The Nurse from Hawaii

By Ethel Hamill
(pseud. Jean Francis Webb III), ©1964
Cover illustration by Edrien 

Gail Ingersoll, born and raised in Hawaii, had longed for months to return to the beauty and warmth of the Islands. But a sense of duty had kept her in Vermont, where she had gone to nurse old Miss Abigail Ingersoll, the last of the family on the Mainland. Now Miss Abigail was dead, and as soon as Gail had recuperated from a recent bout with pneumonia, she could begin making plans to go home. Vermont was covered with snow the day Dean Mathias and the small child in a red snowsuit came to seek shelter in the old carriage house—not even asking permission, if you please. Dean Mathias, with his sultry good looks, his pantherlike grace, could leave at any time, Gail decided, but it would break her heart if he took the small blonde Clancy away with him. There was some mystery about the pair, Gail was sure—something that had brought them from California to Vermont. Until that mystery was cleared up, and Clancy was quite safe—Dean was threatening to leave and take Clancy with him—Hawaii must wait. Only by giving up her dream could Gail realize her full potentialities as a nurse and find a love—or rather, two loves—that would make her renunciation an easy choice.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“The expensive, ugly wallpaper showed lighter rectangles where other pictures had hung; past Ingersolls had bought themselves the best, but with no eye for beauty. And now, indestructible, their mistakes survived them.” 

REVIEW:
It was with great pleasure that I realized that Jean Francis Webb, one of my favorite VNRN authors, had written a nurse novel that I hadn’t read yet. This is the youngest of the six, written three years after the delightful Aloha Nurse, and it almost seems like it might have been the child of a second mother, as it has none of the camp or wit of its older sisters. But it is a smooth, gentle story that feels written, with a small (if not altogether obvious) mystery at the end, and worth reading, if for different reasons. 

Gail Ingersoll was born and raised in Hawaii, but for unclear reasons came to New York to work as a nurse. There she met Old Dr. Hawkstrom, who hails from the tiny town of Cutler, Vermont. She happened to have the same name as an elderly, wealthy woman desperately in need of a nurse, and as fate would have it, the two are second cousins twice removed, and this familial bond (though Gail had not been aware of the existence of old Abigail) compelled her to move to Cutler and nurse the old bat for four years, through what sounds like Alzheimer’s, until the woman had run out into the winter night and drowned herself in the pond. Gail has inherited the entire fairly large estate, and is casting about for something to do with it—she’s considering starting a hospital in town—when a tanned Californian surfer with “almost a dangerous face” is discovered in the carriage house with an ill five-year-old child named Clancy.

Gail immediately takes over the little girl, moving her into the house and falling unreasonably in love: “She hadn’t known a day ago that Clancy existed. Today, the tiny creature on the sofa bed seemed the most important person in the world.” She has Old Doc out to inject some penicillin, and the doctor seems strangely taken by the little girl, as well. It’s not too hard for us to see the writing on the wall: Dr. Hawkstrom’s daughter Beth had run away to California and hadn’t been heard of since. The little girl calls the man by his first name, but everyone assumes he is her father. He’s a cool, suave snake, and Gail warily puts up with him because she wants to keep Clancy—and of course the girl shouldn’t be moved for weeks after this little cold that she’s suffered.

Eventually Gail proposes to give Dean a stipend that would allow him to spend his life surfing in Hawaii if he will let her adopt Clancy. He comes back with a counter-proposal: That she come with him and Clancy to Hawaii, and, he tells her, “I’m perfectly willing to marry you first,” sealing the offer with a “hard and virile and questing” kiss. Another catch is that she can only have Clancy if she keeps her inheritance—but mercifully, she does not consider this for a moment.

Then Old Doc’s son, Dr. Jon Hawkstrom Jr., arrives in town, and Gail finds the air a bit thin and electric when he’s around. She’s sure he’s going to help her with her plan to convert the old mansion into a cottage hospital, but he insists he has some research projects he can’t abandon, and off he goes. Then Dean is on the brink of pulling out with Clancy, and stops to say goodbye to Gail—just as Doc Junior returns to town, and a lively conversation ensues in which all is revealed!

If the plot, in the retelling, seems a little dull, the story is assuredly not. The depiction of this snow-bound Vermont village evokes the Lucy Agnes Hancock books of the 1940s, calm and sweet; the tone is even, dare I say, a little Robert Frosted. Lovely sentences abound: “Spring seemed to be stirring in its sleep, under white blankets.” And: “I’d hate to see you crack your heart on the impossible.” Peripheral characters are well-drawn and charming, and there’s a compelling if tiny story of a woman who the town thinks has run off with the owner of the feed store. Gail is shown on several occasions to be a smart, competent, dedicated nurse with no idea of quitting her job, even when she’s a wealthy woman: “I’m a nurse and I always will be,” she insists. Completely devoid of the delicious camp of his past books, in this book Mr. Webb has instead created a lovely, simple story that, if of a different style than his earlier efforts, still demonstrates that he was a gifted writer. And one whose works I have now, sadly, exhausted.

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Small Town Nurse

By Emily Thorne
(pseud. Jeanne Judson), ©1956

Also published as Enter Nurse Marian

Diagnosis: Loneliness

Prescription: Love

As simply as that, Nurse Marian Rutledge prescribed for the people of Bridgetown. There was Marian’s brother Clive, who frequently thought that something—or someone—was missing from his life. And Alberta Thwaits, who withdrew into one small corner of a dusty, rundown mansion. Or Olive Cressett, a timid spinster, whose domineering mother constantly “protected” her from unhappiness—and men. For these, Nurse Marian could make quick diagnoses—and find just the right cures. But for herself, she was as helpless as any other woman in love.

