“He’s a goner,” Alan said, “might as well leave him.”
But Blair was looking at the man’s eyes, closed now, but she saw that he was struggling to live. She couldn’t tell what was hurt inside him, but she thought that maybe he had a chance. By all rights, he should be dead now, yet he wanted to live enough that he was hanging on.
Blair looked at Lee, and for a moment he was reminded of the union organizers’ eyes.
“I think there’s a chance. Can we open him and see? I think he wants to live,” she persisted.
“Blair,” Alan said in an exasperated voice, “anyone can see that he can’t live more than minutes. His whole insides must be crushed. Let him die with his family.”
Blair didn’t even look at Alan, but kept her eyes on Lee. “Please,” she whispered. “Please.”
“Let’s get him to the operating room,” Leander bellowed. “No! don’t move him. Keep him on that table and we’ll carry it.”
Blair was right, but so was Alan. His insides were crushed, but not as badly as they’d thought when they’d first opened him. His spleen was ruptured and it was bleeding a lot, but they managed to remove it and clean some of the other wounds.
Because of the internal bleeding, they had to work fast and, without anyone being conscious of what was happening, Alan was pushed out of the way. Leander and Blair, who worked so well together and who had the experience, sewed as fast as Mrs. Krebbs could thread needles. She was Leander’s favorite nurse and had been with him since he’d returned to Chandler. Alan, realizing that he couldn’t work as fast as Leander and Blair, stepped back and let the three of them repair the man’s mashed insides.
When they had sewed him shut, they left the operating room.
“What do you think?” Blair asked Lee.
“Now is when God comes into the matter, but I think that you and I did the best we could.” He grinned at her. “You were damned good in there. Wasn’t she, Mrs. Krebbs?”
The stout, gray-haired woman grunted. “We’ll see if the patient lives,” she said as she left the room.
“Not given to compliments, I take it,” Blair said, as she scrubbed the blood from her hands.
“Only when you deserve them. I’m still waiting for mine. Of course, I’ve only been here two years.”
As the two of them laughed together, Blair wasn’t aware of Alan standing against the wall watching them.
Once out of surgery, they went back to the wards and, late in the day, attended a child who had been scalded. And as the day wore on, Blair and Leander seemed tireless, but Alan followed them feeling more and more as if he were completely unneeded. Twice, he tried to talk to Blair about going home, but she’d hear none of it. She stayed next to Leander’s side every minute. By ten that night, Alan was drooping.
“Come into my office,” Lee said at eleven. “I have some beer and sandwiches there, and I want to show you something.”
Alan sat in a chair and hungrily ate his sandwich while Lee unrolled plans and spread them across his desk. “These are my plans for the women’s infirmary, a place where a woman can go for any ailment and get competent treatment. I’d like a training center, too, for women to be taught how to look after their children’s health.” He stopped and smiled at Blair. “No horse manure or cancer plasters.”
She smiled back at him and realized that his face was inches from hers and that he was moving toward her with an expression on his face that she’d seen only once before—that night. Before she knew what she was doing, she was leaning toward him in a way that seemed very natural to her, and it seemed perfectly normal that he should kiss her.
But, only a breath away from her lips, he pulled back abruptly and began to roll the plans. “It’s late and I’d better get you home. It looks like we’ve worn Alan out. Besides, it’s useless for me to show you these plans. You won’t even be here. You’ll be in a big city in an established hospital, and you won’t have the nuisance of having to build a place from scratch, of having to plan where you’ll put the equipment, of whom you’ll hire, of planning just what you’ll teach and whom you’ll treat.” He stopped and sighed. “No, in your city hospital, you’ll have everything already planned. It won’t be hectic like this new clinic will be.”
“But that doesn’t sound bad. I mean, it might be fun to decide how you want things. I’d like to have a burn clinic or maybe a special isolation ward or—.”
He cut her off. “That’s kind of you to say but at a big city hospital, the people pay their bills.”
