Jolie Benoit, R.N.

By Ruth McCarthy Sears, © 1970

For three long years lovely Jolie Benoit had been a nurse at bustling Empire General Hospital in New York. Now she was flying home to Kansas in a private plane—at the call of handsome young Senator Brad Benedict, who had deserted Julie at the altar to pursue his political career. When Jolie arrived, she found Brad at death’s door. Romantic dreams were forgotten as she joined with Dr. Quentin Hale to fight for Brad’s life. But the gnawing questions of the heart could not be long ignored. Should Jolie spurn the attentions of the Brilliant doctor at her side? Was she helping to save a man who wanted only to use her, then break her heart again? Amid medical drama and emotional turmoil, Jolie Benoit, R.N. had to make the hardest and most fateful decision of her young life.

GRADE: F

BEST QUOTES:
“All during the thick blackness that preceded the dawn she prayed fervently that a tracheotomy would not be necessary.” 

“Even though he was in a coma, she sensed his grim determination to win whatever he undertook to win—in this case his life.”

REVIEW:
There is nothing worse than opening a new nurse novel and finding, right there on page two, that the heroine you are about to spend the next few hours with is a dope. Meet Jolie Benoit, R.N. On the first page, she’s in a limo en route to the airport at 3:00 a.m. to jump on the private plane belonging to a guy from back home in Kansas City who had dumped her at the altar three years ago and never spoken to her since, preferring instead to chase a career as a senator and “the nation’s top diplomat.” “Three years without a word—and now this! Why hadn’t she trusted Brad completely? Why hadn’t she believed in Brad, and waited?” Oh, bless your heart, honey, don’t get me started! Well, all right: Why does not have to be 3:00 a.m. instead of a more reasonable 9:00? Won’t a phone call suffice? And really, three freaking years without a word, she jumps on a plane when he sends his secretary to bang on her door in the middle of the night? All Jolie has to placate us with is, “How like him to be so flamboyant, so mysterious, so dramatic!” She forgot selfish, inconsiderate, and manipulative, but maybe I’m just not as impressed by a private jet that’s been named after me as Jolie is. 

So all the way to his house she is scheming beautiful, unicorn rainbow dreams of their ecstatic reunion—and when she is shown to Brad’s room by a servant, she finds him transformed into a “deathlike figure” lying in bed. Drawing on her three years of intensive training in a New York City hospital, she promptly “cried out in a long wail of horror, ‘My God!—Oh, my God!” And faints, “or at least lost consciousness briefly.” It turns out he’s gotten tetanus from scratching his arm on a rusty nail in the stable, and Jolie has been called in because “the strictest secrecy must prevail,” explains Brad’s secretary: “Should those with whom Mr. Benedict has been negotiating—or, for that matter, our own people—discover that he is ill—I cannot estimate the dire results.” Only four people in the world are to know that he’s sick, and when Dr. Quentin Hale shows up, he is frank about his doubts about one of the party. “So! This is how you care for a patient, is it? Sniffling and daydreaming? I might have known I’d get some silly schoolgirl!” But he’s an expert on tetanus, because his wife died of it. And he’s an expert on silly nurses, because when he gives Jolie an afternoon off, first reminding her of the utmost importance of secrecy, the first thing she does on arriving at the family manse is blab to big sister Bernadette and the son of Bern’s deceased husband the whole story. Big miss for the book, though, is the fact that the pathetic pair actually keep Jolie’s secret, so Jolie’s stupidity remains unchastised.

Jolie is thrilled to see Bern again, though we the readers are not sure why, because Bern is a self-absorbed loser—apparently it runs in the family—who constantly tosses off petite French phrases and announces that she’s mortgaged the house and given the money to stepson Watt Wilkins, a short, fat guy with “liver-colored lips” who ogles Jolie and says things like, “What’s all the ruckus, Bern? Where’s my spuds you went to git?” Watt has built a meat empire in town, because why not?

Turn the page and weeks have gone by, and Brad finally gets better—wouldn’t you know, dang it, at the very second in which Jolie and Quentin Hale decide to make out, rather unprofessionally, in front of their heretofore comatose patient. But now Jolie is a-quiver in anticipation of Brad tumbling out of his hospital bed, kneeling before her and proposing. First she goes for a walk, though—and when she comes back, there’s an epidemic going on: “The place was a mess from the constant vomiting, the continuous diarrhea, and the moaning and suffering.” It turns out Watt’s sold poisoned meat all over town, and Jolie is enlisted to help the beleaguered hospital staff. Unfortunately, not even she can make a difference, and 31 people die, including Bern, who apparently vomits to death: “The awful round of nausea began again. When it was over, Bernadette was dead.”

