Nurses Dormitory

By Alice Brennan, ©1962

“Is it wrong to marry for money?” asked Nurse Miller. “Is it wrong to resent your mother because she is a glamorous movie star?” asked Nurse Gray. “Is it wrong to love the boy next door who thinks of you as a kid sister?” asked Nurse Leighton. Nurses Dormitory is an unusually warm story of the lives of three young nurses and the men they fall in love with. Told against the backdrop of the wards, corridors and operating rooms of a big city hospital, there is an authentic insight into the scene behind the scenes and every character is as real as a favorite friend.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Gosh, Lita, with your looks and figure, why on earth did you ever want to become a nurse?”

“Work may be enough for a man. It isn’t enough for a woman. A woman needs a man to look after her; to hold her hand in the darkness; to be there! Without a man she’s not quite complete!”

“The three of us. We should write a book!”

“Wear kiss-proof lipstick, Veronica. There might be a bit of necking on the evening’s schedule.”

REVIEW:
When I picked up this book, I was concerned that it might not be a real vintage nurse romance novel. This is the first book I’ve read that details the lives of more than one heroine, and with the cover lines advertising that they love “the wrong men,” perhaps the requisite happy endings would escape the grasp of one or more of the ladies. Is Gone with the Wind not a romance because in the end Scarlett doesn’t have Rhett, just a stubborn determination to win him back? Well, I’ll think about that tomorrow.

Today I turn my attention to Lita Gray, whose mother is a movie star; Susie Miller, one of six children raised in a poor family who strives to find herself a wealthy man; and Veronica Leighton, whose crush from the age of 12, now-Dr. John Sernian, still sees her as the gangly pre-teen she once was. The advantage of having three heroines is that their stories are pretty well encapsulated in that one sentence. There are, of course, a few guys to add to the mix: Mark Brandel is a pediatric surgeon who is angry and short with the staff. His wife and three-year-old son were killed in a car accident five years ago, and he continues to beat himself up because he could not save them. He avenges their deaths by pulling out every stop in his attempts to save the lives of every child wheeled in through the doors of St. Jo’s Hospital. He seems charmed by Lita, who has also built a wall around herself as a defense against shallow people who can’t care for her: “She’d been so sick of useless, bored people lapping up excitement the way a cat laps up cream. Of no real importance to anyone except themselves. Concerned only with themselves. She’d craved a reason for being. An importance to her life. To her mind nursing had supplied that reason. It continued to supply it.”

For Susie we have Veronica’s brother, Doug, who comes to town and sweeps Susie off her money-grubbing feet. This is a big blow for her, and she spends a lot of time battling with herself and Doug about how awful it would be to be poor, even if you are happy, versus marrying for love. “If you’re left $100,000 or so, why, ask me to marry you again,” she tells Doug. “But until then, the answer is no … no … no!” And to think that you’re scarcely considered rich these days if you have a million dollars.

The main story centers around the hospital’s chief administrator, Larson Payne, who is intent on boosting hospital profits at the expense of the poor “ward” patients. Naturally, between his gruff manner and his propensity for giving his patients every possible medical treatment, Dr. Brandel quickly runs afoul of him. He has defenders on the hospital staff, including Dr. John Sernian, who go to bat for him, but Larson Payne retaliates by cutting medicine quotas for ward patients in half—which means that at mid-month there is no more oxygen, medicine, or blood products for those patients. Even if Dr. Brandel is gruff, you come to like and pity him, and he clearly has his heart in the right place when it comes to his patients. But you know something bad is going to happen, and all Dr. Brandel’s patients are children, so the build-up to the final gun battle at the corral felt real to me.

The writing is cute, though it does tend toward the mildly self-conscious. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. For example, I give you this: “Night is the time of rest, when after a day’s work, you can stretch your weary, aching bones across your own bed, close your eyes and be alone.” Readers more cynical than I am might raise a brow, but for me it worked more than not. And while two of our ladies do come out engaged on the other side, one remains Scarlet-esque, waiting hopefully for her beau to come around. He’s expressed interest, though, so we know it’s just a matter of time. I was pleasantly surprised by this book, and I looked forward to coming back to it when I put it down at bedtime. Don’t be put off by the homely cover; give this book a chance.

