Nurse to Remember

By Teresa Holloway, ©1970

Against her better judgment, Adair Davis let herself be talked into becoming nurse on Dr. Garnett’s secret government project. In that ancient isolated house where it was being conducted, she was both attracted and frightened by the doctor’s assistant, the tall, handsome young doctor, Sam Lennox, whose hostility was coupled by a concealed concern. The phones were tapped, the house harbored mysteries, strangest of which was the unseen presence of a mysterious woman somewhere in an upstairs bedroom. But it was Adair’s feminine heart that was to be the major traitor to her planned flight.

 

GRADE: C-
 

BEST QUOTES:
"Even the oxygen tubes in the strong, aristocratic nose did not deter him."

 

"I always thought the description of the beautiful girl who tended the dwarfs [in Snow White] had far more imagery than anything Shakespeare wrote."

 

"She had the feeling, and she didn’t like it, that the eye of the Kremlin was fixed on them."

 

"Here was buried, it related, the body of a little girl, preserved at death in a keg of rum by a father who’d promised the mother to bring her home intact from a journey abroad. When the child died of the plague, the father true to his promise bought a keg of the ship’s spirits, knocked off the head, placed the girl inside and refixed the head to the keg. ‘American ingenuity,’ Adair marveled. ‘And understandably comforting to the poor bereft mother.’ "

 

"Inwardly, she was reacting violently to the super-saturation of adrenal fluid his voice had generated."

 

" ‘I’m a husky American girl,’ she reasoned. ‘I can do it.’ "

REVIEW:

Early on, I found myself thinking that this was one of the more boring VNRNs I’ve read. Later, I found myself thinking that it was one of the dumbest. I guess I’ll take dumb over boring, but neither makes for a great read.

 

Adair Davis has taken a job as a nurse for Dr. McGregor Garnett, an aging scientist with metastatic pancreatic cancer living and working in a rambling old house in Beaufort, North Carolina, an actual town on the Inner Banks. She didn’t really want the job, but she was pressured to take it with the encouragement, "You’ll be useful to your country if you go." She’s been selected for the job because she’s good at chemistry and "had a few hours of college pharmacology in her freshman year," because a few hours of pharmacology is all you really need; just ask any pharmacist who’s finished their six-year PhD program.

 

While unpacking in her room—she’s brought several Dresden figurines, a paperweight of a Kennedy half-dollar, and a signed photograph of the President with her, curiously—she meets Edwina Jernigan, who works in the bank nearby and has been invited to stay in the house, apparently as a sort of chaperone while Adair is there, and Dr. Mac’s young assistant, Dr. Sam Lenox. She’s quickly inducted into the top secret project, and if "only a half a dozen people in North Carolina know about Project Beaufort," that number is going to grow exponentially the way these guys blab. The boys are under the impression that the most important contribution that science could make to the world (it’s not a cure for cancer, because "that’s in the works," she’s told) is to create a pill that would enable a person to remember anything that’s ever happened to them. This, somehow, is going to put an end to "sheer unadulterated illiteracy." "Think, if you can, of what such a drug will do to empty the ghettos, to close the ‘genius gap’ between our country and Russia, if it exists," Dr. Lenox tells her, and never mind that a person would have had to actually do the studying in the first place in order to be able to remember it later on. Adair dubs their invention a "recall pill," and the boys light on the name as if it’s the greatest contribution their project could have. "She’s everything they said! They’ve sent us a woman who thinks!" crows Dr. Mac, apparently unacquainted with many such oxymoronic creatures.

 

The scientists also ask her if she wouldn’t mind popping a pill or two, because "we need to make a couple of experiments that will be woman oriented." She’s fervently against the idea, which sets the project back a bit since they will now have to find another woman to experiment on; Edwina is never considered, for some unexplained reason. They have given the pills to a female cat, which caused it to completely freak out. They ascribe this reaction to recalled memories of a time when the cat was caught and nearly killed by a dog, though how they can be so sure of what the cat was feeling is not explained. "It is our theory that perhaps a woman, being primarily an emotional being, will recall a dominant emotional episode at the outset of reaction," explains Dr. Lenox. Adair, mercifully, is not taken in: "What does a male cat recall?" she retorts.

 

Then Adair receives a late-night phone call directing her to be at the bus station the next day. Off she dutifully trots, and after she has been waiting around for several hours, Dr. Lenox pulls up to claim her just as a strange man approaches her, and the man runs off. At this point the boredom wears off the book and exciting events occur every two or three pages: There’s an explosion at a paint factory, and Adair and Dr. Lenox are pressed into service at the hospital; Adair gets a flat tire in her car and discovers the spare is also flat; she tours a cemetery at Eddie’s suggestion and encounters the bus station fellow—whom she now unfortunately refers to as "The Man from ‘They’ "—who pulls a gun but kindly runs off to fetch a cup of water when she begins to faint and doesn’t return when Dr. Lenox again arrives at the opportune moment. All of which happens on the same day.

