Island Doctor

By Isabel Cabot

(pseud. Isabel Capeto), ©1963

Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti
[Note that Woman Doctor also uses the same cover illustration]

 

Young and extremely pretty Dr. Alison Clay had come to Britt Island because aging Dr. Ben needed her. With an exciting new life awaiting her back in the city, it wasn’t part of her plan to stay more than three weeks. Then Dr. Alison was caught up in a hurricane of emotions, and she began to discover that a woman’s heart makes its own plans …

 

GRADE: B+

 

BEST QUOTES:
“What happened to your sense of humor? Was it bottled in formaldehyde along with someone’s cut-out appendix?”

 

“I’ve been doctoring for thirty-six years and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of patients I honestly felt could be helped by going somewhere like Boston.”

 

“What did you get your M.D. in? Sadism?”

 

“Did Alison pull a boob?”

 

“Dr. Bond, did you specialize in meddling?”

 

“We didn’t exactly acquire our medical degrees through a correspondence school, you know.”

 

“Mr. Kirby knows from nothing, unless it’s bottled, canned, or on draft.”

 

REVIEW:

Alison Clay is a 26-year-old doctor returning home to Britt Island and her uncle Dr. Ben, the island GP. He lives with his sister, and the pair raised Alison—and are still caring for Alison’s younger brother and sister—after her parents died. (These VNRN gals are beginning to feel as cursed as Disney heroines.) It’s been three years since Alison has been back home, but Dr. Ben had written that he’s planning on taking a vacation, so she agreed to fill in for him. What she hasn’t told him is that she’s staying only three weeks, after which she’ll return to a fancy-pants practice in the city with the haughty Dr. Erica Stacy and leave another doctor she has arranged ahead of time in her stead. It turns out that Dr. Ben hasn’t been entirely honest, either; he’s planning to be gone for six months! But when she tells him that she’s only temporary and that the nice Dr. Hale is waiting in the wings, he cancels his vacation and goes all grumpy. It’s not clear to me why she stays on at that point, but she does.

 

Another doctor, Nathan Bond, lives on the mainland nearby and also works on the island a couple days a week. Wouldn’t you just know it, he turns out to be the same man whom she’d insulted when they both had stopped at a drawbridge outside of town. It turns out that Dr. Alison has a bit of a temper, encouraged by condescending behavior from her fellow trainees during the eight years of her training. Actually, this seems to serve her in good stead: When she meets a patient who has been paralyzed in a car accident and is being over-coddled by his grandmother into believing that he can never walk again, she lets him have it. “ ‘Jim Britt,’ Alison addressed the man on the bed, ‘You’re a disgusting sight.’ ” Out on another case, where a 12-year-old boy is in need of an emergency tracheotomy and his drunk father is getting in the way, she tells the gentleman who brought her there to give the father a bottle of whisky—or hit him over the head with it. As she coolly sets out the tools for the procedure, the woman holding the flashlight professes feeling like she is going to faint. “You do, and I’ll personally ram that flashlight down your throat,” Alison replies. A bit harsh, perhaps, but if Alison is a bit cut-throat in her dealings with Dr. Ben, Nathan, and even her friends and patients, it works: The boy’s life is saved by her brilliant work, and the paralyzed man agrees to check into a ten-week program in Maine, where “they’ve made great strides in physiotherapy,” says Alison, and we can only hope that the pun was unintended.

 

Drs. Clay and Bond cross paths on Alison’s first night on the island at a house call, when he was summoned after the patient realized, too late to call her off, that it was the female Dr. Clay who was en route to their aid. Alison does not respond well, as is her disposition, when Nathan offers to split the fee. “I’ve had my fill of men like you,” she says, though it must be confessed that Dr. Bond has not said much more than hello. “When you’re not being patronizing, you’re flexing your muscles or beating your manly chest trying to convince people that the space between your ears serves for more than keeping the two apart.” Ouch. Naturally, it isn’t ten minutes before Nathan is thinking, “Why of all women did he have to fall in love with Alison Clay? She was aloof, self-sufficient, and possessed other qualities that he had always despised in women.” First of all, I wasn’t aware that being self-sufficient was a bad thing. Secondly, I’m hoping, but not confident, that the qualities he despises in women are the same qualities he despises in men. Lastly, why would anyone fall in love with someone who is repeatedly nasty and whom they don’t seem to like very much? (When she asks him, “You don’t like me much, do you?” he answers, “You haven’t given me any reason”—and then promptly kisses her.) This is a VNRN, after all, where stranger things have happened.

 

Alison soon decides that she will stay with Dr. Ben for the full six months so he can leave on his vacation after all, but it seems she’s doing it more out of guilt than anything else and is hoping to get back to Dr. Stacy’s practice before her place there is filled by someone else. But Dr. Ben has other hopes: He confesses to Nathan that he planned this “vacation” so as to lure Alison away from Dr. Stacy, as “being associated with her would be no asset.” Dr. Stacy proves her reputation when Alison telephones to say she’s staying until May. “What is there to handling an island practice? All one needs is a sympathetic ear and a jar full of aspirins,” snipes Dr. Stacy. “This is where your future is, not in some backwash island. What kind of medicine can you possibly practice there? Bellyaches and pregnancies are no challenge. The island grannies have been handling those for generations.” I felt a little uneasy that the only other woman doctor in the book is set up as a bad egg.

