Million Dollar Nurse

By Rebecca Marsh
(pseud. William Neubauer), ©1966
Cover illustration by Darrell Greene 

When pretty Dorothy Malloy left Buttrick Hospital to become wealthy Andrew Bossart’s private nurse, her orderly world changed overnight. Young and handsome, Andrew Bossart was recovering from an accidental gunshot wound. His reputation as a dangerous ladies’ man made some people wonder if the shot had been an accident after all … Despite Dorothy’s determination to remain uninvolved, she was too attractive a girl to escape Bossart’s attention—and too good a nurse to ignore the needs of her patient. Before long she found herself entangled in an unexpected mystery, a strange romantic triangle—and a scandal that would rock the city …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“There’s more to conversation than attractive legs.” 

“Even a hospital should be hospitable.”

“Like all career girls, you get flustered when someone behaves like you’re human.”

“I don’t think it helps a man’s innards when a bullet is shot into them.”

“There are proper and improper ways to go about achieving a desired object. You learn that quickly in surgery. You don’t incise down from the shoulder to remove an appendix. Similarly, you don’t club someone in order to reason with him.”

“In our special ways we’re all ill.”

REVIEW:
Author William Neubauer, here writing as Rebecca Marsh, is one of my favorites. His plots are usually more intricate, and his heroines are smart, hard-working, sassy gals who put up with little nonsense. The problems with his books are that the romance part of the book is usually just crammed in around the margins, barely visible; the plots can sometimes get overly confusing; and the boyfriend is sometimes not especially desirable. Here he has done pretty well, as the plot is mostly navigable, but he did stick us with a middling man. At least we scored an amazing cover illustration.

Dorothy Malloy is a surgical nurse at Neubauer’s classic Buttrick Hospital—this noble, California coast–institution has hosted at least three other of his VNRNs (TV Nurse, Pam Green Rehabilitation Nurse, and Recovery Room Nurse) and some peripheral characters in this story (Dr Lee Vaughan, with whom Dorothy lunches one day, for example, is the alleged hero of TV Nurse) are stars in other books, which is a fun bonus for the die-hard Neubauer fan. She is an ambitious lass, hoping to be promoted to assistant chief—and her ambition is viewed with some skepticism around the hospital, because why would a woman want to be promoted?

Anyway, she’s called to special Andrew Mark Bossart, a devilishly handsome playboy who has gotten himself mixed up with Lisa Locatelli, a 17-year-old student nurse at Buttrick, as well as Catherine Cowell, the owner of a large corporation in town. The young gal swears Andy proposed to her, but then dumped her for the wealthy Catherine, so she calls Catherine to give her the down-low about Andy’s sneaky dealings, and then tries to kill herself—but is saved due to fast action on the part of her nursing school roommate. Catherine calls Andy over to her beach house—and the next we see him, he’s on the OR table with a bullet in his gut, and Dorothy is part of the team commissioned to dig it out and repair the damage.

She’s then transferred to the recovery ward unit (unfortunately we didn’t cross paths with Jane Kemp while we were there) to special Andy—but this puts her out of the running for a promotion, because “in the surgical suite she had status, even a type of seniority. Logically, the longer she remained there, the better her chances would be to make the jump to rank as a junior executive. But if she were popped into a recovery-room suite, she’d be the low girl in an area where promotions were few and far between.” The transfer is happening, we learn, because the chief of the surgical unit, Miss Sipsie, is dating Joe Elyot, an orthopedic tech, who is also seeing Dorothy, whom he might possibly prefer.

The head of the recovery room, Clara Dendrock, likewise recommends that Dorothy should be transferred to another department. Clara, it turns out, is upset that Dorothy didn’t sign a petition like all the other nurses opposing the expulsion of Lisa Locatelli, who has been deemed too unstable to go on with a nursing career. Dorothy has been one of Lisa’s chief mentors, so her “betrayal” of Lisa doesn’t sit well with the other nurses, but Dorothy is an astute player, and has already discussed her opinion that Lisa should be allowed to continue with Mrs. Dolezal, the superintendent of nurses, and feels that signing the petition might undercut her chances for promotion and won’t accomplish Lisa’s reinstatement.

Caring for Andy Bossart, Dorothy has a front-row seat to the drama. Though there is no proof that Catherine shot Andy—the gun has not been recovered, without which she apparently cannot be arrested—Andy, who’d been working a high-paying job ($25,000 a year!!!) at Catherine’s company is suing Catherine for a million dollars for loss of his career and, oh yeah, that hole in his gut. When he’s finally out of the hospital, he invites Dorothy to dinner to thank her for her hard work—but has also invited Catherine and the local newspaper columnist, Millicent Haight, to the party, and Catherine beans Dorothy on the head, giving her a black eye. This injury—plus her current political situation at the hospital—leads Mrs. Dolezal to give Dorothy two weeks off to recover, and Catherine, out of gratitude that Dorothy has not pressed charges, offers Catherine use of her beach cottage—the house where Andy was shot—to recover.

There she has lovely meals and walks on the grounds, sails on Catherine’s yacht, and pleasant conversations with Catherine’s housekeeper, who is another of the locals deeply devoted to Catherine—like Dorothy’s boyfriend, Joe Elyot, who was rescued from a life in the slums when Catherine, a high school classmate, offered to pay for his schooling to fit him for the job he currently holds.

Eventually all the threads are neatly tied up—the story of what happened to the gun, the alibi that is going to get Catherine off the hook for the shooting, Lisa’s reinstatement at the hospital, and Dorothy’s career—in a manner that is mostly understandable. We even wrap up Dorothy’s love life when she announces out of the blue—many Neubauer women have this annoying habit—that she is going to marry Joe. While we are certainly happy for almost everyone, and for Dorothy’s clever playing of her career and hospital politics, I wasn’t too please to see her end up with Joe.

Joe is clearly very devoted to Catherine out of gratitude for her help—to the extent that he helps fabricate her alibi and plant false evidence, basically abetting a felony assault—but he starts out the book as something of a cad, telling Dorothy on a date that he’d kissed Catherine once and dates other women, Miss Sipsie in particular. This hurts Dorothy’s feelings, so “he condescended to lean forward quickly and give her left cheek a greasy peck. As she drew back, flushing, he laughed.” It’s so amusing to be a jerk! Later he tells Dorothy that he’s chatted with several nurses who are upset with her about the petition business and that he’d defended her “because I like you,” but then complains that feeling like he wants to defend her can push him into marriage, and he doesn’t want to get married—and somehow Dorothy takes this for a compliment, but then gets mad when he tries to persuade her to sign the petition instead of supporting her decision. Next time we see him, he’s hanging out at the beach house with Dorothy and sighing that he should have tried to marry Catherine. Two pages after that, she decides to marry him while he’s not even present. So you see we don’t have a lot to admire in him.

Another odd thing about the book is that both Catherine and Andy end up getting inpatient psychiatric care—but Lisa, the would-be suicide who clearly needs it way more than anyone, does not. Instead, everyone refers to her suicide attempt as a “goof” that she shouldn’t be punished for. Overall, though, as I have said, this is a brisk, interesting, enjoyable book with an excellent heroine to admire. If William Neubauer here has not given us his best work, it's still better than most VNRNs out there, and easily worth an afternoon of your time.

Doctor Chris

by Elizabeth Seifert, © 1946

When the new doctor arrived at Lakeside Hospital, the reaction was lively. Nobody had expected Dr. Chris Metcalf to be a girl. The nurses were not pleased, for another young woman meant keener competition for the attention of the handsome Chief of Staff. The Chief of Staff himself was not pleased, for he believed that medicine was for men alone. So Chris had something to fight against, as well as a lot to learn during her year of hospital life. It was anything but a dull year, however, what with this vigorous opposition, with sabotage in an Army Ordnance plant nearby, and with the personable young lawyer in town who appreciated Chris as a woman rather than as a doctor. In her latest novel Elizabeth Seifert shows the development of Chris Metcalf is a person and as a doctor, and adds a vivid new story to her popular group of novels about doctors and the drama of their work. 

