Ivy Anders Night Nurse

By Helen B. Castle 

(pseud. Frank Castle), ©1963

Three men wanted Nurse Ivy Anders. Dr. Paul Farrow wanted her to be his mistress. Detective Dick Rudd wanted her to marry him. And patient Sebastian Cruz wanted to disfigure he beautiful body beyond recognition. Here is the thrilling story of a lovely young nurse and the passions which threatened to destroy her—revenge, jealousy, love, and her own unshakable dedication to the noble profession of healing.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“It is a rough, lonely business to stand over someone with steel in your hand, knowing you must try to play God, knowing how inadequate you really are.”

“So who needs dates? It’s a pretty ridiculous routine, really, the whole business of working at being vivacious, companionable, and terribly interested in the details of some man’s job, when he is usually thinking only of setting up an opportunity to neck, a poor word to describe what he actually has in mind.”

“Men were interested in pretty, decorative women, not those who displayed some intelligence and ambition.”

“Sometimes I think a surgical gown is the most efficient man-trap ever devised, though there is a good deal to be said for a nurse’s uniform, too, at least where doctors are concerned.”

“I’m all for any woman who can get a man to an altar. It is a knack that I certainly never acquired!”

“Maybe this was what is in store for her, Ivy thought wryly, to grow old in a nurse’s uniform. Maybe she ought to get a cat. Old maids and cats seemed to go together.”

“See that he marries you—and no more foolishness about running around with a street gang!”

REVIEW:
Ivy Anders works the night shift at St. Vibiana’s Hospital, located somewhere near Atlanta. At 26, she is starting to seriously sweat the fact that she’s not married. Working the night shift makes dating difficult, and she’s very devoted to her job. But suddenly, it’s raining men: Detective Sergeant Dick Rudd, coming to the hospital after visiting hours to visit a family member, slips and puts his arm through a window and is promptly sutured closed and admitted to Ivy’s ward. Dr. Stan Dykestra, about to conclude his residency, is asking her to have coffee with him in the cafeteria. And Dr. Paul Farrow starts hanging around the nurse’s station to talk to Ivy about how his wife doesn’t understand him and how lonely he is. Yes, a married man!!

Things begin to look up for Ivy when Dick asks her out on a date and promptly proposes. She says she’ll think about it, because “as for getting to know Dick Rudd, Ivy remembered a thought offered by her sister Benita on one occasion, ‘You tell yourself you know a man, marry him, then discover he isn’t quite the person you thought he was, at all.’ If this was true, why bother to wait—?” A match made in heaven. Dick’s talking about the honeymoon in Hawaii when he drops the deal-breaker: “You won’t be doing any more nursing. My wife isn’t going to work!” When Ivy points out that she spent more time training to be a nurse than he did to become a cop and asks him if he could quit his job, he says it’s not the same thing because he’s a man. “A man’s duty is to make a living, a woman’s duty is to make a home, and to take care of the kids.” So that’s the end of that. “She was not going to throw it all over simply because this man high-handedly demanded that she do so!”

But then Stan is looking at her as though Ivy was “very much in his thoughts.” She tries to find opportunities for them to be alone together so he can pop the question. Eventually he asks her—not exactly to marry him, but to “go with me when I leave.” She will, and now her days are full of “making many plans and of getting acquainted, of attempting in a hurry to learn a man’s ways, his likes and dislikes, an interesting but frequently perplexing business.” Yet she has a “sense of some indefinable obstacle between them.” Sure enough, the day Stan ends his residency, he disappears, and sends her a postcard from his hometown in Idaho. He shows up at the hospital a week later with a woman on his arm. He introduces her to Ivy as his wife, whom he married four years ago, a week before he started his residency. He hasn’t seen her in all these years, and he’d gone home to divorce her—but he couldn’t. “It is an obligation I must carry,” he tells her, adding that he also has an obligation to a church group that financed his medical education to go to Burma to run a clinic there for seven years, and he and his wife are leaving next week.

It’s a close call for Ivy, but now all that’s left for her is Dr. Farrow. Either him or she becomes one of those “staff nurses, unwed, middle-aged or older, who were inclined to be fussy, short-tempered, the objects of amusement. They were women who had turned inward on themselves, who had reached the point where their world had narrowed down to the hospital and a lonely apartment or a room at the nursing home, nothing else.” So when Dr. Farrow asks her to dinner, she accepts. He kisses her goodnight, then “sudden forceful insistence, an attempt to go farther which Ivy found difficult to handle.” But she can’t stop seeing him. “Perhaps, she thought, what Paul was offering her was all she was ever going to get, life in a man’s shadow, but that the half-loaf of an affair with him might be more desirable than nothing at all.”