 

Then Dr. Alison, driving out during a winter storm, skids on ice and crashes her car on the edge of a cliff. She’s teetering there, unable to escape, and slowly freezing. Will she be found before she dies of hypothermia or plummets into the ocean? Will she come to her senses and abandon Dr. Stacy? Will she accept Dr. Ben’s job offer? Will she marry Nathan? You can probably guess the answers to these questions, but the wrap-up isn’t as satisfying as it could be. Alison has been defensive and shouldering a large chip through the entire book, but at the end everything is magically washed away, apparently during a brief interchange with Nathan, who asks her, “Why must you regard every little consideration as a personal slur on your medical ability?” He goes on, “My father was seriously ill only twice in his life and both times he wouldn’t have any other doctor but my mother. Yet from the day they were married to the day he died, he never let her take one night call. Do you think that was because he lacked confidence in her medical ability?” So after they are united, he tells her, “Once we’re married, you’ll take no night calls,” and Alison “meekly” answers, “Yes, Doctor,” her neurosis apparently completely resolved. If she can’t tolerate any aspersions on her medical ability, she’s A-OK with chauvinism masquerading as chivalry.

 

Overall, this is a nice story. The book spends most of its time chronicling Alison’s dealings with her younger brother and sister, her friends on the island, and her growing patient population, and these are enjoyable, amusing anecdotes. Alison is a feisty character, and other peripheral characters have lots to offer as well. (One character, a novelist, is a fount of zippy one-liners, to wit: “Even at the risk of destroying some beautiful image you might have of us Norberts, I must confess that we still have an ample supply of vermouth.”) The main drawback to this book is a regular disregard for sense and logic. Alison is mildly anxious about her brother’s relationship with Mrs. Norbert, but it’s ridiculously obvious that the boy is secretly studying acting with her. Then Alison decides that Dr. Ben and Nathan had shown “good medical judgment” in sending a patient with an abdominal mass to the local hospital when she’d advocated for a big-city specialist. The X-ray had shown a perfectly normal appendix, so Alison had been rightly concerned about colon cancer—hence her desire for the specialist—but the local surgeon endorsed by the male medics uncovers an abscess from a perforated appendix. It’s clear that neither Ben nor Nathan had wanted to accept a diagnosis of cancer: “Both of them were grasping at anything that would point to a ruptured appendix that had sealed itself off, rather than a carcinoma.” That they were correct is not good medical judgment, it’s luck, and Alison’s vow to “re-evaluate” her medical decisions is unfounded, possibly even dangerous to her patients. And, of course, Alison’s apparent transformation at the end is either miraculous or a mirage. But on the whole, though these flaws bring the book down slightly, they by no means ruin it, and Island Doctor is easily worth reading.



Woman Doctor

By Alice Lent Covert,©1952
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

Maggie Waynescott was a woman born for love. Petite and beautiful, no man could look at her without wanting to take her in his arms. Now she had fallen deeply in love with newspaperman Mike Hubbard. Here, finally, was the man she wanted close to her for the rest of her life. But Maggie Waynescott was also Dr. Waynescott, a woman in a very special man’s world … a world she knew Mike would never share. Somehow she had to choose—her man or her career.

GRADE: A

BEST QUOTES:
“Let’s get ourselves an honest-to-goodness Hawaiian tan, not the common variety we get at Rockover beach. Something with class.”

“A physician, of all people, should know how to cope with something as simple and fundamental as a biological urge.”

“He wielded his scalpel like a kingly scepter.”

“ ‘I have a new playsuit that simply begs to be worn—’
‘Brief?’ he asked hopefully, and she chuckled.
‘Positively curt!’ ”

“Women were supposed to have been emancipated way back when. They make a big thing of getting fitted out for a career in medicine or law or industry—then they creep meekly away to some fusty old desk job and the men go right on doing all the worth-while things and grabbing off all the glory. Look at my racket. I wanted to be a foreign correspondent, so what happened? I sat at a desk and told the dames how to make ducky sandwiches for their Tuesday bridge clubs.”

“He’s been sulking all evening, and uttering cryptic comments. I’m not sure whether he’s feeling downtrodden or simply observing a period of suffering for those who are.”

“If we were poor people, we’d be considered frightfully bad-mannered—with the possible exception of Cleatus. The rest of us are just eccentric. It’s the same thing as bad manners, you know; it just depends on which bracket you can afford.”

“Unless you’ve some other completely asinine remark you feel you’ve just got to make, will you kindly shut up and kiss me?”

REVIEW:
Dr. Maggie Waynescott is, at 28, in the midst of a midlife crisis. First of all, as a woman doctor at a prestigious clinic, the only patients she gets are the neurotic wealthy women with no health problems that aren’t psychosomatic. Then her boyfriend, reporter Mike Hubbard, wants to marry her, but to Maggie, “Marriage to him would be the death blow to her career.” She thinks, “If I were insane enough to let Mike talk me into tossing everything else overboard just to be his wife and the mother of his children, I’d come to hate myself, and him!” To be fair, though, Mike has never suggested that she give up her work. “He was willing to admit it might be possible for a woman to successfully combine the medical calling with a healthy, enduring marriage. He was willing and anxious to try to help Maggie combine them.” So the pressure to quit working comes entirely from Maggie and her own ideas of what would make Mike happy: “He wanted quiet evenings with his pipe and slippers and a serene knowledge that if the telephone rang it would be someone with an invitation to bridge, or a wrong number—not a distracted summons calling the little woman out on an all-night confinement case!” So it’s going to be difficult persuading her to walk down the aisle.

