Mary Ellis, Student Nurse

By Hope Newell, ©1958 

Mary Ellis Stebbins, the delightful heroine of A Cap for Mary Ellis, who left her home in New York’s Harlem to attend a newly integrated nursing school upstate, is sure her second year of study will bring many problems. It does, but they have little to do with racial conflict—for the most part, they concern her additional responsibilities as a second-year student. And then there is the entirely welcome complication of furthering her friendship with a nice young intern!

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“I think I’ve finally persuaded her that there are more important things in life than comfort.” 

“If you youngsters talked less about managing patients and more about understanding them you’d make a lot more headway.”

“How annoying patients can be when they try to make things easy for nurses.”

“Lots of girls take up nursing with the idea of being angels of mercy to the sick and suffering and all but idolized by their grateful patients. Then they meet up with a few Miss Swopes and find out that even angels are not always appreciated. Before they know it they’ve forgotten their high ideals and begin to think of nursing as just a way to make a living.”

“It wasn’t necessary to answer insulting people.”

REVIEW:
Mary Ellis Stebbins is returning to Woodycrest Memorial Hospital for her second year of nursing; she was one of two Black students admitted the year prior when the school integrated, and a third Black woman is starting this fall as a new student. The incoming class is introduced to the second years, and each is given a “little sister” to mentor, so immediately we have 14 nursing students to keep straight—not helped by the fact that they are all given fairly stupid nicknames. Mary Ellis, for example, is called Tater, because last year she was posing as a patient when another student was practicing washing, and was told that the amount of water she was using wasn’t enough to clean a potato. And so it goes for 13 more young ladies. 

Each incoming student has some handicap to overcome—some are just poor with scraped-together wardrobes, but Claudia Orcott had a “coasting accident”—not really sure what that is, sledding, possibly—and disfigured her nose; even though grumpy plastic surgeon Dr. Meyers refuses to do plastic surgery “merely for cosmetic reasons,” Mary Ellis decides she’s going to ask him to fix Claudia’s horrific appearance, and then we don’t hear from Miss Orcott or about this again until the end of the book.

Before long intrigue blooms when in one afternoon a gold rosary and two other students’ money go missing. What a scandal! “As long as every one of our class is in on the secret, I reckon we won’t have any trouble keeping it from the rest of the school,” Mary Ellis suggests with apparently genuine sincerity. Well, the mystery is solved by one of the students—not Mary Ellis—who would give Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple a run for her money. Now the book is half over and we only have 75 more pages to go.

As a second-year nursing student, Mary Ellis is the only person staffing an entire ward on the overnight shift. Astonishingly, the only “horrible experience” she has is when an elderly patient with a fatal disease dies and she does not realize this when she checks on him in the morning before going off duty. But time goes on, “gradually dulling her misery” over this terrible “mistake,” and soon we’re three-quarters through the book, when four new interns come to the hospital, and one of them, Dr. Harris, is Black! Which means that “each of the three colored girls was hoping that Dr. Harris would seek her out and ask her for a date.” That was how it was in the day, unbelievable as it is now.

Now we have a whirlwind of crises for Mary Ellis to right. It turns out the plastic surgeon Dr. Meyers and his wife are hoping to adopt a child but are considered too old. You will not be shocked to hear that Mary Ellis discovers a soon-to-be orphaned boy in the hospital; his mother has “an incurable disease” and “had not long to live.” She manages to rescue the boy, Sammy, when he nearly strangles on the restraining straps tying him to his crib (!!), and introduces Sammy to Dr. Meyers—a week later everything is all settled, and Mary Ellis then asks Dr. Meyers to have a look at Claudia’s nose, which apparently no one has bothered to do until now, though several discussions among the staff have occurred during the school year. All that remains is for Mary Ellis to wangle a date with Dr. Harris and pass her exams and we can close the book.

One of this book’s flaws is that it gets too heavily into details. For example, there’s a pages-long discussion of possible ways Claudia might first glimpse her new nose, and more pages discussing the machinations behind the organization of the Capping Ceremony; there are also more than 60 named characters to try (and fail) to keep track of (not to mention their nicknames). Furthermore, for a nursing student, we don’t see much of Mary Ellis outside the dormitory. She is constantly dwelling on the fact that her teachers tell her she is “not very hot in making decisions and that kind of thing.” But her daily life as a nursing student is almost completely ignored and we rarely ever see her at work, when she is either burning the toast or saving a toddler from strangulation. The fact that Mary Ellis is one of the first Black women accepted to her school and is likely subjected to racism is only rarely or tangentially discussed, and it seems that the author of this book was actually white. Author Rubie Saunders is widely (and as far as I can discover, appropriately) credited as being the first Black author of romance novels featuring a Black heroine, but here we have a curious example of a white author writing a Black heroine. I am curious to know how and why this book came about, but I’m guessing this mystery will never be answered; if only we could get Mary Ellis’ classmate on the case.

Nurse in Danger

By Maisie Greig, ©1955

The steward laid a small table for them in the cabin and set silver and a pink-shaded lamp upon it: the white cloth reflected the soft light so that suddenly Jane felt she was in some exclusive nightclub. It really was very romantic. As the boat dipped gently she could see through the porthole the silver-crested waves, the moonlight cutting a path through the dark waters … but how could one feel romantic, when dining with a man who obviously intended to murder you at the first possible opportunity?

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“You talk as though you were a Commie.” 

“If you don’t have a pretty fair opinion of yourself, what’s the good of going on living?”

“You have spunk, Jane, as well as a fertile imagination, and those qualities I admire in a woman. That and a nice little body.”

“You lack complete understanding of other women, Jane. They like to be hit about, they like to grovel. It’s the slave complex.”

“Perhaps in the last analysis you can take anything for yourself, it’s only when you see others punished and humiliated before your eyes you finally revolt.”

