Nurse of Spirit Lake

By Dorothy Brenner Francis, ©1975 

Ellen Ferris was aghast at her first sight of Scarlet Point Lodge. Never had Aunt Madeleine mentioned that the hotel she had recently purchased on the shores of Iowa’s Big Spirit Lake was in fact a run-down four-story monstrosity with a red tile roof and Gothic-arched Spanish belfry towers. Even more astonishing was Aunt Madeleine’s revelation that she had only four guests—really five, she carefully explained, if you counted sandy-haired Doug Cooper, the young writer who helped out with odd jobs in exchange for his room and board. But Aunt Madeleine had plans—ambitious intentions of restoring the lodge to its former graciousness—and she had hired Frank Welborn, an architect with blond hair and deeply tanned skin, to supervise the renovation. Resignedly Ellen tried to concentrate on setting up a first-aid station for the lodge’s four elderly guests. It was for this purpose that the blue-eyed nurse had come to spend the summer at Spirit Lake. And she had welcomed the invitation, because it afforded her time to ponder the problem that had arisen during her last semester of teaching at a California nursing school. Before long, however, Ellen’s problem was eclipsed by the thornier ones involved in running Scarlet Point Lodge—and in managing her own unpredictable heart. And then the odd occurrences began …

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“No matter how far a guy travels there’s nowhere to look for subject matter except within oneself.” 

“Good food can distract almost anyone from unpleasantness.”

“Sincere compliments for work well done never spoiled anyone.” 

“History is a crop that sometimes gets plowed under.”

“Every place in the world is special, but life moves so fast that it takes a magician, or an artist, to make people stop and notice the uniqueness right at their doorstep.”

REVIEW:
Ellen Ferris had never wanted to be a nurse, but had been forced into it by her Aunt Madeline, who had raised her after she had been orphaned at 15. But she’d gotten her way in the end, becoming a teacher at a nursing school after she had obtained her RN. Now she’s again doing her aunt’s bidding by coming to Scarlet Point Lodge, the run-down hotel on the shores of Spirit Lake in Iowa, to serve as staff nurse for the whopping four guests at the lodge who seem to be staying all summer as well. She’s in a bit of a pickle at school: A wealthy man’s daughter is flunking Ellen’s class, and if she flunks the student, the father is going to change his mind about the endowment he’s planning to give the school. So Ellen is hoping this little sojourn away from school will help her figure out if she’d rather keep her principles or her job.

Before long strange things start happening: food is going missing from the pantry, and Ellen finds a hair ribbon on the third floor, which is closed to guests. And someone has used the rowboat! Aunt Madeleine also demonstrates some erratic behavior such as standing on the railing of the third-floor belfry and becoming too frightened to get down, not to mention staffing and stocking out a first aid station for a meager four guests when she has better things to do with her money, as her hotel is literally falling apart and the lawn isn’t even mowed. But that doesn’t seem to bother Ellen as much as the hair ribbon does.

Meanwhile there are two young men to compete for Ellen’s hand in marriage, because it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a heroine of a nurse novel must be in want of a husband. There’s Doug, a writer with a gloomy outlook—he obsesses a lot about the history of Native American massacres in the area, constantly calling Ellen’s attention to the site of this attack or that one—and he has some odd ideas: “I believe there’s a universal thought bank that’s made up of every thought and every idea that has ever existed. And I believe that each individual mind is an inlet that’s in some mysterious way connected to this huge thought bank,” he tells her, adding that he’s tapped into this thought bank, because “even if I’d never read a word about the Spirit Lake massacre, I know I would have sensed a feeling of death when I visited this area. It’s all around us.” Because no one anywhere else has ever died. She likes him anyway, but does think “there was an unrest about him that troubled her, interested her.”

