Nurse March

By William Neubauer, ©1957

Dawn March had her future all planned—she would marry handsome Dr. Ken Jones and they would settle in the little seacoast community that she loved and build a happy and beautiful life together. But Dawn hadn’t figured on a couple of interferences that became substantial obstacles to the realization of her dream. The first was Ken himself. There was a side of his nature that Dawn was slow to recognize, that shocked her when she did. Ken fancied himself a big-time success, and his impatient ambition was such that it left little room for the kind of life that Dawn had hoped they would share. Another was the entrance of Mrs. Clara Royce, a divorcee of great wealth, considerable beauty and no scruples whatsoever. Clara Royce offered Ken the fulfillment of his dreams—and a short-cut to the success he craved. Dawn began to realize that even the best-made plans of bright young nurses can sometimes get pretty well upset!

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Oh, I know you young girls. You simply refuse to eat proper meals and sleep proper hours. Dash here, dash there, hurt this young man, hurt that young man, call the district attorney a liar, call the newspapers liars, and go careering on your way straight to a nervous breakdown.” 

“What you ought to do is marry me while you still have something to offer.”

“I ought to break a leg. That would interest you, wouldn’t it?”

“A girl so lovely, so obviously decent and well-intentioned, ought to have been married long before this. What had happened? What was her problem?”

“Lovely women aren’t often interested in business.”

“I’m told a woman never quite forgets her first husband.”

REVIEW:
Faithful readers will know that I am a big fan of Bill Neubauer, a truly interesting individual (check out his biography) and the author of about 20 nurse novels (this is the 11th book of his I have read). With Nurse March, he again proves he is capable of a meatier book than most authors, imbuing his story with multiple plot threads that, even if they don’t all easily weave together to create a cohesive whole, nonetheless make for a more interesting read than the usual VNRN. 

Nurse Dawn March is a 24-year-old visiting nurse who provides free care to the residents of Port West, a seacoast California town. She has a “sense of duty that had always kept her moving along and had earned her the reputation, at least in certain quarters, of being a girl dedicated wholeheartedly to her career.” As part of her duties, she is sent to the shack of Dan Colby, an artist who lives at the town dump, who is diagnosed with a fractured patella. He is receiving a monthly stipend from a local business magnate who fancies himself a patron of the arts, which allows him to concentrate on his painting without needing to waste all that time earning a living or even selling the paintings he produces.

Dawn does not  agree with this arrangement and has it out with Dan who, for his part, explains that he doesn’t like to sell his work because “the subjects mean a great deal to me. Or perhaps because expression of any kind is too personal a thing to sell.” She argues with him about it, and he tells her he’s not interested in compromise, which would force him “to paint pretty birds that aren’t birds at all, to paint the sea as it never is, but the way some editor thinks it ought to be.” Ultimately he decides, “She had the same sort of mind that his father had. Bend to the storm! Sell your heart’s blood, if necessary, to provide material comforts for the rest of your body! And live, therefore, without dignity, without meaning!”

Unfortunately, when Dawn finds out that Dan has turned down several offers of work—selling his art to a gallery, accepting commissions from magazines to create artwork for a magazine—she feels it’s her job to make him change his ways. She starts by telling him he’s a bum in a rut, but he responds, “It sems to me that I have a pleasant existence, one with considerable point. I paint. I work very hard to learn what I need to know. I grow. Now what precisely is wrong with all that? Perhaps in another society there would be room for people who like to paint.” It’s not a bad point.

Appallingly, she takes it upon herself to meet with Dan’s benefactor, Mr. Patton, and convince him that he’s ruining Dan’s life by supporting him. Though several art critics have stated that Dan has a lot of talent, she declares that Dan is not gifted or even working on improving his art. She tells Mr. Patton that Dan works “only as it suits him to, and when it suits him to. And he does not learn, and he therefore does not progress, because the only work he does is the work he chooses to do in the way he chooses to do it. That isn’t the way to develop.” Which is ironic, because we have witnessed Dan fielding criticism that the feathers of a painting of a seagull were overdone, and he appraises his work and finds that the evaluation was true, and decides to alter his technique.

It seems Dawn’s biggest complaint is that Dan is receiving the charity of the city through her nursing visits while not contributing to society by earning a living. She misses the point that Dan is in fact being paid to paint, whether he offers a canvas in exchange for the money or not, and it’s not her call as to whether the exchange is worthwhile. “I simply think he must learn the same things we all learn—that is, to earn our living while we’re also preparing ourselves to do the sort of work we want to do. He owes it to himself and to the community to accept the commissions he’s offered. He’s had free medical care and nursing care. To that degree he’s certainly obligated to the county and to the community.” When Mr. Patton offers to pay for Dan’s medical care, she turns it down, telling Mr. Patton that his patronage is turning Dan “into a bum.” Unfortunately, she prevails, and Mr. Patton cuts Dan off. She smugly decides, “She’d at last managed to do Dan some real good.” God forbid anyone else she decides to “help”!

In her personal life, Dawn is also on the wrong tack. She’s hopelessly smitten with dentist Ken Jones, who is essentially just a pretty face. He’s been dating Dawn but doesn’t bother to remember the anniversary of their first date; it’s his kind and generous sister Hattie who invites Dawn to dinner at her and Ken’s house to mark the occasion. Curiously, though, when Ken expresses a desire to open a chain of dentistry offices throughout Southern California and in so doing reap large profits, with the investment of Clara Royce to back him, Dawn is outraged. “I think you should work as my father works, for something other than purely personal gain.” She’s convinced that Clara’s attentions have given him too much ambition: “Much of this big talk hadn’t been hatched in the mind of Ken Jones. Just a month ago, he’d been happily talking about the pleasure he found in living and working in Port West. Then, quite suddenly, here he was talking in grandiose terms and dreaming grandiose dreams.” So she dislikes one man’s lack of ambition but also decries what she feels is too much in another. Apparently Ken is not impressed with meddling women either; ultimately he nakedly says to Clara Royce in front of Dawn, “You stop leading me on, and I’ll stop leading her on.” Ouch!

The man who actually loves Dawn, Wes Overton, is a real estate agent with some interesting ideas, and who seems to fall into Dawn’s sweet spot as far as ambition goes. “I think a fellow owes it to himself and to society to do a good hard day’s work every work day of the year. But I don’t think life should be twisted into a mean grubbing for money. I think a life so twisted is a life without dignity.” He believes, he tells Dawn, that “a person has an obligation to himself to do whatever will make himself and his loved ones happy.” But never-happy Dawn sneers at his attitude, telling him, “There you are just plodding along as you’ve done all your life.” 

Toward the end of the book, the now endowmentless Dan is forced to hire an agent and accept commissions to paint particular subjects for wealthy movie moguls. Dawn is elated, but I was not. Dawn’s father hints that “of late you haven’t been yourself,” but it’s not clear what he’s referring to. Her meddling with Dan’s life? Her moping over her ill-fated romance with Ken?