REVIEW:
Jane is another orphan nurse who has landed the lucky job of caring for a wildly wealthy young widow, Elsa Spiegal. Well, mostly she’s just a companion, but “in case she had another of those wretched heart attacks she wanted Jane to be along.” So Jane relocates from England and follows Elsa everywhere: “the Colony, Sardis, the Algonquin, the 21 Club.” And she’s hot, too! “She had slim and shapely legs, one of the reason many of the weary habitués of the Stork Club or the El Morocco half turned in their chairs and watched her samba.” Which unfortunately isn’t working out well: “That may have been one of the reasons why Mrs. Spiegal seemed to have turned rather cool towards her lately, almost to resent her.”

Or maybe it’s the fact that Professor Dick Creswell seems to like her. “Reputedly he was a mineralist and geologist of distinction,” but he had also inherited a lot of money and is hosting this fabulous party on his yacht. But instead of flirt with Dick, she is forced to listen to Mrs. Palmer cry, because her three-year-old was kidnapped more than two weeks ago, and no one at this silly party cares at all! They don’t: “We’re all very sorry for her and all that, but she is becoming a bit of a pest,” snorts Dick, earning his name. But Jane is able to shrug off his callousness and accompany him to his cabin where he shows Jane and Elsa his jewelry collection. Elsa, “reputed to have one of the finest collections of diamonds in the whole of the United States,” exhorts Dick to lend her a diamond watch for an exhibition, and then casually details her entire security arrangement, including the fact that Jane knows the combination to the safe and will be home alone for a week while Elsa is away. Now Jane demonstrates more sense, appreciating an “atmosphere she’d been conscious of when she’d first stepped on to the yacht, a disturbing, even a frightening undercurrent of suspicion, it might even be danger.” Well, we know it’s danger, since it says so right there on the cover!

She meets a young seaman on board who ridicules the other guests, pointing out their callousness toward others, Mrs. Porter being a case in point, and Jane reluctantly agrees—well, they’ve been so kind to her! He’s caught talking to Jane by Dick, who tells her that the man is an attempted thief whom he has hired in an attempt to set him on the straight and narrow with hard, honest work. Then he tells her that Elsa is wildly jealous because he is attracted to Jane and kisses her in the moonlight, the cad. Now the young innocent nurse is tortured about her own feelings for him, and his for her, when we savvy VNRN readers know the truth! Guess who enters Elsa’s apartment days later on the aforementioned day when Jane is there alone, sporting a small automatic pistol? He empties the safe, and kidnaps Jane, making it look like she herself was the thief. “Her only hope of fighting him was to pretend to acquiesce and, the chill though struck into her heart again, her only hope of living.” He drags her on board his yacht again, setting sail for who knows where? There she meets the sailor again, and he scorns her as a cheap tramp who has come on a cruise unchaperoned with a man she’s just met. She doesn’t dare to set him straight since Dick has suggested that she will “be a good girl” or be killed, and she interprets this as not telling anyone she’s a prisoner.

The seaman does warm to Jane, even kissing her before she even knows his name, and enlists her help in a scheme. He somehow manages to make Dick fall down a staircase, breaking his arm, and Jane injects him with some drug that knocks him out for 24 hours. While he’s out, she pokes around in his room and finds a child’s book that she recognizes as belonging to poor Mrs. Palmer’s kidnapped daughter Sally! Now we have question marks sprinkled across every page like ants at a picnic. They’re usually stupid questions Jane is asking herself repeatedly, though if she gave things an actual minute of thought she could likely figure out the answer. Now that Dick is her patient, though, he’s a lot more sympathetic toward her, and she convinces him that she’d been casing Mrs. Siegel’s jewelery collection a lot longer than he had, and he owes her half his profit from the heist. And it turns out that Jane is quite the actress! “He was beginning to be afraid that there might come a time when his emotions might interfere very seriously with his cool judgment” when it came to Jane.  Then she’s off to hide behind the life boats with Jaspar, kissing him “in the throes of her first big love affair.” That was fast! “They were in grave danger of their lives, but they were young and they were in love, and for that moment nothing else seemed to matter.”

We do get into some interesting philosophical discussions regarding wealth and its distributions, ideas that have more relevance in this day and age. “Why should a stupid woman like Elsa Spiegal have some of the world’s best jewels?” asks Dick. “What has she done to deserve them? What has she given to the world?” He, working as a professor, “contributed much to the world’s knowledge,” but had only a “pittance.” I have to admit I agree with his position—tax wealth, not work!

More philosophy ensues when a man is thought to have attempted to signal a passing ship, and Jaspar is ordered to throw the man overboard to the sharks. Now Jane is arguing with herself because she is still in love with Jaspar. “What a madly illogical thing love was,” she thinks. “Sometimes you hated yourself for living, and yet there it was, the strongest force in life that throbbed through your veins and blood. It couldn’t be killed by disillusion, however bitter; and while you despised yourself there was something in your heart that still sang with joy.” I don’t think love is quite as immortal as she would make out, otherwise the divorce rate might be a bit less than it is. But Jane seems to have some odd ideas about love; in the climax of the book Jaspar is rather vicious to several of the villains, but Jane decides that Jaspar is a “savage brute,” but “Savage brute or not, I’d die if I wasn’t going to be married to him!” He shows up at just that moment and she tells him she thinks he’s a brute, “and now hgis hard, blunt-fingered hands gripped Jane’s shoulders. ‘I’ll show you how much more of a brute I can be when I’m married to you, my girl,’” he answers, and shakes her. Stunningly, she neither runs screaming nor calls off the engagement, but says, “I don’t care if you beat me up every day, so long as you keep on loving me.” Just wow.

Overall the writing is engaging, though it does indulge in way too many rhetorical questions. The book’s biggest flaw is that Jane as a character is utterly bipolar. One minute she is coolly lying her head off to get out of a dangerous situation with the Professor, and then she’s shrieking hysterically during an escape in which the slightest sound could get them caught. Her over-the-top feeling for Jaspar based on a total of ten minutes in his company is completely unbelievable, and then when he is increasingly proved to be alarmingly domineering, her unswerving devotion to a future as an emotionally if not also physically abused wife is baffling. Author Maysie Greig’s lovely Doctor’s Wife had given me high hopes for her work, but now three additional books all written in the 1950s and lacking that book’s charm makes me think that early work, written in 1937, exhausted her genius. There seems to be another half-dozen nurse novels by Ms. Greig, so time will tell, but I’m not making any bets they’ll get much better.

