North Country Nurse

By Robert Ackworth, ©1965

Lovely young Mary Loring, her nurse’s training behind her, came home to the north country for two reasons—one, to help the people in this vast wilderness land; the other, locked in her heart, to work with young Dr. Ken Shannon who was coming back here to start his practice. But when Ken stepped off the plane, beside him was a beautiful, titian-haired bride. Now Mary wanted only to escape—from this man she could never have, from her beloved north country that would always remind her of him. It took a startling confession from Ken, and a danger-filled mercy flight with a devil-may-care pilot named Eddie Garrett, to show Mary that she didn’t have to run away—that a girl doesn’t always know the secrets of her own heart …

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:|
“It’s odd that of all the moments a person passes in a lifetime, only a few are important, isn’t it? I wish now that I had decided I wanted to be something, instead of insisting that I must belong to someone.” 

REVIEW:
Nurse Mary Loring has returned to her home, a tiny town of 900 God-fearing souls in the “north country,” unspecified except that it’s not Idaho—Montana? Wyoming? Some state that is home to dude ranches and trappers and loggers—and few medical personnel. Mary is coming back with every intention of marrying Dr. Kenneth Shannon, who also grew up in this town. She’s been crushing on him for a decade, since she was 12 years old—they grow up fast in the mountains—when he left for medical school, and she’s seen him only a couple of times since then, so right off the bat we’re stuck with this extremely awkward and implausible albatross of a major plot device. And it’s not improved when the good doctor steps off the Cessna with—gasp!—his new bride!

Mary immediately decides she will leave town, never mind her vows to help her isolated fellow citizens, which would leave them without a nurse. But only a month after Kenneth arrives, “when people would not be likely to guess the real reason for her departure.” Does it really matter? Anita Shannon turns out to be as incredibly gorgeous as she is shy, completely unable to extend herself or make friends. Mary just hopes that “the absolutely unexpected might happen” while Anita is out taking long walks in the woods, or that “the strange woman who was Kenneth Shannon’s wife might walk out on him.” Nice! Kenneth does his best to get help for Anita—unfortunately asking his best female “friend,” Mary, to befriend Anita, “who was seen less and less as the days went by.”

Again and again, given an opportunity to be generous, mature, and kind, Mary instead puts on a deep freeze, doing little, and then only when absolutely forced, thinking that “her only hope for a future with Kenneth rested with the possibility that Anita Shannon would not make adjustments.” Anita even tries to unburden herself about her difficulties to Mary, but Mary just acts indignant at the “cold peculiar” woman and completely shuts her down, snapping, “Mrs. Shannon”—and her formality of using Anita’s married name is hostile all by itself—“I just won’t comment. What you do is entirely up to you.”

Later, when through her own hard work, Anita starts to open up and make friends with other villagers, “Mary could not help staring at Kenneth Shannon’s beautiful wife. She had seemed almost warm. It was hard to believe.” Naturally, Mary’s enormous hypocrisy is completely lost on her—and possibly on the author as well, as he makes no hints about how horrible Mary has been, and Mary never experiences any regrets about her cruel behavior.

When she’s not giving poor Anita the cold shoulder, she’s running hot and cold with three men in town. She accepts dates with forest ranger Tom Fogarty, even though she thinks he’s boring and awkward, and though she knows her best friend has a crush on him—and she’s completely taken by surprise when the friend, who feels doomed to be a spinster in this tiny town of few single men, leaves town for manlier pastures. Mary also has hot and hunky Perry Wynn, who runs her aunt’s ranch very capably, hinting gently about his feelings for her, but Mary calls him strange too, and gets all cranky anticipating she’ll have to turn down another man she doesn’t want—but is “annoyed” when he doesn’t stand in the barn door to watch her leave. Last is pilot Eddie Garrett, a frightening, arrogant man whose behavior toward Mary crosses well into harassment, making me concerned he’s a potential rapist: Though she’s told him from the outset that she’s not interested in him, he will not take no for an answer, and instead leers, “I’m going to make you get to know me,” and “I’m going to find your breaking point someday—the kind of breaking point I mean.” He grabs her at a dance and refuses to let go as she tries to pull herself away, saying, “When we dance you have to let me hold you in my arms. If I tried it any other way you’d yell blood murder from a false sense of outrage.” But when he tells her he was orphaned and raised by uncaring relatives, suddenly Mary feels guilty about “how unjustly she had leaped to conclusions about him,” and apologizes to him when he kisses her. Ew.

The rest of the book has some pretty descriptions of the north country scenery, especially if you are fond of the forests of the western states, but the medicine is laughable (the doctor, who performs appendectomies, is unable to manage a punctured lung, which only requires a chest tube; Mary brings large quantities of tongue depressors to a forest fire first-aid station) and of course Mary herself is obsessive, self-centered, and vindictive, and her choice of men in the end is unfathomable—she is, in short, not a likeable character. The writing otherwise isn’t terrible, but it’s just too difficult to get around the problems of a stupid plot device combined with a stupid heroine. I love the north country, but I could not love this nurse.

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.  

Debutante Nurse

By Lois Hobart, ©1959
Cover illustration by Tom Miller 

Elaine Forrest lived in two worlds. She was a Registered Nurse with an outstanding record. She was also a wealthy society girl soon to wed Bryce Thorne, a prominent lawyer. Her future was neatly planned, carefully catalogued—until Dirk Yeager shouted angrily at her, “Stop kidding yourself, Elaine. You’ve got to face the facts.” Then he turned and stalked off into the night. Elaine was left trembling and frightened. Her professional reputation challenged, her engagement broken, Elaine was passionately involved with a man who could ruin her way of life.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“‘You needn’t talk as if he were a robot in my hands,’ she retorted angrily. She shivered. ‘Bryce dear, would you fetch my stole from the living room?’”

REVIEW:
Nurse Elaine Forrest is fairly unique in the VNRN genre in that she is, at least in the beginning of the book, a rather horrible character. Spoiled, selfish, and inconsiderate, she’s managed nonetheless to hook physicist Bryce Thorne, because even as a young girl, “the outlines of the kind of life she wanted to shape for herself were quite clear to her, and Bryce fitted into it.” 

On the train to her new job as a public health nurse, she runs into a man on the train. “He was certainly not a type that appealed to her. Too casual, with a tieless open-collared shirt and the tweed jacket slung over his shoulder. There was something too—not irresponsible exactly, not fresh, not precisely unreliable but—uncertain, unpredictable, that was it. And Elaine liked predictable: actions, situations, people that she could interpret and anticipate and deal with.” We’re already waiting to see him pop up again in a few more pages.

