Runaway Nurse
By Ethel Hamill (pseud. Jean Francis Webb III), ©1955
For Nurse Jennifer Stowell, flight seemed the only solution. After the scandal involving her with the head of the Octagon Hospital , Jenny fled to the peaceful beaches of Hawaii Waikiki , handsome Dr. Brian Craig fell in love with Jenny. And Jenny, knowing all too well the damage that malicious gossip can do to the career of a promising young doctor, had to run again—this time from the arms of the man she loved.
GRADE: A-
BEST QUOTES:
“I don’t want to be a lady, Aunt Alma. I want to be an artist.”
“Doctors are just men. Ask the girl who owns one.”
“If you absolutely must, you may confess later on that what really sends you is not my ardent kisses but assisting at a long session of episkeletal surgery.”
“Sit here and contemplate the rewards of sin. I’ll case the joint.”
REVIEW:
There are a few VNRN authors who give me a reason to get out of bed in the morning, and Jean Francis Webb III is one of them. Snappy writing, excellent plotting, great characters—Webb is a master, and I am grateful he chose to bestow a few gems to the VNRN genre.
When we first meet Jennifer Stowell, she has more than a little back story: She’s coming home to New York after running off to Hawaii for an extended vacation, escaping a scandal at home that had placed her in the arms of a prominent surgeon in his apartment after midnight, which had been captured on film by newspaper reporters and the doctor’s wife. While on that vacation, she had gotten chummy with Dr. Brian Craig—so chummy that the doctor had actually proposed marriage. But since she had told him nothing of her career or her shame, she’d felt obliged to leave him an insulting note and flee the islands, because being associated with her would have ruined his career, too.
But darned the guy, he follows her home and insists that she loves him and must marry him. She alternates between clinging tightly to him one minute and then to her belief that his association with her would ruin him, and does her best to fight him off with one lie after another, including the story that she actually was involved with Dr. Phil Grocer, and that they are planning on getting married when the dust has settled on his divorce.
You know that eventually the truth will out, as does the real story of how and why it was that Jennifer was lured to Dr. Grocer’s apartment, which not even Jennifer knows. In the intervening pages, Jennifer’s incessant insistence that she cannot marry Brian—as well as Brian’s almost-stalkerlike determination that she must—would be far more than the slight annoyance they are in the hands of the masterful Webb. The mystery, once revealed, is not simplistic or stupid, as some secrets are (see Nurse of the North Woods), but it’s not so complicated as to be unintelligible. In the meantime, the writing is smart (“This isn’t a place for tender confidences”) and even, dare I say, poetic (“A construction crew alongside the tracks were stripped to underwear above their belts, and their beef and muscle had begun to turn golden in prophecy of summer’s mahogany stain”). The characters are vivid and thoroughly enjoyable (well, Jennifer’s constant worrying does drag her down a bit), especially Brian, who has a tendency toward the bon mot, and the peripheral femme fatale character, the doctor’s publicist. The only thing that mars this story is not even the writer’s fault: Jennifer’s conviction that her disgrace will ruin Brian’s life just does not translate to modern times and so feels quite silly, especially since the book’s central problem hinges on it. Beyond that, however, this book is a delightful romp, and further cements Mr. Webb’s standing as one of the top five nurse novelists of all time.
Nurse of the North Woods
By Ellen Randolph, ©1967“I never knew how much you meant to me,” said Dr. Ralph Parton quietly. Nurse Nancy felt a glow of pleasure at his words, yet she tried not to let it show. She knew it wouldn’t take much to make Ralph openly declare his love for her. Then what would she do? Tell him the truth? She wasn’t sure she had the courage.
GRADE: B-
BEST QUOTES:
“You’re a pretty girl. Much too pretty for a nursing supervisor. I thought they were always old maids with thick glasses.”
REVIEW:
Nurse Nancy Rusk has been working in a small clinic about 40 miles from Fredericton , New Brunswick Montreal
The man she has her eye on, Dr. Ralph Parton, likes her too, but she’s afraid to get involved with him because of her secret, of course, but also because of his sister Isobel. A stereotypical old maid at 42—right down to the gray tweed suit of mannish cut, flat-heeled brown walking shoes, and dour expression on the wrinkled and liver-spotted face—42 lying practically at death’s door—Isobel guards Ralph jealously, and Nancy is afraid that the ugly but intelligent woman will uncover and expose her infamous secret. Yet she doesn’t seem to resist all that much when Ralph offers to take her to dinner or on a drive alone, and certainly not when he kisses her in chapter three.