Nurse Sally’s Last Chance

By Anne Durham, ©1967 

Sally Marston had been in continuous hot water for a long time, until in desperation her family persuaded her to take up nursing as a last chance to settle down. But what made any of them imagine that that would keep Sally out of trouble?

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Most girls go all round the world to get at what they want to say, and after one has found out, one is too tired to care.” 

“Tea was a meal that saved one from getting irritable in the arid length of hours between lunch and the evening meal. It was sacrilege not to make the most of it.”

“Number Fifteen has just slopped over herself her new bottle of orange squash and the other dimwit who came with you is making heavy weather of mopping up. Go and see how much you can add to the confusion.”

REVIEW:
Right out of the gate I could not help but like Sally Marston—who is not a nurse; at book’s end she has only just finished the preliminary probationary period in the first weeks of nursing school. When we meet her, she has volunteered to wash the dishes even though she loathes the job and is ferociously attacking the chore: “If you were doing something noisy and useful like washing up, she told herself grimly, the chances were that people would leave you alone.” At 19, she already has a rather dismal career: She’d been tossed from boarding school after sneaking out for a late date with smooth operator Frank Sandford, more than a decade her senior, and “that clot of the girl who shared her room had forgotten to open the window and Sally had been caught.” From there she had lurched into a job at a stable she abruptly quit, then to one at a hotel that had also ended disastrously, so now she is skulking around the house feeling at loose ends.

Dr. Bruce Carmichael, the town GP, “is so good-looking it oozes out of his ears—and doesn’t he know it! He’s so pleased with himself, you can sense at, even from his back view!” He is caring for her parents: Her mother was injured in a train wreck that occurred while she was on her way to attempt to soothe Sally’s mishaps, and her father has some unspecified cardiac issues, inferred to be caused by worry about his wife, so she feels responsible for both her parents’ health concerns. Dr. Bruce also takes it upon himself to suggest that Sally become a nurse, her “last chance” of landing a decent career after her early spectacular debacles, though the details of these fiascos are slow in coming and in fact impossible for the reader to guess—quite the rarity in a VNRN. Sally agrees to go, because she does not want to burden her parents further, and he pulls some strings to get her into a training program. Fabulous Sally is not exactly grateful: “Who does he think he is, to talk to me like that? Honestly, he expects that I shall be thrown out! I’m going to stay here and I’m going to qualify, just to show him! If it’s the last thing I do, I’m sticking it out to the bitter end.”

Of course, Sally runs into none other than the cad Frank in town, who takes up where he abruptly left off after ghosting her a year ago, feeding her a convoluted story about a concussion and lost addresses, etc. etc. But “she was sick and silly over him, though she knew he was no good,” and after sneaking out late to see him her first week, she’s locked out of the dorm again—clearly having learned nothing from boarding school—but nice Dr. John Weaver rescues her and get her safely back inside. It’s not long before Frank stands her up again—and again Dr. Weaver is on hand to tuck her into his car and buy her a jolly lunch at a charming country inn.

Gradually the plot threads of her earlier mishaps uncurl, and extend grasping tendrils to try to wrap her up tight again. The fun is digging layer by layer into the complicated mess, slowly unearthing more clues that still don’t make the end obvious—but it must be confessed that when all was finally revealed, I didn’t entirely follow the whole plot. As the story trots briskly along, we watch Sally interact with the three men in her life, always entranced by Frank, bounder that he is; irritated by well-meaning Dr. Carmichael; and pleased by Dr. Weaver. She has a good friend in roomie Cerise Oldham, who is unfortunately not the witty, interesting stereotype, but a friend is a friend regardless. The writing is occasionally humorous—every letter Sally chucks at Cerise to read ends up skidding under the dresser, for example—and Sally is an interesting and entertaining character to spend 188 pages with, which is a long length of time to keep this reader engaged. If in the end her romantic choice is rather obvious, this is the only straightforward aspect of the book, which makes it an excellent chance that you will thoroughly enjoy Nurse Sally’s Last Chance as much as I did.

The White Jacket

By Kate Norway (pseud. Olive Norton), ©1961
Cover illustration by Paul Ann Soik 

Vivien loved her surgical work with all the enthusiasm of her temperamental nature. She had been attracted to Johnny Dysart by his even temper and sound common sense. But the arrival of a new and disturbingly attractive member of the staff changed both their lives—and indeed the lives of many of the doctors and nurses at Queen’s Hospital.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Men! she thought angrily. As soon as a woman begins to think for herself they tell her she’s tired. Tired!” 

“Well, if there’s any giving in to be done, I always think it’s best to let the men have the last word, Doctor. They set a lot of store by it. Women know when they’ve won, and they don’t need to have it in black and white the way men do.”

“Nature heals and the doctor only encourages the patient while she does it.”

“Nothing worthwhile ever is simple.”

REVIEW:
It’s interesting to me that when a VNRN has a female doctor protagonist, there is often at least one more woman MD on the staff—but when the book’s heroine is a nurse, almost never do you meet a female doctor. Anyway, here we have Dr. Vivien Bromwich, who is working in an English hospital. From what I can tell she’s finishing her residency, and covers all specialties, though she spends a lot of time in surgery with Dr. Malcolm, her boss and mentor. 

She’s sort of engaged to Johnny Dysart, though it’s not “official,” whatever that means, because “I want to feel a hundred per cent sure,” she tells Johnny. I guess it really means they’re not engaged. Johnny is a cool customer: “It wasn’t easy to tell with Johnny. His comfortable cheerfulness never varied very much. Big and confident, he made her feel safe.” Safe, of course, is not always a promising feature in VNRN men.

