Hurricane Nurse

By Joan Sargent
(pseud. Sara Jenkins Cunningham), ©1962 

A hurricane in Miami draws a cautiously mixed assemblage to the Flamingo Elementary School for shelter. Among them are: Donna Ledbury, red-haired school nurse, the current girlfriend of the school principal. Hank Fincher, who, according to the school grapevine, had a new girl each year, and who had just jilted Mary Hendley, first-grade teacher, who still carried a torch for Hank; Cliff Warrender, a “gangster” lawyer in Donna’s opinion, but whose worse fault was in defending the oppressed whether they were in the right or not; Melissa and Jack Hartson, whose first baby was destined to be born in the cafeteria of the school, with the aid of Donna and Baby LaRue, an ex-strip-teaser, now in her seventies, who welcomed the hurricane season as a relief from the humdrum of life; Old Dr. and Mrs. Ward, gentle people whose greatest fear was of dying and leaving the other alone—a fear that was never to be realized because of the hurricane; Dusty Hosey and his leather-coated gang of teen-agers, who came looking for trouble, but found their match—and incidentally, friends—in the school nurse and Cliff Warrender. There were others, of course, at the schoolhouse during those three days of the storm, but how the lives of these people were changed by a cataclysm of nature makes an exciting and intensely human nurse story.

GRADE: D

BEST QUOTES:
“You’re polite enough for a divorced couple meeting for the first time in public.” 

“Nothing draws two people together like a common dislike.”

“Wouldn’t it be painful to be the complete lady all the time?”

“New lipstick had made the menace of the storm seem less imminent.”

“Even if you haven’t been here but a month, surely you have heard of hurricane parties? They’re one of the nicest features of our fair city.”

REVIEW:
You’d think a major hurricane bearing down on a school full of frightened Floridians would make for an interesting book. Though there are quite a few adventures in this Hurricane Nurse (see also Peggy Gaddis’ version with the same title), unfortunately the story dwells mostly in stupidity—and the primary sinner unfortunately is our heroine, Donna Ledbury. She is a 22-year-old school nurse about to experience her first hurricane, which she did not realize means that she has to ride out the storm at the school with whatever refugees show up, though that seems an important part of a job description to neglect to mention to your new hiree. She’s not alone, though; principal Henry Fincher is there to lend a hand. He’s a rather hot guy, and the pair have dated a few times—and “she liked Hank. She always had fun when they went out together. But was that love?” Well, a hurricane is certainly just the ticket to help her figure it out!

So off she goes to the high school, unfortunately accompanied by Cliff Warrender. “He was a lawyer, not the sort of lawyer she wanted to know. ‘A mouthpiece’ they called his sort in gangster novels. He had got Genio (the Ox) Alcotti off from a bookie charge. She didn’t want to be friendly with Cliff Warrender.” She’s even scornful of the fact that he is well dressed, though “there was nothing garish about him.” The problem with him in my view is that he comes on too strong, constantly saying things like, “This is my girl, but she hasn’t caught onto it yet,” adding that he’s going to win her over despite her prejudices. She snaps back, for some strange reason, “If you are implying that red-haired girls are man-crazy—”. But Cliff just helps her into the car and off they go to the market where he purchases lots of helpful supplies, and everyone greets him like he’s their best friend. But she’s angry that he’s going to defend a woman who was arrested for shoplifting, even though the woman told him she did it. “She was disgusted with him,” we are told, but the sad part is that Cliff never is allowed to explain to this moron what defense attorneys do, that they are there to keep the system honest and keep people from being given unfair sentences if they are convicted. So her prejudice against his occupation is never dealt with in any satisfactory way, just swept under the rug.

Over at the high school, people show up—even after the hours after which the staff is supposed to turn away anyone seeking shelter, like that’s a good idea? There’s a 90-something couple married for 65 years, each expressing privately to Donna that they can’t imagine how the other will survive after the other dies. There’s a gang of “smart alec” “young squirts,” initially sassy to Donna, but quickly brought in check by Cliff, before he takes off on a run to the hospital to obtain medical supplies that Donna never thought to bring. Baby Larue, a 70-year-old former stripper, shows up in a tiny dress and three-inch stilettos, and carrying her mangy parrot, which Donna stuffs in a locker in the dispensary and promptly forgets about.

