Chapter 6
While Lizzie and Alex explored the delights of San Francisco when they had days off together, Audrey was steadfastly caring for her mother. She loved hearing about their exploits in San Francisco, exotic dinners in Chinatown, walking on the beaches in Marin, although there were gun emplacements there now, and men assigned to watch for planes, after Pearl Harbor. An attack on the West Coast was always a possibility, but hadn’t happened so far. The two young women had borrowed a car and driven as far south as Big Sur, and they reveled in its spectacular natural beauty. They drove north to Lake Tahoe in the mountains, where people skied in winter, and they had dinner in the restaurants of the Italian district in North Beach, in the city.
Audrey felt as though she had gotten to know Alex through Lizzie’s descriptions of her. The nursing they did in the Presidio was demanding and exhausting, but also rewarding when they were able to help save a limb or a life. The men returning from the Pacific were badly damaged. Audrey knew that both of Lizzie’s brothers were there now. Greg had enlisted in the army as a physician and was serving at a hospital in New Caledonia. It was a prefab building with a real structure, not a tent hospital, and he said it was very efficient, with running water and electricity. They treated the wounded from battle zones, and the men suffering from diseases like malaria. Henry was a medic south of the Solomon Islands. Both of them were a constant source of worry for Lizzie, and they all followed the news closely. The Hattons had all three children in the army now. Audrey knew her brother would have been there too, if he were still alive. He was one of the first casualties of the war.
By the fall of 1942, most of Europe had fallen into Hitler’s hands, and the war was raging on. The German Luftwaffe had bombed England mercilessly, and there had been countless deaths during the Blitz in London: 43,000 civilians had died, and 140,000 were wounded. In November of 1942, British and American forces invaded North Africa.
Meanwhile, Audrey was waging her own war against her mother’s illness, and slowly losing ground. A bad cold which turned into bronchitis nearly took Ellen’s life on Christmas. Audrey sat up with her day and night, with visits from Mrs. Beavis to give her a break, until after Christmas. Miraculously her mother survived it, but Audrey knew then that they wouldn’t be able to stop the inevitable for much longer. Ellen couldn’t get out of bed by then, and hadn’t in a long time. Audrey said little of it to Lizzie when she wrote to her. There was no point whining to her about it, and the reports would have been too depressing, so she soldiered on alone, with no break, no support, and only Mrs. Beavis to help her. She felt as though she were trapped on a desert island, shipwrecked, and help was no longer coming. She felt incredibly alone.
The life that Lizzie described, working at the hospital in the Presidio, sounded like heaven to her, no matter how injured her patients were. At least Lizzie and Alex had some chance to save them. Audrey knew that in the long run she had no chance at all to save her mother. She had always known that, but facing it now day by day, hour by hour, was a harsh dose of reality for her. Lizzie suspected it from what she didn’t say, and admired her for her strength and courage. However different their lives were, she knew it would have been agony to watch her mother waste away with a debilitating illness. Ellen had been ill for seven years now, most of Audrey’s adult life. She was twenty-two years old.
Alex was on regular duty in the psychiatric ward at the Presidio hospital by then, and loved the work, although it was challenging and often depressing. She brought a positive, cheerful attitude to it, and the men loved her, not just for her striking beauty, but for her compassion and how kind she was to them. She often achieved results with them that the doctors and other nurses couldn’t. She had endless patience.
From little bits and snippets of things that slipped into Alex’s conversation from time to time, Lizzie had begun to suspect that Alex’s life at home was very different from the other nurses and people she lived with now. She accidentally admitted to Lizzie once, after a second glass of wine on a night out together, that she had been a debutante, and Lizzie shared with Audrey that she suspected Alex might be from a fancy family in New York, and that she had grown up in luxurious circumstances.
Compared to even Lizzie’s very solid, educated, medical family in Boston, Alex seemed to have led a life that none of them even dreamed of, but she was careful not to talk about it, and never boasted or showed off. Alex was modest, simple, warm, and genuine in every way, and had loaned money to some of the other nurses occasionally, when they were short on cash before payday. Lizzie was sorry that Audrey still hadn’t met her and hoped she would one day. Audrey was still her best friend, but she had grown very fond of Alex, and respected her.
In the early months of 1943, there were rumors that some of the medical personnel would be shipping out to the Pacific and to Europe, even the nurses. They needed more medical officers for the hospital ships: surgeons, doctors, nurses, corpsmen. The numbers of wounded were growing. Lizzie and Alex wondered if they would be among the nurses sent abroad in the coming months. They were both willing to go, and even liked the idea. After nearly a year of working in the Presidio, their work had begun to seem almost routine, and they were hungry for new challenges to conquer.
Audrey was taking longer and longer to respond to Lizzie’s letters by then. The fight for her mother’s life was all-consuming, and she rarely had the time to sit down and write to anyone, even Lizzie. Each day was a life-and-death battle, and in November, Ellen finally lost the war. Ellen was unconscious for the final days of her life, and quietly slipped away as Audrey sat and watched her. Audrey was alone in the house, in the deathly silence, as she closed her mother’s eyes. Ellen had fought valiantly against her illness for a long time, and so had Audrey, and Ellen had earned her peace at last. Audrey kissed her cheek, and sat next to her for a long while, feeling her flesh cool rapidly. She realized as she looked at her mother that she was an orphan, alone in the world now. Both her parents, and her brother, were gone. She had no one. She wished that Lizzie could have been there with her. She felt excruciatingly alone. Audrey sent Lizzie a telegram in San Francisco telling Lizzie what had happened the day her mother died. Lizzie called her that night from the Presidio. Audrey had been crying when she answered.
“I’m so sorry, Aud,” she said, and they both cried. It wasn’t a surprise, but it was hard anyway. Caring for her mother had been her only life for two and a half years since she graduated from nursing school. The doctor had been amazed that Ellen had survived for as long as she had. It was mostly due to Audrey, and Ellen’s own determination not to abandon her daughter. But the Fates had conspired against them, and the major losses Ellen had suffered had weakened her even further. “What are you going to do now?” Lizzie asked her, worried about her best friend, although she and Alex had formed a bond too. Working together in wartime brought people closer quickly, not just romances but also friendships. Alex had become a good friend, as they shared their experiences day by day, working in the hospital and rooming together.