Love Comes to Dr. Starr

By William Johnston, ©1963
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

Dr. Claudia Martin stood by as she watched her fiancé, Dr. Dan Starr, treat his new patient, Kathleen Emory, who suffered from a partial paralysis that could only be cured by physical therapy. Spoiled and petted by her husband, Kathleen was used to getting what she wanted. And Claudia was sure that right now Kathleen wanted Dan. Claudia was used to Dan's becoming involved with his patients' problems. But this time it was different. This time the patient was a very beautiful girl. How long could Claudia's love for Dan last if she was forced to share his emotional commitment with another woman? After all, being a doctor didn't mean that she wasn't a woman. She had a woman’s need for her man's attention. How could she make Dan see that she, too, needed him?

 

GRADE: B+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“That’s the secret of French cooking. Time. You’re so hungry by the time you get it, you’re sure it’s super-colossal.”

 

“Why don’t you marry the girl and get her out of your life?”

 

“She felt she had to compensate for being a woman in what was generally considered a man’s profession, and so she was less quick to show compassion, an expression which she subconsciously felt would give the impression that she was more of a woman than a doctor.”

 

REVIEW:

I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to decide if this actually accounts as a nurse novel (and yes, books about women doctors do count as “nurse novels”). The character we spend the most time with is Dr. Dan Starr, and it’s his name that populates the cover. But Dr. Claudia Martin is also a leading character, we do get into her head a fair amount, and she ends up with her man (again) at the end; they were engaged from the opening page. The story is largely about him, his infatuation with another woman and how he extricates himself from it, but VNRNs can be about a man’s wandering attention and how he comes to his senses. In the end, though, I think the fact that he occupies more of the book than she does, that we don’t follow Claudia’s daily life, and that we don’t get to know her as well as we do him, means that this book is not actually a VNRN.

 

So the question of whether I should review it on this blog also comes up. The answer to that is easier; I read the book, so what the heck, I’ll do a review. Purists should skip to the next post.

 

Dan Starr is a chief resident at Rothwell Clinic in Manhattan. His fiancée is Dr. Claudia Martin, a psychiatrist. They get together for dinner and witty repartee: “Wouldn’t you like to put your feet up and relax?” she asks him when he arrives at her place. “I’m sorry I don’t have a dog to bring you your pipe and slippers.” But something must intrude on their happy affair or there wouldn’t be a book, so enter Kathleen Emory, a 20-year-old waif married to 50-year-old Eugene Emory. Theirs is an epic love story: He hired her to work at his factory as a secretary, but she was completely incompetent, so he shuffled her around the office until the only position left for her to take was the one as his wife. He takes care of her, because she’s ridiculously insecure and inadequate—this is due to an overbearing mother—and they don’t have a physical relationship, because she’s so childlike that neither one of them think she can handle it.

 

She’s landed in the clinic after a car accident ruined her arms, which she cannot raise or even twitch. Her physical therapist, Dr. Mary Young, is a burly sort—“From the rear, from Dan’s view, she had much the look of a Yale lineman”—who pushes her patients hard. Mr. Emory feels she is pushing Kathleen overmuch, and complains to the head of the hospital, who asks Dan to look into it. But—and this point is one of some contention between the Drs. Starr and Martin—Dan has a tendency to get overly involved with his patients. Sure enough, once Dan claps eyes on the pretty, helpless, tearful young thing in room 713, he feels the only way he can get to the bottom of the question of whether Dr. Young is working Kathleen too hard is if he himself personally gives her physical therapy treatments every night, in addition to the treatments she gets from Dr. Young, even though he admits he has little knowledge of physical therapy. Needless to say, Claudia is not too excited about this, and after visiting Kathleen, she quickly arrives at the idea that Kathleen is in love with Dan.

