Nurse Kelly’s Crusade

By Nell Marr Dean, ©1969

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.

Nurse March

By William Neubauer, ©1957

Dawn March had her future all planned—she would marry handsome Dr. Ken Jones and they would settle in the little seacoast community that she loved and build a happy and beautiful life together. But Dawn hadn’t figured on a couple of interferences that became substantial obstacles to the realization of her dream. The first was Ken himself. There was a side of his nature that Dawn was slow to recognize, that shocked her when she did. Ken fancied himself a big-time success, and his impatient ambition was such that it left little room for the kind of life that Dawn had hoped they would share. Another was the entrance of Mrs. Clara Royce, a divorcee of great wealth, considerable beauty and no scruples whatsoever. Clara Royce offered Ken the fulfillment of his dreams—and a short-cut to the success he craved. Dawn began to realize that even the best-made plans of bright young nurses can sometimes get pretty well upset!

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Oh, I know you young girls. You simply refuse to eat proper meals and sleep proper hours. Dash here, dash there, hurt this young man, hurt that young man, call the district attorney a liar, call the newspapers liars, and go careering on your way straight to a nervous breakdown.” 

“What you ought to do is marry me while you still have something to offer.”

“I ought to break a leg. That would interest you, wouldn’t it?”

“A girl so lovely, so obviously decent and well-intentioned, ought to have been married long before this. What had happened? What was her problem?”

“Lovely women aren’t often interested in business.”

“I’m told a woman never quite forgets her first husband.”

REVIEW:
Faithful readers will know that I am a big fan of Bill Neubauer, a truly interesting individual (check out his biography) and the author of about 20 nurse novels (this is the 11th book of his I have read). With Nurse March, he again proves he is capable of a meatier book than most authors, imbuing his story with multiple plot threads that, even if they don’t all easily weave together to create a cohesive whole, nonetheless make for a more interesting read than the usual VNRN. 

Nurse Dawn March is a 24-year-old visiting nurse who provides free care to the residents of Port West, a seacoast California town. She has a “sense of duty that had always kept her moving along and had earned her the reputation, at least in certain quarters, of being a girl dedicated wholeheartedly to her career.” As part of her duties, she is sent to the shack of Dan Colby, an artist who lives at the town dump, who is diagnosed with a fractured patella. He is receiving a monthly stipend from a local business magnate who fancies himself a patron of the arts, which allows him to concentrate on his painting without needing to waste all that time earning a living or even selling the paintings he produces.

Dawn does not  agree with this arrangement and has it out with Dan who, for his part, explains that he doesn’t like to sell his work because “the subjects mean a great deal to me. Or perhaps because expression of any kind is too personal a thing to sell.” She argues with him about it, and he tells her he’s not interested in compromise, which would force him “to paint pretty birds that aren’t birds at all, to paint the sea as it never is, but the way some editor thinks it ought to be.” Ultimately he decides, “She had the same sort of mind that his father had. Bend to the storm! Sell your heart’s blood, if necessary, to provide material comforts for the rest of your body! And live, therefore, without dignity, without meaning!”

Unfortunately, when Dawn finds out that Dan has turned down several offers of work—selling his art to a gallery, accepting commissions from magazines to create artwork for a magazine—she feels it’s her job to make him change his ways. She starts by telling him he’s a bum in a rut, but he responds, “It sems to me that I have a pleasant existence, one with considerable point. I paint. I work very hard to learn what I need to know. I grow. Now what precisely is wrong with all that? Perhaps in another society there would be room for people who like to paint.” It’s not a bad point.

Appallingly, she takes it upon herself to meet with Dan’s benefactor, Mr. Patton, and convince him that he’s ruining Dan’s life by supporting him. Though several art critics have stated that Dan has a lot of talent, she declares that Dan is not gifted or even working on improving his art. She tells Mr. Patton that Dan works “only as it suits him to, and when it suits him to. And he does not learn, and he therefore does not progress, because the only work he does is the work he chooses to do in the way he chooses to do it. That isn’t the way to develop.” Which is ironic, because we have witnessed Dan fielding criticism that the feathers of a painting of a seagull were overdone, and he appraises his work and finds that the evaluation was true, and decides to alter his technique.

