Jane Arden’s Home-Coming

Book 7 of 7
By Kathleen Harris, ©1963
Cover illustration by Edrien King 

This would be Jane’s last visit home to her family in Ohio as a single girl. Upon her return to Florida, she would become the bride of handsome, blue-eyed Jeff Wallace, ranch-owner and Chairman of the Hospital Board, who had fallen in love with Jane on the day of her arrival to take over as director of the Julie Friedmont Memorial Hospital for Children in “the Glades.” As she drove along the highway, Jane was looking forward to meeting with her family and of the joy of telling them all about Jeff. It was only eighty miles from her destination that the accident occurred that was to send Jane to Hill Crest Sanitorium—a victim of amnesia so deep that the doctor there despaired of her ever regaining complete memory of the past. Gone from Jane’s consciousness was all memory of Jeff. The only person who counted with her—her whole world—was dark and attractive John Harmon, chief doctor at the rest home.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“I often stand on my head for a short time if I am exceptionally tired.”

“Jane agreed that most girls really wanted to be a wife and mother more than anything else.”

REVIEW:
With the utmost of relief, I bring you the seventh volume in the god-awful Jane Arden series, which means that in a few short paragraphs I am done with the most appalling heroine I have met in almost 400 nurse novels. In the first six books, Jane Arden R.N. has proved herself to be immature, hypocritical, egocentric, manipulative, male-validated, and mean. In another stroke of good luck, in this book, she sustains a serious head injury in a car crash that results in a coma and brain surgery and ultimately—the soap opera staple—amnesia, not to mention a significant personality change, so she’s not the thoroughly detestable bitch we’ve always known and despised.

This does not mean, however, that we are completely free of the usual cornerstones of Jane’s horrifying personality, or of author Kathleen Harris’ prose. For starters, in the first pages we get a picture of Jane and Jeff’s relationship that is so glowing that it borders on radioactive, which may not be far from the truth, given that it’s the last thing Jane is able to remember as she recovers from amnesia later on. (“When Jeff kissed her, the world sang in her ears and she literally was in the clouds. And she knew it would always be like that.”) We’re then whisked pell-mell through a synopsis of the plots of the last six books, mentioning virtually every character in them, yet still delivering not much that will have any meaning to the lucky gal who has never read a Jane Arden novel before, or more likely, those who have repressed the horrifying details. (To wit: “Remember that religious fanatic of a father who tried to shoot up the whole hospital because we wanted to save his little girl? You got in the way of the bullet, risking your life to save Miss Tyler’s—and by doing so finally won over the whole community and set yourself up as a heroine, as well as capable of directing Memorial.” Sure, we remember that!)

Before her upcoming wedding to Jeff, Jane, who has not seen her family in more than a year, decides she must go visit them, but curiously does not invite Jeff, who has never met them. Nor does it appear that the family is invited to the wedding—particularly strange since this was a major stumbling block in her engagement to her first fiancé David Hyatt (Jeff is her third; three other luckier men had narrow escapes). She decides to drive “a safe fifty miles an hour, in two and a half days” because the train is “tedious and tiring,” but nevertheless is involved in the car crash, and the next thing the reader knows, it’s six months later, and Jane is living in a sanitorium for lunatics under the care of Dr. John Harmon, a Hungarian in his early 40s who fled a concentration camp where his wife and daughter were killed before moving to Ohio to practice psychiatry on Jane Arden, who needs every ounce of skill he can muster.

At first, Jane does not remember anything about herself, and repeats often that she is glad she is not a nurse, because she thinks she is “frivolous-minded,” “a bit selfish, someone who liked to be gay and happy … irresponsible …” Sounds about right. Gradually we get a picture of Jane as someone who has suffered what sounds like a psychotic break: “Jane had to protect herself again with the shell she had built to keep out not only the darkness but light that could be unbearably bright. For she might use her will, not to escape, but to remain within a prison that was sanctuary.” We’re given the idea that Jane is hiding from her future with Jeff: “Without any past, the future was not binding in any way.” Dr. Harmon tells her, “The forgotten things are those you do not wish to remember. That is how the mind works. It shuts out memories that seem better forgotten for some reason.” Gradually Jane remembers more and more, her family, her nursing career—she even leaves the sanitorium as a patient to work there full-time—everything except Jeff. The only clue why she might want to block him out of her life is not easy to swallow: “Had she been afraid of being too happy?” Also—brain damaged or not, this is still Jane Arden, the woman who can’t rest until every man she meets has fallen for her—she’s in love with Dr. John Harmon, and “he loved her, as she loved him,” and as long as she remains ill, “she would not have to return to a past she did not want to remember. She could stay here with John.”

