Doctor’s Wife
By Maysie Greig, ©1937Two women loved Dr. Bob Bradburn. Natalie Norris had always loved him. Hers had been an idealized love when she was fourteen, and then, as she grew older and worked side by side with him, a love that made her long to be part of his hopes, his discouragements, his triumps. Hers had been more than the ordinary hero-worship of a young girl, and more than a nurse’s infatuation for a handsome doctor. But there had to be many moments when she could not share in Dr. Brad’s life. He was married to Marjorie Daw, a beautiful, spoiled child of a girl who knew how to fill his leisure hours with gayety and excitement. Into the story that tells which one was to give him the more lasting happiness, Maysie Greig has woven drama, thrills, tragedy—all the many colored aspects of true romance.
GRADE: A
BEST QUOTES:
“When you’re dealing with unintelligent people you should never lose your temper.”
“That’s what makes life pleasant and at the same time possible—that we do forget.”
“It’s important for a girl to have a job which will enable her to meet decent men. I suppose I mean, by that, men with money. It’s more imprtant really than getting good pay. You don’t get much fun out of life otherwise.”
“Women, after all, belonged to the lighter side of a man’s life. Bob had rather old-fashioned ideas about women. They were a man’s recreation—gay, delightful creatures to turn to when the day’s work was done, to share vacations with, to go out to parties with, to be at home when one wished to relax. It never occurred to Bob that there could be a woman who could enter into the other side of his life, who could share his ambition, his work, who could become so much a part of his every waking thought that it would be impossible to go on without her.”
“I shouldn’t have said you were looking haggard. I know it’s the unpardonable thing to say to a woman.”
“Perhaps there wasn’t quite so much thrill in a husband as there was in a lover. At least, not the sort of thrill that made you want to spend every available moment alone with him.”
“It’s so pleasant to feel you’re a martyr. It gives you nice little prickles of virtue all the way up your spine.”
“You can always excuse what you do yourself; it is not so easy to excuse what someone else does.”
“Women like to be treated badly. It’s the old slave complex coming out in them.”
“You should never be sorry for anyone who can genuinely feel an emotion, whatever it is. You should be sorry only for those people who have lost all capacity for feeling anything.”
REVIEW:
After a long drought, I offer you Doctor’s Wifeas a gentle rain on a thirsty desert. Natalie Norris is just 14 when we meet her; her grandmother has just died and left her alone in the world, and Dr. Robert Bradburn, 24 and just starting his career, is advising her to go into an orphanage, though she is fighting with the condescending charity maven who has swooped in to do what’s “right” for the young waif. On her own, Bob suggests, she will not be able to finish her education and will never be more than a shop girl; if she goes to the orphanage, she will be able to go to nursing school and so embark upon a satisfying and well-paying (relatively speaking) career that will maximize her brains and talent. Natalie reluctantly agrees to the proposal, as long as Dr. Bob will hire her when she finishes nursing school, which he agrees to do.
Cut to six years later, and Natalie is finally a nurse when she runs into Bob in the hospital—or rather, faints dead away when the nurse she is with mentions that Bob is about to be married to socialite Marjorie Daw. Once roused, she reminds Bob of his promise, and now she’s working in his office and stirring up the jealousies of the frivolous young thing who has become the doctor’s wife. And with good reason: Marjorie will “always be a child,” Bob tells Natalie. “She makes you forget your cares and enter the world she lives in. It’s an unreal world, of course, a make-believe world, but it’s very pleasant.” Natalie, a serious, deep individual who likes to read literature, immediately understands: “She is champagne,” she replies, and Bob is startled into seeing her as a human being, one with far greater possibilities than his wife.
