Crusading Nurse

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

Susan Leighton was a pretty young nurse and as innocent as they come. She had no idea what was going on at Parsons Community Hospital, even though the newspapers hinted at mismanagement and malpractice. It was handsome Dr Corbett who opened her eyes—who set her off on a lonely crusade against some powerful enemies, and a shattering struggle against the man she loved.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Any time that beautiful hunk of man wants to breathe down my neck, he’ll get a warm welcome.” 

“Is that passion or asthma?”

“Nobody’s ever going to like you less for saying you’re sorry.”

“How can a man that handsome be that irritating?”

REVIEW:
Susan Leighton is admittedly not the strongest nurse on my bookshelf. She took her training at a “small and not highly accredited” school that had “left innumerable blanks in her education,” and after arriving in Parsons, IL, to work at the community hospital there, she remains insecure about her ability. She’s been reading her textbooks at night because, she tells hospital board President Eugene Kalb, “I’m so terribly conscious of the responsibility a nurse takes on. I actually get cold chills, sometimes, realizing that a child’s life may depend on my doing the right thing. I want to be sure I haven’t forgotten anything I learned in pediatrics.” Her temerity leads her to be overmuch “in awe of the hospital and the people who ran it,” overly impressed that “everyone’s so—so dedicated.” When Eugene complains that reporter Mike Stetson is rooting around the hospital for any evidence that the facility’s practices are subpar, on the heels of stories the newspaper has published about graft in the city government, the administrator candidly admits that there is “a little hanky-panky going on” at City Hall, but there’s none at the hospital! Susan just nods and smiles.

On the job, her colleague, Tenny Williams, a longtime and highly experienced nurse, voices concerns about safety practices—there’s only one nurse covering the night shift on the newborn nursery, which can hold up to 25 babies. “Susan frowned, wishing Tenny would stop involving her in matters that weren’t the concern of ordinary employees. She felt a queasy sense of disloyalty, questioning the decisions of her superiors.” Because it’s not her concern if she is responsible so many patients that they are in danger.

Then Dr. Dale Corbett turns up on the premises. He wanders around asking the staff a lot of questions about how the hospital is run, and it’s revealed that he’s from Boston and is working on a paper evaluating hospital safety. He eventually wanders into the nursery and starts asking Susan questions about her work. “It’s less taxing and it’s sort of fun,” she says, explaining why she likes working in the nursery. Possibly amused by how adorable this answer is, he then asks her if she is aware that two-thirds of infant mortality occurs in the first week of life and what she knows about erythroblastosis fetalis (aka Rh factor incompatibility) which one infant on the nursery suffers from, and she is forced to confess her ignorance. Despite her initial claims that she worries about being a conscientious and knowledgeable nurse, now she is “resentful of what seemed to be a petty inquisition” rather than horrified at her ignorance and dashing back to her textbooks.  But she can’t help panting when he’s around, soon deciding after having lunch with him in the cafeteria that she is falling in love with him.

It’s not going to be an easy relationship, though, as she asks Dale why he isn’t “really serving humanity” by opening a medical practice instead of scrutinizing hospital policy. “Because maybe I’ll be forced to take patients to a hospital that kills instead of cures,” he answers—and she responds by again relentlessly and naively defending the hospital. After a couple of dates they finally kiss, and he proposes on the spot. Susan wisely answers that they should get to know each other better, but after he bizarrely stiffens up and leaves, Susan reverses course and decides, “They had disagreed on an important issue, they had known each other only a short time, they were virtually strangers. None of that mattered! Love was enough.” Of course, the question of whether it can really be love after just two dates is not asked.

The next day at work, everything should be bliss, but that darned Dr. Corbett shows up in the pediatrics ward where one child has a postop Staph infection after a tonsillectomy, and he asks why no one is taking infection precautions such as gowning and gloving and handwashing before and after seeing the patient. “Smugly, identifying herself firmly with the medical staff,” Susan declares, “Why, the laundry bill, if we put on and discarded a gown every time we go into this room, would be staggering.” Then, when Dr. Corbett points out a chain of medical errors and prevents Susan from delivering a major overdose to a patient, she snaps, “You’ve managed to unnerve everybody who works here. We’re all so nervous, we’re making mistakes because of you! All I know is that we were getting along very well without your constant sniping. We were doing a good job.” Her ignorance is colossally staggering, but more so is her arrogant conviction that she, a self-admittedly poorly trained nurse in her first weeks on the job, knows more than a doctor about management of a serious infection. I really can’t imagine why her alarming blindness does not turn Dr. Corbett off completely, as it seems to indicate a serious character flaw.

