Nurse with a Past
By Diane Frazer (pseud. Dorothy Fletcher), ©1964
Cover illustration by Harry Bennett
“Let’s leave Nancy
“Shy!” Midge shrieked. “Now I’ve heard everything. Her Highness shy! Why, she’s conceited and snobbish. Apparently we’re not good enough for her.”
“Oh, Midge, you don’t even mean that,” Minerva protested. “She’s a little bit nuts about meddcin, as she calls it. She really wanted to hang out a shingle herself.”
“Oh, Midge, you don’t even mean that,” Minerva protested. “She’s a little bit nuts about meddcin, as she calls it. She really wanted to hang out a shingle herself.”
“Stop it,” Midge answered, “we’ve all heard that sob story. If you ask me, it’s just a front. She doesn’t give a damn about a career. What she really wants is a man with money. But real money. If she finds one, you’ll see how quickly she forgets about doctors and nurses!”
GRADE: A-
BEST QUOTES:
“ ‘You make me want to cry,’ Ralph said. ‘What a hideous waste! A girl with legs like yours reading that kind of stuff.’ ”
“It wasn’t a bad place to work, the lab. Plenty of quiet corners for confabs with cute nurses.”
“She had gone out with him twice, but one time didn’t really count because they had gone to a movie she had wanted to see, a movie called The Savage Eye, which left him shaky and unfit for normal pursuits afterward.”
“If you want to behave like a doctor, read Playboy, or something like that.”
“Who wants to leave the hospital, with nurses like you around?”
“Margaret Wilkerson had come to nursing through a simple process of elimination, more or less as young men of small talent decide to take up business administration in college instead of the humanities.”
REVIEW:
Nancy L. Woodward, RN, is 22 and has a reputation of being a bit of a snob. That’s because, well, she sort of is. Right there in the opening paragraph, she’s enjoying, and not just because it tastes so good, a slice of coconut cream pie, which, “she thought with some satisfaction, not all of her nurse colleagues could afford to indulge in.” Nancy had really wanted to be a doctor, but hadn’t been able to afford it, so had “settled for nursing as second best,” but once in, she now views nursing as “an almost holy vocation.” This loss and the fact that it was lack of money that caused it has made her a bit, shall we say, practical, and dedicated “to the idea of not wasting time with young men like Ralph Bleeker who, though decent and pleasant enough, was neither ambitious nor dedicated and who therefore would not go very far.”
This young man Ralph is a lowly lab technician. “You had to take in stride that Nancy Nancy
The thing is, early in the book, she was asked to witness a new will—Orrin Chandler, aged wealthy cardiac patient, had rewritten his will after receiving a fatal diagnosis, leaving every bit of his fortune to his son, art career notwithstanding. She is eventually reminded of this incident, which she had forgotten—and responds by breaking up with Dick out of concern that he would believe that she was only interested in his money.
I need tell you not one thing more about the plot, because you well know how it ends. Its predictability, however, does not detract one whit from the complete pleasure. Diane Frazer is a hit-or-miss author, and has certainly given us a number of dogs (see Date with Danger?), but when she’s on, she has a wonderful ability to paint a scene or a character. In this book she is in top form, and her dialogue is amusing and snappy, right out of a Hepburn-Tracy movie. Her erratic output does make you wonder what makes a great writer produce a bad book (short on the rent?), but in Nurse with a Past, you are completely safe.
Vietnam Nurse
By Della Field (pseud. Fanny Quincy Howe), ©1966
Cover illustration by Mort Rosenberg
Natalie Knight of the Navy Nurse Corps had come a long way from Oregon to the battle-torn plains and jungles of Vietnam. But it was a journey of love and devotion. She was looking for Tom, her Green Beret fiancé. He had been reported as missing, but Natalie did not give up hope. She knew that Tom, and hundreds like him, needed her because she was a Vietnam Nurse.
GRADE: C+
BEST QUOTES:
“You’ll have fun here, a knockout like you.”
REVIEW:
Natalie Knight, known as “Lee,” has enlisted to serve as a nurse in Vietnam. Not out of any sense of duty or patriotism, but because she’s searching for her fiancé, Tom Lender, a Green Beret who went missing a year ago during a battle at the Cambodian border. “I’m sure he’s still alive, a prisoner of war,” she tells her roommate, Maggie Jackson. She resists Maggie’s brutal advice to “forget it, doll. He’s bound to be dead. They don’t just turn up again out of the blue.” Not surprisingly, Maggie and Lee do not hit it off, and indeed, Lee “cursed herself for having told Maggie her precious secret.”
Lee’s devotion to Tom is not depicted as entirely healthy. As a child, Lee “had been a gawky, even ugly child, that she had been left out of friendships and games and dates for many years.” And though now she is beautiful, “Lee herself still thought of her face and body as laughable.” This insecurity makes her withdrawn, and she’d been completely unsociable with the other nurses on the ship on their way to Vietnam. As a result, she now has essentially no friends on the staff. At one point, “she smiled at the diamond ring on her finger as if it were here only friend,” and that’s not far from the truth. Instead of socializing, Lee spends an inordinate amount of time daydreaming about Tom; Maggie even refers to Tom as Lee’s “dream lover.” We learn that Lee and Tom had been in high school together, he a few years older than she, and she’d only fantasized about hunky Tom Lender, “waited for the day that he would see her,” and it had been hero worship come to life when he eventually discovered her in their college years. Then he’d enlisted, and she’d visited him twice, he proposing just before he was shipped to Vietnam, two years ago. “He had lived in her imagination for many years. In a way, his disappearance didn’t matter to her because he had such a strong place in her mind.” Indeed, “her mind was fixed on Tom at all times.” This is a gal desperately in need of some therapy.
