Nurse Nancy
By Jane Scott (pseud. Adeline McElfresh), ©1959
Special-duty Nurse Nancy Davies thought her case with Angela Crayton, the famous actress, would be a dream. She lived with the beautiful star in her summer home where Angela kept open house for all her
GRADE: C-
BEST QUOTES:
“She’s so sure she’s going to die on the table, I wouldn’t be surprised if she does.”
“Everyone knew that Lee Saltonsbie was counting the days until he would go into private practice and ‘get started on my first hundred thousand.’ ”
“Clay’s future in politics had nothing whatever to do with their growing apart. If they had, she thought. No, it was hercareer—her dedication to it—that was causing the trouble.”
“Angela was improving. Or seemed to be. Sometimes, with these mental things, you couldn’t tell.”
REVIEW:
Nurse Nancy Davies is one of those sad VNRN heroines engaged to a man who not only is unfortunately named Clay Randall but who is not the man she thought he was when they met in Maine last summer “on a glorious vacation of sunswept days and moon-drenched nights. They were a bronzed god and a laughing nymph alone in the enchantment of their love,” if you must know. Unfortunately, however, these deities were obliged to go back to work, and now she’s desperately trying to convince herself that her fiancé doesn’t have feet of Clay—and there’s only so much of this a reader can take before you’re ready to pummel Nurse Nancy right upside the head. “She didn’t hate Clay; she couldn’t do that. But did she love him? She had at first—of course she had! she told herself sternly. Surely that surge of happiness, the wonderful, exciting, different happiness, had been love! She wasn’t the type of girl to fall lightly in love and then out … and yet …”
See what I mean?
Clay, it turns out, is ambitious for a career in politics, and so
Anyway, the central plot is also somewhat patronizing, at least to faded theater star Angela Crayton, who once was the queen of Broadway but after three successive flops about a decade ago has holed herself up on the shores of
So the book is mostly a tennis match between Nancy’s distaste for her fiancé and her work as a typist and spy, noting every despondent look and midnight drive of Angela’s, and doing absolutely nothing about it. Eventually Dr. Howard strikes on the idea of having the local theater group stage the play that was Angela’s greatest triumph and asking her to reprise her starring “rôle”—and have a Hollywood director offer her the leading part in a movie. Just the thing to shake off the crow’s-feet blahs!
As Angela naturally improves under this thoughtful treatment, she eventually fires
Back in
This is a pedestrian, automatic, stupid book. It’s not badly written, and its most irritating aspects—its views on psychiatry, and Nancy’s reluctance to give up a man she doesn’t like and a future she will despise—can in part be chalked up to the archaic attitudes of the times. But the book is lazy, and the heroine who cannot acknowledge the dichotomy between adherence to sexist attitudes and the complete abandonment of logic and reason that these positions require is not worthy of our time. No one—especially not nurses, who are by definition strong, independent, smart, and capable—should be a willing victim. While I’ve certainly read nurse novels that are far worse than Nurse Nancy, I find after a couple hundred VNRNs under my belt I am becoming increasingly intolerant of stupid heroines, and so I cannot suggest that you stop and visit with Nurse Nancy.
A Nurse for Rebels’ Run
By Jane Scott (pseud. Adeline McElfresh), ©1960Lovely, dark-haired Nurse Nora Kane, on temporary assignment at wild, mountainous Rebels’ Run, fought side-by-side with young Dr. Morgan Terry against the disease, ignorance and poverty besetting these proud mountain folk. How different the gruff “hillbilly g.p.” was from the suave young specialist, Dr. Tom Morrisey, waiting back home to marry Nora! Would she choose to be the wife of a fascinating, socially prominent doctor—or remain at Rebels’ Run and reap the deeper, richer rewards of her noble profession?
GRADE: B+
BEST QUOTES:
“There’s more to medicine than pills and powders and knowing when to prescribe them.”
REVIEW:
Nurse Nora Kane has taken a six-month temporary job in the deep recesses of West Virginia at the request of her Uncle Jed, who’s been the local G.P. for 40 years and whose nurse has gone on maternity leave. She’s also taking a six-month break from her fiancé, Dr. Tom Morrissey, who is demanding that she quit her job after they are married. So already you know how this book is going to play out. We’ll get 80 pages of snide comments about the fiancé, interspersed with declarations of an undying love that turns out to be a complete delusion by book’s end. So let’s get right to it, beginning on page 6: “Could she give up nursing and still be happy? She loved Tom Morrisey with every fiber of her being. But was love, alone, enough? Could she, if she married Tom and did as he demanded, be utterly miserable and still make him happy, make him a good wife?” It’s curious to me that her main concern about consigning herself to a life of misery is whether she’ll make Tom happy in spite of it. Talk about peculiar priorities.
Anyway, Uncle Jed’s partner is Morgan Terry, and Nora gets off on the wrong foot with him almost at once when, trained under the grasping tutelage of Dr. Tom, Nora can’t understand why Morg, as he is unfortunately known, wouldn’t insist that a woman come to the clinic to have her baby instead of slogging out into the woods to deliver it at her squalid house. One of the first patients we meet is Miss Meliss, born in 1871 and now 90 years old, who is an avowed Confederate and asthmatic. Morg clearly respects her beliefs; “his voice softened” as he tells Nora that Meliss “continues to hold the banner of the Confederacy high.” Morg spends a few paragraphs musing what it must have been like to live in the South during the Civil War, “hated and dreaded Union soldiers riding arrogantly, searching, accusing, and, more than once when they found the Confederate they sought, capturing or killing.” War is certainly a terrible thing, and I don’t mind the depiction of the war from the Southern civilians’ point of view, but sympathy for Confederate ideals, even mildly hinted at, is a little uncomfortable.