 

GRADE: A

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Science ought to be the tool of the doctor. Instead, many modern doctors are the slaves of science. They depend too much on gadgetry and the discoveries of the research chemists. We laugh at the doctors who two hundred years ago and less used to bleed everyone, no matter what their ailment. I dare say bleeding was good for a man suffering from too much roast beef and port wine, but it killed the people with tuberculosis. Just yesterday almost every doctor was giving penicillin to everyone with anything from a head cold to double pneumonia. Anyone with average intelligence can get though medical school. It’s how you apply your knowledge afterward that counts.”

 

REVIEW:

This book snuck up on me. Part of the disguise was the similarity between its cover and that of Nurse against the Town, which was pretty bad. Also I didn’t recognize the author’s name, which is actually a pen name of one of my favorite VNRN authors, Jeanne Judson (do not miss the delightful Visiting Nurse and City Nurse). So I was gently pulled into its spell, and I got possibly even as far as chapter five before I realized with a start that Small Town Nurse is a true gem.

 

Nurse Marian Rutledge has returned home to visit her brother Clive, 11 years older than she, who is a widower and GP in—guess—a small town, Bridgetown, Pennsylvania. He’s been a widower for five years, so he has a battle axe of a housekeeper, Mrs. Doughty, who has no first name and feels that every item of furniture should be pushed against a wall, and that every table must have a doily on it. Soon after arriving, Marian is enlisted to help with an auction that will raise funds for the town’s first hospital. And before long, she’s convinced to quit her job—she works in a tuberculosis sanitarium—and sign on as nurse for the other town doc, Thomas Labadie. He’s a no-nonsense sort, nice to children, “but that was probably just professional geniality,” Marian thinks. “As a human being, he left much to be desired—unimaginative and utterly without a saving sense of humor.” For Clive’s part, he thinks Tom “would expect the woman he married to carry her own weight. He ought to marry a girl who would stand up to him, fight for her rights and maybe make him a little ashamed of himself now and then. It would do Tom Labadie good to meet a woman like that.” Now, just who could that woman be? Hmmm.

 

Tom’s secretary, Alberta Thwaits, is in love with her boss, but he “was no more impressed with her than he was with the files she kept so neatly.” Marian, fearing Alberta will dislike her as a potential rival for the doctor, works hard to win Alberta over by encouraging her to come over and redecorate Clive’s house, much to Mrs. Doughty’s horror. The two quickly become fast friends, and their decorating efforts are fun to watch, as is their work on the auction. There’s a big dance at the auction’s end, when Marian becomes deliriously ill with pneumonia, and the scene is written with such subtle brilliance that it calls to my mind the time David Copperfield gets drunk (the passage is quoted here).

 

This is the best sort of VNRN, in which the story focuses on the heroine and her life with her friends, her battles and her victories. The characters here are delightful—I haven’t even mentioned the horsey next-door neighbor, Norma Thomas, and her invalid father, Judge Thomas, who dispense humor and wisdom with both hands—and Mrs. Doughty’s replacement, an enormous black woman named Abby Cameron, a genius in the kitchen who is recognized as such and highly respected for her talents. (She does tend to talk in the heavily stylized vernacular of black VNRN domestics, unfortunately, which does make me cringe.) The writing and the story are gentle, with an easy humor that doesn’t really translate to the Best Quotes section well, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. The only drawback to the book is that Marian essentially collapses in a lovesick swoon into the arms of a man she has not much liked up until the last few pages, but I will overlook that one quibble since we foresaw this ending long ago, and Ms. Judson gets it over quick and concludes the book with an amusing little joke. All in all, Small Town Nurse emphatically cements Jeanne Judson’s reputation as one of the very best VNRN authors on my shelf.

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Nurse Greer

By Joan Garrison
(pseud. William Neubauer), ©1954

Pretty young Nurse Mary Greer suddenly found herself the center of a shocking scandal that brought a bitter attack on her professional integrity, an end to her engagement to Paul Tate and threatened Paul’s chances of being the next mayor of the town of Port West. When wealthy old Mr. Clarke left his fortune to the nursing home where Mary worked he disinherited a conniving niece and a weakling nephew who weren’t about to let their uncle’s riches slip through their fingers. Their charges of “undue influence” against Mary and the home brought Nurse Greer’s fighting spirit to the fore. But they also brought pressures from Paul who urged Mary to compromise her principles and avoid any further unpleasantness. After all, Paul was running for office and he valued public opinion, perhaps even more than truth. Truth mattered to Mary, mattered more than anything. And so he rolled up her sleeves and prepared to fight it out—alone, if necessary. She found a valiant ally in Bill Underwood, a newspaper man with an eye for a good story, an innate respect for truth and, as it turned out, a grade A case on Nurse Greer.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“Know any girls, Pop? She can be old or young, fat or lean, just as long as she can cook and wash socks properly and keep a fellow’s shoes in order.”

“Girls kill. You think they don’t, Son. You walk up the aisle with them and you smell the orange blossoms and you see ’em in white and you say to yourself, ‘Say! This is pretty durn good.’ Only thing is, they kill. You start supporting ’em, Son. And it goes on year after year. And you grow old. And you tucker out, and the first thing you know you’re dead, and there they are spending the insurance they made you buy.”

