Collecting Book

Two Loves Has Nurse Powell

Cover illustration by Robert Bonfils

You know Nurse Powell, or perhaps you’ve just seen her walking down a hospital corridor. For a nurse, she’s a bit too distracting in face and figure, but she’s tops in her profession, capable, calm, trained right down to her fingertips. You might suspect that there was a romance between her and that brilliant young doctor, and you’d be right. But did you know that simply because of one patient, her off-duty hours became a whirlpool of politics and pleasure, she forgot her professional coolness, and lost her heart completely to a completely different type of man?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“It’s a grand old name, Mary. You don’t hear it much anymore. What is it we get these days? Kims! And Tuesdays! Oh, I keep up with the fashions. A man in politics has to. He never knows when he’s goin’ to ask a wee little babe’s name of its mother and she’s goin’ to answer back, ‘Tuesday’ or ‘Kim’—and a man has to be on his toes in a situation like that. If he followed his natural inclination and asked leave to go off and throw up his supper like he felt, he’d be sure to lose the vote.”

“I always like to see young people fight. It shows they’re not each other’s rubber stamps. It shows individuality. A good fight is a good beginning. It’s a mistake to save the fighting for marriage.”

“I see you don’t have your needle with you. May I consider that a sign of peaceful intentions?”

“You don’t have to be smart. You’re a redhead.”

REVIEW:

When a books starts off with writing that crackles, I relax a bit and smile with anticipation for what delights the rest of the book will bring. So it was with this book: Nurse Ellen Powell wakes with a premonition that the day is going to go badly, and it puts her in a funk. She’s worried that the impending doom revolves around her fiance, Dr. Dan O’Meara, who—though he has told her that he loves her—has not actually proposed. Soon she’s weeping, convinced that their relationship is over. But when she ventures into the kitchen, she finds that the coffee maker is on the fritz. Now she’s convined that this is the Bad Thing, and the wrinkles staining her brow are instantly smoothed. On to work.
There she finds that Packey Mackey, a most colorful 86-year-old politician, has been admitted for heart problems. Word on the street is that he’s actually just trying to duck testifying before a grand jury on a corruption charge, for stealing from the Welfare Fund and lining his own pockets. In the hospital, Packey’s health and treatment is being very carefully managed by none other than Dr. O’Meara. Dan is convinced that Packey is actually sick, and is running him through a complete workup, despite pressure to discharge Packey so he can face the music before the election and presumably be brought down instead of habitually returned to office by his loyal constituents. Got all that?

When she’s not caring for Packey, Ellen just can’t seem to stop herself from quarreling with Dan, though she never comes out and tells him what is really upsetting her. He assures her that he loves her, but that’s not enough for her—but she refuses to discuss it. Instead they head off to meet Neal Conlon, who is running against Packey in the upcoming election and also happens to be an old boyhood acquaintance of Dan’s—you couldn’t really call them friends. After this meeting, in one of their fights, Ellen declares she is going to work on Neal’s campaign every night, and how does Dan like that? “You’re a big girl now—you can think for yourself,” he says, admirably, despite all evidence to the contrary. So off she goes to Neal’s office, where she is immersed in his idealism and excitement. There she watches him threaten people with what will happen if they vote for Packey. And submits when he pressures her for information about Packey’s medical condition. “When we do wrong we’re doing it so that weventually we can do right,” he explains, pulling her close and holding her hand. Oh, OK, Neal! So when he starts kissing her, she’s swept off her feet, suddenly believing that she’s in love with Neal as well as Dan. And when Neal presses her to pump Dan for information too, she wonders about his seeming so shallow and opportunistic, that “there was little Neal would no do to get what he wanted”—yet keeps on spending all her free time with Neal and fighting with Dan about what she sees as his favoritism for Packey at the expense of truth, justice, and fair elections.
If Dan won’t propose, Neal certainly will, and wants to do it on election night: “It’s got schmalz. The little old ladies will love that.” Ellen has shown little ability to see Neal’s cold-heartedness up to this point, and once he starts kissing her, she is unable to do so now. But later, when Neal snaps at Ellen because she refuses to try to convince the chief of surgery that Dan is drawing out Packey’s stay in order to protect him from the grand jury, she tries to break up with him. He talks her out of it, though: “Let me take care of you. If you have doubts about me, about us—just squash them,” he tells her. Though she waffles some more, she does end the interview by telling him she wants to take time away from him. He’s fine with that—“and if anything new happens at the hospital, call me,” he tells her. Still she’s working every night at Neal’s campaign headquarters. But after he tells her to keep her eye on one of the surgeons who will be assisting at Packey’s operation, she suddenly sees through him: “his drives—his hate for his enemies and his professed love for her—had stemmed from nothing more than his own frantic need for self-gratification.” It’s a curious conclusion to make, based on the conversation that preceded it, and ridiculously overdue, given all the other conversations that had preceded it.