The other woman MD in the book, Dr. Rena Todd, is a 36-year-old surgeon in training who is much discussed by the staff. “Too much ambition,” Johnny snorts. “Rena’s determined to be a Great Surgeon—and if she only knew it, she’d probably be a darn sight happier being the Little Woman to some nice chap.” Vivien, to her only partial credit, disagrees, saying, “She’s not a cabbage like me. I don’t want to be a career woman all my life.” Rena, it turns out, has been married and even had a baby, but it had died and her husband had left her. She’s now unable to have children, so she feels “I’m a failure as a woman,” and that’s part of the reason she works so hard at surgery.

On her own career front, Vivien is proving herself in the OR, and Dr. Malcolm asks her to stay on as his registrar, which I think is the British term for fellow. “Wasting your time, working with me, if you’re not going to go on with it,” he points out. When she says she might get married—the horrible inference being that she’ll quit working—he answers, “Any fool can keep house. But you can do surgery.” I love Dr. Malcolm. Discussing the invitation with Johnny, he refuses to even recognize the compliment, much less consider the offer. “I’m a man, and I have to think about having a career and providing for a family. You don’t,” he tells her. “Why can’t he let me glow, just for once?” she wonders.

In her personal life, while she’s waiting to feel 100 percent certain of Johnny—good luck with that—Vivien meets Edward Featherstone, who is working as an OR porter. “Emboldened by the perfect fit of their interlocking glances,” she starts snatching kisses with him in the autoclave room, and her secret smooching leads her to think she shouldn’t marry Johnny. But then she and Johnny are in a car crash, while he’s driving their friend Dr. Dick Clements’ car, and Johnny is badly hurt, requiring the amputation of several fingers. Now surgery as a specialty is out for him—and we’re panicking, thinking she’ll marry him out of pity, but he breaks up with her from his hospital bed. “Now I begin to live my life the way I want to live it,” she thinks, and the freedom in that sentence truly made my heart lift up.

Unfortunately, the insurance won’t pay for Dick’s car, and the book takes a turn into a mystery story. Vivien borrows $200 from Edward Featherstone and gives it to Dick for his car, but then Edward comes to Vivien in a panic and says he needs the money back immediately, as he’s leaving the area in a highly suspicious hurry! Then avuncular Dr. Malcolm is assaulted and dies of a head wound, and Edward has disappeared, and a patient has been robbed of $200, bills he had fortuitously marked in advance. Edward calls Vivien and tells her to leave the $200 in a telephone booth, and then she learns that he is wanted by the police for murdering Dr. Malcolm. While trying to decide what to do, she confides in Dick Clements, who is increasingly but gently making it clear that he has feelings for Vivien. He sends her to the hospital archives, where she learns that Edward was once signing hospital notes as Edward Featherstone Catlow MD, and that he had lost his privileges at the hospital for stealing drugs.

She and Dick go to the police, who are supposed to surveil the telephone booth after Vivien drops off a fake envelope, but they seem to have gone for doughnuts at the crucial moment because one of the OR nurses is discovered knocked out in the telephone booth and the envelope is gone. Vivien and Dick then head for the coffee shop, but it turns out that the bill Vivien uses to pay the tab is one of the stolen bills! Dick stands by her as she’s questioned by the police—who now think she was the one who knocked out the nurse. “If you’re in it, Viv, I have to be in it too, until it works out,” Dick tells her. “I’m with you.” He’s the kind of person who sees she’s troubled and pulls her aside for a talk. “His quiet strength was unbearably moving to her, the more so for its silence. He put an arm across her shoulder and waited. It was clear that he was prepared to wait all night, if necessary, for her to confide in him.” Well, I was won over!

The mystery is wrapped up, not in the way I’d imagined, but it does turn out that Vivien is innocent after all! This book is a little above the usual, with a mystery that actually is one in some places, solid writing, fine characters, and luscious ball gowns. If we are subjected to the usual sexism that the heroine doesn’t work especially hard to shrug off, she doesn’t completely accept it, either, and lives her life in an honest, forthright way—with a little help from her friends. Olive Norton, here writing as Kate Norway, is quickly becoming a trusted source for an enjoyable, pleasant read, and I am happy to have found her, and this charming book.

Resident Nurse

By Frances Dean Hancock
(pseud. Jeanne Judson), ©1966 

Mark Lennon wanted to marry Nurse Lyle Mackey and take her away to Mexico. But Lyle, not sure she really loved the young architect, kept putting him off. Besides, she enjoyed taking care of the twenty elderly women “guests” at Harewood House. It was a dream job. The dream became a nightmare, however, when one of the guests reported a valuable ring missing. When Lyle found the ring, under “mysterious” circumstances, ugly rumors began. Still, no one would have seriously suspected her of theft if Dr. Tom Blake hadn’t encouraged the idea. Lyle wondered why he hated her so much … perhaps because she’d refused to date him after he’d tricked her into accompanying him to a gambling house? Then the ring vanished again, and this time unfounded suspicion drove Lyle out of Harewood—heartsick, wondering if she would ever be able to clear her name …

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“I hate middle-aged people. Youth is glorious and old age is compensating.” 

“Lyle sometimes suspected that she would have been more enthusiastic about him if her parents had been less so.”

“Sometimes I feel like beating you and wonder why I’m so much in love with you with so little encouragement.”

“It’s the rich old women she feels sorry for. In poor or middle-class homes the old women have the satisfaction of still being useful as baby sitters or helping with the housework, and they know their children aren’t tolerating them for the sake of legacies, because they have nothing to leave.”

“Being a good-natured woman, she bit into a caviar sandwich to restrain herself from making any comment about people who had never heard of the apostolic succession.”

“I’ve seen a lot of girls wearing their hair like that. Usually they’re accompanied by men with beards.”

“Oh, you and your ethics.”

“When you’re older you’ll find out that many times you will be credited with virtues you don’t deserve and with faults that you never dreamed of.”

