Flying Angels(4)

She was impressed by how mature they seemed on the first day of school. They were going to spend much of the first term in the classroom, which Will did during his flight training too, learning about aerodynamics and the complicated calculations he had to know how to make. And even during their first term, Audrey would be meeting and dealing with real patients under close supervision.

   On Audrey’s first day of classes, she glanced around the room and saw half a dozen girls she would have liked to meet. They all looked older than she was and seemed very sophisticated to her. She suddenly felt small and inexperienced at life. She felt like she might have a panic attack as she observed the girl sitting next to her. She was beautiful and seemed so poised and adult. She was wearing a gray wool skirt, a white blouse, and plain, simple black high heels. She looked more like a secretary in an office than a nursing student. She had blond hair and big blue eyes. There was a halo of soft curls near her face, and her hair was pulled back tightly in a bun. Audrey was wearing an old navy blue suit of her mother’s that Ellen had loaned her when she’d turned sixteen and needed something to wear when her school took them to a performance of Swan Lake in Baltimore. Her mother had let her keep the suit afterwards. She was wearing a small string of pearls her mother had just given her when she turned eighteen, as a symbol of her adulthood. The pearls said she was no longer a girl but a woman.

Audrey glanced sideways at her neighbor, who smiled at her. They didn’t speak to each other until the first break, and then she turned to Audrey with a warm look.

“Hi, I’m Lizzie Hatton. From Boston. Where are you from?” Some of the girls were local, but many weren’t, like Lizzie.

“Here. I’ve lived here all my life,” Audrey said shyly.

   “Everyone in my family is a doctor or nurse. I didn’t get in to nursing school in Boston, so I wound up here.” She seemed mildly embarrassed as she said it. Her grades had slipped a little during senior year. She was having too much fun and didn’t really care about nursing school. She mentioned that she was living in the dorm.

“Mine are all sailors,” Audrey said with a grin. “My father was a captain, my grandfather was a vice admiral, and my brother is a navy pilot.”

“That sounds interesting. What does your mom do?” Lizzie was intrigued by Audrey, who seemed very self-possessed, cool and collected, much more so than Lizzie felt.

“Nothing. She’s sick. But she didn’t work before that.”

“Mine is a nurse. My father’s a doctor, and so are my grandfather and uncle. My older brother is in medical school at Yale, and my younger brother is premed at BU. I wanted to go to medical school too, and they had a fit. According to my father, it’s fine for a woman to be a nurse, but not a doctor. I told him that’s an antiquated point of view. All they really want me to do is get married and have babies. They think nursing school is a suitable activity while I look for a husband.” Lizzie looked annoyed as she said it.

“Is that what your mom did?” Audrey asked her.

“More or less, but she doesn’t put it that way. After they got married, she helped in my father’s office until she had us. She quit when my older brother Greg was born. Now she volunteers at a hospital twice a week. She’s a Gray Lady with the Red Cross.”

“Why wouldn’t they let you go to med school?” That sounded puzzling to Audrey. She thought Lizzie was an interesting girl. And she was excited to be talking to someone her age. She hadn’t had time for a close friend since her parents got sick.

   “They said it takes too many years of study for a woman to become a doctor, and men don’t want to marry women who work or have a career. That’s probably true. So maybe we’ll wind up spinsters after we’re nurses,” she said, laughing. There was something bright and bold about Lizzie that Audrey liked.

“But your father married your mother, and she was a nurse.”

“I don’t think she ever intended it as a career forever,” Lizzie admitted. “Just until she married.”

“I’m here to learn how to take better care of my mother. She has Parkinson’s,” Audrey confided in her. She was enjoying the exchange and confidences immensely.

“That’s serious,” Lizzie commented. “So you’re not going to work as a nurse after you graduate?” That seemed too limited to Lizzie. It did to Audrey too, when she said it out loud. Her life of dedication to her mother was hard to explain, and what her father had left them meant she didn’t have to work, as long as they were careful. Neither Audrey nor her mother were extravagant.

“I’ll have to decide when I graduate. It will depend on how my mother is by then.” They knew her condition would continue to deteriorate in the coming years.

They had lunch in the cafeteria together and met several of the other girls. Lizzie was nineteen, a year older than Audrey, and several of the girls were a few years older than they were. As it turned out, Audrey was the youngest in the group. A few of them were the daughters of doctors, like Lizzie, or their mothers were nurses. Medicine seemed to run in families, from what Audrey observed. She didn’t tell anyone else that her mother was sick. Lizzie seemed particularly confident while meeting their fellow students, and all the girls were excited about meeting each other and making friends.

   Audrey rushed home when classes ended, to see her mother. Mrs. Beavis, the nurse they’d hired, had come twice that day, as promised, to check on Ellen and make her lunch. Ellen was happy to see Audrey at the end of the day and asked her all about school. Nothing earth-shattering had happened so far. They’d been given a book on hospital protocols. They had to learn the basic instruments for surgery for an appendectomy by the next day. Eventually they would know all the instruments and rules.