The other young man, Frank Welborn, is the architect that Madeleine has hired to spruce up the hotel. He’s “a sleek type who might have stepped from a clothing advertisement in a slick magazine,” and we first meet him when Ellen discovers him in her room, allegedly measuring the space for future renovations. She dates him too, even though he uses the adjective “super” in about every other sentence, but on the plus side he’s never even heard of the Spirit Lake massacre and “never cared much for local history,” so he’s not bringing up dead people all the time. He tells Ellen to pass her student and move to New York City with him. “You aren’t afraid to try making it in a big city, are you?” Luckily he decides they should head out on the dance floor before she’s obliged to continue this “uncomfortable conversation,” but there she decides, apparently based on Frank’s smooth dance moves, that “Frank was a man a girl could build a dream around.”

When she’s not kissing boys, there’s lots of other action at Scarlet Point Lodge for Ellen to get involved in. There’s a huge storm in which the 77-year-old guest decides to go for a walk and a tree falls on him, giving him a head laceration, which Ellen treats with sedatives and then sends him off to bed, possible concussion or brain bleed be damned! The fireplace chimney gets blocked and smokes out the ground floor, causing one of the guests to have a severe asthma attack and vows to check out immediately. “Madeleine Ferris is an idiot,” he pronounces, having only just arrived at a conclusion that would have been painfully obvious from the first minute on the place. But Ellen shows who the idiot is when she distracts him from his idea with a buttered muffin. Then she finds a runaway girl, 12-year-old Lori Wilde, who has run away from a foster home while her mother serves six months in jail for shoplifting food. Lori, intent on not being seen, is shining a light around the dock and singing along to a radio in the middle of the night when Ellen timidly ventures out to see who is making all the ruckus. Lori might not be as dopey as her hiding skills make you think, as right away she asks Ellen, “Why are you bothering to ask me dumb questions?”

Janey van Allen, the young woman who Ellen caught cheating on the exam, turns up after driving 1,500 miles and tells Ellen that the reason she cheated on the exam, though she is otherwise an A student, is that she had been caring for her 7-year-old sister with severe tonsillitis for the previous three days and hadn’t had time to study. She begs for forgiveness and swears she will never cheat again. It’s curious that this story hadn’t surfaced weeks earlier, at the time of the actual incident, but hard-hearted Ellen is unimpressed. Then Doug proposes, but he’d just gotten a letter from someone named Julie Jackson and doesn’t explain it to Ellen, and then she sees Frank holding Janey’s hand and there’s lipstick on his cheek, so there go both of her men, as easy as they came. Only a hotel fire will put everything to rights!

Honestly, you’d swear Ellen is jinxed the way one calamity after another happens to her. She herself is a confusing character, as she is determined to do the “right” thing by expelling her student from school but herself repeatedly fails to report the runaway child, leaving the girl to sleep in the woods for days. She also doesn’t seem to have much sense as she navigates the world, freaking out about Doug getting a letter from a woman and swooning for the asinine Frank. Overall this book and a number of its characters, Aunt Madeleine in particular, are a bit perplexing. Failure of logic and inconsistent characters are two of the most common problems VNRNs have, and Nurse of Spirit Lake has both in abundance, so you might want to save your time and pick a different book.

First Year Nurse

By Diane Frazer
(pseud. Dorothy Fletcher), ©1964

Cover illustration by Harry Bennett

“You’re leaving us, Dr. Troy?” Taffy closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “You let me know if there is an opening in your hospital, Doctor.”
Dr. Troy stared at her. It was the stare of a boy seeing all the toys he had wanted under the Christmas tree. There was a silence that seemed to last forever. “No need to check,” he said hoarsely. “I know there’s an opening.”
“Is there?” she said, and looked directly into his brown eyes. What happened next was completely her doing. It wasn’t possible that she had put her arms up to his shoulders and put her mouth on his. It wasn’t possible. But there she was in his arms, which had promptly wrapped themselves around her, as if he been waiting for her to do exactly that. And maybe he had been waiting, waiting a long time. 

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“The doctors, as usual, were running off at the mouth, spouting their learned phrases. Doctors never lowered their voices. They seemed to try to outdo each other in pedantry.” 

“She knew that to find someone who would ask you to give up your career, you must first have a career.”