Part of what is driving Ivy is her fear, never expressly stated, of dying a virgin. One of her patients, an 18-year-old girl named Jill, is sleeping with Sebastian Cruz, the head of a gang called the Toros. Jill is brought in when she and her boyfriend are attacked by the rival gang, and Ivy is tucking Jill in for the night when the girl pulls up her nightgown and shows Ivy her naked body. “I’ve got a real classy shape, huh?” she says. “I bet you don’t even know what it means to be a woman. Well, I do! I’m Sibby’s woman, all the way. When we get together, it’s thunder and lightning, we really blow up a storm! Like, there’s no tomorrow, and what’s the use waiting—?” Jill isn’t the only unmarried woman getting some action; Ivy catches another single nurse wearing nothing but a slip in a hospital room with a man. “A perverse imp—or her other self—seemed to whisper that she might be missing something desirable that life had to offer, and perhaps should begin to find out for sure before it was too late.” So Ivy mulls over Paul’s offer to become his mistress. “She would know what it meant fully to be a woman. Jill’s scornfully derisive charge that she did not know still rankled in her.”

Fortunately for her, Ivy never has to make up her mind about what to do. She tracks down the gang leader, who is suffering from stab wounds, and en route to the hospital is stopped by the rival gang and injured in the battle that ensues before Dick Rudd runs them all off and literally carries Ivy, whose uniform has been ripped down the front, to the hospital. When Ivy comes to, after demonstrating why healthcare professionals make such lousy patients, she worries only that her hair has been shaved off, she isn’t wearing any makeup, and Dick saw her exposed body. At the end of the book, when one of her suitors shows up and Ivy is safely engaged, one of the floor nurses gives Ivy “a look which contained many things—congratulations, admiration, envy, plus a whole-hearted sharing of this moment which only a woman could savor, the moment when the puzzling, exasperating and often torturing business of being a female at last had meaning and purpose.”

This book, more than most VNRNs, clearly paints the difficult corner that women of Ivy’s generation were in. She might have a satisfying, meaningful career, but she’s expected to toss it away without a second thought the minute she gets engaged, because it’s not a career that gives her life real value in the world but a husband (and, by inference, a sex life). But marriage is a tricky business. The husband in question, fashioned out of a near stranger, is beguiled or even fooled into marriage, and her career—possibly her happiness as well—are sacrificed at the altar for this “greater” good. I appreciated the book’s ending, which does not force Ivy to give up her work, but I’m not convinced that Ivy, once married, is going to be all that happy. I had been looking forward to this book after enjoying Helen Castle’s Emergency Ward Nurse, and Ivy Anders doesn’t disappoint. It’s not exactly a classic VNRN, but this book stands out because it is the most clear-eyed—not to mention risqué—example of the genre I have met to date.

Special Nurse

By Lucy Agnes Hancock, ©1948
Cover illustration by Mark Dawson

“It’s all over, my darling.” Gently, Pete’s hand brushed her cheek. Pam was only partially conscious, but she felt that the comforting voice belonged to someone she knew and loved. When Pam awoke in the hospital, Pete was gone. But the nurse told her what had happened to him. “That young man was eloping when his car hit yours. The accident upset his plans, but it’s all right. He’s married now!” Pam couldn’t choke back her tears. She had lost him. But why had he called her “my darling”? Why had he pretended to be in love with her when he had a fiancée all the time? Pam hoped she had seen the last of the flirtatious Dr. Peter Allen. But she hadn’t—not by any means!

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Solitude is for the old and disillusioned, the ugly and neurotic.”

“First and last at head and heart, whether you acknowledge it or not, you’re a woman—a female of the species—a congenital winner of hearts—born to be the wife of one man and the mother of others.”

“It’s the hardest thing in the world to try to teach people to live sensibly.”

“What better way to get acquainted than to marry and live together?”

REVIEW:
Like many a VNRN heroine, Pamela Ware has received a legacy from a grateful patient, and has decided to blow the $500 on a vacation. So she buys a used car and hits the road for a month, driving wherever she feels like it and camping along the way. At her first stop, at a quiet inn, a man with a puppy mistakenly barge into her room, where she is in her “lounging pajamas” reading a book. The puppy refuses to be extracted, the young man is flustered and apologetic, she is frosty and cool. It’s love at first sight. Somehow she continues to see him sporadically during her entire vacation, as he seems to be following her, initially to apologize again, then just to piss her off. She sees the MD on his car’s license plate, and this clinches her attitude toward him, as she’s sworn never to get involved with a doctor. “I detest smart-alecky internes and abhor know-it-all doctors both young and old—they’re simply impossible.” His name is Pete, and they spar verbally on numerous occasions, and then, one evening, he kisses her. It’s “a devastating kiss,” and Pam thinks about Pete often at night after that.

Then she is struck by a yellow car—the same color as Pete’s—bearing a blonde woman sitting next to the driver. In the hospital, barely conscious, she hears Pete saying to her, “It’s all over, my darling. You will sleep now.” When she wakes, she finds she’s recovering from surgery. The driver of the other car was eloping with the blonde woman at the time of the accident, but they’ve since married, Pam is told, and she makes “queer little hysterical whimpers” when she hears this news. She’s heartbroken, convinced that Pete called her darling and then ran off to marry another woman. He’s “just a common philanderer—that most detestable of all creatures, a male flirt!” Henceforth, it is commonly noted that Pam is not the usual cheery person she was when she went on vacation. But wild horses will never drag the story from her, so she tries to be happy and mopes in private.