When she gets to the office on the first day, she finds everyone a little too relaxed and informal for her liking. She’s “appalled” that the other nurses will do things like run errands or even the dishes, if you can imagine, and on her first visit to a harried family, she “followed the woman upstairs, not supplying her name because the woman was too disorganized to care.” When it’s over, she thinks, “Hardly a very interesting first call.” But she’s OK with that; “she didn’t intend to get into the habit of carrying all her cases with her, as the others did.” Instead, she thinks about what to wear to a party she’s attending later on. So much more satisfying!

Of course, the man on the train turns out to be a new consultant, Dirk Yeager, who is writing a sociology PhD thesis on what he calls “diagnosing families,” which turns out to be a sort of psychoanalysis of relationships within a family to determine how they may be contributing to illness. “We have to understand what the family’s problems are and how each individual fits in,” he explains. Elaine, who has no interest in any of the families of her patients—or even, really, in her patients themselves, beyond their illnesses—is not wild about Dirk’s theories. She’s snippy to him, and the pair are soon arguing at every opportunity, despite the “electricity” she feels when she is forced to dance with him. But she quickly snaps out of it: “This was the real Elaine, carefully groomed, unswayed by any talk of chemistry. This was the Elaine who always knew what she was doing—not that silly, emotional, unpredictable creature of a preposterous situation. Enough nonsense about Dirk. He could not be trusted; he was probably practicing his psychology on her.” Before long, he’s practicing his psychology by taking her in his arms and telling her that he has feelings for her, but “there must be no more of that electricity,” she decides, and she gives him the brushoff.

It turns out, though, that boyfriend Bryce has been hiding a secret—he wants to chuck research and become a high school teacher. Elaine is horrified, and had “the uncomfortable feeling that she had lost control over Bryce.” She admits that “her motive was sheer selfishness; she did not welcome the status of the wife of a high school teacher. She resented the crushing of her plans.” She is openly dismissive of his ideas, but he demonstrates some spine for the first time in their relationship, takes a job teaching despite her disapproval, and then breaks their engagement. How shocking! “Elaine simply could not reconcile this firm Bryce with the one she knew, so amenable to reason, so deferent to her wishes. It was beyond belief.” He is well rid of Elaine, that much is clear.

When Dirk hears of it, he gives Elaine a complete assessment of her character, calling her “a cold fish,” and a “self-centered egotist.” He says that there’s hope for her, since she did choose nursing as a profession when she didn’t need a career at all. “I admire your ability, your intelligence, your purposefulness, but I can’t stand those blind spots—the impersonal way you deal with your patients, your impatience with the element of sympathy that makes a real woman,” he says. These disses from two different men arriving together give her a night of sleepless self-reflection, when “new humility tangled with bewilderment that the things she had been so sure of, her plans and hopes for marriage, Bryce, her very self, should be so baseless and insecure. How could this happen to her? But she was discovering new qualities in herself, new strengths as well as perplexities.”

Then there’s a flu epidemic, and after Elaine spends days vaccinating firefighters, she and her fellow nurses agree to hang out and have a beer with the guys. “It struck Elaine that once she would have ignored men like these, so different in personality and type, so remote from her previous experience of people; and in doing so would have missed the richness of range that she now valued.” She also starts to waken to her patients’ personal lives—to family diagnosis, if you will—and even makes a cup of coffee for a father who’s been up all night. “This warmth and understanding, a sensitivity to the needs of others, was it something Elaine could learn herself? Mrs. Hagstrom had it; Molly Carew had it. No wonder they were marvelous nurses. And marvelous people. Perhaps you didn’t have to conform to some idealized pattern or be socially attractive to find satisfaction in your work and an effective role in life. Maybe Elaine could accept herself for what she was and do the best with her own temperament, whatever its faults. Whatever its faults … strange to think of herself apologetically after all these years, a young lifetime of taking her good fortune and gifts for granted.”

Elaine’s growth as a human being occurs in fits and starts: In one minute she’s thinking about how cramped her old life is, the next she’s thinking of her best friend, whom Bryce is now seeing, as “a girl from a common family and background and education—how could she fit in with Bryce’s breeding, family position, and wealth? She gave her head a toss, trying to shake off this residue of snobbery and ego, but it wasn’t that easy.” This wavering makes her growth more believable, though, and I did like Elaine better in the end.

Overall, the book is well-written, despite giving us nothing pithy for the Best Quotes section. We spend a lot of time visiting patients, and the supporting characters in the book (outside of the one-dimensional male lead) are interesting. Unfortunately, her love life does not evolve as nicely as her growth as a character, Dirk (no surprise there) displaying the same presumption and bossiness that he had condemned in Elaine. I guess it’s OK to be inconsiderate and domineering if you’re a man, and if you’re a woman, you’re just hoping to find a man who will order you around: “A tiny thrill ran though her. Dirk might not leave the decision entirely in her hands.” Curious that the message of this book is that Elaine needs to be more receptive to the feelings of others, while at the same time her beaux are only admirable when they are ordering her around with no consideration of what she wants. But if you can overlook this flaw—one that is admittedly far too common in VNRNs—Debutante Nurse is a pleasant enough read.

A Prize for Nurse Darci

By Suzanne Roberts, ©1965

Darci Betton loved being a nurse, but at the writers’ conference she discovered a glamorous new world. It almost made her forget Dr. Mark Garrett whose last angry words were branded on her heart. When Jerome Sinclair, the famous writer and Darci’s private idol, showed more than a passing interest, Darci’s new world seemed perfect. Would a new love help her forget the old?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“You wouldn’t want us coming on duty without our coffee, would you doctor? We might give a heart stimulant to that patient who sneaks liquor into his room, and then you’d really have something to complain about.” 

“I’m not even so sure it’s a good thing for the patients to read poetry. Maybe they ought to be resting instead of reading.”

“Being around you makes me want to go out and get myself a job in a munitions factory. I feel as if I’d like to help murder the human race, instead of trying to help it.”

“Look here, I was about to kiss you. And suddenly you’re telling me I ought to have X-rays or something! What kind of a romance is this, for Pete’s sake?”

“Darci almost wished she had fainted. It would have been so nice to be in his arms and be carried to the couch and worried about.”

