Nurse Greer

By Joan Garrison
(pseud. William Neubauer), ©1954

Pretty young Nurse Mary Greer suddenly found herself the center of a shocking scandal that brought a bitter attack on her professional integrity, an end to her engagement to Paul Tate and threatened Paul’s chances of being the next mayor of the town of Port West. When wealthy old Mr. Clarke left his fortune to the nursing home where Mary worked he disinherited a conniving niece and a weakling nephew who weren’t about to let their uncle’s riches slip through their fingers. Their charges of “undue influence” against Mary and the home brought Nurse Greer’s fighting spirit to the fore. But they also brought pressures from Paul who urged Mary to compromise her principles and avoid any further unpleasantness. After all, Paul was running for office and he valued public opinion, perhaps even more than truth. Truth mattered to Mary, mattered more than anything. And so he rolled up her sleeves and prepared to fight it out—alone, if necessary. She found a valiant ally in Bill Underwood, a newspaper man with an eye for a good story, an innate respect for truth and, as it turned out, a grade A case on Nurse Greer.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“Know any girls, Pop? She can be old or young, fat or lean, just as long as she can cook and wash socks properly and keep a fellow’s shoes in order.”

“Girls kill. You think they don’t, Son. You walk up the aisle with them and you smell the orange blossoms and you see ’em in white and you say to yourself, ‘Say! This is pretty durn good.’ Only thing is, they kill. You start supporting ’em, Son. And it goes on year after year. And you grow old. And you tucker out, and the first thing you know you’re dead, and there they are spending the insurance they made you buy.”

“She was very attractive. He liked the feathery arrangement of her auburn hair, the animation of her sparkling hazel eyes. He liked the tan gabardine suit she wore. He liked her figure. His intensely male nature was charmed, and then she smiled coolly and she became merely another woman to him.”

“ ‘That will be fine, Bill. Just toot your horn and I’ll come scampering.’ Really, she thought later, she’d sounded positively eager and desperate! Her mother, of course agreed. ‘Oh, fine,’ she exclaimed in Mary’s bedroom. ‘A man crooks a finger and you go running. Don’t you remember any of the things I’ve taught you? A decent, maidenly reserve! One time in ten, perhaps, a pleasant yes, but only if the fellow has worked hard for it, and only with the sweet air of making a very kind and generous concession.’ ”

“In another age, he thought, she’d have made a fine pirate.”

“You may have my permission to seize your dreadful instruments and have at my poor, helpless body.”

“Lord love men, she thought, they were strange.”

“I was so sure that if I could just dress decently I’d make a nice marriage.”

REVIEW:

Nowhere will you find more terminally ill wealthy people than in nurse novels, and Mary Greer is yet another kind, generous nurse benefitting from a last-minute discussion with an attorney. It’s curious that the author bothered to make her a legatee at all, however, since Mary’s “inheritance” is the promise of a job at the nursing home where she currently works—indeed, it is pointed out by several people throughout the book that since she already has what the will is promising her, she isn’t really benefitting at all. But the nursing home where she works will receive enough money to build and run another building where poor elderly people can take up residence, and it is for this ideal that Mary takes up her sword when dear dead Mr. Clarke’s scoundrel relatives, niece and nephew Harriet and Frank Clarke, threaten a lawsuit to block the will unless the nursing home agrees to give them half the estate.

Enter Paul Tate, Mary’s fiancé, who is running for Mayor of Port West. He’s behind in the polls, and tells Mary that the scandal that a lawsuit against her would bring will damage his campaign, and he asks her to settle. She, of course, is appalled that he would sell out the old folks so quickly, and their engagement comes to an abrupt end when she goes to the local newspaper and gives them a statement to that effect. But all is not lost for Mary’s love life; in the course of breaking off publicly with Paul, Mary meets Bill Underwood, the newspaper’s editor, and they soon start dating. She admires his dogged pursuit of the truth, and his restraint in not publishing everything he knows, and that he stands by her when she has her day in court. There she pulls out her trump card, a letter written to her by the late Mr. Clarke, which she reads aloud—up to a point, where she stops and asks Harriet Clarke if she should continue, it being clear that Mr. Clarke is about to reveal a certain breach of ethics on his niece’s part. Harriet instantly decides to drop the suit, and soon the architects are breaking ground on the new nursing home building.

Now Paul is back again, his interest in Mary rising with his numbers in the polls. Mary agrees to go on a picnic with him, but she is not as wild about him as she used to be. We’re not, either; he has a penchant for saying things like, “Up and at ’em, woman. History says it’s women who get the meals on the tables for mighty men.” But Bill has stopped calling Mary, so she reluctantly agrees to a few evenings with Paul. In the interim, Paul has found a discrepancy in the town’s accounting—$100,000 has gone missing. He’s not elaborating on the details, just saying that it’s up to the present mayor to explain. The mayor is saying that he never took any money and can’t explain the discrepancy, and it’s starting to look like Paul might actually win the election, after all. He asks Mary to marry him again, but she’s not biting. “What would happen if once again he had to choose between that love he talked of so glibly, and the political success he seemed to be on the verge of scoring?” Take a wild guess, honey.