REVIEW:
Lyle Mackey works as a nurse at Harewood House, a private residence for 20 wealthy old women who intend to live out their lives there, a sort of early assisted living facility. She loves her work because for the most part the old gals are fairly healthy and only need routine pills and maybe a back rub now and then—working at the hospital had been a difficult, low-paying job, and she was glad to be out of it. Her boyfriend, Mark Lennon, relentlessly pushes her to marry him, and makes sneering remarks about the Old Dears. “ ‘I can just see you passing out the sleeping pills and the tranquilizers and the cathartics and diuretics, and so on.’ Mark’s mouth twisted in disgust.” He’s got no pity for the “selfish old biddies thinking only of prolonging their useless lives,” although I’m not exactly sure what he thinks the alternative is, and what exactly any of us are doing every minute? She’s just wasting time at her job, he tells her. “You could do better—marrying me, for example,” he says. Right. So exactly no one is sorry when Mark packs off to Mexico for several weeks on business. But before he leaves, he proves true to form by insisting, “When I return from this trip, either you’ll  marry me and go back there with me or we’ll just say goodbye.” If I were Lyle, I wouldn’t have made him wait weeks for his answer. At least she feels that his ultimatum “offended her sense of freedom and independence.” 

In her free time, Lyle accepts a date with Dr. Tom Blake, who is the nephew of Mattie Pringle, a Harewood House inhabitant. He’s a handsome man, but Lyle is not impressed when he takes her to a private house on their date. “He’s going to entertain me inexpensively by taking me to visit friends who are giving one of those Bohemian parties at which anyone is welcome, Lyle thought angrily.” Which seemed snobbish and odd to me, but as luck would have it, the place turns out to be a gambling parlor. Tom dumps her in a chair and heads off for the craps table, where he makes a bundle, and she makes the acquaintance of George Glyndon, who happens to be an antique dealer, Mark’s boss, and a cousin of another Harewood House resident—talk about small worlds! Eventually Tom is ready to leave, but his time with the dice has turned him into a monster, and after he insults Lyle for not enjoying gambling, he drives her home and assaults her in the car outside the front door. She slaps him hard across the ear and escapes, while he shouts, “You’ll be sorry for this, you little tramp. No one’s going to treat me like that and get away with it.”

His plan for revenge involves taking up with the other nurse at Harewood House, Mollie, and curiously Lyle says nothing at all to Mollie about her nightmare date with the creep, and her hints that she would never date Tom again only intrigue Mollie more. “I’d like to live dangerously just once,” she says, and soon she’s seeing him regularly, though it’s not clear if Tom is assaulting her too.

Then Tom’s aunt’s valuable emerald ring goes missing, and many chapters are spent looking for it. When we’ve finally forgotten all about the darned thing, it turns up in the drug cabinet—to which only Lyle, Mollie and Harewood House director, Mrs. Gaitskill, have keys. Good doobie that she is, Lyle turns the ring in to Mrs. Gaitskill, who decides they will say that the ring was found in the bookshelf. Miss Pringle is relieved to get it back—but then a few days later it’s disappeared again, and now she’s out for murder, egged on by nasty nephew Tom, who starts spreading gossip among the old ladies that Lyle stole it. Soon everyone is looking at her askance, except Mrs. Bickford, who takes her aside to tell her that she had been accused of murdering her husband years ago, but there had never been enough evidence to convict her—painting a picture that leaves you thinking that she actually did it. She tells this story to Lyle in the hope that it will help her feel better, but the next day we learn Mrs. Bickford died overnight. Did Lyle kill her? Apparently not, but why did the author?

Now with ignominy hanging over her, Lyle suddenly decides, “She was ready to marry Mark now. Then, because she was always questioning herself, she asked herself if it was love for Mark or a desire to get away from a job that no longer interested her and had become actually unpleasant.” But though she always questions herself, she doesn’t like to give any answers, and in the next sentence we’re on to some new scene. In the meantime, Tom is pressing Miss Pringle to call the police and have Lyle arrested, saying that Lyle had thrown herself at him and had stolen the ring as revenge when he had turned her down. Though Mrs. Gaitskill is smart enough to make Miss Pringle realize that police involvement in the matter will not turn out well, she nonetheless fires Lyle, truthfully pointing out that her effectiveness at the establishment is shot, though Lyle had been on the verge of quitting anyway. Naturally, now that she has been given what she was likely to take, Lyle is not so excited about it. So when Mark writes that he is coming home imminently, suddenly Lyle is madly in love: “What a fool she had been to let him go without an answer. How could she have been so stupid? She loved Mark; she had loved him almost from their first meeting. Was it some silly idea of keeping her independence? She didn’t want independence now. She wanted protection. She would marry Mark at once. Mark would take her to Mexico with him, and long before they came back, everything would be forgotten. It would solve all her problems.” Oh, absolutely, that’s true love, for sure, though we readers have seen nothing in the man to inspire anything except disgust. Mark enters stage left about five minutes later, and Lyle repeats these self-delusional statements for him, but adds, “I’ve just remembered I can’t marry you,” and tells him the whole story.

Well, you are not going to believe this, but somehow in the few minutes between landing at the airport and picking up Lyle, Mark had seen George Glyndon, who as it happens had shown Mark a remarkable emerald ring—guess whose it turns out to be? It seems that Tom Blake, who had run up huge debts at the gambling house, had stolen it the first time and used it as collateral for his debts, then won some money and gotten it back, but then lost even more money, taken the ring again, and sold it to George. In a patented Agatha Christie scene, everyone is invited to Mrs. Gaitskill’s office, where the truth is revealed. Lyle is offered her job back, and though Mrs. Gaitskill all but begs her to work for even a few days since she is now down to just one brand-new nurse who is still learning the ropes—Mollie has quit, too—Lyle turns out to be somewhat mean herself and refuses to help out, though it’s Mark who does all the speaking for her, because now that she has a man, she doesn’t need a job or a voice.

