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.
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