Student Nurse
By Peggy Gaddis, ©1959“Being nice to you could easily become habit-forming,” he said quietly. Loyce Hamilton, pretty student nurse, felt a warm sweetness in her heart at handsome Reed Shelby’s words. For he was the head of the Shelby clan—and a bachelor to boot! But when Loyce realized the callous way the Shelbys dominated everyone in town, the warmth began to chill. And Reed’s jealousy of Dr. Gordon Grant didn’t help matters …
GRADE: B
BEST QUOTES:
“People who are destitute or almost, and who have mental quirks, are called crazy! But if they have enough money to get themselves out of unpleasant jams, then people say they are merely eccentric.”
REVIEW:
In Loyce Hamilton, we have a nurse named in one of the finer Peggy Gaddis traditions (see also her Leota, Luana, Leona, and Linette). Also like these lovely ladies, Loyce is a strong, capable, and compassionate nurse working in Georgia in a small community hospital of only 40 beds out in the sticks. There she meets another Gaddis staple, the stuck-up city doctor who hates the country but is forced to work there until his med school loan is paid off and he can go back to the city and become the highly paid specialist that only pompous, lazy, heartless snobs endeavor to be.
While she serves out her month-long rotation, Loyce rooms with the Shelby family, local landowners who own, well, everything in town. The family is headed by Ruth, the “very, very handsome” but “big—very big” spinster sister doomed never to marry, the numbers stacked against her: age (30), height (5'10"), and weight (200). Rounding out the family is Reed, the big brother, the obvious love interest, and Marcy the sister-in-law, widow of Hank, who died in the war. Marcy has a son, Paul, but she has been divested of any responsibility for the baby, who is cared for exclusively—and has even been renamed—by Ruth. Marcy is essentially a prisoner of the family, which they frankly admit: “Marcy wanted to stay in California and get a job after the baby was born. But of course we couldn’t permit that,” Reed tells Loyce. Marcy, though she has an inheritance that could support her, can only hand over the baby on command and cry. Loyce, hearing this story, is incredulous: “But for goodness sake, Marcy, he’s yourbaby!” she says. “I can’t see any reason you shouldn’t take the baby and go away.” There is no logical answer to this; all Marcy can do is fume that she’s a prisoner. She’s not exactly wrong; when she asks Reed if she can leave Georgia, he says she is free to go—but the baby stays. “This is his home; he’ll stay here and grow up here and take his rightful place.” Since she lacks the gumption to just take the boy and go, there she stays.
Loyce comes to fall for Reed, which we saw coming from page one. The two go on several dates, including to lunch at the Cloister, a historic hotel on Sea Island, which I know well; it’s like unexpectedly meeting an old friend when we drive up the causeway past the “century-old oaks, their massive limbs draped in swaying curtains of green-grey Spanish moss.” Despite these dates, when Marcy suggests that Reed is in love with Loyce, she all but falls off her chair: “I have never heard of anything so silly in my life,” she stammers. “Why, he’s never given me a second glance or a second thought!” This, after pages of him giving her tender looks and calling her “darling” and “wonderful,” and suggesting they honeymoon at the Cloister. If it were simple insecurity that makes Loyce respond so, I could forgive it, but it comes across as a false modesty that “nice” girls were forced to adopt in the day, pretending not to notice a man at all until the day he proposed, which I find irritating and stupid.
After the Shelbys grudgingly allow it, Marcy takes a volunteer job at the hospital, and while she’s there, she comes under the notice of Dr. Grant. So Loyce goes to bat for Marcy, telling Reed that she thinks the family is domineering and cruel to the spineless little lamb, pretty much pouring ice water on her blooming romance. Dr. Grant then shows up at the Shelby mansion for a meeting with the extended family, where he tells them he will stay in Shelbyville and marry Marcy—though he has never had any discussion with Marcy about his feelings for her—once again treating her like a voiceless pet. This time, however, she doesn’t seem to mind so much, and agrees to marry the doctor after he says that he will take her and the baby away from the Shelby house.
Though the family is in uproar, Reed later thanks Loyce, surprisingly enough, for having pointed out some hard truths, and he tells her that they will make it up to Marcy, possibly by even “allowing” her to remarry. But there’s another marriage he wants to discuss, and he asks Loyce if she will mind becoming part of such a domineering family. Loyce, horrifically enough, after having fought for Marcy’s independence, is thrilled to have the chance to shed her own: “After being alone most of my life, having to make my own decisions, hoping they were right and sort of muddling through, I can’t think of anything more wonderful,” she coos. Even if she insists that she is going to work after they marry, it can’t quite resolve my nausea after she says, “No place in the world where youare could ever be dull to me! It would be exciting and beautiful—because I love you so much!” Ew.
On occasion Peggy Gaddis can turn out a great book, but this is not one of her best. The biggest problem is that it rehashes of all the usual Gaddis gimmicks and sexist attitudes, even if the latter are largely a product of the times and the region. For most of the book Loyce is an admirable, outspoken woman who fights for the underdog, and Gaddis’ writing is generally entertaining. Though she’s capable of better, this book is enjoyable enough for an afternoon on the veranda with a mint julep.
Nurse in Istanbul
By Ralph E. Hayes, ©1970When Donna Mitchell left City Hospital for private nursing, she didn’t expect her first job to take her halfway around the world—to Istanbul Istanbul
GRADE: C
BEST QUOTES:
“Is this a nurse or a go-go girl?”
“They definitely did not tell me in nursing school that there would be days like this.”
“Donna was suddenly very impressed with Steve’s ability in hand-to-hand combat.”
REVIEW:
The back cover blurb, above, is one of the more dull ones I’ve come across—and an apt predictor of what’s inside that same cover. Our heroine, Donna Mitchell, is a paradoxical creature who can’t decide if she really loves the genuine ass she is dating, yet the next minute is credited with being so steady of mind that she single-handedly recovers a priceless stolen artifact (a tribute we readers, who have witnessed the whole affair, will receive with astonishment). I guess it’s possible to be both, but the author does not have the talent or depth to pull off a character this complex.
We first meet Donna when she is interviewing for a private nursing job for the “wealthy but aging gentleman with a serious heart condition,” like there is any other kind in a VNRN. Everything that is wrong with the status of women in 1970 is summed up by the opening remarks of his secretary: “You are a lovely girl,” the woman tells Donna. “I think Mr. Eastman will be pleased. I’m unmarried, dear, and you may call me Penny.” Mr. Eastman’s accountant, Steve Chandler, tries to warn Donna against accepting the job, but here she shows her spunky side: “I’m quite capable of taking care of myself,” she snaps at him, a declaration we later find to be completely untrue.
