My Surgeon Neighbour

By Jane Arbor, ©1964

Cover illustration by Bern Smith

 

When Nurse Sarah Sanstead inherited an old house in the country and decided to turn it into a convalescent home for children, she did not guess the complications which would ensue. Her new neighbour, the surgeon Oliver Mansbury, wanted the house as an extension for his next-door nursing home, and did not hesitate to express his scepticism about Sarah’s plans: “Aren’t you really only waiting to be collected as some man’s wife, the mother of his children?” Sarah was indignant. But little did she realize that a time would come when she would hope against hope that she might become Oliver Mansbury’s wife and the mother of his children.

 

GRADE: C+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Not that you don’t look just as sweet in your starch. But I’ll say you can blossom when you like.”

 

“So many children are spoonfed on TV that the ones who really prefer to get things from books appear as freaks of nature.”

 

“A man loves a woman quite differently from the way she loves him, everyone knows.”

 

REVIEW:

“Mother of his children”? Maybe this phrase off the back cover blurb above is meant to be a euphemism, but when I see a hot guy, the last thing I think about is babies. Regardless, when Sarah Sanstead inherits an enormous old house in the country, she decides to turn it into a rehab facility for children recovering from illness. The rub is that her neighbors have turned their house into a rehab facility for old folks, and matron Kate of Greystones is fighting with Sarah at every turn about it, because she had hoped to buy Sarah’s house and expand her own facility. And those screaming kids make such a racket!

 

The matron’s nephew, Oliver Mansbury, is (guess) a surgeon in the employ of Greystones; though you’d think an internist might have been a better choice, you just can’t get good help these days. Oliver is initially opposed to Sarah’s plans, and has a talk with her early on when she refuses his offers to buy her out. He wants to know if she is really committed to her facility, or is her devotion “the kind a lot of women parade as a virtue, when they’re really only waiting to be collected as some man’s wife”? She is shocked—shocked!—by the question, and declares that she is utterly sincere. “My job is the one thing I want to do,” she says—but adds, “when I marry I should want that to be the one thing I must do.” So how will she manage, he wants to know, when her true love comes along? “When there’s just one thing that you know matters most to you, everything else takes second place,” she answers naively. He is skeptical, and dubious of her facility, but in a few more pages, the place is up and running smoothly, and Oliver is easily won over by the young lady’s hard work and dedication.

 

So now it’s the daily ups and downs of a house full of children, men to go out with even though they’re really just good friends and not boyfriends, and minor skirmishes with Matron Kate and, also, Jurice Grey, a wealthy and shallow young woman who is hoping to become engaged to Oliver, in part by kneecapping the competition she sees over the fence. And Sarah’s own growing affection for Oliver, but if “the leap of her heart at sight [of] him was too disturbingly familiar,” she is wholly unable to see that she is falling for him. I am always irritated by this particular contrivance of the VNRN, as it just makes our heroine seem stupid. The penny always drops eventually; “she loved the man,” Sarah finally realizes in the penultimate chapter, which comes as a surprise to exactly no one else. But “the realization shook her to the core.” Ugh.

 

Without much fuss, Sarah and Oliver eventually find their way to each other. But now rears its head the question of which is more important to Sarah, her work or her man. “If I insist that marriage to me will be a full time job,” Oliver says, will she agree to close down? Yes, she will, “without question”—but not to worry, folks, he was just joking! “I was testing your wifely compliance,” he explains, ha ha, and isn’t it big of him to let her keep her business after all? Only, though, if she agrees to expand into something much larger, an idea she has resisted mightily throughout the book. “ ‘Now you are beginning to manage me too!’ she accused him happily,” because nothing makes a lady more pleased than to be bossed around by her boyfriend. “Who with a better right?” he answers, and all there is for them to kiss and live happily ever after, or at least until Sarah recovers the staunch independence of spirit that has made her facility a success up to this point.

 

This book is pleasant, but not much more than that. The characters are not especially exciting, with the sole exception of bad girl Jurice; her battles with Sarah are the only spice the story has to offer, even if they, too, are as predictable as the rest of the book. It’s a vanilla pudding—easy, smooth, and nice enough, but maybe not the first thing you’d reach for, if there’s molten chocolate cake to be had. There’s not always, I’ll grant you, so it will do in a pinch, but it’s nonetheless best left at the back of the cupboard for a day when it’s otherwise bare.

Nurse from the Shadows

By Arlene Hale, ©1975

Nurse Adena York had been in love with Dr. Dave Bradfield for a long time. But every time the subject of marriage came up, Dave found some excuse to put it off. Adena became alternately depressed and exasperated. Why couldn’t Dave see that they were really meant for each other? Why? A new doctor had joined the hospital staff. He was quite a bit younger than Dave. But Adena, tired of what she regarded as the runaround from Dave, found it easy to accept the newcomer’s date-offers. But one day a bombshell erupted—and it seemed as if Dave, her dearest, most wonderful Dave, was caught right in the middle of it. It was then, while Dave fought to save a life, that the dark shadows fell away from between them … at long last.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“ ‘You certainly know how to please a man, Adena,’ Doctor Dave Bradfield said. ‘I always thought nurses made terrible housewives. Yet, you have this very nice apartment and you can cook like a dream.’ ”

“Most women frighten me unless they’re anesthetized and under my scalpel in the O.R.”