This book is a bit over-long and takes us to some odd corners, such as Mrs. Bickford’s confession and death, without ever being especially interesting or suspenseful. The angle of Tom Blake as an evil masher and jewel thief is unsatisfying because in the end, after he’s cruelly dumped Mollie and is setting off on a luxury cruise with Miss Pringle to get away for a while to put this embarrassing incident behind him, he is never punished for any of his bad behavior, but rather, as the book declares, is rewarded, because this way everyone saves face. I’m not sure why this is the most important thing, but there you have it. Lyle’s instant conversion into a smitten fiancée is not at all convincing, particularly since the book itself points out that she is likely using the marriage to run away from this upsetting situation—again, to save face. Her sudden chucking over of the independence she’d initially valued so highly to marry a man who had shown not one single redeeming feature in the first half of the book is especially maddening. I’m always curious about authors who leave us with these odd messages. Was it the times—remember, this book was written more than 50 years ago—that forced her to suggest to young women that their independence was not as important as landing a man? that sexual assault was something the victim should be ashamed of to the point of not even warning a potential future victim? that men always win, even when they are felonious assholes? Was she self-aware in the slightest about the horrible messages she was sending her readers? Or was her whole-hearted embrace of them meant to slap some sense and feminism into the young gullibles? I’m not sure that, without at least a glimmer of a clue that Lyle is aware at the end that she has made an enormous sacrifice at the altar of convention, we can ascribe the latter motive to Ms. Hancock, we can, sadly, only believe that she had drunk the Kool-Aid, and is now offering the readers a silver serving tray laden with more of the same.

Nurse Judy

By Elizabeth Wesley (pseud. Adeline McElfresh), ©1958

As Nurse Judy Byron worked under the white lights of the operating room, she remembered the words of a wise teacher: “A good surgical nurse is as important to a surgeon as a steady hand, a keen eye.” Now, watching the skilled hands of Doctor Peter Clay as they coaxed life back into  a still heart or pieced together a shattered skull, the words had a fine, true ring. She was an essential tool in the surgeon’s miraculous work. But Judy Byron the woman could not escape the tensions growing around her, the distrust and hostility between the two chief surgeons, Doctors Murdoch and Clay. As a nurse she should never take sides, but watching Dr. Clay’s steady hands so often clenched in anger as he worked to save Murdoch’s patients, she found she cared very much. As her love grew, Judy Byron knew she must become more than just a surgical tool to Peter Clay.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“Doc’s great on acquainting his patients with what’s going to happen to them. Makes a patient feel better, he says, to be familiar with hospital routine. Well, now, he sure should have told me there’d be a hazel-eyed angel to hold my hand and—”

REVIEW:

Judy Byron is a nurse at Whittingill Memorial, where she cares for surgical patients. The chief surgeon, named Dr. Montgomery Mason Murdoch, of course, has been carrying on with Karen Whittingill, great-granddaughter of the hospital’s founder and owner of the Whittingill chemical plant. And whenever you see the words “chemical plant” in a nurse novel, you know what’s coming. In fact, this book has a good number of the usual tropes, but it’s as if they are isolated gum drops thrown into a melted frappe of a novel, as a good number of them go nowhere despite taking up considerable space in these pages. There’s the crabby patient of Dr. Murdoch’s, rich Mrs. Ravensby, who keeps ringing the fricking call light for no reason at all and demands a lot of Nembutal. She’s becoming increasingly put out with her doctor, and a number of times Judy involves the nursing supervisor out of some never-named “concern” for Mrs. R, but at the end of the book she’s suddenly discharged and her story, whatever it might have been, is left bafflingly open-ended.

There’s “Staph” with a ph Murdoch, who never washes his hands before surgery so all his patients flirt unnecessarily not just with him but with death by sepsis after their trips to the OR. “Lister would turn over in his grave, at the way he scrubs up,” says another nurse. But the chief of staff seems completely unable to stop it, again for no reason that we’re given, except possibly because of Karen Whittingill’s intervention on her longtime boyfriend-but-not-fiance’s part.

The explosions at the chemical plant (you knew they would happen) is combined with a general sense of unease: “Things are pretty bad out there, Judy. It’s the morale, I think,” explains Judy’s longtime beau, newspaperman Hi Lambert, and I feel like I run into a brick wall every time I see his name on the page. “Something very definitely was out of kilter in both Whittingill Manufactory and the hospital,” we’re told. A sense of unease so great that everyone in town is talking about it, but the only explanation the book gives us, after suggesting that something sinister is behind the several chemical burn incidents, is that one of the employees is a drug addict—hardly enough for all the number of times “tiny prickle that is apprehension cake-walked along her spine,” the “throttled” doubts, the “nibbling small worry,” and don’t even get me started on all the issues Judy has going on under her sternum.

There’s the night someone sneaks up behind Judy when she is on duty alone on the night shift and knocks her out with ether—though nothing else seems amiss apart from Judy herself, who wakens insisting that she needs to finish getting ice water for Mrs. Ravensby, because she is one dedicated nurse! But after an hour’s worth of kerfuffle, during which hunky Dr. Peter Clay comforts her in his rumbling warm voice and steadies her with his firm, fine surgeon’s hands, it’s back to normal with not even a security guard or a motive for the attack—as every little pill in the drug cabinet is accounted for.

Orderly Andy Dexter continues to remain employed despite the fact that he seems to be the source of every patient-privacy-revealing story that Hi prints in the paper, and Judy’s increasing displeasure with Hi who “had no business sneaking around Dr. Tim’s back to get his story!” demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of basic journalism despite the fact that she’s been dating this man for many years.

Only a few of these  mysteries come to a head when a man at the plant is clubbed on the head and suffers third-degree chemical burns, an attack witnessed by a young woman who promptly vanishes. The victim dies despite Dr. Clay’s magical hands, and now everyone in town is on high alert except Judy’s ward, where one night she stumbles across a big guy riffling through the drug cabinet. Instead of calling security, Judy decides to confront the man, who in classic evil-villain monologue confesses to the attacks on the dead man and Judy herself, and having taken the keys to the drug cabinet out of her pocket and rather than immediately avail himself of an excellent opportunity to clean it out, instead somehow had a copy of the key made (at the nearby 24-hour hardware store?), slipped the key back into her pocket and waited for a super-busy night a week later to come back for the goods. Then he decides to strangle Judy, who is rescued by the rare ambulatory patient wielding a potted gloxinia, and I kid you not.

