Millionaire Nurse

By Katherine Foreman, ©1965

Cover illustration by Mort Engel

 

$1,160,303.54 is a fortune any way you look at it. And that’s what penniless young Andrea Corbury discovered she’d inherited—just minutes after receiving the R.N. degree she’d struggled so long for. Andrea faced a hard and fateful decision. Would she practice the profession she was dedicated to? Or would she live the life of a gay society heiress—and earn the scorn of the handsome young doctor who loved her?

 

GRADE: B-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“He had been a country doctor of the old school, and it was his astonishing contention that the only two things essential to the performance of a successful operation were a surgeon and a patient. All else sank into comparative unimportance. A surgeon’s task was to get results by any means at hand, and how he got them was of no great concern to the patient. A good surgeon, he maintained, should be able to do a good job whether he did it in the most modern hospital or on a kitchen table in a farmhouse. Kitchen surgery had taught him invaluable facts, chief among them being the lesson that clean and swift operating did more to minimize infection than all the bothersome face masks and white gowns ever made. Yes, in his later years he had worked in some very find hospitals, but some of his best work had been done in farm kitchens, in his shirt sleeves, with a few boiled instruments in a dishpan. He hadn’t much use for assistants. They got in the way.”

 

“It’s against nature for a woman to take no pride in her looks!”

 

REVIEW:

Through great personal hardship and dedicated perseverance, Andrea Corbury has received her nurse’s degree—and no sooner is the papyrus is placed in her hand than she is whisked to a meeting with the attorney of her recently deceased Uncle Jefferson. He had loaned her money for her studies, to be repaid, of course—but now it seems the old geezer was loaded and left it all to her if she actually made it through nursing school. So now the whopping sum of $1,160,303.54 is hers.

 

Naturally, she and her sister, 17-year-old Joan, go completely to pieces. They buy a huge mansion, renovate it to the latest tastes, outfit themselves in sables and satins, and spend their nights partying at the country club. Much to the disappointment of Andrea’s long-time beau, Dr. Fred Falk, who feels she has thrown away her values; this he tells her when she proposes to him shortly after the interior decorators have had their way with her new mansion. So she starts seeing other men. When she meets society playboy Gerald Maitland at the country club, where the likes of Fred Falk cannot afford to go, she finds Gerald “coldly unapproachable,” and she was “a little frightened of him.” A minor incident with a drunk in which Gerald knocks the poor sap out shows her that Gerald is “a dangerous man,” and that “the polished manners cloaked a tiger.” Naturally he becomes her main beau. What is wrong with these women?

 

He proposes, but eventually she wises up and turns him down, instead becoming infatuated with Lee Archer, a painter newly returned from Paris who is being pressured by his father to take up the family business. The question of his talent is at best dubious: His canvases haven’t arrived yet from France, the “atmosphere” of Texas is not conducive to painting, and he protests a bit too loudly that art is his true calling! Like all serious artists, though, he spends a lot of time drinking, but Andrea feels that Lee is so in love with her that he cannot leave Grenville, and it’s the torture of being denied his art that causes him to drink, so “to that extent, she was responsible for his drinking.” To save him, then, she decides to marry him, so they can go anywhere and he can start painting again. And believe it or not, Andrea marries Lee before the book is half over.

 

But at the reception Lee becomes blindingly drunk and scoffs loudly that now he has all the money he needs, and he can go back to Paris and Marie: “All I needed was t’ catch a millionaire sucker,” he sneers. So that’s the end of that marriage—fortunately, we are reminded later, never consummated. And soon he’s been killed in a communist uprising that he has joined somewhere in South America.

 

So now it’s back to Gerald, who has become a meeker, nicer beau. And meanwhile, Andrea is getting worried: Gosh, if Gerald won’t have her, she’ll die a lonely old maid. What would she do to fill her time without him? If only she “could discover in herself an all-absorbing interest,” she thinks. “She could think of nothing that would fulfill her own urge toward worthwhile endeavor.” Nursing never enters her mind, the dumb twit. So when Gerald finally pops the question, she is so relieved! But not three minutes later, the old bossy Gerald resurfaces with a bound; he’d just been holding his breath under the surface all this time. He plans a cocktail party at which they will announce their engagement, where he preens and struts, staring at Andrea “in cold possession. In his regard she became a chattel.” Fortunately, though, if Andrea was a dolt to fall for Lee, she is a wiser widow now, and turns Gerald down flat in front of everyone: “She would not be robbed of her will and become a slave to his.” Gerald responds by knocking out Andrea’s hired man, fleeing the state, and eventually turning himself in to the authorities, where he is found to be psychotic and committed to the state asylum. Let that be a lesson to you, boys: Be nice to your girlfriends.

