Doctor Garth
By Elizabeth Hoy, ©1959Cover illustration by Paul Anna Soik
“What exactly is an honorary?” Joan Langden asked her fellow nurses on her first day at St. Angela’s.
“A visiting consultant—either physician or surgeon,” explained the senior. “Usually they are men with big reputations. They give their services to the hospital free.”
“Oh!” though Joan softly. So Garth at twenty-nine was an “honorary.” An important surgeon with a reputation. She had known only vaguely of his connection with St. Angela’s and hadn’t been sure just what it was. It warmed her heart to hear the quick commendation of him in this girl’s voice. It made her glow with secret happiness that she might see him soon at his work … but although Joan had known Doctor Garth most of her life, she now found there were many things she didn’t understand about him. Why did he make her feel she was something “special” to him and yet keep so distant? And what was his connection with the pretty mother and her son on whom he was to operate? The story of Joan and Doctor Garth is an unusually appealing one.
GRADE: B
BEST QUOTES:
“There was no use being a nurse if you were going to be squeamish.”
“It would be good indeed if a heart could be no more and no less than Miss Don was describing it, a little chalk sketch on a blackboard, a queer, impersonal muscle with complicated vascular and arterial equipment, a bundle of valves and pumps that had nothing to do with aching and grieving, that could not possibly lie like a lump of stone in a person’s breast day after day!”
REVIEW:
Joan Langden is a 21-year-old nurse from the English countryside who has been in love with 29-year-old Dr. Garth Perros since she was knee-high to a tea table. She’s just starting her nurse’s training in the hospital where he is a surgeon, and all is going swimmingly between them until the arrival of the adorable seven-year-old Ivan Petrovna, stricken with appendicitis, and his mother, ballet dancer Vera. From the moment he claps eyes on Vera, Garth is “ashen” and walking around like a zombie. Soon enough, Joan learns the horrific truth: Garth knew Vera eight years ago, and the little tyke Ivan is the product of their friendship.
Joan is almost literally hysterical with this news, acting as if she has learned that Garth is a serial axe murderer with anal warts. “Garth was lost to her,” Joan wails, and she is incable of even speaking to looking at Garth, much less speaking to him. “She wanted to be done with him now and forever. He had failed her,” she moans. Eventually, however, Garth forces her into a corner, where he offers her an explanation: He is actually married to Vera, though they had only gotten hitched because she needed a green card, and stayed together for just one summer before she took off, and he had been unable to track her down. So after 25 pages of Joan’s frantic heartbreak over Garth’s bastard child, now that the poor boy has been legitimized, we relive the sloppy hysterics anew over his marriage: “Garth was lost to her hopelessly and forever! The dream of her whole girlhood was burned to ashes. Garth! her heart cried in anguish. Garth!” And there’s another 25 pages of pale cheeks, stony looks, sobbing in bed, and sickening jerks of the heart now that we know that he’s not just a father, but a husband as well.
Eventually Garth corners Joan again and tells her that Vera will agree to a divorce if he promises never to see Ivan again, so will Joan marry him when it’s all fixed? After thinking it over, though, Joan selflessly decides that she cannot accept Garth’s proposal of marriage—if she turns him down, Garth will stay with Vera, and, more importantly to everyone concerned, with Ivan, who needs a father. And indeed, soon Vera and Ivan have moved into Garth’s flat, and Ivan is the happiest boy ever! But if Garth and Vera couldn’t last more than a summer when it was just the two of them, things aren’t going to last that even long now that there’s the boy to consider as well. Vera, it turns out, is unhealthily obsessed with Ivan, refusing to allow him to go to school or even have friends his own age. She is furious that Garth wants her to give up the stage, and has her Russian friends over for vodka and caviar and loud, brash parties. Take a wild guess as to how we dispose of Garth’s bride.