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Just so I’m the biggest something in your life, sweetheart.”

REVIEW:
Poor Dr. Chris Metcalf is a 24-year-old intern, having just graduated from medical school, and is arriving at Lakeside Hospital somewhere in Missouri. Of course, the initial joke is that with the nickname of Chris, everyone thinks from her resume that she is a man. What fun when she arrives wearing a skirt! Well, maybe not fun, as she gets the fisheye from multiple mossbacked and/or jealous nurses and doctors, including her new chief, 40-year-old Dr. Key Edmons. (I know, “Key” is about the worst name ever, but it’s not the first time we have met one, and probably won’t be the last, unfortunately.) But Chris is not intimidated: “I’m not frightened of you, and you don’t shock me,” she tells him. “Another thing you can count on, I won’t bother you by falling in love with you.” That shows him! Except maybe not, as he has an exceptional amount of prejudice to overcome, and she is perennially smacking into that wall. Frankly it gets more than a little tiresome to continually encounter remarks such as, “There is something you’re going to have to learn, Dr. Metcalf, though I’m damned if I think you can learn it. Because you’re a girl!” Or, “You didn’t handle the father, and the reason you didn’t is the same reason we have against your trying to be a doctor. You’re a girl.” Honestly, Chris is never going to experience any gender confusion, she is reminded so frequently of hers, though it seems likely that she has progressed through puberty and actually qualifies as a woman.

She does not have much spare time, being an intern and all, but soon Chris has hooked up with a local playboy, 35-year-old attorney Allan Gifford, who is apparently about to be engaged to one wealthy socialite while also having an affair with the chief OR nurse. If that doesn’t make him enough of a catch, he, too, is ridiculously prejudiced against women doctors. “Why should a pretty little girl like you go into anything so gruesome as the practice of medicine?” he asks her when they first meet. He repeatedly pressures her to marry him, but is very open about his insistence that she quit medicine if she does, so she doesn’t really take him seriously.

The book rolls along and we watch Chris tackle with varying degrees of success various medical situations, always carrying the weight of her entire gender on her back. I will say she is a bit on the wimpy side and does have a tendency to break into tears, but the pressure of one’s intern year combined with the accompanying lack of sleep might do that to anyone. She is fierce in her regular and ongoing battles with Dr. Edmons about her capabilities, I will give her that: “Don’t you dare say that’s why I have no business doctoring,” she snaps at him when he tells her that women can’t be doctors because they have “a tender heart.” “Men have tender hearts, too. Don’t they? Don’t they?” (Dr. Edmons, who is obviously falling in love with Chris, begrudgingly admits she may be right.)

Two of the more interesting cases that Dr. Metcalf encounters involve reproductive rights: a young woman, pregnant by a bounder, who asks for an abortion—Chris refuses because it’s illegal and she is only an intern without the requisite skills; it’s not clear which is the bigger obstacle—and in another case a woman who is having her appendix out asks to have her ovaries removed as well. Dr. Edmons refuses to do it because the ovaries are not diseased, but Chris replies that they would take out healthy ovaries during a hysterectomy. The argument is dropped before it progresses, but it is curious that author Elizabeth Seifert introduces these weighty topics in such an offhanded manner.

Eventually, as you knew there would be, there is a case of serious sabotage at the nearby Army ordnance plant in which a plane crashes into it, and Chris and Dr. Edmons work all night to save the burned men. Chris than deduces who the scurrilous foreign agent is—the only character with a German accent (*eyeroll*)—and plays a large role in bringing the criminal to justice, with the help of Allan Gifford, who turns out to be FBI! Unfortunately, “all the glamour Cooper and Hoover have given to the G-men, the aura of Sherlock Holmes—all glimmered about Allen’s big, homely person” and now she thinks she is in love with him and accepts his ring, “the badge of submission, of subordination.” Well, that sounds lovely! Then he is injured in a shooting accident and she saves his life, proving to everyone that she is a “real” doctor—but also to herself that she is not in love with Allan: “Have I got so hard, so unfeeling that I could have done what I did for Allan, if I really loved him—the way I should love him?”

Overall, this is a low-key, satisfying book by an excellent author. It’s not especially exciting or unique, but it is well-written and has a quiet humor in several instances that unfortunately doesn’t translate to the Best Quotes section. It certainly is a slice of life of a young woman trying to forge her way through a career that is difficult today, much less 75 (!!) years ago, and if the incessant prejudice is trying for us to endure, I imagine it was a great deal more so for the brave women who actually lived through it. If this gentle book isn’t the most memorable, it has a pleasant competence that makes it worth reading about Dr. Chris.

Nurse Martin’s Dilemma

By Rosamund Hunt, ©1961
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti 

For eighteen months Nurse Beth Martin was stalked wherever she went by the nightmare of her past. At last, in a remote New England hospital she found safety and love. With Dr. Chad Dennison she began to forget her tragedy. Then a little man arrived—asking questions and looking for Nurse Beth Martin. If she ran again, she’d have to run forever …

GRADE: C

REVIEW:
The abducted-baby plot is a bonus because it offers our accused nurse-heroine an oversized scandal, followed by an equally righteous triumph in the end—and an opportunity to sneer at the mother at the same time. Here Nurse Beth Martin has agreed to care for boarding school chum Harriet Sawyer’s infant son—not that she deserves a baby, and we are allowed to ask if she even wants one: “the beautiful spoiled” Harriet had “complained constantly” during her pregnancy and, when the child was born, “didn’t want any of the burden of its care,” to the point that she’s never seen him undressed and “had held him only when he was dressed in his expensive, handmade little garments. Even then, she had been only too glad to hand him back shortly, had seemed to see the baby only as proof of her own accomplishment, a new possession to be shown off to admiring friends and relatives.” Then one afternoon, Beth is alone with Baby Bunky—“Harriet had gone off on a shopping expedition”—when the phone rings and rings until Beth goes inside to answer it, leaving Bunky on the terrace, and when asked to hold, she does, apparently for quite some time, as when she gets back, Bunky is gone! 

The police can’t convict her, though “the tabloids had had a field day,” and she’d fled to Europe until her apparently substantial inheritance (she’s an orphan, of course) has run out, and now, 18 months after her graduation, she has returned to America, somewhere in New England far from the Californian scene of the crime, for a job as a charge nurse of the surgical floor. It’s a tough assignment, as the patients are demanding and the hospital is short-staffed, and Beth, in her first hospital job, “could not have got off to a worse start if she had been trying deliberately.”  She flaunts her college degree before a top student nurse, who, rightfully offended, tells Beth she shouldn’t “ride the girls who know what they’re doing because they’ve learned it by actual experience”—a valid point—and then sets out to ruin Beth’s life. Beth does not learn from this incident, unfortunately, and continues to prove herself to be a snob.

She’s not helped by the ridiculously coincidental appearance of Dr. John Chadwick Dennison, known as Chad, whom she’d known as a child and of course been crushing madly: “She had always felt that the reason she had never fallen in love again was because no one had ever measured up to the ideal she had met, and lost, when she was 16.” Now we watch Beth make an even bigger ass of herself as, having unburdened herself about the Bunky mishap to Chad, she decides that she’s still in love with him and literally thrusts herself between him and Nurse Elinor Chase, who anyone can see he actually cares for. Now she has her obsession to “give new meaning to her life,” and she spends every evening alone in her room waiting for Chad to call, remembering all the words he’s spoken to her and “reading into them what she wanted to be there.” She snubs good-hearted Dr. Bill Holloway, who is the only person to stand up for her when she snatches a tin of salted nuts away from a hospital trustee three days after an open cholecystectomy. She decides on their disastrous date that “she wanted to repay him” and so “if he wanted to kiss her tonight, she would not resist. There would be no disloyalty to Chad. It would be merely a friendly gesture, her way of saying ‘Thank you.’” Um, thanks, lady! Of course, she’s insulted when he doesn’t.