“I take my belt to all lovely women.”

“Go home and fix your warrior a nice supper—nothing rich or heavy.”

REVIEW:
Adena York is unique among VNRN nurses in that she is in her 30s. Her boyfriend, Dr. Dave Bradfield, is in his 50s, though, so there’s still that classic 10- to 15-year age gap that always baffles me—the inherent inequality of a relationship in which the man is almost old enough to be your father is absolutely not appealing to me. Adena has been dating Dave for five years now, and he still hasn’t come up with a ring. He had been married early in life to a woman who’d walked out on him, and this seems to make him gun-shy. Adena, naturally, is beginning to lose patience.

Then Dave interviews surgeon Scott Lockwood to work at the clinic he heads up. Scott is a brilliant doctor at 26, and he works with Dave in the OR like he’s Dave’s left hand. But Dave is uneasy: “He couldn’t shake the feeling that something didn’t ring true about Scott.” He hires him anyway, and soon he’s starting to wonder if Scott is scheming to unseat him in his position as clinic chief. Then the son of his best friend is brought in after a car accident and requires urgent surgery. Scott is off, not even on call, but Dave is unreasonably furious at Scott for not being available to do the surgery, and insists that even on his days off, Scott should be calling in every hour. Scott is not convinced, and the two now become overt enemies.

Meanwhile, Adena dumps Dave and starts dating Scott. Scott is also dating the daughter of the clinic’s owner, and Dave believes that both relationships are meant to unsettle him, one emotionally and the other from his job. Then a malpractice lawsuit comes up, involving Dave’s handling of a patient we have only met in passing, and this lawsuit is threatening to destroy Dave’s career and bring down the clinic at the same time. These days, when doctors expect to be sued regularly, this crisis seemed overblown, but maybe the torts were different in those times. Dave is indeed asked to step down from his job, and as he’s hanging up the phone from hearing this news, it rings again—it’s his ex-wife, in town and dying of emphysema, and now the secret comes out that Scott is actually Dave’s son! Which the savvy reader began suspecting 50 pages ago!! Dave responds by getting into a boat and drifting around the local fishing hole for an entire day, moping. “All his life he had wanted a son, needed a son and when he had found him, he was betrayed by him!” Poor Dave!

But he needn’t worry, since there are only six more pages left, so everything is quickly set to rights: Dave and Scott kiss and make up, the clinic owner’s daughter marries to an Englishman, the malpractice suit is dropped, Scott decides he really wants to date his secretary, and even Adena gets her man in the end. The fact that she’s been kissing Dave’s son is not addressed, so it’s just left to the reader to imagine the awkwardness at Thanksgiving.

This book is a complete dud. In the first place, the title turned out to be too true—the nurse is left completely in the background in this book, as it is told entirely from Dave’s point of view, so it doesn’t actually qualify as a nurse novel. Secondly, even if nurse Adena York had been the star of the book, its plotline—how the young lady lands the reluctant longtime beau—is my least favorite: There’s no surprise and no real choice for the heroine, as she’s already made it when the book opens. Then the “drama” of Scott turning out to be Dave’s son is so not; I had suspected this all along. But even if I hadn’t figured that out, I just didn’t care what happened to Dave or Scott or even Adena. They’re all vapid, empty characters with not a thing to recommend them. I don’t expect anything much from Arlene Hale, who despite her prodigious output is mediocre at best, but the interesting title and cover illustration did give me some hope. Fooled again.

Five Nurses

By Rose Williams
(pseud. William E. Daniel Ross), ©1964
Cover illustration by Mort Engel

Five beautiful nurses … They had been close friends in nursing school and now they had gathered for their fifth reunion … There was –
Louise: the class belle, now desperately ill
Linda: who had married for money and lived to regret it
Harriet: who shut out love for her career
Janice: unbalanced by the deaths of husband and child
Shirley: with her heart torn between a film tycoon and a devil-may-care reporter…
A dramatic story of the highly eventful lives of five lovely young nurses.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“Sometimes she felt that girls with plain faces had all the best of it.”

“Every day I look around and see more mixed-up people. We haven’t enough psychiatrists to cope with them. We’re living in mentally sick times, Miss Jensen.”

“If she’d only do more with herself. She’s always looked older than she should because she’s so careless with clothes and make-up. Has she improved any?”

“You girls are all alike. Never want to eat anything.”

“Only in New England can you get French food like this.”

REVIEW:
This book may pretend to be a story about five nurses, but in fact it’s the story of one nurse with four nurse friends. Something else that struck me somewhere in the third chapter, as I encountered the phrase “dark girl” seven times in three pages, is that this book is written by Mr. Ross, who has an enduring attachment to that particular descriptor (see Network Nurse and Nurse in Nassau), and whose four other books I have read were not terribly impressive. He has lived up to his reputation with Five Nurses.

Shirley Jensen is leaving Miami, where she has been caring for wealthy Max Kane. He is all better now, and she’s decided to use an upcoming fifth-year reunion of her nursing class as an excuse to move to Boston, the site of her alma mater. Shirley is looking forward to the gathering; “there would be the excitement of planning what she’d wear to the reunion.” She’s also eager to catch up with old friends like Harriet Sanders, who springs to mind when she’s wishing she were ugly so she wouldn’t have to fend off Max’s advances. She then thinks of Janice Kent, “her best girlfriend,” whom she hasn’t spoken to in two years—“the last Shirley had heard, Janice had been in a dreadful car accident in which her husband and baby had been killed.” Shirley is, in a word, shallow.

