Nurse Craig
By Isabel Cabot (pseud. Isabel Capeto), ©1957
Cover illustration by Martin Koenig
Toni Craig, student nurse at Riveredge Hospital, wanted no part of Chad Barlow. He had the reputation of being a wolf; besides, her ideal was Dr. Matt Nicoll, a brilliant, ambitious young surgeon at the hospital. But Chad refused to be discouraged even after her engagement to Matt. And then Toni began hearing disturbing rumors about her fiancé. They were saying he would stop at nothing to get ahead. And so she faced a new heart-twisting question. Could she marry a successful doctor whose practices she couldn’t respect?
GRADE: B-
BEST QUOTES:
“Never make a pass at a girl with a lighted cigarette in her mouth.”
REVIEW:
If there is one thing that VNRN characters should know, it’s never let another woman “tend” to your boyfriend, no matter how briefly. Toni Craig is a nursing student in her first year of nursing school, and after the capping ceremony, which punctuates the probation period, class vixen Melita Fanning makes the grave error of pushing her boyfriend, Chad Barlow, on Toni until she can get rid of her parents. Toni’s friend Gail Sanders does her best to warn Toni of Chad’s low character, advising, “Don’t go behind any potted plants with him.” Toni needs no reminding, having met the young man in question at a previous social event in which he punched a police officer. At this meeting—under the sheltering bower of a large fern, as fate would have it—Chad rises to expectations by telling her that her uniform is “all wrong” because “it doesn’t do a thing for your figure. Now that little one-piece number that you wore at the beach party …” When she objects to this comment and to his constantly referring to her as “darling,” he drawls, “Honey, it doesn’t mean a thing. It’s like calling a guy ‘Mac.’ It saves straining your brain to remember names.” Chad is just drawing his arm around Toni when Gail appears—“I’m little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother,” she quips—and sends Toni off on an errand. Here we learn from various cryptic comments that Gail has had some encounter with Chad in the past that has hurt her deeply, but Chad apparently has no recollection of the incident. More to come later.
Five months later, Toni is working in the hospital and pining after Dr. Matt Nicoll; Ruth, the nurse’s aide who grew up with Matt, is something of an encouraging confidante, and Matt soon warms to Toni. He asks her out for coffee, and she accepts without hesitation. (When Ruth hears of their date, her smile seems a little forced, Toni thinks.) But who should show up at the diner? Chad Barlow, of course, and when Matt suddenly realizes he’s due back at the hospital, Chad offers to walk Toni home.
After Matt has departed, Chad reveals to Toni that he only barged in because Matt’s conversation (a full-volume and in-depth review of each of their patients, and confidentiality be damned) sounded so boring. Though she agrees to allow Chad to walk her home, she doesn’t speak to him the whole way—but when he calls the next day and asks her out, she accepts, curiously just after she has told him that for him she would never be free. She ends up having a great time, or so she says, as we don’t spend much time with them on their date. When she tells Gail about it, Gail seems disgusted, and that night goes missing. Toni phones Chad for help, and he delivers Gail, passed out drunk, safely home. So when he asks her out again, she feels obliged to go. During that date, he makes the obligatory pass/assault: “With a swiftness that stunned Toni, Chad had her in his arms. His lips were on hers, bruising and demanding. Toni had to fight to break his hold. She was breathing hard as she pushed away from him to the far side of the seat. Chad started to reach for her again, but involuntarily, Toni began to cry. ‘Cut it out. You’re not hurt,’ Chad said roughly.” The next day she blames herself, of course, for having suggested they stop to look at the ocean, which apparently is akin to asking for it.
To help a doctor friend, Dr. Gus Rogers, who has an unrequited crush on Gail, Toni agrees to double-date with the couple and Chad. To put her at ease, Chad declares that Toni need not fear him; the two will just have “a strictly buddy-to-buddy relationship” from now on. They start going out regularly, but just as friends. She’s still seeing Matt as well, but growing a bit more concerned about his worship of Dr. Heally, the pompous yet successful chief of surgery who is universally disliked among the nurses (always a bad sign, even today!) for never accepting personal responsibility and for throwing everyone else under the bus if something goes wrong with his patients. Then Gail and Gus, out on another date, are in a car accident, and Gus is badly injured. It comes out that Gail had been married seven years ago, but her husband had been killed in a car accident—and the other driver was Chad Barlow. Even though Chad had been “out carousing” and speeding to get home on time, he’s forgiven, because he’d crawled a mile with a broken leg to get help, and that though he’d been “a little wild in those days, he’s done his best to make it up.” We really haven’t seen him be anything but a little wild since we were introduced to him, however, so his easy absolution doesn’t really jibe.
