The Cherry Ames Page: War Nurse, page 6

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Cherry Ames, War Nurse
Fiction Meets Reality, page 6

In this section

Mother Cherry

Romance

Mother Cherry

Though Cherry joins the army as a skilled registered nurse, her role is not only nursing, but nurturing. She is only twenty-one years old when she enlists, but she will also be a maternal presence, a surrogate mother to the "boys" whose own mothers must wait anxiously at home.

Figure 7

The soldiers she will care for are clearly not potential suitors or objects of romantic or sexual fantasy; they are little boys caught up in a horrible war whom she will seek to soothe and comfort as a mother would. (The Red Cross poster shown in Figure 7 illustrates how the role of mother was used and idealized during the war.) Nor are the pretty young nurses romantic or sexual beings to the soldier patients: they are the idealized mother.

As Cherry is riding to an army base for the first time, she gazes carefully and pensively at the soldiers who will be her future patients. The men in uniform

looked half-familiar to her, like her friends and schoolmates, like her own brother. Some of them looked lonesome, some tired, some were deep in their own thoughts. "Those are the boys I'm going to take care of," Cherry thought, and although many of them were older than herself, she felt motherly. (Army Nurse, pp. 5-6)

When her family is driving her to the train station in Hilton before she reports for duty in the army, Cherry notices a poster of "a boy in khaki ... kneeling and clinging to the rifle with both hands, his head drooping" (Army Nurse, p. 16). Her mother, somewhat stunned, tells Cherry:

"He looks just like Charlie! ... You know, honey," she admitted, "I didn't want you to go. I didn't say so, but--I didn't. Now I guess I do. You're going to take my place, all the nurses are going to take the mothers' places out there." (Army Nurse, p. 17)

Of course, the nurses provide skilled care to their soldier patients. But, in addition, the mere presence of a nurse--the nurturing mother--in itself eases the pain of the sick and wounded soldiers, whose eyes light up when they see the American "girls" who will tend their injuries.

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When Cherry begins working at a two-thousand-bed army base hospital, in Panama, the patients "--some of them were mere boys--smiled when the girls came in. ... Cherry saw each soldier's face turn on the pillow and light up gratefully as the new nurses came in" (Army Nurse, p. 132). And, later: "They wanted Cherry to be mother and sister and friend, as well as nurse" (p. 150). One happy soldier exclaims, "This is almost as good as having my mother show up!" (Chief Nurse, p. 42), when Cherry and the other nurses arrive at an isolated jungle outpost:

One of the soldiers seized Cherry's hand and shook it. Every face she looked at was stunned and overjoyed. Cherry swallowed hard. So they had been cut off for two monotonous years in the nightmare jungle! These fighting men looked to her suspiciously like homesick small boys. They were pathetically eager for the nurses to make some sort of response. (Chief Nurse, pp. 43-44)

The presence of a nurse is, in one way, even more desirable than the presence of a mother, because the nurse has a fuller understanding of what the combat soldiers face, and need not be shielded from the painful realities of war:

The soldiers often told the nurses hair-raising stories of their adventures. They had to get it off their chests to someone. They seldom wrote these things home, for fear of worrying their families, because civilians might not understand. But nurses are soldiers, too, and they have their patients' confidence. (Chief Nurse, pp. 67-68)

In one case, as Cherry is ministering to the men aboard her plane during the airlift of wounded soldiers from the battlefield, the identification with mother is explicit:

A boy with a gunshot wound in his abdomen became delirious. In his thoughts, he was still at the battlefield. Cherry gave him a hypodermic, quieted him, kept her cool hand on his forehead. He cried out, "Mother! Mother! I knew you'd come!" Cherry held him in her arms, as his mother would have done, until his wrenching pain gave way to drugged sleep. (Flight Nurse, p. 110)

Except for one unpleasant soldier, a "sharp-eyed young man with a sickly mustache," who says to Cherry, "Got a minute to talk to me, Beautiful? ... I'm lonesome, Beautiful" (Army Nurse, p. 70), no soldier patient ever crosses the "mother-son" boundary that is implicit in the nurse-patient relationship--at least in Cherry's army.

Romance

But romance can be found in the army, though the course of true love does not always run smooth. Army nurses were permitted to marry, but, as Cherry tells Dr. Lex Upham when she tries to ward off his first marriage proposal, "though an Army nurse can marry, she might not be stationed near her husband ..." (Senior Nurse, p. 201).

Cherry and Lex both are initially part of the Spencer unit and able to continue their romance while stationed in Panama, and Lex later does officially propose to Cherry and give her a ring, but before she can decide, she is sent to the Pacific, and Lex is shipped stateside to Bethesda, Maryland, as a researcher on tropical diseases for the Army Medical Corps. He writes to her: "I know it's essential but between you and me, Cherry, I'd rather have a gun in my hands" (Chief Nurse, p. 143). Absence does not make the heart grow fonder, and when Cherry goes to England as a flight nurse, Lex writes to her that he intends to marry someone else. But by that time Cherry has become rather fond of her handsome pilot, Captain Wade Cooper.

Cherry's friend Vivian Warren has a misguided romance with a handsome but rather contemptible army captain. Another friend, Ann Evans, is luckier in love. Ann, who has been engaged to soldier Jack Powell since before she entered nursing school, contents herself with writing to her fiance. She learns that he is being sent to the Pacific and will be taking part in the big battle that everyone anticipates. Cherry consoles her:

Cherry found Ann's hand, with the small winking engagement diamond on it, and squeezed it. "Don't worry, Ann. Please don't. It doesn't do any good. At least you and Jack are in the same part of the world, even if you can't see each other. At least we nurses are close by where the fighting is, so we can really help." (Chief Nurse, p. 145)

Though Ann is thrilled to have Jack come through the battle unscathed and arrive on Island 14, their hopes for an immediate marriage are dashed because of army regulations--"There's a three-month waiting period for a nurse between the application to get married and the marriage itself" (Chief Nurse, p. 201)--and the hidebound commanding officer flatly refuses to waive the rules. But Ann and Jack are finally able to marry later, when she and Cherry are in England as flight nurses:

Ann, fully dressed and awake, ripped Aggie's covers back. "Get up! Jack arrived half an hour ago! And he's already got permission and we're to be married today! Get up and help the bride!" (Flight Nurse, p. 198)

Cherry and her friends orchestrate an impromptu wedding--arranging for the cook to bake a wedding cake and to disguise the ever-present mutton as mock-chicken salad; decorating the base chapel with garlands of rhododendron leaves; styling the bridal gown from a silky new bedsheet; and creating a short, flyaway veil from starched and doubled mosquito netting.

Ann's wedding went off with great beauty and dignity. ... Everyone wore full military regalia. The organ pealed forth and filled the chapel with music. Jack stood waiting with the chaplain at the flower-decked altar.

Then Ann came slowly down the aisle, on the Major's arm. Everyone turned. Tears started to Cherry's eyes. She had never seen Ann look so beautiful nor so moved, as she did in her trailing, white gown, walking slowly toward Jack. (Flight Nurse, pp. 207-08)

Though Ann and Jack's love story has a happy ending, Cherry remains levelheaded and a bit skeptical of romance in a combat zone: "In the Army, you think you fall in love, when you're only homesick, I guess" (Flight Nurse, p. 205).

Next: Noble Soldiers, Ignoble Enemies -->

Figure 7: "The Greatest Mother in the World." Produced by the American Red Cross, 1943.