Society Nurse

By Jane Converse
(pseud. Adela Maritano), ©1975
Cover illustration by Allan Kass 

Love sick. That’s what pretty Nurse Nina Bateman was, though she knew handsome, wealthy, dedicated Doctor Mark Danover was way out of her league. Then Mark asked her to take a private case, caring for a beautiful young heiress, Cindy Calvert, who happened to be Mark’s next-door neighbor. Was he looking for a competent nurse, or, as his manner suggested, was there something more behind Mark’s request? Everything seemed wonderful, until Nina met Cindy and her domineering mother. Nina realized before introductions were over that she couldn’t stand the haughty Mrs. Calvert. And what was worse, Mrs. Calvert made it obvious she thought Mark would make the perfect husband for Cindy! How could Nina compete for her heart’s desire against the ambitious scheming of her lovely young patient’s overpowering mother?

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“I’m surprised at you. I thought that line went out with starched collars and the five-cent cup of coffee.” 

“A man who told you that he loved you should also believe in you.”

“I was furious. Hurt and furious about you letting that creep make a pass at you.”

REVIEW:
Some authors inspire certain feelings the minute you pull one of their books off the shelf. Jeanne Judson inspires a contented smile, Peggy Gaddis an exasperated sigh, and Jane Converse an anticipatory giggle. And when we have her Society Nurse open before us, we will giggle aplenty. Nurse Nina Bateman lives with her unloving mother in a rundown section of Chicago’s North Side, where she works at a clinic for the downtrodden.  There, two glorious afternoons a week, the godlike Dr. Mark Danover, who lives in a different sort of North Shore suburb, comes to work for free at the clinic, but he is not the sort to brag; “He was doing something he wanted to do and saw no reason to be praised for doing it.” So yes, Nina is in love with Dr. Mark, but “there was no encouragement to be found in his warm smiles, his thoughtful gestures, or even from his complimentary remark,” because “he was uniformly pleasant to everyone.” A rare find in a VNRN, a love interest who is genuinely a good man. Sigh … 

One day, though, Nina and Mark get to talking after a long, hard day, when she reveals she is one of the kids from the ’hood, and that she spends most of her evenings home alone with a book. “Nina thrust her chin up in the air. ‘I happen to like good books.’” And I happen to like Nina! Naturally Mark seems to, too, and asks her out to dinner—and then ruins it by saying he wanted to talk to her about a private case he’s hoping she’ll take on because the patient is a 17-year-old girl with diabetes, and Nina is so well-versed in endocrinology. Also, the patient is a very special friend of Mark’s, and his next-door neighbor. Of course she agrees, thinking she’s likely to see him more often—but the case turns out to be more than she expected.

Poor little rich girl Cindy Calvert is the sweetest little naif with a penchant for saying things like, “Oh, wow, Miss Bateman!” Cindy also has a penchant for Dave Tolson, another poor kid who is putting himself through medical school by mowing Dr. Mark’s lawn—how quaint! But Cindy’s mother Faye is one of those classic divas with “dark eyelashes that were too long and too upswept to belong to their present owner,” who “surveyed Nina as though she were examining a somewhat questionable pot roast.” The only reason Nina gets the job is that she is recommended by Dr. Mark, and Faye has her eye on Dr. Mark as the future Mr. Cindy Calvert, though he clearly has nothing but avuncular feelings for the young girl almost half his age.

So in moves Nina, where she has front row seats to witness Faye’s attempts to “keep Cindy in a state of perpetual childhood,” forbidding her to leave the house, exercise, see friends or especially that Dave Tolson, all because of her disease. “Yet, if anyone who lived here was sick, it was the woman who had made a bright, aesthetically lovely, completely lovable girl see herself as a burden—someone to be ashamed of.” Nina spends her days counting the calories in Cindy’s diet, measuring out and delivering insulin shots, testing blood sugar, and trying to instill a spine into sad, brainwashed Cindy, who is gushingly grateful to the mother who is trying to convince her that she’s “a burden, she should be grateful that people cared about her at all. It had taken years of conditioning to make the girl accept this self-effacing state; the results would not be undone in a few short conversations with a newly engaged R.N.” But liberate Cindy is what Nina cannot help but try to do, and spends afternoons giving her pep talks about her rights.

Needless to say, Nina soon tangles with the imperious Faye, who has told the household staff to tell Cindy’s beau Dave that she’s not available when he calls, but Nina has answered the phone and passed it to Cindy. Summoned to Faye’s lair for a scolding, Nina tries to explain that relationships are good for Cindy, but Faye calls out Nina (somewhat rightly) for overstepping what she knows to be the rules in a house where she is only an employee. Nina, bless her, stands up for herself, saying, “I don’t consider myself a member of your household staff, Mrs. Calvert. I have a degree in nursing. I’d like to be respected as a professional.” Unfortunately, the conversation goes south from there, as Faye calls Nina “common, cheap, conniving” and Nina shouts, “You’re the coldest, the cruelest, the most selfish excuse for a human being I’ve ever met!” And guess who is walking through the door at that moment?

