Settlement Nurse

By Rosamund Hunt
(pseud. Miriam Lynch), ©1966 

Wealthy, attractive Nurse Rebecca Hazlett had no great love for the patients of “The Downs,” the slum area where Dr. Paul Coleman had his office, though being near Paul, despite the fact that he hardly noticed her, seemed to make it all worthwhile. But when she met Paul’s friend, handsome, enigmatic, politician Steve Pryor, she found herself eager to help in his fight to clean up the city—working with the poverty-stricken, going into the depths of the slums, mindless of the underworld dangers that surrounded her. Suddenly she realized her life had taken on a new meaning—but dare she confuse it with love?

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“No one was actually rich these days. She might have told him that high taxes and the maintenance of a place like the house of Larchmere Street did not give her parents much leeway.” 

REVIEW:
Wealthy Becky Hazlett is a child, just 21 years old (why must VNRN heroines be so alarmingly young?), fresh out of nursing school, which she had attended in part “because she had wanted to escape from the sort of life her mother had planned for her”—that of an upper-crust society wife—but also because she liked the challenge of it, and the knowledge that she was doing something “most people would find difficult or distasteful.” So, in short, it was most certainly not because she had any burning desire to help people, especially those less fortunate than herself.

Then why is she working in the Downs, the town’s slum, when she “never came into Folger Street without a feeling of distaste”? Well, silly, it’s because she’s in love with Dr. Paul Coleman, who for some unfathomable reason has decided to take up “the most difficult phase of the medical profession in a run-down section of the city where money was scarce and patients put the doctor’s bill at the very end of the list of necessary expenditures.” And why is she in love with Paul? “Because every other young, single, impressionable nurse in the hospital had yearned and speculated, Becky had become interested in him. Because so many other girls wanted him, she knew that she had to have him. It was a form of swimming upstream again.” Well, I guess there are worse reasons.

But needless to say, because otherwise this would be a short book, Paul has no interest in Becky. In classic VNRN fashion, “He never saw her as a person; merely as someone to help ease his heavy burden of duties.” Though  perhaps Becky isn’t being entirely honest with herself; “there was about her face a look of something like aloofness. And too much pride. She had heard herself described, during her training days, as a ‘snob’; and one of her instructors had call her ‘a spoiled brat.’” Perhaps her disdain for the people she works with is not invisible to Paul either.

Then a pal of Paul’s, Steve Pryror, stops by the clinic. He’s running against the forever incumbent for mayor, who has a grifty sort of administration that, according to Steve, helps enforce the poverty that keeps the Downs full, and he wants to change it. He wins the endorsements of Paul and therefore Becky, as well as financial donations from both. But when Steve then publishes an ad in the paper naming them both as financial supporters of his campaign, Becky’s genteel parents are shocked and embarrassed! Furthermore, this puts her in some physical danger from the goons of the Hardcastle administration, but ensuring Becky’s safety is taken up as a personal mission of local ex-con Robbie Hood (self-named, though Paul quips that Robbie “steals from the poor to give to himself”), and Robbie escorts Becky on her work errands, much to her mixed feelings, as she finds Robbie tedious and boring, but recognizes the usefulness of his protection. As her bodyguard, however, he meets her cousin Alicia Coatsworth, who has dropped by the family manse for an extended vacation, and soon Alicia is out on the town with Robbie, wearing clothes borrowed from Becky—and now there’s a photo in the paper of the pair in a seedy nightclub after hours, but the caption misidentifies Alicia as Becky.

Well, this is just too much for her parents, so Becky moves out of the house and into a shabby but clean house in the Downs, where an impoverished widow with two teens is compelled to rent rooms to meet expenses. Becky quickly enjoys being part of a warm, affectionate family so unlike her own, and living in the neighborhood begins to shift some of her condescending attitudes. As she chats up the young daughter, who is keen on becoming a nurse herself, Becky begins to realize her own shallowness and self-absorption. “She could feel no pride in herself as a person. She could see now how false had been her values and motives, how enormous her selfishness.”

Then there is a political rally by Steve after which he is savagely beaten by the current mayor’s thugs—which Becky witnesses along with a slightly deranged old woman who lives in the area. Becky treats Steve on scene, then specials him in the hospital in the evenings until he is out of danger.  Becky and the aged Miss Augusta Shelburne are now star witnesses in the prosecution, and in even more danger. Becky promptly moves Miss Shelburne into the house where she is living so the thugs won’t be able to find her, but unfortunately decides to take this crucial moment to move back home to the safety of her parents’ house, sadly abetted by Paul. “I’ll feel better when you’ve left the Downs behind,” he tells her, though he lives there himself and presumably always will, which will make him quite a hypocrite if and when he marries Becky and she moves in with him.

