Earlier this year I posted scans from the cover story of Love Secrets 32, "I Fell For A Commie". The book also contains this 6-page nurse romance story, "He Wasn't My Kind of Man". The scenario is as follows: Alice Daniels is a newly hired private nurse for financier Byron Mapleton. Mapleton's handsome secretary, Michael Lester, is also a recent hire, and he and Alice are quick to team up in their task of surviving old Mapleton's grumpiness. It also looks as though something romantic might develop between Alice and Michael, until Mapleton's no-good son Craig turns up. He starts putting the moves on Alice straight away, which is bad news, because he's not the industrious student his father believes him to be.
Against her better judgment, Alice weakens and goes out with Craig, who likes to spend his father's money liberally, but not in the way his father expects. Alice gets caught up in a romantic whirl with Craig, and it all happens so quickly that Michael has no opportunity to tell Alice he's in love with her until he's about to leave Mapleton's employ. By then Alice is convinced that there's something real between her and Craig.
Craig's reckless gambling ends up getting him in trouble with the mafia. He steals some money from his father to pay his gambling debts, and when old Mapleton finds the dough missing he prefers to blame Michael rather than his son. Alice spills the beans about Craig, who tries to lie his way out of trouble, unsuccessfully. Alice has already realized Craig is a loser who didn't care about her really, and her hopes that Michael might still be interested in her are realized.
As is often the case with these nurse romance stories, the nurse is a proxy for stereotypes of womanhood generally, and in this story she's shown as someone who is easily fooled, easily led by a manipulative male. On the other hand she's principled, and although she went out with Craig knowing Mapleton would disapprove, she fairly quickly concluded that the younger Mapleton's behavior was hugely inappropriate, and she does the right thing in shopping him to his dad. Although she leaps to the righteous Michael's defense, the concluding scenario places her back in the subordinate position to her new man. She's feminine, and delicate in the final analysis, even though she stood up to her boss when he falsely accused Michael. She's definitely the kind of tough but vulnerable flower any respectable, mildly chauvinistic, heterosexual male would like to scoop up and protect, which is what Michael does.
No comments:
Post a Comment