River Nurse

By Teresa Holloway, ©1969

Now that her mother was dead, the last thing Barrie Foster wanted to do was to go back to Delta, the small river town where she grew up. But she felt that she owed old Dr. Hamilton a debt for helping to put her through nursing school. Once that debt was paid, she could think about taking a job like the one she’d been offered in Atlanta. But Barrie had no time to feel sorry for herself. Delta was caught in its usual summer outbreak of sleeping sickness. And the town was divided over a hospital project—with the most influential citizen very much against it. To further complicate matters, a young and very handsome doctor, Jon Tyler, had moved to town … in direct competition with Dr. Hamilton. Suspecting Dr. Tyler had been “invited” to Delta to help eventually force the ailing Dr. Hamilton to give up his practice, Barrie soon found herself caught between her loyalty to the man to whom she owed so much, and her growing attraction to Jon …

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“One of the minus factors of being a nurse is never getting to finish a cup of coffee.”

“Time’s a lousy measuring stick for anything except how long it takes a virus to grow.”

“An experience like marriage was for the hale.”

REVIEW:

Nurse Barrie Foster is a new orphan, father long deceased and her mother having joined him two months earlier, when she arrives back at her home town intending to serve four years under aging, venerable Dr. Hamilton, the town GP, in order to pay him back for having assisted her financially when she was going through nursing school. Immediately upon pulling into a parking space on Main Street, she witnesses a young girl being hit by a car and runs to apply pressure to the head wound. A man in street clothes steps up as well, and she orders him repeatedly to go get a doctor—classic VNRN mistake!—only to discover that he’s the new medico in town, Dr. Jon Tyler. Ooooh, how embarrassing! And now we can segue quickly into another classic VNRN trope, in which the pair develop “sheer hostility at first sight.” Start shopping for something to wear to the wedding now!

Barrie catches up with girlhood friend Lola Gilreath, whose father is president of the bank and therefore in a position to quash our third VNRN chestnut, the idea of building a hospital in this rural, isolated town of 7,000 which practically speaking is unlikely to be able to support one. But never mind about that, because old dad immediately drops of a heart attack, opening up all sorts of opportunities for Barrie: First, Lola suddenly has room to spare and asks Barrie to move in, and now opposition to a hospital has melted away, and Lola’s house, much too big for two women in a way it wasn’t for Lola and her father, starts to look like a great place to open a convalescent home. It’s a blessing for Lola as well, as she steps into her father’s job and makes a big success of it, even if she is, well, just a girl, and a pretty  one at that: “Whoever would have believed that a brain lives under those blonde tresses?” says Barrie, Lola’s alleged friend.

Dr. Hamilton, spotting a good thing when he sees it, decides to have an attack of his own, but he opts for a stroke, which leaves him partially paralyzed, oddly from the waist down. This means he has to give up his practice to hottie Dr. Jon, but now he has time to putter around in his lab and develop a vaccine for the encephalitis that plagues the town. You will not be surprised to learn that soon a major drug company is knocking on his door offering large sums of money and a “tall and shapely, and with a smile you wouldn’t believe,” lab assistant to wheel him around. This means Barrie is off the hook, so she wastes no time in corralling a dozen women to each get 300 women to sign a petition to get a hospital in town. For those of you who resisted doing the math at home, this is a total of 3,600—in a town of 7,000, which even if half female must have some children too young to heft a pen.

Now all that remains is for Lola to give her house to Barrie for the convalescent home and for Barrie to contract pneumonia, which makes her the home’s first client. While still bedridden, the men who apparently run the town pop in to tell her that they’ve decided to fund the hospital, and soon Jon puts to rest Barrie’s conviction that he is in love with the receptionist, and we can lay the book down.

There are a number of strong women characters—the aged black former domestic of the Gilreaths, who has a quiet dignity and a role supporting the younger women, and Lola stand out—and the book drifts pleasantly along. It’s not a sparkling standout, but certainly the best of the four others of Holloway’s we’ve met (Nurse Paige’s Triumph, which was not; Nurse to Remember, best forgotten; a couple others whose titles don’t make for easy putdowns). Even the cover illustration of this Valentine publication is not as horrific as most of those from this imprint. So while in general not an overwhelming home run for us, this book is a win for Teresa Holloway.

Nurse in Nassau

By Rose Williams
(pseud. William Daniel Ross), ©1967 

His past caught up with the man she loved … “Beth,” he told her, “I’m engaged to another girl—back home.” New York was suddenly bleak and wintry to Nurse Beth Kane. She had to escape. Was Nassau, the semitropic island of beauty and serenity, just a refuge for her bruised heart—or was it more? Was Neil Callum, the famous playwright, just her patient—or something more? How would she choose—between her profession and her heart? 

