Collecting Book

Mountain Nurse

By Peggy Gaddis, ©1959

"I’m not going to ask you to marry me," Ken said—and Julie felt the words like a blow. For one awful moment she was speechless. Then her angry, hurting words rushed out. "I don’t want you to ask me to marry you! I wouldn’t even if you did!" After all, why should she? Her fabulous job—the job that meant so much to her—was waiting. Who needed Ken? But her heart lurched, for not until this moment had she admitted even to herself that she was in love with him.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
"It’s colder than the heart of organized charity out there tonight."

"A woman doesn’t like to be told she’s remarkable. She’d much rather be told she’s beautiful, or alluring, or charming."

REVIEW:

This book may well be unique among VNRNs in that the heroine, Julie Winston, is an unmitigated snob, and remains so right through to the end—or at least we are not given any indication that her underlying character has changed. Out of the gate, she is ferociously condescending toward the patients and families that her sister, widow Linda Blake, cares for in this rural Georgia mountain setting (the quintessential Peggy Gaddis novel backdrop). She prefers her upscale Atlanta clinic, which caters to rich folk, and has swooped in to insist that her sister return to civilization with her. Linda, however, is a sweet, dedicated, selfless type who would never leave her patients, even if she is, according to Julie, "overworked, poorly paid, miserably uncomfortable, lacking in all the things any woman her age should have." Not Julie: She’s even horrified when one of her colleagues leaves her post as a "luxury nurse" to join the war effort, telling Linda, "The idiot has joined the Army Nurse Corps and asked for overseas duty. Can you imagine?" She might as well admit that she beats puppies for what this remark is supposed to do for our view of Julie.

Out on call with Linda in the rickety jeep, and none too impressed with the "squalid" domiciles they visit, Julie is nonetheless pressed into duty when one very ancient woman, Miss Dovie—who is rumored to be a witch and therefore avoided like Ebola—is found near death from a stroke and no one else is willing or able to serve as private nurse. To her credit, Julie volunteers for the duty—but is completely ungracious about it; she’s just called Linda a "blind idiot" for refusing to leave the mountains, when her next words are to ask for instructions for caring for Miss Dovie. "I’m willing but not eager," she says. The neighbors drop by with firewood and food, but absolutely will not "set foot in a witch’s house" who can’t die, "she’ll just get on her broomstick and fly off to join her master, the Devil Hisself!" according to the roughneck who drops off groceries that include a "mess of the fresh"—butchered hog, that is.

When a huge blizzard starts up the next night, it’s looking like Julie is going to be snowed in for some time, but then there’s a pounding on the door. It’s Kendall Stockwell, aka The Wayfaring Stranger, God help us, a well-known folk singer whom Julie apparently saw perform in Atlanta last summer. He’s in the neighborhood looking for folk songs "that haven’t been sung to death by the others," he says, though Julie thinks it’s odd that he would just drop his very successful career to go wander the mountains in the middle of winter. His jeep is stuck in the road, so he’s got nowhere else to go, and Julie invites him in. The pair hangs out and chats for several days, and on a hike to the top of the mountain, Julie gets an anti-proposal when Ken tells her she "needn’t be frightened" because "I’m not going to ask you to marry me." Phew! Oh, wait, no; "his words had been a blow that struck straight at her heart. Not until this moment had she admitted even to herself that she was in love with him; but his words had torn away the gossamer cloud that had concealed this fact from her consciousness." If her sudden ardor wasn’t enough to make you ill, the florid prose should surely put things over the top.

The reason he can’t marry her is idiotic, of course: His business partner and best friend swindled him out of the money that should have been his, so he walked out on all his engagements and took to the hills, and now he has legal liabilities and no money to support a wife. He couldn’t possibly take his friend to court, he insists, because it would "prove to the whole world what a first-class fool and chump I am." Apparently it’s not the fact that he actually is one that’s the issue; it’s only if everyone else knows it, too.

Back at the cabin, the snow finally melts enough for the doctor to arrive to check on Miss Dovie and take the pair back to civilization. It occurs to Julie that she might want to say goodbye to the patient she’s cared for day and night for a week, but the doctor says, "She’s in a coma, Julie—she wouldn’t know," so she doesn’t bother—that’s our shallow Julie!—and heads back to Linda’s house, where she has her first encounter with a mirror in a week, much to her horror: "Lindy, if he fell in love with me when I look like this—then it’s just got o be love, hasn’t it?"