 

The next isn’t any better: Hurricane Janelle approaches the island in a fury, Adair discovers that her Kennedy souvenirs—engagement gifts from Bill, a man who is no longer her fiancé, we learn—have been taken from her room, and she finds the butler unconscious on the stairs as well as a trip wire that had been set up to send someone plunging. Ben has a severe concussion, but there’s an x-ray machine in the basement, so Dr. Lenox takes some pictures with it and then gives the plates to Adair to deliver to the radiologist in town, though how the diagnosis will help when the patient is stranded at the house is unclear. Adair drives through an increasingly ferocious storm, the winds up to 70 mph and downed power lines snapping at her car. Needless to say, the radiologist is not in his office, so she takes the plates to the police station and, after severely spraining her ankle getting out of her car, insists that the solitary officer there deliver the plates at once! Then, back in her car, she drives back to the house using her left foot on the accelerator the whole way, only to find that Ben has died in the interim. Damn!

 

Home again, events continue to pile up: Adair learns that Edwina’s husband, CIA man Frank Taylor, has been secretly living in the spare bedroom next to hers. Dr. Mac needs a hypodermic after all the excitement, but the syringes have vanished from their usual spot in the locked medicine cabinet, and the key has gone missing as well! Two pages of kerfuffle about that and what everyone is going to have for lunch, and the key turns up under the pile of wet clothes Adair had changed out of. She’s anxious to "fix her face," so she dumps out her handbag’s contents on the bed and finds a stack of bills, $2,500. Instantly she’s under the suspicion of Frank the CIA man, and Dr. Lenox tells her that with Ben’s murder, she will be a prime suspect if she can’t explain the money. If you can connect those dots, let me know, because I’m just not seeing it. The money, Adair decides, was put there to "discredit" her, and that’s another leap that I don’t follow, but if she could only remember where she’s seen Frank before, and when she left her purse unattended, everything would be great!

 

So she hobbles down the hall on her sprained ankle to Dr. Mac’s room and collects a little purple pill, because "it’s only right for a nurse to remember," and let’s all groan together about the lame association with the book’s title. She swallows the pill on the spot, and fortunately for her, the side effects of nausea and dizziness don’t come on until after she’s back in bed with a tape recorder, so as to document her experience. There she gratuitously recollects her encounter with President Kennedy during "that desperate hour in the White House. She’d been in Bill’s office waiting for him to finish work, when the President had come in, gray-faced with worry. Only later did she associate his tension with the ill-fated Bay of Pigs affair, unknown to her at the time."

 

Edwina comes in to report that she’s found the hypodermics, and that Adair must have forgotten that she’d put them in a different location. You’d think this would lead to some revelation about the syringes being tampered with—a possibility that Adair herself mentions—but instead she remembers leaving her bag for a minute at the bus station to buy a paper, and finding it slightly misplaced when she returns to it. She mentions this to Dr. Lenox, and then remembers that she met Frank while out on a date with Bill years ago, only then he’d been named Francis Talenov and was working at the Russian embassy, and he’d been accompanied by "The Man from ‘They’ "! Rather than tell anyone this, she allows Dr. Lenox to shoot her up with one of the suspect syringes and turns out the lights so she can get some sleep. A while later, Frank enters her room and tries to smother her with a pillow, but for the third time, Dr. Lenox turns up, this time with a gun, to save the day. Frank begins swearing in Russian, and Adair hops over to the dresser to retrieve—and I am not kidding—her red, white, and blue scarves to tie up the bad guy. This is the moment that Dr. Lenox decides to announce to the room that he and Adair are going to be married, but Dr. Mac stops into the room to cut him off, saying that he’s decided to give Adair his house, so she and Dr. Lenox, who has decided to quit lab work and become a GP in town, can live and work there.

 

Seldom has so much happened to a VNRN heroine in the span of two days, and seldom do so many loose ends remain dangling: What was the deal with the hypodermics? And the flat tires in Adair’s car, which she’d previously blamed on Edwina? Who put the money in Adair’s bag, and why? Who killed Ben the butler? What happened to the Kennedy souvenirs? And "The Man from ‘They’ "? The improbable plotting is equally unfortunate, and the writing also sloppy—at one point Frank’s outfit is described while he’s on the other side of a door, knocking to be admitted. Which is sad, because early on in the book—when the plotting was a lot duller—the writing was actually almost fine in places, such as, "the racket she’d made with the knocker seemed somehow discourteous." If you approach this book ready to poke fun, it’s a perfect vehicle for your mockery, but beyond that, it has little use unless it’s to prop up a wobbly table.

