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.