Nurse in Paris

By Renée Shann ©1964

Nurse Sara Farriday was no stranger to trouble. Hospital duty had made her familiar with all kinds of pain and suffering. But she was totally unprepeared when disaster struck at her own  heart. Her romance with Don had been beautiful. She had never dreamed anyone could fall so deeply in love. But now, abruptly, it was over … the engagement was broken. And Sara left the shattered pieces of her old life behind to try to find a new life and new hope in Paris, the city of dreams. At first, it seemed to be working. To her own surprise, she found herself falling in  love again—with the dashing and charming Jimmy. But another tragedy brought Don back into her life—and she was faced with an impossible choice…

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“‘Enter Florence Nightingale,’ he said, ‘only much more fetching. A great woman, Florence Nightingale, but no glamour-puss.’”

“‘Why do we poor blighters never get the pretty nurses? I suppose Matron’s scared one as good to look at as you would speed up the pulses. Mine’s racing, isn’t it?’”

“But who had tricked her and why? She began to consider fantastic possibilities. White slavery still existed in the world; unsuspecting girls still got tricked and sent to South America. Only a few months ago she had read a report about it.”

“‘Paris is full of strange people. I dare say London is too, but they seem stranger here.’”

“‘It’s quite a city.  A girl who keeps her nerve can have a lot of fun round here.’”

“For a man with a Colles fracture he looked remarkably perky.”

“‘A place like this makes you wonder why these people ever leave home. As soon as they get to Paris they nose out all the English restaurants, eat English food, never speak anything except English, read the English papers and go back at the end of a week thinking they’ve had a wonderful holiday abroad.’”

“‘The girl who was with him in the accident died a short time ago. Just as well, perhaps. She would have been much disfigured.’”

“He was in the hospital for a minor stomach ailment that only a man with a lot of money could afford to indulge so luxuriously.”

“‘The Princess is keeping your boy-friend Pablo warm for you.’”

“The driver took them across Paris with the usual Parisian disregard for life and law.”

REVIEW:

Sara Farriday is a 24-year-old British nurse engaged to a man she met while vacationing in Spain. She’s deliriously in love (though no one else seems to like the man much) and shopping for the dress she’ll wear to her wedding, which is to be in six weeks, when Don drops a bomb: They can’t get married in church because he was married before and got divorced. This is a blow, of course, surprisingly not because all the good alternative wedding venues are likely booked, but Sara quickly recovers. It’s only when a week later he confesses that his Mexican divorce is not legal in England so he can’t get married until he gets another divorce that she loses it and ends the relationship. It’s not clear why this is worse than a year’s worth of dishonesty about his past, but it appears to be due to the embarrassment of having to cancel the wedding and return all the gifts.

She’s so devastated that she can’t even work again, she says, because she’d have to tell her former manager that the wedding is off, which would be just too humiliating. Her mom, though, gets impatient with Sara’s silliness and makes an appointment for Sara to interview for a nursing job in Paris, which Sara is incapable of cancelling—again due to apparent misplaced embarrassment—so off she goes, even accepting the job because she’s unable to refuse. En route to Paris, Sara has the most tragedy-ridden one-hour flight ever: First the Arabic passenger across the aisle, who boards the plane in a completely sound state of health is stricken with a flu-like illness and actually dies after he’s tucked into the pilot’s bunk and Sara goes back to her seat to flirt with Jimmy Jordan, the man sitting next to her. Then the plane’s front wheel won’t unfold and the plane crashes on landing. It’s all OK, though, because Jimmy immediately stakes a claim as Sara’s boyfriend, and on their first date, this silly woman decides she could be falling in love with Jimmy. Even more curious about this date is the fact that on her way out the hospital door, whose mangled carcass is being pulled from the ambulance but Don’s? “Supposing he begged her again to marry  him. She couldn’t be indifferent to him despite all that had happened. Especially now he had had this dreadful accident …”

She finally has to care for poor Don, completely mummified in gauze, and in what was likely not intended to be a comic scene, when he sees her, “the tears rolled slowly and disappeared into the bandages.” In bed that night with fresh roses from Jimmy on her bedside table, it’s her turn to cry: “Which man was she in love with—Don or Jimmy?” My money says this flighty infant has no idea what love is.