But she’s saved from actually answering the question by the telephone: It’s the mayor, inviting her to City Hall for an important meeting. It turns out that Harriet Clarke is threatening to reveal that she made a $500 contribution to Paul’s campaign in exchange for his attempt to persuade Mary to split the estate with her. Harriet will not talk if Mary will give Harriet the letter Mr. Clarke wrote, thereby eliminating any evidence against Harriet. Mary instantly refuses to hand over the letter, choosing honesty over protecting Paul’s campaign. So Harriet tells Bill that the missing money is really just an error of accounting—the money isn’t really gone, it’s just in the wrong account. When Bill prints this in the paper, Paul is forced to withdraw from the race. He then tries to salvage the other thing he’s lost, his relationship with Mary, but she tells him that she thinks he was cheap to tarnish the mayor’s reputation when he knew that the mayor hadn’t stolen any money, that he was fickle to dump her when he thought it would hurt his prospects. And she conveniently decides that she never really loved him in the first place. I hate that; the plot device that insists that what she felt for the man she doesn’t choose wasn’t real love.

This book is better than most nurse novels. It has an actual theme—honesty vs. convenience—and even works hard to present Paul’s case as being an acceptable course of action, suggesting that Paul may have made a better mayor than the incumbent, and that he had chosen the best course of action, despite its moral dubiousness, to achieve that grand—and good—goal. It offers some amusing and sparkling writing, a very spirited appreciation for nursing as a professional calling, and even a very touching section about an elderly patient of Mary’s who dies of cancer. The characters are drawn well, if perhaps a bit too lightly: I admired Mary’s spine, but wished she’d smacked Paul’s face when he ordered her to set the table; I loved bad-girl Harriet, but wished she’d showed more claws. The ending was especially nice, a rarity in these formulaic novels. Joan Garrison only wrote one other nurse novel that I could find, Rehabilitation Nurse, but after Nurse Greer I will pick up that book with high hopes. 

NOTE: After this review was written, I learned that Joan Garrison is the pen name of William Neubauer.                                                                                                                   

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Navy Nurse

By Ruth Ives, ©1962

Cover illustration by H. Kane

When lovely Nurse Pamela West was assigned to Lattimer Air Force Base to be part of the government’s space-training program, she realized that her new work would be both complex and demanding. Pam worked hand in hand with the first eight astronauts as they went through their rigorous training. The chief doctor on the base, tall handsome Steve Forrester was assisted by Sybil Paige, a very attractive young woman. Pam had a great deal of admiration for Dr. Forrester, but she was also aware of Sybil Paige’s hostility, although she could not understand it. Then someone warned her: “Don’t get involved with Steve Forrester. Others have and got nothing but trouble…”

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:

“Hey, angel, I’m ready to orbit anytime if heaven has gorgeous dolls like you waiting.”

“Whenever I stick a pin into you, I draw ice water instead of blood!”

“Other gals have made cow-eyes at the guy before—and got nothing but a hatful of trouble.”

“Delia looked wonderful—in spite of the fact that in a few weeks, the wife of the astronaut was due to ‘launch’ her third child.”

“She’s thirty-five, an old maid, and always will be.”

“His brief smile sent a glow of happiness through Pamela, from the top of her primly starched nurse’s cap down to the tips of her neatly shod feet.”

“I know I’m not supposed to burden him with my feminine foolishness.”

“It was good to have decisions made for her, she thought, as she snuggled down in the red leather bucket seat.”

REVIEW:

Pamela West is a lovely blonde from Connecticut when she lands at Lattimer Air Force Base, where she is to take up a new position packed with “the glamour and thrills of space nursing.” Not that she’ll actually be working in space, mind you—girls don’t go into outer space, silly!—but she’s assisting with some vague tests involving oscillators and G-force simulators on eight men who are being groomed for two spots on a spaceship that will soon be orbiting Earth.

She’s arrived with a broken heart, as her fiancé was killed in a plane crash, apparently just a month ago. But lo, upon arriving in Arizona, she meets Col. Dr. Steve Forrester, and meets up with Barney Steele, the man who talked her and Johnny out of eloping a week before his fatal crash and coincidentally is now one of the astronaut candidates. But she’s not had her first shower after arriving on base before “curious excitement stirred her.  It wasn’t just that Steve was tall or handsome or competent and admirable in his profession. It was something chemical, perhaps—or something magical, induced by the spangled desert sky that reeled overhead.” And less than a week later, she decides she’s in love with the man—and is fighting for her career against the sabotage of Dr. Sybil Paige, the lady doctor who’s trying to get her own hooks into the doc. Steve does have something to say on the matter, however, and takes Pamela out on a horseback ride into the desert and kisses her. “What do you feel, Pam?” he asks her. “Is it what I feel, too?” It is, to be sure, but she tells him that she’s afraid that her involvement with him will jeopardize her career. He says he understands how she feels—and then, back at the base, gives her the cold shoulder for a week.

She’s upset, of course, and feels that she’s ruined her chances with Steve. But there’s Barney Steele to date in the meantime, even though she thinks of him only as a friend. Soon, however, he is blaring to the entire base that Pamela is “his girl,” and Steve is shooting Pamela cold looks. But out of the blue, he asks her to go on a picnic in the desert again, and this time, when he tells her, “I don’t want to take the chance on being rebuffed again,” the sly fox answers, “Try me.” Before he has the opportunity to do so, however, a jet plane crashes half a mile from them, and they have to hike up to the wreck to save the pilot. Steve has a bad leg, though, left over from an accident in his early Navy days, so it’s up to Barney Steele, flown in on the rescue helicopter, to climb down into the canyon to pull the man out. His heroics are somehow leaked to the press, along with the news that Pamela is his fiancée. So it’s back to fish eyes from Steve, and Pamela is sure she’s lost him for good now, because she couldn’t possibly go tell the man that it’s not true. “She wanted to tell him, but how could she do it in the face of his strange bitterness? She could hardly throw herself at him, could she? What value would he place on her love then?”

