Collecting Book

The Doctor’s Wife

For two years, R.N. Ivy Carter had been engaged to Dr. Gerald Larrimore, a brilliant young surgeon and cardiologist. Despite the fact that Gerry was studying and doing research in a large Northern city, Ivy continued her nursing in a small town in the South while she awaited his return. But when he came back, it was not alone—it was with a new bride, one who seemed bent on corrupting Gerry’s professional integrity. Overcome by shock and heartache, Ivy refused to be comforted by Murray Blake, the intern who had long secretly and hopelessly adored her, or by Gary Whitman, the millionaire playboy who found in Ivy the one woman he had been searching for. Could Ivy work alongside the man she loved day by day and watch him being manipulated and destroyed by a scheming woman? Could she accept the fact that the man was out of her life forever and accept love from another?

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“In Oakhaven servants were hard to come by. The new dress factory, about which the county seat town had been little less than ecstatic, had drained off the women and girls who were normally available as maids and cooks. It was a not so funny joke among the more prosperous women that in Oakhaven there was no servant problem, because there were no servants available.”

“I like to feel that, professional house guest though I may be, I’m not quite a gigolo.”

“You want to be the big provider who goes out and slays dragons and pulls them home by the tail to show the little woman, huddling in the cave to which you brought her.”

“My Pop says that people that live uptown don’t fight. Must be kinda dull, don’t you think, Nurse? I kinda like a good fight, with people screaming and folks heaving things at each other.”

“I look like the breaking up of a long, hard winter, and you doctors should surely know it, since you had a lot to do with the way I look.”

“I’ll have fun doing over the house, and then at night when you come home, we’ll be together. And no woman in her right mind could want more out of life!”

REVIEW:

It’s a real pity about the cover of this book, because this illustrator’s work makes me cringe in horror, but it’s one of the best Peggy Gaddis novels I’ve read. So unless I can find it in a different edition with a better cover, we’re just going to have to bear it.

The book opens with the kindly supervisor of nursing giving Ivy the cruel news, that her fiancé of several years—who just wrote to her not three weeks ago to assure her of his love and interest in the plans for their upcoming wedding, the skunk—is turning up after a two-year stint in a New York hospital sporting a ring on his left hand and a wife on his arm. After tumbling from the supervisor’s office, Ivy walks blindly into Dr. Murray Blake and tells him the reason for her pale visage. This being a Peggy Gaddis cumDern book, you know there has to be a threatened spanking in here somewhere, and Gaddis mercifully gets it over early on, when Murray warns Ivy, “If you start defending the so-and-so, I’ll probably turn you across my knee and wham you!” From this low there is nowhere to go except to the stalker-like profession of undying love, so Murray offers it up with a thick frosting of darlings, but Ivy isn’t moved, curiously.

Denise Larrimore, the new wife of Dr. Gerry, arrives in due time, and she is “small, shy, demure, and unbecomingly dressed.” She straightaway offers more patented Gaddis treacle, to wit: “I’ll always be happy anywhere you are, and unhappy anywhere unless you are there,” she coos to her new husband. But we soon discover it’s all an act, for reasons unknown: “Being a clinging vine had really paid off, she told herself exultantly,” she says after having won an argument by crying and flinging her arms around his neck. “She’d put it over again!” Denise, who is quite wealthy in her own right and therefore has little need of a man to support herself, proves to be quite the conniver, worming her way into the most important social circles in town—that would be the Garden Club and the Civic Center and the Hospital Auxiliary. I’m not quite sure what made Gerry ever think this woman was shy and demure, because apart from her gushing at him, she certainly never acts like a shrinking violet; she in fact was the one who proposed marriage, not Gerry.

We’re alerted to the fact that “her whole campaign of marriage had been aimed at establishing him as a ‘luxury doctor,’ to whom the people she knew would come when they needed medical advice.” He’s adamantly opposed to the idea, though he feels guilty that he has dragged Denise from her sophisticated city life to a backwater southern town. But it’s not clear why Denise wants this of him, and I’m not really sure if she even loves him, though she repeatedly tells everyone else she does, because in her conversations with him she see-saws between scorn and syrup, and we’ve already been shown that her overblown sentiment is a fiction.

Indeed, it isn’t long before Denise is neglecting to pass on messages that a patient of Gerry’s is dying (“He asked for you before he went into a coma,” Ivy tells the good doctor the next day), spitting at him that she hates this “dizzy, weird little town,” and looking “chic if a bit overpowering in gold lame pants and a black and gold top.” Of course, after gliding down the stairs, she collapses in a puddle and begs Gerry not to divorce her, and the dolt laps it up—and when she’s smiling and satisfied with herself, he suddenly realizes “how little he really knew her. The real Denise, hidden behind her façade of shyness, was demure, retiring. But, he told himself, she wasn’t really like that at all. She was a determined woman who had every intention of getting exactly what she wanted, and if anyone got in the way—well, that was just too bad.” He tells her that he doesn’t know her, but she isn’t at all perturbed: “After all, darling, we have all our lives to get acquainted with each other. And isn’t that a beautiful, frabjous thought?” I’m sorry to report this is not the only time Denise uses the word frabjous.