On her way out of the hospital, Susan runs into Eugene Kalb in the hallway. He starts to gripe about Dr. Corbett, and she, shaken by what might have been a fatal error, tells him there might be room for improvement in an organization as large as this one. He snaps, “You have to align yourself either with people who have worked hard to make this hospital a reality or with those whose object seems to be to tear it down.” Suddenly she sees “in Eugene’s ethic there were no patients whose lives depended on your skill and knowledge and compassion. There were only customers, from whom a specified sum was to be extracted.” Then, meeting with the hospital head nurse to confess her error, she catches the woman in a weak moment and she confirms of all Dr. Corbett’s insinuations—that the hospital is “a disgrace to the profession and a threat to this community,” that a number of patients have died or been injured due to shoddy practices.

Now Susan is all afire to save the hospital and decides to get all the hospital employees to start making suggestions about how their practices can be improved—and gets nothing but cold stares from her coworkers when she suggests it. And that’s the end of that—because the pediatrics ward’s lack of precautions with a highly infectious patient have resulted in a hospital-wide outbreak of Staph infections, and finally everyone is on board with improving their outcomes—after the epidemic, which results in seven deaths, has been tamed, and Dr. Corbett and the reporter have been vindicated in their mission to improve the hospital. All that remains is to find out if Susan will triumph in her mission of winning back Dr. Corbett.

This book is well written and amusing, as books by the erratic and prolific (this is the 33rd book of hers I have reviewed) author Adele Maritano are, and even includes a sensitive portrait of an experienced and intelligent Black nurse (Tenny Williams), one of the best Black characters I’ve met in a VNRN, alongside Marilyn Morgan. But our heroine’s head-snapping flips in attitude, from insecure new nurse to arrogant hospital defender to “crusading” (albeit only for a day) nurse, are problematic to say the least. It’s hard for me to understand why anyone who knows her at all would want to continue to do so, because her rigidity of thinking and her nastiness to anyone who challenges it are not pleasant character traits. But when Adele Maritano is on her game, she is second to none, and if her heroine brings down the grade on this book, her writing here is top form, making time with it well spent.

Lab Nurse

By Rona Randall, ©1958
Also published as Sisters in Nursing

They were three beautiful sisters, triplets in fact, but each girl had her own distinct personality: Faith, the lab assistant, was the serious and intense sister. Her hair was dark and her eyes, a deep blue. Hope, the staff nurse, had flaming copper-colored hair and she was always gay. Charity, the physiotherapist, was blonde, gentle, graceful—and blind … The three girls were entirely devoted to one another, to nursing and to St. Bede’s hospital where they lived and worked. When three young and attractive doctors arrived—a visiting surgeon, a pathologist, and a house physician—each girl found the happiness, excitement and romance that were needed to make her life full and complete …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“In endeavoring to antagonize no one he failed to succeed in pleasing anyone.” 

“Nothing had worked out as she planned. Not a doctor here had fallen in love with her or even shown the slightest willingness to flirt with her. It had been a very dull visit, after all.”

REVIEW:
This book was originally published under the title Sisters in Nursing, and it’s too bad they changed it because the original is much more fitting, as this is the story of three sisters named, I’m sorry to have to tell you, Faith, Hope and Charity Connell. They are triplets, orphaned shortly after birth and raised by the matron of St. Bede’s  hospital. Each one of them—a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead (what are the odds!)—are beautiful and intelligent and charming. And as we open the book, we find its ending is foretold in its first seven words: “The arrival of three new medical men …”