Assisting at the surgery, it’s an open-and-close affair—which means only one thing, that Packey has inoperable cancer. And when it’s over, she doesn’t rush off to telephone Neal. In fact, home in her own apartment, she doesn’t even answer the phone when it rings all night. A few days later, though, when Neal calls her to come down to headquarters and celebrate, she pulls on an off-the-shoulder cocktail dress and heads downtown, long enough to break up with Neal for good. Then she just has to make up with Dan and we can close the book.

I loved the writing in this book, and the political machinations—even more complicated than I have given you here—are not easy wrong-or-right situations, but shades of gray that give you something to think about. I would have easily given this book an A grade—except I just can’t forgive how the author has treated Nurse Ellen, who is easily one of the most gullible, spineless, simple-minded heroines I have ever met. Her character was uncalled for, and it significantly depreciated this story for me. It’s still worth reading, but you’ll want to do it with a roll of Tums by your side, a remedy for the queasy feeling brought on by the fickle, pathetic Ellen Powell, RN, who doesn't deserve to have one man love her, let alone two.

Nurse in Love

By Isabel Stewart Way, ©1963
Cover illustration by Charles Fracé

To Julie Stone nursing was more than a profession. It was a way of life, and she approached it with competence, determination, and dedication. But to handsome Merc Albeny, the intern whom she intended to marry, medicine was only a hobby. His real profession was women. Then, into the tangle of two young lives, came Dr. Dave Banner. Dr. Dave was old enough to advise Julie on affairs of the heart, both medical and romantic—but young enough to care. Nurse in Love is a deeply moving story of medicine and those who practice it. Under each white robe beats a heart you will want to know and understand.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:

“He wore a beard and his greasy dark hair was ducktail-cut; even his skin had a dingy look. A beatnik—when beatniks were no longer in style!”

“Any girl likes to have a handsome boy friend drop in at such times; it gives her prestige by certifying that she is attractive!”

“A doctor can always make a good impression by coming late, after he’s been delayed by a big emergency!”

REVIEW:

Julie Stone is working at Sea Memorial Hospital in California when she is abruptly told by the nursing supervisor that she is going to take a new job, with local neurosurgeon Dr. David Banner, and will be moving out of the nurse’s dormitory and into an apartment with Dr. Dave’s two other nurses over the upcoming weekend. Uh, OK. Julie “felt a wave of rebellion, and opened her mouth to tell how she felt about the high-handed way the affair had been arranged. But habit stopped her—the habit of taking orders from the Superintendent of Nurses. So she swallowed her resentment and did as she was bidden.” These VNRN heroines really need some gumption.

As further proof of that, Julie is engaged to Dr. Merc Albeny, a brash, charming, attractive intern who won’t marry her until he is established. “She loved Merc—how could she help it?—yet something seemed wrong. Instead of the rapture of being in love, Julie felt irritation and troubled questioning, and a queer vague unhappiness when she was away from Merc and his blond charm.” She’s apparently not accustomed to saying no to doctors, either, or she’d be out of this jam in a jiffy.

In Dr. Dave’s clinic, she meets beautiful, 17-year-old Carlinda Haynes, who has epilepsy and as a result has been all but written off by her wealthy parents, who are so “ashamed” to have an epileptic as a daughter that they reveal the secret they had not even told Carlinda, that she is adopted, lest anyone think she had inherited this shocking disease from either of them. Julie helps convince Carlinda to go through with the long series of tests with Dr. Dave, who she is convinced will be able to cure Julie. Merc, meanwhile, is using Julie to butter up to Dr. Dave, in the hope that the well-established and highly regarded attending will be able to throw the new resident some work with rich patients who might benefit his practice down the road. Julie is horrified by Merc’s grasping ways, but instead of dumping Merc, she just feels disloyal for her unflattering opinions of Merc, and never mind how accurate they may be. Then Merc decides that he can best take advantage of Julie’s growing bond with Dr. Dave by getting engaged—and now that they’re engaged, “It seems foolish to wait, if we still do have to wait,” he says urgently after kissing her “vehemently” on a moonlit beach. Uh, yes, you do, pal.

Back at work, Carlinda is found to have been suffering the effects of an undiscovered subdural hematoma, and one quick brain surgery later, she is back to normal! And so great is their relief at their recovered patient that Julie and Dr. Dave kiss in the clinic hallway! “And it was as if it were the first time she had ever been kissed,” of course! In an attempt to resolve the issues this little episode has raised between them, Dr. Dave decides to tell Julie that he is in love with her. “Can’t we let it go, now? Can’t you bury it, and go on just as we have been going on—working together?” Uh, sure, Doctor. Everything is soon put to rights, however, when in a shocking coincidence of crossed paths, Julie discovers Merc and Carlinda kissing in the gift shop, and Dr. Dave wanders in as well just a minute or two later, and chews out Merc, who is supposed to be on duty in the ED. Carlinda tries to take the blame, but Dr. Dave declares, “A doctor needs will power to refuse, and the ability to make his own decisions,” two qualities, it must be pointed out, that Julie utterly lacks as well. The only possible hope we are given for her is at the very end, when Merc proposes and she declines, and then tells Dave that she wants to marry him and “bear your children,” if you can keep your gorge down when you hear it.

