Staff Nurse

By Jane Corby, ©1962

Lovely Sally Benedict had found challenge galore at busy, modern Boston Hospital. But she had no idea what lay in store when she became staff nurse at a giant mill in a small Massachusetts town. Trouble came from all directions. A tyrannical mill owner. A battle between labor and management. Pettiness and jealousy and even uglier emotions directed toward Sally as the impulsive young nurse was drawn into the problems of the workers. Meanwhile, Sally faced an even more painful problem of her own. There was attentive, charming Bill Clemens, son of the mill owner, and young Dr. Bob Royce, sarcastic, bitter, yet strangely attractive, each demanding to be the one man in her life. Sally knew who her choice should be—if only her head could control the longing of her heart.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTE:
“Why does everyone assume that a nurse and doctor who work together will surely get married?”

REVIEW:
There are some interesting things about Staff Nurse. First of all, if men ever really did talk to women this way, women’s lib didn’t come along a moment too soon. This is not the first book in which the male characters talk to the female protagonist as if she were some sort of window dressing, to be admired for her appearance and little else, but Staff Nurse really lays it on thick. Indeed, its first words are, “Hi—Beautiful!’’ Which isn’t so horrible in and of itself, but every single man passing through the doors of the infirmary office of the Clemens Paper Company manages his tongue in a similar fashion.

This particular greeting comes from Bill Clemens, paper company mill owner, and Sally Benedict shoots back with a valiant and wasted diatribe about how she wasn’t hired for her looks, that she’s really a qualified registered nurse—and Bill responds that she can “change her status any time you’ve a mind to,” he says. “All you have to do is marry into the firm.” Next we meet Dr. Robert Royce, a crabby, “thin, intense young man” whose first words to her are, yes, another reference to her looks: “Bill Clemens missed his calling—he should have been casting director for a Broadway musical. You don’t look as if you could even make a bed properly.” She offers to show him her diploma and then skims through the highlights of her resume, but he, too, is unimpressed by her talents. Bill’s father, whom she looks after when he breaks his leg at the company picnic, tells her, “You look too pretty to be a nurse,” and one of the mill workers says, “They didn’t tell me that the nurse at this mill was such a doll. You’re a real looker, baby.” This same mill worker later flatters her with an attempted sexual assault, from which Bill rescues her. Really, it’s enough to make a woman want to burn her bra.

Sally has some ideas for the mill workers that might get her into trouble with Joe McCarthy. “To Sally, the workers at the plant were real people.” Well, that kind of thinking will get you into hot water every time. One apparent result of Sally’s meddling, which includes painting the mill walls bright colors and starting a bowling league for the employees, is that young millworker Herman Strauss starts going with Celia Armstrong, the daughter of a wealthy landowner. “You think you’re as good as anybody else,” Celia’s father tells Herman. “And the reason you’re getting so uppity is because Miss Benedict, who is supposed to be a nurse, has told you that you ought to have all the comforts and luxuries of your betters. … She has overstepped the bounds of her position and she is a disturbing element among the workers. She is destroying their morale.”

Sally also disagrees with the fact that the Clemens factory owns housing, which it rents to the workers, preventing them from achieving the American dream of home ownership. But her problem with the situation seems to stem from the fact that the workers’ houses are all painted white: “When you own their homes, when you paint their houses—the color you want them painted—and when you assume their responsibilities, you rob them of all initiative.” She persuades him to sell the houses to the workers, but this doesn’t work out so well. Those workers who can afford to buy their homes paint them blue with purple trim, or yellow with blue trim and a sapphire blue foundation, God love the poor tasteless simps. Those who can’t afford to buy are stuck with the white paint. “For the … workers whose houses are painted white, there is nothing to do but admit to their neighbors that they cannot afford to own their own homes,” Dr. Bob angrily explains to Sally. “In a way, [they] are advertising the fact that they are poor. It hurts—it hurts bitterly … it is a body blow.” By this curious argument, we should be opposed to public education because someone will be upset they didn’t get into Harvard.

The romance aspect of the book plays out disappointingly, as she goes for the wrong guy (spoiler alert), the irritable doctor who dumps on her for bettering the workers’ lives, rather than the boyish, charming factory owner who sticks up for Sally and her ideas. It must be acknowledged that Bill is mostly just pleased that production is up 1% after the mill’s walls are painted red-orange, but at least he is in favor of her changes, while Dr. Bob snaps at her, “You cannot interfere in other people’s lives—you must not interfere. You might do great harm.”