Marjorie likewise understands that there is much in her husband that she will never access: “She knew that there were depths to him she couldn’t reach, that despite his frequent laughter and the humorous twinkle that, every now and then, lighted his eyes, there was a deep seriousness to his nature she couldn’t altogether appreciate or understand.” She is a social butterfly fond of parties, but as time passes she becomes increasingly discontent with this role as the happy housewife, because she realizes her superficiality and its limited attractiveness to her husband but is at the same time powerless to change her intrinsic nature. She becomes increasingly resentful of Natalie, especially after she demands to see Bob in his office when he is with a patient and Natalie forbids it, and when Natalie crashes a party at Bob’s house to tell him that his patient is dying and requires immediate surgery; it turns out that Marjorie has intentionally turned off the phone (by jamming paper between the clapper and the bells to muffle the ringer, quaintly enough) to keep Bob at home for the event (and needless to say, this always spells certain doom to a relationship in a VNRN).
Now Bob is awakening to Natalie’s charms, and to the fact that his initial attraction to his simple wife has dried up. Marjorie decides to go to sailing in Cuba Havana Cuba
The final chapter is a bit of a letdown, but it’s only five pages, and since we’ve had such a beautiful ride through the first 200, it’s not too difficult to forgive author Maysie Greig. This is one of those charming older nurse novels that reads like it were wrapped in the airiest of chiffons. What it’s about doesn’t really even matter; it’s a lovely read, light yet filling, and it’s a rare joy to find a VNRN like this one. The characters are real and well-drawn—even silly Marjorie is a sympathetic character—and the writing is far more than the minimum required to get the job done. It seems the author has penned several other VNRNs, including the pleasant enough Overseas Nurse under the pen name Jennifer Ames, so I’ll be doing a little shopping in the near future, particularly for her earlier works. But it will be hard to find one that tops this delightful little book.
Vietnam Nurse
By Della Field (pseud. Fanny Quincy Howe), ©1966
Cover illustration by Mort Rosenberg
Natalie Knight of the Navy Nurse Corps had come a long way from Oregon to the battle-torn plains and jungles of Vietnam. But it was a journey of love and devotion. She was looking for Tom, her Green Beret fiancé. He had been reported as missing, but Natalie did not give up hope. She knew that Tom, and hundreds like him, needed her because she was a Vietnam Nurse.
GRADE: C+
BEST QUOTES:
“You’ll have fun here, a knockout like you.”
REVIEW:
Natalie Knight, known as “Lee,” has enlisted to serve as a nurse in Vietnam. Not out of any sense of duty or patriotism, but because she’s searching for her fiancé, Tom Lender, a Green Beret who went missing a year ago during a battle at the Cambodian border. “I’m sure he’s still alive, a prisoner of war,” she tells her roommate, Maggie Jackson. She resists Maggie’s brutal advice to “forget it, doll. He’s bound to be dead. They don’t just turn up again out of the blue.” Not surprisingly, Maggie and Lee do not hit it off, and indeed, Lee “cursed herself for having told Maggie her precious secret.”
Lee’s devotion to Tom is not depicted as entirely healthy. As a child, Lee “had been a gawky, even ugly child, that she had been left out of friendships and games and dates for many years.” And though now she is beautiful, “Lee herself still thought of her face and body as laughable.” This insecurity makes her withdrawn, and she’d been completely unsociable with the other nurses on the ship on their way to Vietnam. As a result, she now has essentially no friends on the staff. At one point, “she smiled at the diamond ring on her finger as if it were here only friend,” and that’s not far from the truth. Instead of socializing, Lee spends an inordinate amount of time daydreaming about Tom; Maggie even refers to Tom as Lee’s “dream lover.” We learn that Lee and Tom had been in high school together, he a few years older than she, and she’d only fantasized about hunky Tom Lender, “waited for the day that he would see her,” and it had been hero worship come to life when he eventually discovered her in their college years. Then he’d enlisted, and she’d visited him twice, he proposing just before he was shipped to Vietnam, two years ago. “He had lived in her imagination for many years. In a way, his disappearance didn’t matter to her because he had such a strong place in her mind.” Indeed, “her mind was fixed on Tom at all times.” This is a gal desperately in need of some therapy.
