Nurse with a Past
By Diane Frazer (pseud. Dorothy Fletcher), ©1964
Cover illustration by Harry Bennett
“Let’s leave Nancy
“Shy!” Midge shrieked. “Now I’ve heard everything. Her Highness shy! Why, she’s conceited and snobbish. Apparently we’re not good enough for her.”
“Oh, Midge, you don’t even mean that,” Minerva protested. “She’s a little bit nuts about meddcin, as she calls it. She really wanted to hang out a shingle herself.”
“Oh, Midge, you don’t even mean that,” Minerva protested. “She’s a little bit nuts about meddcin, as she calls it. She really wanted to hang out a shingle herself.”
“Stop it,” Midge answered, “we’ve all heard that sob story. If you ask me, it’s just a front. She doesn’t give a damn about a career. What she really wants is a man with money. But real money. If she finds one, you’ll see how quickly she forgets about doctors and nurses!”
GRADE: A-
BEST QUOTES:
“ ‘You make me want to cry,’ Ralph said. ‘What a hideous waste! A girl with legs like yours reading that kind of stuff.’ ”
“It wasn’t a bad place to work, the lab. Plenty of quiet corners for confabs with cute nurses.”
“She had gone out with him twice, but one time didn’t really count because they had gone to a movie she had wanted to see, a movie called The Savage Eye, which left him shaky and unfit for normal pursuits afterward.”
“If you want to behave like a doctor, read Playboy, or something like that.”
“Who wants to leave the hospital, with nurses like you around?”
“Margaret Wilkerson had come to nursing through a simple process of elimination, more or less as young men of small talent decide to take up business administration in college instead of the humanities.”
REVIEW:
Nancy L. Woodward, RN, is 22 and has a reputation of being a bit of a snob. That’s because, well, she sort of is. Right there in the opening paragraph, she’s enjoying, and not just because it tastes so good, a slice of coconut cream pie, which, “she thought with some satisfaction, not all of her nurse colleagues could afford to indulge in.” Nancy had really wanted to be a doctor, but hadn’t been able to afford it, so had “settled for nursing as second best,” but once in, she now views nursing as “an almost holy vocation.” This loss and the fact that it was lack of money that caused it has made her a bit, shall we say, practical, and dedicated “to the idea of not wasting time with young men like Ralph Bleeker who, though decent and pleasant enough, was neither ambitious nor dedicated and who therefore would not go very far.”
This young man Ralph is a lowly lab technician. “You had to take in stride that Nancy Nancy
The thing is, early in the book, she was asked to witness a new will—Orrin Chandler, aged wealthy cardiac patient, had rewritten his will after receiving a fatal diagnosis, leaving every bit of his fortune to his son, art career notwithstanding. She is eventually reminded of this incident, which she had forgotten—and responds by breaking up with Dick out of concern that he would believe that she was only interested in his money.
I need tell you not one thing more about the plot, because you well know how it ends. Its predictability, however, does not detract one whit from the complete pleasure. Diane Frazer is a hit-or-miss author, and has certainly given us a number of dogs (see Date with Danger?), but when she’s on, she has a wonderful ability to paint a scene or a character. In this book she is in top form, and her dialogue is amusing and snappy, right out of a Hepburn-Tracy movie. Her erratic output does make you wonder what makes a great writer produce a bad book (short on the rent?), but in Nurse with a Past, you are completely safe.
Nurse Greer
By Joan Garrison, ©1954Pretty young Nurse Mary Greer suddenly found herself the center of a shocking scandal that brought a bitter attack on her professional integrity, an end to her engagement to Paul Tate and threatened Paul’s chances of being the next mayor of the town of Port West. When wealthy old Mr. Clarke left his fortune to the nursing home where Mary worked he disinherited a conniving niece and a weakling nephew who weren’t about to let their uncle’s riches slip through their fingers. Their charges of “undue influence” against Mary and the home brought Nurse Greer’s fighting spirit to the fore. But they also brought pressures from Paul who urged Mary to compromise her principles and avoid any further unpleasantness. After all, Paul was running for office and he valued public opinion, perhaps even more than truth. Truth mattered to Mary, mattered more than anything. And so he rolled up her sleeves and prepared to fight it out—alone, if necessary. She found a valiant ally in Bill Underwood, a newspaper man with an eye for a good story, an innate respect for truth and, as it turned out, a grade A case on Nurse Greer.
GRADE: A-
BEST QUOTES:
“Know any girls, Pop? She can be old or young, fat or lean, just as long as she can cook and wash socks properly and keep a fellow’s shoes in order.”
“Girls kill. You think they don’t, Son. You walk up the aisle with them and you smell the orange blossoms and you see ’em in white and you say to yourself, ‘Say! This is pretty durn good.’ Only thing is, they kill. You start supporting ’em, Son. And it goes on year after year. And you grow old. And you tucker out, and the first thing you know you’re dead, and there they are spending the insurance they made you buy.”
