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.

 

Visiting Nurse

By Alice Brennan, ©1962 

Lovely and dedicated Arleen Anderson, a visiting nurse in the slum section of Saltboro, Michigan, knew that she would need both her courage and love of nursing to face the daily visits to her poverty-stricken patients. But Arleen also had the admiration of two very desirable men:
Mark Wynter—the talented and handsome doctor who gave Arleen the courage and the hope that she needed.
Guy Newman—the promising young businessman who love Arleen and wanted her to become his wife.
Arleen’s choice was clear—a glamour-filled life with Guy, or a challenging existence with Dr. Mark … 

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“Is dirt contagious too, nurse lady? I know the answer to that one. It sure is.” 

“You look very snazzy. Not at all like your usual dull, demure self.”

“If something is within your reach, it loses its value for you.”

“There’s no victim so sure as the one who is certain she’ll never be a victim.”

“I promise not to beat you. Or make you milk cows. Or bring me my breakfast in bed.”

“A husband never keeps you up too late. Only a beau does that.”

REVIEW:
When we first meet Arlene Anderson, she is being whistled at as she walks down the sidewalk to start her job as a VNA. “She was, womanlike, very much aware of the compliment the whistle implied.” And not so much aware of the insult. When I was young this was common practice—and downright frightening if you were walking past a construction site—and it’s not missed by me, anyway. She works in the slums of Michigan, where she seems to have only two or three patients that suck up all of her time and emotional energy. One is Neelie Ryan, a sweet older lady bedridden by arthritis (though she is likely not much older than 60), who has only her devoted if alcoholic and unemployed husband Al to care for her. Neelie is always convinced that her household’s good luck is just around the corner, and wants above everything else to see the swallow migration in Capistrano, California. 

The other is a family of ten, and the mother, Anna Luigui, has just birthed a baby that she had no desire for. It’s a compelling argument for birth control. Anna mostly lies around drunk while the baby is left wet and hungry and dirty, and Arlene pops in now and then to change, bathe and feed the poor little muffin. The oldest child in the household is a winning lass named Rose who has a fondness for tight skirts and the leader of the local gang (adorably called the Roosters), Peter Rossi. Arlene makes the mistake on her first visit of giving one of the younger kids a candy bar, and the poor thing is immediately assaulted by all its starving siblings in search of some desperately needed glucose. Arlene, horrified by her naivete and the desperate nutritional status of the children, shows up next time with a whole bag of candy, even though “she knew candy wasn’t the answer; that the children needed eggs and meat and vegetables and milk.”

Her heart bleeds way more than it should for someone whose job it is to care for people in dire poverty, and she is constantly haranguing everyone to help these two poor households. “Would you prefer steak or chops for our welfare clients, Miss Anderson?” snipes the head of the welfare division. “Perhaps caviar and avocado might appeal to their taste. You do your job, Miss Anderson, and let us at the Welfare Department take care of our own. We do the best we can on the funds we’re allotted.”

She has many conversations with the “dedicated” (uh oh) Dr. Mark Wynter, who lives in the tenements and ministers to its occupants, seldom getting paid for his Sisyphean efforts. “You have to develop a certain callousness,” he tells her over one of their many cups of coffee at Barney’s coffee shop (where the owner promises, “It’s safe to eat in here; you ain’t liable to get ptomaine.” Great.). “You can’t help them all; you don’t have the time or the money or the know-how to change things. So you plow along, helping as best you can, and yet always knowing that no matter how hard you work, you aren’t going to change things for the majority of them. If you succeed in changing the life of just one, that has to be reward enough.”

In her off hours, her sparky roommate Evelyn tries to liven up her life. “Honey, what you’re lacking is good old-fashioned fun. That’s my diagnosis,” she decrees. “The prescription is some nice, wacky dates with some nice, wacky guys, and I’m going to see that the prescription is filled.” The man she comes up with is Guy Newman, who is a slums-raised businessman who was able to escape and make a successful life for himself. He lives in California but seems to make a lot of business trips to Michigan, where he wines and dines and dances Arleen around—and quickly declares that he’s in love with her, that “you should be some man’s wife. You should have a man to protect you and take care of you.” But Arleen’s little heart had been broken by a man years ago—he had proposed, then asked for the ring back because he wanted to marry a woman who was richer and with more prospects than small-town Arleen. Now she’s never going to love again!