Everyone’s problems are neatly tied up in the end, of course, though there does seem to be a little epidemic of comas going around, and even Linda lands a fiancé, despite her tearful devotion to her husband, dead these three long years. It’s not a bad book overall, but there are the bones of a better one poking through that make it disappointing. The ending overflows with the usual Gaddis treacle about how blissfully happy everyone is when they are engaged, even throwing in the ubiquitous "I want whatever Ken wants," and it wouldn’t be a Gaddis book without a reference to spanking—though in this case it’s Linda threatening to paddle her sister, so that at least was a little twist. As it is, the story comes off flat, without a lot of sparkle, and it’s just perplexing that this pair falls for each other at all, let alone in two days, because neither of them seems all that interesting—although Julie at least is a feisty lass. So while I’ve read worse Gaddis books, I’ve certainly read better, and with such a promising setup, it seemed especially unfortunate that she was not able to pull off a better story in Mountain Nurse.

Resort Nurse

By Diana Douglas

When lovely Elizabeth Spencer, R.N., made up her mind to escape the narrow confines of hospitals and see for herself what went on in the outside world, she never expected anything like her job at Key Sud—the luxury Florida hotel where female attributes seemed more important than nursing qualificiations. She also never expected to be working with a doctor as handsome as Kimball Brown—nor with a nurse’s aide who was a very rich, very pretty, seventeen-year-old hippie with much too grown-up ideas. But the biggest surprise of all was James Scott Haldane, the savagely good-looking author who threw Elizabeththe curve of her life … and forced her to wonder whether she was ever meant to be a nurse at all.

GRADE: D

BEST QUOTES:

“With her legs pressed together, she was feeling uncomfortable in the overly short uniform the management had insisted even the hotel nurse should wear.”

“You’re an intelligent girl, Elizabeth, and very, very attractive. I’ll be surprised if you remain a nurse for very long.”

“It was her eyes that fascinated him—those glorious, golden-brown, slightly slanted eyes. He had seen Eurasian girls with eyes shaped like that, but with most Eurasians there was an impenetrability behind them. These eyes were different—vital, utterly feminine, and full of changing expressions. And they were wholly American.”

“Women should only hide their eyes behind sunglasses if they have very pale, mean, blue eyes. Or if they have a squint.”

“You’re still a kid until you marry.”

“Rita was rather a plain girl with mousy hair and pale blue eyes, but she was cheerful and efficient, and beneath her mini-skirt she had perfect legs which, as far as the men on the staff were concerned, more than compensated for her face.”

“She was twenty-five years old, and she supposed it was time she thought of marriage with the right guy. But how did a girl go about finding the right guy? At one time she had thought that if he were tall, dark, and handsome, and two or three years her senior, that would be sufficient. But now she knew that this was not enough. A lot of other things came into it. Love and marriage should be for keeps, and that meant a great deal more than just physical attraction in a man.”

“I don’t believe any drug can put into the mind what isn’t there. The impulse must already be present, whether the addict knows it or not. But he or she has been told that this is what the drug will do, and, because they want to feel that particular way, they take it, and suggestion does the rest.”

“A doctor friend once told me that the difference between an heroin addict and an alcoholic is that the alcoholic gets high and goes home to beat his wife, but a heroin addict goes home and his wife beats him.”

REVIEW:

I don’t pick up a Diana Douglas/Richard Wilkes-Hunter book with any eagerness whatsoever, and Resort Nurseis yet another reason why. They—and this—are superficial, stupid, patronizing, and perfunctory. And a little creepy; the heroines are usually ridiculously beautiful with “slim, high-breasted figures,” and in the case of Elizabeth Spencer, R..N., brains and personality—or so we are told, though we see little evidence of either in any of the pages that follow. Exhibit A: Elizabeth has left her job at a hospital because she’s decided “to escape the narrow confines of hospitals and to see for herself, for a while, a little more of what went on in the outside world. Life owed her that, she had decided, and this had been the argument she had used to escape, no matter how briefly, from discipline and routine. She had tried private nursing, at first, but had found the patients demanding and irritable.” So right off the bat, Elizabethcomes across as a lazy whiner.

