Calling Nurse Blair

By Lucy Agnes Hancock, ©1954 

Lovely Alex Blair was not unaware of Douglas Allen’s attraction. He was a young and capable doctor, and friendly with everyone at the Haddon Hospital. Alex had decided to make nursing a career after an unfortunate tragedy. In the daily round of hospital work she found satisfaction and personal contentment until the jealous envy of Night Superintendent Ellen Ridley was directed against her. Alex believed that there was not place in the life of a nurse for such rivalry or resentment, yet at the same time she had to stand up for herself. The whole affair had been brought about by Ellen’s determination to marry young Dr. Allen. Through her attempts to discredit Alex, Ellen not only lost the interest of Dr. Allen but revealed the true and romantic discovery between him and Nurse Blair. A full and absorbing novel of Doctors and Nurses.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Doctors don’t give a hoot for nurses. They work us to death, boss us around, take all the credit when a patient recovers and give us the blame when one dies. Have to ‘Yes, Doctor. No, Doctor’ them when you would like nothing better than to place the sole of your shoe on their anatomy where it would do the most good.” 

“When people play eavesdropper why on earth don’t they get things straight and complete in detail?” 

REVIEW:
Alex Blair is a serious young woman who experienced a horrible tragedy at the age of 17—her older brother impulsively eloped, then shot his wife and himself to death on their wedding night. The scandal caused the death of Alex’s grandfather, who had raised the siblings after they were (natch) orphaned. The family’s money suddenly depleted at the same time, Alex was forced to sell the family home and fend for herself, and nursing it was. Now, as the book opens, she has been working as a nurse under her birth name, Alex, instead of her old nickname, Lisa, to hide from the shame of her brother’s crime, which had chased her from her home town. She is quiet and sincere, never gossips, but has a magical ability to smooth out the roughest patients. For this she is admired by everyone except Ellen Ridley, the night nursing supervisor and the granddaughter of the hospital chief of staff. 

One young assistant surgeon, Dr. Douglas Allen, would like to admire Alex more personally, but she remains aloof—but not enough to satisfy Ellen, who has decided she wants Dr. Allen for herself. Though he has regularly dated Ellen—she at least never says no—as her jealousy of Alex makes her increasingly hostile and mean, Doug becomes less intrigued with Ellen and more so with Alex, not helping Ellen’s disposition at all, until she is constantly stomping through the hospital swearing to destroy Alex Blair by uncovering her secret past.

This is essentially all there is to Calling Nurse Blair, with numerous patient stories woven in, and if the ending of Ellen’s story is a very small surprise—rather than being chased from town with pitchforks, she is redeemed—nothing else in this book will be. I am a fan of author Lucy Agnes Hancock, who worked as a secretary at International Harvester and lived with three of her sisters, none of whom ever married, and started a career turning out romance novels in 1936, when she was almost 60 years old. Her clean, sweet writing describes a simpler, gentler lifestyle (whether that was ever realistic I cannot say) that I always enjoy escaping to, but this book suffers from a skimpy plot that moves slowly, and Alex’s relentlessly angelic nature—especially against the contrast of Ellen’s demonic one—nearly had me rolling my eyes. A couple of themes that could have proved interesting—the benefits and downsides of rigidly following rules, for one—were quickly dropped before they were developed. But overall this book is a pleasant gift from the secretary-turned-novelist, and with its marvelous cover illustration as an added bonus, there are much worse ways to spend an afternoon.

Camp Nurse

By Kathleen Harris
(pseud. Adelaide Humphries Rowe), ©1961

Offered the position as a nurse at a boys’ camp, in the Catskills, young and beautiful Tanis Thaler accepted reality. However, she was told to look less attractive so that none of the older boys would fall in love with her. Tanis finds a real challenge in being a camp nurse. There are fifty boys to look after and two in particular present real problems to her as a nurse. But as a lovely young woman, she has an even greater problem. Because she must dress and act like a dowdy spinster, the handsome athletic director, Jim Nielson, whom she has grown to love with all her heart, treats her like a sister … 

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“Mrs. Carson’s in number three, all ready for you, Doctor—and she can’t leave until I give her back her shoes and girdle.” 

“What age is an unimpressionable one?”

“She ought to be able to walk back alone. It was not yet dark; and it wasn’t far. But there might be snakes.”

“There was no sense in a girl hiding her legs, especially when they were nice legs.”

REVIEW
“How would you like to take a leave of absence from the office and spend the summer in the Catskills?” said no doctor, ever, to the most dependable staff nurse in their busy surgical practice. So right out of the gate we know we are in for an unbelievable story. Tanis Thaler, recovering from an open appendectomy weeks ago, is apparently not yet fit to go back to work, so her boss decides that sending her to work at a boys’ camp for the summer would be an awesome way for her to get her strength back, because 50 boys would be so easy to wrangle! There’s just one problem: Tanis is just so gosh-darned beautiful that it would be a huge distraction to the impressionable young men. “Try to make yourself look a bit more—severe,” Dr. Wedner tells her, so she shops for dark, heavy glasses, oversized uniforms that “would not accentuate any curves and were too long to show off to advantage of a nicely turned calf. Tanis thought she would look positively dowdy.” 

And what success she has! When on the train she meets Jim Neilson, a stunningly handsome man, he looks her over lustily not at all, instead feeling sorry for the “timid soul, the born-to-remain-unwed type,” whom “no man could possibly be attracted to.” And so he condescends to be “exasperatingly polite” to Tanis for most of the book. In his thoughts, however, he is downright rude, wondering “what the heck was wrong with this girl’s legs that she wore her dresses so long,” and “what was the big idea, anyway—going around looking like a frump,” as if her attire is an affront to his personal dignity.

Fortunately for Tanis’ future marriage prospects, she also has Perry Davis, another camp counselor, who “liked to brag about his conquests with women”; faced with the prospect of a summer in a camp with only one unmarried woman, Perry is determined to make the best of a bad lot. “When marooned on a desert island a guy had to take what was at hand,” because “it couldn’t be that he was interested in a girl who looked as she did, although he had paid her the compliment of saying that she had a fine mind” after their discussion about Krushchev’s speech at the UN summit meeting. Of course, Tanis thinks, “no girl in her right mind wanted to be complimented merely on that score,” but Perry soon realizes she’s a knockout after he’s forcibly kissed her and knocked off her glasses in the process. “Next time I kiss you, it won’t be just because you’re a girl,” the flatterer declares and proposes, because though he has never been interested in getting married, “if he ever did decide to settle down, however, it might be good to settle for a nurse—they earned a good salary.” He then advises Tanis he won’t give her secret away. “Why, if Jim, for instance, knew what a dreamboat you are, he’d try to impress you with all that brawn of his!”

