Country Club Nurse

By Dorothy Cole 

(pseud. Frances Y. McHugh), ©1967

 

They were the glamorous super-rich—could she help heal their broken lives? Caring for an overindulged young socialite at the wealthy Chanticleer Club, Nurse Erda Sanders soon finds a new romance among “the beautiful people”—as well as plots and counterplots threatening not only her principles but lives!

 

GRADE: C-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Oh, don’t try any of your nurse psychology on me. Go on to bed.”

 

“Go change your dress. You’ll be more comfortable in something less forbidding.”

 

“They read the newspapers together every day and discussed the state of the world politically, as well as socially. Although Erda was upset by the various riots around the country, she tried not to show it so she wouldn’t upset her patient.”

 

“I got fed up and gave him back his ring. It didn’t amount to anything anyway. You could scarcely see the stone.”

 

REVIEW:

After the delightfully daffy Nurse at the Fair, I had been looking forward to another encounter with author Dorothy Cole. Unfortunately, the second date leaves me far less impressed: Country Club Nurse is pretty dumb, but not nearly as out-and-out dopey as its sister, and nowhere near as entertaining, I am sorry to report.

 

Erda Sanders is coming home after a month-long assignment in upstate New York to the apartment she shares on 85th Street between York and East End Avenues (we’re actually given the exact bus route she takes from Grand Central, but I won’t bore you) when she sees a young woman “with Miss Clairol honey blonde hair” run over by a boy on a bicycle. Erda is hired on the spot to care for socialite housewife Jessica Prentis, moves into the patient’s apartment, and spends a week watching with increasing irritation over the spoiled, demanding patient and witnessing numerous loud arguments between manipulative Jessica and her domineering husband Bart.

 

When Bart is at work, Jessica hangs out with Lenny Williams, who “was what could be called ‘a hippie.’ At least Erda guessed that was what they called ‘beatniks’ now. She didn’t keep up with such things.” Lenny coaxes money from Jessica and steals her engagement ring, but Jessica has an unexplained attachment to the seedy lad and continues to support him. Bart, needless to say, is not fond of the youth, and the pair fights about Lenny as well.

 

Upon her arrival into the domestic scene, Erda immediately begins to pose a lot of questions about her new employers: “Was Jessica Prentis really the only woman in Bart Prentis’ life? Did he really love her, in spite of the fact that he hadn’t shown any evidence of it that afternoon? And where did his grandmother fit into the picture?” (The question about the grandmother is about as odd to the reader as it appears here.) Jessica eggs on Erda’s natural detective instincts by asking random questions such as, “Did you ever want to kill someone?” Furthermore, when Jessica meets up with Lenny, they converse about his aunt, home from the hospital, and that incites Erda’s paranoid delusions too: “All the way up in the taxi she’d wondered about the conversation concerning Lenny’s aunt, and why she should be bitter against the Prentis family.” In another book, these questions might be foreshadowing, but it must be acknowledged that a good 75 percent of Erda’s suspicious musings go absolutely nowhere.

 

So when the Prentises offer Erda the opportunity to come with them to the Chanticleer Country Club on Long Island for the duration of the summer, Erda tags along despite the fact that she really doesn’t like her patient at all, who incidentally is increasingly mobile and in fact goes out shopping daily. Not long after she arrives, Erda’s duties are transferred to the mysterious grandmother, Mrs. Isabelle Prentis, who is spry enough at 80 that Erda can barely keep up with her when they walk the club grounds. With Bart’s aunt Jean and her son Joseph also in residence, the family of five manages to fight viciously at every meal. Isabelle at one point declares to Erda, “I’m not a favorite with my family. All families don’t love each other. And I am a very rich woman.” Now the nurse has this to obsess over—combined with Jessica’s idle question about murder, she’s really building it into something with legs: “But she wouldn’t! Not in cold blood!”

 

Meanwhile, Erda is falling for Joseph, who is a physics professor at Amherst wounded twice in Vietnam and captain of the family yacht, which is kept moored at the club, so he parades around in full navy whites a lot. He invites her dancing and tells her, “I wish I knew you well enough to kiss you,” the cad. “And dancing in his arms, Erda felt that at last she had found a man for whom she would be willing to give up her profession, her very life.” Yikes! This after barely half an hour!