Army Nurse

By Barbara Bonham, ©1965
Cover illustration by Mort Engel

“I can’t believe it,” Connie said in a stunned voice to the Communist agent. “We were so sure she was dead. Can you get her out of China?” “For a price,” Bo Duc said. “You could be very useful to us.” Connie shuddered. It was the cruelest form of blackmail, one the Communists used masterfully. “You devils!” she said through clenched teeth. Lt. Constance Moorehead had two great secrets—her war mission and her love for Captain Harmon. To carry out her duty she was prepared to risk her loyalty, her love, and even her life.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“What’s a gorgeous girl like you doing in this place?”
“Fighting Communism,” Connie replied.

“Connie had had to hold herself back the last few times Niles had kissed her to keep her lips from revealing her love for him.”

“I’m familiar with Communist tactics. I cut my teeth on them.”

“And you guys think you can conquer the world! You can’t even make a decent whisky.”

REVIEW:
Lt. Constance Moorehead is the first nurse heroine I’ve met who isn’t white – she’s biracial, as her mother was Chinese. Her parents met when her American father was teaching English in China, but when Connie was six years old, the Communists began to overrun China, and her family fled the country on a sampan for Hong Kong. En route, however, they were strafed by a Communist patrol boat, and her mother was killed. Which explains her burning hatred for the Commies. Now that she’s 22, she’s enlisted in the army has been stationed in the Southeast Asian country of Surbaco, which is struggling against a Communist take-over, serving capitalism the only way a girl can. “Nursing the wounded is the next best thing to actually carrying a gun against the Communists myself,” she says.

As much as she hates the Communists, she loves Capt. Niles Harmon, MD, whom she just met a month ago. He’s attracted to her “mysterious and exotic beauty,” as he puts it. Then Bo Duc, the waiter at the officer’s club, jumps out of the bushes next to the nurses’ quarters and tells her that the Communists have her grandmother. Unless she cooperates with them, they will kill Nana. She responds with the most vehement curse she can think of: “You devils!” she spits through clenched teeth. But she proves to be somewhat resourceful: She sends a letter to American Ambassador Kilby, who checks into the hospital six hours later, complaining of chest pain. Connie can’t get over the coincidence, but guess what? It’s all a big hoax so he can talk to Connie alone! He tells her to cooperate with Bo Duc for now, as they may have an opportunity to track down the communist leader through him. Though Dr. Niles is perplexed that he can’t figure out what’s wrong with the ambassador, he doesn’t suspect anything. Yet.

Connie leaves a window open in the supply room along with a list of the supplies that the bad guys need. Niles, discovering the break-in, sees Connie slip the list, which the thieves have inconveniently left behind, into her pocket. You’d think this would be an opportunity to bring up Connie’s racial background and use it against her, but Dr. Niles is made of sterner stuff, and just frowns. But the Commies aren’t satisfied, and soon come back with another assignment: She’s to put a bomb under the bed of the Surbacoan president. A few days later, at a ball at the president’s mansion, Dr. Niles catches her coming out of the president’s living quarters. The president, who has been informed of the plot by Ambassador Kilby (who Connie keeps in the loop), isn’t hurt, the scuttlebutt goes, because an aide had woken him to take care of an important matter that had just come up. Niles ups the ante and gives her the cold shoulder on rounds that afternoon.

Next the Communists kidnap Connie and Niles, dragging them out into the jungle to care for their general. Connie doesn’t have enough time to contact Ambassador Kilby, but she does manage to mail a letter – though she has no idea where in the jungle they are to be taken, so things are looking glum for the medical team. At first Niles is pretty pissed – “You lousy traitor!” he hisses at Connie – but after they’ve amputated the general’s gangrenous foot and they have a minute alone, she fills him in on her double-agent duties, and soon they’re smooching behind the general’s tent. But the Commies are threatening to kill them both as soon as the general is better. Will they be found in time?

As action-packed as the plot may seem in the retelling, I just couldn’t bring myself to care whether Connie and Niles were rescued or not. The ending was wholly predictable, the writing uninspired, and the only fun in it from the puerile jabs at communism. It’s interesting for its view on war in Southeast Asia at a time when the country was actually fighting one there, but apart from that, it’s pretty much a waste of time.

