Nurse Adele

By Hilda Pressley Nickson, ©1966
Also published as Season of Mists

Staff Nurse Adele Palmer had always brushed aside Sister Margaret Bowen’s bitter comments on her romance with Norman Wayne as the jealousy of a frustrated woman—until it began to dawn on her that Margaret might be right after all …

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“I’ve known many an otherwise fine and intelligent woman be attracted to the dopiest man.” 

“No wonder women surgeons and doctors were not popular. In the main, they were over-conscientious and inclined to interfere with matters out of their province. They seemed naturally to have an eye for detail and for domestic matters, traits which the wise professional woman used to advantage, traits which could be valuable but which were so often misused.”

“Men? I guess some of us will put up with anything to get the woman we want. Rent, rates, mortgages—even children.”

REVIEW:
Every nurse heroine I’ve met lately seems to be working happily on the night shift, and Nurse Adele Palmer is such a one. “She always found night duty so immensely satisfying. A night nurse had a much deeper, closer relationship with her patients, could help them in a way which often contributed to their recovery far more than drugs or even the surgeon’s knife. The murmured confidences, the heart-to-heart talks in the small hours when the rest of the ward were wrapped in their own dreams. Then, a nurse became friend, physician, priest and councilor, the problems of another human halved by being shared.” When I worked nights, there were a few hardy nurses who did actually prefer it, but most seemed to be forced into it by the demands of their family life. 

Adele, the youngest of three children, lives at home with her parents. Her father is a cold, aloof man who barely speaks to his daughter and discourages her from bringing anyone home. Her mother aids and abets the old goat, but fortunately the couple are travelling a lot, he on business and she going with him because “her parents were still so much in love that they could not bear to be parted for long.” She won’t be lonely, though, because she is going out with Dr. Norman Wayne, with whom she has quickly fallen in love and is planning to marry. Though one might be forgiven for thinking that what she is really in love with is the idea of moving out of her father’s cold house. “How wonderful it would be to have a place of one’s own where once could really be free. Adele was beginning to what that more than anything else, and dreamed of the home she and Norman would one day set up together. Their children would feel absolutely and completely free to bring anyone home at any time. She must talk to Norman about this.”

Fortunately, Norman is dragging his heels about getting married—she seems to want to have it over and done within months of their starting to date, so anxious is she to move out—ironically because he loves her parents’ home so much that no rinky-dink flat, all they would be able to afford, will do. What he really wants to do is move in with Adele’s parents, not at all comprehending that Adele would rather live under a bridge than with her parents.

Three other people round out the list of dramatis personae: Nurse Margaret Bowen, a thirtysomething angry woman who “was a good nurse in many ways, but was inclined to adhere too much by the book,” who has an “intimidating, dominating personality” and a “pessimistic, soul-destroying view of life.” Standing up to Margaret one night on the floor when the older nurse is convinced that there is hanky-panky going on in the kitchen (the junior nurse was making tea), Adele does what anyone would do when forced to work with such a monster: She invited her to come stay with her for a week while her parents are out of town yet again. While visiting, the two have minimal chilly conversations in which Margaret strongly disapproves of not just Norman but every male on the planet. The stuff of great friendships.

Two other doctors round out the cast: Dr. Susan Kent, a cool, unfriendly surgeon who insists on flicking on all the lights and flinging back the covers on the sleeping patients on Adele’s ward. (Adele, admirably, resists this unnecessary treatment, but in the end she is forced to apologize for her insubordination, and never mind that she’s right.) The other is Dr. Ian Patterson, who was once engaged to Susan; he’s a kind but shadowy figure with whom Adele has maybe three conversations with until the day they start making out in the woods.

And that’s really about all there is to say about this book. Adele and Norman spend a lot of time looking at flats, none of them proving suitable for Norman. Adele, out of the blue, decides she’s really in love with Ian—while she’s still engaged to Norman—but happily catches Norman smooching Dr. Kent, so that makes everything easy there. And Margaret is given a personality transplant, her incessant, angry sniping about men, so tiresome to the reader, melts away into wreaths of smiles when she meets a nice man who likes her. Even Adele’s unhappiness with her father is smoothed away with a single honest conversation. Pretty much every character in the book is a shallow, self-deluded fool whose fundamental psychoses melt into rainbows at the lightest touch. Adele often demonstrates confidence and backbone as a nurse, but she has none of these traits as a human being, and her successes at work are minimized while her successes in her personal life are essentially accidental—“Adele had too much pride to do the chasing,” we are reminded again and again, so she makes little effort to get what she wants. Her relationship with Margaret cannot be called a friendship, but she certainly chases after this unpleasant, bitter woman, and though it pays off in the end, it’s impossible to understand why she pursues that relationship so determinedly. A perplexing, uninteresting character, it’s ultimately not rewarding to spend any time with Nurse Adele.

