Chapter V
DEAREST WOMAN
Some day I may partially forget you, and be able to enjoy another woman, but there’s nothing to show that it’ll be soon. If anything, I’m a damnder fool now than I ever was.
—S AM H AMMETT TO J OSEPHINE A NNIS D OLAN , 1921
There was nothing uncommon about a patient taking an interest in one of the young women in white pinafores cheerfully coming in and out of his room. Their visits were the high point of any recovering serviceman’s routine, and the women were all too used to the male attention; a certain amount of flirty banter even helped move the day along. Thousands of men had fallen for their nurses during the war, and while the more experienced ones had learned to deflect the romantic chatter, occasionally a soldier’s persistence kindled more than sympathy. Even without the disease that altered his life, Hammett still might have later tried his hand at writing, but he certainly would never have met Josephine Annis Dolan,an army nurse with a second lieutenant’s rank, who caught the eye of every young man whose life she enriched on her rounds.
The place where the two came together was a converted Indian trade school on the outskirts of Tacoma that had chiefly served the Puyallup tribe. Before its conversion, the fifty-year-old Cushman Indian Trades School had already been on the decline when it was hit hard by the influenza epidemic in 1919, went bankrupt, and was closed. By the fall of 1920, Hammett was among the healthier of the two hundred patients at the repurposed facility, the Cushman Institute: “[T]he Veterans Administration hadn’t any hospitals of its own in those days,” he wrote in Tulip , “so the United States Public Health Service took care of us in its hospitals. In this one about half of us were lungers, the other half what was then called shell shock victims, segregated as far as sleeping quarters and eating were concerned.”
Tall, clean, charming, and neatly dressed, Hammett even made his own bed, all of which was noticed by his admiring young nurse. Of all the guests there, “he seemed to stand out,” she recalled. “He always dressed so beautifully, and the area where he slept was very neat. He wasn’t very sick then, and he helped the other patients.” Josephine, called Jose, * was soon so taken with the handsome newcomer that she chose not to believe Hammett had tuberculosis, which she knew could be fatal as well as contagious, but had merely been sent to recover from the influenza. Soon the two were sneaking out together, onto the bridge, to the parks, out for a ferry ride or a long dinner in Tacoma at the Peerless Grill. She was a nurse like hismother, but unlike Annie Hammett, who was largely housebound, she had been on her own since she was fifteen. Soon the Pinkerton shadow man was following after his nurse on her rounds, making himself useful.
In later years, Hammett attempted to write about an appealing young nurse and her patient, but he could not set down his full feelings as he did in his early letters to Jose. 1 These reflect a young man in love, perhaps for the first time, unburdening himself in a way later made impossible by the hard-boiled style he would perfect. He came to write to her as the man he hoped to be—calling her Dear Nurse, Little Chap, Dear Lady, Little Fellow, Josephine Anna, “dearest small person in the world,” Dear Boss, Little Handful, and Dearest Woman, and signing off as Sam, S.D.H., Daddy L.L., or Hammett.
When Hammett first saw her, Josephine was three years his junior, twenty-three, pretty, petite, and good at her job. She had been born in Basin, Montana and had the kind of childhood in which perhaps the nicest thing that had happened was her leaving the orphanage as a young girl. Unlike her handsome patient, she had clearly been in Butte and Anaconda during the labor violence of 1917, the great mine explosion, and the lynching of Frank Little, and as a second lieutenant in the army nursing corps, she
DEAREST WOMAN
Some day I may partially forget you, and be able to enjoy another woman, but there’s nothing to show that it’ll be soon. If anything, I’m a damnder fool now than I ever was.
—S AM H AMMETT TO J OSEPHINE A NNIS D OLAN , 1921
There was nothing uncommon about a patient taking an interest in one of the young women in white pinafores cheerfully coming in and out of his room. Their visits were the high point of any recovering serviceman’s routine, and the women were all too used to the male attention; a certain amount of flirty banter even helped move the day along. Thousands of men had fallen for their nurses during the war, and while the more experienced ones had learned to deflect the romantic chatter, occasionally a soldier’s persistence kindled more than sympathy. Even without the disease that altered his life, Hammett still might have later tried his hand at writing, but he certainly would never have met Josephine Annis Dolan,an army nurse with a second lieutenant’s rank, who caught the eye of every young man whose life she enriched on her rounds.
The place where the two came together was a converted Indian trade school on the outskirts of Tacoma that had chiefly served the Puyallup tribe. Before its conversion, the fifty-year-old Cushman Indian Trades School had already been on the decline when it was hit hard by the influenza epidemic in 1919, went bankrupt, and was closed. By the fall of 1920, Hammett was among the healthier of the two hundred patients at the repurposed facility, the Cushman Institute: “[T]he Veterans Administration hadn’t any hospitals of its own in those days,” he wrote in Tulip , “so the United States Public Health Service took care of us in its hospitals. In this one about half of us were lungers, the other half what was then called shell shock victims, segregated as far as sleeping quarters and eating were concerned.”
Tall, clean, charming, and neatly dressed, Hammett even made his own bed, all of which was noticed by his admiring young nurse. Of all the guests there, “he seemed to stand out,” she recalled. “He always dressed so beautifully, and the area where he slept was very neat. He wasn’t very sick then, and he helped the other patients.” Josephine, called Jose, * was soon so taken with the handsome newcomer that she chose not to believe Hammett had tuberculosis, which she knew could be fatal as well as contagious, but had merely been sent to recover from the influenza. Soon the two were sneaking out together, onto the bridge, to the parks, out for a ferry ride or a long dinner in Tacoma at the Peerless Grill. She was a nurse like hismother, but unlike Annie Hammett, who was largely housebound, she had been on her own since she was fifteen. Soon the Pinkerton shadow man was following after his nurse on her rounds, making himself useful.
In later years, Hammett attempted to write about an appealing young nurse and her patient, but he could not set down his full feelings as he did in his early letters to Jose. 1 These reflect a young man in love, perhaps for the first time, unburdening himself in a way later made impossible by the hard-boiled style he would perfect. He came to write to her as the man he hoped to be—calling her Dear Nurse, Little Chap, Dear Lady, Little Fellow, Josephine Anna, “dearest small person in the world,” Dear Boss, Little Handful, and Dearest Woman, and signing off as Sam, S.D.H., Daddy L.L., or Hammett.
When Hammett first saw her, Josephine was three years his junior, twenty-three, pretty, petite, and good at her job. She had been born in Basin, Montana and had the kind of childhood in which perhaps the nicest thing that had happened was her leaving the orphanage as a young girl. Unlike her handsome patient, she had clearly been in Butte and Anaconda during the labor violence of 1917, the great mine explosion, and the lynching of Frank Little, and as a second lieutenant in the army nursing corps, she
Similar Books