Honestly, I’m not sure what more there is to say about this book. I can tell you that Faith is a junior pathologist, and that one of the new men, Dr. Charles Wilstack, is the new pathologist. Faith was “shy, reserved, sensitive. It might take him quite a time, he thought, to break down those barriers, but he would do it in the end.” Hope is a nurse on the surgical floor, and on page 19, “just like that, it happened. With no clash of cymbals, no roll of drums. Right at that moment, she fell in love” with Dr. Phillip Trent, the new surgeon, who is intimidating and stiff with nurses, but Hope immediately sees that his actual problem is that “he has never learned to laugh!” and so it not cowed by him. He’s originally from this town and has moved back in with his older unmarried sister Agatha, and is immediately taken up by his old flame, the wealthy and divinely evil Felicity Drake (even she has a noun for a first name), who had spurned Phillip in their youth but is now divorced from the man she’d chosen instead. Felicity is “an elegant young woman. She wore a beautifully cut suit of moss green, with a lavish mink stole and a chic little moss green hat trimmed with mink tails.” I, for one, swooned—nothing makes me tumble harder than a gorgeous, well-tailored suit ornamented with fur, a weakness that dates back to the excellent Graduate Nurse, reviewed in 2011, in which the vixen had a similar outfit but, even better, was stepping from a smart blue “roadster” when we met her. But I digress: Last of the trio is Charity, who is a physical therapist, and who is blind—although so adept that when the new internist Dr. Michael Shearling meets her and holds out his hand to her, he is insulted that she does not shake it, only later learning that it wasn’t rudeness that caused her to miss his gesture. Michael is “tall and dark, with a strong face and a bitter mouth,” which Charity of course cannot see, but oh yes, she can: “At some time in his life something has happened to Dr. Shearing that hurt him,” she tells her sisters. “And he is still hitting out against it.”

And so we have the dramatis personae of this book, but it is nicely padded with some lovely extra characters: Dr. Phillip’s sister Agatha Trent is a joy, as are Matron and Dr. Shearling’s mother. There’s even a happy little dog, Charity’s pseudo seeing eye companion, and a silver gown to wear to the ball. Not much really happens—with a  triple-threaded braid of a plot, each of the strands is fairly thin—but it’s smooth and pleasant and sweet, not at all challenging but mildly comforting, like chamomile tea when you have a slight cold. It’s a story worth reading, maybe best after you’ve had a lousy day and you need a light soothing stroke on your hair. As long as you are not expecting more than mild pleasantries, Lab Nurse will take perfectly good care of you.

Nurse by Night

By Doris Knight, ©1965 

Dr. Tony Warren and Nurse Norma Ferris; how could a love so beautiful go so wrong? That was the question everyone asked—the hospital staff, Norma’s parents, even her patients. What they didn’t know was Norma’s very own secret and it took a heartbreaking experience and Dr. Rick Stanton before people could truly understand their romance. And then Norma understood herself …

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Norma forgot that he might be a murder and hurried to him.” 

“Now, Inspector, I am a busy man. I have lives to save. So this interview is at an end.”

REVIEW:
I’m never quite sure what to do with a book like Nurse by Night. It is an absolute gem, a rare masterpiece—but of the sort that it is brilliant in its daffy stupidity, like the classic Nurse at the Fair or almost anything by Arlene Fitzgerald. So is a stupid book that makes you repeatedly laugh out loud at its idiocy a bad book or a good one? These are nurse romance novels, after all, not capital-L Literature, so I must decide that if a book is amusing and makes you want to read passages out loud or recommend to a friend as “so bad it’s amazing”—in short, the perfect beach read—then it must be good. And so this book earns an A- (maybe one with an asterisk?) instead of a D. 

Nurse Norma Ferris, who it seems has only gotten three hours of sleep in the several days spanned by this book, is a ubiquitous orphan from New York who moved to London to surprise the obstetrician she’d been in love with, Dr. Tony Warren, when he’d abruptly taken a job there. Though actually, Norma found out about the job when Tony’s friend handed him a plane ticket and told him he had five hours to pack and get to the airport, so why she thought it would be a smart move to majorly disrupt her life and chase this guy across the ocean is the first of many mysteries we will encounter here. 

He’s unexpectedly ecstatic to see her again, though he had not written her during their separation, and now, two years later, he is pressing her to get married—in secret, because he plans to take a two-year job in the Bahamas that requires the physician be unmarried—can you imagine such a thing?—and it becomes increasingly apparent from Tony’s hot murmurings while in the throes of passion stolen in the hospital shrubbery what he really wants: “I can’t take any more of this. We must have this weekend together, Norma,” he whispers, and then he’ll go off for two years without seeing her after they’re married. You’d think there would be an easier way.

Then one evening at 11:00 pm, Norma decides to go for a walk when a thunderstorm is threatening, stays out too late after the storm starts even though lightening scares her silly, and takes a shortcut through Porter’s Alley, forbidden because a  nurse was strangled to death there a year ago, the murderer never caught. In the alley she sees two men in white raincoats fighting for possession of a knife. She hears one of the men scream “a cry of mortal agony” and runs off. When she reaches the hospital she calls the police from a phone booth outside, but hangs up before giving any more information other than that there’s been a murder in the alley because “she didn’t intend to get mixed up in this.”