You can’t have 50 boys in a book without some of them being bad seeds, and if the book is set 60 years ago, the toughs are going to have adorably silly names like Stinker. “Scrapper” Donahue is a bully who goes around beating up the little kids and taking their lunch money, causing Tanis to go full-bore guilt trip on the unsuspecting kid. When she catches him pounding little Timmy Parkinson to make him say “uncle,” she scolds him that he should find something better to do with his time. “If you mean a four-eyed dame like you, I’ve got no time to waste on chicks,” retorts Scrapper, instantly winning my affection. Tanis lets this go by and instead delivers some sappy lines like how everyone would admire and look up to him if he weren’t such an asshole. “I’m sure that Timmy—and lots of the others—would, if you’d only let them,” she tells him, and Timmy, true champion that he is, manages not to throw up on her shoes.

Another young camper, Stewart, comes from a “broken home,” and is “over-sensitive—and exceptionally brilliant, moody, unresponsive,” and 17 years old, the perfect target for Tanis. “She had been wondering how to ‘reach’ him—get him to confide in her,” though what she wants to know about is not clear. Ironically, after all the emphasis on Tanis’s looks, when Stewart comes down with mumps (one of two vaccine-preventable illnesses the camp is overrun with this summer), she tells him, “It’s you I like, Stewart—not the way you look.” Stewart, at least, is the only guy in the camp who falls for Tanis exactly as she appears. “It did not matter that Tanis was not pretty by accepted standards. What did matter was that he could talk to her and she listened and understood; that she believed in him. He would never ask for anything more. All he wanted was for this—and Tanis—never to change.” Honestly, Tanis should be chasing Stewart, the only good man in the book.

Tanis attempts to get Jim to let Timmy out of sports essentially because he’s a wimp, but after finding out that Timmy is not “a bit mixed-up”—could this be a euphemism?—Jim won’t hear of it, telling her that if the other boys duck him in the pond, it’s all in fun. “In order to become a man, a boy has to learn to take it,” he says. It’s an alarming point of view, but he does note that you can’t win if you don’t play, and that “a man doesn’t have to excel at any sport, but he does have to learn to stand on his own two feet.” This is actually a valid point of view, coping skills being essential to surviving life, but Tanis fights it in her own weird way, getting Timmy out of sports by tucking him into a cot in the infirmary, and then leaving him there alone all night, possibly because a boy has to learn to take it? After Jim refuses to baby Timmy, Tanis decides Jim is “stubborn, opinionated, and egotistical. No longer could he seem too attractive to her”—because for one brief moment, a character’s physical appearance is not the major factor in whether a person is beautiful to another. Don’t worry, it won’t last. 

Perry eventually sort of proposes to Tanis, telling her to “name the day,” which she does not do—so therefore in her mind they are not engaged, while in Perry’s they are. She acknowledges to herself that she is essentially playing a rotten game with Perry because she’s tired of not having anyone chase her for the summer. “She had only encouraged him because her feminine pride had demanded some masculine recognition—and yes, to be honest, because she had been hurt when Jim had not given her any,” the second part of her nefarious plan being to “jolt” Jim into paying attention to her. “If he didn’t—well, what difference would it make if she were engaged to Perry—or even if, eventually, she decided to marry him?” Seems to me it might make an incredibly enormous difference, and not to mention it’s a really sick game to play.

Tanis also gradually starts shedding her “disguise,” wearing shorts and dumping the glasses, and it works! Jim, appreciating her new look, thinks, “She seemed to be an entirely different person. Not the strait-laced, mousey type of girl he had imagined, but a girl any man would notice.” So Tanis dumps Perry, who immediately picks up on the real reason she had been seeing him: “You wanted to make Jim jealous. Like all the girls, you go for all that brawn and muscle. I suppose you’d marry a guy like him in a second if he asked you.” Because it’s not the person he is—which is not in any way attractive—that’s important, it’s how he looks. And guess what? When, on the last night of camp, she dresses up in pumps and a dress that doesn’t hide her knees for the big send-off dinner, Jim grabs her arm and pulls her off to dinner at an outside restaurant without even asking her, and tells her, “I wouldn’t let you marry Perry if I had to marry you myself”—high motivation indeed—well, that’s all it takes for Tanis!

This is the book’s enormous contradiction. Author Adelaide Humphries (here writing as Kathleen Harris), as often as she has Tanis mouthing words about how it’s who you are that matters, not how you look, the book’s plot clearly demonstrates she doesn’t actually believe that to be true. Jim has not been in any way kind to Tanis all summer, so her realization in the last pages of the book that she is in love with Jim seems to prove Perry entirely correct: Jim’s only redeeming features are his good looks and his killer body. As for Jim, the first time Jim pays anything other than stiffly polite attention to her is when she’s wearing nylons, so his interest in her is equally shallow. The only person in the book with a genuinely honorable character is 17-year-old Stewart, so the moral of the story seems to be that it’s up to the younger generation to save the world. Good luck, Stewart, you’ve got a big job on your hands!

Nurse by Night

By Doris Knight, ©1965 

Dr. Tony Warren and Nurse Norma Ferris; how could a love so beautiful go so wrong? That was the question everyone asked—the hospital staff, Norma’s parents, even her patients. What they didn’t know was Norma’s very own secret and it took a heartbreaking experience and Dr. Rick Stanton before people could truly understand their romance. And then Norma understood herself …

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Norma forgot that he might be a murder and hurried to him.” 

“Now, Inspector, I am a busy man. I have lives to save. So this interview is at an end.”

REVIEW:
I’m never quite sure what to do with a book like Nurse by Night. It is an absolute gem, a rare masterpiece—but of the sort that it is brilliant in its daffy stupidity, like the classic Nurse at the Fair or almost anything by Arlene Fitzgerald. So is a stupid book that makes you repeatedly laugh out loud at its idiocy a bad book or a good one? These are nurse romance novels, after all, not capital-L Literature, so I must decide that if a book is amusing and makes you want to read passages out loud or recommend to a friend as “so bad it’s amazing”—in short, the perfect beach read—then it must be good. And so this book earns an A- (maybe one with an asterisk?) instead of a D. 

Nurse Norma Ferris, who it seems has only gotten three hours of sleep in the several days spanned by this book, is a ubiquitous orphan from New York who moved to London to surprise the obstetrician she’d been in love with, Dr. Tony Warren, when he’d abruptly taken a job there. Though actually, Norma found out about the job when Tony’s friend handed him a plane ticket and told him he had five hours to pack and get to the airport, so why she thought it would be a smart move to majorly disrupt her life and chase this guy across the ocean is the first of many mysteries we will encounter here. 

He’s unexpectedly ecstatic to see her again, though he had not written her during their separation, and now, two years later, he is pressing her to get married—in secret, because he plans to take a two-year job in the Bahamas that requires the physician be unmarried—can you imagine such a thing?—and it becomes increasingly apparent from Tony’s hot murmurings while in the throes of passion stolen in the hospital shrubbery what he really wants: “I can’t take any more of this. We must have this weekend together, Norma,” he whispers, and then he’ll go off for two years without seeing her after they’re married. You’d think there would be an easier way.