As Denise mindlessly chatters and watches Gerry eat turnip greens she’s cooked, the recipe for which she’s scoured the town (recipes for turnip greens apparently being very difficult to come by in the South), “her mind was busy. Some day, and not too far off, she would accomplish her purpose for him! She would get him away from that silly little town and back to where he would be appreciated for the very fine cardiologist he was. She would have to move very slowly, very cautiously. She couldn’t afford another misstep.” Just then he interrupts her interior monologue to ask if she is happy and she replies, “I’ve always told you that wherever you were, that was where I wanted to be, and that all I ever want is your happiness.” She gives him a “radiant” smile. “But even as she was convincing him of her happiness there, she was visualizing him in a swank Park Avenue office, beautifully and expensively equipped, with a list of patients that came straight from the top drawer of New York’s most exclusive families. The time would come. Of that she had no doubt.” Slow curtain, and that’s the last we see of this most interesting couple.

Back to the central—and less interesting—pair: When we’re not witnessing Denise’s machinations, we follow Ivy around the hospital as she cares for her patients (including a young boy who has been abused by his mother). She dates Murray, who goes on—with a bit less syrup than Denise—about how much he loves her. “I do so wish that I loved you, Murray,” she tells him heartlessly. For his part, he’s begging, “Maybe some day you’ll discover that you could use my comfort permanently?” Eventually, over dinner, they have an endless argument after she tells him she loves him after all, and then finally come to kisses and the sighing declaration that her love for Gerry was a mistake, and that “you are really the only man I’ve ever wanted to marry.” For good measure we’re told that Gerry has changed. “Now he’s—well, arrogant, and cocksure and self-important,” though we really haven’t seen him acting that way at all.

I can’t help wishing this book had been about Gerry and Denise—it’s pretty clear that Peggy Gaddis found them the more appealing pair, which in point of fact they are, to the point that the book is named for Denise. Ivy is a strong, assertive woman who largely stands up for herself, even with Murray, and her patients are interesting, their stories complex, not facile, and not always with happy endings. We are certainly left with a big question mark regarding Denise’s motivation and her eventual success, which I actually find enjoyable, for once not having the obvious ending plodding toward its inevitable conclusion—sort of like Murray and Ivy’s story. The ongoing debate about whether Denise is demure or outspoken is a bit stupid: How can you be “inwardly” shy if you’re out bending half the town to your will? Isn’t one’s actual behavior the determining criterion? And does inward shyness, if indeed Denise has some, excuse her manipulative actions or make her a more sympathetic character, as Gerry seems to think? The central questions—whether she actually loves Gerry, what drives her to marry him, and whether succeeding in her attempts to re-create him will make her happy—are completely ignored, though this is not necessarily a detriment to the book. Leaving the fate of the Larrimores, and the contents of the heart of the Mrs., completely unresolved is in large part what makes this an interesting story. If there is a fair amount in this book to feel annoyed with, there’s enough here that’s alluring and new to make it well worth reading.

Nurse Under Fire

By Florence Stuart
(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1964

Jock had once tried to commit suicide because of his frustrated love for Nurse Ruby Compton. Now he was her patient in a psychiatric clinic and his emotional struggle was starting all over again. Ruby didn’t love him, but she pitied him too much to push him out of her life—even though his mental instability could make him dangerous. Even though being kind to Jock was ruining her chances with the doctor she really loved.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:

“What’s the use learning fancy words if you don’t trot them out to show how smart you are?”

“Ruby hated the current rage for pants, but she had to admit that Connie looked like a doll in them.”

“You mean I should marry a character who bores me to death, then spend the best years messing around with pots and pans and babies while he struggles through college? And turn into a worn-out old hag before he lands a job that really pays off? Uh-uh. All the fellows I know are pretty much like George. They’re poor, they bore me stiff, and all they’ve got on their minds is going to college for the rest of time and learning a lot of stuff so they’ll be big shots—some day. And they really want to marry just to have some girl around to cook and clean and make life easy for them, while they sit glued to their books. I can’t see it.”

“You’d be surprised how many patients we get who have cracked up simply by driving themselves to make more and more money to buy more and more things which they didn’t really need.”

REVIEW:

Ruby Compton is, to my eye, about as deranged as the patients she cares for at the Olive Hill Psychiatric Clinic. Her ex-beau, Jock Jordan (and what a name!), tried to hang himself six years ago when his rich father broke up his relationship with the less socially endowed Ruby, and has since nursed a major obsession with Ruby while living so recklessly that his antics on the freeway resulted in a multi-car crash that left several people critically injured and one killed. Instead of heading straight to jail, Jock’s father managed to get him committed to the booby hatch, but now his time is served and Jock is going home. And insisting that Ruby escort him on the 100-mile drive. Given the fact that she’s had no compunction about serving as Jock’s nurse, it was a long shot that she would agree with her boyfriend, hospital physician Nat Casey, that it would be best if she skipped that trip.

