Nurse Molly

By Marjorie Norrell, ©1964

Cover illustration by Bern Smith

After Molly Patterson was jilted, she was determined never to trust a man again. But she was a very attractive girl, and more than one man was anxious to make her change her mind. Was Molly going to be able to stick to her decision?

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“It never pays to run away from anything, not really. It, whatever it is, has a dreadful habit of catching up with you sooner or later, and it usually turns out it wouldn’t have been one half so dreadful if you’d stopped and faced it out in the beginning.”

REVIEW:

Molly Patterson introduces herself to us as a bit of a moron: She’s about to quit her career, less than a year old, to marry a man whom it does not take a reader experienced in VNRN tropes to recognize as an ass—but then, it’s seldom that these men aren’t obvious from the outset, though it’s not clear to me why it always needs to be so, and why the heroines aren’t as clear-eyed as us readers. Is this lazy writing? An author’s low opinion of her readers’ intelligence? But anyway, as the curtain rises, Guy Vale is not listening as Molly speaks, his “thin, too-clever face touched for a fleeting moment by a thin smile, then the previous scowl was back,” “his dark grey eyes wearing the cold expression she hated. ‘I don’t know what made me ask you to marry me,’” he tells her, right there on the first page. The only reason the ring doesn’t hit him in the eye is that he hasn’t given her one—oh, wait, that’s not how she feels at all! She offers to take this really fabulous job she’s seen advertised to help with expenses, but he explodes that she will not work! And besides, “anyone with a grain of common sense” would not want that job, which “sounds like something out of a story book—for five-year-olds,” he sneers.

Shockingly, Molly is completely devastated—she faints, actually—when Guy breaks off with her (by letter, the louse) less than two weeks before the wedding to chase a wealthy heiress, so Molly ends up taking the job after all. Also strangely, she is insulted when her new colleague nurse Annie Hart assumes that Molly “would forsake her career for the first bit of masculine attention which came her way.” To her credit, she instantly recognizes her own hypocrisy in that she was about to do exactly that for Guy, but goes no further in her introspection, merely stating that “I’m not interested in men. I’m over the love virus, once and for all time.” You bet, kid.

Enter Paul Thanet, barrister, and son in a very wealthy family that anchors the very small town she’s moved to for this new job in the north of England, far from her former life. He’s kind and solicitous, and very helpful when who should turn up but—brace yourself, don’t want you fainting like stalwart Nurse Molly—Guy Vale with his lady friend-employer Monica Blessingbourne, on an expedition to strip-mine a really beautiful, enchanted piece of the neighborhood that was sold after the son contracted polio and his prolonged illness and ensuing disability proved very costly (this book being written before the advent of the vaccine and the National Health Service).

Honestly, there’s not much more to the story than that—Paul sees Guy forcing a kiss on Molly, saying he loves her but not enough to give up his pursuit of Monica’s money, the romantic fool—and there’s a bit of frigidity to be overcome after that, figuratively and literally, after Molly falls through the ice at a skating party, just having rescued Monica from the same predicament, and as she wakes, Paul comes in the room and in his second sentence tells Molly she’s giving up her career again, a lousy way of proposing, we quickly find.

The characters, especially the Thanet family, are well-drawn and charming, and it’s a pleasure to spend a few hours with them, as is to be expected in a book by Marjorie Norrell, and in a rare treat she is giving us with Paul Thanet a love interest who actually deserves to be one. The problem with this book is that it wants Molly to be a strong, resourceful, confident go-getter quick to leap into action—yet she is even quicker to leap out of her career the instant a man darkens her doorstep. How can any reader with any common sense reconcile these polar opposites? Can we cut to the epilogue in which a defeated and joyless Molly is in the kitchen with a screaming infant on her hip, two toddlers pulling at her skirt, a mostly empty bottle of gin on the detritus-strewn breakfast table and a copy of The Feminine Mystique in her raw, work-worn hand? In the end, I feel like I’ve been reading propaganda intended to lull the female masses into a deluded trance, to lure them into becoming willing participants in their own oppression. If I’d had a say in it, I’d have named this book Throw off Your Shackles, Nurse Molly! in the hope that Molly might stop letting men decide her life for her. But somehow I don’t think Marjorie Norrell has that particular flavor of Kool-Aid in her refrigerator.