But where good psychiatric help is wanting, an interested man will do just as nicely: Lee soon meets another Green Beret, Johnny Winston, who promises to help Lee find out what happened to Tom. He takes her out and she talks to him for hours about Tom, but he clearly is interested in more than her stories, telling her that she is beautiful and that he would like to marry someone like her. She’s fearful and confused, but remembers Tom writing to her that if he should not return, she should find someone else, “and that way the dream will last.”
When she’s not dreaming, Lee works in the OR for six hours in the morning, then teaches a class on the medical ship S.S. Charity, parked off the Saigon shore. In the hospital, she meets a Vietnamese woman named Khai, who never merits a last name, and Khai becomes her only real friend. Khai takes Lee on a tour of Saigon, during which Khai lets slip the fact that she is married and that her husband Pham is away, but begs Lee not to speak of it at work. Lee, self-absorbed and incurious, wonders “why he was such a mystery, but then decided she knew nothing of life in this strange country and went to sleep.” Soon Maggie, who is ragingly jealous of Lee’s good looks, is claiming that Khai is Viet Cong and insists that Lee report her, or Maggie will report Khai, and Lee for abetting her. Lee declares that she does not want to get involved, and Maggie rightfully retorts, “What are you doing in the navy? You may be here for romantic reasons, but the rest of us are fighting a war against the Communists. Even little lotus blossom is fighting a war.” An excellent point.
Lee eventually asks Khai straight out, learning that Pham is Viet Cong, but Khai professes, war “is no solution and the terrible wounds we see are just a waste. I have no political affiliations.” But soon, tending to the wounded on a daily basis, Lee decides that she hates the men who are wounding and killing the American soldiers she nurses. She begins to feel “anger and rejection of the girl whose husband was a Viet Cong.” She does her best to remember that Khai is a friend, not an enemy, but “what held them together was the same situation that would split them apart: the war and the men they loved. When it came right down to the heart of the matter, each girl would side with the man she loved and thereby renounce their own friendship.” Eventually she asks Khai to see if she can find out what happened to Tom. “She had reached a point where she would, at last, believe what she was told about Tom’s whereabouts; she couldn’t go on dreaming much longer. She could now believe in his mortality and accept the fact of his death.” It’s not clear what exactly has led her to renounce her dream world, so this evolution in her character rings more than a little hollow.
It’s not too long before Khai returns with Tom’s dog tags, telling Lee that he had parachuted across the border into Cambodia and been badly wounded, seized and taken to a prison camp, but had died before he’d been tortured. Now that she knows the truth, Lee is ready to pack up and go home, but instead realizes that the American men she has been caring for need her help. “She had a duty outside herself now and it filled her with a new sense of freedom. She wouldn’t go home. She would stay in Saigon, where all her training and experience would be more useful. Out of the ashes of her dream, she would construct a full life for herself, for there really was no choice.” And find a new boyfriend; before too long, Lee is involved with Johnny. “She thought of Tom and promised she would try to make their dreams survive with Johnny.”
Khai eventually pulls away from Lee, saying that their friendship is “too difficult” because their allegiances are to different sides of the war. “Americans are innocent. You are a nation of children. Don’t you see? Things are not good and bad, but contain many elements, and your soldiers have adopted the methods of the French, who raped us and left us. How can I be your friend?” This sentence is made more poignant by the story of Khai’s family: Khai’s mother, left a widow in a beriberi epidemic, had approached a local French plantation owner for help saving her children. The Frenchman had aided Khai’s mother, but then “he gave her me as well,” Khai relates. She is angry with her mother for this, saying that she had no principles: “She gave in to him. That’s all. She says she loved him, and she stayed with him until he died. But she was just being a coward.” (Khai tells Lee that her French half is “bad,” saying, “I am Vietnamese first.”) This story also recalls an early scene in the book when Lee and Johnny watch three Vietnamese girls in short skirts and too much lipstick trailing after a group of American servicemen. “Guess what they want,” Johnny tells Lee, the implication being that the girls are either prostitutes or close to it. Johnny, however, is better than Khai’s father, saying, “I don’t want to exploit the war through them.”