This is a pleasant little nothing of a book, a faint, floral perfume that quickly wafts away. Julie is far too passive and vapid to be an enjoyable heroine, even when she’s pounding on Dr. Dave’s chest in the final pages and he calls her a “spitfire,” the liar. It’s not badly written, and the antiquated ideas—that epilepsy and out-of-style beatniks are mortifying, to name a couple—are amusing, and if you are interested in neurosurgery, you get to witness a couple of well-described surgeries, but that’s really all this book has to offer, apart from a great cover illustration.

Rangeland Nurse

Trudi Dalton left the bluegrass country of Kentucky on a very special journey. On a sprawling ranch set in the deep purple mountains of the West, a little boy named Ricky was confined to a wheelchair. And the young nurse had come to take care of him Trudi soon discovered that her real problem was not in nursing the boy, rather it was in dealing with his father, widower Matt Frazier. For the handsome rancher’s bitterness and indifference to his son provoked Trudi’s fiery temper. Yet, unwillingly, she found herself falling in love with Matt Frazier. Faced with a terrible crisis that would affect all their lives, Trudi would be forced into a desperate gamble—if she succeeded, they could become a united family—and if she failed she would lose both Ricky and Matt forever…

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“Men like girls with tempers, you know.”

“I learned long ago that you can’t sop a woman from doing what she wants to do. Oh—you can tie her up and maybe horse whip her, but if she doesn’t want to stay around, she isn’t going to.”

“I—I’m through making promises about what my talented, noble, sensitive doctor’s hands can do in surgery.”

REVIEW:

Rancher and widower Matt Frazier is not a nice man. He’s rude, bitter, distant, angry, “cold and mixed-up and yes even cruel.” He insists that his ten-year-old son, Ricky, confined to a wheelchair with myasthenia gravis, will be completely cured, though the chances of this are slim—and talks to Ricky “as if nothing else in this world was important, except that he be able to walk again. As if there would be no kind of life for him if he wasn’t made well.”

Naturally, Nurse Trudi Dalton, trucked out to the West to care for Ricky, instantly falls in love with this monster. Even at their first meeting, when he grabs her by the shoulders and shouts at her, “You’ll damned well do what I tell you to!” all she can think of is how “strangely exciting” are his fingers digging into her shoulders, of Matt’s “amazing power and charm.” Charm? Though she thinks that “falling in love with Matt Frazier would be a deadly, heartbreaking business. Might as well fall in love with a cobra,” it’s a short seven more pages before the dope is doing just that. Now, when Matt “barked orders at her, she merely nodded and obeyed.” Several times when he has actually fired her, she goes crawling to him, begging for her job back. It’s positively revolting.

Matt has hired San Francisco surgeon David Fielding to come to the ranch for two weeks to prepare Ricky for removal of his thymus gland, which might improve Ricky’s myasthenia gravis. While he’s in the neighborhood, David takes out Trudi and falls for her, and Trudi finds that “there was a wonderful kind of closeness between them. David was—security.” The surgery, when it finally comes to pass, is complicated by an unspecified problem with Ricky’s breathing that necessitates a tracheotomy, and somehow this means that the thymectomy is a failure, and that Ricky will not improve after the surgery. It also means that Trudi can’t marry David, because now Matt and Ricky will need her back at the ranch. Ricky certainly will, because now his father refuses to see him or speak to him. “My boy might as well be dead as live the kind of life he’s going to be living from now on,” he tells Trudi. “A lifelong cripple leading a dull, useless, futile life!” Thanks, Dad.

So when Matt leaves for a three-week business trip—without saying goodbye to his son, of course—Trudi cooks up a wild plan, to teach Ricky to ride the most dangerous, wild stallion on the ranch, the one who’s constantly kicking down the walls to his stall. It’s “a way to change a lot of things and make them better,” she tells Ricky. I’m not sure I follow the logic, but there it is. And I’m not going to be as patronizing as author Suzanne Roberts is and tell you how this all pans out, because you already know. The ending is as nauseating as such an insipid story deserves, is all I’ll say, and hope that you are persuaded to avoid this brainless novel altogether.

New England Nurse

Nurse Judy Andrews found life rewarding in her lovely, quiet, snowbound Vermont village. Engaged to Neal Bentley, whom she had known all her life, she was happily planning to be married in the spring. Overnight, her comfortable world changed. Curt Wiley, a handsome Texas engineer, came to town to build a ski resort on the mountain that Judy loved. By the first snowfall, the sleepy little town would be seething with activity. Judy hated Curt the moment she met him, hated this Texan who was charming all the women in town and was now turning that charm on her! Then, unaccustomed to the New England climate, Curt came down with pneumonia. As she nursed him back to health, Judy discovered that Curt was not the playboy he appeared to be, not just a fast-talking promoter, but a decent, sensitive human being who had a difficult job to do, and who seemed to be falling in love with her. Suddenly Neal Bentley seemed dull and uninteresting to Judy. By spring she had to make a decision. She had to choose between the rootlessness of a life as a construction man’s wife, or the steady, homespun love of her childhood sweetheart … a decision that was as much of a surprise to Judy as it will be to you.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:

“Judy was the kind of nurse one usually encountered only on the covers of a magazine. The majority of nurses turned out to be middle-aged specimens, often with a superior demeanor.”

