Backstage Nurse

By Jane Rossiter 
(pseud. William Danial Ross), ©1963 

Shirley Grant was excited about her new job as private nurse for the famous actor, Oliver Craft—and she found herself equally drawn to the two men closest to him: Hugh Deering, a former doctor and now a handsome leading man, and Roger Craft, wealthy young businessman from Philadelphia, who was also the star’s grandson. Both were exciting. Both offered her happiness. But only one could win her heart.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“That’s what working in the theater did for you; helped develop a flair for selecting clothes.”

“A new, pretty girl backstage to flirt with! Maybe this won’t be such a bad tour after all!”

“You’ll get used to her, or else you’ll wind up like some of the rest of us, wanting to murder her.”

“Do nurses take their medicine without complaints when they’re ill?”

REVIEW:
Nurse and orphan Shirley Grant was once an actress for a few years, so that makes her perfect for her new assignment: she has been selected from all the nurses at Eastern Memorial Hospital to care for Famous Movie Actor Oliver Craft, who has pancreatic cancer and is recovering from surgery (in which he was “cleaned up”), but now is insisting on going on tour with a stage play. “The end will be the same, no matter,” he says. “And I prefer to die in harness.” Shirley does have to fight with curmudgeonly senior Dr. Trask for the job, as he thinks she is “Too young! Too pretty! More a fashion model than a model nurse! And she’s a redhead with a snub nose! Redheads with snub noses are invariably stubborn!” It’s not your resume, it’s your looks that really matter! But Shirley fights back: “I’m twenty-seven, and I’m considered rather homely by some people,” which is enough to win her the job. 

The tour conveniently starts in the city where they are, Boston, at the Colonial Theater (which really exists, across from Boston Common). One of the actors is Dr. Hugh Deering, who quit medicine after he was “blamed for a man’s death” – though the actual story is pretty ambiguous. He was the driver in a car crash, and “Dr. Deering wasn’t able to help him. Witnesses said he was drunk. Just stumbled around and couldn’t do a thing,” a gossiping nurse tells Shirley, adding that the passenger in his car died. Shirley, who moments before was thinking “she had just met a pleasant young man whom she felt she could really like, with the prospect of being in his close company for several months,” decides that “now it was all spoiled by this revelation about his character.”

The band of actors includes Joy Milland, “a wild, restless sort,” who is out to own Hugh Deering and possibly encourage his drinking if it will help her meet that objective. Early on, Joy tells Shirley that Hugh has asked her to marry him but she hasn’t said yes. This news makes Shirley decide to avoid Hugh, who weeks later asks her why. She tells him it’s because he and Joy are engaged—which is not actually what Joy had said—he emphatically denies it, so she starts spending more time with him. But he may not be the winner there; she has decided that Hugh should give up acting, even though she thinks he’s good at it, and go back to being a doctor, and she’s rather rude about it. “Don’t you want to stop pretending and really live your life again?” she asks him, and when he says he’s quite happy being an actor, she tells him, “You’re not a man; you’re a cynical shadow.”

She has another man to play with, Roger Craft, Oliver’s grandson. Roger is a real estate millionaire that Shirley toys with a bit: “She hadn’t minded Roger’s interest because she had believed that Hugh was engaged to Joy Milland. Now she wasn’t so sure,” she thinks. Hugh, teasing Shirley about Roger, jokingly bets her a week’s pay that when Roger follows the show to Cincinnati, he will propose—and he’s right, though Shirley thinks one thing and says another. “She wasn’t at all certain that she would like Roger’s Philadelphia family, or fit in with them. And she realized that it wasn’t really important to her whether they liked her or not,” thinks the snob, but then, minutes later, tells Roger she likes him a lot and that she will think about it. “She had almost said ‘yes’ to his proposal. She looked up at him fondly. ‘You’ll be very close in my thoughts,’” says the tease.

The bulk of the book is a very tedious will-he-or-won’t he be able to perform, alternating with does-she-or-doesn’t-she love Hugh. One health crisis after another has us supposed to be biting our nails but instead found me quickly wearying of the repetitive plot. The Roger-or-Hugh debate is so riddled with hypocrisy on Shirley’s part, where one minute she thinks she would like to marry Hugh and the next minute she “felt completely miserable at the idea of spoiled Joy linking her life with that of the young ex-doctor’s.” Somehow the show staggers through a week each in Toronto, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Indianapolis—hard to believe the old man, who is at death’s door every other page, rebounds every time, because I personally was struggling to keep going.