And then a mysterious man shows up at the hospital asking for Beth, and, combined with Chad’s engagement—not to Beth!—she decides “she would have to leave the hospital and the city,” because she cannot face “what a fool she had been.” It seems to me that a little facing up would be good for Beth, but it’s not strength of character but of Mother Nature in the form of a weak blizzard (only 12 to 14 inches of snow, kids’ stuff!) that keeps her in town, trapped on duty as the nurses who live farther afield are unable to show up for work for 36 hours—these can’t be real New Englanders! The stranger is brought in with a heart attack, triggered by standing outside Beth’s rooming house waiting for her, and soon it’s revealed that he’s not out to harm her, but to tell her his mentally ill daughter was the one responsible for kidnapping Bunky, and that the baby is alive and well as one can be when they’re living in Florida.

If nurses can’t get to work, at least planes are running, so Beth is off to the airport, but not before she hears “the voice in her own heart telling her that she was in love with Bill Holloway,” which is especially tragic because she still has to leave town forever, as “she could not drag him or his fine family” into “the publicity, the gossip which would spread, like a flame in a high wind, throughout the city where Bill was building up a reputation as a successful young doctor.” She’s assuming he wants anything to do with her, a bit of a stretch in my opinion, but these VNRN docs aren’t always the smartest of guys.

Of course, Bunky’s mother Harriet couldn’t pick her own child out of a lineup, and only Beth knows about the birthmark she had never revealed to Harriet, knowing that Harriet “had always had a passion for perfection. She had wanted everything she possessed to be flawless.” Summoned by Beth to collect their newfound child, Harriet and husband Ben arrive and so too does Bill, insisting, “I’m taking over!” After he and Beth are married, he suggests, “your past will be nobody’s business,” and besides, it wasn’t her fault! Initially I was hopeful: “No one can be completely free from human errors,” Bill scolds her—everyone, that is, except Bunky’s mother. “If she had been home that day, never letting the baby out of her sight the way most mothers are happy to do, the whole thing might not have happened,” he explains. “It’s rottenly unfair that she slid out of taking any of the blame!”

And so it’s a happy end for everyone except Harriet, who now has to take care of her own child, at least on the plane ride home and until she finds a new nurse. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to be satisfied with Beth Martin, who has been narrow-minded, jealous, and immature from the beginning, only to be transformed with the turn of a page into someone who recognizes all her past mistakes and is held accountable for none of them. There are some enjoyments to be had from this book, and not just from the fabulous Lou Marchetti cover (but who is the blonde? Surely not Nurse Elinor!)—it is fun to be exasperated with horrid Beth—but not many. The dilemma about Nurse Martin is why anyone would care about her, but it needn’t be yours if you just decline to open the book.  

Desert Nurse

By Jane Arbor, ©1963 

After the break-up of her romance with Greg Ryder, Nurse Martha Shore decided that the best thing to do was to find a new interest, which she did with a vengeance when she accepted Doctor Jude Tarleton’s offer of a past at his tiny hospital east of Aden. She had successfully managed to jump out he the frying-pan. But did her new job, in the burning desert heat, not ominously resemble the proverbial fire? For it was not long before Martha had to admit her love for Greg was forgotten in her new, overwhelming attraction to Jude—an attraction which he made it clear was not returned. How could she hope to appeal to him, anyway, when the experienced and glamorous Naomi was already so firmly in the picture?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“That’s how feeling needed does take one, I think—grateful for the chance and set-teeth determined to be worth it.” 

REVIEW:
I had been dreading reading Desert Nurse, and with good reason, given the VNRN genre’s track record with foreign peoples, and the cover illustration was not very encouraging. But I am happy to report that Jane Arbor has here drawn a portrait of Saudi Arabians as being different from the English, of course, but no less honorable or dignified. Nurse Martha Shore, who in fact has spent some time in the area as a child and speaks some Arabic, returns for a one-year stint at a hospital supporting a rural (can that word be used with a desert?) community and a team of Brits attempting to strike oil under the auspices of Dr. Jude Tarleton—and her reason for doing so is the dissolution of her engagement to Greg Ryder, a pilot who prefers to marry the rich daughter of his intended employer instead of our steady, honest, plucky heroine.

Given that beginning, you can easily deduce the bones of the story that follows, including Greg’s crash landing at the settlement and insistent efforts to take up again with Martha—his fiancée had left him when he’d carelessly let fall to her father that he’d considered his daughter “good company and a looker, and if she was the price of her old man’s backing, that was all right.” Martha is no longer interested, but the big question here is why she would ever have had anything to do with the shallow, conceited ass for a minute, much less be engaged to him for a year. The usual misunderstandings between her and the camp’s doctor, Jude Tarleton, unfold, but there are side stories demonstrating Martha’s strength and pluck to amuse us—even if she does have a tendency to fall (sometimes literally) into scrapes form which Jude must rescue her.

The plot holds no surprises, but the writing is pleasing and we are treated to multiple interesting peripheral characters. I was even actually convinced of Martha’s feeling for Jude, “a secret madness that didn’t show” no matter how intensely she feels when their hands brush. The final conversation reconciliating their misunderstandings went on for far too long and could easily have been cut altogether: As Frank Capra said of the scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” when Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart skipped a page of the script in their first and only take of the scene in which they kiss, “with technique like that, who needs dialogue?” A thin plot, though it might keep a book out of A-range grades, is not a big drawback in a VNRN, and the rest of this book is charming enough to make it a welcome oasis in a too-often dry genre.

The Fledgling Nurses

By Diana Douglas, pseud. of 
Richard Wilkes-Hunter, ©1971
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

“Tina,” John whispered, “I’ve never seen you the way I’m seeing you now.”
“No? I guess you never bothered to look,” she answered. Any second now he was going to kiss her, and most girls would give anything to have such an attractive man look at them as he was looking at her now. But all Tina felt was a diminishing satisfaction that John’s date Dell would see them—that what Dell would feel would be payment for some of the dirty tricks she’d played on Tina at the hospital. John’s kiss was passionate and very, very exciting—too exciting. For when Tina saw Dell staring at them furiously, she knew that what had started out as a simple act of revenge might signal the beginning of a love that would threaten all of them … 

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“Inside this hospital, nurses do not run even in an emergency. Running promotes panic. In patients as well as nurses. Remember that.” 

“‘Sometimes it’s like that with people,’ he said. ‘You just look at one another and you vibrate.’”

REVIEW:
Tina Lambert, a second-year nursing student, hates her fellow student Dell Blandon with a burning passion. Dell, who’s at the top of their class, is always ratting out Tina, who is somewhere at the bottom. Tina’s problem is that she has mixed feelings about nursing, mostly stemming from her mother, who is director of nursing at a hospital in Berkeley, California, across the bay from Bayview Hospital, where Tina is a student. “My mother’s more than a trial—she’s a conviction, too,” Tina gripes, adding that it was her mother’s idea that she become a nurse. Honest and self-aware, though, she admits, “I wanted to be a nurse. But I wanted to make my own decision about it, that’s all. I didn’t want to be taken by the ear and led into a nurse’s uniform. Would you?” No, I wouldn’t, and it explains Tina’s attitude and mixed performance as a student. 

One evening Tina and the gang and their men friends go to a club—“It’s now, it’s wow, it’s the Rainbow Pad,” and I laughed for about ten pages at the wild, swinging hippie scene with hypnotic, psychedelic lights and a “depth-perception machine,” whatever that is. Unfortunately, Tina is not able to “swing your hang-ups away!” and instead decides to wreak her revenge on Dell by taking away her boyfriend, John Small. Unfortunately, it’s not very difficult, as John seems too eager to kiss Tina from the moment he lays eyes on her. She lets him do it as she sees Dell exiting the ladies’ lounge, and Dell, furious, leaves the club with Stanfurd playboy Peter Spain. That night, Tina hears Dell sneaking into the nurses’ dorm way past curfew and cry herself to sleep, and—too late—she starts to feel remorse. But it proves difficult to drop John, who now is hypocritically angry with Dell for dating Peter. Eventually, trying to get Dell to go back to John, who Tina is sure still loves Dell, Tina comes completely clean to Dell, in her startlingly honest way. Dell, not very surprisingly, is devastated and humiliated, and thinking that she’s lost the man she loves forever, walks out of the hospital when she should be heading for class.

