I nodded again, then gestured to remind him that I could write if he would hand me paper and a pen.
“No, no, no,” he said, laughing. “I’m going to enjoy this one-sided conversation. I’ve been out on dates with some girls and couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”
I would have asked if he considered this a date if I could have talked. He leaned toward me, propping one elbow on his knee, resting his chin on his hand.
“I saw you reading the Bible when you were in the other ward. That impressed me. It’s usually not the favored reading material of women your age. At first I was afraid that you might be planning to become a nun or something—which would be a tragic waste of a beautiful woman—but then I remembered seeing you at Christ Church. You go there sometimes, right?”
I nodded, feeling more and more like a trained horse.
“See, that intrigues me. Attending church is obviously your choice, since your parents aren’t around to drag you there by the hand. I’m a physician not a detective, but unless I’m reading this all wrong, I suspect that there is some spiritual depth to you, Grace Bauer—along with beauty and intelligence. Sorry—I confess that I peeked at your grades too.”
By now I was blushing fiercely. I longed to duck beneath the covers to escape his probing eyes, but I knew I would look foolish. I was glad I couldn’t talk because I had no idea what to say. Nor could I imagine ever conversing with someone as poised and articulate as Stephen Bradford.
“Am I right? Have you had some sort of . . . spiritual experience?” he asked.
“My faith is very important to me,” I whispered. The effort hurt my throat, bringing tears to my eyes. He sprang to his feet and poured a glass of water, then lifted my head so I could drink.
“Hey, you’re not supposed to talk. You’ll start hemorrhaging. Do you taste blood?”
I shook my head.
“Good. Dr. Reynolds will murder me if he has to pack your throat. Let me do the talking, okay?” He settled back in the chair again. “My parents dragged me by the hand to church when I was small, and I thought it was okay—pretty music, nice people. But nothing much happened inside me, you know? It didn’t mean anything. Then I came down with appendicitis when I was twelve. My appendix ruptured and I nearly died of peritonitis.”
I had the feeling I was seeing a side of Stephen Bradford he rarely revealed. “I started talking to God. I told Him I wanted to live, and I pleaded with Him like King Hezekiah did in the Old Testament. When Hezekiah prayed, God gave him fifteen more years to live. Of course, I was secretly hoping for a few more years than fifteen, but I would take what I could get. Obviously, God answered my prayer. I lived. This is my fifteenth year, by the way.” He gave a quick, shy smile before continuing.
“But as I lay there recovering, I started to get the feeling that now it was God’s turn to talk to me. It seemed like He was saying that everything I’d gone through had been for a reason. He had given me a firsthand look at doctors and hospitals and saving lives because He wanted me to serve Him by becoming a doctor—if I was willing. On my first Sunday home from the hospital we sang the song in church, ‘Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee.’ I told God I was willing.”
Stephen stopped suddenly and looked away, as if embarrassed that he’d told me so much. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this—I hope you don’t think I’m crazy. I just had the feeling, somehow, that you’d understand.”
“I do,” I whispered. He stood and put his fingers on my lips.
“Shh. You can tell me all about it in a couple of days.” He gazed at me for a long moment, and he was a completely different man than the nonchalant doctor who had first strolled into my room. I liked this man very much.
“So do you think you’ll be going to church next Sunday?” he asked. I nodded. “Great. I’ll wait for you in front of the building. We can sit together.”
I got out of bed early Sunday morning, giving myself plenty of time to fix my hair and put on my makeup. Stephen had seen me at my worst in the hospital. Now I wanted him to see me at my best. I arrived at Christ Church twenty minutes early and saw Stephen already waiting for me, pacing a bit and glancing at his watch.
“Oh good. You came,” he said when he saw me. His magnificent smile lit his face and I couldn’t utter a sound. Fortunately, we walked up the steps and into the sanctuary, so I didn’t have to. After sitting in church alone all my life, it felt like a dream to sit beside Stephen, sharing a hymnbook, hearing him sing in his booming baritone voice. That’s when I knew that I could never get seriously involved with any man who didn’t share my faith.