But before she goes, Vera—who until now had been a largely sympathetic character and even a friend of Joan’s—becomes “the poor girl with her mind half crazed at last, hiding her son in that poverty-stricken cottage, changing her name, half-starving herself, driven on by the senseless fears which were a legacy from her terrible, tragic childhood.” It’s as if VNRN authors can’t bring themselves to treat these up-until-now noble characters so shabbily unless they give them a hideous makeover first, a literary insult to injury. Furthermore, even before Vera is dispatched, all the utter impossibility of being with Garth, the pages upon pages of wailing and gnashing teeth, are utterly forgotten. “Her heart was singing suddenly as she slipped on her soft fur coat, thinking that after all it was she who had the most precious part of Garth Perros’ allegiance in spite of all that lay between them. Vera might have his name—his son. But to herself he had given his love.” Which she’d had from chapter one, but it wasn’t much consolation then, so why is it now?
For all my carping, this is mostly an agreeable book. True, Joan’s weeping is a bit much, and the wild oscillations of her logic when it comes to Garth are hard to follow. But the writing is pleasant, if not as stellar as that which brought us Nurse Tennant. Elizabeth Hoy knows how to create real emotion in her readers, and this book, if not the best, is a pleasant outing, worth taking.
Visiting Nurse
By Jeanne Judson,©1957Proud, lovely, ardently devoted to the great task of aiding the poor and helpless, Elizabeth Downer knew she had found her calling. But her passionate young heart was torn between two doctors, each arrogantly claiming her as his alone. Dr. Galland was darkly handsome. Sometimes she believed his youth and high spirits hid a deep understanding of human suffering. Dr. Denham, quite but strong, was intensely dedicated to medicine. His burning eyes were like the eyes of a priest. And one of these doctors had a secret—a secret which Elizabeth was forced to face. How this warmly courageous girl forged the life she desired is the theme of this moving and fascinating story.
GRADE: A-
BEST QUOTES:
“You’re not old enough to be a public health nurse and you’re much too pretty. You can’t expect sensible people to take you seriously.”
“All blind dates were either dull or obstreperous. Attractive men could find their own girls.”
“She was delighted to find that among his other and more obvious attractions, he must be a most accomplished, tactful, and spontaneous liar.”
“What fools men were. They pretended to think nothing of dress, but they really saw little else in a girl. Helen of Troy in a dusty uniform, wearing clumsy-looking shoes, wouldn’t attract a second glance from any of them.”
“Link never let anything as prosaic as statistics interfere with his exuberant optimism.”
REVIEW:
Elizabeth Downer is a county nurse in Cornwall, PA. She’s working with two doctors: handsome Dr. Kit Galland, who is the nephew of Dr. Purvis, the town’s most senior MD, and is expected to step into his practice when the old man retires; and Dr. Frederic Denham, who has no connections and works tirelessly. But Dr. Denham is also a little creepy; when she first meets him, “She was trying to think what his eyes reminded her of—something disturbing. They were the eyes of a zealot, claiming a sacrifice of self that was beyond ordinary people. Dr. Denham’s eyes were as hard and bright as diamonds.” So right away we understand which of the two Elizabeth hankers for, and it isn’t too much longer before we figure out that he’s not the one who most wants her. (This makes the back cover blurb, above in italics, a complete fiction, one of my personal pet peeves.)
Soon it is revealed that Dr. Denham is to become the new chief of medicine at the local hospital—the very position that Dr. Purvis had been reserving for Dr. Galland. A wealthy foundation has approached the hospital, offering to finance a large new wing, but only on condition that Dr. Denham is made chief. Elizabeth tries to stay neutral in her opinion of Dr. Denham, but soon he’s asked her to dinner and is pressing her to help him in his new role. “You’re going to help me. We’re going to do this together,” he says, eagerly pressing her hand. Then he remembers he has patients waiting and abruptly ends the date, leaving her to get home from the restaurant on her own. After that Dr. Denham seems to pop up and invite himself to lunch a lot. Elizabeth’s friend Peggy warns her: “Whatever you do, don’t go and get yourself engaged to Frederic Denham. You couldn’t call your soul your own, married to a man like that. He’s the kind of man who would want to give you improving books.” Sure enough, he drops by with a “very heavy, much footnoted tome on geriatrics.”