 

After this last setback, Andrea, instead of rejoicing over her narrow escape, instead lapses into a deep depression. And the only thing that pulls her out of it is when she discovers something that she can devote her life to with selflessness and joy—that’s right, another man. Once she has him in hand, then she can turn her attention to other things—like transforming the house, yet again, this time into a cottage hospital, and maybe working on its staff. It will cost about a million dollars to get the hospital built, but apparently she and Joan only spent $160,303.54 in all their sprees, so it’s all good! Especially with Uncle Jefferson smiling down from heaven on the newly wise heiress: “Knowing that the true worth of money lay in the wise use of it, he had balanced her strength of character against the pitfalls of misusing it; and she had almost failed his trust. If he could see and hear her now, he would know that she had finally won through to glorious rewards far more precious than money.” So if you should happen to inherit a million dollars, heed Andrea Corbury’s advice, and don’t go falling for controlling, money-hungry men; just give it all away—starving nurse novel bloggers would be particularly worthy charities—and you will be so much the happier for it.

Small Town Nurse

By Emily Thorne
(pseud. Jeanne Judson), ©1956

Also published as Enter Nurse Marian

Diagnosis: Loneliness

Prescription: Love

As simply as that, Nurse Marian Rutledge prescribed for the people of Bridgetown. There was Marian’s brother Clive, who frequently thought that something—or someone—was missing from his life. And Alberta Thwaits, who withdrew into one small corner of a dusty, rundown mansion. Or Olive Cressett, a timid spinster, whose domineering mother constantly “protected” her from unhappiness—and men. For these, Nurse Marian could make quick diagnoses—and find just the right cures. But for herself, she was as helpless as any other woman in love.

 

GRADE: A

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Science ought to be the tool of the doctor. Instead, many modern doctors are the slaves of science. They depend too much on gadgetry and the discoveries of the research chemists. We laugh at the doctors who two hundred years ago and less used to bleed everyone, no matter what their ailment. I dare say bleeding was good for a man suffering from too much roast beef and port wine, but it killed the people with tuberculosis. Just yesterday almost every doctor was giving penicillin to everyone with anything from a head cold to double pneumonia. Anyone with average intelligence can get though medical school. It’s how you apply your knowledge afterward that counts.”

 

REVIEW:

This book snuck up on me. Part of the disguise was the similarity between its cover and that of Nurse against the Town, which was pretty bad. Also I didn’t recognize the author’s name, which is actually a pen name of one of my favorite VNRN authors, Jeanne Judson (do not miss the delightful Visiting Nurse and City Nurse). So I was gently pulled into its spell, and I got possibly even as far as chapter five before I realized with a start that Small Town Nurse is a true gem.

 

Nurse Marian Rutledge has returned home to visit her brother Clive, 11 years older than she, who is a widower and GP in—guess—a small town, Bridgetown, Pennsylvania. He’s been a widower for five years, so he has a battle axe of a housekeeper, Mrs. Doughty, who has no first name and feels that every item of furniture should be pushed against a wall, and that every table must have a doily on it. Soon after arriving, Marian is enlisted to help with an auction that will raise funds for the town’s first hospital. And before long, she’s convinced to quit her job—she works in a tuberculosis sanitarium—and sign on as nurse for the other town doc, Thomas Labadie. He’s a no-nonsense sort, nice to children, “but that was probably just professional geniality,” Marian thinks. “As a human being, he left much to be desired—unimaginative and utterly without a saving sense of humor.” For Clive’s part, he thinks Tom “would expect the woman he married to carry her own weight. He ought to marry a girl who would stand up to him, fight for her rights and maybe make him a little ashamed of himself now and then. It would do Tom Labadie good to meet a woman like that.” Now, just who could that woman be? Hmmm.

