Palm Beach Nurse

By Peggy Gaddis,©1953

Also published as Moon of Enchantment

Julia Blake was not only a very good nurse and an extremely attractive woman but, most important, people trusted and confided in her. And so she knew: 

Why Joseph Smith, her patient and a promising violinist, was brutally beaten but not quite murdered

Why Alice Jerome, who was not only rich but kind, brought Joseph to America from his native Italy

Why Isobel Cartwright, the young, beautiful heir to Miss Jerome’s fortune pretended to be in love with Joseph 

And it was certainly because of her warmth and sincerity that Kent Harper, Miss Jerome’s lawyer and advisor, was deeply in love with Julia, but sometimes not as attentive as she would have liked. Julia finds her job in Palm Beach the most exciting one she has ever had … one which combines the challenge of nursing with mystery and romance.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Julia’s crisp white uniform was very becoming, and the perky cap that crowned her crisp, shining hair was tilted at exactly the correct angle for a smart, efficient and very pretty registered nurse.”

 

“As much as she could see of his face, beneath the bandages about his head, she liked.”

 

“No fancy dress designer in the world had ever been able to dream up a costume as becoming as a nurse’s uniform.”

 

“It always amuses me that men are so sure that the sole purpose of a girl’s life is to find some hapless male to pay her bills and keep a roof over her head. No matter what her profession is, or how happy she may be in it, or how successful, she’s supposed to be only ‘marking time’ until a man she can snare comes along.”

 

“I yearn to turn her across my knee with the business end of a slipper in my strong right hand!”

 

“The three things that make life worth living are, first of all, someone to love; something to hope for; and last but terribly important, something to do.”

 

“It’s the sort of life I want, too. A small white house, a garden, a tree or two, a sand-box for the kids. Me with a job, coming home late in the afternoon to find you waiting for me at the gate.”

 

REVIEW:

Julia Blake has traveled to Palm Beach in the customary VNRN fashion: One of her patients in her Atlanta hospital needed a nurse to accompany her home and stay with her, and Julia took the job. But that patient is well now, so she accepted an assignment as a special at the hospital—“very, very special indeed, if I may say so,” says the patient’s doctor when he sees her—a young man who was beaten and is now in a coma. On her first day, she walks into the patient’s room to find three people there, despite the no visitors sign posted on the door. So she throws them out—and then discovers that the older woman is Alice Jerome, one of the hospital’s major benefactors.

 

Miss Jerome has asked to see Julia at her home, and Julia is obliged to put her head in the lion’s mouth—but when she arrives at Miss Jerome’s beachfront villa, Miss Jerome doesn’t decapitate her, she hires Julia to care for the patient when he is well enough to return to Miss Jerome’s home, and installs her in the large suite upstairs with views of the ocean. The patient—an Italian named, strangely, Joseph Smith—is a violinist whom Miss Julia brought home with her from the Continent last year, and she is intent on training him to become a world-class musician, apparently purely out of the goodness of her heart.

 

Also out of the goodness of her heart, Miss Jerome has raised Isobel Cartwright from infancy, giving the girl everything she wants. Unfortunately, Isobel has not responded with the same gratitude that Joseph shows, and instead displays her true colors by marching into Julia’s room without knocking and telling Julia, “You are to leave my men alone.” This means not just Joseph but also Kent Harper, Miss Jerome’s 30-year-old attorney, who was in the party that Julia ejected from Joseph’s hospital room. Isobel goes on to explain to Julia that she really has a thing for Kent, but is engaged to Joseph on the off-chance that Miss Jerome decides to leave him a lot of money when she dies—which is bound to be soon, because she’s really old and besides, this is a Peggy Gaddis VNRN—so she will have claim to it, since all that money rightfully belongs to her.

 

Kent, however, has other ideas, which occur to him almost immediately upon clapping eyes on the beautiful Julia in her breathtaking nylon uniform. He takes her out on dates and kisses her—then abruptly stops asking her out, telling her that he loves her and wants to marry her, but he can’t see her for now: “Wait until I can explain a lot of things that you are going to feel need explanations. Will you trust me, darling?” This is not the only mystery Julia grapples with, but the only one she is unsuccessful at solving. The two other main mysteries in this book, i.e. why Miss Jerome is so devoted to Joseph, and why was Joseph beaten up, are soon explained away, when the person who knows the answer decides out of the blue to unburden themselves to Julia. She should have considered a career as a police detective. But she shouldn’t feel too badly about the one answer that got away, as in fact the reader never gets any explanation for this, either.

 

Joseph, it turns out, is the grandson of a man whom Miss Jerome fell in love with as a young girl, but since the man was merely a violin teacher, and Italian to boot, her family not only rejected the match but drove the man out of the United States. Miss Jerome had tracked down the young Joseph, the last remaining descendent of her true love, and ensconced him at her house, but her attentions to him are ironically his undoing, as they brought him to the notice of an Italian syndicate. His attackers are desperately trying to bring an Italian woman named Vera into the United States. They believe that if Joseph tells Miss Jerome he wants to marry Vera, Miss Jerome, with her money and power, will get Vera into the states without an extensive background check, which would apparently reveal Vera as a bad seed. But Joseph, who cannot betray Miss Jerome, refuses to do this. Unfortunately, he has a weak spot: He’s afraid that the gang will discover that he’s in love with this woman in Italy, Lucia, and that the gang will harm her in some way.

 

It’s a lot of back story, but eventually we get some action: One night, Julia hears a noise from Joseph’s room, and enters to see a man bending over Joseph with a knife. She screams, the man runs off, and the entire house turns up in his bedroom. She’s a bit embarrassed that all she could manage in this moment of crisis was a shriek: “What a terrible way for a nurse to behave,” she says. When she tells everyone what she saw, Joseph looks them all in the eye and tells them that Julia was dreaming and that there was no man. Finally she gets the hint and agrees she was dreaming, though Kent isn’t buying it. He posts a guard outside Joseph’s windows—and Julia’s, lest the man she saw come back for her, too—but one night Joseph is able to give the guards the slip and escape the house. His body is found on the beach the next morning—and his suicide note is on his pillow, and a scrap of paper with Lucia’s name and address on it is under Julia’s pillow.