Part-Time Nurse

By Elizabeth Houghton, ©1964

At home, Karen was very much in the background, coming a poor second to her glamourous half-sister Celia, but in her work as part-time nurse in a home for old people, she was loved by all her patients, and she found a good friend in Simon Guthrie, the consultant physician. And then Simon met Celia. Would the inevitable happen? 

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“Love isn’t just a one-way street. Parents have to earn it as well as their children.” 

REVIEW:
It’s really an insurmountable problem when the heroine of your book is unlikeable. Is the author so out of touch that she can’t understand what qualities the reader will find admirable? There must be a few books I’ve liked despite its heroine, and in these situations a generous reader might believe that the author, for some unknown reason of her own, chose to write a dislikeable heroine while assembling a more interesting supporting cast and story line. A better option would be to create a heroine who starts out badly but improves through personal growth, but these, too, are rare. This book, unfortunately, is neither of these. Here we have the milquetoast Karen Shelley, not aided by the modern meme imposed on her first name, who is several times referred to as a Cinderella who has given up her hospital nursing job to care for her aged, invalid mother—a woman in her mid-50s who’d had “a heavy cold and threatened pneumonia” that “was brought under control with drugs in a few days” and now, months or possibly years later, mother is still not allowed to leave the house by her physician, and Karen is obliged to spend every waking hour waiting on the “whining invalid,” a mean and ungrateful woman who runs Karen down as much as she spoils Karen’s younger half-sister Celia, who contributes neither labor nor money to the family but insists Karen be home at 9:00 am to wake her up for her job as a receptionist for a real estate firm.

Through what may be divine intervention, given the thin eye of a needle she is threading, Karen finds a job at Langdale Place, an old folks’ home that needs her only between 7:00 and 9:00 am—and ever-grateful mum is peeved both that Karen is not starting sooner because they need the money and also because Karen will be out of the house when she’s usually bringing in breakfast on a tray: “I suppose I’ll have to manage,” mother says “grudgingly”—and never mind that Celia would be at home and could get breakfast for her if she’s unable to do for herself, though it’s difficult to see why she can’t.

All this mistreatment has left Karen beaten down: “She had learned long ago not to heed the defensive urge to talk back.” She’s horrifically spineless, absorbing direct and implied insults from her family without a word, but curiously, in her first encounters with Dr. Simon Guthrie, who oversees the Langdale Place residents, she slams out of his car before he’s even started the motor because he’d asked her if she was sure she wanted to work with geriatrics—and then she freaks out for the next five pages that he’s going to fire her the next time he sees her.

Bizarrely, Simon seems interested in Karen though her minimal hours mean they never cross paths, and she’s such a pansy that she is blushing almost constantly in the first pages. But maybe that’s what he likes, as he swoops in and, without discussing it with her, frees her mother from the doctor’s orders that have kept her indoors, offers mom a job at Langdale Place, and tells Karen that she’ll now be working full-time, so less than halfway through the book its title is no longer applicable. Karen is so grateful to be liberated from her prison that she fights him at every turn, even concluding pathetically, “Celia will never wake up without me there!” (Simon reminds her of this handy invention called an alarm clock, and Karen reluctantly goes along with his plan, but only because she’s sure mum will refuse to take the job at Langdale Place. She doesn’t.)

The plot next turns on a real estate deal that threatens the building Langdale Place occupies, but coincidentally Celia works for the financier behind the deal, apparently doing more than just answering the phone, as she’s spotted in clubs and limos in cocktail dresses and mink coats accompanied by old men with “dark greedy eyes” “licking his lips,” disappearing with her suitcase apparently en route to Paris with her boss but turning up at home in the morning, her dress ripped, and her sometime boyfriend Barry worrying that Celia is “getting mixed up with something nasty” as Karen thinks of “white girls kidnapped for Moroccan night clubs”—but no one ever bothers to ask  Celia what’s going on.

