Nurse in Spain

By Diana Douglas, pseud. Richard Wilkes-Hunter, ©1975

Cover illustration by Allan Kass

Lovely young Fran Kelly had accepted a transfer to the American Army base at Coronado, hoping for an easy tour of duty and a  much-needed rest. Almost at once Spain began to work its magic. Perhaps it was the presence of handsome Dr. Des Walton which made the country seem so wonderful. Or was it Mario Vallejo, the landed aristocrat and famous matador who showed her the most fascinating places in town? But Des kept brooding over some secret in his past, and Mario was involved in activities Army intelligence frowned upon.  Confused by rumors of terror and violence, how could Fran choose between the two men? If her heart betrayed her, Fran would face a danger that could destroy her only chance for happiness ...

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“He should remember that he is a guest of Spain, not we of America.”

“They do not matter. They are tourists from the north who come here. German, Scandinavian, Dutch. Their own developers build for profit the concrete warrens they vacation in, and our government allows this because of the deutsche marks, the kroner, the guilders they spend here. Other than money, they bring nothing to Spain except the permissiveness of their own decaying society! They do not even bother to learn enough of our language to ask for their needs.”

REVIEW:

Lt. Frances Kelly is a surgical nurse who has just transferred to the US Army base in Coronado because “Spain was full of interesting places and people and things,” and besides, she’d been worked so hard in New Mexico she was about ready to drop. She is fluent in Spanish, and it goes without saying that she is a top-notch nurse. She has an excellent surgeon, Dr. Des Walton, to work with. He’s an emotionally wounded guy, scarred from Vietnam, where he had done an emergency splenectomy and nephrectomy on a good friend—only to find later that the patient had congenital absent kidney and so died in less than a week after his only kidney was removed. As Fran arrives, Des had just walked out of a similar operation, unable to go on, and gotten drunk. Fortunately the base commander, Major Bill Ryan, another surgeon, is forgiving, understanding Walton’s actions as the result of a neurosis, and doesn’t court-martial him; instead he pairs Fran with Des in the OR, thinking, “Des Walton was a man who needed a calm and reassuring girl just like her.”

Eventually, as you know it will, another identical case lands on Walton’s OR table with no other surgeons available. Walton is about to lose it when Fran calmly and reassuringly suggests that Walton make a midline incision and manually palpate for the good kidney before removing the bad one. It’s such a crazy idea, it just might work! Walton follows her suggestion and then, reassured of the second kidney, is able to complete the surgery. “It was you who gave me back my confidence,” Des tells her afterward. Another life saved! Now if only all war-related PTSD was so easily cured …

In the interim, Frances has gone to a bullfight and witnessed the most brilliant performance ever, by matador Mario Vallejo. She’d called, “Good luck!” to him before the match, shockingly—“norteamericanos do not usually do this,” she is told—and he’d sent her his cape to display during the fight. Major Joe Crane, a self-absorbed possessive ass she’s attended the fight with, tells her, ”You don’t know these people like I do. Vallejo wasn’t paying you any compliment when he gave you that thing. When they give any foreign woman a gift like that it’s because they want her. There’s no way they’d marry outside their own kind.” To her credit, Fran replies, “Really? So I’m flattered that he wants to go to bed with me! Thank you for explaining that, Joe.”

You will not be amazed to learn that Frances meets Matador Mario again in town, and he takes her to lunch, and out shopping, and to see flamenco danced for realz, by “a big woman. Even in her dress with its flashing skirt she looked far too heavy for a dancer. And she was no beauty now, though she might have been thirty years ago. Her features had grown too heavy, and the dark shadow of one of the faint moustaches Fran had noticed and disliked on older Spanish women at the corrida showed quite plainly on her upper lip.” But boy, can she dance! She is such an artist that people on the street, hearing the music inside the bar, which has been locked for this private performance, pound on the door, begging to be let in to watch. Matador Mario is a hero in Coronado, and Fran’s day with him is magical.  “It was like traveling around with one of the great American film stars at the height of his career. It was a thrill being with someone like that. It was just about the greatest thrill of her young life.” At the end of the day, when they are kissing passionately, “it occurred to Frances that she was in the process of being seduced by an expert. But that didn’t seem to matter …”

She keeps seeing him, much to the great consternation of Major Joe, who warns her to keep away from Matador Mario because “the name of the game is subversion!” Gasp! It seems that our matador muy suave is involved in a plot to overthrow the government and install a new king of Spain. Frances calls Mario to ask him about this and discovers that his home has been seized by the Guardia  Civil police force and that they are looking for Mario. Instantly she jumps into her car and speeds into town, warned only casually by the base guard to “watch it in town tonight. There’s rioting in town [with] Guardia Civil everywhere with submachine guns.” But have a good time, honey!

