By Teresa Hyde
Phillips, ©1936
Celia Landis looked
across the dingy table at Tony Starr, whose fine surgeon’s hands were toying
nervously with a coffee cup. “No, Tony,” she said slowly, “I’m not ready to be
married yet. I … I haven’t really lived.” And Tony, who knew she was the best nurse
St. Martha’s had ever had, smiled into her impetuous young eyes, and was
silent, thinking, “You’ll be back soon enough!” So Celia tried life—a life not
bounded by nurse’s rules or constant sacrifice, and with the help of suave
Carlie Daklin she became the best photographer’s model in New York. But what of
happiness? Celia had to choose between Carlie—her kind “angel” in this new and
giddy world and Tony—the symbol of a life she had vowed to abandon. Which would
it be?
GRADE: A-
BEST QUOTES:
“The only thing wrong with you is astigmatism.”
“I have had dozens of nurses it seems to me in these last
weeks and I had begun to believe that your profession begets none but worthy
women who look like nothing but disasters on land and sea.”
“Women were such egotists, they thought that what they said
and did and what happened to them mattered so much.”
“I’m a Harvard man. I wouldn’t get myself seriously shot
outside a lady’s boudoir.”
“One’s mind said, ‘One must not think, nor remember, nor
hope.’ Champagne said, ‘Leave that all to me.’”
“Character is a better bet than glamour any day.”
“Women have some silly romantic idea about surgeons. Completely
uncalled for. They have a job, like the rest of us.”
“Men! They let you down. For chivalry, for kindness, you
went to women.”
REVIEW:
Celia Landis is “twenty-one, beautiful and free!” She’s just
graduated from nursing school, and Dr. Anthony Starr, right there on the first
page, is “offering her the prisonhouse of marriage, proffering the ball and
chain.” Good girl, she turns him down flat. “I don’t believe in marriage,” she
says. “I don’t want to be tied down. I want to see things, to do things, to
find out for myself. I want to be on my own.” The author, interestingly,
doesn’t seem to be on the side of her heroine, as Dr. Starr, who “knew that
only in bonds is there freedom,” is smiling condescendingly at Celia.
It seems that Celia thinks she has made a mistake by
becoming a nurse. She was forced into it when both her parents died her
freshman year in college and there was no money to pay for her education. Now
she has no other option but to work to support herself, though she is
not interested in dedicating her life, “as that of his wife must be, to illness”
and is hoping to find another career option. “I’m not tough,” she tells him. “I
want the beauty and the fun of life.” Of course, she is nonetheless “an
exceptionally good nurse,” as VNRN heroines, reluctant though they may be, usually are.
She loses her first two cases because men in the house
insist on forcing themselves on her, and the head of the nursing registry of
course blames Celia for this. “If there was anything to be deplored in a nurse,
it was beauty. Beauty. Detestable quality, leading only to trouble,” the woman
thinks. In the depths of despair that she will never get another nursing job, Celia runs into Tony and his boss, Dr. Alderdice, and the pair take her
to lunch. Afterward, as Celia tries to tell Tony about her fears, he dutifully
proposes again, though Celia thinks he does not mean it and decides she’s not
sure who he really is. “She felt that she no longer had any hold on him. None
whatsoever.”
Then Carleton Daklin, the husband of one of her patients who
had fired her, calls her up and offers her a modeling job. He is the head of an
advertising agency and is looking for a nurse to pose in a series of ten ads
for the National Hygiene Council, and the pay is $1,000—an enormous sum in the
wake of the Great Depression, when a furnished two-bedroom apartment on East 43rd Street costs $120 a month. She takes the job, and when Tony calls her to say
he’s taking a trip to the West Indies to do germ research, she tells him of her
triumph. He is happy for her, but less so when he hangs up the phone, though he
berates himself for his idiocy. “Had he for a minute thought she would say to
him: ‘Tony, my darling, nothing that happens to me is of the slightest interest,
there’s only you and your life.’” Now he is the one thinking he has lost Celia,
but “he knew Celia, he thought, better than she knew herself.”
Then United Models calls, and soon the phone is ringing off
the hook. Eventually Tony comes home and phones her, and he’s dismayed with
her new life. “What had this girl thrown over? A real job, the greatest thing
in the world—medicine,” he thinks, again frustrated that she did not ask him
how his trip had gone. She goes out to dinner with Tony and enjoys his companionship, believes “there was no one like him, no one who could touch him
in any way.” But he again sneers at her new profession with “amused malice” and
tells her she should not have given up nursing so soon. “As a nurse, Celia
Landis was a bust on her first two tries and only because she let herself think
of herself as a bust,” he says. She is torn between her desire to live her own
life and her attraction for him, but chooses the former, though she’s not
certain for how long: “When she came to him she must come with everything—heart
and mind and with every intent.”
When Tony walks her home, Carleton Daklin is waiting for her in her
apartment—the first time Celia has seen him since he got her
the modeling job—but Tony does not believe it and stomps out, and when Celia
calls him to explain, he is cold. So she starts going places with Carleton,
becoming the It Girl of Manhattan. “The emptiness Tony left was teaching her
things. It was enlightening.” But one late-night party goes awry and a man is
stabbed. Celia is the only one who can keep a cool head, not surprisingly, but
the scandal lands her in the tabloids with a not-so-gentle assist from a couple
other women in Celia’s circle who do not have her heart of gold—just as the
sordid affair has made her realize she wants out of the glittering birdcage,
the same day an offer to become chief nurse of the OR at the hospital where she
trained arrives, which is withdrawn the next day. Tony runs to her house when he
hears the news, but Celia, wounded to the core, can only snarl, “To tell me
exactly what to do—is that your idea of friendship?” It’s more than a little
true, but Tony says good bye and leaves, Celia thinks for good.
There are the usual crises before Celia is brought back to
her man and nursing career, and if the ending wasn’t quite the complete
perfection I wanted it to be, this is still a really lovely book. The writing
in this book is sparkling: “Behold Miss Celia Landis, R.N., diploma summa cum
laude, drilling through the traffic of Manhattan in a taxi which looked like
any other taxi but which, if the world had eyes, was a jumping-off place from
which one flung oneself into the fun of accomplishment.” It’s a thoughtful book
full of philosophy about life and what is important, but not overly
intellectual. It’s not hard to feel what the characters are going through, and how Celia has grown over the course of the book. If for most of this book
she is not working as a nurse, she is still at heart a nurse throughout. My
only real beef is that the ending does not clearly give Celia the strength she
has earned from her experiences, and it’s not quite certain how she is going to
live up to her new character. But that aside, this is a thoroughly delicious
book, and if you can track down a copy for yourself, the effort will be worth
it.