Kit Cavendish—Private Nurse

By Margaret Malcolm ©1965 

Kit had always taken care to keep her work as a private nurse quite separate from her private life—but she was unable to prevent this happening when she took a job in the Baylis household. And as things turned out, she was quite right to be apprehensive about it.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:|
“Whether we liked it or not, there’s only one world for everybody to share, and the sooner we realized that we had no right to expect a bigger or better share than other people, the more we would enjoy what we had got.” 

“You know, with a face like yours, anyone would imagine you had a sweet, sympathetic nature. Always ready to lay a soothing hand on a fevered brow—metaphorically in this place, of course. But how wrong one would be!”

REVIEW:
Kit Cavendish, who has been working as a private nurse for the past year, has just been hired to care for a wealthy gentleman recovering from a broken leg sustained when he fell while having a heart attack—so he has two ailments to recover from. As it happens, this man lives just outside Kit’s hometown, which she left six years ago for her training. She no longer has any family in the area to bring her back before now, but she accepted the job because she thought it might be fun to go back and see her former haunts. 

It isn’t. It turns out there’s a big new factory in town—owned by her patient, Ralph Baylis—and as a result, “Where there had been fields and farms and perhaps a few isolated houses there were now rows and rows and rows of small, ugly houses, each exactly like its neighbor,” built to house the new workforce. Then there’s a young man from her past, Victor Wrinch, who is now an accountant for the factory. Years ago he’d had some unrealistic ideas about his relationship with Kit, who was too nice for too long about it, until the day she found “she had had to be almost brutal” to clue him in to her disinterest in him romantically. But when she arrives in town by train, Victor is the one waiting to meet her at the station, telling her that he and Ruth Baylis, her patient’s wife, had decided on Kit for the job: “Someone intelligent who could keep him occupied with other interests so that he doesn’t have time to worry” about the factory. Or the fact that Ruth Baylis—incidentally 20 years Ralph’s junior and his former secretary—has stepped into the role of running the business while Ralph is home doing nothing at all out of fear that he might have another coronary. Unfortunately, you can see the trouble coming a mile away, because how could a woman possibly run a company well? “When a woman thinks she’s as clever as a man—or cleverer—she always goes too far, simply to convince other people. And she doesn’t care what methods she uses either.” Another option for this story line—and a more interesting one at that—would have been that Ruth actually was good at running the company, but Ruth starts out mean and lying, so we know something shady is afoot.

Then who should show up but Jason Heathfield! (If I’m going to snark about the Baylis’ age difference, I should also mention with raised brow that he’s 14 years older than Kit.) He is the cardiologist on the case, and had abruptly ditched Kit four years ago for no apparent reason; of course, “she could never marry any other man” after that. So now she has Jason’s slightly warm—or is it just slightly less cold?—demeanor to negotiate on top of the family drama, which includes not just the mystery of what Mrs. Baylis and Victor are doing at the factory, but Ralph’s son Noel (from a previous marriage) to fend off and Ruth’s niece Sue, an overworked and underappreciated Cinderella. Noel likes to play around with life and women, and while Ralph is hoping Noel will come to work at the factory, Ruth just wants to keep her current position as boss and uses Kit as a vehicle to tarnish Noel’s reputation with his father. Sue, of course, is in love with Noel but doesn’t stand a chance, due to her shy demeanor and Kit’s outstanding and forthright personality.

Then one day, out for a walk, Kit meets Jason just as she is setting out a huge picnic, and she asks him to join her. In the course of general conversation, he says something vague and obscure and covers her hand with his—“She knew beyond doubt that what he had said was much more than a mere generalization. He had expressed a personal hope—and one which concerned not just other people, but themselves.” She’s a bit of a mind reader, and she needs to be, because that’s the end of that conversation, except he promises never to let her go without a fight again! Until Kit is abruptly sacked by Mrs. Baylis, and Jason says not a word as she packs up and heads back to her old hospital job in London. “She realized you’d got too strong a character to be got round, so she’d made up her mind you’d got to go”—Victor tells Kit, explaining that Ruth wanted to keep Ralph an invalid and out of the office so she could keep the top job, while Kit wanted exactly the opposite, as she knows it is best for Ralph to be healthy and occupied.

In the end Jason comes around and explains why he’s been such a curmudgeon, but it’s hard to start liking a fellow on page 184 when he’s been an aloof ass for the previous 183. Some of how the tangles are tied up make for sweet endings, particularly the way Ralph Baylis wins yet simultaneously makes peace with his unhappy, frustrated wife. I wish Ruth Baylis hadn’t been such a shrew, as it is easy to dismiss the real problem of there being few real outlets for intelligent gifted women in the 1960s when the woman in question is a scheming harpy. But overall this book is a good read with interesting characters and plot developments—if only the book’s hero had been included in either category.  