REVIEW:
I will confess that I’ve had this book on my shelf for some time but have been loath to pick it up, because my experience with Suzanne Roberts has not been particularly enjoyable. Unfortunately, she’s written at least 14 nurse novels, of which I’ve endured only half (every one of them earning a C grade of some sort), and though it’s all right for you to steer clear, it’s my self-appointed job to plow through these bombs—and hopefully my pain will save you some. To that end, let this stand as a warning to avoid drippy Darci Anne Betton, who is a shallow, spineless, insipid patsy. 

She is, though, a very dedicated nurse, and when the new ward resident, Dr. Mark Garrett, shows up, she’s determined to impress him. But he’s a mean, nasty tyrant who has imposed a slate of new rules for the floor—including a three-minute time limit for coffee breaks, even though it takes five minutes to get from the 10th floor ward to the cafeteria. Of course, it’s utterly unrealistic that a doctor could have the authority to insist on these things, and this one’s only a resident, not even an attending! Every nurse on the floor is putting in for transfers except Darci, who thinks, “When he doesn’t look angry—he has the nicest mouth”—the trouble being that he always looks angry.

The good news is that she’s won a story-writing contest, and the prize is free tuition at a writer’s conference, which miraculously falls on exactly the same two weeks as her upcoming vacation. The big draw for the conference is famous but fading writer Jerry Sinclair, who phones Darci at 3:00 a.m. to ask her to pick him up at the airport and have dinner with him. Instead of banging down the receiver on the inconsiderate, selfish ass, “She closed her eyes, joy going through her. ‘I’ll meet your plane, Mr. Sinclair,’ she said eagerly.”

Meeting the man, it is clear that he is a horror show—for starters, he doesn’t let her drive her own car. He’s a slimy type out to use Darci for his own purposes, and it’s certainly not hard to imagine why a writer might be pumping this naïve young woman for details about working in a hospital. Darci, curiously, sees it too—but when he takes her parking, “it might have been pure feminine instinct that made Darci sit very still, not talking, her hand as quiet as a tame bird, there in Jerry’s.” We are not surprised to find, then, that she absolutely cannot say no to the man, and instead foolishly seems to be talking herself into falling in love with him: “Am I falling in love with him? And, she wondered, if this was love. She had even mentioned the possibility that she might be in love. At the time, she had felt a little bit foolish. But now she wasn’t sorry at all she had written to her girlfriend and admitted she might be in love. Because right now, at this very moment, whatever it was she was feeling was either love or hero worship.”

Whatever it was, Jerry quickly proves himself deserving of neither, as he monopolizes her time, manipulates and guilts her into seeing him, and repeatedly insists he’s completely dependent on Darci—and he treats the conference students cruelly and unprofessionally, as well. “I was shook up because I’d phoned you and you didn’t answer my calls. That made me everything seem so—hopeless,” the stalker tells her, jealous of the time she spent writing a letter to her roommate. “Just stay with me. I need you, little girl.” Rather than run to the police department and file for a restraining order, Darci the Dope thinks, “He was probably one of the most intelligent and fascinating men in the world. Wasn’t it true that what she had was the beginning of a very hard crush on this man? And wasn’t it also true that their beloved image of Jerry had begun to fade?” Because Darci always wants to have everything both ways, even fantasizing about grumpy Dr. Garrett, who suddenly “seemed both challenging and exciting.” She has two assholes in her life, and “they were both strangely secretive and moody, and yet, Darci felt an odd tenderness and warmth towards both of them.”

As Jerry pumps her harder for details about the hospital, even Darci starts to edge away—but when the conference ends, Jerry cons her into allowing him to move to her hometown and show him around the hospital. She fears Jerry is writing an expose about the hospital, but nonetheless dutifully trots him around the hospital and introduces him to everyone. Lo and behold, Jerry eventually admits he is writing a scandalous tell-all. “Darci felt an odd sensation of fear go through her. She felt like running from Jerry in that moment and yet, he wasn’t really mean or cruel, or even cunning.” I’m not sure who she’s fooling, because we have seen him be all these things—frankly, seldom is he anything else.

Since she came home lugging Jerry Sinclair with her, Dr. Garrett has been especially frosty. But that never stops Darci—suddenly “she was in love with him. She was in love with that cold, angry man who could be so gentle with a patient but so unbending with the girl who worked side by side with him all day long.” Nurse Darci Betton is a bona fide nut case. But Mark won’t date her, so she keeps going out with her other lunatic. In his room, waiting for Jerry while he showers before another of their dates, she finds his manuscript and reads the lurid tell-all he’s written, which includes a near-miss medication error of her roommate’s, and the suggestion that at a prior job Mark’s negligence had killed a patient. Who saw that coming? Again proving herself psychotic, she wonders, “Could she still go on loving Mark if what Jerry had written was true? […] Darci tried to think more kindly of Jerry.” Really, this woman should just start dating axe murderers and be done with it.

She runs to Mark’s apartment to warn him and he tells her the story Jerry has uncovered—as an intern he had witnessed a car crash, pulled a victim from the wreckage, and the woman had died shortly afterward. This is the sort of “scandal” that frequently befalls people in nurse novels—they can’t in any way be blamed for it, but the hospital turns their actions into a terrible crime, making it a pathetic cop out. The pair end up kissing, and the next day Darci is a wreck, because “the two of them made rounds, attended patients, subbed in Emergency during noon time, and nothing at all was said. No plans were made for the future.” Apparently one kiss means it’s time to start picking out china patterns—not in the coming months, but immediately, and never mind the important work they should be concentrating on. “How can I talk to you about marrying me?” Mark rightfully asks, less than 24 hours after their first kiss—even if “it was a stop-the-world kind of kiss.”

Darci is in love with love, and getting married is her main objective—she’ll talk herself into the first ogre that comes along, and we should not be surprised, because on page three of this book we’re told “Neither girl was in love, but, of course, both of them hoped to be. Falling in love at the Center was something just about every nurse did.” Even her “plump” roommate is planning a wedding, to a patient whose sling she’d changed a couple weeks earlier. This book paints a horrific picture of the lives of young women, not to mention marriage, and I shudder to think of all the kids who’d read this fifty years ago and imagined that this was what they were supposed to be—compliant yet grasping, blind bits of putty whose main objective was to convince a man—any man, no matter how unworthy or even insane—to slip a diamond onto her hand. This book is just depressing.