Indeed, arriving in town she finds several friends of Mario’s, including the flamenco dancer, have been shot dead. She avoids arrest by playing the dumb tourist, and finds Mario at the bullring with his pals. They jump into her car and flee the city, Mario curiously telling his chums, “If she should try to betray us, shoot her.” As the men are climbing out of the car to flee into the mountains on foot, Mario chooses this moment to propose: “Come to France with me, Fran. We will be married there in a little chapel we have on  Vallejo land. You will be the Countess Frances Vallejo y Carlos. And one day a distant relative of ours will rule all Spain.” Between the gunplay and the idea of being on the lam, she’s not exactly won over and decides, “That’s not for me.” She tells him she doesn’t really love him after all: “Fascination isn’t love. I’d never met anyone like you before. It was like meeting a famous star back home and being flattered and kissed because you admired him. And I did admire you. You were like a storybook lover. But that isn’t really love either, Mario.” So as he dashes into the mountains, Des Walton shows up, and she holds his hand—and tells him a half-truth about her day’s adventure. And that’s where the book ends.

This is actually one of the better Richard Wilkes-Hunter (aka Diana Douglas) books I’ve read. We know it’s him from the usual gratuitous reference to her “firm young body” in the shower, and only male VNRN writers overtly mention sex, as in, “I’m not accusing you of sleeping around with the guy,” or in the discussion of Spanish women as mistresses or whores. But apart from denigrating remarks about Spanish women, which reflects a sexism demonstrated equally toward American woman (as when Frances is told by Mario, “Politics in Spain were not for women”), I really didn’t find anything terribly racist in this book, unlike Flight Nurse, which has a lot of similarities to this book, like the matador who is an accomplished lover working to overthrow the Spanish government. Neither book allows the heroine to pair up with the Spaniard, but at least here Frances takes Mario seriously as a boyfriend, even if in the end he is disqualified. The story moves along well and Frances has no obvious foibles—she hates the domineering Joe Crane and makes it plain to him that she does, she takes risks, she speaks her mind, she’s a great nurse. There’s nothing really special about it, apart from the unusual ending (all of which I have not revealed here), but it is a worthwhile bit of armchair travel.

Flight Nurse

By Kathleen Harris, ©1960

Fiestas, bullfights, the adulation of the aficionados—this was the thrilling world Raoul Bermudez, Spain’s celebrated young matador, opened to golden-haired Lieutenant Faye Ramsey, stationed at a US air base in Spain. Vainly Captain Russ Campbell cautioned the young nurse—“Love is only a game to these Latins, Faye.” But Faye didn’t hear him. She was living in an enchanted dream. Then reality broke in on Faye. Horrified, she saw that her ideals as a nurse and as an American girl were in jeopardy!

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTE:
“I’ve about had my fill of being a gay bachelor.”

REVIEW:
The cover of this book, of a woman ducking under a tree branch while a plane behinds her goes up in flames and another flies low over it, gives this book an air of urgency before you’ve even opened it. Does our heroine crash in the mountains and nurse the injured crew back to life? Is she the lone survivor after her plane is shot down? Is she taken prisoner by a hostile enemy after her plane crash-lands behind enemy lands? No, no, and no. More soap opera than action movie—which we can hardly blame a VNRN for being—the actual story does not live up to the anticipation created by the cover. Nonetheless, it’s still a pretty good read.