The book has a truly interesting and complex idea at its heart, that everyone must earn a living even if that means doing something they don’t enjoy on their path toward getting to what they really want. But if the person can find support by some other path, even if that means accepting a sponsorship or charity, is that wrong? Is Dawn forcing Dan to be in some respects a whore to do work he does not value? Should an artist be supported by the community on their path toward developing their technique in a way that a doctor or nurse, for example, is not, and may be forced to work, say, as a nurse’s aide or EMT to pay for their training toward a more complex career? The problem with how this issue is handled in Neubauer’s story is that Dawn is a hypocrite, chastising both Ken for his ambition and Dan for his lack of it and ignorning Wes’s happy medium; she believes Ken should be doing more for free and settling for less, while Wes should be working harder to expand his business. And why is it her job to wreck the good life Dan is enjoying for himself, and even Mr. Patton’s enjoyment in helping Dan achieve that?

The end of the book holds some real surprise twists, and Dawn ends up with a man who deserves better. I had hoped that the self-righteous and shallow Dawn, meddling in affairs that didn’t concern her and chasing a pretty boy with no character, would face some sort of come-uppance that would cause her to realize the error of her ways, but she did not, and I can’t feel that Dawn is a better person at the end of the book. But the story did give me a lot to think about, and talk over with other people who hadn’t read the books, so in that respect it was successful. As usual, Neubauer gives us delightful characters and charming writing, so if the heroine was not all I wish she had been, this book still has a lot to offer, and my high opinion of Bill Neubauer remains unchanged, and even fleshes out my ideas of what his character was that he produced a book with this message.  

Jubilee Hospital

By Jan Tempest (pseud. Irene Mossop Swatridge), ©1958

Verna’s career was going very well. At twenty-three she was the youngest Sister the Jubilee Hospital had ever had. But at home, too, she was the youngest sister, continually overshadowed by the brilliant, charming Daphne, and that fact brought a good many unwelcome complications into Verna’s life.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“Verna wondered if it was a sign of weakness in her that she did rather thrill to a man like Moray Morton-Alleyne. To be taken in hand by him, to be loved and cherished and possessed by such a forceful personality would be a marvelously exciting experience.”

“The yearning for power is very strong in most women.”

“Men don’t choose wives for their suitability.”

“The police are really most inconsiderate these days.”

“Very few patients have any sense.”

“I’ll try not to drive you to drink or drugs.”

REVIEW:

Verna Ellesworth is the youngest of a trio of sisters that includes middle daughter Ellice and Daphne, the eldest. Verna is a wallflower at home, dubbed, unfortunately, “Baby,” though at work she is hard-working and smart enough to be made the head nurse of the pediatrics ward at age 23. Her sister Ellice has it a lot worse in the nickname department, though, as she’s called “Elephant” by their oh-so-charming sister Daphne. Daphne is a glamorous, beautiful, charismatic young woman who had enthralled or been engaged to half the men in town, moved on to Edinburg where she’d become engaged to a Scottish doctor she calls “MM,” then ditched him at the last minute and eloped with a wealthy Californian 20 years her senior, which is considered a terrible letdown by Daphne’s family. Now that she’s gone, Ellice and Verna are forging lives—love and otherwise—of their own. Ellice is in love with bounder Clay Derrilles, one of “Daphne’s Discards” and son of the town’s rich man. Clay, however, is never going to notice the “brainy” Ellice, an unsentimental, “uncompromisingly squarish,” “much less fun” straight shooter who is “too broad for feminine standards.” If Ellice is not always kind in her speaking, she is always honest, and her actions are extraordinarily caring. She’s decided that since Clay won’t have her, she’s going to pick up another Discard, Francis French, a journalist who is funny, smart, and steady, and as fate would have it, he likes her too. “Let’s face it!” Ellice snaps at Verna when she is reluctant to approve the match. “One can’t always have what one wants, if one doesn’t happen to be a Daphne, isn’t it as well to settle for what one can have, before it’s too late? Francis and I understood each other. We’re neither of us wildly romantic, but we like being together. We shall make a good team.” And they do, as we have ample opportunity to witness.

For her part, Verna feels she is doomed to be a forgotten waif. She is “nice and conscientious and endearing, but not in the least outstanding. It wasn’t often that Verna distinguished herself in any way.” But right out of the gate, she encounters Dr. Morton-Alleyne, and instantly “she felt as if she had just received a violent electric shock,” and suddenly she had “known with a wild, unshakable conviction that he was the fulfilment of her vague and childish dreams.” “She knew that this particular man was for her and she for him. It was equivalent to pairing gloves. There could be no uncertainty. A pair was a pair.” I know that sounds nauseating, but the portrait we are given of Verna as a very young innocent makes it somehow seem reasonable that she should feel this way. She’s so naïve, in fact, that she fails to figure out until very late in the book what the reader realized on about page 20: That Dr. Moray Morton-Allyne, who hails from – wait for it – Edinburg, is actually the Discard who had been engaged to and relieved from marrying Daphne when she ran off with the Californian.

Anyway, the plot—and there is one—involves the Habbitt family: mom Dora gives birth to quintuplets who are nursed into life and health by Dr. Morton and Verna. Husband Bill, driving recklessly to his wife’s side in Clay’s car (Bill works for Clay’s dad), gets into a wreck that gravely injures an old man, Clay included, and flees unseen from the scene, leaving Clay in the hospital holding the bag for a possible manslaughter rap should the pedestrian die. Peculiarly, Clay decides not to rat out Bill but instead pleads amnesia to such a degree that not only is he unable to remember the accident, he also thinks Verna is Daphne come home to marry him, and he insists she wear Daphne’s old engagement ring. Now we have one of those VNRN tropes, the one where the ill, usually paralyzed man must be allowed to think that he’s engaged to our heroine, who does not love him. Clay even has a slipped disc in his back, but his ability to ambulate is mercifully barely questioned. Furthermore, everyone thinks Clay is faking it, and he is soon forced to acknowledge the fact, but everyone is still pressing Verna to marry Clay, including Clay himself.

The wrench in the works for Clay is that eventually Moray takes Verna into his arms and tells her that he loves her. “She raised her lips to his in glad, frank surrender.” OK, that’s unfortunate, but again it is entirely within Verna’s character. Unfortunately, Daphne turns up shortly thereafter, having been divorced after a year of marriage to her Californian, with the intention of reclaiming M.M. Verna, who has idolized Daphne as a near goddess, instantly throws in the towel and breaks off her engagement with Moray, telling him he should have let her know he had been engaged to her sister (which he should have) and that she knows he’s still in love with Daphne.

Back in her own back yard, Daphne turns out to be quite horrid. She’s a self-centered, mean, overdressed (who wears diamonds and sapphires to the Nurse’s Ball?), shallow divorcée, and Verna and Ellice instantly recognize this. She drapes herself around Moray, who clearly is not enjoying it but astonishingly loses what until now has been an overly sturdy spine and is unable to tell her straight up that he has no interest in her. For her part, Verna is pathetically blind to Moray’s discomfort as well as his attempts to tell her that he loves only her. On the evening of Ellice’s engagement party, which Daphne plans to make as much about her as possible, the steadfast Ellice pulls off a stunt that plays on Daphne’s shallow character and causes her to publicly relinquish Moray and instead cast herself into Clay’s arms—the former cad now found new strength and character from his brush with death or incarceration and likely to be able to bring Daphne to heel. So Moray, having done nothing on his own to cast Daphne aside, is now free for Verna to accept again.