Mark is appropriately shocked. “Frankly, I’m astonished. Name calling! It seems so beneath you,” he tells Nina, but to keep Cindy from falling to pieces at losing one person in her life who cares about her, he convinces the shouting women to give it another try. “If I make any radical changes now, Cindy is liable to run off with that absurd thing with the freckles,” acquiesces the gracious Faye. But it isn’t long before the ladies are back at it, as Faye starts preaching the gospel that her young, gold-digging boyfriend, Reverend Ronald Perry, espouses—that you can cure disease with your mind. (The ever-sassy Nina remarks, when he attempts to sell her his snake-oil theories, “You don’t mind if they keep the surgical wards at County open? A ruptured appendix can be such a nuisance to someone who doesn’t know all you do.”) Faye follows this up by insisting that Nina reveal her true colors—that she’s angling to win Mark for herself. Nina has just admitted that she’s in love with Mark when the man himself walks in—what a knack he has for showing up at awkward moments! He asks Nina if it’s true, and good for her, she replies, “That I love you? I’m not ashamed of that. What if I do?”

Of course it turns out that he loves her too, and there’s a lot of smooching then. But true love never sails smooth in a vintage nurse romance novel, and soon the boyfriend Ronald is assaulting Nina just as Faye walks in—obviously taking lessons from Mark about when to make an entrance. Ron, unphased, tries to salvage what woman he can by insisting, “You must have enjoyed that as much as I did,” to which Nina replies, “I haven’t been so thrilled since my dentist told me I’d have to have root canal work.” But Faye runs straight to Mark, who refuses to hear what Nina has to say about what happened, and she is promptly fired by the cold-faced pair.

Then she’s back working at the old clinic when a stricken Dave Tolson turns up, telling Nina that Mark is out of town at a conference and he is sure that Faye has fired the new nurse and embarked Cindy on a faith-healing treatment plan prescribed by Ronald, and he’s certain that Cindy has lapsed into a diabetic coma. Off sprints Nina to the rescue—will she get there in time? And if she manages to save Cindy, can she cure Mark of his stupidity as well?

Of course she can—she’s a smart, strong, spicy Jane Converse heroine. The writing is sprinkled with Jane Converse’s excellent bon mots, and the characters are enjoyable. If Faye Calvert is too easily dismissed as “whacked out” and insane—it would have been less simplistic and condescending to deal with her as what she is, a deeply troubled, insecure woman who would imperil her daughter to try to keep her man, and there are plenty of people like that in the world—that’s the biggest flaw of an otherwise thoroughly enjoyable book.

Nurse Jane and Cousin Paul

By Valerie K. Nelson, ©1964

From what her dear friend Jeremy had told her, Nurse Jane Ashley had the worst possible opinion of his cousin Paul. What a hard, managing old man he must be, she thought, to try and force Jeremy to study for a career which did not interest him. “Sometimes you remind me of Paul,” Jeremy told her. “Like him, you’re fifty years behind the times. It’s that hospital and all those Florence Nightingale sentiments. I must get you away from it, double quick.” Then, Nurse Jane met Paul—and began to think that, if he was fifty years behind the times, it was not a bad place to be!

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“You’re not going to faint or anything, are you? But perhaps that’s another of the Victorian fashions which is coming back again.” 

“Oh, you know what men are, my dear. So brief in their explanations that they’re positively maddening.”

“I thought nurses were always hungry.”

“Ordinary-looking people very often have some unsuspected depths.”

REVIEW:
This book has taken all the most overused VNRN tricks and thrown them into one package: Orphaned heroine? Check. Wimpy, shallow boyfriend nobody could possibly like? Check. Angry, domineering man more than a decade older than her? Check. Spunky heroine fighting constantly with the arrogant bastard and suddenly discovering she’s in love? Check! If all of this sounds appealing to you, then this is the story for you!

If at this point you have any interest in learning more about this story, by all means, press on: 19-year-old Nurse Jane Ashley is in love with a shallow cad named Jeremy who is clearly lying to her left and right. She is in her first year of nursing school in London—so she does not even qualify as a nurse—when she is persuaded by Jeremy to get a job “nursing” his aunt, Meriel Darling, an imperious, wealthy hypochondriac who lives in a manor far out into the country. She sets out for the interview that has been arranged by Jeremy, only to find the house empty and a severe rainstorm coming on. Drenched to the bone with a cold coming on—and concerned that the woman she has been told is an invalid might be lying out cold on the bathroom floor—she gets in through a back door. While investigating the premises, the doorbell rings, and she opens it to start her first fight with 31-year-old Paul Rowfield (a creepy 12 years her senior, if math isn’t your bag). He literally drags her around the house with a hard “hurting grasp” on her wrist and accuses her of being the local burglar. Naturally, “he affected her in such a strange way … a different way from which she’d ever been affected before. When he looked at her, her heart began to beat faster, and she seemed to tingle from head to foot.” Sigh.