Then her uncle, Dr. John King—who raised her from a young age, like all other heroines, when her parents died—writes that he has suffered a heart attack, and his practice in the mining town in New Mexico where she grew up is hers if she wants it. So she packs up and heads for the hills. Interestingly, we learn in the first chapter that what Mike, a former war correspondent, really wants to do is edit a country weekly and write a book, and it seems like Sky River might be an ideal spot to do both. Yet when Mike suggests he go with her, she tells him, “There’d be nothing for you in Sky River.” And she has another reason as well: He shouldn’t do it, she says, because “a man wants the woman he loves to be willing to follow him,” and if he follows her, he’ll be unhappy. Mike answers, “I can see where saving a man’s life rates higher in the human scheme than furnishing him something to read over his breakfast coffee. Maybe the obvious solution would be for the man to follow his woman, for a change. I might free-lance, take a crack at fiction—” But then he shakes his head. “It doesn’t jell, does it?” And Maggie agrees that it does not, and that’s that. Better they break up than try to make their relationship work, regardless of how it might not fit the norm of the day. Given the fact that Maggie has made a career in what was then considered “a man’s world,” you’d think she would be more open to bucking tradition, but apparently not.

En route to Sky River, she travels in a bus with just one other passenger, Chris Rutledge, the general manager of the Fleming mine company, which is the big operation in the area. “He tried to flirt with Maggie, and was cheerfully unabashed when she ignored him. His overtures failing to draw her into conversation, he talked lazily to no one in particular. Today, he informed the sun-flooded, pine-scented world, the scenery inside the stage was even more beautiful than the outside. He meant to write a letter to the company officials, commending them and suggesting that such pleasant interior decorations be made a permanent feature of the service.” Before long, naturally, the two are best friends, going on long hikes up the local mountains and working to restore an old house she’s bought.

The problem is that Chris is the property of Diane Fleming, the daughter of the prominent Fleming family. Diane is a cold, beautiful vixen, and also a state senator. She has no qualms about informing Maggie early on that Chris is hers and she should back off. So Maggie keeps her relationship with Chris platonic, telling him that although “the idea of your kissing me isn’t obnoxious to me,” she has another boyfriend and he has another girlfriend. But they’re still hanging out, and Diane has her revenge when she asks the senate to table a bill that would have funded a hospital in Sky River, which has long been a dream of Maggie’s Uncle John. Chris brings Maggie a copy of the newspaper article announcing this development, and Diane shows up drunk not much later for a cheap, fabulous brawl in which Chris tells Diane that he loves Maggie, not her, and then takes Diane home. As Maggie is recovering on the front porch, who should turn up but Mike—just as the phone rings, and it’s Diane, saying that she has shot Chris. Which sort of puts an end to any chance Diane might have had of winning Chris back.

Mike lingers around town for weeks afterward, getting involved with the local newspaper, writing free-lance and working on a book (sound familiar?). He’s also helping young Bill Fleming, who always had a hankering to write, get the floundering local newspaper back on its feet. Meanwhile, Chris is partially paralyzed from the waist down. He has to undergo rigorous physical therapy, and Maggie, feeling guilty about her part in his shooting, feels she has to be there for every minute of it, bullying and coaxing and teasing him into just one more leg-lift. Diane, thanks to Chris’ insistence that it was an accident, isn’t facing charges, but she’s drinking so much that it looks like she’s attempting suicide by vodka and tonic. Mike, seeing the amount of time Maggie spends with Chris and how her efforts with him are sucking the life out of her, asks her to marry him, but she believes that if she marries Mike, Chris will lose his motivation to walk. So Mike leaves town, and her. Two months pass, and Chris finally walks across a room—and asks Maggie to marry him, and she accepts. But then Diane is arrested for drunk driving and put in detox. Chris goes down on his crutches to visit her, and comes home looking thoughtful.

You know exactly how things are going to play out from here. Not that that’s always a bad thing. This book is a wonderfully written, amusing, thoughtful, and smart, sprinkled with phrases like, “I freely accord you the selfsame privilege of refusal.” It combines stock characters—the shallow bitch on heels, the rangy cowboy, the sage elderly town doc—with real feeling and motivation that gives the book both a sense of fun and the satisfaction that comes with a well-told story that feels true. The book isn’t without flaws: Early on we spend some time inside Bill Fleming’s head, which made me think that he was to be Maggie’s new boyfriend, and at book’s end it’s still not clear why this detour was necessary. Mike’s reasons (slim as they appear) for not going to Sky River with Maggie at the beginning of the story are completely ignored when he does move there in the end, undoing the central angst of the entire book. And the psychology of Maggie’s refusal to marry Mike is somewhat explained, but she never internalizes these lessons to the extent that her acceptance of him makes much sense. But overall, this is an engaging and enjoyable book that even moved me to a few tears in places. It’s a nurse novel (about a doctor) that wants to be a real story, and succeeds in a way that few do.

