The Nurse from Hawaii

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

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

GRADE: B+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Surfing Nurse

By Diana Douglas
(pseud. Richard Wilkes-Hunter), ©1971
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

“Too good to be true!” was how Nurse Kara Simmon felt about her temporary assignment away from St. Mark’s. For she was on Surfari with the American Surfing Team as team nurse and as top competitor in the World Championships in Australia. And now this halcyon dream is abruptly shattered as she finds herself pulled by conflicting desires more turbulent and dangerous than the pounding surf … Caught between two men—brothers in name only. Surgeon/surfer Paul Denning, blond, handsome, coolly professional—who seems more interested in her skills than in herself as a woman. And Ross, the professional surfer—wild, headstrong, his animal magnetism undeniable… In conflict between the same, familiar world of nursing and an exciting new world of the professional surfer’s endless summers on the beaches of the world.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“Kara had won wolf whistles and applause herself when she walked into the South Sea Lounge with Ross. The spontaneity of that had made her feel good.”

“Let’s make this last dance really Hawaiian! The rest of you make a circle and undulate!”

“You don’t even know me yet. How can you when we haven’t even kissed?”

“She must stop him soon now, she knew. But for a moment still she could thrill to the male warmth pressing against her. Moments like this were few when you were a nurse, she remembered. Too often there was sickness and pain, grief and death. And those things built up tensions inside you.”

“These days everyone has doubts. It’s a symptom of the times.”

“They’re good guys, but they exaggerate like Texans.”

“It would be too much to look like you do and be able to cook like that too.”

“Some of the surfers were taking photos of an odd-looking building on the foreshore of Sydney harbor. It looked like something from science fiction, shaped like huge, streamlined orchestral shells in an intriguing pattern. One of the reporters who joined them at the rail explained that it was an opera house and something of a national joke with Australians. It had been years since the building began and nobody seemed to know when, if ever, it would be completed.”

REVIEW:
To call this a nurse novel is a bit of a stretch. True, Kara Simmon is a registered nurse with a job at St. Marks Hospital in Los Angeles, and theoretically she’s the official nurse to—as well as a member of—a contingent of American surfers, but she doesn’t really do any nursing in this book. Mostly she’s catching a wave. She won the California state women’s surfing title this past summer, which gives her the right to enter a world title competition in Australia. Her surfing mentor, Paul Denning, just happens to be a surgeon at St. Marks. He’s the son of the founder of Denning surfboards, and actually dropped out of his internship twice to pursue surfing, but then decided to return to medicine. He’s the one who coached Kara to her surprising win in California, and the relationship is “an odd sort of intimacy into which sex did not intrude.” It’s not often you meet a VNRN that dares to use the word sex, but maybe that’s because this book was written by a man.

Paul’s younger brother Ross is also entered in the competition, and as the book opens, the American team is on a cruise ship steaming to Australia. Paul has had to remain back in the states practicing medicine, which is lucky for Ross and his enormous ego: “If Paul Denning was with us on this surfari, Paul Denning would win it,” she’s told by one of the other surfers. Ross isn’t likely to win the competition for Kara’s affections, either, the poor conceited sap. He’s convinced Kara is going to tumble for him any second and pursues her relentlessly, much to her annoyance. But when he finally catches up with her one night, he tells her that if she wins this competition, she could make a lot of money and travel the world endorsing Denning surfboards—and she needs his help as a coach to win. She tells him she’s not going to quit nursing, but she agrees to accept his coaching. Only then does he put the moves on her, which she curiously goes along with. I continue to be amazed at the number of women in these novels who kiss men they don’t like.

When the surfing team finally arrives in Australia, Ross takes her out to the beaches and teaches her that she has to maximize her scoring points with each wave. That night, at a beach party, a totally plastered Ross decides to try night surfing, though all the other surfers warn him of the danger. While out in the surf, he is attacked by a shark, which “fastened into his thigh and torn off a long strip of flesh all the way down to his heel.” Ew! Kara applies pressure to the femoral artery until the ambulance arrives, Ross is whisked into surgery, and his life is saved, though his surfing career is over. The never-mentioned upside to this is that he is now spared from ever having to compete directly with his brother in a surfing competition, and so can live on as a champion in his own mind.

The next day, Kara and the rest of the team is back surfing at the beach, the callous dudes. Later she tries to call Paul, but guess what! He’s quit the hospital and is on his way to Australia! He arrives a day later, and Kara quickly persuades him to take Ross’s spot on the team: “Then, and only then, will you really know to which world you belong.” He also takes over Ross’s place as Kara’s coach: “Don’t try any last-minute gimmicks, no matter what Ross tells you,” he advises her. “Surf your own natural style.” During her heat at big competition, she follows his advice—until her last wave, when she hangs five, whatever that means. She knows Paul wouldn’t like that, but thinks Ross would—“Ross was inclined to showboat that way himself.” She wins the heat by just one point, and now she’s in the finals. “She was tempted to try a left break, but memory of the chance she took hanging five drove it from her mind. It was better to stay with her natural style, surfing safely and as well as she could,” just like Paul advised her to do. So what is she doing with her next wave? Why, breaking left, of course. “Don’t ask me why I did that, Paul,” she says as she steps out of the surf onto the beach.