“Let’s go for lunch,” he said afterward.
“Sure.” I had progressed from nodding to monosyllables. Great. I would have to do better than that if I ever wanted to see Stephen Bradford again. When we were seated in a diner near the hospital, I said, “What did you think of the pastor’s comments on faith versus works?”
“I thought his logic was flawed in some places,” Stephen said, “but I agreed with the basic content of his message. The book of James has always been controversial in that respect. In fact, Martin Luther thought it should be thrown out of the Bible—but then, he was reacting to its misuse by the Catholic church.”
I could tell by his quick gestures and the excitement in his voice that Stephen enjoyed a vigorous debate. I took a risk, daring to disagree with some of his opinions as we talked, playing the devil’s advocate. Father O’Duggan used to do the same thing with me in some of our conversations, and I’d loved the challenge of defending my ideas.
“Were you in debate club in high school?” Stephen finally asked, laughing as we finished eating our pancakes.
“No, but one of my best friends since childhood was Father O’Duggan, the parish priest. You should debate him sometime.”
“A Catholic priest? My impression is that they are usually all wrapped up in Catholic doctrine at the expense of faith in Christ.”
“Father O’Duggan must be different, then. He truly loves God.”
For the next several weeks, Stephen and I met at Christ Church every Sunday. Afterward, we would go out for lunch if he wasn’t working, and if the weather was nice, we’d walk the long way home through a nearby park, stopping to sit for a while on our favorite park bench beside a pond. I told him how I’d first sensed God’s presence when I was thirteen, and how I’d learned to rely on Him as my heavenly Father ever since.
“It’s so refreshing to be with a woman I can converse with,” Stephen said. “Someone whose mind isn’t on shallow things.”
Stephen and I became good friends, but that was all. To my great disappointment, he didn’t hold my hand or try to kiss me.
Then my rotation changed and we ended up on the pediatrics ward at the same time. I saw him as Dr. Stephen Bradford, and it was painfully obvious why he didn’t ask me out. He was so completely unattainable—suave, good looking, self-assured. He strode through the corridors like he owned the hospital, not at all like a lowly intern. He was slightly under six feet tall, with the compact muscles of a man who’d been the star quarterback on his high school football squad and rowed for the winning crew team at his Ivy League college. All the nurses that worked for him fell in love with him.
“Isn’t he dreamy?” they sighed when he walked onto the floor. “Wouldn’t you love to lip wrestle with him?” Stephen seemed to take their adulation for granted.
At work he treated me no differently than any of the other student nurses, as if I had dreamt all our Sunday mornings together. With so many women competing for him, I knew I didn’t stand a chance. That’s why when he finally did ask me out I was speechless.
“Do you like to dance, Grace?” he asked one Sunday as we walked home through the park. “I’m supposed to have Friday night off. I thought we could go to a dance.”
“Y-yes . . . I’d love to go.”
Instead of going to the club near the hospital where all the nurses and interns went, we took a bus to t
he USO club where I’d first danced with the sailor more than a year earlier. For the first time, Stephen took my hand in his as we walked. When we danced, he pulled me snugly to himself like a prized possession. As with everything else he did, Stephen was excellent at dancing. We seemed to float above the floor, our feet barely touching the ground, like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. He held our clasped hands against his chest and pressed his cheek to my face. I hated for the slow songs to end, revelling in the nearness of him and the musky scent of his after-shave.
“Mmm, you feel so good in my arms,” he murmured as we danced to “I’ll Be Seeing You.” “It feels as though you belong here. I don’t want to let you go, Grace.”
I remembered Father O’Duggan’s warnings. Stephen might have been spinning me a line. But the attraction I felt for him was as strong and as irresistible as gravity.