If Morg isn’t wildly impressed with Nora, it’s curious that he’s engaged to a wealthy young socialite, whom he believes is a lot like Nora: “Miss Kane was too much like Paula—too pretty, too sure of herself, to certain that other people’s worlds moved as smoothly on their axes as her own always had.” He later thinks, when Paula disagrees with him and voices the strong opinion that he should raise his fees, “Paula needed the spankings she should have gotten as a child, when, if Paula grown up was any criterion, she certainly should have had them.”
And the book unfolds as you know it will: After a few weeks of tenderly caring for Miss Meliss in her cabin accessible only by a 2-mile footpath and all the other flea-bitten locals, Nora begins to re-evaluate her dedication to nursing. “As bone-tired as she became during the week hours of the morning, she enjoyed every minute of the time. She felt strangely at home, as she had not felt at home during a year in Tom’s elegant, modern suite of offices.” Before too long she’s “prettying up” for Dr. Terry, telling herself all the while that “he didn’t know she existed—which was the way she wanted it, she told herself with firmness,” but we know better, don’t we, readers?
Then, her time up in Rebels’ Run, Nora goes back to her home in Vermont, spurred by an announcement in the paper of Morg and Paula’s engagement. But in the interim “she had metamorphosed into a young woman for whom, now, there could only be a career—not a career and marriage, as she used to dream.” So she pouts around the hospital, and Tom tries unsuccessfully to kiss her: “The hint of savagery that been in his first, interrupted kiss was a surging passion now; it was a long, hard, hurting kiss that became angry as he sensed her lack of response.” This is not the first time I’ve come across men using a kiss as a weapon of sorts, a moderately chaste rape, to punish women who don’t love them, and needless to say I find it rather appalling. It does, however, signal the end of any pretense of a relationship between Tom and Nora. Then, when a letter arrives from Rebel’s Run saying that Morg and Paula are not married after all, so Nora decides to indulge in some “shameless chasing” and she heads back to West Virginia to be private nurse for Miss Meliss. Morg turns up the next day to check on his patient, finds Nora there, and that’s that, in a quick but relatively cute ending.
Frankly, I would have bet a lot of money that this book was written by Peggy Gaddis, because it has all her classic elements: feisty old woman, inaccessible mountain cabin, references to spanking, rich spoiled fiancée, grasping rich fiancé, good-hearted elderly G.P., pro-Southern sentiment, strong heroine who experiences a change of heart about the rubes she’s forced to care for. It’s not actually a bad story as far as nurse novels go, but the formula is so tired by this point that the fact that I can recite along with the story line is a not insignificant drawback. If you can overlook that flaw, however, it’s a book worth reading.
New England Nurse
By Adelaide Humphries, ©1956Nurse Judy Andrews found life rewarding in her lovely, quiet, snowbound Vermont village. Engaged to Neal Bentley, whom she had known all her life, she was happily planning to be married in the spring. Overnight, her comfortable world changed. Curt Wiley, a handsome Texas engineer, came to town to build a ski resort on the mountain that Judy loved. By the first snowfall, the sleepy little town would be seething with activity. Judy hated Curt the moment she met him, hated this Texan who was charming all the women in town and was now turning that charm on her! Then, unaccustomed to the New England climate, Curt came down with pneumonia. As she nursed him back to health, Judy discovered that Curt was not the playboy he appeared to be, not just a fast-talking promoter, but a decent, sensitive human being who had a difficult job to do, and who seemed to be falling in love with her. Suddenly Neal Bentley seemed dull and uninteresting to Judy. By spring she had to make a decision. She had to choose between the rootlessness of a life as a construction man’s wife, or the steady, homespun love of her childhood sweetheart … a decision that was as much of a surprise to Judy as it will be to you.
GRADE: B-
BEST QUOTES:
“Judy was the kind of nurse one usually encountered only on the covers of a magazine. The majority of nurses turned out to be middle-aged specimens, often with a superior demeanor.”
“Meeting you, Miss Andrews—and knowing I’ll be seeing you again soon—has practically cured me!”
“Marriage is a woman’s goal—she wants to be a wife and mother. Yet she knows that, once she has taken this step, nothing will ever be the same again. With a man, it’s different. I guess that’s how it should be. It’s a woman who bears the children, my dear. And that’s what I meant when I said that marriage—children—makes a woman settle down, put others before herself, give up her own identity—to a certain degree, anyway.”
“Once they were married, all these anxieties would melt away as though they had never existed. There would never be any regrets.”
“A woman can handle a situation better if she knows she looks her best.”
REVIEW:
Vermont nurse Judy Andrews has a problem common to VNRN heroines at book’s open: Her boyfriend is a dud. “Neal was so good looking that the sight of him ought to quicken any girl’s heart,” we learn in the second chapter. “Only of course she was so used to looking at him, that her blood pressure remained normal.” She’s not wild about kissing him, either; “Judy had taken Neal’s good-night kisses so much for granted that she had never thought much about them afterwards.” So needless to say, we are not optimistic about their future. When wealthy Neal Bentley proposes, she gives him a resounding, “I—I suppose so—”
Judy is partly disappointed because “romance seldom came as one dreamed of it. For Judy, like every other young girl, dreamed of an unknown prince who would one day sweep her off her feet and carry her away, if not on a white charger, at least to places she had never seen before.” But hold on to your hat, chicken, because look who’s coming down the road: Curt Wiley, in a “two-toned hard-topped job” with white-walled tires. He’s in town to build a ski resort on the town’s mountain, though Judy feels this will ruin both the town and the mountain she loves so much. But her initial bias against Curt soon turns, as Curt also seems to share her sentimental feelings toward the environment, telling her that “it seems a shame to spoil all this.” Now Curt is looking more attractive: “Curt seemed to have the same feeling about the mountain as she did. Neal would not understand it—for now that she faced it, all Neal thought of now was how he could personally profit by the changes that had come to their community.” When Curt tells her he is never going to be rich, she thinks “money was far too important to some people—for instance, to Neal.” And when Curt is invited for Christmas at her house, “Curt fitted in exceptionally well. Better, Judy found herself thinking, than Neal would have.”
