Collecting Book

Art Colony Nurse

By Jane Converse, ©1969

It was all so simple … in the beginning. Handsome young Dr. Larry Rhodes wanted a capable nurse; Eileen Bonham, R.N., had all the qualifications. Eileen wanted romance with marital possibilities; Larry had all the qualifications. Simple. Storybook perfect … until the day Eileen discovered the Bohemian art colony on the California coast and nothing seemed duller than life with a successful, hard-working doctor, nothing more exciting than a free-swinging affair with a flamboyant artist. Suddenly Eileen found herself torn between the man and career she’d always dreamed of—and a thrilling, carefree adventure she’d never dared to imagine.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:

“Nobody bothered to warn me you were beautiful.”

REVIEW:

Eileen Bonham has taken a break from nursing in Los Angeles to spend a few weeks at her parents’ house in northern California, though her parents keep hoping she’ll stay for good. There are no good job prospects to keep her there, however, until local GP Dr. Larry Rhodes advertises for an office nurse. On the interview, she finds him hunky but a bit somber for her taste. Nonetheless she takes the job—well, after she learns Dr. Rhodes is single. After weeks at work, though, she becomes increasingly disenchanted, busy and interesting though the job may be, because Larry hasn’t asked her out yet.

In addition, she soon sees a side of him that she doesn’t particularly care for, when a family of hippies brings in their young son, who has fallen from a tree. Dr. Rhodes, disgusted with the young parents’ lifestyle, terrifies them by painting a horrific description of the lockjaw that will almost certainly ensue, he says, if young Tad Shearer hasn’t gotten his vaccinations. After a few calls to the boy’s pediatrician, it’s found that he’s up to date, but man! What a bummer! Eileen is not impressed with Larry’s deliberate cruelty to the parents, and when they do go out to dinner for the first time, they get into a heated discussion about whether the Shearers have any right to have children, since they are not financially stable and live in an art colony of dubious reputation and plumbing. The date, needless to say, is a fiasco, and Eileen decides that Larry is a rigid square who thinks that only an orderly life is worth living.

Curiously, however, Eileen, chides herself for having “fallen in love with a man whose basic thinking was so at odds with her own,” and she continues to believe that she loves him, even though through many of the ensuing pages it is quite clear that she doesn’t like him one bit. She’s hoping that “some restricting bonds inside him would break, he would sweep her into his arms, and she would reach to the warm, relaxed core of a human being named Larry Rhodes who had only been pretending he was made of wood.” It seems imprudent to wait around hoping that someone you dislike will suddenly change into someone you do like, but maybe that’s just me.

Also curiously, Eileen deliberately decides to do something that would piss off the good doctor: hang out with the Shearers at the art colony. There she meets another irritating ass, Nick Hamilton. Tall and handsome, he has a tendency to sport dandyish outfits such as a white Nehru jacket trimmed with gold braid, tightly fitted black Edwardian trousers, and gray suede boots. Spotting an unattached female with a steady paycheck, Nick proceeds to woo the gullible Eileen. Though she spends many ensuing evenings canoodling with Nick on a picnic blanket in the hills, she is still having Larry over for dinner on occasion despite the fact that she dreads his boring conversation, and again, she chastises herself that “this was the man she was supposedly in love with.” So when Nick announces to the entire colony that the pair are engaged—without having consulted Eileen—“it seemed right, somehow,” and she goes along with it. Really, not one thing in this woman’s love life makes any sense to me at all.

Eventually she tells off Larry, letting him know what a straitlaced dullard he is and that his condescending attitude toward the artists is appalling. Unexpectedly, Larry seems to take her words to heart and soon is inviting her to carnivals and otherwise trying to be less stultifying. She instantly warms to him, but decides that it’s “important to let him know that she liked him (loved him?) for himself, for what he was, and not only for what he was trying, in the hope of winning her approval, to be.” When she’s just spent the last five chapters sneering at how tiresome he is? Then, when Larry proposes, she accepts—now to quickly call it off with Nick before Larry finds out!

It’s just not to be, however, because a tapestry weaver whom Nick threw over for Eileen attempts suicide, and when Larry is called out to save the woman, Eileen’s double engagement comes to light. Eileen has written her letter of resignation to the doctor and is about to clear town when Mrs. Shearer comes to her in the middle of the night—there’s an outbreak of hepatitis at the art colony! Eileen rushes out to the encampment, leaving word with Larry’s love-sick secretary to let him know what’s going on. Needless to say, the jealous secretary fails to pass on the message, leaving Eileen to manage copious infectious bodily fluids alone for almost a day before the situation is revealed. Then the two are working side by side for almost a week to cure everyone, and when it’s over, Larry has a new-found appreciation for the hippies and the art they produce, and for Eileen as well, so she gets her man in the end, after all.

I never understood Eileen’s feelings for either Larry or Nick, so it’s difficult to find any satisfaction with this book. The artist colony and the hippies are a fun bit of cultural time-travel—their vocabularly in particular—and of course the title of this book is pretty superior, so there may be some reason to pick it up. But if you’re looking for a satisfying story, you will not find it in this art colony.