But she’s going to date a lot, between coffee and even movies with Mark, who kisses her a lot but promises little, and his dedication to his work and his poor patients is regularly held up as indication of his terrible suitability as a husband. “Heaven help a woman if he ever did get around to proposing to her. She’d starve to death!” To her credit, Arleen is never impressed with these arguments. “If I had wanted life to be safe and secure, I wouldn’t have picked out nursing as a career—especially not this particular kind of nursing.” It is a credit to her that she persists in spite of the incredibly depressing nature of her work, but unfortunately we are never given any reason for her motivation, or any basis of her strength; she just keeps showing up, even after one of the worst gang members, Lonnie, kills a bird in front of her just to demonstrate his own power.

There’s a power struggle going on with the Roosters between Peter, who is seeing Rose Luigui, and Lonnie. Soon Lonnie and the rest of the gang are caught breaking into a doctor’s office in an attempt to steal drugs. Invalid Neelie’s husband Al is beaten up, taken for the suspected narc, but Peter tells the  gang that he’s the one who did it. His life is now clearly in danger to everyone except Arlene, but after Rose finally clues her in, Arlene manages to save pretty much everyone and land herself the man she wants in the last chapter. One wonders what she’s going to do when the next batch of patients comes along.

This book has some interesting philosophical questions, namely how to care for people you can’t really help in a meaningful way, or whether it’s better to care too much as Arleen does or to become callous. These questions are not satisfactorily answered, and it’s not clear how Arleen is going to carry on in this work and still pay the rent after she’s purchased fans and candy for all the patients under her care. The issue of escaping the slums is also treated in contradictory ways; Guy explains how his bad upbringing made him poorly fit to work hard at a job, but says that his benefactor persisted until Guy got himself sorted out; Peter’s exit, on the other hand, is immediate and apparently an easy sell. The characters are not especially interesting or complex, and I was not invested in yet another I-refuse-to-fall-in-love-again-until-I-do trope that was not particularly well executed. Arleen has some admirable qualities, but when she’s the blandest character, it’s hard to get too excited about the book.

Settlement House Nurse

By Jane Converse, ©1965

Donna Marker, R.N., was new to the settlement house and to its surrounding slums. She worked within the sheltering walls of the Pediatric Clinic, with infants and toddlers. Dr. Gar Brevermen, the intense young psychologist in the counseling clinic, tried to open her eyes to the danger of the teen-age gangs with whom he worked. Fearing where her innocence might lead, he made her promise not to get involved. Because she was so deeply drawn to Gar, Donna promised … too easily. When a fifteen-year-old youngster appealed to the nurse to help her break with a vicious girl gang, Donna found she could not stand aside. As a nurse, as a human being, she had to help. So she broke her hasty vow, never guessing that her compassionate instincts would trigger a chain reaction of violence that might cost her Gar’s love—and her own life.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“The muggings are more spirited at this time of the year. The hoodlums smile when they’re stomping you.”

“Ann’s making her mark across the street. She’s become a whiz at arranging flowers.”

“You can tell where a girl stands with a man by her shopping sprees. A few weeks ago I was cornering the market in colognes, like you. I’m at the kitchen-gadget stage now. Watch … you’ll be stocking potato peelers like mad in a little while.”

“He was too anxious to get the cloak-and-dagger meeting under way to notice Donna’s new lounge suit.”

REVIEW:

There is nothing like a 1960s-era gang to warm the heart’s cockles, and in this book we have a few adorable examples: the Rippers, the Marauders, the Steamers, the Conquests, and the stars of the book, the “vicious” girl gang, the Tabby Cats, who are “easily recognizable by the ‘cat uniforms’—tight black turtleneck sweaters, even tighter elasticized black Capri pants, the vests of sleazy cloth-imitation leopard skin.” You just want to pinch their heavily rouged cheeks! The adventures of our nurse heroine, Donna Marker, begin when she runs into the Tabby Cats one night, and the she-devils trip her as she passes by, knocking her to the sidewalk. “Nursie faw down,” they snarl. “Didn’ watchum her footsie-wootsies.” These girls are tough as nails! But one, the not-quite-indoctrinated Ann Julian, leaps to help Donna pick up the contents of her handbag, which have spilled on the pavement. Head gangster, a 17-year-old named – wait for it – Tabby, is needless to say not impressed by Ann’s do-goodism.  

