Collecting Book

Student Nurse

“Being nice to you could easily become habit-forming,” he said quietly. Loyce Hamilton, pretty student nurse, felt a warm sweetness in her heart at handsome Reed Shelby’s words. For he was the head of the Shelby clan—and a bachelor to boot! But when Loyce realized the callous way the Shelbys dominated everyone in town, the warmth began to chill. And Reed’s jealousy of Dr. Gordon Grant didn’t help matters …

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“People who are destitute or almost, and who have mental quirks, are called crazy! But if they have enough money to get themselves out of unpleasant jams, then people say they are merely eccentric.”

REVIEW:

In Loyce Hamilton, we have a nurse named in one of the finer Peggy Gaddis traditions (see also her Leota, Luana, Leona, and Linette). Also like these lovely ladies, Loyce is a strong, capable, and compassionate nurse working in Georgia in a small community hospital of only 40 beds out in the sticks. There she meets another Gaddis staple, the stuck-up city doctor who hates the country but is forced to work there until his med school loan is paid off and he can go back to the city and become the highly paid specialist that only pompous, lazy, heartless snobs endeavor to be.

While she serves out her month-long rotation, Loyce rooms with the Shelby family, local landowners who own, well, everything in town. The family is headed by Ruth, the “very, very handsome” but “big—very big” spinster sister doomed never to marry, the numbers stacked against her: age (30), height (5'10"), and weight (200). Rounding out the family is Reed, the big brother, the obvious love interest, and Marcy the sister-in-law, widow of Hank, who died in the war. Marcy has a son, Paul, but she has been divested of any responsibility for the baby, who is cared for exclusively—and has even been renamed—by Ruth. Marcy is essentially a prisoner of the family, which they frankly admit: “Marcy wanted to stay in California and get a job after the baby was born. But of course we couldn’t permit that,” Reed tells Loyce. Marcy, though she has an inheritance that could support her, can only hand over the baby on command and cry. Loyce, hearing this story, is incredulous: “But for goodness sake, Marcy, he’s yourbaby!” she says. “I can’t see any reason you shouldn’t take the baby and go away.” There is no logical answer to this; all Marcy can do is fume that she’s a prisoner. She’s not exactly wrong; when she asks Reed if she can leave Georgia, he says she is free to go—but the baby stays. “This is his home; he’ll stay here and grow up here and take his rightful place.” Since she lacks the gumption to just take the boy and go, there she stays.

Loyce comes to fall for Reed, which we saw coming from page one. The two go on several dates, including to lunch at the Cloister, a historic hotel on Sea Island, which I know well; it’s like unexpectedly meeting an old friend when we drive up the causeway past the “century-old oaks, their massive limbs draped in swaying curtains of green-grey Spanish moss.” Despite these dates, when Marcy suggests that Reed is in love with Loyce, she all but falls off her chair: “I have never heard of anything so silly in my life,” she stammers. “Why, he’s never given me a second glance or a second thought!” This, after pages of him giving her tender looks and calling her “darling” and “wonderful,” and suggesting they honeymoon at the Cloister. If it were simple insecurity that makes Loyce respond so, I could forgive it, but it comes across as a false modesty that “nice” girls were forced to adopt in the day, pretending not to notice a man at all until the day he proposed, which I find irritating and stupid.

After the Shelbys grudgingly allow it, Marcy takes a volunteer job at the hospital, and while she’s there, she comes under the notice of Dr. Grant. So Loyce goes to bat for Marcy, telling Reed that she thinks the family is domineering and cruel to the spineless little lamb, pretty much pouring ice water on her blooming romance. Dr. Grant then shows up at the Shelby mansion for a meeting with the extended family, where he tells them he will stay in Shelbyville and marry Marcy—though he has never had any discussion with Marcy about his feelings for her—once again treating her like a voiceless pet. This time, however, she doesn’t seem to mind so much, and agrees to marry the doctor after he says that he will take her and the baby away from the Shelby house.

