Collecting Book

Nurse in Acapulco

By Jane Converse

Mrs. Breckenridge’s maniacal possessiveness had turned her handsome son into a peevish playboy, her daughter into a shrill, contemptuous and cheating wife, her son-in0law into a drunken failure. When it seemed as though one of her captives might break away, Mrs. Breckenridge had another heart attack and threatened to change her will. In accepting the wealthy hypochondriac as a patient, special nurse Donna Walton had no way of knowing that she was to be used as bait in the old woman’s devious scheme to keep her son by her side … forever.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“They close the bullring and jai-alai court for the summer. The really chic parties don’t get off the ground before December. Prepare to perish, Miss Waldron.”

REVIEW:

We’ve been to Acapulco before, in Beauty Contest Nurse and the other Nurse in Acapulco. This trip is about as successful—which is to say, not very—as our last two expeditions, I’m sorry to say. Here, it’s Donna Walton who is stalking the moonlight beaches and feeling “deeply touched by the warm, trusting simplicity of these people, by their unsophisticated love.” Donna’s come to Mexico to care for an aging (but not old, she’s in her 50s) hypochondriac Grace Breckenridge, who keeps her children, Enid and the unfortunately named Buzzy, on a short leash that they dare not slip, lest she cut off the funding for their louche lives of luxury. Donna has only agreed to take this job because she’s come off a particularly demanding case, caring for a terminally ill cancer patient for the past seven months. For once, this dying patient is actually broke, and Donna received no pay for her final nine weeks of work when he ran out of money. So she needs a vacation, and she needs to replete her bank account; this job, which pays twice her normal salary, seems to fit both bills.

But at what cost? There’s the small matter of her conscience, soon smote when she’s called to help an actual injured patient, the grandchild of the hacienda’s gardener. When she delivers the boy to the local medico, Dr. Emilio Camargo, who has a garden full of impoverished patients waiting hours to be seen, he asks her, “You will come again, no? When you have nothing of greater importance to do than that which you are doing from day to day?” Her agenda thus far has been no more taxing than learning to surf, attending parties, and playing bridge, and she thinks, “I wish he’d had reason to respect me as a nurse, instead of looking at me as though I was a conscious parasite.”

Then a houseguest arrives, an old friend of Enid’s husband, Kenny. Dr. Stanley Sherwood, a psychiatrist practicing in New York, went to medical school with Kenny before Kenny married Enid and decided to switch careers and become a kept boy and gin aficionado, though I’m sorry to report that he appears to prefer his cocktails served in a coconut shell rather than in a coupe, so low has his self-worth fallen. For Dr. Sherwood, Donna decides after one day with him, “she herself had waited all her life.” But how does he feel? Ah, if only these women of the 1960s actually had the gumption to just initiate an honest conversation. One night, when a drunken Enid accuses Donna of running after Buzzy, Kenny, Dr. Camargo, and now Dr. Sherwood, the latter overhears, but she takes no action at all. “If he had heard Enid’s vicious accusations, there was no way of knowing what conclusions he had reached. To throw a robe over her nightgown now, to deliberately run out into the corridor and deny the accusations Enid had made, might only give them credence.” Really?

So while he goes off to a conference for five days—and will he ever return for her?—she works in the evenings at Dr. Camargo’s clinic to buff up her conscience and reputation. The days pass, and pass, and no call from Stan, though when she learns that Stan is staying at a nearby hotel, she actually manages to pick up the phone. He’s not in, though, and she’s just hung up when an earthquake strikes! Because there’s nothing as redemptive as a major natural disaster to improve everyone’s character! The hacienda’s idle rich leap into action: Enid opens the house to wounded victims and cares for them to her best ability, Kenny forcibly drags his brother-in-law from under a chandelier that collapses moments later and then labors with Enid to tend the wounded, Buzzy taps his ham-radio hobby to contact San Diego for a pint of “rare” blood, AB positive (though in fact they can receive blood from about 92 percent of the population; it’s AB negative that’s the rarest blood type, carried by only 1 percent of the population). Stan and Donna, of course, work with Dr. Camargo at the clinic, and sad, hysterical, screaming Mrs. Breckenridge is left untended—indeed, she’s told to “mix yourself a drink and relax” while everyone else works tirelessly. When the crisis has passed, Enid and Kenny are plotting to buy a house near the University of California in Berkeley, apparently unaware that the otherwise stellar educational powerhouse has no medical school, and Stan is suggesting that instead of returning to her job in Oregon, Donna might instead consider New York. But that’s it for redemption; Buzzy’s emancipation is anticipated but not witnessed, and we never learn whether the histrionic Mrs. Breckenridge rebounds from her abandonment.

