Nurse Felicity

By Peggy Dern (pseud. Peggy Gaddis), ©1966

Nurse Felicity grew up in the Georgia hill country and watched her father doctor the sick there. She understood the natives and they trusted her. But Felicity loved a strong-willed mountain lawyer who resented her work. Could she forget him and start a new life with young Dr. Aleck Potter, somewhere away from “injun medicine and voodoo witchcraft”?

 

GRADE: C-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“You and I are committing one of the scarlet crimes of nurses, gossiping about a doctor. Shame on us!”

 

“How a girl as lovely as you are could possibly be contented to disguise herself in a white canvas uniform I’ll never understand.”

 

“I am not nosy. I’m just interested.”

 

“So many girls are so busy being charming and alluring and seductive that they don’t give a man a chance to enjoy their company, because he’s so busy protecting himself from their feminine wiles!”

 

“Just as soon as you’re strong enough, you’re going to get the paddling of your life, sweetheart.”

 

“I wonder why you and I are foolish enough to put in years learning to practice medicine when just love will take care of any illness.”

 

REVIEW:

This morning I surveyed my bookshelf of VNRNs and sighed at the overly large number of books by Peggy Gaddis still waiting to be read. I decided I might as well get it over with and plucked Nurse Felicity out of the lineup, lured by its interesting cover. But it did not take many pages after opening that cover that I experienced that familiar sense of gloom, an inevitable complication of Gaddis’ books, as I watched Nurse Felicity Caldwell leap immediately to her feet when the call light went on at 3:00 am and hold a patient’s hand until he went back to sleep (you will understand my disgust if you’ve ever worked as a nurse on the night shift) and leap to her feet again when Dr. Aleck Potter enters the ward. The pair then enter into a lengthy conversation that exposes Gaddis’ prejudice against the Native Americans who live in the “Georgia hill country,” and discuss of Deenie Taylor, an orphan raised by Indians because her grandmother was a witch and when Granny had died “no white people would have her,” who now wanders randomly through the hospital apparently just for fun. She hates white people, see, and “some of the patients are so afraid of her that if she just stands and looks at them, they go off into a frenzy.” There’s nothing left for her but to learn witchcraft from the Indian medicine men, they decide. I sighed wearily and turned to page 9.

 

Dr. Potter is just working here for a year to pay back the state for his medical education, then plans to return to the city. Based on his dislike of rural medicine, Felicity “felt that she had never disliked anyone more,” which means he will either marry her or Deenie, but my money was on the latter. Felicity is dating local attorney Corbett Raiford who wants her to quit her job when they marry. “He can’t see any future for a woman finer than being a wife and a mother,” Felicity decides, and Aunt Ellen, who raised the orphan (there are three of them in this book; parents apparently die frequently in Georgia), doesn’t seem to be rooting for him, instead suggesting she go out with that nice Dr. Potter instead! On Felicity’s next date with Corbett, he tells her she should “snap out of that silliness of yours and consent to behave like a reasonable creature,” so you are definitely agreeing with Aunt Ellen, but she continues to go out with him, though every single outing we witness—and there are at least half a dozen of the tedious affairs—end with this same quarrel. So what’s a gal to do?

 

Well, she can have the plot diverted away from her stupid boyfriend by a beautiful young woman, who has clearly spent more than a day pushing through the densest woods anyone has ever imagined, tossing herself in front of the car of Len Mallory, a handsome and wealthy man from Atlanta who is in town to visit his mother, who has had a heart attack. The woman instantly lapses into a coma that lasts weeks, and no one knows who she is—until Deenie shows up and says she’s the insane niece of a woman who lived with her son in the deepest woods near the Indians’ settlement, and that the young woman had shot them both and set the house on fire. Len Mallory, sensing an opportunity when he sees one, asks Felicity out to dinner, when he tells her that he can’t marry her because (1) “I have not the faintest hope in the world of ever persuading you to fall in love with me,” and (2) he would never move to the mountains and she would never move to the city, so they could never be together. Some people have the most interesting dates!

 

Peggy Gaddis loves to introduce us to a passel of young men and women and then play musical chairs to see who ends up with whom. I was a little surprised how the six or seven young people we meet in Nurse Felicity played out, and not optimistic about our heroine’s choice working well for her. In between Felicity’s arguments with Corbett and her sparring with Dr. Potter (who always seems to piss her off to an extent that usually precedes wedding bells in Gaddis’ books), we get plenty of the usual Gaddis illogical nonsense that I guess you’re just supposed to gloss over, such as when the sheriff casually explains to an out-of-town visitor, “This Deenie Taylor is the granddaughter of a witch,” like that’s a normal thing here in the mountains, plus the usual doctor-as-lordly-being, spanking, and scheming, flirtatious women we always find. And in another more unfortunate recurrence, this book is obliging me to write another check on behalf of the White Doctor Foundation to try to atone for its racism; Peggy Gaddis has instigated 30 percent of those donations. I suspect, when I finally finish all her books, there will have been many more.

Nurse Lucie

By Georgia Craig (pseud. Peggy Gaddis), ©1964
Also published as Nurse at Guale Farms

Nurse Lucie Hatcher walked headlong into another world when she arrived at the small Georgia clinic at Guale Farms, eager to work with the skilled Dr. Wesley Warren. Lucie didn’t plan to get involved with the handsome young doctor, nor with the rich owner of the experimental farms, Perry Latham. But she did … with both. Then suddenly, women from Wesley’s and Perry’s lives appeared and disrupted Lucie’s paradise. Could she give Wesley up to the mysterious woman from his past? Could she fight the powerful and jealous Latham family for Perry’s love? Lucie’s paradise soon turned into a nightmare …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“You’re much too pretty to be working at a grim job like this.” 

“A job? My dear girl! That’s a nasty word. Go immediately and wash your mouth out with soap and water.”

“The one end and aim of every woman is marriage and a home of her own.”

“She’s really a looker, isn’t she, now that we’ve got her dried out and all?”

REVIEW:
Lucie Hatcher has left Atlanta to come work in a small rural town, and a good number of the local folks are bewildered as to why she—or he—is willing to “bury herself in a place like Lathamtown. It’s just about the most lonesome place anybody ever heard tell of.” But it’s well paying, and she’s always wanted to experience life in the country, as she’s been a city gal her whole life, and now that she’s arrived in her “silly scrap of a yellow pillbox hat” she’s here to stay, dammit! 