The hokiness of some of the plot threads made me want to not like this book, but it just couldn’t be helped. It’s an enjoyable story that sucks you into its characters, infuriating as they can be—how can Mr. Ellesworth be so enthralled with his most disagreeable daughter?—while giving you some really lovely people who make you look up with eagerness when they enter a room, Ellice and Francis in particular. Even Daphne, horrid is as she is, is still interesting to watch, catlike, as you wait for her inevitable downfall. Characters believably grow, and if Verna and Daphne are not any of those, the surrounding cast and the brisk plotting make this a very pleasant story. Only after I had finished it did I realize that the author also gave us Nurse Willow’s Ward, another absorbing story of a family of sisters with snappy dialogue (snappier than this book, it must be confessed). Author Irene Swatridge apparently wrote huge numbers of romance novels, so I look forward to meeting the nurses among them.

Nurse Nolan’s Private Duty

Book 4 of 4

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1966

Cover illustration by Victor Livoti

When Jill accompanied Carol Winston to Pinetop Farm, she knew her patient was in need of more than her medical skill. But Jill’s training had not taught her how to heal an almost broken marriage …

GRADE: D+

BEST QUOTES:

“I’m a whiz with a Toni.”

“Taffy was surprisingly chipper for someone whose dura had gushed blood the instant it was opened.”

“She was a nurse, not a teen who at long long last has been noticed by the school’s basketball hero.”

“He sensed her hesitation as skillfully as, during surgery, he would have ferreted out a bit of malignant tissue that must be dissected.”

REVIEW:

When I read a VNRN, I tuck an oversized index card into it and make notes as I read on particular passages or plot twists I want to revisit as I write my review. With Nurse Nolan’s Private Duty, however, my card is covered with accounting: the number of times Adeline McElfresh used one of her favorite compound adjectives, “deckle-edged” (two), the variations of people speaking insert adjective here–toned (written just like that, following the verb) (seven: deep, quiet, low, firm, sharp, soft, and warm), the number of times someone freaks out and screams, “Oh God!” (when it’s the nurse) or “Oh Christ!” (when it’s a man) (9 and 7, respectively), the number of times someone calls someone “darling” (too many to count, or five times in just the letter one character writes to her husband asking for a divorce) or any other endearment (zero)—and I haven’t even started discussing how often McElfresh’s prose plunges right off the cliff into the Valley of the Vapid (“sent wind fingers exploring through her hair”), or how Jill’s poor sternum really takes a beating (“an icy lancet scraped behind Jill’s sternum,” “renewed malaise nibbling behind her sternum,” “the icy lancet behind Jill’s breastbone had become a handful of scalpels, indiscriminately wielded”), or the long, boring medical descriptions (“the rate of the infusion had been greatly decreased from the rapid 100-drops-a-minute pace that at first had carried the glucose-sodium chloride-aqueous cortical extract-plasma-penicillin combination into the basilic vein in her right arm”). Really, this book was just too much for me to take.

If at this point you have any interest in hearing about the stupid plot, you are made of firmer stuff than me, but here’s the gist: Our heroine Jill Nolan, with whom we have already plodded with varying degrees of willingness through three other books, is here asked by her fiancé, Giff (Dr. Donald Jonathan Gifford to everyone else), to go with his childhood friend, Carol Cadwallader Winston, back to Carol’s hometown to nurse her through her treatment for Addison’s disease. Carol had wanted to be a pediatrician but had dropped out of medical school in her final year to marry Paul Winston, and we are reminded of this tragic personal sacrifice on virtually every page, as Carol is always embedded in a medical book or journal or mentioning how she had wanted to be a doctor or teaching the girl next door how to make medical tinctures to give her dolls. Paul is a historical romance novelist, if you can believe it, and is working on a horrifyingly long novel (he’s at chapter 23 at book’s open) with his pretty, dedicated, young secretary Susan Morrisey. Carol is convinced that Paul is having an affair with Susan, and actually so is Nurse Jill, after she hears Paul talking to Susan on the phone late one night, saying that everyone will be in bed by 9:00, which clearly indicates that he is “planning an assignation,” that bastard. Jill goes around telling everyone else of her suspicions, and constantly frets that Carol’s worry over the affair is going to send her into an Addisonian crisis that will kill her. No amount of time that Paul spends with Carol or his reasonable explanations for what the ladies paranoically see as suspicious behavior convince them otherwise—until page 123, when Jill suddenly makes a complete about-face and fervently argues with Carol that she’s wrong about Susan and Paul, and seems to believe it, too.

The two major twists in the plot are when ten-year-old Taffy falls off a horse and suffers a subdural hematoma, Nurse Jill of course being sent to the hospital to nurse her, and when Jill suddenly thinks she’s in love with Carol’s brother Michael, with whom she has exchanged about ten pages of brief conversation. As abrupt as her conversion to believing Paul is not in love with Susan, Jill’s devotion swerves erratically back to Giff, which sets up her “hungry” kiss with him in the last paragraph, and my nausea. There are some truly revolting love scenes, the final one almost causing me to heave violently on the morning train. It may be cruel of me, and feel free to skip ahead if you are weak of stomach, but here is just one alarming example: “His kiss had been gentle at first and then hungry, as their love had grown of late; Jill was poignantly conscious of its remembered warmth and yearning on her lips. Oh, how I am going to miss you, Giff, darling!” The married couple abruptly lurches back together in the end and sets sail for Bora Bora, but Carol's continued deep regret over giving up her career is never addressed, perhaps because we're supposed to think that if a woman has a man in her life she doesn't need anything else. 

Honestly, I think you might not find this book as horrible as I did, which I think is in no small part due to an overdose of McElfresh (I’ve read 11 of her books, though never graded her as badly as I did this time around; she had a B- average up until now). But after this, all I can say is Oh God! No, wait, I mean how I am not going to miss you, Jill Nolan, darling! No, just that I am going to have to take a long long vacation from Adeline McElfresh.

My Love an Altar

By Joan Sargent
(pseud. Sara Jenkins Cunningham), ©1963

To Roxanne Collier, Dr. Vance Collier had become a shadow-husband keeping up the façade of an empty marriage, so when Dr. Fritz Bascomb showed her that she was still a beautiful, desirable woman, she was grateful and flattered. Then tragedy struck in the form of an epidemic that threatened the lives of the town’s children. It was a time for some quick and deep soul-searching, for Vance and Roxanne faced not only the break-up of their marriage but the loss of their child.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“What’s he doing to Pomeroy that the rest of us wouldn’t if we got the chance?”

“He’s going to get better. He assures me that he won’t stay in such a place as this and that he hates me. You can’t down a man like that.”

“Miss Skipper, completely won over, was quite willing to try anything that went with that smile.”

“How do you like being an incurable disease, Beautiful?”