On the side, though, Nancy Nancy ’s “friend” in Montreal , Nancy
After she and Ralph power through a couple of serious medical emergencies, they’re relaxing in his office in the middle of the night when she finally tells all: There had been a scandal involving a car accident in which she was falsely convicted, but the real problem is that her then-boyfriend, the actual culprit who had gotten off by blaming her, has been pursuing her relentlessly ever since; he’d ended by making a scene at the Montreal hospital where she was working and shouting that he would kill her if she didn’t come back to him, forcing her to quit and go on the run. Now that she’s finally confessed, though, all her problems are resolved in one fell smooch. Given the public awareness of the issue of abuse in the current day, it’s hard for the reader to dispose of Nancy
Call Dr. Margaret
By Ray Dorien, ©1961Dr. Margaret had faltered only once in her determination to follow her medical career, but her radiant dream of marriage and motherhood had been changed, and her character with it, in a moment of tragic discovery. She imagined that this private past was unknown, that she could go on to her work at St. Antholin’s Hospital, but there she met the one man who had unknowingly stumbled on her secret.
GRADE: B+
BEST QUOTES:
“I do disapprove of you driving on Sunday. Oh, I know you pride yourself on being free and independent, but I’m not so sure that it’s good for girls.”
“If you don’t drive away this instant, I shall eat you. You look so delicious.”
“She did not want to be a woman, longing for love. She wanted to be doctor only.”
REVIEW:
Dr. Margaret Addam is a fresh young attending about to start her first job at St. Antholin’s Hospital in London when she makes the serious error of taking a two-week holiday in Brittany. There she encounters suave architect Amyas Burdett, and that really is his name. She tumbles for him, of course, and agrees to meet him back in England. She is, in fact, to see him en route to her new job. Picking him up at a train station, she finds him to be a cooler, more remote individual than the ardent suitor he had been in France. He directs her to a hidden cottage, where the pair has a lovely picnic. After washing up the dishes, he passionately urges her to stay the night with him. She agrees, the scandalous tart, and is about to fetch her suitcase when her necklace breaks, and the beads fly everywhere. Searching the floor, she finds all but one. She ties up the beads and has just stepped out onto the verandah to retrieve her nightie from her car when a young woman is heard letting herself in the front door, conveniently located on the other side of the house away from the driveway, and asking Amyas, “Darling, aren’t you pleased to see your wife?”
Oh, the shame! Margaret climbs into her car and allows it to roll down the steep driveway before starting the engine and peeling out onto the main road, almost running into another car in the process. She pulls over a mile down the road to weep over the “tremendous mistake in the most important happening of her life,” and the man driving the near-miss vehicle stops also, to ask if she is all right. She brushes him off and he leaves her to her ignominy, never to be seen again … until she arrives at St. Antholin’s and finds he is Dr. Jack Fanning, with whom she will be working closely! And he is also the childhood friend of Veronica Burdett, the almost-deceived wife of treacherous Amyas!
Margaret keeps her identity a secret by always wearing her hair up instead of loose around her shoulders as she had that day, which proves surprisingly successful as a disguise, though not as a style; Dr. Fanning chides “the very severe way you do your pretty hair. What do you think you are, ballerina or relic of the fight for women’s rights?” Ouch! She also assumes a brisk and cold personality, having decided that her two-week fling with Amyas is all the love she will ever know, that “one side of her life was closed to her.” It’s a ridiculous position to take, made all the more so by the fact that this is a romance novel and any second-grader will be able to predict what happens over the course of the book. Dr. Fanning isn’t impressed with this demeanor, either, and tells her that it’s just as important to listen to a patient’s stories, rambling though they may be, as it is to listen to their hearts, so the patients will bond with and trust their doctors, and adhere to their treatment plans (as valuable a lesson today as it was when this book was written more than 50 years ago). “If you can’t give something more, you’ll never be any good as a doctor, or maybe as a woman either,” Dr. Fanning tells her, and suggests that she get out more. Initially furious at his criticism, Margaret nonetheless starts socializing with the other new doctors, even dating Jack Fanning more and more frequently, and becoming a kinder, gentler person and doctor in the process.
In the meantime, Amyas’ wife Veronica has found the bead that Margaret dropped at the love nest and given it to her old friend Jack Fanning, telling him she is concerned that Amyas is unfaithful. And Margaret gives the remaining beads to a young nurse friend, who restrings them and wears them to a concert. Jack soon spies Nurse Jones wearing them, but also learns that Margaret had been in Brittany at the same time as Amyas, and begins to suspect Margaret, “his Margaret,” as he now thinks of her, of an affair. Margaret, meanwhile, coming increasingly to love Jack, is planning to tell him “the innocent, guilty-seeming story, and then she would be free of it forever.” But wouldn’t you know it, Jack learns that Margaret gave the beads to the nurse and immediately severs all ties with Margaret. When he tells her it is over between them, he doesn’t bother to ask her for an explanation, so naturally she declines to give him one, saying instead, “I thought if people loved each other, there could be trust and some understanding.” I’m not crazy about this sort of plot twist, as I find it frustrating and a bit facile, but we’re only 12 pages from the end, so it’s short—and too easy—work for Margaret to go home for Christmas only to return and find Jack humbly apologetic, having had an offstage discussion with Amyas and learned the whole truth.
