Calling Dr. Jane

Book 3 of 6
By Adeline McElfresh, ©1957

She was in love with her future husband, and Doctor Jane Langford eagerly prepared to join him at his remote African medical mission station. But then Doctor Paul Hamlin arrived to take over Jane’s busy practice. And as they worked side by side, the darkly handsome young doctor made no secret of his growing desire for Jane, his determination to keep her for himself. As Jane’s warm but errant heart responded to Doctor Paul she was faced with the greatest challenge she had ever known … Against the background of the busy, hectic world of modern medicine is told this challenging story of a young, beautiful woman’s search for truth and honesty.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Being short and dumpy may have its compensations but I don’t know what they are.”

“So long as there is one person in the world, there will be senselessness.”

 

“There ought to be a law against you.”

 

REVIEW:

Having spent very little time with Dr. Jane Langford and Bill Latham, her fiancé, in Doctor Jane, I had hoped we might get to see them together in Book 3 of the Doctor Jane series. But no—on page one, Bill has been in Africa doing missionary work for the past three months. Back in Halesville, Indiana, Dr. Paul Hamlin, a refugee from New York, has stepped onto the scene, and is supposed to take over the practice from Jane, oh, about now. But Jane just hasn’t yet bought that plane ticket. And now Bill is getting letters from Jane, and “something was there, between the lines.” Oh, no, Mr. Bill!

 

Jane starts off by protesting too much—and soon she’s up to her schoolgirl-crush usual, swooning over Paul. And then, before too long, Jane is kissing him and picking out a new house for them to live in after they’re married, the fickle wench. Meanwhile, there are strange goings-on: An unnamed doctor refused to see a woman with appendicitis because she was poor, and the woman nearly died … a strange, overly wired man barges into Jane’s office looking for Paul … later that same night, the local druggist is bashed on the head and killed, but all his money is still in the drawer … someone is prowling around outside Jane’s house at night, looking in the outbuildings …

 

For the most part, this book is incredibly delightful. The writing is amusing and interesting, and the little, sharp details that Adeline McElfresh tosses in almost off-handedly create a brilliantly realistic picture; at times I wondered if certain passages weren’t an actual diary of someone’s day rather than a fiction story, they felt so true. Most of the time we are out and about with Jane, through the various hospitals and homes and doctor’s offices, meeting a fairly substantial population of named patients and hospital staff. In some books, these hordes of characters can become overwhelming, but here, we get enough story about some patients that we easily remember them when they pop up again later, while others drop quietly away, serving as a quiet demonstration of Jane’s reach throughout the community and its importance to her.

 

The problem, as has been with the first two Dr. Jane books, is Jane’s utter lack of maturity when it comes to her love life. She falls like a ton of bricks for men we’ve barely met, and even after she’s engaged to Paul, we still don’t get to know him very well. Rather, what sticks is the quick observations of the things Paul doesn’t like, which also happen to be the things Jane loves: “Paul said they were medieval not to have an office nurse, as well as a secretary,” “Paul frankly admitted that he had no idea country doctors got out and around so early,” “he thinks we’re pretty small potatoes,” “no wonder Paul found Halesville dull sometimes.” These little droppings never bode well, and you won’t be surprised to learn that they weren’t wrong here, either.

 

The mystery of the book is not at all surprising when it eventually unfolds—which it does in two lightning-fast pages at the end, too fast to follow easily—and the red herrings that had been so convincing as they appeared are just as convincingly disposed of. Adeline McElfresh is a top-notch writer and a real joy when she is at the top of her game, as she is here. It’s just Jane’s lack of any sense whatsoever when it comes to a pretty face that misses the mark. I keep hoping that as Jane gains more experience with boys—she’s now had four beaux—she will wise up some, but so far, no such luck. Let’s hope that her next stop, Africa, proves she’s learned a trick or two.

Dr. Jane’s Mission

Book 4 of 6

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1958

Cover illustration by Bob Abbett

 

Dr. Jane Langford went to Africa eager to join the man she loved and help him in his dedicated work among the natives. The tiny medical mission seemed secure and peaceful, but as the days passed, Jane learned that the strange and evil powers of the witch doctors had been turned against the hospital and all in it—powers that Jane began to suspect might be stronger than modern medical knowledge!