So she decides to request a transfer off the base and goes to Dr. Sybil Paige who, curiously, is in charge of such things. But at the last minute, Pamela, burning with inner patriotism, says that her work on the space mission is more important that her shattered little heart and tears up her transfer request. In the face of such devotion to career and man, Sybil admits that she has given up her quest to capture Steve—“Don’t be sorry,” she tells Pamela, “my work is enough for me. It will have to be, it seems”—and that’s all it takes for Pamela to chase Steve into the garden and fling herself at him, after all. Then it’s a quick proposal from Steve, accompanied by a little shared wonderment for their mission: “You and I, Pam, can help man in his final effort to break loose from the bonds of earth that have kept man a prisoner for so many, many ages!” Steve gushes. “Our part in it is small, but we can be useful, we can do what we can to help.”

This is easily one of the campiest books I have read in quite some time, and I laughed (or snorted) starting with the first sentence: “The hot desert sun, Pamela West thought, burned as relentlessly as the determination in each of the eight carefully chosen astronaut candidates.” And the gems keep popping up at regular intervals: “Clinging to past memories was selfish in the face of the excitement of conquering space,” “the singing in her heart could not be denied,” “it was too late for dreams.” But I just couldn’t bring myself to really like the book. Pamela does not win my respect for abandoning her feelings for her dead boyfriend so quickly—indeed, like most VNRN heroines, she decides that it wasn’t really true love at all—and likewise I cannot trust that her instant devotion to Steve after one week really is the be-all that she thinks it is. I’m not impressed, either, by her refusing to talk to Steve one minute and then rushing to him the next. And there are a lot of loose ends in the book—an astronaut’s wife virtually crippled by anxiety, the question of who leaked the story of Pamela’s alleged engagement to Barney to the press, a psychiatrist’s repeated requests that Pamela share with him her opinions on the fitness of the candidates for the mission—that are summarily abandoned as the next plot twist hoves over the hot desert horizon. I was surprised to find that Ruth Ives is the same author who brought us Congo Nurse, the first review I ever posted to this blog (while this review is my 201^st, if you’re counting), as I don’t recall much amusing in that book beyond the New York socialite arriving in Africa with an iron lung. But my impression of that book, that I couldn’t bring myself to care for the characters and found the ending to be too perfunctory, holds true for this one. The camp factor is off the charts in Navy Nurse, and this alone makes it worth reading, but it won’t be winning any VNRN awards.

Eve Cameron, MD

By Ann Rush

(pseud. Sara Jenkins Cunningham) ©1957

Dr. Eve Cameron, just graduated from medical school, came home to the small Georgia town her family had ruled for generations. There, she took over her uncle’s big country practice—determined to devote her life to the poor. But young, red-headed Matt Sanders, son of an overseer and now superintendent of the paper mills, told her she was only playing doctor. He knew Eve was the glamorous heiress of the Cameron fortune and he couldn’t believe this spoiled girl would persevere in her desperate battle against poverty, disease and vice. Eve Cameron thought she didn’t care what Matt Sanders said. She had no interest in either men or love—

 

GRADE: B

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Mighty few people really make the bed they lie in.”

 

“The kind of courteous you have to try to be is usually worse than out-and-out rudeness, don’t you think?”

 

“Other girls sat in the swing and talked to boys; she went out and set bones.”

 

“She felt relaxed for the first time, felt more like a girl than a doctor.”

 

“As for my killing off your patients, I’m doing it so that you’ll get some rest when you get home.”

 

“You’d be a real inspiration to any man to get well. Or to have an illness that went on and on.”

 

“I wouldn’t want to marry Bob if I was going to be horrid looking for the rest of my life. It wouldn’t be fair.”

 

“I guess I’ll have to teach you about adjectives. You certainly scatter them about with a careless hand.”

 

REVIEW:

In the great VNRN tradition, wealthy and beautiful Eve Cameron is returning to her tiny home town of Quiet Harbor after having been jilted by Dr. Smoke Jones, who dumped her for a plain, freckled nurse with “a vacant stare.” She’s planning to lie low for a bit and knit her broken heart back together again before moving on to a glamorous job in the city. Arriving home, she discovers that a paper mill has been built in town by her uncle Peter, and it blankets the town in a horrible sour smell—but has also brought jobs and money to town. She also discovers that Matt Sanders, a former grade-school classmate who was “a whiz at arithmetic,” is now the plant supervisor and seems to be carrying a mighty big chip on his shoulder toward her and her well-heeled family. But she doesn’t have much time to think about that opinionated, self-satisfied young man, because her Uncle Rufus, the town doctor, suffers a heart attack and is now out of commission for a couple of months. So she picks up his black bag and starts ministering to the populace.