Conflict for Nurse Elsa

By Jeanne Bowman 

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

Also published as Nurse à la Mode

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

GRADE: F 

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

“I am Hoyt, of Chicago.”

REVIEW: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Graduate Nurse

Lucy Agnes Hancock, ©1947 

Also published as Dr. Kim

Jill Ordway was proud to be a nurse. She threw all her energy, her radiant health, her high courage into making the Kimberly sanatorium a success. Like the owner and Chief of Staff, Dr. Kimberly, she was fired with the dream of a haven for troubled minds and sick bodies—and its great power for good. But gradually, Jill saw that sinister forces were at work, forces led by Sylvia Webster, the wealthy young society girl who was determined to marry the handsome young doctor—if it meant destroying the sanatorium in the process. As Jill watched the town of Westhaven choose sides, she realized it was her duty to act—even if her action meant trouble for herself.

GRADE: A- 

BEST QUOTES: 

“So you’re the gal who brought Bruce Kimberly back from death’s door intact and set him on the road to life, liberty, and the pursuit of—Sylvia Webster’s idea of happiness.” 

“By aiming high we shall certainly reach a greater elevation than if we made our target the nearest blackberry bush.” 

“I’m sort of exclusive, darling. I’ll have no other gal’s tears dampening my shoulder except yours.” 

REVIEW: 

The last book I read of Ms. Hancock’s was Student Nurse, a saccharine, nauseatingly patriotic tale of Nazi spies infiltrating a small town in Indiana. Having covered the student nurse’s life in excessive detail, Ms. Hancock apparently moved on to a student who has finally graduated, but I was not hopeful for any change in her sanctimonious character. 

I love a good surprise. Graduate Nurse is a well-written, entertaining, engrossing story that has (almost) entirely cleared Ms. Hancock’s reputation with me. 

Dr. Bruce Kimberly has just returned from World War II, where he suffered a shrapnel wound in his right arm, and a subsequent infection and sepsis nearly killed him. This was followed by a “nervous collapse” that also took its toll. But devoted Lt. Jill Ordway, R.N., nursed him back to health over many months in her Tunis hospital. Now safely at home, Bruce’s career as a surgeon is in shreds, so he’s decided to open a sanatorium where fellow soldiers can recover their shattered spirits. 

It’s a “common” problem, he tells his spoiled, beautiful fiancée, Sylvia Webster, who despises Bruce’s “morbid interest in the ailments of derelicts,” as she thinks of psychiatric patients. She is constantly after him to sell out the sanatorium, urging him to forget work and come out and play with her and her friends, and constantly apologizing for her snarky remarks, such as when, right on page 3, she tells him, “Honestly, one would never suspect you of being a cripple.” She’s devious, vapid, and (of course) completely wrong for Bruce, but from the beginning I was smitten, especially after she, “in a smart black suit and furs, stopped her blue roadster at the curb in front of Westhaven’s Y.W.C.A.” 

She’d gone there to see Jill, who has just returned from overseas and is in town to visit Dr. Bruce. Sylvia accuses Jill of “maudlin sentimentality” when it comes to Bruce—and when she sees Jill at a cocktail party later that day, pretends they’ve never met before. Jill joins the sanatorium staff despite Sylvia’s enmity, and is soon a huge favorite with both the patients and Ruth Kimberly, Dr. Bruce’s sister and herself an R.N., now serving as chief supervisor of the sanatorium. We spend a lot of time hanging out with Jill and her fellow nurses, who, when they are not working hard to nurse their “neurotic” patients back to health, walk to the nearby pond half a mile away for skating parties—replete with a blazing bonfire, fresh coffee, and lots of other friendly youths—or skiing on a nearby hill, or going on sleigh rides. It really sounds like an idyllic life. 

The book’s dramatic tension comes from an undercurrent of concern about the sanatorium’s financial troubles; Sylvia is scheming to get her uncle, who is a cranky millionaire, to buy out—and then close—the sanatorium. And then there’s the ongoing question of whether Bruce is going to wise up and dump Sylvia. He has some odd notions about marriage: “Sometimes he didn’t seem to have the patience with her moods that he used to have, and perhaps marriage was the answer.” Because if you don’t like her before you’re married, a walk down the long aisle will surely solve all that. 