It seems Dawn’s biggest complaint is that Dan is receiving the charity of the city through her nursing visits while not contributing to society by earning a living. She misses the point that Dan is in fact being paid to paint, whether he offers a canvas in exchange for the money or not, and it’s not her call as to whether the exchange is worthwhile. “I simply think he must learn the same things we all learn—that is, to earn our living while we’re also preparing ourselves to do the sort of work we want to do. He owes it to himself and to the community to accept the commissions he’s offered. He’s had free medical care and nursing care. To that degree he’s certainly obligated to the county and to the community.” When Mr. Patton offers to pay for Dan’s medical care, she turns it down, telling Mr. Patton that his patronage is turning Dan “into a bum.” Unfortunately, she prevails, and Mr. Patton cuts Dan off. She smugly decides, “She’d at last managed to do Dan some real good.” God forbid anyone else she decides to “help”!

In her personal life, Dawn is also on the wrong tack. She’s hopelessly smitten with dentist Ken Jones, who is essentially just a pretty face. He’s been dating Dawn but doesn’t bother to remember the anniversary of their first date; it’s his kind and generous sister Hattie who invites Dawn to dinner at her and Ken’s house to mark the occasion. Curiously, though, when Ken expresses a desire to open a chain of dentistry offices throughout Southern California and in so doing reap large profits, with the investment of Clara Royce to back him, Dawn is outraged. “I think you should work as my father works, for something other than purely personal gain.” She’s convinced that Clara’s attentions have given him too much ambition: “Much of this big talk hadn’t been hatched in the mind of Ken Jones. Just a month ago, he’d been happily talking about the pleasure he found in living and working in Port West. Then, quite suddenly, here he was talking in grandiose terms and dreaming grandiose dreams.” So she dislikes one man’s lack of ambition but also decries what she feels is too much in another. Apparently Ken is not impressed with meddling women either; ultimately he nakedly says to Clara Royce in front of Dawn, “You stop leading me on, and I’ll stop leading her on.” Ouch!

The man who actually loves Dawn, Wes Overton, is a real estate agent with some interesting ideas, and who seems to fall into Dawn’s sweet spot as far as ambition goes. “I think a fellow owes it to himself and to society to do a good hard day’s work every work day of the year. But I don’t think life should be twisted into a mean grubbing for money. I think a life so twisted is a life without dignity.” He believes, he tells Dawn, that “a person has an obligation to himself to do whatever will make himself and his loved ones happy.” But never-happy Dawn sneers at his attitude, telling him, “There you are just plodding along as you’ve done all your life.” 

Toward the end of the book, the now endowmentless Dan is forced to hire an agent and accept commissions to paint particular subjects for wealthy movie moguls. Dawn is elated, but I was not. Dawn’s father hints that “of late you haven’t been yourself,” but it’s not clear what he’s referring to. Her meddling with Dan’s life? Her moping over her ill-fated romance with Ken?

The book has a truly interesting and complex idea at its heart, that everyone must earn a living even if that means doing something they don’t enjoy on their path toward getting to what they really want. But if the person can find support by some other path, even if that means accepting a sponsorship or charity, is that wrong? Is Dawn forcing Dan to be in some respects a whore to do work he does not value? Should an artist be supported by the community on their path toward developing their technique in a way that a doctor or nurse, for example, is not, and may be forced to work, say, as a nurse’s aide or EMT to pay for their training toward a more complex career? The problem with how this issue is handled in Neubauer’s story is that Dawn is a hypocrite, chastising both Ken for his ambition and Dan for his lack of it and ignorning Wes’s happy medium; she believes Ken should be doing more for free and settling for less, while Wes should be working harder to expand his business. And why is it her job to wreck the good life Dan is enjoying for himself, and even Mr. Patton’s enjoyment in helping Dan achieve that?

The end of the book holds some real surprise twists, and Dawn ends up with a man who deserves better. I had hoped that the self-righteous and shallow Dawn, meddling in affairs that didn’t concern her and chasing a pretty boy with no character, would face some sort of come-uppance that would cause her to realize the error of her ways, but she did not, and I can’t feel that Dawn is a better person at the end of the book. But the story did give me a lot to think about, and talk over with other people who hadn’t read the books, so in that respect it was successful. As usual, Neubauer gives us delightful characters and charming writing, so if the heroine was not all I wish she had been, this book still has a lot to offer, and my high opinion of Bill Neubauer remains unchanged, and even fleshes out my ideas of what his character was that he produced a book with this message.  

The Taming of Nurse Conway

By Nora Sanderson, ©1964

Nurse Nicky Conway already hated Dr. Peter Trenton, whom she considered responsible for her mother’s death—so that when he began to interfere with her plans for marrying Geoff Hutchinson, it was altogether too much to bear!