The next 40 pages devote themselves to a long, drawn-out, day-long hunt all over San Francisco for Dell, ending with Tina, John and two friends driving through the thick fog (you knew the fog would make an appearance at some point) to track her down—only to end up in a car crash, and wouldn’t you know it, the car they hit contains Dell and Peter! Tina, who’s been a hit-or-miss student—though we do hear she’s especially strong on the first aid exam, in a bit of foreshadowing—saves John’s life while the other two student nurses go to pieces, and when the victims are finally wheeled into the ED doors, Tina wins the admiration of chief surgical resident Dr. Roger Carr.

Eventually everything is tied up, but not before Tina pulls a half-hearted Dell maneuver herself and runs into the park after dark and is nearly assaulted before Roger shows up in the nick of time, in a perfunctory 2½-page adventure that feels insulting to the reader. Overall it’s certainly not author Richard Wilkes-Hunter’s worst, which can be pretty bad (see Resort Nurse, Nurse Deceived, Mystery Nurse, and Surfing Nurse, to name just a few—he has definitely earned his berth on the Worst VNRN Authors list). But here he has given us a short story stretched yawningly into 125 pages, and we can’t avoid Wilkes-Hunter’s trademark awkward references to Tina’s “firm breasts” and the shower in which she is “letting the warmth pour down over her smooth young curves,” which make me feel like a creepy voyeur. But Tina is a forthright, insightful, admirable young woman who learns from her ability to perform under pressure that “if I can do that once, I can do it again, can’t I? I mean, I can help people who need what I am able to do for them.” It’s a rarity for Wilkes-Hunter to give us such a feisty and enjoyable heroine, but after wading through 13 of his other books and finding them overwhelmingly to be duds, I am glad to have met her.

Office Nurse

By Rebecca Marsh
(pseud. William Neubauer), ©1960

Gerry Staley, R.N. loved the sleek elegance of the society doctor’s office but her conscience told her there was more to nursing then caring for the imagined ills of the rich. Then, when diamond-in-the-rough Tom Covert demanded an answer and self-confident Dr. John Driscoll asked her to wear his ring, Gerry knew she must make the decision that would influence the rest of her life.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Ho, for the old days, when the blacksnake whip could be summoned to teach you your duty.”

“Aren’t we a bit formal this morning? The first sir is acceptable, of course. It establishes your respect for my skill, my position, and my bankroll. But once you have established that, Staley, you mustn’t belabor the point.”

“Well, you don’t always look forty, Boss. On day like this, with that look in your eye, you look maybe thirty-nine.”

“The man should always be allowed to think he’s doing the chasing.”

“Ah, have a good cry, Staley; it’ll clean out the ducts just fine.”

“‘Will you tell me why so many men are so idiotic?’
“‘Girls,’ he explained solemnly. ‘They do that to us, for some reason.’”

REVIEW:
Gerry Staley is a 23-year-old nurse working in the posh office of fortyish Dr. John Driscoll. It’s a well-paying job and one that she enjoys, but at book’s open she is talked into helping a young man she knew growing up in the slums who has made a stupid mistake and robbed a jewelry store. She testifies for the young man’s defense, but this means that she needs to come clean with Dr. Driscoll, who is unaware of her upbringing on the wrong side of the tracks. Upon learning this about her, he magnanimously agrees to keep her in her position after “he checked up on you all over town before he graciously agreed to retain the best nurse he’s ever had”—though you’d think the fact that he’s worked alongside her for more than a year would acquaint him to her character. This is just the start of a long line of dominoes that tumble following this one seemingly in significant act in a plot that is fairly typical of author William Neubauer—not that there’s anything terribly wrong with that. 

Gerry is dating ambitious and successful salesman Tom Covert, but she has a crush on Dr. Driscoll, and apparently everyone in town knows it, including Tom. Nonetheless, she continues to see Tom, even though “he wasn’t John Driscoll, of course. He had neither John’s handsomeness nor John’s suave wit. Yet with Tom, at least, she could always be herself.” Interestingly, if Gerry likes him, everyone else in town thinks Dr. Driscoll is “a greedy, money-chasing, social-climbing guy.” The objection seems to be that he doesn’t take enough pro bono shifts: “The only time your fellow goes to the slums it’s a great big show,” Tom tells Gerry. “There’s the limousine sparkling like this bauble. There you are in a spanking fresh uniform and your red-lined cape. Everyone knows you’re there doing charity work. Only it isn’t charity work, because your fellow gets his compensation in the form of publicity.”

Dr. Driscoll seems to live up to the town’s idea of him when, in an attempt to rid himself of his girlfriend Iris Preston, who he feels is getting too serious, the good doctor asks Gerry to pretend that the two are engaged, and he’ll pay her to go out with him a couple times a week. As much as Gerry would love to be with Dr. Driscoll, she is outraged by his proposal. “Did you honestly think, Dr. Driscoll, that I’d help you play such a rotten trick on any woman?” she shouts. “What a strange, pathetic man you are!” She’s summarily fired, but has a new job in five minutes in the hospital emergency department.

Meanwhile, Tom is working on a plan to buy in on a local food distribution business, which he thinks he can leverage into great profits. But he needs $25,000 to swing the deal, and the bank will not lend him the money outright. He asks Gerry to use her connection with Iris, since her dad is also the bank’s president, to influence a positive decision on the loan. So now, with more free time on her hands, Gerry meets with Iris and puts in a plug for Tom’s business. Iris, though, insists on the truth about why Gerry isn’t working for Dr. Driscoll any more—and Gerry gives it to her. “And that, Iris thought weakly, would teach her to do less snooping in the future!” Iris agrees to promote the loan with her father and rushes out the door to see Dr. Driscoll, in a scene that is played offstage.

A few days later Gerry bumps into Dr. Driscoll in the ED, and he tells her that what he really wants is to start a free clinic, and has even purchased a building in the poor section of town; all his money-grubbing ways are so he can amass a pile of money to open the clinic. When Gerry tells Tom about this, he suggests that if Dr. Driscoll really wants to raise money for the clinic, he should undertake a fund-raising campaign, so Gerry suggests he run one, since he’s such a great salesman—and since it’s not likely he’s going to get the loan from the bank. If he succeeds at fund-raising, she suggests, he’s likely to get his seed money from other sources. Sure enough, the campaign is successful, Dr. Driscoll lends Tom the money, and Gerry goes back to work for Dr. Driscoll. Suddenly, though, Gerry is saying to an old friend, “Surely you don’t imagine for an instant that I’d marry Dr. John Driscoll? I’m fond of him, sure, but as a girl might be fond of a rather nice if strange older brother. Lord, it’s always been Tom.” News to us!

Everything ties up very nicely, as you imagine it will. The writing is wonderfully amusing, and there is a terrific character in the person of the Superintendent of Nurses, who has marshalled Gerry along with tough love through her training and now career, and the two regularly meet to trade witticisms, much to our benefit. Dr. Driscoll, also, has a marvelous way with words, à la another personal favorite, author Alan Jackson, who wrote as Rosie M. Banks. “There are times, Iris, and this is one of them, when a man wants the companionship of a full-blown woman,” he says in one lovely example of his eloquence. “Even the cave man was unhappy if there wasn’t a cave woman to grunt her admiration when he’d slain some prehistoric beast. Do grunt your admiration, there’s a pet.”