The entire premise of the book—Margaret’s devastating, potentially career- and romance-ending shame of having not slept with a married man—is more than a little silly from our vantage point a half-century after the book was written. It would have made for a more interesting story if she actually hadslept with Amyas, and given a legitimate motivation for all the hand-wringing we witness, but I should know better than to expect much thought from a VNRN. Apart from that, it’s a pleasant enough book, decently written with sturdy characters. If she suffers overmuch from her horrible “mistake,” Margaret is otherwise a feisty gal with a spine, and a pleasant person to spend 140 pages with.
Masquerade Nurse
By Jane Converse, ©1963Kathy Barrett awoke in a hospital bed … When the lovely nurse opened her eyes she remembered the sickening skid, the crash, and nothing else. How did she get there; where were here friends Jim and Lynne? She struggled to speak, to ask questions of the handsome young doctor who stood at her bedside and who looked so much like Jim Stratton. His eyes were concerned, his voice tender as he spoke. “It’s all right, Lynne,” he said. “You’re going to be all right now, Lynne….” This stirring novel is the story of a nurse who is the sole survivor of an automobile accident, a nurse who borrows the identity of her dead friend to find a new home and escape a threatening past, a nurse who lives a life of painful lies while she falls deeply in love with a dedicated doctor.
GRADE: B+
BEST QUOTES:
“You had to keep remembering the miracles and doing what you could to prolong life, even when your patient begged for release.”
REVIEW:
The back-cover blurb of this book—and the similar plot abstract just inside the book’s cover—are a serious detriment to the reader, who would be far better off not knowing what’s coming. Because the setup is a bit complicated and requires almost 50 pages before we can get on with the car crash, I for one tended to rush the earlier reading. But that’s a shame, because it’s a pleasant story of a smart, competent nurse with a few issues. Like many a nurse before her, she comes from an orphanage, but she had her best friend, Lynne Haley, to suffer alongside. The two share an apartment, and it’s Kathy who introduces Lynne to the doctor who would become her fiancé, Jim Stratton. This is one of the aspects of the VNRN that I’ve always enjoyed best, the nurse and her roomie sharing jokes and dinner together, but this doesn’t get as much play as I would have liked in what is actually a too-short nurse novel (and it may well be a first that I have said that here).
Kathy’s troubles begin when, her better judgment obviously still on break, she accepts a date with the unctuous hospital administrator, Ralph Knoll. After a steak dinner that includes too many drinks, Ralph predictably puts the moves on, and Kathy is forced to tell the little troll what she thinks of him. So when a terminally ill cancer patient is discovered to have been relieved of his suffering with an unhealthy dose of Nembutal, Ralph is quick to lead the inquisition, declaring that Kathy—who subbed during the dinner hour for the nurse specialing the patient—is guilty of a mercy killing. Though no one believes her guilty, she is nonetheless suspended until the truth can be learned—and the bereaved widow, who just happens to have been given a script for Nembutal recently, is catatonic with shock and can’t answer any questions. So it’s going to be a long suspension.
To pass the time, Kathy drives to Oregon with Jim and Lynne, who is to meet Jim’s family for the first time. En route is the fatal mishap, and Kathy wakes, groggy and dazed, with this hot doctor holding her hand and calling her Lynne (because she had been passing Lynne’s pocketbook to its rightful owner at the time of the accident, and everyone assumed that the ID inside the bag belonged to the woman clutching it; apparently IDs didn’t have photos in the 1960s). At first too dazed to correct Dr. Dane Stratton, then attracted by the idea of the family Dane wants her to become part of, and also concerned that Dane’s poor mother will suffer another heart attack when she learned that the “daughter” she’s now pinning all her hopes on is actually as dead as her son, Kathy goes along with the misunderstanding. She isn’t totally ignorant of the fact that assuming Lynne’s identity could help her out of the jam she’s in at the hospital, but she spends a lot of time berating herself for perpetuating the charade and not coming clean, planning the moment when she will spill the beans, and then letting the moment pass yet again. It’s the sort of inner dialogue that could come across as stupid or overwrought or unbelievable, but Jane Converse is a fine writer and pulls it off seamlessly.
Kathy obviously can’t return home as Lynne and has been pressed to join the family unit, which includes the charmingly boyish 17-year-old brother Petey as well as Mom and Dale. This assemblage of characters is as attractive to the reader as it is to orphan Kathy, who has always longed for a home. As the weeks pass, the deceit becomes increasingly difficult; posing as the schoolteacher Lynne she is unable to chat about educational reform or explain the flawless tracheotomy she performs on a choking neighborhood boy. After she resigns from Lynne’s job she is forced to cash Lynne’s final paycheck. The fact that this is a felony does not pass lightly, as Kathy now realizes that her deception has crossed legal lines, and she worries about how this crime will impact her ability to retain a nursing license if discovered.