GRADE: D+

BEST QUOTES:
“From three till six in the morning—that’s the time a night nurse feels like sitting down and writing a last will and testament.” 

“If you keep on flying into rages like this you’ll have a frightfully interesting stroke when you’re older.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Nicola Conway is easily one of the most unpleasant heroines I’ve ever met. I’m not alone in this assessment—pretty much every other character in the book chews her out at one point or another, over her irrational obsessive persecution of Dr. Peter Trenton, who was on call the night her mother, in her 40s, had a stroke and died at home with Nicky in attendance, before Dr. Trenton could arrive. It’s been more than a year since the incident, and still Nicky cannot bring herself to forgive the man and move on, or even keep a less-than-overtly-hostile expression on her face when he’s in the room. Her excuse for her hatred is that Dr. Trenton has always readily agreed that if he’d arrived sooner, Nicky’s mother would have survived—but it’s also clear that there’s some secret that exonerates the good doctor, and that the only person in New Zealand (where the book is set) who isn’t aware of this secret is Nicky herself.

Unfortunately, the pair work in the same hospital and run into each other on a daily basis—and Nicky can’t help “giving Dr. Trenton hell—you know you have, in a cruel, clever way so that he can’t hit back at you,” says her former best friend Jane, who eventually—along with all the other nurses—gives Nicky the cold shoulder for her shoddy treatment of the man, who is much beloved by the rest of the staff, the patients, and every member of the community, who all but stop him in the street and ask for his autograph. The only mystery bigger than the one surrounding Mrs. Conway’s death is why Nicky hasn’t been fired for her constant maliciousness: “If I were Dr. Trenton I’d see that you didn’t last one more day on the nursing staff,” says another ex-friend nurse. “You’re just a spoiled, self-opinionated little brat! We’d all be glad to see you go.”

So Nicky says truly horrendous things to poor Dr. Trenton on pretty much every other page, and by mid-book we readers are also wishing she’d get sacked. Even when—as you know would happen—Nicky decides, “I’ve gone and been mad enough to fall head-over-heels in love with Dr. Trenton,” which seems essentially impossible given her unswerving hatred for the man, her behavior barely budges out of the appalling zone.

A large and fairly stupid subplot involves a childhood friend of Nicky’s, Geoff Hutchinson, who has fruitlessly been hounding Nicky to marry him—and who is a victim of an accident at work that blinds him. As the weeks roll by and Geoff’s vision does not recover, Nicky idiotically decides she will marry Geoff and be his full-time nurse, for reasons that are never entirely clear. Dr. Trenton is convinced that Geoff is faking his blindness, and Nicky is equally sure he is not—giving them fodder for many more exasperating arguments—but interestingly, Geoff himself is barely seen at all in much of the book despite his starring role in the impending ruin of Nicky’s life and in all her arguments with Dr. Trenton. The question of whether Geoff is rendered a helpless baby by his blindness is viciously argued on both sides by Nicky—a hypocrisy that the book itself never acknowledges—depending on who she’s talking to: She insists that Geoff is unable to fend for himself when she’s screaming at Dr. Trenton that she must go through with the marriage, and furious that her fellow nurses are “all so determined to thrust him back into the nursery! Losing their sight doesn’t make a child of anyone!”

Equally perplexing is the huge amount of discussion about Nicky donating one of her corneas to Geoff so he would be able to see, and Dr. Trenton’s refusing to allow it—then agreeing, thinking that Geoff would never agree to Nicky’s losing an eye if he is malingering—but never in all of the talk is the surgery ever discussed with Geoff himself, which would quickly put an end to the debate and at least one source of much arguing. (The whole fake-blindness plot is not a new one, either; we’ve met it in New Surgeon at St. Lucien’s, which was also published under the Harlequin imprint though by a different author, Elizabeth Gilzean.)