Clinic Nurse

By Adelaide Humphries, ©1958
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

After three years at an exclusive girls’ school, Susan Randall decided to finish her education by taking a course in physical therapy at the University. Upon graduation, Susan threw herself wholeheartedly into her work as a physical therapist in a New York clinic. It was incidental to Susan that handsome Jon Crawford, whose small daughter was a patient at her clinic, was a very rich man. In Susan’s scheme of things, Jon was no more important than her young neighbor, Ray Farrell, disabled and embittered by a serious accident. Through her skill, perhaps she could bring Ray back to health …

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“How could anyone want to be a nurse? Why would anyone want to be around sick people all the time? Listening to them moan and groan …”

“Some people claimed the present generation was wild, with rock ’n’ roll and all.”

“Forgive me for saying so, Susan, but I certainly wouldn’t want you to practice on me if I were a patient!”

“When you grow up, you stop having birthdays; especially if you’re a girl. Girls don’t want people to know they are getting older. After they reach twenty-one, they stay there—for a while, anyway.”

REVIEW:
Susan Randall has been attending a women’s college when she decides that a liberal arts degree is not really what she wants. She’s decided to leave Meredith College and transfer to another school where she can study to become a nurse specializing in physical therapy. This decision comes as a devastating blow to her fashionable mother, Mrs. Randall: “ ‘Columbia!’ she exclaimed in a horrified voice. ‘But that’s a coeducational school, Susan. Why would a girl like you want a diploma from Columbia when she could get it from one of the most exclusive women’s colleges in the country? And what on earth is Physical Therapy?’ ”

Mrs. Randall is constantly pushing Susan to dress better, wear her hair more stylishly, and date the right men—because winning the right husband for her daughter is her raison d’être. As such, she scores the lion’s share of the best lines, such as when she describes a friend of Susan’s: “She looked positively frumpy, like the sort of girl who had always been a wall-flower and would never catch a husband no matter how hard she—or her mother—tried.” Because Susan lives at home, we’re treated regularly to these sorts of harangues, and toward the end of the book I started to marvel that they still retained their humor and freshness, a tip of the hat to author Adelaide Humphries.

Susan has been friends with this boy down the street, Ray Farrell. Ray had an unfortunate accident when he fell from a telephone pole—he was working as a lineman—and broke both his legs. He’s been unable to walk since then, but Susan is convinced that with a little PT, Ray can rule the world. Indeed, once she has graduated and gotten a job, she persuades the spinster nurse who runs the physical therapy clinic to take on Ray as a pro bono patient, and soon he’s up and hobbling around, his limp becoming increasingly less noticeable. To show his gratitude, Ray stops calling Susan for dates.

But not to worry, there’s this little girl at the clinic, Bitsy, who’s been paralyzed by polio. Her father, Jon Crawford, is a single man in possession of a good fortune, who certainly must be in want of a wife. Indeed, he soon proposes to Susan, but she is only shocked: “This was absurd! Asking her to marry him when they had only met three times! The whole idea was ridiculous.” He is completely up-front about the fact that he does not love her, but nonetheless tries to persuade her by parroting Mrs. Randall’s sentiment that “every girl wants to be married,” and by saying he would permit her to continue working—with Bitsy, but Susan could also “give a few hours a week to the clinic. Most women seem to want some outside interest, say a pet charity, or something of the sort, after they marry.” Though Susan isn’t terribly impressed—“every woman wanted to be loved for herself”—she still thinks that “any proposal of marriage was an honor,” and continues to date him, even if she is partly creeped out by him.