 

GRADE: B+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Sidonie turned from the window to her patient, saw that the brown-lashed eyelids were just a fraction raised. A most unromantic fraction, but then, when is coming out of anesthesia romantic? Not even the class’s glamour girl could look sexy while full of cyclopropane.”

 

REVIEW:

When last we saw Dr. Jane, she had thrown off the shackles of a corrupt, smooth doctor and fled Indiana to be with her then-fiancé, Rev. Bill Latham, who had set off on a mission into the deepest heart of Africa. Now, as the book opens, the time has flown, and she and Bill have been married for seven blissful months. Jane has, of course, thrown herself into her work with complete abandon, though she’s not entirely won over by Africa. “She simply did not understand these people,” she is thinking to herself in the first chapter, upset that an obstetrics patient’s great-grandmother has attempted to administer a witch doctor’s potion after a difficult delivery. “Their social and spiritual mores, their bewitchery— She shook her head.”

 

That said, though, author Adeline McElfresh does a more than respectable job, particularly considering the times, of imbuing her African characters with dignity and personality, to a degree that I’ve not seen before in a VNRN. The African countryside is likewise presented with a painterly lushness that makes you feel that you are there—and more importantly that Jane is there, which again differs from other African VNRNs (see Jungle Nurse, Congo Nurse, and Bush Hospital) in which the heroine might be working in Cincinnati, for all the background we see.

 

Since this is supposed to be a romance novel and our heroine is married, we can all but see the bull’s eye on poor Bill’s back. Nonetheless, I was thrilled at the spectacular way he departed the scene; it was so fantastic that although poor Jane is all but prostrate with grief, it’s hard to refrain from giggling. But even with Jane back on the market, she is just not very good at love—and this has been a major flaw with the Doctor Jane series. In fact, the next gentleman she tumbles for, Tom Radcliff, basically kisses her out of the blue one day, and then then next thing we know, she’s thinking, “She did love him—of course she did!” and planning her trousseau.

 

But she’s about as lackluster about Tom (her second boyfriend of this name, in case you’re keeping track at home; see Dr. Jane, Interne) as we are—in fact, we’ve barely met the man—which again is not surprising for the Doctor Jane series. For with Jane, she’s either swooning like a 12-year-old at a Justin Bieber concert or approaching her beloved as she would a nail trim. Fortunately, romance is not the center of this book, and the vast majority of the time we are wandering around Africa with Jane, looking on as she cares for her patients with the unusual diseases or settings as we would expect to find in rural Africa of almost 60 years ago.

 

As the pages at the back of the book grown increasingly few and the book shows little intention of going anywhere, Jane suddenly, quite literally in mid-sentence, decides she’s through with Africa and can’t marry Tom. It’s just two pages for her to break his heart and book her passage on a boat down the river, and now we are free to pick up the fourth installment, appropriately titled Dr. Jane Comes Home. One of her patients, a reporter named Mike Riley, has preceded her to Halesville, so we shall not at all be surprised to find her taking up with him in that tome. But as these books pile up, I begin to lose heart that Jane will ever find a relationship that shows any of the intelligence and maturity that she displays in every other aspect except her love life. But overall, her competence, aplomb, and adventures make this book worth reading on its own.

Dr. Jane Comes Home

Book 5 of 6

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1959

 

Woman or doctor? When beautiful, raven-haired Dr. Jane Latham returned to her hometown after her brief, tragic marriage she planned to devote the rest of her life to her profession. She was Jane Latham, doctor, she told herself. She had ceased to be Jane Latham, woman. But when Dave Riley, internationally famous newspaperman, came into her life he had other ideas. He begged Jane to renounce her vows and join him in his own cosmopolitan, easy-going life of fun and travel. Lonely, confused, filled with the ardor of youth, Jane Latham’s effort to deny her woman’s needs now met its sternest test.

 

GRADE: B

 

REVIEW:

I’m not sure what book the person who wrote the back-cover blurb (above) read, but it wasn’t the one I did. Maybe all that is forthcoming in the next (and final) book of the series, Dr. Jane’s Choice. In Dr. Jane Comes Home, it seems to be two years since her husband Bill died—done in by a crocodile in Africa—and one since she returned home to Halesville, Indiana, to resume her general practice. Journalist Dave Riley, whom she met in Africa before she left, has come with her, ostensibly to write an article about her but staying on because he loves this small town that much. Oh, and Jane too, but he’s waiting to spill the beans on that little secret, out of respect for her mourning.