Though the family is in uproar, Reed later thanks Loyce, surprisingly enough, for having pointed out some hard truths, and he tells her that they will make it up to Marcy, possibly by even “allowing” her to remarry. But there’s another marriage he wants to discuss, and he asks Loyce if she will mind becoming part of such a domineering family. Loyce, horrifically enough, after having fought for Marcy’s independence, is thrilled to have the chance to shed her own: “After being alone most of my life, having to make my own decisions, hoping they were right and sort of muddling through, I can’t think of anything more wonderful,” she coos. Even if she insists that she is going to work after they marry, it can’t quite resolve my nausea after she says, “No place in the world where youare could ever be dull to me! It would be exciting and beautiful—because I love you so much!” Ew.

On occasion Peggy Gaddis can turn out a great book, but this is not one of her best. The biggest problem is that it rehashes of all the usual Gaddis gimmicks and sexist attitudes, even if the latter are largely a product of the times and the region. For most of the book Loyce is an admirable, outspoken woman who fights for the underdog, and Gaddis’ writing is generally entertaining. Though she’s capable of better, this book is enjoyable enough for an afternoon on the veranda with a mint julep.

Night-Duty Nurse

Pretty red-haired Karen Hayden was new at the hospital, but already she had a reputation for efficiency and dedication—since work came first in her life … Then one night a tragic explosion brought scores of emergency patients to the hospital. In the excitement Karen was kissed by Clay Palmer—the handsome, aloof new intern all the nurses were whispering about. After that kiss, sensible as she was, Karen could not wipe the moody Dr. Palmer from her dreams. It was only when Clay Palmer turned all his attention toward a female patient that Karen agreed to date the flirtatious Jack Arlen, an ex-patient of her own, and the son of the most influential man in town. But Jack Arlen was more than an irresponsible playboy, as Karen would soon learn—and Clay Palmer was not a man whose kiss she could easily forget ….

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“Right now she was all for planned parenthood, though she knew that on the following day she would change her mind.”

“Close my eyes—with you to look at?”

“Did you, by any chance, have surgery for the removal of the heart, and then run away before they could transplant the new one?”

“I’m going to ask those doctors over there to examine you if they want to discover a sensational phenomenon—a living woman without a heart.”

“ ‘I formed the habit of eating early in life,’ she told him, ‘and I don’t seem able to break the addiction.’ ”

“Did anybody ever tell you how pretty you are when you’re angry? I see now why fishwives always keep their husbands.”

REVIEW:

This book opens with a bang—a literal one, as a ship loaded with crude oil explodes in the harbor outside the hospital. “Enemy attack!” gasps our paranoid heroine, Karen Hayden, as she scrambles to her feet. She reports to Emergency, where she is teamed with the dreamy new resident to help a young man with a severe leg injury. Dr. Clay Palmer is back from a stint in Vietnam that seems to have left him rather crabby, as his first remark to her is, “Stop your daydreaming, Nurse!” To his credit, he apologizes in the cafeteria later, but as Karen starts babbling on about how the patient was petrified he would lose his leg: “It’s like being half a man,” she says understandingly, and Dr. Palmer abruptly stalks off.

Karen quickly recovers from this unfortunate gaffe, or at least with us readers, as she’s soon bantering with her friend Lorna with a sense of humor often relegated to minor characters. With Dr. Palmer, however, it’s another story, and the next time they meet he overhears her saying to a group of tittering nurses, “He has a disposition about as sweet as a crabapple!” Awkward! To her credit, however, she immediately apologizes. He asks about new patient Jack Arlen, spoiled son of wealthy Judge Arlen, who’s cracked up his head and his latest sports car and wants Karen to rub his pains away and otherwise gratify his every whim while he’s in the hospital. Dr. Palmer offers to get young Jack a special so as to free Karen from his wiles, but she tosses her head and declares, “I can take care of myself!” In response to this, Dr. Palmer grabs her and kisses her—and when she kisses him back, he pushes her away and says, “All women are vulnerable.” There is just no way to leave this scene with any fondness at all for Dr. Clay Palmer. And we are reminded of this on two other occasions, when Karen recalls “a young, brash doctor who had kissed her to show his superior strength and laughed at her anger.” But—and you will not be surprised to hear it—her heart is constantly racing or doing double flips or hopping and skipping like a frolicsome rabbit, I’m sorry to report, every time he is near.