Gerry is a strong, determined, intelligent, hard-working, top-notch nurse, and not one to fall swooning into anyone’s arms; in fact, she is quite hard to get, right to the bitter end. The only trouble with this story is that you will at times struggle to keep up with the intricacies of the plot, as is customary with Mr. Neubauer, but that’s certainly no reason to shun his books. Rather, it’s a treat to see a VNRN writer who actually puts in an effort to construct a story that you haven’t read fifty times before, and in Office Nurse we have a smart, witty little gem that you could actually read several times and still get something more out of it every time.

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The Nurse’s Dilemma

By Vera Cleaver, ©1966
Cover illustration by Mort Engel

“I’d better warn you, Nurse … I’m going to marry Stephen Templeton—so forget any ideas you may have in that line. I’m not ashamed of my money—I like it and I like what it can buy.” Helen Harrison’s arrogance infuriated Nurse Jean Wheaton, but she was comforted by the memory of the handsome surgeon’s embrace. “I doubt very much if you’ll buy Dr. Templeton. Is that all you wanted to tell me?” “I just thought I’d warn you,” Helen said. “Steve is not the man to settle for … second best.” Burning with fury, Jean went to meet Dr. Stephen Templeton. Second best! Anyway, I have no intention of falling in love with him—or have I …? A beautiful young nurse, a rich society girl, and a handsome surgeon become involved in a triangle that rocks Monroe General Hospital.

GRADE: A

BEST QUOTES:
“I was talking to a guy this afternoon who drives a truck for a living. He told me he makes four dollars an hour. We could live on four dollars an hour, couldn’t we?”

“I’m going to wear my new white sweater and my new black pants, and when you see how handsome and virile I look whizzing around on my new silver skates with the wind in my hair and a song on my lips, you’ll fall to your knees and entreat me to marry you immediately. 

REVIEW:
It is with great sorrow that I tell you that The Nurse’s Dilemma is the only nurse novel that Vera Cleaver ever wrote. It was her first, written when she was 47, and thereafter she turned her focus to books for young adults, mostly written in partnership with her husband Bill Cleaver; you may have heard of their third book together, Where the Lillies Bloom, which was written in 1969 and was a National Book Award finalist.

But here we have a truly remarkable story, of Nurse Jean Wheaton, who is an excellent surgical nurse. “If you’re just routinely good, you wait for the surgeon to ask for the instruments. If you’re more than good—if you’re standing there moving, breathing, feeling with him—you anticipate. You know ahead of time and you act … You are trained and, more than that, there is a built-in intuition in you, so you don’t wait for him to ask. You give. It’s a little like dancing with a stranger.” She’s the preferred scrub of Dr. Stephen Templeton, who likes everything just so, and who has carefully plotted out his life. “Dr. Templeton wants prestige in his life,” she tells her roommate Willow. “You can tell that from the way he speaks and dresses and acts. He graduated from one of the best schools in the East. He’s not going to throw all that away now.” His plans to obtain nothing but the classiest mean, Jean suspects, that she isn’t high on his list of suitable dates.

Nonetheless, he accepts Jean’s invitation to visit her raucous family in the hills for Christmas, and upon seeing him in her messy home, she realizes that she’s blown it. “When we all trooped in and took our places, and I saw Stephen Templeton look at it, I knew that the table covering should have been white cloth, that I should have somehow managed matching napkins, that the thick restaurant china my father had bought at an auction should never have been considered for such an occasion ... that it and all of us were in our element, but not in Dr. Templeton’s.” But he’s still human underneath his armor of plans, and he falls in love with Jean anyway. He’s announced his engagement to Helen Harrison, a society snob, but tells Jean he’s going to break it off with her. Unfortunately, Helen beats him to the punch and tells him that she has tuberculosis, so now we have the slightly stale situation of a couple staying together because of tragic illness. “We have to be sensible. And we have to do the honorable thing,” Stephen tells Jean, and she agrees. She packs off to a new job 600 miles away while Helen packs off to a sanitorium.

Months pass, and then there’s a knock at the door: Helen has hired a detective to find Jean, and sends a summons. She’s going to die, she tells Jean, and though Jean the trained nurse determinedly denies the truth, Helen refuses to have it, and frankly acknowledges, “My marriage to Stephen wouldn’t have been successful. It would have flopped because Stephen is in love with you.”

From here the story is fairly predictable, but what I couldn’t have predicted was how fine and how truly original the writing, how honest the emotions, how lovely the characters. The story has an actual heart. The characters are admittedly flawed, but in the end, they realize their failings and promise genuine growth, together, as a real honest love should. The medicine is detailed and mostly accurate, showing that Vera Cleaver put in a lot of time at the library for this one. This book demands a special niche on your VNRN bookshelf as a rare story that actually deserves to be read a second time, with a tear that it has no sisters, but a relieved smile that we have the remarkable gift of this one.

Nurse Julie of Ward Three

By Joan Callender, ©1964

Julie Doran had been very happy in the busy, peaceful atmosphere of the geriatric ward, caring for her aged patients and on the friendliest of terms with the physician-in-charge, Hal Gardiner. But everything changed for the worse when Annette marsh came on in charge of the ward. Was it Julie’s fault—and if so, what she to do about it?

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“If she did not marry, she would undoubtedly reach the heights of her profession.” 

“For one preparing to cope with Dr. Blake, a little trouble with Mrs. Forrester seemed like child’s play. The hazards of life on Ward Three were as nothing compared with the hazards of Life.”

“Having thus made up her mind, in what she in imagined was a perfectly calm and logical manner, to throw away her career and her opportunities to be near the man she loved, she found she had nothing to do for the moment.”

“You look different. Not tired, exactly, but subdued. Has anyone been subduing you?”

“Surely he must have his doubts and fears, like everyone else? Even Matron had her moments of anxiety, which she relieved by talking to her pet cat. Perhaps Doctor Gardiner kept goldfish, or something. Perhaps he sat in an easy chair and watched them swimming round and round in a huge glass bowl. Perhaps he confided in Annette. Personally, she would have preferred the goldfish.”

“She did not expect to be successful in arguing with a man with whom she could not even discuss the weather in a natural manner.”

“You won’t go all cold and haughty again, will you? My nerves wouldn’t stand it.”

“Just in time, she remembered that today she was beautiful. Beautiful people could go anywhere.”

“It’s a pity you have to change into your uniform. That dress would make any patient feel better.”

“You see what I mean, Gill? That’s exactly how you behave when you’re in the throes of a romance. Touchy.”

“The voice of common sense has little hope of being heard above the wild, glad music of love.”

“Weeping solved no problems. It just left ugly marks on the face and a sense of shame on the mind.”

“I must be growing disillusioned in my old age. Each batch of students seems sillier than the last, these days.”

“It was a stare which would have paralyzed a lesser man.”

REVIEW:
When we first meet Julie Doran, she is three months out from graduation and is working on the geriatric ward. Unfortunately, her sweet aged patients have little regard for the niceties of protocol when the doctor is rounding and will insist on singing loudly in the bath, much to Julie’s consternation. But nice Dr. Hal Gardiner has visited the ward more than once and understands the old biddies. “They’ve lived too long to care about our little rules and regulations,” he says. “When you’ve been here for three years, you’ll have discovered what is important, and what is not, in this type of work.” 

Unsurprisingly, life is about to get more complicated for Julie. Motherly head nurse Crompton of the ward is the loser in a bicycle versus car encounter and is sidelined for several months, which means nurse Annette Marsh is sent up from surgery in the interim. Annette is “a remote, glamorous figure” who “made no secret of the fact that she considered most of those with whom she came into contact as being greatly inferior to herself. She could be kind, in a lofty way, and she was certainly efficient, but her manner in general was that of a queen forced among peasants.” When Julie politely remarks that she hopes Annette will enjoy work on the ward, Annette responds, “I don’t expect to.” She does not share Dr. Gardiner’s charitable attitude toward codgers: “Old people are selfish. The care for nothing but their own comfort,” she snaps. Naturally, Julie—and indeed most of the other ward staff—does not appreciate Annette’s gifts.

