Emergency Nurse

By Jane Converse (pseud. Adele Kay Maritano), ©1962 

“You don’t  belong in a hospital! If you were honest you’d operate a beauty parlor.” Nurse Diane Waycott flung these bitter words at plastic surgeon Dr. Ken Michelson the night her mother died. Maddened with grief, she believed that her fiancé was more concerned with preserving vanity than saving life. But when a young girl, victim of an auto crash, was brought to Emergency with a bloody, unrecognizable face, Diane knew that only Ken could help. Only his sensitive hands could build a new life for this tragic girl—and for the desperate boy who had ruined her beauty.

GRADE: A- 

BEST QUOTES:
“You can’t have a pretty face if there’s hate written over it.” 

“That icy-tongued perfectionist is either going to make top-flight plastic surgeons out of us, or we’ll get the chair for bludgeoning him.”

“Good management is adaptable. Why consult an expert if you’re going to overrule his opinion?”

REVIEW:
Emergency Nurse hangs on the curious premise that Emergency Room Nurse Diane Waycott, engaged to plastic surgeon Dr. Kendall Michelson, has no idea what he actually does. But for the sake of this otherwise excellent book, I ask you to overlook this minor flaw. The issue is Diane’s prejudice against plastic surgery: “Never, in all the months she had loved him, had she been able to generate a profound, nurse’s respect for him as a doctor.” And when he drives her home from the hospital on the night her mother, who has battled cancer since her retirement (and therefore been unable to enjoy any relaxation), finally dies, she’s overcome by the injustice of it all. “Maybe just one more doctor might have made the difference!” she shouts at him. “Just one more man in a laboratory, or in surgery, might have found the answer a year ago, or five years ago, or ten. You might have found it! And she wouldn’t have suffered. She’d be alive!” Instead, she adds, “you’ll probably become rich bobbing the noses for show girls or eliminating the scars from some wanted hoodlum’s face. You’ll get ahead even faster if you gain a repaution for bust reconstruction!” Well, she’s not wrong about the boob jobs, but Ken is so outraged at this slur on his profession that he slams out the door, and when she never calls him to apologize, he never calls her either, so she’s single again. 

Months after their breakup, an anonymous young car crash victim is brought in, and she and Dr. Paul Otis sew up her face, which has been badly cut. If the hospital knew who she was and whether her parents had money, they’d have called in Ken to repair the damage, but since time is a-wastin’, ED Dr. Paul Otis perfunctorily does the job. And when the bandages come off, the resulting scars are so hideous that her father, who turns out to be wealthy and powerful automotive parts magnate Harley Gilmore, screams in horror and is shoved out of the room while the young girl, Cammie, crumples into sobs. (In a later scene, Diane unprofessionally argues with Dr. Otis when he’s about to amputate three fingers of another unidentified accident victim, saying that the fingers might be saved, which gives enough time for the patient’s wife and doctor to arrive and save the hand.)

Diane’s kid brother Bud, who has been allowed to pretty much do whatever he wants after his mother died, turns out to have been driving the car involved in the accident, which Diane figures out not too slowly. Petrified that Bud’s life will be ruined by his leaving the scene of the accident—he had carried Cammie into a nearby house and called an ambulance, but then fled—she asks no questions, just hints to Bud that she’s aware of his role, and leaves him to keep skipping school. But her concern about Cammie slowly draws her into the girl’s care and life; Cammie’s widower father, a large, powerful, angry man, has refused to allow her to have any friends or even leave the house, and Diane is the only person who stands up to him, telling him that he needs to let go of his daughter if he wants to keep her.

Meanwhile, Diane starts dating stodgy Dr. Otis, who, now that Diane’s mother is dead and her brother is old enough to support himself, finds the prospect of marrying a woman with no dependents to support much more enticing. “Anticipating the question with which he would probably end the evening, Diane projected herself forward. Should a husband be chosen on the basis of flash-in-the-pan excitement, or eliminated because he didn’t convert every moment to a bell-ringing, physically tingling carnival of thrills? A marriage should be built on more solid groundwork. Paul offered a firm foundation for the future.” On the other hand, “No hour with Ken had ever been dull.” That old trope again!

Eventually Bud, eaten alive by guilt, finds his way to Ken and unburdens himself. Ken immediately tells Diane that Bud must go to the police in the morning, and Diane, disappointingly, has learned nothing from her first fight with Ken, and blames him for the ways of the world: “The day I see Bud hauled off to a cellblock, I’ll know you sent him there!” she screeches. Even after he’d just kissed away her tears of fear. So we have to wait a bit longer.

If the plot works out exactly as you know it will, it’s a most enjoyable ride. Diane and Harley Gilmore’s characters grow organically, as Diane learns more about Ken’s patients and as Cammie’s father Harley receives a few more hard truths from Diane. And the writing here is a step above the usual. There are inside jokes that pop up later, and author Jane Converse, who can be erratic, here is in top form. Of the four Emergency Nurse VNRNs in existence that I can find (see Anne Lorraine, Peggy Gaddis, and Rosamund Hunt’s mediocre offerings) this one has the best story—and arguably the best cover—of the quartet. If you have a few hours—maybe in an ED waiting room?—you could do a lot worse.

