Jane Arden Head Nurse

Book 5 of 7

By Kathleen Harris, ©1959

When Jane Arden took over as Head Nurse at the Friedmont Hospital, she knew that the job had many pitfalls. But it was an exciting challenge in a field she loved. Then she met Jeff Wallace, the young, outspoken Chairman of a strife-torn Hospital Board. Jane needed his support and his friendship. She saw him more and more. At first when people started to talk she didn’t care. But she had enemies who wanted to get rid of her any way they could. Suddenly Jane realized that her whole career was threatened—as well as her growing love for Jeff. Was it already too late?

GRADE: D

BEST QUOTES:

“A good-night kiss didn’t necessarily mean anything; in fact, it was not much of a compliment to a girl when a man didn’t want to kiss her good night after such a pleasant evening.”

“A man liked to do the pursuing, and Tony, more than most men, got scared off when the women pursued him.”

“Too much time, I sometimes think, is spent over charts when it’s the patient that needs the nurse’s time.”

REVIEW:

On some things we can completely depend: Death, taxes, and that Jane Arden is an infantile, heartless borderline psychopath. Here in the fifth volume (good news! only two more to go!) to chronicle her endeavors to jerk around as many men as possible, we find that she has returned to Florida, the site of the previous unpleasantness in Jane Arden Registered Nurse, but to inland “farming territory known as the Glades,” because she was too embarrassed about her appalling behavior to return to West Palm Beach. No, that’s not it—she is as clueless and self-righteous as ever and dives right in with her usual rapidly shifting realities as pertains to her men friends: On the second page she is only “tentatively engaged” to Dr. Anthony Gray, the NYC surgeon she has left behind for a year to work as head nurse and director of a children’s hospital (though she has maybe three years tops experience as a nurse, none of it in peds). Why the waffling? Either you’re engaged or your not—and Jane can’t decide which version of reality is more expedient.

First she claims that bastard Tony “was almost too willing to wait that long to get married and had never actually asked her again” after his first proposal after the phone—but how many proposals do you need? And what about that time at the airport when he’d said, “Don’t go, Jane. Let’s get married right away and the heck with everything!” Well, that doesn’t count, and neither does her own lack of commitment—“Jane had been the one to insist that they wait before making their engagement absolutely positive.” She hasn’t even told her parents about Tony’s existence, much less that they’re engaged, and somehow she can’t bring herself to mention him to Jefferson Wallace, farmer and hospital board chair, whom she dates in what is on her side an allegedly entirely platonic guise, because “it seemed silly” to mention it. Besides, “telling him about Tony might spoil their friendship,” based as it is on the lie of her relationship status. “Why spoil the evening—and take the risk of spoiling others that might follow?” thinks the narcissistic and manipulative Jane. And if Jeff doesn’t know about Tony, Tony certainly knows about Jeff, as Jane brings him up every time she writes or calls, because “she didn’t want him to be too sure of her, after all!” “If Tony didn’t want Jane to see too much of someone else—Jeff for instance—he ought to come visit her in Florida,” though he is a very busy surgeon and she could far more easily pop up to New York for the weekend. With fiancées like Jane …

Even her acceptance of the position at the children’s hospital is bipolar as well: On one hand she and Tony “had agreed that it was best for Jane to obtain a little more nursing experience” before she is married, though “that would mean abandoning her beloved nursing career,” so it’s not clear why she needs more experience. But one page later we find “she had had to accept this new position because so much pressure had been brought to bear on her; it would have been next to impossible to turn down the offer.”

Anyway, after she arrives in Florida and scores a free ride to the hospital from Jeff—“when I start taking money from women—well, that will be the day,” he chivalrously declares—she allows him to think she’s visiting her sick child, never correcting his assumptions, though his own brusque, bossy and rude demeanor might justify her disinclination to engage more than necessary with the boor. Imagine her shock, and his, when she discovers he’s chair of the board, and he finds she’s the new director! He’s unduly pissy about it, feeling he’s been made a fool, and she’s unduly nasty back, likely because even if “she looked just like the Angel of Mercy men dreamed about waking up to find holding their hand and smoothing their fevered brow,” “here was one man not affected that way. Jane might just as well have been ugly and old and fat,” as if it’s justifiable to treat anyone rudely—but that’s not the point! How dare he! So when he eventually apologizes after the board meeting where they are officially introduced, “Jane’s response was cool and reserved; she had no intention of meeting him halfway, or showing that his apology was accepted.” When he asks if she minds if he smokes, “Jane did not mind in the least. But just to be perverse, she said that if she did not mind, she would prefer that he didn’t smoke. It amused Jane to have the upper hand even in such a small incident.” I really hate Jane Arden.

Though the warning signs are writ large, Jeff asks Jane out on Christmas, even though she’s promised to wait by the phone for Tony to call. New Year’s Eve finds them out together again, and soon Mrs. Griffin, shrew member of the board, is warning Jane that she’s being “indiscreet” by dating Jeff, though I’m not sure exactly what the objection is, but it appears that it’s having a personal life that’s objectionable. “It never pays for a young woman to get herself talked about. It is so easy for a girl to lose her good name. Men don’t always consider that they may be placing a young woman in a difficult situation so it is up to the woman to protect her good name. Then there is the good name of the hospital to be taken into consideration.” The morals police really go ballistic when Jane brings Tony to her sister Roberta and her husband Nicky’s house for the weekend. (Jane, true to her narcissistic form, takes complete credit for Nicky’s transformation: “She had turned a playboy into a man” when “she had been the one to encourage him in his art an insist that he take it up in earnest.” The truth being, as usual, not that at all: Jane had jerked Nicky around for a while, trying to decide if she should marry him even though she didn’t love him, eventually dropping him for the bird in the hand that was Dr. Tony, and now her insistence on their “brotherly-sisterly attachment” smacks a bit of sour grapes, since it was her sister who snatched him up after Jane kicked him to the curb.)