 

Matt, meantime, is trying to get a clinic started at his mill, and condescends to ask Eve for her help. She advises him regarding the supplies he’ll need and where to get the best bargains and how to find a good nurse to staff the clinic. The two run hot and cold with each other, one minute all friendly and the next minute flaring with insults, so you can clearly see where that’s going. Curiously, the relationship causes Eve to develop an inferiority complex, and she regularly worries that she is overbearing when she tries to improve the lives of some of the poor folk around her, which her uncle calls “just plain bossiness.” She compares herself to the nurse Matt’s hired, who is “purry and utterly feminine,” and worries that “Matt Sanders hadn’t said she was a woman. Perhaps he didn’t even think of her as one. He was probably one of those dodoes in his thinking who considered a woman who didn’t sweep and wash dishes and iron and cook three meals a day to have forfeited her womanhood. He probably thought of her as—as— She couldn’t think of the word she wanted, but she was sure it wasn’t complimentary or feminine. Darn Matt Sanders anyhow. She’d show him. When he got back she’d show him who was a woman.” She starts fretting about the fact that Matt isn’t going to like her, and at a meeting with him about the clinic, she bursts out, “Do you think I’m unfeminine, unlikable, because I butt into other people’s business, because I try to manage their lives?” Matt sputters in surprise, and she stomps out, humiliated, and vows to leave Quiet Harbor posthaste.

 

I’ve always had a difficult time with the word feminine. It purports to equal female, but it also includes all the stereotypical ideas of what a woman is supposed to be—delicate, pretty, gentle—all of which are completely artificial and an identity that others have forced on women. So the minute I come across it, up go my hackles—and when its opposite, bossy, is trucked out at the same time, look out! Are men ever called bossy, or is it just in women that initiative, drive, and executive abilities are considered a bad thing? I’m surprised that a woman as smart as Eve Cameron doesn’t see through the paradox she is creating for herself with her anxieties: If she were meek and mild, she certainly could not succeed as a country doctor, so her determination to be more timid so that Matt will like her seems completely at odds with her desire to be a great doctor, not to mention contrary to her very nature. It’s true that, a few pages after her confrontation with Matt, after she’s set up one girl in a poor family to go to nursing school and another to secretarial school, she feels pretty pleased with herself. “It was a good way for a country doctor to be, even if it wasn’t feminine. She’d be careful and try to be tactful in her bossiness, and if no man ever came along that appreciated a woman who wanted things better—well, she’d be a bachelor like Uncle Rufus.” But it’s not a complete victory, as she still feels she has to try to soften her ambition to make it more palatable to potential husbands. And in the end, the issue of her ambition is left unresolved when she and Matt finally hook up and he never weighs in on this central theme.

 

Overall this is a pleasant book, well-written and entertaining, but not really offering any especial jewels to put it above the madding crowd. Eve is a good character but not a great one, and her anguish over her gumption is irritating to a modern reader and never satisfactorily put away as silliness. I enjoyed following Eve on her rounds and watching her work, performing surgery and delivering babies, and if the back-cover blurb (see above, in italics) was erroneous both in its depiction of her character and of the plot, I think it’s a better book than what we were set up to expect.

Leap in the Dark

By Rona Randall, ©1956

Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

Jeanne Cleary’s eventual destination was the nursing school in London, but on her own for the first time she felt an urgency to sort out the mysterious circumstances of her birth. Born to an aristocratic French woman who had married against her family’s wishes, Jeanne had been left an orphan when her parents died during the war. Now, having just discovered the existence of her French grandparents, Jeanne was determined to have at least one look at her mother’s ancestral home. But Fate was not to be satisfied with just a far-away glimpse. Before she could turn away from the imposing Château de Clémenteaux, Jeanne would become entangled in a series of lies which would bind her to another’s identity … an identity which would keep her from the man she loved, and prevent her from unmasking the imposter who said she was the real Jeanne Cleary.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“As for his sister, one could forgive her for being a novelist—that was deplorable and unfeminine, of course, but could be overlooked.”

“We do not know just what we are capable of until we actually do it.”

“Women, like flowers, were meant to be decorative and pleasing. But they were of greater service than flowers. He could enjoy them and make use of them at the same time.”

“Oh, Anne, not you—not you, of all people wearing trousers!”

REVIEW:

For starters, let’s begin by clarifying that this is not a nurse novel. Jeanne Cleary, fresh out of the orphanage—and not just any orphanage, mind you, but a convent orphanage—is on a train in France en route to a nursing school in London when the train pulls into the abandoned station in Vraipoupon. Completely on impulse, Jeanne grabs her small, cheap suitcase containing the handful of meager possessions that are all she has in the world and hops off. She starts walking, and comes to a grand estate. Guess what? It happens to belong to her grandmother, the Comtesse Clémenteaux, whom she has never seen because her mother, after eloping with the English soldier John Cleary, was disinherited by her parents! Even more coincidentally, the cook Emilée, rushes up the path, grabs her, and pulls her in, insisting that she is the nurse Hélène Dubois, who has arrived to care for the blind Comtesse.

Once she claps eyes on the sweet old lady who is her only living relative, Jeanne cannot bring herself to tell the truth and so poses as the nurse—fortunately for her, she’s really more of a companion than a nurse, so not even Dr. Paul Antoine suspects the truth. Naturally Jeanne takes to life at the estate like a duck to water, and she and the Comtesse become as one in spirit. But suddenly, in through the grand entrance marches Anne Cleary, accompanied by the Comtesse’s attorney Jacques Bergerot, who claims Anne is the real granddaughter and heir to the estate! What to do, what to do?