Back in Boston, she takes a room with her former classmate Louise Shannon and her husband, Bob. “The first thought that came to Shirley as she looked up into the face of the dark girl was that Louise had failed terribly,” as she’s looking pale and tired. It turns out that Louise has leukemia, a fact she has told no one, including her husband Bob; Shirley only finds out when she runs into the absurdly unprofessional doctor treating Louise. He adds, “I’ve managed to keep it quiet,” though I’m not sure how, if he’s telling the fatal secret to a woman he hasn’t seen in five years within 60 seconds of her walking through his office door.

Next Shirley visits her old friend Linda, who promptly dropped nursing after graduating to marry, and now has a two-year-old daughter, Ann. She also takes up where she left off with Jerry Wade, a former reporter for the Boston Globe who quit the paper to write a novel that never materialized. Even Max turns up, in town for a business meeting, and she has dinner with him; “in spite of the gray at his temples, he looked quite handsome.” Perhaps it’s the gray that causes her to turn him down when he proposes after dinner at Locke-Ober and a performance by Robert Goulet, who “did a wonderful show that made Shirley forget her problems for a time,” namely that “Louise is slowly succumbing to an incurable disease and Janice is deep in a world of madness.” Yes, Shirley’s problems are heavy, indeed. Or maybe she’s really worried about the fact that she’d spent nearly two hours in a Brookline shopping center searching for a suitable party dress and found nothing in her size that seemed just right.

She shouldn’t have fretted, however, for the very next day at Filene’s better dress department, she quickly finds exactly what she’s looking for. And on her way out, she runs into Janice and has fairly normal lunch with her, though “she is still a bit odd.” Janice gets up to phone home, saying she was expected some time ago, and never returns to the table. Then “it came to her with striking abruptness that the frail girl had acted much too sanely in the last several minutes of their conversation. It should have been a warning to Shirley, who’d had experience in handling psychopathics.” Apparently acting normal is the classic sign of mental illness.

Then we hear that Janice has kidnapped Linda’s daughter. As the last person to see Janice, Shirley is brought to Linda’s house, where she is interviewed by the police inspector, who says supportive things like, “It’s not easy to deal with a madwoman,” and notes that Janice, while institutionalized, had attacked and severely wounded a hospital attendant. After a long pause, the dolt “seemed to realize that he had presented a frightening picture of their youngster’s plight to Linda and Frank,” but nonetheless feels compelled to add, “If we panic this poor demented creature, she could do some wild thing without considering the child’s welfare.” He should get Shirley’s phone number.

Jerry is by Shirley’s side through the whole ordeal, and even reaches out to his old contacts to help with the search. Dropping by his office to let Jerry’s boss Ruth know why he hasn’t been at work, “Shirley noted the attractive green outfit Ruth was wearing and suddenly felt dowdy. She had dressed hurriedly in a plain skirt and blouse, knowing that she would be wearing her raincoat and being more concerned with getting to Linda than with dressing in style.” Now she’s feeling the grave error of her careless ways but doesn’t have too much time to dwell on her gaffe, as they get a call from Harriet. In her work as a visiting nurse, Harriet has spotted Janice in an old Fenway tenement building, and Shirley and Jerry rush to the scene. Shirley is ushered up to the roof, where Janice is poised on the edge with Ann, and Shirley manages to talk Janice away from the brink. Once safely in Shirley’s arms, Janice lapses into a coma and is taken to the hospital, where they presumably will not be discharging her in time for the reunion, darn it!

Now that all the excitement is over, Jerry decides he’s going to quit working for Ruth—a job he hates—and go back to the Globe. “But won’t that be accepting defeat?” asks Shirley helpfully, apparently under the impression that after five years of floundering to write a novel, continuing to fail to produce one is better than returning to a career he had enjoyed. She adds that he shouldn’t count too much on her being a part of his new life, because “you’re one of those people who continually go around with their head in the clouds.” The Jerry we’ve seen up to now has been dependable, generous, and hard-working, so where this picture of a shiftless dreamer comes from is beyond me—but curiously, Jerry instantly becomes that person by “sulking.” The phone rings, and it’s Max. Shirley, displaying new depths of cruelty, has Jerry drive her to a late-night date with him—after she’s fixed her hair and changed into something fit to be seen. Max tells her he’s leaving for Florida tomorrow and again proposes. She again declines, but kisses him and whispers, “Come back to Boston, Max.” Is she just a ruthless tease, or is she changing her mind about Max?

The next morning, as Louise sleeps in, Shirley takes it upon herself to spill Louise’s secret and tells Bob that Louise has leukemia. But Louise and Bob have such a great marriage that Bob never tells Louise that he knows that she’s dying and instead starts cooking breakfast, which is sure to be a big help to Louise! Then it’s off to the department stores to find poor, plain Harriet a decent dress to wear to the reunion—though Shirley has to note that Harriet is still “looking a bit less glamorous” than Linda—and to get Louise into a red dress that “will help give you some color,” our compassionate stylist Shirley observes, and it’s off to the reunion! “During a lull in the proceedings, Shirley noticed that it was after seven-thirty and wondered if Max had started on his flight to California. For a moment she felt a certain sadness. Then she gave her attention to the speaker again.” So maybe she’s not in love with Max after all. But with shallow Shirley, who really knows? When they leave the reunion for the after-party in Wakefield, “Shirley thought they all looked beautiful and glamorous and still satisfyingly young. They were on their way to a party with the men they loved.” And that, oddly, is where the book ends.