Of course, you know how it will end up, with a medical emergency that calls on Hugh to act the part of a doctor—but it’s quick, with the victim dropping to the floor on one page and packed away in the ambulance on the next. All that remains is for Hugh to tell Shirley he’s going back to medicine, and since this was the only obstacle standing in the way of Shirley’s alleged love for Hugh, they can leave the theater arm in arm. Overall it’s a boring, perfunctory book. The only high points are the rare bit of Iively spark from Shirley’s dialogue and the character of Oliver Craft, who is well-drawn as a grand lion of the theater. Apart from that, though, this book is about par for the course for William Daniel Ross. You’d be much better off opting for Wicked.

Nurse Felicity

By Peggy Dern (pseud. Peggy Gaddis), ©1966

Nurse Felicity grew up in the Georgia hill country and watched her father doctor the sick there. She understood the natives and they trusted her. But Felicity loved a strong-willed mountain lawyer who resented her work. Could she forget him and start a new life with young Dr. Aleck Potter, somewhere away from “injun medicine and voodoo witchcraft”?

 

GRADE: C-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“You and I are committing one of the scarlet crimes of nurses, gossiping about a doctor. Shame on us!”

 

“How a girl as lovely as you are could possibly be contented to disguise herself in a white canvas uniform I’ll never understand.”

 

“I am not nosy. I’m just interested.”

 

“So many girls are so busy being charming and alluring and seductive that they don’t give a man a chance to enjoy their company, because he’s so busy protecting himself from their feminine wiles!”

 

“Just as soon as you’re strong enough, you’re going to get the paddling of your life, sweetheart.”

 

“I wonder why you and I are foolish enough to put in years learning to practice medicine when just love will take care of any illness.”

 

REVIEW:

This morning I surveyed my bookshelf of VNRNs and sighed at the overly large number of books by Peggy Gaddis still waiting to be read. I decided I might as well get it over with and plucked Nurse Felicity out of the lineup, lured by its interesting cover. But it did not take many pages after opening that cover that I experienced that familiar sense of gloom, an inevitable complication of Gaddis’ books, as I watched Nurse Felicity Caldwell leap immediately to her feet when the call light went on at 3:00 am and hold a patient’s hand until he went back to sleep (you will understand my disgust if you’ve ever worked as a nurse on the night shift) and leap to her feet again when Dr. Aleck Potter enters the ward. The pair then enter into a lengthy conversation that exposes Gaddis’ prejudice against the Native Americans who live in the “Georgia hill country,” and discuss of Deenie Taylor, an orphan raised by Indians because her grandmother was a witch and when Granny had died “no white people would have her,” who now wanders randomly through the hospital apparently just for fun. She hates white people, see, and “some of the patients are so afraid of her that if she just stands and looks at them, they go off into a frenzy.” There’s nothing left for her but to learn witchcraft from the Indian medicine men, they decide. I sighed wearily and turned to page 9.

 

Dr. Potter is just working here for a year to pay back the state for his medical education, then plans to return to the city. Based on his dislike of rural medicine, Felicity “felt that she had never disliked anyone more,” which means he will either marry her or Deenie, but my money was on the latter. Felicity is dating local attorney Corbett Raiford who wants her to quit her job when they marry. “He can’t see any future for a woman finer than being a wife and a mother,” Felicity decides, and Aunt Ellen, who raised the orphan (there are three of them in this book; parents apparently die frequently in Georgia), doesn’t seem to be rooting for him, instead suggesting she go out with that nice Dr. Potter instead! On Felicity’s next date with Corbett, he tells her she should “snap out of that silliness of yours and consent to behave like a reasonable creature,” so you are definitely agreeing with Aunt Ellen, but she continues to go out with him, though every single outing we witness—and there are at least half a dozen of the tedious affairs—end with this same quarrel. So what’s a gal to do?

 

Well, she can have the plot diverted away from her stupid boyfriend by a beautiful young woman, who has clearly spent more than a day pushing through the densest woods anyone has ever imagined, tossing herself in front of the car of Len Mallory, a handsome and wealthy man from Atlanta who is in town to visit his mother, who has had a heart attack. The woman instantly lapses into a coma that lasts weeks, and no one knows who she is—until Deenie shows up and says she’s the insane niece of a woman who lived with her son in the deepest woods near the Indians’ settlement, and that the young woman had shot them both and set the house on fire. Len Mallory, sensing an opportunity when he sees one, asks Felicity out to dinner, when he tells her that he can’t marry her because (1) “I have not the faintest hope in the world of ever persuading you to fall in love with me,” and (2) he would never move to the mountains and she would never move to the city, so they could never be together. Some people have the most interesting dates!

