Night Shift at St. Brendan's

At eleven thirty-five on the morning of Friday the twenty-eighth of January, 1977, the sky over Lake Erie turned the color of dishwater and came down on Buffalo all at once.

Mara saw it from the window of a third-floor room in the nurses' residence of St. Brendan's Hospital, in South Buffalo, still in a bathrobe with a cup of instant coffee going cold on the sill. One minute there was the courtyard below, the parked cars humped with old snow, the red brick of Old Main across the way and the newer pale bulk of the main hospital beyond it, and the bare trees of Cazenovia Park past the roofs. The next minute there was nothing. Not falling snow. A white wall moving sideways, so thick that the window glass might as well have been painted over, and a sound in the old sash like a train going by that did not stop.

It had been a mild morning. Twenty-six degrees, the radio had said, and people had gone to work in light coats. By two o'clock the radio was saying zero by dark, and wind gusts near seventy by evening, and the lake, which had frozen early in December and lay under three feet of loose snow, was blowing ashore a mile at a time. The police were begging people to stay off the roads. Cars were stopped dead on every road into the city, with their engines running and their exhausts drifting over. The schools were keeping the children overnight.

Mara had graduated from the St. Brendan's School of Nursing in June, with the school pin from the Sisters, and had been a registered nurse on 4 West for seven months. Today was a three-to-eleven shift, like most days. At a quarter past two Mara put on the hospital whites and the white shoes, with a parka and a scarf over everything, and went down to the residence's courtyard door.

Ziggy Wrobel, the hospital's chief engineer, had strung a rope at one o'clock from the residence door across the courtyard to the side door of Old Main, sixty yards, tied off on a drainpipe at each end. "Hand over hand," he had told the nurses at lunch. "Don't let go of it for anything. You let go of that rope today, you could walk into the lake and not know it."

Mara did not let go of it. Outside, the wind took her breath away like a hand over the mouth, and the snow was not snow but a blast of white grit that stung the eyes shut, and the cold went through the parka and the uniform and the skin as if they were not there. It took four minutes to cross sixty yards. At the far end Ziggy himself was standing in the doorway of Old Main in a sheepskin coat, counting nurses in like sheep.

"Seven," he said, and slammed the door. "Go on up. Your ward's been asking for you."

4 West was the top floor of Old Main, under the roof: twenty-six beds in a building put up in 1911, with tall windows and iron radiators and a long corridor of brown linoleum polished to glass. The radiators were knocking and hissing as if they were fighting the storm personally. The windows on the west side, the lake side, were white blind squares, and the wind leaned on them so hard that the glass bowed in its frames.

Mrs. Dombrowski, the day charge nurse, was waiting at the nurses' station with her coat already on and her car keys in her hand, which she plainly knew were useless.

"Thank God," she said. "Sit. Mrs. Oberle isn't coming; she called from a gas station in Cheektowaga. She's been in her car since noon. You've got charge."

Mara sat at the Kardex, the long flip file of patient cards in its metal tray, and Mrs. Dombrowski turned the cards one by one with a quick red fingernail and talked fast. Room by room. Diet, activity, IV, meds due, what to watch. Twenty-one patients. Mr. Wozniak in 412, heart failure, wet again this morning, watch him. Mrs. Toohey in 418, comfort care, the doctor's note says no code, her daughter can't get in. The Sanfilippo boy, new diabetic, learning his shots. Mrs. Bielski, gallbladder, day two, tube to suction. Mr. Kowal, who would try to climb over the side rails at dusk the way he did every night. Mara wrote it all down on the back of a census sheet in a small fast hand, and when Mrs. Dombrowski stopped, Mara read it back, and she nodded.

At the station Mrs. Dombrowski unpinned the ring of keys from her uniform, the narcotics key, the med-room key, the linen-closet key, and held it out.

"The ER's filling up with people off the roads," she said. "They'll send you overflow, if the CCU's full. Sister Rosaria's the supervisor tonight; she's in the main building, she'll call. The crash cart's checked. Remember the rule. If somebody codes, you call it, you start, and you wait for a doctor. Nurses don't shock. Not on this floor. Not yet." She looked at Mara a moment, kindly, the way you look at someone at the edge of cold water. "You'll be fine. You're a good nurse. Don't be a hero."

Then she buttoned her coat and went off down the corridor toward the elevator and the glass bridge, to see if there was any way at all to get home, and Mara stood at the station with the keys in her hand and the wind screaming in the roof.

It was twenty-five minutes to four on Friday afternoon. Nobody yet thought it would be the longest night of anybody's life.