Well, first off, Jeanne falls like a ton of bricks for the suave and shady Jacques Bergerot, the innocent little dope. She has to fall for someone, I guess, and the doctor just finds her irritating from the word go—though we all know what that means. When Jacques kisses her and looks into her eyes—“his commanding and hers submissive,” if you can bear to know—she believes that he is going to marry her. In truth, however, Jacques is cavorting with Anne, who turns out to be the real Hélène Dubois, and a seedy tramp. We know this because she finds life in the country boring, she doesn’t like the Comtesse, and she’s rude to the servants. So Anne is as shocked to encounter Jeanne as Jeanne is to encounter Anne. But of the two, Anne is a lot more resourceful, and she soon searches Jeanne’s room and discovers the documents and photos that prove Jeanne’s real identity and secrets them in her own room—save the passport, which she tosses in the kitchen stove one night when Armand the gardener is too sick to sleep there, as he usually does.

So now Jeanne seems to be completely out of luck; all she will have is Jacques and his love to keep her warm. But as fate would have it, on the night of the big ball when Anne is to be announced as the Clémenteaux heir, Jacques and Anne announce their engagement!!! Jeanne is devastated, of course, but fortunately the good doctor is there to help buck her up, and in witnessing her despair, he realizes, “Damn the child—I am in love with her!” (He is right to describe her as a child; she is 17, and he is in his 30s.) But all is quickly set to rights: The Comtesse declares that she hopes Anne will wear the Clémenteaux family ring, which Anne has never heard of. The Comtesse becomes quite upset over this, and to comfort her, Jeanne slips her hand into the Comtesse’s—who quickly realizes that Jeanne is wearing the ring! Now all we need is for Emilée the cook to show up bearing the passport, which wasn’t actually burned up, and for Paul to declare, “I think I should warn you, Comtesse, that I have decided to marry this troublesome girl at the first opportunity, irrespective of who, or what, she is.” Jeanne doesn’t get to dance at the ball, because she almost fell through the rickety drawbridge fleeing the house when things looked black for her, but that’s a small price to pay.

This book is utterly predictable, but it’s nonetheless entertaining. The story is told from many characters’ points of view, which makes it a bit more interesting, since Jeanne is far and away the most vapid of all the characters. (When Paul’s sister wishes, “If only Paul would marry some nice girl who had no literary or medical ambitions, who wanted nothing in life but marriage and motherhood!” we know beyond doubt, much to our dismay, that Jeanne fits this bill precisely.) So even if the heroine is a bore and the storyline is ridiculously obvious, this book is still worth reading. Now if only it were an actual nurse romance novel.

Probation Nurse

By Gertrude E. Mallette, ©1941
Cover illustration by Freeman Elliot

A nurse’s duty is to serve—to obey orders unquestioningly—to respect her superiors—to follow the rules at all costs. But if the cost is a human life—and she believes her superiors to be wrong—should she take it upon herself to disobey? With only three months to prove she could be a nurse, Sabra Dunning had to choose between a patient’s life and her own career. To whom did she owe allegiance? The very rules which forced her to a decision cut her off from the only man she could turn to—her fiancé, Dr. Galen Trent. Alone, Sabra made her choice …

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“I thought you’d sworn off thinking.”

“There’s an isolating quality about a personal disaster. It sets everything off from you, so you can see what you are and what you aren’t.”

REVIEW:
Between the lame cover illustration and the title, I secretly hoped that this might turn out to be one of those seedy nurse novels, this one perhaps about a hard-boiled RN who had strayed off the virtuous path and had to do objectionable things with a slimy blackmailing doctor to keep her past hidden. Alas, no such luck. This is in fact a story about the wholesome Sabra Dunning, who has just been accepted to nursing school. Probation nurses, which I have met in many other nurse novels but never quite understood, are apparently student nurses on their first probationary months of nursing school. If they don’t pass muster in the first three months, they are kicked out.

Unfortunately for us, the first three-quarters of the book take us on a real-time crawl through Sabra’s classes. We learn how to make beds and spend a good chapter watching the young nurses practice. We fold linens, take pulses, practice our printing, shake down thermometers, fold bandages, learn how to walk quietly and how to bathe patients, and tour every single ward and closet in the enormous hospital. I bore all of this fairly patiently, right up until “they spent a few moments learning about hot-water bottles. Boiling water was never used, they learned. They were surprised to hear that even with the cover on, and with the water well below the boiling point, a patient could sustain a severe burn from a hot-water bottle.” Innocuous as this passage may seem, it was the last straw.

But fortune finally smiled upon me, as this was something of a turning point in the book, when we at long last heard the barest rustle of a plot under the hospital sheets. A frightened man on Men’s Medical keeps asking Sabra if all the women in the ward are nurses, and tells Sabra that she’s lying when she insists that they are. Miss Burke, another nurse just six months ahead of her in training, used to be a court reporter and hints sneeringly to Sabra that she knows something about the patient’s criminal past. What exactly this is, she won’t reveal, but Sabra now spends chapters gnashing her teeth in the most Jeanne Bowman­–like manner about how the patient is too frightened to get well, and how she ought to speak to the nursing supervisor about it so as to get Miss Burke removed from the ward so the poor man can relax and get better again. Eventually she does speak to the nursing supervisor, but won’t reveal who the nurse with the goods on Mr. Landow is, and Miss Burke, not surprisingly, firmly resists Sabra’s urging to identify herself. The situation eventually sorts itself out when Mr. Landow jumps out the window one night, hails a cab, and dies in the back seat en route to the pier. And that is all we will ever learn about Mr. Landow; indeed, apart from his daily paranoid exchange with Sabra, we never even hear him speak.