It turns out that the nephew of the wife of the chief of staff at her hospital himself performed the unspecified surgery that saved Pam’s life. This nephew, Percival Chadwick, is coming to take the chief’s job, but hasn’t arrived yet; he just happened to be in the building when Pam came in after her accident. The nursing staff dubs him “Dear Percival,” and “they say he’s not only a wonder as a surgeon but the acme of masculine pulchritude.” You don’t need to have read hundreds of VNRNs to quickly deduce that Dear Percival is Pete, and it’s just a matter of time until they run into each other again and all is put to rights.

That doesn’t actually happen until page 127, but guess what—you won’t mind at all. In the interim, we watch Pam nurse numerous patients back to health and hang out with her roommate, Joan. Pam is a spunky gal who calls a spade a spade, tells people off when she has to, and she is kind and generous and quick-witted. Her roommate is the one of the snappy dialogue, who speaks of the time when “Dear Percival is to brighten our drab lives. […] The day draws near, Pam. Aren’t you excited?”

When they finally do meet, at a dinner at the chief of staff’s house, she is indeed. He explains that he is Percival Chadwick—but he hates to be called Percival, smart man, and so he goes by Pete—and he was not the eloping driver of the car who hit her. But she shuts him down again, because she heard a rumor that Dear Percival is in love with a woman who turned him down. Gee, who could that be? She continues to snub Pete mightily, though he tells her he loves her and wants to marry her. It’s another 40 pages until the final reconciliation, and unfortunately, from this point on, the book loses some of its spark. It’s never easy maintaining any kind of suspense about an issue that anyone else except a VNRN heroine could see right through, and Ms. Hancock doesn’t quite pull it off. But everything else about this book makes it absolutely worth reading. The relationship between Pam and Joan and the stories of the patients Pam meets at work, paint a vivid picture of this woman’s life. The writing is snappy and entertaining, and the book hums along—up until the end, but forgive Ms. Hancock this flaw and read this book nonetheless.

Alternative cover,
illustration by Barye Phillips 

Sandra Surgical Nurse

By Patti Stone, ©1961
Cover illustration by Bob Abbett

A surgeon tormented by his past—a beautiful nurse deeply in love. Two figures struggled through the midnight blizzard up to a lonely, snow-shrouded farmhouse. They were just in time. Working in the feeble glow of gaslight, a courageous doctor saved the life of a woman and her new-born baby. When it was over, the nurse spoke softly to her exhausted companion: “They would have died. Two lives saved because of you. You can forgive yourself now, can’t you?”
 
GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:

“I’m in for a nice hunk of broken heart and that’s something you can’t put together in Surgery.”

“If she is going to catch Tod, I’ll see to it that she’ll be one bride who is able to cook whether she wants to or not!”

REVIEW:
Sandra O’Shea is a “suture nurse” at Queens Hospital in Gereton, Indiana. This is apparently the equivalent of a scrub tech today, as she spends her days slapping instruments into surgeons’ hands. We meet her on her first day at Queens, as she’s just finished her training as a surgical nurse back home in Iowa. Her new workplace holds a bit of a mystery: Two surgeons who are brothers, Rand and Frank Cox, haven’t spoken to each other in two years. Of course, in a VNRN the mystery is quickly brought to light: The boys’ father was the chief of staff at the hospital, and on a hunting trip out in the boondocks with his sons he slipped and accidentally shot himself in the chest. At the nearest rinky-dink hospital, Dr. Rand had insisted on operating, though Dr. Frank had wanted him to be flown to a city hospital, and Rand attempted the surgery and their father died. Dr. Frank accused Dr. Rand of killing their father, and this had not exactly made for warm feelings at work.

On the job, we hear a lot about a couple of unusual physical traits Sandra has. She’s “a big girl, graceful even in the awkward surgical robe, and taller” than her surgeon. She is constantly obsessing over this: “How she hated her size!” When an intern congratulates her for being able to restrain a wild patient, she snaps, “I know exactly how big I am and that I’m a corn-fed country girl!” She tells her roommate she’ll never get a date: “I know what I look like. I’m too big and generously shaped.” She’s “too big and husky,” “much too big,” “a big lumbering peasant.” Mysteriously, after much moaning over this fact, it’s dropped halfway through the book, and we are only told in passing that she might not have made through that snowstorm if she hadn’t been so hale and hardy. But perhaps to make up for this particular deformity, she is one of the rare women in a VNRN who has the magical hands: “The hospital grapevine had already carried news of the new blond nurse with the soft voice and the strong skillful hands.”