REVIEW:

I’ve been on a roll lately, finding myself in some of the more interesting VNRNs I’ve met to date. My Love an Altar continues in this vein: The main characters are a decade older than most, are already married (even if only to each other), and are attracted to other people. Roxanne Collier is the perfect doctor’s wife, beautiful, stylish, a brilliant hostess—and she hates every minute of it. On the inside she is insecure, lonely, and contemplating a major change in life. Her husband, chief of staff Vince Collier, admittedly married young Roxanne for her money, and has built a successful career as the head of a major sanatorium for tuberculosis treatment. He’s not happy, either, however, because he is overwhelmingly guilt-ridden, feeling he has been handed everything on a silver platter belonging to his father-in-law, who has funded Vince’s education and the hospital itself.

Then, at a dinner party during which Roxanne is suffering a major migraine, she is seated next to psychiatrist Fritz Bascomb, who recognizes Roxanne’s ailment as springing from the deep-seated dissatisfaction in her life. He rescues her from the party, takes her home, gives her medication, and days later is taking her out for pie at the truck stop on the edge of town. He’s an incorrigible flirt and knows how to use his powers, and soon his attentions perk up the wilting Roxanne, giving her a confidence she had lacked when she felt overlooked and unappreciated. She secretly begins taking classes at the local university and plots a trip to Reno when the couple’s daughter, Susan, goes off to college next year.

Vance, meanwhile, has an office nurse, Mary Pendleton, who has long been in love with the doctor and with whom he shares a not entirely professional relationship. Nothing untoward happens, of course, but his demeanor toward her is more possessive and involved than it should be. After several years of this, Mary has decided she needs to put an end to the chaste affair and submits her resignation. Vance has a better idea, however, and offers her a post working for the new doctor in town, Tom Hazard. Soon Mary is looking at Tom with the same adoring eyes she once cast on Vance, and for some inexplicable reason Vance despises young Tom and his new-fangled ways of treating tuberculosis.

The climax of the book comes when Vance’s daughter—along with a good number of other children in town—becomes desperately ill with a tuberculosis-like disease that no one can diagnose, and it’s all hands on deck to save her life. The ending is exactly what you know it will be—even the mystery epidemic is foretold in the book’s opening chapter (and this is by no means a spoiler). We couldn’t actually have a VNRN solve its romantic dilemmas with divorce, but this book is unique in that it gives us characters who are preparing to take that ignoble route. The writing is quietly more than competent and honestly sincere, and I must confess I even shed a tear at one point. Though it lacks the camp I hope for in a VNRN, we do, however, have some sass in the Collier’s daughter, Susan, who is full of quips like, “I know the book says an adolescent gets a crush on a man much older, but don’t worry about me and Dr. Bascomb. I’m thinking of having my crush on Mr. Bates, who teaches physics at school. He’s more my type. Sort of plain and helpless.” If its ending is not as revolutionary as it hints it could be, this book has a lot more to offer than most of the herd. 

Nurse from the Shadows

By Arlene Hale, ©1975

Nurse Adena York had been in love with Dr. Dave Bradfield for a long time. But every time the subject of marriage came up, Dave found some excuse to put it off. Adena became alternately depressed and exasperated. Why couldn’t Dave see that they were really meant for each other? Why? A new doctor had joined the hospital staff. He was quite a bit younger than Dave. But Adena, tired of what she regarded as the runaround from Dave, found it easy to accept the newcomer’s date-offers. But one day a bombshell erupted—and it seemed as if Dave, her dearest, most wonderful Dave, was caught right in the middle of it. It was then, while Dave fought to save a life, that the dark shadows fell away from between them … at long last.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“ ‘You certainly know how to please a man, Adena,’ Doctor Dave Bradfield said. ‘I always thought nurses made terrible housewives. Yet, you have this very nice apartment and you can cook like a dream.’ ”

“Most women frighten me unless they’re anesthetized and under my scalpel in the O.R.”

“I take my belt to all lovely women.”

“Go home and fix your warrior a nice supper—nothing rich or heavy.”

REVIEW:
Adena York is unique among VNRN nurses in that she is in her 30s. Her boyfriend, Dr. Dave Bradfield, is in his 50s, though, so there’s still that classic 10- to 15-year age gap that always baffles me—the inherent inequality of a relationship in which the man is almost old enough to be your father is absolutely not appealing to me. Adena has been dating Dave for five years now, and he still hasn’t come up with a ring. He had been married early in life to a woman who’d walked out on him, and this seems to make him gun-shy. Adena, naturally, is beginning to lose patience.

Then Dave interviews surgeon Scott Lockwood to work at the clinic he heads up. Scott is a brilliant doctor at 26, and he works with Dave in the OR like he’s Dave’s left hand. But Dave is uneasy: “He couldn’t shake the feeling that something didn’t ring true about Scott.” He hires him anyway, and soon he’s starting to wonder if Scott is scheming to unseat him in his position as clinic chief. Then the son of his best friend is brought in after a car accident and requires urgent surgery. Scott is off, not even on call, but Dave is unreasonably furious at Scott for not being available to do the surgery, and insists that even on his days off, Scott should be calling in every hour. Scott is not convinced, and the two now become overt enemies.

Meanwhile, Adena dumps Dave and starts dating Scott. Scott is also dating the daughter of the clinic’s owner, and Dave believes that both relationships are meant to unsettle him, one emotionally and the other from his job. Then a malpractice lawsuit comes up, involving Dave’s handling of a patient we have only met in passing, and this lawsuit is threatening to destroy Dave’s career and bring down the clinic at the same time. These days, when doctors expect to be sued regularly, this crisis seemed overblown, but maybe the torts were different in those times. Dave is indeed asked to step down from his job, and as he’s hanging up the phone from hearing this news, it rings again—it’s his ex-wife, in town and dying of emphysema, and now the secret comes out that Scott is actually Dave’s son! Which the savvy reader began suspecting 50 pages ago!! Dave responds by getting into a boat and drifting around the local fishing hole for an entire day, moping. “All his life he had wanted a son, needed a son and when he had found him, he was betrayed by him!” Poor Dave!

But he needn’t worry, since there are only six more pages left, so everything is quickly set to rights: Dave and Scott kiss and make up, the clinic owner’s daughter marries to an Englishman, the malpractice suit is dropped, Scott decides he really wants to date his secretary, and even Adena gets her man in the end. The fact that she’s been kissing Dave’s son is not addressed, so it’s just left to the reader to imagine the awkwardness at Thanksgiving.

This book is a complete dud. In the first place, the title turned out to be too true—the nurse is left completely in the background in this book, as it is told entirely from Dave’s point of view, so it doesn’t actually qualify as a nurse novel. Secondly, even if nurse Adena York had been the star of the book, its plotline—how the young lady lands the reluctant longtime beau—is my least favorite: There’s no surprise and no real choice for the heroine, as she’s already made it when the book opens. Then the “drama” of Scott turning out to be Dave’s son is so not; I had suspected this all along. But even if I hadn’t figured that out, I just didn’t care what happened to Dave or Scott or even Adena. They’re all vapid, empty characters with not a thing to recommend them. I don’t expect anything much from Arlene Hale, who despite her prodigious output is mediocre at best, but the interesting title and cover illustration did give me some hope. Fooled again.