She’d seen an ad for a nurse at a resort in Key Sud, Florida, and now she’s in Miami, being subjected to an unnerving interview with her boss, who insists, “When we’re alone, call me Marvin. That’s one thing you learn in the hotel business. People in high places come to detest formality, Elizabeth. They have too much of it in their work. Success is a lonely thing. It’s made me a lonely man. That’s why I want you to call me Marvin.” Next thing he’ll be telling her that his wife doesn’t understand him. When she finally shakes him off, she can’t get a cab, and when a handsome hotel guest offers her a ride in his “powerful white sports car,” she hops right in. It turns out that her escort is James Scott Haldane, a very successful novelist. She immediately dissects his latest play, which she didn’t like at all, and when he drops her off, “she had been ready to refuse an invitation to dine with him—or at least to go out with him again. Now she felt frustrated and angry: He hadn’t asked her at all. He hadn’t even bothered to ask her name!” So when James Scott Haldane calls her later to ask her out for a drink, she gets all pissy and hangs up on him. The next day she heads to the beach for an early swim and is “indignant” when he doesn’t show up, angry when he doesn’t call her. “Not that it mattered, she told herself, because neither did she have the slightest interest in James Scott Haldane.” Clearly.

But while in Miami, she inadvertently stumbles into a club for a cup of coffee and finds out it’s a drug den, with a couple of stoned teenaged hippies dancing in the back. Now we get a pages-long lecture about how evil LSD is and how it causes genetic defects and “leukemia-like symptoms of cell abnormality” (it doesn’t). Ham-handed foreshadowing is a specialty of the author, so I shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s still irritating.

Once Elizabeth reaches the hotel, she is working with Dr. Kimball Brown, who “was not at all like James Scott Haldane.” Their biggest medical concern is Mrs. Connell, a pregnant woman with a heartrate of 42 and hyperemesis gravidarum, which the good doctor tells the patient, is “primarily caused by a neurotic influence, so you see how important it is for you to try to control your vomiting and not worry.” He asks her to “help us by trying not to expect to be ill every time you eat something.” His treatment is bed rest in a darkened room, codeine for sedation, and—the obvious treatment for someone who is bradycardic and vomiting excessively—fluid and diet restriction. He tells Elizabeth privately that hyperemesis gravidarum is “one of the toxemias”—an older term for pre-eclampsia (it is not)—and that “left untreated it could have led to dehydration,” so again, one does wonder why the doctor has ordered fluid restriction. Elizabeth is also told to position Mrs. Connell in bed “so she can’t inhale any vomitus while she’s under heavy sedation.” God help this poor woman, because the doctor obviously won’t.

After Mrs. Connell is soundly mismanaged, the next person to walk into the clinic is a 17-year-old girl in a “brief mini-skirt, a white sweater that accentuated her young, pert breasts, and she wore the pale makeup that kids seemed to find attractive.” And so I recalled with further dismay that Wilkes-Hunter never described a woman without mentioning her breasts. Sharon Miller asks about the “dangerous drug cabinet”—where could thatpossibly be going?—and then, “How much of a drag is it? Learning to be a nurse, I mean.” Elizabethquickly assures the teen that “nurses have boyfriends they go out on dates with, the same as anyone else,” and adds, “I guess one of these days I’ll get married and that will be the end of my nursing career.” The more this book progresses, the less I like Elizabeth Spencer, R.N. Sharon asks if she can help out in the clinic, “as a sort of nurse’s aide,” to decide if she wants be a nurse in the same mold as Elizabeth: “Where I worked wouldn’t matter as long as I don’t have to be ‘dedicated.’ I could work until I got tired of it or wanted to marry some guy.” The ugly mirror Sharon is holding up to Elizabeth passes, needless to say, unnoticed.

It isn’t long before Sharon asks Elizabethto “give me one of those pep pills,” and helpfully suggests amphetamine, or, when Elizabethbalks at that, “benzedrine then.” Elizabethgives her a lecture instead, but decides Sharon’s interest in drugs “was not important,” and assigns Sharon to sit up all night with and dispense medication to pregnant Mrs. Connell, who is vomiting, hopefully while positioned on her side, despite the codeine. Poor Mrs. Connell’s prospects of surviving her medical treatment are growing increasingly dim.

Outside of work, Elizabeth is just full of bright ideas: She goes on a date in Miamiwith her lonely boss, Marvin, and between the two of them they consume a magnum of champagne. Amazingly still consious after this, she has him drive (!!!) her back to the seedy club for coffee, where they spot a girl who looks like Sharon Miller, apparently the same hippie stoner Elizabethhad seen gyrating wildly the last time she’d dropped in. Rather than try to chase the girl down, they convince themselves that it isn’t really Sharon and drive back to the hotel, Sharon’s head “pillowed carelessly on Marvin’s shoulder,” and nevermind the four or five times she’s hoped he wasn’t going to make a pass at her; she gives him an “almost sisterly kiss.” At this point I am wondering if the author wants us to hate Elizabethin particular or if he hates all women in general. (Actually, I’ve read enough of his books to believe it’s the latter.)