Anyway, before long, the quiet, serious one—Rand—asks Sandra out on a date. But she can’t go, because she’s promised the church square-dancing group that she’d go to the dance that night. Drat! Then who should turn up at the dance but Dr. Frank, who is apparently stalking her? And when there’s an emergency and she and Dr. Frank have to go directly to the hospital in their square-dancing clothes, who should be there at the door when they come in but Dr. Rand? Double drat! He, of course, is convinced that Sandra is dating Frank and goes all Frigidaire on her—not that you can tell the difference from how he was before. So even though she really prefers the cold and frosty brother, she starts going out with good-time Frank. And Rand, Sandra tells her roommate, “ ‘is trying to stay away from me too. Oh, he still requests me for difficult operations, so I guess he doesn’t think I’m a total loss.’ Not as a nurse, she thought ruefully, but definitely a loss as a friend? As a woman?’ ”

Then during a Christmas Eve blizzard, when Sandra’s home alone feeling maudlin and full of self-pity, Rand pounds on her door. He needs her help to deliver a baby at this farmhouse out in the country. After Rand has saved both the baby and the mother, they drive back to town and Sandra invites him in for coffee cake. Before three minutes have passed, Rand has broken down over his belief that he killed his father, Sandra has comforted him, Rand has proposed marriage, and Sandra has planned the wedding: “Like any girl, I want my parents with me. I want to wear the most beautiful dress I can find, and my mother’s wedding veil—and of course I want to be married in church.” It’s to be a small wedding, though, close friends and family only, and her mother will make her dress, and well, “there will be all sorts of arrangements to be made. Maybe by rushing things we can be married on Easter Sunday.” Instead of running screaming for the door, Rand instead “agreed meekly.” And we still have 25 more pages to get through.

So to give us something to do, Dr. White, the aging Chief of Staff, obligingly drops with a heart attack in the OR, and despite open-heart massage, Rand is unable to save him. Dr. White’s gorgeous daughter calls Rand a murderer—it’s déjà vu all over again—and he runs off. While driving out to see him, Sandra and Frank witness a plane crash into a housing development. They’re trying to rescue a man trapped in a burning house when the building collapses on them. Frank’s arm is badly injured, and the doctors at the hospital are insisting that it must be amputated—though it would mean the end of Frank’s career as a surgeon. Only Rand believes the arm can be saved, and calls in a prominent orthopedic surgeon. As he’s wheeled into the OR, Frank apologizes to Rand for calling him a murderer, and now the only thing left to be saved is Sandra’s Easter wedding …

The best thing about this book is the surgery. It’s accurately described, and we get lots of it: a Whipple, an appendectomy, a Caesarian, and of course the fight to save Frank’s arm. I also liked Sandra’s relationship with her roommate, Peggi (yes, spelled with an i), though I wished Peggi weren’t so obsessed with “catching” intern Tod, who runs hot and cold on her. Beyond that, though, this books runs toward the saccharine, and Sandra’s attraction to the dour Rand is completely inexplicable. The cover is great (apparently Richard Prince thought so too; part of it is featured in his work “Nurse in Hollywood #4”), but the book is not much.

2011 VNRN Awards

Welcome to the second annual Vintage Nurse Romance Novel Awards! Winners are chosen from the VNRNs I have read this year, which for 2011 is 78 different books by 43 different authors. Only the Best Authors category is cumulative, including all the VNRN books I have ever read. May they inspire your own reading in 2012!

BEST BOOKS
1. A Challenge for Nurse Melanie, Isabel Moore, 1963
2. “K,” Mary Roberts Rinehart, 1914
3. City Nurse, Jeanne Judson, 1959
4. Ski Resort Nurse, Jane L. Sears, 1962
5. Aloha Nurse, Ethel Hamill, 1961
6. Nurse at the Fair, Dorothy Cole, 1971
7. Runaway Nurse, Florence Stuart, 1964
8. Graduate Nurse, Lucy Agnes Hancock, 1947
9. Nora Was a Nurse, Peggy Gaddis, 1953
10. Visiting Nurse, Margaret Howe, 1956



WORST BOOKS
1. Conflict for Nurse Elsa, Jeanne Bowman, 1968
2. Door to Door Nurse, Jeanne Bowman, 1967
3. Challenge for Nurse Laurel, Fay Stone, 1970


BEST COVERS
1. Terror Stalks the Night Nurse, Blanche Y. Mosler, cover illustration by Lou Marchetti
2. Ozark Nurse, Fern Shepard
3. Nurse Forrester’s Secret, Jane Converse
4. Las Vegas Nurse, Jane L. Sears
5. Nurse on the Beach, Arlene Hale

BEST QUOTES
1. “With a small sigh she turned in the seat, gazed at the back of Charles [sic] neat neck beneath his chauffeur’s cap, and let her fingers idly trail along the leopard skin upholstery. ‘My gosh!’ she whispered to herself. ‘Wait until Olive hears about this!’ ” Ski Resort Nurse, Jane L. Sears
2. “Go embellish Mother Nature while I pop around the corner. I believe I noticed a haven for weary travelers as I drove up.” Nurse in Hollywood, Jane Converse
3. “ ‘Now when I was a kid, about your age, there was a character known as Popeye who was something of an authority on spinach. Is he around any more?’
“Bobby’s round blue eyes gazed up at her with utter disgust. ‘Oh, to hell with Popeye,’ said Bobby.” Runaway Nurse, Florence Stuart
4. “She wondered where he was and if he was still tortured.” Ski Resort Nurse, Jane L. Sears
5. “As always, Gail longed to take the child in her arms, to give him a big bear hug. But a bear hug could kill Jimmy.” Runaway Nurse, Florence Stuart
6. “He had a strong, distinguished-looking face, even with half of it lacerated and bloodstained.” Arctic Nurse, Rose Dana
7. “Don’t eat that candy! It may be poisoned!” Nurse’s Alibi, Jane Corby
8. “ ‘You’ve got good hands, boy,’ he said. ‘You might have made a good surgeon. Pity you wasted them on the wrong kind of knives.’ ” Marie Warren, Night Nurse, Blanche Y. Mosler
9. “I told you if you went off like that by yourself you’d make a fool of yourself. And now look at you—running around in slacks, for Heaven’s sake, and that awful shirt, and not even tucked into your pants.” Nora Was a Nurse, Peggy Gaddis
10. “Let’s make this last dance really Hawaiian! The rest of you make a circle and undulate!” Surfing Nurse, Diana Douglans

