Dr. Garrett’s Girl

By Miriam Lynch, ©1970 

Why did the name of Dr. Kennett Garrett turn every face hostile, and seal all lips? Lovely young nurse Julie Garrett desperately wanted to find out. For she was Dr. Garrett’s daughter, too young to have really known him, when he died, and now back for the first time in the closely knit New England town where he had practiced. Quickly Julie found work in the office of Dr. Robert MacDougall. Soon she had lost her heart to the handsome young physician, and earned the hatred of the beautiful, willful woman who wanted him for her own. But the trials of love paled beside the threat of terror as a shadowy figure tried to force Julie to give up her search for the key that would unlock the doors of mystery that surrounded the past—and free her to find happiness with the man of her dreams.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“He could be impatient with middle-aged women with lives of such paucity that they wasted his time and their money with imaginary ailments. Once Julie heard him snap at one of them to stop reading medical columns in magazines and go home and scrub her kitchen floor and thank God for her good health.” 

“He, like all doctors, never wrote anything that could be deciphered without eyestrain and loss of temper.”

“They tell me it’s not cause for gossip these days if a girl goes to a man’s apartment at dinnertime.”

REVIEW:
Julie Garrett is on vacation when she arrives in Riverford, the town in which she spent her first six years, and where her father, Dr. Kenneth Garrett, was the town doctor. She’d wanted to see her early home, but is startled when the proprietor of the shabby and struggling hotel turns her away after she reveals she’s Dr. Garrett’s daughter: “I don’t have a room in the place for you. Just remembered,” he tells her convincingly. Confused, she stumbles into the current doctor’s office and meets Dr. Robert MacDougall and finds that he is “someone she had fashioned in her hopes and dreams.” He, of course—overworked, over-dedicated small-town GP—is clueless about the mystery that makes door after door close in Julie’s face after she accepts Dr. MacDougall’s desperate plea that she accept a job in his overrun office and looks for an apartment to rent, to find only a room in the house of elderly spinster Charlotte Spencer, who is clearly lying to Julia when she denies any knowledge of Dr. Garrett. 

Of course there is the usual rich, evil woman longing to hook Dr. Robert, and she is Flavia Harrison, a widow with a four-year-old diabetic son and heir to the fortune of the Lawrence family, who founded the hospital, school, and even Dr. Garrett’s education. She literally stomps over Julie at their first meeting, as she pushes her way past a room full of patients for an “urgent” confab with the doctor, who seems unable to tell her to take a number. Julie is not able to say no, either, remaining at her job for only the crumbs of attention of the overworked doctor who never has time to thank her for her overtime: “He was completely absorbed in his work, and he evidently saw no reason for praise or comment on her long hours and hard work.”

Then the calls in the night, a rasping voice croaking, “You’re not wanted here,” the letters adorably composed of cutout newspaper letters stating the same, the slashed tires, all convince her that she’s wasting her time pining after a man who cares not for her and who is so clearly in the sights of a very determined woman. On the verge of packing her bags, she meets Craig Farnsworth, Flavia’s brother, and now Julie is the one being chased—taken out every night for dinners and dancing. Robert, damn him, amiably chats up Craig in the office when the young man pops in to wait for Julie at the end of the day, “did not even seem to notice that she had a suitor,” such a cute word!

You can see the natural disaster peeking over the horizon at mid book, so you will not be surprised when it starts to rain. The river, so close to a community of poor folks too proud to ask for help, begins to rise. Curiously, this also coincides with a  huge surge in disease requiring hospitalization, so Julie is sent to help staff the local hospital, where she works about 30 hours straight without sleep or even meals—and for once, no “note of recognition or hostility. She had simply been one of them, working as hard as she could to keep death at bay.”

While on her hospital tour, she cares for an attorney, Martin Balfour, as well as her landlady, Charlotte Spencer, both of whom cough up more than a little pneumonia-associated phlegm as they reveal that they, along with Julie’s father and Eleanora Lawrence, town darling and original heir to the town founder’s fortune, were a firm foursome as young people—one wonders if Charlotte hadn’t been, along with the two young men, in love with Eleanora. More truth unfolds—though it’s hard to see how this will improve Julie’s standing in town—though it is perplexing why she is held responsible to such a high degree for alleged sins of her father, who had died 20 years previously—not much to think about in small towns, apparently—but so too does the truth between Julie and Robert emerge, so there’s half an unsurprising happy ending for you.

Though the writing is not much more than average, I did appreciate this book for the actual surprise, after 500+ nurse novel reviews, this book offered in the reason for Julie’s ostracism, as well as in its climactic scene, in which the motivations and villains are laid bare. If the repercussions—does the villain get away with it, as it seems they will? Will Julie be accepted by the community at last?—and the problem of the heroine falling in love with a man who barely recognizes her existence and who promises only that “although he left her often, he would always come back to her” are left unanswered, overall this is a book with at least a bit of novelty to it that makes it worth reading.