Condemned Nurse

By Jane Converse
(pseud. of Adele Kay Maritano), ©1971
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

“I’m going to have fun!” Donna announced, her defiant words blurred by the bourbon she was downing. “That’s why I quit my job. I’m going to live a little!” Jackie looked at her pale, disheveled roommate who was renouncing her career, reviling the doctor who loved her, and drinking herself into a stupor. “Why?” she wondered, “why?” Too soon, Jackie would learn Donna’s dark secret—a secret Jackie could not share with anyone, must not even hint to Donna that she knew—a secret that, in the end, might destroy Jackie too.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“He knew I wasn’t going to meet any eligible young interns, cooped up in his office.”

“If he keeps up with that silly Victorian attitude about not wanting a wife to support him, and he’s not about to take on a big responsibility like marriage until he’s financially secure, blablabla, etcetera—if he keeps that up, you can either decide that he’s stalling and doesn’t want to marry you, or else he’s such an out-dated, pride-filled stuffed shirt that you’d be lucky to escape getting permanently involved with him.”

“Last night she was gulping cocktails as though she were in a contest sponsored by refugees from Alcoholics Anonymous.”

“Becoming Mrs. Travis would be the best possible thing that could happen to Donna.”

REVIEW:
Jackie Dellinger is a nurse at Overton Memorial Hospital in Overton, Michigan. She’s dating the perennially harassed resident Steve Sayres, who barely has time to see her one night a week, and who is routinely described as having gone 36 hours with only three hours’ sleep. Her roommate, Donna Silsbee, is a “conscientious surgical machine” in the OR and a “madcap blond bundle of laughs” outside it. Donna is dating surgeon George Travis, who is a widower. She’s had a tragic childhood, passed from foster home to foster home, where she was all but chained to the furnace, which has made her a bit skittish about accepting George’s marriage proposal.

When the book opens, everyone is commenting on Donna’s appearance. She’s been overly tired lately, and pale, and after she faints one evening, Jackie suggests that Donna see her old chum, Dr. Gaynor, for a checkup. A week later, and now it’s Donna’s behavior everyone is commenting on, how she’s carrying on “like she wanted to cram in every kick imaginable,” how she is displaying a “hysterical determination to have fun, fun, fun.” Gosh, I wonder what the old doc had to say? Jackie goes to visit the doctor, and snoops in Donna’s file, discovering that Donna has leukemia, with six months to live. But she can’t tell anyone, and Donna is carrying on a farce that it’s not the hospital she’s visiting, but friends in northern Michigan; she brings her tennis racket with her to get blood transfusions.

Now the plot takes an unexpected turn, as Jackie, lured into having dinner with an acquaintance of Donna’s who seems nice enough. Out on the town, Dan feeds her two bottles of champagne and lures her back to his apartment. There, three thugs leap out of the closet, bash Dan unconscious, tear her dress off, throw her down next to him, and photograph them in an apparently compromising position on the living room floor. It turns out he’s getting a divorce from a woman who wants more alimony. Dan says he is poor, but he drives a Ferrari and lives in a penthouse, which Jackie had been too naïve, or drunk, to notice. The next day, she meets with the soon-to-be ex-wife and pleads for the photos to be destroyed, but the cheesy platinum-bleached blonde just laughs. “You don’t deserve to live,” Jackie spits out as she storms out. And the poor old tramp turns up dead the next day!

This book is quite similar to another story of Jane Converse’s, Nurse in Crisis, but not as inspired. Jane’s usual humor and descriptive writing are largely missing here. The whole detour of Jackie falling under suspicion of murder seems a bit contrived, and it’s a plot twist Jane has given us before (see Nurse on Trial). But even with this device to ostensibly liven things up, it’s a fairly straightforward plod through to the end, when everyone is neatly disposed of, either by marriage or by death.

The Nurse from Alaska

By Florence Stuart 

(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1964 

Also published as Strange Triangle

Nurse Carol had loved Doctor Mike since she was fifteen—and now, at last, she was to be his wife, work by his side, raise his young daughter as her own. Then, on the eve of their wedding, the glamorous and beautiful Beth Bliss came back to town from Alaska—and demanded that Doctor Mike be hers. She had three powerful weapons: she had been Mike’s wife, she knew a strange secret—and she was Nurse Carol’s own sister.

GRADE: B- 

BEST QUOTES: 

“He thought about all that Carol would be giving up to take on the care and responsibility of his child by another woman. In particular, she would be sacrificing her nursing career. Whenever they discussed this problem, Carol would smile at his doubts. She would remind him that she was, first of all, a woman, and a woman in love.” 

“The love of her life was as close as the nearest mirror.” 

“I’d like to sit at the bar and smoke a cigarette. Maybe somebody will take me for an abandoned woman who has really loved and refuses to quit.” 

“Carol didn’t want to think about what might happen if the child was taken away from both her and her father, to be given over to the mother she instinctively hated. It could lead to deep emotional disturbance, even brain damage.” 

“She was as efficient as an IBM machine if anything went wrong.” 

“You’re suffering from a rush of blood to the head, darling.” 

“As long as the little girl remains in this hospital, she will have proper nursing care, from a competent person who neither threatens her nor allows her to wander around and hemorrhage in a closet.” 

“Give me a prescription for some barbiturates with real authority.” 

“It seems to have become a habit with you, dear. When you can’t think what else to do, you must say to yourself, Well, I can always run over and threaten to ruin Mel Walters as a doctor.” 

“Let’s say I tuned in on some vibrations saying that you needed me, sweetheart.” 

REVIEW: 

I am irritated by false advertising in a book’s title. Now, The Nurse from Alaska does not exactly qualify, since the anti-heroine, Beth Bliss, has in fact arrived in town from Alaska, but the story takes place in Kentucky, and there are no snow-topped mountains, fur parkas, or totem poles anywhere in the book except in the cover illustration (which, if somewhat irrelevant, is excellent). I think this gives author Florence Stonebraker, who we have met before as Florence Stuart and Fern Shepard, a near 100 percent average in this respect. 

Beth has returned home after her impending marriage to an Alaskan millionaire was undone by an inconvenient plane crash. She’s heard that Dr. Mike Conway, whom she left five years ago with their infant daughter Joannie, has come into $3 million. But like all VNRN medicos who inherit millions, Mike intends to use every dime (and the easily nauseated might wish to avert their eyes) to build a new hospital to help poverty-stricken orphans. He also intends to marry Carol Bliss, but gorgeous, evil Beth turns up in his office and sobs on his shoulder that she has incurable leukemia, and he develops the spine of a jellyfish. She wants to marry him again so she can be with little Joannie and have a family again in her last remaining year on this earth. The money means nothing to her, nothing at all. But if he doesn’t marry her, she’ll go to court and get sole custody of Joannie. 

To stall her, he agrees to let her take Joannie away for a week, though he knows the child despises Beth and hasn’t seen or heard from her in five years, and agrees to postpone his wedding to Carol—which was supposed to be tomorrow, by the way. Beth is a nurse herself and worked with local GP Dr. Mel Walters years ago in New York, and knows that his young wife, dying of cancer and in extreme pain, had begged him to put her out of her misery with an extra-large helping of morphine. He refused to do it, but someone else in the hospital did—and though no evidence had been found against him, he was dismissed from the hospital. Beth threatens to reveal the whole story, which would ruin Mel’s career, if he doesn’t back up her leukemia act. He agrees, but insists on doing a complete physical exam … “At the end of that hour his eyes were grave, his tone that of a serious medical man. … ‘I’m afraid I have a little bad news for you,’ he said.” 

