Settlement Nurse

By Rosamund Hunt
(pseud. Miriam Lynch), ©1966 

Wealthy, attractive Nurse Rebecca Hazlett had no great love for the patients of “The Downs,” the slum area where Dr. Paul Coleman had his office, though being near Paul, despite the fact that he hardly noticed her, seemed to make it all worthwhile. But when she met Paul’s friend, handsome, enigmatic, politician Steve Pryor, she found herself eager to help in his fight to clean up the city—working with the poverty-stricken, going into the depths of the slums, mindless of the underworld dangers that surrounded her. Suddenly she realized her life had taken on a new meaning—but dare she confuse it with love?

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“No one was actually rich these days. She might have told him that high taxes and the maintenance of a place like the house of Larchmere Street did not give her parents much leeway.” 

REVIEW:
Wealthy Becky Hazlett is a child, just 21 years old (why must VNRN heroines be so alarmingly young?), fresh out of nursing school, which she had attended in part “because she had wanted to escape from the sort of life her mother had planned for her”—that of an upper-crust society wife—but also because she liked the challenge of it, and the knowledge that she was doing something “most people would find difficult or distasteful.” So, in short, it was most certainly not because she had any burning desire to help people, especially those less fortunate than herself.

Then why is she working in the Downs, the town’s slum, when she “never came into Folger Street without a feeling of distaste”? Well, silly, it’s because she’s in love with Dr. Paul Coleman, who for some unfathomable reason has decided to take up “the most difficult phase of the medical profession in a run-down section of the city where money was scarce and patients put the doctor’s bill at the very end of the list of necessary expenditures.” And why is she in love with Paul? “Because every other young, single, impressionable nurse in the hospital had yearned and speculated, Becky had become interested in him. Because so many other girls wanted him, she knew that she had to have him. It was a form of swimming upstream again.” Well, I guess there are worse reasons.

But needless to say, because otherwise this would be a short book, Paul has no interest in Becky. In classic VNRN fashion, “He never saw her as a person; merely as someone to help ease his heavy burden of duties.” Though  perhaps Becky isn’t being entirely honest with herself; “there was about her face a look of something like aloofness. And too much pride. She had heard herself described, during her training days, as a ‘snob’; and one of her instructors had call her ‘a spoiled brat.’” Perhaps her disdain for the people she works with is not invisible to Paul either.

Then a pal of Paul’s, Steve Pryror, stops by the clinic. He’s running against the forever incumbent for mayor, who has a grifty sort of administration that, according to Steve, helps enforce the poverty that keeps the Downs full, and he wants to change it. He wins the endorsements of Paul and therefore Becky, as well as financial donations from both. But when Steve then publishes an ad in the paper naming them both as financial supporters of his campaign, Becky’s genteel parents are shocked and embarrassed! Furthermore, this puts her in some physical danger from the goons of the Hardcastle administration, but ensuring Becky’s safety is taken up as a personal mission of local ex-con Robbie Hood (self-named, though Paul quips that Robbie “steals from the poor to give to himself”), and Robbie escorts Becky on her work errands, much to her mixed feelings, as she finds Robbie tedious and boring, but recognizes the usefulness of his protection. As her bodyguard, however, he meets her cousin Alicia Coatsworth, who has dropped by the family manse for an extended vacation, and soon Alicia is out on the town with Robbie, wearing clothes borrowed from Becky—and now there’s a photo in the paper of the pair in a seedy nightclub after hours, but the caption misidentifies Alicia as Becky.

Well, this is just too much for her parents, so Becky moves out of the house and into a shabby but clean house in the Downs, where an impoverished widow with two teens is compelled to rent rooms to meet expenses. Becky quickly enjoys being part of a warm, affectionate family so unlike her own, and living in the neighborhood begins to shift some of her condescending attitudes. As she chats up the young daughter, who is keen on becoming a nurse herself, Becky begins to realize her own shallowness and self-absorption. “She could feel no pride in herself as a person. She could see now how false had been her values and motives, how enormous her selfishness.”

Then there is a political rally by Steve after which he is savagely beaten by the current mayor’s thugs—which Becky witnesses along with a slightly deranged old woman who lives in the area. Becky treats Steve on scene, then specials him in the hospital in the evenings until he is out of danger.  Becky and the aged Miss Augusta Shelburne are now star witnesses in the prosecution, and in even more danger. Becky promptly moves Miss Shelburne into the house where she is living so the thugs won’t be able to find her, but unfortunately decides to take this crucial moment to move back home to the safety of her parents’ house, sadly abetted by Paul. “I’ll feel better when you’ve left the Downs behind,” he tells her, though he lives there himself and presumably always will, which will make him quite a hypocrite if and when he marries Becky and she moves in with him.