“Meeting you, Miss Andrews—and knowing I’ll be seeing you again soon—has practically cured me!”

“Marriage is a woman’s goal—she wants to be a wife and mother. Yet she knows that, once she has taken this step, nothing will ever be the same again. With a man, it’s different. I guess that’s how it should be. It’s a woman who bears the children, my dear. And that’s what I meant when I said that marriage—children—makes a woman settle down, put others before herself, give up her own identity—to a certain degree, anyway.”

“Once they were married, all these anxieties would melt away as though they had never existed. There would never be any regrets.”

“A woman can handle a situation better if she knows she looks her best.”

REVIEW:

Vermont nurse Judy Andrews has a problem common to VNRN heroines at book’s open: Her boyfriend is a dud. “Neal was so good looking that the sight of him ought to quicken any girl’s heart,” we learn in the second chapter. “Only of course she was so used to looking at him, that her blood pressure remained normal.” She’s not wild about kissing him, either; “Judy had taken Neal’s good-night kisses so much for granted that she had never thought much about them afterwards.” So needless to say, we are not optimistic about their future. When wealthy Neal Bentley proposes, she gives him a resounding, “I—I suppose so—”

Judy is partly disappointed because “romance seldom came as one dreamed of it. For Judy, like every other young girl, dreamed of an unknown prince who would one day sweep her off her feet and carry her away, if not on a white charger, at least to places she had never seen before.” But hold on to your hat, chicken, because look who’s coming down the road: Curt Wiley, in a “two-toned hard-topped job” with white-walled tires. He’s in town to build a ski resort on the town’s mountain, though Judy feels this will ruin both the town and the mountain she loves so much. But her initial bias against Curt soon turns, as Curt also seems to share her sentimental feelings toward the environment, telling her that “it seems a shame to spoil all this.” Now Curt is looking more attractive: “Curt seemed to have the same feeling about the mountain as she did. Neal would not understand it—for now that she faced it, all Neal thought of now was how he could personally profit by the changes that had come to their community.” When Curt tells her he is never going to be rich, she thinks “money was far too important to some people—for instance, to Neal.” And when Curt is invited for Christmas at her house, “Curt fitted in exceptionally well. Better, Judy found herself thinking, than Neal would have.”

And so it is not surprising that, when Curt kisses Judy under the mistletoe, it’s a kiss that Judy isn’t likely to forget, like one of Neal’s: “It left Judy weak and limp as a rag doll. It had been the kind of kiss she had dreamed about in those dreams concerning a prince who would come from out of nowhere to carry her away. She felt like the princess who had been awakened after a long sleep.” Though Curt has heretofore been set up as something of a flirt, he seems to be developing a certain fondness for Judy. At one point, when they are out on the mountain together, he says, “I want you to know that—I’m crazy about you.” In response, she kisses him. “It was not like the kiss beneath the mistletoe. But her whole heart was in it.”

Suddenly, though, the town Curt once found so charming is “this godforsaken place,” and he can’t wait to get out. He’s talking about going to South America to build bridges, and he tells her that he cares for her but can only offer her a vagabond life without much money. In the end, though, he asks her to consider going with him when he leaves Vermont in a few weeks. She thinks about what a dud Neal is, and all but tells Curt she doesn’t love Neal. In the pages in which she ponders her decision, the biggest sticking point seems to be that “there would be talk, lots of talk. The blame would all fall on Judy Andrews, a farmer’s daughter who had run away with a stranger.”

A few days later, Neal picks up Judy at work, and she is just on the brink of telling Neal that she won’t marry him after all, “that it was Curt she loved. That when he asked her, as she knew he would, she would have to go away with him.” At this point, Curt’s character undergoes a startling about-face. Up until now, we’ve believed that “Curt is a gentleman,” as Judy’s mother, who has struck up a good friendship with the young man, says. But now, ten pages from the end, Neal tells Judy that Curt run off with Cynthia. And now, as they pull up in front of Judy’s house, she’s changed her mind: “How could she ever have thought she could leave all this?” Neal, too, has become someone else; “there were depths within him that she had not recognized before. And they belonged together—they had been born and reared in the mountains, among folks of their own kind. How could she ever have thought she wanted anyone except Neal?” And even better, suddenly his kisses are “somewhat exciting!” How convenient.

