Soul Nurse

By Rose Dana
(pseud. William Daniel Ross), ©1970 

Sally Hughes, R.N., had a nurse’s dream come true at Canton General. Her boss was the brilliant chief surgeon, Dr. Stan Thorne. She was respected for her dedication, talent and poise. And two men loved her—the bitter but handsome Dr. Jim Dawson and Stan himself. But Stan was white. Could Sally, a black girl, even hope to surmount the difficulties their love presented in the small New England town? Perhaps she would find a way … then tragedy struck. Canton’s mayor is mysteriously stabbed, a black person is unjustly accused and Sally faces a desperate choice—one that involves not only her man but the meaning of her life. 

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“It’s fortunate the doctor also happens to be adept with a knife.” 

“You’re not the least female in that respect. Your punctuality constantly amazes me.”

“It was those who clung most precariously to a rung of the status ladder who refused to make a break with the pat order of things.”

“You need a steady hand for that brain tumor today.”

“Isn’t that the goal of most of the people these days? They want drugs to make everything seem rosy from the cradle to the grave. It’s no longer fashionable to try and change things. You just take drugs so you won’t notice them.”

“Like a scalpel frankness should be used only by skilled hands, otherwise it can work great havoc.”

“Interns devour little girls like you. You be careful with them.”

“Don’t be so bitter. You’re much too pretty.”

“Loud talk brings on more loud talk.”

REVIEW:
A nurse romance novel, which necessarily delves into the life of a woman, is always a little problematic when written by a man. A nurse novel about a Black nurse is especially unfortunate when it’s written by a white man, and I’ll admit I am even more wary when the author in question is one I’ve never liked, here William Daniel Ross writing under one of his many pseudonyms, who has earned only a C+ average across 16 reviews. And perhaps not surprisingly, this book is somewhat problematic—yet not nearly as bad as I had feared it would be, so that’s a win. 

Sally Hughes is a Black scrub nurse working at Canton General Hospital in New Hampshire’s “largest seacoast city,” which at the time when this book was written was Portsmouth. (I have to state that I once lived in Portsmouth, so I have some expertise regarding this setting.) Sally works alongside Dr. Stan Thorpe, who lost his wife to breast cancer three years ago, leaving him with a now-15-year-old daughter Karen, with whom Sally is especially close and sees regularly. Stan also has fond feelings for Sally, and repeatedly pleads with her to marry him, but though she “perhaps even loved” Stan, she is constantly talking herself out of a relationship with him entirely on racial grounds. “What would be the community’s reaction? Would it harm his career?” she worries and considers, “There were things she and Dr. Stan Thorpe would never be able to share, points of view, emotional feelings about remembered days long past, pride of race and color.” She seldom gives any thought about whether being with Stan and Karen makes her happy—which obviously it does, as she spends an enormous amount of time with them. “It was useless to pretend that being with Stan Thorpe and Karne didn’t mean anything to her. Probably she gained a great deal more from it than they did. For just a short time she was allowed to feel part of a family unit.”

There’s another man in her orbit, Dr. Jim Dawson. “It was only natural that they should be attracted to each other,” we are told, but it isn’t until 18 pages later that we learn that Jim is Black, which I guess is supposed to be the reason why their attraction is “natural”—in the same way it’s natural for every white woman to be attracted to every white man? Jim is an exceptionally talented doctor who has built up a good practice in this predominantly white community, a fact that is repeated often with a tinge of surprise. Jim is described as the stereotypical angry Black man barely under control: “Sally was fearful for him. She knew better than most of the others that beneath his calm professional exterior and mocking, sometimes bitter humor there was an explosive temper. Although now it was carefully controlled, the day might come when some insignificant incident might be enough to touch it off.”

Well, you can be sure something happens, but it’s not insignificant. First the mayor is stabbed in his own driveway—saved in the OR by Dr. Stan Thorpe and his right-hand gal Sally—but the mayor has a slimy colleague, Sam Grayson, who is intent on promoting the idea that the perpetrator was a Black man from Boston—he even uses the N-word—though the mayor declares he never saw his assailant, and there’s not even any evidence outside of Sam’s say-so that any Boston Blacks were in town that night.

Then it is announced that a new “cut off” to Interstate 95 is planned—and it will be passing directly through Blair Settlement, a neighborhood of 150 families. (The actual number of Black people living in Portsmouth in 1970 was about 116, or about 0.4% of the total population, so the book’s number is wildly unrealistic, as is the idea that Route 95 would need an additional on-ramp in this fairly rural community.) But the impending destruction of the neighborhood sends Jim into a fury. Sally tries to assuage Jim repeatedly that “it may not be as bad as it seems,” because “she knew it was going to take a great deal of patience and tact to save this man she was so fond of from taking a big leap into trouble and destroying his career.”