But where good psychiatric help is wanting, an interested man will do just as nicely: Lee soon meets another Green Beret, Johnny Winston, who promises to help Lee find out what happened to Tom. He takes her out and she talks to him for hours about Tom, but he clearly is interested in more than her stories, telling her that she is beautiful and that he would like to marry someone like her. She’s fearful and confused, but remembers Tom writing to her that if he should not return, she should find someone else, “and that way the dream will last.”
When she’s not dreaming, Lee works in the OR for six hours in the morning, then teaches a class on the medical ship S.S. Charity, parked off the Saigon shore. In the hospital, she meets a Vietnamese woman named Khai, who never merits a last name, and Khai becomes her only real friend. Khai takes Lee on a tour of Saigon, during which Khai lets slip the fact that she is married and that her husband Pham is away, but begs Lee not to speak of it at work. Lee, self-absorbed and incurious, wonders “why he was such a mystery, but then decided she knew nothing of life in this strange country and went to sleep.” Soon Maggie, who is ragingly jealous of Lee’s good looks, is claiming that Khai is Viet Cong and insists that Lee report her, or Maggie will report Khai, and Lee for abetting her. Lee declares that she does not want to get involved, and Maggie rightfully retorts, “What are you doing in the navy? You may be here for romantic reasons, but the rest of us are fighting a war against the Communists. Even little lotus blossom is fighting a war.” An excellent point.
Lee eventually asks Khai straight out, learning that Pham is Viet Cong, but Khai professes, war “is no solution and the terrible wounds we see are just a waste. I have no political affiliations.” But soon, tending to the wounded on a daily basis, Lee decides that she hates the men who are wounding and killing the American soldiers she nurses. She begins to feel “anger and rejection of the girl whose husband was a Viet Cong.” She does her best to remember that Khai is a friend, not an enemy, but “what held them together was the same situation that would split them apart: the war and the men they loved. When it came right down to the heart of the matter, each girl would side with the man she loved and thereby renounce their own friendship.” Eventually she asks Khai to see if she can find out what happened to Tom. “She had reached a point where she would, at last, believe what she was told about Tom’s whereabouts; she couldn’t go on dreaming much longer. She could now believe in his mortality and accept the fact of his death.” It’s not clear what exactly has led her to renounce her dream world, so this evolution in her character rings more than a little hollow.
It’s not too long before Khai returns with Tom’s dog tags, telling Lee that he had parachuted across the border into Cambodia and been badly wounded, seized and taken to a prison camp, but had died before he’d been tortured. Now that she knows the truth, Lee is ready to pack up and go home, but instead realizes that the American men she has been caring for need her help. “She had a duty outside herself now and it filled her with a new sense of freedom. She wouldn’t go home. She would stay in Saigon, where all her training and experience would be more useful. Out of the ashes of her dream, she would construct a full life for herself, for there really was no choice.” And find a new boyfriend; before too long, Lee is involved with Johnny. “She thought of Tom and promised she would try to make their dreams survive with Johnny.”
Khai eventually pulls away from Lee, saying that their friendship is “too difficult” because their allegiances are to different sides of the war. “Americans are innocent. You are a nation of children. Don’t you see? Things are not good and bad, but contain many elements, and your soldiers have adopted the methods of the French, who raped us and left us. How can I be your friend?” This sentence is made more poignant by the story of Khai’s family: Khai’s mother, left a widow in a beriberi epidemic, had approached a local French plantation owner for help saving her children. The Frenchman had aided Khai’s mother, but then “he gave her me as well,” Khai relates. She is angry with her mother for this, saying that she had no principles: “She gave in to him. That’s all. She says she loved him, and she stayed with him until he died. But she was just being a coward.” (Khai tells Lee that her French half is “bad,” saying, “I am Vietnamese first.”) This story also recalls an early scene in the book when Lee and Johnny watch three Vietnamese girls in short skirts and too much lipstick trailing after a group of American servicemen. “Guess what they want,” Johnny tells Lee, the implication being that the girls are either prostitutes or close to it. Johnny, however, is better than Khai’s father, saying, “I don’t want to exploit the war through them.”
The climax of the story comes when Lee and Johnny drive out to a field hospital which is attacked by the Viet Cong shortly after their arrival. Lee is asked to go into a rice paddy shortly after the gunfire has ended to help the wounded and finds Johnny, shot in the abdomen. She bandages him and stays with him for hours, until the helicopters arrive, then is driven back to the base to assist in his surgery. He’s sent back to America to recover, and won’t be coming back to Vietnam. Lee, with still a year left to serve in Vietnam, is left behind, “but the future held hopes of peace and joy. Even in the midst of sadness, she knew that better times would have to come. So many people wanted them.”
I don’t know when I have been more disappointed in a nurse novel. Not that this book is so much worse than the bulk of nurse novels, but I was looking forward to it after reading Ms. Howe’s only other VNRN, West Coast Nurse, which, if not the greatest book ever (I gave it a B+), was brooding and singular and intriguing. Vietnam Nurse, written three years later, is ordinary and even half-hearted, without much to recommend it apart from some nice travel writing. It devotes little time to the politics of the Vietnam War; Lee says displays little interest in learning about it, saying, “What she had read in the papers was so ambiguous and hard to understand that she had given it up as a loss,” in so doing coming across as a bit of a dolt. And it seems to think we readers are dolts as well, merely brushing over what could be interesting themes, like the difficulties inherent in Khai and Lee’s friendship, letting go of someone who has disappeared, and the effects of colonialism and war in modern times. The hints at complexity that Howe drops and then, perhaps thinking that these ideas would be too complex for a lowly nurse novel, lets lie essentially unexamined, make you long for the better book that has been left unwritten. But whatever the reason, if this book gives you something to think about, it won’t be because you got much encouragement from the author.