The climax of the story comes when Lee and Johnny drive out to a field hospital which is attacked by the Viet Cong shortly after their arrival. Lee is asked to go into a rice paddy shortly after the gunfire has ended to help the wounded and finds Johnny, shot in the abdomen. She bandages him and stays with him for hours, until the helicopters arrive, then is driven back to the base to assist in his surgery. He’s sent back to America to recover, and won’t be coming back to Vietnam. Lee, with still a year left to serve in Vietnam, is left behind, “but the future held hopes of peace and joy. Even in the midst of sadness, she knew that better times would have to come. So many people wanted them.”
I don’t know when I have been more disappointed in a nurse novel. Not that this book is so much worse than the bulk of nurse novels, but I was looking forward to it after reading Ms. Howe’s only other VNRN, West Coast Nurse, which, if not the greatest book ever (I gave it a B+), was brooding and singular and intriguing. Vietnam Nurse, written three years later, is ordinary and even half-hearted, without much to recommend it apart from some nice travel writing. It devotes little time to the politics of the Vietnam War; Lee says displays little interest in learning about it, saying, “What she had read in the papers was so ambiguous and hard to understand that she had given it up as a loss,” in so doing coming across as a bit of a dolt. And it seems to think we readers are dolts as well, merely brushing over what could be interesting themes, like the difficulties inherent in Khai and Lee’s friendship, letting go of someone who has disappeared, and the effects of colonialism and war in modern times. The hints at complexity that Howe drops and then, perhaps thinking that these ideas would be too complex for a lowly nurse novel, lets lie essentially unexamined, make you long for the better book that has been left unwritten. But whatever the reason, if this book gives you something to think about, it won’t be because you got much encouragement from the author.
Nurse on the Riviera
By Jane Converse (pseud. Adele Kay Maritano), ©1968She took the posh European assignment to be near Bill Lindley. It seemed ideal, really. Private duty nurse to millionaire Richard Olner; guest of her patient, and his son and daughter on the glamorous Riviera. Once there, Terry Crane realized she’d made a mistake. The handsome and eligible Dr. Lindley was enjoying himself immensely—with the jet-set crowd. And Terry found herself alone in a climate perfect for love. … That’s when her millionaire patient turned romantic and his twenty-four-year-old son turned competitive. That’s when the amorous French doctor entered her life. For Terry Crane romance was everywhere on the Riviera—except in the eyes of the one man she really loved.
GRADE: C-
BEST QUOTES:
“It’s bad medicine to create a scene.”
REVIEW:
Terry Crane is in love with Dr. Bill Lindley. We’re told that on the second page, and we’ll just have to take Terry’s word for it, because we hardly know the man. They exchange a few perfunctory words about their patient, a wealthy 46-year-old businessman felled by a major stroke, and then the crickets start chirping. She agrees to tag along on the patient’s trip to France, despite the fact that he’s recovered pretty well at this point—his main disability seems to be … an aggravating propensity … to drop ellipses into his speech … every few words or so … a trait that Terry adopts … to my increasing annoyance …. Her sole motivation is to spend more time with Dr. Lindley, but once they arrive, he sets off for the swankier spots along the Cote d’Azur, leaving Terry to wander the halls of the villa and go on occasional dates with the local medecin, Dr. Armand Gautier. After a few dinners, though, she tells him she’s in love with Dr. Lindley, and that ends that minor diversion. With little else to do, patient Richard falls in love with Terry and begins pressing her to marry him, much to the chagrin of his money-grubbing children. She resists him, too, but now she can squabble with the kids, who are intent on scaring her off.