 

His reason for doing himself in, apparently, is to prevent the bad guys from finding Lucia, which is what Julia tells Miss Jerome in an attempt to console her when Joseph’s death leaves her prostrate with grief. Julia wants to track down Lucia in Italy to help her—what this help might be remains unclear—but if she goes racing off to Italy, the bad guys will follow her and find Lucia, and maybe wreak some vengeance. She needs a cover, and what better excuse for her to go to Italy, Miss Jerome decides, than to go on a honeymoon? So two days later, Julia finds herself marrying Kent in Miss Jerome’s bedroom. Isobel is late for the ceremony, and shows up just as the happy bride and groom are kissing—and stomps up to Julia and slaps her to the ground. This is just too much for Miss Jerome, who promptly expires.

 

But Miss Jerome has one last secret—and you’ll never guess what’s coming—Isobel has been written out of the will, and the estate (after generous legacies to the devoted staff) is to be divided between Kent and Julia. In the meantime, Kent and Julia spend a lot of time discussing, in public places and with numerous people, their top secret mission to find Lucia and prevent the bad guys from discovering her as well. Though we never actually find out how that goes, my guess is that Lucia is doomed.

 

On the whole, this was a fun and enjoyable book. There is a good amount of camp, and the characters, though straight out of the usual Peggy Gaddis playbook, are entertaining, and for once the ungrateful young rich girl doesn’t see the light, so that was something new. Julia is feisty, competent, and likable, though I was disappointed by her abrupt change in attitude once she has a ring on her finger. She early on declares that she would never give up her job for a man—and after she and Kent marry, they decide she will keep working “until the babies start coming, anyway”—but all the independent spirit she possesses at the beginning of the book is tossed away with the wedding bouquet and she says, “Honestly, Kent, it’s going to be your job to make important decisions. I’d like anything that you’d like. It’s always going to be like that.” After Kent and Julia are married, the book spends about 30 pages treading water as everyone waits for the will to be read, squandering the liveliness it’s had up to this point and slowly fizzling out. It doesn’t pay to look too hard at some of the details of the book—would the mob think that the best way to get Vera into the U.S. is to have Joseph marry her? would Joseph really leave Lucia’s address behind if he’s killing himself to protect her?—but this is, after all, just a silly nurse novel, and in the end it’s still better than most.

Love Comes to Dr. Starr

By William Johnston, ©1963
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

Dr. Claudia Martin stood by as she watched her fiancé, Dr. Dan Starr, treat his new patient, Kathleen Emory, who suffered from a partial paralysis that could only be cured by physical therapy. Spoiled and petted by her husband, Kathleen was used to getting what she wanted. And Claudia was sure that right now Kathleen wanted Dan. Claudia was used to Dan's becoming involved with his patients' problems. But this time it was different. This time the patient was a very beautiful girl. How long could Claudia's love for Dan last if she was forced to share his emotional commitment with another woman? After all, being a doctor didn't mean that she wasn't a woman. She had a woman’s need for her man's attention. How could she make Dan see that she, too, needed him?

 

GRADE: B+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“That’s the secret of French cooking. Time. You’re so hungry by the time you get it, you’re sure it’s super-colossal.”

 

“Why don’t you marry the girl and get her out of your life?”

 

“She felt she had to compensate for being a woman in what was generally considered a man’s profession, and so she was less quick to show compassion, an expression which she subconsciously felt would give the impression that she was more of a woman than a doctor.”

 

REVIEW:

I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to decide if this actually accounts as a nurse novel (and yes, books about women doctors do count as “nurse novels”). The character we spend the most time with is Dr. Dan Starr, and it’s his name that populates the cover. But Dr. Claudia Martin is also a leading character, we do get into her head a fair amount, and she ends up with her man (again) at the end; they were engaged from the opening page. The story is largely about him, his infatuation with another woman and how he extricates himself from it, but VNRNs can be about a man’s wandering attention and how he comes to his senses. In the end, though, I think the fact that he occupies more of the book than she does, that we don’t follow Claudia’s daily life, and that we don’t get to know her as well as we do him, means that this book is not actually a VNRN.

 

So the question of whether I should review it on this blog also comes up. The answer to that is easier; I read the book, so what the heck, I’ll do a review. Purists should skip to the next post.

 

Dan Starr is a chief resident at Rothwell Clinic in Manhattan. His fiancée is Dr. Claudia Martin, a psychiatrist. They get together for dinner and witty repartee: “Wouldn’t you like to put your feet up and relax?” she asks him when he arrives at her place. “I’m sorry I don’t have a dog to bring you your pipe and slippers.” But something must intrude on their happy affair or there wouldn’t be a book, so enter Kathleen Emory, a 20-year-old waif married to 50-year-old Eugene Emory. Theirs is an epic love story: He hired her to work at his factory as a secretary, but she was completely incompetent, so he shuffled her around the office until the only position left for her to take was the one as his wife. He takes care of her, because she’s ridiculously insecure and inadequate—this is due to an overbearing mother—and they don’t have a physical relationship, because she’s so childlike that neither one of them think she can handle it.

 

She’s landed in the clinic after a car accident ruined her arms, which she cannot raise or even twitch. Her physical therapist, Dr. Mary Young, is a burly sort—“From the rear, from Dan’s view, she had much the look of a Yale lineman”—who pushes her patients hard. Mr. Emory feels she is pushing Kathleen overmuch, and complains to the head of the hospital, who asks Dan to look into it. But—and this point is one of some contention between the Drs. Starr and Martin—Dan has a tendency to get overly involved with his patients. Sure enough, once Dan claps eyes on the pretty, helpless, tearful young thing in room 713, he feels the only way he can get to the bottom of the question of whether Dr. Young is working Kathleen too hard is if he himself personally gives her physical therapy treatments every night, in addition to the treatments she gets from Dr. Young, even though he admits he has little knowledge of physical therapy. Needless to say, Claudia is not too excited about this, and after visiting Kathleen, she quickly arrives at the idea that Kathleen is in love with Dan.