When a previously well nurse dies of a flu-like illness, the penny does actually drop and Sara tells the hospital doctor about the sick man on the plane. Dr. Scully contacts the airport for a report: “One can’t be too careful. These nuclear bomb experiments could cause mutations in bacteria. We live in a  terrifying world, Farriday.” While Dr. Scully mulls treatment options, looking for an antibiotic effective against this virus (though by definition an antibiotic will not kill a virus), fickle Sara holds Don’s hand and calls him darling with alarming frequency, though she refuses to discuss marriage with him and bristles when the nurse matron tells her that she needs to marry Don to give him a reason for living, especially now that his leg’s been amputated. Unfortunately, Jimmy is bringing Sara home from a date when she’s met at the front door by the Matron, who urges Sara to go see her ailing “fiancé” immediately. Jimmy, rightfully livid, breaks up with Sara on the spot, and you will be shocked to hear that Sara makes absolutely no effort to reach out to Jimmy to explain the situation, because “no girl should run after any man.” In this case she should also be discouraged from action by a guilty conscience, though I am quite sure that she is not.

Then Jimmy comes down with the fatal flu, which is now rampaging through Paris, and Sara breaks a medical protocol by giving Jimmy, who is in the control arm of a trial of a medication that might cure it, the actual drug. He is immediately cured, but Sara is sacked, and stupidly refuses to take the pay that is due her. With nowhere else to go, she accepts an offer to be a private nurse for a rich former patient who had stared at her a lot. The man is now completely well, and Sara is somewhat concerned that he has immoral acts on his mind, but all he wants to do is drive her around town in his convertible and have her wave to his friends.

Eventually, though, he does propose, and tells her he’s booked tickets for them to go to London and meet her parents and get married. Horrid Sara decides she will accompany him to London—but “once she was safely back in London she would walk out on Monsieur Bruyarde without any pang of conscience.” Unfortunately she comes down with the flu on the way to the airport, and once there becomes too sick to walk, or to understand that Monsieur is being arrested, and then Jimmy mysteriously shows up to take her back to her old hospital, this time as a patient. When she’s well, she learns that the Monsieur had been hoping to pass Sara off as his dead wife, whom she resembled, so as to keep his wife’s money, which somehow he had not inherited. All that’s left is for her and Jimmy to reunite and we can end the book.

Renée Shann has in the past given us a couple decent reads (Ring for the Nurse and Student Nurse), and we can put Nurse in Paris up alongside them. The writing is regularly campy, with great lines such as “After a time Jimmy grew tired of contributing a solo performance as the life and soul of the party,” and we can laugh through comic scenes such as when Sara and her spirited roommate Lulu are driving around the Bois de Bologne at 4:00 am trying to find two of Lulu’s boyfriends who have decided to duel over her. Interestingly, Sara is something of an unlikeable character, too wishy-washy to decide which of her own boyfriends she really loves, too backward to clear up her misunderstanding with Jimmy or look for a job, immoral enough to cheat an employer out of a plane ticket to London. The plot is a little random, with quite a few unexplained loose ends, but in the end it’s a better-than-average book with enough joy in its pages to tide you over the rough spots, even if one of them happens to be the heroine.

Annapolis Nurse

By Virginia B. McDonnell, R.N. ©1965

Red, white … and the Navy blues! Nurse Julie Arany, a former Hungarian refugee, hated all men in uniform after the Communists killed her parents and forced her to flee from her home. But at Annapolis, a courageous young midshipman taught Nurse Julie the difference between Navy Blue and Communist “Red”—and handsome Dr. Warren Stone taught her the meaning of love.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“‘And,’ she laughed nervously, ‘I outrank him. That’ll keep him in his place.’”

“An answer to an age-old problem. If only all girls who were looking for husbands could know what she’d just discovered: all it takes to get a proposal of marriage is a deep conviction that you don’t want to get married.”

“Without problems, how could anyone grow up?”

REVIEW:

One of the more interesting features of Annapolis Nurse is that its heroine, Julie Arany, is a native Hungarian who was living in Budapest during World War II, first under German occupation and then the Russian “liberators,” who apparently weren’t much better—they would force local young women to “go out at night” with them. Eventually her family decided to try to flee the country, which unfortunately resulted in the death of both of her parents. Her grandmother Ilona and brother Peter did manage to escape to the United States—back when our country was meeting refugees with open arms instead of tear gas—ultimately becoming citizens.

Her war experience, not too surprisingly, left Julie with a bitter hatred of soldiers. The real mystery of the book is why Julie, who reminds us again and again of how much “she feared and hated all men in uniform,” enlisted in the Navy to become a nurse. Her ostensible reason is that she’s worried about her younger brother, who will be drafted as soon as he turns 18. Her bizarre thinking is that if she’s in the military, then Peter will not be called—although she has absolutely no evidence that this might be the case and never bothered to find out before she signed up for a two-year stint caring for people who instinctively horrify her.