“She was very attractive. He liked the feathery arrangement of her auburn hair, the animation of her sparkling hazel eyes. He liked the tan gabardine suit she wore. He liked her figure. His intensely male nature was charmed, and then she smiled coolly and she became merely another woman to him.”

“ ‘That will be fine, Bill. Just toot your horn and I’ll come scampering.’ Really, she thought later, she’d sounded positively eager and desperate! Her mother, of course agreed. ‘Oh, fine,’ she exclaimed in Mary’s bedroom. ‘A man crooks a finger and you go running. Don’t you remember any of the things I’ve taught you? A decent, maidenly reserve! One time in ten, perhaps, a pleasant yes, but only if the fellow has worked hard for it, and only with the sweet air of making a very kind and generous concession.’ ”

“In another age, he thought, she’d have made a fine pirate.”

“You may have my permission to seize your dreadful instruments and have at my poor, helpless body.”

“Lord love men, she thought, they were strange.”

“I was so sure that if I could just dress decently I’d make a nice marriage.”

REVIEW:

Nowhere will you find more terminally ill wealthy people than in nurse novels, and Mary Greer is yet another kind, generous nurse benefitting from a last-minute discussion with an attorney. It’s curious that the author bothered to make her a legatee at all, however, since Mary’s “inheritance” is the promise of a job at the nursing home where she currently works—indeed, it is pointed out by several people throughout the book that since she already has what the will is promising her, she isn’t really benefitting at all. But the nursing home where she works will receive enough money to build and run another building where poor elderly people can take up residence, and it is for this ideal that Mary takes up her sword when dear dead Mr. Clarke’s scoundrel relatives, niece and nephew Harriet and Frank Clarke, threaten a lawsuit to block the will unless the nursing home agrees to give them half the estate.

Enter Paul Tate, Mary’s fiancé, who is running for Mayor of Port West. He’s behind in the polls, and tells Mary that the scandal that a lawsuit against her would bring will damage his campaign, and he asks her to settle. She, of course, is appalled that he would sell out the old folks so quickly, and their engagement comes to an abrupt end when she goes to the local newspaper and gives them a statement to that effect. But all is not lost for Mary’s love life; in the course of breaking off publicly with Paul, Mary meets Bill Underwood, the newspaper’s editor, and they soon start dating. She admires his dogged pursuit of the truth, and his restraint in not publishing everything he knows, and that he stands by her when she has her day in court. There she pulls out her trump card, a letter written to her by the late Mr. Clarke, which she reads aloud—up to a point, where she stops and asks Harriet Clarke if she should continue, it being clear that Mr. Clarke is about to reveal a certain breach of ethics on his niece’s part. Harriet instantly decides to drop the suit, and soon the architects are breaking ground on the new nursing home building.

Now Paul is back again, his interest in Mary rising with his numbers in the polls. Mary agrees to go on a picnic with him, but she is not as wild about him as she used to be. We’re not, either; he has a penchant for saying things like, “Up and at ’em, woman. History says it’s women who get the meals on the tables for mighty men.” But Bill has stopped calling Mary, so she reluctantly agrees to a few evenings with Paul. In the interim, Paul has found a discrepancy in the town’s accounting—$100,000 has gone missing. He’s not elaborating on the details, just saying that it’s up to the present mayor to explain. The mayor is saying that he never took any money and can’t explain the discrepancy, and it’s starting to look like Paul might actually win the election, after all. He asks Mary to marry him again, but she’s not biting. “What would happen if once again he had to choose between that love he talked of so glibly, and the political success he seemed to be on the verge of scoring?” Take a wild guess, honey.

But she’s saved from actually answering the question by the telephone: It’s the mayor, inviting her to City Hall for an important meeting. It turns out that Harriet Clarke is threatening to reveal that she made a $500 contribution to Paul’s campaign in exchange for his attempt to persuade Mary to split the estate with her. Harriet will not talk if Mary will give Harriet the letter Mr. Clarke wrote, thereby eliminating any evidence against Harriet. Mary instantly refuses to hand over the letter, choosing honesty over protecting Paul’s campaign. So Harriet tells Bill that the missing money is really just an error of accounting—the money isn’t really gone, it’s just in the wrong account. When Bill prints this in the paper, Paul is forced to withdraw from the race. He then tries to salvage the other thing he’s lost, his relationship with Mary, but she tells him that she thinks he was cheap to tarnish the mayor’s reputation when he knew that the mayor hadn’t stolen any money, that he was fickle to dump her when he thought it would hurt his prospects. And she conveniently decides that she never really loved him in the first place. I hate that; the plot device that insists that what she felt for the man she doesn’t choose wasn’t real love.

This book is better than most nurse novels. It has an actual theme—honesty vs. convenience—and even works hard to present Paul’s case as being an acceptable course of action, suggesting that Paul may have made a better mayor than the incumbent, and that he had chosen the best course of action, despite its moral dubiousness, to achieve that grand—and good—goal. It offers some amusing and sparkling writing, a very spirited appreciation for nursing as a professional calling, and even a very touching section about an elderly patient of Mary’s who dies of cancer. The characters are drawn well, if perhaps a bit too lightly: I admired Mary’s spine, but wished she’d smacked Paul’s face when he ordered her to set the table; I loved bad-girl Harriet, but wished she’d showed more claws. The ending was especially nice, a rarity in these formulaic novels. Joan Garrison only wrote one other nurse novel that I could find, Rehabilitation Nurse, but after Nurse Greer I will pick up that book with high hopes. 