 

And how does Dan feel? “Dan avoided asking himself if he were in love with her. He was not sure what the answer would be. He knew, however, what he must do. He had to continue treating her.” Because if you think you might be falling in love with a patient, married or not, and it’s pretty clear that the patient is falling for you, the best thing is to go right on spending too much time with them. Even the head of the hospital, when he hears what’s going on, tells Dan, “You’ve made something complicated out of something simple.” Yet night after night, there is the altruistic doctor, rubbing Kathleen’s pale, limp arms and feeding her chocolates that she can’t lift for herself. How sweet.

 

It turns out that Eugene does not want Kathleen to get better; if she is crippled, she will be helpless and dependent upon him for life, and that suits him just fine. When she figures this out, Kathleen tells Eugene that she wants to be strong and well, and he responds by nastily describing all the enormous responsibilities he is going to load on her when she gets home, and won’t that be great? Naturally, when he leaves, she has a hysterical fit. The next night, when Eugene returns to visit his wife, “he had the look of a man who has won a battle and who assumed that he had thus won the war.” Not so fast, buddy. Kathleen tells Eugene that she is leaving him for Dan, who loves her and wants to marry her. “He’s a handsome and wonderful man. A man—understand?” she snipes at him.

 

Eugene naturally goes straight to Dan, whose answer is to visit Kathleen. There, he pulls essentially the same stunt that Eugene did earlier—one that came across as low and despicable when Eugene did it—by telling her that he’s all excited to marry her, and give her “a normal life,” and Dr. Martin is going to be brought in “to get you ready, to prepare you to be my wife.” Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. I was curious as to how Claudia was going to do this, exactly—show her porn movies? Review sex toys and techniques? But never mind, Kathleen caves to the pressure and screams at him to go away and leave her alone. Not content to stop there, Dan chews out Kathleen in the most heartless and unjustified way: “This business of being in love with me, do you know why you pulled that one? To give you a tighter hold on your husband. You intended all along to let him win you back. What a joke that was. You could never leave him. He was your closet where you could hide out. You couldn’t be a wife to any man because you’re not a woman—not the way you are.” Frankly, I did not see where this was coming from; nothing in Kathleen’s behavior or speeches makes me think that she did not believe herself to be in love with Dan. So my opinion of Dan plunged even further.

 

That’s not the end of the weirdness, however. Having beaten the emotional stuffing out of Kathleen, he marches off to see Eugene. There he pulls the same cruel game, telling Eugene that Kathleen is going to sue him for an annulment. “In that way, the fact that you and Kathleen have never really been man and wife and the reason for it will be brought out,” he says. What this “reason” could be is only hinted at. “How much do you know?” Eugene asks Dan, and then goes on to tell Dan that he married Kathleen because the men at his company were needling him about being single: “A man of fifty who’s never—who’s never … wanted a woman. They know about me.”

 

Could he … could he be … gay? In retrospect, all the classic signs are there. Eugene’s apartment is lavish and well-appointed, and he says, “Most people comment on my excellent taste,” when he shows Dan in. Flash back to our first meeting with Eugene: “Emory could have very well just stepped from the pages of Esquire magazine. He was wearing a meticulously trim, black worsted suit, a sparkling white silk shirt, and a silver silk tie, which more only the meagerest hint of a pattern, black shoes polished to conservative gloss, and a black homburg that sat on his head at a precisely correct tilt. His face, long and narrow, was interrupted by a guardsman moustache. Whoever kept it in trim was quite clearly a precisionist.” Why didn’t we see this before?

 

But let’s not beat ourselves up over it. Because there are greater villains at hand, and they grow increasingly more odious: Dan, not content to stop there, essentially blackmails Eugene into helping Kathleen get therapy so “she can someday be a woman.” He insists that Eugene “tell her about yourself—fully. And then, if you’re in love with her, by seeking the cause of your own abnormalcy, and trying to—” I assumed he was going to say have sexual relations, but that’s going too far for Eugene. “It can’t be that,” he cuts off Dan. “I’m what I am and I’m not ashamed of it.” Dan tries to encourage Eugene to get psychoanalysis, but Eugene refuses. “I’ve lived fifty years with this. If I changed, I wouldn’t be myself any more. I have my ways of living—my books, my apartment here, my privacy.” Instead he agrees to offer Kathleen a quiet divorce, which Dan graciously accepts on Kathleen’s behalf, although I’m not sure how the quivering aspic Kathleen is going to feel about all of Dan’s “help.”

 

I wonder if author William Johnston thought this was going to play as a happy ending, but to me it seemed a colossal nightmare, with no one winning. Kathleen might get therapy and someday go on to have sex—that is, after all, what all the “being a woman” euphemisms are about, and it seems that her virginity is of colossal importance to not only Dan but also her success as a human being according to the author—but Eugene is destroyed, and Dan is revealed as an evil, persecuting tyrant who will emotionally bully his own patient, and her husband as well, if it suits him. The no doubt unintended irony here is that the reason he got involved with Kathleen to begin with is that he was asked to look into whether she was being bullied by a doctor. It turns out that she is, but the perpetrator is Dr. Starr. And at the end of the book he’s hailed as a hero, and goes off to have coffee with the now-exonerated Dr. Young.

 

This is an odd book, but nonetheless a good one. It is well-written and humorous, and trots along at a good pace. The bizarre situation, the constant allusions to Kathleen’s sex life, and the hints at Eugene’s homosexuality make it one of the more unique and risqué books I’ve read, but since it’s not really a nurse novel, I guess that means it doesn’t count. Even so, it’s an interesting and worthwhile detour.