Stationed at a hospital in Florida before the book’s open, Julie had cared for a Naval Academy midshipman Tim Cooper, who was badly burned pulling another man from a plane crash. In hospital johnnies sailors apparently do not trigger Julie’s PTSD, so she manages to fall for Tim, and had gone so far as to transfer to the naval hospital in Annapolis so she can check up on him and make sure he is completely healed. Seeing Tim in uniform, however, she tries to give him the cold freeze, but this proves difficult given that she’d already accepted a date with him to the Academy Ring Dance, where she has a huge lapse and kisses him a lot, ultimately deciding she’s in love. Once the dance is over, however, she goes back to being cold and nasty and dating a hospital doctor who offers a plethora of alarming stalker lines like, “You  happen to be my private property,” and, “Starting now, I keep an eye on you.”

Guess what? Peter is not on the same page as Julie—he enrolls at the Naval Academy, much to Julie’s complete despair. And in a bizarre coincidence, when Peter shows up for his first year, the upperclassman responsible for making his life a living hell turns out to be Tim. Julie begs Tim to lighten up on Peter, even saying that if he does she will “try to be nicer,” but Tim is outraged and tells her off, saying, “You’ve done your best to spoil him rotten; it’s a wonder he ever made it into the Academy,” and then refuses to see her.

Peter actually proves Tim right, slipping out one night after curfew, but Tim goes after him to bring him back and keep him from getting expelled, and his caught himself while Peter makes it safely back. Tim is sentenced to two months’ confinement to campus, while Julie writes him long letters and undergoes a transformation in her attitude—or so we are initially led to think. Because when Tim is finally allowed to see her and proposes (for the second time, actually, the poor dope), on the Naval Academy docks, she’s about to turn him down again—ARGH!—because although she understands that “Tim and Peter would be different from the brutal men who usually wore uniforms. But they were not typical of military men. Tim mustn’t marry a girl who wasn’t heart and soul in favor of the Navy. Such a girl would hurt his career. Nothing, no  one must hurt his career; it meant too much for him.”

Fortunately for Tim, he’s spared another disappointment when a boat on the river suddenly explodes and a boy is thrown into the water. Tim leaps in and saves the kid—but is burned, again, and so lands back in the hospital under Julie’s care, again. So without any further explanation, she agrees to marry him—and at graduation with all those shining faces reciting The Prayer of a Midshipman, Julie completes her change of heart with the realization that “in that other military, God was denied. Without Him, the soldier or sailor became brutal.” I’ll skip debating that point, which seems clearly ludicrous—anyone else remember the Inquisition?—but in the last chapter Julie has her Annapolis wedding and cuts the cake with Tim’s sword, “the shining moment of her life,” I am sorry to report.

There’s a lot of armchair travel in this book, with an extensive tour of Annapolis, the Naval Academy, and its many traditions, which could make this book worth reading if you have an interest in any of that. But the R.N. after author McDonnell’s name is completely wasted here, as the minimal mentions of Julie’s actual work are limited to very clinical descriptions of various surgeries she assists in. And Julie herself is a frustrating, peculiarly motivated, unsympathetic heroine. Even if the writing does not make you need to throw the book, it is completely devoid of wit, camp, and even style, and the plot is certainly stupid enough to make it a struggle to continue turning the pages. My advice: Don’t bother to try.

A Nurse Named Courage

By Florence Stuart
(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1965

Cover illustration by Mort Engel

Soon after she became a nurse at Shields Memorial Hospital and met Dr Bert Ives, Courage Williams found she’d have to live up to her name. Handsome, intense and moody, Bert was known as much for his iron will as for his brilliance as a surgeon. He was not used to being contradicted. But Courage could be stubborn too, and she and Bert clashed violently over the treatment of a handsome young ward patient. Before long, Courage began to wonder whether Bert’s anger was professional—or jealous…and whether she was reacting so strongly to him as a nurse—or as a woman.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“One glance from your blue eyes, and the good doctor gives all the signs of a man entering a strong magnetic field.”

“It was doubtful, very doubtful, if the beauteous Bernice knew how to do a colotomy. But what man with all his marbles would want her to?”

“All you could say for her flannel robe was that is was warm and comfortable.”

“Why don’t you get busy and rescue him from that glamorous dish?”