“She was very attractive. He liked the feathery arrangement of her auburn hair, the animation of her sparkling hazel eyes. He liked the tan gabardine suit she wore. He liked her figure. His intensely male nature was charmed, and then she smiled coolly and she became merely another woman to him.”
“ ‘That will be fine, Bill. Just toot your horn and I’ll come scampering.’ Really, she thought later, she’d sounded positively eager and desperate! Her mother, of course agreed. ‘Oh, fine,’ she exclaimed in Mary’s bedroom. ‘A man crooks a finger and you go running. Don’t you remember any of the things I’ve taught you? A decent, maidenly reserve! One time in ten, perhaps, a pleasant yes, but only if the fellow has worked hard for it, and only with the sweet air of making a very kind and generous concession.’ ”
“In another age, he thought, she’d have made a fine pirate.”
“You may have my permission to seize your dreadful instruments and have at my poor, helpless body.”
“Lord love men, she thought, they were strange.”
“I was so sure that if I could just dress decently I’d make a nice marriage.”
REVIEW:
Nowhere will you find more terminally ill wealthy people than in nurse novels, and Mary Greer is yet another kind, generous nurse benefitting from a last-minute discussion with an attorney. It’s curious that the author bothered to make her a legatee at all, however, since Mary’s “inheritance” is the promise of a job at the nursing home where she currently works—indeed, it is pointed out by several people throughout the book that since she already has what the will is promising her, she isn’t really benefitting at all. But the nursing home where she works will receive enough money to build and run another building where poor elderly people can take up residence, and it is for this ideal that Mary takes up her sword when dear dead Mr. Clarke’s scoundrel relatives, niece and nephew Harriet and Frank Clarke, threaten a lawsuit to block the will unless the nursing home agrees to give them half the estate.
Enter Paul Tate, Mary’s fiancé, who is running for Mayor of Port West. He’s behind in the polls, and tells Mary that the scandal that a lawsuit against her would bring will damage his campaign, and he asks her to settle. She, of course, is appalled that he would sell out the old folks so quickly, and their engagement comes to an abrupt end when she goes to the local newspaper and gives them a statement to that effect. But all is not lost for Mary’s love life; in the course of breaking off publicly with Paul, Mary meets Bill Underwood, the newspaper’s editor, and they soon start dating. She admires his dogged pursuit of the truth, and his restraint in not publishing everything he knows, and that he stands by her when she has her day in court. There she pulls out her trump card, a letter written to her by the late Mr. Clarke, which she reads aloud—up to a point, where she stops and asks Harriet Clarke if she should continue, it being clear that Mr. Clarke is about to reveal a certain breach of ethics on his niece’s part. Harriet instantly decides to drop the suit, and soon the architects are breaking ground on the new nursing home building.
Now Paul is back again, his interest in Mary rising with his numbers in the polls. Mary agrees to go on a picnic with him, but she is not as wild about him as she used to be. We’re not, either; he has a penchant for saying things like, “Up and at ’em, woman. History says it’s women who get the meals on the tables for mighty men.” But Bill has stopped calling Mary, so she reluctantly agrees to a few evenings with Paul. In the interim, Paul has found a discrepancy in the town’s accounting—$100,000 has gone missing. He’s not elaborating on the details, just saying that it’s up to the present mayor to explain. The mayor is saying that he never took any money and can’t explain the discrepancy, and it’s starting to look like Paul might actually win the election, after all. He asks Mary to marry him again, but she’s not biting. “What would happen if once again he had to choose between that love he talked of so glibly, and the political success he seemed to be on the verge of scoring?” Take a wild guess, honey.
But she’s saved from actually answering the question by the telephone: It’s the mayor, inviting her to City Hall for an important meeting. It turns out that Harriet Clarke is threatening to reveal that she made a $500 contribution to Paul’s campaign in exchange for his attempt to persuade Mary to split the estate with her. Harriet will not talk if Mary will give Harriet the letter Mr. Clarke wrote, thereby eliminating any evidence against Harriet. Mary instantly refuses to hand over the letter, choosing honesty over protecting Paul’s campaign. So Harriet tells Bill that the missing money is really just an error of accounting—the money isn’t really gone, it’s just in the wrong account. When Bill prints this in the paper, Paul is forced to withdraw from the race. He then tries to salvage the other thing he’s lost, his relationship with Mary, but she tells him that she thinks he was cheap to tarnish the mayor’s reputation when he knew that the mayor hadn’t stolen any money, that he was fickle to dump her when he thought it would hurt his prospects. And she conveniently decides that she never really loved him in the first place. I hate that; the plot device that insists that what she felt for the man she doesn’t choose wasn’t real love.
