Nora Was a Nurse

By Peggy Gaddis
(pseud. Erolie Pearl (Gaddis) Dern), ©1953
Cover illustration by Robert Maguire

“Your reasons for coming to Shellville are your own affair and I have no desire to know them,” Nurse Nora Courtney told the new young doctor—but she knew she lied both to him and to herself. Everything about Doctor Owen Baird interested her for she knew she was hopelessly and passionately in love with him. And when beautiful Lillian Halstead set her cap for the young doctor, Nora realized she must make him see her as a desirable woman as well as an efficient nurse. How Nora achieved her purpose and what these three handsome young people made of their lives is thrilling reading, growing to an unexpected and satisfying climax.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“You’ve been my brother for a good many years and I’m very fond of you. Within reason, of course. But when a man your age who has been a country doctor for forty years suddenly is turned out to pasture and starts kicking up his heels, I fear for the future.”

“Secretly he had been relieved that she had not wanted to be ‘a female doctor,’ because he was old-fashioned enough to object to ‘women medics,’ though torture would not have forced him to admit it.”

“Women have an instinct about other women that is as sure as death and taxes.”

“Come off that lofty peak of disdain, my good woman, and mingle with your betters.”

“Don’t let your profession blind you to the fact that the greatest happiness the world can offer anyone is love and companionship. In being a fine nurse, don’t forget that being a fine wife and mother is an even greater profession.”

“Those white uniforms are so becoming, and I love that crazy little cap!”

“Oh, well, gal-young-’uns ain’t so bad. Reckon wimmen is useful same as men, even if they cain’t plow as good.”

“Lily was a disease that ran rampant, unchecked, because so far nobody had been able to dream up a cure for women like her!”

“Oh, she’s got the usual number of features assembled nicely and all that, but I don’t know that I’d call her beautiful.”

“I told you if you went off like that by yourself you’d make a fool of yourself. And now look at you—running around in slacks, for Heaven’s sake, and that awful shirt, and not even tucked into your pants.”

REVIEW:
Orphan Nora Courtney (VNRN heroines, like Disney characters, are frequently orphans) lives with her grandfather, country doctor John Courtney, and his spinster sister, Susan. Dr. John is getting long in the tooth at 65, and is looking to go on vacation. Enter another orphan, Dr. Owen Baird. He is honored to be stepping into Dr. John’s practice—and Nurse Nora, who runs the office, does her best on his first day to make him feel that he’s made the right choice. “To find a doctor with your qualifications who is willing to come to a place like Shellville, when there are so many richer and more varied fields open to ambitious men in your profession—” she begins, but he cuts her off. “I didn’t murder a patient in an absent-minded moment and have to take it on the lam and hide out here, Miss Courtney,” he snipes. She’s insulted, and tells him so, but before they can smooth things over, in breezes Lily Halstead, the dreamiest belle in all of Georgia. “Dr. Baird sort of melted and ran into the usual gooey consistency of men seeing the beauteous Lily for the first time,” she later reports to her great-aunt.

As gorgeous as she is on the outside, it turns out that Lily is actually an ice-hearted conniving tramp with her eye on the fortune of Dick Blayde, who hired her mother as his housekeeper when Lily’s father was killed in his mill. Dick deserves his name, apparently, and runs Lily and her mother ragged, but he’s conveniently at death’s door. Only the women in town see Lily for the gold-digging tramp she really is, but they can’t tell the men that, because the dopes just think the women are jealous. Nora also realizes that if she reports what Lily actually says, no one will believe her and she herself will end up looking bad. This is a bit of a problem because shortly after Owen tumbles for Lily, Nora realizes that she is desperately in love with Owen.

There’s not too much in the way of plot in this book, but it doesn’t really matter, because it’s a fun ride regardless. The banter between Dr. John and his sister is always amusing, and the camp factor is pretty good. We visit a few patients, including the de rigueur white trash family with a wife-beating drunk for a husband, and a brow-beaten young woman who is healed when Dr. Baird convinces her to stand up to her overbearing mother. We catch Lily out at a seedy diner at 4 a.m. with a ferret-faced flashy wanna-be gangster, but she slips into the bathroom and hides until Nora and Dr. Baird have finished their eggs and bacon (don’t get any ideas, now; they were on their way home from delivering a baby). The chief fun of the story is following Lily’s scheming and Nora’s increasing frustration that Owen is such a chump. We witness some gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair on Nora’s part, but not too much to make it overly nauseating when it comes along. Whenever I open a Peggy Gaddis book, it is with caution; from Dr. Merry’s Husband to Leota Foreman RN, you just never know what you are going to get. This book, happily, is her best so far.

