The Dilemma of Geraldine Addams

By Diane Frazer, ©1965
(pseud. Dorothy Fletcher)
Cover illustration by Harry Bennett 

“Let’s have it,” Dr. Brownlee said to Henry Franklin, a very influential member of the Board of Trustees of Cranston Hill Hospital, with a wife who was an important member of the Women’s Auxiliary.
“Well, this newspaper fellow came to see Clara, and it seems you have someone on the staff here who shouldn’t be on the staff of any self-respecting hospital.”
“You mean one of our doctors?” Brownlee asked, suddenly alert.
“Not a doctor. A nurse. Geraldine Addams.”
Dr. Brownlee sat up straight. “Geraldine Addams? What about her?”
“I gather that she was a pretty notorious playgirl, that she posed for some rather startling photographs, that she was even involved in a hit-and-run accident. You wouldn’t want to retain someone like that on your nursing staff I’m sure, Lyman. Seems she’s in the children’s ward. It’s not the best of situations is it?”

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Everybody has to fight, Gerry. Life is struggle. Life, as the saying goes, is total war. We all find that out as time goes by.” 

REVIEW:
Dorothy Fletcher is one of my favorite authors. If she has penned a few duds that bring down her overall average (she didn’t even make it onto the Best Authors list of the 2022 VNRN Awards), she is a smart, smooth and witty author who can really deliver a solid book. As she has here. 

Geraldine Addams is a nurse on the pediatric ward, and when we meet her, she is delivering medications to her young charges but calling them cocktails—OK, so maybe not so politically correct these days, but still funny!—little Pete gets a gin fizz, Linda gulps her bloody Mary, Susan quaffs a martini. She’s called out by the mean and stodgy spinster nurse Polly Sauerwein, who deserves her name, but Gerry hotly retorts that the kids already knew the drink names, and it makes medications so much easier to take!

We soon learn that Gerry is “not only a competent nurse, and adored by the children, with whom she ‘had a way,’ she was as well a strikingly attractive girl, an extremely well-bred young lady, educated, posed, with faultless manners.” She hails from a wealthy background, schooled in Europe’s finest finishing schools, but when a scandal forced her to re-evaluate her life, and finding “that she was thoroughly fed up with an idle, careless life,” she took up nursing “to prove something to herself.”

She’s been assigned to a very delicate case, that of young Marsha Marston, who has a congenital heart defect and is to undergo major open-heart surgery with talented, tortured Dr. Paul Massey, but Marsha needs to rebuild her strength before she can tolerate the surgery. Gerry instantly wins over young Marsha—and Dr. Massey as well, who calls her one night to come to his house urgently. What could he want!?!

Turns out his wife, Gladys, has come home from New York early and is badly inebriated. He has to leave for a conference in Washington immediately, and he asks Gerry to stay with his wife overnight. But Nurse Polly calls the doctor’s house and recognizes Gerry’s voice on the phone—and immediately runs to the nursing supervisor with salacious stories about Gerry and Paul. Gerry, called on the carpet, refuses to spill the beans about Paul’s alcoholic wife, in part because she recognizes her own guilt. “Between them there was something very strong, only that was not what Mrs. Cranston meant. Mrs. Cranston meant that had they gone to bed together, and that, perhaps, was the lesser sin.” Her case isn’t helped by a new patient who turns out to be a paparazzo, with photos of Gerry from her old days and access to the old newspaper stories. He’s ready to blackmail her, but she refuses, so his stories are added to the gossip, and Gerry’s job—and little Marsha’s health, possibly her life, are on the line!

It must be confessed that the book plays out pretty much as you know it will, but the fun is getting there. And I did appreciate that despite the rather scandalous cover, the illustration really reveals more than the story does about Gerry’s past sins. Here again Dorothy Fletcher has created a sweet, enjoyable story with delightful characters—even if they’re not all nice people. Dorothy doesn’t always deliver a great book, but she does know how to build one—and if Geraldine Addams is having a dilemma, I am not when it comes to recommending this book.