The hook of the story is that one of the drivers involved in the car accident is wrongly being blamed of having caused the accident, and it’s up to Jane to clear his name, though her amnesia is rightfully brought up in court as a possible factor inhibiting her memory of the accident, as is her relationship with John—which, being true, “was damaging evidence, not just against her character, but against John, against Hill Crest, and all it stood for. It could mean the destruction of all that John had built there, of the good new life he had created for himself. And Jane would have been the cause.” In what could be an interesting plot turn, Jane decides that she must save John, “the man she loved, the man she had destroyed.” To do so, she returns to the stand, where she swears that her missing memories have suddenly come back, so her testimony can no longer be doubted. “I did not want to remember because I had found security at Hill Crest,” she tells the court. “I wanted to postpone returning to reality. Until I realized, for the sake of others, that I must accept everything, all of the past, in order to face the future.” Um, sure.

After the trial, she takes a few minutes to crush poor Dr. Harmon’s only hope of ever loving again, of participating fully in life again. “John does not need anything aside from his work—he has spent all his emotions. It is no sacrifice for him to live just for others. He is content doing that,” it is decided. “His heart is in a faraway grave with the wife and child he loved—and always will be there. John has withdrawn from the world to live in this world of shadows in order to help others. It’s as though he were a priest, a recluse. The other world no longer is where he belongs. I do not believe that he could be happy there again.” But not to worry, John understands that “personal happiness was not everything. There were no goodbyes when you loved someone. Distance, differences, could not separate those beloved. And there were many kinds of love. Love was so big that it could include all humanity.” So he can love humanity while Jane goes back to Florida to marry Jeff. And that’s where the book ends, curiously, without any home-coming at all, either to Ohio or Florida. It’s a grandiose ending for a character who has proved shallow and selfish from the word go, perhaps an attempt to refurbish her character before we close the last Jane Arden cover. And, so little so late, it won’t work. Good riddance to you, Jane Arden.

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.

Nurse's Alibi

By Jane Corby, ©1966

Kate Saunders, R.N., returned from a working vacation as a ship’s nurse on a Caribbean cruise to find that a sensational murder had taken place in her home town on the very night of her departure. The chief suspect, George Hewlett, was claiming Kate as his alibi, and although Kate’s fiancé, Dr. Tim Weaver, advised her not to become involved, Kate felt she had a duty to tell what she knew, however dangerous that might be. With the support of handsome newspaper reporter Dave Warren who loved her, Kate followed her instincts and nearly risked losing love…and life as well.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“There was something about the young man that annoyed her. Perhaps it was the way his sandy hair was cut, so that one side of it was combed down over his forehead in a kind of ragged bang.”

“I couldn’t help thinking how much more athletic you look without your clothes.”

“For this occasion she had not spared the eye shadow.”

“Don’t eat that candy! It may be poisoned!”

“The district attorney did manage to bring out the fact that George’s mother was ‘emotionally disturbed,’ but even this, Kate thought, would only prejudice the jury in his favor. Most of the men—and there were seven on the jury—had perhaps had a similar experience with their wives for a short period.”

REVIEW:
There is just no excuse for a dumb heroine. How can you have any sympathy for a woman who continually makes the worst possible choices, who throws logic to the wind, who is a complete hypocrite?