She’s offered a ride from the bus station to the clinic by the pathologically angry schoolteacher Jane Berner, who warns Lucie that she’s to keep her mitts off Gareth Latham, who has just returned home after getting kicked out of college yet again. He’s the stepbrother of Perry Latham, who runs a large experimental farm in nearby Lathamtown and “doesn’t want anything that would bring tourists this way. He doesn’t want Graysville to install drive-in movie theatres, or taverns, or beer-and-wine package stores, or pin-ball machines; anything that might lure the young of Lathamtown astray. He’s not going to allow such devices within easy reach of his people.” Lucie lets this description of an oppressive local dictator pass with little comment or musing about how one person could possibly prevent the development of a whole town, and when she actually meets the tall, very good-looking man with a lean, sun-bronzed face, any further reference to this alarming aspect of Perry’s character drops away and is never mentioned again. As long as he’s cute, who cares if he’s fascist? It’s not long, of course, before he’s kissing her goodnight.

Perry has a stepmother, Belle, and she and Gareth “will never let Perry marry any woman.” When Lucie rightly expresses her incredulity that a grown man, especially a fascist, will be led around by his stepmother, she is told that Belle will “go after the girl. Once Belle gets the idea that Perry is seriously interested in any girl, she’ll sharpen up her knives until they’ll make every scalpel in the clinic seem dull.” Lucie also starts to question, when Jane puts the idea in her head, why “a doctor as young as Dr. Warren is and as skilled would be working in a small rural clinic instead of setting up a fine city practice somewhere or specializing in doing research.” But Dr. Warren is described as a local authority to whom other area doctors regularly consult, so his practice does not seem unsatisfying, if one is interested in primary care for an underserved community—and it’s curious that such a practice, today considered noble, would be scorned.

But Dr. Warren’s practice takes a considerable hit when Leonore Arnold, his fiancée, shows up in a rainstorm. It turns out the woman has gone insane after seeing her mother murdered by home invaders and has been committed to an institution—but has improved enough from her previously catatonic state to learn where Dr. Warren is, escape and find her way 20 miles to his door. Dr. Warren immediately tries to resign because when the town hears that “there’s a mental case here, the story will be built up that she’s a lunatic and her presence here makes everybody unsafe.” Perry insists that he stay, and that Leonore is sure to get well, even if she must never, ever remember that horrible incident again, because “her love will restore her to complete sanity.” Sure it will! Also, remember that since only the clinic personnel know she’s there, the secret won’t get out, “because nurses aren’t allowed to discuss their patients with outsiders.” Lucie, however, immediately lets drop in a packed waiting room that the doctor in charge of the sanitorium has arrived in the clinic to see a patient, and tells Belle that the patient “is no maniac,” just “a girl who is mildly ill mentally.” (And, it must be pointed out, she repeatedly tells anyone who asks about numerous other patients under her care.) So much for keeping a secret. 

Soon patients stop coming to clinic or calling for Dr. Warren’s services, and everyone, including Lucie, is perplexed as to how word got out, interestingly enough. Unfortunately, Leonore herself is one of those classic Peggy Gaddis characters, a beautiful, “bright-eyed, inquisitive child” who has no personality or brain whatsoever, and flings herself at poor Dr. Warren whenever he’s near, pleading, “Please, please, darling, let me stay here with you! I’ll die if I have to be taken away from you!” Not surprisingly, Dr. Warren at one point admits to Lucie that he no longer loves Leonore, but since the nutty shrinking violet is utterly helpless, he is soon declaring his love to her face and insisting they be married immediately. Another thorny issue raised and then perplexingly dropped completely.

Then Belle pops in to threaten Lucie, as promised, that she must not marry Perry, though she has absolutely no weapon to use against Lucie. Perplexingly, Lucie—who is now in love with Perry—tells Belle that she has no interest in Perry but plans to marry Gareth, which sets Belle back on her heels a bit, but then Lucie reverses course and says, “I wouldn’t marry either of the Latham men, even if they were the last men in the world!” Guess who has just come in the door behind her? The only possible way the pair could be reconciled is if Leonore, whose mental illness has mysteriously rendered her unable to walk, takes off into the swamp in her wheelchair and the rest of the gang is somehow unable to find her, and the overwhelming stress of the situation sends Lucie straight into Perry’s arms. The good news is that Leonore is found in a coma suffering from concussion, and the prognosis of her mental illness improves enormously because “a mild concussion might be helpful in restoring her mind. Perhaps when the concussion heals, she may be able to recall the past.” A couple of x-rays—a highly sensitive test for diagnosing mild brain injury (not)—“had been most satisfactory,” whatever that means, and a week later Leonore wakes from her coma!

The overwhelmingly bad medicine in this book is actually comical if you have any actual medical training or ever watched a few episodes of “Grey’s Anatomy,” and it’s hard to understand why Peggy Gaddis, who wrote what feels like thousands of nurse novels, never bothered to learn anything about the subject. Her penchant for raising difficult problems—like a man whose leg is amputated after he is attacked by an alligator and whose wife leaves him because he’s “a cripple,” though Lucie indignantly protests that the young woman is only in shock and will come to her senses and return (she doesn’t)—and then utterly abandoning them unresolved is also infuriating. But overall this is far from the worst Peggy Gaddis novel I’ve met (that would be Dr. Merry’s Husband, which rated a D-), ranking in the top third of the 34 novels of hers I’ve reviewed to date (God help me, I’ve at least that many more to read before I can rid myself of Peggy Gaddis forever). So if you enjoy the occasional novel that you can chuckle at (not with) without suffering overmuch from aggravating writing and characters, this may be a good bet for you.

We can always count on Valentine
for a hideous cover illustration.

Emergency Nurse

By Peggy Gaddis, ©1963 

The nurses in the Emergency Ward were always busy. And one of the busiest was Nurse Elaine Prescott. Two doctors called for her … after working hours as well as during them. When Dr. Toby Latimer even glanced at her, her pulse did flip-flops. How odd, then, that she should be so impatient for her next date with Dr. Jay Dillard. His kind of attractiveness spelled danger … a danger she didn’t want to think about … yet …

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“I’ve never seen her in anything except operating garb. And you know what that is! Liz Taylor would look like a hag in one of those sickening green gowns and masks.” 

“I knew how much it would mean to him to look at something young and pretty. Miss Simmons and the other nurses on this ward are definitely not either!”

“Since I’ve been here, and especially since my service in Emergency, I’ve come to believe that the automobile is far more deadly than the atom bomb!”

“‘It’s a dance sensation called “the twist,”’ he explained kindly. ‘Care to try it?’
“‘I do not!’ Elaine assured him firmly. ‘I have much too much respect for my sacroiliac! Nobody over eighteen should ever attempt that sort of dance, that is, if it is a dance, which I doubt. It looks like something dreamed up in a nightmare.’” 

“If I felt any better I’d have to take something for it.”

“Parents sometimes take a whole lot of understanding, don’t they?”

“Any little thing I can ever do for you, or even any big thing like murder or arson, just let me know and consider it done.”