Simon at least plays true to character and organizes a plot that he never explains to Karen even as it’s unfolding, in which Celia uses her influence on her boss—though it’s not clear how, as Langdale Place is ultimately torn down—and is “taken” by her boss’s gang for the evening, all very murky and never explained. In the end, the most we hear is that Celia has “decided to forget it ever happened. It’s the best way.” Oh, OK.

There are happy endings for all in the end, and Karen wins a prize at work, though we’re not sure why, since all she seemed to do was submit everyone else’s ideas for the new home that’s to be built when the current building is torn down. This is the book’s most consistent problem, that Karen is a spineless cipher to whom good things are given after her term of suffering, for little apparent effort or merit of her own. I do wonder whether a Cinderella can really be a likable personality—if you have willingly subverted your wishes for your own life, are you likely to be interesting when set free, particularly if you played no role in obtaining your freedom? Karen is not a character we root for, and so her liberation is meaningless to us, and we have no regrets when we close the book on her, apart from the hours wasted in her insipid company.

Nurse Shelley Decides

By Arlene Hale, ©1964

Cover illustration by Mort Engle

 

“Are you after a fat paycheck, Nurse?” The contempt in Dr. Adam Victor’s voice stung Shelley—but it was true she was leaving the hospital to nurse a private patient, and Miriam Bleeker was very rich indeed. The handsome young doctor looked on Shelley as a deserter—and what made it worse was that Dr. Victor had declared war on the whole Bleeker family … and anyone who was with them was his enemy!

 

GRADE: C+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“I’m direct. That’s my big problem. I say what I think. Do you know how many people go around never really saying what they think or doing what they want, or being their real selves? IT’s sickening. It really is.”

 

REVIEW:

Dr. Adam Victor is a tall, hungry-looking young man who yells at all the nurses and “seemed to hate all women in general, nurses in particular and Shelley especially.” Naturally, Nurse Shelley Stevens is drawn to this doctor, with whom she does nothing but fight.  “She didn’t know why she allowed him to upset her so much, but he invariably did.” Well, we know why, don’t we, readers! Shelley has a boyfriend, artist Paul deWinters, but though she loves hanging out in his apartment, she’s not as emphatically gung-ho about him. He doesn’t have a lot of ambition, “content to drift along in his easy-going way,” and besides, “there was always something just not quite right. Something was not complete.” This setup is a fairly standard VNRN ploy, telegraphing from the first page what’s going to happen on the last. It bores me.

 

Shelley lives and works in a mill town, and the mill in question is owned by the Bleeker family. The operating conditions at the mills are poor, and many workers end up in the hospital after accidents that could have been avoided. This is why Dr. Victor hates the Bleekers so much. But Shelley is asked as a special favor by Dr. Harris, an old friend who encouraged her to go to nursing school, to take a job specialing Miriam Bleeker, who is recovering from a stroke. So though she knows it is going to get her into hot water at work—and sure enough, it does—she takes the job. While she’s living in the Bleeker mansion, she begins to run into numerous mysteries: Why won’t the unions advocate for the workers but are content to let the lax conditions go unchallenged? Why is Dr. Harris, who is the medical director for the mills, also disinterested in pushing for better safety for the workers? What is Dr. Harris’ relationship with Mrs. Bleeker? Why has Mr. Bleeker abandoned the family?

 

About halfway through the book, Dr. Vincent and Shelley meet up at the funeral of a much-beloved patient and end up at dinner together—and kissing afterward. “I don’t understand. I thought we hated each other,” says Shelley the simpleton. After kissing her silly, Dr. Victor insists that Shelley quit working for the Bleekers, or “we’ll forget what just happened.” She’s shocked, but has enough spine to give him a piece of her mind and go back to the Bleekers.

 

Eventually, the crisis you knew was going to happen actually does: There’s a big explosion at the mill, and many people are seriously injured or killed. The shock of the accident also sends Miriam into a second and fatal heart attack. This saves everyone from the responsibility of agency: With Miriam out of the picture, her son Blake finally has the spine to throw his cheating wife and the corrupt union boss out on their ears, and start running a responsible business, vowing to rebuild the mill according to the best safety standards out there! Mr. Bleeker is returned to the mansion from the nursing home where he’d been hiding out, and Shelley is obliged to return to her job at the hospital. So now all it takes is for Dr. Victor to come striding over to her, grip her painfully by the shoulders, and command, “You’re going to marry me, Shelley. Just as soon as it can be arranged.” And that’s that, all but the nauseating final sentence.