Jane Arden Space Nurse

Book 6 of 7

By Kathleen Harris, ©1962

Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

As Jane embarked upon the most exciting adventure of her career, she was forced to postpone her marriage to handsome Jeff Wallace. Jane had no way of foreseeing the personal crisis that would confront her as a “space nurse.” Nor could she have anticipated the lasting impact of the two attractive astronauts she met at Cape Canaveral. Fascinating Clyde McLaren, a strong candidate for the moon shot, was brilliant and quite friendly. —Or did he want more than friendship? And what of the dashing continental Lieutenant who made it clear that he was more than interested in her? —Just where did his interest lie?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:

“Any daughter of mine is going to devote her full time and attention to looking after me.”

“It sounded fantastic to Jane; she did not think such a project as setting up medical centers in space could happen soon—but then, not many people had though there would be television, jets, atomic bombs, missiles, wonder drugs for most fatal diseases—all the miracles of this Space Age.”

“I like your independence—it’s a challenge to a man. Every man prefers to do the chasing.”

“This whole affair was given so much publicity that a lot of suspects—enemies of our country—will be rounded up.”

“I imagine any man—anyone in pants—would do for the fair Jane. She likes to dangle all the scalps she can at her belt.”

REVIEW:

Nurse Jane Arden, who in previous books in this series had been assiduously striving to nail down the top berth on the Worst VNRN Heroines list, has in Jane Arden Space Nurse not been putting in the same superlative effort we’ve seen on our past encounters. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this. On one hand, I have avoided the usual indignation and ire that Jane Arden usually inspires. On the other, this fairly bland, obvious story is like a bowl of tepid oatmeal, arousing little emotion at all apart from the rare eyeroll. Is it better to spend an hour with a book that at least gives you the moral satisfaction and mental exercise of picking apart all the hypocrisy, lies, and infantile behavior that in past books made up the bulk of Jane’s character, or to sleepwalk through a book you won’t remember in an hour? That is the question! Who knew nurse novels could inspire such heady philosophical debate?

Anyway, here we have Jane, of all the nurses in the country, summoned to Washington to take a post supporting the space program at Cape Canaveral during the race with Russia to put a man on the moon (indeed, during this story, Jane watches the takeoff of Gus Grissom’s suborbital flight, America’s second, on July 21, 1961). I’m sure it was Jane’s training in surgery and pediatrics that made her a top candidate.

She boldly accepts the job without asking the permission of—or consulting, even—her fiancé, Jeff Wallace, the latest in Jane’s string of toys. But he and her family “had come to accept the fact that Jane’s career as a nurse had to be given first consideration,” though she’s been perfectly willing to chuck it for her first two fiancés. What this really means is that Jane does whatever she wants with little regard for anyone’s feelings, which we certainly have seen again and again in past books.

“It does seem to me you could have waited until we talked it all out before you went off into space,” Jeff pouts, but Jane reminds him that girls don’t go into outer space, silly! It’s her “obligation as a patriotic citizen” that compels her to accept, so off she goes to Florida to engage in duties so secret that even the reader hears little of them, apart from acting essentially as doting maid to heartthrob astronaut Clyde McLaren, cooking his breakfast, following him around all day while he undergoes strenuous workouts, and checking his blood pressure afterward.

While she’s waiting for Clyde to finish his day in the mock capsule, Jane accidentally blunders into a top secret conference room to relax in the big cushy chairs there, but is found by a Marine captain and bawled out. Later, out of the blue, she tells Clyde that she saw someone else in that room, Lt. Seth Zboski—“don’t look so startled; he’s a Czech”—who happens to be her roommate Nancy’s boyfriend, thought that doesn’t stop him from putting the moves on Jane, or giving her “The Look” every time he sees her. Clyde urges Jane to tell the Top Brass (a phrase that here is always capitalized) what she’s seen, and after doing so, she is chewed out by another captain. After this experience, “she resolved that if she ever saw anything else that looked suspicious, she would keep it to herself. She wouldn’t even tell Clyde, her best friend at the base.” If you see something, for Pete’s sake, don’t say something!

Months pass and Jane and Clyde’s friendship deepens, and there begins to be a little talk around the base—and Jane’s reputation is not enhanced by the one weekend when Jeff comes to visit. They go on a weekend driving tour of Florida, and the pair are scandalously forced to stay in the same hotel, in separate rooms “at least twenty-some other units in between,” so Jane decides “there really was nothing wrong in Jeff’s staying at the same motel where she was registered.” Wrong-o! A bunch of the guys are also staying at that hotel and see them having breakfast together the next morning, and now Seth Zboski is slandering her all over the base: “A man seldom marries a girl so free with herself,” he sneers, likely wishing he were in on the action. So Clyde is assigned to a different nurse and Jane is asked not to see Clyde at work or outside of it. Clyde, upset that Jane is suddenly giving him the cold shoulder—because no one has bothered to clue him in—drags her out on the beach to ask her what the hell, and true to form Jane lies, saying that it was her idea because they’ve been seeing too much of each other. When he responds by saying that she’s cold and uncaring, she tacks back again: “She could not let Clyde think she was like that, insincere, shallow”—in short, the truth. But their conversation is cut short by a thunderstorm and they are forced to shelter, clutching each other desperately, under a sand dune: “not intentionally, she was sure, he gathered her closer. Nor did she mean to cling to him.” Now Clyde proves himself the biggest person in the entire series, for as the rain clears away he agrees, “We cannot be friends,” and when he adds, “I could have loved you, Jane,” we are relieved for his narrow escape.

Then on to the big climax, when Seth Zboski is driving erratically all over the base in the middle of the night and Jane is the only one who notices, and “maybe it was her woman’s curiosity that led Jane’s feet toward the building and inside” to, you guessed it, The Top Secret Room, and watches him sneak out with a briefcase.  Since she’s decided not to report anything suspicious, she goes back home and to bed, because if she reports anything again, “the Marine captain could have her dismissed in disgrace by manufacturing some cooked-up story against her character.” If the captain has been reading these books too, he won’t have to cook up anything, and Jane’s poor judgment in this situation is more fuel to the fire. The next morning, Nancy tells Jane that Seth has given her something to hold for him, and he is going to stop by tonight to pick it up. “Jane had decided there was nothing she could do about it,” so she spends the entire day cleaning the house, and just when Seth is likely to stop by, she starts snooping in Nancy’s bedroom, finding the case just as Seth walks in. A struggle ensues in which clever Seth pulls out a bottle of clear liquid: “What fiendish thing did he have in mind?” Well, first of all, it’s his monologue, which starts out, “You ought to thank me for putting you out of a world gone mad—a world that will be destroyed before long, anyway, wiped out by a single nuclear bomb.” Just as Seth is forcing the liquid down her throat, the door is broken in by Clyde, who’s been spending the day outside Jane’s apartment, mysteriously convinced that something was going down, and had seen Seth grabbing Jane through the window. Seth escapes, but is eventually found stabbed in the  back—not by the Army, but “some of his own people who caught up with him. I suppose when he didn’t turn over the papers he’d stolen, there was nothing for them to do but put him out of the way. That’s the way these Commies operate, you know,” explains Jeff, remarkably in the know for a civilian. Not to worry, though, if the enemy is clever enough to get into secret places, because they’re also “usually, in the end, dumb enough to pull something wrong.”