Hollywood Nurse
By Patricia Libby, ©1962Cover illustration by Rudy Nappi
Three men called her “Jenny, Darling.” There was Tom, honest and sincere, who wanted her as a “full-time wife.” There was Mike—Mike to her, to others a screen idol and notorious playboy—who had fallen hard for her and had said, “This time it’s forever.” And there was Brad, the young doctor who shared her dreams and her dedication—but was engaged to another girl.
GRADE: C+
BEST QUOTES:
“I’d marry you for your cooking even if you were an old hag.”
“She was incurably romantic despite the fact of being an old maid.”
“ ‘Oh, Tom,’ she sighed in a trembly, little girl voice guaranteed to bring out the protective in males.”
“ ‘I make good home for Johnnie. I give him much love and smiling face. Is right way, Miss Tyler?’
“ ‘It’s the wise way, Koyo,’ Jenny answered. ‘The way to happiness in a marriage. Don’t ever change.’ ”
REVIEW:
Jenny Tyler works at the Holly View Sanitarium in Beverly Hills, where unhealthy movie people go to get well. She’s in love with Dr. Bradford Conners, but after he got one look at the chief of staff’s glamorous daughter, Faye Kettering, ambition and testosterone got the better of him and he dumped Jenny to propose to Faye. A business proposal soon followed, and now Brad is the chief’s assistant and medical heir. As the book opens, Brad and Jenny—who still have to work together, of course—are squabbling over the hospital’s central philosophy, which is that the medical staff should only tell patients what they want to hear. Which means that sweet old Western actor Laredo Sims, found to be in possession of an inoperable lung tumor, is left ignorant of his fatal condition. “People in the entertainment business live in a world of pretense,” Brad tells Jenny. “Truth is a stranger to them. An unwelcome one.”
Even Jenny’s roommate, Suzan, prefers illusion to reality. “Don’t be so darn truthful and practical,” she tells Jenny. “It takes the fun out of my dreaming.” Suzan is engaged to Dr. Kris McKenzie, but early in the book Suzan comes down with flu-like symptoms and is found to have an unexplained bruise on her shoulder. You will not be shocked to learn that Suzan is soon diagnosed with leukemia and given less than six weeks to live. You will be even less shocked that Suzan is the only one who isn’t told this. Curiously, Jenny instantly decides that “truth, which had always been the principle she believed in and practiced, must be exchanged for pretense.” Despite the fact that she has taken the opposite view on Laredo Sims’ case, virtually identical to Suzan’s, Jenny decides that she has to “give Suzan hope for a little longer.” When Suzan finally figures it out, she takes it in stride that all her friends have been lying to her, curiously. She and Kris decide to get married—and the hospital staff pools its resources, giving the newlyweds a check for $230 which “meant that they could have a honeymoon.” Today this amount would buy you four days at a Motel 6 and McDonald’s, but I guess there’s been some inflation in the past fifty years.
When she’s not battling illness and illusion at work and at home, Jenny is struggling to decide who to marry. Tom Russell is kind, dependable, and in love with her. “She had only to give him a little encouragement and he’d surely propose. Why not, she asked herself. Tom would make a good husband. He was nice-looking, charming, fun to be with, and they shared similar interests.” Marriage, in most VNRNs, is first and foremost a business deal, unless love sweeps all common sense under the rug. But Tom wants Jenny to quit nursing if they are married, so this—and her love for Brad—keep her single. Soon another beau enters the scene: Mike Ryan, who is a sort of George Clooney–type movie star. Despite his reputation as a lothario, he proposes within a week and is apparently quite serious; turns out he’s been looking for an honest woman, but Jenny’s the first one he ever met in Hollywood. Jenny goes to lots of glamorous parties with Mike and seriously considers marrying him, but in the end decides that she could never be at home in his world of glitter and indolence. “Love wasn’t enough, Jenny wanted to tell him. It took understanding and tolerance and the wanting to share each other’s interests and thoughts for a successful marriage. Mike’s world was pretending. Hers was reality.” Of course, she doesn’t really love him, either, so that would be a bit of a handicap as well.
In the meantime, Brad is still carrying on a low-grade flirtation with Jenny, dancing with her at the hospital ball and fighting with her when her bitterness about being dumped makes her catty. Eventually Brad becomes impatient with all the bickering, and asks her, “Can’t you stop being such a fighter?” This puts her in a tailspin: “Had her job made her so independent that she had become less of a woman? Stand up for what you believe. Speak the truth. There it was again. The principles she had governed her life by were proving to have a high price. Faye was no fighter, that was a foregone conclusion. She was every inch a woman. Softly feminine and seeming helpless. No wonder Brad had fallen into her trap. Dumb like a fox. That was Faye Kettering.” I have to say, I’d take integrity over a wedding ring, any day, but that’s just me.
With all her beaux off the table, Jenny decides to take a job in another hospital in Oregon, close to her home town. When Brad comes to tell Jenny goodbye, he blurts out that he is less than satisfied with his prospects: “My future all decided with no sweat or struggle involved. All I’ll have to do is agree with my father-in-law and cater to my wife. A small price for success, wouldn’t you say?” Jenny is surprised by Brad’s bitterness, especially when he tells her, “You’ve been a banner of truth in a citadel of illusion,” now apparently coming to appreciate the very qualities he despised at book’s open. This leads them both to agree that “truth should be tempered with kindness, even with little white lies sometimes. Just as illusion should never replace reality. There was room and need for both.” It’s a pat lesson, not really earned, and it falls flat.