Two Loves Has Nurse Powell

By William Johnston, ©1963

Cover illustration by Robert Bonfils

You know Nurse Powell, or perhaps you’ve just seen her walking down a hospital corridor. For a nurse, she’s a bit too distracting in face and figure, but she’s tops in her profession, capable, calm, trained right down to her fingertips. You might suspect that there was a romance between her and that brilliant young doctor, and you’d be right. But did you know that simply because of one patient, her off-duty hours became a whirlpool of politics and pleasure, she forgot her professional coolness, and lost her heart completely to a completely different type of man?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“It’s a grand old name, Mary. You don’t hear it much anymore. What is it we get these days? Kims! And Tuesdays! Oh, I keep up with the fashions. A man in politics has to. He never knows when he’s goin’ to ask a wee little babe’s name of its mother and she’s goin’ to answer back, ‘Tuesday’ or ‘Kim’—and a man has to be on his toes in a situation like that. If he followed his natural inclination and asked leave to go off and throw up his supper like he felt, he’d be sure to lose the vote.”

“I always like to see young people fight. It shows they’re not each other’s rubber stamps. It shows individuality. A good fight is a good beginning. It’s a mistake to save the fighting for marriage.”

“I see you don’t have your needle with you. May I consider that a sign of peaceful intentions?”

“You don’t have to be smart. You’re  a redhead.”

REVIEW:

When a books starts off with writing that crackles, I relax a bit and smile with anticipation for what delights the rest of the book will bring. So it was with this book: Nurse Ellen Powell wakes with a premonition that the day is going to go badly, and it puts her in a funk. She’s worried that the impending doom revolves around her fiance, Dr. Dan O’Meara, who—though he has told her that he loves her—has not actually proposed. Soon she’s weeping, convinced that their relationship is over. But when she ventures into the kitchen, she finds that the coffee maker is on the fritz. Now she’s convined that this is the Bad Thing, and the wrinkles staining her brow are instantly smoothed. On to work.

There she finds that Packey Mackey, a most colorful 86-year-old politician, has been admitted for heart problems. Word on the street is that he’s actually just trying to duck testifying before a grand jury on a corruption charge, for stealing from the Welfare Fund and lining his own pockets. In the hospital, Packey’s health and treatment is being very carefully managed by none other than Dr. O’Meara. Dan is convinced that Packey is actually sick, and is running him through a complete workup, despite pressure to discharge Packey so he can face the music before the election and presumably be brought down instead of habitually returned to office by his loyal constituents. Got all that?

When she’s not caring for Packey, Ellen just can’t seem to stop herself from quarreling with Dan, though she never comes out and tells him what is really upsetting her. He assures her that he loves her, but that’s not enough for her—but she refuses to discuss it. Instead they head off to meet Neal Conlon, who is running against Packey in the upcoming election and also happens to be an old boyhood acquaintance of Dan’s—you couldn’t really call them friends. After this meeting, in one of their fights, Ellen declares she is going to work on Neal’s campaign every night, and how does Dan like that? “You’re a big girl now—you can think for yourself,” he says, admirably, despite all evidence to the contrary. So off she goes to Neal’s office, where she is immersed in his idealism and excitement. There she watches him threaten people with what will happen if they vote for Packey. And submits when he pressures her for information about Packey’s medical condition. “When we do wrong we’re doing it so that weventually we can do right,” he explains, pulling her close and holding her hand. Oh, OK, Neal! So when he starts kissing her, she’s swept off her feet, suddenly believing that she’s in love with Neal as well as Dan. And when Neal presses her to pump Dan for information too, she wonders about his seeming so shallow and opportunistic, that “there was little Neal would no do to get what he wanted”—yet keeps on spending all her free time with Neal and fighting with Dan about what she sees as his favoritism for Packey at the expense of truth, justice, and fair elections.

If Dan won’t propose, Neal certainly will, and wants to do it on election night: “It’s got schmalz. The little old ladies will love that.” Ellen has shown little ability to see Neal’s cold-heartedness up to this point, and once he starts kissing her, she is unable to do so now. But later, when Neal snaps at Ellen because she refuses to try to convince the chief of surgery that Dan is drawing out Packey’s stay in order to protect him from the grand jury, she tries to break up with him. He talks her out of it, though: “Let me take care of you. If you have doubts about me, about us—just squash them,” he tells her. Though she waffles some more, she does end the interview by telling him she wants to take time away from him. He’s fine with that—“and if anything new happens at the hospital, call me,” he tells her. Still she’s working every night at Neal’s campaign headquarters. But after he tells her to keep her eye on one of the surgeons who will be assisting at Packey’s operation, she suddenly sees through him: “his drives—his hate for his enemies and his professed love for her—had stemmed from nothing more than his own frantic need for self-gratification.” It’s a curious conclusion to make, based on the conversation that preceded it, and ridiculously overdue, given all the other conversations that had preceded it.

Assisting at the surgery, it’s an open-and-close affair—which means only one thing, that Packey has inoperable cancer. And when it’s over, she doesn’t rush off to telephone Neal. In fact, home in her own apartment, she doesn’t even answer the phone when it rings all night. A few days later, though, when Neal calls her to come down to headquarters and celebrate, she pulls on an off-the-shoulder cocktail dress and heads downtown, long enough to break up with Neal for good. Then she just has to make up with Dan and we can close the book.

I loved the writing in this book, and the political machinations—even more complicated than I have given you here—are not easy wrong-or-right situations, but shades of gray that give you something to think about. I would have easily given this book an A grade—except I just can’t forgive how the author has treated Nurse Ellen, who is easily one of the most gullible, spineless, simple-minded heroines I have ever met. Her character was uncalled for, and it significantly depreciated this story for me. It’s still worth reading, but you’ll want to do it with a roll of Tums by your side, a remedy for the queasy feeling brought on by the fickle, pathetic Ellen Powell, RN, who doesn't deserve to have one man love her, let alone two.

