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.