All but calling Jane a slut, Mrs. Griffin insists that Jane resign at once. However, encountering a crazed father sporting a sawed-off shotgun in the hospital one night, Jane saves the day and the entire hospital from a senseless massacre by karate-chopping the gun out of his hand. Now the town hero on top of local darling (after a newspaper article touts her finer points, which appear to be the facts that she is descended from Revolutionary War-era ancestors and that her brother in law is worth millions), Jeff pulls out his testosterone and “spoke in the masterful masculine way that his Jamaican houseboy had said a woman liked her man to use.” (And with this, continuing the pledge I made after reading White Doctor, I mailed off a check to the NAACP.) Jeff insists that Jane take to her bed after the incident, and “what could … a gal do when a man was as masterful as Jeff?” So when Masterful Jeff proposes, “now was the time to tell him about Tony,” but nope, instead she agrees, realizing that he’s the first of her string of unlucky beaux who feels she should keep nursing, and so she suddenly finds “a love she had never known before; a mature love,” though it can’t be that mature, a word we would never associate with Jane, because she decides she’s not going to tell him about Tony, “not now,” and though she decides she would have given up nursing if Jeff had asked her—having it both ways—in response to his proposal of marriage, she replies, “I think we should have three.” Children, that is. Jeff, rather than bolt for the nearest exit, seems stunned but remains rooted to the spot, so he’s stuck for now, until the next book and the next sap hoves into view. I count myself one such sap, since I’ll be there to witness Jane’s next infuriating adventure.

Jane Arden Space Nurse

Book 6 of 7

By Kathleen Harris, ©1962

Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

As Jane embarked upon the most exciting adventure of her career, she was forced to postpone her marriage to handsome Jeff Wallace. Jane had no way of foreseeing the personal crisis that would confront her as a “space nurse.” Nor could she have anticipated the lasting impact of the two attractive astronauts she met at Cape Canaveral. Fascinating Clyde McLaren, a strong candidate for the moon shot, was brilliant and quite friendly. —Or did he want more than friendship? And what of the dashing continental Lieutenant who made it clear that he was more than interested in her? —Just where did his interest lie?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:

“Any daughter of mine is going to devote her full time and attention to looking after me.”

“It sounded fantastic to Jane; she did not think such a project as setting up medical centers in space could happen soon—but then, not many people had though there would be television, jets, atomic bombs, missiles, wonder drugs for most fatal diseases—all the miracles of this Space Age.”

“I like your independence—it’s a challenge to a man. Every man prefers to do the chasing.”

“This whole affair was given so much publicity that a lot of suspects—enemies of our country—will be rounded up.”

“I imagine any man—anyone in pants—would do for the fair Jane. She likes to dangle all the scalps she can at her belt.”

REVIEW:

Nurse Jane Arden, who in previous books in this series had been assiduously striving to nail down the top berth on the Worst VNRN Heroines list, has in Jane Arden Space Nurse not been putting in the same superlative effort we’ve seen on our past encounters. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this. On one hand, I have avoided the usual indignation and ire that Jane Arden usually inspires. On the other, this fairly bland, obvious story is like a bowl of tepid oatmeal, arousing little emotion at all apart from the rare eyeroll. Is it better to spend an hour with a book that at least gives you the moral satisfaction and mental exercise of picking apart all the hypocrisy, lies, and infantile behavior that in past books made up the bulk of Jane’s character, or to sleepwalk through a book you won’t remember in an hour? That is the question! Who knew nurse novels could inspire such heady philosophical debate?

Anyway, here we have Jane, of all the nurses in the country, summoned to Washington to take a post supporting the space program at Cape Canaveral during the race with Russia to put a man on the moon (indeed, during this story, Jane watches the takeoff of Gus Grissom’s suborbital flight, America’s second, on July 21, 1961). I’m sure it was Jane’s training in surgery and pediatrics that made her a top candidate.

She boldly accepts the job without asking the permission of—or consulting, even—her fiancé, Jeff Wallace, the latest in Jane’s string of toys. But he and her family “had come to accept the fact that Jane’s career as a nurse had to be given first consideration,” though she’s been perfectly willing to chuck it for her first two fiancés. What this really means is that Jane does whatever she wants with little regard for anyone’s feelings, which we certainly have seen again and again in past books.

“It does seem to me you could have waited until we talked it all out before you went off into space,” Jeff pouts, but Jane reminds him that girls don’t go into outer space, silly! It’s her “obligation as a patriotic citizen” that compels her to accept, so off she goes to Florida to engage in duties so secret that even the reader hears little of them, apart from acting essentially as doting maid to heartthrob astronaut Clyde McLaren, cooking his breakfast, following him around all day while he undergoes strenuous workouts, and checking his blood pressure afterward.

While she’s waiting for Clyde to finish his day in the mock capsule, Jane accidentally blunders into a top secret conference room to relax in the big cushy chairs there, but is found by a Marine captain and bawled out. Later, out of the blue, she tells Clyde that she saw someone else in that room, Lt. Seth Zboski—“don’t look so startled; he’s a Czech”—who happens to be her roommate Nancy’s boyfriend, thought that doesn’t stop him from putting the moves on Jane, or giving her “The Look” every time he sees her. Clyde urges Jane to tell the Top Brass (a phrase that here is always capitalized) what she’s seen, and after doing so, she is chewed out by another captain. After this experience, “she resolved that if she ever saw anything else that looked suspicious, she would keep it to herself. She wouldn’t even tell Clyde, her best friend at the base.” If you see something, for Pete’s sake, don’t say something!