So off she goes—even bringing her 17-year-old sister Connie on the trip. The jaded Connie has designs on the wealthy Jock, and it comes out that she’s even been visiting him on the sly in an attempt to land herself a rich husband. “So what if he is a psycho?” she asks. “If Jock were to fall in love with a cute girl, get out of that place and get married, I’ll bet he’d be as normal as anybody.”

Of the actual road trip, which has been built up for 55 pages, we get not a sentence: After Ruby’s final argument with Nat, the next sentence has her pulling into Jock’s father’s house. Joe Jordan is away on a business trip, though, and Jock’s stepmother Dorothy refuses to allow Jock to come into the house, instead steering him and Ruby—Connie has been deposited at a local hotel—to the gatehouse: “I’m scared of crazy people,” she explains. But Ruby insists that they be allowed to stay in the main house. Once back in his old room, Jock is “brooding and staring, like someone in a stuporous daze,” and Ruby is concerned that this might be one of Jock’s “depressed spells which, once or twice, had come close to being a psychotic breakthrough.” Her solution is to take Jock and Connie out for dinner. Connie is all in favor of this plan: “Hey, it is okay if I douse myself with that perfume that Mom says smells like a hussy’s boudoir?” she asks her sister. But out at the restaurant, when Connie begs Jock to dance, Ruby reminds her, “He’s not supposed to dance. Doctor’s orders.” Because we all know that dancing can cause psychosis, especially the Wahtusi.

So while Connie finds someone else to boogie with, Jock takes the opportunity to beg Ruby, again, to marry him. When she refuses, he asks if she’s in love with someone else—and she lies to him. But when Connie returns to the table and is again rebuffed by Jock, she decides to settle the score by telling him that Ruby is engaged to Dr. Nat. Jock responds by taking a trip to the loo and not returning. In another dramatic jump between scenes, we are back at the oceanfront Jordan house, and Ruby spots someone swimming—gosh, who could that be at this time of night? Instantly she is powering through the waves, dragging Jock’s limp body back to shore, and pumping the salt water from his lungs. The paramedics arrive and bundle him up to bring back to the house (not the hospital), and now Ruby has another disaster to cope with: Mrs. Jordan, and she is pissed. “Lucy tells me what that lunatic has been up to: trying to kill himself again, making trouble and disturbance for everyone,” she shrieks, insisting that it’s out to the gatehouse with Ruby and Jock. Or not; Ruby insists that Dorothy go to her room: “Must I remind you that I am a psychiatric nurse? I have been trained to use force when it becomes necessary.” And it does become necessary, so Ruby seizes Dorothy Jordan in a judo hold and locks her in her own bedroom. What a gal!

Nat shows up unexpectedly, fortunately before Mr. Jordan gets home, so he can break the news about all the goings-on. Amazingly, Pa Jordan lets everyone stay, and in the morning has a heart-to-heart with Ruby in which he offers her $1 million if she will marry Jock. Next thing we know, the whole gang is back at Olive Hill, and Ruby is actually, amazingly, thinking over the offer: “Even if there is no more than once chance in a thousand, I must see that he gets that chance,” Ruby tells Nat. “I cannot have it on my conscience that I might have saved Jock from a living death, and did not.”

Only a bout of pneumonia keeps Ruby from eloping with Jock at once. But that gives Connie time to cook up a plan to prevent the marriage—yes, Connie, the girl who at book’s open deplored poverty, now declares that “what she really wanted was to marry some nice guy, love him to death, have a cute little house, and kids, and all the stuff most girls wanted.” So off Connie goes to see Dorothy, and tells her that $1 million of her husband’s precious fortune will slip through her fingers if Ruby marries Jock. Dorothy instantly reaches for the little pearl-handled revolver she keeps hidden amongst her underthings and hops into her black Caddy with the red leather seats to pay Jock a visit. She tells Jock about the bribe—and that Ruby is planning to go through with it, then have him committed to an insane asylum, annul the marriage and run off with Nat. She offers him her car and some money—$60, the cheapskate—but Jock’s not that dumb. He grabs the gun instead, knocks Dorothy down—poor Dorothy seems to have a “kick me” sign on her back—and heads for Nat’s office, just as Ruby herself is trotting down the Olive Hill corridors with the same destination. Oh, how will it all end?

The four or five final paragraphs of the book are actually quite sweet, but the perfunctory and plodding 17 preceding chapters are a hard slog. When the heroine holds multiple enormously flawed opinions, it’s hard to feel very sympathetic toward the little dunce. Florence Stonebraker pulls out a few great scenes in this book, but Nurse Under Fire is no match for her best works (i.e. City Doctor, The Nurse and the Orderly, Runaway Nurse). I love Florence Stonebraker enough that I could never just dismiss one of her books as not worth reading, but I do have to say, sadly, that you needn’t put this one at the top of your reading pile.