The rest of the story plays out in an easily predictable plotline, but I did appreciate that Becky is the rare VNRN character who actually grows over the course of the book, and not in an abrupt, unbelievable manner. It is told more than shown—“the change in her did not come overnight, and certainly it did not come easily,” we are told, with examples including her willingness to smile at others on the broken sidewalks—but we still have it nonetheless. My only disappointment with the story was Becky’s step backward when she chucks her independence to run home to Mom and Dad, who had never been particularly supportive of her career, to be “pampered and fretted over” by her parents and their extensive staff. If overall the book has no sparkling prose or even any good quotes to pull out, it’s still perfectly serviceable.

Nurse April

By Katherine McComb, ©1967

Maybe her kid brother was right, maybe April Bonner was a jinx. From her first day on the hospital staff as a full-fledged nurse, things began to happen. A mob rioted outside. A knife-waving fanatic invaded Emergency and seized April as a hostage. A baby was kidnaped from the nursery. Nurses’ training hadn’t prepared the tall, attractive redhead for anything quite like this. It also hadn’t prepared her for handsome young Dr. Ned Sparks, who didn’t mind if April became emotionally involved with him, though he seemed to be serious about someone else, but who warned her about becoming emotionally involved with any of her patients—a warning that came very close to being a tragic prophecy …

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“An R.N. in the family! A female who gives baths and bedpans to strange men—ugh!”

“What pretty girl doesn’t enjoy being stared at—or whistled at, for that matter?”

“You’re as pretty as a new stethoscope.”

“She knew he would be furious if he learned that Mrs. Norman had tried to shoot her, and later tried to wreck the car and kill them all.”

REVIEW:

I tell you, if you ever find out that April Bonner is a nurse at your hospital, pack your bags and run!! This “tall, lithe figure modeling a white nylon uniform, a small white cap perched smartly on her red-gold hair,” is a magnet for bad news, even for the ER, where she is sent her first day on the job. She gets a kid with an open tib-fib fracture after being hit by a car, a worker with chemical burns, and a gunshot victim whose treatment consists of stitching the bullet wounds closed. On her second day, there’s a mob rioting for never-specified concerns, and “mangled bodies” arrive in a constant stream. One of the rioters, looking for the leader of the gang, grabs April and holds a knife to her throat as Dr. Ned Sparks gives him a tour of every patient in the ED until he finds the leader’s corpse in the morgue. The man cries a bit, then pulls April out into the crowded street, where the mob is tear-gassed, but April is pulled to safety by Dr. Ned. Then, on her day off, Ned takes her to the beach, where he saves her from a rip tide that somehow manages to pull her out to sea when she tries to pick up a conch shell on the shore. And they almost get into a car crash on the way home. All this in just four days’ time.

One major source of excitement comes when a newborn is kidnapped after April puts him down for a nap, although April seems more upset about being blamed for the kidnapping than she is sympathetic for the frantic parents; she has “the tussle of her life” with the baby’s mother, who attempts to get out of bed to search the hospital for her missing son. But rest assured, April saves the day when she identifies the kidnapper after the police round up the usual suspects from their “list of women with mother complexes.” And we haven’t even scratched the surface of April’s fantastic exploits, either. There’s also a rollercoaster accident in which two teens fall from the car in front of April and both are killed (April pronounces one on scene and the other dies en route to the hospital); a car crash in which always-on-the-scene April pronounces three people dead and saves one from bleeding out by demanding a “clean white towel” (no other color will do, apparently) from one of the passengers and wrapping the patient’s head in it; a patient, driven crazy by an anonymous letter-writing campaign to make her think that April is trying to steal her husband, threatens April at gunpoint; and yet another car crash, this time with April actually in the car with the psychotic driver, after which April “hovered near death” from “a slight skull fracture and a few crushed ribs.” “Seems like you’re one of those people who always happen to be around wherever there’s trouble,” her brother Bob says, and he doesn’t know the half of it.

She’s also a magnet for the boys, and she is shocked that on her first day the interns are giving her “bold stares and wolf calls in the corridors,” and when she complains to Dr. Ned, he says, “I simply could not reprimand those interns for staring. I would probably have done the same thing myself.” It’s a horrible world the women in this book live in, where they are constantly judged on their appearance; one nurse is fired from her job because she “had a face as long as a donkey’s head, and ears as big,” and the nursing supervisor “went on with a chuckle, ‘the nurse would never take a beauty prize.’” Even April, speaking of her best friend Rita, says, “Rita arrived at April’s apartment in a tan pleated cotton dress that did nothing for her sallow complexion and only accentuated her large hips.” April saves another life when she takes charge and insists that Rita start “rolling on the floor to reduce your hips, and doing stooping exercises to flatten your tummy—and cutting out sweets. Then we’ll go shopping for some clothes with plain skirts, instead of those pleated things,” and she also dyes Rita’s hair and gives her weekly hairdos. And in no time flat Dr. Les Brown is proposing!