Another complication is her growing esteem for Dr. Gardiner. It’s a sweet crush that grows organically: First she is over-analyzing a trivial exchange for deep hidden meaning, then briefly tries to talk herself out of it (“she was glad she had discovered this weakness in herself for gray eyes. In future she would be on her guard against it”), but that doesn’t last long. “Having failed, the night before, to be sensible about Hal Gardiner, she had found such joy in not being sensible that she was no longer attempting to reason with herself. She was going to see him again soon, and if that knowledge gave her pleasure, she was doing no wrong, she told herself, in admitting it.” The wrenches in the works are: number one, Dr. Gardiner’s relationship with Annette, as it seems the pair are not complete strangers; “there was certainly an undercurrent of tension between those two. At times, they seemed to be fighting a duel of words. Did they secretly enjoy these encounters, or were they natural antagonists?” You can sense the coming misunderstanding of the relationship a mile away. Number two is Dr. Gavin Blake, who has arrived to work alongside Dr. Gardiner for a few months and thinks Julie is a plump gazelle waiting to be chased, though he leaves her cold. “She would tell him that he was embarrassing her, and that she preferred him to leave her alone. Once she had made her feelings quite clear to him, he would surely not persist.” Oh, think again, honey.

But the obvious idea of putting Gavin together with Annette occurs to Julie: Not only would this solve two of her problems at once, but the pair are perfect for each other. “They belonged together, male and female of the same breed. Physically they complemented each other, but there was something else, something in the nature of each that was partnered by the other.” Perhaps it’s that Gavin “was sometimes strangely lacking in perception of other people’s feelings,” while for her part, Annette “seemed to be incapable of understanding the feelings of other people.” (These two descriptions occur 40 pages apart, and made for a nice echo through the text.)

The crisis comes when Julie is having a bad day on the wards—one of the more senile old ladies accuses her of poisoning the boiled potatoes—and while having a good cry, she runs into Gavin, who mops her face as good friends do, but kisses her as good friends don’t. The next day, when she tells Hal she can’t go with him to the beach because her day off has been cancelled (which is the truth), he tells her he doesn’t want to go out with her any more. She is caught completely off-guard, though we are instantly certain that he witnessed the scene with Gavin. Sad and lonely, she agrees to go on platonic drives with Gavin, until the day he decides to pull the car into a secluded lane and says, “I expected you to be a little more—adult. Let’s find out just how adult you are.” Interestingly, here is one of the few times I have seen an unsolicited kiss described appropriately: “To be in his arms was to be imprisoned, to feel his mouth on hers was to suffer an assault,” Julie thinks. So what does she do? “She remained passive, waiting for him to let her go.” And he does, suggesting, “I could still change your mind. Luckily for both of us, I’ve still got a grain of sense, so I won’t do it. Persuasion is one thing, but to take advantage of someone as inexperienced as you is another,” which to me reads as if he is suggesting he could force himself on her, though I fail to comprehend how this would “change her mind.” There are more mean words after this, and only then does she fling open the car door and climb out.

A few days later she’s clubbed on the head in the dirty utility room by the crazy patient who thinks she’s being poisoned, so you imagine that this will bridge the misunderstanding between her and Hal—and it does, in a very roundabout way. The way things get pulled together in the end is, I am very sorry to say after what had heretofore been a most delightful book, abrupt, ham-handed, way too simplistic, and wildly out of character for the individual who plays the chief role in sorting everything out. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been too surprised, as Julie does on occasion behave in ways that surprise, including shouting at a patient (after she’s severely scolded another nurse for doing the same, scant pages earlier) and hurling some pretty insulting language at Annette (when she’s been subdued for most of the book, just quietly absorbing Annette’s verbal blows up to this point). Minor foibles include the fact that some points of plot are dropped (the orderly who is apparently gossiping with the patients about Julie) as are some characters (Julie’s friends Susan and Gillian), and about half the characters are only sketchily identified though they recur throughout the book, drifting in and out like ghosts in the periphery.

But any fault this book may have is more than made up for by the fabulous writing, which is frequently subtly clever and amusing, as evidenced by the lengthy list of great quotes resting atop this review. Many more lovely turns of phrase wouldn’t translate when taken out of context, such as when Julie and two of her friends are lounging by the hospital pool (!!!), and they spot Dr. Gardiner and the head nursing matron approaching. Julie is deliberately looking away, “but after a moment or two she could tell by the way her friends began to gaze blankly into space that the two had moved nearer.” The key characters are quite sharply drawn, and you really feel you know Annette, Gavin, and Hal—and Gavin is especially enjoyable. The real tragedy of the ending is that it is such a copout, and I was disappointed in author Joan Callendar for not putting in the effort to deliver us the truly stellar book that she is clearly capable of. Sadly, this appears to be the only book Ms. Callendar has published, so I cannot hope she will redeem herself in another novel. But if this book is not perfect, it nonetheless should not be overlooked.

There Came a Surgeon

By Hilda Pressley, ©1964

Another child’s toy, another girl’s boy, it was all the same to Elvira. Whatever Alison had, Elvira had to try and snatch it from her—even to the extent of becoming a nurse in Alison’s hospital. And Alison never realized how much she minded Elvira until Steven Hartley joined the hospital staff …

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“Even knowing the worst is better than not knowing at all, and worrying about it.” 

“When you were in love you did all manner of foolish things.”

“You women often have the same blind spots about hats that you have about men.”

“There was very little to a kiss these days. It didn’t mean anything.”

REVIEW:
This fairly simple book gives us the slow story of nurse Alison Lynwood, who at book’s outset is mad about Dr. Johnny Crowther, but “Johnny’s the type who can make you feel you’re the one girl in the world for him one minute and let you down the next,” says Alison friend’s Norah. “The trouble is with Johnny, he doesn’t want to settle down, doesn’t want to tie himself down to one woman.” On her side, Alison is in love with Johnny, and so spends a lot of time sighing by the silent phone—until Dr. Steven Hartley moves to town. Suddenly she has someone to dance with at the hospital ball while Johnny is whirling another gal around the floor. Alison gets the bright idea of dating Steven so as to make Johnny jealous, but the catch is that she really likes Steven. “How nice he is, she thought, not for the first time. He was such a restful person to be with. He was a much nicer person than Johnny. The thought brought her up with a jerk, but she realized it was true.” 

Over the ensuing pages, the volume turns down on Johnny—who, miffed, calls Alison even less than usual—and up on Steven, until “she was no longer in love with Johnny. As a man he could not hold a candle to Steven.” The rub here is that Alison’s cousin Elvira turns up, chasing Johnny actually, as she’d met him at Alison’s home one time and become instantly smitten. She’s enrolled in the nursing school and starts taking up Johnny’s spare time, but when she notices that Alison’s eyes have turned to Steven, suddenly she wants that man, too. Knowing 19-year-old Elvira as we do, though, it seems hard to believe she’s going to tempt a solid type like Steven. “Elvira was so ruthless,” Alison thinks. “She could lie, cheat, scheme or even steal to get her own way. That she had good looks and a superficial charm and could to thse things without the slightest compunction made her a most formidable enemy.” But she is very transparent, tossing herself in Steven’s path or passenger seat with flirtatious lies that even a cad like Johnny could see through and tire of.