Hong Kong Nurse

By Ellen Elliott, ©1968
Cover illustration by Edrien King

For blonde Betty Anders, the offer to nurse in Hong Kong hospital seemed the answer to her prayers. Far from home, she might forget the shattered romance that had left her heart in tatters. There was little time in her new job for sad memories. Days were spent in the hospital, and evenings with the young and handsome Dr. Rod Corbett. But just as Betty felt almost ready to love again, disaster struck. Inspired by pity, she had become involved with certain confidential problems of Dr. Sun, a brilliant Chinese surgeon. Angered, Rod turned away from her. How could Betty explain the truth without violating Dr. Sun’s secret: Amid danger, international intrigue and pulse-racing excitement, the lovely young nurse found the answer.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“He was extremely good-looking without being in any way weak or effeminate; they were the strong good looks of a man very much a man.”

“Betty watched her, graciously diminutive beside the tall, white-smocked doctor, aware of a tiny start of fear and apprehension as she reflected upon how gauche Occidental women must appear beside such gentle, gracious creatures.”

“An American nurse—a beautiful American nurse, that’s an event. Especially when she happens to be a blonde, with a head-turning figure and eyes as blue as Texas skies.”

“Betty, watching him, suddenly felt very sorry for the elderly, plain-faced English matron. People behaved as she had behaved for one reason—because they were unhappy, because society, life, the happiness of a husband, a home and children had been denied them. The old cliché about embittered spinsters being found more in the nursing profession than in any other occupation was a true one.”

“Sister Gwen Robertson, a short, dumpy woman in her mid-thirties, had come out to Hong Kong because she felt that her chances of landing a husband would be better than at home. Once glance at her face, and Betty had known why the sister was still a spinster and likely to remain that way.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Betty Anders has run away to Hong Kong because her previous boyfriend of eight months turned out to have a wife and two kids back in Maine. It seems like a long way to go from Texas, her home, but what the hell, they’re short-staffed in Hong Kong. There she meets a white guy, Dr. Rod Corbett—“Rod was a nice name, a good masculine name, a name that fitted his appearance and personality as tightly as the rubber gloves he wore on his hands.” He gets pissed at her because she asks whether his mentor, Dr. Wade Ching Sun, has a family. Then she hears his story from another patient: He’s married to another doctor, a surgeon who is a Communist, working in Canton. The patient asks if she is American: “You are good people—all the world knows that,” he says. “ ‘Get to the point,’ Betty said irritably,” the irony of her answer escaping her. The patient needs a favor; he would like to meet Dr. Ching Sun.

When Dr. Ching Sun sees the patient, he learns that the patient has a letter from his wife, and the patient will give it to him only if he is granted asylum in Hong Kong. The doctor is so upset by this that he breaks down in tears in surgery and can’t finish. Dr. Rod is furious! He starts seeing the beautiful Jeanne Liu, who runs an orphanage, and barely speaks to Betty. He even asks Jeanne to marry him, but Jeanne’s twin sister is some sort of harlot—she is a nightclub entertainer, and “it certainly wouldn’t help his career to get mixed up with a girl who has a sister like that”—so Jeanne turns him down.

Meanwhile, Dr. Ching Sun asks Betty to help him get the letter back, and when it is in his possession—it was being held by Jeanne’s sister, for some odd reason that is never explained—he learns that his wife is disillusioned with communism and wants to come to Hong Kong. Then Jeanne collapses, and we learn that she has been sick all her life, though appearing to be in perfect health. After many tests at the hospital, it is found that she has kidney disease, which is killing her. If only she could have a new kidney … but wait! She has a twin sister!

After the geneticists run tests—“they compare hair color and texture; iris color and texture; ear and tooth shape; finger and toe prints are compared; blood tests run for the major blood groups as well as the many subgroups”—they’re apparently a long way from DNA testing—the kidney is transplanted by Rod and Dr. Ching Sun in a brilliant surgery. In an odd conclusion to that story line, Jeanne dies anyway, and her sister “would not ever enjoy the same sort of perfect health she had enjoyed before agreeing to sacrifice her kidney in an effort to save her sister.” Rod asks Betty to help him forget Jeanne, and on a date with Dr. Ching Sun and his wife, newly rescued from China, who strongly reminds Betty of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Dr. Ching Sun tells Rod and Betty that they’ve really been in love with each other “for weeks, only you’re both too silly to know it!”

This is a throwaway book that makes virtually no use of its setting apart from brief descriptions of nightclubs and food, and the characters are not very interesting. It has little plot, and the “intrigue” of the communists using Jeanne’s sister is only hinted at, with the barest of explanations which makes no sense at all. If you want a book that will allow you to do some armchair traveling, try Wilderness Nurse or Aloha Nurse, but leave this one on the shelf.

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.