Jim is having none of it, and repeatedly insults Sally, telling her, “I can do without your well-integrated caution,” and calling her a “turncoat,” a “would-be Delilah” who has “lost her identity.” He’s bringing in a big-time organizer from a Black Power group to speak at a meeting he’s calling to protest the plans, and Sally is afraid the move will end in violence, and that general opposition to the project—currently pretty high, according to hospital gossip—will evaporate. Soon Jim is getting hate calls in his office, and he’s decided to leave the area for a big city. “People here only want me around when they’re too sick to think of anything but their own white skin. Well, I won’t be at their beck and call. I’m leaving,” he announces, forgetting that all doctors are “called” by their patients when they’re ill. He wants Sally to come with him, but she’s not sure: “I’d be afraid of being tainted by your twisted thinking, by your stupid hates. Emotional illness is sometimes like physical sickness—it can be catching,” she tells him.

Not only is Jim just endlessly mean to Sally, he never overtly proposes to her, never speaks of any feeling for her other than disgust at her position, only asking her to “go with me” when he leaves town. Stan, on the other hand, speaks often and freely of his love for Sally. “You’ve made life bearable for me again,” he tells her. “I’d still be lost without you. Any time I lose you I’ll suffer. I’m in love with you. We’re ideally suited. I’ll keep on asking you to marry me until you say yes.” When she tells him, “It would be a nightmare. I’m positive it would,” he answers, “If you’re trying to say we are not suited because of race or color, that’s sheer nonsense. I’m in love with you.”

The big town meeting comes to pass, but Sally does not attend, choosing instead to spend the evening at Stan and Karen’s house. The meeting turns out to be a complete bust when the organizer—himself a racist; he tells Sally, “I’m not sure I know any decent white people”—“started ranting about everything under the sun,” Jim tells Sally. “He rambled and raged so that he left the Blair Settlement crowd bewildered.” In the end Jim had stepped up and explained that he was hoping to send a petition to the governor, but by that time the fiery rhetoric had lost some of the crowd. Ultimately the neighborhood is saved—but only for the most banal of reasons, budget. “They’ve made a lot of other cuts in their highway budget but that’s the main one,” we are told. Sally continues to insist that bigotry “doesn’t represent the feelings of most Canton people,” but Jim can’t believe that and is determined to leave town. He also has lost interest in Sally, it seems: “Jim Dawson had stopped proposing to her some time ago. He’d even suggested she marry Stan.”

There’s a lot to think about with this book. Is Sally’s preferred method of just talking to people the best way to save the neighborhood? She explains to a friendly fellow nurse, a white woman who has pointed out that the Black families would have been financially compensated for their loss, that it’s hard for Black people to buy homes because they might not be welcome or may not be able to afford a different home, and the nurse “looked embarrassed. ‘I see now it’s not a simple problem of selling homes and buying other ones. I didn’t really understand what it was all about,’” she says, showing that white people in town are reasonable, if ignorant of the realities of Black lives.

On the other hand, the other extreme of the Black organizer being too radical for a small-town New Hampshire crowd is too pat and seems like a cop out—one has to ask if it was the author’s racially motivated fear that inspired this plot turn. Dodging a real discussion of Jim and Sally’s preferred tactics (though Sally’s is tacitly endorsed as she wins over her work colleagues and roommates with conversation) is lazy, and the medium path of Martin Luther King’s peaceful marches is never entertained, nor is the obvious outreach to the general public through the press or general meetings or a door-to-door campaign. I did appreciate that in her daily life Sally repeatedly and calmly faces down racism with smart retorts, but in the end, her strength isn’t enough to keep me from feeling that this white male Canadian author demonstrates a clear bias writing about a female Black American and her struggles for racial equality. I saw this when the characters’ attempts at strong advocacy were made such a complete failure, and when the people who actually saved the neighborhood were not its residents but faceless bureaucrats without feeling for the problem or the potentially dehoused locals. Even Sally’s totally bewildering final decision about her love life is suspect, and I have zero hope that she will ultimately be happy by choosing the then-culturally accepted path instead of following her heart and going with the right (white) man. I’m going to suggest, though, that it doesn’t mean this book isn’t worth reading. Overall the writing and characters (aside from reactionary Jim) are good, and it’s always important to be able to spot the flaws in writing and thinking, especially when it comes to prejudice. As bigotry becomes more subtle (granted less so recently), it takes more skill to see it, and this book offers opportunity to hone your skills. 