Faye Ramsey is a nurse in the Air Corps. She isn’t happy just working at the base hospital, so she had volunteered for flight-nurse duty. When we meet her, she has already spent six weeks in formidable training: “Faye not only had to drill and march, but carrying a medical kit and a pistol, she had been ordered to clamber out of planes that were supposed to have crashed—both on land and in water. She and the other nurses in training had had to keep themselves, their equipment, and a dummy afloat. She had had to swim through burning gasoline and oil, escape from simulated plane accidents—casually listed as ‘crash procedure’—and as a finale, as she had called it, she had had to learn how to jump and fall with a parachute. Then, before receiving her silver wings, she had to pass written exams. She had come off with the highest grade in her class.” So Faye is no slouch, and indeed, we have already been treated to a paragraph of her medical knowledge of treating wounded patients and how the altitude of the plane affects various wounds.

Faye has been seeing her steady boyfriend, Gerry Jackson, who is an obstetrician on the base, for two years. But she’s not really sure if he’s the right guy for her: “She couldn’t imagine being so much in love that it would fill her life, blot out everything else, including her career as a nurse.” Neither, apparently could many housewives of the early 1960s; enter Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name.” Faye meets up with Gerry to tell him that she has been called up for flight duty overseas and will be away for two years. But before she has the chance to drop her news on Gerry, he tells her he’s found “a way out” of her flight nurse duty: If they get married and she gets pregnant, “the expectant mother must leave the service—with an honorable discharge, of course.” In a few more months Gerry will be through with his tour of duty, so “in the event that you were ordered elsewhere, you’d have a foolproof way out,” he tells her.

Well, Faye gets pretty steamed about this: “She was hurt at the way he took it for granted that she would jump at the chance to marry him. Hurt and indignant—and a little disappointed in Gerry. He hadn’t understood why she wanted to be a flight nurse, after all.” He responds to her indignation by saying that she should have realized he wanted to marry her. “You did take things pretty much for granted. Including me, Gerry,” she answers. “You never came right out and asked me if, when the time came that we could, I would marry you. And now, when you finally have—well, you could scarcely call it a proper proposal.” So though she gives a passing thought to his slight of her work, when it comes down to it, it’s not really the disrespect Gerry has for her career but being taken for granted and the fact that Gerry didn’t get down on one knee with a gigantic sparkler in hand when he proposed that really upsets her.

She’s shipped off to Spain, where Faye’s flight commander, Russ Campbell, naturally has his eye on Faye. He immediately starts calling her “Angel,” even though “she wished he wouldn’t call her by that ridiculous nickname.” And he is another one of those guys who will “take it for granted that she would go with him” to dinner. Four pages later, there he is again, “taking it for granted that he knew what she wanted, how she would feel.” Russ defends himself by saying, “Most girls liked a masterful man, a man who would make up their minds for them.” Remarks like this don’t make the fifty intervening years between then and now seem long enough.

As Faye gets out and about in Spain, there is plenty to be said about the Spaniards. “The living conditions are on about as low a level as in the fifteenth century. You’ve never seen so much filth and squalor—in the poorer sections, naturally. Although the well-to-do … are not too particular when it comes to cleanliness and conveniences,” she is told by the colonel in Spain. But his wife takes Faye aside and tells her to ignore the colonel. “He is so very American that he is inclined to be prejudiced. He thinks the people here are more lazy than diligent, more bloodthirsty than placid, more unfeeling than kindly,” she says, without offering a kinder interpretation of the culture. On the other hand, Russ tells her, “The Spanish are never bound by time. … If we could be like that, our hospitals wouldn’t be so crammed with mental patients—and all in all, we’d get more out of life.” And on the whole, descriptions of the Spanish countryside and customs are favorably depicted. But the book plays it both ways by never really committing wholeheartedly to one interpretation or the other, perhaps hoping to avoid offending either the bigots or the internationals in its possible audience.

There’s another prejudiced view of the Spaniards: They are superior lovers. Her friend Barbara says, “These Latins know more about playing the game of love, courting a girl, than our American boys can ever learn.” And then there’s the fact that “everyone knew that foreign men were much more romantic than Americans. Although when it came to being serious, American men made the best husbands.” Faye indulges in this particular form of prejudice when she becomes enamored of Raoul Josepha Bermudez, the nephew of a marquesa, and, of course, a very famous matador! “One thing Faye was certain of—Senor [sic] Bermudez would never take her—or any woman—for granted.” This, of course, is a big plus for her. She also appreciates Raoul’s semantics, telling Russ that Raoul “isn’t taking me—he invited me to go” to a local fiesta.

