Sisters in White

By Suzanne Roberts, ©1965 

Seeing Vicki and Nicki Evans striding down hospital corridors together in their crisp, white uniforms and perky caps, people always did a double take. The nurses looked exactly alike—they were identical twins. Which made for a certain amount of fun around Community Hospital. Fun for everybody but Vicki. For Vicki was the dedicated and hard-working one, whereas her carefree and vivacious sister had never failed to capture the heart of any man she wanted. And now she had set her cap for Vicki’s special man. This meant trouble—in this case, double trouble.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Any girl who would wear a red satin bouffant dress with three sequined petticoats just wasn’t the kind of girl who’d be happy emptying bed pans.” 

“I’m not supposed to be safe. I’m a nurse—remember?”

REVIEW:
If you are unlucky enough to remember those horrible Wrigley’s Doublemint gum commercials with the vapid blonde twins masticating in unison, the cover illustration and back cover blurb of this book may revive some nauseating memories. Certainly author Suzanne Roberts, who has until now earned only C grades, doesn’t make a reader feel confident that anything other than a saccharine, stereotypical blandness awaits. But while I won’t promise you double your pleasure or double your fun with the Evans twins, I can say it’s not half bad. 

Vicki Evans is the dedicated one, Assistant to the Ward Supervisor at Chicago Community Hospital. She’s so serious that little student nurses tremble when she approaches—but worse than that, she never gets any dates! “I worry about you, Vicki,” her spinster boss declares. “It’s one thing to be a dedicated nurse, but quite another to make nursing your entire life. You need to get out more!” But there’s only one man for Vicki, and that’s similarly serious Dr. Keith Bryan. So serious is he, in fact, that “the only time Keith really seemed deeply interested in people was when they were sick.” She asks herself that age-old question, “Why can’t he ever see me as anything but an efficient machine?”

The trouble really begins when Vicki’s sister, who had to be named Nicki (go ahead and roll your eyes, you’ll feel better), shows up. She’d managed, somehow, to become a registered nurse too, but had quit upon graduation to be a flight attendant—maybe because she’s so, well, flighty. “‘Go ahead and get all the A’s,’ Nicki had once said good-naturedly. ‘I’ll settle for the B’s, honey. As long as B stands for boyfriend!’” Nicki is running away from a man who’d lost interest and has decided to go back to nursing. Well, maybe. “They surely wouldn’t put me on a ward that was—terribly depressing, would they?” she asks. And because she’s cute and blonde and vivacious, and because she bats her eyes at Dr. Keith, they don’t; she ends up working under Vicki, and never mind how inappropriate that may be. Immediately Nicki shows her true colors by never showing up on time, by dropping a pair of sterile gloves on the floor and then handing them to a doctor to be used in surgery, by taking two-hour breaks, by lying to everyone about that time she saved all those people when her plane crashed. And she starts chasing Dr. Keith.

This is where we’re supposed to hate Nicki for stealing the only man her sister could ever love, but in truth we can’t blame her—because Vicki, the dope, never tells Nicki how she feels about Keith. “She was determined not to let Nicole know that she had a crush on Keith. Because once a man decided to fall in love with Nicole, there was usually no stopping him.” It seems clear that Nicki and Keith are not right for each other, even if Nicki knows better than to wear her red dress and her jazzy jewelry on a date with him, because the goal is to just land a man, not to get one you might actually be happy with. But as he dates Nicki, he and Vicki keep exchanging these long, meaningful glances, when “that quick, electric, breathtaking spark seemed to flow between them,” until Nicki interrupts the moment.