Cruise Nurse

Sheila Dorrance was young and lovely, and determined to make the most of her God-given assets. With memories of her impoverished youth always in back of her mind, she set out to use her nurse’s training as a passport to wealth and luxury. And the job as ship’s nurse on the pleasure liner Southwind certainly provided ample opportunity. There were any number of wealthy playboys aboard, and more than one of them was interested in wining and dining—and maybe even marrying—the pretty young nurse. But in spite of her longing for luxury, Sheila found herself falling for the Southwind’s dedicated young medical officer. And she knew that before her job as cruise nurse was over, she would have to decide whether her destiny was to be ruled by her head … or her heart!

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“You couldn’t be sure how an intern might turn out; he might be one of those who could think only of serving humanity and would never bother to collect a bill.”

“You never can tell young people anything. They always know everything.”

“After we’re back home, I want your job to be me.”

REVIEW:

Our heroine, 21-year-old Sheila Dorrance, is admittedly shallow: She decided to be a nurse so she could “meet a doctor or a prosperous patient, marry him, and never again have to worry about being poor.” She is quite candid with her aspirations with Dr. Peter Stowe, the young doctor on board the cruise ship where she is working; he turns out to be one of the noble types who interned at a local charity hospital and so is off her banquet table. But after an initial spat about it, he seems to forgive her, because after all, she’s a very competent nurse.

Sheila soon meets Clay Masters, an apparently wealthy young man with pressed white linen pants. Soon he’s beauing her around the Caribbean ports—she’s on the night shift her first week—and she’s dreaming of sparkly diamond rings. But she is also growing to like—take a guess—the good Dr. Peter, who is a sturdy, dependable sort and less inclined toward frivolous parties than Clay. So one evening, when Clay loses his head on a moonlight deck and kisses her a bit too much, Sheila panics and tells him that she isn’t ready to be serious. She soon tells her friend Peter, explaining that though she hasn’t ascertained Clay’s net worth, she hasn’t really thought about it much, only that she has fun with him, and that this isn’t enough to base a marriage on. He laughs, “Sheila Dorrance, you’re a fraud. You’re not honestly looking for a rich man. That’s just the way you talk.”

Soon Sheila is encouraging Clay to take out mousy Elise Ferrier, a browbeaten millionairess whose mother all but chains Elise to the radiator to keep her under her thumb. Mrs. Ferrier has been felled by her appendix and is recuperating ever so slowly in sick bay, leaving Elise to her own devices for the first time in her life, and she likes it!

The book trots along predictably, but there’s nothing wrong with that if it’s an enjoyable ride. The scenery—Havana, Haiti, Kingstown—is well-drawn, and as the plot progresses we are offered increasing glimpses into people’s characters. Clay, says his sister, enjoys taking Elise out because he can boss her around, and “this one would mean ‘love, honor, and obey’ if she said it.” When Sheila expresses surprise at this characterization, Angela Masters replies, “You didn’t know him very well, did you?” Touché, but to Sheila’s credit, this was one of her own objections to getting too deeply involved with Clay. Though the poor little rich girl does grow a bit of a spine, standing up for herself when her mother tries to insist that Elise stop seeing Clay, she doesn’t make any superhuman recovery. She’s always going to be emotionally fragile, Sheila realizes: “Elise would always need somebody who could make most of her decisions, somebody she thought wise beyond anything human.” The thought of feeling that way about someone makes Sheila herself snort in disgust, so we are left to feel pleased that Sheila was saved from Clay—who in the end turns out not to be rich, after all, so double phew! And on a tour of the Trinidad countryside, where the children are mostly naked with the swollen bellies of severe protein deficiency, Sheila and Peter’s taxi breaks down, and Sheila spends an afternoon at the hut of a rural woman and her seven children, coming to realize what real poverty is.

This is a fun little book, with a pleasant population, interesting armchair travel, and an occasional dose of humor. The writing is quite good as far as VNRNs go, and the plausible evolution of the characters is a welcome surprise. My only disappointment is that the book backing this Ace double novel, Calling Dr. Merryman, is not another nurse novel, and so is wasted on me. But apart from that, this is a cruise worth taking, and though there seems to be just a pitiful handful, I will look forward to more novels from Joan Sargent.

Down East Nurse

Cover illustration by Martin Koenig

Lovely, city-bred Claudia Snowden came to Maine to nurse her aging aunt—isolated in a remote New England village. Expecting to find an old-fashioned doctor using outmoded methods, Claudia found herself working instead with young, handsome Dr. Adams—who was as dedicated as the top-notch physicians she had worked with in the city… so dedicated that Claudia apparently could not tear his attention away from his work to herself. Should she abandon all hope of ever reaching this aloof doctor and say yes to the man who really needed her?