Graduate Nurse is such a pleasant trip that it feels like the author forgot she was supposed to be taking us somewhere. The almost summary climax—Jill is attacked by a patient—ends Bruce’s engagement to Sylvia, brings Jill and Bruce together, and also finds a husband for Ruth, in about 10 swift pages, leaving you feeling like your leisurely drive through the country just met up with a tornado. A mysterious endowment is made to the hospital to assist with their financial woes, and though you guess this is associated with the disappearance of a favorite patient for an afternoon, it is never quite explained. And anyway, it doesn’t really matter in the end; Ruth’s fiancé buys the sanatorium’s mortgage, saving them from hostile takeover. But if the ending feels forced and hasty, leaving several loose ends unexplained (how did the patient who attacked Jill know that her real name is Juliet, a question debated by several of the nursing staff?), the book as a whole is such a treat that you can easily forgive it.

Alternative cover, illustration by
David Attie

2010 VNRN Awards

Welcome to the first annual Vintage Nurse Romance Novel Awards! Winners are chosen from the VNRNs I have read this year, which for 2010 is 50 different books by 36 different authors. May they inspire and guide your own reading in 2011! 

BEST BOOKS

1. District Nurse Faith Baldwin, 1932 

2. Surf Safari Nurse Jane Converse, 1966 

3. Nurse Landon’s Challenge Adelaide Humphries, 1952 

4. Nurse Pro Tem Glenna Finley, 1967 

5. Wilderness Nurse Marguerite Mooers Marshall, 1949 

6. Surgical Call Margaret E.Sangster, 1937 

7. The Nurse and the Orderly Florence Stuart, 1964 

8. Cover Girl Nurse, Patricia Libby, 1963 

9. Private Duty Faith Baldwin, 1935 

10. Nurse in Crisis Jane Converse, 1966 

WORST BOOKS 

1. Dr. Merry’s Husband Peggy Gaddis, 1947 

2. Jungle Nurse Sharon Heath, 1965 

3. Student Nurse Lucy Agnes Hancock, 1944 

4. Nurse Kathy Adeline McElfresh, 1956 

5. A Nurse for Apple Valley Peggy Gaddis, 1964

BEST COVERS 

1. Office Nurse Adelaide Humphries 

2. Nurse Landon’s Challenge Adelaide Humphries 

3. Nurse Kathy Adeline McElfresh 

4. Ring for the Nurse Renée Shann 

5. Nurse Marcie’s Island Arlene Hale 

WORST COVERS 

1. Cruise Ship Nurse Michelle Josephs 

2. Nurse in the Shadows Peggy Gaddis 

3. Nurse on Trial Jane Converse 

4. Courtroom Nurse Fern Shepard 

5. Hospital in Kashmir Belinda Dell 

BEST QUOTES

“You look like a million dollars in government bonds, that is to say, expensive, hard to acquire, extremely valuable but not exhibiting much interest.” Private Duty, Faith Baldwin 

2. “Ted needs his job, you know he does. His sister has to have all sorts of expensive treatments if she’s to lick that awful paralysis.” The Nurse and the Orderly, Florence Stuart 

3. “Grant’s in the kitchen fixing a hypodermic needle.” Private Duty Nurse, Isabel Cabot 

4. “ ‘The reason I hadn’t called you sooner,’ Peter said, ‘was that this epidemic has kept me so busy.’ ” Nurse Landon’s Challenge, Adelaide Humphries 

5. “She wanted to kill him. But she was a rotten shot.” Nurse in the Shadows, Peggy Gaddis 

BEST AUTHORS 

1. Faith Baldwin (A average, based on 2 reviews) 

2. Adelaide Humphries (A- average, based on 2 reviews) 

3. Jane Converse (B average, based on 5 reviews) 

BEST PUBLISHING HOUSES 

1. Triangle Books (A average, based on 2 reviews) 

2. Pocket Books (B+ average, based on 3 reviews) 

4. Bantam (B average, based on 5 reviews) 

4. Berkley (B average, based on 3 reviews) 

5. Harlequin (B- average, based on 3 reviews) 

WORST PUBLISHING HOUSE 

1. Dell Candlelight (C+ average, based on 7 reviews)

Nurse at the Castle

By Joanne Holden (pseud. Jane Corby), ©1965

It was surprising how much courage it took to walk into the bedroom of someone who has tried to choke you, Nancy thought. But she need not have worried. Lavinia Barclay was her usual friendly self and greeted Nancy cheerily. “Good morning. And to what do I owe the pleasure of this early morning visit from the doctor?” Nancy answered evasively. “I think he was invited to sleep over. That’s all.” She changed the subject. “Did you sleep well?” “Beautifully,” her patient answered. Evidentally [sic] Lavinia Barclay had no notion of what had happened the night before. And, to Nancy, this was the most frightening thing of all…