Months pass and Jane and Clyde’s friendship deepens, and there begins to be a little talk around the base—and Jane’s reputation is not enhanced by the one weekend when Jeff comes to visit. They go on a weekend driving tour of Florida, and the pair are scandalously forced to stay in the same hotel, in separate rooms “at least twenty-some other units in between,” so Jane decides “there really was nothing wrong in Jeff’s staying at the same motel where she was registered.” Wrong-o! A bunch of the guys are also staying at that hotel and see them having breakfast together the next morning, and now Seth Zboski is slandering her all over the base: “A man seldom marries a girl so free with herself,” he sneers, likely wishing he were in on the action. So Clyde is assigned to a different nurse and Jane is asked not to see Clyde at work or outside of it. Clyde, upset that Jane is suddenly giving him the cold shoulder—because no one has bothered to clue him in—drags her out on the beach to ask her what the hell, and true to form Jane lies, saying that it was her idea because they’ve been seeing too much of each other. When he responds by saying that she’s cold and uncaring, she tacks back again: “She could not let Clyde think she was like that, insincere, shallow”—in short, the truth. But their conversation is cut short by a thunderstorm and they are forced to shelter, clutching each other desperately, under a sand dune: “not intentionally, she was sure, he gathered her closer. Nor did she mean to cling to him.” Now Clyde proves himself the biggest person in the entire series, for as the rain clears away he agrees, “We cannot be friends,” and when he adds, “I could have loved you, Jane,” we are relieved for his narrow escape.

Then on to the big climax, when Seth Zboski is driving erratically all over the base in the middle of the night and Jane is the only one who notices, and “maybe it was her woman’s curiosity that led Jane’s feet toward the building and inside” to, you guessed it, The Top Secret Room, and watches him sneak out with a briefcase.  Since she’s decided not to report anything suspicious, she goes back home and to bed, because if she reports anything again, “the Marine captain could have her dismissed in disgrace by manufacturing some cooked-up story against her character.” If the captain has been reading these books too, he won’t have to cook up anything, and Jane’s poor judgment in this situation is more fuel to the fire. The next morning, Nancy tells Jane that Seth has given her something to hold for him, and he is going to stop by tonight to pick it up. “Jane had decided there was nothing she could do about it,” so she spends the entire day cleaning the house, and just when Seth is likely to stop by, she starts snooping in Nancy’s bedroom, finding the case just as Seth walks in. A struggle ensues in which clever Seth pulls out a bottle of clear liquid: “What fiendish thing did he have in mind?” Well, first of all, it’s his monologue, which starts out, “You ought to thank me for putting you out of a world gone mad—a world that will be destroyed before long, anyway, wiped out by a single nuclear bomb.” Just as Seth is forcing the liquid down her throat, the door is broken in by Clyde, who’s been spending the day outside Jane’s apartment, mysteriously convinced that something was going down, and had seen Seth grabbing Jane through the window. Seth escapes, but is eventually found stabbed in the  back—not by the Army, but “some of his own people who caught up with him. I suppose when he didn’t turn over the papers he’d stolen, there was nothing for them to do but put him out of the way. That’s the way these Commies operate, you know,” explains Jeff, remarkably in the know for a civilian. Not to worry, though, if the enemy is clever enough to get into secret places, because they’re also “usually, in the end, dumb enough to pull something wrong.”

The only flashes of indignation this book inspires are dulled by the fact that statements in this book do not accurately portray Jane’s appalling past behavior: We hear that Jane’s sister’s husband Nicky “had thought, for a brief period of their friendship, that he was in love with Jane, although she had known all along that theirs could never be anything more than a brother-and-sister relationship”—completely ignoring how Jane had toyed with Nicky and never relieved him of the impression that he was obligated to propose to her when he returned from his studies in Paris in Jane Arden Surgery Nurse, only dumping him when she had a better prospect in hand, some doctor guy she was sort of engaged to for about ten minutes.

My favorite part of the ending was the part where Jane vows, “From now on, she wouldn’t keep anything from Jeff. And this was one resolution she meant to keep.” And immediately breaks it by deciding that she won’t mention near miss with Clyde. “Later, she would tell him about Clyde.” I also enjoyed how in the end Nancy hooks up with trainee Carl, who has dated Jane already, and was dismissed as “not much of a conversationalist. Carl never had anything to say; he kept in the  background. In Nancy’s opinion, he was something of a droop.” As a discard of Jane’s, Jane is very happy to “thoroughly approve of her roommate’s choice.”

The best news of all is that there is only one more book to go in the Jane Arden series. Even though I’m starting to think that, as the heroine I love to hate, I might actually miss the infuriating, hypocritical, lying, shallow, manipulative Jane Arden.

Jane Arden’s Home-Coming

Book 7 of 7
By Kathleen Harris, ©1963
Cover illustration by Edrien King 

This would be Jane’s last visit home to her family in Ohio as a single girl. Upon her return to Florida, she would become the bride of handsome, blue-eyed Jeff Wallace, ranch-owner and Chairman of the Hospital Board, who had fallen in love with Jane on the day of her arrival to take over as director of the Julie Friedmont Memorial Hospital for Children in “the Glades.” As she drove along the highway, Jane was looking forward to meeting with her family and of the joy of telling them all about Jeff. It was only eighty miles from her destination that the accident occurred that was to send Jane to Hill Crest Sanitorium—a victim of amnesia so deep that the doctor there despaired of her ever regaining complete memory of the past. Gone from Jane’s consciousness was all memory of Jeff. The only person who counted with her—her whole world—was dark and attractive John Harmon, chief doctor at the rest home.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“I often stand on my head for a short time if I am exceptionally tired.”