Then one evening at 11:00 pm, Norma decides to go for a walk when a thunderstorm is threatening, stays out too late after the storm starts even though lightening scares her silly, and takes a shortcut through Porter’s Alley, forbidden because a  nurse was strangled to death there a year ago, the murderer never caught. In the alley she sees two men in white raincoats fighting for possession of a knife. She hears one of the men scream “a cry of mortal agony” and runs off. When she reaches the hospital she calls the police from a phone booth outside, but hangs up before giving any more information other than that there’s been a murder in the alley because “she didn’t intend to get mixed up in this.”

But outside the phone booth door is a “good-looking” man in (gasp) a white raincoat who grabs her wrist and asks her if she’s American and if she heard a man scream. She pulls away and ducks into into the nurse’s dorm just in time for curfew. “Old Mike,” who is usually on duty at the door monitoring the residents, is absent, so she steals one of the wooden figurines he is always carving—but suddenly there’s a massive multi-car crash outside the dorm doors, so she does the obvious thing and runs up to her room to hide, then decides to put the figurine back, but cuts herself on something sharp as she tries to pull the object from her pocket. Returning the now-bloody object without bothering to figure out how she got cut, she heads back to her room, but notices some potted fir trees in the hallway have been re-arranged, and someone behind them sneezes! Now she bolts back upstairs, hides her muddy shoes and wet and bloody uniform in a locked drawer, then figures out that someone had hidden a bloody scalpel in her cape!

So she washes off the knife and has just added that to her collection of Suspicious Objects when someone knocks on her door! “Was it the murderer out there, come to collect the knife?” Because that’s what a murderer would be wanting of a witness, but if he knew how fervently Norma intends to aid and abet the crime, he wouldn’t bother. But no, it’s her roommate—did she forget her key?—telling her that it’s all hands on deck for the car crash, so down to the Emergency Department Norma goes, where she finds that not only a murder and a car crash but a lightning strike in Potter’s Alley has ignited a farm building and burned a couple hiding there, and the farm truck that decided to go for a drive hit a pedestrian and then was found to have a body in the back, a man who’s been stabbed to death! “Norma sighed. If she did marry Tony secretly, she was going to miss being a part of St. Christopher’s Hospital,” and if this much zany activity is occurring in less than one hour, I have to agree it would be a tragic loss—though it might be pointed out that her job there is caring for the same people she had just run from at the first opportunity.

When the immediate traumas are cleared away, Norma is sent to special Dr. Stanton, a new addition to the staff who decided to show up for his first day at midnight and was, if you can believe it, the pedestrian struck by the farm truck. He’s literally bandaged head to toe, for a single rib fracture and a sprained ankle, but Norma knows it’s not really Dr. Stanton because she knew Hugh Stanton in high school in Manhattan, and his eyes were gray, but this man’s are blue! So she passes out on the spot! When she comes to, the patient insists she not leave his side, but sleep three hours in the chair next to his bed, and when she wakes up all his bandages have been removed and he’s better! But he’s still going to stay in the hospital for another two days because he’s the long-lost brother of Dr. Hugh Stanton, Dr. Rick Stanton! And she’s going to stay on duty 24 hours a day nursing a completely well man while they figure out who the murderer is!

Oh, and for her to break up with Tony—several times, in case he didn’t get the picture after the twice she’s told him to his face and the message she sent via her roommate, because “I hate secrets,” she says, bringing up Tony’s not-so-secret other girlfriend. But despite being such a champion of truth, she lies to the police several times about what happened That Fateful Evening, and she does end up falling on top of her patient and kissing him until “she began to fear for his cracked and bruised ribs” (there’s only one), which required a full-torso cast, but only for 12 hours.

We’re only about halfway through the book at this point, and there are so many mysteries to wonder about, not least being how Norma is able to even walk most of the time as her legs are always going weak with fear—but also, how did the scalpel end up on top of the electric meter in Norma’s room? Who got her muddy clothes out of the locked drawer and how, and why did they just throw them on the floor for her roommate to clean up? How does Tony know so much about what’s going on in Norma’s room when he’s not supposed to even be in her dorm? What was the deal with the sneezing man behind the fir trees? How can a woman so constantly paralyzed with fear be an effective nurse, much less set herself up as bait to trap a murderer? And why isn’t there a quota on the number of exclamation points an author can use? The contradictions of plot and prose are nonstop and regularly hilarious, making for one highly entertaining book. If author Doris Knight (and you do have to admire the pun of the title Nurse by Night) tied for fourth in the Worst Author category in this year’s annual VNRN Awards, this book ironically proves the point while simultaneously vaulting her out of the running with its spectacularly fabulous flameout.

Dr. Garrett’s Girl

By Miriam Lynch, ©1970 

Why did the name of Dr. Kennett Garrett turn every face hostile, and seal all lips? Lovely young nurse Julie Garrett desperately wanted to find out. For she was Dr. Garrett’s daughter, too young to have really known him, when he died, and now back for the first time in the closely knit New England town where he had practiced. Quickly Julie found work in the office of Dr. Robert MacDougall. Soon she had lost her heart to the handsome young physician, and earned the hatred of the beautiful, willful woman who wanted him for her own. But the trials of love paled beside the threat of terror as a shadowy figure tried to force Julie to give up her search for the key that would unlock the doors of mystery that surrounded the past—and free her to find happiness with the man of her dreams.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“He could be impatient with middle-aged women with lives of such paucity that they wasted his time and their money with imaginary ailments. Once Julie heard him snap at one of them to stop reading medical columns in magazines and go home and scrub her kitchen floor and thank God for her good health.” 

“He, like all doctors, never wrote anything that could be deciphered without eyestrain and loss of temper.”

“They tell me it’s not cause for gossip these days if a girl goes to a man’s apartment at dinnertime.”

REVIEW:
Julie Garrett is on vacation when she arrives in Riverford, the town in which she spent her first six years, and where her father, Dr. Kenneth Garrett, was the town doctor. She’d wanted to see her early home, but is startled when the proprietor of the shabby and struggling hotel turns her away after she reveals she’s Dr. Garrett’s daughter: “I don’t have a room in the place for you. Just remembered,” he tells her convincingly. Confused, she stumbles into the current doctor’s office and meets Dr. Robert MacDougall and finds that he is “someone she had fashioned in her hopes and dreams.” He, of course—overworked, over-dedicated small-town GP—is clueless about the mystery that makes door after door close in Julie’s face after she accepts Dr. MacDougall’s desperate plea that she accept a job in his overrun office and looks for an apartment to rent, to find only a room in the house of elderly spinster Charlotte Spencer, who is clearly lying to Julia when she denies any knowledge of Dr. Garrett. 

