Collecting Book

Wings for Nurse Bennett

“Office-dressing” … That, Sarah thought wryly, was exactly what she had been as nurse to the handsome and successful Dr. Ralph Caldwell Porter. Looking wand-slim and elegant in her white nylon uniform, her heaviest duty had been to stand by serenely while Ralph administered to the imaginary needs of some fawning, simpering female. And now she was suddenly in the wilds of Alaska, newly appointed stewardess of the Alaska Passenger and Freight Airlines, about to board the frighteningly small and flimsy-looking plane for her first trip. But at least, she assured herself, here she could be useful. And perhaps, in this new land, she would get a new perspective on her life. Because she had to make up her mind about Ralph. She had to decide whether she could marry a man she loved—but didn’t respect.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“ ‘Can you imagine a man ever wanting to go to bed with Miss Davenport, darling?’ Ralph had asked her once when, miraculously, the waiting room was empty. ‘She’s a good nurse—the best in Dayton, barring not even you, but ugh.’ He had kissed her. ‘Don’t ever let yourself get fat and frumpy, sweetheart.’ ”

REVIEW:

Sarah Bennett is working as a flight attendant on a small Alaskan airline (apparently in the old days flight attendants were nurses as well; in any case, she is one). She’s taking time away from her job working for Dr. Ralph Caldwell Porter, who is just as he sounds: A pompous, society doctor who panders to neurotic wealthy women, and who plans to marry Sarah and turn her into one. She’s desperately in love with Ralph and can’t wait to marry him, she says, but is constantly thinking things like how great it was to be a flight attendant, “a member of the team, just as she had been at the hospital, as she had not been, not really, in Ralph’s office.” But she’s managed to tear herself from his well-groomed side for a few months to step onto the plane, subbing on the job formerly held by her old friend and wife of the pilot Paul Fergis; Jenny Fergis is pregnant, and so grounded. It’s Sarah’s third day on the job when this particular flight takes off from Killmoose to Tanacross, and not half an hour into the flight, one of the passengers steps into the cockpit with a revolver and knocks out Al Malcolm, the co-pilot.

Back at air control, the radio is blasting reports of three men who crashed a stolen Cessna near Killmoose and haven’t been seen since. The men are wanted for questioning in the attempted sabotage of one of the United States’ Distant Early Warning bases in far northern Alaska—these would be the bases where, during the Cold War, people sat around and watched the skies for incoming Soviet nuclear missiles, so they could call home and say goodbye before the missiles arrived on American soil. The air traffic folks instantly recognize from the descriptions that these guys are on Sarah’s flight!! Now everyone is combing the Alaskan wilds, but it’s a lot of ground to cover, so things are looking grim…

Meanwhile, the gun-toting head basher puts the plane down in a clearing hundreds of miles off course and hustles everyone except his two co-conspirators off the plane, then takes off again. So now the story’s narrative jumps from the worried air controllers listening to the news, to the passengers trying to survive in dilapidated miners’ cabins in the woods, to Paul Fergis and a passenger who have set off through the Alaskan winter to try to find help. As the passengers trap rabbits and build bedding out of spruce boughs, Al Malcolm is increasingly warming the cockles of Sarah’s heart, though she tries again and again to remind herself that “she was in love with Ralph, she was going to marry him—to her Al Malcolm could be no more than Paul Fergis’s co-pilot.” But there’s just the small problem that Ralph is a philandering ass, and is never set up to be anything but, even to Sarah: “Sarah wished she could think of Ralph Porter without something unpleasant nudging into her mind,” she thinks before we’re a quarter of the way through the book—“Why did she keep thinking of Ralph? Remembering things that made her slightly sick at her stomach.” I wonder how everything is going to turn out?

Of course, the passengers that the bad guys have been kind enough to abandon rather than simply murder outright are prone to all sorts of health issues. Needless to say, everything turns out swimmingly for the stranded passengers, who have the capable Sarah to steer them through their medical crises, though she is inclined to a hysterical interior monologue: “Oh, God, Sarah thought. Suppose something is going wrong?” she wonders when she’s delivering a baby, which despite her fears—“Oh, God! Was the baby stillborn? After all this—” is perfectly healthy, only now she’s got to concoct something else to worry about, like the baby catching “pneumonia, here—” But it doesn’t, so on to the next emergency: One man, unfortunately named George Jefferson, develops right lower quadrant pain and “Sarah’s breath caught in her throat. Not appendicitis! Please, God, don’t let it be appendicitis.” But it is, and now we have pages of watching George’s temperature rise: “Four-tenths in an hour? Oh, God!” But she convinces Al Malcolm to assist her with the surgery, which she pulls off effortlessly in 43 minutes. Now she’s worried that she’ll go to jail: “What would they call it, practicing surgery without a license? Or—or criminal negligence?” For crying out loud, someone get this woman a Xanax!

Eventually the two men wandering the wilderness are spotted by a rescue plane, the party in the woods is whisked back to civilization, George Jefferson recovers easily and reveals that he is actually an FBI agent assigned to nab the bad guys who hijacked the plane—not a very good one, it seems—and the bad guys, not being very good pilots, are discovered to have crashed the second plane as well and killed themselves in the process. Sarah finds she’s not going to jail or lose her job, and that she does not love Ralph after all. Not to worry, though, someone else is waiting to offer her marriage on the last page, and then—oh, God!—we can finally close the book.

Nurse Farley’s Decision

Auburn-haired Susan Farley had brilliantly graduated from her long, difficult nurse’s training. Now, at big, modern St. Patrick’s she was practicing the profession she loved. One day Susan was assigned the traction case in Room 212 in the Orthopedic wing. Oliver Cox, she saw, was a handsome older man accustomed to wealth and power. Grateful for Susan’s skillful nursing, Cox offered to endow St. Patrick’s with a cancer clinic. But there was a string attached to his gift—in exchange he wanted Susan for his wife. Susan was faced with an overwhelming decision. As Oliver Cox’s wife she might be instrumental in finding the cure for the deadly killer. But—what of the profession for which she had so proudly trained and dedicated herself?