And so it is not surprising that, when Curt kisses Judy under the mistletoe, it’s a kiss that Judy isn’t likely to forget, like one of Neal’s: “It left Judy weak and limp as a rag doll. It had been the kind of kiss she had dreamed about in those dreams concerning a prince who would come from out of nowhere to carry her away. She felt like the princess who had been awakened after a long sleep.” Though Curt has heretofore been set up as something of a flirt, he seems to be developing a certain fondness for Judy. At one point, when they are out on the mountain together, he says, “I want you to know that—I’m crazy about you.” In response, she kisses him. “It was not like the kiss beneath the mistletoe. But her whole heart was in it.”
Suddenly, though, the town Curt once found so charming is “this godforsaken place,” and he can’t wait to get out. He’s talking about going to South America to build bridges, and he tells her that he cares for her but can only offer her a vagabond life without much money. In the end, though, he asks her to consider going with him when he leaves Vermont in a few weeks. She thinks about what a dud Neal is, and all but tells Curt she doesn’t love Neal. In the pages in which she ponders her decision, the biggest sticking point seems to be that “there would be talk, lots of talk. The blame would all fall on Judy Andrews, a farmer’s daughter who had run away with a stranger.”
A few days later, Neal picks up Judy at work, and she is just on the brink of telling Neal that she won’t marry him after all, “that it was Curt she loved. That when he asked her, as she knew he would, she would have to go away with him.” At this point, Curt’s character undergoes a startling about-face. Up until now, we’ve believed that “Curt is a gentleman,” as Judy’s mother, who has struck up a good friendship with the young man, says. But now, ten pages from the end, Neal tells Judy that Curt run off with Cynthia. And now, as they pull up in front of Judy’s house, she’s changed her mind: “How could she ever have thought she could leave all this?” Neal, too, has become someone else; “there were depths within him that she had not recognized before. And they belonged together—they had been born and reared in the mountains, among folks of their own kind. How could she ever have thought she wanted anyone except Neal?” And even better, suddenly his kisses are “somewhat exciting!” How convenient.
The book has some curious attitudes about marriage, mainly that once married, a woman must no longer have any opinions or ideas that her husband didn’t come up with first. Shortly after Neal proposes, he tells her that they have to cut short their drive so he can have a chat with her father. “ ‘Whatever you say,’ Judy agreed. She wondered if this was how it would be for the rest of her life—whatever Neal decided would be all right with her. Or at least she would pretend that it was.” Later, when she contemplates the upcoming Christmas holiday, she realizes that this will be her last Christmas with her own family; “as Neal’s wife, it would be her duty to spend the Christmas holidays with his people, not hers. To Judy, not to be with her own family at Christmastime would be heartbreaking. Yet she supposed it was a sacrifice she must learn to be willing, even glad, to make.” She also thinks, “Marriage would mean the end of one’s personal freedom. Until then, you were not obligated to try to be what the other person wanted, or thought, you to be.” It sounds pretty grim to me. And not much like the heroine we come to know, “a young woman with a mind of her own.”
In the end, though Judy has maintained that she is in love with Curt, all that is brushed off for what is now painted as a deeper and enduring love for Neal. All we have heard throughout the book is what a self-centered, shallow bore he is, but abruptly we find that he is exactly what Judy wanted all along. If he doesn’t make her heart pound, we’re supposed to take a page from Judy’s mother, who at one point tells Judy that she’d considered running away the morning of her own wedding, but is now very content with her life. And so Judy too is suddenly happy to abandon her career (it is taken for granted that she will stop working after she is married), her opinions and identity, passion, and even true love—if we can believe what we have been told about her feelings for Curt—for an ordinary life with a man she seems to look on as a not very interesting companion. I was annoyed at Judy’s change of heart, and I was annoyed that with Curt’s conversion at the last minute into a felonious Lothario (it’s a crime to transport a minor across state lines), she never even made a choice of her own; removing Curt from the picture took even that away from her. Though we are left with the impression that Judy is going to live happily ever after with her true prince, Neal, it sounds more like a prison sentence to me.
The Doctors
By Clara Dormandy ©1959Cover illustration by Edrien King
Now, at last, the dream was a reality. They were doctors! Throughout their training, these three young women had been inseparable, but the knowledge of eventual separation had always been with them. For Anne Clive, Fleur’s leaving for her far-off home was a wrench, but the great hurt came with Susie’s surprise engagement to George Wyndham, brilliant surgeon and teacher. Not only did Anne fear that George Wyndham would do little to encourage his wife in her chosen career, but there was the inescapable fact that Anne herself was in love with the handsome Dr. Wyndham!
GRADE: B+
BEST QUOTES:
“You prepare yourself for a party as if—as if you were applying some complicated surgical dressing.”
“He’s not bad for a biochemist.”
“He’s not bad for a biochemist.”
“You must never be afraid of disagreements even if you feel that you might be wrong. It’s your only chance of finding out.”
“Who ever heard of anyone expecting a marriage to be exciting?”
“It must be horrible having a self-supporting wife.”
“Men clear out the moment they discover that a girl has a mind of her own. They seem to have some sort of vague idea that if a girl has intellect she can have no feelings.”
“There are rights which it is difficult to carry through and wrongs which seem easy, but every person must decide for himself which he chooses.”