 

Basically this book follows Jane as she manages patients and disasters, sheds an occasional tear over poor dead Bill, and otherwise snoops on minor Halesville characters old and new. A cast of more than 50 named people populate this story, which can be a bit confusing, but otherwise it’s a gentle, meandering story. At the end of the book Dave is in a serious car accident, which of course brings Jane’s latent love for him to the fore with her usual sappy “Oh, Dave, Dave—” which she has sighed again and again for every man who has passed through her heart, much to my increasing exasperation. We’ll see what dilemmas this new relationship brings to her in the final book.

 

It’s a pleasant story, but it doesn’t have much to offer: No offerings for the Best Quotes section; no real growth in Jane’s character; no interesting dilemmas, career or personal, for her to work out. It’s just more of Jane. Which, again, is nice enough—she’s smart, competent, independent, and strong—but unless you’re already this deep into the series and feel compelled to see it through, this book doesn’t really have much to offer.

Dr. Jane’s Choice

Book 6 of 6

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1961

Cover illustration by John W. Scott

 

To hundreds of thousands of readers, Doctor Jane Langford (later briefly married to the Reverend Bill Latham) is the most beloved heroine in all medical romance literature. Sternly incorruptible, but often hesitant as she chooses what is right and what is desirable—a gifted surgeon and general practitioner, but a woman first and foremost—Doctor Jane strikes an answering chord in every reader’s heart, for Jane is more than a dedicated professional, she is a woman needing masculine strength and love. In this present novel, Jane is faced with the most important choice of her life—how she reaches that choice makes for one of Adeline McElfresh’s most engrossing novels.

 

GRADE: B+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Don’t you talk her right arm off, Henry. She might need it in surgery in the morning.”

 

“She wanted to share his life, divide herself between being Mrs. Dave Riley and Dr. Jane Latham.”

 

REVIEW:
When we last left Dr. Jane Langford Latham, she was mourning her husband, Bill, killed in Africa by a crocodile, and I am not kidding. She thinks she’s falling for reporter Dave Riley, whom she first met in Africa and who followed her home to Halesville, Indiana, so as to write and wait for her to come around. But Jane isn’t sure, because she really, really loved Bill. So she takes a job at the nearby City Hospital—where she did her residency, by the way (see Dr. Jane, Interne)—as director of outpatient medicine.

 

In the course of her work, she discovers that a local woman who lives in the seedy part of town performs abortions, and goes on the warpath, declaring that she will “not stop until that woman is found, arrested, jailed.” Perhaps not coincidentally, a young pregnant woman from that same neighborhood is found drowned, and now the book turns into a mystery story. Whodunnit? Well, this local reporter, Charley Lewis, takes up the case, and the book is divided between following Jane and her patients, and Charley in his attempts to track down the girl’s killer.

 

I could go into more detail about the case and Jane’s success as a doctor despite her gender, but it’s not really important, and if you didn’t figure out what Jane’s Choice is going to be at the beginning of the last book, Dr.Jane Comes Home, then I won’t spoil it for you. The central question for the reviewer and the reader is, should you read these six books? The problem is that they are neither good enough to make the answer a clear yes, nor bad enough to make it an emphatic no. I always appreciate the quiet competence of the writing, which is occasionally humorous, and here we find a little inside joke: “If you two will excuse me, I’ve got Elizabeth Wesley’s new book. About doctors,” says the wife of Dr. Warren, her former attending in Dr. Jane, Interne. (Elizabeth Wesley is, of course, a pen name of Adeline McElfresh’s!)

 

The books are interesting, but they don’t have a lot of zest or camp to give them sparkle. I enjoyed Jane, but six books about her is a bit much, considering that the format or story of every book was essentially the same: All about Jane and her daily life, and then at the end, a big decision, usually more or less out of the blue, about some man, the “romance” being almost irrelevant to the rest of the book. The mystery that pervades the plot of this book is not a first for the Dr. Jane series—see Calling Dr. Jane—but it’s a bit of a distraction from what is supposed to be the central point, i.e. Jane. So if you don’t have a better book to reach for, go ahead and make the investment in Dr. Jane, but don’t expect her to leap off the page and dazzle you. She’s much too sedate for that.