REVIEW:
Elaine Prescott is a nurse in an Emergency Department where every patient is brought in on the edge of death, usually from a car crash; unfortunately, the patients seems to have a mortality rate of more than 50 percent. Maybe because the staff thinks it’s a good thing when patients are thrown from car crashes, they dig out bullets and suture bullet wounds, and persuade dying patients to have surgeries that won’t cure them. Has medicine changed that much, or do VNRN authors not bother to do their homework? 

When she’s not assisting at malpractice, Elaine is usually arguing with Dr Jay Dillard or Dr. Toby Latimer. Toby is the son of a very wealthy society doctor, Fergus Latimer who, paradoxically to how these kinds of MDs are usually portrayed, is an extremely talented surgeon. Dr. Fergus holds lavish parties that his dowdy wife Ellen avoids like the plague; she prefers to volunteer in the pediatric ward or putter in the garden. Everyone assumes Toby is going to step into his father’s practice, though Toby has never made it a secret that he plans to use his trust fund to open a clinic in the slums. Dr. Fergus is very dismissive of Elaine when she attends a party at the country club with Toby and has tea with Ellen at the family manse; Ellen, for her part, tells Elaine in the kindest possible way not to get involved with Toby because Fergus is going to change Toby’s mind about both the clinic and Elaine, and then she’ll be hurt. Elaine is outraged that Ellen thinks she is “pursuing” Toby, but then Ellen “clarifies” that rather she knows Elaine is not in love with Toby, but that he is in love with her and “I didn’t want to see you hurt” by marring a man she doesn’t love. 

Elaine responds to this by accusing Ellen of child abuse: “You have bullied him and hectored him and laughed at his plans and his hopes,” she says—though when we meet Ellen earlier, we are told that “it was obvious that Mrs. Latimer hadn’t the faintest doubt of her son’s ability,” and Ellen herself says, “I think Toby is quite old enough and intelligent enough to make his own decision” about going into practice with his father. After this contradiction, Elaine adds another: “I’m not the least bit in love with Toby, nor do I think for an instant that he is in love with me.” We doubt Elaine is as impassive as all that, as on their first date “Elaine’s happy heart gave a little excited skip at the implication that this was not to be their only date.” As for Toby’s feelings, on numerous occasions Elaine is assured by the people around her that Toby is in love with her, and Toby himself has told his father that he’d like to marry Elaine “more than anything in the world.” This could be the classic VNRN denial of the obvious—a classic tactic for Peggy Gaddis—but it’s hard to know what to do with this; either the heroine is disingenuous at best or completely schizophrenic, and neither is very conducive to a happy love life, or a good story line.

As for Elaine’s other beau, Jay Latimer is planning to step into his father’s practice—but that’s OK, because his father is a general practitioner in the North Georgia mountains. Whenever this particular geography is aligned with a character in a Gaddis novel, you know that’s who we’ll be with on the final pages. But in virtually every exchange, Jay and Elaine are squabbling, usually because Jay has made some disparaging remark about Toby, and Elaine is defending him.

In between Elaine’s battles with Jay and Toby’s parents, both of whom are doing their best to keep Elaine and Toby apart—again, rather perplexing, since Toby’s mother is initially painted as a doting, underappreciated saint—a 15-year-old girl who has been groomed to be lonely by her social-climbing parents and who was almost the victim of half a suicide pact (her boyfriend shot her in the lung and then chickened out on killing himself and ran, which ends their relationship) and her story resolves happily after she delivers a lengthy and astoundingly psychologically insightful lecture to her parents about their failings. We also have the more bizarre story of a 32-year-old widow who has conjured her dead husband’s ghost, whom numerous people hear speaking to her and who drives her car, and her, into a tree. Her story also ends “happily,” we are told, when she dies: “I’m so glad she didn’t have to go on living without her husband,” says the wise 15-year-old. “She loved him so very much, and she was so alone without him.” Curiously, these two stories contradict each other—although, come to think of it, given that this is a Gaddis story, it’s not curious at all—one young woman is lucky to have lived and lost her boyfriend, while the other is lucky to have died after losing her husband.

This is the problem with Peggy Gaddis. She starts writing one story that is abruptly flipped on its head, and we are told with a straight face that everything we’ve been led to believe up to this point is false, and the opposite has been emphatically true all along. A young woman who is outraged when she is thought to be chasing one man suddenly openly pursues another with gusto; a man and a lifestyle she’s been chilly toward from book’s open, we now find she’s been “pursuing like mad ever since we first met!” When did that happen exactly?

One of the more interesting aspects of this book is that it holds an amazing prejudice toward both upper and lower classes. After her evening at the country club Elaine says, “There didn’t seem to be a serious idea among the crowd! I can’t imagine anything duller or more boring than a steady diet of such dates; or the sort of life those people live. They all looked bored and dissatisfied with themselves and the world at large.” At the same time, Toby endures an inordinate amount of disdain from his peers—Jay Latimer in particular—despite the fact that he’s an extraordinarily dedicated and hard-working doctor, because his father is a rich man. But being poor is not much better, at least being urban poor: Characters talk of the “savage brutality in the slum areas” that “springs from ignorance as much as from native brutality: people can be taught to rise above such animal-like things”—and that’s from Ellen Latimer, who has the kindly view. Dr. Fergus Latimer just calls the slum-dwellers “lazy, ignorant and shiftless, who are unwilling to lift a finger to help themselves and rush to grab anything the city or the state or the government hands out.” Curious contrast to the mountain-dwelling poor, who are painted as a holy, hard-working, noble species.

For the most part it’s a well-written story, though even urban nursing students tend toward cutesy epithets such as “Saints preserve us and forevermore!” and “Praises be!” and “For the love of Florence Nightingale.” There’s enough bizarreness in the side plots to be entertaining—what is up with the ghost???—and the contradictions of the plots are not especially irritating, partly because instead of turning into a vapid, spineless wimp who does what her man tells her, which happens too frequently in Gaddis novels, rather the opposite is true. Elaine, who shows little interest in any man for much of the book after her first and only date with Toby, in the end puts her feelings on the line—up to a point. “I’ve gone so far as I intend to go! After all, this is supposed to be partly your job, you know. You really shouldn’t expect me to drop on my knees and put my hand on my turbulent heart and beg for your hand in marriage!”—and by saying this, she is making it clear that she would like it if he did the same. The good news is that, once safely betrothed, Elaine insists on waiting a miserably long six months for the wedding, because “we have been alone only in the cafeteria, and neither of us has ever had enough time off at the same time to get really to know each other.” So that’s a smart move we can all get behind, even if we feel confident that to get engaged after only one date seems a bit foolhardy. Peggy Gaddis is a bit frustrating as a VNRN author because as good a writer of sentences as she is, her themes and plots are not infrequently off-putting, and she has a penchant for lazy writing mechanics. But in Emergency Nurse she does better than usual and gives us a book we can largely enjoy.