Nurse in Danger

Willo Davis Roberts, ©1972

The voice coming over the phone was like a deadly purr. “Keep your mouth shut, nursie. Because, if you don’t—you’re dead.” Nurse Denise Morgan hung up the receiver in an agony of trembling. She hadn’t really seen the man who had tried to kill her patient—only his silhouette, as she reeled backward from the blow he’d given her. It was a vicious, hate-filled plot, and Nurse Denise found herself in the middle of it. Only the strength of Dr. Pat Riordan kept her on an even keel … as they waited one dark night to spring the trap.

 

GRADE: C-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“There was an outbreak of whistling when Peggy introduced her. Denise had had this happen before; it didn’t shake her composure.”

 

“Any man who enjoyed looking at a pretty girl shouldn’t want to die.”

 

“Only a minute or two, that’s all it takes to terrorize a girl.”

 

REVIEW:

Before I even get started on what’s inside this book, I simply must comment on what’s on the outside. This is absolutely one of the worst cover illustrations ever! The black mass on her head that purports to be hair resembles more a dead animal. And is anyone going to be strolling casually down the lane with a half-smirk on his face while a house burns behind him? I am doubly disheartened that this is an Ace title, when that publisher in the 1960s consistently turned out amazing book covers. (See my other blog, Vintage Romance Covers, for proof of this statement.) And now that I’ve got that out of my system, we can move on.

 

The most interesting aspect about Nurse Denise Morgan is the fact that, when she was away at nursing school, a young man they had taken in six years previously inexplicably shot her parents and four siblings at the dinner table, and was subsequently hanged. Her name is really Denise Davonne, but she changed it after the massacre so that no one would tie her to it. And she lives alone, not in the nurse’s dorm, so she doesn’t have to answer questions from her fellow nurses about her painful past.

 

She’s working on men’s surgical, lusting after Dr. Patrick Riordan, when Ed Hale is brought in. He’s been run over in the street, an attempted murder, because he is planning to testify in a corruption case against Vince Gurley, the big union boss. Ed is mostly worried about his wife Laura and son, who he fears will be attacked by Vince’s goons while he’s abed. So Denise volunteers to spirit the pair out of town to her family’s farmhouse one night. When Laura and Eddie Junior come to visit Ed in the hospital, Denise disguises Laura as a nurse, pops the boy onto a gurney, and out the back door they go. The plan is a complete success, and no one—not even the police who were supposed to be guarding Laura and Eddie—knows where they are.

 

Everything is great—Dr. Riordan is even starting to notice her—but then, “there was no way for her to know that within twenty-four hours she would have plunged into a nightmare so terrifying that a peaceful night’s sleep would seem an unattainable goal.” Good thing the author warned us about this, or we might not understand how scary the situation is supposed to be; you’d certainly never guess it from reading about it. One evening shift, Denise enters Big Ed’s room to find the policeman guarding him on the floor, and a thug with a gun standing over Ed. The thug pops Denise across the face, fires blindly at Ed in bed, hitting him in the jaw but not killing him, and vanishes.

 

When everyone rushes in and turns on the lights, Denise sees all the blood and has a PTSD moment: “The present and the past existed simultaneously in a series of pictures in Denise’s mind, clicking off and on. The kitchen at home, on the farm, spattered with blood. The hospital bed, empty now, stained dark red.” It is rather curious that she had requested a transfer to a surgical floor, where a nurse is necessarily exposed to more blood and guts. But she pulls herself together when Dr. Riordan tells her, “Snap out of it!” She describes her attacker to the cops and they’re out looking for him, but now he’s calling her house. “Keep your mouth shut,” he tells her. “Because if you don’t, nursie, you’re a dead tomato.” A dead tomato? Denise responds to this threat not by laughing her head off but by fainting dead away on the kitchen floor.

 

She tells Dr. Riordan and the cops about this, too, and then there’s this nosy reporter, Larry Groves, coming around who wants to write a story about Denise and put it on the front page, his dazzling ambition totally blinding him to the fact that doing so places Denise and the Hale family in further danger. When Larry barges into her apartment to demand an interview, Denise is horrified: “He couldn’t write a story about her, he couldn’t!” But instead of saying no, she says she has to ask the hospital supervisor, the shrinking violet. The next day, as Larry pesters her again in the hospital foyer, she lets it slip that the woman wearing the mink coat is the wife of another patient who has tried to kill himself—and this sideline is rather jarring when so much of the book is focused on the Ed Hale—so now Larry wants to write a big story about the patient, who is a well-known businessman in town. The wife is naturally upset at this threat to her privacy, but Denise reassures the woman, “I assure you none of the staff would tell the newspapers anything.” This from the one who tipped Larry Groves off to begin with.

 

Larry’s no dope, and soon puts it together that Denise is actually the lone survivor of the Davonne massacre, and further realizes that Denise has hidden the Hale family at her old house. So he decides to drive up there himself and interview Mrs. Hale—and the only thing Denise can do to stop him is to drive up there first, since there is no phone at the house, and she asks Pat Riordan to drive her. When they reach the farmhouse, they extinguish all evidence of the family’s week-long stay there in five minutes, and then all four of them hike the half-mile to the old tree house and climb up into it. They can see the lights of Larry’s car, but they’re still waving their flashlight around like idiots—and then to cap it off, Pat decides he’s going to sneak back to the house, Denise in tow, to be sure that Larry leaves after he’s broken into the house and found no one there. But hot on Larry’s trail is Tony Gurley, Vince’s younger brother and the thug who tried to kill Ed in the hospital. Tony is about to murder Larry until Pat steps in with a rusty pitchfork, and a kerosene lamp is knocked to the floor, igniting the farmhouse, as presaged by the terrible cover illustration. Tony is tamed and tied up with his belt, but through it all, Denise is pretty useless. “She didn’t know how she managed to move at all. People died from fear … but she couldn’t die, or Patrick would die, too, and Larry.” Not that she does much at all when she does move, except start the car to distract Tony.