That’s really about all there is to the plot of this book—Susan dating Jon, occasionally seeing Ray, working with Bitsy. You will not be surprised to learn that Susan’s affections increasingly turn toward Ray, just as her feeling of obligation to Jon—and even more to Bitsy—deepens. So how will we get Susan off the hook? Why, bring back Bitsy’s “dead” mother, of course—it turns out she was an opera singer who took a part in an opera on the West Coast, and was promptly served with divorce papers accusing her of desertion. Now, thankfully, Mom has come to her senses: “I no longer care about singing; I don’t believe I will ever sing again.” So she’s now eligible to resume her role as wife and mother. Phew!

With Jon and Bitsy off her back, Susan is now free to worry about the fish that got away: “Lately there were times when Susan, in looking ahead, wondered if her work would always be enough. It could be for someone like Miss Armstrong, but Susan wasn’t certain she had that much fortitude.” Because even strong women have their breaking points, and Mrs. Randall’s truism is ringing in our ears: “I never heard of a young girl who didn’t want to get married! It’s unnatural!” Re-enter Ray, who just got a promotion in the personnel department at work. “I’ll be able to take care of a wife now,” he tells Susan. He thinks that in a year or so he should be able to swing one—is Susan interested in the job? To her credit, she says, “If you’ll hurry up and ask me, Ray, we could get married right away. I can go on working at the clinic—lots of wives do, you know. Together we can manage until you become, if not the president of the company, at least one of the bigwigs. You will, you know, with a wife to help you.” He’s so pleased by this that he responds, “Of course I wouldn’t ask you to give up your work when it means so much to you, Susan. Not for a while, anyway.”

We can give partial credit to Adelaide Humphries for pursuing the idea that a woman working is acceptable, even after marrying—up to a point. It seems that once the children are born you really have to abandon that sort of foolishness. The book is not badly written and is entertaining enough, but there’s just not all that much there. What it has is pleasant, but don’t plan on making a meal of it; it’s more of a light snack, like a dish of salted peanuts to accompany your cocktail.

Nurse's Masquerade

By Jean Carew (pseud. Jane Corby), ©1964

Never in her nursing career had lovely Cara Merrill received so strange a request. But Brent Butler was so persuasive that she reluctantly agreed to accompany him to the fabulous Butler estate and pretend to be his debutante fiancée. Cara’s real purpose, Brent told her, was to watch over his elderly uncle whose health had been mysteriously failing. Brent was suspicious of his handsome cousin Paul—and when both men declared their love for her, Cara had to make the most important decision of her life!

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTE:
“When you’re in love, the eyes do get shinier.”

“Seaking of fireworks, you should have seen the display Dad put on when he heard I’d ordered a topless bathing suit!”

“If two people are in love, there’s no use to discuss the pros and cons of the future like a Philadelphia lawyer.”

REVIEW:
Cara Merrill is bored with working as a nurse at a New York City hospital. She’s only 22, and presumably has only been there for a year or two—she’d better get married quick so she can give up her job permanently and become a housewife. In the meantime, however, she’s saved up some money so she can sleep late, go window shopping on Fifth Avenue, and take drives into the country. But the money is running out, and she needs a new job. So she sends a “rather flippant note” in response to an ad in the paper seeking a nurse who is “experienced, blonde, willing to live in the country (large estate).” Why she needs to be blonde is never addressed, but her facetious response surprisingly wins her an interview. Even more surprisingly, though she opens the interview with Brent Butler by scolding him about his unusual ad, he offers her the job. The position entails pretending to be his fiancée and going to stay for a month at Soundings, his Uncle Josh’s Long Island estate, to find out if Josh is being poisoned. Josh hates doctors, so Brent can’t just take Josh to see one, and instead has concocted this scheme to get him medical observation on the sly.

