peeling. Her mittens were two big holes through which her fingers showed, raw—from the broken masonry everywhere. Her shoes were slit and her feet bled. Nobody could have recognized her under the dirt; she was hardly identifiable as a child, or even as a person.
But her voice was about the same. “Hello, Miss Groves. I left Mrs. Sloan in a big car up the street a few blocks. But it took so long to get here!”
Alice Groves thought of all the people between that “car” and the Infirmary. ‘What’s wrong with her?”
“Her legs got mashed and she’s unconscious.”
“Is her body mashed?”
“Oh, no. She’s all right. Her heart’s going good. We listened to it.”
“We?”
“Jeff, that’s her butler. He ran—toward the end. Willis, that’s the chauffeur. He had a stroke or something.”
“And you came on here?”
“Well, I finally did. I had to go back and around and every whichway—and I climbed in a window that was too little for some men—because they were thinking of climbing in and couldn’t.” She added, “Colored men. They boosted me.”
“I don’t know who we could send,” Alice Groves murmured. “Could you tell the nurses where her car is and what it looks like?”
“Oh, yes. It’s a green Buick sedan and it’s just this side of St. Angelica Street, a little on the right.”
One of the nurses said, “Let her die there, the old rip!”
Alice Groves shook her head. “She—her husband—built us this place. And she maintained it. And she was coming to us for help.”
“She didn’t know she was coming,” Nora said honestly. “She was brought.”
Alice smiled. “Miss Elman, see if Dr. Symes will come off a ward and take a bag and try to reach her. He used to play football, and if anybody could get through….”
Another doctor, a colored man, in white, white clothes bloodier than any butcher’s, leaned from the operating room doorway. “Miss Groves, could you please! We’ve got a bad head wound here…”
Alice nodded. “In a sec!” She addressed the nurse again. “Have we got a bed anywhere—crib—cradle—mattress…?”
“Yours is still empty….”
As the superintendent went back to work, she said, “Take her up. Give her a shot-she’s out on her feet.”