One can only hope it’s a massive hangover that impairs her judgment and not her basic lack of sense when, the next day, Elizabeth asks Sharonto count the drugs in the drug cabinet. You will be shocked to find out that some amphetamines go missing—as does Sharon, who had gone to Miami for the evening. Does the penny drop? Not for our idiot heroine. She innocently asks Dr. Brown if someone might have stolen the drugs, but he is outraged at the insinuation that Sharon might have taken them, no doubt because he liked the tiny little bikini Sharonwore when he went surfing with the teen earlier.

Now Elizabeth is called to the penthouse suite, only to find—James Scott Haldane! Who finally gets around to asking Elizabeth’s name! She tells him about the missing drugs and kid, and he convinces Elizabeth that the two might be related: “She’s in the age group with too much money and too much freedom to do as she pleases. On top of that, she’s bored with her parents and is ripe for all that talk about middle-class Freudian hang-ups, indifferent parents, escapes, and so on.” The man missed his calling; he should have been a psychiatrist. So the pair climb into his powerful white sports car and head back to the club, where they chat with a groovy lad wearing a red-and-blue-striped coat and a stovepipe hat, who tells them Sharon has run off with a heroin addict named Roger. Hot on their trail, Elizabeth and James Scott Haldane find their dilapidated hideaway, break in, kick open bedroom doors, shine a flashlight around although the hall light had worked perfectly well, and find Sharon, buck naked and unconscious, on a blanket with needle marks on her “white thighs—which, along with her breasts, contrasted vividly with the rest of her suntanned body.” Next scene, it’s a few hours later and James Scott Haldane is inviting Elizabethup to the penthouse for a drink and a little conversation, which entails his ordering her to quit her job and come to his ranch in Nevadawith him, after they’re married in Miami. Ugh.

The constant references to women’s breasts; Elizabeth’s unbelievable stupidity and shallowness; the obvious, overly moralistic plot; the automatic and distasteful marriage proposal on the penultimate page—this book’s faults are many and egregious. It’s frankly insulting that the author should think Elizabethis a heroine that we should like, although to be fair, there really isn’t one single likeable character in the book, so maybe he hates everyone—though his particular disrespect for women is quite apparent. As it happens, the book’s readers will most likely be women, and it’s usually a bad idea to insult your target audience. And so I suggest you refuse to allow Wilkes-Hunter to talk down to you and decline to open his books.

Celebrity Suite Nurse

Poppy Helden had never forgotten her promise to return to her hometown as a nurse in the little clinic there. But Miami Beach, where she was training, had many distractions. There was the warm lazy sunshine of the beach, and the beguiling attentions of young Dr. Steve Harper. When Poppy’s singing idol, Nicky Farrell, became her patient in the Celebrity Suite, Poppy’s heart began to beat to a new and different tune and she was caught in a clash of conflict … in which both her love and career hung in the balance.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:

“We certainly don’t want an interne around who’s slightly psycho.”

“You look much too unworried to be a doctor.”

“Poppy—don’t fall in love with somebody famous before I get you down to the chili parlor tonight—okay?”

“If I’m running a fever, baby, you’ve got only yourself to blame.”

“Goodness, she thought suddenly, men can certainly complicate a girl’s life!”

“I’ll bet a wife like you could save a guy millions of dollars a year. I’ll bet you watch for all the sales and I’ll bet you can cook.”

“Stop behaving as if you’re still a silly student nurse, dying to get married!”

“There are very few girls who look really pretty in the early morning.”

REVIEW:

On page one, Poppy is a new graduate, a hard-working hillbilly from a hardscrabble town in the Georgia mountains who borrowed money from the hometown doctor to complete her training. She’s sworn to return home to work after her training, but she’s planning to take one more year at Marymount-on-the-Beach Hospital in Miami Beach to gain a little more experience before packing her bikinis and heading home to the mountains. Unfortunately for her, the nursing supervisor has decided that the experience our little waif really needs is with the idle rich: She’s been assigned to the celebrity suite, where she will tend to just one patient at a time.

She’s not too excited about this, as she had hoped to be a little busier. But nursing supervisor Isabel Duncan has other plans. “I think, with the life you have planned,” she explains to Poppy, “that seeing the so-called pampered darlings of the world with their masks off, will do you good.” Why the hospital would waste the skills of someone who is acknowledged to be the most dedicated graduate they’ve seen in years on private duty with just one patient to teach her this trifling life lesson is perplexing.