The plot thickens when Beth goes to court anyway and gets sole custody of Joan for 30 days. Carol and Mike are helpless, though they greatly fear that Beth is insane, “and psychos can be very dangerous,” says the man with the medical degree. When they break the news to Joannie, she becomes violently ill with “quinsy,” or peritonsillar abscess, which she apparently gets regularly (I will spare you the details of why this is medically unlikely), and has to be admitted to the hospital. There, Beth comes marching in wearing a nurse’s uniform, fires Mike and Carol from the case, and assumes complete control of Joannie’s medical care, because she has a court order, darn it! 

As Carol looks on, Beth proceeds to punch Joannie so hard she knocks her off the bed and threatens to take a strap to her. Carol, instead of running straight to the nursing supervisor, goes to Mike’s office, where the pair have some brandy to buck themselves up before they go off to do this emergency appendectomy on “the town’s confirmed old maid” who is “thirtyish.” It actually takes the night nurse, who has no more authority than Carol, to have Beth thrown out of the hospital after she guesses what Carol should have known all along, that Beth does not have permission to work as a nurse in the hospital, much less a Kentucky nursing license, and that abusing patients makes her unfit for the job in any case. I was hoping that the night nurse might be the one to end up with custody, since she seemed to be the only one capable of actually protecting poor Joannie. 

No such luck—after Joannie is discharged, Beth turns up on Mike’s door, out of her mind with fear because she has to have a hysterectomy to cure her cancer. “She thought about the patient, just her own age, who had gone through such an operation in the New York hospital. Oh, she had lived. A hundred percent cure, the doctors said. And when Beth ran into her, months later, she looked like an old hag of seventy. Her skin was all dried out and grooved with a thousand wrinkles. It had to do with cutting off nature’s supply of female hormones. When they went, your youth went.” To get her mind off the surgery, Mike, the blithering idiot, tells Beth that Carol has taken Joannie to Mike’s house in the mountains. How incompetent can the man be? Guess where Beth goes when she leaves Mike’s office? Well, after she stops at the hotel for a gin and tonic? 

Author Florence Stonebraker loves a sexy woman (see Runaway Nurse) and a violent woman (The Nurse and the Orderly, Courtroom Nurse, Night Nurse). Here we get both in one package, but Beth just isn’t as satisfying as she could be. I laughed at the old faked-illness-comes-true plot, and the issue of Beth’s uterus as the source of her vitality could spawn several term papers. I did wonder if it wouldn’t turn out that it was Beth who actually bumped off Dr. Mel’s wife, which would have made a lot of sense, but the true “killer” was never identified; perhaps Stonebraker intended to write this in but forgot about it. The Nurse from Alaska is a fairly typical Stonebraker story, between the motherless child, the sexy ex-wife, the child abuse, and the psychos (it even has the sassy sidekick), but it’s not one of her best. I don’t care if the plot is hackneyed, but the central characters need to be admirable, and their inability to see the obvious (that Beth has no right to care for Joannie in the hospital) or protect their child makes them not so. The book isn’t a complete waste of time, but it’s vaguely dissatisfying, and not the first I’d reach for.

This book was also
published as Strange Triangle,
with a much worse cover.

Runaway Nurse

By Florence Stuart
(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1964

“Your man hasn’t broken away from the past—and never will.” Nurse Gail Winters tried to forget her mother’s words. She and Dr. Craig Hadley were in love and that was all that mattered. But was it? Craig was divorced. He had nothing but hatred for his former celebrity wife, Vera Vaughn. But there was a matter of a million dollars involved and Vera was a very greedy woman. All Gail could offer Craig was her love. But was that enough when his ex-wife was offering him his child? It was a game with high stakes—and the winner would take all.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“How about some lunch before you go? I have some nice indigestible frankfurters.”

“ ‘Now when I was a kid, about your age, there was a character known as Popeye who was something of an authority on spinach. Is he around any more?’
“Bobby’s round blue eyes gazed up at her with utter disgust. ‘Oh, to hell with Popeye,’ said Bobby.”

“As always, Gail longed to take the child in her arms, to give him a big bear hug. But a bear hug could kill Jimmy.”

“This was a good neighborhood, the homes in the thirty or forty-thousand-dollar class, the cars mostly Cadillacs.”

“If I hadn’t tried that judo hold we nurses are taught, she might have killed me.”

“Gail sat very still, her hands clasped in her lap, and found herself wishing fiercely, a bit madly, that she had a shotgun.”

REVIEW:
Gail Winters has something no other vintage nurse romance novel heroine I’ve ever met has: a divorced fiancé. Well, at least she’s not the one with the divorce, which would impugn her virginal status. But even more scandalous is the fact that Dr. Craig has a five-year-old daughter. Ginny was born with a heart condition—“some heart veins were on the wrong side,” we are told, these days known as transposition of the great vessels, for all you aspiring cardiologists out there. She had surgery at age 18 months and barely survived the long odds, but now she must be kept from the least stress or pressure lest her defective little heart explode or something.

Naturally, Mommie Dearest isn’t helping much with this. Craig’s ex-wife, Vera, is a fabulous piece of work, in the noblest glamorous-fading -starlet-run-amok tradition. She’s still got it, but not for long: “Despite her forty-three years, Vera was still a lovely-looking woman, even now, in the morning.” Pregnancy, rather than bestowing her with a beatific glow, just “ruined her figure.” When Ginny lands in the hospital with pneumonia, Vera shows up, “a stunning, black-haired woman, wearing a white wool suit collared in flattering white fox fur,” leaning over her delirious child and seething, “You’re the most exasperating child. Screaming tantrums, now this. As if I didn’t have enough on my mind already.” Vera stars in a TV show that is losing sponsors by the minute, but she has the idea that if she can get Ginny on the show—“Ginny is perfect for the part of my obstreperous little stepdaughter, just perfect!”—her ratings will climb back up again. Dr. Craig and Gail, however, are of the opinion that the stress would kill pathetic little Ginny.

Vera had a hardscrabble childhood, living “in a horrid little flat above a cheap, smelly delicatessen where her German father sold greasy sausages and revolting concoctions that were enough to turn your stomach. The odors that came up from that shop were sickening … and out of them were born Vera’s determination to get away to be somebody, to get hold of money.” In what could be a smart bit of writing or just a fortuitous accident, the author ends this description of Vera’s motivations with a subtle study of contrasts: “Now, at forty-three, what did she have to show for all her splendid dreams, for the hard work and sacrifices of a lifetime? She rubbed herself dry with an enormous towel, slipped on a yellow satin robe and went back to the bedroom.” In her California mansion, Vera has clearly come a long way from the delicatessen, but it’s just not enough for her insatiable appetite.