NOTE: After this review was written, I learned that Joan Garrison is the pen name of William Neubauer.                                                                                                                   

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Visiting Nurse

By Jeanne Judson, ©1957

Also published as A Doctor for the Nurse

Proud, lovely, ardently devoted to the great task of aiding the poor and helpless, Elizabeth Downer knew she had found her calling. But her passionate young heart was torn between two doctors, each arrogantly claiming her as his alone. Dr. Galland was darkly handsome. Sometimes she believed his youth and high spirits hid a deep understanding of human suffering. Dr. Denham, quite but strong, was intensely dedicated to medicine. His burning eyes were like the eyes of a priest. And one of these doctors had a secret—a secret which Elizabeth was forced to face. How this warmly courageous girl forged the life she desired is the theme of this moving and fascinating story.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“You’re not old enough to be a public health nurse and you’re much too pretty. You can’t expect sensible people to take you seriously.”

“All blind dates were either dull or obstreperous. Attractive men could find their own girls.”

“She was delighted to find that among his other and more obvious attractions, he must be a most accomplished, tactful, and spontaneous liar.”

“What fools men were. They pretended to think nothing of dress, but they really saw little else in a girl. Helen of Troy in a dusty uniform, wearing clumsy-looking shoes, wouldn’t attract a second glance from any of them.”

“Link never let anything as prosaic as statistics interfere with his exuberant optimism.”

REVIEW:
Elizabeth Downer is a county nurse in Cornwall, PA. She’s working with two doctors: handsome Dr. Kit Galland, who is the nephew of Dr. Purvis, the town’s most senior MD, and is expected to step into his practice when the old man retires; and Dr. Frederic Denham, who has no connections and works tirelessly. But Dr. Denham is also a little creepy; when she first meets him, “She was trying to think what his eyes reminded her of—something disturbing. They were the eyes of a zealot, claiming a sacrifice of self that was beyond ordinary people. Dr. Denham’s eyes were as hard and bright as diamonds.” So right away we understand which of the two Elizabeth hankers for, and it isn’t too much longer before we figure out that he’s not the one who most wants her. (This makes the back cover blurb, above in italics, a complete fiction, one of my personal pet peeves.)

Soon it is revealed that Dr. Denham is to become the new chief of medicine at the local hospital—the very position that Dr. Purvis had been reserving for Dr. Galland. A wealthy foundation has approached the hospital, offering to finance a large new wing, but only on condition that Dr. Denham is made chief. Elizabeth tries to stay neutral in her opinion of Dr. Denham, but soon he’s asked her to dinner and is pressing her to help him in his new role. “You’re going to help me. We’re going to do this together,” he says, eagerly pressing her hand. Then he remembers he has patients waiting and abruptly ends the date, leaving her to get home from the restaurant on her own. After that Dr. Denham seems to pop up and invite himself to lunch a lot. Elizabeth’s friend Peggy warns her: “Whatever you do, don’t go and get yourself engaged to Frederic Denham. You couldn’t call your soul your own, married to a man like that. He’s the kind of man who would want to give you improving books.” Sure enough, he drops by with a “very heavy, much footnoted tome on geriatrics.”

Elizabeth is becoming increasingly disenchanted with Dr. Denham, changing her customary path home so she won’t pass by his office, but he finds her anyway and refuses her refusal of dinner with him. Unfortunately, she lacks the spine to insist. “Being with him was not a relaxation. It was more like a continuation of work,” she thinks—and then he tells her that he is a single man in want of a wife, and goes on to explain his plans for the future at length. “With a little training, a little guidance from me, you can learn to control your impulses,” says the romantic fool. She turns him down, saying she does not love him—and that he has not said the he loves her. “Oh, that—I forgot,” he says, and then kisses her so awkwardly that he is provoked to tell her, “I’ve never approved of the promiscuous familiarities.” He leaves, saying he’ll give her time to think it over, completely missing the fact that Elizabeth has already declined. “She realized that he believed she had refused him because she thought the honor or the responsibility too great.” (Shades of Jane Austen, anyone?) After this, Dr. Denham becomes increasingly irritating, and there’s “something disturbingly proprietary in his indulgent smiles which were more frequent than formerly.”

But she is also working with Dr. Galland on her rounds, and indeed becomes his patient when she falls and breaks her wrist (it’s a Colles fracture, if you’re curious). Dr. Galland is dropping by daily with flowers and mystery stories, while Dr. Denham stops in to lecture her on the virtues of constant study: “It is only by reading the conclusions of many different people that you attain the critical faculty to judge the value of a book for yourself,” he drones. He objects to Dr. Galland’s flowers and mysteries: “It’s high time we let him know that I’m going to marry you,” he says, still not hearing Elizabeth’s constant refusals: “You can’t marry me if I don’t say yes,” she tells him, and thinks, “He couldn’t—could he?”

Then Dr. Denham’s secret is revealed—he is actually very rich and the driving force behind the foundation that bought his own promotion in the hospital. His intention in his new position is to establish new medical techniques: “Cornwall is to be a sort of guinea-pig town,” Peggy tells Elizabeth. “When he has our hospital running as smoothly as a Russian slave labor camp, he’ll go on to some other place and do it all over again, until he’s made the entire country over the way he wants it.” This does not improve him in Elizabeth’s eyes—indeed, it sinks him: “One can’t feel sorry for a multimillionaire.” So now it’s just a matter of convincing him that Elizabeth isn’t going to marry him, and of convincing Dr. Galland that he should, which comes to pass in an enjoyable scene. The sweet ending is almost undone by an unexpected turn from one character on the penultimate page, but it’s a minor glitch.