In thinking over her options, Sally believes “Bill hadn’t spoken too strongly in her defense. Of course he had objected when she said that she was going to quit, but Sally suspected that was only a matter of politeness.” This when, two pages earlier, he called her “our most valued employee. … Sally’s ideas are splendid.” It’s true he receives her letter of resignation rather cavalierly, but it turns out he’s not too upset about it because he is hoping she will marry him, in which case she’d have to quit her job anyway, since that’s what wives do. And besides, it would be awkward for her to continue as his employee after they are engaged. What she tells him is, “We look at things differently; just the way you spoke of my being a nurse shows that. It wouldn’t work, Bill. I’m sorry.” And that’s that. But it almost seems like her actual objection to Bill is that he is rich. “You didn’t turn down the Clemens’ bank account, did you?” Dr. Bob asks her. “And the mink coats—and the jewels—and the winters in Florida—and, maybe, your own plane?” She replies, “I can’t see myself in mink and jewels. And … what’s the matter with the regular passenger jet?”

Apart from its social curiosities, the book has little to offer. It’s not badly written, just disappointing. The story has no sparkle, and the frustration and utter bewilderment that the ending create undo the interest it generates with its explorations of color theory and improving the lives of the downtrodden. If it’s a socialist message you seek in your vintage nurse romance novel, chuck this book and reach for District Nurse, which really knows how to do Karl Marx proud.

Private Duty

By Faith Baldwin, ©1935

Pretty Carolyn Cutler generall knew her own mind. She had learned to during three long years of training at Updale, earning the right to sign herself, Registered Nurse. But now that she was successfully out on her own, she faced a problem which her nursing training alone couldn’t solve. Three men wanted to marry her. And they all knew their own minds.
First there was Dr. Livingston. Carolyn had idolized him while she was in training; they had, in fact, considered themselves engaged. Now she wasn’t sure whether she really loved the man or the surgeon. Then there was her employer, Derek Williams, whose household she was running now that his wife had died. She knew she didn’t love him, but she pitied him and she adored his difficult young son. And last there was an impetuous, red-headed scamp named Bill Hamilton whose chief claim to fame was the number of breach of promise suits in which he had been involved. That is the involved situation of one of Miss Baldwin’s fastest, most appealing romances. It is a novel of hospital life, of the trials and problems of a nurse on private duty, and, above all, the story of a grand young girl for whom the world grew so complicated that it finally took a bloody factory strike to provide the solution.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTE:
“She looked at him and marveled silently at the utter stupidity of men. … She supposed the fault was common to the sex. It was amusing in a way. People were always talking about how brilliant they were—there wasn’t a surgeon in the state more highly esteemed than Richard Long, nor a manufacturer any better known than Andrew Hamilton. But in matters which were far more important than surgery or underwear these great men were certainly half-witted.”

“The Boston paper was restrained and brief, as befitted a Boston paper …”

“You look like a million dollars in government bonds, that is to say, expensive, hard to acquire, extremely valuable but not exhibiting much interest.”

REVIEW:
Faith Baldwin has done it again with this crackerjack novel. Maybe not quite as good as District Nurse, its sister, Private Duty is nonetheless unceasingly funny with well-drawn characters, sparkling writing, and a modern sensibility that far outweighs that of some vintage nurse romance novels written decades later. I begin to greatly regret that Faith Baldwin only wrote one or two other books that might fall into this category (He Married a Doctor, and possibly The Lonely Doctor), and I may well dub her the Jane Austen of the vintage nurse romance novel.

Carolyn Cutler has just graduated from nursing school and has moved in with her best friend from nursing school, Sally Austin. Sally is a spunky gal with a penchant for saying things like, “Run along to the boy friend and if he starts beating you up or anything, scream. I still pack a wallop.” They have a third roommate, Marie, who is hopelessly in love with a married doctor who does not know she is alive, so she has dedicated her life to working in his shadow just to be near him. The women all do private duty, which means they are hired to care for private patients either at the patient’s home or in the hospital, on 12- or 24-hour shifts. Sometimes they have work, sometimes not.