GRADE: B+

REVIEW:

When we first meet Claudia Snowden, she’s standing in her rich great-aunt’s over-decorated living room in Reachwood, Maine, evaluating the contents for its monetary value (she doesn’t find it) and wondering, “Where was the Snowden money?” She’s been dispatched to this godforsaken backwoods to care for old Elizabeth Snowden, an aging spinster with pneumonia, by her widowed mother in the hope of securing a prominent position in the old bag’s will. But Claudia is not the best option for a special nurse. Upon graduating, she had decided that “she wanted no more of bedside nursing” and had gone to work for an upscale specialist where patients pass quickly through, and “there was no feeling of involvement of responsibility.” She is full of scorn for the country doctor who has not admitted Elizabeth to the hospital, particularly because “when she met a man for the first time, she took for granted that instantaneous spark of interest and admiration in his eyes”—and the look the good Dr. Adam Walker bestows upon Claudia is rather one of scorn. Indeed, he dresses her down for criticizing his treatment plan, telling her that “Miss Libby” has refused hospitalization.

So Claudia is stuck in Maine, caring for Aunt Elizabeth. The only friend she has in an unctuous unsuccessful self-proclaimed artist, Chase Carpenter, though “the challenge of capturing Dr. Walker’s interest still remained.” Chase is entertaining, but Claudia has her doubts about him: He leaves his two boys, ages 7 and 8, at home alone; he refuses to pay Dr. Walker’s bill when one of his sons was ill; he shows no compassion for the poor. But when he finally kisses her, she is “astonished” to find that she enjoyed it. “Had she fallen in love at last?” Uh, no, dear. That’s just your glands talking.

She’s certainly not impressed with the townsfolk, who, though they regularly drop by with a bucket of milk or a cold ham for Miss Libby, aren’t warm and embracing. Indeed, Claudia finds them taciturn and coldly aloof, narrow-minded and insular. So when Aunt Elizabeth is clearly on the mend, Claudia is about to blow town when Chase falls out of the loft where he paints and shatters his leg, requiring surgery. He refuses to go to the hospital, however, unless Claudia stays with him morning and night. To get him to go, she agrees, thereby cementing his idea that she is in love with him, loudly proclaiming to every patient and healthcare professional that Claudia is “his girl,” much to her chagrin. Oddly, however, she doesn’t seem able to correct him on that score. But at the short-staffed hospital she helps out when she’s not rubbing Chase’s back, and manages to make herself useful, even coming to feel attached to a few of the patients.

Then comes the unfolding of a commonplace plot: Adam is cold to Claudia because he thinks she’s engaged to Chase, and she can’t bring herself to tell him—or Chase—that she’s not. It’s one of the more idiotic turns, because it seems utterly ludicrous that she can’t just open her mouth and start talking. But the book is largely redeemed by the way it presents her gradual unbending into a less grasping and materialistic individual into a caring, conscientious professional and human being. I also appreciated that Adam is always depicted as an admirable person; his initial disdain for Claudia is well-deserved and we know it, so we are spared another VNRN convention that I cannot stand, the complete ass presented as a dreamboat. The ending hits a small rough patch, though, with a dark secret from Adam’s past revealed but never really resolved. If the writing gives us nothing for the Best Quotes category, it goes down easy, and overall this is a pleasant enough book.

Nurse Greer

Pretty young Nurse Mary Greer suddenly found herself the center of a shocking scandal that brought a bitter attack on her professional integrity, an end to her engagement to Paul Tate and threatened Paul’s chances of being the next mayor of the town of Port West. When wealthy old Mr. Clarke left his fortune to the nursing home where Mary worked he disinherited a conniving niece and a weakling nephew who weren’t about to let their uncle’s riches slip through their fingers. Their charges of “undue influence” against Mary and the home brought Nurse Greer’s fighting spirit to the fore. But they also brought pressures from Paul who urged Mary to compromise her principles and avoid any further unpleasantness. After all, Paul was running for office and he valued public opinion, perhaps even more than truth. Truth mattered to Mary, mattered more than anything. And so he rolled up her sleeves and prepared to fight it out—alone, if necessary. She found a valiant ally in Bill Underwood, a newspaper man with an eye for a good story, an innate respect for truth and, as it turned out, a grade A case on Nurse Greer.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“Know any girls, Pop? She can be old or young, fat or lean, just as long as she can cook and wash socks properly and keep a fellow’s shoes in order.”

“Girls kill. You think they don’t, Son. You walk up the aisle with them and you smell the orange blossoms and you see ’em in white and you say to yourself, ‘Say! This is pretty durn good.’ Only thing is, they kill. You start supporting ’em, Son. And it goes on year after year. And you grow old. And you tucker out, and the first thing you know you’re dead, and there they are spending the insurance they made you buy.”

“She was very attractive. He liked the feathery arrangement of her auburn hair, the animation of her sparkling hazel eyes. He liked the tan gabardine suit she wore. He liked her figure. His intensely male nature was charmed, and then she smiled coolly and she became merely another woman to him.”