The incident is brought to a swift end when Donna’s so-called boyfriend, psychologist Dr. Gar Breverman, runs to Donna’s side and kindly asks, “What the devil are you doing way out here? Don’t you have a brain in your silly head?” Then he takes her to dinner where he harangues Donna further about how she can’t help these horrible kids. In fact, the pair spends a lot of time going over this ground again and again, with Gar acting the condescending prig who routinely insults Donna, with lots of comments from the author along the lines of, “Gar’s sarcasm could sometimes cut the air like a cleaver,” and “she felt the customary annoyance rising within herself, the resentment that Gar invariably stirred with his protective warnings and his lofty professional arguments.” You will be as surprised as I was, then, to learn that Donna is in love with him, since he demonstrates not one single redeeming quality. Her attitude, also, is a bit nauseating, in that she is constantly berating herself for arguing with him and “creating an unpleasant atmosphere,” because winning his affection, “to have his approval again, on any grounds,” is more important than having him love the person she really is, or being able to be yourself with the man you love.

When Ann Julian comes round to Donna’s office to apologize for the incident, it’s clear that Ann’s heart is not really into this gang stuff, and Donna gives Ann her phone number so they can be pals. When Ann does call, though, it’s because her young brother has a bad case of croup and is turning blue. Donna rushes over and saves the boy with a hot steam shower and a trip to the ED, and then can’t resist the impulse to perform CPR on the girl’s character, as well, by suggesting that Ann become a candy striper and then, if the work appeals, a nurse. Ann jumps at the chance, and soon is the bestest candy striper the world has ever seen, so good that even doctors are asking for her to come and pat the hands of their patients. Gar, however, is not impressed, and he and Donna fight some more, Gar telling Donna that she’s filling Ann’s head with “a big, unattainable, frustrating goal”—because a poor kid becoming a nurse is utterly impossible, apparently—and that her efforts are doomed. The troubles worsen when Ann drops the Tabby Cats, and the gang beats her senseless.  Gangster Tabby’s boyfriend, Chip O’Neill, who is also head of the Conquests gang, seems a little too interested in Ann’s recovery, both from the gang life and her beating, and soon starts talking about going back to school and getting a job. But the Conquests wreak their own revenge and assault Chip in an alley, stabbing him repeatedly, and Tabby, defending him, kills one of the assailants. What a mess Donna has caused with all her do-gooding! She is so repentant now! But Gar, in his worry that Donna is going to be attacked too, comes around and tells Donna that he loves her, so that’s really all that matters, and all the other loose ends are quickly tied up, to various degrees of success—though I’m not sure how much success Donna is going to have with a man who does not seem to respect her.

The book has some humorous writing, and the story trots along smoothly, which I completely expect from Jane Converse. And there are actually some interesting ideas here. From this vantage point 50 years later, both Gar and Donna seem to be too extreme; though it’s theoretically his job to help the troubled youth of the neighborhood, Gar’s approach is to work on winning over only the leader of the gang in the hope that that influential personage can drive the whole herd in a more righteous direction. Donna’s naivete is equally foolish; she suggests to Chip, as he’s recovering in the hospital, that instead of running around in gangs, the boys might instead “turn all that energy into some positive channel ... like a car club. Or an athletic team. You could still compete with the other …” (Chip realistically rolls his eyes, and in the end decides he’s going to stick with the gang after all.) Part of what wins this book a higher mark is its silliness, but the question of how to help underprivileged youth with no hope of a better future is not an easy one, and an unusually deep idea for a nurse novel to attempt to explore. Donna’s love life is an appalling disappointment, so it loses points there, but overall this book is easily worth reading.

Village Nurse

By Joanne Holden, ©1964

Lorena read it in Deke’s glazed eyes. He had lost his battle to clean up River Street. And failure could mean an epidemic. As Deke’s office nurse—and the woman he loved—Lorena had to help him. There was just one way. The one who could save him was Beat Wetherill, the richest man in town. Lorena would go to him—and plead. But she was asking for trouble. Beat Wetherill—once Deke’s friend—was now his enemy. And he was irresistably attractive …

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:

“You’re what is known as a natural dancer. I ought to have gotten the message from the way you cross the office floor.”