“Maybe she has enough brains to pretend she hasn’t any, and that’s why she’s won the man you’d like to have.”

“‘Hello,’ Courage said, and was told that if every girl looked that cute in pants, he would happily approve the fashion.”

“She smiled back, and decided that the melting feeling that came over her when he was near might well be the beginning of some form of virus.”

REVIEW:

There are some badly named VNRN heroines out there, but poor Courage Williams may well near win the prize. Even the man she loves, Dr. Nat Warren, can’t bring himself to call her by her name, and instead calls her “Billie,” for some odd reason. Courage is named in honor of her grandfather, who captured an entire platoon of Germans during the war with just one itty-bitty rifle, and just about every unsuspecting passerby is forced to hear the story of granddaddy’s bravery. But it’s the key to Courage’s feistiness, which in this book is focused on saving poor Wally Savage, a whimpering slip of a man who’s been overwhelmed by his domineering mother.

The woman, who wears tight lime-green pants and a satin jacket embellished with a bedazzled parrot, has forced him to go to law school, when all he wants to do is—is—sing! And marry Maria Marino. But mom breaks up the love-struck kids and ruins Wally’s singing career, and the poor lad is so distraught that he drives his car off a cliff, which is why he is now a patient at Shields Memorial.

Mom has enlisted the help of Dr. Bert Ives, who is a brilliant surgeon but not too straight in the head himself. Bert is obsessed with Courage, having conflated her with his mother, who never cared for him much, but rather doted on her older son, Kevin. When that god-like hero had been eaten by a shark off the coast of San Francisco—I kid you not—Mrs. Ives had killed herself, and now Bert is living some sort of sick Oedipal complex, insisting Courage be both his wife and mother. Attacked several times in his office, even slapped in the face, Courage keeps showing up when ordered and neglecting to bring the cops with her.

She concocts a hare-brained scheme to rescue Wally by convincing Maria to marry him—Maria will surely go along with it since she’s “probably very romantic, because Italians are like that. That’s the reason they wrote so many tragic operas, all about lovers dying because they couldn’t have each other, on account of somebody stood in the way, or somebody clobbered one of them, or something.” Amazingly, the plan goes off without a hitch, and now Maria has the right to spring her husband from the hospital, just in time to save him from the lobotomy that Mrs. Savage has planned to send him for with Dr. Ives. Now if only Dr. Nat can free himself from his gorgeous fiancée Beatrice, who is “quite a dish” …

Florence Stonebraker is easily one of the best, and her prose here is top-notch. She loves a screaming shrew, beautiful or otherwise; insanity-driven shoot-outs; and the spunky roommate; and lucky us! Here she’s given us all three! There’s not a lot of the usual squirrelly games that VNRN heroines frequently play with their beaux, just some legitimate lack of confidence, which Courage easily makes up for by being one of the few VNRN women who actually tells her man how she really feels. This book is a light and thoroughly pleasurable romp, and we can be grateful that the venerable author has yet again delivered a fantastic book into our eager hands.

A Nurse Is Born

By Bess Norton

(pseud. Olive Norton), ©1962

Cover illustration by Bern Smith

For a long time Candida Jones had set her heart on becoming a nurse. But her parents were on the other side of the world, and she had a hard time persuading her uncle and aunt to allow her to start training. It was a hard life for a girl, her uncle reminded her, unless she had a real vocation for it. However, Candida eventually received their consent to train at the local hospital near their Welsh Valley home. And sure enough, Candida turned out to be a born nurse, and found nursing even more rewarding, exciting, and—with the advent of Doctor Randon Lord—more romantic, than she had ever imagined.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“He must surely be a surgeon, with those slim, strong fingers.”

“Kindly do not giggle. A most unpleasant habit in a nurse. Indicative of a light mind.”

“I never knew such a girl for minutely studying the movements of every male creature on her horizon.”

“If you’re a very good girl, and get full marks for anatomy, I’ll give you a lift.”

“It’s ‘not done’ to tell a man how you feel.”

REVIEW:

“That’s got to be a pretty dull book,” my son quipped, “while you wait for her to grow up and go to nursing school.” Fortunately, the title refers to a metaphorical birth, so we miss watching Candida Jones wean off diapers and trundle her way through high school. She’s still only 19 when we meet her, though, parking her scooter outside the hospital to stare at the man who spends a lot of time in the rose garden, on whom she has developed a painful crush despite the fact that she’s never so much as said hello to him.

