A Nurse's Story (Characters)

Characters

Eunice Barnacle

Born in Richmond, Virginia, into a deeply troubled family, Eunice Barnacle is "a lean, sharp-featured black woman in her middle twenties, with a straight nose, small teeth, wary eyes, and a straightforward manner." A recent addition to the staff at the Booth-Tiessler Geriatric Center, she is responsible for the daily care of Mary McDonald, whom she questions intermittently about the history of the nurses' union that Mary helped establish in the mid-1960s. One reason Eunice moved to New York, with her three-year-old daughter Coretta in tow, is to be nearer her mother, who is serving a life term for murder in Sing Sing Prison, located in nearby Ossining, New York.

Warren Booth

Chairman of the board of the Booth-Tiessler Community Hospital during the 1967 nurses' strike, Warren Booth stands for the complexities of the politics and the civic spirit of Booth's Landing. Generously philanthropic, he is, at the same time, unyielding in his business ethic.

Warren Booth Jr.

Son of the chairman of the board of the Booth-Tiessler Community Hospital during the 1967 nurses' strike and recipient of a pass from George McDonald Jr. that had won the high school football team the county championship in the year of the strike, Warren Booth Jr. is the town's leading banker. He is resentful still about the impact that the 1967 strike had on his family and his own teenage life. He remains a symbol, even in the 1990s, of the conservative base upon which small towns like Booth's Landing are often built.

Richard Dill

Richard Dill is a reporter on the Booth's Landing Gazette who covered the 1967 nurses' strike and who now lives on the same floor as Mary McDonald at the Booth-Tiessler Geriatric Center. His son, Roger, has followed in his father's footsteps and works for the local newspaper.

Roger Dill

Son of Richard Dill, Roger Dill follows in his father's journalistic footsteps and becomes a reporter for the Booth's Landing Gazette. Unlike his father, though, Roger is neither excited nor inspired by the events of the small town and remains emotionally and imaginatively disengaged from its workings. He is responsible for writing Mary McDonald's obituary.

Eunice's Mother

Sixteen years old when she gave birth to Eunice Barnacle in Richmond, Virginia, Eunice's mother is serving a life term in Sing Sing Prison for killing an abusive boyfriend, Jethro. As Eunice tells the story, her mother bailed Jethro out of jail in order to kill him. At the time of the story, Eunice's mother is thirty-nine years old.

Clarice Hunter

Ten years older than Mary McDonald, Clarice is a colleague who solicited Mary's help in 1965 in taking the first steps toward forming a nurses' union at the local hospital. She is also the first person to challenge Mary on her beliefs about life, work, and her sense of her own value as a person, a woman, and a hospital employee. Clarice Hunter was the head of the nurses' strike committee in 1967.

Clarice is also more intimately connected to Mary McDonald's past than union-building suggests. A lifelong friend, she was the nurse who cared for Mary's grandmother in the final days of her terminal battle with colon cancer. Mary's grandmother, who asked little from life or those around her, saw in Clarice "a jewel" of humanity. Even when surrounded by family as she lay dying, Mary's grandmother demanded with "a look so fierce that Mary still remembered it" that Clarice be at her bedside when she died.

Jane

Mary and George McDonald's only daughter, Jane, is a nurse. She has a troubled history and is always on the edge of alcoholic relapse. Living in Boston, she has two young daughters.

Sister Margaret

Sister Rosa's successor in the role of executive director of the Booth-Tiessler Community Hospital, Sister Margaret became head of the institution in 1984. Her expertise in materials management "dazzled everyone who worked with her." She is also the director of the hospital when Mary McDonald is transferred there for the final days of her life.

Brad Mcdonald

The youngest child of Mary and George McDonald, Brad has moved to Seattle where he is making his own mark with the corporate giant Microsoft.

George Mcdonald

George McDonald is Mary's husband, whom she first met in 1948 while she was working in the emergency ward of the local hospital. He was twenty-seven when they met, "a big man, six foot three, with hair the color of fresh corn and a big boyish smile" that in many ways belied the fact that he had already fought in two significant battles of the World War II: the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway. Not ambitious, he taught music at the local high school and was happy being what he was in Booth's Landing. Married to Mary for thirty-nine years, he was a devoted husband and proud father of three children, "all of them grown now and moved away." He died of kidney failure in 1988, and Mary remembers him as "A man who rarely lost his temper, a father who taught his sons how to scramble eggs and his daughter how to throw a baseball, a small-town music teacher who loved the clarinet." As Mary dies, she awakens into a bright new world in which she is reunited with a young, healthy George.

George Mcdonald Jr.

Mary and George McDonald's oldest son is George Jr., a "gangling, loose-jointed, long-armed boy" who has grown up to be an "earnest, quiet-voiced" Chicago attorney dressed in rumpled suits." He is remembered by the townspeople for a touchdown pass that he threw to Warren Booth Jr. that won the local high school team the county championship in 1967, the same year as the now infamous nurses' strike.