 

Peggy Gaddis loves to introduce us to a passel of young men and women and then play musical chairs to see who ends up with whom. I was a little surprised how the six or seven young people we meet in Nurse Felicity played out, and not optimistic about our heroine’s choice working well for her. In between Felicity’s arguments with Corbett and her sparring with Dr. Potter (who always seems to piss her off to an extent that usually precedes wedding bells in Gaddis’ books), we get plenty of the usual Gaddis illogical nonsense that I guess you’re just supposed to gloss over, such as when the sheriff casually explains to an out-of-town visitor, “This Deenie Taylor is the granddaughter of a witch,” like that’s a normal thing here in the mountains, plus the usual doctor-as-lordly-being, spanking, and scheming, flirtatious women we always find. And in another more unfortunate recurrence, this book is obliging me to write another check on behalf of the White Doctor Foundation to try to atone for its racism; Peggy Gaddis has instigated 30 percent of those donations. I suspect, when I finally finish all her books, there will have been many more.

12th Annual VNRN Awards

Welcome back to the 12^th annual vintage nurse romance novel awards! But in the spirit of my grandmother, who was known to say, “Have some chicken—it’s kind of tough,” I have to state that I don’t think this year’s offerings were particularly outstanding, earning an average grade of C+. Perhaps that was because I fell off a bit in terms of my reading, only getting through 24 books by 18 different authors, but even the Best Quotes, which usually have me snorting with laughter, seemed lackluster. It seems like every five years I lose some steam, and that was the case in 2024. Hopefully I’ll get it back next year!

Someone who never seems to lose it is one of my favorite authors, Bill Neubauer (a really remarkable person; please do read his biography through the link), who authored two of the seven Best Books this year. He wears the biggest tiara of all, having now chalked up the most wins—nine—in this category. Betty Neels, a grande dame of the genre, debuted shockingly late in this blog just last year, but this is her second year in a row winning top honors, and I expect we’ll be seeing more of her in the future. Marguerite Mooers Marshall and Olive Norton, numbers 4 and 5 respectively on 2022’s Best Authors list, again snag a couple berths on the Best Books list for themselves this year. And looking over to the doghouse, there aren’t many surprises on the Worst Books list, as we find Arlene Fitzgerald, Arlene Hale and William Daniel Ross reliably popping up like dandelions in the lawn.

If 2024 is not the most exciting year I’ve had, there are still enough gems to keep the faithful happy, books and authors to enjoy (and dis, which can be just as much fun!). Enjoy, and we’ll meet back here next year for more excitement! 

Best Books

1. Damsel in Green by Betty Neels

2. Arms and the Girl by Marguerite Mooers Marshall

3. Tangled Autumn by Betty Neels

4. Nurse March by William Neubauer

5. Dedication Jones by Kate Norway (pseud. Olive Norton)

6. Nurse Rivers’ Secret by Anne Durham

7. Million Dollar Nurse by Rebecca Marsh (pseud. William Neubauer) 

Worst Books

1. Hurricane Nurse by Joan Sargent (pseud. Sara Jenkins Cunningham)

2. Log Camp Nurse by Arlene J. Fitzgerald

3. A Nurse’s Strange Romance by Arlene Hale

4. Beauty Doctor’s Nurse by W.E.D Ross

5. Navy Nurse by Adelaide Humphries

6. Nurse Jane and Cousin Paul by Valerie K. Nelson 

Best Quotes

“‘Your bosom is heaving too—so many girls don’t have bosoms these days. I supposed it’s the fashion.’ He sighed.” Damsel in Green, Betty Neels

“She wished Walt would stop referring to Norman as a man who had committed manslaughter.” Cynthia Doyle, Nurse in Love; Adelaide Humphries

“In the back of her mind she was constantly thinking of Dick.” Navy Nurse, Virginia McCall

 “I do believe you would feel compelled to offer any burglar foolish enough to enter a cup of tea before you laid him out with a poker.” Tangled Autumn, Betty Neels