The rest of the story plays out in an easily predictable plotline, but I did appreciate that Becky is the rare VNRN character who actually grows over the course of the book, and not in an abrupt, unbelievable manner. It is told more than shown—“the change in her did not come overnight, and certainly it did not come easily,” we are told, with examples including her willingness to smile at others on the broken sidewalks—but we still have it nonetheless. My only disappointment with the story was Becky’s step backward when she chucks her independence to run home to Mom and Dad, who had never been particularly supportive of her career, to be “pampered and fretted over” by her parents and their extensive staff. If overall the book has no sparkling prose or even any good quotes to pull out, it’s still perfectly serviceable.

Behind Hospital Walls

By Ruth Dorset
(pseud. William E. Daniel Ross), ©1970 

Also published as Head Nurse

Lena Mitchell’s life changed when her younger sister Jan came to work for her at Middleboro General. Jan was blonde, lovely, vivacious—but also, Lena knew, lacking the dedication she expected from her staff. When a patient of Jan’s died, Lena could find reason to excuse her—for the responsibility may well have belonged to an older doctor kept at Middleboro by political intrigue. Lena had vowed to aid young Dr. Jim Porter in his efforts to save the hospital from such corruption. To the last, she hoped for Jan’s help. Until Jan turned on her—and made a play for the man she loved.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“Lena made a quick check of his condition and confirmed the fact that he was in a coma.” 

REVIEW:
Nurse Lena Mitchell works the night shift at Middleboro General, which is located in Massachusetts, 90 miles north of Boston—and never mind distance actually puts you well into New Hampshire. She has a problem in her younger sister Jan, who also went to nursing school, and who is “giddy and anything but a dedicated nurse. ‘I don’t intend to be one of those self-sacrificing nurses who wear their flat heels out on a hospital floor for fifty years. I’m going to marry me a rich doctor or patient, whoever offers first, and retire just as soon as I can,’” the lovely blonde had confessed on the day of her graduation from nursing school. So when Jan calls Lena, who is the charge nurse of her floor, and asks for a job, these qualities—even more than the minor issue of nepotism—should keep Lena from agreeing. “She really hadn’t had much choice,” we’re told, so Jan gets a job—and upon moving to Middleboro persuades Lena to move into a bungalow with her. Can you say bad idea? 

Premonitions prove accurate when, upon arriving in Middleboro, Jan immediately puts the moves on Dr. Jim Porter, a “young” man with graying hair who had just lost “a beloved wife” to cancer. Jim, who had been dating Lena, is soon paying Jan a great deal of attention, which does make you think a lot less of him, both for preferring looks to character and for moving on so quickly. And a third of the way into the book he’s proven himself to be even more fickle, dumping Jan to go back to Lena, just days after he’d asked Jan to marry him.

Jan doesn’t exactly help her cause; when she has skipped work to date a former patient who owns a club that is rumored to be “a rendezvous for underworld characters,” instead of firing her, Lena flat-out lies to Jim about Jan’s new boyfriend and tries to convince him to stay with Jan—but the next minute she’s kissing him. When Jan walks in on them, he tells her, “I make no apologies,” but then adds, “you should be wise enough not to enlarge on the meaning of what you saw,” suggesting that Lena means nothing to him. What a guy! Can he have one sister and kiss the other? Jan, anyway, knows a liar when she sees one and promptly moves out of the bungalow, leaving Lena in a lurch with now twice the living expenses to cover. Who saw that coming?

Elsewhere in the plot, Jim has been trying to convince the mayor to allocate funds to improve the hospital, but he is convinced that the mayor is so deeply embedded in corrupt schemes that there is no city money left over for the hospital. Then Lena, on her way to work, comes across a car crash at which the young female passenger flings a suitcase at Lena and runs away, and Lena finds the driver dead. Turns out the man is the assistant mayor, and the suitcase is full of cash—which is promptly stolen out of Lena’s locker at the hospital. How can she and Jim prove the graft that was not really evidenced by the now-missing money? Oh, and narcotics have been going missing for the past few months—could that be tied in? Only marginally, and there’s another bald spot on the tires of this bus.

It’s a fairly predictable storyline that wraps up unsatisfactorily. There’s the unsuccessful attempt on Lena’s life, but she’s had years of professional training to keep cool during emergencies, so she responds by screaming a lot. Then Jan turns out to be even more of an evil louse, but in the end she’s really sorry, because “I didn’t dream it would lead to this; that they’d try to kill you,” she says; she’d just been intending for her generous big sister to eat her heart out as a lonely spinster her whole life. “Can you forgive me?” Lena “smiled up at the pretty sister. ‘Of course,’ she said,” and that might be the worst, except that Jim implies Lena will be giving up nursing, as he tells her, “From now on I have other duties in mind for you.” I’m no fan of William “Dan” Ross, who has a habit of creating shallow, unlikeable heroines (see Five Nurses and Resort Nurse, for two egregious examples). This isn’t his worst book ever, but unfortunately that’s the best I can say about it.