But outside the phone booth door is a “good-looking” man in (gasp) a white raincoat who grabs her wrist and asks her if she’s American and if she heard a man scream. She pulls away and ducks into into the nurse’s dorm just in time for curfew. “Old Mike,” who is usually on duty at the door monitoring the residents, is absent, so she steals one of the wooden figurines he is always carving—but suddenly there’s a massive multi-car crash outside the dorm doors, so she does the obvious thing and runs up to her room to hide, then decides to put the figurine back, but cuts herself on something sharp as she tries to pull the object from her pocket. Returning the now-bloody object without bothering to figure out how she got cut, she heads back to her room, but notices some potted fir trees in the hallway have been re-arranged, and someone behind them sneezes! Now she bolts back upstairs, hides her muddy shoes and wet and bloody uniform in a locked drawer, then figures out that someone had hidden a bloody scalpel in her cape!

So she washes off the knife and has just added that to her collection of Suspicious Objects when someone knocks on her door! “Was it the murderer out there, come to collect the knife?” Because that’s what a murderer would be wanting of a witness, but if he knew how fervently Norma intends to aid and abet the crime, he wouldn’t bother. But no, it’s her roommate—did she forget her key?—telling her that it’s all hands on deck for the car crash, so down to the Emergency Department Norma goes, where she finds that not only a murder and a car crash but a lightning strike in Potter’s Alley has ignited a farm building and burned a couple hiding there, and the farm truck that decided to go for a drive hit a pedestrian and then was found to have a body in the back, a man who’s been stabbed to death! “Norma sighed. If she did marry Tony secretly, she was going to miss being a part of St. Christopher’s Hospital,” and if this much zany activity is occurring in less than one hour, I have to agree it would be a tragic loss—though it might be pointed out that her job there is caring for the same people she had just run from at the first opportunity.

When the immediate traumas are cleared away, Norma is sent to special Dr. Stanton, a new addition to the staff who decided to show up for his first day at midnight and was, if you can believe it, the pedestrian struck by the farm truck. He’s literally bandaged head to toe, for a single rib fracture and a sprained ankle, but Norma knows it’s not really Dr. Stanton because she knew Hugh Stanton in high school in Manhattan, and his eyes were gray, but this man’s are blue! So she passes out on the spot! When she comes to, the patient insists she not leave his side, but sleep three hours in the chair next to his bed, and when she wakes up all his bandages have been removed and he’s better! But he’s still going to stay in the hospital for another two days because he’s the long-lost brother of Dr. Hugh Stanton, Dr. Rick Stanton! And she’s going to stay on duty 24 hours a day nursing a completely well man while they figure out who the murderer is!

Oh, and for her to break up with Tony—several times, in case he didn’t get the picture after the twice she’s told him to his face and the message she sent via her roommate, because “I hate secrets,” she says, bringing up Tony’s not-so-secret other girlfriend. But despite being such a champion of truth, she lies to the police several times about what happened That Fateful Evening, and she does end up falling on top of her patient and kissing him until “she began to fear for his cracked and bruised ribs” (there’s only one), which required a full-torso cast, but only for 12 hours.

We’re only about halfway through the book at this point, and there are so many mysteries to wonder about, not least being how Norma is able to even walk most of the time as her legs are always going weak with fear—but also, how did the scalpel end up on top of the electric meter in Norma’s room? Who got her muddy clothes out of the locked drawer and how, and why did they just throw them on the floor for her roommate to clean up? How does Tony know so much about what’s going on in Norma’s room when he’s not supposed to even be in her dorm? What was the deal with the sneezing man behind the fir trees? How can a woman so constantly paralyzed with fear be an effective nurse, much less set herself up as bait to trap a murderer? And why isn’t there a quota on the number of exclamation points an author can use? The contradictions of plot and prose are nonstop and regularly hilarious, making for one highly entertaining book. If author Doris Knight (and you do have to admire the pun of the title Nurse by Night) tied for fourth in the Worst Author category in this year’s annual VNRN Awards, this book ironically proves the point while simultaneously vaulting her out of the running with its spectacularly fabulous flameout.

