Cover illustration by Rudy Nappi
Doctor Stuart Marsden
was too busy for love … until Hilary Westbrook, R.N. joined him in his uphill
fight to better conditions for all the oldsters in the community. Then Doctor
Marsden realized his efficient assistant was also a woman—and a lovely one!
GRADE: C-
BEST QUOTES:
“I wasn’t asking a question, Doctor, not of you. I wouldn’t dare, because you’re a
doctor.”
“She distrusted men who were spectacularly good-looking.”
“From now on, nobody yells at me but you.”
REVIEW:
Some books I look forward to reviewing. For others, I
barely know what there is to say. Nurse Hilary has been hired to work at what
is essentially a hoity-toity assisted living facility. No one’s really sick at
all; their “ills” come from loneliness, shyness, or nastiness. Nurse Hilary
spends her time swooning over Dr. Stuart Marsden, who is a gerontologist and
uses the facility to do his “research” into old people. What exactly he’s researching—do
they prefer green Jell-O to red?—is never made clear, but apparently watching
healthy old people play bingo and crochet is going to advance the field
enormously. He’s got a bee in his bonnet, however, about an unused ward in the
building. He feels this should be used for older people with actual health
problems who can’t afford to pay the high cost of residence at the Senior
Citizens Retirement Club. The SCRC administrator has a different opinion, of
course; he feels that the underprivileged would bring down the tone of his
swanky establishment. So they are at a bit of a stalemate over that one.
Enter Nurse Hilary, who goes manor a mano with the administrator shortly after hearing about the
hunky doctor’s yen for the empty wards, and is tossed out of his office before
she can finish her sentence. But she’s safely established herself as a feisty
gal who will go to the mat for a cause she believes in, and boosted the good doctor’s
opinion of her, so the endeavor wasn’t a total loss. Now there’s just a lot of
pining—and even pitching petulant fits—until he starts to notice her, and tells
her, “I love you—I think.” She smiles to herself, because “she was a little
dazzled by the prospect of what the future must hold for them.” I’ve said it
before, but honestly, if couples in the 1960s got married on as little a
foundation as all the VNRN heroines, it’s a small wonder that the divorce rate
is so high.
The only other things that happen in this book is that
Hilary wrangles with the facility’s resident witch, Kate Keenan. The crone demands
that either Hilary goes or she goes, and the entire population of geezers rises
up, with help from their walkers, and tells “the Duchess” to hit the road.
Hilary intervenes by seeking out Mrs. Keenan, working her miraculous healing
powers on the woman’s shriveled soul, and transforming her overnight into a
generous, gracious woman who will publicly apologize for insulting another
resident and throw her a tea party to boot.
The only point in the book worth noticing is the curious
attitude about two of the seniors who decide to get married. Shy Mrs. Lily-Mae
Barton is starving in her room after her arrival because no one told her to
come downstairs for dinner. Hilary saves the little mouse from a slow,
unpleasant death by cluing her in to the location of the dining room, and as
she steers Mrs. Barton in to lunch, she decides to kill two birds with one meal
and plops Mrs. Barton down at a table with Jason Hodding, a lonely retired
executive who always eats by himself. Love blossoms, and soon Lily-Mae blurts
out in the dining room that Jason has proposed. Gales of laughter ensue, and
even Hilary—who can tell Mrs. Keenan at her venom-spewing worst, “I want to be
friends, because I like you”—can’t be completely happy for the couple: “Once,
she might have thought there was something ridiculous in the love between two
people in their seventies; not funny, not amusing, but faintly absurd. Mrs.
Barton was sixty-nine, her chart showed; Mr. Hodding was seventy-three. Yet
there has been a look in his eyes, as he had watched her, a tone in his voice
when he had spoken to her, that people expected to see and to hear in the voices
and eyes of youngsters. It was, Hilary thought, deeply touching—and more than a
little sad.”
This geriatric romance is so shocking that the facility’s
receptionist, who clearly thinks little of ethics or her paycheck, drops a dime
to the local newspaper. Mrs. Barton’s family comes across the expose in the
morning edition and goes ballistic: “The children are all just furious with me
and so shocked to find I’d make such a fool of myself—and that I’d held the
whole family up to ridicule—and they’re driving up to take me home!” quivers
Mrs. Barton to Hilary. “Jill thinks it’s disgusting for us to want to get
married at our age. She says that when she gets her hands on me, she’s going to
paddle me good!” (Mrs. Keenan, who has by this time abandoned the dark side, quips,
“That doesn’t sound as if they think you’re too old to get married; it sounds
as if they think you’re too young!”) I can only surmise that the horror
everyone seems to feel about this union stems from the unstated fact that, once
safely inside the bonds of holy matrimony, these old people will probably be
having sex!!! How disgusting!!!
This curiosity is clearly an accident of changing social
mores, not any real talent on the part of the writer. Indeed, Ms. Gaddis had
displayed little skill at all in penning this smidgen; reading it you may feel
half asleep, as she apparently was when wrote it. She is capable of much better
(and, it must be admitted, much worse), so I’ll overlook this little
disappointment and move on.