A Season in Hell by Marilyn French

Author:Marilyn French [French, Marilyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781860494475
Publisher: Virago Press Ltd
Published: 1998-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

1993

FEBRUARY–APRIL

I WAS RELEASED FROM Sloan-Kettering for the last time on February 4, 1993. I have returned since only for day treatments—endoscopies, which I needed often in the years following my treatment—or to consult my neurologist or oncologist.

I went home. The children hired the same nurses who had tended me in the hospital—Ursula, Gay, and Yvonne. In hospital, I loved Ursula best; outspoken and forceful, she cared for me almost affectionately. But she behaved differently in my house, perhaps put off by a penthouse duplex with terraces overlooking Central Park. For whatever reason, she became sullen and opportunistic, attitudes that intensified gradually as I needed her less. Ursula, originally from Guyana, was married, with a teenage son and a younger daughter, but she never spoke of her husband, and rarely of her son. I had the feeling she had given up on them, but her daughter was central in her life. The girl was bright and talented, and Ursula was as ambitious for her as she was for herself. Like the other nurses, she was a student working toward an R.N. degree, and between chores, she pored over her texts. She was very intelligent and made high grades.

Gay, too, was from Guyana, but she had a very different nature. A late child in a large family, she was taken in after her parents died by siblings who treated her like a slave. She was not allowed to leave for school in the morning until she had put in several hours of work; her life was made hard in every possible way. Younger than my other nurses, she was a meek woman, whose pious servility I at first disliked. But as she came to trust me and tell me her story, I began to understand her manner and grew to like her very much.

Gay was married to a young man she regarded as her savior: loving her, he had “saved” her from her sister’s brutality and meanness. That alone made him her hero. Then he brought her to the United States and “allowed” her to attend nursing school. Her husband, however, was not essentially different from her sister, except that he used love rather than cruelty to enforce his will. Since she worked as a home nursing aide, she often had to spend evenings away, but he refused to eat if she did not prepare his meal for him. If she had to stay out late she had to prepare his dinner early in the morning, before work and her classes; and she could never go on a trip. He was helpless, incapable of using a dustcloth or a vacuum or running a washing machine, so in addition to working eight hours a day for me or another patient, going to school, and studying, she had to do everything in the house, walking long blocks (he of course took the car; conveniently, she could not drive) carrying heavy loads to the laundromat and from the supermarket.

There were other problems, but when I suggested she could solve them by negotiating with him, she demurred ever so sweetly.

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