The good news is that Watt’s off to jail, so now all lovesick Jolie has to do is wait in her house for Brad to come by and propose. Um, good luck with that, “kid,” as Brad irritatingly calls her in every sentence: “This isn’t good-bye, kid, just aloha,” he says as he jumps into the limo and jets back to Washington to save the world. What a creep. Without a whiff of irony, Jolie wonders, “Had Bern needed to give of herself in a martyrdom of duty to that thankless, greedy Watt? But Brad would come back for her, and until that day came, she would live cheerfully in this home that Bern had preserved for her at such a sacrifice.” In other words, she’s going to do exactly what she feels Bern wasted her life doing.

To fill her empty heart, she’s offered the position of superintendent of nurses, because her one week on the job has shown her to be the only suitable candidate in a hospital full of nurses. But Jolie turns out to be amazing at solving everyone else’s problems. She saves all the postoperative patients who “become depressive” and demonstrate “distemper” and “suicidal tendencies,” by suggesting they open the sunporch and “recruit some ladies to demonstrate flower arranging, weaving—that sort of thing.” Next she saves the town, which is going bankrupt, by suggesting that they have the interstate rerouted three miles so it passes through town, and build a replica of old Prairie City for the tourists, replete with “ladies of the evening” who “daintily picked their way to the elegant dining room of the hotel, where they quaffed make-believe champagne and provided an interesting atmosphere,” as well as “daring dance-hall girls, resplendent in black lace stockings, beads, and sequins.” Guess what—her whorehouse cum tourist attraction is a smashing success.

Another 18 months go by without a word from Brad the louse, or apparently either from Dr. Hale, who also has taken a job at the hospital. Brad finally arrives back to town, leaps from his ubiquitous limo at a parade, and takes her in his arms before the entire town as the band strikes up “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” If you can believe it. He tells her, “This is it, kid! We’ll be together now—for good. Always!” Jolie about explodes in joy: “The years of waiting, of praying for this moment, had come. Brad wanted her, always and forever, for his love, his wife!” There are about two more paragraphs that run along this vein—I’ll spare you—but then a photographer steps up for a snap, and Brad says, “You’re blocking me, kid,” and gently moves her to one side. Well, 15 years of chasing this one lame guy are sunk with those four little words. “This isn’t the beginning, her heart whispered. It isn’t the beginning at all. It’s the end.” So she walks off, runs into Quentin, and the pair head off to get a hamburger, “running toward the future—together—where there is safety and warmth.”

Holy smokes, I just don’t even know where to start. I’ve given a lot of thought in the past few days to terrible nurse novels. I have only given a flat F to one other book, Conflict for Nurse Elsa, but even that book had so much zaniness to it that there were at least a few moments to pluck out and hold up for laughs. And there are those so-bad-you-gotta-read-it books, of which Arlene Fitzgerald and Zillah MacDonald are the undisputed champs, so though they are veterans of the Worst Authors list on the Annual VNRN Awards, I still look forward to picking up another of their books.

This book, unfortunately, is not of that ilk; it is just plain terrible. Its sins include the trivial, such as when we’re told that “the four giant wings of Wyandotte Memorial Hospital” were “built in the shape of a T,” which of course has only three branches. The language is startlingly formal, such as when, in the throes of passion, Brad blurts out that Jolie is “a vital presence without which I did not wish to die,” the romantic fool. The story is regularly just plain bizarre, such as when it mentions a wild squirrel one of Jolie’s siblings had tamed “until Bernadette accidentally had slammed the casement on his furry little body,” or a pony that Watt, age ten, had beaten with a stick, breaking its back so it had to be shot. The Jolie family is apparently actually French, though we’re never overtly told this, which belatedly but still unsatisfactorily explains Bern’s occasional pretentious français. We off-handedly learn that Jolie’s two brothers were killed in Korea and that her sister is a cloistered nun in Wisconsin who is allowed to send only a single postcard once a year. Bizarrely, Brad was “only a freshman in high school at age twenty,” and that’s all we learn of that. These strange details are randomly tossed into the soup and just float there—or more likely, sink—adding nothing.

Then there’s the essential problem of Jolie’s obsession with Brad, which is fervent and unswerving except when he’s in the room, and then she tells him “the spontaneity is gone”—but not to worry, so is he, three paragraphs later. Almost everything that happens in this book is told to us rather than shown; I don’t believe we are given more than two dozen sentences from either one of the leading men in 157 pages. The story is just dull: There are no talking parrots, no exonerating medical charts stuffed into a hole in the sofa, no intruders who leave half-full bottles of whisky in the cupboard. I had a premonition of foreboding when I saw the cover illustration, but maybe it was actually Ruth McCarthy Sears’ name, as the woman has given us some profoundly mediocre books (see Nurse in Acapulco and Timberline Nurse). All I can say is that in the future, when I pick up another RMS book—and she seems to have written a total of 19 nurse novels, woe unto me—I will understand any omens of ill portent that tiptoe down my spine. Although Ghetto Nurse sounds promising.

