Nurse at the Cedars

 By Peggy Gaddis, ©1964

He took Susan to his private island to be his private nurse. The old gentleman had only two weeks to live when Dr. Scott Murdock gave him a new wonder drug. Then it looked like he might pull through—and Doctor Scott and Nurse Susan began to find they had more than medicine in common. The country doctor had won the heart of the city nurse. But when greedy relatives, who expected their rich uncle to die, found him convalescing instead—real trouble rocked the little island!

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Relax, Merrill. I’ve had breakfast, and I rarely gobble up nurses before lunch. You are perfectly safe.” 

“If just one more white-clad individual comes at me with a treatment tray and a needle big enough to vaccinate a horse, I’m not going to be responsible for my actions!”

“There’s two schools of thought about raising kids. One was to bring ’em up the way they ought to be; and the other was just to let the FBI handle it later on.”

REVIEW:
My copy of this book was sent to me by a reader of this blog, so the first thing I have to say is Thank you Joanne, for thinking of me! Secondly, I am relieved that Peggy Gaddis here has produced something she’s not often capable of—a good book. Here we find Susan Merrill nursing Mr. Cantrell, a rich man of 68 at a hospital in Atlanta when he decides he would prefer to go home to his estate on an island off the coast of Georgia to die—he has subacute bacterial endocarditis (and there’s an overly dense explanation of the disease that seems like it was lifted from a medical textbook for you to wade through) and has two weeks to live. Of course, he’s decided to take Susan with him as his nurse.

There she meets Dr. Scott Murdock, who is called “Dr. Murdock” throughout the book, even during tender scenes between him and Susan. He is an orphan (Susan, of course, is, too) whose education, residency and present clinic in town were all arranged and paid for by Mr. Cantrell, so since the gentleman’s diagnosis he has been burning the midnight oil researching treatments and has come across an experimental medication that might prolong his life by years, and he persuades Mr. Cantrell to try it.

Then the expected happens: Two greedy nephews and a niece show up, hoping to witness their relative expiring before their eyes and leaving them all the dough, and they are not at all pleased to find the old man is recovering! As Susan and Dr. Scott endeavor to cure the old man while protecting him from his family, they naturally and perfunctorily fall in love as the book hits the halfway point, and 14 pages later Susan essentially proposes. “I should have waited for you to propose to me, all formal and everything, I suppose. I guess I—well, sort of jumped the gun, didn’t I?” Given that they’ve only known each other two weeks, um, yes, you did, honey. But it’s actually a nice change from Gaddis’ usual method of the heroine becoming deeply hurt and insulted over her man’s inability to declare a love she has blindly refused to see.

To be honest, not much happens for a bit, though there’s a lot of flurry with the relatives and the insinuation that one of them might resort to murder, but it never comes to that—the old man conveniently drops of a stroke, as you knew he had to. Now there’s just the reading of the will, and you can probably guess the outcome of that scene, which concludes with Susan slapping the niece! Unfortunately this scene occurs only on page 102, and the rest of the book is a bit of a slog, with many characters coming and going from the house and long discussions about the various lawsuits that will follow, but though this does bring the book down somewhat, overall it is still a good one for Gaddis. The heroine really is a strong character who doesn’t metamorphose into a silly kitten the minute her man is near, and indeed when he tries to send her back to Atlanta, she refuses to go and tells him, “Hush trying to give me orders.” Gaddis does like to latch on to words—here someone is speaking “huskily” or “nodding soberly” every page of the first chapter, but she seems to have decided to reach for her thesaurus as the book progresses. Overall, it’s a satisfying achievement for Ms. Gaddis, so if you are curious to see what she can do when she’s firing on most cylinders, Nurse at the Cedars is not a bad opportunity to find out.