“Jane agreed that most girls really wanted to be a wife and mother more than anything else.”

REVIEW:
With the utmost of relief, I bring you the seventh volume in the god-awful Jane Arden series, which means that in a few short paragraphs I am done with the most appalling heroine I have met in almost 400 nurse novels. In the first six books, Jane Arden R.N. has proved herself to be immature, hypocritical, egocentric, manipulative, male-validated, and mean. In another stroke of good luck, in this book, she sustains a serious head injury in a car crash that results in a coma and brain surgery and ultimately—the soap opera staple—amnesia, not to mention a significant personality change, so she’s not the thoroughly detestable bitch we’ve always known and despised.

This does not mean, however, that we are completely free of the usual cornerstones of Jane’s horrifying personality, or of author Kathleen Harris’ prose. For starters, in the first pages we get a picture of Jane and Jeff’s relationship that is so glowing that it borders on radioactive, which may not be far from the truth, given that it’s the last thing Jane is able to remember as she recovers from amnesia later on. (“When Jeff kissed her, the world sang in her ears and she literally was in the clouds. And she knew it would always be like that.”) We’re then whisked pell-mell through a synopsis of the plots of the last six books, mentioning virtually every character in them, yet still delivering not much that will have any meaning to the lucky gal who has never read a Jane Arden novel before, or more likely, those who have repressed the horrifying details. (To wit: “Remember that religious fanatic of a father who tried to shoot up the whole hospital because we wanted to save his little girl? You got in the way of the bullet, risking your life to save Miss Tyler’s—and by doing so finally won over the whole community and set yourself up as a heroine, as well as capable of directing Memorial.” Sure, we remember that!)

Before her upcoming wedding to Jeff, Jane, who has not seen her family in more than a year, decides she must go visit them, but curiously does not invite Jeff, who has never met them. Nor does it appear that the family is invited to the wedding—particularly strange since this was a major stumbling block in her engagement to her first fiancé David Hyatt (Jeff is her third; three other luckier men had narrow escapes). She decides to drive “a safe fifty miles an hour, in two and a half days” because the train is “tedious and tiring,” but nevertheless is involved in the car crash, and the next thing the reader knows, it’s six months later, and Jane is living in a sanitorium for lunatics under the care of Dr. John Harmon, a Hungarian in his early 40s who fled a concentration camp where his wife and daughter were killed before moving to Ohio to practice psychiatry on Jane Arden, who needs every ounce of skill he can muster.

At first, Jane does not remember anything about herself, and repeats often that she is glad she is not a nurse, because she thinks she is “frivolous-minded,” “a bit selfish, someone who liked to be gay and happy … irresponsible …” Sounds about right. Gradually we get a picture of Jane as someone who has suffered what sounds like a psychotic break: “Jane had to protect herself again with the shell she had built to keep out not only the darkness but light that could be unbearably bright. For she might use her will, not to escape, but to remain within a prison that was sanctuary.” We’re given the idea that Jane is hiding from her future with Jeff: “Without any past, the future was not binding in any way.” Dr. Harmon tells her, “The forgotten things are those you do not wish to remember. That is how the mind works. It shuts out memories that seem better forgotten for some reason.” Gradually Jane remembers more and more, her family, her nursing career—she even leaves the sanitorium as a patient to work there full-time—everything except Jeff. The only clue why she might want to block him out of her life is not easy to swallow: “Had she been afraid of being too happy?” Also—brain damaged or not, this is still Jane Arden, the woman who can’t rest until every man she meets has fallen for her—she’s in love with Dr. John Harmon, and “he loved her, as she loved him,” and as long as she remains ill, “she would not have to return to a past she did not want to remember. She could stay here with John.”

The hook of the story is that one of the drivers involved in the car accident is wrongly being blamed of having caused the accident, and it’s up to Jane to clear his name, though her amnesia is rightfully brought up in court as a possible factor inhibiting her memory of the accident, as is her relationship with John—which, being true, “was damaging evidence, not just against her character, but against John, against Hill Crest, and all it stood for. It could mean the destruction of all that John had built there, of the good new life he had created for himself. And Jane would have been the cause.” In what could be an interesting plot turn, Jane decides that she must save John, “the man she loved, the man she had destroyed.” To do so, she returns to the stand, where she swears that her missing memories have suddenly come back, so her testimony can no longer be doubted. “I did not want to remember because I had found security at Hill Crest,” she tells the court. “I wanted to postpone returning to reality. Until I realized, for the sake of others, that I must accept everything, all of the past, in order to face the future.” Um, sure.

After the trial, she takes a few minutes to crush poor Dr. Harmon’s only hope of ever loving again, of participating fully in life again. “John does not need anything aside from his work—he has spent all his emotions. It is no sacrifice for him to live just for others. He is content doing that,” it is decided. “His heart is in a faraway grave with the wife and child he loved—and always will be there. John has withdrawn from the world to live in this world of shadows in order to help others. It’s as though he were a priest, a recluse. The other world no longer is where he belongs. I do not believe that he could be happy there again.” But not to worry, John understands that “personal happiness was not everything. There were no goodbyes when you loved someone. Distance, differences, could not separate those beloved. And there were many kinds of love. Love was so big that it could include all humanity.” So he can love humanity while Jane goes back to Florida to marry Jeff. And that’s where the book ends, curiously, without any home-coming at all, either to Ohio or Florida. It’s a grandiose ending for a character who has proved shallow and selfish from the word go, perhaps an attempt to refurbish her character before we close the last Jane Arden cover. And, so little so late, it won’t work. Good riddance to you, Jane Arden.

