Nurse in Danger

By Maisie Greig, ©1955

The steward laid a small table for them in the cabin and set silver and a pink-shaded lamp upon it: the white cloth reflected the soft light so that suddenly Jane felt she was in some exclusive nightclub. It really was very romantic. As the boat dipped gently she could see through the porthole the silver-crested waves, the moonlight cutting a path through the dark waters … but how could one feel romantic, when dining with a man who obviously intended to murder you at the first possible opportunity?

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“You talk as though you were a Commie.” 

“If you don’t have a pretty fair opinion of yourself, what’s the good of going on living?”

“You have spunk, Jane, as well as a fertile imagination, and those qualities I admire in a woman. That and a nice little body.”

“You lack complete understanding of other women, Jane. They like to be hit about, they like to grovel. It’s the slave complex.”

“Perhaps in the last analysis you can take anything for yourself, it’s only when you see others punished and humiliated before your eyes you finally revolt.”

REVIEW:
Jane is another orphan nurse who has landed the lucky job of caring for a wildly wealthy young widow, Elsa Spiegal. Well, mostly she’s just a companion, but “in case she had another of those wretched heart attacks she wanted Jane to be along.” So Jane relocates from England and follows Elsa everywhere: “the Colony, Sardis, the Algonquin, the 21 Club.” And she’s hot, too! “She had slim and shapely legs, one of the reason many of the weary habitués of the Stork Club or the El Morocco half turned in their chairs and watched her samba.” Which unfortunately isn’t working out well: “That may have been one of the reasons why Mrs. Spiegal seemed to have turned rather cool towards her lately, almost to resent her.”

Or maybe it’s the fact that Professor Dick Creswell seems to like her. “Reputedly he was a mineralist and geologist of distinction,” but he had also inherited a lot of money and is hosting this fabulous party on his yacht. But instead of flirt with Dick, she is forced to listen to Mrs. Palmer cry, because her three-year-old was kidnapped more than two weeks ago, and no one at this silly party cares at all! They don’t: “We’re all very sorry for her and all that, but she is becoming a bit of a pest,” snorts Dick, earning his name. But Jane is able to shrug off his callousness and accompany him to his cabin where he shows Jane and Elsa his jewelry collection. Elsa, “reputed to have one of the finest collections of diamonds in the whole of the United States,” exhorts Dick to lend her a diamond watch for an exhibition, and then casually details her entire security arrangement, including the fact that Jane knows the combination to the safe and will be home alone for a week while Elsa is away. Now Jane demonstrates more sense, appreciating an “atmosphere she’d been conscious of when she’d first stepped on to the yacht, a disturbing, even a frightening undercurrent of suspicion, it might even be danger.” Well, we know it’s danger, since it says so right there on the cover!

She meets a young seaman on board who ridicules the other guests, pointing out their callousness toward others, Mrs. Porter being a case in point, and Jane reluctantly agrees—well, they’ve been so kind to her! He’s caught talking to Jane by Dick, who tells her that the man is an attempted thief whom he has hired in an attempt to set him on the straight and narrow with hard, honest work. Then he tells her that Elsa is wildly jealous because he is attracted to Jane and kisses her in the moonlight, the cad. Now the young innocent nurse is tortured about her own feelings for him, and his for her, when we savvy VNRN readers know the truth! Guess who enters Elsa’s apartment days later on the aforementioned day when Jane is there alone, sporting a small automatic pistol? He empties the safe, and kidnaps Jane, making it look like she herself was the thief. “Her only hope of fighting him was to pretend to acquiesce and, the chill though struck into her heart again, her only hope of living.” He drags her on board his yacht again, setting sail for who knows where? There she meets the sailor again, and he scorns her as a cheap tramp who has come on a cruise unchaperoned with a man she’s just met. She doesn’t dare to set him straight since Dick has suggested that she will “be a good girl” or be killed, and she interprets this as not telling anyone she’s a prisoner.

The seaman does warm to Jane, even kissing her before she even knows his name, and enlists her help in a scheme. He somehow manages to make Dick fall down a staircase, breaking his arm, and Jane injects him with some drug that knocks him out for 24 hours. While he’s out, she pokes around in his room and finds a child’s book that she recognizes as belonging to poor Mrs. Palmer’s kidnapped daughter Sally! Now we have question marks sprinkled across every page like ants at a picnic. They’re usually stupid questions Jane is asking herself repeatedly, though if she gave things an actual minute of thought she could likely figure out the answer. Now that Dick is her patient, though, he’s a lot more sympathetic toward her, and she convinces him that she’d been casing Mrs. Siegel’s jewelery collection a lot longer than he had, and he owes her half his profit from the heist. And it turns out that Jane is quite the actress! “He was beginning to be afraid that there might come a time when his emotions might interfere very seriously with his cool judgment” when it came to Jane.  Then she’s off to hide behind the life boats with Jaspar, kissing him “in the throes of her first big love affair.” That was fast! “They were in grave danger of their lives, but they were young and they were in love, and for that moment nothing else seemed to matter.”

We do get into some interesting philosophical discussions regarding wealth and its distributions, ideas that have more relevance in this day and age. “Why should a stupid woman like Elsa Spiegal have some of the world’s best jewels?” asks Dick. “What has she done to deserve them? What has she given to the world?” He, working as a professor, “contributed much to the world’s knowledge,” but had only a “pittance.” I have to admit I agree with his position—tax wealth, not work!

More philosophy ensues when a man is thought to have attempted to signal a passing ship, and Jaspar is ordered to throw the man overboard to the sharks. Now Jane is arguing with herself because she is still in love with Jaspar. “What a madly illogical thing love was,” she thinks. “Sometimes you hated yourself for living, and yet there it was, the strongest force in life that throbbed through your veins and blood. It couldn’t be killed by disillusion, however bitter; and while you despised yourself there was something in your heart that still sang with joy.” I don’t think love is quite as immortal as she would make out, otherwise the divorce rate might be a bit less than it is. But Jane seems to have some odd ideas about love; in the climax of the book Jaspar is rather vicious to several of the villains, but Jane decides that Jaspar is a “savage brute,” but “Savage brute or not, I’d die if I wasn’t going to be married to him!” He shows up at just that moment and she tells him she thinks he’s a brute, “and now hgis hard, blunt-fingered hands gripped Jane’s shoulders. ‘I’ll show you how much more of a brute I can be when I’m married to you, my girl,’” he answers, and shakes her. Stunningly, she neither runs screaming nor calls off the engagement, but says, “I don’t care if you beat me up every day, so long as you keep on loving me.” Just wow.

Overall the writing is engaging, though it does indulge in way too many rhetorical questions. The book’s biggest flaw is that Jane as a character is utterly bipolar. One minute she is coolly lying her head off to get out of a dangerous situation with the Professor, and then she’s shrieking hysterically during an escape in which the slightest sound could get them caught. Her over-the-top feeling for Jaspar based on a total of ten minutes in his company is completely unbelievable, and then when he is increasingly proved to be alarmingly domineering, her unswerving devotion to a future as an emotionally if not also physically abused wife is baffling. Author Maysie Greig’s lovely Doctor’s Wife had given me high hopes for her work, but now three additional books all written in the 1950s and lacking that book’s charm makes me think that early work, written in 1937, exhausted her genius. There seems to be another half-dozen nurse novels by Ms. Greig, so time will tell, but I’m not making any bets they’ll get much better.