Now the really shocking part comes out!! The man turns out to have been the single patient of Dr. Murdoch’s not felled by sepsis who was rewarded for his survival by getting so much narcotics from the illustrious Dr. MMM that he became addicted. Dr. M, instead of taking the obvious way out with his prescription pad, instead steals drugs in some unspecified way from the hospital and sells them at exorbitant prices to the hapless former patient. This is actually the first time I have come across this problem in a VNRN, a problem that has legitimately become a really frightening issue for the country and a seldom acknowledged, seriously shameful blot on the medical profession that started the whole crisis, with much less repercussions than those faced by Dr. MMM. So buried deep in this hapless two-day-old fruit salad of a novel is an actual meaty issue—quickly whisked off the table by the overzealous waiter of an author who wants to turn and burn us, jumping essentially from mid confession to months down the road, spending exactly one page showing us who Judy has eventually married, someone she has heretofore never even kissed (which actually could include her boyfriend Hi).

In wanting to be all things, this book ends up being essentially nothing, completely missing a real chance at providing us with something substantial. Judy has deeper relationships with her flower garden than she does with either of the men she is ostensibly interested in. All the repetitive hackneyed phrases are old, well, not exactly friends, because we can’t actually admire this trite, overused language, but they’re certainly familiar to longtime readers of Adeline McElfresh, here writing as Elizabeth Wesley, who loves a cliché in language as much as she loves one in plot. There’s nothing overtly bad in this book except a blatantly obvious lack of effort, which begs the question of why we the reader should bother with it when the author has not.

Redheaded Nurse

Bennie C. Hall, ©1960
Cover illustration by Gilbert Riswold

Jane Hamilton stood on the top deck of the cruise ship Madrigal, watching the twinkling lights that marked the Mediterranean shoreline. It was midnight, and the sound of laughter and music floated up from the Carnival Room on the deck below. She had known so few carefree hours in her young life, and now she longed to become a part of the gaiety surrounding her—but as ship’s nurse, she was here to work, not to enjoy herself. It would be so easy, she thought, to set conscience aside and forget her job—to surrender completely to a world where anything might happen…

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“They’ll dance, drink and make merry till dawn—and tomorrow they’ll die.”

“Nurses are for healing, not feeling.”

“He removed her cape from her shoulders and folded it as carefully as if it were—well, at least squirrel.”

“Never jump to conclusions, Janie, though I’ll admit most of us redheads do. Remember—it’s impossible to look at a cat and tell when and how far it’s going to jump. It’s the same way with people. You can’t assign characters to human beings and expect them to stay put. They’ll fool you every time.”

“The best sedative was an open mind and a clear conscience.”

“Aside from an occasional headache or an upset stomach, the passengers had remained disgracefully well.”

“It was like a man, she reflected, to be excused for an infraction of the rules, whereas she, a woman, had to wear her remorse like a heavy blanket.”

“Peter was a very studious person and innocent of the implications of a gift from the Island of Lesbos.”

“I thought I’d inherited a temperamental redhead who would know more about catching a man than about curing whatever ailed him.”

REVIEW:
At one point, after being sunk by Cruise Ship Nurse and Sea Nurse, I threatened to toss all my cruise ship VNRNs right into the brink if I got one more dud. Redheaded Nurse doesn’t exactly make up for those two duds, but it will stay dry for the time being.

Jane Hamilton has been selected from all the nurses at her Boston charity hospital to fill the position of head nurse aboard the cruise ship Madrigal. The doctor on board, Dr. Jerry Clayton, is usually mean to her. It’s her “copper curls,” you see, that push Dr. Clayton over the edge, and he asks her to pull her cap down over her ears to hide them when she’s on duty. “You’re too young. And too beautiful,” explains Schuyler Dawson, a young man on the ship. “Chances are he wanted someone more mature, less decorative.” Jane is drawn to young Sky, though early on she had decided he must be a paid companion to one of the older passengers, Mrs. Carter-Peterson. “She knew all about those unscrupulous characters known as ‘gigolos,’ but she had never expected to meet one face to face.” Then Mrs. C-P tells Jane that Sky has stolen a diamond locket from her, and Jane is convinced that Sky is a “slick fellow” whom she should avoid. So the next day, when he plays up to her, she naturally agrees to go dancing with him that night and ashore with him in Alexandria, Egypt, the next day.

They have a great time, dancing as one—but then suddenly Jane realizes that all the other ship’s passengers have left the building. They have to fly across town in a pokey old cab while the ship’s horn is sounding insistently in the background, sprinting down the dock and losing Jane’s hat to reach the gangplank in time while all the passengers watch in amusement. This incident leaves Jane totally mortified beyond reason, and she determines never to go ashore again, until the captain scolds her, “It’s gotten so now your hair shirt is showing—and it’s not a bit becoming with those copper curls.” So all is right again in Jane’s simple little world.

In the meantime, Mrs. C-P has decided to throw a party for all the children at some port of call and give them all dolls, because the poor waifs don’t have any. On an expedition into a part of Alexandria that the captain had expressly forbidden passengers to enter, she is exposed to a smallpox epidemic. While helping the dowager sew dresses for the nude dolls, Jane notices a rash on the back of the older woman’s neck … and so the two ladies are quarantined for a week, until it is determined that it’s some other disease and not smallpox that the great lady has contracted. As a reward for her selfless duty, Jane is allowed to pick out one bracelet from Mrs. C-P’s collection, and inadvertently chooses the most expensive one there—the stone is so huge, it couldn’t possibly be anything other than costume jewelry. She wears it to another dance on the ship, where Sky sets her straight about its real value—and then the bauble disappears that night after he smooches her to such effect that “she could only feel as if she did not exist as a person but only as a part of Sky.” Jane begins castigating herself that “she had fallen in love with a playboy and a card shark. … He goes on one cruise after another in order to play poker with the wealthy passengers and fleece them.”

I am sure that I don’t have to tell you that in the end all this misunderstanding is cleared away, and Jane is proved once again to be a silly little girl. Some older VNRNs have this gentle feeling about them, like chiffon floating on air. Redheaded Nurse is one such book, with a soft touch both in the writing, characters, and situations they are put through. Jane’s mortifications and crises are really small molehills, and we can pass through them without a wrinkled brow. In the end, the book is so light that it doesn’t really amount to much, even if it does have a noticeable flavor of camp to liven things up a bit. But it’s enough to make me want to attempt another VNRN cruise.