She meets him soon enough, though, when she enrolls in the hospital’s nursing school. He’s Dr. Randon Lord, who is developing an anticoagulant drug made from the extracts of roses and rhododendrons. He pretty quickly appreciates Candida, too, but of course there are the usual who-likes-whom tangles to sort out. Here we actually have three intertwined messes, with Candida’s cousin and a classmate also in the mix. Plus all the usual shenanigans like a rock slide trapping one couple in a cave that only Candida can find, the dormitory catching on fire and Candida getting burned rescuing her classmates, and her parents going missing on a plane trip in Brazil—not to mention the many patient stories to round out the book as well.

Making it more interesting is that this is the first VNRN I’ve read that’s set in Wales, so we get to do some armchair travelling and meet people whose names contain only consonants (Twm) or who are suffixed with their occupations or hometowns (Robert Pugh, forestry; Margery Hughes, Pennal), and struggle with place names like Eglwysfach and Llwynau—what a relief when you’re only going to Cardiff!

The story trots interestingly along, for the most part, although Candida’s romance with Ran does unfortunately indulge in some overwrought crises—you do have to nod in agreement when a friend of Candida’s tells her, “You’re quite a girl for building fences so that you can climb over them, aren’t you?” Also, it feels a little creepy to me in that, though we are never told Ran’s age, he  must be at least ten years her superior, if not more, as he is superintendent of the hospital, not to mention a doctor with a prestigious research lab, stuff you don’t get your first year out of med school. And if the writing style is not especially witty or campy, overall it’s an appealing read, if not especially special.

The Nurse Knows Best

By Adelaide Humphries, ©1953

Cover illustration by Tom Miller

Nurse Ellen Copeland suddenly found three men in her life:

Tom Spendler, her boy friend since high school, who was demanding she set a date for their wedding.

Paul Dixon, once a brilliant author and now dangerously close to suicide, who needed her to help him write again and to restore his faith in women and in love.

Dr. Eric Hendricks, attractive, young psychiatrist and the man Ellen was in love with. Only he seemed more interested in his work than in her.

What should she do about these three men? She had to come to a decision. Should she marry Tom out of loyalty? Should she sacrifice herself to Paul because he desperately needed her? Or was there some way for her to make Eric see her as a woman and not just as his nurse?

GRADE: A

BEST QUOTES:

“This younger generation—well, there simply was no accounting for some of the things they would do, at least from what one read and saw going on. Driving souped-up cars, smoking marijuana, drinking and boldly making love in public places, getting divorces almost before the marriage had time to take. But then, in Miss Rutledge’s opinion, the whole world had gone mad, what with all these atomic experiments and tornadoes and floods and talk about so many persons secretly belonging to the Communist Party, and the entire Government, after twenty years, being taken over by the Republicans again.”

“A mother wanted marriage for her daughter, but she wanted to keep her sons as long as possible. That old saying, perhaps, that one lost a son when he married, while a daughter was a daughter all her life.”

“Dr. Hendricks, being the doctor, thought he knew more than the nurse. That might be, but sometimes, Ellen believed, a woman knew more about some things than a man.”

“It did not mean anything—a good-night kiss. Not any more. This was the atomic age, not the stone age.”

“Butch judged a man by his handshake. And if he liked guns and that sort of thing.”

“She was the life of the party and so much fun that no one cared how fat she was or what was the color of her hair.”

“I presume an author can do strange things and it’s expected.”

“Her mother was a dear, but sometimes she got weird notions in her head.”

REVIEW:

Ellen Copeland is a psychiatric nurse, working in the plush Park Avenue practice of young, hunky Dr. Eric Hendricks, when one evening just as the office is about to close, a hobo stumbles in, saying he needs to see the doctor or he will kill himself. As the efficient front-office secretary tries to put him off until next Thursday, Ellen steps in and invites the man back into a treatment room. Dr. Hendricks is a good sort who actually sees the occasional pro bono patient, and he agrees to assess the patient, even if it is after hours. Ellen departs for home, convinced she’s lost her job, but the next day she finds that Dr. Hendricks is pleased! The patient is actually a very successful author, Paul Dixon, who has come home from the war only to find his fiancée has married someone else. He becomes so depressed that he cannot write and is experiencing a psychosomatic loss of sight. Dr. Hendricks enlists Ellen in caring for Paul Dixon, and takes her out for dinner and dancing ostensibly to discuss the patient, which Ellen enjoys just a little too much.

