Nurse of Spirit Lake

By Dorothy Brenner Francis, ©1975 

Ellen Ferris was aghast at her first sight of Scarlet Point Lodge. Never had Aunt Madeleine mentioned that the hotel she had recently purchased on the shores of Iowa’s Big Spirit Lake was in fact a run-down four-story monstrosity with a red tile roof and Gothic-arched Spanish belfry towers. Even more astonishing was Aunt Madeleine’s revelation that she had only four guests—really five, she carefully explained, if you counted sandy-haired Doug Cooper, the young writer who helped out with odd jobs in exchange for his room and board. But Aunt Madeleine had plans—ambitious intentions of restoring the lodge to its former graciousness—and she had hired Frank Welborn, an architect with blond hair and deeply tanned skin, to supervise the renovation. Resignedly Ellen tried to concentrate on setting up a first-aid station for the lodge’s four elderly guests. It was for this purpose that the blue-eyed nurse had come to spend the summer at Spirit Lake. And she had welcomed the invitation, because it afforded her time to ponder the problem that had arisen during her last semester of teaching at a California nursing school. Before long, however, Ellen’s problem was eclipsed by the thornier ones involved in running Scarlet Point Lodge—and in managing her own unpredictable heart. And then the odd occurrences began …

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“No matter how far a guy travels there’s nowhere to look for subject matter except within oneself.” 

“Good food can distract almost anyone from unpleasantness.”

“Sincere compliments for work well done never spoiled anyone.” 

“History is a crop that sometimes gets plowed under.”

“Every place in the world is special, but life moves so fast that it takes a magician, or an artist, to make people stop and notice the uniqueness right at their doorstep.”

REVIEW:
Ellen Ferris had never wanted to be a nurse, but had been forced into it by her Aunt Madeline, who had raised her after she had been orphaned at 15. But she’d gotten her way in the end, becoming a teacher at a nursing school after she had obtained her RN. Now she’s again doing her aunt’s bidding by coming to Scarlet Point Lodge, the run-down hotel on the shores of Spirit Lake in Iowa, to serve as staff nurse for the whopping four guests at the lodge who seem to be staying all summer as well. She’s in a bit of a pickle at school: A wealthy man’s daughter is flunking Ellen’s class, and if she flunks the student, the father is going to change his mind about the endowment he’s planning to give the school. So Ellen is hoping this little sojourn away from school will help her figure out if she’d rather keep her principles or her job.

Before long strange things start happening: food is going missing from the pantry, and Ellen finds a hair ribbon on the third floor, which is closed to guests. And someone has used the rowboat! Aunt Madeleine also demonstrates some erratic behavior such as standing on the railing of the third-floor belfry and becoming too frightened to get down, not to mention staffing and stocking out a first aid station for a meager four guests when she has better things to do with her money, as her hotel is literally falling apart and the lawn isn’t even mowed. But that doesn’t seem to bother Ellen as much as the hair ribbon does.

Meanwhile there are two young men to compete for Ellen’s hand in marriage, because it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a heroine of a nurse novel must be in want of a husband. There’s Doug, a writer with a gloomy outlook—he obsesses a lot about the history of Native American massacres in the area, constantly calling Ellen’s attention to the site of this attack or that one—and he has some odd ideas: “I believe there’s a universal thought bank that’s made up of every thought and every idea that has ever existed. And I believe that each individual mind is an inlet that’s in some mysterious way connected to this huge thought bank,” he tells her, adding that he’s tapped into this thought bank, because “even if I’d never read a word about the Spirit Lake massacre, I know I would have sensed a feeling of death when I visited this area. It’s all around us.” Because no one anywhere else has ever died. She likes him anyway, but does think “there was an unrest about him that troubled her, interested her.”