 

Tom’s secretary, Alberta Thwaits, is in love with her boss, but he “was no more impressed with her than he was with the files she kept so neatly.” Marian, fearing Alberta will dislike her as a potential rival for the doctor, works hard to win Alberta over by encouraging her to come over and redecorate Clive’s house, much to Mrs. Doughty’s horror. The two quickly become fast friends, and their decorating efforts are fun to watch, as is their work on the auction. There’s a big dance at the auction’s end, when Marian becomes deliriously ill with pneumonia, and the scene is written with such subtle brilliance that it calls to my mind the time David Copperfield gets drunk (the passage is quoted here).

 

This is the best sort of VNRN, in which the story focuses on the heroine and her life with her friends, her battles and her victories. The characters here are delightful—I haven’t even mentioned the horsey next-door neighbor, Norma Thomas, and her invalid father, Judge Thomas, who dispense humor and wisdom with both hands—and Mrs. Doughty’s replacement, an enormous black woman named Abby Cameron, a genius in the kitchen who is recognized as such and highly respected for her talents. (She does tend to talk in the heavily stylized vernacular of black VNRN domestics, unfortunately, which does make me cringe.) The writing and the story are gentle, with an easy humor that doesn’t really translate to the Best Quotes section well, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. The only drawback to the book is that Marian essentially collapses in a lovesick swoon into the arms of a man she has not much liked up until the last few pages, but I will overlook that one quibble since we foresaw this ending long ago, and Ms. Judson gets it over quick and concludes the book with an amusing little joke. All in all, Small Town Nurse emphatically cements Jeanne Judson’s reputation as one of the very best VNRN authors on my shelf.

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Nurse Christy

By Isabel Stewart Way, ©1968

 

For Christine “Christy” Merrill, life couldn’t be more wonderful. She had her job as an orthopedic nurse at City General, and she had Paul … Paul Edfield whom she’d known and loved all her life. And one day soon, she and Paul would have their dream come true; he would finish his doctor’s training and open his own practice and she would be his nurse. But that day, suddenly, wasn’t coming soon enough … for Paul. He saw Christy, young, lovely, “wasting” herself, waiting for him. And suddenly Paul decided no more waiting, no more med school. He would take a good job he’d been offered, and he and Christ would be married. But to Christy this was a betrayal of everything they had hoped and planned for … and for the first time she looked at Paul and asked herself if this was the man she wanted to marry … or some stranger she had never really known?

 

GRADE: C-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“I’m glad we ate early before we have to start worrying a lot.”

 

REVIEW:

I was initially tempted to write this book off as having one of the stupider heroines I’ve met, but now that I think about it, I’m considering putting it in the “You’ve come a long way, baby” category. From a vantage point of almost 50 years into the future, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between what we now see as backward cultural expectations and a lack of intelligence.

 

Nurse Christy Merrill, long engaged to medical school student Paul Edfield, is patiently looking for the day three years from now when Paul will finish school and his intern year and they will be able to marry. When he’s finally done with residency, they will move out to the country and start a GP practice together. Paul is working his way through school as a pharmacist, but the waiting and the struggling is killing him, so he tells Christy that he’s going to drop out of medical school and take a job selling drugs with a pharmaceutical company in California—which means they can get married right away and move to Los Angeles! Because being married to Christy is much more important to him than being a doctor!

 

Christy is more than a little flabbergasted in this big change of plan, and by the fact that Paul has already signed a contract when he decides to fill her in on his plans. “A man has to do what he thinks is best,” he explains, “without asking anybody else to share the blame if things go wrong.” Christy, horrified, tells him, “You had no right! It’s my life, too!” Which is absolutely true. The funny thing is that Christy acknowledges several times in this book that she doesn’t even really like nursing: “Nursing doesn’t mean a thing to me anymore! I wanted to be a nurse because of Paul’s plans.” Even if Paul’s new job means she would be quitting her job to raise babies, that’s no consolation; the real blow is that Paul is “cheating himself like this, sacrificing his whole future to marry her sooner,” she thinks. “He had thrown it all away in a terrible useless gesture.” It seems she wants Paul to be a doctor more than he does, so she refuses to marry him, and he drives off into the sunset.