But with this grave mark on Sabra’s record—not to mention the time she got caught in the linen closet pressuring Miss Burke when she should have been answering call lights, and the time she dropped a bedpan, and that her uniform apron got really dirty one day—Sabra knows that she’s going to get kicked out of the program when she is called to Miss MacLaren’s office the day before the probationary period ends. She also believes that the nurse’s cap now resting on Miss MacLaren’s desk had been relieved from the poor ex–night nurse who had been on duty when Mr. Landow fled the premises. But things are never that bad for virtuous nursing students, so if you will not be surprised to find out where that nurse’s cap ends up, you will be relieved that it means the book is over.

The writing itself isn’t bad, but this book is mind-numbing, uninteresting, without any story to speak of, and at 192 pages, much longer than it needed to be. I suspect Gertrude Mallette is capable of better, but this Probation Nurse should never have graduated.

Doctor Sara

By Peggy Gaddis, ©1963
Cover illustration by Robert Maguire

“I never did hold with women doctors,” sneered Blade Morrisey, whose word was law on little Fisher’s Island. But lovely Dr. Sara Winslow was doing a man’s job, and she was used to fighting masculine prejudice. She was determined to win over Blade and the few like him who scoffed at the “lady doctor.” The lonely man in the lighthouse was another matter. Why was he on the island? And why did her heart behave so strangely when they met?

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“I’m a woman. Aren’t women supposed to spend practically their whole lives hunting for a man to marry?”

“Makes me wonder why people call women the weaker sex. Oh, they get scared of things like mice and snakes—but they’ve got more guts than any man could ever hope to have, when it comes to things that really matter.”

“ ‘Man, he’s sure a son-of-a-gun—askin’ your pardon, Miss Doc.’
“ ‘Think nothing of it, Pop,’ Sara answered, ‘There are times when I’d like to use the same expression.’ ”

“Darling, don’t tell me you’re slipping? The girl’s not in love with you. I can’t believe that!”

“If a man I loved so much as gave me a warm glance, I’d hare him off to a preacher so fast he wouldn’t know what had happened to him.”

“I wish I could knit—I bet that would throw the poor darling for a row of Chinese pagodas!”

REVIEW:
Sara Winslow is a 27-year-old doctor tired of Atlanta. So she heads home to North Carolina to see Jane and Arthur Mayson, who have raised this (guess) orphan since her parents were killed in a hurricane when she was five. Arthur runs her out to his favorite fishing port, Fisher’s Island, which has a winter population of 300. It seems their doctor just died, and now they have none—and what they wouldn’t give if Sara, even if she is a “lady doctor” and not a man, would come take his position! (There is one fella, of the unfortunate name of Blade Morrissey, who thinks women shouldn’t be doctors, but he’s quickly won over when Sara diagnoses his only daughter with leukemia.)

So Sara moves to the island and starts birthing babies and sewing up wounds. And wondering about the man who has rented the defunct lighthouse and brooks no trespassers. But before long, he’s injured too, with a deep wound he claims was inflicted by a shark, so now she has to go up and spar with the ornery old cuss. (She quickly discovers a heart murmur, and tells him it’s not serious—“yet. It could be, if you over-exert yourself or worry very much. Bed rest will help a lot.” So though everyone who meets her is soon singing hosannas about what a great doctor she is, they might change their minds if they actually knew something about medicine.) Terence O’Toole (also an orphan) soon warms up to her, and by way of making a pass, tells her that he is “forbidden” to tell her about how he got hurt. “If the mission on which I came here is accomplished successfully, then I can tell you the whole story,” pleads the blabbermouth. But he’s going to have to be replaced soon, he adds, because the enemy has seen his face. He’s about as good a confidential agent as she is a doctor.

Another man comes to the island, Tracy Harper, and though no one trusts him for a second, he’s soon taking Sara out on dates and the local kids out on his boat. As evidence of his shifty character, after she sees Tracy sneaking into the lighthouse, he denies having been there. Even Terence says he doesn’t trust Tracy, and tells Sara that Tracy says he’s been sent to replace Terence on the secret mission. He asks Sara to look into Tracy’s background; “I ask this not just for my own sake but for yours—and the country’s.” Then he kisses Sara, so it seems her reputation will be shot, since we already know that Terence can’t keep a secret. Detective Sara soon uncovers the truth about Tracy—despite the fact that every adult who’s met him thinks he is a slimy snake, he’s exactly who he says he is! But even more interesting is the fact that a dangerous pursuer has tracked him down and landed on the island to capture him—Mimi Courtney, his fiancée, who modestly claims that uncovering the secret agent “didn’t take much of the detective instinct—you left a trail a mile wide.” Then Sara tells Jane and Arthur the whole story about Terence, because, heck, with all the people who already know about this secret mission, a few more can’t hurt! If our national security actually ever depended on folks like these, it would be time to move to Canada.

Back on the island, Sara tells Terence that Tracy is indeed legit, so Terence decides to spill the rest of the beans, “since we both will be leaving here soon,” he tells her, adding, when she protests, “Oh, it’s a wife’s duty to go wherever her husband is sent.” In response, Sara tells him where to put his colossal ego, that she’s not leaving the island, that he’s been nothing but rude to her, so why should she want to marry him? With all this before him, he quickly agrees that he’s been a presumptuous fool and it won’t happen again. “Sara had the silly feeling she had been let down. She had been prepared to fence with him, to go on arguing with him, and she had known instinctively that in the end he would win, not she.” And so we have the patented Peggy Gaddis ending: She wants something, but he says she can’t have it if she marries him, so she agrees to give it up—and in the end, he decides she can have it after all. What a nice man. It’s going to take us a few more pages to get to that point, but we’ve already gotten the telegram that it’s on its way.