Before she leaves for Turkey
On the slow boat to Turkey
Cue the postman, who brings a letter from Richard. As it happens, he is in Beirut , and informs Donna that he’ll be popping up to Istanbul
She does get in a little sight-seeing, visiting the Grand Bazaar, and when she returns, she finds that Mr. Eastman has “stepped out of character” and bought her a brass lamp (upon which Donna wishes for love, ew!). Not long afterward, the old man is found beaten to death in his room. Over the corpse, Steve decides to enlighten Donna regarding the fact that “Mr. Eastman was a dapper gentleman of the underworld,” who had come to Istanbul to purchase the Green Medallion, which had been stolen from the Topkapı Palace U.S.
On their way home from the police station, however, Steve and Donna’s cab is chased and shot at. The pair jumps out at a corner and ducks into the old Roman cisterns, where they jump into the water and hide behind literally the first column they come to. Donna barely endures this brush with death without shrieking at the thought of “all sorts of slimy things crawling on her legs in the dark water” and the bat that had flitted by them—neither of which actually bother her. The bad guys follow them into the cistern but can’t be bothered to venture beyond the doorway before quitting the scene. “Come on, honey,” Steve says. “Let’s get out of here.”
Back at the hotel, they discover that the medallion is actually hidden in Donna’s brass lamp! While Steve steps out to hide it somewhere until they can deliver it to the police, Donna meets Richard for breakfast. After she tells him that her employer is a smuggler who was murdered yesterday and she’s at the hotel with an armed government agent, Richard insists Donna leave Istanbul
But as fate would have it, they are captured and imprisoned in a stone cell, kiss, dig their way out through the ubiquitously loose bars, kiss, escape in a stolen car but are pursued by the gunmen, kiss, jump a ferry, kiss, disarm two of the gunmen with karate chops to the neck (that was Steve, actually), kiss, and are recaptured and forced to the top of a minaret. Donna saves the day by pretending to faint, allowing Steve to jump the gunman, whose pistol “went flying to the floor beside Donna.” Guess what our brave heroine does? “She stared at it fearfully as the two men fought. She could not bring herself to pick it up. She had never held a gun in her life.” It isn’t until Steve has actually knocked the bad guy unconscious that Donna “picked up the gun gingerly and handed it to him.” Thanks, honey. Then they kiss again.
The medallion returned to the Turkish authorities and the caper wrapped up, now we are given Donna’s new-born insecurities about her relationship with Steve. Though the book comes to a damp close after the crazy kids have clasped hands, “gazed into each other’s eyes and were ecstatically happy,” the fact that it’s over quickly is the best thing about it. I appreciate that the author makes a show of presenting Donna as a strong, capable person (and a very competent nurse), but in the end she is nearly helpless in the worst moments, and this dichotomy makes me dislike both the heroine and the book.
Nurse Craig
By Isabel Cabot (pseud. Isabel Capeto), ©1957
Cover illustration by Martin Koenig
Toni Craig, student nurse at Riveredge Hospital, wanted no part of Chad Barlow. He had the reputation of being a wolf; besides, her ideal was Dr. Matt Nicoll, a brilliant, ambitious young surgeon at the hospital. But Chad refused to be discouraged even after her engagement to Matt. And then Toni began hearing disturbing rumors about her fiancé. They were saying he would stop at nothing to get ahead. And so she faced a new heart-twisting question. Could she marry a successful doctor whose practices she couldn’t respect?
GRADE: B-
BEST QUOTES:
“Never make a pass at a girl with a lighted cigarette in her mouth.”
REVIEW:
If there is one thing that VNRN characters should know, it’s never let another woman “tend” to your boyfriend, no matter how briefly. Toni Craig is a nursing student in her first year of nursing school, and after the capping ceremony, which punctuates the probation period, class vixen Melita Fanning makes the grave error of pushing her boyfriend, Chad Barlow, on Toni until she can get rid of her parents. Toni’s friend Gail Sanders does her best to warn Toni of Chad’s low character, advising, “Don’t go behind any potted plants with him.” Toni needs no reminding, having met the young man in question at a previous social event in which he punched a police officer. At this meeting—under the sheltering bower of a large fern, as fate would have it—Chad rises to expectations by telling her that her uniform is “all wrong” because “it doesn’t do a thing for your figure. Now that little one-piece number that you wore at the beach party …” When she objects to this comment and to his constantly referring to her as “darling,” he drawls, “Honey, it doesn’t mean a thing. It’s like calling a guy ‘Mac.’ It saves straining your brain to remember names.” Chad is just drawing his arm around Toni when Gail appears—“I’m little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother,” she quips—and sends Toni off on an errand. Here we learn from various cryptic comments that Gail has had some encounter with Chad in the past that has hurt her deeply, but Chad apparently has no recollection of the incident. More to come later.
Five months later, Toni is working in the hospital and pining after Dr. Matt Nicoll; Ruth, the nurse’s aide who grew up with Matt, is something of an encouraging confidante, and Matt soon warms to Toni. He asks her out for coffee, and she accepts without hesitation. (When Ruth hears of their date, her smile seems a little forced, Toni thinks.) But who should show up at the diner? Chad Barlow, of course, and when Matt suddenly realizes he’s due back at the hospital, Chad offers to walk Toni home.
After Matt has departed, Chad reveals to Toni that he only barged in because Matt’s conversation (a full-volume and in-depth review of each of their patients, and confidentiality be damned) sounded so boring. Though she agrees to allow Chad to walk her home, she doesn’t speak to him the whole way—but when he calls the next day and asks her out, she accepts, curiously just after she has told him that for him she would never be free. She ends up having a great time, or so she says, as we don’t spend much time with them on their date. When she tells Gail about it, Gail seems disgusted, and that night goes missing. Toni phones Chad for help, and he delivers Gail, passed out drunk, safely home. So when he asks her out again, she feels obliged to go. During that date, he makes the obligatory pass/assault: “With a swiftness that stunned Toni, Chad had her in his arms. His lips were on hers, bruising and demanding. Toni had to fight to break his hold. She was breathing hard as she pushed away from him to the far side of the seat. Chad started to reach for her again, but involuntarily, Toni began to cry. ‘Cut it out. You’re not hurt,’ Chad said roughly.” The next day she blames herself, of course, for having suggested they stop to look at the ocean, which apparently is akin to asking for it.
To help a doctor friend, Dr. Gus Rogers, who has an unrequited crush on Gail, Toni agrees to double-date with the couple and Chad. To put her at ease, Chad declares that Toni need not fear him; the two will just have “a strictly buddy-to-buddy relationship” from now on. They start going out regularly, but just as friends. She’s still seeing Matt as well, but growing a bit more concerned about his worship of Dr. Heally, the pompous yet successful chief of surgery who is universally disliked among the nurses (always a bad sign, even today!) for never accepting personal responsibility and for throwing everyone else under the bus if something goes wrong with his patients. Then Gail and Gus, out on another date, are in a car accident, and Gus is badly injured. It comes out that Gail had been married seven years ago, but her husband had been killed in a car accident—and the other driver was Chad Barlow. Even though Chad had been “out carousing” and speeding to get home on time, he’s forgiven, because he’d crawled a mile with a broken leg to get help, and that though he’d been “a little wild in those days, he’s done his best to make it up.” We really haven’t seen him be anything but a little wild since we were introduced to him, however, so his easy absolution doesn’t really jibe.