Country Club Nurse

By Dorothy Cole 

(pseud. Frances Y. McHugh), ©1967

 

They were the glamorous super-rich—could she help heal their broken lives? Caring for an overindulged young socialite at the wealthy Chanticleer Club, Nurse Erda Sanders soon finds a new romance among “the beautiful people”—as well as plots and counterplots threatening not only her principles but lives!

 

GRADE: C-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Oh, don’t try any of your nurse psychology on me. Go on to bed.”

 

“Go change your dress. You’ll be more comfortable in something less forbidding.”

 

“They read the newspapers together every day and discussed the state of the world politically, as well as socially. Although Erda was upset by the various riots around the country, she tried not to show it so she wouldn’t upset her patient.”

 

“I got fed up and gave him back his ring. It didn’t amount to anything anyway. You could scarcely see the stone.”

 

REVIEW:

After the delightfully daffy Nurse at the Fair, I had been looking forward to another encounter with author Dorothy Cole. Unfortunately, the second date leaves me far less impressed: Country Club Nurse is pretty dumb, but not nearly as out-and-out dopey as its sister, and nowhere near as entertaining, I am sorry to report.

 

Erda Sanders is coming home after a month-long assignment in upstate New York to the apartment she shares on 85th Street between York and East End Avenues (we’re actually given the exact bus route she takes from Grand Central, but I won’t bore you) when she sees a young woman “with Miss Clairol honey blonde hair” run over by a boy on a bicycle. Erda is hired on the spot to care for socialite housewife Jessica Prentis, moves into the patient’s apartment, and spends a week watching with increasing irritation over the spoiled, demanding patient and witnessing numerous loud arguments between manipulative Jessica and her domineering husband Bart.

 

When Bart is at work, Jessica hangs out with Lenny Williams, who “was what could be called ‘a hippie.’ At least Erda guessed that was what they called ‘beatniks’ now. She didn’t keep up with such things.” Lenny coaxes money from Jessica and steals her engagement ring, but Jessica has an unexplained attachment to the seedy lad and continues to support him. Bart, needless to say, is not fond of the youth, and the pair fights about Lenny as well.

 

Upon her arrival into the domestic scene, Erda immediately begins to pose a lot of questions about her new employers: “Was Jessica Prentis really the only woman in Bart Prentis’ life? Did he really love her, in spite of the fact that he hadn’t shown any evidence of it that afternoon? And where did his grandmother fit into the picture?” (The question about the grandmother is about as odd to the reader as it appears here.) Jessica eggs on Erda’s natural detective instincts by asking random questions such as, “Did you ever want to kill someone?” Furthermore, when Jessica meets up with Lenny, they converse about his aunt, home from the hospital, and that incites Erda’s paranoid delusions too: “All the way up in the taxi she’d wondered about the conversation concerning Lenny’s aunt, and why she should be bitter against the Prentis family.” In another book, these questions might be foreshadowing, but it must be acknowledged that a good 75 percent of Erda’s suspicious musings go absolutely nowhere.

 

So when the Prentises offer Erda the opportunity to come with them to the Chanticleer Country Club on Long Island for the duration of the summer, Erda tags along despite the fact that she really doesn’t like her patient at all, who incidentally is increasingly mobile and in fact goes out shopping daily. Not long after she arrives, Erda’s duties are transferred to the mysterious grandmother, Mrs. Isabelle Prentis, who is spry enough at 80 that Erda can barely keep up with her when they walk the club grounds. With Bart’s aunt Jean and her son Joseph also in residence, the family of five manages to fight viciously at every meal. Isabelle at one point declares to Erda, “I’m not a favorite with my family. All families don’t love each other. And I am a very rich woman.” Now the nurse has this to obsess over—combined with Jessica’s idle question about murder, she’s really building it into something with legs: “But she wouldn’t! Not in cold blood!”

 

Meanwhile, Erda is falling for Joseph, who is a physics professor at Amherst wounded twice in Vietnam and captain of the family yacht, which is kept moored at the club, so he parades around in full navy whites a lot. He invites her dancing and tells her, “I wish I knew you well enough to kiss you,” the cad. “And dancing in his arms, Erda felt that at last she had found a man for whom she would be willing to give up her profession, her very life.” Yikes! This after barely half an hour!