“I wasn’t born with a thermometer in my pocket. I’ll date anyone I please.”

 

“You add a decorative touch to this plain office.”

“I’m sorry you felt it was necessary to mix your threat to me and your proposal to Lorena in the same breath.”

REVIEW:

Lorena Loring is a rare nurse with a blot on her record. Of course, it’s ill-deserved: She was once sued for assault and battery for having given a patient a blood transfusion despite the fact that the patient refused it on religious grounds. It’s actually an interesting story, from today’s perspective: An unconscious man, brought to the ED, had been ordered blood. When he came to, he told her to stop it, but she was unable to reach the doctor who ordered it. All she could do was “tell the patient once more she could not stop the transfusion except by doctor’s orders.” It’s curious in that, at least in this fictional event, (1) the doctor’s orders superceded the patient’s, (2) Lorena could not bring herself to at least put a hold on the order until the mess was straightened out, and (3) the patient didn’t just rip the IV out of his arm. I certainly hope this sort of thing didn’t happen even in the long-ago ’60s.

Anyway, she moves back to her hometown of Laurelton, in the Berkshire Hills of (presumably) Massachusetts to escape the ignominy, and quickly winds up working alongside Dr. Derek “Deke” Collingwood. There are other men on her horizons, too: the unfortunately named Beat Wetherill, the heir to the paper mill owner. This “exalted being,” as Lorena describes him, was the object of an alarming high school crush; Lorena had spent her time “lurking near the entrance to the Wetherill driveway, hoping to catch sight of Beat Wetherill. She had even been successful a few times and, as Beat flashed by in his sports car, had felt her heart jump in her throat.” What goes around comes around, though, as now she’s the object of an obsession: former casual beau Clyde Furness is convinced she’s returned to town just for him, and can hardly wait for her to marry him and quit nursing. “I’ve going to have you for my own,” he tells her. “Go on and play at being a nurse, and I’ll be waiting when you come back.”

Dr. Deke wades into the action when he tells her, “I’m not going to make a practice of this, but I’m going to kiss you, and nothing you can stay will stop me. Relax.” I can only hope this never really passed for romantic, because today it’s just creepy. Nonetheless, “Lorena did as she was told and thrilled to his kiss,” but not wanting to get into a relationship with her employer, pulls away and offers him a sandwich. Having disposed of him, she now has to fend off Beat, who walks in off the street and kisses her hard as she struggles to get away. Discovered by Dr. Deke, “Lorena was furious: with Beat for his thoughtless attentions; with herself for not anticipating his actions; and with Deke for having picked that moment to come out of his laboratory.” Curious that she blames not just her attacker but herself and the one who helps her fend him off, even if he is pissy about it, though it’s unclear whether he realizes she was being assaulted.

Naturally, Lorena is soon dating the insufferable Clyde and Beat as well, perhaps just to prove Clyde wrong, who has told her that Beat would “never look at a village girl” like her. Their first date is curious, from a sociological standpoint: Out on a picnic by the river, he puts his arms around her and tries to kiss her, “but she slipped away” and started setting out lunch—and then “silently scolded herself for putting him off so abruptly.” Then she brings up the name of a young woman in town who is putting the moves on Dr. Deke, suggesting that Beat would rather have brought her to the picnic. Beat becomes annoyed, telling her, “You’re a spoiled brat. If you weren’t such a beautiful spoiled brat, I’d be tempted to spank you as you deserve.” She, for her turn, becomes upset by his “resentful attitude” when she had brought up this other woman, and wonders if she should “plead a headache and ask to be taken home.” All these headgames brought me back to junior high, yet Lorena doesn’t seem to mind them and continues to see Beat.

Deke, meanwhile, is busy mounting a crusade against the slum that lines River Street, all owned by Clyde Furness. Sure enough, a small epidemic of German measles breaks out, claiming the child of the local handyman. Clyde’s own nephew Eddie is also a slum victim: There’s a cute little rumble between the River Rats gang and the slightly less imaginatively named Bridgers of nearby Bridgerton in which several boys are injured with antiquated weapons including switchblades, a skid chain, the antenna from a car, and a zip gun, and Eddie is the only fatality. Clyde responds to this personal tragedy by stating that he will publicly (and falsely) accuse Deke of malpractice and expose Lorena’s past unless Lorena marries him and Deke leaves town. Deke agrees to go, and Lorena is furious, calling him a quitter for abandoning the poor and the effort to improve health conditions in town. Deke argues that the next doctor will pick up the effort, and that if he didn’t succeed, he furthered the fight. “I don’t feel as if I’d failed, or that I’m running away from the problem at all,” he says, though he clearly has done both. Lorena, relieved, hurries off to make instant iced coffee.

