< previous page page_194 next page >

Page 194
brought in. The small Spatha Station Hospital was empty and still at this early hour of the morning.
A cold, wind-driven rain streaked the glass doors of the emergency room, Nurse Cullen's preserve for the night. Windows and shutters rattled, and twice in the early evening the power had failed, requiring the emergency generator to kick on with a clatter. Spatha Station Hospital had been built in the fifties, a little way outside the town of Spatha, in an area that city boosters and developers had expected to become an upscale community of homes with a small, select shopping district. But the development had fizzled out when a mall, complete with Walmart, had opened on the other side of town. The hospital had remained open and useful through good times and bad, though recently there had been another flurry of talk about closing the place and enlarging emergency facilities at Spatha General in the center of town.
Bobby Lee Calhoun was glad that no decision had been taken on the closing yet, and seemed likely not to be, until Irene Cullen retired.
Bobby Lee, like many of the other locals, had reasons to be sentimental about Nurse Cullen. She had once been an exotic and romantic character in Spatha. She had appeared, a refugee, in the early 1960s, from that mysterious land of Khrnshchev and Sputnik, the Soviet Union. Still young when she arrived in the United States, and settling in Spatha, North Carolina, for no reason anyone could easily discern, she had then been known as Irene Rabinovich. Her sponsors were a family of prominent and wealthy Jews who lived in Raleigh. Irene had been a nurse in the Soviet Union, rising to be head of Nursing Services at the hospital in Odessa where she had taken her training. But her qualifications proved to be insufficient for the North Carolina Board of Medical Examiners. Her sponsors were furious, seeing prejudice in the decision, both against Russians and against Jews. But Irene was, above all, a practical woman. Undaunted by the uproar, she enrolled at the

 
< previous page page_194 next page >