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:

“Circles under blue eyes are danger signals.”

“She put her cheek on one of the thin hands, the one without the needle.”

“What in the world am I going to do about my complexion? Jimmy hates pimply girls, and he’s taking me to Seminole Club tomorrow night.”

“Years of people’s lives went into the training of these hands beneath that brilliant light. Mothers’ lives—teaching gentleness and a desire to serve; fathers’ lives, dedicated to earning the money to make knowledge within their grasp.”

“She’s pretty enough to hang on the wall.”

“Because it was midsummer, Arch Curtis survived his battle with the tiger shark.”

“All the ‘womanly docility’ the Sister in charge of the conduct class had stressed, flew out of the window.”

REVIEW:

Fear not, readers, Susan Farley is not, as falsely advertised on the back cover blurb above, asked to prostitute herself to fund a cancer lab. I don’t quite know what to think when the cover describes a book completely unlike the one I actually read, but in this case I must confess I was relieved, because it sounded horrid.

In actuality, Susan Farley is trying to decide whether she should take a job at Dr. Mitchell’s office, which pays more and will enable her to fund her younger sister’s college education, or stick with hospital nursing, which she really loves. This “decision,” however, is removed from her when her father tells her that she should take the hospital job and they’ll find the money for Grace’s education somewhere else. When she goes to ask for the job in surgery, however, she’s told that it’s been filled, and she’s convinced that Dr. Mitchell—who is, in fact, chief of staff—has blackballed her from the position. She takes a job in orthopedics instead, but only after she jumps into the pier to save a young woman—too late, as it happens—who has just given birth to a baby boy, and the ensuing publicity, her photo landing on the front page and all, gives her a little leverage to make some demands.

At the hospital, she works along side Dr. Archibald Curtis, who makes her little heart go pitter-pat whenever she sees him, and they are good friends but nothing more—“until he himself changed the color of their relationship,” because it’s just not possible for a decent young woman to make a pass. When she catches him talking to a young candy-striper in a pink dress, however, she falls all to pieces, especially after a date with Arch at the beach during which she rescues him from a tiger shark and brings him home to her house and puts on a pink dress, which apparently is going to remind him of this young woman. “In her hurry to get some hot food ready for Arch when he was ready for it, she had chosen the one dress she shouldn’t have. Unfortunately there was no time to change it. Susan was out of sorts all evening. Arch, bewildered, went home early.”

The incident with the shark ends up in the newspaper—making it twice in the past week Susan’s landed on the front page—and Arch is convinced Susan is a publicity hound who took the story to the paper herself. She is mortified: “No man wanted to be pulled out of the water by a girl,” she thinks, as the fellows apparently prefer death to such a dishonor. “What can I do to ease the hurt this story is going to cause Arch? The other fellows are going to rib him about being both shark bait and woman bait—I can just hear them.” Eventually it’s revealed that sister Grace is the one who spilled the beans, to a cute boy who works for the newspaper. So that’s the end of that little escapade.

More little stories pile into the book—a woman with a lip cancer was operated on by Dr. Mitchell but now has a horrible scar and lost her husband because of it, the dead woman’s boy is being raised in the hospital, wealthy patient Oliver Cox agrees to fund a cancer center because of Susan’s fervent interest in that particular disease, it is proposed that the orphaned baby be raised by the hospital, Susan notices a skin cancer on Dr. Mitchell’s nose. At the dinner that brings together the head honchos to talk about the cancer center, Susan is the only woman—invited by Oliver Cox—but Arch gets jealous and snubs her, so she just walks out of the dinner without saying goodbye to anyone, including her date, and climbs into the red Thunderbird belonging to the young candy striper, who immediately drives off the road and is nearly killed, except Susan is there to apply pressure to the head wound in the ambulance all the way to the hospital. Really, if you were hoping for a quiet evening at home, you’d better stay away from Susan Farley.

At the end of the book, Susan out of the blue decides that what with the car accident and all, she’s “getting some kind of sense knocked into my head.” It was probably just a concussion, but she gets up the next morning and goes to work anyway. What she meant by sense, apparently, is that she decides that her younger sister is not the spoiled pet she’d thought she was, and that “I’ve had the attitude, all along, that St. Patrick’s was mighty lucky to have a chance at the services of the dedicated Susan Farley, R.N.” I’m not sure that it follows that her attitude about working in surgery was wrong: Shouldn’t you fight for what you want, and have some healthy egotism about a job you’re good at? Then she decides that the woman’s bad lip scar doesn’t mean she should think less of Dr. Mitchell, that “a man doesn’t build up that large a practice without doing a lot of good to a lot of people. Of course he’s bound to make mistakes. Everyone does.” She exhorts Arch, who has been offered the chance to join the chief of staff’s practice, to give the matter careful thought rather than dismissing it outright, and blames the woman with the scar for not asking to have it fixed—and it turns out that Arch already has, though I’m not sure what his participation in this woman’s story is supposed to signify. All these little revelations, with no actual obvious difference between the character at the beginning of the book and the one at the end, are apparently what passes for “growth”: “It wasn’t only the big, sprawling hospital that was growing. Somehow, it impelled them all to grow along with it,” Susan says on the last page, in a thoroughly anticlimactic ending. Declaring something doesn’t make it so; remember Dick Cheney and the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

Overall this is not a terrible book, and the character of Oliver Cox is very well drawn, as is the party that he takes Susan to. But it can seem like a collection of bizarre incidents and extraneous details such as this one: When Susan discovers that she’s put on a pink dress and can’t change it, she stands in the middle of the big kitchen and makes chopping gestures of anger while holding a messy egg beater and splatters egg all over the linoleum, which Grace had just cleaned that morning since the cleaning woman hadn’t been able to get to it and it was Grace’s day to clean the floors, so Grace is fussing at Susan about the mess while cleaning it up with a damp sponge. Did we really need to know all that minute detail? It just makes me feel puzzled and expectant that something down the road will turn up to give this overdrawn moment some relevance, but it never happens. I think Teresa Holloway has the potential to put together a fine book, because some of the details in this story are very nicely sketched, but she really needs some help on plots, because without a good linear thread, you’re just left with a few pretty paragraphs and a lot of head scratching.