She lands the job—turns out she herself has weak lungs and needs six months in the country to recuperate—though Meriel doesn’t need any nursing and Jane is really just a maid. She continues to be bossed around by Paul, and Jeremy shows up now and then for clandestine, brief meetings in the garden in which he spoon-feeds her endless lies and she gobbles them up like they’re warm scones with homemade strawberry jam and clotted cream. “A man who wants to meet you on the sly hasn’t really much use for you,” advises Paul, who for once is making sense.

The local doctor, Robert Eccles, who had cared for Jane during her illness, has a sister Nina—a jealous wench with her hopes pinned on Paul, who recognizes a rival when she sees one—as well as a brother Ray, invalided at 26 by a severe heart condition. She also meets an ill woman named Iris Eccles, who suggests she is married to Robert, and a man named Brian Draper who “happens” to be on hand when Iris swoons from illness in a café and helps Jane cart Iris back to her shabby flat. Now there’s a number of mysteries to solve—who are Iris and Brian really? Who is burglarizing the neighborhood? Does Jeremy really love her?—shenanigans of Jeremy’s that Jane attempts to put right with little success, plus a very cold and businesslike proposal of marriage from Paul in which he completely fails to express in the most ardent language the violence of his affections, yet Jane can’t even turn him down flat and agrees to think it over. Toward the end of the book she comes to her senses as far as Jeremy is concerned, but that doesn’t stop her, oddly, from flying to meet him in the garden at every possible moment, never once putting off his tepid assurances.

Ultimately—and I hope you will not be too upset at the spoiler—Paul again insists they marry, telling her, “you must, you know. I announced our engagement an hour ago,” in “the same arrogant voice, but undershot with a world of tenderness.” Which makes it all better, of course, that he has essentially bullied her into marrying him—and has been scheming to do so from the very beginning: “From the moment I’d met you, I’d been quite determined that you were going to stay. I’d got Bob Eccles to see that you were given the post with Mrs. Darling, while I waited to get in touch with your guardian to gain his consent to our marriage. I’d thought we might wait until you were twenty, but now I’d decided that waiting was a waste of time.” Instead of screaming in horror and fleeing the county, Jane meekly agrees. Ugh!

The ultimate climax of the book involves some secret relationships and crimes that I found difficult to follow, leaving Jane locked in a lighthouse, possibly to starve to death or be assaulted (she decides she’d rather leap to her death rather than have the man “put a caressing hand on her,” such a delicate reference to rape)! But in the end, she’s found less than an hour later, and feels “unutterably depressed” by her hysteria upon first being imprisoned. I shared the feeling, actually, to a lesser degree, upon reaching the end of this long, mediocre, insulting book that has little respect for its heroine and less for its readers if it thinks that this is what we all would appreciate in a love interest. And it’s not even really a nurse novel, since Jane has quit nursing school and is not working as one! The last straw! So with that, I can give you no reason whatsoever to spend any time with either not-a-Nurse Jane or Cousin Paul.

Betsy Moran, R.N.

By Peggy Gaddis, ©1964

“Special duty with a millionaire…” Nurse Betsy Moran’s roommate moaned. “I’ll never know how you managed to turn the heads of the two most eligible bachelors on the staff, to say nothing of the town’s most exciting playboy.” Judy sighed deeply, “What have you got that I haven’t?” “Oh,” said Betsy, laughing at her friend. “Let’s just say it’s a gift.”

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“R.N.s can be so crude at times.”

“She had to arouse the boy and keep him aroused lest he slip away into a coma.”

“You’re a very lovely girl, and any man would be delighted to wear you on his arm.”

“I’m just sick that I lost my temper and shot you!”

“Us nurses look pretty special in our uniforms. Bet the gals he trots around with when he’s up and on his own two feet break their necks getting all dolled up to devastate him. And when we nurses come along, all starchy-white and soothing-looking, the man does a nose-dive!”

“Sure you don’t want to marry me? It might be fun. And any time you got fed up, all you’d have to do would be to say so and you could have a divorce.”

REVIEW:
Twenty-three-year-old Betsy Moran has a way with men. She scores a date with eligible Dr. Paul Elliott, and then one with widowed surgeon Dr. Stevenson—never mind that he’s twice her age! Dr. Stevenson asks her to special wealthy playboy Dr. Ken Hargroves, who has been shot in the back by one of his girlfriends, though he won’t say who it was—and when Betsy finds out, she, too, agrees to shirk professional ethics and the law, and refuses to name the culprit. She’s perfect for the nursing job, Dr. Stevenson decides, because “Ken Hargroves would go out of his mind without a pretty girl to look at. You just be somewhere Ken can look at you when he needs to.” She does her job well, and soon Ken is putty in her hands!