Nurse at Shadow Manor

By Sharon Heath
(pseud. Norah Mary Bradley), ©1966 

To forget the pain of a tragic romance, Nurse Frances Kimpton journeyed to Shadow Manor to act as companion to its elderly mistress. In that quiet countryside she would try to achieve peace of mind. But the peace she sought turned out to be a will-o’-the-wisp as Frances found when she learned the secret of the manor’s other woman—the young and willful niece of her employer. That secret meant danger and trouble. Frances turned to the attractive Dr. Ralph Grant for help. It was well that she did so. For, together, they were able to thwart a plot that could have ended in murder.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“I was expecting a she-dragon in a starched uniform who would glare at me. But this one’s well disguised, apparently!” 

REVIEW:
To have a bad heart fifty years ago seems to have meant to be confined to a virtual prison. Poor Miss Caroline Eldridge, wealthy and only in her 70s, isn’t allowed to do much for herself and spends most of the day knitting, and everyone sneaks their life around behind her back, because “any sudden shock—mental, not physical—could be fatal.” Unfortunately, there’s a very elaborate network of lies and scheming occurring all around her, and it’s up to Nurse Frances Kimpton to protect the poor woman, even as she participates in and even furthers the intrigue.

The story starts implausibly enough when Frances is dragged in off the street to witness a wedding between a pretty, spoiled-looking woman and a weaselly looking man with a thin moustache. She’s en route to her job at an isolated mansion called Shadow Manor to look after Miss Eldridge, a sweet lady who has taken in an ungrateful niece, Eve Garner. You will not be at all surprised to learn that the mystery bride turns out to be none other than Eve, who has left her honeymoon and groom to return to Miss Eldridge’s mansion with nary a word of her recent nuptials. Eve is mean to everyone and seldom home, never saying where she’s going or when she’ll be back, but Miss Eldridge obtains sweet revenge when she decides to rewrite her will, saying that Eve will not get any inheritance until she turns 30 if she marries a man of whom Miss Eldridge does not approve. Fireworks ensue when Eve hears the news!

For her part, Frances, recovering from a heart broken after her fiancé was killed, is clearly over that lad and now has her wily eye on Miss Eldridge’s doctor, Ralph Grant, who is casually friendly. Then Frances happens to be on hand when Eve meets up with her new husband, Leon Josephs, in a whispered but brief sidewalk conversation—super secret! That night, when Frances offers to set out in the dark rainy night to search for the cat, she stumbles and scrapes her hands. She takes the opportunity of her minor mishap to invite herself to Ralph’s cozy cottage to tell him of her suspicions: that she had tripped over a wire slung across the walk put there intentionally to frighten her, and bless his heart, Ralph takes this statement entirely seriously. And now “the memory of this intimate, tranquil time was something she knew she would always treasure,” the little vixen. Wouldn’t it be fabulous if Frances turned out to be a psychotic manufacturing drama to lure in a man she has a yen for? When “no trace of string or wire had been found on or near the drive,” my hopes leapt!

I hate to disappoint you, dear reader, but alas, it was not the case, as author Sharon Heath has chucked that delicious opportunity for something much more implausible: that Leon for some insane reason is out to murder Frances by the most bizarre methods that turn out to be remarkably deadly. For Leon’s next act, he walks brazenly into the house, identifying himself to Miss Eldridge as a window cleaner, and cuts almost through the cord on the sash of a window in Frances’ bedroom. The very next day, Frances opens the window and decides to stick her arm out of it just as the cord breaks and the window comes slamming down! “Which might have been fatal, she thought, had she been leaning out the window!” Leon must be psychic as well as homicidal!

Next Mike Dering, an old boyfriend of Eve’s who had been too poor at the time to propose, turns up, now gainfully employed, and after spending an hour with the young man, Miss Eldrige invites him to stay at the house and tells Frances she hopes Eve will marry him. Ooops! Even if Eve were single she might not have the chance, because the brakes on her car fail and she drives straight into the river, saved by Mike, who happens to be loitering at the bottom of the hill (is Mike psychic too?). Suddenly Eve is a new person, confessing that she’s been changed all along, that she’d “got really fond” of Miss Eldridge, though she’d never bothered to show her anything of the sort. Furthermore, with just one word from Mike, “headstrong, self-willed Eve subsided at once.” Oy.