Nurse Under Fire

By Florence Stuart
(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1964

Jock had once tried to commit suicide because of his frustrated love for Nurse Ruby Compton. Now he was her patient in a psychiatric clinic and his emotional struggle was starting all over again. Ruby didn’t love him, but she pitied him too much to push him out of her life—even though his mental instability could make him dangerous. Even though being kind to Jock was ruining her chances with the doctor she really loved.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:

“What’s the use learning fancy words if you don’t trot them out to show how smart you are?”

“Ruby hated the current rage for pants, but she had to admit that Connie looked like a doll in them.”

“You mean I should marry a character who bores me to death, then spend the best years messing around with pots and pans and babies while he struggles through college? And turn into a worn-out old hag before he lands a job that really pays off? Uh-uh. All the fellows I know are pretty much like George. They’re poor, they bore me stiff, and all they’ve got on their minds is going to college for the rest of time and learning a lot of stuff so they’ll be big shots—some day. And they really want to marry just to have some girl around to cook and clean and make life easy for them, while they sit glued to their books. I can’t see it.”

“You’d be surprised how many patients we get who have cracked up simply by driving themselves to make more and more money to buy more and more things which they didn’t really need.”

REVIEW:

Ruby Compton is, to my eye, about as deranged as the patients she cares for at the Olive Hill Psychiatric Clinic. Her ex-beau, Jock Jordan (and what a name!), tried to hang himself six years ago when his rich father broke up his relationship with the less socially endowed Ruby, and has since nursed a major obsession with Ruby while living so recklessly that his antics on the freeway resulted in a multi-car crash that left several people critically injured and one killed. Instead of heading straight to jail, Jock’s father managed to get him committed to the booby hatch, but now his time is served and Jock is going home. And insisting that Ruby escort him on the 100-mile drive. Given the fact that she’s had no compunction about serving as Jock’s nurse, it was a long shot that she would agree with her boyfriend, hospital physician Nat Casey, that it would be best if she skipped that trip.

So off she goes—even bringing her 17-year-old sister Connie on the trip. The jaded Connie has designs on the wealthy Jock, and it comes out that she’s even been visiting him on the sly in an attempt to land herself a rich husband. “So what if he is a psycho?” she asks. “If Jock were to fall in love with a cute girl, get out of that place and get married, I’ll bet he’d be as normal as anybody.”

Of the actual road trip, which has been built up for 55 pages, we get not a sentence: After Ruby’s final argument with Nat, the next sentence has her pulling into Jock’s father’s house. Joe Jordan is away on a business trip, though, and Jock’s stepmother Dorothy refuses to allow Jock to come into the house, instead steering him and Ruby—Connie has been deposited at a local hotel—to the gatehouse: “I’m scared of crazy people,” she explains. But Ruby insists that they be allowed to stay in the main house. Once back in his old room, Jock is “brooding and staring, like someone in a stuporous daze,” and Ruby is concerned that this might be one of Jock’s “depressed spells which, once or twice, had come close to being a psychotic breakthrough.” Her solution is to take Jock and Connie out for dinner. Connie is all in favor of this plan: “Hey, it is okay if I douse myself with that perfume that Mom says smells like a hussy’s boudoir?” she asks her sister. But out at the restaurant, when Connie begs Jock to dance, Ruby reminds her, “He’s not supposed to dance. Doctor’s orders.” Because we all know that dancing can cause psychosis, especially the Wahtusi.

So while Connie finds someone else to boogie with, Jock takes the opportunity to beg Ruby, again, to marry him. When she refuses, he asks if she’s in love with someone else—and she lies to him. But when Connie returns to the table and is again rebuffed by Jock, she decides to settle the score by telling him that Ruby is engaged to Dr. Nat. Jock responds by taking a trip to the loo and not returning. In another dramatic jump between scenes, we are back at the oceanfront Jordan house, and Ruby spots someone swimming—gosh, who could that be at this time of night? Instantly she is powering through the waves, dragging Jock’s limp body back to shore, and pumping the salt water from his lungs. The paramedics arrive and bundle him up to bring back to the house (not the hospital), and now Ruby has another disaster to cope with: Mrs. Jordan, and she is pissed. “Lucy tells me what that lunatic has been up to: trying to kill himself again, making trouble and disturbance for everyone,” she shrieks, insisting that it’s out to the gatehouse with Ruby and Jock. Or not; Ruby insists that Dorothy go to her room: “Must I remind you that I am a psychiatric nurse? I have been trained to use force when it becomes necessary.” And it does become necessary, so Ruby seizes Dorothy Jordan in a judo hold and locks her in her own bedroom. What a gal!

Nat shows up unexpectedly, fortunately before Mr. Jordan gets home, so he can break the news about all the goings-on. Amazingly, Pa Jordan lets everyone stay, and in the morning has a heart-to-heart with Ruby in which he offers her $1 million if she will marry Jock. Next thing we know, the whole gang is back at Olive Hill, and Ruby is actually, amazingly, thinking over the offer: “Even if there is no more than once chance in a thousand, I must see that he gets that chance,” Ruby tells Nat. “I cannot have it on my conscience that I might have saved Jock from a living death, and did not.”

Only a bout of pneumonia keeps Ruby from eloping with Jock at once. But that gives Connie time to cook up a plan to prevent the marriage—yes, Connie, the girl who at book’s open deplored poverty, now declares that “what she really wanted was to marry some nice guy, love him to death, have a cute little house, and kids, and all the stuff most girls wanted.” So off Connie goes to see Dorothy, and tells her that $1 million of her husband’s precious fortune will slip through her fingers if Ruby marries Jock. Dorothy instantly reaches for the little pearl-handled revolver she keeps hidden amongst her underthings and hops into her black Caddy with the red leather seats to pay Jock a visit. She tells Jock about the bribe—and that Ruby is planning to go through with it, then have him committed to an insane asylum, annul the marriage and run off with Nat. She offers him her car and some money—$60, the cheapskate—but Jock’s not that dumb. He grabs the gun instead, knocks Dorothy down—poor Dorothy seems to have a “kick me” sign on her back—and heads for Nat’s office, just as Ruby herself is trotting down the Olive Hill corridors with the same destination. Oh, how will it all end?