Private Duty Nurse

By Isabel Cabot
(pseud. Isabel Capeto), ©1958 

Two men wanted lovely young Nurse Johnson. Phil Tyler, a widower, was rich and attractive. And Eleanor knew his motherless little girl needed her woman’s care and love. But young Dr. Grant was a gifted surgeon who wanted Eleanor to share his brilliant future. Then tragedy struck Phil Tyler’s daughter. Love and duty both impelled Eleanor to help, but she knew that in this crucial test she must have a man’s strength and wisdom to guide her. To which of her lovers would she turn? 

GRADE: B- 

BEST QUOTES: 

“Grant’s in the kitchen fixing a hypodermic needle.” 

“I’ve a good mind to kick the next man who treats me like a sister.” 

REVIEW: 

This book starts out with an original twist (well, at least original when it comes to VNRNs): It opens on a scene with Fay Lord discussing a blind date she has set up between Dr. Grant Tyler and her roommate, Eleanor Johnson. The joke is, Dr. Grant thinks it’s Fay’s other roommate, Connie, he’s going out with, and won’t the laugh be on Mr. “High-and-Mighty! … Here he is expecting a beautiful, statuesque redhead and out comes Ellie.” It isn’t until the middle of Chapter 2 that the spotlight shifts to Ellie and stays there, and we realize that Ellie is really the heroine of the book, not Fay. 

On the ill-contrived date, Dr. Grant admits that Eleanor is “not too bad-looking,” but adds, “But neither is she any Helen of Troy. She couldn’t launch a boat of surgical instruments, let alone a thousand ships.” The metaphor is a little contrived, but you get the point. Their date comes to an abrupt end when Grant takes her to Lookout Walk, grabs her, and, though she struggles to get away, tries to kiss her. She pushes him over a stone wall, and he fakes injury. When she approaches him to help, he grabs her again. “I’ll kiss you right, if it’s the last thing I do,” he tells her, and he’s about to when she hits him over the head with a rock to escape, jumps in his car, and drives herself home. Of course, this only intrigues Grant further: “Eleanor had felt so soft and sweet in his arms. And for the briefest moment her lips had been almost responsive under his.” Because there’s nothing like a sexual assault to really turn a girl on. It’s almost more outrageous that, for the rest of the book, he talks as if he were the one who was attacked. “I wonder how the Registry feels about private duty nurses who assault people and steal their cars,” he says to her when he sees her next—and she then blushes and asks, “Do you intend to report me?” as if his version is in fact the accurate one. 

A few days later Ellie is begged to take on a case nursing Thomas G. Tyler, who has had a heart attack, on the night shift. Mr. Tyler is Grant’s uncle, and a very wealthy man in town. When she arrives at the mansion, she naturally runs into the nephew, but he is too worried about “The Captain” to really notice her. As time passes, though, Ellie sees a lot of Grant and Phillip, Mr. Tyler’s widowed son, both around the house and around town. Ellie has no car, so she gets rides to and from work frequently from Phil, who soon asks her out on a date. He seems like a nice guy, and they have a pleasant evening. But when he drops her off at the mansion for her night duty, he, too, grabs her, kisses her, and won’t let go. Only Grant’s appearance at the car door encourages Phil to loosen his hold. Ellie, however, seems not at all alarmed by his aggression and tells him “thanks loads” when he offers to bring in her uniform, which she has left in his car. A few days later she’s out on another dinner date with him. 

And it’s not long before Grant is at it again. He asks her out on a date—and she actually agrees to go, shame on her—but once in her apartment, he “gripped her arm. ‘Let me go,’ she said coolly.” Later in the book, Grant “took her roughly by the shoulders” and does not release her even when she says he is hurting her. These violent tendencies seem not to faze her at all, and once these incidents are over, they never again cross her mind—indeed, rather than finding Grant sick and sadistic, she is attracted to him. Later recalling her first date with him, “her face flushed when she thought of the way they had tussled. And he had had the audacity to laugh. It had been a pleasant laugh, she had to admit. And his lips on hers hadn’t been as harsh as she had anticipated. For the briefest moment—she felt her face burn hotter. Couldn’t she ever forget that night?” But at the same time, she continues to find Grant’s arrogant behavior irritating. He tells her he’s forgiven her for “slugging” him, and when she is appropriately outraged, he replies, “You’re dying for me to kiss you. … Why fight it? You’re afraid to come within a foot of me. What’s the matter? Don’t you trust yourself?” 

The book starts to wrap itself up few pages later when Phil is found in the park with a gash on his head and is hospitalized, near death. Some missing jewelry turns up under a rock in the garden and then vanishes again, accusations of extortion and bribery are made against the wife of the prominent doctor who is officially attending Mr. Tyler, and then Phil’s five-year-old daughter disappears. One of the Tyler boys turns out to be thoroughly rotten, and Ellie ends up engaged to the other one. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that she falls for the character that comes across as the most despicable, and the apparently nice guy is actually not at all. 

I really had issues with the creepy way the men who date her seem to enjoy manhandling Ellie. My disliking of Grant was instant and severe after he mauled her at Lookout Walk, and his subsequent insistence that she was in the wrong that night didn’t help him any. But if that scene and his other attempts to grab her hadn’t occurred, I wouldn’t think he is such a monster. His remark that she is dying to be kissed by him is arrogant and asinine, but it’s not unforgiveable, and it must be acknowledged that this sort of comment is de rigueur for VNRNs. (That’s a topic of discussion for another day.) The regularity with which Ellie is pawed makes me wonder if this was a common practice back in the late ’50s or if Isabel Cabot just thinks this is a nifty device to bring the heroine into a clinch, as of course no nice girl would willingly participate in such a thing unless she was forced to. Whatever the reason for these scenes, they just don’t play in the 21st century, and they bring down what would otherwise be a good book.