It arrives in the form of an apparent mob, when the local fishermen, led by Tracy Harper, go storming up to the lighthouse. Sara, concerned for her man, goes with them, and insists on going in first, because “he’s my patient, and I didn’t want him to have a shock.” The nice mob lets her do that, and when Sara puts her arm around Terence and calls him darling, “he was touched with awe and wonder,” and I was touched with the heaves. But it turns out that it’s not a mob after all; Tracy has brought the men up to hear him tell Terence that “the Big Boy himself” has agreed that they don’t need to keep the mission a secret anymore, so sit back and enjoy the tale: There’s this town in Russia that looks exactly like an American city, and everyone there has been brought up to be exactly like Americans, except they’re fervently patriotic to Mother Russia. “They are to be infiltrated into this country and sent where they can do the most harm to us, the most good to their own country; to ‘sow seeds of discord wherever the soil is fertile.’ ” Terence had come across one trawler smuggling in a few of the mock Americans and been wounded by them, but instead of killing him, “as a gesture of contempt, to show us that they knew we were onto them and that they were abandoning this route,” they left him to be found. But now “Headquarters” has decided to let the locals know about this so they can guard the seacoast themselves, with a little help from the Coast Guard. Now that the story is out in the open, instead of becoming hysterical over the idea of Russians invading the country and living amongst them, everyone calmly goes home and goes to bed.

But the next morning, Sara is back at the lighthouse. He asks her if she wants to stay on the island, but the idiot replies, “I want to marry you, and anywhere you go, I want to go!” But when he says he’s resigning from “the service” to marry her, she’s shot through with doubt. “You must stay on—alone, if that’s what they require.” When he points out that she was ready to give up her job, she says, “It’s only that marriage means so much more to a woman than it does to a man.” Fortunately, Terence snaps, “Who ever fed you that bit of guff? There’s not a word of truth in it, believe me!” He’s going to start working as a fishing guide so the two can stay on the island. “I won’t be a beachcomber, living off my wife,” he concludes. Phew! A happy ending!

What bothers me most about Peggy’s I-go-where-my-man-goes endings is that while she usually gives the heroine what she wants, it’s because the man agrees to let her have it, which is too much of a copout. Here we do have Terence rejecting the idea outright, but Peggy doesn’t really mean what he says; she has Mimi espousing the same tripe—“I’m going to be the kind of wife who goes where her husband goes, whether it’s Alaska or Aruba!”—without a peep of protest from anyone. And don’t forget that Terence’s first proposal came in the form of a declaration that Sara would have to leave the island when she married him. Even if it’s sugar-coated, a poison pill will still kill you.

Doctor Sara is one of Peggy Gaddis’ milder novels. It takes a long while to get going, and if we don’t get much in the way of particularly egregious attitudes until 20 pages from the end, neither does it possess any of the absurdities or camp that can make her novels such fun. Not one of the characters shows any sparkle except Mimi, and she doesn’t pop up until page 100, and then we see too little of her. This work just cruises along, neither too cold nor too hot. So because it is lukewarm, I suggest you leave it on the shelf.

Nurse Tennant

By Elizabeth Hoy, ©1959

Cover illustration by Jack Harman

Nurse Sally Tennant entered the Matron’s cosy sitting-room in St. Winifred’s Nurses’ Home. She was sitting at her neat writing desk, one business-like ear pressed into the telephone. “Yes, Yes,” she was saying. “A good sailor: Yes, of course that would be essential. Naturally I will send someone capable of assuming entire responsibility. Passport? Yes, I’ll see that her passport is in order. Anything else? You’d like her to be along tomorrow afternoon. Yes, I have a most excellent nurse free at the moment.” Miss Hines hung up the receiver and peered at Sally’s interested face over her spectacles. “Did you want me, Matron?” Sally asked breathlessly. Good sailor, she was thinking wildly. Passport … boat sailing the day after tomorrow! It couldn’t be true that words like these could have anything to do with a case of nursing! But it was true. The steamship “Morning Glory” was setting out on a southern sunshine cruise and their nursing sister had fallen ill at the last moment. Thus Sally found herself with the most interesting nursing assignment she could have imagined. And much to her surprise the Assistant Surgeon turned out to be an old acquaintance, Dr. Jimmy Dykell …

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“She wished frantically that she were back in some nice safe operating theatre where the worst thing that ever happened at tables was that people died on them.”

“It was a lonely thing when lovely things happened to you like this sea trip to have no one special you could tell about it.”

“She’d pictured the Americans as rather noisy and loud, given to exclaiming ‘Gee!’ and ‘Gosh!’ and “Swell’ in an extremely nasal manner.”

“The real man, the he-man, is always clumsy and hurtful and a bit cruel. That’s what makes him so adorable. Preserve me from the type of male who ‘understands’ women. They’re the world’s bores, believe me. I’ve men some and I know.”

“Thank goodness I’ve always been well enough to keep clear of hospitals and their tortures.”