The book has some curious attitudes about marriage, mainly that once married, a woman must no longer have any opinions or ideas that her husband didn’t come up with first. Shortly after Neal proposes, he tells her that they have to cut short their drive so he can have a chat with her father. “ ‘Whatever you say,’ Judy agreed. She wondered if this was how it would be for the rest of her life—whatever Neal decided would be all right with her. Or at least she would pretend that it was.” Later, when she contemplates the upcoming Christmas holiday, she realizes that this will be her last Christmas with her own family; “as Neal’s wife, it would be her duty to spend the Christmas holidays with his people, not hers. To Judy, not to be with her own family at Christmastime would be heartbreaking. Yet she supposed it was a sacrifice she must learn to be willing, even glad, to make.” She also thinks, “Marriage would mean the end of one’s personal freedom. Until then, you were not obligated to try to be what the other person wanted, or thought, you to be.” It sounds pretty grim to me. And not much like the heroine we come to know, “a young woman with a mind of her own.”

In the end, though Judy has maintained that she is in love with Curt, all that is brushed off for what is now painted as a deeper and enduring love for Neal. All we have heard throughout the book is what a self-centered, shallow bore he is, but abruptly we find that he is exactly what Judy wanted all along. If he doesn’t make her heart pound, we’re supposed to take a page from Judy’s mother, who at one point tells Judy that she’d considered running away the morning of her own wedding, but is now very content with her life. And so Judy too is suddenly happy to abandon her career (it is taken for granted that she will stop working after she is married), her opinions and identity, passion, and even true love—if we can believe what we have been told about her feelings for Curt—for an ordinary life with a man she seems to look on as a not very interesting companion. I was annoyed at Judy’s change of heart, and I was annoyed that with Curt’s conversion at the last minute into a felonious Lothario (it’s a crime to transport a minor across state lines), she never even made a choice of her own; removing Curt from the picture took even that away from her. Though we are left with the impression that Judy is going to live happily ever after with her true prince, Neal, it sounds more like a prison sentence to me.

Harmony Hospital

By Jeanne Bowman

Life or death cases were nothing to Linda Lovell … but the mysteries she encountered during her nights in the mansion of Harmony’s benefactress Marion Mangrove threatened to destroy her. Why was intern Dan Mavery afraid to enter the mansion? Why was Marion always spying on Linda? Why was Bob Ingersoll, the man who once jilted Linda, now trying to win her back? And why, if Dr. Ed Eaton loved Linda, did he warn her to beware of Marion’s actions—and leave her there!

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“Yesterday, walking on the avenue, a small boy took one look at me and hid under his mother’s skirt. Quite a feat these days. What?”

“I know what I’d like to give you, but as this is a hospital and Emergency’s right over there, you’d recover too quickly.”

REVIEW:

When I was in college, a friend who was fighting a frustrating and lopsided battle with acne declared that he was going to just give up and rub Crisco on his face. After a long string of C- nurse novels, I was feeling the same defeated despair, and so chose a book by Jeanne Bowman for my next review. If I’m going to read a lousy book, at least I have no disappointed hopes with Ms. Bowman.

Well, that’s not entirely true, because the book’s cover is an outright lie: Our heroine, Linda Lovell, is not a nurse’s aide, but what appears to be a secretary (among other clerical tasks, she types up patient menus) for Harmony Hospital, so this is not even a nurse novel. (Neither, as you might suspect from the back cover blurb, is Dan Mavery an intern, or is Bob Ingersoll trying to win her back, or does Marion ever spy on Linda, and during her nights in the mansion, Linda is only sleeping, not encountering any mysteries. But let’s not split hairs.) Linda had wanted to be a nurse, but “when there is limited income, a family concentrates on the one with brains. I have none. It’s been said I was born with an IBM where gray matter should be,” she says, and though this makes no sense to me, it means that the family has chosen to put her older brother through medical school instead of her through nursing school.

On her first day at work, she is essentially picked up by Marion Mangrove, who lives in the mansion next door with her mother, who is never given a first name and is only known as Mrs. Mangrove, even after she marries Mr. Dealy at the end of the book. Marion drives Linda back to Linda’s family’s house in the country, packs Linda’s bags, and then, back at the mansion, unpacks for her as well. Immediately she’s calling upon Linda to help her chauffeur and watch and cut up meat for Mrs. Mangrove, who lives in a wheelchair, though she can walk and do needlepoint perfectly well. Linda is not happy about this domineering landlady but fears that she will lose her job if she moves out of the Mangrove house, as Marion has some unspecified influence at the hospital.

Really, that’s about all there is to the book. The story is about Linda’s attempts to throw off Marion’s chains, free Mrs. Mangrove from the wheelchair, and heal Marion’s controlling personality disorder. And win the affections of Dr. Ed Eaton. Woven through dates, taken by sneaking out the back door when Marion isn’t looking, and typing at the hospital, and Marion’s eventual nervous collapse and hospitalization, are the classic Bowman pop psychology moments. “It is not Marian herself one fights, but your own recoil from the fear thoughts she throws out. And they react upon us physically. We’re so determined she shall not be right, we tense the very areas she indicates and bring about our downfall,” explains Mrs. Mangrove. This is why Marion’s early beau drove off a cliff; she had insisted that he was too upset after a quarrel to drive. You see the power this woman has!