Nurse Penny

By Suzanne Roberts, ©1968

Cover illustration by Don Stivers

Penny Alden came to the plush Ritter Clinic in wealthy Palm Beach for one reason—to gain the nursing skills she needed to help her fiancé, Dr. Kevin Flanagan, in operating a rural hospital for the poor and needy. But at the Clinic the lovely young nurse found that even her dedication was not immune to the pleasures of a sun-filled, carefree life—or to the attentions of handsome, playboy-doctor Mark Hobson. How could she have let this happen, Penny desperately wondered. How could she have fallen in love with one man while engaged to another? How could she stop her foolish heart from betraying all she believed in? Torn by conflicting emotions, Penny desperately searched for her right path as a nurse—and as a woman.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“She would, as his wife, have to learn to take a back seat, for that was as it should be.”

REVIEW:

Nurse Penny is another of those nurses who has worshipped her fiancé, Kevin Flanagan, since she was a bitty girl in rural Georgia, following him around like an obsessed puppy, remaining utterly devoted through his years away for his medical training—even becoming a nurse because she thought it would please him. Now she and Kevin, who is shaping up to be one of the world’s greatest surgeons, are working to build a small hospital in their backwoods community. To that end, Kevin has decided that Penny should go work in Palm Beach for a year at the hospital where he did his fellowship so that she can learn about their research methods and nursing as well. She’s not sure she wants to go, but “she was so used to having Kevin be the  boss that she decided to say no more about it.” So off she packs to Florida, where she finds the lavish lifestyle quite shocking—and enjoys shocking back, by donning her threadbare hillbilly clothes, though with her paycheck she could afford to go buy better—and the workload laughably light, so it’s not clear if she’s actually learning anything from a nursing perspective by caring for rich hypochondriacs.

In her spare time, she is hanging out in the research lab and typing up unspecified notes to send back to Kev. She also walks out a lot to the pier, and early on is waked by Dr. Mark Hobson when he pulls in to the dock in his cigarette boat. She is furious at Mark’s arrogance—“I don’t like him at all!” she decides—so we savvy readers instantly recognize that it won’t be long before she falls into his arms.

Indeed, Mark quickly turns out to be very different from how he appeared at their first meeting, and soon Penny’s little heart is all atwitter every time Mark is near. She snaps at him a lot, though, because he’s super-rich and she’s a snob. But eventually she gives in to her attraction to him—and now we have pages and pages of her insisting to herself that she’s really in love with Kevin even if she’s never felt the same kind of thrill when he’s near, just a sort of sisterly affection for the man she’s determined she’s going to marry because she promised! At a glacial pace Penny starts to creep toward choosing passion over friendship—but then when she’s home for a weekend, Kevin is feeling a little nauseous—and as with the foreboding cough, we can easily predict that his days are numbered. Sure enough, he drops dead of a congenital heart defect, which utterly lets Penny off the hook in terms of standing up for what she believes in, or at least what she ought to believe if she ever gets around to it.

With Kevin gone, everyone believes the plan for the rural clinic is as DOA as Kevin was, since Penny, who has been ferociously dedicated to this dream, is never considered as someone who could make it happen—although actually, with all her contacts in Palm Beach, she is in fact ideally suited to raise money, and has even already collected $5,000 from Mark’s mother. But she’s a girl—so she goes back to try to manage the healthcare of the entire community alone, with a flu epidemic crashing down on them all, so Penny is working 18-hour days and driving herself and Kevin’s dilapidated jalopy into the ground—if only there was some man who would show up and solve all her problems!

This book is dull at best, irritating at worst, with all Penny’s endless waffling about whether she should  marry a man she isn’t really in love with. The book’s failure to see Penny as having any power, either to decide her own life (Kevin’s early exit is a copout), or even to provide care for her community (did the author have to subject her to an medical crisis? Or if she did, why couldn’t Penny have reached out for help and so managed the situation herself?) makes her largely a victim of circumstances. While fortunately ending happily for Penny, she is a passive character who needs the men in her life to rescue her, either by dying or by showing up with a working automobile, a medical license, and a trust fund. As a result, we don’t have a great time following this limp dishrag of a heroine, so I can only suggest that you let this Penny drop.

The Nurse Made Headlines

Adelaide Humphries, ©1962

Cover illustration by Tom Miller

For lovely Cheryl Lanier, nursing wealthy, elderly Trevor Rutledge at his magnificent estate seemed a routine assignment. But that was before Rutledge’s nephew, Victor Lawson, arrived. Perhaps Cheryl should have known  better than to fall in love with the handsome playboy. Certainly there were those—especially the young lawyer, Carl Drew—who warned her about Victor. But Victor’s promises drowned out all warnings—until, amid sudden tragedy and scandal, she heard a different voice: that of agonizing doubt. Had she made the greatest mistake of her young life? Had she given her trust to the wrong mad? And how could she know for sure before it was too late?

GRADE: C-

REVIEW:

It is incredibly frustrating to read a book that is thoroughly annoying, yet has glimmers of what could have been a good story. Even more frustrating than that is the knowledge that the author—in this unhappy case, Adelaide Humphries, who brought us the delightful The Nurse Knows Best, Nurse Landon’s Challenge, and Office Nurse (as well as, it must be confessed, a few duds)—is capable of pulling off that better book. And so here we contend with the disappointment of The Nurse Made Headlines.

Cheryl Lanier is a beautiful, smart, steady, dedicated nurse who has been hired to care for Trevor Rutledge, a wealthy man in his 70s recovering from a heart attack. He is childless, so his huge estate will pass presumably to his nephew Victor Lawson. Vic has been lovin’ ’em and leavin’ ’em for many years, but hearing about Dear Uncle Trevor’s brush with death, he hurries home to suck up to the old man in the event that the recovery does not go well.

He immediately targets Cheryl as a potential plaything—and also the red-haired barmaid Jackie Barnes—but Cheryl has the advantage of having a lot of influence on Trevor, and a lot of information about Trevor’s health and plans. So he cultivates her by taking her out for high-speed drives that muss her hair and her nerves, and visits to the gazebo that muss her lipstick. And he pumps her for details. Initially Cheryl manages to resist Victor’s interrogation tactics, reminding herself on several occasions of the importance of not discussing what would today be called confidential patient health information. But Victor is so beautiful! “Quite the handsomest she had ever seen”! And when she is under the spell of his hypnotic dark eyes laughing down into hers, her cheeks flush, her heart pounds against her ribs. And gathered in his arms, she whispers passionately, “I believe your uncle wants to make some changes in his will.”