The only flashes of indignation this book inspires are dulled by the fact that statements in this book do not accurately portray Jane’s appalling past behavior: We hear that Jane’s sister’s husband Nicky “had thought, for a brief period of their friendship, that he was in love with Jane, although she had known all along that theirs could never be anything more than a brother-and-sister relationship”—completely ignoring how Jane had toyed with Nicky and never relieved him of the impression that he was obligated to propose to her when he returned from his studies in Paris in Jane Arden Surgery Nurse, only dumping him when she had a better prospect in hand, some doctor guy she was sort of engaged to for about ten minutes.

My favorite part of the ending was the part where Jane vows, “From now on, she wouldn’t keep anything from Jeff. And this was one resolution she meant to keep.” And immediately breaks it by deciding that she won’t mention near miss with Clyde. “Later, she would tell him about Clyde.” I also enjoyed how in the end Nancy hooks up with trainee Carl, who has dated Jane already, and was dismissed as “not much of a conversationalist. Carl never had anything to say; he kept in the  background. In Nancy’s opinion, he was something of a droop.” As a discard of Jane’s, Jane is very happy to “thoroughly approve of her roommate’s choice.”

The best news of all is that there is only one more book to go in the Jane Arden series. Even though I’m starting to think that, as the heroine I love to hate, I might actually miss the infuriating, hypocritical, lying, shallow, manipulative Jane Arden.

Mountain Nurse

By Peggy Gaddis, ©1959

"I’m not going to ask you to marry me," Ken said—and Julie felt the words like a blow. For one awful moment she was speechless. Then her angry, hurting words rushed out. "I don’t want you to ask me to marry you! I wouldn’t even if you did!" After all, why should she? Her fabulous job—the job that meant so much to her—was waiting. Who needed Ken? But her heart lurched, for not until this moment had she admitted even to herself that she was in love with him.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
"It’s colder than the heart of organized charity out there tonight."

 

"A woman doesn’t like to be told she’s remarkable. She’d much rather be told she’s beautiful, or alluring, or charming."

 

REVIEW:

This book may well be unique among VNRNs in that the heroine, Julie Winston, is an unmitigated snob, and remains so right through to the end—or at least we are not given any indication that her underlying character has changed. Out of the gate, she is ferociously condescending toward the patients and families that her sister, widow Linda Blake, cares for in this rural Georgia mountain setting (the quintessential Peggy Gaddis novel backdrop). She prefers her upscale Atlanta clinic, which caters to rich folk, and has swooped in to insist that her sister return to civilization with her. Linda, however, is a sweet, dedicated, selfless type who would never leave her patients, even if she is, according to Julie, "overworked, poorly paid, miserably uncomfortable, lacking in all the things any woman her age should have." Not Julie: She’s even horrified when one of her colleagues leaves her post as a "luxury nurse" to join the war effort, telling Linda, "The idiot has joined the Army Nurse Corps and asked for overseas duty. Can you imagine?" She might as well admit that she beats puppies for what this remark is supposed to do for our view of Julie.

 

Out on call with Linda in the rickety jeep, and none too impressed with the "squalid" domiciles they visit, Julie is nonetheless pressed into duty when one very ancient woman, Miss Dovie—who is rumored to be a witch and therefore avoided like Ebola—is found near death from a stroke and no one else is willing or able to serve as private nurse. To her credit, Julie volunteers for the duty—but is completely ungracious about it; she’s just called Linda a "blind idiot" for refusing to leave the mountains, when her next words are to ask for instructions for caring for Miss Dovie. "I’m willing but not eager," she says. The neighbors drop by with firewood and food, but absolutely will not "set foot in a witch’s house" who can’t die, "she’ll just get on her broomstick and fly off to join her master, the Devil Hisself!" according to the roughneck who drops off groceries that include a "mess of the fresh"—butchered hog, that is.

 

When a huge blizzard starts up the next night, it’s looking like Julie is going to be snowed in for some time, but then there’s a pounding on the door. It’s Kendall Stockwell, aka The Wayfaring Stranger, God help us, a well-known folk singer whom Julie apparently saw perform in Atlanta last summer. He’s in the neighborhood looking for folk songs "that haven’t been sung to death by the others," he says, though Julie thinks it’s odd that he would just drop his very successful career to go wander the mountains in the middle of winter. His jeep is stuck in the road, so he’s got nowhere else to go, and Julie invites him in. The pair hangs out and chats for several days, and on a hike to the top of the mountain, Julie gets an anti-proposal when Ken tells her she "needn’t be frightened" because "I’m not going to ask you to marry me." Phew! Oh, wait, no; "his words had been a blow that struck straight at her heart. Not until this moment had she admitted even to herself that she was in love with him; but his words had torn away the gossamer cloud that had concealed this fact from her consciousness." If her sudden ardor wasn’t enough to make you ill, the florid prose should surely put things over the top.

 

The reason he can’t marry her is idiotic, of course: His business partner and best friend swindled him out of the money that should have been his, so he walked out on all his engagements and took to the hills, and now he has legal liabilities and no money to support a wife. He couldn’t possibly take his friend to court, he insists, because it would "prove to the whole world what a first-class fool and chump I am." Apparently it’s not the fact that he actually is one that’s the issue; it’s only if everyone else knows it, too.

 

Back at the cabin, the snow finally melts enough for the doctor to arrive to check on Miss Dovie and take the pair back to civilization. It occurs to Julie that she might want to say goodbye to the patient she’s cared for day and night for a week, but the doctor says, "She’s in a coma, Julie—she wouldn’t know," so she doesn’t bother—that’s our shallow Julie!—and heads back to Linda’s house, where she has her first encounter with a mirror in a week, much to her horror: "Lindy, if he fell in love with me when I look like this—then it’s just got o be love, hasn’t it?"