REVIEW:
Both the book’s title and back cover blurb (see above, in italics) lead the reader somewhat astray. While the outside cover leads you to think the story is going to be about three young women (the illustration might even make you think it’s about a male and female doctor), in truth it’s almost all about Anne Clive, who as the book opens has just graduated from medical school with her two roommates, Fleur Tallien and Susie Martin. Fleur, a scholarship student from South Africa, is discouraged by Susie’s brother David’s lack of attention to her and so promptly debarks for her home country, and we hear nothing of her again until the last few pages of the book. Susie shows up at the graduation party her wealthy parents are throwing for her and announces that she is marrying one of her instructors, Dr. George Wyndham, which comes as a complete shock to her two best friends. “He’s not a complete Philistine, you know,” Susie gushes to Anne after the party. “I told him that I liked French painting, so when I went to see him at St. Agnes’s he talked about impressionism and the romantic movement all through two hernia operations and one gastrectomy. And as he was cutting open the specimen after the operation, he suddenly turned to me and asked if I would marry him.” She couldn’t possibly have turned him down after such a romantic proposal.
Susie’s engagement, far from broadening her horizons, sharply curtails them. Her family is affronted by her abrupt decision to marry, and she’s dropped by her old medical school friends, who are busy planning their careers as she worries about flower arrangements and bridesmaid’s gowns. Even her good friend Anne is avoiding Susie, partly for throwing away her career and partly for living up to the stereotype: “People talked such a lot about women in medicine—saying that they kept men out of hospital jobs, and how their education was wasted because in the end they got married anyway and settled down to family life. Those who called themselves more ‘broadminded’ admitted that medicine was all right for a certain kindof woman—the masculine type, the hard and resolute type, or the studious type like Anne, but for such delightful young things as Susie Martin, it was a waste of their own and everybody else’s time.”
To give Susie partial credit, she does have a conversation with George, asking him if he will “let” her, or at least give her his “moral support” as she tries to find a job after their honeymoon. But, he tells her, “It would be impossible for you to organize your time according to my time-table.” Susie answers, “Has it never occurred to you that I don’t like ‘organizing’ my time according to anybody’s time-table?” So George trots out the old saw: “I should like to have you all to myself, Susie,” he tells her, as if she were a toy boat or a cookie jar. “I want my wife to remain always the pure happiness and joy of my life. You see, Susie, my great love for you makes me selfish.” This seems to settle the matter; Susie says no more of it and soon has two young children and what appears to be a serious case of post-partum depression.
But I’ve skipped ahead: Back to Anne, who lands the plum job as assistant to Dr. Wallis that everyone had expected to go to Susie, so her auspicious career is nicely underway. She decides to go to Vienna on vacation, and while there is introduced to a virtuoso violinist, Kristof Bardy. The man is a cad and a fop—he has named his walking stick Polyder, and “he considered modesty merely the art of letting other people find out for themselves how good he was”—but she enjoys their evening together.
Then it’s two years later, and Anne has won a major medical prize for her research on “blue babies.” She still sees Kristof from time to time; when he’s in town for a concert he sends her tickets to his performances and then takes her out to dinner. She asks him why he likes her, when he has so many beautiful women chasing him. “Adulation is boring,” he says, and the next day he is off to Barcelona. In thinking things over, Anne wonders if, of the three friends, “her life had not turned out to be the happiest of the three. There might be something missing—but was it worth all the sacrifice and heart-burning that seemed to accompany it?” Oh, we come to the age-old question: Is a life without love worth living? But don’t you worry about Anne. Because George is now working alongside Anne at the hospital, and late one evening he takes her in his arms and kisses her—and then Anne realizes that her resentment of Susie’s marriage was due to the nauseating fact that she’d been in love with George all the time and just hadn’t realized it!
And then it’s four more years under the bridge, and Fleur has married David after all and they have a daughter, and she is in London visiting her old friends. George is so much more “lighthearted” than he ever was, Susie tells Fleur, and this has improved her own happiness, but Fleur realizes that “something had gone out of Susie.” Anne has been offered a two-year research post in a California university, but isn’t sure she wants to take it—she’s still involved with George, who is trying to persuade Anne that he should divorce Susie and marry her, but she won’t have it. She has another date with Kristof, who has a “brilliant” idea: He is about to go to South America for an 18-month tour, so she should go to California and they should get married! “We wouldn’t have to make sacrifices,” he explains. “We would each follow our own particular course right from the beginning. I think it would be a glorious idea, an excellent marriage. Just imagine two people not constantly falling over each other.” Anne rejects this notion, curiously.
She goes to see Susie, whom she has ignored since Susie’s marriage, to tell her—and George, now arrived home—that she’s decided to go to California. As Susie is out of the room ringing for tea, Anne tells George, “We would never be able to persuade ourselves that it was the right thing we had done.” After she’s gone, George turns to Susie and suggests that she go back to work—thinking, but not telling her, that this is like Anne’s earlier suggestion to Susie’s bored daughter that she take up stamp collecting so as to have something to keep her mind busy. “I can’t think how I could have gone on living as I have these past several years,” she answers, full of relief and unspoken reproach for George, who kept her out of her profession for so long only to give it back to her after all these unhappy years. “And if there was a note of sadness in his voice, she was too happy to notice it.” He tells her that he came home early to tell her this idea of his—but I can’t help wondering if he’d really come home to tell her of him and Anne, and that Anne’s ending of the relationship put him off that track.
At home that night, Anne calls Kristof, and he immediately decides that she has changed her mind about marrying him. “She kept silent, knowing that this silence would affect her future,” and then says yes. “After Anne put down the receiver, she stood as if paralyzed, gazing at the thing. Then very slowly she lifted her shoulders. It was almost a shrug, and something that was almost a smile came into her eyes. Who knows? Perhaps the fates did not intend man to shape his own destiny according to his coolly balanced intellect.”