 

She immediately has second thoughts, but it’s too late. “She wanted to write him, to phone him, but how could she do that, when she was not sure that he really wanted her?” He’s told her to call him in California if she needs him, but this is not invitation enough for dopey Christy, who points out that Paul did not tell her to call him if she changed her mind, just if she “needed” him, “and the office phone number was just to call in case of any emergency!” Good point. So she mopes around for endless pages, whispering to herself, “Paul! Paul! Call me again!”

 

And dating Tommy Treonne, indolent son of a wealthy businessman, on the side. Tommy is soon proposing marriage, and mentions that he’d talked about it with his parents before popping the question. “Somehow, it rankled, as if he had discussed every phase of this matter with his family,” curiously enough. Later, when a hurricane is bearing down on the Texas town, Tommy comes to pick up Christy and flee the county, telling her that this is what his father had advised they do. “You asked him? You made somebody else decide for you?” You see where this is going, but I didn’t see her point—asking for advice from your family is, after all, essentially what she had wanted Paul to do and why she’s angry with him, for “not even talking things out, making all the decisions, with no discussion with her ahead of time.” Now suddenly discussion is a bad thing? Yes, it is, and she writes Paul a note, telling him, “I was wrong. A man should make his own decisions and stand by them all the way through.” Yuck.

 

Now we have the kind of ending that Peggy Gaddis is fond of employing: The hero admits he was wrong, but the heroine decides, no, she was wronger! Paul, concerned for Christy’s safety after the hurricane, returns to town and tells her, “You had a right to help decide our future, because it was as much yours as mine.” But Christy throws her gains away, saying, “My future belongs to you. All I want is to be with you always!” If this doesn’t make you vomit, the book’s final treacly sentence will finish the job for you. So what do you think? Is Christy a moron, or a victim of a sexist time that urged women to disregard their personal desires and careers for a husband? Maybe both, but either way, it adds up to a book—and a heroine—that are just irritating, and not worth reading.

Traveling Nurse

By Jane Corby, ©1965

 

Nurse Sharon Stone always craved adventure. J. Morton Bishop, a wealthy hypochondriac, liked traveling to unusual places. And he took Sharon along as his nurse-companion. But when Bishop no longer needed her, would she be able to give up her exciting new way of life? Did she love Doctor Mike Baylis enough to return to Plainsville as a small town doctor’s wife?

 

GRADE: C

 

BEST QUOTES:

“The only thing that mattered was the expression of the intense, preoccupied man standing before her, looking at her as a person. It was an unusual experience—one she valued because it happened so seldom. Like J. Morton Bishop, there were many men who looked at her and saw someone who wore clothes well and was, they often said, beautiful. Or, like Dr. Maurice Hamilton, men saw her as an efficient nurse. But only rarely did a man give her credit for intelligence and pride and character.”

 

“I’ll take it for granted you are a great lover and most girls swoon with delight when you make a pass at them.”

 

“I’ve been sure from the minute I saw you that you’re everything I want in a wife: red-gold hair, green eyes, a perfect figure …”

 

REVIEW:

J. Morton Bishop is “a hard-hitting businessman who had successfully out-maneuvered all competitors in the hardware price war which had just been concluded,” and we’re not talking computers. He’s also a hypochondriac, and so has decided that he needs to be attended by a nurse at all times. Enter Sharon Stone—nurse, not actress—who decides she would like the job.

 

There’s just one hitch—her boyfriend, Dr. Mike Baylis. He’s been telling Sharon that they cannot marry for several years, until he’s finished his training. But now that Sharon’s been offered a glamorous job, he’s decided to take a job as a GP in upstate New York right away. “If she stayed on this glamour job, she would be spoiled for the simpler but more satisfying way of life he wanted,” Mike feels, so the only answer is for her to refuse the job with Bishop and marry him right away. “Can you deny that you’re trying to live like a duchess, without the title?” he shouts at her. It’s hard to see how a few months in luxurious hotels will ruin her forever, but such are the absurdities of a jealous male. Sharon, however, ignores his objections; “she could not let him go on assuming she would meekly follow whatever course he decided upon.”