 

Isabelle suddenly comes down with food poisoning, and after a lot of questioning through about 20 pages it’s determined it was the lobster salad—though everyone completely goes to pieces about this, especially the author, who gives Bart “a murderous expression” on one page and induces him to say that a planned family cruise to Halifax “might be murder.” Recovered, Isabelle spots a new maid in the hallway and is convinced that it’s actually her dead son’s widow Elise—Bart’s mother—arrived to follow through on a threat made eight years ago to kill Isabelle. Sure enough, Isabelle shortly goes into insulin shock, and it is found that her normal medications had been substituted for much stronger pills. Then, during yet another of their epic battles, Jessica spills the beans to Bart that Lenny the Hippie is actually his cousin, Elise’s sister’s son, and the money Jessica gives to Lenny is for Elise, who is dying of cancer. In response to this news, Bart promises to beat his mother’s location out of Lenny, and Erda discreetly slips away, returning to her room to ponder the Prentis’ marriage all night.

 

The next day, as the family is taking the club launch out to the yacht, a speedboat appears and begins to closely circle their boat, throwing several people into the water. Lenny is at the helm, hopped up on LSD, and Bart attempts to swim to Lenny’s boat and is run over. Bobbing in the water and barely able to draw breath, Erda is never too busy to come up with a string of pointless questions: “Why, she wondered, was Bart deliberately endangering his life? Was it because he thought he could stop Lenny’s crazy speeding or because he wanted to beat him up and force him to tell where his mother, Elise was?” Bart is going down for the third time when Jessica, sporting the green bikini that Isabelle strictly forbade her to wear, dives in and keeps him afloat until the Coast Guard arrives to collar Lenny and haul the Prentises from the drink. Lenny is babbling about his aunt, who had committed suicide with sleeping pills the day before, leaving a note saying that she had tried to kill Isabelle and was terminally ill anyway. Now that she’s dead, though, “we’ll never know how Elise managed to duplicate the regular insulin pills in appearance,” darn the luck.

 

Though Lenny is guilty of at least third-degree murder, whether he is brought to trial is apparently the Prentis family’s decision, and they opt not to press charges. In the literal wake of this tragic scene, Joseph starts kissing the daylights out of Erda and then proposes, so now it looks like she’ll be heading off to Amherst when the season ends. I wish I could tell you I felt some sort of pleasure at this ending, but all I could do was hope for an engagement long enough to allow poor Joseph to come to his senses.

 

There’s definitely a goodly amount of stupidity in this book, but it’s not as over the top as was Nurse at the Fair. Mostly it’s just dumb, without one bit of inadvertent brilliance in it. Erda comes across as a cramped, prudish character with a penchant for asking absurd and irrelevant questions, and most of the time her “nursing” is really just babysitting wealthy people who don’t like to be alone, hardly admirable work. The inconsistencies in this book are endless: how could a shallow infant like Jessica have kept the secret about Elise for so long? Why does Lenny keep the secret as well? Why does Elise suddenly pop up after eight years to murder Isabelle yet have no desire to see her son? Why do these people who do nothing but scream at each other continue to gather every night of every summer at the club to exercise their animosities? What in God’s name does Joseph see in Erda? How did Elise know that Isabelle took insulin? How did she manage to duplicate the regular pills in appearance? If the inconsistencies felt intentional, as they almost did with Nurse at the Fair, you could chalk them up as a knowing wink from an author endeavoring to entertain a savvy audience with a bit of camp. But at the country club, they just come across as sloppy and pointless, and the intelligent reader is better off staying in Manhattan, or heading for the fair.

Nurse Farley’s Decision

By Teresa Holloway, ©1959

 

Auburn-haired Susan Farley had brilliantly graduated from her long, difficult nurse’s training. Now, at big, modern St. Patrick’s she was practicing the profession she loved. One day Susan was assigned the traction case in Room 212 in the Orthopedic wing. Oliver Cox, she saw, was a handsome older man accustomed to wealth and power. Grateful for Susan’s skillful nursing, Cox offered to endow St. Patrick’s with a cancer clinic. But there was a string attached to his gift—in exchange he wanted Susan for his wife. Susan was faced with an overwhelming decision. As Oliver Cox’s wife she might be instrumental in finding the cure for the deadly killer. But—what of the profession for which she had so proudly trained and dedicated herself?