“No, I had no special plans. Nothing that couldn’t be arranged, anyway. Eddie Fisher wanted to take me to the New York Hilton for dinner, but I put him off. Some other time, I told him. He was terribly disappointed, but never let it be said I let a colleague down.”

“If I blush now I’ll kill myself, Taffy thought. I’ll go out and buy a gun.”

REVIEW:
Perhaps the best thing about First Year Nurse is that it features a cameo by Lily Sorenson Carlton, the starring RN in Nurse Lily and Mister X, a sparkling, witty nurse novel that Frazer/Fletcher wrote in 1961. Unfortunately, while this novel has some admirable qualities, it is not of the same caliber as Nurse Lily.

Here Lily is on the OB ward to deliver her first child, cared for by Nurse Elizabeth Powell, unfortunately nicknamed “Taffy,” apparently because of her hair, but I hope not. She is crushing on obstetrician Dr. Ben Troy, who is as shy as he is handsome; in an early elevator scene we peer into the thoughts of each to realize that they like each other, but each completely misreads the other’s sentences in the worst possible light so as to remain oblivious to the other’s interest. So for most of the book, they pass in the halls and exchange clipped words that continue the hurt feelings.

The book follows various patients and their obstetrical courses, some for better and some for worse. It trails Taffy on her dates with Ernie Browder, a PhD pharmacist who chafes for opportunity and the riches he feels that will bring; they have many bizarre conversations in which he urges her to chase after more lucrative opportunities with the suggestion that her successes will somehow benefit him, though it’s not clear why that might be the case, even if they were to marry. Unfortunately, his influence leads Taffy into the 20th floor office of a wealthy father-to-be one late evening, lured by the promise of a high-paying job in his firm. Well, that’s not actually what the man wants, and in a creepy scene in which he’s locked the office door, he tells Taffy, “I’m not in the habit of attacking young girls, but I’m also not in the habit of wasting my time. This office is virtually a prison and only I have the key. There’s nobody around at all.” Only the mention of Taffy’s relationship with his wife opens the door. It also opens her eyes to what she really wants in life, which had been eluding her up to that point. “Everyone wanted to be rich. Of course. But it shouldn’t eat you up inside,” she decides, realizing that her nursing career, which had previously seemed a bit dull, is “my natural element. This is where I belong. Why, it’s my life.”

Then, in a February blizzard during which only those staff members living within walking distance of the hospital are able to staff the place for three days, Taffy and Ben become friendly. Taffy offers to accompany a stressed mother into the OR during her C-section, and when it’s over, she passes out in the scrub room, and Ben staggers off with her in his arms to find her an empty hospital bed. “How much do you weigh, anyhow? It seemed like about two hundred pounds,” he gripes. The scene’s conclusion should come as no surprise to anyone who’s read a nurse novel before, or the back cover of this novel.

The book itself is somewhat modern in that I think it’s the first time in more than 400 VNRNs that I’ve encountered the word “rape”; when one of Taffy’s roommates staggers in completely distraught, and Taffy asks her, “Nothing really bad happened to you, did it?” the roommate replies, “You mean nobody raped me, did they? Isn’t that what you mean?” (Nobody did.) In addition, to demonstrate how shallow the pool of eligible men in New York is, Taffy recalls a former beau: “It took three dates to find out that he was a homosexual,” possibly another first mention for a VNRN. Working on the maternity ward, Taffy is a first-hand observer of the results of passion; labor, and babies, are “the price to be paid for pleasure, for love.” She thinks of one 19-year-old patient who hemorrhaged during the delivery of her baby: She “had danced at the St. Regis Hotel and fallen in love, made love, and then died from it.” It’s not all grim, though; the book has some of the razor-sharp humor we expect from Dorothy Fletcher, just not as much as we would like. In addition there’s not much plot to this book—certainly not enough interaction between the leads to warrant their apparent engagement in the final pages. You could certainly do worse than this book, but it’s sad to know that author Dorothy Fletcher could easily have done better.