The suitor character in VNRNs is usually drawn fairly loosely—this character is seldom as important as his potential as The Possible Husband in the VNRN—and, true to form, Dale is not among the more detailed men we’ve met. Nonetheless, he is a solid, pleasing character. The lead up, when Kathy is finding Dane increasingly attractive, is well-played, and the electricity she feels when he palpates her shoulder fracture (silly as that sounds), or when “brushing against him accidently while they fixed a midnight snack in the kitchen,” is real. Though Dane eventually succumbs to that very bad habit of VNRN boyfriends, pushing themselves on reluctant heroines with over-the-top declarations of undying love and an alarmingly stalkerish intention of remaining her shadow until she falls for him or at least agrees to marry him, he does so in a very mild and organic way: She’s crying after the tracheotomy, thinking he’s about to tell her he knows she’s a fraud, and instead he, “bewildered and helpless,” tries to console her. He ends up smoothing the tears from her face and saying, “You’re the most wonderful thing that ever happened to us … the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me,” and “looking at her with a burning intensity, yet an expression so poignantly tender” before he quickly snaps out of it and gives her two sleeping pills and rushes awkwardly from the room. This I found much more cute than creepy, which is how those scenes usually come across.
Anyway, you know it’s just a matter of time before Dane finds out who Kathy really is and freaks out. You can also guess that there will be a terrible accident at the high school gymnasium, where Petey has gone to watch a basketball game between the Chatsville Chargers and the Bayport Bruins (carrying a sign he’s made that reads, “Bruins, Sí! Chargers, No!”) that causes radio announcers to plead for any healthcare workers in hailing distance to come to the gym right away to aid in the relief efforts. And you can guess that Kathy’s heroic efforts there, and her genuine alarm for Petey’s safety, will go a long way toward getting her through this mess, as does a little surprise twist.
I always open a Jane Converse novel hopefully, because I know what she is capable of (see Surf Safari Nurse). While Masquerade Nurse is not her best in terms of exuberant writing or humor, she has assembled here a good plot and characters, and she writes them well enough that you can really believe them and not snicker more than once or twice at their stupidity. If this isn’t her best, there’s enough here to make it absolutely worth reading, and certainly a lot more than you might find in most VNRNs.
Leap in the Dark
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti
Jeanne Cleary’s eventual destination was the nursing school in London, but on her own for the first time she felt an urgency to sort out the mysterious circumstances of her birth. Born to an aristocratic French woman who had married against her family’s wishes, Jeanne had been left an orphan when her parents died during the war. Now, having just discovered the existence of her French grandparents, Jeanne was determined to have at least one look at her mother’s ancestral home. But Fate was not to be satisfied with just a far-away glimpse. Before she could turn away from the imposing Château de Clémenteaux, Jeanne would become entangled in a series of lies which would bind her to another’s identity … an identity which would keep her from the man she loved, and prevent her from unmasking the imposter who said she was the real Jeanne Cleary.
GRADE: B
BEST QUOTES:
“As for his sister, one could forgive her for being a novelist—that was deplorable and unfeminine, of course, but could be overlooked.”
“We do not know just what we are capable of until we actually do it.”
“Women, like flowers, were meant to be decorative and pleasing. But they were of greater service than flowers. He could enjoy them and make use of them at the same time.”
“Oh, Anne, not you—not you, of all people wearing trousers!”
REVIEW:
For starters, let’s begin by clarifying that this is not a nurse novel. Jeanne Cleary, fresh out of the orphanage—and not just any orphanage, mind you, but a conventorphanage—is on a train in France en route to a nursing school in London when the train pulls into the abandoned station in Vraipoupon. Completely on impulse, Jeanne grabs her small, cheap suitcase containing the handful of meager possessions that are all she has in the world and hops off. She starts walking, and comes to a grand estate. Guess what? It happens to belong to her grandmother, the Comtesse Clémenteaux, whom she has never seen because her mother, after eloping with the English soldier John Cleary, was disinherited by her parents! Even more coincidentally, the cook Emilée, rushes up the path, grabs her, and pulls her in, insisting that she is the nurse Hélène Dubois, who has arrived to care for the blind Comtesse.
Once she claps eyes on the sweet old lady who is her only living relative, Jeanne cannot bring herself to tell the truth and so poses as the nurse—fortunately for her, she’s really more of a companion than a nurse, so not even Dr. Paul Antoine suspects the truth. Naturally Jeanne takes to life at the estate like a duck to water, and she and the Comtesse become as one in spirit. But suddenly, in through the grand entrance marches Anne Cleary, accompanied by the Comtesse’s attorney Jacques Bergerot, who claims Anne is the real granddaughter and heir to the estate! What to do, what to do?