When they don’t, they go out. When the book opens, Carolyn is engaged to Dr. Bob Livingston, but we quickly see this isn’t going to work out. He wants to put off marriage until he is well-established as a (what else?) surgeon: “ ‘Wait for me, Caro, I promise you I’ll be able to give you everything you deserve in a few years.’ She wondered, lying there, if really she wanted to be given everything. … It seemed so flat, somehow, the waiting. No sharing. No excitement of struggle and work and helping in an office. … ‘When we’re married I’ll keep you out of my office, away from the whole sorry business.’ … Did she want that? Of course, she wanted it. But she didn’t want to wait for it alone. She wanted to wait for it with him.”

Cue Bill Hamilton. (It was a minor difficulty for me keeping Bob Livingston and Bill Hamilton straight in my mind; I wish their names had been a little less two of a kind.) She meets him in stereotypical fashion, by literally running into him, but at least it was uniquely described: “On the way out she collided violently with a tall young man who was barging joyfully through the revolving door. For a brief moment she saw a hundred doors all whirling the wrong way and a thousand stars which have never been charted by astronomers.” Bill’s father owns an underwear manufacturing business, and Bill is intent on “modernizing” the factory, much to the dismay of his father, who is concerned that Bill is a “Red.” Bill isn’t serious about much, and has already had to settle two breach of contact suits with women he had proposed to and then later run away from. After Carolyn nurses him back from a ruptured appendix, he falls for her and proposes marriage: “With me, I could promise you continuous excitement, fights, laughs, never a dull moment.” (The book earns points for acknowledging that marriage will contain the occasional spat, a big departure from the ordinary vintage nurse romance novel.) She realizes he isn’t serious, and so puts him off, though she continues to date him when he’s in town and not busy with his socialist agenda.

But Carolyn and Sally’s boyfriends take a back seat to their work and their lives together. It’s a homey world, of ugly but comfortable bathrobes, where washing your hair is a major event, where the girls’ next meeting, if their schedules don’t coincide, seems more important to them than when they will see their beaux. It isn’t until Marie moves to Boston and Sally goes home to nurse her mother, who has broken her hip, that Carolyn’s love life takes a more prominent role in the story—but even then, it’s still second fiddle to the Williams family, whom she has moved in with after months of nursing the mother, who dies of cancer.

Carolyn is an independent woman. She can take care of herself, and everyone else. She smokes an occasional cigarette, and she drives Bill’s car when they go out together. She is extremely competent at her work—“as a nurse she was near perfection,” the chief surgeon thinks of her—and she doesn’t take kindly to being patronized. “I can’t tell you how it irritates me to have this pretty nurse business flung in my face … it’s a sort of—subtitle. Nurse. Pretty. It goes with pretty stenographer. It gives me … a vast pain in the neck,” she tells Bill. She is a pleasure to watch.

The book’s plot doesn’t really have a lot of places to go, and her situation with the Williams family seems a little gratuitous, created to push Carolyn to her eventual and inevitable marriage. The climactic scene, at a meeting of striking workers that turns violent, is especially forced, and it’s so rushed that it’s not possible to effortlessly follow the action as we have up to now. But the book is so well-written that it’s a joy to follow the characters even into these contrived situations. I greatly look forward to reading Faith Baldwin’s He Married a Doctor—while at the same time dreading it, as I realize that after that’s done, there will be no more Faith Baldwin books to look forward to.

One paperback edition sports
a cover illustration by 
Sam Bates

District Nurse

By Faith Baldwin, ©1932

Ellen Adams had good reason to distrust romantic love. Part of her job as a district nurse was to take care of girls who had been betrayed by men they had loved too deeply. She had seen things most girls never saw—marriages wrecked, love lost, and passion mocked by men. But Ellen was blond, blue-eyed and beautiful. Men fell in love with her easily. In spite of what she knew and what she saw, she dreamed of marriage. As a matter of fact she dreamed a good deal about Frank Bartlett, a young and very attractive lawyer. They were in love. Their future together was understood. Ellen’s love for Frank was a glorious dream until one day a girl named Gladys said two fatal words. Gladys, bewildered and tearful, had been betrayed by a man she loved. Ellen asked her to name the man. It was then that Gladys said the words that woke Ellen from a dangerous dream.