The four or five final paragraphs of the book are actually quite sweet, but the perfunctory and plodding 17 preceding chapters are a hard slog. When the heroine holds multiple enormously flawed opinions, it’s hard to feel very sympathetic toward the little dunce. Florence Stonebraker pulls out a few great scenes in this book, but Nurse Under Fire is no match for her best works (i.e. City Doctor, The Nurse and the Orderly, Runaway Nurse). I love Florence Stonebraker enough that I could never just dismiss one of her books as not worth reading, but I do have to say, sadly, that you needn’t put this one at the top of your reading pile.

Hollywood Nurse

By Patricia Libby, ©1962
Cover illustration by Rudy Nappi

Three men called her “Jenny, Darling.” There was Tom, honest and sincere, who wanted her as a “full-time wife.” There was Mike—Mike to her, to others a screen idol and notorious playboy—who had fallen hard for her and had said, “This time it’s forever.” And there was Brad, the young doctor who shared her dreams and her dedication—but was engaged to another girl.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:

“I’d marry you for your cooking even if you were an old hag.”

“She was incurably romantic despite the fact of being an old maid.”

“ ‘Oh, Tom,’ she sighed in a trembly, little girl voice guaranteed to bring out the protective in males.”

“ ‘I make good home for Johnnie. I give him much love and smiling face. Is right way, Miss Tyler?’

“ ‘It’s the wise way, Koyo,’ Jenny answered. ‘The way to happiness in a marriage. Don’t ever change.’ ”

REVIEW:

Jenny Tyler works at the Holly View Sanitarium in Beverly Hills, where unhealthy movie people go to get well. She’s in love with Dr. Bradford Conners, but after he got one look at the chief of staff’s glamorous daughter, Faye Kettering, ambition and testosterone got the better of him and he dumped Jenny to propose to Faye. A business proposal soon followed, and now Brad is the chief’s assistant and medical heir. As the book opens, Brad and Jenny—who still have to work together, of course—are squabbling over the hospital’s central philosophy, which is that the medical staff should only tell patients what they want to hear. Which means that sweet old Western actor Laredo Sims, found to be in possession of an inoperable lung tumor, is left ignorant of his fatal condition. “People in the entertainment business live in a world of pretense,” Brad tells Jenny. “Truth is a stranger to them. An unwelcome one.”

Even Jenny’s roommate, Suzan, prefers illusion to reality. “Don’t be so darn truthful and practical,” she tells Jenny. “It takes the fun out of my dreaming.” Suzan is engaged to Dr. Kris McKenzie, but early in the book Suzan comes down with flu-like symptoms and is found to have an unexplained bruise on her shoulder. You will not be shocked to learn that Suzan is soon diagnosed with leukemia and given less than six weeks to live. You will be even less shocked that Suzan is the only one who isn’t told this. Curiously, Jenny instantly decides that “truth, which had always been the principle she believed in and practiced, must be exchanged for pretense.” Despite the fact that she has taken the opposite view on Laredo Sims’ case, virtually identical to Suzan’s, Jenny decides that she has to “give Suzan hope for a little longer.” When Suzan finally figures it out, she takes it in stride that all her friends have been lying to her, curiously. She and Kris decide to get married—and the hospital staff pools its resources, giving the newlyweds a check for $230 which “meant that they could have a honeymoon.” Today this amount would buy you four days at a Motel 6 and McDonald’s, but I guess there’s been some inflation in the past fifty years.

When she’s not battling illness and illusion at work and at home, Jenny is struggling to decide who to marry. Tom Russell is kind, dependable, and in love with her. “She had only to give him a little encouragement and he’d surely propose. Why not, she asked herself. Tom would make a good husband. He was nice-looking, charming, fun to be with, and they shared similar interests.” Marriage, in most VNRNs, is first and foremost a business deal, unless love sweeps all common sense under the rug. But Tom wants Jenny to quit nursing if they are married, so this—and her love for Brad—keep her single. Soon another beau enters the scene: Mike Ryan, who is a sort of George Clooney–type movie star. Despite his reputation as a lothario, he proposes within a week and is apparently quite serious; turns out he’s been looking for an honest woman, but Jenny’s the first one he ever met in Hollywood. Jenny goes to lots of glamorous parties with Mike and seriously considers marrying him, but in the end decides that she could never be at home in his world of glitter and indolence. “Love wasn’t enough, Jenny wanted to tell him. It took understanding and tolerance and the wanting to share each other’s interests and thoughts for a successful marriage. Mike’s world was pretending. Hers was reality.” Of course, she doesn’t really love him, either, so that would be a bit of a handicap as well.

In the meantime, Brad is still carrying on a low-grade flirtation with Jenny, dancing with her at the hospital ball and fighting with her when her bitterness about being dumped makes her catty. Eventually Brad becomes impatient with all the bickering, and asks her, “Can’t you stop being such a fighter?” This puts her in a tailspin: “Had her job made her so independent that she had become less of a woman? Stand up for what you believe. Speak the truth. There it was again. The principles she had governed her life by were proving to have a high price. Faye was no fighter, that was a foregone conclusion. She was every inch a woman. Softly feminine and seeming helpless. No wonder Brad had fallen into her trap. Dumb like a fox. That was Faye Kettering.” I have to say, I’d take integrity over a wedding ring, any day, but that’s just me.

With all her beaux off the table, Jenny decides to take a job in another hospital in Oregon, close to her home town. When Brad comes to tell Jenny goodbye, he blurts out that he is less than satisfied with his prospects: “My future all decided with no sweat or struggle involved. All I’ll have to do is agree with my father-in-law and cater to my wife. A small price for success, wouldn’t you say?” Jenny is surprised by Brad’s bitterness, especially when he tells her, “You’ve been a banner of truth in a citadel of illusion,” now apparently coming to appreciate the very qualities he despised at book’s open. This leads them both to agree that “truth should be tempered with kindness, even with little white lies sometimes. Just as illusion should never replace reality. There was room and need for both.” It’s a pat lesson, not really earned, and it falls flat.