This book is delightfully written, full of little gems like, “She rose quickly from the rocking chair, decanting three cats from her lap,” or “Peggy managed to get possession of the cakes and the absence of Mrs. Loftus by a combination of flattery and ruthlessness.” Peripheral characters are well-drawn and amusing, and the story itself is gentle and meandering. Most of the story is about Elizabeth’s patients and how she wrangles them and their problems, and frankly it’s difficult to remember much about the plot after the book is over, but it has a pleasant, sweet touch that lingers. It’s similar to the other Jeanne Judson book I’ve read, City Nurse, even down to the Austen-esque proposals. But that just means you have two delightful books to linger over, lucky you.

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A Nurse Comes Home

By Ethel Hamill
(pseud. Jean Francis Webb III), ©1954
Cover illustration by Edrien King

 

When lovely, blonde Elizabeth Lane returned home to San Francisco, she thought she could take up her life just as it had been before. But in the three years the young nurse had been away—years spent as a prisoner of the enemy in Asia—grave changes had taken place. Handsome Doctor Marsh Carson, who had sworn to marry her, now was engaged to the ravishing, yet strangely sinister Karen Russell. Barney Jordan, who had helped Elizabeth survive her harsh captivity, now claimed a debt she felt she could never honestly repay. Then there was the rugged young newspaperman, Scott Alexander, with his probing questions and disturbing attractiveness. And Elizabeth quickly discovered that she herself was no longer the same girl who had gone away, as she struggled to find out what this new person who bore her name should do.

 

GRADE: A-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“So you’re a good nurse. I need you as a woman. The woman I love!”

 

“I meant to get down to Dr. Carson’s shindig yesterday, but we had an unexpected polio case brought in, and I was all day on the telephone locating another iron lung.”

 

“It was Aunt Wilma’s firm conviction that none of this world’s ills struck too deep to be at least mitigated by hot tea and cinnamon toast.”

 

REVIEW:

As some VNRN authors induce fear and loathing (I’m looking at you, Jeanne Bowman), others land in your lap like a light blue box from Tiffany wrapped in a white satin ribbon. Jean Webb, writing as Ethel Hamill, is most definitely one of the latter; he can write circles around almost everyone else out there. The very first page serves up little prose gems to admire, such as when Nurse Elizabeth Lane is cruising into San Francisco Bay: “San Francisco … She said the name over to herself for perhaps the thousandth time that morning, taking comfort from the syllables as old ladies were supposed to take comfort from a cup of hot tea.”

 

She’s coming home after two years in a prison camp in Korea to be reunited with Dr. Marsh Carson (one of my ongoing quibbles with VNRNs is the ridiculous names they give to the love interests). Like most fickle fiancés, though, in her absence he’s become engaged to the svelte minx Karen Russell. But the man whom she leaned on during her internment, Barney Jordan, is standing by her side—maybe a little too close for comfort, as he soon professes his deep love for her, leaving her with two fellas to contend with. Actually, make that three—as she steps off the boat, famous photographer Scott Alexander snaps her picture, which is broadcast on front pages across the country. He’s now hounding her for an expanded profile piece with lots of pictures to go with it, so he’s hanging around too. For a malnourished, emotionally scarred wreck, she sure is irresistible to the boys.

 

Of course, every one of them has obstacles. Marsh is, of course, engaged to someone else, but he does seem to get awfully jealous of the other boys in Elizabeth’s life. “I’m hanged if I’ll let Barney get away with stealing my girl!” he fumes to Elizabeth, totally oblivious the fact that he abandoned any claim he ever may have had on her when he proposed to Karen. Speaking of whom, his fiancée is quite a cat, and she uses her armory of claws to full effect to keep a grip on her man. Part of her efforts in this direction involve uncovering the fact that Barney, before he went to Korea, was a bank robber who skipped out on his parole and has a little prison sentence waiting for him back in Chicago. She is on the verge of spilling this little tidbit—where else?—at Elizabeth’s welcome home party, but Elizabeth cuts her off and announces that she and Barney are engaged, thus saving Barney from jail: As long as Karen’s competition for Marsh’s affections are engaged elsewhere, she’ll keep her lipsticked moue closed. In the meantime, the old judge, who is a longtime friend of Elizabeth’s family, is working to get Barney pardoned in light of his heroics at the Korean prison camp, but it will go a lot easier with a standup nurse like Elizabeth willing, by marrying him, to vouch for his character and to keep him on the straight and narrow.

 

Scott, meanwhile, is playing the part of the wounded suitor, and though Elizabeth is torn by her feelings for him, she just can’t seem to bring herself to explain the truth of the situation to him and insists that she must go through with the sham marriage to Barney. Everything gets wrapped up tidily in the end, of course, with a crashing finale in the pool cabana that leaves Marsh in a coma. It’s pretty good stuff, but not quite as fabulous as it could have been, I have to say.

 

Part of the fun for me is the fact that this book is set in San Francisco, the greatest city on the planet. There are references to the usual landmarks, of course, but some surprised me, to wit: “They cut along the edge of Union Square, past a yawning mouth to that amazing underground parking garage for which the whole Square had been torn up and set down again just before the second World War.” All the times I passed by, it never occurred to me to consider that garage with anything akin to wonder.