After about a hundred pages in which Terry sees no sights but frequently moans that she’s missing out on all the action, and sees not much more of the elusive Dr. Lindley, we’re finally treated to some action! A boat crashes off shore during the local festival, and one of the passengers is found to have smallpox, so now Terry and the long-absent Dr. Lindley, returned a moment ago from Cannes, are to help vaccinate the village. But the crazy townspeople are under the impression that it’s bubonic plague that has washed ashore, and they are freaking out!!! Even Richard and his kids are flinging their Louis Vuitton cases pell-mell into the Mercedes and making for Paris! (They’re stopped by a roadblock set up for a quarantine, so back they slink in shame.) Bill heads for the clinic to do what little he can, like unpack boxes of medical supplies, since he does not have a license to practice medicine in France, and Terry goes downtown to help a French nurse quell a riot. Since Terry speaks little French, she is equally useless; all she can do is bolster the confidence of the shy nurse, who rises to the occasion and the day is saved!
This book is a waste of time. We are stuck in the villa most of the time and so take in little of the Riviera, which might at least provide some entertaining armchair travel. We are not at all invested in Terry’s devotion to the elusive Dr. Bill, so we share none of her anguish at his apparent disinterest and no joy at his (surprise) change of heart. The patient and his family are not appealing, even when they’re being snarky and mean, and the “excitement” of the end seems downright dopey, since smallpox is now a thing of the past and government laboratories, and the bubonic plague only makes me think of the Monty Python skit (“Bring out your dead!”). Even the trumped-up crisis of the ending shows us nothing about our heroine, and her and Bill’s part in it seems fairly trivial, even silly (Terry spurs the timid nurse to courage by fingering the veil of her nurse’s cap, which is supposed to remind her of the importance of her calling as a nurse). The writing is flat, and it wasn’t until page 110 that I found one small snippet to offer you as a Best Quote. Jane Converse is capable of putting out a great book, but not, apparently, on the Riviera.
Jennifer James, R.N.
By Norman Daniels, ©1961Cover illustration by M. Hooks
Nestled deep in the California hills was a hospital so strange, so unique that only a handful of people knew of its existence, let alone its mysterious mission. Through its antiseptic corridors moved the shadiest of characters—bullet-ridden gangsters, suicidal actresses, punch-drunk pugs—people who could not stand the all-revealing daylight of public exposure. A truly odd assortment of bedfellows. Here, under the most modern and efficient conditions, beneath the secretive cloak of midnight, life-saving operations were performed by a team of highly skilled, dedicated men and women. Jennifer James, Registered Nurse, was one of them. Some people will condemn her for it. Others will come to her defense. But no one will be indifferent to her, or to the doctor she loved—the man she had no right to want.
GRADE: B
BEST QUOTES:
“Bye, sweetie, and I hate you because you’re so damn attractive.”
“Now that’s the epitome of our gentle era. Booze through a straw. Bombs from the bomb bays, missiles from the pads, rockets and men in orbit, atoms from the smashers and booze through a straw.”
“Would you like to go down by the river? There are benches, and I promise to behave outrageously.”
“California now has something to talk about whenever the subject of beauty is brought up.”
“She’s your wife. You should be able to handle her or you shouldn’t have married her.”
“You are much too attractive to worry.”
REVIEW:
Jennifer James, R.N., is wholly unique among the more than 200 nurse heroines I have met to date: Right off the bat, right there on page 16, she sleeps with a married man she had admired but barely known when she worked with him years ago. The man in question, Dr. Rafferty Corbett, is a surgeon at Manhattan’s West Side General, but now he is a rude, sloppy drunk, babbling on about his Eskimo pie of a wife at the hospital’s annual ball. She takes him outside for some fresh air and he all but passes out, so she takes him to her room in the nurse’s dormitory. Big mistake. In his gratitude for her assistance, he forces her down and tears off her dress. She responds as women in VNRNs usually do when they are being assaulted, namely, “she found herself clinging to him instead, pulling him closer.” Next thing you know, she’s picking up her underwear off the floor and rushing to the OR, where she is head surgical nurse, for an emergency surgery.