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTE:
“She practically pushed him away when his closeness interfered with her breathing.”

REVIEW:
I had some hope for this book, with cover lines that seemed to promise both Gothic and nurse novel in one. And the book does make an effort to give us a mystery of sorts, though you would have to be a complete moron—or the heroine of a VNRN—not to see exactly what is going on as early as page 22. So while this book isn’t out-and-out bad, it was hard not to feel disappointed by it.

The “castle” in question is a grandiose mansion in Tarrytown, New York, home of widowed millionaire Lavinia Barclay, who in her early sixties is too old and weak to leave her room or even get out of bed for long. Mrs. Barclay is being managed by her second cousin, John Ferguson, and Dr. Orville Lacey, who have brought in Nurse Nancy Bronson to do the actual work of caring for Mrs. Barclay. Although the doctor has said that Mrs. Barclay is “suffering from hallucinations … rapidly deteriorating, and … it was only a question of time before she would require institutional care,” Nancy quickly comes to the conclusion that all Mrs. Barclay really suffers from is too many tranquilizers and not enough nutritious food or fresh air. And it’s not just because, as Kent Milliard, Mrs. Barclay’s young and handsome lawyer, tells Nancy, “You distrust Dr. Lacey because he didn’t fall for you.”

No, she doesn’t trust the doctor because he is condescending, telling Nancy that he can’t possibly explain what is wrong with Mrs. Barclay because she just wouldn’t understand—“a nurse not being a doctor, of course.” Not only that, but he calls her “dear,” and “Nancy hated to be called ‘dear.’ ” When he catches Nancy taking Mrs. Barclay for a walk in the garden, he calls her “bungling” and refuses to explain why he thinks Nancy’s efforts to give Mrs. Barclay some minimal exercise are unacceptable. So when Nancy realizes that Mrs. Barclay is palming her medications and faking the tantrums and lethargy she displays only in front of the doctor, she keeps her mouth shut and decides to pursue her course of feeding and exercising Mrs. Barclay in secret.

In her leisure hours, Nancy is fending off advances from Cousin John and Greg Mansfield, an antiques expert hanging around the house to create an inventory of the estate’s assets. She also flirts with Kent, walks barefoot on the lawn in the rain with him, the floozy, and aks him to investigate the doctor. She also manages to completely miss the blatant hints about what’s really going on. She overhears a conversation in which John says, “As soon as Lavinia is committed and I get power of attorney, I’ll have control of the money, and Dr. Lacey will get paid off and leave town.” Instead of putting her on high alert, these words serve only to confuse Nancy, and she “stopped listening.” Not long after that, Kent tells her Dr. Lacey is an expert, having been practicing for more than 40 years. She responds by pointing out, “He would have had to be a child prodigy! Dr. Lacey is only 40 years old—or less—today.” Yet still she doesn’t seem to quite connect the dots. After Mrs. Barclay gets an injection from Dr. Lacey and shortly afterward loses her mind, attempting to strangle her, Nancy can only believe that she was wrong and Dr. Lacey correct in his diagnosis of Mrs. Barclay’s mental incapacity. It’s not only in her work that Nancy is dense; when Kent tells her, “I’ve already decided on the girl I want,” she assumes he’s talking about someone else and changes the subject. I don’t mind a small amount of suspension of disbelief, but this is taking things way too far.

I did find myself racing through the last few pages, when Nancy is packing up Mrs. Barclay for her permanent installation in the loony bin, to find out if help would arrive in time (it did!). And the last sentence—“I’ll convince you that a wife may like to work,”—scored points with me. On the whole, the book is a reasonably enjoyable read, without an overdose of saccharine. But it wasn’t really a mystery, it wasn’t really Gothic, it wasn’t really suspenseful. It wasn’t really great.