“ ‘That will be fine, Bill. Just toot your horn and I’ll come scampering.’ Really, she thought later, she’d sounded positively eager and desperate! Her mother, of course agreed. ‘Oh, fine,’ she exclaimed in Mary’s bedroom. ‘A man crooks a finger and you go running. Don’t you remember any of the things I’ve taught you? A decent, maidenly reserve! One time in ten, perhaps, a pleasant yes, but only if the fellow has worked hard for it, and only with the sweet air of making a very kind and generous concession.’ ”

“In another age, he thought, she’d have made a fine pirate.”

“You may have my permission to seize your dreadful instruments and have at my poor, helpless body.”

“Lord love men, she thought, they were strange.”

“I was so sure that if I could just dress decently I’d make a nice marriage.”

REVIEW:

Nowhere will you find more terminally ill wealthy people than in nurse novels, and Mary Greer is yet another kind, generous nurse benefitting from a last-minute discussion with an attorney. It’s curious that the author bothered to make her a legatee at all, however, since Mary’s “inheritance” is the promise of a job at the nursing home where she currently works—indeed, it is pointed out by several people throughout the book that since she already has what the will is promising her, she isn’t really benefitting at all. But the nursing home where she works will receive enough money to build and run another building where poor elderly people can take up residence, and it is for this ideal that Mary takes up her sword when dear dead Mr. Clarke’s scoundrel relatives, niece and nephew Harriet and Frank Clarke, threaten a lawsuit to block the will unless the nursing home agrees to give them half the estate.

Enter Paul Tate, Mary’s fiancé, who is running for Mayor of Port West. He’s behind in the polls, and tells Mary that the scandal that a lawsuit against her would bring will damage his campaign, and he asks her to settle. She, of course, is appalled that he would sell out the old folks so quickly, and their engagement comes to an abrupt end when she goes to the local newspaper and gives them a statement to that effect. But all is not lost for Mary’s love life; in the course of breaking off publicly with Paul, Mary meets Bill Underwood, the newspaper’s editor, and they soon start dating. She admires his dogged pursuit of the truth, and his restraint in not publishing everything he knows, and that he stands by her when she has her day in court. There she pulls out her trump card, a letter written to her by the late Mr. Clarke, which she reads aloud—up to a point, where she stops and asks Harriet Clarke if she should continue, it being clear that Mr. Clarke is about to reveal a certain breach of ethics on his niece’s part. Harriet instantly decides to drop the suit, and soon the architects are breaking ground on the new nursing home building.

Now Paul is back again, his interest in Mary rising with his numbers in the polls. Mary agrees to go on a picnic with him, but she is not as wild about him as she used to be. We’re not, either; he has a penchant for saying things like, “Up and at ’em, woman. History says it’s women who get the meals on the tables for mighty men.” But Bill has stopped calling Mary, so she reluctantly agrees to a few evenings with Paul. In the interim, Paul has found a discrepancy in the town’s accounting—$100,000 has gone missing. He’s not elaborating on the details, just saying that it’s up to the present mayor to explain. The mayor is saying that he never took any money and can’t explain the discrepancy, and it’s starting to look like Paul might actually win the election, after all. He asks Mary to marry him again, but she’s not biting. “What would happen if once again he had to choose between that love he talked of so glibly, and the political success he seemed to be on the verge of scoring?” Take a wild guess, honey.

But she’s saved from actually answering the question by the telephone: It’s the mayor, inviting her to City Hall for an important meeting. It turns out that Harriet Clarke is threatening to reveal that she made a $500 contribution to Paul’s campaign in exchange for his attempt to persuade Mary to split the estate with her. Harriet will not talk if Mary will give Harriet the letter Mr. Clarke wrote, thereby eliminating any evidence against Harriet. Mary instantly refuses to hand over the letter, choosing honesty over protecting Paul’s campaign. So Harriet tells Bill that the missing money is really just an error of accounting—the money isn’t really gone, it’s just in the wrong account. When Bill prints this in the paper, Paul is forced to withdraw from the race. He then tries to salvage the other thing he’s lost, his relationship with Mary, but she tells him that she thinks he was cheap to tarnish the mayor’s reputation when he knew that the mayor hadn’t stolen any money, that he was fickle to dump her when he thought it would hurt his prospects. And she conveniently decides that she never really loved him in the first place. I hate that; the plot device that insists that what she felt for the man she doesn’t choose wasn’t real love.

This book is better than most nurse novels. It has an actual theme—honesty vs. convenience—and even works hard to present Paul’s case as being an acceptable course of action, suggesting that Paul may have made a better mayor than the incumbent, and that he had chosen the best course of action, despite its moral dubiousness, to achieve that grand—and good—goal. It offers some amusing and sparkling writing, a very spirited appreciation for nursing as a professional calling, and even a very touching section about an elderly patient of Mary’s who dies of cancer. The characters are drawn well, if perhaps a bit too lightly: I admired Mary’s spine, but wished she’d smacked Paul’s face when he ordered her to set the table; I loved bad-girl Harriet, but wished she’d showed more claws. The ending was especially nice, a rarity in these formulaic novels. Joan Garrison only wrote one other nurse novel that I could find, Rehabilitation Nurse, but after Nurse Greer I will pick up that book with high hopes.