Washington Nurse

By Tracy Adams
(pseud. Sofi O’Bryan), ©1963

Nurse Amy Loring considered herself the luckiest girl in the world. She loved living in glamorous Washington, D.C., where her brother was a rising politician. And she was in love with—practically engaged to—young Doctor William Tabor. But then she met Congressman Bob Ainsley—handsome, dynamic and so ambitious that everyone knew he’d get whatever he wanted from life. And Bob Ainsley wanted Amy. Soon the young nurse found herself swept helplessly along by the passionate force of his personality. It was impossible for Amy to think of Bob as the ruthless opportunist others labeled him. After all, she reasoned, in Washingtonevery gesture was suspect, every act a matter of intrigue. But how well could she reason when she wasn’t really certain if what she felt for Bob was love or just romantic infatuation?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“Anyone tell you you’re not good for heart patients?”

“Will Big Brother be chaperoning or should I bring my wolf license?”

“There is always a reason for a cocktail party.”

“Obviously I am not dying of a broken heart because I can eat.”

“Gossip is to a hospital what sun is to a flower.”

REVIEW:

When we first meet nurse Amy Loring, she is trying to elude a herd of 20 reporters camped on the hospital steps, all hoping for news about Senator Matters, who is a patient. But “to expect twenty reporters from the Washington press corps to ignore a stunning redhead in blue nurse’s cape, trim white figure and legs that were whistle bait even in flat heeled white oxfords, would have been treason.” So she is pestered for news, which she happily provides: “My patient did have a B.M. yesterday,” she giggles. What a joker!

Amy loves Washingtonbecause “it had the feeling of a universe on the move. Even the thousands of secretaries who are lured to Washington each year stay on, despite the man shortage, despite the few and rare invitations to glittering events, because there is always the feeling that one is listening at a keyhole, is on the verge of putting a finger on the pulse of the world, is taking part in the shaping of history.” She happens to be the sister of Representative Hugh Loring of Indiana, so she is a little closer to the inside than some, particularly since they share an apartment. She’s dating resident William Tabor, but is a little unsatisfied: “Maybe that’s the whole trouble, he’s too dear and nice. I wish … well, what do I wish? That he was a brute, masterful?”

Cue Bob Ainsley, junior representative from Florida. He gives her a ride home from work, and she is mesmerized by him: “He had an aura about him of impatience and of forcefulness.” So soon she is dating him, too, and finding that “even the way he kept his hand lightly on hers now, looked at her in a deep, personal way, made her heart jump as though someone had pumped adrenalin into her.” His ambition and arrogance, discussed by everyone who knows him, make him a somewhat suspicious character, but he seems genuinely smitten with Amy.

Hugh comes down with hepatitis—must have been the canapés Amy served at the cocktail party—and has to take six months to recuperate, so his appointment to chair of the house finance committee seems almost certainly quashed. A newspaper columnist accuses Bob Ainsley of angling for the same spot, and of having bought his seat in Congress to boot! Bob, furious, calls up Amy and tells her he is going to dispute the charges on the house floor tomorrow and wants her to be there. “A man can’t afford not to fight,” he explains to her. “You can’t understand that. You’re a woman.”

Amy switches shifts to be present when Bob takes the floor and explains that he did indeed take money from his constituents—loans for his education, which he is repaying with interest. Furthermore, he says, he proposes that the chair of the finance committee be given to Hugh despite his illness with an interim appointment to someone else until Hugh is well enough to assume the role. He receives a standing ovation, of course, Amy herself “applauding long and hard, tears in her eyes.” Bob also makes another proposal, in private, to Amy: “I didn’t count on a redhead with soft lips and a way of eluding me that is driving me bats. I have work to do here, Amy, important work, and I can’t let my mind wander. I want you to marry me so I can get on with what I have to do.” The flattering dog.

It never rains but it pours: Dr. Bill gets a big grant that is going to enable him to set up the lab he’s always wanted. He proposes, and in what may well be a first in a VNRN, tells her that she has to keep working because he won’t have enough money to support them both. “I wouldn’t give it up anyway, Bill,” she answers. “I can’t. I spent too much time studying to be a nurse to give it up and sit around a house.” The author gets a lot of points from me for this scene alone. Unfortunately, Bob walks in just as Bill is kissing her fiercely, and Bill storms out. Now Bill is pressing her for an answer, and insists that she give it to him tonight, at dinner, after a cocktail party he has to attend to meet Senator Phelps and before his 10:00 appointment with someone else. The fact that her answer to his proposal is sandwiched between so many other appointments helps Amy determine her answer, but unfortunately she decides to give it to him over the phone. Then she grabs her bag and runs off to the airport to catch up with Bill, who is going home on holiday before he starts working on his lab. It’s actually a sweet ending, better than most.

This is the second of Tracy Adams’ books I’ve read, and I have to say that Washington Nurse is an improvement over Spotlight on Nurse Thorne. It’s well written, with occasional spots of humor and archaically interesting scenarios (such as when Amy realizes she has forgotten to set out cigarettes for the cocktail party and thinks this could be interpreted as a deliberate snub to the tobacco industry, or when another guest reacts in horror that Hugh isn’t married and has only his sister to act as hostess for him). If it is more than a bit obvious, well, there are worse crimes in a VNRN, and overall this is a generally entertaining book.