Nurse Laurie’s Cruise

By Adelaide Humphries, ©1956

A nurse-companion on a Caribbean cruise sounded like fun to Laurie Fielding. But to make sure she got the job, Laurie tried to disguise her blonde loveliness before she went for the interview. The first person Laurie met on the Bianca was Jeff Anderson, so much the picture of the man every girl hopes to meet on a cruise that Laurie was instantly put on guard. As they cruised the exotic tropical islands, Laurie found herself paired off with the young professor writing a book on the West Indies and her beautiful employer with the attractive Jeff—with Laurie becoming more and more attracted to Jeff. A delightful and exciting story of a young nurse in search of adventure—with both danger and love lurking for Laurie in the blue waters of the Caribbean.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“I always thought most nurses looked like majordomos.” 

“Nurses have a way of managing things—and people.”

“Isn’t every young, single woman who saves up enough money for a cruise on the lookout for husband material?”

“Fear flooded over her, and she wanted to turn and run. But her nurse’s training restrained her.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Laurie Fielding meets all the criteria for a nurse position that she sees advertised—except the ad specifically requests that the applicant be “preferably not too attractive.” Of course, Laurie does not fit that bill, with her “natural blonde hair, big blue eyes, creamy skin, and a figure that more often than not draws wolf whistles.” So she wears a hair net and large tortoiseshell glasses to the interview, where young widow Irma Potts, age 36, hires Laurie even though, she says, “I don’t want someone to outshine me!” Irma is a flighty, vapid heiress with no actual illnesses other than a few days of seasickness, so Laurie needn’t worry that she “wouldn’t like spending all her time shut up in a cabin with her patient, when she was longing to enjoy the sea air, the pleasures of the voyage, and the interesting sights.” In short, Laurie is hoping for what she herself calls “a vacation” while getting paid for not doing any work, and that is exactly what she gets! In fact, Irma soon advises Laurie to quit dressing down, so even the “disguise” Laurie wears to get the job is quickly abandoned—yet another dopey plot device that goes nowhere.

On board, Laurie soon meets Jeff Anderson, and “there was something about him—perhaps because he looked so much like the sort of man a girl might dream about meeting on a cruise—that made Laurie dislike him.” She’s not wrong, actually; he’s not a likable man, aggressive, always pushing himself onto her and attempting to control her. She is frequently furious with him, but alas, we know what that means—she won’t have the sense or the ability to resist him much longer.  Soon he’s kissing her on a regular basis. “If Jeff had wanted to kiss her again, she knew he would have, without asking,” and the thought gives her chills—of pleasure, unfortunately, because have I mentioned that Laurie doesn’t have much sense?

Laurie tries to make it her job to protect Irma from wolves and thieves, but it’s not going well. She suspects Jeff of being a crook in part because he refuses to have his photograph taken. “If he was the adventurer she believed him to be, his past might catch up with him,” she decides, but is unable to keep him away from Irma. And then Irma is travelling with an enormous amount of valuable jewelry and wears it all at once, so everyone is aware of it, and then she won’t keep it in the safe. Laurie has concerns about a few other suspicious people besides Jeff, starting with a man named John Harvey who uses crutches to walk and whom Irma constantly calls “pathetic” due to his disability. Laurie regularly catches Mr. Harvey in the hall outside Irma’s room, though his room is on another floor, but immediately decides not to say anything about it, deciding that it “most likely amounted to nothing.”

Eventually Laurie decides that the best thing is for her to keep the jewels in her own room, and guess what? The  next night they’re stolen, and Laurie is a suspect! Now she’s trying to figure out who stole them and making a poor job of it. When she finds Mr. Harvey arguing with a rich older woman passenger, “it was another riddle that Laurie decided she might as well forget.” The next night, after finding Mr. Harvey in the hall again, she finds the empty jewel case back in her room—and promptly tosses it overboard. Then Laurie stumbles across a crewmember who is dying from a gunshot wound. He tells her, “The jewels—she found out I knew where they—” but she mentions this to exactly no one, and the man promptly dies. Laurie has the common sense of a gnat. Eventually she does something really stupid and almost gets herself shot, too, but almost every strong male on the ship shows up at the same time and she is rescued! And discovers she’s in love, too!

This is a perfunctory story whose plot makes no sense. On one hand, Laurie cannot put two and two together and constantly sabotages herself—until she is deciding she alone can capture the criminal, who she selects essentially out of the blue, and nearly gets herself killed by someone whose presence is unexplainable, too. Her—no surprise, this—love interest is portrayed in unflattering terms at every meeting, but after hating him for most of the story, she falls for him hard, and the sudden conversion makes as little sense as pretty much everything else in the book. To cap it all off, we have the consistently insulting descriptions of Mr. Harvey’s handicap, and, on visits to numerous ports of call, all the typical colonialistic, patronizing attitudes about Caribbean citizens and countries. My White Doctor Foundation is making a dual donation following this review, to the UNCF and the Cabrillo College Accessibility Support Center (a favorite cause of disabled and most beloved VNRN author Bill Neubauer). You can avoid the particularly noxious ick factor I had to wade through by just refusing to get on board Nurse Laurie’s Cruise.

The Strange Quest of Nurse Anne

By Mary Burchell
(pseud. Ida Cook), ©1964
Cover illustration by Paul Anna Soik 

To Anne Weston, brought up in an orphanage, the sudden discovery of her American cousins was as astounding as it was wonderful, and when they invited her to stay with them in their Maryland home her cup of happiness was full. But as her visit went on, Anne found herself becoming filled with suspicion—and unease…

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Rumor flourishes more luxuriantly in hospital ground than in any other known soil.”

“Surgeons are the biggest menace in creation to susceptible girls.”

“Only dull dogs are universally loved.”

“It has changed a good deal, New York, in the years I’ve known it, and certainly not always for the better. But there’s something about it, there’s something about it. There’s champagne in the air and adventure just around the corner.”

“If anything is obscure or dreary it’s sure of excellent reviews.”

“There’s no great virtue in refraining from doing something that’s no temptation.”

REVIEW:
What could have been a truly superlative book is slightly dampened by the old trope of a VNRN heroine who is dumber than a beetle, as my grandmother would have said. Time and time again, faced with the obvious, Anne Weston, who had the brains to get through nursing school and emerge a very talented nurse, is unable to recognize it. The interesting thing here is that her character in some ways makes this stupidity feasible: Raised in an orphanage without any knowledge about her parents, Anne has had no support or family to fall back on, and has made her own way in the world, which was essentially to take a path straight from the orphanage to the hospital nursing school, where she has lived for the past three years—from one sheltered environment to another, with little exposure to the world. The unfortunate part is that author Mary Burchell has not been able to prevent us from feeling anything other than contempt for Anne’s stupidity. Though her talent as a writer is clearly evident, I wish Ms. Burchell had tried a little harder to sell us on Anne’s blind spots and make us believe her decisions a little better.