Ellen has a boyfriend Tom, who is pressuring her to marry him, but he is moving to Tennessee for work, and Ellen does not want to leave her family in Brooklyn. It’s fortuitous that he is packing up to go just as Dr. Eric is moving in, metaphorically anyway—soon he and Ellen are dating every Friday night.

Ellen is meanwhile helping out Paul by moving him out of his tenement apartment into a farm owned by her uncle, where Paul is finally able to write. Everyone is starting to get ideas about Ellen and Paul, particularly since Paul is clearly in love with Ellen, and she is starting to entertain horrific ideas about actually marrying Paul so as to further his mental stability—especially since Eric finally kissed her and then immediately took off to go on a cruise with a wealthy, beautiful divorcee and former patient. Because a VNRN cannot exist without multiple misunderstandings, Ellen believes Eric is pursuing marriage with the boating divorcee, and Eric and pretty much everyone else, Paul included, is misled into believing that Ellen is in love with Paul.

Naturally everything is sorted out in the end, but believe that the ride is thoroughly enjoyable. Adelaide Humphries is a superlative writer, who in her best books gives you a meaty bone to chew on, with many lovely characters, painterly scene descriptions, and few of the more frustrating devices other VNRN authors fall on too easily—our heroine is never suckered by situations that wouldn’t fool a five-year-old, never manufactures her own misery, never plays stupid mind games. A book by Ms. Humphries, in short, is bound to be excellent, and in this one, she does not let us down.

Nurse with the Red-Gold Hair

By Jane Corby, ©1964

Cover illustration by Mort Engel

She knew how to deal with the drama of life and death … but Nurse Nancy Rogers had to learn how to control her emotions when Scott Lathrop walked into her life. After all, she was engaged to Dr. Ty Abbott—and besides, Scott seemed more interested in his work than in her. She knew she couldn’t go on hiding her feelings forever. It wasn’t fair to herself—or her fiancé. But how was she going to make Scott see that love was just as important to his life as his work?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:

“Perhaps a cheery word or a pat on the hand was not prescribed for patients, but Nancy knew they often helped. A word of encouragement when a woman was combing her hair or a suggestion that she might arrange it in a more becoming fashion always gave the patient a lift.”

“Darling! What an ungodly hour for you to look so crisp and efficient!”

“She carefully fed one of the heart patients her evening meal; the woman was not allowed to lift even a cup of tea to her lips.”

REVIEW:

Poor Nurse Nancy Blake Rogers. Life has been so cruel, endowing her with a mouthful of a name and bipolar hair, which seems to be all anyone can remember about her; almost every patient “chose to forget her name” and instead calls her “Goldilocks” or “red-headed spitfire” or, even worse, “the nurse with the red-gold hair.”

From outward appearances, she is managing her own life and career quite well. An orphan, natch, she sold the rambling family mansion when her mother died and bought a six-room ranch, which she shares with her aging housekeeper, whom she can’t let go even if the old woman is slowing down; to accommodate her, Nancy packs away the sterling and the Haviland and opts for stainless steel cutlery and cheap dishes.

Of course, Nancy has a steady boyfriend, resident Tyrone Abbott, who “roused the maternal instinct in every woman who knew him. Nancy could not fight down the impulse she had, on sight, to pat down his unruly cowlick or ask him if he had remembered to drink his milk.” Ty is clearly doomed.

But Nancy is in fact kind of a pushover. When cousin Joyce, whose “whole world crashed when her parents were killed in that airplane accident,” arrives to stay at Nancy’s house in the middle of the night with two cars full of rowdies intent on an all-night party, Nancy curiously allows all these hoodlums in. For hours she feeds them chips, dip, soft drinks, and all her milk until her “smoldering resentment” finally gets the best of her and she throws them all out at 1:00 am, since she has to be at work at 7:00—and the next day she plans to apologize to Joyce “for her sharp remarks.”

Enter the rocks upon which the ship of their relations will founder: Scott Lathrop, engineer and friend of Joyce’s who has just accepted a job at the Glenville electronics plant, where he will be doing “experimental work” with “violent reactors.” As Joyce continues in the role of ungrateful, bitchy houseguest, slowly commandeering Ty’s free time, that’s just fine with Nancy, who, at Ty’s 26th birthday party, no less, is literally swept away by Scott to the ubiquitous terrace that no self-respecting dance floor would live without. Some time later they return to the party, she looking “like a girl who has been quite thoroughly kissed,” but her enthusiasm dampens when Joyce cattily reveals that Scott was fired from his last job.