BEST AUTHORS
1. Faith Baldwin (4.0 average, 2 reviews)
2. Margaret Mooers Marshall (3.7 average, 2 reviews)

3. Alan Jackson, writing as Rosie M. Banks (3.5 average, 2 reviews)
4. Jean Francis Webb III, writing as Ethel Hamill (3.5 average, based on 2 reviews)
5. Adelaide Humphries (3.4 average, 3 reviews)
6. Florence Stonebraker, writing as Fern Shepard and Florence Stuart (3.0 average, 10 reviews)
7. Jane L. Sears (3.0 average, 3 reviews)
8. Margaret Howe (2.9 average, 2 reviews)
9. Lucy Agnes Hancock (2.8 average, 3 reviews)
10. Adele Kay Maritano, writing as Jane Converse (2.6 average, 10 reviews)

Hootenanny Nurse

By Suzanne Roberts, ©1964

Julie Dodd was in love with David Stace, the boy next door, ever since she could remember. When he studied to become a doctor, Julie decided that nursing would be her career so that their work would bring them together. And that is exactly what happened. Then Chad, a handsome folk singer, came into her life, and suddenly there was a new song in her heart.

GRADE: C

 BEST QUOTES:
“Julie walked as fast as she dared down the hall, pressed the elevator button, and hoped on the brief ride that she still had a bit of lipstick on.”

“ ‘All right,’ Julie said crisply, asserting her authority as on-duty nurse in Emergency. ‘Let’s get those last two out of the hall. That boy with the harmonica, too.’ ”

“Julie’s hands were shaking as she gathered up her purse and the library book on disturbed children she wanted to renew.”

“Losing a dream can sometimes be as hard as losing someone you love.”

REVIEW:
If you are a fan of this genre, you’ve surely been waiting for Hootenanny Nurse. I must confess that I let out a small shriek when I saw this book in Kayo Books, the fabulous vintage book shop in San Francisco. (Florence Stonebraker once lived in the apartment building across the street, for added VNRN thrills!) I promise, you will never find a book in which the word hootenanny is used so frequently, which has its ups and downs. It’s way too much to expect that this book could live up to such an outrageous title, and I’m sorry to report that it doesn’t possess anywhere near the camp factor you’re probably hoping for. But it does offer up a few laughs, so it’s not a complete waste of time.

Nurse Julie Dodd is a student nurse in her final year at a hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. She’s nervous about doing a stint in the ED, though the supervisor tells her not to worry: “Some nights we only get a few phony suicides that need a good stomach wash, and then we send them home. Hysterical women, mostly.” Julie’s true calling is up on the child psych ward, because she more than the other nurses realizes that all these psychotic kids need is “love and comfort and soft words and kisses,” and soon they’re all behaving and there are no more incidents like the one where a schizophrenic boy broke into a medicine cabinet and attacked a nurse with a surgical knife.

Her boyfriend—you knew there was one—is David Stace, who grew up barefoot next door, on a ramshackle farm crowded with too many children. At fourteen, she’d been trying to figure out what she wanted from life—“somehow, just falling in love didn’t seem to be enough.” So when David declared a pre-med major, she signed up for nursing school so they could start a clinic in their poor hometown together. But as he nears the end of school, David buys an expensive car on credit and starts taking her to expensive restaurants, and soon he’s talking of setting up shop in Chicago. Well, she doesn’t think much of this at all! So she smoothes down her uniform and her pride and says, “I want whatever you want, of course.” She spends a lot of time seething about it, but “she didn’t want to be a nagging, pushy wife. She wanted to be, as she’d been all these years, deeply in love with him, letting him make the decisions, and glad that he did.”

Then a bus holding a group of folk singers rolls over, and now they’re encamped on the hospital’s fourth floor. She goes up to visit them and strikes up a conversation with the lead folkie, Chad. Soon she’s singing along with them on an impromptu “folk singing whing-ding.” “I think we’ve found ourselves a regular little Hootenanny Nurse!” Chad says. Before long, Chad is kissing her and talking about having kids. Run, Julie, run! But alas, she is another VNRN heroine without an ounce of sense.

