Psychiatric Nurse

by Dan Ross

  PSYCHIATRIC NURSE

  by Dan Ross

  Avalon Books 1971

  Scanned and Proofed by RyokoWerx

  CHAPTER ONE

  As Nurse Jean Shannon continued her job interview with Dr. Clifton Werner, the head of the private mental hospital known as Tranquility Place, she had the uneasy feeling that the urbane, middle-aged doctor was more interested in probing her motivations as a person than in checking on her professional qualifications for the post of assistant to the head nurse. She could only assume that he was anxious to know her weaknesses so that he might be able to successfully trade on them if he hired her as a member of his staff.

  He was a squat, pompous man with a rather ugly face adorned by horn-rimmed glasses. His nose was a broad blob, and his lips were thin, suggesting cruelty; only his eyes made him outstanding. They were large, brown, and shrewdly penetrating behind the thick lenses. Now he sat behind a broad mahogany desk in the mahogany-paneled room with its modern indirect lighting and studied her application form with a slight smile on his thin lips.

  "I find your background interesting, Miss Shannon," he told her in a husky, somewhat hypnotic-sounding voice with just a trace of a guttural accent.

  "Thank you," she said. "I've had credits in psychiatry and a lot of experience at the state hospital in Danvers. But I feel I can be more useful in a smaller institution."

  His large brown eyes fixed on her with understanding. "A laudable desire on your part, Miss Shannon," he said. "You will find that we have a much different sort of hospital here. Organized on lines of my own beliefs, it is considered by some as unorthodox."

  She smiled. She was blonde, petite, and in her middle twenties. Her face was sensitive, perhaps a trifle narrow, and her features were even. She was regarded as attractive in an intellectual way, rather than catalogued as a beauty. In her dark winter coat and stylish gray Persian lamb turban, she looked the sophisticated young woman she was.

  She said, "It was because I heard that you had a small hospital run on liberal lines that I decided to apply for this job."

  "Interesting," the urbane Dr. Clifton Werner said with that smug smile which bothered her a little. "You will forgive the many personal questions I have asked. But I believe it is necessary to know a great deal about the people I employ. So many factors go into the making of a good worker in our field."

  Stifling her growing uneasiness, she said, "I'm not sure I understand the bearing that your questions have on my ability to do a proper job here, but I am anxious and willing to cooperate."

  She felt she must let him see that she could get along with people. It could be that he was craftily creating this difficult situation to test her abilities in this respect. She still wasn't sure about him.

  He was studying her application, but his question had no bearing on anything she had written there. "As you mentioned earlier, you are a product of a broken home, Miss Shannon?"

  "Yes," she said rather tautly. "My parents were divorced when I was eleven."

  "This caused you unhappiness, of course."

  She shrugged. "I was an only child, and sensitive. I did miss my father, though he had visiting rights."

  The eyes behind the thick glasses searched her face. "You felt that he had been treated unfairly, and this made you resentful of your mother."

  "I suppose so," she said, tense at his going over all this information he had dragged from her for a second time.

  "And when your mother remarried, your unhappiness increased."

  "Wasn't it bound to?"

  He nodded. "Quite a natural reaction." After a pause, "And you were sixteen when word came to you of your father's suicide?"

  "Yes." Her quiet reply was almost a whisper. Why must he torture her with this again? Why had she so readily revealed this tragedy that had haunted her since high school, and which had sent her into nursing?

  "And it was after that unhappy event that you made up your mind to become a nurse?"

  "I'd been considering it before that."

  "But this was, perhaps, the deciding factor?"

  "I suppose so," she said wearily. She was beginning to wonder if she really did want to work for this rather strange, inquisitive man. He had warned her that his methods were original and unorthodox. Perhaps she would find them too much so for her liking. Why didn't she get up from her chair and tell him that she had changed her mind about the job?

  He must have caught her mood, for at once he said, "I hope I'm not discouraging you from wanting to work with me, Miss Shannon."

  She hesitated. "It may be that I'm not the right person for such a responsible post here," she said. "I am used to the more rigid rules of a state hospital."

  Dr. Werner put down the application and stared at her very directly. "What I've been trying to do is to find out your attitude toward mental illness," he said. "It is imperative that I be aware of that. Do you understand?"

  "I suppose so," she said without conviction. To herself, she thought bitterly, He's found out that I was a desperately unhappy child and teenager. That I've never gotten over my father's killing himself, and that I became a graduate in psychiatric nursing mainly because of his suicide. I have a more than average feeling of dedication toward my profession. I want desperately to help mentally sick people, and perhaps save someone from my father's tragic fate.

  "From what you've told me, I know that your attitude toward your patients is bound to be sympathetic," he said in his easy way. "That fits in well with our policy here."

  "I'm glad of that," she said.

  "I dislike cold nursing help, and I will not tolerate negative thinking on the part of any employee," Dr. Werner went on in his slightly guttural accent. "But I feel that your background would make you ideally suited to be on my team."

  His reasonable explanation raised her hopes. Perhaps the long drive on this cold late afternoon in February was not going to end in disappointment.