NOTE: This author should not be confused with the pen name Margaret Malcolm, under which author Edith Lyman Kuether wrote the novel Headless Beings, her only novel.

A Nurse Involved

By Peggy O’More, ©1968 

Also published as Stand By Nurse

The staff of City Core Hospital was faced daily with the problem of saving the lives of would-be suicides and of trying again and again. Nurse Iva Loring had an inner drive that had taken her through school and training at top speed. She gave too much, too rapidly, to her work and was on the verge of a nervous collapse when she took time off to regain her perspective on life. Now she was easing herself back into work as a stand-by nurse. Her special empathy for the depressed and discouraged made her an ideal nurse for the suicide detail. But there was a question of whether or not she was too understanding and too involved to be effective. Iva, herself, had to examine her values and choose between the career to which she was dedicated and marriage to the devoted young hospital pharmacist who had stood by her without making any demands on her emotions. Could Iva make that choice?

GRADE: D+

BEST QUOTES:
“It is easier to forgive a thousand others than one’s own self.” 

REVIEW:
The silver lining of the dark cloud that is this particular Peggy O’More Blocklinger book—an author who is easily one of the worst—is that it’s the last of her books on my shelves that I hadn’t read. There may be more out there in the world, but I am not planning on looking for them any time soon. 

In this book we have Nurse Iva Luanne Loring, who is given a middle name probably so that the author can engage in her penchant of making everyone’s names alliterate—Woodson Wortman, Henry Hanson, Mark Mansfield and at least four more populate these pages. Iva works at City Core Hospital in California, a medical center that seems to treat only suicide victims—we meet at least six—as well as victims of major car crashes and brutal assaults, including what may be a first in my VNRN reading, a rape (the victim is advised to change her name, join a mission service and move overseas). Iva herself is recovering from a nervous breakdown brought on by overwork, requiring that she spend six weeks on the beach—can I get one of those?—so she’s only supposed to be working part-time, though she does seem to work most days anyway. Her own psychological frailty makes her particularly hip to pop psychology and management of the crazier patients, as in typical clunky Bowman phrasing, “trying to adapt emotional feet to shoes of a contour different from those feet.”

Iva’s main problem is that she is engaged to Woody Wortman, a “druggist” at the hospital, who she hardly ever sees and never thinks of with any fondness or even, it must be confessed, at all. “With her, the goal was marriage to Woody, creating a home for him,” she believes, stating,  “Where home is the principal consideration I must forget myself and think of Woody, think of a place for him to come home to,” and doesn’t that sound like a fun life? Woody conveniently shakes her up a bit when he announces that he has purchased a drug store some distance away and plans to install his mother and aunt in one of the apartments on the second floor—a plan that the anal-retentive Woody had not mentioned until it was done. At least Iva has the sense to realize that this is not good: “He must have studied and planned this move for a long time. He would have scanned its possibilities from every angle. Yet not one word had he breathed to her!”

So while Woody is now miles away building up his new business, Iva calls a hiatus to their engagement. Fortunately she has Dr. Ben Dorsey to act as her chauffeur and luncheon companion—though she certainly does not hint at any feelings toward the man any more than she had toward Woody, and Ben himself is one of those who “has an allergy to nurses. Meaning he’s not married, and if and when has no idea of succumbing to the wiles of a white cap.” So it is shocking in a number of ways when he slips a ring on her finger as they are treating yet another suicide attempt in the Emergency Department, the romantic fool!

Here, as in most Peggy O’More Blocklinger books, we are regularly lectured with her patented psychobabble, as in, “If, as some scientists were insisting, thought was a volatile force, what a variety of poisons could be filling the air.” Yet Iva’s own psychological problems—her relentless drive to overwork—are solved on a single introspective afternoon drive in the country, and a page later she has returned whole, with the plan to go back to school to get a PhD in psychiatry. We also get the author’s tendency to use single words as sentences meant to convey pages of meaning, usually indecipherable to us—“‘Cat,’ murmured Iva, and Woodson looked at her, shocked.” Blocklinger’s prose is stilted and clunky, as in, “Food accepted and ingested,” and, “Iva believed bed was indicated.” There’s none of the hilarious stupidity as one would find with Arlene Fitzgerald’s best; this book is just plain stupid—another Peggy O’More Blocklinger novel to avoid. And please, don’t send me any more!