And so Victor learns that Trevor is going to turn his estate into a rest home for poor elderly folks. Lawyer Carl Drew is going to come over to have Trevor sign the new will, the day after he takes Cheryl out to show her how to use the tiny automatic Colt that once belonged to Trevor’s deceased wife, not to mention take her to dinner, fall in love with her, and give her a much more reasonable love interest. Except that “Cheryl did not find him exactly exciting. The touch of his hand, a look from his eyes, did not start her pulses to pounding,” unlike Victor—“Darn it, why did her pulses race whenever her eyes met his?” Oh, but there’s also David Earling from back home, who makes an unexpected and essentially parenthetical appearance on page 75 as yet another man who wants to marry Cheryl, but “he had failed to strike the necessary spark.” Unlike the forest fire that is Victor Lawson. Run, Bambi, run!

On return to the  mansion after her dinner with Carl, Cheryl discovers—you will never believe this—Trevor’s lifeless body in his study. Turns out he’s been shot through the heart, but before she can start screaming, Cheryl is knocked unconscious, and when she comes to, she has that infernal tiny automatic Colt in her hand and the housekeeper standing over her. Victor promptly throws her under the police van, and she is hauled to the station as Suspect Number One. But Carl Drew, bless his wholesome but not nearly so handsome heart, steps in to get her out on bail, and a few days later everyone gathers for the reading of the will—when we learn that Trevor actually had managed to sign his new will a day ahead of schedule, disinheriting Victor. This shocking turn of events causes Victor to completely and inexplicably lose his head, whip out the actual murder weapon and reveal himself as the killer, but since the room has at least three cops in it, he goes down without a fight. As he’s hauled away, Carl decides that he will give Cheryl time to get over her trauma—she’s coming back in a few months to run Trevor’s nursing home anyway—and Cheryl decides she’s going to call her mother and let her know what’s new with her, and to ask mom to pass on her regards to the barely mentioned David Earling.

At the end of this book we are left with no clear love interest for Cheryl—a rarity in VNRNs—and indeed a big huh? over one of her potential options. Exonerated with the police, with the reader Cheryl is easily convicted of being an annoying patsy who abandons everything she stands for to tumble for an obviously manipulative con man, whom even Cheryl can see through. hihHhhOf course good women have been known to fall for bad men, but we are not given any sort of reasonable explanation why Cheryl would be such a dope, just descriptions of her weak-kneed compliance with Victor’s every selfish request. If Ms. Humphries had put in the effort to write a character study that explained Cheryl’s wildly self-contradictory behavior, this could have been an interesting book—and at a crawling 180 pages she certainly had room to pull off something—anything!—more complex and interesting than the plate of indigestion we are actually served. As it is, The Nurse Made Headlines is an exasperating, overly drawn-out story that wraps up in three rapid-fire pages and isn’t worth the time it takes to read, well, a headline.

Student Nurse

By Peggy Gaddis, ©1959

“Being nice to you could easily become habit-forming,” he said quietly. Loyce Hamilton, pretty student nurse, felt a warm sweetness in her heart at handsome Reed Shelby’s words. For he was the head of the Shelby clan—and a bachelor to boot! But when Loyce realized the callous way the Shelbys dominated everyone in town, the warmth began to chill. And Reed’s jealousy of Dr. Gordon Grant didn’t help matters …

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“People who are destitute or almost, and who have mental quirks, are called crazy! But if they have enough money to get themselves out of unpleasant jams, then people say they are merely eccentric.”

REVIEW:

In Loyce Hamilton, we have a nurse named in one of the finer Peggy Gaddis traditions (see also her Leota, Luana, Leona, and Linette). Also like these lovely ladies, Loyce is a strong, capable, and compassionate nurse working in Georgia in a small community hospital of only 40 beds out in the sticks. There she meets another Gaddis staple, the stuck-up city doctor who hates the country but is forced to work there until his med school loan is paid off and he can go back to the city and become the highly paid specialist that only pompous, lazy, heartless snobs endeavor to be.

While she serves out her month-long rotation, Loyce rooms with the Shelby family, local landowners who own, well, everything in town. The family is headed by Ruth, the “very, very handsome” but “big—very big” spinster sister doomed never to marry, the numbers stacked against her: age (30), height (5'10"), and weight (200). Rounding out the family is Reed, the big brother, the obvious love interest, and Marcy the sister-in-law, widow of Hank, who died in the war. Marcy has a son, Paul, but she has been divested of any responsibility for the baby, who is cared for exclusively—and has even been renamed—by Ruth. Marcy is essentially a prisoner of the family, which they frankly admit: “Marcy wanted to stay in California and get a job after the baby was born. But of course we couldn’t permit that,” Reed tells Loyce. Marcy, though she has an inheritance that could support her, can only hand over the baby on command and cry. Loyce, hearing this story, is incredulous: “But for goodness sake, Marcy, he’s your baby!” she says. “I can’t see any reason you shouldn’t take the baby and go away.” There is no logical answer to this; all Marcy can do is fume that she’s a prisoner. She’s not exactly wrong; when she asks Reed if she can leave Georgia, he says she is free to go—but the baby stays. “This is his home; he’ll stay here and grow up here and take his rightful place.” Since she lacks the gumption to just take the boy and go, there she stays.

Loyce comes to fall for Reed, which we saw coming from page one. The two go on several dates, including to lunch at the Cloister, a historic hotel on Sea Island, which I know well; it’s like unexpectedly meeting an old friend when we drive up the causeway past the “century-old oaks, their massive limbs draped in swaying curtains of green-grey Spanish moss.” Despite these dates, when Marcy suggests that Reed is in love with Loyce, she all but falls off her chair: “I have never heard of anything so silly in my life,” she stammers. “Why, he’s never given me a second glance or a second thought!” This, after pages of him giving her tender looks and calling her “darling” and “wonderful,” and suggesting they honeymoon at the Cloister. If it were simple insecurity that makes Loyce respond so, I could forgive it, but it comes across as a false modesty that “nice” girls were forced to adopt in the day, pretending not to notice a man at all until the day he proposed, which I find irritating and stupid.

After the Shelbys grudgingly allow it, Marcy takes a volunteer job at the hospital, and while she’s there, she comes under the notice of Dr. Grant. So Loyce goes to bat for Marcy, telling Reed that she thinks the family is domineering and cruel to the spineless little lamb, pretty much pouring ice water on her blooming romance. Dr. Grant then shows up at the Shelby mansion for a meeting with the extended family, where he tells them he will stay in Shelbyville and marry Marcy—though he has never had any discussion with Marcy about his feelings for her—once again treating her like a voiceless pet. This time, however, she doesn’t seem to mind so much, and agrees to marry the doctor after he says that he will take her and the baby away from the Shelby house. 