Soon after, Matt proposes to Toni, who is giddy with joy, though Gail doesn’t approve. Matt’s busy sucking up to Dr. Heally, though, so Toni keeps on with her buddy dates with Chad. The other nurses are starting to criticize Matt, noting that he’s the first one to laugh at Dr. Heally’s jokes: Even if Matt is a smart and excellent surgeon, his use of flattery of Dr. Heally to win a position as the chief’s main assistant is considered a very serious offense. Then there’s more trouble in paradise: Matt’s mother becomes very ill and is hospitalized for several weeks. This drains Matt’s father’s bank account of the money he was going to lend Matt to start his own practice. Matt is very upset—not about his mother, but about this setback in his plans. Then he ditches Toni for the big Winter Festival parties and insists that she go with Chad instead, and on a scavenger hunt the two are locked in an abandoned ice house for most of a night, during which Chad grabs her and kisses her hard again. Matt’s not too pleased to hear about this, and also not too pleased about his lack of funds, and hers too: “It wouldn’t hurt any if you had a little money of your own,” he says, perhaps thinking of his old friend Ruth, who has recently inherited a bundle of money and left her job as a nurse’s aide to become a very successful businesswoman, tripling her fortune in a matter of months.
The ending is abrupt, dumb, and completely what you would expect, unfortunately. While this book is not without its charms—Gail is the perfect wise-cracking sidekick, and Melita and Ruth were also enjoyable characters—but the men in the book are not so rewarding. Chad Barlow proves again and again to be an ass, so Toni’s attraction to him is puzzling, and Matt’s transformation from hero to “twenty-carat heel” is also inexplicable. Isabel Cabot’s prior offerings, Private Duty Nurse and Island Nurse, are also fairly mediocre—more so Private Duty Nurse, which is also quite rife with scenes of sexual assault cum romance. It’s positively amazing that violence toward women could have been so casually accepted—even blamed on the victims—and that these scenes of humiliation and degradation are apparently meant to be titillating. But I guess we need look no further than the enormous success of Fifty Shades of Grey to realize that maybe we haven’t come so far, after all.
Nurse Shelley Decides
By Arlene Hale, ©1964Cover illustration by Mort Engle
“Are you after a fat paycheck, Nurse?” The contempt in Dr. Adam Victor’s voice stung Shelley—but it was true she was leaving the hospital to nurse a private patient, and Miriam Bleeker was very rich indeed. The handsome young doctor looked on Shelley as a deserter—and what made it worse was that Dr. Victor had declared war on the whole Bleeker family … and anyone who was with them was his enemy!
GRADE: C+
BEST QUOTES:
“I’m direct. That’s my big problem. I say what I think. Do you know how many people go around never really saying what they think or doing what they want, or being their real selves? IT’s sickening. It really is.”
REVIEW:
Dr. Adam Victor is a tall, hungry-looking young man who yells at all the nurses and “seemed to hate all women in general, nurses in particular and Shelley especially.” Naturally, Nurse Shelley Stevens is drawn to this doctor, with whom she does nothing but fight. “She didn’t know why she allowed him to upset her so much, but he invariably did.” Well, we know why, don’t we, readers! Shelley has a boyfriend, artist Paul deWinters, but though she loves hanging out in his apartment, she’s not as emphatically gung-ho about him. He doesn’t have a lot of ambition, “content to drift along in his easy-going way,” and besides, “there was always something just not quite right. Something was not complete.” This setup is a fairly standard VNRN ploy, telegraphing from the first page what’s going to happen on the last. It bores me.
Shelley lives and works in a mill town, and the mill in question is owned by the Bleeker family. The operating conditions at the mills are poor, and many workers end up in the hospital after accidents that could have been avoided. This is why Dr. Victor hates the Bleekers so much. But Shelley is asked as a special favor by Dr. Harris, an old friend who encouraged her to go to nursing school, to take a job specialing Miriam Bleeker, who is recovering from a stroke. So though she knows it is going to get her into hot water at work—and sure enough, it does—she takes the job. While she’s living in the Bleeker mansion, she begins to run into numerous mysteries: Why won’t the unions advocate for the workers but are content to let the lax conditions go unchallenged? Why is Dr. Harris, who is the medical director for the mills, also disinterested in pushing for better safety for the workers? What is Dr. Harris’ relationship with Mrs. Bleeker? Why has Mr. Bleeker abandoned the family?
About halfway through the book, Dr. Vincent and Shelley meet up at the funeral of a much-beloved patient and end up at dinner together—and kissing afterward. “I don’t understand. I thought we hated each other,” says Shelley the simpleton. After kissing her silly, Dr. Victor insists that Shelley quit working for the Bleekers, or “we’ll forget what just happened.” She’s shocked, but has enough spine to give him a piece of her mind and go back to the Bleekers.
Eventually, the crisis you knew was going to happen actually does: There’s a big explosion at the mill, and many people are seriously injured or killed. The shock of the accident also sends Miriam into a second and fatal heart attack. This saves everyone from the responsibility of agency: With Miriam out of the picture, her son Blake finally has the spine to throw his cheating wife and the corrupt union boss out on their ears, and start running a responsible business, vowing to rebuild the mill according to the best safety standards out there! Mr. Bleeker is returned to the mansion from the nursing home where he’d been hiding out, and Shelley is obliged to return to her job at the hospital. So now all it takes is for Dr. Victor to come striding over to her, grip her painfully by the shoulders, and command, “You’re going to marry me, Shelley. Just as soon as it can be arranged.” And that’s that, all but the nauseating final sentence.
The writing isn’t bad, but the plot is trite, and Nurse Shelley’s capitulation is more than a little disappointing, especially after the way she has stood up for herself all through the book. And we’re left with the question: What did Shelley decide? Seems to me the decision was made for her. If you figure it out, let me in on it.
An American Nurse in Vienna
By Diane Frazer, ©1966Cover illustration by Harry Bennett
When nurse Mary Tyler learned that she was being sent to Vienna, she was overjoyed. Cannister Memorial in New York had always seemed to her an exciting place. But all her life she had longed to see Europe. Besides, Franz Schneider, who also worked at Cannister Memorial, was to be one of the two doctors on the team. And Mary was secretly in love with him. Then in Vienna she met a young Hungarian baron who swept her off her feet. She had intended only to make Franz jealous. But soon she found that she was playing with fire.
GRADE: B-
BEST QUOTES:
“Who’s not married? I mean, of the doctors, that is. Among the nurses the percentage is heartbreakingly high, of course.”
