A Nurse Named Courage

By Florence Stuart
(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1965

Cover illustration by Mort Engel

Soon after she became a nurse at Shields Memorial Hospital and met Dr Bert Ives, Courage Williams found she’d have to live up to her name. Handsome, intense and moody, Bert was known as much for his iron will as for his brilliance as a surgeon. He was not used to being contradicted. But Courage could be stubborn too, and she and Bert clashed violently over the treatment of a handsome young ward patient. Before long, Courage began to wonder whether Bert’s anger was professional—or jealous…and whether she was reacting so strongly to him as a nurse—or as a woman.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“One glance from your blue eyes, and the good doctor gives all the signs of a man entering a strong magnetic field.”

“It was doubtful, very doubtful, if the beauteous Bernice knew how to do a colotomy. But what man with all his marbles would want her to?”

“All you could say for her flannel robe was that is was warm and comfortable.”

“Why don’t you get busy and rescue him from that glamorous dish?”

“Maybe she has enough brains to pretend she hasn’t any, and that’s why she’s won the man you’d like to have.”

“‘Hello,’ Courage said, and was told that if every girl looked that cute in pants, he would happily approve the fashion.”

“She smiled back, and decided that the melting feeling that came over her when he was near might well be the beginning of some form of virus.”

REVIEW:

There are some badly named VNRN heroines out there, but poor Courage Williams may well near win the prize. Even the man she loves, Dr. Nat Warren, can’t bring himself to call her by her name, and instead calls her “Billie,” for some odd reason. Courage is named in honor of her grandfather, who captured an entire platoon of Germans during the war with just one itty-bitty rifle, and just about every unsuspecting passerby is forced to hear the story of granddaddy’s bravery. But it’s the key to Courage’s feistiness, which in this book is focused on saving poor Wally Savage, a whimpering slip of a man who’s been overwhelmed by his domineering mother.

The woman, who wears tight lime-green pants and a satin jacket embellished with a bedazzled parrot, has forced him to go to law school, when all he wants to do is—is—sing! And marry Maria Marino. But mom breaks up the love-struck kids and ruins Wally’s singing career, and the poor lad is so distraught that he drives his car off a cliff, which is why he is now a patient at Shields Memorial.

Mom has enlisted the help of Dr. Bert Ives, who is a brilliant surgeon but not too straight in the head himself. Bert is obsessed with Courage, having conflated her with his mother, who never cared for him much, but rather doted on her older son, Kevin. When that god-like hero had been eaten by a shark off the coast of San Francisco—I kid you not—Mrs. Ives had killed herself, and now Bert is living some sort of sick Oedipal complex, insisting Courage be both his wife and mother. Attacked several times in his office, even slapped in the face, Courage keeps showing up when ordered and neglecting to bring the cops with her.

She concocts a hare-brained scheme to rescue Wally by convincing Maria to marry him—Maria will surely go along with it since she’s “probably very romantic, because Italians are like that. That’s the reason they wrote so many tragic operas, all about lovers dying because they couldn’t have each other, on account of somebody stood in the way, or somebody clobbered one of them, or something.” Amazingly, the plan goes off without a hitch, and now Maria has the right to spring her husband from the hospital, just in time to save him from the lobotomy that Mrs. Savage has planned to send him for with Dr. Ives. Now if only Dr. Nat can free himself from his gorgeous fiancée Beatrice, who is “quite a dish” …

Florence Stonebraker is easily one of the best, and her prose here is top-notch. She loves a screaming shrew, beautiful or otherwise; insanity-driven shoot-outs; and the spunky roommate; and lucky us! Here she’s given us all three! There’s not a lot of the usual squirrelly games that VNRN heroines frequently play with their beaux, just some legitimate lack of confidence, which Courage easily makes up for by being one of the few VNRN women who actually tells her man how she really feels. This book is a light and thoroughly pleasurable romp, and we can be grateful that the venerable author has yet again delivered a fantastic book into our eager hands.

Hootenanny Nurse

By Suzanne Roberts, ©1964

Julie Dodd was in love with David Stace, the boy next door, ever since she could remember. When he studied to become a doctor, Julie decided that nursing would be her career so that their work would bring them together. And that is exactly what happened. Then Chad, a handsome folk singer, came into her life, and suddenly there was a new song in her heart.

GRADE: C

 BEST QUOTES:
“Julie walked as fast as she dared down the hall, pressed the elevator button, and hoped on the brief ride that she still had a bit of lipstick on.”

“ ‘All right,’ Julie said crisply, asserting her authority as on-duty nurse in Emergency. ‘Let’s get those last two out of the hall. That boy with the harmonica, too.’ ”

“Julie’s hands were shaking as she gathered up her purse and the library book on disturbed children she wanted to renew.”

“Losing a dream can sometimes be as hard as losing someone you love.”

REVIEW:
If you are a fan of this genre, you’ve surely been waiting for Hootenanny Nurse. I must confess that I let out a small shriek when I saw this book in Kayo Books, the fabulous vintage book shop in San Francisco. (Florence Stonebraker once lived in the apartment building across the street, for added VNRN thrills!) I promise, you will never find a book in which the word hootenanny is used so frequently, which has its ups and downs. It’s way too much to expect that this book could live up to such an outrageous title, and I’m sorry to report that it doesn’t possess anywhere near the camp factor you’re probably hoping for. But it does offer up a few laughs, so it’s not a complete waste of time.