Nurse on the Beach

Arlene Hale, ©1967
Cover illustration by Martin Koenig

From where she stood on the dune below the beach house, Meg could see the young man coming toward her at a rapid jog. His obvious joy at seeing her filled her with gratitude. Suddenly her mind went reeling back to Whitefield Memorial Hospital and her heartbreak at finding Dr. Lee Corey in the arms of a wealthy and beautiful patient. What was she to do when the man she loved had betrayed her? There was only one refuge to seek, Meg thought, as she looked up at the young man now standing close beside her. But would she ever rid herself of the memory of Dr. Corey?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Take my advice, Meg, don’t ever go out with a traveling salesman.”

“You know what I wish we were doing right this minute?”
“Necking,” he guessed with a grin.

“No smooching after eleven o’clock. House rules. Break it up.”

“Wylie bribed me for just five minutes in here this morning. I think he wanted to see how you looked first thing in the morning with no make-up. Most women look pretty horrible. Wylie couldn’t stand to have a wife like that. It would kill him.”

REVIEW:
Our heroine’s name is Meg Ryan, which can be a bit discombobulating. But this Meg Ryan has red hair (the otherwise excellent cover art to the contrary) and a temper to match, which does get her into hot water. Such as when her boyfriend, Dr. Lee Corey, is too busy with patient Ardis Kingley, who happens to be “attractive, rich, and single.” She also happens to be the daughter of the most influential member of Whitefield Memorial Hospital’s board of directors. It seems that the job of director of the hospital is open, and Lee wants it. So when another patient is dying fast in his room, and Meg sends an urgent message for Lee to come at once, he can’t tear himself away, and the old man dies in pain in Meg’s arms without his physician in attendance. In response, Meg tears off her nurse’s pin, throws it at Dr. Corey’s feet, and storms out of the hospital.

To cool off, she moves into a beach house belonging to her guardian, where she runs into Wylie “Pappy” Burke, a beach bum whom she’d previously met—and kissed—and who has been relentlessly pursuing her ever since, calling her at home and showing up at the hospital cafeteria to see her. Perhaps it was his estimation of her measurements (“30-23-30”) at their first encounter that caught her eye. But it isn’t too hard to tell that the relationship between Lee and Meg is bound for the rocks; in a book called Nurse on the Beach, we learn early on that “Lee didn’t like the beach and he didn’t like picnics. Somehow, this kind of fun was childish to him.” And when Meg suggests they go down to the beach for a swim, he answers, “I’d rather be playing golf,” a suggestion that causes Meg to wrinkle her nose in distaste. (Ardis, on the other hand, “was known as an exceptional golfer.”)

When Lee invites Meg to a bar so he can explain, Meg walks in to find another nurse cupping his hands for a light for her cigarette, flees the joint in a blind fury, and promptly hits a truck with her car. Wylie (I just can’t bring myself to call him “Pappy”), who has followed Meg, brings her to his house to nurse her back to health after her concussion, chaperoned by his feisty “Grandmère.” Wylie, it turns out, is a painter of some renown, and he lives and works at the beach.

Lee soon tracks her down at Wylie’s beach house and tells her that he was not told that the old patient was dying, and that he has the hospital director job. All is well for a moment or two, but then Lee tells her to pack her things and come on home, and she refuses. “You’re my girl,” he says. “What you do reflects on me!” She answers, “And we must not have any reflection on the new director. Oh, dear—”

After they kiss and make up and Lee leaves, Wylie enters and she spends some time kissing him. So the next day, when she stops by the hospital and catches Ardis Kingley kissing Lee, she is completely understanding and thinks nothing of it. No, wait, that’s not what happened. “What kind of game was Lee playing?” she asks herself, and when she meets him in the caf minutes later, she nastily wipes the lipstick off his face. “What was I supposed to do?” asks poor Lee. “I’m her doctor. I’m trying to make her well—” Actually, I can think of a number of things he ought to have done, none of which involve wearing another woman’s make-up, but that’s just me. When Meg accuses Lee of sucking up (maybe literally) to Ardis to get the job, he asks, “Am I going [to have to] take you over my knee and pound some sense into you?” The timeless VNRN threat of somewhat kinky yet humiliating violence snaps her out of it. “I guess I wasn’t being fair,” she says.