“ ‘You have my best wishes. I’m rooting for you,’ Shirley said.
“ ‘Root for the Mets,’ Mary said. ‘They need it more than I do.’ ”
“Do you think I think that any man just wants to hold hands?”
“No man should be allowed to have eyelashes like that.”
REVIEW:
Nurse Mary Tyler has been dating Austrian Dr. Franz Schneider, a neurosurgery fellow at Cannister Memorial Hospital, but it hasn’t gone well. Right out of the gate the two are rehashing an old argument: He claims she made an error at work by neglecting to give a patient a medication, and she says the medication was never written in the order book, and he says it was a verbal order, and she says he never gave her the order, that he was just mad because she’d come in five minutes late after inviting an old (male) friend from her home town to her apartment for dinner the night before. She says that only if they are married or engaged does he have the right to question her behavior, and he says her behavior went beyond acceptable standards. “He was horrid, simply horrid,” she thinks, and then agrees to have dinner with him.
Over veal parmagiana, she categorizes his faults: He’s exasperating, ponderous, elderly, very stuffy, critical, possessive, watchful. But the hospital is sending two doctors and two nurses to Vienna, and Franz is going, and he would like Mary to go. She agrees, if he will stay out of her life. But once they arrive, Franz offers to show her around and she accepts. Before long, they’re spending their days and their dinners together. Really, the quality about him she seems to admire is the fact that he’s not hard to look at. “He was so marvelous-looking, she thought. Like a dark Greek god.”
When she meets Otto, Franz’s childhood acquaintance and a now-impoverished Hungarian baron, she starts seeing him, and Franz sees red—and not just the color of Mary’s hair. Franz forbids Mary to go out with Otto, telling her that Otto is a wolf; you can guess how well that goes over. Now she refuses to see Franz at all, on the grounds that “he was a dictatorial and possessive and smothering personality, and if she allowed him to he would take over her life completely, and finally her mind.” Not only does Mary continue to see Otto, but she even recklessly accepts a dare: to cross over the iron curtain and visit Otto’s ancestral property in Hungary for an afternoon. Once there, Otto tells Mary that the border has been sealed for the evening and that they won’t be able to get back until the next day. Otto then makes a pass at Mary, but she fights him off, telling him that if he comes near her she will jump out the second-story window. The next day he coldly drives her, virtue intact, back to the hospital, but it’s clear he won’t be calling her again.
Franz finds out Mary’s been out all night with Otto, though, and he is furious. Now Mary is suddenly heartbroken: “She had thrown away her chances with Franz, played her cards stupidly, lost him,” she thinks. “Oh, yes, she loved him, loved him dreadfully, had always loved him, would continue to love him.” What?!? And there’s more: “She had always felt so safe with him, so protected against the world.” No, she had felt imprisoned by him, which is not the same thing at all. Franz refuses to accept her story, however, believing that she slept with Otto. So she resigns her post in Vienna and returns to the United States. When Franz returns a few weeks later, he takes her to dinner, where he tells her that although he really knew she had not slept with Otto, he was so angry that “I wanted to beat you.” What more is there to do but accept his ensuing proposal of marriage with an emphatic, “I guess so,” thinking that Franz is “the man to whom she had just given over her independence, and it came to her that it was a most desirable loss.”
I cannot stand a book that wants to have it both ways. The Franz we meet in the beginning of the book is a domineering, brooding, condescending ass, and Mary fights his attempts to subjugate her tooth and nail; as the book opens she had stopped seeing him because she could not tolerate his oppressive attempts to control her. Yet suddenly she can’t live without him, and willingly sacrifices her individuality for what will most likely become one of those marriages where if he doesn’t actually beat her, as he’s already expressed an interest in doing, he’ll keep her shut away in the house and refuse to allow her any contact with the outside world. This book is written in an engaging, lively style, and Mary was a character that I particularly liked—up until the end, anyway. When she becomes yet another spineless milquetoast who sells out for an engagement ring, it’s time to say Auf Wiedersehen.
New Doctor at Tower General
By John J. Miller, ©1964Cover illustration by Bob Stanley
It was love at first sight when Surgical Nurse Evelyn Taylor encountered handsome Dr. Hank Young, who came to Tower General with an emergency operation. Right from the start, they seemed to be a team—professionally. Privately, Hank seemed to be more interested in the glamour and glitter of Louise Hayden, daughter of Dr. Dan Hayden, Chief of Surgery. Evelyn knew she couldn’t compete with Louise’s obvious attractions. She could only hope that Hank would see through her superficiality before it was too late. Meanwhile, Evelyn had to go on working beside Hank, assisting him in the dramatic fight for life at every operation, trying to control her emotions when he praised her for her efficiency as a nurse and went on ignoring her desirability as a woman.
GRADE: B
BEST QUOTES:
“She was too beautiful to die, even if she did drive like a darned fool.”
“Can’t some doctor ever get to this hospital on time?”
“Would you rather kiss me—or spank me?”
“Like all advice, no matter how true, each man usually had to learn his own lesson, the hard way.”
REVIEW:
This is another not-a-nurse-novel that made it into the pile. Our hero is Dr. Henry J. Young, M.D., D.A.C.S. (Diplomate of the American College of Surgeons), as we are introduced in the first paragraph. You can bet when we are introduced to the OR Supervisor, we don’t even get the RN after her name; instead we are told that “Miss” Evelyn Taylor is known as “Elusive Evelyn.” She’s calm, cool, and collected when he comes barreling into the OR with a car crash victim with a shard of glass embedded in her heart, and he condescends to thinking that Evelyn is “remarkable” and “competent,” but needless to say he won’t give her another thought after he meets Louise Hayden, daughter of the chief of surgery: “Long blond hair, a youthful line of bangs partially hiding her high forehead, warm blue-green eyes, long legs and beautifully proportioned figure; they were all part of one breathtakingly beautiful picture.” The shallow bastard.
Now, I shouldn’t be catty. Louise is actually a fine person, which is not usually the case with these not-to-be first girlfriends. She’s 13 years younger than Hank, though, a senior in college at “Swarton,” a rich-girls’ school outside of Boston. She spends her summer attending parties with Hank, and two months later, just as she’s about to go back to school, the couple actually kisses, which means that it’s time to “make plans,” apparently for their wedding. I continue to be amazed at the speed with which these VNRN pairs move, and only pray that it wasn’t really like that in the 1960s.
It’s Hank’s professional duties, however, that make up the bulk of the story. He’s been brought in from Los Angeles County Hospital after extensive training in cardiovascular surgery to whip the surgical residency program at Tower General, somewhere in the Midwest, into shape. It’s a political battle that involves numerous doctors and a board of trustees and different alliances and warring factions, and I won’t bore you with all that, but suffice to say that Hank’s chief nemesis through all his efforts turns out to be his Chief, Dr. Dan Hayden, father of his fiancée. Dr. Hayden just hates change, and vows to keep it out of his hospital to the best of his ability, at least until his daughter winds him around her finger and he relents for her sake.