Soon the wise “old” charge nurse (she’s 40) is telling Karen that Dr. Palmer is in love with her, but she’s finally relented and started going out with Jack, who respects her fortitude, though the two are really just good friends. Dr. Palmer doesn’t know that, however, and starts dating a rich widow: “My advice to any working girl is: ‘Marry for money.’ That’s what I intend to do—if I ever marry,” he tells her. In the meantime, there’s a young girl with a bone cancer in her leg who needs an amputation, and who runs away from the hospital because her mother insists that she’s better off dead than with just one leg: “What man would want to marry a girl with one leg?” she shrieks. But Karen tries to calm the girl down by telling her that “many amputees live normal, happy lives”—a curious about-face from her earlier position. And after a quiet half-hour chat with Dr. Palmer, young Laurie bravely marches off for her amputation, and “a fund had been started by the townspeople to buy Laurie the best leg possible.”

Eventually Jack proposes, and Karen turns him down because she is not in love with him. He suggests it’s because she thinks he’s an irresponsible kid, she essentially agrees, and he speeds off down the street in a huff. Needless to say, he’s later found with the wreckage of his car wrapped around a tree, with a girl “from the wrong side of the tracks” in the passenger’s seat. Karen soon learns that the girl, Nancy Lord, has recently acquired a new last name—she’s Nancy Alden! It turns out that Nancy and Jack had been in love since they were kids, only Jack was too worried about what his father would say to marry her. Karen’s barb, as it happens, was exactly what he needed to pop the question to the right woman. Who is now in surgery having her skull fracture repaired. You’d think this crisis is going to be the one that skates us into the book’s finale, but no—the darned hospital catches on fire, and it’s up to Karen to rescue at least two-thirds of the patients when some of the more skittish nurses abandon their posts. Dr. Palmer, even more heroic than Karen, is the last one out of the building and suffers some burns, but Karen is there to nurse him back to health.

There’s a little bit of the usual “he doesn’t love he” waffling, unfortunately, at the bitter end when the rich widow Dr. Palmer had toyed with briefly returns to the scene of the crime, which mars the ending slightly. But it’s over as quickly as most of the various scenes in this book, which at times gave me a bit of vertigo with its rapid spinning from topic to topic. But overall this is an enjoyable and amusing book, easily worth the two hours it will take you to blaze through it.

Eve Cameron, MD

By Ann Rush, ©1957

Dr. Eve Cameron, just graduated from medical school, came home to the small Georgia town her family had ruled for generations. There, she took over her uncle’s big country practice—determined to devote her life to the poor. But young, red-headed Matt Sanders, son of an overseer and now superintendent of the paper mills, told her she was only playing doctor. He knew Eve was the glamorous heiress of the Cameron fortune and he couldn’t believe this spoiled girl would persevere in her desperate battle against poverty, disease and vice. Eve Cameron thought she didn’t care what Matt Sanders said. She had no interest in either men or love—

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“Mighty few people really make the bed they lie in.”

“The kind of courteous you have to try to be is usually worse than out-and-out rudeness, don’t you think?”

“Other girls sat in the swing and talked to boys; she went out and set bones.”

“She felt relaxed for the first time, felt more like a girl than a doctor.”

“As for my killing off your patients, I’m doing it so that you’ll get some rest when you get home.”

“You’d be a real inspiration to any man to get well. Or to have an illness that went on and on.”

“I wouldn’t want to marry Bob if I was going to be horrid looking for the rest of my life. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“I guess I’ll have to teach you about adjectives. You certainly scatter them about with a careless hand.”