Of course there is the usual rich, evil woman longing to hook Dr. Robert, and she is Flavia Harrison, a widow with a four-year-old diabetic son and heir to the fortune of the Lawrence family, who founded the hospital, school, and even Dr. Garrett’s education. She literally stomps over Julie at their first meeting, as she pushes her way past a room full of patients for an “urgent” confab with the doctor, who seems unable to tell her to take a number. Julie is not able to say no, either, remaining at her job for only the crumbs of attention of the overworked doctor who never has time to thank her for her overtime: “He was completely absorbed in his work, and he evidently saw no reason for praise or comment on her long hours and hard work.”

Then the calls in the night, a rasping voice croaking, “You’re not wanted here,” the letters adorably composed of cutout newspaper letters stating the same, the slashed tires, all convince her that she’s wasting her time pining after a man who cares not for her and who is so clearly in the sights of a very determined woman. On the verge of packing her bags, she meets Craig Farnsworth, Flavia’s brother, and now Julie is the one being chased—taken out every night for dinners and dancing. Robert, damn him, amiably chats up Craig in the office when the young man pops in to wait for Julie at the end of the day, “did not even seem to notice that she had a suitor,” such a cute word!

You can see the natural disaster peeking over the horizon at mid book, so you will not be surprised when it starts to rain. The river, so close to a community of poor folks too proud to ask for help, begins to rise. Curiously, this also coincides with a  huge surge in disease requiring hospitalization, so Julie is sent to help staff the local hospital, where she works about 30 hours straight without sleep or even meals—and for once, no “note of recognition or hostility. She had simply been one of them, working as hard as she could to keep death at bay.”

While on her hospital tour, she cares for an attorney, Martin Balfour, as well as her landlady, Charlotte Spencer, both of whom cough up more than a little pneumonia-associated phlegm as they reveal that they, along with Julie’s father and Eleanora Lawrence, town darling and original heir to the town founder’s fortune, were a firm foursome as young people—one wonders if Charlotte hadn’t been, along with the two young men, in love with Eleanora. More truth unfolds—though it’s hard to see how this will improve Julie’s standing in town—though it is perplexing why she is held responsible to such a high degree for alleged sins of her father, who had died 20 years previously—not much to think about in small towns, apparently—but so too does the truth between Julie and Robert emerge, so there’s half an unsurprising happy ending for you.

Though the writing is not much more than average, I did appreciate this book for the actual surprise, after 500+ nurse novel reviews, this book offered in the reason for Julie’s ostracism, as well as in its climactic scene, in which the motivations and villains are laid bare. If the repercussions—does the villain get away with it, as it seems they will? Will Julie be accepted by the community at last?—and the problem of the heroine falling in love with a man who barely recognizes her existence and who promises only that “although he left her often, he would always come back to her” are left unanswered, overall this is a book with at least a bit of novelty to it that makes it worth reading.

Nurse Chadwick’s Sorrow

By Diana Douglas
(pseud. Richard Wilkes-Hunter), ©1967 

Ruth Chadwick would never forgive Dr. Barry Kade for a night of insanity that changed her life. She would never return to Dr. Graham Chadwick, her husband. The only thing that still tied her to these two men was a bond of pain and hatred. And now Tracey Norton was involved. Tracey … pretty, talented, very attractive to a man like Dr. Kade. Unable to stop her, Ruth saw Tracey being caught in her own hidden past—in the frightening truth that lay behind Nurse Chadwick’s sorrow.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“Frigid type? No, you’re too pretty.”

“A man could be made to forget anything else when the girl he loved kissed him.”

“By Friday she had almost resolved to forget all about Barry Kade and dedicate herself to a lifetime of nursing.”

REVIEW:
Author Richard Wilkes-Hunter is not an author I enjoy. His books are generally sexist, stupid and dull, usually landing C-minus grades. So here we have a little treat—not the cover, of course, which is pretty lame—RWH has given us a book that is only irritating, without the usual over-the-top sexism! Curiously, Nurse Chadwick of the title is only a peripheral character. The book centers on Tracey Norton, who has just been hired as a scrub nurse at Pasadena General. From her very first surgery, when she meets Dr. Barry Kade’s large gray eyes beneath very black brows and long, curling lashes, she has to force herself to concentrate on the operation rather than the handsome young assistant surgeon.

Ruth Chadwick is the OR charge nurse, “still attractive, though she must be 30 or more,” thank you very much, Richard. She is also a strict disciplinarian who hates Dr. Kade with a burning passion, for some mysterious reason, so there will be a lot of floundering around in the plot until the secret is finally revealed two-thirds of the way through the book. In the interim Tracey has coffee with Barry Kade and then a few very pleasant dates, though she risks the ire of Ruth Chadwick in doing so. That risk is made especially problematic since Ruth has invited Tracey to take a room in her apartment. Improbably, Tracey accepts, and then, in the name of being honest, is fairly consistently rude and insulting to Ruth.

In close quarters, Tracey is able to spot the mysteries in Ruth’s life. Ruth acknowledges she has a 3-year-old son named David who obviously does not live with her. Ruth goes away every weekend to some undisclosed location, and is driven home by a man in sports clothes in an open convertible—and then cries herself to sleep in her bedroom. “A woman with a child to live for had no right to abandon herself to such grief,” thinks Tracey with great wisdom and kindness.

One afternoon, after a very tense surgery, Ruth takes it as a mild criticism when Tracey says she is going to the cafeteria for coffee—Ruth usually asks one of the student nurses to make the coffee but had instead sent the student to do more important chores—and Tracey “stared defiantly” and snaps, “I wish you would take that chip off your shoulder, Ruth. Why don’t you save that charge-nurse jazz for the operating room? Outside working hours it neither becomes you nor impresses me!” This sort of hyper-aggressive, snarky remark is, unfortunately, characteristic of many of Tracey’s comments to Ruth, and peculiarly, Ruth responds like a puppy who has been smacked with a rolled-up newspaper and becomes thoughtful, then sad, whimpering, “Am I as bad as that?” and asking if they can still be friends. I liked Ruth better when she was snapping, “Walters! A towel for Dr. Russell!”

Now, as Tracey’s mean-girl ways inexplicably cause Ruth to open up more, we get numerous hints about Ruth’s past. Barry tells her that he has been “nearly four years saving for something that’s very important to me,” and that Ruth’s dislike of him goes back four years. Calculating Tracey thinks, “Nearly four years ago. That would be before Ruth’s child was born.” Ruth’s husband doesn’t help when he when he waylays Tracey as she is walking home from work, creepily offering her a ride with the friendly comment, “I promise not to attempt your seduction.” Tracey immediately volunteers that Ruth cries at night and that she knows he drives her home on Sundays, but when he tells her fiercely that he loves Ruth and wants to make the marriage work, Tracey answers, “It’s really not any of my business. I neither peep nor listen. Nor do I pry into other people’s lives!” It’s a remarkable, completely obvious lie. So when Graham asks her to break her date with Barry and go spy on Ruth and David at a remote beach, of course she does, though Barry turns out to be insecure and all but stops speaking to her. What Tracey finds naturally causes everything to turn out perfectly for everyone, even for her, the one who deserves it least. If the Big Secret everyone is keeping is actually interesting, it’s just way too complicated to be resolved by Tracey showing up at the beach and yelling at Ruth some more, then sending David for  “cutting-edge” surgery (not used today) that is explained in such excruciating detail you might nod off.