Once the storm gets underway, the hijinks ensue! A bunch of middle-aged men show up with cards and whisky, and spend about two solid days gambling, only to take a break for a knife fight, which Donna treats with a tourniquet. Later Donna hears loud voices in the hall and “resolved to do nothing about it.” It turns out it’s a married couple and the husband is beating the wife. With a crowd watching, the man “hit her with his fist with force enough to lift her from her feet. She fell several feet away, whimpering, accusing, begging somebody, anybody, to save her from being killed. None made a move. They only stood.” When Hank finally steps in and is knocked unconscious, Donna, too, just stands and watches. “She did not move to Hank’s side”; only Hank’s wannabe girlfriend comes to his aid. Which is appropriate for a woman who’s always saying that she’s not allowed to do anything unless a doctor tells her, but still!

Then one of the women staying there is robbed of $100, and one of the male refugees is found to have given the kids marijuana. But Donna, now back in her manic phase, insists that everything is fine: “We haven’t had any crime, not really,” she insists, “still argumentative.” “And we haven’t had a death,” she adds—but she should be careful what she wishes for, because while having cake with the old couple, a palm frond comes flying through the window and whacks the old lady on the head, killing her instantly—and her husband has a fatal heart attack at exactly the same instant. Donna’s first words after this calamity, interestingly, are, “I’m glad,” because now they won’t have to be alone. Awww.

You will not be surprised to learn that as soon as the lights go out, though, Donna falls apart. Her hands start trembling, and she’s convinced that everyone in the place is going to die, especially a young woman in labor who can’t walk from one building to another, yet is “pacing up and down, flinging her arms about wildly, moaning and muttering” during her contractions, wailing, “Why doesn’t my mother come? She would stop all this hurting. I want my mother.” Donna is equally helpless: “She had a sudden picture of the girl dying because she was inept, because she was ignorant, because it was dark.” Soon it’s “time for her to grow more nervous, to feel more helpless.” As Cliff heads off to let her deliver the baby in peace, she’s “fighting off the desire to cling to his arm, to beg him not to leave her alone with the responsibility that was hers.” Everyone really needs to pull themselves together! But Baby Larue shows up with some whiskey, gets the mother-to-be drunk—with Donna’s permission—and stays to help, proving to be of far more worth than Donna: “Baby had a good deal of practical experience with the work in hand. And best of all, she remained self-confident and cheerful.” In the next sentence, the baby is born, and now Donna starts worrying that the baby is being held by too many germy people. “I do hope she’ll stay well. We haven’t been able to keep her in sterile places, and she’s already been handled by unsterile people.”

Now one of the young kids in the place gets sick, and Donna promptly starts obessing again: “She fervently prayed that it would not turn out to be acute appendicitis, with an operation indicated.” Guess what? It’s not! But what is it? “Polio? Scarlet fever?” As more of the kids start dropping with the same symptoms, she spends literally two days worrying about what it might be—until the first kid gets a scarlet rash, and now she’s so relieved, because it’s just measles! Even though most of them have gotten their vaccinations!

Between caring for sick kids, she’s starting to flirt more with Cliff, who again and again proves himself to be useful and reliable. But “she didn’t believe that Cliff was the man for her. She honestly couldn’t approve of his idea of the practice of law. He spent most of his time defending criminals. The right sort of lawyer would defend the law, not support those who broke it.” Then, in a very bizarre scene, Donna joins the teenagers dancing in the gym and completely loses control while dancing with one of the hoodlums. When the dance stops, “she saw disapproval in hard adult faces,” and she’s pretty much shunned—Principal Hank even suggests that she may lose her job after such a shocking loss of decorum. “She had made a spectacle of herself. She felt shamed by the scorn of the older faces,” and for the rest of the book she’s apologizing for disgracing herself and the school. But what she’s really upset about is that Cliff had gone off to talk to another woman while Donna was dancing, giving her “a feeling of being lost in the great reaches of the universe, as lost as a child who knows not where to go. Somehow it was in the midst of that feeling of being lost that she knew she was in love with Cliff Warrender.” But wait! Two sentences later, “I can’t be in love with him. I have more sense than to get a crush on a stranger. Even a crush. Certainly I wouldn’t fall in love with one.”