After the dance we sat outside on the bench, waiting for the bus. Stephen had grown very quiet and still, his hazel eyes locking with mine. Then he closed his eyes and slowly bent his head until our lips met. The night seemed to come to a halt, like a child’s game of freeze-tag—except that I was far from cold. I’d kissed a few men by then, but I’d been in the hands of amateurs. By the time the bus came, I could barely stumble up the stairs.
For the next four months I turned down dates with every man but Stephen—and since his schedule as an intern was so demanding, I spent a lot of weekends alone. We would steal time together whenever we could though, and sometimes our date was a short walk to the park or a quick cup of coffee in a nearby cafe. I didn’t mind. As an intern, he probably didn’t have much money to spare for dates.
“You’re so easy to talk to, Grace,” he told me in the coffee shop one day. He had been telling me about the patients he had treated that week—the ones he had helped and the one or two he hadn’t been able to help.
“I enjoy listening to you share your triumphs and frustrations,” I said.
“Yeah? Well, today I’m frustrated.”
“Tell me.”
“I signed on to be an army doctor, but now it looks like the war will be over before I finish my internship, and I’ll miss everything! All my old friends from college are in Europe or the South Pacific . . . and here I am. I thought about enlisting as a regular soldier, then finishing medical school after the war, but the need for doctors was too great. Now that I’m almost done, so is the war.”
“You’ve been cheated, Stephen! I think you should write to the president and ask him to prolong the war a little longer, just for you.”
He laughed, then reached across the table for my hand. “You know what else I like about you, Grace? You never let me get too full of myself.”
I knew exactly what he meant. There were two sides to Stephen—the self-assured doctor that most people saw, and the gentle, vulnerable man he often was with me. That warmhearted man was the one I longed to be with every spare moment I had.
“How about a movie this Saturday?” he said suddenly. “I’ll pick you up around seven.”
“I’d love to.”
* * *
That Saturday night, I eagerly waited in the lounge of the nurses’ home for Stephen to pick me up. I stood at the front window, watching through the blinds for him, ready to run outside and meet him on the front steps as soon as I saw him. The web that was slowly being woven between us seemed like such a delicate, magical thing that I didn’t want anyone to know how I felt about him. I was afraid that if I acknowledged it, the spell would be broken and our relationship would end as abruptly as it had started. Romances between medical students and nurses were notoriously fickle and short-lived. I had decided to simply enjoy my time with Stephen for as long as it lasted, promising myself that I wouldn’t be foolish enough to fall in love with him.
In the lounge behind me, four senior nurses sat around a wobbly card table playing gin rummy and loudly discussing all the unmarried residents and interns. As they laughed and joked their way through several categories such as “nicest physique” and “dream date,” I wasn’t surprised to hear Stephen’s name mentioned several times. I glanced at my watch. It wasn’t like him to be this late.
Suddenly a fourth-year medical student dressed in hospital scrubs stuck his head in the door. “Which one of you gorgeous dames is Grace Bauer?”
“I am.”
“Steve Bradford asked me to run across the street and tell you, sorry—he can’t make it tonight after all.” He covered his head in a gesture of self-defense, as if I might throw something at him. “Please, don’t shoot!” he said, grinning. “I’m just the messenger!” The other nurses laughed at his antics.
“How about you, pretty boy?” one of them asked. “Are you free tonight?”
He lounged against the doorframe. “That depends. I usually ask Steve’s girls out after he’s broken their hearts. He has great taste in women. How about it, Grace Bauer? I’m crazy about blondes.”
“No, thank you.” I tried to duck upstairs, anxious to hide my flaming cheeks, but one of the senior nurses stopped me.
“Hey, Gracie, I didn’t know you were dating Dr. Bradford or I would have warned you sooner.”
“Warned me about what?”
“To be careful. Bradford has quite a reputation around here.”
I felt my stomach turn over. I tried to sound nonchalant. “What kind of a reputation?”