And the main fuel to her ambition is the million bucks that a rich dying patient bequeathed to Dr. Craig, though he really intended it to be for Gail, who had cared for him in his final days. He couldn’t just give it to her, apparently, because his greedy, thieving relatives would contest the will and “make something nasty of it.” To protect Gail’s reputation, the thoughtful old dear, he gives it to her fiancé—but then Vera gets the idea that if she marries Craig, she’ll get the money. And Ginny is the perfect bait to lure him into this trap.

You know exactly where this book is going, but it’s a fun ride. I expected greatness from Ms. Stuart, who also penned The Nurse and the Orderly, another camp fest. The only problem is that it gets an idea and really beats it hard. Of the three main female characters—there’s a head nurse in the mix—two of the three are bona-fide psychotics, complete with stopovers in the loony bin on their resumes, and the third (that would be Gail) is repeatedly accused of being one. And as fabulous as Vera is, she’s a one-note wonder that wears a bit thin with repeated pounding. A little less exposure to her ranting would make her a more worthy character.

One unique aspect of this book is how it lets us into the delivery room. We get to witness two babies being born, both of them to teenagers, curiously. One of the doctors is “palpating Hilly’s abdomen with one hand while his rubber-gloved left hand explored the pelvic region”—a possible shocking reference to a vaginal exam!! (Could this bear any relationship to the persistent VNRN fascination with a doctor’s long, slender fingers?) The patient is in labor, and he’s telling her to “just relax and doze off if she felt like it.” Do you suppose the author has actually experienced childbirth?

More of a quibble is that Runaway Nurse is another one of those titles that has very little to do with the story. There is, in fact, a point near the very end of the book where Nurse Gail Winters takes off with Ginny, but the whole situation seemed so unimportant, resolved in a few pages, and occurred so late in the book that I didn’t really associate it with the title. But with such a great cover illustration, and a magnificent story inside, I forgive all.

This book was republished with 
a better title but a really hideous
cover illustration by the master of
ugly covers, Valentine Books.

Conflict for Nurse Elsa

By Jeanne Bowman 

(pseud. Peggy O'More Blocklinger), ©1968

Also published as Nurse à la Mode

Nurse Elsa Hoyt signed on for a temporary stand-by assignment at Port Haven Hospital during her brief vacation in the Southwest. Port Haven had been the scene of many childhood memories, including those of handsome Albert Staffner and those of Dr. Paul Hoag, the stepfather who had broken her mother’s heart. When Elsa discovered that the very same Paul Hoag was the chief of staff of Port Haven, she was tempted to resign immediately. But her stepfather begged her to stay, explaining that he needed her, but not explaining why. Puzzled by his behavior and confronted with the hostility of now Dr. Albert Staffner, Elsa began to suspect a conspiracy against her stepfather. Faced with a decision whether to return to Chicago and to her fiancé or to stay in Port Haven, Elsa was frightened of what she might learn … and uncertain if she really wanted to. It took the chaos of a full-scale Texas hurricane to resolve the chaos in Elsa’s life. 

GRADE: F 

BEST QUOTES:
“Once they were married, her metabolism could change and she blow up sky high.”

“I am Hoyt, of Chicago.”

REVIEW: 

If you are curious to know just exactly how low a publisher could stoop at the height of the nurse novel craze in an attempt to make a buck, speed directly to this book. You will, however, be sorry; this publisher ducked really, really low. 

Elsa Hoyt is one of about 25 people you will meet in as many pages. But you’re stuck with her through the entire book. She has accompanied a patient from Chicago to Florida, and while there, a physician convinces her to answer the call for nurses from a short-handed hospital in Port Haven, Texas. She used to live there, and her ex-stepfather was a doctor at that same hospital. She doesn’t want to see Dr. Hoag, though he raised her from toddler age, because his marriage to her mother broke up for a reason unknown to her when she was in college. But surely everyone she ever knew from Port Haven would have left town by now, right? 

Naturally, the first person she bumps into in the hallway after inking the contract is Dr. Paul Hastings Hoag. He says, “I know how you feel, Elsa, but don’t go away. We need you here. I need you—daughter.” She answers, and I am not kidding, “Atmosphere.” He responds by giving her the keys to his beach cottage, which she says she will rent from him, so no one will know their relationship. What? you may be asking yourself. I asked myself that very question many, many times. But there is no answer. This book is just that loopy. 

Elsa hasn’t seen the man since the divorce, but now she decides that she has to get to the bottom of why her mother left him. Then she is shocked to see a nurse in a miniskirt; she’s told that Mitzi can do anything she wants because she has an in at the hospital. Everyone lives in fear Mitzi will “explode and blow us all up,” another nurse tells Elsa, who immediately thinks, “Without there being powder, there could be no explosion. What was wrong here at Port Haven Hospital?” Huh? Well, never mind how she does it, but based on a cranky nurse in a miniskirt, Elsa figures out there’s a conspiracy against Dr. Hoag at the hospital. “What? Would she learn? Did she want to know?” Do we want to know? Not if we know what’s good for us. 

Elsa naturally proves herself a godsend at the hospital, which is constantly receiving victims of carbon monoxide poisonings, hepatitis outbreaks, car wrecks, and house fires. For example, after the victims of a multi-car pileup are brought to the hospital, it falls to Elsa to tell the chick from Southern California that her husband, “Hominy the Hippy,” has died, because she’s the only one there who can speak jive: “Let’s say he had a date with Destiny. He didn’t really relate to this groovy world. Let’s say he left you a fine young son to see you through, then took off to another dimension.” The girl sighs, and Elsa leaves her sleeping peacefully. You’ve just got to know how to talk to these people. 

For the bulk of the book, Elsa is either pacing the floors of her cottage asking herself what is going on at the hospital, reassembling victims of bloody accidents, or going on about how desperately she needs some rest. Well, to be fair, there are a few other bizarre events. Elsa finds a half-empty whisky bottle in the cupboard that wasn’t there yesterday and assumes someone has broken in to the cottage to read her mail, so she changes the locks and gets a post office box. If you’re snooping in someone’s house, why would you leave whisky in the cupboard? 

The young son of a neighbor eats diet pills containing digitalis left by an anonymous Port Haven doctor and is saved by Elsa and Dr. Hoag. Elsa later decides this was a plot to discredit Dr. Hoag because the pills weren’t approved by Port Haven Hospital. Is this woman psychic or a paranoid schizophrenic? It doesn’t pay to ask yourself these questions, but you just can’t help it. 

Mitzi horns her way into the cottage and then throws a party, but on the night of the party a malevolent trinity in the form of Elsa’s fiancé, Elsa’s mother, and Hurricane Hannah arrive. The partygoers, hospital staff mostly, are called in to work, and it turns out that the Port Haven Hospital has had numerous architectural renovations that make it impervious to bad weather, while other local facilities do not hold up as well and are forced to close their doors and send their patients to PHH. This, it turns out, is what was at the root of the evil plot to drive out Dr. Hoag; he was more interested in improving the facilities than in driving up profits. A disagreement over his use of the hospital funds was what broke up the marriage between Elsa’s mother and Dr. Hoag, but now that Hurricane Hannah has proven him right, they walk off arm in arm. Elsa’s fiancé is bewitched by Mitzi, and she and all the other conspirators at the hospital are so unnerved by the tempest that they submit their resignations en masse. Elsa suddenly realizes she’s in love with one of the doctors, the one who broke into her house and cooked her liver on the grill, so now we can close the book. 