Soon after, Matt proposes to Toni, who is giddy with joy, though Gail doesn’t approve. Matt’s busy sucking up to Dr. Heally, though, so Toni keeps on with her buddy dates with Chad. The other nurses are starting to criticize Matt, noting that he’s the first one to laugh at Dr. Heally’s jokes: Even if Matt is a smart and excellent surgeon, his use of flattery of Dr. Heally to win a position as the chief’s main assistant is considered a very serious offense. Then there’s more trouble in paradise: Matt’s mother becomes very ill and is hospitalized for several weeks. This drains Matt’s father’s bank account of the money he was going to lend Matt to start his own practice. Matt is very upset—not about his mother, but about this setback in his plans. Then he ditches Toni for the big Winter Festival parties and insists that she go with Chad instead, and on a scavenger hunt the two are locked in an abandoned ice house for most of a night, during which Chad grabs her and kisses her hard again. Matt’s not too pleased to hear about this, and also not too pleased about his lack of funds, and hers too: “It wouldn’t hurt any if you had a little money of your own,” he says, perhaps thinking of his old friend Ruth, who has recently inherited a bundle of money and left her job as a nurse’s aide to become a very successful businesswoman, tripling her fortune in a matter of months.
The ending is abrupt, dumb, and completely what you would expect, unfortunately. While this book is not without its charms—Gail is the perfect wise-cracking sidekick, and Melita and Ruth were also enjoyable characters—but the men in the book are not so rewarding. Chad Barlow proves again and again to be an ass, so Toni’s attraction to him is puzzling, and Matt’s transformation from hero to “twenty-carat heel” is also inexplicable. Isabel Cabot’s prior offerings, Private Duty Nurse and Island Nurse, are also fairly mediocre—more so Private Duty Nurse, which is also quite rife with scenes of sexual assault cum romance. It’s positively amazing that violence toward women could have been so casually accepted—even blamed on the victims—and that these scenes of humiliation and degradation are apparently meant to be titillating. But I guess we need look no further than the enormous success of Fifty Shades of Grey to realize that maybe we haven’t come so far, after all.
Candy Frost, Emergency Nurse
By Ethel Hamill,pseud. Jean Francis Webb III, ©1952
Attractive, red-haired, green-eyed Candy Frost had set an almost impossible task for herself. Her prescription was to work hard at her mountain nursing post … and never to love again. That was surely the antidote to the deep wound left by Bruce three months before, when she had given up her nursing to marry him and he had jilted her in a strange city.
GRADE: C+
BEST QUOTES:
“Frost, dear, was that a dreamy quiver to your mouth, just then?”
“I’m just a hard-bitten old maid with a face like a mud fence, so what would I know about romance?”
“You look cuter than ever in that silly cap.”
“To prove to herself how sensible she was, Candy sat primly on the edge of her chair and chewed each mouthful of whatever it was she was eating the prescribed number of times.”
“We’ll have a proper date and I’ll behave like a saint in Levi’s and won’t mention loving you once.”
“You’re talking like a half-baked Florence Nightingale. I could set those lines to music.”
REVIEW:
Candy (and if this nickname is not unfortunate enough, it’s actually a contraction of her given name, Candida, which is, of course, a genus of yeasts) is not an emergency nurse, really. She is a rural nurse, and as such attends to any health issues at the log-cabin clinic, including emergencies. This means she will, at a moment’s notice, slip out of her nylon dress and into riding breeches, toss her emergency kit over her shoulder, and gallop to the scene on her black mare Rocket, the roads being too undependable for vehicular traffic. She had been working at the clinic for a while when she tumbled for an artist who had set up a studio on the mountain, and had left with him for the big city to marry. But as they had checked in to their hotel, a long-lost flame of Bruce’s crossed the lobby, and when Candy went upstairs to change into her wedding garb, he went out the front door with his ex, leaving her with a dear-Candy letter (and apparently the bill).
Now she is returning to her mountain home in disgrace, but en route experiences an emergency of her own when the bus she is riding on goes off the road and rolls into a ditch. Candy is not injured, probably because the handsome young man sitting next to her flings his strong arms around her to protect her from harm. That’s all it takes for Skip Amherst to fall madly in love with Candy. “Something went zzzing!inside you, just as it did with me,” says the romantic poet. But she’s vowed never to love again, so she tells Skip in no uncertain terms that she wants nothing to do with him. “It’s bad manners to turn down a proposal before the fellow makes it,” he answers. “Gives a sort of impression of overconfidence.”