Outside of her dating life, Betsy’s down time is pretty well booked with lunches every Sunday with the aging Miss Emily Wingate, a wheelchair-bound, wealthy spinster near the end of her life, and Miss Emily’s nurse, usually called Maggie by Betsy, but who surprisingly turns out to be Betsy’s mother. The Miss Emily character, angelic but fading, is a Peggy Gaddis staple, and you will not be as shocked as Betsy was to learn that she’s to inherit $100,000 when Miss Emily dies. But her visits to Miss Emily are not so damaging to her social life, after all; she is nearly in a car wreck in Miss E’s driveway, and the young attorney driving the other car, Larry Donovan, insists that she go out with him. Which she does, once, even if the guy is a bit of an ass, becoming angry at Betsy when he runs into her when she’s out on a date with Dr. Paul—but she gets all frosty and refuses to say she won’t go out with Larry again when Paul asks her not to. Curiously, when Larry crashes a lunch at Miss Emily’s house to see Betsy—he tells her, “When I see something I want I go after it, with no holds barred,” forgetting that she might have something to say about it—the dowager asks Betsy not to see Larry, and she insists that she’s not at all interested in the cad, saying that he does not have “the kind of charm that would appeal to me. You don’t have to worry about him. I’ll even promise never to date him again, if it will ease your mind.”

Betsy even has a fair amount of nursing to do, between lying to the suicide victim and telling him he’s going to be fine when everyone knows he’s going to die in about ten minutes, and trying to get the unmarried forty-something career woman Doris Lathrop, hospitalized for atherosclerosis, to stop having temper tantrums, which seem to give her seizures and heart attacks. But not to worry, a man shows up out of the blue with a bouquet of flowers for Doris, so she enthusiastically agrees to give up her career, move to Florida, and marry a man she hasn’t seen in years, and didn’t look twice at when she did know him. Life’s problems solved!

Eventually one of Betsy’s many suitors proposes, on their third date, and then we have two pages of swooning and smooching. And that’s about all there is to this book. It’s not badly written, although on every other page Betsy’s eyes are widening, or she’s staring “round-eyed.” The patients’ story lines are hackneyed and certainly condescending to Doris Lathrop, who isn’t happy until she trades her career for a man. Peggy Gaddis has given us more treacly porridges to choke on in the past, and this isn’t quite as bad as some of her books, but really, that’s not much of reason to spend any time with Betsy Moran, R.N.

Beth Lloyd, Surgical Nurse

By Jane Converse, ©1970

Cover illustration by Allan Kass

Nurse Beth Lloyd had just broken with the man she loved, the brilliant young surgeon Dr. Paul Bryant. She was heartbroken when he accused her of trying to push him into a marriage he felt would hinder his career. Suddenly into their lives came Jimmy Ladue, critically in need of a heart transplant. And Paul’s conservative senior partner, Dr. Weston, so strongly opposed to the new techniques, was for some mysterious reason willing to perform the operation. It was to be a transplant that would transform all their lives. For in its wake a desperate secret would emerge—a secret to threaten the reputation of two fine surgeons and bring Beth Lloyd heartbreakingly close to the man she was trying so hard to forget.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“The chic ex-songstress could be seen puffing an endless chain of cigarettes in the coronary care reception room.”

REVIEW:

Beth Lloyd is a surgical nurse desperately in love with the cardiac surgeon she works for, who proves true to type and is an angry, arrogant jerk who dates Beth but refuses to offer more than vague expressions of interest, a setup that author Jane Converse has employed to equally poor effect in Heartbreak Nurse. Beth, needless to say, can’t seem to shake the loser. “Any opportunity to be with Paul, even a stodgy dinner at the Westons’,” thinks our pathetic masochist, “was better than staying in her own apartment, thinking about Paul, wondering why, apart from a few almost platonic goodnight kisses, he avoided any meaningful involvement with her … gave out no hope that their relationship would progress beyond its present stalemate.” Not surprisingly, at the end of chapter one, they get into an argument in the cafeteria when he gripes that the senior surgeon he works with, Dr. Merrill Watson, and his stuffy, high-society wife Lois are trying to pressure him into marrying Beth and settling him into a “smooth, proper, unchanging” life, which he implies is a “trap” worse than death—and then starts shouting when Beth, feeling rightfully insulted, questions whether his desire to perform a cardiac transplant in a small-town Indiana hospital, likely unprepared to handle such a complex patient, is due to his relentless and single-minded drive to make what he himself calls “some valid contribution to surgery” instead of enjoying life.