 

Isabelle suddenly comes down with food poisoning, and after a lot of questioning through about 20 pages it’s determined it was the lobster salad—though everyone completely goes to pieces about this, especially the author, who gives Bart “a murderous expression” on one page and induces him to say that a planned family cruise to Halifax “might be murder.” Recovered, Isabelle spots a new maid in the hallway and is convinced that it’s actually her dead son’s widow Elise—Bart’s mother—arrived to follow through on a threat made eight years ago to kill Isabelle. Sure enough, Isabelle shortly goes into insulin shock, and it is found that her normal medications had been substituted for much stronger pills. Then, during yet another of their epic battles, Jessica spills the beans to Bart that Lenny the Hippie is actually his cousin, Elise’s sister’s son, and the money Jessica gives to Lenny is for Elise, who is dying of cancer. In response to this news, Bart promises to beat his mother’s location out of Lenny, and Erda discreetly slips away, returning to her room to ponder the Prentis’ marriage all night.

 

The next day, as the family is taking the club launch out to the yacht, a speedboat appears and begins to closely circle their boat, throwing several people into the water. Lenny is at the helm, hopped up on LSD, and Bart attempts to swim to Lenny’s boat and is run over. Bobbing in the water and barely able to draw breath, Erda is never too busy to come up with a string of pointless questions: “Why, she wondered, was Bart deliberately endangering his life? Was it because he thought he could stop Lenny’s crazy speeding or because he wanted to beat him up and force him to tell where his mother, Elise was?” Bart is going down for the third time when Jessica, sporting the green bikini that Isabelle strictly forbade her to wear, dives in and keeps him afloat until the Coast Guard arrives to collar Lenny and haul the Prentises from the drink. Lenny is babbling about his aunt, who had committed suicide with sleeping pills the day before, leaving a note saying that she had tried to kill Isabelle and was terminally ill anyway. Now that she’s dead, though, “we’ll never know how Elise managed to duplicate the regular insulin pills in appearance,” darn the luck.

 

Though Lenny is guilty of at least third-degree murder, whether he is brought to trial is apparently the Prentis family’s decision, and they opt not to press charges. In the literal wake of this tragic scene, Joseph starts kissing the daylights out of Erda and then proposes, so now it looks like she’ll be heading off to Amherst when the season ends. I wish I could tell you I felt some sort of pleasure at this ending, but all I could do was hope for an engagement long enough to allow poor Joseph to come to his senses.

 

There’s definitely a goodly amount of stupidity in this book, but it’s not as over the top as was Nurse at the Fair. Mostly it’s just dumb, without one bit of inadvertent brilliance in it. Erda comes across as a cramped, prudish character with a penchant for asking absurd and irrelevant questions, and most of the time her “nursing” is really just babysitting wealthy people who don’t like to be alone, hardly admirable work. The inconsistencies in this book are endless: how could a shallow infant like Jessica have kept the secret about Elise for so long? Why does Lenny keep the secret as well? Why does Elise suddenly pop up after eight years to murder Isabelle yet have no desire to see her son? Why do these people who do nothing but scream at each other continue to gather every night of every summer at the club to exercise their animosities? What in God’s name does Joseph see in Erda? How did Elise know that Isabelle took insulin? How did she manage to duplicate the regular pills in appearance? If the inconsistencies felt intentional, as they almost did with Nurse at the Fair, you could chalk them up as a knowing wink from an author endeavoring to entertain a savvy audience with a bit of camp. But at the country club, they just come across as sloppy and pointless, and the intelligent reader is better off staying in Manhattan, or heading for the fair.

Nurse's Masquerade

By Jean Carew (pseud. Jane Corby), ©1964

Never in her nursing career had lovely Cara Merrill received so strange a request. But Brent Butler was so persuasive that she reluctantly agreed to accompany him to the fabulous Butler estate and pretend to be his debutante fiancée. Cara’s real purpose, Brent told her, was to watch over his elderly uncle whose health had been mysteriously failing. Brent was suspicious of his handsome cousin Paul—and when both men declared their love for her, Cara had to make the most important decision of her life!

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTE:
“When you’re in love, the eyes do get shinier.”

“Seaking of fireworks, you should have seen the display Dad put on when he heard I’d ordered a topless bathing suit!”

“If two people are in love, there’s no use to discuss the pros and cons of the future like a Philadelphia lawyer.”

REVIEW:
Cara Merrill is bored with working as a nurse at a New York City hospital. She’s only 22, and presumably has only been there for a year or two—she’d better get married quick so she can give up her job permanently and become a housewife. In the meantime, however, she’s saved up some money so she can sleep late, go window shopping on Fifth Avenue, and take drives into the country. But the money is running out, and she needs a new job. So she sends a “rather flippant note” in response to an ad in the paper seeking a nurse who is “experienced, blonde, willing to live in the country (large estate).” Why she needs to be blonde is never addressed, but her facetious response surprisingly wins her an interview. Even more surprisingly, though she opens the interview with Brent Butler by scolding him about his unusual ad, he offers her the job. The position entails pretending to be his fiancée and going to stay for a month at Soundings, his Uncle Josh’s Long Island estate, to find out if Josh is being poisoned. Josh hates doctors, so Brent can’t just take Josh to see one, and instead has concocted this scheme to get him medical observation on the sly.