 

The writing isn’t bad, but the plot is trite, and Nurse Shelley’s capitulation is more than a little disappointing, especially after the way she has stood up for herself all through the book. And we’re left with the question: What did Shelley decide? Seems to me the decision was made for her. If you figure it out, let me in on it.

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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Doctor’s Choice

By Susan Lennox, ©1960

Dr. Bruce Morrow’s beautiful fiancée laughed when she heard the terms of his uncle’s will. “How utterly absurd,” Nina said. “Of course you are not going to bury yourself in a small Southern town and take over the running of a dinky hospital. Dad will build you one right here, if I ask him to.” Bruce knew Nina was right, of course, but he couldn’t help wondering about the pull he felt toward his late uncle’s home town, the hospital he had left him and Nurse Becky Roberts. He was in love with Nina all right, but he couldn’t help wondering why Becky was constantly on his mind and why his resolve to become a rich, big-city society doctor was weakening day by day.

 

GRADE: B-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“It’s a long road we travel, you know, and we can’t find happiness if we get on the wrong road.”

 

REVIEW:

Another not-a-nurse-novel, Doctor’s Choice nonetheless attracted me for its great cover illustration by Robert Maguire. It’s too bad the story inside doesn’t follow through.

 

Dr. Bruce Morrow is about to marry Nina Neely (say that ten times fast), the spoiled, demanding, and wealthy daughter of his mentor and soon-to-be partner. But out of the blue an uncle, a general practitioner also named Bruce Morrow who works in the quaint Southern town of Maplesville, up and dies. His will leaves Bruce II a large home and captaincy of the local hospital, which Bruce I had endowed. Bruce II is committed to the indolent path he has chosen as society doctor, we are told repeatedly—but we also find out that Bruce holds “a desire long dormant and never fully admitted. Deep within his heart he had always had a desire to be a country doctor.” Furthermore, “he supposed he was in love with Nina,” a supposition that never bodes well for a couple’s long-term success.

 

Bruce decides to go to Maplesville as a courtesy, to sign away in person his rights to the estate, which will now fall to the uncle’s nurse, 24-year-old Becky Reynolds, who conveniently lives next door. He’s only planning to spend a day, but as it happens, he witnesses the car accident in which the perpetrator and victim is the spoiled, demanding, and wealthy daughter of the crooked mayor of Maplesville. Cheryl’s arm is crushed, and all the local doctors are voting for just lopping it off, but Cheryl would rather die than lose an arm. Bruce confesses that he’d assisted Dr. Neely in saving an arm in a similar case back home, so his 24-hour stay is dragged out to a couple of weeks while he doctors Cheryl and the other former patients of his uncle, with his trusty Nurse Becky at his side.

 

And you are not going to guess what happens!!! Bruce falls in love with Becky! But he’s one of those dopey types who thinks that he must go through with an unsatisfying career and marriage, and never mind that “the thought of a lifetime with a girl like Nina was very disturbing.” Though he finds “a richness, a contentment, a feeling of well-being here that he did not think he would find elsewhere,” “his sense of integrity would not let him” back out: “He had promised Dr. Neely; he was engaged to Nina; he couldn’t walk out and say he had changed his mind.” Will he come to his senses before book’s end? The tension about killed me!!!

 

Well, that was a little snarky, but it’s an irritating question to hang a book on. And you’ll never guess how it turns out!!! So OK, you will, and there’s no precipitating event or revelation that brings on Bruce’s complete about-face; he just walks into Dr. Neely’s office and blurts out the truth, and Dr. Neely just says, “If that’s what you want, don’t let anyone change your mind.” So he doesn’t even have to fight for what he wants, and there are no repercussions—apart from a bitter scene with Nina—that keep him from his intended career and bride. While the book isn’t badly written, and I mostly enjoyed the characters (although there is one bizarre detour in which Becky masquerades as someone else for a bit before she is found out, and this is never satisfactorily explained), in the end I was annoyed by both the book’s central “problem” and its resolution. If Bruce makes the right choice in the end by becoming a country practitioner, the choice you should make is to leave this one on the shelf.