 

Everyone’s problems are neatly tied up in the end, of course, though there does seem to be a little epidemic of comas going around, and even Linda lands a fiancé, despite her tearful devotion to her husband, dead these three long years. It’s not a bad book overall, but there are the bones of a better one poking through that make it disappointing. The ending overflows with the usual Gaddis treacle about how blissfully happy everyone is when they are engaged, even throwing in the ubiquitous "I want whatever Ken wants," and it wouldn’t be a Gaddis book without a reference to spanking—though in this case it’s Linda threatening to paddle her sister, so that at least was a little twist. As it is, the story comes off flat, without a lot of sparkle, and it’s just perplexing that this pair falls for each other at all, let alone in two days, because neither of them seems all that interesting—although Julie at least is a feisty lass. So while I’ve read worse Gaddis books, I’ve certainly read better, and with such a promising setup, it seemed especially unfortunate that she was not able to pull off a better story in Mountain Nurse.

Resort Nurse

By Diana Douglas

(pseud. Richard Wilkes-Hunter), ©1969

 

When lovely Elizabeth Spencer, R.N., made up her mind to escape the narrow confines of hospitals and see for herself what went on in the outside world, she never expected anything like her job at Key Sud—the luxury Florida hotel where female attributes seemed more important than nursing qualificiations. She also never expected to be working with a doctor as handsome as Kimball Brown—nor with a nurse’s aide who was a very rich, very pretty, seventeen-year-old hippie with much too grown-up ideas. But the biggest surprise of all was James Scott Haldane, the savagely good-looking author who threw Elizabeth the curve of her life … and forced her to wonder whether she was ever meant to be a nurse at all.

 

GRADE: D

 

BEST QUOTES:

“With her legs pressed together, she was feeling uncomfortable in the overly short uniform the management had insisted even the hotel nurse should wear.”

 

“You’re an intelligent girl, Elizabeth, and very, very attractive. I’ll be surprised if you remain a nurse for very long.”

 

“It was her eyes that fascinated him—those glorious, golden-brown, slightly slanted eyes. He had seen Eurasian girls with eyes shaped like that, but with most Eurasians there was an impenetrability behind them. These eyes were different—vital, utterly feminine, and full of changing expressions. And they were wholly American.”

 

“Women should only hide their eyes behind sunglasses if they have very pale, mean, blue eyes. Or if they have a squint.”

 

“You’re still a kid until you marry.”

 

“Rita was rather a plain girl with mousy hair and pale blue eyes, but she was cheerful and efficient, and beneath her mini-skirt she had perfect legs which, as far as the men on the staff were concerned, more than compensated for her face.”

 

“She was twenty-five years old, and she supposed it was time she thought of marriage with the right guy. But how did a girl go about finding the right guy? At one time she had thought that if he were tall, dark, and handsome, and two or three years her senior, that would be sufficient. But now she knew that this was not enough. A lot of other things came into it. Love and marriage should be for keeps, and that meant a great deal more than just physical attraction in a man.”

 

“I don’t believe any drug can put into the mind what isn’t there. The impulse must already be present, whether the addict knows it or not. But he or she has been told that this is what the drug will do, and, because they want to feel that particular way, they take it, and suggestion does the rest.”

 

“A doctor friend once told me that the difference between an heroin addict and an alcoholic is that the alcoholic gets high and goes home to beat his wife, but a heroin addict goes home and his wife beats him.”

 

REVIEW:

I don’t pick up a Diana Douglas/Richard Wilkes-Hunter book with any eagerness whatsoever, and Resort Nurse is yet another reason why. They—and this—are superficial, stupid, patronizing, and perfunctory. And a little creepy; the heroines are usually ridiculously beautiful with “slim, high-breasted figures,” and in the case of Elizabeth Spencer, R..N., brains and personality—or so we are told, though we see little evidence of either in any of the pages that follow. Exhibit A: Elizabeth has left her job at a hospital because she’s decided “to escape the narrow confines of hospitals and to see for herself, for a while, a little more of what went on in the outside world. Life owed her that, she had decided, and this had been the argument she had used to escape, no matter how briefly, from discipline and routine. She had tried private nursing, at first, but had found the patients demanding and irritable.” So right off the bat, Elizabeth comes across as a lazy whiner.

 

She’d seen an ad for a nurse at a resort in Key Sud, Florida, and now she’s in Miami, being subjected to an unnerving interview with her boss, who insists, “When we’re alone, call me Marvin. That’s one thing you learn in the hotel business. People in high places come to detest formality, Elizabeth. They have too much of it in their work. Success is a lonely thing. It’s made me a lonely man. That’s why I want you to call me Marvin.” Next thing he’ll be telling her that his wife doesn’t understand him. When she finally shakes him off, she can’t get a cab, and when a handsome hotel guest offers her a ride in his “powerful white sports car,” she hops right in. It turns out that her escort is James Scott Haldane, a very successful novelist. She immediately dissects his latest play, which she didn’t like at all, and when he drops her off, “she had been ready to refuse an invitation to dine with him—or at least to go out with him again. Now she felt frustrated and angry: He hadn’t asked her at all. He hadn’t even bothered to ask her name!” So when James Scott Haldane calls her later to ask her out for a drink, she gets all pissy and hangs up on him. The next day she heads to the beach for an early swim and is “indignant” when he doesn’t show up, angry when he doesn’t call her. “Not that it mattered, she told herself, because neither did she have the slightest interest in James Scott Haldane.” Clearly.

 

But while in Miami, she inadvertently stumbles into a club for a cup of coffee and finds out it’s a drug den, with a couple of stoned teenaged hippies dancing in the back. Now we get a pages-long lecture about how evil LSD is and how it causes genetic defects and “leukemia-like symptoms of cell abnormality” (it doesn’t). Ham-handed foreshadowing is a specialty of the author, so I shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s still irritating.