April is, unfortunately, a hypocrite. On the opening pages we hear about how April had, at the time of her own appendectomy, “caught a vision. She knew immediately, not what she wanted to be, but what she must be—a nurse. For three years she had dreamed of this moment, had worked toward it with all the strength of her young body and dedicated mind.” Yet once she’s clapped eyes on Dr. Ned, she’s ready to chuck it all: “She wanted only one thing—the love of one man. But she was slipping further and further away from that goal, as if the riptides of life were pulling her, dragging her under.” That may be true, but only because April is stupidly outraged when she tells Ned early on that he can’t be kissing her because he’s engaged to Eunice Frye, and he answers, “I’ve kissed a few pretty girls in my time, but I’ll swear on my Hippocratic oath that I’ve never asked one of them to marry me.” She immediately decides this means that he has decided he will never ask anyone to marry him, and again and again we’re reminded of her stupidity as she fumes along the lines of, “She had heard of men who could not tie themselves down to one woman, and he had practically admitted that he was one of them.” So if her constant snippy behavior to Dr. Ned leaves him disinterested, she only has herself to blame.

The writing here is choppy and comically bizarre, such as the description of one of April’s first ER patients: “It was a restaurant cook with three badly mangled fingers which had been caught in an electric meat grinder. Luckily, none had to be amputated.” As April’s adventures continue to pile up, the story seems increasingly outrageous; by the time the psycho patient pulled the revolver, I was giggling madly on the subway. April’s terrible dilemma over how to win Dr. Ned is solved by April herself after she comes out of her coma, when despite her broken ribs she flings her arms around his neck, pulls him close, and whispers, “I love you.” Her other terrible dilemma about having to quit her job after marriage—early on he’s monologuing, “I’m going to be head of my family, as well as breadwinner. That’s another trouble with these modern mothers. They bear a child, then turn it over to somebody—anybody—to bring it up while they take a job to make more money to buy more clothes, more automobiles, more household gadgets—things less important than the training of their child”—is solved when Ned decides to open a private office and magnanimously agrees to staff it with “Mrs. Ned Sparks.” Awww. Well, until Mrs. Ned Sparks becomes a mother. So overall, if you like the so-bad-it’s-good category, you should definitely add this strange volume to your library.

Nurse at the Fair

By Dorothy Cole 

(pseud. Frances Y. McHugh), ©1971 

Cover illustration by Allan Kass 

Pretty, auburn-haired Merilee Maxwell was happy in her position as nurse and in her love for tall, red-haired Dr. Kendall Ryder to whom she was secretly engaged. But suddenly the serenity of her world was threatened when TV-Western star Tex Howard was admitted to the hospital after being injured in a mysterious accident. Tex was dangerously attractive, and the way he set about working his charm on Merilee was enough to turn any girl’s head. It wasn’t until she was caught in an explosive incident at the local fair that Merilee realized just how dangerous was her relationship with the handsome singing cowboy. She had followed her heart and it had led her into trouble. Had she gone too far to turn back ... ? 

GRADE: A- 

BEST QUOTES: 

“She had hurried so, she knew her perky nurse’s cap was at a rakish angle on her bright auburn curls and that her face could use some powder.” 

“They never dared to look at each other when they were on duty for fear they would show how they felt toward one another—for they were deeply in love, an ecstatic state they had been in for the past two months.” 

“Complimenting a pretty nurse helped a man to feel that he was still a man, even though he was flat on his back in a hospital.” 

“When you have a good-looking woman patient who isn’t married, I can’t sleep nights.” 

“A man feels differently about his horse from the way he does his wife.”

 

“Is this where you came last evening after you got me out of jail?” 

“The hot dog, cotton candy and popcorn booths all contributed their special smells to the atmosphere. Merilee hated to think what the pollution count must be and found herself holding her breath.” 

“Ever since the riot at the fair, Mrs. Rogers had been very cool toward her, even though everyone who had been arrested that night had been released the following day without being brought to trial.” 

REVIEW: 

I have not quite decided whether this book is flat-out brilliant or just so dumb that it appears so. It is, after all, a fine line between clever and stupid. One one hand, we have hilarious lines like, “Merilee felt her heart plummet down into the sensible shoes she’d put on to walk around the fair grounds.” On the other hand, in between jewels like these, we have plodding passages such as, “Merilee hurried along the corridor lined with rooms on either side, each with one, two, three and four patients in it. At the corner, she turned into another corridor, similar to the longer one she had just left. At the far end of that corridor, to the right, was the emergency room, close to the door where the ambulance stopped.” But even if this book is consistently moronic, does it really matter? If part of its fun is its stupidity, does the stupidity make the book less fun? 