Jenny is all packed and ready to go, but Laredo Sims is dying and asks that she come see him. There’s this little matter of a forest fire in the Hollywood hills near the hospital, but Jenny talks her way past the fire trucks blocking the road. Unfortunately, she runs out of gas about a mile up the hill, and the flames are about to overtake her as she runs screaming hysterically down the road, but Brad pulls up on a white horse—oh, no, it was just his car—and carries her up the hospital, where she recovers from smoke inhalation for a few days. It’s just a few pages from the end, and you can surely figure out what happens in the final paragraphs. Except poor Laredo Sims apparently dies alone, because he’s never mentioned again.

This book, written before Patricia Libby’s excellent Winged Victory for Nurse Kerry and Cover Girl Nurse, has none of their camp or humor or even interest. It’s fairly plodding, as nurse novels go, and the whole central theme of truth versus illusion is too easily dismissed with Brad and Jenny’s agreement to compromise. I had high hopes for this book, but apparently it took Ms. Libby a bit to hit her stride. Unfortunately, this is apparently the last of the three nurse novels she wrote, so there will be no chance of redemption, except to go back and revisit the two novels we’ve already read. And given their fabulousness, you might want to consider just that.

Nurse into Woman

Cover illustration by Dave Attie

“I’m a nurse, not a woman,” said Kristine. “I’ve resolved never to marry—never to have a child. I’m a good nurse—I’ll stay one. I’m not going to be a woman.” But to Captain Jim Dudley, whose life she had saved, and to Dr. Bowen, Chief of Staff, Kristine was far more than a nurse—she was a beautiful woman—a woman to be loved.

GRADE: A+

BEST QUOTES:

“People with imagination turned around to look at Kristine, in the subway or on a crowded city street.”

“What’s the use of being a good nurse, since I haven’t got eighteen-karat hair and big blue eyes? Nothing else seems to count, with patients or doctors either!”

“Many nurses at Samaritan had learned to make allowances for a physically unattractive girl’s jealousy, rooted in her inferiority complex.”

“You’re like a rock. Why can’t all women be fit and fine and adequate—not just physically but in other ways? Why do they think helplessness attractive?”

“Nothing seemed to hard, no personal peril—hers had not ended—mattered a whit, if this petty, stupid woman could be made whole again.”

“A nurse knew too much of the strength of sex drives to dismiss them as unforgivable sins. A nurse went too far behind the scenes of human nature to be surprised by any revelation of its baseness.”

“Her professional pride disliked being reminded that nurses can display as much stupidity, vulgarity and petty animosity as any other mortal.”

“Love and marriage and motherhood are three reasons why a woman must live.”

REVIEW:

Kristine Grant is a 22-year-old New York City nurse who has vowed never to get involved with anyone, because her parents died when she was a girl. “The only way to be emotionally secure is not to form personal ties,” she tells her pneumonia patient, Captain Jim Dudley. “I’ll help people who suffer, but I won’t—I won’t—be hurt again. I shall never love anyone. I shall never marry.” We’ll just see about that!

Jim is not like her other patients. Well, he is in that he immediately tumbles for the long-limbed Norse goddess of a nurse. But his love, unlike the spurious fancy that most male patients soon forget, is real: He worries about her working too hard taking care of him. He sends her gifts with personal significance, asks her about herself—but he never kisses her. Eventually he explains that there’s another woman, and when he leaves the hospital he will go disentangle himself and then come back to her. Kristine is quite smitten with this handsome, intelligent, devoted gentleman—as, indeed, so are we—but is convinced she will soon fade from his mind.

So now it’s back to nursing while she doesn’t wait for Jim to come back. Kristine goes to Quebec—one of author Ms. Marshall’s favorite places (she had a home there)—to nurse a recovering morphine addict, on vacation to Belltown (a stand-in for Kingston, the small New Hampshire town where Marshall grew up, and where we meet characters the author has illustrated previously in her not–nurse novel Salt of the Earth), then back to New York to nurse a case of psittacosis, a bird-borne illness that was at that time almost universally fatal (turns out the right antibiotic will put it to a quick end!). While Kristine is on that job, Chief of Staff Lee Bowen, at 45 more than twice her age, tells her that he’s in love with her and begs her to marry him. She trots out her childhood heartbreak: “You say I’m a good nurse—I’ll stay one! I’m not going to be a woman!”

But Dr. Bowen is not to be dissuaded, and with one sentence turns Kristine completely around: “This obsession of yours—for a girl like yourself it’s defeat, spineless surrender to the victory of the grave. You belong to life!” And now, suddenly, she knows she should get married, after all. But though she dates Dr. Bowen, she cannot bring herself to love him and tells him so. But he’s OK with that, he says; he wants to marry her anyway. She’s still holding out for Jim, however, until a young Italian woman lands on the OB ward, saying that the father of her child is Capt. Jim Dudley!!! That bastard! The man, I mean, not the baby. Kristine writes Jim a letter telling him that she cannot marry a man who would leave his child—and the mother of same—so cruelly, and that she is going to marry Dr. Bowen. He responds that she has condemned him without hearing his side of the story, denies ever having met the young woman, and says he will never see her again. She’s beside herself in misery over what she recognizes is the accuracy of his charges—made all the worse because her betrothed, Dr. Bowen, has committed suicide over a scandal that was about to be made public.

Now what is she to do? “A man wishing to make amends for a wrong could take the initiative and go to a woman; reverse the case and she could not run about town after him.” I’m not sure why, but double standards apparently abounded 70 years ago. So Kristine books a passage to Bermuda on the ship he is captaining. Now it’s just a question of catching him alone so that all can be set to right. You know exactly what is going to happen, but the writing is so exquisite that you experience Kristine’s tension and misery for pages before the crucial scene comes to pass—not to mention your own misery with the realization that another Marguerite Mooers Marshall book is nearing its end.