 

GRADE: B-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Circles under blue eyes are danger signals.”

 

“She put her cheek on one of the thin hands, the one without the needle.”

 

“What in the world am I going to do about my complexion? Jimmy hates pimply girls, and he’s taking me to Seminole Club tomorrow night.”

 

“Years of people’s lives went into the training of these hands beneath that brilliant light. Mothers’ lives—teaching gentleness and a desire to serve; fathers’ lives, dedicated to earning the money to make knowledge within their grasp.”

 

“She’s pretty enough to hang on the wall.”

 

“Because it was midsummer, Arch Curtis survived his battle with the tiger shark.”

 

“All the ‘womanly docility’ the Sister in charge of the conduct class had stressed, flew out of the window.”

 

REVIEW:

Fear not, readers, Susan Farley is not, as falsely advertised on the back cover blurb above, asked to prostitute herself to fund a cancer lab. I don’t quite know what to think when the cover describes a book completely unlike the one I actually read, but in this case I must confess I was relieved, because it sounded horrid.

 

In actuality, Susan Farley is trying to decide whether she should take a job at Dr. Mitchell’s office, which pays more and will enable her to fund her younger sister’s college education, or stick with hospital nursing, which she really loves. This “decision,” however, is removed from her when her father tells her that she should take the hospital job and they’ll find the money for Grace’s education somewhere else. When she goes to ask for the job in surgery, however, she’s told that it’s been filled, and she’s convinced that Dr. Mitchell—who is, in fact, chief of staff—has blackballed her from the position. She takes a job in orthopedics instead, but only after she jumps into the pier to save a young woman—too late, as it happens—who has just given birth to a baby boy, and the ensuing publicity, her photo landing on the front page and all, gives her a little leverage to make some demands.

 

At the hospital, she works along side Dr. Archibald Curtis, who makes her little heart go pitter-pat whenever she sees him, and they are good friends but nothing more—“until he himself changed the color of their relationship,” because it’s just not possible for a decent young woman to make a pass. When she catches him talking to a young candy-striper in a pink dress, however, she falls all to pieces, especially after a date with Arch at the beach during which she rescues him from a tiger shark and brings him home to her house and puts on a pink dress, which apparently is going to remind him of this young woman. “In her hurry to get some hot food ready for Arch when he was ready for it, she had chosen the one dress she shouldn’t have. Unfortunately there was no time to change it. Susan was out of sorts all evening. Arch, bewildered, went home early.”

 

The incident with the shark ends up in the newspaper—making it twice in the past week Susan’s landed on the front page—and Arch is convinced Susan is a publicity hound who took the story to the paper herself. She is mortified: “No man wanted to be pulled out of the water by a girl,” she thinks, as the fellows apparently prefer death to such a dishonor. “What can I do to ease the hurt this story is going to cause Arch? The other fellows are going to rib him about being both shark bait and woman bait—I can just hear them.” Eventually it’s revealed that sister Grace is the one who spilled the beans, to a cute boy who works for the newspaper. So that’s the end of that little escapade.

 

More little stories pile into the book—a woman with a lip cancer was operated on by Dr. Mitchell but now has a horrible scar and lost her husband because of it, the dead woman’s boy is being raised in the hospital, wealthy patient Oliver Cox agrees to fund a cancer center because of Susan’s fervent interest in that particular disease, it is proposed that the orphaned baby be raised by the hospital, Susan notices a skin cancer on Dr. Mitchell’s nose. At the dinner that brings together the head honchos to talk about the cancer center, Susan is the only woman—invited by Oliver Cox—but Arch gets jealous and snubs her, so she just walks out of the dinner without saying goodbye to anyone, including her date, and climbs into the red Thunderbird belonging to the young candy striper, who immediately drives off the road and is nearly killed, except Susan is there to apply pressure to the head wound in the ambulance all the way to the hospital. Really, if you were hoping for a quiet evening at home, you’d better stay away from Susan Farley.

