merging styles
(in which we combine the literary style of a famous 20th c. author with a letter to an advice columnist. can you guess the author we were imitating?)
Dear Abby:
I hope your readers won't mind just one more "how we met" story.
Many,many years ago, I was a nurse in an emergency room in a small village in France. We often treated soldiers stumbling in after long drinking bouts on the Rue de St. Germaine, and it was sort of a in-joke that we despised them, despised them in our weary way, our rural way, the way we weary rural nurses have of despising these men who drink on the boisterous streets, and are loud, and crude and then bleeding. So when a handsome man was brought in that dark night, a night as black and empty as the soul of a pensioner, left alone to die in a small, sodden apartment, unloved and unremembered, and he was stinking of gin, and bleeding, the nurses hurried to spill their iodine, and cruelly scrub him, and I, the nurse selected to administer our weary, rural despising, cast my furious, scornful gaze upon him, becoming all the more scornful as he whimpered at the harsh touch of my needle, and my derision. I chastised him cruelly, yes, not for only his sins but the sins of all the boisterous, stinking, drunken and bleeding soldiers who passed through our small village, and his protests that he was not drunken, not a soldier, that the gin had been spilled there, and that it was not a knife wound from some sotten fight did not register on my harsh heart and wearied ears. As he passed in and out of consciousness, his whispering a woman's name-- Anastasia?-- did nothing to soften my heart.
Imagine my surprise when the next day a dozen roses were delivered to my home address, with a note "To my Nightingale", and signed "Dr. James Lance". My face was red when the story unfolded: the handsome man I had so abruptly attended was a doctor, flying in from Prague, who had received his injuries on the flight when he was rushing out the plane and side-swiped a stewardess wearing a dangerous brassiere. Her attempts to clean his wounds with the only disinfectant available had resulted in his gin-soaked state.
To make a long story short, Ann, we were married the next day and recently celebrated our golden anniversary.
Signed,
Mrs. Dr. Lance
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