Nurse on Nightmare Island

By Lois Eby, ©1966
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

Helen Barris was a conscientious nurse. When she surmised from his letters that Dr. Harvey Jenkins, the world-famous physicist who had been her patient at the hospital, was on the verge of a relapse, she went immediately to Morago Island, the ancient pirate hideout where he was recuperating. She knew her mission of mercy would be incredibly difficult. She couldn’t know that before the weird affair was over, lives would be lost—and her own life would be magically changed by an overpowering romance.

GRADE: D

REVIEW:

The very fact that I was unable to find one single sentence in 222 pages that I felt worthy of sharing as a Best Quote says quite a bit about Nurse on Nightmare Island. The island wasn’t actually a nightmare, and truth be told, the book doesn’t really qualify as a nightmare, either; it’s more of a complete snooze. But with the aid of a sharp pin, I managed to keep myself awake for most of it, so here we go: Nurse Helen Barris has been convinced by a series of letters from former patient and physicist Harvey Jenkins that he is hallucinating a six-year-old boy Tony, who is the exact age and has the same name as his own dead son! So she takes what appears to be an endless vacation and jets to Moraga Island in the Antilles to attempt to lure Dr. Jenkins back to the hospital. But when she arrives, it turns out that there actually is a six-year-old boy named Tony living on the island! Like every other situation in this book, a whole lot of angst and pages turn out to be a non-issue.

Now that she’s found that Jenks is actually sane, she spends her days posing as a model while he paints portraits of her with tropical flowers in her hair. Oh, and she gets a job as a nanny to the boy, who has been kidnapped from his mother, Cecily, and her second husband, Rupert Manning, by his father, Philip La Rorsch. Philip owns most of the island, and tells Helen that he kidnapped Tony only because Rupert dangled the boy over a balcony five flights up, which he learned from the boy’s nurse, Janna, who went with Cecily and Tony after the divorce and yet remained loyal to Philip. Got all that?

Cecily arrives on the island claiming that Philip has tried to murder her three times—but she will risk her life to be near her boy, because she’s so devoted to him. She turns up at lunch and drags the painter and his model off for a picnic—where a poisonous snake is found, and killed, and assumed to have been planted there solely to murder Cecily. There’s a lot of to-doing about the dead snake when Cecily’s lawyer sends three men to obtain it as evidence of Philip’s evil deeds, but it has gone missing from the spot where it was buried after its untimely demise. Cecily is convinced that this is because Helen told Philip of the incident and he absconded with the late reptile. If all this sounds like a fairly entertaining scenario, let me disabuse you of that idea: This whole affair just comes off as labored and dull.

This isn’t the only attempt on Cecily’s life; we also get to witness her tumble from her hotel balcony after the rail has been vandalized, but she is not badly injured because she manages to grab some vines on her descent. Helen witnesses this incident and then spends a day caring for Cecily, who campaigns mightily for Helen’s alliance. But Helen is torn about who to believe. Philip, who glowers and shouts a lot, tells her that Cecily is staging the whole thing so as to coerce him into giving her a big divorce settlement. Helen’s boyfriend, a real estate venturer and gadabout named Doug whom she met on the island, is convinced that Philip is the bad guy, but Helen is trying to remain impartial. Doug is waiting for his business partner to turn up so they can seal a deal to buy land for a new hotel. When that’s done with, he wants to run off with Helen, because he feels she is in mortal danger living in Philip’s house. But she’s not sure about marrying Doug. While three dates don’t seem like all that much to base your decision to spend the rest of your life with someone, that’s not Helen’s real worry—she is concerned about what will happen to Tony if she leaves.

Adding to the tortuous plot is the fact that Tony’s nurse Janna, who also fears she is going to be killed, has holed herself up in a locked room in a cave under the island. Helen is trying to get Janna to come out, and when she finally gets into Janna’s room, the nanny’s wrists have been slashed, and Helen is concerned that it wasn’t a suicide attempt but a murder attempt! Fortunately, Helen’s fast actions save Janna’s life, and she’s so speedy about it that she still has time to pack Cecily and Tony off with Doug and his newly arrived business partner on Doug’s boat and then impersonate Cecily at a meeting on a cliff that evening with someone whom she assumes will be the murderous Philip.

It turns out that it wasn’t really Philip who was trying to kill Cecily, but the plot was so transparent that I was not at all surprised at the ending—except by the last few pages, when Helen, recuperating at Philip’s house after the real killer finally succeeds in offing Cecily and in bashing Helen unconscious, declares that Philip has been tortured for years by his suspicion that someone poisoned his mother, driving her mad and inspiring her to dig up this tree on the patio with her bare hands just before she died babbling about Heaven and death. Helen has uncovered the secret behind all that in a book about trees—I am not kidding—and now that she’s clued Philip in, he “was whole again,” and did you also pick up on the fact that he is now also, conveniently, a widow, and so free to marry again? Again, this may sound amusing in synopsis, but in Lois Eby’s leaden prose, it’s only inane.

This book poses as a Gothic story, but the house is not much of a character in this book and is, in fact, “a warm house, a loving house.” In addition to posing as Gothic, the book also wants to be a mystery and a romance—and it ends up zero for three. The writing is so perfunctory and uninteresting that I cannot begin to imagine what made the publishers think it deserved more than 200 pages. The plot is contrived and confusing, yet nonetheless manages to be completely predictable. We would actually be better off if the book was spectacularly bad, because an epic fail would at least engender some strong emotion—but the only emotion this book gave me was a mild bewilderment.