  He could turn out to be a competent, reasonable man after all. She had had only one report on his private hospital, but it had been of a glowing nature. It had come to her from a former patient, and now she worried that she had been too influenced by it.

  "You will never find me disinterested in my patients," she assured him.

  The squat man nodded. "I'm certain of that," he said. "My probing into your past has produced satisfactory answers."

  At this point, the buzzer on his intercom broke in on them. He quickly pressed a button and lifted the receiver. After a brief moment of listening, he said, "Tell Miss Moore I'll be right there." He put the receiver down and stood up. "A minor emergency requires my presence. If you'll excuse me for a moment, Miss Shannon."

  "Of course," she said.

  The suave doctor hurried out of the room. In his white jacket and black trousers, he was the perfect picture of a medical man. She sat back with a sigh in the quiet of the richly paneled office, and thought how little it resembled the austere offices in the state hospital in Danvers with their walls of antiseptic white. Everything here seemed to speak of elegance and taste. Even the French impressionist paintings on the walls spoke of the culture of the person who had chosen them.

  She had left Boston around noon to drive the plowed expressway as far as the Town Lyne House, one of the better eating places along the route. After a pleasant meal there, she had driven on to New Hampshire, and into Maine along the shore route. It was after the Kittery Traffic Circle on the border of Maine that she had seen one of the blue and white road signs indicating that Tranquility Place was on Route 1 A, near York Harbor.

  There had been a small snowstorm the night before, and the evergreens along the highway were covered with a mantle of white, though the road had been plowed bare. It was a below-freezing day with a slight wind, an
d so she had kept the heater working hard all the way. Her first impression of the York Harbor region was of a rugged, beautiful shoreline and stately old mansions set back from the road. She knew it had the reputation of being a haven for the wealthy in the summer season, and the famed Marshall House Hotel was located there.

  Passing through the main area of the village with its drugstore, gas stations, post office and tall-spired white churches, she had come to another of the blue and white signs which indicated the mental hospital was down a side road along the shore area. She headed her car along the narrow, winding road which had some snow and ice on it, enough to make her small car sway frighteningly several times. Then she came out to a large cleared area on a cliff overlooking the ocean.

  The hospital consisted of half a dozen yellow brick cottages with white roofs and trim, connected by passageways, and a large central building behind them that, she was later to discover, contained the general offices and public rooms. The cottages were inhabited by the patients, and there were some wooden buildings to the left and right of the cottages that served as dormitories for the help and as homes for the professional members of the staff.

  The asphalt parking area beside the main building was cleared of snow and held a number of cars. She had left hers there and entered the main door, where a receptionist had sent her in for her arranged interview with Dr. Clifton Werner. Now the interview was almost over, and Jean didn't know whether she had gotten the job—or whether she still wanted it!

  The door to the office opened, and Dr. Werner came in briskly. He stood before her, and with a faint smile on his ugly face, he said, "I'm not going to keep you in suspense any longer, Miss Shannon. I'll be happy to have you as our assistant head nurse. I trust you are ready to begin work at once?"

  "I'm prepared for that," she said with a smile. Again her spirits rose, and the misgivings she had felt about the doctor vanished. Surely he was going to be everything that she had anticipated, modern in his theories and practices. This would be a place where she could achieve the sense of personal contact with patients that she so much desired. She asked, "How many patients do you have here, Dr. Werner?"

  "An average of fifty," he said, all professional now. "I have deliberately chosen to work with a small group. There is an almost continual turnover of patients, but fifty would be the average number."

  "It is my understanding that most of these people have suffered from breakdowns and the like," she said. "You have no violent ward."

  He shook his head. "We have no wards at all."

  "I see."

  "And our guests—I prefer to call them that—are mostly victims of breakdowns, though we have a few suffering from congenital mental illness. We also have a few epileptics. I've pioneered in a new treatment for epilepsy, and from time to time I have patients referred to me from all over the country."

  "Interesting," she said.

  "I've had excellent results with my own drugs and treatment of the ancient disease," he went on. "Ninety per cent of those I've treated here have been able to go back into the world without fear of suffering a recurrence."

  "Do you have a large medical staff?" Jean wanted to know.

  "Myself and two assistants," he said. "We occasionally call on the local G.P.'s for aid if we need it. And when a specialist is required, we send our patients to one of the famous ones in Boston. I may say that all our patients are wealthy or come from families of great wealth. We are a private hospital dedicated to giving the mental patient the luxury and pampered care so often denied to him in the larger mental institutions."

  "I hope this closer interest has resulted in more cures," she said.

  His face showed no particular expression, though his shrewd eyes behind the horn-rimmed glasses eyed her sharply. "I'd say we have managed a satisfactory average," he told her. "I'm fortunate in having Dr. Kenneth Hastings as my chief assistant."

  Her eyebrows raised. "I've heard of him. He's quite famous."

  Dr. Werner offered her another of his thin smiles. "You are thinking of his father, who is one of the nation's most eminent psychiatrists."

  "I'm sure Dr. Hastings must have inherited some of his father's ability."

  "Indeed," the doctor agreed. "And our other medical officer is Dr. Firth Breton, who is a veteran of some thirty years in the field. You might consider him our conservative member of the trio."