“We call him Candy Man. He loves pretty young nurses in their striped uniforms. He gobbles them up like candy, then breaks their hearts when he moves on to the next one. He’s already left a trail of tears a mile long.”
“Besides, everyone knows he isn’t going to marry a lowly nurse,” one of the others added. “His parents are very high society, you know. One of the wealthiest families in Pennsylvania.”
Their warning came too late. I already cared about Stephen Bradford. I cared too much. My sleepless night and sopping pillowcase told me that.
Had he been feeding me a line when he’d said how refreshing I was? How comfortable I felt in his arms? Would he grow tired of me as he had all the others? And why hadn’t he told me that his parents were rich? During all the months we’d been together, we’d never talked about our families. I had been grateful, afraid I’d lose him for sure if he knew about my background. But it was even worse than I’d feared. The son of high society parents would never marry a poor divorced woman’s daughter. If only I had known how hopeless our future was, I never would have fallen in love with Stephen.
Fallen in love. I faced the truth for the first time. I had fallen in love.
How had it happened? And how did a person fall out of love again? I wished Father O’Duggan were here to confide in. He had always helped me sort through my problems in the past. But what would a priest know about falling in love?
After my long, sleepless night I felt groggy the next day, my eyes puffy and red. I stayed home from church. On Monday, I couldn’t seem to concentrate on anything except my own misery, and the head nurse had to reprimand me three times for making sloppy mistakes. I was relieved when I didn’t run into Stephen at the hospital, then I found him waiting for me outside after my shift. My heart began to race the moment I saw him leaning against the hospital zone sign.
“Hi. Have time for a walk?” It wasn’t really a question. He seemed confident that I would agree.
I felt torn. The nurses’ warnings made me afraid to trust him. But I also wanted to know why he had pretended to be a starving intern, riding city buses and eating in greasy cafes if his parents were wealthy people.
“Sure,” I finally said. He held my hand as we walked to the park.
“I wanted to apologize for standing you up the other night. We had an emergency come in about an hour before my shift ended, and I wanted to see it through until the patient was stabilized.” He pulled me down beside him on our favorite bench and draped his arm around my shoulder. “Doug told me how gorgeous you looked. I’m glad you didn’t take him up on his offer to replace me.”
??
?You can’t be replaced, Stephen. You’re one of a kind.” I felt relieved that my voice sounded neutral. He could interpret my words any way he liked.
“So are you, Grace.” He sounded so sincere. “You’re very different from all the other girls. You’re never demanding of my time and attention, and you would never give me a hard time about a broken date.” As we sat on the bench watching the geese, I decided I’d better tell him just how different I really was.
“You’ve never asked me about my parents, Stephen, but I think I should tell you about them anyway. They’re divorced. I’ve never even met my father because my mother left him before I was born. He took her to a back-alley quack and tried to make her abort me.” He shifted on the bench to face me, and I could tell by the stunned look on his face that he was shocked. I hurried on, spilling everything.
“I’ve lived my entire life in a tiny two-room apartment with my mother. We were poor . . . I mean, barely-enough-to-eat poor. In fact, we still are poor. My mother is an out-of-work dance band musician who is currently making tank parts in a factory.”
Stephen suddenly pulled me into his arms. I had the unsettling feeling as he crushed me to his chest that it was because he wanted to silence my words. He didn’t want to know anything about me. It would be easier to dump a girl he had never gotten close to. I pushed him away after a moment. He would probably break up with me anyhow now that he knew about my past, but if what the other nurses said was true, why postpone the inevitable?
“I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel sorry for me, Stephen. I don’t want pity. I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anyone else’s. My mother is such a dynamic, free-spirited soul that she made it an adventure to be poor. She’s a marvelous person . . . and thoroughly unconventional. I spent three years of my childhood in a speakeasy being raised by a bunch of bootleggers, because the only job my mother could find was playing the piano for them.”
He tightened his grip on my arms. “Grace, stop it. Why are you trying to shock me?” His face was puzzled and angry.