Though the family is in uproar, Reed later thanks Loyce, surprisingly enough, for having pointed out some hard truths, and he tells her that they will make it up to Marcy, possibly by even “allowing” her to remarry. But there’s another marriage he wants to discuss, and he asks Loyce if she will mind becoming part of such a domineering family. Loyce, horrifically enough, after having fought for Marcy’s independence, is thrilled to have the chance to shed her own: “After being alone most of my life, having to make my own decisions, hoping they were right and sort of muddling through, I can’t think of anything more wonderful,” she coos. Even if she insists that she is going to work after they marry, it can’t quite resolve my nausea after she says, “No place in the world where you are could ever be dull to me! It would be exciting and beautiful—because I love you so much!” Ew.

On occasion Peggy Gaddis can turn out a great book, but this is not one of her best. The biggest problem is that it rehashes of all the usual Gaddis gimmicks and sexist attitudes, even if the latter are largely a product of the times and the region. For most of the book Loyce is an admirable, outspoken woman who fights for the underdog, and Gaddis’ writing is generally entertaining. Though she’s capable of better, this book is enjoyable enough for an afternoon on the veranda with a mint julep. 

Mountain Nurse

By Peggy Gaddis, ©1959

"I’m not going to ask you to marry me," Ken said—and Julie felt the words like a blow. For one awful moment she was speechless. Then her angry, hurting words rushed out. "I don’t want you to ask me to marry you! I wouldn’t even if you did!" After all, why should she? Her fabulous job—the job that meant so much to her—was waiting. Who needed Ken? But her heart lurched, for not until this moment had she admitted even to herself that she was in love with him.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
"It’s colder than the heart of organized charity out there tonight."

 

"A woman doesn’t like to be told she’s remarkable. She’d much rather be told she’s beautiful, or alluring, or charming."

 

REVIEW:

This book may well be unique among VNRNs in that the heroine, Julie Winston, is an unmitigated snob, and remains so right through to the end—or at least we are not given any indication that her underlying character has changed. Out of the gate, she is ferociously condescending toward the patients and families that her sister, widow Linda Blake, cares for in this rural Georgia mountain setting (the quintessential Peggy Gaddis novel backdrop). She prefers her upscale Atlanta clinic, which caters to rich folk, and has swooped in to insist that her sister return to civilization with her. Linda, however, is a sweet, dedicated, selfless type who would never leave her patients, even if she is, according to Julie, "overworked, poorly paid, miserably uncomfortable, lacking in all the things any woman her age should have." Not Julie: She’s even horrified when one of her colleagues leaves her post as a "luxury nurse" to join the war effort, telling Linda, "The idiot has joined the Army Nurse Corps and asked for overseas duty. Can you imagine?" She might as well admit that she beats puppies for what this remark is supposed to do for our view of Julie.

 

Out on call with Linda in the rickety jeep, and none too impressed with the "squalid" domiciles they visit, Julie is nonetheless pressed into duty when one very ancient woman, Miss Dovie—who is rumored to be a witch and therefore avoided like Ebola—is found near death from a stroke and no one else is willing or able to serve as private nurse. To her credit, Julie volunteers for the duty—but is completely ungracious about it; she’s just called Linda a "blind idiot" for refusing to leave the mountains, when her next words are to ask for instructions for caring for Miss Dovie. "I’m willing but not eager," she says. The neighbors drop by with firewood and food, but absolutely will not "set foot in a witch’s house" who can’t die, "she’ll just get on her broomstick and fly off to join her master, the Devil Hisself!" according to the roughneck who drops off groceries that include a "mess of the fresh"—butchered hog, that is.

 

When a huge blizzard starts up the next night, it’s looking like Julie is going to be snowed in for some time, but then there’s a pounding on the door. It’s Kendall Stockwell, aka The Wayfaring Stranger, God help us, a well-known folk singer whom Julie apparently saw perform in Atlanta last summer. He’s in the neighborhood looking for folk songs "that haven’t been sung to death by the others," he says, though Julie thinks it’s odd that he would just drop his very successful career to go wander the mountains in the middle of winter. His jeep is stuck in the road, so he’s got nowhere else to go, and Julie invites him in. The pair hangs out and chats for several days, and on a hike to the top of the mountain, Julie gets an anti-proposal when Ken tells her she "needn’t be frightened" because "I’m not going to ask you to marry me." Phew! Oh, wait, no; "his words had been a blow that struck straight at her heart. Not until this moment had she admitted even to herself that she was in love with him; but his words had torn away the gossamer cloud that had concealed this fact from her consciousness." If her sudden ardor wasn’t enough to make you ill, the florid prose should surely put things over the top.

 

The reason he can’t marry her is idiotic, of course: His business partner and best friend swindled him out of the money that should have been his, so he walked out on all his engagements and took to the hills, and now he has legal liabilities and no money to support a wife. He couldn’t possibly take his friend to court, he insists, because it would "prove to the whole world what a first-class fool and chump I am." Apparently it’s not the fact that he actually is one that’s the issue; it’s only if everyone else knows it, too.

 

Back at the cabin, the snow finally melts enough for the doctor to arrive to check on Miss Dovie and take the pair back to civilization. It occurs to Julie that she might want to say goodbye to the patient she’s cared for day and night for a week, but the doctor says, "She’s in a coma, Julie—she wouldn’t know," so she doesn’t bother—that’s our shallow Julie!—and heads back to Linda’s house, where she has her first encounter with a mirror in a week, much to her horror: "Lindy, if he fell in love with me when I look like this—then it’s just got o be love, hasn’t it?"

 

Everyone’s problems are neatly tied up in the end, of course, though there does seem to be a little epidemic of comas going around, and even Linda lands a fiancé, despite her tearful devotion to her husband, dead these three long years. It’s not a bad book overall, but there are the bones of a better one poking through that make it disappointing. The ending overflows with the usual Gaddis treacle about how blissfully happy everyone is when they are engaged, even throwing in the ubiquitous "I want whatever Ken wants," and it wouldn’t be a Gaddis book without a reference to spanking—though in this case it’s Linda threatening to paddle her sister, so that at least was a little twist. As it is, the story comes off flat, without a lot of sparkle, and it’s just perplexing that this pair falls for each other at all, let alone in two days, because neither of them seems all that interesting—although Julie at least is a feisty lass. So while I’ve read worse Gaddis books, I’ve certainly read better, and with such a promising setup, it seemed especially unfortunate that she was not able to pull off a better story in Mountain Nurse.

Celebrity Suite Nurse

By Suzanne Roberts, ©1965

 

Poppy Helden had never forgotten her promise to return to her hometown as a nurse in the little clinic there. But Miami Beach, where she was training, had many distractions. There was the warm lazy sunshine of the beach, and the beguiling attentions of young Dr. Steve Harper. When Poppy’s singing idol, Nicky Farrell, became her patient in the Celebrity Suite, Poppy’s heart began to beat to a new and different tune and she was caught in a clash of conflict … in which both her love and career hung in the balance.