So what are we to make of this? Fleur has the man she always wanted, but she is the most minor character of the three and goes back to Europe after reappearing for a few pages at the end with her beautiful baby. Susie has got her self-respect and her career back, though her husband is a deceitful, condescending ass. Anne, easily the most successful career-wise, has had a lengthy affair with a married man and then decided, almost on a whim, to marry a silly peacock whom she is scarcely going to see for the next two years. I can’t see this working out very well, for some odd reason. But there it is.
This book is not at all a conventional VNRN, between the jumps through time, the two or three lead heroines, and the unconventional marriage at the end. If Anne’s motives and ultimate fate are not very clear at the end—has she decided that marriage even to a fool is better than remaining single?—it’s a thoughtful, interesting, and quiet story, and well worth reading.
Woman Doctor
By Alice Lent Covert,©1952Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti
Maggie Waynescott was a woman born for love. Petite and beautiful, no man could look at her without wanting to take her in his arms. Now she had fallen deeply in love with newspaperman Mike Hubbard. Here, finally, was the man she wanted close to her for the rest of her life. But Maggie Waynescott was also Dr. Waynescott, a woman in a very special man’s world … a world she knew Mike would never share. Somehow she had to choose—her man or her career.
GRADE: A
BEST QUOTES:
“Let’s get ourselves an honest-to-goodness Hawaiian tan, not the common variety we get at Rockover beach. Something with class.”
“A physician, of all people, should know how to cope with something as simple and fundamental as a biological urge.”
“He wielded his scalpel like a kingly scepter.”
“ ‘I have a new playsuit that simply begs to be worn—’
‘Brief?’ he asked hopefully, and she chuckled.
‘Positively curt!’ ”
“Women were supposed to have been emancipated way back when. They make a big thing of getting fitted out for a career in medicine or law or industry—then they creep meekly away to some fusty old desk job and the men go right on doing all the worth-while things and grabbing off all the glory. Look at my racket. I wanted to be a foreign correspondent, so what happened? I sat at a desk and told the dames how to make ducky sandwiches for their Tuesday bridge clubs.”
“He’s been sulking all evening, and uttering cryptic comments. I’m not sure whether he’s feeling downtrodden or simply observing a period of suffering for those who are.”
“If we were poor people, we’d be considered frightfully bad-mannered—with the possible exception of Cleatus. The rest of us are just eccentric. It’s the same thing as bad manners, you know; it just depends on which bracket you can afford.”
“Unless you’ve some other completely asinine remark you feel you’ve just got to make, will you kindly shut up and kiss me?”
REVIEW:
Dr. Maggie Waynescott is, at 28, in the midst of a midlife crisis. First of all, as a woman doctor at a prestigious clinic, the only patients she gets are the neurotic wealthy women with no health problems that aren’t psychosomatic. Then her boyfriend, reporter Mike Hubbard, wants to marry her, but to Maggie, “Marriage to him would be the death blow to her career.” She thinks, “If I were insane enough to let Mike talk me into tossing everything else overboard just to be his wife and the mother of his children, I’d come to hate myself, and him!” To be fair, though, Mike has never suggested that she give up her work. “He was willing to admit it might be possible for a woman to successfully combine the medical calling with a healthy, enduring marriage. He was willing and anxious to try to help Maggie combine them.” So the pressure to quit working comes entirely from Maggie and her own ideas of what would make Mike happy: “He wanted quiet evenings with his pipe and slippers and a serene knowledge that if the telephone rang it would be someone with an invitation to bridge, or a wrong number—not a distracted summons calling the little woman out on an all-night confinement case!” So it’s going to be difficult persuading her to walk down the aisle.
Then her uncle, Dr. John King—who raised her from a young age, like all other heroines, when her parents died—writes that he has suffered a heart attack, and his practice in the mining town in New Mexico where she grew up is hers if she wants it. So she packs up and heads for the hills. Interestingly, we learn in the first chapter that what Mike, a former war correspondent, really wants to do is edit a country weekly and write a book, and it seems like Sky River might be an ideal spot to do both. Yet when Mike suggests he go with her, she tells him, “There’d be nothing for you in Sky River.” And she has another reason as well: He shouldn’t do it, she says, because “a man wants the woman he loves to be willing to follow him,” and if he follows her, he’ll be unhappy. Mike answers, “I can see where saving a man’s life rates higher in the human scheme than furnishing him something to read over his breakfast coffee. Maybe the obvious solution would be for the man to follow his woman, for a change. I might free-lance, take a crack at fiction—” But then he shakes his head. “It doesn’t jell, does it?” And Maggie agrees that it does not, and that’s that. Better they break up than try to make their relationship work, regardless of how it might not fit the norm of the day. Given the fact that Maggie has made a career in what was then considered “a man’s world,” you’d think she would be more open to bucking tradition, but apparently not.
En route to Sky River, she travels in a bus with just one other passenger, Chris Rutledge, the general manager of the Fleming mine company, which is the big operation in the area. “He tried to flirt with Maggie, and was cheerfully unabashed when she ignored him. His overtures failing to draw her into conversation, he talked lazily to no one in particular. Today, he informed the sun-flooded, pine-scented world, the scenery inside the stage was even more beautiful than the outside. He meant to write a letter to the company officials, commending them and suggesting that such pleasant interior decorations be made a permanent feature of the service.” Before long, naturally, the two are best friends, going on long hikes up the local mountains and working to restore an old house she’s bought.