Then Amos Cole comes in: He’s 54 but looks 65, with a clogged artery in his heart. At the time this book was written, this means increasingly limited activity until the ole ticker just gives out. But Hank had been working in Los Angeles on a new, pioneering surgical technique that would remove the clot from the hardened cardiac artery and restore the patient to good health. Except for one thing: Of the 18 cases they’d done, 14 died on the table, two survived but had no improvement, and two were “cured.” “If the mortality seems terribly high,” Hank explains, “remember they would all have been dead very soon—if we hadn’t done the surgery. We saved two.” Well, says the suicidal Amos, sign me up!
Now the lines in the sand are drawn and deep: Dr. Hayden, who had been warming to Hank, tells him if Amos dies, he will have Hank fired. Louise, caught between two men she loves, is in a tough position, as each of them lies to her in their attempts to win her loyalty: Her father tells her, “He didn’t care about you or me. He was more interested in stealing a patient than he was in my good will or your love,” and Hank tells her that her father “made a mistake on the course of treatment of Amos Cole, and isn’t enough of a man to admit it.” Well, advising against a surgery with an 80 percent mortality rate isn’t a mistake, it’s a judgment call, and Hank, who’s spent the past three years at a research hospital, ought to know the difference.
Louise, young and afraid, tries to talk Hank out of the surgery, and when he balks, she tells him that they’re over, and that she will drag Evelyn’s name through the mud—Hank has gone out for spaghetti a few times with Evelyn, purely on a platonic basis, much to rejected Evelyn’s chagrin. Hank tells Evelyn before Amos’ surgery the next morning that she may be the subject of some vicious gossip, but Evelyn is not upset, she’s thrilled! Because this means that he and Louise are over, and now she has a shot! Hank, too, is suddenly looking at Evelyn with new eyes: “He couldn’t help contrasting her calm assurance of his ability to Louise’s performance of the night before. How could he have been so blind?”
You’ll not be shocked to hear that the operation goes off without a hitch. Louise tries to make up with Hank, but he essentially dumps her by telling her that he’s moving to New York, knowing that she will never leave the Midwest and her father. After the surgery, he celebrates with Evelyn at their Italian restaurant, and asks her to come to New York with him and be his scrub nurse—not quite the proposal she was hoping for, but as the book closes, she knows the real one will be hers one day, as well.
Told from the doctor’s point of view and written by a man, this book lacks the deft touch of some female VNRN writers who bestow more subtlety of feeling upon their characters. Louise is a carefree, vivacious dish—and if she’s not shallow or stupid, she’s not a rich or nuanced character. Evelyn is either heartbroken or efficient. Hank, it must be confessed, is usually angry, unless he’s in raptures over Louise. Hank’s outings with his friend Mike to play handball lack the gentle fondness or the attitude of conviviality that surrounds a night out with the girls in a Lucy Agnes Hancock story. Now, perhaps it’s not fair to chalk up mediocrity of writing to the author’s gender—lord knows, there are plenty of bad women VNRN authors—but none of the gents (Dan Ross, Jean Webb, Richard Wilkes-Hunter) have ever been able to create the same sweetness that Jeanne Judson, Faith Baldwin, Lucy Agnes Hancock, and Maud McCurdy Welch regularly whip up. Just saying. Even if this book were a true VNRN, it’s more concerned about political maneuvering at the hospital than it is in Hank as a person, and so I didn’t find it all that interesting.
Nurse in Love
By Jane Arbor, ©1953Cover illustration by Paul Anna Soik
What is a woman to do when she finds herself in love with a man who not only does not love her but has been cruelly prejudiced against her even before they met? The problem is made more difficult when they are brought together every day by their work as nurse and doctor. Kathryn’s solution was to take refuge behind a façade of pride—but she found it a very inadequate defence.
GRADE: B+
REVIEW:
This book was among the handful I acquired in my first purchase of VNRNs, yet it has remained unread all these years, due in part to its shabby condition and odd cover illustration. It may well be, however, the best of that initial lot (which also included Dr. Merry’s Husband, Congo Nurse, and Nurse Kathy). Kathryn Clare is a 25-year-old nurse on the children’s ward at Wardrop Hospital in Surrey. In her past is one declined proposal, from Dr. Steven Crendall, for whom she felt nothing but friendship when he asked her to marry him before leaving for a post in Nigeria. His heart was broken, and his catty and beautiful sister Thelma assiduously circulated the idea that it was this that led him to contract a tropical disease and return home in some disgrace, having been revealed as not made of stern enough stuff to succeed overseas.
Now there’s a new MD on the ward, Adam Breve, whom Kathryn meets for the first time when coming to the aid of a five-year-old boy who has been hit by a bus. She rushes in to keep uninformed Samaritans from moving the child and possibly injuring his spine, only to be rudely chastised by Dr. Breve, who pushes his way in and sharply lectures her about “the public’s well-meant efforts with accidents” and tells her, “You can rarely leave ill alone, but must do your misinformed best to make it worse,” before patronizingly instructing her to run off and call for an ambulance. The next day on the ward—though he doesn’t even recognize her, much less apologize for his rude assumptions—he is brusque, but she is inexplicably smitten: “She was seeing him not now so much as a welcome colleague as with an instant’s electric awareness of him as a man.”
He is soon revealed as Steven Crendall’s best friend, so he despises Kathryn on sight for her rejection of Steven, clearly believing Thelma’s lies that Kathryn had encouraged Steven but turned him down because she did not want to live in Africa. Kathryn, insulted by Adam’s rude judgment and verbal assault, is too proud to tell him her true, noble reason for declining Steven—that she did not love him. She continues to adore Adam, however, though he ill deserves her: “She loved a man whose friendship and understanding thought might be for others, but were rarely for her. From her he kept them as private territories to be guarded with words that were edged with reserve, and even with scorn. He did not love her in return. He merely despised her.”
Thelma, a divine shrew, is meanwhile plotting to win Adam for herself and even push Kathryn back to Steven so as to dispose of a rival for Adam’s affections. Steven is offered another position, this time in South Africa with the deliciously named Sir Pirbright Chaffen, and Thelma works the gossip mill like a seasoned professional to get Steven to accept the post and take Kathryn with him; Adam believes the wild rumors and coldly insists that Kathryn accept Steven should he propose again.
Misunderstanding compounds misunderstanding, fortified by pride and prejudice, and you wonder how all is going to come to rights in the end. But it does, of course, and rewardingly so, to the point where I can almost overlook the fact that I did not like Adam Breve one bit in the book’s first 75 pages or so. Fleshing out the story are the trials of Kathryn’s friends, who are a largely comfortable, enjoyable lot, and the viciously fabulous Thelma. If there are no Best Quotes, author Jane Arbor has a quiet, pleasant, and occasionally humorous writing style, which I also encountered in My Surgeon Neighbour (though I found the plot there less satisfying). If it’s not a firecracker of a story, it’s certainly thoroughly enjoyable, and makes for a comfortable afternoon in a cozy chair.