This book was also published
in a hardcover edition, with
cover illustration by Edrien King.

Second-Chance Nurse

By Jane Converse (pseud. Adele Kay Maritano), ©1961

Crisis! The young doctor’s face was etched with bitter hope and desperate strength. Karen Reese looked form him to the small form stretched on the hospital bed and knew that Dr. Mark Corman needed her at last; needed her skill, her devotion, even her silent, unspoken love. For only love’s valiant faith could win this struggle. Death was groping for the child with cold fingers, but they would not, could not, let him die … A dedicated doctor and nurse are united in a heart-gripping battle for the life of a child, while a fierce love grows between them as they thwart death with all the courage of their calling.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“It seems the eight-hour, twenty-dollars-a-day angels of mercy can pick and choose their cases.”

“You’d better move the wedding date up a little, Jo. This smootching into the wee small hours is murder.”

“Happy, sentimental tears were as ruinous to the appearance as the heartbroken variety.”

REVIEW:

One of my least-favorite tropes in the VNRN genre is the beautiful, intelligent, hard-working nurse who’s in love with a jerk. Meet Karen Reese, who works at Los Angeles’ Valleycrest Hospital. Karen is not without flaw, although hers is actually completely trivial, as is the standard in VNRNs. As “an exhausted probationer,” one night, trapped in the hospital during a blizzard that kept the relief staff from coming in but had not kept the victims of a terrible fire from arriving in the ED, Karen in a sleep-deprived haze carried a unit of Type A blood to a Type O victim. The horror!! Of course, the nurse on duty had actually checked the label, realized it was the wrong type and had not given it. “Do you know what your carelessness nearly did to that patient? To the reputation of this hospital?” shrieks the nursing supervisor, telling her that when the storm calms down she’s going to recommend that Karen be barred from the nursing profession. And then, 20 minutes after Karen has left her office, drops dead of a heart attack, and that’s the end of the matter. The guilt of this unforgiveable sin is a heavy weight she carries with her still!

Karen has met Dr. Corman at the hospital, but after she fell hard for the man who paid her scant attention, she left to become a private nurse. Their paths cross again when Dr. Corman calls to ask her to special a child who was lucky enough to live in the days before vaccines were routine and is now sick with tetanus and likely to die. When she shows up for the interview, he is immediately nasty, asking if she’s brought her mystery novel and saying, “I expect you assumed there’d be plenty of time to read. With the kind of cases you usually handle, there might even be time to do your nails. Did you bring nail polish?” Apparently this job requires that she stand next to the patient for her entire 3:00 to 11:00 shift in a darkened room “where the slightest sound might precipitate a fatal spasm,” where there’s a “critical danger involved in a rattle teacup or a dropped teaspoon.” Throw in the opportunity to work with a mean doctor and Karen can’t sign up fast enough! The job itself actually does seem pretty dull—the boy, Ronnie, is under heavy sedation and tied to the bed, and as far as I can tell Karen’s job is to take vital signs, inject meds,  and watch him seize. But the stress is exhausting, and when Dr. Corman stops by, “her awareness of him tensed every nerve in her body”—seems like tetanus is catching. Even as the days drag on and Karen proves her worth, he continues to be a cold brute. “What made the man so vicious … so uncompromisingly cruel?” she wonders. “Dr. Corman was a detestable boor. No woman in possession of her right senses could think herself in love with a detestable boor.” Good thing for Dr. Corman that Karen is clearly out of her mind. Case in point: She decides that “the caustic remarks, the bitterness … perhaps these symptoms of a soul’s sickness, too, could be healed by the touch of gentle hands.” Ugh.

Weeks pass. Ronnie’s father, Thomas, spends a lot of time visiting his boy, and by extension hanging out with Karen. Thomas is divorced from his Ronnie’s mother, Lorena, because while he was working 100 hours a week as a famous TV director, she was spending time with “some sweet-talking young crumb—a would-be actor,” and when Thomas found out, he had Lorena declared an unfit mother and she lost custody (which seems incredibly hard to believe). But Lorena spends a lot of time at the hospital, too, apparently clued in by Dr. Corman when Thomas has left the building, and Karen tries to fend off Thomas’ increasing regard for her while pushing Lorena to fight for custody of her child.