The problem is that Chris is the property of Diane Fleming, the daughter of the prominent Fleming family. Diane is a cold, beautiful vixen, and also a state senator. She has no qualms about informing Maggie early on that Chris is hers and she should back off. So Maggie keeps her relationship with Chris platonic, telling him that although “the idea of your kissing me isn’t obnoxious to me,” she has another boyfriend and he has another girlfriend. But they’re still hanging out, and Diane has her revenge when she asks the senate to table a bill that would have funded a hospital in Sky River, which has long been a dream of Maggie’s Uncle John. Chris brings Maggie a copy of the newspaper article announcing this development, and Diane shows up drunk not much later for a cheap, fabulous brawl in which Chris tells Diane that he loves Maggie, not her, and then takes Diane home. As Maggie is recovering on the front porch, who should turn up but Mike—just as the phone rings, and it’s Diane, saying that she has shot Chris. Which sort of puts an end to any chance Diane might have had of winning Chris back.
Mike lingers around town for weeks afterward, getting involved with the local newspaper, writing free-lance and working on a book (sound familiar?). He’s also helping young Bill Fleming, who always had a hankering to write, get the floundering local newspaper back on its feet. Meanwhile, Chris is partially paralyzed from the waist down. He has to undergo rigorous physical therapy, and Maggie, feeling guilty about her part in his shooting, feels she has to be there for every minute of it, bullying and coaxing and teasing him into just one more leg-lift. Diane, thanks to Chris’ insistence that it was an accident, isn’t facing charges, but she’s drinking so much that it looks like she’s attempting suicide by vodka and tonic. Mike, seeing the amount of time Maggie spends with Chris and how her efforts with him are sucking the life out of her, asks her to marry him, but she believes that if she marries Mike, Chris will lose his motivation to walk. So Mike leaves town, and her. Two months pass, and Chris finally walks across a room—and asks Maggie to marry him, and she accepts. But then Diane is arrested for drunk driving and put in detox. Chris goes down on his crutches to visit her, and comes home looking thoughtful.
You know exactly how things are going to play out from here. Not that that’s always a bad thing. This book is a wonderfully written, amusing, thoughtful, and smart, sprinkled with phrases like, “I freely accord you the selfsame privilege of refusal.” It combines stock characters—the shallow bitch on heels, the rangy cowboy, the sage elderly town doc—with real feeling and motivation that gives the book both a sense of fun and the satisfaction that comes with a well-told story that feels true. The book isn’t without flaws: Early on we spend some time inside Bill Fleming’s head, which made me think that he was to be Maggie’s new boyfriend, and at book’s end it’s still not clear why this detour was necessary. Mike’s reasons (slim as they appear) for not going to Sky River with Maggie at the beginning of the story are completely ignored when he does move there in the end, undoing the central angst of the entire book. And the psychology of Maggie’s refusal to marry Mike is somewhat explained, but she never internalizes these lessons to the extent that her acceptance of him makes much sense. But overall, this is an engaging and enjoyable book that even moved me to a few tears in places. It’s a nurse novel (about a doctor) that wants to be a real story, and succeeds in a way that few do.
Lady Doctor
By Adelaide Humphries, ©1963Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti
Lady doctor—young girl in love—each describes a different kind of woman. Yet each applied to lovely, dark-haired Dr. Billie Whitcomb, who fell in love with a handsome neighbor with an adorable son and a wife who was strangely missing. Billie suddenly must face a girl’s most agonizing decision: What kind of woman was she going to be?
GRADE: C+
BEST QUOTES:
“The fact you’re an attractive female in no manner detracts from your capabilities.”
“Most men like to beat women at games, not because of a lack of chivalry, but because, as Red claimed, women had come to equal men on so many planes that about all there was left for men to excel in was such trivial competition. Red insisted that women now ruled the universe.”
REVIEW:
Dr. Billie Whitcomb is a general practitioner in Tennessee, working alongside Dr. Stuart “Red” Foster. She spends a lot of time with Red, letting him drive her home every night and buy her coffee, though for her it seems to be more of a relationship of convenience rather than true affection. But he admires her as a doctor as well as a person, telling her, “You’re a big girl now—with the right to make your own decisions in your personal life, as well as your professional one.” And she respects him as well: “Red could always make her feel better. It was more than kindness; it was the ability to see the other person’s side of a question, to know how the other person felt, what made him act as he did, even when wrong. And this quality was what would make Dr. Stuart Foster not just an ordinary doctor, but a truly great one someday.”
At the same time, though, he’s always telling her that she has a tendency to follow her heart more than her head—which he bases solely on the fact that she has two X chromosomes—and that this limits her in her profession. “You’ve got to harden that feminine heart of yours in order to get ahead in a man’s field,” he says, and then paradoxically adds, “You should be back in the children’s ward because you are a woman, with a woman’s compassion and love for children.” Also, their dating seems to be curiously contingent entirely on his ability to pay for everything, despite the fact that she is obviously earning a decent salary. “You know that Red can’t afford to take me out often, certainly not for dinner,” she tells her mother, who “hopes that her daughter might do better than to struggle along with a young doctor until he became established.” Does her income count for nothing?
It’s not just with her boyfriend that she is subject—surprise, surprise—to stereotypes. She works with an elderly doctor, Dr. Barnes, whom nobody really likes. He expects her to consult with him before administering any treatment or diagnosis, which she resists—she feels she’s supposed to be working with him, not under him. So she thinks nothing of it when she gives old Mr. Brenner, who is not expected to live after a third heart attack, an injection to help him sleep. The next day she finds he has died overnight, and Dr. Barnes is calling her before the board and accusing her of a mercy killing. She is quickly exonerated by the board, but not content with these back-door dealings, she stops Dr. Barnes in the hallway and defends her need to make autonomous decisions about patients. She adds that she finds it a privilege to work with the experienced physician but she will not be his lackey, and if he cannot work with her as a partner, he should replace her with another doctor. To her surprise, he says he would like to continue with her. “I want you to rely upon your own judgment. Only by doing that can any doctor become a good one. And I guess being a woman has little to do with that,” he graciously allows. “I’ll try to remember that there are some things to be said on the side of youth—and I don’t hold it against you for being a woman.” From this moment on, Billie is Old Barnsides’ number-one fan.