Arctic Nurse

By Dorothy Dowdell, ©1966
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

When beautiful, dark-haired Lori Waters came home to Alaska, she was escaping the memory of heartbreak. She had fallen in love with young Dr. Cliff Randolph, handsome, brilliant, and devil-may-care. But she had lost him, and now she desperately plunged into the excitement and challenge of her work as head nurse on difficult, peril-filled medical missions to distant Alaskan villages. Then, one day, the new doctor arrived. As he descended from the airplane, Lori felt her heart skip a beat, then start throbbing violently. It was Cliff—who now said he loved her. But could she believe him, with his mocking smile and ironic gaze? Could she trust this man who had once so cruelly betrayed her?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“As they drove back to the Littner home, she half-wished that Bob would carry her off like a cave man and end the matter once and for all.”

REVIEW:
Lori Waters is a bit unusual in VNRNs in that she is biracial, half Indian and half white. She was “raised white” by her mother, but her Indian heritage manifests itself in an ivory amulet around her neck that she spends a lot of time fondling throughout the book. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, with her grandfather, Chief Whitewaters, who is college-educated and holds an important position with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. (Her parents are, as is common amongst VNRN heroines, dead; her mother died of cancer when Lori was in nursing school and her father was killed in the Korean War.) She works as the nurse on a series of clinics run in the remote areas around Fairbanks, which she reaches by plane with doctor and pilot Bob Littner. She is crucial to these missions because her grandfather taught her many Indian languages, so she can converse with the natives.

Bob is a childhood friend of Lori’s who is increasingly putting the pressure on her to marry him. She feels very torn about this: She thinks he would make a great husband, but her heart’s not in it. You see, when she was in training in Seattle, she fell madly in love with upper-crust Dr. Clifford Randolph. He dated her for a year—but after one hot and heavy date, she returned to the nurse’s dorm to find a newspaper left anonymously on her pillow with an announcement of Cliff’s engagement to a society princess. Now, a year later, she’s still not over him.

So when one of the usual Alaskan MDs is away for the summer and a new doc from Seattle arrives to take his place, you should not be at all surprised to find that it is Dr. Randolph who steps off the plane. He tells Lori that his engagement ended last week by mutual consent—“it was one of those deals where we had always known each other,” Cliff tells her, describing, curiously, the same situation as Lori and Bob’s. Upon finding himself single, he has made tracks to Alaska to see her. Indeed, he soon proposes to Lori, and though she is a bit wary of him, she accepts. This means that she is going to have to leave Alaska for Seattle, perhaps never to see her grandfather again. Chief Whitewaters is vehemently against the marriage because, as he tells Lori, “Only you can carry out my dream to better the lot of our people.” Although, since Lori is planning to quit working “for good” when she marries, I’m not really sure how much of a difference Lori is going to make.

It’s the usual formula, with Bob begging Lori to reconsider and moping around a lot, even coming to blows with Cliff, until Lori is finally persuaded that Cliff is—duh—the wrong man. This occurs when there is a major earthquake in the north, coincidentally occurring the day before Lori and Cliff are to fly to Hawaii to meet up with his family and get married. Lori, Cliff, and Bob fly off to the hinterlands, where they spend 24 hours patching people up. But then Cliff, increasingly anxious about the fact that further delay will make him and Lori late for the party his mother has arranged for them in Honolulu, arranges for them to fly with a batch of wounded patients on a Red Cross plane to Fairbanks, where they can catch their jet to Hawaii. Lori, aghast that Cliff would rank his own personal interests first during a major disaster, puts him on the Red Cross plane, alone. “I guess I’m far more Indian than I realize,” she tells him. “I can’t go off and leave them.”

When the disaster is laid to rest and they’re back in Fairbanks, Lori and Bob are having coffee in the hospital—the VNRN romantic equivalent of a candlelight bistro in Paris—when she tells him, “I guess I’m not in love with Cliff after all,” and suddenly Bob is making her eyes light up in a new way. It’s a bit perplexing and way too pat, given the earlier descriptions of how she cried her eyes out for a year after Cliff dumped her and her hand-wringing about how, though Bob is otherwise so perfect for her, she does not love him. But I shouldn’t have been surprised; this entire book is perfunctory and automatic, with little of interest to keep the pages turning.

No Tears Tomorrow

By Helaine Ross
(pseud. Dorothy Daniels), ©1962
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

When beautiful Colette LeClair, M.D., decided to come to the tiny island of Northport to fight a dread children’s disease, she left behind an exciting career in a big city hospital, and a man who promised to wait for her love. But now, it seemed that the town did not want an “outsider’s” help … and even their ruggedly handsome young doctor suddenly and mysteriously disappeared from Colette’s laboratory. Colette LeClair was a lovely woman and a dedicated doctor, but she could not cure the ache in her own heart.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“The efficiency drained out of her and she was just a very attractive, very exhausted young woman of twenty-eight who should have been gracing the ballroom floor of a fine New Orleans hotel.”

“You’re not a young girl any more. You’re throwing aside such fine chances to make up for all those dreary years you spent in school.”

“You’re a strange female. You keep getting more and more attractive.”

“They tell me you’re a real doctor. Hard to believe. Pretty girls are to be looked at and courted and made much of, not treat somebody’s bellyache.”

“It’s rather wonderful to have two strong men fighting over me.”

“You were so pretty you had to be a good doctor.”

REVIEW:
Colette LeClair is a southern belle through and through—except for the minor detail that she’s been through medical school—and this is a main reason why we are supposed to admire her. On the first page we find out that she is 5'5" and 116 pounds, which means that if she loses six pounds she will be medically underweight. She wears two-inch pumps to benefit her “slim, well-shaped legs” even if they’re hard on her feet, and “she was possessed of the soft complexion of someone brought up in a gentle climate by parents sufficiently well-to-do so that Colette never had to worry.” Her fiancé, Dr. Martin Ames, by contrast, is a former football player (this fact is so important that we are told this in the fourth sentence of our acquaintance with him) who is a “tall, ruggedly built man.” Let the stereotypes go forth and prosper!

