House of Hate

By Dorothy Fletcher, ©1967 

The stately mansion of the Thibaults held more than art and music. More than beautiful people … it held vicious undercurrents of fear and frustration. When Nurse Norma Theale came there to live, she was the catalyst. Around her gathered the storm, to burst in shattering fury. Because she was there, someone had to die. Would it be Norma herself Whose side was she on? Who was the enemy? Only Norma could find out—if she could survive the storm!

GRADE: A-

REVIEW:
This book is wicked smart (I can say that because I grew up in New Hampshire using that expression before it started appearing in ad campaigns). When you pick it up, I hope your French is not too rusty, or that you have a good translation app at the ready, though you’ll have to go farther afield to learn that crotte de bique means nanny-goat droppings. You might also need Wikipedia as well, to research Iras (the second lady in waiting in the Shakespeare play Antony and Cleopatra), Rouault (an Expressionist French painter), and Sidney Carton (the hero of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens). (If you understand the reference to Berenson’s theory of intuitional knowledge, let me know, because I could never figure it out.) But if this book was more intelligent than me, it is certainly not too dense to make for a lovely, enjoyable read. 

Norma Theale is a 26-year-old nurse who begins our story by attending a concert at Lincoln Center to hear the Violin Concerto in D by Tchaikovsky played by violin virtuoso and heartthrob Nicholas Thibault. She’s about to interview for a job caring for his mother, Victoire Thibault, who is at death’s door at 68 from some unspecified illness that sporadically gives her fits of stupor. She’s drawn to the job because she is a true music aficionado who can identify and chat very knowledgeably about composers and artists, and would be living “under the same roof as the dark god, the legendary enfant terrible of the musical world. The celebrated, gifted artist, the withdrawn, controversial personality who fascinated music lovers and press with his disinclination to conform to type.” Furthermore, she’s completely fluent in French, which the immigrant family lapses into now and again; how an impoverished orphan came by all this education is never explained.

Norma arrives at the mansion on Fifth Avenue somewhere north of the Met, and the property is lovingly and meticulously described, “a darkly glowing jewel,” so it doesn’t exactly fit with the “House of Hate” title. The other problem with the title is that the people who live there are nice—matriarch Victoire, Victoire’s her 17-year-old niece Simone, her daughter Michelle, and Michelle’s husband Henri, are all very kind to Norma. Only Nicholas is cold and aloof, possibly because the rest of the family does tend to pick on him a lot. It’s revealed that he was an unwanted child, possibly the result of a husband-on-wife rape; Madame, in one of her delirious spells, thinks she’s pregnant with Nicholas and shouts, “I will not have the baby. When I bore him Michelle I loved him. I cannot bring his child into the world now. Conceived in hate, nourished in bitterness and loathing—” And though Nicholas is a world-renowned concert violinist, his family does not appreciate his career; they think that “what they did, the family considered work; what Nicholas did was simply fritter away his time on the violin, giving a concert now and then but hardly earning his keep.” Curiously, despite his fame, he has no money at all, and is dependent upon a stingy allowance from his wealthy but tight-fisted mother. The constant barbs from the family, the lack of love, and his inability to escape have made him a quiet, angry man, “frozen with anger and resentment,” Norma thinks, deciding, “A person could be pushed too far.”

But when Norma demonstrates her knowledge and interest in Nicholas’s music, correcting him that it wasn’t Busoni he was playing when she first entered the house but Mendelssohn, he takes an interest in her. He accompanies her on her daily walks, and they window shop and hunt for baklava. Their relationship warms realistically, particularly during a sweet afternoon in which she, Simone, and Nicholas play music together. But then two paintings go missing from the family’s art gallery, and Nicholas is accused of stealing them. Next Norma sees someone bending over Madame in her bed in the middle of the night, and Norma becomes convinced that Nicholas is trying to kill his mother. The climax comes on the opening night of a show at the gallery, when Norma is drugged and another murder attempt is made—during a lightning storm, of course!