But then, when Poppy gets one look at pampered darling Nicky Farrell, a singing sensation checked in with fatigue to rule out leukemia, it doesn’t do her good at all—she’s suddenly, unprofessionally, off her head over the poor, possibly dying boy, leaving the hospital after her first shift to go sit on the beach and brood all night over him—missing her date at the chili parlor with Dr. Steve Harper. This is a blow to the young interne, who has been planning to marry Poppy for quite some time, though up to this point she’s refused to consider herself “his girl.” Now she’s staying late after shifts to visit Nicky, her heart hammering wildly every time she pulls a thermometer from her pocket and pops it in his mouth (cringe), swooning when he tells her he’s in love with her, and, on her third day on duty, dancing with him and kissing him. She’s very confused: “Which man do I belong to?” she asks herself, as if she should belong to anyone, especially a patient she just met 72 hours ago.

Now we enter the middle of the book, which is mainly a lot of moping about whether Nicky loves her, whether she loves Nicky, her feelings for Steve—the fact that she has previously declared that she has none beyond friendship notwithstanding—and “her duty towards the two men who cared about her!” We learn fairly early on that Nicky just has a “glandular infection,” not a fatal illness, but he still insists that he’s in love with Poppy and wants her to come on tour with him. His manager, Joe, fruitlessly tries to warn Poppy that Nicky will leave her for his true love, performing, and tells her that Nicky always thinks he’s in love—the last time to a “crazy chick” who tried to kill herself with sleeping pills after he left her, and whom he never visited when she was in the hospital recovering, the selfish lout.

And Nicky now reveals that he thinks that his manager Joe only cares about him for his money, though it’s clear that’s far from the case—and Poppy wonders, “What if that worked both ways? Suppose that Nicky, feeling that no one could truly love him for himself, was unable to love back?” Quite a stretch, but we have to have some reason for Poppy to decline his marriage proposal—the fact that she’s known him less than a week apparently not sufficing.

Then Luzette Theibou, a French actress who is all the rage in Hollywood, checks in. “She comes to the hospital every time one of her boyfriends doesn’t jump when she tells him to. She tried the sleeping pill routine” when her last romance ended, Poppy is told—and the startling coincidence between her recent escapade and Nicky’s last girlfriend’s suicide attempt is never explained, though it seems Nicky and Luzette had never met. Sloppy plotting, apparently. Then, when Poppy discovers the patients slow-dancing in the Sun Lounge and Nicky insults Poppy by telling her to bring them some Cokes, it appears Poppy’s “relationship” is on the rocks, because “when a boy told girl he cared, and then proceeded to dance with another girl as if there were no tomorrow, it could be pretty darned confusing!”

Suddenly Steve is looking better, but not much: “She didn’t feel that wild and wonderful way around him that she felt in Nicky’s presence, but still, Steve was somebody very nice and comfortable to be with. Like houseshoes,she thought, and she flushed. It didn’t seem like a very complimentary comparison.” Indeed. “Was this love? The easy, friendly, comfortable, quiet thing, where two people sat watching a calm ocean, where two people talked of medicine more than of love or passion, where two people could not see each other for days and when they did, feel as comfortable as they had the moment they left each other.” I hate this device, where the author tries to convince us that friendship is a better foundation for marriage than passion. Call me a romantic fool, but it comes across as lowering your expectations, as putting matrimony ahead of personal happiness: Better to marry a nice man who wants you than remain single and hold out for a man you really love.

When Nicky is released from the hospital, he invites Poppy to come to a concert, and seats her at a table in the front, replete with flowers and a quick visit before the curtain goes up. “You know what? I was hoping you’d wear a white dress tonight,” he tells her. “In your white nurse’s uniform, you looked so pretty. White becomes you.” Poppy immediately feels this means that Nicky only loves her as a nurse—but she’s saved from awkwardly running out the door when Luzette crashes the party and seats herself at Poppy’s table, and tells Poppy that she’s in love with Nicky, whom she’s known for only a day—this guy is really something else! Poppy kindly tells Luzette that it will take time for her to convince Nicky that she really loves him, due to his “seeming inability to accept love,” but that they will be married by spring—so it won’t take that much time, after all.

On her way out of the music hall, however, there’s a bloody disaster, and Poppy calmly saves the patient and calls for an ambulance. Arriving at the hospital, they’re met by Dr. Steve—and now it’s the young doctor who is making Poppy’s heart miss a beat, nauseatingly enough.