Jennifer James, R.N.

By Norman Daniels, ©1961

Cover illustration by M. Hooks

 

Nestled deep in the California hills was a hospital so strange, so unique that only a handful of people knew of its existence, let alone its mysterious mission. Through its antiseptic corridors moved the shadiest of characters—bullet-ridden gangsters, suicidal actresses, punch-drunk pugs—people who could not stand the all-revealing daylight of public exposure. A truly odd assortment of bedfellows. Here, under the most modern and efficient conditions, beneath the secretive cloak of midnight, life-saving operations were performed by a team of highly skilled, dedicated men and women. Jennifer James, Registered Nurse, was one of them. Some people will condemn her for it. Others will come to her defense. But no one will be indifferent to her, or to the doctor she loved—the man she had no right to want.

 

GRADE: B

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Bye, sweetie, and I hate you because you’re so damn attractive.”

 

“Now that’s the epitome of our gentle era. Booze through a straw. Bombs from the bomb bays, missiles from the pads, rockets and men in orbit, atoms from the smashers and booze through a straw.”

 

“Would you like to go down by the river? There are benches, and I promise to behave outrageously.”

 

“California now has something to talk about whenever the subject of beauty is brought up.”

 

“She’s your wife. You should be able to handle her or you shouldn’t have married her.”

 

“You are much too attractive to worry.”

 

REVIEW:

Jennifer James, R.N., is wholly unique among the more than 200 nurse heroines I have met to date: Right off the bat, right there on page 16, she sleeps with a married man she had admired but barely known when she worked with him years ago. The man in question, Dr. Rafferty Corbett, is a surgeon at Manhattan’s West Side General, but now he is a rude, sloppy drunk, babbling on about his Eskimo pie of a wife at the hospital’s annual ball. She takes him outside for some fresh air and he all but passes out, so she takes him to her room in the nurse’s dormitory. Big mistake. In his gratitude for her assistance, he forces her down and tears off her dress. She responds as women in VNRNs usually do when they are being assaulted, namely, “she found herself clinging to him instead, pulling him closer.” Next thing you know, she’s picking up her underwear off the floor and rushing to the OR, where she is head surgical nurse, for an emergency surgery.

 

There she works on a man who has been assaulted to the brink of death by the henchmen of gangster Sydney Delgado. The man, a former associate of Sydney’s, was about to sing to the police about Sydney’s illicit activities, but now he’s fighting for his life with just Jennifer James, R.N., between him and the grim reaper. But there’s this mean police detective, who wants the patient to wake up and talk before his imminent death. Jennifer, who has orders to keep the man sedated lest his shredded spleen start hemorrhaging, dopes the patient with morphine even as the detective is rushing to the hospital administrator to make Jennifer keep the man alert. Her efforts come to no avail and the patient dies, and now there is hell to pay. Jennifer is fired from her job for obeying the doctor’s orders and not the detective’s, and is blacklisted from every job in town—except for one, working for an abortionist, which she turns down, so we know she has some morals.

 

Then she gets a phone call from Raff. He’s in California, having left his wife, and he wants her to take a job at the hospital where he works. Next thing you know, she’s at a very upscale medical facility in the Los Angeles hills. The patients are glamorous movie stars, dirt-poor Mexican immigrants, anyone who needs care—including a number of shady types with suspicious wounds; Jennifer’s first surgery upon arriving is assisting Raff in removing a bullet from a seedy fellow who repays her by grabbing her breast, and only Raff’s quick intervention with a right cross to the jaw preserves her relative modesty.

 

It turns out that the hospital is financed by Sydney, who after watching his mother die of cancer, impoverished and without proper treatment, swore that he would help others in the same situation—apparently the only act of goodness he has ever committed. So all these nice poor people get top-notch care, but the down side is that Jennifer and RAff have to minister to any of Sydney’s associates who might need medical attention. But to have a job again, and to work alongside Raff—and to open her door to him at night—is all Jennifer needs, so she accepts the good with the bad. And the bad includes another assault, this time a near-rape—she is again saved by Raff, whose timing really is uncanny—and the arrival of Sydney himself, who has survived a plane crash and crawled across the California desert to the hospital. Oh, and Raff’s wife turns up as well, and a Hollywood gossip columnist, both of whom are threatening to expose Jennifer and Raff as adulterers as well as the hospital’s slimy underbelly.