The problem with these Gothic murder mystery nurse romances (and there does seem to be such a genre; see Matravers Hall, Nurse Missing,  Nurse at Mystery Villa, Nurse Incognito, Nurse Jean’s Strange Case, Nurse on Nightmare Island) is that they usually stink (I’ve given out two C’s and two D’s among the six). Happily, here we have a quiet gem. The book is sprinkled with a gentle humor that does not translate well for the Best Quotes section, and if only slightly moody and mysterious, the unfolding of Norma’s feelings is prettily described. Its only real flaw is that the author seems torn between painting a luxurious, elegant building and an eerie backdrop for her tale of mystery and love, making discussions of the house as “a beautiful horror,” “a prison, a cauldron of smoldering passions” with “gloom in the wide corridor” completely unconvincing. But ultimately, this is easily the best of this particular sub-sub-sub genre, another lovely offering from the masterful writer Dorothy Fletcher, who, when she is on, is easily one of the best.

Hotel Nurse

By Tracy Adams
(pseud. Sofi O’Bryan), ©1964
Cover illustrations by Lou Marchetti 

When pretty nurse Kay Mercer agreed to take a part-time job at the luxurious Hanes hotel, she found herself in a new world. Here, in the plush, elegant hotel was a way of life so gay and glamorous that it seemed to have everything she had missed in the grim halls of Deepwood Hospital. And there was handsome, gifted young pianist, Johnny Riels. He wanted to make this Kay’s world too. But could she forget the life she come to know and understand at the hospital? And how about the young doctor who had broken her heart?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“The day she had to work to hang on to her guy, as Madge said would be the day she’d turn in her womanhood badge.”

“They were all like this man during the first few hours in a hospital, apprehensive, suspicious as to what was being done to and for them, and afraid, terribly afraid unless they were well informed. And few patients are well informed, Kay often thought, because it’s easier not to know the truth sometimes.” 

“I’m going to do a few tests, find a fancy name for what you’ve got and then send you a bill.”

“What the hell kind of nurse are you anyway?”

“Why don’t you try to hang onto yourself until your doctor completes his tests?”

“I’m indestructible. I’m a nurse.”

“‘I’ve got things to ask you, Nurse,’ he said. ‘Like what to do about blood pressure when a guy’s kooky about a girl and all that!’”

“‘I’m a nurse.’ It was more than a word; it was a badge; it was honor and duty and love and fulfillment for any woman.”

REVIEW:
Kay Mercer RN is, in a word, stubborn. This can be a useful trait, as it was for our poor orphaned heroine, but she calls it “pride”: “You have to have lots of pride to wear hand-me-down clothes, to go to high school without extra money, and more pride to borrow from a girlfriend for lunch hoping you’d get a baby-sitting job to pay it back. Kay’s determination to get an education, to enter nursing school and graduate had also been sustained by her pride and the wish to not give into [sic] circumstances but to fight and get what she wanted most out of life.” And one of the things she wants most out of life is Dr. Mark Bell. We don’t really get to know Mark, because the first time we clap eyes on the alleged heartthrob, he’s squiring TV starlet Penny Adair, who is doing research for her upcoming role as a nurse, around the hospital. 

Unfortunately, in addition to stubbornness a.k.a. pride, Kate is also mighty jealous. This portends an ominous future for the lovebirds. Mark is so busy showing Penny around the hospital that he’s not free to talk to Kay about a part-time job she’s been offered: Her friend Ruth, who is heading off for six-week (!!!) honeymoon, is desperate for Kay to fill her part-time nights-and-weekends job while she’s away or she’ll lose it. Working for a 1,100-room hotel with a full medical staff—what mega-luxury hotel is complete without an operating room?—is not all glamour; “A guy in the kitchen whacks off a finger, we have to be there to pick up the pieces.” Literally.