Elizabeth is becoming increasingly disenchanted with Dr. Denham, changing her customary path home so she won’t pass by his office, but he finds her anyway and refuses her refusal of dinner with him. Unfortunately, she lacks the spine to insist. “Being with him was not a relaxation. It was more like a continuation of work,” she thinks—and then he tells her that he is a single man in want of a wife, and goes on to explain his plans for the future at length. “With a little training, a little guidance from me, you can learn to control your impulses,” says the romantic fool. She turns him down, saying she does not love him—and that he has not said the he loves her. “Oh, that—I forgot,” he says, and then kisses her so awkwardly that he is provoked to tell her, “I’ve never approved of the promiscuous familiarities.” He leaves, saying he’ll give her time to think it over, completely missing the fact that Elizabeth has already declined. “She realized that he believed she had refused him because she thought the honor or the responsibility too great.” (Shades of Jane Austen, anyone?) After this, Dr. Denham becomes increasingly irritating, and there’s “something disturbingly proprietary in his indulgent smiles which were more frequent than formerly.”
But she is also working with Dr. Galland on her rounds, and indeed becomes his patient when she falls and breaks her wrist (it’s a Colles fracture, if you’re curious). Dr. Galland is dropping by daily with flowers and mystery stories, while Dr. Denham stops in to lecture her on the virtues of constant study: “It is only by reading the conclusions of many different people that you attain the critical faculty to judge the value of a book for yourself,” he drones. He objects to Dr. Galland’s flowers and mysteries: “It’s high time we let him know that I’m going to marry you,” he says, still not hearing Elizabeth’s constant refusals: “You can’t marry me if I don’t say yes,” she tells him, and thinks, “He couldn’t—could he?”
Then Dr. Denham’s secret is revealed—he is actually very rich and the driving force behind the foundation that bought his own promotion in the hospital. His intention in his new position is to establish new medical techniques: “Cornwall is to be a sort of guinea-pig town,” Peggy tells Elizabeth. “When he has our hospital running as smoothly as a Russian slave labor camp, he’ll go on to some other place and do it all over again, until he’s made the entire country over the way he wants it.” This does not improve him in Elizabeth’s eyes—indeed, it sinks him: “One can’t feel sorry for a multimillionaire.” So now it’s just a matter of convincing him that Elizabeth isn’t going to marry him, and of convincing Dr. Galland that he should, which comes to pass in an enjoyable scene. The sweet ending is almost undone by an unexpected turn from one character on the penultimate page, but it’s a minor glitch.
This book is delightfully written, full of little gems like, “She rose quickly from the rocking chair, decanting three cats from her lap,” or “Peggy managed to get possession of the cakes and the absence of Mrs. Loftus by a combination of flattery and ruthlessness.” Peripheral characters are well-drawn and amusing, and the story itself is gentle and meandering. Most of the story is about Elizabeth’s patients and how she wrangles them and their problems, and frankly it’s difficult to remember much about the plot after the book is over, but it has a pleasant, sweet touch that lingers. It’s similar to the other Jeanne Judson book I’ve read, City Nurse, even down to the Austen-esque proposals. But that just means you have two delightful books to linger over, lucky you.
The Courtship of Nurse Genie Hayes
By Peggy Gaddis, ©1963Cover illustration by Robert Maguire
To Genie Hayes sent to nurse its crippled owner, the tiny island called Raiford Cay looked like paradise. But the enchanted spot had its share of serpents. Janice Burton, Henry Raiford’s lovely ward, was consumed with jealousy of the new nurse. And the patient himself was a source of worry and confusion. What was the mysterious ailment that confined him to a wheelchair? And why did he refuse to see his wife and son? Genie discovered that the unhappy family on Raiford Cay needed her understanding and tenderness as a woman even more than her skill as a nurse—and she gave both freely!