Throughout this overly long book, we are subjected to a “self-righteous and critical and downright conceited,” “bad-tempered and resentful” heroine (we are told several times that Nicky is a good nurse, but we never see her do any actual nursing, and even the patients think she’s “as polite as a tiger crouching to spring”). She is frequently and rightfully called a child and told to grow up, regularly makes ridiculous decisions and stubbornly clings to them, and nastily attacks a very kind and patient doctor to the point where I think she could be prosecuted for harassment, if not creating a hostile work environment. Her assault on the doctor—and by extension the patients, nursing staff, and even us readers—drags right through to the final pages, when the foolish mystery about Mrs. Conway’s death is cleared up and we learn that if everyone had just been honest from the outset, we could have been spared 189 pages of maddening irritation. It’s impossible to believe that anyone could love Nurse Conway, and at no point is she “tamed” that I can see—rather, I pity the fool who would spend a single minute more with her than they absolutely have to. Do not, dear readers, I implore you, be such a fool—leave this book on the shelf.

A Prize for Nurse Darci

By Suzanne Roberts, ©1965

Darci Betton loved being a nurse, but at the writers’ conference she discovered a glamorous new world. It almost made her forget Dr. Mark Garrett whose last angry words were branded on her heart. When Jerome Sinclair, the famous writer and Darci’s private idol, showed more than a passing interest, Darci’s new world seemed perfect. Would a new love help her forget the old?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“You wouldn’t want us coming on duty without our coffee, would you doctor? We might give a heart stimulant to that patient who sneaks liquor into his room, and then you’d really have something to complain about.” 

“I’m not even so sure it’s a good thing for the patients to read poetry. Maybe they ought to be resting instead of reading.”

“Being around you makes me want to go out and get myself a job in a munitions factory. I feel as if I’d like to help murder the human race, instead of trying to help it.”

“Look here, I was about to kiss you. And suddenly you’re telling me I ought to have X-rays or something! What kind of a romance is this, for Pete’s sake?”

“Darci almost wished she had fainted. It would have been so nice to be in his arms and be carried to the couch and worried about.”

REVIEW:
I will confess that I’ve had this book on my shelf for some time but have been loath to pick it up, because my experience with Suzanne Roberts has not been particularly enjoyable. Unfortunately, she’s written at least 14 nurse novels, of which I’ve endured only half (every one of them earning a C grade of some sort), and though it’s all right for you to steer clear, it’s my self-appointed job to plow through these bombs—and hopefully my pain will save you some. To that end, let this stand as a warning to avoid drippy Darci Anne Betton, who is a shallow, spineless, insipid patsy. 

She is, though, a very dedicated nurse, and when the new ward resident, Dr. Mark Garrett, shows up, she’s determined to impress him. But he’s a mean, nasty tyrant who has imposed a slate of new rules for the floor—including a three-minute time limit for coffee breaks, even though it takes five minutes to get from the 10th floor ward to the cafeteria. Of course, it’s utterly unrealistic that a doctor could have the authority to insist on these things, and this one’s only a resident, not even an attending! Every nurse on the floor is putting in for transfers except Darci, who thinks, “When he doesn’t look angry—he has the nicest mouth”—the trouble being that he always looks angry.

The good news is that she’s won a story-writing contest, and the prize is free tuition at a writer’s conference, which miraculously falls on exactly the same two weeks as her upcoming vacation. The big draw for the conference is famous but fading writer Jerry Sinclair, who phones Darci at 3:00 a.m. to ask her to pick him up at the airport and have dinner with him. Instead of banging down the receiver on the inconsiderate, selfish ass, “She closed her eyes, joy going through her. ‘I’ll meet your plane, Mr. Sinclair,’ she said eagerly.”

Meeting the man, it is clear that he is a horror show—for starters, he doesn’t let her drive her own car. He’s a slimy type out to use Darci for his own purposes, and it’s certainly not hard to imagine why a writer might be pumping this naïve young woman for details about working in a hospital. Darci, curiously, sees it too—but when he takes her parking, “it might have been pure feminine instinct that made Darci sit very still, not talking, her hand as quiet as a tame bird, there in Jerry’s.” We are not surprised to find, then, that she absolutely cannot say no to the man, and instead foolishly seems to be talking herself into falling in love with him: “Am I falling in love with him? And, she wondered, if this was love. She had even mentioned the possibility that she might be in love. At the time, she had felt a little bit foolish. But now she wasn’t sorry at all she had written to her girlfriend and admitted she might be in love. Because right now, at this very moment, whatever it was she was feeling was either love or hero worship.”