Back at home, single man Grant Shelton and his young son Jerry move in next door. Grant’s wife, Cynthia, has abandoned the family after Grant told her she would no longer be allowed to spend any time on her profession as a violinist. (Why is it always music that these wives leave their families for?) “Cynthia got it into her head that she wanted to resume her career,” Grant tells her with disgust. Billie tells him of a friend who was a brilliant pianist who gave it up after the children came, only to find that “it was like having lost a right arm—a loss that, in spite of compensations, never could completely heal.” Grant cannot even begin to comprehend this, and Billie thinks, “He must be the kind of man who, having won a wife, believed he also had obtained the right to possess her. Not realizing that possessiveness more often destroys than strengthens love.”
Then Red starts getting a little possessive too, pouting for the rest of the night when, on an evening out, Billie has one dance with Grant. “If that guy—any guy—ever takes you away from me, baby, he’ll have to answer to me for it,” he grumps before taking her home early. Grant becomes even creepier, telling Billie, “Don’t ever let me down—destroy that faith again. Remember that, Billie.” Then he gets angry when an old friend of Cynthia’s suggests trying to track her down, and furious that Billie took a short cut through his back yard and discovered that he’d completely dug up the old rose garden back there, when those roses had been the absolute pride of the house’s previous occupants. He even has Billie wear Cynthia’s old head scarf on a drive in his convertible, which she dons with little thought, a common affliction with her.
Naturally, she is immediately attracted to Grant, far more than she’d ever been for Red. She decides that love “should be something to set one on fire. She had not thought of it that way until the discovery that just the touch of a man’s hands could start the blood coursing madly through her veins.” Poor Red suffers by comparison, in the death by a thousand cuts: “Had she picked it out, he wouldn’t have worn the rather loud striped tie, and she couldn’t help contrasting his taste in ties with her next-door neighbor’s.” Red “wasn’t too expert a dance partner,” unlike Grant, who “was so much better that there was no comparison.” When Grant drives, “there were no sudden stops or groans or squeaks, as with Red’s car. No dashing around other cars or trying to climb on top of them.” Then Grant proposes marriage to Billie on their first date, in celebration of his recent divorce. He wants an answer next weekend, and he’s going to drive her up to his house in the mountains, where the nearest phone is miles away. She’s really looking forward to it: “The bass should be biting, with spring just around the corner,” she tells Red, all eagerness and no tact.
Before the fateful weekend arrives, Red makes a proposal of his own—he’s been offered a position in a practice in Nashville, and Billie can come with him and become a pediatrician! But Billie counters that Dr. Barnes, now felled by a stroke, has offered her his very prestigious practice, and Red has to allow that Billie would be better off taking over Dr. Barnes’ practice. “Red had to be honest. This might blight all his hopes, but Billie had to make her own decision regarding her future work. The most important thing was for Billie to be happy. Dr. Foster loved this young lady doctor—all the way.” If only Billie returned the sentiment: “Again, she wished that she could have fallen in love with this nice redheaded doctor.”
Up at Grant’s cabin on that fateful day, Billie has cooked dinner and cleaned up afterward—“that’s a woman’s job,” she says, and he helpfully answers, “then get a hustle on with those dishes”—and she is sitting down before the fireplace when she notices a bit of gold glinting in the ashes, and now we are just waiting, not totally without anticipation, for dumb Billie to turn down Grant and for him to choke the life out of her and bury her alongside Cynthia in the rose garden back home. When she tells Grant she cannot marry him, he gets all frosty: “You gave me your word you would never let me down, remember?” He picks the gold from the fire, and it’s a heart-shaped locket, and then the penny drops and Billie wonders, “Why, he might have hurt Cynthia … Grant might even have killed her …” She’s calmly asking him to take her home when he snaps and grabs her wrists. “Are you running away from me, too, Billie? Just like Cynthia …” Cue the door bursting open and Red barging into the room—
Though in the aftermath the obvious occurs—Billie “discovered that love did not have to make your heart do flip-flops. Love could be a steady flame,” and this is what she has apparently felt, totally oblivious, for Red all along—there’s a little surprise too, which I won’t spoil. Red is a cut above the usual boyfriend in his truly selfless affection for Billie, but he’s not a consistent character, taking her for granted or playing the possessive master, which makes me wonder if he’s supposed to be flawed or if the writer just wasn’t paying a lot of attention. Billie shows surprising and admirable guts when she stands up to Dr. Barnes, and she is clearly rewarded when she gains the old doctor’s trust and practice. But she becomes overly enthralled with Grant despite clear signs of physical and emotional danger and has to be rescued at the end by Red, so again, I can’t decide if this is meant to indicate complexity of character or just poor writing. In the end, the mixed messages without a clear map from the author degrade what could have been a better—but not a great—book.
My Favorite Nurse
By Arlene Hale, ©1968Cover illustration by Charles Gehm
“My favorite nurse” … that’s the way Roanna Evans’ patients at Rockwell General described her. But Roanna, in turn, became so involved with her patients that, if any of them failed to recover, it was like a dagger in her heart. Dr. Bill Benton, head of the department, was in love with Roanna—but he was extremely worried about her tearful concern for her patients. So he did what he thought best: He ordered her to take a leave of absence. Roanna recovered her spirits in no time. She had taken a new job which made but few demands on her time—and even less on her emotions. Besides, her new boss was very attractive, and often took her out on dates. Suddenly an emergency erupted at Rockwell General. A frantic call went out for every available nurse. Roanna knew that Dr. Bill Benton needed her. … But could she face that ordeal again?