 

And so off Bishop and entourage—which includes his son Luke, secretary Barney Armstrong, and now Sharon—for New Orleans, Yucatan, Denver, and San Francisco, where Bishop meets with a slick doctor in very swank offices who charges outrageous sums of money—$250!—in cash for consultations. Dr. Mellon refuses to allow Sharon to accompany her patient during the exam, and gives Bishop a $150 bottle of unnamed pills to take three times a day. When Sharon asks the pharmacist what’s in the pills, she’s told, “It wouldn’t do for me to give out the information. Professional ethics, you know.” Strange ethics that don’t allow a patient to know what medication they’re being given, but Sharon just nods and apologizes: “Of course. I shouldn’t have asked.”

 

Dr. Mellon doesn’t stop with the pills; he’s also pressing Bishop to enter his sanitarium for a month to regain his “precarious” health. In her alarm and conviction that Bishop is being swindled, Sharon calls Mike, who flies out and investigates, soon discovering that the pills Bishop has been taking are placebos. He also spends a day at the library and learns that Dr. Mellon has been investigated for tax fraud. So Sharon marches into Dr. Mellon’s office and demands that he tell Bishop that he is perfectly well, or she will call the IRS about his cash operation and the AMA about his sugar pills. Needless to say, the very next day, Bishop gets a call informing him that he’s completely healthy!

 

Back in New York a week later, there’s a big article in the paper about Dr. Mellon’s recent bust for fraud. It appears that the timing was a happy coincidence, but Sharon now takes credit for having “cured” Bishop of hypochondria and gives notice, returning to her pedestrian nursing job in the hospital. Now it’s just a matter of time before she agrees to go to Plainsville (and I have to wonder if the town name was deliberately chosen as a foil to the glitz of Mr. Bishop’s lifestyle) as Mike’s wife. Which comes as quite a letdown for a number of reasons. The issues of whether her fling with luxury has spoiled her, and of Mike’s presumption in trying to tell her what she should or shouldn’t do in her working life, are left completely unresolved. I wasn’t much of a fan of the domineering Dr. Baylis, and I wasn’t thrilled that Sharon, in the end, actually does meekly follow whatever course he decided upon, living up to Mike’s suggestion, early in the book, that “you’d better get this nonsense about traveling out of your system. As the wife of a doctor who is trying to build a place for himself in some community, you won’t have time for such nonsense.” In my opinion, it’s her choices after she gets home that are nonsense, but even without this perfunctory and unsatisfying ending, Traveling Nurse doesn’t have much to offer.

Young Doctor Kirkdene

By Elizabeth Hoy, ©1955

 

Doctor Kirkdene had made it quite plain that as a rising young medic he considered domestic entanglements and distractions as hindrances. But Nurse Lindy couldn’t help hoping that in spite of all his theorizing he would eventually come to love her!

 

GRADE: B+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“You mean, you actually make beds, wash patients, do dreadful terrifying dressings, watch gory operations without fainting?”

 

“Career women ought to marry docile men—otherwise they are heading for disaster.”

 

REVIEW:

Nurse Anne Linden—Lindy throughout this book—is hopelessly in love with Dr. Kirkdene, who has no first name and is just known as Kirk. But the man, gorgeous and self-confident, is a shameless cad: “His conquests were legion; hearts fell before him like nine-pins.” But one night Lindy, off in a back room for a sanctioned nap while on night duty (and how I wish such a humane break were more widespread), is followed by the flirtatious Kirk. No sooner has he planted a wet one on her when the door flings open and the night supervisor catches them in the clinch. As if that isn’t bad enough, word gets out that Kirk has left his post in the ED, and when an emergency came in, the nurse there was unable to find him and the patient survived only through her quick thinking.

 

With the two of them about to be tossed not just out on the street but to the metaphoric wolves, Kirk does what any enterprising, ambitious young man would do in similar circumstances: He lies, telling the head of the hospital that he had just proposed to Lindy when they were discovered. This makes everything all right and saves them both—but now they have to pretend they’re engaged.

 

And pretend they do, through an extensive 192 pages. Lindy is angry at the sham, secretly wishing it were real, watching Kirk with alternating fury at his coldly shameless ambition to nail a post at a new pediatrics ward and reverential awe at his complete and selfless devotion to his patients, to the point that he risks his career to help them. There are a few side plots, but this is essentially the book in a nutshell. It may seem simple—in truth, it is—but Elizabeth Hoy is enough of a storyteller to make this little story worth reading.