Meanwhile, in a side plot, Karen’s roommate Patty Tanner seems to get pulled into one heartbreaking case after another. Patty is currently caring for a man with terminal cancer who has not been told of his diagnosis—talk about unethical!—and keeps telling her about all the things he’s going to do when he gets home. There’s a stark contrast between Karen, who is tough enough to shoulder all the stress and emotional torment of her job without even a slump in her posture, and Patty, who spends the evenings sobbing in her bedroom and shrieking, “I’m not a parasite like you. I’m a nurse! I’m a nurse! I’m a nurse!” Psych consult, stat! When Karen finds some little pills in Karen’s bag, she takes one to a friend in the lab who tests it and learns that it’s benzadrine. Karen’s concerned that Patty has stolen the meds from the hospital and is using them while on the job, so she tells Dr. Corman about it, who has Patty hauled in for a grilling. It turns out Patty only took a few pills, which had belonged to her deceased patient, after her patient’s death and then threw the rest out. But as Patty is fleeing the hospital after being fired, she is run over by an ambulance and admitted with broken ribs and a head injury. During that time she gets to know Dr. Tony Eberhart, the intern she’s sworn never to get involved with because he’s a doctor and she hates doctors so much …

Needless to say, everything gets wrapped up nicely in the end. Patty, as she’s about to be discharged from the hospital, is offered a job by Dr. Corman as his office nurse. Ronnie gets better, of course, and Thomas asks Karen to come home with him, if not as his wife then as Ronnie’s nurse. Lorena arrives at the Sills’ ranch one afternoon, and the family reunion involves “laughin’ an’ cryin’ an’ carryin’ on,” the housekeeper tells Karen. Dr. Corman drops by for a house call, full of his usual piss and vinegar, and Karen tells him off, but he reveals that he had initially treated Ronnie’s cut in the ED and had missed the tetanus diagnosis, and the delay in treatment likely made the illness that much worse. That’s why he’s been so horrid, but now that Ronnie is well, he can be nice again. Phew!

Jane Converse has brought us some wonderful books, but she has also written some duds. So I open every book of hers for the first time with real hope—which in this case quickly died. Her writing here is decent, but we’ve met all these characters before in other stories of hers, and didn’t care for them then, either. I guess the  best thing I can say for this book is that it’s not as bad as a case of tetanus, and it’s certainly a strong reminder to keep your booster up to date.

Nurse Conner Comes Home

Arlene Hale, ©1964
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

Sue Conner never thought of competing with her sister Marsha. Marsha was the family beauty who led an exciting life, never lacking for a date. Sue was the serious and sensible type—dedicated to her demanding job as a nurse and resigned to the fact that no man would look at her twice while her sister was around. Yet everything changed when handsome David Wakefield came into their lives. For then Sue found herself in the role of her sister’s rival for a man destined to break one of their hearts.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“It was odd, she thought with a smile touching her lips. All those patients, all those interns, all those doctors and not a single one of them for her!”

“Sometimes, Sue, Marsha just needs to be turned over someone’s knee and spanked.”

REVIEW:
Sue and her sister Marsha share an apartment in Grimes City. Sue is the plain, responsible ant who works as a nurse. Marsha is a beautiful, glamorous, grasshopper who has just quit her job as the book opens and proposes to Sue that they move back to their hometown, Point Pleasant, which they left five years ago after Marsha’s boyfriend, David Wakefield, unexpectedly married someone else. Sue doesn’t want to leave, but she feels responsible for Marsha, perhaps because the two are orphans, raised by their Aunt Kate when their parents were killed in a car crash.

So two weeks later they are back in town—and guess who else is there? David Wakefield and his four-year-old son, Davie! David’s wife died of a heart condition a year ago, and he himself has just returned to town. Coincidence? Sue thinks not, and she is peeved. But Marsha is determined to win him back, and Sue backs down from her indignation, the little doormat. The problem is, Sue can’t stop thinking about David herself. Once, when they were in high school, he had kissed her as a joke, but he’d been dating Marsha even then, and nothing came of it except a hysterical fit from Marsha.

Sue gets a job working for old family friend Dr. Joe Sarten, who counts the Davids Wakefield amongst his patients, so it isn’t too long before Sue runs into David at the doctor’s office, and he asks her out to lunch. They have a lovely time, but soon David is seeing Marsha again—and soon after that, the pair are engaged. The only rub is that Davie doesn’t care for Marsha, though he thinks the world of Sue, who she meets for the first time when he comes to see Dr. Joe for a cut on his hand. Then on a visit to see Davie, Sue notices that the boy is limping. Turns out he’s stepped on a rusty nail, and he’s looking feverish, and when Davie’s mother was ill a few things got neglected … like vaccinations for little Davie …

There’s really not much in the way of plot in this little book, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading. Sue’s complex feelings toward David and Marsha are recognizable and sympathetic, and they evolve organically over the course of the book. It’s obvious where the story is going from the second chapter, and it doesn’t have a lot of excitement or camp to it, but it’s a gentle and worthwhile story.