You can predict how this book is going to end in the first chapter. Apart from the shark attack, which takes a long time to unfold, not much happens in this book. It spends a lot of time surfing, but the jargon is so thick that it’s not really enjoyable to a non-surfer: “She set herself and took off, then saw Nerida dropping in on her right. Kara found herself turning instinctively left. She saw the danger at once: a fast right break with a toppling crest rushing toward her along the wall. Flat water ahead! She went into a tight bottom turn. The velocity she had built up steaming across that smooth wall turned her in the beginning of the flaky white—she was steaming back halfway up the face going right now. She was stoking in a glorious long slide ahead of the crest breaking well behind her. Coming out of it at the foot of the wall way right, she flipped out in a backhand turn and rode white water in to the beach.” Whatever that means. Oddly, the book allows Kara to win by following Ross’s advice, not Paul’s, but it’s Paul that she’s in love with and Paul’s lifestyle as a healthcare professional that she is completely devoted to. In the end, I’m just confused by what this book is trying to tell me, both in its message and its surfing descriptions. I wish I’d watched “Gidget” instead.

Beauty Contest Nurse

By Diana Douglas, ©1973
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

When tawny-eyed nurse Maria MacKenzie sought to escape the routine and regimentation of the Veterans’ Hospital, she never expected anything like her job at a luxurious resort hotel in Acapulco. Assigned to the girls in the Miss All-America Beauty Contest, Maria soon discovered that her feminine attributes as a lovely young woman were more important than her nursing skill—especially with Dick Trevor, the attractive newspaperman covering the contest. Dr. Mitch Gilbert, her handsome, informal boss, was another surprise; as was Andrew Fisher, the powerful, red-headed doctor who was so mysteriously involved behind the scenes. One of these men would change the course of Maria’s life. Caught up in the heady excitement of her glamorous surroundings, could she trust her heart to make a wise choice…?

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTE:
“She proved to be too fertile, and the husband, though proud of his efficiency, could not keep up with the needs of his growing family, so he left her one night. She has found others since, but they leave when she becomes pregnant.”

“She had never really trusted blondes with ingenuous, baby-blue eyes.”

“Maybe you could marry the guy and keep a firm hand on the skillet.”

REVIEW:
Maria MacKenzie is the official nurse at the Miss All-America Beauty Contest in Acapulco, but naturally as she steps from her limo at the hotel where the contest is being staged, all the reporters think she is one of the contestants, seeing as how she is just so gosh-darned beautiful! Dick Trevor, a reporter from the New York Evening Star is smitten before she reaches the door. Once inside, she meets Dr. Mitchell Gilbert and Bill Bryant, pageant organizer, who doesn’t remember who she is but knows what hotel room she’s staying in. The job doesn’t seem to be demanding; as Dr. Gilbert tells her, “I expect we’ll need to prescribe and administer an occasional tranquilizer for tantrums, aspirin for the cyclical troubles, or an antibiotic for a chill or something. That would be about the extent of it.”

That afternoon, tanning on the beach with her bikini top untied so as to erase the white lines across her back (remember when we actually did this?), she is approached by a red-haired surfer who tells her that the two guys out there riding the waves are risking their lives, because the surf is dangerous. Sure enough, one of them falls off his board and is dragged under. The red-haired man instantly leaps to the rescue, and when he snags the stricken surfer and promptly loses his own board, Maria swims out to help them both. As she assesses the injured surfer and suggests a “ring pad” for the man’s head injury, the red-haired man naturally reveals himself to be a doctor and orders her to get his bag from his beat-up jalopy, which is parked in the beach lot. His name is stamped in gold letters on the bag—Andrew Fisher, M.D.

Dr. Fisher has been fired from his job at the hotel because he spends too much time at a local clinic giving free medical care to the natives. This intrigues Maria, and soon she and the reporter are wending their way through the slums of Acapulco, looking for him. But he’s not there—he’s gone to a small village, where the natives grow excellent corn, eat too much of it, and come down with pellagra, or niacin deficiency, which gives its victims a beefy red tongue and the three D’s: diarrhea, dementia, and dermatitis. I tell you, if I read enough of these books, I won’t have to study when it’s time to re-take the boards.