Jenny is all packed and ready to go, but Laredo Sims is dying and asks that she come see him. There’s this little matter of a forest fire in the Hollywood hills near the hospital, but Jenny talks her way past the fire trucks blocking the road. Unfortunately, she runs out of gas about a mile up the hill, and the flames are about to overtake her as she runs screaming hysterically down the road, but Brad pulls up on a white horse—oh, no, it was just his car—and carries her up the hospital, where she recovers from smoke inhalation for a few days. It’s just a few pages from the end, and you can surely figure out what happens in the final paragraphs. Except poor Laredo Sims apparently dies alone, because he’s never mentioned again.
This book, written before Patricia Libby’s excellent Winged Victory for Nurse Kerry and Cover Girl Nurse, has none of their camp or humor or even interest. It’s fairly plodding, as nurse novels go, and the whole central theme of truth versus illusion is too easily dismissed with Brad and Jenny’s agreement to compromise. I had high hopes for this book, but apparently it took Ms. Libby a bit to hit her stride. Unfortunately, this is apparently the last of the three nurse novels she wrote, so there will be no chance of redemption, except to go back and revisit the two novels we’ve already read. And given their fabulousness, you might want to consider just that.
Young Doctor Kirkdene
By Elizabeth Hoy, ©1955Doctor Kirkdene had made it quite plain that as a rising young medic he considered domestic entanglements and distractions as hindrances. But Nurse Lindy couldn’t help hoping that in spite of all his theorizing he would eventually come to love her!
GRADE: B+
BEST QUOTES:
“You mean, you actually make beds, wash patients, do dreadful terrifying dressings, watch gory operations without fainting?”
“Career women ought to marry docile men—otherwise they are heading for disaster.”
REVIEW:
Nurse Anne Linden—Lindy throughout this book—is hopelessly in love with Dr. Kirkdene, who has no first name and is just known as Kirk. But the man, gorgeous and self-confident, is a shameless cad: “His conquests were legion; hearts fell before him like nine-pins.” But one night Lindy, off in a back room for a sanctioned nap while on night duty (and how I wish such a humane break were more widespread), is followed by the flirtatious Kirk. No sooner has he planted a wet one on her when the door flings open and the night supervisor catches them in the clinch. As if that isn’t bad enough, word gets out that Kirk has left his post in the ED, and when an emergency came in, the nurse there was unable to find him and the patient survived only through her quick thinking.
With the two of them about to be tossed not just out on the street but to the metaphoric wolves, Kirk does what any enterprising, ambitious young man would do in similar circumstances: He lies, telling the head of the hospital that he had just proposed to Lindy when they were discovered. This makes everything all right and saves them both—but now they have to pretend they’re engaged.
And pretend they do, through an extensive 192 pages. Lindy is angry at the sham, secretly wishing it were real, watching Kirk with alternating fury at his coldly shameless ambition to nail a post at a new pediatrics ward and reverential awe at his complete and selfless devotion to his patients, to the point that he risks his career to help them. There are a few side plots, but this is essentially the book in a nutshell. It may seem simple—in truth, it is—but Elizabeth Hoy is enough of a storyteller to make this little story worth reading.
After Elizabeth Hoy’s outstanding Nurse Tennant, I went shopping for more of her books. Young Doctor Kirkdene does not live up to its superlative sister, but it’s certainly better than the other title I found, Doctor Garth. The writing is easy and charming, with occasional pretty phrases like, “Sensibly she reminded herself of these things, while her singing heart went its own wild way.” And few VNRN writers can make you feel so acutely the wretchedness of a young woman pining over an unrequited love—she pulls me back to miseries I haven’t experienced since high school. It must be admitted that the length of this book does get a bit tedious, and I found myself wishing the miserable pair could just have one honest conversation and put a quick end to it—indeed, the end, when that finally does occur, was a bit of a letdown. But all things considered, this is a rarity among VNRNs, a novel that actually hurts, and so I happily suggest you make an appointment at your earliest convenience with Young Doctor Kirkdene.
Doctor Dee
By Elizabeth Wesley (pseud. Adeline McElfresh), ©1960
When Dr. Dee Bailey joined the surgical staff of big, modern Still River General Hospital to serve as anesthesiologist under Surgeon Arn Thurston she made an implacable enemy of Nurse Cele Maynard. For the young nurse was madly in love with the handsome surgeon and believed Dr. Dee wanted him, too. Then fate played into the hands of Nurse Maynard. A powerful underworld czar was brought for an emergency operation and Nurse Maynard listened on an extension phone as a sinister voice offered Dr. Dee “real money, a hundred grand—if he don’t come through that operation.” When Phil Roscoe died on the table, the young nurse, almost insane with triumphant malice, made her accusation—Dr. Dee Bailey had taken a man’s life for a hundred thousand dollars!
GRADE: B
BEST QUOTES:
“Let a doctor be personable and good-looking, and they don’t trust him.”
REVIEW:
I didn’t realize until I started in on this book that it is actually the prequel to
Dr. Dorothy’s Choice, which is not a book I cared for very much, since the Dr. Dorothy “Dee” Bailey was a spineless wimp buffeted about by the men in her life. Here, though, she shows a bit more starch, and with good writing to bolster the storyline, we’ve got a better yarn with Dee’s introduction, and one worth reading.
Dee has returned to Still River, Indiana, her home town, after medical school and residency and a job in New York, to work for Dr. Paul Courtney. She’s walked into a bit of a mess, however, taking control of the anesthesiology department from Celia Maynard, nurse anesthetist, who is not happy about her demotion. Cele is also ridiculously jealous because about a week after Dee’s arrival, Cele’s boyfriend, surgeon Arn Thurston, makes a major pass at Dee at a dinner party that he has attended with Cele on his arm. Dee does not show enough sense to tell Dr. Thurston to get lost, unfortunately, and the gossip about Arn and Dee’s moonlit peccadillo doesn’t make things any better between the two ladies.