Marshall is a truly talented writer, easily one of the best VNRN authors out there. Her writing is smart, sophisticated, and picturesque, and her description of the vacation Kristine spends in New Hampshire has me packing my bags—if only I could get to that fictional place and time (though I am definitely going to shop for Salt of the Earth). Marshall only wrote four nurse novels that I’m aware of, much to my chagrin, three of which we’ve already enjoyed. But these four are certainly books one could read more than once, not something I would say about many vintage nurse novels.

San Francisco Nurse

Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

As a nurse, Bret Ames had always dreamed of marrying a doctor, yet when handsome Dr. Nels Larson proposed, she began to have her doubts. Strong, yet gentle, he was the kind of man a girl could lean on. But that was just the trouble. Was he too self-sufficient? Somehow she found herself irresistibly drawn to Dick Travers who needed her care and her love, but who belonged to another woman.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“He’s under sixty and male—that makes him just your type.”

“Half of you is twice as much as any other woman.”

“I won’t deny your husband’s obvious charms, but charms were meant for bracelets, not marriage.”

“Why is it that the unhappy people of this world hold so much power over the happiness of others?”

“How those smashing waves and rough rocks must be torturing his tender stumps!”

“I didn’t lose my head, just my legs.”

REVIEW:

I’ve waited a while for a nurse novel as campy as this one—and camp is something I hold quite dear. So it is with disappointment that I must declare that as much as I wanted to adore this book, the story line just couldn’t match the zingy one-liners. Besides, I was disappointed that a novel called San Francisco Nurse gave us little apart from a dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf—where only tourists venture—of that fine city.

When Chief of Nurses Bret Ames first claps eyes on Dick Travers, he is a “sour apple.” In for a nephrectomy after stones destroyed his kidney, he is as mean as they come—and now, with just one kidney, “only half a man,” he despairs. But she has a way with these types, and so she gladly takes on the challenge of trying to perk him up. Darn it, though, he is just so stubborn! “Look, Little Miss Sunshine,” he snaps at her, “you can save the routine for vaudeville, it may come back some day and you’ll need it.” You can see why after just a couple of minutes of his bitterness, she’s ready to throw in the towel, and not just because “she felt piqued at being so thoroughly ignored. There was no admiration in those dark eyes when he looked at her tall, well-distributed figure.” The nerve!

She soon finds out what his problem is—it’s Virginia Travers, Dick’s malevolent wife, who drove him to the brink of bankruptcy, left him for a wealthier man, and then nearly ruined his reputation when she found out he was in love with one of his graduate students. Her sugar daddy played out and the grad student long frightened away, she’s returned to Dick’s side, insisting he take her back. “I know now what his trouble is—a she-devil wife,” Bret concludes.

Under the terrible strain of his loss of manhood and the return of his evil wife, Dick refuses to smile for Bret. She eventually loses her cool with him, calls him—to his face!—an “ungrateful sour apple,” and then surprisingly kisses him full on the lips. “Dear God, I’m in love with him! Completely, crazily in love!” Bret thinks to herself. And so we have yet another dopey heroine falling for a man who has been nothing but mean to her. It isn’t too long before he’s taking her in his arms and kissing her, but given the Mrs. stomping around the hospital on her stilettos, those scenes are few and followed by guilty quarrels, as Dick sees no way out of his marriage.

So, in an attempt to cool her jets, Bret oddly decides to go visit Mrs. Travers at her home on the Berkeley campus of State University (and times have certainly changed; she drives across the Bay Bridge at 35 mph and is not killed, and the toll is 25 cents—now it’s $6 during rush hour). There, she tells Mrs. Travers that she is going to marry Dr. Nels Larsen, a fabulous doctor and all-around swell guy. “Self-possessed, he needed no one’s reassurance or approbation,” she thinks of Nels on their second date. “She would never lose her identity as Nels’ wife. He would not demand that her every waking thought be devoted to him—he did not need that kind of reassurance.” Sounds like a peach! Naturally she’ll never be able to love him.

When Dick finds out about this, though—and Bret is oddly shocked and furious that the Mrs. should pass along the 411 about the engagement to her spouse—Dick turns right back into that sour apple. He’s nasty, cruel, and shows up at Bret’s engagement party to slap her with the news that he got divorced four days ago—it apparently not crossing his mind to let her know before the announcement party—and chews her out for not waiting for him, when he gave her no reason whatsoever to do so. He also dares to say that “Nels will never give you the chance to be yourself,” when this is the opposite of what Bret had thought of him. “Nels needs nothing from you to make him a man!” he claims, and then clubs her with his parting shot: “I became a man for you. But I overrated your courage by asking you to be a woman for me.” Whatever that means, it completely overlooks his effeminate lack of kidney.

But now all we have left is to undo the engagement between Nels and Bret and all will be right. For your further enjoyment, there’s a side plot about a young man whose legs had to be amputated after a car crash, his engagement to a nurse friend of Bret’s, and his insistence that he cannot marry Sue unless he, too, can “be a man,” even with mere stumps for legs. I’m not sure what all this manliness is all about and why it’s so important to the gents in this book, but it really doesn’t seem to be worth the trouble for them or for their lady friends.

I was also not impressed at the way Nels is built up as a great guy in the beginning of the book, only to be depicted as a completely different man when Bret needs to dump him. His character change lets Bret off the hook too easily; she should have to man up herself, acknowledging the simple truth that she can’t marry Nels because she loves someone else, regardless of what an ass that man is, and not pretend her fickleness is due to any alleged flaw Nels possesses. She neither has to make any effort to go after Dick, because the very second she decides that she’s through with Nels, Dick’s hand drops on her shoulder. So while the zingers are hilarious fun, and these alone make San Francisco Nurse worth reading, the plotting just doesn’t have the backbone to carry this book to the top of the mark.