Kay, won over by the allure, wants to take the job, knowing it will bring in extra money so her little sister Betty, in college and with a part-time job herself, could quit working and focus on her studies. But Mark’s reaction to the news of her six-week gig is that of a possessive lout; he implies that he will mention her moonlighting to the director of nursing, who might kibosh the deal, and adds, “I don’t like you fooling around some hotshot hotel. I have a little enough time to be with you; this means I’ll never be able to make a date with you.” Kay immediately spots his hypocrisy, thinking, “last night he’d been busy with Penny Adair or when they might have had that hour or so together. It was all right for him to take on extra-curricular activities such as Penny Adair, but not for her to do it!” The snarky remarks tumble from her lips, and half a page later, she’s storming off and he’s not following after her. Or calling, or dropping by her apartment, or speaking to her in the hospital hallway. “Stubbornly, however, she clung to the thought that in this instance she was right and he was obstinate.” Which doesn’t help as the days go by.

What does help, however, is for meeting the hotel’s piano player, Johnny Riels. Johnny regularly presses Kay into a corner table with a cocktail after work while he performs for the lounge crowd, then takes her to tiny, exclusive jazz club until 3:00 a.m. This is not a woman who believes in sleeping. But the glamour of it all! “Kay heard music such as she had never heard, improvised music, sweet and low, sad and haunting. There was jazz that tingled, and time was forgotten as the men played because they loved every sound and every tone that came out of their instruments.” So she decides, “From now on it was going to be glamour and excitement and Johnny by her side.”

Eventually Mark turns up at the lounge to see Kay, for the first time they’ve spoken in five weeks, and proposes marriage—though he still has to live at the hospital, for some reason, for another six months, until he finishes his residency. He plunks a ring on the table—and then Johnny comes over and kisses her on the mouth. Mark, not surprisingly, decides to head for the door. “Let him go then; let him stalk off like a spoiled brat,” she thinks to herself. “What had he to offer her, ever? Waiting, hoping, planning and then who was sure they’d ever get married? Who could be sure Penny wouldn’t come into the picture again and make him change his mind?”

It seems unlikely this will happen, given the genre, and equally unsurprising is that calamity that strikes—but here, unfortunately, the calamity is that a small plane has crashed into the building. In the post–9/11 world, it’s PTSD-inducing and, less importantly, unrealistic; the floor where the plane has crashed is still largely intact, with just a small fire, and the pilot’s body is undamaged enough to determine that it’s dead. This scene also a study in what not to do in a mass trauma situation; the hotel doctor focuses on a woman with a broken leg and worries about a blood clot instead of concentrating on victims who might die if not treated immediately. It’s over in two pages, though, and the hospital MD prescribes for his staff, passing around paper cups of brandy and saying, “Chuck-a-lug and that’s an order.” He’s not the only one: Mark shows up at her apartment and tells her, “It’s time I stopped being patient with you and started giving orders,” he says, though I don’t think the cold shoulder counts as being patient, and don’t get me started on the “giving orders” bit. Instead of slapping him, Kay says, “Mark, I was just going to say the same thing.” Any esteem I might have had for Kay melted away when she tells him that while she had been working on the crash victims, “I even prayed you’d come charging in, like they do in the movies, or the Penny Adair television things, you know? Then you’d rescue me and we’d cling together.” Except that she was a rescuer, not a victim.

Though she’s eager to be saved—and ordered around—by her man, when Johnny shows up and tells her to quit her job and marry him, she’s not convinced. “I don’t dig that medicine jazz, sweetie,” he says, adorably. “I want my woman warm and soft and smelling of perfume, not antiseptic. I want you to kick the habit and come out to the west coast with me. I can give you plenty to take care of—me.” As appealing as his language is, she tells him she’s “from another world” and slips out of the club while he’s playing a song for her, deciding that for him “love was as make-believe as the tinsel decorations,” which seems heartless and convenient.