Border Nurse

By Dorothy Dowdell, ©1963 

Jeanne Reynolds was troubled over the events of the past few days. She had been following the explicit instructions of the owners of the Desert Valley Growers’ clinic. Then what did the warning from Merritt Williams mean? “I’m afraid you’re going to be hurt,” he had said last night as they stood at her door. “I find you enchanting, Miss Head Nurse of the Growers’ Clinic. But I’m afraid that one of my cleverest plans is going to boomerang on me.” He had kissed her then. The morning headlines made clear his meaning. Jeanne realized then that her heart had mistaken a foe for a friend.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“I’d rather be glamorous than nice.” 

“When I grow up, I’m going to buy a Geiger counter and hunt for uranium.” 

“Think about me sometimes while you’re strapping a sprained ankle or giving a shot.”

“I’m quite dangerous with a hypo when I think of some of the exasperating things you do and say.”

“She’d better get busy! She’s twenty-four. She’ll be an old maid if she doesn’t look out!”

“We’re going to get married no matter what happened, but it will be lots nicer to be solvent.”

REVIEW:
Jeanne Reynolds has left her job in Los Angeles to work run the clinic for Mexican migrant workers under the auspices of the Growers’ Association of Desert Valley, California, largely because she is fluent in Spanish (her father grew up in the Panama Canal Zone, as his father had been a government employee there, and spoke the language at home). You’d think, though, that poor Jeanne has a hex on her for all the trouble that brews up. First, a hot young lawyer named Merritt Williams who is working to unionize the native-born American migrant farm workers shows up at her clinic with an injured American worker. She is unable to treat the man, though, because this clinic is set up exclusively for the Mexican workers through a joint agreement between the Mexican and American governments. The resulting publicity—a full-page ad in the paper the following day—names her as the villain in the incident, misquoting her and misrepresenting her actions. She is furious about it, but her boss is even more so! “The biggest mistake I ever made was hiring you!” he shrieks before stomping off. She’s so upset that “not even a shower and putting on a becoming green jersey dress raised Jeanne’s spirits” after this exchange.

Later she tells off Merritt for attacking her personally, telling him, “I never want to have anything to do with you again!” But that darned guy is “the most exciting person she’d ever met! He’s like a Greek god,” so before long she’s out on a date with him, swooning in his arms on the dance floor. He reveals that his parents were migrant farm workers, and that’s why he is fighting so hard to unionize them. Then he drops the bomb that “I’d have to be the master of my household. If you learn to care for me, it will be because you think I am invincible. In your heart, you want to be dominated.” And that’s where I would make a beeline for the door, but it doesn’t seem to phase Jeanne one bit. “Was he right? Did she really want to be dominated?”

Next the Mexican consul shows up at the clinic because some patients are complaining about Jeanne, and then a patient that Jeanne has prescribed a medication for a stomach bug dies the day after he saw her, so everyone is convinced the man was poisoned by Jeanne’s prescription. Jeanne’s boss takes the opportunity to chew her out again, so she cries on Merritt’s shoulder and in the process decides that she’s in love with him. “If he asked her to marry him, she knew she would accept.”

But the union guys are causing trouble for the growers by getting the migrant workers to refuse to work for them, so their crops can’t be harvested. A good friend of Jeanne’s, Gary Hunter, is a farmer whose small tomato farm is on the brink of bankruptcy, so Jeanne helps him out by spending one Saturday picking tomatoes with a bunch of his friends. Now it’s Merritt’s turn to chew out Jeanne, because she’d crossed a picket line to help Gary, and seethes through most of their date until she finally snaps and tells him that Gary can’t support the unions because their contract requires him to guarantee laborers work 30 hours a week, and his small farm doesn’t need that amount of labor. “He doesn’t make profit enough to pay a lot of idle men,” she points out, so Merritt declares he’s not going to discuss the matter any further, a convenient tactic for jerks who are wrong. The next day, delivering dinner to Gary after he’s been working in the fields, Jeanne discovers that his truck full of tomatoes had been attacked and his crop destroyed by three anonymous gangsters. She’s convinced that Merritt is behind the attack, so she leaves a letter in his mailbox that she never wants to see him again. “She was in love with Merritt, but she had to admit that he had a merciless streak in him.”