The Sunshine Nurse

By Sharon Heath
(pseud. Norah Mary Bradley), ©1969

Terry Chisholm made her prime concern the health of the delicate children she took care of at Sunshine House. Young and lovely, she considered no future for herself outside of her career as nurse. Even her best friend’s concern could not make Terry slacken her pace—until romance unexpectedly intervened. For when a youthful doctor and a handicapped sculptor misunderstood each others’ intentions, it was left to Terry to smooth out the emotional tangle. And once she had intervened, it was her own heart that became inextricably involved …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Perhaps he would discover that a blonde could be every bit as attractive as a redhead!”

“You mean that your pleasure at seeing me was not simply for my sake? Disillusioned and hurt, I maintain my usual exquisite courtesy.”

REVIEW:
Sunshine House, set down in the English countryside, is “a convalescent home for children whose parents can’t afford to take them away after a severe illness or operation.” The idea is, the parents meet Terry at the train station in London and hand over their sick children (including one boy diagnosed with “nervous deviltry and maladjustment”), who will be taken back to Sunshine House for weeks or months until they are deemed well enough to return home again, with apparently not one visit from their parents in the meantime. I cannot believe anyone ever thought this was a good idea.

A large cast of characters populates this book. Linda is a good friend of Terry’s who got sick and requires a place to go while she recuperates, and later while her boss is off honeymooning. Adrian Brooke is the indolent nephew of Lady Eskerton, who is a patron of Sunshine House. Adrian is a sculptor, but he injured his hand and now can’t work, so he spends his days flirting with Verity Gale, who is betrothed to Linda’s boss. Jonathan Hensley is a physician and the son of old Dr. Hensley, who cares for Sunshine House’s prepubescent occupants. Benjy is a four-year-old boy that Terry and her mother are raising after his parents died and his only living relatives didn’t want him. Bessie Hargreaves is a scullery maid with a sordid past—she married a man who she discovered, when she was about to give birth to their first child, was already married to someone else, and she lost the baby. Now she moons over three-year-old Maida, whose wretched, poverty-stricken mother dies while Maida is at Sunshine House, leaving her an orphan. Bessie wants to adopt Maida, but first she needs a husband and a home. Wait, there’s Ted Larkin, the gardener!

The two eligible bachelors (neither Terry nor Linda is a Lady Chatterley type, going for the gardener) are clearly destined for the two ladies. Of course, it’s a circuitous route to get them safely to the altar. Terry wants to help Adrian with his hand, and the two are always getting caught together by Jonathan Hensley, who incomprehensibly turns cold toward Terry. Linda insults Adrian, who incomprehensibly becomes infatuated with her. In the end, we have three engagements to celebrate, what with Bessie and Ted also hooking up. (Yes, this makes them eligible to adopt Maida.) Curiously, however, Jonathan doesn’t put the moves on Terry until after Benjy’s aunt and uncle from Australia turn up to claim him after all, when it turns out they can’t have kids of their own. “As long as you had Benjy to think of and love, I was afraid I wouldn’t stand a chance,” he tells her. “When I heard he was leaving you, I began to hope again.” A tad bit Oedipal to be jealous of a four-year-old boy; what’s he going to do when he and Terry have children of their own?

I suppose the re-telling can be a bit confusing, but the book itself is easy to follow and a decent enough read. You’ll occasionally come across some snappy dialogue, such as when Linda tells Adrian that she suspects that his girlfriends are “legion.” He replies, “Like the wedding presents in the newspaper reports. Both numerous and costly.” If you’re snowed in over Christmas break, it’s a pleasant afternoon on the couch.

Orphanage Nurse

By Arlene Hale, ©1970

Young, attractive Christine Morgan became a nurse with one end in view—to work at Maple Crest, where she had been raised as an orphan after her parents’ tragic death. There were delightful youngsters in need of loving care at Maple Crest. There was also handsome Dr. Aaron Hoffman, to whom Christine lost her heart, and irrepressible “Fuzz” Kraus, who wanted her to marry him. There was a dire threat to Maple Crest from crusty old Matthew Chancellor, who owned the luxurious estate next door, and dark mystery in his beautiful granddaughter’s strange behavior. All these vivid human threads interwove in a challenge Christine had to meet—to save the place she held dear, and her chance for happiness with the man she loved.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“She wore a white uniform like most women wore a Givenchy gown.”