 

Back in town when everything is all wrapped up, Pat tells Denise, the presumptuous cad, that he’s arranged for the two of them to get a week off, which they will use for a honeymoon, because they’re going to get married that afternoon. Ever-passive Denise responds that she forgot to feed the cat! “She ran out of words. Patrick had said honeymoon…” Denise’s friend Peggy wants to hear all about what happened with Ed Hale’s attacker, but Denise says she’ll tell her all about it next week, because “tonight I’m going to be very busy,” wink, wink.

 

This book has several large and unpardonable  flaws. Denise is so inert in every other aspect of her life that it’s very difficult to believe she would plan and enact the disappearance of two people she’s never met, and put them up in a house that holds horrific memories for her, that she hasn’t visited since the day she discovered her murdered family there. (Who cleaned up the mess is never revealed.) Even her intended doesn’t bother to ask her to marry him; he just tells her what’s what. Then the tragedy of her murdered family is a very large elephant throughout the book. It doesn’t have to have a tidy explanation—senseless crimes occur every day—but the book never spends any time at all addressing it, except to trot it out of the closet now and then to freak Denise out. (Her intended never even discusses it with her after he learns about it.) I don’t think this is something she could ever come to terms with, but she doesn’t have to; just thinking about how it shapes her life and the accommodations she has to make for it (like getting out of surgery?) make it something other than a grim sideshow that feels exploitative and disrespectful. The writing is not engaging or amusing, and I found Denise largely irritating. Since the only other book by this author (Once a Nurse … But Always a Woman) was pretty good, I’m especially disappointed to find that Nurse in Danger is a big dud.

Visiting Nurse

By Jeanne Judson, ©1957

Also published as A Doctor for the Nurse

Proud, lovely, ardently devoted to the great task of aiding the poor and helpless, Elizabeth Downer knew she had found her calling. But her passionate young heart was torn between two doctors, each arrogantly claiming her as his alone. Dr. Galland was darkly handsome. Sometimes she believed his youth and high spirits hid a deep understanding of human suffering. Dr. Denham, quite but strong, was intensely dedicated to medicine. His burning eyes were like the eyes of a priest. And one of these doctors had a secret—a secret which Elizabeth was forced to face. How this warmly courageous girl forged the life she desired is the theme of this moving and fascinating story.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“You’re not old enough to be a public health nurse and you’re much too pretty. You can’t expect sensible people to take you seriously.”

“All blind dates were either dull or obstreperous. Attractive men could find their own girls.”

“She was delighted to find that among his other and more obvious attractions, he must be a most accomplished, tactful, and spontaneous liar.”

“What fools men were. They pretended to think nothing of dress, but they really saw little else in a girl. Helen of Troy in a dusty uniform, wearing clumsy-looking shoes, wouldn’t attract a second glance from any of them.”

“Link never let anything as prosaic as statistics interfere with his exuberant optimism.”

REVIEW:
Elizabeth Downer is a county nurse in Cornwall, PA. She’s working with two doctors: handsome Dr. Kit Galland, who is the nephew of Dr. Purvis, the town’s most senior MD, and is expected to step into his practice when the old man retires; and Dr. Frederic Denham, who has no connections and works tirelessly. But Dr. Denham is also a little creepy; when she first meets him, “She was trying to think what his eyes reminded her of—something disturbing. They were the eyes of a zealot, claiming a sacrifice of self that was beyond ordinary people. Dr. Denham’s eyes were as hard and bright as diamonds.” So right away we understand which of the two Elizabeth hankers for, and it isn’t too much longer before we figure out that he’s not the one who most wants her. (This makes the back cover blurb, above in italics, a complete fiction, one of my personal pet peeves.)

Soon it is revealed that Dr. Denham is to become the new chief of medicine at the local hospital—the very position that Dr. Purvis had been reserving for Dr. Galland. A wealthy foundation has approached the hospital, offering to finance a large new wing, but only on condition that Dr. Denham is made chief. Elizabeth tries to stay neutral in her opinion of Dr. Denham, but soon he’s asked her to dinner and is pressing her to help him in his new role. “You’re going to help me. We’re going to do this together,” he says, eagerly pressing her hand. Then he remembers he has patients waiting and abruptly ends the date, leaving her to get home from the restaurant on her own. After that Dr. Denham seems to pop up and invite himself to lunch a lot. Elizabeth’s friend Peggy warns her: “Whatever you do, don’t go and get yourself engaged to Frederic Denham. You couldn’t call your soul your own, married to a man like that. He’s the kind of man who would want to give you improving books.” Sure enough, he drops by with a “very heavy, much footnoted tome on geriatrics.”