Some male writers can pull off nurse novels. Bill Neubauer and Jean Francis Webb, for example, are respectful, gentle authors who can tell a story with real feeling. Others, however, such as Mr. Wilkes-Hunter (and William Daniel Ross, to name another), clearly view women as objects, and not infrequently demonstrate no understanding for how women act or speak, instead making them bros with perky breasts. This is Tracey Norton in a nutshell, who may be the heroine of this book, but she is no hero—neither admirable, charitable or even likeable. “You have the old girl eating out of your hand,” says a fellow nurse to Tracey, as if dominating Ruth is the only option. It’s not, and if Ruth is happy at the end of the book, I still felt sorry about how badly she’d been treated. So unless you enjoy spending time with mean people like Tracey Norton, you’d do a lot better to look for a book by Bill Neubauer.

A Nurse’s Strange Romance

By Arlene Hale, ©1964

Meredith Michaels, R.N., had three loves in her life: nursing, and two young doctors. Dark-haired, intense Ryan Quinn she had loved since they first began training together. Steve Baxter, big, blond, full of the joy of life, had been the perfect balance for the inseparable threesome. Now they had the chance to open private practice together with Meredith as office nurse—and life seemed complete. Meredith, in fact, was engaged to Ryan. But something happened. Ryan became steeped in gloom, and even Steve’s former gaiety seemed forced. Meredith was distraught. But then, in the middle of the crisis, and with the wisdom she never dreamed she possessed, she grasped on a solution that had been staring her in the face.

GRADE: C- 

BEST QUOTES:
“The hospital frowns upon interns and nurses smooching in the hallways.”

“That blush makes you different from any nurse on the floor. You are the only one that seems to respect some old-fashioned chastity!”

“Long may she walk with her cute little wiggle!”

“What a tasty looking neck!” 

“Maybe it’s not as exciting to diagnose old Mrs. Cleaver’s arthritis as it is to make smears for some important test in a research lab but it is important! At least to Mrs. Cleaver.”

REVIEW:
The author of this very stupid book, Arlene Hale, is something of a thorn in my side. She was ridiculously prolific—I’ve reviewed 27 of her VNRNs so far and she has written at least a dozen more—but her average grade over those 27 books is a pathetic C+. Here we have yet another snoozer—well, it might be a snoozer if the leading man weren’t such an ass, but as it was it just made me mad. Meet Ryan Quinn, a “deep, dark, secretive” driven type who, though the author tries incredibly hard to depict him as a misunderstood soul, is borderline psychotic. As we open the book, Ryan and his best friend Steve Baxter are four months from completing their residencies, at which point they will go into practice and start earning an actual salary. But “payment is being demanded,” Ryan tells Meredith. “I will have to quit and go out and find a job, pay them off.” I am not even going to start on how absurd this situation is, but it’s definitely indicative of how the rest of the book is going to go.

To wit: Nurse Meredith Michaels, who has been dating Ryan Quinn for years now and is all but holding her breath until he drops on one knee and opens the tiny velvet box, has magically inherited a tidy sum from a deceased aunt. Her first inclination is to quit her nursing job and go back to school to become a teacher. Is this her long-denied dream finally coming true? No! Meredith loves nursing! But Steve and Ryan have bizarrely been badgering her to trade her nurse’s cap for blackboard chalk. “You are a pure descendent of Florence Nightingale, no doubt. But they need teachers too. Desperately,” Steve tells her, because nurses are just a dime a dozen! (And the financing of her nurse’s degree remains a secret.)

Ryan’s misfortune turns out to be Meredith’s salvation, as now she can give her money to Ryan and remain in the career she loves best! Ryan, the selfless wonder, hesitates less than ten seconds before accepting. Then he has the balls to tell her that he is “too honorable to make plans to be married until every penny had been paid on his debts,” and furthermore he is accepting a research position that pays very little, so it’s likely to be years before that happens. Of course, if he married Meredith, his debt would be expunged, but that point is overlooked by everyone, even Meredith.

Alas, this is not the end of Ryan Quinn’s perfidy. He leaves for a new job far from Meredith and does not ask her to come work at his new hospital with him, so she remains at City Hospital with Steve, who takes every opportunity to kiss her and make wildly inappropriate remarks to his best friend’s girlfriend. For Ryan’s part, immediately upon arriving at his new hospital, he instantly falls in love with Dr. Carol Simmons and dates her for months, taking her out to restaurants he cannot afford (when he had been too poor to go anywhere with Meredith except to her house, where he had eaten dinners she had cooked for him, and presumably paid for as well). Naturally Ryan does not bother to tell either woman about the other, and it’s nearly Christmas before he fesses up to Carol. He has the nerve to be flabbergasted when she is jealous, but placates her by promising to spend Christmas with her, even though he has already promised the day to Meredith. Then the swell guy is unable to tell Meredith that he won’t be coming home after all—much less that he doesn’t love her and is seeing someone else—until the day before Christmas, when he calls her and lies to her about a patient who he claims needs his attention through the holidays.

As it turns out there is such a patient, Betty Walters, a lonely, pathetic waif with leukemia, and now Ryan drags this poor woman into his miserable clutches as well. He starts to pay “special attention” to her: “At odd moments, he would drop in to see her and say a few words to her, tease her gently and lay the foundation for a relationship that went beyond the normal one of patient and doctor.” Betty, who has only months to live, falls in love with Ryan, and her bullying, equally psychotic brother Bruce blackmails Ryan into marrying Betty: If he refuses, Bruce is going to assault Carol, and if Ryan goes to the police about it, Bruce will have one of his friends do it. Paralyzed with fear, Ryan lets the situation ride for weeks. Eventually Carol hears hospital gossip that Ryan is spending too much time with Betty.  When she confronts him, he insults her: “You’re being female. Jealous! It doesn’t become you.” Just wow. At least Carol has the sense to break up with Ryan—Meredith is still home waiting by the phone.

Steve, clearly pining for Meredith, decides to open a clinic and invites Ryan and Meredith to join him. Bizarrely, Ryan agrees—and when he moves back home, he kisses dopey Meredith, and she’s thinking, “He hadn’t said he loved her. He hadn’t asked her to marry him either. But it was all there in undertones and she could wait. She had already waited this long.” And she is going to wait a lot longer. Because he’s sneaking back to see Carol to tell her what he never told Meredith, that he loves her. Then he heads over to see Betty, kisses her, too, and asks her to wait a little longer to be married to him, thinking, “He did not really want Betty to die and yet her death would mean his own freedom.” I can’t believe author Arlene Hale thinks this guy is a reasonable love interest. 

