Image on the Heart and Other Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Author:F. Scott Fitzgerald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alma Books
Published: 2017-06-19T10:24:24+00:00

“Trouble”

1

The annual turtle race at Luke Harkless Hospital once attained considerable celebrity because it was newsreeled and broadcast on an Eastern hook-up, but this year the hospital’s governing board put its collective foot down. The race gave an undesirable brand of publicity to a great, serious institution, looked like advertising and so on, and had better remain what it was in the beginning – a June-day diversion organized by some ingenious interns a dozen years ago.

As a result of this decision, Trouble’s tumble off the sun deck into the arms of Dr Dick Wheelock, Resident in Orthopaedics, is officially unrecorded. And that is a pity, for it would be nice to have preserved the expression on her lovely face.

It happened like this:

Doctor Wheelock was one of four judges, attired in tail coats and top hats, who were stationed at the four corners of the tennis court where the race takes place. Their business was to see which one among the dozen turtles released simultaneously from a cage in the centre first finds its way to the rim of a surrounding chalk circle – a voyage, if navigated in a straight line, of about fifteen feet.

There were other officials: an announcer with a mike, a bookie – for each turtle represents one section of the hospital – and a remarkable jazz band made up of members of the staff and composed that year of the Spirit of Seventy-Six, Haile Selassie* under an umbrella, a guitar and bass drum and two coloured urchins, who furnished the only real music with lively harmonicas.

But the judges, wilting damply in their finery, were by far the most conspicuous. It was thus that Trouble had been impelled to fix her eyes upon Doctor Wheelock’s profile during the intervals between heats; so that by the time she fell into his arms she was well acquainted with the handsome and rather haughty profile, with the back of his head and the top of his hat, that glistened in the June sun.

Trouble was a trained nurse, at present on general night duty in the private wards. Her real name was Glenola McClurg, but though she was considered an excellent young nurse, she had somehow acquired the nickname “Trouble” and was never known by any other name. Men encountering her in a corridor often thought they knew why. She was Trouble all right, all right. Starting to smile a hundred feet away, she would breeze along, stop and wheel, smart as the military, and come up to the interns, or whoever it was, and figuratively press against them. All she had to say was: “Good morning, Doctor This; good morning, Doctor That” – and then, knowing she’d registered, lean back for a moment against the wall, conscious – oh, completely conscious – of what she had done to their next hours.

Her face was rather like the autumn page from the kitchen calendars of thirty years ago – vivid October eyes, a hazel canopy full of grief that looked down over

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