Cara agrees to the plan, and before you know it, she is en route to the estate in a shiny new beige convertible with a huge sapphire on her hand, both courtesy of her faux beau. Cara is to pretend she is a debutante, which means only gussying up her language. “ ‘It’s a …’ Cara began, and stopped. She had been going to say ‘good,’ but remembered her debutante status and changed it for the livelier, ‘a keen custom, I think.’ ” Naturally, everyone in the house is totally fooled, even if she has never played golf or tennis, can’t sail very well, has never left New York, knows way too much about concussions, and wears dungarees and a green and white plaid nylon frock, the very idea of which send shivers down my spine.

Soundings is a large unkempt mansion with “a vaguely sinister air about it,” which seems to stem largely from its color: “Who ever heard of painting a mansion brown?” Uncle Josh has been bound to a wheelchair for years from polio, but is otherwise in good health—except for these attacks in which he feels “squeamish” and appears sallow and drawn, which always seem to come on after dinner. The suspects include Josh’s sister Susan and her nine-year-old daughter Linda, who have just returned to the States from their plantation in Haiti. Brent’s cousin Paul, a “perennial college boy type,” flirts madly with Cara, making Brent look at her with squinty eyes. Diane Forbes, an old pal of Brent’s, is hanging around the house, apparently determined to win Brent for herself, which makes Cara green with envy. There’s a lot of talk about how neither one of them means a whit to the other, but we know differently, don’t we, readers?

When Paul takes Cara sailing one afternoon and they are late returning home, Cara and Brent have a fight on the terrace, and she gives him back the ring and drives back to her Greenwich Village apartment—only to hitch a ride with Brent back again four days later because Josh had asked her to come to the July 4th festivities. Once there, Cara is growing increasingly concerned because Linda has created a voodoo doll of Diane. “Cara stood as if turned to stone. This was no childish whim!” For someone who doesn’t believe in black magic, she sure gets worked up about it. If it were me, I’d be more concerned about how Linda keeps going on about murdering Diane: “I’m going to kill Diane. I hate her!” Instead, Cara dishes out a treacly lecture: “If we want to hurt another person, and if we have evil thoughts about them, we really hurt only ourselves.” But she should be biting her tongue. Linda tosses her Diane doll into the pool, and a few hours later the phone rings—Diane has driven off a bridge into the river! She’s not dead yet, but maybe we can fish that doll out and try stabbing it with Linda’s “machete,” a silver letter opener!

For Linda’s next act, she concocts a potion out of ground beetles, soy sauce, and rum to feed to Uncle Josh to make him well again. The other adults are banished from the library while Linda, wearing a red scarf around her head and a pillow case as a dress, holds a private ceremony with Josh. Cara feels the sense of menace of the estate stronger than ever, and is shivering on the terrace and tearing her handkerchief to shreds while Paul chain smokes, Brent paces, and Susan clasps her hands tightly in her lap. Even the butler is poised at the door, ready to dash inside. What exactly are they afraid of? And if everyone there thinks this is such a terrible idea, why are they allowing the child to go through with it?

Linda’s voodoo works again, but not as she had planned—Uncle Josh drops with a massive heart attack. Cara springs into action, immediately asking the butler to put Josh to bed—apparently the nearby hospital isn’t a suitable option—and donning the uniform and cap she has brought with her. Josh is saved, and the butler gratuitously reveals that Josh’s “well-publicized attitude toward the medical profession was mainly a pose.” Why he would pretend such a thing? The poisoning angle is never mentioned again, and Cara is engaged just pages later, at the Fourth of July fireworks.

It’s a quick read, and not terribly painful, though the loose ends do flap annoyingly. I was somewhat perplexed by all the bizarre relationships that end by passing unremarked. Is jealousy supposed to be the same as love? Is Susan, who has dismissed Cara’s concerns about Linda, to blame for her daughter’s transformation into a (somewhat successful) witch doctor? And what about the voodoo—is it just coincidence, or is it supposed to be real? I’m left with more questions than satisfactory answers on the last page of this book. Really, the best thing about it is the cover—but even this, when we are all but beaten over the head with our heroine’s blonde tresses (they match her car!), leaves you wondering.