 

It seems black for everyone concerned: How can Raff shake off his wife and the gossip columnist, and persuade Sydney to continue funding the hospital, which, after his first-hand experience as a patient, he now regards as an unworthy medical facility staffed by quacks? (He may have a point there; shortly after his arrival, he is determined to have metastatic lung cancer and less than two weeks to live, and though he is even given radiation treatment, he is never informed of his diagnosis lest he freak out and pull the plug on the hospital’s endowment trust.)

 

Not to worry, in the event that you are: All is resolved when the hospital handyman (a very dignified Mexican) essentially murders Sydney by brutally revealing his illness to him, the shock of which sends Sydney into a coma from which he never recovers, and also by a bit of dirt that Jennifer and Raff fortuitously uncover on Mrs. Raff and Mr. Columnist. It isn’t really a satisfying ending; I had hoped that someone might literally put an end to Sydney, which would have made for a more thought-provoking conclusion to the hospital’s woes, and the way in which Mrs. Raff is dispatched seemed too facile. But on the whole it’s an enjoyable book, even if at the same time it doesn’t have all that much to recommend it. The writing is pleasant and brisk, and the surgeries are well and accurately described, but the plot just aren’t that enticing. I also wasn’t really impressed with Raff, who goes around either threatening to hit everyone or actually doing so, and his initial assault on Jennifer wasn’t too nice, either, even if she did succumb to his charms. It’s an odd addition to the VNRN genre and for that reason alone perhaps worth reading, but otherwise you won’t find that Jennifer James has much to offer outside the bedroom or the OR.

Small Town Nurse

By Harriet Kathryn Myers, ©1962

When the strain and pressure of huge Memorial Hospital proved too great for Ann Wellington, R.N., she was advised to take a tour of duty in a small, peaceful community. At first sight, Beverly Beach seemed like the right place, but her hope was shattered the moment Ann became nurse with the Bronston family—crippled Emily who lived on broken dreams of the past; cruel Hester, who cursed love and all who loved; and strong, handsome Bruce, the young intern who hated nurses.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“If it had been possible for an old hellion like me to sire a daughter, I would have liked her to look like you, Ann, so that when I came home nights tired, I could just look at you and be refreshed. So when the world’s ugliness became too much for me, I could look at your fresh cleanliness and be recreated.”

“The first thing you should do is relax. A pretty young girl like you should never get so tense. It makes a line between your brows, an indentation.”

“A girl as pretty as you should be helpless. She shouldn’t ever have to do anything for herself—growing up as pretty and clean looking as you is enough for anybody.”

“I thought your dad was riding herd on you these days, dressing you like a young lady.”

REVIEW:

Ann Wellington has just completed her training at a large hospital, but finds that her ideals are being mercilessly crushed by the cynicism of the nurses and doctors she works with. She’s worn down and worn out, and she is so lost that she’s considering quitting nursing, before she’s barely even started her career! Then kindly Dr. Sage Millburn—who clearly deserves his given name—calls her to her office to tell her that she is suffering from “medical neurosis,” make her an offer so startling, that “Ann sank back in her chair as if stunned. For a moment the doctor seemed to wheel and skid, changing places with the overstacked book shelves, the windows, the fading sunlight.” Has he suggested she kill herself? Become a prostitute? No! She shouldn’t work in the hospital any more! She should take a job in private duty, working for an old friend of his in Florida who is fighting a fatal illness! It’s a shocking, novel proposal, but tough times call for desperate measures, as after all, “Ann was fighting for her very existance.” Apparently she’s quite a fragile flower, and with a constitution this delicate, it’s a miracle she made it past the first bed pan.

So she quits the hospital, packs up her belongings, and hops a plane for Beverly Beach. She’s so entranced by the palm trees that she tells the cabbie to pull over and walks the rest of the way to the old doctor’s house. “You’ve found your home, Ann,” she tells herself. But when she gets to the doctor’s house, she finds he’s been taken to the hospital and won’t be expected to live much longer, so she doesn’t have a job after all. She heads dejectedly back to the airport, but is in such a daze that she tries to go in the automatic out door, which opens before her and traps her foot underneath it. A handsome porter springs to her rescue, expertly binding her foot, and it’s suddenly like they’ve known each other for years.