As the book opens, she is working on the pediatric leukemia ward, where she encounters little dying waif Mary Larkin. From Mary’s mother, Addie, she learns that their home, a small island off the coast of Maine, has had eight cases of leukemia this year, despite the fact that the disease is rare and the island holds only 365 residents. Colette is instantly bitten with the idea that she must go to Northport Island and find the cure to leukemia, which she feels must be there, because this concentration of cases is “perhaps the most important break we’ve had” in the fight against leukemia. Marty, who is planning to open a his-and-hers practice in New Orleans when they finish their residencies in a few months, is a bit steamed about this decision, but eventually agrees: “You go and get this out of your system, dear, and then come back and settle down.”

So off she goes, and within a few days she’s arrived at Addie’s empty house. The house is wicked cold because it’s fall, and she’s about to freeze to death when Mike Cameron walks through her door and turns up the thermostat. (She being from the south, she had no idea what that contraption on the wall was for.) Mike is a former doctor who quit practicing when he became an alcoholic, and now he lives on the island full-time so as to avoid temptation. Colette cooks him dinner and then hustles him out the door, because she has to be up early to get to work: “In her assigned rôle of leukemia research, minutes were precious.” That extra hour the next morning is going to make all the difference! So at dawn she is up and fiddling with the thermostat and the coffee pot, and then running into town to chat up the locals at the general store. Everyone is pretty forthcoming about the answers to her questions, and helpfully offers directions to the house of one of the leukemia victims, but she leaves the store thinking, “The people were too much like the climate—cold. She could almost imagine she could see the chilly frost on them.” I don’t know what more she is anticipating, but with this sentiment I began to think Colette LeClair, medical degree notwithstanding, is a bit shallow.

Her encounter with the local doc didn’t change my mind on that score. He’s with a patient when she comes into the waiting room, but “Colette had an idea she was being deliberately kept waiting, for half an hour went by.” Believe me, it’s not tough to spend 30 minutes with a patient, which she should surely know, but she seems to be under the impression that it’s all about her. When she finally gets in to see him, Dr. Tierney initially refuses to cooperate, but then Mike shows up and bullies the man into releasing his charts on the leukemia victims and their families to Colette, a clear violation of at least today’s medical ethics.

Mike goes back to her house with her, offers to help her with her research, but then comes across a photo of Marty and storms out of the house. Self-centered Colette thinks that “Mike must have been disappointed and that an alcoholic needs only an excuse to start drinking.” So she chases him back to his house and, in what may be the second hour she’s spent with him, tells him that she’s really in love with him. “She needed him,” she thinks as he’s kissing her. “He would be indispensable in her work, and if he gave way to his problem of drinking, he would be useless. Therefore, perhaps she loved him to keep him from that and for selfish reasons concerned more with research than love.” Well, I don’t know about you, but that didn’t improve my opinion of Dr. LeClair. And when Mike proposes the very next day, she agrees without even stopping to consider her other fiancé.

The next day, though, “she had to admit she missed Marty Ames.” But on the following page, when Mike insists that she hasn’t yet forgotten Marty, she answers, “I think of him, but that doesn’t mean I want to be with him, or that I’m sorry I broke off with him.” Even to herself, during a solitary walk on the beach, she cannot be honest: “She refused to ponder the idea of whether she was in love with Mike. She wasn’t actually certain whom she loved, if anyone.” Then Mike disappears from the island without leaving a note, and Marty turns up. He asks her to leave the island and marry him right away. Her answer—“I … think so”—strikes even him as insincere, but when he asks her, “Has anything happened on this island to make you doubt that being married to me is the best thing?” The little minx, “she shook her head and smiled warmly. ‘No, Marty.’ ” There are words for women (and men) who act like this, but they’re seldom encountered in a VNRN.

Mike soon returns, and it turns out he’s gone to get little Mary Larkin, whose miraculous recovery convinces the islanders to fully cooperate with Colette’s research. But Colette tells Mike she’s leaving the island with Marty in a few days, now that Mike’s back—“Back and cold sober,” he answers. “Colette said sharply, ‘No one even considered …’ ” But this is a lie, for the minute she finds that he’s left the island on his boat, she thinks, “The reason for Mike Cameron’s disappearance was obvious. He had taken his cruiser and gone to the mainland where he could indulge in his crippling habit.” Indeed, she even tells Marty that Mike “went off to find some comfort in the only way he seems to know.”

Marty has to get back to New Orleans right away, but Colette needs a few days to wrap up her research with Mike. After Marty has gone, Addie tells Colette that Marty had received two reports about Mary’s progress that he had deliberately not forwarded to her, even knowing that as Mary’s doctor and alleged leukemia researcher, Colette would have wanted those reports very badly. Colette decides that Marty had been deliberately trying to torpedo her enthusiasm for research on the island, and this is apparently supposed to be enough of a reason for Colette to exhibit even more of her fickle behavior. She takes Mike to New York and the pair makes lots of speeches to leukemia researchers and convinces them to open a major leukemia research lab on the island, a development that occurs in a swift two pages. And best of all, Mike has just one Manhattan!! “I could have refused the first, but it’s no longer necessary for me to try to govern myself,” he explains to Colette. “I’ve licked it. I’ve come to realize that I have some vitally important work to do. Tricky work, at which a hang-over would be a serious impediment. So—that’s it.” All that’s left is for Colette to telephone Marty and dump him, and she and Mike can ride off into a snowstorm.

It’s not just Colette’s character that is a bit uneven; her ideas about leukemia and its cure are many and contradictory. At one point she talks about how “leukemia may be transmitted. Not like smallpox but from sort of contact or some previous illness.” Later she says that leukemia is “certainly not” infectious; “it has been proved that leukemia can’t be caught.” On the other hand, she also is convinced that it may be a virus—though any disease transmitted by virus is, by definition, infectious. “I’m trying to find the proof that other children on this island, along with adults, have become immune to leukemia,” she tells Mike, and that this may be due to “an immunizing virus.” She’s under the impression that “if no other person on this island gets leukemia, then it’s a good indication that everybody is somehow immune,” an idea utterly bereft of logic. But that’s not her only theory: “Perhaps there’s some other disease, which all of the children had—knowingly or unknowingly—and this left its mark so that later they were susceptible to leukemia.” So in total I count at least three different theories she’s going to be chasing down—and even before she abruptly decided to leave the island with Marty she had been planning on being back in New Orleans in “a few months.” Has she stopped to consider the long decades that thousands of researchers had already been working on this disease? Dr. LeClair is either very naïve or very conceited. I’m betting on the latter.