Eventually Steven kisses Alison, but with all the gossip going around the hospital—Alison is not the type to dump poor Johnny as a friend, and still has dinner with him on occasion though it’s clear to him that she has cooled—and with the usual misunderstandings and jealousies, the usual inability to just say how you feel, it takes numerous chapters to sort things out. In the interim, there’s a suicidal patient to talk in off the roof, among other adventures, but after this one, Steven tells her, “I couldn’t—wouldn’t have done it without you, Alison. I kept remembering things you had said in our conversations when we had been out together.” There are Alison’s attempts to befriend and understand Elvira, which result in that young woman climbing out on the roof, too, and Alison takes the lead there, saying, “Don’t you know that you can’t force love? The only way you can win anyone’s affection is by being loving. You could be an absolutely wonderful person, the kind of girl no one could help loving. Do you realize that?” Somehow this does the trick, and Elvira decides she really does love nursing and regrets all her bad-girl antics and wants to be Alison’s friend. Their lifelong rivalry, which has been made much of throughout the book, which has been totally unexplained—poof!—is gone. Alison is tucking Elvira into the spare bedroom in her apartment when Johnny drops by to see how Elvira is, and says he’ll take her out next week. “Do you know what I’ve discovered about Johnny? He loves women most when they’re in need of him,” Alison says slyly, though it does not ring true with us readers. Steven turns up a few minutes later to have his turn with Elvira, brushing her tears away and giving her a hug and a sleeping pill. Elvira can’t understand why everyone is so nice, but Alison lies blatantly: “We’re all being nice to you because we love you,” and not a word is said about this abrupt switch in story line, either. As Alison is seeing Steven out the door, she’s finally able, in the slightest way possible, to suggest her feelings for him when she whispers, “Steven, don’t go—” and this is all it takes to break down the misunderstandings.

I am a complete sucker for the young woman hanging out with her friends in her apartment—somehow a scene in which everyone is sitting around the living room with cocktails in their hands laughing at a joke just slays me. This book has these scenes by the handful, and its relaxed, simple tempo is soothing. Maybe the book is a smidge too simple, and the wrap-up of the conflict between Elvira and Alison is way too forced (a copy-cat would-be suicide? We love you?? Really???), but Alison is a smart, outspoken character we can admire, and on the whole this sweet book is pleasantly enjoyable.

Everglades Nurse

By Peggy Gaddis ©1964

Celia Chalmers was used to conquering men. And Jennie saw the look in her eyes when she met Johnnie Ottwell. It made her wonder if she had been foolish to postpone her marriage to Johnnie. He was a struggling schoolteacher. And she had vowed to help him save for their future. But Celia Chalmers knew how to use her beauty as a weapon to get what she wanted. And now she wanted the man who belonged to Nurse Jennie.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“Who was she, Jennie Cosgrove, with her cherished cap and pin still a beautiful novelty, to object to any orders given her by one of those lordly beings, a doctor?”

“I’m a heel to wish that you were as rich as you are beautiful. I’d do the caveman bit—throw you over my shoulder and lug you off screaming!”

“I’d rather be an irritant to a girl than somebody she just looks at and forgets.”

“I do declare, I cannot get over the fool things city folks will do when they are in the Glades, knowing as they must that the place swarms with poisonous snakes and alligators and mean-natured beasts. They just go blundering around as if they were mowing the lawn in their own back yard.”

“When you are in love you will know that one man, and one man alone, spells the fulfillment of all your dreams, hopes and aspirations.”

“Scruples? I don’t burden myself with anything so silly.”

REVIEW:
Author Peggy Gaddis must have been in a crabby mood in the four hours it took her to churn out this throwaway novel: Characters have the inexplicable habit of flying off the handle at the slightest provocation. Even Gaddis’ usually saintly mother character here gets all peevish when she is offered money for some jam she presents to a guest, snapping sharply at the hapless young woman and making her “flushed and uncomfortable.” The next second Mom “suddenly smiled a warm, friendly smile that wiped out any hint of the momentary resentment she had felt. ‘And I certainly hope you’re going to be a friend of mine and that you will come out again.’” No thanks!

Just like her mother, Nurse Jennie Cosgrove is also prone to being cold and snippy, such as to the rich patient’s handsome chauffeur, a seemingly friendly man who offers to take her to dinner, or to the patient’s daughter, who offers to drive her home and innocently remarks that Jennie’s family of eight might be a bit much taken en masse: “Put down that gun, pal!” Celia Chalmers drawls when Jennie comes at her all ablaze. But when Jennie is in the arms of her intended, Johnnie Ottwell, you’ll definitely need a slug of Pepto-Bismol to tame that tummy upset from too much sugar: “He and Jennie were looking at each other as though they would never tire of it,” and then he “drew Jennie close, entirely oblivious to the others, and kissed her, a long, ardent, satisfying kiss ... Jennie was starry-eyed when she got into the car.”

The lovestruck pair are not planning on getting married until after Johnnie finishes his PhD, which appears to be years in the future, since he works full-time as a teacher, and then there’s the little snag of how they will live together: She works in town, and his job, which he has no intention of ever giving up, keeps him in the heartest heart of the Everglades. You do have to wonder why he’s bothering with the PhD at all, actually.

The problem arises when Celia meets Johnnie and is instantly smitten with the heartthrob. Oblivious Jennie suggests that he take Celia on a tour of the Everglades in his “swamp buggy,” and while they are out, Celia’s conversation—apparently intended to win Johnny over—only proves that the two are completely unsuitable for each other. Johnny explains that he teaches English as a second language to the children of migrant Mexican farm workers, and his attitude is actually quite enlightened for the times: “They must be educated so that eventually they can climb above their parents’ present place in the world and be something more than migrant farm workers. Education is the only answer to the problem of the migrant farm worker, not only here in the Glades but all over the country.” “Sounds pretty dull,” cracks vixen Celia. She digs her hole deeper when she adds, “It seems a shame for a man like you to be wasted on a job like this.” Given this triumphant beginning, it is only natural that Celia should think Johnnie is “everything any same girl could possibly hope to find in the man she wants to snag for herself.” It must be his hot bod; I cannot otherwise explain it. But needless to say, Johnnie is not overly impressed.

Back at the ranch, in a remarkable conversation Celia tells Jennie that since she and Johnnie have not yet set a wedding date, “it looks to me very much as though Johnny were available to any girl who really meant to have him!” and tells Jennie that she plans to pursue Johnny. “Then I am afraid if that is what you want, you will probably win,” Jennie answers. “You are a novelty, new, beautiful, and you can probably sweep him off his feet without have to trying!” It’s a novel attitude about your relationship with your fiancé, I’ll say that much.

To put the deal across, Celia, perhaps realizing she’s blown the interview, tells Johnnie that he should break up with Jennie so Jennie can hook up with Dr. Mark Foreman, a handsome young resident who is clearly smitten with her. It seems Jennie is dating Mark regularly, and frankly we do agree that Mark is the better choice—certainly the more typical pick for a VNRN—but in fact we barely see poor Mark again, except one memorable scene in which Jennie tries to set up Mark with Celia and, when he asks her “just why you are shoving me off on Celia Chalmers,” she “stared at him, completely outraged,” and shrieks, “You must be out of your mind. What possible interest could I have in trying to shove you off on Celia?” when, of course, it’s clear that had been her exact intention, to try to divert Celia away from Johnnie and, at the same time, Mark away from herself.

The book takes a bizarre detour through the life of Celia, who has been adopted by a couple at the man’s request, and the “mother” has never cared for Celia at all. The marriage is not a happy one, and the pair snipe and spar through most of their scenes, but in the end, the husband, who has been on the brink of divorce the entire story, decides he’s going to stay with the horrible woman. Furthermore, he agrees to a lopsided and baffling trade: She will give up her current lover, and he will pack Celia off to college, essentially kicking out of the house for good the one person who dearly loves him. Another strange side story is the friendship of two older women who are patients of Jennie’s, one of whom is a pinched, angry woman who does not deserve the kindness of her wealthy and generous hospital roommate.

The story comes to an abrupt end when Jennie is offered a job in the Everglades at a clinic that caters to the local Seminole population—the doctor is in search of a nurse who is known to the Indians so they will learn to trust him—which means she will be living near Johnnie and they can get married. But there’s one hitch: Upon hearing of this turn of events, Johnnie snaps, “I will not be supported by my wife.” This does not mean that Jennie can’t have a job, but rather that her income will be set aside to pay for their children’s college educations.  Once this little hiccup in their plans is smoothed over, “all about them the jungle seemed to stir and whisper as though the very palms themselves and the unseen animals that looked in the undergrowth were joining in the song that was filling both their hearts.” Time for another slug of antacid.