Paul Bryant’s partner, the stodgy Dr. Weston, is adamant that they will never do a cardiac transplant—until he turns up with 23-year-old  Jimmy Ladue, a talented artist imported from Paris with his trampy mother Sara, a former lounge singer who stalks the hall in her stilettos trailing cigarette smoke. Jimmy is dying from chronic ventricular fibrillation, and now the surgeons are planning their transplant. Even when things are going his way, Paul continues to demonstrate his “tense, almost paranoiac” streak: When Beth offhandedly mentions that the transplant could give a second chance to “a wonderful, talented, valuable person”—well! “Your attitude disgusts me!” Paul erupts, outraged that Beth isn’t “thinking of the advancement this operation may mean in cardiac surgery” and he bizarrely insists that her appreciation of this one patient means she doesn’t care about “old, untalented, unvaluable people”—though of course no doctor in their right mind would do a cardiac transplant on an old unhealthy person unlikely to survive the rigors of surgery. “All the pressure that had caused Paul to use Beth as a target tonight,” Beth thinks, means that “his violent reaction could have been triggered by almost any statement.” No wonder she’s so hopelessly in love.

Now the surgical team is on hold until a suitable donor presents—and after a couple of weeks, a healthy bum who has been beaten to the edge of death wheels in, conscious enough to sign the consent to give his heart to Jimmy Ladue—and conveniently dies on the OR table. Now the team is scrubbing for the cardiac transplant, when a nurse bursts in and cries out that Dr. Weston has died in a car crash on the way in. Dr. Paul proceeds with the surgery, which goes off swimmingly—but now the newspapers are asking why Dr. Weston was going forward with a surgery he had previously disavowed, and how the donor patient turned up so conveniently. Dr. Paul is promptly labelled Prime Suspect #1. The police are closing in when out of the blue the obvious story—one worthy of a Florence Stonebraker novel, actually—emerges and the insane murderer comes forward. It’s not nurse Beth, though you could attribute her with madness when at the end she falls into Paul’s arms and agrees to marry the bastard.

This is a mediocre book in which Jane Converse has fallen back on all her old tricks without putting in the least effort to sprinkle any spice on them. It’s resemblance to Heartbreak Nurse is quite uncanny, and it’s not even as good as that fairly lame book. If your alternative for the afternoon is watching paint dry, this might be a better choice, but on the other hand, you could in that time conjure up without too much difficulty a far better book than this one.

Nurse Nancy

By Jane Scott
(pseud. Adeline McElfresh), ©1959

Special-duty Nurse Nancy Davies thought her case with Angela Crayton, the famous actress, would be a dream. She lived with the beautiful star in her summer home where Angela kept open house for all her Hollywood and Broadway friends. But Nancy soon learned that these men and women had a code of easy morality which said, “live for today, forget tomorrow.” Beautiful, young Nurse Nancy faced the sternest test of her professional career—could she be true to her own standards as a nurse—and a woman—in this glittering world?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“She’s so sure she’s going to die on the table, I wouldn’t be surprised if she does.”

“Everyone knew that Lee Saltonsbie was counting the days until he would go into private practice and ‘get started on my first hundred thousand.’ ”

“Clay’s future in politics had nothing whatever to do with their growing apart. If they had, she thought. No, it was her career—her dedication to it—that was causing the trouble.”

“Angela was improving. Or seemed to be. Sometimes, with these mental things, you couldn’t tell.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Nancy Davies is one of those sad VNRN heroines engaged to a man who not only is unfortunately named Clay Randall but who is not the man she thought he was when they met in Maine last summer “on a glorious vacation of sunswept days and moon-drenched nights. They were a bronzed god and a laughing nymph alone in the enchantment of their love,” if you must know. Unfortunately, however, these deities were obliged to go back to work, and now she’s desperately trying to convince herself that her fiancé doesn’t have feet of Clay—and there’s only so much of this a reader can take before you’re ready to pummel Nurse Nancy right upside the head. “She didn’t hate Clay; she couldn’t do that. But did she love him? She had at first—of course she had! she told herself sternly. Surely that surge of happiness, the wonderful, exciting, different happiness, had been love! She wasn’t the type of girl to fall lightly in love and then out … and yet …”

See what I mean?

Clay, it turns out, is ambitious for a career in politics, and so Nancy must quit her job when they are married. “Why couldn’t he understand that the hospital and her work there were such an important part of her that without them she wouldn’t be the Nancy Davies he had fallen in love with? It didn’t matter that as Mrs. Clay Randall she wouldn’t have to work for financial reasons. She wanted to do more with her life than head committees and have lunch and play golf at the country club.” Why would anyone continue to entertain the idea of marrying this man through 100 pages, even when from page two “Clay’s kisses had become just kisses” and the man is clearly making her miserable—and would only make her more so if she actually went through with it? Have I mentioned that I find this plot device patronizing, idiotic, and lazy?