This book did have more camp than I've seen in the VNRNs I’ve read lately, and it starts right with the opening sentence: “Colette LeClair wore her white coat as glamorously as a society debutante wears her mink.” But our heroine has more than a few major character flaws: She lies, and she’s ridiculously fickle. I have to ask myself, when I meet these lame heroines, if the author ever stops to consider that her leading lady has the depth and sophistication of a mud puddle, and that some might therefore find it difficult to respect her. Indeed, I could not bring myself to care for her at all, and rather worried how long it would be before the dopey man who ended up with her would soon regret his choice.

Clinic Nurse

By Adelaide Humphries, ©1958
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

After three years at an exclusive girls’ school, Susan Randall decided to finish her education by taking a course in physical therapy at the University. Upon graduation, Susan threw herself wholeheartedly into her work as a physical therapist in a New York clinic. It was incidental to Susan that handsome Jon Crawford, whose small daughter was a patient at her clinic, was a very rich man. In Susan’s scheme of things, Jon was no more important than her young neighbor, Ray Farrell, disabled and embittered by a serious accident. Through her skill, perhaps she could bring Ray back to health …

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“How could anyone want to be a nurse? Why would anyone want to be around sick people all the time? Listening to them moan and groan …”

“Some people claimed the present generation was wild, with rock ’n’ roll and all.”

“Forgive me for saying so, Susan, but I certainly wouldn’t want you to practice on me if I were a patient!”

“When you grow up, you stop having birthdays; especially if you’re a girl. Girls don’t want people to know they are getting older. After they reach twenty-one, they stay there—for a while, anyway.”

REVIEW:
Susan Randall has been attending a women’s college when she decides that a liberal arts degree is not really what she wants. She’s decided to leave Meredith College and transfer to another school where she can study to become a nurse specializing in physical therapy. This decision comes as a devastating blow to her fashionable mother, Mrs. Randall: “ ‘Columbia!’ she exclaimed in a horrified voice. ‘But that’s a coeducational school, Susan. Why would a girl like you want a diploma from Columbia when she could get it from one of the most exclusive women’s colleges in the country? And what on earth is Physical Therapy?’ ”

Mrs. Randall is constantly pushing Susan to dress better, wear her hair more stylishly, and date the right men—because winning the right husband for her daughter is her raison d’être. As such, she scores the lion’s share of the best lines, such as when she describes a friend of Susan’s: “She looked positively frumpy, like the sort of girl who had always been a wall-flower and would never catch a husband no matter how hard she—or her mother—tried.” Because Susan lives at home, we’re treated regularly to these sorts of harangues, and toward the end of the book I started to marvel that they still retained their humor and freshness, a tip of the hat to author Adelaide Humphries.

Susan has been friends with this boy down the street, Ray Farrell. Ray had an unfortunate accident when he fell from a telephone pole—he was working as a lineman—and broke both his legs. He’s been unable to walk since then, but Susan is convinced that with a little PT, Ray can rule the world. Indeed, once she has graduated and gotten a job, she persuades the spinster nurse who runs the physical therapy clinic to take on Ray as a pro bono patient, and soon he’s up and hobbling around, his limp becoming increasingly less noticeable. To show his gratitude, Ray stops calling Susan for dates.

But not to worry, there’s this little girl at the clinic, Bitsy, who’s been paralyzed by polio. Her father, Jon Crawford, is a single man in possession of a good fortune, who certainly must be in want of a wife. Indeed, he soon proposes to Susan, but she is only shocked: “This was absurd! Asking her to marry him when they had only met three times! The whole idea was ridiculous.” He is completely up-front about the fact that he does not love her, but nonetheless tries to persuade her by parroting Mrs. Randall’s sentiment that “every girl wants to be married,” and by saying he would permit her to continue working—with Bitsy, but Susan could also “give a few hours a week to the clinic. Most women seem to want some outside interest, say a pet charity, or something of the sort, after they marry.” Though Susan isn’t terribly impressed—“every woman wanted to be loved for herself”—she still thinks that “any proposal of marriage was an honor,” and continues to date him, even if she is partly creeped out by him.

That’s really about all there is to the plot of this book—Susan dating Jon, occasionally seeing Ray, working with Bitsy. You will not be surprised to learn that Susan’s affections increasingly turn toward Ray, just as her feeling of obligation to Jon—and even more to Bitsy—deepens. So how will we get Susan off the hook? Why, bring back Bitsy’s “dead” mother, of course—it turns out she was an opera singer who took a part in an opera on the West Coast, and was promptly served with divorce papers accusing her of desertion. Now, thankfully, Mom has come to her senses: “I no longer care about singing; I don’t believe I will ever sing again.” So she’s now eligible to resume her role as wife and mother. Phew!

With Jon and Bitsy off her back, Susan is now free to worry about the fish that got away: “Lately there were times when Susan, in looking ahead, wondered if her work would always be enough. It could be for someone like Miss Armstrong, but Susan wasn’t certain she had that much fortitude.” Because even strong women have their breaking points, and Mrs. Randall’s truism is ringing in our ears: “I never heard of a young girl who didn’t want to get married! It’s unnatural!” Re-enter Ray, who just got a promotion in the personnel department at work. “I’ll be able to take care of a wife now,” he tells Susan. He thinks that in a year or so he should be able to swing one—is Susan interested in the job? To her credit, she says, “If you’ll hurry up and ask me, Ray, we could get married right away. I can go on working at the clinic—lots of wives do, you know. Together we can manage until you become, if not the president of the company, at least one of the bigwigs. You will, you know, with a wife to help you.” He’s so pleased by this that he responds, “Of course I wouldn’t ask you to give up your work when it means so much to you, Susan. Not for a while, anyway.”