Again and again while reading this book I was overcome with the desire to slap Nurse Donna Ledbury silly. She is badly trained and without the disposition to be caring for a complex group of refugees with few supplies and even less sense; she’s frequently telling everyone that she does not have the authority to dispense medicines, bandage wounds or practice any kind of medicine apart from taking temperatures—but she can’t sterilize the thermometers, so there’s only so many times she can do that. “Nurses don’t give whiskey to patients except on order from a doctor,” she says, after she’s already gotten the mother-to-be drunk. She is a complete disaster as a nurse and as a human being, and I could only feel pity for the man she ended up with. I don’t want to have to pity you, too, so take my advice and run for shelter if you happen to encounter this appallingly awful Hurricane Nurse.

 

Lady Doctor

By Peggy Gaddis, ©1956

When David jilted Dr. Ruth Prescott, her every dream and hope died. Her only thought was to escape the busy hospital and the sophisticated city life she knew. But what help would she find from the bayou people who resented her—and from the man who wanted her so badly he wouldn’t take no for an answer?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“I hope you will look on me as a doctor and not as a pretty woman.”

“Doctors don’t weep, even on such nice broad shoulders.”

REVIEW:
I have sort of a love/hate relationship with Peggy Gaddis. On one hand, her plots tend to be predictable (big city healthcare practitioner moves to the sticks, usually in the mountains of Georgia, and comes to love it) and her writing can be nauseatingly syrupy (“David’s home, she told herself warmly, was in her heart, and her home was anywhere in the world David wanted to be”). On the other hand, they frequently have lively characters and interesting situations, and are laugh-out-loud funny, whether intentional or not. So while I enter into them with an eyebrow askance, I am frequently won over, at least somewhat, by their end (the odious Dr. Merry’s Husband being a notable exception).

Lady Doctor is just such a book. Dr. Ruth Prescott, who is smitten with some guy named David, “since that first night when he had been brought into the hospital, critically injured in a taxicab smash-up.” But he’s been away in the jungle of South America for a year, and she’s been waiting for him … to come home and tell her he’s engaged to a missionary’s daughter. To ease her heartbreak, she does what any sensible professional would do: She chucks her job and moves to a bayou community near Tampa, where only jeeps and motorboats can penetrate the wild country.

There she finds a community divided into squatters (“good-for-nothin’ trash,” according to Maude, Ruth’s landlady) who subsist (quite well, actually) off the swamp, the more genteel Harbor people, and the po’ folk of the Flats. The Flats is a slum belonging to Walt Hubbard, the trading post owner, who overcharges for rent and underpays for wages, keeping the people there in perpetual poverty. Which apparently inclines them toward wife-beating and alcoholism, as Ruth discovers not long after her arrival when little Beatsie Holcombe tears into the doctor’s office screaming, “Pop’s about to kill Mom!” In a fairly graphic scene (for a VNRN) we burst into the filthy, cluttered hovel to find “a thin gaunt woman, face down; over her stood a big hulking brute of a man, a thick leather whip in his hand. The woman’s back was torn and bleeding, and even as Ruth paused, incredulous with horror, in the doorway, the man lifted the whip again to bring it down on that pitiful back.”

This sets Ruth off on a crusade (after she snatches the whip away from Bud and uses it on him a few times) to create a board of health to enforce the laws against slums and beating the womenfolk. On her side is town mayor Len Hudson, who proposes to her the day after he meets her. But the rest of the townspeople either stop showing up at her clinic or openly deride her plans: “Dr. Ed knowed the Harbor, Ruth. He respected people’s rights to live their own lives. And if you’re aiming to stay here, Ruth, I reckon maybe you’d better learn to do the same,” Maude sneers.