Frances, seeing another opportunity to flirt with Ralph, tells him he must come to the house that night but that Miss Eldridge must not know it, and Ralph again proves to be either the greatest sport ever or completely daft. After he sneaks into the house; frantic antics unfold! “I just told Miss Eldrige it was a friend of Mike’s who wanted to see him urgently. Miss Eldridge suggested you should have your talk in the morning room, but, if I leave you there and go to fetch Mike, she may take it into her head to come and have a look at this ‘friend.’ Perhaps you’d better come out with me, instead. Only I hope she won’t look out of the drawing room window just as we pass!” How complicated can these shenanigans get!

While they are tiptoeing through the shrubbery, Ralph tells Frances that he is going to hire a private detective to look into Leon’s past. A week later the detective turns up a game-changing fact, but when Frances races to tell Ralph, who is arriving at the manor, he chastens her: “‘I came here to see my patient,’ he reminded her, and she had to admit he was right.” It turns out that Leon was already married, and his wife is as psychic as she is, having determined Leon’s plans for Eve, found him in England, learned he was blackmailing Eve (though nobody knew except Eve), and gotten a job at the garage where Eve was dropping her car for repairs. She’s also an excellent (if nefarious) mechanic! And the pair is lucky too—ultimately Ralph and Frances decide that if they go to the police with this amazing story, the shock (of finding out her healthcare team is bonkers?) would kill Miss Eldridge.

Author Sharon Heath has given us several other gentle, sweet if not stellar books with A Vacation for Nurse Dean and The Sunshine Nurse, but this book is more of an unwitting and dopey comedy. The characters and their motivations are inexplicable: Ralph is not especially attractive, Frances comes across as a loopy dingbat, and why would Leon want to injure, of all people, the nurse? Wouldn’t it be better to off the wealthy matriarch first, and then his second wife to win the fortune, since murdering Eve first would put him out of the running permanently? But it doesn’t pay to examine stupidity closely, so all I can suggest is that you leave Nurse at Shadow Manor on the shelf and move onto something—anything—else.

Hurricane Nurse

By Peggy Gaddis ©1961

Cover illustration by Harry Bennett

 

Betsy Stockwell had been taught in nurse’s training to maintain an impersonal attitude toward her patient. Only then could a nurse do her job efficiently. But when the patient was your own father, though, how could you be anything but deeply, personally involved? For Betsy’s father, the beloved Dr. Cal, had had a heart attack and after his treatment in the hospital it would be up to Betsy to see that he made a full recovery. Postponing her plans to marry young Doctor Paul Norbert, Betsy accompanies her father to Florida. They are met by a handsome young doctor who practices medicine with a cool competence that both amazes and infuriates Betsy. What is a man like Mark Everett doing in this Florida wilderness? As Betsy begins to learn the answer, she finds that her interest is more than a professional one …

 

GRADE: A-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Funny thing, how all you fellows beat your brains out and wear yourselves to a nub, trying to heal the human race of ills it’s not a bit anxious to lose. So why? The whole world’s about to go boom any day, so why bother to keep people strong and healthy?”

 

“A really top-notch nurse is half the battle in any operation.”

 

REVIEW:

In the first chapter, Nurse Betsy Stockwell is desperately in love with Dr. Paul Norbert, and they are planning to marry in a few months and move to northern Georgia, where Paul will become a small-town GP in order to pay off a school loan. But then Betsy’s father, surgeon Cal Stockwell, drops of a heart attack after finishing a complex kidney transplant, and has to go somewhere dull for six months to recover, and Betsy insists on going with him. Her separation from Paul is all devotion and sorrow: “I love you very much and couldn’t be untrue to you, ever, not even if I took lessons and tried for years and years,” Paul swears; for her part, Betsy vows, “It’s like that with me, forever and ever and until the day after!”

 

You’ll never guess what happens next. Upon arrival at Blue Heron Cay, Betsy meets Dr. Mark Everett, and the pair takes an instant and deep dislike to each other. This is, of course, a standard VNRN device, but to her credit, Ms. Gaddis meets this head-on. “Love and hate are such terribly strong emotions and only a hair’s breadth separates them,” explains Donna Pruitt, a young hussy who brazenly chases Mark, “and quite often when you think you hate somebody to pieces, you wake up some morning and realize you don’t hate him at all. In fact, you’re nuts about him!” (Betsy responds that it will be a cold day in hell when this happens, and Donna says what we’re all thinking—“Famous last words!”)

 

Betsy attempts to take Donna under her wing and educate the poor misinformed lass about the proper way to win a man: “You can’t win a man by pursuing him that way. Keep him guessing!” she says. Betsy belabors this philosophy through several chapters and repeated sermons: “I think you’re scaring the poor man half to death, going after him as shamelessly as you are. I have a hunch that he’s a man who likes to do the pursuing.” Donna remains blithely unmoved, and it is only Betsy who squirms as Donna links her arm through Mark’s.