Night Ward

By Noah Gordon, ©1959

On call … for love. The nurse – beautiful, blonde, and recently jilted by her fiance – has sworn off love. The doctor – handsome and wealthy – is torn between his society background and his medical future. The policeman – ambitious and honest – is on the trail of a psychopathic killer loose on hospital grounds. Each man wants to marry her. But complications of the heart set in when she finds herself falling in love … with both of them.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“The Red Sox were at bat, and as Ted Williams stepped to the plate Mrs. Hanscom poured herself a large glass of lemonade and drained it thirstily. Then, as Williams flied out to center field, she got up, sighed, and switched channels until she found a soap opera that would make her cry, too.”

“Any nurse who expects a doctor to be able to keep an appointment is either a fool or an optimist.”

“Massachusetts men, it seemed, like to make their dates interesting.”

REVIEW:

Ruth Mason, RN, is a doubly tragic figure: Orphaned at age 15, she lived with friends of her parents in Monterey, went to nursing school while her high school sweetheart attended Stanford, and waited some more while he did a tour in the Navy … and then a friend filled her in on the fact that he’d married a wealthy young woman from San Diego. So as the story opens, Ruth is doing what many stalwart VNRN heroines who have been jilted do: fleeing California for the small town of Dutton, Massachusetts, where her mother hailed from, but where she herself had never lived. She quickly lands a job on the night shift at Dutton Memorial Hospital, and soon after that hears the rumors about Dr. Alden MacKenzie, a gorgeous and talented doctor who never, ever dates nurses. Well, we’ll see about that!

Life in this small town are not as dull as one might expect; there’s a crazed lunatic running around knifing folks in the back, even killing some. Ruth, of course, is soon caring for one of the victims and fending off Detective Sergeant Ed Gillis, who hails from South Boston and is eager to question the latest victim.

You’ll be shocked to hear that soon Dr. MacKenzie has asked Ruth out, and during their date he tells her that his mother, with whom he still lives, is planning out his career as the town’s “society doctor”—meaning he will see rich, psychosomatic patients that require not much more than hand-holding. He’s not wild about the idea—he’d rather go into research—but is unable to stand up to his mother. Ruth is unimpressed.

She begins dating Sgt. Gillis as well, though the doctor puts on the full-court press—but when he brings her home to meet mommie dearest, the matriarch tells Ruth that her son needs a wife with social standing, and since she has none, she is not suitable wife material. Ruth, to her credit, tells Mrs. MacKenzie that her ideas are all wrong for her son and will ruin his life and career as an important cancer researcher. The doctor himself seems intent on marrying Ruth – but then at the hospital ball, he becomes very drunk and is the driver in a hit-and-run accident, and then is arrested on suspicion of being the knifer. Ruth has words with Ed Gillis about this, which seems to doom their relationship, much to Ruth’s chagrin.

They do make up, however, on the hospital roof, with kisses and promises, but after Ed has to leave, Ruth is attacked by the crazed killer! Usually at this point in a VNRN, the man would return to save her, but our sturdy heroine needs no assistance, thank you, and between her brains and her brawn, is able to dispose of the attacker with just a mere flesh wound to show for it. Now she just has to choose a man, which isn’t as easy as you’d think: Her gumption has rubbed off on Dr. MacKenzie (now cleared of murder charges and taking a taxi for a  while until his driver’s license is reinstated), who has decided to go into cancer research after all, in Nagasaki, where there should be plenty of patients to treat.

This book is decently written: not especially campy or amusing, however, and the characters are a smidge too flat to make this an A-level book. But I am always mightily impressed with a heroine who can land a punch or a one-liner with equal aplomb, and care for her patients with compassion and intelligence to boot. The cover art even makes it a book worth looking at, in addition to reading. So I can without reservation suggest you spend some time on Night Ward. 

Nurse in Panic

By Jane Converse, ©1971

Cover illustration by Robert Abbett

Diane Whitley was reluctant to leave her nursing job at Greenhaven Memorial for a position at a strange clinic in the New Mexico desert. But the promise of an exciting new medical discovery and the possibility of a new romance made the trip seem very appealing. Yet the moment she arrived at Hollingsworth Clinic she felt a vague sense of uneasiness. At first she thought she was just being foolish. Dr. Darryl Hollingsworth was a dedicated man and his handsome assistant was an earnest medical student. It wasn’t until she found herself falling in love that she realized how foolish she really was—and how easily a mirage of happiness could become a well of heartbreak … and terror …

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“He remembered that he hadn’t told Diane that he loved her. ‘I don’t have to say it, though, do I?’ ”

REVIEW:

When we first meet Diane Whitley, RN, she is serving her best friend, Polly Cravelle Richards, a dish of cherry Jell-O unadorned by even a dollop of Cool-Whip. Diane has taken a pause in her jet-set life to attempt to persuade Diane to leave her dull, dull life in Newark—“there isn’t one single, eligible male on the staff at the hospital. Not one!” Diane complains—to come work at a clinic where a revolutionary doctor has found a cure for cancer. Dr. Darryl Hollingsworth has discovered a medication, Tychorodryn, but despite his miraculous results, he has been dismissed by the medical community at large. Her advocacy on behalf of the Hollingsworth Clinic has a personal note: Her dear wealthy father has come down with a “terminal” case of cancer, but has personally benefitted from the magic touch of Dr. Hollingsworth and is “pepped up like a teen-ager.” In gratitude, Dad is about to bestow a huge chunk of his fortune on the good doctor, and Polly is crisscrossing the country to drum up further support amongst the family’s close (also rich) friends.

