Cover illustration by Forté
Carey Dennis had been in love once, deeply in love. Then he had been hurt, just as deeply. Once was enough. If he ever fell in love again, Carey told himself, it wouldn’t be with a woman like Hilda. A woman whose mind and hands had been highly trained, a woman whose heart was big enough to love all humanity—but perhaps not intimate enough to love a man.
GRADE: A-
BEST QUOTES:
“I might forgive you your profession if you were plain and
wore your teeth on the outside and had mouse-colored hair in a bun. Or if you
were the hearty collar-and-tie type.”
“How come you aren’t taking pulses somewhere instead of increasing them?”
“Kathy didn’t like women her own age, she loathed those who,
like Hilda, were younger, but she was wonderful with any woman over fifty.”
“She was forbidden alcohol. Besides, she didn’t approve of
the stuff, except medicinally. However, she had no objection to other people’s
ruining their stomachs and brains, she said cheerfully, adding disparagingly
that, as far as the brains went, few individuals had the type you’d miss, if
ruined.”
“Possibly your aunt feels you might turn into one of these
very modern, hideously efficient young women who scorn all masculine aid and
protection. Perhaps she’d like to prevent it as it would reduce your chance of
marriage.”
“If you married a woman you expected that you would be her
job.”
“Most marriages are a compromise, an armed truce—men and
women having been born natural enemies.”
“Confession may be good for the soul but it could raise
merry hell with married life!”
“The bridegroom instinctively expects to be greeted on the
threshold of the home by the palpitating bride crying, ‘Darling, I thought you
were never coming, the day has been endless!’ ”
REVIEW:
Hilda Barrington is a doctor. Not just any old kind of
doctor, though; she’s a very special kind of doctor. She’s a woman doctor, a “hen medic.” At 27, she has
just finished her training and gone home to Waynefield, New York, to work
alongside her aunt, Jane Redding, who is a general practitioner there. And a
spinster, because being a woman and a doctor is difficult enough, but to add
marriage into the mix is utterly impossible. Indeed, Hilda has decided she
herself will never marry: “That problem hasn’t changed, no gadgets have solved
it. I ought to marry and have a dozen … well, three or four. How can I? Someone
would be hurt, someone neglected even. Unless I stopped practicing. And I won’t,
she told herself fiercely, not for any man alive. I can’t.”
Then she meets this guy … Carey Dennis is 36 and has just
moved to town. He’s very wealthy and recovering from a broken heart, as his fiancée,
Maida, abruptly married a German baron, Franz von Kunst, which he learned about
in the papers. Carey and Hilda get off to a spicy start with plenty of witty
and insulting repartee. So we know where this is going. The problem with this
book is that it gets there too fast, and indeed, as you might have guessed by
the title, Hilda and Carey are married before we’re even halfway through. This
takes some of the starch out of the book’s spine, as now the central question
is not whether they will end up together but rather whether they will get
divorced. It just doesn’t make for an entirely satisfying problem. (A little
zest, however, comes from the fact that the couple actually has a sex life,
which is demurely alluded to on occasion.)
The plot concerns the arrival of Maida and her new husband in
town. It turns out that Maida doesn’t love Franz after all; it’s Carey she
wants, again, despite the fact that he’s married now, and—oh, yeah—she is, too.
So she plots and schemes, aided and abetted by Carey’s discontent with Hilda’s
career and the arrival of World War II. Franz, being both German and
dislikeable, is highly suspect, though we are advised several times that even if
he is an ass that doesn’t necessarily make him a Nazi. (The Japanese cook,
however, is not treated so gently after the bombing of Pearl Harbor; no sooner
does the news come in over the radio than Carey turns to Hilda to say they must
fire him. “I can’t look that little—” he begins, and Hilda agrees to do the
job.) Hilda is always running out of parties when an emergency arises, missing
dinner, and leaving the house in the middle of the night, and Maida is usually
around to point this out to Carey, and then cry on his shoulder about how
frightened she is of her husband.
If the love triangle is the skeleton on which the book
hangs, its heart is the conflict of being a woman, a doctor, and a wife. The
urgency and importance of this question is vastly exaggerated, when viewed
through 21st-century lenses, but it’s not entirely foreign to the
modern era. The situation is summarized in a scene in which Carey is obliged to
help Hilda intubate a seven-year-old boy with diphtheria and is utterly
horrified by the entire experience, and at the same time awed by Hilda’s skill
and competence. This makes him, as “a mere man, feel degradingly inferior. No
man likes that feeling. I’d rather you weren’t—so capable; I’d rather you
screamed at spiders and sickened at snakes.” Her abilities, detrimental as they
are, are made up for by the fact that she’s “a feminine woman. A woman.” And a good-looking one, at that.
Then again, he wonders, “What would it be like to have such a woman in love
with you and yet to know that you had a rival always, one stronger than
yourself, which all her love for you could not deny?” It’s all right for him to
have a career that keeps him out late, and some day there may be children who will
supersede him a fair amount of the time, but that’s different.
Dr. Jane is another mirror on the question of being a woman
doctor. Jane was a real pioneer in medicine, having been born in 1875 and
attended medical school before the turn of the century. It’s regularly
acknowledged that Jane has made greater sacrifices than, and opened the door
wider for, Hilda and the other young women doctors. Jane also points out the
differences in medicine in the 1900s compared to the 1940s—which sound true
even today: “Sometimes it seems to me that we diagnose by gadget. Your
grandfather could tell more about a heart by using his ear, a stethoscope and
common sense than any machine ever invented. Use every new scientific aid—provided
it’s been tested and proved—that you can lay your hands on, but don’t forget
you have eyes and ears and common sense. All the rest is help, new knowledge
and short cuts. But sometimes gadgets fail. They haven’t souls or hearts.”
Faith Baldwin is a wonderful writer, and starting with the
first page I sighed happily when a hospital was described as “exclusively
expensive or expensively exclusive,” at “a small, plump, dyed woman,” that Dr.
Jane has “fine, square teeth, all of them her own.” Her characters are warm
(well, most of them are), true, funny, and smart, people you wish you could
hang out with for more than just 223 pages. The world she creates is relaxed,
humorous, comfortable, and smart. She thinks
about things, mulling them over through the course of the book, and if no easy
answer is found, it makes for a much better book than arriving at some pat,
facile truism with enough holes to make an excellent colander. The second half
of the book is not its finest, but even with that flaw, Faith Baldwin handily outscores
almost any other writer in the genre.
Hi Susannah,
ReplyDeleteLove your blog. I wanted to talk to you about it for an article for a magazine for nurses. You can contact me at: maryduffy310 at gmail dot com. thanks so much.
mary