As the book opens, Anne is about to bid farewell forever to the hospital and surgeon Philip Coram, on whom she’s had a slight crush, but of course, “he could hardly have been more impersonal and was sometimes cruelly critical.” But on her way out the door, he stops her and tells her she’s one of the best nurses he’s known, asks her what her plans are—and, curiously, what her name is—and when she says she’s going into private nursing, he says he’ll ask for her for his patients.

He calls her for the job of wrestling wealthy and self-centered widowed dowager Mrs. van Elten across the ocean to New York, and it’s worth reading this book just to meet Mrs. van Elten. She’s a salty, outspoken, smart, hilarious, manipulative, and kindly grande dame, and she is Fabulous! Then, just as she’s to leave for the trip, Anne receives a letter from a long-lost cousin, Paula Weston, who has somehow tracked her down, following up the efforts of Anne’s father Donald, who had moved to Australia and died a year ago without ever locating Anne. Paula and her brother Glen live in Maryland and are eager to meet their new cousin, who now will be not as far from them when she finishes her job with Mrs. van Elten. But Anne’s best friend Karen, who “had what she called hunches,” is uneasy about the whole thing, and Anne herself catches a “deep and ominous chill” as the boat pulls out of the Southampton harbor en route for the New World. She’s warmed to the core a few minutes later, though, when she learns that Dr. Coram is sailing on the same boat, bound for medical conferences in New York!

Needless to say, Mrs. van Elton instantly divines Anne’s interest in Dr. Coram, and starts to work on the pair. “I find people intensely interesting,” she tells Anne. “My daughter says I can’t mind my own business about them. But I like to advise and praise and criticize. Particularly to criticize.” Though Mrs. van Elton warns Anne that Dr. Coram is engaged, she still schools Anne on what color dress to wear and insists that Anne stay at the dances after she herself has turned in, the better to dance with the doctor. Anne’s relationship with Dr. Coram grows organically, and soon they’re on the Lido Deck under the stars, but Anne remembers the fiancée at home and becomes chilly just when things start to heat up. After they land in New York, Dr. Coram goes way beyond the call of duty to drive Anne the five hours from New York to her cousins’ house, which is a decaying former country estate; as it turns out, the cousins’ father had gambled away most of the family fortune and they are barely able to keep the place.

Cousin Glen is a smarmy sort of fellow, and his “almost beautiful smile never touched his handsome eyes, which remained hard and curiously inscrutable.” He’s instantly all over Anne, insisting that she marry him, and tells her that Dr. Coram, who had grown up in the area, had “played fast and loose with one or two girls in Washington, it seems, and he got quite a bad name in a set where it takes really something to make people talk.” This runs completely counter to everything Anne knows about Dr. Coram, but she starts to feel less about him, the dope, when it’s completely clear what’s Glen is really up to. There are many other obvious warnings about the cousins’ ulterior motives: A letter written by Anne’s father has been “accidentally” destroyed, and—curse the postal system!—so has another letter sent to her in care of her cousins from a Sydney attorney who, Karen says, is looking for Anne to give her good news about her father’s estate. Then Anne meets the old, slightly senile man who had been a groom on the estate for 50 years, who tells her that her father was rich and that the cousins are trying to get her money. Does the penny drop? No!

When Dr. Coram arrives to bring her back to New York two days later, Anne is completely rude to him, all but slamming the door in his face, and thanks for the ride, bub. The author suggests that Anne is so enthralled with the idea of having a family at last—“it gives one a sort of confidence and security to find a place and a family where one belongs,” she tells Dr. Coram—and Anne genuinely likes Paula, who deserves it, and Glen, who does not—which sets her up to believe what is an obvious ploy to get Dr. Coram out of the picture. And then she’s deeply flattered to be the object of affection for the first time in her life: “It was so utterly wonderful to feel that someone—perhaps, above all, her big, handsome warm-hearted cousin—thought her all-important.” So it is possible, given Anne’s background, that she could be this stupid—but it’s not well-sold to the readers, who can’t help wanting to give Anne a hard shake.

But then Mrs. van Elten drops a bomb—the fiancée is just a myth she’d created to keep Anne from running after Dr. Coram, thinking that “if he were made to do the running, you were just the right girl for him,” as she explains. Fortunately, Anne has the strength of character to call up the abused doctor and apologize profusely, and the pair are restored to friendly terms. But then Mrs. van Elten goes to Florida, freeing Anne to go back to her cousins’ house, and there our suspicions of them pile up—until finally even Anne can’t deny that something terrible is afoot, and when she sneaks out of the house to visit the old retired groom again, he suggests that the cousins might kill her for the money! Finally coming to her senses, she puts on a happy face, makes a frantic call to Dr. Coram to come get her tomorrow, and goes to her bedroom to lock herself in, but the key to her bedroom door has been taken! She stuffs her money in her dress, jumps out the bathroom window, and runs away—but Glen is coming after her in the car! Oh, no!! What will happen next?!?

Overall, this is a lovely book, with a truly outstanding character in Mrs. van Elten (she reminded me of Lady Travitt in Nurse Stacey Comes Aboard, though that book does not come close to this one) and a relationship between the lovers that grows honestly. Its biggest flaw is the fact that Anne is such a dunce about people, and the tragedy is that I think that an author who has given us a book this good could, with a bit more effort, have made Anne’s gullibility more understandable, so we might have wanted to smack Anne upside the head fewer than the two dozen times I did—especially at the end, when she makes a bizarre decision about the money she’s inherited. The title and the cover illustration are both more than a little perplexing, but we can’t pin those sins on Ida Cook, here writing as Mary Burchell, who likely had nothing to do with either. But overlook the strange envelope, and you will enjoy what you find inside it, if your evil cousins don’t destroy it first.

Nurse Stacey Comes Aboard

By Rona Randall, ©1958

Cover illustration by Martin Koenig

Janet Stacey could not believe it when Peter Fuller broke their engagement. He told her that it would be unfair of him with so little income to ruin her chances for a “successful” marriage. Only a girl as much in love as Janet could have failed to read between the lines of such an excuse. As it was, she asked her uncle, owner of a shipping line, to employ her as assistant nurse on the luxury liner Regina, on which Peter was taking a business trip to New York. She thought that if she saw him every day she would be bound to win him back. In this innocent hope she reckoned not only without Peter himself, but without the ship’s doctor, Blane Hartley, who despised all girls in general, and Janet, the privileged niece of the shipowner, in particular.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“The best cure for sea-sickness is champagne.”

“No man who wanted to get on in the world could afford pride, these days. Not if he hoped to afford a wife, too.”

“When I was young I could spend a couple of hours choosing between only two frocks!”

“How one man could hope to stand up against two women Maude couldn’t imagine!”

“I’m off to get that dress material. We could cut it out on the surgery table this afternoon. How about it?”

“I’m always rude myself, and enjoy it, so of course I must excuse the fault in others!”

“Every woman is hurt, at some time or another. It’s better for them to experience it when young. They grow into better women because of it.”

REVIEW:
When we first meet Janet Stacey, she is being jilted by ne’er-do-well Peter Fuller, who says that he can’t marry her because he cannot support her in the lifestyle to which she has been accustomed. And also because her father had let his very considerable life insurance policy lapse, “most unfairly,” Peter grouses. Valiantly attempting to change his mind, she reminds him that she can get a job as a nurse. “Nursing for amusement is one thing,” he says, and so, right there on the third page, we’d like to close the door in Peter’s face. Unfortunately, Janet Stacey is not as smart as we are. “He was all she wanted in life and nothing would ever make her stop loving him,” and though we know she will be proven wrong in the end, unfortunately it’s going to be a long and somewhat excruciating journey.