Well, first off, Jeanne falls like a ton of bricks for the suave and shady Jacques Bergerot, the innocent little dope. She has to fall for someone, I guess, and the doctor just finds her irritating from the word go—though we all know what thatmeans. When Jacques kisses her and looks into her eyes—“his commanding and hers submissive,” if you can bear to know—she believes that he is going to marry her. In truth, however, Jacques is cavorting with Anne, who turns out to be the real Hélène Dubois, and a seedy tramp. We know this because she finds life in the country boring, she doesn’t like the Comtesse, and she’s rude to the servants. So Anne is as shocked to encounter Jeanne as Jeanne is to encounter Anne. But of the two, Anne is a lot more resourceful, and she soon searches Jeanne’s room and discovers the documents and photos that prove Jeanne’s real identity and secrets them in her own room—save the passport, which she tosses in the kitchen stove one night when Armand the gardener is too sick to sleep there, as he usually does.
So now Jeanne seems to be completely out of luck; all she will have is Jacques and his love to keep her warm. But as fate would have it, on the night of the big ball when Anne is to be announced as the Clémenteaux heir, Jacques and Anne announce their engagement!!! Jeanne is devastated, of course, but fortunately the good doctor is there to help buck her up, and in witnessing her despair, he realizes, “Damn the child—I am in love with her!” (He is right to describe her as a child; she is 17, and he is in his 30s.) But all is quickly set to rights: The Comtesse declares that she hopes Anne will wear the Clémenteaux family ring, which Anne has never heard of. The Comtesse becomes quite upset over this, and to comfort her, Jeanne slips her hand into the Comtesse’s—who quickly realizes that Jeanne is wearing the ring! Now all we need is for Emilée the cook to show up bearing the passport, which wasn’t actually burned up, and for Paul to declare, “I think I should warn you, Comtesse, that I have decided to marry this troublesome girl at the first opportunity, irrespective of who, or what, she is.” Jeanne doesn’t get to dance at the ball, because she almost fell through the rickety drawbridge fleeing the house when things looked black for her, but that’s a small price to pay.
This book is utterly predictable, but it’s nonetheless entertaining. The story is told from many characters’ points of view, which makes it a bit more interesting, since Jeanne is far and away the most vapid of all the characters. (When Paul’s sister wishes, “If only Paul would marry some nice girl who had no literary or medical ambitions, who wanted nothing in life but marriage and motherhood!” we know beyond doubt, much to our dismay, that Jeanne fits this bill precisely.) So even if the heroine is a bore and the storyline is ridiculously obvious, this book is still worth reading. Now if only it were an actual nurse romance novel.
Doctor Sara
By Peggy Gaddis, ©1963Cover illustration by Robert Maguire
“I never did hold with women doctors,” sneered Blade Morrisey, whose word was law on little Fisher’s Island. But lovely Dr. Sara Winslow was doing a man’s job, and she was used to fighting masculine prejudice. She was determined to win over Blade and the few like him who scoffed at the “lady doctor.” The lonely man in the lighthouse was another matter. Why was he on the island? And why did her heart behave so strangely when they met?
GRADE: B-
BEST QUOTES:
“I’m a woman. Aren’t women supposed to spend practically their whole lives hunting for a man to marry?”
“Makes me wonder why people call women the weaker sex. Oh, they get scared of things like mice and snakes—but they’ve got more guts than any man could ever hope to have, when it comes to things that really matter.”
“ ‘Man, he’s sure a son-of-a-gun—askin’ your pardon, Miss Doc.’
“ ‘Think nothing of it, Pop,’ Sara answered, ‘There are times when I’d like to use the same expression.’ ”
“Darling, don’t tell me you’re slipping? The girl’s not in love with you. I can’t believe that!”
“If a man I loved so much as gave me a warm glance, I’d hare him off to a preacher so fast he wouldn’t know what had happened to him.”
“I wish I could knit—I bet that would throw the poor darling for a row of Chinese pagodas!”
REVIEW:
Sara Winslow is a 27-year-old doctor tired of Atlanta. So she heads home to North Carolina to see Jane and Arthur Mayson, who have raised this (guess) orphan since her parents were killed in a hurricane when she was five. Arthur runs her out to his favorite fishing port, Fisher’s Island, which has a winter population of 300. It seems their doctor just died, and now they have none—and what they wouldn’t give if Sara, even if she is a “lady doctor” and not a man, would come take his position! (There is one fella, of the unfortunate name of Blade Morrissey, who thinks women shouldn’t be doctors, but he’s quickly won over when Sara diagnoses his only daughter with leukemia.)
So Sara moves to the island and starts birthing babies and sewing up wounds. And wondering about the man who has rented the defunct lighthouse and brooks no trespassers. But before long, he’s injured too, with a deep wound he claims was inflicted by a shark, so now she has to go up and spar with the ornery old cuss. (She quickly discovers a heart murmur, and tells him it’s not serious—“yet. It could be, if you over-exert yourself or worry very much. Bed rest will help a lot.” So though everyone who meets her is soon singing hosannas about what a great doctor she is, they might change their minds if they actually knew something about medicine.) Terence O’Toole (also an orphan) soon warms up to her, and by way of making a pass, tells her that he is “forbidden” to tell her about how he got hurt. “If the mission on which I came here is accomplished successfully, then I can tell you the whole story,” pleads the blabbermouth. But he’s going to have to be replaced soon, he adds, because the enemy has seen his face. He’s about as good a confidential agent as she is a doctor.