Then, when a golf buddy of Arn’s collapses with a gallbladder attack, it is revealed that he has a bad heart due to an unspecified stab wound to the pericardium that makes surgery risky. Scrubbing up for surgery, Dee gets a phone call during which she is advised of a unique financial opportunity: Should former Sing Sing resident and wise guy Phil Roscoe not survive the surgery, her bank account could be $100,000 heavier. Then, when Phil does arrest on the table, Cele, present in the room as a curious onlooker, starts shrieking that she was eavesdropping on the extension and overheard the whole exchange, and that Dee is a murderer.
The rest of the book is a somewhat strange muddle in which a pack of fairly stupid gangsters threaten Arn to speak out against Dee or they will reveal an incident from his past in which he ordered a barbiturate for a young patient who subsequently died; he had denied having written the order and was never proven to be guilty of wrongdoing, though everyone suspected him of it. A bundle of cash is hurled onto Dee’s doorstep, and when she turns it over to the police, she is kidnapped. Instead of whimpering in a corner, though, she plots her escape, and thank goodness she decided to forego the Keds for heels this morning!
In the end, delivered back to Still River by a passing truck driver, Dee lands in the arms of a man she has dated but professed little interest in, so though we should see it coming, it still feels a bit odd. The fate of Dr. Thurston, the gangsters, Cele, and even Dee’s career is left unanswered, and unless there’s another book between this and Dr. Dorothy’s Choice, we can only guess how all that turns out. But there’s some nice writing and some fun characters in this book, and the plot is livelier than many. Even if you decide not to follow Dee’s career path going forward—and I can’t strongly recommend that you do—you could do a lot worse than to watch her debut.
Nurse Carol
By Maud McCurdy Welch, ©1955Carol Gabrielson, one of the prettiest student nurses at Riverview Memorial, was about to be graduated when Dr. Steve Barrett returned to the hospital to be resident physician—and her own boss. Steve had helped her through her first student days, and now that he was back, her world seemed wonderfully complete. At least it was until she learned he was to marry lovely Angela Ashby, daughter of the head of Riverview. Carol threw herself into her work with increased dedication, but despite her demanding job and the attentions of other attractive men, she couldn’t stop thinking about Steve—somehow he didn’t look like a man in love, but a man troubled by a dark secret …
GRADE: B+
BEST QUOTES:
“I’m having a nervous breakdown, or perhaps I’m falling in love. The symptoms are similar, aren’t they?”
“Honey, your figure is something you read about in the ads.”
“If you weren’t so darn pretty, I’d be mad at you.”
“Maybe it looked that way, but she wasn’t trying the old trick of domesticity and good food to get a man away from another girl.”
“All women are alike when it comes to men. There’s only one.”
“You think coffee can solve all the problems of the universe.”
REVIEW:
Carol Gabrielson has such a cumbersome last name that the staff calls her “Miss G,” and one recurring joke is the string of patients who always manage to mangle it. The 1950s were such simple times; what would they have made of Zbigniew Brzezinski? But somehow Carol manages to stagger along under the weight of such a burden. She’s doing better at book’s open because her childhood friend, Dr. Steve Barrett, has come back to the hospital after a year’s absence, about which he will say nothing, and not only because no one, including his dear friend Carol, ever seems to have tried asking him where he was. She’s just graduated from the nursing school, and has started working as a private duty nurse because she wasn’t asked to join the staff, though everyone wanted her and is very upset that she wasn’t. It turns out that the chief of staff’s daughter, who is maneuvering to marry Steve and is jealous of his brotherly attentions to Carol, somehow managed to block her hire. It does make me concerned for the hospital’s future that they let a non-employee barely out of her teens make these sorts of decisions.
But Carol lands on her feet when she takes an apartment with fellow nurse Lora Breck, a mopey sort who appears unstable and is given to staring off into space and saying things like, “Love can—can make you go a little crazy.” We watch the young ladies renovate their new home into a pleasant retreat complete with a parakeet named Pip that sings songs and talks—he’s quite a parakeet! From here they set off for this job and that job, Carol all the while trying to fend off the wealthy, persistent cad Bill Lennox, who keeps insisting that she marry him. One of her patients is the difficult Mrs. Perrin, who after a few days of wearing Carol to rags takes a terrible turn. Her son Andrew is called in from San Francisco—and he turns out to have been Lora’s fiancé at one time, but Lora had broken the engagement because his domineering mother objected to the match. Though Andrew tries to win Lora back, Lora plans to marry another man she’s been seeing, a worthless check who is minutes away from being indicted on fraud charges.
Carol, meanwhile, is growing increasingly jealous of the catty Angela, who snubs Carol at every opportunity. The pair’s engagement is finally announced in the papers, and Carol is forced to admit to herself that—gasp!—she’s in love with Steve! But I shouldn’t poke too much fun, because here the “shocking” revelation that has been clear to us from page one actually plays out with sincerity and comes across as far less contrived as it does in most other VNRNs.
I need say no more about the plot, as it plays out predictably. Even the reason for Steve’s disappearance is something you probably guessed at. But if it is obvious, I was relieved to find that author M.M. Welch managed to find a different plot here, as the other two books I have read, Nurses Marry Doctors and Country Nurse, shared the same one. And it’s a pleasant read: There are the occasional witticisms along the way, such as when Steve asks Carol, “I suppose you’d call that—er, contraption on your head a hat, or wouldn’t you?” and she replies, “If it isn’t, somebody gypped me out of ten dollars and tax.” The gentle, amiable air of most VNRNs from the 1950s, including Ms. Welch’s prior two, pervades this book as well, and Carol’s comings and goings are enjoyable to watch. Even if it won’t land on the Best Novels list on January 1, 2015, you could do a lot worse than spend an afternoon with Nurse Carol.