This book has two fundamental and conflicting problems: Too much going on, and not enough. The central anguish we are subjected to for pages and pages—so much somber wallowing about who loves whom and whether it’s real or not—seems foolish when the relationship is silly and inconsequential and reduces our heroine to some very tacky, not to mention unprofessional, behavior. The questions about whether Nicky is capable of love, whether Poppy’s feelings for Ole Houseshoes Steve is real love, even the question whether Luzette is the old flame of Nicky’s who tried to kill herself, just clutter the story in an unhelpful way, because the story should be about a real relationship developing between Poppy and Nicky so we can find out if what they feel is substantial and long-lasting or just one of those things. As we have it, this is a trivial story about a pair of shallow individuals who just latch onto whatever is convenient.

Nurse Christy

For Christine “Christy” Merrill, life couldn’t be more wonderful. She had her job as an orthopedic nurse at City General, and she had Paul … Paul Edfield whom she’d known and loved all her life. And one day soon, she and Paul would have their dream come true; he would finish his doctor’s training and open his own practice and she would be his nurse. But that day, suddenly, wasn’t coming soon enough … for Paul. He saw Christy, young, lovely, “wasting” herself, waiting for him. And suddenly Paul decided no more waiting, no more med school. He would take a good job he’d been offered, and he and Christ would be married. But to Christy this was a betrayal of everything they had hoped and planned for … and for the first time she looked at Paul and asked herself if this was the man she wanted to marry … or some stranger she had never really known?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“I’m glad we ate early before we have to start worrying a lot.”

REVIEW:

I was initially tempted to write this book off as having one of the stupider heroines I’ve met, but now that I think about it, I’m considering putting it in the “You’ve come a long way, baby” category. From a vantage point of almost 50 years into the future, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between what we now see as backward cultural expectations and a lack of intelligence.

Nurse Christy Merrill, long engaged to medical school student Paul Edfield, is patiently looking for the day three years from now when Paul will finish school and his intern year and they will be able to marry. When he’s finally done with residency, they will move out to the country and start a GP practice together. Paul is working his way through school as a pharmacist, but the waiting and the struggling is killing him, so he tells Christy that he’s going to drop out of medical school and take a job selling drugs with a pharmaceutical company in California—which means they can get married right away and move to Los Angeles! Because being married to Christy is much more important to him than being a doctor!

Christy is more than a little flabbergasted in this big change of plan, and by the fact that Paul has already signed a contract when he decides to fill her in on his plans. “A man has to do what he thinks is best,” he explains, “without asking anybody else to share the blame if things go wrong.” Christy, horrified, tells him, “You had no right! It’s my life, too!” Which is absolutely true. The funny thing is that Christy acknowledges several times in this book that she doesn’t even really like nursing: “Nursing doesn’t mean a thing to me anymore! I wanted to be a nurse because of Paul’s plans.” Even if Paul’s new job means she would be quitting her job to raise babies, that’s no consolation; the real blow is that Paul is “cheating himself like this, sacrificing his whole future to marry her sooner,” she thinks. “He had thrown it all away in a terrible useless gesture.” It seems she wants Paul to be a doctor more than he does, so she refuses to marry him, and he drives off into the sunset.

She immediately has second thoughts, but it’s too late. “She wanted to write him, to phone him, but how could she do that, when she was not sure that he really wanted her?” He’s told her to call him in California if she needs him, but this is not invitation enough for dopey Christy, who points out that Paul did not tell her to call him if she changed her mind, just if she “needed” him, “and the office phone number was just to call in case of any emergency!” Good point. So she mopes around for endless pages, whispering to herself, “Paul! Paul! Call me again!”

And dating Tommy Treonne, indolent son of a wealthy businessman, on the side. Tommy is soon proposing marriage, and mentions that he’d talked about it with his parents before popping the question. “Somehow, it rankled, as if he had discussed every phase of this matter with his family,” curiously enough. Later, when a hurricane is bearing down on the Texas town, Tommy comes to pick up Christy and flee the county, telling her that this is what his father had advised they do. “You asked him? You made somebody else decide for you?” You see where this is going, but I didn’t see her point—asking for advice from your family is, after all, essentially what she had wanted Paul to do and why she’s angry with him, for “not even talking things out, making all the decisions, with no discussion with her ahead of time.” Now suddenly discussion is a bad thing? Yes, it is, and she writes Paul a note, telling him, “I was wrong. A man should make his own decisions and stand by them all the way through.” Yuck.