Another man comes to the island, Tracy Harper, and though no one trusts him for a second, he’s soon taking Sara out on dates and the local kids out on his boat. As evidence of his shifty character, after she sees Tracy sneaking into the lighthouse, he denies having been there. Even Terence says he doesn’t trust Tracy, and tells Sara that Tracy says he’s been sent to replace Terence on the secret mission. He asks Sara to look into Tracy’s background; “I ask this not just for my own sake but for yours—and the country’s.” Then he kisses Sara, so it seems her reputation will be shot, since we already know that Terence can’t keep a secret. Detective Sara soon uncovers the truth about Tracy—despite the fact that every adult who’s met him thinks he is a slimy snake, he’s exactly who he says he is! But even more interesting is the fact that a dangerous pursuer has tracked him down and landed on the island to capture him—Mimi Courtney, his fiancée, who modestly claims that uncovering the secret agent “didn’t take much of the detective instinct—you left a trail a mile wide.” Then Sara tells Jane and Arthur the whole story about Terence, because, heck, with all the people who already know about this secret mission, a few more can’t hurt! If our national security actually ever depended on folks like these, it would be time to move to Canada.
Back on the island, Sara tells Terence that Tracy is indeed legit, so Terence decides to spill the rest of the beans, “since we both will be leaving here soon,” he tells her, adding, when she protests, “Oh, it’s a wife’s duty to go wherever her husband is sent.” In response, Sara tells him where to put his colossal ego, that she’s not leaving the island, that he’s been nothing but rude to her, so why should she want to marry him? With all this before him, he quickly agrees that he’s been a presumptuous fool and it won’t happen again. “Sara had the silly feeling she had been let down. She had been prepared to fence with him, to go on arguing with him, and she had known instinctively that in the end he would win, not she.” And so we have the patented Peggy Gaddis ending: She wants something, but he says she can’t have it if she marries him, so she agrees to give it up—and in the end, he decides she can have it after all. What a nice man. It’s going to take us a few more pages to get to that point, but we’ve already gotten the telegram that it’s on its way.
It arrives in the form of an apparent mob, when the local fishermen, led by Tracy Harper, go storming up to the lighthouse. Sara, concerned for her man, goes with them, and insists on going in first, because “he’s my patient, and I didn’t want him to have a shock.” The nice mob lets her do that, and when Sara puts her arm around Terence and calls him darling, “he was touched with awe and wonder,” and I was touched with the heaves. But it turns out that it’s not a mob after all; Tracy has brought the men up to hear him tell Terence that “the Big Boy himself” has agreed that they don’t need to keep the mission a secret anymore, so sit back and enjoy the tale: There’s this town in Russia that looks exactly like an American city, and everyone there has been brought up to be exactly like Americans, except they’re fervently patriotic to Mother Russia. “They are to be infiltrated into this country and sent where they can do the most harm to us, the most good to their own country; to ‘sow seeds of discord wherever the soil is fertile.’ ” Terence had come across one trawler smuggling in a few of the mock Americans and been wounded by them, but instead of killing him, “as a gesture of contempt, to show us that they knew we were onto them and that they were abandoning this route,” they left him to be found. But now “Headquarters” has decided to let the locals know about this so they can guard the seacoast themselves, with a little help from the Coast Guard. Now that the story is out in the open, instead of becoming hysterical over the idea of Russians invading the country and living amongst them, everyone calmly goes home and goes to bed.
But the next morning, Sara is back at the lighthouse. He asks her if she wants to stay on the island, but the idiot replies, “I want to marry you, and anywhere you go, I want to go!” But when he says he’s resigning from “the service” to marry her, she’s shot through with doubt. “You must stay on—alone, if that’s what they require.” When he points out that she was ready to give up her job, she says, “It’s only that marriage means so much more to a woman than it does to a man.” Fortunately, Terence snaps, “Who ever fed you that bit of guff? There’s not a word of truth in it, believe me!” He’s going to start working as a fishing guide so the two can stay on the island. “I won’t be a beachcomber, living off my wife,” he concludes. Phew! A happy ending!
What bothers me most about Peggy’s I-go-where-my-man-goes endings is that while she usually gives the heroine what she wants, it’s because the man agrees to let her have it, which is too much of a copout. Here we do have Terence rejecting the idea outright, but Peggy doesn’t really mean what he says; she has Mimi espousing the same tripe—“I’m going to be the kind of wife who goes where her husband goes, whether it’s Alaska or Aruba!”—without a peep of protest from anyone. And don’t forget that Terence’s first proposal came in the form of a declaration that Sara would have to leave the island when she married him. Even if it’s sugar-coated, a poison pill will still kill you.