 

And how does Dan feel? “Dan avoided asking himself if he were in love with her. He was not sure what the answer would be. He knew, however, what he must do. He had to continue treating her.” Because if you think you might be falling in love with a patient, married or not, and it’s pretty clear that the patient is falling for you, the best thing is to go right on spending too much time with them. Even the head of the hospital, when he hears what’s going on, tells Dan, “You’ve made something complicated out of something simple.” Yet night after night, there is the altruistic doctor, rubbing Kathleen’s pale, limp arms and feeding her chocolates that she can’t lift for herself. How sweet.

 

It turns out that Eugene does not want Kathleen to get better; if she is crippled, she will be helpless and dependent upon him for life, and that suits him just fine. When she figures this out, Kathleen tells Eugene that she wants to be strong and well, and he responds by nastily describing all the enormous responsibilities he is going to load on her when she gets home, and won’t that be great? Naturally, when he leaves, she has a hysterical fit. The next night, when Eugene returns to visit his wife, “he had the look of a man who has won a battle and who assumed that he had thus won the war.” Not so fast, buddy. Kathleen tells Eugene that she is leaving him for Dan, who loves her and wants to marry her. “He’s a handsome and wonderful man. A man—understand?” she snipes at him.

 

Eugene naturally goes straight to Dan, whose answer is to visit Kathleen. There, he pulls essentially the same stunt that Eugene did earlier—one that came across as low and despicable when Eugene did it—by telling her that he’s all excited to marry her, and give her “a normal life,” and Dr. Martin is going to be brought in “to get you ready, to prepare you to be my wife.” Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. I was curious as to how Claudia was going to do this, exactly—show her porn movies? Review sex toys and techniques? But never mind, Kathleen caves to the pressure and screams at him to go away and leave her alone. Not content to stop there, Dan chews out Kathleen in the most heartless and unjustified way: “This business of being in love with me, do you know why you pulled that one? To give you a tighter hold on your husband. You intended all along to let him win you back. What a joke that was. You could never leave him. He was your closet where you could hide out. You couldn’t be a wife to any man because you’re not a woman—not the way you are.” Frankly, I did not see where this was coming from; nothing in Kathleen’s behavior or speeches makes me think that she did not believe herself to be in love with Dan. So my opinion of Dan plunged even further.

 

That’s not the end of the weirdness, however. Having beaten the emotional stuffing out of Kathleen, he marches off to see Eugene. There he pulls the same cruel game, telling Eugene that Kathleen is going to sue him for an annulment. “In that way, the fact that you and Kathleen have never really been man and wife and the reason for it will be brought out,” he says. What this “reason” could be is only hinted at. “How much do you know?” Eugene asks Dan, and then goes on to tell Dan that he married Kathleen because the men at his company were needling him about being single: “A man of fifty who’s never—who’s never … wanted a woman. They know about me.”

 

Could he … could he be … gay? In retrospect, all the classic signs are there. Eugene’s apartment is lavish and well-appointed, and he says, “Most people comment on my excellent taste,” when he shows Dan in. Flash back to our first meeting with Eugene: “Emory could have very well just stepped from the pages of Esquire magazine. He was wearing a meticulously trim, black worsted suit, a sparkling white silk shirt, and a silver silk tie, which more only the meagerest hint of a pattern, black shoes polished to conservative gloss, and a black homburg that sat on his head at a precisely correct tilt. His face, long and narrow, was interrupted by a guardsman moustache. Whoever kept it in trim was quite clearly a precisionist.” Why didn’t we see this before?

 

But let’s not beat ourselves up over it. Because there are greater villains at hand, and they grow increasingly more odious: Dan, not content to stop there, essentially blackmails Eugene into helping Kathleen get therapy so “she can someday be a woman.” He insists that Eugene “tell her about yourself—fully. And then, if you’re in love with her, by seeking the cause of your own abnormalcy, and trying to—” I assumed he was going to say have sexual relations, but that’s going too far for Eugene. “It can’t be that,” he cuts off Dan. “I’m what I am and I’m not ashamed of it.” Dan tries to encourage Eugene to get psychoanalysis, but Eugene refuses. “I’ve lived fifty years with this. If I changed, I wouldn’t be myself any more. I have my ways of living—my books, my apartment here, my privacy.” Instead he agrees to offer Kathleen a quiet divorce, which Dan graciously accepts on Kathleen’s behalf, although I’m not sure how the quivering aspic Kathleen is going to feel about all of Dan’s “help.”