In Harmony Hospital, Jeanne Bowman overindulges in her penchant for alliterative names: Of course, there’s Linda Lovell, and her siblings Leon and Lucille Lovell; Marion Mangrove and her father Max and brother, the curiously named Manuel Mangrove; Edward Eaton, Emily Enders, Carrie Carlton, and Dick Dealy. Her writing continues to prove clunky and obtuse; characters regularly drop analytical and clumsy remarks such as, “Have you time to sit down and elucidate?” “Linda asked aloud if whales traveled in families or checked water displacement intuitively to determine how many moved within a short distance.” “I might say prothrombin is indicated instead of the three of spades.” “Don’t blame the building [for the tragedies that have taken place there]. It’s the people who inhabit it, their chemical reactions to other people that precipitate events.” Standing on its own, one unwieldy sentence seems harmless enough, but when you keep slamming into these verbal brick walls on about every other page, it’s way too much.

Then we get a too-swift conclusion when Mrs. Mangrove, Marion Mangrove, and even lovely Linda Lovell are healed by the power of marriage at the end of the book—though it must be confessed that all we know about Marion’s rehabilitation is that one of Linda’s beaux tells her, after yet another psychoanalytical treatment of Marion’s character, that he’s planning to marry the little tyrant and move to the city (why in God’s name he would subject himself to such a cruel fate is never explained), so we can only assume that Ms. Bowman intends for Marion to accept and, once she’s attained that gold ring, settle down. I, for one, am not optimistic, since the commandeering Marion has shown absolutely no traces of flexibility or human consideration at any point in the book.

It must be admitted that despite its faults, this is actually one of Ms. Bowman’s more innocuous titles. That said, it’s still not worth picking up. So my self-imposed exercise in defeatism now complete, I’m not sure that I feel any better, except now I know that I have one less book by Jeanne Bowman left to read. Which I guess does count for something, no matter how small.

Nurse in Danger

Willo Davis Roberts, ©1972

The voice coming over the phone was like a deadly purr. “Keep your mouth shut, nursie. Because, if you don’t—you’re dead.” Nurse Denise Morgan hung up the receiver in an agony of trembling. She hadn’t really seen the man who had tried to kill her patient—only his silhouette, as she reeled backward from the blow he’d given her. It was a vicious, hate-filled plot, and Nurse Denise found herself in the middle of it. Only the strength of Dr. Pat Riordan kept her on an even keel … as they waited one dark night to spring the trap.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“There was an outbreak of whistling when Peggy introduced her. Denise had had this happen before; it didn’t shake her composure.”

“Any man who enjoyed looking at a pretty girl shouldn’t want to die.”

“Only a minute or two, that’s all it takes to terrorize a girl.”

REVIEW:

Before I even get started on what’s inside this book, I simply must comment on what’s on the outside. This is absolutely one of the worst cover illustrations ever! The black mass on her head that purports to be hair resembles more a dead animal. And is anyone going to be strolling casually down the lane with a half-smirk on his face while a house burns behind him? I am doubly disheartened that this is an Ace title, when that publisher in the 1960s consistently turned out amazing book covers. (See my other blog, Vintage Romance Covers, for proof of this statement.) And now that I’ve got that out of my system, we can move on.

The most interesting aspect about Nurse Denise Morgan is the fact that, when she was away at nursing school, a young man they had taken in six years previously inexplicably shot her parents and four siblings at the dinner table, and was subsequently hanged. Her name is really Denise Davonne, but she changed it after the massacre so that no one would tie her to it. And she lives alone, not in the nurse’s dorm, so she doesn’t have to answer questions from her fellow nurses about her painful past.

She’s working on men’s surgical, lusting after Dr. Patrick Riordan, when Ed Hale is brought in. He’s been run over in the street, an attempted murder, because he is planning to testify in a corruption case against Vince Gurley, the big union boss. Ed is mostly worried about his wife Laura and son, who he fears will be attacked by Vince’s goons while he’s abed. So Denise volunteers to spirit the pair out of town to her family’s farmhouse one night. When Laura and Eddie Junior come to visit Ed in the hospital, Denise disguises Laura as a nurse, pops the boy onto a gurney, and out the back door they go. The plan is a complete success, and no one—not even the police who were supposed to be guarding Laura and Eddie—knows where they are.

Everything is great—Dr. Riordan is even starting to notice her—but then, “there was no way for her to know that within twenty-four hours she would have plunged into a nightmare so terrifying that a peaceful night’s sleep would seem an unattainable goal.” Good thing the author warned us about this, or we might not understand how scary the situation is supposed to be; you’d certainly never guess it from reading about it. One evening shift, Denise enters Big Ed’s room to find the policeman guarding him on the floor, and a thug with a gun standing over Ed. The thug pops Denise across the face, fires blindly at Ed in bed, hitting him in the jaw but not killing him, and vanishes.