REVIEW:

In the great VNRN tradition, wealthy and beautiful Eve Cameron is returning to her tiny home town of Quiet Harbor after having been jilted by Dr. Smoke Jones, who dumped her for a plain, freckled nurse with “a vacant stare.” She’s planning to lie low for a bit and knit her broken heart back together again before moving on to a glamorous job in the city. Arriving home, she discovers that a paper mill has been built in town by her uncle Peter, and it blankets the town in a horrible sour smell—but has also brought jobs and money to town. She also discovers that Matt Sanders, a former grade-school classmate who was “a whiz at arithmetic,” is now the plant supervisor and seems to be carrying a mighty big chip on his shoulder toward her and her well-heeled family. But she doesn’t have much time to think about that opinionated, self-satisfied young man, because her Uncle Rufus, the town doctor, suffers a heart attack and is now out of commission for a couple of months. So she picks up his black bag and starts ministering to the populace.

Matt, meantime, is trying to get a clinic started at his mill, and condescends to ask Eve for her help. She advises him regarding the supplies he’ll need and where to get the best bargains and how to find a good nurse to staff the clinic. The two run hot and cold with each other, one minute all friendly and the next minute flaring with insults, so you can clearly see where that’s going. Curiously, the relationship causes Eve to develop an inferiority complex, and she regularly worries that she is overbearing when she tries to improve the lives of some of the poor folk around her, which her uncle calls “just plain bossiness.” She compares herself to the nurse Matt’s hired, who is “purry and utterly feminine,” and worries that “Matt Sanders hadn’t said she was a woman. Perhaps he didn’t even think of her as one. He was probably one of those dodoes in his thinking who considered a woman who didn’t sweep and wash dishes and iron and cook three meals a day to have forfeited her womanhood. He probably thought of her as—as— She couldn’t think of the word she wanted, but she was sure it wasn’t complimentary or feminine. Darn Matt Sanders anyhow. She’d show him. When he got back she’d show him who was a woman.” She starts fretting about the fact that Matt isn’t going to like her, and at a meeting with him about the clinic, she bursts out, “Do you think I’m unfeminine, unlikable, because I butt into other people’s business, because I try to manage their lives?” Matt sputters in surprise, and she stomps out, humiliated, and vows to leave Quiet Harbor posthaste.

I’ve always had a difficult time with the word feminine. It purports to equal female, but it also includes all the stereotypical ideas of what a woman is supposed to be—delicate, pretty, gentle—all of which are completely artificial and an identity that others have forced on women. So the minute I come across it, up go my hackles—and when its opposite, bossy, is trucked out at the same time, look out! Are men ever called bossy, or is it just in women that initiative, drive, and executive abilities are considered a bad thing? I’m surprised that a woman as smart as Eve Cameron doesn’t see through the paradox she is creating for herself with her anxieties: If she were meek and mild, she certainly could not succeed as a country doctor, so her determination to be more timid so that Matt will like her seems completely at odds with her desire to be a great doctor, not to mention contrary to her very nature. It’s true that, a few pages after her confrontation with Matt, after she’s set up one girl in a poor family to go to nursing school and another to secretarial school, she feels pretty pleased with herself. “It was a good way for a country doctor to be, even if it wasn’t feminine. She’d be careful and try to be tactful in her bossiness, and if no man ever came along that appreciated a woman who wanted things better—well, she’d be a bachelor like Uncle Rufus.” But it’s not a complete victory, as she still feels she has to try to soften her ambition to make it more palatable to potential husbands. And in the end, the issue of her ambition is left unresolved when she and Matt finally hook up and he never weighs in on this central theme.

Overall this is a pleasant book, well-written and entertaining, but not really offering any especial jewels to put it above the madding crowd. Eve is a good character but not a great one, and her anguish over her gumption is irritating to a modern reader and never satisfactorily put away as silliness. I enjoyed following Eve on her rounds and watching her work, performing surgery and delivering babies, and if the back-cover blurb (see above, in italics) was erroneous both in its depiction of her character and of the plot, I think it’s a better book than what we were set up to expect.