Chad makes an appearance under her window with his guitar and asks her to join his group. They’re finally well enough to leave the hospital to go on tour, but he’s calling her every night and pressuring her to tell her she loves him. She hates the weakness inside herself that “made her cling to Chad, and yes—David. David still, and her parents, and yet she felt as if she didn’t belong with any of them.” Fortunately she has those schizophrenic kids to help cheer her up. Little Maryjo is blooming, thanks to a rag doll that Julie sat up all night sewing for her. “Honestly, Julie, without you, I think that kid would still be sitting up in bed, screaming and needing medication every four hours to calm her!” the ward nurse tells her. “All she needed was love and attention.”

She invites Chad and the gang to her parents’ house for Christmas, and when she gets off the plane, Chad is there to meet her: “We’ve got a Christmas Eve hootenanny going full blast!” He proposes to her, and she accepts, for the best of reasons: “If I don’t marry him, someone else will! And I may end up all alone, an unmarried nurse, just like some of them I’ve seen—with no place to go at night when I get off duty except a lonely little apartment and a TV set for company!” But when she goes back to the hospital wearing his tiny diamond and he goes back on tour, he’s peeved that she has to work and can’t talk to him on the phone. He calls constantly when she’s supposed to be studying for her final exams, sometimes after hours when could get in trouble for being on the phone. Then she goes to visit him one weekend in Memphis and one of the singers comes down with appendicitis, and Julie takes her place in the big solo number, “My Butternut Tree.” She’s a smash hit, of course, so now on weekends she’s performing with the group. “And if a small, nagging doubt, a bit of sadness, came to her now and then, she pushed it back firmly.” There’s a big TV performance coming up, after all, and graduation, and then a wedding to plan: “What more could a girl ask?”

So when graduation is all over and Julie is just about to leave the hospital forever, she learns that little Maryjo, who Julie has been too busy to say goodbye to, has gone missing. Julie misses the big performance in Atlanta to help find her, hiding in the locker where she’d left an old uniform. Despite this little setback, she decides that Maryjo is “nearly well! And Julie realized, with a sudden stab of pride, that she was responsible for Maryjo’s complete change.” So she puts on that old uniform again, “and quite suddenly, without any more struggle, worrying, heartbreak, Julie knew she had found her answer. A wonderful, deep meaning had come into her life.” She calls Chad to dump him: “I can’t leave those children!” she tells him, and tomorrow she’ll talk to the superintendent about getting a permanent job on the children’s ward. And then there’s intern Mike Farrell, a “short, homely young man with unruly, sandy-colored hair and steady, mature gray eyes,” who’s been helping in the search. He offers to buy her a cup of coffee, and Julie thinks, “This too, might be a beginning,” and the two of them walk off together into the elevator.

This is the first nurse romance that doesn’t end with the heroine’s love life completely sewn up, and I have to say that was a nice break. But overall I was not won over by Julie’s spinelessness and her constant obsessing about what to do, what to do? Chad was kind of a creepy character, but she can’t see him for the controlling manipulator that he really is, even if she does leave him in the end. The hootenanny shtick can be amusing, but the constant pounding on this one note makes it a bit wearing in the end. You may not come away exactly singing its praises, but if you must read Hootenanny Nurse, it’s not a complete flop.

Las Vegas Nurse

By Jane L. Sears, ©1963

Marta Humphries had been a nurse for six years. In that time it had not occurred to her that she was using the nursing profession as an antiseptic white wall to protect her from the hurts of the world outside, or from her own fierce craving for a passionate involvement in life. Returning to Las Vegas’ Hoover Memorial Hospital after an absence of five years, Marta discovered that Doctor Spence Marlow, the brilliant young surgeon, and the man responsible for her self-imposed exile, now desired her as she had once hoped he would. Marta unhesitatingly accepted his proposal of marriage. Then handsome Dev Russel, manager of the glamorous Desert Spa Casino, came into her life, first as her patient, then as her sister’s employer. For Marta, Dev personified everything she despised about Las Vegas. But as she got to know him, suspicion turned into an emotion that Marta hardly dared recognize…

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“I wish she’d hurry up and find herself before I end up in a padded cell!”

“I’ve always been crazy about interns. They’re so … so grim and sexy looking!”

“Why, she hadn’t worn seams in ages!”

“Nothing can kill a romance faster than having family label it: acceptable.”

“Doctor McNulty deserved more than her shaking hands and whirling, numbed mind could give him when he began cutting into his patient to remove a cancerous colon.”

“How soignée you look in those tapered pants, Marta!”

“There was this gookie Knight […] The Ogre knew that he’d have to bump off the Knight because the Princess imagined that she was ape over him and the Ogre knew that he couldn’t get all shaped up until this babe loved him. […] The Ogre hunched in his cave far up on the mountain and looked down and watched the Princess and the Knight in their snow white clothes and pondered on how to get the Knight out of the way without making the Princess flip her wig.”

“I kept asking myself how she could go around in that sacky old uniform and have men falling all over themselves.”

REVIEW:
Marta Humphries has returned to Las Vegas to work with surgeon Dr. Spencer Marlow, the same man she ran away from five years ago because she could not bear the heartbreak of his indifference toward her. More than that, though, she's got to start whipping her family into shape. Her father has leukemia and has 6 to 12 months to live; he feels fine, but he’s got to check into the hospital to start dying, even though he emphatically declares he wants to spend his last days in his own home. And then there’s her kid sister who needs bossing around: Polly’s “too tight clothes, a hint of defiance in her attitude toward Marta, and now complete disregard for the parking ticket which was probably just one of many, labeled the girl as rebellious.”