GRADE: C
BEST QUOTES:
“People who scarcely glanced at a girl in street clothes would pause and give her a startled, admiring glance once she was clothed in her crisp white. And that, Genie told herself firmly, was only fair, considering the way a girl had to work before she was given the privilege of donning that uniform!”
“The poor men go around believing that it is they who do the chasing—when any girl knows that if she really wants a man, she has to run him down and brand him.”
“Marriage and a home and children—that’s the most important thing in life for a woman.”
REVIEW:
When our heroine, Nurse Eugenie Hayes, arrives on Raiford Cay to care for dying paralyzed Henry Raiford, the island’s only other white girl greets her by saying, “There’s one good thing. At least you’re not pretty, are you?” Janice Burton, you see, has her eye on Henry Raiford’s son and heir Scott—either him or the boat captain Aleck Rogers, she hasn’t quite made up her mind yet. “And until I make up my mind, you’re to let them both strictly alone. Is that clear?” she tells Genie. Well, maybe not; soon Aleck is kissing Genie in the garden, and “it did something crazy to her heart, ordinarily a very well-behaved organ that minded its own business, and rarely indulged in acrobatics.” Though she’s convinced that Aleck is just toying with her, “she knew, much as she wanted to deny it, that she would be perfectly happy spending her life anywhere at all, as long as she was with Aleck! She had to face the fact that she was already in love with him!” And since Janice seems to pay little mind to Aleck, and is constantly seen on Scott’s arm, her declared interest in Aleck comes across as not exactly sincere, and we imagine that apart from territorial jealousy, she wouldn’t seem too upset to lose Aleck. So from the book’s outset we have everyone pretty nicely paired up.
When she’s not mooning over Aleck, Genie is trying to care for the curmudgeon Henry, who doesn’t seem to be dying at all and wants little to do with Genie. Instead, he spends all his time with his Asian manservant, Mike, who glares at Genie when he’s not playing chess with Henry. The only other person he talks to is Janice, his wife’s god-daughter, who runs the house. Henry hasn’t allowed his wife Mimi or son to see him in over a year, and Genie soon decides that Henry is “willinghimself to die!” But why? He refuses to talk about it, and his family has no idea why—though it seems clear that Janice knows, and is working as hard to keep the secret as Mike and Henry.
Soon, though, the truth is outed to Genie in an offhanded way when the blanket Henry keeps in his lap gets caught in his wheelchair and is pulled away to reveal that he is a double amputee, a state so frightening that no one could ever love him if they knew. Later in the garden, Genie tracks down Janice, who spits up the whole story: Henry’s legs had been crushed in a boating accident, and he’s so convinced that Mimi and Scott will shriek in horror when they see him that he has vowed never to let them find out, the miserable dope. We get the entire family history in three paragraphs, how Henry signed over his business holdings to Scott and grew the hedges tall enough that he could go out on the balcony without being seen and had his rooms converted to a self-sustained suite so he would never have to leave them. I can’t stand this sort of sloppy story-telling, when we are brusquely told the back story—and not even by the principal actors—because the author can’t be bothered to figure out a less lazy way to deliver it to us.
Though Genie senses from the “genuine emotion” in Janice’s voice that she feels “a genuine love for Henry,” Janice insists that Genie keep the secret, saying, “It makes me sick to my stomach to look at him and know about those hideous stumps.” Genie, however, feels that Janice has an ulterior motive: “There’s just one thing that isn’t clear, Janice. That’s why you want things left as they are,” she says. But Genie has sworn to Henry that she will keep the secret, so she does—and then we have another offhanded reveal, when Henry has a heart attack and everyone just rushes in with the doctor and sees his stumps, and guess what? They don’t despise him, after all! And his heart is going to be just fine, too: “No scientist has ever been able to invent a more powerful medicine than love,” says the island’s doctor. “He’s going to be all right now that the strain of loneliness and heartsickness is over.” Phew!