Dick Trevor is taken with the idea of publicizing Dr. Fisher’s work in his newspaper, and Maria is taken with the doctor. She rounds with him through the village, treating the natives in their adobe houses where “traces of the vomitus and excreta which were symptoms of the disease still lingered in the small, airless room.” Back at the hotel, Maria puts in an appearance at the hotel clinic and the pageant, where she drinks too much champagne with Dr. Fisher and then goes parking with him, the tramp. The next day she’s back in the village—I can’t believe she doesn’t get fired from her pageant job—but Dr. Fisher falls down a cliff, and the big climax of the book is his rescue. Has he been killed in the fall? How will he find the money he needs to care for the natives? You won’t need three guesses to figure out the answers.

This book reminded me a lot of Nurse in Acapulco, and not because they share the same setting. Both are mostly phoned in, with jaunts into a country village and a lot of time spent lecturing on one particular disease. It’s not quite as annoying as Nurse in Acapulco, though. No one is terribly irritating, and Acapulco and the Mexican countryside are well-drawn, so you can do a little vicarious touring. It’s a book to reach for if you are looking for an airy little fling that won’t trouble your intellect or your sense of humor at all.

Surf Safari Nurse

By Jane Converse 

(pseud. Adele Kay Maritano), ©1966 

Hawaii had lured them all: Ron Tercotte, who ran from love and a brilliant medical career to a surfboard in Waikiki. Craig Barclay, aging rou, who was delighted to pick up the tab for an international surfing expedition if it would buy his son, and himself, self-respect. Laurie Davis, a beautiful, principled, and dedicated nurse ... As the aimless days passed, Laurie asked herself why she had ever joined the ranks of beach players. Was the fleeting hope of Ron’s love enough to compensate for the hospital, the patients, the nursing career that had given her life meaning? 

GRADE: A 

BEST QUOTES: 

“You know, Diane, I have a confession to make. I was finding it uncomfortable, sharing a room with someone who was either too rude, too snobbish, or too vapid to have anything to say to me. After hearing you tonight, I'll admit something else. I didn’t know when I was well off.” 

“She would address Diane first only under emergency situations. If she noticed that Diane’s hair was on fire, or if Maana Loa blew itself to bits and hot lava threatened the room, she might casually mention the fact to Diane.”

REVIEW: 

Laurie Davis is a scrub nurse, passing instruments in the OR, and dating Ron, a medical student who in the opening scene is revealed as a surfer of widespread fame, the subject of magazine articles and movies. Ron is ambivalent about medicine, which he finds less thrilling than catching a wave. “Just don’t try to compare excising some character’s gall bladder with a perfect day at Malibu,” he tells her. 

Linc, who is a producer of surfing movies, is leading the eponymous surf safari to Hawaii and Australia for three months to make another film, and is recruiting top-notch surfers for the trip. Ron, of course, is invited, and he drops out of med school to go, to Laurie’s dismay; she and Ron break up over it. She and Linc become friends, however, and he invites her to go on the safari as their nurse. She accepts, and off they go. 

The entourage includes the surfers; Eddy Barclay, Linc’s sycophant go-fer who is the subject of continuous degradation by everyone else except Laurie; and Eddy’s parents, an ex-showgirl and an alcoholic would-be playboy, who are financing the expedition. The plot follows the onshore antics of this group, focusing particularly on the surfers’ mistreatment of Eddy. Near the end, in a hilariously stereotypical crisis, Laurie and Ron’s medical skills are put to use, and this brings Ron back to medicine (as you knew something would, and you might even have guessed it would be a shark).

The book offers a great depiction of the lifestyle of the California surfer circa 1966, from the “woodie” (an old wood-paneled relic of a station wagon that had been preserved in pristine condition) that Ron drives, the descriptions of surfing (“plunging downward and to his left, Ron raced with the curling wave, his bronzed body outlined sharply against a wall of green water and feathery white spray”), the surfing vocabulary “when you’ve gone over the falls backward on a twenty-foot giant at Sunset, or it closes out suddenly and you’re caught in that wild soup, or you get wiped out”), and the general slang (“a ho-dad rockout,” “you look groovy,” “the bit’s worn out, you cats. Cool it,” “I’m stoked out of my mind!”, “looks boss”). 

Great descriptions really let you feel the scene: “The voice was followed into the room by its owner, a still-handsome, fortyish woman whose gleaming black hair had been tortured into an intricate, high-standing coiffure and lacquered into place. She had the svelte figure of a magazine model, and it was enhanced by a Spanish-styled lounging costume that would have done credit to the flashiest of matadors; the slim black trousers were tighter than any Laurie had seen on the younger set downstairs, and the red velvet jacket looked as though the woman hadn’t put it on but had been dipped into it.” There is even some actual medicine in the book, including an emergency splenectomy in which Laurie, distressed by Ron’s dropping out of medical school, is not at her best: “I said I wanted a long right angle clamp. Stat!” the surgeon shouts at her.

This book is worth reading even if you are not an aficionado of the genre. It is lively, humorous, and adroitly shows the reader another time and place. The love story is a little incidental to the main plot, but if the story is interesting and well-written, who cares? This is a great read, and after this, I will be on the lookout for other Jane Converse titles.