Meanwhile, there’s a group of resident terrorists that goes around beating the locals and burning down their houses if they try to interfere with the lucrative moonshine business. They are called—and resist the urge to scream—the Pillow Heads, because they wear pillowcases when they’re out for their nightly jaunts. Who could they be, and how can they be stopped? The upside is that they do give the clinic a lot of business, and reason for Candy to go galloping around the mountain on horseback rescue missions, since the clinic doctor, Blanche Thomas, is apparently unfit for the saddle.
When she’s not out and about, Candy takes steps to protect herself from Skip. She has Dr. Blanche write into her contract that she will forfeit a year’s pay if she marries within a year. That will keep her safe! Though why anyone would want to get married less than a year after meeting a new man is a bit of a puzzle to me, and I’m also not certain how a contractual clause against marrying keeps one safe from hot men—you don’t have to buy the cow, after all. Skip is not really convinced, either. “No scrap of paper can keep us apart, Candy, darling,” he tells her. “The only paper that has any real bearing on your future is the wedding license we’re going to take out together.” And he says that she’s overconfident.
Skip has been taken in by the Orr family, whose own son, Ad, drowned in a flash flood that he should have known better than to be caught in. The Orrs have also boarded the new schoolmarm, Lulu Mae, who is a tarty thing with an eye for Skip. Soon gossip is going around town that Skip and Lulu Mae are an item, and Candy finds that she is jealous! She spies on Skip at a dance that she has refused to attend with him and sees him kiss Lulu Mae, and then Mrs. Orr reluctantly tells Candy that she heard him talking to Lulu Mae, saying he’d picked her up on the bus, and that “a girl that’s been tagged with a scandal like that ought to be easy to get.” Now she’s jealous and mad! And when Candy’s old beau, Wayne, proposes, she naturally accepts. So much for that contract.
Candy and Wayne make plans to meet in town to get married, but Skip gets wind of it and kidnaps Candy, literally carrying her off “with a contemptuous ease which suggested he was hefting a not very valuable sack of feathers” when he catches up with her waiting for the bus to town, and I’m impressed at how this sentence implies the sexiness not only of being physically assaulted, but simultaneously of Candy’s dainty physique. And Skip is only getting warmed up. He tells her, “I ought to take you over my knee and spank you right here and now,” before driving her off to a deserted cabin in the woods. “Do you remember saying I couldn’t make you do what I wanted you to do? Rash remark!” he says. When she says she knows that he is carrying on with Lulu Mae, he denies it, but says, “What of it? You’d still be mine—and only mine. And I wouldn’t kiss you again if you came crawling across this room to me on your knees. And you might do exactly that, you know.” His prediction is close to right—when he storms toward her, looking as if he’s going to beat her, she collapses in tears into his arms, but he “flung her from him” and crashes out of the cabin, guarding the door to keep her from escaping until the bus has gone. Candy “settled down on the hard bench to wait. He was master here.” It’s a monstrous scene in so many ways, rendering Skip completely detestable. But that’s never bothered a VNRN heroine before, and it certainly doesn’t slow Candy’s pulse, either.
After this, all the back stories fall into place. There’s a complex scheme that, when brought into the open, explains Skip’s kissing Lulu Mae, the remark Mrs. Orr overheard and relayed to Candy, who the Pillow Heads are, Ad Orr’s untimely death, and the Pillow Heads’ raid on the Orr farm. All this might leave you gasping for air, but Jean Webb has a real flair for plotting, so the entire story seems completely plausible, and it’s also unfolded in such a way as to be not indigestible. Furthermore, his writing is still among the genre’s best. We get tasty morsels like, “The hinged door flattened with a faint pneumanic gasp,” and, “The late moon still swam above them, but her reign was ending.” I am a devoted fan of Mr. Webb’s, who has garnered an A- average in the three other books of his that I have read so far (Aloha Nurse, A Nurse Comes Home, and A Nurse for Galleon Key). Unfortunately, Candy Frost, Emergency Nurse does not meet the standards set by the others: It is short on camp, the hero is utterly despicable, and the heroine is a bit of a moron. Even if Skip had been a stand-up guy, this book doesn’t have much else to recommend it. So while anything Jean Webb writes is worth reading, Candy is not his most delicious.
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