Meet Kate Saunders, who is working part-time as a nurse while she returns to Stratton University in Mansfield, NY, to obtain a graduate degree in psychiatry. A fellow student and acquaintance, George Hewlett, age 20, has been accused of murdering his girlfriend, Claire Taylor, who we are told is both 16 and 17. Kate has heard George say that he would kill Claire before he “let someone else have her,” and that he would do it by strangling her with a wire hanger, which is the exact way she died. She has heard him threaten other people as well. He has told the police that Kate was with him at the time of Claire’s murder, which is not true. She was “frightened at the way he lost control” when she told him she would not give him a false alibi. After George has been released from jail, a car just like his tries to run her off the road, and then George lies to her about where he was that night. And she receives an anonymous box of chocolates that has been poisoned.

What does Kate do with all this? Why, she tells no one at all about being run off the road, because “there was no use to add to the counts against him.” She asks the lab worker who tests the candy to destroy it all as well as his lab report. When she sees George on campus, she hurries to catch up with him and apologizes for not giving him an alibi, and seems hurt when he says, “If a man is going to be persecuted by someone, he ought at least to have the sense to stay away from her,” and stalks off. She apparently agrees that George killed Claire, but does not dwell at all on that question, rather insisting that is going to “help” him by providing a “nurse’s alibi,” which means she is going to testify to the fact that she thinks George is a “borderline disturbed personality,” possibly schizophrenic. She wants to testify on George’s behalf, she tells her fiancé Dr. Tim Weaver, because “nobody else knows what I know about George Hewlett,” and she is willing to break off her engagement with Tim over it. So although she will make considerable personal sacrifices to tell the world one thing she believes about George, she simultaneously buries her other suspicion, barely even admitting it to herself, that he is attempting to kill her.

Tim is opposed to her testifying because he is concerned that the attorneys will attempt to destroy her character and try to convince the jury that she is in love with George. As her fiancé, this will damage his reputation as well. Most of the book details their quarrels, his dates with “number one belle of New England” Mandy Burr, and Kate’s dates with reporter Dave Warren, with an interlude in which she stars in a play about a group of young women in 1910 seeking admission to the then-all-male university. There’s the trial in the end, of course, when all is revealed, and the engagement in the end, when all the difficulties are swept under the rug, but you knew that would happen.

The pop psychology in this book quickly becomes annoying. When George tells Kate that she is “persecuting” him, she starts with the psychoanalysis: “This was something that was definitely tied up with emotional instability. … Had George ever suffered from a persecution mania before?” Does use of the word on one occasion make for a “mania”? George’s mother is living in a sanitarium for the mentally disturbed, and Kate reasons that “her highly nervous condition might have been the cause of her son’s instability, and [George’s father] Jim Hewlett, unwilling to recognize the signs of emotional disturbance as an inherited trait, would be all the more belligerent toward anyone who suspected trouble.”

There is also a curious dichotomy about sexism. Kate and Tim get into an argument prompted by Kate’s horror at how constricted women’s lives were in 1910, when their roles were limited only to “making a man’s life ‘easy and agreeable,’ educating the young and taking care of those who were sick.” However, the other vintage nurse romance novels of the 1960s I have read suggest not a widely different role for women even at that “modern” era. Kate also mentions that in 1910 women teachers “had to work for half of what men were paid,” but in 1960, women were earning only 59¢ for each dollar earned by a man (Getting Even, by Evelyn Murphy, ©2006). So it’s not clear to me that Kate is all that better off than the character she was playing. Especially when her fiancé starts arguing that “there was no use saying women were better off because they could earn their own living. In many cases, this simply meant they supported members of the family, or an indolent husband. They had actually been better off under the old system of being cared for and attending to their household chores.” Kate, the ninny, responds to this by bringing up wife beating, totally missing the point that women are human beings, not possessions, with the same right to choose their own destiny as men.

It should not come as a great surprise that at the end of the book Kate agrees to marry Tim, despite what she has called “the great differences in their points of view on almost everything.” “You won’t let me be myself, and I can be no one else,” she tells him when she breaks up with him. Yet at the end of the book, when she brings up the fact that they don’t “see eye to eye on many subjects,” he answers, “You don’t want a yes-man for a husband,” and tells her that he likes green hair and green eyes like hers more than black hair and brown eyes like Mandy’s. If you’re as dumb as Kate Saunders, R.N., a person’s coloring is just as good a foundation for a life-long relationship as any other. And it shouldn’t be too hard to get used to being considered chattel.