“If a big hospital is so good, then why didn’t you stay in one? Why did you leave?” she asked indignantly.
With a show of great reverence, he put the plans back into the safe. “I guess I like feeling needed more than I like security,” he said, turning back to her. “There are more than enough doctors in the East, but out here it’s a challenge to keep up with all the work. The people here need a doctor more than they do there. I feel as if I’m doing some good here, and I didn’t there.”
“Is that why you think I want to return East? For security? You don’t think that I’m up to all the work here?”
“Blair, please, I didn’t mean to offend you. You asked me why I didn’t want to work at a big, safe, orderly, comfortable hospital in the East, and I told you, that’s all. It has nothing to do with you. We’re colleagues, remember? I’d never dream of telling you what you should or shouldn’t do. In fact, if I remember correctly, I’m the one who’s taking obstacles out of your path. I gave up my intention of marrying you so you could return East, marry Alan, and work in your hospital just like you say you want to. What else can I do to support you?”
Blair had no answer for him, but she felt unsettled inside. At this moment, the thought of working in St. Joseph’s Hospital seemed selfish, as if she were seeking glory instead of trying to help people as she should be doing.
“Speaking of Alan,” Lee was saying, “I think we’d better get him home.”
Blair had completely forgotten Alan and now turned to see him slumped forward in his chair, dozing. “Yes, I guess we’d better,” she said absently. She was thinking too hard about what Leander had said. Maybe a big hospital was “safe,” but the people there got just as sick as they did in the West. Of course, there were more people to treat them there, and here they didn’t even have a decent hospital for women. In Philadelphia, they had at least four infirmaries for women and children, and of course there were women doctors in practice there, and everyone knew that women would sometimes suffer a disease for years before they’d let a man examine them.
“Ready?” Lee asked, after he’d wakened Alan.
Blair thought about what Lee’d said all the way home, and she lay awake in bed for a while and thought about it, too. Chandler certainly needed a female doctor, and she could train with Leander and help run that new clinic of his, all at the same time.
“No, no, no!” she said aloud, as she hit the pillow with her fist. “I am not going to stay in Chandler! I am going to marry Alan, tram at St. Joseph’s Hospital, and I am going to set up practice in Philadelphia!”
She settled down to go to sleep but as she drifted off, she thought of the many women in Chandler who had no female doctor to tend to them. She had a restless night.
On Wednesday morning, Lee came to the house to visit her, and Blair found that she was very glad to see him.
“I don’t have to be at the hospital until late this afternoon, and I thought you might want to go riding with me. I stopped by the hotel and asked Alan to go with us, but he said he was tired after yesterday and he didn’t like to ride anyway. I don’t imagine you’d like to go with me alone, would you?”
Before Blair could say a word, Leander continued. “Of course you wouldn’t,” he said quickly, looking down at his hat in his hands. “You can’t go out with me alone, since you’re engaged to another man. It’s just that the whole town thinks that I’m to marry you in five days, and no other young lady will go out with me.” He turned to
leave. “I didn’t mean to burden you with my problems. My loneliness isn’t your concern.”
“Lee,” she said, grabbing his arm to keep him from leaving the room. “I…I did want to discuss that blood poisoning case with you, maybe—.”
Leander didn’t give her a chance to finish. “That’s great of you, Blair, you’re a real friend,” he said, as his face split into a grin that made Blair’s knees weak. The next moment, he had his hand on the small of her back and he half pushed her out the door to the side yard where two saddled horses waited.
“But I can’t wear this,” she protested, looking down at her long skirt. “I need a divided skirt and—.”
“You look fine to me, and so what if you show a little ankle? I’m the only one who’ll be there, and I’ve seen all of you, remember?”
Blair didn’t get a chance to say another word before he lifted her and put her on top of the horse, and she was busy trying to arrange her skirts so she had some modesty left. She prayed that Houston wouldn’t see her like this. Houston might one day forgive her sister for stealing the man she was to marry, but she’d never, never forgive her for being seen in public wearing the wrong clothes.