Curiously, rather than slap her husband across the face for being such an ass, Mimi turns on Janice with the same allegations of double-dealing that Genie had made earlier: “You let him refuse to see us. Why, Janice?” When Janice replies that she did it because it’s what Henry wanted, Mimi answers, “What he wanted, Janice, or what you wanted?” and then stomps off before she can get an answer. “Janice seemed to hold herself somewhat aloof, but the Raifords were too happily absorbed in each other even to be aware of her behavior,” and that’s all the book is going to give us on this matter. But it’s unclear to me what Janice could gain from keeping the family apart: Since Henry has already given Scott the entire estate, he has no money to give her, and it doesn’t seem like he would have interfered with her marrying Scott. So this red herring is left dangling.
Another side plot involves a nefarious gun-runner Del Rivers, who has crashed offshore and is being nursed back to health by Genie and Dr. Caleb, the local medico. Curiously, after the Raifords are reunited, Janice pops up at the clinic, flirting with the outlaw and lying to Scott about it—and again, it’s not clear at all what Janice has to gain from winning over a thug who is being chased by international police, even if he is “the best-looking thing I’ve ever seen! He’s a dream-boat!” Up until now, Janice has been far too self-interested to be sucked in by a pretty face, and I couldn’t figure out why, with a wealthy landowner like Scott practically in the bag, she would risk losing him for a man with so little to give her. I had to chalk it up to more lazy writing.
To make matters even worse, Dr. Caleb then informs us that Henry’s heart attack was a complete fake—that he had decided to let Mimi and Scott back into his life, thanks to Genie’s persistence that he was mistaken about how they would feel about him with two hideous stumps for legs, and felt that this was the best way to go about it. This makes him far and away the most duplicitous rat in the book, even lower than Janice or Del Rivers, who at least are honest about their evil intentions. But Henry’s reputation as a dear, sweet old man is unsullied in Genie’s eyes, and her prior reputation as a gal with sense begins to slip.
Then, for the author’s crowning sin, Genie becomes engaged to a man she has not exchanged two glances with throughout the entire book. Needless to say, this comes totally out of the blue, particularly since throughout the book we have been treated to sentences such as, “Genie firmly ordered her heart to behave itself and stop whimpering Aleck’s name.” So the “courtship” that we have been promised in the book’s title, slim and miserable as it would have been if she had ended up with Aleck, is a total and utter fabrication with her actual betrothed. For the final slap on your way out the door, she turns to him and asks, “May I still be Dr. Caleb’s assistant?” as the old doctor has just hired her as his nurse. He condescends that he “wouldn’t mind” if she works. “You’re going to be a very nice husband. You’re so understanding and willing for me to do what I want to do,” she croons. “I’ll never do anything or go anywhere that you don’t want me to go.” And with that, my total disenchantment with Nurse Genie Hayes was complete.
The Patient in 711
By Elizabeth Wesley (pseud. Adeline McElfresh), ©1972
Cover illustration by Enric Torres Prat
Pretty Laurie Ames was used to handling dangerous medical crises as a highly skilled nurse—but suddenly a different kind of peril haunted her young life. Behind the heavily guarded doors of hospital room 711 a great scientist lay injured. Foreign agents wanted him out of the way for good, and Laurie knew they might try to reach him through her. Desperately she wondered whom she could trust. Handsome Colonel Hank Romain, whose actions had become so secretive? Dashing playboy Carl Jennings, with his witty repartee and tempting proposal? Or Andy Rogers, the mysterious young patient who had lied about his past? Nurse Laurie Ames was caught in a treacherous web of violence and intrigue—and her only hope for safety lay in a daring gamble of love.
GRADE: B+
BEST QUOTES:
“That Phil Lansing is good with a capital G, in addition to looking like a Greek god. If I’m ever hauled into County General, I can tell you I want him working on me!”
“If it were a movie, one of us would fall in love with whoever all the fuss is about and save his life.”