Dental Nurse at Denley’s

By Marjorie Lewty, ©1968

Everyone at Denley’s was wondering what the new dental surgeon would be like. But when Alison Blake learned that his name was Christopher Stevenson, she knew only too well—and her heart sank …

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“There is nothing like a dental surgery to make all men equal.”

“On the whole men liked the outside of the package to look glamorous before they bothered much about what was inside.”

“The bad things you know about are so much easier to face than the bad things you just have to guess at.”

REVIEW:
Marjorie Lewty, who wrote the splendid Town Nurse—Country Nurse, has written only two other pseudo–nurse novels, I am sorry to say, so there’s only one more after this one. All three novels are about dental nurses, who assist during oral surgery and so are not immediately disqualified as hygienists but do not neatly fit the category of Registered Nurse. But with books this good, I’m willing to be a bit generous.

Alison Blake is a dental nurse at what appears to be a large factory called Denley’s, which is especially odd, because there are three oral surgeons working for the outfit. Three years ago, when she was just starting out, she had worked for Dr. Terry Stevenson, and had fallen madly, blindly in love with the suave cad. But one day, Dr. Stevenson had made a huge blunder and pulled out the wrong two teeth of a teenager, and the mother, rightfully ballistic, was intent on ruining his career. In the throes of her infatuation, Alison the dope agreed to take the blame by creating a new chart in which she falsely indicated the teeth he had extracted as the ones on the hit list, and he got off scot-free while she shouldered the blame—but due to her youthful inexperience was not punished. In his gratitude, Dr. Terry had taken her in his arms and kissed her madly, declaring that they would be married soon. The next day, though, when she had shown up for work, Terry was gone, and his older brother Christopher—also an oral surgeon—was there, telling her she was being fired for her “mistake,” and she never heard from Terry again. Well, until we meet him in this book, which surely you expected.

In her present life, the old surgeon Alison works for is retiring and a new one is coming in, and it turns out to be big brother Christopher. She’s convinced he will sack her the minute he claps eyes on her, but he does not recognize her, and instead they quickly become like perfectly paired steeds in the harness, “on the same wavelength, but we got on marvelously together. Before the morning was finished I felt as if I’d been working with him for years.” And, of course, she’s soon in love with him. But he has one big pet peeve—he cannot stand to be lied to, which he makes plain to Alison early on. So … she continues to keep secret that she’s worked for Terry, because then she’d have to explain about the sacking, and she’s not sure he’d believe her over his own brother that the error had been Terry’s.

Needless to say, it isn’t too long before Christopher asks Alison out to a concert, as they are both passionate about music, and he kisses her afterward. She is giddy with the prospect of their blooming romance—but the next day Terry shows up, and Christopher soon learns of the prior relationship, and his disgust at her dishonesty by omission cools him to approximately the temperature of a bag of frozen peas. The interesting point is that Christopher is aware that Alison had covered for Terry’s mistake—the blighter had gotten into a car crash the night of his “engagement” to Alison and killed Christopher’s fiancée, who had been in the car with him (VNRN readers picking up on the hint immediately), and while recovering in the hospital Terry had told Christopher all, and more!

Now Terry, who lost fingers in the crash and can no longer work as a dentist, is in town to obtain a job at Denley’s in the hush-hush Department Y on Christopher’s reference, so he’s hanging around causing more trouble for Alison in Christopher’s eyes, who has a tendency to misconstrue every interaction Alison has with a man, unfortunately, and to be relentlessly snippy at work. To her credit, she finally tells him off: “Suddenly I’d had enough of his irony, of his jumping to conclusions, of his misjudgment of me. I was as angry as I’ve ever been in my life. I was on my feet, facing him, and I hardly recognized my own voice as I said, ‘Just stop, before you say any more. What right have you to judge me? You just seem to put your own construction on everything that happens,’” and she sets him straight on several matters, including that the two men he’s seen her out with are engaged to other women, as well as the fact that she thinks Terry is actually an industry spy stealing secrets from Denley’s. Well, somehow this isn’t such bad news as you might think, because suddenly Christopher is over his Big Chill and takes Alison in his arms, tells her he believes her, and kisses her silly. Then they go to the authorities and report Terry, who manages to escape the law, but no matter, they’re engaged, and now “I’ll have to find myself another nurse,” Christopher says, tragically, at the end.

There’s a lot more to this book than the plot I’ve revealed here, though. There are two roommates with men troubles, Christopher’s charming mother to have tea with, men friends to hang out with, and jokes galore. The writing is quite witty and amusing, and makes the book a pleasure to read. The characters were well-drawn, and if Alison’s immediate and deep passion for every Dr. Stevenson that walks through the door is a bit hard to understand (though to be fair, she readily acknowledges now that Terry is an ass in designer clothes, and she had been too naïve at 17 to pick up on his actual nature, which she easily spots now), as we don’t really see much of Christopher that’s especially attractive. But in a book this enjoyable—and it has been a while (December 2019, if you want to know) since we’ve had an A-grade review—minor flaws are easily forgiven.

Nurse Morgan’s Triumph

Book 2 of 4
By Rubie Saunders, ©1970

Don’t get involved. That was the hospital rule, but how could a beautiful, sensitive nurse keep her distance … when she is nursing a 5-year-old back to life after an accident that has killed the child’s parents? … when she watches a boy’s mother trying to keep her son an invalid? … when a dynamic young artist finds her as absorbing as the hospital mural he’s commissioned to paint? … when the handsome new chief resident comes to dinner and doesn’t want to go away?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“You can’t really get to know a girl until you’ve seen her at the kitchen sink.”