Jane Converse can be a very fine writer (see Surf Safari Nurse, Nurse in Crisis), but most of the time she settles for mediocrity, as she does here, perhaps opting for quantity over quality (indeed, she was a very prolific writer). Now and again we get the slight sparkle of her sharp wit, but Mrs. Breckenridge, the screaming matriarch character—one I usually enjoy and one of Jane’s usual stock in trade—is no Angela Di Marco, the gin-soaked faded movie star with running mascara and bedraggled marabou from Nurse on Trial; rather, here our grande dame just lamely clutches her heart and sways with eyes closed when her brief screaming harangues are not meeting with success. Donna’s concern that Stan isn’t going to come back to Acapulco after hearing Enid’s slander seems completely silly; after becoming acquainted with both women during his stay, if Stan doesn’t realize the relative substance of each, he’s not worth Donna’s heartache. But I am never impressed when the heroine worries excessively about a ridiculous “crisis” yet fails to take any action whatsoever to set the situation to rights. Nor do I enjoy a ham-handed resolution to everyone’s problems, where personal growth seems more contrived than earned. So while I will always regard Jane Converse as a talent, little is in evidence in Acapulco.

Arctic Nurse

By Dorothy Dowdell, ©1966
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

When beautiful, dark-haired Lori Waters came home to Alaska, she was escaping the memory of heartbreak. She had fallen in love with young Dr. Cliff Randolph, handsome, brilliant, and devil-may-care. But she had lost him, and now she desperately plunged into the excitement and challenge of her work as head nurse on difficult, peril-filled medical missions to distant Alaskan villages. Then, one day, the new doctor arrived. As he descended from the airplane, Lori felt her heart skip a beat, then start throbbing violently. It was Cliff—who now said he loved her. But could she believe him, with his mocking smile and ironic gaze? Could she trust this man who had once so cruelly betrayed her?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“As they drove back to the Littner home, she half-wished that Bob would carry her off like a cave man and end the matter once and for all.”

REVIEW:
Lori Waters is a bit unusual in VNRNs in that she is biracial, half Indian and half white. She was “raised white” by her mother, but her Indian heritage manifests itself in an ivory amulet around her neck that she spends a lot of time fondling throughout the book. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, with her grandfather, Chief Whitewaters, who is college-educated and holds an important position with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. (Her parents are, as is common amongst VNRN heroines, dead; her mother died of cancer when Lori was in nursing school and her father was killed in the Korean War.) She works as the nurse on a series of clinics run in the remote areas around Fairbanks, which she reaches by plane with doctor and pilot Bob Littner. She is crucial to these missions because her grandfather taught her many Indian languages, so she can converse with the natives.

Bob is a childhood friend of Lori’s who is increasingly putting the pressure on her to marry him. She feels very torn about this: She thinks he would make a great husband, but her heart’s not in it. You see, when she was in training in Seattle, she fell madly in love with upper-crust Dr. Clifford Randolph. He dated her for a year—but after one hot and heavy date, she returned to the nurse’s dorm to find a newspaper left anonymously on her pillow with an announcement of Cliff’s engagement to a society princess. Now, a year later, she’s still not over him.

So when one of the usual Alaskan MDs is away for the summer and a new doc from Seattle arrives to take his place, you should not be at all surprised to find that it is Dr. Randolph who steps off the plane. He tells Lori that his engagement ended last week by mutual consent—“it was one of those deals where we had always known each other,” Cliff tells her, describing, curiously, the same situation as Lori and Bob’s. Upon finding himself single, he has made tracks to Alaska to see her. Indeed, he soon proposes to Lori, and though she is a bit wary of him, she accepts. This means that she is going to have to leave Alaska for Seattle, perhaps never to see her grandfather again. Chief Whitewaters is vehemently against the marriage because, as he tells Lori, “Only you can carry out my dream to better the lot of our people.” Although, since Lori is planning to quit working “for good” when she marries, I’m not really sure how much of a difference Lori is going to make.

It’s the usual formula, with Bob begging Lori to reconsider and moping around a lot, even coming to blows with Cliff, until Lori is finally persuaded that Cliff is—duh—the wrong man. This occurs when there is a major earthquake in the north, coincidentally occurring the day before Lori and Cliff are to fly to Hawaii to meet up with his family and get married. Lori, Cliff, and Bob fly off to the hinterlands, where they spend 24 hours patching people up. But then Cliff, increasingly anxious about the fact that further delay will make him and Lori late for the party his mother has arranged for them in Honolulu, arranges for them to fly with a batch of wounded patients on a Red Cross plane to Fairbanks, where they can catch their jet to Hawaii. Lori, aghast that Cliff would rank his own personal interests first during a major disaster, puts him on the Red Cross plane, alone. “I guess I’m far more Indian than I realize,” she tells him. “I can’t go off and leave them.”

When the disaster is laid to rest and they’re back in Fairbanks, Lori and Bob are having coffee in the hospital—the VNRN romantic equivalent of a candlelight bistro in Paris—when she tells him, “I guess I’m not in love with Cliff after all,” and suddenly Bob is making her eyes light up in a new way. It’s a bit perplexing and way too pat, given the earlier descriptions of how she cried her eyes out for a year after Cliff dumped her and her hand-wringing about how, though Bob is otherwise so perfect for her, she does not love him. But I shouldn’t have been surprised; this entire book is perfunctory and automatic, with little of interest to keep the pages turning.