Harlequin reprinted this book
in May 1956 with this
delightful cover illustration

Headline Nurse

By Phyllis Ross, ©1965
Cover illustration by Harry Bennett

“I’m a nurse! Not a woman!” She kept repeating the words to herself as she looked down at Pete’s broken body. His shirt was in rags, one trouser was ripped from ankle to knee, and there was a terrible gash on his forehead. She took out bandages and antiseptic and began to dress the wounds—all the time trying to forget that the battered man was the one she loved. The others in the clinic had turned their backs for a moment. She leaned down quickly and brushed her lips against his bruised cheek. “Oh, my darling,” she cried softly, “My poor darling.”

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“College, by itself, doesn’t fit you for any career except teaching.”

“Not many women can look sleek and sinuous on a stanchion!”

“Chrys went there to relax and Ken went there to neck.”

“What are you—a communist?”

REVIEW:
Chrys Evans has just graduated from nursing school and has taken a job as nurse at the Port Anne Gazette—“temporarily,” she acknowledges, until she gets herself a husband. And not just any husband, mind you, but a rich one. Chrys (short for, I’m sorry to say, Chrysanthemum) is unique amongst VNRN heroines in that she is a blatant gold digger. While hanging out on the docks one evening—she’s from Arizona, see, so all that water is really fascinating—she happens to run into Ken Hopkins, the 22-year-old son of her boss, newspaper magnate Gary Hopkins. At the end of their conversation, he kisses her. I’m always stunned by the rapidity in which the male characters make their move.

While Chrys knows that she could have Ken on a leash in no time, she also knows that “she could never, never get him to marry her. A boy who can be forced into a business he detests will never marry against his parents’ wishes.” So her scheme is to get him to take her to a big upcoming dance at the country club, where she can rub silk-clad elbows with the town’s elite, and “find her way to other, less infant sons.” She’s pretty ruthless in her attempt to reel in her invitation, too. The next time she meets him, she plays him like a pro. “Say, have you eaten lunch?” he asks her. “As if the idea had just come to him,” she thinks. He takes her to a restaurant, where the menu “was oversized—and expensive. Good!” She orders the chateaubriand, and eats every bit of it. This girl is a hungry tiger.

But there’s this up-and-coming reporter, Peter John Sprock. He visits her on the first day with a fake injury, because word gets around—“word that the new nurse was quite a dish!” With lines like that, you know she is going to tumble for him like a bag of wet cement, and who could blame her? The first sign of their blossoming love is a tendency to quarrel whenever they meet. When Pete shows up at the clinic door, trying to find out why Chrys has sent a fellow employee to the hospital, she refuses to tell him anything. “ ‘Career women!’ Pete snarls, and stamped out of the clinic.” Boy, he really knows how to insult a gal.

Chrys finally snags her invitation to the ball—but what is she going to wear? She has to have an insanely expensive dress, “not for Ken, or for Ken’s friends. He wouldn’t know the difference between a basement bargain and a Paris original. But his mother would know, all right, and the mothers of his friends.” So how is our schemer going to get the money for this dress? Enter Pete, who takes Chrys to the horse races—naturally she wins big, $244, on a long shot. She has no qualms about informing Pete exactly what she’s up to. The money is “not really for a dress, Pete. For a chance to sail down that river, and out to sea. For a chance to do things and see things in the great big world—and not be cooped up forever in a narrow town, with a husband I’ve come to despise, and children I resent.” Money can buy glamour, she tells him—and he answers, “Apparently it can buy you.” Chrys, bless her, is not even insulted by this remark.

Then push comes to shove—and to brass knuckles—when Pete is beaten up while covering a dockworkers’ strike. While she is patching him together again, she keeps herself from falling apart by telling herself, “I’m a nurse! Not a woman, but a nurse … That’s not Pete—that’s only a nameless, faceless patient.” She takes him home and stays with him all night—on the living room sofa, I swear!—most of which she spends thinking, “very deeply, about herself.” Guess what she decides?