Stacey’s rich Uncle Jim has a fondness for Janet and can see through Peter, realizing that he’s dumped Janet when “he’d learned that her father’s aura of wealth had been but a façade, that she was penniless, that she wasn’t such a catch as he believed when he met her.” So when Janet asks Uncle Jim to give her a job as a nurse on the same ship on which Peter is sailing to New York on business, with the aim of proving to him that she can too hold a job, he agrees to the scheme, thinking that Peter won’t be able to resist being the adventurer he is and that Janet will finally see his true colors.

Unfortunately, the doctor on board the ship, Dr. Blane Hartley, isn’t impressed with Janet at all, because he thinks she’s a rich girl playing at a job, and “a good-time girl out for what she can get.” During their first meeting, “they looked at one another, antagonism leaping between them like an invisible current. … It was open warfare between them,” and they’re snarling insults back and forth across the surgery. Naturally we know—so smart we are!—how that is going to turn out. Dr. Blane, it seems, “was trying to escape from some emotional problem, or a disappointment which went deep—or maybe only from himself.” So many mysteries! So many tropes!

After her verbal fisticuffs with Dr. Hartley, Janet sets about proving herself, and you will not be surprised to find that she is an excellent nurse, though the only job she ever really had was caring for her dying father. Along the way she takes the nasty rich Lady Elvira Travitt in hand, which turns out to be not too difficult because Lady Travitt, too, has a mushy center: “The first thing Janet noticed about her was the guarded expression of her eyes, as if she determined to allow no one a glimpse of her heart, and the second thing was the tightly maintained line of her mouth, as if she were afraid that if permitted to relax it would betray her. What would it do—droop pathetically? Reveal a sadness she was too proud to acknowledge?” Before long the old dragon has asked her to high tea in the first-class lounge and is plotting out her life.

There’s a beautiful young woman named Patsy Davis, whose luxurious wardrobe is described in such great detail that it isn’t long before we suspect something is amiss. Sure enough, Lady Travitt soon learns from a newspaper article that Patsy is a typist who won a beauty contest—”the only competitor actually holding the perfect measurements”—with a $2,500 prize, and now she’s blowing the wad on a round-trip ticket and one taste of the rich life. Her act quickly lures in playboy Peter, who is rushing her off her feet—and soon she’s in love with him, valiantly so, because she doesn’t believe she will ever see him again after the voyage is over, because she is no dope and can see Peter for exactly what he was—“the wrong man, of course. She knew that with the certainty and wisdom acquired in a tough school. Life had taught Patsy Davis to recognize people for what they were worth, for their character and integrity. But somewhere, somehow, Peter’s character had wavered; his sense of values had gone awry. But it didn’t make her love him any less.”

And of course it isn’t long before the hardened MD starts to bend. Though he is nothing but rude and insulting, Janet stands up to him and earns his respect: “She had sprit, at least, if nothing else. She stood up to him without insolence, answered without impertinence, and displayed a dignified sort of courage which he was forced to admire.” We learn that Blane had been engaged to Lady Travitt’s daughter Carol, who had dumped him for a “rich American—twenty years her senior and father of a grown-up family by the time she became his third, and youngest, wife,” because he was an “impresario” and had been impressed with the talent of the ambitious young woman. She’s “a star in her own right now, and didn’t need Wilmot any more,” and is getting a divorce—and she wants Blane back.

Lady Travitt turns out to be a bit Machiavellian, if not kind, when she tells Dr. Hartley that they should team up, keeping Patsy’s secret and “letting Janet find out for herself, slowly and surely, that the man she loves simply isn’t worth loving! That way, at least, her pride will be preserved. You’re not going to get the best work out of your nurse if her heart is broken.” Even more scheming is her recognition that Dr. Hartley is interested in Nurse Stacey. “She saw a lot—and she saw it clearly. To fall in love with someone else, to forget Carol completely, would be Blane’s salvation.”

So when he catches Janet sitting at his desk one evening—“she had wanted to touch his paper, sit in his chair, feel his pen between her fingers”—yes, just his pen – he swoops her up in an irresistible embrace. She tries to slap him, but he grabs her arm and pulls her toward him “until he pinioned her body close to him again. ‘You can’t escape, Nurse, so you can give up the struggle! Be still, you little fool, while I kiss you again.’” Though initially sobbing, naturally in the end she loves it, and “lay quietly in his arms,” until she tears herself loose and runs off to her room. Now there are pages of internal struggle—why, if she loves Peter, did she love being kissed by Bland? Why, if Bland hates her, did he kiss her?

The biggest problem with this book is that Janet is a complete dope. As she witnesses Peter’s first infatuation with Patsy, she nonetheless thinks, “Peter was absolutely trustworthy—she was sure of that. It didn’t matter to him that his fiancée was merely ship’s nurse, or that another girl was beautifully dressed and obviously moneyed, and that glance of his, which had seemed to observe every detail of Patsy’s appearance, had certainly held no hint of calculation.” Every letter of which is a lie. Even as she catches Peter and Patsy mooning at each other time and time again, she just thinks, “What if they were flirting a little? Her own affair with Peter was so different, elevated above all others. It was something much bigger.” Snap out of it, Janet! When the moment finally comes and Janet wonders, “just how stubbornly, and for how long, a girl could blind herself to the obvious,” we know the answer—125 dragging pages. And when Patsy unburdens herself to Janet, asking her if Peter will dump her when he finds out the truth about her, the scales fall from Janet’s eyes and she decides that she does not love Peter because she never saw him for who he really is. “She was disillusioned by his true character. She saw him as a different person, and one who no longer meant anything to her.” But guess who really is honorable, and who really does mean something to her!

The prose is fairly purple as well, with much hand-wringing and excruciating navel-gazing examinations of every possible angle of every interaction, offering moments when you have to reach for the Tums. But wrapped in all the lavender satin are some truly interesting characters, Lady Travitt and Patsy chiefly, and even Peter to some degree. It is surprisingly common that a writer will give all her skill to the supporting cast and leave the main characters flat and vapid. Janet is one such character, and Blane is just mercurial and moody, cut in the Heathcliff mold, without much real depth. So if there are some parts of this book that sparkle, they are sadly just not enough to make this book really worthwhile.

Marilyn Morgan, Cruise Nurse

Book 3 of 4

By Rubie Saunders, ©1971

Cover illustration by Robert Abbett

How many very overworked young nurses get to spend three beautiful weeks on a Caribbean luxury liner—with pay, no less! Marilyn Morgan knew she was lucky, but she also knew she’d miss New York, the hospital, her friends, and especially a certain young doctor named Matt … But what promised to be a restful cruise to the Islands turned out to be a whirlwind voyage to excitement and romance—complete with a dashing ship’s officer who made New York and the hospital and Matt seem dangerously far away …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“Pretty, talented girls are supposed to be lousy cooks.”

“My, you certainly are a beautiful broad!”