You won’t be shocked to learn that Diane agrees to visit the doctor’s hospital in remote New Mexico, no doubt encouraged by Polly’s description of Steve Bates, a medical student on leave for financial reasons: “He’s unmarried, and all of the aides are over forty. You have clear sailing.” And you also won’t be shocked to learn that Diane and Steve quickly tumble for each other, and Diane agrees to stay on full-time. She quickly falls under the thrall of Dr. Hollingsworth, as she sees all his patients growing pink and energetic under his care, and begins to quarrel more with Steve, who is rightly suspicious of the whole situation and is investigating Dr. Hollingsworth on the side.

Before long, Diane finds herself alone on the night shift when Dr. Hollingsworth stumbles in, smelling of bourbon, and grabs her for “a smothering kiss.” This is especially awkward because Polly has told her that she herself is in love with Dr. Hollingsworth. Though Diane is quite clear about her disinterest in the doctor, Steve suddenly turns quite frosty. And despite her repeated rebuffs, Dr. Hollingsworth continues to grab her behind closed doors before she can shove him off—sexual harassment, anyone?—and it isn’t long before Polly catches him putting the moves on Diane. Though Diane becomes increasingly concerned about the fact that the patients seem to be sleeping an awful lot, she still argues with Steve every time they cross paths, making for page after page of detailed discussion about the many, many problems with Dr. Hollingsworth’s story and treatment, and Diane’s increasingly thin defense of same. Her professed inner doubts make her continued justification of the doctor even more aggravating.

Eventually, though, Steve has one too many arguments with Dr. Hollingsworth and leaves the medical facility. Diane soon decides that she should leave as well—but it takes her quite a while to get around to it, given all the sick patients who need her care and her paranoid feeling that she can’t tell anyone that she’s going, lest they try to keep her prisoner. As she’s sneaking out of the hospital at 11 pm, she unfortunately encounters Dr. Hollingsworth, and starts babbling that she’s going on a date and taking some clothes to a friend who’s helping out a poor Indian family—but the doctor cuts her off and starts doing some babbling of his own, about how he’s converted all his money into Mexican bonds or stashed it in a Swiss bank, and is planning on moving his practice across the border, and darling, won’t you come with me? “Don’t disappoint me, darling,” he says, grabbing her again—you’d think she’d know what’s coming by now and just run when she sees him coming.  car pulls into the nearby parking lot, but rather than scream, she tells him to let her go or she will scream. Naturally he slaps a firm hand across her mouth and drags her into the hospital, but she’s eventually able to jerk free and scream and run into Steve’s arms.

Dr. Hollingsworth naturally gets what he has coming—he’s shot to death by his long-suffering secretary—and Diane gets her man, too, who curiously proposed by suggesting that instead of accepting a loan from Polly, “I’d rather be supported by an R.N. who’s silly enough to go back to work … put me through school.” How could she say no?

It’s a hackneyed story made all the more irritating by our heroine’s stupid inability to see the obvious, though she herself has doubts all along. The endless pages of back and forth about whether Dr. Hollingsworth’s treatment is for real quickly become monotonous; it’s a short story, and not a very good one, stretched into a novel. The writing is perfunctory and the entire situation is baffling, and I am baffled as to why anyone should read this book. 

Nurse Farley’s Decision

By Teresa Holloway, ©1959

 

Auburn-haired Susan Farley had brilliantly graduated from her long, difficult nurse’s training. Now, at big, modern St. Patrick’s she was practicing the profession she loved. One day Susan was assigned the traction case in Room 212 in the Orthopedic wing. Oliver Cox, she saw, was a handsome older man accustomed to wealth and power. Grateful for Susan’s skillful nursing, Cox offered to endow St. Patrick’s with a cancer clinic. But there was a string attached to his gift—in exchange he wanted Susan for his wife. Susan was faced with an overwhelming decision. As Oliver Cox’s wife she might be instrumental in finding the cure for the deadly killer. But—what of the profession for which she had so proudly trained and dedicated herself?

 

GRADE: B-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Circles under blue eyes are danger signals.”

 

“She put her cheek on one of the thin hands, the one without the needle.”

 

“What in the world am I going to do about my complexion? Jimmy hates pimply girls, and he’s taking me to Seminole Club tomorrow night.”

 

“Years of people’s lives went into the training of these hands beneath that brilliant light. Mothers’ lives—teaching gentleness and a desire to serve; fathers’ lives, dedicated to earning the money to make knowledge within their grasp.”

 

“She’s pretty enough to hang on the wall.”

 

“Because it was midsummer, Arch Curtis survived his battle with the tiger shark.”

 

“All the ‘womanly docility’ the Sister in charge of the conduct class had stressed, flew out of the window.”

 

REVIEW:

Fear not, readers, Susan Farley is not, as falsely advertised on the back cover blurb above, asked to prostitute herself to fund a cancer lab. I don’t quite know what to think when the cover describes a book completely unlike the one I actually read, but in this case I must confess I was relieved, because it sounded horrid.

 

In actuality, Susan Farley is trying to decide whether she should take a job at Dr. Mitchell’s office, which pays more and will enable her to fund her younger sister’s college education, or stick with hospital nursing, which she really loves. This “decision,” however, is removed from her when her father tells her that she should take the hospital job and they’ll find the money for Grace’s education somewhere else. When she goes to ask for the job in surgery, however, she’s told that it’s been filled, and she’s convinced that Dr. Mitchell—who is, in fact, chief of staff—has blackballed her from the position. She takes a job in orthopedics instead, but only after she jumps into the pier to save a young woman—too late, as it happens—who has just given birth to a baby boy, and the ensuing publicity, her photo landing on the front page and all, gives her a little leverage to make some demands.