Whatever it was, Jerry quickly proves himself deserving of neither, as he monopolizes her time, manipulates and guilts her into seeing him, and repeatedly insists he’s completely dependent on Darci—and he treats the conference students cruelly and unprofessionally, as well. “I was shook up because I’d phoned you and you didn’t answer my calls. That made me everything seem so—hopeless,” the stalker tells her, jealous of the time she spent writing a letter to her roommate. “Just stay with me. I need you, little girl.” Rather than run to the police department and file for a restraining order, Darci the Dope thinks, “He was probably one of the most intelligent and fascinating men in the world. Wasn’t it true that what she had was the beginning of a very hard crush on this man? And wasn’t it also true that their beloved image of Jerry had begun to fade?” Because Darci always wants to have everything both ways, even fantasizing about grumpy Dr. Garrett, who suddenly “seemed both challenging and exciting.” She has two assholes in her life, and “they were both strangely secretive and moody, and yet, Darci felt an odd tenderness and warmth towards both of them.”

As Jerry pumps her harder for details about the hospital, even Darci starts to edge away—but when the conference ends, Jerry cons her into allowing him to move to her hometown and show him around the hospital. She fears Jerry is writing an expose about the hospital, but nonetheless dutifully trots him around the hospital and introduces him to everyone. Lo and behold, Jerry eventually admits he is writing a scandalous tell-all. “Darci felt an odd sensation of fear go through her. She felt like running from Jerry in that moment and yet, he wasn’t really mean or cruel, or even cunning.” I’m not sure who she’s fooling, because we have seen him be all these things—frankly, seldom is he anything else.

Since she came home lugging Jerry Sinclair with her, Dr. Garrett has been especially frosty. But that never stops Darci—suddenly “she was in love with him. She was in love with that cold, angry man who could be so gentle with a patient but so unbending with the girl who worked side by side with him all day long.” Nurse Darci Betton is a bona fide nut case. But Mark won’t date her, so she keeps going out with her other lunatic. In his room, waiting for Jerry while he showers before another of their dates, she finds his manuscript and reads the lurid tell-all he’s written, which includes a near-miss medication error of her roommate’s, and the suggestion that at a prior job Mark’s negligence had killed a patient. Who saw that coming? Again proving herself psychotic, she wonders, “Could she still go on loving Mark if what Jerry had written was true? […] Darci tried to think more kindly of Jerry.” Really, this woman should just start dating axe murderers and be done with it.

She runs to Mark’s apartment to warn him and he tells her the story Jerry has uncovered—as an intern he had witnessed a car crash, pulled a victim from the wreckage, and the woman had died shortly afterward. This is the sort of “scandal” that frequently befalls people in nurse novels—they can’t in any way be blamed for it, but the hospital turns their actions into a terrible crime, making it a pathetic cop out. The pair end up kissing, and the next day Darci is a wreck, because “the two of them made rounds, attended patients, subbed in Emergency during noon time, and nothing at all was said. No plans were made for the future.” Apparently one kiss means it’s time to start picking out china patterns—not in the coming months, but immediately, and never mind the important work they should be concentrating on. “How can I talk to you about marrying me?” Mark rightfully asks, less than 24 hours after their first kiss—even if “it was a stop-the-world kind of kiss.”

Darci is in love with love, and getting married is her main objective—she’ll talk herself into the first ogre that comes along, and we should not be surprised, because on page three of this book we’re told “Neither girl was in love, but, of course, both of them hoped to be. Falling in love at the Center was something just about every nurse did.” Even her “plump” roommate is planning a wedding, to a patient whose sling she’d changed a couple weeks earlier. This book paints a horrific picture of the lives of young women, not to mention marriage, and I shudder to think of all the kids who’d read this fifty years ago and imagined that this was what they were supposed to be—compliant yet grasping, blind bits of putty whose main objective was to convince a man—any man, no matter how unworthy or even insane—to slip a diamond onto her hand. This book is just depressing.

Nurse Lavinia’s Mistake

By Marjorie Norrell, ©1968

Staff Nurse Lavinia Bolland was tired and worn out by her responsible job in a busy hospital, so when she was offered a post as a nurse in a girls’ boarding school, she decided to accept. Her friends all told her she was making a big mistake—but Lavinia couldn’t agree with them …

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:

“Being a nurse is more than looking neat and laying a cool hand on a fevered brow!”

“Most folks can do a great deal more than they imagine if they’re only determined!”

“Mrs. Wordsworth is a sweet little woman, who asks nothing more than to be left alone to look after her home and to tend the pot plants she’s grown herself from seed.”