I am not certain if this book actually counts as a nurse romance novel. Shirley has no fiancé at the end, but it’s suggested that she “loved” Jerry. She’s turned down his proposal—and Max’s as well—but are we now supposed to think that she’ll marry him after all? It is a welcome change to find a book without the usual climactic clinch, but I was more confused by the ending than anything else. And again and again, I was quite disgusted with Shirley’s preoccupation with her clothes and other people’s appearances. The way she waffles between Max and Jerry, accepting their advances but rebuffing their proposals, feeling “a certain sadness” and then promptly putting them out of her mind, shows something less than honorable intentions. She is not a respectable person, and her “heroism” in saving Janice from tossing herself and Ann off a building is more like happenstance than any real calling to help. The fact that this male writer created such a shallow heroine feels insulting, like he thought we chicks would really dig Shirley’s obsession with her wardrobe and utter lack of sincerity with her boyfriends, her girlfriends, or even her career. Shirley is not someone we will appreciate, and I also don’t appreciate the idea that the writer thinks we should.

An American Nurse in Paris

By Diane Frazer

(pseud. Dorothy Fletcher), ©1963

 

For years, pretty private nurse Norma Scott had dreamed of a European vacation. And when she was offered a special case which would take her to Paris, she had her dream on a silver platter. Europe—first-class, all expenses paid! But, on the day of departure, Norma’s aging patient, Mr. Whittaker, did not arrive. In his place, aboard the deluxe airliner, was his handsome son Thorne. Norma was outraged. Had she been deceived by the rich young man with whom she was Paris bound? But Thorne was persuasive and Norma’s heart found him hard to resist.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“You don’t have to make plans for Paris, Miss Scott. Paris makes plans for you.”

REVIEW:
Norma Scott is a nurse and a good girl. We know this about her because of one scene early on when she “quickly became aware that his eyes were focused on her legs. She hastily smoothed down her skirt, resolving to let it down an inch when she had the time. They were making them shorter and shorter these days. You could scarcely blame a man for … but oh, these Frenchmen.” So when she is lured into a two-week trip to Paris with the promise of an aging businessman patient and then finds that it’s the gentleman’s son, Thorne Whittaker, who seeks her company in other professional ways, she is outraged!

On their first night in Paris, before she has figured things out, he takes her out on the town, and soon finds her to be “very young, very untouched,” and decides that he really cares for her and has to tell her the truth. But once the cat is out, she refuses to have anything to do with him, though he swears over and over he will never lie to her again. She checks out of their chi-chi hotel near the Arc de Triomphe and into a pension, and gets a job at the American Hospital, where she immediately starts dating Dr. Bob Hoyt. “Yet her blood pressure remained at its usual level; there were no delicious little chills running down her spine.” And her thoughts continue to turn to that scamp, Thorne.

Soon she is involved in caring for the young son of a French friend of Thorne’s whom she had met before their parting; the boy, born in Algeria and now depatrified with the Algerian independence of 1962, has been injured while making a bomb. She is tipped off that the police are planning to search the family home, so she asks Thorne help her dispose of the boy’s illegal pistol. After scolding the boy into behaving himself from now on, she and Thorne set off on a very long date, which includes a meander through the Bois de Boulogne, espresso and Dubonnet on the Champs Elysée, and dinner and wine at a bistro on the Ile St. Louis. As they sit on the banks of his Seine—he’s spread his handkerchief on the cold stones for her—he apologizes and kisses her. She resists, saying “I wish I could believe you’re really a decent man and that never again will you try to trick me, be deceitful, that you’re not a playboy.” He just laughs: “If you don’t mind, Miss Scott, I don’t want to talk small talk,” so they stop talking for a while, and then Norma breathlessly says she’ll never doubt him again. Crossing the Seine, she suddenly remembers the parcel! “He laughed lightly. ‘I got rid of it,’ ” he says, admitting he dumped it into a trashcan hours ago. “Of all the low and dirty tricks!” she exclaims, and that’s the end of it.

This book is a throwaway. I adored the cover, and Paris as a backdrop had promise, bien sûr. Florence Stonebraker could have worked something better of the slightly risqué setup with half a typewriter, but in the end this is fluff with a paradoxical ending. Perhaps it’s meant to be amusingly ironic that Thorne’s latest trick is revealed after Norma has forgiven him for the last one, but I found her response only irritating and bewildering. And so you might want to leave the American nurse in Paris and try rather for some other exotic locale.

Nurse in the Tropics

By Peggy Dern 

(pseud. Erolie Pearl Gaddis Dern), ©1958

Cover illustration by Paul Anna Soik

To Martie Howell, a nurse accustomed to routine duty, the assignment to accompany Lisa Long back to her Haitian home and to stay with her during her convalescence from pneumonia seemed like a heaven-sent voyage to enchantment. Nor did the picturesque country, with its brilliant vegetation and its colorful natives, disappoint her. But she was also exposed to Haiti’s darker side—to its voodoo rites and its age-old superstitions. These were frightening when seen at a distance; when used to break up the romance of Lisa and a young doctor, and also to alter the course of the nurse’s life, they inspired hysteria and near-panic.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“I’m a nasty little cat. Why don’t you spank the livin’ daylights out of me?”