Leander grinned back at her and she forgot all about her sister and that she was with a man she shouldn’t be with.
He led her far out into the country. They rode side by side for a while, and Blair got him to talk more about the women’s infirmary and tell her some of his plans. And she told him some of her ideas. Only once did he say, wistfully, that he wished he had someone to work with him. Cautiously, Blair asked him if he’d consider a woman doctor. Lee said he’d more than consider her, and for the next half hour he did nothing but tell her how they’d work together on this new infirmary if she stayed in Chandler. Before long, Blair was caught up in the fantasy, and she was talking about how they could work together and all the miracles they could accomplish. Together, they’d wipe out all illness in the state of Colorado.
“And then the three of us could move to California and cure that state,” Leander laughed.
“Three?” Blair asked blankly.
Lee gave her a look of reproach. “Alan. The man you love, remember? The man you’re going to marry. He’ll be in on this, too. He’ll have to have a part in the new infirmary, too. And he’ll help us like he did yesterday.”
It was strange, but Blair could barely recall Alan being at the hospital yesterday. She remembered the way he hadn’t wanted to help the man who’d been crushed, but had he been in the operating room with them?
“Here we are,” Lee was saying, as she followed him into an enclosed place between gigantic rocks. He dismounted and unsaddled his horse. “I never thought I’d be able to bear this place again after what happened here.”
Blair stepped back as he unsaddled her horse. “What did happen here?”
He paused with the saddle in his hands. “The worst day of my life. I brought Houston here after the night we’d made love, and I found out that the woman I’d spent the most wonderful night of my life with wasn’t the woman I was engaged to.”
“Oh,” Blair said meekly, wishing she hadn’t asked. She stepped back as Leander pulled a blanket from his saddlebags and spread it on the ground, then watered the horses from a little spring nearby and began to spread food on the blanket.
“Have a seat,” he said.
Blair was beginning to think that she shouldn’t have come out here alone with him. He was easy to resist when he was being obnoxious and tossing Alan into the lake, but the last time they’d been alone and Lee had been this nice, they’d ended up with their clothes off and making love. Blair looked up at Lee standing over her, the sun making a crescent around his head and thought that, under no circumstances whatsoever, must she let him touch her. And she mustn’t let the conversation stray to what had happened between them. She must only talk about medicine.
They ate what Lee had brought and Blair talked to him about all the worst cases she’d ever seen in her life. She needed to remember the gory details, because Lee had taken off his jacket and stretched out inches away from her. His eyes were closed, and all he had to do was murmur a response now and then to Blair’s stories and she suspected he was falling asleep. She couldn’t help looking at him as she talked, those long, long legs, and she thought about how they felt next to her own skin. She looked at his chest, broad, strong, his pectorals straining against the thin cotton of his shirt. She remembered how his chest hairs felt against her breasts.
And the more she remembered, the faster she talked, until the words seemed to clog in her mouth and refused to come out. With a sigh of frustration, she stopped talking and looked down at her hands in her lap.
Leander didn’t say anything for a long while, and she thought perhaps he was asleep.
“I never met anyone like you,” he said softly, and Blair couldn’t help but lean slightly forward to hear him. “I never met a woman who could understand how I felt about medicine. All the women I’ve known raged at me if I was late picking them up for a party because I was sewing some man back together. Nor have I met any woman who was interested in what I did. You are the most generous, and the most loving, person I’ve ever met.”