 

At the hospital, she works along side Dr. Archibald Curtis, who makes her little heart go pitter-pat whenever she sees him, and they are good friends but nothing more—“until he himself changed the color of their relationship,” because it’s just not possible for a decent young woman to make a pass. When she catches him talking to a young candy-striper in a pink dress, however, she falls all to pieces, especially after a date with Arch at the beach during which she rescues him from a tiger shark and brings him home to her house and puts on a pink dress, which apparently is going to remind him of this young woman. “In her hurry to get some hot food ready for Arch when he was ready for it, she had chosen the one dress she shouldn’t have. Unfortunately there was no time to change it. Susan was out of sorts all evening. Arch, bewildered, went home early.”

 

The incident with the shark ends up in the newspaper—making it twice in the past week Susan’s landed on the front page—and Arch is convinced Susan is a publicity hound who took the story to the paper herself. She is mortified: “No man wanted to be pulled out of the water by a girl,” she thinks, as the fellows apparently prefer death to such a dishonor. “What can I do to ease the hurt this story is going to cause Arch? The other fellows are going to rib him about being both shark bait and woman bait—I can just hear them.” Eventually it’s revealed that sister Grace is the one who spilled the beans, to a cute boy who works for the newspaper. So that’s the end of that little escapade.

 

More little stories pile into the book—a woman with a lip cancer was operated on by Dr. Mitchell but now has a horrible scar and lost her husband because of it, the dead woman’s boy is being raised in the hospital, wealthy patient Oliver Cox agrees to fund a cancer center because of Susan’s fervent interest in that particular disease, it is proposed that the orphaned baby be raised by the hospital, Susan notices a skin cancer on Dr. Mitchell’s nose. At the dinner that brings together the head honchos to talk about the cancer center, Susan is the only woman—invited by Oliver Cox—but Arch gets jealous and snubs her, so she just walks out of the dinner without saying goodbye to anyone, including her date, and climbs into the red Thunderbird belonging to the young candy striper, who immediately drives off the road and is nearly killed, except Susan is there to apply pressure to the head wound in the ambulance all the way to the hospital. Really, if you were hoping for a quiet evening at home, you’d better stay away from Susan Farley.

 

At the end of the book, Susan out of the blue decides that what with the car accident and all, she’s “getting some kind of sense knocked into my head.” It was probably just a concussion, but she gets up the next morning and goes to work anyway. What she meant by sense, apparently, is that she decides that her younger sister is not the spoiled pet she’d thought she was, and that “I’ve had the attitude, all along, that St. Patrick’s was mighty lucky to have a chance at the services of the dedicated Susan Farley, R.N.” I’m not sure that it follows that her attitude about working in surgery was wrong: Shouldn’t you fight for what you want, and have some healthy egotism about a job you’re good at? Then she decides that the woman’s bad lip scar doesn’t mean she should think less of Dr. Mitchell, that “a man doesn’t build up that large a practice without doing a lot of good to a lot of people. Of course he’s bound to make mistakes. Everyone does.” She exhorts Arch, who has been offered the chance to join the chief of staff’s practice, to give the matter careful thought rather than dismissing it outright, and blames the woman with the scar for not asking to have it fixed—and it turns out that Arch already has, though I’m not sure what his participation in this woman’s story is supposed to signify. All these little revelations, with no actual obvious difference between the character at the beginning of the book and the one at the end, are apparently what passes for “growth”: “It wasn’t only the big, sprawling hospital that was growing. Somehow, it impelled them all to grow along with it,” Susan says on the last page, in a thoroughly anticlimactic ending. Declaring something doesn’t make it so; remember Dick Cheney and the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

 

Overall this is not a terrible book, and the character of Oliver Cox is very well drawn, as is the party that he takes Susan to. But it can seem like a collection of bizarre incidents and extraneous details such as this one: When Susan discovers that she’s put on a pink dress and can’t change it, she stands in the middle of the big kitchen and makes chopping gestures of anger while holding a messy egg beater and splatters egg all over the linoleum, which Grace had just cleaned that morning since the cleaning woman hadn’t been able to get to it and it was Grace’s day to clean the floors, so Grace is fussing at Susan about the mess while cleaning it up with a damp sponge. Did we really need to know all that minute detail? It just makes me feel puzzled and expectant that something down the road will turn up to give this overdrawn moment some relevance, but it never happens. I think Teresa Holloway has the potential to put together a fine book, because some of the details in this story are very nicely sketched, but she really needs some help on plots, because without a good linear thread, you’re just left with a few pretty paragraphs and a lot of head scratching.

The Nurse from Alaska

By Florence Stuart 

(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1964 

Also published as Strange Triangle

Nurse Carol had loved Doctor Mike since she was fifteen—and now, at last, she was to be his wife, work by his side, raise his young daughter as her own. Then, on the eve of their wedding, the glamorous and beautiful Beth Bliss came back to town from Alaska—and demanded that Doctor Mike be hers. She had three powerful weapons: she had been Mike’s wife, she knew a strange secret—and she was Nurse Carol’s own sister.

GRADE: B- 

BEST QUOTES: 

“He thought about all that Carol would be giving up to take on the care and responsibility of his child by another woman. In particular, she would be sacrificing her nursing career. Whenever they discussed this problem, Carol would smile at his doubts. She would remind him that she was, first of all, a woman, and a woman in love.” 

“The love of her life was as close as the nearest mirror.” 

“I’d like to sit at the bar and smoke a cigarette. Maybe somebody will take me for an abandoned woman who has really loved and refuses to quit.” 