In a continuing effort to be fair, Meg spends a day with Wylie, sailing to an offshore deserted island, where they swim, kiss a lot, picnic, and nap. Wylie even proposes marriage, but she just cries. In the hospital the next day, Ardis waylays Meg and tells her to give up Lee. “I’m going to take him away from you,” she says. “Lee has ambitions that will take him to higher levels. I’m in a position to help him get there. Are you?” When it’s put this way, Meg can’t help but go to Lee and tell him that it’s over. “She’s right for you,” she says. “She wants the same things you want. That’s important in a marriage.” Then it’s off to the beach to track down Wylie and tell him that after all she doesn’t love Lee “with every nerve in her body,” as she did on the book’s third page.

This book wasn’t flashy, but it was fun, offered some plotting excitement (a storm, a surgery during a blackout, the rescue of a drowning child) to perk things up, and had some humor to it. And, at the risk of exposing myself to complete ridicule, it had some really sweet parts, like the scene where Wylie and Meg are on the island and Meg, napping on Wylie’s shoulder, is described as Wylie sees her, in an almost Hemingway-esque passage: “The sun caught all the fire of her hair and it was soft as it brushed against his face. Her lashes were long and curled at the end like a child’s.” We watch Lee go home after work one day and interact with his aged father, seeing the camaraderie and interdependence and gratefulness each has for the other, allowing us to understand why the hospital director job is so important to him. It’s more than the cursory VNRN usually offers, so if Wylie is not the most compelling love interest I’ve met (and in fact his stalking of Meg borders on creepy), I’m willing to forgive all and recommend this book, overlooking its warts for its curling eyelashes.

Conflict for Nurse Elsa

By Jeanne Bowman 

(pseud. Peggy O'More Blocklinger), ©1968

Also published as Nurse à la Mode

Nurse Elsa Hoyt signed on for a temporary stand-by assignment at Port Haven Hospital during her brief vacation in the Southwest. Port Haven had been the scene of many childhood memories, including those of handsome Albert Staffner and those of Dr. Paul Hoag, the stepfather who had broken her mother’s heart. When Elsa discovered that the very same Paul Hoag was the chief of staff of Port Haven, she was tempted to resign immediately. But her stepfather begged her to stay, explaining that he needed her, but not explaining why. Puzzled by his behavior and confronted with the hostility of now Dr. Albert Staffner, Elsa began to suspect a conspiracy against her stepfather. Faced with a decision whether to return to Chicago and to her fiancé or to stay in Port Haven, Elsa was frightened of what she might learn … and uncertain if she really wanted to. It took the chaos of a full-scale Texas hurricane to resolve the chaos in Elsa’s life. 

GRADE: F 

BEST QUOTES:
“Once they were married, her metabolism could change and she blow up sky high.”

“I am Hoyt, of Chicago.”

REVIEW: 

If you are curious to know just exactly how low a publisher could stoop at the height of the nurse novel craze in an attempt to make a buck, speed directly to this book. You will, however, be sorry; this publisher ducked really, really low. 

Elsa Hoyt is one of about 25 people you will meet in as many pages. But you’re stuck with her through the entire book. She has accompanied a patient from Chicago to Florida, and while there, a physician convinces her to answer the call for nurses from a short-handed hospital in Port Haven, Texas. She used to live there, and her ex-stepfather was a doctor at that same hospital. She doesn’t want to see Dr. Hoag, though he raised her from toddler age, because his marriage to her mother broke up for a reason unknown to her when she was in college. But surely everyone she ever knew from Port Haven would have left town by now, right? 

Naturally, the first person she bumps into in the hallway after inking the contract is Dr. Paul Hastings Hoag. He says, “I know how you feel, Elsa, but don’t go away. We need you here. I need you—daughter.” She answers, and I am not kidding, “Atmosphere.” He responds by giving her the keys to his beach cottage, which she says she will rent from him, so no one will know their relationship. What? you may be asking yourself. I asked myself that very question many, many times. But there is no answer. This book is just that loopy. 