We can give partial credit to Adelaide Humphries for pursuing the idea that a woman working is acceptable, even after marrying—up to a point. It seems that once the children are born you really have to abandon that sort of foolishness. The book is not badly written and is entertaining enough, but there’s just not all that much there. What it has is pleasant, but don’t plan on making a meal of it; it’s more of a light snack, like a dish of salted peanuts to accompany your cocktail.

A Nurse Comes Home

By Ethel Hamill
(pseud. Jean Francis Webb III), ©1954
Cover illustration by Edrien King

 

When lovely, blonde Elizabeth Lane returned home to San Francisco, she thought she could take up her life just as it had been before. But in the three years the young nurse had been away—years spent as a prisoner of the enemy in Asia—grave changes had taken place. Handsome Doctor Marsh Carson, who had sworn to marry her, now was engaged to the ravishing, yet strangely sinister Karen Russell. Barney Jordan, who had helped Elizabeth survive her harsh captivity, now claimed a debt she felt she could never honestly repay. Then there was the rugged young newspaperman, Scott Alexander, with his probing questions and disturbing attractiveness. And Elizabeth quickly discovered that she herself was no longer the same girl who had gone away, as she struggled to find out what this new person who bore her name should do.

 

GRADE: A-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“So you’re a good nurse. I need you as a woman. The woman I love!”

 

“I meant to get down to Dr. Carson’s shindig yesterday, but we had an unexpected polio case brought in, and I was all day on the telephone locating another iron lung.”

 

“It was Aunt Wilma’s firm conviction that none of this world’s ills struck too deep to be at least mitigated by hot tea and cinnamon toast.”

 

REVIEW:

As some VNRN authors induce fear and loathing (I’m looking at you, Jeanne Bowman), others land in your lap like a light blue box from Tiffany wrapped in a white satin ribbon. Jean Webb, writing as Ethel Hamill, is most definitely one of the latter; he can write circles around almost everyone else out there. The very first page serves up little prose gems to admire, such as when Nurse Elizabeth Lane is cruising into San Francisco Bay: “San Francisco … She said the name over to herself for perhaps the thousandth time that morning, taking comfort from the syllables as old ladies were supposed to take comfort from a cup of hot tea.”

 

She’s coming home after two years in a prison camp in Korea to be reunited with Dr. Marsh Carson (one of my ongoing quibbles with VNRNs is the ridiculous names they give to the love interests). Like most fickle fiancés, though, in her absence he’s become engaged to the svelte minx Karen Russell. But the man whom she leaned on during her internment, Barney Jordan, is standing by her side—maybe a little too close for comfort, as he soon professes his deep love for her, leaving her with two fellas to contend with. Actually, make that three—as she steps off the boat, famous photographer Scott Alexander snaps her picture, which is broadcast on front pages across the country. He’s now hounding her for an expanded profile piece with lots of pictures to go with it, so he’s hanging around too. For a malnourished, emotionally scarred wreck, she sure is irresistible to the boys.

 

Of course, every one of them has obstacles. Marsh is, of course, engaged to someone else, but he does seem to get awfully jealous of the other boys in Elizabeth’s life. “I’m hanged if I’ll let Barney get away with stealing my girl!” he fumes to Elizabeth, totally oblivious the fact that he abandoned any claim he ever may have had on her when he proposed to Karen. Speaking of whom, his fiancée is quite a cat, and she uses her armory of claws to full effect to keep a grip on her man. Part of her efforts in this direction involve uncovering the fact that Barney, before he went to Korea, was a bank robber who skipped out on his parole and has a little prison sentence waiting for him back in Chicago. She is on the verge of spilling this little tidbit—where else?—at Elizabeth’s welcome home party, but Elizabeth cuts her off and announces that she and Barney are engaged, thus saving Barney from jail: As long as Karen’s competition for Marsh’s affections are engaged elsewhere, she’ll keep her lipsticked moue closed. In the meantime, the old judge, who is a longtime friend of Elizabeth’s family, is working to get Barney pardoned in light of his heroics at the Korean prison camp, but it will go a lot easier with a standup nurse like Elizabeth willing, by marrying him, to vouch for his character and to keep him on the straight and narrow.

 

Scott, meanwhile, is playing the part of the wounded suitor, and though Elizabeth is torn by her feelings for him, she just can’t seem to bring herself to explain the truth of the situation to him and insists that she must go through with the sham marriage to Barney. Everything gets wrapped up tidily in the end, of course, with a crashing finale in the pool cabana that leaves Marsh in a coma. It’s pretty good stuff, but not quite as fabulous as it could have been, I have to say.

 

Part of the fun for me is the fact that this book is set in San Francisco, the greatest city on the planet. There are references to the usual landmarks, of course, but some surprised me, to wit: “They cut along the edge of Union Square, past a yawning mouth to that amazing underground parking garage for which the whole Square had been torn up and set down again just before the second World War.” All the times I passed by, it never occurred to me to consider that garage with anything akin to wonder.

 

I also appreciate the fact that after returning home from years of deprivation and torture in the prison camp, Elizabeth and Barney are not laughing and dancing and partying it up. They are haunted by their experiences—and though this is brought up regularly, it is not rubbed in our faces, sensationalized, or irritating. It’s just a fact of their lives. If the complicated web of Elizabeth’s love life is a bit overwrought—and I’m not a big fan of the I-have-to-marry-this-man-even-though-I-love-someone-else plot—the writing is excellent and the characters are well-drawn (with the exception of Elizabeth, who is the weakest of the lot). The most depressing thing about reading this book is that it means I only have four more books by Ethel Hamill left to read.

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