And here’s another instance where we can’t hate Nicki: When Vicki, finally sick of Nicki’s ineptitude, tells her she shouldn’t be a nurse, Nicki flings herself at her sister’s feet. “‘I’m going to change,’ she said, her voice firm. ‘It’s more than just wanting to prove to you that I can be a good nurse. It’s trying hard to do what’s best for the patients. I want that to be my big reason for being a good nurse.’” And though she does continue to make stupid mistakes, she seems to be genuinely trying, reading a few medical journals (though two is all she can manage) and fretting, “Maybe you won’t believe this, Vicki, but it’s terribly important to me. Nursing, I mean. I know you and maybe a lot of other people think I’m an addle-brained somebody and only fit to serve coffee on jet planes, but now that I’m here at Community, I want to be the kind of nurse that you are.” And, when she’s transferred to work in surgery, the toughest ward in the hospital, and after three weeks, she is improving so much that even Vicki has to admit that Nicki is doing well: “I watched you when you assisted the resident in brain surgery today. You were just great. Time was when you’d have fainted dead away.” Retaining consciousness is a low bar, but Nicki is finally accomplishing something!

The problem is that Nicki is a slow learner, though when you think about it, it’s a lot more realistic that she isn’t immediately able to change her personality overnight. And when she “goofs,” as she calls it, she begs Vicki to bail her out. Initially Vicki resists, refusing to cover for Nicki when she’s late for work, but then she takes responsibility when Nicki drops a tray full of medication and doesn’t tell anyone, so the med count is off at the end of the shift. And in a fateful scene we are amply warned is coming (“neither of them had the slightest hint of the horror that was going to come”), Nicki leaves a postop patient for five minutes to freshen her lipstick because she knows Dr. Keith will be coming up to see the patient soon, and Vicki walks in to find the man hemorrhaging from a “gaping wound” unbelievably left after a lung surgery. Nicki again pleads with her sister to save her: “They’ll probably fire me. Please don’t let them do that to me! I was just beginning to be a really good nurse; you said that yourself. I don’t want to lose everything and if you just cover for me,” she cries. “Tell them you told me I could leave. Please help me! I swear to you I’ve learned my lesson, Vicki! I know now how much nursing really means to me.” Vicki, stupidly, agrees, saying, “I won’t cover for you again, Nicki. Not ever.” Which is what she said after the dropped medication incident, but never mind about that.

So she lies to Keith—and believing her capable of this gross error of conduct, he cancels what would have been their first date. Interestingly, no one else in the hospital thinks it’s true—a student nurse stops her in the hall to says she doesn’t believe it, and Vicki’s friend Dr. Bixby also immediately sees the truth and interviews the patient, who identifies Nicki by her perfume and her singing—neither of which Vicki would ever bring into a patient’s room. Vicki tries to cheer up Nicki, saying, “You’ve got to go on believing that you’re a good nurse. You’ve got to hang onto that dream, because nursing could be the most beautiful and important thing in your life,” and adds that they’ll go to Keith in the morning to tell him the truth. In the morning, though, Nicki has packed her bags and run, nobly first stopping at the hospital to leave a note for Keith confessing all. Discovering this when she wakes, Vicki puts in a full day at the hospital, and then she decides to try to find Nicki at O’Hare. The airport was not as busy in 1965 as it is now—well, before Covid, anyway; adorably, it takes her ten minutes to search every ladies’ bathroom in the airport, and more than eight hours after leaving Vicki’s apartment, Nicki’s plane still has not taken off, so when Vicki finally catches up with her, they have time to argue in a coffee shop—until that plane crashes just outside them on the tarmac.

It's an interesting book because at least Nicki shows real growth as a character, even if she remains a flawed individual despite her apparently sincere efforts to improve, which make it a more complex story than most. Vicki, unfortunately, is interesting only in that she seems to diminish as her sister grows—she makes only one small effort to be friendly to Keith, and despite what everyone believes about her character, she still lies for her sister on two occasions. There is real humor in the book, such as when a resident tells Vicki as they sit down for dinner at the diner, “Don’t order any cream pie. I pumped out three stomachs last night and they all—” Suzanne Roberts, in the eighth book of hers we’ve read, has finally served us a cream pie we might actually want to eat.