But then he starts mouthing off about the type of women he doesn’t like: nurses. “They talk smart. They know more after three years of study than a medic knows after eight.” It turns out he’s an intern at Beverly Memorial Hospital, moonlighting as a porter because “I have this horrible nervous habit—I like to eat.” So it’s a good thing nurses are so horrible, because then he won’t want to date one, and he can keep his money for himself. “So I guess I should be grateful to nurses for being such personal creeps,” he concludes. “They’re all so hard. All of them competing for the unmarried doctors. Some of them even after the married doctors.” Then the penny drops, and he asks Ann if she wants to see him throw himself head first off the air tower for his stupid remarks. Ann tells him, “I’ll just accept your word that you’ll do it.”

Naturally, on the next page, they’re having dinner together—nevermind that he’s supposed to be working, and poor. She unburdens herself about her situation, and guess what? He’s got a sickly cousin, Emily, who is between nurses! Emily is a poor little thing—well, actually, an insanely rich little thing—who fell in love with a boy at the age of 17. When her father found out about it, he had the boy beaten within an inch of his life and run out of town. Emily was so upset about this that she drove her car off the road, and now she is paralyzed and in constant pain. Her “caretaker”—and we use the word loosely for the nasty shrew auditioning for Bette Davis’ role in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?—is cousin Hester, who raised Bruce from the day his parents were killed when he was a young boy. She excoriates him with helpful suggestions like how he’s going to turn into a drunk like his father and how he can’t decide on a specialy because he’s afraid. She tears up checks Emily writes for him and keeps Emily locked away in a room with windows that don’t open. She’s a psychotic piece of work, and almost an interesting character, but she has no real power at all to make her interesting; the curiosity of this book is why everyone lets this horrible woman, who is completely dependent on Emily for a home and financial support, continue in her reign of terror for so long.

So when Ann moves in, suddenly things start to change. Ann opens the windows, insists on giving Emily pain medication when she has a seizure, and has a wooden walkway built down to the ocean so Emily look at the waves and wonder where her sailor boyfriend is today. Hester is looking more and more like she’s swallowed a box of tacks, but for the first time no one pays her any mind. We find Bruce and Ann walking on the beach together one day, and we learn that they are all but engaged. It’s a new twist in VNRNs to play what is usually the climactic scene offstage, and halfway through the book to boot. I have to say it doesn’t work too well, but I guess you have to give Ms. Myers some props for trying something new.

Without a couple to affiance, the story turns elsewhere for something to do, so it has sad, lost Emily, who seemed to be just starting to wake up to the possibilities of a better life, die of an overdose of her narcotic pain medication. Naturally Hester starts screaming that it’s Ann who is responsible, and there’s a trial, and it comes out that Ann was sent to Beverly Beach because she’s got this “medical neurosis” thing, which means she’s just a butterfly net away from the loony bin, so let’s burn the witch!

There is no justice in this book. Ann gets off, of course, and Emily has left her a tidy sum due to the fact that Bruce had told Emily that he was going to marry Ann. Bruce also gets a huge chunk to underwrite his fancy new clinic. But Hester—who had buried Emily’s suicide note and been Ann’s chief accusor—gets a large amount of money as well, and the house by the beach to live in, when it seems to me that criminal charges ought to be filed. The other oddity of this book is that it reads something like a sermon, as about every few pages the characters are getting all shiny-faced and beatific, fervently, and seriously, thanking God for getting Ann’s foot stuck under that airport door so she was able to meet Bruce, who prays, “This is what God in His goodness must have had in mind for me all along!” (For her fire-and-brimstone part, Hester uses God to explain why she withholds Emily’s pain medication, because in crashing her car, Emily broke her father’s heart, and “God’s making her pay for it with a life of pain.”)

This book has a few small surprises, like the star witness who upends Hester’s case against Ann, and the whereabouts of Emily’s long-lost boyfriend. It is stunning how truly cruel Hester is, but there’s no thrill in it; I keep thinking of how fabulous and exciting Florence Stonebraker’s baddies are, and how so very far apart they are from Hester. Maybe because her victim is truly helpless, or because there is absolutely no reason why Hester is allowed to be in a position to torture poor Emily, Hester is just disturbing. But this book does not give you satisfaction in any of its plot lines, so it’s best you just leave this one on the shelf.