This book is better than most nurse novels. It has an actual theme—honesty vs. convenience—and even works hard to present Paul’s case as being an acceptable course of action, suggesting that Paul may have made a better mayor than the incumbent, and that he had chosen the best course of action, despite its moral dubiousness, to achieve that grand—and good—goal. It offers some amusing and sparkling writing, a very spirited appreciation for nursing as a professional calling, and even a very touching section about an elderly patient of Mary’s who dies of cancer. The characters are drawn well, if perhaps a bit too lightly: I admired Mary’s spine, but wished she’d smacked Paul’s face when he ordered her to set the table; I loved bad-girl Harriet, but wished she’d showed more claws. The ending was especially nice, a rarity in these formulaic novels. Joan Garrison only wrote one other nurse novel that I could find, Rehabilitation Nurse, but after Nurse Greer I will pick up that book with high hopes.
Palm Beach Nurse
By Peggy Gaddis,©1953Julia Blake was not only a very good nurse and an extremely attractive woman but, most important, people trusted and confided in her. And so she knew:
Why Joseph Smith, her patient and a promising violinist, was brutally beaten but not quite murdered
Why Alice Jerome, who was not only rich but kind, brought Joseph to America from his native Italy
Why Isobel Cartwright, the young, beautiful heir to Miss Jerome’s fortune pretended to be in love with Joseph
And it was certainly because of her warmth and sincerity that Kent Harper, Miss Jerome’s lawyer and advisor, was deeply in love with Julia, but sometimes not as attentive as she would have liked. Julia finds her job in Palm Beach the most exciting one she has ever had … one which combines the challenge of nursing with mystery and romance.
GRADE: B+
BEST QUOTES:
“Julia’s crisp white uniform was very becoming, and the perky cap that crowned her crisp, shining hair was tilted at exactly the correct angle for a smart, efficient and very pretty registered nurse.”
GRADE: B+
BEST QUOTES:
“Julia’s crisp white uniform was very becoming, and the perky cap that crowned her crisp, shining hair was tilted at exactly the correct angle for a smart, efficient and very pretty registered nurse.”
“As much as she could see of his face, beneath the bandages about his head, she liked.”
“No fancy dress designer in the world had ever been able to dream up a costume as becoming as a nurse’s uniform.”
“It always amuses me that men are so sure that the sole purpose of a girl’s life is to find some hapless male to pay her bills and keep a roof over her head. No matter what her profession is, or how happy she may be in it, or how successful, she’s supposed to be only ‘marking time’ until a man she can snare comes along.”
“I yearn to turn her across my knee with the business end of a slipper in my strong right hand!”
“The three things that make life worth living are, first of all, someone to love; something to hope for; and last but terribly important, something to do.”
“It’s the sort of life I want, too. A small white house, a garden, a tree or two, a sand-box for the kids. Me with a job, coming home late in the afternoon to find you waiting for me at the gate.”
REVIEW:
Julia Blake has traveled to Palm Beach in the customary VNRN fashion: One of her patients in her Atlanta hospital needed a nurse to accompany her home and stay with her, and Julia took the job. But that patient is well now, so she accepted an assignment as a special at the hospital—“very, very special indeed, if I may say so,” says the patient’s doctor when he sees her—a young man who was beaten and is now in a coma. On her first day, she walks into the patient’s room to find three people there, despite the no visitors sign posted on the door. So she throws them out—and then discovers that the older woman is Alice Jerome, one of the hospital’s major benefactors.
Miss Jerome has asked to see Julia at her home, and Julia is obliged to put her head in the lion’s mouth—but when she arrives at Miss Jerome’s beachfront villa, Miss Jerome doesn’t decapitate her, she hires Julia to care for the patient when he is well enough to return to Miss Jerome’s home, and installs her in the large suite upstairs with views of the ocean. The patient—an Italian named, strangely, Joseph Smith—is a violinist whom Miss Julia brought home with her from the Continent last year, and she is intent on training him to become a world-class musician, apparently purely out of the goodness of her heart.
Also out of the goodness of her heart, Miss Jerome has raised Isobel Cartwright from infancy, giving the girl everything she wants. Unfortunately, Isobel has not responded with the same gratitude that Joseph shows, and instead displays her true colors by marching into Julia’s room without knocking and telling Julia, “You are to leave my men alone.” This means not just Joseph but also Kent Harper, Miss Jerome’s 30-year-old attorney, who was in the party that Julia ejected from Joseph’s hospital room. Isobel goes on to explain to Julia that she really has a thing for Kent, but is engaged to Joseph on the off-chance that Miss Jerome decides to leave him a lot of money when she dies—which is bound to be soon, because she’s really old and besides, this is a Peggy Gaddis VNRN—so she will have claim to it, since all that money rightfully belongs to her.