Cara agrees to the plan, and before you know it, she is en route to the estate in a shiny new beige convertible with a huge sapphire on her hand, both courtesy of her faux beau. Cara is to pretend she is a debutante, which means only gussying up her language. “ ‘It’s a …’ Cara began, and stopped. She had been going to say ‘good,’ but remembered her debutante status and changed it for the livelier, ‘a keen custom, I think.’ ” Naturally, everyone in the house is totally fooled, even if she has never played golf or tennis, can’t sail very well, has never left New York, knows way too much about concussions, and wears dungarees and a green and white plaid nylon frock, the very idea of which send shivers down my spine.

Soundings is a large unkempt mansion with “a vaguely sinister air about it,” which seems to stem largely from its color: “Who ever heard of painting a mansion brown?” Uncle Josh has been bound to a wheelchair for years from polio, but is otherwise in good health—except for these attacks in which he feels “squeamish” and appears sallow and drawn, which always seem to come on after dinner. The suspects include Josh’s sister Susan and her nine-year-old daughter Linda, who have just returned to the States from their plantation in Haiti. Brent’s cousin Paul, a “perennial college boy type,” flirts madly with Cara, making Brent look at her with squinty eyes. Diane Forbes, an old pal of Brent’s, is hanging around the house, apparently determined to win Brent for herself, which makes Cara green with envy. There’s a lot of talk about how neither one of them means a whit to the other, but we know differently, don’t we, readers?

When Paul takes Cara sailing one afternoon and they are late returning home, Cara and Brent have a fight on the terrace, and she gives him back the ring and drives back to her Greenwich Village apartment—only to hitch a ride with Brent back again four days later because Josh had asked her to come to the July 4th festivities. Once there, Cara is growing increasingly concerned because Linda has created a voodoo doll of Diane. “Cara stood as if turned to stone. This was no childish whim!” For someone who doesn’t believe in black magic, she sure gets worked up about it. If it were me, I’d be more concerned about how Linda keeps going on about murdering Diane: “I’m going to kill Diane. I hate her!” Instead, Cara dishes out a treacly lecture: “If we want to hurt another person, and if we have evil thoughts about them, we really hurt only ourselves.” But she should be biting her tongue. Linda tosses her Diane doll into the pool, and a few hours later the phone rings—Diane has driven off a bridge into the river! She’s not dead yet, but maybe we can fish that doll out and try stabbing it with Linda’s “machete,” a silver letter opener!

For Linda’s next act, she concocts a potion out of ground beetles, soy sauce, and rum to feed to Uncle Josh to make him well again. The other adults are banished from the library while Linda, wearing a red scarf around her head and a pillow case as a dress, holds a private ceremony with Josh. Cara feels the sense of menace of the estate stronger than ever, and is shivering on the terrace and tearing her handkerchief to shreds while Paul chain smokes, Brent paces, and Susan clasps her hands tightly in her lap. Even the butler is poised at the door, ready to dash inside. What exactly are they afraid of? And if everyone there thinks this is such a terrible idea, why are they allowing the child to go through with it?

Linda’s voodoo works again, but not as she had planned—Uncle Josh drops with a massive heart attack. Cara springs into action, immediately asking the butler to put Josh to bed—apparently the nearby hospital isn’t a suitable option—and donning the uniform and cap she has brought with her. Josh is saved, and the butler gratuitously reveals that Josh’s “well-publicized attitude toward the medical profession was mainly a pose.” Why he would pretend such a thing? The poisoning angle is never mentioned again, and Cara is engaged just pages later, at the Fourth of July fireworks.

It’s a quick read, and not terribly painful, though the loose ends do flap annoyingly. I was somewhat perplexed by all the bizarre relationships that end by passing unremarked. Is jealousy supposed to be the same as love? Is Susan, who has dismissed Cara’s concerns about Linda, to blame for her daughter’s transformation into a (somewhat successful) witch doctor? And what about the voodoo—is it just coincidence, or is it supposed to be real? I’m left with more questions than satisfactory answers on the last page of this book. Really, the best thing about it is the cover—but even this, when we are all but beaten over the head with our heroine’s blonde tresses (they match her car!), leaves you wondering.