GRADE: C 

BEST QUOTES: 

“I asked him what he thought about Hollywood marriage, and he said it was a good way to spend a weekend.” 

“Not even the ice cubes here are up to par.” 

“The two times when love is most highly valued are during the days of courting and when the settlement is reached in court.” 

“A little more talk like that, junior, and you’ll be free and paying me for my wasted years.” 

“That lovely body should never be wasted in a nurse’s uniform.”

REVIEW: 
It’s winter in New York, and one of Nurse Beth Kane’s patients is successful actor and playwright Neil Callum, hospitalized for a broken leg after he fell down the icy steps of a friend’s house on East 64th Street. He is always saying charmingly cantankerous things like, “You should be an actress. You’re pretty enough and apparently without any common sense as well. An infallible combination.” 

He’s supposed to be wintering in the Bahamas, at the hotel he owns in Nassau, but of course this darned leg is keeping him penned up in frosty Manhattan. He’ll be discharged in a week, however, and he wants Beth, the prettiest nurse on the staff, to go with him to manage his recuperation. Conveniently, Beth’s boyfriend, Dr. Jim, drops the bombshell over a dinner date that he’s engaged to a secretary back home, which he just forgot to mention up till now, and that he just got a letter from her for the first time in a year. Turns out she’s been locked away in a tuberculosis sanatorium, and he feels compelled to rush back to her side. So Beth is a free woman. Now if only she could afford a trip to Nassau … enter the registered letter from an attorney’s office on 38th Street. One of her patients, who died a year ago, has left her $10,000. It’s not at all clear why she needs this inheritance to make the trip, since Neil is paying her way and a salary, and has offered to allow her to stay on at his hotel at a reduced rate when he’s well. But we have to find some way to fill the pages, and now she can discuss investments with her friends and date the attorney who gave her the check. 

Despite the back cover blurb, in Nassau Beth really has little to do with Neil, who insists right away that he can manage everything on his own, and he is never a serious contender for her affections. So she’s left to party with Dr. Steve Craig, who works too much at the local hospital for her to consider him a serious romantic possibility though he is a divine dancer, and Karl Main, a talented pianist with a serious personality disorder. The second time she meets Karl, he tells her that she had “better let any interested parties know that you’re in love with me.” If he’s not telling her how charming he is, he’s running down his job, the “dump” where he works, and even himself—he warns her he is a rogue “without principle.” He drives way too fast and is frequently in “one of his bitter moods.” Beth worries about him, thinking, “he had an inner desire to destroy his life.” And she goes out with him whenever he calls, although “she couldn’t exactly explain why.” 

Beth eventually becomes friends with Karl’s ex-fiancée Diana Wilson when the two women, Dr. Steve, and Karl hustle off to Iguana Island to help stem an epidemic of St. Louis encephalitis there. Diana is broken-hearted over her breakup with Karl, and has quit drinking in an effort to win him back. Minutes after advising Diana that if she talks to Karl they may be able to patch things up, Beth ponders whether she should marry Karl herself, the two-faced bitch. Though she has never expressed any sort of love for Karl, just “fondness and pity,” she “still wasn’t certain whether it was Karl or Steve who held the key to her heart.” She thinks that perhaps she could give Karl “a calm guiding hand” to help him make the most of his talents, which will surely make for a lasting and successful marriage. In the remaining 15 pages, she saves Diana from a coma by digging deep into her years of training as a nurse and screaming until help comes, returns to her job at the hospital in New York, and out of the clear blue “realized now how much she loved” the young fella who turns up on her doorstep, vowing to change his ways. Bleah. 

The writing is strangely bipolar. We frequently receive humorous quips from Neil with virtually every utterance that drops from his lips, yet the prose outside the quotation marks is fairly leaden; it’s almost as if author Dan Ross, here writing as Rose Dana, got a little help with his lines. (And I couldn’t help but notice that one of Beth’s patients is referred to as “the dark girl” exactly 13 times in the 14 pages on which she appears, making me wonder just what was up with that.) The author loves Manhattan and is constantly giving us locations for the action, such as “Beth Kane came up the steps from the subway station at Seventh Avenue and Fiftieth Street,” “her tiny third floor apartment only a couple of blocks from Washington Square,” “Andy’s was a small restaurant on 49th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues.” We certainly spend a lot of time there for a book ostensibly about a nurse in Nassau, and it’s enjoyable enough to follow Beth around the city. But once she gets to the Bahamas, her fretting over Karl is just perplexing, considering what an unstable ass he is, and the story falls off a cliff. If you love New York yourself, that might give you reason to read this book, but otherwise, either avoid it completely or just put it down once the big white cruise ship leaves the Hudson River and the Manhattan skyline passes over horizon.