An Ill Wind

The strange tale of the Killer Nurse is one of those stories that smells like an urban legend. Charles Cullen, the Angel of Death! You come out of the anesthetic to find him standing over you, his face a mask of granite, his hands gripping the fatal pillow/hypodermic needle/plastic bag.

The picture strains credulity. At least that's what I thought when I went to see my father in the hospital, sometime in the nineteen-nineties, when he was recovering from an operation to install a shunt in his head. I found him strapped to his bed. The anesthetic they gave him for the operation made him so crazy they didn't know what he might do.

"See that man?" he said to me, as a male nurse silently puttered about the room, doing housekeeping nurse chores. "He's trying to kill me. Get these restraints off me. I have to get out of here."

"It's all right, Daddy. They're going to take care of you until you're well enough to go home."

"I tell you he's trying to kill me. All these people are after me. They want to take my money and send it to Washington." Well, I knew that was a lie. He was on Social Security; the only money he had came from Washington. Why would they take it back? So I put the whole rant down to a drug-induced paranoid delusion. Indeed my father regained his wits in a day or two and lived on for many years.

But I remembered that nurse when they arrested Cullen sometime later and charged him with murdering forty people, maybe more, as they lay helpless in their hospital beds. For some reason I was reminiscing about that last year in the emergency room of that very hospital. They were treating Harold for an allergic reaction to some drug or other. A young fellow with a clipboard came into our cubicle to take down some information, and I found myself chattering to him about my father and Cullen.

The young man glanced over his shoulder and pulled the curtain closed. "Ah, yes," he said. "Him."

He proceeded to tell us the following story.

Sometime in the nineties the young man had been hard at work on an Eagle Scout project. This was his second attempt, he said, the first one having failed through some evil stroke of fate. This one was a sure winner. The Catholic Church was hosting a large group of homeless people in one of their facilities, but it was a large open space with no privacy. The Scout drew up plans for partitions to make their stay more comfortable. He cleared his plans with the zoning officer and bought the materials he would need to build the partitions.

Then he took his plans to the parish priest.

"No," said the priest. "You can't do that."

A few days later the priest fell ill, so ill that he was confined to the hospital, where he came under the care of Charles Cullen. That was the end of him.

The following week the Scout presented his plans to the priest's successor, who said, "Go right ahead, son." The young man completed his project and became an Eagle Scout.

I was thinking that this could be a great theme for a TV series, sort of like The Millionaire in reverse. Every week we could get to know somebody and then Cullen could kill him. If it weren't in such poor taste, that is. But then, we're talking about TV here.

Kate Gallison

Irene

People want to know sometimes why I write about the early part of the twentieth century, or why I call myself Irene Fleming in order to do it. It's complicated, I guess, but it may have something to do with my grandmother.

My grandmother was a young nurse in a hospital in Brooklyn about the time of the events that take place in The Edge of Ruin. (How she used to love nurse books! I could never write one of those, any more than I can write real romance novels. Why is that? Can it be that I know even less about real romance than I do about nursing? But I digress.) My grandmother, whose name was Irene, told me many great stories about her life in nurses' training.

A well-bred, gently reared Canadian girl, she was a fish out of water in New York City. The patients were poor immigrants, for the most part, and being unwashed, most of them smelled bad. Shifts lasted sixteen hours, twenty-four if you were on private duty. Hazardous. Fearing germs, she washed her hair daily, a bad idea given the harsh soaps of the time. Once a patient tried something rude while she was asleep in a chair.

The young nurses were trained in deportment and elocution as well as good medical practice. Most of the girls in her class--Jersey girls, New York girls--could not properly pronounce "I laughed to see the calf run down the path."  They said, "I lee-uffed." "I lahffed to see the cahf run down the pahth," was how my grandmother said it. The right way.

The hospital people gave her handy tips  for surviving in the city. "What do you do when you encounter a masher on the elevated?" she asked me one day, rhetorically.

I wanted to say, "What's a masher, Granny? What's the elevated?" But instead I said, "I don't know. What?"

"You stare at his feet."

"Ah."

"If you keep looking at his feet, soon everyone will look at his feet. He will be so embarrassed  that he will get off the train."

Now, this is a piece of advice I have never had occasion to use. I suspect that modern mashers are incapable of feeling embarrassment, not even if their flies are open, not even if every single person on the train (it would be the subway, now) were staring at them. Very few people in the modern day feel anything like shame.

This is why I wanted to go back to the days when Granny was young, maybe even why I called myself Irene, after my grandmother. I know that things weren't so very different then. Terrible things went on. But there was outrage. There was shame. There was an expectation that people would at least try to be decent.

Also, there were hats. My grandmother was very big on hats.

--Kate Gallison