Seaside Hospital

By Pauline Ash, ©1964
Cover illustration by Bern Smith

As a nurse, Lisa Bryant knew the importance of treatment for kleptomania, but when she found that her own sister was suffering from it she didn’t know who to turn to—well, she did know, but she was determined not to drag Doctor Randall Carson into it.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“For a girl with such an innocent face, you certainly manage to get men to run around and do things for you.” 

REVIEW:
The first pages of this book bring Nurse Lisa Bryant’s younger sister Jacky, who has been incommunicado for three years, back into her life with a bang. “Do you know,” Jacky trills, “that’s the first time I’ve seen you in nurse’s uniform! Isn’t it perfectly hideous?” We are not surprised to learn that Jacky “takes, all the time, and has very little to give back”—but Jacky takes literally, and has swiped a solid gold cigarette case that Lisa has to get out of the pawn shop to save Jacky from ruin. And you will not be surprised that Lisa is eventually suspected to be the thief, which is how these klepto stories usually go (see The Case for Nurse Sheridan and Nurse’sDilemma). But here we have a new twist, in that the man Jacky has been stealing from was her boyfriend, who tells Lisa, when she nobly returns the case, that he won’t call the cops if Lisa will “be a hostess, a companion—which she had had to agree to as the price for Jacky’s freedom.” Ew. 

Well, she has some free time, because she’s just been jilted by gadabout Derek Frenton. You have to acknowledge that he has a point when he tells her, “You adore hard work, or else you wouldn’t be so keen on staying at that hospital of yours until you qualify, marriage or no marriage. As for myself, I’ve never done a day’s work in my life, and a working wife would bore me as badly as I should bore her. I know you’ll be sensible about this, so let’s call it quits, shall we?” The knife in the back, though, is that he’s fallen for Jacky, the louse!

She also has a run-in with Dr. Randall Carson, who is “the most important (and the most short-tempered) surgeon at St. Mildred’s,” and wouldn’t you know, the man always seems to be picking on her. “She wished he wouldn’t keep watching her. It almost made her do stupid things. She tried to assess the thoughts going on behind that lean dark face of his, and wondered what he was feeling behind those cold, slate-grey eyes. He was so efficient himself that he just hadn’t patience with anyone who hadn’t achieved the standard of perfection, she supposed.” He is, in a word, horrible—so guess who Lisa develops a crush on?

Unfortunately, Lisa perseveres with her near-suicidal compunction to clean up after Jacky, which means she gets tangled up in all sorts of bad situations, such as when Derek Frenton’s mother’s jeweled brooch is stolen at a house party, and when another cad that Jacky had been dating decides he’d rather go out with fresh, unspoiled Lisa and blackmails her to make her go along with the plan. We know the eventual assault is coming, but alas, Lisa does not.

It’s a fairly convoluted story, with all the secrets and entanglements and coverups, that it’s a little hard to keep track of who knows what, and which lie is being told to whom. Meanwhile, there’s a young boy who’s been run over, and wouldn’t you know it, Jacky’s tangled up in that, too, having attempted to steal a diamond ring from the mother right before the accident, but now the parents are not coming forward to claim their mangled son, and Lisa is playing detective to try to track them down. Of course, through all of this, Lisa tries to keep Randall from thinking the worst of her—with little success, as he is always on hand when she is getting into or out of one man’s car or another. Eventually she takes Randall into her confidence and tells him the truth, so they decide they are going to have Jacky committed, and as Jacky attempts to sneak away before they can capture her, there’s a scene on the beach with the tide coming in, and Lisa and Jacky are trapped in a cave, while the police are closing in on them as well as on the blackmailing beau, who is wanted by the cops (surprise!). Of course, Lisa takes a tumble from the cliff while attempting to go for help, but that’s just the usual clever ploy to snag her man in the end.