The other young man, Frank Welborn, is the architect that Madeleine has hired to spruce up the hotel. He’s “a sleek type who might have stepped from a clothing advertisement in a slick magazine,” and we first meet him when Ellen discovers him in her room, allegedly measuring the space for future renovations. She dates him too, even though he uses the adjective “super” in about every other sentence, but on the plus side he’s never even heard of the Spirit Lake massacre and “never cared much for local history,” so he’s not bringing up dead people all the time. He tells Ellen to pass her student and move to New York City with him. “You aren’t afraid to try making it in a big city, are you?” Luckily he decides they should head out on the dance floor before she’s obliged to continue this “uncomfortable conversation,” but there she decides, apparently based on Frank’s smooth dance moves, that “Frank was a man a girl could build a dream around.”

When she’s not kissing boys, there’s lots of other action at Scarlet Point Lodge for Ellen to get involved in. There’s a huge storm in which the 77-year-old guest decides to go for a walk and a tree falls on him, giving him a head laceration, which Ellen treats with sedatives and then sends him off to bed, possible concussion or brain bleed be damned! The fireplace chimney gets blocked and smokes out the ground floor, causing one of the guests to have a severe asthma attack and vows to check out immediately. “Madeleine Ferris is an idiot,” he pronounces, having only just arrived at a conclusion that would have been painfully obvious from the first minute on the place. But Ellen shows who the idiot is when she distracts him from his idea with a buttered muffin. Then she finds a runaway girl, 12-year-old Lori Wilde, who has run away from a foster home while her mother serves six months in jail for shoplifting food. Lori, intent on not being seen, is shining a light around the dock and singing along to a radio in the middle of the night when Ellen timidly ventures out to see who is making all the ruckus. Lori might not be as dopey as her hiding skills make you think, as right away she asks Ellen, “Why are you bothering to ask me dumb questions?”

Janey van Allen, the young woman who Ellen caught cheating on the exam, turns up after driving 1,500 miles and tells Ellen that the reason she cheated on the exam, though she is otherwise an A student, is that she had been caring for her 7-year-old sister with severe tonsillitis for the previous three days and hadn’t had time to study. She begs for forgiveness and swears she will never cheat again. It’s curious that this story hadn’t surfaced weeks earlier, at the time of the actual incident, but hard-hearted Ellen is unimpressed. Then Doug proposes, but he’d just gotten a letter from someone named Julie Jackson and doesn’t explain it to Ellen, and then she sees Frank holding Janey’s hand and there’s lipstick on his cheek, so there go both of her men, as easy as they came. Only a hotel fire will put everything to rights!

Honestly, you’d swear Ellen is jinxed the way one calamity after another happens to her. She herself is a confusing character, as she is determined to do the “right” thing by expelling her student from school but herself repeatedly fails to report the runaway child, leaving the girl to sleep in the woods for days. She also doesn’t seem to have much sense as she navigates the world, freaking out about Doug getting a letter from a woman and swooning for the asinine Frank. Overall this book and a number of its characters, Aunt Madeleine in particular, are a bit perplexing. Failure of logic and inconsistent characters are two of the most common problems VNRNs have, and Nurse of Spirit Lake has both in abundance, so you might want to save your time and pick a different book.

Nurse at Ste. Monique

By Juliet Armstrong, ©1966

That foggy London morning, when someone tried to snatch her handbag, was to have far-reaching consequences for Maura O’Shea, sending her winging across the seas to a new life in the sunny West Indies. It was indeed a far cry from the renowned St. Matthew’s Hospital in London to the little nursing home at Ste. Monique, but Nurse Maura was to find that the emotional problems facing her there were far, far greater than ever they were in London.

GRADE: B+

REVIEW:
Maura O’Shea is the Irish stereotype, red-haired and feisty; “You could deal out a very smart box on the ear, if you thought a chap deserved it,” she’s told. She is working in London when right there on the first page her handbag is stolen and she is knocked to the ground. “A tall man, carrying a suitcase, strode over to her and lifted her to her feet with his free arm, firmly but gently, as though she were a precious piece of china.” Do we think this gentleman makes an appearance on the last page of the book as well? We sure do! His name is Paul Lasalle, and he is in town on business for his plantation (yeesh) in the Caribbean. Because the robber is soon nabbed, he is required to come back to town to testify at the trial in a few weeks, so the pair go out regularly before he heads back home. But his brother, Claude, is also in town—and he’s a more social fellow, frivolous with his emotions, soon taking her out on a regular basis and calling her “darling,” which makes Paul’s eyebrows rise concernedly when he returns, and he’s a bit too brusque for Maura. “Was it that he suspected her of setting her cap at Claude, and regarded her as on a lower social level than the Lasalles?” 