Overall, it’s not a terrible book. Even if she shows no growth of her character during the story, Kay is a strong, independent woman—well, up to the end, anyway. The book demonstrates a lot of respect for the nursing profession, and the writing overall was pretty good. This seems to be the last of the three nurse novels written by Sofi O’Bryan (see also Washington Nurse and Spotlight on Nurse Thorne), both in terms of chronology and in reviewed books, and I am happy to report she’s going out on a high note.

Nurse in London

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

“I want you, Luv,” said Lee Watson. He was the star of The Tree of Life, the top rock group in England and America, and he lay in a hospital bed, victim of a crippling motorcycle accident. In pain and despair he had clung to Nurse Holly Brooks. Now, he was going back to London to resume his career. “I love you, Holly,” he told her. “Come with me.” And Holly came because he needed her … stepping, unaware, into a frenzied, psychedelic landscape where The Tree of Life flourished, and she was a stranger.

GRADE: C 

REVIEW:
Lee Watson is the creative genius behind The Tree of Life, a rock group that “the young patients on our floor rate up along with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones,” except that this music is “country baroque. Banjo meets harpsichord.” Whatever that is. He and his band have come to the U.S. on tour, and while out for a ride one day on his donorcycle, Lee missed the curves of Topanga Canyon and went over the edge, resulting in injuries that insisted on the amputation of both legs. Though “he hasn’t lost his talent,” the accident set him back on his heels, if you don’t mind the metaphor, and he’s become reliant on Nurse Holly Brooks for his emotional as well as physical recovery. 

Interestingly, we meet here an orthopedic doctor who is concerned that his patient will become addicted to opioids (a rare species in this day and age) and who works with Holly to wean Lee off the morphine he’s been getting. “I am not so certain, not certain, at all, that our young man is unfamiliar with analgesic drugs,” he tells Holly. “We cannot risk addiction.” His solution is to administer an IV placebo, but guess what?

Lee is a volatile individual who one minute is screaming in Italics, “There isn’t going to be any tomorrow! It’s over! Can’t you stop playing your idiotic games and see that it’s all over?” and the next minute he’s going on “like a gushing fountain” about a proposal that his group give a free concert in a London park. He’s a bit manic, if you ask me, but no one else seems to have noticed. In the first scene between Lee and Holly, he tells her—hot on the heels of him rejecting the pills and begging for “a shot”—that he loves her and wants her to come back to London with him. His orthopod agrees: “To prevent him from becoming addicted to a narcotic, to keep his morale high enough so that he does not refuse to follow the routine of his exercises; this appears to be within your power,” he tells her. “Your presence at this time could mean the difference between recovery and total collapse.” But no pressure, luv. And, of course, contrary to all teachings about addiction; only the addict is responsible for their addiction. On Holly’s side, she feels “the flattery of being singled out by the exceptionally attractive idol of thousands of girls,” and has a “breathless sensation” over being invited. So off she goes, and her attitude about being able to save Lee does not bode well for either of them.

Dr. Glenn Raymond is the doctor who is taking over in England, and he quickly turns mean when Lee shouts for her in the middle of a press conference, “C’mon over and give us a kiss, pet. Give these ink-stained vultures something to write about.” Nonetheless, as Dr. Raymond continues to be “blunt, unsympathetic,” “smug and unpleasant,” Holly decides that she is falling in love with “this dictatorial, waspish man,” because nothing turns a woman on more than a man who is an asshole. Dr. Raymond suspects that Lee is on drugs, given his “mercurial” “manic-depressive” presentation. Furthermore, Lee won’t let anyone see his arms, and Glenn and Holly decide that Lee is “hooked on morphine,” provided to him by one of the groupies. They discuss getting him into drug rehab, but Holly thinks Lee will not cooperate. She wants to wait until after the big concert: “You can’t imagine what it means to him … a chance to prove that he isn’t a useless, unwanted cripple.”