When everyone rushes in and turns on the lights, Denise sees all the blood and has a PTSD moment: “The present and the past existed simultaneously in a series of pictures in Denise’s mind, clicking off and on. The kitchen at home, on the farm, spattered with blood. The hospital bed, empty now, stained dark red.” It is rather curious that she had requested a transfer to a surgical floor, where a nurse is necessarily exposed to more blood and guts. But she pulls herself together when Dr. Riordan tells her, “Snap out of it!” She describes her attacker to the cops and they’re out looking for him, but now he’s calling her house. “Keep your mouth shut,” he tells her. “Because if you don’t, nursie, you’re a dead tomato.” A dead tomato? Denise responds to this threat not by laughing her head off but by fainting dead away on the kitchen floor.

She tells Dr. Riordan and the cops about this, too, and then there’s this nosy reporter, Larry Groves, coming around who wants to write a story about Denise and put it on the front page, his dazzling ambition totally blinding him to the fact that doing so places Denise and the Hale family in further danger. When Larry barges into her apartment to demand an interview, Denise is horrified: “He couldn’t write a story about her, he couldn’t!” But instead of saying no, she says she has to ask the hospital supervisor, the shrinking violet. The next day, as Larry pesters her again in the hospital foyer, she lets it slip that the woman wearing the mink coat is the wife of another patient who has tried to kill himself—and this sideline is rather jarring when so much of the book is focused on the Ed Hale—so now Larry wants to write a big story about the patient, who is a well-known businessman in town. The wife is naturally upset at this threat to her privacy, but Denise reassures the woman, “I assure you none of the staff would tell the newspapers anything.” This from the one who tipped Larry Groves off to begin with.

Larry’s no dope, and soon puts it together that Denise is actually the lone survivor of the Davonne massacre, and further realizes that Denise has hidden the Hale family at her old house. So he decides to drive up there himself and interview Mrs. Hale—and the only thing Denise can do to stop him is to drive up there first, since there is no phone at the house, and she asks Pat Riordan to drive her. When they reach the farmhouse, they extinguish all evidence of the family’s week-long stay there in five minutes, and then all four of them hike the half-mile to the old tree house and climb up into it. They can see the lights of Larry’s car, but they’re still waving their flashlight around like idiots—and then to cap it off, Pat decides he’s going to sneak back to the house, Denise in tow, to be sure that Larry leaves after he’s broken into the house and found no one there. But hot on Larry’s trail is Tony Gurley, Vince’s younger brother and the thug who tried to kill Ed in the hospital. Tony is about to murder Larry until Pat steps in with a rusty pitchfork, and a kerosene lamp is knocked to the floor, igniting the farmhouse, as presaged by the terrible cover illustration. Tony is tamed and tied up with his belt, but through it all, Denise is pretty useless. “She didn’t know how she managed to move at all. People died from fear … but she couldn’t die, or Patrick would die, too, and Larry.” Not that she does much at all when she does move, except start the car to distract Tony.

Back in town when everything is all wrapped up, Pat tells Denise, the presumptuous cad, that he’s arranged for the two of them to get a week off, which they will use for a honeymoon, because they’re going to get married that afternoon. Ever-passive Denise responds that she forgot to feed the cat! “She ran out of words. Patrick had said honeymoon…” Denise’s friend Peggy wants to hear all about what happened with Ed Hale’s attacker, but Denise says she’ll tell her all about it next week, because “tonight I’m going to be very busy,” wink, wink.

This book has several large and unpardonable flaws. Denise is so inert in every other aspect of her life that it’s very difficult to believe she would plan and enact the disappearance of two people she’s never met, and put them up in a house that holds horrific memories for her, that she hasn’t visited since the day she discovered her murdered family there. (Who cleaned up the mess is never revealed.) Even her intended doesn’t bother to ask her to marry him; he just tells her what’s what. Then the tragedy of her murdered family is a very large elephant throughout the book. It doesn’t have to have a tidy explanation—senseless crimes occur every day—but the book never spends any time at all addressing it, except to trot it out of the closet now and then to freak Denise out. (Her intended never even discusses it with her after he learns about it.) I don’t think this is something she could ever come to terms with, but she doesn’t have to; just thinking about how it shapes her life and the accommodations she has to make for it (like getting out of surgery?) make it something other than a grim sideshow that feels exploitative and disrespectful. The writing is not engaging or amusing, and I found Denise largely irritating. Since the only other book by this author (Once a Nurse … But Always a Woman) was pretty good, I’m especially disappointed to find that Nurse in Dangeris a big dud.

Country Nurse / Special Nurse

By Maud McCurdy Welch, ©1959

The grapevine in the hospital said all the nurses had a crush on young Dr. David Lorimer, but that he only returned the compliment for one, Cathy Linton. But did he? Though he had been her childhood playmate in Springvale, things were different now … and there was Patrice McDaniel, glamorous, a little wild, but sure of herself where David was concerned. And if David married her, one day he would inherit the directorship of the hospital from his father-in-law. What could Cathy offer him? It seemed out of the question. Yet that lovely summer day by the river when he had tried to kiss her … Meanwhile, work was exciting and far more important—there were other lives and hopes to think about. Roommate Jean Adair and her little Barby … Dear Aunt Dorie … Aunt Margaret, too, who wasn’t so dear … and who was the mysterious stranger who had been searching for Cathy?