Hurricane Nurse

Cover illustration by Harry Bennett

Betsy Stockwell had been taught in nurse’s training to maintain an impersonal attitude toward her patient. Only then could a nurse do her job efficiently. But when the patient was your own father, though, how could you be anything but deeply, personally involved? For Betsy’s father, the beloved Dr. Cal, had had a heart attack and after his treatment in the hospital it would be up to Betsy to see that he made a full recovery. Postponing her plans to marry young Doctor Paul Norbert, Betsy accompanies her father to Florida. They are met by a handsome young doctor who practices medicine with a cool competence that both amazes and infuriates Betsy. What is a man like Mark Everett doing in this Florida wilderness? As Betsy begins to learn the answer, she finds that her interest is more than a professional one …

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“Funny thing, how all you fellows beat your brains out and wear yourselves to a nub, trying to heal the human race of ills it’s not a bit anxious to lose. So why? The whole world’s about to go boom any day, so why bother to keep people strong and healthy?”

“A really top-notch nurse is half the battle in any operation.”

REVIEW:

In the first chapter, Nurse Betsy Stockwell is desperately in love with Dr. Paul Norbert, and they are planning to marry in a few months and move to northern Georgia, where Paul will become a small-town GP in order to pay off a school loan. But then Betsy’s father, surgeon Cal Stockwell, drops of a heart attack after finishing a complex kidney transplant, and has to go somewhere dull for six months to recover, and Betsy insists on going with him. Her separation from Paul is all devotion and sorrow: “I love you very much and couldn’t be untrue to you, ever, not even if I took lessons and tried for years and years,” Paul swears; for her part, Betsy vows, “It’s like that with me, forever and ever and until the day after!”

You’ll never guess what happens next. Upon arrival at Blue Heron Cay, Betsy meets Dr. Mark Everett, and the pair takes an instant and deep dislike to each other. This is, of course, a standard VNRN device, but to her credit, Ms. Gaddis meets this head-on. “Love and hate are such terribly strong emotions and only a hair’s breadth separates them,” explains Donna Pruitt, a young hussy who brazenly chases Mark, “and quite often when you think you hate somebody to pieces, you wake up some morning and realize you don’t hate him at all. In fact, you’re nuts about him!” (Betsy responds that it will be a cold day in hell when this happens, and Donna says what we’re all thinking—“Famous last words!”)

Betsy attempts to take Donna under her wing and educate the poor misinformed lass about the proper way to win a man: “You can’t win a man by pursuing him that way. Keep him guessing!” she says. Betsy belabors this philosophy through several chapters and repeated sermons: “I think you’re scaring the poor man half to death, going after him as shamelessly as you are. I have a hunch that he’s a man who likes to do the pursuing.” Donna remains blithely unmoved, and it is only Betsy who squirms as Donna links her arm through Mark’s.

Then the advertised hurricane strikes, and Betsy and Mark work tirelessly to operate on a four-year-old girl. In their fatigue afterward, Mark holds Betsy’s hand and calls her darling, but surely that’s the lateness of the hour talking! No, Mark insists, they’re in love and must marry, he says the following morning on the beach after the storm has blown itself out. Betsy trots out the specter of Paul, who is no longer described in the adulatory terms we’ve grown accustomed to. Now it’s all obligation: “Paul was counting on her. Depending on her,” she thinks. “She had given Paul her word, and she would live up to it as selflessly and surely as she had lived up to the Florence Nightingale oath.” Again, Ms. Gaddis seizes this metaphoric bull by the horns. “None of which is worth a damn, if you’re not in love with him,” Mark declares. “No man wants a wife who is secretly in love with another man. To go on with your marriage to him would be a wicked, outrageous thing.” But before he has time to carry the point with another smooch, who pulls up to the beach in a battered boat but Donna, and when Mark helps the petrified seadog ashore, Betsy is inanely convinced that Mark will marry Donna.

Suddenly Dr. Cal is well enough to leave the island, and Betsy bravely marches back to her job at the hospital, “as though she was walking toward some dreary future.” But she needn’t worry—before too long she catches Paul in the diet kitchen with another woman! She declares herself relieved to be free of Paul, but is still convinced that Mark is going to marry Donna, based on absolutely no evidence apart from Donna’s dogged ambition. Then Donna shows up in Atlanta, shopping for her bridal trousseau: She’s engaged, but—get this—to another man! Now, however, all Betsy’s lectures to Donna about “chasing” men come back to haunt her, and she tells her father that it would be “too humiliating” to tell Mark that she wants to marry him, after all. Furthermore, “her sense of duty” to a patient she is specialing, a wealthy teenager recovering from a drunk-driving accident, now makes it impossible to visit Mark; why she can’t telephone or write a letter is not explained.

But one evening she discovers that the old watchman has allowed her patient’s friends to sneak into the hospital. Totally out of character, Betsy explodes, telling Larry not just that she will have the watchman fired though he is unlikely to ever find another job again, given his advanced age and ignominious behavior, but also that the young father and husband that Larry smashed into was burned to death in the accident, a little fact that Larry’s parents had meant to keep from him. Larry becomes hysterical, and Betsy, with “icy coolness,” “without remorse that she had told him the truth,” shoots him up with a sedative that knocks him out for the rest of her night shift. “She was still blazingly angry at those spoiled brats who broke laws for thrills,” we are told, as if this somehow justifies her brutality. The next morning Larry’s mother lets Betsy go, but for reasons unrelated to her shocking unprofessionalism. This frees Betsy to fly to Blue Heron Cay, where she finds Mark roaming the beach and confesses, “I’m a shameless woman! I’m pursuing you relentlessly!” She tells him that “as soon as I could get myself fired by the patient I was tending, I came straight down here,” as if her scene with Larry was a deliberate, manipulative act meant to free her from her own responsibilities. Now, she decides, “from that moment on she would do whatever was his will.” I wonder what she will do when she decides that obligation is no longer convenient.

I was quite pleased with this book up until Betsy’s sudden transformation into a brutal enforcer of punishment to rule-breakers, even more troublesome when juxtaposed with her own “joyous” flouting of a social “rule” that she herself has repeatedly beaten Donna with. Betsy undergoes no reflection on her past attitudes that indicates any growth of character or explains such hypocrisy, and the scene of her unapologetically abusing Larry is actually shocking, offering nothing to the plot but a puzzling glimpse of cruelty in our heroine.