Emergency Nurse

Love and a career, ambition and security, often pull in different directions, and it is not easy for the young to sort out their claims. It was particularly difficult for Nurse Gina Delham, haunted as she was by the thought of her parents’ unhappy marriage. How was she to choose between the different paths set before her?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“Nothing is more infectious than highly strung nerves, you know, and I want you to be a rock to your patients, not a nettle. Let them rest on you, rely upon you—and take good care they never get stung, either by your tongue or your brisk efficiency!”

“She’s a woman. Surely you can’t expect her to view mangled bodies with no more emotion than she would inspect a squashed insect? All women are highly strung, emotional is the word you use, I think.”

“Bless you, Gina. You’ve given me something to look forward to at last. Life has been pretty ghastly all round. But on Wednesday at seven-thirty life will begin again in all its old glory! We’ll have fun, my sweet—I’ll bring the chariot to the hospital gates, and mind you have shoes that fit well, for you won’t be home by midnight, and we don’t want any glass slippers left on the highway!”

REVIEW:

Gina Delham is our eponymous nurse working in the English version of the ED, the Casualty Department, which is headed by the aloof Dr. Simon Brayford. She’s been told by the Matron early on that she’s not a career nurse: “Like most girls, if the offer of marriage came along, and was sufficiently tempting, you would have no more hesitation in throwing over this work than a child offered a cream bun would hesitate to throw away a slice of bread and butter.” Gina wants desperately to be serious about her career, but she’s afraid that the Matron is right. Her heart throbs for Simon Brayford, but it’s a lost cause—or so she thinks—because “nurses are, to him, just so much necessary hospital equipment, about as absorbing as a jar of swabs, and not nearly as useful!”

But in spite of her professed admiration for the doctor, she can’t possibly tumble for him because he’s poor and driven and hopelessly devoted to his work, and her parents—you guessed it, killed in a car accident when she was younger—had been driven to hate each other, and the children that bound them together, by the deep poverty they could never escape. So she’s going to marry a rich man, like this here patient, Garrick Peters, who will lift her and her two younger siblings into the good life. Garrick, recovering from a serious car accident and instantly smitten with Gina, seems ready to oblige—a dozen roses with an unsigned card arrive at her door—and Gina is so confident of her future as Mrs. Garrick Peters that she snubs an unprecedented date with Simon. But at his discharge, Garrick is heard telling a woman who turns out to be his fiancée, the duplicitous cad, that he’ll be glad to leave his beautiful blonde nurse behind, saying “The poor kid is making a bit of a nuisance of herself.” Then it’s all over the hospital, her “humiliation, searing, soul-destroying,” that “she had loved him,” she of the frigid, money-grubbing heart.

But on the upside, now she’s free to take up an offer by Simon, who despite her disinterest in him, still wants her to be the chief nurse of the new Casualty Department he’s creating at Barneford Hospital. And she’s still free to continue her paradoxical crush on Simon: “If only the doctor would admit that she had some other use than as a competent ‘mate’ on the job!” she sighs. She seems to vacillate wildly in her points of view, one day wishing madly that Simon would notice her, then insisting tearfully that as God as her witness, she’ll never be hungry again! Mostly, to the reader’s growing boredom, the latter. There are, of course, the usual vague hints that Simon does have feelings for Gina, to which she, as a dense VNRN heroine, is completely oblivious.

Then, while out on an almost-date with Simon—coffee after an ambulance run—they bump into Garrick, who tells Gina that he loved her all along. Yippee! Except that Simon then tells her that he loves her too, and wants her to stay with him. “She must be strong now. […] No foolish heart must be allowed to persuade her to throw aside all her resolutions.” Simon, citing the growing success of Casualty, hires a young nurse he knew years ago, in a past that he never discusses (though she bites Gina’s head off when she says that with hands like his, he surely must have done some surgery at some point). Betty Newent is the most scatterbrained nurse ever, always dropping trays of pills and going to pieces when an accident victim is brought in—not the most logical choice for an ED nurse, but she and Simon are determined to whip her into a successful nurse, with Gina assisting at the lash. Gina, of course, instantly jumps to the conclusion that this is because Simon and Betty are planning to marry, though Betty seems mostly afraid of Simon and he seems mostly worried about her. With this leap of poor logic, Gina realizes that she herself is in love with Simon, and never did love Garrick. But she still can’t go quietly into that good heartbreak: “Simon represented everything against which she had turned herself, years before. He was everything that her husband must never be—a poor man, offering insecurity and constant striving.” It’s maddening, I tell you!

