Page 15 of If You Were the Only Girl in the World
Alice and she had become best friends on staff atHôpital de Neuilly. A tall robust woman with greying hair, Alice had a small apartment off Rue Danton not far from Katrina’s. Alice usually worked days. But last night, she’s taken over as substitute for a physician who had sent a message he was too ill to report.
“I knew we’d encounter inflation. My father always talks about how high prices will go because of the war.”
“Sounds like my brother,” Alice sighed. Her father and brother owned haberdasheries in Omaha, a very profitable chain whose men’s hats Katrina’s father purchased to sell in his Chicago department stores. Supported by a gift of fifty thousand dollars from her father, Alice had sailed off to Paris with his blessing. She lived much the same as Katrina, without much regard to the rising cost of goods.
Like Alice, Katrina earned only a small stipend of ten Francs a week at theNeuilly. She relied on her inheritance and her unspent dowry that her father, in frustration at her failure to marry, had handed over to her. With more than a million dollars in herBanque Nationaleaccount, she worried not at all about her ability to pay for her next meal. Unlike most French in that lack of worry, she resembled them in that no matter her wealth, she often wondered where she’d find the ingredients to cook a tasty meal.
“Do you think America will enter the war?” Katrina worried that if Germany won, many in the States would turn on those who had a German background. Her father’s stores had been vandalized last summer when mobs threw bricks through the front display windows. One man had set fire to the main store. Her father who had hired many German immigrants ordered that no clerk in his store could speak German, only English. He feared his customers might attack his employees.
“I hope so. Soon, too. The French cannot stand much more of this. I haven’t seen a Frenchman younger than fifity standing on two good legs since I got here.”
“Neither have I. I wonder that you and I are treating embassy officials and government staff and their complaints are coughs and colds.”
“No military hospital will have us, Katrina.”
She huddled down into her coat. “As if my gender makes me incapable of treating a man with a bullet wound!”
“They’re afraid we’ll see those parts of men we’re never supposed to admit exist!”
Katrina threw her head back and laughed. “Prudery run amok!”
Alice frowned. “Do you think when it ends, what you and I have done here will matter to anyone back home?”
“I don’t give a damn what they think. I’m going to find a way to make the most of it, here, there, anywhere I want. What we endure here—not only you and I but everyone in this city—is hideous. The sounds of the guns, the alarms that the Germans will break through and the rumors that they’ll come and murder us in our sleep.”
“Do you believe that?” Alice bit her lip.
“I know my parents and my grandmother are in their souls good people. But I don’t know what any soldier has been trained to do or how. I hear the French talk and I do believe they’ve been exposed to decades of diatribes against the feared ‘Hun’. Educated in the art of hatred and believing every word. So I don’t know what to think, Alice. But I do know what I’ll do. If the Germans walk in to Paris, I’m staying here to work.”No matter what they do.
Alice winced. “I don’t know if it’s wise for me to stay. Durlinski is a Polish name. Hundreds of my family live in Warsaw. Shopkeepers, tradesmen, even a count or more! Truly, the Germans have little respect for any of us. After all, their march into that country started this war.”
Katrina wound her arm through Alice’s. “If the Germans take Paris, they might put you and me in prison. But my bet is they’ll recognize that we’re useful and post us to a hospital.”Even if it is in a prison.
Alice gave her a small smile. “I hear rumors that female doctors are allowed to work in their military hospitals. Do you think it’s true?”
“I hope so. Heaven knows if this war goes on much longer, everyone will have to accept us because there are no more men alive.”
“I hear the embassy men talking,” Alice dropped her voice and inched nearer as they walked toward home. “The French and British casualty numbers are atrocious. Thousands gone. Machine guns cutting them down in minutes. What are we doing to each other slaughtering our young men in droves?”
“And those who survive do so with such wounds. Amputations. Often multiple. Their faces, ruined.” Katrina could not believe the horror of waking up from a sedative and finding that the person who looked at you in the mirror was no longer you but…someone else.
“Who are you then? Do you need a new definition of self? And if you do, how do you…I don’t know…form one?”
“Did you study any of Sigmund Freud’s works in school?”
“Briefly.” Alice rolled her eyes. “His work was mostly laughed at.”
“The same for me,” Katrina told her.
“My professor of surgery had a dim view of the man’s work so our attention to what he’d done was colored by the good surgeon’s envy.” Alice Durlinsky was a general practitioner who hailed from New York City. Once on staff at Bellevue Hospital in that city, she left when she learned the United States Army—whether or not the country ever entered the war—would not allow female physicians to join the U.S. Army Medical Corps. Buying up all the medical supplies she could much as Katrina had, Alice had sailed for Paris the summer before Katrina had arrived. They’d become friends, relying on each other when the male staff at the hospital denigrated them and ignored their suggestions. To the men, power was more important than efficiency or methods of improving service to their patients.
“You and I tolerate so much.” Katrina sighed.
“Too much. Nothing different here with Russell.”
The director of the hospital was Doctor Emile Russell. Half French and half American, he was a stickler for punctuality, etiquette and the rights of seniority on his staff. He favored the men who worked under him with smiles and courtesy but Alice and Katrina received critical eyes at their assessments of patients’ conditions. Many times Russell asked one of the males to offer a second opinion. Worse for Alice’s and Katrina’s morale, he took issue with their smiles, their conversation and even their footwear. He approved only of their grey ward dress and white laboratory coats, their long hair bound up tightly into chignons. In addition, he often asked the men to dine with him. While they observed his favoritism, the men did not often refuse him and apologized to the two women privately.
Katrina chose to ignore his actions. Confrontation with a male doctor had never advanced any female physician’s career. After all, she met with such partiality when in medical school and during her internship. She knew how to turn a blind eye to those who disapproved of women in medicine. She was in Paris to save lives. Not play games because of her sex.