Over these refreshing beverages, Deke tells her he’s going to take a research position in New York and he wants her to marry him and go with him. Her main objective accomplished, she’s suddenly tepid: “She had thought she might be in love with him. Yet now she felt curiously detached, as if they were casual co-workers.” Her main concern, it seems, is that, “suppose he ever wants to talk to me about his work? It would be another language as far as I am concerned. A nurse doesn’t deal in abstractions or theories. All nurses deal with people.” I’m not quite sure I follow this at all, but Lorena’s landlady renders the argument moot when she points out that “you would give up nursing anyway and start to raise a family.” The ending soon follows, a tidy resolution to all Lorena’s problems, including that pesky career, as her fiance (and you knew there would be one) tells her, “I’d expect a home-cooked supper” every night. Phew!

 

Lorena is a curious character. On one hand, she is feisty, often ready with the snappy comeback, and not afraid to tell people off. Yet throughout the book we are given example after example of her bizarre motivations and self-defeating decisions, and the two sides of her character seem incompatible. In the end I am just puzzled by the whole book, and the nauseating ending just confirmed the feeling. With the slums about to be revitalized (and you knew they would be), the poor families are summarily dealt with in a way that the healthcare team could have accomplished themselves, had they thought for five minutes about the problem. Furthermore, Clyde’s defense of the slums still echoes: “Suppose I fixed up those houses and charged the people a fancy rent—could they pay it, when they can hardly pay the pittance I ask? How many houses are there in Laureltown where these people could go, if it were not for me? Where would they live, if not on River Street?” Now that the slums are going to be torn down, and the developer emphatically telling Lorena that he plans to make money on the deal (Lorena answers, “You deserve to make money when you do something as fine and necessary as cleaning up the River Street pesthole”), it seems that all that really mattered was that the poor folks be relocated somewhere else so their blighted neighborhood could be eliminated. Both professionally and personally, Lorena has accomplished her missions, and we can all rest easy. Unless you’re one of those poor families about to lose their homes.

The New Nurses

Arlene Hale, ©1970
Cover illustration by Edrien King

Lynn Lawrence and Bobbi Wagner vowed to forget Chicago and devote themselves entirely to their nursing careers. Lynn was white, Bobbi, black, and Quiet Fairview General Hospital seemed an “island of contentment” until … Dr. Paul Hamilton appeared and charmingly, persistently, he began to break down Lynn’s resistance. Despite the memory of a shattered romance, Lynn knew she was beginning to fall in love again. While for Bobbi the attentions of handsome sax-player DeVore Johnson, were proving to be more of a distraction than she had planned. And just when she thought she had really left the ghetto behind, brother Johnny showed up in Fairview looking for trouble. Then a supervisor’s job opened up that both girls desperately wanted. Too late they realized that this sort of competition would threaten their careers, their friendships and their love affairs.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:“It’s all over, Dad. The break was clean. So clean that it is sterile, in fact. I’ll never be infected again.”

“In a way, Steve had been good training for her. She had learned a great deal about the male animal from her association with him, and Doctor Hamilton, when it was all said and done, was just another male animal.”

“I’m forty-two and single and darned glad of it. I’ve got no complaints and if I need something to warm my feet on a cold winter night, I can always get a hot-water bottle.”

“All landladies are a decent sort until you miss a month’s rent.”

“Was her poor, frozen heart beginning to thaw out at last?”

“There was never time for women in my life. I’ve paid for it in loneliness.”

REVIEW:
I deliberately avoided reading this book for a while because the cover illustration of that blonde woman with the big head put me off. The doctor smoking a pipe in the background (I’m always intrigued by the contradiction of a medico who smokes) and the unheard-of major character who isn’t white finally won me over, though—that and the fact that as soon as I get it over with I can tuck the book away and that big-headed woman won’t be staring vapidly at me from my to-read pile.