Kent, however, has other ideas, which occur to him almost immediately upon clapping eyes on the beautiful Julia in her breathtaking nylon uniform. He takes her out on dates and kisses her—then abruptly stops asking her out, telling her that he loves her and wants to marry her, but he can’t see her for now: “Wait until I can explain a lot of things that you are going to feel need explanations. Will you trust me, darling?” This is not the only mystery Julia grapples with, but the only one she is unsuccessful at solving. The two other main mysteries in this book, i.e. why Miss Jerome is so devoted to Joseph, and why was Joseph beaten up, are soon explained away, when the person who knows the answer decides out of the blue to unburden themselves to Julia. She should have considered a career as a police detective. But she shouldn’t feel too badly about the one answer that got away, as in fact the reader never gets any explanation for this, either.
Joseph, it turns out, is the grandson of a man whom Miss Jerome fell in love with as a young girl, but since the man was merely a violin teacher, and Italian to boot, her family not only rejected the match but drove the man out of the United States. Miss Jerome had tracked down the young Joseph, the last remaining descendent of her true love, and ensconced him at her house, but her attentions to him are ironically his undoing, as they brought him to the notice of an Italian syndicate. His attackers are desperately trying to bring an Italian woman named Vera into the United States. They believe that if Joseph tells Miss Jerome he wants to marry Vera, Miss Jerome, with her money and power, will get Vera into the states without an extensive background check, which would apparently reveal Vera as a bad seed. But Joseph, who cannot betray Miss Jerome, refuses to do this. Unfortunately, he has a weak spot: He’s afraid that the gang will discover that he’s in love with this woman in Italy, Lucia, and that the gang will harm her in some way.
It’s a lot of back story, but eventually we get some action: One night, Julia hears a noise from Joseph’s room, and enters to see a man bending over Joseph with a knife. She screams, the man runs off, and the entire house turns up in his bedroom. She’s a bit embarrassed that all she could manage in this moment of crisis was a shriek: “What a terrible way for a nurse to behave,” she says. When she tells everyone what she saw, Joseph looks them all in the eye and tells them that Julia was dreaming and that there was no man. Finally she gets the hint and agrees she was dreaming, though Kent isn’t buying it. He posts a guard outside Joseph’s windows—and Julia’s, lest the man she saw come back for her, too—but one night Joseph is able to give the guards the slip and escape the house. His body is found on the beach the next morning—and his suicide note is on his pillow, and a scrap of paper with Lucia’s name and address on it is under Julia’s pillow.
His reason for doing himself in, apparently, is to prevent the bad guys from finding Lucia, which is what Julia tells Miss Jerome in an attempt to console her when Joseph’s death leaves her prostrate with grief. Julia wants to track down Lucia in Italy to help her—what this help might be remains unclear—but if she goes racing off to Italy, the bad guys will follow her and find Lucia, and maybe wreak some vengeance. She needs a cover, and what better excuse for her to go to Italy, Miss Jerome decides, than to go on a honeymoon? So two days later, Julia finds herself marrying Kent in Miss Jerome’s bedroom. Isobel is late for the ceremony, and shows up just as the happy bride and groom are kissing—and stomps up to Julia and slaps her to the ground. This is just too much for Miss Jerome, who promptly expires.
But Miss Jerome has one last secret—and you’ll never guess what’s coming—Isobel has been written out of the will, and the estate (after generous legacies to the devoted staff) is to be divided between Kent and Julia. In the meantime, Kent and Julia spend a lot of time discussing, in public places and with numerous people, their top secret mission to find Lucia and prevent the bad guys from discovering her as well. Though we never actually find out how that goes, my guess is that Lucia is doomed.
On the whole, this was a fun and enjoyable book. There is a good amount of camp, and the characters, though straight out of the usual Peggy Gaddis playbook, are entertaining, and for once the ungrateful young rich girl doesn’t see the light, so that was something new. Julia is feisty, competent, and likable, though I was disappointed by her abrupt change in attitude once she has a ring on her finger. She early on declares that she would never give up her job for a man—and after she and Kent marry, they decide she will keep working “until the babies start coming, anyway”—but all the independent spirit she possesses at the beginning of the book is tossed away with the wedding bouquet and she says, “Honestly, Kent, it’s going to be your job to make important decisions. I’d like anything that you’d like. It’s always going to be like that.” After Kent and Julia are married, the book spends about 30 pages treading water as everyone waits for the will to be read, squandering the liveliness it’s had up to this point and slowly fizzling out. It doesn’t pay to look too hard at some of the details of the book—would the mob think that the best way to get Vera into the U.S. is to have Joseph marry her? would Joseph really leave Lucia’s address behind if he’s killing himself to protect her?—but this is, after all, just a silly nurse novel, and in the end it’s still better than most.
Copyright © C-buk2016
