Dr. Kessler tilted his head back, in the bright fluorescent light of the cardiac wing, and read the brass sign above the staff chairs in a voice that began confidently and trailed off into nothing. “The Harriet Mobley Corridor. Dedicated in nineteen eighty eight to Harriet Mobley, Registered Nurse, who founded the night nursing training program of this hospital and trained three hundred nurses in nine years.” He did not look down. I am Harriet Mobley, seventy eight years old, and I sat in my late husband old wool overcoat with my hands in my lap, beside the pillar where I had once stood for thirty hours in the winter of 1978.
Before I was a school librarian, I was a surgical nurse. I worked in this hospital from 1969 until 1988, and in that time I scrubbed in on more than four thousand operations. In 1981, I looked around at the night shift and saw young nurses crying in the supply closet, because no one had taught them what to do at three in the morning, and I started a program. Three hundred and four nurses went through it. The little silver caduceus on my lapel, with the number seventeen engraved beneath it, was given to me for seventeen years of service, on my last day.
The older nurse from the desk, Dorothy, gray at the temples, came around and stood beside me with her hand on my shoulder. “Harriet,” she said, quietly, “I was in your fourth class. You taught me to start an IV on an orange.” The man with the oxygen tank had turned his chair entirely. Down the corridor, a janitor with a yellow bucket stopped, and an elderly woman in a bathrobe who was walking with a frame put a hand to her heart. A young resident sat down on the arm of a chair, as if his legs had given way.
A brass sign above the staff chairs gave one retired nurse the length of a corridor to bring a young doctor back to the heart of his hospital in Cleveland.
I gave my terms from the staff chair, which I did not intend to leave. “Doctor, you are tired, and you did not look up, and I have done both of those things in my own life. I will not complain to the hospital. I would ask only that you read the sign over your head every morning for a month. And that you ask the nurses who work with you, the night ones, the ones who walk this corridor, what they wish the doctors knew. They taught me more than any book. They will teach you.”
Dr. Kessler dropped to his knees beside my chair. His voice came out raw. “Mrs. Mobley, I am on hour thirty four,” he said. “I have been awake since yesterday morning, and I saw an old woman in a shabby coat and my brain did what it does when it is tired, which is make assumptions.” He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. “My mother raised me in Parma on a cleaning job. I of all people should never have said homeless.” Dorothy handed him a paper cup of water, and he drank it in one swallow.
But in his distress the young man made one more error. Dr. Kessler reached out, snatched the silver pin from the lapel of my overcoat, and stood up, hurrying down the corridor with it toward the nurse station, evidently planning to ask the administrator to confirm what the sign had told him. He had gone a dozen paces when Dorothy stepped into the middle of the hall. The man with the oxygen tank wheeled his stand across the other side, the tubing swaying, and the old woman in the bathrobe planted her frame.
The doctor halted among them, with the pin in his fist, as if caught in a net of IV poles and walkers. Dorothy did not raise her voice. “Doctor Kessler,” she said, “you will not walk away from Mrs. Mobley.” The man with the oxygen tank nodded gravely. The doctor turned slowly, and the sight of the three of them blocking the hall, an old nurse, an old patient and an old woman in a bathrobe, seemed to dissolve something in him. He came back, and pinned it on me himself, and he was weeping.
The consequences were gentle and long lasting. The hospital reprinted the sign in the corridor, with a small addition at the bottom, a brass plaque the size of a playing card that said, Please sit as long as you need. Dr. Kessler came to my apartment above the laundromat on his next day off, in jeans, to ask how to run a night shift. He began a program of his own for first year residents on the long hours, using my old curriculum, and he put my name on the cover.
In the name of my husband Walter, who passed in 2019, I started the Walter Mobley Fund. It pays for scholarships for night shift nurses and for a volunteer library cart that visits the bedsides of hospital patients, in Cuyahoga, Lake and Geauga counties. In the first year we sent twenty nine nurses back to school and put books into the hands of more than a thousand patients. One was a ninety year old man from Euclid who had not read a novel since 1962 and finished three in a week.
In December, I pushed my library cart down the Harriet Mobley Corridor in my late husband overcoat, humming, as I do on Wednesdays. At the staff chairs, Dr. Kessler was sitting with a sandwich and a stack of charts, and he got to his feet when he saw me, and offered me his chair. “Mrs. Mobley,” he said, with a small grin, “these are for staff only.” I sat down, took the sandwich from his hand, and bit into it. “Then I suppose,” I said, “I had better stay on.”