“The hospital frowns upon interns and nurses smooching in the hallways.” A Nurse’s Strange Romance, Arlene Hale

 “There’s more to conversation than attractive legs.”  Million Dollar Nurse, Rebecca Marsh (pseud. William Neubauer)

“The way to a man’s heart isn’t through his stomach anymore. It’s through his twin carburetors or his new putter, old dear. You’re not with it.” Dedication Jones, Kate Norway (pseud. Olive Norton)

“What a tasty looking neck!” A Nurse’s Strange Romance, Arlene Hale

“New lipstick had made the menace of the storm seem less imminent.” Hurricane Nurse, Joan Sargent (pseud. Sara Jenkins Cunningham)

“She always liked to start a new case feeling as fresh and crisp as the pert, white cap perched on top of her shining head which looked like a spread winged dove ready to take flight.” Log Camp Nurse, Arlene J. Fitzgerald

Best Covers

Million Dollar Nurse, illustration by Darrell Greene

Navy Nurse

Cynthia Doyle, Nurse in Love; illustration by Tom Miller

Log Camp Nurse, illustration by Mort Engel

Nurse in Jeopardy

Damsel in Green

By Betty Neels, ©1970

Nurse Georgina Rodman had met Professor Julius van den Berg Eyffert and his children when they were brought as casualties into her hospital, and the Professor arranged with Matron to have her “on loan” for a time to help with their convalescence. It was not long before Georgina found herself wishing she could be with them “for keeps.”

GRADE: A- 

BEST QUOTES:
“It was a pity that life didn’t allow you time to dawdle a little on the way.”

“Nurses never ran except for fire and haemorrhage.”

“‘Your bosom is heaving too—so many girls don’t have bosoms these days. I supposed it’s the fashion.’ He sighed.”

REVIEW:
Georgina Rodman—everyone calls her George—will “never make a good nurse,” we are told on the second page. “You’re too impetuous,” snaps her floor charge nurse, when it seems to us, in the few paragraphs we have known her, that she is intelligent, helpful, and compassionate about her patients; she knows to fish out a man’s false teeth when he’s wheeled into the Emergency Department looking blue. Despite her “flaws,” she’s just passed the exams to qualify as an RN. Unfortunately, as the Matron is congratulating her, “Matron had said, ‘a splendid career.’ It occurred to Georgina at that moment that she didn’t much care for the idea. At the back of her mind was a nebulous dream of a husband and children,” as if you can’t have both. “She felt a small shiver of apprehension; supposing Matron’s ‘splendid career’ was to be her lot in life?”

Not to worry, though, a few weeks after starting her “splendid career,” she’s working the night shift in the ED when a man, boy and girl in a car crash are brought in. On their heels follows a very large man—quintessential Betty Neels, who never had an even average-height hero—who tells Georgina that the children are his and that he is a doctor. He’s a commanding presence: “She had met him a bare five minutes ago, and on the strength of this short acquaintance was quite prepared to take his word on anything.” His name is as big as he is, Professor Julius van den Berg Eyffert—and “Georgina felt a peculiar lifting of her spirits” when she learns that Julius is single, just the guardian (not parent) of five children, his cousins. Cor, age 7, has broken both his legs, and becomes quite fond of Georgina when he’s in the hospital, so Julius naturally asks Georgina to come with the family when they return home to their village, which is not far from Great-Aunt Polly’s house. She’s an orphan, of course, sent at age 9 to live with Polly when her parents died of flu (it happens—get your shots, people!), and then Polly herself was crippled by polio 7 years later. The only quirk of the job is that she is required to wear a uniform at all times when she is on duty, and when she asks him if she may know why, he answers, “No, you may not.” And he continues to call her Nurse Rodman when the children all call her George. 

Back at the house, we witness a charming family up close, and Georgina slowly falls for them all. Poor Cor is in traction in bed for six weeks, so she spends a lot of time keeping him from “suffering from ennui,” as little Beatrix explains. The only wrenches in the works are that Georgina has fallen tragically in love with Julius, and he has informed her, “I have at last made up my mind to marry.” What a tragedy! And even worse, when she meets him at the end of her day off—not in uniform—he kisses her! What will his fiancée think about that?