Blair was too stunned to speak. Sometimes, she thought she had fallen in love with Alan because he was the first young man who hadn’t reviled her for the way she was. There were many times when Blair had tried to be like her sister, to be quiet and genteel, to not tell a man, when he said something stupid, that what he’d just said was stupid, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. And as a result of her laughter, of her honesty, she had never had very many suitors. In Pennsylvania, men had seen how pretty she was and been interested, but when they’d found out that she was going to be a doctor, they were interested no longer. And if they had stayed around, they’d soon learned that Blair was very smart, and that was death to a woman. All she had to do was beat a man at chess, or do an arithmetic problem in her head faster than he could, and there would no longer be any interest in her. Alan was the first man she’d ever met who wasn’t repulsed by her abilities—and Blair had decided that she was in love with him within three weeks of their first meeting.
Now, Leander was saying that he liked her. And when she thought of all the things she’d done to him in the last few days, the times she’d left him in the desert to walk back to town, she was astounded that he could stand the sight of her. He was either a remarkable man or he liked punishment.
“I know that you’ll be leaving town in a few days, and maybe I’ll never see you again, so I want to tell you what that one night we had together meant to me,” he said in a voice that was little more than a whisper.
“It was as if you couldn’t help yourself that night, as if my simple touch made you come to me. It was so flattering to my vanity. You’ve called me a vain man, but I’m vain only when I’m with you because you make me feel so good. And to have found the woman of my life…a friend, a colleague, a lover without equal, and now to have lost her.”
Blair was inching toward nun as he spoke.
Lee turned his head away from her. “I want to be fair about what has happened. I want to give you what you want, what will make you happy, but I hope you don’t expect me to be at the train station when you leave with Alan. I imagine that on the day you leave with him, I shall get rip-roaring drunk and tell my problems to some red-haired barmaid.”
Blair sat upright. “Is that what you like?” she said stiffly.
He looked back at her in surprise. “Is what what I like?”
“Red-haired barmaids?”
“Why, you stupid little—.” Instantly, his face was flushed red with anger, as he stood and began to shove the blanket, pulling it out from under her, and food into the saddlebags. “No, I don’t like red-haired barmaids. I wish I did. I was fool enough to fall in love with the most pigheaded, blind, idiotic, stubborn woman in the world. I never had any trouble with a woman in my life until I met you, and now all I have is trouble.” r />
He slammed the saddle on the horse. “There are times when I wish I’d never met you.”
He turned back to her. “You can saddle your own horse, and you can find your own way back to town. That is, if you’re not too blind to see the trail, because you sure are blind about people.”
He put one foot in the stirrup and then, on impulse, turned back to her and took her in his arms and kissed her.
Blair had completely forgotten what it was like to kiss Lee, forgotten that overwhelming sensation. She couldn’t have told you who she was when he was touching her, because all sensation left her except for the touch of this one man.
“There,” he said angrily, drawing back from her, then having to give her a little shake to make her open her eyes. “I’ve had blind patients who saw more than you do.”
He walked away from her and started to mount his horse, then mumbled, “Oh, hell,” and saddled her horse for her and put her in the saddle. He led her a chase back into Chandler, and when he stopped before her house, he said, “I expect you at the hospital at eight tomorrow morning.”
She barely had time to nod before he left her alone.
Chapter 15
Bleak was the only way to describe Blair’s mood when she got home. She wasn’t sure what was wrong with Leander, nor did she understand why she was so upset.
Her mother was in the family parlor surrounded by hundreds of boxes. “What’s this?” Blair asked absently.
“They’re wedding gifts for you and Houston. Would you like to open some of yours now?”
Blair just glanced at the presents and shook her head. The last thing she wanted was to be reminded of the wedding that might or might not take place—not that Leander still wanted to marry her.
She called Alan’s hotel and left a message that they were to be at the hospital tomorrow morning at eight, then went upstairs to fill the bathtub.
When she came back downstairs an hour later, Houston was home, a rare thing for her since she always seemed to be out with Taggert, and she was in a flurry of activity as she opened presents and talked to Opal a mile a minute about the plans for the wedding. Houston exclaimed over the gifts from the East, things from Vanderbilts, the Astors, names that Blair had only heard of, and now Houston was marrying one of their exclusive society.