The doctor stomps off, and Holly paradoxically decides that “whatever was done to save Lee had to be done quickly, and it had to be done, Holly decided, by herself alone.” She’s worried that it would be “an unforgiveable breach of ethics” because she would be “proceeding contrary to his orders,” but “all heroic acts were acts of defiance, were they not?” Lee’s monstrous egotism has apparently rubbed off on her. So she gets into a fistfight with the groupie who is dropping off the drugs. Lee’s manager stops the fight and throws out the groupie, and then a hellish night in which Lee suffers withdrawal ensues.

The next morning she summons Dr. Raymond. If Lee is not cured of his addiction that night, Holly recovers from her “arrogant conceit.” Dr. Raymond arranges to have Lee moved to rehab, but before he can accomplish this, Lee flies the coop. They tried to make him go to rehab, but he said no, no, no! He’s got to finish preparing for his big concert, see, and after that’s over, he’ll go, pinkie promise! Dr. Raymond comes over to yell at Holly some more, but after he’s done, and after he’s learned that Holly is not engaged to Lee, he warms up considerably and tells her that he’s in love with her. After some smooching, they decide to get married, because their one date and his subsequent horrible behavior have told her she needs to spend the rest of her life with him.

The concert goes off, and during the last number, Lee wheels himself offstage before the music has concluded. Holly has an ominous feeling and rushes after Lee, only to find that he’s shot himself dead in his dressing room. It’s soon revealed that Lee has left his entire substantial fortune to Holly, and Dr. Raymond trots out his Mr. Hyde personality again, accusing her of having pretended love for Lee to engaged and win his fortune. She dashes off to the airport, but it’s taking her so long to get a ticket that Lee’s manager, Bart, catches up with her. “You’re as bad as Lee, thinking you can run away from yourself!” he says, adding that Dr. Raymond had immediately realized, after hanging up on Holly, that he’d made a huge mistake, and had been trying to track her down ever since.

With a bit of time for backstory before the doctor catches up with them, Bart tells Holly that when he made his will, Lee had had to ask what Holly’s last name was, and mentions that Lee had been married twice before, the first time to an honest woman who’d had a son with him, and who had “kept hoping Lee would come around to see the boy someday. Fall in love with ’er again, if she didn’t annoy him.” Holly tells Bart that it’s was she and his Los Angeles doctor who had made an addict of Lee, but Bart shrugs that off, telling her that Lee had been high on speed at the time of his accident, and that his addiction was inevitable. By now the doc has found a parking spot and rushed into Heathrow to give her a kiss. Immediately she starts to plan “spending the rest of your life in a foreign land. Yet wouldn’t she be willing to live anywhere, for the remainder of her days, if she could be at Glenn’s side?” The terrible problem of her estate she decides to entrust to Bart to manage for her, never mind about helping out Lee’s good-hearted first wife or son, and they head off to get a wedding license and struggle with the burden of being millionaires. Poor kids.

Author Adele Maritano can crank out plenty of great sentences, but here she hasn’t given us anything for the Best Quotes section, and she’s lousy with plots, which is a tragedy for her and for us. Here she writes of addiction as if the attitude that the addict is helpless in the face of drugs is a new one; of course, in 1970 it may well have been, so we can’t blame her for that. But it’s tiresome to the more modern sensibility, especially when a professional like Holly is not with the program and falls into all the typical traps about her responsibility for Lee’s addiction or sobriety. It’s also dated in how it treats the musical genius of Lee; we are told that his brilliance endows him with “the superiority that permitted him to behave like a tyrant and get away with it.” Again, it’s not easy to swallow that perspective 50 years on or watch him abuse people who revere him. Here we have another of Maritano’s many mediocre works that offer little beyond a flashback to another time, which of itself is not really enough reason to pick up this book. There are other, better VNRNs that will take you to London (see An American Nurse in London, not to mention many of the Britain-based Harlequin nurse novels), so I advise you to turn in your ticket and catch a different flight.

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.