“Sickness of the body, she could do something about. But hunger of the heart—that was another story entirely.”

“He’d met several interesting women since coming to Bardwell. There was a cute secretary, that one nurse with the red hair and a society dish that had a cute little way of walking and talking.”

REVIEW:
Somehow, between the title and the cover, I had a feeling this book was going to be a little nauseating. Sometimes my premonitions are wrong (see Surf Safari Nurse and Hospital in Kashmir), but sometimes I am right on the money.

Without further ado, I give you Christine Morgan, the eponymous orphanage nurse. She was an orphan herself, a former resident of Maple Crest Home for Children, after her parents were killed in a car crash when she was 14. She dedicated her life to becoming a nurse and has returned to Maple Crest to assist the vintage caretaker, Sarah, in bringing up 25 fresh-faced young orphans.

The orphanage doctor, Aaron Hoffman, is a quiet, sneering guy. Naturally, Christine is in love with him. We have to be told this repeatedly early on, because the doctor has no redeeming qualities that I could see, and without all the signposts you’d never believe it.

The crotchety old millionaire next door, Matthew Chancellor, hates kids, and has a tempestuous relationship with his only relative, granddaughter Sherrill, who has quit college and just returned home to the mansion. In a shocking coincidence, at the same time a newborn baby turns up in the orphanage bushes. The label has been cut off the blanket the baby is wrapped in, yet enterprising reporter/asshole Pete Jennings tells Christine that the blanket is sold by “only five stores in the entire state.” Boy, with skills like that, Pete is going to have no trouble finding his “big story” to make his name. He’s convinced that his big break is this baby story, and he’s going to track down the mother and spill her humiliation in the papers. But since the publicity about the baby is good for the orphanage, Christine and the doctor keep inviting him in despite their dislike of him and his recurrent rudeness. (Curiously, at the end of the book when Pete finally has the facts nailed, he makes a surprising about-face for no apparent reason and opts not to publish the story after all.)

In the meantime, Sherrill offers to help out at the orphanage. Once in the door she has a tendency, sometimes during a crisis about a sick or runaway child, of throwing herself into Christine’s arms and sobbing about her grandfather, who quashed her relationship with local kid Billy White, who was later killed in Vietnam. Christine responds by confronting old Mr. Chancellor about his hatred for the orphanage, telling him—prepare yourself—“You’re afraid to come to Maple Crest. Afraid you might discover you’ve got a heart after all.”

Sherrill is becoming increasingly attached to the baby, now unfortunately named Dawn. Christine quickly comes to depend on Sherrill, and within two days of Sherrill’s arrival on the scene, Christine has no qualms at all about leaving a college dropout who can’t be more than 20 years old in charge of 25 kids and an infant while she runs off on dates with Dr. Aaron and Donald “Fuzz” Kraus, who is desperately in love with Christine. Aaron is also falling for Christine, and we are treated to endless insecurities on both sides of the relationship, which gets old mighty fast. The only thing more cloying is the syrupy language of their blossoming love: “For a moment, their eyes met and held, and when he reached out to take her hand, she reached halfway. … The pressure of Aaron’s fingers around her own was a sweet, sharp pleasure.” It gets worse, but I’ll spare you.

As the book moves to its ending, Christine declines dinner with the doctor because Fuzz has asked her out, and at the end of their date he “pulled her into his arms and kissed her soundly.” You will be as surprised as I was when he tells Christine just a few hours later that he’s in love with Sherrill and wants to marry her. His fickleness is capped only by Sherrill’s, as we learn that she was actually married to Billy White not much more than nine months previously. In a way, it’s a sad indictment of commitment and responsibility, but somehow I doubt that the author had such heavy themes in mind when she penned this throwaway.

In the event that you haven’t foreseen where this review is going (which should be about as hard to fathom as the “surprise” ending of this book), let me spell it out: Orphanage Nurse is treacly, insulting to the intelligence, and amazingly improbable. Don’t waste your time.