 

Once Elizabeth reaches the hotel, she is working with Dr. Kimball Brown, who “was not at all like James Scott Haldane.” Their biggest medical concern is Mrs. Connell, a pregnant woman with a heartrate of 42 and hyperemesis gravidarum, which the good doctor tells the patient, is “primarily caused by a neurotic influence, so you see how important it is for you to try to control your vomiting and not worry.” He asks her to “help us by trying not to expect to be ill every time you eat something.” His treatment is bed rest in a darkened room, codeine for sedation, and—the obvious treatment for someone who is bradycardic and vomiting excessively—fluid and diet restriction. He tells Elizabeth privately that hyperemesis gravidarum is “one of the toxemias”—an older term for pre-eclampsia (it is not)—and that “left untreated it could have led to dehydration,” so again, one does wonder why the doctor has ordered fluid restriction. Elizabeth is also told to position Mrs. Connell in bed “so she can’t inhale any vomitus while she’s under heavy sedation.” God help this poor woman, because the doctor obviously won’t.

 

After Mrs. Connell is soundly mismanaged, the next person to walk into the clinic is a 17-year-old girl in a “brief mini-skirt, a white sweater that accentuated her young, pert breasts, and she wore the pale makeup that kids seemed to find attractive.” And so I recalled with further dismay that Wilkes-Hunter never described a woman without mentioning her breasts. Sharon Miller asks about the “dangerous drug cabinet”—where could that possibly be going?—and then, “How much of a drag is it? Learning to be a nurse, I mean.” Elizabeth quickly assures the teen that “nurses have boyfriends they go out on dates with, the same as anyone else,” and adds, “I guess one of these days I’ll get married and that will be the end of my nursing career.” The more this book progresses, the less I like Elizabeth Spencer, R.N. Sharon asks if she can help out in the clinic, “as a sort of nurse’s aide,” to decide if she wants be a nurse in the same mold as Elizabeth: “Where I worked wouldn’t matter as long as I don’t have to be ‘dedicated.’ I could work until I got tired of it or wanted to marry some guy.” The ugly mirror Sharon is holding up to Elizabeth passes, needless to say, unnoticed.

 

It isn’t long before Sharon asks Elizabeth to “give me one of those pep pills,” and helpfully suggests amphetamine, or, when Elizabeth balks at that, “benzedrine then.” Elizabeth gives her a lecture instead, but decides Sharon’s interest in drugs “was not important,” and assigns Sharon to sit up all night with and dispense medication to pregnant Mrs. Connell, who is vomiting, hopefully while positioned on her side, despite the codeine. Poor Mrs. Connell’s prospects of surviving her medical treatment are growing increasingly dim.

 

Outside of work, Elizabeth is just full of bright ideas: She goes on a date in Miami with her lonely boss, Marvin, and between the two of them they consume a magnum of champagne. Amazingly still consious after this, she has him drive (!!!) her back to the seedy club for coffee, where they spot a girl who looks like Sharon Miller, apparently the same hippie stoner Elizabeth had seen gyrating wildly the last time she’d dropped in. Rather than try to chase the girl down, they convince themselves that it isn’t really Sharon and drive back to the hotel, Sharon’s head “pillowed carelessly on Marvin’s shoulder,” and nevermind the four or five times she’s hoped he wasn’t going to make a pass at her; she gives him an “almost sisterly kiss.” At this point I am wondering if the author wants us to hate Elizabeth in particular or if he hates all women in general. (Actually, I’ve read enough of his books to believe it’s the latter.)

 

One can only hope it’s a massive hangover that impairs her judgment and not her basic lack of sense when, the next day, Elizabeth asks Sharon to count the drugs in the drug cabinet. You will be shocked to find out that some amphetamines go missing—as does Sharon, who had gone to Miami for the evening. Does the penny drop? Not for our idiot heroine. She innocently asks Dr. Brown if someone might have stolen the drugs, but he is outraged at the insinuation that Sharon might have taken them, no doubt because he liked the tiny little bikini Sharon wore when he went surfing with the teen earlier.

 

Now Elizabeth is called to the penthouse suite, only to find—James Scott Haldane! Who finally gets around to asking Elizabeth’s name! She tells him about the missing drugs and kid, and he convinces Elizabeth that the two might be related: “She’s in the age group with too much money and too much freedom to do as she pleases. On top of that, she’s bored with her parents and is ripe for all that talk about middle-class Freudian hang-ups, indifferent parents, escapes, and so on.” The man missed his calling; he should have been a psychiatrist. So the pair climb into his powerful white sports car and head back to the club, where they chat with a groovy lad wearing a red-and-blue-striped coat and a stovepipe hat, who tells them Sharon has run off with a heroin addict named Roger. Hot on their trail, Elizabeth and James Scott Haldane find their dilapidated hideaway, break in, kick open bedroom doors, shine a flashlight around although the hall light had worked perfectly well, and find Sharon, buck naked and unconscious, on a blanket with needle marks on her “white thighs—which, along with her breasts, contrasted vividly with the rest of her suntanned body.” Next scene, it’s a few hours later and James Scott Haldane is inviting Elizabeth up to the penthouse for a drink and a little conversation, which entails his ordering her to quit her job and come to his ranch in Nevada with him, after they’re married in Miami. Ugh.

 

The constant references to women’s breasts; Elizabeth’s unbelievable stupidity and shallowness; the obvious, overly moralistic plot; the automatic and distasteful marriage proposal on the penultimate page—this book’s faults are many and egregious. It’s frankly insulting that the author should think Elizabeth is a heroine that we should like, although to be fair, there really isn’t one single likeable character in the book, so maybe he hates everyone—though his particular disrespect for women is quite apparent. As it happens, the book’s readers will most likely be women, and it’s usually a bad idea to insult your target audience. And so I suggest you refuse to allow Wilkes-Hunter to talk down to you and decline to open his books.

Celebrity Suite Nurse

By Suzanne Roberts, ©1965

 

Poppy Helden had never forgotten her promise to return to her hometown as a nurse in the little clinic there. But Miami Beach, where she was training, had many distractions. There was the warm lazy sunshine of the beach, and the beguiling attentions of young Dr. Steve Harper. When Poppy’s singing idol, Nicky Farrell, became her patient in the Celebrity Suite, Poppy’s heart began to beat to a new and different tune and she was caught in a clash of conflict … in which both her love and career hung in the balance.

 

GRADE: C+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“We certainly don’t want an interne around who’s slightly psycho.”

 

“You look much too unworried to be a doctor.”

 

“Poppy—don’t fall in love with somebody famous before I get you down to the chili parlor tonight—okay?”

 

“If I’m running a fever, baby, you’ve got only yourself to blame.”

 

“Goodness, she thought suddenly, men can certainly complicate a girl’s life!”