Anyway, the central plot is also somewhat patronizing, at least to faded theater star Angela Crayton, who once was the queen of Broadway but after three successive flops about a decade ago has holed herself up on the shores of Birch Lake, Indiana, and is showing depressive—bordering on suicidal—tendencies. Dr. Bartlett Howard, her physician, needs a nurse to pose as a secretary for Miss Crayton. “If Angela Crayton finds out that her doctor thinks she’s borderline mental the fat might be in the fire,” explains Dr. Paulson, the chief of surgery at Nancy’s hospital, when he urges her to take the position. It’s not evident that Nancy is the right person for the job; as Dr. Howard is filling her in on the details of the case, “Angela Crayton didn’t need a secretary or a nurse, Nancy thought. She needed a keeper.” Psychiatry, when viewed through the myopic lens of a 1950s-era VNRN, is horrifically stunted and frequently sexist. Angela “was being driven, something over which she had no control was lashing her into a frenzy of despondency,” we’re told—and Nancy’s next thought is, “Poor thing. Lonely, and getting old, hating the crow’s feet and wrinkles—” It’s a wonder all women don’t kill themselves at 45.

So the book is mostly a tennis match between Nancy’s distaste for her fiancé and her work as a typist and spy, noting every despondent look and midnight drive of Angela’s, and doing absolutely nothing about it. Eventually Dr. Howard strikes on the idea of having the local theater group stage the play that was Angela’s greatest triumph and asking her to reprise her starring “rôle”—and have a Hollywood director offer her the leading part in a movie. Just the thing to shake off the crow’s-feet blahs!

As Angela naturally improves under this thoughtful treatment, she eventually fires Nancy, telling her that she’s known all along that Nancy is really a nurse—her shorthand was terrible! Angela suggests that Nancy continue to stay on at her house, though, and take a job at the little hospital nearby, working for Dr. Howard. Now we have another trite device: A tornado whips through town, and Nancy is busy patching up victims—and breaking up with Clay, who shows up during the crisis to drag her by the hair back to his cave while she’s giving Mary Claudion another cooling bath and alcohol rub. Curiously, Clay is on his way out of town—empty-handed, of course—at 90 mph when he wraps his car around a tree, so now he’s back at the hospital, this time as a guest under Nancy’s care. Ordinarily this leads to some sort of epiphany or understanding between the couple, even if it’s just to agree they’re not right for each other and part as friends. But in this book, Clay is admitted, Nancy pours him a glass of ice water, and then three pages later she’s dropping him off at his law office and he’s stomping angrily up the walk on his crutches.

Back in Birch Lake, where Nancy has decided to stay permanently, everything is neatly wrapped up. Guess what happens with Angela? Guess who kisses Nancy next? You probably won’t actually guess there’ll be yet another calamity to attend to, with Nancy fervently urging, “Oh, Bart, hurry!” or that the final page will include the death of a minor character for Nancy and her new beau to smooch over—one of the more unusual endings I’ve come across—but these small surprises give not pleasure, only bewilderment.

This is a pedestrian, automatic, stupid book. It’s not badly written, and its most irritating aspects—its views on psychiatry, and Nancy’s reluctance to give up a man she doesn’t like and a future she will despise—can in part be chalked up to the archaic attitudes of the times. But the book is lazy, and the heroine who cannot acknowledge the dichotomy between adherence to sexist attitudes and the complete abandonment of logic and reason that these positions require is not worthy of our time. No one—especially not nurses, who are by definition strong, independent, smart, and capable—should be a willing victim. While I’ve certainly read nurse novels that are far worse than Nurse Nancy, I find after a couple hundred VNRNs under my belt I am becoming increasingly intolerant of stupid heroines, and so I cannot suggest that you stop and visit with Nurse Nancy.

Nurse in Acapulco

By Jane Converse

(pseud. Adele Kay Maritano), ©1964

 

Mrs. Breckenridge’s maniacal possessiveness had turned her handsome son into a peevish playboy, her daughter into a shrill, contemptuous and cheating wife, her son-in0law into a drunken failure. When it seemed as though one of her captives might break away, Mrs. Breckenridge had another heart attack and threatened to change her will. In accepting the wealthy hypochondriac as a patient, special nurse Donna Walton had no way of knowing that she was to be used as bait in the old woman’s devious scheme to keep her son by her side … forever.

 

GRADE: C-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“They close the bullring and jai-alai court for the summer. The really chic parties don’t get off the ground before December. Prepare to perish, Miss Waldron.”

 

REVIEW:

We’ve been to Acapulco before, in Beauty Contest Nurse and the other Nurse in Acapulco. This trip is about as successful—which is to say, not very—as our last two expeditions, I’m sorry to say. Here, it’s Donna Walton who is stalking the moonlight beaches and feeling “deeply touched by the warm, trusting simplicity of these people, by their unsophisticated love.” Donna’s come to Mexico to care for an aging (but not old, she’s in her 50s) hypochondriac Grace Breckenridge, who keeps her children, Enid and the unfortunately named Buzzy, on a short leash that they dare not slip, lest she cut off the funding for their louche lives of luxury. Donna has only agreed to take this job because she’s come off a particularly demanding case, caring for a terminally ill cancer patient for the past seven months. For once, this dying patient is actually broke, and Donna received no pay for her final nine weeks of work when he ran out of money. So she needs a vacation, and she needs to replete her bank account; this job, which pays twice her normal salary, seems to fit both bills.