“Carol didn’t want to think about what might happen if the child was taken away from both her and her father, to be given over to the mother she instinctively hated. It could lead to deep emotional disturbance, even brain damage.” 

“She was as efficient as an IBM machine if anything went wrong.” 

“You’re suffering from a rush of blood to the head, darling.” 

“As long as the little girl remains in this hospital, she will have proper nursing care, from a competent person who neither threatens her nor allows her to wander around and hemorrhage in a closet.” 

“Give me a prescription for some barbiturates with real authority.” 

“It seems to have become a habit with you, dear. When you can’t think what else to do, you must say to yourself, Well, I can always run over and threaten to ruin Mel Walters as a doctor.” 

“Let’s say I tuned in on some vibrations saying that you needed me, sweetheart.” 

REVIEW: 

I am irritated by false advertising in a book’s title. Now, The Nurse from Alaska does not exactly qualify, since the anti-heroine, Beth Bliss, has in fact arrived in town from Alaska, but the story takes place in Kentucky, and there are no snow-topped mountains, fur parkas, or totem poles anywhere in the book except in the cover illustration (which, if somewhat irrelevant, is excellent). I think this gives author Florence Stonebraker, who we have met before as Florence Stuart and Fern Shepard, a near 100 percent average in this respect. 

Beth has returned home after her impending marriage to an Alaskan millionaire was undone by an inconvenient plane crash. She’s heard that Dr. Mike Conway, whom she left five years ago with their infant daughter Joannie, has come into $3 million. But like all VNRN medicos who inherit millions, Mike intends to use every dime (and the easily nauseated might wish to avert their eyes) to build a new hospital to help poverty-stricken orphans. He also intends to marry Carol Bliss, but gorgeous, evil Beth turns up in his office and sobs on his shoulder that she has incurable leukemia, and he develops the spine of a jellyfish. She wants to marry him again so she can be with little Joannie and have a family again in her last remaining year on this earth. The money means nothing to her, nothing at all. But if he doesn’t marry her, she’ll go to court and get sole custody of Joannie. 

To stall her, he agrees to let her take Joannie away for a week, though he knows the child despises Beth and hasn’t seen or heard from her in five years, and agrees to postpone his wedding to Carol—which was supposed to be tomorrow, by the way. Beth is a nurse herself and worked with local GP Dr. Mel Walters years ago in New York, and knows that his young wife, dying of cancer and in extreme pain, had begged him to put her out of her misery with an extra-large helping of morphine. He refused to do it, but someone else in the hospital did—and though no evidence had been found against him, he was dismissed from the hospital. Beth threatens to reveal the whole story, which would ruin Mel’s career, if he doesn’t back up her leukemia act. He agrees, but insists on doing a complete physical exam … “At the end of that hour his eyes were grave, his tone that of a serious medical man. … ‘I’m afraid I have a little bad news for you,’ he said.” 

The plot thickens when Beth goes to court anyway and gets sole custody of Joan for 30 days. Carol and Mike are helpless, though they greatly fear that Beth is insane, “and psychos can be very dangerous,” says the man with the medical degree. When they break the news to Joannie, she becomes violently ill with “quinsy,” or peritonsillar abscess, which she apparently gets regularly (I will spare you the details of why this is medically unlikely), and has to be admitted to the hospital. There, Beth comes marching in wearing a nurse’s uniform, fires Mike and Carol from the case, and assumes complete control of Joannie’s medical care, because she has a court order, darn it! 

As Carol looks on, Beth proceeds to punch Joannie so hard she knocks her off the bed and threatens to take a strap to her. Carol, instead of running straight to the nursing supervisor, goes to Mike’s office, where the pair have some brandy to buck themselves up before they go off to do this emergency appendectomy on “the town’s confirmed old maid” who is “thirtyish.” It actually takes the night nurse, who has no more authority than Carol, to have Beth thrown out of the hospital after she guesses what Carol should have known all along, that Beth does not have permission to work as a nurse in the hospital, much less a Kentucky nursing license, and that abusing patients makes her unfit for the job in any case. I was hoping that the night nurse might be the one to end up with custody, since she seemed to be the only one capable of actually protecting poor Joannie. 

No such luck—after Joannie is discharged, Beth turns up on Mike’s door, out of her mind with fear because she has to have a hysterectomy to cure her cancer. “She thought about the patient, just her own age, who had gone through such an operation in the New York hospital. Oh, she had lived. A hundred percent cure, the doctors said. And when Beth ran into her, months later, she looked like an old hag of seventy. Her skin was all dried out and grooved with a thousand wrinkles. It had to do with cutting off nature’s supply of female hormones. When they went, your youth went.” To get her mind off the surgery, Mike, the blithering idiot, tells Beth that Carol has taken Joannie to Mike’s house in the mountains. How incompetent can the man be? Guess where Beth goes when she leaves Mike’s office? Well, after she stops at the hotel for a gin and tonic? 

Author Florence Stonebraker loves a sexy woman (see Runaway Nurse) and a violent woman (The Nurse and the Orderly, Courtroom Nurse, Night Nurse). Here we get both in one package, but Beth just isn’t as satisfying as she could be. I laughed at the old faked-illness-comes-true plot, and the issue of Beth’s uterus as the source of her vitality could spawn several term papers. I did wonder if it wouldn’t turn out that it was Beth who actually bumped off Dr. Mel’s wife, which would have made a lot of sense, but the true “killer” was never identified; perhaps Stonebraker intended to write this in but forgot about it. The Nurse from Alaska is a fairly typical Stonebraker story, between the motherless child, the sexy ex-wife, the child abuse, and the psychos (it even has the sassy sidekick), but it’s not one of her best. I don’t care if the plot is hackneyed, but the central characters need to be admirable, and their inability to see the obvious (that Beth has no right to care for Joannie in the hospital) or protect their child makes them not so. The book isn’t a complete waste of time, but it’s vaguely dissatisfying, and not the first I’d reach for.