Sea Nurse

By Diana Douglas
(pseud. Richard Wilkes-Hunter), ©1970
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

A secret sorrow haunted Nurse Melinda Madison. She had signed on as cruise nurse to run away from a love affair that had ended in tragedy. And now she was assigned to work with Dr. Peter Raymond. She remembered him from her student nurse days. She’d had a crush on him when he was a promising young surgeon. Why was he the ship’s doctor? Was he running away, too?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“The girl’s appearance was certainly consistent with what the shipping line sought in female staff ashore and at sea.”

“Sue was also on the prowl, but not for any casual affair with a ship’s doctor. Sue’s objective was to marry wealth.”

“His body seemed lighter, younger than when fully dressed.”

“Very briefly their eyes met and he smiled at her, pleased with the way the swab had come firmly and without hesitation into his hand.”

“Enjoy your first sight of Hawaii, Lindy. It’s something you’ll never forget. Aloha-land as they call it, where Polynesia holds out her charms for your enjoyment. At a price.”

“People desperately ill sense trouble in others. Their condition sharpens their perception.”

REVIEW:
Melinda Madison has run away to sea. She’s left her job in Los Angeles to escape the heartbreak of losing her fiance Roy to myelogenous leukemia and taken a position as a ship’s nurse aboard the cruise ship Nirvana. At her first meeting with the ship’s doctor, Peter Raymond, he’s sporting a smear of lipstick on his mouth and stale liquor on his breath. She recognizes him: She used to work as a scrub nurse when he was the house surgeon at her L.A. hospital, but two years ago he left for New York to practice open-heart surgery. After a little prodding, he remembers her, too, hazily. But he doesn’t think well of her backstory. “Sometimes we mistake pity for love,” he says. “You fell in love with a man knowing he had a terminal disease. I used to think you were a smart girl.”

Dr. Raymond is a changed man, because in L.A. he was very serious about his work and would date each nurse only once, so as not to get attached. “Peter Raymond had certainly changed from the sincere young man she had known, yet why should the change in him worry her so?” Lindy asks herself. Gosh, I wonder. He flirts with her shamelessly during an open appendectomy on a crew member: “Reaching for the suture table his face was close to hers, and she saw that his eyes were smiling above his mask.” But he’s still playing the cad with every other woman on the ship, so she shrugs him off.

Soon she meets Shane Reinhart, a newspaper tycoon on the cruise, who teaches her to surf in Hawaii and takes her snorkeling in Tahiti. Before long he’s proposed marriage. But she’s still not over Roy, so she just hangs out with him every possible minute, leading the poor man on while keeping him at arm’s length. Shane eventually spills Peter’s secret, after the good doctor punches him in the mouth for putting the moves on Lindy: Peter is escaping a scandal in which he attempted to save a girl’s life by giving her open-heart massage, but she died anyway. Though he was never convicted of wrongdoing, Peter was driven from New York by the girl’s father, who was on the medical board that reviewed the case.

As Lindy dumps Shane once and for all in Sydney, Shane proves he is a far better man than Lindy deserves and informs her that she never really loved Roy because “it has to be physical too. You can’t love a man with your mind.” He also lets her in on the fact that she really loves Peter, and has for a long time. Back on ship that night, Peter runs into her out on deck under the moonlight and tells her that in L.A. he’d been in love with her and wanted to ask her to marry him—never mind that he didn’t remember her when he saw her again on the ship. As he’s paged to the captain’s office, bringing their brief conversation to an abrupt end, the stars light up in Lindy’s eyes …

The best thing about this book is the cover. The story, at more than 200 pages, is a whole lot of nothing. Nothing really happens, none of the characters are very appealing, and apart from an occasional hint of camp, there’s no reason to read this book. It didn’t make me as seasick as Cruise Ship Nurse, the only other shipboard VNRN I’ve read, but that’s not saying much. I know of at least two more cruise nurse novels out there (a second Cruise Ship Nurse and Nurse Laurie’s Cruise), but if these don’t prove any better, I’m going to stay ashore.