San Francisco Nurse
By Barbara Grabendike, ©1964Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti
As a nurse, Bret Ames had always dreamed of marrying a doctor, yet when handsome Dr. Nels Larson proposed, she began to have her doubts. Strong, yet gentle, he was the kind of man a girl could lean on. But that was just the trouble. Was he too self-sufficient? Somehow she found herself irresistibly drawn to Dick Travers who needed her care and her love, but who belonged to another woman.
GRADE: B
BEST QUOTES:
“He’s under sixty and male—that makes him just your type.”
“Half of you is twice as much as any other woman.”
“I won’t deny your husband’s obvious charms, but charms were meant for bracelets, not marriage.”
“Why is it that the unhappy people of this world hold so much power over the happiness of others?”
“How those smashing waves and rough rocks must be torturing his tender stumps!”
“I didn’t lose my head, just my legs.”
REVIEW:
I’ve waited a while for a nurse novel as campy as this one—and camp is something I hold quite dear. So it is with disappointment that I must declare that as much as I wanted to adore this book, the story line just couldn’t match the zingy one-liners. Besides, I was disappointed that a novel called San Francisco Nurse gave us little apart from a dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf—where only tourists venture—of that fine city.
When Chief of Nurses Bret Ames first claps eyes on Dick Travers, he is a “sour apple.” In for a nephrectomy after stones destroyed his kidney, he is as mean as they come—and now, with just one kidney, “only half a man,” he despairs. But she has a way with these types, and so she gladly takes on the challenge of trying to perk him up. Darn it, though, he is just so stubborn! “Look, Little Miss Sunshine,” he snaps at her, “you can save the routine for vaudeville, it may come back some day and you’ll need it.” You can see why after just a couple of minutes of his bitterness, she’s ready to throw in the towel, and not just because “she felt piqued at being so thoroughly ignored. There was no admiration in those dark eyes when he looked at her tall, well-distributed figure.” The nerve!
She soon finds out what his problem is—it’s Virginia Travers, Dick’s malevolent wife, who drove him to the brink of bankruptcy, left him for a wealthier man, and then nearly ruined his reputation when she found out he was in love with one of his graduate students. Her sugar daddy played out and the grad student long frightened away, she’s returned to Dick’s side, insisting he take her back. “I know now what his trouble is—a she-devil wife,” Bret concludes.
Under the terrible strain of his loss of manhood and the return of his evil wife, Dick refuses to smile for Bret. She eventually loses her cool with him, calls him—to his face!—an “ungrateful sour apple,” and then surprisingly kisses him full on the lips. “Dear God, I’m in love with him! Completely, crazily in love!” Bret thinks to herself. And so we have yet another dopey heroine falling for a man who has been nothing but mean to her. It isn’t too long before he’s taking her in his arms and kissing her, but given the Mrs. stomping around the hospital on her stilettos, those scenes are few and followed by guilty quarrels, as Dick sees no way out of his marriage.
So, in an attempt to cool her jets, Bret oddly decides to go visit Mrs. Travers at her home on the Berkeley campus of State University (and times have certainly changed; she drives across the Bay Bridge at 35 mph and is not killed, and the toll is 25 cents—now it’s $6 during rush hour). There, she tells Mrs. Travers that she is going to marry Dr. Nels Larsen, a fabulous doctor and all-around swell guy. “Self-possessed, he needed no one’s reassurance or approbation,” she thinks of Nels on their second date. “She would never lose her identity as Nels’ wife. He would not demand that her every waking thought be devoted to him—he did not need that kind of reassurance.” Sounds like a peach! Naturally she’ll never be able to love him.
When Dick finds out about this, though—and Bret is oddly shocked and furious that the Mrs. should pass along the 411 about the engagement to her spouse—Dick turns right back into that sour apple. He’s nasty, cruel, and shows up at Bret’s engagement party to slap her with the news that he got divorced four days ago—it apparently not crossing his mind to let her know before the announcement party—and chews her out for not waiting for him, when he gave her no reason whatsoever to do so. He also dares to say that “Nels will never give you the chance to be yourself,” when this is the opposite of what Bret had thought of him. “Nels needs nothing from you to make him a man!” he claims, and then clubs her with his parting shot: “I became a man for you. But I overrated your courage by asking you to be a woman for me.” Whatever that means, it completely overlooks his effeminate lack of kidney.
But now all we have left is to undo the engagement between Nels and Bret and all will be right. For your further enjoyment, there’s a side plot about a young man whose legs had to be amputated after a car crash, his engagement to a nurse friend of Bret’s, and his insistence that he cannot marry Sue unless he, too, can “be a man,” even with mere stumps for legs. I’m not sure what all this manliness is all about and why it’s so important to the gents in this book, but it really doesn’t seem to be worth the trouble for them or for their lady friends.
I was also not impressed at the way Nels is built up as a great guy in the beginning of the book, only to be depicted as a completely different man when Bret needs to dump him. His character change lets Bret off the hook too easily; she should have to man up herself, acknowledging the simple truth that she can’t marry Nels because she loves someone else, regardless of what an ass that man is, and not pretend her fickleness is due to any alleged flaw Nels possesses. She neither has to make any effort to go after Dick, because the very second she decides that she’s through with Nels, Dick’s hand drops on her shoulder. So while the zingers are hilarious fun, and these alone make San Francisco Nurse worth reading, the plotting just doesn’t have the backbone to carry this book to the top of the mark.