This book was also
published as Strange Triangle,
with a much worse cover.

Leota Foreman, R.N.

By Peggy Gaddis
(pseud. Erolie Pearl (Gaddis) Dern), ©1957

“I wonder what happens south of Washington Square?” That’s what vacation-bound Leota Foreman, pretty New York nurse, wanted to find out … Little did she guess how much intrigue and excitement were waiting for her in Poinsettia City, Florida. First there was Dr. Gray MacKenzie, handsome and capable … but so unfriendly. And red-haired, debonair Mitch Adcock, the local lawyer … But where did Mallory Mabry, beautiful and much-married, fit into the picture? Leota finally learned the secret behind Dr. MacKenzie’s bitterness—and with it, the answer to her own heart’s questions.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTE:
“We nurses never seem to have much time for falling in love!”

REVIEW:
With this book, the fourth VNRN of hers I have read, Peggy Gaddis’s stock continues to rise. Leota Foreman (not to be confused with previous Peggy Gaddis heroines Leona of Nurse in the Shadows or Luana from A Nurse for Apple Valley) is living in New York, three years out of nursing school, when the book opens. She’s battling her way home through an icy snowstorm, and when she gets there, she tells her roommate she’s going to Florida—“and was almost as startled to hear herself as Meg was.” So she hops a train for some small town where the living is easy and the sun is warm.

She gets off at Poinsettia City, a town of 4,000 people somewhere in the center of the state. There are no cabs, so she bums a ride at the train station from Mitch Adcock, a total stranger who turns out to be an attorney, and accepts a dinner date with him. Boy, times have changed. Checking into the town’s hotel, she—what else?—collides with Dr. Gray MacKenzie. “Doctor Sour-Puss” has “a built-in grouch, a mad on the world, himself included, and his ‘bedside manner’ is strictly nonexistent. He doesn’t want people to like him; he doesn’t want friends; he’s strictly for himself alone!” according to the desk clerk, 18-year-old Taffy, who is inclined to say things like, “Well, don’t flip your toupee, pal.” Taffy is obviously pining for Mitch—“If you’re getting ready to send Mitch into a swoon, you needn’t shoot the works,” she tells Leota before her date with him—but even having experienced the good doctor’s bad humor, Leota nonetheless tells Taffy to relax: “Dr. MacKenzie is much more my type.”

That night, he is indeed pounding on her door—but only to enlist her medical aid. The hotel chef, an Italian-speaking cordon bleu, has stabbed an assistant for the fourth time because the Hollandaise curdled. Leota helps the doctor reassemble the assistant, and the doctor talks the sheriff out of hauling Caesar off to jail. Based on her expertise in this case, Leota is recommended to care for aging Jemima Mabry, a millionaire who is dying of incurable cancer despite Dr. MacKenzie’s best efforts.

Dr. MacKenzie continues to play hot and cold with Leota. One minute he is sneering at her and dismissing her with his eyes. He asks her to lunch and then, when she asks why a fine doctor such as himself lives in Poinsettia City, says it’s none of her business, and “the tone made the words hurt like a fist plunged into her face.” But Leota takes the high road: “A nurse wouldn’t dare dislike a doctor; it’s forbidden in her training rules,” she says to him. She seems to like him only because he is a competent doctor, replete with “fine surgeon’s fingers,” which she tells him repeatedly. He soon reveals he is falling in love with her—though you would never guess it from his behavior—but can’t have anything to do with her because he was executing some unnamed experiment on his mentor, a brilliant oncologist, at that doctor’s insistence, and the doctor died. “I could never ask any woman to share a life that I have no moral right to enjoy,” he says.

Then Mallory Mabry, who after her divorce “requested and obtained the use of my maiden name”—and how nice of the courts to grant it, too—peels into town in a white Jaguar and snugly fitted Capri pants. She is “a saber-toothed tiger, man-eating variety,” and Miss Jemmy’s closest living relative. Poinsettia City is clearly not her scene, but she’s run out of money and is in town to collect more from her aunt. Before Mallory has a chance to drop by the hacienda, however, Miss Jemmy dies peacefully in her sleep. Her will gives her house and fortune to Dr. MacKenzie to start a hospital in town, but naturally that’s not going to stand unchallenged. Dr. MacKenzie’s medical competence and Miss Jemmy’s mental fitness are held up to withering scrutiny in court, and the suspense—will they emerge sparkling and whole?—is unbearable.

This is the first VNRN I have read in which the heroine is the one who puts on the moves. “Leota stepped close to him and put her arms about him and held him.” “Deliberately she leaned toward him, framed his startled face between her palms, and set her mouth on his in a long, lingering kiss.” A few pages later, young Taffy proposes to Mitch (never mind that he’s a dozen years older than her): She tells him she loves him, and he answers, “What am I going to do with you?” “You could marry me,” she replies. It also ends on a strange note: Miss Jemmy’s other nurse, a confirmed spinster, trips over a spooning couple at Miss Jemmy’s house, and there dawns a “sudden bleakness in Miss Emma’s eyes,” and in the book’s final sentence she “walks silently from the room.”