 

Then the advertised hurricane strikes, and Betsy and Mark work tirelessly to operate on a four-year-old girl. In their fatigue afterward, Mark holds Betsy’s hand and calls her darling, but surely that’s the lateness of the hour talking! No, Mark insists, they’re in love and must marry, he says the following morning on the beach after the storm has blown itself out. Betsy trots out the specter of Paul, who is no longer described in the adulatory terms we’ve grown accustomed to. Now it’s all obligation: “Paul was counting on her. Depending on her,” she thinks. “She had given Paul her word, and she would live up to it as selflessly and surely as she had lived up to the Florence Nightingale oath.” Again, Ms. Gaddis seizes this metaphoric bull by the horns. “None of which is worth a damn, if you’re not in love with him,” Mark declares. “No man wants a wife who is secretly in love with another man. To go on with your marriage to him would be a wicked, outrageous thing.” But before he has time to carry the point with another smooch, who pulls up to the beach in a battered boat but Donna, and when Mark helps the petrified seadog ashore, Betsy is inanely convinced that Mark will marry Donna.

 

Suddenly Dr. Cal is well enough to leave the island, and Betsy bravely marches back to her job at the hospital, “as though she was walking toward some dreary future.” But she needn’t worry—before too long she catches Paul in the diet kitchen with another woman! She declares herself relieved to be free of Paul, but is still convinced that Mark is going to marry Donna, based on absolutely no evidence apart from Donna’s dogged ambition. Then Donna shows up in Atlanta, shopping for her bridal trousseau: She’s engaged, but—get this—to another man!  Now, however, all Betsy’s lectures to Donna about “chasing” men come back to haunt her, and she tells her father that it would be “too humiliating” to tell Mark that she wants to marry him, after all. Furthermore, “her sense of duty” to a patient she is specialing, a wealthy teenager recovering from a drunk-driving accident, now makes it impossible to visit Mark; why she can’t telephone or write a letter is not explained.

 

But one evening she discovers that the old watchman has allowed her patient’s friends to sneak into the hospital. Totally out of character, Betsy explodes, telling Larry not just that she will have the watchman fired though he is unlikely to ever find another job again, given his advanced age and ignominious behavior, but also that the young father and husband that Larry smashed into was burned to death in the accident, a little fact that Larry’s parents had meant to keep from him. Larry becomes hysterical, and Betsy, with “icy coolness,” “without remorse that she had told him the truth,” shoots him up with a sedative that knocks him out for the rest of her night shift. “She was still blazingly angry at those spoiled brats who broke laws for thrills,” we are told, as if this somehow justifies her brutality. The next morning Larry’s mother lets Betsy go, but for reasons unrelated to her shocking unprofessionalism. This frees Betsy to fly to Blue Heron Cay, where she finds Mark roaming the beach and confesses, “I’m a shameless woman! I’m pursuing you relentlessly!” She tells him that “as soon as I could get myself fired by the patient I was tending, I came straight down here,” as if her scene with Larry was a deliberate, manipulative act meant to free her from her own responsibilities. Now, she decides, “from that moment on she would do whatever was his will.” I wonder what she will do when she decides that obligation is no longer convenient.

 

I was quite pleased with this book up until Betsy’s sudden transformation into a brutal enforcer of punishment to rule-breakers, even more troublesome when juxtaposed with her own “joyous” flouting of a social “rule” that she herself has repeatedly beaten Donna with. Betsy undergoes no reflection on her past attitudes that indicates any growth of character or explains such hypocrisy, and the scene of her unapologetically abusing Larry is actually shocking, offering nothing to the plot but a puzzling glimpse of cruelty in our heroine.

 

Until this point, however, this is a crackerjack book. We get sparkling characters like the quintessential sassy girlfriend, and Mark is a self-assured hero whose initial dislike of Betsy stems from her own snobbery of the island, not from the author’s wish to make him an ass one minute and devilishly attractive the next. The writing offers a self-awareness that is unusual in a VNRN and a welcome change, and we regularly meet enjoyable passages such as, “The boat moved like an elderly lady after a day’s hard shopping, determined to get home but not seeing the necessity of hurrying too much lest she wreck her dignity.” I will even dare to say that I found Mark and Betsy’s crucial scenes to be exciting, which is an extreme rarity in this genre. So though it has a serious flaw in the end, I can still heartily endorse this book as one of Ms. Gaddis’ best.