 

I also appreciate the fact that after returning home from years of deprivation and torture in the prison camp, Elizabeth and Barney are not laughing and dancing and partying it up. They are haunted by their experiences—and though this is brought up regularly, it is not rubbed in our faces, sensationalized, or irritating. It’s just a fact of their lives. If the complicated web of Elizabeth’s love life is a bit overwrought—and I’m not a big fan of the I-have-to-marry-this-man-even-though-I-love-someone-else plot—the writing is excellent and the characters are well-drawn (with the exception of Elizabeth, who is the weakest of the lot). The most depressing thing about reading this book is that it means I only have four more books by Ethel Hamill left to read.

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A Nurse for Galleon Key

By Ethel Hamill
(pseud. Jean Francis Webb III), ©1957

When lovely, young Simone Greer arrived at the remote fishing village in the Florida Keys to join Pete Enright, deep-sea treasure-hunter, she was wildly happy. She told herself she was no longer a nurse. Gladly she had forsworn her vows to her stern calling to follow this tall young daredevil. But Simone did not know that a dangerous plot was unfolding in this exotic tropic land—a plot which would threaten her future, and call upon all her training as a nurse … all her resources as a woman.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“A man could burst into flame over you with practically no effort at all, I should imagine.”

“Now I’ll have to get acquainted with a new Simone. The one who can deliver a baby without mussing her hair.”

“Let’s say I intend to salvage your heart.”

“I know that girl-ahoy look in his eye.”

“Watching him stride away from her, Simone felt a sharp twist in that region where her heart (in training, one learned it was merely a muscle) still beat steadily.”

REVIEW:
I don’t know who wrote the back-cover blurb (above), but they didn’t read the same book I did. Which is too bad, because it sounded like a good one. (I’m also intrigued that it hits the major themes of nurse novels in general—i.e. giving up your career for a man, is the heroine a nurse or a woman—though these are not really discussed in the book.) But if the actual story isn’t as intriguing, it is nonetheless a pretty good read.

Simone Greer is a nurse from New York on a Greyhound to the Florida keys–Galleon Key, to be specific—to marry her true love, Pete Enright. Interestingly, Pete doesn’t know she’s on her way. She’d met Pete eight months ago when he came to the city to discuss hunting for sunken treasure with her Uncle Walter, who Simone was nursing through a long and ultimately fatal illness. It was a whirlwind romance, and when Pete left the city two weeks later to return to his treasure hunting, Simone was wearing his ring. Since then, Simone and Pete had been communicating by brief telephone conversations and tepid letters, but Uncle Walter finally died, freeing Simone to send a telegram to her fiancé and hop a bus to Florida.

But when she is dumped unceremoniously beside the road on the tiny nondescript island, Pete is nowhere to be seen. Instead, his best friend, Toby Arnold, is there to do the honors. You’d think that after six months apart from his bride-to-be, Pete might be a bit more eager for the reunion. But he missed the telegram, apparently intercepted by Toby, and is off in a helicopter, looking for his sunken galleon. Toby is in town on assignment for a New York magazine, to write an article about Pete’s project. He’s accompanied by photographer and total knockout Donna Bryant. Before long, Donna is crying on Simone’s shoulder about how much she’s in love with Toby, who cares not a whit for her. But to Simone, Toby is sly and sarcastic and constantly pokes her, making it clear that he’s attracted to her, though she finds him arrogant and rude. It isn’t long before he’s kissing her against her will, and though she struggles to get away, as any good girl would, she’s bewildered by her inevitably passionate response. At the house where everyone is bunking, which belongs to a Greek couple who raise snakes (really), Toby maneuvers mightily—and mighty successfully—to keep Simone and Pete apart. But in her spare time alone, Simone is constantly planning her marriage to Pete. When she tours Pete’s boat, she thinks it is—“next to herself, of course—the love of Pete Enright’s life.”

She decides to solve everyone’s problems simultaneously by tricking Toby into thinking that she’s falling for him, arranging a date with him, and then standing him up and eloping with Pete instead, leaving Donna to break the news to Toby and, in so doing, win him back. It’s a great plan, Donna agrees, but Simone just can’t ever find a minute alone with Pete to let him in on his impending nuptials. She’s a little concerned that Pete will be sorry to take some time off from his treasure hunting project, but decides he’ll gladly do it “for the more glowing one of their marriage. … He would be willing—of course—to do what she wanted.” Such arrogance is surely doomed for a fall, and when it comes, there’s a bit of a twist with it. It’s a pleasing change from the usual straightforward VNRN narratives, but having also read Aloha Nurse, also by Jean Webb cum Ethel Hamill, which packs more turns than a corkscrew, I should have expected a little something even in this otherwise mostly straightforward story.

The writing is superb. Seldom do you find a VNRN packed with phrases like, “that husky drawl somehow reminded her of a cat clawing velvet,” and, “Her oddly colored eyes held the cool assurance of the career girl confident she could lick her weight in wild cats.” The story is fairly straightforward until the end, and even if you know how it’s going to end, the little kick it throws in to get you there is a welcome bonus. I was also pleased that Toby’s transformation from arrogant ass to (surely you have figured this out) bridegroom is not instantaneous and unbelievable, as in some VNRNs, but a slow sketching out of a character that ends up being far richer than what we initially think, a bit like—and I dare say it—Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. So if the plot could be a bit more unique, that’s this book’s only real flaw.

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City Nurse

By Jeanne Judson, ©1959

The imperious ring of the telephone shattered the silence of the sleeping ward. It was a message for young, red-headed Nurse Dora Tracy. “Report to Emergency at once. Dr. Terry has asked for you.” The victims of a terrible explosion were being wheeled in when Dora took her place beside the young surgeon. Silently, with practiced skill, she responded to his brusque commands. As always, Dora thrilled as she worked beside this stern servant of medicine. He had taught her the deeper meaning of their chosen profession. But Nurse Dora sometimes wondered if their shared dedication could substitute for love, the love shared between a man and a woman.