While we wait for Scott to explain this shocking blot on his character, we go to work at the hospital and learn about diabetes, a disease which Nancy, despite years of experience, doesn't know much about. Dr Mason, who believes that “most bodily ailments come from some malfunction of a gland,” lectures us that most diabetics, by the time of their diagnosis, are admitted to the hospital in a coma and die. Nancy also brings home a boy of five who goes into convulsions every time he sees his mother, when the woman herself is admitted to the hospital for appendicitis and the six children are packed off to foster homes despite the fact that their father is unemployed and so is home all day with nothing to do.

In the meantime, Nancy is giving Scott what passes in VNRNs for the cold shoulder. When he drops by to ask her for a date, she tells him that although she would love to go out with him, this darned flu epidemic has her working double shifts seven days a week, so she can’t tell him when exactly she will be free. The highly perceptive young man understands this exactly as it was intended and stomps off in a huff.

So what else is there to do while she is snubbing the man she loves? Well, go on a picnic with Ty and have “a scuffle” with him under the trees during which “the hot dog was dropped into the dirt and lay for a while unheeded.” (These VNRN euphemisms are absolutely divine!) Further, the duplicitous cat becomes irritated and depressed when Ty talks as if he’d “had a heart-to-heart with her cousin.” She has Ty drive her to their usual “parking” spot and returns his fraternity pin, slipping it into the pocket of his beach parka, a garment I am trying very hard to imagine.

Next, Scott rescues a woman from a burning building and is marginally injured, laid up for a total of two weeks, but Nancy is enlisted to care for him. As her strange romance with Scott gets back on track, she decides to drive to New York to pick up the very latest book on electronics for him—and bizarrely brings Ty with her on a date, although “she did not feel the excited anticipation she had known on previous dates.” Then she refers to Scott as “nothing more than a friend,” despite the fact that the two are quoting Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene to each other. During her outing with Ty, he proposes behind a screen of potted palms, and she gently turns him down. She decides Scott does not love her based on her own weird twisting of events: She thinks Scott lied to her at their first meeting about why he came to town, and because he has referred to his two weeks stuck at home as a prison, this means he does not care for her.

Then the boy she’s taken in runs away, and after a frightening night in which she and Scott sit up and snap at each other, the boy is found by police and taken to the hospital. There he undergoes a glorious reunion with his dear mother, suddenly transformed into a caring, doting woman even though she never once visited her son in Nancy’s home and—even worse!—“never attempted to keep house; not even a shred of curtain hung at the dirty windows.” This miraculous revision occurs apparently because her husband has finally gotten a job, so “it looks as if they’re going to be a happy family now.” With the boy out of Nancy’s house, all it takes for Scott to surprise Nancy on her porch after she gets home from work to propose, the romantic fool, and we can wrap up the nurse with the red-gold hair.

The writing isn’t terrible, but Nancy is bewildering, managing her career and patients with aplomb while blundering her personal life with self-delusion of monumental proportions and a complete inability to express even her strongest feelings. Displaying less personal growth than her shallow cousin Joyce, who eventually decides that the boring guy who’s desperately in love with her is the one she really loves too, Nancy should really stick to being a nurse with no name. Clearly as a human being—certainly as a married one with yet one more name for her collection—I can’t see how she is going to be very successful.

Hometown Nurse

By Jane Converse, ©1968

Peggy Mitchell lost the game—and Dr Mark Woodward—to Veronica Nolin. She was ready to leave River Bend forever. Then it happened. The auto accident that paralyzed Veronica’s sister and thrust Peggy into the role of private-duty nurse to a doctor she loved, a woman she hated, and a helpless patient whose dependence could wreck her life.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“Like everyone else one meets on planes, trains, and buses, she was an unlicensed psychologist.”

“Waiting for him to ask for a date was like waiting for an invitation to be the first lady astronaut.”

“Seeing Mark Woodward daily at the hospital provided her with breathless moments at intervals close enough together to threaten her respiratory system.”

REVIEW:

Nothing drives a young woman to visit her childhood home like her widower father starting to date again. Nurse Peggy Mitchell, a year out of school and having persuaded her folks to move to Chicago with her, can’t stand the lovely, unobjectionable widow her father is dating, so she decides to visit River Bend, Texas, though there are only two people she wants to see: girlhood friend Janice Nolan and David Bancroft, who had once professed to love her but whom she had “never dated, because David’s father was abysmally poor, and a car or spending money were undreamed luxuries for a boy who wore patched corduroys and, for the four years he attended River Bend High, the same gray thrift-shop sweater.” Imagine her surprise when she arrives in town to discover that David has become a millionaire real estate tycoon and is engaged to marry Janice!