Needless to say, there is much confusion about who is getting married, the de rigueur Betty Neels trip to Holland, and a near-tragedy to bring the floundering couple together, but the fun is watching Georgina interact with this charming family and Julius, who is a warm, kind, endearing character. Betty Neels is a most charming writer—but you and about 50 million others know that. To wit, after Georgina receives a too-businesslike letter from Julius the morning after he kisses her for the first time, “She put the letter in her pocket, with the unspoken thought that presently, when she was alone, she would tear it up into very small pieces indeed, and consign it to the waste paper basket, but it was surprising what a number of good reasons for not doing this occurred during the day. It seemed expedient, when she went to bed that night, to put it under her pillow.” Georgina is strong, smart, and human, with doubts and foibles and imperfections that make her that much more delightful. The children in particular are lovely and sweet, and this book is what I have already come to expect from Neels (see also The Fifth Day of Christmas and Tangled Autumn). This is the second Neels book I read and also the fourth, as I did not review it in a timely fashion and had to go back and have another go-round, and it was completely worth another viewing—so I can easily recommend it if you haven’t already had the pleasure.

Log Camp Nurse

By Arlene J. Fitzgerald, ©1966
Cover illustration by Mort Engel 

Beautiful Tove Jensen was reared in a lumber camp, but after nursing school she moved to Cosmo Beach at the center of the movie industry. There she found love for the first time. A tragic accident called her back to the lumber camp where she met Dr. Bryden. Then she was torn between two loves. Would it be the courageous lumber camp doctor or the handsome California M.D.? The decision would forever alter her life.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“A pagan wouldn’t have bothered with formalities. He would simply have dragged you off to his lair by those corn silk tresses and had his way with you. Perhaps I should try that.” 

“Dedicate yourself to the cause you were made for—that of making a man happy.”

“When you’re tired of mopping sweat and grime from rugged brows, come back to me, darling. Maybe by then you’ll be ready to shed that noble white garment, and settle down to being my lovely and obedient bride.”

“She always liked to start a new case feeling as fresh and crisp as the pert, white cap perched on top of her shining head which looked like a spread winged dove ready to take flight.”

REVIEW:
Arlene Fitzgerald is one of those writers whose work sometimes tiptoes the fine line between clever and stupid. Is it bad writing or hilarious camp when the nurse and her heartthrob doctor make out over the still-warm body of a patient who has just died, or when a bum for some unfathomable reason decides to eat the powder he discovers in the stomach of a dead fish he’s found on the beach and overdoses on cocaine? It’s a rhetorical question not easily answered, but in the case of Log Camp Nurse it’s essentially moot, because no such hilariously bizarre scenes unfold. Rather here Arlene has given us a clearly dull book without much interest or camp in this falsely advertised log camp, though we are subject to a few of her more annoying quirks (the nurse’s penchant for “ligating” or “clamping” or “tying off” or “severing” a thought or feeling frequently occurring behind her sternum with “the cold, firm scalpel of nurse’s discipline”), plus a few of the usual VNRN hackneyed plot devices that make no sense whatsoever. 

Here we find Tove Jansen (because Arlene loves the unusual name—witness Key and Glee and Stag) visiting her father in a logging camp similar to the ones she grew up in because her dad is a timber man, when a flood doesn’t actually trap her there. But when she’s driving out of the mountains she encounters a truck that has crashed, killing the passenger and severely injuring the driver. The next car that comes along just happens to contain the handsomely homely camp doctor, Russ Bryden, who kisses her in the road before rescuing the injured man, so she decides to quit her job in Cosmo Beach in a hospital for wealthy hypochondriacs who all appear to be female. But she can’t quite bring herself to also abandon her not-quite-fiancé Paul Sleeter, who she swears she loves but actually does not like very much (on pretty much every other page we are told how “handsome, suave, sophisticated, ambitious,” “polished” and “immaculate” he is, while being assured that “she had tried to convince herself she did love Paul” even as “the glamour of being married to a man like Paul had worn thin” and as she pants for Dr. Russ, who “made her heart act up” and “did things to her that Paul had never been able to do, even in their most tender moments”).