“She was certainly a good-looking girl, and intelligent, too. Maybe too intelligent. Marilyn had often wondered if that scared men off.”

“I never would have slept through the noise of you being chased around the sofa—or maybe him being chased around the sofa.”

“I just got off duty. I need to be revitalized.”

REVIEW:
Marilyn Morgan is a nurse from Harlem who, fed up with her parents, moved out of the family home on 127^th Street and into an apartment near City Hospital with her best friend, fellow nurse Marcia Goldstein, in the first book of the series, Marilyn Morgan, R.N., and now, almost a year later, we pick up with the swinging bachelorettes. One of Marilyn’s boyfriends, Matt, has just moved to Chicago for a residency there, so she’s down to just Dr. Bill Burke—but never fear, Marilyn is quite the dating machine! In no time flat she’s added Dr. Hank Brown and artist James Mitchell to her collection, and is out and about with all three on a regular basis. Hank, though, is a bit problematic—a senior resident, he’s ready to marry, and three weeks after his first date with Marilyn he suggests they tie the knot. “No, she didn’t want this to happen. Hank needed a woman who was ready to be a wife and mother, but it wasn’t Marilyn. ‘I don’t think I’m ready for those things,’” she tells him. They still date, but not with the same ardor—and when Marilyn’s “old maid” sister Liz stands in for Marilyn when Marilyn has to work, well, it’s not hard to see the writing on the wall, especially after it turns out that Liz and Hank both like to go to concerts but Marilyn does not.

In the interim, there are patients to care for—Marilyn works on the pediatrics ward of one of the busiest hospitals in New York City, so there are lots of stories, including a five-year-old girl who is seriously injured in a car crash that kills her parents, a young boy who is trying to regain use of his legs after back surgery but his mother seems determined to keep him an invalid, and lots of tummy aches after ice cream and cake are served on the ward. It’s a hectic life!

But the main interest in the story is Marilyn and Marcia’s admirable social life. Their apartment is quite the swinging pad, and there are many parties to throw and attend, dates to go out on, whisky and wine to drink, and boys to kiss! But the book isn’t all fun and games—there is one subplot involving M&M’s new upstairs neighbors, Lucy Anne Hancock and her husband George. The issue is that Lucy Anne is from Mississippi, and Marilyn decides from day one that “I’m just not in the mood to meet any cute little thing from Mississippi, and I doubt if she’ll ever be in the mood to meet me,” though her fear of Lucy Anne’s racism is not overtly mentioned. She warily avoids Lucy Anne at work—because of course Lucy Anne is a nurse on Marilyn’s same ward—but the pair are thrown together caring for the orphaned little car crash victim. Their relationship is mostly formal, but Lucy Anne does call Marilyn at home one evening to tell her that the little girl has finally regained consciousness, and slowly the pair become, well, not exactly friends, but not enemies. Then Lucy Anne runs into Marilyn in the otherwise empty kitchen at one of the wild parties, George’s lethal champagne punch unlooses their tongues, and they have an honest talk about racism. “Do you know that’s the first time in my life I ever sat down and talked to a colored girl?” Lucy Anne says, recalling their first conversation in the nurse’s lounge. “The only colored people I’ve ever known before were my mother’s cleaning woman, or the next door neighbor’s cook. It’s not the same at all. You see, that morning I talked to you as a person. That’s what made it so important.” Marilyn admits that she had decided Lucy Anne couldn’t be a good nurse because she was from Mississippi, and had been determined not to like her. “That’s just how distorted these things can get,” she ends. “Oh, Marilyn, I hope someday things can get undistorted all over,” Lucy Anne sighs, and even if this conversation was not quite as enlightened as it might have been, it was a step in the right direction, for 1970 and maybe even for today—half a century later—and I sighed, too.

The book ends much as it began, with a new drought of men on the horizon for Marilyn, as Dr. Bill heads off to Chicago to accept a fellowship alongside the departed beau Matt, and Hank gets married—you’ll never guess to whom! But you can scroll on over to the review of Marilyn Morgan, Cruise Nurse and learn that our Marilyn never has to spend her nights alone for long. If this series does not exactly count as a VNRN, since the heroine never ends up engaged at the end, I like its forthright honesty about how Marilyn feels about settling down, and honestly, I am wildly jealous of M&M’s social lives, as they really have a lot of interesting friends, amusing conversations, and endless parties (though I have to say I was a little shocked that Marilyn would roll out of a party at 4:30 am and into the hospital less than three hours later for a full day on the floor, with her and the other hungover nurses joking that they hoped they would be able to give the patients the right medications, ha ha ha!). The humor in this book is quite good and fairly nonstop, especially when the boys are around, and I’m sorry to say there’s only one more book in the series, the last one: Nurse Morgan Sees It Through. If I can't really explain what triumph Nurse Morgan experienced that the book’s title might be referring to, except her victory in not getting married, I can easily state that of the four nurse novel series I’ve read, Marilyn Morgan handily beats all the others by a mile.

Marilyn Morgan books:
1. Marilyn Morgan, R.N.
2. Nurse Morgan’s Triumph
3. Marilyn Morgan, Cruise Nurse
4. Nurse Morgan Sees It Through

Nurse Molly

By Marjorie Norrell, ©1964

Cover illustration by Bern Smith

After Molly Patterson was jilted, she was determined never to trust a man again. But she was a very attractive girl, and more than one man was anxious to make her change her mind. Was Molly going to be able to stick to her decision?