There she works on a man who has been assaulted to the brink of death by the henchmen of gangster Sydney Delgado. The man, a former associate of Sydney’s, was about to sing to the police about Sydney’s illicit activities, but now he’s fighting for his life with just Jennifer James, R.N., between him and the grim reaper. But there’s this mean police detective, who wants the patient to wake up and talk before his imminent death. Jennifer, who has orders to keep the man sedated lest his shredded spleen start hemorrhaging, dopes the patient with morphine even as the detective is rushing to the hospital administrator to make Jennifer keep the man alert. Her efforts come to no avail and the patient dies, and now there is hell to pay. Jennifer is fired from her job for obeying the doctor’s orders and not the detective’s, and is blacklisted from every job in town—except for one, working for an abortionist, which she turns down, so we know she has some morals.
Then she gets a phone call from Raff. He’s in California, having left his wife, and he wants her to take a job at the hospital where he works. Next thing you know, she’s at a very upscale medical facility in the Los Angeles hills. The patients are glamorous movie stars, dirt-poor Mexican immigrants, anyone who needs care—including a number of shady types with suspicious wounds; Jennifer’s first surgery upon arriving is assisting Raff in removing a bullet from a seedy fellow who repays her by grabbing her breast, and only Raff’s quick intervention with a right cross to the jaw preserves her relative modesty.
It turns out that the hospital is financed by Sydney, who after watching his mother die of cancer, impoverished and without proper treatment, swore that he would help others in the same situation—apparently the only act of goodness he has ever committed. So all these nice poor people get top-notch care, but the down side is that Jennifer and RAff have to minister to any of Sydney’s associates who might need medical attention. But to have a job again, and to work alongside Raff—and to open her door to him at night—is all Jennifer needs, so she accepts the good with the bad. And the bad includes another assault, this time a near-rape—she is again saved by Raff, whose timing really is uncanny—and the arrival of Sydney himself, who has survived a plane crash and crawled across the California desert to the hospital. Oh, and Raff’s wife turns up as well, and a Hollywood gossip columnist, both of whom are threatening to expose Jennifer and Raff as adulterers as well as the hospital’s slimy underbelly.
It seems black for everyone concerned: How can Raff shake off his wife and the gossip columnist, and persuade Sydney to continue funding the hospital, which, after his first-hand experience as a patient, he now regards as an unworthy medical facility staffed by quacks? (He may have a point there; shortly after his arrival, he is determined to have metastatic lung cancer and less than two weeks to live, and though he is even given radiation treatment, he is never informed of his diagnosis lest he freak out and pull the plug on the hospital’s endowment trust.)
Not to worry, in the event that you are: All is resolved when the hospital handyman (a very dignified Mexican) essentially murders Sydney by brutally revealing his illness to him, the shock of which sends Sydney into a coma from which he never recovers, and also by a bit of dirt that Jennifer and Raff fortuitously uncover on Mrs. Raff and Mr. Columnist. It isn’t really a satisfying ending; I had hoped that someone might literally put an end to Sydney, which would have made for a more thought-provoking conclusion to the hospital’s woes, and the way in which Mrs. Raff is dispatched seemed too facile. But on the whole it’s an enjoyable book, even if at the same time it doesn’t have all that much to recommend it. The writing is pleasant and brisk, and the surgeries are well and accurately described, but the plot just aren’t that enticing. I also wasn’t really impressed with Raff, who goes around either threatening to hit everyone or actually doing so, and his initial assault on Jennifer wasn’t too nice, either, even if she did succumb to his charms. It’s an odd addition to the VNRN genre and for that reason alone perhaps worth reading, but otherwise you won’t find that Jennifer James has much to offer outside the bedroom or the OR.
Copyright © C-buk2016