Not so great a loss for Peggy, though, because David is immediately painted as a bit of a dick. Too concerned about material things, he’s “never read a poem in his life!” exclaims the beautiful, flighty artist Janice. When over lunch Janice quotes a line of poetry she’s written, the patronizing jerk pats her hand and tells her, “You keep having pretty little ideas and looking beautiful, baby.” The story abruptly turns into a mystery, namely why the two women seated at the table didn’t pummel him senseless and leave. Worse than this, even, David refers to Peggy as “Nursie.”

Her curiosity satisfied, Peggy is packing to go back to the windy city when she meets Dr Mark Woodward, chief of staff at the local hospital. She instantly falls in love, and gets a job at his hospital and an apartment in his building. The two become friends—but nothing more than that, and by Chapter 4 (the above action happens in about as many sentences in the book) she’s again decided to leave town—after the big costume ball, her one chance to dance with Mark. During the party, however, it  becomes plain that David is still in love with Peggy, the secret pouring out of him as he pours the drinks in. Finally stomping off in a huff with Janice in tow, to take her for a spin and likely break up with her, the group—including the doctor and the nurse—watches him weave across the lawn without more than the meekest protests, and then sprints to the wrecked car to extricate the near-dead Janice.

Now irrevocably confined to an iron lung for total paralysis, Janice begs Peggy to become her nurse, and of course Peggy cannot refuse, though guilt for her role in allowing the accident to occur is not one of her motivations. She gives Janice a reason to live when she suggests that the patient write stories for children, but Mark persuades everyone not to mention this plan to Janice’s older sister Veronica, a beautiful but domineering woman who has ruled Janice’s life with an iron ¾-length glove and is the driving force behind the upcoming nuptials, because Veronica is somehow going to see this as an indication that Janice will never walk again. But this secret is revealed in short order as well, and Veronica is livid: “Don’t let anybody push a career at you, sweetie,” she snaps, and then she accuses Peggy of trying to steal David while Janice is indisposed. Janice agrees to stop writing stories and go back to planning her wedding, which David is guilt-ridden enough to go through with.

Mark pulls Peggy off the case, saying it was unwise to involve a friend as  a caregiver—again with too little, too late—and Peggy loses it, telling him that he has failed to protect Janice from her “ambitious tyrant” of a sitster, that he is standing by and letting “a sick, vain, money-obsessed woman destroy Janice’s mind!” The charge, given his history of passivity, is entirely valid. She then insists that if he had Janice’s best interests at heart he would keep Veronica away from the hospital and get a psychiatrist involved in Janice’s care, proving that she's better at Mark’s job than he is. The next day, Mark shows up at Peggy’s house, not to tell her he’s barred Veronica or hired a psychiatrist, but to beg Peggy to stay on as Janice’s nurse. He takes Peggy in his arms and tells her he loves her, so his continued failures with Janice are overlooked.

But we still have 33 more pages to go, so one night Veronica shows up at the hospital with a quack who claims to be able to cure Janice. The pair bundle Janice into a portable respirator, which has previously been proven to be inadequate for Janice’s ventilation needs, and truck her out to the quack’s spa in the desert. Needless to say, Janice quickly decompensates—but Peggy and Mark have figured out Veronica’s plan and arrive on scene to save the day, and Janice.

Veronica reacts to this crisis by completely parting ways with reality and is hospitalized herself, in the psychiatric wing. When she’s finally allowed to visit, she swoops in with a bridal veil and more wedding plans. Janice finally demonstrates that she has a spine, even if it doesn’t work, and tells Veronica that she does not love David, is not going to marry him, is never going to get better, and is going to be a writer. As the book ends, Peggy and Mark are planning a honeymoon to Niagara Falls and debating whether Peggy will keep her own career once they are wed. We can only hope Peggy proves to be as strong as Janice and wins that argument.

Jane Converse’s writing is usually a pleasure, and she doesn’t fail us here. The plot, however, gets a little muddy at the end, after Mark and Peggy are united and Veronica’s sanity begins to fray, one twist seeming premature in the book’s pacing and the other gratuitous, though Converse always does an exquisite screaming harpie. I was pleased that she found no miracle cure for Janice, which would have been too easy. If it’s not Converse’s best book, you could certainly do a lot worse.