 

GRADE: C+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“We certainly don’t want an interne around who’s slightly psycho.”

 

“You look much too unworried to be a doctor.”

 

“Poppy—don’t fall in love with somebody famous before I get you down to the chili parlor tonight—okay?”

 

“If I’m running a fever, baby, you’ve got only yourself to blame.”

 

“Goodness, she thought suddenly, men can certainly complicate a girl’s life!”

 

“I’ll bet a wife like you could save a guy millions of dollars a year. I’ll bet you watch for all the sales and I’ll bet you can cook.”

 

“Stop behaving as if you’re still a silly student nurse, dying to get married!”

 

“There are very few girls who look really pretty in the early morning.”

 

REVIEW:

On page one, Poppy is a new graduate, a hard-working hillbilly from a hardscrabble town in the Georgia mountains who borrowed money from the hometown doctor to complete her training. She’s sworn to return home to work after her training, but she’s planning to take one more year at Marymount-on-the-Beach Hospital in Miami Beach to gain a little more experience before packing her bikinis and heading home to the mountains. Unfortunately for her, the nursing supervisor has decided that the experience our little waif really needs is with the idle rich: She’s been assigned to the celebrity suite, where she will tend to just one patient at a time.

 

She’s not too excited about this, as she had hoped to be a little busier. But nursing supervisor Isabel Duncan has other plans. “I think, with the life you have planned,” she explains to Poppy, “that seeing the so-called pampered darlings of the world with their masks off, will do you good.” Why the hospital would waste the skills of someone who is acknowledged to be the most dedicated graduate they’ve seen in years on private duty with just one patient to teach her this trifling life lesson is perplexing.

 

But then, when Poppy gets one look at pampered darling Nicky Farrell, a singing sensation checked in with fatigue to rule out leukemia, it doesn’t do her good at all—she’s suddenly, unprofessionally, off her head over the poor, possibly dying boy, leaving the hospital after her first shift to go sit on the beach and brood all night over him—missing her date at the chili parlor with Dr. Steve Harper. This is a blow to the young interne, who has been planning to marry Poppy for quite some time, though up to this point she’s refused to consider herself “his girl.” Now she’s staying late after shifts to visit Nicky, her heart hammering wildly every time she pulls a thermometer from her pocket and pops it in his mouth (cringe), swooning when he tells her he’s in love with her, and, on her third day on duty, dancing with him and kissing him. She’s very confused: “Which man do I belong to?” she asks herself, as if she should belong to anyone, especially a patient she just met 72 hours ago.

 

Now we enter the middle of the book, which is mainly a lot of moping about whether Nicky loves her, whether she loves Nicky, her feelings for Steve—the fact that she has previously declared that she has none beyond friendship notwithstanding—and “her duty towards the two men who cared about her!” We learn fairly early on that Nicky just has a “glandular infection,” not a fatal illness, but he still insists that he’s in love with Poppy and wants her to come on tour with him. His manager, Joe, fruitlessly tries to warn Poppy that Nicky will leave her for his true love, performing, and tells her that Nicky always thinks he’s in love—the last time to a “crazy chick” who tried to kill herself with sleeping pills after he left her, and whom he never visited when she was in the hospital recovering, the selfish lout.

 

And Nicky now reveals that he thinks that his manager Joe only cares about him for his money, though it’s clear that’s far from the case—and Poppy wonders, “What if that worked both ways? Suppose that Nicky, feeling that no one could truly love him for himself, was unable to love back?” Quite a stretch, but we have to have some reason for Poppy to decline his marriage proposal—the fact that she’s known him less than a week apparently not sufficing.

 

Then Luzette Theibou, a French actress who is all the rage in Hollywood, checks in. “She comes to the hospital every time one of her boyfriends doesn’t jump when she tells him to. She tried the sleeping pill routine” when her last romance ended, Poppy is told—and the startling coincidence between her recent escapade and Nicky’s last girlfriend’s suicide attempt is never explained, though it seems Nicky and Luzette had never met. Sloppy plotting, apparently. Then, when Poppy discovers the patients slow-dancing in the Sun Lounge and Nicky insults Poppy by telling her to bring them some Cokes, it appears Poppy’s “relationship” is on the rocks, because “when a boy told girl he cared, and then proceeded to dance with another girl as if there were no tomorrow, it could be pretty darned confusing!”

 

Suddenly Steve is looking better, but not much: “She didn’t feel that wild and wonderful way around him that she felt in Nicky’s presence, but still, Steve was somebody very nice and comfortable to be with. Like houseshoes, she thought, and she flushed. It didn’t seem like a very complimentary comparison.” Indeed. “Was this love? The easy, friendly, comfortable, quiet thing, where two people sat watching a calm ocean, where two people talked of medicine more than of love or passion, where two people could not see each other for days and when they did, feel as comfortable as they had the moment they left each other.” I hate this device, where the author tries to convince us that friendship is a better foundation for marriage than passion. Call me a romantic fool, but it comes across as lowering your expectations, as putting matrimony ahead of personal happiness: Better to marry a nice man who wants you than remain single and hold out for a man you really love.

 

When Nicky is released from the hospital, he invites Poppy to come to a concert, and seats her at a table in the front, replete with flowers and a quick visit before the curtain goes up. “You know what? I was hoping you’d wear a white dress tonight,” he tells her. “In your white nurse’s uniform, you looked so pretty. White becomes you.” Poppy immediately feels this means that Nicky only loves her as a nurse—but she’s saved from awkwardly running out the door when Luzette crashes the party and seats herself at Poppy’s table, and tells Poppy that she’s in love with Nicky, whom she’s known for only a day—this guy is really something else! Poppy kindly tells Luzette that it will take time for her to convince Nicky that she really loves him, due to his “seeming inability to accept love,” but that they will be married by spring—so it won’t take that much time, after all.

 

On her way out of the music hall, however, there’s a bloody disaster, and Poppy calmly saves the patient and calls for an ambulance. Arriving at the hospital, they’re met by Dr. Steve—and now it’s the young doctor who is making Poppy’s heart miss a beat, nauseatingly enough.

 

This book has two fundamental and conflicting problems: Too much going on, and not enough. The central anguish we are subjected to for pages and pages—so much somber wallowing about who loves whom and whether it’s real or not—seems foolish when the relationship is silly and inconsequential and reduces our heroine to some very tacky, not to mention unprofessional, behavior. The questions about whether Nicky is capable of love, whether Poppy’s feelings for Ole Houseshoes Steve is real love, even the question whether Luzette is the old flame of Nicky’s who tried to kill herself, just clutter the story in an unhelpful way, because the story should be about a real relationship developing between Poppy and Nicky so we can find out if what they feel is substantial and long-lasting or just one of those things. As we have it, this is a trivial story about a pair of shallow individuals who just latch onto whatever is convenient.