“Killing a love like ours calls for a lot of brutality. But then I don’t suppose murder is ever easy.”

“I don’t know who designed the first nursing uniforms, but whoever it was certainly did a fine job! They make a pretty girl beautiful and even a homely girl pretty! Though I don’t believe, now that I think about it, I ever saw a homely nurse!”

“I have to get back to the bananas.”

“I never dreamed there’d be a time when I could laugh and joke with a doctor. I’ve always had a great awe of them.”

“A nurse’s uniform is the most becoming costume any woman can wear.”

“I’m not afraid of evil spirits or any other kind of spirits—except the kind that come out of a bottle and are consumed inwardly.”

“They want to throw a party for us, Martie, to welcome us, but it won’t be a voodoo affair, so don’t be frightened.”

REVIEW:

I can’t help but pick up a book about a nurse in a third-world location with dismay, anticipating the patronizing attitudes I will shortly encounter. Peggy Gaddis has already proved herself a benevolent racist elsewhere, in works including Big City Nurse and The Nurse Was Juliet, so it was just a matter of time before we’d hear about the natives who address the white folk “with childlike affection,” who are “capering” “anxious children afraid of punishment.” “They—well, they’re like children!” Martie exclaims when she travels to a village in the mountains. At the same time, we are told several times that “it’s almost impossible for anyone to understand who has not spent many years here and mingled with the natives.” Curiously, VNRN heroines don’t seem to find similar situations in Paris or Monaco.

We also get to look down on voodoo with all the condescension of those who follow the One True Path of Christianity. An old “witch doctor” who visits a patient in the hospital is forcefully ejected and threatened with jail “because he’s breaking the laws against voodoo and all its weird and nasty practices.” Martie herself finds herself “only a few inches removed from terror of the old man,” an emaciated barefoot waif with “wicked” eyes. It is odd that the white characters, who regard voodoo as a silly superstition, are so regularly struck with complete horror by the two voodoo practitioners in the book.

Martie Howell is accompanying her snotty patient, Lisa Long, back to her home in Haiti. Lisa is far more childlike than any Haitian we meet, and flirts with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, slapping Martie one minute and then, a moment later, flinging herself at her nurse and clinging to her, crying, “Martie, don’t leave me!” Martie responds to Lisa’s tantrums by threatening to “paddle” her and otherwise treating her like a two-year-old: “She’s feeling very sorry for herself because she’s tired and excited,” she tells Lisa’s jilted beau, Dr. Evan Carter, who they encounter on the boat carrying them to Haiti. Lisa and Evan are still in love, but not allowed to marry because the domineering aged family matriarch, Donna Luisa, has decreed that Lisa will marry next-door neighbor Hugh Balcom, so as to unite the two estates. When Martie meets Hugh, she is dismayed to find that he is “spectacularly good-looking,” so it seems pretty clear how things are going to stack up at the end of the book. Indeed, it isn’t long before Hugh and Martie are kissing, but she attempts to squelch the blossoming romance by telling him, “A mere casual kiss is considered no more important nowadays than a cordial hand-shake.” He is understandably cool toward her after that.

Martie soon discovers that Lisa owns the estate, which Donna Luisa is managing on her behalf, and that Lisa will take control of it on her 21^st birthday. Luisa has been hiding this fact so as to exert her power over Lisa, as Lisa under the impression that she is living on Donna Luisa’s largesse and “owes” it to Luisa to marry Hugh. Martie informs Luisa that she is going to spill the beans, so Luisa attempts to fire Martie but suffers a stroke before she is able to complete the deed. When Hugh hears of this, he blames Martie for Luisa’s stroke, as does the local medico, Dr. Eaves. Madame Clélie, a local voodoo witch, arrives to nurse Luisa, and Martie decides she will move to the hospital and work with Dr. Eaves until she can leave Haiti. While she is packing, however, she finds a tarantula in her bed, and though she squashes it flat, she is convinced that Madame Clélie is trying to poison her. She is so spooked by the idea that Dr. Eaves agrees with her plan to leave Haiti: “Once this voodoo stuff gets under your skin, you can easily imagine yourself into a nervous breakdown.”

But the boat isn’t due for a few weeks, so she has time to work with Dr. Eaves at his hospital. The next news from the hacienda is that all has been set to rights: Hugh has thrown Madame Clélie out of the house, Lisa has called Dr. Evan to care for Donna Luisa, and Luisa has started to recover and now approves of Evan. So the very same group of people who looked upon Martie with disgust after Luisa’s stroke are now telling her that Luisa’s stroke was “the best thing that could have happened.” Before you know it, Luisa is hosting a dinner party with Martie as the guest of honor, and apologizing to Martie for her atrocious behavior. All we need to do is throw Martie into Hugh’s arms and wade through several nauseating paragraphs—to wit, “She was trembling from head to foot, and in her heart there was music so glorious, so unutterably perfect that she could only listen in awe and ecstasy”—and then we can put the tropics behind us. Though the question of how Martie, who previously couldn’t get out of Haiti fast enough, is going to manage life there is left unanswered.