But then Ruth is kidnapped by one of Walt Hubbard’s compatriots, rowed out into the swamp, and left on a barge as the sun is going down. “She couldn’t remember who had said it; but she could hear a voice saying, ‘Ain’t nothin’ human could live in the swamp more’n a few hours, come night. Mosquitoes would eat him alive.’ ” Here I had to pause for a hearty laugh, even as Ruth “could not keep back the wild screams that bubbled from her throat” and soon passes out. But little Beatsie has overheard the dastardly plot and runs to Len. The good people of Copeland Harbour, belatedly seeing the error of their ways, and remembering how Ruth took care of Barney “time he stuck a rusty nail in his foot, and sat up with him for two nights to keep him from having lockjaw,” now turn out en masse to find Ruth, burn down the trading post and the Flats, and lynch Walt. It’s quite an ending, I have to say.

I admired how Ruth showed a lot of backbone in standing up for what she thought was the right thing to do, even when she knew it spelled her own doom. I liked how Ruth, delirious with fever after her night in the swamp, calls out for David—and it doesn’t mean at all that she is in love with the man; it’s just that “people in delirium say the darndest things.” And I was pleased with Ms. Gaddis’ occasional ability to see through the sexist situations she herself has set up, as when a friend of Ruth’s, in town on a visit, looks askance at how the townspeople refer to Ruth as “Miss Doc,” because “when we got us a woman doctor, and her so young and pretty and—well, sort of sweet, just saying Doc didn’t hardly seem respectful. So folks got to calling her Miss Doc.” In answer, Ruth’s friend drawls, “I suppose it didn’t occur to you just to call her Dr. Prescott.” In short, this book is sensible and, at the same time, silly, each where it should be—a perfect combination and making for a pretty good book.

A Nurse for Apple Valley

By Peggy Gaddis
(pseud. Erolie Pearl (Gaddis) Dern), ©1964

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“That’s a pretty wonderful thing to happen to a girl, Debbie,” Luana told her gently: “not ever to be lonely or have to make her own decisions.”

REVIEW:
As much as I had looked forward to my next Jane Converse title after reading the delightful Surf Safari Nurse, I dreaded my next Peggy Gaddis title after reading the infuriating Dr. Merry’s Husband. But as Jane’s Nurse on Trial was not as good, nor is Peggy’s A Nurse for Apple Valley quite as bad. While still retaining some of Peggy’s more irritating writing techniques, such as involving us in an entirely different storyline halfway through the book, this story did not make me scream in frustration at the end. Not exactly high praise, but that’s the best I can do with this one.

Luana Ramsdell starts out as a bit of a snot, when on the opening page she is horrified and indignant when her friend, Denise, asks her to take over her nursing assignment for six weeks when Denise is called off to the Caribbean to attend her ailing grandmother. Luana agrees to go to this hill town about 100 miles from Atlanta—it could be right next door to Dr. Merry’s River Gap—but Denise makes Luana promise to keep her mitts off Taylor Culbertson. She thinks the valley’s “leading citizen” is just the bee’s knees, and though he hasn’t proposed quite yet, she plans to make him tumble for her when she gets back.

So Luana sets to work for Dr. Pete Anderson, who is hoping to retire, except there is no doctor in their right mind who would agree to work in such a “ridiculous little hollow in the hills,” as Luana calls it. Yet somehow, she begins to feel “completely at home in Apple Valley.” She soon meets Tay, and though they have little interaction throughout the book, whenever they do she seems to lose control of her bodily functions: “For no sensible reason at all she felt her face go pink with color.” “She caught a look in his eyes that was warm and admiring and that for some completely absurd reason made her heart leap a little.” So every 20 pages or so we witness warm stares and blushing just to remind us that there is some attraction between the two, though you’d never guess it from their dialogue or the amount of time they spend together.