This book was also published under
the provocative title Head Nurse
but with an equally hideous cover 

District Nurse

By Faith Baldwin, ©1932

Ellen Adams had good reason to distrust romantic love. Part of her job as a district nurse was to take care of girls who had been betrayed by men they had loved too deeply. She had seen things most girls never saw—marriages wrecked, love lost, and passion mocked by men. But Ellen was blond, blue-eyed and beautiful. Men fell in love with her easily. In spite of what she knew and what she saw, she dreamed of marriage. As a matter of fact she dreamed a good deal about Frank Bartlett, a young and very attractive lawyer. They were in love. Their future together was understood. Ellen’s love for Frank was a glorious dream until one day a girl named Gladys said two fatal words. Gladys, bewildered and tearful, had been betrayed by a man she loved. Ellen asked her to name the man. It was then that Gladys said the words that woke Ellen from a dangerous dream.

GRADE: A

REVIEW:
The great thing about the nurse romance novels written in the ’30s and ’40s is that they don’t know they’re supposed to be formulaic, and they end up being, first and foremost, a good story. Such is the case with District Nurse, which is a fantastic, very well-written novel with a couple of small mysteries to solve and a social(ist) message—oh, yeah, and there’s a romance in there, too.

It’s the Depression, back in the day when last names conferred an actual nationality. Ellen Adams is 24, her sister Nancy is 20. (So they’re English, about the only ones in the book.) Ellen is a nurse for the Visiting Nurses Association. As such, she knows everyone in the neighborhood: immigrant Ike, who sells fruit from a pushcart; Italian Joe, who fixes her shoes; German Herman, “the small round son of the man known to the neighborhood as Accordion Al.” Mrs. Lenz speaks German (“Gott behüte! Ganz verrückt!”) and Mrs. Lippinsky is Jewish (“I’m telling you, I vonder. Meshugge, that one…”). They may be of foreign origin, but the book never looks down on them for it; Ellen is frustrated with Mrs. Lenz for giving her son a bellyache with hotdogs and ice cream, but she’s never disgusted.

Ellen meets her true love while chatting with the neighborhood truant, eight-year-old Bill, about his new-found puppy. The dog escapes into the street and is almost run over by Frank Bartlett. “ ‘Why, God damn youse,’ Bill was shrieking at the top of his small leather lungs, ‘you lousy bastard—’ ” When a third-grader is using language I have yet to see in any other vintage nurse romance novel—and this only on page 17—you know you are in for a treat.

Vying for Ellen’s affections is Jim O’Connor, who has grown up with Ellen. Jim is up to something shady, but we are only given tiny, offhand hints (“a sedate traffic officer … saluted him, grinning, but … afterward looked after the car, its newness, and its expensive lines with a frown of speculation on his Irish brow”). It’s a pleasure to find a book that doesn’t beat you over the head with its plotting.

We’re tipped off to the socialist bent of the novel with its dedication: “Dedicated, in admiration, to the VNA and welfare nurses everywhere.” Ellen’s patients by a rule always live in squalid tenements: “Dim gas jets flickered on the dirty landing casting eerie shadows. In each hallway, as she passed, was the disgrace of an open toilet. … It was not astonishing that so many women connected with work of this type turned almost fiercely radical, seeing what they must see, realizing how little they could do, important though their work was.” And so we are frequently treated to Ellen’s feelings about the poor, how horrific their lives are, and how a little assistance goes a long way—but not so much that it becomes annoying.

This book is far more frank about the baser aspects of human life than books 30 years its junior, in which the protagonist does not even kiss her beloved until they are engaged (e.g. Society Nurse, for starters). On page 2, as we are being given a tour of the neighborhood, we pass a doctor’s practice. “What kind of a doctor is he? He has an uptown practice. They come here to him. A clever hideaway. All women, who come.” One minor figure in the book is kidnapped and raped, then forced to marry her abductor. Unmarried women sometimes get pregnant, and their moral character is an ongoing concern. At one point Ellen argues with doctor and old friend Pete after he implies that he is not a virgin: “ ‘A man,’ said Ellen, ‘can regard his chastity as something to be disposed of as quickly and as lightly as possible. A man can, of course, do as he pleases—deny himself nothing. Not, I suppose, a woman. A woman can—you call it sin in a woman, don’t you?—sin once, because she is foolish, because she is in love, because promises are made her—and that’s her finish, I suppose. It’s a swell world.’ ”

The writing is incredibly snappy; by page 6 I had such a long list of great quotes that I quit taking notes. (Just one example: “ ‘It’s Ellen Adams,’ she called; and then, the sesame that had opened so many closed doors ‘…the visiting nurse.’ ”) We live Ellen’s family’s daily life: their dates, their budgetary concerns, their neighborhood and its inhabitants. We really care about these people. Ellen’s rapprochement with Frank in the final pages actually means something, and the only letdown is that her engagement is understood to mean she will have to give up nursing. “ ‘When she puts me before the work, then I know she really loves me. And you have,’ he triumphed.” Frank may find it a victory, but I thought it was a tragedy. Nonetheless, this was the only letdown in the entire book, which is an overwhelmingly great read.