Word: harmonic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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REBECCA A. HARMON San Francisco, Calif. ¶ Merely...
...Harmon crumbles. He bitterly concludes that his life had always been directed by clever, domineering women, first his brilliant physician-mother, then his wife Laura (who as an architect made more money than he and treats him now as if he were a patient), and finally his two daughters, who are bright and saucy with progressive-school wisdom...
...every civilian sent by the U.S. Government to remote World War II assignments came back the worse for life in backwoods or jungle. Take the hero of Author Davidson's novel, William Harmon. He is a successful lawyer, with a charming wife and two soundly precocious children; he seems to have everything he could reasonably want. He is intelligent, sensitive, attractive to women; he loves his wife. Yet suddenly there occurs what Mrs. Harmon calls, with deadly chivalry, "the trouble." Harmon's humiliation, handled with tact and delicacy by everyone, including Author Davidson, is that he has become...
While he wrestles with his problem, there comes a bid from Washington, to serve on a technical mission to "Alba," a fever-ridden province in a South American country. Harmon grabs at the chance. In Alba, he begins to find new resources within himself. He bucks the "business-as-usual" policies of the mission's chief, blimpish Colonel Burling; he finds an understanding friend in Ernestina Manriquez, neglected wife of a rich landowner. From her he regains the "sense of recklessness, the grandeur of being a man, being male." But it is from his new friend Vicente Hidalgo...
When Hidalgo is murdered, Harmon issues a statement placing responsibility on the local government, though he knows it will mean instant dismissal from the mission. He remembers Hidalgo's words: "In bullfighting, William, they have a marvelous phrase for describing the climax of the ceremony-that ultimate moment of reality when the sword strikes the bull. 'La hora de verdad-the hour of truth.' A man must not waste away into nothing, William; a man must find his hour of truth." Having faced his hour, Harmon now feels that he can return to his family and find...