“I was thinking how much fun it would be to give you mouth to mouth resuscitation.”

“This old-fashioned music has one great asset; a guy gets to hold his girl in his arms!”

“Harmless! What a terrible thing to say!”

“I think she’s even more intelligent than any of us thought. What a pity!”

“You can learn a lot from detective novels, like how to murder your wife.”

“I’m getting the big rush simply because I’m the only broad on board who doesn’t have acne or gray hair.”

“If there’s anything I don’t appreciate, it’s a girl with strength of character.”

REVIEW:

Note: This VNRN series is not being reviewed in order; the first book in the series, Marilyn Morgan, R.N., is the only other one I’ve read so far.

As this book opens we hear a lot about how nurse Marilyn Morgan is soooo overworked. “This is the third time straight this month you’ve worked 16 hours straight!” gasps her roommate Marcia Goldstein. “At the rate you’re going, you’ll wind up being a patient at City Hospital instead of being one of its best nurses.” As a PA who works a 24-hour shift every week, I didn’t have a lot of sympathy, and I do wonder how the nurses square poor Marilyn’s work schedule with those of the residents who work more than 80 hours a week. But since Marilyn is losing weight and is “always tired,” her many friends team up to throw her a party and find her a three-week job on a cruise line.

Marilyn has a pretty great life in her New York apartment, throwing lots of parties, smooching with Bill and Matt, and drinking a shocking amount of vodka and tonics. She’s pretty hot for Matt, who kisses her until her knees are weak and she has to throw him out of the apartment or risk her virtue, but she’s not sure she’s in love with him. In any event, “she was sure she wasn’t ready to be tied down to anyone yet.” On the other hand, she also seems to enjoy her young men: As she sets off for another hot date, she thinks, “This was one evening she didn’t want to end with a handshake!”

But off she goes on her cruise, which mainly involves hanging out with the purser, Barney Davis, a native of Jamaica (he has to tell her where he’s from; she doesn’t place his accent). Being nurse on a cruise ship means passing out a lot of pills for seasickness and telling a young girl that she has menstrual cramps “because you think you’re supposed to have them,” which reminds us to be grateful we don’t live back in the days when women’s pain was dismissed as psychosomatic. So Marilyn has a lot of time for socializing, spending days and nights ashore when the boat is docked, even when there’s a patient in sick bay. She even spends two days in Jamaica with Barney, meeting his family, and drinking too much and getting kissed by numerous strangers at a Mardi Gras party. In her drunken stupor, she kisses Barney a lot and he obliquely proposes, but she fends him off.

Back on board, the ship passes through the “most disastrous hurricane in years,” but the 36-hour storm is over in four paragraphs, and never mind that Marilyn secretly drugs the complaining Mrs. Haynes by slipping a sedative into her coffee, because even if “it may have been unethical, but it probably saved Mrs. Haynes from being tossed overboard by Captain Barker or some other member of the crew.” As she’s heading back to her cabin, she thinks about how grateful she is that she’s been too busy to see Barney, because “things between them were getting too hot for comfort.” Naturally her next thought is “she’d look him up now.” But she’s suddenly overcome with fatigue and goes to her cabin to sleep. When she wakes up, the ship is docking in New York, so she’s saved from his passionate clutches again. As she emerges on deck, she runs into Barney and he asks her if he was just a fling. “I’d like to see you again, so please call me,” she tells him, and they kiss until she is “weak-kneed and breathless.” And then she’s thinking about Bill and Matt, and heads back to her cabin to pack, and that’s the end of the book.

One of the interesting aspects of this book is race: Marilyn is black, as are all her main boyfriends, but on occasion white men will also make suggestive remarks to her, such as when the Swedish first mate tells her, “I shall become sick just for the pleasure of having you nurse me back to health.” It is refreshing to find in a VNRN black characters who speak with perfect grammar, who are strong, smart people with successful careers. Author Rubie Saunders writes with a wonderful sense of humor, much better than most; Diane Frazer (pseudonym of Dorothy Fletcher) is the only author who readily leaps to my mind as a rival to Saunders. If this book isn’t exactly a true VNRN, since it leaves the heroine unengaged at the end and no fewer than three contenders, in a way that’s more honest than other VNRN series that have the heroine engaged to five men in as many books just to keep it going (I’m looking at you, Dr. Jane, Nurse Jill Nolan, and the disturbing Jane Arden, whom you can thank heaven you haven’t met yet, but all I can say is Look out!). I can’t exactly say that this book is worth $82.50 (what it’s (not) selling for on Abebooks), but I found my copy for $12.50 after diligent weekly web searches, and it is definitely worth that. We have two more volumes to spend with Marilyn, and this is the first series that I am actually hopeful will give us a character who can be stretched out that long without becoming way too thin.

Marilyn Morgan books:
1. Marilyn Morgan, R.N.
2. Nurse Morgan’s Triumph
3. Marilyn Morgan, Cruise Nurse
4. Nurse Morgan Sees It Through

Doctor down under

By Anne Vinton, ©1964

When Nurse Kate Norwich arrived in Australia to marry her fiancé Trevor, she found him suffering from amnesia, and the wedding temporarily off, so she took a job as assistant to Doctor Rick Howleigh of the Flying Doctor Service to tide her over. But always she was conscious of Trevor, hundreds of miles away, keeping her to a promise she now wondered if she should ever have given.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“Jan was so plain and homely of countenance that she was resigned to never being a bride herself.”

“Apparently she had never heard of the word ‘love’ except as something which appeared in pop songs and rhymed with above.”

“I thought she was terribly courageous; that red hair and a red hat. It takes some doing.”

“I would have thought it pretty expensive to risk turning a pretty little filly like you loose and unlabeled among the herd.”

“Children are always getting infections and babies are insistent about coming into the world. You won’t lack employment.”

“To regret events is to regret life.”

“Nurses were so desirable as wives; their training had not only developed in them a deep and practical sympathy for afflicted souls but made them into warm personalities pre-destined to be good friends and sweet lovers.”

REVIEW:

Nurse Kate Norwich has fallen in love with former patient Trevor Gallyard, but he’s gone off to Australia to start a new life with the plan for Kate to come join him there after he’s gotten established. Right out of the gate there’s trouble in River City, as Kate’s best friend does not like Kate’s beloved, thinking him “a bit wishy-washy”—and Kate herself, after being separated from him for a while, is forgetting his finer points. “Of course when they met again it would be wonderful once more.” Famous last words!

On the day that her ship sails for Australia, she gets a letter from Trevor saying that he doesn’t have the money to support her yet and she should postpone her voyage, “but nowadays the rules were not so rigid and couples managed to be happy sharing both the bread-winning and the running of a home.” (Of course, even today, both spouses might work, but it’s still the woman who’s doing most of the running of the home.) And Kate’s a feisty lass, to boot, so off she sails. The trouble is that she immediately meets Dr. Rick Howleigh, and they are naturally attracted to each other—but after she tells him about Trevor, his friendship cools, much to her disappointment: She finds herself “craving for Rick to look at her again as he used to do, his deep brown eyes speaking compliments which thrilled the woman in her. Now his gaze was cool, polite and impersonal. She could scarcely bear it.” She asks him why he’s changed, and he points out that she can’t eat her Rick and have her Trevor too, but then subverts his own argument by kissing her until she’s so weak-kneed she has to beg off dancing. “‘It was only animal attraction,’ she told herself somewhat desperately, ‘sex rearing its ugly head. Only—’ she turned uneasily in the bunk—‘it wasn’t at all ugly. Why didn’t I struggle, I wonder? I could have—should have struggled, at least.’”