Elizabeth is becoming increasingly disenchanted with Dr. Denham, changing her customary path home so she won’t pass by his office, but he finds her anyway and refuses her refusal of dinner with him. Unfortunately, she lacks the spine to insist. “Being with him was not a relaxation. It was more like a continuation of work,” she thinks—and then he tells her that he is a single man in want of a wife, and goes on to explain his plans for the future at length. “With a little training, a little guidance from me, you can learn to control your impulses,” says the romantic fool. She turns him down, saying she does not love him—and that he has not said the he loves her. “Oh, that—I forgot,” he says, and then kisses her so awkwardly that he is provoked to tell her, “I’ve never approved of the promiscuous familiarities.” He leaves, saying he’ll give her time to think it over, completely missing the fact that Elizabeth has already declined. “She realized that he believed she had refused him because she thought the honor or the responsibility too great.” (Shades of Jane Austen, anyone?) After this, Dr. Denham becomes increasingly irritating, and there’s “something disturbingly proprietary in his indulgent smiles which were more frequent than formerly.”

But she is also working with Dr. Galland on her rounds, and indeed becomes his patient when she falls and breaks her wrist (it’s a Colles fracture, if you’re curious). Dr. Galland is dropping by daily with flowers and mystery stories, while Dr. Denham stops in to lecture her on the virtues of constant study: “It is only by reading the conclusions of many different people that you attain the critical faculty to judge the value of a book for yourself,” he drones. He objects to Dr. Galland’s flowers and mysteries: “It’s high time we let him know that I’m going to marry you,” he says, still not hearing Elizabeth’s constant refusals: “You can’t marry me if I don’t say yes,” she tells him, and thinks, “He couldn’t—could he?”

Then Dr. Denham’s secret is revealed—he is actually very rich and the driving force behind the foundation that bought his own promotion in the hospital. His intention in his new position is to establish new medical techniques: “Cornwall is to be a sort of guinea-pig town,” Peggy tells Elizabeth. “When he has our hospital running as smoothly as a Russian slave labor camp, he’ll go on to some other place and do it all over again, until he’s made the entire country over the way he wants it.” This does not improve him in Elizabeth’s eyes—indeed, it sinks him: “One can’t feel sorry for a multimillionaire.” So now it’s just a matter of convincing him that Elizabeth isn’t going to marry him, and of convincing Dr. Galland that he should, which comes to pass in an enjoyable scene. The sweet ending is almost undone by an unexpected turn from one character on the penultimate page, but it’s a minor glitch.

This book is delightfully written, full of little gems like, “She rose quickly from the rocking chair, decanting three cats from her lap,” or “Peggy managed to get possession of the cakes and the absence of Mrs. Loftus by a combination of flattery and ruthlessness.” Peripheral characters are well-drawn and amusing, and the story itself is gentle and meandering. Most of the story is about Elizabeth’s patients and how she wrangles them and their problems, and frankly it’s difficult to remember much about the plot after the book is over, but it has a pleasant, sweet touch that lingers. It’s similar to the other Jeanne Judson book I’ve read, City Nurse, even down to the Austen-esque proposals. But that just means you have two delightful books to linger over, lucky you.

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I, Theresa, Registered Nurse

By Diane Frazer

(pseud. Dorothy Fletcher), ©1965
Cover illustration by Harry Bennett

“You see, Greg,” she said soberly, “nobody really knows when my birthday is.” He turned around and looked into her face. “What is this, a gag? Surely your mother knows. She was there after all.” She sat up straight. “Nobody knows when I was born. I’m not really the daughter of Stewart and Alicia Winslow; they adopted me when I was a little girl. It’s rather like a Victorian novel. But it’s fact, no fiction.” “But who … but they must know who …” “No, I was found, it seems, asleep and almost frozen to death in some woods in France, near the Swiss border. The Winslows took me from a home for such war orphans in France. All they know is that I was about four when I came up to the French peasants who discovered me and said, Je suis Thérèse …”

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“She was a nurse but she was also a girl. And being a girl she had, more or less naturally, asked for and received all pertinent information about the male members of the staff of Goodswill Hospital.”

 

“We don’t look very tempting in those uniforms, do we?”

 

REVIEW:

With a name like Theresa Winslow, you can probably already guess that our heroine comes from the proper side of Central Park—Park Avenue, in fact. She became a nurse “not out of need for earning a living,” but I’m sorry to tell you we never really learn what inspires Tessa to be the superb nurse that she is. She’s dating Greg Halsey “—that was the Halseys—” who is a Southampton neighbor of hers, but she finds him frivolous. Rather, she has the hots for Dr. Thomas Blair, who, for some strange reason, treats her with “a marked reserve” though he jokes around with the other nurses. Hmmmm.

 

One of her patients, as we enter the book, is Franz Grauer, a withdrawn, elderly Hungarian man with no visitors, chronic stomach pain, and a number tattooed on his arm. She is strangely intrigued by him, and visits him in her off-duty hours. He mentions that his daughter Susanna (and I must mention my delight at finding a character with my name; it doesn’t happen often!) died at the age of five in Europe during the war. She then tells him her own story: She was found in France, wandering in the woods alone, when she was about four. All she could tell of her identity was, “Je suis Thérèse,” though she also spoke a smattering of both German and Spanish. She was adopted by the Winslows after the war but has always wondered about her origins.