Most of the book involves Tove and Russ being hauled from one emergency to another, Tove somehow being the only healthcare professional available any time a woman goes into labor (for a camp with a population of several hundred, babies are born on a startlingly frequent basis), which means appalling preparations of shaving and enemas and sterile “technic” for a completely unsterile vaginal birth and shoving the husband out the door (one of whom is suspected of heading straight into the arms of the camp prostitute because his wife’s pregnant body is so unattractive, causing the woman to decide that she will not be having any more children). Paul makes the obligatory appearance in the humble logging camp to assist in a splenectomy for a patient who had been shot, an astonishingly dry surgery for a patient who we are told is bleeding out. During his little visit he affectionately assures his would-be bride that “if I thought that homely, red- headed doctor had done anything to smirch your conscience—or that you had allowed him to—I’d kill you both, darling.” And so he continues to win Tove’s admiration as well as ours.

You know where this book is headed from the first chapter, and Arlene gives us none of her fantastic flights of reality to enliven the story in this frankly dull book. Even the end—the ubiquitous mine cave-in in which Tove is the only person small enough to squeeze through the tiny opening in the rocks to administer the live-giving treatment of tucking a wool blanket around the man with a crushed chest, and the too-soon appearance of Dr. Russ, who manages to get through with two additional men and a stretcher about ten minutes later—is boring. We know Arlene is capable of delivering a lot more laughs—again, whether intentional or not, whether out of delight or derision, involves a much longer discussion—but the end result is that in Log Camp Nurse she does not give us anything worth reading, for better or for worse.

Arms and the Girl

By Marguerite Mooers Marshall, ©1942

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“The Lord knows we men are an undecorative species. I hope you can stand looking at me across the table.” 

“Beautiful girls like you should do nothing but exist.”

“People get the poetry they deserve.”

“I am going to have a relapse. You don’t take me seriously any longer.”

“There’s nothing so becoming to a pretty girl as a nurse’s uniform.” 

“Facts are so bald and unimaginative. Facts often annoy. If embroidered or flavored, they are easier to take.”

“You can always get killed in a war if you insist, and frequently if you don’t.”

REVIEW:
This book was a surprise to me because I thought I had read all the VNRNs written my Marguerite Mooers Marshall, who is one of my favorite authors. So now there are five (see also Nurse into Woman, Wilderness Nurse, Her Soul to Keep and Nurse with Wings), and if this one is not her best, well, even Marshall’s mediocre books are still miles better than most. 

Here we find Rosemary Alden (yes, descended from those Aldens of Mayflower fame), who is nursing the mother of an old boyfriend. Mrs. Marianne Sibley is a spoiled, demanding, wealthy woman who wants more of a prop than a nurse, and the only thing that keeps Rosemary on the job is that she has been able to spend time with Philip Sibley, Marianne’s 24-year-old son, who is a sweet young man if utterly lacking seriousness, which is what keeps Rosemary from being, well, serious about him. Soon it comes to light that Philip is being called before the draft board—World War II is about to break loose in Europe—and Marianne is planning to tell them she’s destitute (she’d cleverly moved her money out of the markets and into her mattress a year ago), dependent on her son for maintenance, and furthermore that her health is so fragile that she will drop dead of a heart attack if he is drafted. In truth, Marianne wouldn’t drop dead if she were run over by a dump truck, and as Marianne’s meeting with her health team unfolds, all the doctors fall into line—but Rosemary, disgusted, tells them all off and quits on the spot.

From there she marches over to the Red Cross Nursing Committee to enlist in the Army. But before all the paperwork comes through, Philip is on her door telling her he is in love with her and begging her to marry him. He also mentions that his enlistment has been deferred and his mother is now healthy as a horse and has fired her new  nurse and doctor. She likes him a lot, she tells him, “yet it was all no use. He was a boy unwilling to do a man’s work, a boy who wouldn’t go where even she, a girl, was going. Anything else she might forgive—not refusal to pay a debt of honor, the greatest debt man or woman owes, the debt to country.”

So off she goes to war—well, not exactly, she goes to a training camp located near Winchester, Massachusetts! There she spends many long hours dreaming about Philip: “She remembered the tumbled hair, the tie and the hat never quite straight, the flash of even teeth in the wide irregular mouth when he laughed. She remembered his effortless physical power, his way of making friends with dogs and horses and small grimy children, his sheer boyish charm and decency. So much in him that was winning and fine—yet he flinched at the one hard, disagreeable task ever laid on his twenty-four years! With a frowning shrug, she resolved to put the young man out of her mind. And did not.”