Philosophical arguments aside, Merilee Maxwell is a nurse in a perky cap engaged to a manly would-be family doctor, Kendall Ryder, who also performs surgery on a regular basis. They have been dating for about six months, and he’d proposed on the first date because, as he told her at the time, he’d worked with her in the hospital for a few months and everyone thought well of her. He already has her picking out the furniture for their new house, which he is in the process of buying when the book opens. If people in the 1960s rushed into marriage with the alacrity of the couples in VNRNs, it’s no wonder everybody’s parents are divorced. 

But—and there’s always a big but—then Robert Blakely is wheeled into the ED. He is badly injured, and Merilee and Dr. Ken get right to work cleaning off his face and legs. Only when he is sparkling clean, apart from the broken nose and at least three bleeding gashes on his face, is he wheeled into x-ray to see if he might actually be dying of a ruptured spleen or something. First things first. Dr. Ken has recognized the man as the star of a TV western who goes by the name Tex Howard. Tex has a horse ranch nearby and claims he was injured riding a horse, but Dr. Ken doesn’t believe it. He knows that Tex has a wife “somewhere,” though Tex had told Merilee he had no family; this news made Merilee’s “heart feel unusually heavy.” There’s trouble brewing in Crystal Springs. 

She’s obsessed with Tex, and pesters Dr. Ken for details of his injuries when he comes over later that night for the usual VNRN fare of a martini, steak, baked potato, and tossed salad. She’s upset that Tex has been put in a room with Mr. Oldfield, who hollers all night, and thrilled that she will be his nurse tomorrow. But when she’s checking on him the next day, after she’s questioned poor Tex relentlessly about his wife, someone fires a gun through the window. Merilee, who is either very brave or very dim-witted, immediately runs to it to see who it is. Is the author’s overwhelming disregard for human nature intentional or ignorance? In any case, the shooter is not discovered, and the incident quickly fades in the rear-view mirror. 

After he gets out of the hospital, Tex invites Merilee to come to the eponymous fair to hear him perform, and despite Dr. Ken’s insistence that she stay away from Tex, off she goes. For his opening number, Tex sings a new composition called “Marilee, Where Are You?” and is about to play it again when “a shot rang out, and Tex crumpled to the floor of the stage.” Maybe someone just can’t bear to hear that song again. The audience takes this in stride and taps their feet as red-coated musicians, who immediately rush on stage to block the view of Tex, break into a lively tune. Then there’s an explosion, apparently set off by the hippies sitting in front of Merilee, and this is finally too much for the crowd, which immediately erupts into a riot and begins throwing punches en masse. 

Merilee, who is even slower out of the gate than the audience, watches for a while longer, until the announcer pleads with the crowd to leave quietly. This request has the opposite effect on Merilee, who freaks out and tries to push her way to the stage but is sucked into the riot, where she starts hitting people. The fuzz finally arrives and drags her off to the police station, where she is booked by friendly Seargent Rosetti, whom she had nursed through a recent bout of appendicitis. She’s freed on bail by long-suffering Dr. Ken, who is understandably chilly, though she doesn’t seem to understand and is hurt when he doesn’t want to chat about Tex on the way home or come in for a visit. Tex vanishes after the shooting, but Dr. Ken knows where he is and takes Merilee with him to change the bandages, as Tex has been shot in the “fleshy part” of the shoulder. Merilee suppresses an unprofessional gasp when she realizes that “if the bullet had gone a few inches lower, it would have penetrated his heart,” which is apparently located between his nipple and his armpit. 

At this point, a mystery breaks loose. There’s a photo of Tex’s wife in Tex’s bedroom that one of Tex’s horse trainers wants Merilee to get for him, but it’s gone missing. The book finally starts to wonder about who is trying to kill Tex, how he landed in the hospital, and what the story is with his wife. Through it all, Merilee maintains a complete inability to comprehend the effects of her actions. Ken’s long-lost sister shows up, and when Ken spends the evening with his sister instead of with Merilee, she wonders, “Was the pleasant pattern of her relationship with Ken going to be spoiled because of the sudden arrival of his sister?” Of course, it’s already been spoiled because of her intense infatuation with Tex, but apparently that hasn’t occurred to her. 

This sort of overwhelmingly blatant stupidity is rampant throughout the book. Initially I found it irritating, but it was so pervasive that I actually started to wonder whether it was intentional. Can the author really be unaware that her book’s situations so consistenly run contrary to common sense and human nature? The amusing quotes—e.g. “his lips were firm yet able to smile easily”—are as dopey as they are funny. The book is not so over the top, not so obviously campy, that I can be certain that it’s deliberate, and this did detract somewhat from my enjoyment of it. But this book is easily so dumb that it’s a good read, an absolutely worthwhile way to spend an afternoon.