 

But at what cost? There’s the small matter of her conscience, soon smote when she’s called to help an actual injured patient, the grandchild of the hacienda’s gardener. When she delivers the boy to the local medico, Dr. Emilio Camargo, who has a garden full of impoverished patients waiting hours to be seen, he asks her, “You will come again, no? When you have nothing of greater importance to do than that which you are doing from day to day?” Her agenda thus far has been no more taxing than learning to surf, attending parties, and playing bridge, and she thinks, “I wish he’d had reason to respect me as a nurse, instead of looking at me as though I was a conscious parasite.”

 

Then a houseguest arrives, an old friend of Enid’s husband, Kenny. Dr. Stanley Sherwood, a psychiatrist practicing in New York, went to medical school with Kenny before Kenny married Enid and decided to switch careers and become a kept boy and gin aficionado, though I’m sorry to report that he appears to prefer his cocktails served in a coconut shell rather than in a coupe, so low has his self-worth fallen. For Dr. Sherwood, Donna decides after one day with him, “she herself had waited all her life.” But how does he feel? Ah, if only these women of the 1960s actually had the gumption to just initiate an honest conversation. One night, when a drunken Enid accuses Donna of running after Buzzy, Kenny, Dr. Camargo, and now Dr. Sherwood, the latter overhears, but she takes no action at all. “If he had heard Enid’s vicious accusations, there was no way of knowing what conclusions he had reached. To throw a robe over her nightgown now, to deliberately run out into the corridor and deny the accusations Enid had made, might only give them credence.” Really?

 

So while he goes off to a conference for five days—and will he ever return for her?—she works in the evenings at Dr. Camargo’s clinic to buff up her conscience and reputation. The days pass, and pass, and no call from Stan, though when she learns that Stan is staying at a nearby hotel, she actually manages to pick up the phone. He’s not in, though, and she’s just hung up when an earthquake strikes! Because there’s nothing as redemptive as a major natural disaster to improve everyone’s character! The hacienda’s idle rich leap into action: Enid opens the house to wounded victims and cares for them to her best ability, Kenny forcibly drags his brother-in-law from under a chandelier that collapses moments later and then labors with Enid to tend the wounded, Buzzy taps his ham-radio hobby to contact San Diego for a pint of “rare” blood, AB positive (though in fact they can receive blood from about 92 percent of the population; it’s AB negative that’s the rarest blood type, carried by only 1 percent of the population). Stan and Donna, of course, work with Dr. Camargo at the clinic, and sad, hysterical, screaming Mrs. Breckenridge is left untended—indeed, she’s told to “mix yourself a drink and relax” while everyone else works tirelessly. When the crisis has passed, Enid and Kenny are plotting to buy a house near the University of California in Berkeley, apparently unaware that the otherwise stellar educational powerhouse has no medical school, and Stan is suggesting that instead of returning to her job in Oregon, Donna might instead consider New York. But that’s it for redemption; Buzzy’s emancipation is anticipated but not witnessed, and we never learn whether the histrionic Mrs. Breckenridge rebounds from her abandonment.

 

Jane Converse can be a very fine writer (see Surf Safari Nurse, Nurse in Crisis), but most of the time she settles for mediocrity, as she does here, perhaps opting for quantity over quality (indeed, she was a very prolific writer). Now and again we get the slight sparkle of her sharp wit, but Mrs. Breckenridge, the screaming matriarch character—one I usually enjoy and one of Jane’s usual stock in trade—is no Angela Di Marco, the gin-soaked faded movie star with running mascara and bedraggled marabou from Nurse on Trial; rather, here our grande dame just lamely clutches her heart and sways with eyes closed when her brief screaming harangues are not meeting with success. Donna’s concern that Stan isn’t going to come back to Acapulco after hearing Enid’s slander seems completely silly; after becoming acquainted with both women during his stay, if Stan doesn’t realize the relative substance of each, he’s not worth Donna’s heartache. But I am never impressed when the heroine worries excessively about a ridiculous “crisis” yet fails to take any action whatsoever to set the situation to rights. Nor do I enjoy a ham-handed resolution to everyone’s problems, where personal growth seems more contrived than earned. So while I will always regard Jane Converse as a talent, little is in evidence in Acapulco.