 

After Elizabeth Hoy’s outstanding Nurse Tennant, I went shopping for more of her books. Young Doctor Kirkdene does not live up to its superlative sister, but it’s certainly better than the other title I found, Doctor Garth. The writing is easy and charming, with occasional pretty phrases like, “Sensibly she reminded herself of these things, while her singing heart went its own wild way.” And few VNRN writers can make you feel so acutely the wretchedness of a young woman pining over an unrequited love—she pulls me back to miseries I haven’t experienced since high school. It must be admitted that the length of this book does get a bit tedious, and I found myself wishing the miserable pair could just have one honest conversation and put a quick end to it—indeed, the end, when that finally does occur, was a bit of a letdown. But all things considered, this is a rarity among VNRNs, a novel that actually hurts, and so I happily suggest you make an appointment at your earliest convenience with Young Doctor Kirkdene.

Doctor Dee

By Elizabeth Wesley
(pseud. Adeline McElfresh), ©1960

When Dr. Dee Bailey joined the surgical staff of big, modern Still River General Hospital to serve as anesthesiologist under Surgeon Arn Thurston she made an implacable enemy of Nurse Cele Maynard. For the young nurse was madly in love with the handsome surgeon and believed Dr. Dee wanted him, too. Then fate played into the hands of Nurse Maynard. A powerful underworld czar was brought for an emergency operation and Nurse Maynard listened on an extension phone as a sinister voice offered Dr. Dee “real money, a hundred grand—if he don’t come through that operation.” When Phil Roscoe died on the table, the young nurse, almost insane with triumphant malice, made her accusation—Dr. Dee Bailey had taken a man’s life for a hundred thousand dollars!

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“Let a doctor be personable and good-looking, and they don’t trust him.”

REVIEW:

I didn’t realize until I started in on this book that it is actually the prequel to Dr. Dorothy’s Choice, which is not a book I cared for very much, since the Dr. Dorothy “Dee” Bailey was a spineless wimp buffeted about by the men in her life. Here, though, she shows a bit more starch, and with good writing to bolster the storyline, we’ve got a better yarn with Dee’s introduction, and one worth reading.

Dee has returned to Still River, Indiana, her home town, after medical school and residency and a job in New York, to work for Dr. Paul Courtney. She’s walked into a bit of a mess, however, taking control of the anesthesiology department from Celia Maynard, nurse anesthetist, who is not happy about her demotion. Cele is also ridiculously jealous because about a week after Dee’s arrival, Cele’s boyfriend, surgeon Arn Thurston, makes a major pass at Dee at a dinner party that he has attended with Cele on his arm. Dee does not show enough sense to tell Dr. Thurston to get lost, unfortunately, and the gossip about Arn and Dee’s moonlit peccadillo doesn’t make things any better between the two ladies.

Then, when a golf buddy of Arn’s collapses with a gallbladder attack, it is revealed that he has a bad heart due to an unspecified stab wound to the pericardium that makes surgery risky. Scrubbing up for surgery, Dee gets a phone call during which she is advised of a unique financial opportunity: Should former Sing Sing resident and wise guy Phil Roscoe not survive the surgery, her bank account could be $100,000 heavier. Then, when Phil does arrest on the table, Cele, present in the room as a curious onlooker, starts shrieking that she was eavesdropping on the extension and overheard the whole exchange, and that Dee is a murderer.

The rest of the book is a somewhat strange muddle in which a pack of fairly stupid gangsters threaten Arn to speak out against Dee or they will reveal an incident from his past in which he ordered a barbiturate for a young patient who subsequently died; he had denied having written the order and was never proven to be guilty of wrongdoing, though everyone suspected him of it. A bundle of cash is hurled onto Dee’s doorstep, and when she turns it over to the police, she is kidnapped. Instead of whimpering in a corner, though, she plots her escape, and thank goodness she decided to forego the heels for Keds this morning!