Enter Couple B of the story, the one that steals the limelight until Couple A can be brought together in the book’s last three pages. Debbie Lanford hates all medical professionals because her mother received blood during an operation, became infected with hepatitis from the transfusion, and died of cirrhosis. So when she meets Luana, it doesn’t go well. “I’d hoped when Denise left that we’d be spared having another of your kind up here,” she says. Debbie also runs into Derry Blanding, who is in Apple Valley on vacation but is cagey about his past. He is instantly smitten with Debbie and tries to buy her an engagement ring, but when a busload of kids gets into an accident and he instantly rolls up his sleeves and starts scrubbing, things look grim for the couple’s future. Derry, you’ll be stunned to learn, is actually Bland Deering, an esteemed physician scoping out Apple Valley as a possible site to spend his career. (And yes, his name is really Bland.)

Debbie refuses to see him after his occupation comes to light, but he hunts her down, grabs her by the arm, and tells her, “You’re going to marry me, and that’s that! And you’re going to get over this nonsense about hating doctors and people who are connected in any way with the medical profession. Is that clear?” That’s all it takes: “Her face was wreathed with a radiant smile that lit twin candles in her eyes, and she cried out softly, “Oh, Derry … I’m so tired of deciding things for myself.” This devolves into a nauseating antifeminist conversation in which she agrees to let him “boss me around” because “you’re so much smarter than I am!” He replies, “Now that … is what I call a perfect basis for a perfect marriage—a docile wife and an adoring husband.” A couple of pages later, Debbie—who has previously worn no makeup, a flannel shirt, jeans, brown boots, and a shabby leather jacket—has apparently gone shopping: She appears “smartly dressed in a well-cut linen sheath of a shade that matched her eyes, a soft white sweater swung carelessly across her shoulders.” It must be love.

I have to pause here at the “wherever my man goes, whatever my man wants to do, that’s what I want too!” business. I acknowledge that this book is now more than 45 years old, but did this sort of attitude ever play well? Weren’t nurses, as subjects of romance novels, supposed to appeal to the general public because nursing was one of the few professions open to women, allowing them independence? Luana’s character is admired for her work, and in her perfunctory rapprochement with Tay, no mention is made of her giving up her job. Even Dr. Merry, drippy as she is, is completely dedicated to her career. Is Debbie the dishrag a means of playing it safe with readers who might be nervous about Luana’s self-sufficiency? Were there ever any such readers, or did the author just think there might be? It was, after all, just a year after Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique blew the lid off the idea that women enjoyed being treated like children all their lives.

In another culturally curious passage, Dr. Pete has just delivered a couple’s fifth child. The father, upon finding out that the infant was his first son, “beamed all over his long-jawed face and said proudly, ‘Well, now, Granny, another hoe-hand!’ ” Dr. Pete tells Luana, “He’ll be kind and gentle with Betsy now, for a while, anyway.” When Luana expresses her surprise, he says, “Don’t you ever run into brutal husbands back in Brady Memorial?” Luana answers, “Only a few husbands are brutal and beat their wives.” And Dr. Anderson responds by telling her to run along and get some rest, because tomorrow may be a busy day. Apparently beating your wife, unfortunate though it might be, didn’t bring on anything more than a momentarily furrowed brow in 1964, or at least in this book, as it certainly didn’t warrant any action on the part of the beaten woman’s physician. Another reminder that the “good old days” maybe weren’t so good, after all.

But back to the book: The writing itself isn’t painful. There are the colorful hill country characters, like Aunt Judy, who is, naturally, a witch: “You folks come in and set a spell and let me get you some cider,” she tells Luana when Dr. Pete first introduces them. “It’s been setting quite a spell, and it’s getting right lively.” But it can be sloppy: two consecutive paragraphs start with the same sentence, “Dr. Anderson shot her a swift glance,” not so original that it bears repeating. And all the pink cheeks, as quoted above, are not exactly stretching your writing chops. Then there’s the Peggy Gaddis patented diversionary plot tactic: Bland/Derry and Denise fill Chapters 5 to 13, leaving us just 15 pages to resolve Luana and Tay, in an ending that is bewildering in its rapidity, not to mention completely unbelievable, all that blushing aside. So while it is possible to get through this book, it’s not completely free from irritation.