But Claude has to return to the Caribbean soon, and Maura tells him she’s not going to see him any more—so he shows up and proposes marriage. It’s arranged that she will sail to the Caribbean in a few weeks, and at the first stop she gets a telegram telling her to get off there, though she’d planned to finish her trip at another island, and when she steps off, she’s met by Paul, who tells her that Claude has gone back to his ex-wife—whose existence surprises Maura. When Paul tells her he will pay for her to fly back to London on the next flight, instead of being grateful, she’s rude: “You’re in a great hurry to get me out of the island! I might have the plague!” she snaps, not at all grateful that he’s trying to help her out of a huge jam. Instead she takes a room in a boarding house and gets a job at a nursing home, but Paul warns her that the nursing home is on the verge of going bankrupt, because although it’s a profitable business, the owner, Mrs. Martin, took on a lot of debt to finance its startup and is having trouble paying her creditors as well as the business expenses. Again, is she thankful for the tip? No, she is not!

Yet he keeps popping around to see her or take her to dinner, and they inevitably squabble, mostly about his concerns about the men she is dating—his motivations transparent to everyone except Maura, who thinks, “How hard and distrustful he could be, how lacking in charity”—although one time when they are driving to dinner and she has fallen asleep in the car she dreams that he gently kissed her lips … and then suddenly, out of nowhere, Maura decides “to part with him finally and forever, would be utterly unbearable”! This is one of the worst sorts of plot twists, completely inconsistent—even if completely predictable—with the character we have followed in the last hundred pages. Yet she still argues with him at every turn, and then does her best friend Phyllis a bad turn when she dates her boyfriend and he thinks he’s fallen in love with her. Only a series of crises with both Paul and Phyllis—again, completely predictable—sort out everyone’s true feelings, although one of the crises, which lands Paul in the hospital, is so bizarre it’s hard for me to imagine Paul would ever look at Maura again.

In the meantime, Maura is being quite rude to a coworker who, it must be confessed, is not a nice person, though she should know even at 22 that she’s not helping the situation. Oddly, she is reluctant to visit Paul in the hospital but finally goes a week or two later, “cost her what it might in pride,” though it’s clear to me that she owes him a lot more than a visit—but he’s left the hospital days ago. She meets the nurse who had cared for him there, and now she’s stupidly in agonies that Paul has fallen for his nurse, wondering if she “was the reason for his silence”—and never mind that she hasn’t reached out to him at all, either, so maybe he’s wondering about her silence, but “she was too proud to ring up the Lasalles, as she would have loved to do.” Maura is her own worst enemy, and it’s a little difficult to understand what all the men see in her. And now she’s decided to leave the Caribbean in two weeks, another smart decision. Then her feud with her co-worker lands her in hot water at the immigration office, as she’s been working without a permit, and is told to leave the island the next day. What will happen next?

The obstacle with this book is that Maura is a stupid and not very likeable person. She deserves little of the good that happens to her and all of the bad. But the writing is good, even if I found nothing for the Best Quotes section above, and the other characters in the book are interesting. If you can tolerate a very predictable plot (but then, aren’t all VNRN plots very predictable?) and a foolish heroine, it’s not a bad read.

Starring Suzanne Carteret, R.N.

By Diane Frazer
(pseud. Dorothy Fletcher), ©1966
Cover illustration by Harry Bennett

When, almost by chance, Suzanne Carteret was summoned as a consultant on a television series devoted to nursing, it seemed to her a wildly exciting prospect. The entertainment world was a madly glamorous one and she was eager to penetrate it. But it proved far different from what she had imagined. Soon she found herself sucked into a vortex that threatened to carry her far over her head. Things began happening more quickly than she had ever imagined possible, and for a moment it even began to look as if she might be swept into a whole new career. Would it turn her head? Could she abandon nursing, for which she felt such a genuine vocation? And what about young Doctor Clive, with whom she had thought herself in love? The decision was hers. Or was it? Everything moved with a rapidity that made her feel sometimes that she no longer had any control over her life!