This book was also published by Lancer Books
under the title "Special Nurse" in 1967.
The cover illustration is by Mort Engel.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:

“Almost any kind of marriage is better than none. I know, because I’m an old maid. You get married, honey, and have a home and babies, so that your heart won’t be empty like mine.”

REVIEW:

When Nurse Cathy Linton’s father, the local country GP, dies suddenly, he leaves her less than nothing—mean old Aunt Margaret, who has more money than God, turns up to console Cathy with papers showing that her father owed Margaret $10,000, which she expects Cathy to repay. Margaret also tells her that she’s to start a new job at Barrett Memorial Hospital in Memphis, 70 miles from her country home, at noon that day. So she packs—“We must hurry, Cathy,” says Margaret’s sister Dorie, “Margaret has a luncheon engagement”—and off she goes, the country mouse to the big city.

She’s given a bungalow on the hospital grounds, which she shares with Nurse Jean Adair, who is never home, mysteriously, and it’s two weeks before they actually cross paths. Cathy is lonely, of course, but the saving grace for her is that Dr. Daniel Lorimer, her childhood friend, is also working at Barrett. She hasn’t seen him in ten years; he left town when he was 17 and she was 13. She hears a lot of gossip about him from the other nurses, such as, “He keeps his heart in deep freeze. Just has no time for women.” Well, maybe one woman—he takes Cathy home to Springvale for a day and, after a swim in the river, tries to kiss her, but she slaps him hard! Because after all, he’s engaged to Patrice McDaniel, the daughter of the hospital chief! Which she knows for a fact because everyone at the hospital says so!

Meanwhile, Aunt Dorie, who never married, is growing weary of living on Aunt Margaret’s largess and under her thumb. What she wouldn’t give to have a job as a baby nurse! And as fate would have it, we have a baby who needs nursing—Jean’s baby Barby, almost three, is being cared for by Jean’s grandmother, but Gramma ain’t as spry as she used to be and keeps forgetting to feed the baby. And where’s the father? Well, it seems he lost his job and then disappeared, but Jean knows that Johnny really loves her and will come back some day, so can’t bring herself to file for divorce. So Dorie moves in with Gramma and Barby, and now Jean and her family are happy and well-fed.

It turns out the hospital gossip mill has something to say about Cathy, too, that she is engaged to Dr. Bob Kendall, whom she’s dated a couple of times but has no especial fondness for. Though she is shocked to hear such outrageous lies spread about her, when te same grapevine declares that the announcement of David’s engagement to Patrice is also imminent, she is totally crushed by the news. Then one night David catches Cathy out walking on the hospital grounds and tells her that a new hospital is opening in Springvale, and he’s been offered the job as head of it. He’s going to take it, of course, and he wants Cathy to marry him and come home and work there with him. But she can’t marry him, because she owes so much money to Aunt Margaret: “I can’t marry a man and let him shoulder such a debt,” she tells Jean—not David, of course, who is left completely in the dark as to why she’s turning him down. So when she hears the next day at the hospital that Patrice is marrying David, the stupid girl “believed Patrice was the girl David really loved.” Argh!

Not to worry, though; before too long, all the loose ends are swiftly tied up. Jean’s husband comes back; Mildred, Jean’s new roommate, finds out that the woman she saw her boyfriend with was his mother, who is in town to meet Mildred in anticipation of the couple’s engagement; a mysterious man who has been looking for Cathy since the beginning of the book (and doing a really poor job of it) turns up with a letter from Cathy’s dead father, which turns out to be a contract of sale of an invention he’d been working on that will earn her, his sole heir, $46,000.78. Now she can marry David—“then she told herself not to be absurd. Everyone said that Patrice was back in the picture now. Nearly all of the gossips were betting they’d get married.” It takes good old Jean to tell David the truth, and to get him to come back for one more try at setting stupid Cathy Linton straight. I wasn’t completely overjoyed when he succeeded.

During most of the last half of this book, I had the distinct impression that I’d read this book before. When I checked on the other book of Ms. Welch’s that I’d read, Nurses Marry Doctors, that déjà vu feeling became clear: It, too, has the same misunderstanding between the heroine and her intended, who thinks she’s going to marry the other doctor she’s been casually dating; the same young nurse caring for a baby without a father (in the other book, the baby was named Betsy, not Barby); the same nurses living in bungalows on the hospital grounds where they spend a lot of time strolling; even down to the same pleasant light sweetness that pervades the book. It’s not a bad read, but it’s not really satisfying—Aunt Margaret never gets a comeuppance, Cathy’s stupidity remains intact and unchastised at the end. The only faint hope for Cathy’s redemption lies in the fact that in the end, when he asks her if she loves him—“You couldn’t possibly have let such a ridiculous thing as a debt come between us, if you had”—she essentially proposes to him, saying, “I love you very much, David. I—want to marry you if you still want me.” But like I said, it’s only a faint hope, and I can’t imagine that anyone as susceptible to hospital gossip and as unable to communicate with her beloved as Nurse Cathy Linton is going to remain happy for long.