She’s going to soothe her aching heart with a heavy work schedule. “It’s the only way to forget things that have to be forgotten,” a maxim that she shares with both Simon and Betty, though it’s not clear to Gina why, if Simon and Betty are soon to be united in wedded bliss, they should both be so darned mopey. Then Garrick proposes and Gina accepts, even though they have a frank chat about the fact that she doesn’t love him. Simon makes a proposal of his own, that Gina come with him when he leaves Barneford Hospital to start a clinic back where he comes from. She responds by freaking out, yet again: “I’ve been afraid of poverty because of what it can do to people—and if I can’t have my family with me now, do you think I’d consider, for one moment, a job where I still could not have them with me? I want a real life, with security, and freedom, and fun—” So, curiously, when Garrick insists that Gina quit her job after they are married so she can better attend his frivolous and boring cocktail parties where, “hour after hour, the talk was only of frothy trivialities,” she tells Garrick that she will not give up her work.

That fight is tabled for the time being, as they are en route to see Gina’s younger brother and sister and gladden their hearts with promises of college and riding lessons. But lo, Alan doesn’t want to go to college and has arranged a position for himself at the local garage, and little Jennifer is working at the horse barns in exchange for riding lessons, so they’re all set, thank you very much. Then, as the final straw, Aunt Katie, who has raised the little Delhams, tells Gina that her parents really did love each other madly, and those fights that Gina overheard were just words of the moment: “They fought like cat and dog at times, but it was all good fun,” Katie tells her—ha, ha. It turns out that Katie, who had been in love with Gina’s father, had fostered the idea in Gina’s mind that her parents didn’t love their children or each other as a sort of nasty revenge. Katie has to tell Gina the truth now because Gina is marrying a man she doesn’t love, and Katie wants Gina to have the kind of love her parents had for each other. Curiously, Gina responds to this shocking revelation by flinging herself into Aunt Katie’s arms and having a good cry. I myself would have, at the very least, slapped Katie silly, but I’m funny about that sort of treachery.

So Gina decides she can’t marry Garrick after all. “He offered her fun as another man might offer her eternal devotion, and fun wasn’t enough for her. She wanted so much more from life; she would welcome hard work, idealism, sacrifice—anything which life with a man such as Simon might demand, which life with Simon must demand.” She is so dazed by this realization that she wanders as if senseless through town—which she tends to do after a crisis, such as when she overheard Garrick talking to his then-fiancée—and is run over by a bicyclist. Like any good nurse, she shrugs off the headache that becomes increasingly ferocious over the next few days. When she’s finally felled by the pain and the story of the accident comes out, she’s sent for tests and discovered to have a large clot on her brain, and only the most promising brain surgeon can help her—three guesses as to who this turns out to be!

As she’s lying in the hospital, she learns the truth of Simon’s past: He and Betty were engaged once, but she dumped him for his best friend, and then on their honeymoon the pair were in a car accident, and the groom injured and brought to Simon. But the young man died despite Simon’s best efforts, and Simon was obliged to flee the gossip that followed him, suggesting that he had deliberately allowed the man to die. Now he’s just trying to help Betty get back on her feet and get over her dead husband; the two feel only friendship for each other. Gina, seeing her clot as a golden opportunity for the man she loves, refuses to have anyone else do the surgery. Does she die on the table? Does Simon feel he can resume his brilliant career as a brain surgeon? Does Gina agree to marry Simon in the end? What do you think?

This book is a bit of a mess, with a lot of dead ends. The identity of the man who sent the roses—you can’t help but suspect that it was Simon, not Garrick as Gina assumed—is never revealed. Simon notes in passing that he has two adopted children who are “parked”—his word—with his sister, and whom he has never mentioned or visited in the months that make up the story. He says he loves these children, and loved their parents, who are now deceased, but this is all we ever find out about them. Several times Gina is accused as being overly demanding, and we are treated to a flashback in which her mother tells her, “You are so greedy, my dear—you make more demands on those you love than they can ever hope to meet.” Later on, a minor nurse character also tells Gina, “You demand so much of people that you scare them away from you.” But we have no evidence of this at all; rather, the opposite is true: Gina has a tendency to be so closed up that she suffers from not knowing what she herself wants, let alone making demands of others. So what’s that supposed to be about?

The endless waffling on Gina’s part about whether she should feel hurt that Simon doesn’t love her or pursue Garrick for his money becomes more than a little frustrating. Also, pretty much everyone in the book—Simon, Betty, Gina, Garrick, and even minor characters like the Matron and the hospital librarian—have secret pasts or past secrets that they allude to constantly, and usually tearfully, while refusing to discuss them outright. “Do we have to talk in riddles all the time?” Garrick asks Gina at one point (after she’s learned the truth about her parents’ relationship but is clearly not going to share this with her betrothed, just mawkishly presses their love letters to her cheek). It’s a really excellent question. This book would have been a whole lot shorter than 191 pages if anyone could have just had an honest conversation. And I might have liked it a bit better, and had more respect for Gina. As it happens, the only enjoyable character in the book is Garrick, who regularly drops foppish remarks like, “I’m Garrick Peters, remember? Your very dearest, most precious patient—who fell in love with you when in a state of deep unconsciousness on a marble slab.” But unfortunately, he doesn’t pop up enough to make the book worth the time, and none of the remaining characters are so attractive or interesting that you should spend an afternoon reading about them.