The New Nurses

Arlene Hale, ©1970
Cover illustration by Edrien King

Lynn Lawrence and Bobbi Wagner vowed to forget Chicago and devote themselves entirely to their nursing careers. Lynn was white, Bobbi, black, and Quiet Fairview General Hospital seemed an “island of contentment” until … Dr. Paul Hamilton appeared and charmingly, persistently, he began to break down Lynn’s resistance. Despite the memory of a shattered romance, Lynn knew she was beginning to fall in love again. While for Bobbi the attentions of handsome sax-player DeVore Johnson, were proving to be more of a distraction than she had planned. And just when she thought she had really left the ghetto behind, brother Johnny showed up in Fairview looking for trouble. Then a supervisor’s job opened up that both girls desperately wanted. Too late they realized that this sort of competition would threaten their careers, their friendships and their love affairs.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:“It’s all over, Dad. The break was clean. So clean that it is sterile, in fact. I’ll never be infected again.”

“In a way, Steve had been good training for her. She had learned a great deal about the male animal from her association with him, and Doctor Hamilton, when it was all said and done, was just another male animal.”

“I’m forty-two and single and darned glad of it. I’ve got no complaints and if I need something to warm my feet on a cold winter night, I can always get a hot-water bottle.”

“All landladies are a decent sort until you miss a month’s rent.”

“Was her poor, frozen heart beginning to thaw out at last?”

“There was never time for women in my life. I’ve paid for it in loneliness.”

REVIEW:
I deliberately avoided reading this book for a while because the cover illustration of that blonde woman with the big head put me off. The doctor smoking a pipe in the background (I’m always intrigued by the contradiction of a medico who smokes) and the unheard-of major character who isn’t white finally won me over, though—that and the fact that as soon as I get it over with I can tuck the book away and that big-headed woman won’t be staring vapidly at me from my to-read pile.

This is a tale of two nurses: Lynn Lawrence, who is blonde and blue-eyed; and Bobbi Wagner, who is not. The two are “as different as black and white,” in Bobbi’s words. “What a contrast there was. Bobbi was Negro, light-skinned and while not strikingly beautiful, she was nice-looking and the uniform suited her. Lynn was a golden blonde, with very blue eyes and a peaches-and-cream complexion. They were a startling combination.” They’ve been friends and roommates since nursing school in Chicago. Lynn has just left Chicago to escape a broken relationship with Steve, about whom we learn little over the course of the book, apart from the fact that he and Lynn are not getting married after all and Lynn’s crushed little heart will never live again. She’s pleaded with Bobbi to come with her, and Bobbi has agreed: She’s escaping too, but it’s from her little brother Johnny, a good-for-nothing mooch always tapping her for money since he can’t hold a job.

The two move in together, but they’re not all that close, and much is made of this throughout the book: “Though they were friends, there were some things that they had never fully shared with each other.” This is partly due to their different races, we are told. Lynn “didn’t know what it was like in the Harlem of Chicago and that was scarcely her fault. But all the same, it made a breech between them that perhaps they never would be able to span.” It’s also due to the fact that Bobbi can be a bit of a bitch, with “moods … sometimes as black as her skin.” And now she’s in a real funk about Johnny, who soon shows up, grafts himself onto the girls’ couch, and seems content to moulder there indefinitely. Lynn professes not to mind, but Bobbi certainly does. She can’t actually kick Johnny out, though, because then he’ll go sponge off their parents, and “it would kill Dad if he knew the sort of man Johnny really was. Mamma would accept it quietly but it would put more lines in her face, more gray in her hair, more sadness in her eyes. They’d endured enough!” Then Bobbi hears about these robberies in town … and Johnny goes out only at night … and he wears all these flashy clothes …

Of course, we have to work in some romance for the two. Lynn starts dating Dr. Paul Hamilton, and Bobbi hooks up with DeVore Dunsmore, a groovy sax player in town for a six-month gig who wears “red socks, a red tie and had a matching red handkerchief in his breast pocket. His shoes were two black mirrors. A small diamond glittered on his left pinkie.” Did I mention that he’s a real swinging cat? Before long, DeVore hears that Johnny is involved in a gang called, quaintly, the Rovers, and he also hears that the Rovers are responsible for the robberies, which leaves Bobbi smoking cigarettes like a chimney, pacing the apartment, rudely rebuffing all Lynn’s efforts to help.

