Arleen said firmly, “Be at the clinic at two on Wednesday, Mrs. Luigui.” She directed a hesitant smile around the room, but the children didn’t smile back; they stood in little huddles, regarding her mutely.
Arleen let herself out. As she stood ready to turn the door-knob, she looked back into the room and saw that Rose Luigui was regarding her, the dark eyes made even darker by. anger.
Arleen stepped out into the hall, closing the door quietly behind her. “I should have realized,” she thought, “that one candy bar wouldn’t near go around for that many children.”
The five dollars, she knew, was not going to make up for what she had not known. And to Rose Luigui’s way of thinking, Arleen realized that what she had not known was the ugliness of Rose’s kind of poverty.
She was surprised to find the young doctor who had bumped into her earlier waiting in the lower hall.
“I have the time to apologize for bumping into you,” he said. “I do apologize.” He had a most engaging grin, Arleen thought.
“I have a patient on the top floor,” he explained. “Usually she sends for me once a week, saying she’s dying. She has a bad heart, so I can’t be certain that she isn’t.”
“He not only has a very nice smile,” Arleen found herself thinking, “he also has the nicest eyes. I like that shade of gray.”
“I was rushing up to see her when I bumped into you,” he went on. The light brows drew slightly together. “You looked upset just now.”
“Upset?” Arleen gave a rueful laugh. “I just left the Luigui apartment. How can people. . . .”
He cut in, his voice gentle, “Live like that? People live in all sorts of ways. They bring up defenses to allow themselves to live that way. You’ll have to get used to people like the Luiguis.” His eyes scanned the uniform. “A visiting nurse has to accustom herself to the kind of special ugliness that lives here alongside the people.” Abruptly he added, “I’m Dr. Mark Wynter. Now that I’ve introduced myself, why not tell me your name, and then I think we should be properly introduced.”
Arleen laughed. “Arleen Anderson.”
He slanted a grin at her. “Called Arleen for short, I presume?” He stopped laughing, and in repose Arleen thought his face looked very sad. “Now, Miss Arleen Anderson, could I buy you a cup of coffee at Barney’s? It’s a very unclassy place, but he makes fairly good coffee, and he’s fairly clean. I must warn you, only fairly clean.”
“I could use a cup of coffee,” Arleen told him. She hesitated. “But I’ll accept your offer only if you’ll let it be dutch.”
He shook his head. “I see you’ve already heard about my poverty. But I assure you I can afford to buy two cups of coffee. I’m a special customer of Barney’s. He never charges me more than five cents a cup.”
Seeming to take her consent for granted, he stepped ahead of her, opening the door, holding it until she stepped out onto the cracked and littered sidewalk. A vagrant April breeze seized bits of paper from the gutter and sent them sailing gaily through the air like miniature kites.
Arleen looked at her car, and let out a gasp. Garbage had been flung at her windshield, and bits of orange and tomato littered the hood.
Behind her, Mark Wynter heard her gasp, stopped for a second to survey the car, said quickly, “Wait here. I won’t be but a moment,” and disappeared with long-legged strides down the street and around a corner.
When he reappeared he had three small boys in tow. He marched them up to the car and said sternly, “Miss Anderson is a friend of mine. I don’t like you playing such tricks on friends of mine. I want you to have her car cleaned by the time we get back. Understand?”
Still frowning fiercely, he let go of the boys, dug a hand into a pocket and came up with some change, which he distributed evenly among the three. “That’s for candy for each of you. But first the car has to be cleaned.”
As she and Mark walked away, Arleen asked curiously, “Will they do what you told them to?”
Mark gave a wry grin. “It’s a gamble,” he told her. “I don’t always win.”
CHAPTER 3
MAY IN SALTBORO differed from April only in that it was hotter and drier. Litter from the city streets, swept by the occasional gusts of fierce wind, choked the nostrils and the throat with dust. The factories belched smoke and grime into the air until it seemed to rest like a heavy load across Arleen’s chest.
As her eyes stung and her throat ached from the smog-laden air, she would think, with a pang of homesickness, of the fresh green lawns and the clean air, scented with fresh-cut clover, that characterized her home.
Not the tiny apartment she shared with Evelyn Drew, a nurse at Saltboro’s General Hospital. The place was hot and uncomfortable, in spite of the window fan she and Evelyn had installed. Home to Arleen was still the big, airy, clean rooms in the house at the end of Main Street, back in Carson.
As Arleen drove the small black coupé into the ^Leland Street area this Wednesday morning in late May, she seemed more aware than ever before of the bleak ugliness of the place; the air of hopeless defeat and dismal unconcern that crowded the lungs like the choking smog.
She parked her car and walked toward the tenement building that was her destination this morning. She no longer feared to leave her car unlocked. Mark Wynter seemed to have an uncanny control over the children of the area. Since that first morning, when Mark had collared the young culprits, her car and possessions had been left strictly alone.
Evelyn, her roommate, tall and blonde, filled with the joy and excitement of being young, was wont to tease Arleen about Dr. Wynter.
“Aha, the knight in shining armor! Did he come on a white horse and swoop you up in his arms?”
She enjoyed Arleen’s blushing. “It isn’t a matter of modesty at all,” she’d tell her. “It’s a matter of pigmentation.” Her blue eyes would twinkle at Arleen’s increasing discomfiture.
Lately she had waxed serious on the subject of Mark Wynter. “Any girl is a complete fool if she lets herself become involved with a dedicated man, and Mark Wynter is the most dedicated man I’ve ever known. You fall in love with a man like that, and it’ll be just as if you had cut your own throat.”
Arleen would shrug if off. “Just because I have a few cups of coffee with Dr. Wynter, you’ve got me involved with him. For your information, Evelyn, I’m not going to get involved emotionally with any man. So stop worrying about me. I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”
Evelyn still was not convinced. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” she said. “You’re the stars-and-moon-light kind. They always fall hard. And Dr. Wynter is not, and I don’t think ever will be, husband material. Sometimes I wonder (and I’m not the only one, I can tell you) if Mark Wynter even knows women exist . . . as women.”
Arleen said quietly, “I was in love once. I’m not making that mistake again.”
Evelyn hooted. “Once? Honey, I’ve been in love a dozen times. When I stop falling in love, I’ll be old. But you, honey, you’re different. You take it seriously.”
Arleen’s heels clicked on the pavement as she walked with her usual briskness. “Yes,” she thought, “I do take love seriously. That’s why I’m never going to fall in love again.”
Once you’ve walked too close to a fire and got burned, there is no desire in you to walk so close again, Arleen thought grimly.
Even at this hour of the morning the sun beat down mercilessly. Arleen thought of the staggering heat that must already