The Nurse Was Juliet

By Peggy Gaddis, ©1965 

Julie hated what he stood for. Change to her beloved little mountain town. Change in the way she and her doctor mother conducted their small clinic for the people of the hills. Change in her fiancé, till now the most dependable thing in Nurse Juliet’s life. And most frightening of all—change in her heart. How could she hate a man—hate everything he died—and still dream of him all the time? 

GRADE: C 

BEST QUOTES: 

“A home and a husband and children are a woman’s trinity.” 

“This is for life; not for a romantic novel.” 

REVEIW: 

When you know an author was turning out several books a month, it’s hard not to feel a little guilty for expecting more from a book than formula. But darn it, when I see the same setup again and again, I am annoyed—especially when it’s just minor aspects of the story that wouldn’t be all that tough to switch up. For example, in this Peggy Gaddis throwaway, we meet Miss Sarah, who lives in the rough-hewn cabin set at the top of a long winding path far from the nearest road—a de rigueur setting for at least one character in four of the five of her books I’ve read to date. 

In this one, our eponymous nurse hails from a small dirt-poor town in the Georgia mountains—another big stretch for Ms. Gaddis. Steve Hayden, a newspaper reporter from Atlanta, comes to town to cover a murder trial that had a change of venue to this backwater location, and from the moment she claps eyes on him, Juliet Cochran is nasty and mean beyond all reason. You see, she is furious that the name of her hometown will be forever sullied, as people will think the murder happened here rather than just the trial, and she blames Steve for this. 

Oddly, however, she is also opposed to her fiancé’s hopes of improving the place. “He’s going to do everything he can to change Haleyville, first by getting a good road to the county seat and then, no doubt, by getting a hospital over here,” she snarls. She doesn’t mind the poverty of the residents, their hardscrabble lives, their miserable and crowded living conditions, that the “girls marry before they get out of their teens, some of them before they get into their teens,” because it’s what she’s known all her life. Besides, her parents are doctors, so she doesn’t have to live that way, which makes it all just charming and quaint. 

The aforementioned Miss Sarah has a “crumpled old face” and graying hair, and she calls herself “a cross-grained old woman,” and “a battered old creature.” Juliet visits the housebound recluse every week to give her “a life-giving injection that would keep her going for another week.” (That must be some shot!) But Steve digs up a shocking secret about her: It seems that she married a very wealthy man from New York when she was 18 and gave birth to a son a year later, only to run away back to her shack shortly afterward. Steve finds the 26-year-old Gerard and brings him to meet his mother, and all is right with the world. And now for the real shock—Miss Sarah is actually just 45 years old! Apparently the hardscrabble mountain life really takes a toll on a person. 

The millionaire Gerard then sets out to upgrade Haleyville. In a matter of months, new houses are springing up all over town, the roads get paved, banks open, industries move in, and the general store starts carrying Capri pants, halters, and Bermuda shorts. If only we had this guy on President Obama’s economics team, we’d have the recession turned around in no time. Juliet begins to see that jobs are a good thing after all, although it may be the latest fashion trends that really melt her cold, cold heart. All that remains is for her to dump her fiancé and for Steve to swing by and claim his prize, and we can toss this book over our shoulders.

This book has a couple of odd moments. One is its interest in spanking, though it would not be the only VNRN to have this unhealthy obsession. “What an unpleasant creature you are! Dr. Laura, I’m afraid you didn’t spank her often enough when she was growing up,” Juliet’s fiancé says of her. A few chapters later, Steve chimes in, “For two cents I’d turn you across my knee and wallop the daylights out of you.” Juliet reacts by catching her breath with wide eyes, as if this is an actual possibility. “And don’t tempt me by saying I wouldn’t dare!” he continues. “I can’t think of anything at the moment I’d rather do! It’s way past time when somebody should have done it!” The whole idea is wrong in so many ways—from the apparent acceptability of violence against women, to treating women like children, to the hint of kinkiness to the act—that it could be an entire term paper in someone’s women’s studies class.