GRADE: A

BEST QUOTES:
“Sanitary engineers, good old plumbers, have done more for the health of the world than all the doctors since Aesculapius.”

“All the interesting men died three or four hundred years ago.”

“He spoke in the cheerful way that doctors always do about other people’s pain.”

“Men are a necessary convenience.”

“She walks as if she had joints all the way down.”

“All men look like thugs when they aren’t shaved.”

“Little girls were wriggling their thin hips, twirling bright-colored hoops, a passing phase that had hit the juvenile world like a pestilence, or like those epidemics of involuntary dancing that had manifested themselves in the Middle Ages.”

“Don’t think that I’m a philanthropist. I’m not. But it’s the fashionable way to avoid income tax right now. First, you make a lot of money and then you start giving it away—not to the people you took it from, naturally.”

“Don’t modern doctors trace every ill, physical and mental, to the pernicious influence of parents and guardians who do not understand their children half as well as welfare workers and psychiatrists?”

“No man will admit that it is mere beauty in a woman that attracts him. He always tries to pretend that he is fascinated by her intellect or her character.”

“ ‘She lives in the Bronx.’ She might as well let him know the worst about Mercedes at once. There were lots of men who would rather drive to Boston than to the Bronx.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Dora Tracy has left her home in Hartford and moved to New York to take a job at Manhattan Memorial, on the men’s surgical floor. Dora is quietly efficient, which is noticed by Dr. Terry, who himself is a machine: “The other doctors would usually make one or two casual remarks just to show that they were human beings as well as doctors, but Doctor Terry never wasted a word.” He calls Dora down to assist in the Emergency Department one night when a ship in the nearby harbor explodes and two dozen burned sailors are brought in—and one young man who is clearly not a sailor. He is well-dressed and handsome, carrying no identification and huge wads of cash, and, wouldn’t you know it, in a coma. She is assigned to “special” him, or care for only him on her eight-hour shift, and she comes to think more about him than she should about a patient, though she knows nothing about him: “When he did come out of his concussion, he would probably turn out to be a ‘dese and dose’ character.”

He doesn’t; it turns out he is Chris Thorsen, the son of the owner of the shipping line, a very wealthy young man. Dr. Terry, a neurosurgeon by trade, wants to perform a new operation he’s perfecting, but Chris declines. Instead, Chris’s father offers up an old sailor, knocked on the head and never the same since, and if Dr. Terry cures him, Captain Thorsen will fund a new hospital for Dr. Terry. The operation is successful, of course, and Dr. Terry asks Dora to come work for him in the new hospital when it is up and running.

Dr. Terry’s interest, however mild it may be, is noticed by Nurse Vera Maynard, who is desperately in love with the doctor, and in petty revenge she takes it upon herself to spread malicious gossip about Dora. One of the lies she propagates is to tell Chris that Dora is in love with Dr. Terry. Chris asks Dora out, but she can’t go—Dr. Terry has asked her to go with him to the Founder’s Day Dance, because, as he explained when he asked her, “One must show up there for a while, at least, and it’s better to go with someone. I can’t stay long, but if you go with me, it will be a sort of—protection.” What a romantic fool. Chris tells Dora he’s heard she’s in love with Dr. Terry, but before she can explain, the Captain plows in and starts insulting everyone by handing out crisp $100 bills, and Dora runs off. Chris is discharged, and Dora tries to get on with her life.

Thankfully, Dr. Terry has ordered Dora to take advanced coursework at Columbia three nights a week, so that keeps her mind off Chris. She doesn’t have many friends, not really even her roommate. Liza is a wealthy young woman with a PhD in Greek and Latin that she doesn’t want anyone to know about who endlessly dates a stream of eligible young men, interested in none of them. “I don’t want to marry anyone,” she tells Dora. “It isn’t George that I dislike. I wish I did. It’s matrimony. The word has an ominous sound. It means the giving up of all freedom. It can’t be helped. It’s just the way things are. If you marry, you have to live in the mental, social, and financial milieu of your husband. You’re classified. So far, I’ve been able to live without belonging to any class—as free as one can be in this world.”

And so the book floats gently along, through Dora’s daily struggles in the hospital and at home, until it drifts into its easily foretold conclusion. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few surprises along the way—what happens to Liza, for example, and the Founder’s Day Dance, when Dora looks so ravishing in a silver gown and “properly absurd” $23 slippers, doesn’t turn out at all like the big dances in VNRNs usually do, but much more honestly. I especially liked the treatment of Dr. Terry, who begins the book as an awesome hero on a pedestal and is gradually deflated, chapter by chapter, until we see him as the inconsiderate, selfish pedant that he actually is. I actually wonder if Ms. Judson hasn’t deliberately subverted the usual custom of awarding the VNRN heroine to the deified doctor.

The writing is sophisticated, with references to Joyce Kilmer and his poem “Trees,” and the passage in which Dr. Terry offers Dora a job is “almost like a proposal out of Jane Austen,” when he begins, “This may be a little premature—you probably haven’t noticed that I’m interested in you and of course it will have to be some time in the future—” Dora is well-educated enough to spot the similarity: “For a moment she had been preparing a speech in which to tell him that she ‘esteemed’ him but could not love him.” The book is also witty and humorous, with a decent chuckle on practically every other page; my list of Best Quotes, above, is edited down to about half its original length, yet still longer than any other book I’ve reviewed. In short, City Nurse is an elegant and intelligent book, gentle in the tradition of earlier VNRNs (e.g. “K,” District Nurse, Graduate Nurse), and not to be missed.