Peggy Gaddis can write some good books, but this is not one; it’s a perfunctory story that lurches around like drunks in a van. The characters are a mercurial, moody, disturbed lot, not one of them worth the ink. The most interesting part of the book is its approach to teaching English as a second language and education for migrant children, and that is sadly brief. It offers a mixed bag toward the Indians; on one hand, Celia—honest to God—greets an Indian shopkeeper by saying “How!” and “lifted her hand in what she had long ago been taught was the proper greeting to an Indian.” But the shopkeeper just snickers and answers, “Haven’t you heard? We all speak English now.” Whenever we meet Indians in the book, they are seen through Celia’s bigoted eyes (“Celia stared at them, and suddenly realized that they were Indians!”), even if the Indian characters do have the last laugh, and “turned away as though he had found her unworthy of his scrutiny.” So it’s another donation for the American Indian College Fund, and another book I can’t recommend, though you might want to check out a Peggy Gaddis novel that might vaguely pass for a sequel, County Nurse—you really can’t beat a monster running loose in the swamp!

Hollywood Nurse

By Alice Brennan, ©1966

Merry Neil, private nurse to the “King of Hollywood” finds but nearly loses brilliant, handsome Jeff Morrow in the heartbreak city. Her love is threatened by Natalie Pries, moviedom’s beautiful, spoiled darling, and the romantic tension builds and builds …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Everyone who comes to California has to drink orange juice. It’s part of the protocol.”

“‘He didn’t try a pass or anything like that.’
“Tammy said crisply, ‘I’d feel  insulted if I were you.’”

“We all live by ourselves. I mean, when you come right down to it.”

“Who wanted a big, husky girl anyway? Not men, surely.”

“One thing that always ruins a conversation is somebody getting serious.”

“What she needs is the kind of guy who’d sock her any time she got out of line. She’d respect a guy like that. But she was born with a beautiful face and that louses everything up.”

“Don’t you know blushing is passé?”

“One thing I’ve found out,  nurses don’t need to diet. They run it off!”

“‘It isn’t fair for nurses to be as pretty as you two,’ he chided. ‘It makes people want to be ill.’”

“‘You don’t have the proper look of awe,’ he chided. ‘Don’t you know I’m a very important guy?’”

“How can you get romantic about a girl who has to stick her tongue out first thing so you can get a look at her throat or intestines or something?”

“‘Do you know what I really like to drink?’ Natalie asked her. ‘Milk. I mean, really, isn’t it ghastly? Can you imagine something like that getting out? “Sex queen admits she drinks milk”? I mean, really!’”

“You’re a very difficult person. I’m beginning to feel slightly sorry for your patients.”

“Southern California in the smog would make a great background for one of those old English horror movies.”

REVIEW: 
Author Alice Brennan brought us a triplet of nurse heroines in Nurse’s Dormitory, and here she earns another B+ for her second trio with the incorrectly singular Hollywood Nurse: By my count, Merry Neil, Agnes McLeod and Tammy Moore are more than one. As stories go, each character is less than a whole, though, so maybe not much more than one.

Merry Neil is the ostensible star of the book, and she’s a fairly bland lass who as roommate Tammy grouses, “for a girl who doesn’t want any breaks, and who wouldn’t know what to do with a break, you’re getting them all. It’s a shame you’re so nice, because I’d like to hate you.” For starters, Merry is nursing aging producer Pierson Webb, who’s checked in for what turns out to be metastatic cancer. Then, in attempting to escape the paparazzi who chase her down for an update on Pierson’s status, she’s picked up by a strange man in a white Jaguar who turns out to be famous crooner Arch Heller. She ends up dating Arch’s lawyer Tom Harton, who had been squiring young starlet Natalie Pries. It’s true that for a  lowly nurse, Merry does land undue attentions: She’s stalked by both Natalie and gossip columnist Mai Hinge in addition to the aforementioned male celebrities. But to no avail, she swears! She’d fallen for a man back in Michigan who’d turned out to be married, and now, time after trying time, she reminds herself fiercely, “I will not allow myself to fall in love with him. Or with any man. Never, never, never again!” The fact that this means she will be alone all her life never crosses her mind, and her philosophy certainly doesn’t stop her from dating. But all this is irrelevant; we know how her story will turn out!

Next we turn to Agnes, who had married an intern at an early age, but the bastard had walked out on her, not knowing she was pregnant, because “I suddenly realized the enormity of what I’d done. I’d saddled myself with a wife when all I’d ever wanted in my entire life was to become a doctor. So I walked out on her,” Harvey Miles says now when he miraculously turns up as a blind date at the nurse’s apartment in Hollywood, when he’d last seen Agnes in Ohio six years ago. In the interim, Agnes has had a baby, Ellen, who lives in San Francisco with Agnes’ mother—apparently there are no nursing jobs in the Bay Area—and is rapidly dying of a congenital heart defect that Agnes cannot bring herself to acknowledge, much less agree to treat. Once he learns of Ellen’s existence, from blabbermouth Tammy, Harvey forces Agnes to agree to Ellen’s surgery, and what a break for Agnes: “She wasn’t ready to admit it,  but there was almost a feeling of relief in her: She was almost grateful to Harvey for taking the decision out of her hands.” After Ellen’s operation, the rapprochement is pending, even if Agnes can’t admit it. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m not ready to think about it yet,” she says but the pair are not actually divorced, so you can feel fairly confident they will get back together, especially since they have a child to consider. “What she did would depend on what she thought best for Ellen,” and Ellen herself is already growing attached to Harvey. “Agnes watched his head bent over the child’s bed. The word ‘daddy’ was still painful and shy in Ellen’s lips, but she seemed to find delight in saying it.”

The most interesting of the three nurse roommates is Tammy, who only became a nurse “because her mother had thought she should  be one. She wasn’t like Merry or Agnes … dedicated.” Instead, Tammy wants to be … a star!! Her plan on becoming one do not, however, involve trying out for parts or taking acting classes—that’s strictly for chumps!—but to wow famous people with her good looks and be “discovered,” so she begs Merry to ask Pierson to give her a screen test. Pierson agrees to meet Tammy at his house, and the scandal is that he’s planning to put Tammy on the casting couch with gossip columnist Mai hiding behind the curtains to witness and publicize Tammy’s downfall. It’s an interesting dilemma, because Tammy has said conflicting things: “If anybody … I mean anybody … tried that proposition stuff on me, I’d punch him in the nose,” she insists, but then wonders, “Is that the truth? Would I do that? If … if Pierson Webb offered me what I want, a screen test, a contract, and there were strings attached to it, what would I really do?” For better or worse, though, she’s spared the actual test of her character when Pierson changes his mind and “talked to me like a father. He said I should go to drama school and learn how to be an actress. He told me beauty alone can’t get a girl by in Hollywood these days.” Phew! Although the book holds up Natalie Pries as a woman who’d been working in a dinky drugstore when Pierson had wandered in and made her a phenom, so the lecture doesn’t really hold a lot of water.

Then Tammy meets Pierson’s son, whom he’d abandoned decades ago, and wilts into a pathetic, spineless nothing: “She was content just to be with him. And she’d never felt like that with any man before. Always before a man had been there to be used.” Here we uncover the book’s main theme—“what she really needs is to get married to a guy who’s the boss and makes her know it and like it.” Frankly, I can’t imagine any sane woman liking the fact that she has no say in a relationship, but what do I know? Clearly these nurses are all landing  men, the only thing that matters, once they surrender their independence. Two out of the three, anyway—Merry’s man just forces her to admit what she doesn’t want to, that she’s in love with him—before she lands safely in his arms. If this central theme is a bit disturbing, on the whole this is an amusingly written story with one slightly complex character, anyway, even if she’s cut off at the knees in the end. You could certainly do a lot worse than Hollywood Nurse, who’s worth the drive up Mulholland Boulevard.