How will it all wind up? Likely as you think it will, but not the way you wish it had, as she lets Gary, the nicest man in the book, get away. She also seems entirely pleased to be walking away from her career—well, it must be acknowledged that she’s had the most difficult year ever—to become a wife and mother. Curiously, a side plot about the married doctor she works for possibly having an affair, possibly with Jeanne’s roommate—the doctor repeatedly asks Jeanne to call his house at 10:30 pm and say that he needs to come to the clinic immediately, and Jeanne, the dope, always goes along with this unethical behavior, thinking that “it’s none of my business,” clearly not realizing that her actions are making her a part of it, that she is helping to cause the pain experienced by his young son, with whom she is good friends. We never find out what’s actually behind the doctor’s actions, though Jeanne decides “the doctor would have his periodical affairs, and nothing would change.”  There are some interesting debates about the work that laborers do and how it is valuable but not valued—not unlike those in the similar book Graduate Nurse—and Jeanne’s arguments with Merritt hint that she will stand up to him, he will not be the “master” of his household, and that he will actually appreciate her reasoning from time to time. It would be a more interesting book, though, if these parts played a bigger role, and we had greater confidence that the man might actually come to realize the error of his chauvanistic ways. As it is, it’s a mild enough read, with enjoyable armchair travel of the Southern California desert country.

Saturday’s Child

By Betty Neels, ©1972 

Abigail was a true ‘Saturday’s child’; she worked very hard for her living. And it looked as if she could expect to go on earning her own living, for no one seemed to be in any great hurry to marry her—least of all Dominic van Wijkelen, who admired her as a nurse but who seemed to have no personal feeling for her at all—except dislike!

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Abigail took off her gloves and unwound her scarf and went to find the kitchen, small and a little old-fashioned, with a gay gingham frill round the mantelshelf above the small electric cooker and a row of pot plants on the windowsill.” 

“There was no doubt at all that pretty clothes did a lot for a girl.”

“Happy times are for remembering.”

REVIEW:
This is the fourth VNRN by Betty Neels that I have read, and all the usual ingredients are here: The plucky 24-year-old orphan, here called Abigail Trent, with few friends and no family, a hard worker who never complains—the book’s title being a reference to an English verse, the book explains: “Saturday’s child has to work for her living, and Abigail was a term used some hundreds of years ago to denote a serving woman.” She thinks herself “not in the least pretty,” failing to understand that her kindness, honesty, and smile (not to mention a new pink dress) render her quite beautiful, indeed. She’s hired to work in Amsterdam caring for an English woman with a gastric ulcer, and there she meets Neels Standard #2, Professor Dominic van Wijkelen, a “giant of a man,” handsome and 40, “arrogant and ill-humored,” always treating our stalwart heroine “with the cold courtesy she had come to believe was the only alternative to his ill-humor.” But she refuses to be overly intimidated by the man and occasionally throws some sass his way, which clearly rocks his world view but makes him take more notice of her as an independent woman not interested in chasing his skirts. 

Next is the Neels Standard Plot: Though he is nearly relentlessly mean to her, occasionally he is kind, and soon—here on page 54—“somewhere behind that forbidding manner must be the man she had fallen in love with.” And though “the professor was as likely to fall in love with her as the moon would turn to cheese” (wensleydale?), he does keep finding work for her that keeps her in Holland and him visiting her (patients) every day. Neels is likely to toss in a dance that he invites her to after which he kisses her and tells her, “You have almost restored my faith in women,” hinting at a broken heart that has kept him bitter and alone. There will be at least one child in the story, here Dominic’s three-year-old niece Nina, who requires expert nursing that he witnesses with extreme gratitude as she works tirelessly—sometimes around the clock—to encourage the lovable muffin back from the brink of death.

In this iteration of the Neels classic, we are lucky to meet two delightful elderly characters, both much beloved by Dominic and who need nursing by Abigail. She brings another elder to the table, a former employee of Abby’s family before her parents died, when they were better off, and to whom she is extremely devoted, planning to support for the duration of her career; Dominic hires the old man to be a gardener and odd-jobs man. These three we can see have wisely assessed the hurdles the relationship between Dominic and Abigail must clear and are working behind the scenes—sometimes literally, as we are not always witnesses to what we can easily believe to be their gentle hands on the wheel—to assist the would-be lovers to an understanding.

Ultimately it becomes harder for me to know what to do with Betty Neels. Though this is, on its own, an excellent book, it shares so many similarities with the three preceding books I have reviewed that it’s hard not to feel like I am getting the same whole cloth I have had before, just with a few different patches sewn on to differentiate it for the sake of the copyright laws. It’s a great book easily worth recommending, but I just wish I wasn’t closing the cover feeling that I’ve read it all before.

Kit Cavendish—Private Nurse

By Margaret Malcolm ©1965 

Kit had always taken care to keep her work as a private nurse quite separate from her private life—but she was unable to prevent this happening when she took a job in the Baylis household. And as things turned out, she was quite right to be apprehensive about it.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Whether we liked it or not, there’s only one world for everybody to share, and the sooner we realized that we had no right to expect a bigger or better share than other people, the more we would enjoy what we had got.” 