GRADE: C
BEST QUOTES:
“If you make a woman stop being a woman, it will be a dull old world.”
“It’s indecent for a woman to look so pretty so early in the morning.”
“So you’re the new nurse. I heard you were a looker.”
“She found herself being very thoroughly and expertly kissed.”
“Listen, sweetheart, there’s just one thing I want out of life: fun. A good time. A pretty woman like you.”
REVIEW:
Roanna Evans is the best nurse at Rockwell General Hospital. But she’s on the brink of going down in flames: She cares for her patients so much that every setback is a knife to her heart. But she has this one patient, the crabby old Luther Holland, who in true VNRN is style quite rich. She’s won him over, natch, and now he is insisting that she come work for him at his department store. She’s not convinced that she’s making the right decision, as she feels she is abandoning important work, but she just can’t take it anymore. So she hands in her resignation and walks out, a free woman who apparently doesn’t believe in two weeks’ notice.
Holland’s Department Store has been a local cornerstone for decades, and the shop is looking a little rough around the edges. But Luther refuses to modernize, even when a new, ultra-modern department store decides to open in town. Ted Holland, Luther’s do-nothing son, grumbles a lot that without a little updating, Holland’s is doomed, but his father refuses to listen to him. So Ted comes up to the nurse’s office regularly to cry on Roanna’s shoulder. And ask her out. And kiss her behind closed doors. She seems to like him, but she’s also wary: Another woman on the staff, Claudia Graham, tells Roanna, “Ted Holland has a line from here to there and it’s a very charming one.” She ought to know, because she’s kissing him behind closed doors, too.
Claudia needn’t worry too much, though, because Roanna is determined not to marry until her kid brother, Kenny, finishes medical school. They are, of course, orphans, and she is paying his tuition and living expenses, so the two have sworn to live hermetically until he graduates, so as not to muddle their concentration on his studies. “I won’t waste my time or your money on girls or any other form of recreation,” he promised her when their parents died. (I did wonder why, if money was so tight, they bothered to pay for Roanna’s nursing school at all, since “once she was married, she wanted to stay home, raise a family, be a housewife.”) But oddly, Kenny has moved out of his boarding house and asked her for a loan of $100. What’s up with that?
Further complicating matters is Dr. Bill Benton, who proposes upon learning that Roanna is going dancing with Ted. In response, “she covered her ears with her hands and shook her head. ‘Please, Bill. Don’t say any more.’ ” Poor Bill. But she doesn’t have much time to think about this new development because longtime Holland customer Mrs. Tadmeier falls in the furs department and twists her ankle. Now she’s suing the store, and this could be the bad publicity that will drive all their customers over to that other department store. But detective Roanna soon deduces that Mrs. Tadmeier suffers from hypertension, which causes dizzy spells, and it was one of these that caused Mrs. Tadmeier to fall—not the scruffy carpet. Crisis averted!
Now all she has to do is persuade Ted to man up and talk to his father. “Did she dare say it? Did she dare give him that little push in the right direction? A man resented a woman trying to bend him to a mold. Was Ted weak or was he just groping?” Judging from his dates with Roanna, he seems to be both. But then Luther drops from another attack, and when she and Ted go to visit Luther in the hospital, Ted finally grows a spine and tells his father he is going to redo the store, and you just know that Holland’s will be saved. Another crisis averted!
Next, Kenny shows up and tells Roanna that he secretly got married and used that $100 for a honeymoon. She is pissed! “I’ve deliberately turned away from love, from getting involved! I’ve worked unbelievable hours! All for you, Kenny!” she shrieks. He stomps off, and she goes on a date with Ted, kissing him with new abandon. He seems to like the reckless Roanna and proposes. She’s going to think it over: “Ted could be the answer to all of her problems, even Kenny!” She runs into Bill, who is attending to Luther, long enough for him to tell her that she’s changed since she started working at Holland’s. It’s a pretty astute observation, considering that her crass attitude only erupted a dozen pages ago, but then, Bill’s a really great doctor.
For our next calamity, we learn that the town’s other hospital has caught on fire and that all the patients are being transferred to Rockwell General. Roanna, recognizing a dire emergency, goes back to work at the department store for half a day before visiting Ted’s office, where she finds him kissing Claudia. She resigns on the spot, telling him that she doesn’t really love him and that he and her job at Holland’s have just shown her that “I could never be happy being anything but a nurse at Rockwell General.” At least until she gets married, and that shouldn’t be long, either, because she’s come to realize that “it was Bill she loved!” She heads off to Rockwell, works for ten straight hours, then reports for duty on her regular night shift. She’s just writing a note to Kenny on her coffee break and enclosing her usual check by way of making up for being such a shrew when Bill stops by her table at the cafeteria. A page and a half sets them to rights, and then we can close the book.
Author Arlene Hale wants her heroine to be several things at once. Roanna is often strongly assertive and taking action, such as with the Mrs. Tadmeier situation and when she is trying to steer Ted and Luther back into each other’s arms. But the text of the book wants us to think she’s a mousy wimp, like when she’s wondering if she dares to encourage Ted to talk to his father or with her plans for abandoning nursing to become a housewife. We’re told several times that working at Holland’s has changed her, but right up until her showdown with Kenny, she’s worrying about Luther’s health and what is going on with Kenny, and telling herself that she likes Ted, “maybe more than just a little.” The never-ending plot twists in the book’s final 30 pages felt like a manic to-do list, with little enthusiasm or excitement. It’s sloppy and uninspired writing which, unfortunately, I have come to expect from Ms. Hale. Even more unfortunately, she was ridiculously prolific. Wish me luck.
Copyright © C-buk2016