Then there’s the fact that Juliet and her mother have hired Aunt Jemima to do their cooking. “Mattie, vast and ebony-hued and immaculate in her dark print dress and white apron,” is constantly urging the women to eat in her honey-chile vernacular. “Miss Laura, you ain’t had a mouthful of vittles!” she scolds Juliet’s mother. “Mattie was at the stove, smiling a white-toothed welcome that split her ebony face into a happy smile … fists on her ample hips.” Like Mammy in Gone with the Wind, she’s a sympathetic and caring character, but one that nonetheless makes me wince.

This book is not Peggy Gaddis’s finest, nor her worst. She does pursue her habit of picking up certain words or phrases and beating them to death—I think she referred to “vertical” farms on at least three occasions—once was good, but enough is enough. She also hints at things that are never answered: There’s the suggestion that something happened to Juliet when she was in nursing school—“Here was a girl who had been badly hurt sometime, undoubtedly during the years she had spent in Atlanta,” Steve thinks—though we are never told what happened, or even if this is in fact the case. Juliet herself is not a terribly sympathetic character, as she is always sniping at someone, and she is called selfish by several characters, including her mother. But for its flaws, it’s pleasant enough, especially if you haven’t already read other Peggy Gaddis books.

Cruise Ship Nurse

By Michelle Josephs, ©1969

A too recent tragedy made it impossible for Ellen Hayden to continue her nursing career in a midwestern hospital. She sought escape in the adventurous life of a cruise ship nurse. But she had not counted on the volatile relationship of two men, a doctor and an officer, who had fallen in love with her. She never thought she would be led into a situation so ugly and destructive that her future was threatened.

GRADE: D+

REVIEW:
I have in the recent past doubted the prospects of a book because its cover illustration was not great. I was proved completely wrong, and so forced to acknowledge the truth of the old adage about judging a book. Cruise Ship Nurse, however, has made me re-think that position. The cover of Surf Safari Nurse, while not living up to its endless potential, is detailed, and suggests that someone gave it some thought. The cover of Cruise Ship Nurse, on the other hand, feels perfunctory and dashed off—and so does the text within.

Ellen Hayden leaves Lincoln, Nebraska, to take a job on a cruise ship based out of New York. At the job interview, she meets Michael Carter. “I’m the reservation manager here but my secret duty is to make sure old Harmon hires pretty young things,” he tells her. (That made my skin crawl, but she dated him a few times before setting sail anyway.) Once on board, when not working like a dog for stern, hard-driving Dr. Roberto Gazza, she starts dating Tonio Grimaldi, a molto suave steward on the ship. But when the good doctor, who has hitherto shown her no interest whatsoever, hears about this, he immediately puts the moves on her, and the two Italians begin competing for her affections. “Life was never so complicated in Nebraska,” she tells her friend and co-worker Betty. (Actually, Ellen says this on two separate occasions, which suggested to me that the author and editor were asleep at the wheel.) There’s a smuggling subplot with Ellen marked as the unsuspecting mule, several searches of her person and cabin, jail, and a trial. And, of course, a wedding at the end.

The story trots along at a decent pace, but it feels like the author is cruising on autopilot. While there is initially some question about whom the smuggler is, that lasts all of ten minutes before we are given his identity, so that small excitement is quickly snuffed out. Even when the plot theoretically heats up, I felt like a dispassionate observer. Ellen is frequently described as feeling numb; if the protagonist has no feeling about what is happening to her, how am I supposed to?

I actually had some hope that this book might at least slightly redeem itself by allowing its protagonist an international affair. No such luck: One man is the crook and the other already has a lover in New York. “You’re the best cure I know for Latin-love-itis,” she tells the white boy, her blandest and only remaining romantic option.

The book contains many typographical errors (note the missing comma (after here) in skeevy Mr. Carter’s above quote). This may not matter to the vast majority of Americans, but as a former copy editor and daughter of a linguist, I must confess that my dinner out has been significantly marred by restaurant “special’s.” So between the lame cover, uninspired writing, and lackadaisical proofreading, I got the impression that no one involved in the production of this book cared a whit about it. Guess what—you’re not going to, either.