I was hopeful from the first sentence: “Casualty was almost empty after a really busy Monday, when they brought in the man who was to play such havoc in Lisa Bryant’s life.” The rest of the book was not as quite as interesting, particularly when they trotted out the klepto relative with the covering nurse storyline, and the plot did get a bit bogged down in the end. But overall it was a quick-paced, lively and pleasant enough book. I could swear I’ve read this trapped-in-a-cave bit, too, but I couldn’t find it – no worries, that will pop up again, I’m sure, along with another kleptomaniac and an aloof, older doctor you can’t imagine anyone would reasonably fall in love with!

Nurse Deborah

By Marjorie Norrell, ©1969

Nurse Debby Carfax had always viewed her half-cousin Margot with some wariness—Margot having always been the type of girl who couldn’t see Debby have anything without wanting to take it away from her. And now Debby had a promising new boy-friend, and Margot had announced that she was coming to Debby’s hospital to work …

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“One doesn’t run the risk of dying of ennui in our profession, does one?”

“Being afraid is the one thing to fear.”

“To get something out of anything—life, love, work, happiness, but most of all life itself—one has to put something in before being able to take something out.”

“Never underestimate yourself, child. That’s a fatal thing to do. Remember, most people accept other people at their own valuation, so don’t set too low a price on your own head.”

REVIEW:
It’s depressing to close a book of 188 pages and realize that in all that time, pretty much nothing happened between the last sentence and the first. At the same time, Nurse Deborah starts out in a rather familiar fashion—lovely Deborah Carfax, of the easy, open, and friendly manner; the great skill for nursing; and the warm and loving family, is saddled with her cousin Margot Ruthermeade, who is the exact opposite: clever and unscrupulous, “selfish in every way,” and manipulative, someone who makes a game of smashing all Debby’s friendships and is unable to form any of her own because she cares only for herself. (Although Margot clearly cares a great deal about destroying Debby’s life, this deep, lifelong hateful commitment is never explained.) This is a plotline that has been plumbed in other VNRNs (There Came a Surgeon, Hospital on Wheels), so it loses points for its unoriginality.

Debby has just been forging a friendship with shy resident Robin Peterson, but from the moment Margot shows up in town and senses the budding romance, it is mere child’s play for her to drive a wedge between the two before they’ve even become established as a real couple. So for most of the book, “Robin’s attitude indeed had changed, from one of something more than friendliness back to its original one of formal politeness.” Debby just sadly accepts the situation, saying, “We haven’t even talked enough to quarrel!” and apparently never will talk enough to set things straight.

Meanwhile, Margot chases wealthy and important doctors, somehow attracting the understanding and affection of Dr. Philip Randall, who frequently consults Debby in his stealthy pursuit of Margot, further clouding the way between Debby and Robin, who misunderstands the friendship. Debby does manage to invite Robin to the Matron’s Ball, but Robin decides to show up only when the formal dinner is about to begin, after the dance is over and Debby has spent most of the evening crying in the hallway, because having barely had any friendly words with him for the first third of the book and virtually none at all for the last two-thirds, “she loved Robin Peterson, truly loved him, with all the fire of her more than generous heart, with every fibre of her small, compact being.”

But just as the supper is starting—and Robin is dashing back out of the ball three minutes after arriving in another maddening mix-up in which he mistakes Margot for Debby kissing Dr. Randall on the dance floor—a flash fire erupts, igniting one of the senior nurses, who is conveniently saved by wallflower Debby, but apparently nothing else is touched, as the fire department is not called and the dinner proceeds with only a short delay. Debby is hauled off in a stretcher, the senior nurse is never mentioned again, and all the dancers make do with a stand-up buffet instead of a sit-down dinner. Robin and Margot both rush to Debby’s hospital bed and confess their love and sins respectively to her gauze-wrapped body. And that’s the end.

You’d think there would be more to report about the story, and more of a relationship outside of what can only be called a budding friendship before undying love and marriage proposals are declaimed—at least on one side, as Debby’s face is bandaged and she’s high on morphine, and so rendered mute. There’s not, though, so I can’t really advise you to spend the hours requisite to plowing through this dull, unsatisfying story.