“Most girls are so boring that the sooner you can shut their mouths with a kiss the more bearable they are.”

“He won’t be talking to her about diaphragms and arteries, she thought with sudden acrid bitterness.”

“I can’t jilt Sally very well before marriage. It seems to me so much less insulting to do it afterwards. Divorce is simple, and alimony usually comforts women quite a lot.”

REVIEW:

What a relief to find a good VNRN! After a long string of lousy books, Nurse Tennant has restored my devotion to the genre—and, with Town Nurse—Country Nurse, in the Harlequin imprint, which so far this year has not been kind to me.

Sally Tennant is a private nurse suffering another drab English summer and an endless string of gouty old men patients. But then she’s given a position on a cruise ship about to depart for the Mediterranean: “The nursing sister of the Morning Glory had fallen ill at the eleventh hour. Kind, considerate nursing sister!” When she boards the ship, however, she finds that the resident doctor is none other than Jimmy Dykell, a young doctor whom she had dated two years ago, hoping to marry, until Jimmy’s mother took her aside and told her that if he were to marry, it would distract him from his burgeoning sure-to-be-brilliant career, and Sally wouldn’t want to be responsible for Jimmy’s failure, would she? No, she wouldn’t, so she’d started seeing other men, leaving Jimmy to wonder, broken-hearted. Now, reunited professionally, at least, Jimmy is looking at her with cold eyes, and her great stroke of luck has turned to torture.

Part of her job is to dine with a table of passengers, and she lands a group of Americans traveling together: Dulcie Manners, age 19, and her mother; and the Seldens and their son, Derek. The two youngsters are supposed to marry, but Dulcie has instead gotten herself secretly engaged to Jimmy, whom she met a couple of months ago on holiday in Scotland. Dulcie is spoiled and shallow, with a tendency to say things like, “I think your uniform is the cutest thing!” and, “Aren’t men just too stupid for words?” But she’s also likable, and so with mixed feelings, Sally befriends with Dulcie, promising to help Dulcie convince her mother that becoming Mrs. Dykell would be the best thing to ever happen to the teenager. Mrs. Manners, however, has a rapidly shrinking bank account, so she is eying the Seldens’ fortune with admiration and is not inclined to be impressed by a new MD with nothing but prospects to keep him warm.

Though Jimmy is usually cold and aloof with Sally on duty, from time to time he does find her charms irresistible, such as when she’s about to go blundering off a cliff in Monte Carlo and he feels compelled to pull her into his arms and kiss her, so relieved is he that he’s saved her from the fatal plunge. He also clearly appreciates her (naturally) superior nursing skills, and is forever encouraging her to raise her sights beyond being a visiting nurse. He has a very strong faith in the excellence of her character, and as time passes and they warm up a bit to each other, he presses her on occasion to explain why she left him. Though she still loves him and yearns for him tragically, she can’t break her promise to Dulcie and feels her own chance with Jimmy has passed, so she can’t bring herself to tell him the truth. “It is nothing to him that my hair is piled up in the very newest of little curls on my forehead, that I’ve opened my best bottle of Chanel, or that this dress suits me better than most,” she despairs at one point. Their relationship feels genuine, and genuinely painful, and I believed it.

With Dulcie set to marry Jimmy, Derek is left out in the cold, but not to worry—he soon discovers Sally’s attractions. “Listen, darling!” he tells her. “I’m rich and I’m not altogether of a villainous disposition. I could give you a rattling good time. Wouldn’t it be better to marry me than go back to this dull job of yours?” Sally, seeing an easy way to deter Jimmy once and for all—since his own engagement hasn’t stopped him from displaying his affection for her on occasion—agrees to this unique proposal. It’s better to be in a loveless marriage than alone, she reasons: “Miss Tennant, spinster, she thought with a shudder, a gaunt, gray-haired creature with a  gallant smile nailed to her haggish, thin-lipped countenance, a smile that grew more and more gallant and apologetic as the years went by. That was probably what happened to you if you wasted your whole heart over one fruitless unhappy love affair and neglected to find yourself a nice sensible husband!”

Sally also takes up with aging and wealthy Mrs. de Frene, who has a fatal heart condition and is expecting to die on this cruise. But she doesn’t mind, really, because then she’ll be with her beloved husband in heaven. It’s a common device, the aged wealthy widow who you can tell from the minute you clap eyes on her is going to end up leaving our heroine with a bundle of money, but Mrs.de Frene is a sweetly drawn character, and I didn’t mind at all the otherwise trite plot device.

This is a top-notch book, livelier than most, entertaining, and sincere. For starters, I loved Elizabeth Hoy’s writing from the second sentence: “From the double row of sturdy plane trees the leaves blew down, torn and brown and finished.” Throughout the book, little gems like this sparkle. Sally is not the ordinary VNRN heroine, but has spunk and intelligence and humor. Other characters also are not simplistic; while it would be easy to make Dulcie into an undeserving, spoiled snippet, she is in the end sympathetic, even if she is admittedly vapid. Scenes when Sally and Jimmy are together, and Sally is feeling both drawn to him and the impossibleness of having him, feel real, even a painful. The ending is one of the nicer I’ve read, sweet without being nauseating, and including the smartly self-aware sentence, “There isn’t much more of importance to add to the history of Sally and Jimmy.” And so it was with complete satisfaction that I closed Nurse Tennant, and it is with eagerness I look forward to Elizabeth Hoy’s three other nurse novels.