The book does a nice job of painting a scene of a particular place and time, and the lesser female characters, Taffy and Mallory, are spicy and enjoyable. If the romantic relationships in the book are not very satisfying, at least they don’t take up too much of the reader’s time. And while the ending is not hard to predict, other unique aspects of the book make up for that. It really puts you in this particular time and place, and on the whole this is a very pleasant book and worth reading.

Dr. Merry's Husband

By Peggy Gaddis
(pseud. of Erolie Pearl Gaddis Dern), ©1947

A man can combine marriage and career but when a woman tries to be wife, mother and career girl as well, she may lose everything she holds dear. And when strikingly beautiful Iris Collier pointed out maliciously that Merry’s beloved Hugh was known as “Doctor Merry’s husband” Merry knew she must change things at once. She must be known first as Hugh Prather’s wife and then as Doctor Merry. It was that or lose him ... But how was this to be done?

GRADE: D-

Dr. Merry’s Husband is actually about a woman doctor, not a nurse, but I allowed it into the category—which turned out to be a mistake. Dr. Meredith Prather lives in River Gap, a small mountain town in some unspecified southern state, where she has taken over her grandfather’s practice. She is married to “a wealthy man, a one-time famous athlete” Hugh Prather, who is the town mayor and a recent transplant to the town; he moved here years ago with a serious illness thinking he was going to die, and Merry cured him. They have two kids, toddler Butch and baby Emily Ann. All is domestic bliss and becoming housecoats—and then the Colliers come to town.

Herbert Collier is opening a shirt factory, and his wife, Iris, is “one of the most beautiful blondes Meredith had ever seen.” She’s also arrogant, and a snob, and taken with Hugh. She tells Merry early on that Merry is being unfair to keep a man as “fine” as Hugh in River Gap. “Inwardly he cringes a bit every time somebody says, ‘Oh, Hugh? He’s Dr. Merry’s husband.’ ” Merry feels the sting of this comment, and anxiously watches Hugh’s increasing interest in Iris. This, combined with the ubiquitous internal struggles about whether she should stay at home for her husband, causes her to ask Hugh if he is bored with living in River Gap, and with her. He replies, “I—don’t get much chance to be bored with you, do I, Merry?” This is apparently meant to be a bitter jab, as Merry bites her lip and cannot speak, and Hugh apologizes profusely. But when she asks Hugh if she should quit her job, he refuses to say: “It’s your life, and you’ve worked hard in your profession …. No man worth his salt could ever ask you to give that up.” She asks Hugh what he wants from her, and he says he wants to go to New York on vacation—but the day they are supposed to leave, she is called to the mountains to deliver quadruplets; the mother and one baby die, and Hugh goes off to New York without her.

What to do, what to do? Well, who really knows, because instead of working on Merry’s problems, we solve Iris’s. We learn that the reason she is such an incorrigible flirt is that she lost her baby to meningitis. Problem solved: Give her the surviving quadruplets!! Once Iris has them, she is a changed woman: “the once gleaming, red-lacquered nails had been filed short and round, and were guiltless of any save a colorless polish.”

Should we return to Merry now? Heck, no! Instead we switch focus to Thelma, a mysterious unmarried pregnant woman who is taken in by Granny Stillers. Thelma is revealed as Janet, the ex-wife of Dr. Andrews, a young intern at Dr. Merry’s hospital. We spend a couple of chapters with Thelma/Janet, then we take quick peeks into two more marriages: Merry’s sister’s husband is planning to transfer to a big city and a big job because he thinks it will make his wife happy. She tells him she is happiest in the mountains, poor as a church mouse, because “I want whatever you want,” and he takes her in his arms, and we cut to a commercial. Then there’s Matilda, the wife of Dr. Nichols, the old oncologist, who turns out to have a tumor that she conceals from everyone until Merry worms the secret out of her. She’s bundled off to surgery and is destined to recover completely, but Merry tells the doctor that his aging wife needs more than that: “You and Jennie watch over her so carefully, and if she so much as lifts a finger, you scold her … Now that she’s no longer as strong as she used to be or so capable of doing things for herself, and you and Jennie are so busy taking work off her hands, I think Mattie has grown a little—well, lonely in a way.” Dr. Nichols promises to be less smothering, and that’s another happy couple fading into the sunset. Back to Janet—her baby is born, and though she has vehemently sworn she will never love her son or ex-husband, the minute she holds the baby, Dr. Andrews is pushed into the room by a well-meaning nurse, and they rush into each others’ arms.
With all these happy endings, we only lack one for Dr. Merry, and we are duly given it: “As Hugh came around and opened the [car] door for her, and drew her into his arms for a moment before he kissed her lightly and set her feet on the steps, Meredith’s heart rang out with a soft paean of sheer joy. Everything was so gloriously right in this most perfect moment of all worlds, and she was surely the most fortunate woman that ever lived.”

What? Where did this come from? If the other three couples are meant to be examples, things do not bode well for Merry. She already has children, so babies will not heal her soul the way they do Iris and Janet’s. We never really find out what Hugh wants her to do about her job, so she can’t do whatever he wants (although she’s made it clear in her inner musings that her job is her calling and she can’t give it up)—but he eventually does get his week in New York, and maybe that’s all it takes.

In the final scene, it’s Christmas Eve, and everyone is gathered at Merry’s house. Merry, her sister, and the longtime hospital nurse are asked to be godmothers to Iris’s triplets, and Janet chimes in that she wants Merry to be godmother to Steve Junior as well. As the curtain draws slowly closed, the happy residents are gathered together, listening to the words of ‘God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen.’ And if this doesn’t make you want to throw up, you are made of firmer stuff than me.