 

At the end of the book, Susan out of the blue decides that what with the car accident and all, she’s “getting some kind of sense knocked into my head.” It was probably just a concussion, but she gets up the next morning and goes to work anyway. What she meant by sense, apparently, is that she decides that her younger sister is not the spoiled pet she’d thought she was, and that “I’ve had the attitude, all along, that St. Patrick’s was mighty lucky to have a chance at the services of the dedicated Susan Farley, R.N.” I’m not sure that it follows that her attitude about working in surgery was wrong: Shouldn’t you fight for what you want, and have some healthy egotism about a job you’re good at? Then she decides that the woman’s bad lip scar doesn’t mean she should think less of Dr. Mitchell, that “a man doesn’t build up that large a practice without doing a lot of good to a lot of people. Of course he’s bound to make mistakes. Everyone does.” She exhorts Arch, who has been offered the chance to join the chief of staff’s practice, to give the matter careful thought rather than dismissing it outright, and blames the woman with the scar for not asking to have it fixed—and it turns out that Arch already has, though I’m not sure what his participation in this woman’s story is supposed to signify. All these little revelations, with no actual obvious difference between the character at the beginning of the book and the one at the end, are apparently what passes for “growth”: “It wasn’t only the big, sprawling hospital that was growing. Somehow, it impelled them all to grow along with it,” Susan says on the last page, in a thoroughly anticlimactic ending. Declaring something doesn’t make it so; remember Dick Cheney and the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

 

Overall this is not a terrible book, and the character of Oliver Cox is very well drawn, as is the party that he takes Susan to. But it can seem like a collection of bizarre incidents and extraneous details such as this one: When Susan discovers that she’s put on a pink dress and can’t change it, she stands in the middle of the big kitchen and makes chopping gestures of anger while holding a messy egg beater and splatters egg all over the linoleum, which Grace had just cleaned that morning since the cleaning woman hadn’t been able to get to it and it was Grace’s day to clean the floors, so Grace is fussing at Susan about the mess while cleaning it up with a damp sponge. Did we really need to know all that minute detail? It just makes me feel puzzled and expectant that something down the road will turn up to give this overdrawn moment some relevance, but it never happens. I think Teresa Holloway has the potential to put together a fine book, because some of the details in this story are very nicely sketched, but she really needs some help on plots, because without a good linear thread, you’re just left with a few pretty paragraphs and a lot of head scratching.

Doctor’s Wife

By Maysie Greig, ©1937

Also published as Dr. Brad’s Nurse, pseud. Jennifer Ames

 

Two women loved Dr. Bob Bradburn. Natalie Norris had always loved him. Hers had been an idealized love when she was fourteen, and then, as she grew older and worked side by side with him, a love that made her long to be part of his hopes, his discouragements, his triumps. Hers had been more than the ordinary hero-worship of a young girl, and more than a nurse’s infatuation for a handsome doctor. But there had to be many moments when she could not share in Dr. Brad’s life. He was married to Marjorie Daw, a beautiful, spoiled child of a girl who knew how to fill his leisure hours with gayety and excitement. Into the story that tells which one was to give him the more lasting happiness, Maysie Greig has woven drama, thrills, tragedy—all the many colored aspects of true romance.

 

GRADE: A

 

BEST QUOTES:

“When you’re dealing with unintelligent people you should never lose your temper.”

 

“That’s what makes life pleasant and at the same time possible—that we do forget.”

 

“It’s important for a girl to have a job which will enable her to meet decent men. I suppose I mean, by that, men with money. It’s more important really than getting good pay. You don’t get much fun out of life otherwise.”

 

“Women, after all, belonged to the lighter side of a man’s life. Bob had rather old-fashioned ideas about women. They were a man’s recreation—gay, delightful creatures to turn to when the day’s work was done, to share vacations with, to go out to parties with, to be at home when one wished to relax. It never occurred to Bob that there could be a woman who could enter into the other side of his life, who could share his ambition, his work, who could become so much a part of his every waking thought that it would be impossible to go on without her.”

 

“I shouldn’t have said you were looking haggard. I know it’s the unpardonable thing to say to a woman.”

 

“Perhaps there wasn’t quite so much thrill in a husband as there was in a lover. At least, not the sort of thrill that made you want to spend every available moment alone with him.”

 

“It’s so pleasant to feel you’re a martyr. It gives you nice little prickles of virtue all the way up your spine.”

 

“You can always excuse what you do yourself; it is not so easy to excuse what someone else does.”