Arriving in Australia, there’s another wrench in the works when she’s met by Trevor’s manipulative but rich aunt, who tells Kate that Trevor’s been in an accident and developed amnesia, and doesn’t remember her at all! Rather than take the next boat home, she decides to accept a job working with Rick in the outback, and stupidly agrees to honor the engagement for six months to give Trevor’s memory time to return. So off she and the good doctor go, driving and camping for days in the heart of Australia to join a crew of eight in the flying health service, delivering medical care by airplane to the European settlers in the far-flung regions.

Before 23 pages have passed, though, Kate realizes “I’m in love with Rick,” and then their plane develops engine trouble and they crash in a remote valley, stranded for days. “There are certain basic desires which, though kept decently sublimated in society, roar with a sense of urgency when man-made rules are even slightly relaxed,” Rick tells her. “If we stay here, like this, in three days it will have happened … we must move heaven and earth, if necessary, to get out of here.” Interestingly, Kate’s not in complete agreement: “The supreme capitulation, the giving and the taking, the act of love between a man and a woman. Was she supposed to be terrified? He would probably find her more than willing three days from now.” However each of them thinks of it, they are rescued with Kate’s virtue intact, and Trevor turns up to act the part of the relieved fiancé, kissing her passionately in front of Rick—and now she’s the cold one who’s forgotten the other. “Trembling with shock and mortification,” Kate “turned to look at this stranger who had dared make that show over her in public.” She decides, however, that “it would be cruel at this stage” to tell Trevor she does not love him—no, better to wait for his memory to be restored or for him to fall for her again before doing the obvious—and right—thing.

She and Rick work on side by side for a while, until Rick decides he’s had enough and resigns his contract. But then Trevor gets his memory back and Kate also leaves to fulfill her promise to marry Trevor, but fortunately Trevor with memory is not as dumb as Trevor without, and he quickly realizes that Kate does not love him, and that Rick really is her man. They end the charade on friendly terms, and Kate decides to stay on in Brisbane to work in the hospital there rather than return to England—but tell Rick she’s free? “What is a nice girl to do? No matter how much she loves somebody she has to wait to be asked.” Fortunately, Rick immediately turns up and in a disappointingly treacly paragraph they close up the book, but at least that part is done quickly.

Overall this is a pleasant story with interesting characters, only slightly weighed down by those contrived, lazy “obstacles” that force the star-crossed lovers apart (an engagement that cannot be broken, an inability to convey the news of its termination). This is one of the more frank VNRNs I’ve read on the topic of sex, which here is portrayed as something that normal, nice girls want to do, even if they shouldn’t—a unique point of view. Early on the book has a sense of humor, which sadly fades as the it progresses, and if not the most sparkling, the writing is good, and no one loves a plot line involving amnesia more than I do (a predilection that comes from years devoted to TV soap operas when I was a teen). This enjoyable book is worth an easy afternoon of armchair travel.   

Cruise Ship Nurse

By Dorothy Daniels, ©1963
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

Karen Carlisle thought her frantic flight from the past was over when she boarded a luxurious ocean liner, to become the ship’s nurse. There, among strangers—the richest and most glamorous people in the world—she felt safe. Nobody asked why she was there. And she could pretend she was free like the others. But when an infant was stricken with a fatal disease which only Karen understood, her safety, her career, the love she had learned to cherish above all else, must be sacrificed. Though it might mean disgrace and the loss of her fiancé, Karen Carlisle prepared to reveal the scandalous truth.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“What a bedside manner. You’ll charm the women out of their minor illnesses.”

“I suppose everyone is entitled to a ship romance. It must even be included in the brochure of the cruise.”

“Now run along and attend to your gown and your makeup, all the things that will make everyone appreciate you so much.”

“There’s nothing better than a pizza in Japan.”

“They want a doctor, not a fashion plate.”

REVIEW:
Seldom do we meet a VNRN heroine as smart and as feisty as Karen Carlysle. In truth, she should really be a physician assistant or nurse practitioner, so focused is she on diagnosis and treatment (she had wanted to be a doctor, but financial considerations forced her to drop that dream). This interest surfaces right away when she is assisting society hack Dr. Radcliffe, who is “oozing his bedside best” with a rich, demanding woman with a thyroid tumor. The patient wants an immediate diagnosis, so Dr. Radcliffe pulls out a Vim-Silverman needle for an on-the-spot biopsy. Karen, who had been studying up on thyroid cancer, looks upon the doctor with horror and reminds him that a needle biopsy of a cancerous lesion can seed tumor cells, causing metastasis. He drags her into the corridor and, as she argues with him that the procedure is incorrect and dangerous, declares that he will have her license revoked for interfering with a doctor.

Fortunately, though, also present in the room was her fiancé, Dr. David Logan, who will naturally back her up with this important but outdated doctor. “I’m a lowly resident. I don’t know anything,” he tells her. “A nurse should know even less, but the most important thing she should know is to keep her mouth shut. Damn it, you’re not a doctor. You’re just an interfering nurse who shouldn’t even wear that uniform.” Thanks, Dave. Needless to say, when called to testify before the chief of staff that Dr. Radcliffe had been about to perform a contraindicated biopsy, Dr. Logan “promptly” denied it.

Karen, expecting to lose her license as quickly as she lost her fiancé, is on her way out of the hospital when she passes the room opposite the thyroid patient’s, where she finds an elderly man in respiratory distress. She cannot resist a patient in need, so despite her own problems, she helps him until he is better. It turns out that he had heard the entire exchange, and now wants to help Karen. It turns out that he is the owner of a cruise line, and with one phone call gets her a job on the Prince Thatcher, a luxury liner embarking on a three-month cruise through the Pacific tomorrow.

So off she sails … but her troubles are not exactly behind her, because the ship physician, Dr. Lloyd Dunlop, is more concerned with cocktail parties and bridge games than he is with medicine. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to see what is coming next. One patient on board, a Filipino diplomat named Ramon Morrano, is returning to Manila with a fatal lung cancer to die, but it looks like he won’t make it. Karen “had made it a habit of reading all of these journals she could find.” This was how she had known so much about papillary carcinoma of the thyroid; “the hospital library had been at her disposal and she’d studied case histories thoroughly. It was like Karen to do that because her interest in medicine and nursing was such that all this hard work was of vast satisfaction to her if she understood a little more.” So now a little paper about advanced treatments of terminal cancers is teasing her memory. A few hours and a stack of Dr. Dunlop’s virgin medical journals later, Karen discusses a new anabolic medication with Mr. Morrano, who would like to try it—but a nurse can’t prescribe, only Dr. Dunlop can. Needless to say, he is not at all impressed with his uppity nurse. “I refuse to take any responsibility for administering a drug I know nothing about,” he shouts.