Nurse Julie Dodd is a student nurse in her final year at a hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. She’s nervous about doing a stint in the ED, though the supervisor tells her not to worry: “Some nights we only get a few phony suicides that need a good stomach wash, and then we send them home. Hysterical women, mostly.” Julie’s true calling is up on the child psych ward, because she more than the other nurses realizes that all these psychotic kids need is “love and comfort and soft words and kisses,” and soon they’re all behaving and there are no more incidents like the one where a schizophrenic boy broke into a medicine cabinet and attacked a nurse with a surgical knife.

Her boyfriend—you knew there was one—is David Stace, who grew up barefoot next door, on a ramshackle farm crowded with too many children. At fourteen, she’d been trying to figure out what she wanted from life—“somehow, just falling in love didn’t seem to be enough.” So when David declared a pre-med major, she signed up for nursing school so they could start a clinic in their poor hometown together. But as he nears the end of school, David buys an expensive car on credit and starts taking her to expensive restaurants, and soon he’s talking of setting up shop in Chicago. Well, she doesn’t think much of this at all! So she smoothes down her uniform and her pride and says, “I want whatever you want, of course.” She spends a lot of time seething about it, but “she didn’t want to be a nagging, pushy wife. She wanted to be, as she’d been all these years, deeply in love with him, letting him make the decisions, and glad that he did.”

Then a bus holding a group of folk singers rolls over, and now they’re encamped on the hospital’s fourth floor. She goes up to visit them and strikes up a conversation with the lead folkie, Chad. Soon she’s singing along with them on an impromptu “folk singing whing-ding.” “I think we’ve found ourselves a regular little Hootenanny Nurse!” Chad says. Before long, Chad is kissing her and talking about having kids. Run, Julie, run! But alas, she is another VNRN heroine without an ounce of sense.

Chad makes an appearance under her window with his guitar and asks her to join his group. They’re finally well enough to leave the hospital to go on tour, but he’s calling her every night and pressuring her to tell her she loves him. She hates the weakness inside herself that “made her cling to Chad, and yes—David. David still, and her parents, and yet she felt as if she didn’t belong with any of them.” Fortunately she has those schizophrenic kids to help cheer her up. Little Maryjo is blooming, thanks to a rag doll that Julie sat up all night sewing for her. “Honestly, Julie, without you, I think that kid would still be sitting up in bed, screaming and needing medication every four hours to calm her!” the ward nurse tells her. “All she needed was love and attention.”

She invites Chad and the gang to her parents’ house for Christmas, and when she gets off the plane, Chad is there to meet her: “We’ve got a Christmas Eve hootenanny going full blast!” He proposes to her, and she accepts, for the best of reasons: “If I don’t marry him, someone else will! And I may end up all alone, an unmarried nurse, just like some of them I’ve seen—with no place to go at night when I get off duty except a lonely little apartment and a TV set for company!” But when she goes back to the hospital wearing his tiny diamond and he goes back on tour, he’s peeved that she has to work and can’t talk to him on the phone. He calls constantly when she’s supposed to be studying for her final exams, sometimes after hours when could get in trouble for being on the phone. Then she goes to visit him one weekend in Memphis and one of the singers comes down with appendicitis, and Julie takes her place in the big solo number, “My Butternut Tree.” She’s a smash hit, of course, so now on weekends she’s performing with the group. “And if a small, nagging doubt, a bit of sadness, came to her now and then, she pushed it back firmly.” There’s a big TV performance coming up, after all, and graduation, and then a wedding to plan: “What more could a girl ask?”

So when graduation is all over and Julie is just about to leave the hospital forever, she learns that little Maryjo, who Julie has been too busy to say goodbye to, has gone missing. Julie misses the big performance in Atlanta to help find her, hiding in the locker where she’d left an old uniform. Despite this little setback, she decides that Maryjo is “nearly well! And Julie realized, with a sudden stab of pride, that she was responsible for Maryjo’s complete change.” So she puts on that old uniform again, “and quite suddenly, without any more struggle, worrying, heartbreak, Julie knew she had found her answer. A wonderful, deep meaning had come into her life.” She calls Chad to dump him: “I can’t leave those children!” she tells him, and tomorrow she’ll talk to the superintendent about getting a permanent job on the children’s ward. And then there’s intern Mike Farrell, a “short, homely young man with unruly, sandy-colored hair and steady, mature gray eyes,” who’s been helping in the search. He offers to buy her a cup of coffee, and Julie thinks, “This too, might be a beginning,” and the two of them walk off together into the elevator.

This is the first nurse romance that doesn’t end with the heroine’s love life completely sewn up, and I have to say that was a nice break. But overall I was not won over by Julie’s spinelessness and her constant obsessing about what to do, what to do? Chad was kind of a creepy character, but she can’t see him for the controlling manipulator that he really is, even if she does leave him in the end. The hootenanny shtick can be amusing, but the constant pounding on this one note makes it a bit wearing in the end. You may not come away exactly singing its praises, but if you must read Hootenanny Nurse, it’s not a complete flop.