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.
Nurse on Paradise Isle
By Nell Marr Dean, ©1967Gently bending palm trees, an untouched island paradise—it all seemed so perfect when pretty Nurse Leslie Sheridan accepted her first assignment. She was to be the only medical attendant to a construction project on an isolated island near Tahiti. But the swaying palms only camouflaged the rampant tensions of the island. Even with a temperament to match her red hair, Nurse Leslie found she was no match for roughneck contruction workers and revenge-seeking natives. But the peril most unbearable for the young nurse was the threat of losing to a native beauty her new found love for big Jim Cobalt, the construction boss. Would the irony of the island named Paradise forever haunt her dreams of love and duty?
GRADE: C
BEST QUOTES:
“Sometimes she wished that he were not so fircely masculine. Such rugged vigor was like a magnet to a woman … and she was a woman.”
“Sweetheart, I could hardly keep my mind on the blueprints from seeing you priss around in that fluffy white uniform.”
REVIEW:
Leslie Sheridan has left her job at Bayshore Hospital in San Francisco to take a temporary position on a remote island—named Coral Reef Island, by the way, not Paradise Island—where construction on a new hotel, the Tongahiti, is underway. The Tongahiti will be the island’s first hotel, transforming it into a tourist mecca, much to disloyal Leslie’s dismay, and she’ll be tending to any construction workers injured on the job as well as any islanders who might need her assistance. But construction boss Jim Cobalt is none to happy about her arrival because, as he snaps at her, “I’m going to have to keep an eye glued to every workman on the job who’s got a wandering eye. Frankly, you’re just too darned pretty.” Leslie just laughs this off and goes for a swim.
And goes about establishing herself not just as a good nurse but really, owing to the fact that she has the most medical training on the island (there’s also a local nurse who is a smart, comptetent professional, but apparently not as schooled as Leslie), more of a nurse practitioner. She befriends many of the locals, all except one—Luva, “the half-breed” daughter of an American and a local island woman, who is “something like a wild animal—one who’ll never be tamed.” Luva was educated at an English school in Fiji, where she picked up “a slight French accent,” but despite the fact that she is one of the very few islanders with a formal education, she is the only character in the book who can’t put together a grammatically correct sentence: “They lewk for you een your clinic, mademoiselle. Or ees you always at Jeem Cobalt’s quarters?” Luva is hankering in a big way for Jeem, but it’s a doomed affair—her half-Polynesian heritage means she could never return to the U.S. as his wife: “He would have to give up his friends and his family, and be an outcast.” And if they had children, “they would be part Polynesian and part American. That would be the real tragedy.” In the meantime, though, while he’s on Coral Reef Island, Luva can hang all over Jim and make Leslie see green. But not for long—soon she and Jim are smooching on the beach at a luau and dating seriously.
But this is not enough for dopey Leslie, because Jim Cobalt “never had told her right out that he loved her,” and he hasn’t proposed marriage in the months she has been seeing him. What else could that mean except that “he had made love to her and now that the season’s end had come, he was going to say goodbye as easily as the wind veers.” So she offers her resignation to the owner of the hotel, effective as of the hotel’s opening night, now just a week or two away. Will she actually have an honest conversation with “the only man she wanted to love her,” or will she “go on pretending” that she doesn’t care about him? Well, there’s nothing like a disaster to bring two people together—in this case, the hotel burning down, which we foresaw from Chapter 1, when the local nurse tells Leslie that the locals resent the hotel “immensely”: “When the hotel is built and people swarm like flies over their small kingdom, their resentment might erupt, like a volcano.” It turns out that ole Jim was keeping a secret from Leslie: the fact that he was married, though his divorce just came through three days ago, and it was this that prevented him from telling her that he loved her—though leaving him completely free, apparently, to fool around with her all summer. (And lest we worry for Jim’s virginity, he tells her that he and his wife never “lived together.”) “Oh, Jim, you should have told me the truth,” declares the hypocritical Leslie, and they walk off into the sunset, “their backs to the smoldering ashes of the Tongahiti.”
This is a throwaway book, curious only for its stereotypical prejudice against the “indolent and shiftless” natives, though it is odd that the only native character who is neither dignified nor honest is Luva—perhaps it’s the taint of her American blood that makes her so scheming and ignorant. Leslie has some admirable qualities, and is in general a strong and capable character—except when it comes to her boyfriend, which is just irritating. The book leaves a few loose ends, like what is going to happen to the hotel—and the island along with it—not to mention the local nurse, in love with a white man she can never marry (though Jim and Leslie nonchalantly agree that “she will die of a broken heart”). Really, there’s not much to say about this book, which I guess is the most telling fact of all.
Luxury Nurse
By Peggy Gaddis, ©1956“You’re sound, Sally, very sound,” Dr. Garry Linton told her. Nurse Sinclair laughed. “Are you talking about a nice big russet apple, or me?” she asked. But she was troubled. He said he loved her, but did he? And now she would be away nursing Lisa Cannon for three long months, Lisa, whose high-strung disposition and self-pity made her as unpleasant to be with as she was lovely to behold. But Sea Island was a magical isle and Sally Sinclair was determined to explore all of the magic of it. It began when she discovered the exquisite miniature village—a Lilliput town—which Allen Blaisdell had built. After that, everything seemed to change, as if Sally had found the key to the secret garden, to Lisa’s recovery, and to her own heart.
GRADE: C-
BEST QUOTES:
“ ‘I have never,’ stated Garry grimly, ‘seen anybody I would so thoroughly enjoy turning over my knee for a session with a slipper in my good right hand. How do you stand her, Sally?’ ”
“Women are the simplest creatures on earth; all they ask is to be loved and considered vastly mysterious, which they aren’t in the smallest degree.”