Mary Mcdonald

A working nurse for forty years, sixty-nine-year-old Mary McDonald is dying slowly from a cancer that appeared first in her colon but has spread to her liver and bones. Confined to her room on the third floor of the Booth-Tiessler Geriatric Center, she is known as a political activist who advocates on behalf of patients' rights but, more importantly, on behalf of nurses and their struggle for fair pay and improved working conditions. She was, as Eunice Barnacle notes, one of the driving forces in bringing unionization of nurses to the local hospital and thus a symbol of the power of women to initiate a revolution both locally and nationally.

But as the story unfolds, Mary emerges as a much more rounded character, one who remembers fondly the courtship with her late husband George in the late 1940s, the raising of her children (George Jr., Brad, and Jane), her passion for beer (especially Guinness) and football (especially as it is played by the New York Giants), and her struggle with her faith when it comes in conflict with political necessity. Moreover, the story of her life soon becomes the story of the town and of the births, deaths, and tragedies that continue to be its daily business. At once individual, representative of a town and of a profession, Mary becomes, too, a symbol of an entire generation of revolutionary women.

Mary's Grandmother

A strong woman, Mary's grandmother died of colon cancer in the mid-1950s. "A plain-looking, plain-talking woman, with only an eighth-grade education," Mary's grandmother "expected nothing from life and generally got what she expected." A genealogical connection with Mary McDonald that expresses itself in the stories that they share and in the disease that kills them, Mary's grandmother is also a narrative thread that links the two women to Clarice Hunter, a union-raising colleague of Mary's and the nurse who tended her grandmother in her final days.

Ida Peterson

A minor character in the sense that she was a patient of Mary McDonald's more than forty years earlier, Ida Peterson is important because she brought to Mary's world a new understanding of the human need "to die a peaceful, dignified death," which in Ida's case meant a "natural death" (without medical intervention) in the presence of her husband. Although Mary had dealt with hundreds of patients since Ida, the memory of their brief interaction changed the way Mary thought about life, death, and the dignity of the individual.

Sister Rosa

The executive director of the Booth-Tiessler Community Hospital during the 1967 nurses' strike, Sister Rosa had worked with Mary McDonald in 1962 on a plan to improve the patient scheduling in the radiation department. A "short, no-nonsense woman," Sister Rosa worked by the very simple mandate that "management must manage" for the best interest of the institution, which might at times come into direct conflict with the best interests of the employees. Sister Rosa comes to Mary McDonald as she slips into a dream-like state in the final moments of her life, talking with her one-time nemesis and reassuring her about what lay ahead and discussing, for one last time, the 1967 strike.

Nick Santino

Proprietor of Santino's Funeral Home, Nick Santino embalms Mary McDonald's body, while remembering how she took care of his own mother while she was dying. As he handles Mary's body with the latest embalming equipment, he remembers with tenderness how Mary treated his mother with humanity and deep respect, how she washed his mother's feet.

Laura Seybold

Mentioned briefly during one of Mary McDonald's memory episodes, Laura Seybold is the mother of Dr. Tom Seybold. Mary had cared for Laura during both of the miscarriages that had taken "the life out of her eyes" as well as later "during the three days [Laura] spent in the hospital after the Saturday night when she swallowed every pill in the house."

Dr. Tom Seybold

Mary McDonald's doctor, Tom Seybold, is "a large man with a friendly face, pink skin, and paprika-colored hair. His breath smells like peppermint." With strong hands and gentle humor, he is a representative of the many connections that Mary McDonald feels to the town, to the stories of the people who live in it, and through both of these lines of continuity, to her own history.

Ruth Sullivan

Ruth Sullivan is a nurse who worked with Mary McDonald and Clarice Hunter in the 1960s and during the tumultuous years leading up to the nurses' union vote.

Beverly Wellstone

"A nurse who had once been a nun," Beverly Wellstone fasted for thirty-three days in support of the striking nurses. Her decision marked the turning point in the strike.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

• Write two or three more episodes that might be included in Baida's story, focusing in your original writing on the perspectives of characters other than Mary McDonald. You might consider, for instance, writing from the point of view of Eunice Barnacle or Dr. Tom Seybold. Alternatively, you might look to other members of the town who come in contact with Mary during the course of her life, such as Nick Santino or Laura Seybold.
• Recalling Mary's story of the picket lines and the slogans that appeared on the signs that the nurses carried, do some research into the history of slogans of this sort. Think of possible situations in which such sayings might prove useful: marking support for a football team or a political candidate, for instance, or during a labor dispute of some sort. Build a catalogue of possible slogans, noting as well the context in which you think each would be most effective.
• Research the history of the debate over unions within the Catholic hospital system. Prepare a series of newspaper editorials based on these facts. Be sure that some of your opinion pieces support the union effort and that others support the rights of the hospitals to function without unions as part of their business plans.
• Draw a tourist map of Booth's Landing as you might imagine it to look from the details of the story. Be sure to include brief descriptions and histories of the most important landmarks, as well as a couple of paragraphs recounting the history of settlement.