Ryan flees back to his hotel room, but Bruce follows him and beats him to a pulp. This finally convinces him that Bruce really means business, so Ryan—this guy just never stops—calls Meredith, tells her he’s been in a car accident and asks her to wire him $500, which he then uses to pay for the wedding, which goes off the next day. The cake is not even crumbs before he has fled back home, where he goes straight to Meredith’s apartment and tells her he loves her and wants to marry her! When she says, “I am not sure I believe you anymore, Ryan,” for the first time showing some actual sense, he says “Darling, you must! You have always trusted me, always believed in me. Don’t stop now. Don’t you know I need you, that I’ve always needed you? Don’t doubt me now. I couldn’t endure it! We’ll be married whenever you say.” To which she replies, “Darling, let’s be married on my birthday. Next week!” And now he is back to hoping that Betty dies in the next few days so he won’t become a bigamist. So to atone for the huge mess he’s in, he goes straight to Carol’s house where he kisses her—and then tells her he is being married to Meredith.

Meredith breaks the news to Steve the next day, and now Steve is going to pieces. “His idea was to take the bull by the tail and spin him until he crashed into the wall and broke it down, or a woman by the hair and—” and now he is racing to Meredith’s apartment, bursts in, grabs her and kisses her though she beats at him and protests, “but he would not let her go,” instead telling her that he loves her, too. Guess what—she suddenly realizes that it’s Steve she is in love with.

Honestly, I just can’t go on. Let me just say that Meredith Michaels is a pathetic sap, Ryan Quinn is a self-absorbed psychotic, and Steve is a self-absorbed, domineering bully. Don’t waste your time with this trio. You might take them as an object lesson not to waste your time on any more Arlene Hale books, either, and I wouldn’t fault you in the slightest.

Nurse Madeline of Eden Grove

By Marjorie Norrell, ©1965

When her old friend Miss Emily Eden left Staff Nurse Madeline her large house, Madeline decided to turn it into a much-needed nursing home. It meant, among other things, that she would be able to see a lot more of the attractive surgeon Michael Foyle—but would it make him any more interested in her?

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“People find their happiness in the most unexpected places.” 

REVIEW:
Madeline Frazer is a very nice young nurse who works in a small British hospital. I’m not a person who flings the word nice around with abandon, but I have to admit that Nurse Madeline is nice: polite, kind, pleasing, agreeable and respectable, as Merriam and Webster suggest the word should connote. But that, unfortunately, is about all she is. She is not witty or spunky or tenacious or quirky or interesting. And neither is her book. 

Madeline frequently visits wealthy 83-year-old Emily Eden, who lives in the stately eponymous manor house, because the old lady was also a victim in the train crash that killed her parents though Madeline survived, and the lady bizarrely took Madeline in after that. Now Madeline visits weekly on her days off, if the young swain who has captured her eye, up-and-coming plastic surgeon Dr. Michael Foyle, has other plans. But Michael is not a lover who is going to last long, as we soon know this even if Madeline isn’t, because he is one of those young doctors who has “an aura of ruthlessness” and “whose main ambition is to have an outsize bank balance.”

We take a while to get around to Miss Emily’s sad demise, and learn that she has left the house to Madeline—and perfect timing, too, because a group of doctors including Dr. Foyle is trying to open a nursing home but lack a suitable building—and Eden Grove is perfect!

Madeline feels obliged to reach out to Richard Eden, Miss Emily’s only living relative, a nephew who is mildly successful writer—but Miss Emily has unfairly refused to admit him into her presence, much less her affection, because she disapproved of his mother (for no good reason, of course). In the course of discussing Miss Emily’s estate, Madeline and Richard Eden have several telephone conversations, during which he assures her that he is quite happy for her to have the house. He sends her a copy of his latest book, written under the name Richard Prentiss (his mother’s maiden name), so she starts dreaming a little about this mystery man.

Then she meets with Richard Grey, a man at the attorney’s office, to discuss the bequest, and tells him with passionate fervor about her hopes for the nursing home, and the attorneys arrange the lease of the house for her—but she keeps thinking of Richard Grey, and soon he’s ringing her up and asking her out. But isn’t it funny how much Richard Grey and Richard Eden sound alike, and how they share the same first name!

She spends a week’s vacation with Richard Grey—Richard Eden is away assisting with the filming of one of his books—and soon finds that thoughts of him are driving any lingering regrets about Michael Foyle away, even if that fickle lad, now finding Madeline less interested, doubles down on his pursuit of her, much to the chagrin of snippy Dr. Irene Stapleton! But Richard Grey also has to leave town for weeks or months on end for reasons he never explains—Madeline assumes it’s confidential business for the law firm. He also refrains from mentioning his undying love for her, leaving her feeling a bit uncertain—though we savvy VNRN readers have no doubts, do we, folks?

The usual tempest in a teapot occurs—Michael kisses Madeline, wouldn’t you know it, just as Dr. Irene is walking into the room, and when Richard Grey shows up the next day to tell Madeline a Big Secret, will this not-what-it-seemed kiss, or Richard’s mystery, destroy Madeline’s happiness forever?

This book is perfectly pleasant. There are a few quietly enjoyable moments, such as the relationship between Madeline and Margaret Barret, the new Matron of Eden Grove Nursing Home, and I really cannot find much fault with the book, but it just does not rise above nice. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad, I leave for you to decide.

Nurse Rivers’ Secret

By Anne Durham, ©1965
Cover illustration by Bern Smith

Everyone at Ripplegate General Hospital was tremendously excited when the film star Dawn Delaney was admitted as a patient—everyone, that is, except Nurse Nina Rivers, who knew Dawn only too well and dreaded the complications she would inevitably bring with her.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“She’d be a proper corker out of that horrible uniform.” 

“No one looks at a nurse unless she’s doing something to attract attention.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Nina Rivers has made a life for herself apart from her family; she comes from a fairly broken home. Her father died when she was very young, and Mother married Alexander Fitchworth, a very nice man who had been a real father to Nina. Of course, he went and died, and Nina became a sort of Cinderella to her temperamental and beautiful stepsister Alexandra, waiting on her hand and foot. Astonishingly, when Mother and Alexandra had decided to move to America, Nina elected to remain in the U.K. to become a nurse, and neither of them has ever forgiven Nina for “abandoning” them and what would have been a life of unappreciated drudgery.

Imagine poor Nina’s surprise when her sister is brought in to her hospital as a pampered private patient—under the name Dawn Delaney, as she is now known, as she is a rising movie star and is making a film in a castle nearby; Dawn had fallen through a rickety balcony when she had been up there outside of working hours with a film mogul who could do things for her career. Nina is immediately sacrificed at Dawn’s altar by none other than Mommie Dearest. Not a hug or word of affection passes from Mommie’s lips after years apart from her first daughter before she is exhorting Nina not to tell anyone of the relationship. “You’ve always said you didn’t care for that sort of life. This is what you prefer, and as soon as Alex has recovered, she will go right out of your life again, and not trouble you,” she says, blaming the victim. “You must come and have tea with us one day,” she adds, finishing the job with a knife to the heart.