GRADE: A

REVIEW:
The great thing about the nurse romance novels written in the ’30s and ’40s is that they don’t know they’re supposed to be formulaic, and they end up being, first and foremost, a good story. Such is the case with District Nurse, which is a fantastic, very well-written novel with a couple of small mysteries to solve and a social(ist) message—oh, yeah, and there’s a romance in there, too.

It’s the Depression, back in the day when last names conferred an actual nationality. Ellen Adams is 24, her sister Nancy is 20. (So they’re English, about the only ones in the book.) Ellen is a nurse for the Visiting Nurses Association. As such, she knows everyone in the neighborhood: immigrant Ike, who sells fruit from a pushcart; Italian Joe, who fixes her shoes; German Herman, “the small round son of the man known to the neighborhood as Accordion Al.” Mrs. Lenz speaks German (“Gott behüte! Ganz verrückt!”) and Mrs. Lippinsky is Jewish (“I’m telling you, I vonder. Meshugge, that one…”). They may be of foreign origin, but the book never looks down on them for it; Ellen is frustrated with Mrs. Lenz for giving her son a bellyache with hotdogs and ice cream, but she’s never disgusted.

Ellen meets her true love while chatting with the neighborhood truant, eight-year-old Bill, about his new-found puppy. The dog escapes into the street and is almost run over by Frank Bartlett. “ ‘Why, God damn youse,’ Bill was shrieking at the top of his small leather lungs, ‘you lousy bastard—’ ” When a third-grader is using language I have yet to see in any other vintage nurse romance novel—and this only on page 17—you know you are in for a treat.

Vying for Ellen’s affections is Jim O’Connor, who has grown up with Ellen. Jim is up to something shady, but we are only given tiny, offhand hints (“a sedate traffic officer … saluted him, grinning, but … afterward looked after the car, its newness, and its expensive lines with a frown of speculation on his Irish brow”). It’s a pleasure to find a book that doesn’t beat you over the head with its plotting.

We’re tipped off to the socialist bent of the novel with its dedication: “Dedicated, in admiration, to the VNA and welfare nurses everywhere.” Ellen’s patients by a rule always live in squalid tenements: “Dim gas jets flickered on the dirty landing casting eerie shadows. In each hallway, as she passed, was the disgrace of an open toilet. … It was not astonishing that so many women connected with work of this type turned almost fiercely radical, seeing what they must see, realizing how little they could do, important though their work was.” And so we are frequently treated to Ellen’s feelings about the poor, how horrific their lives are, and how a little assistance goes a long way—but not so much that it becomes annoying.

This book is far more frank about the baser aspects of human life than books 30 years its junior, in which the protagonist does not even kiss her beloved until they are engaged (e.g. Society Nurse, for starters). On page 2, as we are being given a tour of the neighborhood, we pass a doctor’s practice. “What kind of a doctor is he? He has an uptown practice. They come here to him. A clever hideaway. All women, who come.” One minor figure in the book is kidnapped and raped, then forced to marry her abductor. Unmarried women sometimes get pregnant, and their moral character is an ongoing concern. At one point Ellen argues with doctor and old friend Pete after he implies that he is not a virgin: “ ‘A man,’ said Ellen, ‘can regard his chastity as something to be disposed of as quickly and as lightly as possible. A man can, of course, do as he pleases—deny himself nothing. Not, I suppose, a woman. A woman can—you call it sin in a woman, don’t you?—sin once, because she is foolish, because she is in love, because promises are made her—and that’s her finish, I suppose. It’s a swell world.’ ”

The writing is incredibly snappy; by page 6 I had such a long list of great quotes that I quit taking notes. (Just one example: “ ‘It’s Ellen Adams,’ she called; and then, the sesame that had opened so many closed doors ‘…the visiting nurse.’ ”) We live Ellen’s family’s daily life: their dates, their budgetary concerns, their neighborhood and its inhabitants. We really care about these people. Ellen’s rapprochement with Frank in the final pages actually means something, and the only letdown is that her engagement is understood to mean she will have to give up nursing. “ ‘When she puts me before the work, then I know she really loves me. And you have,’ he triumphed.” Frank may find it a victory, but I thought it was a tragedy. Nonetheless, this was the only letdown in the entire book, which is an overwhelmingly great read.