She’s working in the OR, “slapping the required instruments into Doctor Spence Marlow’s gloved hand almost before the command left his lips.” In the OR, Spence becomes “dictatorial, whiplashing impatience. He literally barked his commands, swore under his breath periodically, sighed and snarled… His sudden harshness indicating to Marta that so far things were going well.” And since he even has “the clever surgeon’s hand that had held Marta tense with admiration for its skills,” he’s got all the prerequisite signs of a brilliant surgeon. When she’s not in the OR, she’s attempting to take a patient’s temperature by holding his wrist and counting—which in modern times we would call a pulse, but you know how quickly medicine changes. Another patient of hers is Dev Russel, the owner of a hot nightclub on the strip. Polly, who is 17, takes to visiting Dev in the hospital, where the pair indulges in cocktails and cigarettes. This is one swinging hospital!

It’s not long before Spence notices Marta’s gray dress and asks her out, and by Chapter Six he’s proposed and he and Marta are squabbling about picking out the furniture for his new house. And about the wedding date—Marta feels she can’t marry for a year, considering that she’s just gotten home and she needs to get Polly safely grown up first. The first step is getting Polly a job at the airport. “Perhaps it would be interesting enough and exciting enough to nurture higher ambitions in Polly, secretarial school for instance, where she’d learn the tools necessary for a good, steady and high paying job with a future and security.” As for her own future with him, apart from raising children, “when the children were of school age she’d be able to act as Spence’s office nurse and even continute her surgical work at the hospital if he wanted her to. That decision, of course, would be up to him.”

Spencer is furious about the delay; he tells Marta, “I want a wife and home, and I want it now, Marta!” Though considering they’ve only been dating a few weeks, one wonders why he doesn’t want to make sure he’s got the right gal picked out. But then he takes her to Dev Russel’s nightclub to catch a show, “the chorus girls prance onstage, their scanty bikini constumes winking brilliantly against the spotlights, breasts bouncing, hips grinding to the fast jazz music … It was Polly!” The fact that Polly is a showgirl degrades both Polly and Marta, Spence says, and she is rightly furious for his comments and for springing this “surprise” on her. The next day she goes to visit Dev Russel and plead with him to fire Polly, but Dev just laughs. She’s humiliated and inscensed, but she can’t get his browned muscular figure out of her head.

Then after work the next day, Dev is parked outside the hospital, waiting for her. He tells her that if she just lets Polly get this showgirl thing out of her system, she’ll drop it soon enough. This instantly makes “wonderul sense” to Marta, and when Dev next asks her to meet this family he knows, she goes along. Cathy Murray is the widow of his best friend, and the oldest of her three children works for Dev as a busboy. Cathy and the two younger children all have muscular dystrophy. “They were all going to die. … Marta’s practiced reserve very nearly melted when Kit limped unsteadily toward her and said: ‘Pretty lady!’ ” From then on we spend quite a few days with the Murrays, agonizing in italics but without benefit of commas about how poor Cathy “couldn’t even lift the pot her muscles were so deteriorated!” There’s also a star-crossed flirtation between Dev and the engaged Marta, in which he says charming things like, “Can’t you see I want to get that good-looking broad … I mean dame, alone for a minute!” Who will she choose—the shady nightclub owner or the steadfast but domineering doctor? Well, all I have to say is that Las Vegas Nurse has, hands down, the most peculiar marriage proposal I’ve ever seen in a VNRN: “How’d you like about fifty years of private duty, you dumb broad?”

Jane L. Sears, author of the sublime Ski Resort Nurse, is ever high in my esteem based solely on the utter fabulousness of that one book. Television Nurse also had its moments, but this, her third and apparently last book, is sadly not the equal of either of its sisters. Campy characters and situtations should come easily to a book about gangsters and showgirls, but what we get most of is syrupy sentiment about the dying family. Or Marta freaking out about her sister’s wild behavior, or sighing over Dev’s devilishly handsome mien, or grumping to herself about Spence’s selfishness. There’s just not all that much to hold your interest in this book. Given my high regard for Ms. Sears, it pains me greatly to say it, but there it is. She is capable of greatness, but the only divine aspect about this book is its cover.

Nurse with Wings

By Marguerite Mooers Marshall, ©1952

Anne was engaged to mary Dr. “Staff” Stafford, ambitious young New York society doctor who demanded that she give up the career she loved. Then, one storm-tossed night, her plane crashed in the Canadian wilderness, and the whole pattern of her life was swept out of her control. For as she sought to save her passengers from the burning wreckage, she found a stranger working skillfully by her side. He was Dr. Paul Roy, a young Canadian doctor. Back in New York in Staff’s possessive arms Anne Austin tried to forget the quiet, masterly young Canadian.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Some women steal spoons. Others, if they get the chance, steal the fillings out of your teeth or the man who is your man.”

“I’ve known her for a long time, which may be the reason I should never consider her anything except a former associate and acquaintance, certainly not a friend.”