Now we have the kind of ending that Peggy Gaddis is fond of employing: The hero admits he was wrong, but the heroine decides, no, she was wronger! Paul, concerned for Christy’s safety after the hurricane, returns to town and tells her, “You had a right to help decide our future, because it was as much yours as mine.” But Christy throws her gains away, saying, “My future belongs to you. All I want is to be with you always!” If this doesn’t make you vomit, the book’s final treacly sentence will finish the job for you. So what do you think? Is Christy a moron, or a victim of a sexist time that urged women to disregard their personal desires and careers for a husband? Maybe both, but either way, it adds up to a book—and a heroine—that are just irritating, and not worth reading.

Five Nurses

By Rose Williams
(pseud. William E. Daniel Ross), ©1964
Cover illustration by Mort Engel

Five beautiful nurses … They had been close friends in nursing school and now they had gathered for their fifth reunion … There was –
Louise: the class belle, now desperately ill
Linda: who had married for money and lived to regret it
Harriet: who shut out love for her career
Janice: unbalanced by the deaths of husband and child
Shirley: with her heart torn between a film tycoon and a devil-may-care reporter…
A dramatic story of the highly eventful lives of five lovely young nurses.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“Sometimes she felt that girls with plain faces had all the best of it.”

“Every day I look around and see more mixed-up people. We haven’t enough psychiatrists to cope with them. We’re living in mentally sick times, Miss Jensen.”

“If she’d only do more with herself. She’s always looked older than she should because she’s so careless with clothes and make-up. Has she improved any?”

“You girls are all alike. Never want to eat anything.”

“Only in New England can you get French food like this.”

REVIEW:
This book may pretend to be a story about five nurses, but in fact it’s the story of one nurse with four nurse friends. Something else that struck me somewhere in the third chapter, as I encountered the phrase “dark girl” seven times in three pages, is that this book is written by Mr. Ross, who has an enduring attachment to that particular descriptor (see Network Nurse and Nurse in Nassau), and whose four other books I have read were not terribly impressive. He has lived up to his reputation with Five Nurses.

Shirley Jensen is leaving Miami, where she has been caring for wealthy Max Kane. He is all better now, and she’s decided to use an upcoming fifth-year reunion of her nursing class as an excuse to move to Boston, the site of her alma mater. Shirley is looking forward to the gathering; “there would be the excitement of planning what she’d wear to the reunion.” She’s also eager to catch up with old friends like Harriet Sanders, who springs to mind when she’s wishing she were ugly so she wouldn’t have to fend off Max’s advances. She then thinks of Janice Kent, “her best girlfriend,” whom she hasn’t spoken to in two years—“the last Shirley had heard, Janice had been in a dreadful car accident in which her husband and baby had been killed.” Shirley is, in a word, shallow.

Back in Boston, she takes a room with her former classmate Louise Shannon and her husband, Bob. “The first thought that came to Shirley as she looked up into the face of the dark girl was that Louise had failed terribly,” as she’s looking pale and tired. It turns out that Louise has leukemia, a fact she has told no one, including her husband Bob; Shirley only finds out when she runs into the absurdly unprofessional doctor treating Louise. He adds, “I’ve managed to keep it quiet,” though I’m not sure how, if he’s telling the fatal secret to a woman he hasn’t seen in five years within 60 seconds of her walking through his office door.

Next Shirley visits her old friend Linda, who promptly dropped nursing after graduating to marry, and now has a two-year-old daughter, Ann. She also takes up where she left off with Jerry Wade, a former reporter for the Boston Globe who quit the paper to write a novel that never materialized. Even Max turns up, in town for a business meeting, and she has dinner with him; “in spite of the gray at his temples, he looked quite handsome.” Perhaps it’s the gray that causes her to turn him down when he proposes after dinner at Locke-Ober and a performance by Robert Goulet, who “did a wonderful show that made Shirley forget her problems for a time,” namely that “Louise is slowly succumbing to an incurable disease and Janice is deep in a world of madness.” Yes, Shirley’s problems are heavy, indeed. Or maybe she’s really worried about the fact that she’d spent nearly two hours in a Brookline shopping center searching for a suitable party dress and found nothing in her size that seemed just right.

She shouldn’t have fretted, however, for the very next day at Filene’s better dress department, she quickly finds exactly what she’s looking for. And on her way out, she runs into Janice and has fairly normal lunch with her, though “she is still a bit odd.” Janice gets up to phone home, saying she was expected some time ago, and never returns to the table. Then “it came to her with striking abruptness that the frail girl had acted much too sanely in the last several minutes of their conversation. It should have been a warning to Shirley, who’d had experience in handling psychopathics.” Apparently acting normal is the classic sign of mental illness.