REVIEW:
Laurie Ames is a 24-year-old RN working at a local hospital and dating Col. Hank Romain, who works at an Air Force compound where a top-secret NASA program investigating space travel to Jupiter is underway. She’s been invited out to interview for the industrial nursing position, but she’s dubious; “She doubted that she could be happy passing out aspirin to scientists and assorted other geniuses whose heads ached from the problems and assorted frustrations of projected space exploration and interplanetary travel.” She’s touring the facility with newspaperman Jack Howard, who’s writing an article about the less-secret aspects of the program. But while the pair is there, an accident occurs and two men are injured. Sean Riordan “just about was The Jupiter Project. If anything truly serious had happened to him, it could have meant failure, or at least months’ or years’ delay.” Now he’s been bashed on the head by who-knows-who and is in a coma, as it happens on Laurie’s floor at the hospital.
On her shift the next day, she finds both accident victims. The genius Riordan is ensconced in the eponymous Room 711, but he’s being attended to by private nurses and doctors and, with several guards outside his door, no one ever gets a glimpse of him. There’s also a car accident victim, Andrew Rogers, who wrecked his car a few miles outside the base. He had an appointment with Col. Romain but never made it, poor thing. Between all these new patients and a shortage of nurses, that means Laurie is on duty an awful lot, so she’s running herself ragged. “Why couldn’t I have become a clerk-typist or a lady lion tamer or an exotic dancer?” Laurie mourns, listing about all the careers open to women in 1972 except teacher and stewardess. But it’s a good thing she’s around, because she notices strange doings, like phone calls from strangers who are trying to find Sean Riordan, shadowy figures on the lawn looking toward his room’s windows, and a sudden preponderance of new staff members. “It was strange that, all of a sudden, County General could find nurses, orderlies, and medical technologists, when for years they had been extremely scarce.” She goes straight to Hank with these concerns, and he rewards her by becoming cold and blowing off dates with her. “Something had changed between them. Almost from the day of Sean Riordan’s injury, Hank had been different.”
She’s also wondering about Andy Rogers, who has no family or friends that anyone can track down. She also wonders why he hasn’t called anyone, now that he’s awake and lucid. “No one should be so utterly alone,” she worries. “She liked him. She maybe could more than like him. The realization, and her thundering pulses, surprised her.” This despite his secret past: “For all anyone knows about him, he might have been born at age 28 in the ambulance that brought him here and he’s willing to leave it that way,” muses Dr. Lansing to Laurie. He remembers an old med-school chum who hails from the same small town that Andy is supposed to come from, and a story that doc told him about an Air Force man named Rogers who married a local gal and then went MIA in Vietnam. “ ‘What are you saying, Dr. Lansing? That Andy is—is an amnesiac?’ She couldn’t bring herself to say ‘married.’ Oh, God, don’t let him be!” But Dr. Lansing thinks he’s worse than married, that he’s a spy who stole the real Andy Rogers’ driver’s license and is “taking all of us for a ride in a troika.” Yikes!
The shenanigans continue apace: New orderlies are caught whispering in the linen closet, a faked “emergency” in the elevator meant to draw staff away from Room 711 fools our stalwart heroine not a second, Laurie tails a strange man sneaking up the stairs and is attacked by him before she fights him off and escapes. Then, five pages from the end, the final scene kicks off unceremoniously when Laurie notices that the door to Andy’s room, usually open ajar, is now closed. She walks in to find two armed men holding Andy hostage—and Andy is soon revealed to be none other than the real Sean Riordan!!! Laurie once again saves the day by managing to press the call button, and the door explodes open and Hank and five security agents subdue the bad guys. It’s an unusual method of answering a call light, but in this instance it certainly comes in handy. Then all that’s left is for Andy/Sean to kiss Laurie, even if it is against hospital regulations, and the book comes to what is actually a sweet ending.
This is a satisfying and pleasant book, even if it isn’t doesn’t have much in the way of camp or sparkling writing. We spend a lot of time with Laurie as she cares for various patients, and we participate in her life in a way that feels genuine. Her growing affection for Andy is a bit out of the blue, as she spends little time with him over the course of the book, and all the various plots and mysterious happenings play out a bit like an author’s to-do list, but these minor flaws don’t detract much from the enjoyable trip that is The Patient in 711.
Copyright © C-buk2016