  "You seem to have established a good balance," she said.

  "I hope so. Now I'm going to take you to the office you will share with Head Nurse Catherine Moore. And she, in turn, will see that you are acquainted with your living quarters and introduced in the staff dining hall. I take some meals there, but I usually try to have the evening meal with my wife in our house."

  "Of course," Jean said. "It's an impressive location. It must be lovely in the summer."

  "It is. I had some difficulty in acquiring the property. There was resistance among the local people to having a mental hospital in the area. It was useless to try to explain that our patients would not be numerous or of an aggressive type. There is still ignorance and fear of the mentally sick, even among people who should know better. Eventually I won over enough of the town-council members to get permission to build on this location. I consider it ideal."

  Having said this, the doctor led her from his office down a short, narrow corridor to another office with two desks side by side. At one of the desks sat a prim, gray-haired woman checking reports. She looked up when they entered, and Jean saw that the woman had large blue eyes with dark circles under them and a rather sad face.

  Dr. Werner gave the woman a pleasant nod. "Miss Shannon and I have come to terms, so she will be your new assistant."

  Head Nurse Moore rose and came to shake hands with Jean. Nurse Moore was a rather tall woman, at least a head taller than the doctor. She said, "I read your application and I was pleased with it. I'm sure you're exactly the sort of person we need here."

  Jean smiled at the older woman. "You're very kind. I'll do my best. But it'll take me a little time to understand your way of running things."

  "Miss Moore will help you with that," Dr. Werner said. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some other things to attend to."

  "Thank you for everything," Jean told him as he left.

  Head Nurse Moore waited until the doctor had closed the door after him. Then, with a hero worship that she couldn't disguise, she smiled and said, "Dr. Werner is a wonderful man. But you'll discover that before you've worked here very long."

  "He seems very nice," Jean agreed.

  "I've never worked for anyone like him before," the gray-haired woman said with a tone of complete devotion in her voice.

  Jean realized that Dr. Werner could do no wrong in the eyes of his head nurse. Her admiration of him might very well be justified; Jean only hoped that it was. She said, "I'll have to depend on you for everything. I don't even know where I'm to live."

  "In Hazen Cottage," Nurse Moore informed her. "I live there, and so do a number of other key members of the staff, including Dr. Hastings and Dr. Breton."

  "I probably should take my bags over there now and freshen up for dinner," Jean said.

  "I'll have an orderly take your bags and show you where to go," the older nurse said. "You'll have dinner at our table in the staff dining room in this building. I'll introduce you around."

  She lifted her phone and asked for someone named Moriarty to come to the office. A few moments later he arrived, a thin, diminutive Irishman with a bald head and a thrusting jaw. His smile, on being introduced to Jean, was welcome enough.

  "I'll take you across to Hazen Cottage," he told her, and picked up a bag in each hand as he led the way.

  They went out a side door and crossed a path through the light layer of snow to a three-story wooden building. It was large, and had once been the main building on the estate that Dr. Werner had purchased for his private hospital.

  "Hope you like it here," the little Irishman said as they walked. He didn't see
m to mind the cold, though he wore no hat or overcoat.

  "I hope so," she said.

  "Miss Hillman, the one whose place you're taking, was older than you," Moriarty confided as he trudged along. "She was a good enough nurse, but she and Dr. Werner didn't hit it off, so she left."

  "Oh?" Dr. Werner had been careful not to discuss with her why the position was open.

  "Yep, Miss Hillman thought the doctor was too careless in issuing drugs to the patients. She told him so and they had a row. She left right away. But she told me about it before she went." He gave Jean a wary look. "I don't know whether what she said was true or not, but I'm depending on you not to repeat it, or I'll be in trouble."

  "You needn't worry, Moriarty," Jean said. But his remark caused her some concern. Had it been a second sense, born of experience, that had made her initially suspicious of Dr. Werner? And was her doubt concerning him going to bear fruit? A shadow of worry crossed her pretty face as they entered the old wooden house.

  The hallways were high-ceilinged and broad. Moriarty led her directly along the first floor hall to the rear of the building. There he opened a door and waited for her to enter. Jean went into the room and found it a good size, pleasantly furnished in the bedroom style of a half-century ago. It was clean, and its single bay window looked out on an evergreen woods.

  The little Irishman placed her bags on the bed for unpacking. "It's one of the nicest rooms in the place," he said. "The dormitory where I and a lot of the others live is a converted barn. They did it over well enough, but the rooms are biscuit-box size."

  "I'll be very happy here," she told him. "There are other nurses in the building," he said. "And the doctors. Anything else, miss?" He paused by the door.

  "No. And thank you very much."

  "Part of my job," he said with a grin. "Glad to see another pretty face around."

  And with that bit of Irish brazenness, he left her. This was her second live-in position, and Jean thought the quarters assigned to her were much nicer than those in her previous job. Slowly she began to unpack her things. The radiator, an old iron one, hissed, and the room maintained a good heat. The window took on a frosted pattern as darkness came. She changed into a chic dark woolen dress for dinner, wanting to make the best impression she could on her new colleagues.