Luxury Nurse

By Peggy Gaddis, ©1956

“You’re sound, Sally, very sound,” Dr. Garry Linton told her. Nurse Sinclair laughed. “Are you talking about a nice big russet apple, or me?” she asked. But she was troubled. He said he loved her, but did he? And now she would be away nursing Lisa Cannon for three long months, Lisa, whose high-strung disposition and self-pity made her as unpleasant to be with as she was lovely to behold. But Sea Island was a magical isle and Sally Sinclair was determined to explore all of the magic of it. It began when she discovered the exquisite miniature village—a Lilliput town—which Allen Blaisdell had built. After that, everything seemed to change, as if Sally had found the key to the secret garden, to Lisa’s recovery, and to her own heart.

 

GRADE: C-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“ ‘I have never,’ stated Garry grimly, ‘seen anybody I would so thoroughly enjoy turning over my knee for a session with a slipper in my good right hand. How do you stand her, Sally?’ ”

 

“Women are the simplest creatures on earth; all they ask is to be loved and considered vastly mysterious, which they aren’t in the smallest degree.”

 

“If you dare offer me a sedative or a supposedly soothing word, I’ll throw something at you.”

 

REVIEW:

Sally Sinclair is dating Dr. Garry Linton, but is quite clear about the fact that she is the only nurse at the hospital who isn’t in love with him. He’s told her that he wants to marry her—as usual, in a few years when he has established his practice and can support her—but she gives him a cold shower, right there in the second chapter: “I’m not a bit sure that I’m in love with you,” she says. “I like you enormously; I admire you tremendously; but I’m not sure that’s love.” Well, we’ll just see about that, missy.

 

She’s caring for 18-year-old Lisa Cannon, “the season’s most successful and most popular debutante,” who is in the hospital for the foreseeable future because, according to Nurse Sinclair’s expert diagnosis, “your nerves cracked up from sheer exhaustion.” Lisa’s ready to leave the hospital, but needs nursing for the three months it will take for her to recover from her crackup. So Sally is nominated to go with her, because she’s so good at dispensing helpful advice such as, “You’ll have to pull yourself together and stop that crying, or I’ll have to get Dr. Linton to give you a sedative.” If disdain doesn’t work, a good nurse can always resort to violence; when Lisa insults her father, “Sally barely managed to restrain an impulse to slap the girl hard.” Needless to say, I’m not impressed with Sally’s haughtiness, disrespect, and rudeness to her patient, but in a Peggy Gaddis novel, these qualities add up to a great nurse, since Sally is slightly better behaved than her extremely spoiled patient.

 

So off Sally and Lisa go to the Cannon cottage on Sea Island, Georgia—a beautiful, upscale beach resort that I happen to know fairly well and that figures very prominently in the book. If you’re familiar with it also, it’s especially fun to go for dinner and dancing at The Cloister, the historic hotel there, even if that worthless cad Thorne Cooper does show up and make eyes at Lisa across the ballroom. He’d accepted $50,000 from Mr. Cannon to stay away from Lisa, but now he strides up to the party and drops a check on the dinner table, the principle from the “loan,” plus $10,000 interest. “I made you no loan,” Mr. Cannon explodes in response. “I bribed you to stay away from my daughter.” But that’s admirable too, in Peggy Gaddis’ eyes, just a good father protecting his child from social parasites.

 

Now Thorne is dropping by the house, making no bones about the fact that he’s only interested in Lisa’s money. Garry also stops by now and then, but Sally continues to remind him that she doesn’t love him. Then one day while wandering the beach in the morning—Lisa sleeps until noon, of course—Sally comes across a tiny town of miniature houses and buildings and even twee rosebushes that have to be watered with an eyedropper. It’s a business created by local resident and old crush of Lisa’s, Allen Blaisdell (though it’s not clear how they knew each other; he’s ten years older than she is), who has hired veterans disfigured by the war to build these creations. Sally is utterly captivated and speaks so warmly of Allen to Garry that her beau asks her if she’s in love with Allen (she demurs). But when Allen drops by the Cannon cottage, Lisa gloms onto the man to such an extent that Sally is shoved to the sidelines, and even Thorne loses his appeal; she laughs to Sally that she sees Thorne only “because it annoys Dad, of course. Why else?” But the rub here is that Lisa is horrified by the sight of physically handicapped people. “That awful-looking creature!” she shrieks upon seeing one of Allen’s friends and employees, a man in a wheelchair. “I’d die if a thing like that so much as brushed against me.”

 

Not to worry, though, the power of love will set Lisa on her feet in the end. One day while walking among Allen’s tiny houses, she encounters a rattlesnake, and only the quick intervention of a nearby wheelchair-bound man inexplicably carrying a gun saves her life. She screams and screams and screams! and flings herself into the lap of her rescuer, who pats her hair with his artificial hands and smiles over her with his scarred face, and Lisa refuses to let go. (You might ask yourself, how does a man with no hands fire a gun? Let’s ask wise Nurse Sally: “The marvels of artificial limbs, Lisa, can never be overestimated,” she explains somberly to her equally incredulous patient.) In any event, Lisa is now a convert: When Sally asks Lisa skeptically if she thinks she can accept the deformed man’s invitation to dine with him and his wife, Lisa answers, “I’d almost kneel at his feet. Oh, Sally, what do you think I am?” I, for one, thought she was a nasty brat who didn’t care if she trampled dollhouse rosebushes and who sneered, “I don’t see how Allen can even tolerate those hideous creatures,” but perhaps it was all meant kindly.

 

Now we only need to cast about for someone for Sally to marry at the last minute—hey, that Dr. Garry might do! When, three pages from the end, Garry asks her if she loves him, suddenly it’s all tears and hot cheeks: “She went into his arms as naturally, as beautifully as a homecoming bird comes into its nest at sunset,” and I flung the book across the room as naturally as an outraged reader slapped with the final straw.

 

Peggy Gaddis seems to have tossed several of her other books—Nurse in the Shadows, Nurse in the Tropics, Big City Nurse—into a blender and poured out Luxury Nurse. Unfortunately, the result is not a tasty chocolate malt. Sally is a patronizing, righteous tyrant, somehow meant to be admirable; Lisa is cruel, small-minded and selfish, and her complete about-face in the end is entirely unbelievable. It’s hard to believe that we could find a man dumb enough to take one of them, let alone two. My favorite things about this book were its setting on Sea Island and the cover. But I readily acknowledge that unless you have actually been to the Cloister, the first pleasure will most likely be lost on you, so you can save yourself several hours by just enjoying the cover illustration and then setting this annoying amalgamation aside.