 

(She’s told Greg this story, and his reaction, after appraising her “fair and milky skin,” her hazel eyes and reddish gold hair, is that she “had just the coloring and texture once would expect in a child of pure English-Scotch-Irish background. […] It was simply not possible that she could have come from some middle-European background where, as everyone knew, all kinds of influences tend to mar the pure beauty which—Greg Halsey thought sincerely, could only be found in Anglo-Saxons. There was not the slightest hint of anything else.” This is a turning point in their relationship; she tells him he is ridiculous and stops seeing him.)

 

She is fascinated by Mr. Grauer: “From the very first minute that she had seen Mr. Grauer, she had the strange sensation of having seen him before. The odd feeling that he was no stranger to her but someone she had known, someone who had been very close to her. Someone she mustn’t lose again.” But her interest develops into an obsession. She loses her head and asks Tom Blair, on their first date, to keep Mr. Grauer in the hospital even though all tests on him have come back negative; Tom feels that the problem is either psychosomatic or that Mr. Grauer is a malingerer. He responds by chewing her out, reminding her of the shortage of beds for truly sick patients, and adds, “I see your kind every day, Junior Leaguers coyly doing volunteer hospital work and feeling just marvelous about it. Well, I don’t happen to think that a hospital should be a playground for spoiled and satiated society girls.” Ouch!

 

Undeterred, however, her lapse in moral judgment continues, and she is caught in Mr. Larsen’s office attempting to obtain Mr. Grauer’s wallet—all patients’ valuables are kept in a locked cabinet there—where he keeps a photograph of his daughter, which he has refused to allow her to see. She’s so far gone that she is “jolted” that Tom has not asked her out again after their initial date, apparently not recalling how disastrous it was or his disgust with her deteriorating personal and work ethic(s).

 

After Mr. Grauer has left the hospital without saying goodbye, she tracks him down at a shabby West Side address. She presses him to reveal his own history, and he tells her that he and his wife had fled Hungary with their daughter for occupied France—spoken only French to Susanna to help conceal their suspicious origins, and called her Thérèse as an alias—and that as they attempted to cross into Switzerland they were found by Nazis, though Susanna/Thérèse was able to hide and thus avoided capture. Our heroine is overjoyed, sweeping up her new father and depositing him at a better (East 63^rd Street) apartment and learning to cook Hungarian entrees for him. They invite Tom to dinner and he is again warming to Tessa, though he is concerned about a future with her. “She had everything—position, family, money. How could you take care of a girl like that? What could you give her, in the early, lean years of doctoring?”

 

Now comes the philosophical debate over who owns Tessa. The characters’ attitudes suggest that she is a piece of property in a battle between the Winslows and her birth parents. Mr. Grauer asks her what she would do if she were to find her birth parents, and she says, “I would go to them. Go where I belonged.” He answers, “And give up all you have?” as if, somehow, her two sets of parents are an either-or choice. Mr. Winslow fears “that there might be anyone who had a right to Tessa—a stronger right than he and his wife.” The Winslows “have acquired a right” to Tessa by adopting her, but “a [birth] father’s right is stronger.”

 

If her parents have a right to own Tessa, her future husband, once found, apparently not only supersedes but also obliterates all prior comers. “I just found her and now soon someone will come and take her away again,” says Mr. Grauer, referring to this husband. Tessa’s mother, concerned that birth parents could take her place, is hoping for a marriage between Greg and Tessa, seeing this “as a final break between Tessa and her past.” Tom tells Mr. Grauer that “someone would claim Tessa one of these days. In that case she would be with neither you nor the Winslows.”

 

To protect his so-called rights, Mr. Grauer is thinking about going back to Hungary and taking Tessa with him. When Tom disagrees with this plan, Mr. Grauer asks, “Do you not think I have a right to ask my daughter to come with me? Do you not think I have a right to some happiness after all I went through?” Curiously, Tessa’s rights, and her opinion on the matter, are not considered for one minute. His plan to move overseas with Tessa is his decision; Tessa has no say in the matter, and it is simply assumed that she must go with him.

 

Suspicious that Mr. Grauer is not really Tessa’s birth father, Tom—who is interested in making his own bid for Tessa—asks a friend to look into Mr. Grauer’s past, saying that there is a “legacy” at stake, “and I want to make sure he’s entitled to it.” When the results from this investigation are in, he goes to see Mr. Grauer, who circumvents what he can see is coming by asking if Tom has come to ask for Tessa’s hand in marriage. Tom protests that “I haven’t said a single romantic thing to Tessa.” Again, what does Tessa’s opinion matter? “When I was young, the girl was the last to know,” Mr. Grauer answers. “The most important thing was to ask the father.” So Tom immediately asks for Tessa. Mr. Grauer, interestingly, refuses—then says that he’s not Tessa’s father, and he knows that Tom is aware of this, but how did Tom find out? “She is an altogether different racial type,” he answers—bringing us back to poor jilted Greg’s response.

 

But there are other bits of evidence, and Mr. Grauer admits all. Tom realizes that if he tells Tessa the truth about Mr. Grauer, she will most likely reject him—so he will lose Tessa either way. But then Mr. Grauer offers his olive branch: If Tessa decides to marry Tom, Mr. Grauer does not have to be dethroned as the birth father. “One loses a daughter, but one gains a son. Shall we drink to that, Dr. Blair?” It’s a done deal, and Tessa is bought and sold over glasses of Hungarian wine.