 

“Women like to be treated badly. It’s the old slave complex coming out in them.”

 

“You should never be sorry for anyone who can genuinely feel an emotion, whatever it is. You should be sorry only for those people who have lost all capacity for feeling anything.”

 

REVIEW:

After a long drought, I offer you Doctor’s Wife as a gentle rain on a thirsty desert. Natalie Norris is just 14 when we meet her; her grandmother has just died and left her alone in the world, and Dr. Robert Bradburn, 24 and just starting his career, is advising her to go into an orphanage, though she is fighting with the condescending charity maven who has swooped in to do what’s “right” for the young waif. On her own, Bob suggests, she will not be able to finish her education and will never be more than a shop girl; if she goes to the orphanage, she will be able to go to nursing school and so embark upon a satisfying and well-paying (relatively speaking) career that will maximize her brains and talent. Natalie reluctantly agrees to the proposal, as long as Dr. Bob will hire her when she finishes nursing school, which he agrees to do.

 

Cut to six years later, and Natalie is finally a nurse when she runs into Bob in the hospital—or rather, faints dead away when the nurse she is with mentions that Bob is about to be married to socialite Marjorie Daw. Once roused, she reminds Bob of his promise, and now she’s working in his office and stirring up the jealousies of the frivolous young thing who has become the doctor’s wife. And with good reason: Marjorie will “always be a child,” Bob tells Natalie. “She makes you forget your cares and enter the world she lives in. It’s an unreal world, of course, a make-believe world, but it’s very pleasant.” Natalie, a serious, deep individual who likes to read literature, immediately understands: “She is champagne,” she replies, and Bob is startled into seeing her as a human being, one with far greater possibilities than his wife.

 

Marjorie likewise understands that there is much in her husband that she will never access: “She knew that there were depths to him she couldn’t reach, that despite his frequent laughter and the humorous twinkle that, every now and then, lighted his eyes, there was a deep seriousness to his nature she couldn’t altogether appreciate or understand.” She is a social butterfly fond of parties, but as time passes she becomes increasingly discontent with this role as the happy housewife, because she realizes her superficiality and its limited attractiveness to her husband but is at the same time powerless to change her intrinsic nature. She becomes increasingly resentful of Natalie, especially after she demands to see Bob in his office when he is with a patient and Natalie forbids it, and when Natalie crashes a party at Bob’s house to tell him that his patient is dying and requires immediate surgery; it turns out that Marjorie has intentionally turned off the phone (by jamming paper between the clapper and the bells to muffle the ringer, quaintly enough) to keep Bob at home for the event (and needless to say, this always spells certain doom to a relationship in a VNRN).

 

Now Bob is awakening to Natalie’s charms, and to the fact that his initial attraction to his simple wife has dried up. Marjorie decides to go to sailing in Cuba, and now Bob is free to take Natalie out to dinner and dancing. One evening he confesses that he loves her, but now she insists that they must part, because there must be no temptation or divorce to ruin his career. She’s given her notice when Bob gets a call that a very important patient is in Havana—where Marjorie is sailing!—and needs his surgical services immediately. Natalie must go with him to Cuba to assist in the surgery, and Marjorie soon learns that Bob and Natalie have checked into the Hotel Carlos. She storms to the hotel, where doctor and nurse are enjoying a cocktail after having performed “one of the most skillful and courageous operations in medical records.”  Marjorie stages an absolute superlative of a scene and then whirls out in a hysterical fury, driving a “great, powerful, supercharged Dusenberg”—and surely I don’t need to tell you what happens from this point on.

 

The final chapter is a bit of a letdown, but it’s only five pages, and since we’ve had such a beautiful ride through the first 200, it’s not too difficult to forgive author Maysie Greig. This is one of those charming older nurse novels that reads like it were wrapped in the airiest of chiffons. What it’s about doesn’t really even matter; it’s a lovely read, light yet filling, and it’s a rare joy to find a VNRN like this one. The characters are real and well-drawn—even silly Marjorie is a sympathetic character—and the writing is far more than the minimum required to get the job done. It seems the author has penned several other VNRNs, including the pleasant enough Overseas Nurse under the pen name Jennifer Ames, so I’ll be doing a little shopping in the near future, particularly for her earlier works. But it will be hard to find one that tops this delightful little book.