Meanwhile, at the camp’s Officers Club—she’s a second lieutenant—she meets the debonair Captain Gerald Lee, who is Rhett Butler reincarnate, even hailing from a plantation in South Carolina. On their first meeting entices her to go on a date with him in Boston, and soon they are spending much free time together, and everyone is wondering when the engraved invitations will be mailed. But “she did not love him—did not, did not! Something in her so stubbornly resisted. And yet why?” Maybe it’s because she knows that on the very next page she’s going to receive a telegram telling her that Philip has joined the Army and is going to be arriving at her camp tomorrow!

When she meets Philip at the camp, he tells her he wants to prove to her that he has what it takes. “I’m willing to wait,” he tells her—which is a first in VNRNs, the man waiting for the woman! But the bad news here is that she’s an officer and he’s just a private, so they are absolutely forbidden to fraternize. Instead they just write letters to each other, and she continues to date Jerry Lee. And goes home to visit her parents in Belltown, which is a stand-in for the New Hampshire town Marshall grew up in (Kingston) and has appeared in all the other Marshall VNRNs I’ve read. But Philip finds out about Jerry and writes that she’s done him wrong by not letting him know there was someone else, and he’s through!

Two pages later Philip is wheeled into the infirmary, delirious from an infection in his leg, and she offers to special him for 24 hours a day until he is out of danger. So now they can clasp fervent hands and kiss goodnight, and she tells Philip she will stop seeing Jerry. But Jerry has other plans: When Rosemary and Philip secretly meet for a date in Boston, who should spot them strolling the North End but that rascal Jerry? He soon has a chat with Rosemary in which he tells her that it would be such a shame if anyone heard that the two were fraternizing, because it would be terrible for Philip’s career—he’s angling to go to Officer Training School. Unless she continues to date Jerry and stops seeing Philip, he tells her, he will ensure Philip is not accepted into officer training. She decides she will not communicate with Philip any longer—but he stops writing to her, and now she’s hurt that he’s apparently dumped her without a word, and never mind that’s what she was planning to do to him! Her pride keeps her from writing to him, and then she gets a letter from his mother saying that she’s told Philip she will disinherit him if he marries her. She doesn’t want to believe that this is why he is not writing, but can’t quite not believe it. In the meantime she goes out on very chilly dates with Jerry. There are a few twists to the story after this, and another lovely visit to Belltown to visit her father, who immediately names the problem and the obvious solution. Thanks, Dad!

This is another sweet, gentle book from Marshall. I always enjoy visiting Belltown in them, which is painted as an idyllic small town, and Rosemary’s father is a particularly endearing character. There are a few of Rosemary’s friends who are also excellently drawn as well. Ordinarily I might find all the patriotism a little thick, but in this era when our country’s democracy seems to be paper thin, I appreciated Rosemary’s fervent dedication to protecting it. In the end, if I can’t say this is Marshall’s best book, it is certainly one worth reading.

Cynthia Doyle, Nurse in Love

By Adelaide Humphries, ©1953
Cover illustration by Tom Miller 

What did it take to make Dr. Sellars notice her? wondered Nurse Cynthia Doyle. Oh, he was aware of her professionally. But it was discouraging to work by his side, to loo at him, her heart thumping wildly, and get no recognition from him that she was a WOMAN as well as a NURSE. Couldn’t he see that she was pretty? Couldn’t he see that she was flesh and blood and not an automaton? Cynthia decided it was high time she did something about the situation. But what—short of being brazen and forward—could a girl do to make Dr. Sellars see that he was the man for her, she the woman for him?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“She wished Walt would stop referring to Norman as a man who had committed manslaughter.” 

“I must be getting on in years, she thought wryly, remembering that soon she would have a birthday and be all of twenty-four.”

REVIEW:
Cynthia Doyle is yet another VNRN heroine who is in love with a doctor who does not know she is alive. Dr. Walt Sellars is a handsome but dedicated man who is head of physical therapy at a clinic that seems to do nothing else except PT, in a poor part of their Virigina town. She’s beginning to see her life slipping away—at age 23, it must be confessed— because she has worked with him for two years and he’s never asked her for a date, though she gets a little frisson of excitement when their hands touch accidentally, and her heart pounds when he’s near. 