This is a tale of two nurses: Lynn Lawrence, who is blonde and blue-eyed; and Bobbi Wagner, who is not. The two are “as different as black and white,” in Bobbi’s words. “What a contrast there was. Bobbi was Negro, light-skinned and while not strikingly beautiful, she was nice-looking and the uniform suited her. Lynn was a golden blonde, with very blue eyes and a peaches-and-cream complexion. They were a startling combination.” They’ve been friends and roommates since nursing school in Chicago. Lynn has just left Chicago to escape a broken relationship with Steve, about whom we learn little over the course of the book, apart from the fact that he and Lynn are not getting married after all and Lynn’s crushed little heart will never live again. She’s pleaded with Bobbi to come with her, and Bobbi has agreed: She’s escaping too, but it’s from her little brother Johnny, a good-for-nothing mooch always tapping her for money since he can’t hold a job.

The two move in together, but they’re not all that close, and much is made of this throughout the book: “Though they were friends, there were some things that they had never fully shared with each other.” This is partly due to their different races, we are told. Lynn “didn’t know what it was like in the Harlem of Chicago and that was scarcely her fault. But all the same, it made a breech between them that perhaps they never would be able to span.” It’s also due to the fact that Bobbi can be a bit of a bitch, with “moods … sometimes as black as her skin.” And now she’s in a real funk about Johnny, who soon shows up, grafts himself onto the girls’ couch, and seems content to moulder there indefinitely. Lynn professes not to mind, but Bobbi certainly does. She can’t actually kick Johnny out, though, because then he’ll go sponge off their parents, and “it would kill Dad if he knew the sort of man Johnny really was. Mamma would accept it quietly but it would put more lines in her face, more gray in her hair, more sadness in her eyes. They’d endured enough!” Then Bobbi hears about these robberies in town … and Johnny goes out only at night … and he wears all these flashy clothes …

Of course, we have to work in some romance for the two. Lynn starts dating Dr. Paul Hamilton, and Bobbi hooks up with DeVore Dunsmore, a groovy sax player in town for a six-month gig who wears “red socks, a red tie and had a matching red handkerchief in his breast pocket. His shoes were two black mirrors. A small diamond glittered on his left pinkie.” Did I mention that he’s a real swinging cat? Before long, DeVore hears that Johnny is involved in a gang called, quaintly, the Rovers, and he also hears that the Rovers are responsible for the robberies, which leaves Bobbi smoking cigarettes like a chimney, pacing the apartment, rudely rebuffing all Lynn’s efforts to help.

Meanwhile, the nursing supervisor is felled by a brain tumor, and now that job is up for grabs. Both Lynn and Bobbi want it, but Bobbi is convinced that she will never get it because she’s black. “Oh, if she could only get that super’s job! It would prove she was more than just that black girl from Chicago!” This makes her more than a little nasty to Lynn, and she accuses Lynn of dating the doctor in order to get the job, causing “the first serious rift of their friendship.” Johnny figures out what’s eating Bobbi, and attempts to cheer her up: “You know what’s wrong, don’t you? You forget where you’re from. You forget you’re just a black girl. Nothing’s going to change that, Bobbi. You’ll never make it. Because you’re black. You got to make your own luck when you’re black!” Thanks, bro.

One night Johnny doesn’t come home—he’s been beaten to a pulp by a bunch of unnamed men at the club where he and the Rovers hang out. Johnny refuses to say anything at all about the incident, but he swears to Bobbi on the Bible that he’s not involved in the robberies, so Bobbi knows he’s telling the truth, because even Johnny would never lie on the Bible. When pressed, he tells Bobbi that he got his clothes from a rich woman who liked him, and Bobbi is completely relieved: Her brother is not a thief, he’s a gigolo! Phew! Johnny is offered a more respectable job in the hospital, but he turns down this chance at redemption: “I’d just be cleaning up, doing the dirty little jobs. That’s not for Johnny Wagner!” That night he blows town without saying goodbye, so the questions of why he was beaten or what’s going to become of him is never resolved. You can’t help thinking that it’s only a matter of time before he’ll turn up again, and not exactly a changed man.