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Aloha Nurse

By Ethel Hamill
(pseud. Jean Francis Webb III), ©1961

The nurse is a captivating blonde whose profession means everything to her. Now it is all she has—her fiancé has just married another girl. The doctor is young, handsome, and eager—for money. He is a talented surgeon, a skilled practitioner. But he is willing to throw up his medical career to become a singer. They meet in an explosive romance played against the background of Hawaii’s superscientific Aloha Hospital and the plush, glamorous night clubs of Waikiki Beach.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Jewel was so ladylike she wasn’t possible.”

“Why, I haven’t been managed by a woman since one fed me strained vegetables and changed my three-cornered pants!”

“I’m not really a bad guy. I earn my own living—one way or the other. I’m kind to animals. I help old ladies through the traffic in downtown Honolulu.”

“You, the nurse, there’s more starch in your face than in your uniform.”

“If he had been a woman, love might have been enough to make up the difference. But for men, it simply wasn’t. It never had been; it never would be. Men needed more than love.”

REVIEW:
Cosima Arnold is a nurse at the “ultra-scientific” Aloha Hospital in Honolulu. This hospital is so cutting edge that, fifty years later, most of its technologies have yet to be put into practice in the real world. But in addition to her nursing job, she has been assigned by the millionaire benefactor of the hospital to serve as the assistant to a New York public relations wiz, Timothy Nairn, moved into the hospital temporarily at the behest of the same millionaire, to promote the career of Dr. Perry Hilton. Dr. Hilton is chucking medicine to become a lounge singer, and the millionaire wants to promote his career because he thinks this will soften the locals to his presence on the island and get his wife invited to parties. I guess that’s a little convoluted, as is Cosima’s service to Timothy—why couldn’t they just hire him a secretary?

But ours is not to question the whims of millionaires. As part of her duty to Timothy, she is sucked into his scheme to have Perry managed by a group of beautiful blonde women—it will get them more publicity—which is fine with Dr. Hilton, who has a bit of a crush on Cosima. But Coz’s heart is turned to stone, because Dale Banning, a textile executive whom she met “a few months ago” and who left “a few short weeks ago” on a business trip to London, married Pegeen O’Hara in London and let her find out by reading a squib in the London newspapers. She is never going to fall in love again! Well, we’ll just see about that, missy.

One of the other bimbos on Perry’s “Board of Blondes,” Margot Ambrose, is jonesing for a Hollywood career, and bad. She thinks she can hook herself to Perry’s wagon and turn herself into a movie star. Cosima, quickly catching on to Margot’s plan, does her best to rescue Perry from Margot’s clutches by kissing him smack on the lips in front of all the photographers after his triumphant debut at the Hibiscus Room. It apparently curls her toes something fierce, but this does not mean that she is in love with Perry! “Couldn’t they believe the simple truth?” she asks herself, the self-deluded little fool.

Meanwhile, Margot is scheming like mad. She calls Tim and tells him that if Cosima doesn’t stay away from Perry, she will tell the press that the Board of Blondes is a cheap trick to win over the locals, causing them to turn against Dr. Hilton. Then Dale turns up on Cosima’s doorstep, telling her that he only married Pegeen to put his textiles deal across and plans to take up with her where he left off. Cosima gives him the heave-ho—but he turns up later, drunk, and assaults Cosima. Not to worry, Perry arrives in the nick of time to knock out Dale, but he’s got Margot in tow, who has manipulated her way into a date with him. After Cosima, in an attempt to comply with Margot’s demand, insists that Perry leave so she can revive Dale, Margot drops a dime to both Pegeen and a photographer from a local gossip rag, who catches the tender reunion of wronged wife, straying husband, and framed nurse on film and drops it into the next edition. This only gives Margot more ammunition to use against Cosima, which she plays to further advantage. When Cosima learns that Margot is going to blackmail Perry into taking her to Hollywood with him—he’s just landed a movie contract of his own—she realizes—gosh!—“I’m in love with Perry!”—how in the world will she save him from the evil Margot?

The futuristic medicine of the is pretty far out: meals are prepared electronically and pop out of a slot in the wall, surgery happens in the patient’s own room under a hermetically sealed tent, and one nurse manages an entire ward of 24 patients by television and electronically recorded vital signs. Sure, most of that is totally off base and displays a bit of ignorance on Ethel Hamill’s part on the details of how medicine is actually practiced. But it shows that the author put some thought and care into this book—and besides, it does predict the linking of computers by telephone.

It’s not just its utopian tinges that make this book a cut well above the usual VNRN. The writing is more sophisticated, which becomes apparent with the first two sentences: “Awakening to a sudden, vivacious life of its own, the tiny light above the reception desk at dead center of Unit Three, Aloha Hospital, began to wink at her. It winked with the vigor of an eye attempting to rid itself of grit.” We are regularly hit with vocabulary words like pulchritude and sequent, and the book assumes a level of sophistication in the reader, as when we are told that the millionaire sold, among other properties, “his town house on Russian Hill”—we are supposed to know that Russian Hill is in San Francisco. (Which I did, so I was flattered.) The plot twists are almost Machiavellian, and it’s sometimes a bit of an effort to keep up. But this I can forgive, because at least the author has put some thought into this story, and besides, there’s a little surprise at the end that finally squelches Margot. This book is a little gem, and I look forward to reading more of Ms. Hamill’s work.

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