Wings for Nurse Bennett
By Adeline McElfresh, ©1960“Office-dressing” … That, Sarah thought wryly, was exactly what she had been as nurse to the handsome and successful Dr. Ralph Caldwell Porter. Looking wand-slim and elegant in her white nylon uniform, her heaviest duty had been to stand by serenely while Ralph administered to the imaginary needs of some fawning, simpering female. And now she was suddenly in the wilds of Alaska, newly appointed stewardess of the Alaska Passenger and Freight Airlines, about to board the frighteningly small and flimsy-looking plane for her first trip. But at least, she assured herself, here she could be useful. And perhaps, in this new land, she would get a new perspective on her life. Because she had to make up her mind about Ralph. She had to decide whether she could marry a man she loved—but didn’t respect.
GRADE: C-
BEST QUOTES:
“ ‘Can you imagine a man ever wanting to go to bed with Miss Davenport, darling?’ Ralph had asked her once when, miraculously, the waiting room was empty. ‘She’s a good nurse—the best in Dayton, barring not even you, but ugh.’ He had kissed her. ‘Don’t ever let yourself get fat and frumpy, sweetheart.’ ”
REVIEW:
Sarah Bennett is working as a flight attendant on a small Alaskan airline (apparently in the old days flight attendants were nurses as well; in any case, she is one). She’s taking time away from her job working for Dr. Ralph Caldwell Porter, who is just as he sounds: A pompous, society doctor who panders to neurotic wealthy women, and who plans to marry Sarah and turn her into one. She’s desperately in love with Ralph and can’t wait to marry him, she says, but is constantly thinking things like how great it was to be a flight attendant, “a member of the team, just as she had been at the hospital, as she had not been, not really, in Ralph’s office.” But she’s managed to tear herself from his well-groomed side for a few months to step into this role, formerly held by her old friend and wife of the pilot Paul Fergis; Jenny Fergis is pregnant, and so grounded. It’s her third day on the job when this particular flight takes off from Killmoose to Tanacross, and not half an hour into the flight, one of the passengers steps into the cockpit with a revolver and knocks out Al Malcolm, the co-pilot.
Back at air control, the radio is blasting reports of three men who crashed a stolen Cessna near Killmoose and haven’t been seen since. The men are wanted for questioning in the attempted sabotage of one of the United States’ Distant Early Warning bases in far northern Alaska—these would be the bases where, during the Cold War, people sat around and watched the skies for incoming Soviet nuclear missiles, so they could call home and say goodbye before the missiles arrived on American soil. The air traffic folks instantly recognize from the descriptions that these guys are on Sarah’s flight!! Now everyone is combing the Alaskan wilds, but it’s a lot of ground to cover, so things are looking grim…
GRADE: C-
BEST QUOTES:
“ ‘Can you imagine a man ever wanting to go to bed with Miss Davenport, darling?’ Ralph had asked her once when, miraculously, the waiting room was empty. ‘She’s a good nurse—the best in Dayton, barring not even you, but ugh.’ He had kissed her. ‘Don’t ever let yourself get fat and frumpy, sweetheart.’ ”
REVIEW:
Sarah Bennett is working as a flight attendant on a small Alaskan airline (apparently in the old days flight attendants were nurses as well; in any case, she is one). She’s taking time away from her job working for Dr. Ralph Caldwell Porter, who is just as he sounds: A pompous, society doctor who panders to neurotic wealthy women, and who plans to marry Sarah and turn her into one. She’s desperately in love with Ralph and can’t wait to marry him, she says, but is constantly thinking things like how great it was to be a flight attendant, “a member of the team, just as she had been at the hospital, as she had not been, not really, in Ralph’s office.” But she’s managed to tear herself from his well-groomed side for a few months to step into this role, formerly held by her old friend and wife of the pilot Paul Fergis; Jenny Fergis is pregnant, and so grounded. It’s her third day on the job when this particular flight takes off from Killmoose to Tanacross, and not half an hour into the flight, one of the passengers steps into the cockpit with a revolver and knocks out Al Malcolm, the co-pilot.
Back at air control, the radio is blasting reports of three men who crashed a stolen Cessna near Killmoose and haven’t been seen since. The men are wanted for questioning in the attempted sabotage of one of the United States’ Distant Early Warning bases in far northern Alaska—these would be the bases where, during the Cold War, people sat around and watched the skies for incoming Soviet nuclear missiles, so they could call home and say goodbye before the missiles arrived on American soil. The air traffic folks instantly recognize from the descriptions that these guys are on Sarah’s flight!! Now everyone is combing the Alaskan wilds, but it’s a lot of ground to cover, so things are looking grim…
Meanwhile, the gun-toting head basher puts the plane down in a clearing hundreds of miles off course and hustles everyone except his two co-conspirators off the plane, then takes off again. So now the story’s narrative jumps from the worried air controllers listening to the news, to the passengers trying to survive in dilapidated miners’ cabins in the woods, to Paul Fergis and a passenger who have set off through the Alaskan winter to try to find help. As the passengers trap rabbits and build bedding out of spruce boughs, Al Malcolm is increasingly warming the cockles of Sarah’s heart, though she tries again and again to remind herself that “she was in love with Ralph, she was going to marry him—to her Al Malcolm could be no more than Paul Fergis’s co-pilot.” But there’s just the small problem that Ralph is a philandering ass, and is never set up to be anything but, even to Sarah: “Sarah wished she could think of Ralph Porter without something unpleasant nudging into her mind,” she thinks before we’re a quarter of the way through the book—“Why did she keep thinking of Ralph? Remembering things that made her slightly sick at her stomach.” I wonder how everything is going to turn out.
Of course, the passengers that the bad guys have been kind enough to abandon rather than simply murder outright are prone to all sorts of health issues. Needless to say, everything turns out swimmingly for the stranded passengers, who have the capable Sarah to steer them through their medical crises, though she is inclined to a hysterical interior monologue: “Oh, God, Sarah thought. Suppose something is going wrong?” she wonders when she’s delivering a baby, which despite her fears—“Oh, God! Was the baby stillborn? After all this—” is perfectly healthy, only now she’s got to concoct something else to worry about, like the baby catching “pneumonia, here—” But it doesn’t, so on to the next emergency: one man, unfortunately named George Jefferson, develops right lower quadrant pain and “Sarah’s breath caught in her throat. Not appendicitis! Please, God, don’t let it be appendicitis.” But it is, and now we have pages of watching George’s temperature rise: “Four-tenths in an hour? Oh, God!” But she convinces Al Malcolm to assist her with the surgery, which she pulls off effortlessly in 43 minutes. Now she’s worried that she’ll go to jail: “What would they call it, practicing surgery without a license? Or—or criminal negligence?” For crying out loud, someone get this woman a Xanax!