Then one day as she is walking home, she sees a car speed through the neighborhood and hit a young boy, then speed off. As the locals and cops gather, a man shows up and states he was the driver—but Cynthia knows it was a woman driving. Still she pipes up as the local “Nurse Lady” everyone knows and says that the car wasn’t speeding and that the accident couldn’t be avoided. The reason for her lie is that she’s worried that the crowd will get unruly: “She knew mob violence. It had to be snuffed out before it began to simmer.” The man, Norman Brandt, is ready to pay for all the child’s medical bills—and make a date with Cynthia. She snubs him mightily because he lied about being the driver, and never mind that she did, too, but guess who turns up at her apartment to take out her roommate that night? The roommate, Roz Effinger, is a gorgeous woman on the lookout for a rich husband—but has decided that Norman is the man she finally wants to commit to! The little problem is that Norman, having seen Cynthia cradling the stricken boy’s head on her lap in the middle of the street, has decided he’s in love with her.

This is about where the plot gets really peculiar. Norman, we are told, is some sort of former spy for the government who is now being recalled to Washington and doesn’t have to do any top secret missions anymore, so he’s free to tell everyone that he doesn’t do top secret work anymore ... because that makes so much sense. Cynthia tells Norman she won’t date him because Roz likes him, so he tells Roz that he’s in love with Cynthia, and Roz says, “I had hoped it might be me. But since it’s Cyn, and she’s quite something too, I wish you both luck.” It was hard for me to believe that a woman who cares about nothing except marrying a wealthy man would be so gracious when losing the “man of her dreams.” Then Walt, seeing that Norman has become interested in Cynthia, suddenly decides out of nowhere that he’s got to stop her from getting involved with Norman. “How he would hate to see Cynthia leave. Why, the clinic simply would not be the same place without her!” So he decides to employ “devious means” to find out how serious Norman is and to interfere. He orders Cynthia to take a month’s vacation in the hope that she will go back home to Indiana to see her family, but they’re on a long driving trip out West and aren’t home, so she just stays in town and dates Norman. Frustrated, Walt calls her up all the time, quizzes her about her activities, and gets pissy when she tells him honestly what she’s been doing.

Before too long, Norman kisses Cynthia and then proposes, because what else comes next? She reasonably says she’d like to take more time to get to know him, but then comes up with the idea that she’s going to try to get Walt to kiss her, to see if she likes it more than she liked kissing Norman. Walt then sort of goes off his rocker and drags Cynthia off from a date she’s on with Norman, telling her, “I won’t let you marry that Brandt fellow,” adding that the way he’s going to accomplish this is to marry her himself. Then he kisses her, and Cynthia is left “wide-eyed and unbelieving,” but “it had not left her weak and shaken.” Nonetheless, she then spends the next few days upset with Walt that he’s not making more of an effort to be nice to her at work, to have lunch with her, to walk her home from work, since they’re engaged—all the while angry that “he had not said that he loved her,” or even, for that matter, asked her to marry him, just assumed they were engaged. During the five pages she’s acting like they are engaged, she’s telling herself that she has to go out and buy him a hot sandwich when he refuses to eat a cold one because “he was the man she probably would have to look after for the rest of her life,” and that when he is too busy to spend time with her, “she would have to get used to his time not being his own” and that she’s not his top priority.

Then Norman proposes a huge television fund-raiser for Walt’s clinic, hosted by the up-and-coming TV starlet who was driving the car who hit the boy, and Norman’s mother also decides to create a huge philanthropic campaign that will provide huge funds for the clinic. I mean, what? Walt really gets loopy then, grabbing Cynthia by the arms and hurting her, telling her she can’t see Norman anymore, and then driving very erratically when they have an argument in the car. He seems, frankly, like a significantly unhinged individual.

There’s a big crisis in the end that helps Cynthia figure out what to do, but neither man seems like a great choice. Norman, though he seems slightly more rational than Walt, pursues her relentlessly from the first time he sees her, and Walt just seems like a lunatic, which makes Cynthia’s devotion to him and semi-acceptance of his decision that she will marry him seem absurd. The clinic, which serves poor children crippled by polio or cerebral palsy, is barely mentioned, when it seems like it should be an important backbone to the story, since Cynthia makes it clear to everyone that she wants to continue working there for the rest of her career. The many unanswered questions about Norman’s career, the woman driving the hit-and-run car, Roz’s easy acceptance that she’s losing the man of her dreams to her roommate, and even a police officer who seems like he might turn into a potential love interest and doesn’t, just leave me wondering what the hell author Adelaide Humphries was thinking when she wrote this book. It comes off like a one-draft wonder written without any advance planning over a long weekend before the mortgage payment was due—and so I can’t recommend you give it any more consideration than she seems to have done.