 

“I’ll bet a wife like you could save a guy millions of dollars a year. I’ll bet you watch for all the sales and I’ll bet you can cook.”

 

“Stop behaving as if you’re still a silly student nurse, dying to get married!”

 

“There are very few girls who look really pretty in the early morning.”

 

REVIEW:

On page one, Poppy is a new graduate, a hard-working hillbilly from a hardscrabble town in the Georgia mountains who borrowed money from the hometown doctor to complete her training. She’s sworn to return home to work after her training, but she’s planning to take one more year at Marymount-on-the-Beach Hospital in Miami Beach to gain a little more experience before packing her bikinis and heading home to the mountains. Unfortunately for her, the nursing supervisor has decided that the experience our little waif really needs is with the idle rich: She’s been assigned to the celebrity suite, where she will tend to just one patient at a time.

 

She’s not too excited about this, as she had hoped to be a little busier. But nursing supervisor Isabel Duncan has other plans. “I think, with the life you have planned,” she explains to Poppy, “that seeing the so-called pampered darlings of the world with their masks off, will do you good.” Why the hospital would waste the skills of someone who is acknowledged to be the most dedicated graduate they’ve seen in years on private duty with just one patient to teach her this trifling life lesson is perplexing.

 

But then, when Poppy gets one look at pampered darling Nicky Farrell, a singing sensation checked in with fatigue to rule out leukemia, it doesn’t do her good at all—she’s suddenly, unprofessionally, off her head over the poor, possibly dying boy, leaving the hospital after her first shift to go sit on the beach and brood all night over him—missing her date at the chili parlor with Dr. Steve Harper. This is a blow to the young interne, who has been planning to marry Poppy for quite some time, though up to this point she’s refused to consider herself “his girl.” Now she’s staying late after shifts to visit Nicky, her heart hammering wildly every time she pulls a thermometer from her pocket and pops it in his mouth (cringe), swooning when he tells her he’s in love with her, and, on her third day on duty, dancing with him and kissing him. She’s very confused: “Which man do I belong to?” she asks herself, as if she should belong to anyone, especially a patient she just met 72 hours ago.

 

Now we enter the middle of the book, which is mainly a lot of moping about whether Nicky loves her, whether she loves Nicky, her feelings for Steve—the fact that she has previously declared that she has none beyond friendship notwithstanding—and “her duty towards the two men who cared about her!” We learn fairly early on that Nicky just has a “glandular infection,” not a fatal illness, but he still insists that he’s in love with Poppy and wants her to come on tour with him. His manager, Joe, fruitlessly tries to warn Poppy that Nicky will leave her for his true love, performing, and tells her that Nicky always thinks he’s in love—the last time to a “crazy chick” who tried to kill herself with sleeping pills after he left her, and whom he never visited when she was in the hospital recovering, the selfish lout.

 

And Nicky now reveals that he thinks that his manager Joe only cares about him for his money, though it’s clear that’s far from the case—and Poppy wonders, “What if that worked both ways? Suppose that Nicky, feeling that no one could truly love him for himself, was unable to love back?” Quite a stretch, but we have to have some reason for Poppy to decline his marriage proposal—the fact that she’s known him less than a week apparently not sufficing.

 

Then Luzette Theibou, a French actress who is all the rage in Hollywood, checks in. “She comes to the hospital every time one of her boyfriends doesn’t jump when she tells him to. She tried the sleeping pill routine” when her last romance ended, Poppy is told—and the startling coincidence between her recent escapade and Nicky’s last girlfriend’s suicide attempt is never explained, though it seems Nicky and Luzette had never met. Sloppy plotting, apparently. Then, when Poppy discovers the patients slow-dancing in the Sun Lounge and Nicky insults Poppy by telling her to bring them some Cokes, it appears Poppy’s “relationship” is on the rocks, because “when a boy told girl he cared, and then proceeded to dance with another girl as if there were no tomorrow, it could be pretty darned confusing!”

 

Suddenly Steve is looking better, but not much: “She didn’t feel that wild and wonderful way around him that she felt in Nicky’s presence, but still, Steve was somebody very nice and comfortable to be with. Like houseshoes, she thought, and she flushed. It didn’t seem like a very complimentary comparison.” Indeed. “Was this love? The easy, friendly, comfortable, quiet thing, where two people sat watching a calm ocean, where two people talked of medicine more than of love or passion, where two people could not see each other for days and when they did, feel as comfortable as they had the moment they left each other.” I hate this device, where the author tries to convince us that friendship is a better foundation for marriage than passion. Call me a romantic fool, but it comes across as lowering your expectations, as putting matrimony ahead of personal happiness: Better to marry a nice man who wants you than remain single and hold out for a man you really love.

 

When Nicky is released from the hospital, he invites Poppy to come to a concert, and seats her at a table in the front, replete with flowers and a quick visit before the curtain goes up. “You know what? I was hoping you’d wear a white dress tonight,” he tells her. “In your white nurse’s uniform, you looked so pretty. White becomes you.” Poppy immediately feels this means that Nicky only loves her as a nurse—but she’s saved from awkwardly running out the door when Luzette crashes the party and seats herself at Poppy’s table, and tells Poppy that she’s in love with Nicky, whom she’s known for only a day—this guy is really something else! Poppy kindly tells Luzette that it will take time for her to convince Nicky that she really loves him, due to his “seeming inability to accept love,” but that they will be married by spring—so it won’t take that much time, after all.

 

On her way out of the music hall, however, there’s a bloody disaster, and Poppy calmly saves the patient and calls for an ambulance. Arriving at the hospital, they’re met by Dr. Steve—and now it’s the young doctor who is making Poppy’s heart miss a beat, nauseatingly enough.

 

This book has two fundamental and conflicting problems: Too much going on, and not enough. The central anguish we are subjected to for pages and pages—so much somber wallowing about who loves whom and whether it’s real or not—seems foolish when the relationship is silly and inconsequential and reduces our heroine to some very tacky, not to mention unprofessional, behavior. The questions about whether Nicky is capable of love, whether Poppy’s feelings for Ole Houseshoes Steve is real love, even the question whether Luzette is the old flame of Nicky’s who tried to kill herself, just clutter the story in an unhelpful way, because the story should be about a real relationship developing between Poppy and Nicky so we can find out if what they feel is substantial and long-lasting or just one of those things. As we have it, this is a trivial story about a pair of shallow individuals who just latch onto whatever is convenient.