Raoul lives up to the hype when he tells her that he loves her even though he does not think she returns the sentiment: “He reached out to take her hand in his … ‘You are not angry that I spoke so soon?’ he asked. … ‘But I loved you from the moment I looked into your blue eyes, saw your smile, gentle as a madonna’s.’ So this was the way a Spaniard spoke of love, with passion, yet tenderness. Not a work of taking for granted that its recipient would love him in return. So different from Russ and Gerry.”

Russ is angry about her relationship with Raoul, and tells her not to see him again, “because he’s not your kind.” He says, “You’re not being very patriotic, Angel.” She responds, “I am perfectly capable of looking after myself … I’m a nurse—remember?—and over twenty-one.” And the fact that she has given both Russ and Gerry the back of her hand does cause the two to start mending their ways. Gerry sends her a ring for Christmas, and in his accompanying letter, he seems to be catching a clue, writing, “Please don’t think, honey, I am taking it for granted that you will wear the ring.” For his part, Russ has no problems taking orders from Faye when patients are on the plane, as “the captain realized that when a patient was aboard the flight nurse was in command—as far as the patient went, anyway.” On one of their missions, Faye dramatically saves an injured pilot by tying off a gushing artery in his leg. Russ “was struck dumb by what he was witnessing. … His voice held humility, as well as respect, as he asked if it was all right for the take-off.” She comes to admire his leadership when he talks the crew out of danger when they are briefly abducted by a group of insurgents in a surprisingly tensionless scene. “Faye had been amazed that Russ had used so much tact in dealing with the commander. She had had no idea that he could be such a diplomat. Nor had he ‘eaten crow’; he had maintained his dignity and leadership.”

So it would seem that Faye has three men to choose from, but the foreigner, it should not come as much of a surprise to learn, is out. Not only is Raoul engaged (it’s an arranged marriage), but he also has a mistress on the side. And to top it all off, he also turns out to be a Commie traitor. Before he gets arrested, however, he delicately suggests to Faye that he could continue to see “the woman he loves” even after he is married, but of course this goes over like a ton of bricks: “All the flowers in the world could not erase the facts: he had deceived her, betrayed her trust, he was scheming to betray his country.”

While she is supposed to be in love with Raoul, and is at first pretty broken up about his engagement, not much time passes before Faye realizes “she did not love him—had never loved him. It had been a thrilling experience—a romantic infatuation, a part of being in Spain.” Her little fling is painted as a learning experience: “Faye’s brief romance with the Spaniard had made her grow up—a maturity that would help her over any rough spots in the future.” She actually does display some sense when she tells Russ that she has to be sure before she gets engaged, and to be sure she has to go home and see Gerry. But the book quickly takes an easy way out, telling us something new and unexpected about one of her beaux that effectively ends that relationship. I’ve said before that I just can’t forgive these out-of-nowhere plot turns when they involve the most important moment of the book (see Nurse Pro Tem), and I still mean it.

There are some fun parts to this book. Faye’s dates in various Spanish locales—a restaurant in a castle, a bullfight, a local fiesta—are entertaining and dated in a good way, in that you can feel what the times were like. Her tours with the flight crew are also vividly drawn, particularly their rescue of the crashed pilot. But the book tries to play it both ways on a regular basis. Faye is perfectly open to dating a Spaniard, but there’s no way an American woman could seriously consider marrying one. Then she repeatedly insists she’s an independent woman who can make up her own mind, but the first time the new and improved Russ asks her what kind of flowers she wants (“Russ offering to send her flowers! What had happened to him?”), she answers, “Any kind you like.” She insists that being a flight nurse is very important to her, but when she falls into the arms of her true love, it’s “so satisfying—so right—that it blotted out everything else.” The very second she gets the respect and recognition she’s been insisting on, she renders it null and void by subsuming her choices and her identity to a man. So while I have to say that this book is worth reading, in the end it may just piss you off.