This book is not worth reading as an interesting story or even as an armchair travelogue. The characters are not particularly attractive; even Martie is disdainful to her patient and the Haitians, overly hysterical about voodoo, and pathetically wide-eyed with Dr. Eaves and Hugh. Really the only interesting person in the book is a talented Haitian surgeon, who is viewed as somewhat tragic, as some white folks (Donna Luisa among them) won’t allow a black man to treat them. But he doesn’t seem too upset by that fact: “ ‘I am of the black people, Mam’selle Martie,’ he said and there was no trace of humility in his voice. Instead there was a pride that bordered on arrogance.” After enduring 160 pages of these ugly Americans, I can’t say I blame him for being glad he is not one of them.  

Town Nurse—Country Nurse

By Marjorie Lewty, ©1970

Cover illustration by Bern Smith

After a disastrous love affair, Kate had felt she never wanted to live in the country again, and firmly turned herself into a town girl. So when her dental surgeon boss suggested that she help out, temporarily, a colleague of his in a small country town, she was determined to stay there no longer than was necessary…

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“You can’t do it. You simply can’t tell anybody, in cold blood, that you don’t love the country.”

“Hugo’s white panther of a car leapt on the miles and devoured them with a kind of satisfied, purring sound that I imagined a panther would make.”

“The kitchen was enormous, about as half as big again as the front room, with a stone floor and great cupboards and a dresser all along one side of the wall. There was a modern electric cooker and a washing machine, but the table where Chloe was shearing neat slices of bread off a huge cottage loaf was the solid white deal kind that needs scrubbing every day. She looked up and smiled. ‘Primitive, aren’t we? John’s going to get the kitchen converted for me one day, when there’s time to get around to it. You know, thermo-plastic tiling on the floor, stainless steel sink, Formica tops—the lot.’ ”

“Mr. Pill was peering at me with his eyes half-closed, as if I were a new shade of emulsion paint that he wasn’t quite sure whether he approved of or not.”

“Any crisis, major or minor, must be an occasion for making tea.”

“ ‘She pushed me—’ He pointed an accusing finger at Rosemary. I was wholly on Rosemary’s side. We girls must stick together, I thought, and besides, she really did look angelic in that little pink dress.”

“How easy it was for a nice man to have an absolutely horrid daughter.”

“I shall be calm and placid, like a vegetable marrow.”

REVIEW:

Kate Moorcroft is actually a dental nurse. She’s not a hygienist, though, and doesn’t do any actual work in anyone’s mouth; she just assists the dentist with his more complicated procedures, so I think this still qualifies her as a nurse, and therefore this book as a VNRN. But it does skate up to the technical line.

The first part gimmick of this book is that Kate despises the country. She was born and raised there, and had intended to marry a farmer, but when her father died, her beloved told her that he didn’t feel he could take on the family farm’s huge mortgage, and he’d mostly wanted to marry her because her father had offered to take him on as a partner. Since wising up to the realities of the deal he’d signed up for, he’d decided he’d really rather go off to Australia, and alone at that. So she’d moved to London and worked hard to floss every hayseed from her teeth. That was three years ago; now she’s dating the wealthy, attractive, and debonair bachelor Hugo Whipple. Things are just starting to heat up with him when her boss sends her off to aid a close friend, Dr. Ben Holland, who has a small practice in—gasp—the country! 

But she grits her teeth and off she goes, to camp at the house where the doctor lives with his sister and her husband. Kate, not being the complete ignoramus that so many VNRN heroines are, quickly realizes—“with a feeling that I’d been punched hard in the middle”—Dr. Holland’s brother in law is a farmer! This is supposed to make her sojourn to the country even more “painfully nostalgic,” but soon she’s over it, and wrestles a lamb trapped in a hedge and a day-old calf about to be kicked by its mother, who is freaking out during a thunder storm. But she’s decided that she’s not going to tell the doctor that she’s from the country, lest she have to go into the story of her sordid past. That’s the second part of the gimmick; Kate has to go around pretending that she doesn’t know that hay shouldn’t be out in a rainstorm or how to operate a kerosene lantern. It’s not going to hold a lot of water, but this book isn’t pretending to be Tolstoy, so it mostly works.

Meanwhile, back at the office, she and the good doctor, who seems less than appreciative of her efforts, spar regularly, as Kate is far too spunky a gal to lie down and take it when he snaps at her. Despite his animosity, she can’t bring herself to actually dislike him: “This Ben Holland had magnetism—loads of it.” Unfortunately for Kate, he has more than just magnetism; he also has a lady friend, Val, a smooth, possessive customer whom Kate dislikes at first sight. “Most unreasonable, but there it is,” Kate admits. “Whatever Ben Holland’s shortcomings, he didn’t deserve a girl like that.”