REVIEW:

Nurse Lavinia Bolland has been, like many VNRN heroines, working at an understaffed hospital in the throes of a flu epidemic. She’s completely exhausted, so she opts for something most VNRNs reject as a point of pride: the escape hatch. She is nursing the headmistress of a girls’ school through appendicitis, and Miss Clamp—who begins the book named Mary but makes an unexpected change to Laura midway through the book—offers her a job as school nurse. Taking this job is the “worst mistake of your life,” Nurse Lavinia is told, though it’s hard to see how, since the matron offers her her old position back any time she wants it. But the job is seen by everyone in the book as a lesser position: The school doctor Marshall Bowie, her new boyfriend Roy Conliff, even Mary/Laura Clamp herself all tell her that they hope and expect that Lavinia will not be slumming in this position for long.

Part of the reason Lavinia has left town is because of Dr. Peter Noble, a researcher working on infectious diseases who spends most of his time in the lab. Those rare occasions when he emerges he is “always expecting her to be there, ready and waiting to fall in with whatever mood happened to be his at the time.” She’s dated him casually for two years now, though she has no idea what his intentions are as he has never mentioned love or marriage or offered her more than a chaste peck. Nonetheless, she “would be quite willing to wait until he had done all he wished to do …. It would take years, but …  Peter would never be able to hold it against her that she had not thought enough about him to be able to wait.” Pity he doesn’t think enough about her to make any feeling whatsoever plain to her.

So she is happy to meet Roy, who is a coach about to become a housemaster at the boys’ school down the road, and who immediately treats her with far more interest, kindness and ardor that Peter ever did. After a few dates with Roy, their blooming romance is going swimmingly, and Lavinia suddenly realizes that since starting her new job “she had not given one thought to Peter Noble!” From then on, unfortunately, she makes up for lost time by thinking of Peter Noble constantly, and the emotional writhing that ensues quickly becomes wearing.

The hook that she hangs her neurosis on is the fact that a spoiled, wealthy 17-year-old girl has a crush on Roy and is planning to have her father fund his career as a professional athlete—a career and a girl that Roy emphatically tells Lavinia early on that he has absolutely no interest in. One minute Lavinia is confident that “there was nothing underhand or deceitful about him, she would have staked her life on it!” and the next she has a “prickle of fear along her spine” because “of the man himself she had no knowledge, only her instinctive feeling that he was kind and generous, and that he hadn’t a mean thought in his head.” You can see why she would feel so anxious about him, when he’s calling her daily and is disappointed if she puts him off. One minute she’d decided she can’t talk to him about her concerns and the next she does, and he is completely sweet and reassuring, but ten pages later we’re back to worrying the issue to death. She does not deserve Roy.

If more evidence of this were needed, she invites Peter Noble up for the weekend and starts dreaming about this cold clam of a man who has given her literally nothing in the two years she was dating him. Again we encounter her schizophrenic ability to simultaneously think two contradictory things of her beaux: “Now she thought of him, thought hard, of all the friendly outings they had enjoyed, the casual goodnight kisses which had evidently meant nothing to either of them, and wondered. He must think something of her, if only as a friend … and, for the first time since she had come to Avonlea, she felt he might prove the port in a storm she had thought of him as being once before.” With no apparent reason, Lavinia has worked herself into a crisis and thinks of choosing between Peter and Roy as “one of the most important decisions of her whole life!”

It’s just not clear why she feels she needs to consider Peter at all, since he has clearly never considered her once—and when he shows up, continues to trend with a monologue about the bacteria he’s growing in the lab. Finally she realizes Peter is a dud, and her frantic worrying of the last chapter is quickly rendered a tempest in a teapot—so she manufactures another one by deciding she must quit her job immediately so she won’t stand in the way of Roy accepting the rich girl’s proposal, a proposal he has utterly no interest in. Lavinia needs some serious therapy.

In the interim, Miss Clamp is bizarrely trying to set up Lavinia with Dr. Bowie, though he is clearly in love with Miss Clamp and she with him, and then the dorm catches on fire and Lavinia has to rescue a teacher who’s gone back for her makeup case, and the catastrophe—and a new promotion—spur Roy to propose, and she agrees that she’s always known that they’d be together for always, the liar, and we can close the book wondering if Lavinia will have ten minutes of joy before she’s back in the throes of irrational insecurity, and how long it will take Roy to realize that his betrothed is a nut job.

If Lavinia weren’t so completely neurotic, the book would be pleasant enough, but I just can’t enjoy watching this kind of self-inflicted emotional trauma, and it’s not clear to me why the author would think the endless waffling would make a good book.