Then we hear that Janice has kidnapped Linda’s daughter. As the last person to see Janice, Shirley is brought to Linda’s house, where she is interviewed by the police inspector, who says supportive things like, “It’s not easy to deal with a madwoman,” and notes that Janice, while institutionalized, had attacked and severely wounded a hospital attendant. After a long pause, the dolt “seemed to realize that he had presented a frightening picture of their youngster’s plight to Linda and Frank,” but nonetheless feels compelled to add, “If we panic this poor demented creature, she could do some wild thing without considering the child’s welfare.” He should get Shirley’s phone number.

Jerry is by Shirley’s side through the whole ordeal, and even reaches out to his old contacts to help with the search. Dropping by his office to let Jerry’s boss Ruth know why he hasn’t been at work, “Shirley noted the attractive green outfit Ruth was wearing and suddenly felt dowdy. She had dressed hurriedly in a plain skirt and blouse, knowing that she would be wearing her raincoat and being more concerned with getting to Linda than with dressing in style.” Now she’s feeling the grave error of her careless ways but doesn’t have too much time to dwell on her gaffe, as they get a call from Harriet. In her work as a visiting nurse, Harriet has spotted Janice in an old Fenway tenement building, and Shirley and Jerry rush to the scene. Shirley is ushered up to the roof, where Janice is poised on the edge with Ann, and Shirley manages to talk Janice away from the brink. Once safely in Shirley’s arms, Janice lapses into a coma and is taken to the hospital, where they presumably will not be discharging her in time for the reunion, darn it!

Now that all the excitement is over, Jerry decides he’s going to quit working for Ruth—a job he hates—and go back to the Globe. “But won’t that be accepting defeat?” asks Shirley helpfully, apparently under the impression that after five years of floundering to write a novel, continuing to fail to produce one is better than returning to a career he had enjoyed. She adds that he shouldn’t count too much on her being a part of his new life, because “you’re one of those people who continually go around with their head in the clouds.” The Jerry we’ve seen up to now has been dependable, generous, and hard-working, so where this picture of a shiftless dreamer comes from is beyond me—but curiously, Jerry instantly becomes that person by “sulking.” The phone rings, and it’s Max. Shirley, displaying new depths of cruelty, has Jerry drive her to a late-night date with him—after she’s fixed her hair and changed into something fit to be seen. Max tells her he’s leaving for Florida tomorrow and again proposes. She again declines, but kisses him and whispers, “Come back to Boston, Max.” Is she just a ruthless tease, or is she changing her mind about Max?

The next morning, as Louise sleeps in, Shirley takes it upon herself to spill Louise’s secret and tells Bob that Louise has leukemia. But Louise and Bob have such a great marriage that Bob never tells Louise that he knows that she’s dying and instead starts cooking breakfast, which is sure to be a big help to Louise! Then it’s off to the department stores to find poor, plain Harriet a decent dress to wear to the reunion—though Shirley has to note that Harriet is still “looking a bit less glamorous” than Linda—and to get Louise into a red dress that “will help give you some color,” our compassionate stylist Shirley observes, and it’s off to the reunion! “During a lull in the proceedings, Shirley noticed that it was after seven-thirty and wondered if Max had started on his flight to California. For a moment she felt a certain sadness. Then she gave her attention to the speaker again.” So maybe she’s not in love with Max after all. But with shallow Shirley, who really knows? When they leave the reunion for the after-party in Wakefield, “Shirley thought they all looked beautiful and glamorous and still satisfyingly young. They were on their way to a party with the men they loved.” And that, oddly, is where the book ends.

I am not certain if this book actually counts as a nurse romance novel. Shirley has no fiancé at the end, but it’s suggested that she “loved” Jerry. She’s turned down his proposal—and Max’s as well—but are we now supposed to think that she’ll marry him after all? It is a welcome change to find a book without the usual climactic clinch, but I was more confused by the ending than anything else. And again and again, I was quite disgusted with Shirley’s preoccupation with her clothes and other people’s appearances. The way she waffles between Max and Jerry, accepting their advances but rebuffing their proposals, feeling “a certain sadness” and then promptly putting them out of her mind, shows something less than honorable intentions. She is not a respectable person, and her “heroism” in saving Janice from tossing herself and Ann off a building is more like happenstance than any real calling to help. The fact that this male writer created such a shallow heroine feels insulting, like he thought we chicks would really dig Shirley’s obsession with her wardrobe and utter lack of sincerity with her boyfriends, her girlfriends, or even her career. Shirley is not someone we will appreciate, and I also don’t appreciate the idea that the writer thinks we should.