Eventually it turns out that Ben thinks Kate’s been sent down by her employer to convince him that he should abandon the country and go into practice in the city. Kate, of course, knows of no such plan, and his suspicions are revealed when she demands to know why he’s being such a cold ass, just not in those terms. He’s forgiven after he humbly apologizes: “To be on the receiving end of a smile that packed so many volts was very disturbing,” she says. More than just a potential boyfriend, Kate finds two good girl friends in the country: Ben’s sister, Chloe, and Ben’s new nurse, Celia. These two characters are well-drawn, and their friendships with Kate, if they do move a bit fast, feel real. It’s a really heartwarming—if I dare to use such a schlocky word—aspect of the book, but I mean it. “It’s wonderful to fall in love and it turns your world upside down, but lately I’ve thought that there’s something that’s just as good, though not so spectacular,” says Celia, “just making friends.” I got a little verklempt at this point, but I am known to sob at the long-distance commercials.

So now Kate and Ben can get along on better terms. But Val schemes to get Kate packing back to the city, moving into the farmhouse to take her spot there. It doesn’t work out, however, for anyone: Back in London and out with Hugo, he maneuvers her to his new apartment and propositions her, not for the first time, and she finally realizes that he’s a cad, and that the city-slicker persona she’s put on since leaving the country has misled him. “I’m only playing at being this sort of girl, a dolly girl, out for kicks. I’m really a country type, a cabbage. I need the—other kind of life,” she tells Hugo, and then, when he tries to force a drink on her, she very belatedly realizes “Hugo was much, much older than I’d ever supposed. The lines round his eyes were deeply engraved; there was a slight looseness about his chin.” This spells 
t-h-e  e-n-d for Hugo, but he’s gracious about it and calls her a cab. (Though I’m not certain what he had to be gracious about, and what was his alternative, assaulting her? As if that would have been acceptable under the circumstances?)

Then Kate is called back to Ben’s establishment: Val has up and left, and the house is in a shambles. Kate appears, puts everything and everyone to rights, and she and Ben end up kissing—but then he says that though he finds her attractive, he can’t be with her. Val has witnessed this scene through the window outside, enters the room after Ben has left it, and proceeds to tear Kate a new one and then smack her across the face. But as she rides off in a fury on her horse, she slips on a wet bridge and falls into the river. There’s no one around to save her but Kate, so she shouts at a little girl to go get help and hoves herself into the current, where she’s got one hand on a rapidly loosening willow and the other on the unconscious Val’s chin, to keep it above water. This selfless heroism, of course, is just the thing to bring Ben around, after Kate has been properly rescued and dried off. “Tell me you don’t really want that smooth fellow with the vulgar great car,” he says to her, admits that he loves her, “and he proceeded to demonstrate.” When all is straightened out between them, he chides her for pretending to be a city girl. “What should I have done?” she retorts. “Disappear through the stage and spring back, clad in blue gingham, with a hay-fork in one hand and a pail of buttermilk in the other, crying, ‘Surprise, surprise, here I am, your very own rustic village maiden?’ ” Touché.

This is only the second VNRN I’ve read that’s been written in the first person. (The first, Bush Hospital, also a Harlequin, wasn’t as good as this one). It helps that Kate is a strong character with a sense of humor, guts, and humanity. She also has a rare commodity in a VNRN heroine: intelligence. When a situation is unfolding that any sensible reader could see right through, well, so can Kate. “I wasn’t going to pretend I didn’t know what he meant. I’d lived in London for three years,” Kate says when Hugo hints that he could spend the night in her hotel room. (She kicks him out.) But when she doesn’t pick up on something—like the fact that she’s fallen for Dr. Ben—she speaks about it as if she realizes that she should have known: “Even at that point, I didn’t know,” she says, after Ben gets snippy when he runs into her when she’s out with Hugo (the night he propositions her). I don’t mind a touch of blindness when the heroine recognizes that she is. She’s also self-aware: Toward the end, when Ben is watching her cook with an approving smile on his face, she feels an appropriate level of cynicism: “Domestic scene, I thought, with a whiff of self-contempt. Little woman in home setting. Bah!” And so my satisfaction with Kate Moorcroft was complete. This is a playful, amusing, enjoyable book. It has its flaws, no doubt, but these are easily overlooked when you’re hanging out with a great gal like Kate Moorcroft.

Candy Frost, Emergency Nurse

By Ethel Hamill,
pseud. Jean Francis Webb III, ©1952

 

Attractive, red-haired, green-eyed Candy Frost had set an almost impossible task for herself. Her prescription was to work hard at her mountain nursing post … and never to love again. That was surely the antidote to the deep wound left by Bruce three months before, when she had given up her nursing to marry him and he had jilted her in a strange city.

 

GRADE: C+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Frost, dear, was that a dreamy quiver to your mouth, just then?”

 

“I’m just a hard-bitten old maid with a face like a mud fence, so what would I know about romance?”

 

“You look cuter than ever in that silly cap.”

 

“To prove to herself how sensible she was, Candy sat primly on the edge of her chair and chewed each mouthful of whatever it was she was eating the prescribed number of times.”

 

“We’ll have a proper date and I’ll behave like a saint in Levi’s and won’t mention loving you once.”

 

“You’re talking like a half-baked Florence Nightingale. I could set those lines to music.”