The writing style is almost impressionistic in its vague way of expressing itself and in how each subsequent sentence seems to shoot off in a completely new and bizarre direction. In the first pages, there are two conversations occurring simultaneously, and it’s almost indeterminable who is talking, or what they are talking about. I had no idea what had happened in this first chapter until Elsa explained her arrival at PHH to one of the other nurses. But puzzlement is not an uncommon feeling brought on by this book; you will spend a lot of time early on, reading pages and paragraphs again and again with wrinkled brow, trying to figure out just what the heck is going on. Eventually, though, you get used to its flaky way and just float along, only occasionally rousing yourself to irritation over some especially egregious flaw. Don’t let apathy drag you down. Conflict for Nurse Elsa is a flaccid excuse for a VNRN, with very little story or common sense. Get angry, and get rid of this book.

This book was also published under the title Nurse à la Mode,
which makes about as much sense as the rest of this book.  

Nurse in the Shadows

By Peggy Gaddis (pseud. of Erolie Pearl Gaddis Dern), ©1965

Could anyone be trusted? The pleasant young lawyer who warned her against the socialite playboy? The beautiful dissatisfied young wife? The grief-stricken parents? Or the handsome bachelor who was playing two games at once? Caring for a handsome patient on a luxurious Florida estate had seemed a superb private nursing assignment for Nurse Ramsey—but it was turning into a nightmare!

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTE:
“Don’t ever try to understand a woman, Allen—any woman! Nothing could be more insulting to her! We like to think of ourselves as being very mysterious, because it makes us seem more glamorous and intriguing, I suppose.”

REVIEW:
Thus far I have not been a fan of books by Peggy Gaddis, though it must be acknowledged that I have read only two (Dr. Merry’s Husband and A Nurse for Apple Valley). So I opened Nurse in the Shadows with my guns blazing, prepared to pump it full of holes. And the book is not perfect, but as I found myself overly outraged by the ten different times the word pretty was used in 15 pages, I suddenly realized that this is as egregious as its faults get, and on the whole this is a pretty good book.

Leona Ramsey (not to be confused with Luana Ramsdell of A Nurse for Apple Valley) has come to Miami Beach to care for a patient in a coma at the request of his extremely wealthy parents, who now look after him. Tony Kincaid was shot in the head by his wife, Cheryl, just a few months after their marriage, and though it was ruled an accident, the rest of the family isn’t too sure: “She wanted to kill him. But she was a rotten shot,” Leona is told by the nurse who is leaving the job. Tony does not require much care, just hooking up to the IV for his feedings. (Eighteen months after the incident, he must have one colossal bedsore.)

The Kincaids live in a beachfront mansion, and it needs to be big to house all the people who live in it. Apart from Tony, his parents, several housekeepers, and Leona, Cheryl is also living there. Before she married Tony, Cheryl was “a cheap little night club dancer; never got out of the chorus line. … When she met Tony, she just latched on to him like a bulldog latching onto a nice juicy steak.” Now she is a sulky brat with honey-colored hair who trots around in beach clogs and “a mere wisp of a white silk bathing suit that left her delectably sun-tanned young body revealed to daring degree.”

Tony’s parents, Preston and Eunice Kincaid, have adopted Allen Leonard, an attorney and advisor to Mr. Kincaid, who also has a room. Allen, in a major first for vintage nurse romance novels, is “homely” and “rather pleasantly ugly until his friendly smile illuminated his rugged face with a sort of boyish charm.”

Rounding out the cast of characters is heartthrob Barry Manning, the only one who doesn’t live in (he is the next-door neighbor) and a former chum of Tony’s. He introduced Tony to Cheryl, but now he seems to be helping the not-grieving not-widow fill her days, and her nights too: “He has been a great comfort to Cheryl since Tony’s accident,” Leona is told.

Things get off to a fast start when, her first night there, Allen warns Leona to stay away from Barry: “Barry’s talents seem to inspire him to make a mad pursuit of every young and pretty girl he sees. And I just wanted to warn you not to take him seriously.” Leona responds with a string of hostile remarks. Barry naturally enters into the scene, followed shortly by Allen’s exit. Leona is quickly quarreling with Barry, but just a page later he says, “I think I’ve fallen in love with you,” kisses her, and then walks away. The next time she sees Barry, as she emerges from the ocean after a quick swim, he acknowledges that he has been watching the beach with binoculars for her, and invites her out; she quickly accepts, though his come-on is way too creepy to be attractive to any sane woman.

But before they actually set up a date, she goes to the greyhound races with Allen, where he makes it evident that he, too, is smitten, though he is much less slimy about it, and contents himself with looking at her admiringly, guiding her through the throngs, and telling her, “Just being with you is all and more than any man could hope for.” When Leona finally gets around to dinner at Barry’s house, she inadvertently overhears a conversation between Barry and Cheryl in which he says, “We will just have to wait it out until—well, until you inherit from Tony.” Then he tells Cheryl he is just “playing up to the nurse to throw dust into the Kincaids’ eyes… If they think I am pursuing her, then … there will be no danger of anybody thinking it’s you I’m in love with.” On her tear-filled rush back to the house, Leona runs into Allen, who takes her out to dinner and thereby solidifies his position as top contender for her affections.

Peggy Gaddis’ device of putting us inside the heads of a second couple is actually used to good effect in this book, as we are allowed to follow Cheryl around. She tells her father in law that she wants a divorce and a large settlement, and while he is all in favor of the divorce, he sets her straight as far as the money goes: “As Tony’s widow, you would, of course, inherit a very substantial amount … but as Tony’s divorced wife, you will have no claim whatever on any of the estate.” He also mentions that Barry, who lives in an outbuilding on his estate and rents out the main estate because he isn’t as wealthy as all that, will never marry her as long as she has no money of her own. So you can guess where this is going to go. And we get to follow Barry and Cheryl as they work their cons on Leona, Allen, and the Kincaids, and watch with no small pleasure as the saps completely fall for it.

In the end, of course, all is set to rights, though the final scene between Leona and her intended is rather unsatisfying. She basically spends four pages arguing with him when he says she can’t go on a cruise with the elder Kincaids because he has plans for her—why are heroines so unbelievably dense in these final scenes?—and then because he has proposed before he has said that he is in love with her: “Any girl likes to—well, to put away a few lovely memories of the time her man proposed to her, and you’re cheating me of that! You’ve never said you loved me.”

There is also a good deal of sloppy writing, like when Cheryl “shrank from” Allen four times in three pages, when the word inimical is used four times, when Preston asks a question bluffly—is this just a typo, or does Peggy really think this is a correct use of the word? But I am a former copy editor with, I admit, unreasonably high standards in these regards, especially when it comes to this particular genre, which is not known for attention to detail. And this book is actually something of a page-turner—I finished it in one sitting—and perfectly enjoyable, once you put down your guns and your prejudice against Peggy Gaddis’ books.