Until this point, however, this is a crackerjack book. We get sparkling characters like the quintessential sassy girlfriend, and Mark is a self-assured hero whose initial dislike of Betsy stems from her own snobbery of the island, not from the author’s wish to make him an ass one minute and devilishly attractive the next. The writing offers a self-awareness that is unusual in a VNRN and a welcome change, and we regularly meet enjoyable passages such as, “The boat moved like an elderly lady after a day’s hard shopping, determined to get home but not seeing the necessity of hurrying too much lest she wreck her dignity.” I will even dare to say that I found Mark and Betsy’s crucial scenes to be exciting, which is an extreme rarity in this genre. So though it has a serious flaw in the end, I can still heartily endorse this book as one of Ms. Gaddis’ best.

Northwest Nurse

A torrent of excitement raced through her, as his lips met hers in a firm, gentle kiss. Holly Doran, R.N., had come to Oregon on a temporary assignment, but she found something much more permanent there—a town of people she cared about, and a wonderful young doctor named Key Catrell. There was only one problem—a handsome psychiatrist back in San Francisco who expected her to return to him, and with good reason—he was her fiancé.

GRADE: D

BEST QUOTES:

“She lowered her own eyes, thinking that the man could very well be a mental case, with eyes like that.”

REVIEW:

So for starters—the doctor’s name is Key? Really? Who comes up with names like this? Well, Arlene Fitzgerald, apparently (though Peggy Gaddis is also notorious for giving her men nouns and adjectives for names; see Blade in Doctor Sara, Gray of Leota Foreman, R.N., and Bland of A Nurse for Apple Valley). But this is just the least of this sad book’s flaws.

One VNRN device that really ticks me off is the nurse engaged to a man she frequently claims to love but who is clearly—even in her own eyes—a bit of an ass. We wade deeply into that ploy on the fourth page, when Holly Doran, who has decided to spend the summer nursing in a rural coastal town in Oregon, remembers her fiancé declaring that “no young doctor would be fool enough to stick himself off up there in the Oregon boondocks, when there are countless city pigeons to be plucked.” In case that clue isn’t enough, we are shortly told that “her engagement to Dr. Brian Merdahl had proved to be a disappointment. Somewhere along the way, the sweetness and light had gone out of their romance. For her, at any rate.”

Indeed, her very motivation for taking some time away from Brian is so that she can “evaluate her true feelings for him. A woman shouldn’t feel fear, when the man she loved wanted to make love to her.” In the first place, if she has enough doubt that she needs time out from the relationship before they’re even married, it seems clear that it’s time to return the ring (which she’s actually left at her parent’s house for her little vacation). The second problem with this statement is that just one of Holly Doran’s irritating characteristics is that she is afraid of everything. Within the span of six pages, Holly “shouldn’t feel fear,” “a sudden horror constricted her throat,” she’s “stifling a feeling of panic,” “she clamped the feeling of panic with firm nurse’s discipline,” “the sudden fright had squeezed around her throat,” “she felt queasy inside, with a gnawing little fear that she refused to recognize.” Among the many, many things that Holly is afraid of, beyond sex with her fiancé, is a tidal wave washing away the coastal village, a car-smuggling ring that’s known to be working along this area of Oregon, and sexual assault; of that list, only one thing doesn’t actually happen, so in addition to being overly fearful, Holly demonstrates some impressive psychic abilities.

And if she can’t bring herself to get frisky with Brian, she’s certainly thinking about Key in ways that most chaste VNRN heroines wouldn’t begin to consider until they’re safely married: “She wanted more than a scolding from the tall, handsome man who looked like a deck hand, and who, she admitted to herself, had stirred something that lay deep inside her, like a seed ready to burst forth with new life.” “The feeling of pleasure stayed with her, as she moved about the small, clean office, involving a part of her that was all woman; all longing, with a yearning that Dr. Brian Merdahl had not, with all of his suave utterances of love, been quite able to satisfy.” My, my.

Which leads me to point out that Arlene describes her two female leads using language far more provocative than I’ve seen in any other VNRN, the exception being the other Arlene Fitzgerald book I’ve read, Young Nurse Rayburn. Which is fine, except that it’s badly done, repetitive, and incongruous, such as when “in the next instant, her eagerness turned to stone, beneath her small, round breasts.” Arlene is too fond of the word “ripe,” which she uses most absurdly when Holly is “popping the crisp bacon between her ripe lips.” Arlene’s other favorite word is “voluptuous,” one she sprinkles liberally over Holly’s competition for Key’s affections: “the voluptuous woman’s soft, ripe exterior,” “the voluptuous redhead” “had the kind of bold, voluptuous looks that drew male eyes like a magnet.” Even if it is supposed to be racy, I just can’t find a thrill in badly written prose.

Beyond trashy, Arlene’s prose is excessively florid, and she proves herself to be overly fond of commas, and I can illustrate both propensities with the book’s opening sentences: “The road swooped above the vast Pacific, following the flounced contours of the Coast Range. Then, just as suddenly, it dipped down to a broad harbor, formed by the wide mouth of a river that curved back from the sea, deceivingly silent, as smooth and shiny as a satin ribbon, between high, green mountains.” I tell you, 144 pages never seemed so long, unless it was in Dante’s Inferno, but I think that was only 70 pages and written in stanzas, so it had a lot fewer words.

I usually devote some time in these reviews to the story itself, but why bother? You’ll spend so much time fuming over the bad writing, lazy plotting, and innumerable commas (well, maybe you’re not as passionate about commas as I am) that the story line is immaterial. I had really looked forward to this book (missing the fact that this was penned by the same author as the one who gave us the D+ Young Nurse Rayburn), based entirely on the fantastic cover illustration. Will I ever learn? After Northwest Nurse has so emphatically driven home the complete dissociation between the quality of the cover and that of the story within, at long last I just might.