 

REVIEW:

Candy (and if this nickname is not unfortunate enough, it’s actually a contraction of her given name, Candida, which is, of course, a genus of yeasts) is not an emergency nurse, really. She is a rural nurse, and as such attends to any health issues at the log-cabin clinic, including emergencies. This means she will, at a moment’s notice, slip out of her nylon dress and into riding breeches, toss her emergency kit over her shoulder, and gallop to the scene on her black mare Rocket, the roads being too undependable for vehicular traffic. She had been working at the clinic for a while when she tumbled for an artist who had set up a studio on the mountain, and had left with him for the big city to marry. But as they had checked in to their hotel, a long-lost flame of Bruce’s crossed the lobby, and when Candy went upstairs to change into her wedding garb, he went out the front door with his ex, leaving her with a dear-Candy letter (and apparently the bill).

 

Now she is returning to her mountain home in disgrace, but en route experiences an emergency of her own when the bus she is riding on goes off the road and rolls into a ditch. Candy is not injured, probably because the handsome young man sitting next to her flings his strong arms around her to protect her from harm. That’s all it takes for Skip Amherst to fall madly in love with Candy. “Something went zzzing! inside you, just as it did with me,” says the romantic poet. But she’s vowed never to love again, so she tells Skip in no uncertain terms that she wants nothing to do with him. “It’s bad manners to turn down a proposal before the fellow makes it,” he answers. “Gives a sort of impression of overconfidence.”

 

Meanwhile, there’s a group of resident terrorists that goes around beating the locals and burning down their houses if they try to interfere with the lucrative moonshine business. They are called—and resist the urge to scream—the Pillow Heads, because they wear pillowcases when they’re out for their nightly jaunts. Who could they be, and how can they be stopped? The upside is that they do give the clinic a lot of business, and reason for Candy to go galloping around the mountain on horseback rescue missions, since the clinic doctor, Blanche Thomas, is apparently unfit for the saddle.

 

When she’s not out and about, Candy takes steps to protect herself from Skip. She has Dr. Blanche write into her contract that she will forfeit a year’s pay if she marries within a year. That will keep her safe! Though why anyone would want to get married less than a year after meeting a new man is a bit of a puzzle to me, and I’m also not certain how a contractual clause against marrying keeps one safe from hot men—you don’t have to buy the cow, after all. Skip is not really convinced, either. “No scrap of paper can keep us apart, Candy, darling,” he tells her. “The only paper that has any real bearing on your future is the wedding license we’re going to take out together.” And he says that she’s overconfident.

 

Skip has been taken in by the Orr family, whose own son, Ad, drowned in a flash flood that he should have known better than to be caught in. The Orrs have also boarded the new schoolmarm, Lulu Mae, who is a tarty thing with an eye for Skip. Soon gossip is going around town that Skip and Lulu Mae are an item, and Candy finds that she is jealous! She spies on Skip at a dance that she has refused to attend with him and sees him kiss Lulu Mae, and then Mrs. Orr reluctantly tells Candy that she heard him talking to Lulu Mae, saying he’d picked her up on the bus, and that “a girl that’s been tagged with a scandal like that ought to be easy to get.” Now she’s jealous and mad! And when Candy’s old beau, Wayne, proposes, she naturally accepts. So much for that contract.

 

Candy and Wayne make plans to meet in town to get married, but Skip gets wind of it and kidnaps Candy, literally carrying her off “with a contemptuous ease which suggested he was hefting a not very valuable sack of feathers” when he catches up with her waiting for the bus to town, and I’m impressed at how this sentence implies the sexiness not only of being physically assaulted, but simultaneously of Candy’s dainty physique. And Skip is only getting warmed up. He tells her, “I ought to take you over my knee and spank you right here and now,” before driving her off to a deserted cabin in the woods. “Do you remember saying I couldn’t make you do what I wanted you to do? Rash remark!” he says. When she says she knows that he is carrying on with Lulu Mae, he denies it, but says, “What of it? You’d still be mine—and only mine. And I wouldn’t kiss you again if you came crawling across this room to me on your knees. And you might do exactly that, you know.” His prediction is close to right—when he storms toward her, looking as if he’s going to beat her, she collapses in tears into his arms, but he “flung her from him” and crashes out of the cabin, guarding the door to keep her from escaping until the bus has gone. Candy “settled down on the hard bench to wait. He was master here.” It’s a monstrous scene in so many ways, rendering Skip completely detestable. But that’s never bothered a VNRN heroine before, and it certainly doesn’t slow Candy’s pulse, either.

 

After this, all the back stories fall into place. There’s a complex scheme that, when brought into the open, explains Skip’s kissing Lulu Mae, the remark Mrs. Orr overheard and relayed to Candy, who the Pillow Heads are, Ad Orr’s untimely death, and the Pillow Heads’ raid on the Orr farm. All this might leave you gasping for air, but Jean Webb has a real flair for plotting, so the entire story seems completely plausible, and it’s also unfolded in such a way as to be not indigestible. Furthermore, his writing is still among the genre’s best. We get tasty morsels like, “The hinged door flattened with a faint pneumanic gasp,” and, “The late moon still swam above them, but her reign was ending.” I am a devoted fan of Mr. Webb’s, who has garnered an A- average in the three other books of his that I have read so far (Aloha Nurse, A Nurse Comes Home, and A Nurse for Galleon Key). Unfortunately, Candy Frost, Emergency Nurse does not meet the standards set by the others: It is short on camp, the hero is utterly despicable, and the heroine is a bit of a moron. Even if Skip had been a stand-up guy, this book doesn’t have much else to recommend it. So while anything Jean Webb writes is worth reading, Candy is not his most delicious.