Ice Show Nurse

By Jane Converse
(pseud. Adele Kay Maritano), ©1970
Cover illustration by David Blossom

In the spotlight Tina, a queen on ice, spun … and the audience gasped with delight. Behind the scenes Nurse Wells stood watching with the doctors … the man she’d joined the ice show to be near. But could the quiet, competent nurse hope to win her man when Tina whirled, glittering, out of the spotlight and into his arms?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“ ‘You’re simply too good-looking to have settled for a …’ Alan hesitated, perhaps deciding against words like ‘menial’ and ‘dull.’ ‘For something as unglamorous as nursing. Not that a pretty face and a good figure are the criteria here.’ ”

“Hey, I can think of better places to make love to you. Let’s get out of here.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Jeanette Dawson is working at Taylor Memorial Hospital in Chicago when she bumps into Roark Wells. He’s visiting from his stint with the Fantasy on Ice show, where he’s been bandaging sprained ankles and egos for the past year. Just the sight of him makes her go weak in the knees, and in the brain, apparently; when he offers her a job as nurse with the ice show, she accepts, even though everything about the job disgusts her. At the interview she meets the show’s star, Tina Lavalle, who is imperious and rude, natch, and the show’s producer, Alan Duarte, “had no respect for Jeanette’s profession or Roark’s knowledge, apart from the fact that they might be occasionally useful in keeping his show going.” When she finds out she has the job, she feels “more annoyed than elated.”

Even her “unbelievable good fortune of being Roark Wells’ private nurse, of spending every day in his presence, of traveling all over the country with him, of becoming someone indispensable to him,” quickly pales when it becomes clear that Roark has zero interest in Jeanette. She never sees him, he pays her no attention beyond that a professional doctor would pay a professional nurse, and in fact, he is dating Tina! So she spends a lot of time mooning in the most revolting manner, as in, “Jeanette invariably found her breathing erratic for a few minutes after Roark stepped into a room.”

She starts dating producer Alan expressly to “inspire a ray of jealousy in Roark,” but it doesn’t work at all; he’s too busy taking Tina out to notice. Before long, she and Alan are a serious item—or at least he is serious and she doesn’t clue him in to the fact that she doesn’t care for him—even if she is still trying to prolong conversations with Roark, thinking, “If she held Roark’s attention long enough, if they talked about non-medical matters long enough, maybe …”

Alan’s strategy has been to pamper Tina in every way, but Jeanette convinces him that he should be playing hardball instead. He’s got this up-and-coming skater, Gretchen Hiller, after all, who has been turning up the heat under Tina’s blades. So Alan announces that Gretchen is going to have a new solo in the show. Tina responds by clawing Gretchen across the face and threatening to quit the show. Alan demonstrates his new-found spine and responds by telling her that if she does, he will sue her for breach of contract. Roark responds by putting a Band-Aid on Gretchen and telling her, “That’s going to heal up in no time, Gretchen. I’ve got to go look after some permanent scars,” and chasing after Tina. He slings his arm around Tina’s shoulders and tells her, “We’ll talk about it, darling. You’ve still got me, and it’s all going to be fine.” See, he’s thinking of going into psychiatry, and Tina, who he believes to be “a tortured victim who needs all the love and understanding she can get,” is a great patient for him to work on. Somehow, though, I don’t think Freud would approve of his methodology.

Then, during the debut of Gretchen’s solo act, Gretchen stumbles on the ice and crashes head-first into the railing. She’s carted off to the hospital in a coma, and the ice is found to have Gretchen’s own gold hairpins scattered across its surface. Everyone knows Gretchen is much too concerned with safety to have allowed this to happen, so who did it? Roark immediately leaps to Tina’s defense with a lot of blather about Tina’s “fantastic progress,” how he’s “been trying to make her understand that she doesn’t have to fight her way through life, that she’s capable of loving and being loved,” but Jeanette knows better. When Tina is found guilty, she asks him, is he going to “tell us she couldn’t help putting Gretchen into the intensive care unit because she had an unhappy childhood? Her mother was frightened by a hairpin salesman?”

Roark stomps off, and Jeanette believes even their tenuous friendship is over. She’s devastated, and decides to quit the show, where she realizes she has been wasting her talents. But before she leaves, she goes back to the arena and talks the performers into forgoing their threatened strike over the incident and putting on the performance of their lives. She tops this off by extracting a confession from the guilty individual and then deactivating the nuclear weapon hidden in the broom closet that’s set to go off during the show. Well, not that last, but something even more outrageous happens: Jeanette tells Roark that she’s leaving because she loves him, and he admits that he has been desperately in love with Jeanette the whole time! The book ends with the two of them racing off to find a preacher and me racing off to find some Pepto-Bismol.

I usually pick up a book by Jane Converse with some enthusiasm. She’s a good writer, humorous, and her story lines are usually pretty good. Ice Show Nurse, however, must have been cranked out because the rent was due. This perfunctory book has little enthusiasm, camp, or fun. Even the psychotic skating star, a character that could be the stuff Oscars are made of, is more pathetic than fearsome. I found it curious that the back-cover blurb mistakes the nurse’s name; she’s Jeanette Dawson, and the doctor is the one named Wells. When even the blurb writers can’t pay enough attention to a story to get it right, you know you’re in trouble.