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“It never pays to run away from anything, not really. It, whatever it is, has a dreadful habit of catching up with you sooner or later, and it usually turns out it wouldn’t have been one half so dreadful if you’d stopped and faced it out in the beginning.”

REVIEW:

Molly Patterson introduces herself to us as a bit of a moron: She’s about to quit her career, less than a year old, to marry a man whom it does not take a reader experienced in VNRN tropes to recognize as an ass—but then, it’s seldom that these men aren’t obvious from the outset, though it’s not clear to me why it always needs to be so, and why the heroines aren’t as clear-eyed as us readers. Is this lazy writing? An author’s low opinion of her readers’ intelligence? But anyway, as the curtain rises, Guy Vale is not listening as Molly speaks, his “thin, too-clever face touched for a fleeting moment by a thin smile, then the previous scowl was back,” “his dark grey eyes wearing the cold expression she hated. ‘I don’t know what made me ask you to marry me,’” he tells her, right there on the first page. The only reason the ring doesn’t hit him in the eye is that he hasn’t given her one—oh, wait, that’s not how she feels at all! She offers to take this really fabulous job she’s seen advertised to help with expenses, but he explodes that she will not work! And besides, “anyone with a grain of common sense” would not want that job, which “sounds like something out of a story book—for five-year-olds,” he sneers.

Shockingly, Molly is completely devastated—she faints, actually—when Guy breaks off with her (by letter, the louse) less than two weeks before the wedding to chase a wealthy heiress, so Molly ends up taking the job after all. Also strangely, she is insulted when her new colleague nurse Annie Hart assumes that Molly “would forsake her career for the first bit of masculine attention which came her way.” To her credit, she instantly recognizes her own hypocrisy in that she was about to do exactly that for Guy, but goes no further in her introspection, merely stating that “I’m not interested in men. I’m over the love virus, once and for all time.” You bet, kid.

Enter Paul Thanet, barrister, and son in a very wealthy family that anchors the very small town she’s moved to for this new job in the north of England, far from her former life. He’s kind and solicitous, and very helpful when who should turn up but—brace yourself, don’t want you fainting like stalwart Nurse Molly—Guy Vale with his lady friend-employer Monica Blessingbourne, on an expedition to strip-mine a really beautiful, enchanted piece of the neighborhood that was sold after the son contracted polio and his prolonged illness and ensuing disability proved very costly (this book being written before the advent of the vaccine and the National Health Service).

Honestly, there’s not much more to the story than that—Paul sees Guy forcing a kiss on Molly, saying he loves her but not enough to give up his pursuit of Monica’s money, the romantic fool—and there’s a bit of frigidity to be overcome after that, figuratively and literally, after Molly falls through the ice at a skating party, just having rescued Monica from the same predicament, and as she wakes, Paul comes in the room and in his second sentence tells Molly she’s giving up her career again, a lousy way of proposing, we quickly find.

The characters, especially the Thanet family, are well-drawn and charming, and it’s a pleasure to spend a few hours with them, as is to be expected in a book by Marjorie Norrell, and in a rare treat she is giving us with Paul Thanet a love interest who actually deserves to be one. The problem with this book is that it wants Molly to be a strong, resourceful, confident go-getter quick to leap into action—yet she is even quicker to leap out of her career the instant a man darkens her doorstep. How can any reader with any common sense reconcile these polar opposites? Can we cut to the epilogue in which a defeated and joyless Molly is in the kitchen with a screaming infant on her hip, two toddlers pulling at her skirt, a mostly empty bottle of gin on the detritus-strewn breakfast table and a copy of The Feminine Mystique in her raw, work-worn hand? In the end, I feel like I’ve been reading propaganda intended to lull the female masses into a deluded trance, to lure them into becoming willing participants in their own oppression. If I’d had a say in it, I’d have named this book Throw off Your Shackles, Nurse Molly! in the hope that Molly might stop letting men decide her life for her. But somehow I don’t think Marjorie Norrell has that particular flavor of Kool-Aid in her refrigerator.

Emergency Calling Nurse Mallon

By Jeanne Bowman, ©1964
Cover illustration by Mort Engel

Beautiful Marjory Mallon welcomed the surging drama of her new job at Southern Emergency Hospital, for it helped her forget a private sorrow—and a crushed romance. But as the young nurse plunged herself into the hectic routine of critical accidents and crucial operations, she found that her own heart was imperiled by the attentions of a handsome intern and a dashing resident…

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“That kid’s all right, even if she is pretty.”

“A nurse’s most valuable asset was a sense of humor.”

“What was she—a woman or a mouse? Ah, a nurse.”

“Marjory learned some new words she doubted she’d ever use.”

“On visiting the convicted man at the penitentiary a year later, he had found him gay.”

REVIEW:
Marjory Mallon has just left a private duty during which her patient died; she’s looking for some excitement after caring for a patient in a coma. She signs on at Southern Emergency, “a rugged assignment” at a pink concrete building on the edge of an industrial district with “low class homes and incomes.” Another reason for her search for action is that during her three months living with the Kelmer family she and son Noel had fallen in love, but on her deathbed (this must have been before the coma) Mrs. Kelmer made the pair promise they would not marry for two years, and in that time see each other “as seldom as possible.” This from a woman who claims she loves Marjory as a daughter; it’s a bizarre tactic to ensure marital bliss.