Doctor Sara is one of Peggy Gaddis’ milder novels. It takes a long while to get going, and if we don’t get much in the way of particularly egregious attitudes until 20 pages from the end, neither does it possess any of the absurdities or camp that can make her novels such fun. Not one of the characters shows any sparkle except Mimi, and she doesn’t pop up until page 100, and then we see too little of her. This work just cruises along, neither too cold nor too hot. So because it is lukewarm, I suggest you leave it on the shelf.
Town Nurse—Country Nurse
Cover illustration by Bern Smith
After a disastrous love affair, Kate had felt she never wanted to live in the country again, and firmly turned herself into a town girl. So when her dental surgeon boss suggested that she help out, temporarily, a colleague of his in a small country town, she was determined to stay there no longer than was necessary…
GRADE: A-
BEST QUOTES:
“You can’t do it. You simply can’t tell anybody, in cold blood, that you don’t love the country.”
“Hugo’s white panther of a car leapt on the miles and devoured them with a kind of satisfied, purring sound that I imagined a panther would make.”
“The kitchen was enormous, about as half as big again as the front room, with a stone floor and great cupboards and a dresser all along one side of the wall. There was a modern electric cooker and a washing machine, but the table where Chloe was shearing neat slices of bread off a huge cottage loaf was the solid white deal kind that needs scrubbing every day. She looked up and smiled. ‘Primitive, aren’t we? John’s going to get the kitchen converted for me one day, when there’s time to get around to it. You know, thermo-plastic tiling on the floor, stainless steel sink, Formica tops—the lot.’ ”
“Mr. Pill was peering at me with his eyes half-closed, as if I were a new shade of emulsion paint that he wasn’t quite sure whether he approved of or not.”
“Any crisis, major or minor, must be an occasion for making tea.”
“ ‘She pushed me—’ He pointed an accusing finger at Rosemary. I was wholly on Rosemary’s side. We girls must stick together, I thought, and besides, she really did look angelic in that little pink dress.”
“How easy it was for a nice man to have an absolutely horrid daughter.”
“I shall be calm and placid, like a vegetable marrow.”
REVIEW:
Kate Moorcroft is actually a dental nurse. She’s not a hygienist, though, and doesn’t do any actual work in anyone’s mouth; she just assists the dentist with his more complicated procedures, so I think this still qualifies her as a nurse, and therefore this book as a VNRN. But it does skate up to the technical line.
The first part gimmick of this book is that Kate despises the country. She was born and raised there, and had intended to marry a farmer, but when her father died, her beloved told her that he didn’t feel he could take on the family farm’s huge mortgage, and he’d mostly wanted to marry her because her father had offered to take him on as a partner. Since wising up to the realities of the deal he’d signed up for, he’d decided he’d really rather go off to Australia, and alone at that. So she’d moved to London and worked hard to floss every hayseed from her teeth. That was three years ago; now she’s dating the wealthy, attractive, and debonair bachelor Hugo Whipple. Things are just starting to heat up with him when her boss sends her off to aid a close friend, Dr. Ben Holland, who has a small practice in—gasp—the country!
But she grits her teeth and off she goes, to camp at the house where the doctor lives with his sister and her husband. Kate, not being the complete ignoramus that so many VNRN heroines are, quickly realizes—“with a feeling that I’d been punched hard in the middle”—Dr. Holland’s brother in law is a farmer! This is supposed to make her sojourn to the country even more “painfully nostalgic,” but soon she’s over it, and wrestles a lamb trapped in a hedge and a day-old calf about to be kicked by its mother, who is freaking out during a thunder storm. But she’s decided that she’s not going to tell the doctor that she’s from the country, lest she have to go into the story of her sordid past. That’s the second part of the gimmick; Kate has to go around pretending that she doesn’t know that hay shouldn’t be out in a rainstorm or how to operate a kerosene lantern. It’s not going to hold a lot of water, but this book isn’t pretending to be Tolstoy, so it mostly works.
But she grits her teeth and off she goes, to camp at the house where the doctor lives with his sister and her husband. Kate, not being the complete ignoramus that so many VNRN heroines are, quickly realizes—“with a feeling that I’d been punched hard in the middle”—Dr. Holland’s brother in law is a farmer! This is supposed to make her sojourn to the country even more “painfully nostalgic,” but soon she’s over it, and wrestles a lamb trapped in a hedge and a day-old calf about to be kicked by its mother, who is freaking out during a thunder storm. But she’s decided that she’s not going to tell the doctor that she’s from the country, lest she have to go into the story of her sordid past. That’s the second part of the gimmick; Kate has to go around pretending that she doesn’t know that hay shouldn’t be out in a rainstorm or how to operate a kerosene lantern. It’s not going to hold a lot of water, but this book isn’t pretending to be Tolstoy, so it mostly works.