Eventually the two men wandering the wilderness are spotted by a rescue plane, the party in the woods is whisked back to civilization, George Jefferson recovers easily and reveals that he is actually an FBI agent assigned to nab the bad guys who hijacked the plane—not a very good one, at that—and the bad guys, not being very good pilots, are discovered to have crashed the second plane as well and killed themselves in the process. Sarah finds she’s not going to jail or lose her job, and that she does not love Ralph after all. Not to worry, though, someone else is waiting to offer her marriage on the last page, and then—oh, God!—we can finally close the book.
A Nurse Abroad
By Marion Marsh Brown, ©1963Originally Kathy Cramer thought of her visit to her Army-based family in Germany as a brief vacation. But it soon became something more important in the life of the lovely, auburn-haired young nurse. First, a handsome, charming, yet strangely elusive young man named Mike Davidson made her pulse beat far faster than normal. Then came a wonderful chance to join the staff of a local army clinic. And finally there was that growing sense of mystery and peril as Kathy stumbled onto a dark conspiracy within the hospital walls. Suddenly the gallant young nurse had to play a new and dangerous role to foil the schemes of the enemies of her country, while pursuing her own campaign to win the man of her heart.
GRADE: C-
BEST QUOTES:
“She jerked open the car door and saw the blood gushing from his chest. Instantly she stepped out of her half-slip and started tearing it in strips. I’m glad I wore a cotton one,she thought.”
“I was never eager to go out with him—but, perhaps, for the good of our country, I should!”
REVIEW:
The Candlelight Romance imprint continues its reliable record of producing mediocre tripe with A Nurse Abroad, in which recently graduated nurse Kathy Cramer flies to Frankfurt to spend six weeks with her family before starting a new job back in the States on August 1. We know this book is half a century old by the fact that on the flight over, Kathy is able to step over her sleeping seatmate without waking her and repairs to the lounge with the hunky man across the aisle, Mike Davidson, where she “slid onto a comfortably cushioned, plastic-covered daveno” (a ’50s term for couch) and whiled away five and a half hours eating eggs out of an eggcup and falling in love.
Arriving in Germany, she gives Mike her address, he says, “I’ll write to you,” and then he’s gone, leaving her crushed on the curb outside customs. But Mom and Dad and sister Sue are there to pick up her luggage while she manages the shards of her heart, and soon they’re touring German tourist attractions before arriving at the Cramers’ home, Ramstein Air Base, where Mr. Cramer is a dentist. He soon sets up Kathy with a job at the local clinic, working alongside Dr. Gruenig, whom she doesn’t care for—“he’s just not human,” she tells her shocked family, no matter how dreamy he is. He treats all his patients without any compassion, even poor little Johnny Turner, “the spastic.” In contrast, Kathy, when she meets little Johnny, immediately starts asking him how much he’d like a dog, and when “his head jerked pitifully,” Kathy decides that he must have one, though his mother is quite adamant, over several clinic visits, that she sees no pets in Johnny’s future. In her further attempts to convince Dr. Gruenig that kindness is good for his patients, she chats up the 19-year-old pregnant girl from Virginia so that the patient will relax and the doctor can “properly complete his examination.” You know it won’t be long before Dr. Gruenig sees the error of his cold, cold ways.
In the meantime, Kathy’s worrying about clinic pharmacist Herman Heinrich. He’s supposed to be from East Germany, though she notices “something different about his accent” that no one else seems to have observed, and decides “she didn’t trust him. She supposed it was his eyes.” There are other incidents, too, that trouble her—she keeps seeing him leaving different American housing complexes on the base, and spots him on a tourist boat with a group of men she’d noticed in a restaurant just the night before discussing an emerald they were planning to use as a bribe: “By now there was little doubt in Kathy’s mind that Herr Heinrich was working for the Communists.” Dad, as conspiracy-minded as his daughter, promptly goes to the CIA with all this. But who needs the CIA when you have Kathy Cramer, RN, on the job? or plotters dumb enough to discuss their plans in a restaurant loudly enough for other tables to overhear?
And just what is Herman up to? As it happens, Kathy’s dad is in charge of the survival kits that have been placed in the basement of each of the Army housing units to aid residents in the event of a nuclear attack, “if there should be any survivors.” It’s Mr. Cramer’s job to instruct all the families in their unit how to use it, if blankets and can openers have been heretofore unknown to them. After Herman comes to Kathy’s house to ask her on a date, which she reluctantly accepts so as to better keep tabs on him, she’s getting ready for bed—“oh, dear! She was getting very sleepy! And she hadn’t creamed her face”—when she sees Herman leaving her building, an hour after she’d thrown him out of her apartment. She immediately rouses Dad, and the two of them investigate the survival kit in the basement—the seal has been broken! It seems the medicine in the kit has been partly replaced—only the bottles on the left side, and Herman is left-handed! and a pharmacist! with untrustworthy eyes!
The CIA is moving too slowly for Kathy’s liking, so she decides to keep watch from her apartment windows to catch Herman when he returns to finish the job. Fortunately it’s only her second night on guard duty when Herman obligingly pops up. Kathy follows him to the basement, and when he pulls a gun, she reprimands him indignantly: “You wouldn’t dare! I’m a U.S. citizen.” Even Communist saboteurs recognize the power of her nationality, so instead of gunning her down, he just bashes her on the head. But her scream brings three sleeping couples awake, out of bed and their apartments, and into the basement before the slow-witted and slower-moving villain can escape up a single flight of stairs. No wonder Communism is such a failure.
Kathy has clearly missed her calling in not going in for intelligence work—the captured Herman turns out to be a Russian spy—though it turns out that Mike Davidson has, which we discover when he shows up at her bedside, explaining that he couldn’t see her until he’d cleared up this troublesome ring of saboteurs, or at least until she cleared it up for him. Next we know, it’s the following weekend and Kathy and Mike are planning where to get married before returning to the States and Kathy’s new job next week: “The train pulled into another tunnel and there were no more words for quite a while.” Which is about as graphic as VNRNs get.
Even with the overblown mystery of Herman Heinrich and the survival kits—and all the manufactured patriotic hysteria that ensues!!—this book is ho-hum. And devoid of logic: Why bother tampering with a survival kit that wouldn’t be used unless a nuclear bomb had been dropped? The tens or hundreds of people thusly harmed is ridiculously small potatoes in the wake of a bomb that would have killed hundreds of thousands of people, not to mention long on effort for such a small and unlikely return. (In another demonstration of lack of sense, the author dedicated the book to a doctor “who has been helpful in many ways,” and then christened her villain with the same given name as the doctor she wished to honor. It could have been an inside joke, I suppose, but with all the other lapses, I’m not sure.) The writing is not bad enough to make you cringe, but the characters are as perfunctory as Kathy and Mike’s engagement. Even when poor spastic Johnny gets his dog in the end and is promising to gain weight, this feels as hollow and exploitative as the book’s other plot devices. If it’s armchair travel you seek, don’t bother heading abroad with this nurse.