But Dawn/Alex is a spoiled brat, always on the call light and sobbing in self-pity, and the only one who can soothe her is Nurse Rivers, who is constantly pressed into duty to pat the limpid hand of her sister. Dawn is also one of those ladies who “always found the men belonging to other girls much more acceptable to her than other men. She didn’t mean any harm; she just couldn’t help it.” Yeah, right. And of course the first man she notices is Dr. Antony Alsford, who is all but engaged to Nina—if only they can settle the thorny issue of whether she will quit working when they get married. “I just want a career of my own,” she tells him repeatedly, but he is having none of it. “He didn’t like his girl-friend to be the one with ideas, the one to want to make plans. He would want a yes-woman, Nina felt.” It’s clear why she wants to marry him and why she is heart-broken when he becomes starry-eyed over the dewy, rose-colored Dawn—and breaks off their engagement with a story about how he is doing her a huge favor by ending it. “I’m standing in your way,” he generously explains. He has no idea how right he is, and unfortunately neither does Nina.

Because there’s nice old Dr. Stephen Cornwell to help her over the rough patches, give her a lift into town and buy her tea and pass over his handkerchief. Though he starts out “much as a kindly uncle,” his charm grows naturally on Nina, and he is clearly in love with her—though she, of course, is the last one to figure this out. She does come to understand something her own feelings early on, however—“a rather special feeling towards Dr. Stephen Cromwell, that had begun deep down in her almost imperceptibly, and was now like a glow of warmth on a cold day, stealing gently yet swiftly all over her. A glow that made her want to be with him all the time.” Unfortunately Dawn, recognizing the attraction between the pair, now decides that, having won Antony for her own, she no longer wants that fickle man and has her heart set on winning poor Dr. Cornwell. “She hadn’t really wanted Antony permanently; she had just wanted to feel that she could take his attention away from another girl, and now she was finished with him.” What a sweet girl!

Now Dawn is making herself sick with longing for the good doctor, and Nina feels she has no choice but to exhort Dr. Cornwell to go along with the charade that he loves her in order to help her recover. “Dawn wanted him, and they must consider her, because she was so ill,” she decides. He flat out refuses, however, proving himself to be a man of principles and character. “She’s behaving like a spoilt child. She wants something. She must have it. It doesn’t matter if it’s some pretty toy or a man’s attention, it’s all one to her. And I, for one, will not pander to it,” he tells her, adding, “I think you’ve let Dawn and her mother make a doormat of you for years, and I’m going to personally stop it.”

But Nina is a clever lass, smart enough to figure out another way to get Dawn off Dr. Cornwell’s leg—even if in enacting her plan she risks losing the doctor for good. Complications and misunderstandings ensue, of course … and in the end we have another fairly typical Harlequin story, sweet and slow, with an admirable, strong heroine—and in this instance, we are lucky to have an attractive love interest as well. Some side characters are well-drawn; Nina’s mother in particular was terrifically horrid in a subtle sort of way. If overall this book is not especially sparkling, it’s still well worth an afternoon.

New Yorker Nurse

By Dorothy Fletcher, ©1969 

When a pretty, single girl is taken to a bachelor’s luxurious, isolated seashore house, wined and dined by the charming young man she believes is the “Mr. Right” she’s been waiting for, what does she do when he becomes amorous? If the girl is Dinah Mason, a tawny-eyed nurse, vivacious and sophisticated at 25, and if her Mr. Right is Dick Claiborne, a serious lawyer by day and a jet-setter by night … there’s bound to be some swinging surprises in the age-old art of loving.

GRADE: A-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“He eyed her long and shapely legs and winced when he came to the stout, serviceable nurse’s shoes. A girl with legs like that shouldn’t have to wear those clumpy shoes, damn it. When were they going to do something about the shoes? Pucci was dolling up the airline hostesses. Why didn’t some designer give the nurses a break?”

 

“You look like a strawberry. Good enough to eat.”

 

“It seems to me that people are getting more and more inarticulate with each succeeding generation.”

 

“On a day like this it was difficult to believe that the air was poisoned with monoxides.”

 

“Home is really someone you love more than anything else in the world.”

 

“Nurses always have thick ankles and things like that. They have severe expressions. And almost invariably, a suggestion of moustache on their upper lips.”

 

REVIEW:

Dinah Mason is our eponymous New York City-based visiting nurse who is between jobs when the book opens, and is spending an afternoon visiting her former patient Victoria Blanding, a charming and tough old gal whom Dinah had nursed through a broken hip. Victoria remarks to Dinah that had she come later she could have met her lovely nephew, who is engaged to be married to “a quite dreary girl. Jet-set type of young woman, the kind I can’t stand. Pity you couldn’t have met him first.” It is a pity, because she’s going to be 26, which means she’s about doomed to a long, lonely, spinster existence, since she just can’t bring herself to marry her longtime beau, Mike Corby. “The hoped-for spark was missing; she didn’t tingle, not the way she should,” she thinks.

 

After leaving Miss Blanding’s Park Avenue apartment, she heads to 57th Street, then to York, winding up in a park off Sutton Place near the Queensboro Bridge. There she meets a shabby older gentleman reading Baudelaire in the original French. Down on his luck, she assumes from his ratty clothes, and so chats him up to lift his spirits for a bit; “People like that make my heart ache. Isn’t it terrible what happens to some people?” Then she’s off for a date with Mike, during which she again says no to his proposals for marriage and sex; this book is one of the most open about the possibility of the heroine having sex with her boyfriends. She doesn’t, though, of course: “It was always a good way to work up a head of steam, pondering the role of the single girl in society. If she heard a man say just once more, What’s the matter with you … you frigid or something? she would scream. Didn’t they ever wonder if there was something wrong with their own appeal? The male ego, she told herself, was stupendous.”

 

Dinah’s next job is caring for Margaret Paley, a lonely 51-year-old widow who attempts suicide with a bottle of sleeping pills. “I have no shame about what I did, Dinah. Only despair that it was abortive. A person has a right to do with her own life what she wants to,” Mrs. Paley says—a vastly different attitude about suicide than what the typical VNRN offers, which is deep shame for the patient and a hasty sweep under the rug of the offensive action. Once Mrs. Paley is out of the hospital, Dinah accompanies her to her apartment on 56th Street, coincidentally at York Street and Sutton Place. She sees the old man in the park and dashes in to say hello to him before dashing off again—but leaves Mrs. Paley’s suitcase behind. Fortunately, the old man’s son, Dick Claiborne, is also loitering in the park nearby, and has been scoping out the lovely nurse, and he rushes after her with the case, and then offers to drive her to collect Mrs. Paley and chauffer her home.