“If you dare offer me a sedative or a supposedly soothing word, I’ll throw something at you.”
REVIEW:
Sally Sinclair is dating Dr. Garry Linton, but is quite clear about the fact that she is the only nurse at the hospital who isn’t in love with him. He’s told her that he wants to marry her—as usual, in a few years when he has established his practice and can support her—but she gives him a cold shower, right there in the second chapter: “I’m not a bit sure that I’m in love with you,” she says. “I like you enormously; I admire you tremendously; but I’m not sure that’s love.” Well, we’ll just see about that, missy.
She’s caring for 18-year-old Lisa Cannon, “the season’s most successful and most popular debutante,” who is in the hospital for the foreseeable future because, according to Nurse Sinclair’s expert diagnosis, “your nerves cracked up from sheer exhaustion.” Lisa’s ready to leave the hospital, but needs nursing for the three months it will take for her to recover from her crackup. So Sally is nominated to go with her, because she’s so good at dispensing helpful advice such as, “You’ll have to pull yourself together and stop that crying, or I’ll have to get Dr. Linton to give you a sedative.” If disdain doesn’t work, a good nurse can always resort to violence; when Lisa insults her father, “Sally barely managed to restrain an impulse to slap the girl hard.” Needless to say, I’m not impressed with Sally’s haughtiness, disrespect, and rudeness to her patient, but in a Peggy Gaddis novel, these qualities add up to a great nurse, since Sally is slightly better behaved than her extremely spoiled patient.
So off Sally and Lisa go to the Cannon cottage on Sea Island, Georgia—a beautiful, upscale beach resort that I happen to know fairly well and that figures very prominently in the book. If you’re familiar with it also, it’s especially fun to go for dinner and dancing at The Cloister, the historic hotel there, even if that worthless cad Thorne Cooper does show up and make eyes at Lisa across the ballroom. He’d accepted $50,000 from Mr. Cannon to stay away from Lisa, but now he strides up to the party and drops a check on the dinner table, the principle from the “loan,” plus $10,000 interest. “I made you no loan,” Mr. Cannon explodes in response. “I bribed you to stay away from my daughter.” But that’s admirable too, in Peggy Gaddis’ eyes, just a good father protecting his child from social parasites.
Now Thorne is dropping by the house, making no bones about the fact that he’s only interested in Lisa’s money. Garry also stops by now and then, but Sally continues to remind him that she doesn’t love him. Then one day while wandering the beach in the morning—Lisa sleeps until noon, of course—Sally comes across a tiny town of miniature houses and buildings and even twee rosebushes that have to be watered with an eyedropper. It’s a business created by local resident and old crush of Lisa’s, Allen Blaisdell (though it’s not clear how they knew each other; he’s ten years older than she is), who has hired veterans disfigured by the war to build these creations. Sally is utterly captivated and speaks so warmly of Allen to Garry that her beau asks her if she’s in love with Allen (she demurs). But when Allen drops by the Cannon cottage, Lisa gloms onto the man to such an extent that Sally is shoved to the sidelines, and even Thorne loses his appeal; she laughs to Sally that she sees Thorne only “because it annoys Dad, of course. Why else?” But the rub here is that Lisa is horrified by the sight of physically handicapped people. “That awful-looking creature!” she shrieks upon seeing one of Allen’s friends and employees, a man in a wheelchair. “I’d die if a thing like that so much as brushed against me.”
Not to worry, though, the power of love will set Lisa on her feet in the end. One day while walking among Allen’s tiny houses, she encounters a rattlesnake, and only the quick intervention of a nearby wheelchair-bound man inexplicably carrying a gun saves her life. She screams and screams and screams! and flings herself into the lap of her rescuer, who pats her hair with his artificial hands and smiles over her with his scarred face, and Lisa refuses to let go. (You might ask yourself, how does a man with no hands fire a gun? Let’s ask wise Nurse Sally: “The marvels of artificial limbs, Lisa, can never be overestimated,” she explains somberly to her equally incredulous patient.) In any event, Lisa is now a convert: When Sally asks Lisa skeptically if she thinks she can accept the deformed man’s invitation to dine with him and his wife, Lisa answers, “I’d almost kneel at his feet. Oh, Sally, what do you think I am?” I, for one, thought she was a nasty brat who didn’t care if she trampled dollhouse rosebushes and who sneered, “I don’t see how Allen can even tolerate those hideous creatures,” but perhaps it was all meant kindly.
Now we only need to cast about for someone for Sally to marry at the last minute—hey, that Dr. Garry might do! When, three pages from the end, Garry asks her if she loves him, suddenly it’s all tears and hot cheeks: “She went into his arms as naturally, as beautifully as a homecoming bird comes into its nest at sunset,” and I flung the book across the room as naturally as an outraged reader slapped with the final straw.
Peggy Gaddis seems to have tossed several of her other books—Nurse in the Shadows, Nurse in the Tropics, Big City Nurse—into a blender and poured out Luxury Nurse. Unfortunately, the result is not a tasty chocolate malt. Sally is a patronizing, righteous tyrant, somehow meant to be admirable; Lisa is cruel, small-minded and selfish, and her complete about-face in the end is entirely unbelievable. It’s hard to believe that we could find a man dumb enough to take one of them, let alone two. My favorite things about this book were its setting on Sea Island and the cover. But I readily acknowledge that unless you have actually been to the Cloister, the first pleasure will most likely be lost on you, so you can save yourself several hours by just enjoying the cover illustration and then setting this annoying amalgamation aside.
Copyright © C-buk2016