 

I wonder if author William Johnston thought this was going to play as a happy ending, but to me it seemed a colossal nightmare, with no one winning. Kathleen might get therapy and someday go on to have sex—that is, after all, what all the “being a woman” euphemisms are about, and it seems that her virginity is of colossal importance to not only Dan but also her success as a human being according to the author—but Eugene is destroyed, and Dan is revealed as an evil, persecuting tyrant who will emotionally bully his own patient, and her husband as well, if it suits him. The no doubt unintended irony here is that the reason he got involved with Kathleen to begin with is that he was asked to look into whether she was being bullied by a doctor. It turns out that she is, but the perpetrator is Dr. Starr. And at the end of the book he’s hailed as a hero, and goes off to have coffee with the now-exonerated Dr. Young.

 

This is an odd book, but nonetheless a good one. It is well-written and humorous, and trots along at a good pace. The bizarre situation, the constant allusions to Kathleen’s sex life, and the hints at Eugene’s homosexuality make it one of the more unique and risqué books I’ve read, but since it’s not really a nurse novel, I guess that means it doesn’t count. Even so, it’s an interesting and worthwhile detour.

He Married a Doctor

By Faith Baldwin, ©1943
Cover illustration by Forté

Carey Dennis had been in love once, deeply in love. Then he had been hurt, just as deeply. Once was enough. If he ever fell in love again, Carey told himself, it wouldn’t be with a woman like Hilda. A woman whose mind and hands had been highly trained, a woman whose heart was big enough to love all humanity—but perhaps not intimate enough to love a man.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“I might forgive you your profession if you were plain and wore your teeth on the outside and had mouse-colored hair in a bun. Or if you were the hearty collar-and-tie type.”

“How come you aren’t taking pulses somewhere instead of increasing them?”

“Kathy didn’t like women her own age, she loathed those who, like Hilda, were younger, but she was wonderful with any woman over fifty.”

“She was forbidden alcohol. Besides, she didn’t approve of the stuff, except medicinally. However, she had no objection to other people’s ruining their stomachs and brains, she said cheerfully, adding disparagingly that, as far as the brains went, few individuals had the type you’d miss, if ruined.”

“Possibly your aunt feels you might turn into one of these very modern, hideously efficient young women who scorn all masculine aid and protection. Perhaps she’d like to prevent it as it would reduce your chance of marriage.”

“If you married a woman you expected that you would be her job.”

“Most marriages are a compromise, an armed truce—men and women having been born natural enemies.”

“Confession may be good for the soul but it could raise merry hell with married life!”

“The bridegroom instinctively expects to be greeted on the threshold of the home by the palpitating bride crying, ‘Darling, I thought you were never coming, the day has been endless!’ ”

REVIEW:

Hilda Barrington is a doctor. Not just any old kind of doctor, though; she’s a very special kind of doctor. She’s a woman doctor, a “hen medic.” At 27, she has just finished her training and gone home to Waynefield, New York, to work alongside her aunt, Jane Redding, who is a general practitioner there. And a spinster, because being a woman and a doctor is difficult enough, but to add marriage into the mix is utterly impossible. Indeed, Hilda has decided she herself will never marry: “That problem hasn’t changed, no gadgets have solved it. I ought to marry and have a dozen … well, three or four. How can I? Someone would be hurt, someone neglected even. Unless I stopped practicing. And I won’t, she told herself fiercely, not for any man alive. I can’t.”