“You know, with a face like yours, anyone would imagine you had a sweet, sympathetic nature. Always ready to lay a soothing hand on a fevered brow—metaphorically in this place, of course. But how wrong one would be!”

REVIEW:
Kit Cavendish, who has been working as a private nurse for the past year, has just been hired to care for a wealthy gentleman recovering from a broken leg sustained when he fell while having a heart attack—so he has two ailments to recover from. As it happens, this man lives just outside Kit’s hometown, which she left six years ago for her training. She no longer has any family in the area to bring her back before now, but she accepted the job because she thought it might be fun to go back and see her former haunts. 

It isn’t. It turns out there’s a big new factory in town—owned by her patient, Ralph Baylis—and as a result, “Where there had been fields and farms and perhaps a few isolated houses there were now rows and rows and rows of small, ugly houses, each exactly like its neighbor,” built to house the new workforce. Then there’s a young man from her past, Victor Wrinch, who is now an accountant for the factory. Years ago he’d had some unrealistic ideas about his relationship with Kit, who was too nice for too long about it, until the day she found “she had had to be almost brutal” to clue him in to her disinterest in him romantically. But when she arrives in town by train, Victor is the one waiting to meet her at the station, telling her that he and Ruth Baylis, her patient’s wife, had decided on Kit for the job: “Someone intelligent who could keep him occupied with other interests so that he doesn’t have time to worry” about the factory. Or the fact that Ruth Baylis—incidentally 20 years Ralph’s junior and his former secretary—has stepped into the role of running the business while Ralph is home doing nothing at all out of fear that he might have another coronary. Unfortunately, you can see the trouble coming a mile away, because how could a woman possibly run a company well? “When a woman thinks she’s as clever as a man—or cleverer—she always goes too far, simply to convince other people. And she doesn’t care what methods she uses either.” Another option for this story line—and a more interesting one at that—would have been that Ruth actually was good at running the company, but Ruth starts out mean and lying, so we know something shady is afoot.

Then who should show up but Jason Heathfield! (If I’m going to snark about the Baylis’ age difference, I should also mention with raised brow that he’s 14 years older than Kit.) He is the cardiologist on the case, and had abruptly ditched Kit four years ago for no apparent reason; of course, “she could never marry any other man” after that. So now she has Jason’s slightly warm—or is it just slightly less cold?—demeanor to negotiate on top of the family drama, which includes not just the mystery of what Mrs. Baylis and Victor are doing at the factory, but Ralph’s son Noel (from a previous marriage) to fend off and Ruth’s niece Sue, an overworked and underappreciated Cinderella. Noel likes to play around with life and women, and while Ralph is hoping Noel will come to work at the factory, Ruth just wants to keep her current position as boss and uses Kit as a vehicle to tarnish Noel’s reputation with his father. Sue, of course, is in love with Noel but doesn’t stand a chance, due to her shy demeanor and Kit’s outstanding and forthright personality.

Then one day, out for a walk, Kit meets Jason just as she is setting out a huge picnic, and she asks him to join her. In the course of general conversation, he says something vague and obscure and covers her hand with his—“She knew beyond doubt that what he had said was much more than a mere generalization. He had expressed a personal hope—and one which concerned not just other people, but themselves.” She’s a bit of a mind reader, and she needs to be, because that’s the end of that conversation, except he promises never to let her go without a fight again! Until Kit is abruptly sacked by Mrs. Baylis, and Jason says not a word as she packs up and heads back to her old hospital job in London. “She realized you’d got too strong a character to be got round, so she’d made up her mind you’d got to go”—Victor tells Kit, explaining that Ruth wanted to keep Ralph an invalid and out of the office so she could keep the top job, while Kit wanted exactly the opposite, as she knows it is best for Ralph to be healthy and occupied.

In the end Jason comes around and explains why he’s been such a curmudgeon, but it’s hard to start liking a fellow on page 184 when he’s been an aloof ass for the previous 183. Some of how the tangles are tied up make for sweet endings, particularly the way Ralph Baylis wins yet simultaneously makes peace with his unhappy, frustrated wife. I wish Ruth Baylis hadn’t been such a shrew, as it is easy to dismiss the real problem of there being few real outlets for intelligent gifted women in the 1960s when the woman in question is a scheming harpy. But overall this book is a good read with interesting characters and plot developments—if only the book’s hero had been included in either category.  