Fortunately, Karen has a new friend on board, Pete Addison. Pete refuses to tell Karen what he does for a living and seems to be trailing—and photographing—another passenger, Robert Nesbit, a shy recluse who turns out to be one of the richest men in the world. Karen is upset about this, but Pete tells her that he has given his word to keep this secret and so cannot tell her about it, much as he’d like to. Karen believes Pete to be honorable, and it also turns out that he’s powerful, because he has some of this drug flown by jet from New Jersey to Los Angeles, then on a military bomber to Hawaii. Pete also has a few words with Dr. Dunlop, and soon Mr. Morrano is well enough to take some liquids and even go out on deck to enjoy the views. And remember that Pete is a journalist for a very important and quite conservative news magazine, who had interviewed him once in Washington. “You must never let him become aware of the fact that you know who he really is and what he’s up to,” Morrano advises. “Let him tell you himself, for then he will feel more important and honest. Never bring a young man’s head down out of the clouds.”

And it’s not too long before Pete’s compunction to keep secret his mission fades, and he tells Karen that he is trying to do a profile about Mr. Nesbit, who has always refused any press in the past. But “he has no right” to privacy, Pete states, that the public has “a right to at least know what he looks like,” a curious assertion. And Mr. Nesbit’s six-month-old baby, Melissa, is looking a bit blue about the lips and not taking her food. Dr. Dunlop prescribes a change in formula, but our bold diagnostician Karen has cardiac ideas. When she finds, after a more careful examination than Dr. Dunlop’s, that Melissa is limp, pale, afebrile, and tachycardic, she insists that the baby has more than a minor stomach upset, but Dr. Dunlop furiously denies it. “See that you remember your place,” he snaps. “You are a nurse, not a doctor.”

Needless to say, however, the formula change makes no difference to Melissa, and now the Nesbits are calling for Karen, not Dr. Dunlop. “Frankly, I think you know more than he does and you apply your skill better,” he tells her. Karen is worried, of course, that she’s just adding to her troubles: “I guess I’m not a very good nurse. The first thing we’re taught is to obey the doctor.” But Pete has confidence in her: “If you saw Dunlop going off on a wrong diagnostic tangent, you’d step right in and do what you honestly knew to be right, even if it meant more trouble. You stick by your guns, my girl.” So she returns to the sick bay and promptly starts reading up on pediatrics. When she discusses the case with Dr. Dunlop the next day, he declares that the baby may have acute appendicitis, and Karen is “almost in awe of the man’s complete ignorance.” A blood count proves him wrong, but Dr. Dunlop is afraid to do and EKG for fear of upsetting the Nesbits. Feeling powerless to contradict the doctor, Karen pours out her worry to Pete, who has a talk with Mr. Nesbit. Mr. Nesbit listens to Karen’s reasoning and insists that she do the EKG, but now Karen is in the precarious position of having introduced the journalist to her patients.

The EKG shows ventricular hypertrophy, and Karen diagnoses coarctation of the aorta. The baby will need immediate surgery, but again, a medication, plus oxygen and antibiotics, will help relieve her symptoms until she can have the surgery. She just has to go up against Dr. Dunlop again. “If she was wrong, she was finished as a nurse. But she was certain the medical books backed her up—if she had read them properly—and she knew she had.” In her discussion with him, she is calm, confident, and insistent that he do the right thing, advising that he communicate with a cardiologist by radio—which is promptly done, and the MDs ashore confirm Karen’s diagnosis. In a meeting with the captain, however, Dunlop brings up Karen’s insurrection with Dr. Radcliffe, suggesting that she “has some type of complex and is possibly psychotic. If that’s all, Captain, I’ll return to my party.” But Pete steps up and asks the doctor if he even knows what the proper treatment for the baby is. He does not, unsurprisingly, but Karen sure does! Her treatments are confirmed by the cardiologist ashore, so now all we have to do is get Melissa to a hospital that specializes in pediatric cardiology in the next 36 hours. But Pete—first confessing his occupation to Mr. Nesbit, destroying his film, and tearing up his story—calls on his amazing contacts with the military and arranges a helicopter from a nearby aircraft carrier to swing by and pick up Melissa, Mrs. Nesbit, and Karen, take them to the ship and then to Honolulu by military jet, then by private jet to Los Angeles—the very hospital Karen was to be drawn and quartered at. There, the baby is saved, and Karen is cleared of all wrongdoing in the thyroid case, after sworn affidavits from the cruise ship owner, the supply room manager, and the patient herself showed that Dr. Radcliffe had called for a Vim-Silverman needle. Phew! All that’s left is for Karen to receive Pete’s proposal of marriage over the telephone from Singapore, and all is well.

I’m not really certain that Karen is going to be happy professionally as a nurse, now that her name is cleared—she most positively would not be content as a housewife. But I appreciated both her confidence as a healthcare practitioner, her diligence in doing her homework, and her assertiveness (and her doubts) in challenging the doctor. She is truly an enjoyable heroine, one able to toss of a biting remark when necessary. The writing is slightly above par, and the characters were, for the most part, well-drawn. And when the first class of physician assistants matriculates at Duke in a few years (the first four PAs graduated in 1967), we can only hope that Karen Carlyle will apply.

Cruise Nurse

By Joan Sargent
(pseud. Sara Jenkins Cunningham), ©1960

Cover illustration by Robert Maguire

 

Sheila Dorrance was young and lovely, and determined to make the most of her God-given assets. With memories of her impoverished youth always in back of her mind, she set out to use her nurse’s training as a passport to wealth and luxury. And the job as ship’s nurse on the pleasure liner Southwind certainly provided ample opportunity. There were any number of wealthy playboys aboard, and more than one of them was interested in wining and dining—and maybe even marrying—the pretty young nurse. But in spite of her longing for luxury, Sheila found herself falling for the Southwind’s dedicated young medical officer. And she knew that before her job as cruise nurse was over, she would have to decide whether her destiny was to be ruled by her head … or her heart!

 

GRADE: B+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“You couldn’t be sure how an intern might turn out; he might be one of those who could think only of serving humanity and would never bother to collect a bill.”

 

“You never can tell young people anything. They always know everything.”

 

“After we’re back home, I want your job to be me.”

 

REVIEW:

Our heroine, 21-year-old Sheila Dorrance, is admittedly shallow: She decided to be a nurse so she could “meet a doctor or a prosperous patient, marry him, and never again have to worry about being poor.” She is quite candid with her aspirations with Dr. Peter Stowe, the young doctor on board the cruise ship where she is working; he turns out to be one of the noble types who interned at a local charity hospital and so is off her banquet table. But after an initial spat about it, he seems to forgive her, because after all, she’s a very competent nurse.

 

Sheila soon meets Clay Masters, an apparently wealthy young man with pressed white linen pants. Soon he’s beauing her around the Caribbean ports—she’s on the night shift her first week—and she’s dreaming of sparkly diamond rings. But she is also growing to like—take a guess—the good Dr. Peter, who is a sturdy, dependable sort and less inclined toward frivolous parties than Clay. So one evening, when Clay loses his head on a moonlight deck and kisses her a bit too much, Sheila panics and tells him that she isn’t ready to be serious. She soon tells her friend Peter, explaining that though she hasn’t ascertained Clay’s net worth, she hasn’t really thought about it much, only that she has fun with him, and that this isn’t enough to base a marriage on. He laughs, “Sheila Dorrance, you’re a fraud. You’re not honestly looking for a rich man. That’s just the way you talk.”