“Hadn’t someone said a woman’s husband is simply the oldest of her children?”

“Every rule has exceptions between friends.”

“Pity is a beautiful virtue but no basis for lifelong happinss in marriage. A woman wants to look up to her husband, not look after him.”

“A girl gets used to realizing the nicest men she meets are almost always married.”

REVIEW:
Nurse with Wings opens with a bit of a literal bang: Anne Austin, stewardess and registered nurse, is assisting her passengers off her plane—which has just crashed in a field in Quebec. She’s trying to get a baby boy untangled from a smashed seat and his dead mother, but “she was no Amazon,” and it’s only the assistance of passenger Dr. Paul Roy that frees the boy. Once out, she and Dr. Roy agree to drive the baby to his father’s house, several hours away. On the drive they impress each other with their patriotism, their love of flying, their interest in “mercy flights” bringing remote, ill people to hospitals. They soon discover they are both bilingual, French and English, and binational, with one American and one Canadian parent. And she trained at the Quebec City hospital where he now works as an eye, nose and throat surgeon. When they part on page 23, “Anne, with the queer feeling of losing not a new but an old friend, gently freed herself from the strong, sensitive surgeon’s fingers still holding hers.”

Back at home, she has a fiance, Dr. William Lee Stafford, waiting for her, and he manages to irk in the very sentence in which we first meet him when he kisses Anne “proprietorially,” and then it’s all downhill from there. He’s pissy about the years he was drafted into the army during World War II, which he feels were a waste—nevermind about the waste of Anne’s brother Doug, who was killed in the same war. He’s described as brusque, suspicious, petulant, bitter and sullen, and this is all on the first page we spend in his company. Then we learn that “Staff” is constantly nagging Anne to quit her job, though she loves it, is well-paid, and has to work half the hours she would in a hospital, which gives her time to care for her ailing mother. He is such a complete ass that it’s extremely hard to figure out why Anne puts up with him. She is clearly an intelligent woman—she went to Vassar, after all—so her stupidity on this score is quite baffling. Fortunately, Staff is one of those guys who won’t marry until he can support his wife, regardless of the fact that she makes a decent salary and is self-supporting, so she’s unable to ruin her life by chaining herself to this loser just yet.

Mrs. Austin, Anne’s mother, has terrible migraines induced by the summer heat in their New York city apartment, so Anne takes her on vacation to their New Hampshire home on Great Pond in Belltown—Mrs. Marshall was born and raised in Kingston, N.H., which hosts a pond of the same name—and she invites Staff to join them. Soon after his arrival, she takes him to Great Boar’s Head, a rocky promontory in the real-life Hampton (named “Campton” in this book), where the wind is so ferocious that it almost sweeps Anne off the rock into the water. At that moment, rather than grab for her, Staff pushes her off him so as to avoid being pulled in as well. She recovers her balance in time, but she can never quite look at him the same way after that. But soon he decamps, lured away by the promise by a comely young nurse of a job in a sanitorium outside of New York City catering to the ubiquitous wealthy neurotic women. She’s not happy about it, but decides it’s not her place to criticize his choice of career—perhaps forgetting that he has no qualms about doing the same to her.

In the meantime, cataracts are eroding Mrs. Austin’s eyesight. Anne calls Staff, and he gives her the names of two eye doctors in New York. But he makes no effort to help her by calling these doctors, who might be inclined to offer a discounted fee to family of another doctor. The consultations are a complete bust: One doctor refuses to see her out of hand, and the other demands more than $1,000 for his services. So her thoughts turn to the eye surgeon Dr. Roy. What a difference a Canadian makes. While her American fiance offers next to nothing when asked for help, a letter from Dr. Roy magically arrives the day after she thinks of writing to him, offering his services if she should ever be in need of them. After she writes back of her mother’s situation, he sends a telegram offering his surgical services, and soon she and Mrs. Austin are en route to Quebec City. And this is not an isolated incident; time and again, Dr. Roy offers up something Anne and her mother need even before they can ask for it.

Anne is under the impression that Dr. Roy is married—he speaks of two children at home that he has brought up—and at the same time, he tells her that he expects to be paid for the surgery he performed on Mrs. Austin, though he won’t name an amount. Well, we savvy VNRN aficionados completely understand what is going on here, even if the couple in question does not. Then there’s her engagement to Staff in the way as well—

This book has quite a few of the same ingredients we savored in the other book we’ve met by Ms. Marshall, Wilderness Nurse: New Hampshire, New York City, Quebec, bilingual main characters. I enjoyed them all the first time around (and not just because I’m from the same area of New Hampshire), and they’re almost as well done in this book. The picture she paints of a summer cottage in rural New Hampshire is bucolic and beautiful, something you feel you are experiencing with Anne and her mother. The heroine is spunky, independent and likeable, if slow to realize that her fiance is a total dolt. It’s a gentle, easy-flowing book, well-written and intelligent. Its only real flaw is that the plot never really offers up much excitement; this story is more of a pleasant walk along a pretty garden path than any wild ride. So while I did enjoy it, it’s not quite as stellar as Wilderness Nurse.