Meanwhile, the nursing supervisor is felled by a brain tumor, and now that job is up for grabs. Both Lynn and Bobbi want it, but Bobbi is convinced that she will never get it because she’s black. “Oh, if she could only get that super’s job! It would prove she was more than just that black girl from Chicago!” This makes her more than a little nasty to Lynn, and she accuses Lynn of dating the doctor in order to get the job, causing “the first serious rift of their friendship.” Johnny figures out what’s eating Bobbi, and attempts to cheer her up: “You know what’s wrong, don’t you? You forget where you’re from. You forget you’re just a black girl. Nothing’s going to change that, Bobbi. You’ll never make it. Because you’re black. You got to make your own luck when you’re black!” Thanks, bro.

One night Johnny doesn’t come home—he’s been beaten to a pulp by a bunch of unnamed men at the club where he and the Rovers hang out. Johnny refuses to say anything at all about the incident, but he swears to Bobbi on the Bible that he’s not involved in the robberies, so Bobbi knows he’s telling the truth, because even Johnny would never lie on the Bible. When pressed, he tells Bobbi that he got his clothes from a rich woman who liked him, and Bobbi is completely relieved: Her brother is not a thief, he’s a gigolo! Phew! Johnny is offered a more respectable job in the hospital, but he turns down this chance at redemption: “I’d just be cleaning up, doing the dirty little jobs. That’s not for Johnny Wagner!” That night he blows town without saying goodbye, so the questions of why he was beaten or what’s going to become of him is never resolved. You can’t help thinking that it’s only a matter of time before he’ll turn up again, and not exactly a changed man.

The gals’ love lives aren’t nailed down either, but Lynn gets the happier ending. She and Paul profess their love for each other, and while the ring isn’t on her finger at the end of the book, you know it won’t be long. DeVore likewise tells Bobbi he wants to marry her, and that she can move around the country with him as he plays with his band, getting jobs as a nurse everywhere she goes. “We’d have a swinging good time,” he tells her. “Be a vagabond nurse?” she snorts, and I can see the title of Arlene Hale’s next book. But Bobbi never claims to love DeVore, and she tells him there are things she has to do first, “and then later she would think about love, marriage, a home, and maybe even kids!” DeVore claims he’s going to hang around until she’s ready, but it’s unclear how he’s going to manage that when his gig runs out in a few months. So either she doesn't get the guy, or she sacrifices her own desires to marry a man she doesn't love and take on a lifestyle that doesn't seem to excite her.

Race is not something often addressed in a VNRN. In this book, we are encouraged to feel sympathy for the difficulties Bobbi faces—“the insults, the sly looks, the talk, the open prejudice,” including her perceived obstacles getting the supervisor job and even a decent apartment: “A lot of people don’t want to rent to Negroes,” Bobbi points out. The fact remains, though, that the two major black male roles are overwhelmingly stereotypical. DeVore is a decent guy, but that flashing diamond irks me just a bit. And while the white girl’s straightforward problems are quickly disposed of, Bobbi’s complex issues are punted into the future, and she does not get the VNRN heroine’s traditional—or the white character’s—happy ending. Even the issue of who gets the supervisor position, though resolved in a way that allows the friends to smooth things over, doesn’t address the fundamental issue: Could Bobbi ever hope to get promoted, or is prejudice working against her in the hospital? So while this book attempts to tackle a tough issue in a fair way, in the end it says one thing but itself doesn't treat the two women equally.