The gals’ love lives aren’t nailed down either, but Lynn gets the happier ending. She and Paul profess their love for each other, and while the ring isn’t on her finger at the end of the book, you know it won’t be long. DeVore likewise tells Bobbi he wants to marry her, and that she can move around the country with him as he plays with his band, getting jobs as a nurse everywhere she goes. “We’d have a swinging good time,” he tells her. “Be a vagabond nurse?” she snorts, and I can see the title of Arlene Hale’s next book. But Bobbi never claims to love DeVore, and she tells him there are things she has to do first, “and then later she would think about love, marriage, a home, and maybe even kids!” DeVore claims he’s going to hang around until she’s ready, but it’s unclear how he’s going to manage that when his gig runs out in a few months. So either she doesn't get the guy, or she sacrifices her own desires to marry a man she doesn't love and take on a lifestyle that doesn't seem to excite her.

Race is not something often addressed in a VNRN. In this book, we are encouraged to feel sympathy for the difficulties Bobbi faces—“the insults, the sly looks, the talk, the open prejudice,” including her perceived obstacles getting the supervisor job and even a decent apartment: “A lot of people don’t want to rent to Negroes,” Bobbi points out. The fact remains, though, that the two major black male roles are overwhelmingly stereotypical. DeVore is a decent guy, but that flashing diamond irks me just a bit. And while the white girl’s straightforward problems are quickly disposed of, Bobbi’s complex issues are punted into the future, and she does not get the VNRN heroine’s traditional—or the white character’s—happy ending. Even the issue of who gets the supervisor position, though resolved in a way that allows the friends to smooth things over, doesn’t address the fundamental issue: Could Bobbi ever hope to get promoted, or is prejudice working against her in the hospital? So while this book attempts to tackle a tough issue in a fair way, in the end it says one thing but itself doesn't treat the two women equally.

Marie Warren, Night Nurse

By Blanche Y. Mosler, ©1963
Cover illustration by Mort Engel
Also published as Terror Stalks the Night Nurse

Lovely Nurse Marie Warren was alone with a terrible secret. She alone knew that the dreaded street gang the Cobras had sworn revenge against her hospital, every doctor, nurse and patient in it, for the death of their leader under the surgeon’s knife. But she had no proof. The hospital authorities, even the man who loved her, thought she was a neurotic, frightened girl. Her only safety was in flight. But Marie Warren stayed—to risk her career, her love, her life itself, everything for the lives and safety of others.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“They were in their own peculiar kind of shock which no amount of plasma would have power to alleviate.”

“A snack for that fresh truck driver—Sam Brown—no doubt. If they built his strength up any more than it was, the nurses would have to go in for either track-running or Judo!”

“I’ve been running my shapely legs off!”

“Oddly, never had she felt less ‘female’ than in dealing with this tough trio. Not that she wanted their admiration—she would have loathed it.”

“You’re a mighty sexy dame in that white uniform, know it?”

“A girl! Oh, no. What this world needs is more men!”

“It had been a fine life, strong and secure, with big wheat farms clustered around the town whose grain elevator shaft lifted proudly into the sky.”

“You don’t deserve my sheik-like caresses. You turned off my football news.”

“ ‘You have swell legs,’ he said; ‘they cause naughty thoughts.’ ”

“Al Dawson’s death had changed shadowy, silent corridors into murder traps and now, from his grave, he was reaching out to snatch her love, because terror of his gang was changing her from the gay girl she’d been to a worried, harassed girl no man would be attracted to.”

“A girl can lose her virginity in 317 in less than a couple of minutes.”

“ ‘Hoodlums or no hoodlums,’ she said out loud, banging pots and pans, ‘I’ll pick out my wedding outfit this week-end, or know the reason why. I’ll be darned if I’ll march down the aisle in my birthday suit. So there!’ ”

“A few minutes could end her dreams, her happiness, slashing like a bright, glittering scalpel!”

“‘You’ve got good hands, boy,’ he said. ‘You might have made a good surgeon. Pity you wasted them on the wrong kind of knives.’”