 

But then the Winslows return from Europe, and Dad has a final trick up his sleeve. While abroad, he’d done some research of his own and found an elderly curate in France who remembered the day Tessa and her birth parents came to town. The parents were shot trying to escape, he’d discovered, but the little girl, who had told the curate, “Je m’appelle Thérèse,” had not been found. But all interested parties win in the end: The last chapter has Tessa going to visit the graveyard in Mornex, southeast of Geneva, with her new husband (guess who that is?). Despite getting married, she hasn’t written off Mr. Grauer, though he’s found a Hungarian lady friend and “maybe her job was about done” with him.

 

The book has a very pretty ending, and it certainly raises a lot of interesting topics: identity, what it means to be a parent, relationships and the rights that come with them. The book doesn’t actually resolve the issues about who owns Tessa, unless we award her to her husband, so all that philosophical wrangling for her seems like a waste of time. The writing in the book is not particularly special, but the author has built a unique storyline, which I really appreciate after 178 VNRNs that seem to share the same three or five plots, and if you like to ponder the issues, this book is worth reading.

2012 VNRN Awards

As the new year breaks open before us, it is time once again to trot out the third annual Vintage Nurse Romance Novel Awards—and also, perhaps, to ponder the question, Don’t I have anything better to do right now? In the event that your answer is no, I shall inform you of the rules of the contest: Winners are chosen from the VNRNs I have read this year, which for you statistics geeks is 50 different books by 34 different authors. The Best Authors category is cumulative, including all the VNRNs reviewed for this blog, but only authors with more than one review are included; the One-Hit Wonders category is reserved for the best of this group.





BEST BOOKS
1.       City Doctor, by Thomas Stone (pseudonym of Florence Stonebraker)
2.       He Married a Doctor, by Faith Baldwin
3.       Walk out of Darkness, by Arlene Karson
4.       Winged Victory for Nurse Kerry, by Patricia Libby
5.       A Nurse Comes Home, by Ethel Hamill (pseudonym of Jean Francis Web III)

WORST BOOKS
1.       Nurse Jean’s Strange Case, by Arlene Hale
2.       Nurse on Nightmare Island, by Lois Eby
3.       Roxanne, Company Nurse, by Zillah Macdonald and Josie Johnson
4.       Psychiatric Nurse, by Mary Mann Fletcher


BEST COVERS
1.       Date with Danger?, cover illustration by Harry Bennett
2.       West Coast Nurse, cover illustration by Bill Johnson
3.       Dude Ranch Nurse
4.       Mystery Nurse
5.       Palm Beach Nurse



BEST QUOTES
1.       “I meant to get down to Dr. Carson’s shindig yesterday, but we had an unexpected polio case brought in, and I was all day on the telephone locating another iron lung.” A Nurse Comes Home, by Ethel Hamill (pseudonym of Jean Francis Webb III)
2.       “Every attractive woman should take time out for love now and again. It keeps you young, helps the circulation, and it’s very broadening. Don’t you want to be broadened?” City Doctor, by Thomas Stone (pseudonym of Florence Stonebraker
3.       “The woman in her transcended the physician momentarily, as Serenity thought to herself, ‘She does something to that hair.’ ” His Wife, the Doctor, by Joseph McCord
4.       “Why don’t you marry the girl and get her out of your life?” Love Comes to Dr. Starr, by William Johnston
5.        “You look swell in that orange slacks suit, Diane.” Mystery Nurse, by Diana Douglas (pseudonym of Richard Wilkes-Hunter)
6.       “You mean you don’t know how to do brain surgery? What kind of a doctor are you, then?” The Nurse and the Pirate, by Peggy Gaddis
7.       “Miss Shannon is holding her own: Her temperature is normal, her blood pressure is normal, her appetite is normal, she wanted champagne for breakfast. We think she will live.” Nurse Kitty’s Secret, by Fern Shepard (pseudonym of Florence Stonebraker)
8.       “You’ll still have coffee with me, won’t you? I hope you’re not afraid of me. My doctor wouldn’t have given me a pass if he thought I’d go berserk, you know.” Psychiatric Nurse, by Mary Mann Fletcher
9.       “Marrying Sherri won’t mean a life sentence, honey. Her marriages never last very long.” Nurse Kitty’s Secret, by Fern Shepard (pseudonym of Florence Stonebraker)
10.     “See that he marries you—and no more foolishness about running around with a street gang!” Ivy Anders, Night Nurse, by Helen B. Castle


BEST CHAPTER TITLE
1.       “Ann Shares a Fateful Moment with ‘B.M.’ ” Nurse Todd’s Strange Summer, by Zillah K. Macdonald and Vivian J. Ahl



BEST AUTHORS
1.    Faith Baldwin (3.9 average, based on 3 reviews)
3.    Marguerite Mooers Marshall (3.7 average, based on 2 reviews)
3.    Patricia Libby (3.7 average, based on 2 reviews)
4.    Ethel Hamill (3.6 average, based on 3 reviews)
5.    Helen B. Castle (3.3 average, based on 2 reviews)



ONE-HIT WONDERS: Best VNRNs by authors with only one review
1.       “K”, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
2.       A Challenge for Nurse Melanie, by Isabel Moore
3.       Surgical Call, by Margaret Sangster
4.       City Nurse, by Jeanne Judson
5.       Nurse Pro Tem, by Glenna Finley
6.       Walk out of Darkness, by Arlene Karson

7.       Nurse at the Fair, by Dorothy Cole