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Never buy a sling chair, Ted. I found bones where I never knew I had them before.” 

REVIEW:
Picking up a book written by Dorothy Fletcher, here under her usual pseudonym, gives me a little frisson of excitement. Maybe it’s the Harry Bennett cover illustration—he seems to have done most of her books—a little cutting edge, a little weird. Maybe it’s anticipating the saucy repartee that will inevitably sparkle from the yellowed pages. Maybe it’s meeting another independent, strong woman who knows her mind, most of the time anyway, who will be a treat to spend time with. Here we have all that—and if the plot isn’t Ms. Fletcher’s finest, well, you know it’s still worth the hours. 

Suzanne Carteret, R.N., is our nurse heroine. She works on the neurology floor for a Manhattan hospital, so it’s not clear why she and neurosurgery intern Dr. David Clive care for so few neurology patients. But who cares? She and her feisty roommate Dorcas double date with David and his intern friend Pete, going out for spumoni and beer on Saturday nights, and why not? They’re poor, so they can’t afford Sardi’s. But in the first chapter, Suzanne meets a man who can, Ted Binghamton, an associate producer for a new TV show, “Women in White.” It’s about nurses, and when he and a few of the actors come to the hospital to learn a few things about it on background, Suzanne shows them around. By the end of the hour, Ted is smitten. He calls her up and asks her out, and wouldn’t you know it, he’s caught her at a time when she’s feeling a little disenchanted with her beloved.

David Clive is a kind, compassionate, hard-working young intern, putting in tons of hours and breaking dates at times because he’s offered to scrub a case that’s unexpectedly going to the OR late. But gosh, all he talks about is the hospital, and medicine, and patients! Even on their one big splurge date, when “she wanted to talk idly and dream,” he doesn’t. “Let’s not talk about the hospital, she silently adjured him. Oh, David, forget about the hospital for once. Talk to me. Just to me, please.” But she forgets to speak the words aloud, and when he doesn’t read her mind, she snaps at him, and they have a little fight. Then she starts noticing that he does seem to have a one-track conversation every time they’re out. “There they sat, David and Pete, absorbed in abstractions, oblivious to herself and Dorcas, oblivious to the passing scene. Beyond lay the world, and the world was more than medicine. The world was light and laughter and gaiety and frivolity. When you were twenty-three years old, as she and Dorcas were, laughter and frivolity were things you wanted. Things she wanted, and wanted badly.” Unfortunately she doesn’t get them with David, nice as he is.

So she agrees to go out with Ted, and he takes her to Sardi’s! He invites her to the TV studio, and there she befriends a young actress, Virginia Clegg, who is on her last dime, and if she doesn’t do well with this role, her dream of acting is over! Unfortunately, the aging actress on the show has got it in her head that Suzanne should play the part instead of Virginia. The back cover blurb notwithstanding, Suzanne has almost no interest in becoming an actress, and repeatedly rebuffs the idea. But she does keep saying yes to Ted, who keeps asking her out on fabulous dates. We know that seeing multiple people isn’t really wrong in this era—men who are engaged are constantly kissing and even grabbing other women in vintage nurse romance novels—but she hasn’t told David that she’s dating Ted, and she’s wondering if maybe Ted is more interesting than David.

I think that’s really all I can say about the plot, which as I hinted above is not very complicated, without giving away the story. But it’s still a good story, replete with Fletcher’s trademark witty dialogue, and in addition it is also an homage to being a young woman loose in Manhattan, with lovely passages describing the streets and the passersby in the park and how it all makes you feel alive. It’s clear Dorothy Fletcher did love New York; she lived there from her early 20s until she married in her late 40s and moved to Florida. If we never get to experience life in the city for ourselves firsthand, we’re lucky we have Dorothy to show it to us, and I’m only sorry that of the 16 nurse novels Dorothy wrote, I have only two left.