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 girl friend 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 .