Then she meets this guy … Carey Dennis is 36 and has just moved to town. He’s very wealthy and recovering from a broken heart, as his fiancée, Maida, abruptly married a German baron, Franz von Kunst, which he learned about in the papers. Carey and Hilda get off to a spicy start with plenty of witty and insulting repartee. So we know where this is going. The problem with this book is that it gets there too fast, and indeed, as you might have guessed by the title, Hilda and Carey are married before we’re even halfway through. This takes some of the starch out of the book’s spine, as now the central question is not whether they will end up together but rather whether they will get divorced. It just doesn’t make for an entirely satisfying problem. (A little zest, however, comes from the fact that the couple actually has a sex life, which is demurely alluded to on occasion.)

The plot concerns the arrival of Maida and her new husband in town. It turns out that Maida doesn’t love Franz after all; it’s Carey she wants, again, despite the fact that he’s married now, and—oh, yeah—she is, too. So she plots and schemes, aided and abetted by Carey’s discontent with Hilda’s career and the arrival of World War II. Franz, being both German and dislikeable, is highly suspect, though we are advised several times that even if he is an ass that doesn’t necessarily make him a Nazi. (The Japanese cook, however, is not treated so gently after the bombing of Pearl Harbor; no sooner does the news come in over the radio than Carey turns to Hilda to say they must fire him. “I can’t look that little—” he begins, and Hilda agrees to do the job.) Hilda is always running out of parties when an emergency arises, missing dinner, and leaving the house in the middle of the night, and Maida is usually around to point this out to Carey, and then cry on his shoulder about how frightened she is of her husband.

If the love triangle is the skeleton on which the book hangs, its heart is the conflict of being a woman, a doctor, and a wife. The urgency and importance of this question is vastly exaggerated, when viewed through 21^st-century lenses, but it’s not entirely foreign to the modern era. The situation is summarized in a scene in which Carey is obliged to help Hilda intubate a seven-year-old boy with diphtheria and is utterly horrified by the entire experience, and at the same time awed by Hilda’s skill and competence. This makes him, as “a mere man, feel degradingly inferior. No man likes that feeling. I’d rather you weren’t—so capable; I’d rather you screamed at spiders and sickened at snakes.” Her abilities, detrimental as they are, are made up for by the fact that she’s “a feminine woman. A woman.” And a good-looking one, at that. Then again, he wonders, “What would it be like to have such a woman in love with you and yet to know that you had a rival always, one stronger than yourself, which all her love for you could not deny?” It’s all right for him to have a career that keeps him out late, and some day there may be children who will supersede him a fair amount of the time, but that’s different.

Dr. Jane is another mirror on the question of being a woman doctor. Jane was a real pioneer in medicine, having been born in 1875 and attended medical school before the turn of the century. It’s regularly acknowledged that Jane has made greater sacrifices than, and opened the door wider for, Hilda and the other young women doctors. Jane also points out the differences in medicine in the 1900s compared to the 1940s—which sound true even today: “Sometimes it seems to me that we diagnose by gadget. Your grandfather could tell more about a heart by using his ear, a stethoscope and common sense than any machine ever invented. Use every new scientific aid—provided it’s been tested and proved—that you can lay your hands on, but don’t forget you have eyes and ears and common sense. All the rest is help, new knowledge and short cuts. But sometimes gadgets fail. They haven’t souls or hearts.”

Faith Baldwin is a wonderful writer, and starting with the first page I sighed happily when a hospital was described as “exclusively expensive or expensively exclusive,” at “a small, plump, dyed woman,” that Dr. Jane has “fine, square teeth, all of them her own.” Her characters are warm (well, most of them are), true, funny, and smart, people you wish you could hang out with for more than just 223 pages. The world she creates is relaxed, humorous, comfortable, and smart. She thinks about things, mulling them over through the course of the book, and if no easy answer is found, it makes for a much better book than arriving at some pat, facile truism with enough holes to make an excellent colander. The second half of the book is not its finest, but even with that flaw, Faith Baldwin handily outscores almost any other writer in the genre.