 

Dinah, attempting to jolly Mrs. Paley out of her deep depression, drags her out on walks in the city, finally taking her to the Sutton Place park. Sadly, the park only reminds Mrs. Paley of her deceased husband, which makes Dinah sigh, “You can’t win. Everything in the world must remind you of the person you had loved and lost.” Then she spots the older gentleman and brings Mrs. Paley over to share the bench and a little conversation. Soon he is describing the boats and canals of Venice—and then Mrs. Paley suddenly chimes in with her own rhapsody for that beautiful city, as well as Paris, Provence and the travels each of them had done with their now-departed spouses. After the ladies have headed for home, Mrs. Paley enlightens Dinah that the gentleman is wearing fine tailored clothes, even if they are well-worn, and is clearly quite wealthy. “Rich people never look rich,” she says. “Rich people have holes in the soles of their shoes. It’s because they don’t care. They don’t have to care.” Feeling better now, Mrs. Paley dismisses Dinah, who next moves in with the Wallace family, the mother of which is recovering from knee surgery, at 920 Park Avenue—nothing but the finest addresses for our Dinah! There we enjoy the younger Wallaces, Joanie (age 8) and Wendy (age 4), who track gooey finger paint all over the apartment.

 

Dick, meanwhile, after dropping off Dinah and Mrs. Paley, has been unable to get Dinah out of his mind, so he phones all over town to track her down, finally reaching the Wallace’s house on his fifth try but being subjected to a long conversation with the four-year-old before Dinah intervenes. Dick asks her out, and Dinah eagerly accepts. “I’ve always wanted something like this to happen to me, Dinah thought. Someone coming unexpectedly into my life … remembering me. Not forgetting. Calling me up …” Their date takes them throughout New York, and Dinah is completely won over: “She was brimming with contentment, happier than she ever remembered being, so much at peace that she would almost have settled for this perfect day being the last one of her life.”

 

For her part, Mrs. Paley wanders back to the Sutton Place park and runs into the older gentleman—now we learn he is Gordon Claiborne—who is reading a book that he offers her along with an invitation to dinner in a painful, tender and truly touching scene in which they discuss loneliness before deciding to dine together at a bistro on 51st Street on scallops and trout with French pastries and vintage brandy afterward. “I don’t remember ever having been so hungry,” Mrs. Paley thinks. “It was simply the incontestable fact of a woman on the arm of a distinguished man that made all the difference. It was a social thing, a human thing.” They make another date as they say goodnight, and she falls asleep without effort, for the first time since her husband died.

 

There are the inevitable hurdles for the younger lovers to overcome, such as Mike Corby, and Dick’s fiancée, and a beautiful day sailing that ends disastrously when Dinah realizes that Dick is trying to seduce her: “I refuse to be someone’s prey,” she fumes and is about to walk home when he offers to drive her, but asks her to stop for coffee on the way to clear the air. “If he was just going to take her home and ditch her, write her off as a bad try and a poor guess, why would he suggest stopping off for coffee?” She thinks hopefully, realizing he wanted her because he loves her, not just to use her. Over coffee he invites her to meet his aunt, and a series of startling coincidences unfolds, ultimately leading to what would be a truly fabulous ending, except for the last sentence.

 

This book is as much an homage to the city of New York as it is a double romance—not surprising, given the title. We traipse all over the city on various dates, take in the view on Wall Street and Trinity Church, commune with the animals at the Central Park Zoo, dine out on Bank and MacDougal Streets in Greenwich Village, and sip cocktails at the Drake Hotel. I also especially appreciated the double romance that included an older couple, which was so unexpected and sweet that it actually left me weeping in a public lobby.

 

As usual, Fletcher tucks in many cultured references such as Elsa and Siegfried, Balenciaga, Fleurs de Rocaille perfume, Emma Bovary, Steiff toys, Schubert, Genêt, Jane and Paul Bowles, tempus fugit, and the Perls art gallery, among others. The humor is sprinkled liberally throughout, with lines like “‘Did it cost an arm and a leg?’ ‘Just an arm,’ Dinah said.” and “It was sentimentality, born of the gratuitous effects of a sleeping pill, but it was nice to hear.” The only thing I didn’t love about Dinah is that she is willing to chuck her career when she gets married, which she thinks won’t be a problem if she’s “crazy in love.” “Now her nursing days were almost over. Was she sorry about it? Yes, a little. When you married, you gave up your own life. Women did, at any rate. Would she ever regret it?” But in general, this is a top-notch book, Fletcher—who continues as one of my very favorite authors—in fine form.

 

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.

Nurse Harlowe

By Jane Arbor, ©1954

Gillian Harlowe, staff nurse at St. Ranulph’s Hospital, had told herself over and over again that it was sheer folly for her to fall in love with that distinguished surgeon, Adrian Pilgrim, whose interest in her was obviously confined to approval of her professional skill. Worse – he seemed almost to welcome the idea that she might marry his charming, reckless young cousin Colin, while he himself was busy squiring the sophisticated (and very determined) Elspeth. Yes, she knew she ought to put him out of her thoughts. But it isn’t always possible to persuade one’s heart to listen to reason.

GRADE: C

REVIEW:
The cover illustration completely sums up this book: Plot devices you’ve seen before, assembled with little skill, and achieving a mediocre result. Those story lines we’ve met numerous times in the past:

1. The heroine, Gillian Harlowe, at 23 is fifteen years younger than the man of her dreams.
2.      Dr. Adrian Pilgrim “had never given any sign that he recognized anything but the trained dexterity of her hands,” but she Gillian falls in love with him anyway.
3.      Gillian had been in love with playboy Colin Fenmore four years ago, but he’d dumped her after a summer of fun—and now he’s turned up in her ward after a serious car accident that may leave him crippled for life.
4.      The only way Colin is going to pull him through his recovery is if Gillian pretends that she’s in love with him.
5.      Dr. Pilgrim believes Gillian is going to marry Colin.
6.      Gillian believes Dr. Pilgrim is going to marry sexy vixen Elspeth Paul.
7.      The Ward Sister, Clarice Hugh, is a bitter, mean shrew because she had lost her fiancé 20 years ago.
8.      Clarice is transformed into a warm, kind human being when her ex-fiancé returns for her.
9.      Dr. Pilgrim kisses Gillian at the Nurse’s Ball, but she thinks he means only to insult her by it.
10.   Despite a recent promotion to charge nurse that she says means a great deal to her, Gillian plans to throw over her career when she is married.

And that, essentially, is all there is to say about this book. The writing is perfectly tolerable, but the story a straight, wide highway through the desert: It’s clear where you’re going, and you’ve seen before what little there is along it. I think the most emotion I felt during this book was when the fiancé quotes Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew to her in the final pages: “‘Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper; Thy head, thy sov’reign.’ Are you really content, my sweet, to have it so?” And she replies. “It’s all that my life could ask—” It wasn’t a pretty emotion, but it was one. If it’s not an emotion you would care to have yourself, you might want to consider giving Nurse Harlowe the slip.