Headline Nurse has some unique aspects to it, and the writing is entertaining. The cover illustration is good, if limited, and I love the fact that the cover includes the line, “Continued on back page.” At first this just confused me, but the back cover is more clearly laid out to look like a newspaper clipping, so even if it took a while, I finally got the reference. All in all, even if this is not a great book, it is nonetheless worth reading.

Nurses Dormitory

By Alice Brennan, ©1962

“Is it wrong to marry for money?” asked Nurse Miller. “Is it wrong to resent your mother because she is a glamorous movie star?” asked Nurse Gray. “Is it wrong to love the boy next door who thinks of you as a kid sister?” asked Nurse Leighton. Nurses Dormitory is an unusually warm story of the lives of three young nurses and the men they fall in love with. Told against the backdrop of the wards, corridors and operating rooms of a big city hospital, there is an authentic insight into the scene behind the scenes and every character is as real as a favorite friend.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Gosh, Lita, with your looks and figure, why on earth did you ever want to become a nurse?”

“Work may be enough for a man. It isn’t enough for a woman. A woman needs a man to look after her; to hold her hand in the darkness; to be there! Without a man she’s not quite complete!”

“The three of us. We should write a book!”

“Wear kiss-proof lipstick, Veronica. There might be a bit of necking on the evening’s schedule.”

REVIEW:
When I picked up this book, I was concerned that it might not be a real vintage nurse romance novel. This is the first book I’ve read that details the lives of more than one heroine, and with the cover lines advertising that they love “the wrong men,” perhaps the requisite happy endings would escape the grasp of one or more of the ladies. Is Gone with the Wind not a romance because in the end Scarlett doesn’t have Rhett, just a stubborn determination to win him back? Well, I’ll think about that tomorrow.

Today I turn my attention to Lita Gray, whose mother is a movie star; Susie Miller, one of six children raised in a poor family who strives to find herself a wealthy man; and Veronica Leighton, whose crush from the age of 12, now-Dr. John Sernian, still sees her as the gangly pre-teen she once was. The advantage of having three heroines is that their stories are pretty well encapsulated in that one sentence. There are, of course, a few guys to add to the mix: Mark Brandel is a pediatric surgeon who is angry and short with the staff. His wife and three-year-old son were killed in a car accident five years ago, and he continues to beat himself up because he could not save them. He avenges their deaths by pulling out every stop in his attempts to save the lives of every child wheeled in through the doors of St. Jo’s Hospital. He seems charmed by Lita, who has also built a wall around herself as a defense against shallow people who can’t care for her: “She’d been so sick of useless, bored people lapping up excitement the way a cat laps up cream. Of no real importance to anyone except themselves. Concerned only with themselves. She’d craved a reason for being. An importance to her life. To her mind nursing had supplied that reason. It continued to supply it.”

For Susie we have Veronica’s brother, Doug, who comes to town and sweeps Susie off her money-grubbing feet. This is a big blow for her, and she spends a lot of time battling with herself and Doug about how awful it would be to be poor, even if you are happy, versus marrying for love. “If you’re left $100,000 or so, why, ask me to marry you again,” she tells Doug. “But until then, the answer is no … no … no!” And to think that you’re scarcely considered rich these days if you have a million dollars.

The main story centers around the hospital’s chief administrator, Larson Payne, who is intent on boosting hospital profits at the expense of the poor “ward” patients. Naturally, between his gruff manner and his propensity for giving his patients every possible medical treatment, Dr. Brandel quickly runs afoul of him. He has defenders on the hospital staff, including Dr. John Sernian, who go to bat for him, but Larson Payne retaliates by cutting medicine quotas for ward patients in half—which means that at mid-month there is no more oxygen, medicine, or blood products for those patients. Even if Dr. Brandel is gruff, you come to like and pity him, and he clearly has his heart in the right place when it comes to his patients. But you know something bad is going to happen, and all Dr. Brandel’s patients are children, so the build-up to the final gun battle at the corral felt real to me.

The writing is cute, though it does tend toward the mildly self-conscious. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. For example, I give you this: “Night is the time of rest, when after a day’s work, you can stretch your weary, aching bones across your own bed, close your eyes and be alone.” Readers more cynical than I am might raise a brow, but for me it worked more than not. And while two of our ladies do come out engaged on the other side, one remains Scarlet-esque, waiting hopefully for her beau to come around. He’s expressed interest, though, so we know it’s just a matter of time. I was pleasantly surprised by this book, and I looked forward to coming back to it when I put it down at bedtime. Don’t be put off by the homely cover; give this book a chance.