Navy Nurse
By Ruth Ives, ©1962Cover illustration by H. Kane
When lovely Nurse Pamela West was assigned to Lattimer Air Force Base to be part of the government’s space-training program, she realized that her new work would be both complex and demanding. Pam worked hand in hand with the first eight astronauts as they went through their rigorous training. The chief doctor on the base, tall handsome Steve Forrester was assisted by Sybil Paige, a very attractive young woman. Pam had a great deal of admiration for Dr. Forrester, but she was also aware of Sybil Paige’s hostility, although she could not understand it. Then someone warned her: “Don’t get involved with Steve Forrester. Others have and got nothing but trouble…”
GRADE: C+
BEST QUOTES:
“Hey, angel, I’m ready to orbit anytime if heaven has gorgeous dolls like you waiting.”
“Whenever I stick a pin into you, I draw ice water instead of blood!”
“Other gals have made cow-eyes at the guy before—and got nothing but a hatful of trouble.”
“Delia looked wonderful—in spite of the fact that in a few weeks, the wife of the astronaut was due to ‘launch’ her third child.”
“She’s thirty-five, an old maid, and always will be.”
“His brief smile sent a glow of happiness through Pamela, from the top of her primly starched nurse’s cap down to the tips of her neatly shod feet.”
“I know I’m not supposed to burden him with my feminine foolishness.”
“It was good to have decisions made for her, she thought, as she snuggled down in the red leather bucket seat.”
REVIEW:
Pamela West is a lovely blonde from Connecticut when she lands at Lattimer Air Force Base, where she is to take up a new position packed with “the glamour and thrills of space nursing.” Not that she’ll actually be working in space, mind you—girls don’t go into outer space, silly!—but she’s assisting with some vague tests involving oscillators and G-force simulators on eight men who are being groomed for two spots on a spaceship that will soon be orbiting Earth.
She’s arrived with a broken heart, as her fiancé was killed in a plane crash, apparently just a month ago. But lo, upon arriving in Arizona, she meets Col. Dr. Steve Forrester, and meets up with Barney Steele, the man who talked her and Johnny out of eloping a week before his fatal crash and coincidentally is now one of the astronaut candidates. But she’s not had her first shower after arriving on base before “curious excitement stirred her. It wasn’t just that Steve was tall or handsome or competent and admirable in his profession. It was something chemical, perhaps—or something magical, induced by the spangled desert sky that reeled overhead.” And less than a week later, she decides she’s in love with the man—and is fighting for her career against the sabotage of Dr. Sybil Paige, the lady doctor who’s trying to get her own hooks into the doc. Steve does have something to say on the matter, however, and takes Pamela out on a horseback ride into the desert and kisses her. “What do you feel, Pam?” he asks her. “Is it what I feel, too?” It is, to be sure, but she tells him that she’s afraid that her involvement with him will jeopardize her career. He says he understands how she feels—and then, back at the base, gives her the cold shoulder for a week.
She’s upset, of course, and feels that she’s ruined her chances with Steve. But there’s Barney Steele to date in the meantime, even though she thinks of him only as a friend. Soon, however, he is blaring to the entire base that Pamela is “his girl,” and Steve is shooting Pamela cold looks. But out of the blue, he asks her to go on a picnic in the desert again, and this time, when he tells her, “I don’t want to take the chance on being rebuffed again,” the sly fox answers, “Try me.” Before he has the opportunity to do so, however, a jet plane crashes half a mile from them, and they have to hike up to the wreck to save the pilot. Steve has a bad leg, though, left over from an accident in his early Navy days, so it’s up to Barney Steele, flown in on the rescue helicopter, to climb down into the canyon to pull the man out. His heroics are somehow leaked to the press, along with the news that Pamela is his fiancée. So it’s back to fish eyes from Steve, and Pamela is sure she’s lost him for good now, because she couldn’t possibly go tell the man that it’s not true. “She wanted to tell him, but how could she do it in the face of his strange bitterness? She could hardly throw herself at him, could she? What value would he place on her love then?”
So she decides to request a transfer off the base and goes to Dr. Sybil Paige who, curiously, is in charge of such things. But at the last minute, Pamela, burning with inner patriotism, says that her work on the space mission is more important that her shattered little heart and tears up her transfer request. In the face of such devotion to career and man, Sybil admits that she has given up her quest to capture Steve—“Don’t be sorry,” she tells Pamela, “my work is enough for me. It will have to be, it seems”—and that’s all it takes for Pamela to chase Steve into the garden and fling herself at him, after all. Then it’s a quick proposal from Steve, accompanied by a little shared wonderment for their mission: “You and I, Pam, can help man in his final effort to break loose from the bonds of earth that have kept man a prisoner for so many, many ages!” Steve gushes. “Our part in it is small, but we can be useful, we can do what we can to help.”
This is easily one of the campiest books I have read in quite some time, and I laughed (or snorted) starting with the first sentence: “The hot desert sun, Pamela West thought, burned as relentlessly as the determination in each of the eight carefully chosen astronaut candidates.” And the gems keep popping up at regular intervals: “Clinging to past memories was selfish in the face of the excitement of conquering space,” “the singing in her heart could not be denied,” “it was too late for dreams.” But I just couldn’t bring myself to really like the book. Pamela does not win my respect for abandoning her feelings for her dead boyfriend so quickly—indeed, like most VNRN heroines, she decides that it wasn’t really true love at all—and likewise I cannot trust that her instant devotion to Steve after one week really is the be-all that she thinks it is. I’m not impressed, either, by her refusing to talk to Steve one minute and then rushing to him the next. And there are a lot of loose ends in the book—an astronaut’s wife virtually crippled by anxiety, the question of who leaked the story of Pamela’s alleged engagement to Barney to the press, a psychiatrist’s repeated requests that Pamela share with him her opinions on the fitness of the candidates for the mission—that are summarily abandoned as the next plot twist hoves over the hot desert horizon. I was surprised to find that Ruth Ives is the same author who brought us Congo Nurse, the first review I ever posted to this blog (while this review is my 201st, if you’re counting), as I don’t recall much amusing in that book beyond the New York socialite arriving in Africa with an iron lung. But my impression of that book, that I couldn’t bring myself to care for the characters and found the ending to be too perfunctory, holds true for this one. The camp factor is off the charts in Navy Nurse, and this alone makes it worth reading, but it won’t be winning any VNRN awards.
Copyright © C-buk2016
