“…dropped his car keys, and said…” and the whole foyer heard it. Ron Holloway, a big, ruddy, silver haired man in a golf shirt, stood in the patio doorway with his keys scattered at his feet, staring at Senator Hale. He said, in a voice as thick as syrup, “Walter, I told you in 1973 that I could not find the nurse. That was not true. I could find her. I knew her name the whole time. And I have been a coward for fifty years.” Nobody breathed. The harp player, a young woman in a long dress, set her hands in her lap. Whitney stood motionless with a flute of champagne tilted dangerously in her fingers.
Senator Hale took one step toward his nephew in law. He was seventy six, tall and silver, and his hands were not steady. He said quietly, “Ron, what are you telling me?” Ron wiped his face with his palm. He told us that in 1973 he had been a twenty year old night clerk at Presbyterian Hospital, working the front desk during the ice storm. The hospital had been understaffed that night, dangerously so. One nurse on the whole obstetrics floor. And the next morning the administrator had called him into an office and ordered him to remove the nurse name from every record.
“He said it was a lawsuit waiting to happen,” Ron said, in a cracked voice. “If anyone found out they had left one nurse on that floor with two women in labor, the hospital would be sued out of existence. So he told me to tear the page out of the log book, and I did. I lost the name. And when you came back, Walter, a month later, asking who she was, I told you I did not know.” He turned toward me. He said, “Mrs. Mercer, I am so sorry. I have not slept properly in fifty years.”
A mop in a foyer, a state senator who took off his sunglasses, and a page torn from a hospital log fifty years ago.
I looked at him for a long time. I thought of a frightened boy in a hospital hallway, in a stiff uniform, who had held the door for me while I carried a blue, tiny baby in my arms. I had known his face, too, I realized. I said, “Ron Holloway, I was too busy that night to be angry, and I am too old now.” I took a breath. “But I would like to know what became of that little boy.” Senator Hale made a sound like a sob. He turned toward the French doors and said, “Come in, son. Come in.”
A tall man in a charcoal suit stepped through the patio door. He was fifty one, with his father cheekbones and a quiet, serious face. He held a small gift bag in one hand. He walked straight across the foyer to me, and stopped, and said, “Mrs. Mercer, I am James Hale. I was the second twin. I weighed two pounds and eleven ounces when I was born. The doctors told my father that I would not last until sunrise.” He swallowed. “My mother told me, all my life, about the nurse who held me inside her uniform, against her own skin, through the night. I became a doctor because of you.”
I could not speak. I had held that infant for eleven hours, in a darkened ward, with a flashlight propped on the bed rail, rubbing his tiny back with my thumb, whispering every lullaby I knew. At dawn, the power came back, and the doctors rushed in, and a stranger took him from my arms, and I never saw him again. I put out my hand, and touched his cheek, as I had touched it that night. He was a neonatologist now, he told me, at Duke. He had saved, by his count, six hundred babies. His eyes filled. “Every one of them,” he said, “is yours.”
The party, which had gone so quiet, began to move again, like a river thawing. The caterers set out fresh champagne. Greg, who had come inside, red eyed, from the parking lot, stood beside me with his arm around my shoulders. Whitney had not moved. She stood by the cake, pale as the icing, and when I turned toward her, she lowered her eyes. I walked across the room. I took her hand. I said, very softly, “Whitney, I will take that mop to the bathroom, if you wish. I have cleaned worse. But I do not think that is what you want.”
She burst into tears. She said she was ashamed. She said she had been raised to think that people had value according to their jobs, and that she had never once asked what I had done in my life. She said, “Ruth, you held my husband first, did you know? In 1976, in the delivery room. You were the one who put him in his mother arms.” I had not known. I looked at Greg. He nodded, with wet cheeks. I said, “Well, then. We have a good deal to catch up on.” And I gently took her champagne glass out of her hand and set it on the table.
That afternoon I held my grandson Liam for the first time without a single word about germs. He was a warm, drowsy weight in a long white christening gown, with a fuzz of golden hair, and he yawned in my arms and opened one blue eye. Senator Hale stood beside me with his hand on my shoulder, and Dr. Hale stood on the other side. The priest blessed the baby. And in the pew behind me, Whitney wept without a sound, and her father stared at his shoes, and the harp played, sweet and slow, in the high stone nave.
In March, the Hale family announced the Ruth Ann Mercer Nursing Scholarship, a fund of two million dollars for young women and men entering obstetrics nursing in the Carolinas. At the ceremony, they hung a framed photograph of the ward at Presbyterian Hospital, taken in 1973. A young nurse in a white cap, holding a flashlight. Whitney introduced me. She stood at the microphone in a simple gray dress, and said, “This is the woman who taught me that there is nothing small about cleaning up after people. Mrs. Ruth Ann Mercer.” And I rose, and I held the mop. She had asked me to.