Elsa hasn’t seen the man since the divorce, but now she decides that she has to get to the bottom of why her mother left him. Then she is shocked to see a nurse in a miniskirt; she’s told that Mitzi can do anything she wants because she has an in at the hospital. Everyone lives in fear Mitzi will “explode and blow us all up,” another nurse tells Elsa, who immediately thinks, “Without there being powder, there could be no explosion. What was wrong here at Port Haven Hospital?” Huh? Well, never mind how she does it, but based on a cranky nurse in a miniskirt, Elsa figures out there’s a conspiracy against Dr. Hoag at the hospital. “What? Would she learn? Did she want to know?” Do we want to know? Not if we know what’s good for us. 

Elsa naturally proves herself a godsend at the hospital, which is constantly receiving victims of carbon monoxide poisonings, hepatitis outbreaks, car wrecks, and house fires. For example, after the victims of a multi-car pileup are brought to the hospital, it falls to Elsa to tell the chick from Southern California that her husband, “Hominy the Hippy,” has died, because she’s the only one there who can speak jive: “Let’s say he had a date with Destiny. He didn’t really relate to this groovy world. Let’s say he left you a fine young son to see you through, then took off to another dimension.” The girl sighs, and Elsa leaves her sleeping peacefully. You’ve just got to know how to talk to these people. 

For the bulk of the book, Elsa is either pacing the floors of her cottage asking herself what is going on at the hospital, reassembling victims of bloody accidents, or going on about how desperately she needs some rest. Well, to be fair, there are a few other bizarre events. Elsa finds a half-empty whisky bottle in the cupboard that wasn’t there yesterday and assumes someone has broken in to the cottage to read her mail, so she changes the locks and gets a post office box. If you’re snooping in someone’s house, why would you leave whisky in the cupboard? 

The young son of a neighbor eats diet pills containing digitalis left by an anonymous Port Haven doctor and is saved by Elsa and Dr. Hoag. Elsa later decides this was a plot to discredit Dr. Hoag because the pills weren’t approved by Port Haven Hospital. Is this woman psychic or a paranoid schizophrenic? It doesn’t pay to ask yourself these questions, but you just can’t help it. 

Mitzi horns her way into the cottage and then throws a party, but on the night of the party a malevolent trinity in the form of Elsa’s fiancé, Elsa’s mother, and Hurricane Hannah arrive. The partygoers, hospital staff mostly, are called in to work, and it turns out that the Port Haven Hospital has had numerous architectural renovations that make it impervious to bad weather, while other local facilities do not hold up as well and are forced to close their doors and send their patients to PHH. This, it turns out, is what was at the root of the evil plot to drive out Dr. Hoag; he was more interested in improving the facilities than in driving up profits. A disagreement over his use of the hospital funds was what broke up the marriage between Elsa’s mother and Dr. Hoag, but now that Hurricane Hannah has proven him right, they walk off arm in arm. Elsa’s fiancé is bewitched by Mitzi, and she and all the other conspirators at the hospital are so unnerved by the tempest that they submit their resignations en masse. Elsa suddenly realizes she’s in love with one of the doctors, the one who broke into her house and cooked her liver on the grill, so now we can close the book. 

The writing style is almost impressionistic in its vague way of expressing itself and in how each subsequent sentence seems to shoot off in a completely new and bizarre direction. In the first pages, there are two conversations occurring simultaneously, and it’s almost indeterminable who is talking, or what they are talking about. I had no idea what had happened in this first chapter until Elsa explained her arrival at PHH to one of the other nurses. But puzzlement is not an uncommon feeling brought on by this book; you will spend a lot of time early on, reading pages and paragraphs again and again with wrinkled brow, trying to figure out just what the heck is going on. Eventually, though, you get used to its flaky way and just float along, only occasionally rousing yourself to irritation over some especially egregious flaw. Don’t let apathy drag you down. Conflict for Nurse Elsa is a flaccid excuse for a VNRN, with very little story or common sense. Get angry, and get rid of this book.

This book was also published under the title Nurse à la Mode,
which makes about as much sense as the rest of this book.