Beautiful Kelly Jarman was a dedicated nurse, but she was also a young woman in love. And now her heart was torn between her professional pride and her personal emotions. At Harbor Hospital in San Francisco where Kelly worked, she led the demands of nurses for better pay and greater recognition—demands that handsome intern Cass Sterling looked upon with scornful disapproval. Kelly could not stop loving Cass, but she could not desert a cause in which she deeply believed. Nor was her decision made easier when jet pilot Marty Randolph offered to take her away from this scene of heartache. It took a shattering crisis, and a dramatic hospital battle against disaster, to show Kelly the way out of her painful dilemma, and into the arms of the man who was right for her.
GRADE: C
BEST QUOTES:
“What happened to that darling little girl who had bubonic
plague, I didn’t hear any more after she left Pediatrics.”
“We think it’s marvelous that you have two men chasing you.”
REVIEW:
Kelly Jarman works in San Francisco but commutes to her home
in Menlo Park, here surprisingly located across the freeway from the San
Francisco airport (in reality it’s 20 miles south of SFO), where she lives with
her two lively roommates, while her younger sister Babs—newly divorced with a
one-year-old son—lives nearby. It’s not clear what Kelly’s titular “crusade”
is, because though the nurses are planning a mass resignation from their jobs
to get a pay differential for nights and weekends and Kelly is going along with
the idea, she’s not really involved in any part of the organization of the
effort. She does crusade hard to discourage Babs, however, from opening a makeup
and jewelry store, believing that Babs doesn’t have the brains or perseverance
to make it work, to the point that she moves to Telegraph Hill in the city so
she won’t be around to help with the bookkeeping or manning the store on
occasion. Not sure if that’s the most admirable cause to be working for, but maybe that’s just me.
Neither does Kelly seem very interested in the men she is dating: airline pilot Marty Randolph, who takes her out every week or so when he’s laying over in San Francisco, or Dr. Cass Sterling, the intern who has years to go before he can start paying off his medical school debts, not to mention a likely two-year stint in the Army. When Cass tells her he doesn’t have the money to marry her, she suddenly decides “she was only a convenient date” and snaps, “Whatever made you think I was interested in marriage? What’s between us but a few dates?” So Cass, surprisingly thin-skinned, stops calling.
Meanwhile, Marty flies Kelly to Texas, where he is planning on starting a small airline company—and fickle Kelly thinks this expensive venture is a way better idea than Babs’: “With you and Dave so much in love with flying, your venture should get off to a good start. I’ll admit it takes vision to make dreams come true.” And capital, marketing plans, an accountant, FAA paperwork—Babs took a class and studied her brains out, but Kelly still thinks her sister is wasting the legacy that their (of course) dead parents left her—until a man who knows how to put up shelving starts hanging around the store. “He’s what Babs needs—a man who will never kill her spirit but who will give her only so much rein,” Kelly says—not realizing that she herself has given Babs no rein at all while constantly trying to kill her dream. Seems like it’s all about the gender of the dreamer with Kelly. And while she’s “appalled” that Babs is spending her money on a business, when Marty says he can’t marry Kelly due to lack of funding, Kelly is quick to offer Marty her own money, knowing less about his business plan and character than she did about Babs’. Kelly may not have a crusade, but she does have hypocrisy in spades!
Then there’s a huge ship accident just outside San Francisco Bay, and Kelly curiously decides that her best course of action would be to drive to Fisherman’s Wharf and get on a fishing boat heading out to rescue survivors—because a nurse with no supplies on a boat is going to be so much help out there instead of in the emergency department—the walkout has kept her steadfast in refusing to go to the hospital where she could be of real help—and who should climb into the same boat but Cass Sterling? When she tells him she thinks she’s should instead to go to the hospital to help out there during the emergency, he barks, “You little bonehead, you’re doing nothing of the sort. You’re going to stand by your convictions. You believed in resignation once. You believe in it now.” Um, because a mass casualty changes nothing, even temporarily? “She was glad that he had such a way of making things seem all right,” after his persuasive, intelligent, respectful argument.
Of course you know Cass somehow recovers from his concerns about money and proposes—guess who Kelly has been in love with all this time?—and never mind that her salary and legacy never come up as a solution to Cass’s financial problems in her conversation with him they way they did when Marty proposed—why is a single nurse’s money never a consideration to a doctor who “can’t afford” to marry when they are both financially capable of feeding and housing themselves independently?
The best thing about this book is the armchair travel in San Francisco—Gumps, North Beach, Broadway and its “tasteless” clubs, Telegraph Hill. But the main characters have no sense—even Kelly’s roommate enlists in the Air Force apparently to convince her unsteady boyfriend to propose—so if the book is a quick, easy read, the advantage there is that it will be over so much the sooner.
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