In the end, delivered back to Still River by a passing truck driver, Dee lands in the arms of a man she has dated but professed little interest in, so though we should see it coming, it still feels a bit odd. The fate of Dr. Thurston, the gangsters, Cele, and even Dee’s career is left unanswered, and unless there’s another book between this and Dr. Dorothy’s Choice, we can only guess how all that turns out. But there’s some nice writing and some fun characters in this book, and the plot is livelier than many. Even if you decide not to follow Dee’s career path going forward—and I can’t strongly recommend that you do—you could do a lot worse than to watch her debut.

Nurse on the Riviera

By Jane Converse (pseud. Adele Kay Maritano), ©1968

 

She took the posh European assignment to be near Bill Lindley. It seemed ideal, really. Private duty nurse to millionaire Richard Olner; guest of her patient, and his son and daughter on the glamorous Riviera. Once there, Terry Crane realized she’d made a mistake. The handsome and eligible Dr. Lindley was enjoying himself immensely—with the jet-set crowd. And Terry found herself alone in a climate perfect for love. … That’s when her millionaire patient turned romantic and his twenty-four-year-old son turned competitive. That’s when the amorous French doctor entered her life. For Terry Crane romance was everywhere on the Riviera—except in the eyes of the one man she really loved.

 

GRADE: C-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“It’s bad medicine to create a scene.”

 

REVIEW:

Terry Crane is in love with Dr. Bill Lindley. We’re told that on the second page, and we’ll just have to take Terry’s word for it, because we hardly know the man. They exchange a few perfunctory words about their patient, a wealthy 46-year-old businessman felled by a major stroke, and then the crickets start chirping. She agrees to tag along on the patient’s trip to France, despite the fact that he’s recovered pretty well at this point—his main disability seems to be … an aggravating propensity … to drop ellipses into his speech … every few words or so … a trait that Terry adopts … to my increasing annoyance …. Her sole motivation is to spend more time with Dr. Lindley, but once they arrive, he sets off for the swankier spots along the Cote d’Azur, leaving Terry to wander the halls of the villa and go on occasional dates with the local medecin, Dr. Armand Gautier. After a few dinners, though, she tells him she’s in love with Dr. Lindley, and that ends that minor diversion. With little else to do, patient Richard falls in love with Terry and begins pressing her to marry him, much to the chagrin of his money-grubbing children. She resists him, too, but now she can squabble with the kids, who are intent on scaring her off.

 

After about a hundred pages in which Terry sees no sights but frequently moans that she’s missing out on all the action, and sees not much more of the elusive Dr. Lindley, we’re finally treated to some action! A boat crashes off shore during the local festival, and one of the passengers is found to have smallpox, so now Terry and the long-absent Dr. Lindley, returned a moment ago from Cannes, are to help vaccinate the village. But the crazy townspeople are under the impression that it’s bubonic plague that has washed ashore, and they are freaking out!!! Even Richard and his kids are flinging their Louis Vuitton cases pell-mell into the Mercedes and making for Paris! (They’re stopped by a roadblock set up for a quarantine, so back they slink in shame.) Bill heads for the clinic to do what little he can, like unpack boxes of medical supplies, since he does not have a license to practice medicine in France, and Terry goes downtown to help a French nurse quell a riot. Since Terry speaks little French, she is equally useless; all she can do is bolster the confidence of the shy nurse, who rises to the occasion and the day is saved!

 

This book is a waste of time. We are stuck in the villa most of the time and so take in little of the Riviera, which might at least provide some entertaining armchair travel. We are not at all invested in Terry’s devotion to the elusive Dr. Bill, so we share none of her anguish at his apparent disinterest and no joy at his (surprise) change of heart. The patient and his family are not appealing, even when they’re being snarky and mean, and the “excitement” of the end seems downright dopey, since smallpox is now a thing of the past and government laboratories, and the bubonic plague only makes me think of the Monty Python skit (“Bring out your dead!”). Even the trumped-up crisis of the ending shows us nothing about our heroine, and her and Bill’s part in it seems fairly trivial, even silly (Terry spurs the timid nurse to courage by fingering the veil of her nurse’s cap, which is supposed to remind her of the importance of her calling as a nurse). The writing is flat, and it wasn’t until page 110 that I found one small snippet to offer you as a Best Quote. Jane Converse is capable of putting out a great book, but not, apparently, on the Riviera.