Meanwhile, back at the office, she and the good doctor, who seems less than appreciative of her efforts, spar regularly, as Kate is far too spunky a gal to lie down and take it when he snaps at her. Despite his animosity, she can’t bring herself to actually dislike him: “This Ben Holland had magnetism—loads of it.” Unfortunately for Kate, he has more than just magnetism; he also has a lady friend, Val, a smooth, possessive customer whom Kate dislikes at first sight. “Most unreasonable, but there it is,” Kate admits. “Whatever Ben Holland’s shortcomings, he didn’t deserve a girl like that.”
Eventually it turns out that Ben thinks Kate’s been sent down by her employer to convince him that he should abandon the country and go into practice in the city. Kate, of course, knows of no such plan, and his suspicions are revealed when she demands to know why he’s being such a cold ass, just not in those terms. He’s forgiven after he humbly apologizes: “To be on the receiving end of a smile that packed so many volts was very disturbing,” she says. More than just a potential boyfriend, Kate finds two good girl friends in the country: Ben’s sister, Chloe, and Ben’s new nurse, Celia. These two characters are well-drawn, and their friendships with Kate, if they do move a bit fast, feel real. It’s a really heartwarming—if I dare to use such a schlocky word—aspect of the book, but I mean it. “It’s wonderful to fall in love and it turns your world upside down, but lately I’ve thought that there’s something that’s just as good, though not so spectacular,” says Celia, “just making friends.” I got a little verklemptat this point, but I am known to sob at the long-distance commercials.
So now Kate and Ben can get along on better terms. But Val schemes to get Kate packing back to the city, moving into the farmhouse to take her spot there. It doesn’t work out, however, for anyone: Back in London and out with Hugo, he maneuvers her to his new apartment and propositions her, not for the first time, and she finally realizes that he’s a cad, and that the city-slicker persona she’s put on since leaving the country has misled him. “I’m only playing at being this sort of girl, a dolly girl, out for kicks. I’m really a country type, a cabbage. I need the—other kind of life,” she tells Hugo, and then, when he tries to force a drink on her, she very belatedly realizes “Hugo was much, much older than I’d ever supposed. The lines round his eyes were deeply engraved; there was a slight looseness about his chin.” This spells
t-h-e e-n-d for Hugo, but he’s gracious about it and calls her a cab. (Though I’m not certain what he had to be gracious about, and what was his alternative, assaulting her? As if that would have been acceptable under the circumstances?)
t-h-e e-n-d for Hugo, but he’s gracious about it and calls her a cab. (Though I’m not certain what he had to be gracious about, and what was his alternative, assaulting her? As if that would have been acceptable under the circumstances?)
Then Kate is called back to Ben’s establishment: Val has up and left, and the house is in a shambles. Kate appears, puts everything and everyone to rights, and she and Ben end up kissing—but then he says that though he finds her attractive, he can’t be with her. Val has witnessed this scene through the window outside, enters the room after Ben has left it, and proceeds to tear Kate a new one and then smack her across the face. But as she rides off in a fury on her horse, she slips on a wet bridge and falls into the river. There’s no one around to save her but Kate, so she shouts at a little girl to go get help and hoves herself into the current, where she’s got one hand on a rapidly loosening willow and the other on the unconscious Val’s chin, to keep it above water. This selfless heroism, of course, is just the thing to bring Ben around, after Kate has been properly rescued and dried off. “Tell me you don’t really want that smooth fellow with the vulgar great car,” he says to her, admits that he loves her, “and he proceeded to demonstrate.” When all is straightened out between them, he chides her for pretending to be a city girl. “What should I have done?” she retorts. “Disappear through the stage and spring back, clad in blue gingham, with a hay-fork in one hand and a pail of buttermilk in the other, crying, ‘Surprise, surprise, here I am, your very own rustic village maiden?’ ” Touché.
This is only the second VNRN I’ve read that’s been written in the first person. (The first, Bush Hospital, also a Harlequin, wasn’t as good as this one). It helps that Kate is a strong character with a sense of humor, guts, and humanity. She also has a rare commodity in a VNRN heroine: intelligence. When a situation is unfolding that any sensible reader could see right through, well, so can Kate. “I wasn’t going to pretend I didn’t know what he meant. I’d lived in London for three years,” Kate says when Hugo hints that he could spend the night in her hotel room. (She kicks him out.) But when she doesn’t pick up on something—like the fact that she’s fallen for Dr. Ben—she speaks about it as if she realizes that she should have known: “Even at that point, I didn’t know,” she says, after Ben gets snippy when he runs into her when she’s out with Hugo (the night he propositions her). I don’t mind a touch of blindness when the heroine recognizes that she is. She’s also self-aware: Toward the end, when Ben is watching her cook with an approving smile on his face, she feels an appropriate level of cynicism: “Domestic scene, I thought, with a whiff of self-contempt. Little woman in home setting. Bah!” And so my satisfaction with Kate Moorcroft was complete. This is a playful, amusing, enjoyable book. It has its flaws, no doubt, but these are easily overlooked when you’re hanging out with a great gal like Kate Moorcroft.
Copyright © C-buk2016