REVIEW:

Lovely Nurse Marie Warren works the night shift (duh) at a city hospital, where she sneaks longing glances at her fiancé, Dr. Keith Andrews, a surgical intern, as he speeds down the hall behind another stretcher bearing patients on the brink of death. One evening while she is working—which means mostly making sandwiches and coffee for the families of patients in surgery—a youth named Al Dawson is brought in. He has been struck by a car, and his brother, King, along with two other young men, Bat and Strangler, are waiting for the news from the OR. They are all members of The Cobras, which Marie finds out when they turn around and she reads the words on the backs of their black leather jackets. “These must be toughs from the notorious south side,” she thinks in horror. But despite her boyfriend’s best efforts, the young delinquent can’t be saved. The autopsy clears Keith of any wrongdoing: “what did kill this boy [was] the twin evils of neglect—possibly resulting from poverty—and violence, resulting from environment, plus his own meanness,” says the pathologist. That’s actually three evils, but who’s counting?

Though The Cobras walk out without a fuss, Marie is instantly seized by the idea that the gang is going to return and take its revenge on everyone in the entire hospital, including herself, Keith, the chief of staff, the anesthesiologist, the medical technologist, the assistant surgeon, the OB nurse, and the two scrub nurses. She tries to warn everyone, but they mostly just mock her: “Don’t tell me we can expect a—what do you call it?—rumble at good old dignified Kenwood? Switchblades vs. scalpels?” asks the OB nurse. So she worries enough for all of them, her anxiety shrieking on every page: “And now, oh, God, will we ever be rid of them—ever be free again?” Her throat tightens, she tries to push down the cold panic in side of her, she digs her nails into her palms, terror uses all her energy, she tries to thrust away the stark knowledge that danger was terribly real, she tries to suppress her screams. “This is where the hoodlums have us, she thought. We have to think of—work for—others, while they can devote every minute to hatching their evil.” But really, she devotes an extraordinary number of minutes to thinking of them. And before long, you just want to give Marie a good slap and tell her to pull herself together.

Apart from a nervous breakdown, the other disadvantage her obsession could bring on is that if she makes too big a deal about this gang of hooligans, she will end up becoming such a downer that Keith dumps her for former girlfriend Nurse Barbara Street, who is quite the hot tomato; “even in flat white shoes, her walk had a come-hither switch.” Barbara is doing her best to win Keith back, and Marie worries that if she’s totally not on her game, her apparently shallow fiancé will leave her: “Lose your figure and you’ll lose Keith,” she thinks, but mostly it’s her anxiety that’s driving him away. “While I grow edgier, she can—without any burden of terror—be quite the gay companion,” she thinks. “And after the tensions of heavy surgery, Keith demands a girl who has ‘the light touch’—a girl who can ‘take it easy—’ Take it easy—oh, God—” Someone get the Ativan, stat!

Honestly, I just didn’t know what to do with this book. The camp factor here is off the charts—but it’s a one-note tune played at absolutely top volume. By page 20 I was already rolling my eyes every time Marie went off on some hysterical rant. The ending, in which Marie’s predictions come true in the most hilarious way—“The Cobras had taken over the hospital! Oh, God, this was it—then!”—went a long way toward improving my opinion of it. And I had to recall my recent review of Nurse Kate’s Mercy Flight, in which I chastised the book because Nurse Kate, allegedly on the brink of a nervous collapse, spent most of her time baking pies with complete bliss and going to the ballgame. So perhaps it’s not that easy to create a strung-out character that doesn’t exasperate the hell out of the reader. And I should be careful what I ask for.

Beyond the camp, the book has a few other redeeming features. The gritty aspects of hospital life are not ignored in this book: Patients die from botched abortions, a couple is severely burned in a plane crash, a baby is born to a woman whose husband was forced to marry her and then left her (“Johnny, damn your skimpy jeans,” Marie thinks), characters actually swear. There is a totally unique passage in which Marie tells a feisty truck driver to stop pinching the nurse’s bottoms. “We’re grieved that we can’t provide all the comforts of home for you here in the hospital, but your sex problems don’t happen to be among the major ones in this hospital,” she says. “You’ll be home with Mrs. Brown before long.” He answers, “Y’know, my old lady’s a slob, but she’s better’n nothing. Paddles around in a sloppy robe, hair uncombed.” She replies, “Maybe a lot of that is your fault. Think it over.” Apart from my surprise that a character is acknowledged to be having sex, I was a bit taken aback at the apparent suggestion that Mrs. Brown’s role is to service her husband. So if you can grit your teeth through Marie’s pathetic whining, the book does have its rewards. 

Note: Another blogger has also reviewed this book.

This book was also published under the title 
Terror Stalks the Night Nurse, which had a
different cover, illustrated by Lou Marchetti.