NOTE: This author should not be confused with the pen name Margaret Malcolm, under which author Edith Lyman Kuether wrote the novel Headless Beings, her only book.

A Nurse Involved

By Peggy O’More, ©1968 

Also published as Stand By Nurse

The staff of City Core Hospital was faced daily with the problem of saving the lives of would-be suicides and of trying again and again. Nurse Iva Loring had an inner drive that had taken her through school and training at top speed. She gave too much, too rapidly, to her work and was on the verge of a nervous collapse when she took time off to regain her perspective on life. Now she was easing herself back into work as a stand-by nurse. Her special empathy for the depressed and discouraged made her an ideal nurse for the suicide detail. But there was a question of whether or not she was too understanding and too involved to be effective. Iva, herself, had to examine her values and choose between the career to which she was dedicated and marriage to the devoted young hospital pharmacist who had stood by her without making any demands on her emotions. Could Iva make that choice?

GRADE: D+

BEST QUOTES:
“It is easier to forgive a thousand others than one’s own self.” 

REVIEW:
The silver lining of the dark cloud that is this particular Peggy O’More Blocklinger book—an author who is easily one of the worst—is that it’s the last of her books on my shelves that I hadn’t read. There may be more out there in the world, but I am not planning on looking for them any time soon. 

In this book we have Nurse Iva Luanne Loring, who is given a middle name probably so that the author can engage in her penchant of making everyone’s names alliterate—Woodson Wortman, Henry Hanson, Mark Mansfield and at least four more populate these pages. Iva works at City Core Hospital in California, a medical center that seems to treat only suicide victims—we meet at least six—as well as victims of major car crashes and brutal assaults, including what may be a first in my VNRN reading, a rape (the victim is advised to change her name, join a mission service and move overseas). Iva herself is recovering from a nervous breakdown brought on by overwork, requiring that she spend six weeks on the beach—can I get one of those?—so she’s only supposed to be working part-time, though she does seem to work most days anyway. Her own psychological frailty makes her particularly hip to pop psychology and management of the crazier patients, as in typical clunky Bowman phrasing, “trying to adapt emotional feet to shoes of a contour different from those feet.”

Iva’s main problem is that she is engaged to Woody Wortman, a “druggist” at the hospital, who she hardly ever sees and never thinks of with any fondness or even, it must be confessed, at all. “With her, the goal was marriage to Woody, creating a home for him,” she believes, stating,  “Where home is the principal consideration I must forget myself and think of Woody, think of a place for him to come home to,” and doesn’t that sound like a fun life? Woody conveniently shakes her up a bit when he announces that he has purchased a drug store some distance away and plans to install his mother and aunt in one of the apartments on the second floor—a plan that the anal-retentive Woody had not mentioned until it was done. At least Iva has the sense to realize that this is not good: “He must have studied and planned this move for a long time. He would have scanned its possibilities from every angle. Yet not one word had he breathed to her!”

So while Woody is now miles away building up his new business, Iva calls a hiatus to their engagement. Fortunately she has Dr. Ben Dorsey to act as her chauffeur and luncheon companion—though she certainly does not hint at any feelings toward the man any more than she had toward Woody, and Ben himself is one of those who “has an allergy to nurses. Meaning he’s not married, and if and when has no idea of succumbing to the wiles of a white cap.” So it is shocking in a number of ways when he slips a ring on her finger as they are treating yet another suicide attempt in the Emergency Department, the romantic fool!

Here, as in most Peggy O’More Blocklinger books, we are regularly lectured with her patented psychobabble, as in, “If, as some scientists were insisting, thought was a volatile force, what a variety of poisons could be filling the air.” Yet Iva’s own psychological problems—her relentless drive to overwork—are solved on a single introspective afternoon drive in the country, and a page later she has returned whole, with the plan to go back to school to get a PhD in psychiatry. We also get the author’s tendency to use single words as sentences meant to convey pages of meaning, usually indecipherable to us—“‘Cat,’ murmured Iva, and Woodson looked at her, shocked.” Blocklinger’s prose is stilted and clunky, as in, “Food accepted and ingested,” and, “Iva believed bed was indicated.” There’s none of the hilarious stupidity as one would find with Arlene Fitzgerald’s best; this book is just plain stupid—another Peggy O’More Blocklinger novel to avoid. And please, don’t send me any more!