 

Soon Sheila is encouraging Clay to take out mousy Elise Ferrier, a browbeaten millionairess whose mother all but chains Elise to the radiator to keep her under her thumb. Mrs. Ferrier has been felled by her appendix and is recuperating ever so slowly in sick bay, leaving Elise to her own devices for the first time in her life, and she likes it!

 

The book trots along predictably, but there’s nothing wrong with that if it’s an enjoyable ride. The scenery—Havana, Haiti, Kingstown—is well-drawn, and as the plot progresses we are offered increasing glimpses into people’s characters. Clay, says his sister, enjoys taking Elise out because he can boss her around, and “this one would mean ‘love, honor, and obey’ if she said it.” When Sheila expresses surprise at this characterization, Angela Masters replies, “You didn’t know him very well, did you?” Touché, but to Sheila’s credit, this was one of her own objections to getting too deeply involved with Clay. Though the poor little rich girl does grow a bit of a spine, standing up for herself when her mother tries to insist that Elise stop seeing Clay, she doesn’t make any superhuman recovery. She’s always going to be emotionally fragile, Sheila realizes: “Elise would always need somebody who could make most of her decisions, somebody she thought wise beyond anything human.”  The thought of feeling that way about someone makes Sheila herself snort in disgust, so we are left to feel pleased that Sheila was saved from Clay—who in the end turns out not to be rich, after all, so double phew! And on a tour of the Trinidad countryside, where the children are mostly naked with the swollen bellies of severe protein deficiency, Sheila and Peter’s taxi breaks down, and Sheila spends an afternoon at the hut of a rural woman and her seven children, coming to realize what real poverty is.

 

This is a fun little book, with a pleasant population, interesting armchair travel, and an occasional dose of humor. The writing is quite good as far as VNRNs go, and the plausible evolution of the characters is a welcome surprise. My only disappointment is that the book backing this Ace double novel, Calling Dr. Merryman, is not another nurse novel, and so is wasted on me. But apart from that, this is a cruise worth taking, and though there seems to be just a pitiful handful, I will look forward to more novels from Joan Sargent.

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Ship's Nurse

By Rosie M. Banks
(pseud. Alan Jackson), ©1961

Cover illustration probably Robert Maguire

When her aunt, the ship’s senior nurse, breaks her ankle, Cathy volunteers for duty. There seems to be more than the usual shipboard intrigue—the ship’s doctor drinks tea, secretly laced with rum, to forget painful memories. His young assistant yearns to leave the ship to start his own practice. A stowaway—on a last fling before settling down to responsibility—is discovered. A raucous Texas dowager drinks too much and her gigolo-husband has a roving eye. Cathy herself if faced with an oversupply of admirers. An innocent flirtation and sudden tragedy make Cathy realize the depth of her dedication to nursing—and where her heart is.

 

GRADE: B+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“I want to see you married and have children, but in fairness to them you should bring them some knowledge other than what the inside of the Twenty-one Club looks like.”

 

“He thought not that the world was his oyster but that he was the pearl within it.”

 

“A nurse is always a philosopher.”

 

“A stowaway! It sounded romantic—like an MGM movie. He might be carrying some dread contagious disease, and she would be the nurse and cure the patient, and—since it was an MGM movie—she would marry him. That brought her back to reality. She would have to see him first.”

 

“Perhaps he was a writer. They were the nutty ones.”

 

REVIEW:

I can hardly contain my excitement about having discovered the identity of the Alan Jackson who penned this novel: A Princeton grad, former Saturday Evening Post editor and Paramount Picures story editor, Mr. Jackson (1906­–1965) also penned Perdita, Get Lost and a breakfast cookbook under his own name. I know I’ve gone on and on about the joy I take in the fact that this pen name was stolen from a P.G. Wodehouse novelist who wrote torrid romances, but really, I just love that.

 

Anyway, Cathy Jerrold, a freshly minted RN, is taking a celebratory ten-day cruise to Bermuda onboard the same ship that her aunt, Mary Jerrold, will be working as head nurse—but before the ship has left the harbor, Mary falls and breaks her ankle and is shipped ashore to the hospital. Cathy carries on with her cruise, and volunteers to help the two remaining nurses cover their shifts—and is rewarded with the midnight-to-4-a.m. shift. No good deed goes unpunished, clearly.

 

But this leaves her days free to fend off advances from a veritable army of men: Alan Richards, a suave gadabout who doesn’t really love her, just the pursuit of her; Arturo Verdi, aka Turo Green, the Italian husband of an oil widow who is 25 years his senior; and both ship’s doctors, the old widowed one who drinks spiked iced tea all day and pops tranquilizers to boot, and the young one who is planning to leave the cruise line and set up shop on Nantucket.

 

The cast of characters also includes Tim O’Leary, the shiftless boyfriend of one of the nurses, who stows away to be with her and also to see Bermuda. When he is discovered, he is rescued by Turo Green, who puts him up in a first-class cabin and gives him his own clothes to wear. Turo’s wife, Vinnie, is a loud, brassy Texan appealing only for her bank account; she also drinks excessively and is flirting with death as a result of it. The closest thing to a plot the book has centers around the question of whether Vinnie will die soon, leaving Turo to (openly) pursue Cathy, and if Turo’s grace toward Tim stems from a desire to use him as an alibi should he decide to hasten his wife’s impending departure for the pearly gates.

 

In truth, it must be said that the book does not deliver much in regards to story. Though the plot takes an unexpected swivel from the direction I thought it was headed with the Greens, the ending is somewhat perfunctory, when we are told rather than shown that all the characters have grown from their experiences on the ship. For her part, Cathy makes several heretofore unsuspected decisions about her career and marital status: “I have seen a person come of age,” thinks the ship’s captain at book’s end. “That is Cathy Jerrold.” Good thing he clued us in, else we might have missed it.

No, the real reason to read this book is for the writing. In the event that you have missed my prior reviews of Alan Jackson’s works (that would be Navy Nurse, Surgical Nurse, and Settlement Nurse), Mr. Jackson is an intelligent and witty writer who gives us sly passages such as, “The orchestra continued its determined fortissimi,” and, “Before he was able to resume the tenor of his conversation which she had interrupted like a tornado, she again took the lead.” He tackles this story with an angle seldom seen in a VNRN, from the perspective of the omniscient foreshadowing the story’s direction. We get hints such as, “These were the people who were to make trouble for the ship.” And, after one character declares they will have a wonderful vacation, we are told, “She was wrong.” In most instances this is fun, but it does get a bit heavy-handed, overly doom-and-gloom about the import of events that then come across as fairly ho-hum, as in: “So there sat Cathy, the catalyst, the element which changes others and does not itself change. Cathy, unconscious that at her table were four men who because of the mere sight of her were deciding to alter their plans and their mode of living. A complicated situation, at best, and a potentially dangerous one.” But this is a minor quibble, and in general his descriptions and characterizations are vivid, and I enjoy watching these people come and go. If this isn’t the most brilliantly plotted book, it’s still an easy, breezy afternoon’s companion, and if you are encamped in a steamer chair with a chilled martini at your side when you take it in, all the better.

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