But it’s actually not a bad idea, as Noel is one of those VNRN archetypes, the idle rich. “Let’s face it,” he tells Marjory. “I have no real purpose. I can’t see going into some job someone else needs for a living.” Visiting Marjory at the hospital one evening, though, one of the hospital’s frequent mass traumas occurs, this time a crash between a packed car and a van. Noel is pressed into action, and when it’s over he has a reason for living! “I’ve found a goal,” he tells Marjory. “I want to isolate the suicide motivation behind so many of these crashes. I want figures, studies of individuals. I am going to try to perfect what insurance companies are doing: find the wrecker before he kills himself and other innocent people.” To that end he starts hanging out at S.E. with Drs. Stedman and Compton, seeing Marjory almost daily but exchanging mere pleasantries and not much else with her. For her part, Marjory is dismissive of Noel’s mission—and frankly, you can’t honestly blame her—and is annoyed that he’s not paying more attention to her. “She felt like a wrapped bandage stuck far back on a shelf, to be used if and when those on the forward part had disappeared.” She’s also annoyed that Dr. Compton doesn’t pay her more attention, either, the hypocrite: “No wonder the other young nurses developed psychosomatic heart trouble,” she thinks as she moons over his blue eyes. “Fortunate she had the thought of Noel to act as an antibiotic to inflamed emotions.” Yeah, right. Back to dreaming of Dr. Compton: “He was adorable, Marjory thought, and how utterly handsome when he laughed. She just loved him.” Quick, pass the Neosporin! In the meantime, it’s one crisis after another at the hospital. Kids shot with revolvers found in the house. At least four more car crashes. Homeless families giving birth in their car. Victims of a bar fight. And, of course, “Sunday was suicide day.”

Through it all we’re treated to author Jeanne Bowman’s patented psychobabble, which is to say, a lot along the lines of Noel’s proposed thesis, that physical disease and trauma comes from psychological damage. “Mangled legs and a mangled conscience,” Marjory says of a car driver and the man he’d run over. “She wondered which of the two conditions would be easier to live with.” She and Dr. Compton seem to be social workers as much as healthcare practitioners, as they are always coming up with things like new coats for a stabbing victim whose coat was slashed: “He’ll heal faster, the patient, if a new coat’s waiting,” Dr. Compton explains. Dr. C also sets up a homeless couple in a rundown country cabin he’d inherited, knowing that the husband will work more than full-time to fix it up for his expanded family: “When you give to any but the defeated, you reach down to them. Soon their incentive muscles grow flabby. They simply sit and wait for further gifts.” Dr. Compton is full of such bon mots, including, if you can stand it, “If we can catch them before they have become exposed to the virus, defeat, they have a chance.”

In her spare time, Marjory is also working on Dr. Stedman, the floozy, and has several dates with him: “Marjory dressed with care, wishing she had bought a different type of hat, something to stun the eye of one Dr. Stedman.” (Noel, bizarrely, stops Marjory in passing to let her know he approves.) She gets what she wants, sort of, when Dr. Stedman proposes 16 pages from the end, which is when we finally learn his first name—Stanton. Well, author Jeanne Bowman has always had a thing for alliterative names. At least Dr. Stedman gets one; we never learn poor Dr. Compton’s first name. Marjory is saved from having to answer him—or Noel, who comes crashing in minutes later to tell her that his father has released them from the promise they made Mrs. Kelmer to wait two years—because of a massive explosion in the slums next to the hospital. Gosh, what a unique idea! The next few days and pages are filled with caring for the victims, and at the end the outraged citizenry have stormed City Hall and demanded that a beautiful neighborhood be built in the slum’s place. Sounds like gentrification if you ask me, but how the poor are going to afford the new apartments is not addressed, which for Ms. Bowman is like missing the fat pitch right down the middle; if she’d had her eye on the ball, she could have expounded for several chapters on this theme. The unintended consequences of this redevelopment is that the hospital too is going to be torn down, so Marjory is going to have to look for a new job. Good thing both doctors have offered her one, and she has those two marriage proposals to consider—plus a date with Dr. Compton, in which they have hamburgers with onions because they have no more patients, “and if we both have them—” Uh oh. Here comes proposal number three, the most bizarre yet:

     “Mallon? That is, Marjory—”
     “Your diagnosis is correct,” she murmured.
     “That I do love you? But I could not—”
     “Diagnose me? You were right. My condition hadn’t developed.”
     “Stop it,” he says, and we readers are right there with him.

It must be confessed that as irritating as I found this book, it’s not as bad as many of Jeanne Bowman’s books; I could actually just be having an anaphylactic reaction to the merest whiff of Ms. Bowman’s disorienting prose, far too much of which I have had to endure. Remember, she’s scored the #3 spot on the Worst Writers list on this year’s VNRN Awards, and I had to endure ten of her books to put her there. Beyond the pop psychology, the dizzying number of medical emergencies, and the complete lack of investment in the characters’ emotional lives while simultaneously suggesting they are all in a stew of attraction for each other, culminating in automatic proposals utterly devoid of feeling, there is the lack of basic housekeeping, such as a lot of incorrect medicine in this book. This sort of inattention to detail is a pet peeve; you should not write about a subject if you can’t be bothered to look up the details. A patient with an inner ear infection is said to be passing out all the time, which is not a symptom of an ear infection, and can’t be chalked up to old-timey ignorance. Carbon monoxide poisoning is treated with transfusion, which maybe it once was, and “heat to stimulate circulation,” which it does not, and we are also told that in this condition the poisoned blood “was filled with minute air bubbles.” No, that’s the bends, honey. So much to quibble about, so little time. Suffice to say that if you must read Jeanne Bowman, this is not her worst, but you can certainly do a lot better—if you pick a completely different author.